[Transmissions (VII – The Beguiling of Merlin)]

"Live with a man 40 years. Share his house, his meals. Speak on every subject. Then tie him up, and hold him over the volcano's edge. And on that day, you will finally meet the man."

-Joss Whedon

So there was her great miscalculation:

In the end, the person you give your feelings to was supposed to be able to throw you off balance to an extent.

That what it meant when someone's feelings were more important than yours, and your measures to keep them safe.

That's where the expression 'stolen your heart' comes from.

Of course you want to have the caution and sanity to be wary of those who would see devotion as a weakness to be exploited, but it's not like the person who cares less in a relationship is the one who "wins". There is some opening up required to get the full experience.

In the end, they both had the same problem:

Her,

In order to keep a handle on life, to never feel lost again, to live up to her mother's legacy, for herself – to get what she wanted.

Him,

because he had to make hard decisions, because the unsteady life he led assured that nothing would ever stay in his life for too long, to live up to those who expected a hero in his stead, for those who'd died along the way.

Both of them,

for the people who might still depend on them.

In that way, they'd found each other, in that way they'd recognized each other's mixed and contradictory signals, not perfectly, not to an extent that their repressions and hangups would have negated themselves, but well enough. They hadn't been able to carry on with their games as usual because they weren't used to dealing with someone who was the same as them.

This idea that everyone has "flaws" and "streghts"? To hell with it. People have traits, that can be hard to change, and whether they're good or band depend on the context, how they're applied. Some are clearly more useful than others, but most are more complex than just 'good' or 'bad', and when you add a second person with another set interacting in different situations, you get even more of a jumble – In their cases, what kept them together and what created their difficulties was often one and the same.

They could give each other something very few others could offer them, not in this same combination – but they were reluctant all the same, all the more perhaps.

Their reluctance and the extent to which they could affect and infuriate each other was ultimately directly tied to how much of an unique and important place they'd come to occupy in each other's lives.

He had lost so much and dreaded the pain any and all attachments would immediately bring him, but he could not actually stop himself from growing attached. He cared, in personal, immediate ways like one might for one's younger siblings, old friends, and mad loves. He was not that untouchable demigod wandering above the world that his enemies sometimes took him for – He was a silly, curious person who was, ultimately always willing to stand corrected and learn something new, and if he were capable of dismissing the world like that, he wouldn't be willing to live with the consequences of the harsh things he'd had to do to protect it in the first place, he may never have left the ivory towers of Gallifrey to begin with.

And as for her, as much as she had this drive to keep everything around her under her firm hand, she was who she was because that coexisted with curiosity, openness and a drive to be challenged – her desire to experience something worthwhile was usually stronger than her desire to stay within her comfort zone, and things that didn't fit into her idea of the world interested her more than they frightened her, so while she did have some capacity for distortion or denial, she couldn't ever become the sort of person who'd viciously stomp on everything that didn't fit into her ideas.

In that sense, they had both chosen the curses of their conditions, and with each other, they were as much at long last rewarded as finally justly punished.

And maybe that was the only way he was ever going to accept happiness – There was a part of him that had never fully believed that he could ever possibly deserve happiness, and that was part of why he was so suspicious when she first came into her life, why he was always so quick to draw back, let go, send her away, extricate himself-

But after what she'd proven herself capable of on that black, black day, she didn't believe she deserved happiness, either.

Maybe she'd been putting 'happiness' quite secondary to what 'should' be all along, and perhaps she'd equated it with the sort of sentiment that makes you give something up to help a friend in need, but whom had her latest actions ever helped?

Certainly not Danny.

Him least of all – in that blunt, heavy whack of a moment, she felt the sky cracking and tension pulling at the sinews of the world, knocking the breath right out of her, and this was not supposed to happen here, this was supposed the reliable, predictable part of life, this was supposed to always be there for her to return to it – Danny Pink was supposed to be there tomorrow when she went to work, to patiently listen to whatever she had to vent that day, tell her some insightful thing that would make her feel justified , and help her produce those descendants she was supposed to have had if she hadn't misunderstood from the beginning.

Trapped under her skin in a life that she didn't want to be hers anymore, suffocating under the weight, the sheer, heavy implication that she'd always carry that irreversible weight wherever he went, the wrongness she would feel whenever she dared to be happy – happy alongside a man he hated – while an innocent, even virtuous man would rot in the ground, would be scattered as ashes that would be floating around somewhere each time she'd be doing something he could never do again.

She was supposed to have apologized, to have put this right like her sins and deceptions had never happened, but that was impossible now, and she had no more flimsy excuses to shield her from the weight of her deeds, and how they'd let to the worst possible consequence, and she couldn't escape the responsibility.

She'd let her guard down, she'd let the truth out – whether it was the truth he put together when he found her work on the TARDIS, or the truth she let slip in the console room, after their encounter with the Foretold – and now she couldn't fix it, and she felt her chest tightening, her fingers losing focus, all of her body just freezing into place like it was bound by many wires and tiny ropes, like Gulliver upon his arrival in Lilliput – She was not capable of any reaction other than deadened numbness as she felt the plans and certainties of her life derail all around her –

Her grandmother was probably right when she, as always, saw through that pallid, impassive mask and told her to let the feelings flow, but letting herself feel, or process it, even begin to do anything but delay the moment she would do that through increasingly iron denial, would mean making it real, admitting it had truly happened – this couldn't possibly be real, she didn't want it to be real-

And in that moment her wires crossed, and her raw, jumbled feelings attached themselves to any hint of any chance of possibly reversing this.

She wouldn't let go, wouldn't let herself be lost, powerless and suffocating as long as she hadn't exhausted all her resources, squandering everything at her disposal for her need to take back a semblance of control, to force her will on this whole damn universe after all she had done to save its sorry backside – anything to stave off the creeping awareness of just what she had done.

Nothing could stop her now.

From a certain point of view, she was, perhaps, still hanging on to some twisted remnant of the trust and esteem she placed in him – She knew she was fortunate enough to be owed by him and she'd seen him do the most brazen wonders right in front of her eyes, so it might not surprise anyone that she would call for him in this darkest hours, to inquire if he could bend the rules for her and haggle for a little more time to uphold and perfect her fiction and restore that steadily crumbling, perfect image of virtue –

But she couldn't risk him saying no.

She was gonna have to make him, no big deal, she'd done it before, made him do her bidding hundreds of times – Her Emotions were numbed into silence, and yet, all that was driving her; Her mind was racing through a multitude of scenarios, but not once in her icy calculations did she think of what would happen after, his logical reaction to the means she was about to resort to – Her thoughts didn't go further than the moment when she'd have Danny back right in front her and would get to exhale in relief and put everything right – Given that she would have saved him, they would be even. Bringing him back would make it alright, make everything how it should be and undo everything that shouldn't be, like waking up from a nightmare.

She'd make him put it right, of course she would; he had him assessed, analyzed and understood, didn't she? She knew all his hiding places, all his little gadgets, and oh, she remembered him speaking time and time again about how precious his ship was to him; It was the means to his lifestyle, a beloved hostage, the last thing that hardened man could possibly have left to lose – though initially war of her, he'd come to trust her with his every secret, given her ample opportunity to understand how he operated, and pick up a little of his 'magic' by herself, and so, she was become Vivien, the deceptive disciple turning on the wise old mage, who had, ultimately, not been completely above being a frivolous braggart, one who should find herself trapped between fire and ice down in the ninth circle of hell: A traitor. A betrayer, to both of them and all they, or she, had ever stood for. Deceiver, faker, cheating whore, serpent two-face, the lowest thing there is – she with the cheeks and lips like apples and the blood of reptile underneath, not a person, but a disease, selfishly pulling her surroundings with her into the abyss.

Now she'd done it.

She'd gone and broken all the things that were good in her life.

There she was, ready to trap him in a cave under a stone, or just amidst streams of lava befitting a cartoonish supervillainess. But he was an ancient beast and the smelting heat before a tempest, he was the dark heart at the bottom of the ocean, and he knew her, too;

He might have picked up that something was wrong the moment she stepped onto the TARDIS, maybe what had passed for his usual sour manner were actually subtle attempts to dissuade her- but once she'd made her move, there could be no doubt that the old monster had seen straight through her feeble machinations, and used the 'sleep patch' right back at her.

Not so frivolous after all, it turns out – For all the breath of himself that he might have opened to her, he had never forgotten that she, too, was a monster, and he was too seasoned, too experienced, to well-prepared in this sort of thing to allow himself to be hoist with his own petard.

He even told her straight to her face, in the middle of her display, that he knew himself to be very much in control, fully aware that she was so far at his mercy that even her knowing would make no difference in the end.

His long history had prepared him, with strong-willed ladies and wistful historians trying to save doomed civilizations, and a girl who had been moved by a simple jolt of human emotion to save their ill-fated fathers; He'd been tempted himself at times, but never had he faced something this calculated and deliberate from someone he'd have considered an ally.

He should have been fearsome, an angry god to cover before, but to the end, he didn't seem to have believed that she would really do it, that he would not be able to talk her down. When he accused her, his voice was not stern and authoritative, but quite affected, barely restrained anger and disappointment quaking in his voice.

He'd watched with morbid curiosity, but he'd also given her an opportunity to purge and vent in an enclosed environment until the mask of denial broke and full realization set in as her tears finally flowed and grief for a lost man and sins both new and old claimed its rightful place.

He tried to summon up some measure of composure, to normalize their impending orphean journey with some disapproving comment about the state of her eyes, but he couldn't manage it – His voice trembled halfway through, the last few minuted kept bleeding through into his expression, he was, all things considered, hopelessly undone – She'd hurt him, no two ways about it – Thinking that she'd been helpless against the universe, she'd scratched and bitten at everything around her, and it would seem that she did have claws, and with them, the power to destroy.

This time, she couldn't overtake him or make him do her bidding, but she found out that she didn't have to take or force his devotion, nor lay a single finger on him to make hi fall to pieces – All this time spent trying to control him and assure his submission, when the most valuable dedication was that which was simply given of his own free will.

His loyalty might not always have come when, or how she expected it, and sometimes it had manifested in ways that had been misguided or hard to decipher, but now she knew that its depths were limitless.

She was humbled again by how little she'd really known about him, how crucial a detail had sipped past her feelers all along. He'd been saying all those harsh and insensitive things, and wile she learned to see past it, live with it even, it was only then that she fully realized that he only did this because he assumed that everything was taken for grated, that she knew anyways what he now just sadly 'reminded' her of – When she'd confessed her feelings after their adventure on the Orient Express, she didn't do it to hear him say it back, she merely did it because she wanted him to know.

Now, their mutual honesty hangups had engineered a situation where it was possible for this to happen both ways.

He was sneaky about it as well, just as she had been; It was just an incidental extra layer added to the sentence by a single word, the way he'd explicitly said 'care for' instead of 'care about', which she, as a notoriously perfectionist English teacher, was bound to notice – and how this might've been contradictory to the complete abandon he treated this revelation, like it was just some courious background fact he was casually mentioned because it incidentally pertained to the topic of his loyalty. To him, it probably was.

He'd first openly revealed his feelings when he informed her of his decision not to act on them anymore, but he'd never outright said that they were gone. Those feelings, it turns out, hadn't gone anywhere at all... but how could she possibly reply to that now, when she's still mourning Danny and breaking under the guilt of the many ways she'd failed him? What right did she have to speak up now after what she just did, now that she feels so unworthy of everything and everyone in her life?

There was no way she could say anything now, and that was probably just according to his plan; He didn't want to bother her with that, or feel pressured... nay, he had fully accepted that the one she wanted, needed and loved was someone else, someone he couldn't even stand, someone about whom he didn't have the slightest idea why she could possibly like him, and he was wiling to do anything in his power to bring him back to her.

This was the designated hypotenuse in a soap crying that she wants her beloved to be happy even if it's not with them, this was the little mermaid's spirit kissing the prince on the forehead before ascending to do her time with the daughters of the air. This was a man who had wholly and completely given up, even on just having her near – He didn't presume that she'd be interested in spending time with him any longer after this whole traumatic event, given that he'd been a factor that had complicated her relationship.

This might be farewell, and that's why he even considered letting her know, everything that had been there had stayed exactly where it was, a feeling burning so slowly, that its stir and swell could hardly be perceived and made it easy to mistake for a static thing, ever and steady in the sky; A love like the sun that dwelt in the unreachable distance, beyond layers upon layers, light minutes' worth in sheets of cold nothingness, and still continuously enveloped the earth with its gales of heat, light and energy, even when in couldn't be seen from behind the clouds.

She had easily seen through his excuses during his little 'undercover' stint and correctly deduced that he wasn't telling her because she wouldn't like the answers. She'd instantly known that he hadn't told her the full truth about their space-train venture the second she saw the force field around the TARDIS. But this, this most crucial, hilariously obvious thing surprised her now, and, in combination with the circumstances, along with the greater declaration of loyalty her words were woven into, it was woven into, left her too shocked, too absolutely floored to even consider to do anything about it, she just stood there with large, tearful eyes as the words in and of themselves burnt within her soul.

But seriously, even in hindsight, what could she even have done? Run toward him and embrace him, kiss him even? Say it back? That's what you'd expect to happen in a book or something, but in the cold hard light of reality, it seemed ludicrous?

As a person who once foolishly prided herself of her integrity, she felt tiny and dwarfed next to the unconditional devotion of a man she had so grossly misjudged.

What right could she possibly have to speak of love after the deed she'd just committed, after mere days of promising those words to someone else?

How could she, how dare she think that she, now newly single, could just go off frolicking in outer space when Danny Pink lay rotting in the ground? The very thought seemed grotesque, a transgression the laws of the universe would most certainly not allow – No, her place was where it ought to have been these past few months, where she'd promised it would be when she agreed to be Danny's girlfriend, and if that place was within the cold slippery earth, in the trenches of Malebolge or on the bottom of the sea, then – and the was shamefully aware of her hesitation at this point – so be it, for they were ready to depart: Next stop: Tartarus, where the Titans where chained, next stop: Helheim, between the roots of the world tree, and who knew what their vows would be worth after the sights of today –

So this was all she could say:

"I don't deserve a friend like you."

What came out managed to be both depressing and uplifting at the same time, marinated in his rather characteristic mixture of frankness & self-deprecation, and not even making a big deal out of how easily he'd just consigned himself to her, to belonging to her, to being here for her in one sense or another – and maybe he'd done so long ago when he chose to come and get her no matter what, right when she'd proven her readiness to do the same for him, when he'd been able to take this form of his as a result, or some other unspecified point of their joint ventures, but there he was, truly and completely bewitched, standing there all along, ready for the day she might need him to break her fall, or to tentatively her own tiny fingers in a small and uncertain gesture, frayed, but willing to state down the darkness with her.

"Never trust a hug, it's just a way to hide your face." -

Now that made an unexpected amount of sense. Not the words themselves, of course, in the life she'd be leading now, she would need to have at least this much common sense left – But the idea that he would think this, that made sense, always the rebel, with or without due cause, and prone to unprecedented randomness, leave it to him to find the commonly accepted form of expressing affection distinctly overrated, leave it to her to wait till the end to ask the simple question that would reveal what she'd perceived as a frustrating, daunting barrier, a remainder of world she may never tread in – which was, perhaps, why she'd never expected any sort of decipherable answer before now, why she'd gradually let up on her initial insistence to make him get over himself in that regard, because it occurred to her that it might possibly something to do with touch-telepathy, some involuntary revulsion of her warm and squishy human flesh or some other fix, immutable distinction in their conditions that couldn't, and shouldn't be changed – but in the end, the reasoning behind it turned out to be a sentiment fairly akin to one of her students boycotting a fashion trend or some part of the institution that was the school and as such a simple extension of his general stubborn disdain for any sort of pleasantries, his view that they were dishonest and useless either way –

Now it ocurred her that for all he'd protested the occasional unsheduled bear hug, he'd been far less reluctant - if still considerably awkward and not always completely comfortable - when it came to other touch-related vetures, such as linking arms with her, taking her hand or some brief, 'guiding' gesture on each other's backs, none of which were even terrily rare occurences when you didn't explicitly draw comparisions to before his stay on Trenzalore, and by now, she'd learned to content herself with that -

And yet, here he was, actually compromising on the etiquette, not even arguing when she asking and even getting up fist, letting her tiny body fall against him, even tentatively closing his arms around her, slightly turning his head in the tiniest, subtlest of caresses – She had wished for something like this to happen for a very long time, so many nights interrupted by dreams of holding him close again, but now, his sagging, icy cheeks against her face brought her little respite from the heavy truth she'd chosen to swallow down.

She couldn't say if it had always felt like this or if that was merely a testament of how long she'd been severed from his chest, but it didn't feel like proximity, not really, not when there was no real warmth, no real substance on he bony, narrow shoulders beneath her arms, all made out of sharp angles that could have cut her, not when their souls and minds that had never been in twain for long were forced apart by the secret burning in her chest, the tale of sorrow she wanted to share with him so badly, but could not.

If anything, it was his words, the modicum of personality contained in that last puzzle piece about him, much like the sight of the TARDIS outside the Café doors, did much more to spark a sudden awareness of the life she would be giving up much more than his weight in her arms or his soft hair vaguely tickling at the side of his face.

In that moment, her expression wavered, and she felt acutely aware that she would never step through those blue doors again, never leave her tiny little fragile blue orb for as long as she lived, never find any sort of constructive use for her polished serpent tongue that was just a simple vice here, and at that, the one that had been her undoing, and the cause for a sin she could never undo.

If she could stay with him, he might have taken her to some great and exciting place, another of those decisive turnstiles of history where her skills and traits would be exactly what was the endangered masses would be needed. And if he could stay with her, with the knowledge she had now and these last few revelations that had become quite clear between them, they could have stood together at the top of the world and lived out her blaze of glory, now that she would never have a reason to doubt the deep affections, affinity and appreciation he had a hard time showing, nor would there be any further grounds to hold back from showing him hers –

But as it turns out, there was one thing that could make her give him up and leave him with a defection, the same thing that had put a stop to her plans of traveling when she first pursued the idea in her youth – A friend in need. Back then, it was the Maitlands; Now, it was him who needed her, not to stay with him but to let him go, to refrain from burdening him with any further guilt now that he'd finally found his home world and seemed uncharacteristically intent to actually stay here, perhaps a testament to how much his long journey had eventually worn him out – There was a good chance that at least some of those children and grandchildren would turn up alive, maybe his parents and brother, possibly his classmates and many political allies from his past interferences back home – Even if he didn't come to rule the place, he'd be far too busy with too many things, and she'd only be a sad, brief glimmer of a girl completely out of place, staring dejectedly out of the towers while nursing her own personal grief.

And in a way, it only seemed right they couldn't just continue their journeys as if none of this had ever happened - after all she had done, to him, and to others, she didn't believe that she could deserve happiness - Get a move on, fair Nimue, you might still be sucessful at deceiving the old master after all.

(But amid all the lies exchanged that day, one of these things was true. She gets the collected words right for once, the grave pause connects like a sharp low, the delierate repetition manages to hit right home carrying the wealth of her thought and feeling like a short poem or one of these Six-word-stories:)

"Travelling with you made me feel really special. Thank you for making me feel special."

"Thank you for exactly the same."

(He says, unceremonially, almost insultingly casual, just mentioning, not inclined to drag out the farewell any more than strictly necessary - there's nothing more he's got, or is willing, to say that hasn't been said already, or isn't sufficiently paraphrased by the last long look his lare grey eyes take at her before he turns to close the door. To the woman who never saw herself as the junior partner in their team to begin with and had found herself frequently incensed by possiilities of how he might view her, he could not have done a greater honor.)