With my usual brilliance, I decided it would be a better idea to sit down and wait for a plot bunny to appear than make and eat dinner. Ah. So, many hours later and much hungrier, I turned out this. It is strange and inspired by my own inability to write action sequences, thus the quick ending to the one contained here. Enjoy!

The Many Faces of Arthur Pendragon

Or, to give it an even poncier name:

The Peculiarities of Expression

By the end of his first training session with Arthur, Merlin had grasped the fact that he was not very good with swords. By the end of the thirty first training session, he understood that he was downright awful with swords. He had also learnt that Arthur, when he won, even against whelps like Merlin, became so infuriatingly cocky it was hard to not strangle him.

Of course, for the majority of those first few weeks Merlin had wanted to strangle the prince. Or curse him with boils. At one point he had come tantalisingly close to doing so, but Gaius had caught him reading up on it and given him a lecture that was so long and went into far too much anatomical detail about boils that Merlin made sure never to think of the unfortunate pustules again.

Still, even as Arthur had improved by degrees (something Merlin, in his less modest moments, liked to claim partial credit for) his manner after winning a fight remained insufferable, and no matter how many times Merlin muttered about seeking attention and needing confirmation, he could not shake the irritation it presented.

Thus, with a deviousness that was really not devious at all, Merlin went about practicing. The sole claim to deviousness was that Merlin did not mention these supposedly secret practices to his employed, which, considering the amount of what Merlin did say that Arthur did pay attention to, was no real accomplishment.

Not that Merlin got far with his practise. In fact, after discovering there was no spell in his book to help the speaker master swordplay, the only move Merlin did manage to grasp was the one he'd seen Arthur perform most, the signature move before each fight began. The best name Merlin could think of for it was 'the twirly wrist sword arch double move' and every time he said it in his mind, he supplied himself with comments about dancing, in Arthur's voice.

Still, he told that part of his mind which sounded like Arthur, he was doing this for the look on its- no, wait, Arthur's face when the next practice session rolled around. So, ignoring his own snide comments, Merlin went about his practice until he could perform the move perfectly, without nearly cutting off his own ear, dropping the sword or breaking half of Gaius' pots.

Practice session thirty-two rolled around after several weeks of rain. The ground underfoot was wet and slippery and, after a sudden rush on the armoury as every knight burst out to train in this first bright day, Merlin was left in a too-tight suit of armour that looked as though it had been made centuries before. Considering where he'd found it, in a dusty old corner next to what looked like the hilt of a sword that had rusted away completely, that wasn't improbable.

For days beforehand, Merlin had been worrying about whether the face, if it came, would be visible for the half a second or so before Arthur got angry, or laughed, or ruined it in some other way. Luckily, the helmet had rather a wide eye slit, and Merlin blinked a few times just to make sure he didn't miss the crucial moment. An inane grin spread across his face as Arthur came towards him with 'the twirly wrist sword arch double move' and he performed it in mirror image.

The look was priceless. It made Arthur, normally devilishly handsome, look for a moment like some ungainly cross between a golden retriever and a Pekinese, as his eyebrows shot up and his eyes crossed. Merlin gazed at the look in a kind of stupor, the tin box he was in echoing with laughter until the face changed into a rather nice smile and Arthur moved forwards impossibly fast.

"You've been practicing, I see." The words rolled around the helmet and Merlin nodded, a little giddy that his plan had succeeded when SLAM! BANG! Arthur, hopelessly overestimating how much his manservant had learnt, brought his sword crashing down once across the top of Merlin's helmet and once across the chest. Glad to have the natural order of things restored, the Prince stood back to survey his handiwork, a smug grin sitting comfortably on his face.

Merlin had just enough time to see the expression change to one of pale terror and horror before something hot and sticky and unbelievable red ran down his face and he fell to the ground. Staring at the sky, Merlin realised several things. The armour had been too old. As he ran his fingers across the breast plate unseeingly, he could feel the wide crack that Arthur's blow had created and, as he realised it, he could feel the pain that the shards of metal embedded in his chest were causing. Fingers met fingers that weren't his, and Merlin realised Arthur was here too, and definitely not being cocky.

Slowly, his helmet was eased away and while Merlin contemplated how cold and bright it was outside the metal death trap Someone else swore, in a voice that sounded remarkably like the one in his head. Which sounded like Arthur. Which meant… For some reason, probably the head wound he'd just received, Merlin's thought process became a little blurred. When he closed his eyes to clear his head, he didn't open them for longer than he had intended. The Someone swore again and told him to "keep his blasted eyes open," which he didn't, at which point the Someone muttered something about not understanding the servant master relationship.

Later, when the time between his eyes opening was growing longer and longer and each time he saw a different flash of the castle until he reached Gaius' bench, Merlin could have sworn that the Someone was being tender with him. As both he and the Someone waited for Gaius to return, though why Merlin couldn't quite fathom, the Someone's hands were constantly checking his head and chest and saying in increasingly high pitched tones "Stay awake, Merlin" and "stop bleeding, Merlin" and "For God's sake, Merlin," the last of which made Merlin wonder what he was meant to be doing for God's sake.

His eyes, opening for he first time in about ten minutes, registered that the ceiling was Gaius' and that the Someone, whoever they were, (and he did know, somewhere, but he just couldn't reach it) was wearing red and rather close. His eyes drifted shut again after a mere second or so, but thankfully, hearing and feeling remained for a moment longer, unless he imagined that last gentle swearword that had sounded so close, and the breath of air on his lips before someone else's – the Someone else's – touched his.

The next day, with a bandage around his ribs and some stitches from Gaius in his head, Merlin turned up at the Prince's chambers just as his headache was beginning to ebb away. As he sauntered, well, limped in to the rooms, Arthur glanced up at him and seemed to do a double take. Had Merlin's ribs been able to take it, he might have laughed, but all he managed was a slight wheeze. For some unearthly reason, Arthur pushed him into a chair and told him to 'take it easy' whilst giving him the once over.

"You look woozy. You lost a lot of blood yesterday."

"Nah, I didn't," Merlin drawled back, before recognising that directly contradicting a Crown Prince was not exactly a wise action, especially when said Crown Prince had put you in the infirmary the day before. Though when you lived there the infirmary wasn't really the infirmary – Merlin's head was still doing small loops, but unlike the day before he could reel his thought process back under control. "I mean, Gaius said head wounds always bleed a lot, and the memory loss is normal." Arthur looked at him for a long time and then nodded to himself, apparently satisfied. "And the one on my ribs barely hurts," he added, lying through his teeth.

The only response he received for this little titbit was a hmmm and Merlin, seizing the opportunity to physically do nothing, tried to reign back his thoughts from the truth of infirmaries and homes and whether it was possible to mix the two, when he got sidetracked into thinking, in a somewhat roundabout way, about his own thinking the day before.

In particular about the Someone.

Merlin's grin had never been larger. "You carried me to Gaius'!" he burst out, the exuberance hurting his ribs a little. Arthur looked up at him sharply, blue eyes searching Merlin's face with something akin to worry, if Pendragons could worry about their servants and whatever idiotic things came out of their mouths. "You mopped my brow!" was the next exclamation, which brought Arthur, now definitely worried and frowning, to his feet. Merlin joined him on his next cry, "You swore when you thought I was dying. Oh Arthur, you do care," he cried in a falsetto, swanning about the room in an uncannily good impersonation of Morgana, utterly failing to notice that Arthur was sweating and breathing rather heavily.

Merlin stopped in front of the window, frowning as he looked out across the courtyard. "There was something else. Give me a second, I'll remember. Err… oh, it was something… Oh. OH. You… you…" Merlin turned around, only to find Arthur right there. Barely an inch away. And he looked – was that fear? It looked like fear.

"What? What did I…?" The question was breathless and sounded like it had to be torn from Arthur's throat, as the Crown Prince looked at Merlin, gaze flicking from eyes to mouth to neck to eyes to hair nervously. Merlin bit his bottom lip, and something other than magic shone in his eyes. Something that looked suspiciously like Mischief, Puck's favourite mistress.

"You know, I can't remember," Merlin replied, his eyes telling a completely different story as he waited for a reaction. He was playing with knives, playing fast and loose with a momentous decision, but somehow he was confident that however long it took he'd get the answer he wanted. It was just a question of sweating it out.

He didn't have long to wait. The words "I can," were followed by a hand on his jaw and a rush of lips and teeth and tongue that would have had Merlin falling out of the window if stronger arms than his had not prevented this. True, in the process of being saved from falling, his ribs did get squeezed rather tightly and he felt his cut reopen with a wince, but when you're kissing a Crown Prince you can ignore trifling details like that.

Really, by far and away, thought Merlin, Arthur's 'kissing Merlin' face was the best he'd even seen on Arthur. Which, all in all, made the whole debacle worth it.

Well, that's over. Phew.

Review? It makes me so terribly happy.