Puttin' on the Blitz

by b0rtney (b00mgh)

Summary:

It is the Blitz in Britain and Merlin is called to the RAF hangar because some blonde himbo just sprinted in shouting in an ancient gaelish dialect and stole a plane to go shoot down nazis.

In other words, Albion's need is greatest, and Arthur Pendragon is back... provided he doesn't get himself killed immediately by not knowing how to land a plane.

In London, sunset comes around 8 o’clock for early May, so Merlin doesn’t arouse any suspicion staying a bit late at work, since dusk has only just descended.

A few of his coworkers cajole him.

Mr. Basil Gray, deputy keeper for Oriental Art, tells him that his wife and a few of her friends do volunteer work in one of the Underground shelters, and they could get him a spot near the gramophone. Basil is more interested in politics than art, and Merlin would rather not owe him a favor even if he were to evacuate to a shelter, Underground or otherwise, so he tells him oh, that’s quite alright, I’ll just finish this up and head home.

Mr. Stanley Robinson says his wife, Pamela, is making Woolton pie and she always makes more than they can finish, and Merlin could stand to gain a few pounds, and it would be so helpful to make Pamela feel helpful now that the girls have moved out. It’s a smarter approach, proving that Stanley actually knows Merlin and how much he hates the claustrophobia of the Underground shelters and, were he to take shelter at all, would prefer to do it at home where the even brickwork wouldn’t remind him of captivities gone by. Stanley served in the Great War, or now they’re calling it the first war, so he understands that Merlin isn’t bothered so much by the bombs as by the stiff quiet of the lulls between shells. That you can kill parts of a man before the body dies.

But Merlin tells him he just can’t this evening. The Arthurian exhibit wasn’t sent off for safekeeping like the withered books and stolen vases and ancient tablets of text. While it didn’t send to much of a shock to people to take out the withered books, which only the few remaining university students who weren’t drafted noticed, or the stolen vases, which were demonstrably fragile even to being tapped by unruly children, taking out the exhibit of sturdy Medieval armor and swords and the big old table they think could have been the round table (it isn’t. It’s a table from the servants’ kitchens of Cenred’s kingdom) might make some waves in the public morale.

The Arthurian exhibit stays in the museum even at the height of the Blitz.

And so does Merlin.

He couldn’t very well leave Arthur’s things behind. For the first part, Arthur, whenever the prat decides that ‘Albion’s need is greatest,’ he’ll want his things back. Eventually, he’ll have to assimilate and wear normal trousers and shirts and shoes, but keeping his final remaining shirt (which Merlin has tucked into a particular storage crate in the basement and keeps clean and mended) and his armor set and a replica of his sword in comfortable, working order will help him adjust better.

Or so Merlin reasons to himself.

The second part is one that Merlin scarcely admits to himself. It is the terrifying thought that claws at his spine even now and threatens to bring him to his knees as he pretends to flip through his old ‘research’ journal to deter any other well-meaning colleagues from asking him to leave the British History Museum. He can’t leave the museum, not with the low drone of planes already humming somewhere near the horizon outside.

Merlin hasn’t left the museum for anything longer than a grocery run since September 23 last year.

He had come back to part of the East Wing, where King’s Library Gallery sat, awkwardly empty with most of it’s books sent away like the children to the countrysides, but a few hundred books were lost or damaged beyond repair.

To Merlin, a few hundred lost books was no great tragedy. He had seen magnificent storytellers’ tales die with them, had noticed, centuries later, that his favorite story had never had but one written copy that would never be found. But Henry Thomas, Keeper of the department of Print Books, the loss had been so severe that he had to go to one of the mental health clinics.

And it was Merlin’s fault. He had slept at his flat that night, exhausted from the worry about when the Germans would drop their bombs, and had missed the incendiary bomb that set the library ablaze and destroyed part of the exterior wall. The next day, as he and a few other department Keepers directed volunteer groups in cleanup operations, all he could think was what if it had been the Arthurian exhibit?

And so the second part of why Merlin won’t evacuate is because he spends every night projecting shields above the British Museum of History to make sure that it is never the target of another bomb.

It has been eight months of this.

Merlin is very tired.

But he can’t lose the last bit of Arthur he has left.

Kathleen Schlesinger, not a department Keeper but a researcher on something to do with music, pokes her head into Merlin’s office. She’s an older woman with a quiet voice and loud smile who is always wearing floral scarves over her dark hair. She knows, by that pink thread of intuition, what nobody else knows about Merlin.

“Staying tucked in tonight as well?” she asks, and doesn’t wait for an answer. She bustles herself in, one arm heavy with thick scripts of literature and sheet music, and the other with a small casserole dish, which she sets on Merlin’s desk. “I didn’t see you take a lunch-- I’m right across the hall, mind, dear, and you never left this office. I’ve got some stew and carrot cookies here, you eat them and you get some sleep tonight, Luftwaffe be damned.”

Her insistence on friendship was a bit unexpected from a woman who struggles to raise her voice when not projecting for musicality, but Kathleen leaves no room for negotiation in it. She reminds Merlin of Gwen, and even 1500 years later that hurts.

“You only make the carrot cookies when Elsie is in town,” he redirects. “How is she?” He’s met Elsie Hamilton, an Australian composer and a friend of Kathleen’s in the same way that Arthur was a friend of Merlin’s, once. She is intense, only speaks when she has something to say, and has a knack for obtaining rare instruments for the research she helps Kathleen with relating to ‘pure intonation,’ whatever that is.

“Well, she’s in town, so I think you may well know how she is,” Kathleen replies simply, and her mischievous smile around the woodwind-wrinkles of her lips makes it unclear whether this refers to the ludicrous concept of visiting your friend in London during the Blitz or the probably incredibly prolific physical relations they may or may not be having in Kathleen’s flat. “She’s trying to convince me to move back to Australia with her, I’m trying to tell her I’m too old to make that trip and I refuse to let the Germans win.”

“It’s good to have her with you though,” Merlin says, because he knows what Elsie means to Kathleen just like Kathleen knows that Merlin has lost someone he can never tell anyone he lost. Somewhere east of them, a man with a ridiculous facsimile of a Charlie Chaplin mustache would stick them both with a pink triangle and burn them for it. Merlin has been under threat of burning before, and chemical would be no different than pyre: it wouldn’t take.

“It’s good to have her with me,” Kathleen echoes. She takes the moment to step back toward the door of his office, straighten her floral head scarf under the slight shake of the ceiling under the oncoming drone of the German planes. “I’m going to head back before they get going,” she says. “You eat that stew and get some rest.” She leaves.

Merlin realizes she never told him to leave, as straightforward a woman as she is.

Some days he wonders if she knows more than she lets on, but that could just be music academics, or it could just be women. They always seem to know things Merlin hasn’t told them.

The bombs start, but they sound pretty distant. He’s got a while before they reach this side of town, if they hit this side at all tonight. As much energy as Germany is putting to hitting Britain where it hurts, they sure don’t seem to know their way around London.

Merlin grabs a restoration and polishing kit and heads to the Arthurian exhibit to kill some time.

Every day he maintains the armor, cleaning and polishing and oiling the joints. When Arthur was alive he’d do nothing but complain about it-- to Gaius, to Gwen, to the other knights, to Arthur -- but now Arthur is gone. The knights and Gwen and all their children and grandchildren and sixth-great-grandchildren are gone, dispersed so far it’s impossible to tell who they’re directly related to anymore. Gaius doesn’t even have a smudged parchment or tapestry stitch to commemorate him.

So Merlin oils the aching joints of Arthur’s armor, just as he would if Arthur were set to compete in a joust the next day, or ride to battle, or have some ceremonial treaty speech. He polishes every centimeter of it until it shines. He dusts the table that’s actually a servant’s kitchen table from Cenred’s rule, because even the enemies of those times feel closer than the friends of today. He inspects every replica blade for chips and rust, and, finding none ha ve miraculously cropped up in the three hours since he was last here, settles for dusting those too.

If only Arthur were here to get dirt and mud and ash and even, yes, blood on them. On anything. If only he were here, Merlin would happily clean up any mess.

But Merlin stopped believing in Kilgarrah’s final words about five hundred years ago, when he nursed patient after patient through palliative care during the Black Plague, and Arthur never showed.

But if he only would—

What’s the use in hoping?

He begins to head back toward his office, dropping off the restorative supplies for the exhibit to check Arthur’s remaining shirt for holes.

And is promptly stopped by Mr. Cottie Arthur Burland, Keeper of Ethnography, who sprints at him full force. “Mr. Merlin! You’re needed!”

“Needed?” Merlin echoes, blankly confused. Who could possibly need him? He’s just a curator of Iron Age and Medieval artifacts.

“You speak Irish, right?” Cottie demands. He seems terrified, and excited.

“A few Celtic languages, yes,” Merlin replies. There is nothing very pressing about knowing regional dialects of Gaelic and Brittonic, and so Merlin has declined to share that he is much more of an authority on these languages than the current curator of Antique Languages, because Merlin does not want to sit around and read books he’s already mostly read before.

“Sure, Celtic. There’s a bloke out there spouting off, doesn’t speak a word of English, and he’s trying to steal a plane!”

“What!?”

“It took six people to even try to hold the blonde bastard down! And he said your name, Merlin!”

A wave of ice petrifies Merlin to his spot in the hallway. “My name?”

There’s no way.

“Kathleen was passing by on her way home and saw the whole thing. She ran to my house across the way on her short little legs to let me know so I could get ahold of you— was this someone you knew in Ireland?”

Merlin does not know anyone in Ireland who is still alive.

“You said he was blonde?” he asks, trying not to tremble.

“Yes, yes, blonde as anything— Kathleen said he was set on getting in that plane! They need your help!”

Nobody knows Merlin anymore. Nobody blonde, nobody speaking any Celtic language, nobody who would have the gall to jump, uninvited, into a fighter jet during the Blitz.

Except one person.

Merlin’s heartbeat is in his ears and by the time he can hear over that he’s aware that he’s halfway to the RAF aircraft hanger. He only realizes he’s not in the museum because a bomb knocks him sideways into a rapidly-growing puddle pouring out of a broken hydrant. He’s now cold and wet, which chafes more in the thick, layered style of the 1940s than it would have were he in something from the 500s.

But that’s alright.

Nothing broken except the hydrant and the street. He waves a hand and fixes the hydrant in case the fire brigade needs it later.

He keeps running.

He trips another two times before he’s there, and the young man pushing the occasional terrified civilian toward a shelter or a home mistakes Merlin as part of the shuffle and starts to push him away. “No!” Merlin shouts, as firm as he can manage while so full-to-bursting with hope, “I’m Professor Merlin Hunith from the British Museum— you called for a language scholar!”

“ You’re Merlin!?” the man cries, looking Merlin, wet and dirty and grinning, up and down. “Get in here! He already took the bloody plane!”

“He did what!?”

A bomb drops on the next street over, and the warm glow of fire peeks through the buildings in an instant. “Lunatic stole a Hurricane and set off! Chief Marshal Park said that as long as he’s shooting the Luftwaffe not to waste bullets on him, but whoever your friend is, he’s getting put away for a long time after this.”

Oh for fucksake, Arthur is the stupidest man to return from the dead. The bar for that isn’t high, since, as far as Merlin knows, he’s the only man to return from the dead, but even then he is really setting himself up for success, isn’t he! He’s been back alive for less than half an hour and he’s already making Merlin save his stupid, royal ass again! How does he even know how to fly a plane! The technology is new to Merlin, who was alive the whole time it was invented! Arthur shouldn’t even know what a plane is! And with his stupid sausage fingers, he shouldn’t even be able to have the dexterity and lightness of touch to control the damn thing! And he certainly isn’t good at picking up new skills quickly; how is he planning on landing once he’s done seeing to Britain’s greatest need! And Merlin is sprinting through the London streets laughing and crying because he hasn’t been so happy in centuries.

Now that he knows he’s looking for a Hurricane jet flying probably very poorly by a blonde head of hair with no brain beneath it, using magic to pick out all the Hurricane jets in the sky and then pick out the one flying the most erratically is a cinch.

Unexpectedly, Arthur has taken out half a dozen German sorties already, the planes limping back east on burning engines and broken wings. It’s a nearly suicidal effort, probably because Arthur doesn’t know what he’s doing, and Arthur’s Hurricane is smoking from a few spots. He needs to land. Or eject. Whichever one means he gets out of the burning plane. If either of them was supposed to burn to death, that was probably meant to be Merlin.

But fate has a cruel sense of humor and Merlin hasn’t trusted her in a millennia, so he’s not surprised when Arthur’s fighter starts to lag in altitude and he’s even less surprised when a bullet strikes the engine and sends the plane stuttering downwards. That doesn’t stop the horrified yelp that escapes his lips as he sprints toward Arthur, arms outstretched so his magic can slow the plummeting descent. It would be incredibly obvious if a plane were to stay suspended mid-air forever, but a marginally slowed descent and no impact can suspend the bridge of belief, surely. Merlin can’t lose him to this. Not to the stupidest possible death imaginable.

The bloody idiot is still shooting at the Luftwaffe as he plummets, probably fully unaware that he’s even falling.

At this point, they’re near the outskirts of London proper, near a park that Merlin doesn’t frequent enough to recognize under fighter drones and sirens and the ashy debris of the night. He sets the plane down there, and waves his hands to summon a theatric spray of dirt and dust. Coughing his way through it, he hears the sweetest sound he could have imagined possible, here, as a bomb falls a block away and crumbles half a department store.

Arthur is screaming for him. “Merlin!”

Merlin laughs, head thrown back and feeling the weight of crushing eons sluice off like sweat under a shower. When he is past the cloud of summoned dust and in the eye of the storm, Arthur is there, dressed in his red shirt and brown trousers, covered in mud and oil and grime, but then so is Merlin, and the way Merlin slams into him could be easily mistaken for violence if not for how lovingly Arthur holds him fast the moment he’s close enough to do so.

“Merlin!” he cries again, now clearly laughing.

And Merlin is sobbing and cackling into his shoulder, and it occurs to him mid-breath that Arthur should have no idea that Merlin was nearby at all. “How’d you know I was here?” he asks, somewhat suspicious. A bomb falls about six feet to their left and Merlin wraps them in a protective shield so thick they don’t even feel when it detonates.

“That,” Arthur replies. “Your magic has a weird feeling when you do it. Feels kinda dense.”

Lifting his head off Arthur’s shoulder, Merlin snaps, “Sorry, my magic is dense?”

“Would you prefer snug?” Arthur asks.

“Sire, do you mean comfortable?”

“Did I say comfortable?” Even pressed against his chest, Merlin can hear his eyes roll.

“No, wait, back a step,” to emphasize this, Merlin physically steps away. “Are you saying you can feel my magic!?” How would that even work? If Arthur could feel it, then how did he not know about it until days before his death?

“Not always,” Arthur says, hands fidgeting in an incredibly uncharacteristic way, unsure of where to be on Merlin’s body, “but once I was aware it was you, after you told me a few days ago, I realized I’d felt it before. A lot. Easy to put it together.”

A few days ago.

A few days ago.

To Arthur, his death was just moments before. No time has passed, for him. Some deafening screech of inadequacy fills Merlin as he scrambles back for space, and senseless as it is he cannot shake it. Arthur came as soon as he could, and Merlin had stopped hoping a thousand years ago. How dare he doubt him?

“You came back,” Merlin says. He’s drinking in Arthur’s eyes, unsure of when they’ll be stolen from him again.

“Of course I came back,” Arthur says. His arms are reaching out for another hug. Why is he reaching out for a hug? He doesn’t step forward though. “Let’s get you sitting down.”

Sitting down? Why on Earth would they sit down? “We need to get to a shelter,” he suggests instead.

“Sure,” Arthur says, and it’s in that tone he’d use with knights who had a bone sticking out that they didn’t see. Compulsively, Merlin looks down, inspecting his legs and arms for funny angles, and the vertigo that abruptly moving his head comes with has Arthur’s arms around him in an instant. “What the hell are you looking for?” he asks sharply as he starts supporting more and more of Merlin’s weight.

“Bones,” Merlin replies, tongue lazy with unexpected nausea and dizziness. “You’re looking at me like I had bones.”

Now slumped against Arthur’s chest, it’s hard to tell if the breath Arthur lets out is an amused chortle or annoyed sigh, but Merlin is so glad he’s breathing that he can’t really care. “Where’s that shelter you mentioned?”

“They’re everywhere,” Merlin mutters. Anything with a roof is considered some kind of shelter, for those who can’t stand counting bricks. Then again, Arthur is finally back, so maybe an Underground shelter wouldn’t be so bad. “Just go down the stairs for the tube.”

“The tube, sure,” Arthur says. “You got a direction for me, or do I just guess and hope?” Merlin chews on his tongue trying to find an answer and Arthur eventually tires of waiting. Must have been a millennia or so then, because Arthur’s always been more stubborn between the two of them. “Look at you, of course you don’t.”

What the hell is that supposed to mean?

“I don’t look that bad,” Merlin says, and it shocks him that his own voice is a faint whisper below the scream of another bomb dropping from somewhere above, and that they are now three streets over from the park. None of that matters to him so much as the fact that Arthur can’t hear him, and the terrible, achingly lonely thing carved out of the memory of not telling him what truly mattered and then losing him all too slow and all too young and Merlin vomits into a puddle next to a street drain.

He had not realized Arthur was still holding him up, and is now kneeling next to him, holding some tufts of sticky-wet hair out of his face. There are many people shouting, and they are all Arthur, and Merlin begins to beg for forgiveness. He promises he never meant to hurt anyone and that he’ll do better, just please, please don’t burn him.

“Merlin,” all the Arthurs say, out of sync and cacophonous, “Merlin, I won’t burn you, but you need to tell me where to go!”

Between the vomiting and the horrible, screaming noise of another bomb falling and all the Arthurs demanding answers Merlin doesn’t have because he doesn’t recognize this part of Camelot and the sickening sensation of guilt that is eating his limbs, Merlin decides he would like to take a nap, and he lifts a hand, flicks his wrist, and teleports them back to his flat.

Arthur has had, quite frankly, one of the worst days that could be imagined on short notice. He dies a slow and painful death after having everything he knew about the person he loved most in the world turned on its head, and immediately comes to with the firm and unshakable knowledge that:

1. He must get into a fighter jet and attack the German Luftwaffe forces (he does not know what a fighter jet, a German, or a Luftwaffe forces are), and

2. An incredible amount of time has passed, long enough that everyone he could possibly know is certainly dead, and,

3. It doesn’t matter, because he is still needed, if only for this one last fight.

He then proceeds to lose terribly without any way to communicate the people he is assuming (by the coat of arms on their vehicle) are supposed to be his allies in this fight, and injure his own vehicle beyond further usability, where he started plummeting to the ground. But Arthur had taken several other ‘fighter jets’ down with him, and something unfurled from around his heart, releasing him. He knew the worst was over, that he was no longer needed, and he let himself fall.

And then Merlin, the great bloody bastard, caught him as he fell, and the warm, comfortable cocoon of his magic, a sensation so welcome because it was that of a friend, had reassured Arthur so fully that he resumed shooting at the enemy until the trees prevented a clear shot.

It had been a recurring motif in Arthur’s life, and he had attributed it to his mother’s spirit watching over him at times, that when things seemed darkest and he was truly in danger, a warm, snug sensation would wash over him, and the problem would solve itself in quick and unexpected ways. Falling tree branches, well-timed wind, pure luck— he thought. But when he lay dying, when Merlin was not hiding from him, he felt that rush of warmth again and he knew it had not been his mother watching over him.

But when he saw Merlin, the fool was as covered in blood as he was dirt. A nasty cut on the side of his head was actively dripping onto his ridiculous-looking clothes, and one of his sleeves was fully charred, and Arthur expected the skin below was as well.

Not that Merlin noticed, because Merlin is stupid and thinks, even after deflecting a bomb (what is a bomb!?), that Arthur might burn him at the stake!

Even at his angriest, when he had just learned of a decade of lies, he never truly considered burning Merlin. He wouldn’t. Not Merlin.

Perhaps, if death had given him more time to think it over, he may have come to bring introspection around into regret, but it had chucked him bodily into the future instead, and so Arthur has not yet had time for any of that.

Because though Merlin knows which herbs do what and how to distill a potion appropriately, Arthur is not completely clueless for field medicine, and he knows what a concussion looks like.

“Merlin.” Nothing. Clotpole remains placidly asleep and sluggishly bleeding on the floor of whatever room they’re in. “Merlin.” Still nothing except a chest rising and falling too fast and too shallow.

But Arthur knows a trick that has brought back a good handful of knights from edges closer to death than this, and so he clears his throat of the lump trying to take residence, squares his shoulders, and cries, as petulantly as he can muster, “Merlin, you are late!”

And it works like a charm as Merlin sits straight up, babbling, “I did not eat the sausages!”

“Of course you didn’t,” Arthur replies, and it’s not hard to pretend he’s still annoyed about the lie. “Now, about your magic--”

This was the wrong thing to say. Merlin, insensate as he is, starts crying again. “I didn’t hurt anyone,” he insists, pleads, sobs. “Only the people who were trying to kill us. I would never hurt you, Arthur, I wouldn’t.”

“You think I would!?” Arthur snaps, but the words don’t reach Merlin’s ears because he’s still, somehow, convinced he is Arthur’s servant in Camelot, not whatever he is now, wherever they are now.

“I kept your armor and your last shirt,” he rambles. “It’s in a crate, I was going to wash it--”

This isn’t working. New approach. “No, Merlin, remember, I ordered you to use magic.” With his prior life as a king that executed druids and wizards alike (does that make him a tyrant? Was Arthur Pendragon a tyrant? Did he grow into his father’s shoes? He can ruminate and regret later) so fresh on his tongue, the words come out feeling slimy and false, but they capture Merlin’s scattered attention, and Arthur cradles the pieces as carefully as he’s able.

“You did?” Merlin had looked nearly old enough to be Arthur’s father when Arthur first saw him, but he has shrunk down now to the scrawny thing Arthur bossed around, and with his big, wet eyes on Arthur, he looks horribly vulnerable.

Unbidden, Arthur’s thumbs smear away the tears on his cheeks, turning the thin tracks in the dust into half-cleared sludge piled on his cheekbones. “Yes, I did. Now, you said you knew healing magic?” Merlin has never said this, but magic has to be useful for something other than well-timed wind and breaking branches, and there are certainly some things Arthur has lived through which, reasonably, he shouldn’t have.

Miserably, but with a brilliantly bright and horribly, obviously lovestruck expression, he nods.

“Why haven’t you fixed yourself already then?” Arthur asks. He is trying so hard to be patient, but Merlin is dripping blood from his charred arm onto the floor, and Arthur is skittish about magic and its costs.

“But there’s no bones,” Merlin replies simply. “I checked.”

For the love of— “Yes, but you are bleeding. All over the floor.”

Merlin looks at the floor, its small puddle of blood, and follows the trail up to his arm, which he waves a hand over and it (and the sleeve over it) are repaired as though nothing happened. His eyes glow gold, and then flicker as they roll back in his head.

“No! No, no, Merlin, not yet, you can’t sleep yet!” With visible struggle, Merlin pulls himself to consciousness, leaning heavily forward. Arthur rests a hand against the injured part of his skull. “Your head, Merlin. Fix your head.”

Humming vaguely in assent, Merlin focuses hard on a spot on the floor between them, and then his head isn’t bleeding anymore. “Done,” he mutters, “Now let me sleep, Arthur.”

“Sure,” Arthur says, and Merlin’s eyes roll back in his head so suddenly that Arthur has to catch the back of his neck and head before he falls backward and gives himself another concussion. Instead, Arthur lays him down gently on the floor.

In the deafening silence of Merlin laying, covered in blood and completely fine, on the floor of this strange room, the whistle-boom of another bomb drop in the distance finally becomes audible to Arthur’s ears. War should not be a comforting sound, but war raised Arthur and his spine unhitches when he hears that far-off violence.

It must be true then. Arthur must be a tyrant. He followed his father, sent his sister to slaughter, got his most trusted knights killed— and all for what? To ensure magic would not come to Camelot? Merlin had been there since Arthur was a boy. Magic had not been the danger for Camelot: war had.

But war raised Arthur, and so he found any excuse to fight.

And it made him a tyrant just as his father was.

And, arguments and anger aside, Merlin thought in his most confused moment that Arthur would kill him.

Because Arthur has killed dozens of sorcerers and druids and wizards.

And Merlin stayed by his side anyway.

Merlin awakes with the same feeling he had after he drank that one home-brew alcohol he had on that farm in the 1700s (which ended up being fatal to the two people who tried to outdrink him). His memories are hazy, filled with hallucinations of Arthur and the warmth of blood and being held.

When he blinks the grit from his eyes and swallows the worst of the cottony feeling from his mouth, he sits up and finds himself largely clean and wearing dress slacks and a button-up flannel pajama shirt, he thinks maybe he accidentally did get fucked up on some kind of homemade illicit substance, and then he sees Arthur, wrapped in Merlin’s throw blanket, passed out on the floor next to the bed.

Arthur is here.

Arthur is alive.

There isn’t even the general embarrassment he might reasonably feel over how weird he was acting last night to dampen his spirits, because that was an incredibly fatal concussion he had, and he remembers basically none of it, outside of Arthur’s presence and some blood.

But because he remembers basically none of it, he is somewhat confused as to how Arthur came to be sleeping on the floor of his flat. Trying to backtrack, he latches onto the last stable memory of the night prior— Kathleen bringing him stew and cookies— and ekes his memory forward. Cottie shouting that someone was looking for him and speaking “Irish,” running to the RAF hanger, feeling wet and dirty, a cloud of smoke, Arthur, crying. Had he cried? It seems likely, Merlin thinks. He feels like crying at the moment because Arthur is not vanishing like so many hallucinations before.

Just to be sure, he slides his legs out of bed and taps Arthur’s thigh with his toe. His toe connects with solid flesh and not a mirage, and neither does Arthur dissipate like a popped bubble.

He does, however, roll over before blinking groggily awake, just the same as last time Merlin woke him, although Arthur’s bed burned down with most of the other furniture a good few centuries ago when a kitchen boy swapped jobs with a manservant for a day and wasn’t careful about the fireplace.

“Let me sleep, Merlin, it was a long night.”

Remembering having cried last night is feeling so incredibly reasonable as Merlin scrubs moisture from his cheeks. Arthur is alive.

“I’m afraid I don’t have your shirt here at the flat,” he says, and he isn’t sure himself if this is a joke or a self-admonishment. All this time he’s waited and he’s still not ready.

“What’s flat?” Arthur mumbles. The blanket pulls off his shoulder and Merlin realizes Arthur is wearing his shirt. Technically it’s an undershirt, very warm, but soft and simple enough to wear under other clothes in winter, but it looks fantastic hugging the contours of Arthur’s arms, his chest.

Merlin’s tears have been replaced with blushing, horribly out of place excitement. “That’s my shirt,” he says.

Arthur groans and begins the melodramatic production of sitting up. “Don’t be such a girl, Merlin, you have plenty of clothes to spare, and I was not sleeping covered in your blood.”

“I was bleeding?”

Arthur blinks to awareness in an instant, something tenses in his shoulders and he comes to kneel in front of Merlin. “Is your head still hit?”

“I hit my head?”

This is not the right answer. Arthur stands and begins carding through Merlin’s tacky, tangled hair for injuries, muttering about stupid manservants or whatever Merlin is now.

“Arthur, I have been alive for 1,492 years. If a head wound could kill me, it would have by now.”

“That long!?” Arthur cries. “I felt like time had passed, but how many lifetimes is that!?”

“54,” Merlin answers simply. “Gwen has some 52-great grandchildren somewhere in the American and Australian colonies. And Leon has some descendants in Brazil, of all places.”

“What’s an American?”

“Filthy little traitor upstarts,” Merlin mutters. He still blames George for that. How do you lose an entire set of colonies? They were working with rationed supplies and some sticks, and George had one of the most advanced navies of the age! And he lost the damn colonies! Not that Arthur knows that. “Nevermind. How are you back?”

After a brief, suspicious glance, and then a little shrug, Arthur replies, “I thought you did something.” He joins Merlin on the bed, and startles a little when the springs bounce under him. “Raising the dead not in your wheelhouse?”

“Ha-ha.”

But it was hardly a joke, and the laugh doesn’t suspend them far enough over the chasm of the unknown. Arthur’s shoulders, deprived of purpose, droop under their own weight. It occurs to Merlin, not for the first time, that Arthur has never lived without purpose. Every step he took was under the weighted threat of duty, and every breath had oxygen siphoned off for a noble cause. Britain’s greatest need will pass, and then Arthur will be left with no kingdom and no cause.

What will that do to him?

What will that do for him?

When Arthur speaks, his voice is small. Small like Uther’s grave, weathered to a nameless rock. Small like Gwen’s first child, with some knight she loved and who loved her. Small like the infinite specks of time between the day Merlin and Arthur’s hearts stopped beating in time and today, as they desperately try to sync up. “What do I do now?”

Merlin, with eons of practice in living like a leaf in the wind, attached to no place and no person, replies, “What do you want to do now?”

And Arthur, having died and been reborn as the exact same prat just yesterday, says, “Can you get me some breakfast?”

Notes:

:D i personally think this would have been THE time for arthur to come back. also. according to my research elsie and kathleen FUCKED (/lh)

anyway authorial diary entry time: i am broke but happy. i have painted my older siblings house (meaning the only large projects left to do are the flooring and the fence, the latter of which i am slowly chipping away at now that the weather is cooling down). it looks very nice :D and me and my gf are doing well (it's her birthday tomorrow so imma spend the whole day with her). i recently got the realtor i work for 2 different clients in a week, which feels stellar (and means money flowing in abt a month from now, hopefully), and i got some interest in my wriiting commissions over on tiktok, which will be nice as well!!! overall things are going well. my cat sits next to me as i write this and all is good :D <333 peace and love on planet earth.

i hope yall had a good day as well!!

scream at me in the comments!! nothing brings me more joY!!! <33333