Chapter Text
Merlin is late.
Which is about as surprising as a chicken is when it lays its daily egg.
Late is a routine, a lifestyle Merlin has unwittingly zipped up around himself like a onesie, parading around the streets in. He snorted late once and got addicted immediately.
It’s the little, ridiculous things that make him late. The should I hold the toothbrush with my foot, or the how do I make that paper-aeroplane sentient, or the what are the ethical implications of impersonating presidents?
But hey, if there’s still new things to be distracted by 1500 years into his life, then he’s not going to take it for granted. They’ll run out eventually, who’s to blame a man for making the most of it whilst he can?
At-least, that’s his justifiable excuse.
Perhaps Merlin is late because he’s Merlin. Simple as.
He’d apparated to Hogsmeade after the train stopped, intending to quickly scour whatever information the Daily Prophet had decided to drip-feed out regarding the recent Dark Mark. It is terribly telling, Merlin had thought, as he’d sifted through the papers, that at this stage in life he has to resort to snobby publishers and wart-ridden journalists for his worldly updates. His joints were rusty and he knew it.
It was after reading the third article with some awful forehead-banging-inducing pun in the title that he decided to give up betting coins on humanity’s societal success. Merlin had felt doomed, the type of doomed that a two-year-old feels when his tower of blocks falls down. The end-of-the-world doomed that means throwing a tantrum and waiting until his parents pick up the blocks and tell him to try again.
The articles had been made of flowery language and no cut-to-the-chase, they were made of fabricated tales and high-heeled gossip-grabbers, they were made of politics inserted into basic morality and facts distorted into dopamine hits.
Merlin had slapped the paper back onto the rack like a toddler in strop-mode. He’d currently gotten better facts out of three fifteen-year-olds on a train than these pathetic writings . I mean, who does this Rita Skeeter think she is? Dear Avalon .
He had been about to scout out a secluded spot to apparate back to Hogwarts when he sees it. A small, pathetic, ugly little thing, teeth like rotting popcorn kernels and a stench rivalling last year’s foot-fungus trials.
“Hello, little one,” Merlin coos, because apparently the holy trinity of small-pathetic-ugly is his forte. The rat waddles up to him, fur sewed in clumps of grease and shit and the chewing gum spat from some skateboarding kid fresh out of primary school trying out this new thing called ‘cool’.
Merlin fishes out stale breadcrumbs from the canyons of his pockets; tosses them near the rodent. It vacuums up the first one in blinks, then proceeds to staple the following crumbs between its teeth, scarpering off into the shadows. Merlin, rendered from birth as incapable of refraining from nosiness, follows.
He finds the rat placing the crumbs in front of a nest of younglings and a second rat, said rat in question wounded and cowering, copper roses blooming from its chest. Merlin swears. He really wants to get to Hogwarts in time for those roast potatoes.
He answers his next thought before he’s even had time to form it. Of course I’m healing the bloody rat. The smelly, disease-ridden dying rat.
He shuffles closer to the creature. Its wounds are deep - too deep. It’s fading. Almost faded.
A web holds a fly. Buzzing fading. Almost faded.
He looks at the dying rat.
Back at the dying fly.
Who is he to deem himself worthy enough to judge who’s life holds more value? Who is he to judge which suffering to end over which suffering to heal? Who is he to cut up the cards from the hands of the gods and throw them onto the table in front of them with the aces face-side up?
In a split but heavy second, he catches the wisps of the rat’s soul just before they reach the veil. He holds the fly’s soul in the other hand, level.
Is making no choice a choice in itself?
Merlin’s tongue is bound to the drug called altruism, tied up to it with rope and veins.
The rat lives.
He waits out a wingbeat, expectant. The veil opens in front of him and a rage-filled wrinkle-webbed woman storms out of it, her corpse-like eyes locking onto the target scribbled on Merlin’s forehead. He grimaces, resigned. Braces himself.
“EMRYS!”
“Dramatic much, Cally,”
There is a child. Standing in her way.
A smelly-breathed snot-nosed baby-faced attempt at a human.
“Move it, turd-face.” Oh, look, it even speaks.
Aithusa flares her nostrils and tries to resist the appealing thought of scorching its eyebrows off. She tries to remember children are fragile pathetic little things with sensitive skin and cravings for warm milk bottles.
“I am not moving, kid.” She says, watching in sharp amusement as it puts its hands on its hips like a bald baby peacock trying to be threatening. “Recalling correctly, I was here first.”
“ No , I was,”
“Bull. You scooted around me like I was some dead wooden stump, just so you could get further in the queue.”
The child huffs and deflates its chest, scowling petulantly. “Just wanted to be next to my new friend, ass-hat. Is that such a crime?”
“Yes, actually. Your parents not teach you manners?”
“At-least they gave me attention. Did they not even tell you your shirt is inside out?”
Aithusa looks down immediately, horrified for her dignity.
The shirt is fine.
“Hah,” The child guffaws, momentarily scrunching its pudgy face in an uncanny resemblance to a naked mole rat’s buttock. “Made you look!”
“You little-“
“Was only playin’!” It says. Aithusa tries to think of more bullet points to add to the don’t sear the kid’s eyebrows off list. “Come on, just let me stand by my new friend! We want to get Sorted together!”
Said friend joins in with the whining performance. Aithusa should have bought salted popcorn and a seat for Kilgharrah.
“Friendships are transactional.” She spits, guarding her rightful place in the line. “You’re living a lie, get your head out the sand before I start calling the water in.”
The child goes all jelly and red-nosed. Its bottom lip wobbles.
“Oh, for fucks-“ Aithusa mutters. Maybe she should bring its warm milk bottles instead of popcorn.
She gives the kid a not-so-unfriendly shove on the shoulder until they’ve switched places in the line. It beams, lurching towards her with a squeal, arms wrapped around her like some god-damn leech.
Pathetic.
She sweeps her eyes, again, around the Great hall, tuning out the chatter and the glass clinks and the incessant giggling. There’s a limit to how much exposure to warm-blooded creatures she can take, and today’s toes are hovering a little too close to the line. She taps her foot, impatient, double checking the Professors’ table.
Come on, she thinks. Where is he?
Merlin, eventually, darts through the Hogwarts gates, lungs openly wheezing and whining for oxygen. He’s sure his face could be in the runners up of next year’s Scotland’s largest tomato contest. He unceremoniously collapses onto the entrance wall to catch his breath and re-insert himself into the dictionary definition of ‘human’.
He swipes his palms on his cloak and ruffles the dark twines on top of his head into something he hopes resembles hair.
Gods’ above, he really needs to stop being late.
The warlock, satisfied that shoes are on the right feet and limbs are attached to the right ligaments, waltzes through the corridors and through the teacher’s entrance in the very picture of nonchalance. He knows if he’s quiet enough, he can sneak in without meeting the front-view of half-moon glasses and pearl-white beards.
He opens the door. It doesn't creak. Check box one.
He peers around the back of the Professors' table. He spots a spare seat. Check box two.
He walks in the chair’s direction, movement going unnoticed amongst the current Sortings. Check box three.
He stubs his toe. Yelps. 600 heads turn towards him. All further check boxes abort to immediate effect.
“Heh,” he says into the sudden silence, trying to remember how to back-pedal his facial expression from the grimace it’s currently in. “Sorry, eh, rats - always making me late - inconvenient little things. Carry on,”
“Allow me to introduce,” Oh, bloody- “Our new History Professor.” Dumbledore says without looking at him, and Merlin rests his hands on the back-board of the chair, all awkward and off-guard. “Malcolm Emrys.”
The warlock inclines his head slightly. “Greetings. Here, we all have the same amount of toes as toenails. Or at least I hope so,” Merlin says, deadpan. “So, to the first years’, happy toe-clipping day.”
Dumbledore turns almost imperceptibly to his direction, as if to say anything else? Any other words of wisdom? Any life-changing proverbs or tear-jerkers to offer?
Merlin pulls out a chair and sits.
He stifles a chuckle at the pathetic dribble of disjointed and hesitant claps that follow.
“Thank-you, Professor Emrys,” The headmaster says, tone sculptured into something perfectly smooth. “Now, let us continue the Sortings,”
“Cordner, Juliet?”
Merlin observes the following Sortings for a moment, breathing in the unbridled, fresh-faced excitement, the sort that only youths can birth into the world. His grin falls not sixty seconds later, as he notices the most esteemed and important part of the ceremony has not yet arrived.
“Where are the roast potatoes?” He asks to the air, as if it would answer back with a ‘sorry’ and a ‘here you go, sir.’
Silence. Then -
“Grapes.”
Merlin almost flinches at the silk-filled voice. Then again, he hasn’t exactly tested the hypothesis that oxygen molecules can’t speak.
“Grapes,” The air speaks again. “Here, you fool,”
The voice sounds to be coming from the molecules to his right. Merlin twists his head to observe the phenomenon, only to be ambushed half-way by beetle black eyes and grease-slathered hair.
Alright, so the speaking-air-molecules-theory is, once again, yet to be proven.
“Why, hello-!”
“Roast potatoes arrive as part of the feast, Emrys.” The man says, coating his words with a rotten-chocolate-smelling sneer. “ Grapes,” He continues, words sharpened to a pin-prick point, jutting his head momentarily towards the direction of a bowl, “-are the only morsels available.”
He speaks as if the very act of speaking is inconvenient.
Merlin hums, intrigue levels almost comically high. Fascinating, he thinks. A bar-humbug spotted in the wild.
Merlin pops a grape in his mouth. Another. Another. Then another. He chews all four simultaneously, teeth bathing in sweet juice.
“So,” Merlin starts, before he’s even finished chewing, voice muffled. He swipes a back of hand boyishly across his lips. “What are you up to, these days?”
The beetle-eyed man is silent for a moment, a moment long enough for Merlin to draw the conclusion that either a) the guy is hard of hearing, or b) the sun slacked off the morning shift and Merlin has dreamt up this slimy, snivelling skin-suit of a man as a personification of every crippling regret and survivors guilt moment he’s ever accumulated.
The man hits Merlin with a calculating gaze, the sort that feels like how some obnoxiously expensive printer would scan a face and churn it out on paper as if the image would make more sense to itself if it was two-dimensional. Merlin smirks; pops in another grape just to elicit a reaction.
“Why,” the man speaks, lips curling in apparent displeasure, “do you speak as if we are familiar with one other enough to allow informality?”
Merlin snorts. “Unless without my knowledge you don’t have a pulse, skin tissue and calcium lurking in that body - in which case no, we are not familiar.”
The man returns, again, to his default printer mode. “The name is Severus Snape.”
“Oof!” Merlin exclaims, satirically charade-ing a women fanning herself and batting her eyelashes. “Would ya feel that velvet! ”
Snape stares. “Velvet.”
“I think you’d get substantial revenue if you did a podcast with that voice,” Merlin says, too caught up in juicing the moment to its limit to notice the white-haired girl emerge from the line to be Sorted. “We could talk about how your childhood trauma made you like this. Therapy with Severus. New episodes every Monday and Wednesday.”
Snape stares.
“I can handle the marketing and promotion side of things, free of charge in the name of the goodness of my heart,” Merlin continues, a train that doesn’t know how to stop. “My, I can already hear your fan-base screaming.”
Snape stares. Merlin’s fingers find the grapes again.
The woman calling out the Sortings clears her throat.
“Kwiti, Aithusa,”
Merlin chokes on his grape.
Aithusa had always been.. well - unhinged , for lack of a better word. Like a screw nailed at just the right angle for the wood to splinter only on the underside. Like a needle pulling thread just far enough from the fabric’s ends to pass as a seam. Like a taxidermist with just enough fingertip control and reverence to use animals only from the roadside.
Perhaps she was formed in the egg wrong. A leg twisted a little too much to the right, a heart beating on its own a little too early, a voice found a little too late. All things just small enough for her to function like nothing was wrong.
Her body grew around her flaws and they left strange out-dents and bulges under her skin, a beautiful, haunting pattern that she branded in morse code on her tongue and everything she touched, claiming things, seeing how far she could push them to break, just to feel the breath of I was here.
She blames Merlin, sometimes. She blames the years of red-ringed eyes and chains in holes, she blames the praise and purpose felt only when stopping heartbeats of Camelotians in battle. She blames the lies and the woman’s soft, motherly tones, and hearing his name only when spoken in curses from her mouth.
She blames Merlin, sometimes, just to have something to blame.
He knows, of course he does. But he also knows that she sees him like the seed-heads see the breeze. Needed, intertwined, always there. Part of existence. Part of her.
To the stranger in the bar’s eye, they act like fuel and fire, lice in each other’s hair, two four-year-olds squabbling and slapping each other to get the last cream-egg on the shelf. It’s a strange music-score of forgiveness that they’ll be dancing to as long as the seas kiss the sand.
It’s why Aithusa likes to follow him sometimes. Likes to tease him to the extreme, likes to press and splinter all his buttons until the circuit malfunctions. There’s something about knowing that he’ll remain, despite all her flaws, all the ugly patterns on her skin.
They’ve been riding this wave for centuries; the one statue-d thing in a world that’s constantly morphing whilst they remain unchanged.
Which is why, Aithusa muses, as she puts the sorting hat on her head, Merlin has no excuse to look that horrified at the sight of her on the stool. Perhaps she should be offended. But perhaps, more than anything, she can revel in the sight, and listen to the sound of the lute playing their strange music-score through the breeze.