![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
definewisdomPart 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
The bakery in Ealdor was a small affair, barely ten foot square in the main shop, with three ovens and a staff of two – and that was including Merlin.
It was understood, when Merlin shuffled into work for his first day, that he was not there to stay. It was an interim job, just until he could find somewhere else that needed no qualifications other than being able to handle one of the most demanding men in the world for over three years without committing suicide. Mr Polburn the baker did not ask any questions, nor did he supply any answers. There was a picture in the kitchen, over the worktop where he would knead the dough, which might have been his wife, or a grown up daughter, or someone completely unrelated. Merlin returned the favour and chose not to pry.
He mostly worked up front in the shop, and he enjoyed it. Not in the same way he had enjoyed working for Arthur – always on the fringe between aroused and infuriated – but because he got to talk to ordinary people and just see life going on. In his previous job, everything had been fake, on the screen and off it. Sophia was just one of the most obvious examples. In Ealdor everything was terrifyingly real, from the mother of three, with the bags under her eyes and the third child screaming for a gingerbread man, to the little old lady who flirted outrageously with him.
He gave the little old lady, Mrs Green – call me Meg, sweetheart – an extra sticky bun and an extra large smile and enjoyed just being himself.
Will came in every now and then to make suggestive comments about the éclairs and men in aprons (and not much else). His mother popped in and look at him sadly before ordering two loaves and a bag of pastries.
She had been surprisingly quiet about his sudden return home, catching his arm with one hand as he walked into the house and asking quietly whether he was sure.
He had never been able to lie to the woman who raised him, and he had just shrugged and told her that he did not know what else to do. Any other comments she might have made were swept away as she hugged him tightly and told him that she was glad to have him back.
He knew that she didn’t like his working there, she thought he was meant to be somewhere else, and sometimes so did he.
It was a month after he had left when the bell on the shop door jangled out and Merlin looked up to find himself staring into the eyes of a distinctly unimpressed Morgana LeFay.
“Can I help you?” he asked, quirking a grin at her. He had been talking to her and Gwen over the phone and email, but to have her suddenly turn up, well out of her way and with no sort of warning, was a little jarring.
“I like the hat,” she said, and Merlin reached up to self-consciously pat the white hairnet-slash-fashion statement that graced his head.
“I’m trying to start a trend,” he quipped easily, reminding himself that this was just Morgana, whom he had seen in various states of undress over the years and who had given him verbal arse-kickings more times than he could count. Behind her another customer came in and as soon as he recognised her, did such a perfect double take that Merlin almost wished he had had a camera to record the moment. “I’ve got a spare in the back if you’d like, together we could take over the world.” He managed to raise a secretive half-smile from her and marked that up as a triumph.
“I think I’ll pass. I don’t think my agent’s ready for bakery chic yet,” she returned.
“You could have had the world…” he said.
“I’d be happy to have a few moments of your time…” she said. Merlin was just about to reply when the guy behind her finally worked up the courage to make a noise that sounded like an alarmed sheep. Merlin watched Morgana click into her ‘fan’ persona effortlessly, turning to him with far more grace than the bakery had ever seen, even before Merlin and his rebellious limbs had taken up residence there.
“Are…” the man coughed as his voice came out unnaturally high and Merlin took a moment to remember his name – Thomas, from down the road. He was the local plumber and Merlin had never seen him bashful before, nor blushing. Without commenting, he got the plumber’s usual order ready. “Are you Morgana LeFay… the real Morgana LeFay?”
“Yes.” Morgana replied easily, “nice to meet you, Mr…”
“Matthews, Thomas Matthews,” he beamed as he took her hand, and Merlin could almost picture the thoughts going through the guy’s mind: ‘I’m touching her, dear God; I can’t believe she’s looking at me.’ “I’m a huge fan, Miss LeFay.”
“Call me Morgana, please,” she said. Merlin switched off as she went through the usual patter, niceties about how his day had gone, a quick query about autographs, signing a photograph followed by a polite but firm dismissal. Morgana had always been the queen of public relations. Arthur was good in official capacities, awards ceremonies and press releases, but on a more ad hoc basis, he tended to be a little more himself. Morgana was aware of herself every second of every day. Merlin had once asked Gwen if she measured every smile before hand, just to check that they were exactly right. His only answer had been a laugh and he still did not know to what lengths the actress would go to for publicity.
“Your order, Mr Matthews,” Merlin said, sliding the bag of bread across the counter and taking the outstretched money in return. Before he could give the plumber his change, he had wandered out in a daze.
“Should you take that to him?” she asked curiously.
“I’ll pop it round on my way home,” Merlin told her with a shrug.
“Nice to see you’re as devoted to your new job as you used to be to your old one,” she said, leaning over the counter at him. She looked like some sort of glossy magazine cover and Merlin again wanted a camera. The main problem with Morgana was, he had decided years ago, that she was impossible to hate. Even when she had been with Arthur, even when she was so untouchably perfect, there would be moments when she’d crook an eyebrow, or spike Arthur’s sandwich with chilli and she would be completely human.
“We’re a full service bakery, Miss LeFay.”
“So few men these days take responsibility for their actions,” she said, and Merlin could feel the undertones in her voice tingling through him. “It’s admirable.”
“What can I do for you, Morgana?” he asked slowly, cutting to the chase. He knew that if he did not, she would continue all day, slowly circling around the issue, shaving him into tiny pieces as she went. It would be better to get it all out in the open at once, rather than letting her toy with him.
“You know Arthur’s on his fifth assistant since you left?” she asked abruptly. Merlin shrugged, trying not to let on that he had been counting every time Gwen had told him another one bit the dust. “It would have been more, but Uther and Gaius performed an intervention after the first one lasted three hours and demanded that he keep them at least a week, to be sure.” He was sure that his desperate attempts to keep a straight face must be the worst in history, but she did him the credit of not commenting, just staring straight at him until he shifted uncomfortably where he stood. “According to Arthur they’re all awful: they’re too noisy, or too quiet, or they don’t have a sense of humour… or they lose his favourite pair of blue Armani jeans.”
“Arthur hates those jeans,” Merlin said before he could stop himself. The trousers in question tended to bunch a little too much around Arthur’s ankles and the star had relegated them to the back of his wardrobe. Merlin had always thought they complemented his arse, though. Morgana smiled, as though she had just won some private war.
“You know that, I know that… the poor schmuck who was thrown bodily out of his room and will probably never work in the business again did not.”
“He threw him from the room?” Merlin asked, his jaw dropping in incredulity. “Jesus, I thought he’d got over the tantrums.”
“You know Arthur, always a prima donna,” she said airily. “His current PA’s due for the chop today actually. Gwen, Gaius and I have a bet over what the reason will be. Care to weigh in? Gwen says it’ll be for breathing too much, Gaius suggested standing incorrectly… personally I think it might just be because she’s not you.”
“Morgana, I…”
“Arthur’s an idiot,” she said abruptly, “A lifetime of living in films has given him unreasonable expectations of himself and everybody else, and he can’t ask for anything he really wants.” She tossed her hair in a way that had made a million men fall in love with her time and time again, Merlin just smiled.
“Arthur has never had a problem asking for anything,” he said, remembering the orders, the demands and the two am phone calls that had been his life for three years.
“Come on, Merlin. You know him better than that,” she leaned closer, her eyes boring into his. “Arthur never asks for what he really wants.”
“You can talk,” Merlin said.
“Merlin, if I wanted you to screw me silly on the floor of this bakery right now, I would have no compunctions about asking for it. If I wanted you to work for me, I would call you up and say ‘please come back’,” she paused. “I wouldn’t stop before hitting the call button, or pressing send.”
“Morgana, I’m not going to go back just because Arthur’s being a brat,” he said firmly. “The whole point of this is to stop him from using me any more.”
“Right… that’s the point,” Morgana said, not sounding entirely credulous. “I thought it was because you were both too stupid to talk to each other. But I can see that I was wrong.” She sighed and smiled serenely. “It’s good to see you, Merlin. You shouldn’t be a stranger. Even if you and Arthur are being morons, that’s no excuse for turning your back on everyone else.”
“I’m sorry,” Merlin said, truthfully. He missed Gwen, and Gaius too, and even Morgana, although they had never been terribly close as far as he knew. Though he knew she had very few close friends, so perhaps he meant more to her than he thought.
“Come down next week, you can stay with Gwen and I. We’ll take you out for dinner,” she commanded.
“Morgana, I really have…” his voice trailed off under the force of her imperious stare. “Is Tuesday okay?” he asked with a sigh.
“Perfect,” she smiled happily and leaned over the counter to peck him on the cheek, smearing flour over her own cheek in the process. Somehow it still suited her, almost as though it were artfully placed. “Gwen will be pleased.”
“Would you like anything?” he asked. She looked down at the pastries under the glass with a wicked look in her eyes.
“Are those Eccles cakes?” she asked, leaning closer.
“uh… yes.”
“Oh, three of those, then,” she said. “I really should give my driver something for lugging me all the way up here.”
As Merlin was bagging up her Eccles cakes and wondering whether or not to give her the discount reserved for staff and their families, her phone rang and she answered it.
“Gwen?” he overheard followed by a lot of half complete sentences and hmms of agreement. The conversation was barely started before it was finished.
“Four pounds eighty,” he said. She handed over a five pound note without even thinking about it.
“That was Gwen,” she said, sliding her change across the counter towards her. “She says that another one bit the dust… Arthur fired her because she was too nice, apparently.” She shrugged and turned to depart, leaving Merlin staring after her in agitation.
It had all been simple for that one month, no Arthur – except on the television. He had stripped his room bare of posters and rolled them all up in a corner. His mother had given him a tight lipped look of concern when she had wandered into his room and not found Arthur staring at her from every surface, but he had shrugged it off.
Now Morgana had come and upset everything. She took some kind of sadistic pleasure in turning people upside down and shaking them to see what came out, he was certain of it. And she could never, ever, admit to being wrong.
As he shuffled home from work, the chills of early spring still in the air and his hands stuck deep into his pockets, he couldn’t quite get his mind off the fact that he had agreed to go back the next week. Arthur would be there. He had no illusions about what Morgana was trying to do, and arranging for Arthur and him to meet ‘by accident’ was high up there on the list. But, as peaceful as his life was in Ealdor, he missed his life before. It had taken him weeks to stop freaking out that his iPhone was not going off every five seconds.
When he walked into his living room, his mother and Will were sitting on the sofas eating Chinese take-away.
“’lo,” he muttered, stripping off his coat and, under his mother’s watchful gaze, hanging it up on the rack.
“Yours is in the kitchen,” Will told him around a mouthful of prawn cracker. The quiet in the room was unnerving as Merlin left to retrieve his dinner, and he had the uncomfortable feeling that the pair of them had been talking about him before he had walked in. Even when he returned, tray full of still hot Chinese in his hands, they had not recovered from the lapse in conversation.
He sat down and began to eat, he was starving, for all he worked somewhere that sold food. Pastries lost their allure after a couple of weeks.
“Thanks,” he said, in between mouthfuls.
“I’ll take that as an ‘I owe you my undying thanks, Will. You are a god among men,’” his friend replied.
“You keep believing that,” he answered, but the banter did not continue, fading away again, swallowed up by a conversation that they were not having.
Strangely, dinner was in almost silence, the three of them edging around conversations, although Will and Hunith kept giving each other distinctly suspicious glances. Finally, after they had all finished and Will had taken his leave, hugging Hunith and whacking Merlin on the shoulder with an admonishment to be less of an idiot, something broke and his mother turned round to him with a serious look on her face.
“I think we need to talk,” she said calmly, gesturing for him to return to the living room.
“About what?” he asked, sitting down and looking at her as blankly as he could manage. She looked at him with a glance that only mothers could give and waited. “Mum… I’m fine.”
She just sat down next to him and patted his knee gently.
“You don’t want to work at the bakery,” she said, and Merlin couldn’t deny that. It was a pleasant enough break, but it was hardly what he wanted to for the rest of his life. “Arthur seemed like a nice young man when I met him.”
Merlin smiled. It was so very Arthur that he still had his mother charmed and wrapped around his little finger when he was miles away and had only met the woman for those four days.
“What happened?” she asked, carefully, “Will won’t tell me. He just says you’re being ridiculous and I’ve never known him to mince his words before.”
“He doesn’t even like Arthur,” Merlin commented wryly.
“He likes you, and we both know you’re not really happy.” She sighed and changed tactics, straightening up and crossing her arms. “Merlin, I did not raise you to run away from things or hide. You’ve always been your own person, and you’ll probably never realise how proud I am about that, but I refuse to stand back and watch while you ruin yourself.”
“Mum… I’m in love with him,” Merlin managed to tell her.
“I know.”
“So does he…” Merlin’s voice was almost a whisper.
“Why is that such a bad thing?” Hunith asked, carefully smoothing back his hair.
“Because he knows…” Merlin said, waving his hands to try and intimate the several million levels of wrong that were encompassed by Arthur knowing. “He’ll use it.”
“Merlin… the man spent four days here when he could have hidden out anywhere else in the world. He put up with Will…”
“I…” he began.
“And these came today, in the post.” She handed him a stiff brown envelope which Merlin tore open carefully.
“It’s a copy of my references,” he said, “Arthur typed them up himself…” he said, noting the post-it stuck to the top: hope these are useful. He scanned downwards and blushed slightly as he took in just how good they were.
“I take it he has some nice things to say,” his mother commented, Merlin just passed her the sheet. Reading it more carefully than her son had, she sighed deeply. “You should talk to him, Merlin. I know that I don’t know what happened, but he does care about you.”
“He’s straight.” She smiled as Merlin spoke.
“Talk to him,” she instructed.
“I’m going down on Tuesday,” he mumbled, “to see Morgana and Gwen. I think Morgana’s planning to help us bump into each other. I’ll see what I can do.”
His mother kissed him once on the forehead before standing up.
“Come on then,” she said, brushing her hands together, “help me clear all of this away.”
*
Tuesday came quickly enough, in hindsight, though the waiting switched between dragging hopelessly along and hurrying away so fast that Merlin could hardly keep up. When he woke up in the dark pre-dawn hours, he groaned and rolled over, trying to remember why he had agreed to this again. There was a part of him that wanted to bury his head in his pillow and just sleep until it all seemed like a bad dream, but there was another part of him, just under the surface, that made him feel like he was at the top of a rollercoaster, which wanted to see Arthur again in real life.
He opened his eyes to the blank grey-white of his ceiling which still looked wrong to him after so many years of waking up to Arthur’s face. He barely recognised his room. It was that more than anything that made him swing his legs out of the bed. There was something utterly wrong about the whole situation.
He sighed and ran a hand over his head before heading out of his room to glare at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. Today was going to be one of those days, he could feel it.
His mother was up in time to see him off, with a silent kiss to his forehead. He had half expected her to have another meaningful chat with him and was unbelievably relieved when she didn’t.
So he drove off, in the car that had been sitting in the garage for four years waiting for him to drive it. Will had taken it out a few times, to keep it running and always pretended that he had totalled it over the phone. Merlin was surprised to find it was still in full working order, mostly. There was a high probability that it was going to burst into flames on the motorway, it was that old.
The journey was quiet, unnaturally so, but the radio was broken and the cassette/cd player had never worked properly in all the time Merlin had known it. He was left to his own thoughts and devices, which was unhelpful. He wanted something to take his mind off everything, but there were only business men in cars on their daily commute and lorry drivers swerving across the lanes, which at least kept him awake.
It had been a while… years really, since he had driven himself any great distance, and the concentration kept him somewhat occupied, but there still wasn’t enough to keep him from turning back to Arthur and Morgana and Arthur again.
Who he was thinking about when his phone rang.
Will would have laughed at him if Merlin ever told him he actually pulled over into a Welcome Break service station to answer the thing. But the look on his mother’s face if she ever found out he had been on his mobile while driving was enough to make him.
“Merlin? ” Gwen’s voice was anxious and alert on the other end.
“Gwen? What is it?” he asked immediately. His friend did not have a habit of exaggerating problems. If anything she downplayed them, it was an essential skill in their job… her job, Merlin mentally corrected.
“We’re worried about Arthur. ” She told him. Roughly translated that meant either that Arthur had committed murder, or suicide. Merlin swore.
“What’s happened?” he wondered how many times he had said those very words in his professional capacity. It was usually a drunken altercation with a reporter, or a yelling match with Morgana, or once – and thank God that it was only once – a run in with an insane pelican. He knew that his voice had slipped back into ‘Arthur’s PA’ and he tried to reign in the thoughts that were already planning strategies for the above.
“He didn’t show up this morning, ” Gwen said slowly, “he hasn’t left his room today and he’s not answering his phone. ” Merlin considered that for a moment, staring at the white bird on the service station sign. He opened his mouth to say that he would deal with it, but then closed it again. That was not his job any more. He didn’t run around fixing the things that Arthur broke. That was someone else.
“What about his Assistant?” He asked, sliding back into his professional tone because it was easier than admitting what it cost him to say that sentence.
“Uh…” Gwen paused for a moment. “He’s not really available. ”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“That he’s in the corner crying. ” Gwen replied. “Arthur… there was an argument… over ice-cubes. ”
“Ice-cubes?”
“Well, that’s what we think it started as… But Arthur may have said some things about his mother, and possibly some rather cutting remarks about his life. ”
“Arthur made him cry?” Merlin struggled for dead-pan, but it was difficult when he was torn between amused and righteously angry.
“I don’t think he meant to. I think he’s just given up firing them and started trying to make them quit. ”
“Sounds like it’s working.”
“A little too well, ” she agreed, followed by a sigh. “Look, Merlin. I know that this isn’t your job any more… even if that is because you ran away. ” Merlin blinked at that, sometimes Gwen could be cutting without even noticing. “But, you’re on your way here anyway. I mean, you are coming, aren’t you? ”
“I’ll be there in just under an hour, if the traffic holds out,” he said, looking at the clock.
“So, maybe you could try and talk to him. We think he’ll listen to you. ”
“Gwen…” Merlin began, but there was a rustle of noise on the other end of the line and the next voice he heard was not Gwen’s warm tones, but the clear, precise enunciation of Morgana.
“Merlin,” she said calmly.
“Fine. I’ll talk to him.” Merlin capitulated. As soon as Morgana got involved there was no way out. She would get her way even if she had to chain you up and drag you there. “He’s probably just sulking or something.”
*
For all Gwen’s concern and Morgana’s lack of emotion, Merlin was not expecting it to be that bad. After all, Arthur tended to throw things and hit things until he got all his emotion out, and yell at people who cleaned up after him. Three years of knowing Arthur’s life better than he knew his own had boiled down to understanding when to make a joke at someone else’s expense and when to duck the bottle of expensive booze being tossed in the general direction of his head. Arthur never aimed at him, but there was always a chance he would miss.
So the crowds of reporters outside the hotel were unexpected, especially the way they were all craning their necks up towards the roof.
No one noticed him pulling into the car park, narrowly avoiding hitting an overzealous photographer, except Gaius.
“Merlin!” The relief in the publicist’s voice was enough to make all the misgivings return. The young man looked around at the scene and took a deep breath.
“Please tell me they’re not looking at Arthur…” he said slowly. Gaius’ pained expression was enough. “Where are Gwen and Morgana?” he asked.
“They went up to try and talk to him, but security seemed to think it would be a bad idea…” Gaius’ eyebrow twitched in a way that implied that he had thought it was a bad idea and had persuaded security to agree with him.
“I can’t imagine why,” he said, wryly, following Gaius and the publicist turned around and hurried towards the back entrance of the hotel, hurriedly locking his doors over his shoulder. “So… has he threatened to jump?” Merlin asked, as soon as they were inside the doors. It was amazing how easily he fell back into the habit of all of this, ignoring the reporters, keeping up a conversation about a possible suicide attempt while maintaining complete calm.
“No…” Gaius said. “We’re not sure why he went up there, but then Uther came along and he seemed to think that it was excellent publicity and told everyone not to call the papers, so of course someone phoned the television stations and… well, it turned into a two ring circus.”
“Well, Heath Ledger got a posthumous Oscar,” Merlin commented bleakly. Gaius turned and glared at him.
“That’s what Uther said,” Gaius muttered.
“His father…” Merlin had once told Gaius that nothing Uther did would ever be able to surprise him again, after the man had Arthur thrown in jail for three days for reckless driving. He had been proved wrong more times since then than he cared to think about. It was not that Uther did not love his son, he just had a crap way of showing it, which involved wanting him to be famous in whatever way was possible.
“Did Arthur hear?”
“I doubt it, he was seven storeys above our heads at the time,” Gaius said, pushing Merlin into a lift and punching the roof button. “Look, I’ve got to handle things down here. Make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid, will you?” Merlin almost laughed.
“I couldn’t do that when it was my job, what makes you think I’ll manage it now?” he asked. There was no reply as the doors hissed shut and the lift jerked into action.
There was something highly anticlimactic about the slow lift journey up to the roof. In one of Arthur’s films, the lifts would have been out of action and the dashing hero (Merlin liked to cast himself in that part) would have had to race up the stairs, only to get to the roof just in the nick of time to stop their one true love from throwing themselves to their death in a fit of despair.
Merlin was glad that he did not have to do that. By the time he had got to the roof he would have been out of breath and Arthur would probably have already tripped and flung himself over the side in a moment of pure stupidity. He’d probably take it into his head that he could fly or something.
He hissed and watched as the number changed from two to three. He could have sworn that walking would have been faster. But he wouldn’t have been able to talk once he got there.
What did you say to a film star that might or might not be about to throw themselves off a roof? What did you say to a film star you’d had a one night stand with, were desperately in love with and had (as Gwen had so kindly put it) run away from?
‘Hello’ might not be the best place to start. ‘Sorry’ implied he knew what he was apologising for.
All he really wanted to do was yell at the idiot, but considering his possibly delicate state of mind, maybe that would not be the best idea either.
Suddenly the numbers appeared to be switching from six to seven and Merlin was out of time.
As it was, the first words he spoke as the door ‘ding-ed’ open and he saw Arthur again for the first time since the fateful morning after, were ‘oh bugger’. They seemed as good as any.
“Oh bugger,” he said again for good measure, and stepped onto the roof before he could chicken out and travel back down.
Arthur did not look as though he was contemplating jumping. He was sitting on the low wall around the roof and, certainly, that wasn’t the safest place to sit, but it wasn’t like he was standing on the edge yelling out ‘goodbye cruel world’ or something.
“Uhm…” he said eloquently, and Arthur finally turned round to him, looking more irritated at the interruption of his thoughts than suicidal. As he noticed Merlin, though, his face changed abruptly, swivelling through guilty, worried and resigned before settling on the blank aggression he thought would scare people away. “Hey Arthur.”
“Merlin… what are you doing here?” he asked.
“Well, I was coming to see Gwen and Morgana,” and you he did not add because there were already enough possibilities for this discussion to turn horrendously saccharine without him walking right into them. “But then I got here and the first thing I hear when I arrive is that you’re about to throw yourself off the roof and I thought ‘that I’ve got to see’, but the crowds down there are quite big,” they looked down at the vultures below them. “So I decided to come up here and get a front row seat.” Arthur almost smiled, the edges of his mouth quirked up a tiny amount. Enough that Merlin thought it would be safe to cross over the roof and sit next to him. “Take your time though,” he said calmly, trying to forget that they were eighty feet above the ground. “It’s not like I’m doing anything else.”
“I’m not going to jump, moron.” Arthur told him firmly, kicking his legs against the wall slightly and raising a gasp from the crowd. “I just came up here to think really. I certainly wasn’t expecting this. ” The actor waved a hand toward the crowds. “Honestly…”
“Your father called them in,” Merlin said idly.
“Anything for publicity,” Arthur agreed. “He’s good like that.” Merlin let out a bark of slightly hysterical laughter, causing Arthur to look at him in concern. “Were you really supposed to be here, or did Morgana call you?”
“A bit of both…” Merlin admitted, gazing out over the countryside that surrounded that hotel. It wasn’t something he had ever really noticed while he was staying there, but from the roof it was easy to see why rooms were so sought after. “Could you not have thought in your room… or is that a stupid question?”
“People would have looked for me there, and that... your replacement would be standing in the corner cringing. ”
“Ah, he’s a cringer. Although you might be glad to hear that he’s quit.”
“Good, he was worse than you, and I didn’t even think that was possible.”
“So…” Merlin said, at a loss for conversation. “How’s life?”
“How’s Will?” Arthur asked and Merlin blinked at the bitterness in Arthur’s voice. He shrugged.
“He’s okay, I suppose.”
“Good.” They lapsed into silence for a minute. As Merlin opened his mouth to ask some other inane question his phone rang in his pocket and he pulled it from his pocket.
“Morgana?” he asked as he put the mobile to his ear. Arthur was watching him carefully. He listened to her and Gwen yell at him for a few seconds. “He’s fine, he’s not going to jump… If I hit him from you I might just push him off though.” Arthur shook his head. “I know, I know… he’s an idiot. So am I. Look, I’m currently sitting on the edge of a roof with my feet dangling over a rather large drop so maybe I could finish this conversation at a later date?” There was a definite negative from the other end before Arthur grabbed the phone from his hand.
“Merlin’s busy right now, Morgana,” Arthur said firmly down the phone. “Stop telling me what I need to do… well maybe we would be talking if you hadn’t called… Morgana… Morgana…” he pulled the phone away from him and stared at it curiously before dropping it.
“Arthur!” Merlin yelled at him, lunging towards the phone without even thinking about it, only Arthur’s arm, snaking out in front of his chest and holding him back kept him from going over. But still they tilted dangerously on the edge for a moment.
“Idiot! ” Arthur spluttered as they both recovered from the shock. “What were you thinking?” he demanded, forcing them both back off the wall and grabbing Merlin by the shoulder. “You utter moron. You could have killed us both!”
“You threw my phone off a building.” Merlin said angrily, shaking Arthur off him. And looking over the side towards the tiny splintered remains of his mobile. “You are so buying me a new one for that, you dick.”
“I think saving your life should be worth a mobile phone.” Arthur told him, crossing his arms angrily and glaring at Merlin with the expression he had had to perfect for being a hit-man with a heart in Valiant.
“If you hadn’t thrown my phone off a building you wouldn’t have had to save my life.”
“I had to shut Morgana up,” Arthur told him with a shrug.
“You could have hung up…” Merlin said, and Arthur gaped at him for a moment. “Shit Arthur… we don’t all have millions of pounds at our disposal, you know.”
“Fine, I’ll buy you a phone,” Arthur snapped.
“Not to mention that if you had been an ordinary person and just stuck a do not disturb sign on your door in the first place I wouldn’t have been sent up here to stop you from sodding killing yourself, so we wouldn’t have had any of these problems.”
“I said I’ll buy you a goddamn phone. Will you shut up?! I’d forgotten how terrible you are at this.”
“Thank God I quit then!” Merlin yelled back, although there was not as much feeling in it anymore. The wind was ruffling across Arthur’s hair and the anger was making his eyes more vivid than usual. Most of Merlin’s higher brain function had either switched off or dedicated itself to reminding himself why kissing Arthur was such a mistake.
“Yes, thank God you did!” Arthur yelled back. They stopped then, staring at each other, before Merlin couldn’t help but smile. “What are you grinning about?” Arthur asked petulantly.
“That’s not what you said in my references.”
“Well, I was being generous. I didn’t think there was any way you’d find another job on your own merit.” But Arthur was beginning to smile as well, properly this time, not one of his smirks, nor just a quick flicker of the lips, but a genuine smile.
“So…” Merlin said, sinking down to sit on the roof – not the edge this time. Arthur dropped down next to him. “Morgana thinks we should talk.”
“She does…” Arthur told him, clearly unwilling to begin the conversation.
“Right… well,” Merlin said slowly. “We had sex.” Blunt was good, it got them to the point, anyway.
“Good to know you noticed that,” Arthur said, obviously trying for nonchalant, but missing by several miles.
“It was fairly noticeable,” Merlin murmured.
“I’d like to think so,” Arthur gave him a grin that was a little too close to a leer. Merlin just rolled his eyes.
“Only two problems with that,” Merlin told him with a sigh “You’re straight and I’m desperately in love with you. Other than that, it’s all brilliant.” Arthur blinked, looking thoughtful for a moment.
“Maybe… not so much,” he said, slowly.
“Not so much what?”
“Not so much straight… really.”
“How not so much are we talking here?” Merlin asked slowly.
“How not so much do you need?”
“Do I need for what?”
“Do you need for…?”
“Do I need for what?”
“Are you ever going to stop answering my questions with questions?” Arthur asked in exasperation. Merlin chuckled and shrugged.
“Are you ever going to tell me what you’re talking about?”
“Couldn’t we just…” Arthur paused, tracking back through their conversation “…desperately in love with me?” Merlin could feel the tips of his ears brightening to a brilliant red. “Merlin?”
“Huh,” he said, trying to keep his voice normal. “You do listen to me.”
“Desperately?” Arthur asked again.
“That might have been the word I used.”
“In love?”
“I do recall those words passing my lips, yes,” Merlin said, sighing. He really should not have let that slip. Arthur would never let it go and it would inflate his ego to ten times its normal size. “I thought you’d worked that out already. You did see the posters.”
“Well yes, but I just thought…”
“That it was normal for me to have your face plastered all over my room?” Merlin said slowly.
“Well, yes. I mean, you are gay and I am irresistible,” Arthur told him. “I didn’t think.. in love?”
“Only reason I can think of that I put up with you for three years.”
“In lo- You. Utter. Moron!” Arthur told him, cuffing Merlin round the back of the head lightly. “You’re in love with me… why on earth did you run away? I though you and Will…”
“You think that Will is why I left?” Merlin asked.
“Obviously. I mean, we had sex and you felt guilty for not being able to resist me…”
“I couldn’t resist you?” Merlin asked, choosing to overlook the truth of the statement for the blatant arrogance behind it. Arthur mouthed the word ‘desperately’ at him and Merlin ground his teeth. “Anyway, Will and I… we’re not. I told you about us.”
“Yeah, but no one says what they really think,” Arthur told him bitterly.
“I do. Most of the time,” Merlin said, forcing himself not to jump Arthur there and then by reminding himself that security would probably be stationed not too far away and there was a crowd of reporters with recording equipment in the car park. The best way for Arthur Pendragon to come out to his adoring public was probably not on the six o’clock news.
The fact that he was thinking about Arthur Pendragon coming out at all was mind boggling.
“You really thought I was straight?” Arthur asked, incredulously. Choosing to leave Merlin’s humiliating confession behind for the moment, which was very chivalrous of him, considering how big a berk he was.
“Well… you’ve never slept with a guy,” Merlin pointed out.
“I slept with you.”
“Well… yes, but that was different. You were just curious, then.”
“I was?”
“Mmhm…” Merlin hummed, wondering why Arthur was questioning that. Arthur just stared back at him, confused.
“Anyway, that’s all sorted out then,” Arthur said with a smile, neither a grin nor a smirk, but something in between that lit up his features in a way that Merlin was sure Will would tease him forever for noticing. The voice in his head that sounded like his best friend was breaking into a chant of ‘girl, girl, you’re a girl’ There was even a dance routine, which Merlin thought made Will more of a girl than him, but it was in his head, so perhaps it was more a reflection on him than Will. While Merlin was watching his inner voices do the can-can round his occipital lobe, Arthur stood up and brushed off his trousers, which cost more than a month’s lease on the bakery Merlin worked in.
“What’s sorted?” Merlin asked, allowing Arthur to drag him to his feet. The actor shrugged.
“Everything.”
“What’s sorted?” Merlin asked again as Arthur turned to walk towards the door to the lift. “I don’t remember anything being sorted… Arthur?”
“Well, you’re desperately in love with me, so it’s all alright,” Arthur told him.
“Uh… right.” Merlin stood, by the edge of the roof, suddenly aware that he was bloody freezing. Arthur had somehow reached the end of a conversation Merlin did not remember having and the press were still gathered at the entrance to the hotel, hoping for a running jump or something.
“Are you coming?” Arthur asked, pausing at the door. “We should probably go and tell Morgana we’ve got it all sorted.”
“Right… of course,” Merlin said. “All sorted… all of what, exactly?”
Arthur crossed back over to him in confusion.
“You’re desperately in love with me,” Merlin was so busy regretting his hasty use of the word desperately, that he almost missed the next words out of Arthur’s mouth. “I’m sort of in love with you, it’s all sorted.” There was dead silence on the roof for a second and Merlin tried to remember how to close his mouth while Arthur’s cheeks reddened slightly. True to form, he covered the embarrassment with bluster. “Honestly, Merlin. If you were much slower, you’d be going backwards.” He said leaning forward to kiss Merlin firmly. “Any more questions?”
Merlin really should have been dwelling on the way Arthur was staring at him, or how good it had felt, or how happy he was, all of which were true, but far too girly for words.
“Just one,” he said. Arthur waited, more patiently than Merlin had expected. “Did you really mean to do that in front of your father and the national press?” he asked.
Arthur gaped and looked down at the flash bulbs below them, clearly not having realised how close they were standing to the edge.
“Bollocks,” he muttered. Merlin repressed a slightly hysterical laugh.
“What do we do now?” he asked, trying to maintain his calm.
“Traditionally,” Arthur said slowly, linking his fingers with Merlin’s in a move that most definitely did not make his heart jump a little, because Arthur was a git and had thrown his mobile off a roof and just made him come out to the whole world and its wife, “we would wave.”
“Right…” Merlin said raising his hand, half-heartedly. Arthur seemed to be taking it all with far more aplomb than Merlin thought was reasonable. “And then?”
“We could go finish this somewhere a little less public,” Arthur whispered sideways, his usual photo-op smile pasted to his face.
“We could try that…” Merlin said slowly.
“I do remember you mentioning something about a do not disturb sign…”
-
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
The bakery in Ealdor was a small affair, barely ten foot square in the main shop, with three ovens and a staff of two – and that was including Merlin.
It was understood, when Merlin shuffled into work for his first day, that he was not there to stay. It was an interim job, just until he could find somewhere else that needed no qualifications other than being able to handle one of the most demanding men in the world for over three years without committing suicide. Mr Polburn the baker did not ask any questions, nor did he supply any answers. There was a picture in the kitchen, over the worktop where he would knead the dough, which might have been his wife, or a grown up daughter, or someone completely unrelated. Merlin returned the favour and chose not to pry.
He mostly worked up front in the shop, and he enjoyed it. Not in the same way he had enjoyed working for Arthur – always on the fringe between aroused and infuriated – but because he got to talk to ordinary people and just see life going on. In his previous job, everything had been fake, on the screen and off it. Sophia was just one of the most obvious examples. In Ealdor everything was terrifyingly real, from the mother of three, with the bags under her eyes and the third child screaming for a gingerbread man, to the little old lady who flirted outrageously with him.
He gave the little old lady, Mrs Green – call me Meg, sweetheart – an extra sticky bun and an extra large smile and enjoyed just being himself.
Will came in every now and then to make suggestive comments about the éclairs and men in aprons (and not much else). His mother popped in and look at him sadly before ordering two loaves and a bag of pastries.
She had been surprisingly quiet about his sudden return home, catching his arm with one hand as he walked into the house and asking quietly whether he was sure.
He had never been able to lie to the woman who raised him, and he had just shrugged and told her that he did not know what else to do. Any other comments she might have made were swept away as she hugged him tightly and told him that she was glad to have him back.
He knew that she didn’t like his working there, she thought he was meant to be somewhere else, and sometimes so did he.
It was a month after he had left when the bell on the shop door jangled out and Merlin looked up to find himself staring into the eyes of a distinctly unimpressed Morgana LeFay.
“Can I help you?” he asked, quirking a grin at her. He had been talking to her and Gwen over the phone and email, but to have her suddenly turn up, well out of her way and with no sort of warning, was a little jarring.
“I like the hat,” she said, and Merlin reached up to self-consciously pat the white hairnet-slash-fashion statement that graced his head.
“I’m trying to start a trend,” he quipped easily, reminding himself that this was just Morgana, whom he had seen in various states of undress over the years and who had given him verbal arse-kickings more times than he could count. Behind her another customer came in and as soon as he recognised her, did such a perfect double take that Merlin almost wished he had had a camera to record the moment. “I’ve got a spare in the back if you’d like, together we could take over the world.” He managed to raise a secretive half-smile from her and marked that up as a triumph.
“I think I’ll pass. I don’t think my agent’s ready for bakery chic yet,” she returned.
“You could have had the world…” he said.
“I’d be happy to have a few moments of your time…” she said. Merlin was just about to reply when the guy behind her finally worked up the courage to make a noise that sounded like an alarmed sheep. Merlin watched Morgana click into her ‘fan’ persona effortlessly, turning to him with far more grace than the bakery had ever seen, even before Merlin and his rebellious limbs had taken up residence there.
“Are…” the man coughed as his voice came out unnaturally high and Merlin took a moment to remember his name – Thomas, from down the road. He was the local plumber and Merlin had never seen him bashful before, nor blushing. Without commenting, he got the plumber’s usual order ready. “Are you Morgana LeFay… the real Morgana LeFay?”
“Yes.” Morgana replied easily, “nice to meet you, Mr…”
“Matthews, Thomas Matthews,” he beamed as he took her hand, and Merlin could almost picture the thoughts going through the guy’s mind: ‘I’m touching her, dear God; I can’t believe she’s looking at me.’ “I’m a huge fan, Miss LeFay.”
“Call me Morgana, please,” she said. Merlin switched off as she went through the usual patter, niceties about how his day had gone, a quick query about autographs, signing a photograph followed by a polite but firm dismissal. Morgana had always been the queen of public relations. Arthur was good in official capacities, awards ceremonies and press releases, but on a more ad hoc basis, he tended to be a little more himself. Morgana was aware of herself every second of every day. Merlin had once asked Gwen if she measured every smile before hand, just to check that they were exactly right. His only answer had been a laugh and he still did not know to what lengths the actress would go to for publicity.
“Your order, Mr Matthews,” Merlin said, sliding the bag of bread across the counter and taking the outstretched money in return. Before he could give the plumber his change, he had wandered out in a daze.
“Should you take that to him?” she asked curiously.
“I’ll pop it round on my way home,” Merlin told her with a shrug.
“Nice to see you’re as devoted to your new job as you used to be to your old one,” she said, leaning over the counter at him. She looked like some sort of glossy magazine cover and Merlin again wanted a camera. The main problem with Morgana was, he had decided years ago, that she was impossible to hate. Even when she had been with Arthur, even when she was so untouchably perfect, there would be moments when she’d crook an eyebrow, or spike Arthur’s sandwich with chilli and she would be completely human.
“We’re a full service bakery, Miss LeFay.”
“So few men these days take responsibility for their actions,” she said, and Merlin could feel the undertones in her voice tingling through him. “It’s admirable.”
“What can I do for you, Morgana?” he asked slowly, cutting to the chase. He knew that if he did not, she would continue all day, slowly circling around the issue, shaving him into tiny pieces as she went. It would be better to get it all out in the open at once, rather than letting her toy with him.
“You know Arthur’s on his fifth assistant since you left?” she asked abruptly. Merlin shrugged, trying not to let on that he had been counting every time Gwen had told him another one bit the dust. “It would have been more, but Uther and Gaius performed an intervention after the first one lasted three hours and demanded that he keep them at least a week, to be sure.” He was sure that his desperate attempts to keep a straight face must be the worst in history, but she did him the credit of not commenting, just staring straight at him until he shifted uncomfortably where he stood. “According to Arthur they’re all awful: they’re too noisy, or too quiet, or they don’t have a sense of humour… or they lose his favourite pair of blue Armani jeans.”
“Arthur hates those jeans,” Merlin said before he could stop himself. The trousers in question tended to bunch a little too much around Arthur’s ankles and the star had relegated them to the back of his wardrobe. Merlin had always thought they complemented his arse, though. Morgana smiled, as though she had just won some private war.
“You know that, I know that… the poor schmuck who was thrown bodily out of his room and will probably never work in the business again did not.”
“He threw him from the room?” Merlin asked, his jaw dropping in incredulity. “Jesus, I thought he’d got over the tantrums.”
“You know Arthur, always a prima donna,” she said airily. “His current PA’s due for the chop today actually. Gwen, Gaius and I have a bet over what the reason will be. Care to weigh in? Gwen says it’ll be for breathing too much, Gaius suggested standing incorrectly… personally I think it might just be because she’s not you.”
“Morgana, I…”
“Arthur’s an idiot,” she said abruptly, “A lifetime of living in films has given him unreasonable expectations of himself and everybody else, and he can’t ask for anything he really wants.” She tossed her hair in a way that had made a million men fall in love with her time and time again, Merlin just smiled.
“Arthur has never had a problem asking for anything,” he said, remembering the orders, the demands and the two am phone calls that had been his life for three years.
“Come on, Merlin. You know him better than that,” she leaned closer, her eyes boring into his. “Arthur never asks for what he really wants.”
“You can talk,” Merlin said.
“Merlin, if I wanted you to screw me silly on the floor of this bakery right now, I would have no compunctions about asking for it. If I wanted you to work for me, I would call you up and say ‘please come back’,” she paused. “I wouldn’t stop before hitting the call button, or pressing send.”
“Morgana, I’m not going to go back just because Arthur’s being a brat,” he said firmly. “The whole point of this is to stop him from using me any more.”
“Right… that’s the point,” Morgana said, not sounding entirely credulous. “I thought it was because you were both too stupid to talk to each other. But I can see that I was wrong.” She sighed and smiled serenely. “It’s good to see you, Merlin. You shouldn’t be a stranger. Even if you and Arthur are being morons, that’s no excuse for turning your back on everyone else.”
“I’m sorry,” Merlin said, truthfully. He missed Gwen, and Gaius too, and even Morgana, although they had never been terribly close as far as he knew. Though he knew she had very few close friends, so perhaps he meant more to her than he thought.
“Come down next week, you can stay with Gwen and I. We’ll take you out for dinner,” she commanded.
“Morgana, I really have…” his voice trailed off under the force of her imperious stare. “Is Tuesday okay?” he asked with a sigh.
“Perfect,” she smiled happily and leaned over the counter to peck him on the cheek, smearing flour over her own cheek in the process. Somehow it still suited her, almost as though it were artfully placed. “Gwen will be pleased.”
“Would you like anything?” he asked. She looked down at the pastries under the glass with a wicked look in her eyes.
“Are those Eccles cakes?” she asked, leaning closer.
“uh… yes.”
“Oh, three of those, then,” she said. “I really should give my driver something for lugging me all the way up here.”
As Merlin was bagging up her Eccles cakes and wondering whether or not to give her the discount reserved for staff and their families, her phone rang and she answered it.
“Gwen?” he overheard followed by a lot of half complete sentences and hmms of agreement. The conversation was barely started before it was finished.
“Four pounds eighty,” he said. She handed over a five pound note without even thinking about it.
“That was Gwen,” she said, sliding her change across the counter towards her. “She says that another one bit the dust… Arthur fired her because she was too nice, apparently.” She shrugged and turned to depart, leaving Merlin staring after her in agitation.
It had all been simple for that one month, no Arthur – except on the television. He had stripped his room bare of posters and rolled them all up in a corner. His mother had given him a tight lipped look of concern when she had wandered into his room and not found Arthur staring at her from every surface, but he had shrugged it off.
Now Morgana had come and upset everything. She took some kind of sadistic pleasure in turning people upside down and shaking them to see what came out, he was certain of it. And she could never, ever, admit to being wrong.
As he shuffled home from work, the chills of early spring still in the air and his hands stuck deep into his pockets, he couldn’t quite get his mind off the fact that he had agreed to go back the next week. Arthur would be there. He had no illusions about what Morgana was trying to do, and arranging for Arthur and him to meet ‘by accident’ was high up there on the list. But, as peaceful as his life was in Ealdor, he missed his life before. It had taken him weeks to stop freaking out that his iPhone was not going off every five seconds.
When he walked into his living room, his mother and Will were sitting on the sofas eating Chinese take-away.
“’lo,” he muttered, stripping off his coat and, under his mother’s watchful gaze, hanging it up on the rack.
“Yours is in the kitchen,” Will told him around a mouthful of prawn cracker. The quiet in the room was unnerving as Merlin left to retrieve his dinner, and he had the uncomfortable feeling that the pair of them had been talking about him before he had walked in. Even when he returned, tray full of still hot Chinese in his hands, they had not recovered from the lapse in conversation.
He sat down and began to eat, he was starving, for all he worked somewhere that sold food. Pastries lost their allure after a couple of weeks.
“Thanks,” he said, in between mouthfuls.
“I’ll take that as an ‘I owe you my undying thanks, Will. You are a god among men,’” his friend replied.
“You keep believing that,” he answered, but the banter did not continue, fading away again, swallowed up by a conversation that they were not having.
Strangely, dinner was in almost silence, the three of them edging around conversations, although Will and Hunith kept giving each other distinctly suspicious glances. Finally, after they had all finished and Will had taken his leave, hugging Hunith and whacking Merlin on the shoulder with an admonishment to be less of an idiot, something broke and his mother turned round to him with a serious look on her face.
“I think we need to talk,” she said calmly, gesturing for him to return to the living room.
“About what?” he asked, sitting down and looking at her as blankly as he could manage. She looked at him with a glance that only mothers could give and waited. “Mum… I’m fine.”
She just sat down next to him and patted his knee gently.
“You don’t want to work at the bakery,” she said, and Merlin couldn’t deny that. It was a pleasant enough break, but it was hardly what he wanted to for the rest of his life. “Arthur seemed like a nice young man when I met him.”
Merlin smiled. It was so very Arthur that he still had his mother charmed and wrapped around his little finger when he was miles away and had only met the woman for those four days.
“What happened?” she asked, carefully, “Will won’t tell me. He just says you’re being ridiculous and I’ve never known him to mince his words before.”
“He doesn’t even like Arthur,” Merlin commented wryly.
“He likes you, and we both know you’re not really happy.” She sighed and changed tactics, straightening up and crossing her arms. “Merlin, I did not raise you to run away from things or hide. You’ve always been your own person, and you’ll probably never realise how proud I am about that, but I refuse to stand back and watch while you ruin yourself.”
“Mum… I’m in love with him,” Merlin managed to tell her.
“I know.”
“So does he…” Merlin’s voice was almost a whisper.
“Why is that such a bad thing?” Hunith asked, carefully smoothing back his hair.
“Because he knows…” Merlin said, waving his hands to try and intimate the several million levels of wrong that were encompassed by Arthur knowing. “He’ll use it.”
“Merlin… the man spent four days here when he could have hidden out anywhere else in the world. He put up with Will…”
“I…” he began.
“And these came today, in the post.” She handed him a stiff brown envelope which Merlin tore open carefully.
“It’s a copy of my references,” he said, “Arthur typed them up himself…” he said, noting the post-it stuck to the top: hope these are useful. He scanned downwards and blushed slightly as he took in just how good they were.
“I take it he has some nice things to say,” his mother commented, Merlin just passed her the sheet. Reading it more carefully than her son had, she sighed deeply. “You should talk to him, Merlin. I know that I don’t know what happened, but he does care about you.”
“He’s straight.” She smiled as Merlin spoke.
“Talk to him,” she instructed.
“I’m going down on Tuesday,” he mumbled, “to see Morgana and Gwen. I think Morgana’s planning to help us bump into each other. I’ll see what I can do.”
His mother kissed him once on the forehead before standing up.
“Come on then,” she said, brushing her hands together, “help me clear all of this away.”
*
Tuesday came quickly enough, in hindsight, though the waiting switched between dragging hopelessly along and hurrying away so fast that Merlin could hardly keep up. When he woke up in the dark pre-dawn hours, he groaned and rolled over, trying to remember why he had agreed to this again. There was a part of him that wanted to bury his head in his pillow and just sleep until it all seemed like a bad dream, but there was another part of him, just under the surface, that made him feel like he was at the top of a rollercoaster, which wanted to see Arthur again in real life.
He opened his eyes to the blank grey-white of his ceiling which still looked wrong to him after so many years of waking up to Arthur’s face. He barely recognised his room. It was that more than anything that made him swing his legs out of the bed. There was something utterly wrong about the whole situation.
He sighed and ran a hand over his head before heading out of his room to glare at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. Today was going to be one of those days, he could feel it.
His mother was up in time to see him off, with a silent kiss to his forehead. He had half expected her to have another meaningful chat with him and was unbelievably relieved when she didn’t.
So he drove off, in the car that had been sitting in the garage for four years waiting for him to drive it. Will had taken it out a few times, to keep it running and always pretended that he had totalled it over the phone. Merlin was surprised to find it was still in full working order, mostly. There was a high probability that it was going to burst into flames on the motorway, it was that old.
The journey was quiet, unnaturally so, but the radio was broken and the cassette/cd player had never worked properly in all the time Merlin had known it. He was left to his own thoughts and devices, which was unhelpful. He wanted something to take his mind off everything, but there were only business men in cars on their daily commute and lorry drivers swerving across the lanes, which at least kept him awake.
It had been a while… years really, since he had driven himself any great distance, and the concentration kept him somewhat occupied, but there still wasn’t enough to keep him from turning back to Arthur and Morgana and Arthur again.
Who he was thinking about when his phone rang.
Will would have laughed at him if Merlin ever told him he actually pulled over into a Welcome Break service station to answer the thing. But the look on his mother’s face if she ever found out he had been on his mobile while driving was enough to make him.
“Merlin? ” Gwen’s voice was anxious and alert on the other end.
“Gwen? What is it?” he asked immediately. His friend did not have a habit of exaggerating problems. If anything she downplayed them, it was an essential skill in their job… her job, Merlin mentally corrected.
“We’re worried about Arthur. ” She told him. Roughly translated that meant either that Arthur had committed murder, or suicide. Merlin swore.
“What’s happened?” he wondered how many times he had said those very words in his professional capacity. It was usually a drunken altercation with a reporter, or a yelling match with Morgana, or once – and thank God that it was only once – a run in with an insane pelican. He knew that his voice had slipped back into ‘Arthur’s PA’ and he tried to reign in the thoughts that were already planning strategies for the above.
“He didn’t show up this morning, ” Gwen said slowly, “he hasn’t left his room today and he’s not answering his phone. ” Merlin considered that for a moment, staring at the white bird on the service station sign. He opened his mouth to say that he would deal with it, but then closed it again. That was not his job any more. He didn’t run around fixing the things that Arthur broke. That was someone else.
“What about his Assistant?” He asked, sliding back into his professional tone because it was easier than admitting what it cost him to say that sentence.
“Uh…” Gwen paused for a moment. “He’s not really available. ”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“That he’s in the corner crying. ” Gwen replied. “Arthur… there was an argument… over ice-cubes. ”
“Ice-cubes?”
“Well, that’s what we think it started as… But Arthur may have said some things about his mother, and possibly some rather cutting remarks about his life. ”
“Arthur made him cry?” Merlin struggled for dead-pan, but it was difficult when he was torn between amused and righteously angry.
“I don’t think he meant to. I think he’s just given up firing them and started trying to make them quit. ”
“Sounds like it’s working.”
“A little too well, ” she agreed, followed by a sigh. “Look, Merlin. I know that this isn’t your job any more… even if that is because you ran away. ” Merlin blinked at that, sometimes Gwen could be cutting without even noticing. “But, you’re on your way here anyway. I mean, you are coming, aren’t you? ”
“I’ll be there in just under an hour, if the traffic holds out,” he said, looking at the clock.
“So, maybe you could try and talk to him. We think he’ll listen to you. ”
“Gwen…” Merlin began, but there was a rustle of noise on the other end of the line and the next voice he heard was not Gwen’s warm tones, but the clear, precise enunciation of Morgana.
“Merlin,” she said calmly.
“Fine. I’ll talk to him.” Merlin capitulated. As soon as Morgana got involved there was no way out. She would get her way even if she had to chain you up and drag you there. “He’s probably just sulking or something.”
*
For all Gwen’s concern and Morgana’s lack of emotion, Merlin was not expecting it to be that bad. After all, Arthur tended to throw things and hit things until he got all his emotion out, and yell at people who cleaned up after him. Three years of knowing Arthur’s life better than he knew his own had boiled down to understanding when to make a joke at someone else’s expense and when to duck the bottle of expensive booze being tossed in the general direction of his head. Arthur never aimed at him, but there was always a chance he would miss.
So the crowds of reporters outside the hotel were unexpected, especially the way they were all craning their necks up towards the roof.
No one noticed him pulling into the car park, narrowly avoiding hitting an overzealous photographer, except Gaius.
“Merlin!” The relief in the publicist’s voice was enough to make all the misgivings return. The young man looked around at the scene and took a deep breath.
“Please tell me they’re not looking at Arthur…” he said slowly. Gaius’ pained expression was enough. “Where are Gwen and Morgana?” he asked.
“They went up to try and talk to him, but security seemed to think it would be a bad idea…” Gaius’ eyebrow twitched in a way that implied that he had thought it was a bad idea and had persuaded security to agree with him.
“I can’t imagine why,” he said, wryly, following Gaius and the publicist turned around and hurried towards the back entrance of the hotel, hurriedly locking his doors over his shoulder. “So… has he threatened to jump?” Merlin asked, as soon as they were inside the doors. It was amazing how easily he fell back into the habit of all of this, ignoring the reporters, keeping up a conversation about a possible suicide attempt while maintaining complete calm.
“No…” Gaius said. “We’re not sure why he went up there, but then Uther came along and he seemed to think that it was excellent publicity and told everyone not to call the papers, so of course someone phoned the television stations and… well, it turned into a two ring circus.”
“Well, Heath Ledger got a posthumous Oscar,” Merlin commented bleakly. Gaius turned and glared at him.
“That’s what Uther said,” Gaius muttered.
“His father…” Merlin had once told Gaius that nothing Uther did would ever be able to surprise him again, after the man had Arthur thrown in jail for three days for reckless driving. He had been proved wrong more times since then than he cared to think about. It was not that Uther did not love his son, he just had a crap way of showing it, which involved wanting him to be famous in whatever way was possible.
“Did Arthur hear?”
“I doubt it, he was seven storeys above our heads at the time,” Gaius said, pushing Merlin into a lift and punching the roof button. “Look, I’ve got to handle things down here. Make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid, will you?” Merlin almost laughed.
“I couldn’t do that when it was my job, what makes you think I’ll manage it now?” he asked. There was no reply as the doors hissed shut and the lift jerked into action.
There was something highly anticlimactic about the slow lift journey up to the roof. In one of Arthur’s films, the lifts would have been out of action and the dashing hero (Merlin liked to cast himself in that part) would have had to race up the stairs, only to get to the roof just in the nick of time to stop their one true love from throwing themselves to their death in a fit of despair.
Merlin was glad that he did not have to do that. By the time he had got to the roof he would have been out of breath and Arthur would probably have already tripped and flung himself over the side in a moment of pure stupidity. He’d probably take it into his head that he could fly or something.
He hissed and watched as the number changed from two to three. He could have sworn that walking would have been faster. But he wouldn’t have been able to talk once he got there.
What did you say to a film star that might or might not be about to throw themselves off a roof? What did you say to a film star you’d had a one night stand with, were desperately in love with and had (as Gwen had so kindly put it) run away from?
‘Hello’ might not be the best place to start. ‘Sorry’ implied he knew what he was apologising for.
All he really wanted to do was yell at the idiot, but considering his possibly delicate state of mind, maybe that would not be the best idea either.
Suddenly the numbers appeared to be switching from six to seven and Merlin was out of time.
As it was, the first words he spoke as the door ‘ding-ed’ open and he saw Arthur again for the first time since the fateful morning after, were ‘oh bugger’. They seemed as good as any.
“Oh bugger,” he said again for good measure, and stepped onto the roof before he could chicken out and travel back down.
Arthur did not look as though he was contemplating jumping. He was sitting on the low wall around the roof and, certainly, that wasn’t the safest place to sit, but it wasn’t like he was standing on the edge yelling out ‘goodbye cruel world’ or something.
“Uhm…” he said eloquently, and Arthur finally turned round to him, looking more irritated at the interruption of his thoughts than suicidal. As he noticed Merlin, though, his face changed abruptly, swivelling through guilty, worried and resigned before settling on the blank aggression he thought would scare people away. “Hey Arthur.”
“Merlin… what are you doing here?” he asked.
“Well, I was coming to see Gwen and Morgana,” and you he did not add because there were already enough possibilities for this discussion to turn horrendously saccharine without him walking right into them. “But then I got here and the first thing I hear when I arrive is that you’re about to throw yourself off the roof and I thought ‘that I’ve got to see’, but the crowds down there are quite big,” they looked down at the vultures below them. “So I decided to come up here and get a front row seat.” Arthur almost smiled, the edges of his mouth quirked up a tiny amount. Enough that Merlin thought it would be safe to cross over the roof and sit next to him. “Take your time though,” he said calmly, trying to forget that they were eighty feet above the ground. “It’s not like I’m doing anything else.”
“I’m not going to jump, moron.” Arthur told him firmly, kicking his legs against the wall slightly and raising a gasp from the crowd. “I just came up here to think really. I certainly wasn’t expecting this. ” The actor waved a hand toward the crowds. “Honestly…”
“Your father called them in,” Merlin said idly.
“Anything for publicity,” Arthur agreed. “He’s good like that.” Merlin let out a bark of slightly hysterical laughter, causing Arthur to look at him in concern. “Were you really supposed to be here, or did Morgana call you?”
“A bit of both…” Merlin admitted, gazing out over the countryside that surrounded that hotel. It wasn’t something he had ever really noticed while he was staying there, but from the roof it was easy to see why rooms were so sought after. “Could you not have thought in your room… or is that a stupid question?”
“People would have looked for me there, and that... your replacement would be standing in the corner cringing. ”
“Ah, he’s a cringer. Although you might be glad to hear that he’s quit.”
“Good, he was worse than you, and I didn’t even think that was possible.”
“So…” Merlin said, at a loss for conversation. “How’s life?”
“How’s Will?” Arthur asked and Merlin blinked at the bitterness in Arthur’s voice. He shrugged.
“He’s okay, I suppose.”
“Good.” They lapsed into silence for a minute. As Merlin opened his mouth to ask some other inane question his phone rang in his pocket and he pulled it from his pocket.
“Morgana?” he asked as he put the mobile to his ear. Arthur was watching him carefully. He listened to her and Gwen yell at him for a few seconds. “He’s fine, he’s not going to jump… If I hit him from you I might just push him off though.” Arthur shook his head. “I know, I know… he’s an idiot. So am I. Look, I’m currently sitting on the edge of a roof with my feet dangling over a rather large drop so maybe I could finish this conversation at a later date?” There was a definite negative from the other end before Arthur grabbed the phone from his hand.
“Merlin’s busy right now, Morgana,” Arthur said firmly down the phone. “Stop telling me what I need to do… well maybe we would be talking if you hadn’t called… Morgana… Morgana…” he pulled the phone away from him and stared at it curiously before dropping it.
“Arthur!” Merlin yelled at him, lunging towards the phone without even thinking about it, only Arthur’s arm, snaking out in front of his chest and holding him back kept him from going over. But still they tilted dangerously on the edge for a moment.
“Idiot! ” Arthur spluttered as they both recovered from the shock. “What were you thinking?” he demanded, forcing them both back off the wall and grabbing Merlin by the shoulder. “You utter moron. You could have killed us both!”
“You threw my phone off a building.” Merlin said angrily, shaking Arthur off him. And looking over the side towards the tiny splintered remains of his mobile. “You are so buying me a new one for that, you dick.”
“I think saving your life should be worth a mobile phone.” Arthur told him, crossing his arms angrily and glaring at Merlin with the expression he had had to perfect for being a hit-man with a heart in Valiant.
“If you hadn’t thrown my phone off a building you wouldn’t have had to save my life.”
“I had to shut Morgana up,” Arthur told him with a shrug.
“You could have hung up…” Merlin said, and Arthur gaped at him for a moment. “Shit Arthur… we don’t all have millions of pounds at our disposal, you know.”
“Fine, I’ll buy you a phone,” Arthur snapped.
“Not to mention that if you had been an ordinary person and just stuck a do not disturb sign on your door in the first place I wouldn’t have been sent up here to stop you from sodding killing yourself, so we wouldn’t have had any of these problems.”
“I said I’ll buy you a goddamn phone. Will you shut up?! I’d forgotten how terrible you are at this.”
“Thank God I quit then!” Merlin yelled back, although there was not as much feeling in it anymore. The wind was ruffling across Arthur’s hair and the anger was making his eyes more vivid than usual. Most of Merlin’s higher brain function had either switched off or dedicated itself to reminding himself why kissing Arthur was such a mistake.
“Yes, thank God you did!” Arthur yelled back. They stopped then, staring at each other, before Merlin couldn’t help but smile. “What are you grinning about?” Arthur asked petulantly.
“That’s not what you said in my references.”
“Well, I was being generous. I didn’t think there was any way you’d find another job on your own merit.” But Arthur was beginning to smile as well, properly this time, not one of his smirks, nor just a quick flicker of the lips, but a genuine smile.
“So…” Merlin said, sinking down to sit on the roof – not the edge this time. Arthur dropped down next to him. “Morgana thinks we should talk.”
“She does…” Arthur told him, clearly unwilling to begin the conversation.
“Right… well,” Merlin said slowly. “We had sex.” Blunt was good, it got them to the point, anyway.
“Good to know you noticed that,” Arthur said, obviously trying for nonchalant, but missing by several miles.
“It was fairly noticeable,” Merlin murmured.
“I’d like to think so,” Arthur gave him a grin that was a little too close to a leer. Merlin just rolled his eyes.
“Only two problems with that,” Merlin told him with a sigh “You’re straight and I’m desperately in love with you. Other than that, it’s all brilliant.” Arthur blinked, looking thoughtful for a moment.
“Maybe… not so much,” he said, slowly.
“Not so much what?”
“Not so much straight… really.”
“How not so much are we talking here?” Merlin asked slowly.
“How not so much do you need?”
“Do I need for what?”
“Do you need for…?”
“Do I need for what?”
“Are you ever going to stop answering my questions with questions?” Arthur asked in exasperation. Merlin chuckled and shrugged.
“Are you ever going to tell me what you’re talking about?”
“Couldn’t we just…” Arthur paused, tracking back through their conversation “…desperately in love with me?” Merlin could feel the tips of his ears brightening to a brilliant red. “Merlin?”
“Huh,” he said, trying to keep his voice normal. “You do listen to me.”
“Desperately?” Arthur asked again.
“That might have been the word I used.”
“In love?”
“I do recall those words passing my lips, yes,” Merlin said, sighing. He really should not have let that slip. Arthur would never let it go and it would inflate his ego to ten times its normal size. “I thought you’d worked that out already. You did see the posters.”
“Well yes, but I just thought…”
“That it was normal for me to have your face plastered all over my room?” Merlin said slowly.
“Well, yes. I mean, you are gay and I am irresistible,” Arthur told him. “I didn’t think.. in love?”
“Only reason I can think of that I put up with you for three years.”
“In lo- You. Utter. Moron!” Arthur told him, cuffing Merlin round the back of the head lightly. “You’re in love with me… why on earth did you run away? I though you and Will…”
“You think that Will is why I left?” Merlin asked.
“Obviously. I mean, we had sex and you felt guilty for not being able to resist me…”
“I couldn’t resist you?” Merlin asked, choosing to overlook the truth of the statement for the blatant arrogance behind it. Arthur mouthed the word ‘desperately’ at him and Merlin ground his teeth. “Anyway, Will and I… we’re not. I told you about us.”
“Yeah, but no one says what they really think,” Arthur told him bitterly.
“I do. Most of the time,” Merlin said, forcing himself not to jump Arthur there and then by reminding himself that security would probably be stationed not too far away and there was a crowd of reporters with recording equipment in the car park. The best way for Arthur Pendragon to come out to his adoring public was probably not on the six o’clock news.
The fact that he was thinking about Arthur Pendragon coming out at all was mind boggling.
“You really thought I was straight?” Arthur asked, incredulously. Choosing to leave Merlin’s humiliating confession behind for the moment, which was very chivalrous of him, considering how big a berk he was.
“Well… you’ve never slept with a guy,” Merlin pointed out.
“I slept with you.”
“Well… yes, but that was different. You were just curious, then.”
“I was?”
“Mmhm…” Merlin hummed, wondering why Arthur was questioning that. Arthur just stared back at him, confused.
“Anyway, that’s all sorted out then,” Arthur said with a smile, neither a grin nor a smirk, but something in between that lit up his features in a way that Merlin was sure Will would tease him forever for noticing. The voice in his head that sounded like his best friend was breaking into a chant of ‘girl, girl, you’re a girl’ There was even a dance routine, which Merlin thought made Will more of a girl than him, but it was in his head, so perhaps it was more a reflection on him than Will. While Merlin was watching his inner voices do the can-can round his occipital lobe, Arthur stood up and brushed off his trousers, which cost more than a month’s lease on the bakery Merlin worked in.
“What’s sorted?” Merlin asked, allowing Arthur to drag him to his feet. The actor shrugged.
“Everything.”
“What’s sorted?” Merlin asked again as Arthur turned to walk towards the door to the lift. “I don’t remember anything being sorted… Arthur?”
“Well, you’re desperately in love with me, so it’s all alright,” Arthur told him.
“Uh… right.” Merlin stood, by the edge of the roof, suddenly aware that he was bloody freezing. Arthur had somehow reached the end of a conversation Merlin did not remember having and the press were still gathered at the entrance to the hotel, hoping for a running jump or something.
“Are you coming?” Arthur asked, pausing at the door. “We should probably go and tell Morgana we’ve got it all sorted.”
“Right… of course,” Merlin said. “All sorted… all of what, exactly?”
Arthur crossed back over to him in confusion.
“You’re desperately in love with me,” Merlin was so busy regretting his hasty use of the word desperately, that he almost missed the next words out of Arthur’s mouth. “I’m sort of in love with you, it’s all sorted.” There was dead silence on the roof for a second and Merlin tried to remember how to close his mouth while Arthur’s cheeks reddened slightly. True to form, he covered the embarrassment with bluster. “Honestly, Merlin. If you were much slower, you’d be going backwards.” He said leaning forward to kiss Merlin firmly. “Any more questions?”
Merlin really should have been dwelling on the way Arthur was staring at him, or how good it had felt, or how happy he was, all of which were true, but far too girly for words.
“Just one,” he said. Arthur waited, more patiently than Merlin had expected. “Did you really mean to do that in front of your father and the national press?” he asked.
Arthur gaped and looked down at the flash bulbs below them, clearly not having realised how close they were standing to the edge.
“Bollocks,” he muttered. Merlin repressed a slightly hysterical laugh.
“What do we do now?” he asked, trying to maintain his calm.
“Traditionally,” Arthur said slowly, linking his fingers with Merlin’s in a move that most definitely did not make his heart jump a little, because Arthur was a git and had thrown his mobile off a roof and just made him come out to the whole world and its wife, “we would wave.”
“Right…” Merlin said raising his hand, half-heartedly. Arthur seemed to be taking it all with far more aplomb than Merlin thought was reasonable. “And then?”
“We could go finish this somewhere a little less public,” Arthur whispered sideways, his usual photo-op smile pasted to his face.
“We could try that…” Merlin said slowly.
“I do remember you mentioning something about a do not disturb sign…”
-
Tags:
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-03-15 05:55 pm (UTC)I remember watching AS and getting majorly annoyed at the weak script and over-acting but you...you made a whole new universe thats so different from the original story but still sticking to the core theme and hahaha I love the fact that Merlin worshipped Arthur pre-job (and after that too) Oh! My heart sighs for Will as in all fics but still, great job! Loved the movie-esque ending with the kiss on the rooftop in the end ;)
Thank you for writing this- all 60,000+ words of it <33
no subject
Date: 2009-03-17 05:30 pm (UTC)I'm glad you enjoyed it. Thanks
no subject
Date: 2009-03-15 06:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-15 06:20 pm (UTC)You are a wonderful person, have I told you that recently? And I had many things to tell you as I was reading through your notes, but for the life of me I can't remember them now... so just - you are brilliant.
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2009-03-15 06:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-17 05:36 pm (UTC)Thanks so much for reading.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-15 07:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-17 05:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-15 07:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-17 05:37 pm (UTC)Really glad you liked it. Thank you!
no subject
Date: 2009-03-15 08:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-17 05:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-15 08:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-17 05:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-15 08:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-17 05:52 pm (UTC)Thank you! I'm really happy you enjoyed it.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-15 08:54 pm (UTC)I just spent the last 2 hours reading this, with a huge grin plastered over my face.
It is amazing and I really adored every single bit of it.
I am always struggling with my comments, since I am not English, but I do hope I can convey this right now: *GREAT* job! :-)))
Thanks thanks thanks!!!!!
no subject
Date: 2009-03-17 05:53 pm (UTC)Your point was made brilliantly. Thank you so much for the lovely review. I'm glad you enjoyed it so much. :D
no subject
Date: 2009-03-15 09:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-17 05:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-15 10:11 pm (UTC)Was going to clean my room. WAS. Instead I spent aaaaaaages reading your fic beginning to end and now I'm grinning like an idiot because it was so, so much fun. Arthur's character development was a little slow early on, but it picked up nicely after the Sophia fiasco and by the end I just wanted to hug him. Firing all those assistants. :) Also, you did a really nice job on Will and Hunith, Will especially, he was snarky to the right degree and still had his little moments. The best part was Arthur and Merlin hiding out at Hunith's house, I think; it was smooth and homey and definitely changed the direction of the fic. Morgana and Gwen were also great fun, in pretty much the same roles as Arthur and Merlin but in character the whole time. Ending?=perfection.
*contented sigh*
no subject
Date: 2009-03-17 05:55 pm (UTC)Hope your room didn't suffer too much as a result of extended fic reading. I'm glad you enjoyed it though, and especially glad you liked Will (he was my favourite character shh don't tell Arthur)
Thanks again. :)
no subject
Date: 2009-03-15 10:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-17 05:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-15 10:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-17 05:56 pm (UTC)Thanks for commenting. I'm happy you (desperately) liked it. Arthur would approve.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-15 10:58 pm (UTC)prescribe(LOL, what?) subscribe to that diet.Wonderful!
no subject
Date: 2009-03-17 05:59 pm (UTC)The chocolate and caffeine help with everything... except headaches and insomnia.
I'm really glad you liked it. I liked writing it (some of the time, when it wasn't trying to kill me) ^_^. Thank you!
no subject
Date: 2009-03-15 11:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-17 06:00 pm (UTC)I'm really glad you liked it and thank you so much for taking the time to comment.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-15 11:04 pm (UTC)Well done!
no subject
Date: 2009-03-17 06:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-15 11:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-17 06:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-15 11:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-17 06:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-16 01:34 am (UTC)Well done!
And we do have our happily ever after!;)
no subject
Date: 2009-03-17 06:09 pm (UTC)I'm glad you enjoyed it, and thanks for taking the time to comment.
It's hollywood based, how could I give anything other than a happily ever after? ;)
(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2009-03-16 02:52 am (UTC)Brava my dear!
no subject
Date: 2009-03-17 06:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2009-03-16 02:55 am (UTC)but it was worth
no subject
Date: 2009-03-17 06:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-16 03:44 am (UTC)I also have a massive soft spot for Merlin/Will, and I loved what you did with them. LOTS OF LOVE FOR EVERYTHING, BASICALLY.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-17 06:13 pm (UTC)Writing this sort of made me fall in love with Will... I really enjoyed writing his parts.
Thanks again ^_^
no subject
Date: 2009-03-16 04:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-17 06:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-16 05:33 am (UTC)DO NOT REGRET THAT AT ALL.
This fic is made of nothing but utter WIN. So much win. Gah. I wish I could give longer feedback, but I really do have to sleep now.
Job very well done on orchestrating a wonderful piece of fiction! :D
no subject
Date: 2009-03-17 06:16 pm (UTC)Thanks for reading and commenting. Enjoy your sleep! I'm really glad you liked it.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-16 05:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-17 06:15 pm (UTC)