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Arthur’s hand is on Merlin’s cheek. His hand is on Merlin’s cheek and his thumb is stroking Merlin’s cheekbone and his other hand is on Merlin’s waist and his eyes are darting down to Merlin’s lips and his tongue is licking his own lips and he’s getting closer and leaning in and his eyes are closing, and so are Merlin’s, and Arthur’s lips touch his and everything goes black.
Merlin blinks awake. Somebody is pressing a cool compress to his forehead. Somebody else is pacing back and forth across the wooden floors.
“He just fainted?” Gaius says, a frown in his voice.
“Yes.” Arthur. “I—startled him, I suppose. Accidentally. He just—” Arthur put the back of his hand to his head and imitated a swoon. “I had to catch him before he hit his head on the floor. I just laid him down there and yelled for you.” He runs a hand through his hair, looking agitated—which is to say he looks highly irritated and slightly ill, which is how he expresses agitation.
Merlin snaps his eyes shut. Unfortunately for him, Gwen notices.
“He’s awake!” she calls. She shakes Merlin’s shoulder gently. “Merlin—Merlin, can you hear me?”
“Is he all right?” Arthur asks, anxious, rushing over. Merlin squeezes his eyes shut tighter.
“Merlin, look at me,” Gaius commands. Slowly, reluctantly, Merlin opens his eyes.
Gaius runs him through a couple of exercises—“Follow my finger without turning your head,” “Who’s the king of Camelot?” “Sing the alphabet backwards”—and proclaims that he’s perfectly fine.
Arthur lets out a whoosh of breath, but Merlin’s gut sinks. Arthur may be relieved now, but in a couple minutes he’ll have forgotten about his worry and realized what a rich teasing potential he’s just had served up to him on a silver platter. If Merlin had a concussion or brain damage or something, at least he’d be spared imminent humiliation.
It takes less than a minute, thanks to a traitor named Guinevere. “What did you do to startle him so much, Arthur?” He loves Gwen, he does, but he sort of desperately wishes she were dead. Why is she always around Gaius’ chambers, anyway? She’s not the physician’s assistant, Merlin is. (Not that Merlin would’ve been much help tending to his own collapse, but whatever.)
“Oh, er—” Arthur goes red. But dawning comprehension soon supersedes embarrassment. A slow smile takes over his face. Merlin wishes he were still unconscious, or possibly dead. (Life would be a whole lot easier if everyone was dead.) “I suppose I…overwhelmed him.”
“Sit up and eat this,” Gaius says, shoving an apple at him. “Keep your stomach full and stay hydrated. Sire, I think it would be best if you didn’t ask Merlin to engage in any strenuous labor for the rest of the day.”
Arthur has his hand over his mouth, barely concealing a delighted grin. “Yes, of course,” he says. “Merlin must recuperate. Send him to my chambers when you feel he’s recovered enough wit to function.”
“I haven’t lost my wits—” Merlin protests loudly, but Arthur hushes him.
“You need rest, Merlin,” he says, all unbridled glee. Merlin thunks his head back on the table, but, tragically, fails to lose consciousness.
A few hours later, Merlin eases open the door to Arthur’s chambers. His attempt at sneakiness goes nowhere: Arthur hurries over with a chair and an exaggerated look of concern.
“Do you need to sit down? I know it’s a bit much, seeing my face again…”
Merlin groans, stalks over to the bed, and faceplants into it.
“No, again! Shall I grab the smelling salts?” Merlin gropes for a pillow to throw at Arthur’s face, fails to find one, and flips him off instead.
The bed depresses as Arthur sits down next to him. “I kissed you,” he says, in a voice even richer with self-satisfaction than usual, “and you fainted.”
Which really just says it all, doesn’t it?
Merlin flops over to glare at the ceiling. “I hadn’t eaten much,” he says. “And Gaius’ tower was boiling—heat rises, you know. And I didn’t get much sleep last night—”
“I kissed you,” Arthur says, deliberately emphasizing each word, “and you fainted.”
“Yes, all right, already,” Merlin snaps. “Look, there was a lot of buildup—both in the actual moment and, y’know, in general.” He waves a vague hand. “Since we’ve known each other. And especially lately. And until today I was never totally sure it wasn’t just in my head, on your end, and—”
“I kissed you and you fainted! I knew my touch affected you, but I’d never’ve guessed it would be so overwhelming.”
“I could hex you.”
Not even the threat of being turned into a donkey (or a toad, or a person capable of shutting up once in a while, or whatever other torment Merlin can think of to inflict—and he can be creative, dammit) breaks through Arthur’s smugness.
“The question now is what are we going to do about it,” he says. “We’ll have to titrate you up. Start small. See if you can handle me touching your hand without swooning dead away.”
“It was a one-time thing!” Merlin protests. “Anyway, your enormous ego is making you seem less and less appealing by the minute, so you’ve got nothing to worry about.”
“Really,” Arthur says, smirking. And puts his hand on Merlin’s cheek.
Merlin’s heart starts beating faster, because it, like Gwen, is a traitor. Arthur’s face is drawing nearer. His breath gets shallower, quicker. Arthur licks his lips. His vision begins to grey out at the edges.
“Good lord, Merlin,” Arthur says, pulling back. He looks caught between even unholier glee and being horrified. “How is this ever going to work? Maybe if you pretend I’m someone else, someone you fancy but not quite as much—” He frowns. “No, I don’t like that idea at all, actually.”
Merlin sits up, glaring. “You’ve gone and got in my head, is all! This is just like when you messed up that one move at practice—the twisty stabby jerky one—”
“They have names, Merlin, and you’re supposed to have learned them—”
“—and even though you’d done it perfectly countless times before, getting it wrong that one time made you self-conscious, and it took weeks for you to get it right again.”
“And you think that’s comparable to you passing out when I make a move on you?”
“Yes. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we both expect me to faint, I will.” He feels himself go slightly pink at the admission, but keeps his chin raised, defiant.
“Huh.” Arthur shifts, propped up on his elbow. He glances down at Merlin’s hand. Merlin’s heartbeat picks up again, in anticipation that he might take it. (Fuck, it’s getting worse, not better—at this rate, he may indeed need a chair handy to sink into at the mere sight of Arthur’s visage.) “It was your fault I messed up that day, you know.”
“What?” Merlin squawks, indignant. “What did I do?”
“You distracted me. I glanced over, and you were drinking from a waterskin—my waterskin, in case you’ve forgotten—and then you poured the rest of it over your head.” Arthur mimes it, ridiculously exaggerated, as though Merlin had been attempting to emulate some particularly concupiscent nymph. “You looked like a colt caught in an unexpected downpour. It wasn’t remotely alluring, which was weirdly the problem. Why was I”—he grimaces, a side effect of being forced to express attraction that’s even more absurd than a tendency toward dizziness, if you were to think of it—“allured? Every time I tried the move after, that image of you would come into my head and I’d get distracted all over again.”
“So you’re saying I incapacitated you?”
Arthur sighs and rolls his eyes—typical overkill—but a smile quirks his lips. “Yes.”
Merlin allows the smugness engendered by Arthur’s confession to permeate his whole body—turnabout is fair play, after all. “How did you get over it?”
Arthur looks directly into his eyes. “By deciding that at the next available opportunity, I would kiss you.” Merlin swallows.
“So…” he trails off, already lightheaded. Dammit, how is this ever going to work? What sort of twisted destiny is this, to experience all the classic symptoms of attraction to such an extreme extent that he’s actually physically incapable of acting on it? This has to be Kilgharrah’s fault. How, he has no idea, but it must be.
“So,” Arthur echoes. Again his eyes dart to his lips. Merlin tries to control his breathing. Maybe if he keeps his eyes open, he’ll be able to stay conscious? Sure, it’ll be weird and more than a little creepy, but—
“I need you to polish my sword,” Arthur says, rising abruptly.
“I—what?”
“That’s not a euphemism,” Arthur says admonishingly, as though anyone had implied otherwise. “It needs it. You’ve been slacking off even worse than usual lately, and that’s saying something.”
“Come off it,” Merlin says, weakly. “You don’t mean…”
“Stop moping and get to work.”
“I’m not moping!” Merlin finds the pillow this time. Arthur, the bastard, dodges with ease.
Merlin is moping.
He blew it. He blew it, and tragically, that’s also not a euphemism. He had a chance and he got in his own head and ruined it forever—all because he wanted to kiss Arthur so badly that he literally couldn’t. The dramatic irony was so thick it swung right back around to farce. Now Arthur’s given up on kissing him ever again, and Merlin is stuck alone in the armory polishing his stupid sword when he could’ve—
Arthur barrels around the corner.
Merlin doesn’t even have time to gasp before he’s being snogged for all he’s worth, and quite a bit more besides. He doesn’t have time to get faint, either. In fact, he realizes with delight, he doesn’t feel even remotely close to passing out right now. Quite the opposite, in fact. He feels positively invigorated.
If he had any dignity, he would make a point of this fact. He would demonstrate how far he is from blacking out by being cool and aloof and utterly unaffected.
But he’s never had any dignity to speak of, as the day’s events have already made painfully obvious, so he kisses back with all the enthusiasm he can muster—which is, to say the least, something more than a hell of a lot.
Arthur pulls back, bright-eyed and mischievous and pleased in a way that for once doesn’t read as insufferably smug. “There, you see? No more buildup.”
And if Merlin’s vision goes a bit fuzzy later on, when Arthur’s hands drift lower, it’s no real matter; he figures out he can just zap himself with a quick shock of magic to bring him back to earth. And if, later still, on the threshold of another monumental touch, the shock doesn’t quite do the trick, and he does actually faint dead away again—well. Arthur can’t actually see him at this angle, and when he comes back to, it’s to a much more pleasant state of affairs than the last time.