alx_diamondTitle: Long Live the Queen
Rating: PG-13
Pairing/s: Merlin/Arthur
Character/s: Morgana, Arthur, Merlin
Summary: She found them hunched together in the darkness, her dying brother and his treacherous lover.
Warnings: S5 finale. Pretty much everyone dies.
Word Count: 500
Prompt: #278: wlm-500
Author's Notes:
She found them hunched together in the darkness, her dying brother and his treacherous lover. As she watched them, she searched inside herself for any trace of the fondness she’d once held. All the years of companionship and good-natured rivalry with Arthur, the time when she’d considered Merlin a friend—nothing remained. Her heart was a solid, unfeeling thing, hardened to bone in her chest. Mordred’s murder had wrapped it in steel.
Hatred she felt, ceaseless, overflowing like long-denied magic bursting free; but that didn’t come from her heart. It crawled up out of the pit of her gut, slithered through her veins like ice water, cast shadows in her mind so dark and stretched that she couldn’t tell where she ended and the benighted forest began.
She could see Arthur’s life seep out of him, though, and what a sight it was. Not least because Emrys knelt beside him and wept, helpless after all the times he’d thwarted her. All the times he’d betrayed her, betrayed all those like her. Betrayed his own magic for the Pendragons.
But this he could not stop. He wouldn’t rob her of watching Arthur die in slow, delicious agony.
He tried to stifle a groan as Emrys jostled him with an attempt to suppress a sob; neither of them was more successful than the other. She bit her lip into a smile, a thrill racing through her at the sound, but it still wasn’t enough to satisfy her.
Emrys would suffer as she suffered before she killed him, but Arthur—Arthur had further to fall. He was playing at honor still, acting the martyr-at-peace to comfort his heartsick lover. Though his hand shook as he held it to Emrys’s face, he stroked over the gaunt curve of cheekbone as though he weren’t smearing blood dark as pitch across pale skin. His chest shuddered as he gathered the breath to say something sickening, and she couldn’t bear to hear it.
“Emrys,” she cooed, and he forgot to cradle Arthur as he jumped to his feet and spun. The power behind her outflung hand had him pinned to a tree before his eyes could glow; his breath knocking out of him was as delightful a sound as Arthur’s gasp of pain.
She turned away from him to crouch by Arthur’s side, brushing the hair away from his pain-soaked brow. “Dear brother.”
He couldn’t gather up his breath again after she’d stolen his chance to use it, but she had enough to say for the both of them.
“You’re going to die. You know that. He knows that.” She twisted her head to smile at Emrys, who scowled and shouted and could not break free. “But before you do, I want you to know one more thing.”
Arthur’s sword lay just to the side, its glimmer catching her attention in the dimness. How touchingly poetic. She drew it from its scabbard and stood, savoring the horror dawning across his features. “You won’t die alone,” she promised.