Chapter Text
There. I saw you, there, across the campus square, with your golden hair, and that fucking smile. How dare you smile? All you ever fucking did was make me scream.
alternate epilogue
tragedy
Merlin Wyllt did not come through the past two years unscathed.
Merlin Wyllt does not want to live, but somehow he has persisted.
It’s been — difficult.
Which is why, the first time he sees Arthur Pendragon on his university campus, day one of his first term, it’s as though an earthquake strikes the ground under his feet and he stops breathing until he’s safe inside a toilet cubicle on the first floor of Building Number Whatever, sobbing and groaning with the terror of it. There is no place he can escape his past.
Arthur Pendragon.
God, how beautiful he’d looked in the split second their eyes had met, and those blue eyes had widened in surprise — how? Surprise how? — and —
Merlin faints.
He opens his eyes about (he checks his watch) ten minutes later. He’s on the floor, head resting on the door underneath the cubicle lock. His heart is still racing, even though somehow he feels rested, drained, a little groggy. It takes him not long at all to recollect where he is and why. He copes a little better this time. No more terror, at least.
Merlin hasn’t really any idea what he’ll do now. If he had ever been a rational person, he isn’t any longer, and these days it takes him nearly all he has to function and pretend to be a normal human being and hide effectively the gaping maw of nothingness that he really consists of.
Freya. Freya’ll know what to do. But first he’s getting out of the fucking cubicle, because he’s not going to call her on the bog.
It’d been stupid of him not to check for feet from the gap, though, because there he fucking is when Merlin opens the door. There, waiting, is the demon Arthur Pendragon.
He’s not really a demon, not even figuratively. Merlin feels so tired even thinking that. He knows Arthur must have undergone his own trials and tribulations, and that’s what made him into such an arsehole that could do what he did to an innocent person who’d only ever loved him. Therapy for you, and you, and you — but then Arthur speaks and breaks into his thoughts.
“I’m sorry,” is the first thing Merlin hears in that gorgeous voice in two years. “I’m sorry, Merlin.”
Merlin does a double take, because —
“Why the fuck do you look so scared?” Merlin isn’t prepared to handle his own voice sounding so… venomous. “I’m not going to fucking stab you in the eye or whatever.”
“I’m not — no,” protests Arthur. But there had been fear on his face. Or perhaps it had been worry. “I’m only here because, well, yeah, I followed you —”
“To Camlann fucking University, you stalker?” Merlin doesn’t get where the anger is coming from. OK, not true. He knows, and he’s going to get it out. All out.
“No!” says Arthur, and the despair that adorns his lovely face (of course it’s still lovely, but for two small scars on his left cheekbone) tells Merlin that this conversation is definitely not going Arthur’s way at all. “I came here because it’s the furthest I could get from my father and Cambridge and still be in the same country. Spelling notwithstanding. I didn’t think for a second I’d find you here!”
“Yeah, right,” spits Merlin.
“I swear to whatever God you believe in, and every single one you don’t, I had no idea.”
“You —” How do you continue to say words instead of making guttural sounds to someone whose very visage makes you want to collapse, crying, back into the little boy you were? “I’m leaving. I’m leaving, and you’d better not follow me, Pendragon.”
“Merlin, please listen. All I want to do is explain myself.”
“Oh, closure?” Merlin sneers. “I’ve been to therapy, too. I owe you nothing. Your psych might tell you that himself.”
“It’s — it’s a woman, actually —” and oh, how Arthur clearly regrets that little bit of flippancy —
Merlin muffles a scream behind gritted teeth and pushes past Pendragon into the hallways of Building — ah, it’s the main one, Building One — and the second he feels fresh air on his skin he whips out his phone and calls the one person who might pick up in seconds.
Arthur does not follow this time.
Merlin hates the fact that he hoped he would, just a little, just so Merlin could shove Arthur away again. Just for that satisfaction.
Maturity does not become Pendragon.
Freya’s doing a little social media investigation for him. Oppo research might be the term for it. Merlin certainly feels like he just ran into an enemy.
“Yeah, his knights all made it to Camlann, too,” she tells him. Even though the mobile network is patchy and her face is blurred, Merlin can construe her consternation. “They’re all there, reading political science.”
An ineffable dejection arises in Merlin, along with bile. There’s a lot of buzzwords his therapist taught him. Trauma, for one. He’s facing some re-traumatisation.
No. Thinking about it in therapy-speak isn’t going to help, and that man had made him talk and talk and talk about everything in such visceral detail that he was now part of the agony Merlin felt when he thought about Arthur Pendragon, fuck him.
The last time that Merlin had seen Arthur was the day that they had almost made love (for realsies) and then Arthur had just left him — in his own room, to boot — and that had been it. For two years, Merlin had no idea where Arthur was, if he was alive, or if he’d killed himself, or if he’d been shut up in a hospital for wanting to, like Merlin almost had.
He’d actually gone to Uther Pendragon to ask, like a fucking idiot who thought he’d actually get the truth out of that bastard.
“My son is none of your business,” was all he’d heard back. “If you wish to preserve your scholarship, you may want to leave my office this instant.”
And that had been that. Merlin had obsessively checked social media for a year, until Arthur’s year had all matriculated, and when for a year Arthur’s profiles had all been inactive, he thought Arthur had really just died and he’d —
broken. Completely.
Lost everything. The scholarship. His place at the academy. His prospects at a university more decent than this one.
It had taken him so long to get back on his feet, and look where he was now! Square fucking one!
“Look, just live your life,” encourages Freya. “I think he’ll have got the hint.”
Merlin wants to weep. Arthur would never even think of leaving him alone, not when he could get his claws in again.
Will had gone on to do bigger and better things in the land of bigger and better things. Gwen had found herself at Cambridge, where Merlin had thought Arthur would end up, and Daegal — well, he and Daegal didn’t talk much any more.
Even though Will and Gwen constantly text him, Merlin never really feels like talking to them, successes that they are, with their shining lives that shouldn’t be touched by toxic clouds of darkness like Merlin — except Freya, a fellow gleaming failure like him, someone who lost her scholarship and had to leave Camelot in her final year, just like him. Her he can tolerate.
God, he misses being normal. What he wouldn’t do for one calm year —
Merlin had indeed called Arthur mature too soon. He finds Merlin after class, three weeks after that disaster of a first meeting.
“Please talk to me,” is what he says this time, as if he thinks he’s got the right after giving Merlin enough space to adjust. Merlin doesn’t want to.
“I don’t fucking want to,” Merlin shoots back. His fellow students filter out of the classroom. He’s managed to get on everyone’s good side by being… himself, somehow, and is friends with most of them. It’s curious looks from them that he’s catching at the moment. They have no idea who Arthur Pendragon was. What Merlin wouldn’t give to be one of them, normal, normal —
Arthur has the temerity to look upset. “I owe you an explanation, Merlin, for vanishing. For that year.”
“But I don’t fucking owe you my ear,” Merlin retorts.
“I’d have thought you’d want to know,” hisses Arthur, apparent patience snapping suddenly, “given that it was my disappearance that made you have a total mental fucking breakdown, Merlin.”
Merlin reels as though he’s been slapped. He hopes no one else heard the words. Funny how that’s what he cares about most; preserving what little remains of the sane life he’s managed to build up around him. No one would ever treat him the way they do right now if they found out he wasn’t quite normal, quite as well-adjusted as he seemed.
Not that people can ever be normal; no one is normal. But people can be stable, can pretend, and Merlin would hate to be thought of as someone who can’t even do that.
“I’m sorry,” says Arthur, “but you surely didn’t think I didn’t know.”
“I didn’t,” murmurs Merlin, adrenaline draining away. “I didn’t realise it had made headline news wherever you’d fucked off to.”
“I’d run away, all right?” says Arthur quietly. He looks exhausted the way Merlin feels. “I’d run away to Morgana.”
Merlin doesn’t really want to hear more. He doesn’t want to react. But he can’t help himself. He wants to hurt Arthur, he wants Arthur to know and repent for what he did to Merlin. This, of course, is predicated on Arthur having the capacity to feel remorse, which he does seem to. What he really lacks is the ability to leave someone alone who wants nothing to do with him. You have to listen to and accept my apology. You have to love me again. I apologised. Everything needs to be OK now, because I said sorry, and that’s more than I’ve ever done in the past, so just forgive me and kiss me and fuck me again. I fucking said I’m sorry, didn’t I?
“You just left me there,” Merlin whispers, so that Arthur has to lean in. His smell — no cologne for Arthur today, just sweat, the same sweat that Merlin had dreamed about for months after the breakdown — “You just left me there in that bed, for hours, and then I didn’t see you again for two years, and you didn’t even send me a message. I thought you’d died.”
Arthur looks desolate. Shame ill-fits him, but that’s there, too.
“You didn’t even tell me you were my Arty. It was my mum that did.” Tears prick Merlin’s eyes. It’s as though all his rage at Arthur’s gone, replaced by nothing but misery. The next period’s started, but thank God Merlin has nothing left to do all day, because he rather thinks he’ll go back to his room and just… sleep for a while. “You were my Arty, my best friend, and you bullied me instead of just telling me you were mine. You tortured me. You were such an arsehole.”
“Yeah,” says Arthur. He doesn’t seem very willing to disagree, not that Merlin would have cared. “I was. And I wanted to tell you that I’m sorry for all of it. I’m as sorry now as I was then.”
“Well, that certainly makes everything OK,” says Merlin. “I’m all good and healed now. Thanks. I never want to see you again.”
Arthur glances at him uncertainly.
“Do you mean that?”
“Mean what?” asks Merlin, mendacious.
“You never want to see me again?”
Merlin stays silent.
“Then I… I think you should know. I love you, and I did back then, and I do now. I think I always will. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
This motherfucker.
Something glorious and beautiful rears up in Merlin’s chest, a feeling on fire, a roar of yearning. He has ached and ached to hear these words for so long, and this certainly is vindication of every kind, and he’d known inside that Arthur had loved him after all back then. But what use is any of it now? Nothing about Merlin is the same any more. He’s broken, and only just putting himself back together. There’s no way Arthur being present in his life will do more than just remind him of the great tragedy that is his derailed life.
“And I think you should fuck off,” says Merlin, and it takes him everything he has to say it, and everything that’s left afterwards to walk away without even a peek at the devastation that radiates from Arthur, like the all-destroying sludge from Chernobyl, a physical thing that Merlin can sense heating his back. It would burn him alive to turn around and look.
When he is home, he is that boy again, the boy who wept into his mother’s arms. All he wants now is to be rid of Arthur. That is all he wants. Nothing more.
Then Arthur is at his dorm, at his door, and Merlin feels so helpless. He’s never had the urge to become physically violent before. Arthur truly breaks him in new ways every time their ships lurch into each other.
How do you end a love story that was never really a love story?
Merlin doesn’t know. He wants to be alone, alone, alone leave me ALONE YOU HURT ME YOU TORTURED ME YOU CUT MY HEART UP YOU LAUGHED AT ME YOU INSULTED ME THAT’S NOT LOVE, THIS IS NOT LOVE, WE’RE NOT IN LOVE, YOU USED ME, YOU USED ME I WAS JUST A BOY WHO LOVED YOU HOW WAS I TO BLAME IN ANY OF THIS
“Go away,” he snarls at Arthur.
Arthur looks like shit, of course, but that was to be expected. Merlin very distantly sympathises with him for his love story not really working out the way he’d hoped, but Merlin will literally (literally) go insane with the maelstrom of lovehurtlustrage he feels if he spends another year around Arthur Pendragon.
What Merlin doesn’t expect — what neither of them expects, he thinks, is for Arthur to get down on his knees to actually beg for a last chance.
“Please,” and now there are tears in Arthur’s eyes. Come to think of it, Arthur seems fairly drunk, too. Jesus Christ. “Please, just be my friend, if you can’t be anything else. Date and marry whoever you want. Do whatever you want, I’ll never get in the way. Please, don’t just close the door. I was wrong for everything I did to you, I was cruel and awful, but please, if you could find it in yourself just to tolerate me, please, please, please …” He trails off into silence, ready to promise the moon and the stars, to drag down God himself from the heavens should Merlin but hint at wanting so.
Merlin knows there can be no commas and semicolons here, not if he’s to save his sanity. No graceful endings, no pirouetting off stage.
He takes a deep breath, and prepares to plunge the knife in deep. He swallows.
“I’m going to apply to transfer to another university tomorrow. I want to live my life without you in it.” God, he doesn’t mean it, he doesn’t mean the second bit, but he’s got to do it, hasn’t he? He’s got to do it.
Arthur visibly shatters. That’s his last plea, finished. And then he’s screaming with the agony of it. Merlin drags a limp Arthur up and into his arms, slamming the door shut with his foot, who gives a shit if anyone complains to the RA, he’s fucking leaving anyway, and they fall into Merlin’s bed together, Arthur a helpless wreck, Merlin clutching him tight, arms and legs wrapped around him for the last time, ever.
It’s not fucking fair. He doesn’t know which of them is repeating this into the other’s ears.
That’s how Merlin falls asleep. To the sounds of Arthur crying and apologising, again and again, not wishing any more for Merlin to stay. Even though he must. Even though he desperately must. Even though he might wither away without Merlin, the way Merlin has without Arthur.
It’s the first time he’s fallen asleep without a pill in two years.
He dreams that they’re in an apartment, eating dinner together. One of them is talking about wedding bells. Their chests can’t stop heaving with disbelief and love and gratitude. They’ve made up, good and proper, and are glowingly in love, and they’re dancing now, and the first time they make love as a real couple is transcendent and proves there’s no way they weren’t fated for each other. They get married and they learn to trust each other, and they have their happy, hopeful ending.
Merlin blinks awake in the middle of the night. Arthur’s mouth is on his neck. He’s exhaling warmth into Merlin’s skin. Merlin shakes with stifled anguish. He’s — he’s making a mistake, Mum, help me. He’s made the mistake already, and can’t take it back. He’s done what was right for him, hasn’t he? Arthur came and did exactly what Merlin had spelled out he wanted in front of his overzealous therapist. Arthur is capable of remorse. Is Merlin incapable of forgiveness?
This is how he closes his eyes to the last sight of Arthur Pendragon he will ever have. With doubt, and a quiet acknowledgment of the love for Arthur inside him, flickering like a single little lamp in the face of the void.
Arthur is gone the next morning. This time he might stay away for good.
Merlin’s heart aches, fluttering feebly in his chest.
He tries not to think about the fact that one day he will close his eyes and Arthur’s face won’t be so clear in his memory. He’ll get the shade of gold wrong, of his eyelashes. He’ll give those lips less of a curve. He’ll imagine freckles, maybe, or a dimple where there’s none. He’ll get the voice wrong, maybe.
(He’ll lie to himself about having forgotten all these things.)
He wonders when the regret will set in. Will he cave, and seek Arthur out in turn, and find himself rebuffed?
He starts packing.
He just wants to sleep.
Outside, the gathered clouds start to weep.
fin (encore)