Warnings: Homosexuality, mentions of drug abuse, alcohol abuse, sexual abuse-just all kinds of abuse, OK-swearing, violence, homelessness, and homelessness. All ye who are not down with that, go away.

Pairings: Chiefly (and only eventually) Merlin x Arthur. Other pairings will develop and be abandoned as needed.

0o0o0

Prologue: He Was a Candle

In his hand he holds a candle flame minus its candle, plucked apart with quick fingers because all he wants is the best part, the beautiful arch of severed light. Doing it this way, there's no wax to melt, the wick won't burn—everything will be alright. The flame doesn't need the candle if there's a little magic involved, so he leans against cracked plaster walls, ignores the damp falling through the crumbling roof, and draws dirty knees to his chest.

The fire makes it so it isn't that cold.

The flame flickers as wind blows through the building, whistling angrily. No one would be here if they could help it. This building is condemned and has been for a long time. At any moment that dilapidated roof could collapse, or the floor give out from underneath. But the wind still visits and whistles the tune of old grudges. It is calling a bird to it.

Merlin.

It's his name, whenever there's someone to call it.

But there hasn't been anyone in a long time.

0o0o0

He's sixteen. And he wants a cake.

OK, so it's not his birthday… probably. He does remember about birthdays, even if it's been a while since home and parents and—to be honest, walls without holes in them. Birthdays were worth remembering. He remembers a tune (lost the words though; they never made a lot of sense in the first place), sunlight, and wrapping paper stuck to the soles of his feet. And cake. In his memories it was warm, so his birthday probably wasn't in the middle of December, but you know what? He wants a cake for the first time in ages, so today is going to be his birthday whether the calendar likes it or not.

He gets a few stares as he leaves his room. The other tenants, the ones who breathe plumes of cigarette smoke between cracks in the floor and go into fits in between drug highs, all through the night, yowling like cats; they blink at him like he has secrets up his sleeves. Merlin (but not Merlin. Who here knows his name?) stares right back and carefully closes the door to his room. There's no lock, but the door doesn't open once Merlin closes it unless he wants it too. He sees the other squatters shiver.

(It's cold.)

Someone grabs onto his pants leg—"do you have a—can you spare it—please, please—" and Merlin pulls away, letting her fall on the floor. He doesn't service those who kill themselves. She convulses, lips flapping soundlessly at the ceiling. But her wings are already broken. She withdraws and Merlin drifts past her, breathing into his hands to warm them against the chill in the air.

No one would be here if they could help it. But they are here nonetheless. When you have nowhere else to go in the dead of a wet English winter, you could do a lot worse than someplace with four walls and a roof, never mind the holes.

Outside, Merlin sticks his head into the path of sunlight, which hits him like a slap. Its heat is unexpected and forceful. Merlin exhales a plume of foggy breath upwards and there's a cloud that looks like a dragon. There always is. Merlin salutes it solemnly. Its wet snout points down Asher Street, so that's where Merlin goes. He lets his feet hash it out about where he's headed. He feels sorry for them, his feet. They're wet and cold in spite of the layers of socks he uses to keep warm. Socks soak up ditch water and sludge until the bite of cold is up to his calves. His shoes aren't worth mentioning.

Merlin is slightly convinced the dragon is trying to kill him. Then again, sometimes he gets paranoid from all the smoke the other tenants send billowing up into his room.

He winds up on a busy city street, which makes his mouth twist—he definitely doesn't like this; doesn't like everyone so packed close, so loud, so eager to push and shove and feel—but his chest aches with anticipation. Not time yet, no; wait. Gritting his teeth, he huddles against a lamppost, but it doesn't offer much of a barrier. Every new body hits him like a crashing ocean wave, dragging him under. Like one bullet after the next.

Merlin's breath begins to come in short, shallow gasps. He sinks to the ground, pulling his knees in tight. He buries his face in his arms, making himself an egg not yet hatched. Nothing can touch him, not really. If the back of his neck feels cold and exposed, it's his imagination. He's waiting. Waiting bites.

When he feels it, it makes him gasp in a breath in earnest. It's cold outside the shelter of his arms—he's lifted his head, feeling now reaching through his ribcage and gripping his heart. They're on the other side of the road—typical—and smiling, chatting. The girl isn't one of the ones that makes Merlin cringe with Backwards Feeling. The other one though? His smile makes Merlin taste the burn of alcohol in the back of his throat, makes him flinch away from the impact of a phantom hand on his skin.

There's no name, but their rarely is. The light changes and when Merlin sees that the man is flirting with the girl, making her reel away and giggle, he scurries across the asphalt amid the crush of a thousand jacketed, shuffling bodies. The couple still hasn't noticed it's their turn to cross the street (maybe that's the problem, Merlin thinks, annoyed). His left hand twists the knife in his pocket and he reaches out, colliding with the man.

"Whoa, mate!" Hands on Merlin's shoulders, steering him away, and Merlin shudders, hiding his grimace with a duck of his head. He pretends to lose his footing again, knocking into the girl, who yelps and shoves him off, which feels better. Harder. More real. He lands on the concrete and stares up, dazed, as the man swears and hauls him back up. "Are you drunk or what?" He asks, and Merlin nods wordlessly, trying to find space in the crowd to back away, but instead the man's hands are buffeting earth-stained snow from his clothes. The man frowns at him. "You look like shit. Do you need to see a doctor?"

"Hey, let's go," the girl hisses, tugging on the man's arm, trying to separate the two of them. She throws Merlin a crinkle-browed look from the corner of his eye. "Leave it. He's just some stoner."

Cake, Merlin reminds himself as the man's hands make their final sweep across his clothes. He's being frowned at, faced with that tilted head that tries to hypnotize eyes to meet. He's not a bloody snake; it doesn't work. His eyes stay fixed firmly on his feet. Lots of cake. And candle flame without the candles.

The man frowns, and Merlin curses internally when he realizes that somehow their eyes have met. "…Hang on. Don't I know you?"

Merlin shakes his head wordlessly and the girl huffs. Pretty girls can make their breathing sound like a threat—this one is informing the man that he will never be spoken to again if he doesn't start paying attention right this minute. "Gwaine!"

Is that his name? Merlin has the presence of mind to wonder as the man heeds her warning. The pair of lovers (what else could they be with the menacing breathing and the way he offers his arm) dash onto the icy road. The light is about to change and they're not on the crosswalk—Merlin hears the blare of a horn and the girl slips in her haste to get away. A tire screeches and—

Everyone is shouting now, fighting forward to get a clearer look. It's Christmastime and the whole block is an uproar of vultures. Merlin melts with practiced ease into the background. He needs to breathe and is unable to remember how that works. He blinks instead. His vision fractures into camera shutter images.

Shoulders jostling. Someone's shopping bag swinging at his face (duck). Gray sky, dragon cloud. Asphalt—gray too. A different, darker gray. The lovers have been thrown several feet back from the car that hit them. Merlin's hands, the gloves on them. They have no fingers. Every time Merlin nicks himself a new pair, he always cuts the fingers out. It's a compulsion. OCD. No choice.

Merlin's bare fingers burn from the touch of skin, a static sensation practiced at drawing shudders out of him. He drops back against the brick wall of some building because his legs are about to give out. He lets himself slide down for a moment, trying to feel the rough scrape of brick, the cold sting of sludge melting through his pants leg—trying to stay in his own skin.

When the pain really hits him, it's like standing on the tracks in the metro. He can see it coming, and then—heavy, jarring impact, air knocked out of him. His head snaps back, he's rocked off of his feet. He feels his bones snapping apart like Legos with nerves, feels himself being deconstructed by force and metal. Burned rubber assaults his nose and he feels himself rupturing inside—

And then it's over.

Merlin gasps in the air he needs, surfacing from the dark, disconnected pain. It ebbs slowly, leaving him whimpering into the ground—he's toppled over and half his face is numb with cold. But it's his own skin again, his own bones. His blood evaporates from the snow in sanguine wisps and his leg jerks back into a natural position as the bones mend themselves.

He breathes. When he can stand, he does that too.

And then he steals a cake from the bakery two blocks down because he needs a reason to be out that isn't this.

0o0o0

It wasn't a very good cake. That street needs a better bakery.

Merlin is juggling candle flame now, idly, rolling it off his fingers and along his nose. It rolls like a unicycle on a tightrope in some grand, empty circus. Merlin still feels a bit uncomfortable. Sure, he's warm. But he can't shake the feeling that there's one flame he's missing, one flame that even still and solitary will keep him warm and entertained.

He dreams of such a thing sometimes, usually after he's had a bad episode.

It's only the first time that requires skin contact. Some go away after that, like that girl (pretty, blonde, Gwaine's). But the others, the ones with so much Backwards Feeling that Merlin feels like he's being extracted from his own skin like some rare strain of disease to be bred and confined—they stay with him. If he doesn't shut them out brick by mental brick, he can feel them, echoing his heartbeat. If he focuses on them, his eyes roll back in his head for hours and he lives a television program where he has another name and another face and this whole other life that doesn't make sense because Merlin ran away from home when he was fourteen and university and jobs and family mean nothing to him.

So it can have him any time, can't it, the Backwards Feeling? The collection of souls he's touched and made a part of himself. Them and their unique sensation that there's nothing in him except for those other people. The feeling that the only place Merlin exists in is outside of himself, where he isn't. That inside is hollow.

Backwards Feeling indeed.

Sometimes, after that first skin contact, he can fight it. When the Backwards Feeling sweeps over him while he's sitting in his room and demands he hurt, he can deny it that. If it's something little—a burned thumb, a stubbed toe—Merlin can fight it with deep breaths and clenched fists. If it's not, he falls on the floor and convulses. Depending on what it is, he bleeds. His flesh blisters. He has a heart attack. Once, notably, he's even drowned.

Merlin once wonders if there's a place where they buy him; some greasy underground tunnel where some toothless salesperson leers. Get your mutant teenage runaway here, folks! Take him for a spin—whatever injury you suffer, he'll suffer in your place! You'll survive to throw yourself off a cliff as many times as you fancy. And he can be all yours for just fourteen ninety five plus tax and shipping!

(Merlin sincerely doubts that he would be expensive.)

He hates it. Touch pretends to be something nice and good—warm—safe—and it's not. It lies, it throws him off-guard, and he's never really prepared for the way pain rips at him just long enough to cough blood up in someone else's place. He hates it. He hates the way he never dies from it.

He's lost count of how many people have the Merlin Insurance Policy. Their numbers are always on the rise. Sooner or later he'll be called again by the awful ringing in his ears, telling him to go, go now, before someone dies. Go sit and wait for someone to come so you can touch them and save them. Go make up an excuse about cakes or new socks so that you feel like you've got the tiniest amount of control over your shit life.

At midnight, the flames vanish and the circus ends. This is because Merlin topples to the floor of his room and has another man's stroke. His nails dig gouges in the floors and fill his fingertips with splinters. Somewhere in the world, someone Merlin doesn't know is still alive.

Merlin curls up under his extra jacket and goes to bed early. His stomach hurts. Damn cake.

0o0o0

A/N: ...I don't think I'm capable of writing happy things anymore. Anyway. I am writing again, so there's that. I don't want Merlin to be over. Ever. Anyway, there's another long storyline planned out for this one. I hope to actually get it out this time. For those who read all the way to the end, thank you very much! I hope you will continue to read my (horrid) writing.