Fic: Never Pay the Reaper With Love Only [1/3]
Title: Never Pay the Reaper With Love Only [1/3]
Rating: NC-17 overall, PG-13 this part (language warning throughout)
Pairing: Merlin/Arthur
Word count: ~19,000
Prompt: The Incredible Hulk (2008)
Summary: "You think they're making Merlins," Morgana commented very quietly.
*
{100% encrypting}
/Unicorn: Dragon, you there?
/Dragon: You're still out there.
/Unicorn: Evidently.
/Dragon: ... ... ...
/Unicorn: Sorry. I get. You're spitting fire.
/Dragon: I will let it go. This time.
/Dragon: Did you find it?
/Unicorn: Yes.
/Dragon: Good.
/Dragon: Try a high dose.
/Dragon: On a SAMPLE.
/Unicorn: ... Yes, I'll get right on that. Immediately.
Dragon really did think he was an idiot, whoever s/he was.
And anyway, after the last time, it wasn't like he'd be injecting just any random flower juice into his veins again.
Dr. Merlin Emrys pushed away the memory of lying in a grubby flat in Prague, wishing he could claw his own veins out as the near-change from gamma reactive cells to normal and back ripped through his body. It had almost killed him: if it hadn't sparked the other, more dramatic change in his veins and all the resilience that entailed, it probably would have. And that was where the memory nearly stopped.
Pestle, grind and mix.
Had he not survived, somewhere in the afterlife, eventually Arthur would have tracked him down and kicked his arse for dying of a flower overdose. Possibly with a snide comment about winning an award for Gayest Death Ever.
Listening to the black market centrifuge start to wind down in the background, Merlin shot a single look to the corner of the photograph sticking haphazardly out of a worn backpack beneath the desk. It wasn't even the corner of a photograph; it was the corner of a newspaper clipping and it was barely even a corner, geometrically speaking. Merlin had ripped it hurriedly from a newspaper at one of a French cafe's outside tables eleven months before, the first possession he'd reclaimed after the disaster because it was the one thing he could never really get back.
And what would it do to Arthur's ego to know that thinking about him twice removed, in print and in a language he barely spoke, made the wristwatch monitoring his heart's beats per minute beep at him that bit faster? Things, Merlin decided with a twitch in the corner of his mouth, that he never wanted to see. He liked the world too much to unleash that on it.
/Dragon: Ready?
/Unicorn: Yes? Yes.
/Dragon: What are you waiting for?
Merlin made a face at the screen of the laptop. It ran on Windows Prehistoric, so he could claim oh, shit, sorry. This laptop. It made me hang up on you. But being a child about it wouldn't change the fact that he needed the condescending bastard on the other end.
He pricked the end of his thumb and squeezed a few drops onto the slide, slipping it under the microscope and dropping three drops of the concentrated mix onto the blood. Under the microscope, clear to the eye, were the green cells that caused him to lose clarity of memory and swim the English channel in a short blur.
Merlin watched the green fade into red, attention rapt and staring, his heart rate climbing more rapidly than he should allow.
His breathing stilled, watching in what felt like a slow motion moment as the red blood cells - normal red cells - bumped gently against each other on the slide, oblivious to being a sight and miracle up there with the birth of Jesus Christ himself.
But it started on the cells the way it started on his body - here, there, the pressure building from the inside to push out, out, out and discolour and twist -
Merlin leaned forward with both hands clenching on the edge of the worktop, breathing in fits and spells, feeling the scrape of splinters and trying to listen beyond the white noise for the watch until his BPM fell low enough for it to stop making noises at him.
/Dragon: ?
/Unicorn: Fail.
/Dragon: Up dose.
/Unicorn: Can't.
/Dragon: Over half gone?
/Unicorn: All.
The cursor blinked on the screen for a stretch of breaths as Merlin felt his heart hammer against his ribcage.
/Dragon: Send me a blood sample.
/Unicorn: Will it help.
Merlin cursed years of internet geekery for that one, for giving away his instinctive no, no way in his punctuation.
/Dragon: Yes. Not as much as direct.
*
/Unicorn: Not safe.
In the depths of an obscure computer lab in Camelot University, Arthur Pendragon looked at the words and muttered, "No bloody shit, idiot." Then he typed:
/Dragon: No meeting. Can't help.
It was a rough, callous thing to hold over him - hold over Merlin - but Arthur did it anyway. The conversation stalled but he'd gotten used to that.
He was prepared to let Merlin wallow in wherever the fuck he was for exactly two choruses of a Vampire Weekend song, probably threading both of his bony hands through his ridiculous hair and imagining all the worst calamities that could happen in the life of a radioactive test tube sent via Royal Mail. It'd be endearing, but Arthur had already gone through and back through the ethical, familial dilemma and decided fuck it, it's Merlin. Then he'd signed up to watch several underground fringe science forums online, pouncing on anything that suggested gamma research or the scrawny git. And nothing suggested Merlin like forward-slash-fucking-Unicorn.
/Unicorn: Not. Safe.
That meant, Arthur knew well, that Merlin was considering looking out from under the rock- at least for long enough to get to a bloody post office. And yes, a trip to the post office to pick up the blood sample actually meant a trip to an Edinburgh PO box depot, but Arthur liked the excuse to visit Gwen anyway.
/Dragon: Neither is living with GAMMA poisoning. Stop chasing flowers.
Looking at the line of text, he winced. Sometimes he wondered if Merlin knew who he was talking to already, but Arthur knew he'd have run away to the underside of another virtual rock, fallen in with a bad crowd and possibly gotten himself killed if he'd guessed - all to keep Arthur unreasonably safe and out of it.
*
Merlin stood, flexing his toes over the battered wooden floor, clenching and unclenching his hands, his eyes locked on the screen. Dragging someone else into this could not happen - especially not someone helpful who probably thought Merlin was just some bastard who had played with fire and now couldn't get his dick working again, which was pretty close to the truth if he left most of the truth out, which was only a bit like lying if you'd learned the definition from Arthur.
Glancing at the bottom right of the screen, Merlin swore under his breath. The other part of the day - the part where the pasty pale boy hauled bricks around in the Spanish sun, building kit houses for British ex-pat retired couples to live in - started in exactly forty minutes.
/Unicorn: Watch the post.
*
"'Watch the post?!'" Arthur hissed at the screen, watching Merlin's username vanish from the list of available contacts. Still, he thought, leaning back in the plastic mistake masquerading as a chair, progress.
It was safer for Merlin to stay away from Camelot. It was better for Arthur's general life quality and all that bullshit if he stayed away, but-
Arthur's logical reasoning out of why he was stalking the other man was interrupted by the reason for Merlin's current lifeplan in the first place. Arthur's phone began to shake in his pocket and play whatever the least crappy ringtone that had come pre-installed on the thing had been.
He could have cut his father off in the aftermath of the explosion, but it had taken him two weeks to wake up and by then, his father had dragged Merlin away from his bedside. Bad enough, but he'd tried to take him into 'protective military custody' - which was a polite way of saying that he'd marked Merlin's body property of Queen, country and the shady research division that had been so fucking keen on gamma research in the first place. It had gone as well as trying to chain up a pissed off, twenty-foot, built green badass could go, but Arthur couldn't take any happiness from the mental images of the bodies that he knew Merlin would savage himself over both awake and asleep.
It had seemed smarter to quietly reach out to Merlin, who seemed to be doing his best to crawl away and die or some bollocks like that, and keep his credit cards and money held in trust in case of short-notice, one-way flights. However, he'd started the slow process of transferring said money to accounts his father had no legal or semi-legal access to: the inherited account in his mother's name at Coutts, offshore holdings, current accounts in other names that his father didn't know existed.
"Yes. Dinner at the Feys, of course. Please inform my father I'll attend."
At the end of the terse conversation with his father's assistant's secretary at an office that didn't exist except physically, Arthur disconnected from the university wireless network, shut down the laptop and slipped it into his leather satchel. Standing to stretch out his complaining muscles, he thanked Apple and God, in that order, that macs could be carried everywhere and weighed near-nothing, or else Merlin would owe him a new spine along with everything else.
*
Merlin ran, sweat pouring down his back between the thin t-shirt and the backpack.
Once, Arthur and he had run away for a month of back packing in Brazil, somewhere in the summer between finishing being undergrads and starting learning to be princes (of the universe). It had been the sad, sad result of playing the Queen soundtrack from Flash Gordon the entire night after the classifications had come through to their university emails and drunkenly booking flights to South America, because the two naturally went together, of course, and Merlin had all of that spare money, of course.
Merlin had gasped his way up to the top of steep favelas in the hills of Rio de Janeiro, cursing that Arthur and his sickening athleticism (for a lab rat) had seen too many reruns of that 1980s exercise in travel journalism, Rough Guides, on Sky. He liked the programme well enough, but the knowledge that Magenta Devine had done it all before them hadn't made the arduous climb through Rocinha or Turano any more pleasant.
Running lithe and quick up the hills of the El Parc Tres Turons region of Barcelona, Merlin wondered what his younger self and Arthur would make of him now - they'd been too arrogant, the both of them, wanting everything at their feet when they didn't need to force anything to kneel. With the gamma pounding in his veins like the blood in his temples, he pushed higher and harder on the winding roads. It was a dangerous, vital game, this running. He had to run fast enough to work his improved muscles, now strapped tightly to his body and lean where before he'd just been thin. He couldn't work too hard, preferring to keep his heart in the safe but profitable range somewhere between 150 and 170 beats per minute, or else he'd fall from the hillside in a green blur and take the houses with him. They'd fold beneath him like the floors of that cheap hotel in Prague.
His body had to be in perfect condition, had to be ready. It wasn't the usual reason for learning fitness and fighting, running away, but it was better than staying in a fight he could only win by inflicting catastrophic, undiscerning damage on a city he liked well enough to be trying to learn bits and pieces of Spanish and Catalan.
There were shouts, some of them familiar, asking how the crazy English man was, some of them pissed off because Merlin had just planted a foot on their railing to scale a roof to leap a wall, but they faded into the humming white noise with every heartbeat.
*
"Yes, Morgana, do steal some," Arthur drawled, gesturing to his plate and Morgana's fork mining it for roasted treasures. "I wasn't planning on eating that honeyed parsnip at all."
His father smiled indulgently from next to Morgana before turning back to General Fey, Morgana's father.
After dinner, Morgana found him in the well-stocked library they'd played in as children, sitting in the chair he'd curled up in with books too heavy to hold up.
"Always Doré illustrations for you," Morgana murmured into his shoulder, body braced against the back of the green leather chair and leaning half over it. Arthur wondered if her bare feet were even on the ground. "I wonder what that suggests."
Arthur turned the pages of the illustrated Paradise Lost and smiled softly. "Are you going to psycho-analyse me, Morgana? Bringing your work home?"
"Father's asked me to take a job in his department - he says he needs someone to assess the psychological suitability of candidates," Morgana continued in a very low voice, tracing a finger down the edge of a mounted plate before making a small noise and moving away to a shelf. Arthur remained, staring at the winged creature among the clouds in the book but seeing the end of the before and the beginning of the end again.
It started with a wink, as a lot of nasty stories do. Strapped to a chair, about to be bombarded with gamma radiation, Merlin, the bastard, winked and it was all Arthur could do to stay on his side of the glass. They'd come up with the theory together, Arthur's father had jumped on it and called in military favours with promises of super-soldiers.
The argument for which of them would sit there in the first live test had been brutal, fierce and possibly an absolute singularity in space and time: Merlin and his father against Arthur. Arthur's argument that he looked more like Captain America than Merlin had gotten a twitch of a grin and a hand on his arm from the other man followed by a heated glare from his father.
And then-
"Try this," Morgana sat a book on top of Arthur's, blotting out Lucifer falling from tyrannical grace with delicate pictures of faeryland and goblins.
"Rackham," Arthur nodded, eyes following the sweeping curves and smooth turns in the illustration, "it suits you better. You're never so heavy as Doré." He turned as much as he could with two folio-sized books on his knees. "Don't take the job, Morgana."
"Why not?" Morgana turned her head as she turned the page over his shoulder, one light wrist resting on his collarbone. Something in Arthur seized up, looking around the sanctuary of his childhood in her library and unable to shift the taint on the room from his vision. "There isn't much beyond the military and the university in Camelot anymore, Arthur."
"There are things that-" Arthur let out an explosive breath, feeling the soft weight of her hand on his shoulder when he faltered, "-things that human bodies and human souls can't take, Morgana. I've known you since we were children. Don't be the one to sign this."
Morgana made a noise that sounded like agreement but could have been anything as Arthur processed what she had told him. She was like a creature in Rackham's lily ponds, light and spun of something beyond them but near in colour to all the shades of violet at once. If the weight of Merlin's breaking, the experiment and the result couldn't be held between his larger, solid shoulders, something instinctual cried out in Arthur to keep his sometimes-sister from it.
Arthur had dragged his eyes from Merlin's seizing body, seizing torso, jerking hips and wildly shaking head. He had forced himself to look away from the monitors, some of them reading beyond what was considered within the wide remits of medical possibility.
Whatever thread had been keeping him thinking rationally and objectively had snapped when the heart monitor read zero beats per minute, when the body that should not have been Merlin's paused, halted and slumped over the edges of the chair it had been dwarfed by minutes before.
He had had seconds- less than. Hands flying across panels, calculating levels, he had switched the gamma radiation off before looking to his father, frozen in shock. They'd never predicted this.
"You think they're making Merlins," Morgana commented very quietly, in a still manner that suggested ripples of outrage in the depths. She never was one for mincing her words, with an absolute conviction in what she saw in people and their probable actions. Coming to kneel beside him, her head on his knee and her hand over his ankle, she apologised with a glance and amended, "you think they'll do to others what happened to our Merlin."
Arthur nodded curtly. "Your father saw me, saw my father after- ...after."
Morgana raised her head, leaning her cheek against his knee and keeping her eyes on his, taking in the rise and fall of Arthur's voice as he almost said something else and didn't. "It was very bad, wasn't it?"
Arthur had had no idea what he was doing and it scared him shitless.
The thought had crossed his mind idly while his hands worked the panels, pushing lab assistants out of the way and calling to Gwen to try to get computers active in the clean room.
His father had stood by his shoulder, looking over it uncomprehendingly the way he always did.
"What-"
"Merlin is dying," Arthur had cut in forcefully.
"Shock him?"
About to retort that his father's weekly worship at the altar of House MD didn't help right then, Arthur had frozen before calling out instructions to Gwen.
"No one can go in there, sir," a small, timid voice had explained to General Pendragon behind his back. "The gamma radiation-"
"-will save Merlin," Arthur had interrupted, steel lining his voice and deflecting the sixty million objections raised in the following five seconds.
All except Gwen, who had grabbed both of his arms and turned him to face her. "Save him to be what?"
"He'll live," Arthur had shot back and turned back to the panels, pumping even more radiation into the room to excite the cells in Merlin's blood. Gwen had sent him a terrified, pitying look and threw herself back into securing the rooms. This had to work, Arthur had kept thinking, over and over and feeling young as hell. It would be just enough, it would. And they were beyond medical and biomedical and chemical already, so why not keep pushing?
In the room, in the clearing smoke from the overloading machines and the smashed machines and the burning machines, a large fist had twitched.
Arthur didn't answer Morgana directly, looking at the chair arm and remembering, looking at her. She raised her chin. They were family but they didn't do hugs and tears; the two of them just looked, saw what they found there and rose to it.
"It's too intriguing," Morgana continued with a gentle head jerk to the dining room. "Your father won't - he'll fight its effects, its progeny and its existence - but the military can't leave be. It's surprising they've asked my father, though."
"I know," Arthur answered quietly as Morgana stood, not even mentioning how she wasn't supposed to know about Merlin or the gamma project or the probable nature of the project she hadn't yet officially been asked to join. Morgana was like that; she knew things, the same way her mother had known things, but without the madness that had come with always knowing. "Are you intrigued?" Arthur asked as he pushed up from the chair, closing the books with separate, muted thuds.
"I could have been," Morgana replied, a thin line of hazy, soft edges and purple against the door frame, her hands pressed lightly against the dark wood behind her back, "if only I couldn't see you."
*
The Dragon hadn't logged on the night before, but that had been mostly fine by Merlin. In the wake of the latest failure, he'd run himself to exhaustion and perfected the trick of running along a ledge less than four inches, only falling off four or five times in the process. He was actually looking forward to swinging past his boss's to pick up his envelope, despite it being his day off; he'd bought new Converse off the internet with his boss's credit card, due to be delivered to the construction office.
It was such a fucking cliché, the Cons, but it was the last scrap of a time he couldn't help but consign away as lost, back when Arthur had ripped the piss out of him for liking the Libertines, back when they'd been finishing PhDs early, Merlin wearing neck ties, ever-tightening jeans and a purple iPod, dragging Arthur along to gigs with the tragically hip kids dressed in black. Merlin justified the Cons because the crossword-patterned canvas shoes had a light sole and were as narrow as his feet - perfect for free running and general running away. He'd regret it in the first afternoon rain, but that could wait.
Picking up a package the size of a shoe box, wherein he'd wrapped the test tube in at least three layers more than necessary and nestled that in among styrofoam, Merlin headed out. He had to go to the nearest Post Office before the building site, lest he forget and the Dragon chose to smote him with the opposite of smiley faces.
*
Crawling back into what was still unalterably their house, Arthur had looked at the laptop and considered the effects of the wine before going to bed. It was the worst bit of the charade: pretending that he was helping Merlin out of some obscure sense of scientific duty or because it benefited the anonymous dubious scientist he was pretending to be. Regulating his sentences so as not to give away who wrote them was important had to be approached the way Arthur approached science: methodically, thoroughly and completely. It had been pure tactics to use the name 'Dragon': Merlin always credited him with more good sense than he deserved, therefore Merlin would never think him fool enough to use his actual name or a part of it.
He hadn't always been careful - neither of them had been - but the mess they'd created was teaching Arthur that skill day by day.
He woke up in the house with the mild buzz of a headache he always got after drinking wine. He'd only had the two glasses, but the generals always drank thick, red stuff that he had to swallow twice to get down. Arthur assumed he'd appreciate when he was sixty and had something to compensate for, too.
Hitting the alarm clock with a vicious swipe, he rolled over and fell onto the floor on the other side of the bed. He raised an eyebrow, almost hearing Merlin's absent pun: it'd be something horrible and obvious about getting up on the wrong side of the bed but wickedly delivered. He groaned and pushed himself up onto the palms of his hands to do the first push up of the first hundred.
Exercise, Merlin had never understood, was soothing.
Quickly showering and grabbing a Tracker bar from the fridge, he shrugged on a shirt, a dark pair of jeans and Vans. With only the two classes that morning, he figured he could be in the lab and online by 12.15, if he stopped by the union for a baguette on the way. And those two sets of the same class would either crawl by or fly, he knew; the Intro to Haemoglobin biomed class for freshers was a piss-take, sexily named after the most famousmetalloprotein to pack the students in before ripping the rug from under their poor, fresh feet.
Well, Camelot University did have a reputation to maintain, and they kept it by throwing people in at the deep end. Not quite as up itself as either of the Oxbridges and a hell of a lot further to the right on the political spectrum, it had mostly garnered its weight through military-endorsed scientific and tech research. Arthur and Merlin had ended up working together, thrown in classes by taking a degree combination politely defined as stupid by half the faculty and proving themselves equally brilliant in it.
So much so that military funding had followed them and propelled them into their own lab and the gamma project.
Arthur felt his mood sour, picking up his satchel and coat.
*
"Merlin!"
Merlin turned with a loose smile and a wave, watching his boss make his way across the construction site on the second white-washed villa to get to the midway stage that week. A sign behind Will's head proclaimed that the houses were 'terraced and air conditioned for your convenience,' which would be fair enough in three or four weeks, maybe.
Muttering asides in Spanish as he made his way over, Will clapped him around the neck and began walking in the direction of a still piece of machinery. "Couldn't take a quick look at this before you pick up your packet, could you?"
Will was as English as Merlin, but had made a mint out of the expats in Barcelona. He'd taken to the Spanish sun, the Spanish booze, the Spanish food and the Spanish women with the smile of someone used to being much less rich and much more shy. "What is it?"
Passing him a heavy drill, Will watched as Merlin turned it over in his hands, running a fingertip down the ridge where the plastic sides met and pulling up an edge. Squinting and turning his head with the drill, letting the 11am sun illuminate the wires, Merlin found the problem and winced.
"Let me guess," Will said dryly, "I'm going to need a new one."
Merlin nodded, lifting a screwdriver from a nearby work bench and teasing the wires back into their allotted places. "It'll work for another while now, but I'd replace it soon as you can."
"You know, mate," Will commented as Merlin took a tube of super glue from his back pocket to seal it back up again, "three months you've been helping me with stuff like this. Let me put you on the payroll - you're too smart for day labour."
Merlin stopped, about to reply that it wasn't possible for the second time that month, and sat both the superglue and the drill down. Aarón was standing, sweating pouring from his temples, bracing a tipping wall as people shouted urgently in Spanish even faster than normal. Merlin and Will ran to help along with everyone else within swearing distance, and the wall slowly shuddered back onto stable and upright. Will checked where everyone was and if everyone was all right like a roll call in a Barnsley pub, not a near-fatal site accident, before turning back to Merlin.
"Go on then, trickster," he grinned, making shooing motions, "your girlie shoes and your money are in the office. You look about due a siesta-" Will's eyebrows rose, "long night, eh?"
"Something like," Merlin grinned and nodded, not wanting to explain to this nice man and his neat existence about things like gamma-induced nightmares and half-empty beds. Will knew Merlin was something, Merlin knew, but it was good of the man to keep paying him like a regular cart-horse and not press for an explanation Merlin couldn't give.
*
Arthur walked through the still-warm air of the Camelot campus towards the union, considering whether he should get the turkey or the tuna sandwich. The turkey was always dry, but his normally robust stomach hadn't exactly appreciated the tuna the last time he got it. He could always just get a salad sandwich, if the 65% vegetarian English Lit kids hadn't nicked all of those, coming out of a lecture across the road at ten to twelve.
The laptop moved against his hip in the bag, permanently on standby, as he shifted irritably in the queue, watching his sandwich options dwindle to turkey before his eyes. Once upon a time, Wednesday afternoons had meant kicking various arses at rugby on a muddy field, then home to Merlin laughing at the state of him. Wednesday afternoon sports for Merlin had meant online MMRPGs and Arthur possibly throwing in a casual, you know you like me when I'm dirty, bitch, on his way to the shower. Now it meant marking term essays and class tests while waiting for a blinking cursor to show up.
He'd always known Merlin was going to be a long haul or a marathon, right back before Merlin had known it, right back in their own personal Intro to Haemoglobin piss-take of a class. Arthur had still been a bit of an Etonian prat and his father hadn't known about him being a prat or gay, or no doubt he'd have been sent to Cambridge for a career with MI5 instead, and Merlin was still stammering and shy from being the only gay in the village. Opening the laptop and connecting to the network, cursing Merlin for making him use an IM service that only Merlin and the animated dinosaurs in the Land Before Time would recognise, Arthur settled in to get on with the wait.
*
Brown-wrapped package of new shoes under his arm, backpack with his laptop and the few other things he carried at all times shifting on his back and making him tighten the straps, Merlin narrowly missed dying on the front end of a really shitty hackjob of a car.
Picking himself and the package up, Merlin winced and realised that he'd scraped the heel of his hand on a sharp stone. He swore and reached for the superglue, covering the cut and closing his eyes as it stung like fuck. Then, thinking about how stupid he'd be not to at least check, he began the walk back to the building site. His blood couldn't get out amongst normal people- he'd no idea what it would do to them, how even a small concentration in the blood would show itself as poison. And selfishly, gamma radiation was distinctive: it would flash from hospital to hospital, from database to database, like fire signals along the Great Wall of China and he'd have SWAT teams or the SAS or worse, Uther Pendragon and his extermination squad, on his head.
Will found him staring at the wall they'd propped up that morning.
"Something bugging you, Merlin?"
"No-" Merlin shook his head, putting his hands in the pockets of his three-quarter length shorts. "It was definitely this wall, yeah?"
"Yeah," Will squinted at him. "Why does it matter? Do you think it'll come down again? I had the boys-"
"No, no, don't worry," Merlin smiled softly, running a fingertip down the blood-free wall. "It was something else."
"You're a weird one, you are," Will shook his head and walked away with a crooked grin, "see that you get a rest, mate. You're not getting off easy on my time tomorrow."
Merlin grinned and started off towards his flat in the hills, Converse under his arm, superglue on his hand and having missed the way the boys had turned some of the large, concrete bricks a few times in rebuilding the weak part of the wall. This pointed the bloodstain from Merlin's hand down into the cement, but not before another worker from the hills, Diego, had pressed his own rough palm to the stain.
*
Arthur glared at his phone, vibrating loudly on the table by his side of the bed. And then typically, just as his fingertips brushed its edge, it stopped. Rolling his eyes and groaning, he picked it up to check who thought interrupting his sleep at 3am was a smart plan for long-term survival. Morgana. He didn't sit up. It could be nothing, because God knew she picked her timing for pranks sometimes, but he did stay awake and alert through the next missed call, watching it vibrate on his palm. He got up and activated the laptop by habit because he wasn't going to get back to sleep now, but forgot all about it when the phone rang a third time.
Three missed calls had been their signal since the beginning of time and Nokia 3310s; I can't talk, but it's urgent.
So 'urgent' at thirteen and twenty-eight were (often) totally different things. It didn't stop Arthur tugging on jeans over his boxers, jamming his feet into his Vans and pulling on the nearest tshirt. He signed onto IM, heart beating erratically in his chest and telling himself that he had no reason to presume that Morgana's signal meant anything to do with Merlin. And damn him, for once, he wasn't online.
No reason, and yet when the text just saying 'safe' came through, he shut the lid, bagged the laptop and left the house at a run with the rain cutting his vision into thin horizontal strips and nothing but his jacket and its collar to hold against it.
Morgana met him at the back door, eyes crackling and the lines of her body taut and sharp against the white night gown. "Geoffrey called an hour ago, my father said he'd meet your father and the unit at the airstrip. I don't know where they're going."
Arthur froze on the step before kissing her on the cheek and turning on his heel to go back to the house and do the only thing he could do in the absence of being able to do anything: wreak havoc on his bank accounts via internet banking, continue his endless preparations to go to ground and stay awake until Merlin either came online or Morgana fed him some news. Or email Gwen and ask if she could do a few hacks - she wouldn't be able to get right into his father's department, but she could -
"Arthur," Morgana raised her voice to cut through the rain. Arthur turned and went up the steps again, standing under the slight shelter of the open door. "There's one more thing."
Arthur felt his hair flat against his forehead, the longest strands sharp at the upper edge of his vision. "What is it?"
His voice cracked slightly and he saw Morgana's expression flinch, knowing it had come out as what else can he do?
She pulled the thin gown tighter around her body and looked up into his eyes. "My father asked if you or Gaius were coming with them. I didn't hear Geoffrey's answer, but my father turned the air blue."
Well, that was it then. The one other thing he could do.
The thought crossed his mind and he flattened his back against Morgana's door frame, feeling his fingers and toes go numb and not from the cold.
He felt Morgana tug his wet sleeve and pull him into the kitchen. As she moved in the dim half-lit room, he found it in him to be disgusted by their sheer Britishness, but conceded there really was nothing they could do but drink tea.
*
Merlin trudged up the hill, slower this time thanks to being dragged out to a bar by Will, who seemed to be intent on cultivating him as a social human being or something like it. Merlin could have told him it was a waste of time, but it had been nice to sit at a tacky bamboo-decorated bar with a singular cold beer and someone who had no idea.
He logged on, despite the very small amount of alcohol thrumming in his veins. As nice as it had been to pretend, it had made him sharply aware that normal was one thing he wasn't. The Dragon didn't appear to be online. Merlin had once tried to calculate the other scientist's timezone and approximate location from when he appeared online, but it seemed like the Dragon lived in the same geekzone as the rest of them, the one that canceled out normal sleeping patterns. Either that or s/he deliberately varied their routine to throw him off, but that seemed like paranoia. Merlin switched his view to include offline contacts and sent the Dragon a message anyway.
/Unicorn: Hello.
/Unicorn: You there?
/Unicorn: If we were to meet I'd need more than a PO Box address.
He waited for ten minutes before stowing the laptop in his backpack with a sigh, but then realised that he couldn't sleep for worrying.
The thought of leaving what had become a fairly comfortable shit hole of a flat and what was genuinely a pretty good job for his current mess wasn't easy or comfortable. He had a roll of one thousand Euros in a waterproof black bag concealed at the bottom of the bag, as always, but leaving meant not coming back to the centrifuge or Will or Aarón or Benny, the cashier at the newsagent who sold him Mars Bars for thirty cents.
The pinprick of red light on the wall made the decision for him, Merlin diving out of the bed, grabbing the laptop and the old Cons, all the while slightly amazed that all those years watching action films had paid off and that sniper sighting lights actually looked like they did in the films.
PART TWO
Rating: NC-17 overall, PG-13 this part (language warning throughout)
Pairing: Merlin/Arthur
Word count: ~19,000
Prompt: The Incredible Hulk (2008)
Summary: "You think they're making Merlins," Morgana commented very quietly.
*
{100% encrypting}
/Unicorn: Dragon, you there?
/Dragon: You're still out there.
/Unicorn: Evidently.
/Dragon: ... ... ...
/Unicorn: Sorry. I get. You're spitting fire.
/Dragon: I will let it go. This time.
/Dragon: Did you find it?
/Unicorn: Yes.
/Dragon: Good.
/Dragon: Try a high dose.
/Dragon: On a SAMPLE.
/Unicorn: ... Yes, I'll get right on that. Immediately.
Dragon really did think he was an idiot, whoever s/he was.
And anyway, after the last time, it wasn't like he'd be injecting just any random flower juice into his veins again.
Dr. Merlin Emrys pushed away the memory of lying in a grubby flat in Prague, wishing he could claw his own veins out as the near-change from gamma reactive cells to normal and back ripped through his body. It had almost killed him: if it hadn't sparked the other, more dramatic change in his veins and all the resilience that entailed, it probably would have. And that was where the memory nearly stopped.
Pestle, grind and mix.
Had he not survived, somewhere in the afterlife, eventually Arthur would have tracked him down and kicked his arse for dying of a flower overdose. Possibly with a snide comment about winning an award for Gayest Death Ever.
Listening to the black market centrifuge start to wind down in the background, Merlin shot a single look to the corner of the photograph sticking haphazardly out of a worn backpack beneath the desk. It wasn't even the corner of a photograph; it was the corner of a newspaper clipping and it was barely even a corner, geometrically speaking. Merlin had ripped it hurriedly from a newspaper at one of a French cafe's outside tables eleven months before, the first possession he'd reclaimed after the disaster because it was the one thing he could never really get back.
And what would it do to Arthur's ego to know that thinking about him twice removed, in print and in a language he barely spoke, made the wristwatch monitoring his heart's beats per minute beep at him that bit faster? Things, Merlin decided with a twitch in the corner of his mouth, that he never wanted to see. He liked the world too much to unleash that on it.
/Dragon: Ready?
/Unicorn: Yes? Yes.
/Dragon: What are you waiting for?
Merlin made a face at the screen of the laptop. It ran on Windows Prehistoric, so he could claim oh, shit, sorry. This laptop. It made me hang up on you. But being a child about it wouldn't change the fact that he needed the condescending bastard on the other end.
He pricked the end of his thumb and squeezed a few drops onto the slide, slipping it under the microscope and dropping three drops of the concentrated mix onto the blood. Under the microscope, clear to the eye, were the green cells that caused him to lose clarity of memory and swim the English channel in a short blur.
Merlin watched the green fade into red, attention rapt and staring, his heart rate climbing more rapidly than he should allow.
His breathing stilled, watching in what felt like a slow motion moment as the red blood cells - normal red cells - bumped gently against each other on the slide, oblivious to being a sight and miracle up there with the birth of Jesus Christ himself.
But it started on the cells the way it started on his body - here, there, the pressure building from the inside to push out, out, out and discolour and twist -
Merlin leaned forward with both hands clenching on the edge of the worktop, breathing in fits and spells, feeling the scrape of splinters and trying to listen beyond the white noise for the watch until his BPM fell low enough for it to stop making noises at him.
/Dragon: ?
/Unicorn: Fail.
/Dragon: Up dose.
/Unicorn: Can't.
/Dragon: Over half gone?
/Unicorn: All.
The cursor blinked on the screen for a stretch of breaths as Merlin felt his heart hammer against his ribcage.
/Dragon: Send me a blood sample.
/Unicorn: Will it help.
Merlin cursed years of internet geekery for that one, for giving away his instinctive no, no way in his punctuation.
/Dragon: Yes. Not as much as direct.
*
/Unicorn: Not safe.
In the depths of an obscure computer lab in Camelot University, Arthur Pendragon looked at the words and muttered, "No bloody shit, idiot." Then he typed:
/Dragon: No meeting. Can't help.
It was a rough, callous thing to hold over him - hold over Merlin - but Arthur did it anyway. The conversation stalled but he'd gotten used to that.
He was prepared to let Merlin wallow in wherever the fuck he was for exactly two choruses of a Vampire Weekend song, probably threading both of his bony hands through his ridiculous hair and imagining all the worst calamities that could happen in the life of a radioactive test tube sent via Royal Mail. It'd be endearing, but Arthur had already gone through and back through the ethical, familial dilemma and decided fuck it, it's Merlin. Then he'd signed up to watch several underground fringe science forums online, pouncing on anything that suggested gamma research or the scrawny git. And nothing suggested Merlin like forward-slash-fucking-Unicorn.
/Unicorn: Not. Safe.
That meant, Arthur knew well, that Merlin was considering looking out from under the rock- at least for long enough to get to a bloody post office. And yes, a trip to the post office to pick up the blood sample actually meant a trip to an Edinburgh PO box depot, but Arthur liked the excuse to visit Gwen anyway.
/Dragon: Neither is living with GAMMA poisoning. Stop chasing flowers.
Looking at the line of text, he winced. Sometimes he wondered if Merlin knew who he was talking to already, but Arthur knew he'd have run away to the underside of another virtual rock, fallen in with a bad crowd and possibly gotten himself killed if he'd guessed - all to keep Arthur unreasonably safe and out of it.
*
Merlin stood, flexing his toes over the battered wooden floor, clenching and unclenching his hands, his eyes locked on the screen. Dragging someone else into this could not happen - especially not someone helpful who probably thought Merlin was just some bastard who had played with fire and now couldn't get his dick working again, which was pretty close to the truth if he left most of the truth out, which was only a bit like lying if you'd learned the definition from Arthur.
Glancing at the bottom right of the screen, Merlin swore under his breath. The other part of the day - the part where the pasty pale boy hauled bricks around in the Spanish sun, building kit houses for British ex-pat retired couples to live in - started in exactly forty minutes.
/Unicorn: Watch the post.
*
"'Watch the post?!'" Arthur hissed at the screen, watching Merlin's username vanish from the list of available contacts. Still, he thought, leaning back in the plastic mistake masquerading as a chair, progress.
It was safer for Merlin to stay away from Camelot. It was better for Arthur's general life quality and all that bullshit if he stayed away, but-
Arthur's logical reasoning out of why he was stalking the other man was interrupted by the reason for Merlin's current lifeplan in the first place. Arthur's phone began to shake in his pocket and play whatever the least crappy ringtone that had come pre-installed on the thing had been.
He could have cut his father off in the aftermath of the explosion, but it had taken him two weeks to wake up and by then, his father had dragged Merlin away from his bedside. Bad enough, but he'd tried to take him into 'protective military custody' - which was a polite way of saying that he'd marked Merlin's body property of Queen, country and the shady research division that had been so fucking keen on gamma research in the first place. It had gone as well as trying to chain up a pissed off, twenty-foot, built green badass could go, but Arthur couldn't take any happiness from the mental images of the bodies that he knew Merlin would savage himself over both awake and asleep.
It had seemed smarter to quietly reach out to Merlin, who seemed to be doing his best to crawl away and die or some bollocks like that, and keep his credit cards and money held in trust in case of short-notice, one-way flights. However, he'd started the slow process of transferring said money to accounts his father had no legal or semi-legal access to: the inherited account in his mother's name at Coutts, offshore holdings, current accounts in other names that his father didn't know existed.
"Yes. Dinner at the Feys, of course. Please inform my father I'll attend."
At the end of the terse conversation with his father's assistant's secretary at an office that didn't exist except physically, Arthur disconnected from the university wireless network, shut down the laptop and slipped it into his leather satchel. Standing to stretch out his complaining muscles, he thanked Apple and God, in that order, that macs could be carried everywhere and weighed near-nothing, or else Merlin would owe him a new spine along with everything else.
*
Merlin ran, sweat pouring down his back between the thin t-shirt and the backpack.
Once, Arthur and he had run away for a month of back packing in Brazil, somewhere in the summer between finishing being undergrads and starting learning to be princes (of the universe). It had been the sad, sad result of playing the Queen soundtrack from Flash Gordon the entire night after the classifications had come through to their university emails and drunkenly booking flights to South America, because the two naturally went together, of course, and Merlin had all of that spare money, of course.
Merlin had gasped his way up to the top of steep favelas in the hills of Rio de Janeiro, cursing that Arthur and his sickening athleticism (for a lab rat) had seen too many reruns of that 1980s exercise in travel journalism, Rough Guides, on Sky. He liked the programme well enough, but the knowledge that Magenta Devine had done it all before them hadn't made the arduous climb through Rocinha or Turano any more pleasant.
Running lithe and quick up the hills of the El Parc Tres Turons region of Barcelona, Merlin wondered what his younger self and Arthur would make of him now - they'd been too arrogant, the both of them, wanting everything at their feet when they didn't need to force anything to kneel. With the gamma pounding in his veins like the blood in his temples, he pushed higher and harder on the winding roads. It was a dangerous, vital game, this running. He had to run fast enough to work his improved muscles, now strapped tightly to his body and lean where before he'd just been thin. He couldn't work too hard, preferring to keep his heart in the safe but profitable range somewhere between 150 and 170 beats per minute, or else he'd fall from the hillside in a green blur and take the houses with him. They'd fold beneath him like the floors of that cheap hotel in Prague.
His body had to be in perfect condition, had to be ready. It wasn't the usual reason for learning fitness and fighting, running away, but it was better than staying in a fight he could only win by inflicting catastrophic, undiscerning damage on a city he liked well enough to be trying to learn bits and pieces of Spanish and Catalan.
There were shouts, some of them familiar, asking how the crazy English man was, some of them pissed off because Merlin had just planted a foot on their railing to scale a roof to leap a wall, but they faded into the humming white noise with every heartbeat.
*
"Yes, Morgana, do steal some," Arthur drawled, gesturing to his plate and Morgana's fork mining it for roasted treasures. "I wasn't planning on eating that honeyed parsnip at all."
His father smiled indulgently from next to Morgana before turning back to General Fey, Morgana's father.
After dinner, Morgana found him in the well-stocked library they'd played in as children, sitting in the chair he'd curled up in with books too heavy to hold up.
"Always Doré illustrations for you," Morgana murmured into his shoulder, body braced against the back of the green leather chair and leaning half over it. Arthur wondered if her bare feet were even on the ground. "I wonder what that suggests."
Arthur turned the pages of the illustrated Paradise Lost and smiled softly. "Are you going to psycho-analyse me, Morgana? Bringing your work home?"
"Father's asked me to take a job in his department - he says he needs someone to assess the psychological suitability of candidates," Morgana continued in a very low voice, tracing a finger down the edge of a mounted plate before making a small noise and moving away to a shelf. Arthur remained, staring at the winged creature among the clouds in the book but seeing the end of the before and the beginning of the end again.
It started with a wink, as a lot of nasty stories do. Strapped to a chair, about to be bombarded with gamma radiation, Merlin, the bastard, winked and it was all Arthur could do to stay on his side of the glass. They'd come up with the theory together, Arthur's father had jumped on it and called in military favours with promises of super-soldiers.
The argument for which of them would sit there in the first live test had been brutal, fierce and possibly an absolute singularity in space and time: Merlin and his father against Arthur. Arthur's argument that he looked more like Captain America than Merlin had gotten a twitch of a grin and a hand on his arm from the other man followed by a heated glare from his father.
And then-
"Try this," Morgana sat a book on top of Arthur's, blotting out Lucifer falling from tyrannical grace with delicate pictures of faeryland and goblins.
"Rackham," Arthur nodded, eyes following the sweeping curves and smooth turns in the illustration, "it suits you better. You're never so heavy as Doré." He turned as much as he could with two folio-sized books on his knees. "Don't take the job, Morgana."
"Why not?" Morgana turned her head as she turned the page over his shoulder, one light wrist resting on his collarbone. Something in Arthur seized up, looking around the sanctuary of his childhood in her library and unable to shift the taint on the room from his vision. "There isn't much beyond the military and the university in Camelot anymore, Arthur."
"There are things that-" Arthur let out an explosive breath, feeling the soft weight of her hand on his shoulder when he faltered, "-things that human bodies and human souls can't take, Morgana. I've known you since we were children. Don't be the one to sign this."
Morgana made a noise that sounded like agreement but could have been anything as Arthur processed what she had told him. She was like a creature in Rackham's lily ponds, light and spun of something beyond them but near in colour to all the shades of violet at once. If the weight of Merlin's breaking, the experiment and the result couldn't be held between his larger, solid shoulders, something instinctual cried out in Arthur to keep his sometimes-sister from it.
Arthur had dragged his eyes from Merlin's seizing body, seizing torso, jerking hips and wildly shaking head. He had forced himself to look away from the monitors, some of them reading beyond what was considered within the wide remits of medical possibility.
Whatever thread had been keeping him thinking rationally and objectively had snapped when the heart monitor read zero beats per minute, when the body that should not have been Merlin's paused, halted and slumped over the edges of the chair it had been dwarfed by minutes before.
He had had seconds- less than. Hands flying across panels, calculating levels, he had switched the gamma radiation off before looking to his father, frozen in shock. They'd never predicted this.
"You think they're making Merlins," Morgana commented very quietly, in a still manner that suggested ripples of outrage in the depths. She never was one for mincing her words, with an absolute conviction in what she saw in people and their probable actions. Coming to kneel beside him, her head on his knee and her hand over his ankle, she apologised with a glance and amended, "you think they'll do to others what happened to our Merlin."
Arthur nodded curtly. "Your father saw me, saw my father after- ...after."
Morgana raised her head, leaning her cheek against his knee and keeping her eyes on his, taking in the rise and fall of Arthur's voice as he almost said something else and didn't. "It was very bad, wasn't it?"
Arthur had had no idea what he was doing and it scared him shitless.
The thought had crossed his mind idly while his hands worked the panels, pushing lab assistants out of the way and calling to Gwen to try to get computers active in the clean room.
His father had stood by his shoulder, looking over it uncomprehendingly the way he always did.
"What-"
"Merlin is dying," Arthur had cut in forcefully.
"Shock him?"
About to retort that his father's weekly worship at the altar of House MD didn't help right then, Arthur had frozen before calling out instructions to Gwen.
"No one can go in there, sir," a small, timid voice had explained to General Pendragon behind his back. "The gamma radiation-"
"-will save Merlin," Arthur had interrupted, steel lining his voice and deflecting the sixty million objections raised in the following five seconds.
All except Gwen, who had grabbed both of his arms and turned him to face her. "Save him to be what?"
"He'll live," Arthur had shot back and turned back to the panels, pumping even more radiation into the room to excite the cells in Merlin's blood. Gwen had sent him a terrified, pitying look and threw herself back into securing the rooms. This had to work, Arthur had kept thinking, over and over and feeling young as hell. It would be just enough, it would. And they were beyond medical and biomedical and chemical already, so why not keep pushing?
In the room, in the clearing smoke from the overloading machines and the smashed machines and the burning machines, a large fist had twitched.
Arthur didn't answer Morgana directly, looking at the chair arm and remembering, looking at her. She raised her chin. They were family but they didn't do hugs and tears; the two of them just looked, saw what they found there and rose to it.
"It's too intriguing," Morgana continued with a gentle head jerk to the dining room. "Your father won't - he'll fight its effects, its progeny and its existence - but the military can't leave be. It's surprising they've asked my father, though."
"I know," Arthur answered quietly as Morgana stood, not even mentioning how she wasn't supposed to know about Merlin or the gamma project or the probable nature of the project she hadn't yet officially been asked to join. Morgana was like that; she knew things, the same way her mother had known things, but without the madness that had come with always knowing. "Are you intrigued?" Arthur asked as he pushed up from the chair, closing the books with separate, muted thuds.
"I could have been," Morgana replied, a thin line of hazy, soft edges and purple against the door frame, her hands pressed lightly against the dark wood behind her back, "if only I couldn't see you."
*
The Dragon hadn't logged on the night before, but that had been mostly fine by Merlin. In the wake of the latest failure, he'd run himself to exhaustion and perfected the trick of running along a ledge less than four inches, only falling off four or five times in the process. He was actually looking forward to swinging past his boss's to pick up his envelope, despite it being his day off; he'd bought new Converse off the internet with his boss's credit card, due to be delivered to the construction office.
It was such a fucking cliché, the Cons, but it was the last scrap of a time he couldn't help but consign away as lost, back when Arthur had ripped the piss out of him for liking the Libertines, back when they'd been finishing PhDs early, Merlin wearing neck ties, ever-tightening jeans and a purple iPod, dragging Arthur along to gigs with the tragically hip kids dressed in black. Merlin justified the Cons because the crossword-patterned canvas shoes had a light sole and were as narrow as his feet - perfect for free running and general running away. He'd regret it in the first afternoon rain, but that could wait.
Picking up a package the size of a shoe box, wherein he'd wrapped the test tube in at least three layers more than necessary and nestled that in among styrofoam, Merlin headed out. He had to go to the nearest Post Office before the building site, lest he forget and the Dragon chose to smote him with the opposite of smiley faces.
*
Crawling back into what was still unalterably their house, Arthur had looked at the laptop and considered the effects of the wine before going to bed. It was the worst bit of the charade: pretending that he was helping Merlin out of some obscure sense of scientific duty or because it benefited the anonymous dubious scientist he was pretending to be. Regulating his sentences so as not to give away who wrote them was important had to be approached the way Arthur approached science: methodically, thoroughly and completely. It had been pure tactics to use the name 'Dragon': Merlin always credited him with more good sense than he deserved, therefore Merlin would never think him fool enough to use his actual name or a part of it.
He hadn't always been careful - neither of them had been - but the mess they'd created was teaching Arthur that skill day by day.
He woke up in the house with the mild buzz of a headache he always got after drinking wine. He'd only had the two glasses, but the generals always drank thick, red stuff that he had to swallow twice to get down. Arthur assumed he'd appreciate when he was sixty and had something to compensate for, too.
Hitting the alarm clock with a vicious swipe, he rolled over and fell onto the floor on the other side of the bed. He raised an eyebrow, almost hearing Merlin's absent pun: it'd be something horrible and obvious about getting up on the wrong side of the bed but wickedly delivered. He groaned and pushed himself up onto the palms of his hands to do the first push up of the first hundred.
Exercise, Merlin had never understood, was soothing.
Quickly showering and grabbing a Tracker bar from the fridge, he shrugged on a shirt, a dark pair of jeans and Vans. With only the two classes that morning, he figured he could be in the lab and online by 12.15, if he stopped by the union for a baguette on the way. And those two sets of the same class would either crawl by or fly, he knew; the Intro to Haemoglobin biomed class for freshers was a piss-take, sexily named after the most famousmetalloprotein to pack the students in before ripping the rug from under their poor, fresh feet.
Well, Camelot University did have a reputation to maintain, and they kept it by throwing people in at the deep end. Not quite as up itself as either of the Oxbridges and a hell of a lot further to the right on the political spectrum, it had mostly garnered its weight through military-endorsed scientific and tech research. Arthur and Merlin had ended up working together, thrown in classes by taking a degree combination politely defined as stupid by half the faculty and proving themselves equally brilliant in it.
So much so that military funding had followed them and propelled them into their own lab and the gamma project.
Arthur felt his mood sour, picking up his satchel and coat.
*
"Merlin!"
Merlin turned with a loose smile and a wave, watching his boss make his way across the construction site on the second white-washed villa to get to the midway stage that week. A sign behind Will's head proclaimed that the houses were 'terraced and air conditioned for your convenience,' which would be fair enough in three or four weeks, maybe.
Muttering asides in Spanish as he made his way over, Will clapped him around the neck and began walking in the direction of a still piece of machinery. "Couldn't take a quick look at this before you pick up your packet, could you?"
Will was as English as Merlin, but had made a mint out of the expats in Barcelona. He'd taken to the Spanish sun, the Spanish booze, the Spanish food and the Spanish women with the smile of someone used to being much less rich and much more shy. "What is it?"
Passing him a heavy drill, Will watched as Merlin turned it over in his hands, running a fingertip down the ridge where the plastic sides met and pulling up an edge. Squinting and turning his head with the drill, letting the 11am sun illuminate the wires, Merlin found the problem and winced.
"Let me guess," Will said dryly, "I'm going to need a new one."
Merlin nodded, lifting a screwdriver from a nearby work bench and teasing the wires back into their allotted places. "It'll work for another while now, but I'd replace it soon as you can."
"You know, mate," Will commented as Merlin took a tube of super glue from his back pocket to seal it back up again, "three months you've been helping me with stuff like this. Let me put you on the payroll - you're too smart for day labour."
Merlin stopped, about to reply that it wasn't possible for the second time that month, and sat both the superglue and the drill down. Aarón was standing, sweating pouring from his temples, bracing a tipping wall as people shouted urgently in Spanish even faster than normal. Merlin and Will ran to help along with everyone else within swearing distance, and the wall slowly shuddered back onto stable and upright. Will checked where everyone was and if everyone was all right like a roll call in a Barnsley pub, not a near-fatal site accident, before turning back to Merlin.
"Go on then, trickster," he grinned, making shooing motions, "your girlie shoes and your money are in the office. You look about due a siesta-" Will's eyebrows rose, "long night, eh?"
"Something like," Merlin grinned and nodded, not wanting to explain to this nice man and his neat existence about things like gamma-induced nightmares and half-empty beds. Will knew Merlin was something, Merlin knew, but it was good of the man to keep paying him like a regular cart-horse and not press for an explanation Merlin couldn't give.
*
Arthur walked through the still-warm air of the Camelot campus towards the union, considering whether he should get the turkey or the tuna sandwich. The turkey was always dry, but his normally robust stomach hadn't exactly appreciated the tuna the last time he got it. He could always just get a salad sandwich, if the 65% vegetarian English Lit kids hadn't nicked all of those, coming out of a lecture across the road at ten to twelve.
The laptop moved against his hip in the bag, permanently on standby, as he shifted irritably in the queue, watching his sandwich options dwindle to turkey before his eyes. Once upon a time, Wednesday afternoons had meant kicking various arses at rugby on a muddy field, then home to Merlin laughing at the state of him. Wednesday afternoon sports for Merlin had meant online MMRPGs and Arthur possibly throwing in a casual, you know you like me when I'm dirty, bitch, on his way to the shower. Now it meant marking term essays and class tests while waiting for a blinking cursor to show up.
He'd always known Merlin was going to be a long haul or a marathon, right back before Merlin had known it, right back in their own personal Intro to Haemoglobin piss-take of a class. Arthur had still been a bit of an Etonian prat and his father hadn't known about him being a prat or gay, or no doubt he'd have been sent to Cambridge for a career with MI5 instead, and Merlin was still stammering and shy from being the only gay in the village. Opening the laptop and connecting to the network, cursing Merlin for making him use an IM service that only Merlin and the animated dinosaurs in the Land Before Time would recognise, Arthur settled in to get on with the wait.
*
Brown-wrapped package of new shoes under his arm, backpack with his laptop and the few other things he carried at all times shifting on his back and making him tighten the straps, Merlin narrowly missed dying on the front end of a really shitty hackjob of a car.
Picking himself and the package up, Merlin winced and realised that he'd scraped the heel of his hand on a sharp stone. He swore and reached for the superglue, covering the cut and closing his eyes as it stung like fuck. Then, thinking about how stupid he'd be not to at least check, he began the walk back to the building site. His blood couldn't get out amongst normal people- he'd no idea what it would do to them, how even a small concentration in the blood would show itself as poison. And selfishly, gamma radiation was distinctive: it would flash from hospital to hospital, from database to database, like fire signals along the Great Wall of China and he'd have SWAT teams or the SAS or worse, Uther Pendragon and his extermination squad, on his head.
Will found him staring at the wall they'd propped up that morning.
"Something bugging you, Merlin?"
"No-" Merlin shook his head, putting his hands in the pockets of his three-quarter length shorts. "It was definitely this wall, yeah?"
"Yeah," Will squinted at him. "Why does it matter? Do you think it'll come down again? I had the boys-"
"No, no, don't worry," Merlin smiled softly, running a fingertip down the blood-free wall. "It was something else."
"You're a weird one, you are," Will shook his head and walked away with a crooked grin, "see that you get a rest, mate. You're not getting off easy on my time tomorrow."
Merlin grinned and started off towards his flat in the hills, Converse under his arm, superglue on his hand and having missed the way the boys had turned some of the large, concrete bricks a few times in rebuilding the weak part of the wall. This pointed the bloodstain from Merlin's hand down into the cement, but not before another worker from the hills, Diego, had pressed his own rough palm to the stain.
*
Arthur glared at his phone, vibrating loudly on the table by his side of the bed. And then typically, just as his fingertips brushed its edge, it stopped. Rolling his eyes and groaning, he picked it up to check who thought interrupting his sleep at 3am was a smart plan for long-term survival. Morgana. He didn't sit up. It could be nothing, because God knew she picked her timing for pranks sometimes, but he did stay awake and alert through the next missed call, watching it vibrate on his palm. He got up and activated the laptop by habit because he wasn't going to get back to sleep now, but forgot all about it when the phone rang a third time.
Three missed calls had been their signal since the beginning of time and Nokia 3310s; I can't talk, but it's urgent.
So 'urgent' at thirteen and twenty-eight were (often) totally different things. It didn't stop Arthur tugging on jeans over his boxers, jamming his feet into his Vans and pulling on the nearest tshirt. He signed onto IM, heart beating erratically in his chest and telling himself that he had no reason to presume that Morgana's signal meant anything to do with Merlin. And damn him, for once, he wasn't online.
No reason, and yet when the text just saying 'safe' came through, he shut the lid, bagged the laptop and left the house at a run with the rain cutting his vision into thin horizontal strips and nothing but his jacket and its collar to hold against it.
Morgana met him at the back door, eyes crackling and the lines of her body taut and sharp against the white night gown. "Geoffrey called an hour ago, my father said he'd meet your father and the unit at the airstrip. I don't know where they're going."
Arthur froze on the step before kissing her on the cheek and turning on his heel to go back to the house and do the only thing he could do in the absence of being able to do anything: wreak havoc on his bank accounts via internet banking, continue his endless preparations to go to ground and stay awake until Merlin either came online or Morgana fed him some news. Or email Gwen and ask if she could do a few hacks - she wouldn't be able to get right into his father's department, but she could -
"Arthur," Morgana raised her voice to cut through the rain. Arthur turned and went up the steps again, standing under the slight shelter of the open door. "There's one more thing."
Arthur felt his hair flat against his forehead, the longest strands sharp at the upper edge of his vision. "What is it?"
His voice cracked slightly and he saw Morgana's expression flinch, knowing it had come out as what else can he do?
She pulled the thin gown tighter around her body and looked up into his eyes. "My father asked if you or Gaius were coming with them. I didn't hear Geoffrey's answer, but my father turned the air blue."
Well, that was it then. The one other thing he could do.
The thought crossed his mind and he flattened his back against Morgana's door frame, feeling his fingers and toes go numb and not from the cold.
He felt Morgana tug his wet sleeve and pull him into the kitchen. As she moved in the dim half-lit room, he found it in him to be disgusted by their sheer Britishness, but conceded there really was nothing they could do but drink tea.
*
Merlin trudged up the hill, slower this time thanks to being dragged out to a bar by Will, who seemed to be intent on cultivating him as a social human being or something like it. Merlin could have told him it was a waste of time, but it had been nice to sit at a tacky bamboo-decorated bar with a singular cold beer and someone who had no idea.
He logged on, despite the very small amount of alcohol thrumming in his veins. As nice as it had been to pretend, it had made him sharply aware that normal was one thing he wasn't. The Dragon didn't appear to be online. Merlin had once tried to calculate the other scientist's timezone and approximate location from when he appeared online, but it seemed like the Dragon lived in the same geekzone as the rest of them, the one that canceled out normal sleeping patterns. Either that or s/he deliberately varied their routine to throw him off, but that seemed like paranoia. Merlin switched his view to include offline contacts and sent the Dragon a message anyway.
/Unicorn: Hello.
/Unicorn: You there?
/Unicorn: If we were to meet I'd need more than a PO Box address.
He waited for ten minutes before stowing the laptop in his backpack with a sigh, but then realised that he couldn't sleep for worrying.
The thought of leaving what had become a fairly comfortable shit hole of a flat and what was genuinely a pretty good job for his current mess wasn't easy or comfortable. He had a roll of one thousand Euros in a waterproof black bag concealed at the bottom of the bag, as always, but leaving meant not coming back to the centrifuge or Will or Aarón or Benny, the cashier at the newsagent who sold him Mars Bars for thirty cents.
The pinprick of red light on the wall made the decision for him, Merlin diving out of the bed, grabbing the laptop and the old Cons, all the while slightly amazed that all those years watching action films had paid off and that sniper sighting lights actually looked like they did in the films.
PART TWO