Merlin Headcanons

Arthurs and Alternate Realities

A/N: Remember "Mordreds and Multiverses"? Similar concept, but the two stories aren't part of the same continuity. This time it's Arthur popping from reality to reality.

Multiverses will be a running theme for a while if I stick to the poll. This is in response to the "Resurrected Arthur" option; the true "Mordreds and Multiverses" continuation should be soon which brings me to my next point: Multiverses is currently tied with Dark!Merlin or was last time I checked. If the tie remains unbroken, I'll just post in whatever order suits me at the time.

Fair warning: Mordreds and Multiverses was mostly crack. This one is . . . Less so. Much less so.

. . . . .

There was no magical portal that carried him from one reality to the next which was probably for the best, really. Giant magical portals tended to cause panic more often than not.

Instead, he would die. Simple as that.

Except when people spoke of going "on", he figured they didn't normally mean going on to wake up at your coronation ceremony.

That was how it would go. He would become king. Sooner or later, he would die. When he did, he'd find himself in another world, the crown just placed upon his head.

There were exceptions, of course. Depending on what exactly was going on in Camelot, the coronation might be a lot less formal than that, but the point was, he would "wake up" once he was king.

His life didn't actually start at the coronation. He had a childhood, a past, but he wouldn't remember his previous lives until he was king which was just as well. A two year old had no business dreaming of dying at Camlann.

It was always Camlann. In all three hundred seventy-five versions of Camelot he'd ruled, it was always Camlann. Somewhere in the middle, when he'd started to wonder if he was going a bit mad from the futility of it all, he'd seriously considered banning the name from the English language. It had come closer to passing into law than he'd later want to admit. It was usually Merlin's job to talk him out of ideas like that, but since in that reality Merlin had been a prophet, Merlin had actually been in favor of the law.

In that reality Merlin had been . . . That was how Arthur always thought of it. For everyone else it was "that reality's Guinevere", "that reality's Uther", "that reality's Camelot." They truly were different people, different places. It had nothing to do with whether Gwen was Celt or maid or princess, blonde and pale or dark of skin and hair, and everything to do with the way in one world she had about as many brains as a mayfly and in the next she could probably compose a treaty in her sleep. It had to do with the way in one world Lancelot all but worshipped honor and the next he used it only as a fancy wrapping to hide his deeds. Some things he could put down to how the world has shaped them but . . . It wasn't just their circumstances that had changed. It was their very souls.

Merlin, on the other hand, was different. No matter what changed - his appearance, his age relative to Arthur's, his powers, his heritage, his past - it was always the same wise idiot grinning at him behind those blue eyes. Arthur was convinced of it. Sometimes his innate goodness was buried deeper than others, but it was always there. Merlin, it seemed, was a universal constant.

Then something changed. He stopped waking up in Camelot.

He started waking up in England instead.

It wasn't always called England, mind, but it was how he always thought of it. Camelot was the old. England was the new.

Except England was sort of the old too. More often than not his friends - and sometimes his enemies, more's the pity - were there too. He was the Once and Future King, so for every Camelot he'd lived through, there had to be a future.