![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
phantomjam) wrote2008-12-16 11:04 pm
fic: I Promise You This
Rating: PG
Pairing: None, gen. Tiny hints at Merlin/Arthur if you want it.
Warnings: None
Spoilers: Heavy spoilers for 1x13
Summary: They had every chance to heed the omens; they did not, and this is only the beginning.
A/N: So the finale kind of grabbed me round the throat and refused to let go until I submitted to its whims and wrote about a million character studies. What was originally meant to be a series of snapshots from that ep turned into this. IDEK, don't ask me.
I Promise You This
It started long before the Questing Beast, omen upon omen rising in the dark – plague and poison, creatures of legend rearing up in blood, a dead knight walking free of his tomb – and everywhere the taste of magic. It was there all along: old magic of the Old Religion, the lifeblood of the earth flowing unconquerable just beneath the surface. Still, they turned away, eyes blind, refused to acknowledge what was coming, the threat thrumming in the air.
Even when Morgana comes spilling down the steps, hair unbound, feet bare, eyes red with the terror of knowledge, even then they turn away. Power of a seer and they will not heed it; Merlin will not heed it. ‘I will make sure he is safe,’ he says, and here it begins, a chain of broken promises and empty words. They take her by the arms and drag her away, out of sight, like something shameful. They close their ears to her piteous shrieks and send her back to her tortured dreams; she weeps in her chambers: weeps for her curse, weeps for Arthur and Merlin and Uther, weeps for Camelot itself, and weeps most of all for her own futility. Only Gwen will listen to her but Morgana sees in her eyes that she does not understand. Morgana laughs, low and bitter, for she sees the future and yet can speak only words that make no sense, and she is not yet so far gone that she cannot appreciate the irony.
She does not sleep, and when she goes to Merlin for a second time her eyes are sunken and dark and she is pale, a wraith ghosting the corridors of the damned and the doomed. She catches his sleeve and begs with her eyes and her words. ‘This is only the beginning,’ she tells him, because she knows what he is and he must be warned. He looks at her, searches her face, and she can only guess at what he sees because he says not a word in return. The last thing he has said to her – ‘I will make sure he is safe’ – the promise hovers shattered between them. He turns away in guilt and shame, pulls back from her touch. He thinks he knows already the flavour of his own death but he has no idea. She watches him go, unheeded, but weeps no longer; her grief is a bottomless well, still and unending beneath the surface, because she has seen what will come but lacks the power to stir even a ripple in the vast ocean of fate.
The courtyard is a sea of candles in the night, brief flickers of light against the swallowing dark. Uther watches them and feels the bite of despair closing fast on his heels. ‘I have conquered the old religion!’ he had proclaimed, as if by the words alone he could make it so – empty words, hollow, that fell dead even as they left his tongue. ‘Its warnings mean nothing to me now,’ he had said, until that warning was Arthur’s body brought back through the gates, cold and still and barely alive. Now he feels it, the old magic, slipping in through the cracks like Arthur’s life slipping through his fingers. Its presence weighs heavy on him now – it is the weight of his son’s body bearing him to his knees (dead weight he thinks and turns his head away); the weight of his grief crushing the air from his lungs; the weight of his guilt and his regret bearing down on him with the force of a kingdom crumbling, each stone and foundation pressing on his weary back.
He stares at the candles glimmering in the darkness; each little flicker of light is a reminder of all those lives he fed to the flames himself. He has built his walls high to keep the past at bay, but now it comes circling back: the Questing Beast and the Old Religion, Igraine and a bargain he struck so long ago, before he understood the workings of the world. Igraine was price enough; he cannot lose Arthur now. If only, he thinks, if only he could hold back the tide of magic, the demons of his past, and spare his son, if only Arthur could live free from the sins of his father; he turns from the window and bows his head because he doesn’t believe in miracles. Yes, Uther is all atonement while his son lies restless on his deathbed, but when Gaius and Merlin come with their ‘tincture’, when Arthur swallows and wakes and lives, the poison turned back from his veins, Uther blinds his eyes with relief and does not ask. He does not think of bargains and lives paid in trade – he does not think of consequences.
Merlin is no different, not at first. He is young and foolish, and when he goes to the Isle of the Blessed and speaks with Nimueh it is with open hands and honest eyes and his own life offered up before him. ‘I willingly give my life for Arthur’s,’ he says, and ‘his life is worth a hundred of mine,’ earnest and straightforward and desperate. ‘How brave you are,’ she spits back in his face, words twisted with mockery, but he does not falter. The rain comes pouring down, cool and sweet, until the cup overflows and salvation runs in rivulets down its sides. He returns triumphant but he does not yet know what he has done: he, like Uther, will not accept the price demanded of him. He lies down to sleep and thinks that he will never wake again; he does, jolting upright, shocked and breathing and alive, only to find his mother on the cusp of death in his place.
He goes to the dragon. ‘You made me trade my mother’s life for Arthur’s!’ he shouts, as if it wasn’t him, wasn’t his choice, his foolish action that set this nightmare unravelling before him. He takes it all, his guilt and horror and fear and throws it in the dragon’s face, refuses the capricious creature and denies it all hope of light. His hate flares large in the cavern and he leaves it there in the dark with the shackled beast, so that when he goes to Arthur he is calm through the remnants of his tears. He says his farewells though not in so many words, and it’s the most truthful he’s ever been with Arthur, bare and open, but not saying what he really means at all. Arthur stares back at him disturbed and doesn’t know what to do with such sudden sincerity. Merlin wonders how much he understands, what he’ll do when he realises that this time Merlin’s never coming back, if the pain of loss will hit him square in the chest as well. Small things, selfish things, but he can’t help wondering even though he’s already running on borrowed time.
He rides hard now, harder than before, and he leaves a hundred promises in his wake, to his mother and to Arthur and to himself, and to Gaius gone on ahead. He promises that he will make it better, shoulder this burden and pay the price he meant to from the start. All the way his mother’s words and Gaius’ ring in his mind – ‘you’re such a good son’ and ‘to sacrifice myself for you is but an honour’ – and bitterness twists in his gut until he thinks he’ll be sick; now he’s learning but he’s not there yet.
Gaius, though, Gaius is a different matter. He’s waded through this nightmare once before and for too long he’s been content to stand by and hold his tongue, but no more. He faces Nimueh and it’s a familiar scene; lives hang in the balance now just as much as then, only this time he comes with something to trade. He feels it: past, present, future all stretching out around them at this juncture, all the choices that have brought them both to this point, face to face after so long. She mocks him, unearthing the spite and viciousness of decades honed fine and sharp. He takes each barb and each verbal strike, lets her lay him open to the bone because he knows his protests would be empty; they both know better than that.
This, though, is not about the past; he speaks of the future, and in that much at least he is correct. He speaks of a new kingdom, a new order, built on the shoulders of hopeful youth. ‘Peace,’ he says, ‘beauty.’ He feels the cool burn of Nimueh’s scorn but it means nothing. He knows that he does not deserve to see the new world with all the shame that lies in his past, but if he can lay down his life to make it a reality then that small part will send him happy to his grave. When Nimueh looks him dead in the eyes and asks him if he is ready to die he tells her that he is, because then finally his aimless guilt-ridden life might have some greater meaning. He knows that Merlin has such greatness in him, and Arthur too, and it makes him yearn for a destiny of his own. Perhaps, he thinks, this is it. ‘For Merlin,’ he says, and gives himself over.
Gaius gives and Nimueh takes. She watches the old fool crumple to the ground and thinks of Uther, ignorant and unaware. He sits heedless on his throne and feasts and drinks to the rhythm of the executioner’s axe and tells himself that it is power, control, safety; she will bring his reign to the dust. A life for a life, and Igraine’s breath had stilled even as her son’s gasped loud and strong for the first time in the open air, and still Uther did not understand the meaning of consequences. He sent his men out into the streets to hunt and purge the kingdom of magic as though it could purge him of his guilt. He thrust all of the pain, all of the blame upon the practitioners of that so-called cursed art and brought the black hand of judgment down upon them all. She retreated then before the face of a rage as unquenchable and unreasoned as the flames that climbed high on the pyres in the streets of Camelot.
A life for a life and Uther has made the streets run red; now he will feel the pain tenfold. She has relinquished Arthur’s life. Now she will take Gaius’. It will still be a blow, and Merlin also has felt the first sting of power, of the old magic. Soon he will learn his place and together they will call back the magic from the dark corners and hidden places where her people have been forced to cower. The Old Religion people call it, now just a nameless fear in the night, their glory degenerated into something furtive and tainted and unnamed. She stands there, priestess in her tattered dress, and her head swims with the power and ecstasy of the future, of Uther crushed and trembling under her hands. She thinks the years have made her strong; they have made her petty. She is just as blind as the man she so despises.
So it is that when Merlin arrives for the second time she has no idea what is coming for her; a life for a life indeed, and she has taken many in her time. She taunts him, tempts him, full of her own importance, drunk on her own magic, the power over life and death that she thinks she owns but which rightfully owns her. He faces her down over Gaius’ body, angry and grieving and utterly untamed.
‘I will make Arthur King!’ he proclaims, and he knows that this at least is true; this promise he will keep, if he must tear apart the earth to its very foundations to do so. He doesn’t care for destiny now, doesn’t care whether the dragon spoke true or if all those precious things he nurtured in his heart were lies: this is his destiny, the destiny that he claims for himself. He and Arthur, side by side, will face down the future, and there is no room in his glorious vision for Nimueh, for the Old Religion – ancient things, dark things now twisted by the horror of their persecution. She strikes him down but he refuses to fall. He calls the lightning, lets it sing in his veins. He will not be denied this time, he will not let this promise at least fall empty into dust. He stretches out his hand and pulls the clouds from the sky, makes the world heave and bend to his summons with the sheer force of his desperation and determination. He obliterates her, the priestess of the Old Religion, watches her body turn to ash. It leaves him cold, the taste of murder on his tongue, but it must be done, he thinks, for Arthur, and their future burns warm and certain in his chest.
Gaius lives. The balance is restored – Merlin has wrenched it into to place with his will alone, forced Nimueh’s life onto the scales. Merlin is giddy with relief and adrenaline. He has dragged himself through hell itself and in the end he has not lost a thing. This is what he thinks; he is wrong. He has not learnt. He has no idea what he has wrought – to anger a dragon, imprisoned though it may be, is a dangerous thing; to split the sky with magic in this place is more dangerous still. The ripples will spread far.
Morgana waits and watches for his return, feels his approach in the tremor of her bones, like thunder, like the drumming of war. Merlin rides proudly back through the gates, and Gaius with him; they smile and laugh, strong and full of life the both of them. They go about their business as if the order of the world has not just jolted away from beneath their feet, as though there is no scent of change and smoke on the air. Merlin goes about his work for Arthur. It is tense at first, fragile – Merlin knows too much and Arthur too little – but Arthur is a prat and Merlin is an idiot and they soon fall into place, a little brighter, a little sharper than before but still in perfect synchronicity in their own particular way.
Uther sits iron in his throne and Gaius mixes his herbs and his poultices in his rooms; all is as it was before, but every time Morgana passes Merlin in a corridor, every innocent glance he throws her, rocks her to the core and leaves her flayed and shaken. He is changed, though he does not recognise it yet. The coil of power inside of her stirs even while waking now and she knows it is because of him. She feels the pull of the undertow that will one day drag her down – this too she has seen – but for now it is only the light tug of a drifting current. She skulks alone in empty corridors and waits for the threads of her sanity to unravel, that she might not have to face down the future sober and sane and alone in her fear; fire rages in the depths below, and the dragon is calling.
She shakes her head: they have not heeded her words, and this is only the beginning.
no subject
no subject
no subject
MY THOUGHT EXACTLY! I mean, he act all angry, but both Nimueh & the dragon warned him that to save a life, a life would be taken, and that it would not be as easy as Merlin giving his life. I thought he was a bit stupid and unfair in this episode... XD
Fantastic fic! :)
no subject
Thanks, glad you like it! :D
no subject
Same here, I'm still very much obsessed by him lol, but it was irritating!
no subject
I'm in a rush so you'll have to put up with a rushed ineloquent comment for now, but this was brilliant.
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject