So, it's been a while, sorry about that. There have probably been loads of modern day reincarnations fics recently, but I couldn't get the idea out of my head, and then I told a friend about it and she gave me tons of encouragement to write this. I was going to wait until I'd already written a few chapters before posting the story, but I guess I didn't really want to wait to hear what people thought of it.

With regards to my other story, Fate Keeps Us Apart, I'm not sure what's going to happen to it. I've lost my muse for it so it might be discontinued. I feel that I haven't done Mordred's character justice and it has a lot of continuity problems. At first I told myself that I'd lay off the longer stories for a while and post some one-shots before working on a multichapter. That didn't work. This story will be a multichapter, but it won't be huge. That said, I hope you enjoy it!


The waiting was the worst part. In fact it just so happened to be the only part. All he ever did all day was wait. His days were spent by wandering around the Lake of Avalon, keeping an eye on its waters just in case. He needn't have bothered though. For the past thousand years he needn't have bothered. Nothing had happened yet.

They had said it would happen someday. There would come a time when Albion would need the Once and Future King again and Arthur would live once more, this day had not happened yet though, and it almost seemed like it never would.

When Arthur had first died and Kilgarrah told him that he would live again, Merlin had thought that he would die at an old age and be born into a younger body. It seemed that the world had other plans for him.

It took him a while before he realised that he wasn't ageing. Just a few months after Arthur's death he had been rubbing his chin wondering why he didn't grow stubble any more. That was when his suspicions started, but it wasn't for another few years before he knew completely: he wasn't ageing anymore. In fact, he hadn't aged since the day Arthur died.

The reality of what was going to happen came to him one day when Gaius fell over while he was working in his chambers. The physician was growing old, it was getting increasingly hard for him to walk and it seemed he only had a few more years in that world. As Merlin watched his mentor fall, using magic to soften his impact, he suddenly realised that he was going to be forced to watch the deaths of all his remaining friends and family. One day, Gaius, Hunith, Gwen, Leon and Percival would all be dead, and he would be alone. The truth had come to him so suddenly that he almost broke down where he was. The fact that one day he would walk the earth alone was almost too much to think about. So instead he didn't think about it, and tried to spend as much time with his friends as he could. Once he noticed that his mother wasn't getting any younger either, he took more time off to see her.

Gwen didn't mind, she had long ago guessed that he wasn't ageing, and understood that he was going through a bad time. However, despite his troubles he made the most of what he had while he still had it.

Under Gwen's rule, magic had been returned to the land and he had been made court sorcerer. It was the Albion he had always dreamed of: sorcerers were allowed to live peacefully inside Camelot and magic roamed free. Gwen had even managed to make a treaty with all the other kingdoms to form Albion; before "Albion" had just been a word to describe the kingdoms, now it was real. Although it was still divided into kingdoms ruled by different people, they all lived in harmony and worked together to try to create a new world. In the name of Arthur, Gwen had brought peace to the lands. Even so, she had managed to put most of the glory on Merlin's shoulders. He had been hailed as a hero for killing Morgana, and the people almost feared him now they knew he was a sorcerer. His friends still thought of him the same though, they now knew that beneath the clumsy manservant there was a powerful sorcerer (or as he preferred it: warlock), but they treated him the same as they always did.

All this had disappeared eventually though. The first to go was Gaius. He lived for another six years after Arthur died, before finally dying peacefully in his sleep, at an age which was a great achievement for the time. In later years, Gwen sometimes wondered if Merlin was using magic to prolong their lives as much as he could. However, not even all the magic in the world can stop death completely.

Hunith was next. During one particularly harsh winter, Merlin spent some months away from Camelot looking after her. She was about seventy years old by this point, her body frail and barely able to cope with the cold. Merlin slept on the floor next to her bed every night, using magic to warm her up. At one point she told him to leave her and make small fires in the houses of all the other people in Ealdor so no one would freeze to death. He did so and although he had created a lingering fire to warm her, by the time he returned she was shivering badly. In the end and despite his magic, the cold was too much for her and she left in the early hours of the morning. He only stayed long enough to give her a proper burial. He never returned there.

Percival and Leon stayed in Camelot as knights. They both found wives and had children, although Percival left often to keep Saxons away from Albion. He always volunteered for these missions, and Merlin thought that it was his way of trying to make up for what happened to Gwaine. He never seemed to have got over it. Then one day, around the time that Hunith died, he didn't come back. No one ever found out what happened to him; some said that he had been killed by a Saxon, and others said he had deserted. Nobody truly believed the later though. Percival was not one to run away from anything.

Leon usually stayed near the queen's side, especially as he became older. In time he became more of an advisor to her than anything else, having known her since they were children he was the one person left in Camelot she had known for the longest. Eventually, she had him leading her army. He retired from being a knight once he reached a ripe age and became a member of her council. He died at a good age, unlike so many of his fellow knights.

Of Merlin's friends, Gwen was last to go. For a few years he had been afraid of becoming too attached to people and so he had distanced himself from others he didn't already know. He became known as quite elusive because of this and some of the people stopped trusting him. Gwen never lost her faith however; she knew why he was doing it, even if he never admitted it.

For years he had been disguising the fact that he didn't age. At the time of Gwen's death, he resembled how he did when he first disguised himself as an old man.

When Gwen lay on her death bed, she had been reigning for over fifty years. Despite this and all that she achieved, she had never remarried and had no heir to succeed her. In her last moments, she handed the royal seal to Merlin and said slowly, "I have no heir, no one to succeed me. I trust that you can find someone suitable … Merlin? I think we should look at each other properly, no disguises."

Merlin let the glamour hiding his youthful features fall, and she smiled to see what he truly looked like after so many years.

"Unfair," she joked. "Was I one of the only few to actually get wrinkles?"

When he didn't answer she said, "Merlin. Smile."

He weakly turned up the corners of his mouth in a fairly pathetic attempt, however Gwen seemed happy.

"I can't remember the last time you did that," she said, smiling herself. "You look after yourself. And tell Arthur that I miss him very much. I hope … I know that we'll meet again someday."

He didn't have the heart to remind her that he was immortal. Those were the last words she ever said and the last words a friend spoke to him for a very long time.

After her death he travelled the lands in search of a worthy king, but in his opinion none he met along the way even came close to what Arthur had been. After his search was over, he didn't return to Camelot. Instead he travelled to the Valley of the Fallen Kings where he entered the Crystal Cave. Some say that he never came out and most believed that he was dead. No one knew what really became of him. No one knew why he went in there. No one knew that he returned to the Lake of Avalon in his true form. Each day he would watch the lake, never straying for more than a few miles from its shores. For a few months he slept rough, not once with a roof over his head, and when winter came he constructed a hut with all his basic needs.

For three hundred years he stayed by the shores, only very rarely speaking to people. In that time he recounted every day he had spent in Camelot, even though it hurt him more than he could say. In those three hundred years he changed more than any person can, yet in some ways he never changed at all. He became reclusive, barely speaking, and rarely the clumsy idiot people thought he used to be. Yet at the same time he never once wavered in the duty he had been set. He stayed loyal to Arthur and his destiny every day. At least he did for three hundred years.

There came a day when he looked at the lake and couldn't do it anymore. The years had driven him almost to insanity. He had watched each of his friends' die, along with countless others he didn't even know. Camelot was no longer Camelot, only a small piece of Albion. The peace that Gwen had brought no longer existed; war had broken out, and not just with the Saxons. Brother fought brother, father fought son. Death was rife in the land, and although he was used to it, Merlin just couldn't take it anymore. He didn't want to wait for Arthur to live again; he just wanted to see the people he cared about again. There was only one way to do that.

In the early morning, just as dawn was breaking, Merlin waded out into the lake. He then submerged himself and took a lungful of water into his body. Yet trying to drown himself didn't work, because as soon as he did so he felt a pair of hands pushing him back out onto the shore. It seemed that someone didn't want him to die.

From that day on, he never once thought of doing anything like that again. Not even for another eleven hundred years.

After his time of weakness he watched three kings fight for the right to rule over England, he saw the Normans defeat the Saxons, and he saw the Doomsday Book being written. He saw the Magna Carta being signed, he watched the War of the Roses form a distance, and he survived the Black Death and the Great Fire of London in consecutive years. He saw the Industrial Revolution and watched as both World Wars passed. He saw king after queen after king rule Albion, but never one as great as Arthur.

Once, there came a time in the mid-twentieth century when he looked at the world around him. For a very long time he hadn't taken a proper look at where it was those days. Thinking about it, things were much better. He had never thought about it properly before because he had always being comparing things to how they were back in Camelot, and of course he had found fault in every modern thing he could find. But thinking about it, people these days had things much easier. They had infinitely better healthcare and lived longer lives. The technology they had was incredible, but so few of them really seemed to appreciate it. Admittedly they had come up with new ways of killing each other and had made everything so complicated that he yearned for the old days even more than usual, but in that one day he began to see things differently. He forced himself to stop seeing the bad in everything, and saw what good there was in the world. And he saw lots of it too. It gave him hope in the world once more. Hope that one day the land could be brought to the glory that Camelot had once been. And although he had promised to himself that he would never stray from his task, it gave him more faith to wait out the last few decades – although he did not know that he only had a few more years of waiting left.

It was in the eighties that the first signs of Arthur's return appeared. The only thing was Merlin didn't notice them.

Around medieval times a town had been built by the lake. The townspeople had named it Avalon after the lake it was situated by, although in the present day it was generally thought that the lake was named after the town and not the other way around. Merlin didn't live in the town, he still lived in the hut he had created, although those days it was a small bungalow rather than just some logs bound together. He often made his way through Avalon though. Despite being immortal, he still needed food and drink. Although he could not die of starvation, it was rather an unpleasant experience to have an empty stomach.

In the early nineties he walked past a young girl who was about eight years old. For the next few years he would always walk past her when she was on her way to school. He should have known then, he should have paid attention to her brown skin and dark curly hair, but as it was he didn't, and so he didn't notice the first of the reincarnations.


Updates will be random, like always. I kind of write when I'm inspired and I feel I don't write well enough when I'm not, however I'll try to update every week or two weeks. If I don't, bug me until I do. I want to finish this thing.

It's started off on a bit of a low note, but it will get increasingly happier as it progresses. Please let me know what you think!