How Much a Heart Can Hold
Title: How Much a Heart Can Hold
Wordcount: ~2,400
Summary: The problem with having two boyfriends is Valentine's Day.
A/N: Written for the "holiday" square on my trope bingo card (you may think from looking at it that I intend to do the top line. If I ever come up with something good for "au: steampunk" that may even be true).
Disclaimer: I do not own Merlin.
The problem with having two boyfriends is Valentine’s Day.
Or maybe, more accurately, Valentine’s Day is a problem when you have two boyfriends. Gwen thinks that’s probably the better way of phrasing her problem, since it’s not as though she wants any of them to stop loving each other, but at the moment she’s annoyed enough to blame them rather than the greeting card industry.
Mostly, Gwen doesn’t care if things aren’t perfect, with them or with anything. They all knew at the very beginning that anyone who finds out, parents and friends, is going to take some convincing (with the exception of Merlin’s mum, because she’s a saint, and Morgana, because she’s the exact opposite). They get odd looks and erroneous assumptions and a frankly insulting amount of people assuming Arthur and Merlin are a gay couple taking pity on Gwen and letting her cuddle with them. She does her best to ignore it, they all do their best to ignore the bad parts, because they know what they’ve got is worth it.
Right now, though, standing in front of a display of cards that use the words “only you” far too much, Gwen just can’t stop wondering why a day meant to be all about expressing your love for people makes it so hard to do it. She’s already made them both cookies, but she did the same for her students, so she’s not quite sure it counts. Arthur will probably take them both out to dinner-Gwen’s favorite curry place followed by somewhere that serves ice cream for Merlin, because Merlin would eat ice cream at the South Pole-and likely buy them both something extravagant besides. Merlin has always been good at gifts, from way back when they were friends, so he’s undoubtedly got them passes to a circus or a certificate for a couples massage where the establishment won’t turn their noses up when three people show up or something else equally odd and wonderful.
Gwen spends ten more seconds staring at the display of cards that don’t say anything that makes sense for her life and calls her brother. “What’s up, Gwen?” he asks, a little hesitant. He’s undoubtedly right to be.
“I don’t know what to do for Arthur and Merlin for Valentine’s.” She winces and stares directly at a plush giraffe with unnervingly close-set eyes holding a heart.
She knows exactly the series of expressions going across his face, the ones where he has to remind himself that two of his friends are not actually debauching his sister. Or at least not without her enthusiastic consent. “Why are you asking me?”
“You’ve dated people over Valentine’s Day and it’s never seemed to end in horrible epic disaster.” Not that any of hers have, but generally they just go out to dinner and maybe exchange cards. Two boyfriends apparently means twice the stress, especially when they were all friends for so long before getting together. “Just tell me what you do?”
Elyan makes a pained noise that the sister in her thinks is hilarious. “Sex stuff, okay? I usually haven’t been dating people too long by the holiday, so it doesn’t mean a lot, and we do interesting sex. Happy now?”
Gwen decides not to say that that is almost certainly on the table as well, courtesy of all three of them, and also decides not to ask further questions in that vein. Especially as this will be his second Valentine’s Day with Leon and he’s quite likely freaking out about it. “What would you do if you were me, then?” she asks instead.
“You’re always making people gifts, for Christmas or whatever,” he offers. “Arthur and Merlin both wear those scarves you made for them all the fucking time, it’s obnoxious.”
She makes a despairing noise. “It’s the day of, though, that’s not enough time for a sewing or knitting project. I should have done this weeks ago, but I’ve been putting it off because I knew it would be awkward.”
“They wouldn’t care if you spent the night cuddling on the couch in your track pants watching a marathon of Mythbusters, G. I don’t know what to tell you. You’ve got craft supplies stowed all over your flat, do something with those.”
“You are no help,” says Gwen, and thinks about hanging up like Arthur and Morgana are always doing to each other. Instead, she sighs. “I love you, I’ll call you soon, blow Leon’s mind tonight and absolutely do not tell me any of the details.”
“Same to you, G. Good luck.”
“Bye,” she says, and gives herself a second to collect her wits after she hangs up. Obviously standing in the shop with all the nervous husbands and boyfriends who have forgotten the holiday is doing her no good at all, and she should take Elyan’s advice and go home.
Arthur undoubtedly has some secret timetable somewhere that is ticking slowly towards inviting Gwen and Merlin to move into his unfairly massive flat, but for now Gwen is glad to have her own space to retreat to, messy and small as it is. The second she’s through the door, she dumps half her craft supplies out on the table, since at the very least she can get cards done for them, ones that don’t say I love you only or any of the other things that are quite romantic until you find yourself with two boyfriends.
In the end, she ends up with two cards all made up of construction paper and glitter, which will make Merlin beam and Arthur hide a smile, and inside all she can think to do is to write out a list of why she loves each of them, which ends up taking so long her handwriting cramps at the bottom of the page so she can fit it all. Merlin’s reads everything from I love your ears to I love the way you look when I go down on you to I love the way you’ve never given up on your art. Arthur gets I love you for telling your father about us no matter what he thought and I love the way you patch us up when we get hurt and I love you for acting like a knight in an old story. Some of them overlap, but she’s quite pleased with most of them by the time she finishes.
That still leaves gifts to deal with, but one of the items on Merlin’s card is I love you for making playlists for every time Arthur drives us somewhere, and Gwen ends up on a hunt around her flat for blank discs and CD cases so she can throw together a playlist of unabashedly soppy love songs and burn two copies of it, decorating them both personally and adding a special song to each that she thinks Merlin and Arthur will like respectively.
By the time she’s finished, Gwen barely has time to shower the glitter off herself and get dressed before she has to run for Arthur’s flat (because he insisted on planning the night for them: “Merlin got Halloween and you got Christmas,” he reminded her when she tried to object, and there wasn’t much arguing with that). She’s running late enough that she ends up on the lift with Merlin (who is never on time somewhere if he can be ten minutes late), both of them carrying bags that they try to hide from each other for about two seconds before they start snogging and don’t stop until they get off on Arthur’s floor.
Arthur’s flat, when he opens the door for them, smells delicious, and he grins at them both, absurdly proud of himself. “I thought we’d stay in tonight,” he says, pointing at his table, set with what Gwen recognizes as his mother’s china.
“Did you order in?” Merlin asks, just as cheerily oblivious as ever and missing that Arthur has quite probably been working on dinner all day, since he’s not meant to be at the hospital today.
“I cooked, Merlin, it is a thing that some of us adults have learned how to do.”
“Yes, like me and Gwen.” Merlin shrugs off his coat and hangs it up because Arthur looks at him as though he was raised by wolves when he doesn’t, and Gwen follows suit, giving Arthur a quick kiss hello as she goes.
“You don’t count, all you can cook is pasta and lemon chicken. And waffles.”
Gwen intervenes before they can get into one of their interminable arguments. “It smells lovely, Arthur. What are we having?”
Arthur rattles off the menu while Gwen and Merlin stow their bags and then sets about serving it with a flourish, lighting the red candles on the table as he goes. Merlin stops teasing after a few minutes and sets into eat with an enthusiasm that belies his apparent skepticism of Arthur’s skills, and Gwen makes a point of exaggerating her reactions to the food, which is very nearly as delicious as she’s pretending it is. Mostly, it’s a normal meal for them, despite the ambience-they talk about their days and catch up on what their friends are up to.
After the food, including the gourmet ice cream sundaes Arthur serves for dessert, they all retire to the couch with their various bags and envelopes. “My gift was dinner, I’m afraid,” Arthur starts, looking a little uncomfortable, and Gwen hushes him before he can do something stupid like apologize for that. “I do have cards for you, though,” he adds when that crisis is averted, and hands them out.
Gwen opens her envelope to find a card much like the ones she rejected in the shop, a picture of a cartoon bee on the front landing on flowers shaped like hearts that says Valentine … on the outside. When she opens it to see the … bee mine! on the inside, however, Arthur has added in his precise, copperplate handwriting (and Merlin’s) before he continues on with a heartfelt message that is so painfully brave and so painfully Arthur all at once that she has to stop and tell him she’ll read it over later so she won’t get teary over it. Merlin, after his initial burst of laughter at Arthur’s correction to his card, smiles and turns away to hide both the words and his reaction to them from their eyes while he reads.
“Me next,” he says when he’s done, any sign of what he thinks of Arthur’s message hidden. “I made one card for the both of you, so you have to open it together.”
Merlin’s envelope and card are both huge and hand-made. The front has a picture of the TARDIS and two cartoon hearts and reads If I were a Time Lord I could give each of you a heart …. The inside, when Arthur gestures for Gwen to do the honors of opening it up, turns out to be a graphic and very realistic picture of a human heart, beautifully hand-drawn and colored by Merlin, reads … but I guess you’ll have to share this one instead. I LOVE YOU BOTH!
“And my present,” he says when they’ve both finished laughing over that, taking a deep breath and looking more than a little nervous, “aside from the very nice chocolates Freya told me I ought to get you, is an invitation for both of you to the gallery showing I’ve got this spring.”
Arthur’s the first one to let out an excited shout and throw his arms around Merlin, but Gwen isn’t far behind, hugging the daylights out of them both because Merlin has been waiting for this for years, working at galleries but always one spot away from getting shows in them since he hasn’t got the connections (and refuses to use Arthur’s name as one). Merlin grins at them, pleased with himself for springing his news on them without either of them having guessed, and it takes nearly twenty minutes of grilling him for details and congratulations before they all settle. “You’ve shown us both up, and Gwen hasn’t even had a chance to go yet,” Arthur chides him at last, still all wrapped around him from the brief wrestling match they got into halfway through the conversation.
Gwen, who wisely retreated to the far end of the couch when they started rolling about, grins at them. “It will seem rather anticlimactic, after all of this, but I don’t want to forget about these, so you get them anyway.”
Both of them grin at the CDs, which she didn’t take the time to wrap, and Arthur puts his in his laptop to play in the background while they open up her cards. They both applaud the glitter, Merlin with more enthusiasm, and go quiet to read the insides, which she feels unaccountably nervous about.
They finish reading around the same time, Merlin curled into himself again because he likes to keep things he cares a lot about private and Arthur with the same lost expression he gets whenever one or both of them overwhelms him with too much affection. Gwen saves them from having to say anything. “I think it’s customary to spend the last part of Valentine’s Day shagging each other rotten, at least if Elyan is to be trusted.”
Arthur and Merlin both wrinkle their noses in a good approximation of the way Elyan looks every time she even hints at mentioning that she has sex with them. Arthur recovers first. “Well, if it’s custom, I suppose we must. We’re all terribly traditional, after all.” He stands up and offers them both a hand, and Gwen and Merlin go, leaving the CD going on Arthur’s laptop.
Arthur’s bed is huge, and always lovely for spending time on, and after they’ve all thoroughly exhausted themselves, Gwen finds herself in the middle, which is her favorite place to be when it’s cold outside. “I love the way you are never afraid of telling us how much we mean to you,” Merlin whispers into her hair from one side, and Arthur chimes in with “I love that you pretend I’m a gourmet chef when you obviously noticed the three attempts at dinner I tossed in my bin before you came.”
“Happy Valentine’s Day,” she says, settling into Arthur’s side because he’s always warmer than Merlin but reaching back to loop Merlin’s arm over her side. “I love you both.”
And in the end, she decides, that’s what Valentine’s Day is, no matter how many people are involved. She doesn’t mind so much if the card companies don’t agree.
"Nobody has ever measured, even poets, how much a heart can hold." ~Zelda Fitzgerald
Wordcount: ~2,400
Summary: The problem with having two boyfriends is Valentine's Day.
A/N: Written for the "holiday" square on my trope bingo card (you may think from looking at it that I intend to do the top line. If I ever come up with something good for "au: steampunk" that may even be true).
Disclaimer: I do not own Merlin.
The problem with having two boyfriends is Valentine’s Day.
Or maybe, more accurately, Valentine’s Day is a problem when you have two boyfriends. Gwen thinks that’s probably the better way of phrasing her problem, since it’s not as though she wants any of them to stop loving each other, but at the moment she’s annoyed enough to blame them rather than the greeting card industry.
Mostly, Gwen doesn’t care if things aren’t perfect, with them or with anything. They all knew at the very beginning that anyone who finds out, parents and friends, is going to take some convincing (with the exception of Merlin’s mum, because she’s a saint, and Morgana, because she’s the exact opposite). They get odd looks and erroneous assumptions and a frankly insulting amount of people assuming Arthur and Merlin are a gay couple taking pity on Gwen and letting her cuddle with them. She does her best to ignore it, they all do their best to ignore the bad parts, because they know what they’ve got is worth it.
Right now, though, standing in front of a display of cards that use the words “only you” far too much, Gwen just can’t stop wondering why a day meant to be all about expressing your love for people makes it so hard to do it. She’s already made them both cookies, but she did the same for her students, so she’s not quite sure it counts. Arthur will probably take them both out to dinner-Gwen’s favorite curry place followed by somewhere that serves ice cream for Merlin, because Merlin would eat ice cream at the South Pole-and likely buy them both something extravagant besides. Merlin has always been good at gifts, from way back when they were friends, so he’s undoubtedly got them passes to a circus or a certificate for a couples massage where the establishment won’t turn their noses up when three people show up or something else equally odd and wonderful.
Gwen spends ten more seconds staring at the display of cards that don’t say anything that makes sense for her life and calls her brother. “What’s up, Gwen?” he asks, a little hesitant. He’s undoubtedly right to be.
“I don’t know what to do for Arthur and Merlin for Valentine’s.” She winces and stares directly at a plush giraffe with unnervingly close-set eyes holding a heart.
She knows exactly the series of expressions going across his face, the ones where he has to remind himself that two of his friends are not actually debauching his sister. Or at least not without her enthusiastic consent. “Why are you asking me?”
“You’ve dated people over Valentine’s Day and it’s never seemed to end in horrible epic disaster.” Not that any of hers have, but generally they just go out to dinner and maybe exchange cards. Two boyfriends apparently means twice the stress, especially when they were all friends for so long before getting together. “Just tell me what you do?”
Elyan makes a pained noise that the sister in her thinks is hilarious. “Sex stuff, okay? I usually haven’t been dating people too long by the holiday, so it doesn’t mean a lot, and we do interesting sex. Happy now?”
Gwen decides not to say that that is almost certainly on the table as well, courtesy of all three of them, and also decides not to ask further questions in that vein. Especially as this will be his second Valentine’s Day with Leon and he’s quite likely freaking out about it. “What would you do if you were me, then?” she asks instead.
“You’re always making people gifts, for Christmas or whatever,” he offers. “Arthur and Merlin both wear those scarves you made for them all the fucking time, it’s obnoxious.”
She makes a despairing noise. “It’s the day of, though, that’s not enough time for a sewing or knitting project. I should have done this weeks ago, but I’ve been putting it off because I knew it would be awkward.”
“They wouldn’t care if you spent the night cuddling on the couch in your track pants watching a marathon of Mythbusters, G. I don’t know what to tell you. You’ve got craft supplies stowed all over your flat, do something with those.”
“You are no help,” says Gwen, and thinks about hanging up like Arthur and Morgana are always doing to each other. Instead, she sighs. “I love you, I’ll call you soon, blow Leon’s mind tonight and absolutely do not tell me any of the details.”
“Same to you, G. Good luck.”
“Bye,” she says, and gives herself a second to collect her wits after she hangs up. Obviously standing in the shop with all the nervous husbands and boyfriends who have forgotten the holiday is doing her no good at all, and she should take Elyan’s advice and go home.
Arthur undoubtedly has some secret timetable somewhere that is ticking slowly towards inviting Gwen and Merlin to move into his unfairly massive flat, but for now Gwen is glad to have her own space to retreat to, messy and small as it is. The second she’s through the door, she dumps half her craft supplies out on the table, since at the very least she can get cards done for them, ones that don’t say I love you only or any of the other things that are quite romantic until you find yourself with two boyfriends.
In the end, she ends up with two cards all made up of construction paper and glitter, which will make Merlin beam and Arthur hide a smile, and inside all she can think to do is to write out a list of why she loves each of them, which ends up taking so long her handwriting cramps at the bottom of the page so she can fit it all. Merlin’s reads everything from I love your ears to I love the way you look when I go down on you to I love the way you’ve never given up on your art. Arthur gets I love you for telling your father about us no matter what he thought and I love the way you patch us up when we get hurt and I love you for acting like a knight in an old story. Some of them overlap, but she’s quite pleased with most of them by the time she finishes.
That still leaves gifts to deal with, but one of the items on Merlin’s card is I love you for making playlists for every time Arthur drives us somewhere, and Gwen ends up on a hunt around her flat for blank discs and CD cases so she can throw together a playlist of unabashedly soppy love songs and burn two copies of it, decorating them both personally and adding a special song to each that she thinks Merlin and Arthur will like respectively.
By the time she’s finished, Gwen barely has time to shower the glitter off herself and get dressed before she has to run for Arthur’s flat (because he insisted on planning the night for them: “Merlin got Halloween and you got Christmas,” he reminded her when she tried to object, and there wasn’t much arguing with that). She’s running late enough that she ends up on the lift with Merlin (who is never on time somewhere if he can be ten minutes late), both of them carrying bags that they try to hide from each other for about two seconds before they start snogging and don’t stop until they get off on Arthur’s floor.
Arthur’s flat, when he opens the door for them, smells delicious, and he grins at them both, absurdly proud of himself. “I thought we’d stay in tonight,” he says, pointing at his table, set with what Gwen recognizes as his mother’s china.
“Did you order in?” Merlin asks, just as cheerily oblivious as ever and missing that Arthur has quite probably been working on dinner all day, since he’s not meant to be at the hospital today.
“I cooked, Merlin, it is a thing that some of us adults have learned how to do.”
“Yes, like me and Gwen.” Merlin shrugs off his coat and hangs it up because Arthur looks at him as though he was raised by wolves when he doesn’t, and Gwen follows suit, giving Arthur a quick kiss hello as she goes.
“You don’t count, all you can cook is pasta and lemon chicken. And waffles.”
Gwen intervenes before they can get into one of their interminable arguments. “It smells lovely, Arthur. What are we having?”
Arthur rattles off the menu while Gwen and Merlin stow their bags and then sets about serving it with a flourish, lighting the red candles on the table as he goes. Merlin stops teasing after a few minutes and sets into eat with an enthusiasm that belies his apparent skepticism of Arthur’s skills, and Gwen makes a point of exaggerating her reactions to the food, which is very nearly as delicious as she’s pretending it is. Mostly, it’s a normal meal for them, despite the ambience-they talk about their days and catch up on what their friends are up to.
After the food, including the gourmet ice cream sundaes Arthur serves for dessert, they all retire to the couch with their various bags and envelopes. “My gift was dinner, I’m afraid,” Arthur starts, looking a little uncomfortable, and Gwen hushes him before he can do something stupid like apologize for that. “I do have cards for you, though,” he adds when that crisis is averted, and hands them out.
Gwen opens her envelope to find a card much like the ones she rejected in the shop, a picture of a cartoon bee on the front landing on flowers shaped like hearts that says Valentine … on the outside. When she opens it to see the … bee mine! on the inside, however, Arthur has added in his precise, copperplate handwriting (and Merlin’s) before he continues on with a heartfelt message that is so painfully brave and so painfully Arthur all at once that she has to stop and tell him she’ll read it over later so she won’t get teary over it. Merlin, after his initial burst of laughter at Arthur’s correction to his card, smiles and turns away to hide both the words and his reaction to them from their eyes while he reads.
“Me next,” he says when he’s done, any sign of what he thinks of Arthur’s message hidden. “I made one card for the both of you, so you have to open it together.”
Merlin’s envelope and card are both huge and hand-made. The front has a picture of the TARDIS and two cartoon hearts and reads If I were a Time Lord I could give each of you a heart …. The inside, when Arthur gestures for Gwen to do the honors of opening it up, turns out to be a graphic and very realistic picture of a human heart, beautifully hand-drawn and colored by Merlin, reads … but I guess you’ll have to share this one instead. I LOVE YOU BOTH!
“And my present,” he says when they’ve both finished laughing over that, taking a deep breath and looking more than a little nervous, “aside from the very nice chocolates Freya told me I ought to get you, is an invitation for both of you to the gallery showing I’ve got this spring.”
Arthur’s the first one to let out an excited shout and throw his arms around Merlin, but Gwen isn’t far behind, hugging the daylights out of them both because Merlin has been waiting for this for years, working at galleries but always one spot away from getting shows in them since he hasn’t got the connections (and refuses to use Arthur’s name as one). Merlin grins at them, pleased with himself for springing his news on them without either of them having guessed, and it takes nearly twenty minutes of grilling him for details and congratulations before they all settle. “You’ve shown us both up, and Gwen hasn’t even had a chance to go yet,” Arthur chides him at last, still all wrapped around him from the brief wrestling match they got into halfway through the conversation.
Gwen, who wisely retreated to the far end of the couch when they started rolling about, grins at them. “It will seem rather anticlimactic, after all of this, but I don’t want to forget about these, so you get them anyway.”
Both of them grin at the CDs, which she didn’t take the time to wrap, and Arthur puts his in his laptop to play in the background while they open up her cards. They both applaud the glitter, Merlin with more enthusiasm, and go quiet to read the insides, which she feels unaccountably nervous about.
They finish reading around the same time, Merlin curled into himself again because he likes to keep things he cares a lot about private and Arthur with the same lost expression he gets whenever one or both of them overwhelms him with too much affection. Gwen saves them from having to say anything. “I think it’s customary to spend the last part of Valentine’s Day shagging each other rotten, at least if Elyan is to be trusted.”
Arthur and Merlin both wrinkle their noses in a good approximation of the way Elyan looks every time she even hints at mentioning that she has sex with them. Arthur recovers first. “Well, if it’s custom, I suppose we must. We’re all terribly traditional, after all.” He stands up and offers them both a hand, and Gwen and Merlin go, leaving the CD going on Arthur’s laptop.
Arthur’s bed is huge, and always lovely for spending time on, and after they’ve all thoroughly exhausted themselves, Gwen finds herself in the middle, which is her favorite place to be when it’s cold outside. “I love the way you are never afraid of telling us how much we mean to you,” Merlin whispers into her hair from one side, and Arthur chimes in with “I love that you pretend I’m a gourmet chef when you obviously noticed the three attempts at dinner I tossed in my bin before you came.”
“Happy Valentine’s Day,” she says, settling into Arthur’s side because he’s always warmer than Merlin but reaching back to loop Merlin’s arm over her side. “I love you both.”
And in the end, she decides, that’s what Valentine’s Day is, no matter how many people are involved. She doesn’t mind so much if the card companies don’t agree.
"Nobody has ever measured, even poets, how much a heart can hold." ~Zelda Fitzgerald