fic: The Course Of True Love Never Did Run Smooth
Title: The Course Of True Love Never Did Run Smooth
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Arthur/Merlin
Spoilers: None whatsoever
Summary: AU. The Merlin cast in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Very little actual Shakespeare, more a comedy of errors. -
-
Lance chooses to tell Merlin he's been sacked less than a month from opening night at a really, very nice restaurant and Merlin had more been entertaining nebulous ideas of it being a date, rather than a world-ending, career-ruining bombshell.
"What?!" Merlin says, maybe a little too loudly, and a waiter looks pointedly at them and sniffs. "But--"
"Yes," says Lance. "Sacked."
"But can't we--"
"No."
"Why--"
"Uther."
"Oh," says Merlin. "Shit."
"I know."
Lance is quiet then, but Merlin doesn't say anything because he can feel the truth bubbling beneath the silence and he knows that, if he waits a while, Lance will tell him everything anyway.
"It's my fault," says Lance, eventually, when Merlin has eaten nearly all of his pasta in nonchalance. "I lied on my references. I've never even been to drama school."
Merlin feels like the meal he can't afford has just dropped through the bottom of his stomach. Lance is one of the best actors Merlin has ever seen, no joke, and there isn't anyone else in perhaps the entire world that could play Demetrius like Lance could.
"But the play starts in three weeks!" Merlin says, hoping that his voice hasn't gone past shrill and into something only dogs can hear. "You're the Demetrius to my Lysander. It's A Midsummer Night's Dream, for god's sake, this could be the most important play of your life. Why did you have to go and lie on your fucking references, you twat?"
Merlin knows that his ears are going red in that way they always do when he's upset, but at least he knows he's got a reason to be, because this is quite possibly the worst thing Lance could have pulled right now. Merlin can't even imagine playing Lysander without Lance as Demetrius, it's just wrong in his head, and that has nothing to do with the fact that Lance is a great actor and everything to do with the fact that he's a great friend, kind and loyal, and Merlin would never have dreamed that Lance had hidden this from him and picked now, of all times, to reveal it and get himself kicked out of the company.
"I'm sorry," Lance says, as if he knows it's not enough.
"It's okay," Merlin replies. It's not. They both know that there aren't any understudies up to filling his place, that, with less than a month to go, it's a miracle that the play hasn't been cancelled entirely. "What's going to happen now?"
"I think I'll go abroad. America, perhaps. Uther said he's getting someone in to fill my part. Don't know who, it was sort of lost in amongst him telling me I'd never work in theatre again."
"When are you leaving?" Merlin doesn't even bother asking if he's going to leave. Lance has never really been that grounded anyway. Always restless, always wanting something more, something different.
"Tomorrow. Time is money, and all that."
Merlin helps him pack, before going out and getting ridiculously drunk. They remember all the best bits of their friendship, all the funny moments, all the facebook disasters, and when Lance says goodbye in the morning, a cab waiting to take him to the airport, they both cry.
(but only a little)
When Merlin finally gets into the rehearsal studio, hungover and upset, he finds half the cast milling around, clutching coffee and looking generally as haggard as he feels. Gwen looks on the verge of tears, Morgana keeps patting her arm, and Merlin joins in, asks what's wrong.
"Have you seen Lance at all?" she says, hiccupping a little on the name.
"Well, yeah, actually. We-- erm...He..." he realises, too late, that Lance has left for America, spent his last hours with Merlin, and not told Gwen any of this. "Uh, no. Never mind."
Morgana glares at him, but mercifully stays silent, and offers Gwen another tissue. Merlin feels that he should email Lance and tell him that, should he ever come back, getting with Gwen might never be an option, seeing as she probably won't ever forgive him for this. Morgana certainly won't.
Morgana is sarky with him all day, pulling off Hermia's indignance with far too much credibility.
"Oh, when she is angry, she is keen and shrewd," Gwen is meant to sneer, but today it is half-hearted at best. "She was a vixen when she went to school, and though she be but little, she is fierce."
"Little again?" says Morgana, turning to Merlin more in anger than appropriate desperation. "Nothing but 'low' and 'little'? Why will you suffer her to flout me thus? Let me come to her."
Merlin grabs her arm before she launches herself at Gwen and she grips him just as hard, fingernails digging into his tendons. "Get you gone, you dwarf," Merlin snarls at Morgana. "You minimus of hind'ring knot-grass made, you bead, you acorn."
There is a beat, and then everyone freezes as they realise that no one is there to read Demetrius' line.
Uther, still in-scene as Oberon, clears his throat and begins to speak the missing lines, but Morgana interrupts him.
"When are we getting a new Demetrius?" she demands, and the rest of the cast is thankful because Morgana, despite being a woman, is the only one with the balls to stand up to him.
"Soon," is all Uther says, ignoring her continuing objections.
One of the fairies stands in for Demetrius for the rest of the day's rehearsals, but Merlin keeps forgetting his lines and his cues because he's so used to Lance's voice prompting him, and it's not the same at all.
-
Merlin consoles himself by going out on the lash with Will and the girls and doing inadvisable things involving jaegermeister, fishnet stockings and a digital camera, so when he crawls into rehearsals the next morning, hungover for the second day in a row, he is in an entirely disagreeable mood and therefore unable to cope with anything other than reading the right lines (if in the wrong order) and drinking coffee.
Unfortunately, this is the morning that Lance's replacement arrives, who demands more of Merlin than the above two activities.
"Hullo," says the replacement, and a more sober Merlin would judge him to be arrogant, disgustingly charming and generally a twat just from that greeting, but it is half past eight in the morning and Merlin has only consumed half the caffeine he needs to shake his hangover, so he foolishly reserves judgement.
"Hi," says Merlin, still not tired enough to miss how ridiculously gorgeous this bloke is. Like, prince-charming-perfect and it's not, not fair. "Who are you?"
"Arthur," he says, holding out his hand. Merlin doesn't shake it, and so it is withdrawn not with disappointment, but with condescension, as if Arthur isn't the kind of person to expect handshakes from those who are barely classed as human.
"And why are you here?" Merlin knows he's coming off a bit rude, but none of the rest of the cast is here yet to ask the important questions and also, rather selfishly, Merlin wants to flirt with this gorgeous bloke and that will never happen if Morgana appears with her spectacular cleavage and distracts him.
"I'm the emergency replacement for Demetrius," says Arthur. "My father called me as soon as it all blew up. I took a train down from Edinburgh, I finished a different performance of Demetrius there a fortnight ago."
"What?" Merlin asks, sure there was something in that sentence he should pay attention to. "What was that last bit?"
"I did the same role two weeks--"
"No, not that. The other thing--your dad."
"My father? I came down here as soon as I could, because he sounded bad-tempered on the phone and that means he'll be utterly unbearable in person."
"Yeah," Merlin says, noncommittally, because he's getting a horrible sinking feeling in his stomach and it's not the ill-advised bacon sandwich he scarfed down twenty minutes ago. "What did you say your surname was, again?"
"I didn't," says Arthur, sneering slightly, "It's Pendragon."
Merlin doesn't want to flirt with this gorgeous bloke anymore. Morgana and her magnificent breasts can have him. It is too much for Uther to replace the brilliant Lance with an equally stunning young actor, as well as garnishing it with an unrivalled display of nepotism by bringing in his son.
He just stares at Arthur for a moment and wonders if it will be too offensive to ignore him and go in search of a vending machine, but then the rest of the cast appear en masse, banishing any vague hope of a further injection of caffeine. The others don't appear to really notice Arthur because Uther is commanding all the attention, pointing and shouting, and Merlin barely hears, "Lovers to studio three!" before he's shoved into studio three with Arthur, the girls and Gaius, the assistant director.
Morgana and her chest take a liking to Arthur in the beginning, while Gwen seems alternately charmed and anxious, but that all flies out the window when Arthur halts their rehearsal of a scene and says,
"You know, this would be better, I think, if Lysander were a bit angrier."
"That's not beyond the realms of possibility," says Merlin, through gritted teeth. He tries to catch Gaius' eye, but the wizened git is purposefully looking at his script too intently to notice.
While Arthur turns on Gwen and starts 'suggesting improvements', Merlin and Morgana have a short conference in which they decide that although Arthur is undoubtedly a very good actor and possibly the only person in the country that can save their play, he is also a dick and has no right to change things a month before opening night just because he's the director's son.
Things get worse later, when Will is brought in to do the end of act three, scene two and Arthur criticises his placement on the stage, for Christ's sake, and unwittingly condemns himself to universal hatred for the rest of his natural life.
-
Will bitches to Merlin during lunch.
"What is this shit?" he says. "Who the fuck does this clown think he is, the Queen of Sheba?"
"I think he thinks he's Uther's son," replies Merlin. "Which is true, so perhaps we can forgive him."
"Not bloody likely. Being the son of a ruthless dictator does not excuse you from being a dick. It should have acted like reverse-psychology, you know--'Oh, god, I must never grow old and become that man."
"It does, unfortunately, mean that Uther will notice if we try and get rid of him."
"Crucify him, more like."
The cast last another twenty-four hours before cornering Merlin at lunch the next day while Arthur is having a meeting with the directors.
"You have to do something, Merlin," commands Morgana. The cast all nod fervently behind her. Merlin clutches his Boots' Meal Deal to his chest and tries to back away.
"What?" he protests, though weakly. "Why me?"
"Because," she says, "You're his closest co-star," --entirely untrue and by which Merlin takes to mean that he is the biggest pushover-- "And you're a boy, so you can go and do manly things together."
"Like?"
"Take him out for a drink. Break it to him gently," says Gwen. Some of the fairies behind her shift in a way that indicates they would rather the news were broken to him less than gently.
"You can't do this to me," Merlin says. "I thought you were my friends-- You can't make me tell the director's son where to stick it."
"Lets have a vote," suggests Will. "All those in favour of Merlin taking the princeling for a drink?"
The cast all raise their hands.
"And all those against?"
Merlin tries to raise his hand, but they glare him into submission.
"Oh, all right," he says. "But I'll take this moment to inform you that this is highly unfair and undemocratic and you are all fascist pigs."
He steels himself for the extension of the olive branch closer to the end of the day, anticipating a great deal of embarrassing cajoling, but the whole ordeal suddenly becomes much easier than he thought when they have their first scene together with Hippolyta and he has to nearly drag Arthur from the scene.
"I had no idea you and Sophia had ever met before."
"Met?" says Arthur, after drinking half of his pint in one go, ensconced in the darkest corner of the nearest pub. "That doesn't even begin to cover it."
Merlin thinks that should have come out as arrogant and boastful (Sophia is the kind of beautiful only previously seen in pre-Raphealite paintings), but Arthur says it with a kind of almost shudder and he'd said his lines to Hippolyta with barely veiled distrust. Sophia had been shaking so hard in anger she'd dropped a prop, a ceramic vase, and rehearsal had been halted while the shards were swept up.
"That bad?" he offers, because there's not much more he can ask without seeming rude or nosey.
Arthur just snorts ungracefully before finishing his beer and changing the subject to football, which is something Merlin can identify with and is probably one of those 'manly things' Morgana was talking about.
"It's so refreshing to be back in London where there's team diversity," Arthur says. "I've been in Scotland for the past year. There, they don't even ask what team you support. They just say: 'Rangers or Celtic?'"
"I'm more of a rugby person, myself," says Merlin, then drowns the next sentence in his beer because he'd been about to say something inappropriately homo about muscled sportsmen in tight shorts.
They have a short argument regarding the merits of each sport, and Merlin manfully manages to hold his tongue concerning rugby players and their uniforms, and by the end of the evening, four beers and an hour and a half later, he thinks he might have come to the very worrying conclusion that Arthur is, in fact, quite a nice guy.
With moments of imbecilic foolhardiness, but nevertheless a nice guy.
Understandably, Merlin does the sensible thing--invites Arthur out at the weekend and does not broach the subject of his inappropriate stage decorum at all.
-
Equally understandably, none of the cast believe him.
After another fraught day of rehearsal in the same studio as Arthur's boundless enthusiasm, they pull Merlin into the same pub, into roughly the same seat, and interrogate him under the guise of 'a quiet drink'.
"There's only one reasonable explanation for this," says Will. "Merlin has been tainted by the dark side. We can't take anything he says for truth--whatever comes out of his mouth is just enemy propaganda."
"You're being stupid," Merlin tries to say, but Morgana overrides him.
"We'll just have to put up with him," she says, and all the other occupants of the table except Merlin look morose. "And Merlin, too, now that he's all traitorous."
Merlin spends the rest of the week trying to persuade deaf ears that Arthur isn't as bad as they think he is, but by the weekend, everyone's sick of it, even himself. So it's a change to spend another evening with Arthur, to consciously talk about anything but the play and convince himself that all these funny ideas he's been having about Arthur aren't just beer-induced fairytales.
Arthur prefers Thai to Chinese, and Merlin has no objections, so they eat yellow curry in front of the rugby in Merlin's little flat, which is another new manly activity Merlin's not really familiar with because his best friends are two women and a gay man, but it's strangely comfortable. The banter between them is a bit wittier than Merlin's used to and Arthur's smile is beginning to make him go weak at the knees, but that's all right because Lance used to do that to him too--used to do that to everyone, a little.
-
Part 2
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Arthur/Merlin
Spoilers: None whatsoever
Summary: AU. The Merlin cast in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Very little actual Shakespeare, more a comedy of errors. -
-
Lance chooses to tell Merlin he's been sacked less than a month from opening night at a really, very nice restaurant and Merlin had more been entertaining nebulous ideas of it being a date, rather than a world-ending, career-ruining bombshell.
"What?!" Merlin says, maybe a little too loudly, and a waiter looks pointedly at them and sniffs. "But--"
"Yes," says Lance. "Sacked."
"But can't we--"
"No."
"Why--"
"Uther."
"Oh," says Merlin. "Shit."
"I know."
Lance is quiet then, but Merlin doesn't say anything because he can feel the truth bubbling beneath the silence and he knows that, if he waits a while, Lance will tell him everything anyway.
"It's my fault," says Lance, eventually, when Merlin has eaten nearly all of his pasta in nonchalance. "I lied on my references. I've never even been to drama school."
Merlin feels like the meal he can't afford has just dropped through the bottom of his stomach. Lance is one of the best actors Merlin has ever seen, no joke, and there isn't anyone else in perhaps the entire world that could play Demetrius like Lance could.
"But the play starts in three weeks!" Merlin says, hoping that his voice hasn't gone past shrill and into something only dogs can hear. "You're the Demetrius to my Lysander. It's A Midsummer Night's Dream, for god's sake, this could be the most important play of your life. Why did you have to go and lie on your fucking references, you twat?"
Merlin knows that his ears are going red in that way they always do when he's upset, but at least he knows he's got a reason to be, because this is quite possibly the worst thing Lance could have pulled right now. Merlin can't even imagine playing Lysander without Lance as Demetrius, it's just wrong in his head, and that has nothing to do with the fact that Lance is a great actor and everything to do with the fact that he's a great friend, kind and loyal, and Merlin would never have dreamed that Lance had hidden this from him and picked now, of all times, to reveal it and get himself kicked out of the company.
"I'm sorry," Lance says, as if he knows it's not enough.
"It's okay," Merlin replies. It's not. They both know that there aren't any understudies up to filling his place, that, with less than a month to go, it's a miracle that the play hasn't been cancelled entirely. "What's going to happen now?"
"I think I'll go abroad. America, perhaps. Uther said he's getting someone in to fill my part. Don't know who, it was sort of lost in amongst him telling me I'd never work in theatre again."
"When are you leaving?" Merlin doesn't even bother asking if he's going to leave. Lance has never really been that grounded anyway. Always restless, always wanting something more, something different.
"Tomorrow. Time is money, and all that."
Merlin helps him pack, before going out and getting ridiculously drunk. They remember all the best bits of their friendship, all the funny moments, all the facebook disasters, and when Lance says goodbye in the morning, a cab waiting to take him to the airport, they both cry.
(but only a little)
When Merlin finally gets into the rehearsal studio, hungover and upset, he finds half the cast milling around, clutching coffee and looking generally as haggard as he feels. Gwen looks on the verge of tears, Morgana keeps patting her arm, and Merlin joins in, asks what's wrong.
"Have you seen Lance at all?" she says, hiccupping a little on the name.
"Well, yeah, actually. We-- erm...He..." he realises, too late, that Lance has left for America, spent his last hours with Merlin, and not told Gwen any of this. "Uh, no. Never mind."
Morgana glares at him, but mercifully stays silent, and offers Gwen another tissue. Merlin feels that he should email Lance and tell him that, should he ever come back, getting with Gwen might never be an option, seeing as she probably won't ever forgive him for this. Morgana certainly won't.
Morgana is sarky with him all day, pulling off Hermia's indignance with far too much credibility.
"Oh, when she is angry, she is keen and shrewd," Gwen is meant to sneer, but today it is half-hearted at best. "She was a vixen when she went to school, and though she be but little, she is fierce."
"Little again?" says Morgana, turning to Merlin more in anger than appropriate desperation. "Nothing but 'low' and 'little'? Why will you suffer her to flout me thus? Let me come to her."
Merlin grabs her arm before she launches herself at Gwen and she grips him just as hard, fingernails digging into his tendons. "Get you gone, you dwarf," Merlin snarls at Morgana. "You minimus of hind'ring knot-grass made, you bead, you acorn."
There is a beat, and then everyone freezes as they realise that no one is there to read Demetrius' line.
Uther, still in-scene as Oberon, clears his throat and begins to speak the missing lines, but Morgana interrupts him.
"When are we getting a new Demetrius?" she demands, and the rest of the cast is thankful because Morgana, despite being a woman, is the only one with the balls to stand up to him.
"Soon," is all Uther says, ignoring her continuing objections.
One of the fairies stands in for Demetrius for the rest of the day's rehearsals, but Merlin keeps forgetting his lines and his cues because he's so used to Lance's voice prompting him, and it's not the same at all.
-
Merlin consoles himself by going out on the lash with Will and the girls and doing inadvisable things involving jaegermeister, fishnet stockings and a digital camera, so when he crawls into rehearsals the next morning, hungover for the second day in a row, he is in an entirely disagreeable mood and therefore unable to cope with anything other than reading the right lines (if in the wrong order) and drinking coffee.
Unfortunately, this is the morning that Lance's replacement arrives, who demands more of Merlin than the above two activities.
"Hullo," says the replacement, and a more sober Merlin would judge him to be arrogant, disgustingly charming and generally a twat just from that greeting, but it is half past eight in the morning and Merlin has only consumed half the caffeine he needs to shake his hangover, so he foolishly reserves judgement.
"Hi," says Merlin, still not tired enough to miss how ridiculously gorgeous this bloke is. Like, prince-charming-perfect and it's not, not fair. "Who are you?"
"Arthur," he says, holding out his hand. Merlin doesn't shake it, and so it is withdrawn not with disappointment, but with condescension, as if Arthur isn't the kind of person to expect handshakes from those who are barely classed as human.
"And why are you here?" Merlin knows he's coming off a bit rude, but none of the rest of the cast is here yet to ask the important questions and also, rather selfishly, Merlin wants to flirt with this gorgeous bloke and that will never happen if Morgana appears with her spectacular cleavage and distracts him.
"I'm the emergency replacement for Demetrius," says Arthur. "My father called me as soon as it all blew up. I took a train down from Edinburgh, I finished a different performance of Demetrius there a fortnight ago."
"What?" Merlin asks, sure there was something in that sentence he should pay attention to. "What was that last bit?"
"I did the same role two weeks--"
"No, not that. The other thing--your dad."
"My father? I came down here as soon as I could, because he sounded bad-tempered on the phone and that means he'll be utterly unbearable in person."
"Yeah," Merlin says, noncommittally, because he's getting a horrible sinking feeling in his stomach and it's not the ill-advised bacon sandwich he scarfed down twenty minutes ago. "What did you say your surname was, again?"
"I didn't," says Arthur, sneering slightly, "It's Pendragon."
Merlin doesn't want to flirt with this gorgeous bloke anymore. Morgana and her magnificent breasts can have him. It is too much for Uther to replace the brilliant Lance with an equally stunning young actor, as well as garnishing it with an unrivalled display of nepotism by bringing in his son.
He just stares at Arthur for a moment and wonders if it will be too offensive to ignore him and go in search of a vending machine, but then the rest of the cast appear en masse, banishing any vague hope of a further injection of caffeine. The others don't appear to really notice Arthur because Uther is commanding all the attention, pointing and shouting, and Merlin barely hears, "Lovers to studio three!" before he's shoved into studio three with Arthur, the girls and Gaius, the assistant director.
Morgana and her chest take a liking to Arthur in the beginning, while Gwen seems alternately charmed and anxious, but that all flies out the window when Arthur halts their rehearsal of a scene and says,
"You know, this would be better, I think, if Lysander were a bit angrier."
"That's not beyond the realms of possibility," says Merlin, through gritted teeth. He tries to catch Gaius' eye, but the wizened git is purposefully looking at his script too intently to notice.
While Arthur turns on Gwen and starts 'suggesting improvements', Merlin and Morgana have a short conference in which they decide that although Arthur is undoubtedly a very good actor and possibly the only person in the country that can save their play, he is also a dick and has no right to change things a month before opening night just because he's the director's son.
Things get worse later, when Will is brought in to do the end of act three, scene two and Arthur criticises his placement on the stage, for Christ's sake, and unwittingly condemns himself to universal hatred for the rest of his natural life.
-
Will bitches to Merlin during lunch.
"What is this shit?" he says. "Who the fuck does this clown think he is, the Queen of Sheba?"
"I think he thinks he's Uther's son," replies Merlin. "Which is true, so perhaps we can forgive him."
"Not bloody likely. Being the son of a ruthless dictator does not excuse you from being a dick. It should have acted like reverse-psychology, you know--'Oh, god, I must never grow old and become that man."
"It does, unfortunately, mean that Uther will notice if we try and get rid of him."
"Crucify him, more like."
The cast last another twenty-four hours before cornering Merlin at lunch the next day while Arthur is having a meeting with the directors.
"You have to do something, Merlin," commands Morgana. The cast all nod fervently behind her. Merlin clutches his Boots' Meal Deal to his chest and tries to back away.
"What?" he protests, though weakly. "Why me?"
"Because," she says, "You're his closest co-star," --entirely untrue and by which Merlin takes to mean that he is the biggest pushover-- "And you're a boy, so you can go and do manly things together."
"Like?"
"Take him out for a drink. Break it to him gently," says Gwen. Some of the fairies behind her shift in a way that indicates they would rather the news were broken to him less than gently.
"You can't do this to me," Merlin says. "I thought you were my friends-- You can't make me tell the director's son where to stick it."
"Lets have a vote," suggests Will. "All those in favour of Merlin taking the princeling for a drink?"
The cast all raise their hands.
"And all those against?"
Merlin tries to raise his hand, but they glare him into submission.
"Oh, all right," he says. "But I'll take this moment to inform you that this is highly unfair and undemocratic and you are all fascist pigs."
He steels himself for the extension of the olive branch closer to the end of the day, anticipating a great deal of embarrassing cajoling, but the whole ordeal suddenly becomes much easier than he thought when they have their first scene together with Hippolyta and he has to nearly drag Arthur from the scene.
"I had no idea you and Sophia had ever met before."
"Met?" says Arthur, after drinking half of his pint in one go, ensconced in the darkest corner of the nearest pub. "That doesn't even begin to cover it."
Merlin thinks that should have come out as arrogant and boastful (Sophia is the kind of beautiful only previously seen in pre-Raphealite paintings), but Arthur says it with a kind of almost shudder and he'd said his lines to Hippolyta with barely veiled distrust. Sophia had been shaking so hard in anger she'd dropped a prop, a ceramic vase, and rehearsal had been halted while the shards were swept up.
"That bad?" he offers, because there's not much more he can ask without seeming rude or nosey.
Arthur just snorts ungracefully before finishing his beer and changing the subject to football, which is something Merlin can identify with and is probably one of those 'manly things' Morgana was talking about.
"It's so refreshing to be back in London where there's team diversity," Arthur says. "I've been in Scotland for the past year. There, they don't even ask what team you support. They just say: 'Rangers or Celtic?'"
"I'm more of a rugby person, myself," says Merlin, then drowns the next sentence in his beer because he'd been about to say something inappropriately homo about muscled sportsmen in tight shorts.
They have a short argument regarding the merits of each sport, and Merlin manfully manages to hold his tongue concerning rugby players and their uniforms, and by the end of the evening, four beers and an hour and a half later, he thinks he might have come to the very worrying conclusion that Arthur is, in fact, quite a nice guy.
With moments of imbecilic foolhardiness, but nevertheless a nice guy.
Understandably, Merlin does the sensible thing--invites Arthur out at the weekend and does not broach the subject of his inappropriate stage decorum at all.
-
Equally understandably, none of the cast believe him.
After another fraught day of rehearsal in the same studio as Arthur's boundless enthusiasm, they pull Merlin into the same pub, into roughly the same seat, and interrogate him under the guise of 'a quiet drink'.
"There's only one reasonable explanation for this," says Will. "Merlin has been tainted by the dark side. We can't take anything he says for truth--whatever comes out of his mouth is just enemy propaganda."
"You're being stupid," Merlin tries to say, but Morgana overrides him.
"We'll just have to put up with him," she says, and all the other occupants of the table except Merlin look morose. "And Merlin, too, now that he's all traitorous."
Merlin spends the rest of the week trying to persuade deaf ears that Arthur isn't as bad as they think he is, but by the weekend, everyone's sick of it, even himself. So it's a change to spend another evening with Arthur, to consciously talk about anything but the play and convince himself that all these funny ideas he's been having about Arthur aren't just beer-induced fairytales.
Arthur prefers Thai to Chinese, and Merlin has no objections, so they eat yellow curry in front of the rugby in Merlin's little flat, which is another new manly activity Merlin's not really familiar with because his best friends are two women and a gay man, but it's strangely comfortable. The banter between them is a bit wittier than Merlin's used to and Arthur's smile is beginning to make him go weak at the knees, but that's all right because Lance used to do that to him too--used to do that to everyone, a little.
-
Part 2