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Arthur is dizzy and dumb with wine again.
He’s also thinking about Merlin again.
He keeps telling himself he’s refilling his glass to drown thoughts of Merlin, to escape from the relentless tide of sickness and betrayal building and solidifying in his gut like swallowed lead, but what ends up happening is the wine just seems to dissolve his defenses in its blood-colored sea. Instead of walling Merlin off in his mind he’s flooded with him. His blue eyes and improbable pink lips and the smell of herbs in his clothes. He is haunted by the last time he saw Merlin, and cannot rid his mind from the memory of tears upon cheeks and his mouth twisted in a litany of confessions, of apologies.
Arthur pours the rest of the bottle into his goblet, disappointed to find there’s only a finger or so left. He orders for more, and the servant who is not Merlin calls him sire, nods formally, and leaves out the door with a straight back and polished shoes and all of it, all of it just makes Arthur miss Merlin all the more furiously.
It’s a terrible thing, to miss a version of someone that does not exist.
Arthur misses his Merlin. The whip-tongued, insolent, idiot peasant boy who has always completely and utterly refused to treat him as if he was special, save for the rare, precious moments he got that strange intensity to his gaze and told him with grave certainty that he was the most special. He misses the impossibility of Merlin, the mess of contradictions, the fierce loyalty and wild irreverence. But now—now that he knows about the magic—every single moment of their history together is cast in a new and terrible light. Merlin is not a fool who has flashes of unexpected brilliance, he’s a powerful sorcerer only masquerading as a fool. And it hurts, to be so wrong about the person Arthur trusted most in the whole of the world. It hurts, to only have lies to comfort himself with.
The servant returns with another open bottle. Arthur takes it and dismisses him, waving him off. He does not even bother with the goblet his time, and swigs straight from the glass neck. As he swallows the bitter-sweetness, he thinks with a fierce lurch of his heart that what hurts the very most is not being lied to. It’s having been so stupid and blind he could not even realize he was being lied to in the first place.
For the last several years, (ever since Merlin came to Camelot, really,) Arthur has been distantly aware of some protective, guardian force watching over him and keeping him from harm. And at the same time, he has been more acutely aware that there is something special about Merlin. Something he could not understand or pin down, something he has been afraid to, because of what that revelation might say about him. Something strange and magical clinging to him like fog, surrounding him, inside of him, occasionally revealing itself if the angle is just right, the lighting just so.
Arthur feels quite foolish, now, upon realizing that the invisible guardian force he’s been sensing and the peculiar haze about Merlin were one and the same. And that they were both magic, the whole damn time.
He finishes the bottle of wine and promptly retches it all up, a scarlet lake on the floor of his quarters like spilled blood a stranger will mop up. And maybe Merlin is a stranger too, but at least Arthur knows the way he looks when he is knelt down and scrubbing. The pale swan-curve of his neck, the black of his hair, the corner of his mouth like a foxtail, worrying its way into tender skin and refusing to be plucked without a fight.
—-
Arthur thinks about it obsessively. Tumbling incidents in his head one by one, mulling them over until they are bruised like too-ripe fruit, glass battered smooth and opaque by the unyielding rage of the sea.
There’s a physical sensation brought about by magic, he realizes. Something prickling and warm, like nettles. Something he’s felt touch him and leave him breathless, like the brushes of an insect’s wing, a sting at the back of his neck, crackling along his scalp. It’s strange and unsettling to accept that he is well-accustomed to the touch of sorcery, even if he did not recognize it until now. That there was magic, all along, in everything he did. Magic in his bath water, clinging to the shine of his armor, cooked into his food, flickering in the fires Merlin lit to heat his quarters. It makes Arthur feel sick to think about, but the more he presses on this tender wound, the more he realizes it is not a sickness born of disgust, or anger, or even the ache of betrayal. At least not entirely.
Mostly, it is a sickness born of longing. Of lack.
He has grown so subconsciously dependent upon the burn of magic flickering over his skin in the last few years that without it, he does not feel whole.
—-
Arthur has wanted Merlin for a terribly, shamefully long time. So much so it’s not even something he thinks about consciously anymore, it’s just who he is, something written into the fabric of his being, carved into his bones like scrimshaw. He thought it might eventually die if he neglected it, since there was nowhere for it to grow. He denied it sun and water and left it in the darkest recesses of himself to wither as soon as he realized what it was, and there it has remained.
There’s a garden within the castle grounds that once belongs to his mother. When she died and Arthur was born, Uther ordered the gates locked and abandoned it, so that everything growing therein might wilt to nothingness along with any word of the once queen. Arthur learned of its existence when he was thirteen, and snuck out one evening to find it, all the while chastising himself for foolishly imagining he might find her there: preserved behind the latched gates, hidden among dead trees, a white wisp awaiting him so that he might free her. In his mind’s eye, he visualized everything dry and crisp and yellow and bitter, like the Fisher King’s land.
But when he did make it to the garden and pressed his face to the heavy iron bars to behold it, he found the grounds wild and overgrown. Nothing had died when it stopped being tended to: instead it grew freely and frantically, ivy eclipsing stone walls, branches criss-crossing and twisting with vines until he could not differentiate one plant’s swift green tendrils from another. He stood for a long time at his vantage point outside the locked and rusted gate, and watched rabbits rustle through the brush, bees pollinate the vast explosion of feral, nameless blossoms.
And that is exactly how loving Merlin has gone. He tried his hardest not to look at it. He told himself it was an impossible, folly desire and that nothing would ever come of it, so he locked it away like his father hid his mother’s garden. But when he dares to peer at it from behind the gate, it has not grown pale and brittle. It is rich and lush and alive. It has covered and consumed him, as if Arthur is the stone wall constricted in the choke of ivy, and there is nothing he can do about it. No hope in taming it, pruning it, managing it.
It grows and grows, until it is not a garden at all anymore, but the thick of nature itself, as wild as the wood.
And this is why Arthur cannot stay locked up in his room for much longer. He wants to be angry with Merlin, and he is. But more than that, he misses him. He needs him. He yearns so powerfully for his proximity that it is debilitating. He needs the herb and tack-polish smell of him, the slice of his smile, the crystal blue of his eyes. He needs the way he has never, not once, let Arthur treat him as if he is less than him. He’s always made it quite clear he views them as equals, and so they are, and so they have been, and without that, Arthur is truly alone.
He dreams of sinking his hands into a thatch of foliage, and vines tightening around his wrist until his blood slows.
—-
Arthur thinks of the sphere that found him in the dank caves beneath the forest of Balor, for even when he thought he was risking his life to save Merlin, it was Merlin himself who made it possible. He thinks of the unicorn, of the Questing Beast, of the dragon. Of all the countless times some mysterious light cracked through the darkness and sowed the seeds of hope into him yet again. Of all the times he felt that there was a power surrounding his body, and providing him with the last shred of strength he required to defeat a foe.
And every time, it was only Merlin.
Merlin. Merlin guiding his hand, his sword, his crossbow. Merlin cupping his heart between sweet pale palms, and keeping it safe.
—-
He lasts just short of a week before the distance becomes unbearable. Arthur hates being away from Merlin. His new servant is too proper and too serious and far too adept at his job. Arthur feels like a prize hunting hound, coddled and groomed, spoiled so that there is not a single rough edge about him anymore. And that is not what he wants. He wants the way Merlin combs his hair too roughly, the way he calls him arrogant when he thinks he’s grown too far from the needs of his people, the way his gaze hangs on him when he trains but drops back down to whatever he’s doing when Arthur rounds on him to check that he’s looking, because nothing makes him feel more worthy or actualized than the weight of Merlin’s eyes resting upon him like a snow-heavy bough. He rarely manages to catch him in the act but sometimes Arthur freezes time, something cackling between them unspoken as their eyes lock. I see you, and you see me, too, is what it feels like in these moments. You are the only person who has ever seen me, Arthur had thought, and he used to wonder if Merlin was thinking the same exact thing from across the green, his hand clutched around a neatshoof oil soaked rag as he blacked Arthur’s boots.
Now he knows that is not what Merlin was thinking, but perhaps he wanted to think it. Perhaps he wanted Arthur to see his magic, to know it consciously instead of just with his body, the instinctive shiver of being brushed with something ineffable and sun-golden.
And Arthur misses even that, he realizes. The unmatched sensation of being watched, protected, charmed. Of being seen, and flayed, and loved all the same no matter how ugly his insides were spilled out to rifle amongst. And so, he realizes there is nothing to do but seek out that singular burn yet again.
—-
Halfway into a bottle of wine, Arthur cracks and shatters to bits far too small to collect and reassemble alone, without magic. So, he finds himself stumbling down the stairs and knocking on the physician’s quarters, throat too thick to even say Merlin’s name.
Gaius opens the door and studies Arthur with unreadable eyes for a moment. “Sire,” he says, but Arthur hardly hears him over the roar of blood in his own ears as he peers over over his shoulder and into the room, where Merlin sits frozen at the table, eyes red-rimmed like he’s spent days crying, face even more wan and pale than usual. Arthur’s insides gather and lurch powerfully at the sight, and he wonders how he’s lasted so long without the sight of him. “Gaius,” he says, studying Merlin, the stricken look in his eyes, the tremor of his full mouth. “I need to speak to my servant alone.”
“Of course, my lord,” Gaius says after a moment, exchanging a long, loaded look with Merlin before disappearing out the door.
They end up in Merlin’s quarters anyway, as if even the rows of bottles and herbs stacked against the walls are too much an audience to discuss something as secret as magic. “I should have told you,” Merlin blurts as soon as the door is latched behind them. “I should have—“
Arthur shakes his head, cuts him off. “I understand why you thought you couldn’t,” he admits in a clipped voice. “You had every reason to think that telling me would put you in danger.”
They waver there together for a moment, but it’s not enough, it’s not the full truth, it’s not all Arthur has to say. So before he can stop himself he’s spilling, “But—you—you could have told me, because I never would have hurt you,” he explains, voice coming out choppy, fractured, thick with the threat of tears. “Even if you had done something truly terrible, I would have made excuses, broken the rules, defied my father. You must know I would have. You must know by now that’s how I am.”
Merlin does not say anything, but Arthur hears the click of his throat as he swallows, feels the heat of his gaze burning into him critically, like he’s not certain he can trust anything he’s saying. Like this might be a trick. Arthur tries his hardest to be patient, to sit there and wait for a response instead of gripping Merlin by his narrow, bony shoulders and shaking one out of him.
Eventually he inhales a ragged breath, head in his hands as he asks in a very tired voice, “Arthur, why are you here?”
And Arthur doesn't know how to answer that, not really. There is too much surging inside him, threatening to rupture his chest and spill forth. Because I love you and can’t bear to be away from you. Because I cant stop going over our whole history together and thinking about how you were there, protecting me, when I thought I was protecting you. Because I miss the feel of your magic on my skin, even though it frightens me. Because I’m beginning to realize I would rather live as a peasant by your side outside Camelot than a prince within its walls, if that’s what it takes to have you. All of you. He swallows thickly and chews the inside of his cheek, eventually settling upon. “Because—I want you to show me.”
Merlin looks up, eyes glistening in the candle-light, wet to the point of near overflow. “Show you what?”
Arthur shrugs, rubs his arms, squirming with discomfort and incredulity. “What you can do,” he says, each word thorned in his mouth. “How your magic works.”
Merlin stares at him for a long time, like he cannot believe this conversation is happening. And normally Arthur would rip his gaze away at such sustained scrutiny, but not this time. He’s so relieved to see Merlin at all that he cannot look away. His gaze sweeps over him again and again: the jut of his throat bobbing as he swallows, the pale ghosts of his hands as they twist in the hem of his own tunic, the orange reflection of the candle’s flame in the black of his hair. Then, he licks his lips and murmurs, “It’s—it’s not evil, or bad, inherently. It’s just energy. I can move things, for example, using my mind. I can affect, um, the weather. Start fires, or put them out.” Then he chokes out a mirthless laugh, eyes flicking to the ceiling before he adds, “I can talk to dragons.”
Arthur’s heart clenches, speeding in the cage of his chest. This is too much for him to process, but more than that it’s not what he actually wants. “Don’t tell me these things,” he spits out, making a fist in his own trousers, frustrated. “Show me.”
Merlin’s eyes are wide, startled. “You want me to call a dragon to Camelot?”
“No! Don't be an idiot, I want—I want you to show me the other bits. Do some magic,” he begs, and it comes out so sharp and reedy he pauses, realizing what this might sound like, to Merlin. A threat, a corner he’s backing him into. So he clears his throat and softens his voice before murmuring, “It isn’t a trap. I am not going to hurt you, I just—I want to see. To understand. You have my word.”
After a while Merlin nods, something dark and resigned slicing across his gaze before he reaches out and produces a sudden flame from his cupped palms. It flickers between their bodies as they hunch together, illuminating the sunken, tired angles of Merlin’s face. Instead of staring into the fire Arthur instead studies the way it plays over Merlin’s cheek bones. Arthur wants to trace the shadows beneath them, with his fingers first, and then his lips. He leans instinctively closer and then he feels the shiver of magic dancing around the fire like an invisible cloud and oh—yes, there it is. He freezes and focuses, trying to chase the sensation, to categorize it. “What are you thinking?” Merlin asks, flexing his fingers so the flame winks out for the briefest of moments before shuddering back to life.
“Just that—did you know that it feels a certain way? The magic, I mean. When it touches me,” he admits.
Merlin snuffs the fire immediately, gaze flashing up to behold Arthur through the haze of sudden smoke. “I—no. What does it feel like?” He sounds wary, like he’s worried it hurts.
Arthur’s stomach twists at the loss of heat. “Light it again,” he says gently. “I’ll try and describe it.”
The flame wavers into existence and Arthur shifts closer, holding his breath as he very gently lays his hands on the backs of Merlin’s, thumbing over his knuckles, watching the fire intensify, crackle, the flame jumping into a pinwheel of sparks at his added touch. Interesting, he thinks, throat thick with longing. Merlin twists the shape of the fire into a horse, its neck an elegant arch, tail lashing in tendrils of gold. “It’s beautiful,” Arthur admits, staring at the light where it plays off the lines and creases in Merlin’s careful palms. “And it feels—I don’t know. Warm.”
“That’s the fire, Arthur,” Merlin jokes in a low voice, the corner of his mouth twitching up into an almost smile as he studies Arthur through the dancing flames, eyes reflecting them back so his pupils are wide and gold. “All fire is warm.”
“Shut up,” Arthur huffs out, with no real heart in it. He drops his hands before leaning in and pressing his knee into Merlin’s, because he cannot stand to not touch him right now, in some way. “It’s different, it’s a different warmth. It’s like. A heartbeat or something, that thrums.”
Merlin’s face grows somber. “I didn’t know you could sense it, all this time.”
Heart racing, Arthur swallows. “There were so many moments, out in the forest when I’d—I’d feel it. The warmth, against the back of my neck, prickling the hair up. We’d be fighting bandits or some awful monster and I’d think you were hiding.” His voice falters at this point but he forces himself to press on, gaze skittering down to the bare floor boards between his feet, worn from use. “And I’d call you a coward—I acted like I minded. But I didn’t mind. I liked feeling strong. Like nothing would happen to you because I was there.”
“Arthur,” Merlin breathes, and it sounds like an apology. Or perhaps not an apology, maybe—forgiveness, instead.
Arthur holds a hand up, silencing Merlin so he doesn’t lose his nerve and stop confessing. “I only felt strong because I felt it—felt this. This warmth, this force, this energy, whatever it is. It felt like a presence that would watch over me and it made me feel invincible but—I was so stupid,” he chokes out, shaking his head, cheeks burning, throat tight. “It was you all along. I wasn’t strong.”
Merlin’s fire disappears as he reaches out, encircles Arthur’s wrist with his long fingers, sudden and hot. “You are strong,” he says, with such certainty. The certainty of a man who has been ensuring strength in another. It’s humiliating, in some ways, but more than that it’s heart-stopping. Arthur’s breath trips, his blood stops. Then Merlin lets go, and conjures what looks like a crow’s feather, black and inky. He absentmindedly strokes up and down it, fingers white against the lovely soot-black. “I wanted to tell you the truth so badly, you know.”
It takes Arthur a long time to reply because his throat is tear-thick, eyes glistening as he swallows and swallows, grits his teeth until the urge to crumble passes in dust, like a wave of sickness. “I didn’t make it very easy for you,” he says.
Merlin wets his lips before frowning, gaze dark. “I thought you might put me to death,” he admits, and it feels like an arrow through Arthur’s heart, the cold terrible truth. His own cruelty, his father’s cruelty, reflected back to him in the flint black shine of Merlin’s wet eyes, the obsidian feather he worries between his knuckles. “It’s what I’ve been thinking the last few days. Wondering if you were going to kill me, imprison me. If you were talking to Uther, attempting to pardon my life. Or just—if you were planning on banishing me. Never speaking to me again. I wondered what I’d do without you. And I—I hated myself for putting you in that position. So, I know it hasn’t been easy for you, either.”
It moves Arthur to know that was what Merlin was concerned about. Not his own life but Arthur’s difficult decision, his tumult, his conflicted rage of feeling. Again and again, he realizes that Merlin is too good for him to comprehend, his only and truest friend. The truest friend anyone could ask for, and here Arthur is, here he has always been: longing for impossible things for him. Twisting the purity of Merlin’s love into something filthy and fractured and awful. He shakes his head, scrubbing a hand over his mouth. “I thought it might be clear, by now, that I do nothing but bend the rules to accommodate you,” he admits, throat constricting, voice wet. “That I’d never—I couldn’t ever. Merlin.” He tries, he tries so very hard, but the words are lost to feeling and his hands start to shake as he wipes his eyes. He cannot speak. He cannot.
Merlin hands him the black feather, like he knows Arthur is in love with him. Like he knows he will die for any scrap of him.
Arthur takes it, smoothing his fingers up and down the spine of it just like Merlin did. It’s soft, black like night and shiny like the stars mired within it, faintly oily like Merlin’s hair. “You see—this, too. I can tell it’s magic, just from holding it. Now that I know what magic feels like, anyway. It has that warmth. It makes my fingers prickle.”
Merlin nods quietly. “Do you want to see more?”
“Yes,” Arthur admits, as he tucks the feather into his pocket like a keepsake. Touch me with it, he wants to say. Because touching things Merlin has fashioned from nothing isn’t enough, for the dark, roiling, desperate want inside of him. He wants it on his skin, in his arms, down his throat. And Merlin—loving him—it felt impossible before this, but perhaps anything is possible, in a world where Arthur craves the heat of magic. Perhaps Merlin’s magic can change the world as he knows it. Maybe he can change his father, change Camelot, or else burn it all down. Build something new from the ash where Arthur’s love is not filthy and fractured and awful. “Can you heal?” Arthur asks, gaze flitting up to hold Merlin’s.
The shape of his mouth flickers. “I little. I’m not a healer but I can remedy magical ailments, I suppose. And small, superficial wounds.”
Arthur nods, takes his dagger from his belt, and pricks his thumb with it so blood rises to the surface in a lewd crimson bead. “Hey!” Merlin says, alarmed.
“What about this?” Arthur asks in a harsh voice, offering his hand.
Merlin shakes his head, face a mess of fondness, of shock, of awe. Arthur tries to find the barest trace of love in the wreck of it all, wondering if there is room for that. If Merlin could—if Merlin would let him. If he’s thought of it. If he’d allow it. If he’d fashion a home for it in the crumbling remnants of a once great kingdom, or if he only uses his magic for honorable things. “Give me that,” he huffs out, taking Arthur’s hand between his palms, and pressing his own thumb to the pinprick of red.
He flattens the drop of blood to nothing between them. It stings, and then Merlin whispers something unintelligible as his eyes flash amber. Arthur studies him, waiting, and then fuck, yes, it comes like lightning: a flicker up his arm, a tingling heat, a wave of indescribable sensation climbing from his hand to the ditch of his elbow, where the blood thrums like the the crash of the sea. Before Arthur can stop himself or think better of it he closes his hand around Merlin’s wrist and draws him in, pressing their mouths flush.
Merlin is soft and slack, at first. He lets out a stunned breath and does not kiss back, but Arthur will show him. If he keeps kissing him, he knows he can prove to him how good it can be, here in the overgrown garden, in the tangled thicket of weeds, in the kingdom of of dust. Because perhaps, sorcery has been the answer all along. The missing piece required to make something grow. If he just—if he only—but then quite suddenly, Merlin changes. It is like he’s waking up, collapsing, reforming. He groans and cups the back of Arthur’s neck to hold him in place, opening up like a sinkhole, slick and wet. He gives Arthur the plush wet of his tongue, licks his teeth, tangles fingers in his hair so Arthur is left gasping, losing his hands in the folds of Merlin’s tunic, trying to find the skin underneath.
Arthur cannot hold the tears back then. They sting in the corners of his eyes, stick in his throat as he hauls Merlin into his lap, puts his hands all over him. “Arthur,” Merlin prays between hungry, desperate kisses. “I thought—fuck. I thought for certain I’d lost you. I’d notice, sometimes, the way you looked at me but I thought I was inventing it, and even if I wasn’t that if you knew about my magic you’d—you’d take it back. You’d never—”
“I love you,” Arthur confesses, cupping Merlin’s impossible face between his palms, thumbing reverently over the hinges of his jaw, tilting him left and right to drink in the sight of him through the sheen of his own tears. “I love all of you. I love your magic.”
That makes Merlin choke out a strangled sob as he ducks to press his face pressed into the ditch of Arthur’s neck as Arthur mauls his hands up and down his back, tracing over the slope of his vertebrae, the ladder of his ribs. Trying to memorize every jut and angle in case he is only dreaming. “This is mad,” Merlin huffs out, mouth wet and open along the cords of Arthur’s neck. “Do you want me in bed?”
“Yes, yes of course,” Arthur murmurs, inhaling from his hair. “I want you every way.”
Merlin curses, stands, hauls Arthur up after him before manhandling him onto his cot. It is too narrow for them to lie side by side so Merlin climbs atop him, his weight a barely-there thing perched and wavering on Arthur’s hips. Arthur is about to reach for him, make a fist in his tunic and drag him down to slot their mouths flush, but before he can, Merlin uses magic to pin Arthur’s hands above his head, and Arthur loses all hope of control, of composure. He’s reduced to nothing but gasps and bucks, shuddering beneath Merlin like something rain-wet and blooming. “What do you want?” Merlin says, voice dark and quiet as the prickle of magic climbs down Arthur’s neck and undoes his shirt laces, leaves him scalding and in pieces and held fast and pinned to the mattress.
“God. That. You.” Arthur confesses, sweat on his brow and burning in his eyes as he blinks rapidly. “I want it all over me.”
Merlin sucks in a tremulous, disbelieving breath, cupping Arthur’s face between his palms as magic pushes beneath Arthur’s tunic, spreads possessive and cloying over his stomach. It’s maddening, it makes him squirm and groan as Merlin kisses him in deep, hungry, claiming drags. “Like this?” he whispers into Arthur’s gasping mouth.
“Yes,” he manages, pushing himself into the cradling pressure of sorcery as it makes quick work of his boots, his trousers, leaving him exposed to the night wherever he is not trapped beneath Merlin’s body. “Please, fuck.”
Merlin shakes his head before licking hungrily into Arthur, sucking his tongue and grinding against him and spilling over him him everywhere in ribbons of magic, the power of it coursing around them and between them and crashing over Arthur in relentless, terrible, astounding waves. It feels like being touched. Not with many hands, however, but with the fabric of the universe: starlight and sea foam, darkness and light. Arthur can’t keep his eyes open and he’s not fully certain he can sustain the intensity without falling apart, but he doesn’t care. He dissolves willingly, surrenders completely. He pants and writhes as Merlin continues to kiss him, down his neck, over his feverish pulse, back up to his gasping mouth which he bites before spitting into, so that Arthur is forced to swallow the frothy hot slick of him like an offering. “You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” Merlin tells him, breath hot against his skin. “I worried if I’d ever got to have you this way, that my magic would—that I couldn’t contain it, even if I tried. That I’d never be able to hide it from you. I can’t believe you want it.”
“I want it terribly. Want you,” Arthur pants, hair sweat soaked and sticking to his brow as Merlin takes his cock in hand at long last, thumbing through the dripping slick at the crown and groaning. A sudden blizzard of white eclipses Arthur’s vision as he thrusts up into the ring of his palm. “Fuck. Merlin.”
The magic curls around his thighs like vines and parts them, tugging at Arthur like he is a wishbone, splitting him. “Do you want it inside of you?” Merlin asks in a low, tremulous voice as he strokes Arthur’s cock, grip practiced and certain, like he has thought of touching Arthur this way so very many times before. It feels so fucking good Arthur would agree to anything, so as he fucks desperately into the pressure and cedes to the vibrating hold of the magic, he nods frantically.
“Yes, whatever, just—I want everything. You may have me anyway you’d like,” he chokes out, licking sweat from the heart-breaking curve of Merlin’s cheekbone, where there is the most lovely flush spreading like spilled wine. “Make me come with it, Merlin.”
Even then, as he begs for it, he could not have prepared himself for the way it feels. Like fire, like absolution. The magic cores him and he cries out, thighs falling apart greedily, body fluttering around the intrusion, sucking at it like this is something he cannot live without. Something he’s made for. Merlin moans with him, sucks his mark into his throat, murmurs things in languages he does not understand. His thighs are wet, everything is wet, he is flooded and he is a flood and there is nothing in the world more lovely than magic, Arthur knows this for certain now.
He never thought he’d like something like this, even when he imagined being with Merlin or fancied a handsome knight as a young boy. He skipped over it in his mind, or else imagined himself on the other end to justify the ache of wanting a man in the first place. He could tolerate the desire as long as it wasn’t this, in particular, as if there’s some unspeakable shame in being opened up and spilled into. A vulnerability, a pain. But now, he knows this is him, in his deepest self. He he meant to be full of Merlin, full of his magic, a vessel for the most stunning warmth in the whole of the universe. He needs it, he loves it, and he says so, face pressed into Merlin’s hair as he lets himself be fucked to ruin, “Please, more, more—Merlin—more—” until he comes in a mess of sticky heat between their shifting bodies.
Merlin kisses him through breathless, staggering sobs. “Can I touch you there?” he asks, struggling out of his trousers, rutting against the pearlescent mess of come shining on Arthur’s heaving stomach. “Not just with my magic,” he clarifies, fingers prodding at the slick, swollen ring of muscle with barely restrained longing.
“Do what you will,” Arthur murmurs, stars still stealing his vision. “M’yours.”
Merlin pushes deep with his fingers then, replacing the incandescent glow of the magic with the sweet banality of his knuckles and oh, somehow that is even better, and Arthur’s body clutches around him, holding him there and pulsing. “God, Arthur, you’re perfect,” Merlin hisses, rubbing insistently, everything so sensitive and aching Arthur cannot stop the muscles in his thighs from spasming, cannot silence the thready cry on his lips. “I want to come inside you.”
“Do it,” Arthur prays, fingers in Merlin’s hair as he kisses salt from the tails of his eyes. “Please.”
Merlin slides in easily, not as long or as thick or encompassing as the sensation of magic, but it is still a burning drag, a shocking stretch. Arthur grits his teeth through it, his own cock twitching and half-hard on his stomach, as if he has not yet spent. Merlin thumbs back and forth over his panting mouth as he fucks him, pushes his knees to his chest, takes him with a hungry desperation until Arthur is boneless and wrecked and it is only Merlin’s body and the grip of magic keeping him in place. He is raw, an overwrought nerve and he loves it, wants this searing, expansive thickness inside him forever. When Merlin comes he trembles on top of Arthur, the crown of his head digging into his neck so Arthur can turn his head just so and press a kiss to his sweaty brow, insides fluttering around the pulses of seed.
He thinks Merlin will collapse into his arms and let him hold him, then, but it seems he’s not done. He pulls out in a single motion and shifts down the bed to take Arthur’s cock into his mouth, even as he whimpers and shivers and promises he cannot come again. Merlin cannot be deterred, though, he sucks Arthur back to full hardness and makes him come dry and gasping again, fingers buried and crooked into some secret, nervy spot deep inside him. It could be minutes or another full hour there in the maddening slick of his mouth, Arthur does not know. He’s lost time, he’s lost all sense of himself. The magic clings to him in a patina of surreality, glistening on his skin alongside his sweat as he stares up at the ceiling, and tries his hardest to breathe.
He’s not sure he can move, so he doesn’t. He just lies there in Merlin’s terribly narrow cot, spread out and messy as Merlin kisses his thighs, his stomach, up his chest where he eventually settles. Arthur idly pets his hair, traces the bones in his face over and over again so that he does not forget a single thing. Waits for the ghost of shame to creep back into him, but it never does. Perhaps magic erases all things—breaks bones and resets them into something that heals, and does not ache come winter. Perhaps magic is not an end, but a beginning. As he drifts off and the candles burn out and leave them in darkness, he wonders.
——
The sky is trying its hardest to rain the afternoon Arthur and Merlin sneak out to his mother’s garden. The air is heavy and grey around them, thunder rumbling in the far-away distance as Arthur stands close behind Merlin, shielding his body as he uses an incantation to easily unlock the rusted padlock and unwind the heavy chain. Then they lean their full combined weight into the drizzle-slick bars, push the gate open, and are inside.
It is much how Arthur remembers it, even though years have passed since the last time he stole a glimpse. The ivy jungle, the planter boxes split apart from the strength of roots forcing themselves from their constraints. There are flowers, herbs, trees, everything tangled together in a strange, uniform canopy above them. “S’beautiful,” Merlin says, stepping into the dark of it. When Arthur hesitates he reaches for him, making a fist in the sleeve of his tunic and tugging him along. Their boots notch together on the weed thick earth, and Merlin tastes of fog when Arthur pushes him against the gnarled trunk of a willow and kisses him.
“Could you tend it with magic?” Arthur asks, flicking his gaze up to the branches above them, haunted by their sway and creak.
Merlin hums against his throat, rucking the neck of his shirt open so that he can fit his mouth over the line of his collarbone. “I don’t think it needs to be tended to,” he says then. “S’alive, isn't it?”
And yes, Arthur supposes it is. He cups Merlin through his trousers and rubs until he throws his head back and makes a sound, something low and reflexive that the distant thunder obscures as it rolls closer to them. And perhaps he will not tend to something that does not need to be tended to, but still as Merlin curls magic around Arthur’s wrists, down into his clothes, through his hair in wild, tangling fingers as they kiss, blossoms spring up from the ground around them as he does it, like nature and Arthur are the same, and he possesses them both.
Arthur dreams version of version of Camelot where he does not have to tuck away into wild, overgrown, secret places to behold such magic, and as it begins to rain, he lets himself be kissed, and tries not to crush flowers beneath his feet.