Everything Old Is New Again

Chapter 1

Chapter Summary

Chapter Notes

1.

In the mornings, they ring the bells, once, twice, to signal the beginning of the day.

Arthur likes to get up before they sound, climbing up the Eastern Tower to see the sun rise over the hills. This area of Camelot has been built tight and narrow, catwalks of rusting pipes, and rickety metal. They’ll have to rebuild this area when they get a chance, maybe recreate the wall out of stone, like in the older castles Arthur’s seen in worn-out picture books. For the most part, only the guards make their way up the difficult ladders to their watchtower, but Arthur loves the quiet of it, where he doesn’t feel like he’s being squeezed in. They get new people all the time, traveling in from the countryside, and there’s been quite a few births these past few years, which is both a blessing and a curse.

Arthur’s father says that after the plague, no one was sure whether or not the human population would ever recover. He always smiles -- a thin, sad smile -- when he hears of a new baby, a new birthday, and he’ll always remind Arthur that each life is not something to take lightly, that Arthur’s own mother had been lost to childbirth. After her death, Arthur’s father had turned his full attention towards running their tiny outpost, throwing everything he had into it, including Arthur himself.

“One day, you will be the one responsible for these people,” his father likes to say. “I would not trust anyone less.”

For now, Arthur helps lead the guards. He’s younger than most of them, but he’s known them all since he was little, and he’s been training hard since he first learned how to pick up a gun. He went on his first foraging mission at the age of twelve, walking the the wide, empty streets, the old pavement overgrown with weeds, with two guards at his back. It had been the first time he’d been in a city before, outside of the protected walls of Camelot, and it had been beautiful and sobering all at once. The buildings were so tall, so imposing, and also so very dead.

Arthur had never realized how alive Camelot was, with its busy narrow streets, its crowded homes, its ever-increasing food issues. In the city, there was nothing, just the crunch of pavement underneath their feet, the rattle of wind against a boarded up window.

Most of their foraging was for scrap metal, engine parts, oil and equipment if they were lucky to overturn an old shed or garage that hadn’t been picked over before. Most times, they manage come back with a few things, though the passing years have made for slim pickings. Almost anything worth taking has been stripped away or rusted over or long since spoiled.

Gaius has tales of the days before the plague. He’ll sit the younger children down after dinner when everyone is sleepy and spin them tales of wars and political intrigue and some people called ‘celebrities’ that Arthur doesn’t quite understand. Arthur likes the stories about television the best, just the thought of it, moving pictures on a screen, and the stories of a man with an ever-changing face and a blue box.

His father doesn’t approve in the least. “I wish he wouldn’t fill your head with that nonsense,” his father would say. “That world is dead. This is the one we must live in.”

---

There’s a new group of people who have come to Camelot today from Ealdor. Travel between the various outposts has increased now that the plague has passed, and the guards no longer have to be quite so rigorous about whether or not anyone walking through their gates carried the disease. They usually get about ten new visitors per week. Traders, willing to risk their lives and their wares, carrying old jewelry, childrens’ toys, travellers, trying to find a permanent home, farmers who have decided to take to the fields by themselves again, bringing in carts full of vegetables and fruits and meat.

Arthur watches them arrive from the catwalks that surround the outer wall. He’s on guard duty that day, and he keeps a firm grip on his assault rifle as they pass through the outer checkpoints, watching them for any sign of deceit or malice. They’re normal, for the most part. Arthur spots a few familiar faces, a few new ones, but no one who looks suspicious.

“Any good gossip?” Gwen asks after his shift is over. They like to meet near the edge of the kitchens, where they can smell the bread baking for the day and listen to the rattle of old pots and pans. “I heard that there’s another boy our age.” She grins, quick and sharp.

“Yes, there is. I saw him when they were coming in.” Arthur has a vague impression of black hair, a boy skinny, skinnier than most, a sweet goofy smile, carrying a pack on his back as his gaze wandered over the towers, the gate, the guards.

Gwen rolls her eyes, the way she has since they were both ten years old. She, Arthur, and Morgana are the only children in Camelot that were born in their year, during the tail end of the plague, and they’ve been thrown together ever since they were little. They’ve put bugs in each other’s hair, and they’ve refused to share their toys, and they protected each other that one time they slipped past the outer walls and almost got eaten by a fox before the guards found them huddled together in a clearing. “His name is Merlin, I hear,” Gwen says. She whispers it, like a secret. “Gaius was mumbling about it earlier.”

“How does Gaius know that?” Arthur asks. He’s the best doctor they’ve got, but he’s getting old and a little forgetful. (“The curse of time, young Pendragon,” Gaius liked to say, even though Arthur’s last name isn’t Pendragon. “A young man like yourself wouldn’t understand.”) Arthur didn’t think he paid any attention to the goings on outside of their outpost.

“Dunno,” Gwen says. “He got a letter last month.” She twists a finger around a curl of her hair.

“And you didn’t think to tell me?” Arthur asks.

Gwen shrugs. “I don’t tell you everything. And besides, you were too busy training people with the new weapons last week.”

“One of them bloody near sliced his foot off with that sword, you better believe I’m putting more time into training.” Arthur says, and his tone might be the slightest bit defensive.

Gwen doesn’t answer that. She refuses to do so when she thinks he’s being a prat. “I wonder what his story is.”

Everyone has a story around Camelot, or at least a story of their parents or their grand parents. Where they were when the plague hit or who they were before then. Arthur’s father had been a soldier, his mother a teacher. Gwen’s father was a mechanic (still is, really), and her mother used to work as an analyst in an investment bank (a concept that Gaius had tried to explain to Arthur many times, but still didn’t quite make sense).

“Well,” Arthur says. “I guess we’re going to find out.”

---

2.

For as long as Morgana can remember, she’s had the dreams. Gaius says that that’s to be expected, that sometimes childhood psychological scars manifest in our subconsciousness even as adults. Morgana knows he’s saying this because he knows her parents were killed by raiders when she was just barely old enough to remember it. They were amongst the first to push beyond the walls of Camelot, ready to form another settlement, expand the ring of the main outpost into the hollowed out remnants of a village from before, but they had pushed too far. Camelot’s guards couldn’t protect them.

Morgana survived the attack by hiding in a closet, keeping quiet as the raiders demanded information on how to breach Camelot’s defences. She remembers the heavy footfalls on the floorboards. She remembers breathing in the scent of her mother clothes all around her as she listened to her mother and father’s screams. Uther was the one who found her crying there in the aftermath, ugly tears rolling down her face, and she remembers the feel of his fatigues as she clutched and sobbed into them.

Morgana’s dreams aren’t of those nights, though. She can’t quite make them out yet, but they feel heavy, dangerous. They don’t feel like terror and the house she used to live in, old wood soaked through with blood. They feel like stone and water, something deep and powerful, and when she wakes up, they fade so quickly she can’t hold onto them.

Gwen thinks they’re important somehow, that they’re about something Morgana has forgotten, that they’re something she’s trying to remember. Arthur thinks that they’re just dreams, like that one he had of running around Camelot without a shirt on and then riding on a horse that could climb up ladders.

As she’s gotten older, something has shifted. The dreams feel darker, stranger and when she wakes up, it takes longer for the fog to clear. Some details linger, a lake, a roar of a strange beast, stone walls against her palms.

During the days, she works with Gwen in the forge, machining the parts they need around the outpost while Gwen forges batches of bullets that still will still work with their old weaponry. Gwen’s father taught them everything they know, and he trusts them to be able to run things while he gets their sole truck working or he patches up the boiler or he replaces a loose railing on the walkways. Uther (who has raised her now for ten years) doesn’t approve of her work, though he doesn’t put up much of a fight. He gets enough accusations of favoritism for granting Arthur his place on the guards. Morgana thinks he’ll always look at her and see the fragile little girl she was and not the woman she’s become, and with Arthur, Uther sees the man he could be and not the boy he still is.

---

Morgana’s hard at work when the new arrivals, which is why she misses the big news. Her shoulder still aches from when she strained it the week before, trying to hold too much weight on her back. It’s just her for the moment. Gwen’s hared off to pester Arthur about something. She gets like that about all the juicy gossip.

Morgana is so focused on her work, she doesn’t hear him come in. She doesn’t hear him until he’s shouting to be heard over the noise of her lathe.

“Hello,” someone says. “I’m looking for, um, Gaius? I seem to have gotten a bit turned around.”

She turns to see a boy there, about their age, standing in the doorway to their workroom. She freezes. That thing inside her shifts again. Recognition, this time. She knows he feels it too, because his voice trails off, his eyes going wide. She turns the machine off.

“Who are you?” she asks, when really she wants to ask what are you.

“I-- Merlin,” he says. “I’m Merlin. From Ealdor.” His forehead furrows, and he bites his bottom lip. “I know we don’t know each other yet, but do you ever-- do strange things happen when you’re around?”

“No, not really,” Morgana says, because the dreams don’t count. She may not understand what he’s asking, but she can feel -- the way she can feel when danger is coming close or the way she knows when a metal piece is perfect in her hands -- that the two of them are the same, that they’re alike.

“But-- you’re--” Merlin says.

Morgana shakes her head. “I don’t know what you’re asking,” she says.

Merlin frowns. It looks almost comical on his earnest face. “Oh, sorry. I didn’t-- sorry.”

---

It takes less than a day for Gwen to start inviting Merlin to eat meals with the rest of them, and Morgana isn’t sure if she finds his presence more amusing or unsettling. Thing is, Merlin’s kind of an oaf, prone to tripping over his own feet or stumbling over perfectly ordinary conversation. But there are other times when he’ll look at her, and she swears his eyes are a different color.

He and Arthur get off on a bad foot from the start (not very difficult when it comes to Arthur), and they spend all of lunch sniping at each other while Gwen tries to keep the peace.

“What’s Ealdor like?” Gwen asks. She’s only ever been outside the walls once, and that time, they’d gotten lost in the woods. Not much to see there except trees and dirt. Arthur’s been out foraging, and Morgana once had the chance to revisit the place where her parents had been killed, but Gwen doesn’t have that excuse.

“Small,” Merlin says. “Loads smaller than Camelot.” He shrugs. “Not much to say, really. Mum thought it would be better for me if I trained in Camelot for a while. They say this is the only place that’s got power -- electricity -- in the entire region.” He fiddles with his napkin and bites his lip. “Dr. Gaius was kind enough to give me a place to say.”

Arthur snorts. “Fat lot of good that’s done him, seeing as you’ve already broken two test tubes and set one of his chairs on fire. We’ve only got one glassblower, you incompetent, and Gaius always complains that he’s not very good.” Morgana does have to agree there. Edward tries very hard, but the results of his work tend to be misshapen and a little lumpy.

“Oi!” Merlin says. “It’s my first day. Some of us don’t have a father who’s always around to make sure we get plum positions with with the guards.”

“Stop it, both of you,” Gwen says. She’s always been the one to step in when Arthur and Morgana are going at it. Morgana is not surprised to see that she’ll do the same with a new person in the mix.

“He started it,” Merlin says, jabbing a thumb in Arthur’s face.

Arthur sputters. Morgana sighs. She says, “Arthur, do stop being a prat for a moment and let Merlin talk.”

“I’ve got more training to do now anyway,” Arthur says. He stands up and leaves the table. He’s always been something of a drama queen when he doesn’t get his way. It’s one of the things that Morgana really hates about him.

Gwen shoots them both annoyed looks. “There’s been talk that Mercia is looking to attack, and he’s worried that we we’re not ready for it. His father has been on his case for weeks now.”

“Oh,” Merlin says.

“No reason for him to take it out on us,” Morgana says.

Gwen just sighs and shakes her head.

---

That night, Morgana dreams of dragons.

Chapter 2

Chapter Summary

Chapter Notes

3.

The best thing about Merlin’s arrival, Gwen has decided, is the injection of all sorts of new things to talk about. It wasn’t that their usual topics of discussion had gotten stale, necessarily, but they’d known each other for much too long, and the outpost was only so big. Merlin just had all these stories, about going down to the nearby stream where they catch fish and wash out their clothes, about the fields where he used to play with his childhood friends.

“There’s this hill behind the schoolhouse,” Merlin says. “We used to climb to the top of it and look out over the town.”

The two of them are sitting on stools in Gaius’s lab, a mug of tea for each of them. Gwen’s spent a few hours in here before. That time when she was sick with the a bad cold when she was ten, her father fussing and doting and worried about a possible increased susceptibility to the few remaining strains of the plague while Gaius tried to explain to him that they just needed to keep her rested and hydrated.

Now, this is part of Merlin’s domain, and he’s invited Gwen into it as well. Gaius’s lab is probably the one place in all of Camelot that looks like it could have come from before the plague. The rest of them, they have blocky, functional wooden furniture and misshapen metal cups and windows covered up with spare tarp. Gaius’s lab is all sleek metal tables and expensive lab equipment and painted walls, tile floors underneath their feet. He’s put up a set of old-fashioned posters on the walls -- printed, explaining how to check for breast cancer and how to perform CPR, in bright colors -- and it always makes Gwen wonder what it was like, before the plague. Their parents would talk about it when they were growing up, but the stories always feel strange and unreal, like the stories about hobbits and Superman and the god of thunder coming to earth to fight aliens. There’s no way those tall buildings that they foraged through really were filled with people, could they? There’s no way there’d been enough electricity that every home had it, that they had the infrastructure to power lights on every street. They couldn’t have had machines that flew through the air between cities, countries, continents.

But in Gaius’s lab, it’s easier to believe that there was a world like that, that it was real.

“Do you miss it? When you’re here Camelot?” Gwen asks, a wistful sigh threading through her voice. “Ealdor sounds so nice.”

Merlin ducks his head and gives a shrug. “It’s loads different,” he says, “but I really like it here. Gaius has been really patient about teaching me things.”

Gwen turns to study him. Gaius hasn’t taken an apprentice as long as she’s known him, and she knows Uther has been awfully sore about that. Gaius has trained people up as nurses and medics, taught them how to handle and care for human bodies, but he’s never deemed any of them ready to be his successor. “What sorts of things?”

Merlin’s eyes go wide, nervous. “Medical things!” he says, just a touch too loud. “Like stitches and babies and such.”

Gwen studies a poster about dental floss. She’s never had a chance to properly read it before, and it seems like the sort of thing she should know. “Well, that’s good, I suppose,” she says. So many things to learn. The old world left behind so much, and they’re all just trying to figure out how it all worked. They’re all running to try to catch up.

“Yeah,” Merlin says. “Oh, you should tell me about the engines! We didn’t have any of those in Ealdor.”

---

Morgana has been strange, lately, stranger than usual. Gwen doesn’t know if she should be worried or not (okay, she’s worried, she’s officially worried). Morgana has always been quiet, has always kept to herself, but she’ll still snipe at Arthur when he tramples into her personal space, physically or emotionally, and she’ll stay up late to talk to Gwen about almost anything. When it comes to the three of them, she’s usually willing to make an exception. But now, Morgana is moody, and she shrugs when Gwen asks her things, and she doesn’t rise to Arthur’s bait when he tries to pick fights with her. She disappears at the end of her shifts and she doesn’t speak during their meals.

Gwen tries to corner her, one night after dinner, outside Morgana’s quarters. Morgana lives in the same barracks that Uther and Arthur do, a large bunker near the edge of the wall. Gwen’s invited her to stay with her and her father, but Morgana always turns down the offer.“What’s going on?” Gwen asks, jogging up to her as Morgana unlocks her front door.

Morgana doesn’t turn to face Gwen. “It’s nothing,” she says, her eyes focused on the door knob. “I’ve just been feeling a little under the weather, is all.”

She steps inside, and Gwen follows her in. Gwen has always hated Morgana’s quarters. They’re bare, empty save for the bed, the nightstand, the table in the kitchen. Morgana refused to keep anything that belonged to her parents and she never quite picked up Gwen’s penchant for collecting odds and ends until Gwen’s own rooms are covered in paintings from some of the neighborhood children, tiny wooden sculptures from the carpenters, and a few blocky machines with tiny intricate parts that Arthur has brought back with him from the cities. Morgana has never expressed any interest in any of that, but Gwen’s determined to put a little life into the place. Sometimes, she’ll try to make Arthur pick some flowers or spend the day working metal into beautiful twists and curls, but the flowers die, and all of Gwen’s gifts end up in a stray corner somewhere, and Morgana’s rooms still have that empty, unlived-in air.

“Morgana--” Gwen says. She hates having to be the one to fix things all the time, that when Arthur and Morgana have their little snits, she’s the one who has to pull them all back together again. It’s exhausting, and it’s not fair, but if she doesn’t do it, no one else will. Gwen grabs hold of one of Morgana’s hands, and Morgana lets out an audible breath, relaxing her shoulders ever so slightly.

“I just--” she says. “I get this feeling sometimes, like everything is changing, and I don’t--”

Gwen tugs her into a hug, wrapping her arms around Morgana’s back. “It doesn’t matter,” she says. “Whatever happens, we do this together.”

That’s how they’ve always done it. Arthur was the one who traveled to the next nearest outpost on foot to get the right kind of antibiotics when Morgana came down with strep throat, and Morgana had once stayed up late to help Gwen weld together a metal sculpture that she was going to give to her father to celebrate his fiftieth birthday. Gwen can feel the moment when Morgana relaxes in her arms, breathing out, tucking her face into Gwen’s shoulder. “Together,” Morgana says, and she almost sounds like she believes it.

“Yes,” Gwen says. “Of course.”

---

Arthur has been antsy since Merlin arrived. Gwen knows that it’s because Mercia’s threats of war have made him worried and anxious, especially since Uther is more than willing to meet force with force. Arthur has been making noises about sending a peaceful envoy, though he’s not willing to say anything critical of his father or his decisions.

She knows Merlin and Morgana can get irritable around Arthur, something about his bravado and his convictions that tends to rub them the wrong ways. Arthur’s been taught not to give any quarter, to never show any sign of weakness. Morgana likes to lash out when she feels backed into a corner, and Arthur hasn’t figured out when not to push. Merlin’s so new and so untried, and Arthur has very little patience for inexperience when it comes to the safety of Camelot.

Gwen meets him near the kitchens, their favorite hiding spot. Arthur is as tense as ever after a meeting with his father. Uther has been making plans for starting out a new settlement, one that could accommodate the constant new influx of people, and Arthur is worried about the guards spreading themselves too thin to handle raider attacks or another outpost looking for a prime piece of farming land without the walls of Camelot to protect them.

He leans back against a nearby building, his head making a hollow metallic thunk against the wall. “I just don’t know if--” he says. “I know we’ll need to eventually. We’ve already got four families in need of housing and twelve families that are outgrowing their existing space, but I know the last time we tried, it ended badly.” He bites his bottom lip, a nervous tic he never quite grew out of. Gwen knows he’s thinking of Morgana’s family, the hollow-eyed girl that came into their lives when they were eight.

Gwen’s the only one who gets to see him like this, uncertain of himself and vulnerable. With the other guards, he needs to prove himself against his age, and with Morgana, he feels the need to protect himself against any possible attack. With his father-- well, that might be the worst of it. Arthur so desperately craves his approval. “You’ve already started protecting the major roads between outposts,” Gwen says. “This is just the next step.”

Arthur’s smile is faint and warm, and a fierce sort of protectiveness washes over her, the same kind she feels when Morgana gets lost in her own head or when her father runs himself ragged after a storm tears holes through their walls. She believes so strongly in him, even when he can’t quite believe in himself. “Thank you, Gwen,” he says. He holds one of her hands in his and squeezes it tight. He makes her feel like this, too, grounded and solid and real.

“Anytime,” Gwen says.

---

4.

It’s not that Merlin doesn’t like Camelot. Camelot is big and loud and busy where Ealdor felt calm, steady, cozy. Camelot is loud mornings, the bells ringing as the sun rises over the horizon, before Merlin has to dodge through the packed streets to get some breakfast from the cafe. Camelot is the watchful eyes of Uther’s guards and the hum of the generator at night. Camelot is Gwen’s bright laugh and Morgana’s serious eyes and the slap of Arthur’s hand against his shoulder. Camelot is Gaius’s careful fingers and watchful eyes, his voice calm and comforting and serious.

In Camelot, everything feels heavy, weighted down with responsibility. In Camelot, Merlin doesn’t have space where he can practice his magic, confined to Gaius’s lab, an old book of spells spread out in front of him as he tries not to destroy anything he can’t fix back up again. He misses the days when he could grow rose bushes in the forest with a flick of his hand so he could pick flowers for his mum when she was having a bad day. He misses the smell of bread from her ovens, the feel of kneading dough underneath his hands, and the little light shows he would put on sometimes to make her laugh.

“I think it would be unwise,” Gaius says, the first time Merlin asks him if he can-- if it would be alright if he told Gwen about him, about what he can do. “The fewer people who know, the safer you’ll be until you get this whole thing under control.” He waves an absent hand through the air, like the entirety of Merlin’s entire existence can be summed up in the gesture.

Merlin likes Gaius. Merlin likes his patience, his sharp wit, his prickly sort of caring. He likes that Gaius has things to teach him, that there’s so much more to learn about himself, about Camelot, about how things were before. He likes the way the magic feels when he uses spells, the way he can feel it bending to his will. “What about Morgana?” Merlin asks. He remembers the first time he met her, the way the magic in him had jumped when he had seen her standing there, in coveralls and wearing a tight smile. A flash of recognition he’s never felt before.

Gaius’s forehead furrows. “What about her?” he asks. He putters around the lab, collecting the ingredients of a spell they’re going to try, transmuting a block of wood into a block of steel.

“She’s like me, isn’t she?” Merlin tries to pay attention to the spell in front of him, but he has a hard time doing that while he’s trying to keep an eye on Gaius’s reaction at the same time.

Gaius takes a deep breath before he nods. “I suspected as much. She’s manifesting much differently than you are, and I’d hoped--” He sighs and rubs at his forehead. “It’s all happening so fast.”

Merlin feels a chill creep its way down his spine. “What’s happening so fast?” He knows that who he is, what he is shouldn’t exist. His mother would look at him so sadly sometimes and hug him tight and tell him that she loved him no matter what. And then when things started to become difficult, when Merlin started to lose control over his gifts, she was the one who told him to come here, to find Gaius and learn what he could.

Gaius looks at him, and his eyes are too old for his face. He looks as though he might say something, but he doesn’t. “You should go back to studying,” he says. “Maybe next time, you’ll learn not attempt that trick with the bucket of water when your balance is so compromised.”

---

Merlin is surprised when Gaius tells that there’s a dragon living in the hills to the east. He’s even more surprised when Gaius suggests that Merlin should go out to meet it.

Getting out of Camelot is the easy part. The front gates are not so heavily guarded now that Uther has relaxed the restrictions on entering and leaving the outpost, and Merlin has been given special dispensation from Gaius to come and go as he pleases. Merlin isn’t sure what he told Uther about what Merlin needs to do beyond the walls, but he’s sure it wasn’t this. Arthur had raised one suspicious, judgmental eyebrow, but he hadn’t questioned anything further. Their initial hatred has faded into a cool mutual distrust, for all that Gwen insists that they’d be good friends if they gave each other half a chance. Merlin just can’t be bothered with someone their age who takes themselves so seriously.

The caves are a mile away from the walls, and the day is cloudy and wet. His boots sink into the muddy grass as he walks. The loudest sound Merlin hears is the howl of the wind over empty fields. It’s the first time since Merlin’s arrival at Camelot that he’s been past the walls, and he’s forgotten how different it is, outside.

When he gets to the foot of the cave, he lights a torch. It doesn’t take much more than a quick press of magic against a large stick, watching as the rod catches flame. Then he takes a deep breath and steps inside.

The inside of the cave is dark and dank, smelling heavily of moss and a little of rot. Merlin nearly kicks over a rabbit carcass as he stumbles on the uneven rock. “Hello?” he says. He feels a bit silly, because he could have-- this could be the wrong cave after all. He did get a bit turned around trying to find the entrance, even though he followed Gaius’s directions, and--

“Emrys,” a voice says from somewhere deeper in the cave.

Merlin startles back, nearly tripping over his own feet again, but when he gets his bearings, he ventures further in. The narrow entrance gives way to a larger cavern, and in the center, there sits a dragon. Gaius had shown him pictures in one of the old books he keeps in his library, so Merlin isn’t surprised by the wings, or the scales, or the teeth, but he is surprised by the size of it. The dragon isn’t much taller than him, and there’s something unformed about it, the head not quite rounded, its legs skinny. Merlin had thought it’d be… bigger, larger than life.

“Hello,” Merlin says.

“It has been some time, Merlin,” the dragon says, “since you last visited me.” It bares its teeth, which are long and sharp, and breathes out steam through its nostrils, tendrils that curl through the air.

Merlin blinks a few times, trying to recall if-- he would have remembered, wouldn’t he? “It is?” Merlin asks. Gaius hadn’t told him why he should find the dragon that lived out in the caves (and that Arthur didn’t even seem to know about it), but he’d said it was important, that it had something to do with fate and destiny and all sorts of things that Merlin doesn’t even believe in.

The dragon snorts, an irritated noise. “Humans,” it says. “Your memories are so short and so useless.”

Merlin doesn’t know what to do, whether he should inch forward or inch back. “Sorry?” he says.

“There is much work to be done, little wizard. Are you sure you’re up to the task?” The dragon takes a step back and spreads its wings, casting long shadows in the dim light of Merlin’s torch.

“I don’t think I’m supposed to be doing any sort of work, because Gaius said-- well, and I’m not done with my studies yet,” Merlin says. He grips the branch tighter, palms sweating, and takes a step back. He knows the way Gaius looks at him when Gaius thinks he’s not paying any attention, a furrowed brow, a downturned mouth, a shake of his head, and Merlin knows the way Gaius is so careful with his words around Merlin, like he’s afraid to give something away.

“We have been born again,” the dragon says, “to come to aid this land in its hour of need. And of course you’re still a blubbering idiot.” It sounds petulant, like a child sneering at his older brother.

“Oi!” Merlin says. He tries not to feel the tiniest bit put out that he was insulted, by a dragon, for no reason whatsoever. “Am not! If you know so bloody much about what needs to be done, why don’t you just go ahead and do it all yourself, then?”

“The old man sent you to me because he rescued me when I was much smaller than I was now, because I told him that one day you would come to Camelot, and because he understands now that he has a role to play in what lies ahead. The once and future king has returned to us.”

“We haven’t got any kings anymore,” Merlin says. His mother once told him about watching the royal wedding on the television, how she’d sighed and giggled over it for ages. She said that no one knows what happened to the royal family once the government fully collapsed and they were all left to fend for themselves. Rumor has it that they ended up hiding in the Scottish highlands under strict quarantine. Not that it matters any longer. No one would bow to their authority even if Prince George himself decided to show up and declare himself king. Not after all this time.

“Nevertheless,” the dragon says. “He has his destiny much as you have yours. The sickness has weakened this land. It has called him back to aid it.”

Something inside Merlin shivers -- the magic -- as if it recognizes the weight of what the dragon is saying, as if it knows that the dragon is speaking the truth. “And what am I supposed to do about it?” Merlin asks.

“Help him, little wizard,” the dragon says. “Make sure that King Arthur will once again sit on the throne of Albion.”

Merlin’s eyebrows crawl up his forehead. “Arthur?” he says. “Really?” From the moment Merlin set foot in Camelot, he and Arthur have been at odds, but he can grudgingly admit that he might have the potential. The guards all admire and respect him, despite his youth and his arrogance, and he already carries himself with the weight of the entire outpost on his shoulders for all the good that it does him.

The dragon cocks its head to the side studying him, and Merlin freezes, keeping himself still. He’s not quite good enough yet to keep himself from being turned into a crisp if the drago decides he’s not worthy. At least he doesn’t think he is. “Return to Camelot,” it says, eventually. “Protect him. Guide him. It may be some time before he is ready, but he is the one we have been waiting for.” It turns around as if it’s bored with him already.

“But--” Merlin says. He feels a little dizzy with all of this new information, but by then, the dragon’s already flown off to someplace deeper into the cave.

When he steps back outside into the daylight, he extinguishes the flame of his torch and tosses the branch to the side. The world seems exactly as he left it, green sloping hills, a cloudy sky overhead, the smell of soft dirt and cold mist. It seems stranger somehow, threaded through with mysteries that Merlin can’t quite understand. He reaches out with his magic groping blindly for some answers. He’s not trained well enough, and instinct can only do so much, but for a moment he feels it, the pulse of life underneath the surface of what he can see, vast and deep and overwhelming.

For the longest time, Merlin’s thought of the plague as the end of everything. That’s the way the adults always talked about it, like they were always looking backwards at what the world had been, like every day after that was just… surviving. But looking at everything now, he can see that they’re wrong. It’s the beginning of something new, something beautiful. Quite frankly, Merlin isn’t sure what to make of the whole ‘Arthur will become king of all Albion’ business, but he likes the idea that they’ve been born -- re-born, even, if the dragon is telling the truth -- to change this world, to rebuild it, to make it anew.

Merlin looks around himself, and he takes a deep breath. He wonders if Gwen would think he was bonkers if he told her about all this. He wonders if Morgana would like-- if she’d be interested in studying magic with him. He wonders what the hell he’s supposed to do to get Arthur ready to be king. But it’ll be alright, he thinks. He’s got Gaius, and he’s got the dragon, and he’s got himself. He zips up his jacket and flips the collar up so that it’ll block the wind.

And then he starts to walk.

FIN.