Title: Magic or Madness
Genre: Angst
Rating: T
Pairing: N/A
Spoilers: End of series
Summary: We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented.
Word Count: 2,989
Warnings: Future-verse

Disclaimer: Not mine. Summary belongs to Stephen Chbosky.

A/N: Magic and the modern era.

It is 861 and Merlin had somehow found his way into the Nordic territories. After a few hundred years of waiting for Arthur, Albion had become dull – literally everyone he'd ever known (and their children's children's children's children's great-great grandkids were all dead, too). So he'd left, wandering aimlessly around the countryside – and out of it – in order to somehow occupy the growing feeling that Arthur was going to make him wait a hell of a long time to come back.

A few years ago, he'd wound up in a strange society, full of fiercely beautiful women and just plain fierce men. Pillagers and plunderers, warriors all. Merlin didn't really know why they'd kept him alive save the fact that when he'd been brought before the Earl, Merlin had tripped into the sacrificial alter and apparently that was some sort of sign from their gods, so they'd kept him as a sort of talisman.

Now though, he was on a ship. It was pouring rain – biblical flood proportion rain. Merlin was miserable. He was contemplating jumping overboard and ending his miserable trip on this lovely vessel. But he wasn't sure the Lady of the Lake would help him way out in the middle of the godforsaken ocean. So he hunkered down against the gale and tried to think dry thoughts.

Between one wind gust and the next, however, a crack of lightning illuminated the night, jagged light zigzagging across the sky and striking the ship's mast. The smell of burnt ozone and scorched wood permeated the air.

"Oh, for the love of – " Merlin had had it. They were already drifting aimlessly around in middle of the ocean in the pitch dark, who knew how far from shore; without a sail they might as well just drown themselves now and save themselves the misery. With a flash of golden eyes, a roll of thunder rumbled overhead, and, with it, a strong upward gush of wind began to blow away the storm clouds.

"You – you – you – " Merlin glanced up at the stuttering face of one of the deck hands, cocking his head comically to the side as the man gaped at him. "You're god touched!" Merlin had perfected the precise air of confusion a long time ago.

"Sailor, what are you on about?"

"Captain!" The young Viking spun around. "His eyes! They were glowing! Just like lightning!" He was frantic, pointing at Merlin, then at the sky, then gesturing around them at the clear, star-filled sky, the calm waters. "He stopped the storm, sir! I saw it!"

Merlin pursued his lips, staring up wide-eyed at the captain, eyes a perfectly normal blue. "Son, I think you might be a little seasick, you best go rest below deck."

"But – "

"Now, sailor."

Merlin could see the Captain thinking as he stared at him, but thankfully, at just that moment, one of the other crewmembers shouted out, "Land, captain!" and Merlin and his golden eyes was forgotten.

Merlin was bored. Booorrreeedddd. It was boring here. (Here being China, 1044). All he did was practice his calligraphy or meditate or grow herbs or any other dozen boring things. He needed excitement.

With a furtive look around, Merlin glanced down at his creation. A papier-mache dragon, beautifully rendered after The Great Dragon, and filled with sand. With one more glance around, Merlin touched a fingertip to the wick, and felt the sand within change form. A snap and a spark and the dragon took off, flying into the sky before exploding in a huge outpouring of light and noise and light.

"Hey! What do you have there?!"

Crap.

I have literally never hated a single person this much, Merlin thought vehemently, staring at the young man pontificating before the court. I would gladly clean Arthur's boots with my tongue right now if he would just shut up.

Most of the 1200's had been uneventful so far, but all of a sudden, in the spring of 1266, a young upstart had wandered into Kublai Khan's court (a court where Merlin had made himself quite at home, thank you very much), and starting talking about all these crazy things he'd seen and all these places he wanted the Khan to show him. And he never shut up. Not for one second since he got here had Merlin ever seen him with his mouth shut.

Standing abruptly he was pleasantly surprised when the visitor's mouth snapped shut. Before he could start talking again, Merlin reached out a hand to clap him on the shoulder, friendly and welcoming. "Must go, sir" must go and never return since you'll probably talk until you die, "but it has been a pleasure meeting you, Mr. Polo."

As he walked out, Merlin flicked his fingers dismissively over his shoulder in Polo's direction, an almost imperceptible showering of golden dust setting on his face.

Take that, kid. Merlin smirked. In a few thousand years, let's see if anyone remembers your crazy stories.

It was absolutely astonishing how many places Merlin had lived where it seemed there was no city planning. No one had any thought for water or city streets or marketplaces. Everything was chaos. So it was an understatement to say that Merlin was hysterically surprised when he arrived in Tenochtitlan and found a perfectly organized system of streets, houses and palaces all set up in a neat and systematic fashion, and huge pyramids as the focal point of it all.

When he arrived, the canals were almost completed, and he could see men at work on a perfectly glorious system of aqueducts. Though… with a critical eye he noted that their slope was off by just enough – the water would never slant downward continuously enough to reach the main part of the city.

With no one around, Merlin coughed into his hand, covering the rumble that resounded through the ground and settled the aqueduct at just the perfect slant.

There, now there was a pretty good place to spend a few decades.

They called him angel. Doctor. Healer. Saint. Devil. Magic. Witch. God.

They called him all sorts of things. But the families of those who were ill didn't care what he was, where he learned to heal, as long as he could save their loved ones, soothe their fevered browed, smooth their marred skin. He could be Lucifer himself, but as long as he could heal their children mother's wept on his shoulder. As long as he could heal their wives, men let him sleep at their hearth. As long as he could heal their parents, children offered to share their meals with him.

He had sensed this coming for years. Merlin had felt the slow rolling dread that comes before catastrophe for so long now, that when the sickness finally caught up to where he was, he was taken aback at the force of its spreading.

Years ago, decades, when he had last visited Europe, it had been thrumming with life, a simply beautiful land no matter where you were. Now however, in the mid 1300's, it was decrepit, dark, teeming with death and decay, filled with wailing and crying. A terrible place.

So for now, Merlin didn't care who saw him, he healed who he could, and prayed that anyone who saw would be too grateful to say anything.

"No, no, no, there's no way that would work!"

"Of course it would, boy! I've studied birds for long enough!"

"But a machine isn't a bird! You can't get a machine to control feathers – and I sure don't know how, do you?!"

"Well, no – "

"See! I told you so!"

"Well what do you suggest then if you're so smart? It needs to be something strong enough to withstand the updraft created when it's in the air."

"… what about bat's wings?"

"Too similar to the original problem… But what if we curved the material? If we could get it to spin fast enough – "

" – it would create its own upward thrust!"

In hindsight, it was probably a terrible idea. But at the time, Merlin was quite convinced he was a genius.

See, he missed Arthur. Granted, the man was a git and annoying as hell, but Merlin missed him. He wanted someone to talk to who understood where he had come from, who grew up in his home country, who knew the same people he'd fought beside and grown to love.

He was homesick, basically.

But Arthur's soul was in whatever limbo the Once and Future King's soul was being held in, so Merlin couldn't really talk to him. But, he reasoned, if he could get a hold of the Lady of the Lake, maybe she could grant him time to speak to Arthur.

Albion was a long, long way from where he was, so a power up was required. An apt and brilliant student, Merlin knew exactly how to safely boost his spell…

Kidding. He'd never learned anything like that ever, in fact, he wasn't even sure anything like that existed, but if it didn't he was going to invent it now. Here's how the thought process went.

Merlin = weak
Sun = strong
Merlin + Sun = good to go

So with utmost focus, Merlin attempted to focus on the bright rays of sun streaming into the field where he was meditating, focus on absorbing the power, of drawing it to him.

Unfortunately, he was pretty much just focusing a vast amount of the sun's energy into one continuous stream, so two hours later, Merlin got a jolt and was knocked unconscious of the remainder of the day, and woke dazed and confused in the middle of the night.

The next morning's headline read: Does Yesterday's Supernova Spell the End for Us All?

"Oh, shit."

Well, that would teach Merlin to try and light a candle with magic while mildly intoxicated.

Living on the outskirts of town, Merlin sometimes didn't notice things happening until the gossip was already weeks old. But the amount of racket coming from Salem these days was hard to ignore. He hadn't heard so much screaming and crying since Anne Boleyn tried to avoid her beheading.

Wandering down from his little cabin in the woods, looking particularly sage-like with his long beard, knobby walking sticks, and tattered coat, he took his time. Sometimes he forgot when he looked like an old man to act like one. It really threw people off, and they were pretty testy in these parts.

When he reached the town square, the village was in an uproar. Women were crying, men were yelling out orders, a pinched faced young girl was pointing at people saying, "That one! That one!" and watching as guards hauled them away.

"What is happening?"

No one answered, everyone was too focused on the drama.

He almost didn't notice when the girl pointed at him and said, "Him. He used magic potions to cure my mother. He's a witch."

Merlin was too shocked to respond. It had been a long time since anyone had called him a witch. And he really had used a magic potion to heal that woman, how did she know?

But as guards hauled him away, and he looked at the other accused, he began to realize that she didn't know, she was just making false accusations and reveling in the attention it was garnering her.

The guards were questioning all of the accused, and they all, obviously, kept denying the claim that they were witches. When the priest reached Merlin and asked him if he, too was a witch, Merlin had pretty much had it with this town.

"Yes."

"Lies do not – what?"

"I said yes. I'm a witch." He tilted his head to the side. "I thought you already knew that."

There was silence in the square for a heartbeat, then – "BURN HIM!" Merlin was jostled forward and unceremoniously tied to a stake (he was pretty sure it was a hitching post), and left there while villager after villager left, only to return with armfuls of wood.

Merlin sighed as they threw the match onto the kindling and began to pray. He really didn't want to find a new place to live, it was becoming so tedious.

As the flames rose higher, his eyes began to glow, causing a woman in the front row to shriek. Another cried out that Merlin was the same Devil who had visited her in her chambers the night before and tried to tempt her to sin. Good Lord, really?

A heavy eye roll was the last thing the townspeople saw before Merlin vanished in a poof of ashes and the priest declared that his soul had been cleansed of evil, and thus he had returned to God.

What a bunch of idiots.

Okay, in all fairness, this was not Merlin's fault. If anyone was to blame, Merlin would have to put every cent he had to his name (and over the centuries that had become quite a lot) that it was all that crackpot Hamilton's fault.

I mean, yes, technically, he wasn't here right now. Technically, he wasn't any of the people throwing tea in the harbor. And technically, he hadn't told anyone to do this.

But he implied it! He was always talking of revolution and doing stupid shit like stealing cannons and what did he expect people to do?! Americans were bloody dramatic as hell, of course, they were going to do something so monumentally stupid. And who knew this British tea came in blocks has hard as cement? It was like tossing rocks into the Harbor!

Plus half the people here were drunk on revolution, so they weren't being all that quiet. It wasn't long before the British heard and gave chase and why exactly was Merlin involved in this again?

Scattering across the pier, everyone ran in a different direction and because Merlin is Merlin, no less than three British officers chose to follow clumsy him. So, at the risk of having to magic his way out of prison, he instead used a few well-placed bolts to trip all the British into the sea. (And if maybe a few more cases of tea tumbled down on top of them, well, hey, Merlin didn't control gravity, now did he?)

At the tavern later, with Americans high on success, Merlin, sober and irritated, had a sudden crystalizing thought: Alexander Hamilton, you bloody git, I'm leaving this country because of you.

Ah, France. The wine. The women. The bread. The architecture. The bloody rolling heads of victims of the French Revolution.

Do the gods hate me, Merlin wondered. He had left America, returned to Europe. And now, barely a hundred years after being burned on the stake, here he was, about to be beheaded. I did my best by Arthur. I'm waiting for him to return patiently. I can't make him come back any quicker. Why am I being punished like this?

So irritated was he, that he didn't even bother to be subtle with his escape. When the guillotine came slicing towards his neck, he flicked up a finger, freezing it in place. As the executioner struggled to force it down, Merlin sent it flying open. He stood, shackles falling from his wrists, and stared coldly around at everyone's shocked and terrified faces.

"I am going to become a hermit."

A hundred years later, fresh into the 1900's, Merlin emerged, blinking in the light, wondering if Arthur had appeared yet, deciding that he hadn't. The world was teeming with people now, more than Merlin had every thought possible. And there were new inventions everywhere. It was like a new world.

The two young lads he befriended reminded him so strongly of da Vinci that it made the nostalgia beat hot and heavy in his heart. He couldn't help himself, really, when they began to create their own flying machines. It felt so much like his conversations so many lifetimes ago with a different man obsessed with flight.

Okay, maybe Merlin shouldn't have graced them with a bit of luck, but surely that's not an inappropriate use of magic, is it?

Merlin was praying. He was praying very strongly to gods he hadn't prayed to in a long, long time. He was praying that people stopped inventing computers and making them smarter because they were really starting to creep him out. What was next? Phones that answered your questions? Robots that cleaned your house? It was terrifying.

And confusing.

And he was getting that sinking feeling again, the one that basically lets you know something terrible was about to happen. That's why he was elbow deep in the government's main computer room, staring at a mess of wires and hoping the guard he'd Jedi mind tricked still thought Merlin worked for I.T.

With a start, he focused more intently on the circuit board, trying to see the magic in this form. If he crossed his eyes, he could see the error, see where the "spell" had gone awry. He reached out one long fingered hand to give it a nudge and felt it slid back into place.

There. That should do for a few generations.

A/N Subsequent: A timeline of notable events, if anyone is keeping track:
861: Vikings discover Iceland
1044: Chinese invent gunpowder
1266: Marco Polo's first visit to the court of Kublai Khan
1327: Aztec empire rises
1347: Black Death
1483: Leonardo da Vinci designs the helicopter
1572: Tycho Brahe observes supernova
1666: Great Fire of London
1693: Salem Witch Trials
1773: Boston Tea Party
1798: French Revolution
1903: Wright Brothers make their first flight
2000: Y2K