"Scam Me" Part 6/?
Arthur/Merlin
Prompt : Being immortal means that Merlin has been forced to become a master conman and fraudster; forging birth certificates, false identities and opening bank accounts that never seem to empty. No one has ever twigged that there is something wrong with his paper trail because he's enchanted everything. People can't look too closely without getting an overwhelming feeling that they should be doing something else.
That is until a very stubborn Detective starts snooping around.
Warnings : The occasional cussword, potential character injury, nothing else in this part
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Arthur woke him up this time with a bucket of water to the face.
"Guh!" Merlin shouted as he came to, and twitched in the chair, but he was tied down pretty tightly. Arthur had made sure of it. He gave the man time to sputter uselessly as the water dripped down and soaked his clothes. Finally he got over the shock and began taking in his surroundings. They were in the brick room again, Arthur standing on the other side of the table next to a few machines. He was being more careful this time.
"Do you know what an electric fence is?" he asked.
"Wah?" Merlin answered intelligently.
"Good," Arthur mused in a voice that, for those who knew him, reeked of dangerous calm. He'd picked it up from his father. "So let's pick up where we left off." He plucked out a folder from his box, a red one this time. "1932, Manhattan."
Merlin jerked up in his chair, suddenly awake. "Wait, Arthur no, this is really bad timing, I was in the middle of something."
"Really?" Arthur's grin was all teeth. "What were you doing?"
"Uh..." Merlin shrugged helplessly as much as he could move. "There's this... wraith, and..."
"Did you release this one too?"
Merlin pursed his lip in a pout, still struggling. "Shut up," he mumbled.
"So... yes?"
The 'yes' was written all over him, but he didn't answer it. "Look, things are going to get really nasty if you don't let me out of here to go stop it. It might even be able to track me to here from my magical signature. And.... how'd you find me, anyway?"
It was a small victory to see that bafflement on the man's face, but Arthur didn't let himself dwell on it. "Has this wraith eaten anyone yet? A postman or two?"
"Well, it's gonna, if you don't let me... oh for the love of..." Merlin struggled in the bonds, then squinted with concentration. The ropes slunk off of him like timid snakes fleeing a predator. And left in their wake thin wires, which had been stretched tense over the rope but now sprang tighter around the suspect's limbs and connected with each other at the tips. Merlin spasmed as the electricity hit him.
Arthur let it go on just long enough to make an impact, then shut it off from the control box. He went over and tied a limp and pliant Merlin back up, then took swigs of his coffee and waited for him to come round.
"1932, Manhattan," he said as soon as the dark eyes held a hint of awareness.
"You electrocuted me," Merlin moaned, head lolling.
Arthur ignored the wallop of guilt that bubbled up. "A series of destroyed buildings over the course of a month, seems to be your signature." As soon as he'd figured that out, his mountain of files had doubled in size. He was beginning to risk emptying out the police station's old files archive entirely at this rate. "Reports of a 'monster' attacking the Central Park Hooverville, also your signature. Eye witness accounts of great explosions in the park on November 14th, and of flames in many colors, so that police thought it might involve fireworks. A man found dead at the scene, surrounded by scorched earth on all sides, but completely unburnt. Not a mark on him, but still dead."
Merlin was very quiet, eyes closed. The shock seemed to have taken the fight out of him.
"Merlin," Arthur added sternly.
Merlin peeked out at him from under his eyelid. "What did he look like," he said finally in a dull tone.
Arthur flipped through the file for the associated page. "Tall, long blond hair. Formal clothes, cane."
"Oh."
He peered over the top of the folder. Merlin's eyes had drifted shut again. "Oh?"
"Yeah. It was a... rough time."
"Did you kill him?"
Merlin's eyelid opened to gaze at him again.
"Did you?" Arthur repeated, though suddenly he wasn't sure he wanted to know.
"Yeah," Merlin answered anyway, staring right at him, unblinking. Those dark eyes echoed like wells, the depth in them going all the way back to 1932 and further, and Arthur suddenly felt very small. He wanted to slap himself for the instinctual desire to respond 'I'm sure he deserved it'. And the worst was, he wanted to believe it. The tension in his shoulders doubling, he checked to make sure he wasn't too close to Merlin. Five yards away. If the man had any sort of chemical boobytraps or... just go ahead and say it, magic... maybe it would be weakened by the distance.
"Why did you kill him?"
Merlin didn't answer, but he looked away. Arthur breathed again.
"So you admit to murder," he forced himself to say.
"In 1932?" Merlin asked wryly.
"I don't care if it's admittable, do you confess to it?"
Merlin made a disgusted sound and rocked in the chair forcefully. "If you don't care then why are we even doing this?"
"Because you murdered a man!" Arthur barked, slamming a hand on the table. "You took a life and should be held accountable. And you're sitting over there and you don't even care!"
"So you decide to punish me yourself," Merlin snapped bitterly.
"I'm holding you accountable."
"By electrocuting me."
"Well what was I supposed to do?!" Arthur flung the folder and hit Merlin in the head with it, papers flying out of it to scatter everywhere like overlarge snow. "You're a goddamned sorcerer! How is normal police work supposed to compete with that? I can't even keep you tied up for five minutes without resorting to torture! But you don't get to live above the law just because you're capable of it!" And now he couldn't keep a straight face because one of the papers had landed in Merlin's hair.
"I don't live above it, just around it," Merlin muttered from under the paper, his breath puffing it up in small jerks in a way that was very distracting. "And I hold myself more accountable than you can possibly imagine."
Arthur scoffed, and turned his back to fight down the threat of a smile without Merlin seeing. He achieved a cop's sobering glower in time to turn around to spot Merlin trying to work out of both the ropes and the wire. "Woah, no, don't you dare," he ordered, marching forward to cuff him around the ears if that's what it took. "You do that and the next time I drag you in it'll be with tazer marks."
Merlin stilled and shot him a scowl. "You're a prat," he declared.
Arthur was very confused by how pleased that made him.
"What's a tazer?"
Shaking his head in amazement, Arthur checked the ropes to make sure they were tight.
"Arthur," Merlin breathed into his hair. Arthur glanced up, and was struck all over again by those eyes, that had called him from the crumpled photograph that used to sit on his shelf. They were inches away and they were grey, actually, not black at all, and so much more human for it.
"Wraith."
"What?" he breathed.
"Wraaaaith," Merlin insisted, the eyes flicking to the side.
Arthur glanced behind him, and there was something black and unspeakably horrible there. He leapt out of the way, snatched up the broken lamp and swung it around, but it passed straight through the shape without so much as a pause. The blackness loomed close, and it was cold and dark in the room now. His breath shivered out of him.
There was the popping, static sound of electricity behind him, and then a roar of light passing just by his head, and the wraith melted like a shadow in the morning.
Arthur waited as the dizziness passed. He found Merlin drooling half-awake on the floor, red circles of electric burns around his wrists. The chair was in splinters all over the room, and the rope was only so much cinder. Across the table the control box smoked of melted plastic.
He propped Merlin up against a wall and applied ointment to the burns, and dripped water on his head until he came round. "Did you kill it?"
Merlin slowly focused on him, then groaned. "No, just sent it off for awhile. It'll take a proper binding spell to subdue it. Which I was all set up to do when you kidnapped me, you know."
"Shouldn't take you long to set up again, then," Arthur grunted, packing up the ointment in his medical kit.
Merlin stared around blearily. "I'm untied," he offered.
Arthur set his jaw firmly. "Well, you saved my life, I think. So you can go. This time."
"What happened to accountability?"
"You saved my life," Arthur repeated, feeling uncomfortable. Why were they still talking about this? "I'm not giving up the case. You will be held to face your crimes, by jury or me or whatever I can work up. But... you're right. Torture by electricity is not exactly a fair trial."
Merlin watched him with those very grey eyes, then slowly shifted towards Arthur in a way that seemed half gravity and half intent. "You're not going to like this," he said just before impact, "but I'm going to hug you now."
Arthur shoved Merlin backwards so that he flopped onto the floor. "You're right, I don't like it."