Fic: Never Pay the Reaper With Love Only [2/3]
Title: Never Pay the Reaper With Love Only [2/3]
Rating: NC17 overall, PG13 this part (language)
Pairing: Merlin/Arthur
Word count: ~19,000
Prompt: The Incredible Hulk (2008).
Summary: "You think they're making Merlins," Morgana commented very quietly.
Arthur sat at the breakfast bar in Morgana's kitchen - it's always been her kitchen in her father's house - with his laptop out and staring at the message from the now-offline Merlin.
If we were to meet I'd need more than a PO Box address.
His fingers were numb right to the ends, looking at the three lines of text, three lines of testimony to how truly, spectacularly awful their timing could be. He should have expected it given the way it'd taken them so long to get to kissing that didn't involve bashing teeth right back at the start, but everything else for so long had been so easy. Nothing that should have constituted a life crisis had been anything like as dramatic as it could have been: they got on, they moved in, Arthur's father - thanks to much mediating by Morgana - was made to deal with the way the three bedroom house had one double bed.
The fact that the beginning was on his mind so much these days scared the shit out of him; it made him think there was something like an end coming.
Morgana's fingers trailed across his knuckles in the barely-lit kitchen. She didn't tell him he should sleep, only leaned her head forward on the breakfast bar and told him to wake her when he needed to.
*
Two floors wasn't scary. Prague had been five. And yes, he wasn't currently a huge green badass, but still. Two floors - not scary.
Okay, scary as fuck, but less so than the blinking red lights and the bullets slamming into his crappy walls and sending puffs of plaster into the air.
Merlin jumped diagonally, throwing his right side against the wall of the building opposite and bouncing back to land under his own window without broken bones. The world and his life had gone completely mental, he decided right there with the aftershock of the landing and his possessions reduced instantaneously to a small backpack. It didn't stop him running.
He heard the boots and wondered, feet moving on railings and window sills and roofs all the while, what it meant when the military coming after him didn't bother to hide the sound of their passing. He wanted to turn and smack them for shouting at people in English like the most arrogant tourists he'd heard in the centre - you're in Spain. It's a reasonable assumption that not everyone speaks English, bastards. He kept his hands busy, crawling and grasping and throwing himself down broken, intermittent slopes of roofs in the slums.
With mental apologies to Will, he turned on a roof, hands clasping the edge and dropped to the ground. He dodged into the familiar building site, slamming his back against a wall of a half-built house and looking at the watch at his wrist. It was on silent mode but still flashed at him insistently that 147 bpm was too high. Merlin closed his eyes and attempted to control his breathing, opening them to the quiet of the labyrinth of grey walls and shells of houses. If he'd chosen to learn it, he might have enjoyed free running, but really, Arthur was the fucking natural born athlete and things like that didn't cross between halves in the partnership.
He heard steps beyond the thundering of his own heartbeat; these steps didn't wish to be heard. Merlin scrabbled to his feet and looked into the centre of the unfinished houses, seeing a figure in black standing taut in the middle, gun by his side.
With a start, Merlin realised that somehow this wasn't just like Prague. In Prague, Uther Pendragon had brought tranq guns.
Well, that changed things.
But really, did it? Merlin clenched his fists and lowered his heartbeat by force of will. It changed the stakes on the surface, but it had always been his life. To turn himself in or allow himself to be caught meant his life lived in a cell, his life gone either way. That Arthur's father had moved onto just plain shooting him (because corpses gave less attitude, didn't shag his son, presumably, or nearly kill his son) was almost a relief.
"Emrys."
With a start, Merlin realised that it wasn't a goon out there: Uther Pendragon had come himself, come out to Spain to do this - to kill him himself.
He didn't reply.
"I won't make an offer you'll refuse, but I can make it quick and bury you with dignity. Hunith would like that."
The way that Uther was being sincere made it all the worse. His heartbeat rose to 155.
"I never wanted this. Some things must be done."
Merlin crouched further into the corner, the corner that would become a cupboard in someone's holiday home away from someone's neat, orderly life.
"They're looking for you. To make more of you."
His stomach rolled unpleasantly; they couldn't think to - he was an aberration, a freak, an -
"You're an abomination. Think what more of you unleashed on the world would wreak."
The last time Merlin had agreed with Uther Pendragon, it had been on throwing himself to the wolves as well. It was no less weird an experience the second time around.
"Think of the people. Arthur does no less, moving on. I hope that comforts you."
He sucked in a ragged breath because no. His temper could stand a passing reference even to his mother, could stand Uther's shitty logic for murder, but it could not stand Arthur. The pulse flashing on the watch rose.
"His girlfriend does no less."
Merlin bit his lip and tasted blood. Liar, he thought instantly and coldly. If he'd said 'partner', even 'boyfriend', Merlin would have felt a curling tendril of doubt, but not this. Arthur deserved better than him, he knew, but more than that, he deserved a father willing to look at him.
Uther was saying something else and Merlin was counting, counting, breathing. Merlin risked a look around the corner, saw him still standing there, but worse, saw them. They were everywhere, creeping in black among the grey blocks and walls like it were a city of eras past, abandoned in the twilight of the streetlights.
Uther had distracted him - Uther had captured him, used Arthur, his mother, against him. It might not be his finger on the trigger, his hand on the gun, but if he died now Uther would have killed him.
The chill in his bones felt wrong against the bile in his throat and the way his heartbeat was climbing faster, faster, racing through his veins and the way his thoughts were rushing, freezing, colliding and distilling themselves into the simple awareness that it was happening and nothing he could do would stop it.
He had seconds; he stowed the backpack in the gap between two steel foundation bars. He ripped off his Cons and threw them into the top of the bag, hoping against hope that Will would understand what they meant and hoping he didn't trash the site to the extent that Will burned them out of hate.
Merlin reached up to support himself, head spinning, and the hand that slammed into the granite block broke chunks of it off, showering grey debris down on top of the bag.
The pain ripped through his arms, his legs, like pins and needles but possibly a million times worse.
He'd come back from near this stage before, clawed his way to calm, to pale, but knew that this time, he was gone.
*
The dawn was non-descript, obscured by grey clouds that merged into the moment when colours had been drained from the world. Arthur found himself waking up, limbs stiff and contorted, on a stool in Morgana's kitchen.
He heard the door slam and looked up to see Morgana's father in the doorway, looking at him.
General Fey said nothing, a shadow half in and half out of the kitchen, eyes on them curved over the breakfast bar, Morgana still asleep.
Arthur was being considered, he could tell. He was tired of being considered. Standing, he put the laptop back in his back and jutted his chin out as he kissed Morgana's head, walking out of the back door and deciding that the general could make what he would of Arthur looking like the morning after the night before.
He didn't go to their house. He considered going to his father's house- the house Arthur had grown up in and was self-consciously aware of having left not once but three times. He settled for sitting on a bench down the street, feeling like a crossover between a tramp and a spy, battered yet again by the knowledge that this was what they did now and just how much they hadn't meant to sign up for it.
His father returned at nine thirty am, looking as shit as Arthur felt. Arthur wanted to walk up to him and shake the answers out of him - did you kill Merlin last night, is he alive, do you have him - but didn't. Not immediately, but it was a close thing, heart pounding in his ears and fists curled around the bench. His father had tried to kill Merlin: Arthur was out of time to decide, out of time to square the circle of fitting both Merlin and his father in his life.
*
Merlin came to somewhere outside the suburbs, half-naked behind a bucket of putrid smelling trash and with only the haziest memories of the night before, head pounding and legs and arms burning from over-exertion.
Just like the first time Arthur had introduced him to tequila, he thought with black humour, grateful at least to the shadow that lurked beneath his consciousness and his heartbeat that he knew where he was and how to get to the site from there.
He avoided the main paths even after he got to the slums - it wasn't that seeing someone half naked, beaten up, swaying and swerving on their feet was an unusual sight, but Merlin was more worried about lingering military presences on watch for him doing exactly what he was doing - trying to reclaim some of his belongings.
It was early enough that no one was on the building site; Merlin was even more grateful to Will for dragging them out on that drink. He'd had that one solitary beer, but few others on the site had shown anything like restraint.
He ducked under beams and bars and around walls until he reached the space where he'd stashed his backpack.
"Looking for this, mate?"
Merlin turned, meeting Will's eyes as he held up Merlin's backpack in what would be the doorway of the ground floor of that particular unit.
The sun wasn't high enough for sweat to be breaking out at Merlin's temples. It did anyway. Merlin nodded, catching the familiar Cons and unfamiliar shirt Will threw to him.
They walked in silence to the edge of the site near the office, Will pressing an envelope into his hands.
"It's not payday," Merlin said raggedly, swallowing as he realised the envelope below his hands weighed at least twice his usual pay.
"You won't be here for the next one. I'm assuming you look like shit because some bastards beat you up on the way back from the bar," Will answered, blinking, "anyone asks, that's what I'm assuming. It's what I was assuming when I went by yours on the way in this morning to check you'd got back all right since you haven't got a phone."
And found something that looked like a SWAT team and/or bullet holes all over the place, Merlin finished in his head.
He nodded, tugging at the hem of the shirt as he slung the backpack over one shoulder and swallowing. "Thanks."
Will shook his head, mouth quirking. "Take care of yourself, trickster."
Two streets later, hating himself for needing to, he bent down in an alley and cautiously opened the backpack to check everything was in it. It was- everything down to that bloody photo ripped out of a French paper, the one that didn't really look like Arthur but kind of did - too much to throw it away, at any rate. It didn't look like Arthur the way Merlin knew him: stupid hair, stupid laugh, grinning every which way or hammering at a keyboard, methodically piecing together the obvious and the insane. It looked like the distant, smiling cousin of Arthur, better known to Merlin lying asleep at three in the morning or covered in mud from the rugby. It was Arthur in a tux with a smile that showed his cheekbones in the right light, taken at the party after Uther had gotten some big honour, medal- whatever. Merlin hadn't bothered ripping out the whole article, he'd known more about it than he'd wanted to by then, but the photo had only been of interest when the son of the general had been in critical condition for two weeks in a Camelot hospital.
Merlin stowed it back into the waterproof pocket and moved on.
*
Fully aware he looked like a survivor of a natural disaster, Arthur hesitated on the street outside the house until his phone announced a text message. From Morgana: M, alive, unaccounted for. 4 dead.
Arthur walked into the house. He had a shower to have and bank accounts to ruin.
*
For the first time in a long time, Merlin thanked various gods that he looked something quite like a smiling gap year student - he was certainly not-quite-clean enough - and made the most of his mediocre Spanish. He managed to make the journey on various buses across the border to Toulouse without being noticed and in roughly six hours. His first order of business was to find a hostel and switch to his not even mediocre French, his second was to shower and his third was to log onto the wireless network with his laptop.
/Unicorn: Hello.
*
Arthur heard the ping from his computer and leaped from where he'd been sprawled across the bed marking lab reports in lieu of having anything else to do, having finished the funds transfers in one final barrage of calls and internet banking.
/Unicorn: Hello.
/Dragon: About bloody ti
Arthur winced and hit the DEL key. Technically, Merlin didn't know that it had been the longest two days in the history of ever on both sides of the screen.
/Dragon: We should meet. Are we agreed?
He wondered at his sanity, protecting Merlin from the knowledge of who he was and setting up a meeting at the same time. But in his head, it could go two ways. Merlin would see Arthur. And then a wonderful haze would descend and everything, somehow, would be made better. More realistically, what he expected was that Merlin would freak out and he'd have to do some fast persuading, most of it along the lines of pushing Merlin against a wall and pointing out in his most reasonable, neurotic-student appeasing tone that he was really too far in to back out now and that it was half his fault anyway. Or something. Usually Arthur was meticulous and downright anal about planning where Merlin expected things to happen by magic (which they usually did around him); now Arthur was the one counting on hazy optimisms.
/Unicorn: Where do I go?
Arthur let out a sigh of relief and hit his forehead against the desk. This was when it could go disastrously wrong. One mention of Camelot and there'd be no getting Merlin back. He'd go so far to ground that Arthur would have to search among packets of compost in garden centres, politely asking old women and young parents to get the hell out of his way.
/Dragon: Edinburgh, Scotland.
/Unicorn: Address?
/Dragon: To follow.
*
Merlin looked at the screen and let out a breath he didn't realise he'd been holding. He pulled up google maps and calculated how long it would take to get to Scotland - the crossing would be the hardest part. That and dodging the authorities in a country who gave a damn and had him on most systems as missing, dangerous, unbalanced or criminal.
He refused to think of what it was going to be like to be in Camelot, so close to Arthur, his mother, Morgana, Gaius and Gwen. He'd been trying to make the separation from his clusterfucky life and theirs so complete that he'd even managed to resist googling them, knowing from various wry remarks of the Generals Fey and Pendragon that the military had a lot of tech at their disposal. He'd decided that paranoia was the most sensible course; after all, Merlin knew they were out to get him.
Yes, Dragon had said Edinburgh. But Merlin still needed something from Camelot and it would be idiotic not to try for the lab results from the experiment. He hadn't been able to get them before he'd had to run (while Arthur was still unconscious) and he had never tried in the months since.
But that had been while he'd had other options, while the authorities weren't trying to track him down with renewed vigour, and while he'd never been so close to being caught before. He no longer had options.
/Unicorn: at latest one week.
*
Three days later, Arthur looked up at the knock on the door, hearing it open and walking into the hall. His father - part of him was unsurprised, knowing no one else with the temerity to walk into a house not theirs as if they had every right. They walked silently into the living room.
Uther Pendragon glanced behind Arthur's shoulder to the visible bag lying on the bed in the bedroom, half-packed. "Going somewhere?"
"Gwen's, up in Edinburgh," Arthur answered honestly, standing straight with his chin raised, daring his father to challenge him solely on the basis that Gwen had been in that room they didn't talk about on that day they never mentioned. "I need away for a weekend."
Uther made a noise that might have been interpreted as whatever the listener wanted, tracing a finger along the space on the mantelpiece next to the photo of Morgana, Gwen, Merlin and Arthur.
Merlin and Arthur had never really been photo people, not the type to do what grandparents and some girls seemed to do; plaster all available surfaces with photographic evidence of everything, ever. But they'd had three or four, scattered around the house, just casually placed, much like the casual gesture of just happening to only kit one room in the house out as a bedroom, despite it having three rooms that could be turned to that purpose. Just a casual gesture; just an assurance that no one could misinterpret them as anything less than what they were, just spurred by a particularly condescending remark of Uther's that if they moved in together, people might assume things. Like permanence. Like them mattering.
In his quiet, wordless way, Merlin had understood when Arthur had come back from lunch with Uther and had, for the following three weeks, gone on what could be politely called a Domestic Kick. He hadn't even protested stupid things like Arthur buying out Lakeland for the sake of having aprons in the kitchen and mats on the bathroom floor.
Listening to Uther talk about General Fey, Morgana and all their other mutual acquaintances, asking about how his teaching was going, noting the absence of any questions about him having found a new research project, Arthur looked at the blank space next to that photograph where one of Arthur and Merlin being idiots circa 2002 had used to be. Merlin's hair had been extremely stupid and possibly multi-coloured back then.
No, they'd never been photo people, but having to put away those sporadic gestures of determined permanence for the appearance of moving on had hurt more than Arthur was ever willing to admit.
A few minutes of polite, probing conversation later, Uther found other things to do and another place to be. Arthur let out the breath he'd been holding, realising that somewhere in him, every encounter with his father was laced with a fear that this would be the time he chose to break it to Arthur that they'd done it, they'd killed Merlin and his body was property of the state; to be retro-engineered and mass produced. For everything he and Merlin were, his greatest fear - and, he suspected, Merlin's greatest fear - went above and beyond the two of them. It wasn't the fear of one person for their partner; it was the fear of a general's son and a scientist with experience dealing with the military.
He opened the laptop and sent an email to Gwen, before remembering he had to go into campus before he could leave for Edinburgh.
*
Merlin pulled his hood up in the near-dark and jammed his hands in his pockets. Converse, backpack, dark hoodie: Camelot was big enough that if he kept his head down, he could be in and out in a night and no one would be the wiser.
He'd temporarily acquired some fame as the boyfriend - the first boyfriend -of Arthur Pendragon. They'd raised a few eyebrows: Camelot was a stronghold for conservatisms of all stripes, Tory-voting, the centre of a Church of England diocese and had a significant military presence. Thankfully, that had waned and he'd been largely left alone to research and teach. He denied all knowledge and certainly any part in various student facebook groups dedicated to he and Arthur's Undying Love.
It was much easier to dampen wanting to know - wanting to see - any of them, but especially Arthur, when he wasn't walking furtively down streets they'd once stumbled home drunk on, wandered to classes through, claimed as their own.
It had been much easier when he had known he wasn't walking distance from a house that was his home, that he still had the key to tucked in a backpack of things that weren't all useful but were all essential.
He took a left to a familiar back door - the way into the twenty-four hour computer labs because scientists were a crap lot when it came to getting eight hours a night - and hesitated at the keypad. Then he took a breath and remembered that there was no point in throwing himself into danger half-arsed, and used the house key and a stolen swipe card to trick the system into thinking an administrator wanted access- it was a trick that he didn't understand and only knew because Gwen, the best computer geek he'd ever known, lacking that contempt for the uninitiated so many of them held, had shown him the sixth time he'd gotten locked out of the labs.
He took the back stairs to the research labs, knowing he could access Arthur's account from pretty much any terminal. He'd have to try something more risky - like Uther Pendragon's administrator account - if what he was looking for wasn't on Arthur's files.
All the while he was carefully planning and thinking and walking up the stairs, he was trying to get over exactly how weird it all was. It should have been different, surely, but it wasn't, down to the photocopied flyers on the walls and the boarded up window on the third floor that hadn't been fixed.
*
Arthur sat at a computer terminal in the general computer lab on the third floor rather than going to the trouble of going into the lab assigned as his own, trying hard not to swear and worry about catching his flight, which was in five hours and therefore it was fine.
It didn't help that the computers were largely shit.
Well, not really. Just not as good as the laptop permanently attached to his hip, which won by being a mac and being perfectly set up for Arthur's every need. His mood usually dropped a few points simply by having to log onto a university computer, but he needed to upload a bunch of files for the class that he'd dumped onto Bedivere the next morning. The least he could do was make sure the post-grad had handouts to chuck at the freshers.
And he had the time. He was trying hard to convince himself that getting to the airport four hours before a domestic flight was excessive and that it didn't mean Merlin wouldn't show up, especially considering he was arriving at Gwen's a whole day early.
Hitting windows+D, Arthur sighed and scanned the desktop for things to clear up. Because he didn't have to leave yet.
*
Merlin scanned the half-lit lab quickly, looking for signs of anyone else being in. On the one hand, it was a Friday night. On the other hand, Camelot science students were notorious for not having lives.
One person was in, but with half of the fluorescent lights off, he couldn't see anything but the back of their head and the rough shape of a jacket.
What he could see quite clearly was files disappearing into a recycling bin on the page. He stepped closer, because it would be just his luck to interrupt the military deleting exactly what he needed.
*
Arthur's freakishly good hearing and instinct for other people on approach wasn't the result of a childhood spent in crime but the result of many, many games of hide and seek with Morgana and had been honed by all of the officer training bollocks his father had put him through in his teens, back before he'd accepted that Arthur was going into science, not Sandhurst.
Hence, he knew someone had entered the lab, because he'd heard the door. He knew someone was walking up behind him, because whoever it was stepped as lightly as an elephant tangoing with a rhino.
He took a deep breath.
*
Merlin realised that the other person had realised he was there when they turned in their chair in one smooth motion to look up at him and - Arthur. It was bloody Arthur, who Merlin had been counting on to have a life on a Friday night.
Arthur.
They froze, both of them, Arthur standing with wide eyes and sending the chair clattering irrelevantly to one side.
Arthur- blue eyes wide, hair longer than Merlin remembered. Still wearing a coat that he'd been replacing with as near to the exact same since he was thirteen, to Merlin's knowledge. Still wearing a leather satchel that Merlin would bet had a laptop in it, a satchel that looked battered and worn if you didn't look at the extensively padded interior. Still Arthur, cheekbones standing out in the shitty lighting, still bloody gorgeous even under fluorescents, staring with his lips just parted and hand half-reaching out, the cuff of the jacket resting below the first knuckle of his thumb.
Still exactly as he wanted Arthur to stay; Merlin bolted.
PART THREE
Rating: NC17 overall, PG13 this part (language)
Pairing: Merlin/Arthur
Word count: ~19,000
Prompt: The Incredible Hulk (2008).
Summary: "You think they're making Merlins," Morgana commented very quietly.
Arthur sat at the breakfast bar in Morgana's kitchen - it's always been her kitchen in her father's house - with his laptop out and staring at the message from the now-offline Merlin.
If we were to meet I'd need more than a PO Box address.
His fingers were numb right to the ends, looking at the three lines of text, three lines of testimony to how truly, spectacularly awful their timing could be. He should have expected it given the way it'd taken them so long to get to kissing that didn't involve bashing teeth right back at the start, but everything else for so long had been so easy. Nothing that should have constituted a life crisis had been anything like as dramatic as it could have been: they got on, they moved in, Arthur's father - thanks to much mediating by Morgana - was made to deal with the way the three bedroom house had one double bed.
The fact that the beginning was on his mind so much these days scared the shit out of him; it made him think there was something like an end coming.
Morgana's fingers trailed across his knuckles in the barely-lit kitchen. She didn't tell him he should sleep, only leaned her head forward on the breakfast bar and told him to wake her when he needed to.
*
Two floors wasn't scary. Prague had been five. And yes, he wasn't currently a huge green badass, but still. Two floors - not scary.
Okay, scary as fuck, but less so than the blinking red lights and the bullets slamming into his crappy walls and sending puffs of plaster into the air.
Merlin jumped diagonally, throwing his right side against the wall of the building opposite and bouncing back to land under his own window without broken bones. The world and his life had gone completely mental, he decided right there with the aftershock of the landing and his possessions reduced instantaneously to a small backpack. It didn't stop him running.
He heard the boots and wondered, feet moving on railings and window sills and roofs all the while, what it meant when the military coming after him didn't bother to hide the sound of their passing. He wanted to turn and smack them for shouting at people in English like the most arrogant tourists he'd heard in the centre - you're in Spain. It's a reasonable assumption that not everyone speaks English, bastards. He kept his hands busy, crawling and grasping and throwing himself down broken, intermittent slopes of roofs in the slums.
With mental apologies to Will, he turned on a roof, hands clasping the edge and dropped to the ground. He dodged into the familiar building site, slamming his back against a wall of a half-built house and looking at the watch at his wrist. It was on silent mode but still flashed at him insistently that 147 bpm was too high. Merlin closed his eyes and attempted to control his breathing, opening them to the quiet of the labyrinth of grey walls and shells of houses. If he'd chosen to learn it, he might have enjoyed free running, but really, Arthur was the fucking natural born athlete and things like that didn't cross between halves in the partnership.
He heard steps beyond the thundering of his own heartbeat; these steps didn't wish to be heard. Merlin scrabbled to his feet and looked into the centre of the unfinished houses, seeing a figure in black standing taut in the middle, gun by his side.
With a start, Merlin realised that somehow this wasn't just like Prague. In Prague, Uther Pendragon had brought tranq guns.
Well, that changed things.
But really, did it? Merlin clenched his fists and lowered his heartbeat by force of will. It changed the stakes on the surface, but it had always been his life. To turn himself in or allow himself to be caught meant his life lived in a cell, his life gone either way. That Arthur's father had moved onto just plain shooting him (because corpses gave less attitude, didn't shag his son, presumably, or nearly kill his son) was almost a relief.
"Emrys."
With a start, Merlin realised that it wasn't a goon out there: Uther Pendragon had come himself, come out to Spain to do this - to kill him himself.
He didn't reply.
"I won't make an offer you'll refuse, but I can make it quick and bury you with dignity. Hunith would like that."
The way that Uther was being sincere made it all the worse. His heartbeat rose to 155.
"I never wanted this. Some things must be done."
Merlin crouched further into the corner, the corner that would become a cupboard in someone's holiday home away from someone's neat, orderly life.
"They're looking for you. To make more of you."
His stomach rolled unpleasantly; they couldn't think to - he was an aberration, a freak, an -
"You're an abomination. Think what more of you unleashed on the world would wreak."
The last time Merlin had agreed with Uther Pendragon, it had been on throwing himself to the wolves as well. It was no less weird an experience the second time around.
"Think of the people. Arthur does no less, moving on. I hope that comforts you."
He sucked in a ragged breath because no. His temper could stand a passing reference even to his mother, could stand Uther's shitty logic for murder, but it could not stand Arthur. The pulse flashing on the watch rose.
"His girlfriend does no less."
Merlin bit his lip and tasted blood. Liar, he thought instantly and coldly. If he'd said 'partner', even 'boyfriend', Merlin would have felt a curling tendril of doubt, but not this. Arthur deserved better than him, he knew, but more than that, he deserved a father willing to look at him.
Uther was saying something else and Merlin was counting, counting, breathing. Merlin risked a look around the corner, saw him still standing there, but worse, saw them. They were everywhere, creeping in black among the grey blocks and walls like it were a city of eras past, abandoned in the twilight of the streetlights.
Uther had distracted him - Uther had captured him, used Arthur, his mother, against him. It might not be his finger on the trigger, his hand on the gun, but if he died now Uther would have killed him.
The chill in his bones felt wrong against the bile in his throat and the way his heartbeat was climbing faster, faster, racing through his veins and the way his thoughts were rushing, freezing, colliding and distilling themselves into the simple awareness that it was happening and nothing he could do would stop it.
He had seconds; he stowed the backpack in the gap between two steel foundation bars. He ripped off his Cons and threw them into the top of the bag, hoping against hope that Will would understand what they meant and hoping he didn't trash the site to the extent that Will burned them out of hate.
Merlin reached up to support himself, head spinning, and the hand that slammed into the granite block broke chunks of it off, showering grey debris down on top of the bag.
The pain ripped through his arms, his legs, like pins and needles but possibly a million times worse.
He'd come back from near this stage before, clawed his way to calm, to pale, but knew that this time, he was gone.
*
The dawn was non-descript, obscured by grey clouds that merged into the moment when colours had been drained from the world. Arthur found himself waking up, limbs stiff and contorted, on a stool in Morgana's kitchen.
He heard the door slam and looked up to see Morgana's father in the doorway, looking at him.
General Fey said nothing, a shadow half in and half out of the kitchen, eyes on them curved over the breakfast bar, Morgana still asleep.
Arthur was being considered, he could tell. He was tired of being considered. Standing, he put the laptop back in his back and jutted his chin out as he kissed Morgana's head, walking out of the back door and deciding that the general could make what he would of Arthur looking like the morning after the night before.
He didn't go to their house. He considered going to his father's house- the house Arthur had grown up in and was self-consciously aware of having left not once but three times. He settled for sitting on a bench down the street, feeling like a crossover between a tramp and a spy, battered yet again by the knowledge that this was what they did now and just how much they hadn't meant to sign up for it.
His father returned at nine thirty am, looking as shit as Arthur felt. Arthur wanted to walk up to him and shake the answers out of him - did you kill Merlin last night, is he alive, do you have him - but didn't. Not immediately, but it was a close thing, heart pounding in his ears and fists curled around the bench. His father had tried to kill Merlin: Arthur was out of time to decide, out of time to square the circle of fitting both Merlin and his father in his life.
*
Merlin came to somewhere outside the suburbs, half-naked behind a bucket of putrid smelling trash and with only the haziest memories of the night before, head pounding and legs and arms burning from over-exertion.
Just like the first time Arthur had introduced him to tequila, he thought with black humour, grateful at least to the shadow that lurked beneath his consciousness and his heartbeat that he knew where he was and how to get to the site from there.
He avoided the main paths even after he got to the slums - it wasn't that seeing someone half naked, beaten up, swaying and swerving on their feet was an unusual sight, but Merlin was more worried about lingering military presences on watch for him doing exactly what he was doing - trying to reclaim some of his belongings.
It was early enough that no one was on the building site; Merlin was even more grateful to Will for dragging them out on that drink. He'd had that one solitary beer, but few others on the site had shown anything like restraint.
He ducked under beams and bars and around walls until he reached the space where he'd stashed his backpack.
"Looking for this, mate?"
Merlin turned, meeting Will's eyes as he held up Merlin's backpack in what would be the doorway of the ground floor of that particular unit.
The sun wasn't high enough for sweat to be breaking out at Merlin's temples. It did anyway. Merlin nodded, catching the familiar Cons and unfamiliar shirt Will threw to him.
They walked in silence to the edge of the site near the office, Will pressing an envelope into his hands.
"It's not payday," Merlin said raggedly, swallowing as he realised the envelope below his hands weighed at least twice his usual pay.
"You won't be here for the next one. I'm assuming you look like shit because some bastards beat you up on the way back from the bar," Will answered, blinking, "anyone asks, that's what I'm assuming. It's what I was assuming when I went by yours on the way in this morning to check you'd got back all right since you haven't got a phone."
And found something that looked like a SWAT team and/or bullet holes all over the place, Merlin finished in his head.
He nodded, tugging at the hem of the shirt as he slung the backpack over one shoulder and swallowing. "Thanks."
Will shook his head, mouth quirking. "Take care of yourself, trickster."
Two streets later, hating himself for needing to, he bent down in an alley and cautiously opened the backpack to check everything was in it. It was- everything down to that bloody photo ripped out of a French paper, the one that didn't really look like Arthur but kind of did - too much to throw it away, at any rate. It didn't look like Arthur the way Merlin knew him: stupid hair, stupid laugh, grinning every which way or hammering at a keyboard, methodically piecing together the obvious and the insane. It looked like the distant, smiling cousin of Arthur, better known to Merlin lying asleep at three in the morning or covered in mud from the rugby. It was Arthur in a tux with a smile that showed his cheekbones in the right light, taken at the party after Uther had gotten some big honour, medal- whatever. Merlin hadn't bothered ripping out the whole article, he'd known more about it than he'd wanted to by then, but the photo had only been of interest when the son of the general had been in critical condition for two weeks in a Camelot hospital.
Merlin stowed it back into the waterproof pocket and moved on.
*
Fully aware he looked like a survivor of a natural disaster, Arthur hesitated on the street outside the house until his phone announced a text message. From Morgana: M, alive, unaccounted for. 4 dead.
Arthur walked into the house. He had a shower to have and bank accounts to ruin.
*
For the first time in a long time, Merlin thanked various gods that he looked something quite like a smiling gap year student - he was certainly not-quite-clean enough - and made the most of his mediocre Spanish. He managed to make the journey on various buses across the border to Toulouse without being noticed and in roughly six hours. His first order of business was to find a hostel and switch to his not even mediocre French, his second was to shower and his third was to log onto the wireless network with his laptop.
/Unicorn: Hello.
*
Arthur heard the ping from his computer and leaped from where he'd been sprawled across the bed marking lab reports in lieu of having anything else to do, having finished the funds transfers in one final barrage of calls and internet banking.
/Unicorn: Hello.
/Dragon: About bloody ti
Arthur winced and hit the DEL key. Technically, Merlin didn't know that it had been the longest two days in the history of ever on both sides of the screen.
/Dragon: We should meet. Are we agreed?
He wondered at his sanity, protecting Merlin from the knowledge of who he was and setting up a meeting at the same time. But in his head, it could go two ways. Merlin would see Arthur. And then a wonderful haze would descend and everything, somehow, would be made better. More realistically, what he expected was that Merlin would freak out and he'd have to do some fast persuading, most of it along the lines of pushing Merlin against a wall and pointing out in his most reasonable, neurotic-student appeasing tone that he was really too far in to back out now and that it was half his fault anyway. Or something. Usually Arthur was meticulous and downright anal about planning where Merlin expected things to happen by magic (which they usually did around him); now Arthur was the one counting on hazy optimisms.
/Unicorn: Where do I go?
Arthur let out a sigh of relief and hit his forehead against the desk. This was when it could go disastrously wrong. One mention of Camelot and there'd be no getting Merlin back. He'd go so far to ground that Arthur would have to search among packets of compost in garden centres, politely asking old women and young parents to get the hell out of his way.
/Dragon: Edinburgh, Scotland.
/Unicorn: Address?
/Dragon: To follow.
*
Merlin looked at the screen and let out a breath he didn't realise he'd been holding. He pulled up google maps and calculated how long it would take to get to Scotland - the crossing would be the hardest part. That and dodging the authorities in a country who gave a damn and had him on most systems as missing, dangerous, unbalanced or criminal.
He refused to think of what it was going to be like to be in Camelot, so close to Arthur, his mother, Morgana, Gaius and Gwen. He'd been trying to make the separation from his clusterfucky life and theirs so complete that he'd even managed to resist googling them, knowing from various wry remarks of the Generals Fey and Pendragon that the military had a lot of tech at their disposal. He'd decided that paranoia was the most sensible course; after all, Merlin knew they were out to get him.
Yes, Dragon had said Edinburgh. But Merlin still needed something from Camelot and it would be idiotic not to try for the lab results from the experiment. He hadn't been able to get them before he'd had to run (while Arthur was still unconscious) and he had never tried in the months since.
But that had been while he'd had other options, while the authorities weren't trying to track him down with renewed vigour, and while he'd never been so close to being caught before. He no longer had options.
/Unicorn: at latest one week.
*
Three days later, Arthur looked up at the knock on the door, hearing it open and walking into the hall. His father - part of him was unsurprised, knowing no one else with the temerity to walk into a house not theirs as if they had every right. They walked silently into the living room.
Uther Pendragon glanced behind Arthur's shoulder to the visible bag lying on the bed in the bedroom, half-packed. "Going somewhere?"
"Gwen's, up in Edinburgh," Arthur answered honestly, standing straight with his chin raised, daring his father to challenge him solely on the basis that Gwen had been in that room they didn't talk about on that day they never mentioned. "I need away for a weekend."
Uther made a noise that might have been interpreted as whatever the listener wanted, tracing a finger along the space on the mantelpiece next to the photo of Morgana, Gwen, Merlin and Arthur.
Merlin and Arthur had never really been photo people, not the type to do what grandparents and some girls seemed to do; plaster all available surfaces with photographic evidence of everything, ever. But they'd had three or four, scattered around the house, just casually placed, much like the casual gesture of just happening to only kit one room in the house out as a bedroom, despite it having three rooms that could be turned to that purpose. Just a casual gesture; just an assurance that no one could misinterpret them as anything less than what they were, just spurred by a particularly condescending remark of Uther's that if they moved in together, people might assume things. Like permanence. Like them mattering.
In his quiet, wordless way, Merlin had understood when Arthur had come back from lunch with Uther and had, for the following three weeks, gone on what could be politely called a Domestic Kick. He hadn't even protested stupid things like Arthur buying out Lakeland for the sake of having aprons in the kitchen and mats on the bathroom floor.
Listening to Uther talk about General Fey, Morgana and all their other mutual acquaintances, asking about how his teaching was going, noting the absence of any questions about him having found a new research project, Arthur looked at the blank space next to that photograph where one of Arthur and Merlin being idiots circa 2002 had used to be. Merlin's hair had been extremely stupid and possibly multi-coloured back then.
No, they'd never been photo people, but having to put away those sporadic gestures of determined permanence for the appearance of moving on had hurt more than Arthur was ever willing to admit.
A few minutes of polite, probing conversation later, Uther found other things to do and another place to be. Arthur let out the breath he'd been holding, realising that somewhere in him, every encounter with his father was laced with a fear that this would be the time he chose to break it to Arthur that they'd done it, they'd killed Merlin and his body was property of the state; to be retro-engineered and mass produced. For everything he and Merlin were, his greatest fear - and, he suspected, Merlin's greatest fear - went above and beyond the two of them. It wasn't the fear of one person for their partner; it was the fear of a general's son and a scientist with experience dealing with the military.
He opened the laptop and sent an email to Gwen, before remembering he had to go into campus before he could leave for Edinburgh.
*
Merlin pulled his hood up in the near-dark and jammed his hands in his pockets. Converse, backpack, dark hoodie: Camelot was big enough that if he kept his head down, he could be in and out in a night and no one would be the wiser.
He'd temporarily acquired some fame as the boyfriend - the first boyfriend -of Arthur Pendragon. They'd raised a few eyebrows: Camelot was a stronghold for conservatisms of all stripes, Tory-voting, the centre of a Church of England diocese and had a significant military presence. Thankfully, that had waned and he'd been largely left alone to research and teach. He denied all knowledge and certainly any part in various student facebook groups dedicated to he and Arthur's Undying Love.
It was much easier to dampen wanting to know - wanting to see - any of them, but especially Arthur, when he wasn't walking furtively down streets they'd once stumbled home drunk on, wandered to classes through, claimed as their own.
It had been much easier when he had known he wasn't walking distance from a house that was his home, that he still had the key to tucked in a backpack of things that weren't all useful but were all essential.
He took a left to a familiar back door - the way into the twenty-four hour computer labs because scientists were a crap lot when it came to getting eight hours a night - and hesitated at the keypad. Then he took a breath and remembered that there was no point in throwing himself into danger half-arsed, and used the house key and a stolen swipe card to trick the system into thinking an administrator wanted access- it was a trick that he didn't understand and only knew because Gwen, the best computer geek he'd ever known, lacking that contempt for the uninitiated so many of them held, had shown him the sixth time he'd gotten locked out of the labs.
He took the back stairs to the research labs, knowing he could access Arthur's account from pretty much any terminal. He'd have to try something more risky - like Uther Pendragon's administrator account - if what he was looking for wasn't on Arthur's files.
All the while he was carefully planning and thinking and walking up the stairs, he was trying to get over exactly how weird it all was. It should have been different, surely, but it wasn't, down to the photocopied flyers on the walls and the boarded up window on the third floor that hadn't been fixed.
*
Arthur sat at a computer terminal in the general computer lab on the third floor rather than going to the trouble of going into the lab assigned as his own, trying hard not to swear and worry about catching his flight, which was in five hours and therefore it was fine.
It didn't help that the computers were largely shit.
Well, not really. Just not as good as the laptop permanently attached to his hip, which won by being a mac and being perfectly set up for Arthur's every need. His mood usually dropped a few points simply by having to log onto a university computer, but he needed to upload a bunch of files for the class that he'd dumped onto Bedivere the next morning. The least he could do was make sure the post-grad had handouts to chuck at the freshers.
And he had the time. He was trying hard to convince himself that getting to the airport four hours before a domestic flight was excessive and that it didn't mean Merlin wouldn't show up, especially considering he was arriving at Gwen's a whole day early.
Hitting windows+D, Arthur sighed and scanned the desktop for things to clear up. Because he didn't have to leave yet.
*
Merlin scanned the half-lit lab quickly, looking for signs of anyone else being in. On the one hand, it was a Friday night. On the other hand, Camelot science students were notorious for not having lives.
One person was in, but with half of the fluorescent lights off, he couldn't see anything but the back of their head and the rough shape of a jacket.
What he could see quite clearly was files disappearing into a recycling bin on the page. He stepped closer, because it would be just his luck to interrupt the military deleting exactly what he needed.
*
Arthur's freakishly good hearing and instinct for other people on approach wasn't the result of a childhood spent in crime but the result of many, many games of hide and seek with Morgana and had been honed by all of the officer training bollocks his father had put him through in his teens, back before he'd accepted that Arthur was going into science, not Sandhurst.
Hence, he knew someone had entered the lab, because he'd heard the door. He knew someone was walking up behind him, because whoever it was stepped as lightly as an elephant tangoing with a rhino.
He took a deep breath.
*
Merlin realised that the other person had realised he was there when they turned in their chair in one smooth motion to look up at him and - Arthur. It was bloody Arthur, who Merlin had been counting on to have a life on a Friday night.
Arthur.
They froze, both of them, Arthur standing with wide eyes and sending the chair clattering irrelevantly to one side.
Arthur- blue eyes wide, hair longer than Merlin remembered. Still wearing a coat that he'd been replacing with as near to the exact same since he was thirteen, to Merlin's knowledge. Still wearing a leather satchel that Merlin would bet had a laptop in it, a satchel that looked battered and worn if you didn't look at the extensively padded interior. Still Arthur, cheekbones standing out in the shitty lighting, still bloody gorgeous even under fluorescents, staring with his lips just parted and hand half-reaching out, the cuff of the jacket resting below the first knuckle of his thumb.
Still exactly as he wanted Arthur to stay; Merlin bolted.
PART THREE