Notes: So there are three things that brought this one about. Firstly, BBC Radio 2 is doing its annual five hundred words children's story writing competition, and I am lamenting the fact that I am far too old to enter. Secondly, I spent the evening with my grandpa, listening to him talking about his wife who has recently been moved to a care home because her Alzheimer's and his near-blindness made it too difficult for her to stay at home. And, thirdly, The Beautiful South's Song for Whoever, which is relevant only in the lyric I wrote so many songs about you, I forget your name. So, we have a five hundred word fic that is not particularly suitable for children regardless of the rating, written to Song for Whoever, where time wins and memory loses.
(Right. Back to my rbb project now...)
The World's Greatest Thief
Memory is a fickle friend, he knows, capable of everything from flights of fancy to the most brutal of betrayals. It abandons him when he most wishes it wouldn't, then manages to be eternally, inescapably present as soon as he wants it gone.
His name was the first he lost, but then he stopped using it after the first few hundred years, the first few thousand introductions, the first few million deaths. It was easier to slip in silently, help however he could, and be gone before anyone thought to ask who the dark-haired stranger so briefly in their midst was.
It was the first thing he lost, the first thing time stole from his mind, but it opened the flood gates, let the water out, and the water took everything else with it. His first life lingered the longest, he knows that, but then those first connections were always the strongest ones he made.
There was a prince, he knows, his prince, and he knows that his name was the last thing he lost, long after he forgot the precise shade of his hair, the shape of his jaw, the imperfection of his teeth (he remembers that they were imperfect, though, so maybe that is something, maybe not everything is lost just yet), his eyes.
His prince was the last thing he forgot, although he's sure there were others then, sure that at one point he had a mother and a father, maybe siblings, hopefully friends and a lover, even if he loved his prince more.
He knows he must have, because the memories of his prince lasted the longest.
He knows he must have, because when it all gets too much and he thinks if he tries hard enough he could wipe himself out, himself and half the country, letting his magic run free and wild and self-destructive...when he wants, more than anything, for it all to end, for his eternity alone and without memory of the world he once loved to be over with, then there is a voice, a promise, and he lets himself believe it's real.
The voice tells him his prince will come back, that his loneliness will end, and he lets himself believe it, lets his hope return, and he knows that only a love he cannot remember feeling and a man he cannot remember loving could possibly enough to keep him here, alive, day after day after day. His mind may have lost it all, let it all go, but his heart has not.
.
In the end, it takes only the blue eyes of a stranger, a man his mind does not know but his heart throws itself at immediately.
"Merlin?" the man says, those blue eyes wide and awed to a degree that is almost fright. He starts, stares, and Merlin can only gasp as an eternity of waiting hits him like a mace.
Merlin. This man, his prince, has given him back his name.
"Arthur," he answers, and he's alive.