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What a treacherous thing to believe a person is more than a person.
Arthur returned on a Wednesday.
It was raining and cold, and not at all a day one would’ve expected destiny to revive itself on. Merlin didn’t mark it in his calendar and Arthur didn’t ask the exact date, because it wasn’t important at all, then. Not with everything that had suddenly changed; suddenly shifted.
Still, though, remembering it was subconsciously done anyway; of course Merlin would remember the day everything became a little more, again.
It hadn’t been what he was expecting: everything didn’t suddenly right itself with Arthur’s presence, it wasn’t glaringly obvious why he was back, the gaping hole in Merlin's chest did not suddenly fill up. Happiness remained as elusive as ever, and with it grew annoyance and frustration and more contempt for Arthur; more anger. If anything, those first few months of Arthur’s return were the most harrowing Merlin had felt in - centuries.
Arthur was loud and dependent. He did not know how to use the materials of the new world, and his expectations to have servants were still there from the old world. He was struck with grief for losing his life and his friends and angry at being thrown into a world he had no concept of. And Merlin understood this, of course, he knew Arthur had every right, but it still made him bitter because at least he didn't have to endure every second of it. At least he got some rest. At least he'd had Merlin in whatever life he was in.
With Merlin's continued silence to Arthur's slowly dwindling taunts and jokes and pleas to just have some sense of normalcy again, Arthur started growing silent, too. He needed things to be normal again, but his normal hadn't been Merlin's normal for centuries - and Merlin had sacrificed enough. He didn't offer Arthur any alternatives, either, though, and Arthur never asked because he did not know there were alternatives at all. They grew more distant in this life than they had ever been during Arthur's death.
Merlin did not know how to bridge that gap between them. Sometimes he wondered if he even wanted to.
They’d also both forgotten how to live; though perhaps in different ways. The new world was too new for Arthur and too known for Merlin. The one thing they agreed upon, at least, was that neither wanted anything to do with it. Sometimes they went days without speaking to each other, where Merlin convinced himself he was living with a ghost; a figment of his insanity that had finally come to haunt him. Sometimes they yelled; Arthur too confused and afraid and angry with what he’d become and Merlin too weary and tired and empty to sympathize. The silence was always worse, somehow, and yet it seemed to be the silence that persevered. Merlin wondered when they gave everything up so completely that they stopped arguing and yelling and trying to get the other to understand.
He drank a lot and Arthur slept a lot. Arthur had questions and Merlin had too many answers and no incentive to share them; no care to relive the pain and anger they brought him. Arthur didn’t understand, because of course he didn’t, and Merlin spent countless nights staring at the ceiling or yelling at the lake, wondering what the point of it all was, if all it amounted to was this.
The first few months were the worst, and then Arthur tried walking back into the lake.
It was during the night. Merlin had been in the tavern the whole day, coming back to a dark and quiet house. Staggering inside had been a purposefully loud affair, anything to disrupt the quiet because Arthur had ruined his life the day he died, so Merlin had every right to ruin his sleep. When no slamming bedroom door answered his drunken entrance, he was - worried. Arthur didn’t go out much, anymore - not at all like he used to in Camelot; not at all like the Arthur Merlin wanted back. No, no. He only went where Merlin dragged him, but Merlin had stopped dragging him anywhere a while ago.
He called out Arthur’s name and got no response; checked his room and under his blanket and then the bathrooms and the kitchen. It was a small house, not one a grown man could be lost in. Merlin’s drunken brain couldn’t make sense of it, and that, soon, made him panic. Made him question if maybe it really was all a dream, if maybe his mind had only just stopped with the cruel trick. If maybe he’d made Arthur up inside his head, all along. (If Arthur was ever real, now or even then.) (He was losing his mind).
Merlin gripped the counter in the kitchen and willed himself to stay upright. No, no, no, no, no he thought. You must’ve been real, I’d only just gotten you back.
The kitchen was almost black, it was so dark, which did nothing to slow his head. The clock on the oven read 02:39 and there was a low buzz vibrating the air from the fridge. No, Arthur must’ve been back, he must have, because the kitchen had never felt so empty. There were four plates in the sink, two from breakfast and one for lunch and dinner each, and Arthur must’ve been back, because Merlin had been out all day.
He didn’t have time to think - losing Arthur again, whatever Arthur he’d become (but he wasn’t different at all, was he? He thought, that was just you refusing to give him the chance to readjust), wasn’t an option. There was only one place Arthur knew by memory, and if he had left on his own volition, Merlin knew he wouldn’t wander in a world he was so uncomfortable with; still such a stranger to. The lake was Merlin's best bet, and he would not lose him again.
Running there wasn’t an option. His body was young, again, but Merlin’s bones still ached with the weight of fifteen centuries. Sometimes he wondered if his magic (or he, himself, subconsciously) purposefully refused to heal that, or if it was all inside his head (sometimes when he was especially drunk, and had only just turned himself young again, he fancied that it was a sign of his - slow coming - mortality. His way out of this miserable excuse of a life; this unwillingly paid cost for his power. But then more decades passed, where he had to slowly age himself, and he banished the thought). Teleportation, on the other hand, was something he’d been working on. Something he’d excelled at (there would be no more two-day journey’s turning into failed, too late quests. Never again).
The shock of cold air was like the blade of excalibur resting against his skin; sharp and stinging. It was a cloudy, cold November; the moon nowhere in sight. Everything was too quiet: a dead world in a dead season. Looking around frantically, Merlin saw nothing, no one at all. Maybe he’s just not here yet he thought - pleaded - desperately, I don’t even know when he left, maybe he’s still on his way.
Only after sinking to the ground did something - a ripple in the water, maybe - catch his attention. It was small, barely even there, but he was scared and desperate, and the Earth had never once lied to him before.
Racing into the lake didn’t take much thought at all. Wading into the water, a million stones clogging his throat as he screamed Arthur’s name, only for his hands to come up empty, all seemed dizzyingly familiar. The memory knocked all the remaining breath out of his lungs and replaced it with more desperation. No, no, no, no he pleaded, plunging into the icy water again and again, please, please, please.
It was a pitch black sort of night regardless, but under the water it was even worse, and Merlin could not see. But he was in the water; with the earth, and he hand long since learned that he did not need to see. Almost as if the ebb and flow of the water was guiding him, the back of his hand collided with something solid and soft, both. Something that could have only been flesh; muscle and bone; and he didn’t think at all, before grasping it and yanking it up, up, out.
It was Arthur - cold and still and heavy as stone, not breathing at all, but still, Arthur. He didn’t know how he managed to get them both back to the shore - reckoned it was more the adrenaline than anything else - but every moment between doing that and Arthur waking up was nothing more than a blur. A blur of gasped breaths and clumsy fingers too stiff with the cold to move or cooperate; of steady pumps against Arthur’s chest and hot tears streaming down his cheeks when Arthur sputtered, back arching as he coughed out the water and rolled to his side, panting and wheezing and shivering from the chill of the night.
“You prat,” Merlin whispered, voice wet and quiet, “you bloody prat, what the hell, Arthur?” He pressed their foreheads together, needing to get closer but not wanting to push, and thought hysterically that there was something about that, too, that was familiar.
But he’s still breathing, part of him sobbed in relief he is not lost.
Arthur regained consciousness quite quickly, after Merlin healed whatever needed healing with his magic.
"No," he whispered, voice hoarse and devastated and sure to break Merlin even further, "no, why did you - you should've let me -"
"Arthur, please -"
“No! I - I cannot -” Arthur coughed, unable to speak for several seconds, “I cannot live in this new world. I can't, I can't I - it’s not for me, I - I don’t know how,” he rasped, and Merlin felt sick with what he’d almost lost again; sick with the tears and desperate plea in Arthur’s voice. He wants to die, he thought, and Merlin’s hands shook as they ran all over Arthur’s freezing body. He is solid, he is breathing, he can move. He’s here. But he doesn’t want to be.
“I’ll teach you - we - we’ll learn, togeth -”
“We don’t work anymore!” Arthur crumbled in on himself, unable to conquer the coughs that wracked his body, and something in Merlin broke. Something he hadn’t even known was there, anymore. No, no, no.
“We do, we do,” he whispered, voice still hoarse and wet with shame and grief. “I was - I’m sorry - Arthur. I’ve forgotten how to - live. And appreciate it and - please, please - I cannot lose you. Not again. Not when I spent centuries waiting, and only just got you back.” Merlin knew he was begging at that point; didn’t know if it would be enough.
“I need - but you’re never around and you - hate me. You - sometimes you look at me and you hate me. Merlin, I could not bear - that with everything else, I cannot -”
Grief threatened to consume him whole, and Merlin made a futile attempt to stave it off by pressing a million little fluttering kisses all over Arthur’s face.
“No, Arthur, I could never. I - I’m sorry.” He wondered how he could ever apologize for this failure, in a way to make it enough.
They did not move for a while, though Merlin couldn’t have said how long. Arthur wouldn’t stop gasping for elusive breaths and Merlin couldn’t stop shaking, and it was there, that it did - finally - all seem to slot into place.
The journey back to the house was as quick as the journey there, Arthur almost a dead weight when Merlin tucked him in in his own bed, and got in behind him.
Merlin rested his forehead against the space between Arthur’s shoulder blades, and squeezed Arthur’s hand after Arthur tangled their fingers together on his stomach, both of them shaking, still. Merlin didn't think he would stop shaking for a long time.
The position - holding Arthur so close and so intimate - was as familiar as much as it was new, and the thought that he could have this now, every day for however long, was enough to make him press closer - kiss the burning skin beneath his touch and vow to hold on for as long as he was given. He’d forgotten how easy it was to forget all the weight on his shoulders in Arthur’s presence - how easy it was to not be a destiny personified around him.
Of course, they had more things to discuss - especially what had happened, on top of everything else - there were harder conversations to have and bigger fights endure and darker nights to survive - but at least they would both be there to see it, that's the only thing they'd need to get through it, anyway (and they would get through it, the same as they always have).
For the first time in a very long time, Merlin thought that if having Arthur back in his arms - like that - was his reward for the fifteen hundred year prison sentence he’d been condemned to, it was enough.
The next few years were slow-passing, especially at first. It was harder to mend century-old wounds than it seemed in a moment's relief. But, it was possible.
Merlin fell in love all over again with the way they bantered and teased. It was much different, when they knew where they both stood in each other's lives. Especially when Arthur smoothed his insults away with fond smiles that betrayed his true meaning, and soft kisses he could not, apparently, hold back.
On Merlin’s thirty-seventh birthday, while they were sprawled across the couch and tangled up in each other, half watching some shite television show that only played between two and five in the morning, and half kissing wine off the other’s lips, Arthur traced the corner of Merlin’s eyes with his thumbs, and asked him when he’d started aging himself.
And Merlin took several minutes trying to keep the tears from spilling from his eyes, grin big and relieved and heart lighter than it'd been in centuries, because he hadn't.