Tears Of Blood
"My heart was dust that used to leap to you; I answered half asleep: 'My pillow is damp, my sheets are red, there's a leaden tester to my bed; find you a warmer playfellow, a warmer pillow for your head, a kinder love to love than mine.'"-The Convent Threshold by Christina Rossetti
This he can say: not that he loved her first, not that he loved her last, but that he loved her more.
Her husband's love was that of possession, a lovely trophy to adorn his home, and one day bear his children. Uther's love was desire, burning hot as the fire on a winter's day, flaring up with a passion that consumed all around him and offering no water to douse the flames. His love is quiet, like the wind through the leaves of the forest, unacted upon, unspoken, demanding nothing and giving only what he can, yet more powerful than either.
Merlin is owned, as much as one person can own another, like souls bonded to light or darkness, his own sold over long ago to the Pendragon line of kings, to serve, to guide, to die if he must to ensure the throne is never empty. His freedom is a chain within the parameters of Castle Pendragon, to wander like a falcon for a little while and then return when summoned. He heals what he can, guides where he may, but above all he is the king's sorcerer, body and soul and a will that might have been free.
When Uther wants something, he takes it, whatever it may be, and tonight it's a spell, a simple utterance of words that he commands, the thing Merlin must give him. But the prize - ah, the prize - a woman, wedded and bound, is for Uther alone.
It's simple to see why Uther wants her. She's beautiful, radiant as sunlight with a spark of fire tucked within, a woman with spirit and intelligence who belongs to another, all the things Uther desires the most. She's a challenge, yet another conquest, to claim and break and make his own, and for a moment he wants to whisper the words between his teeth - not the spell that will transform Uther's face - but far more powerful words that will crush Uther to dust, a spell that would tear him from the inside out and leave him bleeding.
Magic is a powerful thing, a delicate scale of weights that must be carefully balanced. A spell too strong and the speaker is destroyed, and even a small one must pay a forfeit. Uther receives the night he wants with another man's wife, but the child created is never his. It's Merlin's, bought and paid for with a single bloody tear, the ransom for a night, a future king.
This king he isn't owned by. This one, nearly formless and yet already known to his eyes, belongs to him.
oooOOOooo
Once, he was summoned in the fall to heal Uther, the man already beyond the skill of mortal physicians, and he enters the chamber to see Morgan beside her father's bed, clinging to a limp hand that he'd turn on her if he was awake. She looks up at him, face pale and still rounded with the freshness and innocence of youth, a child too young to know there is nothing in Uther's body and soul to love or wish to survive.
"Save him." Morgan whispers, face streaked with tears, and he heals him, not for Uther, but for the child.
Afterwards, when the castle is alive with the whispers of "magic" and "sorcery", he pulls on his cloak to leave when Morgan stops him, reaching for him in a childish expression of gratitude, and he jerks back, pulling away, but not quickly enough. For an instant he sees a flash of light divided from darkness, and tears, crimson and thick, dripping against the stones of the castle floors. It burns inside his mind as he walks out of the castle, images overlapped with Morgan's face, looking up at him with so much faith and trust that - if his hadn't been hardened and jaded - might have broken his heart.
Later, much later, there is hatred in Morgan's once innocent eyes as she's carried away from the castle and into the night, as she screams for a dead mother and a father who'd wanted her dead as well, slamming her fists against the nun who lifts her onto the horse as she spits venom at her father's wife. Igraine, pale and clinging to the wall, says nothing, no defense, no words that tell the child that she saves her, that Uther, drunk on his glory, indulged the whim of his new wife and spared the life of his only daughter, a child he would have swept aside like dust under a cloth in trade for the promise of new heirs.
Morgan is never told, and there are no more heirs. The child formed by magic within Igraine is the only one born, her body barren and silent as years pass, but she mourns only for him and not the ones never created, for the child she held in her arms for only a moment and in her soul forever.
The child is healthy and strong, flawless as only magic can conceive, and no part of him is Uther, but his eyes mirror the ones that stare out of Igraine's face with a sense of horror as he reaches for the child. He tears him - Arthur - from her arms and turns away from her screams, the infant tucked inside his cloak as he walks into the darkness.
He doesn't look back.
oooOOOooo
When he sees her next she's changed, not only with age but with sorrow, lines etched into her yet unfaded beauty, a widow who was never truly a bride. All those years with Uther scarred her to the heart, and yet couldn't destroy her, couldn't shatter her spirit, and some place in him, long thought dead and buried, aches to reach for her, to touch her without hesitation, without holding himself back. She is not his, for she has never been, and he is not her's, but part of them belong to each other, some part of their hearts not yet scarred too deeply to feel.
Later, or perhaps not so long, he finds her, spilled out like water from a broken glass, crumbled onto the stones like something broken and cast aside. He touches her - Merlin who never touches anyone because he can't carry more pain inside him like ashes in an urn - but there are no flashes, no glimpses of what can and cannot be, because Igraine is dying, and they both know it, and all he's done has only led to this. He starts to say the words, muttering and whispering, the magic that bleeds into his throat like molten iron and begins to burn away his life.
He clings to the words as the blood starts to run out of his eyes, dripping onto her wound, and her hand reaches for his face, cutting them off like a knife to the throat.
And she stops him, not with a touch, or a word, or even some forgotten sense of self-preservation. Only a plea, faint and quiet, half whisper and half memory, a vow written in blood before the ages. She asks him to take care of her son, to look after the child he helped create and later ripped from her heart, a man now but still her son. To save the king, young and in need of so much more guidance and wisdom. To live when he's already lived far too long.
And he sees Arthur, lying in a field, with a sword through his chest and the wind tangling in his hair, lifeless and still, with the bodies of his champions spread out around him as far as his eyes can see, and Morgan, once so small and trusting, standing at the edge of the field with blood on her hands and the cruelty worn into her face. The images fade with Igraine, spill out and run down his arms, and his breath catches as her's escapes, as he loses her as he's lost everyone.
He doesn't die.
He lives, because he always does, because he promised, and because his path was set long ago, jagged and sharp and littered with broken glass and rocks that cut and bruise, because Merlin is flesh and blood and heart but never soul. He goes on, to guide, to watch, to try to change what will happen and what cannot be undone.
For men, other men of body and bone who age and change with the passing of the seasons and the breath of the wind stealing their own, tears are clear things, of water and salt, that seep beneath the cracks of the floor without a stain, quickly forgotten. His are crimson, thick and red with blood, silent things that leave a stain on his hands as they splash beneath his fingers and onto the ground, mingling with Igraine's blood, with Uther's, and Morgan's, and Arthur's, and a hundred others before and after, ghosts who are a name and nothing more. But he is not forgotten.
Tears of blood are not easily washed away.