Notes: So, I suck. Sorry. Turns out even when I have things written in their entirety I still can't stick to any kind of posting schedule. If it makes you feel better, there's really only the epilogue to go, and then you can all stop wondering when I'm next gonna update this. But, anyway, I hope you enjoy. Px
X 17 X
Uther looks down the length of the table, watching as Merlin attempts to convince Mordred to eat the jar of disgusting mulch he's holding, and fights the urge to hide his head in his hands.
For some reason, when he agreed to let the Emrys boy live with him, he was expecting it to be for a week or two, at most a month, and yes, Uther is sure that flat-hunting with a baby and very little disposable income isn't easy, but it's now been six months, which is most definitely too long.
It is not that he objects to having his grandson in the house – indeed, from time to time, Uther actually appreciates Merlin's presence, too, after so many years living only with Geoffrey's slightly sycophantic company – but once in a while it might be nice to have company of the female persuasion without worrying about it getting back to his daughter.
As if that isn't enough, he has his daughter yelling at him to kick her ex-husband out, his son sulking and refusing to spend any time with him, and it feels like he hasn't actually slept through the night without being woken by a screaming child in months.
Something has to give and, since this is his home, it is certainly not going to be him.
X
When his mobile rings at half four in the morning, Arthur is too sleep-lagged to think of looking at the name on the display before answering it, which is how he ends up being yelled at by his father well before his first cup of coffee.
Or, more accurately, he's being whispered at by his father, but it's very definitely an angry whisper.
"Arthur Pendragon," his father hisses. "You will come here this evening. I have some papers you need to see."
"You what?" Arthur asks, half-convinced that he's still asleep, or – ideally – hallucinating (then again, he usually hopes he's hallucinating when he talks to his father, and the timing of this call doesn't help matters). "Father, it's the middle of the night."
"You will be here," Uther repeats. "I shall see you in the library at seven."
The line is dead before Arthur can convince his half-awake brain to come up with an objection.
X
Merlin is in the midst of enjoying a very lonely bowl of instant noodles and indulging in some completely unnecessary self-pity when Geoffrey comes to find him, looking excessively sombre.
"You have a visitor, Mr Emrys," he says, sounding as far from deferential as is possible.
"I have a visitor?" Merlin answers, since this is the first time anyone has come here with the express purpose of seeing him since he moved in (Morgana doesn't count, since she's mostly coming so that she can hand over Mordred). "Are you sure he's not here for Uther?"
Geoffrey frowns at him, looking deeply patronising. "I do know the difference between you and my employer, Mr Emrys," he says. "He's waiting the library."
"It's Professor Plum with the lead piping, isn't it?" Merlin says, and if he was expecting laughter he would've been terribly disappointed. "Thanks, Geoffrey," he adds, bleak, then makes his way to the library, Geoffrey following despite his repeated protests that he knows the way.
"Here you are, sir," Geoffrey says, pushing open the door and holding it open for him; Merlin is too baffled by the unusual and most definitely unexpected title tacked onto that statement to pay too much attention to the room he's walking into.
And then the door locks behind him.
X
"God," Merlin says, when he finally manages to find words again. "Your father is a devious bastard. He told me he had a business meeting this evening."
Arthur laughs, and it sounds tense to his own ears. Of course, he is tense, so it's not exactly a surprise, but it might be nice if he could have kept that fact to himself.
"He left us booze, though," Merlin continues, waving to the cut-glass decanter and glasses on the low table between the most and least comfortable chairs in the room. "You think that was deliberate?"
Arthur doubts it greatly, but since he's locked in a room with Merlin, he's fairly sure he's entitled to drink whatever alcohol he can find, and possibly start destroying things if they're stuck in here too long. "You want?" He asks, crossing the room and pulling the stopper from the bottle in order to pour himself a glass that is probably rather more full than it ought to be.
Merlin takes the glass from him before he can get it to his mouth, taking a gulp and leaving Arthur to get a second glass for himself. He steals the good chair, too, which is just bloody typical, and Arthur is too tired to start a fight about it, really.
They've had enough of those lately, anyway.
The thing is, he's fairly sure his father means well (or, no, not really; he's sure his father means to mean well, which isn't quite the same thing at all), but that doesn't mean this is in any way, shape or form a reasonable plan. It would be, if this was any other fight, if he and Merlin were the same men they were a couple of years ago, but they aren't. Things have changed, and Arthur isn't even sure he would change them back if he knew how.
"So," Merlin says eventually, breaking the silence that seems to have reigned forever. He swirls the glass in his hands, the soft browny-yellow liquid inside spiralling out and in, seeming just as hypnotised by it as Arthur is.
"So," Arthur answers, then, for lack of anything better, turns to the one topic no new parent seems able to let go, even if it's a topic he despises. "Is your son with his mother tonight?"
"My son has a name, Arthur," Merlin says, his eyes rising from the glass before him, gaze intent and not a little angry. "He's also your nephew, and even if you hate him I'd thank you not to talk about him like that."
Arthur is too shocked by the anger in his voice to speak, to do anything other than nod blankly, feeling more than a little stupid. "Mordred," he says, since that seems to be the concession Merlin wants of him, and a more stupid name for a child he's not sure he's heard in his life.
"Mordred," Merlin agrees. "And yes, Morgana has him tonight."
"Ah," Arthur says, and he's possibly a tad too beaten down by the sheer failure of that attempt at conversation to try again.
X
Whatever Uther was hoping to achieve from this stunt, Merlin is fairly sure it's not this; he's tipsy, Arthur's tipsy, and what is probably a pretty expensive vintage of whiskey is disappearing rather more quickly than it's supposed to. They're silent, too, and Merlin wishes he was still wearing his ring just because twisting it round and round his finger would give him something to do with his hands. Or maybe not just, because, actually, he quite enjoyed the twisted expression on Arthur's face when he asked him about it; mean and unpleasant of him, yeah, but it looked a lot like Merlin felt when he watched Gwaine walk out of Arthur's bedroom half-naked.
"I don't hate him," Arthur says abruptly, breaking Merlin from his quagmire of jealousy. "Mordred, I mean. I hate that he exists, but as far as babies go, he's no worse than the rest of them."
"A great comfort, I'm sure," Merlin says, and for a second he thinks he's too tired to really argue it. For a second, but a second isn't very long. "What does that mean, anyway? You hate that he exists but you don't hate him?"
"Oh," Arthur says, venomous rather than resigned, or any of the other things oh can sometimes sound. "Like you don't know exactly what it means, Merlin."
"Well, if I knew, I sure as hell wouldn't be asking!"
"You married her! You married my fucking sister, Merlin! Of course I hate anything that reminds me of that!"
Arthur's standing by now, on his feet and yelling in a way that makes Merlin grateful for the strong stone walls and the inches-thick door; even if Geoffrey is the only one in the house right now, that doesn't mean Merlin particularly wants this row to be overheard, and he's sure that if Arthur was thinking properly he wouldn't either.
"I didn't know I had reason not to," Merlin says, hot, just as loud as Arthur, because Arthur and Morgana have spent months – years, now – playing with him, lying and taking his choices from him and he's allowed to be pissed. It's his life, and if he'd known... Merlin softens, suddenly uncertain, a truth coming to him that he can't leave unaddressed. "I still don't, Arthur."
"When was I supposed to tell you, Merlin? What the hell was it supposed to achieve?"
"Well, I might not have married her, for starters!"
Arthur's expression can only be called a sneer, and it stings more than all the rest of the last two years put together. "Right," Arthur says, and he's quieter, too. "Because I wanted you to break my sister's heart out of pity, obviously."
"Pity?" Merlin asks. "Where the hell does pity come into this?"
Arthur sits again, sinking into himself, shoulders rounded and head down, the sort of bad posture Merlin can imagine him getting yelled at for as a child. It's defeat, the same sort that has kept Merlin away from him all this time, the same look he can't bear seeing on Arthur's face now. He can't believe he knows why it's there, because everything Gwaine said about Arthur being in love with him was immediately countered by the fact that the two of them slept together, but there's no way for Merlin to deny that the defeat is there.
"If you knew what we did," Arthur says, which is a lot more of an admission that Merlin thought he was going to get. "If you knew, you'd have left Morgana, and I already felt bad enough for the both of us. I wasn't going to put that on you as well."
"That's guilt, Arthur," Merlin points out. "It's not the same thing as pity."
Arthur laughs without humour, a concession that breaks Merlin's heart. "Okay," he says, even more downtrodden. "Pity is where you realised that I was in love with you, and you broke it off with Morgana so that I didn't have to watch you marry her."
X
Arthur never meant to say all of this, however often he's thought it. The aftermath doesn't play like it does in his imagination, of course, but then when he's imagined it in the past he's usually had his hand down his trousers, so it's hardly any surprise that real life isn't going the same way as his fantasies usually do.
If this was at all like his dreams, Merlin would be echoing him, you're in love with me? Merlin would echo him, surprise and relief and joy on his face, and then he would kiss him, soft for a second and then desperate, hungry, like he'd die if they ever separated. If this was like his dreams, Merlin wouldn't stare at him wordlessly, looking like this is a revelation, something beyond both his wildest dreams and his fiercest nightmares.
"Was?" Merlin asks, when he finally regains the power of speech. It's not really what Arthur was expecting.
"Was what?" he answers, bleak, because he's just pretty much bared his soul to Merlin and that's the reply he gets?
"You said was, Arthur. Past tense."
Arthur feels a flush of relief, so strong it makes him feel a little giddy; Merlin doesn't know everything yet, doesn't realise that Arthur's feelings are so far endless and unshakeable. He doesn't speak, though, because anything he says will say far too much.
Merlin doesn't let it drop, because, except for his silence over the last couple of months, Merlin has never let anything drop. "Don't ignore me, Arthur," he says. "Did you mean was, like, I was in love with you but now I'm not, or was as in, I'm talking about that specific occasion, but nothing has changed since then and I'm still in love with you?"
Arthur shakes his head, unable to answer, because answering will only dig himself in further.
"Which is it?" Merlin demands. "Tell me, Arthur, because I need to know if I went back to my wife for nothing that morning."
"Which morning?" Arthur asks, unable to stop himself, fully aware of how stupid it is, how he's not so much shooting himself in the foot as welding a grenade to it before pulling the pin. "And went back to? You… you were…"
"I was leaving her," Merlin agrees, finishing the end of the sentence Arthur barely even managed to start. "When we told you all that she was pregnant and you left, Gwaine stopped me following you. He told me that I'd already fucked your life up enough, that there was no way in hell he was going to let me do anything else to hurt you, and then when he realised just how much I didn't understand what he was talking about, he told me you were in love with me."
"He told you that?" Arthur asks, feeling even more like a sugar cube dropped into a cup of hot coffee; disintegrating, dissolving, generally facing destruction.
"He told me that," Merlin agrees, something dry and uncomfortable to it, as tired and dismal as Arthur feels. "Of course, since he apparently went over to yours after telling me that, I wasn't putting a whole lot of stock in his word."
You should have done, Arthur thinks; it's not very often that he'd consider something Gwaine says worth the breath it takes to speak it, but this time, Gwaine is more than a little right. Gwaine couldn't actually be any more right, and until Arthur knows what that means for him and Merlin, he's not going to let him know that.
Still, there's something he can say, and if Morgana has any idea what she's talking about, this might actually be helpful.
"Nothing happened," Arthur says, and even though it's not the complete and utter truth, it's something, and it's something Merlin needs to hear. "Between Gwaine and me, nothing happened."
Merlin laughs, broken and a little crazy. "Even if he hadn't pranced practically naked out of your bedroom, the fact that your face looked like you'd been making out with a cactus kind of gave the game away, not to mention the massive bruise on your neck. I'm sure you can understand why I don't believe that, can't you?"
There's the rest of the truth, then, and as much evidence as Arthur needs to know that he needs to talk further; the alternative is pointing out that, at the time, Merlin was still married, which won't make anything any better. "Okay," he agrees. "We were drunk, and we ended up very briefly horizontal on the sofa, but that's it. We both stopped before it really got any further than kissing."
"And the fact that he slept in your bedroom?"
Arthur sighs; too much truth, too much honesty but he has to be nearly there, has to have told nearly everything, nearly enough. "I can count on one hand the number of times I've slept in my bed since we were together, Merlin. You can believe me or not, but I promise you, what happened with Gwaine was nothing compared to us."
"Us," Merlin says, like he's tasting the word, trying it out before he makes a decision. "Us," he says a second time, more feeling to it. "I miss there being an us, Arthur."
"So do I," Arthur admits, and if confessing to Morgana all those months ago did nothing for him, this helps. This is what people mean when they say the truth shall set you free.
"I was going to leave her," Merlin says, and even if it seems something of a non-sequitur, Arthur thinks he's just back-stepping through the conversation, to the part where Gwaine wasn't an issue. "He told me you were in love with me, I remembered what happened, and everything made perfect sense, the way it never quite did with Morgana. I came to tell you that, and that I was going to leave her for you, and..."
"And Gwaine was there," Arthur says, finishing the sentence when Merlin seems unable to do so. "Sodding Gwaine."
"Sodding Gwaine," Merlin agrees, but he's smiling, smiling like Arthur never thought he'd see from him again, certainly never directed at him again. "So, since you're apparently too scared to say it first, I will. You're still my world, Arthur. You always will be."
"I'm still in love with you," Arthur answers, the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but. "I don't think there'll ever be a time when I'm not."
"Better not be," Merlin says, and Arthur sort of feels the need to burst into song. He won't, because that would be horribly embarrassing and might actually change Merlin's mind (it's not often Arthur will admit to not being good at something, but even he can't argue that his singing is anything other than atrocious).
"I think I'm going to kiss you now, if that's okay," he says instead, and the bounce to it is nervous joy, not a tune, honest.
He doesn't give Merlin chance to object, but then the complete lack of hesitancy that meets him is enough reason for Arthur to know he doesn't have to.