vengeance built me hastily || Merlin/Arthur
For the prompt: AU where Merlin is the prince and Arthur is the servant. Was thinking it could be set in a world where magic is revered and anyone who doesn't have it is looked down on, by
dark_angelis.
ETA: Now with a darling illustration by luisadeza , of Arthur and the dragons.
the centrifuge that throws the spires from the sun
an unlikely prince, a rebel leader;
a boy caught between.
Arthur is trained to kill from birth. He uses daggers to fell sapling foes until he can heft a sword, wields slingshots until he has the height and reach for a bow. He can stay on a horse before he can walk, can go absolutely silent and still, hidden, patient, before the sounds he can make take the shape of words.
His first, incidentally, is yield, growled at the cat he's managed to pin, refusing to cry even though it's scratched him.
Uther smiles his approval, knights boy and cat with a wooden spoon, and Arthur is utterly bound to him from that moment on.
Or so he thinks.
-
Uther and his men are content to exist outside the king's rule, to roam and hate, liberating their kind from a power-gorged tyrant. This mostly involves riding into a village, telling its people they've been liberated, and killing any magic users to prove it. Sometimes people rejoice, breathe easier, feed them. It makes up for when the women wail and the men ask how the rule of a sword is any better than that of a staff.
Arthur never asks this himself: it is better because his father says it is. If he says as much because it was the staff, not the blade, that killed his wife--well, Arthur had lost a mother. He can let it fill him with a facsimile of his father's rage when the want of his approval isn't enough. He is trained to hate in his father's presence, dutifully, achingly, but he flounders on his own, wrestles with it and can't put it to rest, ceases to try.
Things change, though, when Albion's king names his heir. It is one thing to be ruled by a sorcerer, Uther growls, who at least comes from noble blood and noble upbringing, but he cannot stand to see the throne passed to a boy that grew up no better than his own son. Whose only merit is magic and the good word of dragons. Serpents, he calls them, speaking lies and riddles to suit their own aims.
Arthur fought one, once, though he isn't sure he can call it a fight. It danced with the tip of his blade, driving gusts of warm air across his face with its wings, and eventually retreated. The men with him called it a victory, but he'd known, watching those keen, gold eyes, that he'd been let go.
Meeting Merlin Emrys, prince of Camelot, is much the same.
-
The plan is simple: he's set up as a servant for the feast, while his father's men ride into the city to make peace. All Arthur has to do is get close enough to the head table, spike the prince's cup, leave him vulnerable to the envoy's attack. It had made him nervous, something that easy, until his father reminded him how the court thought of them, pitiful, simple mortals; how they expect threats to come under glamours and veils, for their beasts and enchantments to protect them from other beasts, other enchantments. They expect poisons and charms, not a plain, unarmed boy with a bit of sleeping draught.
And it is easy, to take the flagon to the head table while the soldiers negotiate surrender and pretend not to see him; to secret the vial against the lip as he pours, dropping it to be crushed underfoot when he's done. It's easy to fill the king's cup, the queen's, and return to the prince's side as if he's waiting for further instruction, ready to pick up the blade and slit his throat if Ewan's aim is untrue.
It's easy, right up to the moment when Merlin looks up from his goblet and smiles at him, curious and unsure. He's at least a year younger than Arthur, likely more, and looking lost in all the talk. He's as far from his home as Arthur is, soft and shy in an ill-fitting cloak, too uncultured yet to pay more attention to his guests than his servants. He's pale, bright-eyed, with untidy hair and a crooked smile. He's about to die.
My mother, Arthur thinks, refusing to smile back. My father, he needs this; and, underneath, maybe this will sate him. Though it won't do anything for Arthur, will likely get the envoy killed and make the king just as keen on killing mortals as Uther is on killing sorcerers.
My mother, Arthur thinks, but Merlin's smile falters and he flushes, drinking from his goblet to hide his mistake, and it won't be Arthur's mother who cries for him.
The plan is stupid, he decides, as Merlin slumps forward in his seat and Ewan drags the dagger from his hip. His companions move to attack the king himself, to distract him from his ward.
Their eyes meet, as he stands to push them back with a word, but after that things are a blur. There's a knife quivering in the back of Merlin's chair, as Arthur himself is quivering, on the floor with the prince curled bonelessly against him. He sees his hands clutching Merlin's cloak, but he doesn't believe what he's done until he's being pulled off, shoved against the wall by surprisingly strong, smooth hands and the king is telling him, through the shock, "You earn your life today, Arthur Pendragon."
-
Earning his life says nothing of his freedom: he spends a week in the dungeons, which are oddly warm and well kept in fresh straw, for a place meant as punishment. "Oh no," Merlin assures him later, "you weren't really being punished, they just had to spend a few afternoons arguing about what to do with you." Merlin wrinkles his nose at the very idea of it; he doesn't enjoy such meetings, not long enough an authority to know much about punishing anyone, especially would-be assassins.
There must be truth to it, since the king decides on a vague sort of house arrest and rewards him the position of Merlin's manservant, which is, in a general sense, a worse fate for a soldier than being executed.
In the specific sense, though, he's less inclined to toss himself off the nearest parapet. Merlin is as used to the luxuries of castle life as Arthur is to providing them, and better at performing such duties by magic than Arthur is by hand. Over time, the job translates roughly into a mixture of friend, bodyguard, and remembering everything Merlin forgets he's supposed to do, with a side of forgetting whatever necessary to keep the prince sane.
Arthur turning traitor at the last moment only fueled Uther's attempts on Merlin's life, and garnered a few on his own; Uther isn't the only one who won't stand to see a bastard son of Ealdor on the throne, either. He's been at Merlin's side for a year, now, and while he can still work up the feeling to miss his father like a lost limb, thoughts of Uther only make him tired.
"He taught me everything I know," he tries to explain. They're in a field just beyond the city walls, tall grass rolled into a nest of green and otherwise uninterrupted view of the sky. Merlin is, ironically, cleaning Arthur's sword, and there's a braid of grass wrapped around his calf that somehow closed up a rather serious wound without even leaving a scar. Viewed from above, one would find another nest, in the trails of stamped and trodden grass, an awkward hill of earth resting in the center. Arthur still feels the insult of it, a beast of clay curling in on itself and dying at his sword--created by magic and enchanted to resist it, but not a mortal blade?
Merlin stares at the sword in his lap, pulling water from air and earth to run down the blade, break the film of blood (virgin), earth (flooded), and salt (coastal). His cloak is stained with each and there is a livid bruise forming on his side, but this he attends to first, the man and the weapon that keep him alive to do it. "Not everything," he answers, voice low. Arthur is already dozing, adrenaline drained away by the summer sun. He looks up into the harsh white of it, eyes gold and bold with the understanding that no one taught Arthur mercy.
-
Resentment is a new feeling for Arthur, and, true to his enthusiasm, he learns it well, takes it up with skill and hones it into a state of being, a solid thing. His life is a shifting, shaking stretch of earth, and he uses it to break the ground, set first cracks then canyons between him and his father, and the king, every assassin, until it's just Arthur and Merlin on a bit of land small enough for him to cling to.
-
Dragons, he finds, are just another thing his upbringing lacked. Uther is right about them on a superficial level, and completely wrong. There are plenty basking on the castle walls and spires, like cats, ranging in size from vermin to warhorses; there are those, larger still, that roam the countryside, conferring with the court without the waste of breath. They do seem to speak in riddles, at first, but it occurs to him that they're only riddles until he puzzles out the meaning. The method leaves little room for deceit: either he understands the truth of what's said, or he doesn't, and they don't care one way or the other.
It's refreshing, to be left on his own like that. To make up his own mind without conflict, consequence.
"I can't stand them," Merlin confesses, crossing his arms like he's cold. "They talk to me when I'm trying to sleep, and," he waves his hand lamely at his chambers. Arthur sets the tray down on Merlin's table and nods: if not for dragons, he'd still be home in Ealdor, with his family, friends, childhood.
Arthur doesn't know whom to blame on his end, because he can’t bring himself to blame his father, and is only slightly more inclined to blame Merlin. Sometimes he blames the king. Often as not, he settles it on his own shoulders and carries it with everything else.
The dragons don't talk to him the way they do Merlin--he has to seek them out, hear it with his own ears. When Merlin is busy learning how to rule a country, or control his magic, or Arthur just can't stand to look at him, he walks the ramparts, finding them or letting them find him. He meets the one from the forest, and she gives a raw, croaking chuckle when he admits that he thinks of the encounter as his first dance--and again, when he says those that followed were no less terrifying. Their golden eyes remind him of Merlin, but their frustrating wisdom and eternal, wry amusement don't. They fold him close with their wings and curve their great necks over his shoulders. They nap with him in the sun; they tell him he’s one side of a coin and that his is a great destiny. And, not in so many words, they tell him he's exactly where he needs to be.
-
Having betrayed his people to keep Merlin alive--given up his father, his budding affair with an amber haired girl who danced like a pleased filly and hunted like a hawk--it only seems logical to give everything else he has to validate it. In his first year of service, Arthur drinks poison, slays creatures he's never even dreamed of, puts knives in the backs of noblemen and enchantresses.
He tries not to ask himself why, or consider that his father might welcome him back if his knife found its way into the back of the prince.
Merlin is always grateful, in that way of his, the way Arthur isn't good at. Even when Merlin returns the favor, draws the poison from him with his magic or mends his wounds after another narrow escape, and Arthur's heart pounds with something sharper than gratitude. Merlin offers him a position in the army, one day, to talk to the king about his freedom, to argue that there is no debt for him to have already paid many times over--
and Arthur goes to muck out the stables before Merlin can find the broken rib because Merlin's nearly died for the third time that week and he's focusing on Arthur like it didn't even happen, and he's noble and kind and going to be a great king, if Arthur can keep him alive long enough. Arthur goes to muck out the stables because he hates his father and he hates Merlin and hates himself, and he doesn't even know why anymore.
"Just because I don't like the dragons doesn't stop them talking at me," Merlin says when he finds him brooding in a stall so clean he might as well have learned magic, sitting with his shoulders slumped and willing his side not to hurt. "And not matter how much they like you," he warns, dropping down, knees astride Arthur's legs and his cloak covering them completely, "they're never any good at keeping your secrets." Not from me, he doesn't add, but his eyes are gold and sad, and his hand is pushing under Arthur's tunic, hot and cold like a balm over the pain, driving it out, and he doesn't have to.
-
The first time Merlin kisses him is in Ealdor, the raiders plaguing his village defeated and one of his oldest friends dead on a table, a needless, petty casualty who had shoved Arthur out of the path of an arrow and said, expiring quite dramatically, take care of him. I do, Arthur had answered, stupid with shock and somehow annoyed.
Merlin is grieving and Arthur isn't feeling much at all, stepping over men he doesn't recognize in uniforms he does; Merlin helps him out of his mail saying, "I wish I'd been here, more. I wish I'd had more time." Arthur just stares at him, sweating and dizzy with how he doesn't know what to say. Uther had lost, yes, and grieved--still grieved, probably, but he'd never taught his son to ease it.
"Arthur," Merlin breathes, gripping his gloved hands, trying to draw him out of himself. Trying to draw him back to where they are, but where they are is muddy and cold, he's tired and bloody and he wants to go home. For the first time, he doesn't think of his father, he thinks of Camelot.
So Merlin asks again, softer, and starts to kiss his face with his lips and the warm rushes of air that follow. Arthur comes back eventually, but not to Ealdor. Just Merlin, reaching up to grab his face and crush their mouths together.
And he's grateful, so grateful. He just doesn't know why.
-
The fights follow, all manner of petty and grand: always vicious, always horrible and drawn out because Merlin doesn't know that it isn't about him, not really, and Arthur doesn't know how to set down a weapon until it's tasted blood.
Merlin makes points like apologies, looking out the window at the courtyard and breathing them into the glass. "He says I'm too fond of you," fogging his view, with just a hint of fear because it's true, Merlin doesn't want it not to be, not now, not ever. "That I'll spare your father, that it will make me a bad king." Arthur likes that, a bit, that the king thinks him a threat to the kingdom's future. It's something else to hold the words back, that it's ridiculous, that whatever he wants from Merlin is already his.
"He ought to hurry up and stop Uther himself," he spits. "He never would've dealt with those raiders, and you know it." Arthur would shout, but his argument is largely treasonous and he isn't sure the king won't behead him, no matter how many dragons (or princes) he charms. It's probably why they keep fighting about him. "He plays with people, Merlin. He lets my father terrorize those people because it keeps the territories he cares about in line. And he keeps me here to keep Uther in line."
"I thought you liked it here." Merlin turns from the window, studying him; Arthur knows he's drawing Merlin out, now, opening him up for a blow but also to strike. He's angry and he hates and he loves. He remembers Uther doing this, working him up and stripping him down, with words, thinking it bound him tighter. It did, for awhile, but now Arthur is far from him, he's with Merlin, and like a cur that's been fed and watered and given a rug by the fire, he isn't so keen to answer the hand that once hit him.
But he'll hit Merlin, he'll bite the new hand; because he was hit, and he keeps waiting for it to pick up where the last one left off.
"No Merlin, I don't much like being what amounts to a hostage at worst and a servant at best, under the heel of a king who is everything my father warned me about, exactly the kind of man who would--"
"He didn't kill your mother," Merlin shouts, folding himself miserably into his cloak and biting his lip as the words echo silently through the chamber. He doesn't look angry, or triumphant in finding a way to lash out: he looks like he knows he just lost something more important than an argument. Arthur pads across the floor to him, head bowed like he's waiting for the blow, the punishment. Merlin has been a prince long enough to learn that, but he's still Merlin, and Arthur folds against him calmly, knowing it will be fair. Merlin shivers, puts his hands on Arthur's hips and draws him closer. "I'm sorry."
He sniffs, unsure, and Arthur nods: the guilt twisting his stomach is fair enough. "I didn't know her anyway," he concedes, pushing him up against the window, breathing him in. He hopes Merlin won't let himself be driven off with the rest.
-
Sophia is seductive, glowing, and she smashes Arthur's heart into pieces he didn't know were still there. His prince, so necessary and beloved, is dull clay in her hands. When he asks the king for his blessing, the man has the gall to be pleased, and Arthur hates him utterly, then, wants to puts the dagger in his back and twist, twist until his hand can push through his flesh and find the malformed heart.
While Merlin's marriage will be a formality, his lineage not really necessary to a magical succession, the king thinks it early yet for him to tie himself down (which, clearly, extends to Arthur). For a moment, Merlin looks relieved, confused, but Sophia squeezes his hand and gives him a pleading look. He's dumb again, grey and hapless, and they flounce from the court in a flow of long, heavy cloaks.
Infidelity aside, Arthur understands that something is deeply wrong when he watches them ride off that night, eloping under the stars: Merlin would never do something that interesting. He tugs on his sword belt dutifully, excitedly--almost glad of the excuse to kill her--and sets after them on foot.
-
Merlin comes to, coughs and shivers, soaked; retches. Arthur heaves a sigh of relief and hits him, hard enough that he passes out again. Next time, he's cautious about opening his eyes, and Arthur kisses the lids apart, licks the lake water and clear, stringy vomit out of his mouth and calls him the worst sorcerer he's ever seen.
-
He hugs the hot stone of the parapet with both arms, wishing he had the power to draw affection from it like water, or just to stop shaking. His face is pressed against the grit, all the pressure of his unhappiness given to something that can't be affected in the slightest.
Beyond the walls, his father's messenger is returning on his horse. His hands and feet are tied, roped together under its belly like a human saddle. There are symbols burned into the flesh of his back that Arthur can't read from such a distance, doesn't want to.
The message had been for him. He wasn't allowed to read it.
"Let them fight," the dragons hiss, their thick claws and hard scales oddly comforting against his back and legs, their sulfur breath easing the tears out of his eyes. "The land will rejoice their passing, and embrace their sons."
All they had to do was embrace each other.
-
Arthur is Merlin's first, surprising himself with his gentleness. He eases inside, careful and regretting: the amber girl (her hair, her glowing skin, the way she stays unchanging in memory) and the tumbles of his boyhood, in a romantic way. Merlin doesn't seem to mind, arching and mewling under his hands, promising him things in turns filthy, beautiful.
They don't mean anything, paling in the face of their destiny. The dragons tell him, you will unite all of Albion and Merlin kisses the line of his jaw, adoringly. It must be connected, and he feels blessed with it, baptized in it: saved. The half cannot truly hate that which makes it whole, pushing in feels right and holding Merlin close feels better; Arthur comes, thinking, the king is dead, long live the king.
dark_angelis.
ETA: Now with a darling illustration by luisadeza , of Arthur and the dragons.
the centrifuge that throws the spires from the sun
an unlikely prince, a rebel leader;
a boy caught between.
Arthur is trained to kill from birth. He uses daggers to fell sapling foes until he can heft a sword, wields slingshots until he has the height and reach for a bow. He can stay on a horse before he can walk, can go absolutely silent and still, hidden, patient, before the sounds he can make take the shape of words.
His first, incidentally, is yield, growled at the cat he's managed to pin, refusing to cry even though it's scratched him.
Uther smiles his approval, knights boy and cat with a wooden spoon, and Arthur is utterly bound to him from that moment on.
Or so he thinks.
-
Uther and his men are content to exist outside the king's rule, to roam and hate, liberating their kind from a power-gorged tyrant. This mostly involves riding into a village, telling its people they've been liberated, and killing any magic users to prove it. Sometimes people rejoice, breathe easier, feed them. It makes up for when the women wail and the men ask how the rule of a sword is any better than that of a staff.
Arthur never asks this himself: it is better because his father says it is. If he says as much because it was the staff, not the blade, that killed his wife--well, Arthur had lost a mother. He can let it fill him with a facsimile of his father's rage when the want of his approval isn't enough. He is trained to hate in his father's presence, dutifully, achingly, but he flounders on his own, wrestles with it and can't put it to rest, ceases to try.
Things change, though, when Albion's king names his heir. It is one thing to be ruled by a sorcerer, Uther growls, who at least comes from noble blood and noble upbringing, but he cannot stand to see the throne passed to a boy that grew up no better than his own son. Whose only merit is magic and the good word of dragons. Serpents, he calls them, speaking lies and riddles to suit their own aims.
Arthur fought one, once, though he isn't sure he can call it a fight. It danced with the tip of his blade, driving gusts of warm air across his face with its wings, and eventually retreated. The men with him called it a victory, but he'd known, watching those keen, gold eyes, that he'd been let go.
Meeting Merlin Emrys, prince of Camelot, is much the same.
-
The plan is simple: he's set up as a servant for the feast, while his father's men ride into the city to make peace. All Arthur has to do is get close enough to the head table, spike the prince's cup, leave him vulnerable to the envoy's attack. It had made him nervous, something that easy, until his father reminded him how the court thought of them, pitiful, simple mortals; how they expect threats to come under glamours and veils, for their beasts and enchantments to protect them from other beasts, other enchantments. They expect poisons and charms, not a plain, unarmed boy with a bit of sleeping draught.
And it is easy, to take the flagon to the head table while the soldiers negotiate surrender and pretend not to see him; to secret the vial against the lip as he pours, dropping it to be crushed underfoot when he's done. It's easy to fill the king's cup, the queen's, and return to the prince's side as if he's waiting for further instruction, ready to pick up the blade and slit his throat if Ewan's aim is untrue.
It's easy, right up to the moment when Merlin looks up from his goblet and smiles at him, curious and unsure. He's at least a year younger than Arthur, likely more, and looking lost in all the talk. He's as far from his home as Arthur is, soft and shy in an ill-fitting cloak, too uncultured yet to pay more attention to his guests than his servants. He's pale, bright-eyed, with untidy hair and a crooked smile. He's about to die.
My mother, Arthur thinks, refusing to smile back. My father, he needs this; and, underneath, maybe this will sate him. Though it won't do anything for Arthur, will likely get the envoy killed and make the king just as keen on killing mortals as Uther is on killing sorcerers.
My mother, Arthur thinks, but Merlin's smile falters and he flushes, drinking from his goblet to hide his mistake, and it won't be Arthur's mother who cries for him.
The plan is stupid, he decides, as Merlin slumps forward in his seat and Ewan drags the dagger from his hip. His companions move to attack the king himself, to distract him from his ward.
Their eyes meet, as he stands to push them back with a word, but after that things are a blur. There's a knife quivering in the back of Merlin's chair, as Arthur himself is quivering, on the floor with the prince curled bonelessly against him. He sees his hands clutching Merlin's cloak, but he doesn't believe what he's done until he's being pulled off, shoved against the wall by surprisingly strong, smooth hands and the king is telling him, through the shock, "You earn your life today, Arthur Pendragon."
-
Earning his life says nothing of his freedom: he spends a week in the dungeons, which are oddly warm and well kept in fresh straw, for a place meant as punishment. "Oh no," Merlin assures him later, "you weren't really being punished, they just had to spend a few afternoons arguing about what to do with you." Merlin wrinkles his nose at the very idea of it; he doesn't enjoy such meetings, not long enough an authority to know much about punishing anyone, especially would-be assassins.
There must be truth to it, since the king decides on a vague sort of house arrest and rewards him the position of Merlin's manservant, which is, in a general sense, a worse fate for a soldier than being executed.
In the specific sense, though, he's less inclined to toss himself off the nearest parapet. Merlin is as used to the luxuries of castle life as Arthur is to providing them, and better at performing such duties by magic than Arthur is by hand. Over time, the job translates roughly into a mixture of friend, bodyguard, and remembering everything Merlin forgets he's supposed to do, with a side of forgetting whatever necessary to keep the prince sane.
Arthur turning traitor at the last moment only fueled Uther's attempts on Merlin's life, and garnered a few on his own; Uther isn't the only one who won't stand to see a bastard son of Ealdor on the throne, either. He's been at Merlin's side for a year, now, and while he can still work up the feeling to miss his father like a lost limb, thoughts of Uther only make him tired.
"He taught me everything I know," he tries to explain. They're in a field just beyond the city walls, tall grass rolled into a nest of green and otherwise uninterrupted view of the sky. Merlin is, ironically, cleaning Arthur's sword, and there's a braid of grass wrapped around his calf that somehow closed up a rather serious wound without even leaving a scar. Viewed from above, one would find another nest, in the trails of stamped and trodden grass, an awkward hill of earth resting in the center. Arthur still feels the insult of it, a beast of clay curling in on itself and dying at his sword--created by magic and enchanted to resist it, but not a mortal blade?
Merlin stares at the sword in his lap, pulling water from air and earth to run down the blade, break the film of blood (virgin), earth (flooded), and salt (coastal). His cloak is stained with each and there is a livid bruise forming on his side, but this he attends to first, the man and the weapon that keep him alive to do it. "Not everything," he answers, voice low. Arthur is already dozing, adrenaline drained away by the summer sun. He looks up into the harsh white of it, eyes gold and bold with the understanding that no one taught Arthur mercy.
-
Resentment is a new feeling for Arthur, and, true to his enthusiasm, he learns it well, takes it up with skill and hones it into a state of being, a solid thing. His life is a shifting, shaking stretch of earth, and he uses it to break the ground, set first cracks then canyons between him and his father, and the king, every assassin, until it's just Arthur and Merlin on a bit of land small enough for him to cling to.
-
Dragons, he finds, are just another thing his upbringing lacked. Uther is right about them on a superficial level, and completely wrong. There are plenty basking on the castle walls and spires, like cats, ranging in size from vermin to warhorses; there are those, larger still, that roam the countryside, conferring with the court without the waste of breath. They do seem to speak in riddles, at first, but it occurs to him that they're only riddles until he puzzles out the meaning. The method leaves little room for deceit: either he understands the truth of what's said, or he doesn't, and they don't care one way or the other.
It's refreshing, to be left on his own like that. To make up his own mind without conflict, consequence.
"I can't stand them," Merlin confesses, crossing his arms like he's cold. "They talk to me when I'm trying to sleep, and," he waves his hand lamely at his chambers. Arthur sets the tray down on Merlin's table and nods: if not for dragons, he'd still be home in Ealdor, with his family, friends, childhood.
Arthur doesn't know whom to blame on his end, because he can’t bring himself to blame his father, and is only slightly more inclined to blame Merlin. Sometimes he blames the king. Often as not, he settles it on his own shoulders and carries it with everything else.
The dragons don't talk to him the way they do Merlin--he has to seek them out, hear it with his own ears. When Merlin is busy learning how to rule a country, or control his magic, or Arthur just can't stand to look at him, he walks the ramparts, finding them or letting them find him. He meets the one from the forest, and she gives a raw, croaking chuckle when he admits that he thinks of the encounter as his first dance--and again, when he says those that followed were no less terrifying. Their golden eyes remind him of Merlin, but their frustrating wisdom and eternal, wry amusement don't. They fold him close with their wings and curve their great necks over his shoulders. They nap with him in the sun; they tell him he’s one side of a coin and that his is a great destiny. And, not in so many words, they tell him he's exactly where he needs to be.
-
Having betrayed his people to keep Merlin alive--given up his father, his budding affair with an amber haired girl who danced like a pleased filly and hunted like a hawk--it only seems logical to give everything else he has to validate it. In his first year of service, Arthur drinks poison, slays creatures he's never even dreamed of, puts knives in the backs of noblemen and enchantresses.
He tries not to ask himself why, or consider that his father might welcome him back if his knife found its way into the back of the prince.
Merlin is always grateful, in that way of his, the way Arthur isn't good at. Even when Merlin returns the favor, draws the poison from him with his magic or mends his wounds after another narrow escape, and Arthur's heart pounds with something sharper than gratitude. Merlin offers him a position in the army, one day, to talk to the king about his freedom, to argue that there is no debt for him to have already paid many times over--
and Arthur goes to muck out the stables before Merlin can find the broken rib because Merlin's nearly died for the third time that week and he's focusing on Arthur like it didn't even happen, and he's noble and kind and going to be a great king, if Arthur can keep him alive long enough. Arthur goes to muck out the stables because he hates his father and he hates Merlin and hates himself, and he doesn't even know why anymore.
"Just because I don't like the dragons doesn't stop them talking at me," Merlin says when he finds him brooding in a stall so clean he might as well have learned magic, sitting with his shoulders slumped and willing his side not to hurt. "And not matter how much they like you," he warns, dropping down, knees astride Arthur's legs and his cloak covering them completely, "they're never any good at keeping your secrets." Not from me, he doesn't add, but his eyes are gold and sad, and his hand is pushing under Arthur's tunic, hot and cold like a balm over the pain, driving it out, and he doesn't have to.
-
The first time Merlin kisses him is in Ealdor, the raiders plaguing his village defeated and one of his oldest friends dead on a table, a needless, petty casualty who had shoved Arthur out of the path of an arrow and said, expiring quite dramatically, take care of him. I do, Arthur had answered, stupid with shock and somehow annoyed.
Merlin is grieving and Arthur isn't feeling much at all, stepping over men he doesn't recognize in uniforms he does; Merlin helps him out of his mail saying, "I wish I'd been here, more. I wish I'd had more time." Arthur just stares at him, sweating and dizzy with how he doesn't know what to say. Uther had lost, yes, and grieved--still grieved, probably, but he'd never taught his son to ease it.
"Arthur," Merlin breathes, gripping his gloved hands, trying to draw him out of himself. Trying to draw him back to where they are, but where they are is muddy and cold, he's tired and bloody and he wants to go home. For the first time, he doesn't think of his father, he thinks of Camelot.
So Merlin asks again, softer, and starts to kiss his face with his lips and the warm rushes of air that follow. Arthur comes back eventually, but not to Ealdor. Just Merlin, reaching up to grab his face and crush their mouths together.
And he's grateful, so grateful. He just doesn't know why.
-
The fights follow, all manner of petty and grand: always vicious, always horrible and drawn out because Merlin doesn't know that it isn't about him, not really, and Arthur doesn't know how to set down a weapon until it's tasted blood.
Merlin makes points like apologies, looking out the window at the courtyard and breathing them into the glass. "He says I'm too fond of you," fogging his view, with just a hint of fear because it's true, Merlin doesn't want it not to be, not now, not ever. "That I'll spare your father, that it will make me a bad king." Arthur likes that, a bit, that the king thinks him a threat to the kingdom's future. It's something else to hold the words back, that it's ridiculous, that whatever he wants from Merlin is already his.
"He ought to hurry up and stop Uther himself," he spits. "He never would've dealt with those raiders, and you know it." Arthur would shout, but his argument is largely treasonous and he isn't sure the king won't behead him, no matter how many dragons (or princes) he charms. It's probably why they keep fighting about him. "He plays with people, Merlin. He lets my father terrorize those people because it keeps the territories he cares about in line. And he keeps me here to keep Uther in line."
"I thought you liked it here." Merlin turns from the window, studying him; Arthur knows he's drawing Merlin out, now, opening him up for a blow but also to strike. He's angry and he hates and he loves. He remembers Uther doing this, working him up and stripping him down, with words, thinking it bound him tighter. It did, for awhile, but now Arthur is far from him, he's with Merlin, and like a cur that's been fed and watered and given a rug by the fire, he isn't so keen to answer the hand that once hit him.
But he'll hit Merlin, he'll bite the new hand; because he was hit, and he keeps waiting for it to pick up where the last one left off.
"No Merlin, I don't much like being what amounts to a hostage at worst and a servant at best, under the heel of a king who is everything my father warned me about, exactly the kind of man who would--"
"He didn't kill your mother," Merlin shouts, folding himself miserably into his cloak and biting his lip as the words echo silently through the chamber. He doesn't look angry, or triumphant in finding a way to lash out: he looks like he knows he just lost something more important than an argument. Arthur pads across the floor to him, head bowed like he's waiting for the blow, the punishment. Merlin has been a prince long enough to learn that, but he's still Merlin, and Arthur folds against him calmly, knowing it will be fair. Merlin shivers, puts his hands on Arthur's hips and draws him closer. "I'm sorry."
He sniffs, unsure, and Arthur nods: the guilt twisting his stomach is fair enough. "I didn't know her anyway," he concedes, pushing him up against the window, breathing him in. He hopes Merlin won't let himself be driven off with the rest.
-
Sophia is seductive, glowing, and she smashes Arthur's heart into pieces he didn't know were still there. His prince, so necessary and beloved, is dull clay in her hands. When he asks the king for his blessing, the man has the gall to be pleased, and Arthur hates him utterly, then, wants to puts the dagger in his back and twist, twist until his hand can push through his flesh and find the malformed heart.
While Merlin's marriage will be a formality, his lineage not really necessary to a magical succession, the king thinks it early yet for him to tie himself down (which, clearly, extends to Arthur). For a moment, Merlin looks relieved, confused, but Sophia squeezes his hand and gives him a pleading look. He's dumb again, grey and hapless, and they flounce from the court in a flow of long, heavy cloaks.
Infidelity aside, Arthur understands that something is deeply wrong when he watches them ride off that night, eloping under the stars: Merlin would never do something that interesting. He tugs on his sword belt dutifully, excitedly--almost glad of the excuse to kill her--and sets after them on foot.
-
Merlin comes to, coughs and shivers, soaked; retches. Arthur heaves a sigh of relief and hits him, hard enough that he passes out again. Next time, he's cautious about opening his eyes, and Arthur kisses the lids apart, licks the lake water and clear, stringy vomit out of his mouth and calls him the worst sorcerer he's ever seen.
-
He hugs the hot stone of the parapet with both arms, wishing he had the power to draw affection from it like water, or just to stop shaking. His face is pressed against the grit, all the pressure of his unhappiness given to something that can't be affected in the slightest.
Beyond the walls, his father's messenger is returning on his horse. His hands and feet are tied, roped together under its belly like a human saddle. There are symbols burned into the flesh of his back that Arthur can't read from such a distance, doesn't want to.
The message had been for him. He wasn't allowed to read it.
"Let them fight," the dragons hiss, their thick claws and hard scales oddly comforting against his back and legs, their sulfur breath easing the tears out of his eyes. "The land will rejoice their passing, and embrace their sons."
All they had to do was embrace each other.
-
Arthur is Merlin's first, surprising himself with his gentleness. He eases inside, careful and regretting: the amber girl (her hair, her glowing skin, the way she stays unchanging in memory) and the tumbles of his boyhood, in a romantic way. Merlin doesn't seem to mind, arching and mewling under his hands, promising him things in turns filthy, beautiful.
They don't mean anything, paling in the face of their destiny. The dragons tell him, you will unite all of Albion and Merlin kisses the line of his jaw, adoringly. It must be connected, and he feels blessed with it, baptized in it: saved. The half cannot truly hate that which makes it whole, pushing in feels right and holding Merlin close feels better; Arthur comes, thinking, the king is dead, long live the king.