fic: Home is home, though it be homely (1/2)
Title: Home is home, though it be homely (1/2)
Author: nyargles
Pairings/characters: Arthur/Merlin, Gwen/Lancelot, minor hint of Morgana/Leon, mentions of other characters
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 20k
Warnings: Mentions of drug abuse, buckets of angst
Summary: We follow Merlin's journey as he turns homeless for a while after a bad flatmate experience. After a while of camping out with various friends, he eventually ends up living with Morgana and her housemates. Featuring pimp!Arthur, stripper!Morgana, addict!Gwen and dealer!Lancelot. How does normal average Merlin even start trying to fit in here?
Author's notes: Thanks to Sirell for the VERY LAST MINUTE beta job - all mistakes are purely my own, sorry! Thanks to binglejells for getting me to withdraw out of my little shell and involve other people. Lots of SQUEE!THANKS to pianeko for the art (AMG *___*)! And also a sorry for being utter fail with the lack of internet and communication. And finally, lots and lots of thanks and apologies to the_muppet who was ever so patient with me for being such a fail!participant. ;___; This fic is dedicated to bedofpearls, because she likes this sort of thing. Please enjoy!
Art link: Gorgeous art that I can't keep my hands off all here by Pianeko
Disclaimer: Not mine, wah! D:
-
As Merlin moved the last of his things out of the flat, he paused next to Edwin, wondering what sort of goodbye he should say to this man. He'd lived with Edwin for almost a year now, and it had been an emotional rollercoaster. It had been a disappointing rollercoaster at that, with far more downs than ups. They had started out fine, with similar tastes in many things. Edwin had been a history student like him, and they had got along well. There had even been some mutual attraction on both of their parts. Merlin settled for a small wave, and a half-hearted: "See you around."
Merlin hoped that didn't sound too fake, because he never really wanted to see Edwin again, and Edwin no doubt knew this. In return, Merlin got a small nod, and he sighed. Carrying two rucksacks, a suitcase and a box by himself onto the bus, Merlin cast one last look at the little flat he'd loved when he'd moved into it. It had been cosy, but spacious enough that they hadn't been tripping over each other all the time.
Edwin had been neat enough, and generally washed up after himself. Everything in the flat worked, apart from the kitchen window, which never closed. Merlin found himself sighing and looking after Edwin, who was getting a train to whoever he was staying with now. Maybe they could make it work, get another flat in the same price range, and... Merlin shook his head. He couldn't go over all the stress and guilt he'd suffered the last few months all over again.
This was his fourth bus journey over to Gaius', which was the last of his trips, and Merlin panted as he finally stood in Gaius' small flat, sweating from the exertion. He looked at the jumble of belongings that defined his life now, and slumped onto the sofa. He would think about it all later.
Right now, Merlin just wanted to relax, and not get angry at the last three months where he'd paid more than his fair share of the rent for Edwin because he hadn't scraped together the money despite having a steady job as a nurse, and the very last month, where Merlin both hadn't enough money to cover Edwin's excess, which had got more and more each month, and hadn't had the patience to do it. The result had been that they'd been evicted for being unable to come up with the rent. Merlin had been angry and annoyed, but part of him was also relieved that he wouldn't have to live with Edwin anymore.
His new problem was, of course, that he didn't have anywhere to live after that.
-
"I'm so sorry!" Merlin yelped as he narrowly escaped being conked on the head by Gaius' elbow and instead smacked his head into the arm of the sofa instead as he straightened up from his crawl. Rubbing the top of his head and ruefully shrugging at Gaius' bemused expression, Merlin staggered upright to flop onto the sofa. There was, he surmised, nowhere else in the entire room that was safe. He clutched his laptop to him and stroked it soothingly, telling it what a good laptop it was and how he wouldn't hit it if it would just turn on and stay connected to Gaius' broadband for more than two minutes.
When Gaius had offered Merlin somewhere to stay temporarily as he searched for new lodgings with the warning that his flat was small and cramped, Merlin had only been grateful for the prospect of a real room and not questioned the spacing issues. He had known that Gaius worked from home, concocting various herbal remedies to soothe mild ailments. He just hadn't quite realised that in a one bedroom flat, said concocting all happened in the living room, the sofa of which happened to be Merlin's temporary lodging. He hadn't yet managed to go a single day without knocking over a packet of dried leaves, a jar of powdered root or some pickled tubers of some form.
Merlin had only been rooting around on the floor looking for that elusive extension lead so that he could plug in his laptop and had nearly upended an entire table. Finally, he managed to coax the thing to life. "Yessss! Well done, good Kilgarrah!" Merlin beamed, logging onto his email and hoping that there were some replies from that flatshare website he'd checked out a few days ago. He scrolled through them, frowning as one told him that the place had been taken, another that the space wouldn't be free for another couple of months and the last that they were really hoping to flatshare with a girl.
Sighing, Merlin prepared to go back to the website and dig out some more rooms, preferably cheap and not sharing with weird people who wanted to be his daddy. About to send off more emails, he absently dug his phone out from where it was wailing inside his pocket. "Yes, Will?" Merlin never bothered saying 'hello' to Will.
-
"It's not that bad," Will slung an arm around Merlin's shoulders as Merlin tried to forget last night. "She was really hot. She even asked me if you wanted to join in." Merlin gagged a little at the idea of having a threesome with his best friend.
Merlin shook Will's arm off. "Yeah, she was really hot. That wasn't really the problem, you know," he said, "It's more that the idea of hearing someone I consider my brother having wild, massively noisy sex is really disturbing." He shuddered, remembering how he had spent the night with his head buried under the sofa cushion attempting to drown out the sound.
Will grinned and put his arm right back where it had been, ignoring Merlin's discomfort as he steered them both to the kitchen for lunch. "It's really not that bad," he repeated.
"The next time you're trying to sleep," Merlin said, "I'm going to wank off really loudly." The smile on Will's face wilted and his arm dropped back to his side as disgust started to seep into the curve of his lips. "See?!" Merlin pointed at his face as if that proved his entire point.
Merlin picked up his mug of tea. He sighed, and shook his head. "I'm sorry, Will. I'm really glad you're letting me crash with you for a while. I'll try and get out of your hair soon, promise."
Ruffling his hair, Will smiled at him. "No problems, mate. You know you can stay here as long as you need to, and you'll find somewhere of your own soon, Merlin." Merlin hoped that he would too. This had been the third girl so far, and he'd only been camped out here for two weeks.
-
Merlin buried his head in his hands, trying to let the tension flow out of his body. He finally had somewhere with a room of his own, and Merlin had thought that he could live with anyone after having to beg off his friends. He heard his name being yelled from outside his room, and winced. When the room had opened up, Merlin had snatched up the offer from Nimueh, who had merely said that the last person who lived there had mysteriously disappeared.
Barely days into the arrangement, Merlin realised that Nimueh didn't really consider him a flatmate, but rather a lodger in her property. On top of giving Merlin a very extensive set of rules, which included being home by ten and leaving the toilet seats down, she would also nicely ask him to go food shopping or dust the house, not afraid to bring up that she paid more rent than him and that most of the appliances he used in the house were hers if he complained. Merlin looked up from his hands to check that his door was locked, and slumped over on the bed. He tiredly reached for the laptop, wondering if any rooms had become free since the last time he had checked an hour ago.
Nimueh pounded on his door, and Merlin pretended that he wasn't in, although how his door was bolted if he wasn't in was beyond him. She yelled somehow about there not being enough tomatoes in the fridge, and Merlin made a face at her. He had somehow been conned into buying all of the food for the house, since she would simply nick his things, so he deliberately didn't buy tomatoes. He was allergic anyway, so why would he buy them especially for her? Merlin wondered for how much longer he could avoid her.
It had been months since Merlin had moved out his shared flat with Edwin, and it was getting ridiculous. He opened up google wearily and typed in his search, sighing as he saw almost the entire first page of links in purple, showing that he'd visited them all before. He was loathe to ask any of his friends for help, not wanting to burden them: he'd only even stayed with Gaius and Will because they had offered first.
His phone rang. Merlin scooped it up to his ear. "Hello?"
"Merlin?" Morgana's voice came through on the other end. "Do you still need a place to stay?" Merlin sat up abruptly, wondering how Morgana had heard. Then he remembered: Morgana had always got on well with Will, and they still kept in touch as far as he knew, which meant that will occasionally texted Morgana asking if she wanted to have sex with him and would reply rejecting him.
He and Morgana had met at university and were good friends, even though they hadn't ever spent that much time hanging out. Morgana had always been busy in the evenings working. When he had found out she was picking up shifts as a stripper in a classy club, Merlin hadn't known what to say, but he had stepped back that it didn't make Morgana any less friendly, scary or self-assured than before, so he had gone to visit her club once in support, and then stopped badgering her to come out with them at night.
"Erm, yes?" Merlin rubbed at his forehead. Morgana had always seemed nice; she treated him well and genuinely seemed to care when she asked about his day. She seemed like she would be nice, or at the very least, reasonable to live with. "Do you have somewhere?"
Morgana hesitated before answering him. "Maybe. It's probably not exactly what you're looking for." Her tone was mysterious, but Merlin ignored it. He had a headache from Nimueh's yelling, and he was terrified that she would pounce on him the moment he stepped out of his room. He wasn't looking forward to needing the loo.
With a wan smile, Merlin answered, "I'm looking for anything at all at the moment, really. How soon can I move in?" 'Can it be today?' he added in his head.
-
The house looked like the sort of thing that would make a very good Haunted House setting. It must have once been grand, with its multitude of rooms, but weather and time had battered it until the paint was an off-white, cracked and peeling from the walls. There was moss and mould growing near the bottom and there was a large dent in the front door where it looked like someone had perhaps tried to kick it in. The only indication of the house number was the different paint colour, the actual metal numbers that had once protected that patch of paint long gone. The door handle was rusty and the windows hadn't been washed in about a decade. "Welcome home," Morgana smiled.
As they stepped inside, Merlin half expected the house to start collapsing around them. He could hear the ceiling creaking as someone walked across the floor above, and there were missing rails from the banister. It was impossible to tell what colour the carpet had been, because it was a patchy grey now, and dust gathered at the walls where no one had bothered to clean properly. Merlin tried to think about it, and realised that really, it wasn't worse than some student flats he had been perfectly happy in. It just wasn't the sort of thing he expected real, grown-up adults to live in.
"Arthur, fresh meat!" Morgana called from the hallway, where she was busy changing out of her deadly stilettos into a pair of large fluffy bunny slippers that had seen better days. The stilettos were tossed casually onto a large bookshelf by the door that seemed to be used as a shoe rack.
"Morgana, you have got to stop bringing strays home." The voice came from inside the kitchen, and Merlin peered around the doorway to see who was speaking. A tall blond man was leaning against the kitchen counter, smoking, evidently the one who had just spoken. Around the table was another man, counting an extraordinary amount of money. Merlin frowned and eyed him up and down; the blond man did the same to him. Merlin thought that he looked completely out of place. His shirt was a crisp white with thin grey pinstripes, his trousers were impeccably ironed and his shoes blacked and polished. "He looks a bit cleaner than the rest at least," Arthur remarked. "New to the scene?"
Morgana dumped her bag onto the kitchen table, and smacked the man on the arm. "Honestly, Arthur, he's not a stray. He just needs somewhere to stay for a bit. Don't listen to him, Merlin." She padded over to the cupboards, reaching inside one that had lost its door to fish out two mugs. Merlin found that he was surprised that they were clean. "Tea, Merlin?"
"Please," Merlin shuffled uneasily into the room trying to get his bearings, before stepping forward to put the kettle on. He could at least figure that out. Morgana pointed to the water filter, and Merlin poured out enough water for the two of them. "New to what scene?" He waited for the water to boil.
"Really, Arthur, not everyone does drugs." Morgana came to lean on the counter next to Merlin, looping an arm around his shoulders. "I met Merlin at uni. He's just looking for a flatshare. Merlin, this is Arthur Pendragon. He's the landlord on this place, I suppose. No one knows if he actually owns it, but he's the one who takes rent on it so it's good enough." She also pointed at the man at the table. "And that's Lancelot, no first name. If you need a pick-me-up, he's your man. You get a house discount for living here."
Lancelot looked up from his money-counting, and waved. Merlin found himself awkwardly waving back. "Wha-what?" Merlin wasn't dumb. He knew what Morgana meant. It was just that Lancelot was clean-shaven, and wearing a clean shirt, and didn't look remotely out of his mind. In university, Merlin's brief encounters with people who sold drugs were generally sporting a bit of stubble, looked slightly crazy and only had three moods: wanting to get high, high and on a come-down. To be fair, he hadn't had many encounters with drug dealers, but they certainly weren't like this man. "You don't look like a drug dealer," he blurted before looking down at the dirty kitchen floor. "I mean, I don't really do that anymore, Morgana." He blushed; he'd smoked weed a few times, and had decided that he didn't really need the rest of the experience.
Lancelot laughed easily. "I don't take any of my own stuff. It's purely a business venture." Merlin nodded as if he understood.
"Very admirable," Arthur said, still looking at Merlin with his arms crossed as if he was evaluating him. Merlin supposed that was what potential landlords did, even if they were in charge of somewhere as unconventional as this. "I hope you don't mind sharing rooms, Merlin." He switched to speaking to Morgana abruptly, and Merlin busied himself with the hot water so that he didn't have to watch Arthur watching him. "He can bunk wiiiith..."
Morgana tossed a glance at Merlin, before suggesting, "Leon?" Arthur considered it, and then nodded curtly. "Leon is your best bet for staying sane," Morgana informed Merlin. "There are eight bedrooms in here, and eleven of us living here. I share with Gwen, and Sophia and Vivian share a room," Morgana was ticking off the rooms on her fingers. Merlin stared; houses big enough to need to have the rooms ticked off on fingers shouldn't be allowed to still exist. "Gareth and Gawain have that big attic room. And then Arthur, Lancelot, Owain, Tristan and Leon are all on their own at the moment."
Merlin sipped his tea, wondering if there was anything stronger for his nerves before remembering that he was standing in front of a drug dealer. He shivered: he'd stick with tea. Morgana carried on, rattling the names off easily. "Tristan snores like a train and is grumpy to the point of violent in the mornings. Owain occasionally wets the bed and will most likely try to share a bed with you once his is wet. Lancelot got the room with the bathroom attached because he needed a lab. So Leon's your best bet."
"Right," Merlin said faintly. He did notice that Morgana had missed Arthur off the list though. He glanced quizzically at Arthur, realising that the guy who ran this place would probably not want to share his room. "Anything else I should know?"
"Yes, I highly recommend not trying to get into my room," Lancelot looked up and smiled at Merlin, a friendly welcoming smile that both reassured Merlin and made him more bewildered about his entire house. "It's booby-trapped in case the others try to get in for drugs. That's rent, Arthur." He handed a thick wad of bills, mixed tenners and fivers, to Arthur.
Arthur took it, stuffing the entire wad into his pocket, having counted it at the same time as Lancelot. "Not much else. Rent's cheap because nothing in this dump works. Don't flush the loo before you shower, or you won't get hot water for five minutes after that. The radiator knobs work the opposite way around to the way the knob says. That's the only socket that works in the kitchen," he pointed to the one the kettle was plugged into at the moment, "don't use the top oven because it doesn't turn off so you'll leak gas, don't try to sleep with my people unless you're paying for it, and don't bring tricks home. I think that's probably about it."
"Right," Merlin repeated, giving the oven nervous looks as if it would combust at any moment. When Merlin finally recovered enough to make his way out of the kitchen, Morgana showed him the way upstairs. "His... people?" The realisation was probably there at the back of his mind, but vocalising it was something quite different.
"His people," Morgana said, squeezing him around the shoulder comfortingly. "Arthur pimps everyone in the house apart from me and Lancelot. We're the only two who have other jobs. You'll get used to it," she added kindly. Merlin mouthed a silent acceptance, and concentrated on picking up the largest suitcase before realising that Arthur had assumed that he was a prostitute too.
Dropping the suitcase, Merlin barged back into the kitchen. "Tricks?" He scowled at Arthur. "I don't do that." Arthur merely blinked at him, and nodded, not really interested. Merlin felt a bit foolish at that, and bustled back out again. Behind him, he heard Arthur rasp a crisp laugh.
Wrestling his suitcases up the splintery stairs, they finally made it to the landing. Morgana banged on the first door to the left. "Leon! Are you decent?" If the answer had been 'no', it would have been too late anyway, since Morgana opened the door and waltzed in regardless. Merlin poked his head in to see a man sprawled on one of the beds, texting. His eyes flicked up at Merlin, and Merlin stared back. He had almost been expecting some waifish young man with large doe eyes, but Leon was sturdily built and looked as though he might be in banking or something entirely mundane. "New roommate," Morgana announced with a smile, eyeing all the things heaped on the other bed.
With one smooth motion, Morgana used the duvet to whip everything off onto the floor in one go, and Merlin sank down onto the mattress warily, clutching the handle of his suitcase. "Hi," he offered. There was a pause. "I don't snore, get violent in the mornings, wet the bed or make drugs," he added weakly, remembering how Morgana had described the others not sharing rooms, and Leon let out a sudden bark of laughter. His smile filled his face, and Merlin somehow felt reassured.
"I guess we'll get along fine then," Leon swung his legs down to sit up and held out his hand, muttering about 'bloody Owain'. Merlin took it, and received a firm handshake in return. Morgana patted him on the shoulder, and left them to it: Merlin was inordinately glad for her choice of roommates.
-
Venturing out of his room the next day after a night of blessedly normal sleep, Merlin found the house quiet. It was nearly three pm, his usual waking time of waking up after getting in after work at six am, and for the first time he could appreciate how peaceful it was to have everyone else work similar hours to himself. He padded to the kitchen, making a cup of tea and cuddling it in his hands before taking a look at the living room. It was large, with three sofas and an armchair, several tables and a large television. He smiled a little - it looked like a comfortable gathering for a large family.
Merlin sank onto the end of one of the sofas, nodding to Sophia, who was reading a magazine on one of the others. He curled his feet up underneath him and sipped his tea, hoping that this new place would work out. He considered himself an open-minded sort of person, but it was still difficult trying to wrap himself around the world he had landed himself in.
He replayed last night in his mind, remember that Sophia and Vivian had been coming home at the same time he had. They had been talking animatedly about one of Vivian's regular customers, who liked to quote Shakespeare in good humour at her. Merlin had silently nodded, trying to digest it all.
Feeling his body warm up with the tea, Merlin was planning out the things he needed to do with his day in his head. He needed to put in a forwarding address to the post office - yet another one - and inform his work of the change in address. He needed to unpack properly, and he wanted to spend some more time meeting the other flatmates too. His thoughts were interrupted as someone else came into the living room though. Merlin looked up and smiled; Morgana had briefly introduced her roommate last night.
Gwen looked awful though. She was pale and shaking, and a thin sheen of sweat coated her skin. Merlin's smile faltered. "Are you all right?" He asked with a frown, reaching out to help her sit down. She curled into the corner of the sofa, and stared at him.
"I don't mean to be a bother, but..." She stopped, and looked down at her lap. From the corner of his eye, Merlin saw Sophia look up, and shake her head, lip curling. He wondered what that meant. "I mean, I know I just met you, but I really need a favour." Her fist loosened, and Merlin could see a smattering of coins clutched in her hand. "I just need to borrow a bit of money. It's just a small bit, mind. I'll pay you back, of course, as soon as I can," she added brightly.
Merlin smiled at her. "Of course." It was strange that she was asking him for money, but he supposed that he and Sophia were the only two up at the moment, and from the looks of it, she and Sophia did not get along. She looked sweet, Morgana had said that Gwen was lovely, and he trusted Morgana's judgement. "How much do you need?" Merlin pulled his wallet out of his pocket and was too busy pulling out some money to see the hungry gleam flash through Gwen's eyes.
"Just a bit, really, whatever you can spare would be fine," Gwen said, dipping her head in thanks. Merlin found himself warming to her as he handed over twenty pounds. "Thanks, Merlin," she waved the money at him, "I'll return it when I can." She slithered off the sofa, lightly running out of the room.
"You shouldn't have done that," Sophia remarked idly from her sofa, not looking up for her magazine.
Merlin frowned, putting away his wallet. "Why? She seems nice."
Sophia shrugged one shoulder delicately. "She is nice. But she's also an addict. You're never going to get your money back, because she never has any. You should have let Arthur take care of it. She's a wreck." The last sentence didn't come across as rude or derogatory, but rather factual and that possibly made the reality of it sink in much quicker for Merlin.
Merlin sat for a moment, considering going to get his money back, before deliberately leaning back on the sofa. "It's only twenty quid," he said softly. This time, Sophia's eyes seemed to silently respond.
-
Merlin tucked his feet up on the battered sofa, a sheaf of yet more job applications to be filled out in his hand, and watched Arthur for a moment. He was curled up on the big armchair, typing away on his laptop. He looked like a business man, smart and presentable, and yet here he was in the homely living room of an old creaky house. When Merlin had asked what Arthur used the laptop for, having seen it a few days ago, Arthur had said that he was emailing some of his prostitutes, as if that was an entirely normal thing to happen. Perhaps it was; Merlin didn't know.
"How did you get into this?" Merlin asked suddenly. "This..." he waved his hand around as if to encompass the entire situation. "Everything."
Arthur finished typing, and then looked at him with an eyebrow raised. "You mean whether I woke up one day and suddenly decided that pimping was the vocation for me?" Merlin blushed, and nodded hesitantly. "I don't think it's something I really grew up wishing I could be," he said dryly, "but when we were in university together, Leon started sleeping with people for the extra cash. Some of them wanted to do more things, get violent, that sort of thing." He shrugged. "I said that they couldn't, stopped it, and made sure that he only had safe clients. It just spiralled out from there."
Fiddling with his pen, Merlin gazed on in disbelief. "You went to uni?" It wasn't that he couldn't believe that Arthur had gone to university: in fact, he very much could. He thought of Leon, his friendly, confident roommate too. Merlin's head ached a bit from trying to wrap his head around it.
"You want to ask why I'm still doing this if I went to university," Arthur said quietly. He sighed, and closed his laptop, shifting to look straight at Merlin. "I graduated with a first in Law from LSE. Leon has a 2:1 from UCL in Mechanical Engineering." Merlin stared. "What did you get?" Arthur seemed to really want an answer; he was looking at Merlin with an intensity that made Merlin squirm in his seat.
Merlin dropped his eyes, not sure how to maintain eye contact. "I got a 2:1 reading History at UCL." He'd done really very well for himself, actually. His tutor had told him in no uncertain terms that he should consider staying on for further study, but there was no way that Merlin could have funded that.
The answer seemed to satisfy Arthur. He leaned back into the armchair and pulled up the lid of his laptop again. "I make more pimping people out and collecting rent than a graduate does," Arthur said, now in a completely pragmatic tone. "And at least it means my people have protection if they belong to someone."
Merlin fingered his job applications, looking down at them but finding that he was unable to actually read any of them. Arthur spoke again even though he was engrossed in his email or IM chat. "Some of us do it because we have to." Gwen's name remained unspoken. "But some of us do it because we prefer it. Leon is good enough at what he does to be able to pick his clients. Lancelot makes more dealing drugs a couple of hours a day than a full-time job in retail would pay. Morgana can afford designer clothes taking her clothes off."
Suddenly, Merlin found that etching his name onto the twenty-fourth job application this month somehow felt empty.
Merlin was getting a sense of déjà vu. He stared as Gwen plopped herself down on the other end of the sofa and plucked at the worn fabric of the cushion. He raised his mug of tea to cover his face as she asked for more money again, earnestly smiling as she promised to return the money when she could. It had been over a month since the first time, and Merlin had got to know Gwen in the meantime.
Gwen really was the kindest person he had ever met. She did a good deal of the chores of the house just because she wanted to help, and her smile brightened all of their days. She was humble and sweet. She was trying to kick the drug habit, Morgana had said. Morgana had also said that she'd been trying for almost a year to stop now, but she always relapsed. Morgana had said all of that in a factual tone too, and Merlin had felt his gut roil. He somehow hoped that he would never be able to speak of such things in such a way.
"I'm sorry Gwen, I don't have anything to spare this month after rent," Merlin lied. He watched the hope on her face slide off as she wrenched it into an expression of despair. Her fingers twitched around themselves anxiously as her trembling increased and Merlin clenched his jaw in his effort not to reach out and comfort her. It was for her own good, he told himself, watching her demeanour crumble in on itself.
Even in the midst of the withdrawal pangs though, Gwen looked up at Merlin and smiled tremulously at him. "It's all right, no problem at all, Merlin."
Merlin felt his heart burn as she quietly slipped off the sofa, tugging her coat more firmly around herself even though it wasn't cold in the slightest. "I mean, I might be able to find some loose change," the words tumbled desperately out of his mouth before he could stop them, and Merlin found himself reaching for his wallet, passing her a crumpled tenner.
"Oh, thank you, Merlin," Gwen's face lit up and the comparison drew Merlin's attention to just how ill-looking she was. Her cheeks were sunken, and the circles under her eyes were dark in comparison to her pale skin. She hurried out of the room and Merlin stood up, watching as she darted to the door. He frowned, seeing the man who had evidently been standing outside waiting for her. He carried on watching as she pressed the note and a couple of others she peeled out of her pocket into his hand, receiving a small bag in return.
The man left, and Gwen slumped against the wall. She slid down to sit of the stairs, staring at the bag as if she didn't even have the willpower to go upstairs to her room first. She pulled out a dirty shop giftcard and expertly cut a little pile of white powder on the shoe-shelf just as if she was cooking in the kitchen. She snorted two lines immediately and breathed sharply. Merlin could see that her entire demeanour had relaxed, and he bit his tongue to stop from saying anything. She didn't even notice him anyway.
The first dose having been taken, Gwen stumbled up the stairs, the precious bag clutched in her hand. He slowly followed her up the stairs, finding himself unable to not watch what he had helped to create. He pushed open the door to the bedroom that Gwen and Morgana shared with his fingertips and stared as he watched Gwen snort the rest of the bag off the bedside table as she muttered about doing it before Morgana found out and took it away from her.
Merlin had gone to uni with enough of a variety of people to know that the amount was something that would last someone for a whole night, one line every few hours. It was gone in a matter of seconds. Her delicate fingers flittered over the nightstand, pressing and picking up any last sprinkles of white that she had missed. Merlin closed his eyes, his ears burning with shame, before lurching towards Arthur's room to tell him that Gwen needed the night off.
-
Merlin was huddled on his bed in the dark. It was his night off, and usually he'd be down in the living room catching up on the news and trying to socialise with the others before they went off to work. He didn't want to face them today though. It wasn't because he had given money to Gwen and helped her relapse, but rather because they would all carry on as normal. All of them would act as if this was a normal occurrence and look at him as if he had been born yesterday if he seemed weirded out by it.
Eventually, Morgana came looking for him, switching on the light and making him flinch. She sat down on the bed next to him and hugged him. "You're an idiot, Merlin," she said quietly. He blinked in surprise, and scowled. That hadn't been a remark he had been expecting. She looked stoically at him. "We'll start clean again tomorrow."
Merlin closed his eyes, frowning before nodding with conviction. "Yeah," he agreed hoarsely. "Yeah, we will."
"Come with me to work tonight," Morgana patted Merlin's arm suddenly, dragging them both off the bed. Merlin blinked cluelessly at her. "I'll let you in backstage. You can see us at work." Merlin suddenly understood - he knew that everyone in the house dealt in the shadier part of life, but he had never seen any of them do it. He would be able to see it firsthand this way. He nodded.
-
The girls that Morgana worked with were a hoot. Merlin perched on a stool in the middle of their dressing room, feeling very much like the fox in the hen house. It was too bad that this fox wasn't very interested in the hens as they bustled around him in a flurry of activity. Morgana had rattled off a list of names as they had walked in and Merlin had waved shyly.
Even though he was a man, the girls walked about half dressed or mostly undressed, not caring that they were flashing him. Merlin found himself engrossed in a discussion on Come Dine With Me with one of them as she stapled feathers to her bra, asking Merlin to hold it for her as she put the feathers in the right place. It was bizarre, and yet Merlin wouldn't have dared to say that. To express it would have been like to judge the atmosphere, and say that it was wrong, whereas it was simply just not what he was used to.
The place looked almost as he had expected - a tabletop ran across the entirety of three walls, as did a wall mirror, divided into each girl's section with a little name label on the wall. Lockers ran across the remaining wall, half of which simply hung open as the owners toddled around with various parts of prop and costume. The room was brightly illuminated, to the point where Merlin could barely tell that they were underground, and the atmosphere was bright, cheerful.
"We're having a themed night tonight," Morgana informed him between lacing herself into a ridiculously fancy medieval dress and trying to pull her cleavage up. "Everyone loves theme nights. They're so much more interesting." Merlin smiled, and nodded sagely. Morgana laughed. "Most nights are quite same-y. Everyone establishes their own sort of routine, their own special thing they're good at, but we get to dress up in extra pretty dresses for theme nights." She swished her dress. Merlin continued to smile and nod sagely.
"You're a boy, you don't understand the pleasures of an extra pretty dress," Morgana grinned at him, fixing up some hairpiece that was the same green as her dress.
Merlin chuckled, spinning on his stool. "I feel like I'm backstage at a west end show or something," he said. The words 'and not at a strip club' hung unspoken, and Morgana patted his cheek as he looked around. The other girls were tying up bodices and checking that all the Velcro bits of their costumes would rip off at the appropriate moment. Morgana waved over his head at someone, who promptly marched over.
"Who's this?" A blonde woman husked at him, staring down with heavily kohled eyes. She wasn't wearing a dress, but rather a fitted suit of armour. She even had a helmet tucked under one arm. "I hope he's not a new girl, or standards really have fallen. I'm Morgause."
"I'm Merlin," Merlin chirped, holding out a hand. "I'm just tagging along. It's like bring-your-child-to-work day or something." The woman shook his hand and laughed. She seemed a bit terrifying, in the same intimidating way that Morgana could be terrifying. Merlin bet Will would love her. He waved at her costume. "No damsel in distress for you?"
Morgause grinned. "I like to do the rescuing. When Morgana is languishing in the cardboard tower doing nothing but brushing her hair and taking her clothes off, I come along and rescue her and give her true love's snog. And then we take our clothes off together." Merlin might have choked a little.
"Our theme nights have plots," Morgana giggled. Merlin smiled at the two of them, concocting their little plot as if they were performing in a school play, and not about to strip to a club full of horny men. As he span around some more on his stool, Merlin found himself relaxing. Perhaps the room looked a lot as he had imagined a dressing room of a strip club, but he paused to consider all the things that weren't the same too.
For starters, there was no smoking inside, so it wasn't a blear of a room where the women clutched their cigarettes for their fix of baccy. There wasn't anyone who looked miserable, or who was hovering over a little baggie on their desk. None of the women looked trashy in the slightest, and their costumes were well made. Merlin had even been introduced to the girls' manager, to reassure him that he wasn't just some customer who wanted a free show, and he had been lovely.
It all scared Merlin a bit more than if he had walked into some opium haze of drug-taking and prostitution on the side.
"Girls, five minutes until we start," warbled someone from outside the room, and one of the girls squealed, tottering towards the door as excitedly as if she was the opening act of the Royal Variety Show, trailing a three metre train behind her.
"She's always a bit excited, Helen," Morgana grinned. "But she does do a great opening act. She reels everyone's interest in, but it's a simple act so it's not devastatingly difficult to follow. I've gotta go, Morgause and I are right after her," Morgana finished her hair and waved at Merlin, striding out with Morgause behind, who gave him a small wave. Merlin grinned, and seated himself at her desk, wondering what he could sabotage.
"Just don't touch the glitter," the girl on the next desk advised with a grin. "Morgana loves her glitter." Merlin laughed. The name plate above her allotted desk space read 'Freya', which was good, because Merlin couldn't remember most of the names Morgana had introduced to him. "What do you do?"
"I'm in sales," Merlin said, his default answer for that question. "Speaking of which - what exactly am I meant to call you guys?"
Freya looked at him, a half-smile curling on her lips. "Some of us say exotic dancers, but I just tell people I'm a stripper." Merlin nodded, licking his lips. Here, this girl was able to say that - and he couldn't even just tell people he worked in a supermarket. He squirmed a bit. "There's only shame in it if you think there is, so it depends more on how you say it rather than what you call it, I think," she smiled brightly at Merlin. He hadn't thought of it in that way before.
Merlin cleared his throat, and tried it. He could feel the embarrassment threatening to creep up from his neck already. "I mean, I'm just a night shift cashier at Tesco's." He breathed heavily, shuffling his feet. He hadn't said that out loud in a long time.
Without batting an eyelid, Freya smiled serenely at him. "I bet you meet a lot of interesting people on the night shift."
Merlin burst into laughter. "If you mean a lot of drunk people, yes," he admitted, launching into several anecdotes of particularly bladdered people. As he made small talk with her as she got ready, Merlin somehow got a sense of professionalism from Freya. This perhaps had never been a lifetime ambition when she had been younger, but it certainly was just a job for Freya, and she treated it in exactly the same way she might have if she was a west end dancer. Merlin found himself admiring her. "I'm on in just a moment," Freya said, glancing at the small clock on her desk, "Sorry, excuse me. Nice to meet you," she smiled at Merlin and he couldn't help but notice that she had a pretty smile.
Morgana should be back soon, and Merlin leaned back on her desk, overhearing snatches of the other conversations. They were incredibly mundane, with topics from needing to go to the bank tomorrow, forgetting to go food shopping and whether one girl should really buy that new dress. He found himself staring at the floor, tuning in to different conversations. They weren't people who had fallen down on their luck or had been conned into signing a contract to dance indefinitely for a cruel manager. Mostly though, Merlin found himself thinking how very ordinary they were.
As Morgana came back, looking a bit hot from her time under the lights, she waved a hand in front of Merlin's face. He snapped up with a squeak, and suddenly reached out, hugging Morgana around the waist, his cheek pressed into the beadwork at her waist. She pursed her lips, and ruffled his hair.
"You okay?" Morgana asked into his hair, and he knew that she wasn't asking if he had been fine by himself when she went out for her act.
"Yeah," Merlin smiled.
-
Morris, at work, asked Merlin if he was all right. A few of them had noticed that Merlin had been a bit quieter recently. Merlin was known as the person who could smile through the force of everything, from shirty customers to wailing babies in the dead of night to drunken louts. Merlin smiled, and just said that he wasn't getting enough sleep. He made a conscious effort that day to be more cheerful, cracking his usual infectious grin, and it wasn't until then that Merlin realised how fake it had always been.
After his shift was over, his shift manager, Matthew, told him that he was changing to a daytime shift so that he could actually ever see his family, and said that Merlin should consider applying for the position, Merlin had stared at it for a long moment, and then raised his eyes to Matthew, and expressed his heartfelt thanks. He clutched the application on the way home, touched that there were people at work who cared about him, and noticed him. It didn't seem as bleak as he had always thought.
Merlin filled in the application that night, returning it to Matthew, who nodded at him. There would be others applying, of course - Cedric had expressed interest in it, but then Cedric always expressed interest in anything that involved more money - so Merlin barely dared to get his hopes up, but at least Matthew had expressly asked him to consider. He'd smiled brightly at Merlin when he'd handed it in too, saying that he was glad that Merlin had applied. The little sliver of hope wormed its way back into Merlin despite his best efforts.
-
Gwen laughed at Merlin's bad joke, and he smiled to see her face lit up. Gwen was on a good streak right now, getting into the rhythm of keeping herself busy and keeping herself from wanting to take the drugs. They had fallen into the routine of watching tv together in the afternoons before work, alternating between The Weakest Link and Escape to the Country. Some of the others joined them at times, but it was a routine to them to be plonked in front of the tv by quarter past five every weekday. They were discussing their own hypothetical escape to the country at the moment, with Merlin opting for Wiltshire, with its villages and farms and pigs and mud and Gwen opting for Cornwall. Her dad had taken her there to go bodysurfing when she had been much younger, and he had been alive.
Then, Gwen received a text and it seemed like she couldn't concentrate on the tv anymore . She looked at her phone every few minutes, and the tremors kicked back in for a moment before she clenched a fist, willing them away. After ten minutes, Merlin couldn't stand it anymore. "Give me your phone," he demanded. Gwen held it out, but her fingers were clasped tightly around it when Merlin tried to take it, and he had to gently pry it from her.
Scrolling to her inbox, Merlin noticed that the number wasn't saved, and the text merely read Got more u want any? Merlin deleted it. "You don't," he told her firmly. She glanced at her phone screen, and quietly made to tuck her phone back into her pocket. Merlin stopped her quickly. "How about," he fished out his own phone, "every time you want to reply to that, you text me instead? And every time you want to give in, you phone me instead?"
Gwen looked at his offered phone for a moment, and then took it, punching her number in. "Thanks, Merlin," she said quietly. He squeezed her shoulder.
Merlin hadn't known if Gwen really would, but the first time he received a text from her, he had been confused when it merely said Yes. He realised quickly that it was an answer to her dealer's question though, and called her. He was only in the kitchen, and she most likely in her room, but if he called her, then he would jam up her phone and she'd be unable to text her dealer.
"If you had to choose one European country to visit, where you go?" He asked inanely, trying for nothing more than to distract her. It worked, that time. They talked for twelve minutes on Italy before Merlin realised that he was wasting credit and leapt up the stairs to continue the conversation.
This started to slip into their routine too, and Merlin started trying to think of new and interesting things he wanted to know about Gwen even when she wasn't texting him. It worked well for two weeks or so, and then Merlin noticed that her phone calls to him were getting much more frequent, going up to two or three times in the same day. He tried to keep up.
One night, Merlin finished up an exhausting shift at work. It was a Friday night into Saturday morning shift, which always had a large amount of drunk people coming in to sate their munchies. He picked up things from the staff office, and noticed fourteen missed calls on his phone. He scrolled through - they were all from Gwen. The first few were spread out between a couple hours, but the last nine had all been in the same half hour. Merlin called Morgana.
"Morgana, it's Gwen," Merlin panted as soon as she picked up. "I mean, I'm not Gwen. It's about Gwen. I think she's going to relapse again." He felt Morgana's tension crackle over the phone.
"I'm just in the living room, I'll go see," Morgana said crisply, and Merlin could hear her moving through the house, her slippers flapping against the stairs. "Gwen, are you here? Oh, Gwen - " Merlin tried to keep up with what was happening from just the sounds as he hurried home, twisting through the familiar roads without paying much attention as to what was happening.
Merlin clutched his coat around him in the thin crispy air of dawn as he pressed his phone closer to his ear. He could hear some scuffling, and then Gwen's distressed voice. 'No, no! That's mine, that's mine! Give it back!' Merlin could hear Morgana too, as she spoke in that low, overly calm tone that really meant that she wanted to yell as loudly as she could. 'You don't really want it, Gwen, you don't need it. Arthur!' Gwen was wailing in the background as Merlin hit the drive, running up it and blasting through the front door and then the stairs with his shoes still on.
Gwen was curled around the bedside table, a light trace of white dabbed on her nose. Powder was smeared over the table surface and Morgana towered over Gwen, half a baggie clutched in her hand, held away from Gwen as Arthur held Gwen's arms away from Morgana, his face red from where she's accidentally hit him in reaching for Morgana. Merlin stumbled in, dropping his bag on the floor. "Gwen, are you all right?" He knelt next to her as she eyed the table, trying to see how much of the remains she could salvage.
Gwen turned to look at him, and Merlin saw a glimpse of a person he had never seen before. She relaxed in Arthur's arms, and he let go with an unhappy look, rubbing his cheek. "I'm fine, Merlin. It doesn't hurt anymore."
-
Closing the door behind Gwen, Merlin snuck one last look at her, lying back on the bed with her eyes closed. "How much did she take?" Merlin asked in a low voice as they retreated to the living room for the time being, Leon already asleep in his room.
"A lot," Morgana said angrily. Merlin understood though - she wasn't angry at him, or even at Gwen. She was angry at herself. She waved the little bag. "This was the second one, and they were full." Twobags. Merlin blanched.
Arthur smiled grimly. "She always buys more on the first time after a relapse, thinking that she'll buy in bulk and save some for later. She never saves any." He sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose. He wasn't technically meant to interfere in this as Gwen's protector - he only had to keep her from the dangerous customers and the drugs counted as Gwen's personal life. Merlin knew that he cared, though.
They slumped onto a sofa, curling together for comfort. Merlin poked the remaining half a bag. "What are you going to do with that?"
"Sell it," Morgana said shortly. "And then give the money back to Gwen. I might to have to dip into my fund again, too, depending on you." She nodded at Arthur. "I hope you're prepared for tomorrow, Merlin."
Merlin frowned wearily. "Fund? Arthur? What's tomorrow?"
Morgana smiled a little. "I keep money set aside for Gwen in case this happens and she can't pay rent. I try not to use it, or she'd depend on me for rent all the time, but if it comes down to it, I don't want her homeless on top of all this. Arthur sometimes helps too. He doesn't like to put it that way, but if he's in the mood, he'll pay her for rent."
Merlin tried to figure out if he'd got it right, that Arthur would pay to have sex with his own prostitute so that she could pay his rent. After a lot of thought, Merlin realised that it was probably exactly the sort of thing that Arthur would do, and was his subtle way of being kind without seeming like he was giving to charity. He looked sideways at Arthur, a seed of admiration growing. Arthur steadily looked at the coffee table, his face impassive.
The smile slid off Morgana's face though, and Merlin looked back at her. She said grimly, "Tomorrow's the come down." She winced, and patted Merlin's knee, before rising. "I really need some sleep. You should get some too."
Arthur rose, and caught Morgana by the wrist. "Bunk with me tonight." His tone was still neutral, but his eyes flicked upwards, in the direction the girls' bedroom was. Merlin felt guilty that he hadn't thought of it first - of course Morgana wouldn't want to sleep in the same room was Gwen tonight.
-
Merlin rolled over the next morning, exhausted despite a full eight hours of sleep. Leon was lying in bed listening to music, and Merlin smiled. Leon was the best person he could have asked to share a room with. He was neat enough, but not so concerned that he minded Merlin's sporadic leaving of clothes on the floor. He didn't wake too easily when Merlin came in later than him, and was quiet enough to not wake Merlin when it was the other way around.
Getting dressed, Merlin padded out. Thinking of his own roommate had made Merlin wonder how Morgana was, probably thinking all night of a drugged up Gwen. Morgana was already in the kitchen, huddled over a mug of black coffee. Morgana never took coffee. "Couldn't sleep very well," Morgana turned to him with a smile and a nod towards the mug of tea waiting for him, even though she was clearly even more exhausted than Merlin.
"How is she?" Merlin asked in hushed tones. His words seemed to sink into the silence of the kitchen.
Morgana drained the rest of her coffee. "I'm just gathering up the courage to go upstairs," she confessed. Merlin followed suit, glad that Morgana had had the foresight to make his tea beforehand. That little gesture made him glad that she had known that he would be up early too, and that she had waited from him before doing this together.
They made their way back to Morgana's room together, easing the door open. There was barely a creak from the hinge, but still a muffled groan came from Gwen's bed. Merlin tiptoed over, his lips drawn together as each step closer revealed how pale and drawn she was. Her eyes were bloodshot from the lack of sleep and her lips dry. She looked half-dead. "I need some more," Gwen whispered, and Merlin shook his head sadly. Gwen seemed to take that a denial of more from him, and clutched at him with one cold hand. "Please, I need some more. Just to take the pain away. Make it go away, Merlin."
"I'm sorry, Gwen," Merlin felt tears forming in the back of his eyes. Morgana's hand rested on his shoulder. She knew better than to say anything.
They stayed with Gwen for as long as they could. Gwen huddled in the bed, sweating as if she had a fever. At times, she rocked slightly, clutching at her head and at others she just lay under the covers, whimpering. Every so often, she would ask for more, saying that it was the last time, it was really the very last time.
"How did she get like this?" Merlin asked Morgana in a low voice. Gwen wasn't even listening to them. Merlin wondered how someone could spiral into such a dependency - he'd never really seen the appeal of drugs other than the occasional use.
Morgana's expression softened. "Her dad died. He was the last family she had, and it happened when she was young. She didn't have anything to do for work so Arthur set her up when she asked. A little bit was to get here through that, and to stop the pain in her heart. It just wasn't enough after a while." She sighed. "The worst sort of way to get into it all, I suppose." Despite their similarities in the type of thing they did, Morgana and Gwen had come to it in such different ways, and that was the gap that had always stretched between them.
It was such a simple story. Merlin just found himself wanting to reach out more to this girl who had found herself alone so young. Eventually though, they both had to go to work. "I don't want to leave her alone," Merlin murmured, smoothing her hair back. Gwen had murmured 'more' at him again.
They crept out of the room, Merlin glancing at his watch. He was already going to be late. "We all have to work," Morgana said, equally ruefully. "If it was tomorrow, I'd ask Lancelot to keep an eye on her, but he's always selling on Saturdays."
"How can Lancelot do this?" Merlin asked, finding himself suddenly angry at the friendly, cheerful man. "How can he do this, knowing it does... this to people?" He gestured at the closed door. His heart seemed to have been left behind in the room with Gwen.
Morgana waited for him as he collected his bag. "Ask him yourself, later." She smiled gently, if tiredly. "He's not a bad person, Merlin. He cares about Gwen, a lot. He pays for and drives her to her counselling session every week." Merlin sighed, trying to reconcile the idea of Lancelot and the kind of person who would supply Gwen with drugs.
When Merlin came home the next morning though, Gwen was sprawled on the bed completely relaxed, and the old biscuit tin labelled 'Rent' in her neat handwriting was empty. Merlin sank into a numb sleep after lying in bed with his eyes open, unblinking, staring at the darkness for a few hours.
Merlin came home to find Lancelot where he had left him a few hours ago, right by Gwen's bed. Merlin had gone out in frustration to the local library, and brought a few books home in the hope that it would help Gwen, or help him help Gwen. He'd scoured the internet for advice, and most of it had been useless crap such as Just be there for your friend and let them know that you will be there for them.
Peering over at Gwen, Merlin could see that she was curled up under covers, clutching at the duvet and her head. "The shakes set back in," Lancelot said sadly. Merlin could only look accusingly at him. He didn't sell drugs to Gwen, but someone like him had. Lancelot looked up, and recognised the look in Merlin's eyes immediately.
-
Merlin knew that going cold turkey was the hardest way to stop taking drugs and even more potent in his mind than this logical though was seeing Gwen going through withdrawal symptoms. He logically knew it would never break the cycle, but every time he made to stop her by taking away her phone or standing in front of the door and refusing to let her open it for her dealer or confiscating her bags when she managed to get a hold of them, Merlin's heart broke. Sooner or later, every few times, he would give him, and let her take something, just to ease the pain.
Confessing this to Morgana, with tears in his eyes after one frustrating night when he'd finally let Gwen take something again, Merlin smacked his hand down on the table angrily. Morgana pressed a hand over his fist and looked at him straight in the eye, and said sadly, "I know." And she did.
Between them, they tried a different tactic. They eased Gwen off in small amounts, throwing the remains away immediately so that there really was nothing left when she begged for more. Morgana spoke to Arthur, who appeared silently behind them one night as Gwen bought her next baggie from her dealer, Lancelot making sure that he didn't sell her more than what they had weaned her down to.
As Gwen trotted upstairs to make her first line, Arthur stepped outside to have a friendly chat with her dealer. He wouldn't tell Merlin what it was he had said, and the dealer, Aredian, still came to give Gwen her ever decreasing amounts, but he did stop bombarding her with text messages all the time after that, and Merlin saw him far less. He had said thanks to Arthur quietly, but Arthur had shrugged it off.
Part Two
Author: nyargles
Pairings/characters: Arthur/Merlin, Gwen/Lancelot, minor hint of Morgana/Leon, mentions of other characters
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 20k
Warnings: Mentions of drug abuse, buckets of angst
Summary: We follow Merlin's journey as he turns homeless for a while after a bad flatmate experience. After a while of camping out with various friends, he eventually ends up living with Morgana and her housemates. Featuring pimp!Arthur, stripper!Morgana, addict!Gwen and dealer!Lancelot. How does normal average Merlin even start trying to fit in here?
Author's notes: Thanks to Sirell for the VERY LAST MINUTE beta job - all mistakes are purely my own, sorry! Thanks to binglejells for getting me to withdraw out of my little shell and involve other people. Lots of SQUEE!THANKS to pianeko for the art (AMG *___*)! And also a sorry for being utter fail with the lack of internet and communication. And finally, lots and lots of thanks and apologies to the_muppet who was ever so patient with me for being such a fail!participant. ;___; This fic is dedicated to bedofpearls, because she likes this sort of thing. Please enjoy!
Art link: Gorgeous art that I can't keep my hands off all here by Pianeko
Disclaimer: Not mine, wah! D:
-
As Merlin moved the last of his things out of the flat, he paused next to Edwin, wondering what sort of goodbye he should say to this man. He'd lived with Edwin for almost a year now, and it had been an emotional rollercoaster. It had been a disappointing rollercoaster at that, with far more downs than ups. They had started out fine, with similar tastes in many things. Edwin had been a history student like him, and they had got along well. There had even been some mutual attraction on both of their parts. Merlin settled for a small wave, and a half-hearted: "See you around."
Merlin hoped that didn't sound too fake, because he never really wanted to see Edwin again, and Edwin no doubt knew this. In return, Merlin got a small nod, and he sighed. Carrying two rucksacks, a suitcase and a box by himself onto the bus, Merlin cast one last look at the little flat he'd loved when he'd moved into it. It had been cosy, but spacious enough that they hadn't been tripping over each other all the time.
Edwin had been neat enough, and generally washed up after himself. Everything in the flat worked, apart from the kitchen window, which never closed. Merlin found himself sighing and looking after Edwin, who was getting a train to whoever he was staying with now. Maybe they could make it work, get another flat in the same price range, and... Merlin shook his head. He couldn't go over all the stress and guilt he'd suffered the last few months all over again.
This was his fourth bus journey over to Gaius', which was the last of his trips, and Merlin panted as he finally stood in Gaius' small flat, sweating from the exertion. He looked at the jumble of belongings that defined his life now, and slumped onto the sofa. He would think about it all later.
Right now, Merlin just wanted to relax, and not get angry at the last three months where he'd paid more than his fair share of the rent for Edwin because he hadn't scraped together the money despite having a steady job as a nurse, and the very last month, where Merlin both hadn't enough money to cover Edwin's excess, which had got more and more each month, and hadn't had the patience to do it. The result had been that they'd been evicted for being unable to come up with the rent. Merlin had been angry and annoyed, but part of him was also relieved that he wouldn't have to live with Edwin anymore.
His new problem was, of course, that he didn't have anywhere to live after that.
-
"I'm so sorry!" Merlin yelped as he narrowly escaped being conked on the head by Gaius' elbow and instead smacked his head into the arm of the sofa instead as he straightened up from his crawl. Rubbing the top of his head and ruefully shrugging at Gaius' bemused expression, Merlin staggered upright to flop onto the sofa. There was, he surmised, nowhere else in the entire room that was safe. He clutched his laptop to him and stroked it soothingly, telling it what a good laptop it was and how he wouldn't hit it if it would just turn on and stay connected to Gaius' broadband for more than two minutes.
When Gaius had offered Merlin somewhere to stay temporarily as he searched for new lodgings with the warning that his flat was small and cramped, Merlin had only been grateful for the prospect of a real room and not questioned the spacing issues. He had known that Gaius worked from home, concocting various herbal remedies to soothe mild ailments. He just hadn't quite realised that in a one bedroom flat, said concocting all happened in the living room, the sofa of which happened to be Merlin's temporary lodging. He hadn't yet managed to go a single day without knocking over a packet of dried leaves, a jar of powdered root or some pickled tubers of some form.
Merlin had only been rooting around on the floor looking for that elusive extension lead so that he could plug in his laptop and had nearly upended an entire table. Finally, he managed to coax the thing to life. "Yessss! Well done, good Kilgarrah!" Merlin beamed, logging onto his email and hoping that there were some replies from that flatshare website he'd checked out a few days ago. He scrolled through them, frowning as one told him that the place had been taken, another that the space wouldn't be free for another couple of months and the last that they were really hoping to flatshare with a girl.
Sighing, Merlin prepared to go back to the website and dig out some more rooms, preferably cheap and not sharing with weird people who wanted to be his daddy. About to send off more emails, he absently dug his phone out from where it was wailing inside his pocket. "Yes, Will?" Merlin never bothered saying 'hello' to Will.
-
"It's not that bad," Will slung an arm around Merlin's shoulders as Merlin tried to forget last night. "She was really hot. She even asked me if you wanted to join in." Merlin gagged a little at the idea of having a threesome with his best friend.
Merlin shook Will's arm off. "Yeah, she was really hot. That wasn't really the problem, you know," he said, "It's more that the idea of hearing someone I consider my brother having wild, massively noisy sex is really disturbing." He shuddered, remembering how he had spent the night with his head buried under the sofa cushion attempting to drown out the sound.
Will grinned and put his arm right back where it had been, ignoring Merlin's discomfort as he steered them both to the kitchen for lunch. "It's really not that bad," he repeated.
"The next time you're trying to sleep," Merlin said, "I'm going to wank off really loudly." The smile on Will's face wilted and his arm dropped back to his side as disgust started to seep into the curve of his lips. "See?!" Merlin pointed at his face as if that proved his entire point.
Merlin picked up his mug of tea. He sighed, and shook his head. "I'm sorry, Will. I'm really glad you're letting me crash with you for a while. I'll try and get out of your hair soon, promise."
Ruffling his hair, Will smiled at him. "No problems, mate. You know you can stay here as long as you need to, and you'll find somewhere of your own soon, Merlin." Merlin hoped that he would too. This had been the third girl so far, and he'd only been camped out here for two weeks.
-
Merlin buried his head in his hands, trying to let the tension flow out of his body. He finally had somewhere with a room of his own, and Merlin had thought that he could live with anyone after having to beg off his friends. He heard his name being yelled from outside his room, and winced. When the room had opened up, Merlin had snatched up the offer from Nimueh, who had merely said that the last person who lived there had mysteriously disappeared.
Barely days into the arrangement, Merlin realised that Nimueh didn't really consider him a flatmate, but rather a lodger in her property. On top of giving Merlin a very extensive set of rules, which included being home by ten and leaving the toilet seats down, she would also nicely ask him to go food shopping or dust the house, not afraid to bring up that she paid more rent than him and that most of the appliances he used in the house were hers if he complained. Merlin looked up from his hands to check that his door was locked, and slumped over on the bed. He tiredly reached for the laptop, wondering if any rooms had become free since the last time he had checked an hour ago.
Nimueh pounded on his door, and Merlin pretended that he wasn't in, although how his door was bolted if he wasn't in was beyond him. She yelled somehow about there not being enough tomatoes in the fridge, and Merlin made a face at her. He had somehow been conned into buying all of the food for the house, since she would simply nick his things, so he deliberately didn't buy tomatoes. He was allergic anyway, so why would he buy them especially for her? Merlin wondered for how much longer he could avoid her.
It had been months since Merlin had moved out his shared flat with Edwin, and it was getting ridiculous. He opened up google wearily and typed in his search, sighing as he saw almost the entire first page of links in purple, showing that he'd visited them all before. He was loathe to ask any of his friends for help, not wanting to burden them: he'd only even stayed with Gaius and Will because they had offered first.
His phone rang. Merlin scooped it up to his ear. "Hello?"
"Merlin?" Morgana's voice came through on the other end. "Do you still need a place to stay?" Merlin sat up abruptly, wondering how Morgana had heard. Then he remembered: Morgana had always got on well with Will, and they still kept in touch as far as he knew, which meant that will occasionally texted Morgana asking if she wanted to have sex with him and would reply rejecting him.
He and Morgana had met at university and were good friends, even though they hadn't ever spent that much time hanging out. Morgana had always been busy in the evenings working. When he had found out she was picking up shifts as a stripper in a classy club, Merlin hadn't known what to say, but he had stepped back that it didn't make Morgana any less friendly, scary or self-assured than before, so he had gone to visit her club once in support, and then stopped badgering her to come out with them at night.
"Erm, yes?" Merlin rubbed at his forehead. Morgana had always seemed nice; she treated him well and genuinely seemed to care when she asked about his day. She seemed like she would be nice, or at the very least, reasonable to live with. "Do you have somewhere?"
Morgana hesitated before answering him. "Maybe. It's probably not exactly what you're looking for." Her tone was mysterious, but Merlin ignored it. He had a headache from Nimueh's yelling, and he was terrified that she would pounce on him the moment he stepped out of his room. He wasn't looking forward to needing the loo.
With a wan smile, Merlin answered, "I'm looking for anything at all at the moment, really. How soon can I move in?" 'Can it be today?' he added in his head.
-
The house looked like the sort of thing that would make a very good Haunted House setting. It must have once been grand, with its multitude of rooms, but weather and time had battered it until the paint was an off-white, cracked and peeling from the walls. There was moss and mould growing near the bottom and there was a large dent in the front door where it looked like someone had perhaps tried to kick it in. The only indication of the house number was the different paint colour, the actual metal numbers that had once protected that patch of paint long gone. The door handle was rusty and the windows hadn't been washed in about a decade. "Welcome home," Morgana smiled.
As they stepped inside, Merlin half expected the house to start collapsing around them. He could hear the ceiling creaking as someone walked across the floor above, and there were missing rails from the banister. It was impossible to tell what colour the carpet had been, because it was a patchy grey now, and dust gathered at the walls where no one had bothered to clean properly. Merlin tried to think about it, and realised that really, it wasn't worse than some student flats he had been perfectly happy in. It just wasn't the sort of thing he expected real, grown-up adults to live in.
"Arthur, fresh meat!" Morgana called from the hallway, where she was busy changing out of her deadly stilettos into a pair of large fluffy bunny slippers that had seen better days. The stilettos were tossed casually onto a large bookshelf by the door that seemed to be used as a shoe rack.
"Morgana, you have got to stop bringing strays home." The voice came from inside the kitchen, and Merlin peered around the doorway to see who was speaking. A tall blond man was leaning against the kitchen counter, smoking, evidently the one who had just spoken. Around the table was another man, counting an extraordinary amount of money. Merlin frowned and eyed him up and down; the blond man did the same to him. Merlin thought that he looked completely out of place. His shirt was a crisp white with thin grey pinstripes, his trousers were impeccably ironed and his shoes blacked and polished. "He looks a bit cleaner than the rest at least," Arthur remarked. "New to the scene?"
Morgana dumped her bag onto the kitchen table, and smacked the man on the arm. "Honestly, Arthur, he's not a stray. He just needs somewhere to stay for a bit. Don't listen to him, Merlin." She padded over to the cupboards, reaching inside one that had lost its door to fish out two mugs. Merlin found that he was surprised that they were clean. "Tea, Merlin?"
"Please," Merlin shuffled uneasily into the room trying to get his bearings, before stepping forward to put the kettle on. He could at least figure that out. Morgana pointed to the water filter, and Merlin poured out enough water for the two of them. "New to what scene?" He waited for the water to boil.
"Really, Arthur, not everyone does drugs." Morgana came to lean on the counter next to Merlin, looping an arm around his shoulders. "I met Merlin at uni. He's just looking for a flatshare. Merlin, this is Arthur Pendragon. He's the landlord on this place, I suppose. No one knows if he actually owns it, but he's the one who takes rent on it so it's good enough." She also pointed at the man at the table. "And that's Lancelot, no first name. If you need a pick-me-up, he's your man. You get a house discount for living here."
Lancelot looked up from his money-counting, and waved. Merlin found himself awkwardly waving back. "Wha-what?" Merlin wasn't dumb. He knew what Morgana meant. It was just that Lancelot was clean-shaven, and wearing a clean shirt, and didn't look remotely out of his mind. In university, Merlin's brief encounters with people who sold drugs were generally sporting a bit of stubble, looked slightly crazy and only had three moods: wanting to get high, high and on a come-down. To be fair, he hadn't had many encounters with drug dealers, but they certainly weren't like this man. "You don't look like a drug dealer," he blurted before looking down at the dirty kitchen floor. "I mean, I don't really do that anymore, Morgana." He blushed; he'd smoked weed a few times, and had decided that he didn't really need the rest of the experience.
Lancelot laughed easily. "I don't take any of my own stuff. It's purely a business venture." Merlin nodded as if he understood.
"Very admirable," Arthur said, still looking at Merlin with his arms crossed as if he was evaluating him. Merlin supposed that was what potential landlords did, even if they were in charge of somewhere as unconventional as this. "I hope you don't mind sharing rooms, Merlin." He switched to speaking to Morgana abruptly, and Merlin busied himself with the hot water so that he didn't have to watch Arthur watching him. "He can bunk wiiiith..."
Morgana tossed a glance at Merlin, before suggesting, "Leon?" Arthur considered it, and then nodded curtly. "Leon is your best bet for staying sane," Morgana informed Merlin. "There are eight bedrooms in here, and eleven of us living here. I share with Gwen, and Sophia and Vivian share a room," Morgana was ticking off the rooms on her fingers. Merlin stared; houses big enough to need to have the rooms ticked off on fingers shouldn't be allowed to still exist. "Gareth and Gawain have that big attic room. And then Arthur, Lancelot, Owain, Tristan and Leon are all on their own at the moment."
Merlin sipped his tea, wondering if there was anything stronger for his nerves before remembering that he was standing in front of a drug dealer. He shivered: he'd stick with tea. Morgana carried on, rattling the names off easily. "Tristan snores like a train and is grumpy to the point of violent in the mornings. Owain occasionally wets the bed and will most likely try to share a bed with you once his is wet. Lancelot got the room with the bathroom attached because he needed a lab. So Leon's your best bet."
"Right," Merlin said faintly. He did notice that Morgana had missed Arthur off the list though. He glanced quizzically at Arthur, realising that the guy who ran this place would probably not want to share his room. "Anything else I should know?"
"Yes, I highly recommend not trying to get into my room," Lancelot looked up and smiled at Merlin, a friendly welcoming smile that both reassured Merlin and made him more bewildered about his entire house. "It's booby-trapped in case the others try to get in for drugs. That's rent, Arthur." He handed a thick wad of bills, mixed tenners and fivers, to Arthur.
Arthur took it, stuffing the entire wad into his pocket, having counted it at the same time as Lancelot. "Not much else. Rent's cheap because nothing in this dump works. Don't flush the loo before you shower, or you won't get hot water for five minutes after that. The radiator knobs work the opposite way around to the way the knob says. That's the only socket that works in the kitchen," he pointed to the one the kettle was plugged into at the moment, "don't use the top oven because it doesn't turn off so you'll leak gas, don't try to sleep with my people unless you're paying for it, and don't bring tricks home. I think that's probably about it."
"Right," Merlin repeated, giving the oven nervous looks as if it would combust at any moment. When Merlin finally recovered enough to make his way out of the kitchen, Morgana showed him the way upstairs. "His... people?" The realisation was probably there at the back of his mind, but vocalising it was something quite different.
"His people," Morgana said, squeezing him around the shoulder comfortingly. "Arthur pimps everyone in the house apart from me and Lancelot. We're the only two who have other jobs. You'll get used to it," she added kindly. Merlin mouthed a silent acceptance, and concentrated on picking up the largest suitcase before realising that Arthur had assumed that he was a prostitute too.
Dropping the suitcase, Merlin barged back into the kitchen. "Tricks?" He scowled at Arthur. "I don't do that." Arthur merely blinked at him, and nodded, not really interested. Merlin felt a bit foolish at that, and bustled back out again. Behind him, he heard Arthur rasp a crisp laugh.
Wrestling his suitcases up the splintery stairs, they finally made it to the landing. Morgana banged on the first door to the left. "Leon! Are you decent?" If the answer had been 'no', it would have been too late anyway, since Morgana opened the door and waltzed in regardless. Merlin poked his head in to see a man sprawled on one of the beds, texting. His eyes flicked up at Merlin, and Merlin stared back. He had almost been expecting some waifish young man with large doe eyes, but Leon was sturdily built and looked as though he might be in banking or something entirely mundane. "New roommate," Morgana announced with a smile, eyeing all the things heaped on the other bed.
With one smooth motion, Morgana used the duvet to whip everything off onto the floor in one go, and Merlin sank down onto the mattress warily, clutching the handle of his suitcase. "Hi," he offered. There was a pause. "I don't snore, get violent in the mornings, wet the bed or make drugs," he added weakly, remembering how Morgana had described the others not sharing rooms, and Leon let out a sudden bark of laughter. His smile filled his face, and Merlin somehow felt reassured.
"I guess we'll get along fine then," Leon swung his legs down to sit up and held out his hand, muttering about 'bloody Owain'. Merlin took it, and received a firm handshake in return. Morgana patted him on the shoulder, and left them to it: Merlin was inordinately glad for her choice of roommates.
-
Venturing out of his room the next day after a night of blessedly normal sleep, Merlin found the house quiet. It was nearly three pm, his usual waking time of waking up after getting in after work at six am, and for the first time he could appreciate how peaceful it was to have everyone else work similar hours to himself. He padded to the kitchen, making a cup of tea and cuddling it in his hands before taking a look at the living room. It was large, with three sofas and an armchair, several tables and a large television. He smiled a little - it looked like a comfortable gathering for a large family.
Merlin sank onto the end of one of the sofas, nodding to Sophia, who was reading a magazine on one of the others. He curled his feet up underneath him and sipped his tea, hoping that this new place would work out. He considered himself an open-minded sort of person, but it was still difficult trying to wrap himself around the world he had landed himself in.
He replayed last night in his mind, remember that Sophia and Vivian had been coming home at the same time he had. They had been talking animatedly about one of Vivian's regular customers, who liked to quote Shakespeare in good humour at her. Merlin had silently nodded, trying to digest it all.
Feeling his body warm up with the tea, Merlin was planning out the things he needed to do with his day in his head. He needed to put in a forwarding address to the post office - yet another one - and inform his work of the change in address. He needed to unpack properly, and he wanted to spend some more time meeting the other flatmates too. His thoughts were interrupted as someone else came into the living room though. Merlin looked up and smiled; Morgana had briefly introduced her roommate last night.
Gwen looked awful though. She was pale and shaking, and a thin sheen of sweat coated her skin. Merlin's smile faltered. "Are you all right?" He asked with a frown, reaching out to help her sit down. She curled into the corner of the sofa, and stared at him.
"I don't mean to be a bother, but..." She stopped, and looked down at her lap. From the corner of his eye, Merlin saw Sophia look up, and shake her head, lip curling. He wondered what that meant. "I mean, I know I just met you, but I really need a favour." Her fist loosened, and Merlin could see a smattering of coins clutched in her hand. "I just need to borrow a bit of money. It's just a small bit, mind. I'll pay you back, of course, as soon as I can," she added brightly.
Merlin smiled at her. "Of course." It was strange that she was asking him for money, but he supposed that he and Sophia were the only two up at the moment, and from the looks of it, she and Sophia did not get along. She looked sweet, Morgana had said that Gwen was lovely, and he trusted Morgana's judgement. "How much do you need?" Merlin pulled his wallet out of his pocket and was too busy pulling out some money to see the hungry gleam flash through Gwen's eyes.
"Just a bit, really, whatever you can spare would be fine," Gwen said, dipping her head in thanks. Merlin found himself warming to her as he handed over twenty pounds. "Thanks, Merlin," she waved the money at him, "I'll return it when I can." She slithered off the sofa, lightly running out of the room.
"You shouldn't have done that," Sophia remarked idly from her sofa, not looking up for her magazine.
Merlin frowned, putting away his wallet. "Why? She seems nice."
Sophia shrugged one shoulder delicately. "She is nice. But she's also an addict. You're never going to get your money back, because she never has any. You should have let Arthur take care of it. She's a wreck." The last sentence didn't come across as rude or derogatory, but rather factual and that possibly made the reality of it sink in much quicker for Merlin.
Merlin sat for a moment, considering going to get his money back, before deliberately leaning back on the sofa. "It's only twenty quid," he said softly. This time, Sophia's eyes seemed to silently respond.
-
Merlin tucked his feet up on the battered sofa, a sheaf of yet more job applications to be filled out in his hand, and watched Arthur for a moment. He was curled up on the big armchair, typing away on his laptop. He looked like a business man, smart and presentable, and yet here he was in the homely living room of an old creaky house. When Merlin had asked what Arthur used the laptop for, having seen it a few days ago, Arthur had said that he was emailing some of his prostitutes, as if that was an entirely normal thing to happen. Perhaps it was; Merlin didn't know.
"How did you get into this?" Merlin asked suddenly. "This..." he waved his hand around as if to encompass the entire situation. "Everything."
Arthur finished typing, and then looked at him with an eyebrow raised. "You mean whether I woke up one day and suddenly decided that pimping was the vocation for me?" Merlin blushed, and nodded hesitantly. "I don't think it's something I really grew up wishing I could be," he said dryly, "but when we were in university together, Leon started sleeping with people for the extra cash. Some of them wanted to do more things, get violent, that sort of thing." He shrugged. "I said that they couldn't, stopped it, and made sure that he only had safe clients. It just spiralled out from there."
Fiddling with his pen, Merlin gazed on in disbelief. "You went to uni?" It wasn't that he couldn't believe that Arthur had gone to university: in fact, he very much could. He thought of Leon, his friendly, confident roommate too. Merlin's head ached a bit from trying to wrap his head around it.
"You want to ask why I'm still doing this if I went to university," Arthur said quietly. He sighed, and closed his laptop, shifting to look straight at Merlin. "I graduated with a first in Law from LSE. Leon has a 2:1 from UCL in Mechanical Engineering." Merlin stared. "What did you get?" Arthur seemed to really want an answer; he was looking at Merlin with an intensity that made Merlin squirm in his seat.
Merlin dropped his eyes, not sure how to maintain eye contact. "I got a 2:1 reading History at UCL." He'd done really very well for himself, actually. His tutor had told him in no uncertain terms that he should consider staying on for further study, but there was no way that Merlin could have funded that.
The answer seemed to satisfy Arthur. He leaned back into the armchair and pulled up the lid of his laptop again. "I make more pimping people out and collecting rent than a graduate does," Arthur said, now in a completely pragmatic tone. "And at least it means my people have protection if they belong to someone."
Merlin fingered his job applications, looking down at them but finding that he was unable to actually read any of them. Arthur spoke again even though he was engrossed in his email or IM chat. "Some of us do it because we have to." Gwen's name remained unspoken. "But some of us do it because we prefer it. Leon is good enough at what he does to be able to pick his clients. Lancelot makes more dealing drugs a couple of hours a day than a full-time job in retail would pay. Morgana can afford designer clothes taking her clothes off."
Suddenly, Merlin found that etching his name onto the twenty-fourth job application this month somehow felt empty.
Merlin was getting a sense of déjà vu. He stared as Gwen plopped herself down on the other end of the sofa and plucked at the worn fabric of the cushion. He raised his mug of tea to cover his face as she asked for more money again, earnestly smiling as she promised to return the money when she could. It had been over a month since the first time, and Merlin had got to know Gwen in the meantime.
Gwen really was the kindest person he had ever met. She did a good deal of the chores of the house just because she wanted to help, and her smile brightened all of their days. She was humble and sweet. She was trying to kick the drug habit, Morgana had said. Morgana had also said that she'd been trying for almost a year to stop now, but she always relapsed. Morgana had said all of that in a factual tone too, and Merlin had felt his gut roil. He somehow hoped that he would never be able to speak of such things in such a way.
"I'm sorry Gwen, I don't have anything to spare this month after rent," Merlin lied. He watched the hope on her face slide off as she wrenched it into an expression of despair. Her fingers twitched around themselves anxiously as her trembling increased and Merlin clenched his jaw in his effort not to reach out and comfort her. It was for her own good, he told himself, watching her demeanour crumble in on itself.
Even in the midst of the withdrawal pangs though, Gwen looked up at Merlin and smiled tremulously at him. "It's all right, no problem at all, Merlin."
Merlin felt his heart burn as she quietly slipped off the sofa, tugging her coat more firmly around herself even though it wasn't cold in the slightest. "I mean, I might be able to find some loose change," the words tumbled desperately out of his mouth before he could stop them, and Merlin found himself reaching for his wallet, passing her a crumpled tenner.
"Oh, thank you, Merlin," Gwen's face lit up and the comparison drew Merlin's attention to just how ill-looking she was. Her cheeks were sunken, and the circles under her eyes were dark in comparison to her pale skin. She hurried out of the room and Merlin stood up, watching as she darted to the door. He frowned, seeing the man who had evidently been standing outside waiting for her. He carried on watching as she pressed the note and a couple of others she peeled out of her pocket into his hand, receiving a small bag in return.
The man left, and Gwen slumped against the wall. She slid down to sit of the stairs, staring at the bag as if she didn't even have the willpower to go upstairs to her room first. She pulled out a dirty shop giftcard and expertly cut a little pile of white powder on the shoe-shelf just as if she was cooking in the kitchen. She snorted two lines immediately and breathed sharply. Merlin could see that her entire demeanour had relaxed, and he bit his tongue to stop from saying anything. She didn't even notice him anyway.
The first dose having been taken, Gwen stumbled up the stairs, the precious bag clutched in her hand. He slowly followed her up the stairs, finding himself unable to not watch what he had helped to create. He pushed open the door to the bedroom that Gwen and Morgana shared with his fingertips and stared as he watched Gwen snort the rest of the bag off the bedside table as she muttered about doing it before Morgana found out and took it away from her.
Merlin had gone to uni with enough of a variety of people to know that the amount was something that would last someone for a whole night, one line every few hours. It was gone in a matter of seconds. Her delicate fingers flittered over the nightstand, pressing and picking up any last sprinkles of white that she had missed. Merlin closed his eyes, his ears burning with shame, before lurching towards Arthur's room to tell him that Gwen needed the night off.
-
Merlin was huddled on his bed in the dark. It was his night off, and usually he'd be down in the living room catching up on the news and trying to socialise with the others before they went off to work. He didn't want to face them today though. It wasn't because he had given money to Gwen and helped her relapse, but rather because they would all carry on as normal. All of them would act as if this was a normal occurrence and look at him as if he had been born yesterday if he seemed weirded out by it.
Eventually, Morgana came looking for him, switching on the light and making him flinch. She sat down on the bed next to him and hugged him. "You're an idiot, Merlin," she said quietly. He blinked in surprise, and scowled. That hadn't been a remark he had been expecting. She looked stoically at him. "We'll start clean again tomorrow."
Merlin closed his eyes, frowning before nodding with conviction. "Yeah," he agreed hoarsely. "Yeah, we will."
"Come with me to work tonight," Morgana patted Merlin's arm suddenly, dragging them both off the bed. Merlin blinked cluelessly at her. "I'll let you in backstage. You can see us at work." Merlin suddenly understood - he knew that everyone in the house dealt in the shadier part of life, but he had never seen any of them do it. He would be able to see it firsthand this way. He nodded.
-
The girls that Morgana worked with were a hoot. Merlin perched on a stool in the middle of their dressing room, feeling very much like the fox in the hen house. It was too bad that this fox wasn't very interested in the hens as they bustled around him in a flurry of activity. Morgana had rattled off a list of names as they had walked in and Merlin had waved shyly.
Even though he was a man, the girls walked about half dressed or mostly undressed, not caring that they were flashing him. Merlin found himself engrossed in a discussion on Come Dine With Me with one of them as she stapled feathers to her bra, asking Merlin to hold it for her as she put the feathers in the right place. It was bizarre, and yet Merlin wouldn't have dared to say that. To express it would have been like to judge the atmosphere, and say that it was wrong, whereas it was simply just not what he was used to.
The place looked almost as he had expected - a tabletop ran across the entirety of three walls, as did a wall mirror, divided into each girl's section with a little name label on the wall. Lockers ran across the remaining wall, half of which simply hung open as the owners toddled around with various parts of prop and costume. The room was brightly illuminated, to the point where Merlin could barely tell that they were underground, and the atmosphere was bright, cheerful.
"We're having a themed night tonight," Morgana informed him between lacing herself into a ridiculously fancy medieval dress and trying to pull her cleavage up. "Everyone loves theme nights. They're so much more interesting." Merlin smiled, and nodded sagely. Morgana laughed. "Most nights are quite same-y. Everyone establishes their own sort of routine, their own special thing they're good at, but we get to dress up in extra pretty dresses for theme nights." She swished her dress. Merlin continued to smile and nod sagely.
"You're a boy, you don't understand the pleasures of an extra pretty dress," Morgana grinned at him, fixing up some hairpiece that was the same green as her dress.
Merlin chuckled, spinning on his stool. "I feel like I'm backstage at a west end show or something," he said. The words 'and not at a strip club' hung unspoken, and Morgana patted his cheek as he looked around. The other girls were tying up bodices and checking that all the Velcro bits of their costumes would rip off at the appropriate moment. Morgana waved over his head at someone, who promptly marched over.
"Who's this?" A blonde woman husked at him, staring down with heavily kohled eyes. She wasn't wearing a dress, but rather a fitted suit of armour. She even had a helmet tucked under one arm. "I hope he's not a new girl, or standards really have fallen. I'm Morgause."
"I'm Merlin," Merlin chirped, holding out a hand. "I'm just tagging along. It's like bring-your-child-to-work day or something." The woman shook his hand and laughed. She seemed a bit terrifying, in the same intimidating way that Morgana could be terrifying. Merlin bet Will would love her. He waved at her costume. "No damsel in distress for you?"
Morgause grinned. "I like to do the rescuing. When Morgana is languishing in the cardboard tower doing nothing but brushing her hair and taking her clothes off, I come along and rescue her and give her true love's snog. And then we take our clothes off together." Merlin might have choked a little.
"Our theme nights have plots," Morgana giggled. Merlin smiled at the two of them, concocting their little plot as if they were performing in a school play, and not about to strip to a club full of horny men. As he span around some more on his stool, Merlin found himself relaxing. Perhaps the room looked a lot as he had imagined a dressing room of a strip club, but he paused to consider all the things that weren't the same too.
For starters, there was no smoking inside, so it wasn't a blear of a room where the women clutched their cigarettes for their fix of baccy. There wasn't anyone who looked miserable, or who was hovering over a little baggie on their desk. None of the women looked trashy in the slightest, and their costumes were well made. Merlin had even been introduced to the girls' manager, to reassure him that he wasn't just some customer who wanted a free show, and he had been lovely.
It all scared Merlin a bit more than if he had walked into some opium haze of drug-taking and prostitution on the side.
"Girls, five minutes until we start," warbled someone from outside the room, and one of the girls squealed, tottering towards the door as excitedly as if she was the opening act of the Royal Variety Show, trailing a three metre train behind her.
"She's always a bit excited, Helen," Morgana grinned. "But she does do a great opening act. She reels everyone's interest in, but it's a simple act so it's not devastatingly difficult to follow. I've gotta go, Morgause and I are right after her," Morgana finished her hair and waved at Merlin, striding out with Morgause behind, who gave him a small wave. Merlin grinned, and seated himself at her desk, wondering what he could sabotage.
"Just don't touch the glitter," the girl on the next desk advised with a grin. "Morgana loves her glitter." Merlin laughed. The name plate above her allotted desk space read 'Freya', which was good, because Merlin couldn't remember most of the names Morgana had introduced to him. "What do you do?"
"I'm in sales," Merlin said, his default answer for that question. "Speaking of which - what exactly am I meant to call you guys?"
Freya looked at him, a half-smile curling on her lips. "Some of us say exotic dancers, but I just tell people I'm a stripper." Merlin nodded, licking his lips. Here, this girl was able to say that - and he couldn't even just tell people he worked in a supermarket. He squirmed a bit. "There's only shame in it if you think there is, so it depends more on how you say it rather than what you call it, I think," she smiled brightly at Merlin. He hadn't thought of it in that way before.
Merlin cleared his throat, and tried it. He could feel the embarrassment threatening to creep up from his neck already. "I mean, I'm just a night shift cashier at Tesco's." He breathed heavily, shuffling his feet. He hadn't said that out loud in a long time.
Without batting an eyelid, Freya smiled serenely at him. "I bet you meet a lot of interesting people on the night shift."
Merlin burst into laughter. "If you mean a lot of drunk people, yes," he admitted, launching into several anecdotes of particularly bladdered people. As he made small talk with her as she got ready, Merlin somehow got a sense of professionalism from Freya. This perhaps had never been a lifetime ambition when she had been younger, but it certainly was just a job for Freya, and she treated it in exactly the same way she might have if she was a west end dancer. Merlin found himself admiring her. "I'm on in just a moment," Freya said, glancing at the small clock on her desk, "Sorry, excuse me. Nice to meet you," she smiled at Merlin and he couldn't help but notice that she had a pretty smile.
Morgana should be back soon, and Merlin leaned back on her desk, overhearing snatches of the other conversations. They were incredibly mundane, with topics from needing to go to the bank tomorrow, forgetting to go food shopping and whether one girl should really buy that new dress. He found himself staring at the floor, tuning in to different conversations. They weren't people who had fallen down on their luck or had been conned into signing a contract to dance indefinitely for a cruel manager. Mostly though, Merlin found himself thinking how very ordinary they were.
As Morgana came back, looking a bit hot from her time under the lights, she waved a hand in front of Merlin's face. He snapped up with a squeak, and suddenly reached out, hugging Morgana around the waist, his cheek pressed into the beadwork at her waist. She pursed her lips, and ruffled his hair.
"You okay?" Morgana asked into his hair, and he knew that she wasn't asking if he had been fine by himself when she went out for her act.
"Yeah," Merlin smiled.
-
Morris, at work, asked Merlin if he was all right. A few of them had noticed that Merlin had been a bit quieter recently. Merlin was known as the person who could smile through the force of everything, from shirty customers to wailing babies in the dead of night to drunken louts. Merlin smiled, and just said that he wasn't getting enough sleep. He made a conscious effort that day to be more cheerful, cracking his usual infectious grin, and it wasn't until then that Merlin realised how fake it had always been.
After his shift was over, his shift manager, Matthew, told him that he was changing to a daytime shift so that he could actually ever see his family, and said that Merlin should consider applying for the position, Merlin had stared at it for a long moment, and then raised his eyes to Matthew, and expressed his heartfelt thanks. He clutched the application on the way home, touched that there were people at work who cared about him, and noticed him. It didn't seem as bleak as he had always thought.
Merlin filled in the application that night, returning it to Matthew, who nodded at him. There would be others applying, of course - Cedric had expressed interest in it, but then Cedric always expressed interest in anything that involved more money - so Merlin barely dared to get his hopes up, but at least Matthew had expressly asked him to consider. He'd smiled brightly at Merlin when he'd handed it in too, saying that he was glad that Merlin had applied. The little sliver of hope wormed its way back into Merlin despite his best efforts.
-
Gwen laughed at Merlin's bad joke, and he smiled to see her face lit up. Gwen was on a good streak right now, getting into the rhythm of keeping herself busy and keeping herself from wanting to take the drugs. They had fallen into the routine of watching tv together in the afternoons before work, alternating between The Weakest Link and Escape to the Country. Some of the others joined them at times, but it was a routine to them to be plonked in front of the tv by quarter past five every weekday. They were discussing their own hypothetical escape to the country at the moment, with Merlin opting for Wiltshire, with its villages and farms and pigs and mud and Gwen opting for Cornwall. Her dad had taken her there to go bodysurfing when she had been much younger, and he had been alive.
Then, Gwen received a text and it seemed like she couldn't concentrate on the tv anymore . She looked at her phone every few minutes, and the tremors kicked back in for a moment before she clenched a fist, willing them away. After ten minutes, Merlin couldn't stand it anymore. "Give me your phone," he demanded. Gwen held it out, but her fingers were clasped tightly around it when Merlin tried to take it, and he had to gently pry it from her.
Scrolling to her inbox, Merlin noticed that the number wasn't saved, and the text merely read Got more u want any? Merlin deleted it. "You don't," he told her firmly. She glanced at her phone screen, and quietly made to tuck her phone back into her pocket. Merlin stopped her quickly. "How about," he fished out his own phone, "every time you want to reply to that, you text me instead? And every time you want to give in, you phone me instead?"
Gwen looked at his offered phone for a moment, and then took it, punching her number in. "Thanks, Merlin," she said quietly. He squeezed her shoulder.
Merlin hadn't known if Gwen really would, but the first time he received a text from her, he had been confused when it merely said Yes. He realised quickly that it was an answer to her dealer's question though, and called her. He was only in the kitchen, and she most likely in her room, but if he called her, then he would jam up her phone and she'd be unable to text her dealer.
"If you had to choose one European country to visit, where you go?" He asked inanely, trying for nothing more than to distract her. It worked, that time. They talked for twelve minutes on Italy before Merlin realised that he was wasting credit and leapt up the stairs to continue the conversation.
This started to slip into their routine too, and Merlin started trying to think of new and interesting things he wanted to know about Gwen even when she wasn't texting him. It worked well for two weeks or so, and then Merlin noticed that her phone calls to him were getting much more frequent, going up to two or three times in the same day. He tried to keep up.
One night, Merlin finished up an exhausting shift at work. It was a Friday night into Saturday morning shift, which always had a large amount of drunk people coming in to sate their munchies. He picked up things from the staff office, and noticed fourteen missed calls on his phone. He scrolled through - they were all from Gwen. The first few were spread out between a couple hours, but the last nine had all been in the same half hour. Merlin called Morgana.
"Morgana, it's Gwen," Merlin panted as soon as she picked up. "I mean, I'm not Gwen. It's about Gwen. I think she's going to relapse again." He felt Morgana's tension crackle over the phone.
"I'm just in the living room, I'll go see," Morgana said crisply, and Merlin could hear her moving through the house, her slippers flapping against the stairs. "Gwen, are you here? Oh, Gwen - " Merlin tried to keep up with what was happening from just the sounds as he hurried home, twisting through the familiar roads without paying much attention as to what was happening.
Merlin clutched his coat around him in the thin crispy air of dawn as he pressed his phone closer to his ear. He could hear some scuffling, and then Gwen's distressed voice. 'No, no! That's mine, that's mine! Give it back!' Merlin could hear Morgana too, as she spoke in that low, overly calm tone that really meant that she wanted to yell as loudly as she could. 'You don't really want it, Gwen, you don't need it. Arthur!' Gwen was wailing in the background as Merlin hit the drive, running up it and blasting through the front door and then the stairs with his shoes still on.
Gwen was curled around the bedside table, a light trace of white dabbed on her nose. Powder was smeared over the table surface and Morgana towered over Gwen, half a baggie clutched in her hand, held away from Gwen as Arthur held Gwen's arms away from Morgana, his face red from where she's accidentally hit him in reaching for Morgana. Merlin stumbled in, dropping his bag on the floor. "Gwen, are you all right?" He knelt next to her as she eyed the table, trying to see how much of the remains she could salvage.
Gwen turned to look at him, and Merlin saw a glimpse of a person he had never seen before. She relaxed in Arthur's arms, and he let go with an unhappy look, rubbing his cheek. "I'm fine, Merlin. It doesn't hurt anymore."
-
Closing the door behind Gwen, Merlin snuck one last look at her, lying back on the bed with her eyes closed. "How much did she take?" Merlin asked in a low voice as they retreated to the living room for the time being, Leon already asleep in his room.
"A lot," Morgana said angrily. Merlin understood though - she wasn't angry at him, or even at Gwen. She was angry at herself. She waved the little bag. "This was the second one, and they were full." Twobags. Merlin blanched.
Arthur smiled grimly. "She always buys more on the first time after a relapse, thinking that she'll buy in bulk and save some for later. She never saves any." He sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose. He wasn't technically meant to interfere in this as Gwen's protector - he only had to keep her from the dangerous customers and the drugs counted as Gwen's personal life. Merlin knew that he cared, though.
They slumped onto a sofa, curling together for comfort. Merlin poked the remaining half a bag. "What are you going to do with that?"
"Sell it," Morgana said shortly. "And then give the money back to Gwen. I might to have to dip into my fund again, too, depending on you." She nodded at Arthur. "I hope you're prepared for tomorrow, Merlin."
Merlin frowned wearily. "Fund? Arthur? What's tomorrow?"
Morgana smiled a little. "I keep money set aside for Gwen in case this happens and she can't pay rent. I try not to use it, or she'd depend on me for rent all the time, but if it comes down to it, I don't want her homeless on top of all this. Arthur sometimes helps too. He doesn't like to put it that way, but if he's in the mood, he'll pay her for rent."
Merlin tried to figure out if he'd got it right, that Arthur would pay to have sex with his own prostitute so that she could pay his rent. After a lot of thought, Merlin realised that it was probably exactly the sort of thing that Arthur would do, and was his subtle way of being kind without seeming like he was giving to charity. He looked sideways at Arthur, a seed of admiration growing. Arthur steadily looked at the coffee table, his face impassive.
The smile slid off Morgana's face though, and Merlin looked back at her. She said grimly, "Tomorrow's the come down." She winced, and patted Merlin's knee, before rising. "I really need some sleep. You should get some too."
Arthur rose, and caught Morgana by the wrist. "Bunk with me tonight." His tone was still neutral, but his eyes flicked upwards, in the direction the girls' bedroom was. Merlin felt guilty that he hadn't thought of it first - of course Morgana wouldn't want to sleep in the same room was Gwen tonight.
-
Merlin rolled over the next morning, exhausted despite a full eight hours of sleep. Leon was lying in bed listening to music, and Merlin smiled. Leon was the best person he could have asked to share a room with. He was neat enough, but not so concerned that he minded Merlin's sporadic leaving of clothes on the floor. He didn't wake too easily when Merlin came in later than him, and was quiet enough to not wake Merlin when it was the other way around.
Getting dressed, Merlin padded out. Thinking of his own roommate had made Merlin wonder how Morgana was, probably thinking all night of a drugged up Gwen. Morgana was already in the kitchen, huddled over a mug of black coffee. Morgana never took coffee. "Couldn't sleep very well," Morgana turned to him with a smile and a nod towards the mug of tea waiting for him, even though she was clearly even more exhausted than Merlin.
"How is she?" Merlin asked in hushed tones. His words seemed to sink into the silence of the kitchen.
Morgana drained the rest of her coffee. "I'm just gathering up the courage to go upstairs," she confessed. Merlin followed suit, glad that Morgana had had the foresight to make his tea beforehand. That little gesture made him glad that she had known that he would be up early too, and that she had waited from him before doing this together.
They made their way back to Morgana's room together, easing the door open. There was barely a creak from the hinge, but still a muffled groan came from Gwen's bed. Merlin tiptoed over, his lips drawn together as each step closer revealed how pale and drawn she was. Her eyes were bloodshot from the lack of sleep and her lips dry. She looked half-dead. "I need some more," Gwen whispered, and Merlin shook his head sadly. Gwen seemed to take that a denial of more from him, and clutched at him with one cold hand. "Please, I need some more. Just to take the pain away. Make it go away, Merlin."
"I'm sorry, Gwen," Merlin felt tears forming in the back of his eyes. Morgana's hand rested on his shoulder. She knew better than to say anything.
They stayed with Gwen for as long as they could. Gwen huddled in the bed, sweating as if she had a fever. At times, she rocked slightly, clutching at her head and at others she just lay under the covers, whimpering. Every so often, she would ask for more, saying that it was the last time, it was really the very last time.
"How did she get like this?" Merlin asked Morgana in a low voice. Gwen wasn't even listening to them. Merlin wondered how someone could spiral into such a dependency - he'd never really seen the appeal of drugs other than the occasional use.
Morgana's expression softened. "Her dad died. He was the last family she had, and it happened when she was young. She didn't have anything to do for work so Arthur set her up when she asked. A little bit was to get here through that, and to stop the pain in her heart. It just wasn't enough after a while." She sighed. "The worst sort of way to get into it all, I suppose." Despite their similarities in the type of thing they did, Morgana and Gwen had come to it in such different ways, and that was the gap that had always stretched between them.
It was such a simple story. Merlin just found himself wanting to reach out more to this girl who had found herself alone so young. Eventually though, they both had to go to work. "I don't want to leave her alone," Merlin murmured, smoothing her hair back. Gwen had murmured 'more' at him again.
They crept out of the room, Merlin glancing at his watch. He was already going to be late. "We all have to work," Morgana said, equally ruefully. "If it was tomorrow, I'd ask Lancelot to keep an eye on her, but he's always selling on Saturdays."
"How can Lancelot do this?" Merlin asked, finding himself suddenly angry at the friendly, cheerful man. "How can he do this, knowing it does... this to people?" He gestured at the closed door. His heart seemed to have been left behind in the room with Gwen.
Morgana waited for him as he collected his bag. "Ask him yourself, later." She smiled gently, if tiredly. "He's not a bad person, Merlin. He cares about Gwen, a lot. He pays for and drives her to her counselling session every week." Merlin sighed, trying to reconcile the idea of Lancelot and the kind of person who would supply Gwen with drugs.
When Merlin came home the next morning though, Gwen was sprawled on the bed completely relaxed, and the old biscuit tin labelled 'Rent' in her neat handwriting was empty. Merlin sank into a numb sleep after lying in bed with his eyes open, unblinking, staring at the darkness for a few hours.
Merlin came home to find Lancelot where he had left him a few hours ago, right by Gwen's bed. Merlin had gone out in frustration to the local library, and brought a few books home in the hope that it would help Gwen, or help him help Gwen. He'd scoured the internet for advice, and most of it had been useless crap such as Just be there for your friend and let them know that you will be there for them.
Peering over at Gwen, Merlin could see that she was curled up under covers, clutching at the duvet and her head. "The shakes set back in," Lancelot said sadly. Merlin could only look accusingly at him. He didn't sell drugs to Gwen, but someone like him had. Lancelot looked up, and recognised the look in Merlin's eyes immediately.
-
Merlin knew that going cold turkey was the hardest way to stop taking drugs and even more potent in his mind than this logical though was seeing Gwen going through withdrawal symptoms. He logically knew it would never break the cycle, but every time he made to stop her by taking away her phone or standing in front of the door and refusing to let her open it for her dealer or confiscating her bags when she managed to get a hold of them, Merlin's heart broke. Sooner or later, every few times, he would give him, and let her take something, just to ease the pain.
Confessing this to Morgana, with tears in his eyes after one frustrating night when he'd finally let Gwen take something again, Merlin smacked his hand down on the table angrily. Morgana pressed a hand over his fist and looked at him straight in the eye, and said sadly, "I know." And she did.
Between them, they tried a different tactic. They eased Gwen off in small amounts, throwing the remains away immediately so that there really was nothing left when she begged for more. Morgana spoke to Arthur, who appeared silently behind them one night as Gwen bought her next baggie from her dealer, Lancelot making sure that he didn't sell her more than what they had weaned her down to.
As Gwen trotted upstairs to make her first line, Arthur stepped outside to have a friendly chat with her dealer. He wouldn't tell Merlin what it was he had said, and the dealer, Aredian, still came to give Gwen her ever decreasing amounts, but he did stop bombarding her with text messages all the time after that, and Merlin saw him far less. He had said thanks to Arthur quietly, but Arthur had shrugged it off.
Part Two