Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Merlin felt the first edges of wakefulness sneak into his mind, and burrowed deeper into his bed to ward it off. He was far too comfortable to be woken right now. He drew the blankets up over him, sighing to himself and letting his muscles loosen, waiting for sleep to take him once more.
Only it refused to.
Merlin tossed about in annoyance. Something was nagging at him, preventing him from truly relaxing, but he refused with everything in him to interrogate what.
He was startled into full wakefulness anyway by the harsh bang of wood against stone, and had no sooner tossed away the cover in indignation than he had seen his own furious visage, staring down at him.
“What the fuck?”

Arthur thought he was a reasonably tolerant man. He allowed his manservant his (many) oddities, he liked to think he was always fair to his people, he listened without letting himself seem too bored to every petty grievance brought before him. But when he had awoken, stiff and sore, only to roll straight out of bed and find himself in Merlin’s chambers with the aforementioned man suspiciously absent, his tolerance had begun to step aside. It began scurrying away when he had seen a lump in his own bed.
It curled away in horror when he saw the person lying in it.
”What the fuck?” his own voice demanded, and he paused for only a moment before his instincts took over. He grabbed the dagger he knew would be under his bed and held it to the imposter’s throat.
“Who the hell are you and how have you impersonated me?”
“Impersonated - you’ve impersonated me!” the other person replied, seeming not overly concerned about the dagger currently threatening them.
“Don’t bother lying; I can see the proof of your sorcery before my own eyes.”
“’The proof of -’ you know what, just look down at yourself.”
“Nice try, but you won’t distract me that easily.”
“Arthur, you great twat, look at your fucking arm!”
And, almost against his own will, he did. And then looked again. And then down at the full length of himself, for good measure. He looked up in horror at the person before him.
“Merlin?!”
“Yes, obviously,“ he replied (and how had Arthur not known before now, there was no one else who would ever speak to him like that), “now can you please take that dagger away from my throat?”
“My throat,” Arthur replied in horror. “Merlin, you have my throat!”
“Yes, Arthur, and you have mine, and all of the rest of me, and how the fuck did this happen?”
“You’re asking me? I should be asking you! You’re the one always bumbling into trouble!”
Arthur felt distinctly wrong-footed by feeling the weight of the glare coming from his own face.
“Alright, fine. It appears we’ve swapped bodies.” He ignored the snort from the person opposite him that seemed to say ’Obviously’, just like he ignored the panic rising pointedly through his gut. “The only logical explanation is sorcery, so it stands to reason that all we have to do is find the sorcerer.”
As if on cue (and if only everything else in Arthur’s life could go so smoothly), there came a great thump from the far corner of his room. He turned instantly towards it, dagger raised, his instincts no duller despite the body he now resided in. He felt, rather than saw, Merlin behind him shift into a similarly defensive stance. As one, they advanced on the noise.
They needn’t have bothered being so careful; the body they were advancing on was dead. Arthur found this himself by giving it a solid kick. Merlin, slightly less direct in his approach, felt for his pulse.
“He can’t have died all that long ago; he’s still fairly warm,” he said.
“Merlin - Merlin, if that is the sorcerer I suspect he is, then the only person who understands what happened is dead.” Merlin-in-Arthur-form turned to the Arthur-in-Merlin form behind him, eyes growing wide.
“Merlin. That means we are well and truly fucked.”

Merlin supposes he must have had worse days than this.
(Though none spring to mind at the moment.)
Behind him, Arthur was glaring daggers into the dead sorcerer’s back, as if the weight of his gaze alone could kill the man again. Merlin, for his part, was doing a damn good job of wearing a track into Arthur’s floor.
“Okay. Okay, it’s not so bad,” Merlin said, and flinched inwardly at hearing Arthur’s voice instead of his own. “So the sorcerer is dead. We’ll just have to figure this out for ourselves. It’s just business as usual, we can ask Gaius and - ”
“No!” Merlin jumped at the shout. “No asking Gaius anything, no telling Gaius, or anyone anything.”
Merlin stared at the man in disbelief.
“But Arthur, I really think we could use the help -”
“No. No one can know about this, Merlin. Absolutely no one. Definitely not until we’ve switched back. God knows how easy I’d be to kill in your body.”
“Hey!”
“It’s true, Merlin, you’re all bones.”
“And you’re half fat, but you don’t see me complaining about the extra weight,” Merlin retorted.
“I am not. fat, ” Arthur replied, and the vision of him trying to look as authoritative and haughty in Merlin’s body as he did in his own had Merlin snorting with laughter.
Arthur hit him upside the head.
“Hey! You can’t do that, this is a King’s body.”
“Yes, and I’m the King, which means I can do whatever I want with my body.”
Merlin snorted again. “Anything, huh?”
Arthur hit him again.
“Shut up, Merlin.”
Merlin was about to retort back when a sobering thought occurred to him. “Arthur… until we can switch back, I’ll have to be the King. You’ll have to be my servant.”
Arthur looked horrified at the idea.
“Merlin, I cannot possibly be expected- “
“’Nobody can know’, remember? We’d have to act as if we were each other.”
“You cannot possibly act as if you were me.”
“What, and you think it’s so easy to be a servant?” Merlin fired back.
“Well, when that servant is you, all I have to do is be horrible at my job, and no one will ever suspect anything,” Arthur replied, all smirks and condescension.
“It’s not that easy, Arthur. You don’t know the first thing about being a servant; you don’t know anything about what I do, running after you all over the place. And if I’m not running after you, I’m running errands for Gauis, or -” Merlin cut himself off before he could say ‘or I’m saving your sorry arse’.
“Or what? Out in the tavern?”
“Out helping the knights,” Merlin replied offhandedly. A second horrifying thought had popped into his head and was now dancing through his brain.
Did he no longer have his magic? What if Arthur did?
“Look. We’ll just have to figure this out, alright? I already know your schedule; I’ll just have to tell you what I’d do if I were me, and you just need to do it. It’s not that hard. You can ask Gwen for help.”
Arthur glared at him. “Alright, fine,” he gritted out at last. “But only because I can’t think of any other option.”
“Then you’ll need to go down to the kitchens and fetch breakfast. The cook will know to expect you, she’ll have everything waiting, you just need to greet her and collect it.”
“Breakfast it is then.”
“Watch out for her spoon, she might want to hit you with it!” Merlin called out at Arthur’s retreating back.
The minute he was gone, Merlin turned from the closed door and muttered a spell into his palm. He sighed with relief when the dragon appeared in between his cupped hand. Arthur may have his body, but thank the gods his magic was still his own.

Chapter Text

Arthur was on his way back from the kitchens, meal in hand and body free of injury, spoon-caused or otherwise, when he ran into Gaius.
“Merlin, my boy,” he greeted, “you ran out in such a hurry this morning that I thought something must be wrong.”
Arthur paused for a minute to think of something appropriately stupid to say before he settled on, “No, just thought I’d get in a bit of exercise.”
He regretted it immediately; there was not a single chance that anyone would believe that Merlin would want to wake up earlier than he needed to, let alone that he would ever exert himself on purpose.
“Exercise…? Ah, of course. And has Arthur taken this exercise well?”
The Arthur in question, who was quite taken aback by Gaius accepting the poor excuse, could think of no way he would respond other than to say, “No, actually, he thought I was suffering from a mental affliction again.”
“Nothing unusual there, then?” Gaius laughed and moved on, leaving an Arthur behind who felt very much as if he’d missed something key in the conversation.

Merlin was getting himself dressed when the door to Arthur’s chambers burst open for a second time that morning, this time to the Merlin-shaped Arthur before him, only looking mildly annoyed instead of outright murderous.
”Do you mind?” he asked, rushing through covering himself up.
Arthur looked back at him incredulously. “Merlin, you’ve never once learned to knock in your life, and you’re asking me if I mind entering my chambers as I please?”
“I was dressing!”
“It’s my body; I’ve seen it all before,” Arthur replied flippantly before moving on, “and anyway, we’ve not discussed me and my struggle in this, which is that the kitchens are noisy and the cook seems offended at your very existence, and I’d always known our Gaius was a bit bizarre, but I swear you’ve passed on your mental affliction to him somehow.” Arthur sniffed as if permanently offended at everything that was Merlin’s fault that he now had to bear.
Merlin, meanwhile, was busy having what felt like his tenth panic attack of the day and was doing his best not to let it on. He let Arthur waffle on (Merlin was the talkative one between them? Really? Give Arthur something to complain about, and he would talk until he was satisfied everyone understood the depth of his suffering, imagined or otherwise)
There were two problems warring for being the center of attention of his panic. Firstly, and most obviously: Gaius didn’t know they’d been swapped, and Merlin currently had no way of telling him; until he could, there was no way that Arthur wouldn’t find out about his magic eventually. Secondly: Arthur himself would have to dress in Merlin’s body at some point. That meant he would have to see it, and all the marks that it bore.
“You can’t be here,” he blurted suddenly, cutting off whatever it was Arthur had been in the middle of saying.
“I very well can be in my own chambers, Merlin,” Arthur sputtered indignantly.
“Obviously, yes,” Merlin gritted out, “what I mean is you can’t be here now. You have to be - at the armoury! You need to polish the leather on the buckles of your armour.” Merlin grasped loosely at the excuse, needing Arthur to buy it.
“I’ve never noticed any polish on them,” Arthur replied suspiciously.
“Well, you wouldn’t if I’m always polishing them, would you? They’d just look normal to you. They’d look weird unpolished.” It was only a bit of a lie; he did polish them. Sometimes. If he remembered to. Mostly, he just kept them looking healthy by magic.
“But why would I need to do that now?”
“Because I haven’t done it in a while and you’ll need to attend to me for the rest of the day; there won’t be time.”
Arthur continued to eye him suspiciously before saying, “If I didn’t know any better, Merlin, I’d think you were trying to get rid of me.”
“I would never, sire,” Merlin replied, putting on his best I’m-innocent-of-any-and-all-charges smile. He rather suspected it didn’t look half as convincing in Arthur’s body.
“Fine. But only because I want this charade to last, I will pretend to polish them, as I don’t doubt you do too.”
“I would never!” Merlin lied. 

The first problem was solved quite easily - one of the advantages to being the King was if someone summoned you at once, unless your name was Merlin, you had to drop everything and obey the summons.
Gaius, understandably, arrived at Arthur’s chambers in a bit of a panic.
“Sire! What’s the matter? The guards said nothing other than you wished to see me as a matter of urgency!”
“Gaius!” Merlin responded, firmly closing the door behind his mentor. “It’s me, Merlin!”
“Sire?” Gaius responded uncertainly.
“It really is me, I promise! Arthur and I have swapped somehow, and he doesn’t want anyone to know, and that includes you, but you can’t know because then you wouldn’t know that he was me and that he doesn’t know about my magic!”
At the mention of magic, Gaius drew back in shock.
“Merlin! What on earth have you done this time?!”
“Nothing, I swear to you! I woke up to Arthur trying to kill me because I looked like him, and I don’t know how, and it’s probably got something to do with the dead sorcerer hiding in the cupboard that we haven’t figured out how to get rid of yet!”
(Merlin knew how to get rid of a dead body. What he really needed to figure out was how to get rid of one without letting Arthur know that this was a thing he had done before.)
Gaius looked in the direction of the wardrobe in question before walking towards it and pulling the sorcerer out. In the tense minutes that followed, Merlin fidgeted while Gaius took inventory of the man’s possession. At last, he recovered some kind of charm from a hidden pocket on the man. Merlin felt a shudder run through him as Gaius held it, as if he could sense the traces of something still on it, radiating a coldness he hadn’t noticed before.
“What is it, Gaius?”
“I’m not quite sure. I’ll have to take it back to look into it a bit more.”
“Thank you, Gaius. I’ll try to help where I can.
“And please don’t let Arthur know you know; he’d kill me if he found out.”
“Of course, my boy,” he replied, before pausing. “Where is Arthur? I would have expected he wouldn’t let you out of his sight given the condition of the both of you.”
Merlin grinned back sheepishly. “Polishing some armour? I had to make him do something to get rid of him! He agreed to pretend to be my servant for now, since he insists that no one can know.”
Gaius just raised that eyebrow at him, as if in reprimand before turning back to the body and getting Merlin to put it back in the wardrobe.
He began to make his way out of Arthur’s chambers, turning just as he was at the door.
“Merlin, I cannot stress how much more careful we both need to be with Arthur in your body. He may not know the dangers you face, but there are those who see you as a target.”
“I know, Gaius. I’ll protect him. I always have.”

Chapter Text

Arthur’d much rather be keeping an eye on Merlin and making sure he didn’t make a fool of himself (as usual) while wearing Arthur’s skin, but the man in question had insisted that Gaius would be expecting him to help with inventory. And so to take inventory Arthur went, though he hadn’t made it a secret how much he didn’t want to.
Which is how he found himself squeezed beside Gaius on the balcony that lined the wall of the physician’s quarters, trying not to grimace as he realised all the many repulsive things he seemed to use in his remedies. He was developing a serious reluctance to ever having another one of Gaius’ cures again, illness and injury be damned.
So lost was he in his disgust that it took about an embarrassing number rounds of Gaius explaining to him what each bottle contained, how much was left, and how to write it down in his baffling inventory before Arthur realised the physician didn’t actually think Merlin was that stupid. He pulled back in annoyance, looking to the ceiling to find some strength to not actually strangle his incompetent manservant the next time he saw him.
”He told you, didn’t he?” he grit out.
Gaius floundered for a moment, not quite meeting Arthur’s eye.
”Who? Told me what?” Arthur supposed Gaius thought he was being nonchalant, but all he was doing was making his sudden onset headache worse.
”Merlin. He told you that we’ve been switched.”
Gaius paused, as if evaluating how well he could get away with lying, before eventually saying, with no small air of defeat, “yes, sire.”
Arthur pinched his brow between his fingers.
”That idiot!”

Arthur supposed he was rather making a habit of slamming open the door to his chambers today, but he could hardly be blamed when Merlin seemed to be conspiring with the universe to try their utmost to piss him off.
”Merlin!” he bellowed as he entered, not even giving the man in question a chance to rise from where he’d been seated at Arthur’s desk before barelling forward. “What part of 'keep this a secret' did you not understand?”
”Erm… any chance I can convince you I have no idea what you’re talking about?”
Arthur twisted his ear between his fingers.
”Who else did you tell, hm? Gwen? The knights? Half the court?”
”Ow, no, Arthur! Only Gauis, I swear!”
Arthur believed him, but he glared at him a bit more for good measure before letting him go.
”You know if someone sees you do that, I can very easily just send you to the stocks, right? Or the dungeon?”
”I haven’t put you in the stocks in years!”
”Well then it must have been a really bad day for you, mustn’t it?” Merlin hissed.
”Why did you tell Gaius?” Arthur asked.
”For one, it’s a lot easier to get rid of the body that used to be stuffed in your wardrobe when you can just ask the court physician to declare his death and move it. And I meant it when I said we can really use his help, he’s the closest thing to an expert on magic that we have.”
Arthur glared at him for a few more moments, before hissing out, “Fine. But don’t think for a second that I’m happy about any of this.”
He didn’t catch whatever Merlin uttered under his breath next, but he knew it was enough to warrant the slap he sent his was in return. He walked around the desk to see what Merlin had been up to.
”Please say you haven’t botched up my correspondence.”
Merlin rolled his eyes. “Of course I haven’t. I help you write them half the time, don’t I?”
This was a fair and solid point, and so Arthur dutifully ignored it.
”Well, what next then, on your list of insurmountable chores?”
He’d be lying to say he was amused by the clear irritation he was causing Merlin.
”Nothing urgent, other than fetching dinner soon. Everything else can wait.”
”See, I knew you did nothing!” Arthur laughed, walking away. His glee was cut off abruptly when he tripped over the edge of the rug.
”Inherited my clumsiness, then, have you?” Merlin sounded incredibly pleased with himself, and Arthur pushed back the urge to throw something at him.
”I’ll just fetch my dinner then, shall I?” he eventually grit out.

After Arthur had eaten (and survived another trip to the kitchens), he and Merlin had somewhat settled into their usual roles: Merlin doing what chores he could whilst seated in front of the fire; and Arthur at his desk attending to the many most boring aspects of being King. He was struggling though; while the buffer of time had soothed the edges of his anger, he was beginning to grow more and more worried about the predicament they’d found themselves in. He didn’t have the barest inkling on where to start tackling it; he knew next to nothing of magic, and with the sorcerer dead, he didn’t know which way to turn.
”Merlin… when you told Gauis-” he started, but wasn’t sure how to voice his next question.
Luckily for him, even in the state in which they now found themselves, Merlin knew what he needed without him needing to ask.
”He searched the body. He thinks he found something, but he’s trying to get more information before saying anything further.”
Arthur nodded. Just as Merlin was turning back to his task, Arthur spoke, “You were right -” he paused, gathering his next words. “- to tell him. We needed the help.”
Merlin just smiled at him softly before once again getting absorbed in his work.

At some point in the hours that followed, he must have fallen asleep, because he was next aware of the sensation of someone shoving him off of his desk.
”Wha- Merlin!”
Merlin just smiled at him.
”Time for bed, I think, sire,” he said, moving around to pull him up.
If Arthur hadn’t still felt half asleep, he would have argued. As it was, all he could do was glare at Merlin before heading towards his bed.
”What do you think you’re doing?” Merlin called after him.
”Going to sleep?” Arthur responded in that tone he reserved when Merlin was being particularly dense.
”And what, you expect me to sleep in my cot? You don’t think people will find it strange that the king of Camelot is spending the night in the physician’s quarters?” Merlin retorted.
”Just sleep in the antechamber, don’t be stupid, Merlin,” Arthur replied exasperatedly.
”Fine. But I’m going there now, and you won’t see me again until morning, so you’re getting your own damn self ready for bed,” he said, turning on his heel and slamming the door behind him.
Arthur rolled his eyes, picking up the nightclothes Merlin had laid out on the bed. As he was lifting his tunic up, he hesitated. He’d fortunately not yet had to relieve himself today (though that was an urge which was making itself increasingly apparent), and Merlin had for some reason fallen asleep in his day clothes- all of which to say so far he’d gotten away with not seeing Merlin’s body in any state of undress.
He felt a flush creep along his cheeks. This was stupid he told himself. I’ve seen other men naked before, so this shouldn’t be such a big deal. For all the good that did, it didn’t change that he’d never needed to see, or even touch, someone else’s body that intimately before.
And.
Well, and this was Merlin. He’d long since pushed the part of him that knew just how he cared for the other man to some distant corner of his mind, where he refused to interrogate it. Now, being in this position, he tried in vain to suppress the excitement of the idea, which fought with the shame the impulse triggered.
Eventually, he decided to just grit his teeth and do it. He pinched the edges of the tunic between his fingers, lifting it up carefully. With one last curse aimed at himself and at the universe which pushed him into this predicament, he looked down.
And stared.
He thought he’d known what to expect - pale skin, and faint muscle stretched over bone. He didn’t have the faculty to check if that was true.
All he could see was the starbust scar that dominated Merlin’s chest.