A/N: Okay, I had way too much fun with this chapter, which is why it ended up so long. I don't know why, but writing up fictitious research and texts is just so fun to me. I might have gotten carried away with it. I have in the past. I've done a few chapters like this one with fake books and research, so… I'm sorry if it's all really boring or longwinded. But for everyone who's been asking for some Young!Arthur/Old!Arthur interaction, here's your chapter! I hope you enjoy it, and know that there will be more of it to come.
Arthur's face had tensed itself into a thoughtful frown since the night before, after the Older Merlin had left. He hadn't slept well that night, and was only half aware of what he was doing as he shoved a shirt over his head. He looked down at his desk and drummed his fingers thoughtfully where he stood.
"Merlin,"
"Hmm?" the servant responded from where he was collecting laundry.
"Have you seen… Merlin at all recently?"
Arthur could hear Merlin pause in whatever he was doing before resuming work. "Only this morning, before I came here," he said.
"You didn't… have breakfast with him or something?"
"No, he was still asleep. Why do you ask?"
Arthur didn't even shrug as he picked up his belt. "Oh, no reason," which both of them knew was a lie, but then, Merlin couldn't have given a better reason than Arthur had, so he didn't call him out on it. The silence in the room, normally comfortable in the early mornings, grew awkward. "Have you seen much of him at all, then? He seems to be sleeping quite a bit."
"Well of course he has, he's not well yet," Merlin said.
"But when he is awake, you two… do you get on?"
Merlin sighed. "Well, I guess so. I dunno. It's weird, but… Arthur, why are you asking me this?"
When Arthur turned around, Merlin was frowning at him in a slightly embarrassed manner. The prince actually felt slightly bad about it, but shrugged it off. "Just curious," he muttered and turned back around. Where Merlin couldn't see, he let the confusion take over his features and screw his expression into one of rare, deep preoccupation.
Seeing himself a few days ago had been highly disconcerting. Hearing himself, seeing what he could become… he didn't like it. Even if Arthur didn't believe this whole time travel nonsense – which he hadn't, at the time – the golden-haired newcomer was far too similar and far too different from himself for Arthur to tolerate introductions calmly. But then, to see Merlin… It was even more disconcerting. He was a whole different person. But not. If someone had asked Arthur to explain it, he wouldn't have been able to. The man was Merlin. But he was more than that. Merlin was a servant. If somehow, by some ridiculous turn of fate, Merlin were made a king, this Future Merlin would be the result. Confident, commanding, wise… it was complete contradiction to the Merlin that Arthur knew. But if anything, it was a contradiction that had sparked a fierce curiosity in the Prince, a curiosity to learn more about what had happened, what would happen to turn his bumbling servant Merlin into such a knowledgeable, capable man. What would happen to Arthur that would make him into such a king. What. How. When. Why.
It was this curiosity that had Arthur's jaw working hard on his right cheek. This wasn't just being curious about a newcomer to court, or a political ally. This was Arthur – Arthur Pendragon – curious about magic. There was no enemy, no sorcerer, no beast or curse waiting to gobble them all up, only two friends from the future and magic. And Arthur was so itchingly curious that it hurt, but some ingrained filter forbid him from indulging his curiosity by interacting with them, by asking them the questions he ached to ask. He wanted to figure it out. He wanted to learn. He wanted to see this though, get them home – somehow. But something told him that his curiosity was prowling around nothing but a web full of magic, and his father's lessons throbbed in his head as he toed a line that his own laws forbade him to cross.
He hadn't realized he'd begun biting at his nails until one was already scarred and jagged. He shook his hand away and blushed, glancing at Merlin out of the corner of his eye. He knew that Merlin knew about his nervous habits, and he knew that Merlin knew that he was nervous. Either way, the servant wasn't saying anything about it, giving Arthur the distinct impression that Merlin understood exactly what was going through his mind. Merlin had always been uncanny that way.
"Don't suppose you or Gaius have figured out all this time travel jumbo yet?" And although he was referring to young Merlin, something about the way he said it made them both wonder if he didn't mean the Older Merlin, too.
"No," Merlin told him as he pulled up the covers of the bed to the pillows. "Gaius is working on it, last time I checked. Arthur is helping him." He added the last part on as an afterthought, but it made Arthur pause.
"I see." Arthur knew he shouldn't pursue questioning again, but he just couldn't help it. "You haven't seen him much, have you?"
"No, him, I have seen a bit," Merlin told him without looking up. Arthur's gut twisted. "Gaius is keeping him cooped up in his chambers, you probably know." Merlin actually smiled. "He's incredibly bored, and at this rate, might actually make a better helper to Gaius than I do. Certainly around more often."
Somehow, Merlin's casual tone about the whole thing made it feel even more surreal, more awkward. Arthur, the prince told himself, that's you he's talking about. You. In a different place. Why did that make him mad? He shook his head. "And, eh… you two… do you get on well?"
Merlin did look uncomfortable, then. "Well, I suppose, yes. Don't have much a choice, with him being there all the time." Merlin fell into silence as he fluffed Arthur's pillows. When he was done, he frowned and looked back up at Arthur curiously.
"Why don't you talk to them? If you have questions, they'll be able to answer more than I can."
Arthur probably looked as nervous as he felt. "I only haven't because… I've been busy."
"Busy?" Merlin said incredulously.
"Yes. Training, and… Father."
"It's alright to be a bit scared, Arthur. I'd be concerned if you weren't. But really, it's not so bad once you talk with them."
Arthur thinned his lips. Trust Merlin to warm up to them so quickly. "I'm not scared," he said. Merlin nodded sarcastically.
"Of course."
"I'm not."
Merlin sighed. "Arthur, you're being childish about this. Not because you're scared, but because you won't admit it." And although the prince rarely if ever tolerated such frankness form anyone, let alone from Merlin, he didn't say anything. "At least go and ask Gaius how his research is coming along, later. Maybe seeing them will help a bit." Merlin picked up a stack of laundry. "Will you need anything else?" Arthur didn't reply, but resumed biting on his nails. Merlin sighed. "Very well, Sire." He sounded somewhat disappointed as he trudged out of the room.
Arthur stared blankly out of the window for what might have been a few minutes, or a whole hour. When the sound of footsteps at the door broke his bubble of thought, he found he'd lost his sense of time passing. Without turning around, he said.
"Merlin, what you said earlier – do you really think that-"
"I'm sorry," a voice interrupted, and the surreal sound sent shivers up his spine. "I'm not Merlin." Arthur turned toward the door, only to see… well, himself. He swallowed. If the Other Arthur was uncomfortable with the situation at all, he was hiding it. "Though if you're truly curious, you should know: if ever Merlin says something ridiculously out of line in that far-too-bossy tone of his, he is probably telling you exactly what he thinks."
Arthur couldn't help it when he looked his other self up and down. He hadn't noticed before, in the interview, the difference in attire, which seemed a bit more worn and… rich than what he was used to wearing. His leanness and athleticism was still there, but there was something… something…
King Arthur coughed, and the prince's train of thought broke. He thought of apologizing, but didn't. "Was there… something I could help you with?" The prince asked with difficulty. "I was under the impression Gaius wasn't allowing either of you to leave his chambers."
Older Arthur smiled. "True. For totally different reasons. Merlin, because he can hardly walk without falling unconscious, the idiot. But I'm stuck there for more… diplomatic reasons." He said meaningfully, indicating the awkwardness of their meeting.
"And… why are you here, then?" Young Arthur asked. The Older Arthur nodded.
"I've been helping Gaius research, you see. Trying to find out anything there is to know about this whole 'time travel' business. Unfortunately, we've run into road block. I need your help."
And only because it was his voice that he was talking to did the prince catch the underlying uneasiness in Older Arthur's tone.
"Help? What kind of help?"
King Arthur was watching him closely, his eyes studying his own, searching for something, some kind of recognition. Recognition of what, Arthur wasn't sure. "We're looking for a book. Several books, possibly. Books that only you and your father can lay hands on."
The prince frowned. "Why not just ask my father, then? You should know, he's just as keen for you to get back to wherever – whenever you came just as much as you are."
"Not quite as keen, I think, if he were to hear exactly what books we need to look through." The king explained.
The tension was palpable. They were looking into time-locked reflections of themselves, and they were fighting with themselves.
"What books?" Prince Arthur asked, and suddenly gathered from the expression on the King's face that he really, really wasn't going to like this.
Getting into the 'forbidden' section of the library was, on paper, easy for any member of the Pendragon family. In practice, Geoffrey of Monmouth held his archives on a tighter watch than a prison. However, after thorough intimidation by Prince Arthur (you do know how I am, don't you?) and persuasive reasoning from King Arthur (Yes, Gaius is the one who sent us…) the respective Arthurs were finally allowed past two locked doors into a room filled with dust and the mustiness of decades' disuse.
Prince Arthur coughed and squinted into the darkness. "Do you have a light?" He asked his other self. King Arthur grunted and fished a flint out of his pocket. "I had thought of that…" he chipped it a few times, and sparked it against a torch that sat mounted at the doorway. Cobwebs sizzled against the flame, and he wrestled it from its mounting to bring the light around to illuminate the room. As soon as he looked around, Prince Arthur froze.
The room wasn't very large. Perhaps a bit smaller than Arthur's bedchambers. But everywhere, on every wall, there were bookshelves, and filling each shelf and spilling onto the tables strewn about the room, there were books. And all over the books, in various places in various fonts, were runes. Magic runes. They were all books on magic. Arthur took a step back out of his uneasiness, and his Older Self cast back a concerned, sympathetic look before sighing and stepping forward.
Of course, Older Arthur had warned him that this is what they'd be doing. But somehow, he hadn't really been prepared. "I don't like it," he told himself. Older Arthur didn't say anything, but both of them could hear the nervousness in his voice. "We need to leave."
"After all the trouble we went through? No, we need to at least look."
Arthur looked around himself. Through the flickering torchlight, the runes in the books stared at him, burning his eyes. Everything he'd ever been taught made this place reek with wrongness. "But they're magic books. Magic!"
King Arthur turned and regarded him, a deep frustration and sadness in his eyes. And something else… regret? Prince Arthur felt incredibly self-conscious in that moment. It looked like Older Arthur was going to speak, but then he stopped himself. Eventually he said, "we came here by magic. It only makes sense that the way back would be magic as well. Gaius thinks we might find a solution in here somewhere." He turned back around and scanned the shelves before him. Merlin would have thrown a fit if he could see his library like this – unorganized, abandoned, unread, unused, and not dusted for decades. Arthur had to smile at the thought. He'd never really viewed Merlin as a dedicated scholar, but there were few things on the earth that his Court Sorcerer was more protective of than his books.
Behind him, Prince Arthur could only think how horrible the library was. "What exactly are we looking for?" He asked, taking a hesitant step forward.
"Golcar," King Arthur said, yanking a stack of books off a shelf and dusting them off with the side of his sleeve.
"What?"
"Who, actually. Gaius and I have been scouring his library for any information on time travel. We've come up with nothing, save for the name of a man who may have studied the subject – 'Golcar'."
Arthur frowned. "That's an odd name."
The king nodded. "Gaius thinks it's probably a surname – researchers are usually known by such. Here, help me." Arthur tossed a book to his younger self, who flailed awkwardly to catch it and looked at the book as if it were going to attack him. Older Arthur couldn't help his slight smirk.
"It won't eat you, you know." Although he had seen some enchanted books that would. "Read it. See what it's about."
With extreme reservation, Prince Arthur opened the book, prepared for some horrible spell to fly up in his face. When it didn't, he looked curiously down at the pages and frowned. It was so… normal. He glanced up at his older self and saw that the other man had found a chair to sit at and was reading a spell book (a very large one, at that) as if it were the most normal thing in the world. He glanced at his own text. It was in English, with normal words, spelled in normal letters, on normal parchment, with a few ink blotches here and there where a normal author must have spilt normal ink by mistake.
But it was a magic book. It wasn't supposed to be normal. Was it? He flipped over the book to see its cover. It was painfully ordinary, with hardly anything to identify it save for the half-faded title on the spine, written in English. Conjuration for the Journeyman. Alright, 'conjuration' wasn't exactly a subject he heard about often, but the text just looked so plain that it seemed unremarkable. Arthur flipped the book back open and began reading again.
Arthur didn't want to admit it, but the anticlimax of it somehow disappointed him. He glanced up at his older self, who was deep in concentration as he leaned over his book. Fighting through a cloud of confusion and disappointment, Arthur focused on the words and began reading. Eventually, he sank cross-legged to the floor.
The vast majority of what the book said floated right over his head. He mentioned this aloud, and King Arthur chuckled in sympathy. "Just scan for certain words… time, time travel, perhaps 'portal' or 'shift'. Don't get too wrapped up in the details. We have a lot of ground to cover."
But the prince couldn't help it. He would skim for a while, but then he'd get caught on a paragraph or a section and he would begin to read in depth. It was so strange. He didn't know what he'd ever expected of magic books, but this was not it. He'd studied science and astronomy as a juvenile (as all good royal children would) and even though he complained about them at the time, had actually taken some small hidden joy out of his lessons with his tutor. He was shocked to find that these magic books were incredibly similar, in word and phrasing, to some of the scientific texts he read as a student.
"…In normal conditions, the conjuration of a diogelu (otherwise known by the Continental mages as the patronus), the strength of the charm is found to be proportionate to the reserves of magika available for use in the caster. The charm itself cannot use up all of the caster's magic (the diogelu itself disallows it by nature) but can tire a sorcerer quickly if left unchecked. In many cases, and some quite remarkable, desperate need and urgency can strengthen the diogelu through a power unclassifiable in magical terms. Research has been poured into this particular conundrum, to little avail. Nevertheless, study on the diogelu conjurations and their riddles continues to this day, most notably under the school of Master Rhys Glenn of Northumbria. Rhys theorizes that the magika currents in a caster are comparable with bloodflow through the human heart, and, like the heart, are aided by certain boosters (e.g. adrenaline) that, under stress, may boost the activity and strength of the caster to the effect of artificially increased magika…"
Arthur suddenly shook himself. No. No. He couldn't do this. He couldn't get wrapped up in magic books of all things. He didn't even like reading. In fact, he despised it. He glanced warily down at the text. But something about this… He'd never heard any of this before. Magic. Research. Mages. Scholars. Schools of magic. It was so normal. Scholarly, yes. Confusing, definitely. But so orderly. So unthreateningly and temptingly fascinating and normal.
As Arthur read on to more books, he realized something else that challenged all he knew about magic. Although it wasn't always clearly drawn or explicitly mentioned, there were underlying boundaries in all the studies he read about. Lines in the sand. Good and bad. Light and dark. Black magic was something he saw mentioned several times, but only in passing, in forbidden tones, in condescension. And in the times it was mentioned, he saw several things that he recognized, things he and his kingdom had been beset by before. Curse. Plague. And even Cornelius Sigan. He was shocked to realize that these authors, these sorcerers mentioned Camelot's enemies with scorn. But they were magic. And all magicians were the same, weren't they?
His head hurt. After five books or so and lord only knew how many hours in that dusty room, Arthur finally came upon a book that he found completely unreadable. It was filled with odd words which he realized must be spells, but by then he was too confused and weary-eyed to react.
"Do you have any idea what this means?" He turned the book around so that his older self could see it. King Arthur was making considerably faster progress, with a good dozen books lying stacked to one side, but he hadn't found anything worth mentioning. He squinted at the book Arthur held out to him, and shook his head.
"Sorry. It's in the old tongue. I can't read it - just set it to the side."
They continued like this for a little while longer until the do it now, fix it now side of Arthur's personality finally decided to give. He sighed. "I don't see a lick of information on this Golcar fellow anywhere in here. Ought we to look somewhere else?"
King Arthur sighed and looked around at the room full of books they hadn't yet touched. "There's so much… Surely, somewhere in here…" He glanced around.
"Did you ask Geoffrey?"
"Gaius wanted to keep him out of this, for now. It is magic we're talking about. We need to be careful."
And Arthur understood that well enough. His stomach clenched in guilt as he surveyed the magic books strewn around him, books he'd been studying for hours. He thought for a moment, then said, "Did Golcar live in one of the Five Kingdoms?" He asked. Older Arthur shrugged as he pulled another stack of books from the shelf.
"I don't know. Possibly. Why?"
"Well, perhaps if we can't find him in here, we can look in the census records." Older Arthur froze at this revelation. Prince Arthur continued, "I mean, at least then we might know a bit more about him."
"That is an excellent idea." King Arthur pointed at him. "And it just might work. I can't leave this room though, or Geoffrey will never let me back in. Go get him to let you through to the records room, see what you can find. If you do find anything, come back and tell me."
Arthur nodded, feeling fulfilled to have a battle plan and even more satisfied that it had been his idea. He marched through the corridors confidently to Geoffrey's desk, and the archivist seemed relieved to see him out of the 'magic book room' and helped him find the records he wanted quickly.
Looking through old census records was immensely more boring than reading magic books, Arthur decided with slight mortification. It was all names and dates and occupations and residences. Luckily, they were sorted alphabetically by last name, which made Arthur's job easier. He'd read back through nearly two centuries of Camelot's residents (thank God censuses were only taken once every decade, or he'd have been there all week) and a century of Lot's kingdom before he finally moved onto the province that was Cenred's kingdom. With a wall of books on either side of him, just barely back to the third century, his tired eyes froze.
There, on the page in front of him, neatly written on parchment that had to have been older than the castle of Camelot itself,
Golcar, Eoran, male age 27
Golcar, Earnan, male age 22
He just stared at it for a moment. He'd begun to believe that 'Golcar' couldn't have existed for not finding anything on him, but now there wasn't just one man with his name, but two. In a haze of mixed excitement, exhaustion, and a leg that had fallen asleep nearly an hour ago, he took the book, marked his place, and stumbled back the room of spellbooks to share his discovery.
A/N: Hope it wasn't too boring, and brownie points to whoever can spot the Harry Potter reference I snuck in there.