I've just finished watching last night's Merlin on iplayer and decided to write this x Please read and review (and maybe my chapters will actually come along if I get everything else out of my system. Eventually xx) The first bit is from the episode, so spoilers (although if you're reading Fanfiction then it's all kind of spoilers)
The doors swung open as she slumped further back into her chair, uninterested. Mordred was forced to his knees before her, the traitor. She wished he would explain why he was here so that she could get on with killing him.
"My old friend." She sounded bored. "Last time we met you tried to kill me." She was so used to that by now she didn't even care.
Mordred looked up at her, eyes dark and stormy, pained. Aah, so he had been betrayed by Arthur at last, seen the errors of his ways. Never mind, it was too late. He had betrayed her one too many times for her to keep him around for much longer. She wouldn't trust him again. She would trust no one ever again.
"I am here for a purpose," he said. "I did not break stride to find you." That did not matter to her. He had already proved his disloyalty. There was a long pause, each sizing the other up.
"I bring you the news you have longer for."
Morgana inched forwards slowly, hardly believing. "Arthur's death?"
"The key to it." He seemed to know what that meant to her.
She edged forwards ever more slowly, knowing that the key to Arthur's life was Emrys and therefore the man was also the key to his death. Anything Mordred had about Emrys...
"I was wrong to ever question your judgement, my lady." She prevented herself from screaming at him to get on with it. "And I wish to make amends."
She nodded impatiently. This was of no use to her. "Tell me!"
Mordred's eyes glinted madly. "There is someone you have been searching for. Someone who has always eluded you."
She barely restrained herself from throwing him into the wall by his throat for him to get to the point. She was quickly running out of patience and she thought that maybe Mordred could sense that and was baiting her. "Emrys," she hissed.
"I know where he is." The younger man's tone was angry with an edge of bitterness, reminding Morgana of the betrayal of her own friends, for reasons she couldn't quite explain.
"Where?"
"Camelot." A powerful sorcerer resided within the walls of the city that condemned it. Oh the irony. "And I have his true name." His true name was not Emrys?
There was a long pause that dragged on, Morgana not daring even to breath in the stillness of the moment, unwilling to find out if this was another of her dreams, or perhaps even one of her hallucinations.
"It is Merlin."
The world stopped for a few moments, spinning furiously as Morgana desperately attempted to rewrite her world with Merlin as Emrys. The foolish, meddlesome servant, a powerful and equally meddlesome sorcerer. Merlin who had become the Prince's manservant by pushing the Prince unexpectedly out of the way of a magical dagger. The kind of thing he should not have been able to sense. Perhaps she was in one of her hallucinations, but she could somehow sense to truth in the name as though Destiny was calling her. It was no trick.
Merlin was Emrys.
She struggled to keep her mask up, not wanting Mordred to see beyond the facade but she knew it was helpless. She gestured for the guards to take him away, anywhere, anywhere but here, and sealed the doors shut behind them; leaving her alone in the empty room.
With a furious scream she hurled an powerful blast of magic at the wall, watching it splinter, like her dreams, her sanity.
Merlin was Emrys.
Emrys was her destiny and her doom, fated to destroy her.
Merlin had already succeeded in his destiny, destroying what was left of the old Morgana - the one that had been liked, trusted, the King's dutiful ward not his magical tyrant of a daughter - with the aid of a friendly smile and a bottle of hemlock. He had destroyed what was left of her and had had the nerve to cry about it.
He'd meddled in all of her plans, and destroyed all of her strategies. he had been the first one to catch on that she was not all that she appeared after returning from Morgause's 'capture' and was always one step ahead of her, thwarting every idea she had. Guinevere was free again, at the amount of power that could only come from Emrys - Merlin. He'd destroyed her immortal army and forced her to murder her own sister. He destroyed her enchantments as though they were nothing and subdued her own magic with apparent ease. He'd betrayed her, taken her to the druids, led Arthur there with a contingent of Knights. The death of those druids was at his hands, not hers. He'd poisoned her.
He was the cause of everything that had gone wrong in the past few years, either as Merlin or as Emrys. Hatred as she'd never felt before welled up in the depths of her soul, an impressive achievement for one as jaded as her.
Merlin, who was the lanky idiotic manservant goofball that would never be suspected of magic, except perhaps in jest. Who defended Arthur's life as his own and denounced magic when it suited him, when it brought him that much closer to his goals.
Merlin would pay. For the crimes he'd committed against her, against his kin. For the betrayal of his own, for his destiny. For daring to meddle in her plots and for being strong enough to do so. For aiding Arthur and not herself, for being so goddamn stupid that despite everything that Arthur did against magic he believed in the King that was Arthur Pendragon. For not being on her side after everything they had been through together, for leaving her to her Fate.
He had forged what she was and slowly created his own place in her life as well.
Her destiny and her doom.
Emrys.
Merlin.
