Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Gwen, I’m gonna cry,” Merlin said as she checked his EVA suit for the final time. It was always a two-person job to get a Pendragon Corp spacesuit on because apparently none of the wankers on the design team had read Have Space Suit, Will Travel.

“Do it before you put your helmet on,” she advised dryly, but he could see how excited she was, both in general and for him specifically. They’d become fast friends when they joined the International Network for the Exploration of Space when they were both fresh out of uni, and he counted himself beyond lucky that they’d both been sent on this mission. She knew how much this meant to him.

Merlin had been eight years old the first time he saw Jupiter.

He’d gotten quite a nice telescope for his birthday and his mum let him stay up late to use it out in the back garden. He had turned it eagerly to the sky, finding the moon immediately and Luna City quite easily, nestled in the Sea of Vapors. Mars wasn’t up, so he couldn’t see the massive construction happening high on the slope of Elysium Mons. That had been disappointing: the first stage of Pendragon Corporation’s colony on Mars had been dominating the news for weeks, and Merlin was desperately curious to see it for himself. Thwarted by orbits, he sought the next best thing: the first and greatest gas giant of the Solar System.

When he found it, many painstaking maths-ridden minutes later, it was about the size of his thumb nail, and hazily pale through the atmosphere and sheer distance. But he could see the stripes. He could see the great stormy eye.

He had found himself weeping in complete stillness, tears coursing silently down his cheeks as he stared up through that little seried stack of lenses.

He hadn’t understood his own reaction, but in the course of the following two decades, he had done everything in his power to follow his heart to Jupiter.

And he had made it.

After twenty years of determined education and grueling physical preparation, selection for the joint INES-Pendragon Corp expedition, and eighteen months of space flight, he was about to behold Jupiter with his own two unaided eyes.

“Have fun,” Gwen said instead of ‘good luck’, and put his helmet on over his head. There was a hiss as the airtight seal engaged, and then the headset crackled to life by his ear.

“Confirm radio reception, over,” Arthur said perfunctorily.

Merlin rolled his eyes. “Confirmed, over.”

“Biometrics connection stable,” Lancelot reported, his French accent gentled by years of English schooling. “But Merlin, your heart rate is elevated.”

“I’ll tell it to calm down,” Merlin quipped.

“Focus,” Arthur snapped. Merlin pulled a snidely mocking face, and Gwen giggled into her hand. “Guinevere, clear the airlock,” he went on, and Gwen confirmed the order. She tapped the glass front of Merlin’s helmet twice, and he grinned. She smiled back with a mix of excitement and trepidation, and exited to the main body of the Camelot. The heavy lock door thunked shut behind her, and Merlin was alone.

His exit of the Camelot was coordinated by the rest of the crew, so he had nothing to do but sit with his nerves as the chamber was depressurized. And despite his cheek with Arthur and Lance, and his smile for Gwen, he was nervous. Not to leave the ship—he hadn’t logged the most EVA hours of any of the crew for nothing—but to be in the presence of Jupiter. He hadn’t really been joking when he told Gwen he might cry.

At last, the red light above the exterior door changed to green, indicating that the airlock had achieved an almost perfect vacuum and could be safely opened.

“Out you go, Emrys,” Lance said cheerfully via the headset. “Bring us back a bag of milk, yeah?”

“Cheers, mate,” Merlin muttered, and disengaged the heavy lock mechanism by pulling the two arms of it in opposite directions, making the middle twist. He checked his tether one last time, and pushed the door open.

And Jupiter was directly in front of him.

Vast, turbulent, majestic.

“Oh, wow,” Merlin breathed. “Oh… wow.”

“Merlin, your heart,” Lance said, half fond understanding, half worried exasperation.

“Sorry,” Merlin said, barely registering the words. “It never does as I tell it.”

“Remember why you’re out there, Merlin.” Arthur’s voice was terse, as it always was when he spoke to Merlin. “Focus on your task.”

“Right…” Merlin said. “Task…”

Jupiter loomed.

It was so huge that it made him feel like the very sky was reaching down to crush him, or grab him up like a giant. He couldn’t make his mind contain the sheer size of the thing, so he just let himself be swamped by disorientation instead. He stared, open-mouthed, at the planet that could fit over a thousand Earths inside it. His entire world, his entire home, a thousand times over. Jupiter was billowing, bilious, swirling with currents older and larger than continents. He’d never understood how flimsy he was before. How utterly insubstantial. Compared to the bulk of Jupiter, the hugeness that blotted out the very sky, Merlin was a speck. An ant. An atom.

“Emrys,” Arthur barked. “Get it together or I’m scrubbing this excursion.”

“No!” Merlin yelped, jumping to attention. “I’m focused, I’m going!”

The magnetic boots made walking clumsy no matter how much one practiced, and it kept Merlin from getting distracted by the massive bloody planet hanging over his head… mostly. He just couldn’t believe…

He put his head down and paid attention to his feet. The Camelot was shaped like an X inside a circle, around the circumference of which were twenty minor traditional engines, which were used primarily for guidance—whereas the five major ion engines, at the center of the X and at the four points where the legs met the circle, were for propulsion. One of the minor engines wasn’t responding properly to guidance instructions, so Merlin was going out to kick it til it worked. Or, if Arthur asked, perform very delicate, careful repairs to the high standard demanded by INES and Pendragon Corp alike. But honestly, sometimes percussive maintenance was the right and proper option.

And Arthur was a total nanny goat anyway. He had a weird vendetta against Merlin: ever since the team members were selected and they started training intensively together, Arthur had been harder on Merlin than anyone else. Gwaine used to get up to way worse stuff before he broke his leg and got replaced by Valiant, and Arthur never used to come down as hard on him as he did on Merlin. It was bloody unfair!

Silently carping about his mission commander kept him entertained until he reached the problem child of an engine and reported back.

“Okay, we have you on camera as well,” Lance replied. “Can you make a visual identification of the problem?”

Merlin began examining the positioning motors of the engine—which was twice as far across as he was tall—but could see nothing immediately wrong. “I’ll have to get up close and personal,” he said, and moved towards the first of the hatches that covered the motor mechanisms themselves.

Only, his magnetic boot didn’t catch on the metal with the characteristic thunk that meant he was locked safely in place. In fact, it didn’t stick at all. And stupid old Newton got involved with his Third Law of Motion, and the force Merlin’s body exerted against the Camelot rebounded right back on him and pushed him away from the ship. It wasn’t very much force, so he wasn’t moving very fast. Despite the weirdness of his boots not working, he had his tether, so he wasn’t worried.

But when he reached to the small of his back where the spool lived and grasped the fine cord, there was no resistance against his pull.

Cold alarm poured down his spine. The tethers were made of woven microcarbons: they did not break. It took specific tools and lots of time to cut them on purpose. There was absolutely no way for it to break by accident, not in the short time Merlin had been out of the ship.

But more important than the hows and wherefores of his situation was the resulting fact that he was freefloating without a tether or functioning boots. He was already two meters away from the metal skin of the ship. Unless he found some way to exert force in the opposite direction, or someone came out to snag him, he would continue floating away into space.

“Camelot, my tether is broken and my boot magnets are not functioning. I am in uncontrolled flight. Camelot, please confirm and advise.”

But there was no answer.

The command center of the Camelot was packed full for the mission’s first spacewalk. Lancelot was manning comms and biometrics, Mithian and Valiant listened in on headsets and watched on the monitors as Guinevere prepared Merlin to exit the ship, and Arthur himself watched everyone and everything, as a Mission Commander should. He paid no more attention to Merlin than was warranted. The fact that a high level of attention was warranted was a mere happy coincidence.

They all watched as Guinevere completed her final checks on the suit and assisted Merlin in putting his helmet on, then exited the airlock.

“Five protein bars says he actually cries,” Valiant said without engaging his mic so Merlin wouldn’t hear.

“Don’t be awful,” Mithian scolded.

“He really might though,” Lancelot said. “You know how he is about Jupiter.”

“Quiet,” Arthur said. “Pay attention.” Not that there was much to pay attention to while they waited for the airlock to be ready. It just made Arthur’s heart clench unhappily whenever he had to hear about how much Merlin loved Jupiter. They all cared about the planet to some extent, of course, but Merlin’s feelings were deep and effusive, and constantly hearing about them had started to put Arthur’s teeth on edge.

Arthur prided himself on being an intelligent man, and pining, or yearning, or lusting or… whatever he was doing for Merlin, was not smart by any stretch of the imagination. Yet, here he was, jealous of a fucking planet because Merlin’s stunning blue eyes went misty when he talked about it.

At last, the lock evacuated all its air and they watched Merlin step forward in the bulky red space suit and disengage the lock on the exterior door. They watched the door slide open and reveal Jupiter to Merlin. Despite himself, Arthur’s heart was pounding.

Merlin was the first of them to see Jupiter with his own eyes. The Camelot had no windows, despite many psychologists’ advice to the contrary. Windows introduced too many points of structural failure, especially for such a long voyage, and so they had all made do with camera feeds from the exterior of the ship. It was still beautiful and impressive, of course, but surely wouldn’t hold a candle to the real thing.

“Oh, wow.” Merlin’s voice was soft and reverent through Arthur’s headset. His heart twisted unhappily at being proven right. “Oh… wow.”

“Merlin, your heart,” Lance said, dutifully minding Merlin’s biometric readouts.

“Sorry,” Merlin said absently. “It never does as I tell it.” Arthur could relate.

But none of that was what they were there for. “Remember why you’re out there, Merlin,” he said sternly. “Focus on your task.”

“Right…” Merlin said. “Task…”

Arthur rolled his eyes. “Emrys,” he snapped. “Get it together or I’m scrubbing this excursion.”

“No!” Merlin yelped, the threat activating enough adrenaline to get his attention. Valiant sniggered. “I’m focused, I’m going!”

And he did, proceeding carefully out of the airlock and onto the exterior surface of the ship. The monitors gave them several angles on Merlin as he walked with the familiarly clumsy steps of the magboots, closing the distance to the engine that was acting up.

For all his task-masterishness, Arthur truly was awed to see a person moving around under the massive bulk of Jupiter. Seeing a human out there in its presence put the entire journey in an entirely new perspective. He had accepted, and took very seriously, the fact that their primary duty was to set the Camelot up as the future base for a Jovian colony. Arthur’s father had impressed the importance of their work on him for as long as he could remember, and it coming to fruition now, with Arthur at the helm, was a tremendous honor. Merlin’s feelings were more personal, less grand, and sometimes Arthur wished he could feel what that was like too. To care about this because he simply loved it, rather than had been trained to dedicate himself to it.

“Alright, I’m at engine nine,” Merlin said.

“Okay, we have you on camera as well,” Lance replied. “Can you make a visual identification of the problem?”

There was no answer as Merlin began his examination, and they all waited patiently.

Then Mithian gasped, “Oh my god,” and pointed at something on the screen she and Valiant were looking at. Arthur pulled himself closer to look, and only saw the problem after several seconds of staring: Merlin’s tether had broken. It was visible only as a shimmering squiggle of light, dipping in and out of sight as its angle of refraction changed, but it was unmistakable. The loose end of it trailed off into space like a shoelace flapping around just waiting to trip the runner up. And Merlin was the only runner.

He quelled the irrational protests that this was impossible, that the tethers were far too strong to snap out of nowhere, and forced himself into emergency mode. “Merlin, return to the airlock immediately. Your tether is broken. Use utmost care with your magboots. Repeat, your tether is broken.”

But Merlin didn't answer, and his figure on the monitors didn't respond in any way.

“Merlin, confirm,” Arthur ordered, heart jamming itself up into his throat.

He didn't.

“Lancelot, try to raise him,” he said. It wasn't time to panic, he told himself. This wasn't one of the impossible nightmare scenarios he'd cooked up on all those sleepless nights before launch, and since. Merlin, despite the ‘great big gormless goof’ act he affected, was not an idiot. He'd notice something was wrong and return to the airlock and they'd sort it all out.

“Merlin, mate,” Lancelot said, voice laced with concern. “Let us know you can hear us, yeah?”

No response.

But on the monitor, he moved.

And it was immediately clear that something was wrong—that something more was wrong. The magboots caused a very specific sort of movement, and the odd bounce when Merlin took a step was not part of it. And floating up off the bloody ship was definitely not part of it either.

“Oh god, Merlin!” Guinevere’s voice was sharp and high with alarm over the headset. She was still down at the airlock, waiting behind the interior door to help Merlin when he got back, but she would be watching on a monitor down there and would see him slowly rising. She and Merlin were close friends, Arthur knew, but he couldn't spare a thought for her fear when the situation was spiralling out of control so quickly.

Merlin was rising slowly but inexorably away from the ship, uselessly waving his arms.

“What the hell is he doing that for?” Valiant murmured, and Arthur concurred with the part of his mind that wasn't rapidly making plans. Merlin ought to know there was no way to control one's orientation in spaceflight, not without a PMU.

“Wait, he's signalling!” Guinevere exclaimed. “It’s a code we invented for a training exercise at INES. He's saying ‘no control, no radio, life support okay'.”

And with her translation, Arthur could see there was a sort of method to Merlin's arm movements. They weren't just the random flailing of panic. Pride prickled in his belly, but the problem was far from resolved. It was good to know his air and heat were functional, but there seemed to be no other good news.

“Valiant, go to airlock two and suit up with a PMU. Guinevere, keep watching Merlin, see if he signals anything else. Mithian, calculate his rate and direction of movement, and Lancelot, figure out how long his air and heat will last under current conditions. Valiant, I’ll check you.”

They pulled themselves through the zero g of the ship quickly and confidently, their eighteen months aboard the Camelot more than enough to give them the skill, even if previous missions and training hadn’t. For the same reason, they were swift in getting Valiant suited and ready, but Arthur was plagued by doubt and fear the entire time: what if something went wrong—wrong-er—and he lost not one but two men? No astronaut had died in space in fifteen years, and to lose two at once, outside of a major disaster, was unheard of. Arthur refused to consider such a legacy.

By the time Valiant was suited and ready with the Personal Maneuverability Unit, Lancelot had finished his calculations. “He’s got enough air for forty-six hours, assuming average usage. Considering the stress he’s under, I’d estimate closer to thirty-nine or forty. Heat’s no problem unless his suit is punctured, but he’s going to get thirsty if we don’t grab him.”

“We will grab him,” Arthur replied grimly. “Guinevere, has he said anything different?”

“No, not yet. He’s actually stopped: probably trying to conserve air and energy.”

Arthur swallowed. “Right. Mithian?” She didn’t answer, and Arthur’s nerves spiked irrationally. Nothing could have happened inside the ship. “Mithian!” he repeated.

“Arthur, I think…” He’d never heard her sound so bewildered, not even when Gwaine kept winning at cards even though he was six drinks deep and had never played the game before. “I think he’s accelerating.”

The entire ship was silent for a long moment.

“That’s impossible,” Arthur said.

“I know, but I did the calculations based on my first observations, and then when I took new ones and did them over to verify, he had sped up perceptibly. Not by much, less than a meter per minute, but I’ve checked twice now. He’s moving faster.”

“We’re not close enough to Jupiter for it to exert that kind of gravity,” Guinevere said, sounding just as pained and confused as Arthur felt. “There’s no force acting on him to change his speed, nothing to…”

“I know,” Mithian said helplessly.

“I’m not going out there,” Valiant announced from inside the airlock.

The silence was purely stunned this time. Arthur had been punched in the stomach before, yet this somehow felt even more like that than the actual experience had.

Then all of them talked at once. “What do you mean you’re—” “—duty to your fellow—” “—coward! Coward!” “—reasonable, can’t we? It’s—” “—abandon Merlin!”

“I’m an astronaut! I am an astronaut!” Valiant’s voice eventually subdued the others vying for bandwidth. “I’m an astronaut, not an idiot. It’s not that I’m unwilling to save a crewmember.” Arthur snarled, but he managed to keep it silent so the mic didn’t transmit it. “It’s that this situation is patently unsafe. We don’t know why his tether broke, we don’t know why his radio cut out, we don’t know why his boots stopped working, and now we don’t know why he’s moving faster. It would be stupid to go out there before we know more.”

There was silence again, and Arthur realized that the rest of the crew was waiting for him to respond. As Mission Commander, he was in charge, and Valiant’s refusal was a challenge to that.

Valiant was the outlier of the group, having replaced the much-loved Gwaine Greene a scarce fortnight before launch, and he had tested Arthur’s leadership in small ways from the moment they’d left low Earth orbit. He had needled and needled and needled and none of it was insubordinate enough for Arthur to call him on it. Here and now, he was disobeying orders, going properly against Arthur’s authority, but he was right to do it. All the crew were empowered to reject a command that would needlessly endanger themselves, their crewmates, or the ship. Valiant was undermining Arthur in a completely legitimate way.

And Merlin’s life was on the line.

Arthur wanted to rage and scream and force him to go, or rip the suit off his traitorous hide and go himself, but Valiant was right: they had no idea what was causing this string of malfunctions and inexplicable phenomena. For all they knew, the next tether might break. The PMU might malfunction. Sending another crewmember out could easily mean throwing their life away.

On top of Merlin’s.

He’d never felt so helpless before. He’d never felt so scared.

“Guinevere, is he still signalling?” he asked, knowing it sounded like capitulation.

“Yes, he… uh, no, I don’t think so, actually…? He’s—Oh, God, Merlin…”

“What?” he demanded. There was a monitor just next to him, but he didn’t switch it on. He couldn’t bear to.

“I think he’s trying to use the length of tether that’s still attached to him as a lasso on the ship.”

The mental image of that was as ridiculous as it was heartbreaking, and a hard determination settled in his chest. He would not lose Merlin.

It would have been brilliant, if it had worked. And it had come so close to working: the tether’s end had brushed over the hull of the ship four of the six times he’d tried, and once even wrapped around a ladder strut, but it hadn’t caught well enough to hold him when he pulled, just slithered off. It didn’t even arrest his momentum.

And now he was too far away, and had run out of ideas. He had used the sign language he and Gwen invented back in training again, telling her—and through her, the rest of the crew—that he was, to be succinct, fucked, and had tried the radio again, to no effect.

He was frightened, physiologically. There was a shiver in his nerves and a shortness to his breath that he couldn’t banish, no matter how much be battered at them with logic. He had nearly two days’ worth of oxygen. He wasn’t moving that fast. Arthur and the rest of the crew were some of the cleverest people he knew, and would surely figure something out. They’d figure out what had gone wrong with the tether and the boots and the radio and continue with the mission as though nothing had happened. Arthur would carry on annoying him, Gwen and Lance would carry on pretending they didn’t want to ride into the sunset together, they’d all carry on acting like they didn’t wish with all their hearts that Gwaine had come on the mission instead of Valiant.

But time ticked inexorably on with no sign of action from the Camelot, and fear started to twist deeper into Merlin’s guts. He was trained not to panic, but he was unaccustomed to extended periods of complete helplessness. The thought that he might die out here started to stare at him from the dark corners of his mind. He’d always been fairly philosophical about death, but all things considered, he would really rather not go through with it just yet.

Before he could get too deep in his own head, an exterior light on the ship started to flash. Merlin stared at it for an embarrassingly long time before he realized it was Morse Code, and hastily dredged up the code he had memorized so long ago.

…SULTED EARTH STOP, he read, and assumed the first word had been ‘consulted’. TOO MANY ANOMALIES NO EGRESS PER INES AND PEND CORP STOP NOT GIVING UP STOP DONT GIVE UP STOP WE LOVE YOU STOP END

Merlin’s throat closed in a rush of affection. It had to be Gwen or Lance sending the message: no one else would outright say they loved him. Valiant wasn’t the sort, even if he did love Merlin, which he absolutely didn’t; Mithian was a good friend, but too Russian to be sentimental in that way; Arthur… well, even if Merlin thought the irritation Arthur sometimes displayed towards him was a bit forced, he was too much their Commander to let anything like personal affection get in his way. Still, Gwen or Lance saying it comforted him immensely. He might be stranded, but he wasn’t alone.

Answering them as best he could, he raised both arms and touched the tips of his fingers to the top of his helmet, making a big, clumsy heart shape.

Eventually though, his slow rotation turned him away from the ship again, and he ended up staring at Jupiter. Despite everything, that old awe stole over him, and he let himself drift in the feeling. It was better than needlessly stressing over a situation he had no control over. His crewmates—his friends—would have to rescue him.

All the books and pictures of Jupiter Merlin had seen as a boy depicted it as a mostly red and orange world, and that mostly held true. But there were creamy white bands, and patches of nauseous green, and strips of diaphanous blue, and splodges of brown, and bruises of purple, and streaks of yellow, and spots of something close to pink, all swirling around and through each other with a sort of slow grace and majesty that was still unimaginably vast and violent. There were storms more powerful than Merlin could dream of down there. Lightning that stretched for miles. Clouds so dense he would drown in them. He was 350,000 kilometers above Jupiter’s cloudtops, give or take a few thousand, in the L5 point of Io’s orbit, where they were going to establish the colony. It was a vast distance by any measure, but Jupiter was too large for even that to matter.

Was he going to fall into Jupiter? He was in orbit, currently, as a very tiny independent satellite, but unlike the Camelot, he was not under any propulsion and his momentum was not very great, so his orbit would quickly decay under the force of Jupiter's gravity. Would he survive long enough to actually enter the Jovian atmosphere? The thought, in isolation, was exhilarating. He'd be a human Cassini-Huygens, if only he were transmitting back to the ship. What a waste.

What a waste. He wished his radio still worked, at least. He wanted to say goodbye. He wanted to give his mother a final message. He wanted to tell Gwen and Lance to go ahead and jump each other already. He wanted to tell Arthur that he was a prat, and the best man he’d ever known, and ask if he would miss Merlin as much as Merlin, guiltily, wanted him to.

But he was not a morbid person, by nature, and soon the slow drift of his own motion and the swirl of Jupiter below him dragged his mind down into a sort of torpor.

‘Hello, little human.’

The words jolted Merlin out of his nearly meditative drift. The words had not come from his headset, and they could not possibly have come from outside of his helmet. They seemed to have come, somehow, from…

‘Yes, inside your tiny mind,’ the voice said.

“Oh, good,” Merlin said, feigning nonchalance as his heart raced. “Insanity.”

There was a low, slow chuckle that crawled down Merlin's back like an icy spider. ‘Try what you call “telepathy” and you'll be closer to the truth.’

This raised the rather tricky question of whether to tell the imaginary voice in his head that telepathy wasn't real.

‘Perhaps not the way you conceptualize it,’ the voice said agreeably. ‘But nevertheless.’

Merlin pressed his lips together, ruthlessly suppressing a mad little giggle. Yes, the voice in his head would be able to hear his thoughts, wouldn't it? Yet even in the midst of rising hysteria, his first and strongest reaction to this development was disappointment. He had really thought that he'd keep better hold of his mental fortitude if the situation ever got as dire as it had.

‘Do not despair, tiny thing, for it is in fact your mental resiliency which caused me to select you. I assure you, by the puny measure of your species, you are quite sane.’

And as much as insanity was, somehow, the more comforting option, Merlin couldn't believe a manifestation of his own madness would sound quite so condescending.

He swallowed thickly. “What… what are you?”

There was, somehow, the sensation of a wide and toothy grin. ‘I am so glad you asked, little human.’

Arthur knew every story of every person who had ever lost their lives in spacing accidents, and he would be damned before Merlin went on the list. He would be damned to hell before he allowed that.

It took an excruciating 88 minutes to get a response from Earth about the situation: 35 minutes for the signal to reach them, 18 minutes for them to deliberate and then make a response, and 35 minutes for that response to make its way back to the Camelot. And while the waiting was torture and the lack of gravity precluded even the small comfort of pacing, Arthur was appalled that it took them less than 20 minutes to decide Merlin’s fate.

“To Commander Arthur Pendragon and the rest of the Camelot crew: due to the inexplicable and numerous nature of the reported malfunctions,” came the voice of Arthur’s father, speaking in his capacity as Mission Comptroller and CEO of Pendragon Corp, “we determine the situation to be too dangerous to risk further rescue attempts at this time.”

“What!” Arthur roared, knowing Uther couldn’t hear but unable to restrain himself. But the rest of the crew reacted similarly, and Arthur’s cry of jagged heartbreak went unremarked.

“No!” Lancelot protested.

“How could they?” Guinevere asked, having come up to the command center while they waited for the response.

“This is not how I will honor a friend,” Mithian declared hotly.

“It is a shame and a waste to lose such a capable astronaut as Mr Emrys,” Uther continued, his half-hour-old words not interrupted by the outrage they caused. “We trust that he shall use every intellectual and physical resource at his disposal to save his own life, and that, should he fail, his commander and crewmates will comport themselves as befit their stations and responsibilities. Remember that you have been sent, first and foremost, with a mission to complete, and that a tragedy such as this is no reason for failure. If the worst should happen, you must continue in his name. End message.”

The command center was utterly silent in the wake of the message, each of them horror-stricken at the callous way Merlin's life had been written off. Arthur had always known that Pendragon Corporation was a business before it was anything else, but this was different. This was his crew. This was Merlin.

“Find some way to talk to him,” he ordered Guinevere. “I don't care if it means running flags up the mast: make it happen.” The Camelot had no mast, of course, but she took his meaning to heart, and, with Mithian’s help, had quickly worked out a way to isolate and control one of the exterior lights to transmit a message in Morse.

Outside, Merlin was slowly rotating away from the ship, but he should still have a sightline, and Lancelot confirmed that his heart rate increased when the light started flashing. Arthur looked on with his arms tightly crossed as Guinevere clicked the switch on and off, tightly controlling his feelings when she ended with ‘we love you’. And Merlin, sentimental bastard that he was, replied with a signal that needed no translation: he made his arms into a big heart shape.

“Arthur…” Guinevere said softly, and it hurt, to stand between his boss's, his father's, orders and the imperatives of loyalty and duty to his crew. But the choice was simple, once he was faced with it.

“I'm going out to get him,” he said. “I'll have a PMU and a tether. Mithian, come help with my suit. Lancelot, Guinevere, keep an eye on him and tell me if anything changes.” He ignored Valiant.

Suiting up was an activity which long practice made automatic. It normally felt like it took very little time because of that, though it really took more than a quarter of an hour. This time, Arthur felt every second of it. The lost time made him seethe, and waiting for the airlock to depressurize was even worse.

“Lancelot, status?” he asked, to distract himself. Lancelot would have volunteered the information if there was any to give.

“He's calm: low heart rate and respiration. He's turned away from us now, so he's, uh, he's probably enjoying looking at Jupiter.” The last words came sheepishly, as though he was embarrassed to give the—honestly very plausible—analysis.

Arthur grimaced, caught between impatience, exasperation, and affection. “Good,” he said. “I'll give him a good shock when I grab him.”

“Be careful, Arthur,” Guinevere said, as the light above the outer door changed from red to green. He stepped forward and disengaged the lock.

He understood, then, Merlin’s awed reaction. Jupiter was bloody huge. They might be hundreds of thousands of miles above even the thinnest cloud layer, but it still looked like a mountain making ready to fall over on him. It was beautiful though. He could almost see why Merlin loved it to the exclusion of so much else.

But the urgency of Merlin’s situation prevented Arthur from getting distracted. He checked his tether—knowing Merlin had done the same, and how much good it had done—and pushed himself off the edge of the airlock floor with a kick of his foot and out into space.

He could see Merlin now, and the distance between them made Arthur’s heart stutter. In the ship, on the monitors, the distance was modulated, and the zoom they used to keep track of him with the exterior cameras concealed how small he had become to the naked eye. Against the storm of Jupiter’s ruddy belly, Merlin was a tiny man-shaped ruby, the red of his Pendragon Corp space suit bright and stark.

Engaging the PMU when he was a safe distance from the Camelot was like being gently kicked in the back, but he just steered towards Merlin and rode the force of the tiny jets across the void.

Mithian murmured numbers through his earpiece, noting their relative positions and angles, Arthur’s, Merlin’s, and the ship’s speeds, and Arthur took them in and adjusted accordingly. None of them were moving terribly fast, relative to each other. Merlin was really only drifting very slowly away from the Camelot, and Arthur started to feel foolish for the degree of worry he had felt. Yes, it was extremely strange that so many things had gone wrong in such quick succession, but all phenomena had explanations if one looked hard enough, and they would do exactly that as soon as Arthur dragged Merlin’s sorry arse back to the ship.

It took a scarce few minutes to get close enough to Merlin to make him man-sized again, and relief washed through Arthur like a stormfront, shaking him to the foundations. Merlin was still facing Jupiter as Arthur closed the last meters, when Lancelot spoke.

“Arthur, his pulse just skyrocketed.”

“What?” Arthur demanded. “But he can’t see me. And he’s not moving.”

“I don’t know what it’s in response to,” Lancelot replied, and there was murmuring in the background of the others trying to help interpret Merlin’s read-outs. “But his BP just spiked to 135 over 88. Respiration also elevated.”

“Guinevere, try another Morse light message,” he said, even though he was less than a body’s length away from having Merlin in his grasp. “Maybe he’s turned just enough to—”

The tether stopped unspooling and Arthur jerked to a stop.

“Arthur? Your pulse is up too now. What—”

“There’s something wrong with my tether,” he interrupted, nausea cramping his stomach. “It can’t be at its limit.” The little read-out on the data screen on his arm confirmed it: the tether still had half its length to go.

“The PMU?” Mithian asked urgently, actually speaking the letters, unlike the rest of the crew, who pronounced it ‘moo’.

Arthur tested the controls and the tiny jets pushed reassuringly at his back, but to no avail against the unrelenting tether. “Functionality confirmed.” He shoved the little toggles down again, and felt the jets flare harder, with just as little result.

And Merlin was drifting away from him.

“I'm unclipping the tether,” he said.

“Like hell you are!” Lancelot shouted, the sentiment immediately echoed by the rest of the crew.

“You are the mission commander!” Mithian cried imperiously. “You may not risk your life for one crewmember when the rest of us—and the entire mission—are counting on you.”

“Arthur, you can't,” Guinevere said in the softest, most heartbroken voice he'd ever heard.

And the worst thing was, they were right. He had already disobeyed orders with this rescue attempt, but to further endanger himself now would be to violate a much deeper law, that which leaders had followed since time immemorial: his own needs, hopes, wants, dreams, all came second to the wellbeing of the people he had been put in charge of. Untethering himself in the hope of catching Merlin with the PMU alone—and trusting that no further inexplicable malfunctions would occur—was a level of foolishness which served only his own wailing heart.

So he didn't do that.

But he didn't let them reel him in until Merlin was a mere scarlet speck against the rufous belly of Jupiter, and a swell of despair so fierce it was more like anger rose up and choked Arthur’s throat. “Merlin!”

Chapter Text

When Merlin was at uni, he had had a student work position in the tech lab, where all the machines had names. There were Milly and Tilly the Printers, Jasper the Dehumidifier, and Grunhilde the Scanner, among assorted others. Grunhilde was temperamental. It had been part of Merlin's training that any time he opened or closed the lab, the very first or last thing he had to do was go over and whisper “Good morning, Grunhilde,” or “Good night, Grunhilde.” Many dire warnings were made about what would happen should he fail in this sacred duty.

He immediately failed in this sacred duty. Deep in his Skeptic phase, the first time he was in charge of opening the lab, he ignored Grunhilde until he had to go help another student use her, at which point he found her beeping shrilly with her light bar zipping back and forth under the clear plastic window. He'd called his supervisor when the usual troubleshooting measures (power cycling, then smacking) failed and explained what was going on, only to receive five seconds of heavy silence, followed by a gravely accusatory, “You didn't tell her good morning, did you?”

This had led to a bit of a shift in Merlin's worldview: he still believed in science and rationality and maintained a healthy skepticism about a great many things, but there was also shit in the universe that didn't have a logical explanation, and that was okay.

But this—this—was really testing his suspension of disbelief.

‘I am an autochthon of this world you name Jupiter,’ the voice said in Merlin's head, and bloody hell, where did this thing get its vocabulary? ‘I intend to help you learn what that means, for it will be unacceptable for your people to come here as what you call “colonists”. You are to be assimilants, or nothing.’

A new sort of fear uncoiled in Merlin's gut and started twisting around some sensitive internal bits. “What—what does that mean?” Verbal speech was unnecessary, since whatever this being was could read thoughts perfectly well, but Merlin couldn't get used to just thinking questions.

‘It means I have worked very hard to bring you to me, little human,’ the voice in his head said. ‘I observed the coming of your little ship for many days and selected you as the most susceptible.’

“The most susceptible to what?”

‘Understanding,’ the voice said, which was as clear as mud.

Merlin, mired in confusion, did not feel susceptible to understanding anything. He was drifting through space with no means of getting back to his ship or crew, with no idea of if or how he was going to survive. He hoped his friends were coming up with some way of rescuing him, and knew that Lance was likely still monitoring his vitals and picking up on how stressed he had got all of a sudden. He wished there was some way to explain what had happened, but he didn't even know what had happened, and his and Gwen's sign language was rudimentary at best.

So all he could do was watch Jupiter engulf the sky as he sank slowly, slowly down towards it, and try to sort through it all.

The most likely explanation, incredible though it felt to even think it, was aliens. Scientists had long suspected Europa of harbouring life, and the IAU had banned any human craft or artifact from ever touching it for fear of germ transfer. But Europa was on the far side of Jupiter at the moment, and the voice had said it was a denizen of Jupiter specifically. No sign or signal of life of any kind, let alone intelligent life, had ever come from the Solar System’s largest planet, but there were so many magnetic fields and types of radiation blazing off it that any observations would have had to be visual, and the sheer size of the world made that a scant chance indeed.

Pendragon Corporation’s intentions of building a colony in the Jovian system had brought the first significant interest to the planet since the Clipper probe of the 2030s, and there was no expectation or preparation for the eventuality of finding any life at all. Their crew had no anthropologists or philosophers or linguists, or anyone useful. Apparently Merlin was the closest thing they had to an effective First Contact agent.

At least the universe had a sense of humor.

And what exactly did the creature mean, ‘assimilants’? Were they the Borg? Merlin didn’t especially want to join an extraterrestrial hivemind, thanks anyway. He wanted to keep admiring Jupiter, and go to Gwen and Lance’s wedding someday, and finally ask Arthur why he was always such a dick to him, and then maybe do something else with dicks, and he couldn’t do any of those things if he was in an extraterrestrial hivemind. Only, wouldn’t he be the extrajovian? Except the voice said that Jupiter wasn’t called Jupiter, or Jove probably, or any of the names humanity had come up with for it over the eons.

And it was becoming stupid to keep saying ‘the voice’, even inside his own mind… which the voice could read. Suddenly angry at the lack of privacy, and embarrassed of what he’d just been thinking, he pushed the thought out as hard as he could. ‘Who are you?’

In response, he got a feeling, like the sharp smile earlier, of a satisfied smirk. And then something… loud happened to him: it was sound and sensation and emotion all at once, blasting into his mind with the force of an inferno, and knotted up at its bottom was the name, ‘Kilgharrah.’

But the overwhelming shock of it dragged his mind sideways and he slewed drunkenly into unconsciousness.

“This isn’t possible.”

“I know you don't want to believe it,” Lancelot began gently, but Arthur interrupted.

“No, I mean physically impossible. Look.” He propelled himself away from the microscope so that the others could take turns looking, grabbing onto a handhold on the opposite wall to keep himself in place.

Arthur hadn't even removed all the layers of his EVA suit before pulling himself into the laboratory with almost violent yanks through the zero-g, having recovered the remaining end of Merlin's tether, the part still attached to the ship, and brought it in for examination and testing.

The irrational hope he clung to was that if he could somehow prove that none of this made sense—that something patently impossible rather than just vanishingly unlikely had come to pass—that it would somehow nullify the whole thing. They'd go back in time five hours and none of this would happen in the first place.

And he thought he had found that something.

Because, as they knew, the tether had been severed somehow. As they also knew, the tethers were made of microcarbon chains, with a tensile strength so high that some physicists theorized that a shell only four or five atoms thick would be able to contain a 1000 terajoule nuclear blast. The extremely specialized tools that were used to break the tethers back on Earth left each resulting end abraded and frayed, yet Merlin's was cut cleanly, like thread sliced by scissors. It didn't make physical sense.

“Well?” he prompted impatiently. Lancelot, Guinevere, Mithian, even Valiant, had had turns at the microscope, and their expressions ran the gamut from miserable to confused to mulish. “There's no explanation for that.”

“A micrometeorite could have…” Lancelot suggested, only for Mithian to disagree.

“No: we would see residue, singes, from the meteorite itself, if not the tether’s material. It is strange.” She was frowning heavily, her delicate features scrunched together in concentration and confusion. It was gratifying that Mithian, by far the cleverest of them in terms of computation and deductive reasoning, agreed with him on this.

“And it doesn’t explain what happened to demagnetize his boots,” Guinevere added, chewing her thumbnail nervously. “Could it have been some sort of radiation pulse from Jupiter, some sort of EMP? That would explain his radio going out.”

“But his life support didn’t fail,” Lancelot reminded her. “And no other equipment in the area was impacted.”

“And an EMP wouldn’t do this to a microcarbon chain,” Mithian added.

The argument went around in circles for a few minutes until Valiant shouted, “Enough! With all due respect, reviewing these impossibilities doesn’t help anyone, let alone Merlin. There may be no single thing that explains all these events. And figuring some explanation out isn’t going to make it not happen. Merlin is gone. I hate to say it so flatly, but avoiding the facts isn’t helpful. We all came out here knowing how dangerous it could be, and one of those dangers got him. Sheer bad luck. That’s all there is to it.”

Everyone stared at him, dumb and horrified.

Arthur felt like he'd taken a blow to the head. Watching Merlin dwindle against Jupiter's mass had been nightmarish. And, realistically speaking, Valiant was right: they had no further chance of rescuing him. After Arthur's tether malfunctioned, there was no way they could trust a PMU in free spaceflight. Whatever bad luck had plagued them had thus far limited its interference to outside of the ship, so that's where they would stay. Logic and sense and every good instinct said that this was the right course of action. But deep in Arthur's heart and soul, he could not believe that he was submitting to staring through a microscope and discussing EMPs rather than hurling himself out the airlock again to go get Merlin back once and for all.

And now Valiant had stripped him of his last, most feeble defense against the truth of the situation.

But Arthur didn't want to think about the truth of the situation. He didn't want to think of all the possible interpretations of Merlin’s vital signs, of the strange spike of adrenaline he'd undergone when Arthur was so close to catching him; the terrifying and inexplicable crash into unconsciousness that had happened just as the outer airlock doors shut behind Arthur again; the ominous lack of change to his shallow respiration and heart rate since then. The Camelot’s cameras could still make him out, barely, and there was no outward change to his condition, which only made the whole situation more strange and unsettling. The only silver lining was that his low use of oxygen meant it would last him longer.

And every bit of it compounded Arthur's grief and guilt and shock. How had this happened so quickly? Five hours ago, Merlin had practically been vibrating out of his skin at the idea of doing an EVA and seeing Jupiter, and Arthur had been equal parts fond and exasperated and envious of the fucking planet, all hidden under a thick armor of annoyance and bossiness. Five hours was not long enough for something of this magnitude to happen. Five hours was not a serious amount of time; five hours was not a fair amount of time. What had Arthur done wrong? What was the failure he could rectify to fix this?

‘Sheer bad luck’ could not be the answer. He could still feel the simultaneous pull of the tether and push of the PMU against his body, one trying to help him reach Merlin, the other mercilessly keeping him away. It had felt purposeful, malicious even. But what force in the universe was capable of such a thing?

“What,” Mithain said coldly to Valiant, “is it that you propose we do, if we are not to seek answers?”

Valiant squared his shoulders. “We should prepare a report for Earth. As we should have done before the Mission Commander risked his own life. Pendragon Corp will need to make a statement.”

Arthur’s heart twisted and screamed like a torture victim trying to avoid the knife. Make Merlin’s loss real? Accept it? Tell Earth? No. No, no, no.

“Oh my God,” Guinevere gasped. “Poor Hunith.” And she burst into tears.

He didn’t feel right. His body felt thick and his mouth felt dry and his brain felt like it had sea urchin quills stabbed into it. It was like a hangover without the nausea, or the knowledge that the previous night had at least been fun.

He could still see a sliver of Jupiter if he craned his head all the way to the right, but he had spun part way around during his unconsciousness, and now faced open space, the pure black of the sky and the shine of the multitudinous stars making his breath catch in his chest. As always when he was alone with the sky, he let himself soak in the vastness of it, loving the sheer scale of the universe.

‘Interesting,’ the voice—the fucking voice—said.

Merlin groaned, trying to kickstart his higher brain functions.

This took a not insignificant amount of effort and time. He was still in his EVA suit, still drifting untethered in a deteriorating orbit around Jupiter, still alive, for the moment. His air was down to thirty-five hours.

And he was hungry.

‘I intend to teach you the solution to that problem,’ the voice—Kilgharrah—said.

“I know the solution to that problem,” he groused, still too discombobulated to remember how redundant talking to a telepath was. “Lunch.” He’d even enjoy what passed for food on the Camelot. Even if it was Arthur’s turn to cook. That man could burn water. A smile tugged at Merlin’s reluctant lips. And he was just out of it enough that he let an old fantasy of Arthur feeding him, well, another way surface in his mind and linger.

‘Cannibalism is frowned upon, little human.’

And this whole thing was so absurd and improbable that it felt perfectly reasonable to ask, “Are you joking right now?”

‘Not successfully, apparently.’

“Jesus fucking Christ.” And a laugh bubbled up out of him at the pure ludicrousness of it all.

He laughed for a long time, unable to keep new peals of mirth from pouring out of him, a catharsis after the absolutely unbelievable stresses he’d been through. And something told him the worst was yet to come.

‘All shall be clear in time,’ Kilgharrah said, and Merlin would have sworn he sounded almost pleased.

Merlin collected himself and focused on the thought, ‘What are you? I know you’re a creature of Jupiter, or whatever its real name is, but I don’t understand how that’s possible. No one ever even imagined there being life on Jupiter—or whatever. You know what I mean.’

‘I do,’ came the rather sardonic reply. ‘The world you call Jupiter is truly named Daobeth.’ That tangled mess of sound-sensation-feeling hurt his head as Kilgharrah’s name had the first time, but it didn’t knock him out, which seemed like a good sign. ‘I have been chosen as an emissary to your people, as I am forty nine years old, and have laid five clutches, and my little observant is thriving.’

‘Forty nine? But Jupiter, er… Daobeth takes almost twelve years to orbit…’ Kilgharrah was silent, as though waiting for Merlin to reach a very obvious conclusion on his own. When he did, he jolted into regular speech out of pure shock. “You're five hundred and eighty years old?”

‘Perhaps by your world’s standards. You call it “Earth”? Hmm.’ Acute judgement saturated the tone. ‘But rest assured: very soon, you will understand me and my kind most intimately.’

Visions of anal probes barged in and started dancing threateningly in Merlin’s head. Sure, he’d had some adolescent fantasies about fit aliens railing him, the Star Trek kind with blue skin or pointy ears or whatever, and obviously six packs and massive cocks, but this didn’t seem to be that kind of alien and—

‘I assure you, nothing of the sort will be involved.’ Kilgharrah’s clear disgust was more comforting than the actual words.

Still, his stress response took a minute to subside, and by then he’d turned far enough around in his very slow personal rotation to face Jupiter—no, Daobeth—again. He was still hundreds of thousands of miles away, but the sensation of being oriented to something besides just the stars after such a long period of drifting stillness made his stomach jolt and clench.

And there was a tiny dark speck on the ruddy surface that seemed… incongruous somehow.

Merlin stared at it for so long that his eyes blurred and crossed and he had to blink and look at something else, but there was nothing else to look at. But there was definitely something strange as he focused on the speck again: mainly, that it was now a dot.

It was getting larger.

It was getting closer.

Something was rising from the surface of Daobeth.

Something was coming towards Merlin.

‘Um?’ He sent the little blip of a question because he couldn’t articulate a better one.

No answer.

‘Kilgharrah, what is that?’ he asked, unease giving him his words back.

Was it a ship? Was Kilgharrah coming up to fetch Merlin? But what sort of ship could bear the intense pressures that seethed below? And did Kilgharrah understand that human physiology would be unable to bear even the mildest of what Daobeth’s atmosphere had to offer?

‘Kilgharrah?’ he sent again, more urgently.

Still, no reply.

And so there was nothing he could do but hang there, heart pounding, slowly spinning, losing sight of Daobeth and the dot and regaining the view of the stars. One of the Galilean moons was a bright sparkle in the distance, but he couldn’t remember the orbital periods well enough to tell which one. The Camelot was out of sight—they couldn’t very well fuck up their orbit by bringing the ship back to look for him—and he wondered if they were still able to see him with the external cameras’ strong magnification. Even if he wasn’t dying as they all must expect, he had no idea if he’d ever see them again. Gwen would be devastated. Feeling heartlorn and sorry all over again, he made his arms into a heart as he had before, then a big O for OK, just hoping they’d get the message and take some little comfort.

He realized, with some chagrin, that he and Gwen should have come up with an arm signal for ‘aliens’. Could he mime a xenomorph? A chestburster, maybe? The mental image made him snort phlegmily.

But the idea sparked another. He had no idea if they would still be monitoring his biometrics at this point, with his fate, they must believe, sealed, but he could hope they were and use their own idea on them: Morse Code. Lacking a light or any other way to signal, he could use his breath, holding the air for short or long times to spell out the message.

Short-long short-long-short-long-short-long short-long-short-short… God, but that was tiring. He was totally winded by the second repetition and gave it up, trusting his crewmates to be as mad as he was. He thought they would be: Gwen would never give up on him, Lance was secretly an absolute loon, and Arthur was as stubborn as a bulldog and extraordinarily uptight about his ‘duty’ and whatever else they taught him at My Daddy Owns Mars school. Oh, the fun he and Gwaine had made of Arthur back during training…

Before long, he faced Daobeth again, and now the dot was a definite something, a dark spot against the burnt orange, with a distinct sort of motion to it. He stared, curious, anxious, transfixed, as it grew by slow, slow increments, larger, and closer.

It took three more rotations before he could make out any details.

And when he could, it took everything in him to keep from voluntarily giving up his sanity and will to live.

Because that was a dragon.

That was a fuck off massive dragon.

The aliens were dragons. The aliens that lived on Jupiter. Kilgharrah, the telepathic denizen of Daobeth, was something out of a legend of knights and chivalry and wizards and maidens and shite and he was flying up at Merlin and was definitely going to eat him. And Merlin didn’t even have a cool space lance to fight him off with! (His whirling mind paused to throw out a little apology to the very cool spaceman Lance. Then it went back to 100% panic.) It wasn’t fair! He hadn’t come all the way to space to die by fucking dragon!

Stupidly, mindlessly, he flailed, the way any self-respecting swimmer would when a megalodon surged out of the murky depths to swallow them whole. Of course, it did nothing except tire him out, and make his shoulders hurt. And he exhausted himself long before Kilgharrah was anywhere near him, so in the end he just watched numbly as the gigantic bastard Daobethian dragon drew nearer and nearer. All the darkly shining scales and sharply gleaming claws and vast bat-like wings and burning ocher eyes and Merlin knew how little bunnies felt when a wolf was coming at them. He thought his heart might have stopped all on its own, to save Kilgharrah the trouble.

And in the end, when Kilgharrah grabbed him with those fuck off enormous sharply gleaming claws, he had spun around again and was facing the stars, and couldn't even see it coming.

He faced the camera and tried to be brave.

“I am Mission Commander Arthur Pendragon of the Camelot. It is my privilege and honor to be leading this mission to Jupiter with a crew of the finest men and women I could ever hope to know.” He paused to hide how his voice was about to break.

“And that means it is also my terrible responsibility to report that we have lost one of them.” He blinked hard and steeled himself. “Today at eleven hundred hours and fourteen minutes, EVA Specialist Merlin Emrys exited the Camelot in order to perform a diagnostic and repair on one of our minor engines, which was not responding properly. During his spacewalk, a series of accidents and equipment failures which we are still seeking to understand caused Mr Emrys to lose radio contact with the ship, and to enter a state of unpowered free flight. Despite his own efforts and our attempts to recover him, he remains outside. And we no longer have a safe means of rescuing him.”

Guinevere started crying again, covering her mouth to stay silent, and pushed herself out to another chamber in the ship. Lancelot followed, leaving only Mithian and Valiant. That helped, somehow. Guinevere and Lancelot had been closest with Merlin, and their evident grief had clawed at Arthur’s tissue-thin self-control.

“At this time,” Arthur went on, forcing his voice to stay even, his eyes to stay dry, “Merlin has approximately twenty-five hours’ worth of air remaining. Due to the ship’s orbit taking us around Jupiter, we are going to lose the ability to pick up signals from his suit before that time comes.” He had to pause again. They had very carefully decided what to say and what to leave out since this message would be going out to the public, after Merlin’s next of kin were notified. They were not telling anyone about Merlin’s irregular spurts of what could only be read as panic, when his heart rate and respiration surged, nor his inexplicable period of unconsciousness, nor the brief and incomplete communications they had managed. Arthur knew the image of Merlin making a heart with his arms was going to haunt him until the day he died.

“Each of us has known and respected Merlin, as a scientist and as a friend, for years. His incredible cleverness has often solved problems that stumped the rest of us, and his strong sense of humor has gotten us through many difficult and frustrating moments. I feel—” His throat closed on him, and he had to clear it twice before continuing. The pressure in his chest felt like a vice. “I feel lucky to have known him. To all his friends and family, especially his mother, I and the rest of the crew out here grieve with you. He will be remembered, and honored, in all of our hearts.”

He made eye contact with Mithian, and she cut the recording. It had to be sent back to Earth for release along with Pendragon Corp’s statement before the Camelot went behind Jupiter and lost touch with Earth and Mars for the several hours of transit. But he let her take care of that. She had liked Merlin too, in her own reserved way, and he knew she would want to do everything she could to facilitate his legacy. Valiant, however, looked askance at Arthur, as though judging him for passing the responsibility too.

Arthur ignored him. He didn’t have the willpower or capacity to deal with the truculent American. He pulled himself out of the command module and made for the sleeping quarters. He locked himself in his dark sleeping cubby and curled into a tight ball inside his sleeping bag, trying to ease the sharp pain in his chest.

He would not cry. He was the Mission Commander. A leader had to be prepared for loss. No one person could be worth his tears, he knew that. He knew that.

But his inhale was a shuddering gasp and his exhale was a sob and all he could think about was Merlin, drifting through space, slowly running out of air, dying alone. And Arthur had never said a kind word to him, too proud to give even a glimpse of his affection when he couldn’t show the whole of it. And now he had to live with that while Merlin died, unknowing.

Chapter Text

Kilgharrah did not rip him to bits, or eat him, or anything else a dragon might be expected to do, such as flambé him. He also didn’t mindspeak to Merlin again, even once he had Merlin secured and was carrying him down towards Daobeth. It was so strange that it made Merlin wonder whether the dragon actually was Kilgharrah in the first place. Was the dragon merely an errand-dragon for the truly intelligent beings who resided in the clouds below? But why would they stop talking to him? It was confusing and scary to be dragged through space by an inscrutable alien, but at the same time, bizarrely, utterly boring. He was in the grip of a dragon, being flown down to Jupiter, which was actually called Daobeth, which he knew because a suddenly-recalcitrant telepathic alien told him so, along with the facts that he was ‘susceptible’ to ‘understanding’. What was he susceptible to understanding? That information seemed to be distributed on an NTK basis, and Merlin hadn’t made the short list.

But thinking about all that just sent him spiraling through panic and wild speculation and more panic and even wilder speculation, and in the end it was probably some psychological self-defense mechanism against burning his neurons out that sent him to sleep. Well, he didn’t so much ‘sleep’ as he just ‘greyed out eventually’. But potato tomato.

The upshot of this was coming to in a dense umber-orange mist.

Without his helmet on.

He choked and jerked, his whole body jackknifing with a spasm of adrenaline. The mist was in his mouth already, in his throat and lungs, and it tasted sulfurous and foul, but, he realized slowly, he was breathing it.

Slowly, his heart ceased its wild throbbing and he was able to look around more carefully.

There wasn’t very much to see. He was floating in the middle of a dense dark-orange cloud, and could barely see farther than his own feet. There was no sign of any other feature or presence, neither the dragon that had dragged him down here, nor Kilgharrah. Unless… was it possible that the intelligent being was some sort of distributed intelligence? Something so vast as to be more geologic or even atmospheric in scale than biologic? Was he inside its brain right now?

‘Your period of passivity has not improved the accuracy of your hypotheses, I see,’ came the sardonic mindvoice of Kilgharrah, and a rush of irritation and relief went through Merlin.

“Where the hell were you?” he demanded, except his voice came out as a shockingly low growl, like he’d been breathing sulfur hexafluoride. Which actually made a fair amount of sense when he thought of Jupiter—Daobeth’s exosphere’s molecular makeup. Always assuming they were still in the exosphere, and not lower down. But wouldn't he be dead if they were? Though if he was breathing the gases here…. That wasn’t the point.

‘Why did you stop talking to me? Where are you? What happened to that dragon? How am I alive with my helmet off?’

‘So many questions,’ Kilgharrah chided, and Merlin scowled. ‘But I suppose one little answer wouldn't hurt.’

And with that, underneath him, the mist began to seethe and boil like a vast pot of orange pasta water, except Merlin was one of the macaroni.

A sudden strong gust cleared the mist away in perhaps a twenty meter diameter area, leaving Merlin exposed as Kilgharrah approached.

He was even more draconic up close. His scales were dark as wet slate, with an oily sheen to them that made Merlin think of gasoline spills on the ocean. His eyes burned amber-bright, citrine-sharp, with a slash of dark pupil. His teeth were as long as Merlin's forearm, and he could see the serrations. It made him shudder to wonder what manner of beast must die with those in its flesh.

‘You are the dragon,’ he mindspoke, half awed, half accusatory.

‘I,’ Kilgharrah retorted, sounding sniffy despite not speaking with his actual airways, if he even had airways, ‘am a derkesthai.’

That word hurt his brain as the others had—perhaps words that had no human equivalent were simply too…what, strong? strange? for humans—but it didn't come close to knocking him out, which seemed promising. Perhaps he was building a tolerance?

Putting that issue aside for another time, he replied to Kilgharrah. ‘Fair enough. Uncanny resemblance though.’ He pushed a mental picture of Smaug out with the words to illustrate his point. ‘But more urgently, how am I alive? However terribly ignorant I and my people are about Daobeth, I feel confident saying its atmosphere isn't primarily oxygen and nitrogen.’

A sensation like a smirk entered his mind. ‘I told you you would have to come to understand us,’ he said. ‘Did you think you would accomplish that without changing, fundamentally? Your transformation has already begun.’

This answer startled Merlin into speaking aloud. “My what?” And the words came out as a guttural roar.

They were subdued and quiet when they assembled for breakfast in the morning.

Five, now. Uneven and off kilter. Arthur's gaze skirted the table, seeing how Merlin's loss had reshaped them.

Mithian had been on night duty and had dark circles under her eyes, but underneath that, she looked sallow and withdrawn. Guinevere's eyes were red-rimmed and puffy from crying. Lancelot looked like he'd taken a blow to the stomach, all curled in as though to protect the pain. Valiant was the least affected: his mouth was tight and his eyes shifted between the others as though measuring what his reaction ought to be based on theirs. Arthur squashed a surge of dislike for the man, focusing instead on his own breathing. It was chancy from minute to minute if breathing hurt for Arthur or not. He generally preferred when it did. Merlin's death was Arthur's fault, and he should suffer for that.

“Whose turn is it to cook?” Arthur asked, knowing he needed to take them out of themselves somehow.

There was a little pause as they thought.

Then, “Merlin's,” Guinevere said, and collapsed into tears again.

Arthur watched helplessly as Lancelot and Mithian moved to comfort her, leaving Valiant with half the table to himself.

If Merlin were here, Arthur thought stupidly, he would know how to help.

But they'd lost him. Arthur had let him die.

Valiant stood suddenly. The ship was still in zero-g, they hadn't spun it up for centripetal force yet, but he'd kept his foot hooked into one of the straps under the table, so he didn't float away. Still, the movement attracted everyone's attention.

“We can't go on like this,” he said bluntly. “I can't say Merlin wouldn't want us to carry on like this because I don't know that he wouldn't, but I do know that we have a mission to complete, and we're already getting behind.”

The rest of the crew stared at him. “It's been less than a day,” Guinevere said faintly, giving voice to the shock they all clearly felt.

“And if we don't get our shit together, we're just inviting more accidents like the one that happened to him,” Valiant countered, the words made harsher by his American accent.

This had already gone too far. “Tonight at dinner, we'll have a memorial,” Arthur said, cutting off the retorts he saw brewing in Mithian and Lancelot. “If you want to say something about M—about him, you may do so then. For now, I'll make breakfast, and then we'll catch up on duties and prepare to initiate spin. If engine nine still needs repairs, I will do that too. Understood?”

He got four nods, with varying degrees of reluctance, and, knowing that was the best he could expect, went to one of the food storage cabinets. It had been very bold of Valiant to make such a strong declaration like that, and while emotions were running so high, too. And it was an overt step on Arthur's authority, the boldest he'd made yet. In one respect, he was right: they were slightly behind on their mission goals. But extenuating circumstances this severe had to be taken into account. Was it worth confronting him over, or would it just make Arthur look like an insecure leader?

Preoccupied with his thoughts, he automatically grabbed three meal pouches in each hand. Then, blinking against a stab of stunningly strong grief, slowly put one back.

‘What do you mean you’ve given me some weird alien shit that’s going to physiologically and mentally change me?’ Merlin demanded.

‘I did not say that,’ Kilgharrah replied testily. ‘I said I infused you with a serum composed of my observant’s pluripotent blast cells, meaning that your cells will shortly be overtaken by derkesthai—’

‘You’re turning me into a dragon!?’ Merlin hoped that the shrill disbelief was translated through his mindvoice. He hoped it hurt Kilgharrah’s mental ears.

Kilgharrah shook his vast head irritably, and in the small corner of his brain that wasn’t freaking the fuck out, Merlin felt smug.

‘Don’t be foolish,’ Kilgharrah mindspoke. ‘That would be impossible.’

Merlin relaxed, fractionally. They were still floating in a bubble of clear-ish air, surrounded by orange-brown fog. The only part of Kilgharrah that Merlin could see clearly was his head and neck, the rest of him extending into the mist as an indistinct shape of darkness, but his head was more than enough. Merlin could probably walk into his mouth and not even notice if he closed it, that was how big it was. Merlin’s suit was dead, none of the little screens or readouts or panels responding when he had tried to wake them up, so he didn’t know the temperature or pressure or anything about the environment beyond what he could feel and observe for himself. And what he could feel and observe for himself told him that he was in a stinky orange fog of lukewarm temperature in the company of a fuck off massive alien dragon. So important to not lose sight of the big things. And one of the other big things seemed to be that Merlin was not turning into a fuck off massive dragon himself, which he counted as good news.

Unfortunately, Kilgharrah wasn’t done talking.

‘I am merely turning you into a demi-derkesthai so you may be a more effective plenipotentiary between our species.’

‘A WHAT?’ Merlin mentally wailed. Where in God’s name had Kilgharrah even learned all these words? The Camelot was full of scientists, not diplomats and English majors. Though actually, hadn't Arthur and Mithian both had some diplomacy training? Arthur had been trained in pretty near everything, as far as Merlin could tell, except for how to not be a bossy obnoxious prat. And how to not look deliciously lickable in spandex.

Not the point.

‘What the fuck is a demi-derkesthai? I like being a human! And it's not okay to change someone's species without asking them!’

‘I invite you to remember whose planet this is, little thing. You came here with the intent to colonize: to invade. I am giving you the terms of that choice.’

Merlin sobered. ‘Still, doing this without giving warning of the consequences beforehand… We would have made different choices, if we had known.’

Kilgharrah seemed to consider this. ‘Life is a series of unforeseen consequences, is it not? That this is the most severe you have endured is unfortunate. But it is too late to reverse.’

The uneasy simmer of emotions in Merlin's chest rose to a boil. From an intellectual perspective, he could—almost—understand that Kilgharrah and the rest of the derkesthai had the right to make their own rules here on their own world, and were under literally no obligation to follow human ideas of morality or bodily autonomy. But Merlin was human, and the idea that his body was being changed by observant potent blast cells or whatever the fuck made his scalp crawl. Had he already started to transform somehow? Was his body different under the layers of the useless suit? His breathing started to quicken, and phantom prickles crept up his back and down his arms and legs. Only, were they phantoms, or actual sensations indicating that he was becoming less and less human?

Before full-blown panic could erupt, he did the emotional equivalent of throwing a blanket over an over-excited dog and sitting on it. Rationality. Rationality had gotten him this far in life, and it would get him through this too. With some help from a rather warped sense of humor, knowing himself.

‘Okay,’ he mindspoke to Kilgharrah. ‘Okay, so what does this mean, exactly? I'm a telepath now, apparently, but what else?’

Kilgharrah made a rumbling sound, and it shook him to his bones. He tried not to think about those whale calls that could vibrate a person to death. But he also realized that he hadn't actually heard the derkesthai vocalize before. Did they communicate vocally with one another at all, or were they entirely telepathic?

‘Strictly speaking,’ Kilgharrah sent, ‘you are not a telepath. You are merely thinking very loudly at a telepath. Very loudly and clumsily.’

Merlin focused on being offended on behalf of his thinking skills, because the alternative was still freaking out.

‘As for the rest of your question, I must say I have no idea. You are the first human to come here, after all, and I have never done this before either.’

The panic-dog freed itself from the mental blanket and went tearing through the screen door of Merlin's self-control. ‘YOU MEAN YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT YOU'VE DONE TO ME!?’

Engine nine no longer had any issues responding to instructions.

Merlin had gone on his ill-fated EVA specifically to fix it, had not performed any repairs before—before the malfunctions, and now the engine was somehow back to normal after no intervention whatsoever.

The whole situation was starting to feel even more nightmarish.

But the engine working meant that Arthur didn't have to go outside to fix it, and they were able to initiate spin for the Camelot. Guinevere and Valiant were at the controls, Guinevere guiding the engines into position and firing them just strongly enough to achieve the thrust they needed, and Valiant keeping careful track of their trajectory and acceleration so that they would maintain their orbit throughout the transition. Mithian and Lancelot monitored from secondary stations, and Arthur observed them all, arms crossed. The command center, situated at the crux of the X of the ship’s structure, would not experience gravity the way the ring would, but there would be a mild Coriolis effect.

The ship rumbled as the engines began to force rotation, and the tremors of it were translated into Arthur’s body through the strap he held on the ceiling. His crew reported in as required: all was going as expected, as planned. No problems. He reported as much to Earth, and received confirmation from a Pendragon Corp shareholder an hour and ten minutes later. The silence from his father was worrisome: Uther was a notorious micromanager, and only the Camelot’s sheer distance kept him from issuing instructions about dealing with the daily vicissitudes of life in space. Arthur knew that silence from his father boded ill more often than good, and he had disobeyed a direct command when he tried to retrieve Merlin. The fallout from that was bound to be severe.

But he just couldn’t bring himself to look this gift horse in the mouth.

The rest of the day was spent getting used to having gravity again, and picking up all the random stuff that had fallen out of the air where it had been previously forgotten. Arthur found several toothcleanse capsules in his cubby that way.

Guinevere prepared dinner that night, with Lancelot’s help. Having gravity in the dining area was strange after a year and a half without it. The habits of movement kept getting in the way: lightly pushing on walls and fixtures and expecting to float across the room, and everyone kept dropping things because they’d got used to objects hanging stationary when released. Drinking Tang out of cups rather than pouches made them all look like toddlers taking their first big-kid drinks. Arthur could imagine all too clearly the jokes Merlin would have made, if he were there.

But he wasn’t.

His absence was like a haunting.

When they had all finished the meal, they stayed sitting at the table rather than getting up to clean and enjoy their private time before bed. The silence between them all grew heavy, and Arthur felt the pressure to speak intensifying. But what the fuck could he possibly say? Merlin was a good man. They all knew that. He’ll be sorely missed. They all knew that too. I think he might have been the great love of my life and I wasted every precious second I had with him by being an absolute prick specifically to hide that from him because I was afraid of my own fucking feelings. Yeah, fuck off.

Guinevere saved him. “I, um, met Merlin in uni,” she said, voice soft and scratchy. “He was the first friend I made there, actually. I was so nervous to be away from home, but he just had such a… such an irrepressible happiness to him, that it was impossible to stay homesick and depressed. He was forever saying, ‘Come on, Gwen, it’ll be brilliant!’ Everything from taking classes with really scary, impressive professors, to applying to INES, to agreeing to this mission. ‘Come on, Gwen.’” Her lip trembled, and tears made shiny streaks down her cheeks. “‘It’s Jupiter. It’ll be brilliant.’” No one knew what to say in the face of such a thing. “I just hope,” she said, voice wavering severely, “that he knows how loved he is.”

Knows, because they didn’t know if he was dead yet. Is, because so many people did still love him. The knife that had lodged itself in Arthur’s heart twisted.

“We told him, in the Morse message,” Lancelot offered, putting his hand over Guinevere’s.

She sniffed, turning her hand over to grip his. “I know. It just doesn’t feel like enough.”

“Nothing does, in these times,” Mithian said gravely. “Nothing is enough except life, and we cannot get that back for him.”

“Well said,” Lancelot murmured. Then he took a deep breath. “I only met Merlin when we began training for this mission, but he immensely felt like the sort of brother I would have wanted to have. Loyal, and clever, and kind. But I've never met anyone so ready to break the rules, either. Once when I forgot my ID, he somehow got me all the way from the car park into the building without setting off a single alarm. He told me later that he would do it on his own for fun sometimes. He was a wonderfully devious man, and I'll never have a better friend.”

Arthur sipped his warm Tang, wishing it were whiskey, or even just beer. It was intolerable to sit here, awash in everyone's grief, without being able to declare the extent of his own. There was no real reason not to, anymore, now that the possibility of fraternization was gone, but he knew that declaring himself would break something irreparably. He could feel that in himself, the tenuous hold on control. And he was already in the doghouse for going against orders: no reason to give Pendragon Corp’s board more fodder against him.

Mithian spoke next, sharing how she had mistaken him for an INES intern when they first met because he was out of uniform, and the embarrassing fallout, even though Merlin had been a gentleman about it.

Then Valiant had his turn, saying something trite about how welcoming Merlin had been when Valiant replaced Gwaine, who had broken his leg in a car crash. Gwaine had fought, well, valiantly—and quite creatively—to be allowed to go anyway, but it was a lost cause, and Valiant had taken his spot as the Camelot’s pilot. No one has been happy about it, least of all Merlin, who, along with Lancelot, had got on with Gwaine like a house fire. But Arthur still knew Valiant was telling the truth: Merlin was the first of the crew to give Valiant the benefit of the doubt.

And then it was Arthur’s turn.

And he still had no idea what to say.

And he had to say something. He was their Mission Commander. He couldn’t fall apart.

Knowing he couldn’t express the true depth of his feelings, he copied Mithian. “Merlin called me an ass when we first met.” He stopped. There was a sea urchin crawling up his throat. There were coals behind his eyes. “I’ll…” His voice was a wisp. “I’ll miss him.” He pressed his trembling lips together and stared at the middle of the table until he felt confident that he could breathe without screaming.

“You may stay up talking if you like,” he said, standing unsteadily. Looking at his crew’s faces was a mistake: Guinevere was looking at him with eyes wide and teary, like she’d just realized something that was breaking her heart; Lancelot looked stricken and somehow guilty; Mithian seemed closer to crying than she had since the accident happened; and Valiant’s eyes were narrowed in something too like suspicion for Arthur’s comfort. “But remember that we’ll have regular duties tomorrow, so factor that in.”

And he fled to his sleeping cubby, still clumsy in the new gravity.

Chapter Text

Kilgharrah’s claw cut the supposedly cut-proof material of the Pendragon Corp spacesuit like it was nothing. They were exactly as sharp and terrifying as they looked when he carried Merlin down into Daobeth’s noxious clouds. The noxious clouds which no longer smelled like anything to Merlin. He had thought he was just going noseblind, but then his skin started to itch so much that not even being stuck in a spacesuit with his own sweat and grime for two days could explain it, and he knew the pluripotent blast cell slurry was doing something to him.

The creepy crawly ‘there is absolutely a spider on me oh god help’ panic set in hard, and he demanded that Kilgharrah help him see what the fuck was happening to him.

The suit peeled off him like the skin off an overripe plum and drifted down into the mists, a blob of stark red amongst the dun orange, quickly lost to view. Merlin twisted and wriggled frantically to free himself of the thin compression jumpsuit that aided circulation in zero-g, and finally got a look at his bare skin.

He was covered in patches of something too pale to be blood scabs but too dark to be dried pus or plasma, which twinged painfully when he touched them.

‘Hm,’ said Kilgharrah, in the tones of someone trying to work out a riddle that they thought would be simple, but isn’t.

‘‘Hm’?’ Merlin mimicked. ‘That’s the best you can do? ‘Hm’? What the fuck is happening to me!?’

‘As I explained,’ Kilgharrah answered, back on his sniffy bullshit, ‘there is no way to be certain of the exact changes you will undergo. When the transformation finishes, if it finishes, you will embody some sort of combination of human and derkesthai physiology and abilities. Then you may show the other humans what it will mean to come to Daobeth.’

‘‘If it finishes’!?’ God, it itched like fire. He rubbed ineffectually at the patches, wincing at the piercing spasms of pain. What if this never stopped? What if the pluripotent blast cell slurry had just turned him into a creature of eternal itchiness? He’d end up impaling himself on Kilgharrah’s claws after all, just to make it stop.

‘Don’t be overdramatic.’

‘Oh, sure, ‘overdramatic’,’ Merlin retorted witheringly. ‘I’m just stuck here on an alien planet with an alien dragon experimenting on me like a lab rat, and the only thing that’s happened so far is that I look like a bad case of Marspox! Tell me, what reaction can you imagine that would adequately express the emotional state of someone in my situation? Personally, I think I’m being incredibly restrained!’

‘Your dermal distress is hardly the only effect you have experienced,’ Kilgharrah replied archly. ‘Have you not noticed that your hunger has dissipated?’

That gave Merlin pause. He hadn’t really noticed it, but Kilgharrah was right: he had been quite hungry before Kilgharrah dragged him down to Daobeth, but since waking up in the clouds, he hadn’t even thought of it. He probed for the sensation now, past the overwhelming itchiness and general high cortisol symptoms, and found that he wasn’t hungry at all. Not even in a ‘oh, I wasn’t thinking of it, but now I realize I’m ravenous’ way, just in a ‘no, I’m good’ way.

‘How is that possible?’ he asked slowly.

Kilgharrah made one of his disconcerting rumbling sounds. ‘My kind do not consume material for sustenance as yours do, little thing. There are what you might call organelles within our bodies which catch and transform the ambient radiation into energy we can use. It seems that your first changes are internal, and are only now beginning to manifest externally.’

‘So, you think, what…’ Merlin asked, stomach churning. ‘These scabby things are going to turn into… scales? Oh, fuck me, I’m going to be a lizard person.’

‘You shall be far more than a mere lizard person,’ Kilgharrah said haughtily. ‘You shall be the first of the demi-derkesthai. If you must be crude, a dragon man.’

The mission proceeded. A week passed, and then another. The Camelot continued its transformation into a fledgling colony, and back on Earth, the final preparations for the second wave were nearing completion; the launch dates for the next ships were being finalized. Arthur gave orders and completed his duties, but he did it from a far remove. He had never prioritized friendship—or any kind of non-professional relationship—with any of the crew, feeling that he had to be their Mission Commander first and foremost, but now he spoke only to talk about the ship and the mission, and when he wasn’t actively engaged in a task, would find himself staring at nothing, practically forgetting to breathe.

The crew left him alone. Guinevere and Lancelot especially were dealing with the loss (and clearly growing closer in the process, which Arthur didn’t say anything against, despite the fraternization rules they were on the verge of breaking), and Mithian and Valiant seemed unwilling to tell anyone they were grieving ‘wrong’.

Seventeen days after the accident, they received confirmation that the three ships of the second wave, the Monarch, the Crown, and the Throne, had launched and were on the first leg of the eighteen-month journey to Jupiter. The Mission Commander of the Monarch, Leon Ritter, sent Arthur a privately encoded message expressing how honored he felt to be participating in such a monumental project.

“It’ll become easier to plan as we get closer to you, of course, and don’t have to wait an hour each time for a reply, but in the mean time, I would appreciate any tips you have on dealing with Gwaine.” Gwaine had been reassigned to pilot the Monarch once his leg healed properly. Just another thing Arthur wished he could tell Merlin. “And…. I know we aren’t close friends or anything, but from one Mission Commander to another, Arthur, I’m so terribly sorry about your lost crewman. And speaking, again, only from how I can imagine feeling, you have nothing to feel guilty over. If there were failures, they were failures of technology, not your decisions.” Arthur watched Leon chew his lip uncertainly, strawberry-blond curls floating around his head like a halo in the zero-g. Eventually, Leon settled on saying, “I look forward to collaborating, and to seeing you in person in a year and a half. Bye for now.”

Arthur let the tablet screen go dead. His sleeping cubby was dark and quiet, deep in the hours of their sleep cycle. Lancelot would be up in the command module on the ‘night’ shift, but everyone else would be asleep. Except for Arthur.

No, he had nothing to feel guilty over, except for the fact that a man was dead—unquestionably dead, there was no possible way that his suit could have supported him for two and a half weeks, and wasn’t the certainty better than those eight ambiguous hours where they weren’t certain if he would still have had air? Wasn’t it better to know?—and that man had been Arthur’s to protect and instead he had sent him out into space with only the flimsy shield of magnet boots and a tether, and he hadn’t ever had the nerve to even imply that he felt anything more than a Mission Commander should. Would it have made a difference, ultimately, if he had been honest? Probably not. Arthur might have been more reluctant to send him outside to fix engine nine, but Merlin would have begged, and he would have had the full knowledge that Arthur couldn’t resist those big blue eyes. And maybe he would have had other ways of convincing Arthur to do what he wanted, ways that included nudity and touching and moaning and—

Fucking Christ, Merlin was dead and Arthur couldn’t even keep himself from imagining having sex with him. He was despicable.

He woke his tablet up again and opened the secret file he kept in the computer equivalent of his sock drawer. “M Drive Backup 004-6175809501-8” was actually his Merlin collection, pictures and interview fragments and articles about him. It had started as pure wank bank back on Earth, full of still shots from interviews where his eyes went half-lidded or his expression was otherwise suggestive, but had grown over the months as his attraction turned into proper feelings. It was stuff he was ashamed to have, but could not bear to delete, especially not now, when pictures and recordings were all he had.

He scrolled blindly until he came to the recording of their very first press conference after being selected as the Camelot’s crew, before anything had gone wrong. He touched it.

Annis Carleon, the head of INES, along with Uther, Arthur, Lancelot, Guinevere, Merlin, Gwaine, and Mithian, sat behind a long table, facing the sea of reporters. Annis made a short speech, then Uther read a statement on behalf of Pendragon Corp, and then reporters were permitted to ask questions. Lots of them were for Arthur since he was Mission Commander, and Uther answered many of them for him. But that didn’t rankle the way it had then. He had worse pains to nurse now.

Merlin didn’t talk very much during the conference. The first time he did, it was because a nervous student asked all of them, “Why did you sign up to go on this mission?” Like it was a little field trip. Like they hadn’t all striven for it. Hadn’t been rigorously vetted, and then specifically invited. Arthur went first, reciting something he’d grown up hearing about furthering humanity’s understanding of the universe; then Lancelot, talking about his desire to explore; Guinevere said something lovely about making her family proud.The words washed over him now as they had then. Then Merlin.

“Well,” recorded-Merlin said, with a cheeky grin that made Arthur’s chest ache horribly, “I already know how to ride a bike and drive a car, so I had to find some new way to scare my mum."

Everyone laughed, and Guinevere smacked his shoulder, and he grinned guilelessly, guiltlessly. Completely unaware that in just a few short years, he would bring every mother’s worst nightmare to life by losing his own.

He stopped the video and shut his tablet off.

His sleep was shallow, and he kept waking up, unable to tell if the faint sounds of his name being called were dreams or someone somewhere on the ship.

Merlin stretched his strange arms, and something ephemeral in him stretched too. The clouds around him had started to feel like… something. Or perhaps his new senses just gave him a different awareness of their composition and movement. He was developing something like synesthesia. Did the clouds really taste like orange juice with cumin mixed in, or did the sound of the winds whipping just make him think of that flavor? Was he actually moving his limbs with his muscles and nerves, or had he had a breakthrough with his telekinesis without realizing it and was now moving himself that way? He couldn’t tell; too much had changed too fast.

Except that was another problem: his sense of time was fucked. He had been trained to live with a weird sleep schedule, first unofficially at uni to keep up with course work, and then very officially at INES, but both of those situations were still married to the 24-hour day cycle, and losing that all of a sudden was doing his head in. Daobeth rotated on its axis every ten hours, but Merlin and Kilgharrah were generally deep in the cloud layer, so the light often didn’t change very much even when they were facing the far distant Sun. The only way to track time meaningfully was to measure the changes happening in himself, which meant he was reduced to estimates like “ten sleeps ago, I didn’t have scales” and “two headaches ago, I couldn’t see extra-purple” and “before I met Aithusa, I didn’t fully believe that I could actually become telepathic”.

These were statements he had to take seriously, despite how utterly batshit they sounded.

He was putting his compartmentalization skills to a serious test to avoid actual insanity. His normal life was back on the Camelot with Gwen and Lance and Mithian and Valiant and stupid Arthur. They were at the cutting edge of science, tasked with settling the ship at Io’s L5 point as the basis for a future colony. He had normal human problems, like wanting to fuck his hot mission commander, and missing his mum’s cooking while he was on a long trip away from home. His life now, on (‘on’? ‘in’?) Daobeth with Kilgharrah and Aithusa, was an endless succession of physically painful transformations and mentally trying conversations.

Aithusa was ‘supervising’ him, as Kilgharrah had said before he pissed off on some derkesthai errand of his own. She was what he called his ‘observant’, which Merlin had figured really just meant ‘student’ or ‘apprentice’, but whatever. She was perhaps five meters long from nose to tail, with a wingspan of twice that width, and a pale, pearlescent color, with a rainbow sheen that made her look like a soap bubble. She was beautiful, to Merlin’s untrained, human eye, but she was also shy and didn’t mindspeak him very much.

But Merlin could still sense something, a sort of movement of something not quite physical within her. He got shadowy impressions of the sensation of wings in flight, and what felt like poetry, and deep, yearning curiosity about him, about Merlin, stymied by Kilgharrah’s injunction against asking the new creature impertinent questions.

Perhaps some of Kilgharrah’s predictions about his abilities were coming true after all.

He stretched his arms out to the sides again, trying to expand that ephemeral feeling of contact.

It was sort of… a mental fluttering, he supposed, like a piece of paper lying on the ground with the breeze just starting to pick it up. He only got vague feelings from Aithusa, and nothing at all from Kilgharrah, except for the helplessness of standing before a massive fortress and knowing he had no means of entrance. Kilgharrah had mentioned that simpler minds were easier to read—condescendingly implying how underdeveloped humans were, that he was able to read all of them from such an incredible distance away—so it made sense that Merlin would pick up Aithusa’s thoughts before Kilgharrah’s.

He focused harder and felt his mind loft for a moment, almost fly, before thunking back down in his skull. Still, he felt Aithusa’s attention sharpen with a mix of approval and surprise at what he had done. These were difficult things he was doing, apparently. Things young derkesthai had to be taught, specifically and rigorously, not just figure out while floating around on any random Tuesday. Or whatever the fuck day it was.

Her admiration did help his ego a bit, though, and he mentally preened even as he let himself relax. Were there easier minds he could practice on than the derkesthai? He had only met the two so far, but surely there had to be more of them, or other species with lower cognitive loads? Even other humans might….

There were other humans. They were far as hell away, but Kilgharrah had done it, and Merlin was turning out to be a surprisingly gifted telepath.

He turned his attention to Aithusa to see what she—literally—thought of the idea, and received the mental equivalent of a dubious shrug. There was an undercurrent of worry about what Kilgharrah would say, but Merlin had always been a ‘forgiveness over permission’ sort.

So he took a deep, sharp breath of whatever it was he could breathe now, and sought again for that lofting feeling. And this time, he tried to make it soar.

The first dream came close to three weeks after the accident. Arthur hung limp in a vast lake of opaque water, floating under a depthless panoply of stars. Something warm caressed his body under the surface, and someone far away whispered, “Arthur…”

A voice he knew.

“Merlin,” he moaned, miserable and serene. “Merlin, I’m so sorry…”

“...dead…” Merlin replied. “...fault, Arthur. …your fault.”

Cold tears traced cold lines from his eyes back into his ears. “I know. Fuck, I’m so sorry, Merlin. I’m so sorry.”

“...ammit, Arthur! Hear…? …idiot… honor… even dead!”

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, and drifted awake with tears on his face there too.

He went through the day in a daze. He didn’t know why his guilty conscience had waited so long to berate him this way, but in some ways he was glad it finally had. None of the rest of the crew had so much as implied Arthur was at fault, and carrying the burden of that certainty all on his own had become exhausting. But even with the lifting of that pressure, it was still torture to have such a visceral reminder of Merlin.

Not that the entire ship, the rest of the crew, and the mission itself weren’t reminders enough.

It was Valiant’s turn to make breakfast, which he doled out in resentful thwacks of porridge into bowls, the advent of gravity having put paid to all the pouch meals they’d endured on all the long months of the journey. The meal was subdued, as had become common. Like Merlin had taken all their joy with him when he slowly sank away towards Jupiter.

Arthur clenched his teeth against the mental image.

“Um, Arthur?” Guinevere said, and briefly, horribly, he loathed how gentle she was with him, even while she was mourning too, even while she still had Lancelot. “Should we start on the hydroponics today?”

Right. That.

He hadn’t formally reassigned Merlin’s duties yet, and very few of them had been completed as a result. They were behind, a fact he had neglected to mention in his reports back to Earth. He knew the four of his remaining crew looked at him askance when he couldn’t see, and that even Lancelot must be doubting his ability to lead by this point, but he just couldn’t bring himself to do it. It felt like lifting a weight he simply wasn’t strong enough for.

“We’ll deal with that tomorrow. Focus on your own tasks today.”

“But—”

“That’s an order.”

Even without looking up from his food, he could feel how they all shot glances at each other.

“Arthur…” Lancelot said carefully, and that was well more than Arthur could bear.

He pushed up from the table, momentarily wishing that they didn’t have gravity so he could just propel himself out of the commissary and be gone. But instead he had to walk on his own feet, under his own power, and pause at the threshold to say, “Hydroponics tomorrow.”

He didn’t dream of Merlin that night, and awoke feeling something between bereft and relieved. He didn’t let them start the hydroponics that day either.

But he dreamt of Merlin that night.

He was walking over an endless plain of white sand, or perhaps very fine snow, and the night sky was so dark and close he could have reached up and plucked the stars like flowers. Far off in the distance, so far he should not have been able to see, stood a figure, naked in the starlight.

“Merlin,” he breathed.

And somehow, Merlin spoke over the distance, and Arthur heard. “Arthur? Arthur… God, please, can you hear me this time?”

“Merlin,” he repeated. “I’m sorry. I never should have sent you…”

“No, stop, please,” Merlin begged, and, by the logic of dreams, he was suddenly close, only a few steps away on the shining white sand. “Please, Arthur, none of that was your fault.” He reached up and cupped Arthur’s cheeks. His hands were hot, unexpectedly so, and Arthur let himself lean into the contact. Surely in a dream it was alright to take comfort this way? It was all in his head. Out in the waking world, he would bear the fault for the rest of his life. Surely here, just for a moment, he could be allowed just a little relief?

He covered Merlin’s hands with his own and looked into that so-long-beloved face. Merlin’s eyes were amber and gold, not the cornflower blue Arthur loved so well, but this was a dream. And Merlin was dead.

“I miss you,” he said wretchedly. “I should have told you what you meant to me before we even left Earth…” He shook his head. “I’m so sorry.”

“Um. I’m. That’s.” Merlin blinked his golden eyes. “That's not exactly what I expected. Um. Alright, maybe we can deal with that, um, later. Arthur, I'm not dead. Alright? I'm on Daobeth. Jupiter. There are aliens here called derkesthai, think dragons but bigger and weirder, and they're changing me into something like them. I'm like a test or a proof of what humans will have to be to live here. But I'm not dead, Arthur. I'm still alive. And I'll come back.”

Confusion had been Arthur's first response as Merlin rattled all this off, but it quickly morphed into pity. What a transparent attempt by his subconscious to offer some comfort. Aliens? Merlin alive with them? Coming back to Arthur and the Camelot? Even in the dream it sounded insane.

Aching with the desire for all this to be true, and the equal knowledge that he had to deny it, he ran his hands down over Merlin's wrists and forearms, then up his biceps to his shoulders, to his neck, to his cheeks, cupping them just as Merlin did his.

“I have to learn to bear this loss,” he told this figment of grief and succor. “I loved him, and I lost him, and it's my fault, and I have to live with that.”

“Oh, Arthur—!” Merlin cried in a voice choked with frustration. “If I was just some dream you cooked up for yourself, would I say that you're an insufferable, pompous ass with too much nobility for his own good? Would I say that I would have hurled you head-first out the airlock before we even reached the asteroid belt if I hadn't wanted to rip your clothes off and lick every inch of you? Fuck’s sake, all this effort I go to and I can't even talk to you while you're awake…!”

An electric current crackled up Arthur's spine.

The plain of white sand started to waver and Arthur's body tingled with the onset of wakefulness. Merlin's eyes widened and he said, “Shit, fuck, fucking—Arthur, I'm not dead! I'm coming back! I'm—”

The dream dissolved, leaving Arthur awake and shaking in his sleeping bag. His heart thundered in his ears, and for the first time in nearly a month, he felt something other than numb dread at the idea of facing the coming day.

Merlin was alive.

Chapter Text

‘You… have contacted your fellow humans,’ Kilgharrah sent, his disbelief as sharp as the scent of vanilla extract.

‘Yes?’ Merlin replied. His sense of time was still completely AWOL, so he wasn’t sure how long Kilgharrah had been gone, but it was a while. Aithusa had been there for most of it, and he knew from her reactions that what he had done was uncommon, but Kilgharrah seemed to think it was actually serious. ‘Is that a problem? I’m going back to them soon, so why shouldn’t I talk to them?’ There was also the minor issue of Arthur unwittingly confessing to some fairly shocking feelings when Merlin managed to make contact with him in his dream, but he wasn’t letting himself think about that. His head would explode. Or maybe his dick. Unclear. And he wasn’t willing to find out. Not with Kilgharrah and Aithusa nearby, at least.

Kilgharrah ground his teeth, making a sound that felt like petting a dog’s fur the wrong way, and swung around to look at Aithusa. His mindspeech to her sounded like someone shouting from several rooms away, half in a language Merlin didn’t understand. Was that a result of the fact that Kilgharrah wasn’t addressing him, or just that his abilities still weren’t strong enough to pick it up? He was fascinated by the changes he had undergone, when he wasn’t freaked out by them, and the scientific side of his brain kept trying to analyze all of them, but there were too many variables, too much he didn’t understand. In any case, none of the changes were helping him eavesdrop.

When Kilgharrah turned back to Merlin, his mindvoice was oddly restrained, and he sent, ‘I believe I have neglected your education for long enough, little thing. An assimilant such as yourself must understand the culture it is entering, mustn’t it?’

‘Erm,’ Merlin replied, feeling that he’d missed a step somewhere.

‘We are in accord,’ Kilgharrah announced, and Merlin felt the bindings of Kilgharrah’s telekinesis close around him and pull him in Kilgharrah’s wake through the turbulent clouds.

“Arthur, I don’t understand,” Lancelot protested, hurrying in Arthur’s wake. “So you dreamed about Merlin. I’ve dreamed about him too, and so has Gwen. It’s natural: we all miss him. But what does that have to do with doing an EVA? Everything is fine outside.”

“It’s not a repair,” Arthur replied, wishing, again, that the spacesuits had been designed so that one person could put it on alone. Instead he had to loop Lancelot in to help, and Lancelot was not being helpful.

“Then what is it?” he demanded, proving the point.

Arthur stopped and growled in pure agitation and frustration. “I just— It’s—” He exhaled, more quietly. “It’s important.” He glanced at Lancelot, at his soft, brown eyes and troubled frown.

“I believe you,” Lancelot said, “but… this worries me, honestly. Can’t you explain why you need to do this, if it’s not for a repair? And what it has to do with Merlin?”

“I—” He forced out a hard breath, trying to tame his impatience. “In your dreams, of Merlin, what happens in them? Does he say… anything?”

Lancelot frowned. Arthur knew it was an invasive question, but if Merlin had also visited Lancelot in the way he had Arthur, then he’d be far more likely to cooperate. “They’re mainly memories,” he said slowly. “Or times we might have had, if he hadn’t… You know, things we might have done or talked about if he were still here. Or ways we might have saved him, if one thing had gone differently.” He shrugged helplessly. “It’s extremely common to dream about a lost friend, Arthur. Especially considering how close we all got.”

Merlin hadn’t visited him, then. That would make it more difficult to convince him.

“I know how this is going to sound,” he began slowly, “and I need you to hear me out before you decide anything.” He waited for Lancelot’s wary nod before continuing. “I don’t think Merlin is really dead.”

“Uhh,” Lancelot said, in clear ‘this is worse than I thought’ tones.

“Listen, please,” Arthur said urgently. “My dreams aren’t like the ones you’ve had. They’re… Merlin actually talks to me, he tells me he’s alive down on Jupiter somehow, that there are aliens, and—” Seeing Lancelot’s expression slip further into dismay, he spoke faster, trying to get his friend on side before he completely lost him. “It wasn't just some comforting dream my subconscious invented to help me feel better! I thought it was at first, but Merlin—he acted too much like himself for it to have been my own guilty conscience. He called me a pompous ass and told me he was with the aliens, whatever he said they're bloody called, and now that I know he's alive? I can't go on living if I don't at least try to bring him back.”

Lancelot stared at him, and Arthur could see the conflict warring in his expression: he wanted very badly for Arthur to be right, for Merlin to be alive. He had been better friends with Merlin than Arthur himself ever had, and missed him nearly as bitterly as Guinevere did. But he was also a scientist, and a doctor on top of that. He had the best idea out of all of them how long the air in Merlin’s tanks would have lasted him, how long he might have made it without water, what the cold would have done to his body when the suit’s heating system gave out.

But he didn’t say any of that when he spoke. “I hear you,” he said, “but have you thought this through? We’re three-hundred and fifty thousand kilometers above the cloudtops right now, and even if you can get down there, your plan is to… what? Fly around in all that vast volume of turbulence and terrible visibility and radiation and God knows what until you find him? And then haul him back up here? With what power source? With what air tanks?” He hissed out a sharp breath and turned away, running his hand through his hair. Arthur ground his teeth, hating that Lancelot knew to play on Arthur’s own practicality. “I’m sorry to be cruel, Arthur, but even if I believed you, even if I helped you get into a suit and PMU, this would not work.”

“What wouldn’t work?” The voice was an unwelcome intrusion from behind them, where Valiant had emerged from one of the hatches that led to a minor engine’s casing. Like the one they’d thoroughly checked before sending Merlin out to investigate engine nine.

Suspicion surged. “What were you doing in there?” Arthur asked sharply.

Valiant looked at him, flatly unimpressed. “Regular maintenance checks? You know: my job?” Somehow his American accent always made him sound even more sardonic than he was trying to be, and it set Arthur’s teeth on edge.

“Very well, then. On your way.”

But instead, Valiant strode closer. “Why don’t you explain whatever the problem is to me? Maybe I can help make it work.”

“No.” If Lancelot didn’t believe him, Valiant definitely wouldn’t. “No, I’ll just have to… find another way to do it.”

But he could feel them both looking at him warily as they all walked back to the laboratory section of the ring.

‘The lifecycle of a derkesthai,’ Kilgharrah lectured, ‘is a complex one, and far different from what I see in your mind as the human norm.’

Kilgharrah had been spouting all manner of trivia about Daobeth, about its elemental makeup and its wind patterns and its natural history, and was now moving on to the derkesthai, relating their customs and their culture and their history, and was now describing their development. It was all intensely interesting and under normal circumstances Merlin would be lamenting the fact that he didn’t have a recording device, but just at the moment he was baffled as to why he was getting a sudden lesson on sociobiology. Wouldn’t it be better for him to keep working on his telepathy? He had made brief contact with Arthur, but Arthur had been asleep and there was no way to tell if Merlin’s message would be actually taken seriously or just as a weird mixed up dream. It tore at his heart to think that Arthur had been blaming himself for what happened, but the revelation of Arthur’s feelings for Merlin had been a far bigger shock. How long had he felt that way? Why hadn’t he said anything? When Merlin made it back to the Camelot, would he want to act on those feelings as much as Merlin did, or—

‘I cannot help but notice how little attention you are paying,’ Kilgharrah sent loudly, and Merlin hastily battened his thoughts down before they could get horny.

‘I’m listening,’ he mindspoke quickly, feeling every inch the inattentive student covering their doodles in class.

Kilgharrah grumbled audibly, skepticism rolling off his mind like a bad smell.

‘Sorry,’ Merlin sent sheepishly. ‘I’ll pay attention.’

He got the mental equivalent of a sigh in return, but the derkesthai did go back to his explanation. ‘My species are sequential hermaphrodites. The physiological changes are triggered by numerous factors including elevation in the cloud column, nutrition, and the sex of one’s mentor. Hence why my observant is female at this time. We are a solitary species and reproduce by dispersal, leaving our biological matter at the correct altitude for it to mix and mature. Few young actually hatch from the resultant egg clutches, and the ones that do make it out of the caul must begin immediately to fly or else fall into the lower altitudes and be lost.’

‘You let your children, what, drown?’ Merlin interrupted, horrified.

‘We ‘let’ nothing,’ Kilgharrah retorted. ‘The weak perish and the strong and adaptable survive. Even your little species understands ‘survival of the fittest’, do they not?’

‘As an evolutionary theory, yes,’ Merlin sent, ‘but surely an intelligent species knows how much more beneficial it is to take care of the weaker members of the community? Especially newborns, for God’s sake!’

Kilgharrah didn’t reply for a while, simply continued telekinetically dragging Merlin along beside him through the endless, skirling, brownish mist. Well, not endless, quite. Eventually it would turn into whitish mist, and orangish mist, and a dozen other shades that had implications for particulate density and wind speed and even goddamn flavor. And physically moving was helping Merlin realize that his mental senses were developing as well: he was accustomed to being able to sort of feel Kilgharrah or Aithusa’s locations when they were close by but invisible to the eye, but now there was a broader sensation of movement in the way his mind felt the environment. There were dim things, large things, vast distances away. Were they other derkesthai? Perhaps he was glad they were so solitary. He didn’t think he could handle another massive, draconic, enigmatic alien intent on giving him stem cell slurpees or sociobiology lessons.

‘I see in your memories,’ Kilgharrah sent, jolting Merlin back to the matter at hand, ‘that there have been many times and places in your species’ history when the suffering of children has been dismissed. Even of newborns.’

‘What, like in wars? I wasn’t saying humans have a perfect track record or anything. Just that… I don’t know, doesn’t intelligence mean having, like…’ He groped for terms he hadn’t used since his psych classes in uni. ‘Theory of mind? And empathy and compassion and all that? Wanting to end something’s suffering even if it doesn’t help you directly?’

‘Little thing, behold our surroundings,’ Kilgharrah sent impatiently. ‘Daobeth has no means of supporting any manner of agriculture. We are intelligent beyond your ken and powerful beyond your imagination, but our world is different. Our lives are different, and if you think them brutal, you are succumbing to your own ingrained and hypocritical conceptions of compassion.’

Merlin bridled, trying to resist Kilgharrah’s telekinetic grip on him and effectively failing, but the derkesthai still slowed to a stop and let Merlin float under his own power.

‘It’s not hypocritical to not be able to do all the good or give all the help you want to,’ he sent, wondering, all at once, how in the flying fuck he had come to be arguing philosophy with an alien on Jupiter. He didn’t even like philosophy. He’d been a STEM student for a bloody reason.

Instead of responding to the point though, Kilgharrah sent, ‘You should not have tried to reach your beloved the way you did.’

‘What—who—reach—my what?’ Mentally spluttering was even less dignified than verbal spluttering, apparently. ‘Do you mean Arthur? He’s not my ‘beloved’, Jesus Christ!’

‘Oh? You certainly think of him fondly. And evidently, he returns the sentiment.’

‘That— That’s still not— He’s my commanding officer.’ And oh, maybe that was why stupid noble Arthur had never said anything. Fraternizing. Merlin had always sort of hand-waved that whole issue away in his late-night fantasies. ‘I have a crush on him. He’s hot. And, you know, a good person. And a total arsehole sometimes. ‘Beloved’ is a whole other… other thing.’

‘Then I apologize,’ Kilgharrah replied archly, not sounding the least contrite. ‘Nevertheless, contacting him in the way you did was, as I believe your saying goes, not on.’

Merlin swallowed, trying to wrestle his focus back to where it had to be. It was sometimes difficult to parse Kilgharrah’s mood, what with him being a fuck-off humongus dragon-y thing, and looking him in the face from ten meters back and still feeling like his teeth were dangerously close did not make it easier to figure out. But Merlin thought he seemed pretty serious about this one. ‘Okay… why, though?’

‘The sanctity of one’s mental privacy is paramount in derkesthai culture. To invade another’s mind is tantamount to assault.’

‘Oh,’ Merlin sent, badly taken aback. ‘I… I guess that makes sense.’

‘From our earliest days, control of our own destinies is our highest aim. Pursuing our own chains of logic and reaching our own conclusions is a nearly sacred task, and to interfere in that task stains the perpetrator indelibly.’

‘Right, okay…’ Merlin replied slowly, trying to feel out a ‘chain of logic’ of his own. God, but he hated philosophy. ‘But you’ve broken those laws with respect to me, haven’t you? So if they don’t apply to me, why should I follow them?’

Kilgharrah stared at him for a moment that stretched very long. Merlin could sense his mind the way he used to feel the fire from the fireplace across his mother’s sitting room, a kind of distant heat, full of unpredictable movement and the potential to either hurt or help. But the details of it were still concealed from him, the sheer size of his mind rendering it nearly impossible to parse. But he could feel… shapes, sort of, of thoughts twisting around each other, like sea monsters under the surface of the water making ripples.

‘You were not derkesthai at the time, and therefore my actions towards you were not transgressive, but rather elvatory,’ Kilgharrah sent decisively. ‘I have raised you to a higher level of consciousness, of evolution.’

Merlin’s skin prickled uncomfortably. ‘Arthur isn’t a derkesthai either,’ he sent. ‘And as you have repeatedly told me, I’m only a demi-derkesthai. I don’t see why my human moral system shouldn’t apply to my interactions with him.’ His heart was pounding in his chest. Fuck fuck fuck fuck philosophy, he was so bad at this.

‘If you are going to live here on Daobeth—’ Kilgharrah began, but Merlin caught something from the surface of his mind, just briefly, barely long enough to understand it.

‘Do you not want me to tell Arthur what’s happened to me?’ he interrupted.

The roiling of Kilgharrah’s thoughts… retreated somehow, until the surface of his mind was smooth and impenetrable. ‘Don’t be foolish, little thing,’ he sent. ‘For what other purpose would I have brought you here?’

And he telekinetically grabbed Merlin again and dragged him off through the skirling fog. Merlin, unable to resist, tried to tell the wild clanging of his pulse to be calm and take Kilgharrah’s question as it had been intended: what other purpose could he have had to bring Merlin here, after all?

Arthur’s desperation to sleep meant it took nearly two hours to actually get to it, and when he finally did, his dreams were barren, Merlin-less.

He woke feeling disoriented and scratchy-eyed and no less determined than before that he needed to get Merlin back. This time, he did not make the mistake of trying to convince anyone as pragmatic as Lancelot: he went for Guinevere’s soft heart like a heat-seeking missile.

Another miscalculation, as it turned out. Or rather, the first miscalculation, in its secondary phase of failure.

“Arthur…” she said, eyes huge and pleading. “I just really don’t think… Lance told me he was worried about you, that something happened yesterday, but this is… Of course I want Merlin back too, he was my best friend for years—” Her wavering voice made him feel an utter pillock for making her talk about it. “—but he’s dead, Arthur. And I know you feel responsible for us as our commander, but there was nothing you could have done. I wish you could let go of this guilt and just…” She took a big, shuddering breath, eyes shiny. “And just grieve.”

He shook his head roughly. “This isn’t guilt,” he insisted. “I mean, I know it was my fault, I shouldn’t have sent him out there, but if these dreams were a result of that, why would they only start now, rather than weeks ago?” He was already losing: she had been primed against him by Lancelot, and now her own determined practicality was preventing her emotions from persuading her to believe him.

“I can get him back,” he said desperately, reaching out to grip her shoulders. “I know I can, Guinevere, I just need this one bit of help—”

“Arthur,” she said firmly, taking hold of his wrists in turn. Her eyes were still wet, but they were determined now. “He’s gone. Stop this. It's interfering with your ability to lead.”

He went cold. “I am still leading,” he said, even though in his heart he was afraid he was lying.

“Then redistribute his duties,” she said. “Accept that he's gone.”

Chapter Text

He was pretty sure his body was done changing.

At least, there hadn’t been any new significant changes in the last few sleep-wake cycles, which was all the barometer he had. He couldn’t say he was happy to look the way he did now, but it could have been worse: he could have gotten a tail. He still had his arms and legs and ears and nose and hair (and dick) and all his fingers and toes. He just also had patches of scales of varying size all over his body, some soft as a snake’s belly, some tough as well, derkesthai. They’d been scabby red when they first emerged, but had shifted to, as best he could tell in the uncertain light, a dark, iridescent blue. At least they were his color. Floating around with neon pink or puke-green scales would have been insult on top of injury. His senses seemed more acute than before as well, but it was difficult to tell how much they had improved, or if they hadn’t even improved at all and he was just used to the Daobethian environment now.

But his telepathy was definitely better. Light years better. He could effortlessly control his own movement now, propelling himself in any direction at any speed; it was almost like being back in zero gravity, except he had a sense of down. And he could cast his mind out over a vast area (though it really wasn’t much when compared to the planet itself), and sense where loads of derkesthai were. Most, as Kilgharrah had said, were alone, but some had smaller minds with them, juveniles who had survived the struggle of their hatching and been taken on as obervants by adult derkesthai as Aithusa had. He could read Aithusa’s mind reliably now too, and often did because she found it exciting that something so little and strange could mindspeak to her so strongly. He could sense Kilgharrah too, but only by the shape of his mind, not by any real details. Kilgharrah had held himself at a sort of mental remove ever since their conversation about telepathic boundaries, as though he didn’t expect Merlin to respect them.

And he could feel the Camelot. Only during the portion of its orbit when it came closest, and he couldn’t seem to reach any of them while they were awake, but still, it was comforting beyond words to feel that connection to his real life. The five minds up there really were smaller than derkesthai minds, even the young ones. It was like looking into pools rather than oceans. Most of them were tainted dark with grief, but one—Arthur’s—blazed with wild determination, and one felt… slimy. Dishonest. Deceitful. He knew Gwen and Lance could never feel that way, and Mithian was too straightforward a person for it to be her, which meant it was Valiant. But what in the world could he be doing? Lying about how far along he was in his tasks? It made him uneasy, and eager to get back up there.

And now that his transformation seemed to have hit its final form, so to speak, he figured it was probably time for him to do just that.

Kilgharrah had brought them deep into the cloud column recently, and the bruise-colored fog was thick and fast in its harried course along the storm belt. Visibility was nearly nil, but he could sense the derkesthai nearby, and he directed his thought that way, starting off strong with an ‘Erm.’

‘Yes, little thing?’ Kilgharrah replied, turning his flood-light attention on Merlin.

Feeling absurdly like a student asking a teacher if he could visit the toilet, he sent, ‘I reckon I can probably go back to the Camelot soon, yeah? To tell them… everything?’

He waited for a response, and when none was forthcoming, tried again with an, ‘Erm, right?’

‘You are not ready yet,’ Kilgharrah eventually sent, but there was something under the words, a disquiet that felt, somehow, like Valiant’s sliminess.

Merlin frowned. ‘What do you mean? How could I be readier? Haven’t you said that you don’t know how much I’m supposed to change? What else do you expect to happen to me?’

He received back a sensation that felt like what a horse looked like when it twitched its skin to get flies off: irritated, dismissive. ‘You still do not understand the depth and extent of derkesthai culture. Any report you make to the humans would be incomplete.’

It still felt a bit like splitting hairs: wasn’t Merlin himself the main lesson? The object lesson, in fact? Why couldn’t he go back to the Camelot and say ‘Hey, there’s aliens about the place, we can stay but they’re going to do this’ (he’d indicate himself) ‘to everyone’? The nitty gritty of derkesthai culture seemed rather besides the point. Pendragon Corp and INES might even choose to pull the plug on the project once they understood what their astronauts and eventual colonists would have to go through. Though on the other hand, he couldn’t really see Uther Pendragon backing down from a fight, even against psionic dragons hundreds of millions of miles away from his own planet.

Still, he figured he should be a good little unethical human experiment and learn all the things from his mad scientist dragon creator. ‘Okay, so… What else do I need to know?’ he asked.

His mental sense gave him the information his eyes couldn’t access, and he felt Kilgharrah turn himself in desultory barrel rolls through the dark clouds of mist. It felt weirdly like a human drumming their nails on something as they tried to think. He was still holding his mind away from Merlin’s, but Merlin could still sense an uneasy twisting going on in there. The seconds trickled in to fill minutes.

In the absence of a response, his own question morphed in his mind, turning accusatory. ‘What aren’t you telling me?’

‘Why must there be a single piece of information that you lack?’ Kilgharrah shot back. ‘My concern is your lack of holistic awareness, your lack of derkesthai instincts and mores. How are you to be an effective envoy if you do not embody the culture you represent?’

But now that his suspicions were up, he wasn’t willing to settle for a puff answer.

A couple of days after unsuccessfully trying to convince Lancelot and Guinevere to help him on his Merlin retrieval mission, he was yet again failing to sleep. After three hours of flopping around in his hammock, he gave up and headed for the command center.

It was so bloody annoying: insomnia had never been an issue for him before, and now, when he actively wanted to sleep—no, desperately needed to sleep—he couldn’t? Absurd.

He climbed the leg of the X that connected the living quarters to the command center, adjusting to the lessening gravity as he left the centrifugal force of the outer ring behind, until he was pulling himself along by the handholds, ankles crossed to keep his feet out of the way as he floated. The zero g felt weirdly soothing as he glided through the last section of tunnel into the command center, but the almost-calm was usurped by a prickle of unease as he drew near the circular opening and heard the flicking of switches and tapping of a keyboard.

His brows drew down in consternation: Guinevere was on night duty, but all essential systems would be looped through her tablet for the duration of the shift so she could be comfortable in her room, just like when every other crew member had their night shifts. Who would be up here at this time?

He entered the command center and found Valiant at the comms station, in the final stages of sending a message.

“What are you doing?” he asked without thinking.

Valiant jumped—or rather, jerked and started to drift out of his seat until he caught the edge of the work station. He spun, but even as he did that, his hand dashed over the keyboard and hit the last step to send the message on its way.

“Arthur,” he said, hitting the Rs too hard, the way Americans always did. And then they just stared at each other for a long moment.

“What are you doing up here?” Arthur eventually repeated.

“Sending a personal message,” he said, too quickly.

“You can do that on your tablet.”

“The app is on the fritz.”

His heart was beating unreasonably hard, way harder than the situation warranted. It was weird, yes, but hardly dangerous. He extended his hand. “Maybe I can help.”

“I left it in my room,” Valiant said, holding his own hands up to display their emptiness.

“...Right.” It was plausible. The apps had been plagued with bugs since before they’d even left Earth, and protocol did dictate that they use the main comms system if the app really crashed hard. But in the middle of the night?

He asked that question, and Valiant drew himself up to his full height, even if the effect didn’t quite land because they were floating ever so slightly crooked in each other’s frame of reference.

“I’m not required to reveal personal communiques to my commander unless they have reason to believe I’m endangering the mission or the rest of the crew,” he said, haughtily quoting the mission handbook. “Do you believe I’m endangering the mission, Arthur?”

Arthur looked at him, disconcerted by the confrontational attitude.

“No,” he said slowly. “I don’t believe that.”

Valiant nodded smartly. “Good. I would never endanger the mission. But if I may ask, sir, what are you doing up here at this time of night?”

“I’m,” he said, and suddenly had no idea what to say next. Valiant watched him narrowly as he tried to find some reasonable excuse. The back of his neck grew damp with sweat. “Nothing,” he eventually said, lamely. “Couldn’t sleep.”

“I see,” Valiant said, but his tone was more skeptical than Arthur had ever heard. And he kicked off and sailed past Arthur and out of the command center without another word. Arthur turned and frowned after him until he had disappeared, feeling that a shoe had just dropped and the other was on its way down.

He lingered in the command center for a while, but he couldn’t remember why he had thought it would bring him any peace. Nothing ever did, anymore.

‘What more could I possibly tell them?’ Merlin demanded, propelling himself through the dense clouds closer to Kilgharrah. ‘What more do they need to know than “this is what you’ll be turned into if you stay here”?’

Kilgharrah exerted his telekinesis to keep Merlin away, but Merlin was so frustrated that he pushed back for the first time, and, to his deep surprise, fended Kilgharrah’s mental grip off.

Kilgharrah was also utterly shocked, if the sudden stillness of his mind was anything to go by. And in that stillness, Merlin caught the shape of something that Kilgharrah had thus far taken great pains to hide.

It was scarcely a second before the derkesthai realized what had happened and wrapped the thought up again, but Merlin had seen. And Merlin was not going to let it pass.

‘You never intended to send me back at all,’ he sent, mental voice clumsy with shock. He sought for more, but Kilgharrah had concealed the whole complex of thoughts that Merlin had glimpsed. ‘Tell me,’ he demanded. He was starting to shiver for some reason, and it made his telekinesis shiver too, and he had to focus hard to keep himself in proximity to Kilgharrah.

‘There is nothing to tell,’ Kilgharrah replied, but there was a sheen of dishonesty to the words, and it stoked Merlin’s fury higher.

‘Tell me!’ he mentally screamed, and lunged into Kilgharrah’s mind.

He was amazed at how easy it was. He tore through Kilgharrah’s mental defences and into the oceanic vastness of his thoughts. Just like in a real ocean, there were currents and riptides, but it was easy to fend those off and seek what he wanted. There: that dim tangle of deception and jealous protectiveness. In it, Merlin saw that he was never meant to be a messenger himself; he was merely the envelope.

Dimly, through his physical ears, he heard Kilgharrah roaring in shock and vicious anger, but it meant less than nothing to Merlin. He pushed and shoved deeper and found that the pluripotent blast cell serum had not been intended to turn him into a demi-derkesthai at all, but rather to change his physiology just enough that it wouldn’t reject a full derkesthai’s mind taking it over. Merlin gaining psionic abilities had not been anywhere in the plan, and Kilgharrah had started to wonder if he should just kill Merlin after all.

The idea didn’t shock Merlin as badly as it probably should have. In fact, it was almost a comfort to know that he had been right to suspect Kilgharrah of some serious duplicity. Though he hadn’t imagined anything quite so serious as this.

With a bone-shaking bellow, Kilgharrah physically surged forward and swiped one massive forelimb at Merlin. His claws, each as long as Merlin’s leg, sliced through the clouds like swords through lace.

At long, long last, in the command center, floating against the belt of the chair he had sat in, Arthur fell asleep. He was aware of this, in a dim sort of way, and glad of it. Sleep meant the possibility of seeing Merlin, of talking to him again.

But the dream, when it began, was chaotic and unstable, like standing in the middle of a sandstorm, and Merlin was an indistinct shape rather than a cohesive body. “Arthur!” he shouted urgently, and Arthur’s every nerve lit up with the gladness of hearing his voice.

“Merlin!” he called back. “Merlin, I tried to come save you, but no one would help me with the bloody suit!”

“What?” Merlin shouted. “Come save—? That’s completely—! How would you ever have found me?” Arthur scowled to hear the subject of his rescue plans voice the same reservations as those who had refused to help him with it. “That’s not the point anyway. Arthur, I’m coming back, or trying to, at least. I’m sort of trying to escape some things here, actually. It’s all a bit— Well, suffice it to say, there might be something following me if I make it back, and he’s pretty big and dangerous. You need to prepare, alright? I know the ship doesn’t have any weapons or anything, but you need to come up with some way of defending everyone. I don’t know what he’ll do, but he’s furious with me—”

Something gripped Arthur’s shoulder, and the dream began to unravel.

“No!” the Merlin shape cried. “Arthur, I’m coming b—”

Arthur jerked awake up in the command center, sandy-eyed and disoriented. “Whuh—?”

Lancelot, Guinevere, Mithian, and Valiant were floating in a loose group beside him. The thing on his shoulder was Lancelot’s hand. They were all wearing expressions of discomfort and unhappiness, except for Valiant, who was very stoic except for the brightness of his eyes.

“Why did you wake me?” he demanded, unbuckling the belt of the chair and coming to a standing position in the zero gravity. “I was dreaming again, I was talking to Merlin! He says he’s coming back! Do you hear? Only there’s something chasing him, I think one of the aliens. He says we have to get the ship ready!”

They all just looked at him sadly, as though he hadn’t just delivered the best news they could have hoped for.

“Arthur,” Lancelot said heavily, only for Valiant to interrupt.

“No, let me explain.”

Giving Valiant a surprisingly unfriendly look, considering his usual bonhomie, Lancelot acquiesced.

Gripping a handle on the ceiling for stability, Valiant straightened his back and looked directly at Arthur. “What I did, I did not do lightly or without much reflection. But as I have repeatedly stated, I hold the success of this mission to be paramount, and I took my actions with that goal at the front of my mind.” The high register of his speech didn’t quite hide his smugness, but Arthur didn’t consider it important enough to rise to. Nothing mattered as much as the fact that Merlin was returning to them. Valiant would get to the point, or he wouldn’t.

“Last night, as you know—” A glimpse of irritation showed on his face before he smothered it, “—I sent an encrypted message back to Earth. The contents of that message concerned your recent shortcomings as mission commander, and your erratic mental state as relates to the tragic death of Merlin Emrys. I see now that my concerns were even better founded than I realized at the time.”

“But didn’t you hear me?” Arthur demanded. “He’s not dead! He’s coming back, and he needs our help!” Which of course was the wrong thing to say. Guinevere exhaled and closed her eyes, and Lancelot grimaced and put an arm around her. Mithian frowned deeply, and Valiant flashed around a quick look of unseemly triumph.

“As a result of my report, INES leadership and Pendragon Corp President Uther Pendragon have hereby decided to relieve you of your command, and install me in that place for the duration of the mission.” He held a tablet out to Arthur, its screen covered in text so dense and small that it looked like ants. But at the top was the Earth-and-Sun sigil of the International Network for Space Exploration and the golden dragon of Pendragon Corp. At the bottom were the swirling electronic signatures of Annis Carleon on Arthur’s father.

The blows of these revelations landed dully, as though through thick padding. Not even the fact that his father had been part of this, had stripped Arthur of his command without even speaking to him first, didn’t hurt as badly as it should have, by all rights. There was something far more important going on.

“I don’t care what fucking Earth has to say,” he snapped. “It’s our duty to help a fellow crew member when they’re in distress.”

“You’re the only distressed crew member I see,” Valiant said archly. “And I don’t think indulging your delusions is going to help anything, let alone you.”

In desperation, he appealed to Lancelot and Guinevere. “You don’t think I’m mad, do you? I’m telling you, it was Merlin. He’s coming back to us, to the ship, but he needs us to help him.”

Lancelot wouldn’t meet his eyes, and Arthur’s stomach soured. “He did this without our knowledge—” Lancelot said miserably, but Arthur didn’t let him get started in on all that rigamarole.

“But you’re not going to let this stand? Please, what does INES or my father know about what’s happened up here? And who knows what Valiant told them in that message?”

“He showed us,” Mithian said unexpectedly. “This morning. It was… uncharitable. But not inaccurate.”

Usurpation, Arthur realized, felt the same as betrayal.

“Look, I don’t care who the mission commander is, as long as we all do whatever it takes to help Merlin come back to us. He says he’s being pursued, by something large and dangerous, and that we have to defend ourselves as well. By all means, let Valiant be commander, but as the commander, it’s his first responsibility to keep us all safe, right? Well, Merlin has told me we’re all in danger from whatever is pursuing him!”

They all looked at him, resigned and unhappy and ashamed.

“I think my first order of business as mission commander will be to confine Arthur to his room,” Valiant said.

And none of the others protested.

Chapter Text

Merlin was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a sport enthusiast. Getting into, and then staying in, good enough shape to qualify for the astronaut program with INES had been gruelling, and the thought of burpees still made him nauseous. People like Arthur and Mithian and Gwaine, who took easily to physical exertion, pissed him off.

Fortunately, what he did have was a strong mind, and telekinesis was a mental ability. He had strength in spades.

And he was going to need every last ounce of it if he wanted to escape Kilgharrah and get off Daobeth in one piece.

The first surge of effort, of power, was a rush of euphoria unlike anything he’d ever felt. It was like opening a door in his house he had theretofore barely been aware of and finding not only the actual for-real Holy Grail, but all the missing episodes of Dr Who too.

He seized his own power and hurled himself upwards, out of Kilgharrah’s reach, using the element of surprise and his own dexterous smallness to avoid the enraged derkesthai’s instinctive telekinetic swipe.

He rushed up through the clouds, one part of his mind cataloguing the changes in color and texture to measure his elevation, another part monitoring Kilgharrah’s anticipated pursuit, and the last flinging itself far, far out in desperate hope of making contact with Arthur, or anyone on the Camelot. He would even take Valiant, if he could get to him. They had to be warned: Kilgharrah was more than strong enough to destroy the ship and everyone on it, but Merlin had nowhere else to go.

To his joy, he found Arthur sleeping, just at the far edge of his reach. He entered his unconscious mind, weaving the roughest possible dream environment for them to talk in, and gave him the quick and dirty version. Arthur said something about wanting to come find Merlin, which was patently insane and threw Merlin off for a crucial few seconds, so he wasn’t sure everything got through before Arthur suddenly broke the dream by waking up. Perhaps something on the ship needed his attention. He hoped it wasn’t serious, whatever it was, but couldn’t spare the energy to check anything.

The cloud column on Daobeth was only fifty kilometers deep, on average, before the molecular hydrogen and helium started getting kooky (a highly specific and technical term) under all the pressure of gravity. Merlin and Kilgharrah had been nearly forty kilometers deep when Merlin broke away from him, but he traversed that distance at absolutely whipping speeds, propelling himself with the force of his own mental will, fuelled by all the lizard brained (oh god, too real, thought rescinded) survival instincts that millions of years of evolution could instil.

Despite the overwhelming fear though, he still felt a tremendous sense of awe when he broke through the tops of the clouds and saw, with new eyes, the vastness and splendor of the world he had come to.

He hadn’t forgotten his very first sight of Daobeth, when the airlock door of the Camelot opened and revealed the glory of the planet he had still known as Jupiter. But by comparison, that world was small. This view, now, was spellbinding. He had always loved cloud formations back on Earth, the complexity and variety and amazing size of them. But they were nothing compared to the sheer scale of Daobeth’s.

The planet itself was so mind-bogglingly huge that the horizon stretched up like the sides of a bowl rather than fading vaguely downwards, or ending unnervingly soon as they did on the Moon and Mars. And within that bowl, clouds the size of mountains piled atop each other, bright gold and dull brown and harsh orange all mixing together in the light of the far-distant sun. Green lightning flickered and spat between the towering shapes, and the wind tore ferociously at everything, flinging sheets of vapor and chromatic particles across the top of the world.

And Merlin was a speck in this vastness. An ant. An atom. An electron ejecting itself from a valence shell out into the void.

Now he just had to cross hundreds of thousands of kilometers of empty space, find the Camelot, figure out how to defend it and all its occupants against Kilgharrah, and see if Arthur still loved him now that he was a lizard man. Demi-derkesthai. Potato tomato.

He aimed for the stars and flew.

His quarters have never been as small as they were now.

Five paces one way, turn, five paces back, turn, five paces, turn, five, turn.

He was going to lose his mind.

They’d locked him in, ‘for his own safety’. He’d been ‘acting so erratically that they feared for his physical and mental wellbeing’. Merlin was ‘dead’ and Arthur’s conversations were ‘dreams created by a tortured and guilty conscience’.

They’d let him keep his tablet, but stripped all his command privileges out of it, leaving it neutered and worthless. He had tried sleeping again, but after an hour of hanging in his hammock, feeling his heart throb in his throat and panicked thoughts thunder through his brain, he gave up.

So he paced, helpless, terrified, useless.

Merlin was coming back: he knew that. It was indisputable. He was being pursued by something, presumably one of the aliens who had abducted him in the first place. Had he been a captive all this time? Undergoing awful experiments, even torture? He hadn’t sounded especially tortured when he’d spoken to Arthur, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Merlin was a resilient bastard.

But he’d also said they’d have to defend themselves. The Camelot didn’t have offensive capabilities or weapons, at least not the sort that fended off angry aliens of unknown size and ability. But that didn’t mean there was nothing…

Taking up his tablet, he ceased pacing and sat down. Even the most useless tablet still had the ship’s specs loaded on it.

The bigness of space just completely foxed him. Bamboozled him. Threw him for a fucking loop. He thought he’d got over that, but he’d been flying for hours, he was pretty sure, and his progress seemed negligible. Daobeth still threatened to swallow him back down, like it could rise up from itself and seize him.

And he was getting tired. Even with amazing, unprecedented, and all the other superlatives that applied to his situation, psionic powers, three hundred and fifty thousand kilometers was a boggling distance, and crossing it was proving to be a challenge he was ill prepared for. His powers might be amazing, unprecedented, superlative in all ways, but he hadn’t had very much practice with them, and certainly never used them so forcefully for such a sustained time. He needed to rest, but resting meant falling back into Daobeth’s gravity well and directly into Kilgharrah’s jaws, or whatever method of execution the derkesthai employed.

Gingerly, he reached back with a tendril of power, and found Kilgharrah far behind him. Kilgharrah was stronger, more practiced, and in all ways better equipped for the task, but the simple laws of mass and velocity still held true: Merlin was smaller; it took him less energy to move faster. The tenor of Kilgharrah’s thoughts was one of boiling rage, and Merlin backed away quickly.

He sensed Aithusa as well, flitting around Kilgharrah, nervous both to be out of the murk and fog of her home for the first time, and also at the fact that she disagreed with her master. She wasn’t convinced that Merlin needed to die, and Merlin found himself disproportionately comforted by that.

Beyond their minds, the derkesthai remaining on Daobeth were restless and perturbed by what was going on. Kilgharrah had acted unilaterally by bringing Merlin down to their world, and not all of them thought it was a good idea. But their attitudes seemed split now that the deed was done: some thought that Merlin should never have been their problem, and now that he was leaving, he should be ignored; others, however, saw the powers he’d been given as a weapon that could be turned against them, and that therefore he needed to be destroyed. Their solitary natures were making consensus-building slow, but the sending of thought to thought was building momentum, and the tenor of their thoughts was not positive, for Merlin’s longevity, at least.

And worst of all, he couldn’t sense the Camelot ahead of him anywhere. He knew it was just bad orbital timing, that the ship was transiting to the far side of the planet in its careful L5 placement behind Io and would be back in a predictable number of hours. But it was still unnerving to throw himself at the stars, trusting that there would eventually be a ship to catch him, and people in the ship to welcome and protect him.

But there was no other option.

So he flew, surpassing every childhood superhero dream and every teenagehood science fiction-fuelled fantasy, pushing himself past anything he should ever have been capable of, throwing his own body forward with the pure force of his mind, and eventually surpassing his energy reserves, growing exhausted and inattentive.

And inattentive was the last thing he could be. He had estimates of how far he needed to go and guesses of the required trajectory, and those needed to be refined over and over and over as he gained new information, from the stars and from the shape of Daobeth behind him as he drew far enough away to make up its arced horizon. But his mind was fuzzy, no matter how hard he bit the inside of his cheek or pressed his fingernails—longer and sharper than they ever used to be—into his palms. He was taxing his body and brain to the breaking point, and still forcing himself on.

But just as he began to microsleep, jolting awake after tiny periods of utterly black unconsciousness, he felt something tug at his mind: Arthur.

The Camelot was sailing back into his awareness, and he latched onto it like a drowning man onto a buoy. Feeling more than calculating the trajectory he needed, he scraped the dregs of his power together and hurled himself at the fateful point where they must meet, or be lost.

Arthur became aware that something was amiss because of a hack he’d done that let his tablet mirror what the others’ tablets were doing. Ethical? No. Necessary? Yes.

Mithian was on night duty, playing those math games she liked, when one of the outer sensors pinged something. Those sensors were rife with false positives, often taking a gleam of light on another bit of equipment as an approaching object, but refused to go away until they were addressed properly, so, after a length of time that perfectly fit rolling one’s eyes, she tapped the alert and a new window opened.

At first, there was nothing to see. Black space, ruddy Jupiter, the edge of the communications array, which wasn’t even gleaming suspiciously. But the alarm persisted, highlighting a little box of Jupiter’s orange side to identify the culprit. And there was a speck, an oddly shaped mix of shadow and blue that even Arthur, primed to expect this as he was, took a long, staring moment to understand.

Merlin.

Arthur’s heart resounded like a bell, nearly exploding with the joyful relief of Merlin’s return. That tangled shape on Mithian’s screen meant that Arthur was sane, and Merlin was alive, and everything was going to be alright now.

Mercifully, Mithian zoomed in, unknowingly giving Arthur a better view as well, and he could imagine her shock and muttered Russian swearing when she registered what Arthur had already understood.

But Arthur’s joy faltered when he saw Merlin’s state: up close, he was not in good shape. He was even thinner than he had been last time Arthur had seen him, and his clothes were the tattered remains of the skin-tight suit worn under the bulky EVA suits, and the skin beneath those tatters was patched with blue. A rash? Strange scabs? Alien tattoos? It was impossible to tell, but the discoloration extended unevenly up his neck and across part of his face. He was still easily recognizable, though.

Worse than his appearance, however, was the fact that he seemed to be barely awake. He was moving incredibly fast—according to the read-out in the corner of the window, he was matching the Camelot’s speed to within a negligible rounding error—and was drawing incrementally nearer to the ship’s trajectory, but his eyes were mostly closed, and his head and limbs were limp as he zoomed along. It was bloody weird, and it made Arthur’s stomach flip nervously. Merlin had returned, yes, but in what state?

Helpless to do absolutely anything, he watched Mithian pull up the intra-crew chat app and vidcall Valiant.

It took a while for Valiant to answer, since he’d almost definitely been asleep, given the time, and he was mussed and terse with annoyance when he did finally accept the call.

“What the fuck, Mithian?”

“Merlin is flying outside, on a trajectory to meet the ship in less than two hours.”

“What?”

“You heard me.” Her annoyance was palpable in turn.

“Yeah, except what you said makes no fucking sense!”

She clicked her tongue impatiently and hooked the feed of Merlin into their chat.

“Jesus Christ on a bike…” Valiant whispered after several seconds of blank staring. “The crazy son of a bitch was right.”

Belatedly understanding that he was the crazy son of a bitch in question, Arthur decided it wasn’t worth getting upset about.

“We have to tell the others,” Mithian said.

“We have to do no such thing.”

Mithian gaped at him, which was far gentler than what Arthur wanted to do right then. “And what,” Mithan said, sharp words even sharper with her accent, “do you propose as an alternative? Acting shocked when he bumps into the ship in two hours? Letting Lancelot or Guinevere notice when they wake up and acting shocked then? And you should know, I will not swear my silence to this. Merlin is back. That is not a secret I would ever keep, even were it possible.”

Arthur would have cheered if he weren’t staring so hard at Valiant to see what he would do next. He couldn’t pretend Merlin wasn’t there, but he could make a strong argument for it being too dangerous to let Merlin back into the Camelot. Who knew what had happened to him in the last month? How was he still alive? What was that blue stuff all over him? Was it contagious? Arthur knew all these concerns were important and valid and that if Valiant took his position as commander even slightly seriously, he would weigh them carefully.

But Arthur was not the commander anymore, and was freed from such considerations: he was going to get Merlin back abroad if it was the last thing he did.

Chapter Text

When Merlin was five, he'd slipped at the pool and hit his head on the tiles. His mother told this story very dramatically in the following years, after she got over the shock, with gory details about the blood pooling under his head and how his eyes had rolled back and she had thought he was dead. Merlin didn't remember any of that. He'd just felt a white rush of impact, and then a tremendous sense of distance from the world, and wooziness.

He felt like that again now, the woozy uncertainty of where his body ended and everything else began. God, but he needed to sleep.

He was fuzzily aware of a growing proximity, minds awash in shock and confusion and joy, and he tried to wave at them, knowing that—save one—they were his allies and friends and wanted to do their best to help him.

Then he was being pulled, held in someone's arms, and laid on a surface that was flat enough and solid enough that he didn't have to keep himself telekinetically afloat, and the relief of relinquishing that effort was euphoric.

It was enough of a rush that he could open his eyes for a moment, and see a bright-red-EVA-suited person leaning over him, the ceiling of one of the airlocks overhead.

The face behind the visor was tense with concern, but dear.

“Hi, Lance,” he whispered, and fell into profound unconsciousness.

After the argument Mithian and Valiant had, which resulted in Valiant admitting that Lancelot and Guinevere would have to be told about Merlin, there was another argument about what to do about Merlin, which Arthur had anticipated. Fortunately, the result of that argument was to allow Merlin back in, but extreme contamination precautions were to be taken, which was only fair. Arthur watched Lancelot, suited as Merlin had been suited when he was lost, take a PMU and grab him—quite literally, bear-hug him, and Arthur was not in the least jealous of Lancelot, not a speck—and pull him back aboard. Merlin, who had seemed semi-conscious at best for most of that process, pretty much immediately passed out. Valiant had Lancelot vacate the airlock and undergo thorough decontamination, then summoned everyone to the command center to try and figure out what the hell was going on.

Arthur eavesdropped shamelessly through Lancelot’s tablet, choosing him because he had stuck a little medical sensor on Merlin and was now scanning through the various readouts to get a grip on what had happened to him during his abduction.

“High temperature, but slow pulse, even taking unconsciousness into account. The reader isn’t very sophisticated, but it’s getting several unidentified antibodies on his red blood cells, and some other stuff it can’t helpfully compare with anything. Possibly viral, possibly a mutation, it’s impossible to say right now.”

“But he’s stable,” Guinevere said, her voice somewhat fainter because she was farther from Lancelot’s tablet. “He’s alive.”

“Somehow, yes,” Lancelot replied, sounding bewildered.

“Arthur mentioned… aliens?” Guinevere sounded extremely dubious. “I don’t see how Jupiter could support alien life, but I don’t see another way to explain how Merlin survived, or to explain the changes that have happened to his body.”

“Nor I,” Lancelot agreed uneasily.

“And didn’t he say Merlin would be… pursued? By one of them?” Guinevere continued, and Arthur could practically see how she would be glancing at the others, seeking assurance that her memory aligned with theirs.

“We cannot give in to speculation,” Valiant declared, clearly trying to sound decisive and authoritative, and instead sounding like he was dodging the question. “We must act on what we know to be true: Merlin has returned to us, somehow, and he is in a dire state of health. He may or may not be contagious. Until we know more, we should refrain from making any big decisions.”

“I think it is foolish for us to ignore what else Arthur told us,” Mithian asserted. “He has said for nearly two weeks that Merlin was still living, and told us that he was returning as well. We must face the fact that whatever was going on, it wasn’t a psychotic break after all.”

Still stuck in his room, Arthur couldn’t help but sniff in vindication.

Valiant’s voice was irritated. “Psychotic break or not, even before he started spouting off about Merlin being alive, he was still failing to perform his duties. He hadn’t redistributed Merlin’s tasks, remember? And he was lying to INES and Pendragon Corp about it. He might not have been insane, but he was failing to lead.”

“Mithian is right though,” Guinevere said. “Arthur may have better insights than any of us as to what happened to Merlin. If we need information to make good decisions, then we need to see what Arthur knows.”

“He has told us everything he knows,” Valiant countered sharply. “Unconnected data points aren’t enough to build a whole hypothesis on, you know that as well as I do!”

“I hardly see how you could call everything that’s happened ‘unconnected’,” Lancelot retorted.

“Everyone seems to be ignoring one vital fact,” Valiant said, strident and angry. “We don't know what has happened to Merlin in the last month. What if he hasn't only changed physically? If we're accepting aliens as axiomatic here, who's to say they didn't change his brain too? His mind? Who's to say if that really is still Merlin in that airlock?” There was a silence as the other three digested this question. Arthur, for his part, felt sick. He knew that wasn't true. Valiant must know it too, but every false ruler instinctively sensed that the best way to maintain control was by fearmongering.

“He knew me, when he saw my face…” Lancelot said, but he sounded uncertain, and Arthur wanted to scream.

“And Arthur still might know—” Guinevere began, only for Valiant to cut her off.

“Arthur has been blinded by his own feelings, don't tell me you haven't seen it. He'll say whatever he has to to vindicate Merlin, no matter what the truth is.”

“You can't be serious,” Lancelot protested.

“Better men than Arthur have done worse for love.”

“Come on…” Guinevere said. “You don't think Arthur would do anything to harm us.”

“All I know is that Arthur's in love with Merlin,” Valiant said. “And Merlin could very well be a danger to the mission, the ship, and us.”

Merlin's mind rose to awareness before his body. He was aware of being within a fragile metal structure, far above Daobeth’s cloudy surface. But he could still sense the roil of derkesthai minds, their growing fury and agreement that the little mutant Kilgharrah had made must be destroyed, for all their safety. And Kilgharrah, already halfway between his world and the tiny ship that carried Merlin and the humans, would soon be close enough to use his telekinesis and crush the ship to nothing. If Merlin wanted to live, he would have to fight back. And Merlin wanted very much to live.

He turned his attention to the granular realities of the physical space his body occupied, finding it inoffensive, but enclosed. A prison, or a cage.

Seeing no reason to stay in that state, he tore a hole in the wall and woke his body up enough for it to walk out into the ship. Using his feet again after so long made him clumsy, and he staggered and leaned hard on his telekinesis.

His rupture of the wall made a loud sound happen—klaxon, came the word from somewhere in his quiescent mind—and the cluster of humans at the middle of the structure became startled and fearful, and began moving in Merlin's direction, including the one that wished Merlin ill. The other mind, the isolated mind, Arthur's mind, was closer, and enclosed, as Merlin has been. That was wrong, so Merlin tore a hole for him too.

The imperative pull he felt towards Arthur won over his desire to deal with the threatening mind, and he pushed his body in that direction, sensing that Arthur was coming to him too.

“Merlin!” Arthur's voice barely cut through the screeching sound waves of the klaxon, so Merlin stopped it so he could hear Arthur better. “Merlin!” Merlin could sense Arthur's progress, and his own mind woke up further and further the closer he came, his senses overcoming his psionics, his identity resettling as the Merlin Arthur was calling to.

And then he could see, with his very own eyes, Arthur. Arthur racing, desperate, reaching for him. Arthur in a welter of relief and joy and frantic fear and—upon seeing Merlin—shocked dismay, but not even that could keep him from rushing to Merlin and colliding with him so hard that only Merlin's abilities kept them from toppling right over.

“Merlin, Merlin, Merlin,” he moaned. His arms were warm and tight, his breathing harsh and hot, his pulse a thunder that some vestigial part of Merlin was surprised he could hear. “Never die again, I couldn’t stand it, I couldn’t live through that again, God, Merlin…”

Merlin wrapped his arms around him too and held on fiercely. “I won’t,” he swore, his voice guttural from disuse, his throat clogged with Daobethian dust. He had to remind himself to breathe so that he could talk. “I’m here. I’m yours.”

Arthur shuddered in his embrace, and pressed his face to Merlin’s shoulder. “Thank God,” he mumbled. “Thank God you weren’t just a dream.”

Merlin twined his fingers through Arthur’s unkempt hair and smiled. “Pompous ass, remember?”

“But not insufferable anymore?”

Merlin chuckled. “Oh, I’ll suffer you, alright.”

Arthur drew back and looked at him then, and Merlin could feel in his mind exactly what he was thinking. There was lust born of relief, but also a guilty sort of concern at how different Merlin looked, and the worry of whether he really was alright. And Merlin suddenly didn’t know how to tell him just how much he had changed.

But before he could even contemplate tackling that, the other minds arrived.

Now that he was awake properly, he knew they were Lance, Gwen, Mithian, and Valiant, and attached all the old emotional layers of his relationships with each of them. But he still had his psionics-derived knowledge too, and knew that Valiant had let his thirst for power and respect get completely out of hand. He was terrified of Merlin and frightened that his return would undermine his newfound authority. The rest of his mind was a mess of calculation gone haywire with confusion and anger and resentment, but trying to pick any specifics out was like trying to hear a phone call while in the pit of a hard rock concert. With time and practice he might have done it, but he had neither.

“Merlin!” Gwen cried, trying to fling herself towards him, only to be held back by Valiant’s outstretched arm.

“Careful,” he said harshly, eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Look at what he’s done to the ship.”

Merlin looked around too, wondering what he was talking about.

It was with deep and genuine surprise that he saw the jagged hole he’d torn in the wall behind which the airlock lay. Well, what used to be an airlock, anyway. It definitely wouldn’t be serving that purpose again any time soon, what with the giant hole in the wall. Merlin knew why he’d done that: he had been trapped, imprisoned, and unwilling to stay that way. He hadn’t had his awareness of the ship back yet. But there was no way Valiant would listen to any of that. Merlin could already see the thoughts in his head, screaming with—in this case, moderately well-justified—fear of The Other, the unknown, the, quite literally, alien.

And Merlin could also see, in Valiant’s mind, and Lance’s and Gwen’s and Mithian’s, and even Arthur’s, that the physical changes he had undergone were extremely disquieting. Reflections of his own features kept leaping out at him as they noticed things—his tattered clothes and the thick layer of brown and orange and greenish dust that coated him all over; the patches of blue scales that stood out starkly against the pale skin they remembered; his yellow eyes. He saw their fear of him, of what his changed appearance and new powers meant, and what they might have to do about them. He’d torn a giant bloody hole in the solid metal wall without evident effort: what else might he do?

“I only did that because I was trapped,” he said angrily, and the words came out in that same low rumble. Had his voice permanently changed? Was it not just a symptom of long neglect? He didn’t like that idea, but there was no time to linger on it. “You can’t seriously think I’d hurt anyone.”

“I see no reason why not,” Valiant snarled. He was brittle with fear, Merlin sensed. He could easily break into something sharp and vicious. Merlin couldn’t let this spiral out of control. Kilgharrah was coming closer by the second, and he had to figure out some method of defense before the derkesthai got close enough to do them any harm. Feeling that Arthur supported him gave him the nerve to step forward.

“Valiant,” he said, holding his hands out. “I know I’m different to how I was before. I know that’s, I mean, scary.” His voice strained, but didn’t break on the word. He couldn’t afford to lose control right now, not when all the others were so close to freaking out. “This, what was done to me? It was intended as a warning, to all of us here and everyone who might come: there is life here, and it doesn’t receive us in peace.”

“You see?” Valiant shrieked, pointing at Merlin with a trembling finger. “He’s threatening us!” And he pulled out a knife.

“Valiant!” Gwen and Lance shouted in shocked unison, and Mithian said something fast and loud in Russian.

“Hey!” Arthur thrust his way in front of Merlin, the blazing urge to protect flaring in his mind like a fire. “Are you mad?”

“Me? Me? He’s corrupted you!” And Valiant lunged forward, the silent glass-crack of his fury and fear ringing in Merlin’s mind like a gunshot.

Arthur had been in a car crash as a child. He remembered the treacle-slowness of the other car coming at them, thinking that if only his body would listen to him, he could just get out of his seat and move out of the way, but it wouldn’t and he didn’t and the other car hit them and killed his mother.

Valiant’s wild dive at him and Merlin had the same quality: if Arthur could only move, only act, only think of what to do then he could prevent the oncoming horror. He’d only just got Merlin back! He couldn’t lose him again!

He pushed Merlin further behind himself, meaning to shield him from the knife Valiant had pulled from somewhere, desperate and terrified. Valiant’s eyes were bulging out of his head, his lips pulled back in a feral snarl, and the knife was angled right for Arthur’s stomach. Everyone else was screaming, but it came from very far away. All Arthur was truly aware of was the lingering pressure where Merlin’s arms had wrapped around him, the heat of where his cheek had pressed to Arthur’s, and the agonizing certainty that if he lost Merlin again, if he failed to protect the man he loved, then his life was forfeit. There would be nothing left of Arthur to redeem.

So he prepared himself to do whatever he needed to do to make sure that didn’t happen.

And then Valiant stumbled and screamed, high and harsh, and fell to his hands and knees, coughed out a gout of dark blood, and collapsed.

Merlin’s arm was gripping Arthur’s shoulder painfully tight as Lancelot rushed forward and pressed his fingers under Valiant’s jaw.

He looked up at Arthur, eyes wide. “He’s dead.”

Chapter Text

He hadn’t meant to.

He really hadn’t meant to.

But Valiant was coming at Arthur with a knife and Merlin would be damned before he let anything happen to Arthur.

But he hadn’t meant to kill him.

Sharp instinct had lashed out and his power, still so poorly understood, still so poorly controlled—was it wrong of him to come back? He’d torn a huge hole in the wall and now he’d killed Valiant and what if Valiant was right? What if Merlin really was a threat that needed to be destroyed?—had done what he had wanted it to and eliminated the threat to Arthur.

And now Valiant was dead.

To the credit of his crewmates, there were no histrionics.

Lancelot enlisted Mithian to help him remove Valiant’s body—his corpse, he was dead, Merlin had made a corpse, he had made a death happen, Valiant had been a living breathing human person and now he was a lump of inert matter, oh God—and Arthur and Gwen stayed with Merlin.

“It was self-defense,” Gwen said, but he could see in her mind that she was severely shaken. In her memory, Valiant hadn’t just coughed up some blood, but seized and twitched in agony for an impossibly long time before finally going still.

The question of whether or not Merlin had done it was not even raised: what else could it have been? Merlin was the one who had come back from a month-long alien abduction with the power to tear through solid metal walls and silence alarm klaxons, after all. And Valiant had been rushing at him and Arthur with a weapon: that was more than enough justification to attack back. Motive, means, and opportunity, as all the crime shows had it.

“Merlin, look at me,” Arthur said, and they were probably the only words that could have worked in that moment because he knew Arthur was safe, he could feel his body and his mind right there, but the deep, human part of his mind needed to see to believe.

He looked up to meet Arthur’s eyes, and in the midst of his distress and confusion, momentarily felt Arthur’s feelings as his own. There was still a tender joy at their unexpected reunion, but it was layered over now with the shock of sudden death and unwilling fear at what Merlin had become in his time away, underscored by the jolt at Merlin’s yellow eyes—Arthur had loved them when they were blue, Merlin learned, felt, mourned. And all those feelings refracted back into Merlin’s own feelings, making him wonder what the next step could possibly be after this, after Merlin had killed another crew member, a man they had all known well, if not exactly liked. He felt that Arthur could see a tenuous way forward, one that—somehow—relied on Merlin.

“You told me there was an—an alien following you,” Arthur said, as though he couldn’t quite believe he was saying the words. Gwen’s mind, so even-keeled and capacious, stumbled over the need to accept it. “A derkesky?”

“Derkesthai,” Merlin corrected, remembering why he had returned to the Camelot in the first place. “Yes, his name is Kilgharrah. He’s the one who did this to me, only he didn’t really mean to, but—well, that can wait. Suffice it to say, he’s bloody pissed with me, and he doesn’t care who gets in the way. We need to defend ourselves, but I know we don’t have any weapons or anything on the ship.”

“That’s not the same as being defenseless,” Arthur put in, and memory after memory of poring over the ship’s schematics crossed the surface of his mind, recent and strong and directed by Arthur’s own keen intelligence. But he didn’t know how massive and powerful and determined Kilgharrah was: none of what he had McGuyvered up was going to cut it, as much as Merlin wished it could.

But it did give Merlin an idea.

Arthur was going to hate it.

“I fucking hate this,” Arthur said into the microphone for, what, the fifth time now?

“Yes, we are all aware,” Merlin replied, new, low voice crackling through the speaker in Arthur’s ear. Arthur still wasn’t sure about the voice thing, but it sometimes sounded like a big cat growling, and that, unfortunately, did things to him. “Is everything ready?”

“Yes, Merlin, everything is ready,” Guinevere said, a sigh coloring her words. Merlin had also said that about five times now.

Arthur, Guinevere, Mithian, and Lancelot were back in the command center, and, the part that Arthur hated, Merlin was outside the ship again. It was too reminiscent of how they had been before, when Merlin had been lost to Jupiter’s ruddy depths. Or Daobeth, as Merlin now called it.

And more than that had changed, of course. Merlin wore no EVA suit or tether, relying on the physiological changes the aliens had imposed on him to keep him alive rather than normal human things like air and heat. It had given Arthur some severe discomfort to watch Merlin standing in the secondary airlock—he’d rendered the primary one useless, after all—wearing nothing but a standard-issue jumpsuit, hair still damp from his hasty wash. And then the discomfort got ten times worse when the outer door clunked open and Merlin propelled himself out into space, using those same powers that had torn through the wall and killed Valiant.

Arthur was purposefully not thinking about that.

They had sent the hastiest of updates to Earth, briefing Pendragon Corp and INES on Merlin’s return and Valiant’s passing, but had not responded to the increasingly frantic demands for more information, even when Leon and the other approaching commanders began asking why they had been warned that the Camelot might have suffered either a mutiny or a collective psychological collapse. In fact, Mithian put the entire comms system into hibernation for the duration of, well… whatever was going to happen. Arthur still wasn’t sure, and he hated being unsure.

That Merlin had powers was undeniable. He had explained, as best he could, about the genetic manipulation that the aliens had done to him, and the resulting psionic abilities he’d developed in conjunction with the more obvious physical changes. Lancelot had nearly had a fit trying to integrate it into the model of medicine he was familiar with, and in the end, despaired of understanding. The rest of Merlin’s explanation had not gone any better. He barely understood his own power, he was honest about that, but still insisted that he knew he could do what he was describing, and begged Arthur and the others to trust him, to cooperate.

So here Arthur was, cooperating, and hating it.

“Do you sense the alien?” Mithian asked. She had adjusted the most smoothly to the new situation, perhaps because she had the least emotional connection to Merlin.

“Yes,” Merlin replied, and Arthur bit his lip against the unwelcome rush of tingling sensation that permeated him. It was very nearly a problem, how severe Arthur’s attraction had become since Merlin came back. He looked and sounded a bit different, yes, but not in a bad way, and he was still fundamentally Merlin, and that was what Arthur had always loved. And knowing that Merlin felt the same way was the most attractive thing he could think of. “He’s not close enough to do anything to you yet, but it will be soon.”

Merlin was a tiny figure on their monitors, exterior cameras zoomed as far as they could to keep him in view. He had gone several kilometers out from the ship so that his battle with the alien had less likelihood of hitting the ship with any crossfire, or whatever one called accidental telekinetic strikes.

And it hit Arthur all over again how absolutely insane this was: a month ago, his biggest problems had been hiding his feelings about Merlin and making sure that the mission stayed on schedule, and he’d done exceedingly well at both. Now, this gangly, clever, funny, beloved man who had been abducted and turned partially alien had killed another crew member and was floating outside in the vacuum of space in order to protect the ship and the rest of the crew from the very same alien who had taken him in the first place. And all Arthur could do to help was blast the Camelot’s engines at him, because that was somehow going to make him stronger. And Arthur absolutely hated it.

Merlin’s voice crackled suddenly in his ear. “Kilgharrah’s almost close enough. Start the engines.”

Arthur glanced at the rest of his crew; at Guinevere in the pilot’s seat, at Mithian on comms, at Lancelot at the mechanic’s station. They all looked back at him, equally wary and scared. He could see their doubts written across their faces: were they going to do this insane thing? Were they going to trust that this was necessary, and would work?

He had the same fears. But as completely nuts as this was, the only thing that made it all make sense was Merlin’s explanation. He had to trust Merlin. They all had to trust Merlin.

“Do it,” he said.

It was quiet in space.

He could almost hear Arthur repeating the old jokes about no one hearing him scream, yes, haha, but really, it was very… peaceful. He hadn’t really registered that at any previous point. When Kilgharrah had first taken him, he’d been overwhelmed by fear and distracted by the majesty of Daobeth, and on his way back up to the Camelot, he’d also been overwhelmed by fear, and had eventually become too exhausted to be aware of much of anything. But here, now, floating out in the nothing while he waited for Kilgharrah to get close enough to fight him effectively, the sheer vast silence struck him full force. His new powers, stretching out in a sphere of influence and awareness several kilometers wide, only made the scale of the universe more evident, because he could imagine more clearly what lay beyond their reach. Void, for ages and ages and ages, punctuated by the tiny searing boil of stars and infinitesimal crumbs of planets. There was life out there, he had believed that even before Daobeth proved it, but there was as much likelihood of making contact as there was of throwing a cricket ball from London and hitting Pluto.

The thought didn’t bother him as much as it used to.

“I fucking hate this.” Arthur’s sudden words brought him back to the matter at hand.

Merlin smiled, in spite of everything. “Yes, we are all aware,” he said, cheating a little with his powers to make the microphone pick up the words. Someone would hear him scream in space, and so there. But his gut clenched nervously in spite of himself. “Is everything ready?” He'd asked already, and he trusted them, and he could sense the state of the ship perfectly well, but he still asked again.

‘Yes, Merlin, everything is ready,” Gwen answered, rightfully exasperated.

“Do you sense the alien?” Mithian asked, and he felt her mix of pure curiosity at his new abilities, and desire to forestall the conversation that had already happened five times. None of them liked the plan, and none of them hesitated to tell him so, and he wasn't the only one sick of hearing about it.

So he answered her, let the conversation patter along for another cycle, let all of them—and himself as well—fill the time with talk rather than more thinking. More thinking could easily become dangerous. Merlin had locked the reality of what he’d done to Valiant deep in his mind, had done his best to purge the sensation of reaching into the man’s body and squeezing until everything simply stopped. He had done it to protect Arthur, and didn’t regret that for a second, but the guilt was like a riptide waiting to pull him down, and he couldn’t let that happen yet. Not until he knew that everyone else would be safe. Until then, he couldn’t let himself get distracted.

Soon enough, what he thought of as his mental proximity alarm went off, telling him that Kilgharrah was nearing the point where he could act against Merlin and the Camelot.

“Kilgharrah’s almost close enough,” he said. “Start the engines.”

There was a brief silence from the ship that Merlin would have been able to read even if he couldn’t sense the tenor of the crew’s thoughts: a last upwelling of doubt, of stubborn disbelief that this was really happening, of a plaintive wish for everything to go back to normal.

But there was Arthur, blazing with determined faith. And Arthur said, “Do it.”

The five major ion engines rumbled to life, radiating just a trickle of the power they were capable of. Merlin reached back with his mind and snared the ship in a net of psionic force, exerting Newton’s old reliable equal and opposite force to the growing thrust the engines were producing, and kept the nearly 900,000 kilograms of spaceship from leaving its orbit. It was an incredibly tricky balancing act, to increase his force in step with the engines, and there were a couple of bumps, but the engines did their job and provided him with ample power, so within a few minutes they had hit equilibrium and Merlin could focus on other things even while he maintained the net.

Other things like the furious derkesthai racing up at them from the planet so far below. It would have been logical to be terrified, but at the end of the day, Merlin wasn’t a logical person. Kilgharrah might be angry, but Merlin was pissed as hell too, and with far more right to be. He was going to harness all that anger, and all the power the Camelot’s engines were blasting at him, and throw Kilgharrah right back down into the clouds where he belonged. And then he was going to fuck Arthur stupid.

Thus fortified, he turned his mind to Kilgharrah and braced himself as the derkesthai finally crossed the line and came close enough to actually attack them rather than passively sensing them, which Merlin assumed he had been doing for the whole intervening time, just as Merlin had been. He was still too far away to be seen with the naked eye—even the cameras on the ship might not catch him, if Merlin’s rough calculations were anything close to right—but that was no matter. He had had the precision to snap Merlin’s tether while still well out of sight of the ship, after all. A large-scale attack would be no different.

And the attack wasn’t long in coming.

The brash impact of Kilgharrah’s mind against Merlin’s was staggering. He had thrown all of his thwarted rage at him, and Merlin, attention split between the fight and holding the Camelot in place, could only divert the force of it, not properly deflect it. He shook his head, reorienting to his psionic senses rather than his physical ones. Eyes and ears would do little good in this fight, and his telekinesis was his true weapon.

This time when Kilgharrah struck, Merlin was able to read the currents of it enough that he could prepare for the blow, which was intended to shatter his psyche, and reorient the force of it, much as a satellite might use the gravity of a moon or planet to increase its speed. Only in this case, Merlin was the gravitational field, and he was throwing Kilgharrah’s telekinetic punch right back at him.

He felt Kilgharrah’s shock and the slapdash defense that saved him.

‘What a clever trick, little thing.’ His voice was strange and faint from so far away, but perfectly understandable. ‘It seems it shall take longer than I originally calculated to smite you.’

‘You need a better calculator if you think you’re going to smite me,’ Merlin shot back. ‘That’s not the only trick in my book.’

That rumble of a laugh. ‘Oh, Merlin. You have no further tricks. You have no book at all. I can read your mind.’

Merlin, who had been following old human instincts by bluffing, grimaced. ‘That may be so,’ he sent. ‘But I can read yours too, and I can see that you don’t know what I’m capable of. And there’s no way for you to know, because I don’t have a clue either. But trust me when I say there’s nothing I won’t do to protect my friends.’ Valiant would attest to that, if Merlin hadn’t done what he had to save Arthur.

Kilgharrah snarled, and battle was joined.

Bludgeons of telekinetic force hammered into him and whips of telepathic power tried to scourge his mind, and he fended each of them off in turn, feeling the impacts like they were fists slamming against a flimsy shield he leaned against. The outpouring of energy from the Camelot’s engines gave him power to draw from, but he didn’t know how to wield it gracefully or economically. When he slashed back at Kilgharrah with a telekinetic flail of his own, the derkesthai laughed scornfully and batted it away.

Merlin scowled and forged a blade out of his will and hurled that down, but Kilgharrah fended it off just as easily.

‘Aithusa could do better than you,’ he sent, the sneer evident in his tone.

‘I should hope so,’ Merlin replied, annoyed more by the dig at Aithusa, who had been nothing but helpful and friendly while he was on Daobeth. ‘She’s had her powers for more than a month, and I assume you’ve actually, you know, taught her useful things.’

A sudden, fierce impact sent Merlin tumbling arse over teakettle, flying nearly a quarter of a kilometer before he righted himself.

‘You were never meant to have the powers of a derkesthai,’ Kilgharrah sent, savage in anger. ‘You were meant to die once you served your purpose.’

Still shaking his head to clear out the dizziness, Merlin retorted, ‘Well, that was your first mistake. Humans are notoriously hard to kill.’

‘Then I suppose I’m glad you aren’t human anymore, little thing.’

Another blast of power sent Merin reeling end over end, and this time, Arthur’s worried voice crackled through his earpiece. “Merlin? Are you alright?”

Merlin just clenched his jaw. “Yes,” he gritted out. He couldn’t keep letting Kilgharrah swat him around like a cat with a mouse, even if that comparison was pretty apt for their relative sizes. There was nothing anyone on the ship could do, and the spikes of their worry and fear whenever he got hit made it harder to concentrate.

He marshalled his powers and focused on Kilgharrah’s slowly approaching mind. He still wasn’t visible, but proximity still made him easier to sense. Easier to target. Merlin struck, again and again, a series of blows that he hoped would disorient Kilgharrah rather than hurt him, and was so distracted by his own offense that he neglected to notice Kilgharrah’s.

It seared his mind like a hand on the hob, and he shrieked at the sudden pain. “Merlin?” Arthur’s shout sounded very distant. “Merlin, what happened?” Not even that was enough to break through the agony. It was like being a vase as it broke, or a car as it crashed, or—or a man as he died. And that, that, would not do. He hadn’t escaped from the bowels of Daobeth, escaped the wrath of a derkesthai, escaped the vacuum of space by the skin of his teeth and made it back to Arthur and the rest of the Camelot just to die now.

He wrenched his mind back together, sank deep into his own consciousness, and found a reservoir of determination and strength that he had never needed before. He must live. He must protect his loved ones. He must get home again despite everything. And because of this imperative, this drive, he would find a way to best Kilgharrah.

With a roar unlike anything he’d ever heard before, he twisted his power into a javelin and hurled it at the oncoming alien. Kilgharrah warded it off, but barely, and Merlin sensed his shock at the strength of it, and how close it had come to damaging him. The reaction was grimly galvanizing, and Merlin did it again, stronger, and Kilgharrah was, again, hard-pressed to defend himself. But while Merlin was preparing to do it again, Kilgharrah counterattacked, striking out at Merlin with a series of sudden, battering waves of psychic force. Merlin tried to divert the energy he had marshalled into a defense rather than an attack, but the sudden adjustment was clumsy and the blows swept him back, reeling.

Back and forth they volleyed, neither gaining the upper hand for long enough to be decisive, and neither willing to back down. It went on for so long that Kilgharrah got close enough to be visible to the ship’s cameras, and the amazement and dismay of his crewmates was gratifying, if a bit distracting.

Their proximity to each other also made the fight faster, more vicious, the blows smaller and more targeted, and Merlin began losing ground. Kilgharrah had the experience and knowledge to wield his powers like a scalpel, like a winnowing knife, whereas Merlin was handicapped by the need to hold the ship still and attack at the same time. It was not a fair fight, but he had never expected it to be, and fought on doggedly.

‘Surrender, little thing!’ Kilgharrah howled, throwing whipping tendrils of power to try and snare Merlin. ‘You have no hope of defeating me!’

‘I’m not doing this for hope,’ Merlin sent back, threading himself through the attack like a needle rather than blocking it or striking back. He was becoming exhausted, even with the power the Camelot’s engines were feeding him, still not having fully recovered from his marathon escape from Daobeth, and shaken by what he’d done to Valiant. He needed to finish this quickly or he’d be flattened, but he couldn’t see a way of doing it. ‘I’m doing it for love!’

‘Your loved ones doubt you, even now as you defend them!’

The words hurt, even though he was already aware of the fact. His return, his new appearance and powers, his use of them to defend Arthur by killing Valiant—he didn’t blame them a bit for being wary. But it did still hurt.

‘That doesn’t matter,’ he declared, as much to himself as to Kilgharrah. ‘I love them and I’m going to protect them, no matter what.’

Merlin watched Kilgharrah absorb this and begin recalculating his approach. And the decision that bubbled forth made Merlin’s blood run cold.

‘Defend them, then,’ Kilgharrah sent snidely, and blasted a sustained telekinetic attack straight at the Camelot.

The ship lurched in Merlin’s grasp, throwing him back as well, and he heard his friends’ shouts of shock and fear in his mind.

“No!” he bellowed, and something in his mind wrenched open. ‘Stop!’

And Kilgharrah stopped.

They both hung suspended in space, shocked, confused, Kilgharrah aghast, Merlin glad of the reprieve.

‘Little thing,’ Kilgharrah hissed, his wrath building like steam in an engine. ‘What have you done to me?’

And Merlin had no idea.

The ship jolted and rocked, and Arthur and the others were thrown around within the command center like beads in a rattle. Arthur swore and tried, unsuccessfully, to catch on to a handle. Guinevere, belted into the pilot’s seat, had the least trouble, but Arthur, Mithian, and Lancelot were all hit by the wall as it crashed into them, and Lancelot cried out in shock and pain.

The shaking only lasted for a few seconds before the ship went still again and they were able to take stock. There were alarms and klaxons blaring and screeching from all quarters, and ominous red lights flashed on the control panels. Arthur had hit his head and the impact was making the world blurry, but he could still see well enough, and hear Lancelot groaning as a worrisome undercurrent.

“Lance, are you alright?” Guinevere called, hands flying over the screens in front of her.

“Dislocated my shoulder,” Lancelot called back.

“Mithian?” Arthur called.

“Yes, I am fine. But that’s a hull integrity alarm.”

“How bad?” Arthur gritted out. He touched the throbbing spot on his forehead and his fingers came away red.

“Tears in the exterior showing at the eighth, ninth, fourteenth, and nineteenth quadrants.”

Fuck. The emergency doors would have isolated the areas automatically, but that was a large area to lose.

“What else?”

“Major engines one and four are showing strain,” Guinevere reported. “And our position has changed: we’re not aimed straight at Merlin anymore.”

He finally let himself ask the question. “And Merlin?”

“He seems… alright?” Guinevere said uncertainly.

Arthur’s stomach clenched, and he pushed himself away from the wall he’d hit to float across to Guinevere and the monitors that showed Merlin out in space.

He was hanging still in the middle of the nothing, and the alien—the derkesthai, the fucking dragon, Merlin had conveniently not mentioned that his alien was basically a fuck-off-massive mythical lizard—was likewise stationary. They were apparently having some sort of staring contest. Was this just the next level of psychic warfare? And what did it mean that the ship had been hit in the first place? Was Merlin losing? He didn’t really look like he was losing. It didn’t look like much of anything was happening.

Arthur touched his earpiece uncertainly. “Merlin?” he said.

There was no response, and fear curled in Arthur’s stomach. He told himself that there were any number of reasons Merlin wouldn’t reply right away: he could be entirely occupied doing psychic things, or he could have simply lost his earpiece. There was no reason to panic, especially since the monitors showed that Merlin was—at least physically—fine.

So Arthur waited while Guinevere got the engines sorted out and Mithian helped Lancelot pop his arm back in and then went about quieting as many of the alarms as could be quieted. They should have worn suits, Arthur belatedly realized. God, how much faith must he have in Merlin to not even have considered that before?

On the monitors, Merlin and the dragon continued to stare at one another for another minute, and another minute, until the dragon suddenly began to twist and writhe, as though trying to resist some sort of binding being placed around it. Arthur leaned closer, worried but intrigued.

After several long moments of resistance, the dragon’s mouth wrenched wide open as though in a scream of protest, and then it turned back towards Jupiter and flew away, shrinking into a dwindling dot, and then nothing.

Arthur took a shuddering breath, feeling as though he hadn’t gotten enough air for the last eighteen hours. For the last month, really.

Merin hung in the emptiness of space for a little while longer, and Arthur didn’t take his eyes off him until he eventually turned and began to slowly make his way back to the ship.

“Merlin, respond,” he said, and when he again received no response, applied Occam’s Razor and figured Merlin had lost his earpiece after all. “Do we have exterior light control?” he asked the command centre at large.

“Should do,” Guinevere replied distractedly.

Arthur pushed himself over to the control panel and flicked switches, sending out pulses of light in short-long patterns that spelled out the words, ARE YOU OK YOU IDIOT.

And on the monitor, Merlin’s tiny image put the tips of his fingers to the top of his head and made a big clumsy heart shape.

Chapter Text

They were in Merlin’s room together, since Merlin had torn a massive great hole in the wall of Arthur’s. Arthur had pulled him in there once Merlin had gotten back on the ship and hugs were shared with the others, explanations given, and safety assured, and he had immediately had a short but very intense sobbing breakdown in Arthur’s arms.

The everythingness of it all had just crashed down onto him once he was back aboard the Camelot and there weren’t any imminent direct threats on his life anymore. He’d successfully fought Kilgharrah off—fucking somehow—and saved himself and his friends, and now all he had to focus on was the fact that he’d killed a man, that he himself was no longer entirely human, and that his future was so uncertain he might as well call it Heisenberg. Even being held in Arthur’s arms, as long desired and incredibly comforting as it was, could only do so much.

“I don’t know what happens next,” he whispered against Arthur’s shoulder, which was still damp from where Merlin had been crying on it mere minutes ago.

In response, Arthur’s arms tightened around his middle, and his thoughts coalesced out of ruminations between the wonderful feeling of Merlin in his arms and worrying about how to help Merlin feel better and mundane matters of ship repairs to focus on what Merlin had said.

Merlin saw that he also didn’t know what came next: from a purely legal standpoint, they were on very shaky ground vis a vis Merlin’s killing of Valiant, as well as Merlin’s continued civil rights as a formerly legally dead man and now a one-of-a-kind mutant packed full of alien genetic material that loads of secretive and dubiously ethical labs would sell their firstborns to get their hands on. When or if Merlin went back to Earth, there was every chance that he’d just get blackbagged and never be seen again. Arthur was not blind to any of these realities. But he had also decided that those realities were mostly far away on Earth, and that the pair of them were here on the Camelot, and that that was all he was going to care about for the time being.

And he also knew that Merlin would be able to see all that in his thoughts and didn’t bother saying any of it out loud, just pulled Merlin into an even tighter embrace.

This time, Merlin let the warmth and strength of Arthur’s body soothe him. After everything that had happened, he couldn’t deny that he wanted something to help him forget, even only for a little while.

So he put his hands flat on Arthur’s back and took a steadying breath. Arthur’s attention pricked up, sensing the shift in him and ready to act in whatever way was needed. God, but he was perfect. But Merlin couldn’t do what he wanted to do without talking about it first.

“In your dream, the first one we spoke in…” he began, and smiled as Arthur’s mind riffled back to the memory. It was weird seeing it from Arthur’s point of view: Merlin seemed wilder, larger than life, more beautiful than he really was, even with a lot of his new derkesthai traits already presenting themselves. And Arthur’s grief was inextricably part of it, the terribly surety that he would never see Merlin again, that he had lost someone so important before he’d even had him. “You said you loved me,” Merlin said softly, into the hollow of Arthur’s throat, almost afraid to look at him as he said the words.

A warm swell of amusement and affection suffused Arthur’s thoughts, but he focused on when Merlin had snapped something about “wanting to rip your clothes off and lick every inch of you”.

Merlin snorted, and confessed, “Still do.”

One of Arthur’s hands came up to cup the back of Merlin’s head and guide him so he wasn’t hiding his face anymore, but rather looking at Arthur as he said, “I still do, too.”

And the big, inarticulate tangle of emotion behind the words, the devotion and the passion and the amusement and the lust and protectiveness and admiration and annoyance and love all pulled Merlin in like a gravity well, and he kissed Arthur gently.

He didn’t mean for it to go on, but it did, turning deep and messy and heavy as their desires met and fed on each other. When they eventually came up for air, Merlin gasped out, “I love you too,” and the little punched out breath that Arthur gave and the wonder that swamped his mind made Merlin say it again. “I love you. I love you. You’re bloody impossible not to love. I’m so fucking glad I get to say it to you.”

And this time Arthur kissed him.

It was a fierce and hungry thing this time, full of the pain Arthur was still excising from when he had thought Merlin was dead—pain he would likely bear the scars of for a long while to come—and the intense lust he’d been concealing for the better part of three years and the sheer fucking relief of finally being able to do this.

Merlin was just as fervent, clutching at Arthur’s clothes and shoulders, pushing his tongue into Arthur’s mouth, pressing, pressing, pressing their bodies together until there was no doubt of what he wanted to be doing. And Arthur wholeheartedly consented. Part of him was annoyed that the telepathy thing didn’t go both ways, but the bigger part of him was pleased that all he had to do to communicate exactly what he wanted was to think it.

And so he thought it, showing Merlin exactly what he’d fantasized about for so long, the slow and wicked seduction, the bruising kisses, all the myriad ways he'd drive Merlin to the peak of pleasure, and then past it. He fine-tuned the scenarios based on Merlin’s ragged gasps of “Yes” and “Please” and “Oh god, please, Arthur”. He was becoming desperate in Arthur’s arms, frantic even, grinding his hard-on against Arthur’s thigh, and clumsily trying to drag Arthur’s jumpsuit zipper down, and kissing him all at once. And as absolutely heavenly as all of that was, it wasn’t really helping them get where they both evidently wanted to go.

Arthur tightened his grip on Merlin’s hair, bringing some control to the situation. He held Merlin in place and kissed him purposefully, licking into the heat of his mouth as he drew his own jumpsuit zipper down, then did Merlin’s too.

But Merlin whimpered as his clothes fell open, and the first touch of hesitancy colored his response. Arthur drew back to look at him confusedly, and found that Merlin was curling in on himself as though shy… as though ashamed.

He was still breathing hard and his erection tented his jumpsuit, but his look was suddenly miserable. “I’m not…” he whispered in that new husky voice of his, “not the same, anymore.”

The scales. Arthur had seen some of them, on Merlin’s neck and wrists and through the rips in the ragged excuse for a jumpsuit he had returned from Jupiter in. And he had seen Merlin’s eyes, gold where they had been blue before. The scales were the same color as his eyes used to be, come to think of it. And Arthur could see why a change like that, especially one induced without permission, would make someone self-conscious.

But Merlin was being silly if he thought a few scales and new eyes and a rough voice were enough to dampen Arthur’s desire for him. And Arthur made sure to think that very loudly, again and again, until Merlin started to blush and his shoulders uncurled.

He smiled at Arthur from under his lashes, biting his lip, wet and swollen from their kissing. “What are you going to do about it, then?”

Arthur smiled back, intent and predatory. “Well,” he said, pressing forward into Merlin’s space again. “This.” He peeled the sides of Merlin’s jumpsuit apart and pushed it off his shoulders, then down his hips along with his pants, all while kissing under Merlin’s jaw. Merlin’s pulse was hammering, and Arthur grinned and licked over it, almost lost in the giddy joy of being able to do this. “And this,” he eventually rasped, walking Merlin backwards to the desk affixed to the wall and urging him to sit on it. Then he had to take a moment to just admire him.

Naked, with a light covering of dark hair on his chest and legs, a denser thatch at his crotch where his cock stood out at eager attention, pale-skinned where he wasn’t sapphire blue. And maybe there was something wrong with Arthur, or he was discovering some hitherto unknown reptile kink, but the scales really were beautiful. They shimmered a bit in the low light, supple where Merlin’s body needed to be able to move, more rigid at spots that didn’t have to bend. Arthur reached out and ran the tips of his fingers over a patch of them on his ribs.

“What does it feel like?” he asked, not taking his eyes off the spot.

“Like…” Merlin’s voice was breathy, and Arthur smiled to know he had made it that way. “Like when someone runs their fingernails over your scalp, you know? But more.”

Arthur hummed in satisfaction. All he wanted in the world—in any world—was to make Merlin feel good, and now Merlin’s new body wasn’t an impediment but a tool for that goal.

He stepped close again, shucking his own jumpsuit off as he claimed Merlin’s mouth and leaning in until their bare chests pressed together, their bare cocks pressed together, Merlin’s bare legs wrapped around Arthur’s bare waist. Arthur shuddered, rutting helplessly a few times against the crease in Merlin’s hip, trying to take the edge off. But there was no edge: it was everything. He’d always known it would be good with Merlin—how could it not be?—but he’d never lost himself to pleasure so quickly and completely.

Merlin chuckled into Arthur’s mouth, clearly hearing the thought and taking it for the compliment it was. He wound his arms tighter around Arthur, and his legs too, pulling Arthur against him. And the kissing, the mad thrusting, the groping touches, none of it was enough anymore. He thought the question at Merlin as clearly as he could, which wasn’t very clearly, given the circumstances.

But Merlin’s low moan and the hitch of his hips and the fact that something smacked against Arthur’s shoulder blade—which turned out to be a packet of condoms and lube, telepathically summoned—was answer enough.

Trembling with anticipation, Arthur grabbed one of the lube packets and squeezed it messily onto his fingers, only for Merlin to grab his wrist and groan, “No, I did it, it’s fine, I’m ready.”

Arthur blinked at him, trying to apply a logic that got results, and it only clicked when he met Merlin’s eyes—Merlin’s golden eyes.

“You prepped telepathically?” he blurted.

“Well, telekinetically,” Merlin mumbled, seeming chagrined. “But, um… yeah.”

“Okay… Hot, but—” And he gave Merlin an old fantasy of Arthur slowly fingering him open, making him gasp and pant and moan. Arthur had really been looking forward to it.

Merlin whined high in his throat, his eyes falling closed, and Arthur grinned. “Next time,” he promised.

“Yes,” Merlin agreed breathlessly. “But please—Arthur—now—”

And Arthur obliged, quickly spreading lube on his hole and checking that he really was ready, and even more quickly sheathing his achingly hard cock in a condom. Then he leaned back in and kissed Merlin’s mouth, his cheek, his jaw, down his neck, pressing him back to lean on the wall and lifting his legs. He could feel Merlin’s shivers under his lips, and Merlin’s hot, fast breath fanned his hair.

“Say yes,” he rasped, his cockhead against Merlin’s hole.

“God damn you, Arthur!” Merlin shouted raggedly. “Yes!”

And Arthur pressed in. They both moaned through the long slide until he bottomed out, and then just rested that way for a moment. Arthur was glad Merlin could see how he felt about all of this, how complete and happy and satiated being with Merlin made him. And the way Merlin wrapped his arms around Arthur’s neck and just held on told Arthur that he felt the same way.

He went back to sloppily kissing Merlin’s neck as he started to thrust in and out, building a fast rhythm that he knew was going to wreck him. He was strong and he was dying for this, but he wasn’t superhuman, and maintaining that speed for as long as he wanted to simply wasn’t going to work. But still, he liked it, and Merlin’s “Ah, ah, yes, ah, yes,” made him determined to keep it up for as long as he possibly could.

Arthur drove into him deep and hard and fast, hips slapping Merlin’s thighs, balls smacking Merlin’s arse, one arm wrapped around his waist, the other hand braced against the wall. Merlin, for his part, pulled his knees higher and dug his heels into the small of Arthur’s back to encourage him, fingers tangling in Arthur’s hair.

Arthur was sweating, the muscles in his back and thighs starting to burn, when something touched his arse. He jerked in surprise, breaking their rhythm, and Merlin whined. There was nothing behind him when he twisted around to look.

“Sorry,” Merlin gasped. “Felt you were getting tired. Wanted to help.”

He whipped back around to face Merlin. “You could— With your—”

Merlin looked nervous when he bit his lip and nodded. Arthur’s head was a mess of realization and his intellectual capacity was severely depleted, but once his brain caught up, he grinned madly. Even after everything he’d seen Merlin do, even after witnessing him use his power to fetch the lube and condoms, he hadn’t even thought of how it might change the sex they could have together. He could practically feel his pupils blow wide.

“Do it,” he said breathlessly. So many new ideas for them flooded his mind that he wasn’t even sure what he meant by the words, but Merlin gave him a wide, wicked smile, so he assumed the basic concept got across.

He expected the touch this time when Merlin’s telepathic or telekinetic or tele-whatever ability settled on his hips, holding him firmly but gently in place, before easing him in, and out, and back in. It was a bit weird, to be held and manipulated like a mannequin, but mainly, he found, he liked it. He would never have suspected this about himself, but he liked being controlled and directed to serve Merlin’s pleasure.

And Merlin’s pleasure, it seemed, was definitely being served.

He had tossed his head back and his breathing was fast and hard, much like the thrusts he was using Arthur’s body to deliver to himself. And now that Arthur wasn’t preoccupied with muscle aches, he was able to admire Merlin—and enjoy himself—all the more.

The dry spell they’d all been on for the last year and a half was an expected aspect of the mission, and they all had their own ways of dealing with it. Arthur’s not-very-good method had been to go several weeks or a month without getting off at all before succumbing to sheer thwarted desire and going on a marathon wank session in the middle of the night, facilitated by fantasies of Merlin. He always had a hard time meeting Merlin’s eyes for a couple of days afterwards, but he had an even harder time regretting it. And now he had the chance to play all those fantasies out with Merlin himself.

Merlin, who not only wasn’t dead, but loved Arthur back.

Merlin, who was currently wrapped around Arthur in an embrace of arms, legs, and mental power, moaning and gasping Arthur’s name. Even millions of kilometers away from Earth, orbiting a planet full of angry dragons, with a lover deeply changed by his experiences, Arthur felt like he was home.

“Arthur—” Merlin whispered, and brought Arthur to stillness, which made Arthur whine unhappily. But he looked at Merlin and saw his golden eyes were brimming with tears, and remembered, again, that Merlin had been able to hear his sentimentality. He wasn’t used to that yet, though he still liked it. And since he had nothing more to add to the idea that he hadn’t already thought, he leaned in and kissed Merlin instead.

Deep and slow and unhurried, he pressed in with tongue and cock alike, rolling his hips until Merlin took over again, this time taking more of Arthur’s body under his control and moving him to suit their mutual pleasure. And he held his own weight up as well, lifting himself telekinetically so that they could get a better angle. Arthur adjusted to each shift easily, but he had to take a moment when he felt his feet leave the floor and realized that Merlin was holding them both in midair.

“Why doesn’t the bed squeak in space?” Merlin whispered, grinning against Arthur’s mouth.

Already laughing at the old joke from the zero-g training module, Arthur replied, “Because you float right off it.”

They giggled like schoolboys who’d just discovered sex jokes, but quickly lost themselves again, discovering new intimacies with each other instead. It was unlike anything Arthur had ever had before, intuitive and passionate and sweet in a way, in that even as Merlin built their speed back up and the pressure of orgasm started to coalesce deep in Arthur’s belly, which Merlin surely knew, they both still took care to hold each other, to look at each other, to kiss when they had enough breath to. Merlin’s face was drawn tight with pleasure, his brows furrowed, his mouth open, his hands gripping Arthur’s shoulders for purchase he didn’t really need, but his eyes were locked on Arthur’s, and the intensity and immediacy of that made everything feel closer, truer, more real. Arthur tried to direct that feeling to him, focusing on it even as his physical experience started to overwhelm him.

Merlin’s mouth fell further open, his breathing going short and shallow, and he gasped, “Arthur—I’m gonna—Arthur—”

And he tensed and curled in, his body tightening around Arthur so that Arthur felt Merlin’s cock jerk and pulse between their stomachs, painting them, skin and scale alike, with hot come. The mad galloping speed that Merlin had maintained faltered as he groaned, and his telekinetic grip on Arthur eased a little, though they were still suspended a meter or so off the floor. That let Arthur set his own speed again, and he took full advantage, fucking into Merlin like his life hung in the balance. And in no time at all, a matter of a few frantic thrusts, the coiled knot behind his groin released itself and flung him into an orgasm so intense that his vision whited out.

When Arthur was cognizant again, he wrapped himself around Merlin like a big blond prawn and snuggled him like a cat on a cold day. Merlin had spread his blanket on the floor and settled them in the middle of it, but the floor was still hard underneath and they’d have to move eventually. For now though, when they were both so spent that gravel would have felt alright.

Merlin lay in Arthur’s arms. His body was exhausted, his psionics still recovering from the fight with Kilgharrah, and he wanted, more than anything in the world, to rest. But it was like his subconscious had been hard at work while the rest of his mind was paying attention to the best sex of his life, and a whole new slew of problems presented themselves, parading through his mind like the universe’s worst carnival.

The mission, for instance. How the fuck were they supposed to explain to Pendragon Corp and INES and the whole rest of Earth that their dream of a Jovian colony to match their Martian one was not only impossible, but actively dangerous? There were three more ships on the way to support and collaborate on the mission: what were they to do? Turn around?

And there was Merlin himself. If leadership back on Earth decided to scrap the mission and recall the Camelot, what was Merlin to do? His derkesthai genetics meant he could technically survive without food and air and those supposedly fundamental ingredients of life, but what sort of life would it be if he stayed out here in space alone? He’d be an exile twice over, and with only Kilgharrah and the other derkesthai for company, he’d be an insane exile in no time. He could defend himself—and that was an issue he hadn’t even considered dealing with yet: deep in his bones, he knew he had had total control of Kilgharrah’s will when he had sent him back to the depths of Daobeth even as the derkesthai fought him every inch of the way, but would he be able to do that again if he had to? Or would he have better luck returning to Earth and hoping he didn’t immediately get drugged to the gills and turned into someone’s pet science experiment?

Arthur grunted unhappily. “You’re way too tense for someone who just had the orgasm I saw you have.”

Merlin smiled. Arthur’s mind had been at a slow lope since they’d laid down on the floor together, and Merlin had instinctively ignored it the way he used to ignore his mum’s radio stations. It was the best sort of privacy he could offer now, until he figured out if there was a way for him to turn his telepathic reception off entirely, which he hoped there would be. Although Arthur was genuinely unbothered by the fact that Merlin could hear everything he thought, and that was a revelation unto itself. Experiencing Arthur’s pleasure along with his own had made their lovemaking intimate beyond measure. His mind was unfocused and fuzzy now, saturated with pleasure and wanting nothing more than to spend the next eternity wrapped up in Merlin.

“I’m just thinking,” Merlin said apologetically, pressing a kiss to Arthur’s cheek, amazed all over again that that was something he could do.

“No, no thinking,” Arthur mumbled, sleep pulling at him, snatching bits of his awareness as he went down with it. “Come dream with me.”

Merlin smiled, and did.