She pulled a tiny banana out of her purse.

Really, it was the tiniest banana he'd ever seen. It was probably one of those extremely overpriced organic bananas that he saw people fawning over as he passed by on his way over to where the regularly priced ordinary bananas were being shunned. If Arthur hadn't been focused on the woman's searching hand he would have thought she'd pulled out a chubby, yellow highlighter.

He pushed himself away from the bar until his back was once more resting against the backrest of the barstool. His back rubbed a little against a wooden ring in the backrest as he laughed. From beside him, Arthur heard Merlin echo the laugh but when Arthur glanced over at him he'd already lost him. He'd lost Merlin to whatever thought was building inside him, to that place he always managed to wander away to. It wasn't a physical distance but it may as well have been. Arthur scrambled to drop words in Merlin's path before Merlin drifted too deep and out of his reach.

"Well I still think that you should be the one to buy my coffee next week," he said and took a sip of his coffee to add some nonchalance to that blurted statement. He watched Merlin covertly over the rim of his mug. He watched the words draw Merlin back to the coffeehouse. Back to where he was sitting beside Arthur.

He watched the amusement get chased over Merlin's face by sarcasm. Sarcasm won and Merlin let out a snort.

"Oh yeah? How do you figure?" Merlin asked as he looked over at Arthur with slightly raised eyebrows.

Well a hastily constructed, blurted statement deserved a hastily constructed, blurted comeback.

"Well, the banana looked more like a tube of lipstick than a wallet." What Arthur didn't add was that it really had looked like anything but a banana.

Arthur wasn't expecting Merlin to lean his head closer to him. It made his thoughts fluttery and his breath foolishly weak. His own reaction made Arthur want to hit his head repeatedly against the wall because after more than a decade of friendship Arthur figured he would have outgrown all this irrationality. Or at least become habituated to them to the point where he no longer noticed them. He swallowed back the movie scene his stupid mind was showing in his head, of what would happen if Merlin decided to lean in a little closer and if Arthur reciprocated the motion.

Merlin looked at him seriously and for one horrifying moment Arthur thought that maybe Merlin had peered into his eyes hard enough to see scenes from the movie. Arthur picked up his mug and brought it to his mouth in an effort to hide his face.

"Arthur," Merlin said without looking away from him, "they make banana shaped phones, who's to say that someone out there hasn't made a banana shaped wallet yet?"

Arthur blinked once and felt relieved and sad at the same time.

He blinked twice and his mind caught up with what Merlin had just said and he couldn't help the laugh that bubbled out of him. His laugh hit the hot coffee in his mug and the steam shot up and moistened his face. His back dug into that uncomfortable part in the chair but he didn't mind. The space between them was easy, almost twelve years of easy, and the feeling flowed between them like honey on a hot day.

Arthur glanced up and he saw Merlin looking at him with softened eyes. His heart spasmed with traitorous hope.

But then Merlin looked away.

Sometimes Arthur wondered if there was an equal sign in the equation of their friendship, their relationship, whatever the hell this was, or if it was more of a double-tilde. Arthur felt like sometimes there was more feeling on his side but it was just so damn hard to tell with Merlin living inside his head. Sometimes Arthur wanted to step inside Merlin's mind and observe how everything spun and all the thoughts that were written in the folds and grooves of his brain – things he didn't let himself say. He wanted to follow connections and see where they led, but most of all, he wanted to see if maybe any of them led to him.

That thought alone scared him.

It scared him because what if none of the sparks of thought led to him? What if his face was just something that flickered for a ghost of a second before it vanished? What if he chased spark after spark, leapt over neuron after neuron, only to find himself nowhere? And if he got lost in the canyons and webs of thought that showed only the truth – the unavoidable, heart-squeezing truth – would he be able to see it every day and not go mad?

No, Arthur decided, he didn't want to peek inside Merlin's head because the truth bore too much weight. It had the potential to crush him and then Merlin wouldn't be his rock, Merlin would just be yet another rock that came and knocked him down.

Life didn't guarantee a happy ending – he knew that and he thought Merlin might too – and yet it happened sometimes, didn't it? Why couldn't it be them?

There were some days where Arthur just couldn't control the way his mind picked at the little area of his brain that he closed off. An area that was filled with an annoying amount of Merlin. He peered over at Merlin from the corner of his eye and he saw the tired slump of Merlin's shoulders, the iron weight of his eyelids and the slightly darker shadows under his eyes. He wanted to brush his fingers against the colour to see if he could wipe it away. Merlin worked so hard and he studied an insane amount to become a good doctor. Arthur was enormously proud of him but sometimes he worried about just how hard Merlin pushed himself. Merlin barely had a day off but when he did Arthur made it his mission to drag Merlin out with the crew so that they wouldn't forget each other's faces.

Sometimes in the late hours of the day – on the odd day that both of them weren't working and neither of them had the energy to go out – they sat in Merlin's kitchen. The sun would be going down and the golden rays would dance along the soft yellow walls; the deep reds and fiery oranges of the sunset would swirl around the kitchen and hug them both. They were beautiful colours; colours that tugged at that ball of longing at the corner of your heart and made you want to say things that you know you shouldn't.

When they sat there – Merlin reading up on new studies in medical journals and Arthur catching up on paperwork – Arthur wondered, from the way Merlin would look up for a moment and his eyes would soften, if he felt it too; but, then he'd look back down at the article in his hands and Arthur would be left all alone with the colours.

Sometimes when he sat there he'd look over the top of his paperwork and study Merlin. Merlin was always the first with a joke and his eyes crinkled so much when he laughed that they were like little upside-down U-shaped slits. No matter how many hours he worked, how many back to back shift he took to cover for sick friends, he always claimed to have energy left over.

And yet Arthur wasn't convinced.

Merlin's smile was just an inch too wide, his laugh a heartbeat too long. Sometimes when he'd turn away, or all the others were laughing over whatever shenanigan Gwaine managed to find himself in, Merlin's smile would slip. It came and went so fast that most times Arthur wondered if he'd imagined the entire thing.

The others – Gwen, Gwaine, Leon and the lot – didn't seem to notice, but then again they probably didn't watch Merlin as much as he did. It was bordering on hilarious just how many times his eyes traced a path to Merlin – a path well-defined, with trampled grass and a clear border. Arthur wondered if Merlin noticed but he knew he was just deluding himself with that line of thinking.

Of course he noticed.

Merlin never once brought it up; whenever he caught him looking he only smiled at Arthur and looked away.

He always looked away.

There were times when Arthur was tempted to just tell Merlin everything just to see how he would react. He had the whole thing planned out in his head and he replayed it so often that he'd almost convinced himself it'd happened.

Almost.

"Do you have to go into the office today?" Merlin, the real Merlin and not the one that ran wild in Arthur's brain, was looking at him questioningly.

Arthur thought about it for a second. "I don't think I do. Maybe for a couple hours in the morning just to make sure that there aren't any new documents on my desk, but other than that, not really." Arthur quirked a brow. "Why?" He took a sip of the coffee that was slowly starting to lose its heat.

Merlin shrugged. "I wanted to maybe catch that new movie that came out a couple weeks ago. Want to come with?"

Arthur tried to think of which movie Merlin could be referring to. "Is it the comedy about the flying deodorant or the documentary about ostriches?"

"I was thinking of the rom-com about the woman who got hypnotised and fell in love with her garden gnome."

"Is that the one with Tom Cruise?" Arthur asked.

Merlin smiled. "No, I think you're thinking of Mission Definitely Possible where Tom gets attacked by an army of garden gnomes."

"Oh, right right. I know the one you're talking about," Arthur said. "Do you want to catch an afternoon showing?"

"Sounds good," Merlin said and Arthur knew he was trying not to laugh. This was their thing. They would bring each other to the worst movies made, movies that were so bad that you really had to wonder at who was stupid enough to cough up the money to produce them. They'd watch them and try not to get kicked out of the theatre for laughing too hard. They'd try to one-up the other by finding a movie that was even worse than the last. It was Merlin's turn this time.

"I'll check the show times," Merlin said, "and I'll text you what time I'll come to pick you up."

Arthur nodded and if his mind was going to pretend that this was a date then he was more deluded and stupid than he'd originally thought.

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