Happy birthday amigo! Hope you like your present.

Warnings: some mild sexual references, a dysfunctional relationship, psychological torture, and Stockholm Syndrome (though by the time you get to the end it's a little unclear exactly who has Stockholm Syndrome).

Disclaimer: After the way Merlin ended, I'd be a little insulted if anyone thought it was my creation.

Merlin's heart pounded as he stared across the throne room at Morgana Pendragon. Months had passed since the last time they were this close to each other, and she was completely ignoring him; her only concern was taunting Arthur. Being overlooked annoyed Merlin, but it was Helios' presence that really angered him - he just got rid of Agravaine, and she had already moved on to another man who was even worse.

I was right to bind her magic, he realized, but I'll have to do more. She'll never learn, and if she makes it out of here she'll just try to dethrone Arthur once more. No, this time I have to stop her for good.

###

Reeling from the discovery that she had somehow been deprived of her powers, Morgana fled, but she didn't make it far before the wound she'd sustained in her escape sapped her strength and she collapsed to the forest floor. Is this to be my end? she wondered. All her schemes, all her ambition - was this all she would get out of it? She was the daughter of a king, a High Priestess of the Old Religion, and she was going to die alone in the dirt, forsaken and reviled by everyone…but then something miraculous happened. A small white dragon appeared and breathed life back into her.

Morgana took it as a sign that the Goddess had not abandoned her after all. She truly was destined to be queen of Camelot. Perhaps the little dragon could be of use in her future plans…

A familiar, hated voice interrupted her musings. "Well done, Aithusa." The dragon chirruped happily and flew away as Merlin stepped out of the trees with his usual infernal grin plastered on his face. Before Morgana could so much as scowl at him, his eyes flashed gold and her world went dark.

###

She awoke on the tiny bed in her hovel and for a brief moment hoped that her failure to take Camelot was just another nightmare, but that hope was dashed by a cheery greeting from Merlin. She bolted off her bed, and there he was, making himself at home in her favorite chair. "You! What are you doing here!"

"You don't remember? I saved your life."

Morgana recalled nearly bleeding to death, but although pain had blurred her memory she was positive Merlin had had nothing to do with saving her. "You're a liar," she sneered. "A dragon saved me."

"True, but I summoned her. I asked her to heal you. I wasn't sure she could do it, but I knew Kilgharrah would put up a fuss if I asked him - he'd want me to let you die, just like he did when I pushed you down the stairs."

"You pushed me-!" Morgana was so enraged that she flung her hand out and uttered the strongest curse she knew, only to find that her magic was still unresponsive.

Merlin's grin widened. Why had she never noticed before how sinister his smiles were? "I bound your powers too," he informed her. "I'm the last dragonlord, and I was born with magic. I always thought things would have turned out different if I had told you." His smile vanished and was replaced by a somber, wistful look. "I'm sorry, Morgana. I made a mistake, and now I'm going to fix it."

"It's too late for that! I will never forgive you!"

"We'll see about that. You might change your mind after you've gone a few weeks…or months…without speaking to another living soul."

"What are you talking about?"

"Every time I let you escape, you come back and try to seize Camelot again." He spoke slowly, as if explaining something painfully obvious to a rather dim child. "That's another mistake I need to correct, so I'm going to keep you here. Indefinitely."

"You can't do that!"

"Yes, I can. Look outside."

Scowling suspiciously, Morgana opened the door. Sitting in front of her hovel was a fully grown golden dragon who breathed a jet of fire at her the instant she set a foot over the threshold. Merlin pulled her out of harm's way and slammed the door. "That's Kilgharrah. He really doesn't like you, and I've given him permission to kill you if you try to leave. As long as you stay inside, he won't harm you. I must be going now - you and your Southron friends-" His eyes darkened dangerously at the thought of Helios "-left Camelot in shambles, and someone has to clean it up. Don't worry, I'll be back."

###

Morgana was determined not to let Merlin take her by surprise again; when he came back, she would be ready, and then she would show him that she was still dangerous even without her magic. Then a week went by with no sign of him, and her vigilance ebbed. On the eighth day she began to run out of food, but Kilgharrah wouldn't let her out to get more. He ignored her when she asked if Merlin planned on starving her.

On the tenth day of her captivity, when she had devoured every last scrap of food in the hovel and was seriously considering an escape attempt - she had no doubt Kilgharrah would kill her, but death by dragon fire would be quicker than starvation - Merlin reappeared. He timed his arrival so that she was asleep when he came in and had a bowl of stew ready when she woke. She wolfed it down greedily; although she hadn't actually been deprived of sustenance more than a few hours, she had already started imagining how endless, unsatisfied hunger would feel.

After she finished eating Merlin washed her bowl, and while his back was turned she picked up a knife and tried to stab him. He sent it flying out of her hand with no spoken incantation - without even turning around - and said, "That wasn't very smart, Morgana. Did you really think you could kill me with a kitchen knife? And what if you had? Kilgharrah wouldn't let you out if I died, and who would bring you food then? As much as I'm sure it pains you, you need me alive."

"I don't need you! I will recover my magic, and then I will make you rue the day you trifled with me!"

If she had expected Merlin to cower in fear at this pronouncement, she was sadly disappointed; instead of being scared, he laughed at her. "Do you really think threatening me is a good idea when I've already stripped you of your powers and captured you? But I won't hold it against you this time since I know how bad you are at planning ahead."

"How dare you insult me this way?"

"It's easy after years of thwarting your plots." He went on to lay out in great detail how each of the plans she had formed with Morgause, Agravaine, and finally Helios had met failure at his hands. By the time he finished, Morgana was beside herself with frustration. It seemed that no matter what she did, she could not get the better of this man. "You want to claw my eyes out right now, don't you?"

Morgana hesitated. Of course she did, but now that she was beginning to grasp the full extent of the powers hidden behind the clumsy manservant's mask she was wary of attacking him directly.

Seeing the apprehension she had never before felt in his presence, Merlin smiled. "It's all right, I won't punish you for being honest."

Her eyes grew wide with incredulity and, though she hated to admit it, a hint of fear. "Punish me!"

"You have to learn the error of your ways somehow."

###

His next few visits followed a similar pattern: he replenished her food stores just before or after she ran out, shared a meal with her or just watched while she ate, then cleaned her dishes. Sometimes he brought her water for bathing, sometimes he didn't; his decisions on that matter seemed completely arbitrary. Morgana could only guess that he gave her bathwater when he felt that she had become too dirty.

Relying on her enemy for such basic necessities was humiliating and, like everything else he did, it drove home the point that the balance of power between them had shifted. Here, she was no longer a noblewoman or a mighty High Priestess, and he wasn't a simple peasant-turned-servant; she was his prisoner, he was a sorcerer with magic that would have put hers to shame even if she could still use it, and she was powerless against him. As long as it took Morgana to understand this, once she did, she slowly became resigned to it.

"They've given up searching for you," he told her during his fifth visit. "They'd never find you anyway, but they aren't even looking anymore. Arthur and Gwen think you're dead, or at least they hope you are. They think it would be for the best. The only one who knows or cares that you're here is me."

###

Sometimes Morgana heard him talking to Kilgharrah. The dragon was pleased that she was being held captive but disliked guarding her; he tried several times to persuade Merlin that simply killing her would be easier, but for reasons known only to himself Merlin wouldn't hear of it.

Morgana was relieved - although her current circumstances were far from ideal, she didn't want to be eaten by a dragon. Kilgharrah reported her daily activities to Merlin as if hoping something she did would eventually convince him of the pointlessness of her continued existence, until finally she couldn't stand his hateful, burning eyes watching her any longer. She shuttered all the windows, which made it very dark inside her hovel. She didn't mind; it was worth it not to have to see Kilgharrah anymore. She was safe in the darkness.

The lack of light took Merlin by surprise when he returned. Alerted to his presence by the sounds of him stumbling around in the dark and cursing when he tripped over something, Morgana scrambled to help him up. She winced when he lit a candle; it had been days since her eyes were exposed to light.

"Why is it so dark in here?"

"So no one can see me. I feel safer this way," she explained, twisting her hands nervously in her lap. Merlin's expression seemed disapproving.

"You are safer if nobody sees you," he agreed. "Anyone who saw you would turn you over to Arthur to be executed. That doesn't mean you can't open a window."

"No!" Morgana blurted out in a panic. "No, Kilgharrah is out there! Please leave the windows closed. Please."

Using the dragon to scare her into submission had worked too well - he hadn't intended to make her afraid to look outside. Still, this decreased the likelihood of her trying to escape even further. Her own fear would trap her more effectively than any dragon. "All right, you can keep the windows shut, but use the candles. I don't want to trip over that stool again."

If she stayed in the dark long enough, she could learn to see as well as in daylight while he would be blind for the short time it took his eyes to adjust. Those few moments might be all the time she needed to finally succeed in stabbing, bludgeoning, or otherwise incapacitating him, and then he'd be at her mercy.

Attacking him never crossed her mind.

###

Three weeks later, their routine changed. Merlin's visit to the hovel proceeded in the same manner as all the previous ones, but when he started to leave, he was stopped by Morgana's hand on his arm. She didn't speak, just gazed intently at him with eyes that somehow seemed to have grown wider since she began spending all her time in darkness.

"Yes? Is there something else you need?" He thought he'd provided everything, but maybe he'd forgotten something. Still she said nothing. Deliberately making his tone a little gentler, he asked, "Is there something you want?" Morgana had been so well-behaved of late that he wouldn't mind giving her a small treat.

After a short internal struggle, she said, "Must you leave so soon?"

"I can't be gone too long, or they'll start wondering where I am… Do you want me to stay?"

Morgana reluctantly nodded. "It's just that I have no one else to talk to." As he'd predicted when he first captured her, she was finding his company more and more enjoyable now that he was her only source of human contact.

So he stayed, and they sat up all night talking, something Morgana hadn't done since the old days when she was best friends with Gwen. As she sat before the fire with Merlin, talking about trivial matters - absolutely nothing to do with schemes or plots to take Camelot - she almost remembered what it was like to have a friend. She was surprised to find that she missed it, because it didn't make sense for her to miss her friendship with Gwen after Gwen took the crown that should have been hers, but maybe it wasn't Gwen that she missed. Maybe she just missed simple companionship from someone who didn't want anything from her. Nearly every time she met with Morgause, it had been so the older witch could tell her her part in their latest attempt at a coup, and she didn't even want to think about what Agravaine and Helios had wanted from her.

All Merlin wanted was to keep her out of the way, and while she still wasn't exactly overjoyed about him holding her captive, she'd realized that he could have just killed her. She couldn't begin to guess at his reasons for keeping her alive, but she was grateful all the same. She had never wanted to die.

Before she had time to think better of it, she slid closer to Merlin and pressed her lips against his.

He seemed responsive at first, his hands gripping her waist, then running up her back until he reached the nape of her neck. Then his right hand suddenly tightened in her hair, pulling her head back with a sharp, painful jerk. "Is this how you got Agravaine and Helios to follow you?" he demanded in a deadly calm voice. "Well, your little games won't work on me."

Morgana was stunned; Morgause had told her that tactic was virtually guaranteed to let her get her way with any man. She protested that she wasn't playing any game, but Merlin didn't believe her. He got up to leave, and she knew intuitively that if he walked out, she might never see him again. He'd probably find a way of getting her what she needed to survive - even now, she didn't think he wanted her dead - but this new thing between them, whatever it was, would be lost forever. He would only be her jailer, never her companion. Never her…friend.

"Wait!" He paused with his hand on the doorknob and slowly turned back to her. "I did…entice those men in order to bend them to my will, but I am not trying to do that now. Let me prove it to you. I'll do anything you want."

###

Looking back, Merlin would never understand why he hadn't just taken her that night; she was willing, or at least she was desperate to prove she wasn't just using him like she'd used so many others, because for all the empty promises she made to her followers, she never actually gave herself to them. Or maybe she just needed someone to touch her again.

Merlin needed it too - he was just as lonely as her even when he was in Camelot, surrounded by people who called themselves his friends but would never know him like she, his worst enemy, knew him - but part of him still clung to Kilgharrah's admonitions that they weren't destined to be together even though he should have known by then that destiny wasn't as absolute as he'd always thought. If it was, he shouldn't have been able to find any other way to neutralize Morgana than by killing her.

He'd never been able to put his unresolved feelings for the witch behind him enough to do that, though, and eventually he gave in to her persistent advances. He told himself it was just a one-time lapse in his usually perfect self-restraint, something he needed to do to get her out of his system once and for all, but that didn't explain why he kept falling into bed with her every time he checked on her.

It wasn't love that bound them together; at least he didn't think so. What he and Morgana had was nothing like what he'd shared with Freya, but that had been so short-lived that he was never able to tell if it had really been love. He didn't think he would ever be able to love Morgana after all the things she'd done, but he knew he would never be able to give her up either.

"Merlin?"

He felt her head lift from his chest a short second before he heard her hushed whisper and reluctantly opened his eyes. "What is it?"

"This isn't love, is it? You don't love me."

"I don't think so," he answered honestly.

"I don't think I love you either." She fell silent for a long moment in which neither of them made any move to disentangle themselves from one another, then asked, "You won't leave me, will you?"

"Never."

She settled down again, content with that. Whatever strange force pulled them together, outweighing love and destiny and even their own desires, she felt it too. It pleased her that he was just as incapable of pulling away as her.

One of them magically extinguished the last candle that was still burning, and they were alone together in the darkness.

Well, there you go. It's actually a lot less dark and twisted than I intended it to be, but I hope it satisfies nevertheless. I tried to keep all the elements you (Eidolon02) liked from the first story intact (minus the 'killing Agravaine' part, obviously) while still delivering more of the requisite Mergana.