A/N: Okay, here's the "interludes," which are both basically drabbles. The first one is Arien's thoughts and the second one is Merlin's. Please bask in the raw emotion. : ) As usual, I don't own Merlin; that belongs to BBC/NBC/SyFy/Arthurian legend writers.
Seeing him was torture, even though she no longer made an effort to do so. It seemed like she saw him more than ever now, but that was probably just due to the fact that she couldn't stop thinking about him. There hadn't been a speck of sympathy in his clear blue eyes that night—only anger.
Every time they passed one another in the halls, she turned away from him. She feared what she might see in his eyes if she looked there again. Besides, he did not to see what he'd done to her. She managed to pull herself together while at work and do what was expected of her, but the moment she left the castle, she crumbled. Every night, she would lie on her bed for hours, torturing herself with memories of Merlin.
She had always heard that losing your first love was the hardest, but she hadn't expected it to hurt this much. Of course, she'd planned on actually having some sort of romantic relationship with the first man she loved. At least then she would have pleasant memories of love, not just tension and hopes between two people.
One day, it would be better. She wouldn't feel knives through her heart every time she heard his name; tears wouldn't run down her face whenever she saw him. She did know that those days were far in the future, possibly so far that she wouldn't even be experiencing them in Camelot.
Tomorrow, she would start to think about where to go when she left Camelot, knowing that if she did not start thinking about it now, she would be stuck in Camelot with her broken emotions forever.
I don't want to leave, she thought. What if he changes his mind after I leave?
That will be his loss.
More mine than his.
He was starting to wonder if he'd made a mistake by yelling at her. She had lied to him, but he was doing the same thing to her—and everyone else. He'd been so hypocritical, hurting her like that.
She still worked every day; for that, he'd begun to respect her greatly. More than once, he had looked her way in the corridors, hoping that she'd look at him for only a second. Every time, she turned away from him, her head down and her eyes pointing in the opposite direction. If she had gotten into any trouble for not focusing on her chores, he hadn't heard of it. If he didn't know her better, he would have believed that she was fine.
Her lack of eye contact with him spoke otherwise.
Life was dry and dull without her. He had no one to talk to halfway through the day when he felt exhausted and no one to walk with once the working day was over. He went to sleep with an empty feeling and woke up with the same huge hole in his chest.
That night had changed him. He hadn't smiled genuinely since they'd last spoken. Whenever he saw her, he recalled how her hand had felt in his that night—soft, warm, and slightly smaller than his own. He wanted to feel that with her again, this time without ruining it by being a thick-skulled idiot.
Three days was too long. He needed to talk with her, even if she'd changed her mind about him. He knew that they couldn't be together right away, but perhaps they could negotiate. If this was life without her, he would keep her around for as long as was possible, even if things didn't end up as he imagined.
