Next one: Fairytale by Alexander Rybak. This was probably the hardest one I've written yet, but done as a special request. It's not Alice he is thinking about! Technically it's based on one of my OC's, but who knows, maybe Gaius was a catch back in his day? ;)
Gaius watched Merlin bustle about, smiling slightly in the memories of having that much energy. There had been a time, years and years ago. When he was so much younger than he was now, thought that the world was still waiting for him.
But it hadn't just been the world that was waiting for him. His childhood sweetheart had as well. He had liked her from the first moment they had met, and judging by the sideways glances she kept giving him whenever her father was looking the other way, she liked him back. It was so long ago, but was still as true as love could be. They may have been young and foolish, but they both knew how they felt.
It was their emotions that made the relationship so interesting. They had different views; they saw things in different ways. By day, they used to fight, argue over trivial things that Gaius couldn't even remember. But by night, it was as if all of their problems suddenly fell away and they once again found themselves in love. All the arguments didn't seem to matter when the moon rise and they stared at each other from across the room, wondering what they were doing.
Gaius still wonders what he was doing. Everything had been so perfect, she was his fairytale. He had almost lost his mind to her because of the strength of his emotions. Love could be a curse, he had no idea how he was supposed to fight it. But one day, he seemed to lose that fight. They suddenly fell apart, no explanation, no real reason. He didn't know what he had been doing on the day she turned up to inform him that she was marrying some lord.
Gaius can't remember his reaction, he had blanked it out. He knew deep down that they would have never worked, days of fighting was no way to live a life, even if the nights made up for it. No one else had managed to lift him as high as she did, sending his spirits soaring in a way that he could now only dream about. That passion, that energy had long since fallen victim to the ravages of time, and yet he still found part of him longing for those days. But whilst no one could lift him as high as she had been able to, no one else could bring him down as much.
She was the only one that could make him beyond sad. Even now, she was still his fairytale, the princess that he could never save in time, the one that he could never rescue. After all of these years, he thought that it would ease, but it could still hurt as much now as it did then. How did he manage to let her go so spectacularly? Why did he not fight for her, she had been his? But deep down, Gaius knew that they could never be. And even after she had left him, he had still found Alice. He had found love again, but nothing could match the rollercoaster of emotions that she had left him with. How could one person be lifted so high and then dropped to the depths of sadness through the actions of one person?
He was in love with a fairytale, something he could never have. It was hurting him each and every day, and he was sure that he had been losing his mind to it before Merlin had turned up and given him a reason again. It felt like a curse, being in love with something that was beyond his reach. He just hoped that his young ward never had to deal with love in this way. It was truly a curse, something that could consume a man.
For over the years, she had become more and more like his fairytale. Something that was so perfect in his mind, yet something he knew that he could never have in reality again.