srin
in
mad_poetics
Inevitability and Poultry
Title: Inevitability and Poultry
Pairing: Merlin/Arthur
Spoilers: An allusion to 2x10, none for series 3.
Rating: PG-13
Length: ~3,300 words
Summary: Wherein Merlin and Arthur tackle an unlikely creature, ponder questions of animal husbandry, and do their very best to avoid a personal conversation.
Note: Silliness, plain and simple.
The first time Arthur and Merlin kiss, it is a spectacularly drunken affair in Arthur’s chambers, more spit than sensuality, and about ten minutes later they both pass out fully clothed on top of the blankets. It is not exactly the start - or, indeed, the conclusion - of a storybook romance.
In the morning, Arthur immediately panics at the presence of another body in his bed and shoves Merlin out of it with a rather unnecessary amount of force; Merlin flails, objects loudly, and attempts to fling a sock he finds on the floor at Arthur’s head. Then Arthur wakes up enough to remember what went on last night - well, a bit of it, at any rate - and that leads to a lot of semi-coherent shouting over who was responsible for the evening’s events. (Which, given the headaches they both have, really isn’t doing anybody concerned any favours.)
The row only ends when Merlin, exasperated and looking vaguely ridiculous with pillow creases all over the right side of his face, catches Arthur staring at his mouth. Then he says, “You know what? I don’t care who started it last night, I am starting it now,” promptly crowds Arthur up against the bedpost, and thrusts his tongue between Arthur’s shocked-open lips.
A very long, very wet, very contact-in-exciting-new-places moment later, Merlin pulls back and says, wearing a stunned expression,
“Your mouth tastes disgusting.”
“Your breath smells like something died in it,” Arthur retorts automatically.
“How can something have died in my breath? It’s breath, it’s just air, there isn’t any place for anything to have-”
At this point they both notice that Arthur is still trapped between the bedpost and Merlin’s body, their thighs jammed against one another’s groins, Merlin’s hands in Arthur’s hair and Arthur’s hands up Merlin’s shirt.
Arthur blinks. He leans forward, very slow and tentative right up until the last moment when he suddenly darts in and touches his lips to Merlin’s again, quick and light and sort of half challenge, half question.
Merlin blinks. “Why don’t I, um - breakfast! And water, nice, clean, fresh water, I’ll get some-”
“Good idea-”
“-and we can, er,” Merlin pauses, removes his hands from Arthur’s hair so he can gesture vaguely, “talk, about, ah, things, later?”
“Yes, that, later, exactly,” Arthur agrees, though it takes him another several seconds to remember that he should probably get his hands out of Merlin’s clothing.
They don’t have the conversation, mostly because shortly after Merlin leaves Arthur’s room, a creature with the body of a sheep, the tail of a beaver, and the face of a chicken arrives to supply some semblance of a plot and attempts to destroy Camelot.
(It’s more dangerous than it sounds.)
(Not least because it defies all the rules of story-telling convention by ignoring the fellows in the nice swishy red cloaks and going straight for Arthur.)
(Also, the beaver tail shoots fire.)
They spend the next several days trying to get rid of the creature, to no avail. (To be more accurate: Merlin spends the next several days sneaking around trying various spells; Gaius spends the next several days with his books; Arthur spends the next several days being knocked strategically unconscious.)
Eventually, Gaius announces that the creature belongs to a species with very strong parenting instincts, and thus can almost certainly be lured away from the city by the sounds of its young. Arthur helpfully points that they do not have any young sheep-beaver-chicken hybrids hanging about the place. Gaius just smiles.
The next day, Arthur and Merlin set out with a lamb on a leash, a covered basket full of chicks, and a wooden device that Gaius insists sounds like a beaver but mostly just sounds like bits of wood doing something bits of wood are not meant to do. (Originally Uther wanted to send some disposable knights, but Arthur helpfully pointed out that even if the noises failed to attract the creature, experience dictated that it would surely be content to chase him.) Their plan is to lead the creature away from Camelot and then over a cliff, which it will hopefully be unable or unwilling to climb.
At first, Arthur makes Merlin carry the chicks and the wooden thing and hold the leash. Almost immediately, however, the lamb starts trying to have Merlin’s tunic for brunch. (Breakfast had consisted of the biscuits they used to lure the thing away from its mother, and no one has threadbare tunics for lunch.)
“It’s eating my shirt,” Merlin complains, trying to push the creature’s head away with his knee.
“No accounting for taste,” Arthur laughs.
“Unlike some people, I don’t have more shirts than brains, and I already lost one set of clothes to the fires this week. If this keeps up I’ll have to go around naked and I know it’s spring but it’s not that-”
Arthur stops abruptly; Merlin, distracted by the lamb, stumbles into his back. The chicks in the basket cheep in a rather distraught manner.
“Arthur?” Merlin asks.
Arthur swallows. “Um. Right. Naked. Can’t have that. Give it here,” he says, in a slightly strangled tone. Merlin holds out the leash and swiftly retreats out of range, all while carefully avoiding so much as a glance at Arthur’s face. (The lamb tries to eat Arthur’s chain mail too, but manages to work out on its own that the armour’s inclusion in the menu ought to be reconsidered.)
“Arthur,” says Merlin.
“Don’t tell me the chicks are after your trousers now,” Arthur says.
“They’re in a basket. No, I - these things are supposed to attract the creature, yeah?”
“So we can lead it away from Camelot, yes,” Arthur agrees, relieved that they will not be furthering the topic of Merlin’s trousers at the moment.
“What exactly is there to stop it setting us on fire as soon as it catches up to us?” Merlin asks.
“Presumably it won’t be too keen to immolate its young.”
“What about when it works out that we do not, in fact, have any of its young?”
“Hopefully it won’t be that clever.”
“Oh, that’s reassuring, thanks.”
Arthur has nothing to say to that. (Well, actually, he has several things to say, but unfortunately any witty retorts bring to mind a recent exchange concerning the flavour of mouths and the odour of breaths, which he is trying not to think about at the moment.)
“I’m not sure why we even need the lamb,” Merlin says a few minutes later. “Or the beaver thing. I mean, it’s got the head of a chicken, so you’d think it would just make chicken sounds-”
“It’s got the face of a chicken. Back of the head and the neck are sort of sheep-y, so it could very well have the voice of a sheep-”
“And the beaver?”
“I don’t know! Gaius said to use everything together, so we’ll bloody well use everything together!”
“And then be set on fire.”
“We will not be set on fire.”
“Is this like that time you said we would absolutely not be ambushed by bandits? Or when you assured me that there was no way that thing with the tentacles could have survived your assault? Or in that valley with the ferns, when you were, and I quote, ‘supremely confident that-‘”
“Merlin.”
“Yes?”
“Shut up.”
“Again: very reassuring, sire, thank you.”
“I will not allow you to be set on fire, is that understood? If - if the thing attacks, which it will not, because this will work - if it attacks, it will attack me as it has done on every other occasion since it arrived in Camelot, and you will hide behind a rock or other fire-resistant shelter, and then you will take my charred remains home and invent a story about how I was saving babies from a burning hut or something because I will not be remembered as the prince who was killed by a sheep-chicken-beaver-thing. Is that clear?”
“No one will believe the hut story. They all saw the flames shooting out of its tail.”
“You will damn well-”
“And anyway, I won’t let you be killed,” Merlin says, with that strange quiet certainty that he tends to display at times such as these.
“It won’t come to that,” Arthur says, with slightly more confidence than he feels. “This will work.”
The lamb bleats, and tries to eat Arthur’s scabbard. (Lunch time. Obviously.)
“Aren’t goats meant to be the ones that eat everything in sight?” Arthur demands, jerking it away.
“Goats are a lot like sheep. Same eyes. Possibly a bit cleverer.”
“Not difficult, that,” Arthur says with a sigh.
They keep walking, with periodic pauses to use the beaver-noise maker and entice the chicks and lamb to make their sounds. The chicks are easy enough - all it takes is a little jostling of the basket - while the lamb is a bit less cooperative. They’re both reluctant to actually harm the thing, but finally Merlin discovers that it will object quite vociferously to being allowed at the tail of Merlin’s belt only for him to back out of its reach.
“I wonder what the creature eats,” Merlin muses after one such break.
“Roasted prince, I imagine,” Arthur mutters.
“Nah, that’d be a rubbish diet,” Merlin says; Arthur turns, mouth open and expression highly affronted, but Merlin ignores him, “I mean, how many princes can there possibly be? There’s no way a population could sustain itself like that, unless each one only needs to eat, say, once in a century, and that’s not very practical either-”
“Merlin,” Arthur interrupts, staring over Merlin’s shoulder.
“-maybe it’s royalty in general, Uther’s probably a bit stringy by now so I can see how they’d give him a miss, but if you include-”
“Merlin,” Arthur repeats, bending down to gather the lamb into his arms.
“-well, no, even that wouldn’t be enough, you need to maintain a breeding population-”
“Merlin!”
“What?”
“Run.”
Merlin turns, blinks, turns back. They run.
Eventually they stop running, when it becomes clear that the chicken-sheep-beaver thing isn’t so much running them down as keeping pace with them and eyeing them suspiciously, inasmuch as it is possible for something with the face of a chicken to have distinguishable expressions.
“Breeding population?” Arthur asks, after they’ve slowed to a more reasonable pace and caught their breaths.
“Oh, well, yes. You can’t just have two of them and breed their children and expect everything to be fine, I mean, royalty do it and look how that-”
“Oi!”
“Sorry,” says Merlin, not sounding the slightest bit repentant. “But it’s true. Bloke next village over from Ealdor tried it with a pair of goats once, and it was fine the first two generations, right, but then the babies started coming out with the wrong number of legs, or stillborn, or just not right in the head.”
“How can you tell that a goat is wrong in the head?” Arthur demands.
“You do not want to know,” Merlin says, sounding so serious that Arthur decides it may be best to take his word on the matter.
“But anyway,” Merlin continues, “these things must eat something other than just royalty, otherwise they’d never be able to sustain a population.”
“How do you know they’re not inbred, though? Maybe this one is wrong in the head, it isn’t as though we have much of a basis for comparison.”
Merlin stops, staring at Arthur.
“What?” Arthur asks.
“Nothing, it’s just, that was actually a good point,” Merlin says, smirking. Arthur rolls his eyes and thumps Merlin’s shoulder, which sets the chicks off again, which prompts the chicken-beaver-sheep thing to creep up a bit closer, looking unhappy.
“…How far is that cliff now?” Merlin asks, eyeing it warily.
“Another mile or so, I think. So stop upsetting the chicks.”
“They were fine until you-”
“Never mind, let’s just - we’ll keep it quiet, shall we? Not provoke one another.”
“Right.”
“Right.”
(The silence lasts all of five minutes, but at least Arthur manages to refrain from making his displeasure known physically for the duration of the journey.)
“Go on then, entice it over the cliff,” Arthur says when they arrive. Merlin stares at him, incredulous.
“Me? What am I supposed to do?”
“I don’t know! Didn’t Gaius tell you?”
“Gaius said ‘here, Merlin, this device makes the sound of a baby beaver when you-‘”
“Didn’t he tell you anything else?”
“No! You were there, remember? You were staring at my-” Merlin stops, suddenly, blushing, and Arthur looks away quickly.
“Er. Yes. Of course,” Arthur says.
They have a prolonged awkward silence.
The lamb bleats. The beaver-sheep-chicken thing, which has tried to hide itself behind a tree that would struggle to conceal a creature half its size, pokes its head out to glare at them.
“We could throw the basket over the cliff?” Arthur suggests.
“What? No! What would you do if someone threw your babies over a cliff?”
“I don’t know, I haven’t any babies!”
“Three words. Fire. Shooting. Tail.”
“Three words? Fire-shooting ought to have a hyphen, surely.”
“Two words with a hyphen are still two words.”
“Do they even have hyphens where you come from? You probably learned to write with a stick and some dirt, you’re hardly likely to be an authority on advanced punctuation-”
“And your tutors probably let you put apostrophes wherever you damn well pleased because you’re the prince!”
They take a moment to glare at one another, at which point the beaver-sheep-chicken thing emerges from behind its tree and starts stalking towards them.
“Merlin, go and hide behind a rock,” Arthur says quietly.
“I’m not leaving you to be burnt,” Merlin says, not moving.
“There is nothing you can do to stop it if it does attack me, and I won’t have you killed.”
(This conversation progresses in a manner about as productive as that of every other conversation Merlin and Arthur have ever had on the same subject.)
After quite a bit of arguing over the relative worth of their lives, the creature’s likely intelligence, Merlin’s upbringing, Arthur’s ability to attract peril, and whose fault it is that Gaius didn’t give them better instructions, they come up with a plan. The plan involves a tree overhanging the cliff, a length of rope from Merlin’s bag tied to the basket of chicks at one end and a branch at the other, some strategically placed foliage, and, while Merlin arranges all of this, Arthur prancing around looking tasty in order to distract the creature.
The plan is a success. (Well, mostly.) Merlin sits in the tree and tugs on the rope to jostle the basket of chicks, which is dangling from the overhanging branch and hidden by the foliage laid out just at the cliff’s edge. The beaver-chicken-sheep thing, upon hearing the chicks’ noises, abandons Arthur and charges toward them, straight through the foliage and over the edge of the cliff.
This would all be very well indeed except that the creature, rather dismayed by this falling over a cliff business, puts its fire-shooting tail into action, sending out a jet of flame which startles Merlin so much he falls from the tree.
“Merlin!” Arthur screams, and dives for the mess of foliage at the edge of the cliff - and finds Merlin dangling from the swaying chick basket, the contents of which are objecting loudly. (Somewhere far before, the sheep-beaver-chicken thing hears their cries, laments that it does not have the wings of some aerodynamically competent species, and resolves to consider cross-breeding with griffins.)
“Hi,” Merlin says, his grin a bit mad and his voice pitched slightly higher than normal. Arthur breathes a heavy sigh of relief, and doesn’t even bother to say something scathing, just waits until the basket swings in closer to the edge of the cliff and grabs it so Merlin can jump back to the ground.
Arthur silently unties the basket from the tree, hands it to Merlin, retrieves the lamb, (which had been neglected in the commotion, and took the opportunity to eat something that may have even been a natural part of the ovine diet,) and starts marching back towards Camelot.
Merlin follows along quietly for a few minutes, then says,
“So… you kissed me.”
“You started it!” Arthur replies immediately, and then grimaces.
“Sure, I’m not denying that, but… You kissed me, Arthur.”
“I thought we weren’t talking about this.”
“We said we’d talk about it later. Creature’s sorted. I think this qualifies as later.”
“Fine,” Arthur huffs. He stops, turns around, and crosses his arms, all of which might have just a wee bit more gravitas if he didn’t have to wrangle the lamb’s leash in order to do it. “What is it that you want to say, exactly?”
“You kissed me,” Merlin says, obviously trying to look blank but with hints of eagerness and nerves bleeding in around the edges of the expression.
“Yes, we’ve established that, your point is?”
“Wouldyouliketodoitagain?”
“…”
“I said-”
“I heard you.”
“And?”
“…”
“…Didn’t expect this to be such a difficult question,” Merlin mutters, and starts walking again - only for Arthur to grab his shoulder, spin him around, and crash their mouths together.
This kiss is, frankly, almost as bad as the first in terms of (complete and utter lack of) finesse. Plus there’s the fact that the chicks in the basket are cheeping in distress at being jostled and trapped between their bodies, and the lamb is taking advantage of their proximity and distraction by having another go at Merlin’s tunic. No one passes out this time, though, which probably qualifies as an improvement.
“Okay?” Arthur asks, a bit breathless, when they part. (They don’t go very far; Arthur keeps his forehead pressed against Merlin’s, and he keeps his gaze on Merlin’s mouth. Because he can’t keep it any higher without going cross-eyed.)
“Yeah,” Merlin says, also a bit breathless.
“I don’t want to talk about it, I just want to-”
“Yeah,” Merlin agrees, and kisses Arthur again. This time it’s soft, gentle; not a kiss to be commemorated in story and song, but not a disaster, either.
Arthur has one hand at Merlin’s waist, the other on his shoulder. Both of Merlin’s are still occupied with the basket.
“I should put this down,” Merlin says, stepping back with an apologetic look on his face. He does, and as he’s straightening up again, Arthur laughs.
“What?” Merlin asks, eyeing Arthur suspiciously. Arthur gestures at the basket and says,
“Destiny and chicken.”
“What?”
“Never mind. Come here.”
He tugs Merlin in close with an arm around his waist. Merlin drapes his arms around Arthur’s shoulders, and they stare at each other for a moment without speaking. Then Arthur says,
“No more falling from cliffs.”
“Fine with me,” Merlin says.
“And no going all funny about this, we’re both men, we needn’t-”
“No objections here.”
“And no-”
“Arthur?”
“What?”
“No more talking,” Merlin says.
This kiss, well, this one might warrant some commemoration. Nothing epic, but a nice vignette might do it, or a succinct bit of verse. Something about the sweet, fresh taste of Arthur’s mouth, (he may have stolen some mint leaves from the kitchens before they set out this morning,) or the tender way Merlin’s fingers stroke Arthur’s neck, or the pleased sounds they both make when their tongues meet. Some discussion of the brush of their noses as Arthur tilts his head to deepen the kiss, and the press of their bodies, too close for uncertainty to remain between them; perhaps an allusion to the many other kisses that are surely still to come.
(The lamb trying to eat Arthur’s hair after he tugs them both to the ground can most likely be left out of it. As can the loss of the beaver-noise maker when Merlin sheds his trousers. And the later argument about who gets to sleep on which side of Arthur’s bed, culminating in a pillow fight.)
(Some mention of happily-ever-afters, however, would not be out of place.)
Pairing: Merlin/Arthur
Spoilers: An allusion to 2x10, none for series 3.
Rating: PG-13
Length: ~3,300 words
Summary: Wherein Merlin and Arthur tackle an unlikely creature, ponder questions of animal husbandry, and do their very best to avoid a personal conversation.
Note: Silliness, plain and simple.
The first time Arthur and Merlin kiss, it is a spectacularly drunken affair in Arthur’s chambers, more spit than sensuality, and about ten minutes later they both pass out fully clothed on top of the blankets. It is not exactly the start - or, indeed, the conclusion - of a storybook romance.
In the morning, Arthur immediately panics at the presence of another body in his bed and shoves Merlin out of it with a rather unnecessary amount of force; Merlin flails, objects loudly, and attempts to fling a sock he finds on the floor at Arthur’s head. Then Arthur wakes up enough to remember what went on last night - well, a bit of it, at any rate - and that leads to a lot of semi-coherent shouting over who was responsible for the evening’s events. (Which, given the headaches they both have, really isn’t doing anybody concerned any favours.)
The row only ends when Merlin, exasperated and looking vaguely ridiculous with pillow creases all over the right side of his face, catches Arthur staring at his mouth. Then he says, “You know what? I don’t care who started it last night, I am starting it now,” promptly crowds Arthur up against the bedpost, and thrusts his tongue between Arthur’s shocked-open lips.
A very long, very wet, very contact-in-exciting-new-places moment later, Merlin pulls back and says, wearing a stunned expression,
“Your mouth tastes disgusting.”
“Your breath smells like something died in it,” Arthur retorts automatically.
“How can something have died in my breath? It’s breath, it’s just air, there isn’t any place for anything to have-”
At this point they both notice that Arthur is still trapped between the bedpost and Merlin’s body, their thighs jammed against one another’s groins, Merlin’s hands in Arthur’s hair and Arthur’s hands up Merlin’s shirt.
Arthur blinks. He leans forward, very slow and tentative right up until the last moment when he suddenly darts in and touches his lips to Merlin’s again, quick and light and sort of half challenge, half question.
Merlin blinks. “Why don’t I, um - breakfast! And water, nice, clean, fresh water, I’ll get some-”
“Good idea-”
“-and we can, er,” Merlin pauses, removes his hands from Arthur’s hair so he can gesture vaguely, “talk, about, ah, things, later?”
“Yes, that, later, exactly,” Arthur agrees, though it takes him another several seconds to remember that he should probably get his hands out of Merlin’s clothing.
They don’t have the conversation, mostly because shortly after Merlin leaves Arthur’s room, a creature with the body of a sheep, the tail of a beaver, and the face of a chicken arrives to supply some semblance of a plot and attempts to destroy Camelot.
(It’s more dangerous than it sounds.)
(Not least because it defies all the rules of story-telling convention by ignoring the fellows in the nice swishy red cloaks and going straight for Arthur.)
(Also, the beaver tail shoots fire.)
They spend the next several days trying to get rid of the creature, to no avail. (To be more accurate: Merlin spends the next several days sneaking around trying various spells; Gaius spends the next several days with his books; Arthur spends the next several days being knocked strategically unconscious.)
Eventually, Gaius announces that the creature belongs to a species with very strong parenting instincts, and thus can almost certainly be lured away from the city by the sounds of its young. Arthur helpfully points that they do not have any young sheep-beaver-chicken hybrids hanging about the place. Gaius just smiles.
The next day, Arthur and Merlin set out with a lamb on a leash, a covered basket full of chicks, and a wooden device that Gaius insists sounds like a beaver but mostly just sounds like bits of wood doing something bits of wood are not meant to do. (Originally Uther wanted to send some disposable knights, but Arthur helpfully pointed out that even if the noises failed to attract the creature, experience dictated that it would surely be content to chase him.) Their plan is to lead the creature away from Camelot and then over a cliff, which it will hopefully be unable or unwilling to climb.
At first, Arthur makes Merlin carry the chicks and the wooden thing and hold the leash. Almost immediately, however, the lamb starts trying to have Merlin’s tunic for brunch. (Breakfast had consisted of the biscuits they used to lure the thing away from its mother, and no one has threadbare tunics for lunch.)
“It’s eating my shirt,” Merlin complains, trying to push the creature’s head away with his knee.
“No accounting for taste,” Arthur laughs.
“Unlike some people, I don’t have more shirts than brains, and I already lost one set of clothes to the fires this week. If this keeps up I’ll have to go around naked and I know it’s spring but it’s not that-”
Arthur stops abruptly; Merlin, distracted by the lamb, stumbles into his back. The chicks in the basket cheep in a rather distraught manner.
“Arthur?” Merlin asks.
Arthur swallows. “Um. Right. Naked. Can’t have that. Give it here,” he says, in a slightly strangled tone. Merlin holds out the leash and swiftly retreats out of range, all while carefully avoiding so much as a glance at Arthur’s face. (The lamb tries to eat Arthur’s chain mail too, but manages to work out on its own that the armour’s inclusion in the menu ought to be reconsidered.)
“Arthur,” says Merlin.
“Don’t tell me the chicks are after your trousers now,” Arthur says.
“They’re in a basket. No, I - these things are supposed to attract the creature, yeah?”
“So we can lead it away from Camelot, yes,” Arthur agrees, relieved that they will not be furthering the topic of Merlin’s trousers at the moment.
“What exactly is there to stop it setting us on fire as soon as it catches up to us?” Merlin asks.
“Presumably it won’t be too keen to immolate its young.”
“What about when it works out that we do not, in fact, have any of its young?”
“Hopefully it won’t be that clever.”
“Oh, that’s reassuring, thanks.”
Arthur has nothing to say to that. (Well, actually, he has several things to say, but unfortunately any witty retorts bring to mind a recent exchange concerning the flavour of mouths and the odour of breaths, which he is trying not to think about at the moment.)
“I’m not sure why we even need the lamb,” Merlin says a few minutes later. “Or the beaver thing. I mean, it’s got the head of a chicken, so you’d think it would just make chicken sounds-”
“It’s got the face of a chicken. Back of the head and the neck are sort of sheep-y, so it could very well have the voice of a sheep-”
“And the beaver?”
“I don’t know! Gaius said to use everything together, so we’ll bloody well use everything together!”
“And then be set on fire.”
“We will not be set on fire.”
“Is this like that time you said we would absolutely not be ambushed by bandits? Or when you assured me that there was no way that thing with the tentacles could have survived your assault? Or in that valley with the ferns, when you were, and I quote, ‘supremely confident that-‘”
“Merlin.”
“Yes?”
“Shut up.”
“Again: very reassuring, sire, thank you.”
“I will not allow you to be set on fire, is that understood? If - if the thing attacks, which it will not, because this will work - if it attacks, it will attack me as it has done on every other occasion since it arrived in Camelot, and you will hide behind a rock or other fire-resistant shelter, and then you will take my charred remains home and invent a story about how I was saving babies from a burning hut or something because I will not be remembered as the prince who was killed by a sheep-chicken-beaver-thing. Is that clear?”
“No one will believe the hut story. They all saw the flames shooting out of its tail.”
“You will damn well-”
“And anyway, I won’t let you be killed,” Merlin says, with that strange quiet certainty that he tends to display at times such as these.
“It won’t come to that,” Arthur says, with slightly more confidence than he feels. “This will work.”
The lamb bleats, and tries to eat Arthur’s scabbard. (Lunch time. Obviously.)
“Aren’t goats meant to be the ones that eat everything in sight?” Arthur demands, jerking it away.
“Goats are a lot like sheep. Same eyes. Possibly a bit cleverer.”
“Not difficult, that,” Arthur says with a sigh.
They keep walking, with periodic pauses to use the beaver-noise maker and entice the chicks and lamb to make their sounds. The chicks are easy enough - all it takes is a little jostling of the basket - while the lamb is a bit less cooperative. They’re both reluctant to actually harm the thing, but finally Merlin discovers that it will object quite vociferously to being allowed at the tail of Merlin’s belt only for him to back out of its reach.
“I wonder what the creature eats,” Merlin muses after one such break.
“Roasted prince, I imagine,” Arthur mutters.
“Nah, that’d be a rubbish diet,” Merlin says; Arthur turns, mouth open and expression highly affronted, but Merlin ignores him, “I mean, how many princes can there possibly be? There’s no way a population could sustain itself like that, unless each one only needs to eat, say, once in a century, and that’s not very practical either-”
“Merlin,” Arthur interrupts, staring over Merlin’s shoulder.
“-maybe it’s royalty in general, Uther’s probably a bit stringy by now so I can see how they’d give him a miss, but if you include-”
“Merlin,” Arthur repeats, bending down to gather the lamb into his arms.
“-well, no, even that wouldn’t be enough, you need to maintain a breeding population-”
“Merlin!”
“What?”
“Run.”
Merlin turns, blinks, turns back. They run.
Eventually they stop running, when it becomes clear that the chicken-sheep-beaver thing isn’t so much running them down as keeping pace with them and eyeing them suspiciously, inasmuch as it is possible for something with the face of a chicken to have distinguishable expressions.
“Breeding population?” Arthur asks, after they’ve slowed to a more reasonable pace and caught their breaths.
“Oh, well, yes. You can’t just have two of them and breed their children and expect everything to be fine, I mean, royalty do it and look how that-”
“Oi!”
“Sorry,” says Merlin, not sounding the slightest bit repentant. “But it’s true. Bloke next village over from Ealdor tried it with a pair of goats once, and it was fine the first two generations, right, but then the babies started coming out with the wrong number of legs, or stillborn, or just not right in the head.”
“How can you tell that a goat is wrong in the head?” Arthur demands.
“You do not want to know,” Merlin says, sounding so serious that Arthur decides it may be best to take his word on the matter.
“But anyway,” Merlin continues, “these things must eat something other than just royalty, otherwise they’d never be able to sustain a population.”
“How do you know they’re not inbred, though? Maybe this one is wrong in the head, it isn’t as though we have much of a basis for comparison.”
Merlin stops, staring at Arthur.
“What?” Arthur asks.
“Nothing, it’s just, that was actually a good point,” Merlin says, smirking. Arthur rolls his eyes and thumps Merlin’s shoulder, which sets the chicks off again, which prompts the chicken-beaver-sheep thing to creep up a bit closer, looking unhappy.
“…How far is that cliff now?” Merlin asks, eyeing it warily.
“Another mile or so, I think. So stop upsetting the chicks.”
“They were fine until you-”
“Never mind, let’s just - we’ll keep it quiet, shall we? Not provoke one another.”
“Right.”
“Right.”
(The silence lasts all of five minutes, but at least Arthur manages to refrain from making his displeasure known physically for the duration of the journey.)
“Go on then, entice it over the cliff,” Arthur says when they arrive. Merlin stares at him, incredulous.
“Me? What am I supposed to do?”
“I don’t know! Didn’t Gaius tell you?”
“Gaius said ‘here, Merlin, this device makes the sound of a baby beaver when you-‘”
“Didn’t he tell you anything else?”
“No! You were there, remember? You were staring at my-” Merlin stops, suddenly, blushing, and Arthur looks away quickly.
“Er. Yes. Of course,” Arthur says.
They have a prolonged awkward silence.
The lamb bleats. The beaver-sheep-chicken thing, which has tried to hide itself behind a tree that would struggle to conceal a creature half its size, pokes its head out to glare at them.
“We could throw the basket over the cliff?” Arthur suggests.
“What? No! What would you do if someone threw your babies over a cliff?”
“I don’t know, I haven’t any babies!”
“Three words. Fire. Shooting. Tail.”
“Three words? Fire-shooting ought to have a hyphen, surely.”
“Two words with a hyphen are still two words.”
“Do they even have hyphens where you come from? You probably learned to write with a stick and some dirt, you’re hardly likely to be an authority on advanced punctuation-”
“And your tutors probably let you put apostrophes wherever you damn well pleased because you’re the prince!”
They take a moment to glare at one another, at which point the beaver-sheep-chicken thing emerges from behind its tree and starts stalking towards them.
“Merlin, go and hide behind a rock,” Arthur says quietly.
“I’m not leaving you to be burnt,” Merlin says, not moving.
“There is nothing you can do to stop it if it does attack me, and I won’t have you killed.”
(This conversation progresses in a manner about as productive as that of every other conversation Merlin and Arthur have ever had on the same subject.)
After quite a bit of arguing over the relative worth of their lives, the creature’s likely intelligence, Merlin’s upbringing, Arthur’s ability to attract peril, and whose fault it is that Gaius didn’t give them better instructions, they come up with a plan. The plan involves a tree overhanging the cliff, a length of rope from Merlin’s bag tied to the basket of chicks at one end and a branch at the other, some strategically placed foliage, and, while Merlin arranges all of this, Arthur prancing around looking tasty in order to distract the creature.
The plan is a success. (Well, mostly.) Merlin sits in the tree and tugs on the rope to jostle the basket of chicks, which is dangling from the overhanging branch and hidden by the foliage laid out just at the cliff’s edge. The beaver-chicken-sheep thing, upon hearing the chicks’ noises, abandons Arthur and charges toward them, straight through the foliage and over the edge of the cliff.
This would all be very well indeed except that the creature, rather dismayed by this falling over a cliff business, puts its fire-shooting tail into action, sending out a jet of flame which startles Merlin so much he falls from the tree.
“Merlin!” Arthur screams, and dives for the mess of foliage at the edge of the cliff - and finds Merlin dangling from the swaying chick basket, the contents of which are objecting loudly. (Somewhere far before, the sheep-beaver-chicken thing hears their cries, laments that it does not have the wings of some aerodynamically competent species, and resolves to consider cross-breeding with griffins.)
“Hi,” Merlin says, his grin a bit mad and his voice pitched slightly higher than normal. Arthur breathes a heavy sigh of relief, and doesn’t even bother to say something scathing, just waits until the basket swings in closer to the edge of the cliff and grabs it so Merlin can jump back to the ground.
Arthur silently unties the basket from the tree, hands it to Merlin, retrieves the lamb, (which had been neglected in the commotion, and took the opportunity to eat something that may have even been a natural part of the ovine diet,) and starts marching back towards Camelot.
Merlin follows along quietly for a few minutes, then says,
“So… you kissed me.”
“You started it!” Arthur replies immediately, and then grimaces.
“Sure, I’m not denying that, but… You kissed me, Arthur.”
“I thought we weren’t talking about this.”
“We said we’d talk about it later. Creature’s sorted. I think this qualifies as later.”
“Fine,” Arthur huffs. He stops, turns around, and crosses his arms, all of which might have just a wee bit more gravitas if he didn’t have to wrangle the lamb’s leash in order to do it. “What is it that you want to say, exactly?”
“You kissed me,” Merlin says, obviously trying to look blank but with hints of eagerness and nerves bleeding in around the edges of the expression.
“Yes, we’ve established that, your point is?”
“Wouldyouliketodoitagain?”
“…”
“I said-”
“I heard you.”
“And?”
“…”
“…Didn’t expect this to be such a difficult question,” Merlin mutters, and starts walking again - only for Arthur to grab his shoulder, spin him around, and crash their mouths together.
This kiss is, frankly, almost as bad as the first in terms of (complete and utter lack of) finesse. Plus there’s the fact that the chicks in the basket are cheeping in distress at being jostled and trapped between their bodies, and the lamb is taking advantage of their proximity and distraction by having another go at Merlin’s tunic. No one passes out this time, though, which probably qualifies as an improvement.
“Okay?” Arthur asks, a bit breathless, when they part. (They don’t go very far; Arthur keeps his forehead pressed against Merlin’s, and he keeps his gaze on Merlin’s mouth. Because he can’t keep it any higher without going cross-eyed.)
“Yeah,” Merlin says, also a bit breathless.
“I don’t want to talk about it, I just want to-”
“Yeah,” Merlin agrees, and kisses Arthur again. This time it’s soft, gentle; not a kiss to be commemorated in story and song, but not a disaster, either.
Arthur has one hand at Merlin’s waist, the other on his shoulder. Both of Merlin’s are still occupied with the basket.
“I should put this down,” Merlin says, stepping back with an apologetic look on his face. He does, and as he’s straightening up again, Arthur laughs.
“What?” Merlin asks, eyeing Arthur suspiciously. Arthur gestures at the basket and says,
“Destiny and chicken.”
“What?”
“Never mind. Come here.”
He tugs Merlin in close with an arm around his waist. Merlin drapes his arms around Arthur’s shoulders, and they stare at each other for a moment without speaking. Then Arthur says,
“No more falling from cliffs.”
“Fine with me,” Merlin says.
“And no going all funny about this, we’re both men, we needn’t-”
“No objections here.”
“And no-”
“Arthur?”
“What?”
“No more talking,” Merlin says.
This kiss, well, this one might warrant some commemoration. Nothing epic, but a nice vignette might do it, or a succinct bit of verse. Something about the sweet, fresh taste of Arthur’s mouth, (he may have stolen some mint leaves from the kitchens before they set out this morning,) or the tender way Merlin’s fingers stroke Arthur’s neck, or the pleased sounds they both make when their tongues meet. Some discussion of the brush of their noses as Arthur tilts his head to deepen the kiss, and the press of their bodies, too close for uncertainty to remain between them; perhaps an allusion to the many other kisses that are surely still to come.
(The lamb trying to eat Arthur’s hair after he tugs them both to the ground can most likely be left out of it. As can the loss of the beaver-noise maker when Merlin sheds his trousers. And the later argument about who gets to sleep on which side of Arthur’s bed, culminating in a pillow fight.)
(Some mention of happily-ever-afters, however, would not be out of place.)