Archive of Our Own ^beta

It starts, as many tales do, with two boys. A noble and a peasant. A marketplace and a banquet hall. A revenge-driven sorceress with a shattered heart that the years have turned to ice. It starts with a rescue - the first of many - and a dubious reward. It starts with a mutual loathing and begrudging agreement of tolerance.

It moves onwards to missions and quests. To polished boots, mucked stables and sharpened swords. To thrown cups and hurled insults and afternoons in imitation of a living compost heap. It moves onwards to a shared respect, an ever-growing sense of trust and familiarity.

Faster than the eye can see, it changes. It changes with a shared laugh, the ease carried in wake of the steady years of camaraderie. A slow-burning friendship. It changes with a heated gaze, an inadvertent seduction in the black of night beside a lazy campfire. It changes with a tangle of limbs, a gasp of breath, an embrace tinged with desperation. A dizzying climb.

And then, quickly as it had begun, it all ends with a crown upon a dark brow, a chorus of "Long live the Queen ". It ends with two hearts breaking, a sense of betrayal, wandering lonely corridors in the black of night. It ends with a last kiss, a whispered apology and a painful throb of understanding that accompanies the hasty explanations of heirs and monogamy. With broken promises of a broken love.

It ends with the cruel, rumbling laughter of a dragon in the deep. "I told you he was your destiny, Merlin, but I never said that you were his."