Chapter Text
‘How long have you been training to be a prat, my lord!’
The half smile, the insolent bow, a brow raised defiantly in mock submission. Arthur Pendragon, prince and heir of Camelot would realise, although embarrassingly late, that this is the moment that would change his life. The mocking bow would remain forever etched in the halls of his mind in all its sarcastic glory.
At the moment though, he can only feel disbelief mingled with thinly veiled anger as his men chuckle behind him, enjoying his humiliation.
Arthur has never had many friends. If he is honest with himself, which he rarely choses to be, he might even admit that there is not a single person in Camelot whom he would call a friend. The laughter of his knights shouldn’t bother him, but it does, betrayal stinging and pinching as he clenches his jaw and raises his weapon. The peasant boy in front of him merely happens to be a convenient target to dispel the humiliation rippling inside him; he’d started it after all.
Never let your enemies get the better of you. That had been one of the first things his father had taught him.
As Arthur swings the mace around in a circle, careful not to actually kill the man, he tries to remember, distractedly, if his father had ever taught him anything about recognising said enemies. He’d just taught him to doubt everyone. Everyone wanted something from him. No one could be trusted.
The metal glints silver in the daylight as the peasant boy steps back, alarmed but still not afraid. Arthur would realise, late as well, that he is almost impressed in the face of that unwarranted bravery. The mace swings dangerously close once, to the boy’s head, and gets stuck into something. After that, it is a haze of confusion, and Arthur looks on as years of training betrays him into making silly mistakes, stumbling over thin air, falling over scraps of metal that had missed his eye.
Humiliation burns inside him stronger as his men stop chuckling, the silence surrounding him heavier than the laughter. His dignity commands him to admit defeat, pride suppressed in a moment of virtue as he pardons the peasant boy of what might otherwise be a ticket to the dungeons, eyes focused on the young face for the first time since he’d met him. Arthur walks back over to his men, chin held high, mind a haze of confusion and humiliation and something he might never admit to himself. And if the image of gold flashing in blue eyes like the sun peeking from behind clouds passes by his eyes as he walks away, Arthur dismisses it as a trick of the daylight.
‘I don’t need a servant, Father.’
‘You have one anyway.’
‘But—’
‘The boy saved your life Arthur. He must be rewarded. What greater reward can be there than the honour of serving the Prince.’
‘I don’t think he wants—’
‘You’re the future king of Camelot, Arthur. Don’t bother me with trivialities.’
‘Come on Merlin, you’re not even trying,’ Arthur punctuates the last word with a clang as his sword comes in contact with the sheild.
The peasant boy is insolent, etiquette-less, insubordinate, and a clumsy oaf on top of that. He trips on his two feet and somehow managed to end up splayed on the grass, a mass of tangled limbs as Arthur waits for him to get up again. He is full of restless energy, with no idea what to do with a servant, having had none as he was a child.
Apparently, Merlin has some idea because he complains about the load of duties he’s been assigned by the Royal Housekeeper as personal manservant all the way back to Arthur’s chambers. Infact, all he does is complain.
‘My head’s ringing and now I have to polish your armour.’
Arthur had never paid attention to that. He just found his armour polished by someone and dismissed it at that. He files it away as a task he could assign Merlin when he would want to, trying to remember what other duties have been taken care of that he doesn’t know about. Merlin rambles behind him as he shuts the door to his chambers, a list forming in his mind in response to the mind numbing chatter.
- Polish the armour
- Wash dirty socks
- Wash dirty shirts
Arthur glances about his chambers to find anything more that needs doing. He finds a roll of parchments stuffed under his desk. He’d meant to read them before training, but Leon had intercepted him with problems regarding patrol duty. He looks at Merlin, wondering if he knows how to read. Perhaps he could read them and provide the gist to Arthur.
Merlin just stares back, dazed and rubbing his temple.
Idiot , Arthur thinks and piles a stack of dirty clothes in his arms.
Maybe he is not as useless as he looks, Arthur concedes grudgingly as glances at Merlin talking to Gauis in the royal feast after they have defeated Valiant. He might even be tolerable. That doesn’t stop Arthur from adding into his list of chores though. He’s been adding to it all day.
When Merlin tells him to buy a drink for him and call it even , Arthur is momentarily stunned, once again struck by the novelty of utter unexpectedness that Merlin carries with him.
He just spouts every bumbling thought that stumbles into his pea sized brain , Arthur wonders and finds that he isn’t as annoyed at this realisation as he might’ve been two days ago.
‘I can’t be seen buying drinks for my servant, Merlin,’ he says instead, feeling his mouth stretch into an amused smile of its own volition.
‘You sacked me,’ Merlin says, eyes mistrustful as his own features smooth out into the beginnings of a grin.
It might be fun to wash that grin off his face, Arthur thinks, the excitement of the feasthall getting to him at last as he recounts the list of chores he’s been forming in his mind for the better part of the day.
‘My clothes need washing, my boots need cleaning, you will repair my armour, and,’ he pauses, savouring this last bit—it’d come to him in a moment of inspiration, right as he’d plunged the sword into Valiant’s armour, ‘and someone needs to muck out my stables.’
Merlin’s face turns sour, but the sparkle in his eyes never dims even as he turns away towards another servant, mouth enveloped not-so-discreetly around the word prat . Arthur grins. He doesn’t think Merlin had wanted the job—not with how much he vocally insults the crown prince on a regular basis—but now, well, he is stuck.
When the goblet hits the floor, Merlin’s pale wrist going limp, Arthur doesn’t think. He just acts. That’s what he is good at, after all—unhindered, uninterrupted action. That is what he’s been trained for. There is no time—no need—to think in battle. There is just skill and practice and the line between point A and point B and the knowledge that the path connecting the two was littered with obstacles you can obliterate.
Arthur doesn’t like to think. So he doesn’t.
It is only after Merlin is lying on the wooden bed in Gaius’s chambers, unmoving and pale as thoughts start to circle around his head like hungry vultures.
Arthur waits for only Gaius to tell him how he can fix this—because he would fix this—before losing himself in the action again. There was little he could not do, that was what he tells himself as he leads his horse out of the stables, going against his father’s explicit orders for the first time in as many years. Arthur hasn’t had a rebellious phase, he’d just been trained to outgrow it before he could experience it, like many other things. He had never gone against his father’s wishes, but he also remembers the red smeared on his sword and the cries of children deafening around him as he’d followed his father’s orders only to wonder for months later if he’d done the right thing. He’d wished then, fifteen and very nearly on the verge of a rebellion that would never be brave enough to surface, that he’d had the courage to question, to challenge, to demand reasons and answers before merely carrying orders. He’d wished to become the prince he was meant to be, not just the soldier he was, with no autonomy of his own, nor any conscience to stand up for what he believed.
That thought has long since been extracted out of him, but it is there again, brighter than ever before. He will not simply obey if obeying meant that someone dies because of him. Even if it is a servant he barely tolerates.
Even if that servant is the only person in the entire castle who doesn’t bow down in respect, doesn’t shut his mouth in submission, doesn’t stop questioning, doesn’t hesitate to challenge.
‘You’re coming back?’
‘She’s my mother, Arthur,’ Merlin says, wistful and apologetic and certain, and Arthur doesn’t let himself panic, because he would’ve been certain too, if it had been his mother. He would’ve given up anything, he thinks sometimes, if it was his mother that he would’ve gotten in return. Arthur cannot blame Merlin for choosing his own over anyone.
‘I understand,’ he says and he does, ‘I would’ve done the same.’
He waits for three hours before making his way to stables after Merlin leaves with his mother. The sun is still high over the horizon, and Arthur allows himself a rare grin—there is no one to see it after all—and urges his horse into a gallop through the narrow path cutting through the woods. He’ll make it in good time.
His father doesn’t know, of course. He remembers the flower and how he’d been punished with grain reports and nearly double the patrol duties for almost a week after. He wonders what it would be like this time, when his father figures out that he’s had yet another reappearance of the rebellious son he’d lost young and early, replaced quietly and stubbornly by the prince everyone expected him to be—indifferent, arrogant and obedient. It has been years of that obedience, and it was only in the last few months that he’d started questioning again, started sneaking behind rules and guards and his father’s expectations. His father could blame Merlin for that if he wished, Arthur thinks, and rides faster.
The sooner he catches up, the better.
When he does catch up, darkness has fallen over the canopy of leaves overhead and Merlin is a skittish bird flitting around in the quiet stillness, always thrumming with noise and action and laughter. Arthur envies it sometimes—the ease with which his manservant moves in this world, the familiarity of his body especially when they are in the wild, the freedom of his words as they fall out of his insolent mouth. He envies most how he hasn’t a care in the world, how he is often unaware of all that is fearsome and dangerous, as if there is never a doubt of him ever being harmed. Which is why when he sees Merlin lurking in the dark with a sword held limply is his hands, like a child play acting in a village festival, he lifts his own gleaming sword at Merlin’s unprotected back
‘I’d ask you for money,’ he says, and Merlin doesn’t even twitch once he hears his voice, just stays turned away like a trusting fool, ‘but I know you don’t have any.’
‘Arthur!’ He says, turns around, and almost takes Arthur’s head off, radiating happiness in a way that Arthur also envies.
‘Put the sword down Merlin, you look ridiculous,’
He does look ridiculous, entirely unfamiliar with the hilt, uncaring of the sharp edges. Arthur makes sure to watch the surroundings as they make their way to where the other’s have set camp.
Arthur doesn’t like Will. Arthur does like Hunith and reminds himself of the fact every time the voice in his head that sounds frustratingly like his father’s tells him to go back and leave these ungrateful people to their fate. He is not proud of the thought, but then, there are many things he is not proud of. He stays near Hunith and Merlin and tries to knock some sense into his servant’s thickheaded friend. He doesn’t understand their friendship either, but Morgana starts giving him significant looks he doesn’t understand whenever he tries to complain about said friend, so he refrains. The battle is like any other battle, the scent of blood clouding the air as swords clash together he fights in routine, without thought, without even conscience effort. He’s been doing this long enough for the actions to bleed back into the background as he is senses focus on everything that is not the man dying in front of him, his intestines coming out with Arthur’s sword. He can hear distant crying, a flash of gold somewhere to his right, a wind passing by, the cries of men being impaled and men hitting walls, the horses running off into a panic. And then he sees the unnatural storm that comes and goes as if at the will of a beckoning finger, and he sees the flash of gold in Merlin’s eyes, his hair as wild and untamed as the strom he’s summoned, and he sees his friend take up the blame for being a sorcerer before dying. Arthur sees—he can only see, and it is long before he can think.
What he thinks, the flames rising from the pyre and coming entirely too close to them, is something along the lines of Never let the enemies get the better of you and don’t trust don’t trust don’t trust don’t trust anyone ever in your entire life , all in his father’s cutting voice. What he feels is anger. There are tears in Merlin’s eyes as he stands beside him, and Arthur says ‘I’m sorry,’ and he says ‘That’s what you were going to tell me,’ and he doesn’t mean to say any of those things.
What he does mean to say is, ‘You should’ve told me,’ and he does say it, thought he doesn’t know what it achieves. He walks away, angry and indifferent, and he doesn’t blame himself for the way sadness pools in Merlin’s features as he hears the words being spoken to him while his best friend is burning away—the death of a sorcerer. The death which should’ve been Merlin’s.