merthur microfic

The door banged open and Merlin woke with a start.

“Rats! Again!”

“Wha—”

“I always knew you were incompetent, Merlin, but this is just ridiculous. What’s the point of having magic if you can’t even sort out something as simple as a rodent infestation? Although, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, since they do have more brains than you.”

“I don’t see you having any luck with catching them, either,” Merlin mumbled, rubbing the sleep from his eyes and sitting up.

Arthur glared at him.

Merlin had, in fact, caught and killed the rats in a matter of seconds, with one simple glance, each night they had appeared. For six nights in a row. It seemed someone was having them on.

It was then, after he’d blinked away the last of the bleariness, that he noticed the pillow Arthur was clutching to his chest.

“Why’ve you got that?” he asked, with a note of foreboding in his voice.

“If you think I’m sleeping in there with the rats, you can think again,” Arthur said.

“Frightened, are you?”

Arthur scoffed. “I don’t get frightened. It is critical for a king to have a decent night’s rest so that he is at his best for his people. Now, budge up, will you?”

Merlin rolled his eyes, but shuffled over all the same, moving his pillow so Arthur could plop his down.

It wasn’t like they had never shared a bedroll; camping overnight often called for it on the colder nights to keep all their fingers, toes, and other vulnerable bits functioning and intact. But this was Merlin’s bed. And there was hardly room enough for one man, let alone two, especially now that Merlin’s chest and arms had filled out to rival Arthur’s own.

He tried not to think about the way Arthur’s thigh pressed up alongside his, or the way his tunic rode down his chest, showing off the smattering of blond hair there. Merlin no longer knew what to do with his hands; his arms lay awkwardly, woodenly at his sides, all too aware that the slightest movement might brush their fingers together.

“There were no guest chambers available, I take it?” he joked.

“Shut up, Merlin.”

As Arthur settled in beside him, Merlin stared up at the ceiling; he felt, in that moment, that he would likely have a better night’s sleep in a room full of rats.

Bonus:

“You must think you’re pretty funny.”

“I do, actually,” Morgana agreed. “But if you’re accusing me of something, you’re going to need to be more specific.”

Merlin raised an eyebrow. “The rats?”

Morgana affected a look of total innocence, which, if Merlin hadn’t known her so well, would have been entirely convincing. “Rats? What are you talking about, Merlin?”

“Please. A rat in his chambers one night is a coincidence, two nights and I thought maybe Elyan and Gwaine were having a laugh, but seven nights? That’s got sorcery written all over it, and I know it wasn’t me.”

Morgana smirked. “Well, it worked, didn’t it?”

“What do you mean?”

“All it took was making Arthur’s chambers somewhat uninhabitable and off he ran to spend the night with you.” She grinned, which did nothing to dim the malevolence in her eyes, but rather accentuated it. “Do you deny it?”

“I—well—all we did was sleep!”

Morgana hummed. “That lie might have worked if you’d remembered your neck scarf,” she said, and turned away, smirk firmly in place.

Merlin’s mouth fell open, and he slapped a hand, rather too late, over the bruises Arthur had left there that morning.

“Gwen will be pleased,” Morgana called as she walked away. “The rats were her idea, you know.”

Post-Camlann | Angst | Immortality

First he ceased to notice the days, and then the weeks.

The golden fall of leaves gave way to snowstorms, and snowstorms to the first sticky green of young leaves, before he remembered he had meant to gather apples and dry them for the winter. The basket by the door had stood there since last September, veiled in cobwebs. 

In the end, he ceased to heed the turning of seasons and years. None of it mattered any more. Without Arthur, all things had lost their meaning, their worth, their motion.

Time itself had no power over Merlin now.

He had stilled.

He had hardened.

When Merlin realizes where Arthur is leading them, he stops in his tracks.

“No,” he says, eyeing the treeline with distrust. “Absolutely not.”

Arthur, the ass, just rolls his eyes. His steps don’t falter. “Don’t be such a girl, Merlin. It’s only the Fire Swamp.”

Merlin gapes after him for a moment– in the years Arthur was gone he’d somehow forgotten how stupid Arthur can be– before following. “Only the Fire Swamp? There’s quicksand, and fire–”

“Funny, I’d guessed that, what with the name.”

Merlin glares at the back of Arthur’s head. He can’t believe that he missed this ass.

“Well, you’re not exactly the sharpest sword on the rack,” Merlin grumbles under his breath before adding at full, exasperated volume, “And there are R.O.U.Ses!”

Arthur scoffs. “I think I can take on an oversized rat.”

“They’re not rats, they’re rodents of unusual–”

Arthur stops at the treeline and turns, leveling him with a look that sits just short of a glare. “Would you rather be dragged back to Florin to marry Prince Humperdink?”

Merlin’s mouth snaps shut. “Right. Point taken.”

Dear Arthur,

I know finding out I have magic has been hard. It’s been a day, and I can tell you’re struggling to come to terms with it. I’m numb to your ridicules. I’m numb to your disbelief, that you can’t imagine me capable enough to be a sorcerer.

I know that beneath all that, the act you put on for the world, you care deeply for me and wouldn’t have me killed for who I am. You’re a good man, Arthur. I trust that you will come around in time.

I’ll still love you unconditionally.

Your devoted friend,

~

“Is that everything?” Gwen asked, poking her head into the bedroom.

“I think so,” Merlin confirmed. There was a strange finality to seeing all his necessities packed away in a crumpled gym bag.

“And has he—”

“He’s coming by on Thursday to get his things.”

“Right. That’s good.” Merlin snorted. “Well, not good, obviously, but it’s—”

“I know.”

Gwen put the box down and came to sit beside him on the uncovered box spring. “You’ll be okay, Merlin. I know you will. This is the shit part, the organising and the deliberating and the waiting, but after Thursday you won’t have to see him again. Not ever, if you don’t want to.”

“I know.”

“I don’t know how he could—”

“Leave it, Gwen, please. I don’t want to talk about it. I just want to get my stuff and leave. Can we do that?”

Gwen patted his hand, white knuckled from gripping the edge of their— the bed.

“‘Course we can. You’ve packed enough?”

“I think so. I can come back if I need anything else. It’s my flat now, apparently. To do with what I want.”

What he wanted was to take a wrecking ball to the place, to break down every wall and smash every window and destroy all the furniture until there was no trace of evidence left that anyone had ever lived there. Every inch felt haunted, empty silence overlayed with shared memories.

The couch they had bought for a steal from a charity shop in Richmond, because Merlin insisted that the best stuff was always in the poshest areas, and had been proven right.

The scuffed table they had managed to haul home on the tube after Arthur’s father had announced he would be dropping by, and they had panic searched gumtree to find something that would live up to Pendragon scrutiny.

The TV that had seen them through university and all the years after that.

The bed — their bed.

“What shall we do tonight?” Gwen asked.

“Drink,” Merlin said, darkly. “Drink a lot.”

“We can do that.”

Merlin leant his head on Gwen’s shoulder. “I just don’t want to feel like this anymore.”

Gwen hesitated. “Like what?”

“Numb. Totally, completely numb. I’m not sad, not angry. I feel nothing. I feel hollow. 9 years. 9 years, over, just like that, and I feel empty. What the fuck is wrong with me?”

“Nothing is wrong with you, nothing at all. Whatever you’re feeling now, it won’t last,” Gwen promised. “And if you ever do want to scream, or cry, or hit things, I’ll be there, and we can do any of it. For now, if what will make you feel better is drinking ourselves into oblivion, I’ll make the drinks. Okay?”

Merlin turned his hand over and felt Gwen’s fingers slotting against his. He brought her hand to his lips, brushing a kiss against her knuckles. “I have no idea what I would do without you, Guinevere.”

The music was so loud that Merlin could feel it in the cavity of his ribs before he could properly hear it, bass thudding through the old rented house in relentless waves while people laughed too loudly over one another, red plastic cups raised in careless toasts, somebody shouting from the kitchen because they had somehow set a pizza box on fire without noticing until the smoke alarm began to complain, and Merlin—who had never really liked parties but had been dragged here by Gwaine with the promise that there would at least be decent snacks and no one would ask him to dance—stood by the drinks table nursing something embarrassingly weak

Arthur had spent the better part of the evening pretending he wasn't watching Merlin from across every room they wandered into, pretending that every glance was accidental and every excuse to drift within conversational distance was coincidental despite the fact that Leon had caught him staring at least six separate times already, each instance earning him another increasingly exasperated look because Arthur Pendragon had been catastrophically in love with his best friend for the better part of two years and apparently intended to spend the next fifty suffering in complete silence simply because Merlin had looked happy with someone else, and Arthur, for all his arrogance, had always loved Merlin enough to believe that happiness mattered more than his own.

Merlin's phone buzzed once against the countertop.

He smiled automatically before he even looked down.

I don't think this is working anymore.

G - 100 words - merlin/arthur - major character death

for @merthurmicrofic prompt "flowers"

***

Merlin has done all this before: closed other eyes, laid a hand on other cool skin. Wrestled other bodies into the trim boats that will convey them to the next shore. Pushed magic into the ground, let it come curling out of the pores of the earth like dough forced through a sieve, pink-gold and white and green, green, green. Like an offering, like life in the midst of death, or perhaps like something less divine; perhaps no more than a soft bed to ease a friend’s journey to the end of the world.

You once asked how I, an unwashed peasant, came to write and read as well as a prince. I don’t remember what answer I gave, but I trust you know by now that snotty little brats are doomed to miserable lives full of unsolved mysteries. In respect to lessons hard learned, I’ll write the truth to you now.

The truth is that my mother taught me, and not because she had any great premonition of a future for me where such skills would be necessary. She learned herself in bits and pieces looking over her brothers’ shoulders and sneaking their books away for practice, and despite the hardships of my childhood, she persisted in the notion that, had I a bit more education and a sliver of the opportunity, I could sail it on to any sort of life I desired.

Strange, isn’t it, the hopes parents have for their children and the blood, sweat, and tears that go into building them. You face expectations far loftier than the dreamlike possibility architected for me, as befitting the difference in our stations. I know this. I know how heavily they’ve weighed on you and the strength it’s cost you to put them aside. Thank you for what you did that night. Whatever is to come, I will never forget that, in our darkest moment, you threw off every childhood lesson and acted on your heart alone.

Secretly I always knew you would. Oh how I love to be proven right.

In my lessons as a boy, my mother would read from a book of Greek tales. One of the fables in her book was of a dead king named Sisyphus, who was arrogant enough to trick death, and who was punished in eternity with the task to roll a boulder up a mountain. Only, every time the king approached the summit, the boulder would inevitably roll back down, forcing him to start again.

Sisyphus was doomed. He made his choices long ago, and in the end he toiled not to atone for his mortal sins, but in vain to beat the gods at their own games. ...It’s here my metaphor falls apart. I was moments from suggesting he might have prospered if he was only brave enough to change, to walk away from the fate that bound him, but I’m remembering now that he would have been flayed by winged women wielding whips if he’d tried.

Lucky for us we’re not in Hell, huh? At least not yet.

Writing to you as a free man, I hope you’ll forgive me if I place yet another expectation upon your worthy shoulders.

Write me back. I can’t give you an address—not in writing, you understand—but if you fold your letter into a boat and place it in the stream, the water will know where to go.

The next time we meet, the world may see us as enemies. But even if it makes me as arrogant as a mythological king who earned himself an eternal punishment, I’m not afraid at all.

I’ll be waiting.

Yrs faithfully,

Merlin,

I write to you directly. Any attempt at subterfuge, such as signing my name with a mere initial, would be no doubt seen through in an instant; and if any method exists to intercept correspondence delivered via magical river, I do not know it.

Unless this letter will merely float downstream until you decide to pluck it out—but such an absurdly inefficient system would not truly be the resort of an almighty warlock, now would it be?

Camelot persists in your absence. I could chronicle the time in sausages unstolen, armor undented, and chaos uncaused, but I shan’t bother.

I am sitting at my desk. The night is cool and pleasant, yet my shutters are drawn. I have employed articles from my washing-basket to block the seam beneath the door. All so that no wondering eye might see the flicker of a candle by which I write now to you. You have asked treason of me, and I should not be surprised. You’ve done it before.

In your letter, you speak of fond memories. Of late, I have found myself preoccupied with memories of my own. George keeps my chambers in spotless condition; his early ventures in his new position uncovered endless proof of your inadequacy, mostly stuffed beneath my bed. Such detritus included the pair of boots once sacrificed to the plague of rats which infested Camelot during the unicorn affair. Do you recall? I cannot imagine you’ve forgotten—but, then, there are many things I could not have imagined.

I have long accepted my culpability for that incident and even now appreciate the edification which it, ultimately, offered me. However, as I am forced to reassess a number of incidents in recent memory—say, the three years since my father invited Lady Helen to sing at court, and all that followed?—something about the unicorn sits uneasily upon my spirit.

The unicorn was slain through the folly of a single man. Yet the righteous consequence did not fall upon that man, but on the vulnerable who must rely upon him. Camelot’s people did not deserve to suffer. What would have happened if some common huntsman felled the creature rather than a prince? How am I meant to reconcile the idea that Magic may not be a scourge inherent to its nature with this experience? Nature can often be cruel; war often punishes the innocent beyond the intentions of its warriors. I don’t understand at all where magic belongs within this paradigm, nor how I am expected to live with it.

I don’t expect you to have an answer, either; or, if you did, that you would bother explaining yourself to me. I don’t know why I’m even bothering to write this. But now that I have damned myself in ink and paper, it must be destroyed, and I suppose water will do for the task.

You should not by any means consider this correspondence, considering the danger it puts us both in; but given that I can’t stop you, you know where to find me.

Guinevere sends her love.

The third time Lancelot comes back from the dead, he comes with life in his eyes. A life that spreads to the eyes of those around him, those that carried his first and second death in theirs. Arthur sees it, faint but real in Gwen's body, slumped in Lancelot's arms as he comes screaming up to the castle steps on his horse, beseeching Arthur to condemn him to the deepest dungeon, so long as Gwen is saved, that her exile is ended. Arthur senses it in the stares of his knights, anxiously awaiting their king's verdict, hope creeping in under fear. Arthur hears it in Merlin's words, his whispered certainty that it's different this time, Lancelot is here, it's him, his soul is restored.

Arthur recognizes it in his own eyes, reflected back at him in the shine of Merlin's with a peace Arthur had forgotten was ever there, it's been so long since he's seen it.

Arthur never thinks of it. He does not engage with the pathetic little boy this desire makes of him. If he thinks of how he has been deprived, he must acknowledge who has done the depriving, and if he does that, his world will collapse in on itself—for why would any noble knight serve an unjust king?

Arthur knows he must caution himself away from this desire—to feel love in its purest form, rather than as a weapon wielded against him when convenient—but Arthur has made a habit of plunging in headfirst, regardless of the danger.

Merlin continues to rant about Uther’s latest lecture.

Arthur slumps in his chair. Something in him is finally content.

Merlin had made an enemy of the nighttime—or perhaps, more accurately, the nighttime had made an enemy of him.

He used to love the way the castle quieted to only the last murmuring embers in the grate, and the distant clatter of the dice the guards played on night duty; now, he longed for the bustle and chaos of morning. At least, during the day, he was often too busy scrubbing floors or polishing armour or fetching Arthur’s dinner to pay any mind to the thoughts that had been racketing around in his brain for the past few weeks.

With nothing to distract him now except for Arthur’s deep breathing, Gaius’s words echoed resoundingly in his head.

 He is the prince, Merlin. He has a responsibility to Camelot—to his people—to marry a princess and produce an heir. I know that you care greatly for him. But, well, might it be wise to put an end to your, er, dalliance? Before someone gets hurt?

Merlin rolled onto his back and stared sullenly up at the ceiling.

“You’re not sleeping,” Arthur mumbled into Merlin’s shoulder.

“Mm. Can’t.”

Arthur lifted his head a fraction, blinking sleepily at him. “What is it?”

“It’s nothing,” Merlin said, and stroked a reassuring hand down Arthur’s back. “I’m fine.”

---

Arthur knew he should be more cautious. Sitting beside the King at a formal reception required a level of repression he found impossible to maintain whenever Merlin was in the room.

He shouldn't notice the way the sunlight highlighted Merlin's sharp cheekbones or the phantom gaze he felt whenever their eyes met. Every measured word died in his throat as Merlin leaned in to refill his goblet.

Throwing all caution aside, Arthur let his hand linger against Merlin’s, a reckless gamble that felt like the only truth that could be shown.

---

 ⚠️WIP excerpt , aquaphobia 

Modern AU | artist Merlin | professional swimmer Arthur |   Hurt Comfort

Vivian looked at him expectantly. Apparently, she was not easily put off. Arthur was about to tell her she could find him here tomorrow morning. After training, he could spare her a few words. Her gaze shifted to something behind him. Her eyes widened in surprise, and her mouth fell open in a perfect ‘O’.

A sudden surge of water washed over his feet. Spray splashed onto his trousers. He turned round, immediately worried about how Merlin would react, and saw that Merlin himself had somehow fallen into the water. ***

It was a nightmare. Horror made real. He had known it. He had always known this would happen. That the water would catch him if it ever got the chance. And now it had.

He did not understand how it had happened. One moment he was standing at the edge, and the next he was falling towards the blue hell below.

He wanted to scream, but he couldn’t.

The water was everywhere. Licking, biting, grabbing. Cold spray rushed into his mouth and nose, blinded him, choked him.

The water coiled around his body, keeping him from reaching the hard edge, dragging him down. He fought it, shoved at it with his hands, struck the surface, but it only spun him round, refusing to let him go, refusing to let him escape.

Arthur had been the last person to head inside at the end of the training session. After the knights left, though, a massive downpour began.

Soaking wet, Arthur entered his chambers without a care for the trail of water his steps left. Ever the loyal servant, Merlin was already waiting for him with towels and a lit fire to warm him up.