Author's Note:
Hiya, I'm on time for once! Yeah anyway... I'd like to say thank you for anyone who has followed/Favorited/Reviewed so far, it's really encouraging and I'm in my first community... not completely sure what that entails but anyway that's great!
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Chapter 7: Something That Can Never Change
It was one minuet to five and Hermione had found nothing, sighing she made her way back to the clearing and waited for Merlin's return, she watched as the seconds ticked by, those seconds becoming minuets, those minuets building up until Hermione began to wonder were the wizard was.
"Come on Merlin." She muttered to herself. Getting up, she began walking, turning right, and then left letting the library leading her on.
At long last, she turned a corner for what felt like the hundredth time and saw him. He was sitting at the end of the row of shelves, legs pulled tightly to his body, clutching an old, tattered book; every now and then he would sniff, causing a fresh tear to splash onto the page.
"Merlin?" He looked round, whipping the tears from his face; he subtly slipped the book back into the shelf behind him.
"Hermione," He looked up at the clock "Oh, ah, I'm sorry" He sniffed.
"Are you okay?" She asked, walking over to the shelf where he was now standing in front of.
"Me? No, I'm fine." He straightened up, "Did you find anything?"
Hermione didn't answer; instead she surveyed the self that Merlin had put the book onto. She tilted her head slightly, so as to read the spine of a book that matched the image in her memory.
"Merlin who's Gaius?" The spine had read 'the diary of Gaius, the court physician of Camelot' she picked up the book, tears had begun sparkling in the boys eyes again.
"Just somebody that I used to know, none really" He gulped, his lip began to quiver, but he swallowed it, running a hand through his hair as he did.
"But he's more than that isn't he?" Hermione pushed, "Merlin if you can tell anyone you can tell me."
At that, she was subject to a shaky, ambivalent stare from the boy that stood opposite her. A few seconds past like this, she could feel those deep blue eyes burrowing into her, but in a moment that stare seemed to break, Merlin sagged letting out a heavy sigh that dragged him to the floor again. Fiddling with the sleeve of his coat he said:
"When I first came to Camelot he took me in, he kept my secret, no matter how badly it hurt him," at the last words his voice broke and he buried his face in his arms.
Hermione carefully slid down beside him, lock of her long brown hair rested on his shoulder for a second before she brushed it back into place.
"You had a secret?" She asked softly,
"Magic was banded in Camelot, on pain of death, so yeah I had a secret." He mumbled into his jacket.
"I always thought Camelot thrived with magic, that's what I've been taught, ever since I was young."
"Come on Hermione," Merlin raised his head a little, "you have a whole library of facts and you choose to believe that?"
"But the Arthurian legends they're…"
"Just legends Hermione, like when you thought the real Merlin was old" Merlin pause, a smile playing at the corners of his lips "I've never been old in the a thousand years of my existence"
Hermione giggled "No I don't suppose you have" She looked him up and down, wondering if she should say anything, but like many times before her mouth was quicker than her brain,
"At school I got taught that you didn't return to Camelot after Arthur's death, is that… Is that bit true? " She blurted out.
Merlin turned his head towards her, his chest slowly rising and falling, nodding slightly he whispered:
"That bit's true," He looked back down at his feet again.
"Why?" The question hung in the air for what felt like ages, almost until Hermione thought he was never going to answer.
But then he did, shaking his head slightly, he said
"I don't even know,"
"You regret not going back?"
Merlin nodded slowly, "Every minuet"
He took a breath that came from the bottom of his lungs "I thought, there was nothing left for me there, but there was, there always had been, it was never just Arthur, I had people there, people that cared for me… I thought I didn't need them, so I left, I've spent my whole life travelling, never looking back, never staying long enough to make friends and by the time I realised I'd made a mistake, Gaius, Gwen, Percival, Leon, they all would have been dead. I didn't even go back to see my mother."
Hermione looked at him in astonishment "and you've never told anyone this?" but Merlin wasn't listening his head was back in his lap again, and his shoulders where heaving. Hermione put her arm round him, just like she had done with her children, but of course Merlin wasn't a child.
She couldn't tell how long they stayed like that, but after a while, he stopped sighing and shrugged off her arm.
She leant back against the book case, feeling awkward, what if Ron had seen her doing that? Quickly she got up and began pacing up and down, but as she did, a note fell out of the book in her hands.
"What the…?" she said to herself, and bending over, she reached out a hand to grab the piece of paper, but then she caught Merlin's eye he was staring at the note, slowly he got up.
"What is it?" Hermione asked.
When he didn't answer she looked him in the face, and to her surprise he was smiling.
"Merlin?"
"We've found it Hermione; this is what I've been looking for all this time!"
He waved the note in her face, written in on the front in large, swirly handwriting was one word, and that word was Emrys.
Author's Note: Okay so there was a little bit of Merlin/Hermione in there, what I want to know is should I take that further? I was thinking about just leaving it but what do you think? Please review and tell me, thank you!