It's funny how memories meld together, isn't it? One minute you're a child, angrily sulking over the fact that you don't want to learn to read, you want to go and watch the Knights train in the grounds, and the next, you're actually training them, leading them.
It seems like only yesterday that Arthur was staring forlornly out of the windows in the castle at them, and yet now he is stood in front of them, leading them into battle when need be (which is more often than not, these days).
It's a testament to just how much he has grown, he thinks, but then again he doesn't really feel like he has grown at all.
He can clearly remember times when he wasn't allowed outside at all, when his Father was overly protective of him, but then that only feels like last week, still. It's like bits of his memories are smashing together, none of them in the right places on the timeline.
Sometimes it's like he never even existed before turning eighteen years old. He finds he cannot remember a time when he was innocent, a time when he didn't have to fight. A time when he could just play with his friends and be a child. Other times he remembers that he didn't have any proper friends, and that everything he does 'remember,' are contradictions of each other.
Sure, there was Morgana, but she was a girl, and girls weren't any fun to be with. The Knights sometimes made a fuss of him, but they weren't friends.
No, he'd not had a friend, a proper friend, until he was eighteen years old.
It's almost like his brain wants to erase all the memories before Merlin.
It's like he can't even imagine a time when he wasn't there, the skinny, bumbling, dark haired boy, made a manservant by saving his life.
Sometimes he tries to remember a time when he was small, but it hurts, so he chooses not to after a while.
Soon, his mind blocks out every memory not associated with the here and now, with Merlin.
He often finds that he wouldn't have it any other way, finds he doesn't want memories that don't contain Merlin, wants all future memories to hold Merlin when he looks back on them.
He feels an extraordinary pull towards the clumsy, awkward mash of gangly limbs that is Merlin, something that feels extraordinarily like love.
He knows that if he did have a friend when he was younger, a best friend even, it would have been Merlin.
Maybe then he would find that he would remember things with perfect clarity, as he so often finds in memories that, so often now, increasingly, beautifully, contain him.
Arthur is certain he would have it no other way.
