Hi guys! I've missed you! Ok, if this isn't crack, I do not know what is. You've been warned. This began as a Land of Myth prompt (coffee prompt), and just became something else entirely, so also keep an eye out for another one-shot sticking more to the actual prompt itself!
Enjoy this, and tell me your thoughts!
Merlin had spent over a thousand years waiting for Arthur to return. But now that he finally had, Merlin found himself struggling not to strangle him.
For one thing, Arthur's fascination with the many technological innovations of the twenty-first century was wreaking havoc on Merlin's electric bill. Try as he might to explain to the king that you needed to turn off the lights, not just wait for them to die down like a campfire, Arthur could not comprehend it.
Just last night, Merlin had come home to find Arthur in the same place he'd left him three hours before—gazing into the depths of the open freezer, oblivious to the puddles of melted Häagen-Dazs dripping down onto the floor he'd just finished scrubbing.
"I was just trying to see where the ice came from," Arthur protested, after Merlin had given him a less than patient lecture on proper freezer use.
Nothing in Merlin's flat was immune to Arthur's curiosity. Unfortunately for Merlin's neighbors, their homes were just as vulnerable as Merlin's, as they'd discovered with the first of many building evacuations due to "kitchen incidents''. Arthur's latest quest to make the ultimate grilled cheese sandwich (and his trial and error method of figuring out what foods and hapless household objects were microwave safe) was turning out to be his most dangerous yet. No person—or cheese—was safe.
Any day that Merlin woke to his alarm clock rather than the smoke alarm was a miracle.
Merlin had always considered himself reasonably patient—he had been waiting around for a millennium, after all—but there were only so many fires and floods (Arthur's new favorite plaything was the bathtub, as the building's residents had learned the first time they'd felt water gushing through their ceilings) that a man could take before he exploded—as Merlin came to learn when he stumbled into the kitchen late one morning, muscles aching from yet another mop-up of epic proportions, to find his empty coffee mug in pieces on the floor…a mug that he was quite certain had been fully intact and filled to the brim with steaming hot hazelnut coffee when he'd last left the kitchen.
To say Merlin was seething with white-hot rage was an understatement.
Fortunately for him—or rather, unfortunately for his now endangered roommate—Arthur was completely oblivious. Which meant he could be caught off guard. Perfect.
As Arthur babbled on and on about his latest grilled cheese attempt, helpfully pointing out the specific areas of the now charcoal-and-cheese encrusted ceiling Merlin would need to scrape with a spatula, Merlin busily contemplated the many ways one could use a spatula as a deadly weapon on a certain idiot.
"—and I'm close. I can feel it!" Arthur said happily. "I remembered to take the plastic off the bread this time. The next one I make is going to be the perfect ratio of cheese to bread, and crunchy toastiness to soft cheesiness. I'll let you have the first taste, too," he offered generously. He hesitated. "You'll have to buy more cheese. And bread. And…possibly a new toaster," he added sheepishly.
"Sure," said Merlin evenly. "Any particular preference on the cheese?"
Arthur mulled it over. "I guess I'd like to try Swiss," he said at last. "I want to study the holes a bit more. Up close."
"Great," said Merlin brightly. "Swiss. Up close. No problem." His eyes flashed gold, and Arthur was falling.
Merlin stretched out a hand to catch him. "That close enough for you?"
The chunk of Swiss cheese that had once been Arthur said nothing. It couldn't.
The fog cleared from his mind as he looked at the small, mercifully quiet Swiss cheese.
"That was my favorite mug," he said matter-of-factly. "What do you have to say for yourself?"
Though it's difficult to tell with cheese chunks, this particular one seemed to be lost for words. Merlin, however, was not.
"You can sit here and contemplate the wonders of Swiss while I go to the grocery," said Merlin, tossing the cheese into the fridge. "And the wonders of refrigerators too, while you're at it."
With that, he slammed the refrigerator shut, and stomped out of the flat, leaving the cheese to reflect on the dangers of ticking off a warlock, and pray that said warlock did not return with a hankering for Swiss.