"Maybe that's why I'm back. The Once and Future King was supposed to restore magic to the land, and it sounds as though someone needs to. It's as good a goal as any, wouldn't you say?"

"As my king commands."

To make a very long story short, they didn't manage it.

They had nearly twelve years, that first time, and they spent more or less all of it embroiled in a defensive, and largely unwinnable, war against invading Saxons. In some ways, it felt very much like the old days, although it took a while for Arthur to get used to not being royalty to anyone except Merlin, who complained that Arthur seemed to expect an entire kingdom's worth of deference from him to make up for the fact that he received none from anyone else. Arthur, with his most irritating smirk, pointed out that since he'd neither expected nor received much in the way of deference from Merlin in their previous lives, he was just making up for lost time. Merlin, unimpressed, muttered something to the effect that turning him into a toad was still a viable possibility; Arthur, who knew perfectly well that it wasn't, generously let him have the last word.

Well, first he caught him in a headlock and knuckled his scalp a little bit. But he didn't say anything, so, technically, he'd let Merlin have the last word. He figured that counted.

It wasn't what anyone would call a 'pleasant' life. Guerrilla warfare rarely is. They were constantly on the move, trying to stay one step ahead of the Saxons, and were cold and hungry as often as not. They lived off the land, scavenged their weapons and armor from the bodies of the slain, and tried not to think much further ahead than the next day, the next skirmish. Death was a constant companion.

And yet, in the centuries to come, those years shone in Arthur's memory like a new-minted coin. If their meals were scanty or unpalatable, or skipped altogether, the conversation that accompanied it was enough to lend it spice. If they slept rough, they slept soundly, back-to-back for safety as well as warmth. If it seemed as though the entire world was dying around them, there was never a moment when either of them doubted that, at least for now, they were alive. And together, both sides of the coin reunited at last. They were as they were meant to be, and they were doing what they were meant for. There was a fierce exhilaration in that.

Arthur had once spent six interminable weeks with his right arm splinted and immobile. Six weeks banned from the training grounds and everything else he enjoyed, trying to go about his business using only one hand—he'd nearly starved before he'd gotten the hang of eating with his left hand without spilling half his meal down his front, and between the clumsiness, the frustration, and the outright boredom, it hadn't done his temper any favors. Morgana had laughed at him for months.

He still remembered how it had felt when he took off the splints. When he'd been whole again. This felt something like that. And he thought that his other half felt the same way; the Merlin at his side during this second lifetime was not much like the driven, distant, effortlessly powerful mage he had tried to imagine after hearing Gwen's version of events, or the haunted, broken man he'd found on the lakeshore. He almost seemed to age backwards, shedding some of the aching grief, the guilt, even the tense, exhausted wariness that had become so familiar over the last few years of their first lifetime. He didn't revert to the carefree, puppyish boy Arthur had met in the marketplace and bullied into an unwinnable fight—into a lifetime of unwinnable fights, come to that—but that was only right, Arthur thought. They had both earned their maturity the hard way; it would have been wrong to cast it aside. His eternally youthful face and coltish physique notwithstanding, Merlin hadn't been a boy for a very, very long time.

He hadn't been happy for a very long time, either, Arthur guessed. But in spite of everything, or maybe even because of everything, he was happy now. They both were. Arthur remembered Avalon, sometimes; it was hard not to think of the feasts he'd attended in palatial banquet halls, with their impossible array of delicacies, when he himself was sitting down to yet another bowl of thin pottage and sour ale, and grateful to have even that, and when he was trying to fend off a Saxon raiding party, in the rain, wearing rusty, ill-fitting mail and carrying a sword he'd taken from the last man he'd killed, he sometimes remembered the gala tournaments the Sidhe would host, a whirlwind of silken banners and gleaming moon-silver armor. And it was always hard, bitterly hard, to look around the camp circle in the evenings and not see his Round Table companions, or his wife.

But he did see his sorcerer—his right hand, his other half, his brother, pick an epithet—sprawled bonelessly at his side. And that alone might even have been enough to be going on with, but it wasn't all he saw. Because he also saw his countrymen, the people he had been born and reborn to protect, even if they didn't know it. Serving them was his duty, his responsibility, his privilege. That was enough, and more than enough. The grim, dismal conditions notwithstanding, Arthur was truly happy in his second life.

…Until the day Merlin didn't make it back from a battle.

The Saxons had gotten wilier, lately. That time, they had hidden reinforcements in a copse, and unleashed them in a hammer-and-anvil tactic at precisely the worst possible time. They had been repelled, in the end, but British casualties had been horrific. Merlin and Arthur had gotten separated in the chaos, and, when it was over, Merlin was nowhere to be found. Hurt? Captured? Arthur, trying not to let his increasing panic show on his face, was just steeling himself to join the men seeing to the scattered corpses for either respectful burial (for the Britons) or, (for the Saxons) disposal in a mass grave, in both cases after being stripped of anything of value, when Merlin came trudging over, weaponless, his mail shirt torn, and drenched head to foot in blood. It was almost certainly too much to hope that it wasn't his own.

"What in the gods' names happened to you?" Arthur said, aghast.

Merlin looked down at himself, as if noticing his state of utter disrepair for the first time, and shrugged. "Archers," he said simply. "Maybe half a dozen or so? I saw five of them, for sure. Stopped their arrows mid-air; you know the trick."

"I do," said Arthur. "So what was the problem?"

"I saw five of them," Merlin repeated. "Seems that there were actually six. One of them got an arrow clear through my throat. That distracted me long enough for a big, ugly brute to cut me damn near in half with a battleaxe. Hence the state of my armor."

Arthur paled.

Merlin, irritated, flicked a finger at the remains of his mail. "He barely needed the axe. Probably could have gotten through this shirt with a wooden spoon. These rings break if you sneeze on them. How come our side doesn't have any competent blacksmiths? Anyway—are you all right, Arthur? I'm sorry I wasn't much help. By the time I woke up, it was all over but the looting."

"Am I all right?" Arthur laughed, disbelieving and unamused. "You got yourself cut in half, and you're asking if I'm all right?"

Merlin shrugged again, his face bleak. "I've had worse," he said simply. "One of the charming little benefits of immortality they don't warn you about is the opportunity to sample pretty much every sort of unpleasant death you can imagine. It's more of an inconvenience than anything else by now. Although I will admit—" he cut himself off.

Arthur looked at him. "Admit what?"

There was a very long pause.

"This time, I wasn't entirely certain I'd wake up," Merlin finally said, not looking at him. "This was my first death since you came back. At least, the first time I was sure I died. There were a few close calls I wasn't completely sure about, but… never mind. I'd thought that maybe the point of my immortality was so that I could be there when you returned. And since you have, and I don't have to wait anymore, there seemed to be a reasonably good chance that I'd become mortal." He shrugged, trying to make it look casual. "Apparently not."

Arthur's mind skipped right past the 'close calls' and to the most horrifying aspect of a horrifying conversation. I don't have to wait anymore.

Merlin didn't know.

Merlin didn't know that this was not a one-time thing. The gods, or the Sidhe, or Destiny itself, for reasons best known to Themselves, had chosen to leave him ignorant of… everything.

"I guess it's still possible that, instead of me becoming mortal, you've become immortal, but I wouldn't recommend testing it," Merlin continued, trying to make it sound lighthearted. "Being chopped to bits isn't nearly as much fun as it sounds, and most people only get one chance to try it."

Arthur thought he might be sick. He had to tell him.

How could he tell him? 'No, sorry, old friend; this is just a quick visit before I go back to paradise, and you'll have any number of chances to die horribly before I come back this way again?'

He had to tell him. He had to. Merlin deserved to know. No matter what hearing it would do to him. To their friendship. Arthur had to tell him.

…But not right this minute, he decided, in a flash of pure cowardice, as Merlin shucked himself out of the ruined mail. "Let's worry about that later," Arthur said. "In the meantime, we'd better find you some new armor. There's got to be something worth salvaging in the spoils pile."

"Yes, because they worked so well for their previous owners," Merlin muttered, with a weary, but genuine, smirk.

Arthur cuffed him, gently, around the back of his head. "Better than nothing," he said. "And once we've gotten you kitted out, you can make us some dinner. I don't know about you, but I'm famished."

"I got cut in half," Merlin reminded him, petulantly. "Doesn't that at least get me out of cooking your meals for one night?"

Arthur smiled, showing a few too many teeth. "Of course. How silly of me! Tell you what. I could cook instead…?"

Merlin's eyes widened in mock terror. "I take it all back," he said quickly. "I'll cook. I'm happy to cook. One death is enough for the day; I really don't need to top it off with a poisoning. No one's forgotten what you did to that poor, innocent rabbit the last time you made dinner. I still have nightmares about it."

"It wasn't that bad."

"By whose standards? It was supposed to be cooked, not cremated."

"At least it wasn't rat," Arthur said, bereft of any better defense. He'd gotten distracted during the meal preparation, and by the time a very disturbing smell had reminded him that he was the camp cook that evening, dinner was more or less a lost cause. He had been unceremoniously and permanently relegated to dishwashing duty after that.

"You didn't complain about the rat stew the last three times we had it," Merlin pointed out.

"Oh, I did," Arthur said, honestly. He had. "And so did everyone else. But I'll concede that it was marginally better than dying of starvation."

"Marginally," Merlin agreed, deciding not to point out that he was speaking from firsthand experience, and grinned at him.

*.*.*.*

It was all too easy for Arthur to keep putting off the 'so, about my return to and from Avalon…' conversation. There was always a good reason as to why right this minute wasn't the best time to explain that things were going to get a lot worse before they got better, if they ever did at all. Arthur thought, with some dark humor, that he was probably getting a lot of insight into how Merlin must have felt about the 'so, about my illegal magic…' conversation, and any lingering hurt he had ever felt about the fact that Merlin had waited until Arthur was quite literally half-dead to broach the topic vanished forever, leaving only a vague determination not to let history repeat itself.

Nor did it. As it turned out, Merlin's timing, pitiful as it was, still beat Arthur's; by the time he had to admit that he'd procrastinated long enough, he was three-quarters dead and no longer in much of a position for long chats.

It had all begun with a string of three consecutive ambushes. They had not left anyone in a particularly good frame of mind.

"You're the sorcerer," Arthur said grimly. "Isn't there some way you could predict what's going to happen? Where the damned Saxons will be next?"

Merlin bit his lip. "I'm no Seer," he said. "If I was any good at foretelling the future, I'd have done a lot of things differently in my life."

"Don't tell me—you'd have taken one look at Camelot and kept right on walking?"

"You might have been better off if I had," Merlin muttered under his breath. "I… look, there's one thing I can try. I can't guarantee anything. But I've… I've got one trick left up my sleeve. I might—might—be able to see something in this." He fished under his collar, drew out a silver chain with a chunk of crystal.

Arthur stared at it. He was entirely certain that he'd never seen it before in his life. Either of them. "What's that?"

Merlin glanced at the stone resting on his sternum, then quickly looked away. "It's a shard from the Crystal Cave," he said. "It's how I escaped."

"Using that?"

"Sort of," Merlin said. "It's… do you remember the story of Prometheus?"

Arthur dredged through his memory of dull tutors droning on about nothing in particular until he found the name. "Wasn't he the one who stole fire from the gods?"

"Yeah," said Merlin. "The gods punished him by chaining him to a rock for all eternity and continually disemboweling him. Until they needed his help again; funny how that works. They compromised, in the end; they stopped ripping his guts out every day, and they did let him off the rock, but forever afterwards, he was made to wear bracelets with a piece of the rock set in the iron. So, technically, he was still chained to the stone, even after he was freed from being actively tortured."

"I see," said Arthur, who didn't.

Merlin touched the chain around his neck. "Same idea," he said. "Whoever Loholt got to craft my fetters knew what he was doing. This was the closest I was able to come to freeing myself—I'm not in the cave anymore, but I'm still chained to the stone."

"I see," repeated Arthur, who now only wished he didn't. "You've had that thing on all this time? Why didn't I notice it before?"

"Invisibility spell," Merlin said. "It's a temptation to thieves otherwise, and anyway I don't like looking at it. Or thinking about it. Mostly, I try to forget it's there. These crystals came close to driving me out of my mind. They show… well, everything. The past and the present, which are bad enough, but they also show the future. Futures. All the things that might be, or might have been if you'd done something different, and everything that might happen as a result. All at once. It's… terrifying."

"What do you mean?"

"The future isn't just one thing. It's millions of billions of them. Say… say you're thirsty. The future could show you drinking water, or wine, or milk, or ale, or nothing at all. Which could mean dying of dehydration, or getting sick from bad water, or a hangover from too much alcohol, or poison slipped into your cup. Or spilling it on the ground. Or a dozen other things, and each of them leads to a slightly different future. That's just one unimportant minute in one person's life. Multiply that by the entire world."

Arthur could see him trying not to shudder, glassy-eyed and tense. "And you were staring at these things for fifty years?"

"…Yeah," he said. "And the further into the future you go, the harder it gets to figure out what's real and what's not. Not to mention the fact that trying to change the future doesn't always work all that well; mostly, I found that everything I did just brought about the future I was trying to stop. It's hell, Arthur. Foresight is hell. I begged Loholt to do anything else to me, just not... well, it doesn't matter now," he said, visibly snapping himself out of the panic-spiral with iron discipline and a sunny smile. "I'm just looking at the next day or so; that shouldn't be too bad."

Arthur, who was having some foresight of his own just then, suspected that yes, it would be that bad. And if he never, ever saw that please-ignore-my-obvious-agony-everything's-just-fine-and-dandy smile again, it would be too damned soon. "Maybe this isn't such a great idea," he said. "Forget it. Put that rock away. We'll do this the old-fashioned way and send out scouts."

"We don't have scouts to spare," Merlin pointed out. "It'll be all right, Arthur. We need to know what to expect. If it looks like I'm having trouble, I'll stop the scry. What's the worst that can happen?"

"Well, let's see. For starters, you did mention something about these crystals nearly driving you out of your mind," said Arthur. "Not that anyone would necessarily be able to tell the difference, but still not a chance I'd take lightly."

Merlin rolled his eyes. "I put up with you day in and day out; what's a few minutes gazing at a crystal compared to that? Look, if you think I'm having trouble, distract me, and I'll come out of it."

"Distract you."

"Yeah. Break my concentration. Call my name, snap your fingers, cut my throat if you have to. Whatever it takes to get my attention."

"Wonderful. I like this idea less every time you open your mouth," said Arthur, drawing his dagger.

"That makes two of us," said Merlin, and took a deep, ragged breath. "Right. Here goes nothing."

He slipped the chain over his head, twisted it around his wrist a couple of times. There was something else on the chain—a small copper disc. Arthur blinked a couple of times, recognizing it—the coin was rubbed smooth, but it still showed the unmistakable Pendragon crest on the side that showed. Arthur wondered which profile was on the other side—himself? Gwen? Surely not Uther…?

Merlin wrapped another loop of chain around his thin wrist. "It doesn't have to be on my neck, it just has to be attached somewhere," he explained, misinterpreting Arthur's curious stare.

"I wasn't wondering about at that; just looking at the coin."

Merlin smiled. "That was a lucky find," he said. "About two years before you came back, someone paid me with a handful of old coins from about eight different kingdoms. This was one of them." His smile got a little wistful. "It's the only concrete object I've got to prove that Camelot really existed."

Arthur reached down, flipped it over. It had two profiles, not one, both blurred into anonymity. "Not one of mine," he commented.

"Yes and no. Gwen issued these," said Merlin. "See? It's got both you and her. All of her coins did. Once and Future King, remember?"

"She never mentioned she'd done that," Arthur said, touched.

Merlin nodded, rubbing a thumb over the coin. "Well, she did," he said softly. "Anyway. Wish me luck."

He cupped the crystal in his hands, bent his head to stare into it. Arthur was not surprised to see his eyes gleaming gold, but, more worryingly, his face went lifeless and his entire body tensed.

"Merlin?" Arthur said.

No response. He reached out and touched Merlin's arm; it felt like touching a marble statue. Just as hard, just as cold, and just as inanimate.

Right. Arthur would give this a count of five hundred, no more, and then, by gods, he would rouse Merlin from this trance even if that did mean stabbing him…

Merlin whimpered, deep in his throat—a horrible, animal sound—and a trickle of blood dripped from his nose, rolled down his immobile face to land on the crystal, where it evaporated with a hiss, like water on a hot pan.

Arthur revised his plan. He would count to one hundred, no more, and then—

"NO!"

The voice didn't sound like Merlin. It didn't even sound human. It was pure, primal agony. For a crazed instant, Arthur thought the entire world shuddered with the force of that scream. Maybe it did.

Arthur dropped the dagger and lunged for the man. With one arm he grabbed him from behind, pinning him to his own chest. With the other, he seized the wrist with the chain and twisted it, crystal and all, behind Merlin's back and out of his line of sight.

Merlin moaned again, went completely limp in Arthur's arms. His breath was ragged, fast and shallow, and Arthur could feel his heart pounding as though it was trying to batter its way clear out of that scrawny chest. "I knew this was a bad idea, you utter idiot," Arthur muttered, lowering them both to the ground. "But do you ever listen to me? Of course not. Gods, Merlin, I wish we had stables. I'd make you muck them out with a spoon. No, forget the stables; I wish we had stocks. Come on, wake up."

Gently, Arthur unwound the chain from around Merlin's wrist. He didn't quite dare throw the damned crystal away for fear that it would somehow make things worse, but he put it around Merlin's neck again, and tucked it out of sight under his tunic. It didn't escape his notice that the sorcerer flinched, hard, as the stone touched his skin. His whole body twitched, tears dripping down his face, but he was still too much in the grip of whatever the crystal had shown him to react any more coherently than that. "I'm sorry," Arthur whispered, grief and pity clogging his throat. He wasn't even quite sure what he was apologizing for—he knew it wasn't just this one disastrous scrying session. It was all of it. Maybe he was just sorry that Merlin hadn't walked away from Camelot before any of this could start. "Gods, Merlin—I am so sorry."

An absolutely interminable minute later, Merlin did in fact open his eyes. Blue. "Arthur?" he mumbled.

"I'm here," he said, his voice even. "Are you all right?"

Merlin, predictably, nodded.

"What happened?"

Merlin didn't say anything for a moment. A split second before Arthur's patience gave out, he said, in a flat monotone, "I saw you die."

Arthur swallowed. "I assume you don't mean at Camlann."

"No," said Merlin. "Here. Now. Or soon, anyway. The Saxons will attack. And you'll die." He shook his head. "All of us will. The whole group. We'll be wiped out to the last man. Except me." His composure cracked. "Except me. I can't go through that again, Arthur. I can't."

"It'll be all right, Merlin," Arthur said, inadequately. "You'll be all right."

"I know I will," he said, bitterly. "And so will you. We're getting out of here."

"We can't abandon the others," Arthur said. "They need us."

"They'll die whether we're here or not," said Merlin, in a hard, callous tone that didn't suit him at all. "You have to live. Tell you what—I'll stay behind and fight it out with them. You get to safety, and I'll come find you after it's all over. How's that?"

"You know I can't do that," Arthur said gently.

"You have to! Don't you understand? You'll die!" said Merlin, frantic. "I can't stand by and let it all happen again! Albion needs you! I need you!"

"Merlin… if this is when I'm meant to die, then this is it. I'm not afraid."

"Well, good for you. You're never afraid of anything," Merlin shot back. "But I'm not as strong as you are."

No. You're stronger. "You said yourself that those damned crystals are only showing possible futures—and that trying to avoid them only makes it more likely that they'll happen. I'll be all right, Merlin. And even if I'm not…"

At that precise, perfectly inconvenient moment, the sentry shouted the alarm, and a swarm of Saxon warriors charged the camp. Arthur had time for exactly one thought—an irritable reflection on the fact that their timing could not have been worse if they'd planned it out for years and a dark suspicion that he could hear the gods laughing at them—before he found himself on his feet, sword drawn and already grappling with a particularly nasty berserker with a beard that looked like weasels had nested in it, not to mention a bearskin cloak that smelled like the weasels had done worse than nest.

Arthur, simply on the grounds of dignity, refused to let that be what killed him the second time, but his next opponent wasn't much of an improvement. Nor was his third. After that it all started to blur together. He never did know for certain who took him down. All he really knew for sure, as he awoke in the boat to Avalon, was that he had failed, and that the memory of Merlin's face as he died in the sorcerer's arms, again, would haunt him forever.