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emachinescat · 3 years

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Night and Morning with My Tears

A Merlin Fan-Fiction

by @emachinescat

@febuwhump day 20 - betrayal

Summary: Takes place when Merlin is Morgana’s prisoner in "A Servant of Two Masters.” When Morgana looks into Merlin’s eyes, what she sees there surprises and angers her in equal measure. Merlin has no right to act betrayed, not when his betrayal was so much worse.

Characters: Morgana, Merlin

Words: 1,756

TW: None

Notes: Takes place during “A Master of Two Servants,” with flashbacks to “The Fires of Idirsholas,” so there will be spoilers for both of those episodes!

Keep reading here, or on AO3!

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I was angry with my friend:

I told my wrath, my wrath did end.

I was angry with my foe:

I told it not, my wrath did grow.

- From “A Poison Tree” by William Blake

And I watered it in fears.

Night and morning with my tears:

And I sunned it with smiles.

And with soft deceitful wiles.

Morgana Pendragon stands before her prisoner, eyes cold and green like the deep forest. Despite her anger at her men for failing so miserably in their task, she cannot say that she is displeased to see Merlin again. Although the servant’s mere presence incites a furnace of rage within her, he could prove very useful in her plans to kill Arthur – and if she is able to play with him in the process, make him pay for what he did to her sister, then all the better.

Merlin hangs, unconscious, from his wrists. He is too tall for the stooping ceiling of her hovel, so his legs fold awkwardly beneath him. His chin rests against his chest, and he sports a nasty wound on one shoulder. She will probably end up healing it eventually, as infection is beginning to set in. She needs Merlin healthy for her plans for him. Still, she supposes she can let him suffer a bit before she takes on the task of cleaning the wound. Any amount of pain he endures will be nothing compared to what he has inflicted upon her, time and time again.

When she throws a cold bucket of water into his face, he wakes, coughing, and gasping; she smirks. When he regains his bearings and locks eyes with her, any satisfaction or pleasure she receives from his struggles melts away like candle wax under a flame. It has been a long time since she has looked into those very blue eyes from mere feet away, and what she finds in them is unsettling and unexpected – they are familiar, but foreign, and they stir up memories that she prefers to keep hidden, even from herself.

Stolen glances, conspiring winks, soft smiles. Fighting bandits in Ealdor, not out of duty, not for Camelot, but out of loyalty, for a friend. Defeating a clay monster, teasing Arthur, smuggling Mordred out of the citadel. This is a part of her life so disconnected from herself that she has all but convinced herself that it happened to someone else.

But a chilly fierceness has descended over his eyes like a veil, and it is as if she is looking at an entirely different person all together. Long ago, back before Morgana knew of her powers and heritage, when she was young and naive and living a life of luxury, Merlin had never failed to have a smile on his face. He spoke softly and kindly, and Morgana had loved the compassion for others she could sense in his gaze. That innocence has vanished, leaving him suspicious, cruel, and hard.

There is one emotion that Morgana detects in those blue eyes that causes a righteous fury to swell inside her like a summer tempest, tints her vision red and sends her hurtling back into her past, to the worst moment of her entire life, and she has to restrain herself from ending Merlin’s miserable existence then and there. Pace yourself, Morgana. You have use for him yet.

But it is a hard battle. Indignation seizes her heart and squeezes. How dare Merlin have the audacity to look betrayed when he looks back at her? How dare he act as if she is in the wrong, as if she is the one who has turned against her friends? Morgana has no friends, not anymore. She has no family. And she has Merlin to thank for that.

He has no right to act like she is betraying him by capturing him, holding him as her prisoner in the hovel he might as well have picked out for her. Morgana is the only one who has the right to feel betrayed – what she has planned for Merlin is nothing, nothing, compared to what he did to her.

***

Dying is strange, if you think about it. It is the one thing, other than being born, that unites all of humanity, all creatures. Two people may live out lives on opposite ends of the map, may never meet one another; one may be a king, the other a slave, one a scholar, the other a simpleton. And yet, someday, they both will die. Death unites us all, even as it tears us apart. The funny thing is, although everyone is plodding forward to the same destiny, only those who have walked the path to completion know what it is like. Death is the great equalizer, but no one who meets it can divulge its secret. It is at once the most common experience of mankind and its greatest secret.

Morgana came closer to discovering that secret than most people who have played the delicate strings of life and death when she was poisoned by a man she called her friend. Even now, when she recalls that moment when she realized that something was wrong – I can’t breathe, oh gods – her blood drains from her body and fear replaces it, cold and numbing and terrible. She remembers with complete clarity the feel of her throat swelling, can hear the rasp of her breath and see her vision becoming a vignette, dark around the edges, closing in, prowling ever closer.

Dying was bad enough. Dying of poison, feeling her body shut down, attack itself, turn on her, was hell. By far the worst part of Morgana’s death, however, was the moment she realized who was responsible. Her entire world came crashing down when her eyes, bulging from the panicked strain of trying to pull in breath where none existed, traveled from the discarded water-skin to the servant she called her friend. If she had doubted his involvement before, it was confirmed with the expression on his face. He reeked of regret and guilt; shame radiated off of him and contaminated the air around them.

Merlin had poisoned her. Merlin, the clumsy, goofy, kind-hearted, loyal servant of the prince, the man she had risked her life for more than once, who had treated her like a person instead of royalty, who had been her friend when she felt alone and afraid as her powers blossomed – Merlin was killing her. It was like she had been stabbed in the heart, that realization, and for a brief moment that could have been the rest of her life, that knowledge that she was dying at the hand of her friend hurt far more than her closing airway, than her lungs starved for air, than the pain and the fear and the darkness of death swooping ever closer.

She backed away, her limbs clumsy; they no longer belonged to her, only the living had use of them. Through pain-hazed vision, she watched as Merlin walked over, sat near her, saw his lips move without hearing his words, and then he was gathering her into his arms, holding her close, and she tried to fight, tried to call out, tried to escape, but – she was helpless.

He sat with her, held her, rocked her like she was a child, and she felt his face against the top of her head, felt warm tears hit her scalp, and she couldn’t breathe, her ears rang like tinny chimes and her vision flickered, her hands and feet tingled like she’d been sitting on them all day, and her chest wouldn’t move.

Oh gods.

The feel of his touch made her want to scream, burning vile fingerprints into her skin. She heard a terrible noise, a choking, garbled sound, and realized it was her. She tried to squirm away from him, from this disgusting facsimile of comfort, partially wondering what his game was, why he was acting like he cared about her, what he could possibly gain by holding her as she died of a poison he had administered. The other part of her knew that it didn’t matter, and resigned itself to the fact that the last touch she was going to feel before she died was that of the man who had killed her.

Her last few seconds of consciousness were comprised of pure terror; she floated in that empty space between life and death, felt everything and nothing, and was consumed by her fear and the overwhelming, blood-freezing understanding that she didn’t want to die. She had done nothing to deserve this; she had only been his friend. It didn’t matter that she didn’t wish for death, that she had plans for her life, that she could have made a difference, that she had a sister she was just getting to know and that she could do so much more. All control had been stripped away, any choice and free will had been stolen in an act of violence and betrayal that she simply could not understand.

Right before she gave in to the pain and the cold and the dark, she realized that she hated Merlin.

When she awoke, sometime later, to Morgause’s concerned brown eyes, not knowing how she could be alive but grateful nonetheless, that feeling of hatred hadn’t dimmed. In fact, it had grown, and it continued to fester, burrowing deep into her soul like a cherished tumor, one that she fed and nurtured, loved and despised in equal measure.

And she waited, knowing that a time would come to repay Merlin for the terrible sins he had committed against her, for taking the trust she had in him and crushing it beneath his ratty servant’s boot.

***

No, Merlin does not deserve to feel betrayed, to look at her through eyes tinted with hurt. He has no right to speak of loyalty, or friends. He pretends at being loyal to Arthur, but Morgana has seen his heart, has felt the rot inside of his soul, and knows that it is only a matter of time before he betrays his beloved king as well. Merlin is no mere servant – he is a hollow man, filled only with cruelty and hate, and sooner or later, he will destroy everything he loves.

Morgana is only helping that process along with the Fomorroh. She relishes the look of betrayal melting into fear. His wide eyes and hitched breath whisper comfort to her innermost hurts.

And when he screams, she smiles.

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