Fic: Where Legends Lie - Part 2
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7
The first time he did it, it was basically an accident. He didn’t mean to drop the chandelier on the witch, but his magic did that thing where it jumped out of his chest again, and then his brain saw dagger and Arthur and told him to pull Arthur out of the way before he remembered that dagger and Arthur was a combination he’d been hoping for ever since he’d met the prat.
He didn’t remember much after that. Uther had thanked him, his gaze fierce as he took in the witch on the ground, but Merlin had been too worried that everyone had noticed his magic to pay any attention to what the king was saying. He left the hall soon after and didn’t stop running until he reached the very depths of the castle.
He slumped down against the wall, adrenaline and magic still pumping through his veins. He’d saved Arthur’s life. He’d saved Arthur’s life, and he wasn’t supposed to interfere. He wasn’t even supposed to be there, in that room, but Arthur would be dead right now if he hadn’t been. It didn’t make any sense. Merlin hadn’t even wanted to save his life. Maybe that Arthur was supposed to have died. Maybe another Arthur had taken his place. Maybe that Arthur wasn’t the Arthur Pendragon, the one from the legend. Maybe -
“Merlin,” a low voice said, cutting off his train of thought. Merlin looked up, startled, because there were three people who knew his name in Camelot and none of them had a voice like that. But the passageway was empty.
“Merlin,” the voice said again. Merlin jumped up, looking wildly around. The voice seemed to be coming from around the corner, so he walked to the end of the passage and peered cautiously around it. There were guards playing some sort of a dice game and beyond that a dark flight of stairs where he supposed the voice must be coming from. He held out his hand, pulled his magic from within his chest and distracted the guards - who seemed to be thick sorts, judging by the way they chased the magical bouncing dice along the passageway - and then slipped down the stairs and into the darkness, wondering who was down there. He hoped it wasn’t some sort of a medieval serial killer. He didn’t much fancy being disembowelled.
It was funny, Merlin thought later. That guess wasn’t actually all that far off.
“Holy shit,” Merlin said. The dragon blinked at him, its claws tapping against the stone beneath his body.
“Merlin,” it said, and Merlin almost dropped the torch he was holding. “Holy shit,” he said again, because he was staring at an actual dragon, a real live one that talked and flew and probably breathed fire and everything. Merlin hadn’t even known they existed outside of computer games.
But then the dragon started talking and Merlin sort of wished that he was facing one of the ones from the games he’d played, because at least those dragons made some sort of sense. This one had probably been on its own for too long. He seemed to think - Merlin paused, frowning. He was terrible at riddles, but from what he could gather, the dragon seemed to think that he was supposed to be here. That it hadn’t been some sort of a magical accident - which Merlin had decided was the most likely cause of his arrival in old Camelot - and instead was, well, destiny. That it was Merlin’s destiny to protect Arthur. Merlin shook his head. It was like talking to a horoscope.
“That isn’t right,” he protested. There was no way that this could be his destiny, because this wasn’t even his time. There was no way that his path and Arthur’s could run together when Merlin’s path started in the twenty first century and, if he had anything to say about it, would finish there too.
The dragon merely laughed. “We cannot choose our destiny, young warlock,” it said, and Merlin wanted to throw something at its smug face, because destiny hadn’t brought him here. It wasn’t destiny that he ended up in Old Camelot, any more than it was destiny when he walked into the grocery store and bought a box of cereal. But he couldn’t explain that to the dragon, because words like grocery store and cereal would be beyond it, and Merlin couldn’t find the right ones to explain that this wonderful, magical destiny the dragon talked about? It didn’t exist. Merlin had read the book, and he knew the legend back to front, and that was as good as a prophecy.
“You’re wrong,” he said, but the dragon simply turned its back and took off, its wings beating hard against the cool air. Merlin frowned, kicking a piece of rock at the place where it had been sitting. Stupid dragon. The only future he wanted to see for himself was one where he avoided Arthur until he could get back to Ealdor. He’d live out his life with his mother and Will close by, find a lovely, skinny brunette man to settle down with and develop a healthy fear of travelling on buses. And as for the book about King Arthur - well, he wouldn’t read that again for a very, very long time.
That plan worked out marvellously in his head, of course, but when he finally got back to Gaius’ chambers and thought of a suitable excuse for why his clothes were covered in soot and smelled like raw meat, it became clear that he ought to start paying attention when people were talking to him.
“I’m what?”
Gaius frowned at him. “Arthur’s manservant, Merlin, do you listen to anything I say? It’s an important position, and it’ll keep you occupied until I find the spell to get you home.”
Merlin stared at him in disbelief. “I can’t be Arthur’s manservant, he’s a prat!” A gorgeous, gorgeous prat who’d destroyed Merlin’s childhood dreams. Merlin sometimes wondered whether other people had as many things go wrong in their lives as he did in his, or whether he was just extremely unlucky. He had a feeling that it was the latter.
Gaius looked up from the book he was flicking through. “He’s also the prince, Merlin,” he said. “It would be best if you did as he said.”
Merlin groaned. He didn’t know what being Arthur’s manservant involved, exactly, but he had a feeling that it would be a lot closer to slavery than any job he’d had before. And he’d be under the control of Arthur, of all people. Arthur who’d physically assaulted him and then thrown him into the dungeons. Great, Merlin thought. This was going to be just brilliant.
When he first arrived at Arthur’s chambers, it became apparent that whatever he was going to get paid for this (and Merlin suspected, from what he’d gathered of medieval Camelot, that he wasn’t) it wouldn’t be enough. He had to help Arthur put on his armour, of all things, which had gone well all those times he’d imagined it while growing up, but in reality was almost impossible to do. For one thing, Arthur wouldn’t stay still for more than two seconds, and whenever Merlin’s fingers accidentally brushed against his skin he’d jump like a startled animal and glare at Merlin as though he’d just been stabbed rather than touched. Merlin was seriously considering just using his magic to force the man to stay still, only then he probably wouldn’t be able to talk, either, and Merlin had found that it was almost impossible to remember what an ass the man was when he had his mouth shut.
So instead he tried hard not to notice Arthur’s glaring, or the way his jaw looked, all shadowed and beautiful, when it was clenched in annoyance, and just focused on trying to get all of the pieces of armour on in all the right places. And if Arthur yelled at him for forgetting exactly where one or two of them were supposed to go, and for leaving his sword up at the castle rather than bringing it down to the field, well it was hardly his fault. He didn’t understand these things. The closest he’d even been to a sword, before now, was when he’d seen one behind glass in a museum. And that one time he dressed up as the main guy from Gladiator for a party, and even that costume hadn’t involved armour so much as a loincloth and sandals. Merlin didn’t remember much from that particular night.
But that was the thing about Camelot, Merlin thought. He had learnt during his first few days that he simply didn’t fit in there. It wasn’t his clothes, because those were perfectly ordinary, although Gaius had given him a strange look when he’d walked out of his room with his scarf wrapped around his neck over his borrowed tunic. It was more the fact that he stared at everything, because even if Arthur wasn’t exactly (or at all) like Merlin had imagined him, Merlin was still in the middle of the story he’d spent half his childhood reading, and that was amazing.
The first time he’d seen Uther’s ward, Morgana, he’d dropped the bucket of water he’d been holding, because even though he was as far from straight as Will was from settling down and having children, he still had to admit that she was absolutely beautiful. He had seen her sitting behind Uther in the hall, her gaze drifting over the nobles seated before the throne, and Merlin thought that she looked like the sort of woman that movie directors would kit out in skintight black leather and drape over cars with two pistols in her thigh holsters. When she walked in to the hall that night, the eyes of half the knights flicked over to her, and Merlin was sure that they didn’t stop staring until she’d left the room after the feast had finished. Of course, it was only when he got back to his room that he realised that that was Morgana, and he was halfway through resolving that he’d have to keep an eye on her when he realised that he wasn’t going to be here for long enough to keep an eye on anyone, and that saving everyone and killing off all of Arthur’s eventual enemies wasn’t what he was here for, no matter what the dragon said.
But that, right there, was the problem, Merlin thought as he lay in bed after his first day of work. He didn’t know when the events he’d read about in the legend would start to happen; he didn’t know whether the people who would become important later on were being influenced even now, or whether things were going to change now that he was here. He had the whole future of this world on the pages in his hands, but he still didn’t know the answers.
He rolled over onto his back, deciding that he’d just have keep his head down until Gaius had found the spell. He’d do the chores that Arthur set him and he’d try not to notice anything that wasn’t right in front of him. It would probably make him seem like a bit of an idiot, but at least it would keep him from imagining things to be more significant than they were.
Even so, he noticed enough about Camelot to ensure he was constantly confused. I don’t understand this place became his mantra for the first week. By the second week, he’d progressed to I don’t understand Arthur. By the third, he’d given up on those two, and simply muttered why? to himself every time he was asked to do something particularly obscure.
He ran into Gwen during his first week as Arthur’s servant, when he was taking water from the well down in the courtyard up to Arthur’s chambers, and it was largely thanks to her that he managed not to seem completely incompetent before the prince. Not that Merlin cared, of course, because he still had his go home, find non-arthuresque guy plan firmly in mind. But he still didn’t want to seem like an idiot. He’d done all of those internet IQ tests. He knew he wasn’t.
Gwen had taken one of the buckets from his hands and helped him to carry it back up the stone steps.
“Are things going alright with Arthur?” she’d asked, as they walked along the passageway. Merlin had stared at her dolefully for a moment and then explained that the only thing he really knew about his duties was how to pour Arthur’s drink at the feasts. And even that wasn’t as simple as it should have been, because Arthur moved around so much that Merlin ended up getting as much wine in the prince’s lap as he did in the man’s cup. Gwen had laughed at that, and then she’d told him that she could probably help him out with learning how to put on Arthur’s armour.
“So how come you know so much about this stuff, anyway?” he asked as Gwen showed him that the piece of armour that he’d been trying to fit around his arm actually went around his neck. She shrugged.
“Blacksmith’s daughter,” she said, showing him how to tighten one of the straps beneath his arm.
“Really? That’s brilliant,” Merlin replied, because he’d wanted to be a blacksmith for a whole summer after that movie with the pirates had come out. Gwen stared at him.
“You’re very strange,” she said. “Not - not that that’s a bad thing. Strange can be good. You’re the good sort of strange.” She blushed and Merlin blinked at her.
“Uh, thank you?” he said. Gwen was - he cut off that train of thought as something niggled at the back of his mind. There was something about her that wasn’t quite - oh. Oh.
“Gwen?” he said slowly, his fingers tightening on the breastplate that he was holding. She looked over at him, tucking several of her dark curls behind her ear. “Is… is your name short for anything?”
“It’s Guinevere,” she said. “But most people call me Gwen.”
Merlin dropped the breastplate.
“Merlin?” Gwen asked, staring at him in confusion. “Merlin, what is it?”
Merlin picked up the pieces of armour from off the table and spun towards the door, almost dropping the helmet in his haste.
“Nothing,” he said quickly. “I - I’d better go and find Arthur.”
It was only once he was outside, with the sun reflecting brightly off the metal in his arms, that he realised that panicking and running probably hadn’t been the best way he could have reacted. But he had been talking to Arthur’s future wife. The Gwen who’d fallen on him, the Gwen who was the daughter of a blacksmith - that was Guinevere of Camelot. The story hadn’t said that she was Morgana’s maidservant. He’d never expected that she had been here from the very beginning, that she had seen Arthur grow up.
Merlin slowed down and dropped onto a bench in the courtyard outside the castle, trying to get it straight in his head. He’d envied her whenever he’d read the book, because she got to sleep beside Arthur and hold his hand and grow old with him. She was the one that he would look for when he returned from battle, and she was the one he would hold to him each night. She wasn’t exactly like he’d imagined her to be, but then, neither was Arthur. Merlin bit his lip, thumping the heel of his boot against the stone ground. He considered whether he would still want to marry Arthur now, if he was in her place, knowing what the man was really like, and he found that his answer was closer to no than to yes. It was strange, then, that Gwen would choose to accept his hand. Perhaps she saw something in him that Merlin did not. Perhaps Arthur really would change. Or perhaps, thought Merlin, she hadn’t had much of a choice. She was only a servant. If Arthur had had his eye on her…
He cut off that thought, because although Arthur was insufferably arrogant, he didn’t think that the man was like that. But it didn’t change the fact that he couldn’t see Gwen - sweet, helpful Gwen, who had called him strange and knew all about armour - as the Guinevere who stood beside Arthur as he ruled over his kingdom. There was something very different about this Camelot and the people living within it, when compared to the Camelot Merlin had read about and the Camelot he’d imagined. It wasn’t just that there were slight inconsistencies, but rather that he could not see how these people, how Arthur and Guinevere and Morgana, could become the people that he’d read them to be. Something was very wrong with this story, he realised as he walked back up to Gaius’ chambers, and he didn’t know whether he’d stay in this world long enough to see it righted.
The following week passed in a blur of armour, wet floors and dirty linen. Merlin felt like he was constantly covered in some sort of dirt, which wasn’t helped by the fact that Gaius seemed to think that bathing once a week would be adequate. On more than one occasion, Merlin found himself heading out before dawn to the stream outside Camelot’s walls, just so he could heat the water with his magic and scrub off all of the dirt on his elbows and his legs. It would have been easier to keep clean, he supposed, if he hadn’t ended up on his hands and knees so often. Merlin would almost have thought that Arthur wanted to see his servant bent over in front of him, if it wasn’t for the fact that the prince always left the room very quickly when he saw that Merlin was scrubbing the floors.
Merlin came across Gwen in one of his early morning trips down to the stream outside of Camelot. She was near the edge of the castle wall, standing on the grass, her hair dark around her face and the hem of her dress soaked with dew. She held a bunch of flowers in her hands, and was bending to collect a second handful when Merlin came walking up to the gate.
“They’re for Morgana,” she said, noticing his curious look. “She likes having some in her room when she wakes.” Merlin nodded, looking into her face as she moved towards him. The pre-dawn light cast odd shadows on her skin, and he realised that she looked exhausted, as though she had been awake more often than she’d been asleep for the past few nights. Merlin knew the feeling well, but it was different for him. He hadn’t been born a servant, and although he did what Arthur asked, he would not allow the man to treat him like one. Merlin was from a time when everyone was equal, more or less, and he’d seen enough bullying during his childhood to know how to stand up against it. He may have been Arthur’s manservant, but he would not allow himself to become the prince’s slave. If there was one thing he knew, it was that whatever his position was here, it was a temporary thing, and that soon he’d be able to get back to his own life, where he got paid for his work and the only prince he’d see would be waving happily at him from a television screen. There was more to Merlin’s life than serving the prince, even if it didn’t feel like it sometimes. His job didn’t define him.
But Gwen, he knew, was different to him. She’d lived in Camelot all her life and she’d been a servant for that entire time. She was always working when Merlin saw her, even on those occasions when he wasn’t, when he’d put aside Arthur’s armour and gone to sit outside in the sun for a while, his back against the warm stone of the castle and his eyes closed against the bright sunlight. He had watched her working during those moments, wondering whether she was happy as Morgana’s servant. Merlin knew that one day she would be something more, if this world turned out like it was supposed to, but Gwen couldn’t know that. He wondered if she ever had fun, or what she’d wanted to be when she was a child. Had she seen another life for herself than the one she was living? Merlin had, but he was lucky. His magic had allowed him to come as close to it as he was ever going to get.
“Gwen,” he started hesitantly as they walked back towards the castle together, “do you like being Morgana’s servant?” Gwen looked sharply over at him.
“Yes,” she said. “Morgana’s lovely.”
“But wouldn’t you rather be something else?” Merlin took a flower from her and turned it over in his hands. “Like a princess, or something?” Gwen blinked at him and then laughed, the sound light in the early morning air.
“I don’t think it matters,” she said. “It’s not likely to happen, unless you’re secretly a prince.” She blushed. “Not that - not that I’m going to marry you, of course.”
“I’m not exactly the marrying type,” Merlin said wryly. Perhaps one day, back home, he’d find someone who he could settle down with, but he’d always imagined himself with - well, with someone like King Arthur, and men like that didn’t come along every day. He’d mentioned that to Will once, but Will hadn’t been all that sympathetic.
“You’ve got two choices,” he had said. “Pay some bloke who looks like your prince -“
“King,” Merlin had corrected.
“King, prince, queen, they’re all the same to me,” he’d replied. “So you pay the man to live with you and do whatever royal things you’d expect a prince to do to you, or you lower your standards and get an ordinary fellow.”
“Why do I have to pay the king?” Merlin asked.
“Look,” Will had said seriously, putting a hand on his shoulder. “I don’t walk around ignoring every girl because I want to fuck Angelina Jolie, do I?” He shook his head. “I don’t, because I’m not going to get Angelina Jolie while Brad Pitt’s around, and that would be unfair to all the other girls who aren’t Angelina.”
Merlin snorted. “Yeah, I’m sure all those other girls would really resent you for not trying to sleep with them.”
“Exactly. So I let other women have a go, and if Angelina comes along and wants to get a piece of this, then at least I’d be experienced.”
“That’s disgusting, Will.”
But Will had simply shrugged.
“You’ll change your mind soon enough,” he had said. “Your prince fellow won’t be worth waiting around for.”
He wasn’t all that wrong about that, Merlin thought, kicking a boot against a tuft of grass. He looked up to see Gwen staring at him, and he realised that he’d completely forgotten what they’d been talking about.
“Sorry, what?” he said.
“I said, of course you’re the marrying type,” Gwen replied, smiling at him. “You’re really nice, and sort of… endearing,” she paused. “Plenty of girls would love to have you.”
“I wouldn’t love to have girls,” Merlin replied, almost automatically, because Will had pointed out women to him so many times that he’d developed a habit of reminding the man that yes, he was gay, and no, there were no breasts in the world, no matter how magnificent, that would change his mind. But Gwen wasn’t Will, and he clapped a hand over his mouth as soon as he’d said it, because he hadn’t been meaning to mention that to anyone here. For all he knew it could get him executed.
“Uh, could you forget I said that?” he asked, wincing, but Gwen simply shook her head.
“It’s alright,” she said with a small smile. “I won’t tell.” She hooked her arm through his as they walked up towards the castle, and Merlin felt, in that moment, that she was going to be a wonderful queen someday.
And then, in his fourth week as Arthur’s manservant, when Merlin was still spending every spare second of his time checking whether Gaius had found the spell, he’d saved Arthur’s life again. Only this time it wasn’t by accident. It wasn’t his magic acting out of turn, but rather it was a conscious decision, because as soon as Merlin had seen Arthur facing off against the enemy knight, he had known that he couldn’t let Arthur die simply because he was irritated by him. The knight was using magic and Merlin knew better than anyone that you couldn’t fight magic with anything but magic. Arthur might have been the best swordsman in the whole country, but he wouldn’t stand a chance if Merlin didn’t help. So he’d used his powers to save the prince and had watched as Arthur won, as he overcame the knight and slid his sword deep into the man’s chest.
That had been the first time he’d seen Arthur kill someone. After it had happened, Merlin had gone back to his room, crawled beneath his sheets, and cried until it felt as though he was going to shake himself apart. He wasn’t used to death. It had lingered around the edges of his life in Ealdor, but it had been distant enough that he didn’t have to acknowledge that it was there. It had shadowed his past, and he’d felt it when he’d visited his father in the tiny plot of ground at the cemetery. But here it was everywhere. Gaius was constantly fighting it, and every time Uther mentioned sorcery Merlin could feel it hanging over his head, reminding him that the very nature of his being, his magic, would get him killed if he were to reveal it. He knew that Arthur had probably killed sorcerers before this one, and he would kill many more before he became king.
And Merlin didn’t understand, because Arthur was a man who was backwards in every way that counted in Merlin’s time. He was young, Merlin’s age, and yet he had killed men, he had fought and injured men and had been struck and injured in turn. He had seen people die, and he had shown more bravery through it all than Merlin had ever believed that it was possible to possess. Arthur had almost died in the tournament, but he hadn’t shown any fear. Arthur had known that he was going to die when he’d walked out to face Valiant, and yet Merlin was the one huddled beneath his blankets while Arthur remained calm throughout it all. Even though the man could act like a complete ass, and even though he wasn’t yet a king, Arthur Pendragon was still more kingly than any man that Merlin had ever met.
It was at the moment when he’d seen Arthur acknowledging the crowd at the end of the fight, with his face drawn and weary and Valiant’s body at his feet, that Merlin had realised that perhaps the prince had a side to him that Merlin hadn’t seen, a side that he kept hidden beneath his arrogance and his pride. It was a glimpse of the king he could be, and even though it was only a tiny fragment, Merlin still felt hopeful. Perhaps Arthur would find the person who could nurture that fragment and help it to grow. Perhaps he could be a little like the king Merlin had read about after all.
But for the most part, Arthur kept that side of himself remarkably well hidden, so much so that Merlin was often left wondering whether he hadn’t simply imagined it. They’d established a routine over the first few weeks of Merlin’s life in Camelot, where Merlin woke up early, fetched Arthur’s breakfast from the kitchens, woke the prince up, got him into his armour, and spent the rest of the day cleaning up the man’s chambers until he came back from training or patrolling or whatever it was that he spent his days doing and Merlin would have to help him out of it again. Merlin had never worked so hard in his life.
“Slave labour is sort of illegal, you know,” he muttered one afternoon, when Arthur had had three training sessions instead of his usual one and had wanted to remove his armour between each. Arthur looked over from where he’d been staring out the window and frowned at him.
“No it isn’t, Merlin,” he said. “Honestly, I don’t know where you get these ideas.”
“Not from anyone you’d know of,” Merlin replied, and Arthur made him spend the evening dusting the top of Arthur’s cupboards as punishment for his insolence.
It was difficult, Merlin thought as he looked over at where the prince was sitting at the table and finishing off his supper, his blonde hair gleaming in the candlelight. Half the time Arthur didn’t understand what he was saying, and the other half of the time he understood all too well and ended up angry at Merlin. Merlin had mentioned Doctor Who in his first week as Arthur’s manservant and Arthur had stared at him like he was speaking Russian, but he’d understood perfectly well what Merlin meant two minutes later when Merlin had called him a prick. It was as though they were on wavelengths that brushed against each other once in a blue moon and the rest of the time they were bouncing round in the dark, hoping to find some common ground.
Arthur looked over at him, eyes glinting in the firelight, and Merlin realised that he’d been staring. He ducked his head quickly, peering down at the duster in his hands. It seemed to be made of actual feathers, rather than the bright pink synthetic ones he always used at home. He smiled, remembering how, as a child, he’d always ended up wearing it on his head rather than using it for dusting. It was a very attractive headpiece, something that had left Merlin looking like a cross between Cleopatra and a flamingo. His mother had always taken photographs of him whenever he’d bounded out into the kitchen with it on. Those same photographs were still stacked under his bed in his old room in Ealdor, where he’d hidden them after the last Christmas lunch. Hunith had loved pulling them out and showing them to Merlin’s extended family, no matter how often Merlin complained about it.
“What is it?” he heard Arthur ask and Merlin looked back up to see the prince frowning at him.
“Nothing,” he replied, running his finger over one of the feathers. Arthur’s eyes narrowed even further.
“You were smiling,” he said, making it sound as though that sort of thing wasn’t allowed. “What is it?”
Merlin sighed. “Memories,” he said. “I used to dress up with one of these when I was younger.” He held the feather duster up near his head, then dropped it down again as he remembered that it was Arthur he was talking to. He didn’t need to know all about Merlin’s less than manly dress-up moments.
“You what?” Arthur stared at him for a second, like he didn’t quite know how to respond to that, but then, unexpectedly, he started to laugh. Merlin froze. He hadn’t heard the prince laugh before - he hadn’t known that Arthur could laugh. He didn’t seem like the sort of man who had time for humour. But now he was laughing, slumped sideways in the chair, his head thrown back, and it wasn’t a proper, delicate sort of a thing, but a full, deep belly laugh that echoed around the room. His throat was exposed, a long line of golden skin that caught the candlelight, with slight shadows around his collarbones and at the place where it met his jaw. Merlin blinked, mentally shaking himself. It was his neck, for goodness’ sakes, not his chest or his arms or - Merlin swallowed - his cock. There was no need to get so fixated on it.
Arthur’s laughter slowed as he realised Merlin wasn’t sharing it, but was instead staring at him like he was wearing fairy wings and dancing naked on top of the table - which Merlin wouldn’t object to, exactly. Christ. He needed to focus.
“Shut up,” he said, because this was Arthur’s fault. The man didn’t need to laugh at him. Arthur stopped laughing, his face sliding into a scowl.
“You can’t talk to me like that,” he said crossly. “I’m the prince.” He glared imperiously at Merlin and then proceeded to list several hundred chores that he expected to be finished by the morning.
“Seriously, sire?” Merlin stared at him incredulously. The ass knew that he couldn’t finish all that in one night.
Arthur walked over to his bed and flopped down across it. “Seriously, Merlin. And muck out the stables.” He stretched out, pulling the sheets up over his shoulders, and shot Merlin an imperious look as if to say why are you still standing there? Merlin scowled, blowing out the candles and collecting the last of the dirty plates from Arthur’s supper.
“Even an entire factory full of machines couldn’t get that much work done,” he told Gaius later on, after he’d left Arthur’s chambers and returned the plates to the kitchen. “Hasn’t anyone thought of workers’ rights yet?” Gaius just raised an eyebrow at him. Merlin sighed, flicking his hand at the floor and using his magic to wipe the last of the mud off Arthur’s boots. He didn’t know why he bothered.
“You ought to be grateful, Merlin,” the old man said as he put the book he’d been scanning through back onto the shelf. “A lot of people would love to be manservant to the prince.” Merlin snorted. A lot of people would love to be the prince, maybe, or the prince’s consort, or his wife, but manservant to the prince? It’d be a desperate man indeed who willingly took up that position.
He managed to get all of the chores done with the help of his magic, and even though he could barely stand the next day, it was still satisfying to see Arthur do a double take when he saw all of his armour polished and cleaned.
“Is that satisfactory, sire?” he asked, holding out the prince’s sword for him to take. Arthur narrowed his eyes, taking it and turning it over in his hands to make sure that it was properly polished.
“You had help, then,” he said after a moment, laying the sword down and stepping closer to Merlin. Merlin shook his head.
“I’m capable of cleaning things by myself,” he said, and Arthur raised an eyebrow at him.
“Are you, Merlin?” he said in mock surprise. Merlin frowned, resisting the urge to thump him across the shoulder. He knew that Arthur was the prince of Camelot, but really, the man deserved a slap.
“Will that be all?” he asked instead, because if he was stuck in the same room as the prince for much longer he would end up hitting him. There was only so much taunting that Merlin could take, especially when it was Arthur Pendragon doing the taunting. It still stung a little more than it ought to, whenever he heard the prince mocking him, because every time Arthur did so he was taking himself a step further away from how Merlin had imagined him to be. It was silly, Merlin knew, and he should have ditched his image of King Arthur as soon as he’d been thrown in the dungeons that first night, but he somehow couldn’t bring himself to discard it. It was a part of him, the ideal behind every boy he’d ever liked and every man he’d ever kissed, and it was too big to cut loose. He could still remember the daydreams he’d had of himself and the king, and if he gave up on King Arthur he’d be giving up on that perfect, flawless version of himself as well.
Merlin looked up to see that Arthur was staring at him and he shook himself, pulling his mind back to the present situation.
“What?” he asked.
“I said, prepare the horses,” Arthur said slowly. “We’re going hunting.”
Merlin had never killed an animal before. He’d barely even seen any non-domestic ones outside of the zoo, and his experience of wild animals was basically limited to hearing them rustling about ominously in the bushes when he’d gone camping with Will when they were fourteen. He’d climbed into Will’s tent and refused to leave for the rest of the night, even though a brief look through the trees in the morning suggested that the fearsome beasts had actually just been rowdy teenagers looking for something to tag with spray paint.
But the point was that when Arthur had handed him a spear and told him to throw it at any animals he saw, Merlin had promptly dropped it - almost on Arthur’s foot - and shaken his head. He wasn’t going to be any part of Arthur’s hunting trip. There were nicer ways to kill things, firstly, and besides, Merlin had seen documentaries on hunting. You had to cut up the thing afterwards, and he had no illusions about who Arthur would pick to carry the meat all the way back to Camelot. He couldn’t do that. Things would get messy.
“You’re coming, idiot,” Arthur had said, shoving the spear back into Merlin’s hand. “And if you drop that again you’ll spend the week in the stocks.”
And so that was how Merlin came to be standing in the middle of the forest beside an intently-focused Arthur, hoping that any animals they came across would be sensible enough to run away before the prince could aim at them. They’d left Camelot two hours ago, from what Merlin could glimpse of the watch hidden beneath his sleeve, and he’d already sent out at least three pulses of magic to send a couple of deer fleeing before Arthur could pick up their tracks. He was using a hearing spell, one he’d stumbled across when he was seven and had wanted to hear what his mother was talking about on the phone in her bedroom. It hadn’t been all that interesting - something about tax returns - but Merlin had kept the knowledge of how exactly he needed to shape his magic in order to do that spell and he’d used it on many occasions since then.
“Merlin,” Arthur whispered. Merlin clapped his hands to his ears, because he still hadn’t figured out the finer points of the magic yet. It made noises that were far away sound louder, but also amplified noises that were close by. Arthur stared at him and Merlin pulled his hands tentatively away from his ears.
“I thought I -“ he started to explain, then stopped as he heard a noise off to his right. It was almost like voices, only Merlin knew that there weren’t any patrols out at this time of day. Besides, there weren’t any roads near here for the townsfolk to travel along.
“Merlin, what - “ Arthur started, but Merlin held up a hand to stop him from speaking and, for once, the prince did as he wanted. Merlin listened harder, closing his eyes, trying to hear past the sounds of the forest. Kill them, he heard, and that was enough.
“Bandits,” he hissed, and Arthur pulled out his sword, just as the first of the men emerged from the trees.
There were four of them, heavy, fierce men with swords held firmly in their outstretched hands. They charged at the prince, their faces wild, but Arthur stood his ground and engaged the first two before Merlin could even think about picking up his spear. The other two ran at Merlin, even though he didn’t think he looked that much of a threat, standing there open-mouthed with his spear lying on the ground two feet away. He didn’t know what to do; he hadn’t fought anyone like this before, but his magic punched its way out through his chest before he even remembered that it was there, and then half a tree fell on one of the men while the other crumpled to the ground with his face twisted up, Merlin’s spear protruding from his chest. He blinked, dazed, and looked over to see that Arthur was standing between the bodies of the other two bandits, his face dark and blood dripping from a gash in his lower arm. Merlin ran over to him, the sick feeling swirling in his chest again - a mix of worry and anger that they’d been attacked and uncertainty that he’d had to interfere again. He was sure that there were only so many times he could do it without derailing Arthur’s future completely.
He pulled up Arthur’s sleeve, trying to see how bad the wound was. Arthur tried to pull himself free, but Merlin held tight to the man’s arm.
“Let me see,” he said. “I’m good with injuries.” It was partly true - he’d only done a first aid course, but that probably meant that he was better than most of the people back at the castle. Arthur made a derisive noise but didn’t try to pull away again. Merlin pushed at the fabric until it was bunched around Arthur’s upper arm. The wound was long, but not as deep as Merlin had feared, and it didn’t look like it would need stitches. He wondered whether Gaius would be able to heal it, and realised that he had no idea what sorts of medicines the physician used.
He reached into his pack and pulled out a handkerchief, one of the ones that he’d deliberately left at home because they had Winnie the Pooh embroidered all over them, but his mother must have put into his bag at the last minute. He tied it as tightly as he could around the wound and then stepped back, allowing Arthur to examine his handiwork. The prince stared from Merlin to the bear and back again, utterly perplexed.
“It’s a bear,” Merlin said.
“I can see that. Why -”
“It’s better than nothing, isn’t it?” Merlin interrupted, and Arthur held his gaze for several seconds before sighing and pulling the sleeve of his tunic back down. Merlin picked up their bags and swung them onto his back, looking away as Arthur walked over to his spear and pulled it out of the bandit. The prince looked at it for several seconds, frowning, and then peered over at Merlin. He didn’t say anything, though, and Merlin was grateful. “How’d you know the bandits were there?” he asked as they made their way back towards Camelot.
Merlin shrugged. “I heard them.” Arthur raised an eyebrow. “I have good hearing,” Merlin continued hastily. “It’s the ears.” he reached up a finger to touch the shell of one. Arthur tracked the movement with his gaze.
“They’re - “ Arthur started to say, staring at them, and then paused. “They’re useful,” he said, and walked off through the trees, leaving Merlin confused. He had the distinct feeling that that wasn’t what Arthur had been wanting to say at all.
As the days went by, Merlin found that he was finally getting used to the routine that he’d fallen into within Camelot - he would save Arthur’s life every other week, do chores for Gaius, or for Arthur, whenever they thought that he had any sort of free time, and keep out of trouble as much as possible - so really, it wasn’t all that surprising when Lancelot turned up and threw Merlin’s life off balance again.
Merlin met him in the forest, and his first impressions of the man came in flashes - a streak of dark hair and olive-coloured skin darting past him, a strong, muscled arm wielding a sword, a voice that sounded deep and tinged with something foreign calling for him to run, run now.
It was only when they skidded to a stop, breathless, with their hearts thudding hard with adrenaline, that Merlin looked up and saw Lancelot in full.
He was noble-looking, but not like Uther’s knights, who stared out over the world as if it was theirs to take. He had a kinder face than that, with deep brown eyes and a smile that spread quick and warm across his face. Merlin liked him immediately.
“I’m Merlin,” he said, smiling.
“Lancelot,” the man replied with a grin, and Merlin probably should have expected as much, because he was young and strong and beautiful, so of course he’d be a part of the legend. It seemed as though everyone who was young and strong and beautiful around here, was.
Lancelot fit easily into life at court, making friends with Leon and the other knights and managing to impress Arthur, despite the fact that he wasn’t a noble. Merlin even caught him standing alone with Gwen in the passageway one morning, but he backed quickly out of sight before they noticed him. It had caught him by surprise, because in the legend it seemed as though the relationship between Lancelot and Guinevere had sprung up after Arthur was king, during the days he spent riding over his newly-formed country and protecting its people. Merlin hadn’t even known that they were supposed to meet yet. He hadn’t thought that seeing them standing close together in the castle halls, smiles on their faces, would seem so right, as though it was Lancelot and Gwen who were supposed to be together and Arthur had simply pushed in between them for a while.
But that was the thing about Lancelot - he seemed perfect here, as though he’d been born to walk the halls of Camelot and to defend its borders. Merlin found that he wanted Lancelot to have what he’d come for - to have the chance to serve Camelot as best he could. Merlin could see how his eyes lit up whenever he described it and the look he got on his face, when he was describing what it was to be a knight, was one that Merlin knew only too well.
And besides, it didn’t seem that much like deception, telling Arthur and the king that Lancelot was a nobleman, because Merlin knew that he would be one in the end. It wasn’t really a lie, he thought, because Lancelot was good enough, brave enough and strong enough to be a knight. Lancelot was meant to be a knight. It was his destiny.
But all the same, he felt a sickening surge of guilt when Lancelot was found out, because - lie or not - it had been his idea to fake the man’s title. He had persuaded Lancelot to try.
Lancelot was gone again, almost before Merlin realised it. He hadn’t stayed for long, really - a brief flash of time when Merlin had somebody other than Gaius who he could talk to, somebody who he could whisper to at night when Gaius was snoring loudly in the next room and someone who he could laugh with when they were watching the nobles flocking around Uther in the hall. Lancelot had seemed so right for this world that Merlin was sure that he would stay.
Gwen seemed quieter after the man had left and for the next few days they would both fall silent whenever one of them mentioned Lancelot. Merlin had thought that the sudden, first-sight sort of love that all the romance novels talked about would be something wonderful, but every time he saw Gwen paused, halfway through folding Morgana’s dresses, a sad little frown on her face, Merlin thought that perhaps it was the worst thing in the world.
The weeks passed quickly after Lancelot left. Merlin saved Arthur’s life on a dozen more occasions, his stomach clenching each time at how close the prince had come to death and how wrong it was that he had interfered. That was the last, he would promise himself each time it happened. That would be the last thing he would do for Arthur, and he would find a way home before the prince got into danger again. But by the time the leaves had all dropped from the trees and the sky had faded to a wintery grey, Gaius still hadn’t found the spell. It was probably in one of the older books of magic, he said, and it was difficult because those ones weren’t ordered at all. It was just as likely to be in the first book he looked in or the last.
So Merlin simply gritted his teeth and carried on, because when it came down to it he’d rather stay in Camelot, where he could see everything unfolding, than hide out in the woods for months until Gaius found a way to get him home. He made sure that he didn’t interfere in any other way than saving Arthur’s life, and that couldn’t hurt anything that much, surely. Arthur was supposed to survive to be king, because that was when the story started, and why would it matter whether the reasons for his survival changed? Merlin couldn’t have let him die. The prince wasn’t a bad person, and a small part of Merlin still held on to the hope that he could still turn out like Merlin had imagined him, if he only survived for long enough.
Merlin was also slowly getting used to his duties as a manservant, though there were times when he simply didn’t understand what he was being asked to do. Like now, for instance.
“You want me to what?” Merlin stared at Arthur, wondering whether he’d heard the man correctly.
Arthur pinched the bridge of his nose, inhaling deeply. “Help me to bathe, Merlin, there’s a feast tonight. I trust that you know what a bath is?” Merlin nodded. He hadn’t had one for months, since washing in Camelot basically involved a lot of frantic scrubbing in icy streams, and back in Ealdor he’d mainly had showers. He liked showers. They were warm and comforting, and you could scrub all of the dirt away, watch it flow down the drain and step out all clean and steaming and fresh.
“Can’t you bath yourself?” he asked, even though Arthur seemed incapable of doing anything on his own unless it involved a horse or a sword. Or wrestling.
“Don’t be an idiot,” Arthur said, confirming Merlin’s thoughts. Merlin sighed. He needed to get back home, he thought, walking out of the man’s chambers to fetch the water.
It wasn’t until he’d reached the well in the town - and it was at moments like these that he really missed plumbing - that he realised that he was going to be bathing the prince, and that would probably involve a whole lot of naked Arthur. Merlin swallowed, pausing from where he’d been pumping the water into the bucket. He’d managed to avoid seeing Arthur completely unclothed so far, which was both a relief, because he hadn’t had sex in months and he didn’t know how much nakedness he could take, especially when it was someone as fit as Arthur, but also irritating, because he hadn’t had sex in months and he’d had weeks of staring at Arthur’s chest and his arms and his neck as he took the man’s armour on and off, and he wanted more, dammit. He knew that Arthur was supposed to marry Gwen, and that as a result he was almost certainly as straight as Will, but Merlin could still look, couldn’t he?
Only now, with the image of Arthur all golden and pink and wet with bathwater floating through his mind, Merlin was beginning to change his mind. He usually needed alcohol in his system before he got anywhere with guys, which Will said was because he was a prude and Merlin thought was because he could never work out if the men were interested or not. Arthur, he knew, most certainly wasn’t, and so Merlin really didn’t want the man to notice Merlin’s interest. He had a big enough ego as it was.
What he really needed to do was to take the edge off, he thought as he filled up the bucket with water. He wasn’t interested in Arthur so much as fit naked men in general, and he had plenty of them on his laptop. He hadn’t used the computer in weeks, now, because he wasn’t sure how long he’d be here and he hadn’t wanted to waste the battery. This wouldn’t be wasting the battery, exactly, he reasoned. It was simply a way to make sure that he didn’t draw any more attention to himself than necessary.
Merlin climbed the stairs leading up from the courtyard, wondering whether he could risk going back to Gaius’ chambers for a few moments before taking the water to Arthur’s. He’d just say he was heating up the water when Arthur asked why he’d taken so long. Heating up bathwater took a while, right?
Merlin sighed as he held the bucket of water up to his chest and pushed open the door. He shouldn’t have to do this. He should be back in Ealdor, where there were clubs he could go to and strangers that he could dance with, until they were both hot and eager and ready. There weren’t any such things here, even though Merlin had scoured the lower town for them in the first few weeks. He hadn’t expected to find any, really, but he’d wanted to find something that he could recognise, some place where he’d know what to do as soon as he walked in and he could forget about his magic and Arthur and this whole town just for a moment. But there weren’t any - the closest thing he could find was a tavern. He’d left it almost as soon as he’d entered, because rowdy barmaids flirting with middle-aged, balding men weren’t really what he had in mind.
He didn’t really know what he had in mind, though. The clubs had never been all that satisfying, and Merlin had always come out of them feeling drunk and filthy. It had been Will who had urged him to go to them, to wander with him round the streets until they found a place that spewed heavy pumping music and had dance floors so dark you couldn’t see who you were dancing with. It wasn’t the life he’d wanted to live then, but now he found that he was missing it.
Merlin set down the bucket in the corner of his room and walked over to where his laptop was hidden under the floorboards near his bed. He pulled it out, brushing the dust off its cover and turning it on. He settled down on the bed with it, the sunlight that was streaming through the open window brushing warm against his skin. Lying back against the pillows, he inhaled deeply. The air smelled like summer. The past few days had been hot and Merlin had found found himself rolling up his sleeves and the legs of his breeches at every spare moment he had, just to feel the heat against his skin. Arthur had walked in that morning when he’d been sitting on the floor of the prince’s chambers with his trousers pushed up to his knees. He had stared at Merlin with an odd expression on his face until Merlin had rolled them back down and gone back to scrubbing the floor.
Merlin closed his eyes, stretching his arms out behind his head as he waited for the laptop to hum its way into life. He could hear the sounds of the market through the window, the low rumble of animals and people and life that sounded almost familiar - like the sound you heard when you walked into central station at Ealdor. It was a noise that he wanted to keep with him, because there were so few that he could recognise here.
He wondered what would happen when Gaius found the right spell. Would Arthur notice if he left? Would Merlin tell him that he was leaving, or would he slip away quietly before Arthur could try and stop him? He didn’t know if manservants were allowed to quit. Perhaps Arthur would have to find someone to replace him. Perhaps Gwen would replace him and Merlin’s departure would form the bond through which they would grow to love each other and from there, to rule beside each other as King and Queen. He tried to imagine it. Gwen would be in purple, with her hair threaded through with ribbons and a solid golden crown upon her head. She would be beautiful, a queen loved by her people because she understood them even better than Arthur. She would teach Arthur how to treat his people - he loved them, Merlin knew, but he was still too separate from them to know how to go about ruling them. Arthur’s rule would be different to Uther Pendragon’s and it would be a servant girl who would make those changes. He couldn’t envy Gwen for that, because she was sweet and lovely and of all the people that Merlin knew, it was her who most deserved to become something more than she was.
But he couldn’t shake the image of Arthur smiling at her, golden crown glinting in the sunlight, with that look in his eyes, the one that Merlin had seen, sometimes, when Arthur was staring out over the courtyard in the afternoons. There was love in that look, and peacefulness, and even though Gwen deserved it, he couldn’t help feeling a surge of disappointment when he imagined the scene.
So he tried to put it from his mind, instead focusing on the scent of herbs from Gaius’ room and the press of the mattress against his shoulders, the bunched up sheets pushing into the small of his back, the edges of his boots hanging off the end of the bed. He was tired; he could feel the warmth of the sun washing over him, soothing him, making him forget what it was that he’d been meaning to do. There was something important, he knew, but he couldn’t quite remember what it was, and it didn’t seem all that important anymore anyway, because -
“Merlin!”
Merlin opened his eyes to see Arthur’s face hovering close above his, a scowl pressed across his face. He blinked, looking around. The light in the room was dimmer than before, and his arm was numb beneath his head. Crap. He’d fallen asleep.
“I was just…” he tried to think of an excuse. “Heating up the water for your bath, Sire,” he said, sitting up abruptly and almost hitting his face against Arthur’s. Arthur stepped quickly backwards and dragged his gaze over Merlin’s messy hair and crumpled clothes.
“For two hours?” he asked incredulously. Merlin winced. He hadn’t meant to fall asleep, but there had been sun and warmth and he’d been so tired. He rubbed a hand over his eyes, trying to focus, and then froze as he saw his laptop lying opened on the edge of the bed. It wasn’t glowing, which meant that it was probably out of power. Arthur didn’t seem to have noticed it, but Merlin pulled the sheet up towards his chest anyway, trying to cover it from view. Arthur looked at him oddly for a second, but the bucket in the corner of the room caught his eye before he could ask what Merlin was doing.
“Merlin,” he said, walking over to it and peering inside. “Heating up the bathwater, are you?” Merlin bit his lip, and Arthur shook his head, exasperated.
“Be at my chambers in five minutes,” he said. “With the bathwater.” And with that he left the room. Part 3