"What was your mother like?"
"I never knew her. She died before I opened my eyes. Barely know anything about her."
"Can't you ask your father?"
"He refuses to talk about her. Must be too painful for him. Sometimes it's as if she never even existed. I still have a sense of her, as though she's part of me."
"That's the same, for my father, I never knew him, and my mother's barely spoken of him. I've got this vague memory. It's probably just my imagination."
"I'd do anything for even the vaguest memory."
Merlin was six when he first asked his mother where his father was. It had been one of those days when she had been out, helping with an illness, and Merlin had been left alone in their small house, watching the other boys his age working and learning from their fathers. Merlin, despite everyone's claims, was old enough to understand that not having a father was a bad thing, even though Will had said that he shouldn't care. So, when Merlin asked her, he wasn't expecting his mother to simply smile wistfully, and hold him close to her. Over the years to come, Merlin would live to understand, when he too would lose the people he held most dear.
Merlin was twelve when he was first called a 'bastard'. He had heard the word whispered around the village of course, but had never heard anyone being called it. When he asked his mother later what it meant, she simply pursed her lips, and didn't speak for the rest of the evening. Merlin wouldn't learn what the word meant until a few months later, when the older boys teased him about his father. It was the first time Merlin cried about his father's absence.
Merlin was fourteen when Will told him that his own father was dead. When Will asked him how he dealt with not having a father, Merlin simply smiled, eyes filled with sadness. How could he tell Will?
Merlin was seventeen when he finally found someone like him. Arthur had never met his own mother, and so Merlin told him, because unlike Will, unlike his mother, Arthur would surely feel the same. So he told him. Told him about this warm memory, this vague sense that he had of his father. What he didn't tell Arthur was how it felt. It felt like a beacon, full of hope, and love, and it called to him. It called from the very depths of his soul, crying out to be heard.
Throughout the next couple of months, the beacon got stronger. The pull almost became unbearable, but Merlin ignored it. He had no time to follow the beacon, no matter how it cried for his attention. Arthur was now Merlin's main concern, and keeping the prince alive was a full time job. Merlin reasoned that he didn't have time to go follow this feeling.
And so Merlin never listened to the beacon. Not until it was too late.
As Merlin cradled his father in his arms, he felt the beacon wink out, drowned in the flood of grief that threatened to overwhelm him, as he tried to hold in his tears.