aleathiel | Fic: Melvin

Title: Melvin
Fandom: BBC's Merlin/Arthurian
Pairing: Arthur/Merlin
Rating: PG
Warnings/Spoilers: None
Summary: He waits.

AN: Contains the

tamingthemuse photo prompt "despair". Photo is at the end of the fic.

It’s almost time to move on again, he thinks, looking out the window.

The trees are winter bare, and the mostly vacant land is scrubby. He can see other houses, many as rough and falling apart as the one he currently resides in. There are children playing outside, but they don’t come near his house. He’s the funny old man, the scary old man, and sometimes they dare each other to run up and ring his doorbell.

Yes, it’s time to move on, because he doesn’t like living here anymore.

He makes his dinner on the stove, heating the baked beans from the tin and then eating them with toast and tea in front of the television. He switches over from his usual cycle of News 24 on mute, and watches a drama set in the seventeenth century.

They’d got it wrong, of course, but they always did. It often brought him great amusement to watch programs about the past – dramas or documentaries – and to shake his head at their mistakes. It was as if they’d never been there.

Which, of course, they hadn’t.

The cat comes in when he’s washing up and he feeds her, strokes the top of her tabby head, enjoying the way she nuzzles against his fingers. She’ll have to come with him when he moves, he decides.

He sits at the table in the kitchen and flicks through an atlas. He’s not been to India for decades, so maybe there. And there are parts of the New World that he’s still never seen. But that’s too far to take a cat, so it’ll have to be somewhere closer for now.

He flicks the TV back to the news and watches for a bit: more wars, more natural disasters. He doesn’t really know what he’s looking for anymore.

He’d thought several times before, that this must be it. That now was the time, because how could it possibly be worse? In 1337 he’d been sure. And then again in 1645. In 1917 he’d been absolutely convinced that this had to be it. And then again in 1940. And then the humans had invented the atomic bomb and he’d realised there was no limit to how awful they could be.

And as the years passed a part of him despaired. Because if this wasn’t time, if this wasn’t the worst it could be, the time of greatest need, then he didn’t want to try and comprehend what could be.

But those were bad days.

Sometimes there were good days. Some places he made friends – although he had to be careful not to stay too long or they’d notice he wasn’t like them, that his hair didn’t grey as the years passed and that his body never wizened further, but remained forever the same – and people had been kind. He’d held positions of influence, tried to guide the country along its best path. He’s taught people, helped people, watched people.

And he’s waited.

Now he sits on his sofa, the cat curled warm and satisfied against his stomach, his laptop open on the coffee table.

His novels have been bestsellers for years – the critics praise his gritty historical realism - and he’s made quite a lot of money. He keeps his wealth divided in different accounts and tries not to spend much of it. Who knows what else he might need it for.

There’s an email from his editor: Dear Melvin… And he’s answered to that name for so long that he sometimes forgets that he ever had another one. After all, he’s reinvented himself so many times since then.

He works for a few hours, then locks up the house and goes to bed, the cat curled purring at the end of the bed. Night is the worst, not for the thoughts that circle in his head, or for the dreams that sometimes plague him, but because occasionally, when he wakes, he stretches out his hand across the bed to someone who isn’t there. Who hasn’t been there for years.

For centuries.

And on those days it’s hard to get out of bed and face the day and to remind himself that there will come a time, a day some unknowable time in the future, when Arthur will come back.