#this one is a little long so

that winter in camelot is the coldest merlin can remember. the snow lays coffin deep in the courtyard, and when he tries using his magic to keep gwen’s chambers warm, she scolds him for giving her preferential treatment. he hasn’t quite gotten the hang of warming the entire castle, much less anything beyond that, so he settles for enchanting the stole leon had gifted her in secret and using his energy to keep every fire he can going.

it’s all he can do, these days, to keep a fire going. gaius has him on a number of draughts and dried herbs he’s carefully stored since the summer solstice, but they do little in the way of keeping merlin’s heart from stopping every time he sees a flash of golden hair.

it’s in the wake of the third snowfall that he hears from his mother.

ealdor is blanketed in white, thatch roofs bending and bowing under the freezing weight, and there’s a teenaged boy he recognises in the unsettling, removed sort of way adding another log to his mother’s dying fire.

his knees give out. a familiar feeling rises in his chest: that he wishes he could make his mother’s bed more comfortable, give her the plushness only royals are privy to. he thinks of gwen’s stole, of her lavish pillows, of her fire raging, and thinks of his mother, dying on a bed of straw.

she’s days away from death, if that. it will be the second person he’s lost this year, and merlin has come to terms with eternity’s cold grip, no longer has the fight left in him to uncurl its fingers from its tight grasp.

he grips her frail fingers and does everything he can to keep the fire going.

to say, “i will never forget you.”

she smiles at him. “that,” she tells him, “is how i know you love me.”

it takes him a few more winters to understand, fully, what his mother meant. in those years, he loses, and loses, and loses, until grief is a friend that walks beside him. when he realises that death will never come for him, but rather will flirt with his friends, seduce those he loves until they leave him to pick up their shadows, it hits him. to love someone is to remember.

so he begins telling stories. he’s not good with words, at first. doesn’t know how to tell anyone about arthur in a way that makes what he was make sense. he was more than my king. he was insufferable. he was half of me. he was arrogant and foolhardy and stupid. he was my destiny.

how do you say that? how do you find the words for that? how do you describe gwen– beautiful, kind gwen, who deserved the world over? how do you describe gaius– wise, complicated gaius, who harboured him when no one else would? how do you describe gwaine, and lancelot, and leon, and percival, and elyan, and morgana, and mordred, and–

how do you make your love into a legend?

merlin tells stories until his throat goes raw. he spends centuries spinning tales. there once, he tells countless, wide-eyed children, was a great king named arthur. and one day, he will come back.

to love someone is to remember. and merlin commissions paintings, reads poetry, watches plays where the actors try to mimic his friends.

all those centuries later, his heart still stops at a flash of golden hair.

in those first years, merlin had wondered if arthur knew how loved he was, how much merlin loved him. so merlin crafts him a world that knows his name, so that when he comes back, there will be no question.

arthur comes back to him in winter. there isn’t snow on the ground, but his skin is chilled from lake water, and merlin does everything he can to keep the fire going.

as he’s warming up his king, combing his hair, drying his hands, he dares to ask.

“do you remember me?”

it’s a question larger than the words that contain it. but arthur turns to him, and honest to god rolls his eyes, and speaks, for the first time in several lifetimes.

“i could never forget you, merlin.”

and merlin thinks, he might love me, too.