Disclaimer: I still don't own Merlin (if I did, Season 5 would have been incredibly different), but since this chapter is a cross-over with the X-Files Season 6 episode "Tithonus", I thought I'd add the disclaimer that I don't own Mulder, Scully, Ritter or Alfred Fellig.
The Un-Grey Man
.
.
He remembered the man.
-x-
October 13, 1928
Woolworth Building
233 Broadway, Manhattan, New York City
"G.B. Emmerson" was only a year old when he paid a dime for his near-death and became the 'Immortal Man' of Broadway. His tale became a wild sensation in a decade of wild sensations - papers for weeks afterwards daily updating the enthralled public on his condition and telling over and over again the story of the pickle seller from 13th Avenue and the kosher candy store owner who was cuckolding him with his flame-haired vamp of a wife, and how their knock-down, drag-out fight had caused the whole disaster to befall the innocent young Englishman - eventually becoming one of the most famous news stories of the Roaring Twenties.
But all of that meant little to the man in question. His own memories of that day were few, and focused on far different things.
-x-
Not ten minutes before it happened, Merlin had ridden the elevators of the limestone coloured building - first from the lobby, then the special lift for the last five floors to the Observation Deck - paying no attention at all to the squat, dark-haired man beside him, completely ignorant of the role the man was to play in his eventual discovery. Feeling strangely good that day, once the heavy oak doors had parted, he emerged into the open air high atop the world's tallest building with a laugh nearly bubbling out of his throat. Above, the sky was a soft blue, filled with thin, cottony clouds. Unable to contain his buoyant mood, he mischievously started whistling "Let's Misbehave" to the pretty red-head in the cloche hat standing just off to his left.
Seven minutes after that he was plummeting fifty-eight stories to the ground without any idea of what had happened. There'd been some sort of ruckus, then something heavy thumping into his back followed by a freakish push up and over the guardrail, and in less than a heartbeat he was falling down, down, down. Indeed, the whole event happened so quickly that Merlin, his brain having yet to catch up, could only wonder at the violent snapping of the corners of his open greatcoat as he fell to Earth.
Surely the wind isn't that strong today? he asked himself rather foolishly.
He hit, his body reverberating as it ploughed through something sharp and hard, his spine breaking against what felt like a block of steel.
Despite his eardrums still vibrating from the explosive sound of his own impact, his next (and only) memory of after events was of prying open his eyes to find himself inexplicably half buried in the crumpled front end of some poor sap's Ford Model A, staring with utter confusion at the building in front of him. Standing in all of its neo-Gothic glory, like a cathedral stretched vertically, it pervaded his bleary, underwater-like consciousness as though it was some supernaturally imbued monolith passing judgement.
Sounds undulated in and out, washing over him. Voices screamed, hands frantically fussed at his clothes, the sky above shrunk to a small circle of blue as the heads of the gawking crowd crammed in around him, but only the building seemed real - until the man stood in front of him. Grizzled and balding, frumpy looking in a rough, down-and-out way, he stared at the blood streaming from the corner of Merlin's mouth with a puzzled pucker to his forehead.
"Why aren't you grey?" Merlin thought he heard the man demand before the world swam away.
-x-
January 6th, 1999
Dean Street, Brooklyn, New York City
A young man with blue eyes stood outside the run down, light tan bricked building, gazing up at where a death had taken place. A photographer had been shot the day before by an FBI agent, right through the lens of his camera, the shot powerful enough to go through both him and the female FBI agent who'd been standing behind him.
A grizzled and balding photographer, frumpy in a rough, down-and-out way.
Alfred Fellig hadn't aged a day in seventy-one years, but now he was dead.
Merlin didn't know what to make of that and so, preoccupied with trying to solve the mystery, he almost missed the brown-haired man staring intently at him from the rickety fire escape.
The ancient warlock recognized the look - the slight surprise, the almost visible racking of the brain as the person tried to place where he'd seen this face before, followed by the eyes widening in recognition - and knew it did not bode well for him.
He swiftly turned and walked away.
That night he left New York.
-x-
February 20th, 1999
A cottage outside of Huntsville, Ontario, Canada
It only took six weeks and three days for Merlin's prediction to come true: the brown-haired man had found him.
He'd considered waiting for the man in New York - he was not particularly frightened (it was extremely rare for him to be frightened by anything anymore), but merely wary of the potential obstacles that might be coming his way depending on what the man knew - but in the end, Merlin was glad he had come here. It had afforded him six weeks of peace and quiet, not to mention it allowed him to meet the brown-haired man on his own terms.
His hand was already on the doorknob as the knocked sounded. He opened it to see the brown-haired man shivering, hair and the shoulders of his overcoat soaked with snow.
"Martin Emmerson?" the man asked.
"Yes, that's me. Please come in, Agent Mulder."
"I'm sorry, do we know each other?" Mulder asked as he stamped the snow off his shoes and then stepped through.
"We've never met, if that's what you're asking. But as to whether we know each other, I suppose that remains to be seen."
"That's a bit enigmatic."
"Not really. You wouldn't have come all this way if you didn't think you knew something extraordinary about me. As for myself, well, there are such things as newspapers, Agent Mulder," Merlin replied, waving vaguely towards a copy of the New York Times sitting on the coffee table. "How is Agent Scully, by the way?"
"She's fully recovered and visiting her mother."
"I'm glad to hear it. A wound like that would have killed most people. Here, let me take your coat. And you might as well take off your shoes as well. You know, boots would have been far more practical."
"My drive up here was a spur of the moment thing."
"I see. Would you like something to drink? Coffee maybe?"Mulder nodded his thanks and Merlin directed him to sit in the living room. "So what can I do for you, Agent Mulder?" he called out from the kitchen.
"You could tell me how old you are."
Merlin didn't falter for a second. It was, after all, the question he'd been expecting. "I'm twenty-seven. My birthday is January 23rd, 1972, though I'm sure you could have found that out as easy as you found the address to this place. So what really has brought you all this way?"
"You tell me."
"You wish to ask me questions about the man killed on Dean Street. Alfred Fellig, I think the papers said his name was."
"It was one of them, at any rate."
"Milk or sugar?"
"Black's fine."
"So Fellig was an alias?" Merlin asked as he walked in with two cups and handed one to the Agent. "I wondered about that. Alfred Fellig, a crime scene photographer - so close to Arthur Fellig, the famous crime scene photographer from the 30s and 40s. Even their styles are the same. I considered the idea he might have been a relative, but still, it just felt wrong. Though why anyone would borrow another man's name and choose the Fellig part, I don't know. Why not be Arthur something? I've always been fond of Arthur."
"You should meet the Dales family," Agent Mulder said dryly. *
Merlin looked at him with confusion; it was the first thing Mulder had said that the warlock hadn't been expecting. "Pardon me?"
Agent Mulder waved it off. "It's not important. What I would like to know, Mr. Emmerson, is why you were standing outside of Fellig's apartment the day after he was killed."
"You think I killed him? I thought the paper said that it was an Agent named Ritter."
"No, I don't think you killed him, but I do think you knew something about him."
"And what's that, Agent?"
Mulder threw a very old file onto the coffee table. "The same thing he knew about you," he said. "I think the papers back then got it more right than they were aware of: you are indeed the Immortal Man."
.
* A little X-Files joke. The Dales family consisted of two brothers, a sister, and the family goldfish, all named "Arthur".
Other Notes:
- "Let's Misbehave" was a song by Cole Porter.
- The Woolworth Building was tallest in the world from 1913 to 1930. In a massive coincidence, it had its 100th anniversary the day before I started writing this, though I didn't know it until I looked the building up on Wikipedia for more information.
- Arthur Fellig was a real person and his name was used purposely in the original X-Files episode. Two more of Alfred Fellig's aliases were also in homage to famous photographers: Mathew Brady/Louis Brady and Paul Strand/Henry Strand.