Memory’s Garden

Author: archaeologist_d

Title: Memory’s Garden

Rating: G

Pairing/s: none

Character/s: Merlin

Summary: Merlin was no farmer but sometimes he needed to grow things in order to forget the past.

Warnings: none

Word Count:221

Prompt 510: garden

Disclaimer: I do not own the BBC version of Merlin; They and Shine do. I am very respectfully borrowing them with no intent to profit. No money has changed hands. No copyright infringement is intended.

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It was a small garden, half-hidden amongst the walls and debris of the past. Sometimes Merlin would go there to forget, sometimes to gather courage from the weeds and wild things. Sometimes he wondered who had designed such a thing. It was of little use as a physic garden or a lady’s bower.

But slowly, surely, Merlin began to plant things there, as much to see if magic could be driven into new life as he could find solace in the quiet and the greenery.

There was foxgloves swaying the the breeze, reminding him of Nimueh with her red-mouthed smile and poisonous words, beautiful and deadly in equal measure. Strawberries as sweet as Freya, the first shoots of oak and mistletoe with Balinor’s wild nature, Lancelot, too, in the fresh greens of pine, and all the others he had lost or destroyed over the years crowding the garden with new life. Nettles and rowan, bluebells and sage, marigold and rosemary and mandrake.

But much as Merlin wanted all the colours and smells of nature unfolding to soothe him when things got unbearable, he also wanted to remember all that he had done in Arthur’s service, the good and the bad.

And so he surrounded himself with a garden of beauty and poison and tried not to regret what he had become.