Summary: Arthur meets a mysterious young man and instantly feels a bond with the stranger. But he does not know this man was born with powerful gift that he uses to fashion himself as a modern-day super hero "Merlin". This power threatens to destroy the sudden love he has discovered, as well as Merlin.

A/N: Although this a chapter story, I try to write each chapter as a small story in itself. I'm a slow writer, but a dogged one that must complete what she starts.

Chapter 2: Merlin

I mailed the package in front of the headquarters of Camelot Insurance Corporation (CIS) setting in motion its implosion. To be rid of all that information was a great relief, as though I had been choking and then Heimlich-ed.

I stood still after I had closed the compartment of the mailbox, waiting for some happiness, some epiphany. Was this what accomplishment felt like? A weary kind of numbness? Then I suppose I accomplished what I had sought to do. And so my life continues with my emotions not so different from those I had before. At the center of me was still that bare patch. Nothing would ever grow there again.

After months of gathering proof of CIS's defrauding the government and illegal stock option deals, and all those memorandums of bonuses for rescinding covered payments, I was finally done. For a year I had kept so busy around the edges to prove their undoing, edges which were all I had.

It was around lunch time, so Dragon and I watched the people stream out of CIS's tall glass building. Men and women in business suits with their little lunch bags smeared long trails of colors behind them like balls of comets. I saw stale browns, mustard yellows, fire blues, blood red and then suddenly hard spears of blackness like swords all combining into whiteness. "Look at the sheep," I said to Dragon. "White like sheep." He just sighed his agreement with a few thumps of his long tail.

Who was I kidding? If life had taught me anything Uther Pendragon, CEO of CIS, would survive this, even after death he'd haunt us with the help of some of a cryogenically preserved brain financed by the death of thousands. I began to feel as if I had become part of a badly written crime novel and my inner critic was taking me to task for being utterly unrealistic character.

Just across the street was homeless man in his frayed coats was sifting through the fecund barrels of trash looking for food. Dragon and I trotted up to him to give him money but he just yelled at me about young bastards and skateboards, or something like that, so we turned away from downtown for our long walk.

Dragon and I usually head toward the coast because the colors I see that others can't are muted and nice there. The breeze had pushed the tall grasses flat that day. A flower with a hundred tiny blooms on it pushed up everywhere. The rains had loosened the smells of everything. I was comforted by the soft silence, my brain had been too noisy of a place lately.

In the back of my mind I tried not to hope to see that golden man again, the one who left behind a royal blue space for a moment. I shut my eyes. I squeezed them tight to just feel the kiss of water on my feet, to dream. I listened to Dragon's panting and the sea stretching in and retreating. But I never thought of him. I never tried to dream of him. I never tried.