Summary: Protect verb (often + from ,against) keep (person etc.) safe; shield.

Disclaimer: I don't own Merlin.

Author's Note: I'm sorry this took forever. If anyone was waiting? Unfortunately I have been sucked into another fandom. Not that I don't still love Merlin! But you know how it is... I'm still terrible at completing things I've started to write, but, if you are interested in what I'm writing, I have just joined tumblr! I'm thinking about using it to post snippets of fics that are half-finished, among other things. Any completed fics will still go up here, but I'd quite like to see how bits and pieces of other things might go down. So check it out, if you fancy it!

Preserve – 1 keep safe or free from decay. 2 maintain, retain. 3 treat (food) to prevent decomposition or fermentation. 4 treat (corpse) to prevent decomposition. 5 keep (game etc.) undisturbed for private use.

So much time has passed, he supposes he should just be grateful that Camelot and Arthur have been remembered at all. But he is not grateful. He is angry and frustrated. Because he knows the truth. He can tell any historian who cares to ask a detailed and thorough account of Camelot, the reign of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. But nobody will ask, because as far as they know Camelot is just a fairy story, Merlin the wizard is long dead and the man Matthew Hughes is a gardener in his early thirties that has no reason to know anything about King Arthur at all.

But they have got it all so wrong. It makes his blood boil to think of how the stories depict Lancelot and Guinevere, destroying the memory of two of his closest friends. But at least he can understand where that tale came from; where on Earth did they get the idea that Mordred was Arthur's son? With Morgana of all people? What does it matter after all of that if he is seen as a doddering old man? Leon and Gaius are completely forgotten.

After another frankly horrible adaptation of 'The Legend of King Arthur', Merlin decides he can't stand it any longer. He knows nobody will believe him, but it isn't as if any of these other writers know what they're talking about. Surely as the only one that knows the truth, it is his duty to at least try to preserve the memory of his King and all the people he had known?

He has tried his hand at so many different professions by now, but he has never been an author. The closest he's come was a brief stint as a journalist in the 1890s, and some work as a translator for a publishing firm in the 1930s. So he starts off cautiously. He wants to get this right after all. He gets a degree in English from the University of Glasgow (a city he has not yet explored) and tentatively submits short stories to the student newspaper. They are nothing special, just little anecdotes from his life, people he has met, places he has been. He has the luxury of a lot of subject material to draw from. They go down well, so he sends some to other newspapers and publishers. There isn't a lot of a response, but he isn't put off. He gets a job in a library after an internship in a publishing firm, which seems to be expected for an aspiring author. He also amuses himself by illustrating children's books, having developed quite a talent for art a couple of hundred years ago.

When he is settled and feeling a little more confident, he finally makes a start on writing down the true story of Camelot. It is a lot harder than he imagined. He wants to write everything at once and doesn't know where to begin. There is too much. He wants to write about more than just the big exciting adventures they had, he wants to include all the boring problems they overcame that were just as important as the dangerous quests, and the tiny little things he remembers that almost matter more to him.

He wants to write how Arthur led his men into battle against a dragon, how he knighted commoners and courted a servant, and he knows people will want to read that. But he also wants to tell them how Arthur argued for months with his council to lower taxes, how he fought to increase the grain store to help the needy in the winter and how grumpy he was in the morning, and that daft smile he directed only at Guinevere and how his handwriting was completely incomprehensible...

It's been a couple of years and all he has is an assortment of barely connected episodes. He knows that writing everything down would be a monster of a book and no publisher in their right mind would ever take it on. He is feeling disheartened, but still determined that he owes it to his friends to tell their story. So he quits his job and moves to a cottage in the middle of the countryside, not a million miles from where Camelot once stood. He needs the inspiration. He makes himself sit down and start from the beginning.

It is still incredibly difficult. Never mind getting everything down truthfully, in a way that people might actually want to read, it is thinking about it at all that is difficult. He has to actively sit down and think about his life back then, remember people and places and events that he'd been trying to forget for over a thousand years. It takes him 20 years to get it to a state he is happy with, not including the 5 year break he took in the middle for a bout of depression. Writing about Arthur's death was heart-wrenching and traumatic. Bringing up all these half-buried memories feels like he is willingly torturing himself all over again. So for 5 years in the middle he drops the project and goes to the US to build satellite components - about as far away from his life in Camelot as he can get.

But eventually it is done. It's absolutely huge, so he painfully decides to break it into more manageable novels. He sends the first off to a dozen publishers and hears back from 5. He meets with them all and they are expecting him to come negotiating prices. Instead he has heated arguments with most of the editors about what bits he should change and what he should leave out. He is uncompromising. This has been a terrible labour of love for him, he will not change a thing. He is left with one publishing house that will pay him pittance, but they agree not to change anything.

He is not to know that this will be the turning point.

His magic has dulled over the years, the world is no longer magical anymore. That probably didn't help matters, but he wonders if perhaps the old religion had hidden them from him before they were ready to learn the truth. All he knows is that his King had returned, almost 1500 years after he had died and that Merlin completely missed it. It never occurred to him that they wouldn't remember everything immediately. But then growing up as a child with such awful memories would have been traumatic beyond belief and they could hardly step into the world exactly as they were or they would know nothing of how to function in this place. It made sense really.

To his amazement, it is his book that changes everything.

In different places and different lives, eight different people read his book. Some of them remember straight away. Some of them get flashes and memories slowly, taking months to get the full picture. They all seek out the author of that book, even though Merlin has changed his name and his face since he last saw them all. Some write to him, some email him, Gwaine somehow manages to get hold of his phone number. But it is Arthur that turns up on his doorstep and Merlin feels complete once more. He has dragged them into the future by the strength of his own memories. It was well worth preserving them.

Once again, apologies for the long wait! Also, I have no idea how the publishing industry works, so I'm sorry for any inaccuracies! Check out my tumblr (there's no fic on it yet, but there will be, I promise!).