[Fic] Love in the Time of Scholar-a - for cor_leonis_1961
Title: Love in the Time of Scholar-a
Author: itachitachi
Recipient: cor_leonis_1961
Pairing(s)/Character(s): Arthur/Merlin, some confused Arthur/Gwen and Gwen/Merlin
Warnings: n/a
Spoilers: character from 2x01 mentioned
Rating: R
Word Count: 9,063
Summary: In which there is something resembling a modern AU. Merlin characters as professors (except for Geoffrey of Monmouth, who is a respected academic source).
Author's Note: Thanks go to I, T, and R for betaing, and to A, B, and the f-list for additional support (i.e. listening to me whine). Cor_Leonis, I truly hope you like this despite the fact that it does your prompt no justice, and that in some small way it helps you to have a happier solstice. :)
Disclaimer: This is a work of fanfiction - none of this ever happened. No copyright infringement is intended. No profit is made from this work. Please observe your local laws with regards to the age-limit and content of this work.
In a land of myth, a millennia or two after the time of legend, the destiny of a great university rests on the shoulders of a young professor.
His name...
"Merlin," the young man says brightly, "Merlin Emrys. I've recently finished my doctorate over at Ealdor and just got a position here at Camelot. I'll be sharing your office!"
Wary, Arthur says, "Arthur Pendragon."
Merlin leans over and extends a hand to shake, apparently forgetting that his arms are full of papers, and spills what appear to be the Camelot University Library's entire collection of working papers in medieval history, unbound and unstapled, all over Arthur's desk, lap, and cup of hot tea.
Arthur looks down.
"Erm," says Merlin.
+
"How did he get hired?" Arthur hisses over the phone to Morgana as he scrubs at the tea stain on his sleeve. "He's the clumsiest person I've ever laid eyes on! Can he even read a book without accidentally ripping it in half?"
"Arthur, you haven't given him a chance," she tells him. (He can hear the rolling of her eyes, which is not just unsettling but also uncalled for.) "Even I've heard of some of the research he's done on the early magical perspective. Why don't you look him up? He's quite brilliant."
"Brilliant, you say," Arthur mutters, and watches across the room as Merlin trips over the wheels of his swivel chair and drops his box of office supplies.
+
"Thank you for helping me with, um, the boxes and stuff," Merlin is saying to Gwen, who looks altogether too charmed by him and his bright-eyed, tongue-tied mannerisms. Gwen's never looked at Arthur like that. He would have noticed. She's always sort of ignored him, no matter how many post-it invitations for coffee he's stuck on her desk.
"It was my pleasure," she says, smiling and fiddling with some of the pencils in Merlin's stupid little elephant-shaped mug. "Have you been to Camelot before? Do you know your way around the university? The city?"
"I probably don't know either as well as you do," Merlin says, bashfully. "I haven't been in town very long, after all."
Gwen ducks her head, smiling in that endearing, embarrassed sort of way. (The pair of them look ridiculous, squirming and blushing at each other the way they are.) "Why don't I show you around sometime, then?" she says hopefully. "Tomorrow, maybe?"
"Sure!" Merlin says.
And then they proceed to stand there for another ten minutes deciding on a time ("noon tomorrow?") and where to meet ("by the statue of founder Sigan, you know where that is, right?") and then they somehow decide to make even more small talk and Arthur is going to go insane if he has to bear the injustice of watching Gwen take up with a younger man right in front of him.
And it's not even an attractive younger man, Arthur thinks morosely, not with the ratty trousers and ill-fitting argyle sweater he has on. The most noticeable things about him are his ears. They look faintly hazardous, perched on either side of his head as if they don't quite belong there-as if perhaps Merlin uses them to direct airplanes. Gwen must not care about the atrocious size of them. It can't be that she hasn't noticed.
"If you ever want to stop by, I'm just downstairs, in archaeology," she tells Merlin, smiling.
"Really? Archaeology?" Merlin asks curiously. He's also smiling. "How did you...?"
"It's silly really," Gwen says, waving it off but looking pleased. "My father found a magical artefact on one of his construction projects when I was little, and I was just fascinated. I wanted to be an archaeologist ever since. Years of education later, a few digs, and," she shrugs happily, "here I am."
"That's not silly at all," Merlin tells her, soft and sweet enough to make Arthur's ears bleed, and then the two of them smile at each other some more.
By the time Gwen leaves the room Arthur hasn't done a thing on his lesson plan but has managed to develop a throbbing headache, possibly from all the smiles in the vicinity but possibly from jealousy (because Gwen's always been very nice-looking, and she'd helped him once when his computer had bluescreened, and she's so knowledgeable about the history of Camelot metallurgy that he suspects if given a forge she might even be able to make a broadsword herself, which is incredible and something Arthur is more than a little jealous of, and alright maybe he really does like her but it's not as if he's about to say so). He's also gotten a twitch in his eye from constantly looking over to glare at Merlin and his stupid, girl-attracting ears.
It's not fair.
"She's nice, isn't she?" Merlin asks him, sprawling into his swivelling desk chair and looking too satisfied for Arthur's liking. "Do you know her well?"
He grunts in response and decides that this is his office, and because it is his office he has every right to ignore Merlin. Sure, maybe it's Merlin's office now too, but that's just a technicality-he's only been here a few hours. These are Arthur's walls, and Arthur's bookshelves full of marked-up and highlighted Monmouth and White, and the desk Merlin is sitting at now had always just been the place Arthur put the texts that didn't fit on his own table. It's his space, and will always be his space, so Arthur has every right to look down at his lesson plan and scribble something messy and unintelligible on it just for the sake of trying to appear busy.
"So, you're Arthur Pendragon?" Merlin asked, ignoring the fact that Arthur is ignoring him.
Arthur doesn't even dignify that with a response. The plaque on his desk with his name printed on it is clearly visible from Merlin's position. Plus, his name is on the door.
The room has his name on it.
"I've read some of your work," Merlin continues. "Um, a paper on the Monmouth archives?"
Arthur hasn't read any of Merlin's work. Hell, he hadn't even known Merlin existed until he'd walked in earlier that morning. Which is ridiculous; Arthur should have been informed well in advance if they were to be sharing a department, let alone an office. Merlin must have been taken on at extremely short notice then, which is a little curious-not that Arthur's going to ask.
"-didn't think it was an entirely accurate portrayal," Merlin is saying, and this is just Arthur's luck. He's been saddled with an officemate, and it turns out to be one who can't stop talking.
So Arthur says in his most snobbish voice, "I'm working right now," and, "Do you mind?"
It shuts Merlin up.
+
Arthur usually likes working in his office at the university and had discovered fairly early on that he spends more time there than most, a fact he takes a slightly embarrassing amount of pride in. The office here is bigger and somehow more homelike than the one in his cramped apartment, and there's something about the sensation of being surrounded by others who love what he loves that makes him just the slightest bit more comfortable. (Morgana's also threatened to gut him if she finds him regularly spending more than ten hours a day working in one location, so having two locations in which he can spend ten hours each is an easy way to spite her.)
The one thing he's liked about both his home and work offices is that in both of them he's alone.
Until now.
"Um, how late do you usually stay here?" Merlin asks, when the clock is nearing six and Arthur shows no signs of moving. He's been fidgeting for the past hour and a half, peeking up at Arthur or the clock in a manner that's apparently supposed to have been conspicuous. The rest of the building is silent.
"As late as I like," Arthur replies, not looking up from his papers. He's finished revising the schedules for his courses and has gathered a list of secondary sources to incorporate into the lessons-he can work on that and some additional research for his next article tomorrow. Right now he's in the middle of a source for the book he's writing. (It's going to be about warfare from early medieval Camelot to the unification of Albion, and how developing strategies reflected social change of the period. Arthur gets excited little butterflies in his stomach whenever he thinks about it, which-which is a lie, because no he doesn't.)
Merlin watches him for a few more moments before saying, awkwardly, "Well, I'll be going then?" He waits for Arthur to say something, but after a stubborn minute without a response, continues. "Yeah, so. Bye then. It was nice meeting you."
Arthur grunts something and turns a page.
Merlin slams the door when he leaves.
+
Arthur goes home ten minutes later, feeling quite satisfied with himself.
+
He doesn't feel quite so satisfied the next day, when Merlin makes working awkward just because he won't stop glaring. (He also keeps clicking his clicky pen, a habit that Arthur finds atrocious and disruptive.) Arthur expects some respite when Merlin leaves for lunch, but then remembers that Merlin is off to meet Gwen. Which means that he's probably going to complain about Arthur to Gwen, because, he thinks, Merlin seems like the whiny type. And if Merlin complains to Gwen, she'll never agree to go out with Arthur.
"Of course she isn't going to go out with you," Morgana says, when he calls her to confirm this, "though Merlin isn't going to have anything to do with that. You do know that if she finds out you're stalking them you won't have even an ice cube's chance in hell, right?"
"You don't know anything, Morgana," Arthur snaps. "And I'm not stalking. You're making it sound far worse than it is." Because what it is is something far more innocent; Arthur had just happened to leave for lunch immediately after Merlin, and then coincidentally found the two of them walking around campus, and then perhaps followed them to a nearby café for lunch.
"Don't delude yourself, Arthur," Morgana says, sounding unhealthily frustrated. "Walk away right now and I won't tell Gwen what you're doing."
He's peering out of his booth and around a potted plant to glare at where Gwen and Merlin are sitting, smiling dopily at each other and eating matching turkey sandwiches, but this makes him pause. "Wait," he says, "you know Gwen?"
Morgana's silent on the end of the line for a few heartbeats (enough time for Arthur's hand holding the phone to get a little sweaty), before she says in a tone of voice that Arthur has learned to fear, "In case you'd forgotten, Gwen is my best friend. I've been complaining about your bad habits and atrocious manners to her since we first took Women's Studies together in undergrad!"
Arthur blinks. He had forgotten.
"I can't believe you!" she shrieks, but Arthur is more preoccupied with the fact that this means...
"Oh god, she'll never go out with me now," he moans, and would have thudded his head upon the table in front of him if his untouched bowl of soup hadn't been there. "Is that why my post-it invitations never worked?"
"You invited her to things by post-it?" Morgana asks sceptically.
"She was always out whenever I walked by!" Arthur says, defensive.
Morgana's sigh makes a horrid, staticky noise over the phone. "You are hopeless, Arthur. She told me about those post-its. You never signed them."
"That is not true!" Arthur protests.
Morgana is silent.
"Fine, I'm a hopeless failure," Arthur groans, and actually contemplates drowning himself in the soup. "Once again, you're right and I'm wrong. Are you happy now that you've successfully demolished all hope that I will ever manage to find a girlfriend?"
"Forget girls, Arthur," Morgana says, soothingly. "Go back to your book. What's it about, again? Medieval kings and their swords?"
Arthur hangs up on her, but grudgingly admits she deserved winning the point this round. She'd probably been saving that one for weeks.
+
When they both get back to the office after lunch, Merlin's mood seems to have risen to astronomically high levels, while Arthur's has turned fouler than the stench of a troll's lair. He says barely two words in response to Merlin's occasional questions, burying his nose instead in reprints of some records preserved from a 6th century keep, until Merlin finally seems to give up.
+
"Is he always like that?" Arthur hears after a few days of the same, upon passing by the lounge on his way out to one of the libraries.
"I don't think so," Gwen's voice says curiously. "Did you do something to him? Say something?"
"Probably," replies Merlin, and his voice is glum. Arthur peers around the doorframe and spots them both standing in front of the coffeemaker, Merlin's shoulders slumped.
"It's only been a few days," Gwen says, and shifts closer to pat Merlin's shoulder. "Keep trying."
Arthur leaves them alone and goes quietly to the library, frowning all the way.
+
Working in his office is like torture. Every minute passes like treacle, and he itches whenever Merlin looks over at him. He's hyperaware of Merlin's presence in his space, which before had seemed too large but now feels too small, not enough to contain the both of them and all the distance Arthur wants between them. It's uncomfortably quiet.
It changes like this:
To: "Arthur Pendragon", pendragon.ak@camu.edu.ab
From: "Merlin Emrys", merlmrys@dmail.co.ab
Subject: Hi
You've barely said two words to me since I started working here. Did I do something to offend you?
It's waiting in Arthur's inbox when he arrives one morning, and he sits and stares at it for a while, trying to decide what to say. Merlin is already there, having arrived earlier than usual, and is trying to look completely absorbed in the papers he's stapling. It's kind of pathetic.
You're kind of pathetic, Arthur types in response.
He stares at the sentence for a few seconds, then deletes it and starts over.
Your ears offend me, Arthur types.
He stares at that one for a few more seconds, then closes the email altogether.
"If you wanted to talk to me you could have just talked to me," Arthur says. His voice is a little too loud in the silence; Merlin jumps and nearly puts a staple through his finger. When he looks up it's with eyes like a unicorn in headlights, wide and innocent and terrified and pathetic.
"I'm not going to bite you," Arthur says, a little bit more meanly than he intended. "Was there something you wanted to say to me?"
"Um," Merlin says. "Not particularly?" He looks even more anxious now.
"Then why did you email me?" Arthur asks. "I sit right across from you. If it was just because you were lonely, well, that's kind of pathetic of you."
Merlin's brows draw together as he frowns. "And that's kind of prattish of you. I guess that makes us even."
"Prattish?" Arthur repeats, disbelieving. "Did you just call me-"
"A prat?" Merlin asks, scowling. "Yes, because that's what you are." He looks back down at his desk and staples something, defiant.
"How very mature of you, Merlin," Arthur says, crossing his arms. "There simply aren't words for how impressed I am by your particular variety of childish name-calling." And then, for good measure, he looks snootily down at the Sudoku puzzle on his desk as if it's something intellectual, witty, and far beyond Merlin's ability to understand.
"You started it," Merlin protests, glaring, but Arthur raises an eyebrow at him and he flushes, pale cheeks and ears going bright pink.
Arthur laughs partly at Merlin's ears but partly because this is ridiculous, he and Merlin and what they're doing. Merlin seems to sense this because he hesitates for only a moment before joining in.
Arthur isn't quite sure why, but from that day on, they're okay. It's strange.
+
Things get better. Days in the office aren't so stilted, though they never get around to talking much. It's nearly the start of classes; they're focusing, or at least Arthur is. He still doesn't like seeing Gwen and Merlin giggling together in the halls, all but holding hands, but he keeps his 'not heartbreak, just disappointment' private.
Except from Morgana, which is a mistake.
"I suppose I liked her more than I thought," he tells her one afternoon, when he drops by the political science office block where she works. It's only three but Merlin has already left for the day and Arthur doesn't have anything else pressing to do, so he thought he might too.
"Arthur, I really don't think they're actually dating," Morgana says, not looking up.
"Really?" he says, snorting. "Then explain to me why they're constantly spending time together and sending each other silly emails."
"First of all, that sounds to me more like a sign of plain friendship than anything romantic," Morgana says, as if this notion is something that should be obvious. "Second, how do you know what sort of emails they send each other?"
"Because I hear Merlin giggling whenever he checks his inbox, it's disgusting," Arthur says. "Also, I snuck a look at his Druidmail account once when he was in the bathroom."
"You're horrible, Arthur," she sighs. "You honestly have no concept of what normal human social interaction is, do you?"
"If any of us is socially inept around here, it's Merlin," he says scornfully. "Did I tell you? He emails people who are sitting in the same room as him."
"You've told me twice already, Arthur," Morgana says, throwing her hands up and going back to the file folders on her desk in a clear sign of 'I no longer feel like dealing with you and your particular brand of lunacy'. (It's a common thing with Morgana.) "Now get out of here. Are you going home already? Good boy."
He glares at her before he leaves and thinks of going back to work just to be contrary, but doesn't.
+
The first day of classes begins in a haze of bustle and crowded halls. Arthur loves teaching more than anything, though he's never told anyone this. His first lecture goes off without a hitch, so he packs his things up to leave feeling pleased with himself and the fresh faces that had been watching him. And with life in general, actually-today it seems to be going right.
Then he walks out the door and crashes straight into Merlin, who's emerged from the lecture hall across the corridor.
He stumbles back, blinking down as Merlin's briefcase hits the floor and pops open. "Oh," he says. "Hello. Sorry."
"No, it was me," Merlin said, looking far too happy for someone who's had all his papers fall out of his bag. He bends down easily to gather it all up. "Must not have been watching-oh, have you got a class to go to?" He blinks up at Arthur, eyes blue and curious.
"No," Arthur says, and without really thinking about it, bends down to help him with the scattered papers, "I've just finished." He jerks a quick thumb at the door behind him, shrugging.
"Wow," Merlin says, beaming like a headlight, "we must be teaching right across from each other at the same time! What a coincidence!"
Arthur rolls his eyes, though can't quite keep his lips from quirking up as he shuffles the papers he's gathered. He looks down at them and reads the top of one, curious. Merlin's teaching...
"Introduction to Magical History?" Arthur asks, surprised.
"Yeah," Merlin says, and takes the papers before he's finished skimming them.
"Wasn't that part of the Magical Studies program, before?" Arthur asks. He's... surprised. He knows the Magical Studies department has been suffering cutbacks-they always are, generally-but hadn't thought that would result in the bleeding of the subject matter into the History department.
Merlin looks at him very seriously-almost too seriously, considering the tableau, with both of them crouched down in a corridor, Merlin's briefcase open between them like a secret they're sharing. "The Magical Studies department here isn't doing very well," he says. "It used to be one of the highest-ranked in the nation, you know. But the Dean's putting all the funding into history instead."
"I know that," Arthur says, uncomfortable. (He's never really liked talking about his father's policies. It always leads to questions being asked about the grants he gets, the special attention he gets, the advantages he has-or worse, his influence and the sorts of things he might be able to accomplish with it. Conversations like that get... messy.) "Your point?"
Merlin shrugs, sliding the papers back into his briefcase and snapping it shut. "If Camelot's decided to cut that department, I'd rather it get integrated into another one than disappear completely. That's all."
Arthur peers at him for a moment, at the tense slump of his shoulders, and then says, "Well, good luck."
Merlin smiles tightly at the floor.
+
It's not that Arthur has anything against the Magical Studies department. Strangely enough, he actually doesn't mind that it exists-unlike his father. Arthur believes that the field covers a lot of useful knowledge, and that there's a need for a place to teach it.
He just doesn't think that place should be the History department.
+
Merlin's quiet when Arthur next sees him in the office, but it's a glancing thing-Arthur leaves just as Merlin's arriving; their schedules don't match.
They meet again after class two days later. Arthur's packing up his things as the students quickly filter out, his seminar having run a bit late, and he's just starting to shift his mind from socio-political models to wondering if he'll run into Merlin again, when who should pop in but Merlin himself.
"I never heard what you were teaching?" he asks, looking hopeful, and that's a lame excuse to start a conversation but Arthur just says, "Theories of Unification," and Merlin nods.
Then, by unspoken mutual agreement, they go for a walk.
It's a short, tentative thing, on the main paths only because Merlin's leading and Arthur doesn't think he knows where he's going. They don't talk at first, until Merlin hesitantly asks about what Arthur's been researching in his spare time. Arthur talks about his book and the evolution of the military through the age of the sword, and Merlin hums and nods in all the right places, before asking, "so the knights-they didn't get any help from sorcerers?"
Arthur scowls a bit and says, "It was an important part of their code, Merlin, that a man would fight with all the strength in his body-"
"-but not with his mind?" Merlin says, and smiles when Arthur glowers at him.
"There were many intelligent warriors of that time, if that's what you're insinuating," Arthur says, turning up his nose. "I don't know what period you study, Merlin, but surely you must realise that."
"I focus on the unification period too," Merlin says, and is still smiling at him a bit wryly. "It's just-you mean to say your book doesn't cover the advantages of magical weaponry in use at the time?"
"It mentions the Excalibur chronicle," Arthur admits, looking away, "but I don't put much stock in those tales. There is evidence," he adds, reciting, "to support past tampering with the records, most likely by sorcerers, putting the Excalibur stories on par with other magical propaganda of the time-"
"...Magical propaganda," Merlin repeats, frowning.
"Yes," Arthur says firmly.
When Merlin raises an eyebrow and doesn't say anything, Arthur decides to pretend he's won this round.
+
It becomes something of a habit over the weeks: walking with Merlin after his seminar every other day. It's when they talk the most, though when they're together in the office Merlin will sometimes start chatting about this or that. Restaurants he's visited with Gwen and if Arthur's been there; his uncle, who teaches at Camelot too (biology or medicine or something like it, Arthur doesn't know); occasionally even about something Arthur's done, though Arthur doesn't do many things so it's hard to think of easy conversation topics.
Those days Arthur thinks back and realises that he can't remember the last time he had a long conversation about anything but his research projects with anyone but Morgana.
Perhaps she's right; maybe Arthur doesn't have any concept of normal human social interaction.
+
He tells her this.
Then he waits while she spends a long few minutes laughing her arse off.
"I feel almost bad for you now," Morgana tells him, wiping her eyes. "I always thought you did it on purpose."
He glares at her.
"Okay," she says, finally getting down to business. "So you've realised that you have about the social skills of an online conversation generator. What do you want me to do about it?"
Arthur doesn't really know. "Merlin's Merlin, but he still managed to go out with Gwen," he says, crossing his arms and not meeting Morgana's overly amused gaze. "Maybe you could tell me how someone like Merlin managed that."
"I don't think they're dating," Morgana says.
Arthur doesn't want to get into this again. About this, at least, he is right and Morgana is wrong.
"That aside, you don't even know how to talk to Merlin, and you work in the same room," Morgana says, ignoring the pointed look he is giving her to flash him one of her own. "Maybe you should start with learning how to get to know him first."
+
Just start conversations more often, and end them less, she'd said. In his head, her voice is tinny. It's not that hard.
"For you, maybe," Arthur mutters.
"What?" Merlin asks, blinking over.
"Um," Arthur says. "I was just-why are you staying in for lunch today? You're usually out." With Gwen.
"Meeting a student to talk about some things," Merlin replies easily. He kicks back a little from his desk and starts twirling in his chair. "Do you usually stay here for lunch?"
Arthur shrugs, uncomfortable. "Usually," he says. "It's more time to get things done."
"You're an absolute workaholic, aren't you," Merlin laughs. "When do you even go home?"
"When I'm finished," Arthur says.
Merlin abruptly stops the spin of his swivel chair. "Is that why?" he asks, eyes wide. "Do you get more work done when I'm not here? Is that why you're always so grouchy?"
Arthur blinks, appalled, and says, "Grouchy?" but then there's a knock, and a boy who can't possibly be any older than fifteen pokes his head in through the open doorway. His piercing blue gaze flickers straight to Merlin.
"Professor," he says, and Merlin smiles and waves him in.
They sit together at Merlin's desk and talk, quietly, about something Arthur can't quite hear-questions the boy has about the early magical societies, Arthur thinks, but doesn't dwell on it.
It's surprisingly pleasant to work with them in the room, Arthur discovers. The murmur of their voices is low and soothing, like background music. He's done with his lesson plans before he quite realises it. The boy leaves a little while after. Merlin smiles after him, but it's not long before he sighs and rubs his face with the heel of his hand.
"Something wrong?" Arthur asks.
Merlin looks at him, face smushed into his palm, and mumbles, "If Camelot's Magical Studies program was any good anymore, that kid would be in it. He'd be good at it, too. This whole situation is just..."
"Oh?" says Arthur. He doesn't know anything about it.
+
So he looks it up.
HIST 115: Introduction to Magical History, PHYS 351: Relative Laws of Life and Death, BIOL 210: Magical Creatures and Where to Find Them. They've all bled out of the MGST listing since the previous year; the Magical Studies program is now all but a skeleton.
He laughs when he finds Special and Magical Effects in Film.
Across the office, Merlin looks up.
"It's nothing," Arthur says hastily, and feels a little guilty when Merlin grins at him.
+
On their walk the following day, Arthur shows Merlin around the back of the campus and its shady, wooded paths. Merlin kicks at a rock as they walk, and tells him about the last time his uncle (the biology professor) tried cooking. It's a silly story and by the end of it Arthur finds himself smiling without quite meaning to.
Merlin grins back at him, hair ruffled from the late autumn breeze, and then asks, "What about you? Done anything interesting lately?"
"Not... really," Arthur says. Merlin doesn't stop smiling at him, but he feels awkward, like he's shoving a wedge into the previously easy flow of the conversation. "Just researching for the book. I told you."
Merlin eyes him a bit speculatively. "Adding in anything about magical weapons?" he asks.
Arthur laughs and says, "No. Get over that, will you? It doesn't fit in my outline."
"Not in your outline, or not in your history?" Merlin asks.
Arthur looks at him sharply, but Merlin's turned away to look at the trees on the other side of the path. "What's that supposed to mean?" Arthur asks. "If I can't fit it in, I can't fit it in."
"Just that maybe you're not trying to fit it in, either," Merlin says. "Magical history is still history, you know. It's still important."
"I know it's important," Arthur says, bristling. "I never said it wasn't important. You deserve to have your own department back to teach it. People ought to know about it."
Merlin glares at him for just a few moments before he seems to lose heart. "Just because I want the department back doesn't mean I think they're separate disciplines," he mutters, picking at the lowest button on his coat. "It's not like we study different histories. Magical history, non-magical history-they're all wrapped up in each other."
Arthur isn't quite sure what to make of this.
"Magical propaganda," Merlin says, not hiding the scorn in his voice. "Come on, I'm getting cold. Let's get back inside."
+
To: "Arthur Pendragon", pendragon.a@camu.edu.ab
From: "Morgana Fey", feymorgana@camu.edu.ab
Subject: Re: girls will never like you if you keep wearing those hideous sweatervests
I'm serious, Arthur. I asked her, and they are not dating.
He looks up from the sharp black and white of the text to where Gwen is sitting, perched on the edge of Merlin's desk. The two of them are nothing but flushed cheeks and bright eyes, talking animatedly, completely fixated on one another.
Arthur deletes the email, trying not to admit to himself that he's feeling sulky. Morgana doesn't know what she's talking about.
+
The term flies by. Merlin doesn't speak with him about certain things anymore, and Arthur isn't sure whether or not he should feel relieved. On one hand, he doesn't have to dwell on it all the time. On the other, he sort of does anyway: history and magic and departments that are being culled.
Merlin himself, Arthur thinks confidently, is at least one thing he doesn't have to think about.
+
But then one day their walk takes them to one of the benches near the statue of Cornelius Sigan. It's getting nearer to winter and when the wind picks up it's bitterly cold, chilling to the bone. Merlin is bundled up in a coat but his ears are fiercely red, and Arthur just has to laugh at them, delighted-they're almost glowing.
Merlin shivers, glaring like a wet cat, and before Arthur can really think about it (because he doesn't have to think about it; that's what Merlin's for) he's unwinding his own scarf, the ugly red and yellow one with Camelot's crest embroidered on the end, and twining it around Merlin's neck.
Arthur realises only as he's pulling away that the move had brought him a little too close for comfort. He'd probably been near enough for Merlin to feel Arthur's breath on his face, just a tickle on his cheek-so Arthur starts wondering about what his breath smells like, if his last meal had contained any onions, and almost doesn't notice when Merlin smiles widely at him and says, "Thanks."
"Just return it tomorrow or something," he replies, looking away-yes, keep it cool, keep it casual, act like nothing happened and you'll be fine.
Like many things, Arthur decides, if he doesn't mention it, it'll never mean anything. Not that it means anything now, because it doesn't.
He shoves the memory of his stomach's minute flip-flop to the back of his mind and thinks, perhaps this is something he'll never mention.
+
Unfortunately, his mind has other plans, as he finds out later than night.
It's a pretty ordinary dream, all things considered. Arthur is, on occasion, prone to bizarre nightly retellings of various historical events by his subconscious. It's been happening off and on for years now, and tonight isn't supposed to be any different.
The dream seems to be based on a story mentioned in the Monmouth archives, of the court sorcerer who had saved one of the pre-unification kings from an untimely death by poison. Supposedly he'd accomplished this by snatching the poisoned chalice straight from the king's hand and performing some sort of spell to turn the poison into smoke. (Arthur isn't sure he believes this particular account-he's of the belief that there hadn't been any poison at all, and that it was just the sorcerer manipulating the court into starting a war. Except there hadn't been a war, Monmouth had said, and Arthur is having a little trouble reconciling that.)
Anyway, as per usual, Arthur's dreamed himself into one of the parts-this time of the medieval king, which is nice. (Sometimes he looks back on the dreams and realises he'd been in the body of a stable boy, or worse: once he had been the queen.) The strange part is that Arthur had dreamed someone else into it as well. Merlin, into the part of the court sorcerer.
"What is the meaning of this?" Arthur asks, a straight quote from the archive text. His voice sounds faraway and deep, almost like his father's. "Sorcerer, I insist you return me the chalice."
"I cannot, my king," Merlin-the-sorcerer replies (and his voice is scratchy and old, sounding suspiciously like what Arthur's always imagined Monmouth's voice to sound like). "The wine in this cup is not what it seems, as I shall prove."
Their eyes meet for a long second, and then Merlin tips his head back and drinks from the poisoned goblet, the idiot, baring his throat for the few long swallows it takes to drain it. Arthur jumps forward and nearly grabs Merlin's arm to wrench the goblet away, but it's too late and all Arthur can do is stare, horrified. How-how-is Merlin so stupid? What kind of purpose, what reason, is there to drink poison? Isn't he supposed to be an all-knowing sorcerer? Couldn't he have just turned it into smoke?
Merlin licks his lips when he finishes, and Arthur stares tersely before asking, "Well?"
"It didn't taste very good," Merlin says, in his normal voice now, sounding confused, and then he keels over.
Poison.
The rest of the dream consists mostly of Merlin lying sweatily on a bed and moaning a lot.
+
When Arthur wakes up, the first thing he does is lean over to write Essay: investigate the role of poison in the reign of early kings? on the legal pad beside his bed.
The next thing he does is call Morgana.
"This had better be a matter of life and death," she grumbles upon picking up. "It's six in the morning on a weekend, Arthur."
"Something's happened to me," he starts.
Morgana hums and guesses, "You've had a bizarre dream that's caused you to realise that the real reason you've been jealous all this time is because you've been pining after Merlin, not Gwen?"
He is silent for approximately the time it takes to have a heart attack, then very convincingly says, "No."
"...Oh my god," she says. "You did?!"
"No, I did not," he shouts, and immediately knows he's done for.
"You did," she cackles gleefully. "This is too good. You probably had a dream about fucking him over his desk, didn't you, and now it's all you can think about!"
"I-what-over his-"
And god help him, as soon as she's said it, it becomes all he can think about.
He thinks about it as he blushes and yells at and denies and eventually hangs up on Morgana. He thinks about it, guilty, over a lunch of reheated takeaway, and then over a dinner of the same. He thinks about it all the way to Monday, when he walks into his office a little later than usual (hair still wet from his cold, cold shower) and is greeted cheerfully by Merlin's broad, early-morning smile.
"I brought your scarf back," Merlin tells him, going a little pink in the cheeks.
This time Arthur's stomach lurches too hard for him to deny. He sits down miserably, feeling nauseous.
+
Merlin is waiting for him when he leaves his lecture hall that afternoon.
"Ready for a walk?" he asks. He has Arthur's scarf in one hand and holds it out-"You didn't pick it up this morning so I just brought it," he says.
"I'm a little busy today," Arthur says, trying to smother his guilt as he takes the scarf.
"Okay," Merlin says, not seeming too perturbed, "we can just walk back to the office, then."
Frantic, Arthur searches for an excuse. "The library," he says finally. "I have to go to the library."
Maybe it's written plainly on Arthur's face, what he means, because all Merlin says to that is, "...Oh."
Arthur goes home early.
+
Sitting in his own office-his home office, the one that Merlin doesn't intrude into-is kind of miserable and sad. But that's been Arthur's recent state lately, so he doesn't think much of it.
His home office is small and cramped-there isn't really room to fit more than two books on the tiny desk (three, if he's feeling particularly creative)-but it's his single remaining private space. It's only after he's laid all the books and articles he owns on non-magical revisionism onto the floor that he realises how much of it there is, and how odd it feels that there should be so much. They were mostly gifts, he thinks, a new one from his father every Christmas or birthday for lack of any other present he might have wanted. (Arthur had been notoriously bad at communicating with his father, and his father had been notoriously bad at choosing presents without clearly communicated cues.)
He looks for the origin of the term. He knows the origin of the quote-there is evidence to support past tampering with the records, etc.-from a recent work by James Belvedere, but that isn't the first time magic has been used in conjunction with propaganda. Where is it, he wonders fiercely, and annotates new questions in the margins as he flips farther and farther back in the texts, back through the decades.
When he finds the answer lying in chapter three of his father's doctoral dissertation, he is somehow less than surprised.
+
Merlin still has lunches with Gwen and still goes on walks with Arthur between classes, still works in Arthur's office. He doesn't talk to Arthur much anywhere. Arthur itches constantly for more, but reminds himself that it's a miracle they're still doing the walks at all after how badly he'd cocked it up.
He still dreams, too, and that's the worst part. Instead of Merlin drinking poison in archaic velvet robes, it's Merlin licking at the line of Arthur's neck or at the crease of his lips, usually in nothing at all (but sometimes in one of his argyle sweaters). Instead of Merlin lying sickly and pale on a bed he's usually flushed and bent over his desk, dark head dropped forward and fingers digging into the wood, crumpling the scattered papers. (One thing that doesn't change from the first dream: Merlin is usually still sweaty and moaning.)
It gets awkward when Arthur's watching Merlin work. One minute it'll be all dipped-head, bitten bottom lip, watching slim ink-smudged fingers trace down a page, and the next it'll be wide eyes and curious frowns and gazes like Arthur. Really? Do you have to watch me like that? Aren't the naughty perverted dreams about me enough?
Arthur is an awful person.
+
Things change like this:
To: "Arthur Pendragon", pendragon.a@camu.edu.ab
From: "Merlin Emrys", merlmrys@dmail.co.ab
Did I do something? I thought we were over the whole you not talking to me thing.
It's sitting in his inbox when he walks back into the office. Merlin's across the room, pretending to be focused on reading something or other, but he's fidgeting enough that Arthur doubts he's actually seeing what he's reading. His fingers are tapping too, repetitive and sharp against the sturdy surface of his desk, and the sound bores into Arthur's brain and makes him a little crazy.
I want to fuck you over that desk, he types.
He starts backspacing almost before he's finished.
I'm hopelessly in love with you, he types.
This one borders the truth so closely that Arthur panics just looking at it, and has to delete it all before he goes into cardiac arrest.
So he just says, uncomfortable, "What are you reading?"
Merlin's looking at him the instant he starts talking, but the question makes him blink back down to the journal in his hand. "Just something my old advisor published recently," he says. "Nothing, really."
"Is it any good?" Arthur asks, because his traitorous tongue is tying and his traitorous brain is refusing to give him any but the most inane ideas for conversation.
"I don't know," Merlin says, and then pre-empts what would be Arthur's automatic snarky remark with a quick, "Not because I'm not reading it-it's just that he always writes in the most cryptic way. I can never really understand what he's saying."
"What's it about?" Arthur asks, a little curious now.
"The First Great Purge," Merlin says, looking down. "It's kind of a vicious article. I don't really agree with him about all of it. He's very..." Merlin pauses.
"What?" Arthur asks.
Merlin shrugs, smiling a bit sadly. "I dunno. He's a great thinker, and I respect him a lot, but... he can be vicious. I probably won't be working with him again, that's all."
They're silent for a moment, Arthur watching Merlin, until he gets restless and has to ask, "Is there anyone else you might consider working on something with?"
He feels awkward as soon as he's said it, but Merlin looks up at him with a soft grin and says, "Yes, I think so. If they wanted to work with me too."
+
Arthur goes to Gwen.
Not because he's desperate or anything-at least not about Merlin. No, this visit is strictly business, he tells himself, and straightens his sweatervest nervously before knocking beside her open office door.
She looks up, startled and frazzled with her glasses nearly falling off her nose, they're so low, and says, "Oh, Arthur! Come in."
He does, and says, "So those papers on the evolution of weaponry...?"
"Right here," she says, smiling, and hands him a sheet covered with names and titles. "A few chronologies and commentaries on metallurgy in the early Post-Magical period."
"Thank you," he says, sincere. He skims the page and sees Gwen's name and a few of her own works, small, at the bottom of the list like an afterthought. He smiles a little; she sees and looks down, embarrassed, but grins when she does it.
He clears his throat once; this is the hard part. "There was one more thing I wanted to ask you," he says.
"Oh?" she asks. "About your research?"
"No," he says, and concentrates on not feeling like an absolute fool. "It's about you and Merlin."
"Me and-?" she echoes.
"Yes, you and Merlin," Arthur says, crossing his arms and looking away. "I just wanted to know if you're... happy together."
She's staring at him, he can tell. His fingers tighten on his arms the longer she looks at him, and he considering just turning tail and running when, suddenly, Gwen laughs.
Arthur just looks at her, incredulous, but she's giggling furiously and has a hand clapped over her mouth.
"Sorry," she gasps, "I'm sorry-oh. That explains everything! Is this what Morgana meant?"
"What does Morgana have to do with this?" Arthur asks, scowling.
"She told me about your strange idea that Merlin and I have been dating," she said, finally managing to smother her laughter. "I thought she told you that we weren't?"
"You aren't?" Arthur asks.
"It's not that I wouldn't date him," Gwen says, "just that I'm not." She smiles at Arthur and it's not a pitying one, to Arthur's relief-though he suspects that if it had been he might have actually deserved it.
"Thank you," he says, doubly awkward. "You... thanks."
She shakes her head like it's nothing, and just keeps smiling at him. Almost like Merlin.
He leaves the room posthaste, wavering between the sort of shame that would have him locking himself in his bedroom long enough for the world to forget him, and a small, tentative bloom of hope. On one hand, the universe has been playing a trick on him for months, and he hasn't noticed despite all the people shouting at him about it.
On the other, Merlin's not dating Gwen.
+
"Merlin," Arthur says loudly, bursting into their office, except there is a problem: Merlin isn't there, so Arthur can't use the swell of confidence and adrenaline he's feeling right now to burst out with the words straightaway like he'd planned (if you could have called it a plan).
So he's forced to lie in wait instead.
He grades essays for a while. Then he gets bored and plays Solitaire a few times, before getting bored again and moving onto his collection of Sudoku and crosswords. Then he tries to work-on research, on his book outline, on lesson plans, anything-until finally he's just sitting there, staring at the phone and wondering if he should call Morgana about this.
He doesn't.
Instead he waits, watching the clock tick later and later into the afternoon, reciting silly things to himself like I like you and I really like you and Remember all the times I said your ears looked funny? Well I was really just hiding the fact that I wanted to do XXX and XXX to you over your desk-He perhaps doesn't actually say that one out loud.
Grading, games, working, waiting; he follows this routine several times and is back to grading, in the middle of giving a student called Valiant a large red F for daring to plagiarise so blatantly-I'll be notifying the Dean about this, when Merlin walks in.
Finally.
Unfortunately, any and all plans (about what to say, how to act, anything) that Arthur may have formed as he waited suddenly evaporate into thin air, leaving no trace. He can only manage a weak "hi" in response when Merlin greets him.
"Been here long?" Merlin asks, dropping his coat on the back of his chair. "It's cold out, isn't it."
"Yes," Arthur says, and stares at the back of Merlin's neck as he leans down and begins unpacking his bag. It's now or never, Arthur thinks urgently, so he says, "Merlin."
"Hmm?" Merlin asks, still buried in his bag.
"I've been thinking about something," Arthur says, chest tight.
"Mmm," Merlin tells him.
Arthur scowls, and in a rush of irritation, says, "This is important. You could at least pretend to be listening to me."
Merlin looks over his shoulder. "I am listening!" he says, eyes deceptively innocent. "You said you're thinking. Not hurting yourself, I hope?"
Arthur scowls but his heart beats a little faster-it's not fluttering or anything, just picked up its pace by an increment or two. He looks down at Valiant's rotten essay and tries not to feel like he's backing out when he says, "I was thinking-erm. Maybe you could help me with my book?"
"Really?" Merlin says, and Arthur has to look up again because Merlin sounds... kind of ridiculously hopeful actually.
"Yes," Arthur says, making something up on the spot. "Maybe, you know, expand the Excalibur chronicles to a whole chapter. We could work together on it. The magical side of warfare. You know. If you're not busy." It actually doesn't sound like a bad idea, he reflects.
"I'd love to work with you," Merlin says, seriously enough that Arthur's mouth goes dry.
"Me too," he says, a bit foolishly.
"Presumably that's why you asked me, and not someone else?" Merlin says.
Arthur swallows and says, "Yes."
Merlin looks at him, calculating, and Arthur can't move an inch; the room's gone still and tense as the times when they weren't speaking. They're not speaking now, but it's different-it just means Arthur can hear the ticking of the clock on the wall, something that's hovered underneath his consciousness until now. He hears the swell and hitch of Merlin's breathing just before:
"You're a little bit bad with people, aren't you," Merlin says, and Arthur scowls up at him a whole lot because yes, maybe he is bad with people but he's been trying, alright? Look at what a step forward he's made!
"Does that mean writing a chapter together is actually your special code for-" Merlin says, stepping hesitantly closer, "-for, um, other things you do together?"
Arthur blushes horridly and says, "Maybe," and then, "Just shut up, Merlin," and then he's standing up and Merlin's tripping across the room and they both go in circles around the furniture until they finally just kiss over Arthur's desk, Arthur's hands catching in Merlin's sweater and at the back of his neck, and Merlin's hands (first knocking over Arthur's pencil jar, and then) coming up to cradle the sides of Arthur's face, soft.
They do that for perhaps longer than is appropriate, this being a school setting, after all, and by the time they pull apart Arthur's lips are a little numb from kissing and his thighs a little numb from digging into the desk and his brain a little numb from kissing.
"After work, coffee?" Arthur asks a little breathlessly, just as Merlin asks, "After work, my house or yours?" And that leads to Merlin turning an absolutely wondrous colour.
+
The next email he gets is an obnoxious piece of spam.
To: "Arthur Pendragon", pendragon.a@camu.edu.ab
From: "Morgana Fey", feymorgana@camu.edu.ab
Subject: I never thought I'd see the day
CONGRATULATIONS ON LOSING YOUR VIRGINITY
Lies. All of it.
+
+
+
They get around to the sex on a desk eventually.
It involves rather less Merlin-bent-over-head-down-moaning than Arthur had expected. It involves quite a lot more god-Merlin-yes-harder-please.
It is also far more pleasant to fantasize about the mess that's going to be made on top of all the papers than it is to actually experience it. He currently has smudged bits of Monmouth transferred to grey print on his elbows, and something by an S. Dragon blurred around his navel. He's also made a bit of a mess all over one of the essays Merlin is supposed to be grading.
"Do you do it on purpose?" Merlin asks, throwing his hands up in the air. "Half the time you're a decent human being-but the other half, god, it's like you really try to make things difficult for me."
" This isn't my fault," Arthur says scornfully. "It's not like I aimed or something."
"Look at what you did!" Merlin yells, waving the stained paper at him. "What am I supposed to do now?!"
"Don't ask me," Arthur says. He pouts out his bottom lip so that Merlin will forgive him, but it backfires; Merlin just goes blotchy and throws the essay at him before rolling over and grabbing for his shirt.
"This is what I mean," he grumbles as he starts putting it on. "This office isn't big enough for both of us and your ego."
"I'm hurt," Arthur says, mock-wounded-and then, because watching Merlin struggle with getting his head through the snug collar of his argyle sweater is making his heart seize with unfortunate affection, adds, "You're unnecessarily cruel to me. And after I've already decided to help you on that silly quest of yours, too."
"If I'm cruel to you, it's because it's necessary," Merlin tells him. His head finally makes it through the collar of his sweater, though the neck catches on one of his ears. He fixes it with two fingers and asks, "What silly quest of mine?"
"Your silly, stupid, noble quest," Arthur says, turning away. "You know, the one to bring your department back. Unless you've picked up any others?"
Merlin is silent for just a hair too long, and Arthur looks back at him, nervous, but it's just that he's sitting there with his mouth fallen open (and nothing but his sweater on), speechless. Arthur moves forward and makes to kiss him-maybe too tentatively, because Merlin meets him before he gets there and presses his mouth to Arthur's, insistent and hot, hand at Arthur's jaw.
When they finally pull apart, out of breath, Merlin grabs Arthur's wrist and holds him there, close. "If you're really asking," he says, "I maybe might have been thinking a little bit about what this place would be like if you were the Dean."
"If I was the Dean," Arthur repeats.
Merlin nods seriously.
"...You certainly don't aim low, do you," Arthur asks, but to his horror he's already begun to contemplate it.
"No," Merlin agrees, eyeing him with a little smile. "I want the very best."
Author: itachitachi
Recipient: cor_leonis_1961
Pairing(s)/Character(s): Arthur/Merlin, some confused Arthur/Gwen and Gwen/Merlin
Warnings: n/a
Spoilers: character from 2x01 mentioned
Rating: R
Word Count: 9,063
Summary: In which there is something resembling a modern AU. Merlin characters as professors (except for Geoffrey of Monmouth, who is a respected academic source).
Author's Note: Thanks go to I, T, and R for betaing, and to A, B, and the f-list for additional support (i.e. listening to me whine). Cor_Leonis, I truly hope you like this despite the fact that it does your prompt no justice, and that in some small way it helps you to have a happier solstice. :)
Disclaimer: This is a work of fanfiction - none of this ever happened. No copyright infringement is intended. No profit is made from this work. Please observe your local laws with regards to the age-limit and content of this work.
In a land of myth, a millennia or two after the time of legend, the destiny of a great university rests on the shoulders of a young professor.
His name...
"Merlin," the young man says brightly, "Merlin Emrys. I've recently finished my doctorate over at Ealdor and just got a position here at Camelot. I'll be sharing your office!"
Wary, Arthur says, "Arthur Pendragon."
Merlin leans over and extends a hand to shake, apparently forgetting that his arms are full of papers, and spills what appear to be the Camelot University Library's entire collection of working papers in medieval history, unbound and unstapled, all over Arthur's desk, lap, and cup of hot tea.
Arthur looks down.
"Erm," says Merlin.
+
"How did he get hired?" Arthur hisses over the phone to Morgana as he scrubs at the tea stain on his sleeve. "He's the clumsiest person I've ever laid eyes on! Can he even read a book without accidentally ripping it in half?"
"Arthur, you haven't given him a chance," she tells him. (He can hear the rolling of her eyes, which is not just unsettling but also uncalled for.) "Even I've heard of some of the research he's done on the early magical perspective. Why don't you look him up? He's quite brilliant."
"Brilliant, you say," Arthur mutters, and watches across the room as Merlin trips over the wheels of his swivel chair and drops his box of office supplies.
+
"Thank you for helping me with, um, the boxes and stuff," Merlin is saying to Gwen, who looks altogether too charmed by him and his bright-eyed, tongue-tied mannerisms. Gwen's never looked at Arthur like that. He would have noticed. She's always sort of ignored him, no matter how many post-it invitations for coffee he's stuck on her desk.
"It was my pleasure," she says, smiling and fiddling with some of the pencils in Merlin's stupid little elephant-shaped mug. "Have you been to Camelot before? Do you know your way around the university? The city?"
"I probably don't know either as well as you do," Merlin says, bashfully. "I haven't been in town very long, after all."
Gwen ducks her head, smiling in that endearing, embarrassed sort of way. (The pair of them look ridiculous, squirming and blushing at each other the way they are.) "Why don't I show you around sometime, then?" she says hopefully. "Tomorrow, maybe?"
"Sure!" Merlin says.
And then they proceed to stand there for another ten minutes deciding on a time ("noon tomorrow?") and where to meet ("by the statue of founder Sigan, you know where that is, right?") and then they somehow decide to make even more small talk and Arthur is going to go insane if he has to bear the injustice of watching Gwen take up with a younger man right in front of him.
And it's not even an attractive younger man, Arthur thinks morosely, not with the ratty trousers and ill-fitting argyle sweater he has on. The most noticeable things about him are his ears. They look faintly hazardous, perched on either side of his head as if they don't quite belong there-as if perhaps Merlin uses them to direct airplanes. Gwen must not care about the atrocious size of them. It can't be that she hasn't noticed.
"If you ever want to stop by, I'm just downstairs, in archaeology," she tells Merlin, smiling.
"Really? Archaeology?" Merlin asks curiously. He's also smiling. "How did you...?"
"It's silly really," Gwen says, waving it off but looking pleased. "My father found a magical artefact on one of his construction projects when I was little, and I was just fascinated. I wanted to be an archaeologist ever since. Years of education later, a few digs, and," she shrugs happily, "here I am."
"That's not silly at all," Merlin tells her, soft and sweet enough to make Arthur's ears bleed, and then the two of them smile at each other some more.
By the time Gwen leaves the room Arthur hasn't done a thing on his lesson plan but has managed to develop a throbbing headache, possibly from all the smiles in the vicinity but possibly from jealousy (because Gwen's always been very nice-looking, and she'd helped him once when his computer had bluescreened, and she's so knowledgeable about the history of Camelot metallurgy that he suspects if given a forge she might even be able to make a broadsword herself, which is incredible and something Arthur is more than a little jealous of, and alright maybe he really does like her but it's not as if he's about to say so). He's also gotten a twitch in his eye from constantly looking over to glare at Merlin and his stupid, girl-attracting ears.
It's not fair.
"She's nice, isn't she?" Merlin asks him, sprawling into his swivelling desk chair and looking too satisfied for Arthur's liking. "Do you know her well?"
He grunts in response and decides that this is his office, and because it is his office he has every right to ignore Merlin. Sure, maybe it's Merlin's office now too, but that's just a technicality-he's only been here a few hours. These are Arthur's walls, and Arthur's bookshelves full of marked-up and highlighted Monmouth and White, and the desk Merlin is sitting at now had always just been the place Arthur put the texts that didn't fit on his own table. It's his space, and will always be his space, so Arthur has every right to look down at his lesson plan and scribble something messy and unintelligible on it just for the sake of trying to appear busy.
"So, you're Arthur Pendragon?" Merlin asked, ignoring the fact that Arthur is ignoring him.
Arthur doesn't even dignify that with a response. The plaque on his desk with his name printed on it is clearly visible from Merlin's position. Plus, his name is on the door.
The room has his name on it.
"I've read some of your work," Merlin continues. "Um, a paper on the Monmouth archives?"
Arthur hasn't read any of Merlin's work. Hell, he hadn't even known Merlin existed until he'd walked in earlier that morning. Which is ridiculous; Arthur should have been informed well in advance if they were to be sharing a department, let alone an office. Merlin must have been taken on at extremely short notice then, which is a little curious-not that Arthur's going to ask.
"-didn't think it was an entirely accurate portrayal," Merlin is saying, and this is just Arthur's luck. He's been saddled with an officemate, and it turns out to be one who can't stop talking.
So Arthur says in his most snobbish voice, "I'm working right now," and, "Do you mind?"
It shuts Merlin up.
+
Arthur usually likes working in his office at the university and had discovered fairly early on that he spends more time there than most, a fact he takes a slightly embarrassing amount of pride in. The office here is bigger and somehow more homelike than the one in his cramped apartment, and there's something about the sensation of being surrounded by others who love what he loves that makes him just the slightest bit more comfortable. (Morgana's also threatened to gut him if she finds him regularly spending more than ten hours a day working in one location, so having two locations in which he can spend ten hours each is an easy way to spite her.)
The one thing he's liked about both his home and work offices is that in both of them he's alone.
Until now.
"Um, how late do you usually stay here?" Merlin asks, when the clock is nearing six and Arthur shows no signs of moving. He's been fidgeting for the past hour and a half, peeking up at Arthur or the clock in a manner that's apparently supposed to have been conspicuous. The rest of the building is silent.
"As late as I like," Arthur replies, not looking up from his papers. He's finished revising the schedules for his courses and has gathered a list of secondary sources to incorporate into the lessons-he can work on that and some additional research for his next article tomorrow. Right now he's in the middle of a source for the book he's writing. (It's going to be about warfare from early medieval Camelot to the unification of Albion, and how developing strategies reflected social change of the period. Arthur gets excited little butterflies in his stomach whenever he thinks about it, which-which is a lie, because no he doesn't.)
Merlin watches him for a few more moments before saying, awkwardly, "Well, I'll be going then?" He waits for Arthur to say something, but after a stubborn minute without a response, continues. "Yeah, so. Bye then. It was nice meeting you."
Arthur grunts something and turns a page.
Merlin slams the door when he leaves.
+
Arthur goes home ten minutes later, feeling quite satisfied with himself.
+
He doesn't feel quite so satisfied the next day, when Merlin makes working awkward just because he won't stop glaring. (He also keeps clicking his clicky pen, a habit that Arthur finds atrocious and disruptive.) Arthur expects some respite when Merlin leaves for lunch, but then remembers that Merlin is off to meet Gwen. Which means that he's probably going to complain about Arthur to Gwen, because, he thinks, Merlin seems like the whiny type. And if Merlin complains to Gwen, she'll never agree to go out with Arthur.
"Of course she isn't going to go out with you," Morgana says, when he calls her to confirm this, "though Merlin isn't going to have anything to do with that. You do know that if she finds out you're stalking them you won't have even an ice cube's chance in hell, right?"
"You don't know anything, Morgana," Arthur snaps. "And I'm not stalking. You're making it sound far worse than it is." Because what it is is something far more innocent; Arthur had just happened to leave for lunch immediately after Merlin, and then coincidentally found the two of them walking around campus, and then perhaps followed them to a nearby café for lunch.
"Don't delude yourself, Arthur," Morgana says, sounding unhealthily frustrated. "Walk away right now and I won't tell Gwen what you're doing."
He's peering out of his booth and around a potted plant to glare at where Gwen and Merlin are sitting, smiling dopily at each other and eating matching turkey sandwiches, but this makes him pause. "Wait," he says, "you know Gwen?"
Morgana's silent on the end of the line for a few heartbeats (enough time for Arthur's hand holding the phone to get a little sweaty), before she says in a tone of voice that Arthur has learned to fear, "In case you'd forgotten, Gwen is my best friend. I've been complaining about your bad habits and atrocious manners to her since we first took Women's Studies together in undergrad!"
Arthur blinks. He had forgotten.
"I can't believe you!" she shrieks, but Arthur is more preoccupied with the fact that this means...
"Oh god, she'll never go out with me now," he moans, and would have thudded his head upon the table in front of him if his untouched bowl of soup hadn't been there. "Is that why my post-it invitations never worked?"
"You invited her to things by post-it?" Morgana asks sceptically.
"She was always out whenever I walked by!" Arthur says, defensive.
Morgana's sigh makes a horrid, staticky noise over the phone. "You are hopeless, Arthur. She told me about those post-its. You never signed them."
"That is not true!" Arthur protests.
Morgana is silent.
"Fine, I'm a hopeless failure," Arthur groans, and actually contemplates drowning himself in the soup. "Once again, you're right and I'm wrong. Are you happy now that you've successfully demolished all hope that I will ever manage to find a girlfriend?"
"Forget girls, Arthur," Morgana says, soothingly. "Go back to your book. What's it about, again? Medieval kings and their swords?"
Arthur hangs up on her, but grudgingly admits she deserved winning the point this round. She'd probably been saving that one for weeks.
+
When they both get back to the office after lunch, Merlin's mood seems to have risen to astronomically high levels, while Arthur's has turned fouler than the stench of a troll's lair. He says barely two words in response to Merlin's occasional questions, burying his nose instead in reprints of some records preserved from a 6th century keep, until Merlin finally seems to give up.
+
"Is he always like that?" Arthur hears after a few days of the same, upon passing by the lounge on his way out to one of the libraries.
"I don't think so," Gwen's voice says curiously. "Did you do something to him? Say something?"
"Probably," replies Merlin, and his voice is glum. Arthur peers around the doorframe and spots them both standing in front of the coffeemaker, Merlin's shoulders slumped.
"It's only been a few days," Gwen says, and shifts closer to pat Merlin's shoulder. "Keep trying."
Arthur leaves them alone and goes quietly to the library, frowning all the way.
+
Working in his office is like torture. Every minute passes like treacle, and he itches whenever Merlin looks over at him. He's hyperaware of Merlin's presence in his space, which before had seemed too large but now feels too small, not enough to contain the both of them and all the distance Arthur wants between them. It's uncomfortably quiet.
It changes like this:
To: "Arthur Pendragon", pendragon.ak@camu.edu.ab
From: "Merlin Emrys", merlmrys@dmail.co.ab
Subject: Hi
You've barely said two words to me since I started working here. Did I do something to offend you?
It's waiting in Arthur's inbox when he arrives one morning, and he sits and stares at it for a while, trying to decide what to say. Merlin is already there, having arrived earlier than usual, and is trying to look completely absorbed in the papers he's stapling. It's kind of pathetic.
You're kind of pathetic, Arthur types in response.
He stares at the sentence for a few seconds, then deletes it and starts over.
Your ears offend me, Arthur types.
He stares at that one for a few more seconds, then closes the email altogether.
"If you wanted to talk to me you could have just talked to me," Arthur says. His voice is a little too loud in the silence; Merlin jumps and nearly puts a staple through his finger. When he looks up it's with eyes like a unicorn in headlights, wide and innocent and terrified and pathetic.
"I'm not going to bite you," Arthur says, a little bit more meanly than he intended. "Was there something you wanted to say to me?"
"Um," Merlin says. "Not particularly?" He looks even more anxious now.
"Then why did you email me?" Arthur asks. "I sit right across from you. If it was just because you were lonely, well, that's kind of pathetic of you."
Merlin's brows draw together as he frowns. "And that's kind of prattish of you. I guess that makes us even."
"Prattish?" Arthur repeats, disbelieving. "Did you just call me-"
"A prat?" Merlin asks, scowling. "Yes, because that's what you are." He looks back down at his desk and staples something, defiant.
"How very mature of you, Merlin," Arthur says, crossing his arms. "There simply aren't words for how impressed I am by your particular variety of childish name-calling." And then, for good measure, he looks snootily down at the Sudoku puzzle on his desk as if it's something intellectual, witty, and far beyond Merlin's ability to understand.
"You started it," Merlin protests, glaring, but Arthur raises an eyebrow at him and he flushes, pale cheeks and ears going bright pink.
Arthur laughs partly at Merlin's ears but partly because this is ridiculous, he and Merlin and what they're doing. Merlin seems to sense this because he hesitates for only a moment before joining in.
Arthur isn't quite sure why, but from that day on, they're okay. It's strange.
+
Things get better. Days in the office aren't so stilted, though they never get around to talking much. It's nearly the start of classes; they're focusing, or at least Arthur is. He still doesn't like seeing Gwen and Merlin giggling together in the halls, all but holding hands, but he keeps his 'not heartbreak, just disappointment' private.
Except from Morgana, which is a mistake.
"I suppose I liked her more than I thought," he tells her one afternoon, when he drops by the political science office block where she works. It's only three but Merlin has already left for the day and Arthur doesn't have anything else pressing to do, so he thought he might too.
"Arthur, I really don't think they're actually dating," Morgana says, not looking up.
"Really?" he says, snorting. "Then explain to me why they're constantly spending time together and sending each other silly emails."
"First of all, that sounds to me more like a sign of plain friendship than anything romantic," Morgana says, as if this notion is something that should be obvious. "Second, how do you know what sort of emails they send each other?"
"Because I hear Merlin giggling whenever he checks his inbox, it's disgusting," Arthur says. "Also, I snuck a look at his Druidmail account once when he was in the bathroom."
"You're horrible, Arthur," she sighs. "You honestly have no concept of what normal human social interaction is, do you?"
"If any of us is socially inept around here, it's Merlin," he says scornfully. "Did I tell you? He emails people who are sitting in the same room as him."
"You've told me twice already, Arthur," Morgana says, throwing her hands up and going back to the file folders on her desk in a clear sign of 'I no longer feel like dealing with you and your particular brand of lunacy'. (It's a common thing with Morgana.) "Now get out of here. Are you going home already? Good boy."
He glares at her before he leaves and thinks of going back to work just to be contrary, but doesn't.
+
The first day of classes begins in a haze of bustle and crowded halls. Arthur loves teaching more than anything, though he's never told anyone this. His first lecture goes off without a hitch, so he packs his things up to leave feeling pleased with himself and the fresh faces that had been watching him. And with life in general, actually-today it seems to be going right.
Then he walks out the door and crashes straight into Merlin, who's emerged from the lecture hall across the corridor.
He stumbles back, blinking down as Merlin's briefcase hits the floor and pops open. "Oh," he says. "Hello. Sorry."
"No, it was me," Merlin said, looking far too happy for someone who's had all his papers fall out of his bag. He bends down easily to gather it all up. "Must not have been watching-oh, have you got a class to go to?" He blinks up at Arthur, eyes blue and curious.
"No," Arthur says, and without really thinking about it, bends down to help him with the scattered papers, "I've just finished." He jerks a quick thumb at the door behind him, shrugging.
"Wow," Merlin says, beaming like a headlight, "we must be teaching right across from each other at the same time! What a coincidence!"
Arthur rolls his eyes, though can't quite keep his lips from quirking up as he shuffles the papers he's gathered. He looks down at them and reads the top of one, curious. Merlin's teaching...
"Introduction to Magical History?" Arthur asks, surprised.
"Yeah," Merlin says, and takes the papers before he's finished skimming them.
"Wasn't that part of the Magical Studies program, before?" Arthur asks. He's... surprised. He knows the Magical Studies department has been suffering cutbacks-they always are, generally-but hadn't thought that would result in the bleeding of the subject matter into the History department.
Merlin looks at him very seriously-almost too seriously, considering the tableau, with both of them crouched down in a corridor, Merlin's briefcase open between them like a secret they're sharing. "The Magical Studies department here isn't doing very well," he says. "It used to be one of the highest-ranked in the nation, you know. But the Dean's putting all the funding into history instead."
"I know that," Arthur says, uncomfortable. (He's never really liked talking about his father's policies. It always leads to questions being asked about the grants he gets, the special attention he gets, the advantages he has-or worse, his influence and the sorts of things he might be able to accomplish with it. Conversations like that get... messy.) "Your point?"
Merlin shrugs, sliding the papers back into his briefcase and snapping it shut. "If Camelot's decided to cut that department, I'd rather it get integrated into another one than disappear completely. That's all."
Arthur peers at him for a moment, at the tense slump of his shoulders, and then says, "Well, good luck."
Merlin smiles tightly at the floor.
+
It's not that Arthur has anything against the Magical Studies department. Strangely enough, he actually doesn't mind that it exists-unlike his father. Arthur believes that the field covers a lot of useful knowledge, and that there's a need for a place to teach it.
He just doesn't think that place should be the History department.
+
Merlin's quiet when Arthur next sees him in the office, but it's a glancing thing-Arthur leaves just as Merlin's arriving; their schedules don't match.
They meet again after class two days later. Arthur's packing up his things as the students quickly filter out, his seminar having run a bit late, and he's just starting to shift his mind from socio-political models to wondering if he'll run into Merlin again, when who should pop in but Merlin himself.
"I never heard what you were teaching?" he asks, looking hopeful, and that's a lame excuse to start a conversation but Arthur just says, "Theories of Unification," and Merlin nods.
Then, by unspoken mutual agreement, they go for a walk.
It's a short, tentative thing, on the main paths only because Merlin's leading and Arthur doesn't think he knows where he's going. They don't talk at first, until Merlin hesitantly asks about what Arthur's been researching in his spare time. Arthur talks about his book and the evolution of the military through the age of the sword, and Merlin hums and nods in all the right places, before asking, "so the knights-they didn't get any help from sorcerers?"
Arthur scowls a bit and says, "It was an important part of their code, Merlin, that a man would fight with all the strength in his body-"
"-but not with his mind?" Merlin says, and smiles when Arthur glowers at him.
"There were many intelligent warriors of that time, if that's what you're insinuating," Arthur says, turning up his nose. "I don't know what period you study, Merlin, but surely you must realise that."
"I focus on the unification period too," Merlin says, and is still smiling at him a bit wryly. "It's just-you mean to say your book doesn't cover the advantages of magical weaponry in use at the time?"
"It mentions the Excalibur chronicle," Arthur admits, looking away, "but I don't put much stock in those tales. There is evidence," he adds, reciting, "to support past tampering with the records, most likely by sorcerers, putting the Excalibur stories on par with other magical propaganda of the time-"
"...Magical propaganda," Merlin repeats, frowning.
"Yes," Arthur says firmly.
When Merlin raises an eyebrow and doesn't say anything, Arthur decides to pretend he's won this round.
+
It becomes something of a habit over the weeks: walking with Merlin after his seminar every other day. It's when they talk the most, though when they're together in the office Merlin will sometimes start chatting about this or that. Restaurants he's visited with Gwen and if Arthur's been there; his uncle, who teaches at Camelot too (biology or medicine or something like it, Arthur doesn't know); occasionally even about something Arthur's done, though Arthur doesn't do many things so it's hard to think of easy conversation topics.
Those days Arthur thinks back and realises that he can't remember the last time he had a long conversation about anything but his research projects with anyone but Morgana.
Perhaps she's right; maybe Arthur doesn't have any concept of normal human social interaction.
+
He tells her this.
Then he waits while she spends a long few minutes laughing her arse off.
"I feel almost bad for you now," Morgana tells him, wiping her eyes. "I always thought you did it on purpose."
He glares at her.
"Okay," she says, finally getting down to business. "So you've realised that you have about the social skills of an online conversation generator. What do you want me to do about it?"
Arthur doesn't really know. "Merlin's Merlin, but he still managed to go out with Gwen," he says, crossing his arms and not meeting Morgana's overly amused gaze. "Maybe you could tell me how someone like Merlin managed that."
"I don't think they're dating," Morgana says.
Arthur doesn't want to get into this again. About this, at least, he is right and Morgana is wrong.
"That aside, you don't even know how to talk to Merlin, and you work in the same room," Morgana says, ignoring the pointed look he is giving her to flash him one of her own. "Maybe you should start with learning how to get to know him first."
+
Just start conversations more often, and end them less, she'd said. In his head, her voice is tinny. It's not that hard.
"For you, maybe," Arthur mutters.
"What?" Merlin asks, blinking over.
"Um," Arthur says. "I was just-why are you staying in for lunch today? You're usually out." With Gwen.
"Meeting a student to talk about some things," Merlin replies easily. He kicks back a little from his desk and starts twirling in his chair. "Do you usually stay here for lunch?"
Arthur shrugs, uncomfortable. "Usually," he says. "It's more time to get things done."
"You're an absolute workaholic, aren't you," Merlin laughs. "When do you even go home?"
"When I'm finished," Arthur says.
Merlin abruptly stops the spin of his swivel chair. "Is that why?" he asks, eyes wide. "Do you get more work done when I'm not here? Is that why you're always so grouchy?"
Arthur blinks, appalled, and says, "Grouchy?" but then there's a knock, and a boy who can't possibly be any older than fifteen pokes his head in through the open doorway. His piercing blue gaze flickers straight to Merlin.
"Professor," he says, and Merlin smiles and waves him in.
They sit together at Merlin's desk and talk, quietly, about something Arthur can't quite hear-questions the boy has about the early magical societies, Arthur thinks, but doesn't dwell on it.
It's surprisingly pleasant to work with them in the room, Arthur discovers. The murmur of their voices is low and soothing, like background music. He's done with his lesson plans before he quite realises it. The boy leaves a little while after. Merlin smiles after him, but it's not long before he sighs and rubs his face with the heel of his hand.
"Something wrong?" Arthur asks.
Merlin looks at him, face smushed into his palm, and mumbles, "If Camelot's Magical Studies program was any good anymore, that kid would be in it. He'd be good at it, too. This whole situation is just..."
"Oh?" says Arthur. He doesn't know anything about it.
+
So he looks it up.
HIST 115: Introduction to Magical History, PHYS 351: Relative Laws of Life and Death, BIOL 210: Magical Creatures and Where to Find Them. They've all bled out of the MGST listing since the previous year; the Magical Studies program is now all but a skeleton.
He laughs when he finds Special and Magical Effects in Film.
Across the office, Merlin looks up.
"It's nothing," Arthur says hastily, and feels a little guilty when Merlin grins at him.
+
On their walk the following day, Arthur shows Merlin around the back of the campus and its shady, wooded paths. Merlin kicks at a rock as they walk, and tells him about the last time his uncle (the biology professor) tried cooking. It's a silly story and by the end of it Arthur finds himself smiling without quite meaning to.
Merlin grins back at him, hair ruffled from the late autumn breeze, and then asks, "What about you? Done anything interesting lately?"
"Not... really," Arthur says. Merlin doesn't stop smiling at him, but he feels awkward, like he's shoving a wedge into the previously easy flow of the conversation. "Just researching for the book. I told you."
Merlin eyes him a bit speculatively. "Adding in anything about magical weapons?" he asks.
Arthur laughs and says, "No. Get over that, will you? It doesn't fit in my outline."
"Not in your outline, or not in your history?" Merlin asks.
Arthur looks at him sharply, but Merlin's turned away to look at the trees on the other side of the path. "What's that supposed to mean?" Arthur asks. "If I can't fit it in, I can't fit it in."
"Just that maybe you're not trying to fit it in, either," Merlin says. "Magical history is still history, you know. It's still important."
"I know it's important," Arthur says, bristling. "I never said it wasn't important. You deserve to have your own department back to teach it. People ought to know about it."
Merlin glares at him for just a few moments before he seems to lose heart. "Just because I want the department back doesn't mean I think they're separate disciplines," he mutters, picking at the lowest button on his coat. "It's not like we study different histories. Magical history, non-magical history-they're all wrapped up in each other."
Arthur isn't quite sure what to make of this.
"Magical propaganda," Merlin says, not hiding the scorn in his voice. "Come on, I'm getting cold. Let's get back inside."
+
To: "Arthur Pendragon", pendragon.a@camu.edu.ab
From: "Morgana Fey", feymorgana@camu.edu.ab
Subject: Re: girls will never like you if you keep wearing those hideous sweatervests
I'm serious, Arthur. I asked her, and they are not dating.
He looks up from the sharp black and white of the text to where Gwen is sitting, perched on the edge of Merlin's desk. The two of them are nothing but flushed cheeks and bright eyes, talking animatedly, completely fixated on one another.
Arthur deletes the email, trying not to admit to himself that he's feeling sulky. Morgana doesn't know what she's talking about.
+
The term flies by. Merlin doesn't speak with him about certain things anymore, and Arthur isn't sure whether or not he should feel relieved. On one hand, he doesn't have to dwell on it all the time. On the other, he sort of does anyway: history and magic and departments that are being culled.
Merlin himself, Arthur thinks confidently, is at least one thing he doesn't have to think about.
+
But then one day their walk takes them to one of the benches near the statue of Cornelius Sigan. It's getting nearer to winter and when the wind picks up it's bitterly cold, chilling to the bone. Merlin is bundled up in a coat but his ears are fiercely red, and Arthur just has to laugh at them, delighted-they're almost glowing.
Merlin shivers, glaring like a wet cat, and before Arthur can really think about it (because he doesn't have to think about it; that's what Merlin's for) he's unwinding his own scarf, the ugly red and yellow one with Camelot's crest embroidered on the end, and twining it around Merlin's neck.
Arthur realises only as he's pulling away that the move had brought him a little too close for comfort. He'd probably been near enough for Merlin to feel Arthur's breath on his face, just a tickle on his cheek-so Arthur starts wondering about what his breath smells like, if his last meal had contained any onions, and almost doesn't notice when Merlin smiles widely at him and says, "Thanks."
"Just return it tomorrow or something," he replies, looking away-yes, keep it cool, keep it casual, act like nothing happened and you'll be fine.
Like many things, Arthur decides, if he doesn't mention it, it'll never mean anything. Not that it means anything now, because it doesn't.
He shoves the memory of his stomach's minute flip-flop to the back of his mind and thinks, perhaps this is something he'll never mention.
+
Unfortunately, his mind has other plans, as he finds out later than night.
It's a pretty ordinary dream, all things considered. Arthur is, on occasion, prone to bizarre nightly retellings of various historical events by his subconscious. It's been happening off and on for years now, and tonight isn't supposed to be any different.
The dream seems to be based on a story mentioned in the Monmouth archives, of the court sorcerer who had saved one of the pre-unification kings from an untimely death by poison. Supposedly he'd accomplished this by snatching the poisoned chalice straight from the king's hand and performing some sort of spell to turn the poison into smoke. (Arthur isn't sure he believes this particular account-he's of the belief that there hadn't been any poison at all, and that it was just the sorcerer manipulating the court into starting a war. Except there hadn't been a war, Monmouth had said, and Arthur is having a little trouble reconciling that.)
Anyway, as per usual, Arthur's dreamed himself into one of the parts-this time of the medieval king, which is nice. (Sometimes he looks back on the dreams and realises he'd been in the body of a stable boy, or worse: once he had been the queen.) The strange part is that Arthur had dreamed someone else into it as well. Merlin, into the part of the court sorcerer.
"What is the meaning of this?" Arthur asks, a straight quote from the archive text. His voice sounds faraway and deep, almost like his father's. "Sorcerer, I insist you return me the chalice."
"I cannot, my king," Merlin-the-sorcerer replies (and his voice is scratchy and old, sounding suspiciously like what Arthur's always imagined Monmouth's voice to sound like). "The wine in this cup is not what it seems, as I shall prove."
Their eyes meet for a long second, and then Merlin tips his head back and drinks from the poisoned goblet, the idiot, baring his throat for the few long swallows it takes to drain it. Arthur jumps forward and nearly grabs Merlin's arm to wrench the goblet away, but it's too late and all Arthur can do is stare, horrified. How-how-is Merlin so stupid? What kind of purpose, what reason, is there to drink poison? Isn't he supposed to be an all-knowing sorcerer? Couldn't he have just turned it into smoke?
Merlin licks his lips when he finishes, and Arthur stares tersely before asking, "Well?"
"It didn't taste very good," Merlin says, in his normal voice now, sounding confused, and then he keels over.
Poison.
The rest of the dream consists mostly of Merlin lying sweatily on a bed and moaning a lot.
+
When Arthur wakes up, the first thing he does is lean over to write Essay: investigate the role of poison in the reign of early kings? on the legal pad beside his bed.
The next thing he does is call Morgana.
"This had better be a matter of life and death," she grumbles upon picking up. "It's six in the morning on a weekend, Arthur."
"Something's happened to me," he starts.
Morgana hums and guesses, "You've had a bizarre dream that's caused you to realise that the real reason you've been jealous all this time is because you've been pining after Merlin, not Gwen?"
He is silent for approximately the time it takes to have a heart attack, then very convincingly says, "No."
"...Oh my god," she says. "You did?!"
"No, I did not," he shouts, and immediately knows he's done for.
"You did," she cackles gleefully. "This is too good. You probably had a dream about fucking him over his desk, didn't you, and now it's all you can think about!"
"I-what-over his-"
And god help him, as soon as she's said it, it becomes all he can think about.
He thinks about it as he blushes and yells at and denies and eventually hangs up on Morgana. He thinks about it, guilty, over a lunch of reheated takeaway, and then over a dinner of the same. He thinks about it all the way to Monday, when he walks into his office a little later than usual (hair still wet from his cold, cold shower) and is greeted cheerfully by Merlin's broad, early-morning smile.
"I brought your scarf back," Merlin tells him, going a little pink in the cheeks.
This time Arthur's stomach lurches too hard for him to deny. He sits down miserably, feeling nauseous.
+
Merlin is waiting for him when he leaves his lecture hall that afternoon.
"Ready for a walk?" he asks. He has Arthur's scarf in one hand and holds it out-"You didn't pick it up this morning so I just brought it," he says.
"I'm a little busy today," Arthur says, trying to smother his guilt as he takes the scarf.
"Okay," Merlin says, not seeming too perturbed, "we can just walk back to the office, then."
Frantic, Arthur searches for an excuse. "The library," he says finally. "I have to go to the library."
Maybe it's written plainly on Arthur's face, what he means, because all Merlin says to that is, "...Oh."
Arthur goes home early.
+
Sitting in his own office-his home office, the one that Merlin doesn't intrude into-is kind of miserable and sad. But that's been Arthur's recent state lately, so he doesn't think much of it.
His home office is small and cramped-there isn't really room to fit more than two books on the tiny desk (three, if he's feeling particularly creative)-but it's his single remaining private space. It's only after he's laid all the books and articles he owns on non-magical revisionism onto the floor that he realises how much of it there is, and how odd it feels that there should be so much. They were mostly gifts, he thinks, a new one from his father every Christmas or birthday for lack of any other present he might have wanted. (Arthur had been notoriously bad at communicating with his father, and his father had been notoriously bad at choosing presents without clearly communicated cues.)
He looks for the origin of the term. He knows the origin of the quote-there is evidence to support past tampering with the records, etc.-from a recent work by James Belvedere, but that isn't the first time magic has been used in conjunction with propaganda. Where is it, he wonders fiercely, and annotates new questions in the margins as he flips farther and farther back in the texts, back through the decades.
When he finds the answer lying in chapter three of his father's doctoral dissertation, he is somehow less than surprised.
+
Merlin still has lunches with Gwen and still goes on walks with Arthur between classes, still works in Arthur's office. He doesn't talk to Arthur much anywhere. Arthur itches constantly for more, but reminds himself that it's a miracle they're still doing the walks at all after how badly he'd cocked it up.
He still dreams, too, and that's the worst part. Instead of Merlin drinking poison in archaic velvet robes, it's Merlin licking at the line of Arthur's neck or at the crease of his lips, usually in nothing at all (but sometimes in one of his argyle sweaters). Instead of Merlin lying sickly and pale on a bed he's usually flushed and bent over his desk, dark head dropped forward and fingers digging into the wood, crumpling the scattered papers. (One thing that doesn't change from the first dream: Merlin is usually still sweaty and moaning.)
It gets awkward when Arthur's watching Merlin work. One minute it'll be all dipped-head, bitten bottom lip, watching slim ink-smudged fingers trace down a page, and the next it'll be wide eyes and curious frowns and gazes like Arthur. Really? Do you have to watch me like that? Aren't the naughty perverted dreams about me enough?
Arthur is an awful person.
+
Things change like this:
To: "Arthur Pendragon", pendragon.a@camu.edu.ab
From: "Merlin Emrys", merlmrys@dmail.co.ab
Did I do something? I thought we were over the whole you not talking to me thing.
It's sitting in his inbox when he walks back into the office. Merlin's across the room, pretending to be focused on reading something or other, but he's fidgeting enough that Arthur doubts he's actually seeing what he's reading. His fingers are tapping too, repetitive and sharp against the sturdy surface of his desk, and the sound bores into Arthur's brain and makes him a little crazy.
I want to fuck you over that desk, he types.
He starts backspacing almost before he's finished.
I'm hopelessly in love with you, he types.
This one borders the truth so closely that Arthur panics just looking at it, and has to delete it all before he goes into cardiac arrest.
So he just says, uncomfortable, "What are you reading?"
Merlin's looking at him the instant he starts talking, but the question makes him blink back down to the journal in his hand. "Just something my old advisor published recently," he says. "Nothing, really."
"Is it any good?" Arthur asks, because his traitorous tongue is tying and his traitorous brain is refusing to give him any but the most inane ideas for conversation.
"I don't know," Merlin says, and then pre-empts what would be Arthur's automatic snarky remark with a quick, "Not because I'm not reading it-it's just that he always writes in the most cryptic way. I can never really understand what he's saying."
"What's it about?" Arthur asks, a little curious now.
"The First Great Purge," Merlin says, looking down. "It's kind of a vicious article. I don't really agree with him about all of it. He's very..." Merlin pauses.
"What?" Arthur asks.
Merlin shrugs, smiling a bit sadly. "I dunno. He's a great thinker, and I respect him a lot, but... he can be vicious. I probably won't be working with him again, that's all."
They're silent for a moment, Arthur watching Merlin, until he gets restless and has to ask, "Is there anyone else you might consider working on something with?"
He feels awkward as soon as he's said it, but Merlin looks up at him with a soft grin and says, "Yes, I think so. If they wanted to work with me too."
+
Arthur goes to Gwen.
Not because he's desperate or anything-at least not about Merlin. No, this visit is strictly business, he tells himself, and straightens his sweatervest nervously before knocking beside her open office door.
She looks up, startled and frazzled with her glasses nearly falling off her nose, they're so low, and says, "Oh, Arthur! Come in."
He does, and says, "So those papers on the evolution of weaponry...?"
"Right here," she says, smiling, and hands him a sheet covered with names and titles. "A few chronologies and commentaries on metallurgy in the early Post-Magical period."
"Thank you," he says, sincere. He skims the page and sees Gwen's name and a few of her own works, small, at the bottom of the list like an afterthought. He smiles a little; she sees and looks down, embarrassed, but grins when she does it.
He clears his throat once; this is the hard part. "There was one more thing I wanted to ask you," he says.
"Oh?" she asks. "About your research?"
"No," he says, and concentrates on not feeling like an absolute fool. "It's about you and Merlin."
"Me and-?" she echoes.
"Yes, you and Merlin," Arthur says, crossing his arms and looking away. "I just wanted to know if you're... happy together."
She's staring at him, he can tell. His fingers tighten on his arms the longer she looks at him, and he considering just turning tail and running when, suddenly, Gwen laughs.
Arthur just looks at her, incredulous, but she's giggling furiously and has a hand clapped over her mouth.
"Sorry," she gasps, "I'm sorry-oh. That explains everything! Is this what Morgana meant?"
"What does Morgana have to do with this?" Arthur asks, scowling.
"She told me about your strange idea that Merlin and I have been dating," she said, finally managing to smother her laughter. "I thought she told you that we weren't?"
"You aren't?" Arthur asks.
"It's not that I wouldn't date him," Gwen says, "just that I'm not." She smiles at Arthur and it's not a pitying one, to Arthur's relief-though he suspects that if it had been he might have actually deserved it.
"Thank you," he says, doubly awkward. "You... thanks."
She shakes her head like it's nothing, and just keeps smiling at him. Almost like Merlin.
He leaves the room posthaste, wavering between the sort of shame that would have him locking himself in his bedroom long enough for the world to forget him, and a small, tentative bloom of hope. On one hand, the universe has been playing a trick on him for months, and he hasn't noticed despite all the people shouting at him about it.
On the other, Merlin's not dating Gwen.
+
"Merlin," Arthur says loudly, bursting into their office, except there is a problem: Merlin isn't there, so Arthur can't use the swell of confidence and adrenaline he's feeling right now to burst out with the words straightaway like he'd planned (if you could have called it a plan).
So he's forced to lie in wait instead.
He grades essays for a while. Then he gets bored and plays Solitaire a few times, before getting bored again and moving onto his collection of Sudoku and crosswords. Then he tries to work-on research, on his book outline, on lesson plans, anything-until finally he's just sitting there, staring at the phone and wondering if he should call Morgana about this.
He doesn't.
Instead he waits, watching the clock tick later and later into the afternoon, reciting silly things to himself like I like you and I really like you and Remember all the times I said your ears looked funny? Well I was really just hiding the fact that I wanted to do XXX and XXX to you over your desk-He perhaps doesn't actually say that one out loud.
Grading, games, working, waiting; he follows this routine several times and is back to grading, in the middle of giving a student called Valiant a large red F for daring to plagiarise so blatantly-I'll be notifying the Dean about this, when Merlin walks in.
Finally.
Unfortunately, any and all plans (about what to say, how to act, anything) that Arthur may have formed as he waited suddenly evaporate into thin air, leaving no trace. He can only manage a weak "hi" in response when Merlin greets him.
"Been here long?" Merlin asks, dropping his coat on the back of his chair. "It's cold out, isn't it."
"Yes," Arthur says, and stares at the back of Merlin's neck as he leans down and begins unpacking his bag. It's now or never, Arthur thinks urgently, so he says, "Merlin."
"Hmm?" Merlin asks, still buried in his bag.
"I've been thinking about something," Arthur says, chest tight.
"Mmm," Merlin tells him.
Arthur scowls, and in a rush of irritation, says, "This is important. You could at least pretend to be listening to me."
Merlin looks over his shoulder. "I am listening!" he says, eyes deceptively innocent. "You said you're thinking. Not hurting yourself, I hope?"
Arthur scowls but his heart beats a little faster-it's not fluttering or anything, just picked up its pace by an increment or two. He looks down at Valiant's rotten essay and tries not to feel like he's backing out when he says, "I was thinking-erm. Maybe you could help me with my book?"
"Really?" Merlin says, and Arthur has to look up again because Merlin sounds... kind of ridiculously hopeful actually.
"Yes," Arthur says, making something up on the spot. "Maybe, you know, expand the Excalibur chronicles to a whole chapter. We could work together on it. The magical side of warfare. You know. If you're not busy." It actually doesn't sound like a bad idea, he reflects.
"I'd love to work with you," Merlin says, seriously enough that Arthur's mouth goes dry.
"Me too," he says, a bit foolishly.
"Presumably that's why you asked me, and not someone else?" Merlin says.
Arthur swallows and says, "Yes."
Merlin looks at him, calculating, and Arthur can't move an inch; the room's gone still and tense as the times when they weren't speaking. They're not speaking now, but it's different-it just means Arthur can hear the ticking of the clock on the wall, something that's hovered underneath his consciousness until now. He hears the swell and hitch of Merlin's breathing just before:
"You're a little bit bad with people, aren't you," Merlin says, and Arthur scowls up at him a whole lot because yes, maybe he is bad with people but he's been trying, alright? Look at what a step forward he's made!
"Does that mean writing a chapter together is actually your special code for-" Merlin says, stepping hesitantly closer, "-for, um, other things you do together?"
Arthur blushes horridly and says, "Maybe," and then, "Just shut up, Merlin," and then he's standing up and Merlin's tripping across the room and they both go in circles around the furniture until they finally just kiss over Arthur's desk, Arthur's hands catching in Merlin's sweater and at the back of his neck, and Merlin's hands (first knocking over Arthur's pencil jar, and then) coming up to cradle the sides of Arthur's face, soft.
They do that for perhaps longer than is appropriate, this being a school setting, after all, and by the time they pull apart Arthur's lips are a little numb from kissing and his thighs a little numb from digging into the desk and his brain a little numb from kissing.
"After work, coffee?" Arthur asks a little breathlessly, just as Merlin asks, "After work, my house or yours?" And that leads to Merlin turning an absolutely wondrous colour.
+
The next email he gets is an obnoxious piece of spam.
To: "Arthur Pendragon", pendragon.a@camu.edu.ab
From: "Morgana Fey", feymorgana@camu.edu.ab
Subject: I never thought I'd see the day
CONGRATULATIONS ON LOSING YOUR VIRGINITY
Lies. All of it.
+
+
+
They get around to the sex on a desk eventually.
It involves rather less Merlin-bent-over-head-down-moaning than Arthur had expected. It involves quite a lot more god-Merlin-yes-harder-please.
It is also far more pleasant to fantasize about the mess that's going to be made on top of all the papers than it is to actually experience it. He currently has smudged bits of Monmouth transferred to grey print on his elbows, and something by an S. Dragon blurred around his navel. He's also made a bit of a mess all over one of the essays Merlin is supposed to be grading.
"Do you do it on purpose?" Merlin asks, throwing his hands up in the air. "Half the time you're a decent human being-but the other half, god, it's like you really try to make things difficult for me."
" This isn't my fault," Arthur says scornfully. "It's not like I aimed or something."
"Look at what you did!" Merlin yells, waving the stained paper at him. "What am I supposed to do now?!"
"Don't ask me," Arthur says. He pouts out his bottom lip so that Merlin will forgive him, but it backfires; Merlin just goes blotchy and throws the essay at him before rolling over and grabbing for his shirt.
"This is what I mean," he grumbles as he starts putting it on. "This office isn't big enough for both of us and your ego."
"I'm hurt," Arthur says, mock-wounded-and then, because watching Merlin struggle with getting his head through the snug collar of his argyle sweater is making his heart seize with unfortunate affection, adds, "You're unnecessarily cruel to me. And after I've already decided to help you on that silly quest of yours, too."
"If I'm cruel to you, it's because it's necessary," Merlin tells him. His head finally makes it through the collar of his sweater, though the neck catches on one of his ears. He fixes it with two fingers and asks, "What silly quest of mine?"
"Your silly, stupid, noble quest," Arthur says, turning away. "You know, the one to bring your department back. Unless you've picked up any others?"
Merlin is silent for just a hair too long, and Arthur looks back at him, nervous, but it's just that he's sitting there with his mouth fallen open (and nothing but his sweater on), speechless. Arthur moves forward and makes to kiss him-maybe too tentatively, because Merlin meets him before he gets there and presses his mouth to Arthur's, insistent and hot, hand at Arthur's jaw.
When they finally pull apart, out of breath, Merlin grabs Arthur's wrist and holds him there, close. "If you're really asking," he says, "I maybe might have been thinking a little bit about what this place would be like if you were the Dean."
"If I was the Dean," Arthur repeats.
Merlin nods seriously.
"...You certainly don't aim low, do you," Arthur asks, but to his horror he's already begun to contemplate it.
"No," Merlin agrees, eyeing him with a little smile. "I want the very best."