(Merlin/Torchwood) The Hamlet Effect for tania_sings
Title: The Hamlet Effect
Author: normalhumanbein
Fandoms: Merlin/Torchwood
Characters Merlin, Arthur, Uther, Gwen; Jack Harkness, Gwen Cooper
Pairings: Jack/Ianto and Merlin/Arthur. Background hints of Jack/Merlin and Arthur/Gwen
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 8056
Spoilers: Set between seasons two and three of Torchwood, with major spoilers for the second series. Spoilers up to 3.09 of Merlin.
Warnings: None
Disclaimer: Merlin and Torchwood belong to their respective creators.
A/N: Many thanks to mumblemutter for betaing, cheerleading and explaining my own plot to me.
Summary: And so it came to pass that, on the third day of the second week of the sixth month of his time in Camelot, Jack Harkness came face to face with the Great Dragon for the first time.
Everyone knew the rift took things. Everyone knew it had preferences. It liked Tosh’s sandwiches, Gwen’s brand of mascara and, Jack claimed, his underwear, though people seemed inexplicably sceptical whenever he used that excuse. It disapproved of Susie drinking at work, of Jack drinking in his office afterward, of herbal tea and bottled water. There was a mildly disturbing phase when it seemed to be systematically finding and absorbing all of Owen’s most-chewed pens, but it turned out that Gwen was throwing them away in an attempt to get him to break the habit. It was the rift that removed any and all yellow highlighters from the building with a thoroughness that bordered on the fetishistic, though, and replaced them with small piles of pungent, purple fruit.
Jack was quite relieved when they worked that out. The idea that he’d been on one planet, in one job long enough to be drafting Do Not Fuck With The Stationery Cupboard memos? Terrifying. The idea that people might actually take them seriously? Worse. The fact that he’d half-considered three ways to explain this in the Torchwood One annual budget meeting - hell, that he’d half-considered attending the Torchwood One annual budget meeting? Shoot him. Shoot him now.
Well, no. He didn’t mean that. It wouldn’t accomplish anything, and he’d wake up to Ianto’s paperwork face.
Anyway.
The fact of the matter was, everyone knew the rift took things. They only became confused when it started giving them back. A ballet shoe. A screwdriver. The inner tube of a bicycle tyre. The gearbox from a Wrimeanian Atmospheric Cruiser. Half a parakeet.
And then: the trilby.
(“Everything,” Jack tells Merlin, heavily, much later on, “everything that has gone wrong can be blamed on that trilby.” He pauses, gropes for a thought through the sticky, shimmering haze the world always seems to be wrapped in after a large quantity of small beer. “Except the dead guy. Man. Alien. Thing.”
“’S a Partismen.”
“Yes.”
“That wasn’t the hat.”
“No.”
“That was…” Jack waves a hand in front of his face as if that will somehow communicate the intricacies of interstellar travel directly into Merlin’s brain. “Your neck,” he says eventually, in the tone of a man who has stumbled past drunkenness and is now clinging doggedly to a sublime truth, “is really good.”
Merlin nods, slowly, as if understanding this for the first time. “Your coat,” he tells Jack, “is on fire.”)
Anyway.
The point is, everything went wrong after Jack found the trilby on the roof. Not immediately; there was an all-too-brief period involving Ianto, braces, the hat, five-point restraints and not a huge amount else, and then a fuzzy, post-coital period where nothing particularly worrying happened, and then, then there was the horrible moment when Ianto said, “Maybe it was the rift.”
“No, that was me.”
“Not - ow, okay, that was you - I mean, that left you the hat. Maybe it’s taken a liking to you. Maybe in rift-speak, sending someone stinking piles of purple fruit is an undying declaration of - Christ, Jack.”
Jack had frowned against Ianto’s stomach. “I thought it was you.”
Ianto shook his head. “Maybe it was - . No. And it wouldn’t have been Gwen. Maybe Andy saw you up there. Maybe he’s taken a liking to you. Maybe in police-speak, being a complete pain in the fucking arse is - shit, don’t do that when I’m trying to take the piss Jack, it’s cheating.”
“Sorry.” Jack muttered, contentedly licking a stripe along Ianto’s thigh.
“Should bloody well hope so.”
“It really wasn’t you?”
“You’ve got enough dressing-up clothes to be going on with.”
“It was in my. Y’know. My spot.”
“Excuse me?”
“The hat, the - where’s it gone? Put it back on - yeah, the hat, it wasn’t just on the roof, it was on my part of the roof. Where I. You know.”
“Sulk like a girl?”
“I will leave you here until the morning, don’t think I won’t.”
“Sorry, sorry.”
Jack remembers the way Ianto’s voice hitched, the full-body shiver he gave when Jack finally, finally touched him, and wonders why the fuck he spent so much time talking about bullshit and so little time committing the important details to memory.
Probably because he hadn’t planned on spending the next six months trapped in a cave.
Anyway.
The fact remained: the rift had left a hat on the bit of the roof with the best view, the overhang where Jack absolutely did not go to brood, ever. And then it started filling his pockets with books of matches for the hand-rolled cigarettes he did not smoke up there, ever, and which did not in any way remind him of The Original Jack Harkness. It gave him an antique brass lighter mosaic-ed with tiny pieces of green glass. And then it sent him some Hamlets.
“Hamlets?” Gwen had laughed. “Maybe it just wants you to cheer up, Jack. You know,” she said, off his blank look. “‘Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet.’ Those adverts. You’ve seen them, Ianto, with that Rab Nesbitt fella in a photobooth.”
Jack scoffed. It was a good scoff, one honed over years spent dodging accusations of fraud, but Gwen hadn’t looked particularly convinced. “I don’t need cheering up,” he insisted. “And I do not brood.”
But he did sweep dramatically out, go up to the roof and smoke a roll-up in the rain, savouring the sodden-match smell and the way the tobacco tasted heavier somehow when it was wet, the damp sound the paper made when he inhaled. He remembered a young woman slapping a cigarette out of the Original Harkness’ hand once, during a raid. She’d ground it out with the heel of her shoe as if the bombers would see the light from miles up, and both Jacks would have laughed at her if she hadn’t looked so delicate and panicked. They’d had sex afterwards, the three of them, on the grubby floor of her tenement.
Jack couldn’t really remember anything about that anymore, either; the faces all blurred into one red-lipped soft-haired blur, her voice and Harkness One’s melting into one too-crisp mid-range trill, the things that made them individual and inviting gone. He could feel the space between him and the scheme of things opening up and pulling away from him, a rock with a river round it, and the whole thing was depressing and confusing enough that he actually dug into his pockets and unwrapped a cigar.
Jack remembers the next part very, very clearly. It went something like this:
1) He bit the end off the cigar.
2) He tugged open his coat to shield it from the rain.
3) Being out of dry matches, he took out the antique brass lighter with the green glass inlay that the rift had so kindly provided.
4) He pressed down on it.
5) He woke up in the woods.
*
Merlin’s version of events up until this point is slightly different.
It started with a comet crashing in the woods outside Camelot. Public opinion was divided as to whether or not it was actually a comet (hindsight tells us it wasn’t) and, if it was, whether that was a good or bad omen (neither, as it turned out), but people generally agreed that the fire it caused was bad and that that fire reaching the crops or the city would be worse, so everyone spent a dizzying night hauling buckets of water and heaping earth on the flames and praying fervently to all sorts of forbidden entities and so on and so forth until two days later they woke up to find that the fire had burned itself out and they were all cursed.
The curse hit just after dawn on a muggy morning, the kind where Merlin stayed in his room for as long as possible to avoid the heat from the fire, and one of the first things it did was make Giaus thrust a bowlful of porridge into Merlin’s lap and snap, “Punctuality is important, Merlin. You won’t make much of your destiny if you show up twenty minutes late with half of what you need. For pity’s sake, pay attention or make lists.”
Merlin had scowled and opened his mouth to complain about not having time to make lists, what with his always having to be in twelve places at once, but what came out was: “You’re the closest thing to a father I’ve ever known.” He clapped a hand over his mouth.
Giaus blinked slowly. “I fell in love with your mother before she left Camelot,” he said, then gaped as if he didn’t know what his mouth was doing. “I didn’t mean to say that.”
“Me neither. Let’s just ignore it. Please. Forever. Because now I can’t stop picturing the -” Merlin shovelled a spoonful of porridge into his mouth in the hope that that would somehow stop it making noise.
“Sit up straight. And take your elbows off the table, where are your manners? Speaking of which, you should really talk back less, although in general you need to talk more, especially when spoken to. Although you’d be wise to choose words which say less.” Gaius clamped his jaw shut, bug-eyed with shock. After a moment’s silence he scooped up a spoonful of porridge, raised it to his lips and tentatively -
“Stop wearing scarves, they make you look shifty.” He covered his mouth.
“Gaius, what’s going on?”
A frantic, tight- jawed shrug.
“It’s a disease,” Merlin suggested, hopefully. “A perfectly treatable disease. Something in the air. Something we ate. Not that I’m saying you can’t cook! But you can’t, this is awful, it’s always awful, sometimes I pretend I need to work early and then eat at Gwen’s. I think Arthur’s in love with her. I think I’m in love with Arthur. I think if he doesn’t realise what I can do soon, I’ll explode. I’ll die of silence.”
The was a long, still moment in which Merlin could feel the blood slowly draining from his face. “It’s a curse,” he heard himself say. “A hideous, hideous curse, Gaius, make it stop.”
The odd thing was that it didn’t feel particularly like a curse: there was none of the twitching, itching feeling at the back of his head that usually bothered him when something else was in there, no solid pressure against his skull forcing the words out. He just couldn’t stop saying what he was thinking and couldn’t help thinking about things he didn’t want to say. He bit into his scarf.
“Excellent plan.”
“Yr duffed ike un eduhot.”
“And you should make a list of the day’s errands before going to work.”
Merlin did, partly to pacify Gaius but mostly because he discovered he was able to write ‘muck out Arthur’s horses’ despite having no intention of doing so. He bit down on his scarf, stuffed his pockets with bits of parchment and scraps of vellum, and set off for the castle.
Work in post-curse Camelot went something like this:
Here is your breakfast, Sire. Would you like anything else?
Arthur stared at the note, then at Merlin, then at the note again. His eyes took on an unfamiliarly soft look. “You’re so clever,” he sighed. “If you tell anyone I said that I’ll have you put in the dunking stool,” he added, equally dreamily. “I’ve a meeting with my father later. Bring me a quill.”
Perhaps it is a disease, was Arthur’s first contribution to the meeting of Uther’s emergency council.
“It is a curse!” Uther wailed. “A spell cast by those who would seek to take you from me and turn you to their own foul purposes, thinking they have a claim on my kingdom because you are their child. I will not have it! I will burn this castle to the ground myself before I hand it over to them, and any man who so much as breathes a word of this will have his tongue cut from his head and pickled.”
Uther’s emergency council studied the floor of the throne room carefully. “These are new rushes,” Lord Westbury observed. “Do you know I’m skimming money from my serfs’ taxes?”
“Sometimes I wish I’d killed my father when I had the chance,” Arthur offered, followed swiftly by, It is a curse. A hideous curse and Fetch me a scarf.
MAKE IT STOP, Uther scribbled, and Arthur nodded his assent, tight-lipped and red-faced.THE COURT IS TO DISBAND UNTIL NEWS OF PROGRESS REACHES US. NOT YOU, WESTBURY.
The assembled gentry fled as quickly as possible, a ripple of mutinous chatter following them out of the Great Hall, echoed by a corridor full of servants who suddenly had an opinion on everything. Merlin just had time to think that, oh well, at least it wouldn’t matter if he was rude anymore, before Arthur hooked an arm around his shoulders, steered him through a side door and said, as quietly as the curse would let him, “You need to stay away from me until this is over. I could make life very dangerous for you.”
“I’m - ”
Arthur quickly shoved Merlin’s scarf back into his mouth. “You’re in idiot,” he said. “Now go and help Gaius, and don’t come back until you don’t want to tell me what I already know.”
Two days passed. Arthur shouted far less than usual but revealed that he could spell some impressively creative insults. Morgana spat in Uther’s face then took to avoiding him entirely, riding to the lake and back in solitude twice a day. Uther sat in the Great Hall, jaw shaking and knuckles white on the arms of the throne, as if his sitting there and staring down all comers in silence meant that the kingdom was running as effectively as ever. People, in general, divided their time between rutting frantically in hay carts and avoiding one another for fear of excessive truth-telling. Merlin did a great deal of the latter, substituted grinding molar-sized holes in three scarves for the former and dutifully swallowed every foul-smelling concoction Gaius placed in front of him in the hope that one of them would stop him from involuntarily shouting out that he was magic.
None of them did.
None of the spells in Merlin’s book helped, either. Nor any of the amulets that you absolutely couldn’t buy anywhere in Camelot for any money, no sir, none of that sort of thing available on my stall I think you must be hearing things why don’t you come round the back and rest yourself?
The dragon, when asked what was happening, sighed morosely. “I used to be challenged, you know,” it said. “Young men would don their best armour and journey for a year and a day unaided for the merest hope of a chance of fighting me and taking something of my hoard. Or fighting me and rescuing a damsel. Or just fighting me. I took a man’s arm off in a scuffle, once, and years later he came and thanked me. Thanked me! For eating his arm! Apparently dragonslayers never go hungry, even if they’re not particularly successful ones. Now? Nary a coin to my name, haven’t so much as smelled a woman in years and the only young man I ever see is you, Emrys, and only when you want something. Go away.” It flapped away into the darkness.
Nobody, in short, knew anything.
And then Gwen flounced.
It was perhaps the only time she ever did so - people in Camelot will still talk about it, if you get them the right kind of drunk and far enough from court - so we can assume it was a rare occurrence and even, perhaps, a spectacular one, if you manage to dig through all the layers of added value. Sadly, all we know for sure is that she went to Gaius’ chambers afterward, sat tearfully at his table and said, “I didn’t mean to do it, I really didn’t. It’s just that the new laundress is so useless - ”
“There’s a new laundress?”
“Just since the fire,” Gwen explained. “Her family lived on the edge of the forest, they lost everything.”
“There’s always a new laundress,” Gaius sighed. “Never marry one, Merlin, they’re all loose-witted and bloodthirsty.”
In an ideal world the new laundress would, obviously, have been a sour-faced yet virtuous woman who had shouldered responsibility for a young family not entirely her own, working tirelessly in the castle laundry to ensure those in her care did not have to go without and Merlin, upon meeting her, would have realised this and learned an important lesson about the dangers of applying narrative logic to real life.
Unfortunately for Merlin’s personal development (but perhaps fortunately for all sorts of other things, like Time and History and Fate and so forth), she was an alien. A fairly obvious one, at that - eyes too close-set, hands too small, voice too deep and too accented to really sound human. So Merlin put on his best servant face, mentally rehearsed his subtler spells and offered her, Can I have a word with you about the Prince’s clothes?
The laundress blinked faster than a person should be able to. “Is this some kind of ruse?” she asked, looking strangely unconcerned. “Have you lost weight?”
“Look,” Merlin said, as quietly as anyone could while under the curse, “I don’t know what you’re doing here, but I’m magic and I have accidentally killed a lot of people. Really.”
“You’ve definitely lost weight, Jack. And height. And charm.” She fast-blinked again. “The ship you sold me was a dud. The engine gave out mid-jump and now I’m stuck here.”
Merlin was not prepared for this. “Who’s Jack?”
The third fast blink had an apologetic edge to it. “Forgive me. Your - ” she took the quill and parchment from Merlin’s hands, species “ - all seem very alike to me. I contacted an associate named Jack Harkness. My readings indicate that he has arrived and is somewhere nearby. Do you know where I might find him?”
At that precise moment, a page rushed down the laundry steps screeching: “There are travelling players in the Hall! They’ve got a wizard! A tame one! It dances!” and Merlin, once again, missed out on a valuable opportunity to learn how the real world works.
That, wrote the blinking laundress, may well be Jack.
*
At this point, the reader might find a few notes on the blinking laundress helpful.
Her name is Thiset. She is from a country called Absh on a planet known as Partis, which is famous among starfaring nations for its rather tenuous grip on its own existence. She works for an inter-dimensional textiles company, because that’s the kind of thing people do on planets where the walls between realities are non-supporting and easily removed. A mis-timed dimension jump left her stranded in Camelot with nothing but a burnt out ship, a dead co-pilot and no working jumpware.
After landing, she covered the burnt out spaceship with as much burnt out foliage as she could find. She moved everything useful into some nearby caves and fit them in as best she could between piles of bottled water and yellow highlighters and the corpse of someone who smelled like he’d been there for a while. It wasn’t the best base camp, but it was better than nothing, and being somewhere so permeable had the dual advantage of offering multiple possible exits (should she work out how to repair any tech that would let her use them) and feeling homely in the meantime.
She followed the sound of water through side- caves and cramped passages, crawling through the mud until she came to a wide, well-lit cavern with what looked like an Ascension Tank in the centre. She placed the dead co-pilot in the tank and said as many of the appropriate prayers as she could remember. That done, she walked back to the place where the walls between everything were thinnest, pushed against them until she had a fair idea of what was on the other side, then informed the universe that she’d like to speak to Jack Fucking Harkness, thank you very much.
The universe, being co-operative in only the most limited sense of the word, sent Jack Fucking Harkness the dead man’s trilby.
Thiset sighed, put on her most human face and went to find a job.
*
But anyway. Travelling players had arrived, bringing with them a tame wizard in a trilby who, by the time Merlin and Thiset reached the Great Hall, was breathing smoke and trying to impress Uther.
“We thought you might like to see him perform, Sire,” the lead player said, smirking. “We felt that to meet such a man and not offer you proof of his gifts would be sorely remiss of us.”
“They have treated me kindly, Your Majesty,” the sorcerer said, winking conspiratorially at Uther.
“This is suicide,” Merlin shouted through his scarf.
“That’s Jack Harkness,” Thiset explained. “It’s best if you just leave him to it.”
“Is he telling Uther to reward the players?”
“Yes.”
“The players who brought him here to die?”
Thiset’s grip on Merlin’s elbow tightened. “I doubt he sees it like that.”
“How does he see it?”
“Put your scarf back in your mouth. Please.”
“And now, for those who need further proof of my mastery of the ancient arts-”
“Execute him,” Uther said, smiling almost beatifically. It was the first time in three days his brain and his mouth seemed to be in accord. “Burn him. Immediately. Thoroughly. Throw the body over the walls and let the birds at it.”
It’s not possible to break a tooth by biting into cloth, but Merlin gave it a good go. Thiset’s warning hand became more of a preventative arm lock.
“I. What?” Jack seemed genuinely surprised. “Your Majesty. Arthur. Art, buddy. You’re a riot, really, but this isn’t the time to be kidding around.”
“Arthur, do you know this man?”
“No, father.”
“Oh, good. I’d hate to have to burn two. Execute him.”
“Whoa. Whoa. You’re not Arthur? This isn’t King Arthur’s court?” Jack risked a glance back at the players, who were all suddenly intensely interested in the floor.
“Are these new rushes?” their leader asked. “Very nice, Majesty. Very chic weave. Gives the place a lovely continental flavour, don’t you think, boys?” The others nodded their agreement, even as they edged backward.
“I think,” Uther said, still with the same beatific coolness, “you may have been labouring under a misconception, sorcerer.”
“Yeah.” Merlin remembers Jack sounding spectacularly bored for a man who had been betrayed by his friends and was about to be put to death. “If I make a joke about how I’d rather labour under you, will things go any better for me?”
“No.”
Jack shrugged. “Worth a shot.”
“You’re insane,” Morgana helpfully informed him. “Both of you. What crime has he committed? What harm has he done?” She added, "I’m being entirely serious, Uther. What does Camelot gain by killing him?" in the neatest hand of anyone so far.
“Sometimes I dream that I’m the idiot child of a common labourer, and all of you are nothing but the idle fantasies of a foolish mind,” Uther said, still radiating the kind of zen-like calm which wouldn’t become fashionable for centuries. “I often struggle to sleep, but on those nights my rest is always sound. Now. Kill him.”
So then the guards rushed forward, finally, and Jack rolled his eyes and punched one or two in a token kind of way and Arthur probably made some reluctantly heroic contribution to the whole thing, like stopping them from running Jack through there and then, but to be honest he did that sort of thing so often people generally didn’t bother to keep a record of it, so we can’t be entirely sure.
Jack slapping Arthur’s arse en route to the pyre while shouting something about burning loins was recorded, but only in the most euphemistic terms. And the fact that Jack Harkness whistled right up until the fire reached his knees was so widely reported that a Druid eventually wrote a song about it, which he later attempted to sing at his own execution (it was, alas, a hanging, and as a result there are none now living who know the words to the second verse).
Anyway. Immortality through song aside, Jack Harkness was declared dead to the world after a few hours in the fire, and his body was thrown into a ditch outside the city walls for crows and small children to pick at.
Arthur and his knights took the body outside the city walls themselves - this was not an honour usually accorded to sorcerers, but Arthur had spent the last three days staring calf-eyed at convicts, asking them if they were okay and would they like anything, were they sure, he was so sorry about all this, the world was a cruel and unjust place and he knew them to be honourable but their fates lay beyond his power, the hands of the mighty are often the most tightly bound etc., etc., so the knights had agreed to accompany the body in the hope that it would stave off the sight of the cursed Crown Prince crying like a child with a split knee in front of the populace.
Merlin took this opportunity to go and steal a long leather coat from Arthur’s long leather coat collection. Thiset borrowed an uncooperative horse from his collection of uncooperative horses. They met by the smouldering corpse at midnight, and waited there until it lurched back to life with a sort of gasping, gnawing sound.
Merlin threw up on the coat.
Jack threw up on what might, in a previous incarnation, have been one of his own arms.
Thiset sighed. “You,” she said, kicking Jack in the thigh even as she ladled out water for him, “sold me a bad ship.”
“Well, you’re a very bad gir - ow, ow, did you just hit me in the face with a ladle?”
“You shouldn’t hit him in the face with a ladle,” Merlin told her, though he wasn’t sure whether to add he’s just risen from the dead or he might turn into a cat.
“Listen to the long drink of water with the ears,” Jack suggested.
Thiset hit him again. “Listen to me,” she hissed, “You are going to get up, you are going to put on this coat, you are going to fix my ship and then I will possibly consider maybe sending you back to whichever rock you were oozing under. Are we clear?”
“I do not ooze.” He slung the coat over his shoulder and winked in a way that made Merlin’s knees do something wobbly and not entirely voluntary. “And who do we have here?”
“Merlin!” said Merlin, more enthusiastically than he’d planned. “Hi. When you smile I’m a lot less convinced that you’re evil.”
Jack - well, you can all probably guess what Jack said. And Merlin, too, what with him being a cursed adolescent in love. Thiset had a fairly one track mind back then, what with being stranded alone several universes from home, and the Pendragons were mostly avoiding the hell out of each other, so. Well. We could do this bit through montage, really, couldn’t we?
Picture it:
Jack Harkness riding naked through the moonlit woods. (Merlin oogling subtly; Thiset glaring).
The cave, lit by the eerie green glare of a glowstick; the look on Jack's face when he realises that this is where the rift has been depositing things for all these years, that those highlighters are his highlighters, that cheap office party booze his office party booze, that dead gumshoe his dead gumshoe! (“Not mine mine, it went missing from a refrigeration unit.”/ “What’s a refrigeration unit?”/“It’s like heaven, Merlin, only colder.”)
The three of them toiling in the noon sun: Thiset trying to coax a blackened computer interface back to life, Jack hitting a temporal gyroscope repeatedly with a hammer, Merlin trying every cloaking spell in the book to see if any of them actually work (“The book says to put a cat’s bone under your tongue and hold it there.” / “The alien from the future says to find something less disgusting.”).
In soothing sepia tones: the triumphant cheers as they finally, finally get the power back on. The group hug when the loading bay doors finally hang straight again. Jack sitting shirtless on the roof of a half-working ship, sipping office party whiskey in the sunset, thinking that if this works out, he might not have to go back.
Less soothingly: the frantic flailing as a hunting party approaches the fire-ravaged section of woodland, looking for an easy kill. Gwen’s suspicious prodding when Merlin starts asking who in the city does the most intricate metalwork most cheaply. Arthur’s suspicious prodding when Merlin turns up to work with a lovebite the size of a fist on his throat. Merlin’s involuntarily anguished expression after Arthur involuntarily calls him a hussy.
“He thinks I’m a hussy and I think he’s a prick, and we need to stop this curse now,” Merlin told Thiset afterwards. “Or else I’m going to propose and he’s going to out me to Uther.”
“It’ll be okay.”
“I can’t come back from the dead,” Merlin said. He was a little drunk and his voice was wet and rough round the edges. “Well, once. Sort of. But not usually and not without killing someone else. Arthur, mostly. Or Gaius. Or - ”
“Shhh, now,” Thismet cooed. “You could keep Jack in a box and kill him however often the Old Ones needed you to, hmm? How does that sound?”
“Tempting.”
Thiset clasped him reassuringly on the shoulder, as if she’d read about the gesture in a book but never had to use it in life. “Well, the ascension shouldn’t take more than another day or two. See how you feel then.”
Merlin blinked, wiped at his not-at-all wet face and said, “Ascension?”
Which is how Merlin ended up spending an evening wading drunkenly around in the caves under Camelot, brandishing a net made of fabric samples from another dimension and fishing pieces of dead co-pilot out of the water supply. “You can’t do this,” he could hear himself shouting, “you can’t just go flinging bodies into people’s springs and press ganging their dead sorcerers and what if I didn’t wear scarves? What if I’d just walked up to Uther and told him the only reason his son’s alive is that I’m a monster, and he could tell what I was saying?”
Thiset launched herself at Merlin with a not-quite-human noise and struck out with some not-quite human limbs, until the pair of them were half-wrestling and half-falling, flinging fistfuls of mud and viscous globules of dead co-pilot as they scrabbled frantically in the mud at the bottom of the well.
“I could have been killed because of you!” Merlin shouted, and Thiset countered with variations on “Reyn died,” Reyn being the aforementioned dead co-pilot who she had worked with for many years but who did not, as Merlin was all too keen to point out, have the fate of a nation resting on his shoulders or a glorious destiny to fulfil, making his ascension to whatever bizarre alien otherworld he was heading toward a lesser priority than Merlin’s own not dying.
Thiset considered this momentarily, then strangled Merlin with a tentacle he hadn’t realised she had.
It felt horrible for a second and then indescribably worse, as the cold, wet feeling of her scales on his neck was superseded by the heavy, rolling sadness of my friend is dead, which appeared, dark and unignorable, in the back of Merlin’s head and spiralled quickly into Will coughing up his lungs on someone’s kitchen table and Hunith whimpering on Gaius’ doorstep and two druids running beside him in the woods then suddenly not, all of it at once, so vivid that Merlin smell the sickness rising off his mother’s clothes.
There was a long beat of terrible, screeching blackness before the tentacle-thing withdrew and allowed Merlin to sit up, spit water and tell himself firmly not to shake.
“I’m sorry,” Thiset said as she rearranged her face into something more human, “that was rude of me. But my friend is dead and you’re lying in his grave before he’s left it.” Her face looked more human then, and like it might be crying if it knew how to. “I know you have this destiny, but other people have things they need to do, too. Before and after you accidentally kill them. It’s not always about sorcery, you know.”
“Right,” said Merlin. His head felt like someone had kicked a hole in it and then climbed inside to die. His chest ached. “Sorry about your. Friend. Copalot.”
“Co-pilot.”
“Co-pilot.”
“Whose name was Reyn.”
“Reyn, right. Sorry.” He climbed out of the well and sat, dripping, on the side. Moving hurt.
Thiset fast-blinked at him. “You should come up to the ship,” she said. “It’s heated again, now.”
“No, thank you.”
“Right.” Thiset blinked again. “Was it the tentacles? I know some species find them strange.”
“No. Well, yes, but it’s not. I just need to think.”
Thiset looked sceptical.
“Please.”
“I’m taking the net.”
Merlin handed it over. “Sorry about the, you know.” He waved the net in such a way as to indicate the desecration of sacred ground.
“Good. I apologise for the, um.” Thismet flashed a tentacle.
“Maybe save them for Jack,” Merlin suggested.
History tells us that Thiset was not sorry enough to avoid mentioning the incident to Jack, or at least the last part of it. Legend has it he turned up in the well chamber just under an hour later, wearing nothing but a neckerchief and strategic smears of the Partismen equivalent of brake fluid. “So,” he grinned, “tentacles.”
Merlin, still too miserable to be struck dumb with lust, said, “Not like that, no.”
“Ah,” said Jack, who, after several lifetimes in the public sector, had delivered enough cultural sensitivity seminars to know a moment of terrible realisation when he saw one. “I’ll go put on some pants.”
“The science of it,” Jack explained to Merlin sometime around dawn, when Merlin was well into his second drunken malaise of the evening, choking his way through a damp Hamlet which he’d been assured would cheer him up, “is that when Partismen corpses break down, they realise something that acts kind of like a barbiturate and everyone gets a little crazy. The creepy religious belief behind it is that by unburdening the living of their problems, the souls of the dead can buy their way into the afterlife.”
“By blurting out secrets that make everybody hate them?”
Jack shrugged. “I have a bleeding heart of a second who’d tell you it was good to talk. I’m gonna go with, it’s good to let other people talk. They’ll tell you all kinds of useful crazy things if you shut up and listen. This one time, we had an infestation of Canups on Anglesey - they look like people with frogs’ heads, you’d get a real kick out of them - and we could not find them. Everywhere we looked, nothing. Everyone we asked looked at us like we were insane. People never look at us like we’re insane, they’re usually kind of grateful, but this time? Insane. And we’re running every scan, monitoring every possible biometric, Owen’s breaking into hospital records, I’m calling old friends from the Agency to see if they know how to track the fucking things, and then Tosh overhears these kids at a goddamn bus stop talking about some hobo who said he’d seen frog people, and whaddaya know, we’ve got ’em.”
“What’s a bus?”
“I feel like you’re kinda missing the point, here, kid.”
“No, I understand, I do plenty of eavesdropping -”
“No, see. The second part to this story is that, turns out the Canups were there long before anything else was. They’re probably there right now. Turns out they’ve been spawning up there for centuries, and if we gun them down - and seriously, after a week in a tourist town? I was so ready to gun someone down - it won’t achieve anything, other than maybe wiping out the species sooner than nature intended. The survivors will just keep coming back, year after year and getting more aggressive every time, until eventually they’re marking the nests with skulls.”
“What’s a tourist?”
“An abomination, Merlin, keep up. I put on a shirt and everything, try to focus. My point is, you can’ t protect the human race from an unknown alien threat until you know what it wants. And most of them want different things. A lot of them want nothing. But you don’t know that until you ask, and you can’t deal with them until they know you know you’ve asked them to - look, boy wizard, the point I’m trying to make is: if it’s your destiny to rule over all of Camelot, maybe you should learn a couple of people’s names. See how they feel about your boy in armour. How they feel about taxes. What they look for in a mistress, anything. It can’t all be about heroism. Sometimes you’ve got to do the HR.”
“HR?”
“Being nice to people so they let you keep your job despite numerous violations of. Huh. Despite numerous violations.”
Merlin contemplated this as carefully as he could after drinking something which had been brewed by Gaius in a broom cupboard. “I can do magic,” he concluded.
“And that’s great, but magic doesn’t make the buses run on time. Magic doesn’t make people happy. Not on its own.”
Merlin attempted contemplation again, this time with considerably more success. (Sources disagree as to what exactly was contemplated: some say it was that no-one, when retelling the story of The Fire-Breathing Sorcerer In the Inadvisable Hat, bothered to mention that Arthur had ensured the man received a trial, only that he had barged into so-and-so while dragging the accused to the dungeons and had said such-and-such to someone else; others suggest Merlin merely thought of the fact that, after eighteen months in Camelot, he still thought of both his neighbours as so-and-so, and neither of them liked him despite his saving them from several monsters, a famine and a plague). “I need you to do me a favour,” he said, finally.
Jack raised an eyebrow. “Explain what a bus is?”
“No. Not quite.”
And so it came to pass that, on the third day of the second week of the sixth month of his time in Camelot, Jack Harkness came face to face with the Great Dragon for the first time. He was wearing armour he couldn’t walk in, a helmet he couldn’t be heard through and was carrying a sword he didn’t really know how to hold. “Hear me, Worm,” he bellowed. “I am Jack McGyan, of the Austell McGyans.” These were, apparently, Merlin’s mother’s sister’s husband’s brother’s friends, who’d had their farm razed before the Purge. “I have come here today to avenge the death of my, uh. Clan. Have at you.” He waved the sword in what he hoped was a threatening manner. “What are you waiting for? I said, have at you. That’s what you say, right?”
“You may say whatever you wish, Jack McGyan,” the dragon said, honey-smooth. “None who enter here shall live to repeat it.”
Jack shifted slightly in an attempt to keep any kind of balance whatsoever inside the armour. “You’d be surprised how many times I’ve heard that.” He hefted the sword aloft again.
The sound the dragon’s teeth made as it smiled would have made a lesser man doubt his own freakish immortality.
Jack laughed and swore off boy wizards forever.
Merlin spent the day before Reyn’s ascension doing something he rarely did and would not admit to later: he made conversation.
He talked with, the Freesons who worked in the treasury and whose daughter, as it turned out, had run away to become a priestess. He talked to Per Aberson, who dreamt of becoming a town crier but had spent most of his waking hours since the age of eight at work in the tannery, and had never learnt to read. He found out about the Davies’ crops failing and the Lewises having moved to Camelot to dodge charges of cattle rustling in their hometown. He spoke to people whose families had died in the Purge and people whose families had only survived because of it. He met a girl down on Marshgate who knew about the cat’s bone spell and used it to keep watch over her sister, who worked in the palace. He got Gaius’ recipe for whatever it was he brewed in the broom cupboard, along with three conflicting recipes from the farrier, the miller and his boy, with the boy also offering the recipe for a tincture which would restore your sight afterwards. He got more answers to the question, “what do you do?” than he could hope to process in a lifetime and realised that, if he were a laundress, he’d probably end up turning to the dark side, too. He heard about Geoffrey of Monmouth’s first love (a red-haired shepherdess) and Sir Elinore’s latest (Geoffrey of Monmouth). He heard stories in which Uther was clever rather than just cunning. He saw a miniature of Igraine that looked nothing like the woman he and Arthur had seen and two which did, both filched from the palace by Arthur’s wet nurse.
And then, for the first time in a long time, he went to work.
There was probably a lot of internal pep-talking and muttered rehearsal going on as Merlin approached Arthur’s rooms, and in a more satisfying narrative Arthur would, perhaps, have happened upon Merlin while he was practicing declaring his love in a mirror or something, but the simple truth is this: Merlin went to Arthur’s rooms. Arthur was out. Merlin spent an hour and a half correcting all his temporary replacement’s mistakes (it should be noted that this largely involved deliberately moving things to the last place Arthur would look for them, ostensibly to teach him the virtue of patience but also out of spite). He ate some fruit. He read three pages of a book on heraldry.
He did not, as far as is known, rehearse anything in front of a mirror.
When Arthur finally returned, he didn’t even make it all the way through the door before he hauled his new manservant into the corridor by the collar and told him to leave them. He screwed up his face in that lockjaw-sufferer expression most people wore during the curse months and locked, bolted and barred the door before he even dared squint angrily at Merlin. “What in blazes do you -”
“Did you know he has an invisible cousin?” Merlin asked, cheerily. “She enchants herself and then wanders round the palace keeping an eye on him and her sister, because they’re the only family she has left.”
Arthur’s squint tightened. “That’s illegal.”
“That’s nothing. One of the cooks thinks that monarchy is an outmoded concept kept alive only be the reliance of the weak-minded on imperialist dogma to give their lives structure.”
Arthur’s eyes were barely visible at this point. “It’s a good thing I’m not entirely sure what that just meant, Merlin, or you’d be in trouble. Speaking of which, didn’t I fire you until we weren’t cursed?”
“We won’t be tomorrow.” Merlin was smiling so wide his face ached. He knelt and busied himself removing Arthur’s riding boots until the grin was back under control. “I thought I’d come in and get a head start. Invisible Cousin Boy - his name is Sean, by the way - has undone all my good work. Your boots were in the cupboard.”
“My boots are supposed to be in the cupboard.”
“You’d get bored if they were there all the time. And besides, it’s not like you’d execute me or anything.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure.”
“Fifty-four per cent of subjects questioned believe you’re a no-capital-punishment kind of a king-to-be.”
“Do they know what kind of a manservant you are?”
“Huh.” Merlin straightened up and put on his best thinking face. He had, to be honest, rehearsed this moment a little bit. Once. Twice at the most. “You know, I think they agreed on ‘excellent’.” And then his hands were slipping under Arthur’s coat, slower and surer than they needed to be, and Arthur was swallowing a laugh and not moving, even though Merlin was far closer than he had any real need to be and seemed, in the face of all reason, to be attempting to push him against a wall, which was so hilarious an idea that Arthur couldn’t help but going along with it, and then Merlin was kissing him, softer and surer than he had any right to.
“Your neck,” Arthur’s mouth said, probably with very little intervention from his brain, “is really good.”
Merlin nodded slowly, the picture of soulful understanding. “It’s the sorcery that does it,” he explained. “Which we will have a frank and serious discussion about. After.”
“Right,” agreed Arthur, several octaves lower than he’d planned. “After.”
Very few people who’ve known Jack Harkness for six months do anything printable in bed.
The day after Reyn’s ascension, the people of Camelot saw something very strange: it was like a comet, apparently, rising up from the dead forest into the sky and streaking fire all the way to the horizon before suddenly vanishing completely.
No-one talked about it much. They didn’t really feel the need.
“What’re you going to do now?” Jack asked, watching as Merlin gathered up his things.
Merlin shrugged. “Go back to Gaius’. Go back to work.”
“Fuck armour boy through the mattress?”
“I don’t think you’re allowed to say that about the Crown Prince.”
“Please. His dad’s dragon ate three of my limbs. Not only can I say that, I can say that in eight hundred years you should make me a tape.”
“What’s a tape?”
“It’s like a bus,” Jack grinned. “Now, who wants to see a magic trick?” He produced a Partismen Emergency Beacon from his pocket (it was brass coloured, with green, glassy dials embedded in the front).
Merlin raised an eyebrow. “This won’t impress me.”
“Sure it will.”
*
Ianto remembers the next part very, very clearly. It went something like this:
1) He went up to the roof of the Hub.
2) He sat down in what he refused to think of as Jack’s spot.
3) He lit a cigarette.
4) He did not think about chain-of-command dating and its ability to ruin one forever, especially if your chain of command was headed by a man who frequently disappeared through holes in the space-time continuum.
5) Jack Harkness landed on him.
6) It hurt.
“I missed you,” Jack said, much later, in the dark of his live-in office, after Gwen had punched him and hugged him and marvelled at how many highlighters he’d managed to find in the Middle Ages and how little detail he managed to put into a twelve-page official report. “It was funny, actually, there was this moment when I was getting eaten by a dragon -”
“Is this a Welsh joke?”
Jack made a mental note: Ianto, naked and acting offended. Remember it. “Yeah,” he laughed, “I was staring death in the face in a new and exacting way and I thought, how can I use this to spread contempt in the workplace?”
“You were never eaten by a dragon.” Laughing: remember that, too.
“It was a favour for a wizard,” Jack told him. “He had a throat.”
“I’m almost afraid to ask what that means.”
Jack laughed into Ianto’s shoulder.
“Oh, I almost forgot. Someone came into tourist information the other day, left something for you.”
“Hmmm?”
“Hmm. Local history nut. Handed in a tape. Said something about buses?”
-END-
Prompt:
Cigarettes.
Author: normalhumanbein
Fandoms: Merlin/Torchwood
Characters Merlin, Arthur, Uther, Gwen; Jack Harkness, Gwen Cooper
Pairings: Jack/Ianto and Merlin/Arthur. Background hints of Jack/Merlin and Arthur/Gwen
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 8056
Spoilers: Set between seasons two and three of Torchwood, with major spoilers for the second series. Spoilers up to 3.09 of Merlin.
Warnings: None
Disclaimer: Merlin and Torchwood belong to their respective creators.
A/N: Many thanks to mumblemutter for betaing, cheerleading and explaining my own plot to me.
Summary: And so it came to pass that, on the third day of the second week of the sixth month of his time in Camelot, Jack Harkness came face to face with the Great Dragon for the first time.
Everyone knew the rift took things. Everyone knew it had preferences. It liked Tosh’s sandwiches, Gwen’s brand of mascara and, Jack claimed, his underwear, though people seemed inexplicably sceptical whenever he used that excuse. It disapproved of Susie drinking at work, of Jack drinking in his office afterward, of herbal tea and bottled water. There was a mildly disturbing phase when it seemed to be systematically finding and absorbing all of Owen’s most-chewed pens, but it turned out that Gwen was throwing them away in an attempt to get him to break the habit. It was the rift that removed any and all yellow highlighters from the building with a thoroughness that bordered on the fetishistic, though, and replaced them with small piles of pungent, purple fruit.
Jack was quite relieved when they worked that out. The idea that he’d been on one planet, in one job long enough to be drafting Do Not Fuck With The Stationery Cupboard memos? Terrifying. The idea that people might actually take them seriously? Worse. The fact that he’d half-considered three ways to explain this in the Torchwood One annual budget meeting - hell, that he’d half-considered attending the Torchwood One annual budget meeting? Shoot him. Shoot him now.
Well, no. He didn’t mean that. It wouldn’t accomplish anything, and he’d wake up to Ianto’s paperwork face.
Anyway.
The fact of the matter was, everyone knew the rift took things. They only became confused when it started giving them back. A ballet shoe. A screwdriver. The inner tube of a bicycle tyre. The gearbox from a Wrimeanian Atmospheric Cruiser. Half a parakeet.
And then: the trilby.
(“Everything,” Jack tells Merlin, heavily, much later on, “everything that has gone wrong can be blamed on that trilby.” He pauses, gropes for a thought through the sticky, shimmering haze the world always seems to be wrapped in after a large quantity of small beer. “Except the dead guy. Man. Alien. Thing.”
“’S a Partismen.”
“Yes.”
“That wasn’t the hat.”
“No.”
“That was…” Jack waves a hand in front of his face as if that will somehow communicate the intricacies of interstellar travel directly into Merlin’s brain. “Your neck,” he says eventually, in the tone of a man who has stumbled past drunkenness and is now clinging doggedly to a sublime truth, “is really good.”
Merlin nods, slowly, as if understanding this for the first time. “Your coat,” he tells Jack, “is on fire.”)
Anyway.
The point is, everything went wrong after Jack found the trilby on the roof. Not immediately; there was an all-too-brief period involving Ianto, braces, the hat, five-point restraints and not a huge amount else, and then a fuzzy, post-coital period where nothing particularly worrying happened, and then, then there was the horrible moment when Ianto said, “Maybe it was the rift.”
“No, that was me.”
“Not - ow, okay, that was you - I mean, that left you the hat. Maybe it’s taken a liking to you. Maybe in rift-speak, sending someone stinking piles of purple fruit is an undying declaration of - Christ, Jack.”
Jack had frowned against Ianto’s stomach. “I thought it was you.”
Ianto shook his head. “Maybe it was - . No. And it wouldn’t have been Gwen. Maybe Andy saw you up there. Maybe he’s taken a liking to you. Maybe in police-speak, being a complete pain in the fucking arse is - shit, don’t do that when I’m trying to take the piss Jack, it’s cheating.”
“Sorry.” Jack muttered, contentedly licking a stripe along Ianto’s thigh.
“Should bloody well hope so.”
“It really wasn’t you?”
“You’ve got enough dressing-up clothes to be going on with.”
“It was in my. Y’know. My spot.”
“Excuse me?”
“The hat, the - where’s it gone? Put it back on - yeah, the hat, it wasn’t just on the roof, it was on my part of the roof. Where I. You know.”
“Sulk like a girl?”
“I will leave you here until the morning, don’t think I won’t.”
“Sorry, sorry.”
Jack remembers the way Ianto’s voice hitched, the full-body shiver he gave when Jack finally, finally touched him, and wonders why the fuck he spent so much time talking about bullshit and so little time committing the important details to memory.
Probably because he hadn’t planned on spending the next six months trapped in a cave.
Anyway.
The fact remained: the rift had left a hat on the bit of the roof with the best view, the overhang where Jack absolutely did not go to brood, ever. And then it started filling his pockets with books of matches for the hand-rolled cigarettes he did not smoke up there, ever, and which did not in any way remind him of The Original Jack Harkness. It gave him an antique brass lighter mosaic-ed with tiny pieces of green glass. And then it sent him some Hamlets.
“Hamlets?” Gwen had laughed. “Maybe it just wants you to cheer up, Jack. You know,” she said, off his blank look. “‘Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet.’ Those adverts. You’ve seen them, Ianto, with that Rab Nesbitt fella in a photobooth.”
Jack scoffed. It was a good scoff, one honed over years spent dodging accusations of fraud, but Gwen hadn’t looked particularly convinced. “I don’t need cheering up,” he insisted. “And I do not brood.”
But he did sweep dramatically out, go up to the roof and smoke a roll-up in the rain, savouring the sodden-match smell and the way the tobacco tasted heavier somehow when it was wet, the damp sound the paper made when he inhaled. He remembered a young woman slapping a cigarette out of the Original Harkness’ hand once, during a raid. She’d ground it out with the heel of her shoe as if the bombers would see the light from miles up, and both Jacks would have laughed at her if she hadn’t looked so delicate and panicked. They’d had sex afterwards, the three of them, on the grubby floor of her tenement.
Jack couldn’t really remember anything about that anymore, either; the faces all blurred into one red-lipped soft-haired blur, her voice and Harkness One’s melting into one too-crisp mid-range trill, the things that made them individual and inviting gone. He could feel the space between him and the scheme of things opening up and pulling away from him, a rock with a river round it, and the whole thing was depressing and confusing enough that he actually dug into his pockets and unwrapped a cigar.
Jack remembers the next part very, very clearly. It went something like this:
1) He bit the end off the cigar.
2) He tugged open his coat to shield it from the rain.
3) Being out of dry matches, he took out the antique brass lighter with the green glass inlay that the rift had so kindly provided.
4) He pressed down on it.
5) He woke up in the woods.
*
Merlin’s version of events up until this point is slightly different.
It started with a comet crashing in the woods outside Camelot. Public opinion was divided as to whether or not it was actually a comet (hindsight tells us it wasn’t) and, if it was, whether that was a good or bad omen (neither, as it turned out), but people generally agreed that the fire it caused was bad and that that fire reaching the crops or the city would be worse, so everyone spent a dizzying night hauling buckets of water and heaping earth on the flames and praying fervently to all sorts of forbidden entities and so on and so forth until two days later they woke up to find that the fire had burned itself out and they were all cursed.
The curse hit just after dawn on a muggy morning, the kind where Merlin stayed in his room for as long as possible to avoid the heat from the fire, and one of the first things it did was make Giaus thrust a bowlful of porridge into Merlin’s lap and snap, “Punctuality is important, Merlin. You won’t make much of your destiny if you show up twenty minutes late with half of what you need. For pity’s sake, pay attention or make lists.”
Merlin had scowled and opened his mouth to complain about not having time to make lists, what with his always having to be in twelve places at once, but what came out was: “You’re the closest thing to a father I’ve ever known.” He clapped a hand over his mouth.
Giaus blinked slowly. “I fell in love with your mother before she left Camelot,” he said, then gaped as if he didn’t know what his mouth was doing. “I didn’t mean to say that.”
“Me neither. Let’s just ignore it. Please. Forever. Because now I can’t stop picturing the -” Merlin shovelled a spoonful of porridge into his mouth in the hope that that would somehow stop it making noise.
“Sit up straight. And take your elbows off the table, where are your manners? Speaking of which, you should really talk back less, although in general you need to talk more, especially when spoken to. Although you’d be wise to choose words which say less.” Gaius clamped his jaw shut, bug-eyed with shock. After a moment’s silence he scooped up a spoonful of porridge, raised it to his lips and tentatively -
“Stop wearing scarves, they make you look shifty.” He covered his mouth.
“Gaius, what’s going on?”
A frantic, tight- jawed shrug.
“It’s a disease,” Merlin suggested, hopefully. “A perfectly treatable disease. Something in the air. Something we ate. Not that I’m saying you can’t cook! But you can’t, this is awful, it’s always awful, sometimes I pretend I need to work early and then eat at Gwen’s. I think Arthur’s in love with her. I think I’m in love with Arthur. I think if he doesn’t realise what I can do soon, I’ll explode. I’ll die of silence.”
The was a long, still moment in which Merlin could feel the blood slowly draining from his face. “It’s a curse,” he heard himself say. “A hideous, hideous curse, Gaius, make it stop.”
The odd thing was that it didn’t feel particularly like a curse: there was none of the twitching, itching feeling at the back of his head that usually bothered him when something else was in there, no solid pressure against his skull forcing the words out. He just couldn’t stop saying what he was thinking and couldn’t help thinking about things he didn’t want to say. He bit into his scarf.
“Excellent plan.”
“Yr duffed ike un eduhot.”
“And you should make a list of the day’s errands before going to work.”
Merlin did, partly to pacify Gaius but mostly because he discovered he was able to write ‘muck out Arthur’s horses’ despite having no intention of doing so. He bit down on his scarf, stuffed his pockets with bits of parchment and scraps of vellum, and set off for the castle.
Work in post-curse Camelot went something like this:
Here is your breakfast, Sire. Would you like anything else?
Arthur stared at the note, then at Merlin, then at the note again. His eyes took on an unfamiliarly soft look. “You’re so clever,” he sighed. “If you tell anyone I said that I’ll have you put in the dunking stool,” he added, equally dreamily. “I’ve a meeting with my father later. Bring me a quill.”
Perhaps it is a disease, was Arthur’s first contribution to the meeting of Uther’s emergency council.
“It is a curse!” Uther wailed. “A spell cast by those who would seek to take you from me and turn you to their own foul purposes, thinking they have a claim on my kingdom because you are their child. I will not have it! I will burn this castle to the ground myself before I hand it over to them, and any man who so much as breathes a word of this will have his tongue cut from his head and pickled.”
Uther’s emergency council studied the floor of the throne room carefully. “These are new rushes,” Lord Westbury observed. “Do you know I’m skimming money from my serfs’ taxes?”
“Sometimes I wish I’d killed my father when I had the chance,” Arthur offered, followed swiftly by, It is a curse. A hideous curse and Fetch me a scarf.
MAKE IT STOP, Uther scribbled, and Arthur nodded his assent, tight-lipped and red-faced.THE COURT IS TO DISBAND UNTIL NEWS OF PROGRESS REACHES US. NOT YOU, WESTBURY.
The assembled gentry fled as quickly as possible, a ripple of mutinous chatter following them out of the Great Hall, echoed by a corridor full of servants who suddenly had an opinion on everything. Merlin just had time to think that, oh well, at least it wouldn’t matter if he was rude anymore, before Arthur hooked an arm around his shoulders, steered him through a side door and said, as quietly as the curse would let him, “You need to stay away from me until this is over. I could make life very dangerous for you.”
“I’m - ”
Arthur quickly shoved Merlin’s scarf back into his mouth. “You’re in idiot,” he said. “Now go and help Gaius, and don’t come back until you don’t want to tell me what I already know.”
Two days passed. Arthur shouted far less than usual but revealed that he could spell some impressively creative insults. Morgana spat in Uther’s face then took to avoiding him entirely, riding to the lake and back in solitude twice a day. Uther sat in the Great Hall, jaw shaking and knuckles white on the arms of the throne, as if his sitting there and staring down all comers in silence meant that the kingdom was running as effectively as ever. People, in general, divided their time between rutting frantically in hay carts and avoiding one another for fear of excessive truth-telling. Merlin did a great deal of the latter, substituted grinding molar-sized holes in three scarves for the former and dutifully swallowed every foul-smelling concoction Gaius placed in front of him in the hope that one of them would stop him from involuntarily shouting out that he was magic.
None of them did.
None of the spells in Merlin’s book helped, either. Nor any of the amulets that you absolutely couldn’t buy anywhere in Camelot for any money, no sir, none of that sort of thing available on my stall I think you must be hearing things why don’t you come round the back and rest yourself?
The dragon, when asked what was happening, sighed morosely. “I used to be challenged, you know,” it said. “Young men would don their best armour and journey for a year and a day unaided for the merest hope of a chance of fighting me and taking something of my hoard. Or fighting me and rescuing a damsel. Or just fighting me. I took a man’s arm off in a scuffle, once, and years later he came and thanked me. Thanked me! For eating his arm! Apparently dragonslayers never go hungry, even if they’re not particularly successful ones. Now? Nary a coin to my name, haven’t so much as smelled a woman in years and the only young man I ever see is you, Emrys, and only when you want something. Go away.” It flapped away into the darkness.
Nobody, in short, knew anything.
And then Gwen flounced.
It was perhaps the only time she ever did so - people in Camelot will still talk about it, if you get them the right kind of drunk and far enough from court - so we can assume it was a rare occurrence and even, perhaps, a spectacular one, if you manage to dig through all the layers of added value. Sadly, all we know for sure is that she went to Gaius’ chambers afterward, sat tearfully at his table and said, “I didn’t mean to do it, I really didn’t. It’s just that the new laundress is so useless - ”
“There’s a new laundress?”
“Just since the fire,” Gwen explained. “Her family lived on the edge of the forest, they lost everything.”
“There’s always a new laundress,” Gaius sighed. “Never marry one, Merlin, they’re all loose-witted and bloodthirsty.”
In an ideal world the new laundress would, obviously, have been a sour-faced yet virtuous woman who had shouldered responsibility for a young family not entirely her own, working tirelessly in the castle laundry to ensure those in her care did not have to go without and Merlin, upon meeting her, would have realised this and learned an important lesson about the dangers of applying narrative logic to real life.
Unfortunately for Merlin’s personal development (but perhaps fortunately for all sorts of other things, like Time and History and Fate and so forth), she was an alien. A fairly obvious one, at that - eyes too close-set, hands too small, voice too deep and too accented to really sound human. So Merlin put on his best servant face, mentally rehearsed his subtler spells and offered her, Can I have a word with you about the Prince’s clothes?
The laundress blinked faster than a person should be able to. “Is this some kind of ruse?” she asked, looking strangely unconcerned. “Have you lost weight?”
“Look,” Merlin said, as quietly as anyone could while under the curse, “I don’t know what you’re doing here, but I’m magic and I have accidentally killed a lot of people. Really.”
“You’ve definitely lost weight, Jack. And height. And charm.” She fast-blinked again. “The ship you sold me was a dud. The engine gave out mid-jump and now I’m stuck here.”
Merlin was not prepared for this. “Who’s Jack?”
The third fast blink had an apologetic edge to it. “Forgive me. Your - ” she took the quill and parchment from Merlin’s hands, species “ - all seem very alike to me. I contacted an associate named Jack Harkness. My readings indicate that he has arrived and is somewhere nearby. Do you know where I might find him?”
At that precise moment, a page rushed down the laundry steps screeching: “There are travelling players in the Hall! They’ve got a wizard! A tame one! It dances!” and Merlin, once again, missed out on a valuable opportunity to learn how the real world works.
That, wrote the blinking laundress, may well be Jack.
*
At this point, the reader might find a few notes on the blinking laundress helpful.
Her name is Thiset. She is from a country called Absh on a planet known as Partis, which is famous among starfaring nations for its rather tenuous grip on its own existence. She works for an inter-dimensional textiles company, because that’s the kind of thing people do on planets where the walls between realities are non-supporting and easily removed. A mis-timed dimension jump left her stranded in Camelot with nothing but a burnt out ship, a dead co-pilot and no working jumpware.
After landing, she covered the burnt out spaceship with as much burnt out foliage as she could find. She moved everything useful into some nearby caves and fit them in as best she could between piles of bottled water and yellow highlighters and the corpse of someone who smelled like he’d been there for a while. It wasn’t the best base camp, but it was better than nothing, and being somewhere so permeable had the dual advantage of offering multiple possible exits (should she work out how to repair any tech that would let her use them) and feeling homely in the meantime.
She followed the sound of water through side- caves and cramped passages, crawling through the mud until she came to a wide, well-lit cavern with what looked like an Ascension Tank in the centre. She placed the dead co-pilot in the tank and said as many of the appropriate prayers as she could remember. That done, she walked back to the place where the walls between everything were thinnest, pushed against them until she had a fair idea of what was on the other side, then informed the universe that she’d like to speak to Jack Fucking Harkness, thank you very much.
The universe, being co-operative in only the most limited sense of the word, sent Jack Fucking Harkness the dead man’s trilby.
Thiset sighed, put on her most human face and went to find a job.
*
But anyway. Travelling players had arrived, bringing with them a tame wizard in a trilby who, by the time Merlin and Thiset reached the Great Hall, was breathing smoke and trying to impress Uther.
“We thought you might like to see him perform, Sire,” the lead player said, smirking. “We felt that to meet such a man and not offer you proof of his gifts would be sorely remiss of us.”
“They have treated me kindly, Your Majesty,” the sorcerer said, winking conspiratorially at Uther.
“This is suicide,” Merlin shouted through his scarf.
“That’s Jack Harkness,” Thiset explained. “It’s best if you just leave him to it.”
“Is he telling Uther to reward the players?”
“Yes.”
“The players who brought him here to die?”
Thiset’s grip on Merlin’s elbow tightened. “I doubt he sees it like that.”
“How does he see it?”
“Put your scarf back in your mouth. Please.”
“And now, for those who need further proof of my mastery of the ancient arts-”
“Execute him,” Uther said, smiling almost beatifically. It was the first time in three days his brain and his mouth seemed to be in accord. “Burn him. Immediately. Thoroughly. Throw the body over the walls and let the birds at it.”
It’s not possible to break a tooth by biting into cloth, but Merlin gave it a good go. Thiset’s warning hand became more of a preventative arm lock.
“I. What?” Jack seemed genuinely surprised. “Your Majesty. Arthur. Art, buddy. You’re a riot, really, but this isn’t the time to be kidding around.”
“Arthur, do you know this man?”
“No, father.”
“Oh, good. I’d hate to have to burn two. Execute him.”
“Whoa. Whoa. You’re not Arthur? This isn’t King Arthur’s court?” Jack risked a glance back at the players, who were all suddenly intensely interested in the floor.
“Are these new rushes?” their leader asked. “Very nice, Majesty. Very chic weave. Gives the place a lovely continental flavour, don’t you think, boys?” The others nodded their agreement, even as they edged backward.
“I think,” Uther said, still with the same beatific coolness, “you may have been labouring under a misconception, sorcerer.”
“Yeah.” Merlin remembers Jack sounding spectacularly bored for a man who had been betrayed by his friends and was about to be put to death. “If I make a joke about how I’d rather labour under you, will things go any better for me?”
“No.”
Jack shrugged. “Worth a shot.”
“You’re insane,” Morgana helpfully informed him. “Both of you. What crime has he committed? What harm has he done?” She added, "I’m being entirely serious, Uther. What does Camelot gain by killing him?" in the neatest hand of anyone so far.
“Sometimes I dream that I’m the idiot child of a common labourer, and all of you are nothing but the idle fantasies of a foolish mind,” Uther said, still radiating the kind of zen-like calm which wouldn’t become fashionable for centuries. “I often struggle to sleep, but on those nights my rest is always sound. Now. Kill him.”
So then the guards rushed forward, finally, and Jack rolled his eyes and punched one or two in a token kind of way and Arthur probably made some reluctantly heroic contribution to the whole thing, like stopping them from running Jack through there and then, but to be honest he did that sort of thing so often people generally didn’t bother to keep a record of it, so we can’t be entirely sure.
Jack slapping Arthur’s arse en route to the pyre while shouting something about burning loins was recorded, but only in the most euphemistic terms. And the fact that Jack Harkness whistled right up until the fire reached his knees was so widely reported that a Druid eventually wrote a song about it, which he later attempted to sing at his own execution (it was, alas, a hanging, and as a result there are none now living who know the words to the second verse).
Anyway. Immortality through song aside, Jack Harkness was declared dead to the world after a few hours in the fire, and his body was thrown into a ditch outside the city walls for crows and small children to pick at.
Arthur and his knights took the body outside the city walls themselves - this was not an honour usually accorded to sorcerers, but Arthur had spent the last three days staring calf-eyed at convicts, asking them if they were okay and would they like anything, were they sure, he was so sorry about all this, the world was a cruel and unjust place and he knew them to be honourable but their fates lay beyond his power, the hands of the mighty are often the most tightly bound etc., etc., so the knights had agreed to accompany the body in the hope that it would stave off the sight of the cursed Crown Prince crying like a child with a split knee in front of the populace.
Merlin took this opportunity to go and steal a long leather coat from Arthur’s long leather coat collection. Thiset borrowed an uncooperative horse from his collection of uncooperative horses. They met by the smouldering corpse at midnight, and waited there until it lurched back to life with a sort of gasping, gnawing sound.
Merlin threw up on the coat.
Jack threw up on what might, in a previous incarnation, have been one of his own arms.
Thiset sighed. “You,” she said, kicking Jack in the thigh even as she ladled out water for him, “sold me a bad ship.”
“Well, you’re a very bad gir - ow, ow, did you just hit me in the face with a ladle?”
“You shouldn’t hit him in the face with a ladle,” Merlin told her, though he wasn’t sure whether to add he’s just risen from the dead or he might turn into a cat.
“Listen to the long drink of water with the ears,” Jack suggested.
Thiset hit him again. “Listen to me,” she hissed, “You are going to get up, you are going to put on this coat, you are going to fix my ship and then I will possibly consider maybe sending you back to whichever rock you were oozing under. Are we clear?”
“I do not ooze.” He slung the coat over his shoulder and winked in a way that made Merlin’s knees do something wobbly and not entirely voluntary. “And who do we have here?”
“Merlin!” said Merlin, more enthusiastically than he’d planned. “Hi. When you smile I’m a lot less convinced that you’re evil.”
Jack - well, you can all probably guess what Jack said. And Merlin, too, what with him being a cursed adolescent in love. Thiset had a fairly one track mind back then, what with being stranded alone several universes from home, and the Pendragons were mostly avoiding the hell out of each other, so. Well. We could do this bit through montage, really, couldn’t we?
Picture it:
Jack Harkness riding naked through the moonlit woods. (Merlin oogling subtly; Thiset glaring).
The cave, lit by the eerie green glare of a glowstick; the look on Jack's face when he realises that this is where the rift has been depositing things for all these years, that those highlighters are his highlighters, that cheap office party booze his office party booze, that dead gumshoe his dead gumshoe! (“Not mine mine, it went missing from a refrigeration unit.”/ “What’s a refrigeration unit?”/“It’s like heaven, Merlin, only colder.”)
The three of them toiling in the noon sun: Thiset trying to coax a blackened computer interface back to life, Jack hitting a temporal gyroscope repeatedly with a hammer, Merlin trying every cloaking spell in the book to see if any of them actually work (“The book says to put a cat’s bone under your tongue and hold it there.” / “The alien from the future says to find something less disgusting.”).
In soothing sepia tones: the triumphant cheers as they finally, finally get the power back on. The group hug when the loading bay doors finally hang straight again. Jack sitting shirtless on the roof of a half-working ship, sipping office party whiskey in the sunset, thinking that if this works out, he might not have to go back.
Less soothingly: the frantic flailing as a hunting party approaches the fire-ravaged section of woodland, looking for an easy kill. Gwen’s suspicious prodding when Merlin starts asking who in the city does the most intricate metalwork most cheaply. Arthur’s suspicious prodding when Merlin turns up to work with a lovebite the size of a fist on his throat. Merlin’s involuntarily anguished expression after Arthur involuntarily calls him a hussy.
“He thinks I’m a hussy and I think he’s a prick, and we need to stop this curse now,” Merlin told Thiset afterwards. “Or else I’m going to propose and he’s going to out me to Uther.”
“It’ll be okay.”
“I can’t come back from the dead,” Merlin said. He was a little drunk and his voice was wet and rough round the edges. “Well, once. Sort of. But not usually and not without killing someone else. Arthur, mostly. Or Gaius. Or - ”
“Shhh, now,” Thismet cooed. “You could keep Jack in a box and kill him however often the Old Ones needed you to, hmm? How does that sound?”
“Tempting.”
Thiset clasped him reassuringly on the shoulder, as if she’d read about the gesture in a book but never had to use it in life. “Well, the ascension shouldn’t take more than another day or two. See how you feel then.”
Merlin blinked, wiped at his not-at-all wet face and said, “Ascension?”
Which is how Merlin ended up spending an evening wading drunkenly around in the caves under Camelot, brandishing a net made of fabric samples from another dimension and fishing pieces of dead co-pilot out of the water supply. “You can’t do this,” he could hear himself shouting, “you can’t just go flinging bodies into people’s springs and press ganging their dead sorcerers and what if I didn’t wear scarves? What if I’d just walked up to Uther and told him the only reason his son’s alive is that I’m a monster, and he could tell what I was saying?”
Thiset launched herself at Merlin with a not-quite-human noise and struck out with some not-quite human limbs, until the pair of them were half-wrestling and half-falling, flinging fistfuls of mud and viscous globules of dead co-pilot as they scrabbled frantically in the mud at the bottom of the well.
“I could have been killed because of you!” Merlin shouted, and Thiset countered with variations on “Reyn died,” Reyn being the aforementioned dead co-pilot who she had worked with for many years but who did not, as Merlin was all too keen to point out, have the fate of a nation resting on his shoulders or a glorious destiny to fulfil, making his ascension to whatever bizarre alien otherworld he was heading toward a lesser priority than Merlin’s own not dying.
Thiset considered this momentarily, then strangled Merlin with a tentacle he hadn’t realised she had.
It felt horrible for a second and then indescribably worse, as the cold, wet feeling of her scales on his neck was superseded by the heavy, rolling sadness of my friend is dead, which appeared, dark and unignorable, in the back of Merlin’s head and spiralled quickly into Will coughing up his lungs on someone’s kitchen table and Hunith whimpering on Gaius’ doorstep and two druids running beside him in the woods then suddenly not, all of it at once, so vivid that Merlin smell the sickness rising off his mother’s clothes.
There was a long beat of terrible, screeching blackness before the tentacle-thing withdrew and allowed Merlin to sit up, spit water and tell himself firmly not to shake.
“I’m sorry,” Thiset said as she rearranged her face into something more human, “that was rude of me. But my friend is dead and you’re lying in his grave before he’s left it.” Her face looked more human then, and like it might be crying if it knew how to. “I know you have this destiny, but other people have things they need to do, too. Before and after you accidentally kill them. It’s not always about sorcery, you know.”
“Right,” said Merlin. His head felt like someone had kicked a hole in it and then climbed inside to die. His chest ached. “Sorry about your. Friend. Copalot.”
“Co-pilot.”
“Co-pilot.”
“Whose name was Reyn.”
“Reyn, right. Sorry.” He climbed out of the well and sat, dripping, on the side. Moving hurt.
Thiset fast-blinked at him. “You should come up to the ship,” she said. “It’s heated again, now.”
“No, thank you.”
“Right.” Thiset blinked again. “Was it the tentacles? I know some species find them strange.”
“No. Well, yes, but it’s not. I just need to think.”
Thiset looked sceptical.
“Please.”
“I’m taking the net.”
Merlin handed it over. “Sorry about the, you know.” He waved the net in such a way as to indicate the desecration of sacred ground.
“Good. I apologise for the, um.” Thismet flashed a tentacle.
“Maybe save them for Jack,” Merlin suggested.
History tells us that Thiset was not sorry enough to avoid mentioning the incident to Jack, or at least the last part of it. Legend has it he turned up in the well chamber just under an hour later, wearing nothing but a neckerchief and strategic smears of the Partismen equivalent of brake fluid. “So,” he grinned, “tentacles.”
Merlin, still too miserable to be struck dumb with lust, said, “Not like that, no.”
“Ah,” said Jack, who, after several lifetimes in the public sector, had delivered enough cultural sensitivity seminars to know a moment of terrible realisation when he saw one. “I’ll go put on some pants.”
“The science of it,” Jack explained to Merlin sometime around dawn, when Merlin was well into his second drunken malaise of the evening, choking his way through a damp Hamlet which he’d been assured would cheer him up, “is that when Partismen corpses break down, they realise something that acts kind of like a barbiturate and everyone gets a little crazy. The creepy religious belief behind it is that by unburdening the living of their problems, the souls of the dead can buy their way into the afterlife.”
“By blurting out secrets that make everybody hate them?”
Jack shrugged. “I have a bleeding heart of a second who’d tell you it was good to talk. I’m gonna go with, it’s good to let other people talk. They’ll tell you all kinds of useful crazy things if you shut up and listen. This one time, we had an infestation of Canups on Anglesey - they look like people with frogs’ heads, you’d get a real kick out of them - and we could not find them. Everywhere we looked, nothing. Everyone we asked looked at us like we were insane. People never look at us like we’re insane, they’re usually kind of grateful, but this time? Insane. And we’re running every scan, monitoring every possible biometric, Owen’s breaking into hospital records, I’m calling old friends from the Agency to see if they know how to track the fucking things, and then Tosh overhears these kids at a goddamn bus stop talking about some hobo who said he’d seen frog people, and whaddaya know, we’ve got ’em.”
“What’s a bus?”
“I feel like you’re kinda missing the point, here, kid.”
“No, I understand, I do plenty of eavesdropping -”
“No, see. The second part to this story is that, turns out the Canups were there long before anything else was. They’re probably there right now. Turns out they’ve been spawning up there for centuries, and if we gun them down - and seriously, after a week in a tourist town? I was so ready to gun someone down - it won’t achieve anything, other than maybe wiping out the species sooner than nature intended. The survivors will just keep coming back, year after year and getting more aggressive every time, until eventually they’re marking the nests with skulls.”
“What’s a tourist?”
“An abomination, Merlin, keep up. I put on a shirt and everything, try to focus. My point is, you can’ t protect the human race from an unknown alien threat until you know what it wants. And most of them want different things. A lot of them want nothing. But you don’t know that until you ask, and you can’t deal with them until they know you know you’ve asked them to - look, boy wizard, the point I’m trying to make is: if it’s your destiny to rule over all of Camelot, maybe you should learn a couple of people’s names. See how they feel about your boy in armour. How they feel about taxes. What they look for in a mistress, anything. It can’t all be about heroism. Sometimes you’ve got to do the HR.”
“HR?”
“Being nice to people so they let you keep your job despite numerous violations of. Huh. Despite numerous violations.”
Merlin contemplated this as carefully as he could after drinking something which had been brewed by Gaius in a broom cupboard. “I can do magic,” he concluded.
“And that’s great, but magic doesn’t make the buses run on time. Magic doesn’t make people happy. Not on its own.”
Merlin attempted contemplation again, this time with considerably more success. (Sources disagree as to what exactly was contemplated: some say it was that no-one, when retelling the story of The Fire-Breathing Sorcerer In the Inadvisable Hat, bothered to mention that Arthur had ensured the man received a trial, only that he had barged into so-and-so while dragging the accused to the dungeons and had said such-and-such to someone else; others suggest Merlin merely thought of the fact that, after eighteen months in Camelot, he still thought of both his neighbours as so-and-so, and neither of them liked him despite his saving them from several monsters, a famine and a plague). “I need you to do me a favour,” he said, finally.
Jack raised an eyebrow. “Explain what a bus is?”
“No. Not quite.”
And so it came to pass that, on the third day of the second week of the sixth month of his time in Camelot, Jack Harkness came face to face with the Great Dragon for the first time. He was wearing armour he couldn’t walk in, a helmet he couldn’t be heard through and was carrying a sword he didn’t really know how to hold. “Hear me, Worm,” he bellowed. “I am Jack McGyan, of the Austell McGyans.” These were, apparently, Merlin’s mother’s sister’s husband’s brother’s friends, who’d had their farm razed before the Purge. “I have come here today to avenge the death of my, uh. Clan. Have at you.” He waved the sword in what he hoped was a threatening manner. “What are you waiting for? I said, have at you. That’s what you say, right?”
“You may say whatever you wish, Jack McGyan,” the dragon said, honey-smooth. “None who enter here shall live to repeat it.”
Jack shifted slightly in an attempt to keep any kind of balance whatsoever inside the armour. “You’d be surprised how many times I’ve heard that.” He hefted the sword aloft again.
The sound the dragon’s teeth made as it smiled would have made a lesser man doubt his own freakish immortality.
Jack laughed and swore off boy wizards forever.
Merlin spent the day before Reyn’s ascension doing something he rarely did and would not admit to later: he made conversation.
He talked with, the Freesons who worked in the treasury and whose daughter, as it turned out, had run away to become a priestess. He talked to Per Aberson, who dreamt of becoming a town crier but had spent most of his waking hours since the age of eight at work in the tannery, and had never learnt to read. He found out about the Davies’ crops failing and the Lewises having moved to Camelot to dodge charges of cattle rustling in their hometown. He spoke to people whose families had died in the Purge and people whose families had only survived because of it. He met a girl down on Marshgate who knew about the cat’s bone spell and used it to keep watch over her sister, who worked in the palace. He got Gaius’ recipe for whatever it was he brewed in the broom cupboard, along with three conflicting recipes from the farrier, the miller and his boy, with the boy also offering the recipe for a tincture which would restore your sight afterwards. He got more answers to the question, “what do you do?” than he could hope to process in a lifetime and realised that, if he were a laundress, he’d probably end up turning to the dark side, too. He heard about Geoffrey of Monmouth’s first love (a red-haired shepherdess) and Sir Elinore’s latest (Geoffrey of Monmouth). He heard stories in which Uther was clever rather than just cunning. He saw a miniature of Igraine that looked nothing like the woman he and Arthur had seen and two which did, both filched from the palace by Arthur’s wet nurse.
And then, for the first time in a long time, he went to work.
There was probably a lot of internal pep-talking and muttered rehearsal going on as Merlin approached Arthur’s rooms, and in a more satisfying narrative Arthur would, perhaps, have happened upon Merlin while he was practicing declaring his love in a mirror or something, but the simple truth is this: Merlin went to Arthur’s rooms. Arthur was out. Merlin spent an hour and a half correcting all his temporary replacement’s mistakes (it should be noted that this largely involved deliberately moving things to the last place Arthur would look for them, ostensibly to teach him the virtue of patience but also out of spite). He ate some fruit. He read three pages of a book on heraldry.
He did not, as far as is known, rehearse anything in front of a mirror.
When Arthur finally returned, he didn’t even make it all the way through the door before he hauled his new manservant into the corridor by the collar and told him to leave them. He screwed up his face in that lockjaw-sufferer expression most people wore during the curse months and locked, bolted and barred the door before he even dared squint angrily at Merlin. “What in blazes do you -”
“Did you know he has an invisible cousin?” Merlin asked, cheerily. “She enchants herself and then wanders round the palace keeping an eye on him and her sister, because they’re the only family she has left.”
Arthur’s squint tightened. “That’s illegal.”
“That’s nothing. One of the cooks thinks that monarchy is an outmoded concept kept alive only be the reliance of the weak-minded on imperialist dogma to give their lives structure.”
Arthur’s eyes were barely visible at this point. “It’s a good thing I’m not entirely sure what that just meant, Merlin, or you’d be in trouble. Speaking of which, didn’t I fire you until we weren’t cursed?”
“We won’t be tomorrow.” Merlin was smiling so wide his face ached. He knelt and busied himself removing Arthur’s riding boots until the grin was back under control. “I thought I’d come in and get a head start. Invisible Cousin Boy - his name is Sean, by the way - has undone all my good work. Your boots were in the cupboard.”
“My boots are supposed to be in the cupboard.”
“You’d get bored if they were there all the time. And besides, it’s not like you’d execute me or anything.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure.”
“Fifty-four per cent of subjects questioned believe you’re a no-capital-punishment kind of a king-to-be.”
“Do they know what kind of a manservant you are?”
“Huh.” Merlin straightened up and put on his best thinking face. He had, to be honest, rehearsed this moment a little bit. Once. Twice at the most. “You know, I think they agreed on ‘excellent’.” And then his hands were slipping under Arthur’s coat, slower and surer than they needed to be, and Arthur was swallowing a laugh and not moving, even though Merlin was far closer than he had any real need to be and seemed, in the face of all reason, to be attempting to push him against a wall, which was so hilarious an idea that Arthur couldn’t help but going along with it, and then Merlin was kissing him, softer and surer than he had any right to.
“Your neck,” Arthur’s mouth said, probably with very little intervention from his brain, “is really good.”
Merlin nodded slowly, the picture of soulful understanding. “It’s the sorcery that does it,” he explained. “Which we will have a frank and serious discussion about. After.”
“Right,” agreed Arthur, several octaves lower than he’d planned. “After.”
Very few people who’ve known Jack Harkness for six months do anything printable in bed.
The day after Reyn’s ascension, the people of Camelot saw something very strange: it was like a comet, apparently, rising up from the dead forest into the sky and streaking fire all the way to the horizon before suddenly vanishing completely.
No-one talked about it much. They didn’t really feel the need.
“What’re you going to do now?” Jack asked, watching as Merlin gathered up his things.
Merlin shrugged. “Go back to Gaius’. Go back to work.”
“Fuck armour boy through the mattress?”
“I don’t think you’re allowed to say that about the Crown Prince.”
“Please. His dad’s dragon ate three of my limbs. Not only can I say that, I can say that in eight hundred years you should make me a tape.”
“What’s a tape?”
“It’s like a bus,” Jack grinned. “Now, who wants to see a magic trick?” He produced a Partismen Emergency Beacon from his pocket (it was brass coloured, with green, glassy dials embedded in the front).
Merlin raised an eyebrow. “This won’t impress me.”
“Sure it will.”
*
Ianto remembers the next part very, very clearly. It went something like this:
1) He went up to the roof of the Hub.
2) He sat down in what he refused to think of as Jack’s spot.
3) He lit a cigarette.
4) He did not think about chain-of-command dating and its ability to ruin one forever, especially if your chain of command was headed by a man who frequently disappeared through holes in the space-time continuum.
5) Jack Harkness landed on him.
6) It hurt.
“I missed you,” Jack said, much later, in the dark of his live-in office, after Gwen had punched him and hugged him and marvelled at how many highlighters he’d managed to find in the Middle Ages and how little detail he managed to put into a twelve-page official report. “It was funny, actually, there was this moment when I was getting eaten by a dragon -”
“Is this a Welsh joke?”
Jack made a mental note: Ianto, naked and acting offended. Remember it. “Yeah,” he laughed, “I was staring death in the face in a new and exacting way and I thought, how can I use this to spread contempt in the workplace?”
“You were never eaten by a dragon.” Laughing: remember that, too.
“It was a favour for a wizard,” Jack told him. “He had a throat.”
“I’m almost afraid to ask what that means.”
Jack laughed into Ianto’s shoulder.
“Oh, I almost forgot. Someone came into tourist information the other day, left something for you.”
“Hmmm?”
“Hmm. Local history nut. Handed in a tape. Said something about buses?”
-END-
Prompt:
Cigarettes.