Awakening Camelot: A Wizard's Quest (Awakening Camelot Duology Book 1)

by Dan Wingreen

  "It was wrong of me," he said, his voice soft again. "I knew how you were feeling, that you wanted to get away. I knew asking would drive you away, but I didn't care. It hadn't even been a month since Gwen left with Lancelot and I was heartbroken and desperate. Maybe I even wanted to drive you away, so at least I'd be ready for it instead of waiting for you to leave on your own like everyone else—"

  "I wouldn't—" Lee started to protest, but Arthur raised a single eyebrow, and the words died in his throat. He'd already admitted he was looking for an excuse to leave, hadn't he?

  "You would have. And looking back, I wouldn't have blamed you." Arthur raised his hand to rub at his bottom lip the way he always did when he was concentrating or uncomfortable, and only then seemed to realize he was still wearing his full set of battle armor. He blinked rapidly, then gave his head a little shake before lowering his hand again. "We were both wrong," he said in the tone he always used when he was making a compromise he actually believed in, instead of one he was forced to make. "We both reacted badly, to a lot of different things, and if you insist on blaming yourself for anything then I have at least an equal share of that blame."

  Lee was shaking his head before Arthur had even finished. "No. No, it was my fault. If I'd been there I could have—"

  "And if I'd been paying attention to anything other than my own sense of betrayal, I could have as well." Arthur fixed him with a firm glare, the kind Lee had tried to imitate for centuries and could still never get quite right. "We were both responsible for him," he said, his voice catching in his throat before he cleared it and went on. "We both missed what he was becoming, and we failed him in different ways. But my failure was greater, because he was my son and he should have been my first priority. Not my last."

  Again, Lee wanted to protest, but he couldn't find the words. Arthur had been a bad father, but Lee had been an equally bad teacher. He taught him how to use his magic, but he never bothered to teach him why. He never tried to teach him any of the important things a teacher or a father is supposed to teach a child, things that had nothing to do with magic and everything to do with how to be human.

  Or a reasonable approximation thereof.

  Lee almost smiled. It was something an angry teenage Arthur used to say about him when he wouldn't agree with him about whatever injustice he was railing against.

  "Maybe you're right," Lee said softly. "Maybe it's both our faults."

  For a long moment, neither of them said anything. They just looked at each other, each seeming to feel the years and mistakes that had gone between them in different, but still startlingly similar ways. Again, Lee found himself wondering what happened to change Arthur from the dour, bitter man he’d been when Lee left back into the friend he held in his fondest memories. How much of that change had happened while Lee was gone from Camelot, and how much happened while Arthur was asleep? He couldn't have been aware and thinking for two thousand years, he would have woken up insane after being locked in his own head for so long. But maybe he could have felt and thought in fits and starts in between the long years of sleep when the spell was listening to the people around him talking. Maybe Lee wasn't the only one with years of regret to make up for.

  It was Arthur who finally broke the silence.

  "Then we should both do whatever we can, not to make the same mistakes again." He stepped forward until he was standing right in front of Lee and clasped his shoulders.

  Lee raised an eyebrow. "That an order?"

  "Think of it more like a plan." Arthur's lips twitched. "We were always at our best when we knew what we were doing."

  This time, Lee did smile at the beginning of their old joke. "It's amazing we ever got anything done then, isn't it?"

  Arthur grinned as he squeezed his arms, and just like that, centuries of guilt and regret seemed to rest more lightly on Lee's shoulders. It didn't erase everything. Lee had seen too much and done too much for there to be any easy way to get rid of his guilt and regret completely, if it was even possible at this point.

  But it was a start.

  After that, it was easy to fall into conversation with his old friend. It didn't take long for the topic to turn to how long Arthur had been asleep and then the only place it could go from there—after he convinced Arthur he wasn't having him on about almost two millennia passing since he 'died'—was to explain as briefly as possible what had happened in the years he'd missed. Even summarizing it took a while, and they'd all have to go into much more detail later, but Lee managed to give Arthur the most basic of primers on the world he'd woken up to. Including the fact that Arthur was now the only person in the world above the age of seventeen who couldn't use magic and that all of them—all their long dead friends and enemies—were revered household names.

  "And…what about Mordred?" Arthur asked after a long silence spent digesting what Lee had told him. Lee knew how much the question cost him to ask, since one of his last memories had to be of him plunging Excalibur into the chest of his son, so he answered as plainly as he could.

  "He died."

  And that was the last they spoke of him.

  After the short silence that followed, the conversation turned towards safer, happier topics. It didn't take long for Arthur to ask about Aidan, something Lee would normally be more than happy to talk about at length. Right then, though, all talking about him did was give Lee a whole new set of failures to worry about. Especially since he was starting to suspect not running after Aidan right away was a bit of a mistake, on his part.

  "Yes," Arthur agreed amiably when Lee mentioned that. "You're probably not making things easier on yourself."

  Lee glared. Arthur was a lot more annoying when he didn't hate the person Lee was in love with.

  "You really should go talk to him," Arthur said seriously a few moments later. "He's probably calmed down by now anyway."

  Privately, Lee doubted that very much. Calm and Aidan very rarely went together. His little fire was well named.

  "What if he…can't deal with it?" Lee asked, hating the whine that crept into his voice but unable to completely hold it back.

  "Can't deal with what?" Arthur looked legitimately confused.

  "All the…" Lee waved his hand and sighed with frustration. Too damn much had happened in the last two thousand bloody years and it would take too long to explain it all to Arthur. Instead, he pulled up one leg of his jeans and pointed to the little cartoon figure on his sock.

  Arthur frowned, although whether it was the little sorcerer or the concept of socks that was confusing him Lee couldn't tell.

  "What," he asked slowly, "is that?"

  Lee looked at him and answered flatly, "Me."

  Arthur blinked, and Lee thought he saw a faint glimmer of understanding flash behind his eyes. Then he laughed. And laughed.

  And laughed.

  Somewhere in the middle of the laughter, when tears were streaming down Arthur's face and he wasn't looking, Lee slipped away to go find Aidan.

  Chapter 14

  Aidan walked through the cave in a daze. He didn't notice the darkness that fell the moment he was away from Lee's light, making it next to impossible to see more than a few inches in front of him. He didn't notice the way his heavy breathing echoed off the walls, surrounding him in the small tunnel like a thick, suffocating scarf. He didn't see the way the darkness slowly lightened as he approached the entrance or feel the wary distrust of the large rock hovering over his head. He didn't even notice he'd stopped outside next to the small pond, or that the dull liquid rush he heard was actually the waterfall, and not the blood surging through his head. He couldn't focus on anything except the one thought that seemed to be scorched into his mind like a fiery brand.

  Lee is Merlin.

  He heard a small, hysterical laugh echoing through the clearing. Did that come from him? He nodded as he decided that, yes, yes it did. He let out another one.

  Lee is Merlin.

  Aidan had no idea how many times the thought had circled
through his mind, but apparently that was the time it broke through his daze of stunned disbelief and he really, finally, felt the impact those three stupid words had on everything he thought he knew.

  Lee is fucking Merlin!

  "Oh, Mer—" His eyes widened as he choked on the words.

  I can't even say that anymore! And then, just because his life wasn't quite screwed up enough from this, he had to go and think of all the other Merlin-related exclamations he'd used in front of Lee. He let out a groan that quickly turned into a scream, then buried his face in his hands and tried to pretend his face wasn't the reddest it had ever been.

  I can't believe I said those things in front of him! How am I ever going to look him in the face and not die on the spot? He froze. Wait, why do I even want to? He should be the one worrying about looking at me! He's the liar! I'm…I'm his victim! He slowly dropped his hands and nodded. That was a much better way to think of it.

  Aidan's mortification blazed into blinding rage.

  How could Lee keep something like that from him? Even as he asked himself that, some stupid part of his brain was reminding him he had never asked. So, I was…what? Supposed to just ask him if he was Merlin? Because that's just something I do with everyone I meet for the first time. "Oh, hi, my name is Aidan and, by the way, are you by any chance fucking Merlin?" It would be ridiculous. But, again, that part of him insisted on disregarding his childish ranting and reminded him that he knew Eallair and Lee weren't his real names. He knew Lee was hiding his past, and Aidan had decided to respect his privacy and not ask any questions when he could have gotten the answers.

  This just made Aidan even angrier. He didn't want to think rationally about Lee's deception. He wanted to be mad at Lee, no, Merlin, no—Lee. He wanted to be angry at Lee, because Lee was someone he could be angry at. Lee was the person who lied about who he was. Lee was the person who might feel like he did something wrong. He had no idea how Merlin would feel. Would he even care? Would he even bother to have a reason for not telling Aidan, or would he just wave away Aidan’s concerns the way he’d swat at a marginally annoying gnat?

  Would he even love Aidan?

  Aidan clenched his jaw against the sudden burning in his eyes. He would not cry. He would not let Lee see him in tears over this when he finally tore himself away from Arthur and tried to find him.

  And why the fuck hasn't he come after me already?

  Aidan solved nothing in the time he stood outside arguing with himself. Except to drive himself crazy with all the thoughts running through his head, of course. So, when he heard his name being hesitantly called from behind him and he whirled around—without a single tear in sight—he had no idea what was going to come out of his mouth until it did.

  "You asshole!"

  Lee flinched. He was standing just outside of the space under the rock with his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket looking like a puppy someone had kicked. He met Aidan's eyes briefly, then glanced away.

  "I'm sorry," he said, just loud enough for Aidan to hear him.

  "You lied to me." Aidan tried so hard to yell, to stay mad, but his voice broke in the middle of his sentence and it came out more pleading than anything else.

  "I'm sorry," Lee said again. He opened his mouth, then closed it. He seemed like he was trying to figure out what to say. "I did try to tell you—"

  "No, you didn't!" Aidan yelled. "When did you try to tell me? Never! That's when!"

  "Why do you think I wore these bloody socks all the time for?" Lee asked, pointing down to his ankles.

  Aidan gaped at him, his mouth opening and closing like a fish drowning on the edge of a lake. A watery laugh forced its way out of his throat because, no matter how he was feeling, there was apparently no way he couldn't laugh at that.

  "Are you mental?" Aidan asked. He had no idea if Lee was being serious or not, but the Lee he knew, the one who wasn't the second closest thing to a god to almost every person in the world, might have tried to use stupid socks to tell him something this important.

  "What was I supposed to say?" Lee asked, not sounding at all like he was asking rhetorically.

  Not that it mattered. Aidan had an answer whether he really wanted one or not.

  "I don't know," Aidan said. "Maybe something like, 'so remember how you said my life was a lot like Merlin's? Well guess what?' Or 'Hey, you know all those really vague stories about dead best friends and evil wizards that I trained? Well here's why I never mentioned any names!' Or, even better, 'Oh by the way, I'm Merlin and I thought you should know before I confessed my love for you and we had sex together!'"

  Aidan flushed again as he said that last, but his glare never lost even a fraction of its intensity.

  "Wait," he said a second later when his brain caught up with what he'd been yelling. "Drey was Mordred, wasn't he?"

  The look on Lee's face was enough to give him his answer. "He hated his name when he was a boy," he mumbled.

  Aidan felt slightly sick. He'd actually felt sympathy for Mordred.

  "And you couldn't just tell me then instead of using some childhood nickname code word?"

  Lee’s shoulders slumped. "That's how I like to think of him," he said, his voice thick with emotion.

  Aidan bit his lip to keep from saying any of the dozen things that came into his head. Even as mad as he was a large part of him shied away from prodding at Lee’s old wounds.

  "Okay," he said after a few moments. He paused for a few heartbeats and tried to reign his emotions in. “You still could have told me.”

  "And you would have just up and believed me if I did?" Lee asked hoarsely.

  "Yes!" Aidan shouted. "If you said it, of course I would have."

  Lee gave him a look that was equal parts warmth, heartache, and skepticism.

  "I—" Aidan took a deep breath. You can’t demand honesty from him if you’re not willing to be honest yourself. "Okay, maybe it would have depended on when you said it. But after you told me you loved me? After the cave? I would have believed anything you told me."

  Lee looked away. "Maybe I didn't want to tell you," he said quietly.

  Aidan was glad Lee wasn't looking, because the last thing he wanted right then was for him to see how much that hurt.

  "Why?"

  Lee looked back at him, and what Aidan saw swimming behind his eyes was the last thing he would have ever expected to see there.

  Insecurity.

  "Because—" Lee's voice caught in his throat. It seemed to annoy him, based on the vicious scowl he was shooting no one in particular. He gave his head a little shake and when he started again, his voice was steadier. "Because of the way you look at Arthur. The way all of you look at him and me, all of us from back then. You all write stories about us and talk about us and—I'm on bloody socks! Everyone hears 'Merlin' or 'Arthur' and they automatically think they know everything about us based on what story they like the best, what myth they've built up in their head."

  He ran his hands through his unbound hair. "I've seen the way you look when we're talkin' about Arthur. Like he's the answer to everything. And maybe he is, and maybe I've looked at him that way too, but he's also a man; my friend." He sighed and began fiddling with the zipper of his jacket. "I like the way you look at Lee. I like that you love me for who I am without attaching me to a bloody name that meant nothin' to me and I ain't even thought of as my own in forever. I didn't want to tell you and see that all change."

  He looked away.

  Aidan stared at him for the longest time. He wants me to see him for who he is. It was painfully easy for Aidan to relate to that. The question was, who was Lee? Aidan wouldn't deny that the second he heard the name Merlin, everything he thought he knew about Lee started to change. Aidan didn't want it to change. Deep down, under all the anger and the feelings of betrayal, he was so scared Merlin couldn't feel the same way about him that Lee could.

  But you know he doesn't think of himself as Merlin, or even Eallair. Maybe who he was doesn't matter near
ly as much as who he is.

  "Are you different?" Aidan asked quietly. "If I didn't know who Merlin was and we met and you told me that was your name, would you be someone I don't even know? Or would you be Lee?"

  Lee was silent for so long that Aidan was starting to dread his answer.

  "I put up a lot of walls," Lee said finally, still not looking at Aidan. "Sometimes I act a way because I don't want anyone else knowin’ that I'm really feeling the opposite." He glanced up at Aidan. "But the way I am when I'm with you is how I'd always be, if I could. It's what feels right. I don't know if that's even the real me, or if it's just another way of pretendin’, but I've been alive for seven thousand years and I've been a lot of people in that time, so I reckon it ain't too much to ask that you understand if, on occasion, I ain't really sure who I am."

  That was, quite possibly, the single most honest answer to a question Aidan had ever heard.

  His anger faded away. He was kind of ashamed of it now, actually. If he'd just admitted what was really bothering him instead of trying to hide his fear and embarrassment behind anger, he might have been able to avoid all this. It seemed like no matter how many times he promised himself he wasn't going to act like a child, he went and did it anyway.

  Well. The good thing about that was he could stop it any time.

  "Yeah. I don't think that's too much to ask." He smiled softly as he walked over to Lee. He tensed, like he wasn't sure if he should run or not, and Aidan found he sort of hated that. Lee should never be afraid of him. He stopped in front of Lee and took one of his hands and held it in both of his.

  "Does Merlin love me?" Aidan asked. He was being insecure, but part of him needed to hear it plainly.

  Lee squeezed his hands. "You know," he said softly, "I don't think I give a shit how Merlin feels. I love you."

  Aidan felt…warm. That was the best way he could describe it, even though it didn't come close to even a fraction of how he felt. It was like his own personal sun was shining down on his soul.