Hi there! Saw your request for head cannons.
In the vein of your modern au with Arthur, what is it like when Arthur first asks you to live with him, considering how independent he’s been for years?
It dawns on him slowly. You stay over his place one night and never really leave, your presence indelible. First it's your necklace on his nightstand and he lies there thumbing the pendant thinking, how is it you go about the world leavin' things everywhere like you own the place? As if he isn't glad for the reminder of you.
Next is your sweater over the back of his cruddy futon, which he will never admit to sitting with on nights alone with a case of beer and the baseball game on his old Zenith TV ("Do they even make those anymore?" You'd ask incredulously the first time you see that dinosaur.) It'd be draped across his chest and he'd bring the collar up to his nose and breathe in your scent, feeling a strange kind of self-loathing for how comforting he finds it -- just to bust your chops the next time you come over like, "This ain't a storage unit, y'know." He'd conveniently leave out the part where he's supposed to tell you to quit leaving your things behind and when he sees your razor in his shower next he rolls his eyes and smiles.
It probably doesn't really start to occur to him until he's in the dairy aisle, trying to find the brand of creamer you like in your coffee. There's a slow-creeping tidal wave of panic, right there in the middle of the Saturday afternoon grocery store frenzy, as he's forced to reckon with the implications of you. He forcefully puts your creamer back, God damn it, denial rising in his throat like bile. You can get your own damn creamer, you're your own damn person just like he's his -- that's the way things have always been and that's how they'll stay. But then he's midway down the next aisle before he's circling back, muttering under his breath like, "Morgan, you moron..." and he buys the goddamn creamer, and those chips you said you wanted to try, and a quart of motor oil since he reckons yours is due for a change soon anyway.
When he finally asks you to stay, it's unceremonious. He figures you're asleep when he sneaks off for a smoke outside, thinking bitterly about how much he likes the way your car looks parked next to his in the drive. He ashes his cigarette and curses under his breath when he just about trips over your shoes by the door.
The place is too small. He's too incorrigible. You're too good. It'd be twice the laundry. Twice the bills. Twice the dishes. Enough laughter to make his belly ache. He could kiss his alone time goodbye. You'd get sick of him, his moods, his habits. What if he doesn't want to answer to you, to anybody? What happens when you start to resent him (and you will, he's convinced) and this life he's fool enough to hope for falls apart at the seams? His skin is mottled with scars from grazed bullets and narrowly-won knife fights but that's a particular kind of hurt he isn't sure he can handle -- not again.
He slips back into the too-small bed and you curl in his arms like wax poured in a mold. He stares at the ceiling for a long while as your breathing evens out and he doesn't dare speak, not until he's convinced you're too far in your dreams to hear him.
"You oughta just stay." He blurts. And then, couching the proposal in practicality as if loving you isn't enough, he adds, "Closer to work for you anyway. Don't make no sense, goin' back 'n forth."
"Don't I already live here?" You mumble against his chest.
He laughs, a weight lifted as he buries his face in your hair. "Yeah. Yeah, I reckon you do."
