.
Chapter Seven
.
The second time it happens is an accident, and a year later, and Merlin probably hasn't slept more than an hour in over a week.
At some point his body decides to take over for the good of all and just shut down. One second he's squinting, trying to concentrate long enough to magic up a fire, thinking in circles about Arthur and the curse like he always is now, and the next he's nowhere.
Everything is dark.
For a second Merlin is righteously pissed off, wondering if the Sidhe, in all of their infinite capacity for being complete asshats, have decided to take his eyesight as punishment for trying—and failing—to break the bargain. But no, he realizes, looking down at his hands; he can still see. There's just nothing to see.
He thinks, This is very strange. And then, But weirdly familiar.
A curious calm has spread through him. Since he has nothing better to do, he decides to wander. There isn't much to see. He can't even tell that he's moving, and normally the thought would make him more than a little bit panicky (he's had this thing about claustrophobic spaces since Morgana trapped him in that fucking cave), but nothing can pierce the eerie calm.
He finds the beach first, soft sand under his shoes slowly replacing the darkness. Blue sky and sea streaking through the black until he can't remember a time when he wasn't standing in this calm place, the taste of salt on his tongue.
And then he sees the man. Well, he sees the color before the man—a glint of gold, and then of silver, solidifying into a man's shape the closer he gets. Which, again, he really ought to be freaking out at this point, shouldn't he? With Merlin's track record it's probably a terrifying shape-shifting creature just waiting to devour his soul or something along those lines.
But it's not, he realizes as he gets closer, his heart jumping painfully in his chest. It's someone familiar.
"Arthur?"
He can barely get the word out, but the gold head turns in surprise and if this is a shape-shifting monster, Merlin thinks he'd call his soul an even trade anyway.
"Merlin?" Arthur says in disbelief. "How did you get here again?"
"Again?" Merlin frowns. Something about this does seem familiar. "I've had this dream before, haven't I? Only this feels very…real. Which is strange."
Arthur looks around the empty space thoughtfully. "Have to agree with you there."
He says something else too, something about empty heads and insides reflecting outsides, all of it undoubtedly obnoxious, but Merlin's stopped listening. He's been distracted by the revelation that he's not seen Arthur as Arthur in what feels like ages; even in the scattered nightmares that descend whenever he gets more than twenty minutes of sleep, Arthur has been blurry, indistinct. It's maddening. Looking at him now, Merlin realizes just how fallible human memory is.
All those years spent serving under Arthur and he still couldn't recreate him perfectly, couldn't hold onto tiny details that keep slipping from his grasp no matter how hard he tries to hold on.
Yet this Arthur is immaculate in his imperfection, and that's what convinces him.
"This is real," Merlin says.
Arthur stares at him in that way that means Merlin is a special sort of idiot. (He has many nonverbal ways of communicating that opinion; Merlin could practically catalogue them at this point.) "Yes, I thought we'd already established that. I did try to tell you last time."
Last time, last time, when his head had been spinning too fast to realize what was actually going on. "No, this is—" His throat feels clogged and his eyes are burning. "This is real. You're here. You're you."
It must show on his face how ragged, how wrung-out he feels, because Arthur doesn't tease. His face softens. "I'm here, Merlin."
There's a tense moment before Merlin unfreezes himself and walks forward, some insistent part of his brain telling him that if he doesn't have his king is his arms in the next ten seconds he will actually fly apart—
—and suddenly he finds himself looking at the endless darkness again.
Stricken, he whirls around and sees Arthur looking at him with a similarly stunned expression.
"Did you just…" Arthur swallows. "Did you just walk through me?"
Merlin imagines he can hear the thud as his heart hits the bottom of his shoes.
"Oh," he says, only his voice sounds odd; distant, with a quality to it that suggests he's trying to speak with a mouthful of marbles. "So we can't…" Can't what? Can't—?
He opens his eyes slowly; the world is white and he's shaking hard enough that he can hear his teeth clacking together. And there's a noise—
The raven is making startled squawking noises, flapping its feathers nervously, and it's that more than anything that forces Merlin out of his bleary inertia and wakes him up.
"Forbearnan," he croaks, facing his palm toward the bundle of sticks he'd pushed together before falling asleep like an imbecile; they light up obligingly, the resulting rush of warmth enough to make him shudder.
He has the presence of mind at least to notice that it's unseasonably early for snow, certainly too early for this bitter cold. But then, a lot of strange things have been happening lately. Maybe the weather has decided to empathize with them.
Or maybe that's a spectacularly arrogant way of looking at it.
The raven edges closer to him. Merlin picks the bird up, ignoring its halfhearted quorks of protest, and huddles it to his chest, trying to keep the wind off it as best he can.
"What was that?" he murmurs under his breath.
He's not expecting an answer, but the raven looks up at him sharply, understanding in those familiar blue eyes, and Merlin's breath catches in his throat.
He's still shaking, and he doesn't think he can blame all of it on the cold.
"Are you—are you in there? Can you understand me?"
The raven looks at him for a few more seconds before making another throaty noise and turning its face back to the flames. Merlin stares down at its feathery black head and wonders, and wonders.
After that he makes a point of getting some sleep, hoping to somehow wander back into that—whatever the hell it was, but it doesn't work. Then the nightmares come back and keep him awake, and perpetually irritable besides, so he goes back to not sleeping at all. At least when he's exhausted he doesn't have the energy to be angry.
But the raven somehow cottons on because it really hounds him, squawking angrily whenever Merlin goes more than two days without rest. It pecks his fingers hard enough to draw blood, so Merlin finally relents and sleeps before his own body betrays him again.
He ends up sleeping every other night, which is enough both to placate the raven and to keep him so tired he blacks out more than falls asleep, which conveniently means fewer nightmares. Everybody wins.
It's some time before he connects the dots, a half-forgotten lecture from Gaius rising back to the surface. An explanation on the different "realms" within the world; it had all gotten painfully theoretical very fast. Merlin mostly remembers his eyes glazing over, but one part had wedged in his mind.
"In dreams, some believe the boundaries between the physical and spiritual worlds can become blurred," Gaius had said. "A few magic users have attempted to replicate this through meditation. They believe they can enter the realm of the spirit by drawing on the natural magic of the earth to ease their way."
He'd held up a warning finger. "But success is rare, and even then it is a dangerous thing to wander between realms. It drains the user of magic, and when it has exhausted that it then begins to sap their very life." A shake of the head. "An exercise better left to theory, in my opinion."
So it's with silent apologies to his mentor that Merlin gives the meditation thing a go. It's not something that can be mastered overnight, Gaius had assured him, but that's fine. Merlin, it seems, has nothing but time.
.
The next day kicks off the mother of all miserable heat waves, which, if the weather app is to be believed, is going to last for the foreseeable future. Which—as far as Mordred's concerned—basically means they're all going to die.
He's taken to lying spread-eagled on the hardwood floor of the bookshop because at least it's sort of cool down there. It's also meant he can now add 'capable of shelving books in the proper order whilst looking at them upside-down' to his list of useless skills. It says something about the general populace and their reaction to the uncharacteristic (and unrelenting) heat that not a single customer comments on Mordred's apparent insanity; the shop's air conditioning is just as ancient as its heating, so they're all pretty much preoccupied with getting their books and getting the fuck out as quickly as possible.
Merlin, the poor bastard, is still stuck being professional. Still stuck smiling through gritted teeth and wearing jeans and—well, wearing a shirt, any shirt, because Mordred's also started forgoing his when he's working in the back. He isn't sure what Merlin's paying him but he's positive it's not enough to justify that kind of torture.
He doesn't see Arthur much, but that's par for the course, since Arthur in his human form is apparently a recluse when he's not working on midnight building projects and keeping Mordred awake, thanks very little.
And so it goes.
About four days in Mordred finally decides he's actually, physically going to go mad if he doesn't have something other than Dewey to keep his mind off the fact that he's slowly melting. It's a slow day, they haven't had a customer in hours, and Merlin's been shuffling the same three sheets of paper for the last forty minutes. He's got a glazed look in his eye; Mordred wonders detachedly if he's found a way of falling asleep standing up.
"Merlin," he blurts.
Merlin doesn't twitch, but he does make a sort of grunting noise that Mordred supposes means he's paying attention. Arthur, who's been perched next to him all day in what Mordred can only assume is a show of solidarity (either that or birds are less sensitive to heat than their suffering human counterparts), doesn't even croak.
"Teach me how to make it snow," Mordred says. There's a pleading note in his voice that would be embarrassing if it was anywhere less than a thousand fucking degrees.
That seems to wake Merlin up, at least. "You want me to what now?"
"Snow," he repeats. "Ice. Popsicles, I really don't care at this point. I'd sleep on your AC generator if you had one."
Merlin glares at the accusatory tone but doesn't even try to tell Mordred off for it, which Mordred figures means he's right. "It's not simple like it is in Harry Potter," he grumbles. "Weather magic is a complicated mess. I'm not going to have you calling lightning down on all our heads because you don't know what you're doing."
Mordred perks up slightly, lifting his head up off the floor. "Do you know how to do that? Call down lightning, I mean?"
The raven opens one very blue eye to peer at Merlin, who suddenly looks a bit embarrassed. "I—well—that's got nothing to do with anything," he hedges. Mordred's jaw might drop a little.
"Seriously? And you're lecturing me about being careful?"
"I'm older than you are," Merlin replies archly. "Much older. When you're my age, then we can talk."
Don't think I'm likely to still be around in a couple thousand years. He just barely stops himself from saying it—they haven't actually talked about that night when Mordred vomited both his problems and the contents of his stomach everywhere, and if he were a little less ignorant he might think Merlin's forgotten that he can apparently wander into other people's dreams.
But he's not ignorant, so he still notices when Merlin's eyes track him a little too long, like he's afraid of what Mordred will do if left to his own devices. Mordred can't tell if he should be flattered or hurt by it. After all, Merlin doesn't know that Mordred once tried to levitate a piece of bread to the toaster and ended up making the toaster explode instead. He's pretty sure he's the opposite of menacing.
But whatever. If he can preserve some measure of domestic peace by pretending he doesn't know Merlin and Arthur are both old as balls, Mordred's more than willing to play along.
"You could teach me something, then," he says. "Instead of trying to glare holes in those papers for another hour."
Merlin sighs—he swears Merlin sighs about ten times more whenever Mordred is in the vicinity, just an estimate—and, to his surprise, leaves the desk to plop down on the floor beside Mordred's head.
He blinks. "It's much nicer down here."
"Heat rises," Mordred drones.
"On that note—come on, sit up—you can't do lightning, or rather you really, really shouldn't do lightning, but I can teach you a bit about fire."
Mordred pauses to cast a dubious look around the very wooden bookshop with its large quantities of flammable books.
Merlin cringes. "It'll be fine. Really. Probably." He clears his throat. "So, the first thing we have to address is how much you already know about controlling your magic."
"Which is nothing," Mordred supplies.
"It can't be nothing nothing or you probably would've killed someone by now," Merlin says. Mordred tries not to flinch. "So at the very least you've got some awareness that there's magic in you, and you have some level of control over it."
"If you say so," he mumbles.
"It's all about focus," Merlin continues, easy the way he only seems to be when he's trying to explain magic.
Only when he forgets who it is he's talking to, Mordred thinks grimly, but he tries to ignore it and pay attention. Focus, and all.
"It's like…oh, like how you know you're hungry or tired, and even if you're not hungry right now, you know you're going to be later? Like it's this completely natural thing that's dormant inside of you. And sometimes, before you can control it, it just rears up when you're not expecting it to. People get into trouble that way."
The raven makes a coughing noise Mordred's gotten pretty sure is his way of laughing. His suspicion is confirmed when Merlin turns and gives the bird a halfhearted look of annoyance.
"Yes, thank you, I know I used to be one of those people."
"Used to be?" Mordred blurts, remembering waking up on a hard floor.
Merlin turns his glare briefly on Mordred before returning it to a still-snickering Arthur.
"Satisfied?" he demands. "He's lost all respect for me already."
It's strange, Mordred thinks, this easy sort of rapport they seem to have even when one of them has feathers and can't speak, at least not using words. They've clearly figured out other ways of making their feelings known. Mordred wonders just how long that must have taken.
"Anyway," Merlin is saying. "That was basically a really long-winded way of saying you have to kind of poke your magic first—wake it up—before you can use it."
Mordred waits for him to clarify, but Merlin just sits there like he's expecting Mordred to do something.
"You do realize that when I say I don't know anything about controlling my magic, I mean I don't know anything about controlling my magic?"
"Close your eyes," Merlin says with uncharacteristic patience. "Feel around. You'll know it once you find it."
Mordred really, really doubts that, but he obeys. Stares at the backs of his eyelids and tries to dig around inside of himself or whatever it is Merlin expects him to do.
Seconds tick by. He's starting to wonder if he could get away with napping under the guise of "training" when he—finds something, there's no other word for it. It shifts ever so slightly underneath his skin and his eyes open. He feels like he's just put his tongue on a battery.
Merlin looks satisfied. "Found it?"
"Think so, yeah." Mordred makes an effort to sound casual, like this is something he does every day rather than a life-altering discovery. He's woken it up, his mind keeps repeating with jittery excitement; he's forced it to do something he wants, even if that something is childishly simple, and that means he can force it to do other things.
Like stay hidden.
"Right, so, spells."
Mordred blinks out of his reverie. "Spells? I thought you said this wasn't Harry Potter."
Merlin ignores him. "Some of us can use our magic without spells, but when you're a beginner that's really not wise. Spells…sort of direct the magic. Keep it on track and more or less contained. Some magic users can't do nonverbal spells at all.
"They can get complicated, especially since the language has changed so much, and good luck finding a book anywhere that agrees on pronunciation and diction and what-have-you. The fire spell is pretty basic, though. It's forbearnan."
"Forbearnan," Mordred repeats, cautious.
The corner of Merlin's mouth twists up. "Relax, just saying the word isn't going to blow us to bits. Especially not the way you're saying it. It's for-bear-nan, not for-bear-nan."
A crack about the proper pronunciation of Wingardium Leviosa is on the tip of Mordred's tongue, but he bites it back—if he makes one more Harry Potter reference Merlin might lose it and blow him up. So he repeats the odd word a few more times until Merlin nods.
"Good enough. That's the easy part done. Now you need to give your magic something to do—visualize what you want, and I mean visualize hard. You need a clear picture or it isn't going to work." Merlin closes his eyes as if to demonstrate. "I'm thinking a small flame is a good idea, so…"
His eyes open suddenly, and Mordred gets a heart-stopping glimpse of them going bright gold as Merlin murmurs, "Forbearnan."
A tiny flame materializes in the palm of his hand.
Mordred's pretty sure his own eyes are about to fall out of his head.
"Doesn't it burn?" he whispers. He's not sure why he's whispering.
Merlin shakes his head. "It's hovering a little over my skin, see? You should probably specify that when you're visualizing, too; self-preservation instinct usually beats out whatever desire your magic has to run amok, but it never hurts to be careful."
He closes his palm and when he opens it again, the flame has disappeared. Mordred stares at his empty hand like an idiot.
If I've gone crazy, he muses, this is probably the coolest delusion I could've had.
"Your turn," Merlin prompts.
Mordred swallows. "Oh. Right."
He closes his eyes and tries to visualize what he's trying to do. It's harder than he suspects it ought to be, especially with 'you're sitting on the floor of a public building trying to conjure up fire, you've well and truly lost it' running on a loop in his head.
Don't listen to it. Focus on the flame. Focus on the tiny, harmless little flame.
"That's it," he hears Merlin say as if from far away. "Just concentrate."
Concentrate, yeah. Keep it under control. You won't hurt anyone this time.
He flinches away from the thought, his eyes opening unbidden—figuring it's now or never, he shouts the spell. Even as he does it he's not sure why he's shouting.
A bonfire engulfs his hand.
Even as he's yelling, panicking, waving his arm around in a wild attempt to put it out, Mordred registers two things: one, the flame is easily ten times the size of what Merlin just showed him; and two, it doesn't feel like it's burning him at all.
"Mordred! Mordred, calm down."
You try calming down when half your arm's on fire, you arse, Mordred thinks, but even as he thinks it, the fire slowly dies away.
There's a minute of absolute silence.
Then Mordred finds the words to croak, "Are my eyebrows still on?"
Merlin makes a sound like he's choking. Mordred looks up in alarm, only to see that he's laughing—practically crying with laughter, the absolute bastard.
"I wasn't being funny," he protests, but that only makes Merlin laugh harder. He's going to tip over sideways and hit his head on the floor and Mordred isn't going to feel one iota of sympathy for him. "You're a terrible person."
From his perch, Arthur makes a noise that sounds an awful lot like agreement.
Merlin finally takes several deep breaths and regains control over himself, even if he keeps muttering "Oh my god. Oh my god," under his breath and sounding no less amused.
"You are the worst magical mentor ever," Mordred grumbles.
Merlin just smirks. "Again. Maybe think less volume this time."
Mordred privately thinks that if he does end up setting this place on fire, Merlin will have earned the resulting loss of his eyebrows entirely.
.
The heat wave continues. Merlin, out of some heretofore-unknown sadistic streak, keeps Mordred working on the fire spell even though it still feels upward of a million freaking degrees without his help. At least it's more distracting than trying to remember how the Dewey system works when his brain feels like it's on fire.
Arthur continues to poke his head in when the sun goes down, usually just to say hello before he goes off and does…whatever Arthur does, Mordred kind of feels bad that he doesn't know what the person sheltering him does in his free time. He's pretty sure he likes to run. Fixes things sometimes, or builds them; Mordred occasionally hears the sound of a power drill being activated and imagines Arthur wielding it as cheerfully as any sword.
Well, it's not much of a stretch to imagine Arthur being a sword kind of person, especially considering how old he is.
It's odd, that. Mordred notices it only because he knows to look for it now; he doesn't think he'd ever have noticed as a disinterested bystander. But it's there—those moments when he remembers he's staying with people who are literally ancient.
"We'll try for a sphere today, I think," Merlin tells him, after he's shut the blinds and put up a sign on the door that proclaims his lunch break. "Now that you've got the basics down. Obviously you have the power to work the spell, so the issue now is control. Try condensing the fire into a shape, this time."
Mordred's look must betray his deep skepticism, because Merlin rolls his eyes.
"You don't have to do it right off. Just start the same as always, I'll talk you through it."
It's easier every day to call his magic up from wherever it rests when Mordred isn't using it, easier to nudge and prod until it barely feels like he's exerting an effort. He's got flames licking up his arm in moments—only up to his wrist, this time; he is starting to gain some control. Along with the ability to not freak the fuck out when he's for all intents and purposes on fire.
Filed under: Unexpected benefits of apprenticing oneself to a sorcerer.
"Good," Merlin is saying. "Now hold it for a minute; I want to make sure you have control before we try this."
"So when do we get to lightning?" Mordred asks, trying to keep his mind off the effort of holding the flames in place a mere inch from his skin.
Merlin doesn't answer, which is odd, because normally this is where he says something to the effect of "that'd be never, Mordred, now focus" because he is the master of killing Mordred's joy.
This time, though, nothing. Mordred spares him a sideways glance.
Merlin's eyes are catching the firelight; he seems almost entranced by it. "It's sort of funny, when you think about it," he murmurs, only Mordred doesn't feel like he's being spoken to at all. "I spent all that time hiding, terrified that someone would find out what I could do and kill me for it. How many people were killed because they were stupid, or they got unlucky? Just for being what they were?"
He shakes his head, mouth curving up in a wry smile. "And now here we are. I could stand in the middle of Trafalger Square and summon a bonfire in full view of the world, and no one would blink. They'd all assume I was faking it somehow."
"Seems safer now," Mordred points out carefully. "I mean, would you want to go back?"
Merlin's eyes refocus, like he's remembered Mordred is there.
"Sometimes," he says quietly. "Things were a lot more dangerous, yeah, but sometimes I think they were…simpler."
There's something in his expression that is abruptly, painfully old. Mordred can nearly see the wrinkles scored into his face by centuries of loving and losing and watching. Hell, he even sounds like an old man, remembering his Golden Years or some shit like that.
'Course, Mordred isn't one to judge. After all, he remembers with a twinge, even if magic was a burning offense way back when, it was also the last time Merlin and Arthur were both human.
He's seen that aged look on Arthur's face too, is the thing, and Mordred realizes suddenly that it's exhaustion—sheer, unimaginable exhaustion, piled on over years and years with no relief in sight.
He can't begin to comprehend how they haven't both gone mad by now.
The thought comes unbidden: There's got to be some way of fixing it, hasn't there?
Merlin clears his throat pointedly. Mordred glances down to find the fire has climbed all the way up to his elbow. With a little yelp, he forces it back down. Merlin snorts, and when he speaks again it's in a perfectly normal tone.
"And that," he says, "is why you can't do lightning. You'd incinerate us all."
"Oh, because you're so responsible," Mordred grouses. "I still don't get why we're messing about with fire in a building full of books. Doesn't anything about that maybe read 'trouble' to you?"
"I'm counting on your self-preservation instincts," Merlin replies. "If you so much as singed one of my books—"
"They'd never find all my pieces?" Mordred guesses, unimpressed. "God, you know how dramatic you are, right?"
Merlin grins. "Well, I was going to say there wouldn't be any pieces left to find, but I guess that works."
"Ha, ha," Mordred deadpans, squinting at the flame until it's back down to an acceptable distance from his face. "What now?"
"Try to condense it." Then, when Mordred makes a noise to convey how spectacularly unhelpful that advice is, "Press it down. Mold it into something specific."
It sounds simple enough, Mordred admits, but it's bloody hard. Like trying to hold water in your hands; there's always something slipping through, out of your control. He's sweating in under a minute, and it's not just the heat doing it.
He thinks he's starting to get it though, the flames reluctantly folding over one another and Merlin's voice murmuring something vaguely encouraging, which is a minor miracle in and of itself so he must be doing a decent job—
Which is of course when the cawing starts, loud and out of nowhere and Mordred jumps.
And then it's like that first time again, the flames leaping gleefully from every single constriction he's tried to put them under and Mordred doesn't even have time to freak out over that before he notices the black shape hurtling directly toward the flames.
He has no time time to think, doesn't know if he yells or if Merlin does or if either of them actually move, but something in his mind clicks and Mordred clenches his fist.
The flames disappear like they've had a bucket of water dumped on them, and the raven flies by unharmed as the sound of a tinkling bell hits Mordred's ears.
"Excuse me," someone is saying from the open shop door. "Are you—"
"We're closed," Merlin says, but he doesn't look like he's even hearing himself, still looking from Arthur to Mordred and back like his brain is furiously working to understand what just happened.
The man sounds irritated now. "But your sign says—"
Merlin's across the room in a flash, eyes blazing.
"We. Are. Closed," he says through gritted teeth. "Pretty sure that's what the sign says, doesn't it?"
He shuts the door without waiting for an answer, locking it this time. Mordred sits on the ground with his mouth hanging open and watches Merlin stare a hole in the wall, a hand going to his face and then dropping again.
"I think we're done for the day," he says. "I think…"
His voice trails off. Mordred swallows and forces his brain to make actual words.
"Want me to lock up?"
Merlin turns to look at him. "That—that'd be great, yeah."
He heads for the stairs, absently holding out an arm for the raven to fly over and perch on. Mordred thinks of something.
"Thank him for me, will you?"
Merlin glances back over his shoulder. "For what? For being an idiot?"
Mordred shrugs. "It's just—if he hadn't done that, we'd've been caught."
Merlin exhales shakily. "I know. I'll…I'll tell him."
"Thanks."
Mordred pulls himself up off the floor, half-convinced the fire's going to leap out of his skin again now that he's given it a taste of freedom, but it doesn't. He supposes that's something.
"Mordred."
He turns. "Yeah?"
Merlin seems to be struggling with something, but at last he manages, "You did well." And then retreats before Mordred has time to retrieve his jaw from the floor.
.
Merlin kicks off his shoes and collapses onto the sofa in silence. The raven perches on the cushion behind him, patient. Or maybe just waiting for the storm to break.
The thing is, Merlin hasn't got one. That jolt of adrenaline downstairs has left him drained, never mind confused, leaving him with zero energy to shout Arthur down for being reckless.
"What the hell is wrong with you?" he asks wearily. "Are you trying to give me a heart attack, is that it?"
The raven nips at his fingers in lieu of an answer. Merlin sighs and strokes the sleek feathers.
"You're not actually an idiot, Arthur. I know you're trying to make a point here."
A disinterested quork is his only response.
"Is it that he stopped?" Merlin asks. "Is that it? He's startled, sees this great black thing flying at his face and his first response is to just…"
Mordred's face flickers in his mind, terrified but for one second utterly resolute. He's been shit at the control thing up to now, not that Merlin's one to talk, and yet he'd managed to cut off the flames in the blink of an eye. It had looked instinctive, too—it had to be; there'd been no time to think about it, just one extended moment of heart-stopping fear. Merlin knows. He's pretty sure they both had the same look on their face.
One single second of being on the same page.
Improbable, but apparently not impossible.
"So maybe he's not necessarily plotting to kill us both in our sleep," Merlin admits. The words are more or less dragged out of him against his will, but he'll lose the right to berate Arthur for being hard-headed if he gets just as bad. "Maybe."
Here's where it gets tricky. Merlin feels like he's trying to balance on a tightrope that won't bloody stop moving.
"I'll try to be nicer to him, alright? And maybe you could stand to write me a damn note instead of throwing yourself at an inferno next time."
The raven tilts its head. Merlin imagines he can hear Arthur's voice in the gesture: Of course I could have dodged the flames at the last possible second, Merlin, your lack of faith really is insulting.
"You're a pain in my arse," Merlin says with feeling. He's starting to feel like he's sinking into the cushions, a long day catching up with his body. "An absolutely terrific pain."
As his eyes slide shut, he can sense a small warmth burrowing in next to his head, and he grins.
"You smell terrible," he remarks, and then yelps when a sharp little beak pecks at his ear.
.
Doing magic for extended periods of time, Mordred's discovered, is really tiring. It's like he's working muscles he didn't know he had. And if magic is a muscle, then Mordred is woefully out of shape. Typical.
The one upside to this is that when he curls up in his musty armchair at night, he tends to fall asleep so fast it's like someone took a mallet to his head. Apparently sufficient exhaustion is enough to counter a hideously uncomfortable bed.
So Mordred's more than a little irritated when he tries to sleep that night and can't.
It's all Merlin's fault, he thinks mulishly, turning over for the fifth time in as many minutes. Merlin and that depressed little cloud over his head and his old man eyes. The look on his face when the raven went flying toward the fire and Mordred's stomach just dropped.
He doesn't think he'd understood up until that point. Hell, he still doesn't have actual confirmation that Merlin and Arthur are a Thing. But that expression had said a lot; Mordred might not've realized it until he'd managed to get his own heart rate down to something resembling normal, but afterward…well. He's not intimately familiar with the look of a man tethered to sanity by exactly one thread, but Mordred's pretty sure he saw it this afternoon.
Arthur is apparently that thread, and if Mordred looks at all of Merlin's actions through that lens then a whole lot of things start to make more sense.
And it's not just Merlin, either, even if Arthur's less blatant about it. Mordred sees the same invisible lines around Arthur's face that he does around Merlin's. They put up a decent front but even Mordred can tell that they're worn down. Tired.
Groaning, Mordred gives up and sits up, reaches for his phone. If he's going to make a go at this whole insomnia thing, he might as well get some homework out of the way.
His frustration grows as he thumbs through his texts, looking for the last assignment he'd been sent. He doesn't know what to do. There's nothing to do—he's somehow ended up trapped in the orbit of two very strange people and all that's left for him is to ride it out and hope he doesn't get flung out into space. That's all. He can't care beyond that.
You did well.
Mordred shakes his head and jabs at his phone with more force than the situation requires. The astronomy article they're meant to read begins to load onscreen.
Honestly, he knows he's just being an idiot. So what if Merlin's crumbs of encouragement make it seem like he's doing something right for a change? So what if Arthur's sideways smiles make Mordred feel like he's a part of something?
What's it mean when Mordred's starting to think his own tethers to sanity are magic lessons and hours spent shelving old books?
"Shit," he mutters out loud. That about seems to sum this situation up.
He's sick of constantly being in orbit, is the thing. Orbiting sucks. Orbiting is being swung around in circles over and over until he doesn't know which way is up; it's being trapped in the same patterns, the same way of thinking. It's being trapped, period. And Mordred's been feeling trapped for a long time—stuck in that fucking unhelpful cycle of fear and avoidance. He wants to break out of it. He wants to do something, preferably something that doesn't involve petty theft or running away from his problems.
I just want to help.
Maybe he's turning into an altruist. Ha.
The article finally loads. Mordred straightens up and tries to shake away thoughts that aren't going to get him anywhere. Time to to muster up some enthusiasm for umbras and moon paths.
Three paragraphs of heinously dull scientific jargon later, Mordred is convinced that this was the perfect assignment to fall asleep to. The thought is practically cheering.
On the fourth paragraph, his thumb freezes mid-scroll.
Because, see, there's a damn good reason why Mordred is still a believer in luck/fate/whatever: Sometimes shit happens with such perfect timing that he doesn't know what to call it, other than destiny.
.