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Merlin doesn’t quite know how long this has lingered in the back corners of his consciousness, wouldn’t have been able to label it even if he’d been able to find it, but one day Arthur turns after delivering the final blow in a tournament, raising his sword in weary victory, and grins when he meets Merlin’s eyes. His mail is filthy with dirt, his hair matted with the sweat running down his neck, and something in Merlin’s stomach gives a sly squeeze. He puts a hand on the wall behind him to steady himself, blinking, before Arthur sweeps by him, shoving his sword into his arms; the tang of iron and blood and something that is purely Arthur makes Merlin suck in a surprised breath.
*
Arthur never entertains anyone in his chambers. It is an unwritten law of Camelot, passed along in warning silences and meaningful looks. Uther approves because it keeps the bloodline pure and eliminates the risk of bastard sons; the servants approve because if Arthur is keeping his hands to himself it’s one less set of hands the chambermaids have to worry about. Merlin wasn’t sure if he believed it at first, remained unconvinced that the lack of evidence meant nothing was there. Night after night, though, when Merlin leaves Arthur’s chambers, the prince is alone, pulling the heavy curtains closed around his bed or hunched over reports at the table, his shadow in the flickering candlelight his only companion.
*
Merlin is dressing Arthur in the soft filtered light of a winter morning, his motions smooth and practiced from months of comfortable routine. Shift, breeches, tunic, boots, belt: Merlin knows them all now, knows which parts have gone delicate with wear, knows how to set the belt just so above Arthur’s hips so his tunic doesn’t bunch or itch. He knows Arthur, too, the long tanned expanse of his shoulders, muscles moving underneath the scars and skin, the firm weight of his legs as Merlin slides his boots on, the pale freckles dusting his cheeks even in the deep snows of Midwinter.
When Arthur is gone, Merlin hides in a corner of the room, reaching one hand out to brace against the wall and letting the other creep down, loosening his own belt. He is fast, harsh with himself, squeezing his eyes shut until it’s done and he slumps, panting, against the cold stone, his head bowed beneath the weight of shame. He wishes, not for the first time, that Arthur was attainable, mortal, that Merlin could feel it was right and good to want him.
*
“Have you ever loved someone?” Merlin asks one evening while Arthur is eating, the window cracked open to welcome in the first damp breeze of spring, stars just beginning to shine through the twilight.
Arthur pauses, bread halfway to his mouth. “Of course,” he says, his voice dry. “I love my father. I occasionally entertain a certain degree of affection for Morgana, if she isn’t being a complete trial. I love my people.”
Merlin shakes his head, worrying the edge of a linen napkin. “I mean loved someone, really, truly. Until death, body and soul – that kind of love.”
“Hardly.” Arthur snorts, but he’s looking at Merlin.
“Oh,” Merlin replies, and they sit silent for a while, listening to the clear chirrup of young frogs outside.
*
It is an accident.
Arthur is relaxed, affectionate after one too many ales, and Merlin has always been an idiot when Arthur is concerned. Merlin helps Arthur to his room, though Arthur hasn’t really drunk enough to lose his way, and slides him out of his tunic and boots, carefully unlacing his breeches though Arthur is nowhere near incapacitated enough to really need the help.
Then it’s just Arthur, standing in the dim light of a solitary candle in nothing but his shift, staring, and Merlin, who has felt the ache lodged in his throat grow deeper, sharper as the months wore on, staring back.
It’s imperfect, messy, too hot; driven by desperation, by gasping breath and the salty taste of sweat. Merlin groans, begs, voice broken with want and lust, reaches up to pull Arthur closer, closer. Arthur elbows Merlin in the stomach by accident and bites his shoulder on purpose, examining the blooming bruise with something like satisfaction, and finally – finally – they move together, hands and mouths and bodies entwined and arching toward divinity, borne up on their own heat toward the stars.
*
They don’t speak about it. Arthur avoids ale and Merlin both, and Merlin avoids all thought of the way Arthur had looked, loose-limbed and warm in sleep, spread out beside him on the pale ruined sheets. Life goes back to an ugly imitation of itself, a flat, stilted performance they convince themselves they believe.
And if Merlin never catches Arthur looking at him, if sometimes he can do nothing more than curl up around the ache which has spread into his gut and caught on fire, well, it was stupid of him to think he could ever truly touch Arthur, ever really reach the stars.
*
He knows it’s stupid before he does it, knows the chances of being caught are too high to even contemplate, but the cost of losing Arthur is greater.
Funny, how he’d never considered he could lose Arthur to other things than death.
Prison is dark and smells like too many people all breathing and pissing and sweating on top of each other. Merlin doesn’t know how many people are in his cell but it’s all he can do to find a small corner of it where he isn’t crawling on top of three other people and hunch in on himself, trying not to vomit from the heavy stench, his vision filled with the betrayed look on Arthur’s face.
He’s never hauled before the king, never accused of sorcery or thrust down upon the headman’s block, but he loses count of the number of times he wishes for it, wishes Arthur would end this half-existence, make up his mind and tell Uther everything.
*
He gets bruises when he tries to reach the trough of food a guard shoves into the cell, but after a while it doesn’t matter because the only food coming in is what the families of prisoners bring, and no one will share with him. Eventually, he stops caring, stops waiting for marching footsteps in the corridor to take him away.
This is the punishment Arthur devised for him, he realizes; betrayal and disloyalty repaid with unforgiving, implacable forgetfulness.
He tries reaching, once, for his magic, but something has blocked it off, shut it away from him; he can feel it tingling at the tips of his fingers, but any chance of using it is gone. He turns inward, barely flinching when someone steps on him and breaks three of his fingers, unresisting as others shove him, shout at him, plunder his belongings and his body. Distantly, he wonders where everything went wrong, wonders if Arthur had ever really been his destiny or if the dragon’s words had been the empty rage of a different prisoner.
*
When Arthur marries Gwen, the prisoners celebrate with extra rations. Merlin drinks his cup of brackish water down and vaguely remembers he should feel something – anger, maybe, or was it joy? – instead of the horrible numbing emptiness lodged between his lungs. He wonders instead what will happen when he dies; whether his body will rot in a corner of this cell like the old man who’d coughed himself to a bloody death a month before, or if the guards will drag him to a shallow grave and cover him with rocks so the dogs can’t dig him up again.
He leans his head against the bars, doesn’t notice when the other prisoners cower back, muttering in dark concern.
“Merlin?”
Recollection is slow in coming; it takes him a moment to remember that word meant him, once.
“My God, Merlin.”
He squints with bleary eyes at the vision beyond the bars – Arthur, gripping the cell door with furious pale-knuckled hands, looking sick, dressed in silk and ermine – and turns away. This vision will disappear again, he knows, just like all the other hallucinations that visit him in this place. He tells himself he’s not disappointed when it does.
*
He wakes to blessed silent darkness and Nimueh standing over him.
“Didn’t I kill you?” he says, voice scraped, rusty.
She laughs, a low chuckle full of deadly promise, and melts away; Arthur stands in her place. Merlin’s breath catches, jagged in his lungs. He shuts his eyes, wishing desperately, though that’s never made the visions leave before.
“No,” he moans, the sound nearly a sob, a whimpering heart-cry. “No, no...” Not again.
“Shh,” the vision says, broken, taking his hand. “Shh, Merlin.” He tugs away, feeble, but it holds him firm, running its rough thumb along Merlin’s palm. He takes a chance, cracks one eye.
Arthur is still there, dressed more simply in clean dark clothes. Merlin stares at where his hand, three fingers crumpled where they healed wrong, is enfolded in Arthur’s own. He is clean, the grime of prison scrubbed from his skin, and the sheets he lies on are soft, white; they smell like the summer sky. He looks back at Arthur, who is looking at him with an expression Merlin never saw on Arthur’s face in life.
He closes his eyes again, breathes, hopes the vision will still be there when he wakes up.
*
The hallucination continues, pleasant and safe and bright after the long time enclosed by moldy prison walls. Merlin never sees anyone but Arthur, who brings him food and steaming water to wash in and nurses him with single-minded focus, and it is lovely, even if Arthur rarely speaks and sometimes lets his shoulders sag and shake when he thinks Merlin isn’t looking.
Merlin is always looking, drinking in the sight of Arthur, a dead man pulled from the desert to the sea.
He wanders around the room, picking up books and statuettes and staring at them before laying them carefully aside again. He climbs up and wedges himself into the high windowsill, gazing down on a town that looks a little bit like Camelot except bigger, cleaner than Camelot ever was. Arthur scolds him when he catches him up there, but Merlin just smiles in the knowledge that a fall in this vision wouldn’t, couldn’t kill him.
*
Merlin surprises Arthur one day, kissing him up against the door, licking at Arthur’s chapped lips until Arthur gasps and lets him in, hands pressing hard against Merlin’s shoulders. Merlin pushes in determinedly and Arthur pushes back, caught between Merlin and the door, scraping his nails down Merlin’s spine and making him shiver.
When Merlin slides his hands beneath Arthur’s shirt, Arthur stiffens and pushes Merlin away hard.
“I can’t,” he says, beseeching, and Merlin stares at him, aching, denied what he wants even in the confines of his own mind. “Merlin,” Arthur pleads. “It’s not that I don’t want to, you have to know how much I want you, but don’t you see? I can’t do that to you, to Gwen.”
Merlin sees. He turns away from Arthur, burrows down into the safety of the bed and turns in on himself, praying for the first time that the hallucination will end.
*
He paces the room, following the walls around and around, looking for a way out. The door is locked; he wonders briefly if he could destroy it with magic, but his magic is still locked away. The tingle in his fingers is nearly gone; he knows if he can just get out, break free of this dream, it will come back to him.
He starts spending more time hunched by the window, which Arthur carefully locks every time he leaves. It’s calming to sit above everything, watch the vision-world go by below him. Arthur still scolds him, but less frequently – now the hallucination is more worried about his hands, which he picks at, trying to feel something in this forsaken place, and pleads with him to eat, ignores him when Merlin says he isn’t hungry, how could he be, since this is all in his mind anyway?
Arthur pulls back at that, looking hurt and a little bit shattered. His fingers shake when they reach up to check the window latch.
*
One day Merlin climbs up and finds the window open, a faint whisper of air curling in through the crack. He pushes at it, cautious, and it swings easily, letting him peer down below. He squirms around onto his knees, bracing his hands on the sunlit stones as he stands, bending his head to keep from hitting it on the top of the deep-set windowsill.
A crash behind him makes him look, shifting sideways and craning his head around. Arthur stands there, the remains of lunch spread out on the floor, broken crockery and steaming soup making a picture of color against the grey.
“Don’t worry,” Merlin says when Arthur steps forward, one hand outstretched. Arthur’s face is miserable, twisted with frantic worry, and Merlin spares a moment for sympathy. “I’m coming back to you, you’ll see. When I wake up, I’ll get my magic back. I’ll break out and come find you, don’t worry.”
Arthur lunges, but he’s too far away, Merlin too quick now that he has a mission, a goal to work for. He steps out and the world falls away beneath him, lifting him up until finally, he finds the stars.