Chapter Text
:::
I don’t care if Monday’s blue
Tuesday’s gray and Wednesday too
Thursday I don’t care about you
It’s Friday I’m in love
Monday you can fall apart
Tuesday, Wednesday break my heart
Thursday doesn’t even start
It’s Friday I’m in love
:::
Merlin’s minding his own business when it happens, making his slow, careful J-turns down the slope—he enjoys snowboarding, but he isn’t what you might call a natural, not when he can only afford to get away every few years, and even then only to a tiny little hill near where he grew up if there’s snow—when some idiot comes screaming down the hill out of nowhere, cutting right in front of him in a whirl of poles and flashing goggles. Merlin has just enough time to register the red jacket, the shaped helmet with the basher bar sticking out in front, before he’s tumbling head over arse down toward the tree line.
He comes to a slow stop before he hits the pines, at least, and takes a moment to make sure all his limbs are still attached, that he hasn’t lost his gloves or broken a rib or anything. His ears are cold, and when he reaches up to tug his hat down further down he discovers it’s missing, probably fallen off somewhere up the slope, and now he’ll have to hike back uphill and try to find it.
He’s looking around for it, hoping it hasn’t gone too far or disappeared—he could try finishing the run without it, since he has another back at the condo, but he’d really liked that hat, it was blue and covered his ears well and his mother had just given it to him for Christmas—when there’s a shower of snow all over him and the hat lands in front of his face, a bit snowy but otherwise intact. Merlin looks up: the fucking red-jacket skier had pulled a hockey stop purely for the pleasure of making Merlin more miserable.
He picks up his hat and jams it on his head, glaring up at the man. “A gold helmet, really?” he asks, because there’s full of yourself, and then there’s just tacky.
“Watch where you’re fucking going,” red-jacket says, and Merlin can’t see his eyes through the mirrored goggles but the man’s mouth is thin and angry, like all this is Merlin’s fault, and isn’t that just the icing on the fucking cake. “God, snowboarders, you all think you own the fucking mountain. Watch yourself or you’ll hurt someone.”
“You watch yourself,” Merlin snaps back, furious, but the man is already moving, using his poles and the v-step Merlin’s seen other skiers use to get their momentum going before he tucks his feet together, bends closer to the snow, and speeds away.
“Prick,” Merlin yells after the man, which doesn’t really make him feel better but soothes his wounded pride a little. He wipes his nose and flips over onto his knees before standing and settling back into the familiar rhythm, wending his way down to the lodge, where Gwen and Freya are waiting with sympathetic ears and overpriced hot chocolate.
The next time he sees that skier, Merlin vows, he’ll get his own back. Trip the man up, see how well he takes a tumble and a face full of snow.
*
The next time Merlin sees the skier turns out to be the next day, at the top of one of the black diamonds. He’s not wearing the red jacket anymore—it’s been replaced by some sort of thick red cape which reaches to his boots—but Merlin would recognize that gold helmet anywhere. Merlin wants go over and give the man a piece of his mind, but he’s surrounded by other people, all skiers, and Merlin doesn’t fancy his chances against a whole horde of them, not when they’re sporting mirrored goggles and sharpened poles in funny curving shapes. It’s like some secret ski mafia meeting, he thinks, and then he sees the starting hut and the flags dotting the slope below.
A racer, Merlin thinks. Of course the tosser is a racer; he probably calculates points with his mates—this many points for hitting a snowboarder, this many for a small child or an old lady, this many for an entire beginner’s class.
Merlin almost wants to shout out something spiteful, just to mess with the guy, but there’s an older man with him, their heads bent close in a conference, and one look at his face convinces Merlin he doesn’t look like the type to let hecklers live very long. Merlin contents himself with sending all of them a bitter, vengeful look, and goes to look for a good spot to watch the race. Maybe the man in the gold helmet will miscalculate a turn and wipe out, he thinks hopefully, and Merlin will at least get to have a good laugh; he has less than an hour before he’s supposed to meet everyone for lunch, and with the lift lines as long as they are he isn’t going to be able to make another run anyway.
It doesn’t take much time for Merlin to find the bottom of the course, where a crowd has already gathered to watch technicians fiddle with wires and an enormous electronic clock which refuses to show anything but a gigantic neon green 88:88:88. Merlin sits to take his board off and trudges to the plastic netting that serves as a fence, looking for a good spot.
“Good weather,” a woman near him remarks after a few minutes, but when he turns to reply she isn’t even looking at him: she’s addressing the older man Merlin had seen at the top of the course with the idiot skier.
The man says something about the snowpack and the direction of the wind that Merlin doesn’t entirely follow, and the woman smiles, looking back up the mountain.
“You worry too much, Coach,” she says. “Your boy’ll do just fine.”
“Of course he will,” the coach says, as if he’s surprised by the assumption that he’d been at all anxious. “Arthur is the best.”
He says it simply, matter-of-fact, and wow, Merlin can see where red-jacket—Arthur, he’s assuming—gets his attitude from now. He wants to eavesdrop more, but the technicians have cleared their equipment from the finish line in a rush and everyone is turning to look up the hill, and when Merlin turns to squint at the mountain himself, someone’s already coming down the course, flying smooth and low across the snow, curving so tightly around the gates that the poles slap the snow. Merlin can’t see exactly how the skier’s hitting the gates—his shoulder, maybe, or maybe he’s actually punching each post as he goes by—and he doesn’t know much about how a skier should look, but he can tell this guy is good, really good. He’s fast, every motion controlled and deceptively smooth; it doesn’t look like he’s moving anything but his legs, his torso steady as his knees tilt close to the snow. It looks effortless, like someone’s dream of flying.
The skier’s halfway to the finish when Merlin realises that it’s Arthur, and he sighs, because of course Arthur is brilliant at what he does despite—maybe because of—being an arsehole. “Figures,” he mutters, and pulls his hat lower over his eyes, slouching when Arthur tucks in low to his boots and zooms over the finish line. He watches a few more skiers, but it turns out that watching races is boring and makes his feet cold, so he puts his board back on and ends up fighting with Lance over the last space on the board rack outside the lodge, tackling him to the ground only to get a snowball down his own back.
“You play dirty,” he accuses Lance afterward, while they make their way into the lodge, and Lance grins, pulling him into a playful headlock.
“So do you,” Lance says, and Merlin, arms flailing, is forced to grudgingly concede the point.
“Only because you do,” Merlin grumbles. Lance only pats his hair soothingly and doesn’t loosen his grip. “I’m going to tell everyone you’ve been abusing me secretly for years.”
“I didn’t know it was a secret,” Lance remarks, and adds, to someone not Merlin, “Hey there, gorgeous. Room for one more at this table?”
It’s Gwen who replies: “Oh Merlin, what did you do?”
“What did I do?” Merlin squawks. “What did this big bully do, is more like it!”
“Come on, Lance, let him up,” Freya says, and she’s prying open Lance’s arm, helping Merlin out and upright.
“The lines are terrible,” Gwen says while they move helmets and mittens and balaclavas to make room for Merlin and Lance at the table. “We already bought some chilli for you, and hot cocoa.”
Merlin reaches for the cocoa Freya hands him eagerly, wrapping his fingers around it and bringing it close to his face, inhaling the steam with pleasure. Gwen laughs at him, tucking a few flyaway strands of her dark, curly hair away from her face.
“I thought you’d like that,” she says. “You’ve not stopped drinking cocoa since we arrived.”
“That’s not true,” Merlin disagrees, smiling. “I’ve been drinking wine, too.”
“One glass,” Freya says, shoving her shoulder into his affectionately. “And then you sang everything you said for the rest of the night.”
“It was more than a glass!”
“One and a half,” Lance says, and Merlin scowls, mock-serious.
“You are all delusional,” he decides, but he can’t keep up the façade long when they’re all laughing.
“Eat your chilli,” Gwen tells him, and Freya pats his shoulder, and after an exaggerated sigh Merlin sets his cocoa down and pulls the bowl toward him.
“Spoon?” he asks, and Freya and Gwen turn matching beatific smiles on him. “God, fine; you two are terrible,” he grumbles, and slides off his chair to go find spoons for all of them.
The lodge is packed with the lunch crowd, all of them loud and bulky with snowsuits and clunking awkwardly around in heavy boots, and it takes Merlin the better part of ten minutes to locate the plastic spoons and grab a few napkins just in case before he can work his way back to their table, where he finds that someone has drunk half his cocoa. He gives them all a plaintive look, and refuses to hand over the spoons.
“Come on, Merlin,” Lance wheedles, but Merlin shakes his head because Lance is his number one suspect: Gwen is too nice to drink his cocoa, and Freya is a vegan.
“Merlin, you are only here because I invited you,” Gwen says, stern, and Merlin sighs and hands her a spoon. He gives Freya hers after a moment’s thought, but it takes death threats and an arm-wrestling game (Merlin loses terribly, all three times,) before he finally, grudgingly, hands Lance a plastic spoon.
The chilli isn’t great, but it’s warm and filling after a day in the cold, and Merlin’s eating it with three of his favourite people in the French Alps, where none of them have ever been before, because after Gwen won the trip she decided to be the most wonderful person in the world and bring the three of them—Merlin and Freya and Will, who is somewhere pretending to be a professional on the terrain park and probably taking headers into snow banks—along with her and Lance instead of using the money she’d been given on the Christmas shopping spree it was intended for. Altogether they speak three words of French and none of them are very good at skiing or snowboarding, (except for Lance, who at one point, Merlin is pretty sure, competed in the X-Games or something,) and they’re only two days into the ten they have at Camelot, but Merlin’s already certain it’s the best holiday he’s ever had.
They split up again after lunch: Gwen and Lance go off to explore the further side of the mountain despite Merlin’s warning that they’ll likely break five bones each trying to negotiate the moguls, and Freya’s taking a class with a ski instructor she says is fantastically talented and drop-dead gorgeous besides.
(“She’s maybe eighteen,” Gwen points out, because Gwen had gone with Freya on the first day and had met the instructor. “Maybe.”
Freya shrugs. “Doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate her,” she says, and waves a pole cheerfully as she skis away.)
Merlin is all set to potter around the slopes for another afternoon, aimless, taking new trails just to see where they end up, and of course, he thinks in disgust when he comes around one narrow bend to see the racecourse laid out below him again, of course he winds up right back in the path of Arthur the arse.
The race is still going, which Merlin can hardly believe—how many times do the racers have to go up and down the same damn course?—but the next time he goes down the slope out of curiosity things seem to be wrapping up, and he joins the crowd just to see what’s going on.
There’s a little podium set up, a pair of skiers already standing on the two lower platforms, and there, just stepping up in between them and bending his head to accept the medal some bundled-up official is placing around his neck, is Arthur, unmistakeable in his red jacket, even with a black fleece hat pulled low over his ears instead of the helmet. Merlin notices that his hair is bright, gold to match his helmet and the medal and shining brilliantly in the sun where it’s sticking out from underneath his hat, and dismisses the thought quickly as irrelevant. What does it matter what colour Arthur’s hair is? He turns his back resolutely just as Arthur is raising the medal to his lips, and sets off in what he hopes is a direction which will take him far away from everything that has to do with Arthur.
*
He’s successful for three glorious days in escaping the circle of Arthur’s influence and undoubtedly enormous ego, and mostly forgets about Arthur entirely—he’s a git but Merlin has other things to worry about, like having fun and not hitting any trees with his face—until he stumbles into the little lodge halfway up the mountain to thaw out one afternoon, because the wind is vicious, bitterly cold, and it’s looking like snow, and Merlin doesn’t fancy himself as a human-sized icicle. This time there’s no one to fight over the rack with, and when he runs out of momentum before he reaches it he hops along awkwardly before giving up and just taking the board off, trudging the last few metres to the lodge and then inside.
Unfortunately, he discovers, everyone else out on the slopes had the same idea he did: the little building is full of frazzled parents with whining offspring and only slightly more composed older kids—Merlin supposes they’re the same age he is, more or less, but they always seem like kids, careless with their money and their unbroken bones—staring out the window and arguing over the conditions.
He looks around fruitlessly for a minute, but eventually he just grabs a cup of overpriced cocoa and plops down at a table with mittens and a jacket turned inside out scattered over the top. There’s some other stuff piled up on one of the chairs, but Merlin doesn’t really pay attention, too focused on curling his stiff fingers around the hot mug to try and warm them up.
“This table’s taken,” someone says from behind him, and Merlin cranes his head around to see—
Of course, he thinks wryly. Of course the universe thinks it’s funny to have him sitting at the same table Arthur has claimed. Arthur’s wearing a thin red fleece—is everything he owns red? Merlin wonders—which does nothing to hide the muscles in his shoulders and biceps, and it’s more difficult than it should be for Merlin to look away.
“There’s nowhere else,” Merlin says, turning back to his cocoa while Arthur makes his way around to the other side of the table.
“It’s taken,” Arthur repeats, scowling. “Move.”
“Unless there are four of you,” Merlin shoots back, “and you need all of these chairs, I’m staying.”
“I was here first.”
“What are you, six years old?” Merlin demands. “There’s nowhere else, and I’m not moving until I can feel my toes again.”
Arthur slams his tray down on the table. “I’m not moving, either.”
“Good for you,” Merlin says, and occupies himself with actively ignoring Arthur while Arthur mutters and stabs his sandwich apart to peel off the tomatoes with a fork and shoots Merlin dirty looks. Merlin pretends not to notice any of it, and also pretends not to notice that Arthur’s eyes are blue and that his jaw is unfairly chiselled.
After a while Arthur subsides into a sullen silence, and when Merlin looks up next the windows have turned white. He curses under his breath, and Arthur raises an eyebrow at him.
“What, you’ve never seen a snowstorm before?”
“Of course I’ve seen snow before.”
Arthur makes a sound that manages to convey exactly how little he trusts that assertion, and Merlin seriously debates moving his cocoa to a nearby table, which is overflowing with a boisterous family speaking a language Merlin doesn’t recognise but is at least free of snobbish prats. He’s about to say something—no doubt it will come out snippy and at a toddler’s level of logic, but it will put Arthur in his place nonetheless—when Arthur speaks first.
“It won’t last long,” he says, authoritatively. “It’ll snow all night, but there’ll be a break in the storm soon; you’ll have time to flee to whatever hole you crawled out of this morning.”
Merlin, caught between glaring and rolling his eyes, says instead, “Who died and made you the weatherman?”
“I’ve been skiing at Camelot since I was born. I know the weather here.”
“You mean you’ve been running people over here since you were born,” Merlin corrects. “God, I bet you were, weren’t you? Three years old and probably already knocking little old ladies off their skis and breaking their collarbones.”
“I was not,” Arthur snaps. “And you didn’t break anything.”
“We’re not talking about me, and anyway, how would you know?”
“You’re still here, aren’t you?” Arthur says, giving Merlin a dismissive look. He lingers a little, and Merlin has a moment to wonder if maybe—but then he blinks and remembers that this is Arthur, the ski racer, who runs innocent snowboarders over without a moment’s thought and then showers them with snow while they’re on the ground.
“You can’t resist hitting things in your way,” he tells Arthur, pointing a finger at him. “You can’t fool me; I watched you race the other day. You hit every single one of those flag things on your way down.”
Arthur stares at him. “The gates?”
“Flag things,” Merlin agrees.
“You’re supposed to hit them,” Arthur says. “It’s called cross-blocking.” Merlin shrugs, taking a sip of his cocoa.
“Figures,” he says. “So much for thinking skiing was a nonviolent sport.”
“It—” Arthur starts, then stops. “Hold on. You watched the race?”
Merlin shrugs again. “It was there. I was on the same trail. I didn’t realise you were in it at first.” It’s not quite the truth, but Arthur doesn’t need to know that.
“Right,” Arthur says, raising an eyebrow and sitting back with an expansive motion, propping an elbow on the empty chair next to him. “So? What did you think?”
He’s clearly expecting Merlin to say something admiring; Merlin wonders if anyone has ever criticised him about anything. He has a particularly haughty sort of arrogance that Merlin suspects cannot be achieved except with constant unconscious cultivation and the help of lots of obsequious friends. A chronic sort of malady, Merlin thinks, and one he can’t hope to cure alone with fifteen minutes of sitting at the same lunch table, though he’d like to take a crack at it.
He gazes thoughtfully at the ketchup bottle in the middle of the table for a moment, and comes to a decision.
Arthur has quick reflexes, and he realises what’s happening sooner than Merlin anticipated, but even as he ducks the ketchup hits him squarely in the face, smearing over his cheeks and forehead and dripping down onto his eyelids. There’s a moment where Arthur doesn’t move and Merlin can’t quite believe he’d actually squirted a ketchup bottle at another adult in public—though that has no impact on the giddy pleasure he gets out of the experience—and then Arthur wipes the worst of the mess out of his eyes and fixes Merlin an angry, expectant look, as if he’s waiting for an explanation.
“It goes with your uniform,” Merlin points out helpfully, and Arthur growls,
“That’s it; you are dead,” before grabbing the mustard bottle in turn, and then they’re really going at it, firing back and forth, until there’s ketchup on Arthur’s neck and mustard all over Merlin’s jumper (which is really Freya’s, she’s going to kill him,) and they’re both laughing too hard to stop.
“You are such a tosser,” Merlin informs Arthur, wheezing, putting the ketchup bottle aside but not letting go of it in case Arthur has any last-minute sneak-attack plans, and Arthur manages a serious face for all of two seconds before he has to put his head back down and laugh.
“You started it,” Arthur says when they’ve both calmed down a little, and Merlin smiles.
“All in the name of great justice,” he replies, and that dims Arthur’s answering smile a bit.
Arthur glances at the table for a moment, running his finger through a stray line of ketchup before saying, “I didn’t mean to hit you the other day, truly.”
Merlin sort of figures that, but he isn’t about to let Arthur off easily—his rental board isn’t damaged, but if it had been... Merlin’s looked at the rental policy and the penalties for returning a damaged board, and they don’t bear thinking about. “I’ll take the apology under consideration.”
“How generous of you,” Arthur drawls, plucking a few napkins from the table and mopping more ketchup from his fleece. “You are a paragon of virtue, aren’t you—?” he stops, looking at Merlin. “I don’t even know your name. You insult me and cover me in ketchup, and never bother telling me who you are.”
Merlin puts a hand out to shake, more out of habit than anything else. “Merlin.”
“I’m Arthur,” Arthur says, taking Merlin’s hand, and Merlin replies before he thinks about it.
“I know.”
Arthur is giving him a sly look before Merlin realises what it sounds like, and he hastens to add: “Oh, stop that; I saw the award ceremony, you prat.”
“Of course you did,” Arthur says, sounding smug and insufferable and managing to make it sound like of course everyone has heard of him and wants a piece of him, and Merlin is no exception. Really, Merlin doesn’t know why he even bothers with these sorts of people, even if they are inevitably too attractive for their own good, and wow, there’s a thought he has to stop immediately.
“So tell me, oh illustrious one,” Merlin begins, but then a woman spills hot soup all down his back, and his witty comeback is lost in the flood of ow ow fucking ow.
He’s wearing three jumpers against the cold, but the soup soaks through all of them and the most he can do about it at first is an embarrassing sort of frantic wiggle away with his shoulders which does nothing to stop himself being burned from neck to arse. Somewhere behind him the woman is gasping and apologising in French, but Merlin ignores her in favour of stripping all the jumpers off until he’s down to the thin black undershirt of his long johns.
He cranes his head over his shoulder gingerly, trying to get a look at the damage; he can’t see much from this angle but the skin feels tender; he definitely doesn’t want Lance to clap him on the back any time soon. Jesus, he thinks, how hot does this place heat their soup? He’s pretty sure there are international laws against serving food which could be used as a weapon, and if there aren’t there should be.
Occupied with making sure there are no oozing blisters on his back and that he has no actually charred flesh, it takes Merlin a moment to realise that Arthur’s stood up and is in the process of explaining to the woman how monumentally stupid she is. He can’t actually understand the words Arthur is saying, but the meaning is clear enough in his narrowed eyes, in the way he’s leaning forward, aggressive and protective all at once.
“Arthur,” Merlin says, because he’s a little touched (in the head, he can hear Will’s voice say, and yeah, okay, he won’t argue with that,) but he’s not comfortable seeing the woman get her just desserts when those desserts are making her cry.
Arthur doesn’t hear him at first, and Merlin has to repeat, louder: “Arthur, enough.”
“—et pour cette raison...” Arthur breaks off, blinking at Merlin, as if he’s already forgotten the reason for his tirade. Maybe he just likes yelling at people; Merlin wouldn’t put it past him. “What?”
“I don’t need you to defend me,” Merlin says, watching the woman seize her opportunity and slip away. Arthur tracks her through the crowd, his shoulders still back and set, as if he’s going to follow her and harangue her until he’s actually driven her out into the snow.
It only lasts a moment, though, before Arthur shakes himself and sits back down. “Well, obviously you can’t defend yourself,” he says, picking up his sandwich again. “Someone has to do the job.”
“I can defend—” Merlin starts, annoyed, and stops. He can already tell that argument will go nowhere. “Where did you learn French?”
“My mother taught me,” Arthur says shortly, and there are blinking lights all around the way he says that telling Merlin to get the hell away, idiot, and so Merlin does.
“Tell me, weatherman,” he drawls, stealing one of Arthur’s fries and thoroughly enjoying the look on Arthur’s face, “when will it be safe for those of us who are not actually immortal to go out into the blizzard?”
“It’s not a blizzard,” Arthur tells him, and Merlin gives him an exasperated look. “A blizzard would be—oh, look, fine, it should lighten up soon; I think it already is. Stop looking at me like that.”
“Like what?” Merlin asks, turning around to look out the window. It’s true; the snow has died down considerably, but the clouds are still hanging low and dark, and Merlin eyes them unhappily, because one way he absolutely does not want to die is frozen somewhere between the treeline and the shuttle to the little condo he’s staying in.
“If you go now you might make it,” Arthur says. “Where are you staying? The lodge hotel? There should be just enough time—”
“Avalon,” Merlin says absently, squinting at the window still.
“Avalon?” Arthur sounds incredulous. “Never mind; you’ll have to sleep here tonight.”
“Huzzah,” Merlin mutters, and takes a gulp of his cocoa. Stupid mountain with its stupid snow; Gwen’s making her famous vegan spinach lasagne tonight, and Merlin is going to miss his chance to steal the best bits while she’s cooking.
Arthur’s quiet for a moment while Merlin puts his head down on the table and wonders whether clicking his heels three times might work, but then he clears his throat.
“Look, come home with me. My place isn’t far.”
Merlin tips his head up so that his chin is resting on the smooth wood of the table, and lets his eyebrows express how terrible an idea he thinks that is. “Go home with you?”
Arthur shifts, shrugs his shoulders. “It would reflect poorly on the resort if you died in the snow, and you can’t stay here.”
“Why not?”
“Because they’ll kick you out at closing, that’s why.”
“Even if I’ll die in the snow if they do?”
“With you?” Arthur’s glaring now, and it’s doing some deliciously terrible things to Merlin’s insides. “They’d definitely kick you out.”
Merlin can feel his willpower fading. “I’d fight them.”
“You couldn’t fight a housefly,” Arthur scoffs, and grabs his jacket. “Come on, put your clothes on. You’re coming to my place.”
“You know,” Merlin points out before he can help himself, already reaching for his jumpers. “Usually that’s the other way around: I go to your place and take my clothes off.”
“Piss off,” Arthur grumbles, and when Merlin doesn’t stop grinning Arthur punches him while Merlin is still tangled in the sleeves of a jumper.
“Prick.”
“Idiot.”
“Arsehole.”
“Come on,” Arthur says, collaring Merlin by the nape and pushing him toward the door. “Less name-calling, more moving. I am saving your life, you know.”
“Oh,” Merlin says, fluttering his eyelashes while he jams his hat on. “Thank you ever so much, my lord.”
Arthur blushes a very interesting colour, Merlin notices, but before he can say anything rude back they’re out in the storm, with the wind snatching at their clothes as it tries to find every exposed part they’d forgotten to cover.
“It’s this way!” Arthur shouts, pointing with his pole once Merlin’s pulled his board out to the trail. Merlin nods, and follows Arthur down the mountain. He can tell Arthur’s going purposefully slow, though whether it’s all due to Merlin or because the snow makes it hard to see very far in front is up for debate, and Merlin’s too grudgingly grateful he can keep up to spend much time composing barbs in his head about it. The snow stings his face and gets in his eyes, and the wind is trying to blow him into the trees, and Arthur is probably right, Merlin thinks resignedly: he would never have made it to the condo.
It turns out that Arthur hadn’t been lying when he said his place wasn’t far; Merlin isn’t exactly sure how far they go but it can’t be more than five or ten minutes before Arthur’s turning off the trail, making his way through a few thickly needled pines and literally skiing up to what must be his door.
It’s a two-storey wooden cabin with something Scandinavian in the design, but it has enormous windows and a wide porch, and when Merlin finally gets the board off his feet and carries it up the steps after Arthur he can’t help but notice the huge outdoor Jacuzzi, recognisable even buried under two feet of snow.
“Seriously?” he asks while Arthur pats down his own pockets in a squirming motion Merlin easily identifies as the where the fuck did I put my keys dance. When Arthur glances at him, Merlin raises an eyebrow and repeats, throwing a hand out to encompass the house and Jacuzzi both, “Seriously?”
“What can I say,” Arthur says, distracted. “I’m excellent at what I do.”
He probably has metric tonnes of cash sitting around in Swiss bank vaults, Merlin thinks, and then notices with a tiny vicious satisfaction that money clearly doesn’t solve the eternal problem of needing keys.
“So when you said you were taking me home, I was envisioning something a little different,” Merlin says conversationally. “A little wine, maybe, a fire, your terrible attempts at flirting; not freezing my extremities off and dying in the snow...”
“Shut up,” Arthur says, but there’s an edge to his voice. “Christ, patience is a virtue, didn’t your mother ever tell you that? I just have to find my keys, they were right here—”
“Oh, shove over,” Merlin interrupts, pushing Arthur out of the way with his shoulder because maybe Arthur has his keys and maybe he doesn’t, but the snow is coming down harder again and Merlin is not getting hypothermia this close to safety. “Do you have a paperclip?” he asks hopefully.
“No—you are not picking my lock, Merlin.”
“Fine. But it would have worked.”
“It would not.”
Merlin steps back to survey the house. “Any low windows that might be unlocked?”
“What? No, what is wrong with you? I am not breaking into my own...” Arthur trails off, looking thoughtful. “Actually,” he says, and the smile he gives Merlin makes all sorts of alarm bells ring in Merlin’s head, “there might be one possibility.”
Five minutes later, Merlin is hanging by his fingertips from an upstairs window, and Arthur is laughing hysterically.
“I hate you,” Merlin yells down, blinking snow out of his eyelashes. “I hate you so much.”
“To the left,” Arthur calls back, his voice weak and shaky from laughter. “It’s a little—more, more, there!”
Merlin has the roof under his feet again, but that fact does not make him any more favourably disposed toward Arthur. “I am going to make you dangle off a building and see how you like it,” he mutters, inching up toward the tiny window and then wiggling in after forcing it open. It isn’t a dignified process, and he can still hear Arthur nearly weeping with laughter down below. “I am going to make your life miserable.”
He has to walk himself carefully in on his hands, arms trembling as he keeps himself from falling into the toilet bowl and then from braining himself on the sink, but finally he’s inside, and he takes a moment to lie on the tile floor and savour the warmth before standing up to shut the window.
The bathroom is boring—thick creamy towels, basic shower with silver taps, a sink with a toothbrush balanced precariously on its rim—and Merlin doesn’t waste time investigating while he clumps out into the hall and down the stairs. The second floor is more of a loft than anything else, he realises; the whole cabin is made up of simple lines and bare polished wood, with colourful rugs and a few paintings scattered here and there. It’s the kind of house that only subtly announces how much money it costs, in the curve of a chair or the appliances in the kitchen, instead of screaming it from every ornamented and unnecessary throw pillow.
Interesting, Merlin thinks, before he distracts himself by pretending not to hear what Arthur is saying through the front window.
“Sorry?” he says, adopting a puzzled expression while Arthur throws a fit outside. “Did you say you were going to take another run? I’ll just stay here and look after the house for you.” He waves cheerfully, and Arthur presses his face—dangerously red with fury—close to the window and yells something that might be no one will find your body or maybe I am fond of lollies.
Eventually, though, Merlin has to open the door, and Arthur wastes no time in hauling him outside and shoving him face first into a snow bank.
“No wonder you have so many friends,” Merlin says after he’s staggered back upright and darted inside before Arthur can lock him out. “Your personality sparkles.”
“You were going to lock me out of my own house,” Arthur points out, but Merlin shrugs that off.
“Your keys would have turned up eventually,” he says, hanging his coat and still-wet jumpers on the row of hooks next to the door.
Arthur snorts, pulling his feet out of his boots. “I should have left you on the mountain to die.”
“Too late now!” Merlin says, positively jolly, and Arthur shoots him a half-hearted glare.
“I’m going to change my clothes,” he says, moving toward the stairs. “Don’t destroy anything while I do.”
“I was going to start in the kitchen and see what damage I could start there before moving on,” Merlin calls up after him. “I thought maybe a grease fire would be fun.”
“I mean it, Merlin! I will cut off your ridiculous ears and mount them on my wall!”
“Not if I hide all your knives first,” Merlin says, but he doesn’t bother making his voice loud enough to reach upstairs. He wanders instead after taking his own boots off and leaving them next to Arthur’s, snooping in the refrigerator—Marmite, really?—before tracing his fingers over the back of the leather sofa and discovering the flatscreen telly that somehow magically folds out of the wall. Christ, Arthur really is a rich bastard.
“Here.” Arthur’s voice comes from behind him, and something soft hits him in the back of the head. “Your things must be wet; use these and hang your stuff to dry.”
Merlin turns and finds a tangled pile of clothing at his feet. He thinks for a moment about refusing, but the shirt of his long johns is damp with soup still and his wool socks are soaked. “Thanks,” is all he says, and gathers the clothes up.
“I’d say don’t ruin them, but I grew out of those things years ago; they’re the only things I could find that might fit your scrawny body.”
“Does it physically hurt you to be nice?” Merlin demands, and goes off to find the bathroom again before he can ask why Arthur’s looking at his body.
He changes quickly—warm, dry socks, track pants, a long-sleeved shirt that’s soft in the way only things that have been worn and washed and loved for years can be—and when he pads back down the stairs Arthur is busy building up the fire.
Merlin flops down on the sofa, enjoying the soft feel of the leather and the way Arthur jumps and chokes at the noise. “Careful,” Merlin advises. “I wouldn’t want you to singe your eyebrows off or anything.”
“Bastard,” Arthur grumbles. He sits back as the fires catches, licking hungrily to life, and Merlin doesn’t look at the way the light glows along Arthur’s hair. He certainly isn’t impressed by the fact that Arthur can start a fire with his own bare hands.
“So you say you’re good at what you do,” Merlin says, as a thought occurs to him. It’ll serve him right if Arthur’s part of the Mafia or some underground gambling ring; maybe he’s only being nice because he’s going to drug Merlin and sell him into slavery. “What exactly is it that you do?”
Arthur shrugs. “I ski.”
“I mean your real person job,” Merlin says, rolling his eyes. “I mean, when you aren’t here using the mountain as your own personal obstacle course—”
“Hey!”
“—what is it that you do with your life?”
“My real person job,” Arthur says, speaking slowly and using his fingers to put mocking air quotes around the words, “is, as I said, to ski.”
“To ski,” Merlin repeats, sceptical.
“I race competitively.”
It surprises Merlin, truly; he’d known abstractly that some people must dedicate their lives to sport, football stars and Olympic swimmers and whoever, but he’d never thought of them only ever doing the things that made them famous. “Really? That’s your job?”
The grin Arthur gives him is a little crooked, the tiniest bit self-deprecating. “Even without the deals I make with companies to sell their products, all the sponsorships and so forth, I still probably wouldn’t have had to work a day in my life.”
“Oh God,” Merlin says in mock-horror, because he’s known this man for something like three hours and he can already see that talking about money makes Arthur uncomfortable, “you’re one of those people.” He lets his head fall back dramatically. “I am probably decreasing the property value of your house as we speak, just by touching it.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything,” Arthur says, laughing, and uses Merlin’s knee to lever himself up. “Cuppa?”
“If you’re really going to serve to commoners,” Merlin says, and adds, more fervently, “please.”
He props his chin on the back of the sofa and watches Arthur in the kitchen, moving about with the kettle in his hand and a practiced, easy air around him. It’s still awkward that Merlin’s hanging around in the home of an almost total stranger, but it isn’t a bad sort of awkward, not really. There’s something almost comfortable about being here with Arthur, the snow still swirling furiously outside and building up along the windowpanes while Arthur asks him about milk and sugar.
“Thanks,” he says when Arthur hands him a steaming mug and sits down next to him. “How did you get into skiing, then?”
“It was important to my father,” Arthur says, “and then it turned into something that was important to me.” He sips at his own tea. “What do you do, then? Run a professional housebreaking business?”
“Of course,” Merlin deadpans. “I come from a tragic past—broken home, boyhood criminal record, the works—and I pass the time by robbing the rich blind to feed the poor.” He rolls his eyes. “Nah, I’d be bollocks at that. I work at a chemist’s.” He doesn’t mention that Gaius is his uncle as well as his employer, though from the sound of things Arthur is hardly in a place to say anything about nepotism.
“A chemist’s,” Arthur says, widening his eyes. “How simply fascinating. And let me imagine, you live in some droll little country town a hundred kilometres away from anything resembling civilisation, where you already know everyone’s prescriptions before they bring them in, and charming housewives bring you tins of biscuits twice a week?”
“Twat,” Merlin says without heat, and spends a moment being a little horrified when he recognises the particular shade of fondness in his tone. “No, in London. Where do you live, here? Because if you do, I don’t think you could make fun of me even if I did live in the middle of nowhere.”
“Not all the time,” Arthur hedges, and Merlin puts his feet on the couch, twisting to nudge a heel against Arthur’s thigh, not quite a kick.
“Go on then, I already know you’re filthy rich; tell me about your manor house on the moors and your summer cottage in the south of France and the yacht tied up somewhere in the Greek isles and the tiny fifteen-bedroom place in Bali...”
Arthur’s laughing before Merlin gets to the yacht; Merlin thinks he could get to like the way Arthur laughs, head thrown back to expose the skin stretched thin over the curve of his throat, sounding delighted and surprised at his own warmth.
Stop that, Merlin tells himself sternly, and scalds himself on the tea to pull his mind back to what Arthur is saying.
“It’s not as bad as all that, it’s only this cabin, a house in London...”
“Oh, only,” Merlin says.
“...and fine, so there is the one place in France, but it’s a dump, really.”
“Of course it is. I’m sure it’s terrible. The Queen would never think of visiting you there.”
“We asked her to tea once,” Arthur says, voice hushed and solemn. “She refused the invitation. It was a terrible embarrassment for the family.”
Merlin nods along for a moment, as grave as Arthur, but when their eyes meet he can’t keep up the pretence, sniggering helplessly and nearly spilling his tea all over Arthur’s lap.
“Shit,” Arthur says, still gurgling with laughter as his phone rings. “I have to get that; it might be a while. Can you entertain yourself for a minute? The telly’s there if you want to watch something.”
Merlin looks between it and the remote warily. “I’m afraid I’ll accidentally program it to release the attack dogs or start World War III or something.”
“Oh no, that’s the other remote,” Arthur says with a wink, grabbing the cordless handset and ducking out of the room. Merlin sets his tea down very carefully, waits a moment to make sure Arthur isn’t going to come back in, and pushes his face into a throw pillow, wondering if he can suffocate himself just enough to be unconscious until the snow lets up and he can escape.
Merlin knows he has a type. He’s enough of an adult by now to admit that, and it’s his own fault that his type is mainly cocky bastards with nice shoulders and a sense of humour. That means nothing, he orders his libido sternly. Arthur still probably plucks the wings off of butterflies for fun, which is unacceptable behaviour, and Merlin can’t allow himself to be swayed by the discovery that maybe Arthur is a human being after all.
Arthur closets himself up with the phone for the better part of an hour, which soothes Merlin somewhat because it means Arthur is probably on the phone with his girlfriend, saying all sorts of terribly sexy things to her, and Merlin is therefore free to like Arthur without worrying about whether he wants to snog Arthur against a wall, because there’s no chance of that ever happening. He gets bored enough to take a chance on the remote after about fifteen minutes, and is inordinately pleased with himself when nothing blows up and he finds an Iron Chef marathon without having to change the channel once.
“So do you like to cook, or do you just take vicarious pleasure in watching other people make poisonous things into something passing as real food?”
Merlin tilts his head straight back and nearly jumps out of his skin when he finds Arthur’s come up right behind him, the sneaky bastard, and has a hand braced on either side of Merlin’s shoulders on the back of the sofa.
“Maybe I’m secretly an Iron Chef,” he says, shuffling himself around to look at Arthur properly and trying to paste a mysterious expression on his face.
Arthur snorts. “You’re more likely to end up as the secret ingredient. What do you fancy for dinner?”
Merlin bites his tongue before anything wildly inappropriate can slip out. “That depends. Do you have tiny elves that come out at night and do all your cooking for you? Because if you’re cooking, I might choose starving over death.”
That earns him a swat on the head. “I am a perfectly capable cook,” Arthur says. “Just for that, maybe I won’t give you anything at all.” He stalks off again, and Merlin follows him, sliding onto a chair in the kitchen and pulling a leg up to prop his chin on his knee.
“I see,” he says speculatively. “You’re breaking class and gender stereotypes by putting yourself in the kitchen. Or did you just figure it’d help you get a shag?”
“I am going to pretend you never said that,” Arthur tells him, arranging ingredients on the worktop. “Maybe I just like cooking.”
Merlin narrows his eyes. “You’re cooking pasta from a box,” he points out. “All you’re really doing is boiling water.”
“I never said I liked cooking that much.”
“I have been lied to,” Merlin says, looking at Arthur with soulful eyes while Arthur puts a pot on the hob and pulls a wine bottle from somewhere beneath the worktop. “I have been led terribly astray, and I shall never recover.”
Arthur scowls, pulling the cork out of the bottle with a practised hand. “Shut up and drink this,” he says, pouring Merlin a glass of wine. “Maybe it will make you less insufferable, Christ.”
“I see how it is,” Merlin sighs. “Having failed to charm me, you’re turning to alcohol to make me blind to your lack of basic human decency. How very underhanded of you.” He takes the glass of wine, though. No sense in turning it down.
“I have lots of decency,” Arthur says. “Just not for you.”
“I bet that line gets you all the girls,” Merlin replies, and adds, before he can think better of it: “Did you use it with your girlfriend; is that why she calls you every night?”
It’s comical, Merlin thinks, how suddenly horror transforms Arthur’s face, twisting all his features to the right and squishing them together. “So,” he says innocently, enjoying the way Arthur seems to be twitching a little and beyond words, “not your girlfriend who called you?”
“No,” Arthur manages. “No, Merlin, that was not my girlfriend. It was my coach.”
Merlin shrugs philosophically, thinking of the older man at the race and hiding his own appalled expression. “You know what they say: to each their—”
“My coach is my father,” Arthur interrupts, his voice climbing uncomfortably close to a screech, and Merlin can’t resist.
“Kinky,” he says, a little strangled, and then he’s laughing too hard to say the rest of the words he had planned, and Arthur has him in a headlock, messing with his hair and threatening to lock him outside again until Merlin is dead from exposure.
“No one would ever miss you,” Arthur threatens.
Merlin beats at Arthur with his fists, uselessly. “Lies,” he says. “Gwen would miss me terribly.”
“Girlfriend? She’s probably planning to kill you as we speak.”
“Not my girlfriend,” Merlin says, gripping Arthur’s arm and trying to pull his head free. “Best friend. Maybe I’ll just leave and go back to Avalon; she’s cooking vegan lasagne tonight, and I bet it’s better than any slop you make...”
Arthur lets him go, and Merlin retreats back to the stool, rubbing his neck and glaring. “Vegan lasagne?” Arthur asks, slow, like he doesn’t think he heard Merlin correctly.
“Yes,” Merlin says defensively.
“Vegan—Merlin, that takes all of the best parts of lasagne out of the lasagne. There is no way it is better than my cooking.”
“Suit yourself,” Merlin says, trying to get his hair to lay flat again, and watches out of the corner of his eye while Arthur shakes his head and turns to the fridge. “It’s quite good.”
“Raised by wolves,” Arthur tells the contents of the fridge, sorrowful, and produces a hunk of ground beef. “Obviously you have never known true food. Pass me the pepper, will you? And make yourself useful; I need that onion chopped.”
“I hate onions,” Merlin grumbles, which isn’t true, but he grabs a knife from the block and sets to work—carefully, because Arthur’s knives are exponentially sharper than his own, and he’s afraid he might cut his whole hand off if he isn’t careful. It’s quiet after that, both of them moving around the kitchen while the food cooks and Merlin’s stomach growls. Arthur finally shoos him out after the fifth time he catches Merlin peeking at the sauce, wondering if Arthur would notice if he just had a little taste.
“Set the table,” Arthur says, pointing Merlin toward the plates, and Merlin makes a face but goes, taking the opportunity to pour himself another glass of wine and breathe air that doesn’t smell as much like Arthur.
“Is this a new kind of torture?” Merlin inquires, watching as Arthur engages in a variety of fiddly little activities which seem to have no point except make Merlin wait. “Cooking dinner and never serving it?”
“Patience is a virtue,” Arthur says absently, but he turns off the gas. “Help me carry things.” Merlin takes the pot of spaghetti from Arthur, ignoring the little tremble that zips through him when their fingers brush. “I’m just going to get the parmesan...” he trails off, and Merlin turns around to see Arthur giving him and the spaghetti a distressed look. “Cheese,” Arthur fumbles when Merlin furrows his eyebrows in a silent question. “I—are you really vegan?”
“Arthur,” Merlin says patiently, crossing his arms. “I just spent the better part of an hour helping you make a sauce which has a pound of meat in it, and you’re only now asking me if I’m a vegan? Because of cheese?”
Arthur opens and closes his mouth a few times, and says, “Yes?”
“You’re hopeless,” Merlin tells him, but he’s smiling. “Give it here and sit down before I have to hurt you.”
“As if you could,” Arthur grumbles, but he hands the cheese over and pulls a chair up to the small table across from Merlin, close enough that their knees brush under the cheerful chequered tablecloth.
The spaghetti is good: the kind of solid, warm food Merlin’s mother had always approved of, and Merlin eyes what’s left over after he can’t take another forkful without risking stomach explosion, wondering if he can maybe sneak off with it tomorrow when Arthur isn’t looking. They drink most of the wine and talk about whatever comes to mind: about sport (Arthur follows cricket with a single-minded religiosity that would be frightening to Merlin if he wasn’t laughing so much), and whether or not the world economy is completely doomed (Merlin’s a cautious optimist; Arthur probably has an underground bunker safe house ready somewhere), and at one point Merlin realises he’s been ranting over the latest NHS scandal for a full twenty minutes and still Arthur is nodding along, looking a little bit lost and a little bit amused and a little bit lovely.
“Er,” Merlin says when he catches himself and trails to a stop. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to...”
“It’s fine,” Arthur says, “I’ll just consider it as early payback for when I start talking about what a nightmare putting the wrong wax on your skis is.”
Merlin knows there are a hundred things he could say to that, but he takes a sip of wine instead because he can’t think of a single one of them. He takes another sip when he notices the look Arthur is giving him, considering and very nearly predatory, the kind of look Merlin might confuse with—
“Are you finished?” he asks, hopping up and holding his hand out for Arthur’s plate. “I suppose I’m on dish duty.”
“I’ll help you,” Arthur says, taking his own plate to the sink. He takes the plates to dry them after Merlin washes them; Merlin knows he’s scrubbing the pots perhaps a little harder than necessary, but Arthur is standing close, too close for Merlin not to leap to hopeful conclusions when their fingers brush every time Arthur takes a dish from him. Merlin clings to the tiny voice of reason that says it’s only the wine speaking, but every time Arthur’s shoulder bumps his own it becomes progressively more difficult to believe.
He’s reminding himself of all the reasons doing what he wants to do is a bad idea when he hands off the last pan and turns to snag a towel from Arthur.
Arthur doesn’t bother wiping the pan dry, merely setting it aside; he’s facing Merlin, and when Merlin turns they’re body to body, close enough that Merlin can feel Arthur’s chest brushing his own, can feel Arthur’s breath faint against his skin.
“Uh. Hi,” he says, hardly daring to think—
“Hi,” Arthur replies, low, the barest flash of teeth beneath his smile, and Merlin knows he’s fucked.
“I need a, uh, a towel,” he says, his voice wobbling the slightest bit. “Could you, maybe—”
The kiss isn’t entirely unexpected, but it startles Merlin anyway, enough that his hands are already fisted in Arthur’s shirt to pull Arthur even closer by the time he remembers that this is probably a bad idea. He’s going to pull back, he is, but then Arthur’s hand slips around to Merlin’s back, sliding up under the borrowed shirt to skim his fingers along the sensitive skin above Merlin’s waistband, and Merlin shivers further into the kiss. It isn’t the filthiest kiss Merlin’s ever had, isn’t the best, would barely register on the scale of great kisses, but Merlin’s melting into it anyway, into the taste of spaghetti and wine still on Arthur’s tongue—and beneath that the slightest hint of something Arthur alone might taste of: Merlin wants to chase that to its source, dig deep into Arthur and maybe not let go again. Arthur has him by the hips, the heat of his hands burning through Merlin’s borrowed trousers. The worktop is digging uncomfortably into Merlin’s lower back, and Merlin’s arms are squashed awkwardly between their bodies while Arthur bends him gradually backward, and still he can feel himself on the cusp of foolishness, the brink of giving more away than he should—
Arthur pulls back, rests his forehead on Merlin’s while they breathe. He doesn’t loosen his grip on Merlin’s waist. “We shouldn’t,” he starts, and stops. “Not that I don’t—it’s only...I don’t know that I can stop. It’s not a good idea.”
“I know,” Merlin says. He does know, because if they go any further he’ll go to his knees right here in Arthur’s kitchen.
Arthur takes a breath. “I don’t want you to think—I didn’t bring you here for this. I didn’t mean to do that; you shouldn’t feel like you’re...” He stops, shaking his head, and Merlin thinks he catches a glimpse—for a moment, the barest of flashes—of something fragile in Arthur’s expression, something more delicate than spun sugar and gone just as quickly. “I usually don’t lose control like this.”
It’s good to hear that Arthur feels something like the shuddering heat in Merlin’s veins, that it’s only interfering scruples holding him back. “I’m not the kind of girl who puts out on the first date, anyway.” Merlin says, and pulls back to crook his mouth at Arthur in a dirty smile.
Arthur chuckles, flexes his arms like he wants to pull Merlin close again before letting go, letting his hands drop to his sides. “Even after I cooked you dinner?”
“Especially then,” Merlin says, straightening and fussing with his sleeves. “I have to make sure I’m not dead from food poisoning in the morning before I let you ravish me.”
“Such a mistrustful man,” Arthur replies, walking past Merlin close enough that their knuckles brush. Merlin bites his lip—still warm from the kiss—and looks out the dark window, where he can’t see the snow that must still be falling. He takes the time to wipe the sink down, exhaling a slow breath, before leaving the kitchen to see Arthur making up the couch.
He hangs back, fingers tangled behind him where Arthur can’t see them, lingering in the doorway until Arthur has finished plumping pillows and distributing blankets and whatever else he’s making himself busy doing, and looks up to meet Merlin’s eyes.
“I don’t have a spare bed,” he says, apologetic; Merlin wants to say we don’t need one, but there’s a look in Arthur’s eye that says now is the wrong time to push. “The sofa’s comfortable enough, though.”
“Thanks,” Merlin says.
Arthur hesitates, then puts the pillow he’s holding down and walks around the sofa, putting a hand on Merlin’s arm just above his elbow and pressing he lips to the corner of Merlin’s mouth. Merlin turns his head into it, looking for one more taste before he pulls back.
“Good night, Arthur,” he says, reaching for Arthur’s hand to give his fingers a soft squeeze, which is all he thinks he can permit himself.
Arthur squeezes his hand back. “Good night, Merlin.”
Merlin watches Arthur pad upstairs, and once he hears the door close he lets himself collapse face first onto the sofa, not bothering to turn down the blankets first, wondering when he became the kind of person who followed arrogant strangers to their houses and didn’t follow up on trying to get a handjob out of the deal at least.
He’s awake a long time in the unfamiliar darkness of the cabin, squirming until he’s made a precarious nest around him of pillows and blankets, staring at the fire as the embers die down. He doesn’t know a thing about Arthur, but that bothers him less than not knowing why the kiss happened: whether it was Arthur experimenting or Arthur taking what he saw as due to him or something else, any number of possibilities Merlin almost feels might be possible. It isn’t until past midnight that he finally drifts off, no less confused but almost willing to take a kiss as a kiss and let it rest as that: a onetime gift.
*