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Chapter Eight

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"So, you and Arthur."

Merlin pauses in the middle of his filing. Thrilling as that particular task might be, it's more unusual that Mordred asks him anything resembling a personal question. He assumes that kind of thing is normally directed at Arthur, who, Merlin readily admits, has been less likely to bite Mordred's head off for trying.

But he's trying to be nicer, so he turns. Mordred is squinting in concentration, trying to levitate three books behind the desk; he's been at it for five minutes now and seems to be holding up pretty well. After a second he seems to realize he's trailed off and finishes.

"Are you two…you know."

Merlin blinks. Not exactly what he'd been expecting, but they've been "you know" for a very long time now, the world's perception of that sort of thing shifting rapidly around them, so the question doesn't make his hackles go up like it would have once. And, he reminds himself firmly, he's trying to be nicer.

"We are," he says.

Mordred nods thoughtfully, still not taking his eyes off the floating books. "Thought so. It's weird, even though I never get to see you two together—like, properly together—it's so obvious. Brick-to-the-head obvious. You're like an old married couple bickering all the time."

"If you never see us together, how can you know we bicker all the time?" Merlin retorts. Mordred just smirks.

"The way you talk about each other. Like I said—obvious."

Merlin doesn't actually have a counterargument.

He gives Mordred the hairy eyeball instead and returns to his sorting. Mrs. Ragnell has dropped off another cardboard box filled with moldy first-edition paperbacks; she insists on making similar "donations" every few weeks. Merlin's fairly sure she only gives so generously because she's cleaning out her attic and wants to get rid of stuff easily, but he still doesn't have the heart to tell her that most of them aren't worth much.

He's trying not to inhale the smell of…whatever seems to be lingering around the tattered Agatha Christie novel when Mordred speaks up again.

"So I've been wondering."

"I'm working, Mordred."

"Humor me." He hesitates. "So this…thing with you two. The whole…" Mordred flaps his hands a few times like he's got really tiny wings. The books move sluggishly up and down but stay airborne. "You know. That thing."

Merlin frowns. "What about it?"

"You said it was a curse, right?"

Merlin stiffens for just a second, but his hands keep moving so he doesn't think the boy notices. He doesn't really want to have this conversation.

"I did."

"Then that means someone cursed you, doesn't it?"

"I guess so, yeah."

"You guess?"

Merlin gives up, tosses Sparkling Cyanide on the desk with a smack and turns to look Mordred in the face.

"Why are you asking about this?" he demands. "What are you actually trying to get at?"

Mordred looks taken aback. "I just wanted to—"

"Yes. Yes, all right? The Sidhe cursed us because I was an idiot and forgot that their kind will fuck you over at every opportunity. They hated me and I still trusted them with Arthur's life." He takes a deep breath. "I was stupid, and now we're stuck. That's it."

The books hit the floor in a succession of heavy thuds. Mordred sits up straighter, eyes blazing.

"That's not it," he says. "If they cursed you, doesn't that mean they can get rid of the curse too?"

"Exactly how long do you think I've been doing this?" Merlin rubs at his forehead. He can feel the migraine coming on. "Of course it stands to reason that the Sidhe could undo their own magic. It makes perfect sense."

"Then what's the problem?"

Merlin glares. "It was the first thing I tried to do! But they'd made me swear to stay away from Avalon in exchange for Arthur's life. I went back and I—" He swallows hard against a sea of rising memories. "I couldn't find the lake. It was like I kept getting turned around without realizing it. I waited years, decades—I thought maybe it would wear off if I waited long enough, but it never did."

"Couldn't you send Arthur to…?"

Merlin's already shaking his head again. "Avalon was well hidden even when Camelot stood. Arthur'd never been there when he was in his right mind, and now I couldn't even help him find it." He sighs. "Besides, I'm pretty sure they've cloaked it somehow. It's the only thing that explains how they've managed to stay hidden all this time. I could probably dig up a spell to break the cloaking, but I'd need to find the place to be able to do that."

"But if—"

"And even if we did, by some miracle, get into Avalon, you don't understand how the Sidhe work. They'll never reverse a bargain once it's been set. Even if we got them to end it somehow, it would only stop the cycle. One of us would still be…" He shudders, wondering how long it would take a person to go mad, trapped permanently in an animal's body. Arthur had managed to hold out for decades; could Merlin hold out for centuries? Millennia?

There's a thoughtful pause.

"So they've got one of you on a string at any given time, yeah?" Mordred says.

"That's the gist of it, yes."

"And what if neither of you had strings on? What if you could just cut them all at once?"

There's a feverish light in Mordred's eyes. Merlin wonders if he ought to be concerned that a teenager is so clearly going mad before his eyes.

"You mean, if we could end the bargain while we were both human?" he says, cautious. "That could work, yeah, if we stopped the cycle while neither of us were affected by it. But haven't you been listening? It's impossible."

"No," says Mordred, triumphant. "It's not."

He slides his phone across the desk and gestures for Merlin to look at it.

It's an article on some rare astronomical thing, a solar eclipse that apparently has scientists flipping tables. Merlin looks at it and feels utterly nonplussed.

"What exactly am I looking at?" he asks.

Mordred fidgets. "It's just—I've been thinking, you know? Since I found out about your whole…" He waves an arm somewhat frantically. "Problem. You know."

Yes, that 'problem' where one of us has fur half the time and the other has feathers, I think I can make that leap.

"Well, anyway, I started thinking. Because the whole thing is based on night and day, right? Arthur is—you know—during the day, and then at night you're—"

"A dog," Merlin cuts in, because honestly, if he has to hear the words you know in this conversation one more time he won't be held responsible for what happens.

"Yeah. Erm." Mordred gulps. "But, so, what if there wasn't a day or a night? Technically. I mean—"

"Like an eclipse," Merlin says slowly. The hairs on the back of his neck are beginning to stand up. "That—but that doesn't make sense. There've been loads of eclipses since this happened. Nothing's ever changed."

But that's not entirely true, is it? He remembers how dark it had been that night when he'd tried to break the spell, that unnatural pitch-black with no moonlight to speak of, and a shiver runs down his spine.

Seven minutes. Maybe this has happened before.

Mordred is ticking off points on his fingers. "One: Total solar eclipses are really rare. Like, really rare. Two: Not everyone gets to see the whole thing—I'm talking full coverage, no light, dark skies, all that. You've got to be in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. Which—wait for it—we're actually going to be."

He grins. "Ms. Fray'd be proud. Pretty sure she thinks I sleep through astronomy."

Merlin's barely listening anymore. A long-forgotten feeling is stirring somewhere inside him—he thinks it might actually be hope, after all this time, and that never ends well. He presses his fingers into his eyes, pushing back the headache, trying to ground himself.

"All right, so say that works." Even admitting that much feels like something massive. "There's still the tiny problem of not being able to get to the Sidhe in the first place. I can't find them, and Arthur can't reach them."

Mordred leans forward. His eyes are still fever-bright.

"No," he says. "But I can."

Just like that, the tentative embers in his chest die. It's almost a relief.

He shakes his head. "No."

Mordred's face falls. "Why not?" he demands. "You need someone who hasn't sworn to stay away from Avalon, and you also need someone who's got magic enough to find whatever invisibility cloak they've put over themselves. Who else do you know who fits both those boxes?"

It's true, and it's also not the point. But for some stupid reason Merlin finds himself making up other excuses. "You honestly think you could find the lake?"

"Yeah. I mean, why not?" Mordred shrugs with all of a teenager's bravado. "I'm magic, and they're magic. There's got to be some way of, you know, sensing them or something."

"That's your master plan? Use the Force?"

Mordred lets out a frustrated noise. "Look, I'm trying to be helpful here! What do you want from me?"

Merlin takes a deep breath and straightens up. He needs to think; he needs to be somewhere not here.

"I want you to drop this," he says quietly. "I want you to work on controlling your magic. And I want you to not say anything about this to Arthur." Not yet, not until I have some idea of whether it can work.

He can't offer Arthur that hope only to see it disintegrate. Even lying to him again would be better than that.

Merlin edges around Mordred, gets out from behind the desk and walks to the door. "I'm going to get some groceries. Mind the till, would you?"

"Why can't you just trust me for once?"

It's Mordred's voice, and it's tired and sad but that same stupid tug at his insides prevents Merlin from giving the answer he should. Which is an unequivocal no, never, never again.

"I'll be back soon," he says instead, and leaves without looking back.

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Mordred stares at the door long after Merlin's gone through it. He's gripping the edge of the desk, his knuckles going white with the effort.

Through the hurt and the anger and the disbelief there's still the question, that same damn question that keeps replaying in his mind:

How do you feel guilty about something you don't remember doing?

How, Mordred?

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A note is stuck to Arthur's forehead when he wakes up.

One of these days, he's going to have to Google whether Post-It glue can be toxic on human skin. Bemused, he pulls it off and reads the single sentence:

Gone out.

That's it. Arthur flips the note over—nothing.

Sure enough, when he looks around, Merlin is nowhere to be seen.

"Could you have possibly been more vague?" he mutters to no one. Really, it must be something about magic types—in retrospect, Arthur doesn't think he's ever met one that didn't spout riddles and/or prophecy at him at least once. It's as if they're all allergic to simple straight answers.

Well, fine. Arthur's got work to do anyway; the bookshelves in the back are in need of some sanding down.

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At some point after they'd gone and settled down—if one could call it that—into the bookshop, Arthur had been put in charge of all things that needed fixing. Something his former self would have scoffed at, undoubtedly, but Arthur's life has taken rather a lot of turns that his far-younger self would never have anticipated.

Marrying someone he loved, for one, and a commoner at that. Knighting thieves and fugitives who also happened to be some of the most loyal men he knew. Flouting his father's laws. Protecting users of magic.

Failing to protect those closest to him.

Dying was the one thing he had anticipated all those years ago, something that was never a question, never in doubt. Not a king in living memory had managed the feat that was dying of old age, so he'd always simply assumed he'd die young, hopefully in battle; preferably after siring an heir or two to rule the kingdom well after his death. It had almost happened, too.

Arthur has never told Merlin this, but he'd felt a sense of contentment at the end. He hadn't managed the siring part, perhaps, but he had left behind the most capable queen Camelot could ask for, and the deadliest threats to the kingdom lay buried in its soil. All things considered, he'd done all right. He thinks he might've actually managed to die in peace.

But Merlin was Merlin was Merlin, possibly as powerful as he was stubborn, and that hadn't happened.

It ended up being just the first in an entirely new list of things Arthur never expected to happen. Turning into a bird certainly took the cake, he thinks wryly, but there have been other things. Seeing the world—or parts of it—beyond his country's borders. Living to a very old age after all. Co-owning a bookshop.

Falling in love, again.

Which is neither here nor there, but he can't deny it wasn't something he'd ever thought would happen. Particularly considering the massive inconvenience of being, well, what they are. But then again, nothing about Merlin has ever been convenient.

So really, when it comes down to it, his picking up carpentry is actually the least strange thing that's happened to Arthur in his life. He'd discovered rather quickly that while he's perfectly good at numbers and the like, he is prone to losing his mind when faced with filing or shelving; a more deathly boring task, he is certain, has never been devised by man. And there's not much else to do in a bookshop, is there?

Fortunately, the building they chose to set up shop in had been old even when they acquired it, and as such has always had an ample supply of things that need fixing. Leaky pipes, broken-down bookshelves, squeaky floorboards, and so on. Arthur suspects that somewhere along the way Merlin had actually started going out of his way to purchase furniture that was two steps away from collapsing into pieces just to keep his housemate occupied, but he's never been able to confirm it.

Judicious use of the internet combined with a healthy dose of grim-faced determinism has served him quite well since the former's inception; before that, Arthur was forced to rely on trial and error, which…had sometimes produced decent results, and other times produced utter chaos. For every magnificently restored 18th-century bookshelf (still a source of pride; in the daytime he crows furiously at anyone who touches it in less than an appropriately reverent manner) there have been at least two ill-repaired floorboards that actually fell through when stepped on.

(Also there had been that incident with the ceiling tile and the dowager countess and the resulting concussion, but Arthur will insist to the end of his days that that one hadn't been his fault.)

It's not the most exciting thing in the world after leading armies and ruling a kingdom, granted, but there's definitely something to be said for entering the shop and knowing that nearly every inch of it has been cared for with his own hands.

He wonders if it's stupidly optimistic to hope the same can be said of the boy now living there. It's not like he'd done such a terrific job of it the first time, after all.

He supposes they'll have to find out.

Mordred is doing something on his phone when Arthur approaches.

"H'llo," he says.

"Still awake?" Arthur asks.

Mordred shrugs. "Texting a friend. Kind of hoping he's not trying to track the GPS on my phone or something, find out where I am."

It's probably ridiculous that Arthur can still be surprised by what modern technology is capable of, and yet. "Can they actually do that?"

Half a grin, lit by the pixels of the screen. "No. I turned off the GPS ages ago."

"Smart," Arthur says, approving. He hauls a pile of books off the opposing armchair and lowers them—very carefully—to the floor before sitting down.

"So has Merlin set you on bodyguard duty or…?"

Arthur snorts. "No. He did disappear last night, though. I wondered if you might know what that was about." Best to be straightforward about these sorts of things, he feels. Less room for misunderstandings that way.

Mordred sets the phone down, leaving them to squint at each other in the half-dark. "He really doesn't trust me, does he?"

This again. Arthur sighs. "Mordred, I told you. Just give him—"

"Time, I know." The boy's mouth tightens, but he shakes his head. "Doesn't matter. I wanted to talk to you, actually."

"What about?"

"I had this—this idea." Now Mordred hesitates. "I don't know that you'll like it, though."

Curious, Arthur says, "Maybe not, but I'll have brought it on myself." Seeing that the boy still isn't convinced, he adds, "I'm no good with mysteries, as I'm sure Merlin would be all too happy to tell you. So come on, out with it."

Mordred swallows hard.

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