Date: January

POV: Arthur

Stimulus word: Brother

Dedication: everyone who reviewed 'Footsteps' – thank you!! This is for you!

AN: Thank you for coming this far – opening this insanely ambitious dream of mine. I hope to write a drabble for each month so far this year, and one for every day in December. Not sure why. Don't ask. Just…wanted to. So here we are :) Please review! It means so much!

-x-

Arthur has always wanted a brother.

Even as a child, he'd watch the other children in the streets – common, lower class, inferior, as he was always told – play together, he'd known that they had something he didn't.

That had confused him. After all, when one glanced around the Pendragon castle it was hard – nay, impossible – to imagine something that they didn't have, showcased proudly by their conceited king amongst all of the elegant, carefully arranged immodesty. Anyway, Pendragon brains are meant not for thought but for blood and war. What use is a head unless you can hit something with it?

As he got older – although not, for the most part, wiser – Arthur realised what he had missed. Something so small, so insignificant and easy to overlook that it came even to him as a surprise that he had finally figured it out; then again, it was something so desirable, so… important, that it also came as a surprise that he hadn't understood earlier on.

Companionship.

So simple. So easy.

So… unachievable.

For the prince – soon to be king – this target seemed nigh on impossible. He couldn't recall a time in his life when it had been a problem (always overlooking it as a child, too immersed in solitude to care, but too busy and wary as a man to remember this hidden prize) – so why on earth should it be one now?

The answer was clear to him; Merlin.

So kind, so friendly and so… there, the young manservant had unknowingly provided the prince with an apt opportunity to seize what he had never had before.

Even if he did call me a prat.

Arthur glanced out of the slim, secretive arrow slit to his right, embedded in the thick castle walls, and smiled. There, on the street below, was Merlin; struggling beneath the weight of his saddle, armour and one pail of water. In a moment of rare compassion, Arthur ran to join him.

I'll be here for you, brother.