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crowie!
Happy birthday crowie! I tweaked it again - sorry - I'm compulsive that way ;-)
For someone, who knows who she is, who requested a fic masterlist. I'll work on it ;-) Incidentally, I know you don't comment much, but it would be appreciated on this one 'cause if you don't get what I've done/am trying to do here there's not much hope for anyone else getting it.
In the meantime, this fic belongs to the same 'verse as Three Degrees of Separation and Gambling Men but actually precedes them and so will stand alone. Those that are familiar with those stories will realise that this makes it a multi-crossover. Two fandoms are obvious in this story, the third less so, but I don't want to give it away.
Fair warning - this is baby!fic, however ascrowie said with touching faith - it is also me writing it - consider that also fair warning ;-))
Fathers, Brothers and Sons
Copyright Margaret Turner
26th August 2009
The tiles were nicotine yellow, the grout between them black with mildew, and against that backdrop the bloody handprint didn’t seem so out of place. The wall was probably the only thing keeping him upright, that and the precious bundles in his arms that would suffer more than he if he fell. The air was thick with blood, it was everywhere: his hands and arms, his clothes, even his face. He could taste it in the back of his throat, that and the bite of cheap whiskey – half anaesthetic, half antiseptic and all bad. He felt filthy; sick and grimy in a more than merely physical sense. If he could, he’d cry. What he wanted more than anything was to curl up and hide from a world that could do this, from what he had just been forced to do. He couldn’t though, not yet, probably not for another couple of decades at least, and while that was only a fraction of his life to date, it seemed an eternity right then.
He had passed beyond words or thought hours ago and now he was weary in a way that not even the many centuries of his life had ever caused. There were hot tears staining his face and his magic was a muted hum beneath his skin. If he didn’t feel so responsible he would have folded himself into its pleasant warmth and just hidden from the world for a while, but he hadn’t done that since the Great War and he wouldn’t do it now. His body was tired, but his magic was as ready and eager as it had always been, almost obscenely so – lack of power had never been his problem. Mentally though and emotionally, he was exhausted. The absolute focus and complete awareness he’d had to maintain for the last few hours had taken its toll and now he was almost at the point of collapse. He slowly slid down the wall, until his legs sprawled before him and the tiles were cold beneath him. He still didn’t know if he had done the right thing.
Merlin took a deep shuddering breath and looked down at the tiny twins in his arms, sleeping thankfully, and he drew them closer, bowing his head over them in gratitude and grief for the lives he had saved and the lives he couldn’t.
Unwillingly his gaze was drawn to the bathtub and the slender hand dangling limply over the rim; the dark blood staining the porcelain was almost obscene. He told himself she hadn’t stood a chance, whatever he had done, but he still wished he could have saved her. She had been as much a victim as the babes, as they all were; victims of the uncaring power of prophecy.
He looked at the newborns again, needing to be sure that they still breathed, for all he knew that as sensitive as he’d had to be to them for the last few hours he’d know the instant they stopped. They looked like all newborns: small and red and wrinkled, but he could still tell them apart. The larger slept contentedly, tucked against him like it already knew him and it was a struggle for Merlin not to reach out to that newborn mind and its newly reborn soul. He didn’t though; no child should have to deal with the lifetimes of memories it would trigger. Experience had long ago taught him that Arthur needed to know himself first, but it was still a temptation.
The second child was a small, sickly looking thing and it whimpered from time to time in its sleep. The doctor in him thought it should be in an ICU, but the deeper part of him could feel a kinship with it. Even now he could feel the child drawing at the edges of his magic, barely noticeable, but enough to keep it alive in the face of all the odds. He didn’t begrudge it – power he had aplenty – but he sympathised; to be so young to have awakened the magic in him, in this day and age it would probably be even more difficult for him than it had been for Merlin. He could feel the way the magic coiled around the child and the fierce will to survive that had drawn it, a will he hoped would be enough to carry the babe to adulthood. It was that strength of will that had made the difference, he thought, as he glanced once again at the bathtub and its grim contents.
Four souls so entangled in destinies and prophecies and chance, each fighting to survive a universe that could accept only two of them, dragging each other down as each tried simply to be. She had been the first to give up, old enough to override her sense of self-preservation and with a mother’s instinct for her children’s survival. Then there were three, the culmination of prophecies that would shake the world, and only two small bodies to house them in. He had tried not to interfere, not to tip the balance in any way, concentrating only on ensuring that those souls would have a place to live not which souls they would be. He wasn’t sure at what point three had become two, but as much as it pained him, he was almost glad not to know when he had failed.
He closed his eyes; he had tried his best, but even the very wise could not see all ends and he had never counted himself one of those. Prophecies were tricky things, he knew from bitter experience: they twisted and writhed whenever you tried to pin them down – finding the loopholes in any escape attempt and warping coincidence until reality stretched at the seams in their drive to be fulfilled. They had a kind of gravity all of their own, drawing lives and deaths into their influence without regard for mere human feeling. For two prophecies of such magnitude to have become so entwined was inevitable once they came into contact, their own unique gravities working both for and against each other, but they never should have touched at all for precisely that reason, the universe had its own failsafes against such things. He didn’t know who had the power, the sight, to have set this up and the list of those who might want to was longer than he cared to imagine. It could even have been coincidence, though of the most monumental proportions, but he doubted it. Finding out who it had been and making them pay was a task for another day though.
He hoped he’d done the right thing, but he had no way of knowing, not for another few decades at least. It took an effort of will he barely believed himself capable of to force his mind away from the possible repercussions of his actions.
He wasn’t surprised that when he eventually looked up he saw Methos standing there as if he’d always been a part of the tragic scene. He wasn’t entirely sure he hadn’t called him at some point in the night when everything seemed to be going wrong and the threads of destiny had slipped through his blood-slicked fingers however briefly.
Methos didn’t say anything for which Merlin was grateful if not entirely surprised. He’d seen the ancient Immortal fill the air with inconsequentials, tall tales and unbelievable truths, but between them silence had been the rule more often than not. He looked again at the children in his arms, the familiar and the not, and he knew why Methos was here.
His slowness as he shifted the bundles in his arms was as much awkwardness as reluctance as Merlin tried to get to his feet without dropping them. He could feel their negligible physical weight completely at odds with the impact these tiny babes would have on the world. He wasn’t sure when or even if Methos had crossed the intervening space to him, but the Immortal was suddenly crouched before him and it was easier than he expected to offer Arthur up to a pair of arms that held him as carefully and confidently as he could ever have wished.
He watched Methos’ face intently as Methos studied the baby in his arms. Sometimes Merlin could see the similarity in the shape of Methos’ face, the pallor of his skin and the darkness of his hair; and sometimes he saw them elsewhere: in the eyes that had seen too much and the power that seethed beneath his skin. On rare occasions, such as this one, he could see both and he understood then how his own legends had grown so much and why people could be so afraid of him. It shone through clearer than any mirror could ever show, but despite all that, he had never been afraid of Methos.
“Please,” he said softly and it was neither request nor plea. He didn’t need to say ‘take him someplace safe, find him a family that loves him, hide him from me until he’s ready for us to meet again’. It was all implicit in that one word and he knew Methos understood.
Merlin deliberately turned his gaze away from Arthur to the small child still in his arms, knowing it would be too easy to change his mind otherwise and he knew he was not what Arthur needed yet, however much he might need Arthur right now. Fatherhood was not his forté; his power added a dimension to it that frightened him as his power alone never had. Even though he sometimes hated it, he found he could excuse Uther some of his behaviour toward his son. He tried not to consciously apply that hard-learned truth to his own life either, but he knew with a certainty he was not always comfortable with, that it was why he had never blamed the ancient Immortal for what he had once done so very long ago.
Merlin turned his head away from his own thoughts and saw the man he had left sprawled asleep in the threadbare armchair hours ago, rumpled and unshaven, reeking of cheap whiskey and cigarettes as thick as his Liverpudlian accent. It hadn’t taken much to tip him into sleep; it had taken more effort not to tip him further when Merlin realised he had arrived too late. The twisted wire coat hanger already gory - so innocuous a thing to cause such pain – and two deaths that would have been four without Merlin’s intervention. It seemed grossly unfair to surrender a child that had already fought so hard to live to such a father, but he had to. He could justify taking Arthur, but not this other child, no matter how much it pained him not to.
He didn’t take his eyes from the spelled man, but he didn’t need to look to be aware of Methos’ return. The thought sprang up unbidden and though it unsettled him, it made an awful kind of sense. He had never been comfortable with killing, though of necessity he had. Methos had been a doctor more often than he, but the old Immortal had been a killer also. Sometimes Merlin wondered if there was some arcane balance between the lives Methos took and the ones he saved, but he suspected he’d never know for sure. There were a thousand ways to kill the sleeping man, but in his mind’s eye it was the simple line of a knife across the throat that did it.
“I could,” Methos’ voice was soft, the first time he had spoken. The words sank in slowly and Merlin turned them over in his mind, savouring the taste of them, letting them decide him.
He didn’t look up, didn’t move, “No,” he decided eventually. It wasn’t in him to kill like this, whether Methos’ hand held the blade or not; there had been too much death already this evening. He turned to look at Methos and watched human expression slip away as the Immortal stared at the sleeping man, making his own decision anyway. Merlin felt his own eyes flare gold in sympathetic resonance with the magic he could feel gathering in the small room; his prescience had never been more than patchy at best, but it wasn’t a precise art anyway – by definition it couldn’t be. It didn’t take prescience however to see that a man who forced an illegal abortion on his wife, nearly killing mother and children both, probably wouldn’t be the best father for the survivors. It was possible perhaps that the loss of his wife would make the man a better father, but Merlin knew with bitter certainty that it was a vain hope.
The child stirred in his arms waking in response to the same magic Merlin could feel and he looked down, giving the boy all the attention he’d probably never get growing up. Unfocused eyes sought a target as tiny hands flailed energetically before latching tightly onto an offered finger.
“Oh you’ll be trouble one day, won’t you?” Methos’ laugh was soft and Merlin looked up startled. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen such gentle amusement and indulgence on the Immortal’s face.
Green eyes looked up and met his, frighteningly direct, “Reminds me of a boy I once knew.”
No voice so soft should shake him so utterly, but Merlin had to lock his knees to stay upright and he hastily blamed the exhaustion he could feel creeping along his veins. He’d sleep for a week after this provided the nightmares didn’t wake him.
Then Methos carefully extracted his finger from the tiny fist, lifting the slight weight from Merlin’s arms and cradling the newborn as gently as Merlin had.
“Go,” he said softly. As it so often was between them, the single word carried a weight of meaning as the Immortal offered to bear the responsibility of this tiny child’s life for him.
Merlin straightened and met green eyes that held a depth no mortal’s ever could in a face that looked almost as young as his own. Something less than realisation, but more than impulse trickled slow and molten down his spine and it might have been merely tiredness-induced stupidity, but Merlin didn’t let that stop him. He reached out and gently touched the child’s head as it wobbled uncertainly, trying to follow the sound of their voices. Then Merlin let his magic rise as he rarely ever did, felt it ripple over his skin and down his arms like a river of gold, until it streamed from his fingertips. He hoped it would be enough to last the child until it could survive on its own or at least until either of them could get to him; it was the best he could do under the circumstances.
Merlin watched the magic slowly sink into the child’s skin and hoped that the fact it looked healthier already wasn’t just his tired mind playing tricks on him.
“I used to think sometimes that I was luckier than Arthur,” he admitted quietly, still watching the child, “that it was better not to have a father at all than to have some of the fathers he’s had.” They’d never spoken of this, not in a thousand years and more.
Methos said nothing and Merlin looked up to see eyes like fallen stars, the very mirror of his own, “It took me longer than it should have to realise I was luckier than I thought.”
FIN
13th December 2009
crowie! I tweaked it again - sorry - I'm compulsive that way ;-)For someone, who knows who she is, who requested a fic masterlist. I'll work on it ;-) Incidentally, I know you don't comment much, but it would be appreciated on this one 'cause if you don't get what I've done/am trying to do here there's not much hope for anyone else getting it.
In the meantime, this fic belongs to the same 'verse as Three Degrees of Separation and Gambling Men but actually precedes them and so will stand alone. Those that are familiar with those stories will realise that this makes it a multi-crossover. Two fandoms are obvious in this story, the third less so, but I don't want to give it away.
Fair warning - this is baby!fic, however as
crowie said with touching faith - it is also me writing it - consider that also fair warning ;-))Fathers, Brothers and Sons
Copyright Margaret Turner
26th August 2009
The tiles were nicotine yellow, the grout between them black with mildew, and against that backdrop the bloody handprint didn’t seem so out of place. The wall was probably the only thing keeping him upright, that and the precious bundles in his arms that would suffer more than he if he fell. The air was thick with blood, it was everywhere: his hands and arms, his clothes, even his face. He could taste it in the back of his throat, that and the bite of cheap whiskey – half anaesthetic, half antiseptic and all bad. He felt filthy; sick and grimy in a more than merely physical sense. If he could, he’d cry. What he wanted more than anything was to curl up and hide from a world that could do this, from what he had just been forced to do. He couldn’t though, not yet, probably not for another couple of decades at least, and while that was only a fraction of his life to date, it seemed an eternity right then.
He had passed beyond words or thought hours ago and now he was weary in a way that not even the many centuries of his life had ever caused. There were hot tears staining his face and his magic was a muted hum beneath his skin. If he didn’t feel so responsible he would have folded himself into its pleasant warmth and just hidden from the world for a while, but he hadn’t done that since the Great War and he wouldn’t do it now. His body was tired, but his magic was as ready and eager as it had always been, almost obscenely so – lack of power had never been his problem. Mentally though and emotionally, he was exhausted. The absolute focus and complete awareness he’d had to maintain for the last few hours had taken its toll and now he was almost at the point of collapse. He slowly slid down the wall, until his legs sprawled before him and the tiles were cold beneath him. He still didn’t know if he had done the right thing.
Merlin took a deep shuddering breath and looked down at the tiny twins in his arms, sleeping thankfully, and he drew them closer, bowing his head over them in gratitude and grief for the lives he had saved and the lives he couldn’t.
Unwillingly his gaze was drawn to the bathtub and the slender hand dangling limply over the rim; the dark blood staining the porcelain was almost obscene. He told himself she hadn’t stood a chance, whatever he had done, but he still wished he could have saved her. She had been as much a victim as the babes, as they all were; victims of the uncaring power of prophecy.
He looked at the newborns again, needing to be sure that they still breathed, for all he knew that as sensitive as he’d had to be to them for the last few hours he’d know the instant they stopped. They looked like all newborns: small and red and wrinkled, but he could still tell them apart. The larger slept contentedly, tucked against him like it already knew him and it was a struggle for Merlin not to reach out to that newborn mind and its newly reborn soul. He didn’t though; no child should have to deal with the lifetimes of memories it would trigger. Experience had long ago taught him that Arthur needed to know himself first, but it was still a temptation.
The second child was a small, sickly looking thing and it whimpered from time to time in its sleep. The doctor in him thought it should be in an ICU, but the deeper part of him could feel a kinship with it. Even now he could feel the child drawing at the edges of his magic, barely noticeable, but enough to keep it alive in the face of all the odds. He didn’t begrudge it – power he had aplenty – but he sympathised; to be so young to have awakened the magic in him, in this day and age it would probably be even more difficult for him than it had been for Merlin. He could feel the way the magic coiled around the child and the fierce will to survive that had drawn it, a will he hoped would be enough to carry the babe to adulthood. It was that strength of will that had made the difference, he thought, as he glanced once again at the bathtub and its grim contents.
Four souls so entangled in destinies and prophecies and chance, each fighting to survive a universe that could accept only two of them, dragging each other down as each tried simply to be. She had been the first to give up, old enough to override her sense of self-preservation and with a mother’s instinct for her children’s survival. Then there were three, the culmination of prophecies that would shake the world, and only two small bodies to house them in. He had tried not to interfere, not to tip the balance in any way, concentrating only on ensuring that those souls would have a place to live not which souls they would be. He wasn’t sure at what point three had become two, but as much as it pained him, he was almost glad not to know when he had failed.
He closed his eyes; he had tried his best, but even the very wise could not see all ends and he had never counted himself one of those. Prophecies were tricky things, he knew from bitter experience: they twisted and writhed whenever you tried to pin them down – finding the loopholes in any escape attempt and warping coincidence until reality stretched at the seams in their drive to be fulfilled. They had a kind of gravity all of their own, drawing lives and deaths into their influence without regard for mere human feeling. For two prophecies of such magnitude to have become so entwined was inevitable once they came into contact, their own unique gravities working both for and against each other, but they never should have touched at all for precisely that reason, the universe had its own failsafes against such things. He didn’t know who had the power, the sight, to have set this up and the list of those who might want to was longer than he cared to imagine. It could even have been coincidence, though of the most monumental proportions, but he doubted it. Finding out who it had been and making them pay was a task for another day though.
He hoped he’d done the right thing, but he had no way of knowing, not for another few decades at least. It took an effort of will he barely believed himself capable of to force his mind away from the possible repercussions of his actions.
He wasn’t surprised that when he eventually looked up he saw Methos standing there as if he’d always been a part of the tragic scene. He wasn’t entirely sure he hadn’t called him at some point in the night when everything seemed to be going wrong and the threads of destiny had slipped through his blood-slicked fingers however briefly.
Methos didn’t say anything for which Merlin was grateful if not entirely surprised. He’d seen the ancient Immortal fill the air with inconsequentials, tall tales and unbelievable truths, but between them silence had been the rule more often than not. He looked again at the children in his arms, the familiar and the not, and he knew why Methos was here.
His slowness as he shifted the bundles in his arms was as much awkwardness as reluctance as Merlin tried to get to his feet without dropping them. He could feel their negligible physical weight completely at odds with the impact these tiny babes would have on the world. He wasn’t sure when or even if Methos had crossed the intervening space to him, but the Immortal was suddenly crouched before him and it was easier than he expected to offer Arthur up to a pair of arms that held him as carefully and confidently as he could ever have wished.
He watched Methos’ face intently as Methos studied the baby in his arms. Sometimes Merlin could see the similarity in the shape of Methos’ face, the pallor of his skin and the darkness of his hair; and sometimes he saw them elsewhere: in the eyes that had seen too much and the power that seethed beneath his skin. On rare occasions, such as this one, he could see both and he understood then how his own legends had grown so much and why people could be so afraid of him. It shone through clearer than any mirror could ever show, but despite all that, he had never been afraid of Methos.
“Please,” he said softly and it was neither request nor plea. He didn’t need to say ‘take him someplace safe, find him a family that loves him, hide him from me until he’s ready for us to meet again’. It was all implicit in that one word and he knew Methos understood.
Merlin deliberately turned his gaze away from Arthur to the small child still in his arms, knowing it would be too easy to change his mind otherwise and he knew he was not what Arthur needed yet, however much he might need Arthur right now. Fatherhood was not his forté; his power added a dimension to it that frightened him as his power alone never had. Even though he sometimes hated it, he found he could excuse Uther some of his behaviour toward his son. He tried not to consciously apply that hard-learned truth to his own life either, but he knew with a certainty he was not always comfortable with, that it was why he had never blamed the ancient Immortal for what he had once done so very long ago.
Merlin turned his head away from his own thoughts and saw the man he had left sprawled asleep in the threadbare armchair hours ago, rumpled and unshaven, reeking of cheap whiskey and cigarettes as thick as his Liverpudlian accent. It hadn’t taken much to tip him into sleep; it had taken more effort not to tip him further when Merlin realised he had arrived too late. The twisted wire coat hanger already gory - so innocuous a thing to cause such pain – and two deaths that would have been four without Merlin’s intervention. It seemed grossly unfair to surrender a child that had already fought so hard to live to such a father, but he had to. He could justify taking Arthur, but not this other child, no matter how much it pained him not to.
He didn’t take his eyes from the spelled man, but he didn’t need to look to be aware of Methos’ return. The thought sprang up unbidden and though it unsettled him, it made an awful kind of sense. He had never been comfortable with killing, though of necessity he had. Methos had been a doctor more often than he, but the old Immortal had been a killer also. Sometimes Merlin wondered if there was some arcane balance between the lives Methos took and the ones he saved, but he suspected he’d never know for sure. There were a thousand ways to kill the sleeping man, but in his mind’s eye it was the simple line of a knife across the throat that did it.
“I could,” Methos’ voice was soft, the first time he had spoken. The words sank in slowly and Merlin turned them over in his mind, savouring the taste of them, letting them decide him.
He didn’t look up, didn’t move, “No,” he decided eventually. It wasn’t in him to kill like this, whether Methos’ hand held the blade or not; there had been too much death already this evening. He turned to look at Methos and watched human expression slip away as the Immortal stared at the sleeping man, making his own decision anyway. Merlin felt his own eyes flare gold in sympathetic resonance with the magic he could feel gathering in the small room; his prescience had never been more than patchy at best, but it wasn’t a precise art anyway – by definition it couldn’t be. It didn’t take prescience however to see that a man who forced an illegal abortion on his wife, nearly killing mother and children both, probably wouldn’t be the best father for the survivors. It was possible perhaps that the loss of his wife would make the man a better father, but Merlin knew with bitter certainty that it was a vain hope.
The child stirred in his arms waking in response to the same magic Merlin could feel and he looked down, giving the boy all the attention he’d probably never get growing up. Unfocused eyes sought a target as tiny hands flailed energetically before latching tightly onto an offered finger.
“Oh you’ll be trouble one day, won’t you?” Methos’ laugh was soft and Merlin looked up startled. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen such gentle amusement and indulgence on the Immortal’s face.
Green eyes looked up and met his, frighteningly direct, “Reminds me of a boy I once knew.”
No voice so soft should shake him so utterly, but Merlin had to lock his knees to stay upright and he hastily blamed the exhaustion he could feel creeping along his veins. He’d sleep for a week after this provided the nightmares didn’t wake him.
Then Methos carefully extracted his finger from the tiny fist, lifting the slight weight from Merlin’s arms and cradling the newborn as gently as Merlin had.
“Go,” he said softly. As it so often was between them, the single word carried a weight of meaning as the Immortal offered to bear the responsibility of this tiny child’s life for him.
Merlin straightened and met green eyes that held a depth no mortal’s ever could in a face that looked almost as young as his own. Something less than realisation, but more than impulse trickled slow and molten down his spine and it might have been merely tiredness-induced stupidity, but Merlin didn’t let that stop him. He reached out and gently touched the child’s head as it wobbled uncertainly, trying to follow the sound of their voices. Then Merlin let his magic rise as he rarely ever did, felt it ripple over his skin and down his arms like a river of gold, until it streamed from his fingertips. He hoped it would be enough to last the child until it could survive on its own or at least until either of them could get to him; it was the best he could do under the circumstances.
Merlin watched the magic slowly sink into the child’s skin and hoped that the fact it looked healthier already wasn’t just his tired mind playing tricks on him.
“I used to think sometimes that I was luckier than Arthur,” he admitted quietly, still watching the child, “that it was better not to have a father at all than to have some of the fathers he’s had.” They’d never spoken of this, not in a thousand years and more.
Methos said nothing and Merlin looked up to see eyes like fallen stars, the very mirror of his own, “It took me longer than it should have to realise I was luckier than I thought.”
FIN
13th December 2009