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Arthur wanders into the kitchen one morning, letting his sense of smell guide him towards breakfast, to find Merlin squinting dubiously at the bubbling pot of something on the stove. Merlin notices him stumble into the room, and perks up.
"Arthur!" Merlin waves him over with a oven-mittened hand. "Can you take a look at this? Do you think I need to turn the heat down?"
Like I'd know that. Arthur yawns, slumping over the dining table and blinking up at him sleepily. A newfound technology called Netflix kept him up all night, and he was rather exhausted. He'll get revenge on Elyan and Percival for introducing him to it later.
"You were the one cooking my meals in Camelot, remember?" he reminds Merlin, who rolls his eyes exasperatedly.
"Fine, fine. I got it." Merlin gives him a long-suffering look - what was that supposed to mean?? - heaves a very unnecessary sigh, then takes the oven glove off his hand and-
- sticks his hand into the flames spurting out of the stove.
Arthur shrieks.
"Merlin!!"
Not even hearing him, Merlin hums, feeling the roaring fire for a few more seconds before removing his hand and turning the heat down a notch. Arthur scrambles over, ignoring the way the room tilted unpleasantly at the sudden movement, and grabs Merlin's hand, which is miraculously unburnt and unblemished.
He gapes up at the dark-haired man. "What -"
Merlin smiles brightly and conjures what looks like a dancing unicorn out of orange sparks with his other hand. "Magic, Arthur. Magic."
There's a clattering of footsteps, and Gwaine and Lancelot come crashing into the room, with Leon close on their heels.
"We heard screaming -"
All three knights stop at the sight of Arthur, his face still an image of I-can't-believe-this-guy, still holding Merlin's wrist. Gwaine looks at the stove, then back at Arthur and Merlin, and starts guffawing. Lancelot, to his credit, looks away from Arthur's steadily reddening face and absently tries to flatten his bedhead. Leon just sighs and walks back to his bedroom.
Arthur drops Merlin's hand and stares up at him in disbelief.
"You -" he pauses, trying to figure out something to say, but seemingly gives up, instead shaking his head and collapsing back on top of the dining table.
Now looking considerably happier than a few minutes ago, Merlin returns to his cooking.
Before falling back asleep on the table, Arthur eyes his manservant suspiciously and thinks, Merlin. Don't make this a thing.
Merlin makes this a thing.
Arthur and Percival were cleaning out a particularly crowded storage cupboard a few days later (Merlin had decided that there was no better time to do a spring clean now that they were all stuck inside) when they come across a dubiously coloured and chemically-smelling container of liquid.
"Bleach?" Guesses Percival, sniffing the liquid and grimacing.
"Perhaps washing liquid," Arthur suggests, taking the container and shaking it a little, watching tiny bubbles form around the edge. There's no label on the rather grimy thing. Arthur screw the cap back on. He's not even sure if it's safe to breathe near it.
If Arthur had learned one thing about life in the modern world, it was not to drink anything that he wasn't absolutely sure of the identity of.
"Let's take it to Merlin," Percival suggests. "He can figure it out."
Before Arthur can protest, the knight is sticking his head out into the corridor and yelling for the household warlock, who appears merely seconds later, a dusting cloth in his hand. In some distant part of Arthur's mind, he realises that Merlin had arrived suspiciously quickly. Could he teleport? He would need to ask him about that later.
"Something wrong?" Merlin says cheerfully. Percival hands him the container.
"We don't know what it is," he explains. "I mean, it looks sort of contaminated, so I'm not sure we can use it, but we should at least know what it is so we can dispose of it properly."
Arthur watches the two of them doubtfully. If a knight of the Round Table and the King of Camelot couldn't find a way to figure out what this thing was, he doubted Merlin would be able to. (Yes, he knows he's supposedly the most powerful sorcerer to ever walk the earth, and he is immortal, but really. How useful can magic be?)
Merlin catches his eye from across the room, grins, unscrews the lid of the container, and swallows a mouthful.
Arthur screeches.
Percival, who hadn't even flinched at Merlin's actions, jumps at the sound of Arthur's voice, knocking over a stray broom. Merlin wipes his mouth.
"Bleach," he confirms. "It's expired though. Better go dispose of it."
Percival gives Arthur an amused look, takes the container, and ducks out of the cupboard. Arthur faces Merlin, at a loss for words.
"Magic," Merlin says again, raising his eyebrows. "I had a thousand years to get good at it. Nothing can touch me now unless I intend it to."
Arthur is still at a loss for words, opening and closing his mouth like a fish. Merlin just looks highly entertained, and picks up the broom Percival knocked over, thrusting it back into Arthur's hands. He barely has the mental capacity to remember to close his hands around it before it falls again.
"Have fun cleaning," Merlin says, and leaves. Arthur can hear him laughing all the way down the hallway.
Only two days later, it happens again.
Merlin still wakes Arthur up every morning out of habit, so they're both in the bathroom brushing their teeth when Elyan comes in and spends ten minutes trying unsuccessfully to get the electric razor to turn on.
"The power's fine, isn't it?" Arthur says through a mouthful of toothpaste, observing the small, weirdly-shaped machine. He never really quite got around to accepting electricity, at least not yet - he'd rather stick with traditional razors when it comes to shaving. He doesn't trust those strange buzzing lightning things around his face.
"Yeah," Elyan says, frowning. He unplugs the machine and peers at the socket in the wall. "Wonder if there's a problem with this."
Arthur edges away slightly as Merlin moves closer to inspect the socket in question. A rather nasty experience with water and electricity has taught him that a safe distance from these things is always advisable. (Morgana had taken a video of the entire thing, and still hadn't told Arthur where she'd hidden it. He was going to find it, though. One day.)
"Hm," Merlin says, taking his toothbrush out of his mouth to get a closer look.
Now, Arthur may still be adjusting to the modern way of life and the common usage of electricity, but he had made an effort to educate himself, and he is more than fairly certain that there are some dangerous, deadly ways to get oneself killed using electricity - such as sticking your fingers into electrical sockets.
Merlin sticks his fingers into the socket.
Arthur chokes on the toothpaste in his mouth.
There's a literal burst of sparks, and crackling electricity, and Merlin doesn't flinch. He feels around the socket for a few more seconds, before withdrawing his hand and murmuring something. His eyes flash gold, and a second later a small, golden bubble appears around the socket.
"It's gone live," Merlin huffs. "I put a barrier around it so nobody accidentally electrocutes themselves, but I can't exactly call an electrician now ..."
"Didn't Leon take a degree in engineering before we found him?" Elyan suggests offhandedly, like Merlin hadn't just casually stuck his fingers into a two-hundred-volt socket. "Maybe he might know how to fix it."
"Why aren't you freaked out by this?" Arthur yells, but he forgot to take his toothbrush out of his mouth so the sentence ends up sounding like a string of garbled noises. Merlin makes a face like he's holding back laughter.
Elyan, guessing his meaning, just shrugs and gives him a sympathetic look.
"You get used to it," he says. "You should have seen the things he did in the seventeenth century."
Arthur, naturally, doesn't get used to it.
He was reading a book on the Arthurian legends (which he never got tired of reading, for some reason, even though most of the scholars who wrote them had wrongly decided that he was a middle-aged man with a beard), with the sounds of Lancelot, who was on the cooking rota that day, making dinner in the background. Merlin was also loitering in the room, doing nothing in particular other than make fun of Arthur's annoyance at his misrepresentation in the illustrations of the books ("At least they look vaguely like you, for some reason everyone thinks I'm an old man with a four-foot-long beard - I was Dragoon the Great for no more than a week, at the very most! Joint pains are no joke!").
Then Lancelot calls for Merlin, asking him to take the chips out of the oven because he had his hands full, and as soon as Arthur hears the word "oven", his head snaps up, looking towards Merlin warningly -
But it's too late, and Merlin is opening the oven and taking out a likely scorching hot tray of freshly cooked food with his bare hands.
"Thanks," Lancelot says. "Maybe use oven gloves next time?"
Arthur wants to scream.
Arthur catches Merlin later that day, because even though none of the things Merlin decides to do is his business anymore, he really can't sit by and let these kinds of things keep happening. For Merlin's own good - and for Arthur's, because he's not sure how much more of this he can take before his blood pressure rises to an unhealthy level.
"I don't see the problem with it," Merlin says quizzically, when Arthur confronts him. "I mean, as long as none of you guys start doing it ..."
"Yes, well, obviously none of us are going to start sticking our hands into stove fires, but the problem here is that you're doing it," stresses Arthur. "Magic isn't an excuse for drinking every questionable and potentially toxic substance you find!"
Merlin's face falls. "Oh," he says. "Is this about my magic? Because I thought that you'd ..."
And Arthur really can't believe he just said that.
"What? Come on, Merlin, you really don't think that I still have a problem with - that was fifteen hundred years ago, for the love of Camelot! How many times do I have to tell you that I have absolutely no problem with your magic?" He lowers his voice, because he can already see Gwaine watching him curiously from the other side of the room. Merlin is still looking lost, and Arthur sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose.
"Okay," he says slowly, clearly. "Look. Magic - fine! It's a part of you. It's only as bad as you are, which means it's about as bad as a blind, defenceless, newborn kitten." Merlin opens his mouth to protest (though he still looks slightly touched), and Arthur continues before he has a chance to speak.
"Magic - fine. But doing things that put you in unnecessary danger with the excuse of your magic protecting you all the time? Not fine!"
Merlin pulls a face, and Arthur raises a hand, stopping him.
"Nope. I get that you're more in control of your magic now, a thousand years of practice and all, but still. Something might go wrong, you might get hurt -" Arthur sighs heavily. "You're mortal now, Merlin. If something happens to you ..."
Merlin peers at him, and Arthur shifts uncomfortably under his piercing gaze.
"You're worried about me?" Merlin says finally, and Arthur huffs, crossing his arms and looking away. He doesn't say anything, but Merlin, annoyingly, as always, can tell exactly what he's thinking even if he doesn't say it.
"You were," says Merlin again, gleefully, and Arthur grabs the kitchen towel off the counter and throws it at him, shutting him up.
Thankfully, after that, Merlin stops actively trying to turn household chores into life-threatening activities. However, household-chores-turned-life-threatening-activities still manage to follow him around, much to Arthur's dismay.
There was the instance with the burning hairdryer, for one.
With Morgana out shopping for groceries (at this point, she was the only one in the household who knew which shops didn't have five-hour-long queues on the weekends), nobody knew how to properly use the thing. Arthur, who had come crashing into the room upon hearing several of his knights starting yelling in panic, didn't exactly know how it happened, but seeing the flaming little object in Gwaine's hands and the (rather hilarious) looks of alarm on Leon and Percival's faces, he could make a vague guess.
"I DON'T KNOW HOW IT HAPPENED!" shrieks Gwaine, holding the burning thing as far away from his face as he could. "DO I DROP IT?"
"THE FLOOR IS CARPETED," yells back Percival, hovering anxiously next to him, looking torn between wanting to sprint out of the room and wanting to help his friend. "DON'T DROP IT!"
"IT'LL LITERALLY BURN MY HAND," Gwaine protests. Leon turns to Arthur for help.
"Throw water on it??" Arthur suggests in a panic.
"IT'S ELECTRICAL, PRINCESS!" bellows Gwaine. "BAD IDEA!"
"That would be the worst thing you could do," Leon agrees, trying to unplug the hairdryer from the wall without having his hair burnt off by Gwaine randomly waving the thing around in a panic.
At that point, Merlin, having noticed the distressed yelling of the three knights, comes crashing into Arthur, almost knocking him over.
"What's going on?" he says, and then his eyes fall on the flaming hairdryer. "- ah."
Gwaine spins around to look at him, still frantically waving the hairdryer around. "MERLIN! DO SOMETHING!"
Merlin darts forward, snatches the hairdryer from Gwaine's hands, and promptly douses the flames with a flash of golden eyes. Gwaine gawks at him.
After a rather long silence, Leon gingerly takes the largely charred remains of the hairdryer and places it on the table.
"So," he says eventually. "Who's going to tell Morgana?"
Merlin, catching Arthur's eye from across the room, shrugs.
What else could I do? he mouths, and Arthur sags into the nearest chair and buries his face in his hands.