Title: Whisper on the Wind
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Merlin/Arthur
Warnings: future fic
Spoilers: Vague spoilers for 1x11, 'The Moment of Truth' and 1x08, 'The Beginning of the End'
Summary: Merlin is ever brought full circle back to Ealdor
A/N: This grew out of an entry for merlin_las because there was no way I could fit the story I wanted to tell into 750 words. The prompt was 'Merlin in Ealdor'. A gigantic round of thanks to syllic and kelene for their excellent beta jobs and as a sidenote, to avert any confusion now, the Avalon mentioned herein refers to the version from 1x07, 'The Gates of Avalon' rather than the Isle-of-the-Blessed, linked-to-the-old-magic' version of traditional legend.

Whisper on the Wind

Merlin returned to Ealdor often once Arthur became King. His place was and would always be at Arthur’s side, and he was glad for it, but he wasn’t raised for the court as Arthur was. The constant weight of scrutiny and expectation, the clinging silks, the veiled barbs of polite conversation – they smothered him. Every day he was forced to smile through his teeth and exchange pleasantries with nobles who would rather see him hang for who and what he was, who disdained and dismissed him for his humble origins and who feared him for his power. He sat in council at Arthur’s right hand and he argued and disputed through the day, debated through the long hours of the night. The running of a kingdom was no easy task, especially not in the upheaval following Uther’s death and Arthur’s radical changes in policy, and the strain of balancing his political and magical duties wore at him, left him tired and drained and weary of scheming and speculation.

It wasn’t always like that – there were the quiet moments shared in Arthur’s chambers, exhausted from difficult negotiations with foreign dignitaries over truces and trade agreements, sitting by the fire and talking in quiet tones, trading jibes with the ease of long familiarity; there were the times when they rode out to survey Arthur’s kingdom, let his presence be known to those who were now his subjects and Arthur, Merlin, Morgana and Gwen would ride ahead on the road just like in the old days, as though venturing forth to vanquish bandit lords and liberate villages, light in their eyes and their laughter echoing up to the sky as the years wound back for a brief space of time.

Merlin took the good with the bad as best he could, but sometimes, just sometimes, it was too much, and he could feel relentless destiny hemming him in. Those were the times when he sought Ealdor again: a few words, a simple spell, and between one breath and the next he was there, the walls and towers of Camelot replaced by open fields and rugged hills, a village nestled in the middle of nowhere. He would take an hour, an afternoon, a day – however long he thought he could be spared – and retrace the familiar landscapes of his youth.

He swam in the fast-flowing river and sunned himself on its grassy banks, where he and Will had spent long summer days hiding from their chores; he wandered the shifting forest trails of his youth, listening to the wind sing softly in the trees, carrying the scent of foxglove and forget-me-not; he lay in the fields or on the hillsides, watching the villagers gather in the harvest in the crisp cool of autumn and planting new life in the spring, living with the rhythm of the seasons. He stretched out in the grass and watched the birds soar overhead, let his magic seep down into the earth and sweep outwards until he could feel the slow pulse of life all around him, interwoven and connected, an age-old cycle indifferent to his presence. He slept there sometimes, dozing under the shade or slipping into deep and dreamless slumber beneath the stars; there was a comfort in the turning of the world, and a feeling of coming home.

Merlin always used his magic to keep him hidden from curious eyes and the interest of anyone who might know him. It was easier that way, not to be known but just to be for a while in his own space; he missed the anonymity of a servant’s rank in some ways, though not in others. He went into the village sometimes wearing a glamour cast to disguise his features, and walked the familiar dirt road between the squat houses. It took some time before he could bring himself to pass the house where his mother had lived. She had died in Camelot of a wasting disease shortly after Arthur’s coronation and Merlin’s official appointment as his advisor, a role he’d been unofficially playing almost since the day they met. She told him she was proud of the man that he’d become.

His old home had new occupants now, a new family growing within its walls. It had stung at first to see them in the place that had once been his and should still be sacred to his mother’s memory, but he knew it was what she would have wanted – the house filled once more with the chaos and clutter of young children, the laughter and the tears. He stopped by to check on them now and then as the years passed, and found to his surprise that somewhere along the line he had acquired a proprietary, paternal feeling towards them, as though he were some estranged uncle come back to visit; he watched them from the window but never spoke or let them see him.

He confided this to Arthur one night, when he’d had a little too much to drink and was feeling too loose and pliant to know better, and Arthur had laughed at him and told him that it was particularly freakish behaviour, even for him. Arthur had referred to him as ‘Merlin the lurking child-snatcher’ for weeks, until Merlin finally snapped and cast a spell that emblazoned the word ‘prat’ in royal gold across the front of Arthur’s favourite tunic, entirely by accident of course. Gaius had eventually taken them aside after a series of increasingly juvenile pranks and informed them that their behaviour was entirely unacceptable and made a mockery of the crown; they were duly chastened, and it never happened again. Thinking back on it made Merlin remember how painfully young they had both been in the first few years of Arthur’s reign, how unprepared, and how quickly that had all been stamped out beneath the twin anvils of destiny and duty.

Gaius had been a godsend during those years, advising them both and bearing them up even as his face became more lined and his back more bent with age and grief; the loss of Uther, the ache of a decades-old friendship cut short, sapped him of his strength more and more. It hadn’t been such a surprise when he passed away. Perhaps on some level they all knew that his time was done – he had passed the torch on to a younger generation and lingered just long enough to see them on their feet. Merlin missed him sorely. He erected a headstone for him in Ealdor the day after it happened, next to the one he had made for Hunith in the glade that had been her favourite place. She had used to take Merlin there when he was a boy and sing to him under the leafy boughs, cradling his head in her lap, stroking his brow with work-calloused hands. Will was represented there as well – a small circle of loved ones lost along the way. A little sorcerous encouragement ensured that the stones were surrounded by wildflowers all year round – violets and bluebells and fragrant columbine. Though their bodies resided elsewhere or nowhere at all, Merlin liked to think of this as their spiritual resting place; he visited almost every time he returned.

Merlin never gave Arthur warning before he vanished. It was a childish gesture perhaps, chafing at the restrictions and the rules of their lives, pushing boundaries as he always had, but he always brought him back a token – a trinket from the market; a stone from the river-bed worn smooth and round; an autumn leaf, bright red and brittle. Arthur never failed to roll his eyes at Merlin’s offerings or make some scathing remark, but Merlin knew that he kept them all in a chest at the foot of his bed, each one wrapped carefully in velvet. It was the only apology Merlin had to give, because that was a side of himself this he could not share with Arthur – the fey pull of his magic that yearned for giddy freedom in the open air and thundering might beneath the earth, a pull that only grew as time slipped by. Merlin lived only half a life in Camelot, and it pained him and Arthur both to recognise it.

Once, and only once, Merlin brought Arthur with him. It was on the eve of his marriage to Gwen – Guinevere as he must now call her. Arthur closed his eyes in Camelot and opened them in Ealdor, shocked and blue and bright with emotion. Merlin pushed him down into the soft grass and made love to him under the trees in the waning light of dusk, a consummation and a farewell because change was on the wind that night and they both knew that things would be different in the light of day. Afterwards they lay naked, hand-in-hand, sheltered by a bower of oak, and Merlin asked Arthur if he loved her.

‘Yes,’ Arthur had said into the quiet dark of night, and Merlin had squeezed his hand and told him he was glad, and found that it was true; he was not happy, but he was glad.

He never took anyone back with him again, but he found Morgana there in Ealdor of her own accord years after that fleeting night, years after Lancelot and Guinevere’s betrayal – he would not now call her Gwen, even if he understood her choice – years too after Morgana had herself disappeared and resurfaced at Mordred’s side. In hindsight they should have seen it coming – Mordred had come to Camelot several times in the intervening years, and Morgana was ever drawn to him, nurturing and fascinated while horror and guilt curled deep in Merlin’s gut. He could see that whatever was forming between them boded ill, but even so he could not help reflecting that perhaps it was not much different from Arthur and himself, kept always in each other’s orbit even when it made them desperate, even when it hurt; perhaps that too was destiny, but maybe Morgana would know that better than him.

He met her there the morning after Camlann, when Mordred’s blood had been spilled red across the black earth as he fell and Arthur had been sent half-dead to Avalon, the one place where Merlin could not follow; Avalon was alien and other in every way that Merlin’s magic was natural and essential, and he was not welcome there. He returned instead to Ealdor, because he couldn’t return to Camelot, to a castle without a king. That place held nothing for him now that Arthur was gone. He couldn’t say exactly what he was looking for; he did not seek freedom, for what good was freedom without the bonds and ties of friendship, loyalty, love to call him back? He did not come to grieve – he could not feel grief because he could not yet conceive of a world without Arthur; after so long spent at his side his mind had no frame of reference for such a thing. He was cut adrift, and his wandering, as ever, brought him round full circle back to the village of his birth, just now stirring into wakefulness under dawn’s virgin touch, and Morgana was waiting for him.

‘I saw that you’d be here,’ she said, voice soft as the wind that swayed through the slender stalks of barley and toyed with the gossamer folds of her trailing gown. Merlin looked at her, anger and horror and betrayal floating disconnected across the placid surface of his mind, drawn down by the fathomless current of exhaustion and suffocated to nothing.

‘You weren’t at Camlann,’ he said.

‘I didn’t need to be.’

They stood together in the golden light, watching the villagers disperse among the fields and set to the day’s labour. These people knew nothing of distant battles and the rise and fall of kings – untroubled, they followed only the rise and fall of the sun and the patterns of the year, constant as the tide and just as heedless; they did not know what had been given in their name. There was nothing for Merlin here either; this was a life to which he could not return just as surely as he could not return to the court. In the space of one breath and the next, it seemed, time had passed him by and he had lost his place.

Morgana took him gently by the wrist and led him away up the easy slope of a hill, and Merlin followed without protest. He found himself at the fringes of a wood, underneath the twining, twisted boughs of an ancient oak, mighty and magnificent with age; he remembered this place, where he had lain with Arthur for the first and final time, the sweat cooling from their bodies. He sank down into the tall grass on his hands and knees and felt the kiss of Arthur’s body in the memory of the earth beneath his palms, stirring at his presence. He lay down, pressed his cheek to the ground and dug his fingers into the rich soil, enveloping himself in the ghost-sensation of a long lost night.

The earth welcomed him as it always did, uncurled for the longing call of his magic. There was movement all around him, reacting to his unconscious summons – the shifting of sediment and rock, the oak tree creaking overhead. He rolled onto his back at the touch of roots burrowing through the earth to coil around his wrists, winding round the length of his body. Morgana stood nearby, just watching, serene and still, and Merlin remembered her as she used to be, vibrant and violent and alive in her passions. He understood this stillness; Mordred was gone, lost to her with more finality than Arthur was lost to him.

‘Where will you go?’ he asked her. ‘To Avalon?’

Morgana’s gift was something woven ethereal from the stuff of dreams, and she might be permitted where he was not. To Merlin’s surprise she laughed, sharp and sudden with startled humour.

‘What, and have to spend millennia trapped there with Arthur? I couldn’t think of a worse fate.’

For a moment she was the Morgana of old, as if the years had rolled back and left her standing there, bold and teasing, hip cocked and brow raised, silhouetted in the morning light, but then her words caught at him and she faded once more into softened edges and blurred lines.

‘Millennia? Is that how long it’ll take?’ he asked.

She shook her head wistfully. ‘Just the blink of an eye.’ She sighed and turned to leave. ‘Time’s up, Merlin.’ The sunlight glinted in her dark hair and in her bright eyes as she gave him one last farewell. ‘Rest well; you’ll see him again.’

It was her parting gift.

Merlin felt the earth open up beneath his back, giving way to receive him as the roots of the oak pulled him down. He turned his head to follow Morgana’s retreating form; beyond her a lone hawk wheeled in the vast arch of the skies – a Merlin, he thought with a smile, and finally let go.

He closed his eyes and felt his magic spilling out with every breath, like blood from a mortal wound, draining away into the soil with every beat of his heart. It spidered out beneath the surface of the land, burying itself deep and wide and anchoring him in the warm embrace of Albion, the familiar touch of Arthur’s kingdom. The steady rhythm of Merlin’s breathing slowed and dragged as he relaxed, matching his pulse to the patient movement of millennia and the eternal tug of gravity. His blood ran sluggish in his veins like the crawl and heave of molten rock at the core of the world.

An image formed in Merlin’s mind: the four of them – Arthur, Merlin, Morgana, Gwen – lying in a sundrenched meadow, heads together, bodies angling out like the spokes of a wheel. They were all of them dressed in bright colours and fine clothes, their hands interlinked and buttercups woven in the girls’ hair. There was no crown on Arthur’s brow, no lines of worry on their faces; they smiled, the blue of the sky in their eyes and the weight of the earth at their backs bearing them up toward the heavens.

Merlin felt the weight of soil covering his chest and rasping against his neck, and let himself sink by languid, lazy degrees into the oblivious haze of the dream.

The wind whispered across his face, its lingering brushes across his cheekbones the last thing he felt before the earth swallowed him down, and in its soft susurration lay the murmur of change, the promise of eons.