Chapter Text
The wine went everywhere.
It was not, strictly speaking, Merlin's fault. The flagon had been badly balanced on the edge of the table since he'd set it down, and it had only taken Arthur shifting his considerable bulk in his chair to send the whole thing lurching. Merlin had lunged for it. He'd almost caught it. He had, in fact, caught it, just slightly too late and slightly too low, which meant that the wine itself had already left the flagon in a graceful, deeply unhelpful arc directly across the front of Arthur's tunic before the vessel was safely in his hands.
He straightened up, flagon in hand, and looked at Arthur.
Arthur looked down at his tunic. Then up at Merlin. Then down at his tunic again, as if perhaps it would look better the second time.
It did not look better the second time.
"Merlin."
"It was already falling."
"Merlin."
"I caught it, actually, if you'd like to focus on the positive—"
Arthur moved rapidly around the table and reached out to cuff him across the back of the head, not hard, the same absent way he might swat a fly that had been bothering him for slightly too long. "You, Merlin," he said, considerable irritation in his voice, "are an idiot."
Merlin rolled his eyes, taking the soiled tunic and dunking it in the wash bucket. "Yes of course it's all Merlin's fault, let's blame Merlin. He only —"
Arthur cut him off. "We are training in twenty minutes, I need you to dress me." He paused, grinning wickedly. "I think you can hold the shield."
He could have caught it, was the thing. The flagon. He'd felt the familiar pull at the base of his skull the moment it had started to tip, that old involuntary instinct, like a hand reaching out before the mind catches up. He'd shut it down in the same instant, the way he always did. A reflex on top of a reflex.
Magic was not something you did in Camelot. Not if you wanted to keep your head attached to the rest of you.
Merlin groaned, dragging himself languidly away from the basin, wringing out the ruined tunic with more force than was strictly necessary.
If Arthur knew.
He turned the thought over the way he sometimes did, not because it was useful but because it had a particular texture to it, like pressing a bruise. If Arthur knew what he was, what he actually was, tucked underneath four years of suppressants and carefully managed normalcy, none of this would look the way it did. There would be no cuffing. No dragging him to training at an hour that ought to be illegal. No Merlin, you're an idiot, pick that up, do it again, faster, you're hopeless, what exactly are you good for, you're a turnip head.
There would be careful voices and careful hands and Arthur looking at him the way he looked at things he considered fragile. He would be managed. Tidied away somewhere comfortable. Fed well and bothered rarely and brought out for special occasions like a good piece of silverware. And to breed.
Merlin would rather be set on fire.
Which was the smaller of his two secrets, as it happened.
The larger one he didn't let himself think about too directly, the way you didn't look straight at the sun. It was within him through a flair of his eyes.
In Camelot, it was a death sentence. In Camelot, it didn't exist.
He was very good at things not existing.
The thing was, and this was the part that made it almost funny, in the way that things were funny when they were also slightly terrible, he didn't even look like what he was. Most omegas were soft. Round-faced and sweet-scented and built on a smaller scale, the kind of people rooms rearranged themselves around, everyone wanting to be near them, to provide for them, to earn that warm approval. Merlin had met a few at court. They had looked down on him with bewilderment, like a dog who'd wandered into a cat show.
He was not soft. He was mostly elbows. He was tall and lanky where most were short and curvaceous, lean from his manual labor in service of the king, sharp-featured in a way his mother called striking and everyone else seemed to find slightly off-putting. The only concession his body had made to what it was supposed to be was a small, infuriating softness at his middle, not a belly per se, but a lack of lean abdominal muscle, a pouch that refused to leave no matter what he did, but that read as slightly unfit rather than omega, which suited him just fine.
And his temperament. He almost laughed, wringing the tunic out again. Omegas were meant to be, not meek exactly, but yielding. Inclined toward harmony. Disinclined toward poking authority figures in the chest and telling them when they were being idiots, which Merlin did on a fairly regular basis. He talked back to the crown prince of Camelot. He had done it the first day they met and had not meaningfully stopped since. Every omega he'd ever encountered would have been horrified by him. He found this deeply satisfying.
The suppressants did the rest. Hunith had started him on them early, early enough that he'd never had a heat. Never had the biological theatre of an omega fully presenting itself to the world. Which meant no scent, or near enough as made no difference. Which meant Arthur, with his broad Alpha shoulders and his frankly unreasonable instincts, had lived in close quarters with Merlin for four years without his nose telling him anything worth knowing.
Arthur thought he was a Beta. Most people did. Neither the magic nor the designation announced themselves, and Merlin had become quietly expert at keeping it that way.
Two secrets. Both of them fatal, in their different fashions.
He dropped the sopping tunic into the basin and straightened up.
From across the room, Arthur was reaching for his sword belt, already moving toward the door, already assuming without checking that Merlin would simply follow. Fall into step. Appear at his shoulder like he always did.
"Training," Arthur said, not even looking back. "Stop fussing with the laundry."
Merlin looked at him. At the set of his shoulders, easy and unconscious, the complete and uncomplicated certainty that Merlin would come.
He would, obviously. He always did.
If you knew, he thought, you wouldn't dare treat an omega like this.
He picked up the sword belt Arthur had also left on the floor, and followed.
The training ground was, by any reasonable estimation, a perfectly ordinary Omega's version of hell.
Merlin couldn't say he enjoyed it. He had never said he enjoyed it. He had said so, repeatedly, to Arthur, who had listened with the attentiveness of a man who had already decided the answer and found the question mildly entertaining. And so here he was, shoulder braced against the rim of Arthur's shield, teeth gritted against the rhythmic, deeply personal assault of a mace that Arthur was swinging with what Merlin felt was unnecessary enthusiasm.
"You're leaning," Arthur observed, from the other end of the mace.
"I'm bracing," Merlin said, through his teeth.
"Same thing, done badly."
Someone laughed. Merlin didn't look to see who. It would only encourage them.
The thing was, he was not bad at this. He had started from nothing, four years ago, all loose limbs and no technique whatsoever, and he had improved through sheer stubborn exposure in the way that anything improved if it was hit enough times. He could hold a shield. He could read a strike before it landed, most of the time. He was quick in a way that occasionally surprised people who had already dismissed him, which he found deeply satisfying.
None of this meant that being on the receiving end of Arthur Pendragon's training regime was anything other than a sustained exercise in impact.
The mace caught the shield low and the force of it travelled straight up through Merlin's arm and into his shoulder and he registered, distantly, that tomorrow that was going to ache in a very specific and memorable way.
Then his foot found the patch of mud that had been waiting patiently for him since the start of the session, and the ground came up to meet him with the resigned inevitability of an old acquaintance.
He lay there for a moment, staring up at the flat grey sky, conducting a brief internal survey of his various complaints.
Arthur's face appeared above him, expression caught somewhere between amusement and the faint, quickly-suppressed concern he would deny until his dying breath.
"Up," he said, and offered his hand.
Merlin took it, and Arthur pulled him to his feet with the easy, unthinking strength that Merlin had also, for the record, entirely stopped noticing. He was upright, and then Arthur's hand moved to the top of his head, ruffling his hair in the absent way one might pat a dog that had fallen off something, fond and faintly patronizing and completely without guile.
Merlin's whole body made a quiet, treacherous suggestion. As he battled to stop himself arching into Arthurs touch.
He stepped back, scrubbing the mud off his hands onto his breeches, and did not do anything with his face that he would have to explain later. "I slipped," he said. "The ground is wet."
"The ground," Arthur agreed, "has been wet every morning this week. One might think you'd account for it."
"One might think you'd call off training when it rains."
"One would be wrong."
There was more laughter from the knights. Merlin accepted this with as much dignity as he could muster flat on his back in the mud, which was to say he ignored it entirely and went to retrieve his pride along with the shield.
He was fine. It was just a hand in his hair. Arthur did it constantly, it meant nothing, it was a reflex the man had developed sometime in the second year and had never bothered to examine. Merlin had not examined it either. He examined nothing. He was practically a hermit of self-reflection.
The morning might have continued in this vein indefinitely, which Merlin would have preferred, all things considered, to what actually happened.
A rider came through the gate at pace, still dusty from the road, and the training ground rearranged itself around the message he carried. Merlin watched Arthur's face go from loose to focused in the space of a breath, the shift that happened whenever Camelot needed something from him. He took the rolled parchment, read it, and looked up.
"We ride tomorrow. Three days, perhaps four." He glanced at Merlin with the complete and uncomplicated expectation of a man who had never once packed his own bag. "Bandit trouble, two towns over. Nothing significant." His eyes swept the assembled knights. "Usual company. Be ready by first light."
And that was that.
Merlin, sore in his shoulder and his pride in roughly equal measure, was dispatched to begin the preparations.
He found Gaius in the physician's chambers, which smelled, as it always did, of dried herbs and old books and something faintly chemical that Merlin had stopped trying to identify years ago. The old man was at his workbench, and he looked up when Merlin came in, taking in the mud on his clothes and the careful way he was holding his left shoulder, Guias said nothing about the clothes but pushes a bottle of salve towards him.
"We're riding out tonight," Merlin said, and sat down heavily on the stool by the door. "Three or four days. Possibly more."
Gaius set down what he was holding. He turned to look at Merlin with the expression Merlin had come to know of as the one that preceded a conversation he'd already had approximately a thousand times.
"How are your supplies?"
"Enough for five days if I'm careful."
"And if the trip extends?"
"I’ll forage”. Gaius snorted “and your foraging skills are that legendary” his sarcasm was a thing Merlin appreciated less.
"You know my concerns," Gaius said, moving to the cabinet at the far wall, pulling out the small, stoppered bottle that had been a fixture of Merlin's life since he was fifteen. "Extended exposure to a group of Alphas while under-supplemented is not a theoretical risk, Merlin. It is a predictable one."
"I'm aware."
"Arthur in particular." He set the bottle on the bench and looked at Merlin steadily. "Proximity to a bonded Alpha is one thing. Prolonged proximity to an unbonded one, in close quarters, with reduced suppressant levels—"
"Gaius." Merlin meant it to sound like a reprimand bit it came out more like the wine of a petulant child.
"I'm not telling you anything you don't know. I'm reminding you that knowing it and accounting for it are different things." He pushed the bottle toward him. "Take more than you think you need. And if anything feels different, anything at all, you come back. You find a reason."
Merlin picked up the bottle and turned it over in his hands.
"It'll be fine," he said. "It's always fine."
Gaius gave him the look that meant you have said that before and we both know how it tends to go.
Merlin was, for the record, furious.
It had been eight days. Eight days of wet boots and cold mornings and sleeping on ground that seemed to find new and inventive ways to be uncomfortable, eight days of Arthur being insufferable about the whole enterprise with the cheerful resilience of a man whose tent was significantly better than everyone else's, and they had not seen a single bandit. Not one. The villages had reported them, certainly. The reports had been detailed and credible and had led Arthur and his knights on a merry circuit of the most miserable terrain the kingdom had to offer, and the bandits had remained, throughout, entirely theoretical.
It was also, as of yesterday morning, day two without suppressants.
Merlin was very aware of this. His body was making sure of it.
It had started as something he could dismiss, a low-level restlessness, a warmth that had no business being there given how thoroughly it was raining. He'd put distance between himself and the camp when he could, drifting to the outer edge of the firelight in the evenings, finding reasons to be elsewhere during the hours when everyone was crowded together and the air was thick with Alpha and Beta and all the things that his body had very strong, very inconvenient opinions about. He'd moved his sleeping roll further into the treeline. Then further still, making something that was not quite a nest from his bedroll and a spare horse blanket in a hollow between two roots, private and enclosed.
He washed in every stream they passed. Twice, when he could manage it without someone noticing. He could smell himself and that was the problem, a warm sweet undertone to his usual scent that the suppressants had kept locked away for four years, and it needed to not exist, so he scrubbed at his skin until it was pink and hoped for the best.
Arthur had said, on the morning of day seven, that Merlin smelled like a wet dog.
Merlin had taken this as a good sign. The smell of the horse blankets was probably masking his scent.
Today he had wandered further from camp than was strictly sensible, following a vague memory of something Gaius had said once about wormwood and its properties. It was not a real solution. He knew that. It was the kind of thing you did when you were out of real solutions and the alternative was sitting still and letting your body make decisions for you, which was not something Merlin was prepared to accept.
He was crouched over a promising-looking bush, rain dripping steadily off the end of his nose, trying to determine whether what he was looking at was wormwood, which might help, or hemlock, which would kill him outright. The leaves were similar. He was working from memory with a rising headache as well as an unaccustomed fogginess slowing his thoughts.
He had just about decided it was probably wormwood and was reaching for it when the undergrowth behind him moved.
He was on his feet before the thought finished forming, but not fast enough. There were five of them, which was not a number he could manage with his hands alone even on a good day, and this was not a good day. He got his back to a tree and that was the last decision that was his, because then the largest of them, an Alpha by the smell and the size and the look in his eyes that Merlin recognised and did not like, had him by the collar and slammed him back against the bark hard enough to knock the air out of him.
The man pressed close. Too close. His face went to Merlin's neck, to the place where his neckerchief had twisted, and Merlin felt the hot drag of a tongue across his gland and recoiled but was trapped against the immovable oak behind him.
He smelled wrong. That was Merlin's first coherent thought, specific and absurd given the circumstances. The man smelled of sweat and mud and something stale and overwhelming, nothing like the clean warm clove of Arthur's imported soap that Merlin had been carefully not thinking about for two days. This was not what he wanted. This was the opposite of what he wanted. His hands were against the man's chest and he was pushing with everything he had and it was not moving anything. “what is a little Omega doing along in the forest”
The man's hot breath ghosted unpleasantly against his neck.
His body, though, was making its own calculations.
He felt it with a lurch of pure humiliation, the heat gathering low in his gut, the slick that had nothing to do with want and everything to do with biology, warm and mortifying and entirely outside his control. His pulse was loud in his ears. His cock was taking an interest that he found unconscionable under the circumstances. His body, stripped of suppressants and backed against a tree by an Alpha it didn't know well enough to be afraid of, was doing exactly what it was built to do, regardless of what Merlin himself thought about any of it.
He did not want this. He wanted to be very clear about that, internally, for the record.
The man said something to the others. There was laughter. Merlin's vision had begun to develop soft edges. This must be heat, he thought, a warm unreliable fog, and through it he could distantly feel himself beginning to stop fighting, which was the worst thing that had happened yet.
No.
The word formed somewhere under the fog, clear and absolute. Not this. Not here, not by this man, not away from Arthur and Gaius and his mother and everything that was his. He was not going to be taken by five men who smelled like something had died on them and dragged off into the forest like lost property.
He stopped pushing and went still, and the Alpha made a satisfied sound, and then Merlin gathered everything he had, every scrap of focus and fury he could find, and let it go.
"Astrīce."
His eyes burned gold. The word left him like a wave cresting and breaking, something that had been building for days finally given an exit, and all five men left the ground at once and went backwards into the treeline with a sound like the world rearranging itself. Much further than he'd intended.
He slid down the tree and sat in the wet leaves and tried to remember how to breathe.
Then footsteps, fast and heavy, and his whole body flinched before his brain caught up. He looked up.
Arthur.
Arthur, wide-eyed and rain-soaked, dropped to his knees in the mud in front of him and grabbing him by the shoulders with both hands, grip tight enough to ground him, shaking him once as if to confirm he was solid and present.
"Merlin." His voice was strange. "Merlin, look at me."
Merlin looked at him. Arthur's face was doing several things at once. His eyes were moving over Merlin rapidly, checking, cataloguing, he looked frightened, none of his usual merriment present.
Then the wind shifted. Causing the tree to unleash a deluge of drops upon them.
Arthur went very still.
Something changed in his expression, his pupils dilated, some instinct that had nothing to do with the conversation they were about to have about the five men currently embedded in the undergrowth or the golden light he had absolutely just watched come out of his manservant's eyes.
He'd smelled him.