Chapter Text
His hand lingered on the heavy brass doorknob a second longer than necessary.
When he pulled, the old wooden door gave a satisfying click, solid and final, the kind of sound that spoke of permanence. The door alone was over a hundred years old. It had worn many colours in its time, but Merlin liked the current black lacquer best: understated, quietly commanding. A bit like him.
The street outside was quiet at this hour. Winchester always felt quiet in the mornings, as though the city were remembering itself before anyone else had the chance to. The early light fell soft and angled across the cobbles of Cathedral Close, gilding the stones and dappling the leaves of the great oak that stood in the shadow of the cathedral. The air was crisp with the first threat of autumn, and the scent of damp stone and moss clung to the edges of the day.
Merlin liked Winchester. It was old and immovable, steeped in tradition and memory. Its roots reached through Roman roads and Saxon earth, but older things still clung to the bedrock here: stories, echoes, remnants that had never quite faded. It felt safe. Familiar. If anywhere still could, it felt like home.
Merlin had been living and working in Winchester on and off since the middle of the nineteenth century, though dates had long since blurred into irrelevance. He had been teaching some version of Arthurian Studies for well over a century, though not always here and not always under that name. Names changed. Curricula shifted. Buildings were renamed after benefactors whose money had outlived their manners. But the myths stayed the same.
Arthur died. Camelot fell. Over and over again.
This year, though, was different.
It was time again for a Recasting. Time to let go of good old Professor 'Dragoon' Emrys, who had politely informed the Chancellor of his decision to retire, recommended his great-nephew as his successor, and then quietly died over the summer.
Recastings were always painful. Not physically. That part was easy enough: paperwork, forged identities, careful adjustments to records and photographs. The pain lay elsewhere. Each new life chipped away at something essential. Another self fading away, another name abandoned, another lifetime of patience consigned to silence and oblivion.
He glanced at the old oak across the Close. It was not a square, of course, and technically not even a close, as a small footpath led back to the Cathedral. It was all a bit of a lie, a subterfuge. But then so was time. A squirrel darted up the trunk, tail flicking, eyes bright. Merlin remembered the day that oak had been planted. Before that, there had been a pear tree, gnarled and stooped with age, generous with its fruit. Merlin had always meant to share its pears with someone.
He never had. There was no one.
That was the way of it, more often than not. He craved connection more than he cared to admit. He liked people. He liked their laughter, their brilliance, their warmth. But friendship meant permanence, and permanence meant interference. Questions. Attachments. People who noticed when you changed your name. People who grieved you when you disappeared.
So he kept to the edges. He let himself age, slowly and subtly, until it was time for a Recasting. Then he vanished, re-emerged under a new name, and began again. He lived quietly in a large house with tall windows, creaking floors, and more rooms than one man needed. Enough for an army. Sometimes he rented them to students, not for the money, but for the comfort of their company.
Students were better. They came and went. After a few years, they moved on with their lives, never thinking twice. No one stayed long enough to notice the patterns.
Once back in the familiar confines of the English department, he would leave a handwritten flyer on the corkboard in the student union. He had argued more than once that Arthurian Studies belonged in History, not English, but had been rebuked with the dreary firmness of people who thought filing systems were moral principles.
ROOM AVAILABLE – CLOSE TO CAMPUS. Flexible terms. Call (pick a tab below) or drop by my office. — Prof. Emrys.
The little tabs at the bottom would be gone by the next morning.
Some students stayed for a term. Some stayed for years. Some could not pay, and he let it slide. He didn't mind. It helped, somehow, to offer something. Even small gestures might tip the world a little more kindly on its axis. That had to count for something.
One day.
Academic years were a slow hum, steady enough to give structure to eternity.
Essays. Exams. Graduation. Grief. Repeat.
Each year became a strange little ritual of its own. Always the same on the surface, until he looked back after ten years and saw that everything had shifted. People came and went. Some made a splash; others disappeared with a whisper. Some died.
Those were the worst.
They reminded him of Arthur, reopening age-old wounds that refused to heal.
Merlin adjusted the strap of his leather satchel, another convenient “bequest” from his great-uncle, like the house itself, and set off across the Close. The university was not far, just a few streets through the older part of town. The breeze picked up as he walked, carrying a fine drizzle with it, and he turned his collar up against the chill. The air tasted like old rain and decaying leaves.
He passed the cathedral without looking up. He knew every stone, every hidden carving, every echo in its great nave. It had been a Saxon church, once. Then Norman. Then rebuilt again. That was the thing about holy places: they burnt, they crumbled, but they did not vanish. They layered themselves.
Like lives.
Like lies.
He stepped through the medieval archway that marked the university’s southern boundary. It had not been a university when he first came to Winchester. Just a seminary then, and a scattering of halls. Now it had faculty buildings, coffee shops, and an MA in Arthurian Studies that was not even the strangest degree on offer.
Merlin exhaled.
The year was beginning.
***
The walk to the university only took a few minutes, a pleasant meander through Winchester’s oldest streets, where the past clung like ivy to the present. Merlin carried a paper cup of coffee, steam curling up toward the soft grey sky. He passed the cathedral with a faint nod, as if acknowledging an old friend he didn't care to speak to today.
It was early still. The city was not quite awake, the pavements not yet scuffed by students or cluttered with coffee cups. He liked this time. No one watching. No one asking.
The Arthurian Studies building stood at the edge of the university’s historical quadrant. It was more of a repurposed chapel wing than modern faculty block. A tall, slender arch framed its wooden door, and stained glass windows caught the light in slanted fragments of saints and swords.
Swords. Gleaming in the light. As if he needed reminding.
Merlin pushed the door open and stepped into the quiet foyer. The air inside was warmer, and smelt faintly of old paper and printer ink. A woman he hadn't seen before sat at the front desk, typing with quiet concentration.
So Martha had retired then.
He would miss her, and would never be able to tell her.
The new secretary looked up as he approached. Her name tag read: Freya.
Merlin’s breath caught.
She was younger than she should have been, perhaps twenty-one, maybe twenty-two, with honey-blonde hair tied back in a loose ponytail and the kind of natural warmth that made people tell her things. Not that Freya, of course. This one was human. Alive. Smiling. Definitely not cursed.
But the name landed like a stone in his stomach all the same.
“Hi,” she said, blinking at him. “Sorry, are you here for student registration?”
“Not quite.” He offered a small, polite smile. “Merlin Emrys. I’m the new lecturer in Arthurian Studies.”
There was a strange, strained moment of silence between them.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, sorry. It’s just… you look really young to be Professor Emrys.”
“That’s what they say,” he replied dryly, and took a sip of his coffee.
She flushed a little and typed something into her computer. “Your office is ready. 2.14, down the corridor, then on the right and…” She bit her lip. “Should I take you?”
“No, I’ll be fine, thank you.”
She let out a relieved sigh. “Okay. Let me just print your welcome pack.”
“Thank you, Freya,” he said, and almost winced at the name. But he had manners, after all.
He took the printed folder from her and made his way down the corridor, heels tapping quietly on the flagstone floor.
It was strange, stepping back into a place he had known in several lives and under more than one name. Stranger still to do so without the mask of age. At Bangor, once, he had been the promising young scholar. In Winchester, more recently, he had become Dragoon the Great: brilliant, mad, ancient, and slightly terrifying. He had worn that persona like a robe, hunched and white-haired, peering at manuscripts through cracked spectacles while generations of students tried to work out whether he was a genius, a lunatic, or both.
Now, clean-shaven, dark-haired, and young enough to be mistaken for a PhD student, he was a different man entirely.
And yet he wasn't.
Just the same soul in a younger casing, spinning the same old lie.
Most of the faculty had accepted his forged academic history without much protest: impressive degrees, a glittering list of conferences, a glowing recommendation from his “great-uncle”, and enough institutional memory blurred by restructuring to make awkward questions inconvenient. A few had raised eyebrows.
One had raised hell.
Dr Adrian Hargreaves, English Literature, Restoration specialist, and perpetually sourpuss, had expected a promotion. Instead, he had watched as the department welcomed a “twenty-something” with the confidence of a bishop and the vocabulary of a Victorian.
Merlin had not spoken to Hargreaves yet. Not in this body.
He was not in a rush to do so.
He passed the wall of framed photographs just outside the common room. There, halfway down the row, was a picture of his older self beaming amidst a pile of dusty books, robes bunched at the shoulder, eyes suspiciously sharp for a man of ninety-two. He was flanked by two visiting lecturers and a terrified student.
Merlin didn't look at it.
He didn't have to.
He knew exactly how many wrinkles the photograph showed. He knew the smell of that robe. He knew how much the old man’s shoulder had ached that day.
He moved on.
***
The lecture theatre was one of the newer ones, light-filled and open, with modern tiered seating and exposed stone arches that hinted at the chapel it used to be. Someone, most likely Hargreaves, had left a cluster of empty coffee cups on the front desk, which Merlin moved aside without comment.
He placed his notes down, though he wouldn’t use them. He never did. A glance was enough. He had, after all, been giving some version of this lecture for centuries.
A murmur rippled through the room as the last few students settled into their seats. There were perhaps forty in total, most clutching phones or jotting down the date on fresh notepads. A few looked at him with mild curiosity, as if still unsure whether this was a joke. Their lecturer couldn’t possibly be this young, could he?
He smiled faintly. Let them wonder.
“Good morning,” he said, his voice steady, clipped, with a trace of old vowels tucked into the syllables. “Welcome to the Arthurian Studies MA, module I: Origins and Early Myth. I'm Professor Emrys.”
He paused, letting the hush stretch just a beat longer than expected.
“There are more books written about King Arthur,” he continued, “than there have been kings of England. Most of them are wrong. Some are right. In part. I was—” His tongue betrayed him, but only for a second. “—sorry. We’ll be exploring that over the next few months.”
There were a few polite laughs, and more than one smirk. Good. He had their attention.
He began to pace deliberately, hands sometimes tucked behind his back, sometimes gesturing mid-thought. His voice warmed as he moved through the opening of the syllabus: early Celtic traditions, the Welsh Mabinogion, the first appearance of Arturus in Latin chronicles, the political uses of myth.
“Arthur, as a figure, is as much a mirror as a man,” he said. “He becomes what the people need him to be: a general, a king, a saint, a failure. A question. A promise. A ghost.”
Pens scratched. A few students had put down their phones.
“What we’ll try to do in this course,” he went on, “is look beyond the crowns and swords. We’ll talk about the world these stories came from: the early medieval landscape, the shifting tribal powers, the folklore of Britain before Britain was a concept.”
He paused again, eyes scanning the room.
“We’ll also be questioning the sources. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae might be entertaining, but it’s hardly gospel. He skips quite a lot. Such as the fact that Arthur, if he existed, was probably not particularly noble, not especially good at sharing, and in his youth, frankly, a bit of a brat.”
That joke got him a few laughs. One girl in the front row scribbled something with visible glee.
“We’ll also talk about the presence of magic. Not as fireballs and dragons, but as something far subtler. Something feared, suppressed, yet stitched through every account. Magic in these stories was both everywhere and nowhere. Unspoken. Unwritten. Repressed.”
He felt it then: the room shifting into stillness, into listening. It was not spellcraft or charms, but the older, subtler magic of words. He let that settle in him for a while.
Then something caught his eye.
In one of the middle rows, a student was leaning back in his chair like the whole thing was a joke! He had wavy dark hair tucked behind his ears, and an air of amusement that flickered just beneath the surface. He had the sort of look that said he got away with everything. Not quite handsome, but compelling. There was a glint in his eye that tugged at something half-buried in Merlin's chest. It wasn’t him, of course. But it was close enough to Gwaine to hurt.
Merlin’s voice hitched, just slightly.
He turned back to the whiteboard, covering the pause.
“—and of course, no early account agrees on how many knights sat at the Round Table. Some say twelve, others over a hundred and fifty.”
He glanced again.
The same young man now nudged the one next to him, a tall, composed, dark-eyed, and equally young man with long fingers steepled over his knee. There was something graceful about the way he held himself. Something reserved, contained. As if he measured everything before he spoke. He had the bearing of someone who was used to holding silence, and a sadness behind his gaze that Merlin didn't want to remember.
Lancelot.
No. No, that was ridiculous.
His gaze drifted further back, and caught on another student: older than most of the others, fair-haired, broad-shouldered, sitting very still among the restless shift of laptops, notepads and coats. He was watching Merlin with a quiet, assessing attention that made something in Merlin’s chest tighten. For one dangerous second, his mind conjured images of polished mail and a red cloak. For the love of Camelot.
They never changed, he thought, even as his voice kept moving through the lecture. Not really. Just names. Faces. Voices in the dark.
“Any questions so far?”
A hand went up. It was the wavy-haired one.
“So, wait, if the earliest texts don’t even agree Arthur was a king, why do we always imagine him with a crown?”
Merlin blinked. The boy was grinning.
“Excellent question,” he said, recovering. “Because Geoffrey of Monmouth had an agenda, and Hollywood has no imagination.”
He got a proper laugh this time.
“What’s your name?” Merlin asked, before he could stop himself.
“Gavin Greene,” the boy said, still grinning.
Of course it was.
He turned to the board again, resisting the urge to run.
The sky was darkening by the time Merlin reached the house again. The autumn drizzle had turned steady, soaking into the collar of his coat. He let himself in with a muttered word rather than the key, the door swinging open with a creak that was somehow both old and familiar.
Inside, the warmth hit him like a sigh. The house held its heat well, thick-walled and tightly built, filled with the deep hush of old wood and older silence.
He dropped his satchel by the stairs, peeled off his coat, and stood in the hall for a moment without moving. The grandfather clock ticked softly from his office. Rain tapped at the windows.
To the right, the shared living room waited, with its deep sofas, threadbare rugs, and shelves that mingled classics with console game cases. A while back, someone had left a blanket slung carelessly over the arm of the chair. There was no student yet this year, but they would come. Sooner or later. They always did.
To the left, there was the study.
He crossed the hallway and unlocked the door with a brass key worn smooth by decades of use.
The room smelt of dust and paper and the faintest trace of lavender oil. It was a habit from another life, meant to preserve parchment. Shelves lined the walls, buckling slightly under the weight of old volumes. Ancient maps curled in a basket by the hearth. A cluster of rolled manuscripts had spilt open across the floor, and he stepped carefully over them.
At the centre sat his desk: vast, oak, scarred by centuries. Piled high with annotated texts, loose sheaves, black notebooks, and half-written lectures.
Beneath it, though he hadn’t looked in months, he knew the blade still lay in its cloth wrappings. Untouched. Waiting.
He didn’t sit straight away. Instead, he crossed to the kitchen at the back of the house and made a cup of tea out of habit. The kettle clicked. The teabag steeped.
He carried the cup back to the study, set it down on the corner of the desk, and forgot it immediately.
He stared at nothing.
They looked like them.
That was the trouble. Not that the students reminded him of people. They always did, in a vague, generational way. But these ones... that boy’s smile, the way he lounged like he was born to charm and brawl and never apologise. And the other, who looked at the world as if it might fall apart unless he carried it gently in his hands.
Gavin.
His breath caught. Not quite Gwaine, but close enough. Maybe.
It’s just coincidence, he told himself. Wouldn’t be the first time.
But even as he thought it, he didn’t believe it. Not really. It was too sharp, too specific. After all this time, faces blurred, even ones he’d loved. He’d tried not to forget them. He'd held them in his memory like pressed flowers. But memory was soft. Untrustworthy. It gave you what you wanted, not what was real.
Still.
There had been something. Something ancient shifting in the lecture hall. That familiar twinge in the air, like a breath before a storm.
He glanced at the cold tea. The surface was undisturbed.
Still.
Like him.
But the feeling wouldn’t let go: that faint pressure behind the eyes, the tightening at the back of the neck. Something had shifted today. Not enough to name. But enough to notice.
He leant forward slowly, pushing aside a stack of printed journal articles and a half-open atlas of ancient Britain. Somewhere beneath the clutter, he unearthed his laptop, scuffed and perpetually dusty no matter how many times he cleaned it. He flipped it open and tapped the touchpad. The screen blinked to life with a soft glow.
There it was. Still unopened.
Subject: Finalised Enrolment List – MA in Arthurian Studies
He hesitated. His thumb hovered over the trackpad.
Then he clicked.
The file opened with the usual formatting — student ID, course codes, names in alphabetical order. His eyes skimmed past the first few lines without seeing.
Brennan, Alice
Carpenter, Amelia
D’Souza, Rishi
Greene, Gavin
There it was. Not just the resemblance. The name. Greene. Like the green knight.
He kept scrolling.
Lake, Lance
Merlin sat back in his chair. For fuck's sake. He could hear his heartbeat now, in his throat, in his teeth.
No. It wasn’t possible. It wasn’t meant to be now. He wasn’t ready. He’d stopped being ready a century ago.
He scrolled further, almost unwillingly. Half hoping it wouldn’t be there.
Knight, Leon
His breath caught in his throat. He pressed his fingers against his temple, as if that might stop the spinning.
There was one more. One other he recognised.
He didn’t want to see it. Yet couldn't avoid it.
Spencer, Arthur
He closed the laptop.
Not dramatically. Just… with a bit too much purpose. It let out a quiet click, like the lid of a coffin being drawn shut.
He sat still for a moment. Just breathing.
Then, as if propelled by something outside himself, he stood. He moved stiffly, like a man rising from burial. He left the study and crossed the hall into the kitchen, switching the light on with the flat of his palm. The warm glow hit the blue-and-white tiles and old copper pans. He opened the cupboard above the stove and reached, not for tea, but for the bottle tucked behind the herbal infusions he never drank.
Single malt. The good kind. Meant for guests he no longer had.
He poured himself two fingers, then added a third. No ice. He didn’t bother with a glass he particularly liked. The good old Ikea tumbler would do.
Back in the study, he lowered himself into the chair, drink in hand. His palm trembled slightly, but he didn’t spill.
Leon. Lance. Gavin. Arthur.
It was ridiculous. Impossible. Yet inevitable. Unmissable.
He took a long swallow of the whisky. Let it burn. Let it settle.
He reached for the teacup, still sitting untouched on the corner of the desk. The two drinks sat side by side. One was cold, the other warm. He stared at them both as though they might speak.
“No,” he whispered. Again, softer: “Not now. Not you.”
But the whisky didn’t lie, and neither did the names. They pulsed behind his eyes like the ringing of bells long buried.
The world had shifted. The silence had cracked.
Arthur had returned.
And the waiting was over.