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thegreatestsorcerertoeverserve · 6 years

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If you're taking writing requests, how about if everyone knew about everyone else's magic early in the series and the four of them would go off for picnics in the woods where Gwen and Arthur could stop pretending they're not in love and Morgana and Merlin can learn magic together and they're all happy and not caught in multiple layers of deception.

I’m answering this one first because ah what a lovely little AU where people are happy

This fic’s peaceful vibes are inspired by this quote: “When love is the way we will lay down our swords and shields down by the riverside to study war no more.” -Bishop Michael Curry

Though it had only been two years since Uther had died, the whole kingdom truly felt that they were experiencing a new era in this time. Uther, through a deathbed stupor that seemed more like a truth serum than anything (Merlin had no idea what you’re implying, Gaius, none at all!), Uther had confessed his secrets to his son. Arthur now knew where his father’s anger and hatred had come from, and though he had forgiven the broken and dying man for the mistakes of his past, he vowed on his father’s tomb that he would never rule by his hatred and guilt.

Thus, a new age had begun. Arthur declared freedom to all sorcerers throughout Camelot, and though many had been too afraid to truly come out into the light in the beginning, the first night of magical freedom saw many a dancing lights in the sky.

Merlin nervously told Arthur the truth about his own magic, which shockingly made cry more than Merlin, and even earned him an official spot on his council (he still kept his position as Arthur’s servant, which was a lot easier now that he could openly use magic). He was rewarded for his courage and sacrifice for the king, which of course meant nothing and everything to him all at once.

Gwen and Arthur were permitted to be together, of course, and the peaceful kingdom enjoyed many a beautiful day.

On one of these such days, Gwen, Arthur, Merlin, and Morgana rode their horses to a meadow in one of Morgana’s favorite parts of the woods. Morgana and Merlin left the two lovers to their romantic picnic and sat together by the trickling stream. Merlin had told Morgana of his magic even before Arthur, in the dead of the night, right after Arthur had made his decision to lift the ban. That conversation had required more tears, though most out of relief than anything else.

Morgana waved a hand absentmindedly, muttering so that the leaves danced above the water in the shape of a old man. “Merlin… Do you think you would have told Arthur, eventually? I mean, if things had been different. If Uther had survived, or if the ban had not been lifted?”

She stole a glance at Merlin, who was looking down, eyebrows furrowed in a way that almost made Morgana feel the weight of the burden he’d carried for so long. “I don’t know.” He kicked around at the pebbles at his feet. “Kilgharrah told me of many possible futures… Futures far worse than the one we have now.”

“Futures like what?”

Merlin no longer avoided her eyes. Those innocent blue eyes stared back at him, and he didn’t want to tell her- the terrible things Kilgharrah had said, the things he’d seen in the Crystal Cave. “Futures where chaos reigned, people starved… futures where you…” He teared up just thinking about it.

Morgana was taken aback. “Futures where I- what? Merlin, what is it?”

Merlin willed his eyes to dry once again. He stared forward into the river and started to weave a fish trap out of the weeds at the bottom. “Futures where I failed you.”

Morgana smiled gently. There was more to the story than he was telling her, that was clear, but now was not a time to press. The sun was shining, and Arthur hadn’t picked up a sword other than for practice in over a year. “Well, those futures are not this one. And you have not failed me, Merlin. You’ve taught me more than I ever thought I would know, about magic and myself.” She gently finished the fish trap with him, a trout already swimming itself into their simple design. Morgana laid a soft hand on Merlin’s hand. “You mustn’t let yourself be weighed down by the things that have not come to pass, Merlin. You’ve carried far too much on those shoulders already.”

Merlin squeezed her hand in gratitude. They watched the as more fish fell for their trap, before their peaceful reverie was cut off by a-

“MERLIN!” Arthur shouted, his piercing volume the result of a whole childhood of leadership education.

“Yes, Arthur?” Merlin called back warily.

“Don’t you have any fish yet? I assume that’s what you two are doing, unless you’re just making leaf puppets again! I’m starving!”

Merlin sighed. “Aren’t I an esteemed member of the royal court now? Why do I still have to feed a lazy arse like you?”

That wasn’t going to sit.

Arthur’s gruffness increased, but you could hear the smile in his voice. “I’m your king, you ignorant wizard! Show some respect!”

“I’d rather eat a toad, sire! Trout or salmon?”

A pause. Arthur murmured to Gwen. “Trout! Gwen’s hungry as well!” Merlin sighed melodramatically and tossed an eye roll over to Morgana.

“Always the servant, aren’t I?”

Morgana grinned. “You wouldn’t have it any other way.” Merlin laughed. Its melody sounded weightless. Morgana thought that maybe, maybe this future was the best they’d ever get.

#anon #fanfic #bbc merlin #au #happy #morgana #merlin #arthur #gwen #arthur/gwen #a little bit of #angst #writing #mine

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septembriseur · 7 years

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This is the first part of a longer Legion fic I’m working on about Cary and Kerry Loudermilk, which is pretty experimental and will probably end up edited:

Four years before she gave birth to a son who was also a daughter, Irma Loudermilk won first place in the Women’s Fancy Dance category at the Twenty-First Annual Crow Fair Pow Wow. She danced with a shawl she had sewn herself: bright red with a blue and white diamond pattern, and almost two feet of silver fringe. Someone took a photograph of her in full dancing regalia, her cheeks slightly flushed and her feathers crooked in her hair. She framed the photograph and kept it. She was eighteen years old. People said she was the best fancy dancer that the Fort Peck Indian Reservation had ever produced. A year later, she married Ray White Cloud, whose favorite dance was the kind you did at closing time in honky tonk bars, boots shuffling in a halting, tender, too-close two-step. He had a big smile and a job as a lumber salesman, and he said, Let’s move to the city, and Irma said, Yes. And that was the end of her fancy dancing.

Much later, after Ray had left, when they had moved from Billings to Missoula, and Irma was working night shifts as a nurse, Cary (Kerry) would creep into the closet where she kept her fancy dance shawl, and unpack it from layers of tissue paper, and wrap himself in it. Wrap themselves. Because back then it was just Cary, but now when they remember it they are two, two people who remember the red gabardine with its ribbonwork diamonds, the smell of camphor, the shimmy of fringe. They had never seen someone fancy dancing. But it was easy to imagine it: their mother twirling like a beautiful leaf in a storm, lightweight and happy, laughing with her head thrown back. Her happiness clung to the shawl, to the satin ribbons. Cary (Kerry) pressed their face into it, as though they might be able to inhale those lost molecules. As though happiness could be exhumed and absorbed through the skin.

They knew without being told that their house was not happy. So maybe happiness could be absorbed through the skin, and the absence of it made a physical difference, like silence you heard with your whole body. They also knew, through some accident of that same skin-prickling radar, that they both were and were not the source of this unhappiness. That this was a paradox didn’t cause them much worry— certainly not by the time Cary was ten, when being two things at once had come to seem like a normal way of living. They were two people who were one person some of the time, or one person who was sometimes two people; they were part Indian and part white, but each of these parts was a whole person; they were part girl and part boy, but again, neither of these parts seemed especially like a part. However you figured it, there was always too much of them.

This might not have been a problem, in spite of the fact that the world seemed predicated on the notion that everyone was just one person, discrete, singular, and whole, if it hadn’t been for the realization that came to a head on particular night in June when Irma came home early from a shift and discovered Cary (Kerry) asleep in their bed, wrapped in her shawl.

In the ensuing lecture (which was largely misdirected, since it was Kerry who had wrapped the shawl around a sleeping Cary to keep bad dreams away from him, but Kerry didn’t like to be yelled at, and tended to vanish whenever that seemed imminent) Irma made it clear that the shawl was fragile, and that it would fall apart if they touched it too much. Was that what Cary wanted? Did he want it to fall apart?

No. That wasn’t what Cary or Kerry wanted. But suddenly it seemed clear to them that this, more than anything else, was their special power. They took things that were supposed to be one thing and tore them apart. So what their mother was saying made sense.

After that night, they never touched the shawl again. They would’ve liked to learn to dance, or at least Cary would’ve, but Irma had told him, “Boys don’t do that kind of dancing.” Later, he thought that maybe she’d also meant: White people don’t do it, though he knew that she would never have said such a thing to his face.

He thought that Kerry would have made a wonderful dancer. But when he told her so— she was nine, and he was thirteen— she said, “Dancing’s for sissies,” and socked him in the shoulder so hard it made both of them hurt. She didn’t know why she was so angry. Cary always wanted explanations, but Kerry wasn’t good at explaining things. For a while Cary thought that maybe between the two of them they’d divided up all of one person’s person-stuff, like maybe Cary had gotten most of the words, and Kerry had gotten most of the knowing how what to do with her body. That was why Cary was a geek who had to wear glasses and stumbled over his own two feet, and Kerry could sneak up on him and dunk him in the Clark Fork River, but she couldn’t do anything except throw tantrums when she was angry, or tired, or sad. “Whatever, geek,” Kerry said when he explained this theory. “See, you admit it, you’re a geek.” And she went back to spinning around in his wobbly desk chair, her insides feeling compressed and strange, like she’d been kicked in the stomach, or like Cary had, maybe. She couldn’t tell whether she wanted them to be parts of the same person, or if she wanted to be a separate person from him.

Later, anyway, he ended up rejecting the idea. Whatever they were was a lot more complicated than that. This was around the time they met Oliver Bird and Cary started using the word “mutant.” Cary loved being a mutant, but Kerry resented the change; she’d liked that there was no word for what they were. It meant that what they were was more her home turf than Cary’s, maybe even that she was slightly better than he was at being them. Secretly she kept on thinking that this was the case. She sensed that being them was harder for Cary than it was for her, and she thought that this was because they weren’t something that you could put on a microscope slide.

When she thought about what they were, she thought about salmon. She and Cary had once driven up to Flathead Lake during salmon spawning season, in September, right after Cary got his driver’s license. It had been cold, so the summer crowds that crammed the lakeside had thinned out. They’d stopped at a Sinclair station to get some pop and a sandwich, and Kerry showed Cary how to open his pop bottle on the side of a picnic table. “You have to hit it really hard,” she said. Cary had been about to start school at the University of Montana. He’d wanted to explain all about non-native fish species and biological imperatives. Kerry had just wanted to watch the red salmon jumping. They were fierce and ugly and she envied them. She tried to make a face like a salmon, with her jaw jutting out. “Look at me,” she said. “I’m a salmon.” “Does that make me a lake?” Cary asked. Kerry thought about it. She knew what he was saying. “No,” she said. “You’re a salmon too.” As usual, she didn’t know how to explain it. She just knew that both of them were fish, sometimes in and sometimes out of water, always coming or going, surfacing here and there with a splash.

So any kind of fish would have worked in that analogy, really. But Kerry imagined them as bright red salmon with silver fins. She imagined them diamond-patterned all over with scales and twirling through the water. She imagined them moving much too fast for anyone to ever touch.

#legion tag tbd #my fic #long post #kerry loudermilk #cary loudermilk #i kind of feel like only terrible people post fic on tumblr #but i also hate writing long work without putting it out into the world

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breakfromwork · 5 years

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November 5th-22nd, Washington-Oregon

After making a run to Seattle for Gae to have a couple ingrown toenails fixed on the 4th, we drove back to Daniel and Melissa’s in Enumclaw for another visit and to deliver a ceramic lamp we’d found abandoned from Seattle Pottery Supply. We stayed with them until the 10th, enjoying meals and doing a little work for them while they earned money.

I put up Melissa’s bird feeder to provide some work-time entertainment to her cat.

The view of Mount Rainier from Daniel’s neighborhood is very nice.

This prune-job I saw on a walk through the neighborhood gave me a laugh… just to be safe!

We left Daniel and Melissa’s on November 10th after Gae attended church. Our drive landed us west of Portland at Gales Creek in Tillamook State Forest for the night. On the 11th, we continued to the coast south of Tillamook, where we stayed at Cape Lookout State Park.

We stopped at Wilson river for a bathroom break, where we checked out placards about the settlers who once called the spot home.

The moss covered trees were spectacular, as always.

Gae took a picture of some jelly-like cup mushrooms on our walk in the woods near Cape Meares.

We took a short walk to the beach north of the lighthouse where a steep trail took us near the waters edge, with this view north from Cape Mears Lighthouse.

By the time we reached the lighthouse, the sunset was lighting up the view.

Just a spectacular night.

November 12th we drove to Lincoln City to do some laundry and visit my Aunt Daphne, who recently remarried at 91 years old. We met Stan Anderson, her new husband, for lunch at their place where we had a great visit getting to know Stan.

Here’s Daphne and Stan, loving each other and life.

We continued south after lunch, stopping for the night at Beverly Beach State Campground.

Luna barked for a quick walk on the beach.

A dense fog covered everything in the distance.

The campground is just east under the bridge from the beach, providing a nice silhouette against the glowing sunset.

November 13th we made a slow start to Corvallis to visit my college roommate and his girlfriend Diane.

Gae opened the glove box on Luna’s head, to get her some treats… eye contact is oh-so-important for proper begging:-)

When we arrived Dave was on his roof, cleaning gutters and pine needles off, and commenting on just how great home ownership was;-)

I got up on the roof to see if I could help, and took this picture for context… he’s about 3 stories up from the back yard.

We stayed at Dave and Diane’s through the 17th, enjoying their company and their expert cooking. We warned them that we might be back with such resort-like treatment!

Dave took us for a tour of downtown via the free local bus service on the 14th, when we posed for this picture in front of some awesome fall color.

Gae and Dave climbed a local installation of modern monkey bars (ropes and connectors), before we stopped at a local brewery to sample some beer.

November 15th Gae and I walked to the awesome local Co-Op where Dave and Diane usually shop.

We ran in to Dave on the way there, sporting his new rain jacket he picked up the day before.

A flock of turkey’s 20 strong stopped us on the sidewalk on the way home with gobbles and feather displays to keep us back.

We took a walk to a nearby park with Dave and Diane on the 16th, looking for edible mushrooms among the heavy leaf litter.

Gae took this nice shot of a hollow ball on the underside of an oak leaf, one of thousands on the forest floor.

I had to include this picture of one stump in the forest… awesome!

Here’s Dave and Diane, relaxing in the evening after a fantastic dinner of locally caught cod and wild mushroom’s we’d picked the day before.

Here I am trying to show how little the drinking has affected me!

We took another walk on the 17th through the OSU forest, while Gae stayed home to gather some energy after church.

Here’s Dave and Diane at a rest spot in the forest… beautiful trails within walking distance of their home.

We left early on the 18th and drove to Costco in Eugene to have 4 new tires put on the van. Always a bit of a hazard, as what else do you do with yourself while you wait, except shop? We tried to contact my cousin Robin, and eventually drove to Fern Ridge Lake to get enough miles on the van to have the lug-nuts checked, as required by Costco. The number of mushrooms at the closed county park was amazing.

Amanitas by the hundreds.

I didn’t know many of those present, but the color and variety were great.

We drove to my Aunt Audie’s after having the tires checked, and luckily caught her home. She treated us to a wonderful middle eastern meal, where we enjoyed visiting with Audie, her daughter Robin, and Robin’s brother Rhodec, who Gae hadn’t seen since he was 7 years old. He’s 24 now!

I didn’t think about my camera until after Rhodec had already left… damn!

We stopped by the local YMCA on the way out of town on the 19th to watch Audie play one of her twice weekly tennis dates, but just caught the last point.

Here’s Audie at 90, just after following through a return… awesome!

I decided to drive to Florence on the coast via Route 36, which runs by Audie and Uncle Mel’s old farm.

There is a series of waterfalls, pools and rock slides that I remembered from my childhood visits just west of Triangle Lake, that we checked out along the way.

The last slide has a 5 foot drop into a pool where I spied several salmon gathering strength to run up the fish ladder I’m standing on here.

We drove through Florence on the coast to Jessie M. Honeyman State Park, where we stayed until November 23rd.

The campground is 2.5 miles from the ocean, mostly covered with huge dunes and a couple of lakes.

Gae and I didn’t know it was so far, but we made it to the top of 2 dunes and realized the hike would leave us in darkness.

We returned to Florence on the 20th to do some laundry, and checked out a wayside just north of town after a nice salad on a bun at Subway.

The Darlintonia Californica Pitcher Plant thrives in the local swampy environment… hard to beat carnivorous plants!

We drove out Jetty Road to be one dune away from the ocean… beautiful in the sun, but with a biting breeze coming off the water.

I had Gae pose with Luna so Luna could show off her flying nun ears in the wind.

We tried out Luna’s pack on a little mushroom hunting expedition before dark… does she look as nervous as me?

Bounty from the hunt included Sparassis and Chanterelles… yummy!

Gae spent some time once we were back in the van to sort and admire her bead purchases she made in Florence.

I went back out hunting on the 21st, running across some beautiful mushrooms.

I also ran across this salamander doing the funky chicken to get away from me.

I added some hedgehog mushrooms to my bounty during the hunt. We made another run to Florence after my morning hunt to return a Redbox movie and for Gae to get some more bead supplies. In the evening I prepped and cooked my mushrooms with a chicken breast in a light cheddar sauce… oh my! Gae took a tumble trying to take Luna for a walk around midnight, scaring the bejesus out of everyone.

We headed south on the 22nd for Coos Bay, not really stopping for anything before settling in at Sunset Bay State Park for the night.

We stopped for the view from Umpqua Lighthouse, where we watched some Coast Guard ships practicing wave driving, cool!

Sunset bay was small but beautiful and a bit noisy with crashing waves.

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