Chapter Text
When Merlin Pendragon met Lydia and Gregory Holmes, he had just moved back to London from a fifty-year expedition through modern America, one of the rather few places he had yet to explore. He had gone before, he was on one of the first ships to successfully reach the new world (with the help of a little magic of course), but every couple hundred years he liked to return to see how things had changed. One of the main reasons he had returned, was admittedly money. Being a thousand-year-old immortal, he had to have obtained some wealth with all the knowledge he had collected, but Merlin wasn’t very good with his money. Each time he “died” and had to leave family and friends behind, they received an anonymous tip that would pay for whatever they needed. Also, traveling wasn’t cheap, and he had done a lot of moving around the past half-century.
Merlin de-aged himself back to about eighteen before he returned to London, posing as a student freshly out of high school and ready to travel the world. He renewed the spell that made him appear to age at a normal pace and tried to settle down. He stayed at a cheap hotel for as long as he could, but when his money ran out he was given the choice: sleep in the cold, rainy streets of London, or ask his best friends if he could stay in their warm, soft guest bedroom for a few days, and while he tended to be overly self-sacrificing, he wasn’t stupid.
Mr. and Mrs. Holmes welcomed him into their home with welcome arms
He only intended to stay for a few weeks at the longest, he didn’t want to be a burden, but every time he tried to leave, saying that he had found a place to stay, Lydia would see through him like glass and insist that he stayed for just a few more days.
Eventually he quit his day job to take care of four-year-old Mycroft when he discovered just how much they were paying for childcare, it was the least he could do after everything they had done for him, and Mycroft agreed.
In the end, he never did move out. He became a sort of live-in nanny for the child, and as soon as they discovered how well he cooked, he began doing that too.
On his first birthday with them, he had to explain that his parents had died “a millennium ago” and thus weren’t coming to celebrate, and on his “twenty-first” birthday, they offered to legally adopt him.
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When six-year-old Sherlock asked aloud to the dinner table of Merlin could “use his magic to make the kids at school smarter,” he laughed it off.
“Sherlie, even if I did have magic, which I most certainly don’t, why would you want that? It’d be like being surrounded by a hundred more Mikes.”
Sherlock nodded at that, “But, you do have magic.”
Merlin looked at him, trying to mask fear from one the two smartest children he had ever come across was harder than it sounded. “Sure, I do,” he laughed.
The child looked confused now, ignoring Mycroft’s furious glares to get him to shut up, “But I saw you cooking three days ago, and the carrots were cutting themselves while you stirred the soup. I was magic! Like from the books.”
He blanched, he needed to be more careful. “Maybe it was a dream, because I don’t remember you being in the kitchen when I was making the soup.”
“Well of course you didn’t see me, I was using my new spy glasses.”
Lydia gave her husband a knowing look and said, ”Merlin sweetie, we will always love you, no matter what gifts you happen to possess.”
He looked around the table, and realized he shouldn’t have expected to be able to keep a secret from this family. This was the first time since Gaius that someone had found out about his abilities and still been accepting.
That night he took off the aging glamour.