title: Is it bright where you are?
characters/pairings: arthur/morgana
ratings/warnings: pg; some violent imagery?
notes: written for the "screw you, canon!" merlin ficathon on lj, for the prompt: Arthur/Morgana - Something always brings me back to you.
x
It's been years now and she should not want this, should not need this.
She knows the dangers of it all very well.
She should not skirt the edges of the kingdom that is no longer hers to call home. More importantly, she should not harness the old blood magic to catalogue all the motions of the quiet gleam that is now his life, not when she has lost count of how many times she has wanted him dead.
x
She makes excuses.
When they aren't enough, when she doesn't buy into her own delusions, she talks and lies to Morgause's bones. Says she does it all for good reason. That it is in her best interests to know his every move.
She lies that it will keep her safer, informed, and knows all the angles from which it leaves her vulnerable and open.
This is a spell that can be traced back, can kill her if she's not careful, and yet she cannot-
(she can, she can-she can't)
-let go.
x
It devours her life, her dreams, and all her waking moments. The sky and water and earth and fire. All of them in all of their formations and there isn't a day, a moment without.
x
And one day, reckless and burning (and homesick, so homesick, though that part of her is long dead; she'll swear it to her grave), she glides through the corridors and enchants herself a cloak like Guinevere's.
Soundlessly, she works her way into his chambers and fingers the hilt of the knife he gave her.
It would be so charmingly ironic.
It would also solve all her problems in one decisive motion for he is and has always been more dangerous for her than Uther even if only for the power he still unknowingly has over her. And this-this would cure her of her obsession, her addiction, this all-encompassing affliction or whatever it is that this had become.
Blood magic, Morgause had once said, was the darkest kind for it was born of something colder and harder than the blackest of hatred. (Love, she had said. Love gone stale and wrong. The sharpest edge. The harshest thing.)
She slices a thin line along the pad of her index finger and touches it to his lips.
(She never did get to say goodbye to him. Realizes that she never wanted that. They've always had something else, something more.)
His mouth smears deep red from it. The sight of it makes her feels weary beyond her years and simultaneously very small, lost and desperate like the days when she had thought him something worth fighting for. Perhaps it is the fight that has abandoned her now.
Come find me.
It is, in all likelihood, her suicide.
But there are far worse things in the world, she knows.