Title: Done and Undone
Fandom: Merlin
Pairing: Merlin/Arthur
Genre: Drama, Angst, Friendship, Alternate Universe
Rating: R
Warnings: Character death
Summary: Camelot is in ruins and Arthur lies dead somewhere within the castle walls, but Merlin knows he has not failed yet. There is still a chance. The way is long and dangerous, but Merlin must try because it is his last hope. It is everyone's last hope.
Prologue
I can still feel the heat of the fire on my face and hands, hotter and stronger and angrier than the fire that burns before me now. I can still hear the anguished cries of innocent men and women as they are slaughtered – were slaughtered, I remind myself, because it's all over now. Now I am alone. But then I was surrounded, as were we all.
I remember crouching down in a corner, Arthur beside me, both of us preparing for the fighting that was to come – the slaughter. I still don't know who it was who led the army, I only know that I believed we would survive. We had been through worse, we had gone up against odds so horribly against us that even I had believed we would fall but every time we had pulled through and I firmly trusted that this time would be no different.
I was a fool. A child so caught up in the glory and recognition I was finally being allotted that I could not see the truth for what it was: we were doomed. I should have taken Arthur from there, gripped his arm tight and pulled him away no matter how he yelled and fought. I should have run.
We all should have run.
And I can still hear it all: the cry of battle Arthur let out when he joined the fray, the scream of anguish when a sword plunged into Lancelot's stomach, the clash of steel against steel, the final words I ever heard from my king's lips: "Merlin, go!", the sound of my own feet beating against the stone floor as I did as I was told – ordered – as I ran. All of them ring through my mind now as I prepare for what I must do to change this, to save him. To save us all.
I remember that after I waited. I waited on the hill for days, cold and hungry and alone, waiting all the while for Arthur to emerge from the shell that was once Camelot. Smoke rose into the sky until it blocked out the sun, turning the sky black as the air grew thicker and thicker with the ash that blew out on the wind. And all the while I waited, hoped, and believed that Arthur would rise from those ashes, that he would emerge from the ruins and come back to me.
I waited for three days before I went back in. I should have left. Should have made the assumption that I already knew to be true – should have accepted that he was dead – and turned my back and just left. It might have hurt less. But I went back. I walked into what was once my home with my head held high as though I had come to claim what was left for my home – as though there was anything left worth claiming. I walked through those old familiar halls, stepping over corpses and searching for the faces that I knew.
I found Gwen and Gaius first, in Gaius' workshop where they had retreated to tend what injured they could save. They lay on the floor in pools of red and I felt bile burning in my throat and I had to turn away. The bile subsided, but hot tears persisted and I let them fall – there was no one here to see my grief, I knew it already. Every body in the castle would be only that: a body; soulless, empty, dead. But I went to find him anyway. I had to know for certain, I had to see.
He was lying on a staircase – the one that had led down to the once imprisoned dragon. His body was sprawled in such a way that I could not tell whether he had been going up or down – then, it had not mattered; now I wish I had tried to determine where he had been going. It might have proved helpful. But then all that mattered was that he was dead – the man I had struggled for years to protect and advise was lying dead before me. I had failed him. I had failed the world.
I cried and held his lifeless body in my arms for hours – maybe even days, I do not know. Time did not exist for me. It lasted only a moment and it lasted forever all at once, that is what I remember.
But I knew I could not stay and when no more tears would fall I stripped him of anything that would serve to identify him and cut at his face with a knife. No one must know that Arthur's great sorcerer had failed him. No one must know the great king had died. I could not let that spread, not yet, because the knowledge of his death could be more damaging than any threat the land had faced yet.
He had to be alive in the minds of the people for as long as possible, I knew, and so I left him among the soldiers – enemies and friends alike – another anonymous death on the pile that surrounded me. For as long as possible, only I would know – I and whatever hand had slain him – that Arthur Pendragon was no more.
I went back to the workshop and took the book that Gaius had given me all those years ago and then I left. I wandered the countryside for months, never staying too long in one place for fear someone would recognize me and ask why I was away from my king. The rumor was spreading that he had fallen and I could not let my face prove the truth of it because it was not true, not yet, not really.
There was a way. There is a way. It has taken me years to separate legend from truth, to find the right answers and to collect the right ingredients and separate the true incantations from the false, but I have finally completed it: the one hope we all have left. The only way to save Arthur.
All I have to do is raise the goblet to my lips, whisper the words, and drink, and I will be on the path to setting things right.
And I know I will not fail him this time.
I can't.