The reason SAS Captain Arthur Pendragon can't keep a communications specialist in Team Excalibur because none of them are good enough. And then Lieutenant Merlin Emrys gets assigned to his squad, and Arthur does everything he can to prove that Merlin isn't good enough, either. Except he is.

"He predates S.H.I.E.L.D. Everything we know about him are stories of legends."

By the time he had teamed up with the one that looked like a very young Tristan, and the one that looked like Bedevere, if Bedevere had been a changeling, or, at least, vaguely fey, he still had not found Merlin.

Wherein Mike is Merlin reincarnated, Harvey is Arthur, everybody else is everybody else, and they fall in love. Again.

They're both less innocent than they were a thousand years ago; less trusting, more broken. This time, Merlin is the one who gets called on his behaviour – and it's true, he thinks ruefully, he'd stopped bothering to learn the names of those around him long ago – and Arthur is the one who refuses to leave anyone behind. This time, Merlin is the one saying words like "idiot" and "moron," and Arthur has the stupid ears.

After the events of 'Midnight,' The Doctor meets with one of the tourists who is not quite what he appears to be.

Mr and Mrs Burton were your average Wizarding couple, married for 3 years, and hoping for children. Needless to say, they weren’t expecting to be called into Hogwarts by Albus Dumbledore, only to be told that Mrs Burton was carrying Merlin, father of Magic.

Gaius taught you magic was something you learned, like an art. Nimueh taught you magic was a gift, something unknowable. If they were alive today, neither could explain how you never got old. How you can’t die.

Sometimes Merlin doesn’t tell Arthur who he is.

The parking lot behind Camelot looked safe and ordinary again in the midday sun, just genre:cracked asphalt and a couple of beat-up old cars.

"If I'm such a legend, then why I am so lonely?"

"Are you appreciating the irony yet?" Morgana's written. "You're ARTHUR PENDRAGON, and you're at GLASTONBURY TOR."

Lancelot was not a great man, sprung as he was from common blood and barely proven. It was not for him to cut away that magic, steal for himself a little piece of a power that could render Albion mighty. It was neither right, nor his right.

In his first trip to Cardiff in over two centuries Merlin was hit by the undeniable sense of Arthur having been reborn nearly as soon as he stepped off the train from London.

Merlin is not how Arthur remembers him. His memories tell him of a man with eyes as gold as the sun, who shared his bed and stood behind his throne; a man powerful enough to rule the world, and humble enough to never do so. The Merlin Arthur knew was joyful, idealistic and naïve. The man Arthur is faced with now, is ancient, broken and has been stoned out of his mind for nearly six centuries.

Immortality is dull. This is the first thing Merlin learned about it - you can mope for a hundred years about your lost lover in the woods, you can have wild sex with seven bards and tell them naughty things about said lost lover, you can write a book and build a castle and set up and then destroy six small monarchies. But you'll get bored eventually. You can settle in the same village with a cat for six hundred years (it's a very special cat), and you can yell at Morgana for as long as you damn well please. You can pine and you can drink. But it all gets boring in the end.

Until the liberation of Warsaw in 1945, many men and women risked their lives trying to help Jews escape Nazi persecution. Merlin tried to help as best he could and it was in doing so, that he was reunited with Arthur.

It’s almost time to move on again, he thinks, looking out the window.

As it turns out, the "citizen" is one Merlin Emrys, a former Lance Corporal for the Independents and a wanted criminal.

What the fuck, Merlin thought in utter shock, staring at Uther--Uther--across a rich mahogany desk in rural Suffolk, fate was like a bad Hollywood remake, then?

So what's a Christian ghost dragon doing under a hill in Glywysing?

Arthur doesn’t have an exceptional rebirth, nor does he live an exceptional life, but it is one free from expectations. Arthur does not marry Gwen, no one betrays him and he lives longer than he ever could have as king. There are no great wars, no disasters, no pain; just a vegetable garden, two cows, and William.

Finally decided to get up, did we. Still lazy as ever, I see, your Majesty."

When they reach the other side, all they find is another endless vista of burning fields and the same infinite stretch of road. The best thing you can have during the apocalypse is a healthy sense of irony. Or a decent car, infinite replenishing supplies and magical powers, but the irony helps.

Then that particular group of girls who always sit together—and out of all there's only one he thinks is hot but she never looks up at the right time—sitting next to Heineken, a broody kid who takes his skateboard to class, and whose real name is forever lost due to a supposed incident during first year introduction that involved a beer bottle, an unsavoury way of putting it to use and a partner too drunk to care.

It was just after midnight on a Sunday in June. Merlin’s life was about to change forever, but he didn’t know it yet.

Arthur comes back as Barack Obama. YES. I WENT THERE.

It's not the first time he's been a woman—after the first few dozen lifetimes Merlin stop caring which body he woke up in, and he rather likes this one. He's not married to the identity—never really has been, but when the Cold War heats up and Arthur is nowhere to be found, Merlin says, fuck it. She joins MI-5. Is 00 before any other woman before, and picks the code name M.

It's been a fair few years now and Merlin's powers don't seem to be good for much but whoring any more. He sees Arthur around (follows him around), mostly on sports teams (he started off three-day eventing, polo, fencing, but now it's football, rugby, cricket), once or twice a politician, an actor once as well. He's been a lot of things; sportsman, mayor, cult-leader, general ... people will follow Arthur anywhere. Merlin does, for a start. He knows he probably shouldn't.

Arthur wouldn’t say he was Merlin Emrys’s biggest fan, whatever evil little cousins called Edwin might suggest. He was just into films, that was all. And ok, so he might have all said actor’s films on DVD, and a few limited edition posters he had picked up here and there (or for Christmas), but there was nothing wrong with that.

Jack investigates an anomaly. The anomaly invites him back to its hotel.

Apparently Arthur's reaction to dropping acid is that he remembers.

Everything.

Percy meets Luke's reincarnation, only to find he's practically the same.

Merlin thought he knew what to expect from his life until he met a fortune-teller and then a dragon.

Merlin's immortality proves to be both a blessing and a curse as he watches the cycle of reincarnation pass him by. Being repeatedly reunited with Arthur only to lose him again takes its toll. But this—this is not a solution he ever would have wished for.