A/N: Fun fact, readers - the print shop I mention was a terrible place I was unfairly fired from about a year ago. Petty revenge is the sweetest revenge!

Hope you like this chapter, thank you for the likes and reviews :)

Hundreds of miles away, in a modern, two-bedroomed flat in North London, clumsy, dark-haired, 'slightly weird but in a sweet way' telemarketer Martin Earlton woke up suddenly.

He had just had the strangest dream.

Martin was on his third coffee when day broke and his housemate finally entered the kitchen. Her name was Morgan, she was all legs and long dark hair, and was a model well on her way to becoming a supermodel. They'd known each other since forever, though Martin could never quite recall how he had ended up having her as a flatmate.

"Morning, Marty," she said cheerily. There - two things already wrong with her, she called him 'Marty' and she was a morning person. "What the hell are you doing up?"

Martin was well known for sleeping in until the very last moment. He was incurably lazy. This was probably why he was still working for one of Vodafone's many call centres, cold-calling what felt like every hour of the day.

He shrugged and sipped his coffee. It was getting cold. "I had a weird dream."

Morgan grabbed her box of cereal. "Oh yeah?"

"Yeah." He couldn't explain it, even now. It was just…images. What had been more gripping was the emotions that went with them, a tangle of pride, loss and hope. He said aloud, "There were cloaks. Red ones." They had been important for some reason, terribly important.

Morgan snorted, emptying the cereal into a bowl. She always ate so much, Martin couldn't work out how she stayed so skinny. "Sounds thrilling," she said. "You going to work today?"

"After my fourth coffee," he said.

"Need to stay awake for Arnold," she said, and winked.

Martin rolled his eyes. He seriously regretted having that last glass of wine on the Saturday before and drunkenly telling her about Arnold. "Nah. Gone off him I think."

"What?" she seemed genuinely upset. "But he's got everything you want! Muscley, blond…"

Martin shrugged. He couldn't even understand it himself. "There's just something," he mumbled.

Morgan snorted again, pouring milk into her cereal. "You're in a weird mood today," she said, and with that barely insult she left for her room, bowl in hand.

Martin stood up and turned the kettle back on. He felt strangely at odds with himself, yet more energised than he had been in a while.

It was as if a part of him had just woken up.

"This is amazing." Arthur was not quite climbing around on his seat, but it was a close thing. Certainly his nose was pressed to the train window. "Look at how fast we're going! It's like galloping on a horse without the saddle sores! How does it work? Is it magic?"

Sarah sat across him and rolled her eyes. She was busy painting her nails blank and sharpening them into points with a nail file. "It's not magic," she said. "But I have no idea how the fuck it works. It's a fucking train. Now make yourself useful and get some food." She nodded over to her purse. "There's a café in the next few carriages along."

Arthur did not need to be asked twice to explore. He grabbed the purse and went.

The train rattled and swayed in an unfamiliar way, but he had kept his excellent sense of balance from his training as a knight and it hardly bothered him. He wondered if Merlin had ever been on a train - Sarah said he had one of those cars, but he couldn't imagine Merlin not trying the train at least once. He'd probably fallen over a lot.

Had he tried a train? Or those - what had Sarah called them - planes? Had Merlin travelled the world? Where had he gone, what had he seen? There were so many things Arthur wanted to ask him…

He wanted to ask Merlin about Camelot. He wanted to ask how it had fallen. He wanted to ask about the knights, about his friends. About Gwen. He could not ask Sarah these things. He needed someone familiar. He needed Merlin.

The food at the little train café was not entirely foreign, though he had no idea what 'crisps' were. He bought a packet of cheese and onion with the rest of his order just to try them out and returned to Sarah. She was texting furiously with one finished hand and leaving the other to dry.

"The others are going mental," she said cheerfully. "They all wish they'd met you with me. Donald's so jealous. He's a massive King Arthur fan."

Arthur opened the bag of crisps and cautiously put one in his mouth. And squeaked.

Sarah glanced up at him. "What?"

Arthur crunched the crisp and swallowed it. "These," he said, "Are amazing."

Sarah grinned. "Fucking Arthur Pendragon," she said, and opened her pack of sandwiches.

Martin propped his weary head on his hand and switched to the next number on his control display.

"Good morning, sir," he started, "Can I just take five minutes out of your busy schedule to talk to you about some of Vodafone's new and exciting - "

The line disconnected. Martin stuck out his tongue at the non-flashing light. "And fuck you too," he said.

He moved to go to the next number, and then an image from his dream came suddenly into his mind, so bright and stark that his hand came to a forced stop in mid air.

He could see a round table. It was sat inside a large, long, beautifully decorated hall. And there was someone there, someone beside him, someone warm and familiar and barely a hand's breadth away -

His mobile (definitely not Vodafone) vibrated on the tabletop, jolting him out of reverie. He glanced at it. It was text from Morgana.

So bored. Photographer knows not what he does. Drinks tonight? Morgie x

Smirking, he tapped out a reply.

Very much a plan. Gorgeous Arnold no longer gorgeous. Damage control! M x

When he put the phone down, he couldn't remember what he'd been thinking about.

He moved back to his display, and put his brightest voice back on.

"Good morning, sir. Can I just take five minutes…"

They reached London by early evening and Sarah immediately dragged Arthur out of Waterloo to the River Thames. It was not far from the station, but it took longer, because Arthur kept grinding to a halt and staring at things like he had come from the darkest depths of the countryside. By the time they got to the river, Sarah was thoroughly embarrassed.

Arthur shut up when they got there though. They looked across to Victoria Embankment in relative peace, listening to the Thames lap and slide gently against the edges of the walkway. Boats spilled along the water, people rushed behind them, there were voices, and music, and everywhere the sound of life.

"You're right," said Arthur after a while. "It is a little like Camelot. All that energy, all those people. And you say this is the capital of Albion?"

Sarah half smiled. "We call it England now, love. But yeah. It's the capital. I was born here."

Arthur nodded. "Of course Merlin would come here," he said.

Sarah glanced at him. "He didn't forget you," she said. "He was always thinking of you."

Arthur swallowed. "He rarely visited," he replied. "He came less and less as time went on."

"He had things to do," Sarah snapped. "What, you just expected him to wait around for you?"

Arthur stared at the Thames for a long time. "I did," he said.

There was another long silence. Life rushed around them, but still the soughing of the Thames could be heard under it, and the call of the birds. Still the sound of nature, still the feeling of wildness, under all the thundering of humanity.

"He's still here," Arthur continued finally. "In the city. I'm sure of it." He had never been more certain of anything; Merlin was here, he was close.

Sarah simply nodded. "In that case," she said, "We should probably hurry up and find him."

The place Sarah walked them to was, by the look of it, a print shop, near an intersection of road close to Tottenham Court Road. It was busy and loud and it had taken a while to walk there, but Sarah had refused to let Arthur go on what she called the 'tube', claiming she wouldn't be able to put up with his constant questions. But they made it eventually.

Arthur wrinkled his nose amongst the traffic and the people, staring at the rather unprepossessing print shop huddled next to a theatre like a sulky interloper. "This doesn't look like any sort of meeting place."

"Nah," said Sarah. "Looks like a crappy print shop. Which it is. On the outside." And then she winked at Arthur and led him around the side of the building. There was a small door stuck in the wall. She pushed at it and beckoned Arthur through.

They walked into a place that looked absolutely nothing like the print shop. It was one large room, with large, white walls covered in strange symbols, a collection of sofas and beanbags in one room and several desks covered with strange looking equipment. There was also a huge bookshelf, stacked with threadbare books.

And inside the room were four of the most mismatched people Arthur had ever seen. A very old woman with long white hair was sitting next to skinhead in a leather jacket, having tea. A middle-aged man with a moustache was flicking through a book and there was a young boy of perhaps ten playing a flashing game on one of the machines.

"Hey kids," Sarah said, striding in. "Look who I found wandering the streets."

Immediately everyone froze in what they were doing and swivelled to the door in a kind of synchronised movement that made Arthur take a small, instinctive step back.

"Oh my god," said the middle-aged man with the moustache. "Oh my god, it's him."

"He looks kind of scruffy," said the young boy, but the man was already standing and approaching Arthur with a slightly terrifying look in his eyes, as if he was about to lay his hands on a huge pile of unprotected gold. Arthur had faced trains and lightbulbs, even enormous cities, but for the first time since he'd left his island, he wished he had his sword with him.

Sarah stepped sharply forward, protecting him. "Back off, Donald," she snapped. "There's time for questions later. We've got things to do." She glanced around the strange looking gathering and raised her voice. "The Professor's vanished. We need to find him."

They sat around on the sofas in a circle and Sarah named each of them to Arthur as if they were all children at a party.

"This is Donald," she said, pointing first to the moustached man. "He's really into his conspiracy theories and myths and legends and things, so he will try and back you in a corner and chew your ear off at some point." She noticed Arthur's eyes widen fractionally and added, "That's...it's just a turn of phrase, Arthur. Anyway, Donald's magical ability is being able to stifle other people's magic. Only temporarily and it depends on the strength of the other person's magic, but he's improving. He couldn't even touch the Prof's magic at first, but he's learnt to make quite a dent in it now."

"My greetings," Arthur said as politely as he could to Donald, then cursed the absent Merlin for teaching him manners.

Donald stared at him with wet, wide eyes for a long time, and then croaked, "Hello."

Sarah rolled her eyes and turned to the skinhead. "This is Turk. He's from Texas, that's, erm...let's just say that's another kingdom quite far from here. He likes fast cars, food and women. And he can make visible things invisible or hide them in different ways - that's how we got this place." She turned to the young boy. "This is Dan. He can make anyone without magic obey any commands he gives. He's the most recent of our finds – the Prof was tracking him down for months."

The boy grinned, slightly unpleasantly. "I kept making people forget they'd seen me."

Arthur did not smile back. He was tired, and irritable, and was getting annoyed with the way they were all staring at him, as if he were a dog about to do a trick. "None of this," he said, "Is helping me find Merlin."

Donald blinked, immediately alerted. "You call him Merlin," he said.

Arthur glared. "Of course I do, what else would I call him?"

His sniping was rewarded with an even more intense look. "There is a school of thought that believed you called him Emrys."

"That's his Druid name, I wouldn't call him that." Arthur rubbed his head – he could feel a headache coming on. "Surely Merlin would have told you these things?"

"He wouldn't tell me," Donald said, a sour note to his voice, slumping slightly in his chair. "He'd hardly talk about you at all, actually."

Arthur's chest suddenly hurt, as if an arrow had been driven into it. He hastily blinked the pain away but Sarah obviously saw, because she snapped, "Donald, shut up," at the man, and regained control of the conversation.

"Anyway," she said, gesturing to the elderly woman, "This is Jocelyn. Mother of two, grandmother of one, sings in her local church, and just so happens to have magic like the rest of us. And her special talent is locating others with magic."

Arthur blinked, then glanced up at Sarah. Sarah winked at him. "Exactly," she said.

"I can't do it now," Jocelyn said, though she smiled at Arthur apologetically. "I've got to have all the equipment with me, plus I need rest."

"Then we'll do it tomorrow," said Turk decisively.

Sarah nodded. "I agree – tomorrow. We don't know what's happened to the Prof, but it could be something bad. The sooner the better."

Arthur blinked, but he too was feeling tired and drained, still not quite recovered from leaving the island. "I have nowhere to stay," he said, and realised, with a sudden pang, that he was actually homeless. Camelot was not...Camelot was gone.

Everyone was gone. Everything was gone. His entire life, he had fought for that place, that world and now it was just...

He felt suddenly and deeply lost. As if this had been some huge mistake. As if he shouldn't be here, in this world, at all.

"You can stay at the Prof's flat," Sarah was saying. "It's not far from here and it's not like he's using it."

Arthur nodded, but he was barely listening.

He felt better when he and Sarah got to Merlin's flat. It was tiny but neat. Merlin had never really needed much space – he had always clung to his old room in Gaius's, even when Arthur became king and it was within his rights as manservant to the king to have a nicer room closer by. But he had protested against it, saying that he still had much to learn from Gaius in the skills of being a physician, and Arthur, knowing that in truth Merlin didn't want to leave Gaius alone, dropped the subject and never brought it up again. Anyway, Merlin had always liked small rooms – he'd said it meant he was forced to keep the place tidy or be doomed to lose absolutely everything – and this was certainly small.

It was what Sarah called a 'studio flat', with no separate bedroom and only a separate bathroom. There was a kitchen in one corner, a small sofa in another, a dining table in the centre and the double bed shoved under eaves so low that Merlin must have banged his head on them once or twice in the mornings. The image of it made Arthur smile, and then miss Merlin so hard that it was difficult to breathe for a moment.

Sarah gave him a friendly slap on the shoulder. "Shall I cook some dinner?" she asked.

She cooked what she called 'pasta bolognese'. It sounded suspiciously foreign to Arthur, but he actually quite enjoyed it. They ate in silence; the window was open and they could hear the many, many cars rushing by, the noise never stopping. It was not entirely uncommon to the sounds that Arthur had sometimes heard from his window in Camelot, the same clattering and clunking, the same murmur of voices as people passed. It was sort of comforting. He wondered if Merlin had found it comforting as well.

When Sarah was washing up afterwards, she suddenly said, "He never stopped thinking about you, you know."

Arthur had been flicking through Merlin's well thumbed collections of books. There were some very old ones mixed up with some very new ones, though he didn't recognise any of the titles. Not one of them was about the 'legend' of King Arthur.

"You talk about him as if he is dead," he replied, for something to say.

Sarah frowned. "I don't mean to," she said. "I'm sure he's fine. I just. I mean, I just thought you should know. Just because he didn't speak about you doesn't mean he didn't think about you. You could tell when he did. He got this daft look on his face."

Arthur smiled to himself. "The clotpole look," he said.

Sarah frowned at him. "What?"

Arthur remembered that no one would know what he meant by this. There was no one left who understood the joke. And if they didn't find Merlin, there never would be. He shrugged. "Nothing," he said. He straightened up from the low bookcase, and was struck with a slight dizziness.

"Oh," he said, a bit faintly. "I must be tired." It hadn't properly hit him until now, his exhaustion. He sat gently on the bed.

Sarah finished the washing up and patted him on the shoulder again. "I'll go and leave you in peace. I don't live far away, if you need anything you can just call – " She caught the expression on Arthur's face and grinned. "Maybe not," she said. "Never mind. Any problems, go to the crappy print shop HQ, I've magicked it so the door won't be locked for you."

Arthur rubbed his eyes. "And we'll find Merlin tomorrow."

Her hand squeezed his shoulder. "Tomorrow," she promised. She grinned at him and grabbed her bag. "See you in the morning – try not to get scared of the toilet."

Arthur's eyes widened. "The what?" he asked, but Sarah just winked and left him alone.

It was the first time he had been alone – properly alone – since he had left the island. It occurred to him that he should feel frightened, but he couldn't quite do it. Not while he was in Merlin's room, surrounded by Merlin's personal effects. Merlin had been here, and he was still somewhere close. Arthur couldn't be alone as long as Merlin was there.

He closed his eyes and listening to the noises rumbling on outside, and tried not to think about how far he had come. "I'm right here, Merlin," he said aloud.

No one answered him, but he hadn't expected them to.

Several miles away, Martin spilled his fresh glass of wine all over the beautifully polished counter of their favourite local bar. Morgan flinched her own drink away. "Watch out Marty!" she yowled.

"Crap," Martin said, dabbing at the wine with paper napkins. "Crap, crap, crap. Sorry," he said to the resigned bar staff now clearing up for him.

Morgan gave him a sideways look and sipped her mojito. "Are you all right?" she asked gently.

"What?" Martin said. "Yes. Yeah, I'm fine."

This wasn't true.

He could have sworn he'd heard someone whisper his name.