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lady_ragnell requested DVD commentaries for two of my Merlinfics when I asked for people on Tumblr to give me things to occupy myself with, so here’s the first! My commentaries are in bold; the original fic is...not. The header applies to the commentary, not the fic.characters/pairings: Arthur/Freya, Arthur/Merlin, Freya/Merlin
length: ~3500 words
content notices: major character death (afterlife-fic); canon-typical violence, references to war; brief sexually-explicit language, sexual content
read the original: on the Archive of Our Own | on DreamWidth | on LiveJournal
524
interregnum
I did a bit of research on when King Arthur was supposed to have died and how this fit into the chronology of English and British kings. This was a...reasonably non-bad guess, based on the scanty historical information for someone who was not, you know, actually a historical figure.
Freya thinks, You killed me, but she looks beyond that at everything that Arthur has become—the good he’s done with his life and the bad he’s undone—and she stretches out her hand toward the boat and does not push it away.
His fingers, still warm, clasp around hers. She pulls him across the last narrow strip of water to Avalon.
553
reign of constantine iii
Constantine III, Arthur’s successor, apparently only ruled for a few years. I found this out while researching for one of the fics I’m currently working on. Whoops.
The first thing Arthur says to her is “What’s going to happen now?” and Freya ignores him.
It’s several (years) days later when he looks at her from a different angle, at the sourceless light tangling in her hair, and says, startled, “Lady. You were—you were—”
I wanted to play around with a time dilation effect, where Arthur and Freya (and everyone else in Avalon) weren’t actually experiencing the centuries that were passing—I didn’t want quite that feel here, because I tend to associate that with needing to form new alliances instead of just wanting to—but weren’t unaware that time was going by a lot faster outside than it was inside.
Freya looks at him narrow-eyed, feeling the urge to hurt rise up sharp-tipped and shadowy inside her. She thinks she knows what he means: you were that girl, that monster; you were one of the people I’ve killed without considering. She says, “Merlin’s lover? Yes,” and watches him flinch.
She is the Lady of the Lake, and one of the guardians of Avalon, but sometimes she’s also the girl who was killed just after feeling the first hope she’d known in what seemed like her entire life.
I don’t know who the other guardians of Avalon are supposed to be. Nimueh, maybe. Morgana or Morgause, not impossible. Other people we’ve never met? Sidhe or other nonhumans? Who knows. I mostly threw that in to make the world seem bigger.
878
reign of alfred the great
“How is he?” Arthur asks.
It’s been a while: Camelot has crumbled and fallen into nothingness, into hardly more than myth, and the king of Albion hides in a peasant woman’s cottage, brooding over a war and leaving her bread to burn.
You all know the little historical fable about Alfred the Great and the burned cakes, right? This is, uh, not a historically-accurate piece of fiction. (I’m not a hundred percent sure I got the year right—I checked a few times, but since it never happened there wasn’t a source to confirm which army he was hiding from where when it didn’t happen.)
Freya turns away from the world and back to Arthur. She doesn’t feel that same fierce wild urge to hurt him—to try to take from him in revenge for what he took from her—anymore.
“Merlin,” Arthur says, clarifies, even though there’s only one he for both of them. He’s learned a little bit of patience since he was prince, but he’s never learned to wait for Freya to decide he’s worth her attention. Maybe he still can’t imagine that there’s anyone who might consider him unworthy.
“The tree thrives.” It is massive, emerald-crowned, with bark soft as velvet and tough as steel. Its roots sprawl through the field in which it stands.
The stories about what happened to Merlin vary. The enchantress who persuaded him to teach her all his secrets locked him in a tower, or trapped him in a cave or a rock or a tree, or turned him into a tree, or...there are probably other options running around. I’ve written one fic already where he was in a rock, and, besides, I really liked the idea of him being someplace that was there, visible yet changing. Hence, tree.
In the sequel I haven’t written yet because I can’t figure out the plot, Freya walks into the tree to get him out and remembers every season of growth she walks through.
Arthur steps closer, close enough that if he had a sword he could cut her in one leap. She draws force up between them and stops him where he stands. Avalon still knows her as queen, knows Arthur as guest but never master. “And Merlin?” Arthur presses. She can feel the strain of his body where he tests it against her shield.
This is the first time they’ve come into contact since Arthur got to Avalon.
Freya looks back at the tree. There are birds nesting in the branches, winged and free. She can almost see through the bark, to where Merlin sleeps curled in the heartwood; can almost taste the blazing gold of his magic. “He is well,” she says.
1001
reign of æthelred the ill-advised
Æthelred the Ill-Advised is perhaps better known as Æthelred the Unready, but I was going for a more ~historically-accurate~ flavor. I don’t know why; as I said before, this is not a historically-accurate fic.
“Can you show me?”
Freya looks from the glint of the Danegeld, the bright sails and swift bodies of invading ships, to what was once a forest and has turned to open meadowland. “Here,” she says, moving so Arthur can look over her shoulder, their eyes fixed on the same point.
Æthelred tried to bribe the Danish king to keep the Danes from invading England, along the general lines of “here, I’ll give you my lunch money so you won’t beat me up.” It was, um, not very successful. Arthur asks about Merlin politely enough that Freya shows him, which means he misses that entire bit of historical drama—something which comes up again at the end.
Arthur’s voice is soft, surprised when he says, “Thank you.”
1029
reign of cnut the great
They watch the ocean together.
There is another historical fable in which King Cnut gathered his court at the seaside and told the tide to stop coming in. It’s frequently mis-reported as if he actually believed it could happen, but as originally told was a grand show of how it couldn’t happen. Wikipedia (I know, I know) quotes a chronicle which reports he said, “Let all men know how empty and worthless are the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws.” Whether or not this actually happened, I liked it here, for obvious reasons.
“I humbled myself,” Arthur says defensively, and she can feel the quick beat of his heart against her back. “I got quite good at it—”
More physical contact! This time considerably closer and more intimate. In the previous section she allowed him to stand sort of vaguely behind her and a bit to the side; now they’re pretty much pressed body-to-body and it’s not a big deal in the personal-space way (though, as seen below, it’s becoming an issue in the getting-turned-on-due-to-proximity way).
Freya turns to give him a disbelieving look. “You stood in front of all your subjects—all of them, not just your most trusted friends—and said that your might and the power of all kings were worthless?”
Arthur looks like he wants to claim he did, but—surprisingly, finally—he’s learned better. He shakes his head.
They’re close enough that her hair brushes across his cheek, dragging over the barest ghost of stubble, and although he doesn’t need to breathe Freya can see his breath catch, feel the quick flutter of her own pulse as his eyes darken.
“That’s a shame,” she says, voice low and breaking, and the world between her hands swings from a beach to Merlin’s tree, bowing with age, imperial.
Something which is heavily implied here and will be actually discussed in the sequel if I ever figure out what disaster calls Arthur to save England (I’ll probably make something up) is that both of them had meaningful relationships with Merlin which they don’t want to betray—possibly Gwen ran off with Lancelot or Morgana in this ’verse—and which they especially don’t want to betray with the other. Freya’s trying (and succeeding, for now) to guilt them both, here.
1045
reign of edward the confessor
This is mostly for the year—I was trying to speed everything up as I went, so that everything tumbled together faster and faster as we progressed. The fact that it’s Edward the Confessor and they’re exchanging confessions is just the sort of thing I apparently find amusing.
“You said you were Merlin’s lover,” Arthur blurts out.
Something in Freya that’s thawed and gentled these (centuries) years goes still and edged and frozen again. She lifts her head and looks up at Arthur—draws power to straighten her spine, to weigh her head as if crowned. She holds the magic of Albion gripped in her hands like sword and shield and scepter, ready to strike or defend or dismiss.
This paragraph is more than a little ornate, in retrospect. I still like it, though. Anyway! When Freya and Merlin were involved, in this version of canon, was (only) during 2.09 “The Lady of the Lake”—by the time she and Merlin met again, he and Arthur were involved. So the memories of who she was that are attached to that relationship are memories which are, uh, not comfortable.
Blood darkens the delicate molding of Arthur’s ears. She doesn't think she's ever seen him flush before. He asks, “Can you tell me?”
Freya is knocked off-balance, left asea. “Tell you?” She was expecting…she doesn’t know what she was expecting. Something angry—hostile and selfish. Arthur’s tone is wistful, though; he wants without wanting to take.
She knows, distantly, that it’s been over half a millennium, not just a few years, since they last saw Merlin. It’s only been a few years for her, though (and for Arthur), short enough that grief sometimes still startles her, long enough that she clutches her memories to her like rags against a blizzard, dreading the day when they wear through completely. She wants more than she has, and—
I really like the simile in that paragraph. (And this is a lot of why I didn’t want time to be passing at a real speed—partly because in five hundred years they probably would have forgotten a lot, partly because this is a choice she makes, and a choice Arthur’s made, not out of desperation and loneliness.)
And, fair enough, she understands why Arthur asks.
“You first,” she says: a challenge.
“He said he’d only ever been with one other person,” Arthur says. His eyes meet hers with the clash of blade on blade, and sparks fly under her skin. “He never told me who. I thought for years it was his friend Will.”
Oh look, it’s my own constant inability to decide who Merlin has and hasn’t had sex with!
“Tell me,” Freya says, because Arthur has had so much more of Merlin than she ever did, because after all the other stories they’ve exchanged this is the only thing left that is only hers. If she’s going to give it to Arthur she wants something of equal value in return—something he held close and precious, something rare and strange and marvelous.
Arthur studies her face like he might a map of enemy territory. “The first time Merlin fucked me I begged for it.”
I don’t know if this works as a shock while reading the fic, startling to the reader as it was to Freya, but it was actually bizarrely hard to type. I’ve gotten a lot less awkward about verbalizing porn I’m writing and I have no problem saying “fuck” in other contexts—even while writing other things where it’s being used as a verb instead of a general obscenity—but the entire mood of the piece up until now had been dreamlike and elegant, sort of pastel, and suddenly I’m hurling crimson paint at the canvas. I decided I liked the effect, but I have no idea how it works, functionally.
On a completely separate note, I really like the idea of Arthur (and Vivian, actually, and various characters from other fandoms who also have roles they feel they need to conform to) getting off on things he feels like he isn’t supposed to enjoy, at least partly because of the whole it’s-forbidden aspect. A romantic relationship with Merlin practically qualifies in and of itself, and any sort of receptive and/or submissive sexual activities (which are of course not automatically synonymous) just add to that.
Even with the blush spreading from his ears across the rest of his skin, it takes Freya a long moment to realize what he’s said: as calm as if it were a normal conversation, as calm as if men of high rank and military inclination were allowed to want that. Understanding sears through her, burning in her racing blood, drying her mouth and stealing the air from her lungs.
Her voice rasps when she says, “All right.”
(Freya also likes the idea of Arthur getting off on things that culturally he ~shouldn’t~.)
When I started this fic it was—the OP of the prompt I wrote this for said they’d enjoy reading anything from gen to PWP, and it was originally going to be essentially a PWP in which Arthur and Freya, both of them missing Merlin, had sort of formed a habit of having sex with each other while imagining Merlin was there instead. The interlude I was going to write was going to involve pegging. And then I got distracted by history and emotions and all those things.
At some point I might also write the sequelish thing where that actually does happen, except with more emotions involved than there were originally going to be, because it’s a shame to waste the idea. It will definitely require less of a plot than the potential Arthur/Freya/Merlin sequel with possible apocalypse or whatever it is.
There’s the faint curl of a smile at the corner of Arthur’s mouth—he knows what he’s done to her, she thinks; it was a good tactical decision on his part; and she shakes her head to try to clear away the image of King Arthur (still hailed as a hero, as a great warrior) thus completely undone.
“It was when he was hiding me,” she begins, sifting through the memories, stitching them back together into a whole, and Arthur listens as if he’d never had anything of Merlin, himself, only a glance in the marketplace or a lonely thought by twilight.
(There was a lot of mostly-clothed fumbling and they both had a lot more fun than they’d expected to. If you were wondering.)
1066
reign of harold godwinson
“Don’t look,” Freya says, and she can feel the bones of Arthur’s wrist shifting beneath her fingers as she squeezes, tries to drag him away from the sight of the world—Albion wrecked again by war, foreign armies taking it again from the people born to the land—
This is William the Conqueror’s invasion, obviously.
—and battles drowning the country, long and fierce and bloody, and Freya suddenly sees echoes of Camlann—sees ghosts of all the men who died there raising their swords by Saxon and Norman alike and attacking each other as eagerly as the living do.
I can’t remember now if I was trying to imply that this battle was taking place in the same spot as Camlann, or what. Let’s assume I was, since otherwise this makes considerably less sense.
Arthur won’t look away. Maybe he can’t, she isn’t sure.
She lets go of his wrist and brings her hands to his face, expecting his gold-glinting stubble to sting her palms and surprised when it doesn’t. He lets her turn him now until he’s staring not at the carnage but at her.
His eyes are blank, shallow and fathoms deep at the same time.
“Arthur,” Freya says, slowly, soothingly. “Stay here.” She isn’t frightened—nothing can frighten here in her portion of Avalon, nothing can strike at her or harm her or do anything that she wills it not to; she can’t possibly be frightened—but she feels something anyway: her hands trying to shake against Arthur’s skin, the uneasy speed of her heart. “Here.” Here, where the fields are green and wet only with dew; here with her where there is safety.
Arthur hadn’t seen Sweyn Forkbeard’s conquest, she realizes, chilled by that knowledge—Arthur’s Albion is whole without need of restoration.
Sweyn Forkbeard started raiding England in 1002 and became its first Danish king in 1013, for those of you who are actually here for the historical tidbits.
1066
interregnum
When Arthur finally answers her, his voice is broken; he sounds hollow, gutted. But he says it anyway, “Freya,” as if it matters, as if it might bring him comfort, and she tightens her grip against the hard edge of his jaw and says, “It’s only for a little while,” and “if it would hurt Albion in truth you’d be back by now, you’d be gone—”
“And you?” he asks, and he’s focusing on her now, not on wars long-gone, not on the uncrowned boy-king’s fumbling and failed attempt at defense, not on the bastard Norman tightening his grip on Albion, and Freya goes still under the vivid intensity of that focus.
”Bastard” here is actually a comment about William’s parentage, not his personality, although I’d imagine in this context it might well be both. Harold’s successor (Edgar the Ætheling) was proclaimed king, but never crowned; he wasn’t old enough to actually be effective as a ruler or a warlord, but there was a brief period of time between Harold’s death and William’s coronation during which Edgar was...sort of the king, kind of.
“I don’t know,” she admits. “I don’t know what’s supposed to happen to me.”
His pulse beats wildly beneath her fingers, and she’s cold and hot at the same time, shivering as she stares up at him.
“You’ll go back too,” Arthur says, with that royal arrogance that Merlin and responsibility and time had mostly polished away between the times she met him—as if anything other than what he wants is unthinkable. As if he could reshape the world without magic, with only pride and obstinacy and a sort of willful narrow-mindedness.
Freya thinks she understands, finally, why everyone close to him would follow him anywhere.
She goes up on her toes and pulls his face down to hers, and the first press of their lips together is both shocking and inevitable.
I had planned to continue this fic—I wanted to at least hit the period when Stephen and Matilda were fighting over England, and also accomplish something more than kissing—but the parallels here were a little too obvious for me to do anything but go with it. It starts after a great battle in the space between kings with Freya pulling Arthur to Avalon; it ends after a great battle in the space between kings with Arthur promising to pull Freya back to the world.
If any of you have any questions this commentary didn’t answer, I’d be happy to answer them now.
