Fic: Merlin; Camelot's Sweethearts; Reel Merlin
Title: Camelot’s Sweethearts
Author: mariana_oconnor
Movie Prompt: America’s Sweethearts (can you see where I got the title from?)
Pairing: Merlin/Arthur overall with Will/Merlin, Arthur/Sophia, past Arthur/Morgana (they aren’t related), background Morgana/Lancelot, background Gwen/OMC
Rating: R
Word Count: Just under 63000 … don’t look at me like that.
Spoilers/Warnings: Uhm, let’s just say the whole of series one, for good luck
Author's Notes: This is the little fic that ran away with my inner editor and killed them, brutally. Many, many, thanks to wrennette who did a spectacular job of betaing every part of it and checking for continuity errors and everything and binglejells who gave another part a thorough looking over during my ‘aargh deadline!’ panic. Any mistakes left are my own.
Also - I know nothing about the film industry.
Third I do not own any of the things mentioned in this fic. Nor do the opinions of the characters on anything from religion to John Barrowman necessarily reflect my own.
Thank god it’s over.
Summary: Arthur is a film star, Merlin is his personal assistant who might, possibly be head over heels in love with him. However, Arthur’s more interested in his ex, Morgana, and then the mysterious Sophia to notice… Oh, and Will is awesome.
Everyone knows that the lives of film stars are glamorous. The glitz, the parties, the endless stream of people trying to worm their way into your affections. True, the life has its down sides; the paparazzi, the insane fans… but everyone knows the pluses outnumber the minuses and everyone envies the riches and the fame.
The lives of film stars’ personal assistants - or slaves as they are affectionately known - are not quite so glamorous. Every film star, to quote a cliché, is like a swan: it glides beautifully on top of the water, but hidden away, the legs are kicking frantically. There’s just one thing that no one ever mentions:
Those legs never belong to the film star.
The legs that we are interested in belong to one Merlin Emrys. Son of Hunith Emrys, born in a small village in the Peak District called Ealdor, not that anyone really cared what his name was. All they cared about was the man he worked for: Arthur Pendragon.
Yes, that Arthur Pendragon. Yes, star of Valiant and also that curious little indie film whose name no one ever remembers. Golden boy of Hollywood. Most famous British actor in years. On the cover of every magazine you could be on the cover of. That Arthur Pendragon, who couldn’t get dressed in the morning without his personal assistant selecting his outfit and making sure his breakfast was cooked exactly right.
Merlin was best known for being ‘that guy with the sticky-out ears who lurks in the back of photos’, if he even got that much recognition. He too had graced the cover of many trashy tabloids (most of which pictures were stuck on his mother’s wall, to his mortification) but no one really seemed to care about that. In fact, all people ever asked him about was Arthur.
“Can I have Arthur’s autograph?”
“Is Arthur going to go for the role in his father’s new film?”
“Will Arthur be ready by five?”
To which the answers were, in order: no, yes and highly unlikely, given that some idiot had decided to let Arthur do his own hair, which always took him forever.
And if he wasn’t answering questions about Arthur, he was answering questions from Arthur, which was a challenge in and of itself.
Screaming teenage girls and weak-kneed middle aged women lined the streets at any event Arthur was going to. He was charming, smiled in a way that made any sane person’s heart (gay, straight, bi, asexual) skip a beat and never swerved from his ‘golden boy’ image. None of the public knew that, behind the scenes, he was the most demanding, pig-headed, arrogant, bloody-minded son of a bitch who had ever walked the earth. Most of the time.
Those people who did know offered Merlin as much pity as he could handle, mixed with a certain amount of awe. He knew that he was the first PA (whipping boy) of Arthur’s to last more than a year, and he also knew that every one before him (without fail) had ended up in some sort of therapy afterwards. But considering most of them had been the type of Hollywood wannabe that clung desperately to Arthur’s coat tails to try and make it on their own, he was not entirely surprised.
Merlin, on the other hand, had just wanted a job with reasonable compensation for his time, a roof over his head and the possibility of travel, someday, perhaps. The ‘on call’ 27 hours a day, eight days a week part was an undesirable side effect.
He had been meant to work as a cleaner in the studio where Arthur was filming his latest epic, The Labyrinth of Gedref, but he had stumbled into the wrong room by accident and narrowly avoided a low flying glass of water.
It turned out that the room he stumbled into was Arthur’s dressing room and the glass of water had been meant for Gregory, his predecessor, but Merlin had not found that out until later. He had berated the man sitting across from him without even looking up, and proceeded to clean up around the broken glass, telling Arthur (and in his defence, he had not known it was Arthur at that point, not that he would have done anything differently if he had known) that if he was going to throw glasses deliberately then he was going to clean up his own mess.
The ensuing argument had lasted a good half an hour, during which time Gaius, the publicist for the studio, had come in and watched in amusement.
Ten minutes later Merlin had been promoted without having any say in the matter and his life had taken a turn for the decidedly bizarre. If he’d known arguing would get him a job, he would have tried it in his first hundred or so interviews.
He had currently been working for Arthur for three years, although it seemed like more, and he really could not imagine being anywhere else. Arthur was a self-centred arsehole, but…
- and it was a really big but -
Merlin was sort of, kind of, slightly, maybe a little, head over heels in love with him, which sort of, kind of, sucked.
But that was the way it went. Arthur was annoyingly handsome and had the most irritating habit of being fundamentally a good person beneath all of the self-obsessed bullshit, and Merlin was his harassed PA. Fairytale endings only happened in the rom-coms. Not a genre Merlin had ever had an affinity with.
All of which sort of explained what Merlin was doing walking down a corridor towards Arthur’s current dressing room at seven am on his birthday when he had had many far better offers (okay one far better offer, involving his friend Will and a pack of beer). There was a cup of coffee in each of his hands, a handful of letters tucked under one of his arms and a brown paper bag containing a croissant hanging from between his teeth.
“Merlin!” There was a familiar voice behind him and he turned, paying very careful attention to the coffees he was carrying. He groaned, Gaius was walking towards him down the corridor and the expression on the older man’s face indicated that this was going to be a bad birthday. From that first instance where Gaius had seamlessly convinced him to take the job, he always got that look on his face when he was about to talk to Merlin about something truly terrible.
“Mmph,” Merlin mumbled around the brown paper in greeting. Gaius nodded absently and waved a newspaper front page in front of his eyes, too fast and too close for him to read it. That was also a bad sign. Nothing ever flustered Gaius; there was never a grey hair out of place in his, admittedly slightly disturbing, hairstyle (Merlin had tried telling him once that he should get a haircut, but had only received the Gaius-eyebrow-raising-of-doom for his troubles). If the contents of this paper were enough to get the publicist agitated, then it would be enough to put Arthur into one of his sulky moods.
Merlin hated Arthur’s sulky moods. They usually ended up with everyone yelling at him because no one dared to yell at the superstar.
“Have you seen this?” Gaius demanded dropping the paper to his side to glare at Merlin as though the headline, whatever it was, was his fault.
“Nhn,” Merlin replied with a shake of his head. The brown paper bag was beginning to get a little damp with saliva, despite his best efforts, and he knew Arthur was going to complain.
“It’s not good, Merlin,” Gaius intoned, and his heart dropped. ‘not good’ usually meant catastrophically bad. “Read it.” He held the paper out for Merlin to take and the only response the younger man could give was an unimpressed look, and it took Gaius a second to realise that his hands were a little too busy, and he held it up for Merlin to see.
Lovebirds Back Together? The headline read and, before Merlin even looked at the picture he knew that this was every bit as bad as Gaius had implied. The black and white photograph depicted a man who was definitely Arthur sitting in the back of a car, and a woman, who could be no one other than Morgana Le Fay, his ex-girlfriend and fellow superstar, getting in next to him. Internally, Merlin let out a string of expletives, externally, he tried to look as innocent as possible.
He should have known this would come back to bite him in the arse. Avoiding Gaius’ gaze, he read on.
The break up two years ago of heart-throb Arthur Pendragon, star of The Moment of Truth and Valiant, and Morgana Lefay, Valiant and To Kill the King, had fans around the country… he skipped that bit, he knew that bit. Not only had he been there for the whole of that ill-advised romance, he had also read all the coverage of it, and its aftermath, in the papers, and seen it on TV, and the Internet. …Yesterday, our reporter caught this image of the two of them leaving from a star-studded party together! Is love in the air once more for this high-profile couple? Have they seen past their differences? Sources close to Morgana suggest that the answer may be yes. We can only hope that these two have worked things out and look forward to an announcement shortly.
Merlin groaned, and almost dropped the post under his arm.
“Do you have any idea where this came from, Merlin?” Gaius asked lightly, and Merlin could tell someone else had already landed him in it. He winced slightly and Gaius reached out to pull the bag from his mouth. “Well?”
“I swear, I didn’t know the photographer was there,” he said immediately. Gaius took a deep breath. “It wasn’t anything, okay. Gwen was ill and she asked me to keep an eye on Morgana as well, they both got bored of the party at about the same time, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and stick them in the same car.”
“What were you thinking?” Gaius asked, “were you thinking? Or did you just take leave of your senses completely?”
“I didn’t notice the camera man…” Merlin repeated, stubbornly. He glared at the picture as though he could cause it to cease to exist if he just stared at it long enough. But no matter how long he stared at it, it was still there, in black and white for the whole world to see: Morgana ducking into Arthur’s car. “And I went with them, it’s not like they were alone.”
“The world doesn’t care, Merlin.” Gaius said solemnly. “You remember what it was like the last time they got together.”
Merlin did. It had been barely six months into his job with Arthur when the actor had decided that he was head over heels in love with his co-star, the beautiful Morgana Lefay. The two of them had barely managed to hold one civilised conversation with each other in the whole time they had known each other, but Arthur was convinced that it was true love. Merlin had, wearily, worked as a go-between for his boss with Morgana’s assistant Gwen, and slowly the two of them had decided to see how things went.
Unluckily, they were caught in a restaurant together by a reporter halfway through their second official date. After that it had been less of a relationship and more of a media circus. Admittedly, it had raised the profile of the film they were working on. Individually they were famous, but together they were the ‘perfect’ couple. For months they were everywhere, TV shows, front pages, entire web pages and livejournal communities were devoted to their relationship.
Arthur had been too much enamoured of the situation to realise the strain it was putting on his relationship, and too convinced of his own superiority to notice Morgana’s waning interest. When the end had finally come, after many screaming rows and smashed vases and mirrors, the only people surprised were Arthur and the public. Somehow, they had managed to keep their issues behind doors.
The entire western world had mourned the end of their relationship.
Arthur had stomped around for a few weeks, glaring and refusing roles in anything other than introspective thrillers, before getting uproariously drunk with his father’s newest secretary and sleeping with her… and her sister.
She had sold her story to the newspapers and soon everywhere was full of Arthur seeks solace for his broken heart. The resulting backlash had sent Morgana to her lawyers for restraining orders on every member of the paparazzi she could name and Arthur into therapy.
Merlin could not do that again. Somehow, people seemed to think that the title of PA meant that he was the only one who could deal with Arthur’s moods, or maybe it just singled him out as some kind of sacrificial lamb. Either way it ended up with him and Arthur alone in a room as the actor attempted to take out some of his agitation - usually on Merlin.
“Shit.” Merlin said.
“I quite agree,” Gaius said, but before he could expand, a shout shook the corridor.
“MERLIN! ” Arthur’s voice could carry across an entire football pitch if necessary (and it had been once, in the classic romantic ending scene of The Moment of Truth). The relatively small distance from his dressing room to Merlin’s ears was barely an obstacle.
“I should…” he said and Gaius nodded, giving him a sympathetic smile before offering the paper bag back to him. He took it gingerly between his teeth.
“MERLIN, Where are you? ” Arthur called again and Merlin turned as quickly as he could and hurried towards Arthur’s room.
“Happy Birthday,” Gaius called after him. If Merlin had had enough hands to stick two fingers up at him, he would have.
He was just wondering how to open the door with no hands when it was flung open from the inside and he looked up into Arthur’s eyes.
It was no wonder that the man was famous. He was gorgeous from the tips of his blond hair to his toes, not that Merlin was biased or anything. Arthur even looked good when he was furious, and that was just not fair. It was so hard to be angry when you were ogling the way the muscles in his neck bunched together, or his arse as he paced the room, and his eyes.
Merlin shook his head to get rid of the unwanted thoughts as quickly as he could. He would have thought that, after 3 years of knowing Arthur for the spoilt brat that he was, the crush would have worn off. After all, he wasn’t a wide-eyed teenager staring at the posters lining the walls of his room and realising that maybe he might just be a little bit gay, anymore. Sadly, his heart still skipped a beat every time Arthur smiled the smile, the one he had first seen twenty times larger than life at the cinema, the one that had made the actor famous. It was pathetic, really. Every time he smiled like that Merlin felt as though it was just for him, and he understood all the screaming fans that followed Arthur around the world, begging him to notice them.
The problem was not that Arthur did not notice him, it was just that he noticed him in the wrong way.
“Apparently,” Arthur drawled, his tone suddenly deathly calm (and that was when Merlin knew to worry) “Morgana and I are back together. Wherever could the press have got that idea, Merlin?”
With the croissant bag still clenched between his teeth, there was little Merlin could do but look sheepish. Somehow, having both his arms full and a paper bag in his mouth helped with that.
“I knew that getting in that car together was a bad idea,” Arthur said, although, Merlin seemed to remember that the man had not mentioned that at the time. “How could you let this happen?” Merlin very nearly spat the croissant bag out of his mouth at that. If he could just get in the door and put the stuff down on the table by the door, then they could have this argument properly. But Arthur was blocking the entire doorway. “Don’t give me that look, Merlin,” the film star continued, pouting slightly (another expression that really should not have been attractive, but really was).
Finally, after a few moments of just glaring at each other, Arthur submitted and stepped aside to let Merlin in. Within seconds he had dumped the stuff down on the table and turned on his boss.
“If you’d known it was a bad idea, you could have clued me in,” he said, watching as Arthur closed the door and crossed his arms over his chest.
“You’re my personal assistant, Merlin, you’re supposed to know these things without my having to tell you. Surely by now you’ve figured that out. Honestly you’re the…”
“-worst assistant you’ve ever had,” Merlin completed for him without missing a beat. “And anyway, it’s not like they’ve got anything definite, and how was I supposed to know there was some guy with a camera out there?”
“There’s always a guy with a camera out there,” Arthur told him with a tired sigh, “and they don’t need anything definite. They’ll run with it anyway. It’s like a game of Chinese whispers with them. What starts out as one thing ends up as the end of the world, or some sort of sadistic BDSM orgy.” He sighed and collapsed into the most comfortable chair in the room with effortless elegance.
“Well, I don’t remember the orgy, or wasn’t I invited?” Merlin asked, trying to break the tension in the room. Arthur looked at him in utter confusion for a moment before allowing a small smile to creep onto his face.
“Why would we invite you to our BDSM orgies, Merlin. Honestly… there are far more interesting people out there,” he waved his hand vaguely to indicate the world. Merlin sighed internally in relief. Arthur was not as mad as he could have been, if he was allowing himself to be distracted by Merlin’s poor humour this early on.
“I could bring the whips,” he said, turning to sort out the piles of paper on the desk, trying to hide the fact that he was blushing slightly at the idea of orgies with Arthur.
“You have whips?” Arthur asked, sounding a little taken aback. “I wouldn’t have thought you were into that sort of thing. You seem a little…”
“What?” Merlin asked, turning round and raising an eyebrow. He had been practising that look, and studying Gaius’ face for hours in an attempt to perfect it.
“Well,” Arthur’s eyes shifted a little uncomfortably, focussing on the wall behind Merlin’s head rather than his face. “Vanilla, I suppose. You always seem a little, prudish, that’s all.”
“Just because I don’t talk about my sex life doesn’t mean I don’t have one,” Merlin pointed out, “not all of us like to have people walk in on them.” Arthur at least had the grace to look abashed at the reminder. Merlin had walked in on him and Morgana several times in the beginning of their relationship, before he had learnt to knock loud enough to be heard by the dead. Then there were Arthur’s other various one-night stands over the years, whom he had had to let down gently, force to sign privacy agreements and escort to the door after cooking them breakfast.
“Yeah, but I’ve never even seen you look at a girl,” Arthur pointed out.
“I’m discrete.” Merlin commented. So discrete that Arthur had not, apparently, realised that he was gay. It was almost a relief, except that it reinforced the fact Arthur had only ever noticed him as the person who brought the coffee and told him he was being a prat.
“Is it the ears?” Arthur asked, curiously.
“Is what the ears?” Merlin asked, although he had an idea where this was going.
“Why you can’t get a girl, is it the ears?” Arthur squinted at him and twisted his head to one side. “You’re not that bad looking really… but the ears are a little dumbo-like.”
“Why, thank you,” Merlin commented handing over the handful of letters that looked like they might be more personal to Arthur. “I think there might almost have been a compliment hidden in there.” Arthur just smirked, before tearing into the first envelope. Merlin took the opportunity to grab a sip of his own coffee - it was cold.
“My father requests my presence at a meeting over the Excalibur casting tomorrow,” Arthur said with a sigh, tossing the letter onto the floor and opening the next. “Like I wouldn’t be there anyway.” Arthur liked to be at every meeting for those films of his father’s he was involved in. He said he liked to see the progression.
“My great-aunt wants a signed picture for a relative’s birthday,” he continued with his usual round up of the day’s post. “And… oh, Gawain’s having a New Year’s party which I must attend.” He leaned back and closed his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose. “All that stuff with Morgana,” he said slowly, and Merlin, perched on the edge of the table, gritted his teeth in preparation. “Do you think it will all go away?”
“Probably,” Merlin answered optimistically, “if there’s nothing else to egg them on then they don’t have any real proof, except for that so called source.”
“Source?” Arthur asked, his head whipping up to catch Merlin’s eye again. “What source?”
“Just something mentioned in the article. Probably complete bollocks,” Merlin backtracked. The tiny alarm in his head that he had trained to warn him when he was heading into dangerous territory with Arthur was ringing loudly.
“What source, Merlin?” Arthur demanded again, his voice going flat and his blue eyes boring into Merlin’s.
“Just… the article, it says that a source close to Morgana said that it was true or something like that.” As soon as the words left his lips, he regretted them. Arthur’s eyes lit up like he had not seen them do in months, maybe even years. He knew that look, it was the one Arthur had had before he became infatuated with Morgana. He groaned inwardly and wished that he could take it back.
“A source?” Arthur asked again, this time eagerly. “Close to Morgana? Who?”
“It’s almost certainly total bollocks, Arthur,” Merlin said, desperately trying to regain control of the situation, but knowing it was futile. Arthur reached out and grabbed the offending paper from the floor and scanned through the article again until he found the relevant passage.
“ ‘Sources close to Morgana suggest that the answer may be yes’,” Arthur read out. “What do you think that means?” he asked. Merlin knew that it was supposed to be a rhetorical question, but he answered anyway.
“Absolutely bugger-all, except that it was a slow news day and they wanted to sound official.”
“But they can’t print it unless it’s based on some sort of truth,” Arthur told him, although both of them knew that was complete rubbish.
“Maybe they spoke to her postman or something… or the man who sold her a car. Who knows?” Merlin reached out to try and pull the article away from Arthur, but the actor pulled it swiftly out of reach.
“Sources close to Morgana…” he muttered to himself. “It’s got to mean that she wanted them to write it.” Merlin thought the holes in Arthur’s logic would probably be big enough for fully grown dolphins to jump through, and maybe a blue whale or two (if they jumped) but he did not say anything. The man was off on his own now, in a fantasy world of his own making and there was no calling him back. “She wants to get back together.”
In the stretch of terrible silence that followed, Merlin decided that this was going to be an awful birthday. Drawing in a deep breath, he resigned himself to the fact. Gaius was going to kill him, and get the effects guys to burn his body so that no one would ever find him. No, he would probably just hand him over to the effects guys first and let them kill him - slowly.
He had sort of hoped that he would live a little longer than twenty two.
“Of course she wants to get back together,” Arthur said to himself, his face falling into the smug, self-satisfied expression that was probably the only expression of his that didn’t make Merlin go weak at the knees. Rather, it made his personal assistant want to smack him, hard. “It’s only natural.”
That had been the problem with Arthur and Morgana’s relationship, Merlin mused, knowing that he wasn’t going to be necessary to the conversation for a little while. Arthur had always thought that Morgana should be grateful for his attention, not realising that she only tolerated him because at the few times when he wasn’t being an arrogant berk, he was actually quite a nice human being.
“And she couldn’t say it herself because… well, she’s Morgana.” Merlin at least agreed with that part. If Morgana, on any level, wanted to get back together with Arthur, she would never say so. However, the possibility of her wanting that was so infinitesimally small - Merlin happened to know through his friendship with Gwen, Morgana’s PA, that she was currently in a relationship with an Italian model - that the point was pretty much moot. “Do you think she wants to get back with me?” Arthur asked finally. Merlin paused a second. He had learnt a long time ago that unless you were completely to the point, Arthur would hear what he wanted to hear.
“No,” he said firmly. Of course, being blunt had its own problems, namely that Arthur tended to react badly when he did not hear what he wanted. There was a dangerous look in his boss’s eye for a second, but then it passed and Arthur was laughing.
“Why am I even asking you anyway?” he asked the room at large, “we already established that you have no sex life.” Merlin restrained himself from pointing out that all they had really established was that his sex life was private, although if Arthur wanted more proof than that Merlin was quite willing to give him a private demonstration.
He gripped onto the edge of the table beneath him so hard that his knuckles turned white. Arthur did not notice.
“You’re still friends with that assistant of hers, aren’t you?” Arthur asked idly, drumming his fingers against the chair arm. “Gwen, is it?”
“Ye-es,” Merlin said reluctantly. He had a feeling he knew where this was going and it was nowhere he particularly wanted to go, ever.
“Perhaps you could find out - and do try to be subtle, Merlin - if I’m right.” Arthur gave him a scathing look that had won him a nomination for an Oscar a few years ago.
“I’m always subtle,” Merlin argued, though he knew there was no point. He was never subtle with Gwen anyway, he knew she would want to talk about the situation anyway and Arthur’s insane theories were always good for a laugh.
“You’re crap at subtle, Merlin,” Arthur told him, and Merlin decided that it was probably good thing that his innuendo often went over Arthur’s head, because it would no doubt be a bad idea to shake Arthur’s insistence that he was always right this late in life. He would doubtless have some kind of psychotic breakdown. Merlin was a lot better at subtle than Arthur ever was. There was nothing about the star that was subtle, from the way he moved to the way he dressed: always the best of everything, always the arrogant, yet annoyingly attractive, swagger. It was more than a little rich to hear him, Mr ‘Everyone-knows-everything-about-me’ laugh at Merlin’s subtlety.
“Oh, and Merlin, can you fetch my coat from the back room?” Arthur asked casually, “I think I’ll need to get it dry cleaned before Friday. There’s some stain all down the front of it…” he shrugged and Merlin sighed. He remembered where that stain had come from, not that Arthur probably could. He had been completely plastered by that time.
“Fine,” he said with a weary sigh, crossing over to the back room. As usual, it was an utter mess. He would undoubtedly be expected to tidy it up before the end of the day. How Arthur managed to make such a mess in a couple of days was beyond him. He grabbed the offending jacket and examined it. The electric light was not kind to it, the greyish stain stood out even more strongly than it had on the weekend.
He came out to find Arthur was sitting at his desk going through the more official letters with a frown creasing his forehead. However, Merlin could sense that his attention was not quite entirely on his task. He had grown used to noticing the smallest aspect of Arthur’s mood, and he had the feeling that Arthur was waiting for something. He looked around the room, and everything looked exactly as it had done before. He gave Arthur another long look, noticing that the actor’s shoulders had fallen almost imperceptibly, as though he was disappointed. Merlin gave the room another quick glance over and his gaze was caught by a splash of brilliant blue and red on the chair Arthur had previously been sitting on.
He could not contain the grin that spread across his features. There was a small, messily wrapped gift on the seat of the chair. Arthur had obviously wrapped it himself, or attempted to. Merlin wondered for a second how long it had taken his boss to wage war against the cellotape and wrapping paper before he had come up with something that would not completely humiliate him.
He knew that Arthur was watching him out of the corner of his eye as he crossed over to the chair and picked up the gift, turning it over in his hands. He allowed his own gaze to linger on the back of Arthur’s head for a moment, when he knew that the other young man could not see him. Then he put the jacket down on the chair and began to tear off the paper.
“It’s not much,” Arthur muttered to a correspondence from the Women’s Institute asking him to present some awards for them in June. Merlin didn’t reply, just gaped at the box in front of him.
It was a watch, a very expensive one, fully digital, with every possible add on that could be found.
“Thank you,” he said quietly, opening the box to pull out the heavy metal strap. He took a second to fasten it round his wrist, reminding himself that Arthur had stupid amounts of money and therefore one tiny watch would barely register on his radar. However, the fact that it was exactly the right size, despite the fact that watches with set strap lengths were always too big for him, did not escape his notice. Seeing as it was his job to select and buy presents for all of Arthur’s relatives and close friends (he could even say, quite proudly, that he had become very good at buying presents for Uther Pendragon) the fact that Arthur had actually chosen it himself rather than scheduling it into Merlin’s time was what struck the dark haired man the most.
“Well… it’s waterproof, and after what happened to the last one,” Arthur commented, still not turning round. He had always had a little trouble with the less abusive moments of their friendship.
Merlin snorted a little under his breath. What had happened to the last one had been that Arthur had dropped something into a river on a location shoot and pushed Merlin in after it. His last watch, which had been with him since his sixteenth birthday, had not been able to withstand the water and by the time he had waded out, shivering and irate, it had shuffled off this mortal coil.
“Thank you,” he repeated.
“It’s better than the piece of crap you’ve been wearing, anyway,” Arthur continued, desperate to move the conversation out of the uncomfortable territory it had entered. “And now you have no excuse for being late.” Merlin just laughed and picked up the coat again before heading for the door. “Remember to ask Gwen, okay?”
“Fine,” he agreed, not putting up a fight.
“Cool… I’ll see you on the set this afternoon?” Arthur turned to him at last and Merlin nodded, still unable to wipe the grin from his face.
***
The smile was still plastered to his face when he met Gwen for lunch in the studio canteen that afternoon. Morgana was between films at the moment, so she had given Gwen the day off, and his friend had decided to buy Merlin a birthday lunch of soggy sandwiches and stale muffins.
She saw him before he saw her, almost immediately he walked into the room and he turned immediately to the frantic yelling of his name.
She was sitting to one side of the canteen, waving at him with a huge smile. There was a suspiciously large carrier bag by her feet and a couple of drinks were already on the table.
“Over here!” she called superfluously, and Merlin headed in her direction, waving a greeting.
“Hey Gwen,” he said as he came up to the table, giving her a loose hug.
“Hey Merlin,” she replied, “Happy Birthday! I was beginning to think you weren’t coming.” They sat down and Merlin reached for his drink gratefully. The birthday present had been the highlight of his day. The dry cleaning facilities had been out of order when he had gone to find them, Gaius had been fielding questions about Arthur and Morgana’s relationship all morning and Merlin had been getting forwarded requests for television interviews from all of the bigger names. The only problem had been that all of them wanted a joint interview with Morgana, which he was not going to give the go ahead for at this point.
“It’s just been a hectic morning, that’s all. Sorry I’m late,” he replied. “What with all this Morgana malarkey going on.” Gwen laughed softly.
“I know. I got a phone call from her this morning asking whether I knew anyone who would have told them that she and Arthur were getting back together.”
“So it’s not true, then?” Merlin asked, remembering Arthur’s admonishments to find out what Morgana felt about the whole situation. Gwen laughed out loud at that.
“Of course it’s not true,” she looked at Merlin in disbelief. “You know as well as I do that there’s no hope of those two ever getting back together. Why did you even ask?”
“Arthur… is,” Merlin sighed, “he’s a little too interested in the story,” he said.
“You think that he wants to get back together?” Gwen asked leaning forward over the table.
“You know Arthur.”
“Not as well as you do,” she replied with a sly smile. “That’s a nice watch, by the way. When did you get a pay raise?” He blushed a little under her scrutiny.
“I didn’t - it was a birthday present,” he said, and allowed her to tug his arm across the table for a closer examination.
“You mean he remembered this year?” she asked with exaggerated incredulity.
“Well… last year, it was in the middle of all that therapy, and the year before that he and Morgana had just broken up, and the year that we had only just met… so it’s not like it’s that big a deal,” he shrugged as she looked up at him curiously.
“Of course it’s not… although I feel a little out done now,” she said, releasing his arm and reaching down to pick up the carrier bag at her feet. “If I’d known Arthur was going to remember I would have got you something better… not that I deliberately got you something bad.” She rolled her eyes at her own ability to put two feet in her mouth and pushed the bag over the table, narrowly avoiding their drinks.
“I didn’t have time to wrap it, I’m sorry. It was just…” Merlin cut her off with a look and she sighed as he drew out a box and gaped at it. “I know… it’s stupid, right? I’ll take it back.” She reached across for it, but Merlin pulled it out of her grasp.
“No you don’t!” he told her firmly, still staring at the present. “You got me… an Arthur Pendragon action figure?”
“Well, I remembered you said you used to collect his merchandise before, you know, you actually met him, and I thought that you might like to push him around for once, rather than, well, the other way round… Or you could stick pins in him… not that I think you’re the kind of person who would do that, I just know that sometimes when Morgana’s being difficult I want to… well, take out my frustration on her and…”
“It’s brilliant,” Merlin said, grinning at her again. “It’s perfect. I shall take great pleasure in throwing him off imaginary cliffs.” They shared a small laugh. “Is he anatomically correct, do you know?” he asked curiously. She blushed furiously, causing him to laugh again. “I’ll take that as ‘you never thought to look’.”
“Merlin,” she said in a hushed voice, looking a little scandalised. He always enjoyed teasing her about things like that. He had no idea how she had managed to get through years of working in the film business and still be so innocent about things like that, but it was fun to needle her. “I didn’t buy it for you to take out your twisted fantasies on it.” Or maybe she wasn’t so innocent. He laughed, but now it was his turn to blush and he could feel the tips of his ears burning.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” he insisted. “I prefer my sex toys to be more… well, real sex toys for a start.” She nodded. “Now, if we have established that I am not going to use the poor toy for nefarious purposes, other than perhaps the occasional beheading… does his head come off?” Gwen nodded. “Then maybe lunch?”
She took his order and headed over to the counter, leaving Merlin still staring at the doll in his lap in amusement. The original artist had apparently been quite good, because it was not one of those dolls where you couldn’t tell who it was supposed to be unless you saw it in the box. It really did look like a miniature version of Arthur smiling out at him.
It was based on an image of him from the fantasy film Valiant in which he had made his debut, still one of his most famous roles as the young Prince who had to battle evil snakes to inherit his birthright, a film Merlin may have watched a few more than five times at the cinema. The doll was in the full garb of Arthur’s costume, even down to a miniature sword hanging by his side.
“Here we are,” Gwen said, placing a plate of odd looking sandwiches in front of him. “Happy Birthday.”
“Thanks,” he said, relaxing as he began to dig in.
Of course, the relaxation did not last for long. Less than five minutes later his phone was ringing urgently. He pulled it out of his pocket with a grimace at Gwen.
“Arthur?” he answered, and within milliseconds his employer was listing into his ear all the things that had to be done before that evening. He sighed. “Okay, I’ll be right there.” Gwen gave him a sympathetic look before stealing the rest of his sandwich and shrugging. She knew the drill: they called, you went; or you got fired and never worked in the industry again - or anywhere else.
Arthur was still rabbiting on as Merlin gave Gwen a one armed hug goodbye and grabbed his new present before walking swiftly from the room.
“I’m on my way, Arthur. I’ll be right there.”
***
Arthur did not listen when Merlin told him what Gwen had said, but when did Arthur ever listen to him? The next thing Merlin knew he could hear Arthur’s yelling from the other end of the corridor and walked in to find Arthur on the phone to Morgana, his face red with anger.
“What do you mean, I’m arrogant?” he demanded down the phone line, and Merlin could hear Morgana’s voice raised in reply, although the exact words were indistinguishable. “You’re the one who’s being petty, Morgana. You just can’t admit you were wrong about anything, can you?” he asked, ignoring Merlin’s presence completely.
And so it continued. Arthur would phone Morgana every few days, or send her flowers, or invite her to some party or other. Every time she refused, sometimes politely, sometimes with thinly veiled threats, once she sent Gwen back with the most recent bouquet, only all the blooms had been beheaded. That had been the worst occasion, Merlin would have to say: the blond had sat staring at the decapitated flowers for over an hour, glowering at them, before excusing himself to the gym. Merlin had passed the door to the gym half an hour later and seen Arthur still taking out his anger on the punching bag. When he had eventually relented and come back, Merlin had had to clean the bloody grazes on his knuckles.
But it still was not as bad as he had been two years ago when they had broken up.
Finally, Morgana broke, or maybe she just wanted to make her point more difficult to avoid, but she agreed to go to dinner with Arthur - once - just to shut him up. Merlin groaned when he heard the news. He liked Morgana, he really did, but he wished he could just have had a little word with her. Her refusals had been bad enough, if she had just ignored Arthur he probably would have given up after the fiftieth try or so; but to accept him, even so that she could tell him to his face he was barking up the wrong tree, would just make it worse.
That night Merlin invested in a pack of long pins and toy-Arthur, who was sadly not anatomically correct, found them being stabbed in some rather sensitive places.
Gwen had been right, it did make him feel better.
Savagely, reminding himself that Arthur was a prick and a jerk, who was completely unworthy of Merlin’s interest in him, he held the doll up to the notice board he always took with him from hotel room to hotel room and, with as much effort as he could muster, thrust the final pin through the doll and into the board, right through Arthur’s heart.
He stared at it for a minute venomously.
Then he sighed and ordered room service. His gaze lingered over some of the atrociously named cocktails, but he knew there was going to be a phone call from Arthur at some point that night demanding his presence, and probably a lift, so, he just ordered food and a glass of sparkling water. Why Arthur never rang his driver at times like this was beyond him, but somehow it was always his job to pick the idiot up when a date went south.
Sure enough, the food had barely arrived when his mobile rang out again and Arthur was grinding his teeth at the other end. He gave the hot food a longing glance, but at least there was a microwave this time.
“I’m on my way.”
***
To say that the date had not gone well was possibly the understatement of the century. When he arrived, Arthur was standing at the rear exit of the restaurant, fuming while a hapless waiter attempted to mop up the wine from his shirt with a cloth. Arthur was pacing back and forth and the poor man was trying to follow him. There was little he could do though.
As soon as Merlin pulled up, Arthur stormed over to the car and got in the back, not even thanking the poor man, although from the look of relief on the waiter’s face, his leaving was probably thanks enough.
“Go well?” Merlin asked, deciding that complete ignorance was probably the best way to play the situation. That way Arthur would get all his yelling out on Merlin and run out of voice before they got back to the hotel.
“Well?” Arthur asked, “Well?! ” He grabbed his sodden shirt and held it away from his body. “Does this look like it went well?” Merlin shrugged. “No… no Merlin, it did not go well. The infuriating woman laughed in my face and then upended most of a bottle of red wine down my front.” Arthur let go of his shirt and stared sullenly out of the window. “I can’t believe I let her convince me to go out with her again. What was I thinking, agreeing to that?” Merlin opened his mouth to reply, but there were some conversational holes that even he was wise enough to avoid, so he remained silent.
“I’ll drive you back to your-” Merlin began, but, before he could finish the sentence, Arthur cut him off.
“No, I can’t go back to my room. The press will have gone there already, and there’ll be god knows how many phone calls waiting for me. We’ll go back to your place.”
“I’m staying at the same hotel you are,” Merlin reminded him, trying not to think about the fact that Arthur was suggesting that he sleep in Merlin’s room, and the fact that he only had one bed. He was driving and he needed to concentrate, he could not be thinking about Arthur in his bed right now. He really couldn’t.
He imagined Gaius doing the dance of the seven veils and regretted it immediately. That was far more disturbing and distracting than any thoughts of Arthur.
“Yes, but it’s not like they’re going to go anywhere near your room,” Arthur insisted. “We’ll take the private entrance and sneak up in the service lift, we should be alright then.”
“Fine…”
The drive back to the hotel was fairly uneventful. Arthur bitched about Morgana, but Merlin had developed the talent of blocking out anything he was not expected to reply to, and humming soft affirmatives at random intervals.
The private entrance to their hotel was only accessible through the underground car park and Arthur had to duck down in the back of the car to get past the crowds of press who were surrounding the entrance. Merlin waved cheerily at them, but they were uninterested in strangely pale, dark-haired men with sticky out ears.
Security at the hotel was good, which was one of the reasons Merlin had chosen it in the first place, so when they got into the car park, there was no one there except for them, the security guards and a couple of other patrons, who were on their way out and did not even bat an eyelid at the sight of Arthur Pendragon, stained with red wine, stalking across the car park towards the service lift with murder in his eyes and a long suffering assistant hurrying after him.
The service lift was often used for such adventures, so there was no problem getting to Merlin’s floor, and that was when he remembered the doll, skewered to the notice board like a hedgehog with interestingly placed spines. He blanched.
“Uh… I’ll go in first, make sure it’s tidy,” he said, slipping the key into the electronic lock. Arthur laughed.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Merlin. I’ve seen your rooms before and I can honestly say that they were never exactly tidy.”
“Maybe that’s because I spend so long tidying yours,” he muttered, but then Arthur pushed the door open and he was far more concerned with going to stand in front of the notice board than arguing the point.
“It’s not even that bad…” Arthur said, completely ignoring the notice board, much to Merlin’s relief, and crossing over to the living room section of the suite (Merlin had a suite, which in itself was disturbing; three years and he still felt out of place in anything more posh than a travel inn) and collapsing on the sofa. “I don’t know what you were so worried about.” Merlin risked a glance behind him at the doll, and wondered whether Arthur would just sack him or kill him with the same pins if he saw it. There was a lengthy silence from the other man and Merlin took the opportunity to pull the doll from the wall. Apparently he had been more exasperated than he had thought, because the pin through Arthur’s heart had gone clean through the board and into the wall. He gritted his teeth to stop a grunt of exertion, as he braced himself against the wall for leverage.
Finally the thing pulled free, so suddenly that he fell backwards into the opposite wall and the doll whacked him quite hard on the nose, making his eyes water.
“Ow…” he muttered, glaring at the smaller Arthur, who was apparently as unmanageable as the larger one currently sitting on his sofa eating his room service.
He paused and glanced over again. He knew he should have been more worried when Arthur stopped talking. He walked over to the sofa, shoving the doll into a drawer as quickly as he could.
“This is good pasta,” Arthur said, turning round just as Merlin had hidden the offending object. He quickly perched himself on the chest of drawers and attempted to look innocent.
“Really? I didn’t have time to eat any before I went out,” he said. Arthur frowned slightly before gesturing Merlin to come and join him.
“You mean you haven’t eaten yet?” he asked. Merlin shook his head. “You’re a moron, you know that?” He handed over another fork and indicated that Merlin should dig in. “I mean, I didn’t get to the eating part of the meal, because of…” he gestured down at his shirt, which was still wet, and clinging to his stomach in a way that made Merlin’s throat go dry. “Talking of which, you don’t have any clean shirts, do you?” Merlin nodded around a mouthful of tagliatelle. “Mind if I borrow one?” Arthur asked, standing up. Merlin gave another nod, and before he had time to consider it, Arthur’s hands were undoing the buttons of his shirt.
Merlin almost choked on his mouthful of pasta as Arthur slid the very expensive shirt off his shoulders and down his arm, dropping it in a small puddle of fabric on the floor.
“Uh…” Merlin said eloquently, dragging his eyes up Arthur’s body to his eyes as quickly as he could. He could not be caught ogling his employer’s abs, no matter how impressive they were. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat, rearranging himself a little. Arthur Pendragon was half naked in his hotel room. There was a time when he was younger when this would have been his fantasy.
“Merlin?” Arthur asked.
Who was he kidding? This was still his fantasy…
“Right… clothes. In the bedroom,” he nodded towards the door on the far side of the room. Arthur nodded abruptly and walked off, leaving Merlin staring open-mouthed at his back, his eyes tracing the line of Arthur’s spine down from his neck.
This was not a good idea.
He forced his eyes away and looked back down at the food, grabbing another forkful with suppressed rage. It just wasn’t fair. Why couldn’t Arthur just be a prick? Then he would just quit, and it wouldn’t even matter because he would have stopped fancying him by now anyway. But for every pratty thing that Arthur did, he always did something dreadfully nice as well, which more than made up for the demands and the ranting and the fact that Merlin had no life of his own. If he could have just been a wholly insufferable git, rather than giving him a birthday present and making sure he ate then he could have hated him for being undeservingly rich and that would have been that.
His thoughts were distracted from Arthur, half-naked in his bedroom, by the incessant ringing of his phone. For once, he was sure it wasn’t Arthur, because even he was not so lazy that he would call when all he had to do was stick his head around the door and yell.
It was Gaius.
“Morgana threw wine at him? ” were the first words out of the Physician’s mouth.
“Yes,” Merlin replied simply.
“In public.”
“If it had been in private I don’t think we’d be having this conversation,” Merlin pointed out, and Gaius hesitated.
“You think you’re funny. ”
“Sometimes.”
“What are we going to do? The press are going to be all over this. I’ve had the phone ringing off the hook since it happened. This is the first break I’ve had. What happened? ”
“I’m not entirely sure. I think that Arthur was Arthur and Morgana was Morgana and that was pretty much that.” Merlin said, running a hand through his hair.
“Why didn’t you stop them? ” Gaius asked.
“I tried, but you know Arthur won’t listen to a word I say when he’s got an idea in his head.”
“We have to fix this somehow. ” Gaius pointed out. Merlin already knew that. “And quickly. ”
“How do we do that?” He asked curiously.
“Lunch, tomorrow, ” Gaius replied, “They go out to lunch, they smile for the cameras, they make nice, everything goes well, they’re friends, they’re happy, the press is happy, the public is happy and I’m happy. ”
“You want to solve the problem of them going out for a meal and almost killing each other by making them go out for another meal?” Merlin asked, not able to keep the tone of disbelief out of his voice.
“Yes, we have to make it seem like they were just involved in a little spat, but everything got sorted out. ”
“And how do we stop them from killing each other again?”
“They’re actors! We get them to act like they like each other, ” was Gaius’ only idea. If Merlin had had enough energy to care, he probably would have laughed, but his higher brain function had left the building and all he was left with was: tired, hungry and holy shit, Arthur’s half naked in my bedroom.
“Good luck with that,” he said, about to hang up.
“You’ll be the one convincing Arthur, ” Gaius pointed out. “Do you think you can handle him? ” In a display of utterly perfect timing, Arthur chose that second to walk out of Merlin’s room. The two of them were a little different in size and the t-shirt, which would have been loose on Merlin, was stretched a little tight across Arthur’s chest and his biceps. Merlin stared at him for a second. “Merlin? ” He really needed to stop zoning out like that while staring at Arthur, it was getting pathetic.
No, it already was pathetic, it was getting disturbing.
“I think I should be able to. Bye Gaius.” He hung up before the older man could inflict any more ill-conceived plans on him and smiled at Arthur, who gave him a weary grin.
“You haven’t eaten it all, have you?” Arthur asked, coming back to sit opposite him. Merlin shook his head and offered Arthur the rest of the plate. “Don’t be an idiot. You need it more than I do. I never realised just how skeletal you were until I tried on your clothes. Do you weigh anything?”
“I’m not that skinny,” Merlin protested and Arthur snorted slightly in disbelief. “I’m not… I just have a very fast metabolism.”
“And I keep interrupting your meals,” Arthur added. Merlin shrugged a vague affirmative. “You know,” the actor said, pausing slightly and looking across at Merlin with a sly smile, “there is such a thing as a cupboard, you know.”
“Yes, I am familiar with the concept,” Merlin agreed.
“Then why don’t you use one?” Arthur asked, leaning over to grab a piece of tagliatelle with his fingers, raising it above his head and slowly sucking it into his mouth. Merlin looked away quickly. “All your stuff’s still in your suitcase.” Merlin shrugged.
“We move around so much, I guess I don’t see the point any more.” Arthur frowned and opened his mouth as though he was about to say something, but then thought better of it and changed the subject, glancing away from Merlin back to the food.
“What did Gaius want?” he asked and Merlin winced, he had been hoping to lead up to that conversation.
“He… uh… the incident at the restaurant got a lot of publicity,” he began and Arthur sighed wearily.
“Yes, I thought it would. Morgana can never do anything half-heartedly, can she?” Arthur was one to talk, Merlin thought, but he kept his mind to himself.
“And he was just suggesting some damage control,” he continued. Arthur nodded.
“Sounds like a plan, after all the premiere’s in three days and it’d be better if people were talking about the film rather than my relationships,” he commented. Merlin wondered why he could not have been that pragmatic and sensible before he started insisting that Morgana go out to dinner with him. “What does he want me to do?”
“Not just you…” Merlin said before he could stop himself. Arthur glanced up quickly. “He… we think it would be a good idea if you and Morgana made some sort of demonstration of friendship.”
“Such as?” Arthur’s voice was low and dangerous and Merlin squirmed under his gaze.
“Well… he thinks that you should… have lunch with her tomorrow, in public.”
“Have lunch with Morgana, after she humiliated me tonight?” Arthur asked. Merlin elected just to nod. “I’m more likely to stab her with the butter knife.”
“Couldn’t you just act as though you like her?” Merlin suggested, mimicking Gaius’ words. Arthur simply glared at him. “That is what you do after all…”
“She’s insufferable, Merlin. She’s so convinced that she’s right and everyone else should just bow to her judgement. She thinks the world revolves around her and…” he hissed, breaking off and standing up to pace up and down the room. Merlin followed his movements with his eyes. Arthur’s words would have been amusing if he were not thinking about how much trouble he would be in if Morgana LeFay were stabbed with a butter knife.
“It’s just one lunch, Arthur… not even that, really,” he said, trying to placate the man. “You just have to show up, give the press a couple of good photo ops and then you can both leave. Just grin and bear it and all that.”
“Lie back and think of England?” Arthur said, pausing to look over at Merlin with a slightly amused smile.
“Exactly… although I suggest you try and keep the meal strictly vertical. There are some photographs we really don’t want the press to get.” Arthur’s smile spread then, becoming full and genuine and Merlin breathed a sigh of relief. Arthur would be there tomorrow, he would smile and play nice - as long as Morgana did.
“Fine, I’ll have some stupid lunch with her,” he said, collapsing back down onto the sofa.
“Good, now, how about we start on pudding,” Merlin suggested. Arthur grinned and reached for the bowl of sticky toffee pudding.
***
Next Part
-
Author: mariana_oconnor
Movie Prompt: America’s Sweethearts (can you see where I got the title from?)
Pairing: Merlin/Arthur overall with Will/Merlin, Arthur/Sophia, past Arthur/Morgana (they aren’t related), background Morgana/Lancelot, background Gwen/OMC
Rating: R
Word Count: Just under 63000 … don’t look at me like that.
Spoilers/Warnings: Uhm, let’s just say the whole of series one, for good luck
Author's Notes: This is the little fic that ran away with my inner editor and killed them, brutally. Many, many, thanks to wrennette who did a spectacular job of betaing every part of it and checking for continuity errors and everything and binglejells who gave another part a thorough looking over during my ‘aargh deadline!’ panic. Any mistakes left are my own.
Also - I know nothing about the film industry.
Third I do not own any of the things mentioned in this fic. Nor do the opinions of the characters on anything from religion to John Barrowman necessarily reflect my own.
Thank god it’s over.
Summary: Arthur is a film star, Merlin is his personal assistant who might, possibly be head over heels in love with him. However, Arthur’s more interested in his ex, Morgana, and then the mysterious Sophia to notice… Oh, and Will is awesome.
Everyone knows that the lives of film stars are glamorous. The glitz, the parties, the endless stream of people trying to worm their way into your affections. True, the life has its down sides; the paparazzi, the insane fans… but everyone knows the pluses outnumber the minuses and everyone envies the riches and the fame.
The lives of film stars’ personal assistants - or slaves as they are affectionately known - are not quite so glamorous. Every film star, to quote a cliché, is like a swan: it glides beautifully on top of the water, but hidden away, the legs are kicking frantically. There’s just one thing that no one ever mentions:
Those legs never belong to the film star.
The legs that we are interested in belong to one Merlin Emrys. Son of Hunith Emrys, born in a small village in the Peak District called Ealdor, not that anyone really cared what his name was. All they cared about was the man he worked for: Arthur Pendragon.
Yes, that Arthur Pendragon. Yes, star of Valiant and also that curious little indie film whose name no one ever remembers. Golden boy of Hollywood. Most famous British actor in years. On the cover of every magazine you could be on the cover of. That Arthur Pendragon, who couldn’t get dressed in the morning without his personal assistant selecting his outfit and making sure his breakfast was cooked exactly right.
Merlin was best known for being ‘that guy with the sticky-out ears who lurks in the back of photos’, if he even got that much recognition. He too had graced the cover of many trashy tabloids (most of which pictures were stuck on his mother’s wall, to his mortification) but no one really seemed to care about that. In fact, all people ever asked him about was Arthur.
“Can I have Arthur’s autograph?”
“Is Arthur going to go for the role in his father’s new film?”
“Will Arthur be ready by five?”
To which the answers were, in order: no, yes and highly unlikely, given that some idiot had decided to let Arthur do his own hair, which always took him forever.
And if he wasn’t answering questions about Arthur, he was answering questions from Arthur, which was a challenge in and of itself.
Screaming teenage girls and weak-kneed middle aged women lined the streets at any event Arthur was going to. He was charming, smiled in a way that made any sane person’s heart (gay, straight, bi, asexual) skip a beat and never swerved from his ‘golden boy’ image. None of the public knew that, behind the scenes, he was the most demanding, pig-headed, arrogant, bloody-minded son of a bitch who had ever walked the earth. Most of the time.
Those people who did know offered Merlin as much pity as he could handle, mixed with a certain amount of awe. He knew that he was the first PA (whipping boy) of Arthur’s to last more than a year, and he also knew that every one before him (without fail) had ended up in some sort of therapy afterwards. But considering most of them had been the type of Hollywood wannabe that clung desperately to Arthur’s coat tails to try and make it on their own, he was not entirely surprised.
Merlin, on the other hand, had just wanted a job with reasonable compensation for his time, a roof over his head and the possibility of travel, someday, perhaps. The ‘on call’ 27 hours a day, eight days a week part was an undesirable side effect.
He had been meant to work as a cleaner in the studio where Arthur was filming his latest epic, The Labyrinth of Gedref, but he had stumbled into the wrong room by accident and narrowly avoided a low flying glass of water.
It turned out that the room he stumbled into was Arthur’s dressing room and the glass of water had been meant for Gregory, his predecessor, but Merlin had not found that out until later. He had berated the man sitting across from him without even looking up, and proceeded to clean up around the broken glass, telling Arthur (and in his defence, he had not known it was Arthur at that point, not that he would have done anything differently if he had known) that if he was going to throw glasses deliberately then he was going to clean up his own mess.
The ensuing argument had lasted a good half an hour, during which time Gaius, the publicist for the studio, had come in and watched in amusement.
Ten minutes later Merlin had been promoted without having any say in the matter and his life had taken a turn for the decidedly bizarre. If he’d known arguing would get him a job, he would have tried it in his first hundred or so interviews.
He had currently been working for Arthur for three years, although it seemed like more, and he really could not imagine being anywhere else. Arthur was a self-centred arsehole, but…
- and it was a really big but -
Merlin was sort of, kind of, slightly, maybe a little, head over heels in love with him, which sort of, kind of, sucked.
But that was the way it went. Arthur was annoyingly handsome and had the most irritating habit of being fundamentally a good person beneath all of the self-obsessed bullshit, and Merlin was his harassed PA. Fairytale endings only happened in the rom-coms. Not a genre Merlin had ever had an affinity with.
All of which sort of explained what Merlin was doing walking down a corridor towards Arthur’s current dressing room at seven am on his birthday when he had had many far better offers (okay one far better offer, involving his friend Will and a pack of beer). There was a cup of coffee in each of his hands, a handful of letters tucked under one of his arms and a brown paper bag containing a croissant hanging from between his teeth.
“Merlin!” There was a familiar voice behind him and he turned, paying very careful attention to the coffees he was carrying. He groaned, Gaius was walking towards him down the corridor and the expression on the older man’s face indicated that this was going to be a bad birthday. From that first instance where Gaius had seamlessly convinced him to take the job, he always got that look on his face when he was about to talk to Merlin about something truly terrible.
“Mmph,” Merlin mumbled around the brown paper in greeting. Gaius nodded absently and waved a newspaper front page in front of his eyes, too fast and too close for him to read it. That was also a bad sign. Nothing ever flustered Gaius; there was never a grey hair out of place in his, admittedly slightly disturbing, hairstyle (Merlin had tried telling him once that he should get a haircut, but had only received the Gaius-eyebrow-raising-of-doom for his troubles). If the contents of this paper were enough to get the publicist agitated, then it would be enough to put Arthur into one of his sulky moods.
Merlin hated Arthur’s sulky moods. They usually ended up with everyone yelling at him because no one dared to yell at the superstar.
“Have you seen this?” Gaius demanded dropping the paper to his side to glare at Merlin as though the headline, whatever it was, was his fault.
“Nhn,” Merlin replied with a shake of his head. The brown paper bag was beginning to get a little damp with saliva, despite his best efforts, and he knew Arthur was going to complain.
“It’s not good, Merlin,” Gaius intoned, and his heart dropped. ‘not good’ usually meant catastrophically bad. “Read it.” He held the paper out for Merlin to take and the only response the younger man could give was an unimpressed look, and it took Gaius a second to realise that his hands were a little too busy, and he held it up for Merlin to see.
Lovebirds Back Together? The headline read and, before Merlin even looked at the picture he knew that this was every bit as bad as Gaius had implied. The black and white photograph depicted a man who was definitely Arthur sitting in the back of a car, and a woman, who could be no one other than Morgana Le Fay, his ex-girlfriend and fellow superstar, getting in next to him. Internally, Merlin let out a string of expletives, externally, he tried to look as innocent as possible.
He should have known this would come back to bite him in the arse. Avoiding Gaius’ gaze, he read on.
The break up two years ago of heart-throb Arthur Pendragon, star of The Moment of Truth and Valiant, and Morgana Lefay, Valiant and To Kill the King, had fans around the country… he skipped that bit, he knew that bit. Not only had he been there for the whole of that ill-advised romance, he had also read all the coverage of it, and its aftermath, in the papers, and seen it on TV, and the Internet. …Yesterday, our reporter caught this image of the two of them leaving from a star-studded party together! Is love in the air once more for this high-profile couple? Have they seen past their differences? Sources close to Morgana suggest that the answer may be yes. We can only hope that these two have worked things out and look forward to an announcement shortly.
Merlin groaned, and almost dropped the post under his arm.
“Do you have any idea where this came from, Merlin?” Gaius asked lightly, and Merlin could tell someone else had already landed him in it. He winced slightly and Gaius reached out to pull the bag from his mouth. “Well?”
“I swear, I didn’t know the photographer was there,” he said immediately. Gaius took a deep breath. “It wasn’t anything, okay. Gwen was ill and she asked me to keep an eye on Morgana as well, they both got bored of the party at about the same time, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and stick them in the same car.”
“What were you thinking?” Gaius asked, “were you thinking? Or did you just take leave of your senses completely?”
“I didn’t notice the camera man…” Merlin repeated, stubbornly. He glared at the picture as though he could cause it to cease to exist if he just stared at it long enough. But no matter how long he stared at it, it was still there, in black and white for the whole world to see: Morgana ducking into Arthur’s car. “And I went with them, it’s not like they were alone.”
“The world doesn’t care, Merlin.” Gaius said solemnly. “You remember what it was like the last time they got together.”
Merlin did. It had been barely six months into his job with Arthur when the actor had decided that he was head over heels in love with his co-star, the beautiful Morgana Lefay. The two of them had barely managed to hold one civilised conversation with each other in the whole time they had known each other, but Arthur was convinced that it was true love. Merlin had, wearily, worked as a go-between for his boss with Morgana’s assistant Gwen, and slowly the two of them had decided to see how things went.
Unluckily, they were caught in a restaurant together by a reporter halfway through their second official date. After that it had been less of a relationship and more of a media circus. Admittedly, it had raised the profile of the film they were working on. Individually they were famous, but together they were the ‘perfect’ couple. For months they were everywhere, TV shows, front pages, entire web pages and livejournal communities were devoted to their relationship.
Arthur had been too much enamoured of the situation to realise the strain it was putting on his relationship, and too convinced of his own superiority to notice Morgana’s waning interest. When the end had finally come, after many screaming rows and smashed vases and mirrors, the only people surprised were Arthur and the public. Somehow, they had managed to keep their issues behind doors.
The entire western world had mourned the end of their relationship.
Arthur had stomped around for a few weeks, glaring and refusing roles in anything other than introspective thrillers, before getting uproariously drunk with his father’s newest secretary and sleeping with her… and her sister.
She had sold her story to the newspapers and soon everywhere was full of Arthur seeks solace for his broken heart. The resulting backlash had sent Morgana to her lawyers for restraining orders on every member of the paparazzi she could name and Arthur into therapy.
Merlin could not do that again. Somehow, people seemed to think that the title of PA meant that he was the only one who could deal with Arthur’s moods, or maybe it just singled him out as some kind of sacrificial lamb. Either way it ended up with him and Arthur alone in a room as the actor attempted to take out some of his agitation - usually on Merlin.
“Shit.” Merlin said.
“I quite agree,” Gaius said, but before he could expand, a shout shook the corridor.
“MERLIN! ” Arthur’s voice could carry across an entire football pitch if necessary (and it had been once, in the classic romantic ending scene of The Moment of Truth). The relatively small distance from his dressing room to Merlin’s ears was barely an obstacle.
“I should…” he said and Gaius nodded, giving him a sympathetic smile before offering the paper bag back to him. He took it gingerly between his teeth.
“MERLIN, Where are you? ” Arthur called again and Merlin turned as quickly as he could and hurried towards Arthur’s room.
“Happy Birthday,” Gaius called after him. If Merlin had had enough hands to stick two fingers up at him, he would have.
He was just wondering how to open the door with no hands when it was flung open from the inside and he looked up into Arthur’s eyes.
It was no wonder that the man was famous. He was gorgeous from the tips of his blond hair to his toes, not that Merlin was biased or anything. Arthur even looked good when he was furious, and that was just not fair. It was so hard to be angry when you were ogling the way the muscles in his neck bunched together, or his arse as he paced the room, and his eyes.
Merlin shook his head to get rid of the unwanted thoughts as quickly as he could. He would have thought that, after 3 years of knowing Arthur for the spoilt brat that he was, the crush would have worn off. After all, he wasn’t a wide-eyed teenager staring at the posters lining the walls of his room and realising that maybe he might just be a little bit gay, anymore. Sadly, his heart still skipped a beat every time Arthur smiled the smile, the one he had first seen twenty times larger than life at the cinema, the one that had made the actor famous. It was pathetic, really. Every time he smiled like that Merlin felt as though it was just for him, and he understood all the screaming fans that followed Arthur around the world, begging him to notice them.
The problem was not that Arthur did not notice him, it was just that he noticed him in the wrong way.
“Apparently,” Arthur drawled, his tone suddenly deathly calm (and that was when Merlin knew to worry) “Morgana and I are back together. Wherever could the press have got that idea, Merlin?”
With the croissant bag still clenched between his teeth, there was little Merlin could do but look sheepish. Somehow, having both his arms full and a paper bag in his mouth helped with that.
“I knew that getting in that car together was a bad idea,” Arthur said, although, Merlin seemed to remember that the man had not mentioned that at the time. “How could you let this happen?” Merlin very nearly spat the croissant bag out of his mouth at that. If he could just get in the door and put the stuff down on the table by the door, then they could have this argument properly. But Arthur was blocking the entire doorway. “Don’t give me that look, Merlin,” the film star continued, pouting slightly (another expression that really should not have been attractive, but really was).
Finally, after a few moments of just glaring at each other, Arthur submitted and stepped aside to let Merlin in. Within seconds he had dumped the stuff down on the table and turned on his boss.
“If you’d known it was a bad idea, you could have clued me in,” he said, watching as Arthur closed the door and crossed his arms over his chest.
“You’re my personal assistant, Merlin, you’re supposed to know these things without my having to tell you. Surely by now you’ve figured that out. Honestly you’re the…”
“-worst assistant you’ve ever had,” Merlin completed for him without missing a beat. “And anyway, it’s not like they’ve got anything definite, and how was I supposed to know there was some guy with a camera out there?”
“There’s always a guy with a camera out there,” Arthur told him with a tired sigh, “and they don’t need anything definite. They’ll run with it anyway. It’s like a game of Chinese whispers with them. What starts out as one thing ends up as the end of the world, or some sort of sadistic BDSM orgy.” He sighed and collapsed into the most comfortable chair in the room with effortless elegance.
“Well, I don’t remember the orgy, or wasn’t I invited?” Merlin asked, trying to break the tension in the room. Arthur looked at him in utter confusion for a moment before allowing a small smile to creep onto his face.
“Why would we invite you to our BDSM orgies, Merlin. Honestly… there are far more interesting people out there,” he waved his hand vaguely to indicate the world. Merlin sighed internally in relief. Arthur was not as mad as he could have been, if he was allowing himself to be distracted by Merlin’s poor humour this early on.
“I could bring the whips,” he said, turning to sort out the piles of paper on the desk, trying to hide the fact that he was blushing slightly at the idea of orgies with Arthur.
“You have whips?” Arthur asked, sounding a little taken aback. “I wouldn’t have thought you were into that sort of thing. You seem a little…”
“What?” Merlin asked, turning round and raising an eyebrow. He had been practising that look, and studying Gaius’ face for hours in an attempt to perfect it.
“Well,” Arthur’s eyes shifted a little uncomfortably, focussing on the wall behind Merlin’s head rather than his face. “Vanilla, I suppose. You always seem a little, prudish, that’s all.”
“Just because I don’t talk about my sex life doesn’t mean I don’t have one,” Merlin pointed out, “not all of us like to have people walk in on them.” Arthur at least had the grace to look abashed at the reminder. Merlin had walked in on him and Morgana several times in the beginning of their relationship, before he had learnt to knock loud enough to be heard by the dead. Then there were Arthur’s other various one-night stands over the years, whom he had had to let down gently, force to sign privacy agreements and escort to the door after cooking them breakfast.
“Yeah, but I’ve never even seen you look at a girl,” Arthur pointed out.
“I’m discrete.” Merlin commented. So discrete that Arthur had not, apparently, realised that he was gay. It was almost a relief, except that it reinforced the fact Arthur had only ever noticed him as the person who brought the coffee and told him he was being a prat.
“Is it the ears?” Arthur asked, curiously.
“Is what the ears?” Merlin asked, although he had an idea where this was going.
“Why you can’t get a girl, is it the ears?” Arthur squinted at him and twisted his head to one side. “You’re not that bad looking really… but the ears are a little dumbo-like.”
“Why, thank you,” Merlin commented handing over the handful of letters that looked like they might be more personal to Arthur. “I think there might almost have been a compliment hidden in there.” Arthur just smirked, before tearing into the first envelope. Merlin took the opportunity to grab a sip of his own coffee - it was cold.
“My father requests my presence at a meeting over the Excalibur casting tomorrow,” Arthur said with a sigh, tossing the letter onto the floor and opening the next. “Like I wouldn’t be there anyway.” Arthur liked to be at every meeting for those films of his father’s he was involved in. He said he liked to see the progression.
“My great-aunt wants a signed picture for a relative’s birthday,” he continued with his usual round up of the day’s post. “And… oh, Gawain’s having a New Year’s party which I must attend.” He leaned back and closed his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose. “All that stuff with Morgana,” he said slowly, and Merlin, perched on the edge of the table, gritted his teeth in preparation. “Do you think it will all go away?”
“Probably,” Merlin answered optimistically, “if there’s nothing else to egg them on then they don’t have any real proof, except for that so called source.”
“Source?” Arthur asked, his head whipping up to catch Merlin’s eye again. “What source?”
“Just something mentioned in the article. Probably complete bollocks,” Merlin backtracked. The tiny alarm in his head that he had trained to warn him when he was heading into dangerous territory with Arthur was ringing loudly.
“What source, Merlin?” Arthur demanded again, his voice going flat and his blue eyes boring into Merlin’s.
“Just… the article, it says that a source close to Morgana said that it was true or something like that.” As soon as the words left his lips, he regretted them. Arthur’s eyes lit up like he had not seen them do in months, maybe even years. He knew that look, it was the one Arthur had had before he became infatuated with Morgana. He groaned inwardly and wished that he could take it back.
“A source?” Arthur asked again, this time eagerly. “Close to Morgana? Who?”
“It’s almost certainly total bollocks, Arthur,” Merlin said, desperately trying to regain control of the situation, but knowing it was futile. Arthur reached out and grabbed the offending paper from the floor and scanned through the article again until he found the relevant passage.
“ ‘Sources close to Morgana suggest that the answer may be yes’,” Arthur read out. “What do you think that means?” he asked. Merlin knew that it was supposed to be a rhetorical question, but he answered anyway.
“Absolutely bugger-all, except that it was a slow news day and they wanted to sound official.”
“But they can’t print it unless it’s based on some sort of truth,” Arthur told him, although both of them knew that was complete rubbish.
“Maybe they spoke to her postman or something… or the man who sold her a car. Who knows?” Merlin reached out to try and pull the article away from Arthur, but the actor pulled it swiftly out of reach.
“Sources close to Morgana…” he muttered to himself. “It’s got to mean that she wanted them to write it.” Merlin thought the holes in Arthur’s logic would probably be big enough for fully grown dolphins to jump through, and maybe a blue whale or two (if they jumped) but he did not say anything. The man was off on his own now, in a fantasy world of his own making and there was no calling him back. “She wants to get back together.”
In the stretch of terrible silence that followed, Merlin decided that this was going to be an awful birthday. Drawing in a deep breath, he resigned himself to the fact. Gaius was going to kill him, and get the effects guys to burn his body so that no one would ever find him. No, he would probably just hand him over to the effects guys first and let them kill him - slowly.
He had sort of hoped that he would live a little longer than twenty two.
“Of course she wants to get back together,” Arthur said to himself, his face falling into the smug, self-satisfied expression that was probably the only expression of his that didn’t make Merlin go weak at the knees. Rather, it made his personal assistant want to smack him, hard. “It’s only natural.”
That had been the problem with Arthur and Morgana’s relationship, Merlin mused, knowing that he wasn’t going to be necessary to the conversation for a little while. Arthur had always thought that Morgana should be grateful for his attention, not realising that she only tolerated him because at the few times when he wasn’t being an arrogant berk, he was actually quite a nice human being.
“And she couldn’t say it herself because… well, she’s Morgana.” Merlin at least agreed with that part. If Morgana, on any level, wanted to get back together with Arthur, she would never say so. However, the possibility of her wanting that was so infinitesimally small - Merlin happened to know through his friendship with Gwen, Morgana’s PA, that she was currently in a relationship with an Italian model - that the point was pretty much moot. “Do you think she wants to get back with me?” Arthur asked finally. Merlin paused a second. He had learnt a long time ago that unless you were completely to the point, Arthur would hear what he wanted to hear.
“No,” he said firmly. Of course, being blunt had its own problems, namely that Arthur tended to react badly when he did not hear what he wanted. There was a dangerous look in his boss’s eye for a second, but then it passed and Arthur was laughing.
“Why am I even asking you anyway?” he asked the room at large, “we already established that you have no sex life.” Merlin restrained himself from pointing out that all they had really established was that his sex life was private, although if Arthur wanted more proof than that Merlin was quite willing to give him a private demonstration.
He gripped onto the edge of the table beneath him so hard that his knuckles turned white. Arthur did not notice.
“You’re still friends with that assistant of hers, aren’t you?” Arthur asked idly, drumming his fingers against the chair arm. “Gwen, is it?”
“Ye-es,” Merlin said reluctantly. He had a feeling he knew where this was going and it was nowhere he particularly wanted to go, ever.
“Perhaps you could find out - and do try to be subtle, Merlin - if I’m right.” Arthur gave him a scathing look that had won him a nomination for an Oscar a few years ago.
“I’m always subtle,” Merlin argued, though he knew there was no point. He was never subtle with Gwen anyway, he knew she would want to talk about the situation anyway and Arthur’s insane theories were always good for a laugh.
“You’re crap at subtle, Merlin,” Arthur told him, and Merlin decided that it was probably good thing that his innuendo often went over Arthur’s head, because it would no doubt be a bad idea to shake Arthur’s insistence that he was always right this late in life. He would doubtless have some kind of psychotic breakdown. Merlin was a lot better at subtle than Arthur ever was. There was nothing about the star that was subtle, from the way he moved to the way he dressed: always the best of everything, always the arrogant, yet annoyingly attractive, swagger. It was more than a little rich to hear him, Mr ‘Everyone-knows-everything-about-me’ laugh at Merlin’s subtlety.
“Oh, and Merlin, can you fetch my coat from the back room?” Arthur asked casually, “I think I’ll need to get it dry cleaned before Friday. There’s some stain all down the front of it…” he shrugged and Merlin sighed. He remembered where that stain had come from, not that Arthur probably could. He had been completely plastered by that time.
“Fine,” he said with a weary sigh, crossing over to the back room. As usual, it was an utter mess. He would undoubtedly be expected to tidy it up before the end of the day. How Arthur managed to make such a mess in a couple of days was beyond him. He grabbed the offending jacket and examined it. The electric light was not kind to it, the greyish stain stood out even more strongly than it had on the weekend.
He came out to find Arthur was sitting at his desk going through the more official letters with a frown creasing his forehead. However, Merlin could sense that his attention was not quite entirely on his task. He had grown used to noticing the smallest aspect of Arthur’s mood, and he had the feeling that Arthur was waiting for something. He looked around the room, and everything looked exactly as it had done before. He gave Arthur another long look, noticing that the actor’s shoulders had fallen almost imperceptibly, as though he was disappointed. Merlin gave the room another quick glance over and his gaze was caught by a splash of brilliant blue and red on the chair Arthur had previously been sitting on.
He could not contain the grin that spread across his features. There was a small, messily wrapped gift on the seat of the chair. Arthur had obviously wrapped it himself, or attempted to. Merlin wondered for a second how long it had taken his boss to wage war against the cellotape and wrapping paper before he had come up with something that would not completely humiliate him.
He knew that Arthur was watching him out of the corner of his eye as he crossed over to the chair and picked up the gift, turning it over in his hands. He allowed his own gaze to linger on the back of Arthur’s head for a moment, when he knew that the other young man could not see him. Then he put the jacket down on the chair and began to tear off the paper.
“It’s not much,” Arthur muttered to a correspondence from the Women’s Institute asking him to present some awards for them in June. Merlin didn’t reply, just gaped at the box in front of him.
It was a watch, a very expensive one, fully digital, with every possible add on that could be found.
“Thank you,” he said quietly, opening the box to pull out the heavy metal strap. He took a second to fasten it round his wrist, reminding himself that Arthur had stupid amounts of money and therefore one tiny watch would barely register on his radar. However, the fact that it was exactly the right size, despite the fact that watches with set strap lengths were always too big for him, did not escape his notice. Seeing as it was his job to select and buy presents for all of Arthur’s relatives and close friends (he could even say, quite proudly, that he had become very good at buying presents for Uther Pendragon) the fact that Arthur had actually chosen it himself rather than scheduling it into Merlin’s time was what struck the dark haired man the most.
“Well… it’s waterproof, and after what happened to the last one,” Arthur commented, still not turning round. He had always had a little trouble with the less abusive moments of their friendship.
Merlin snorted a little under his breath. What had happened to the last one had been that Arthur had dropped something into a river on a location shoot and pushed Merlin in after it. His last watch, which had been with him since his sixteenth birthday, had not been able to withstand the water and by the time he had waded out, shivering and irate, it had shuffled off this mortal coil.
“Thank you,” he repeated.
“It’s better than the piece of crap you’ve been wearing, anyway,” Arthur continued, desperate to move the conversation out of the uncomfortable territory it had entered. “And now you have no excuse for being late.” Merlin just laughed and picked up the coat again before heading for the door. “Remember to ask Gwen, okay?”
“Fine,” he agreed, not putting up a fight.
“Cool… I’ll see you on the set this afternoon?” Arthur turned to him at last and Merlin nodded, still unable to wipe the grin from his face.
***
The smile was still plastered to his face when he met Gwen for lunch in the studio canteen that afternoon. Morgana was between films at the moment, so she had given Gwen the day off, and his friend had decided to buy Merlin a birthday lunch of soggy sandwiches and stale muffins.
She saw him before he saw her, almost immediately he walked into the room and he turned immediately to the frantic yelling of his name.
She was sitting to one side of the canteen, waving at him with a huge smile. There was a suspiciously large carrier bag by her feet and a couple of drinks were already on the table.
“Over here!” she called superfluously, and Merlin headed in her direction, waving a greeting.
“Hey Gwen,” he said as he came up to the table, giving her a loose hug.
“Hey Merlin,” she replied, “Happy Birthday! I was beginning to think you weren’t coming.” They sat down and Merlin reached for his drink gratefully. The birthday present had been the highlight of his day. The dry cleaning facilities had been out of order when he had gone to find them, Gaius had been fielding questions about Arthur and Morgana’s relationship all morning and Merlin had been getting forwarded requests for television interviews from all of the bigger names. The only problem had been that all of them wanted a joint interview with Morgana, which he was not going to give the go ahead for at this point.
“It’s just been a hectic morning, that’s all. Sorry I’m late,” he replied. “What with all this Morgana malarkey going on.” Gwen laughed softly.
“I know. I got a phone call from her this morning asking whether I knew anyone who would have told them that she and Arthur were getting back together.”
“So it’s not true, then?” Merlin asked, remembering Arthur’s admonishments to find out what Morgana felt about the whole situation. Gwen laughed out loud at that.
“Of course it’s not true,” she looked at Merlin in disbelief. “You know as well as I do that there’s no hope of those two ever getting back together. Why did you even ask?”
“Arthur… is,” Merlin sighed, “he’s a little too interested in the story,” he said.
“You think that he wants to get back together?” Gwen asked leaning forward over the table.
“You know Arthur.”
“Not as well as you do,” she replied with a sly smile. “That’s a nice watch, by the way. When did you get a pay raise?” He blushed a little under her scrutiny.
“I didn’t - it was a birthday present,” he said, and allowed her to tug his arm across the table for a closer examination.
“You mean he remembered this year?” she asked with exaggerated incredulity.
“Well… last year, it was in the middle of all that therapy, and the year before that he and Morgana had just broken up, and the year that we had only just met… so it’s not like it’s that big a deal,” he shrugged as she looked up at him curiously.
“Of course it’s not… although I feel a little out done now,” she said, releasing his arm and reaching down to pick up the carrier bag at her feet. “If I’d known Arthur was going to remember I would have got you something better… not that I deliberately got you something bad.” She rolled her eyes at her own ability to put two feet in her mouth and pushed the bag over the table, narrowly avoiding their drinks.
“I didn’t have time to wrap it, I’m sorry. It was just…” Merlin cut her off with a look and she sighed as he drew out a box and gaped at it. “I know… it’s stupid, right? I’ll take it back.” She reached across for it, but Merlin pulled it out of her grasp.
“No you don’t!” he told her firmly, still staring at the present. “You got me… an Arthur Pendragon action figure?”
“Well, I remembered you said you used to collect his merchandise before, you know, you actually met him, and I thought that you might like to push him around for once, rather than, well, the other way round… Or you could stick pins in him… not that I think you’re the kind of person who would do that, I just know that sometimes when Morgana’s being difficult I want to… well, take out my frustration on her and…”
“It’s brilliant,” Merlin said, grinning at her again. “It’s perfect. I shall take great pleasure in throwing him off imaginary cliffs.” They shared a small laugh. “Is he anatomically correct, do you know?” he asked curiously. She blushed furiously, causing him to laugh again. “I’ll take that as ‘you never thought to look’.”
“Merlin,” she said in a hushed voice, looking a little scandalised. He always enjoyed teasing her about things like that. He had no idea how she had managed to get through years of working in the film business and still be so innocent about things like that, but it was fun to needle her. “I didn’t buy it for you to take out your twisted fantasies on it.” Or maybe she wasn’t so innocent. He laughed, but now it was his turn to blush and he could feel the tips of his ears burning.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” he insisted. “I prefer my sex toys to be more… well, real sex toys for a start.” She nodded. “Now, if we have established that I am not going to use the poor toy for nefarious purposes, other than perhaps the occasional beheading… does his head come off?” Gwen nodded. “Then maybe lunch?”
She took his order and headed over to the counter, leaving Merlin still staring at the doll in his lap in amusement. The original artist had apparently been quite good, because it was not one of those dolls where you couldn’t tell who it was supposed to be unless you saw it in the box. It really did look like a miniature version of Arthur smiling out at him.
It was based on an image of him from the fantasy film Valiant in which he had made his debut, still one of his most famous roles as the young Prince who had to battle evil snakes to inherit his birthright, a film Merlin may have watched a few more than five times at the cinema. The doll was in the full garb of Arthur’s costume, even down to a miniature sword hanging by his side.
“Here we are,” Gwen said, placing a plate of odd looking sandwiches in front of him. “Happy Birthday.”
“Thanks,” he said, relaxing as he began to dig in.
Of course, the relaxation did not last for long. Less than five minutes later his phone was ringing urgently. He pulled it out of his pocket with a grimace at Gwen.
“Arthur?” he answered, and within milliseconds his employer was listing into his ear all the things that had to be done before that evening. He sighed. “Okay, I’ll be right there.” Gwen gave him a sympathetic look before stealing the rest of his sandwich and shrugging. She knew the drill: they called, you went; or you got fired and never worked in the industry again - or anywhere else.
Arthur was still rabbiting on as Merlin gave Gwen a one armed hug goodbye and grabbed his new present before walking swiftly from the room.
“I’m on my way, Arthur. I’ll be right there.”
***
Arthur did not listen when Merlin told him what Gwen had said, but when did Arthur ever listen to him? The next thing Merlin knew he could hear Arthur’s yelling from the other end of the corridor and walked in to find Arthur on the phone to Morgana, his face red with anger.
“What do you mean, I’m arrogant?” he demanded down the phone line, and Merlin could hear Morgana’s voice raised in reply, although the exact words were indistinguishable. “You’re the one who’s being petty, Morgana. You just can’t admit you were wrong about anything, can you?” he asked, ignoring Merlin’s presence completely.
And so it continued. Arthur would phone Morgana every few days, or send her flowers, or invite her to some party or other. Every time she refused, sometimes politely, sometimes with thinly veiled threats, once she sent Gwen back with the most recent bouquet, only all the blooms had been beheaded. That had been the worst occasion, Merlin would have to say: the blond had sat staring at the decapitated flowers for over an hour, glowering at them, before excusing himself to the gym. Merlin had passed the door to the gym half an hour later and seen Arthur still taking out his anger on the punching bag. When he had eventually relented and come back, Merlin had had to clean the bloody grazes on his knuckles.
But it still was not as bad as he had been two years ago when they had broken up.
Finally, Morgana broke, or maybe she just wanted to make her point more difficult to avoid, but she agreed to go to dinner with Arthur - once - just to shut him up. Merlin groaned when he heard the news. He liked Morgana, he really did, but he wished he could just have had a little word with her. Her refusals had been bad enough, if she had just ignored Arthur he probably would have given up after the fiftieth try or so; but to accept him, even so that she could tell him to his face he was barking up the wrong tree, would just make it worse.
That night Merlin invested in a pack of long pins and toy-Arthur, who was sadly not anatomically correct, found them being stabbed in some rather sensitive places.
Gwen had been right, it did make him feel better.
Savagely, reminding himself that Arthur was a prick and a jerk, who was completely unworthy of Merlin’s interest in him, he held the doll up to the notice board he always took with him from hotel room to hotel room and, with as much effort as he could muster, thrust the final pin through the doll and into the board, right through Arthur’s heart.
He stared at it for a minute venomously.
Then he sighed and ordered room service. His gaze lingered over some of the atrociously named cocktails, but he knew there was going to be a phone call from Arthur at some point that night demanding his presence, and probably a lift, so, he just ordered food and a glass of sparkling water. Why Arthur never rang his driver at times like this was beyond him, but somehow it was always his job to pick the idiot up when a date went south.
Sure enough, the food had barely arrived when his mobile rang out again and Arthur was grinding his teeth at the other end. He gave the hot food a longing glance, but at least there was a microwave this time.
“I’m on my way.”
***
To say that the date had not gone well was possibly the understatement of the century. When he arrived, Arthur was standing at the rear exit of the restaurant, fuming while a hapless waiter attempted to mop up the wine from his shirt with a cloth. Arthur was pacing back and forth and the poor man was trying to follow him. There was little he could do though.
As soon as Merlin pulled up, Arthur stormed over to the car and got in the back, not even thanking the poor man, although from the look of relief on the waiter’s face, his leaving was probably thanks enough.
“Go well?” Merlin asked, deciding that complete ignorance was probably the best way to play the situation. That way Arthur would get all his yelling out on Merlin and run out of voice before they got back to the hotel.
“Well?” Arthur asked, “Well?! ” He grabbed his sodden shirt and held it away from his body. “Does this look like it went well?” Merlin shrugged. “No… no Merlin, it did not go well. The infuriating woman laughed in my face and then upended most of a bottle of red wine down my front.” Arthur let go of his shirt and stared sullenly out of the window. “I can’t believe I let her convince me to go out with her again. What was I thinking, agreeing to that?” Merlin opened his mouth to reply, but there were some conversational holes that even he was wise enough to avoid, so he remained silent.
“I’ll drive you back to your-” Merlin began, but, before he could finish the sentence, Arthur cut him off.
“No, I can’t go back to my room. The press will have gone there already, and there’ll be god knows how many phone calls waiting for me. We’ll go back to your place.”
“I’m staying at the same hotel you are,” Merlin reminded him, trying not to think about the fact that Arthur was suggesting that he sleep in Merlin’s room, and the fact that he only had one bed. He was driving and he needed to concentrate, he could not be thinking about Arthur in his bed right now. He really couldn’t.
He imagined Gaius doing the dance of the seven veils and regretted it immediately. That was far more disturbing and distracting than any thoughts of Arthur.
“Yes, but it’s not like they’re going to go anywhere near your room,” Arthur insisted. “We’ll take the private entrance and sneak up in the service lift, we should be alright then.”
“Fine…”
The drive back to the hotel was fairly uneventful. Arthur bitched about Morgana, but Merlin had developed the talent of blocking out anything he was not expected to reply to, and humming soft affirmatives at random intervals.
The private entrance to their hotel was only accessible through the underground car park and Arthur had to duck down in the back of the car to get past the crowds of press who were surrounding the entrance. Merlin waved cheerily at them, but they were uninterested in strangely pale, dark-haired men with sticky out ears.
Security at the hotel was good, which was one of the reasons Merlin had chosen it in the first place, so when they got into the car park, there was no one there except for them, the security guards and a couple of other patrons, who were on their way out and did not even bat an eyelid at the sight of Arthur Pendragon, stained with red wine, stalking across the car park towards the service lift with murder in his eyes and a long suffering assistant hurrying after him.
The service lift was often used for such adventures, so there was no problem getting to Merlin’s floor, and that was when he remembered the doll, skewered to the notice board like a hedgehog with interestingly placed spines. He blanched.
“Uh… I’ll go in first, make sure it’s tidy,” he said, slipping the key into the electronic lock. Arthur laughed.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Merlin. I’ve seen your rooms before and I can honestly say that they were never exactly tidy.”
“Maybe that’s because I spend so long tidying yours,” he muttered, but then Arthur pushed the door open and he was far more concerned with going to stand in front of the notice board than arguing the point.
“It’s not even that bad…” Arthur said, completely ignoring the notice board, much to Merlin’s relief, and crossing over to the living room section of the suite (Merlin had a suite, which in itself was disturbing; three years and he still felt out of place in anything more posh than a travel inn) and collapsing on the sofa. “I don’t know what you were so worried about.” Merlin risked a glance behind him at the doll, and wondered whether Arthur would just sack him or kill him with the same pins if he saw it. There was a lengthy silence from the other man and Merlin took the opportunity to pull the doll from the wall. Apparently he had been more exasperated than he had thought, because the pin through Arthur’s heart had gone clean through the board and into the wall. He gritted his teeth to stop a grunt of exertion, as he braced himself against the wall for leverage.
Finally the thing pulled free, so suddenly that he fell backwards into the opposite wall and the doll whacked him quite hard on the nose, making his eyes water.
“Ow…” he muttered, glaring at the smaller Arthur, who was apparently as unmanageable as the larger one currently sitting on his sofa eating his room service.
He paused and glanced over again. He knew he should have been more worried when Arthur stopped talking. He walked over to the sofa, shoving the doll into a drawer as quickly as he could.
“This is good pasta,” Arthur said, turning round just as Merlin had hidden the offending object. He quickly perched himself on the chest of drawers and attempted to look innocent.
“Really? I didn’t have time to eat any before I went out,” he said. Arthur frowned slightly before gesturing Merlin to come and join him.
“You mean you haven’t eaten yet?” he asked. Merlin shook his head. “You’re a moron, you know that?” He handed over another fork and indicated that Merlin should dig in. “I mean, I didn’t get to the eating part of the meal, because of…” he gestured down at his shirt, which was still wet, and clinging to his stomach in a way that made Merlin’s throat go dry. “Talking of which, you don’t have any clean shirts, do you?” Merlin nodded around a mouthful of tagliatelle. “Mind if I borrow one?” Arthur asked, standing up. Merlin gave another nod, and before he had time to consider it, Arthur’s hands were undoing the buttons of his shirt.
Merlin almost choked on his mouthful of pasta as Arthur slid the very expensive shirt off his shoulders and down his arm, dropping it in a small puddle of fabric on the floor.
“Uh…” Merlin said eloquently, dragging his eyes up Arthur’s body to his eyes as quickly as he could. He could not be caught ogling his employer’s abs, no matter how impressive they were. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat, rearranging himself a little. Arthur Pendragon was half naked in his hotel room. There was a time when he was younger when this would have been his fantasy.
“Merlin?” Arthur asked.
Who was he kidding? This was still his fantasy…
“Right… clothes. In the bedroom,” he nodded towards the door on the far side of the room. Arthur nodded abruptly and walked off, leaving Merlin staring open-mouthed at his back, his eyes tracing the line of Arthur’s spine down from his neck.
This was not a good idea.
He forced his eyes away and looked back down at the food, grabbing another forkful with suppressed rage. It just wasn’t fair. Why couldn’t Arthur just be a prick? Then he would just quit, and it wouldn’t even matter because he would have stopped fancying him by now anyway. But for every pratty thing that Arthur did, he always did something dreadfully nice as well, which more than made up for the demands and the ranting and the fact that Merlin had no life of his own. If he could have just been a wholly insufferable git, rather than giving him a birthday present and making sure he ate then he could have hated him for being undeservingly rich and that would have been that.
His thoughts were distracted from Arthur, half-naked in his bedroom, by the incessant ringing of his phone. For once, he was sure it wasn’t Arthur, because even he was not so lazy that he would call when all he had to do was stick his head around the door and yell.
It was Gaius.
“Morgana threw wine at him? ” were the first words out of the Physician’s mouth.
“Yes,” Merlin replied simply.
“In public.”
“If it had been in private I don’t think we’d be having this conversation,” Merlin pointed out, and Gaius hesitated.
“You think you’re funny. ”
“Sometimes.”
“What are we going to do? The press are going to be all over this. I’ve had the phone ringing off the hook since it happened. This is the first break I’ve had. What happened? ”
“I’m not entirely sure. I think that Arthur was Arthur and Morgana was Morgana and that was pretty much that.” Merlin said, running a hand through his hair.
“Why didn’t you stop them? ” Gaius asked.
“I tried, but you know Arthur won’t listen to a word I say when he’s got an idea in his head.”
“We have to fix this somehow. ” Gaius pointed out. Merlin already knew that. “And quickly. ”
“How do we do that?” He asked curiously.
“Lunch, tomorrow, ” Gaius replied, “They go out to lunch, they smile for the cameras, they make nice, everything goes well, they’re friends, they’re happy, the press is happy, the public is happy and I’m happy. ”
“You want to solve the problem of them going out for a meal and almost killing each other by making them go out for another meal?” Merlin asked, not able to keep the tone of disbelief out of his voice.
“Yes, we have to make it seem like they were just involved in a little spat, but everything got sorted out. ”
“And how do we stop them from killing each other again?”
“They’re actors! We get them to act like they like each other, ” was Gaius’ only idea. If Merlin had had enough energy to care, he probably would have laughed, but his higher brain function had left the building and all he was left with was: tired, hungry and holy shit, Arthur’s half naked in my bedroom.
“Good luck with that,” he said, about to hang up.
“You’ll be the one convincing Arthur, ” Gaius pointed out. “Do you think you can handle him? ” In a display of utterly perfect timing, Arthur chose that second to walk out of Merlin’s room. The two of them were a little different in size and the t-shirt, which would have been loose on Merlin, was stretched a little tight across Arthur’s chest and his biceps. Merlin stared at him for a second. “Merlin? ” He really needed to stop zoning out like that while staring at Arthur, it was getting pathetic.
No, it already was pathetic, it was getting disturbing.
“I think I should be able to. Bye Gaius.” He hung up before the older man could inflict any more ill-conceived plans on him and smiled at Arthur, who gave him a weary grin.
“You haven’t eaten it all, have you?” Arthur asked, coming back to sit opposite him. Merlin shook his head and offered Arthur the rest of the plate. “Don’t be an idiot. You need it more than I do. I never realised just how skeletal you were until I tried on your clothes. Do you weigh anything?”
“I’m not that skinny,” Merlin protested and Arthur snorted slightly in disbelief. “I’m not… I just have a very fast metabolism.”
“And I keep interrupting your meals,” Arthur added. Merlin shrugged a vague affirmative. “You know,” the actor said, pausing slightly and looking across at Merlin with a sly smile, “there is such a thing as a cupboard, you know.”
“Yes, I am familiar with the concept,” Merlin agreed.
“Then why don’t you use one?” Arthur asked, leaning over to grab a piece of tagliatelle with his fingers, raising it above his head and slowly sucking it into his mouth. Merlin looked away quickly. “All your stuff’s still in your suitcase.” Merlin shrugged.
“We move around so much, I guess I don’t see the point any more.” Arthur frowned and opened his mouth as though he was about to say something, but then thought better of it and changed the subject, glancing away from Merlin back to the food.
“What did Gaius want?” he asked and Merlin winced, he had been hoping to lead up to that conversation.
“He… uh… the incident at the restaurant got a lot of publicity,” he began and Arthur sighed wearily.
“Yes, I thought it would. Morgana can never do anything half-heartedly, can she?” Arthur was one to talk, Merlin thought, but he kept his mind to himself.
“And he was just suggesting some damage control,” he continued. Arthur nodded.
“Sounds like a plan, after all the premiere’s in three days and it’d be better if people were talking about the film rather than my relationships,” he commented. Merlin wondered why he could not have been that pragmatic and sensible before he started insisting that Morgana go out to dinner with him. “What does he want me to do?”
“Not just you…” Merlin said before he could stop himself. Arthur glanced up quickly. “He… we think it would be a good idea if you and Morgana made some sort of demonstration of friendship.”
“Such as?” Arthur’s voice was low and dangerous and Merlin squirmed under his gaze.
“Well… he thinks that you should… have lunch with her tomorrow, in public.”
“Have lunch with Morgana, after she humiliated me tonight?” Arthur asked. Merlin elected just to nod. “I’m more likely to stab her with the butter knife.”
“Couldn’t you just act as though you like her?” Merlin suggested, mimicking Gaius’ words. Arthur simply glared at him. “That is what you do after all…”
“She’s insufferable, Merlin. She’s so convinced that she’s right and everyone else should just bow to her judgement. She thinks the world revolves around her and…” he hissed, breaking off and standing up to pace up and down the room. Merlin followed his movements with his eyes. Arthur’s words would have been amusing if he were not thinking about how much trouble he would be in if Morgana LeFay were stabbed with a butter knife.
“It’s just one lunch, Arthur… not even that, really,” he said, trying to placate the man. “You just have to show up, give the press a couple of good photo ops and then you can both leave. Just grin and bear it and all that.”
“Lie back and think of England?” Arthur said, pausing to look over at Merlin with a slightly amused smile.
“Exactly… although I suggest you try and keep the meal strictly vertical. There are some photographs we really don’t want the press to get.” Arthur’s smile spread then, becoming full and genuine and Merlin breathed a sigh of relief. Arthur would be there tomorrow, he would smile and play nice - as long as Morgana did.
“Fine, I’ll have some stupid lunch with her,” he said, collapsing back down onto the sofa.
“Good, now, how about we start on pudding,” Merlin suggested. Arthur grinned and reached for the bowl of sticky toffee pudding.
***
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