It had been too long, life. The feeling of being alive. He had seen all his friends leave him and be reunited in afterlife.

He had shut himself off for the remaining time being, reminiscing, thinking about what he could have done to prevent what happened and what he would do, should he be given a second chance. And even after a few hundred years of torturing himself, he accepted that that would never happen. He did what he did and everything had gone so, so horribly wrong. He couldn't turn back time. He knew, since that was a topic he had been researching for half his life. But even then, he had ended up empty-handed.

After seeing so many generations die and being born, he started giving up hope, started giving up on the thought of ever seeing him again.

How he missed him, his everything, the way he smiled, the way he said his name. The way he held him, the way he kept him going.

He thought back to the time he set foot in Camelot for the first time and his first real argument with Gaius. "If I can't use magic, I might as well die." He used to think it was his magic that made him who he was. How wrong he had been.

Now, walking past his long lost one's last resting place again, like every day for over a millennium, the rain pouring over him, he knew. He knew what he had to do. What he had kept himself from doing for all these years now. "Take heart, for when Albion's need is greatest, Arthur will rise again." Always these words, always the knowledge he should wait. The knowledge that with Arthur's rise, he himself would live once more too. But he had seen so much, too much. The wars, the diseases, the disasters. And by now, he had lost all hope and all the courage to hope.

How many times had he thought of this, but now the moment was there.

He left to a quiet place, shut himself off for the last time and whispered the words that would take away all of his sorrow, pain end grief. For a moment he was alone and he was surrounded by darkness. But once more, like all those years before, a light, the brightest one, found him and he was greeted by a whisper that sounded so foreign and so familiar at the same time. "Merlin?"