From the author's desk: I don't know where this came from. But Bastille's "Icarus" has been a Gwaine-song for me for a long while now. So here you are, a story about Gwaine, and how he found his way. I would love to hear what you have to say about this.

Disclaimer: I don't own Merlin. Lyrics from and title inspired by Bastille's "Icarus."

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To Take a Fall, and to Rise Once More
by dreamsweetmydear

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You put up your defenses when you leave
You leave because you're certain
Of who you want to be

You're putting up your armor when you leave
You leave because you're certain
Of who you want to be.
-Bastille, "Icarus"

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"Please my lord. Please! We need your help!"

A beat of silence.

The woman drops to the ground, prostrates herself.

"I beg you, Your Majesty. Please help us," she sobs.

More silence, then, "Take them away."

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Dark eyes snap open to be blinded by the sunlight filtering through the slats of his window, his mother's sobs and the king's condemnation still ringing in his ears. He squints in the light flooding his room, before sitting up slowly and swinging his legs over the bed, shaking his head to clear the last of the memory-nightmare away.

He has much to do today.

The silence of the large house is oppressive as he walks through the corridors to his mother's chamber. No servants roam the halls anymore, and the furniture and rooms collect dust with no one to look after them.

He knocks gently upon her door, before opening it. The physician—the only other person in the house besides himself and his mother—looks up as he enters, and he knows from his expression that he won't like what he's about to hear.

"She hasn't got much longer now," the physician says. "Perhaps a few hours."

He nods in response and takes a seat next to his mother's sick bed.

"I'm sorry, Sir Gwaine, but I can't do anything more for her."

His eyes snap to the physician for a moment before he drags his gaze back to his ailing mother. "I'm not a knight, Elric. Never was."

"You would have been by this time. It's something your father hoped for, that I know."

Gwaine snorts. "He was a knight as well. Look where that got him, and the rest of us."

He strokes his mother's hand, working hard to keep his face stoic and voice unaffected. "The knight's code is a bloody farce."

They lapse into silence, and Gwaine watches his mother as she sleeps. It is sometime later when her eyes flutter open, squint up at him.

"My darling Gwaine," she rasps. "Should you not be at training today?"

Gwaine smiles, though his heart aches by her lack of awareness of where they are and how the times have changed. "It was cancelled today. The weather is poor," he lies smoothly. "All the better for me to spend time with my mum, eh?"

Her smile is faint, and her hand trembles as ehe reaches up to caress his face. "Oh you. You are my boy, through and through. You never did like to do as you were told." Her smile is a bit stronger now. "You got that from me. Always walking to the beat of your own drum."

Her eyes close for a long moment, before they crack open again. It's the first time in many, many endless days of this limbo that they are clear as they gaze into his. "You will find your own way, my darling. And I'm sure you will make me proud as a knight."

Gwaine doesn't respond to that, not willing to tell her that he no longer has any intention of ever becoming a knight.

Not after that bastard Caerleon sent his father to die, and forsook his mother and he in their time of need.

Instead, he watches his mother's eyes droop shut again. Her breathing is slower, and her chest barely rises with the effort.

"Sleep mum. I'll be right here if you need me," he says softly, holding her hands gently in his.

"I love you, my boy," she whispers. "Send for Amelia, would you? I'd like some tea when I wake."

"I'll tell her," he promises, and kisses his mother's hands. "Sleep now."

She hums contently and drifts off.

His mother doesn't wake again.

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Later, after her body is burned, and he has given the physician the last of his payment, Gwaine goes to the stables. His lone mare stands ready, saddled with his bedroll and travel pack strapped to her back.

Gwaine straps his father's sword—a memento of his parents, aside from his mother's favorite hairpin, tucked away safely in a pouch in his pack, and his father's ring on the cord around his neck—to the saddle, before climbing on to the horse and nudging her into a gallop.

He doesn't turn back to look at his once home, now an empty, desolate structure.

He's finally free. Free of any obligation or responsibility, free to go where the wind takes him.

But Gwaine's departure doesn't quite feel like the freedom and the relief he had hoped for.

He tries not to think about the empty gnawing in his chest, focusing instead on finding a new place to call home, on making a new life for himself.

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He's three months into his sojourn when he finally comes to the realization that home is nowhere.

Gwaine decides this when he wakes to yet another bleary headache, with little recollection of the night before, in what has become an endless cycle of taverns and drinking and brawls and the occasional lovely young maid to share his bed.

Then again, maybe his home is in the taverns.

He supposes it's a long way to fall after being born and raised in nobility—reduced to a common drunk with little coin to his name.

But this is what he had wanted. A life where class and titles stand for nothing. Life as a common man is so…simple. All he has to worry about is where he'll get his next drink, his next meal, his next roof overhead.

It's not so bad, really, when he takes the time to think about it. Between the ale and the women and the brawls—because he's usually the one looking for a fight, only for the fun in it, unlike his opponents who are too far in the cups or who have their heads too far up their arses, so really it's his duty to give them a good dose of reality—it's not such a bad life, drifting from place to place.

More often than not, he meets some pretty good people, too.

He smiles a bit.

Yeah, it's all right. This life isn't so bad.

He'd wanted freedom. And now he's got it.

No, not bad at all.

(A little voice nags in the back of his mind that he's still as empty as he was when he left home. That the alcohol and the fights and the women and the drifting are just a shield.

That he's still hurting, and that he'll never find what he's looking for, even though he doesn't really know anymore what he seeks.)

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It's an ordinary day for Gwaine, in an ordinary tavern, when an ordinary git storms in and starts harassing the barmaid.

Gwaine grins to himself. Another fight this week? The gods are smiling down on him with all this free entertainment.

But the events that follow are most definitely out of the ordinary for Gwaine. He's not expecting another bloke—blond and too shiny to be a commoner—to step into the fray before him, even the Gwaine is the first one to throw a punch. More than that, he's not expecting Blondie's scrawny dark-haired friend to actually find a way to fight with the rest of them.

"What's your name then?" he asks the cobalt-eyed youth, who surprisingly stands his ground behind the bar counter.

"Merlin," he responds, and Gwaine catches the merriment in his voice and in his smile, but just the tiniest bit of guilt in his eyes too.

Gwaine supposes he can understand that bit of guilt. This is the barmaid's livelihood after all, and they're all but destroying the place in their fight with the greedy thugs.

A tiny part of his brain recognizes it's the first time he's thought of someone else instead of himself in a long time.

But most of Gwaine's thoughts and energy are thrown into the fight, into protecting Blondie from an underhanded tactic.

Much later, after waking with an injury, and scoffing at finding out he saved a prince, and having a free run of Camelot, and wreaking havoc in Camelot's tavern, Gwaine has another interesting moment with Merlin.

Well, two if he's honest.

The first is when he talks about his father for the first time in years. Gwaine is sure that it was the alcohol talking for him, loosening his tongue, but the last thing he's expecting is for the younger man to understand, to look at him with empathy.

But it's the second that sticks out in Gwaine's mind.

It's not the going-to-save-Merlin part of it either.

What strikes him most, is watching Merlin willingly put himself into danger, in order to get the proof he needed, in order to keep his master safe.

He hasn't seen loyalty like that in a long time. It reminds him of Merlin's words to him when they were cleaning the entire army's boots—"I think it's fair"—because Merlin wasn't just saying that Arthur's punishment was fair, but also showing how much he internally respected Arthur as his sovereign. Because Merlin had seen something in Arthur that made him worthy of the younger man's respect.

Gwaine thinks maybe he's seen tiny glimpses of that something, but he's not sure yet, not ready to acknowledge that maybe he's been a bit wrong about nobles and their ilk.

But Merlin's loyalty to Arthur brings to Gwaine's mind the knight's code that he called a farce at his mother's deathbed.

It didn't matter to Merlin that he wasn't a knight. It didn't matter to Merlin that, as a servant, he had no power in court to prove what he'd found out about Oswald and Ethan's scheme.

The knight's code dictated that one must protect those who couldn't defend themselves, to never turn one's back on a foe, to persevere in the face of a challenge.

It was meant to be a code for men of nobility, like Gwaine, to follow—tenets by which to build their lives. And here was Merlin, a common man, embodying the code that Gwaine had lost faith in.

He smiles to himself.

Of course it would be Merlin who shows him what he's missing. Merlin, who can't fight a lick, but had jumped into the fray in a tavern brawl anyway to stand alongside Arthur. Merlin, who scrubbed boots for the whole army on top of all of his chores, out of respect for Arthur's decision and because he is just that good-natured to his friends. He didn't have to sit there and slave away with Gwaine—they weren't that close really—but he did it anyway.

Gwaine had said it himself, hadn't he? "It's what's inside that counts."

But he hadn't actually believed his own words, not really. He'd hoped for them to be true, but he hadn't put a lot of stock in them.

Merlin, in his own way, proved to him that the code his father lived by, that he had forsaken wasn't a lie after all.

So of course, Gwaine goes after him, and saves his scrawny arse and gets himself into trouble.

Because it's the right thing to do.

And he'll never admit it aloud, but it feels good to do the right thing, to stand and fight for the right reasons.

It's why he comes back the next day, in the guise of a knight, to help Arthur.

Because of the code.

Because of Merlin, and his own unique brand of chivalry.

Walking away from Camelot a second time, back to his endless cycle of tavern and brawl and ale and women, Gwaine finds he's a little sad to be leaving.

Because after these few eventful days in Camelot, it's sad to go back to his tumbleweed life.

But he feels lighter than he has in a long time. He doesn't feel as aimless as he did before, as empty.

This time, Gwaine can tell his journey is different. It feels like the fresh start he'd been hoping for when he left home so long ago, and he has Merlin to thank for that.

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Months later, as he rests and readies himself for a battle he's sure they have no chance of winning, but one he wouldn't miss for the world, newly knighted Sir Gwaine remembers his dying mother's words.

You will find your own way.

He has hasn't he.

And in the end, he's become a knight, just like his father and grandfather and great-grandfather.

He just had to figure things out for himself first before he could finally get here.

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fin

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