Work Text:
“Isn’t this a little early for a briefing?” Roxy asks, adjusting her earpiece as she accepts the call.
There’s a generous hour left before she has to head down to the party and Merlin has a departmental policy to keep the final briefing to a concise fifteen, a concept she’d support in theory if it didn’t mean having to sift through detailed information packs on a cross-Atlantic red eye flight. She peers at her under eye bags in the mirror and wonders whether even her best concealer will be enough to make them vanish.
In her ear, Merlin says, “This isn’t a strictly professional call,” his voice devoid of the chill he reserves for the command centre floor.
“You are calling through an encrypted line,” Roxy says, the emphasis making it sound more like a question.
“It seemed easier to create an erase record of a red channel than be caught with a personal device,” Merlin says and she rolls her eyes even though she knows he can’t see her.
“Only you would say that. You’re such a show off,” Roxy murmurs, her voice rife with affection. “Speaking of, aren’t you meant to be juggling Galahad tonight?”
“I’m keeping an eye on the floor from my office. He’s fine.”
“Fine? You know Eggsy gets terribly jealous when you pawn him off on one of your handlers, right?”
“I have a dozen agents and multiple wider ops to manage,” Merlin says and Roxy cuts back with, “I don’t think sneaking off to ring your girlfriend counts as being incredibly busy.”
There’s a silence before he asks: “Shall I leave you to it to go babysit?”
“No, please, I could use the company,” Roxy says, softening her voice to smooth over his embarrassment.
Three years in and he’s still caught out by her when she so plainly lays out his quiet brand of love, when she says what he considers to be the unspoken in a throwaway line.
In the space she leaves for him, Merlin asks, “Are you getting ready?”
“Yes. You’re missing your favourite show.”
“I fear I draw the line of acceptable breach of professionalism at having a live feed of your tits on my screen.”
“I’m wearing a robe, you pervert.”
“If it’s that silk one you packed, it definitely doesn’t qualify as clothing.”
Glancing at herself in the mirror, Roxy is inclined to agree. It’s a fabric so thin it shifts over her like water as she reaches for her makeup bag, casting a shadow onto her bare rib cage as it lifts away from her skin.
To Merlin, she says: “It’s the only comfortable thing in heat like this.”
“You’ll be complaining of the cold again in no time.”
She thinks of the bone chill in his flat and how he set up a space heater on ‘her’ side of the sofa when she kept whinging about it the other winter. How, when she wanders into his office in the middle of the afternoon to talk herself out of her own boredom, he never tells her off for pressing the flats of her palms against the warmest of his servers even though she knows he wipes her handprints off after she leaves.
“It’s not my fault you and all your machines seem to think a frigid eighteen degrees is a temperature compatible with life. And don’t even think of mentioning the energy bill to me!”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“Mmh-hmm,” Roxy murmurs, unconvinced.
She’s set her tools out in front of her, the canvas of her face blank in the mirror. She swears she didn’t used to look this tired or maybe she was just too preoccupied with getting ahead to notice. Twenty-seven feels like too many years for her to be carrying.
“Stop fretting,” Merlin tells her and Roxy startles out of her thoughts.
“I wasn’t,” she tries to say. Pushing away the notion that he knows her all too well, she squirts some primer into her hands and starts to work it into her skin.
“You absolutely were. It’s pathological. Every morning I catch you staring at yourself like you’re agonising about where exactly your first wrinkle is going to appear.”
“That is not true,” Roxy insists even as her brain supplies it will be her smile lines.
The way he’s always right is so irritating, it makes her want to hang up on him, but she sidesteps the impulse by brushing an even coat of foundation over the smattering of freckles left over from their last holiday: a week spent languishing in the overripe heat of Sicily in August.
“You realise you haven’t got a chance of lookin’ old next to me,” Merlin says into the quiet that’s fallen between them.
“Women aren’t awarded the same grace with ageing.”
“I’ll be derelict before you’ve got so much as a crinkle in your eyes.”
It’s the sort of thing he would have said jokingly a few years ago, back when she used to tease him about his age, but it’s become a certainty somewhere along the line — quietly, without fanfare — that she’ll be around for that, that they’re growing old (or at least older) together.
“It will be much sooner than you think if you keep sending me out at these ungodly hours,” Roxy says, dabbing concealer into the inner corners of her eyes. “And how come I always seem to end up in the desert?”
“Would you rather be in Eggsy’s shoes?”
She thinks of her last mission on the equator, the wet heat of the tropics crawling down her back as she hacked her way through a particularly stubborn bit of jungle. “No, I don’t.”
There’s a knock in the background followed by some words she can’t make out in a voice that is not Merlin’s. Judging by his responses, it has something to do with a tracking signal.
Roxy uses the lull in their conversation as he carries on another to suck in her cheeks and brush some bronzer under her cheekbones before she sweeps blush onto the apples of her cheeks.
When Merlin comes back to her, it’s with a grumbled, “Speaking of the devil…”
“Thought that might have been about Eggsy. How is he?”
“Crabby.”
“Yeah, he doesn’t take heat well,” Roxy says, recalling the last time they were on a mission together.
Watching him in the passenger seat of the SUV with a wet shirt wrapped around his head, Eggsy had looked sunburnt simply from how flushed the midday heat made him, bottle after bottle of their water supply seeming to evaporate off of him. By the third day, she’d stopped making fun of him and genuinely started to worry about his kidneys.
She’d told Merlin about it on the plane to Italy last summer, not expecting him to fare much better in the Mediterranean heat, but it was her who walked around pink-cheeked and lethargic there. Apparently he’d acclimatised to it living in North Africa for four years when he’d been her age, a fact she resented him for enough at the time to tease him relentlessly about his sun hat.
All too aware of the fact that they’re on stolen time, Roxy asks: “Do you have to go?”
“No, Alsop has it well in hand. Tell me about Vegas.”
“Have you never been?”
“‘Course I have; your predecessor had a mean gambling streak, ”Merlin tells her and Roxy makes a note to ask him about that later. “What I’m interested in are your personal impressions.”
“Well,” Roxy says, “it’s far too bright for a start. Between the sun and all the lights, I don’t know how anyone here sleeps a wink.”
“I doubt many people visiting Vegas think about sleep.”
“No, I don’t suppose they do,” Roxy says.
She sets her powder down to shuffle around in her makeup bag for the sleek little eye shadow quad she tucked away in it earlier that morning, packing herself a suitcase at Merlin’s instead of her own place because they’ve moved enough of each other into both of their flats to comfortably live out of either.
It’s a gradual entwining they haven’t really spoken about, like how more and more of their belongings are things they’ve given one another: the little stag head collar pins that sit on his dresser are an Etsy find of hers, the scarf he wore to work yesterday a souvenir she got him from St Petersburg, the eye shadow palette she’s holding now an exorbitant Christmas present from him.
Roxy runs her index finger over the gold embossing on the black lid and thinks of all the nights she’s spent getting ready in his bathroom — Merlin pretending to be bored by the elaborate ritual of it, all while pointedly lounging on his bed in a way where it’s easy for him to cast long looks at her through the open doorway as he does the crossword. She’d never paid much attention to how much attention he pays her (glasses low on the bridge of his nose, tossing clues her way nonchalantly) until she unwound the string on the ornate, telltale gift box last winter and it became evident that not a single one of her remarks about eyeshadow formula had slipped him by.
She still finds herself dumbfounded by it sometimes: The way he can surprise her with just the right takeaway after a long day, or how he’ll reorder the dog food before she even has the chance to realise she’s forgotten about it again, the deliberate way he sorts her mail on her foyer table when he comes by to water her plants during her longer stints abroad.
His attention is quiet yet unmistakable. Nothing about his silence on the line is distracted.
In their early days, she could not see it for what it was, lying awake in bed long into the night when he didn’t text her after a date. He was so easy to second guess, her senses not attuned to this kind of love.
She’d spent so much of her time at uni having too loud drunken arguments in the corner of grimy clubs that she thought love was something to shout about. But Merlin is not like that. Everything about him is as covert as their chosen line of work, so Roxy has learned to read him in the way she reads whispered conversations from across the room: all the weight in the details.
In her ear, she can hear a quick burst of typing, then the tap tap tap of his index finger bouncing lightly on a single key while he thinks of what to do next. The message sent (he always hits the enter key a little harder, the loose rattle of it pathognomic), he takes a sip of whatever his tea of choice is today.
Bergamot , Roxy thinks, the box forgotten on his kitchen counter the morning she left.
She’s smoking out her crease, lost in thought by the time he asks: “So what are you bestowing upon those poor bastards tonight?”
“I thought a touch of Blitz Bordeaux would be appropriate. It is a bleeding hearts ball, after all.”
“Have I seen that one?”
“Yes, many, many times. I wore it to Balthazar last week.”
He says, “Ah,” recognition dawning, “the sinful red.”
Roxy can’t suppress the smile that bubbles up unannounced and she has to pull the brush away before she makes a mess of things.
“The very one. And you’ve seen the dress of course.”
“I’ve seen your expenses claim for it,” Merlin says. “Accounting has been hounding ops over the wardrobe spending you and Guinevere seem to rack up.”
“They ought to stop sending us out on honeypots then. Besides, it’s the cost of sexism. It isn’t our fault only the suits are made in house.”
“Don’t pretend you don’t get off on wandering around Harrods with her picking the most expensive, slithering silk to put on the company card.”
Roxy shrugs a shoulder, sure he can sense the gesture somehow. “Perhaps… Guilty as charged, but I didn’t hear you complaining the last time you got your hands on it.”
“Ah, see, I never complained about it before that either. Personally, I consider it an investment worth every penny, but then again, accounting doesn’t get to undress you at the end of the day, so you can see how they might disagree.”
That gets a laugh out of her, the kind that echoes on the tiles, amplified in the small bathroom. “What else do you think I could write off just by flashing a bloke in a committed relationship with a calculator?”
“I dare say anything you want.”
His voice dips low, gravelly like it is after midnight in bed, and Roxy’s cheeks blossom with heat. She’s never doubted that she looks phenomenal, but coming out of his mouth, the sentiment still renders her shy.
His turn to meet her halfway, Merlin asks: “So, red lip to go with it?”
“Of course.”
“You know, it’s my favourite colour on you even though it renders you unkissable for a night.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Maybe the anticipation is part of the thrill, being invited to watch your lips all night — every smile, every smirk, every word they form — yet being unable to touch .”
When she can’t find any words to reply, he merely sighs and starts telling her all too casually about an operation he ran once to bust a smuggling ring operating out of a carmine factory, as if she can think of think of things like drugs and pigments when her mind is firmly on a dinner party three weeks ago, his eyes a little too insistent across the table in a way she could not pinpoint until this very moment.
Swallowing, Roxy forces herself to focus on what he’s saying: an anecdote about who broke the espresso machine in the comms break room that morphs into a complaint about one of the neighbours she’s sure she’s met but who Merlin insists died two years before Roxy ever stepped foot in the building.
She tries not to giggle while attempting to apply her mascara, but throws in the towel when it comes to the eyeliner. “You did not say that to her,” Roxy says, putting the cap back on the pen.
“No. I didn’t want my hands to end up in her freezer.”
“She was eighty-two!”
“She never hit you in the shin with that walking stick of hers.”
“Of course not,” Roxy says: “Old biddies love me.”
Done with her makeup and hair, Roxy takes one last satisfied look at herself in the mirror before she wanders out into her half lit room to find her dress. It shimmers purple on its hanger by the window, stained by the neon lights.
“Are you getting dressed?” Merlin asks, because of course he could tell she’d left the bathroom just by the way her voice carries.
“Uh-huh,” she says, shimmying into it. “I’m supposed to leave soon and I think you’d prefer it if whoever’s running the main comms doesn’t get a view of me half naked.”
“You know you’re half naked whilst wearing that dress. I doubt any state of undress could be more scandalous than the thing itself.”
“Mmh, I must admit, it is a stunner. The silk is just exquisite. It looks almost… wet.”
“And yet,” Merlin says, “an odd choice for a mission when you have such difficulty zipping it up by yourself.”
“You can’t possibly hear that over the phone,” Roxy says, and he slips her an easy, “No, but I know you.”
She’s too flustered to respond to that immediately and, in the space that falls between them, there’s a knock on the door.
“Case in point,” Merlin says. When she doesn’t move, he mutters: “Go on, open it.”
Compliance built deep into her bones, Roxy’s feet move of their own accord. Crossing the room, she takes stock of where her gun is, what items within arms reach might make for a good weapon in a pinch, her agent’s instincts kicking in even though she knows this is one of Merlin’s personal stunts, not a sign of the mission going tits up before it’s even started.
When she opens the door, she’s greeted by a bellhop holding a bouquet of burgundy roses.
“Sorry to interrupt, madam. Delivery for you.” He holds out the roses and Roxy reaches for them on autopilot, cradling them so close to her chest, the scent of them hits her without warning, sharp and heady. It takes her a moment to realise he’s fishing something out of his pocket, but before she can panic about a weapon, he’s presenting her with a little black box held out on the flat of his palm.
“Oh, thank you,” she says with her heart pounding as her fingers close around it.
“My pleasure, madam. Also, your husband called to say you were in need of some… assistance.”
“Assistance?” she echoes and his eyes dart to the floor, cheeks pinking.
“Your dress,” the bellhop and Merlin say in unison.
“ Oh .”
“If you would rather a lady came up, I can send my manager as soon as she is free. It is just that she preoccupied at the moment and he said it was urgent.”
“Umm, yes, I have an engagement to get to,” Roxy says.
It takes her moment too long to respond, so Merlin whispers, “Turn around,” in her ear, and she spins around to present the bellhop with the half-done up zipper.
His hands are warm and damp where they touch her skin, gone again as soon as they’re there — the quick, crisp, professional zing of the zipper the only indication they were ever there.
“Thank you,” she murmurs over her shoulder.
He curtsies nervously at her before hurrying off down the hallway as Roxy shuts the door again.
“What is all this?” she asks her empty room.
Thousands of miles away and simultaneously in her ear, Merlin answers: “It’s Valentine’s day.”
“I thought we wouldn’t be these people,” Roxy says because she’s sure that to contemplate his sentimentality would mean making the lump in her throat even larger.
“Maybe it was an inevitability.”
In the silence that hangs as dark as a desert night, Roxy takes a slow deep breath of the bouquet. It smells like her grandmother’s garden in June and the sweetness of it is grounding when her heart is pounding in disbelief.
“I know it’s just a date on the calendar,” Merlin says, “but I still wish I could be there tonight.”
Roxy huffs. “I wish I had had the foresight to do anything at all. This is all so sweet and I have nothing to give you in return.”
Very quietly, he says, “There is something you can give me.”
The words burn in her cheeks and leave her tongue numb when she asks, “And what’s that?”
“The box… you haven’t opened it yet, have you?”
“No.”
Roxy uncurls her fingers to look at it properly in her hand. It’s made of black leather, none of that velvet shit, and a size she doesn’t know what to do with: too small for a necklace, too square for a bracelet, and not quite right for a ring either.
But that last thought stalls and loops in a way that renders her nervous.
Merlin says, “Good. I want to see your reaction.”
Surely he wouldn’t? Not like this, not at all. It’s not something they’ve discussed even though she’s pretty sure the idea of forever has grown on him as much as it has on her.
“Should I call-” she starts to ask and then remembers what she was doing before she was interrupted by the knock on the door. “Oh, the necklace.”
“Precisely.”
“You’ll have to splice this out of the feed,” Roxy tells him as she places the roses on the bed so she can dig out the case with her mission gadgets from the side compartment of her suitcase.
“Of course. We both have reputations to maintain, after all.”
She takes the case and the box into the bathroom, placing them side by side on the counter.
The case pops open at the touch of a finger, programmed to recognise her prints, which it occurs to Roxy, Merlin must be far more familiar with than has ever occurred to her. I’ll have to look at his when I get back , she tells herself as she checks her kit.
It’s not always guns and knives; sometimes, it’s intelligent jewelry and unobtrusive earpieces.
“You’ve upgraded comms.”
“Newer model. Guinevere did the prototype testing. I thought you might like it.”
“Should I be jealous she gets to trial all your pet projects?”
“Not at all. Consider it a testament to how indispensable you are.”
Ignoring all the implications of that line, Roxy says, “This is why you weren’t worried about calling through the main line. There’s already a separate mission channel set up.”
“Last minute, slightly strategic equipment swap, I must admit.”
“Yes, this definitely wasn’t in here when you gave me the tour,” Roxy says, slipping the new earpiece into her other ear.
The other pieces, she doesn’t have to ask about.
One is a sleek gold anklet with a snake charm dangling from a ruby that conceals a location tracker, either a backup for herself or to slip into someone else’s pocket. The other is the necklace. It’s weightier, about two feet of thin gold chain. She loops it around her neck and feeds the end with the threader through a hole in the stacked gemstones attached to the other end. The larger one is an artificial onyx, meant to appear black to the eye while still being translucent enough to house a tiny camera piece for HQ to have a visual feed. The stone meant to draw the eye is another blood red ruby polished to perfection. Roxy pulls the chain tight enough for the onyx to sit in her jugular notch and the ruby to catch the light over her sternum.
“How’s that?” she asks.
The loose end of the threader disappears into her dress in the mirror and she wonders if his eyes follow its path like hers did.
“You look… divine,” he breathes. “Sublime. All the more devastating that I can’t be there.”
“You sound like a Victorian vampire,” Roxy tells him and this time, the smile playing over her mouth is not lost in translation.
“I suppose that’s the cost of being three hundred years older than you.”
“Oh, stop it,” Roxy says even though she’s grinning.
“I’m afraid my present won’t do much to dispel the allegations of vampirism.” His voice goes dangerously soft again and Roxy has to swallow before she can muster the courage to make a joke.
“You’ve not sent me a vial of your blood, have you?”
“Not quite.”
Staring at the onyx in the mirror in lieu of being able to look at him, Roxy asks, “Can I open it?”
“Yes,” Merlin says, the word so faint, it’s scarcely a breath.
Trying to still her nerves, Roxy picks up the box and exhales before she flicks it open. The breath she sucks in seeing the earrings cuts so deep, it leaves the back of her throat raw.
“They’re stunning,” she gasps. Old gold, yellower than anything she’s ever seen, and set with two rubies nestled in a cluster of tiny diamonds. “Are they vintage?”
“An heirloom. My grandmother’s.”
Her eyes jump back up to the mirror. “You didn’t; I’m on a mission!”
“All the more reason not to lose them,” he says and Roxy wishes she could see him, certain he’s smirking at the other end of the line.
“Merlin…” she whispers and feels the atmosphere shift.
“I want you to have them,” he says.
Roxy doesn’t know what to do with that, with any of it. With him, always tipping her off kilter. She sniffles, self-conscious about how he can see her when she can’t see him, and wipes her nose on the back of her thumb.
“Will you just put them on?” Merlin asks and she can’t stop herself from laughing.
“Okay, okay, I will.”
Hands shaking, she picks the earrings up and slips them on one by one. They’re heavier than she expects and somehow look even richer on her than they did in the box.
Roxy wonders about the last time someone put them on, about all the family occasions of Merlin’s they might’ve seen long before her days, and whether they’ll see more of them on her. The thought alone is enough to make her tear up again and Roxy has to suck in another deep to keep herself level.
“How dare you threaten to ruin my makeup?” she asks because it’s easier than voicing any of the things that are bubbling up in the pit of her stomach.
“Oh no, we can’t have that,” he says in a tone that is equally carefully modulated to sound casual. “You’ll be late.”
Roxy sniffles again, then lets the weight in her chest melt out of her with a sigh. “You know, I don’t have enough words to tell you how touched I am.”
“You, with your English master’s with a distinction?”
“Yes, me.” Her voice is shaky. “I love you so much, and I am so angry that you aren’t here right now for me to tell you that in person.”
Merlin says: “I’ll be in your ear all night… Unless Eggsy commits a colossal fuck up, of course, but I have faith in him. And if you get what we need tonight, you’ll be back in London by tomorrow. We’ll call it being fashionably late, write it off as a time difference.”
Roxy nods, steeling herself. Valentine’s day or not, they have a mission to run. “Have some faith in me, will you. I look far too good not to ace this.”
“I can’t argue with that. You’ve got to get going though; the handlers are waiting.”
“Shit,” Roxy says, remembering the time. “I’m late, aren’t I?” She dashes out of the bathroom to find her shoes as Merlin says: “You’ve still got two minutes to spare.”
“Impeccable timing.”
“As always.”
She tightens the strap on one of her heels, then the other. “It’s a skill, I suppose.”
Standing back up, Roxy runs her palms over the front of her dress to smooth it out and catches one last quick look at herself in the mirror.
“Merlin?” she asks.
“Yes?”
“When I’m back, I think I do want to go out for a proper dinner.”
“I’ll make reservations.”
“Thank you,” she whispers.
In her left ear, the new earpiece comes alive and a female voice says: “Lancelot?”
“Here,” Roxy answers automatically. “I’m about to set off.”
She’s at the door by the time she remembers the roses still splayed out on her bed.
“Go on,” Merlin murmurs in her other ear, “I’ll take care of it.”
“Okay,” she says, and after a beat adds, “I’m off,” for the handler’s benefit.
“I’ll be with you in five,” Merlin tells her as she grabs her keys and clutch to head out.
Shutting the hotel room door behind her, Roxy reaches up to turn off Merlin’s earpiece and slips it into her bag as she heads for the elevators, catching herself in every mirror on the way.