Desperate Measures

Desperate Measures is the eleventh part in the Loaded March series. It was uploaded to Archive of Our Own on December 26, 2012. It consists of 91,277 words.
If you really want to torture yourself, you can find it here. But it's really rather painful.
==Summary==
Excalibur lost a battle, their advantage, their loved ones, their heart and soul.
A broken Captain, a shattered team, and no one to trust. Their mission has been full of secrets, the present is the broken past, and the only thing that's left to do is to enact desperate measures.
==Plot==
Hunith turns out to be a bamf, Balinor is alive, Excalibur can't trust anyone, Morgana and Gwen are bamfs, and Merlin  and Kay get beat up a lot. Aredian jumps to the top of the shit list.
Excalibur manage to rescue everyone apart from Merlin.
ooOOoo 
It begins in a rainy 
Wales three days after the fuck up in France. Excalibur went to Merlin’s mom Hunith for help. The team is beaten and exhausted, especially Arthur who is beating himself up for not having a contingency plan for what had happened—for not seeing this possibility. Arthur is still trying to wrap his head around dragons. Dragons.
Hunith tells Arthur to eat and to rest. Arthur, not so nicely, demands a non-traceable, safe phone from Hunith. Will’s dad Allan tells him to think about it before he calls anyone.
Morgana and Gwen are being holed away in a house no too far from the testing grounds. Already they have tried to escape twice. Morgause brings in items that look like they belonged to Excalibur and tells them that the team died. After Morgause leaves the room, Morgana and Gwen search through the materials, finding Leon’s watch and Lance’s keychain. These are trackers. There are also dogtags that have coordinates to a safe house on them. The girls turn on the trackers.
Merlin and Kay have been tortured for the last three days, beaten in a way that they could keep track of time by how consistent and timely the beatings were. But on this day (Tuesday or day 4 since the testing grounds, if you count the testing grounds as day 1) something is different. Aredian comes in and threatens them and tell Merlin he needs to crack the Pendragon hard drive. Aredian has Kay and Merlin hosed down with cold water to ‘clean them up’. While Merlin is shivering on the floor, drying off and dying a bit, Will shows up with Bryn . Will ends up killing Bryn. Oh, and Merlin’s magic is AWOL/not working properly.
Arthur is surprised that he had fallen asleep and wakes up to the asked for phone and with a top secret for- his- eyes- only folder. Arthur figures out how to work the phone and puts it off to the side—not knowing who to call. Instead he picks up the files. Inside he learns about Operation Albion —a mission that Kilgarrah , Mandrake , Bayard , Olaf , Uther and Merlin’s dad Balinor were all a part of. There are coordinates that he gives to Gwaine to figure out. Excalibur discovers that Morgana and Gwen’s trackers have gone off. 
Morgana and Gwen are moved into Paris. Morgause talks to Morgana about Uther and how he was a part of a team collecting artefacts and that Uther had liberated quite a few. 
Merlin wakes up in pain and with Will there. Will tells Merlin Arthur is dead and while Merlin is crying, he quietly tells Merlin that Arthur and the team disappeared and that no one knows where to. Some of Aredian’s men come in to gather merlin to begin decrypting the hard drive. Kay is laid up in another room recovering from some back alley surgery. Will tells Merlin that Aredian and his men will hurt/kill Will if Merlin doesn’t do as he’s told. Merlin is upset.  
Arthur feels like a failure and keeps looking at Merlin and Kay’s loacators. The ones that hasn’t turned on. The team finds out that Hunith was being followed home, so they pack up and go to intercept her. They retrieve Hunith and capture the people following her—one of those being Vivian Niedermann .  They keep driving both cars. Arthur talks to Hunith about Operation Albion and the artefacts recovered. Arthur calls Kilgarrah and demands to see him and Balinor.
Arthur has a nice chat with Vivian, which is Arthur talking, Vivian reacting, Arthur interpreting her reactions and coming up with the correct conclusions, which makes Vivian believe that Arthur can read her mind a bit. Arthur discovers that Will was a double agent for MI-5 . Olaf had gotten to him before Bayard. Hunith tells Arthur where Vivian can go for safe keeping. 
Morgana has a vision of Uther in his younger years working for Operation Albion and with researching artefacts. Morgana wakes up in a warehouse in Paris. Morgana assumes that Morgause is going to have Morgana go into Pendragon’s Paris location and steal the database again. Morgana sneaks out of the car and eavesdrops on Morgause. She finds out that Merlin is dead. Morgause is pissed and does some accidental magic, hurting Morgana. She gives Morgana a healing bracelet, so Morgana finds out about magic—magic besides  prophetic dreams. She also finds out that Morgause knows about her dreams. That the NWO has  been watching her. Creepy.
Merlin gets to see Kay for a bit before they take him away once again to get codes and passwords from him. Merlin is disoriented and only has to slightly pretend that he can’t focus. Will changes Merlin’s cover a bit, trying to intimate that Merlin is more than he appears. Merlin uses his body to get what he wants—to manipulate. Merlin was not stupid and weak. Merlin was manipulating Arthur to get what he wanted. Will did that so Aredian didn’t try to replace Arthur with himself. Merlin  ‘tries’ to verbally give Aredian the passcode.  When Merlin fails to make sense, Will is beaten.
At an old druid circle, a place where couples went to have the spirits bless their handfasting—the place prophesized to be the place of magic return--, Arthur figures out that Merlin is an artifact. That at this place Balinor and Hunith were handfasted—at this place they frequently visited—and at this place they may have conceived Merlin. 
Arthur calls Kilgarrah, telling him about what happened in France. How someone came early and messed it all up. And that now all Arthur needs from him is Balinor Emrys in 24 hours. 
Excalibur goes after Morgana and Gwen. Arthur correctly guesses that Morgana will go to Pendragon’s Paris Office. He splits them into two groups to simultaneously get the girls back-Gwen from the warehouse and Morgana from Pendragon Consulting.
Rescue mission a go and a success. They go to a safe house in Paris. 
Merlin gives Aredian a code. Aredian seems pleased with it. Merlin and Will talk about escape. Kay takes some healing goop and so does will. Will gets a hold of weapons for them. They take their guards out. Merlin searches for his magic. He goes deep to the spot between heartbeats and “in that complete, utter perfect silence, in that darkness where there was now a light, and found a boundless strength that wasn't his own, a will and a resilience that stood fast against the pain. Arthur.” 
Something in Merlin’s magic breaks and it is unleashed like an angry animal. They are almost away, but Merlin is exhausted and people are coming in. He tells Will to get kay to the van  kay’s doctor was driving and get them out of there—to leave him. Will does as merlin says, but it pains him. Merlin unleashes the spells in his tattoo. 
At the safe house Morgana had told Arthur what she had overheard about Merlin being dead. Arthur refuses to believe it. Then, Kay’s tracker goes off and the team heads out on another rescue mission. They save Kay and Will, but they miss Merlin by minutes. 
==Quotes==
"I don't know who started this war. I don't know when it started. I don't care much, either. But someone got it wrong when they thought we were pawns. We're knights."    --Arthur to Hunith  
"Huzzah," Lamorak and Galahad said simultaneously. 
"Damn it, Arthur," Vivian snapped. "The CIA disproved telepathy in the 60s. How are you doing this?"  "They never disproved Arthur," Leon said.
Arthur couldn't raise his eyes. He didn't dare. He swallowed hard, and it burned his throat. He shook his head again, and when he spoke, it was without recognizing his own voice. "I keep seeing him the way he was in Algiers. Cut and bloodied and dying. That's my greatest fear. That we'll find him and it'll be like that again. Except it'll be a million times worse, because I'm too late, and he's already gone before I can say good-bye. So don't you think, not for one second, that I don't know how you feel. They have my sister. They have one of my oldest friends. Don't you dare tell me that you forgive me when that's nothing but a goddamn lie to get me to keep going because you need me to help you get Morgana and Gwen back. I will get them back." Arthur to Leon
==Series Timeline==
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