#i don't normally write postcanon but i could mess with this

[wordsinhaled]

another day another WIP

in which we answer the question what if Arthur adjusted fine and Merlin were the fucked-up one after Arthur's return?

-

“I swore to myself that I wouldn��t forget any part of you,” Merlin says softly.

They sit together in the center of Merlin’s bed, facing one another. The lights are turned down, casting the room in a soft glow, almost as that of candles. Merlin had explained it to him: the effect is achieved with something called voice-activated dimmable bulbs, which are a modern technology, but which, in practice, appear to Arthur not too dissimilar to Merlin’s magic. Merlin had laughed when Arthur reminded him he could douse a campfire with nary a word a thousand years ago, and pointed out the world was only catching up. "Well," he'd said, seeming pleased. "I suppose you're right."

Arthur reaches out, enfolds one of Merlin’s hands in both of his. It had taken Merlin weeks to let him do only this, and now he relishes any chance to feel just this bit of Merlin’s skin, warm and close against his, proof that he had survived and so had Merlin.

“But you recognized me straight off.” Arthur means to lighten the mood—it would have been nigh impossible to mistake him, wandering into Waterstones in full armor in the middle of one of Merlin’s book signings—but his attempt falls flat.

Merlin lifts his free hand to Arthur’s face, traces wondering fingertips over Arthur’s brow, his cheek, his jaw. At first he had taken to keeping his hands shoved in his pockets or clasped behind his back when Arthur was nearby, as though it took a great force of will for Merlin not to try to learn Arthur again in this way. He said it was for Arthur’s sake that he kept a distance, but Arthur had quietly considered that it might be just as much for Merlin’s own sake, and had forced himself to be patient. These exploratory touches, ever so tentative and restrained, had finally come some months after the hand-holding began.

“Don’t joke, Arthur. I swore it.” Merlin’s manner is forlorn. He had always tended to self-recrimination, even before, but now it is harder for Arthur to cajole him out of such moods. “Your voice. Your eyes. How could I forget them?”

“Come now, Merlin,” Arthur says, hoping he sounds gentle enough. “It’s been centuries. Anyone would.”

This is the most difficult bit. To Arthur, their time apart feels like a matter of hazy, indistinct hours; like waking from a particularly wretched nightmare to find the dream-world dissipating and your lover once again beside you, familiar and constant, grounding you in the present. Merlin has endured a millennium without him, moved through countless new iterations of the world entirely alone. Little wonder that he sometimes looks at Arthur like he’s seeing a stranger standing in his kitchen or a ghost asleep in his guest bed.

“But I’m not just anyone,” Merlin insists. “And neither are you.”