Arthur and the Pornbats 3/? - The Ride Home, Day Two
~ Chapter One ~ ~ Chapter Two~
Rating's still at T...
Disclaimer, Pairing, Summary and other info in Chapter One.
A/N: >:) Enjoy!
The next morning was…awkward.
They both remembered the dreams…the ones they had before they both woke up, and the ones they had after they’d gone back to sleep - which, on the whole, were far more explicit.
Arthur was never going to be able to watch Merlin eat a sausage ever again.
They got ready to go in silence, and left in silence, and traveled in silence, and even the landscape and the weather seemed suited to silence. What had been bright and sparkly and vibrant was now dull and drab and grey, and both of them seemed completely focused on getting back to Camelot to ask Gaius his advice and maybe get him to mix up anti-venom, or something.
Merlin, who had had much more practice with the whole telepathy thing than Arthur, did his level best to keep their minds separate. It was difficult. Some influence was breaking down his mental barriers, and he kept getting images and scenarios broadcast into his brain. To be fair, images and scenarios were being broadcast from his brain too, but mostly they were just improvements on the ones he was getting. And, anyway, he had to admit to a certain pleasure at hearing some of the strangled coughs that his images and scenarios produced from Arthur.
The bite on his wrist was itching something fierce by midmorning. Merlin kept looking at it to see if it had grown any red bumps, but it was still as smooth as the morning before. Well, except for the long, red, angry nail-marks he’d been leaving there all day. It certainly didn’t help his concentration any.
At midday, they had lunch, fought off a crowd of bandits, got a tad excited and hugged one another when the bandits were all either dead or had run away, and then ended up on either sides of their own horses, embarrassed and not wanting to talk about it.
Until, at least, Arthur turned around and came face-to-face with their guides from the cave.
“You!” Arthur yelled, loud enough that Merlin came running from the other side of his horse. “What have you done to us?”
“You willingly paid the price,” the one in the middle spoke first, and seemed a little defensive.
“This is nothing new to you,” another said with a shrug. “We merely opened your minds to the feelings and thoughts that had been there all along.”
Merlin and Arthur very carefully didn’t look at one another.
“How do you make it stop?” Merlin demanded.
The third woman looked slightly sad, as though she was seeing something tragic. “It can be ended only when the price has been paid in full,” she said.
“And when will that be?” Arthur asked.
The women said nothing, and said it eloquently.
“Who are you?” Merlin tried again. “What do you want from us?”
“The urges will get stronger,” the first woman said suddenly, ignoring Merlin’s question. “You will not be able to deny your feelings. If by some fate you do, we will have to exact the remainder of our price in another way.”
Their eyes glowed in the sunlight, which was damned creepy in its own right.
“How?” Arthur asked.
The three women stepped forward. They moved with an odd gait, graceful on the ground, but with the impression that they would very much rather be in the air - and very soon would be.
“Do not deny your feelings, young Pendragon,” the one in the middle said. “It will only make them stronger.”
“So…if we acknowledge them, act on them…they’ll stop?”
The three women grinned.
“We didn’t say that.”
And then they were gone. They just vanished. Without the courtesy of a chant, or waved arms, or puff of smoke. They were simply gone as though they’d never been there to begin with.
Arthur swore - loudly. He looked at Merlin, who was smirking slightly. He grinned back, until they both went red and looked away.
The telepathy thing wasn’t all bad, Arthur thought some time later as they finished laying out the bodies of the bandits. For instance, Merlin had had a brief warning that the bandits were there, moments before they jumped out, and Arthur had gotten that information immediately, without having to resort to the spoken word and alerting their foes. It would be easy, he realized, to slip into complacency.
But magic was magic, and magic was banned in Camelot, and sometimes Arthur wondered if his father wouldn’t just have them burned at the stake, rather than find some sort of counter spell.
“I don’t think he will,” Merlin said, having picked up on Arthur’s thoughts.
“Stay out of my head, Merlin,” Arthur barked back. He was still embarrassed by the hug earlier, especially because he usually wasn’t given to hugging anyone in excitement.
“I would if I could,” Merlin said, not at all upset by Arthur’s tone of voice. He understood where it was coming from. “Believe me. You could try no thinking so loudly, though. At that volume, I could hear you all the way to bloody Camelot.”
“Speaking of which, we need to get going.”
Merlin nodded, made sure his saddle bags were secured, and then went around to offer Arthur a leg up onto his horse. Arthur seemed about to refuse, and then accepted. It was, after all, one of Merlin’s duties. Even if having Merlin that close to him made his spine tingle.
They set off at a gallop to make up for time lost fighting bandits
That night was pretty much the same as the one before it. They made camp, cooked what was left of the doe, saw to the horses and went to sleep in separate beds with a fire between them (both real and metaphorical).
Dreams bounced back and forth between them as they tossed and turned in their beds on either side of the fire. They weren’t always the explicit ones that were the cause of Arthur’s distrust of sausages, either. Some of them were quite normal, by dream standards, a miss-mash of imagery that made next to no sense. And some of them were just plain odd.
In one of the oddest, Arthur took a flying leap off a cliff that bore a striking resemblance to the Cliffs of Ewe, only to be snatched out of the air by a giant owl that screeched at him in Merlin’s voice. He was deposited back on land, and then the owl became Merlin, only Merlin was much older, and taller, and stronger, and had better hair, and antlers growing out of his head.
In the dream, Arthur didn’t seem to think there was anything wrong with this - this is what Merlin actually looked like, after all. Golden eyes, antlers, good hair, and a cloak of feathers; a forest god, almost. Ageless. Beautiful. Arthur found himself kneeling.
The forest-god-who-was-Merlin spoke in a voice as golden as the sun. “Get up, you idiot!”
“Why?”
“It’s time to wake up, Arthur. Arthur!”
He opened his eyes. Merlin was leaning over him, eyes large and dark.
Still half asleep, Arthur smiled to see his face. He reached up as though let his fingers trail over the arch of Merlin’s cheekbones.
Merlin’s eyes closed slightly, apologetically, as though he wished he could allow the contact, as though he wanted to lean into the touch.
We’re surrounded, Merlin said directly into Arthur’s mind. The bandits…the ones that escaped went for their friends. They came back in force.
You could have said that first, Arthur replied petulantly. He dropped his hand.
“Let me up,” Arthur said aloud, and rose. What kind of force? He added to Merlin.
At least fifty. The ones we met today were a scouting party.
There were men standing on the far side of the fire, large, angry men who probably didn’t bathe more than once a year. They all had swords, managed to swagger while standing still, and were wearing grubby leather clothes.
Yuk, Arthur said on their private link. They smell like a pig’s sty.
You have a plan to get us out of this, right? Merlin replied, though he agreed with the prince’s assessment of their captors.
I’m working on it.
“The skinny one tells me you’re Arthur Pendragon of Camelot,” the obvious leader said, pushing a man forward. Arthur recognized him from this afternoon. He’d been called Runt by the others. Arthur had let him go, had shown him mercy. And this was how he repaid that?
“Runt is correct,” Arthur replied. “I am on a quest. A friend is gravely ill, and we must bring her the medicine to cure her.”
The leader laughed. “Runt! So you were telling the truth. We’ll fetch a fine ransom for ‘em after all. Bring ‘em!”
Smelly bandits darted forward and hauled Merlin and Arthur to their feet. Someone else grabbed their horses and another tied their hands together and gathered up their weapons.
“A fine way you repay our kindness,” Arthur said, glaring at the skinny man they’d let go earlier. “It’s a three day ride to Camelot,” Arthur added to the leader. “We must get to our friend as soon as possible. Please; allow us to continue on our way, and I give you my word; you will receive a reward.”
That’s your plan? Merlin raised an eyebrow.
Arthur glared at him. Best I can come up with, under the circumstances.
Merlin snorted. Prat.
Despite the danger of their situation, Arthur tossed Merlin a grin.
The leader of the bandits looked back and forth between them, wondering what conversation they could be having without words. He pretended to consider Arthur’s proposal, and then shook his head. “No,” he said. “I will send someone to negotiate for a much higher ransom. King Uther may not negotiate with bandits, but I think he will when he knows I hold his only son.”
“Then you’re dreaming,” Arthur replied, much more confidently than he felt, Merlin knew. “Your only hope of reward is to return me and my servant unharmed to the gates of Camelot.”
The leader clearly didn’t believe Arthur, and so bundled Arthur and Merlin up and carted them off to their main bandit camp, wherever that was.
On the way, Arthur was growing more and more worried about Merlin. His servant was obviously wrestling with some interior debate, but whatever it was didn’t - for once - get sent directly into Arthur’s mind.
What’s bothering you? Arthur asked. He was really getting the hang of this mind-to-mind communication thing. Pity it was banned in Camelot.
How far would you be willing to go to…Merlin trailed off, and seemed unwilling to speak.
To what, Merlin?
Well…doesn’t a situation like this make you wish you had magic?
You mean beyond the fact that I seem to be compelled to fondle your well-formed backside?
Merlin didn’t say anything for a long moment, and then: My backside is well formed?
That’s not the point, Arthur said defensively. And that’s just the spell that those cave women put on us under talking, so don’t go getting any ideas.
Ideas are not what I lack, Merlin replied with a hint of a mental smile. And your backside isn’t bad either. What I mean is, hypothetically speaking, if one of us were to - oh, I dunno - know a spell or two that could rip everyone here but us to pieces, would you use it?
No, Arthur replied after a long silence. Magic comes at too great a price for that. We’re walking proof. Besides which, the chaos that drives the magic you would have me use would too soon consume us.
I didn’t say I would use it, Merlin replied, going on the defensive himself.
Good. Then don’t, Arthur shot back.
Arthur could feel the guilt radiating off Merlin from where he was, but he didn’t press the issue. For one, he’d just trod on a very sharp rock and was cursing steadily, and for another, they were arriving at the bandit’s camp.
The bandit’s camp had in it, among other more campy things, a rickety old woman named Nerys who cooked and cleaned for the leader. She took one look at Merlin and Arthur, wailed about doom for three to five minutes, and then prostrated herself before them, begging for forgiveness from the Once and Future King and Lord Emrys respectively.
“Don’t mind ‘er,” the leader of the bandits said. “She’s gone off in ‘er ‘ead, if you know what I mean. But she makes a mean stew, so we keep ‘er ‘round.” The rest of the bandits laughed.
Merlin and Arthur said nothing, and Merlin very carefully didn’t think about the fact that he’d heard both of those names before (though no one had called him ‘lord’ anything before…that gave him a bit of a warm feeling, at least until he caught Arthur’s expression).
They were given a hut-tent thingy for the night. Merlin wasn’t quite sure how to classify it, except that it had guards to make sure they wouldn’t do a runner, and a lock on the ‘door’ and wooden bars on the inside, but was mostly made of cloth. They were divested of their weapons and bags, but Merlin was allowed to stay with Arthur because - as the bandits’ leader said sarcastically - all princes need their servants.
Then they were left alone.
In a small room.
Together.
“I know that man,” Arthur said a while later. Merlin, who was on the other side of the tent and trying very, very hard not to inhale, looked up. He welcomed the distraction. The crazy cave women were right; the feelings and urges were getting stronger.
“Who is he?” Merlin asked.
“He used to be a knight of Camelot, if you can believe it,” Arthur said. “When I was a boy. He stole a box of my mother’s jewels, so my father stripped him of his rank and title and sent him out, homeless, into the world.”
“Ah.”
“They aren’t going to let us go,” Arthur continued. “He won’t let us go. He’ll wait until we’re about to be handed over, and then shoot us in the back with a crossbow. He’s that sort of man.”
“What’s his name?”
“Can’t remember. But I know that face.”
The memory blossomed in Merlin’s head as though it belonged to him. The man striding away through the crowd that’d gathered to see his sentence passed. The girl he’d hit to get her to move out of the way. Arthur, not more than seven, enraged by this act of cruelty, running after him, and the man picking him up and tossing him aside like so much trash…
Merlin found himself quivering with righteous indignation. Not even the remembered moment of the crowd nearly taking the man apart for harming their Golden Boy of a prince seemed to temper it.
“Get some rest,” Arthur said, turning away from Merlin. “Dawn’s not far off, and we’re going to need all of our strength.”
He didn’t add ‘not just to escape’. He didn’t have to. Merlin understood.
Suddenly, the cage seemed much too small.
A/N: Still good? Don't worry, the porn is coming (pun not intended)
Rating's still at T...
Disclaimer, Pairing, Summary and other info in Chapter One.
A/N: >:) Enjoy!
The next morning was…awkward.
They both remembered the dreams…the ones they had before they both woke up, and the ones they had after they’d gone back to sleep - which, on the whole, were far more explicit.
Arthur was never going to be able to watch Merlin eat a sausage ever again.
They got ready to go in silence, and left in silence, and traveled in silence, and even the landscape and the weather seemed suited to silence. What had been bright and sparkly and vibrant was now dull and drab and grey, and both of them seemed completely focused on getting back to Camelot to ask Gaius his advice and maybe get him to mix up anti-venom, or something.
Merlin, who had had much more practice with the whole telepathy thing than Arthur, did his level best to keep their minds separate. It was difficult. Some influence was breaking down his mental barriers, and he kept getting images and scenarios broadcast into his brain. To be fair, images and scenarios were being broadcast from his brain too, but mostly they were just improvements on the ones he was getting. And, anyway, he had to admit to a certain pleasure at hearing some of the strangled coughs that his images and scenarios produced from Arthur.
The bite on his wrist was itching something fierce by midmorning. Merlin kept looking at it to see if it had grown any red bumps, but it was still as smooth as the morning before. Well, except for the long, red, angry nail-marks he’d been leaving there all day. It certainly didn’t help his concentration any.
At midday, they had lunch, fought off a crowd of bandits, got a tad excited and hugged one another when the bandits were all either dead or had run away, and then ended up on either sides of their own horses, embarrassed and not wanting to talk about it.
Until, at least, Arthur turned around and came face-to-face with their guides from the cave.
“You!” Arthur yelled, loud enough that Merlin came running from the other side of his horse. “What have you done to us?”
“You willingly paid the price,” the one in the middle spoke first, and seemed a little defensive.
“This is nothing new to you,” another said with a shrug. “We merely opened your minds to the feelings and thoughts that had been there all along.”
Merlin and Arthur very carefully didn’t look at one another.
“How do you make it stop?” Merlin demanded.
The third woman looked slightly sad, as though she was seeing something tragic. “It can be ended only when the price has been paid in full,” she said.
“And when will that be?” Arthur asked.
The women said nothing, and said it eloquently.
“Who are you?” Merlin tried again. “What do you want from us?”
“The urges will get stronger,” the first woman said suddenly, ignoring Merlin’s question. “You will not be able to deny your feelings. If by some fate you do, we will have to exact the remainder of our price in another way.”
Their eyes glowed in the sunlight, which was damned creepy in its own right.
“How?” Arthur asked.
The three women stepped forward. They moved with an odd gait, graceful on the ground, but with the impression that they would very much rather be in the air - and very soon would be.
“Do not deny your feelings, young Pendragon,” the one in the middle said. “It will only make them stronger.”
“So…if we acknowledge them, act on them…they’ll stop?”
The three women grinned.
“We didn’t say that.”
And then they were gone. They just vanished. Without the courtesy of a chant, or waved arms, or puff of smoke. They were simply gone as though they’d never been there to begin with.
Arthur swore - loudly. He looked at Merlin, who was smirking slightly. He grinned back, until they both went red and looked away.
The telepathy thing wasn’t all bad, Arthur thought some time later as they finished laying out the bodies of the bandits. For instance, Merlin had had a brief warning that the bandits were there, moments before they jumped out, and Arthur had gotten that information immediately, without having to resort to the spoken word and alerting their foes. It would be easy, he realized, to slip into complacency.
But magic was magic, and magic was banned in Camelot, and sometimes Arthur wondered if his father wouldn’t just have them burned at the stake, rather than find some sort of counter spell.
“I don’t think he will,” Merlin said, having picked up on Arthur’s thoughts.
“Stay out of my head, Merlin,” Arthur barked back. He was still embarrassed by the hug earlier, especially because he usually wasn’t given to hugging anyone in excitement.
“I would if I could,” Merlin said, not at all upset by Arthur’s tone of voice. He understood where it was coming from. “Believe me. You could try no thinking so loudly, though. At that volume, I could hear you all the way to bloody Camelot.”
“Speaking of which, we need to get going.”
Merlin nodded, made sure his saddle bags were secured, and then went around to offer Arthur a leg up onto his horse. Arthur seemed about to refuse, and then accepted. It was, after all, one of Merlin’s duties. Even if having Merlin that close to him made his spine tingle.
They set off at a gallop to make up for time lost fighting bandits
That night was pretty much the same as the one before it. They made camp, cooked what was left of the doe, saw to the horses and went to sleep in separate beds with a fire between them (both real and metaphorical).
Dreams bounced back and forth between them as they tossed and turned in their beds on either side of the fire. They weren’t always the explicit ones that were the cause of Arthur’s distrust of sausages, either. Some of them were quite normal, by dream standards, a miss-mash of imagery that made next to no sense. And some of them were just plain odd.
In one of the oddest, Arthur took a flying leap off a cliff that bore a striking resemblance to the Cliffs of Ewe, only to be snatched out of the air by a giant owl that screeched at him in Merlin’s voice. He was deposited back on land, and then the owl became Merlin, only Merlin was much older, and taller, and stronger, and had better hair, and antlers growing out of his head.
In the dream, Arthur didn’t seem to think there was anything wrong with this - this is what Merlin actually looked like, after all. Golden eyes, antlers, good hair, and a cloak of feathers; a forest god, almost. Ageless. Beautiful. Arthur found himself kneeling.
The forest-god-who-was-Merlin spoke in a voice as golden as the sun. “Get up, you idiot!”
“Why?”
“It’s time to wake up, Arthur. Arthur!”
He opened his eyes. Merlin was leaning over him, eyes large and dark.
Still half asleep, Arthur smiled to see his face. He reached up as though let his fingers trail over the arch of Merlin’s cheekbones.
Merlin’s eyes closed slightly, apologetically, as though he wished he could allow the contact, as though he wanted to lean into the touch.
We’re surrounded, Merlin said directly into Arthur’s mind. The bandits…the ones that escaped went for their friends. They came back in force.
You could have said that first, Arthur replied petulantly. He dropped his hand.
“Let me up,” Arthur said aloud, and rose. What kind of force? He added to Merlin.
At least fifty. The ones we met today were a scouting party.
There were men standing on the far side of the fire, large, angry men who probably didn’t bathe more than once a year. They all had swords, managed to swagger while standing still, and were wearing grubby leather clothes.
Yuk, Arthur said on their private link. They smell like a pig’s sty.
You have a plan to get us out of this, right? Merlin replied, though he agreed with the prince’s assessment of their captors.
I’m working on it.
“The skinny one tells me you’re Arthur Pendragon of Camelot,” the obvious leader said, pushing a man forward. Arthur recognized him from this afternoon. He’d been called Runt by the others. Arthur had let him go, had shown him mercy. And this was how he repaid that?
“Runt is correct,” Arthur replied. “I am on a quest. A friend is gravely ill, and we must bring her the medicine to cure her.”
The leader laughed. “Runt! So you were telling the truth. We’ll fetch a fine ransom for ‘em after all. Bring ‘em!”
Smelly bandits darted forward and hauled Merlin and Arthur to their feet. Someone else grabbed their horses and another tied their hands together and gathered up their weapons.
“A fine way you repay our kindness,” Arthur said, glaring at the skinny man they’d let go earlier. “It’s a three day ride to Camelot,” Arthur added to the leader. “We must get to our friend as soon as possible. Please; allow us to continue on our way, and I give you my word; you will receive a reward.”
That’s your plan? Merlin raised an eyebrow.
Arthur glared at him. Best I can come up with, under the circumstances.
Merlin snorted. Prat.
Despite the danger of their situation, Arthur tossed Merlin a grin.
The leader of the bandits looked back and forth between them, wondering what conversation they could be having without words. He pretended to consider Arthur’s proposal, and then shook his head. “No,” he said. “I will send someone to negotiate for a much higher ransom. King Uther may not negotiate with bandits, but I think he will when he knows I hold his only son.”
“Then you’re dreaming,” Arthur replied, much more confidently than he felt, Merlin knew. “Your only hope of reward is to return me and my servant unharmed to the gates of Camelot.”
The leader clearly didn’t believe Arthur, and so bundled Arthur and Merlin up and carted them off to their main bandit camp, wherever that was.
On the way, Arthur was growing more and more worried about Merlin. His servant was obviously wrestling with some interior debate, but whatever it was didn’t - for once - get sent directly into Arthur’s mind.
What’s bothering you? Arthur asked. He was really getting the hang of this mind-to-mind communication thing. Pity it was banned in Camelot.
How far would you be willing to go to…Merlin trailed off, and seemed unwilling to speak.
To what, Merlin?
Well…doesn’t a situation like this make you wish you had magic?
You mean beyond the fact that I seem to be compelled to fondle your well-formed backside?
Merlin didn’t say anything for a long moment, and then: My backside is well formed?
That’s not the point, Arthur said defensively. And that’s just the spell that those cave women put on us under talking, so don’t go getting any ideas.
Ideas are not what I lack, Merlin replied with a hint of a mental smile. And your backside isn’t bad either. What I mean is, hypothetically speaking, if one of us were to - oh, I dunno - know a spell or two that could rip everyone here but us to pieces, would you use it?
No, Arthur replied after a long silence. Magic comes at too great a price for that. We’re walking proof. Besides which, the chaos that drives the magic you would have me use would too soon consume us.
I didn’t say I would use it, Merlin replied, going on the defensive himself.
Good. Then don’t, Arthur shot back.
Arthur could feel the guilt radiating off Merlin from where he was, but he didn’t press the issue. For one, he’d just trod on a very sharp rock and was cursing steadily, and for another, they were arriving at the bandit’s camp.
The bandit’s camp had in it, among other more campy things, a rickety old woman named Nerys who cooked and cleaned for the leader. She took one look at Merlin and Arthur, wailed about doom for three to five minutes, and then prostrated herself before them, begging for forgiveness from the Once and Future King and Lord Emrys respectively.
“Don’t mind ‘er,” the leader of the bandits said. “She’s gone off in ‘er ‘ead, if you know what I mean. But she makes a mean stew, so we keep ‘er ‘round.” The rest of the bandits laughed.
Merlin and Arthur said nothing, and Merlin very carefully didn’t think about the fact that he’d heard both of those names before (though no one had called him ‘lord’ anything before…that gave him a bit of a warm feeling, at least until he caught Arthur’s expression).
They were given a hut-tent thingy for the night. Merlin wasn’t quite sure how to classify it, except that it had guards to make sure they wouldn’t do a runner, and a lock on the ‘door’ and wooden bars on the inside, but was mostly made of cloth. They were divested of their weapons and bags, but Merlin was allowed to stay with Arthur because - as the bandits’ leader said sarcastically - all princes need their servants.
Then they were left alone.
In a small room.
Together.
“I know that man,” Arthur said a while later. Merlin, who was on the other side of the tent and trying very, very hard not to inhale, looked up. He welcomed the distraction. The crazy cave women were right; the feelings and urges were getting stronger.
“Who is he?” Merlin asked.
“He used to be a knight of Camelot, if you can believe it,” Arthur said. “When I was a boy. He stole a box of my mother’s jewels, so my father stripped him of his rank and title and sent him out, homeless, into the world.”
“Ah.”
“They aren’t going to let us go,” Arthur continued. “He won’t let us go. He’ll wait until we’re about to be handed over, and then shoot us in the back with a crossbow. He’s that sort of man.”
“What’s his name?”
“Can’t remember. But I know that face.”
The memory blossomed in Merlin’s head as though it belonged to him. The man striding away through the crowd that’d gathered to see his sentence passed. The girl he’d hit to get her to move out of the way. Arthur, not more than seven, enraged by this act of cruelty, running after him, and the man picking him up and tossing him aside like so much trash…
Merlin found himself quivering with righteous indignation. Not even the remembered moment of the crowd nearly taking the man apart for harming their Golden Boy of a prince seemed to temper it.
“Get some rest,” Arthur said, turning away from Merlin. “Dawn’s not far off, and we’re going to need all of our strength.”
He didn’t add ‘not just to escape’. He didn’t have to. Merlin understood.
Suddenly, the cage seemed much too small.
A/N: Still good? Don't worry, the porn is coming (pun not intended)