Fic: Where Legends Lie - Part 1
Masterpost | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7
There were five ways in which Merlin Emrys did not fit into his life. He was wonderful at making friends, but hopeless at keeping them, he had a room that he never kept as ordered as his mother wanted it to be, and he’d had, in the past several months, more jobs than he could remember, because while his bosses were as different from each other as it was possible to be, the one thing they shared was a belief that Merlin Emrys was a terrible employee.
He was also, as it happened, a warlock, and as far as he was aware there weren’t any others like him around anymore. Merlin had endured several long years of knowing what exactly he could do, but not what it was, and after his mother, Hunith, had realised that it was magic, they’d decided that it should probably be kept secret. But the most significant reason that Merlin did not fit into his life was this - he had spent the entirety of it wishing that he could be somewhere else.
It wasn’t that he dreamt of island villas, or sandy white beaches where he could lie beside golden skinned women, like Will always seemed to do. The beach had never been all that appealing - it was probably because of all the sand - and Merlin was almost certain that women in general, no matter how golden-skinned, would never feature prominently in any of his fantasies. He’d realised that he was gay when he was around thirteen years old and the shirtless builders working on the house across the road from his interested him far more than the Playboy magazine his mates were huddled around.
No, what Merlin dreamt of was different from that. His dream was one that he’d had for most of his life, something that was both closer to him and further away than all of Will’s golden-skinned women. It had started when he was still small -only ten or so - and he’d been alone in the library, looking for something to read that wasn’t bright pink or blue with illustrations on every page. He had walked between the shelves until he’d reached the back wall, and there, nestled between A History of Camelot and a battered old travel guide, was the book.
He didn’t know why he’d been drawn to it, really. The cover was old, almost falling apart, and he’d barely been able to make out the image on the front of a man, golden-skinned, bearded and holding a sword. It wasn’t that picture so much as the state of the book that had made him pick it up. It looked like it had been discarded, swept aside, and even though it was only a book, Merlin couldn’t help feeling sorry for it. It had obviously been loved once, but not anymore.
So he’d taken it down off the shelf, held it up for the librarian to scan and tucked it under his arm, keeping it nestled against his body for the whole trip home. He’d opened it just once in the car to see lines and lines of words, ones that he couldn’t yet read. So instead, he’d flipped to the front page and read the title, the words heavy and strange in his mouth. The Legend of King Arthur. Even then, Merlin had known that this book was something special.
And it was that same book that Merlin was currently reading, curled up on the back seat of the bus with his backpack on his lap and his scarf wrapped firmly around his neck to keep out the cold. He could see the outskirts of the city through the front windscreen of the bus every time he looked up, and he hugged the book closer to his chest at the sight. It was a familiar, comfortable weight in his hands - one that hadn’t changed all throughout high school, one that had remained the same, even after his friends drifted away when school ended. He knew the story off by heart - brave King Arthur and his knights, ruling from the castle of Camelot, defending Albion against enemies and beasts, marrying Guinevere and becoming beloved by his people until the day he fell under Mordred’s hands. It was a familiar story, but one that could still send a thrill of joy through him every time he read it.
Merlin hadn’t had much contact with the city, but once he’d left school there weren’t many job opportunities for a boy of his age in Ealdor. And those that he had tried weren’t quite right. Or he wasn’t quite right. Something definitely wasn’t quite right. Merlin had gathered that much from the short meetings he’d had with his bosses before they let him go.
So one night, after he’d been fired for the third time in as many months, he’d gone down into the kitchen when his mother was serving dinner and suggested that he might go to the city to look for work.
“Where will you live?” she’d asked after a long moment, because she knew by now that once he’d got an idea into his head, it was easier to let him carry it out rather than argue about it.
They’d talked it over, he’d asked Will about it - Will being the only other person in Ealdor who’d care if Merlin left - and then somehow, over the course of a few months, that idea had grown into something more. It had turned from a vague, half-formed intention to leave into a reality.
Merlin wrapped his arms around himself as he stared out the bus window, thinking over the past few days. They had gone by quickly, a whirl of packing and farewells that had left him breathless. Will, however, had been calm throughout it all. He had spent the entirety of the day before, for example, grinning at Merlin and making helpful observations about Merlin’s packing style from his position on Merlin’s bed.
“I have no idea how you got into medical school,” Merlin had said, sitting up from where he’d been pulling the last few books out from inside his desk and looking over at Will. The man had been sprawled across Merlin’s bed with his feet hanging over the edge and a magazine in his hands.
Will had dragged his eyes away from the girl in the centrefold and looked over at him. “I have my ways,” he said, winking, and Merlin knew that two years before that would have had his heart flopping around inside his chest like a dying fish. Or something. But he had grown up a lot since then, and had gained some degree of taste. Or, as Will put it, he’d realised that Will was ‘way out of your league, baby.’ Merlin had laughed at that. He and Will were in similar leagues, he knew, but Merlin was playing an entirely different game.
“Anyway, I’m only in it for the nurses,” Will continued, turning back to the magazine. Merlin snorted. Will had an oddly warped view of the world, in that he thought that every pretty woman he met would be flattered to know that Will wanted to have sex with her. He had been rejected more often than any other man Merlin had ever met.
Merlin picked up the last of his socks, none of which matched, and stuffed them into the final cardboard box that was sitting by the door.
“Done,” he sighed, staring around his mostly empty room, and Will sat up from the bed, tossing the magazine aside.
“Excellent. Let’s go to the pub.”
Merlin shook his head. “Will, I’m leaving tomorrow. At eight in the morning.”
“So you have a good twelve hours left in Ealdor,” he said with a grin, clapping a hand down on Merlin’s shoulder. “And you’re going to use them well.”
And that was how Merlin had found himself standing in the middle of The Green Dragon, Ealdor’s main pub, downing his - he didn’t know, maybe his fifth? - pint of beer, while Will alternately cheered him on and whispered things Merlin really didn’t want to know about to the blonde he had his arm wrapped around. It also explained how he had ended up sitting at the bar telling the bartender that ‘if King Arthur was here, sir, I’d take him home so hard’, and why he’d woken up at five to eight that morning, in his bed, with Will passed out on top of him, his head aching like somebody had thrown a brick at it and his stomach churning.
“Shit,” he said, heaving himself out from under Will, and the next five minutes had passed in a whirl of clothes and shoes and Will’s snoring and his mother, Hunith, passing him toast around the bedroom door while he dressed. He’d kicked Will awake, said goodbye, and checked three times that he hadn’t forgotten his favourite book before he left his room for the final time.
His mother was waiting in the hallway and he kissed her on the cheek as he ran past, promising to visit on the weekend and not to use his magic unless it was an emergency. He raced up the road towards the bus with one of his trainer laces still untied. It wasn’t exactly the farewell he’d expected to give Ealdor, but then again, nothing in his life so far had really gone the way he’d expected it to.
And now - now he was on a bus heading away from Ealdor for the final time, to his new home in the heart of Camelot. Well, home was stretching it a little. Merlin had moved some of his boxes over to the building the previous weekend, but he’d promptly forgotten about them because he had job applications to fill out and television shows to watch and Will’s ‘goodbye Ealdor pub crawls’, as he termed them, to endure.
The flat had been suspiciously cheap, and Merlin was sure that there was some huge flaw in it that he hadn’t yet noticed about it, like a missing roof, or a rat infestation. It had a door that closed and locked, at least one of the power points worked, and the windows still had all their glass in them. That was better than the other places he’d visited, so he had happily agreed to rent it.
Thinking about it now, though, Merlin could see that that hadn’t been the smartest idea. He had barely been away from home before, not even on school camping trips - because he’d gone through a period of sleep-magicking that made it rather dangerous for him to sleep in a room with other people - and now, with Ealdor shrinking rapidly into the distance behind him and a backpack on his lap that was stuffed full of things his mother had had to remind him to take, he felt a little bit afraid. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to go, because he knew being able to live on his own and support himself would help his mother out, but he didn’t quite feel ready for this.
He’d visited the city, of course, but that was when he was with Will and they had a plan that involved dancing and clubs and alcohol and girls (for Will) and boys (for Merlin). The city was easier to deal with when you had a pint of beer sloshing through your veins. It seemed smaller, then, because all you could comprehend was where you were at that moment and where you wanted to go next, and if you couldn’t think of where you wanted to go next it didn’t matter all that much, because you could just sit down on the kerb until things started making sense again. Sometimes, Merlin wondered whether his experience of clubbing was anything like how nights out were supposed to go.
But right now there was a significant lack of alcohol in his system, and the city seemed too big and too grey as they sped towards it. Merlin felt a rising urge to jump off the bus and run back to Ealdor, because at least they had trees there. But he couldn’t do that, not now. So instead, he looked back down at his book, staring at the curly script and the familiar yellowed pages, pretending, just for a moment, that he wasn’t on a bus heading towards Camelot. That instead, he was riding beside Arthur as he travelled around Albion; that he was lying close beside the King as he slept on the forest floor at night. He didn’t know if Arthur had truly lived - no one did, the truth was lost to time - but the stories were nonetheless a comfort to him. And if some of the men he’d dated happened to be blonde and bearded and muscular, then what of it? It was a hell of a lot safer to idolise dead mythical kings then it was to crush on Camelot’s celebrities. There was less chance of running into them and completely embarrassing himself, for starters.
Merlin often wondered what it would be like to meet King Arthur. He imagined it sometimes, when the weather was hot and he was lying in bed with sleep creeping around the edges of his mind. It was never the same situation - sometimes the man would be riding, and come across Merlin in the forest, or sometimes Merlin would walk around the Round Table and kiss Arthur in front of all his knights, just because he could. But Arthur was always powerful and blonde and in control, while the Merlin he imagined himself to be around the king was smooth and confident, and didn’t ever trip over things, or lose control of his magic. It was his secret fantasy - the man he’d always wanted with the man he’d always wanted to be.
The phone in his pocket vibrated suddenly, pulling him out of his thoughts, and Merlin shoved his backpack sideways off his lap so that he could manoeuvre it out of his jeans. The old lady sitting next to him shot him a disgruntled look, clutching her hard leather handbag closer to her chest. Merlin pulled the bag quickly back onto his lap as he flipped open the phone.
Could always become Camelots #1 queer hooker if u ever need cash. Pete says theyre well into that.
Merlin grimaced. He didn’t want to know who Pete was, or why he was so well informed about Camelot’s prostitutes. Shielding the phone’s screen from the curious eyes of the lady to his right, he tapped out a reply.
I’ll find a job, prick. Remind me why I’m friends with u again?
You <3 me. Plus i hav a cock.
And Merlin had to smile at that, because Will was crude, far too straight for his own good and he didn’t always understand Merlin, but Merlin did love him. They’d grown up together, and they were as close as brothers. Will had even wanted to change his surname to Emrys when they were seven, just so the government would see that they were related and ought to be living in the same house as each other.
Will was also the only one - apart from Merlin’s mother - who knew about his magic, even though he’d tried to keep it a secret. Merlin didn’t know what the authorities would do if they found out about him. All he knew was that actual magic, like the type that he had, had all but died out. He hadn’t met anyone else with his power. He didn’t know if anyone else like him existed.
“You’re special,” his mother had told him as a child. “But you have to keep that to yourself.”
And so Merlin had. He’d never told any of the kids in his classes that he was magic, and he’d never used it to do things that he could do by hand. Sometimes he couldn’t control it and it burst out of him, like the time when Will fell in the river, but most days he kept it hidden away. It didn’t feel right to keep it secret, though, not when there was so much he could use it for, and he’d mentioned that to his mother several times.
“It’s not your time,” she’d said sadly. “It’s not a time of magic anymore, Merlin. But maybe it will be again someday.” Merlin had hoped so, but as the years passed, he’d come to realise that if there had been a time in which magic was accepted, it was a time long past.
The bus driver braked suddenly as the traffic lights turned red and Merlin was jolted forward in his seat. He clutched at the handrail on the back of the chair in front of him with one hand and held his book close to his chest with the other, trying to stop it from slipping onto the mud-splattered floor of the bus. The lady next to him gave him an odd look, her eyes wide behind her silver-framed glasses. Merlin supposed that he must look a little strange, sitting there with his fingers clenched tight around the battered cover, but he didn’t loosen his grip until he was sure the bus had stopped. He loved that book. He didn’t want to risk ruining by accident. He knew that he was a little obsessed with it; that it was probably going to make it impossible to find anyone to settle down with in real life, because none of them would live up to how Merlin pictured King Arthur, but he honestly couldn’t bring himself to care.
Will, on the other hand, cared a great deal. He told Merlin on several occasions that he was an idiot, that he should ‘go find someone you can actually fuck, mate, and forget this Arthur ponce,’ and he’d even tried to burn Merlin’s copy, until Merlin got so angry that he accidentally moved the whole house several feet to the left. Because when it came down to it, it wasn’t just because of King Arthur that Merlin loved the story. A large part of it was King Arthur, sure, and Merlin would probably throw the book into the back of his cupboard and never look at it again if King Arthur suddenly turned up in Ealdor, but there was more to the book than that. Merlin loved the adventures, the courtly manners and the loyalty and the grace of it all, as well. People today just weren’t like that. Life today just wasn’t like that.
It wasn’t, Merlin knew, that he didn’t belong in his own life. It was more that he sometimes felt as though his life wasn’t all that it could be. It was an unnerving feeling, and one that he’d tried to ignore, but as the years went by it sat in the back of his mind - not growing, as such, but simply refusing to leave. He felt as though there was a way he could be better, be all that he could be and all that, but he didn’t know what it was, or how he could even begin to achieve it.
“It’s called a mid-life crisis, mate,” Will had said. “It means your life is half over. Bad luck.”
Merlin had laughed along with him, but he’d known that this was something else. It was something Will didn’t feel, and something that Will, close though they were, couldn’t understand.
Merlin stared out the window, watching the last of the fields race past beside the bus. Perhaps he’d find what he was looking for in Camelot. It was a new place, and Merlin could be a new person there. He’d get a job he could actually keep, he’d fix up his flat and perhaps find a golden-haired man to curl up in bed with each night, and everything else would fall into place. He smiled, satisfied, and at that moment everything went to hell.
There was a bang, and the bus rocked wildly on its axles. Merlin cried out and scrabbled at the seat beneath him, trying to find something to hold onto. Something flashed golden-yellow, and a there was a low, rough noise, like the roar of a plane taking off. Merlin felt his magic jump inside his chest, responding to something that he didn’t recognise.
It felt strange, to have something inside him that was acting of its own accord, that he couldn’t control with the careful precision with which he controlled his limbs and his head and the rest of his body. It didn’t feel much like it was his magic, though. Merlin knew what his magic felt like - it was familiar, and Merlin could always feel its edges when he used it, lines of power stretching out from his body and pulsing hot through his veins. But this magic felt different. It was cold and alien, as though someone had punched into his chest and dragged the magic out, or pushed their own magic into his body beside his own.
Merlin jerked wildly as he felt the seat beneath his body vanish, leaving him suspended in the air, and for a second all he could feel was light and heat and the book clutched against his chest and the strap of his backpack wrapped tight around his wrist. It was as if the whole world had fallen away, and he’d been caught at the edge of it, not quite falling but not quite safe, either. He couldn’t see the bus, or the other passengers. He couldn’t see anything but the light, and that was fading now as well, giving way to a deep black that dropped down upon Merlin until he was covered by it; until he couldn’t remember how it felt to see.
And then there was a pressure around his head like someone was pushing down on it. Merlin couldn’t breathe, and his brain was telling him that it needed oxygen, only he knew that the whole world had vanished, so there wasn’t any left to have. He slipped into unconsciousness just as he felt his back hit the ground.
-
The first thing he noticed was the noise. Or rather, the lack of it. The world had never been this quiet. Not even when they’d gone hiking in the forest, just him and his mother, and Merlin had fallen over every tree branch there was and had vowed that he’d never, ever do anything like that again - even then you could still hear planes every so often, and cars passing by on the road off to the north. Here, there was the sound of birds, and the rustle of trees, but beyond that, there was nothing.
Merlin blinked, looking around himself. The light was dim, but he could see that he was lying in what looked like a forest, the trees thick-trunked, with low-hanging branches. The ground was soft and damp beneath his body and there was a coppery smell mixed in with the heavy scent of the earth. The bus was nowhere to be seen.
He sat up and held a hand up to his aching head, wondering what had happened. Even though he’d spent his whole life using magic, it still surprised him with what it could do. It was one of the reasons (the other being that he simply wasn’t any good with numbers) why he’d never taken any of the subjects like physics at school, because he couldn’t bring himself to sit there and learn a set of rules that he knew weren’t quite right, because magic managed to break every single one of them, every time he used it.
Merlin looked around again, but he couldn’t see the road that the bus had been driving along. He supposed that the swirl of power he’d felt must have been some sort of teleportation spell, or something. He didn’t think that it was his own magic that had done this, but he didn’t know what else it could have been. His magic usually only acted out when he was in danger, and he wondered whether that meant that the bus had crashed. He bit his lip, worried. The bus had been full of people and they’d been moving fast. A crash at that speed would probably be a serious one.
Merlin leant back against the trunk of the tree, crossing his legs beneath him. At least he still had his backpack, he thought, dragging it into his lap and reaching into the pocket. He would just call Will, or his mother, or the emergency services, and they’d work out where he was and how he should go about getting back. He could try using a spell, he supposed, but the magic didn’t seem familiar and he didn’t want to leave parts of himself behind. He’d read Harry Potter. That sort of thing was just nasty.
But when he flipped open his phone, there wasn’t any reception. He waved it around wildly in the air for a few minutes, cursing, but there was no change.
“Shit,” he said, tucking it reluctantly back into his backpack. He must have travelled further away then he’d thought. A small voice in his head told him that he could be hundreds of miles from anywhere, but he didn’t think that listening to that voice would really help him all that much right now.
“Shit,” he said again, because swearing was good. It was better than panicking. He looked down at his backpack, thinking. All the survival books he’d read said the same thing: if you get lost from your group, stay where you are. But Merlin doubted that that applied to his situation - his group was on a bus somewhere, probably crashed, and Merlin didn’t think they’d be in a hurry to go looking for a pale, skinny boy who mysteriously vanished mid-trip. They probably thought he was a ghost.
No, he’d just have to walk until he found something resembling civilisation, or until he got reception back on his phone. He stood up, pulling out his penknife and swinging his bag onto his back. His father had left the knife to Merlin when he’d died, along with a tiny carving of a dragon, its wooden spikes worn down from all the times Merlin had run his fingers over them.
He pressed the blade against the trunk of the tree, gouging out an X in the wood. He’d just walk in a straight line from here, he decided, and if he didn’t find anything he could always turn around and come back again. Though there didn’t really seem to be any point in coming back here, he thought, taking one last look around the clearing. There was nothing to suggest he’d be able to get back to the bus from this particular spot.
He flicked the knife closed, shoved it back into his pocket and turned towards the place where the trees looked the sparsest, the forest curving dark and quiet over his head as he set off.
Two hours later, Merlin was starting to worry. He still hadn’t found any signs of civilisation, his legs were aching, and he could feel the sunlight sinking into his skin, reddening it, despite the fact that it was filtered by the canopy above him.
He shifted his backpack around on his back, trying to stop the straps from digging quite so hard into his shoulders. The sun was high in the sky now and Merlin wondered what would happen if he didn’t find any houses before dark. He could start fires with his magic - he’d done it often enough - but if he fell asleep it would probably burn down half the forest before he could stop it. But then again, sleeping alone in the darkness, in the middle of an unknown wood, didn’t really seem like a favourable alternative.
The small voice in his head came back again after that, telling him that things really weren’t looking so good, and Merlin was almost beginning to believe it when the forest started to thin out. He smiled, because that was definitely a good sign, and was just about to tug his phone back out of his backpack when he saw the castle.
Castle, he thought. And then he stopped, because castle. He didn’t remember there being any castles in Camelot. Will would have mentioned it. He would have seen it, for god’s sake. He hadn’t been that drunk when he’d visited the city.
But there was a castle in front of him now, a huge, pale, stone thing, with actual red-gold flags on the battlements, whipping in the breeze. Below the castle there seemed to be some sort of a town, only it had smoke billowing gently from chimneys and everything seemed to be wooden and Merlin didn’t know where in the world he was, but it certainly wasn’t Camelot.
In fact, he thought as he made his way down through the trees towards the town, it didn’t look like any sort of place he’d ever heard of. Perhaps it was one of those theme parks where everything was old and everyone wore costumes. That must be it.
He stopped again as he reached the bottom of the hill, and a man rode past him on a horse. In chain mail. It was definitely a theme park then, Merlin decided. God, this day was getting stranger and stranger.
He walked along the road leading up to the gates, figuring that even a theme park had to have some sort of a phone. People got heatstroke at those things, all the time, and they’d need some way of calling for help. He looked up to see that there was a lady coming towards him carrying a basket, her clothes plain brown and old-fashioned.
“Excuse me,” Merlin said. “Which town is this?”
The lady looked at him as though she wasn’t quite sure whether he was being serious. “Camelot,” she said after a moment. Merlin blinked.
“No it’s not,” he said after a moment. “There’s no castle in Camelot. Camelot has cars and office buildings.”
The lady stared at him for a second, holding her basket to her chest and frowning, like he’d just told her the sky was green. Merlin watched in bemusement as she backed away from him and then walked quickly along the road towards the town gates. He shook his head, deciding that he’d just have to find a phone on his own, and started walking along the road in the same direction as the lady had fled.
When he reached the gate, he noticed that there were guards standing on either side of it, wearing the same type of chainmail that he’d seen on the man who rode past him earlier. They frowned fiercely at him as he passed them, and Merlin grinned. This place was good, he thought. If he ever worked out where it was, he’d have to bring Will back here.
He walked beneath the high arch of the gate, then stopped and stared, his mouth falling open, because everything just looked so medieval. He didn’t know how he was going to find a phone, or a map, or anything that would help him to work out where he was in a place like this. He hadn’t been overseas before, but he had discovered a stack of old National Geographics in the study cupboard one winter that had images of places that looked a little bit like this one. The towns they showed were all cobbled streets and wooden houses and horse-drawn carts, as though they had dropped out of time in the seventeenth century, and someone had found them and pushed them back into the twenty-first by mistake. But even those photos, strange though they were, hadn’t shown anywhere as completely and utterly foreign as this place. The road beneath his feet was made of actual stone, there were men wandering past in robes, sporting beards that looked as though they’d never seen a set of clippers, and the houses around him looked like they’d collapse if you pushed against their walls. They were nothing like the solid, concrete-and-cement buildings of Ealdor. There were tethered animals in the marketplace off to his right, and what looked like an actual blacksmith’s forge to his left, a fire roaring in the centre and the scent of metal wafting out from under its low roof.
He moved further along the road, slinging his backpack around and clutching it to his chest. He felt like he needed something to hold onto, because his magic had been strange before, but it had never been this strange. It was one thing, he knew, to travel to a foreign country, but quite another to appear suddenly in one. He didn’t know whether the people were friendly, or whether this was all some sort of an elaborate hoax, or whether he’d just fallen asleep on the bus and was dreaming the entire thing. He pinched himself roughly on the arm, just to make sure. No, he thought, wincing. Definitely not a dream.
But there was something else different about the town too, Merlin realised. Everyone he passed seemed to avoid catching his eye and no one was walking close to him, even though the crowd was pressed firmly together at every other point in the marketplace. It was as though no one wanted to associate with him - as though they were scared of him, just as the woman he’d talked to outside the gates seemed to be. Merlin supposed that his clothes might have had something to do with it, but skinny jeans and a dark blue t-shirt wasn’t, in his opinion, particularly menacing attire. For the tenth time in as many minutes, Merlin wondered just where exactly he was, because it was quickly becoming apparent that he wasn’t in Camelot, or Ealdor, or anywhere near them. Nowhere near Ealdor had markets like these, with animals tied up outside the stalls, and Merlin had never seen anyone dressed as these people were, with plain, dark, old-fashioned clothes. There were also no cars, no buses or trains or overhead powerlines or signs of technology at all. If it was a theme park, it was a very well-constructed one. Even the air smelled different, because beneath the scent of the marketplace there was no hint of petrol, or of any of the other smells that Merlin was used to.
There was a noise like cheering, or the sound of a crowd, off to his right. Merlin stopped walking, turning his head towards the noise. Perhaps it was a performance or something, he thought, one of those historical re-enactment things. He turned down a narrow street in the direction of the noise, hoping that would mean that there would be someone who would be willing to point him in the direction of home, or at least tell him where on earth he was. There were people standing in the doorways of the houses that he passed, but they did not greet him, and nor did they follow him towards the sound. Merlin wondered briefly whether he shouldn’t ask them what he was walking towards, in case it was a riot or something, but before he’d made up his mind to do so, the alleyway widened out into a square at the very base of the castle.
Merlin paused for a moment, looking up at it in awe. He hadn’t seen a castle up close before, and this one was like everything he imagined a castle would be - it had tall stone towers, crenelated walls, and it was built out of pale, moon-coloured stone slabs that looked bright in the midday sun.
There was a man standing on a balcony above the square, making some sort of a speech, and Merlin saw that the crowd of people packed into it were all staring up at him, as though he was someone important. He had a fierce expression on his face as he stared down over the people and he was wearing a crown, Merlin realised, so perhaps he was some sort of a ruler.
Merlin looked around, wondering if the people were simply here to listen to him speak, and at that moment the crowd shifted and he saw - oh, god, was that an executioner’s block? It was low and solid, and there was a man positioned on it, his head on one side. Merlin couldn’t see his face, but his body was held in place by two black-clothed men, and his shoulders were twitching, as though he was trying to get away. Merlin took a step forward, beginning to raise his hand - the man was obviously distressed, and Merlin wouldn’t just stand there and watch him die - but the man on the balcony held out his hand before Merlin could act, and suddenly there was an axe swinging through the air above the man’s head. The crowd surged forward, obscuring Merlin’s view, but he could still hear the heavy thud of the blade hitting the wood, and the king’s voice in was loud in his ears. Sorcerer, he said. The penalty for sorcery is death.
Merlin stood still for a moment, staring at the place where the axe had fallen. It had to be staged, didn’t it? But the white, wide-eyed faces of the crowd and the way the man’s body was sagging against the ground looked far, far too real for that.
He turned quickly and pushed his way back through the crowd, feeling sick. Shit, he thought. There was a man dead because of magic. Merlin had almost used magic to try and save him. He shoved against the wall of people surrounding him, forcing a path through. The man on the balcony was still speaking, but Merlin didn’t listen. He didn’t understand this place, and that was dangerous. He had to leave, to find a way to get home, back to Ealdor, where Will would be sitting in the pub hitting on girls and his mother would be in the garden hanging out washing. Those things were real. This - this town, with its killing and its odd scents and its strange people -wasn’t. It was just a place, a horrible place, yes, but one that Merlin didn’t have a name for, one that he couldn’t locate on a map. As long as it stayed anonymous, and as long as he got out of it as soon as possible, then there would still be a chance that it wasn’t real. That there wasn’t a bloodstained axe in the square behind him, and that the man on the balcony wasn’t really there, and wasn’t announcing a feast with the same breath he’d used to condemn a sorcerer to death.
Merlin slipped through a low stone arch, heading for the place where the crowd was the thinnest. It was only when he reached the stairs that he realised he’d managed to cross the square and that he was now inside the castle. He leant back against the cool stone of the passageway, trying to understand. They’d actually killed someone, right there in front of him, and the crowd had barely even made a noise as it happened, as though that sort of thing was ordinary. He didn’t know how that could be, because he hadn’t thought that there were any other sorcerers alive anymore. And even if there were, it wasn’t right - it couldn’t be normal - to just kill them.
He shook his head and pushed himself upright from the wall. He didn’t like this place, he didn’t understand it, and the sooner he got out of it the better. He would just go back the way he came and find the clearing again, he thought. He had a vague idea of how the magic might have worked; he would try using it to send himself back to Ealdor. Adjusting his backpack, he turned back towards the archway, walking around the corner and -
“Ouch.” Merlin looked up to see that he’d collided hard with a woman and knocked her against the wall.
“Sorry,” he said quickly, holding out a hand to help her upright. But he’d misjudged how light she was and he pulled her too far, sending them both tumbling over onto the floor.
“Sorry,” he said again, trying to wriggle out from beneath her. She was laughing now and Merlin couldn’t help but laugh too.
“I’m Gwen,” she said between gasps.
“Merlin,” Merlin said, sticking out his hand to shake hers. She looked at it for a moment and then started laughing all over again, because they were still lying down and shaking hands lying down probably wasn’t normal here. It certainly wasn’t normal back in Ealdor. Merlin made a face.
“Where am I, anyway?” he asked once she’d stopped giggling and they’d both got themselves upright. “And don’t say Camelot, I know it isn’t.”
Gwen raised her eyebrows. “Camelot,” she said slowly. “Where else would we be?”
Merlin looked through the archway at the medieval-looking stalls and the dirt path functioning as a road.
“Australia?” he guessed. “I don’t know. But I’ve been to Camelot, and this isn’t it.”
Gwen stared at him for a second and then looked around at the castle, frowning. “It really is Camelot,” she said, bending to pick up the linen she’d dropped. “Perhaps you’d better go see the physician, there might be something wrong with your head.” She bit her lip, looking at him with wide eyes. “Not that I’m saying you’re stupid, or anything,” she continued quickly. “It’s just that most people know where they are and if you don’t you’re probably not right. In the head.”
Merlin stared at her. “Right,” he said slowly. “Uh, thanks. I’ll do that.” He moved aside to let her walk past, and then continued along the passageway, rubbing the side of his head where he’d hit it against the ground. There was definitely something wrong with this place.
Merlin supposed that revealing his magic to the physician probably wasn’t the best way to go about introducing himself, but he’d walked into the room just as the man was falling off the balcony and he couldn’t just let him die, if there was something that he could do to help. It had been the same with the time Will fell in the river, and Merlin had just let his instincts take hold and push the right magic out of him. His mother had understood when he told her about it later on, because it was Will and Merlin would have revealed his magic to the whole world in order to save him.
But this time, it was for an old man he didn’t know in a place where magic was illegal and Merlin hadn’t even wanted to go see the physician, not really, but the castle guards had been staring at him suspiciously and so he’d decided that getting out of their sight was probably the smart thing to do. He’d spotted the physician’s chambers and thought that he could hide inside until they’d passed by.
“How did you do that?” the man asked incredulously, as soon as he’d righted himself from the bed. “And don’t you know that magic is illegal in Camelot, boy?”
“Yes, I know,” Merlin said weakly, because he remembered the execution all too well. “And I don’t know where this is, but it isn’t Camelot. Do you have a phone?”
“I can assure you that this is Camelot,” the man replied sternly, his eyebrows raised. “And if you continue to practice magic like that, Uther Pendragon will have your head.”
Merlin rubbed a hand across his face, because this day was already far too long and he just wanted a straight answer so that he could get home and - wait, what?
“Did you say Uther Pendragon?” he asked.
“Yes,” the man said, frowning.
“The Uther Pendragon?”
“Uther Pendragon, the king of Camelot.”
Merlin froze, trying to put together all the things he’d seen into some sort of order. Everyone insisting that this was Camelot, medieval-looking houses, livestock in the street, men in chainmail on horses, an execution, and now this man was insisting that Uther Pendragon - as in the Uther Pendragon who fathered King Arthur - was king - either this was some very, very elaborate hoax, or...
“I’m in Camelot,” Merlin breathed.
The man looked at him like he was a little bit thick. “Yes,” he said.
“No, I’m in Camelot,” Merlin said. “Not my Camelot, but this Camelot.” He swung his bag off his back, ripping open the front pocket and brandishing his book in the old man’s face. The man reached out a hand to look at it, and Merlin snatched it back.
“Actually no, don’t look at that,” he said hastily, because if Uther was king then Arthur probably hadn’t been born yet, and Merlin shouldn’t be showing what was essentially a prophesy to the people who lived here. He pushed it back into his bag and looked back over at the man, wondering exactly how to explain what he’d just realised.
“I’m Merlin,” he said after a moment. “And I think… I think I’m from the future.”
The physician - Gaius, he said his name was - was actually remarkably knowledgeable on the subject of magic for someone who was living in a time when it was illegal. He had more books on the topic than Merlin had ever seen in his life. Merlin had tried to read them over Gaius’ shoulders, until the man had raised his eyebrows sternly and batted him away.
“It would take a very powerful spell to create that kind of shift in time,” Gaius said after a while, looking up from a dusty page. Merlin took his hand away from the wall (which he hadn’t been stroking, exactly, but it was a wall of Pendragon Camelot and Merlin wanted to see what it would feel like) and walked back over to Gaius.
“Can I get back?” he said. Gaius flipped through a couple of pages and then frowned.
“Yes, I believe so,” he said, and Merlin sighed with relief, because from what he’d gathered, he fit in even less here than he did in his own time. “But it’ll take time to find the right spell,” Gaius added. “The wrong one could do untold damage to both this time and yours.” Merlin nodded. That, at least, he could understand.
“I will find it though, Merlin,” Gaius said quietly, looking over at Merlin. Merlin felt a surge of relief flood his chest at that - relief that someone else knew what was happening to him and relief that the physician was going to help him. He knew he was in Uther Pendragon’s Camelot, in the castle that Arthur would one day live in, and that every time he’d imagined this sort of thing it had been exciting and fun and brilliant. But Merlin was tired. He’d been shoved around, he’d watched an execution, he’d got lost in a forest and he was thousands of years away from home, and right now all he felt was relief that Gaius understood that, and that the man had shown him kindness.
Gaius had given Merlin one of his rooms, which Merlin was grateful for, even if he wasn’t quite sure what the mattress was made of and the bed felt sort of like it had been carved from stone. The old man had also eyed Merlin’s attire for a long moment and then given Merlin some clothes, muttering something about modesty. Merlin didn’t know what was immodest about jeans, really, but apparently they weren’t appropriate for wandering around the castle in. He kept his scarf when he changed, though because there would never be a time when scarves weren’t fashionable.
It was only once he’d pulled on an old tunic, one that had an earthy, clean sort of a scent, and had curled beneath the sheets that night that he let himself think about where he was. He’d seen Uther Pendragon. He was in Arthur’s Camelot - not exactly in Arthur’s time, of course, but it was closer than Merlin had ever dreamt of getting. He didn’t know whether this was real, or whether he had somehow ended up inside the story, but he found that it didn’t really matter. It felt real enough now, with the sheets tucked around his shoulders and the mattress rough beneath his back, and Merlin knew that he couldn’t hate this place, not anymore. It was dangerous and foreign and Merlin had a feeling that he wouldn’t fit in it at all, but he had been given the chance to brush against the edges of King Arthur’s story - the story that had shaped his life - and he couldn’t hate that.
He rolled onto his side, tugging the scratchy blanket further up his chest, and wondered exactly how he’d gotten here. It couldn’t have been his doing - and okay, yes, Merlin knew that of the strange things that occurred when he was around, ninety nine percent of them were his fault. And that of that ninety nine percent, at least half of them were involuntarily his fault. But he knew that he hadn’t done this. He didn’t know how to do this, and he didn’t think that there was enough power in his body to do it. Perhaps there was another sorcerer, Merlin thought sleepily. If there was, he’d have to thank them for this someday. And with that thought still swirling around in his mind, he slipped quietly into sleep.
When Merlin came out into Gaius’ chambers the next morning, the man shoved several bottles into his arms and told him to take them to various parts of the castle while he kept looking through his books for the spell Merlin would need. Merlin went without complaint, because he was in medieval Camelot and there was no way that he was going to miss out on an opportunity to explore it.
“Try not to interfere with anything,” Gaius said as Merlin hurried towards the door. Merlin made a face back at him, because of course he wasn’t going to interfere. He’d seen enough time travel movies to know that messing around in the past was all kinds of dangerous.
But even so, he couldn’t stop himself from trailing his fingers along the walls of the passageway as he walked along it and grinning widely at the maidservants who passed by. He wondered if one of them would look after King Arthur when he was born, and whether the man would walk along these same hallways and look out of the same windows as Merlin did. It was exhilarating, to know that he was this close to the place that he’d always dreamt of going; that he was this close to the man he’d always wanted to meet. He wondered whether Will would believe him if Merlin told him about it when got back home. Probably not, Merlin thought. Will was very selective about what spells he believed in - if it was something he’d seen Merlin doing, he would admit that it was real. If Merlin did it by himself and told Will about it later, the man would usually just laugh and tell him to stop bragging.
Merlin managed to deliver Gaius’ potions without incident and he barely interacted with their recipients, just in case this was part of history and he said something wrong and erased half the of the population of 21st century Camelot by mistake. He knew it was probably an irrational worry - he’d interacted with dozens of people already, so any damage he was likely to do had probably already been done, but he was wary nonetheless.
He walked back down the stairs from the final set of chambers he’d needed to visit. Gaius would probably take a while to find anything worth using, so there was no point in going straight back to the man’s chambers. Merlin looked down at himself, considering. He was wearing slightly-too-large but definitely medieval-looking clothes - ones that had belonged to Gaius, or to Gaius’ last apprentice, he supposed. He figured that he blended in enough to risk exploring the rest of the castle, as long as he stayed out of the way and didn’t talk to anyone.
He peered around the passageway he was standing in, wondering where to go first, then paused as he heard the faint sound of raised voices from outside. It sounded as though there were several people shouting, and Merlin walked down the stone steps towards the noise, wondering what the commotion was about.
It was just as he was rounding the edge of the castle wall that Merlin saw him. Well, them actually, because there were several other men - knights, Merlin realised - standing around, but Merlin didn’t pay any attention to them. He was too busy looking at the man in front of him. He was - he was fucking fit, as Will would say. And, judging by the number of swords he was carrying, probably also a knight. The man’s hair was light blonde and just long enough for him to have to flick it out of his eyes every so often, with a toss of his head that Merlin found both irritating and really damn hot. He was muscled and golden, with a smug grin plastered across his face, as though he knew full well what he wanted and that he would be able to get it. The man was built in a way that made Merlin want to - not climb him, exactly, but certainly push him down and run his lips over the man’s skin, until he was squirming and moaning and hard beneath Merlin’s hands.
Merlin stared at the man’s lips, which were full and red, knowing he should probably turn around and go back the way he had come, before he did something stupid like talking to the knight. But he couldn’t bring himself to move. If the man grew a beard, he’d be exactly Merlin’s type.
The man glanced over at him, his grin still firmly in place, and then raised his arm and threw something that was sharp-looking and silver towards - towards another man. Merlin blinked as he took in the rest of the situation. The man was throwing knives at people. Actual knives, with pointed tips and everything. Merlin knew that he shouldn’t really be surprised - this was a medieval society, after all, and that sort of thing was probably normal - but the other man looked like he was struggling beneath his shield and he felt sure that the blonde man was going to miss the target at any second now.
So Merlin opened his mouth and threw his non-intervention plan out of the window, because he couldn’t just stand by and let the blonde man torture people, even if he looked absolutely gorgeous while doing it. He called out, his brain supplying words that he threw out of his mouth without actually stopping to consider whether they were the smartest ones to be using. It wasn’t his fault though, because he was a bit distracted by the sun, which was shining off the man’s hair and bathing his golden skin, and just generally making him look a bit too much like a god and not enough like a spoilt brat.
Because Merlin realised that - like many of the stunningly pretty people he’d met - the man was acting like an absolute tosser. And because his mouth had decided it didn’t need to wait around for his brain to catch up, he found himself telling the man as much.
“You’re a-“ he started, before realising that he should probably check how dead using the word fuck would get him before he started tossing it into conversations. “A prat,” he finished, because that sounded like the type of insult they would use.
The man was in front of him now, staring at him with disbelief. “What?” he said, stepping closer, until Merlin could see every one of the man’s blonde eyelashes.
“You’re a prat,” Merlin said again, only he didn’t sound so sure this time, because the man’s blue gaze was pinning him in place and he was close enough to touch, and he certainly didn’t look like a prat. He looked like the sort of man Merlin would have wanked over if he’d seen him on the front of a magazine. Merlin swallowed. He really didn’t need to be thinking about that right now.
The knight was speaking again and Merlin tried to refocus his mind, because the man’s tone was derisive as he looked Merlin over, and Merlin had a feeling that he was getting insulted. And okay, taking a swing at the man probably wasn’t the wisest thing he could have done, but the man was acting unbelievably arrogant, and Merlin wasn’t going to stand there and let himself be walked all over. He only realised after the man had Merlin’s arm pinned painfully behind his back that there might have been a reason for his arrogance, and that - since battles and things were sort of a big deal back in medieval times - his skill as a fighter might have had something to do with it.
Even so, Merlin thought, jumping slightly as he was pulled backwards until his back was pressed against the knight’s own, the man was completely overconfident.It wasn’t as though he was the king, or anything. He voiced this last thought aloud, because he really needed to keep his mind off the way the man’s thighs felt against the backs of his own.
“Who do you think you are?” he asked, trying to pull his arm free. “The king?”
“No,” the man said, pulling him closer. “I’m his son, Arthur.”
“You’re Arthur Pendragon?” Merlin gasped, twisting his head around, and Arthur stared incredulously down at him.
“You can’t address me like that,” he spat, and it was just as well that the man chose that moment to twist Merlin’s arm so that he collapsed to the ground, because Merlin didn’t think he would ever have been able to live down the fact that he fainted in Arthur Pendragon’s arms.
After he got out of the dungeons, where he’d woken up after his encounter with the prince, Merlin decided to avoid Arthur for the next few days. He also tried his hardest not to think about him, either, because whenever he did his feelings started bumping clumsily around inside his chest, making it impossible to get any of the tasks Gaius had set for him done. He was confused, and shocked, but beneath all that there was a deep sense of disappointment and Merlin didn’t want to acknowledge that right now. If he acknowledged that, it would be acknowledging that the Arthur he’d met was the Arthur of legend, and that the beautiful, selfless king he’d spent his childhood dreaming of was simply a man - and a rather horrid one at that.
And then Merlin would have to reconcile the Arthur that he’d built up in his head with this living, breathing man, and he didn’t exactly know how to start. Merlin had never imagined Arthur to be young, let alone his own age, and it was difficult to look at the prince, so fresh and golden and arrogant and - Merlin admitted reluctantly, gorgeous - and compare him to the king that Merlin had read about, the one who led armies and was loved by his people and ruled over the whole of Albion. He didn’t know whether this Arthur had it within himself to become that person, that king, or whether Merlin had simply built the man up inside his mind to something that he would never become.
So he stayed away from the prince and instead spent two long days wandering around Gaius’ chambers, tidying up the man’s workbench and bookshelves. It was only when Gaius tried to persuade him to clean out his leech tank that Merlin resisted.
“I’m not touching that,” he said, looking at the tank in disgust. “And you can get rid of them anyway,” he added. “Bloodletting doesn’t work.” Gaius raised an eyebrow at him.
“Keep things like that to yourself, boy,” he said sternly, and Merlin sighed, walking back into his room before he revealed anything else he shouldn’t.
He spent the rest of that afternoon on his laptop, which was still on full battery, trying to work out whether he could use magic to somehow send an email through to his mother or Will. He knew that his mother wouldn’t be overly worried if he didn’t answer the phone at the flat, because he didn’t even know if it was connected yet, but he wanted to have some contact with Ealdor, just so that he’d know it was still there. There was no way of knowing if he was successful at sending the thing through, however, and after the fifteenth attempt he turned the computer off and flopped down onto his bed.
Something poked him sharply in the small of his back and he rolled over to see that he’d landed on top of his backpack. Sitting up on the bed, he pulled it open, trying to remember what he’d brought along. He already knew that he had his laptop, which he would have to keep hidden. It was probably just as dangerous to have in his possession as a book of spells, if only because it didn’t look at all medieval. Uther would probably think it was some kind of sorcerer’s tool if he ever saw it.
He tipped the bag upside down, sending a cascade of condoms tumbling into his lap. Merlin frowned. He really hoped that that was Will’s idea and not his mother’s. He’d seen Will skulking around near the backpack on the last afternoon before Merlin had left, though, and he supposed that he really should have expected something like this. Merlin sighed, stuffing them all back into the outside pocket of his bag. In all of the imagined scenarios in which he’d met Arthur Pendragon, he would have needed most of those condoms. But this Arthur… well, Merlin wanted to punch him in the face just as badly as he wanted to strip him naked.
Of course, it was on the same day he had that thought that he first saved Arthur’s life.
Part 2