Title: The Once and Future Love
A/N: Written for a prompt on Tumblr, and dedicated to gigaku, creator of this plot bunny that ran wild in my head.
I have loved you for a thousand years
I'll love you for a thousand more
He was gone. Arthur, his Arthur, was gone. Merlin had failed.
Hundreds of years flickered past, images flashing by, but his pain never dulled. Merlin hurt. He had expected death to take him long ago, and Merlin would have gone willingly. It would have been a release from everything.
It took Merlin a long time to realise that he was aging. He went twenty, fifty, one hundred years at a time without looking in the mirror. When a middle aged face stared back at him he jumped in shock and dropped a jug.
It gave him a little more hope to think that he would die one day, even if that time was thousands of years in the future.
He wandered the country of Albion restlessly, waiting for the end.
The end never came. Merlin became ancient, with long white hair and a flowing beard – the form of Dragoon, of Emrys. But then the beard began to recede into his chin. His hair slowly darkened and became shorter, until one day he was a teenager with a mop of black hair.
Then, he met Arthur. Merlin started to live again.
