HAPPY BIRTHDAY LASS <333
To the loveliest lassiterfics on this illustrious day of her birth, I bequeath this revolutionary AU (which we had already spun threads of here before it sort of was forgotten, and then I appropriated its general approach). This managed to start out simply enough, but then it then snowballed into a giant social-theory spree that got a little out of hand. It's kind of a pasttime, really?
Rewriting the Old Language
Merlin, PG. 8207 words.
Merlin, Morgana, Arthur, and Gwen all live their own revolution within a revolution; they defy the desire of the cloture of metaphysics to “make the definition coincide with the defined, the ‘father’ with the ‘son’.”
Title and summary quote are from Gayatri Spivak's preface to Derrida's Of Grammatology.
Authors who helped me make this: CLR James, Sigmund Freud, Herbert Marcuse, Karl Marx, Herman Melville, Simone de Beauvoir, Michele Foucault, Jack Kerouac, and unconsciously if not specifically Max Weber.
"In short, [Captain Ahab] is a man who wants to live fully and completely according to his beliefs. That precisely is the cause of his undoing."
C.L.R. James, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways.
I was here before him, before her, and I will be here after they are gone.
I had a plan - I had forever to think of it, shut up like this, and it would have worked, it would have solved everything. I had to restore the old religion and make of all men universal converts. Out of all the candidates she rose to the top; she conquered the rest and appropriated their power. I had all my hopes in her, until the boy came along, and I realized that I could lead a double pronged attack. She would infiltrate and reach the people; he, their masters. But he wasn't very good at following the plan. Doesn't he know? I would have made Arthur immortal; his image would have been on every building, his name on everyone's hearts and lips. The people would have known him as the greatest leader of men the world has ever seen. I would give Arthur Pendragon a place where no time could weaken him, and there would be no politics to taint him. And she, the genius, was poised to take the enemy by the throat, to release the wave of revolution worldwide, when that foolish boy turned on her and destroyed her.
Merlin, no matter how you think you will break the cycle, you cannot escape your nature. You are revolutionary as long as magic is repressed, and when it is no longer repressed, it will overflow the world.
Before Merlin returns, the very stones of Camelot shake for a few seconds, and settle.
It wakes Arthur up, and in alarm he turns on the radio to see what could have happened.
" - wow, did you feel that! We’ve got some kind of earthquake here, in Albion of all places -"
The broadcaster hasn't finished his sentence and Arthur is putting on his pants and boots as quickly as he can. He knows what they don't: the subversives can and will use explosives. These days, man shakes the earth more often than she shakes herself.
But it was nothing after all. He is relieved, more relieved than the police squad, almost more than his father (who would have had hell to deal with, reporters and demands on higher security, greater surveillance, everything he was already doing and more). Sometimes he thinks his father wants them to bomb a building, kill some people, so just cause can be declared and they no longer have to hold back. Arthur's never seen a dead man. The idea of it makes him shake, and as long as he lives he never wants his father to see that. Arthur's never seen a dead man and he never wants to, and every new statistic of the war against terror nauseates him.
We've come so far with medicine and food, he thinks. Infant mortality is at an all-time low. Life expectancy is at an all-time high. But it's not gone yet. The world is killing enough of us; how can we even think of killing each other in the meantime?
-
It hasn't even been that long, Merlin thinks in shock when he sees the first shirt with her picture on it. Her face is uplifted as though she spent her life looking into the future, but he knows the work she did in the name of her cause. It sullied any ideal these young people had seen in that lifted gaze. History, Merlin thinks, is strange, and it's stranger when you can see it pass you by, when you can remember the old narrative still and can feel it slipping away in the face of the new. In a few years no one will be able to much more than her name: Nimueh. It'll be a rallying cry for whatever they decide she stands for: violent resistance. Liberation. Anarchy. Truth. Species-being. Magic.
She wasn't just an empty figurehead, though; he remembers hearing her speak once and the sway that she held. It was intimate; she didn't command crowds but worked her way into your confidence. She was human, and weak, until you realized she had tricked you into thinking yourself perhaps her equal, and then perhaps her superior, and then she reared her head to reveal her powers: she had her hands in everything. What other people thought was dirty work was actually raw power in resources, and while you took these resources for granted she knew them intimately, down to their last fault and quirk, their malleability and unexpected strengths.
It wasn't exactly like that, Merlin thinks as he sits there and sips his iced mocha. But that's what I remember about her. I can't even grasp what all she could do and yet somehow I got in the middle of it and tore her out of it and I won't take her place. I won't. I never would. The Dragon, fuck, the dragon's never going to speak to him again; he's lucky the guy's practically under house arrest or else he'd be afraid for the country. Merlin feels so very alone in this whole mess except for his uncle Gaius. And even he doesn't understand all what's going on. He only has the texts - Hegel, Marx, Engels, Robespierre, the Druids, histories of the Sidhe, old pagan rites - we can't comprehend how they've transformed except to go out and see what the people are doing these days, what magic is to them. Arthur knows this, he understands. Uther's good enough at kissing babies but only Arthur can and will sit down to have a conversation with the voter, will listen to a negro, will eat at a coffee shop like this one.
She reminds him of Nimueh - Morgana. It scares him when he realizes it. It's in the middle of one of her poems when instead of yelling she reads the facts about fallout in Hiroshima in a cool, clear, almost quiet voice. Everyone leans in to hear better. Merlin, sitting in the back in his worn brown jacket, chin on his fist, finds himself and everyone else utterly absorbed in the way her voice is acquiring grain, straining, potent with suppressed emotion. And he wonders, suddenly, if his magic is even real compared to this. Can he touch people's hearts like this? There's no such thing as a love potion; he has looked through his book and all of Gaius' for ages. There's nothing in magic that will touch the heart so, that will bring tears all on its own, that will make Morgana smile like Gwen makes her, or Arthur's voice strong like finding that men entrust him with their livelihoods.
When Morgana finishes she smiles a little and brushes past a young bespectacled college student to sit at Merlin's table.
"How's it going?" she asks coolly.
Merlin shrugs, and grins. "You were great," he says.
She rolls her eyes and he gives her a thumbs up because he already knows she thinks he's a square.
"Hey!" Gwen says, coming in from the back. "Guess who's here?" She has Arthur in tow, and he lets go of her hand to offer it to Morgana. She grasps it firmly and Merlin sees him barely conceal a wince, then give her hand a few good pumps.
"Good job," he says. "I didn't know you did so much writing, or performing."
"I've been doing more of it recently," she says. "And reading."
"I bet you read more out of school than you did in," he says. She retorts, "You probably haven't read anything in or out of school."
Gwen looks uncomfortable but Arthur laughs. "I feel overdressed," he says, and Merlin nods. He looks like a lawyer, not a free-spirited coffee-shop denizen. Like he has money.
"You're fine," says Gwen. "Sit down. I'll go get us some coffee."
"Let me get it," Arthur says, but she puts a hand on his shoulder and pushes gently.
"I know the baristas," she says with a smile. "Trust me. Anything special?"
"Just milk and sugar," Arthur says. Merlin shakes his head and lifts his cup; he's already got his.
"Black," Morgana says. Arthur raises an eyebrow in her direction. She raises one right back. “I drink it black on principle,” she says, but Gwen giggles and nudges Merlin with her elbow. “She not-so-secretly loves caramel macchiatos,” she whispers in his ear. Merlin tries not to laugh.
-
Morgana’s father was an ambassador, good friends of the Pendragon family. When they were assigned to Chile they asked Uther to take care of eleven-year-old Morgana. “She’ll have a better school here, she’ll know the language, she’ll be around Arthur, who’s her own age,” her father said. "It'll be much better for her. We’ll be visiting frequently, but you know things are unstable in Santiago and Morgana’s mother would be able to sleep at night if she were to be here in the US."
"I'll take good care of her," Uther says. "You know I'm not around much but the house staff is like family; they've looked after Arthur since his mother died. She'll have a home here."
Morgana doesn't feel the same, but what eleven-year-old does? She and Arthur go to the same school, and at their age they at first don't get along, but while Arthur has friends at school they're none of them close, and he's actually quite lonely at home most of the time. So they play games together and fight over who was cheating, and before long they're as good as siblings, bickering but nearly inseparable.
They're in their last few weeks of primary school, getting ready to graduate from eighth grade, when they get the news that Morgana's parents have been killed. The capitol was overthrown in a military coup, and though the newspapers say it was nearly bloodless, they only mean that most of those in the Capitol building that day survived. But the Le Fays weren't among them.
Morgana doesn't go to school for a week. She cries in her room for days, won't touch the food they bring her, but eventually Uther gets her to come out of her cave once or twice for meals. They talk, in private, but Arthur doesn't know what to do until one afternoon an idea occurs to him and he goes to knock softly on her door.
"Who is it?" Morgana says. Her voice is low and dead.
"It's me," Arthur says.
"What do you want?"
He opens the door a crack. "I need someone to practice fencing with. Do you know how to hold an epee?"
She looks up from her book. "I can figure it out."
Arthur holds out the practice sword to her and she draws it, and he isn't sure but he might not have imagined a little smile on her lips.
That summer is a good one, despite everything. Arthur gets loads better at epee than his coach expected him to, and he starts saying things like "Soon when you're team captain," which makes Arthur grin. When he tells Morgana she rolls her eyes and says, You're not that good, but she smiles and he knows she's happy for him too. She's not half bad herself, he says, for a girl who just started. He might even enjoy practicing with her.
Once school starts up again, though, they stop having time to practice, and generally see less of each other. Arthur is attending a prestigious prep school while Morgana is at the city's oldest all-girls Catholic academy, and he starts bringing friends home, and she starts rolling up her school uniform skirt like all the coolest girls do, wearing her black sweater every day and buying tight jeans with her allowance.
She doesn't know anyone at the school, really; it's very small and these girls' families are so entangled they've had social alliances since they were three. When she eats lunch instead of lurking in the library, she ends up sitting at the only empty table with a dark-skinned doe-eyed girl. Her name is Gwen, Morgana learns, and she's there on scholarship. Her father's an ironworker and they live far away, in one of the rougher neighborhoods. They make friends, or at least the closest thing Morgana knows to friends, which involves Morgana sharing clothes with her and Gwen sewing patches onto Morgana's jeans.
Arthur says she's getting girly, and instead of blowing up at him like she would have a year ago, she just rolls her eyes, and goes back to talking to Gwen on the phone.
-
Gwen and Morgana end up going to the same college, a state school, and being roommates. Morgana wants to do Art and Gwen is working on her English and Communications double major. They move out together after their first year into a nice furnished apartment. As long as Morgana majors in Political Science or International Relations, Uther will let her stay there, all expenses paid so she can focus on her degree. She's determined to somehow evade or defy his decree, but after Gwen calms her down and she takes a class or two, she realizes that she might actually be interested in it.
"It's about how the world works," she tells Gwen enthusiastically after her first Classics of Social Thought class. "Not history or current events, but why and the big picture. It's like having a veil torn away."
"It sounds amazing," Gwen says, and she listens avidly all through dinner to Morgana's enchanted raving.
-
Arthur Pendragon and Merlin Emrys share an apartment; they were roommates in college and it worked out so well (Merlin didn't mind doing laundry for both of them as long as Arthur cooked). Arthur figured it would be better than moving out with any of his fraternity brothers, who got drunk every weekend and trashed their own apartments. Arthur only knows Gwen through Morgana, but it turns out that Merlin and Gwen are in a bunch of the same classes, both being English majors, and so they end up seeing a bit of each other.
Arthur's father, Morgana's adoptive father, is President Uther Pendragon of the United States of America, and Arthur is being conditioned to take up his mantle. Merlin does not approve but he's a little weird, Arthur thinks, some kind of free spirit; still, he does hate the prospect of having his life planned out for him, with a set of boundaries and rules and everything, and the only one who hates that more than he does is Morgana. He used to think Merlin was lucky, that his mom didn't call to ream him out for a misstep, and sent cookies instead. That at least he wasn't trapped; he could major in whatever he wanted. Arthur used to think a lot of things.
Once, when Uther is touring abroad in September, Arthur discovers Merlin's life and what real need is. When Arthur comes back from his last class before winter vacation, he found Merlin in the midst of his sty of a room, throwing things into a suitcase. He has to go home for a week, he says. His mother has a farm - which surprises Arthur, he'd never known that Merlin grew up on a farm, how didn't he know this - the family farm, which she runs mostly on her own, with enough hired hands and neighborly help to keep it running modestly, but there's this drought that's struck this summer and her neighbors are occupied with their own fields, and there aren't as many laborers locally, and she won't be able to harvest enough to pay the mortgage.
Arthur doesn't know a thing about mortgages, but when Merlin asks Arthur (and he never, well pretty much never, asks Arthur for favors) if he could help him out, Arthur says yes immediately. He has never been able to explain this but since he was young, he has wanted to experience farm life. He used to read Laura Ingalls Wilder and other books about living off the land, and ever since he has just known that the most fulfilling life must be one where you are so very self-sufficient, where everything you have, you've earned and you know how it works because you built it yourself.
The week they spent there, Arthur will never forget. His suspicions that there was no greater thing than men and earth working together were confirmed. It was the hardest week of his life and it was the simplest. Here was real scarcity, real toil to make a living; here was real work, real subsistence. It was a religious experience; he saw this with his own eyes and his heart felt strong and right. That he was doing right by his father the President, if not his father the dictator; he was doing right by the human race. Here was the heartland, the farmland, where the farmer works close by the earth, by his honest labour, by the sweat of his brow. Here was the heartland where the apprentice attended to the journeyman, who attended to the master of his trade: the ironworkers, the teamsters, the wiremen, the carpenters.
When he left Merlin’s town, however, he realized that he barely knew the half of it. He realized that economic competition between neighbors was only detrimental to both; the sense of hierarchy here was flat, that everyone was tied much more closely and clearly to each other than any infrastructured city. When these people talked about important issues, they weren't abstracts; they were their own lives. Here, when he helped out on the Emrys farm alongside the hired labor, whose muscles were a greater help than any fine education, he felt a camaraderie he hadn't ever before.
After the end of the week, he and Merlin both left with Hunith’s embrace; they arrived law student and country boy to a cold administrative summons. Standing there in the Oval Office before his father, awaiting a reprimand for his unwarranted absence, he felt his own isolation. Here there were none his equals, in that endless cubicled bureaucracy where he could not reach out and touch the arm of the man beside him because there were no men beside him, only below him, and his father, his President, above.
-
Even though her major has changed, Morgana doesn't give up art. She couldn't ever, Gwen suspects. She has an artist's temperament, up one day and down the next, obsessive and a little compulsive, alternately social and hermetic, painting and writing in spurts but never really stopping.
She read about this in Freud - how art is a way of channeling inner tension out and venting that destructive energy. Morgana's paintings are strange things, as strange as her dreams must be. This awful dark struggle in her brings out the most vivid things. Part of Gwen is a little jealous that she can create all this beauty, but most of Gwen is sad when she sees how frustrated Morgana is. She has nightmares all the time, she knows. When she says something Morgana says, “I don’t know how anyone can have happy dreams. There’s so much to have nightmares about.”
Gwen frowns and gestures to their apartment, saying, “What’s so unhappy about this?”
Sometimes Morgana feels trapped in buildings, in this city, in this country, in her life. She paints cages from the inside out. But sometimes Morgana will blink, and reach for Gwen’s hand, and say, You’re right, you’re right, oh Gwen, and bury her face in Gwen’s shoulder. And Gwen will stroke her back, and it's all right, everything is all right for the time being.
-
When Morgana comes home after the first month or two of college, it’s pretty awful. Arthur says she's really changed, she can't do anything useful in heels, and what's she doing at a state school, she'll just end up being a secretary with that art degree. She calls him a jerkwad and a brainless jock, and says she can beat him at fencing any day.
Arthur bristles and scoffs, but she goes to get the practice swords from the attic. It doesn't take much more goading until they are in the back yard, assuming their stances.
"I bet you've forgotten everything," she says, and he says, "You have too." She smirks and says, "It won't even take me five tries to beat you." "You're on," he says.
The first and second are hardly even close, but she's forgotten much less than Arthur thought, and she's still wiry whereas he's slowed down. The third bout is closer, and suddenly Uther is watching from the deck - wasn't he gone campaigning today? Neither of them could keep track. The fourth, they're both getting out of breath, but she is still just a little bit quicker on her feet, and that's when she gets him.
She crows, Uther claps, and Arthur scowls, holding the stitch in his side. "Luck," he says.
"Shut up, it was not."
"Sure it was. If you hadn't stepped into that divot and lurched at the last second -"
"What are you talking about? I did not."
Uther comes over to give her a clasp on the shoulder. Arthur goes to set his sword down on the deck but Morgana calls after him, "Where are you going? We still have to play the fifth."
"No," Arthur says. "That wasn't the agreement."
"Yes it was, I said five tries."
"It's over, Morgana; you got your little victory. It's no fun when you're so easy to beat."
"I just beat you," she says. "Get back here so we can finish this." But he's already inside, and Uther says "It's not ladylike to gloat," but all she can think of are those years that he spent gloating at her about all the things he could get away with, do better, be better. But I just beat you and it's nothing to you, either of you, she thinks. And she realizes that this victory hasn’t won her a thing. Her attempts to win acceptance in this man’s world of the Pendragon household are entirely dependent on them giving her the opportunities to become a man - and then they say it's not her place to be one. Fencing was just something Arthur was giving to her and now he denies that she earned it.
In fury she storms off and goes home to her apartment - even this is Uther's, though, which pisses her off even more so she slams the door open when she enters, slams it shut behind her, and hopes something broke. Gwen looks up in surprise from her reading and sees that Morgana is halfway between spitting and tears; immediately she gets up and says, "Tell me what happened."
"I hate - that bastard, both of them - I've got to get out of here - I am so sick of the goddamn patriarchy!" she screams, and Gwen takes her hand and leads her out the door. "Keep talking," she says, turning the key in the lock, and Morgana doesn't know where they're going but it doesn't matter.
They walk down the street till they reach the new coffee shop in the next neighborhood over. "Get something to drink," Gwen commands. Morgana, having spent most of her stormy rage, looks at the chalkboard behind the barista. "What’s Free Trade?" Morgana asks. The barista squints at her, and Gwen orders her a caramel macchiato, sits her down at a table and says, Look, this is how it is.
She explains how she grew up without a mother, and how her father is the gentlest man she's ever known; she explains how when she was just in sixth grade her cousin tried to molest her and she couldn't tell anyone for years; she explains how she works because her family's not exactly rich, and she knows the way the customers at the department store look at her, and she also knows that the best jobs she's had have been the ones where she's working alongside other young men and women who have also been working since they were young, and for whom work is just a way of life the way anything else is. They're like brothers and sisters, she says; all dishwashers are equal, everyone who works at a factory stitching seams or punching out auto parts is equal. It's just when you get into managers and hierarchies, when you have to fight for every penny you earn even after you've earned it, that's the problem. And all those managers, she says, they're all men, or they answer to men.
Morgana nods.
You're in the wrong part of society to find equality for women, Gwen says, and Morgana looks back on her years of high-school cliques and living with Arthur and Uther, and thinks she's never had someone be so honest with her before.
-
It's sort of the other thing that brought them together - together into this strange new world of protest poetry and socially conscious consumers and counterculture and radicals. Gwen gets a job as a barista, and Morgana starts going to the open mic held every Friday night. After the first couple times in the audience, Gwen persuades her to go perform something - she knows Morgana writes, and Morgana can't deny that this would be perfect for her - so Morgana puts on her new black turtleneck and walks up to the microphone. She gets a couple wolf whistles, but they don't phase her; as soon as she opens her mouth it's a hard machine-gun firing of words, phrases, utterances of her advanced cynicism. The crowd shuts up and Gwen, after a moment's surprise, smiles as she pours the cream. The next week, there aren't as many catcalls, and Morgana has eased up on the vitriol. She doesn't talk about magic, even though that's what the open mics are all about, but it seeps into her language.
It's their new world and they enjoy every minute of it. Gwen loves to see Morgana up there at the mic as she makes lattes and Morgana loves the special drinks Gwen makes for her, admires how easily Gwen talks to the cooks in the kitchens, the busboys, the strangers and regulars who walk in off the street and into her life as though there is no counter and cash register between their exchange.
-
For President Pendragon's State of the Union, Morgana and Arthur are issued formal invitations, their names plus one guest, signed by Uther's own hand. He doesn't ask them in person, but they come anyway; it's hardly an option when you're the President of the United States' immediate family. Morgana brings Gwen and Arthur brings Merlin, and all sit by each other and switch guests to avoid awkward questions from the press.
The address seems to go well enough, as well as these things go. But there isn't much change in store for the nation, Arthur thinks; President Pendragon's methods are tried and true as far the Administration is concerned, and the majority of the people feel safe when they see that investigations are being run, arrests made. The threat of magic is one that's strong but distant, enforced by those twinkling lights they see each night, the satellites unmarked, the anarchic stars yet without a sovereign. As long as the war is being fought, things are going in the right direction.
But who is arrested? People like the Dragon, who became a more powerful figure in captivity than free. People like Gwen's father who was coerced and whose trials were sped through the courts. Arthur knows these things somewhere in his mind but tries to forget them. Merlin will bring them up, and Arthur gets quietly angry because there's nothing he can do about it, he's only the President's son, only some law student in the Ivy League. Merlin accuses him of dodging responsibility, but he honestly doesn't see what responsibility he has, not yet at least.
They just keep talking about legacies, his father and Merlin. Arthur doesn't want to believe in a legacy. He just wants to do his best by the nation, however he ends up serving. Can't that be enough of a legacy - to serve and protect? Apparently not. Uther's every word demands a more congruent, complete cloture, an assumption of the Pendragon mantle of the Presidency, a continuation of a tradition.
-
"It's unjust," Morgana says after the speech. She managed to disappear after the speech, of course, accidentally losing Gwen and abandoning Arthur to the press in the process. As soon as he gets the chance he goes to look for her and finds her in some office room. He decides to stay a few minutes or more before emerging again to face the endless sea of journalists. Having lit his cigarette, Arthur looks up in reprimand and she repeats, "It's an unjust war being fought without justice."
"It's the law and it’s for our own safety," he says sharply, looking around in what is admittedly a paranoid manner. "Careful; you don't want to say things like that around here."
"What, talking about the government in a government building? Are you afraid of our own democracy, Arthur?" She taps her cigarette into an ash tray on the anonymous desk.
"Everyone is under surveillance here. Everything you say is overheard; you could be misunderstood. It's dangerous, these days. My father is waging a war and you don't want to be caught on the wrong side."
She glares at him. "Your father is responsible for the deaths of innocent people."
The official line is that these deaths were necessary, or that they were accidents, that there is no war without casualties. Arthur has said these things before but now, somehow, he can’t bring himself to mouth his lines. Instead, he says, "Nimueh has committed atrocities and she must be stopped."
"It's hardly as simple as sides," Merlin says quietly from behind Arthur, and Arthur turns around. He's found them somehow and, closing the door quickly behind him, stands there with Gwen, who is looking around a little nervously at the locked filing cabinets.
The official line is sour in his mouth and he's never agreed more with Merlin in his life. He might carry forward the Pendragon rule if it was only his life depending on it, but he can't carry on this benevolent domination when he's met the people on the receiving end, when some of the statistics have faces, when it's not a criminal but Gwen's father in an offshore prison or one of the dishwashers from the cafe.
-
Merlin knew this wasn't simple from the start, he knows it, if he can keep his head above the overwhelming tide he'll keep knowing it. More magic is not the solution to their problem, just like less magic is not the solution to Uther's.
He tries to tell Morgana this but she won't listen. By now she's been part of the revolution just long enough to see hope for change, but not long enough to know what it culminates in, to know that it goes on and on. She has this concept of vengeance, of making things even, turning the tables. She has this concept of the oppressed rising up and ruling over the oppressor. This isn't really how it should be, Merlin says, after all look at what happened to Nimueh, but he knows she doesn't hear him. Every day is a new chance. Every action is another chain link cracked.
Merlin can't get through to her, but Gwen can, he knows. He sees Morgana sipping at Gwen's vanilla lattes, wearing her clothes sometimes, smiling when Gwen smiles. The girl's magnetic. He understands, understood from the first look; you can't ever live without a girl like that, who gives without a second thought and doesn't hold back and doesn't ask for a thing in return.
-
When Gwen's father was finally found, dead, Morgana told her to stay at home and not to work, made sure she had meals and that no one bothered her, while she went to Uther. Merlin came to see Gwen when he could; even Arthur with the schedule his father kept him on came to apologize for what happened. She just nodded and sat there, puffy-eyed in her sweats.
Finally Morgana comes back after a day or two, and she's more furious than when she left, but she's at Gwen's side all day. "I'm sorry I left," she said. "I went to him for you, for your father. Uther's a beast," and she would go on, except she sees Gwen's face and defeated slump, sitting cross-legged on her bed, and in that minute she realizes that her words will not help this time.
Kicking off her shoes, she crawls onto Gwen's bed and sits behind her, wraps her arms around her and lets the other girl lean her dark head back onto her shoulder.
"I'm sorry," Morgana whispers into her hot neck. "I'm so sorry."
When she hands Gwen some sleeping pills that night, Gwen asks "Where'd you get these?"
"They're mine," Morgana says. "I've got a prescription to help me sleep better at night."
Gwen looks like she's about to protest but Morgana says, "You look like you haven't slept the whole time I was gone."
About to set the pills on the bedside table, she hesitates at this, and her soft dark mouth twists briefly in a mockery of her old smile. She takes the cup of water Morgana holds out to her and swallows them without a word.
It's been a while since that happened. Gwen visits her father's tombstone every couple weeks, bringing him flowers. She brings flowers home too, to their apartment, and Merlin didn't realize how much he appreciated them until they were sitting there by the sink, glowing in the morning light. He's been sleeping there a few nights; Arthur is out of town for a few days, on some trip his father has set up, and the apartment gets lonely.
Gwen's walls are sparsely decorated, but her curtains are flowery, and a wrought peace sign her father gave her hangs above her bed, a miniature replica around her neck. She wears peasant blouses that are bright white against her skin, making it glow, and lets her hair hang loose about her shoulders. Morgana's side of the room is a stark opposite: no window, just a solid wall of posters in dark colors, a row of empty colorful bottles on her bureau, a padlocked box painted with the anarchy symbol by her bed, full of letters. Her half would be a mess, too, if Gwen didn't pick up after her constantly. Morgana asks her not to but Gwen rolls her eyes and folds a pair of discarded jeans.
In the summer, Morgana stays pale, while Gwen goes out more on walks and browns. They are like opposites, Merlin sees, but they still pull close no matter how far they seem to drift.
-
At some point, there is an article published in the New York Times that mentions Arthur Pendragon. This is not remarkable in itself; what is remarkable is that Uther is only briefly mentioned in the first paragraph. The rest of the column of text (Merlin scans it and he knows Arthur left it on the table on purpose) is all about Arthur and his policy work in Merlin's hometown not so long ago, his current policy work with industrial labor.
Whether the article sees it as genuine or politicking, it doesn't matter, because Merlin knows it's true: Arthur has began to act unlike his father, to stand not in the place of the ruler nor in the place of the opposition but from the masses. They are beginning to love him; that much is plain to see, even to Uther. Arthur is growing into his own as flesh-and-blood figure, and Uther would like to make the father connect forever to the son but Arthur isn’t like that, he isn’t his father. The people don’t love him for his similarities nor his differences but who he is in what he says and does.
Merlin folds the paper just as Arthur walks in, and neither can hide his smile.
"I think I might take a road trip next summer," Arthur says.
"Where?" Merlin asks as he pours a glass of orange juice. He offers it to Arthur but Arthur waves it away, and Merlin chugs it quickly.
"Through the Midwest," Arthur says. "Maybe into the West. Maybe all the way to California. You want to come?"
"Oh, do I ever!" Merlin grins. "Who else are you going to ask? Lance?"
Arthur shrugs. “I think Lance is going to be in Indonesia all summer. D'you think Gwen would be interested? And Morgana," he says, as though an afterthought.
"I think they'd be thrilled."
-
Despite herself, Morgana has grown to love her own voice. Gwen says it makes her feel warm inside when she reads her poetry aloud at home, and gives her goosebumps when she performs at the open mic. Even Arthur says her writing is impressive, the vocabulary and rhetoric strong - "You should go into politics," he says, and she groans but she smiles anyway.
Merlin said to her once, "You have powerful words but it's more than that. You know how to speak, you really do. I can see you playing with the audience; you know how to keep them hanging on your words, they lean forward when you pause. You make them want what you want. You have a powerful voice. Take care."
She relishes the power to send chills up coffee-shop patrons' spines; some days she thinks of going on the radio, or speaking at a rally. But she thinks of Gwen's soft head on her shoulder as she reads, and if she has to choose (somehow, she knows, she has to choose) she'll choose this.
-
Occasionally Gwen gets off work early and comes to find Morgana in the library, and drags her out to lunch. They eat fresh rolls and phad thai at a little place down the street with wood carvings of Ganesh on the sunny walls. Morgana softens around her and forgets to smoke, remembers to laugh. Sometimes they go on walks together, but more and more recently Morgana has a commitment, a meeting with the group, sometimes the feminist discussion group, sometimes the anarchy one that Gwen frowns about.
Merlin ends up coming along on a lot of Gwen's walks, and he learns where the city's community gardens are, where the unmowed fields in the parks are, where the nicest wildflowers grow. They explore together and sit while Gwen teaches him to make a daisy chain. He puts it on his head and it's too big, it falls down and gets caught on his ears and hangs there like a daisy-beard, and Gwen laughs and Merlin laughs and she thinks they might be the only people left in this country who know how to laugh. How to string flowers together. How to clamber down the edges of the ravine into the drained pond, how to crawl through the drainage pipe under the railroad tracks, how to forget about the trains that don't come anymore and how to brace themselves against each other to walk on the rails, holding hands to form an arch with their arms over the tracks.
Why can't Morgana see this, Gwen wonders. Why can't Arthur be here, Merlin wonders. This simple, happy play is so close, but for the others it is so very far away.
-
"I worry about her too," Merlin says one night. They are sitting on the roof - he managed to convince Gwen that this was okay - getting high - Gwen didn't need that much convincing about this part - and looking for satellites. Morgana is out late with the anarchist society and Gwen is suspicious. She sighs. "No, really," Merlin says, "it's a tough crowd." He knows better than she might think.
"It's such a bad time for this," Gwen says. "And she's doing it for all the wrong reasons. I think she's doing it for me. I don't want her to, she's just going to get hurt. They're going to start building bombs or she's going to get hit by a nightstick at a protest and I'm afraid of her getting hurt."
Merlin is silent.
"She's smart, she's really smart and strong, but I don't know if she can take care of herself if she gets in over her head. It'll happen before she knows it. She'll make enemies she can't unmake."
"I think," Merlin says, "you're right that it's dangerous. But there isn't anything these days that isn't dangerous. You can't just pick whatever side looks the safest, and you can't not pick a side. When it comes to it you have to stand somewhere and there's always going to be someone standing against you, trying to tear you to the ground."
"Where do you stand, Merlin?"
"Oh, wherever Gaius stands, I suppose. He knows a lot more about what's going on than I do."
"Merlin, you're full of it. You work for Arthur but you hang out at that coffee shop with Morgana. You knew who those radicals were who fled the country and got caught in South America by the CIA, you knew about them before Morgana did. You know more than you let on, I think."
"I don't really know, I just hear things -"
"Don't," Gwen shakes her finger at his nose, "think I believe that."
"You want to be free from all this fear, don't you? Where do you stand?"
She bites her lip. "With Morgana, I suppose. But bombs - if it came to that - they're innocent victims, Merlin, there isn't a single person who deserves that. There's terror coming from both sides, it's obvious. There's got to be another way."
"Yeah," Merlin sighs. He rests his chin on his fist. "You ever hear Arthur talk about it?"
"No," Gwen says. "What does he say? He's always stood by his father, even if he seems less awful."
"I think you're right about that," Merlin says slowly, as though this is just occurring to him, as though by saying it he is just coming to realize it himself. "I think something's going to change. I think he's going to be a part of it."
Suddenly everything seems terrifying but possible, there on the roof of the building with the few stars and a couple satellites twinkling overhead. The purple sky seems magical; the city smells like summer; Gwen smells like plants and life and sweet human sweat.
She kisses him there, holding the blunt to the side as he kisses her back. Merlin thinks of Morgana and Gwen thinks of Arthur, and guilt occurs to them but they dismiss it, and it floats away on a tendril of smoke.
-
It's as simple as this: one Indian summer, Merlin brings him home. His mother has a farm, and how did Arthur not know this, he feels like a fool - his mother has the family farm and it’s in trouble. It’s like a Laura Ingalls Wilder book. It’s like going to meet reality. A week turns into a universe of its own; he hardly feels time pass in a whirlwind of work, and there is nothing else in life, these interminable moments, until it seems like he is packing his bag only a moment after he arrived.
What he remembers is - what doesn't he remember? He can't describe it. His body holds memories more solidly than his mind - he feels every toss and pull and lunge and plunge long afterwards, and his aching body reveals to him muscles he didn't know he had. His vision is full of the white sun and crisp morning sky, the sunbleached farmhouse, golden fields; the world blinds him with all there is to see.
What does he remember - he remembers this, a late afternoon in the hay loft, stacking bales with Merlin. The musty old hay odor of the loft fills his nostrils, and the fresh stuff smells wonderful, warm and sun-baked as he stands over a bale, grasps the twine, and heaves it onto the stack. It's a rhythmic motion they take a while to establish, their bodies tired already after the long day, and this work less urgent than the actual harvest so they take it at a relaxed pace. Merlin grabs one end of a bale, and Arthur the other, and they heave, sometimes one jostling the other as they bump shoulders reaching for the next bale. His hands feel numb in their canvas gloves so he takes them off after they're done with the heavy stuff, and have to deal with picking up the loose straw from one bale that burst its twine. They dig and dig in the piles, like children, squeezing and grasping at the bunches and at each other's hands, meeting easily there. It's so very easy to meet each other, here, when the late afternoon light is warm and golden on the hay, and the dust motes swirl around them in the sunbeams, and work has turned into play effortlessly as they shove the stuff into piles, throw handfuls at each other and shove them down each others' shirts. They have put off who they were and see each other for who they are: goofy grinning faces with straw sticking out of their hair, hands and arms brown with dirt, in too-big overalls and worn-out boots.
They meet each other then, flopped down in the hay where Merlin tells him something, a secret, and Arthur thinks he already knew and only now is he ready to hear it.
What's it like? Arthur asks.
Merlin's eyes light up.
-
On the radio station Arthur listens to late at night, when he can’t sleep, there's a caller calling in about strange lights she sees next door. She thinks it’s a signal, but the building's been vacant for years and her husband couldn't find anyone there. When investigated, the signals vanish and appear further on. Well, that’s awfully funny, the deejay says as though he really does want to laugh, but his partner says firmly, You should call the cops.
In the apartment where Merlin is sound asleep and Arthur sits awake alone, he hears the sound of a far-off television or radio that keeps switching channels, almost but not quite clear enough to distinguish what’s being said. He sticks his head out the window of his apartment into the storm-fresh air and sees someone standing on the sidewalk below with a radio. The kid looks up at the sound of the window opening and reaches for the dial, walks away quickly.
Morgana calls in the morning, asks if he’s doing all right, Gwen said something the other day that made her think of him and she knows he’s been under plenty of pressure lately. Arthur is on the cusp of saying, Of course everything’s all right, but he stops himself, hesitates. He hears Gwen’s voice in the background, remembers the strange lights and the fear on the radio, the growing strangeness of the coffee shop where Morgana used to spend all her time.
"I don’t know," he says. "I guess I’m fine. I’m worried about everything else."
"Tell me about it," she agrees.
"Look," Arthur says, and he feels strange saying this, but it’s a sunny Saturday morning after a rainy night and everything is bright and clean and wet so why not. "Do you want to get coffee? It’s been a while since we talked."
-
Merlin has the resources. He usurped Nimueh and appropriated her networks of intelligence and operation; he could continue her mission, with have sufficient sway over any subversive group he stumbled upon. It's a system with such potential, even after it's crumbled and divided after losing its spiritual leader. It could still be a glorious revolution - but not like this. Not like it was. It needs reform.
It needs (Merlin says to Morgana over coffee) to go back to the texts; it needs (he says to Arthur at breakfast) to remember that its theories rest on material preconditions; it needs to remember how to play. It needs to know that domination was necessary to civilization but no longer. Do you remember reading about species-being and the human senses? Do you remember Eros?
Arthur will look at him and Morgana will look at the volume stuffed with letters in his outstretched hand, and they will look like they haven't seen him before, and he will feel as though he's speaking in tongues, as though he's the last person either of them would expect to have visions.
It doesn't have to end the way you think it does, he will say. He will say, Take it.
"When you've understood this scripture, throw it away. If you cant understand this scripture, throw it away. I insist on your freedom."
Jack Kerouac, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity verse 45
Rewriting the Old Language
Merlin, PG. 8207 words.
Merlin, Morgana, Arthur, and Gwen all live their own revolution within a revolution; they defy the desire of the cloture of metaphysics to “make the definition coincide with the defined, the ‘father’ with the ‘son’.”
Title and summary quote are from Gayatri Spivak's preface to Derrida's Of Grammatology.
Authors who helped me make this: CLR James, Sigmund Freud, Herbert Marcuse, Karl Marx, Herman Melville, Simone de Beauvoir, Michele Foucault, Jack Kerouac, and unconsciously if not specifically Max Weber.
"In short, [Captain Ahab] is a man who wants to live fully and completely according to his beliefs. That precisely is the cause of his undoing."
C.L.R. James, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways.
I was here before him, before her, and I will be here after they are gone.
I had a plan - I had forever to think of it, shut up like this, and it would have worked, it would have solved everything. I had to restore the old religion and make of all men universal converts. Out of all the candidates she rose to the top; she conquered the rest and appropriated their power. I had all my hopes in her, until the boy came along, and I realized that I could lead a double pronged attack. She would infiltrate and reach the people; he, their masters. But he wasn't very good at following the plan. Doesn't he know? I would have made Arthur immortal; his image would have been on every building, his name on everyone's hearts and lips. The people would have known him as the greatest leader of men the world has ever seen. I would give Arthur Pendragon a place where no time could weaken him, and there would be no politics to taint him. And she, the genius, was poised to take the enemy by the throat, to release the wave of revolution worldwide, when that foolish boy turned on her and destroyed her.
Merlin, no matter how you think you will break the cycle, you cannot escape your nature. You are revolutionary as long as magic is repressed, and when it is no longer repressed, it will overflow the world.
Before Merlin returns, the very stones of Camelot shake for a few seconds, and settle.
It wakes Arthur up, and in alarm he turns on the radio to see what could have happened.
" - wow, did you feel that! We’ve got some kind of earthquake here, in Albion of all places -"
The broadcaster hasn't finished his sentence and Arthur is putting on his pants and boots as quickly as he can. He knows what they don't: the subversives can and will use explosives. These days, man shakes the earth more often than she shakes herself.
But it was nothing after all. He is relieved, more relieved than the police squad, almost more than his father (who would have had hell to deal with, reporters and demands on higher security, greater surveillance, everything he was already doing and more). Sometimes he thinks his father wants them to bomb a building, kill some people, so just cause can be declared and they no longer have to hold back. Arthur's never seen a dead man. The idea of it makes him shake, and as long as he lives he never wants his father to see that. Arthur's never seen a dead man and he never wants to, and every new statistic of the war against terror nauseates him.
We've come so far with medicine and food, he thinks. Infant mortality is at an all-time low. Life expectancy is at an all-time high. But it's not gone yet. The world is killing enough of us; how can we even think of killing each other in the meantime?
-
It hasn't even been that long, Merlin thinks in shock when he sees the first shirt with her picture on it. Her face is uplifted as though she spent her life looking into the future, but he knows the work she did in the name of her cause. It sullied any ideal these young people had seen in that lifted gaze. History, Merlin thinks, is strange, and it's stranger when you can see it pass you by, when you can remember the old narrative still and can feel it slipping away in the face of the new. In a few years no one will be able to much more than her name: Nimueh. It'll be a rallying cry for whatever they decide she stands for: violent resistance. Liberation. Anarchy. Truth. Species-being. Magic.
She wasn't just an empty figurehead, though; he remembers hearing her speak once and the sway that she held. It was intimate; she didn't command crowds but worked her way into your confidence. She was human, and weak, until you realized she had tricked you into thinking yourself perhaps her equal, and then perhaps her superior, and then she reared her head to reveal her powers: she had her hands in everything. What other people thought was dirty work was actually raw power in resources, and while you took these resources for granted she knew them intimately, down to their last fault and quirk, their malleability and unexpected strengths.
It wasn't exactly like that, Merlin thinks as he sits there and sips his iced mocha. But that's what I remember about her. I can't even grasp what all she could do and yet somehow I got in the middle of it and tore her out of it and I won't take her place. I won't. I never would. The Dragon, fuck, the dragon's never going to speak to him again; he's lucky the guy's practically under house arrest or else he'd be afraid for the country. Merlin feels so very alone in this whole mess except for his uncle Gaius. And even he doesn't understand all what's going on. He only has the texts - Hegel, Marx, Engels, Robespierre, the Druids, histories of the Sidhe, old pagan rites - we can't comprehend how they've transformed except to go out and see what the people are doing these days, what magic is to them. Arthur knows this, he understands. Uther's good enough at kissing babies but only Arthur can and will sit down to have a conversation with the voter, will listen to a negro, will eat at a coffee shop like this one.
She reminds him of Nimueh - Morgana. It scares him when he realizes it. It's in the middle of one of her poems when instead of yelling she reads the facts about fallout in Hiroshima in a cool, clear, almost quiet voice. Everyone leans in to hear better. Merlin, sitting in the back in his worn brown jacket, chin on his fist, finds himself and everyone else utterly absorbed in the way her voice is acquiring grain, straining, potent with suppressed emotion. And he wonders, suddenly, if his magic is even real compared to this. Can he touch people's hearts like this? There's no such thing as a love potion; he has looked through his book and all of Gaius' for ages. There's nothing in magic that will touch the heart so, that will bring tears all on its own, that will make Morgana smile like Gwen makes her, or Arthur's voice strong like finding that men entrust him with their livelihoods.
When Morgana finishes she smiles a little and brushes past a young bespectacled college student to sit at Merlin's table.
"How's it going?" she asks coolly.
Merlin shrugs, and grins. "You were great," he says.
She rolls her eyes and he gives her a thumbs up because he already knows she thinks he's a square.
"Hey!" Gwen says, coming in from the back. "Guess who's here?" She has Arthur in tow, and he lets go of her hand to offer it to Morgana. She grasps it firmly and Merlin sees him barely conceal a wince, then give her hand a few good pumps.
"Good job," he says. "I didn't know you did so much writing, or performing."
"I've been doing more of it recently," she says. "And reading."
"I bet you read more out of school than you did in," he says. She retorts, "You probably haven't read anything in or out of school."
Gwen looks uncomfortable but Arthur laughs. "I feel overdressed," he says, and Merlin nods. He looks like a lawyer, not a free-spirited coffee-shop denizen. Like he has money.
"You're fine," says Gwen. "Sit down. I'll go get us some coffee."
"Let me get it," Arthur says, but she puts a hand on his shoulder and pushes gently.
"I know the baristas," she says with a smile. "Trust me. Anything special?"
"Just milk and sugar," Arthur says. Merlin shakes his head and lifts his cup; he's already got his.
"Black," Morgana says. Arthur raises an eyebrow in her direction. She raises one right back. “I drink it black on principle,” she says, but Gwen giggles and nudges Merlin with her elbow. “She not-so-secretly loves caramel macchiatos,” she whispers in his ear. Merlin tries not to laugh.
-
Morgana’s father was an ambassador, good friends of the Pendragon family. When they were assigned to Chile they asked Uther to take care of eleven-year-old Morgana. “She’ll have a better school here, she’ll know the language, she’ll be around Arthur, who’s her own age,” her father said. "It'll be much better for her. We’ll be visiting frequently, but you know things are unstable in Santiago and Morgana’s mother would be able to sleep at night if she were to be here in the US."
"I'll take good care of her," Uther says. "You know I'm not around much but the house staff is like family; they've looked after Arthur since his mother died. She'll have a home here."
Morgana doesn't feel the same, but what eleven-year-old does? She and Arthur go to the same school, and at their age they at first don't get along, but while Arthur has friends at school they're none of them close, and he's actually quite lonely at home most of the time. So they play games together and fight over who was cheating, and before long they're as good as siblings, bickering but nearly inseparable.
They're in their last few weeks of primary school, getting ready to graduate from eighth grade, when they get the news that Morgana's parents have been killed. The capitol was overthrown in a military coup, and though the newspapers say it was nearly bloodless, they only mean that most of those in the Capitol building that day survived. But the Le Fays weren't among them.
Morgana doesn't go to school for a week. She cries in her room for days, won't touch the food they bring her, but eventually Uther gets her to come out of her cave once or twice for meals. They talk, in private, but Arthur doesn't know what to do until one afternoon an idea occurs to him and he goes to knock softly on her door.
"Who is it?" Morgana says. Her voice is low and dead.
"It's me," Arthur says.
"What do you want?"
He opens the door a crack. "I need someone to practice fencing with. Do you know how to hold an epee?"
She looks up from her book. "I can figure it out."
Arthur holds out the practice sword to her and she draws it, and he isn't sure but he might not have imagined a little smile on her lips.
That summer is a good one, despite everything. Arthur gets loads better at epee than his coach expected him to, and he starts saying things like "Soon when you're team captain," which makes Arthur grin. When he tells Morgana she rolls her eyes and says, You're not that good, but she smiles and he knows she's happy for him too. She's not half bad herself, he says, for a girl who just started. He might even enjoy practicing with her.
Once school starts up again, though, they stop having time to practice, and generally see less of each other. Arthur is attending a prestigious prep school while Morgana is at the city's oldest all-girls Catholic academy, and he starts bringing friends home, and she starts rolling up her school uniform skirt like all the coolest girls do, wearing her black sweater every day and buying tight jeans with her allowance.
She doesn't know anyone at the school, really; it's very small and these girls' families are so entangled they've had social alliances since they were three. When she eats lunch instead of lurking in the library, she ends up sitting at the only empty table with a dark-skinned doe-eyed girl. Her name is Gwen, Morgana learns, and she's there on scholarship. Her father's an ironworker and they live far away, in one of the rougher neighborhoods. They make friends, or at least the closest thing Morgana knows to friends, which involves Morgana sharing clothes with her and Gwen sewing patches onto Morgana's jeans.
Arthur says she's getting girly, and instead of blowing up at him like she would have a year ago, she just rolls her eyes, and goes back to talking to Gwen on the phone.
-
Gwen and Morgana end up going to the same college, a state school, and being roommates. Morgana wants to do Art and Gwen is working on her English and Communications double major. They move out together after their first year into a nice furnished apartment. As long as Morgana majors in Political Science or International Relations, Uther will let her stay there, all expenses paid so she can focus on her degree. She's determined to somehow evade or defy his decree, but after Gwen calms her down and she takes a class or two, she realizes that she might actually be interested in it.
"It's about how the world works," she tells Gwen enthusiastically after her first Classics of Social Thought class. "Not history or current events, but why and the big picture. It's like having a veil torn away."
"It sounds amazing," Gwen says, and she listens avidly all through dinner to Morgana's enchanted raving.
-
Arthur Pendragon and Merlin Emrys share an apartment; they were roommates in college and it worked out so well (Merlin didn't mind doing laundry for both of them as long as Arthur cooked). Arthur figured it would be better than moving out with any of his fraternity brothers, who got drunk every weekend and trashed their own apartments. Arthur only knows Gwen through Morgana, but it turns out that Merlin and Gwen are in a bunch of the same classes, both being English majors, and so they end up seeing a bit of each other.
Arthur's father, Morgana's adoptive father, is President Uther Pendragon of the United States of America, and Arthur is being conditioned to take up his mantle. Merlin does not approve but he's a little weird, Arthur thinks, some kind of free spirit; still, he does hate the prospect of having his life planned out for him, with a set of boundaries and rules and everything, and the only one who hates that more than he does is Morgana. He used to think Merlin was lucky, that his mom didn't call to ream him out for a misstep, and sent cookies instead. That at least he wasn't trapped; he could major in whatever he wanted. Arthur used to think a lot of things.
Once, when Uther is touring abroad in September, Arthur discovers Merlin's life and what real need is. When Arthur comes back from his last class before winter vacation, he found Merlin in the midst of his sty of a room, throwing things into a suitcase. He has to go home for a week, he says. His mother has a farm - which surprises Arthur, he'd never known that Merlin grew up on a farm, how didn't he know this - the family farm, which she runs mostly on her own, with enough hired hands and neighborly help to keep it running modestly, but there's this drought that's struck this summer and her neighbors are occupied with their own fields, and there aren't as many laborers locally, and she won't be able to harvest enough to pay the mortgage.
Arthur doesn't know a thing about mortgages, but when Merlin asks Arthur (and he never, well pretty much never, asks Arthur for favors) if he could help him out, Arthur says yes immediately. He has never been able to explain this but since he was young, he has wanted to experience farm life. He used to read Laura Ingalls Wilder and other books about living off the land, and ever since he has just known that the most fulfilling life must be one where you are so very self-sufficient, where everything you have, you've earned and you know how it works because you built it yourself.
The week they spent there, Arthur will never forget. His suspicions that there was no greater thing than men and earth working together were confirmed. It was the hardest week of his life and it was the simplest. Here was real scarcity, real toil to make a living; here was real work, real subsistence. It was a religious experience; he saw this with his own eyes and his heart felt strong and right. That he was doing right by his father the President, if not his father the dictator; he was doing right by the human race. Here was the heartland, the farmland, where the farmer works close by the earth, by his honest labour, by the sweat of his brow. Here was the heartland where the apprentice attended to the journeyman, who attended to the master of his trade: the ironworkers, the teamsters, the wiremen, the carpenters.
When he left Merlin’s town, however, he realized that he barely knew the half of it. He realized that economic competition between neighbors was only detrimental to both; the sense of hierarchy here was flat, that everyone was tied much more closely and clearly to each other than any infrastructured city. When these people talked about important issues, they weren't abstracts; they were their own lives. Here, when he helped out on the Emrys farm alongside the hired labor, whose muscles were a greater help than any fine education, he felt a camaraderie he hadn't ever before.
After the end of the week, he and Merlin both left with Hunith’s embrace; they arrived law student and country boy to a cold administrative summons. Standing there in the Oval Office before his father, awaiting a reprimand for his unwarranted absence, he felt his own isolation. Here there were none his equals, in that endless cubicled bureaucracy where he could not reach out and touch the arm of the man beside him because there were no men beside him, only below him, and his father, his President, above.
-
Even though her major has changed, Morgana doesn't give up art. She couldn't ever, Gwen suspects. She has an artist's temperament, up one day and down the next, obsessive and a little compulsive, alternately social and hermetic, painting and writing in spurts but never really stopping.
She read about this in Freud - how art is a way of channeling inner tension out and venting that destructive energy. Morgana's paintings are strange things, as strange as her dreams must be. This awful dark struggle in her brings out the most vivid things. Part of Gwen is a little jealous that she can create all this beauty, but most of Gwen is sad when she sees how frustrated Morgana is. She has nightmares all the time, she knows. When she says something Morgana says, “I don’t know how anyone can have happy dreams. There’s so much to have nightmares about.”
Gwen frowns and gestures to their apartment, saying, “What’s so unhappy about this?”
Sometimes Morgana feels trapped in buildings, in this city, in this country, in her life. She paints cages from the inside out. But sometimes Morgana will blink, and reach for Gwen’s hand, and say, You’re right, you’re right, oh Gwen, and bury her face in Gwen’s shoulder. And Gwen will stroke her back, and it's all right, everything is all right for the time being.
-
When Morgana comes home after the first month or two of college, it’s pretty awful. Arthur says she's really changed, she can't do anything useful in heels, and what's she doing at a state school, she'll just end up being a secretary with that art degree. She calls him a jerkwad and a brainless jock, and says she can beat him at fencing any day.
Arthur bristles and scoffs, but she goes to get the practice swords from the attic. It doesn't take much more goading until they are in the back yard, assuming their stances.
"I bet you've forgotten everything," she says, and he says, "You have too." She smirks and says, "It won't even take me five tries to beat you." "You're on," he says.
The first and second are hardly even close, but she's forgotten much less than Arthur thought, and she's still wiry whereas he's slowed down. The third bout is closer, and suddenly Uther is watching from the deck - wasn't he gone campaigning today? Neither of them could keep track. The fourth, they're both getting out of breath, but she is still just a little bit quicker on her feet, and that's when she gets him.
She crows, Uther claps, and Arthur scowls, holding the stitch in his side. "Luck," he says.
"Shut up, it was not."
"Sure it was. If you hadn't stepped into that divot and lurched at the last second -"
"What are you talking about? I did not."
Uther comes over to give her a clasp on the shoulder. Arthur goes to set his sword down on the deck but Morgana calls after him, "Where are you going? We still have to play the fifth."
"No," Arthur says. "That wasn't the agreement."
"Yes it was, I said five tries."
"It's over, Morgana; you got your little victory. It's no fun when you're so easy to beat."
"I just beat you," she says. "Get back here so we can finish this." But he's already inside, and Uther says "It's not ladylike to gloat," but all she can think of are those years that he spent gloating at her about all the things he could get away with, do better, be better. But I just beat you and it's nothing to you, either of you, she thinks. And she realizes that this victory hasn’t won her a thing. Her attempts to win acceptance in this man’s world of the Pendragon household are entirely dependent on them giving her the opportunities to become a man - and then they say it's not her place to be one. Fencing was just something Arthur was giving to her and now he denies that she earned it.
In fury she storms off and goes home to her apartment - even this is Uther's, though, which pisses her off even more so she slams the door open when she enters, slams it shut behind her, and hopes something broke. Gwen looks up in surprise from her reading and sees that Morgana is halfway between spitting and tears; immediately she gets up and says, "Tell me what happened."
"I hate - that bastard, both of them - I've got to get out of here - I am so sick of the goddamn patriarchy!" she screams, and Gwen takes her hand and leads her out the door. "Keep talking," she says, turning the key in the lock, and Morgana doesn't know where they're going but it doesn't matter.
They walk down the street till they reach the new coffee shop in the next neighborhood over. "Get something to drink," Gwen commands. Morgana, having spent most of her stormy rage, looks at the chalkboard behind the barista. "What’s Free Trade?" Morgana asks. The barista squints at her, and Gwen orders her a caramel macchiato, sits her down at a table and says, Look, this is how it is.
She explains how she grew up without a mother, and how her father is the gentlest man she's ever known; she explains how when she was just in sixth grade her cousin tried to molest her and she couldn't tell anyone for years; she explains how she works because her family's not exactly rich, and she knows the way the customers at the department store look at her, and she also knows that the best jobs she's had have been the ones where she's working alongside other young men and women who have also been working since they were young, and for whom work is just a way of life the way anything else is. They're like brothers and sisters, she says; all dishwashers are equal, everyone who works at a factory stitching seams or punching out auto parts is equal. It's just when you get into managers and hierarchies, when you have to fight for every penny you earn even after you've earned it, that's the problem. And all those managers, she says, they're all men, or they answer to men.
Morgana nods.
You're in the wrong part of society to find equality for women, Gwen says, and Morgana looks back on her years of high-school cliques and living with Arthur and Uther, and thinks she's never had someone be so honest with her before.
-
It's sort of the other thing that brought them together - together into this strange new world of protest poetry and socially conscious consumers and counterculture and radicals. Gwen gets a job as a barista, and Morgana starts going to the open mic held every Friday night. After the first couple times in the audience, Gwen persuades her to go perform something - she knows Morgana writes, and Morgana can't deny that this would be perfect for her - so Morgana puts on her new black turtleneck and walks up to the microphone. She gets a couple wolf whistles, but they don't phase her; as soon as she opens her mouth it's a hard machine-gun firing of words, phrases, utterances of her advanced cynicism. The crowd shuts up and Gwen, after a moment's surprise, smiles as she pours the cream. The next week, there aren't as many catcalls, and Morgana has eased up on the vitriol. She doesn't talk about magic, even though that's what the open mics are all about, but it seeps into her language.
It's their new world and they enjoy every minute of it. Gwen loves to see Morgana up there at the mic as she makes lattes and Morgana loves the special drinks Gwen makes for her, admires how easily Gwen talks to the cooks in the kitchens, the busboys, the strangers and regulars who walk in off the street and into her life as though there is no counter and cash register between their exchange.
-
For President Pendragon's State of the Union, Morgana and Arthur are issued formal invitations, their names plus one guest, signed by Uther's own hand. He doesn't ask them in person, but they come anyway; it's hardly an option when you're the President of the United States' immediate family. Morgana brings Gwen and Arthur brings Merlin, and all sit by each other and switch guests to avoid awkward questions from the press.
The address seems to go well enough, as well as these things go. But there isn't much change in store for the nation, Arthur thinks; President Pendragon's methods are tried and true as far the Administration is concerned, and the majority of the people feel safe when they see that investigations are being run, arrests made. The threat of magic is one that's strong but distant, enforced by those twinkling lights they see each night, the satellites unmarked, the anarchic stars yet without a sovereign. As long as the war is being fought, things are going in the right direction.
But who is arrested? People like the Dragon, who became a more powerful figure in captivity than free. People like Gwen's father who was coerced and whose trials were sped through the courts. Arthur knows these things somewhere in his mind but tries to forget them. Merlin will bring them up, and Arthur gets quietly angry because there's nothing he can do about it, he's only the President's son, only some law student in the Ivy League. Merlin accuses him of dodging responsibility, but he honestly doesn't see what responsibility he has, not yet at least.
They just keep talking about legacies, his father and Merlin. Arthur doesn't want to believe in a legacy. He just wants to do his best by the nation, however he ends up serving. Can't that be enough of a legacy - to serve and protect? Apparently not. Uther's every word demands a more congruent, complete cloture, an assumption of the Pendragon mantle of the Presidency, a continuation of a tradition.
-
"It's unjust," Morgana says after the speech. She managed to disappear after the speech, of course, accidentally losing Gwen and abandoning Arthur to the press in the process. As soon as he gets the chance he goes to look for her and finds her in some office room. He decides to stay a few minutes or more before emerging again to face the endless sea of journalists. Having lit his cigarette, Arthur looks up in reprimand and she repeats, "It's an unjust war being fought without justice."
"It's the law and it’s for our own safety," he says sharply, looking around in what is admittedly a paranoid manner. "Careful; you don't want to say things like that around here."
"What, talking about the government in a government building? Are you afraid of our own democracy, Arthur?" She taps her cigarette into an ash tray on the anonymous desk.
"Everyone is under surveillance here. Everything you say is overheard; you could be misunderstood. It's dangerous, these days. My father is waging a war and you don't want to be caught on the wrong side."
She glares at him. "Your father is responsible for the deaths of innocent people."
The official line is that these deaths were necessary, or that they were accidents, that there is no war without casualties. Arthur has said these things before but now, somehow, he can’t bring himself to mouth his lines. Instead, he says, "Nimueh has committed atrocities and she must be stopped."
"It's hardly as simple as sides," Merlin says quietly from behind Arthur, and Arthur turns around. He's found them somehow and, closing the door quickly behind him, stands there with Gwen, who is looking around a little nervously at the locked filing cabinets.
The official line is sour in his mouth and he's never agreed more with Merlin in his life. He might carry forward the Pendragon rule if it was only his life depending on it, but he can't carry on this benevolent domination when he's met the people on the receiving end, when some of the statistics have faces, when it's not a criminal but Gwen's father in an offshore prison or one of the dishwashers from the cafe.
-
Merlin knew this wasn't simple from the start, he knows it, if he can keep his head above the overwhelming tide he'll keep knowing it. More magic is not the solution to their problem, just like less magic is not the solution to Uther's.
He tries to tell Morgana this but she won't listen. By now she's been part of the revolution just long enough to see hope for change, but not long enough to know what it culminates in, to know that it goes on and on. She has this concept of vengeance, of making things even, turning the tables. She has this concept of the oppressed rising up and ruling over the oppressor. This isn't really how it should be, Merlin says, after all look at what happened to Nimueh, but he knows she doesn't hear him. Every day is a new chance. Every action is another chain link cracked.
Merlin can't get through to her, but Gwen can, he knows. He sees Morgana sipping at Gwen's vanilla lattes, wearing her clothes sometimes, smiling when Gwen smiles. The girl's magnetic. He understands, understood from the first look; you can't ever live without a girl like that, who gives without a second thought and doesn't hold back and doesn't ask for a thing in return.
-
When Gwen's father was finally found, dead, Morgana told her to stay at home and not to work, made sure she had meals and that no one bothered her, while she went to Uther. Merlin came to see Gwen when he could; even Arthur with the schedule his father kept him on came to apologize for what happened. She just nodded and sat there, puffy-eyed in her sweats.
Finally Morgana comes back after a day or two, and she's more furious than when she left, but she's at Gwen's side all day. "I'm sorry I left," she said. "I went to him for you, for your father. Uther's a beast," and she would go on, except she sees Gwen's face and defeated slump, sitting cross-legged on her bed, and in that minute she realizes that her words will not help this time.
Kicking off her shoes, she crawls onto Gwen's bed and sits behind her, wraps her arms around her and lets the other girl lean her dark head back onto her shoulder.
"I'm sorry," Morgana whispers into her hot neck. "I'm so sorry."
When she hands Gwen some sleeping pills that night, Gwen asks "Where'd you get these?"
"They're mine," Morgana says. "I've got a prescription to help me sleep better at night."
Gwen looks like she's about to protest but Morgana says, "You look like you haven't slept the whole time I was gone."
About to set the pills on the bedside table, she hesitates at this, and her soft dark mouth twists briefly in a mockery of her old smile. She takes the cup of water Morgana holds out to her and swallows them without a word.
It's been a while since that happened. Gwen visits her father's tombstone every couple weeks, bringing him flowers. She brings flowers home too, to their apartment, and Merlin didn't realize how much he appreciated them until they were sitting there by the sink, glowing in the morning light. He's been sleeping there a few nights; Arthur is out of town for a few days, on some trip his father has set up, and the apartment gets lonely.
Gwen's walls are sparsely decorated, but her curtains are flowery, and a wrought peace sign her father gave her hangs above her bed, a miniature replica around her neck. She wears peasant blouses that are bright white against her skin, making it glow, and lets her hair hang loose about her shoulders. Morgana's side of the room is a stark opposite: no window, just a solid wall of posters in dark colors, a row of empty colorful bottles on her bureau, a padlocked box painted with the anarchy symbol by her bed, full of letters. Her half would be a mess, too, if Gwen didn't pick up after her constantly. Morgana asks her not to but Gwen rolls her eyes and folds a pair of discarded jeans.
In the summer, Morgana stays pale, while Gwen goes out more on walks and browns. They are like opposites, Merlin sees, but they still pull close no matter how far they seem to drift.
-
At some point, there is an article published in the New York Times that mentions Arthur Pendragon. This is not remarkable in itself; what is remarkable is that Uther is only briefly mentioned in the first paragraph. The rest of the column of text (Merlin scans it and he knows Arthur left it on the table on purpose) is all about Arthur and his policy work in Merlin's hometown not so long ago, his current policy work with industrial labor.
Whether the article sees it as genuine or politicking, it doesn't matter, because Merlin knows it's true: Arthur has began to act unlike his father, to stand not in the place of the ruler nor in the place of the opposition but from the masses. They are beginning to love him; that much is plain to see, even to Uther. Arthur is growing into his own as flesh-and-blood figure, and Uther would like to make the father connect forever to the son but Arthur isn’t like that, he isn’t his father. The people don’t love him for his similarities nor his differences but who he is in what he says and does.
Merlin folds the paper just as Arthur walks in, and neither can hide his smile.
"I think I might take a road trip next summer," Arthur says.
"Where?" Merlin asks as he pours a glass of orange juice. He offers it to Arthur but Arthur waves it away, and Merlin chugs it quickly.
"Through the Midwest," Arthur says. "Maybe into the West. Maybe all the way to California. You want to come?"
"Oh, do I ever!" Merlin grins. "Who else are you going to ask? Lance?"
Arthur shrugs. “I think Lance is going to be in Indonesia all summer. D'you think Gwen would be interested? And Morgana," he says, as though an afterthought.
"I think they'd be thrilled."
-
Despite herself, Morgana has grown to love her own voice. Gwen says it makes her feel warm inside when she reads her poetry aloud at home, and gives her goosebumps when she performs at the open mic. Even Arthur says her writing is impressive, the vocabulary and rhetoric strong - "You should go into politics," he says, and she groans but she smiles anyway.
Merlin said to her once, "You have powerful words but it's more than that. You know how to speak, you really do. I can see you playing with the audience; you know how to keep them hanging on your words, they lean forward when you pause. You make them want what you want. You have a powerful voice. Take care."
She relishes the power to send chills up coffee-shop patrons' spines; some days she thinks of going on the radio, or speaking at a rally. But she thinks of Gwen's soft head on her shoulder as she reads, and if she has to choose (somehow, she knows, she has to choose) she'll choose this.
-
Occasionally Gwen gets off work early and comes to find Morgana in the library, and drags her out to lunch. They eat fresh rolls and phad thai at a little place down the street with wood carvings of Ganesh on the sunny walls. Morgana softens around her and forgets to smoke, remembers to laugh. Sometimes they go on walks together, but more and more recently Morgana has a commitment, a meeting with the group, sometimes the feminist discussion group, sometimes the anarchy one that Gwen frowns about.
Merlin ends up coming along on a lot of Gwen's walks, and he learns where the city's community gardens are, where the unmowed fields in the parks are, where the nicest wildflowers grow. They explore together and sit while Gwen teaches him to make a daisy chain. He puts it on his head and it's too big, it falls down and gets caught on his ears and hangs there like a daisy-beard, and Gwen laughs and Merlin laughs and she thinks they might be the only people left in this country who know how to laugh. How to string flowers together. How to clamber down the edges of the ravine into the drained pond, how to crawl through the drainage pipe under the railroad tracks, how to forget about the trains that don't come anymore and how to brace themselves against each other to walk on the rails, holding hands to form an arch with their arms over the tracks.
Why can't Morgana see this, Gwen wonders. Why can't Arthur be here, Merlin wonders. This simple, happy play is so close, but for the others it is so very far away.
-
"I worry about her too," Merlin says one night. They are sitting on the roof - he managed to convince Gwen that this was okay - getting high - Gwen didn't need that much convincing about this part - and looking for satellites. Morgana is out late with the anarchist society and Gwen is suspicious. She sighs. "No, really," Merlin says, "it's a tough crowd." He knows better than she might think.
"It's such a bad time for this," Gwen says. "And she's doing it for all the wrong reasons. I think she's doing it for me. I don't want her to, she's just going to get hurt. They're going to start building bombs or she's going to get hit by a nightstick at a protest and I'm afraid of her getting hurt."
Merlin is silent.
"She's smart, she's really smart and strong, but I don't know if she can take care of herself if she gets in over her head. It'll happen before she knows it. She'll make enemies she can't unmake."
"I think," Merlin says, "you're right that it's dangerous. But there isn't anything these days that isn't dangerous. You can't just pick whatever side looks the safest, and you can't not pick a side. When it comes to it you have to stand somewhere and there's always going to be someone standing against you, trying to tear you to the ground."
"Where do you stand, Merlin?"
"Oh, wherever Gaius stands, I suppose. He knows a lot more about what's going on than I do."
"Merlin, you're full of it. You work for Arthur but you hang out at that coffee shop with Morgana. You knew who those radicals were who fled the country and got caught in South America by the CIA, you knew about them before Morgana did. You know more than you let on, I think."
"I don't really know, I just hear things -"
"Don't," Gwen shakes her finger at his nose, "think I believe that."
"You want to be free from all this fear, don't you? Where do you stand?"
She bites her lip. "With Morgana, I suppose. But bombs - if it came to that - they're innocent victims, Merlin, there isn't a single person who deserves that. There's terror coming from both sides, it's obvious. There's got to be another way."
"Yeah," Merlin sighs. He rests his chin on his fist. "You ever hear Arthur talk about it?"
"No," Gwen says. "What does he say? He's always stood by his father, even if he seems less awful."
"I think you're right about that," Merlin says slowly, as though this is just occurring to him, as though by saying it he is just coming to realize it himself. "I think something's going to change. I think he's going to be a part of it."
Suddenly everything seems terrifying but possible, there on the roof of the building with the few stars and a couple satellites twinkling overhead. The purple sky seems magical; the city smells like summer; Gwen smells like plants and life and sweet human sweat.
She kisses him there, holding the blunt to the side as he kisses her back. Merlin thinks of Morgana and Gwen thinks of Arthur, and guilt occurs to them but they dismiss it, and it floats away on a tendril of smoke.
-
It's as simple as this: one Indian summer, Merlin brings him home. His mother has a farm, and how did Arthur not know this, he feels like a fool - his mother has the family farm and it’s in trouble. It’s like a Laura Ingalls Wilder book. It’s like going to meet reality. A week turns into a universe of its own; he hardly feels time pass in a whirlwind of work, and there is nothing else in life, these interminable moments, until it seems like he is packing his bag only a moment after he arrived.
What he remembers is - what doesn't he remember? He can't describe it. His body holds memories more solidly than his mind - he feels every toss and pull and lunge and plunge long afterwards, and his aching body reveals to him muscles he didn't know he had. His vision is full of the white sun and crisp morning sky, the sunbleached farmhouse, golden fields; the world blinds him with all there is to see.
What does he remember - he remembers this, a late afternoon in the hay loft, stacking bales with Merlin. The musty old hay odor of the loft fills his nostrils, and the fresh stuff smells wonderful, warm and sun-baked as he stands over a bale, grasps the twine, and heaves it onto the stack. It's a rhythmic motion they take a while to establish, their bodies tired already after the long day, and this work less urgent than the actual harvest so they take it at a relaxed pace. Merlin grabs one end of a bale, and Arthur the other, and they heave, sometimes one jostling the other as they bump shoulders reaching for the next bale. His hands feel numb in their canvas gloves so he takes them off after they're done with the heavy stuff, and have to deal with picking up the loose straw from one bale that burst its twine. They dig and dig in the piles, like children, squeezing and grasping at the bunches and at each other's hands, meeting easily there. It's so very easy to meet each other, here, when the late afternoon light is warm and golden on the hay, and the dust motes swirl around them in the sunbeams, and work has turned into play effortlessly as they shove the stuff into piles, throw handfuls at each other and shove them down each others' shirts. They have put off who they were and see each other for who they are: goofy grinning faces with straw sticking out of their hair, hands and arms brown with dirt, in too-big overalls and worn-out boots.
They meet each other then, flopped down in the hay where Merlin tells him something, a secret, and Arthur thinks he already knew and only now is he ready to hear it.
What's it like? Arthur asks.
Merlin's eyes light up.
-
On the radio station Arthur listens to late at night, when he can’t sleep, there's a caller calling in about strange lights she sees next door. She thinks it’s a signal, but the building's been vacant for years and her husband couldn't find anyone there. When investigated, the signals vanish and appear further on. Well, that’s awfully funny, the deejay says as though he really does want to laugh, but his partner says firmly, You should call the cops.
In the apartment where Merlin is sound asleep and Arthur sits awake alone, he hears the sound of a far-off television or radio that keeps switching channels, almost but not quite clear enough to distinguish what’s being said. He sticks his head out the window of his apartment into the storm-fresh air and sees someone standing on the sidewalk below with a radio. The kid looks up at the sound of the window opening and reaches for the dial, walks away quickly.
Morgana calls in the morning, asks if he’s doing all right, Gwen said something the other day that made her think of him and she knows he’s been under plenty of pressure lately. Arthur is on the cusp of saying, Of course everything’s all right, but he stops himself, hesitates. He hears Gwen’s voice in the background, remembers the strange lights and the fear on the radio, the growing strangeness of the coffee shop where Morgana used to spend all her time.
"I don’t know," he says. "I guess I’m fine. I’m worried about everything else."
"Tell me about it," she agrees.
"Look," Arthur says, and he feels strange saying this, but it’s a sunny Saturday morning after a rainy night and everything is bright and clean and wet so why not. "Do you want to get coffee? It’s been a while since we talked."
-
Merlin has the resources. He usurped Nimueh and appropriated her networks of intelligence and operation; he could continue her mission, with have sufficient sway over any subversive group he stumbled upon. It's a system with such potential, even after it's crumbled and divided after losing its spiritual leader. It could still be a glorious revolution - but not like this. Not like it was. It needs reform.
It needs (Merlin says to Morgana over coffee) to go back to the texts; it needs (he says to Arthur at breakfast) to remember that its theories rest on material preconditions; it needs to remember how to play. It needs to know that domination was necessary to civilization but no longer. Do you remember reading about species-being and the human senses? Do you remember Eros?
Arthur will look at him and Morgana will look at the volume stuffed with letters in his outstretched hand, and they will look like they haven't seen him before, and he will feel as though he's speaking in tongues, as though he's the last person either of them would expect to have visions.
It doesn't have to end the way you think it does, he will say. He will say, Take it.
"When you've understood this scripture, throw it away. If you cant understand this scripture, throw it away. I insist on your freedom."
Jack Kerouac, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity verse 45