I've officially popped the cherry to this account. Hopefully I won't regret it! No beta, because I don't think I've written creative fiction in a good six years.
Summary: Merlin has waited a thousand years and across endless space for Arthur.
The Turning of the Earth
Merlin's been waiting, waiting since Albion was left to burn and magic turned to ashes since the end of Arthur's reign. Learned to use magic to run carriages, steam engines, automobiles. His magic was the lifeblood of Big Brother — watching, always watching for one person. At one point, he'd tried waiting in the long-lost lands of Albion, but the Earth was larger now, and Arthur could have been anywhere — into the Americas, into the dusty regions of the Tanami Desert, into the snowy mountains of Tibet, and so Merlin let his magic run into the veins of technology that links the world (and wonders, slowly, when he'd stopped listening to anything else but the heartbeat of the Earth and the silence of Arthur).
He's searched and waited, the magic of the Earth dwindling and the forests shrinking into dry weed, and watched the black sludge of nuclear waste and fire burn the land and evaporate the seas, and despairs when the earth that had borne Arthur became the Earth-That-Was. Suddenly he seems even further from Arthur than he ever could be, now that there was more than his Earth. His search is so much greater. But he has been waiting over a thousand years and will continue to wait more.
So he buys a ship with antiques a thousand years in the making, and travels. Merlin travels through the vacuum gloom of space and feels the Earth still burning in the left of his heart, hears Albion crying as Arthur exhales his last, watches with indifference to the slaughter of Miranda (he passes through, uncaring, because his Earth is still burning and Arthur is not there anyway, and if his apathy aches in his throat, he swallows it and lets it be dissolved by acid), watches the Browncoats and the Alliance slaughter one another, and lets the worlds turn by and smoulder because Arthur is not here.
His ship is old now, running on magic instead of fuel, but Merlin continues to travel. He will stop at no world until he finds Arthur. Planets die behind him, but he's resigned himself to that: people are people and Uther is immortal in the laws and traditions of the universe. He travels, and it is another endless stream of years that pass in a breath, until he is on an Alliance planet offering rides to paying customers without bothering to check whether they were dangerous, or dealers, or whores (he never grins anymore, because he is timeless and tired and sick of waiting for a man who once called him an idiot and the bravest man he'd ever met).
He waits at the market, bartering cloth for food, and the sound filters through — the endless babble of Chinese and English, the sounds of chicken slaughter, mercenaries, cloth traders, and — the sound of a man swearing — "…goushi isn't worth a single credit!" — and turns. Merlin knows it's him, it's Arthur, dressed in the blues and greys of the Alliance, and it doesn't matter that he carries a gun or sneers at the people that scurry to get out of his way, because Merlin has been waiting a thousand years for this. His magic floods his veins and suddenly his ship gleams a little brighter and his wares spin red and gold in the afternoon sun.
(In the left of his heart, the Earth-That-Was, after a millennium of burning and screaming, is quiet. Albion begins to breathe, breathe, breathe in smoky air and space debris and Merlin learns to smile again.)