Hollywood AU WIP
Started over here hermette.livejournal.com/271579.html
Hollywood AU in which Arthur maybe a little bit tries to burn his apartment down. Gwen is kind of there at the time, so that's bad.
Written with copperiisulfate
IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO CONTINUE ON, WE MAY! Otherwise, this can just be a record of that thing I wrote part of that one time :)
warnings: angst, angry drunks, Arthurian legend references.
Secretly not that angsty, probably because copperiisulfate has rescued it from that horrible fate.
probably pg-13 for now and the foreseeable future. Mainly because language, but also mentions of violence and Arthur being unstable.
and hey I'm totally retconning this one line about what Arthur is in charge of...but yes! CARRYING ON.
Lyrics from Gaga, obviously.
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ityellsback:
No one is really expecting it, but the tabloids catch hold of something juicy and they don't let go.
When Arthur sees the pictures, he doesn't have to ask Gwen if what they're implying is true or not.
It's hardly the first time a lover has betrayed him.
She swears it started before they were married.
She swears when she married him, she thought Lance had probably died, they hadn't heard from him in so long.
She swears she didn't mean for it to happen again.
For it to keep happening.
He rages out of the apartment and goes to get utterly smashed. The first bar he stops at is no stranger to celebrities, and is good about keeping the paparazzi out.
By the time he stumbles out of there to get to the next bar, he's too drunk to care about the PR anyway.
Sometime between then and three am he's been through too many bars--and bar bathrooms, offering an absolute cocktail of narcotics--and he finds himself back in his penthouse, sobbing in the hallway, because he can't bear to walk into the bedroom where he knows she is.
His phone is ringing, and probably has been for a while. It's the obnoxious pop song his personal assistant set as his own ring tone.
Because I know you hate to answer, Merlin had said, above the boy, the way you blowin' up my phone won't make me leave no fast-uh...
He can't deal with it right now, so he takes his phone out of his pocket and chucks it into the kitchen.
It hits a trash can.
A trash can full of paper.
At some point, his crying turned to laughing, and he can't stop as drags the trash can over, kicks in over in front of his bedroom door.
Digs a lighter out of his pocket.
Watches it burn for a few minutes before coughing on the smoke, and then he just runs.
He doesn't stop until he can't run anymore, until he's in some hell of an alleyway mainly populated by sunset strip hookers.
It hits him, what he just did really sinks in, and he terrorizes a woman in fishnets and little else until she hands over a cell phone, and he dials Merlin's number.
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copperiisulfate:
"You couldn't pick up when I called?"
"Merlin," Arthur slurs, "Merlin, Merlin, Merlin," like he's trying the word out on his tongue. It's a nice name even if it's downright odd but that's very much like Merlin himself.
He hears Merlin's long-suffering sigh over the line. "Yes, that is my unfortunate name. Where do you need me to pick you up from this time?"
"You know me so well, Merrrlin. But wait, listen--"
"I'm in the car. See? I swear it's like a sixth sense by now."
"Listen, listen. Will you listen?"
"Major intersection? Yeah, what?"
"So, I might have, um, set my place on fire."
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ityellsback:
"You. You what? You set your place on fire? Where the fuck was Gwen? Goddamit Arthur, where the hell are YOU?"
"You don't have to yell! I dunno, dunno where Gwen is. Dunno where I am..." it seems Arthur, having told Merlin the important part, was losing lucidity pretty fast.
"God FUCKING DAMMIT, Arthur! Fine, fine, shit, hand the phone back to whoever you borrowed it from."
"Borrowed it...?"
"Yes! Yes, you fuckwit, who you borrowed it from, it's not your number!" It's a testament to exactly how often Arthur had a tendency to pull stunts like this- the drinking and phone throwing and running, not the setting things on fire- that Merlin just assumed when random numbers called him it was Arthur. People not in his phone book didn't generally have his personal number, used only for friends and emergencies.
Arthur shoves the phone back at the fishnets woman, who is thankfully curious enough to put it to her ear instead of just hanging up.
Arthur can't really hear Merlin's side of the conversation, but he does hear the woman eventually giving two street names.
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copperiisulfate:
He can hear the Camaro pull up before he sees it, which is a wonder really considering the high beams are blinding bright and maybe Arthur shouldn’t have drank so much because all this light is making his head spin and making him feel a little sick. Merlin’s honking at him to get inside the car and screaming something along the lines of if Arthur wants to preserve whatever bit of dignity he might have left, he’s going to get in before Merlin gets out and drags him in while all these lovely ladies of the night bear witness.
Right then, thinks Arthur, and tries to get this eye-hand coordination thing going because it should not take him five minutes of fumbling with a seatbelt before he can manage some success, and by the looks of Merlin and that furious line of his mouth, he thinks he will very much be needing the seatbelt. If he has seen some interesting coping mechanisms in his life, he will never understand Merlin’s, which is apparently driving around town like fiend. That, and baking pies. Which reminds him, the car smells like apple and cinnamon. He takes an appreciative sniff.
“Have you been baking again?” Arthur asks, distracted.
“Here is a question for you, Arthur,” Merlin starts in a deceptively gentle voice. “Have you been going on more drunk self-destructive sprees again? Because really, Arthur, I had a grand old time cleaning up the last fifteen over the past year. The fire though. That’s new, isn’t it? Really, nice touch that. Do let me know when you would like to start talking about that.”
“Can we go to your place?” He really doesn't want to go back to his own. Doesn't even want to know what's become of it. At all. And even with Merlin swerving them this way and that with screeching brakes and sharp turns, Arthur thinks he could drift off here. There’s jazz on the radio and whoever said the smell of cinnamon was soothing couldn’t have been more right--
Merlin honks again and Arthur startles awake and scans left and right.
“The fire, Arthur. Can we talk about the goddamned fire?”
“Yeah, see, about that.” Arthur really doesn’t want to. Really, really doesn’t want to. So he pulls out the crumpled front page of the tabloid because of course he’d hold on to it, bless his masochistic tendencies (and they are most certainly not going to talk about the childish ones, not the pair of horns he’d scrawled on Lance’s head or the moustache on Gwen’s smiling face). He pulls it out and flattens it out and throws it in Merlin’s face. “Things kind of progressed naturally after that and it, well, sort of just happened.”
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ityellsback:
Merlin looks at the picture for longer than is really advisable when he's driving, and finally asks, voice quiet and still angry,
"Where did you get this?"
"Under the door. Earlier." Arthur leans his head against the window, watches lights and people streak by. Merlin doesn't exactly live close. He doesn't live far, either, not by L.A. standards.
"Earlier. How extremely descriptive, Arthur. I'm sure I can get all the information I need from that, Arthur. That's really very--"
"Look, can you quit with the fucking sarcasm, this isn't--"
"This isn't WHAT, Arthur?? Because you just almost lit my BEST FUCKING FRIEND on fire, that's just, I mean, I don't even know if she's okay right now, it's not, fuck you, like your marriage would've lasted--" and Merlin cuts himself off. Just stops, breathes deeply.
Arthur doesn't look over at him because he's scared what he'll see, because he knows from the sniffling noises over there that Merlin will still look angry, so angry, and that now he's crying. He's only seen Merlin cry twice before, and once was Will's death and the other was when his other boss Gaius was in the hospital. About to die. Since it seems Merlin only cries at death, and oh, he thought he was panicked in the alleyway, but this has nothing on this.
"Fuck," he gasps under his breath, then louder, "Fuck, oh fuck, Merlin, what if she's dead, I didn't mean, fuck, that's not, oh god, I, Merlin, she can't be, right, she can't, we have to go, wait, go back, go back, go BACK!" He reaches over for the steering wheel, trying to force them to turn, but Merlin grabs his wrist and forces his arm back to the passenger side, throws it down hard enough Arthur winces.
"Calm the hell down, Arthur. I don't know what you were--shit, calming you down before you kill us, ugh, stop freaking out. I called the fire department already, you fucking SHIT, and, I, I called Lance already."
"You called Lance." Arthur repeats quietly. Stares out the window again. "Right."
"It's not like I knew," Merlin says softly. "Not. Not for sure."
It would be Arthur's turn to yell, but between the alcohol, the drugs, and the receding panic, between the burns on his fingers he is beginning to feel and the way his breathing is finally evening out, he says nothing. Nods against the window. Waits to be able to sleep.
Merlin doesn't ask him anything else, and he doesn't remember anything else of that night.
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copperiisulfate:
He wakes up to the smell of blueberries, and rhubarb, and more cinnamon. It’s like a fucking pastry-shop in here. He’s not exactly complaining.
He also wakes up to bright lights because Merlin didn’t bother to shut them off when he must have thrown Arthur on the sofa, or at least this is what Arthur gathers to be a pretty accurate picture of the previous night as it would definitely not be the first time. It is however first time he’s left the lights on and the air conditioning all the way up and Arthur without either pillow or blanket. And the hangover starts to kick in and, okay, now it’s agonizing and he can start complaining.
“Merlin,” he groans, because Merlin’s not anywhere in sight and he needs to be here, goddamnit, where the hell is he? And fine, he gets that Merlin is pissed but Merlin gets paid to take care of his shit so if Merlin hates it so fucking much, he should have just quit by now and-
“You’re up then,” the scowl still hasn’t left his voice and Arthur sighs, and mumbles something along the lines of painkillers and maybe even breakfast, and where can he find some.
Merlin laughs, cold, “You know what? You are so lucky I didn’t kill you in your sleep.”
“Ugh.” Arthur heaves himself up off the black leather and stumbles around the living room, feet still mostly asleep because he slept with both shoes on and yeah, that night needed to definitely not exist.
Once out of the bathroom, he fumbles through Merlin’s kitchen to find ibuprofen on top of the fridge and boil some water because this headache needs to go. This is approximately when he runs into the sight of something like seven pies on the table and when Merlin catches him eying them, he hisses, “Don’t you even dare.”
“Oh come on. It’s not like you’re going to eat all seven.”
“They’re for your wife,” Merlin spits out the word, like he doesn't deserve one, which, granted, he probably doesn't after what he did last night but, a part of him whines, she betrayed him. No one seems to care about that bit.
Merlin flips the TV on, channel four news, and sinks into a chair, pinching the bridge of his nose.
Arthur spits out his water. "Oh fuck."
Yeah, no one seems to care about that bit.
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ityellsback:
"--ast night, the young actor turned co-owner of Albion Productions Arthur Pendragon attempted to set fire to his Hollywood penthouse. He presumably knew that his wife, Guinevere Smith Pendragon, was trapped inside. Thankfully, due to an anonymous call to the fire department and the heroics especially of the volunteer firefighter Lance Eliot du Luc, Ms. Pendragon escaped with only minor injuries. Police are now looking for Mr. Pendragon in order to--"
"Oh fuck," he repeats from the kitchen. It seems like a very good idea to sit down now. He curls up on his kitchen floor, head in his hands against his knees.
"So. Guess who I called about all this already?"
"Please say the answer is 'my lawyer'."
"Oh, I did you one better. I called Morgana."
"Mor--why would you! Now I have to deal with her, god, are you TRYING to torture me?"
"As a matter of fact, I am, but that's besides the point. She's twice as talented as your lawyer and you need everything you can get."
"She is going to be even angrier than you are! I mean, god, she and...she and you know."
"Oh, are we not saying Gwen's name now?"
"Merlin, christ, please. Can you not? Can you just leave it?"
"So you can wallow in your sadness? Because that sadness seems so apparent from over here--"
"Merlin. Come on, I--" and here he looks up at where Merlin has moved to stand next to him, leaning against the counter and looking down. Merlin still looks angry.
"I thought you'd get it. No, I mean, don't interrupt me. I don't--Merlin, I swear that I have never been more...if she hadn't been okay, god, if she hadn't..."
and Merlin is sinking down to sit next to Arthur, not saying anything but knocking their shoulders together. Arthur means it, if he could fix this, if he could go back and prevent himself from setting that trash can on fire. He leans his head tentatively on Merlin's shoulder, and Merlin doesn't pull away.
"I'm still angry at you," he says finally.
"I know. I'm sorry."
Merlin doesn't ask what he's sorry for, because he's already figured that out. He sighs heavily, then continues, "I'm still angry, and you're still upset, but we need to deal with the now. That picture you got under your door? I made some phone calls this morning, and I don't think that was released to the public. I think someone wanted you to have a break down."
"I probably did even better than they expected, huh?"
"Yeah, you did."
They sit in silence for a minute, until a knock comes on the door and Merlin jumps up to answer it. Arthur does his best to curl into the floor, because maybe that way Morgana won't notice him?
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Also, Why Merlin Has a Leather Couch:
and also my head wrote a backstory for that couch, because why would Merlin own a black leather couch? Well, he had a horrible couch, and Arthur was like, DUDE, WHY IS YOUR COUCH AWFUL, WHERE DID YOU EVEN GET THIS?
and Merlin is like UH. THE CURB.
and Arthur is all NO. NO. UH-UH. NO. I PROBABLY I HAVE CRABS NOW.
and buys him a new one for Christmas, since he has a gabazillion dollars, and
Merlin freaks out a little, like WHAT? NICE THINGS, I CAN'T HAVE THOSE, I RUIN THOSE, so now takes SUPER GOOD CARE of his couch and is REALLY OBSESSIVE about it.
and then everyone was like YOU GUYS ARE SUCH GOOD BOYFRIENDS and they were like AGH, NOT DATING.
THE STORY OF HOW MERLIN GOT HIS COUCH, THE END.
Hollywood AU in which Arthur maybe a little bit tries to burn his apartment down. Gwen is kind of there at the time, so that's bad.
Written with copperiisulfate
IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO CONTINUE ON, WE MAY! Otherwise, this can just be a record of that thing I wrote part of that one time :)
warnings: angst, angry drunks, Arthurian legend references.
Secretly not that angsty, probably because copperiisulfate has rescued it from that horrible fate.
probably pg-13 for now and the foreseeable future. Mainly because language, but also mentions of violence and Arthur being unstable.
and hey I'm totally retconning this one line about what Arthur is in charge of...but yes! CARRYING ON.
Lyrics from Gaga, obviously.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
ityellsback:
No one is really expecting it, but the tabloids catch hold of something juicy and they don't let go.
When Arthur sees the pictures, he doesn't have to ask Gwen if what they're implying is true or not.
It's hardly the first time a lover has betrayed him.
She swears it started before they were married.
She swears when she married him, she thought Lance had probably died, they hadn't heard from him in so long.
She swears she didn't mean for it to happen again.
For it to keep happening.
He rages out of the apartment and goes to get utterly smashed. The first bar he stops at is no stranger to celebrities, and is good about keeping the paparazzi out.
By the time he stumbles out of there to get to the next bar, he's too drunk to care about the PR anyway.
Sometime between then and three am he's been through too many bars--and bar bathrooms, offering an absolute cocktail of narcotics--and he finds himself back in his penthouse, sobbing in the hallway, because he can't bear to walk into the bedroom where he knows she is.
His phone is ringing, and probably has been for a while. It's the obnoxious pop song his personal assistant set as his own ring tone.
Because I know you hate to answer, Merlin had said, above the boy, the way you blowin' up my phone won't make me leave no fast-uh...
He can't deal with it right now, so he takes his phone out of his pocket and chucks it into the kitchen.
It hits a trash can.
A trash can full of paper.
At some point, his crying turned to laughing, and he can't stop as drags the trash can over, kicks in over in front of his bedroom door.
Digs a lighter out of his pocket.
Watches it burn for a few minutes before coughing on the smoke, and then he just runs.
He doesn't stop until he can't run anymore, until he's in some hell of an alleyway mainly populated by sunset strip hookers.
It hits him, what he just did really sinks in, and he terrorizes a woman in fishnets and little else until she hands over a cell phone, and he dials Merlin's number.
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copperiisulfate:
"You couldn't pick up when I called?"
"Merlin," Arthur slurs, "Merlin, Merlin, Merlin," like he's trying the word out on his tongue. It's a nice name even if it's downright odd but that's very much like Merlin himself.
He hears Merlin's long-suffering sigh over the line. "Yes, that is my unfortunate name. Where do you need me to pick you up from this time?"
"You know me so well, Merrrlin. But wait, listen--"
"I'm in the car. See? I swear it's like a sixth sense by now."
"Listen, listen. Will you listen?"
"Major intersection? Yeah, what?"
"So, I might have, um, set my place on fire."
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ityellsback:
"You. You what? You set your place on fire? Where the fuck was Gwen? Goddamit Arthur, where the hell are YOU?"
"You don't have to yell! I dunno, dunno where Gwen is. Dunno where I am..." it seems Arthur, having told Merlin the important part, was losing lucidity pretty fast.
"God FUCKING DAMMIT, Arthur! Fine, fine, shit, hand the phone back to whoever you borrowed it from."
"Borrowed it...?"
"Yes! Yes, you fuckwit, who you borrowed it from, it's not your number!" It's a testament to exactly how often Arthur had a tendency to pull stunts like this- the drinking and phone throwing and running, not the setting things on fire- that Merlin just assumed when random numbers called him it was Arthur. People not in his phone book didn't generally have his personal number, used only for friends and emergencies.
Arthur shoves the phone back at the fishnets woman, who is thankfully curious enough to put it to her ear instead of just hanging up.
Arthur can't really hear Merlin's side of the conversation, but he does hear the woman eventually giving two street names.
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copperiisulfate:
He can hear the Camaro pull up before he sees it, which is a wonder really considering the high beams are blinding bright and maybe Arthur shouldn’t have drank so much because all this light is making his head spin and making him feel a little sick. Merlin’s honking at him to get inside the car and screaming something along the lines of if Arthur wants to preserve whatever bit of dignity he might have left, he’s going to get in before Merlin gets out and drags him in while all these lovely ladies of the night bear witness.
Right then, thinks Arthur, and tries to get this eye-hand coordination thing going because it should not take him five minutes of fumbling with a seatbelt before he can manage some success, and by the looks of Merlin and that furious line of his mouth, he thinks he will very much be needing the seatbelt. If he has seen some interesting coping mechanisms in his life, he will never understand Merlin’s, which is apparently driving around town like fiend. That, and baking pies. Which reminds him, the car smells like apple and cinnamon. He takes an appreciative sniff.
“Have you been baking again?” Arthur asks, distracted.
“Here is a question for you, Arthur,” Merlin starts in a deceptively gentle voice. “Have you been going on more drunk self-destructive sprees again? Because really, Arthur, I had a grand old time cleaning up the last fifteen over the past year. The fire though. That’s new, isn’t it? Really, nice touch that. Do let me know when you would like to start talking about that.”
“Can we go to your place?” He really doesn't want to go back to his own. Doesn't even want to know what's become of it. At all. And even with Merlin swerving them this way and that with screeching brakes and sharp turns, Arthur thinks he could drift off here. There’s jazz on the radio and whoever said the smell of cinnamon was soothing couldn’t have been more right--
Merlin honks again and Arthur startles awake and scans left and right.
“The fire, Arthur. Can we talk about the goddamned fire?”
“Yeah, see, about that.” Arthur really doesn’t want to. Really, really doesn’t want to. So he pulls out the crumpled front page of the tabloid because of course he’d hold on to it, bless his masochistic tendencies (and they are most certainly not going to talk about the childish ones, not the pair of horns he’d scrawled on Lance’s head or the moustache on Gwen’s smiling face). He pulls it out and flattens it out and throws it in Merlin’s face. “Things kind of progressed naturally after that and it, well, sort of just happened.”
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ityellsback:
Merlin looks at the picture for longer than is really advisable when he's driving, and finally asks, voice quiet and still angry,
"Where did you get this?"
"Under the door. Earlier." Arthur leans his head against the window, watches lights and people streak by. Merlin doesn't exactly live close. He doesn't live far, either, not by L.A. standards.
"Earlier. How extremely descriptive, Arthur. I'm sure I can get all the information I need from that, Arthur. That's really very--"
"Look, can you quit with the fucking sarcasm, this isn't--"
"This isn't WHAT, Arthur?? Because you just almost lit my BEST FUCKING FRIEND on fire, that's just, I mean, I don't even know if she's okay right now, it's not, fuck you, like your marriage would've lasted--" and Merlin cuts himself off. Just stops, breathes deeply.
Arthur doesn't look over at him because he's scared what he'll see, because he knows from the sniffling noises over there that Merlin will still look angry, so angry, and that now he's crying. He's only seen Merlin cry twice before, and once was Will's death and the other was when his other boss Gaius was in the hospital. About to die. Since it seems Merlin only cries at death, and oh, he thought he was panicked in the alleyway, but this has nothing on this.
"Fuck," he gasps under his breath, then louder, "Fuck, oh fuck, Merlin, what if she's dead, I didn't mean, fuck, that's not, oh god, I, Merlin, she can't be, right, she can't, we have to go, wait, go back, go back, go BACK!" He reaches over for the steering wheel, trying to force them to turn, but Merlin grabs his wrist and forces his arm back to the passenger side, throws it down hard enough Arthur winces.
"Calm the hell down, Arthur. I don't know what you were--shit, calming you down before you kill us, ugh, stop freaking out. I called the fire department already, you fucking SHIT, and, I, I called Lance already."
"You called Lance." Arthur repeats quietly. Stares out the window again. "Right."
"It's not like I knew," Merlin says softly. "Not. Not for sure."
It would be Arthur's turn to yell, but between the alcohol, the drugs, and the receding panic, between the burns on his fingers he is beginning to feel and the way his breathing is finally evening out, he says nothing. Nods against the window. Waits to be able to sleep.
Merlin doesn't ask him anything else, and he doesn't remember anything else of that night.
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copperiisulfate:
He wakes up to the smell of blueberries, and rhubarb, and more cinnamon. It’s like a fucking pastry-shop in here. He’s not exactly complaining.
He also wakes up to bright lights because Merlin didn’t bother to shut them off when he must have thrown Arthur on the sofa, or at least this is what Arthur gathers to be a pretty accurate picture of the previous night as it would definitely not be the first time. It is however first time he’s left the lights on and the air conditioning all the way up and Arthur without either pillow or blanket. And the hangover starts to kick in and, okay, now it’s agonizing and he can start complaining.
“Merlin,” he groans, because Merlin’s not anywhere in sight and he needs to be here, goddamnit, where the hell is he? And fine, he gets that Merlin is pissed but Merlin gets paid to take care of his shit so if Merlin hates it so fucking much, he should have just quit by now and-
“You’re up then,” the scowl still hasn’t left his voice and Arthur sighs, and mumbles something along the lines of painkillers and maybe even breakfast, and where can he find some.
Merlin laughs, cold, “You know what? You are so lucky I didn’t kill you in your sleep.”
“Ugh.” Arthur heaves himself up off the black leather and stumbles around the living room, feet still mostly asleep because he slept with both shoes on and yeah, that night needed to definitely not exist.
Once out of the bathroom, he fumbles through Merlin’s kitchen to find ibuprofen on top of the fridge and boil some water because this headache needs to go. This is approximately when he runs into the sight of something like seven pies on the table and when Merlin catches him eying them, he hisses, “Don’t you even dare.”
“Oh come on. It’s not like you’re going to eat all seven.”
“They’re for your wife,” Merlin spits out the word, like he doesn't deserve one, which, granted, he probably doesn't after what he did last night but, a part of him whines, she betrayed him. No one seems to care about that bit.
Merlin flips the TV on, channel four news, and sinks into a chair, pinching the bridge of his nose.
Arthur spits out his water. "Oh fuck."
Yeah, no one seems to care about that bit.
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ityellsback:
"--ast night, the young actor turned co-owner of Albion Productions Arthur Pendragon attempted to set fire to his Hollywood penthouse. He presumably knew that his wife, Guinevere Smith Pendragon, was trapped inside. Thankfully, due to an anonymous call to the fire department and the heroics especially of the volunteer firefighter Lance Eliot du Luc, Ms. Pendragon escaped with only minor injuries. Police are now looking for Mr. Pendragon in order to--"
"Oh fuck," he repeats from the kitchen. It seems like a very good idea to sit down now. He curls up on his kitchen floor, head in his hands against his knees.
"So. Guess who I called about all this already?"
"Please say the answer is 'my lawyer'."
"Oh, I did you one better. I called Morgana."
"Mor--why would you! Now I have to deal with her, god, are you TRYING to torture me?"
"As a matter of fact, I am, but that's besides the point. She's twice as talented as your lawyer and you need everything you can get."
"She is going to be even angrier than you are! I mean, god, she and...she and you know."
"Oh, are we not saying Gwen's name now?"
"Merlin, christ, please. Can you not? Can you just leave it?"
"So you can wallow in your sadness? Because that sadness seems so apparent from over here--"
"Merlin. Come on, I--" and here he looks up at where Merlin has moved to stand next to him, leaning against the counter and looking down. Merlin still looks angry.
"I thought you'd get it. No, I mean, don't interrupt me. I don't--Merlin, I swear that I have never been more...if she hadn't been okay, god, if she hadn't..."
and Merlin is sinking down to sit next to Arthur, not saying anything but knocking their shoulders together. Arthur means it, if he could fix this, if he could go back and prevent himself from setting that trash can on fire. He leans his head tentatively on Merlin's shoulder, and Merlin doesn't pull away.
"I'm still angry at you," he says finally.
"I know. I'm sorry."
Merlin doesn't ask what he's sorry for, because he's already figured that out. He sighs heavily, then continues, "I'm still angry, and you're still upset, but we need to deal with the now. That picture you got under your door? I made some phone calls this morning, and I don't think that was released to the public. I think someone wanted you to have a break down."
"I probably did even better than they expected, huh?"
"Yeah, you did."
They sit in silence for a minute, until a knock comes on the door and Merlin jumps up to answer it. Arthur does his best to curl into the floor, because maybe that way Morgana won't notice him?
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Also, Why Merlin Has a Leather Couch:
and also my head wrote a backstory for that couch, because why would Merlin own a black leather couch? Well, he had a horrible couch, and Arthur was like, DUDE, WHY IS YOUR COUCH AWFUL, WHERE DID YOU EVEN GET THIS?
and Merlin is like UH. THE CURB.
and Arthur is all NO. NO. UH-UH. NO. I PROBABLY I HAVE CRABS NOW.
and buys him a new one for Christmas, since he has a gabazillion dollars, and
Merlin freaks out a little, like WHAT? NICE THINGS, I CAN'T HAVE THOSE, I RUIN THOSE, so now takes SUPER GOOD CARE of his couch and is REALLY OBSESSIVE about it.
and then everyone was like YOU GUYS ARE SUCH GOOD BOYFRIENDS and they were like AGH, NOT DATING.
THE STORY OF HOW MERLIN GOT HIS COUCH, THE END.