He finds the horses after an hour of walking, but he can't bring himself to be grateful for it. He knows he's left an entire half of himself had been left behind, and even if that other half may rise once again, it still hurts. He still feels empty, and pathetic – for not being strong enough, for giving into his weakness.
Two sides of the same coin
Gwen rushes to him when he enters the citadel, his face carefully blank. He almost falls off his horse into her arms, and though no tears are shed he knows that the both of them are going half-crazy with grief. He feels a flicker of gladness in his chest, at least he's not alone in this.
No man is worth your tears, Merlin.
He leaves a few days before Gwen's coronation, without a word to anyone.
He takes one of the horses from the stables and rides north and rides and rides and rides until he comes to an unknown place – it's dark, grey, and covered in a layer of snow.
But it's quiet, a place to learn and study the magical arts.
It's a good place to start over, to wait.
He spends nine years there, under the disguise of an old hermit. He uses what he'd learnt from Gauis, to help and heal whomever he can.
He also uses his magic, and learns whatever he can from the other sorcerers in the city.
At night he dreams of soft, cream-coloured skin running along his – soft but strong hands caressing him and bringing him a pleasure that makes his eyes roll back and soft sounds escape his mouth.
He wakes, warm yet cold – his insides twisting with disgust at his own weakness.
One day, with a flurry of gold-embroidery and red, Camelot knights arrive for him.
Her name is Annabeth Pendragon, and she has her father's blond hair and eyes.
Merlin stares at her, awestruck at the resemblance, and she stares back at him, with Arthur's eyes. After a moment, she smiles – and he thinks he can see a glimmer of gold beneath the blue.
"The moment she started showing signs we knew he had to find you," Leon explains to him awhile later, sitting at the desk across from him in what used to be Arthur's room.
He and Gwen had married three years after he'd left, and now had two children of their own.
"It is said that you are the greatest sorcerer to ever live, and there is no one else we trust with teaching her."
How ironic that Arthur's only child would be born with magic.
Annabeth is nine years old when they first meet, Merlin watches her grow into a woman as proud as her father and as strong as her mother. He adores her, so much. When he's with her, he is almost happy enough to ignore the gaping hold in his chest. -
Twenty years later, when she comes barreling into his room wide-eyed and looking no older than thirteen, he realizes how special she really is.
The hole in his chest filled a little at this, he was glad – now he had someone to wait with.
Merlin watches his friends grow old, and pass into Albion.
He grows old, too, but he can feel the magic under his skin and knows that if he lets his growing go on for too long the magic would just force him to grow younger again.
So he stays an older man, no more than forty, with a few lines on his face and streaks of silver running through his hair.
Anna holds his hand through it all, capable and confident in her abilities now.
She chooses to remain younger, "otherwise people will mistake me for your wife," she tells him with a smile.
After a hundred years the monarchy in Camelot is no more when Gwen and Leon's grandchildren decided that the people have just as much a right to rule as they do.
He asks Anna if she'd rather stay, to grow young, take a husband and have a family.
She just takes his hand, and tells him that she'd go and tell the servants to ready horses for them.
Together they travel to distant lands, seeing different countries and people that had never been recorded on any map back in Camelot.
He and Annabeth play a variety of different roles, from father and daughter, mother and son, brother and sister (he still doesn't know how anyone believed them with that one), and husband and wife.
Merlin waits to hear, but Albion remains silent
He ignores the soft look in Anna's eyes whenever she looks at him, or the tender way she brushes again him, or draws close to him when they share a bed.
His heart still longs for the king.
After seven hundred years Merlin leaves Anna sleeping in their house somewhere in France, a small note on the bedside table telling her that he'd find her sometime in the coming months; That he had to be alone for awhile, but that he would find her again.
He goes back to the lake and sits.
He speaks to the lake, asking it what he should do.
He walks up to the shore, and begs Freya to appear to him – to show him what to do.
Silence answers him.
As he sits on the shore, still motionless and listening for something, anything, to be said; in his waiting he remembers the fisher king – the man waiting for the once and future king to return.
Was he destined the same fate?
Was this some cruel ploy the gods had created for him, something to amuse themselves with?
As they watched him wait, and wait, and beg and hurt – were they ever really going to return Arthur to him?
No. He would not play the fool. Not any longer.
He returns to Anna not as soon as he can.
His chest grows tight when she yells at him, her face solemn.
He kisses her forehead, and sighs into her hair.
He would make things right.
He's alone, not four hundred years later in the belly of an abandoned citadel somewhere in the north of Ireland when he finds it.
A tiny book, filled with the most curious spell.
When he finds he stares at the page, reading it over again.
A spell to revive the dead, and to turn back time.
But the cost is great, the souls of ever living thing that been from the present, backwards to the time of death.
How many people had lived in the entire world in the past thousand years?
A million? A billion?
But not even a billion people could compare to Arthur.
It's black magic, and it would take a lot of power, but he knows – somewhere in his heart – that he'd be capable of it. The years had twisted him in a way he hadn't realized.
He thinks of Annabeth, how important she's become to him.
How she's never left him.
But she would still be there, she was conceived before Arthur's death.
He could have Arthur, and his best friend. It would be perfect.
At first she just stares at him, face blank with shock, and then screams at him.
"This isn't you, the Merlin I know would not do this. He wouldn't even consider it."
But Arthur is more important, he always had been.
She takes his face in her hands and pulls him close, crying and pulling at his hair.
"It's okay," he whispers, "soon we'll be home and you can grow up properly – with your father and mother. We will all be happy."
He leaves her, once again, while she's asleep.
He leaves no note this time.
There is always a price with magic, he remembers (later, too late), it will always take the things you hold the most dear.
And after it's done, he opens his eyes and Arthur is in his arms – eyes closed, like he remembered, but when Merlin leans in close and he can feel the soft breaths of air on his face he cries.
He ignores the weight of the billions of lives weighing down on his shoulders.
When Arthur wakes a few hours later, completely healed, they walk into the forest and Merlin still remembers where the horses are from the first time. He longs to reach out and touch his King's arm, his face, and tell him of the thousand lives he lived.
He doesn't.
Arthur leaps off of his horse, and pulls Gwen into his arms the moment he sees her. She starts to cry, Arthur's face softens as he places small kisses along her cheek and face.
They look at each other with such care, that Merlin suddenly feels sick.
He'd almost forgotten – Arthur's attention had always been for Gwen.
Perhaps the years had twisted that, given him some sort of sick hope.
He almost wanted to yell, to push Gwen into Leon's arms and kiss Arthur himself.
But no, none of that had ever happened. Gwen was still bound to Arthur, and him back to her – till death do they part.
The ban on magic is lifted, and Merlin is made court sorcerer.
It's everything he could have asked for.
Though he tries to smother it, he can't help the hope in his heart as he waits – one month, then two months, and then three months….
No one mentions anything about a princess.
A night fourth months later he cries again, realizing that he'd made another mistake.
Why can't I ever get anything right?