Chapter Text
He lived long enough for the world to forget the taste of iron on the tongue.
Centuries stretched out like a road of winter light, and Merlin walked it in old boots with the soles mended so many times they were more thread than leather. He learned the names of plagues and of kings, the new shapes of cities on rivers he once knew, the feeling when an age closed and nothing echoed but the rattling in his chest.
He worked wherever living asked him to. He cooked in smoky kitchens where pans hissed and knives kept their own counsel, learned the grammar of heat and salt, fed strangers until they were not strangers. He wore a uniform for a season as a soldier and discovered he was better at carrying men than shooting them. He served as a doctor, and then a travelling healer, a bag on his shoulder and a ledger of small mercies in his head. He taught letters to children in a mill town and watched their hands unlearn ash and learn ink. He played music in doorways and on river quays, fiddle under his chin, songs that drew coins and a little warmth from grim evenings.
Grief did not pass with years. It arrived in sudden weather. Sometimes it came all at once and stopped him on a stair. Sometimes it came as a laugh that turned to salt. Sometimes it came in sleep and woke him with Arthur’s name on his lips and no one to answer.
On a rain silvered afternoon in a field hospital behind the lines, he bent over a boy whose boots still wore the shine from his mother’s brush. The canvas walls snapped in a nervous wind. A mortar thumped somewhere too close. Merlin pressed linen into torn flesh and whispered comfort that pretended it would be enough. He looked at the rows of cots, at the faces that had already begun to leave even as they blinked up at him, and he thought, bitter as iron, that if this was not Avalon’s time of need then the word had no meaning at all. Still the lake was quiet. Still the prophecy did not break. He worked until his hands forgot how to stop shaking, and he went back the next night, and the next after that.
Kingdoms and countries called themselves new. Roads unspooled in straight lines across heaths that remembered hoofbeats. King’s English fattened and split into dialects like branches heavy with fruit. He made tea over peat fires and coal fires and stoves that hissed politely at the flick of a switch. He learned to sign his false names in hands bold, copperplate, slanted. He grew comfortable in maps where Camelot was a myth and myths were polite lies told to children.
He laughed again, sometimes. He allowed himself hearths and books and a fiddler’s tune in a warm hall. He kissed men in shadowed doorways, eyes closed as if the dark could transform them into someone crowned in red and gold. He made friends and lost them to ordinary time. He carried the memory of their laughter like a charm in a pocket he never emptied.
He stood on muddy fields where cannon smoke made a new kind of fog, and on beaches where the sand was dust fine and hot as a kiln, and on pavements shimmering beside carriages that hummed without horses. He watched towers of glass climb until clouds were neighbors at the window. He learned aeroplane and cinema and microchip with the same clear care he had once learned hemlock and feverfew and hawthorn.
He did not learn how to be finished.
In a century of lit screens and blue faces, he lived in a small flat above a café that steamed in winter and smelled of coffee in all seasons. He kept a drawer of old things: a threadbare red neckerchief, a lunette of bright iron, and a jet disk carved with a dragon, strung on twine he wore at his throat by day and tucked safely away at night.
He visited old riverbeds and tried not to count the bridges. He went to the hill that had been a hill when he first chased a prat with a sword through gorse and laughter. It was still a hill, now trimmed and fenced, wearing a name like a suit it had not been fitted for.
He went to the place where Arthur died. It was a road now, a stripe of asphalt that shrugged at all the years that were not its concern. The willow that had shaded Arthur’s breath was gone. A new sapling trembled in a sleeve of plastic. Cars hissed past like fast rain.
Merlin stood there on a Wednesday in the late afternoon, rain in the air and oil in the puddles, and he said, very softly, “It is time.”
He had looked for Excalibur more times than he could count. He had coaxed the lake with old names and new. He had walked the banks in boots and in trainers. He had called, and the water had been a mirror and not a hand. The sword was elsewhere, sleeping or dreaming or refusing him because there are promises even steel will not keep if you hold them wrong.
So he did something worse. He sat on the curb like a boy who had outlived his errands and told himself the truth. He had become used to forever. He had believed in patience like a religion. He had consoled himself with cycles and seasons. He had told himself it would hurt less if he were busy enough, kind enough, necessary enough. He had been wrong. It hurt the same. It hurt as though the first minute after the last breath were still occurring, stretched like honey between his hands.
He took one breath that scraped his ribs on the way in. He cut his thumb on the edge of the lunette and drew a circle on wet tarmac. He spoke names that were mountains and rivers before they were words. He unthreaded his heartbeat from the present and laid it on the road like an offering. He reached for the place in himself where Emrys slept like a buried city, old as bedrock, kinder than the stories, more dangerous and powerful than any of them admitted. The air grew cold with the cold of stone courts and unburned torches. The smell of peat smoke slipped under the scent of petrol. A gull cried in this century, and another answered from a memory that had not happened yet.
Time has seams if you know where to feel. Time has frays. Time has places where grief has rubbed the weave thin. He set his hands on the fabric and pulled. The world resisted like skin. Light bled. His own name cut him from the inside. Threads burned his palms. For a moment he was only pain and sound and the image of Arthur’s mouth forming a word he had not heard in centuries. Then the resistance tore. He tore with it, a man sized wound. He fell through.
He opened his eyes to banners.
Red, new, arrogant banners that had not learned to fray. Walls that were still proud of being walls. A sky the color of pewter. The city gate ahead of him, just as it had been the first time, hunched with guards, bristling with spears, alive with a thousand human errands.
He looked down. He wore rough homespun, blue as a bruise, laced crooked at the throat. His fingers were ink stained and they were not. His old satchel lay against his hip. The leather knew him.
He laughed, a small foolish sound that turned quickly into a sob. He pressed his palm to the wall as he passed beneath the arch and felt the stone hum back. Hello, hello. He went to meet his destiny again, this time wearing everything he had learned.
“Arthur,” he said under his breath, the name like a key in a lock, like the first sip of water after a long thirst. “Darling, I am home.”
He walked toward the tolling bell.
Time, which had allowed this foolishness because sometimes even the oldest fabrics admire a mended seam, held its breath to watch how he would mend the rest.