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Arthur doesn't press too hard on why he wants to see Merlin drunk—he just does. Merlin sees him in various states of disrepair and vulnerability all the time, so maybe it’s an attempt to level the playing field, or something. Or perhaps Arthur is just so terribly, glaringly lacking in friends that he wants to drink with Merlin in some pathetic attempt to dissolve the decorum and duty between them so that they are just two young men, not a prince and his servant. Whatever the reason, he wants it badly enough to smuggle an extra bottle of wine up from dinner, tucking it into the inside pocket of his jacket when he and Merlin retire.
Halfway up the stairs and to his quarters, he nudges his hips into Merlin, who is very skinny and never expecting these sorts of things, so he very nearly falls down. Arthur takes great pleasure in catching him by the elbow, hauling him up, and announcing, “My god, you are so clumsy, it’s remarkable you haven't broken both your legs going up and down these stairs all day every day.” And then, because it’s always easier to say something sincere to Merlin if it’s sandwiched between carefully crafted insults, “I’ve decided to give you the night off, so that you can split this wine with me. Unless you have other plans, like, crying over poetry or cleaning Gaius’s leech tank or something.”
Merlin makes an incredulous face at him. “Is it really a night off if I’m still expected to spend it with you?” he asks, as rude and irreverent as always. It makes Arthur’s blood rush, his throat tight with the inexplicable thrill of being treated as an equal, not a royal. It’s an odd thing he craves, even if it also makes him angry. There is much about Merlin he does not understand, much about him that feels like a poison ivy rash, itchy and ever-spreading and impossible not to scratch. Arthur has sort of given up trying, anyhow.
“Oh shut up, you should be thanking me. You’ve never had drink this fine. It’s aged. A vintage. You’ll like it.”
“I fail to see what’s so exciting about old wine,” Merlin grumbles, but the corner of his pink lips are tilting up ever so slightly, and Arthur’s heart races to behold it. He shoves him again, digging his elbow into the heat of his body. “You know, I should warn you, ’m not terribly good at drinking. Back in Ealdor, I had a bit of a reputation, no one liked to waste their mead on me because I’d always end up throwing it up.”
“You’re a lightweight,” Arthur nods, grinning to himself, completely unsurprised. “Of course you are. It’s because you’re ninety pounds soaking wet.”
Merlin shrugs. “If you don't want me to puke your fancy vintage wine, I’m sure I could find a leech tank to clean.”
As they arrive at Arthur’s door, he grabs Merlin by his belt and wrestles him inside, loving how easy it is, how even when Merlin puts up a fight, it’s always playful, half-hearted, for show. “You won’t puke, I’ll show you how to do it properly. C’mon. It’ll be fun.”
Merlin lets himself be steered and deposited at the table as Arthur uncorks the bottle and pours them two very full goblets. “Wow, I genuinely had no idea you could do that yourself,” he quips, brows raised over his very clear, very light blue eyes.
Arthur schools a smug grin, sucking the inside of his cheek. “I don’t have the slightest idea how to scrub a plate or cook a chicken, but you can bet I learned to use a corkscrew as soon as possible. Bribing the servants to do it for me only worked half the time, so I had to take measures into my own hands,” he explains, swirling the wine about a bit before taking a sip.
“You’ve been drinking a long time,” Merlin observes, nodding and studying his own glass. “Explains some, but not all, of why you’re such an idiot.”
Arthur steps in and flicks him on the shoulder impatiently, choosing not to rise to the barb. “C’mon, Merlin, have some fucking fun for once in your life! Take a sip.”
“Fine,” he sighs, bringing it to his nose and sniffing it. His eyes water a bit. “Cheers, I guess. I cannot be held responsible for anything I say or do from this moment forward.” Then, he chokes a bit down. “Ugh,” he says. “And you do this voluntarily?”
“It’ll grow on you, I promise,” Arthur tells him, cupping the back of Merlin’s skull with his hand and tilting the goblet to his lips again, forcing him to swallow another few mouthfuls. His hair is very soft and oily between his fingers, and his lips are stained red when he pulls away, and Arthur is so terrifically stuck on these details well after the fact that it keeps leaving him breathless. He polishes off more than half of his own glass, coughing. “How do you feel?” he asks.
“Um. Uncomfortably hot, so far,” Merlin mumbles, blinking and wiping his plush mouth on his sleeve. The shape of it distorts, and Arthur stares at the broken softness with his heart tight in his chest. Merlin spreads his long fingers on his face, which is violently pink beneath the pale splay. Arthur is certain that if he were to press a thumb to him, it would leave a bloodless mark, so he does just that, reaching for Merlin and digging into the terrible, improbable curve of his cheek.
“You are so flushed already,” he observes, taking his hand back before Merlin realises it’s shaking. “How’s your head? Dizzy at all?”
Merlin giggles, which is a good sign. Then he covers his laughing mouth with his arm, wheezing a bit, getting himself under control before taking another sip. “Perhaps. A small. A smidgeon dizzy.”
“A smidgeon?! Oh god, you are a lightweight,” Arthur says, slapping his thigh gleefully before topping off Merlin’s goblet. “Pace yourself, now. I’ll get you some water.”
The water does very little, though. By the time Merlin makes it to the bottom of his goblet, he’s a fucking mess, and so is Arthur. He’s not drunk himself, only pleasantly tipsy, but he’s positively fascinated with how drunk Merlin is, Merlin, who won’t stop touching him, whose breath is hot and boozy and sweet as it gusts over his mouth, whose face is burning like coal against Arthur’s neck every time he presses it there, to his pulse. Merlin, who can hardly stand after just one and a half glasses of good red wine. It’s embarrassing. Arthur is embarrassed for him. Or, he would be, if he was thinking clearly, but he’s not. He’s getting lost in the folds of Merlin’s shirt, where he has to keep making fists to keep him upright as Merlin hangs on him, alternating between very poorly singing Ealdorian drinking songs he hardly remembers the words to and telling Arthur he will be the greatest king Camelot has ever known with heartbreaking sincerity.
“This is not what I wanted when I said I wanted to drink with you,” Arthur tells him as he marches him to his bed and dumps him there. He’s lying though, he realises. He did want this, and now that he’s admitting it to himself, there’s a hint of shame creeping up in his gut at the revelation. He didn’t want to take advantage of Merlin, not concretely, but he did want to see him with his guard down, strip him to his messiest, rawest self. And not just to see him but to dig his fingers into him when he was like this. To pry for truths. Tell me what a great king I’ll be, he wants to beg. Believe in me when I can’t believe in myself. Instead, he just frowns as he tugs Merlin’s boots off, and brings him more water. “Drink this, please.”
Merlin messily sucks it down, rivulets spilling over his chin and throat before they disappear into his neckerchief, which he keeps tugging at in irritation. Arthur’s chest aches, and he helps untie the knot, his own fingers clumsy with wine, too. It takes forever, and he collapses into the bed beside Merlin once he finally gets it off, staring up at his canopy as it swims around him, so that he does not have to stare at Merlin’s pallid sternum as it heaves. “You really think I’ll be a good king?” he asks in a small voice eventually, hating himself the second it comes out.
Merlin rolls over to look at him, not at all mindful of how close he is, how his knee digs into Arthur’s thigh, how his breath cascades onto his lips. Arthur licks them helplessly, then shuts his eyes. He prays Merlin will kiss him as he lies here in a self-made darkness, and this is the first time he’s consciously let himself wish it, but as soon as it surfaces in his mind, he knows it’s something that’s been brewing there for a terribly long time. He swallows thickly. Merlin does not kiss him. He just says, “Not a good king, the best. The very best, Arthur, you’re going to—you’ll change the world. And m’gonna do it with you.”
Arthur’s eyes flash open and take a moment to focus, but when he does, Merlin is staring at him, hazy and earnest. “Oh yes? As my ever-loyal servant who’s absolutely dreadful at his job?” he asks, grinning, even as his stomach plummets.
Merlin grins back before something serious and wavering flickers into his eyes, and his mouth falters into a flat line. “As whatever you’ll have me as,” he answers, like Arthur is supposed to fucking survive that.
He vaults out of bed before he does something stupid, and promptly trips and spills out onto the floor, doing something stupid anyway because that is his fate, he supposes, the grave he must lie in as punishment for bringing the wine up here in the first place and making Merlin’s lips even pinker and more distracting than they already are. Merlin crows in laughter from the bed, peeking a messy head over the edge, hair rucked up in back. “Good thing you have some time before you take the throne, though, dunno if you’re ready for all the world-changing and whatnot.”
“Shut up, Merlin,” Arthur snaps, making the motion of tossing something in his direction, even though there is nothing here on the ground for him to lob at him that is not already attached to his body. He sprawls out to catch his breath before standing and wobbling back to the bottle, which is disappointingly empty. “Sad,” he says, tapping the glass neck.
Merlin lifts a hand before letting it flop back onto his own chest. “I shall go to the kitchens,” he announces. “And steal us another.”
“No, you will not,” Arthur snaps at him, curling his lip. “You will drink more water, and then you’ll sleep.”
“Here?!” Merlin asks incredulously before hiccuping. “In your room? I couldn’t. I’d. It’s not safe.”
Arthur raises his eyebrows at him, and forces more water into his hand. “You want me to deliver you to Gaius in this state?”
He frowns. “Not really.”
“That’s what I thought,” Arthur mumbles, leaning against his bedpost and realising he’s not strong enough to stop himself from watching Merlin messily chug water and get it all over himself again. There’s only so much resistance he’s cut out for in a single evening. “I’ll make a bed for you on the floor,” he mumbles then, rubbing his face with his hands, something prickling in his chest uncomfortably as his mind inevitably supplies him with the thought of lying beside Merlin there in his own bed, burning up in the drunk, slurring heat from his body. He shudders. “Or—I’ll sleep on the floor. I don’t know if I can even move you. You’re deceptively heavy, you know.”
“It’s my bulging muscles,” Merlin jokes matter-of-factly, grinning from the bed and flexing his bony arm. “This—this is your fault, you know,” he adds then, gesturing to himself. “I was content to read. Scrub some things. You're so—you’re insistent, is what you are. Pretend you don’t want me around while you bend every rule just to spend time with me. S’very suspicious.”
That stops Arthur’s heart, ripples through him like water after a cast stone. “Have you considered I’m just a very kind prince who feels sorry for you?” he snaps, hating the way the lie is bitter on his tongue. His body is always giving him away, betraying his secrets if only to himself.
Merlin snorts. “I’ve considered a lot of things, actually,” he offers, carding a hand through his hair and shutting his eyes. “Just because you’re gonna be a great king doesn’t mean you’re a half-way decent prince in the meantime. You’re a prat, right now. I just. M’waiting for things to change, I have faith you’re salvageable. I can be patient.”
Arthur sighs, fishing the empty water glass from his bedsheets before wrenching his comforter off the bed and laying it atop a few of the decorative sham pillows so he can have something soft to lie against on the floor. He doesn't trust himself to be close to Merlin again—not when they’re both drunk, and anything seems possible. Not when he’s talking about having faith, and patience. Arthur grimaces, then punches the stiff fabric into something unrecognisable. “Last time I drink with you,” he grumbles. “You’re even more insolent this way.”
Merlin smiles at him, cheeks so pink. “I told you, m’not responsible for anything I say or do.” Then, he reaches out and tangles his fingers into Arthur’s hair like he is some loyal dog lying at the foot of the bed. “See? M’incorrigible.”
Arthur bats his hand away, heart speeding in panic. “Quit that,” he says, crunching Merlin’s long fingers in a fist ungently. He hisses and writhes on the bed, and that certainly doesn't make Arthur feel any more in control, so he lets go abruptly. “I’m going to kill the lights. Try and sleep this off.”
“Fine,” Merlin mumbles, rolling over and shoving his flushed face into Arthur’s pillow. “Be a sodding stick-in-the-mud spoilsport prat-prince.”
In minutes, he’s snoring lightly, and Arthur lies on the ground in darkness, and does not sleep a wink.
2.
Arthur cannot get drunk with Merlin again, he decides. It’s too risky. His particular brand of deviance cannot be trusted around a man who belittles him and builds him up in equal measure, all the while leaning too close and smelling too good. It is like some terrible hell designed very specifically for Arthur and his weaknesses alone. He has a hard enough time keeping himself from shoving Merlin to the ground and sitting atop him and biting his mouth when they’re both sober, he cannot be trusted to deal with the temptation of a Merlin who is not afraid to touch him, a Merlin who lies in his bed like he belongs there, telling him he’s stupid and brilliant like those things go hand in hand. He just can’t. So, it must not happen again.
But unfortunately, Arthur seems to have put the taste for alcohol into Merlin, because several times after that initial transgression, he disappears mysteriously for days at a time to, apparently, the fucking tavern. Arthur hasn’t actually found him there or caught him in the act, but there’s no reason for Gaius to lie about something like that, so. It must be true.
Arthur is not sure why it upsets him. Or, rather, he is sure, but he doesn't like his reasons, so he resents himself for feeling that way. Because the truth is, it’s not just irritating that Merlin is such a terribly bad servant he shirks his responsibilities without any warning to drink ale, it’s that—well. Arthur hates the idea of him at the tavern surrounded by other men. Drinking around them, touching them, being touched by them. He hates to think of that soft, clumsy, clingy, hungry version of Merlin anywhere but his own room. Sleep-breathing and sloppy in his own sheets. The thought throbs in his chest like a second heartbeat, so he tries his hardest not to think of it. Instead, he blusters about, yelling.
Both times Merlin resurfaces after these incidents, he does not smell like he went to the tavern. There is no pipe smoke ghost of it clinging to his hair, no boozy heat to his breath. Arthur leans close and sucks his exhalations in an attempt to discern a note of it, but he never sniffs anything suspicious. Which means that either Merlin is very good at hiding such things, or else, he (and Gaius, most puzzlingly) is lying.
Arthur hates that it's easier to justify there might be some other reason to keep Merlin’s true whereabouts a secret than it is to think about him spending days in hazy darkness, beside himself while big, rough hands paw over his tottering drunk body.
3.
The next time it happens, it’s entirely by accident: it’s Mabon, and everyone is tipsy. Arthur has not been so drunk in months, perhaps it’s even been a year since the last time he was forced to sit through very long toasts after very tedious treaties, his father calling for the best casks to be brought up in celebration. He doesn’t mean for it to happen—it just does. Merlin keeps refilling his goblet, and he keeps idly draining it until he’s dizzy, his vision sparkles, and he can’t remember why he’s not supposed to look at Merlin for too long. “Have some,” he says, shoving his glass up once Merlin tops it off. “The rest of the servants are all drinking. You look absurd being the only one with your wits about you. Don’t embarrass me,” he mumbles, studying Merlin as he nearly drops the goblet and spills wine everywhere. He holds Arthur’s gaze for a moment, pale eyes helplessly flashing with something darker as he purses his lips.
“You remember what happened last time, my lord,” he reminds Arthur, voice low so no one can hear, the my lord tacked on in case anyone does, anyway. “I drooled on your pillow.”
Arthur’s stomach plummets, his vision swims. Yes, he remembers the drool on his pillow. He remembers the small stain it made, how he put his mouth over it later and shamefully sucked the taste of Merlin's spit from the fine silk fibers while he fisted his cock to messy, shameful finish. How he clung to the scent of Merlin’s hair and sweat in his sheets as long as they lasted, until it faded, and even then, he would still press his face to the place he once was and inhale, hands on his own skin, eyes screwed shut against the tide of impossible longing. These are things he tries to forget in waking hours, but forgetting is hard when it's sometime after midnight and everyone is laughing and he’s had too much wine to remind himself why he shouldn’t be lingering here, in the shadow of his darkest moments, trying to trick his servant into having more wine. “Just fucking drink, Merlin,” he snaps, kicking out clumsily at his shin and missing. “Don’t leave me all alone here in poor company.”
Merlin does, and Arthur watches the effects spread over him like a low, slow-burning fire. The colour creeping into his cheeks. The stumble to his step. His eyes half-lidded and hazy, his smiles all the looser. And god, Arthur needs this, he decides. He needs Merlin raw. It’s not as if he’s ever truly put together, but most days, it feels like he’s hiding something—like there’s a storm brewing beneath the surface of his carefully placid exterior, eddies and tumult swirling under a layer of glass. But with a little wine—he smooths out, opens up. There is nothing hidden, at least not in these moments, and so Arthur can dream of having him this way: Merlin unguarded, honest, pure. His mouth sloppy and berry-sweet, tannin-bitter under the scrape of Arthur’s teeth.
“See?” he says, looping an arm around his shoulders later, pulling him close enough to press his face ever so briefly into the raven-black ruffle of his hair. “S’easier this way, at these stupid feasts and parties. They go more quickly with a bit of drink.”
Merlin opens his hand on Arthur’s chest, then, his fingers tangling a bit in the laces of his tunic beneath his cape, undoing them a bit. Arthur’s heart trips under the splayed pressure. “I dunno—I rather like having my mind about me and laughing at the lot of you while you steadily act more and more foolish.”
Arthur is bold with tipsiness, so he doesn’t think much of cupping Merlin’s face in a palm, pulling him close. “Oh hush,” he says fondly. Too fondly. His thumb is at the corner of Merlin’s mouth, tugging it up into the pantomime of a smile. He’s drifting too close, and so he pitches away, head spinning. “Get—give me some space,” he says then, heart rabbiting as he scans the banquet hall, trying to take note if anyone has seen him. The crowd is an indistinguishable haze, though, and even as he blinks, they do not differentiate. Merlin is watching him, he can feel the heat of his gaze crawling over his body, scouring him like a stoker in hot embers.
“I think we should get you to bed, Sire,” Merlin announces, looping an arm around Arthur’s lower back and hauling him up, steering him away. “C’mon now. You will thank me in the morning.”
And Arthur really, really doubts it, but he lets himself be manhandled into the hallway anyway, the air cool on his fevered cheeks, Merlin stumbling beneath his weight.
4.
Arthur wakes up with a headache, which gets worse in the cold grey of morning sun filtering in through the window as Merlin pries back his curtains. He groans, rolls over, hides his eyes. “Ugh,” he says. “Why the hell are you here so early.”
“I let you sleep until 2 pm,” Merlin scoffs, peeling back the covers so Arthur is left to writhe there naked, stomach in furious knots. “Then I thought it might be a bit excessive if I allowed you to carry on after that.”
Arthur rolls over and snorts, squinting. So, not morning light, daylight. How perfectly dreadful. “Bring me some wine,” he says. Merlin stares at him, mouth lopsided in that horribly judgemental way it gets sometimes. It used to make Arthur want to strike Merlin, but now he knows he’d rather do something else. Bite the rude, defiant twist into submission, perhaps. The mere thought makes his stomach lurch, and he lays an arm over his eyes to block out the glare of sun. “Are you deaf?” he snaps. “Wine, Merlin.”
“My lord,” he says, the honorific dripping with reproach. “Let me remind you, it’s 2 in the afternoon. And as far as wine goes. Well. You had quite enough the night prior, if I recall. Seems you don’t.”
“Haven’t you ever heard of hair of the dog?” Arthur asks, gesturing vaguely, skull pounding. His entire body feels like it's vibrating in time with his heartbeat, each pulse sending him lurching minimally. It’s only then, in studying his body, that he recalls he’s lying here naked, withering beneath Merlin’s scalding gaze. “Wait. Are you—how did I end up with my clothes off?!” he asks then, grabbing the sheet and dragging it up to his waist, cheeks burning at the sudden revelation.
Merlin coughs. “Really, Sire. How. How much do you remember from the Mabon festivities?”
“Plenty,” he argues, though now he’s not so sure. “We drank. I gave you some wine, you refused until you caved, and then we left, and I—I woke up.”
The bed bows beneath Merlin’s slight weight as he lowers himself onto it. If Arthur were feeling as alert and athletic as he often does, he would roll away a bit to diminish the likelihood of their skin touching, but he feels lead-heavy and useless right now, so he doesn’t even bother. His skin prickles all the same, anticipating Merlin’s touch the way starved things hope for food whether or not it’s likely to come. “You tried to get me to drink, I had a few sips. But mostly I spent the whole night tending to you,” he spits out. “You—Arthur. Do you really not remember?”
Panic rockets though his body like lightning, leaving his pulse speeding in its wake. “Remember what?” he snaps. And then he risks a look at Merlin, peering under his arm to study the slope of his profile, the curve of his nose beneath the gentle jut of his brow-bone, every inch of him pretty and angular and completely impossible. Nature should not have crafted someone like Merlin, and fate should not have dropped him into Arthur’s life. He’s not sure mere mortal men are built to deal with such improbability, and it’s not his fault he falters in the face of it, it’s not his fault, it’s not his fault. He chews his lip until he tastes copper, and then, Merlin closes his eyes and shakes his head.
“Perhaps it’s best forgotten, then,” he says, standing. “I will tell you that you retched red wine all over your best white tunic, though. I’ve attempted to scrub it clean, but it's possible you ruined the thing for good. I shall send your measurements to the tailor in that case,” he mumbles, offering an odd, curt bow. There are spots of colour on his cheeks, and Arthur’s body curls around the memory of bile, the bite of it bitter in the back of his throat as he half-remembers scattered moments of the evening in dream-fractured fragments. Merlin’s ink-black hair. Merlin’s long white fingers. Feast-food smell clinging to his clothes, and then, under that, fresh mint and thyme on his skin, beneath the spice of sweat. Why was Arthur that close to his skin? He reels away, terrified to prod at the bruise, lest his fingers come back blood-slicked.
“Wine,” he orders again, grabbing one of his pillows and sending it sailing towards Merlin, though it misses him by a wide margin. Arthur sags back into the bed, defeated. “Merlin. Trust, if I were myself at this moment, I would have already hit you upside the head.”
“Oh,” Merlin says, on his way out the door. “I trust as much, my lord.”
The sarcasm stays with Arthur as he rolls over onto his side, and vomits into his piss pot.
5.
Merlin does not smile for two miserable days. This is probably because he has to clean up after Arthur, wipe the crimson wine speckles of his sick from the floor with a wet rag. Still, it sits poorly with Arthur, his somber mouth and tired eyes weighing upon his shoulders, biting into him like a dull sword. It is not enough to split his skin or make him bleed, but he rubs at the bruises at night anyway, wondering.
Every attempt he makes to ask Merlin what’s wrong is violently refuted, so he stops trying. He decides that eventually Merlin will come around. His smiles and his barbs and his terrible jokes and endless insults will resurface. Arthur just has to be patient, even though he is not very good at that at all. Merlin is much better, anyway. Sitting there watching Arthur blunder and blunder again, waiting for him to somehow, magically become the greatest king Camelot has ever known. Still, Arthur tries his hardest. He will complain, perhaps, but he will endure.
But then, Merlin stumbles into his room the next evening drunk, and everything changes.
He’s off-centre, almost blurry. A hazy shape in the doorway propped up against the frame. He is supposed to be bringing Arthur’s dinner, but he’s entirely empty-handed, and what’s more, smells like a distillery. Arthur’s blood pressure spikes, and his slouch disappears. “Merlin?” he asks, sitting ramrod straight. “Why on earth are you—”
“Drunk?” Merlin interrupts, striding across the room in a very clumsy figure eight. He begins to pace, carding his hand through his hair. “S’because I have something to tell you, and I can’t—I didn’t think I could say it without—” he gestures messily to himself. “Being like this.”
Arthur makes a face at him, lip curling, heart racing. “Well. Clearly this conversation is taking precedence over my dinner, so. Spit it out already, Merlin.” He attempts to sound annoyed but fails—not that Merlin is in a state fit enough to catch the subtlety of delivery, not in this moment. He’s red-faced, stumbling, and he looks absolutely miserable. Arthur can hardly stand it so he stands, grabs Merlin as he whirls about. “Spit. It. Out,” he demands.
“Oh,” Merlin says, forehead crumpling. “You’re not going to like it.”
Arthur shakes him a bit. “I don’t like my servant forgetting my dinner and practically falling over, either.”
“You won’t like it because…because it’s something you said. Something you said the other night at the banquet, and you don’t remember, and I’ve tried to forget it, I really have, but I can’t, and I—I just don’t think I can go on pretending,” Merlin all but wails.
Arthur steers him to the bed and deposits him there, his blood replaced with ice as the panic creeps up on him. “Something I said?” he asks, mind racing. He could have said any number of terrible, incriminating things while he was drunk, a whole litany of embarrassing confessions that could be haunting Merlin. I think about kissing you entirely too often. I like you drunk because I like you broken open because I can’t stand knowing, somehow, that you hide things from me. I wish things could be different, between us. I wish the world were different. He’s already attempting to internally fabricate excuses for half of these when Merlin scrubs a hand over his face, and mumbles something very quickly into his palm.
“Come again?” Arthur asks, prying the hand away.
“You said you were in love with me,” Merlin spits out. “You said my name, too. You said, ‘I’m in love with you, Merlin, isn’t that awful,’ and then you passed out while I mopped up your sick.”
Arthur has to sit down at that. It is awful. He staggers backwards and collapses on a chair, caught between simultaneous impulses to bolt out the door and into the forest, or to tackle Merlin to the ground and twist his arm until he swears to never bring this up again. Instead, he sits there, staring at his feet, face aflame. “That’s ridiculous,” he says weakly.
Merlin shrugs. “Did you mean it?”
“I—I—well.” Of course not! Arthur wants to scream, but he can hardly make his throat work. Instead, he’s swallowing pathetically, watching his life unspool into sudden, self-made shambles, every word wiped from his brain. “Do you want me to mean it?” he finally manages to wheedle out, which, frankly, would function as well as a confession to any other man, but Merlin is both drunk and an idiot, so maybe it will sail over his head.
Merlin is quiet for a long time, tugging at a string from the bed. “Yes,” he says eventually. “I know admitting that makes me a fool, but—”
“You—do you feel the same way?” Arthur interjects. “I. About me, I mean.”
Merlin flops onto the bed, staring up at the ceiling and sighing dramatically. “Unfortunately and against my better judgement, yes. Very much so.”
The relief is so violently palpable that it makes Arthur start to shake. He vibrates his way over to the bed, sitting down beside Merlin, studying him from an inch or so away. His improbable profile, his too-blue eyes. “So I said this to you, and you felt the same way, and you…let me fall asleep? You didn’t take advantage?”
Merlin turns to study him, gaze bleary with drink and disbelief. “I wanted to kiss you,” he admits. “Among other things. But. It didn’t seem right.”
Mouth flooded, Arthur nods. “Then I will try my hardest to offer the same restraint.”
Puzzlement floods Merlin’s face very slowly, like snowmelt beneath the sun. A line through his forehead, a warbling movement to his brows, a twist on that impossible mouth Arthur really shouldn’t be looking at right now if he means to do good by his promise. He closes his eyes. “God, you are so infernally idiotic, it really shouldn’t be attractive, and yet—” his eyes snap open, because there is a fist in the front of his shirt.
“I’m not idiotic,” Merlin slurs. “I’m just very drunk. Not so drunk you cannot kiss me, though, if what you’re saying is, by some miracle, that you want to kiss me.”
Arthur wants very, very much to kiss Merlin. He’s secondhand drunk on the fumes from his exhalations, he’s drifting closer, he’s falling apart. But like Merlin said, it doesn’t feel quite right, not like this. Not with Merlin lolling around in his bed, eyes unfocused. Not when Arthur’s uncertain he can hold himself back, once he gets started. So instead of kissing Merlin, Arthur reaches out, cups his cheek. Hot, smooth skin under his thumb, the rasp of stubble where Merlin’s chin fits neatly and maddeningly into the ditch of his palm. Merlin’s eyes flutter shut, and Arthur thumbs very gently over the line his black lashes make. “I want to kiss you,” he murmurs thickly. “So badly it is driving me mad. But due to my honour and—”
“Fuck your honour,” Merlin slurs, pressing the fever-hot angle of his jaw into Arthurs grip. “Kiss me.”
Arthur is honourable, he really is, but there are things no mortal man can resist, so he curses, then leans in to press one hungry kiss to Merlin’s sinfully soft, wine-sweet lips. “One,” he whispers as he pulls back a hair’s width, wavering as he grinds their brows together. “For now. Until you sober up. Then, you can have as many as you’d like. As many as you can stand.”
Thankfully, that warrants a smug, delicious smile. Arthur reels back before he bites it, vaulting out of bed and away from Merlin’s tar-pit aura of irresistible dragging heat. Then he pours Merlin a glass of water, yanks off his boots, and hauls his legs onto the mattress before killing the candles. “I’m not tired, you know, I’m not going to just sleep it off,” Merlin complains for a grand total of two minutes before passing out. Arthur stands in his room staring at him for a few minutes, something like shock warring the reflexive fury in his chest—he’s just so used to thinking Merlin looks perfectly delectable and then having to kick himself in the arse for it that the reality of one searing, single kiss hasn’t probably set in. Merlin looks perfectly delectable snoring and drooling in his bed, and Arthur doesn’t have to be angry because he gets to kiss him about it later. His grimace warps, not without difficulty, into a skull's mask of grinning elation.
He needs to get out of here before he does something embarrassing, so he slips out to bother Morgana. Something about how his useless servant is too drunk to bring him dinner. She mock-sympathetically offers him some grapes and a dinner roll, while Gwen keeps eyeing him suspiciously, like his smile is leaking out. Or like that kiss branded him, marked his mouth up forevermore.
6.
It’s an agonising, terrifically dull, and anxiety-soaked hour or so before Merlin begins to stir. “Ugh,” he says, kicking off the blankets. “Hot. Sweaty.”
“And here I thought I was doing the chivalrous thing, tucking you in,” Arthur says, thrilled to be put out of his misery as he strides to Merlin’s bedside. His heart trips, and he pauses for a moment, then forces himself past the initial terror to lie down beside Merlin, who is looking at him with narrowed eyes. “How’s your head?” he asks, quietly, this time. Like his voice is cagey about the proximity, too, frightened back into the confines of his throat.
Merlin sits up and chugs the water Arthur left for him on the bedside, face pale in the moonlight. “Not terrible, given the circumstances,” he says once he’s finished, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. His mouth. Arthur wants it so badly he can hardly think of anything else. “So…,” Merlin says, lowering himself cautiously down onto his side again. “Judging by the fact you are in your bed. And I am in your bed. I didn’t dream up that conversation we had.”
“You remember the whole conversation?” Arthur ventures, just to be sure. His own hand drifts between their bodies, stopping just short of Merlin’s chest, a white ladder of bones exposed through the rucked laces of his tunic.
Merlin nods, inching a cool, slender finger up into Arthur’s burning palm. It nearly stops Arthur’s heart, just to touch him like that. “I, unlike you, do not drink myself to utter oblivion. Just the brink of it.”
“Ah,” Arthur says, squeezing Merlin’s finger. “The brink of oblivion. That’s what that was, when you said ‘fuck your honour’ and just about killed me.” Then he grits his teeth, heart speeding as Merlin studies him, refusing to laugh or rise to the barb, instead just staring, unnervingly flaying Arthur with that icy, questing gaze. “Fine,” he says, caving. “So I’m in love with you. There it is. This time, devoid of oblivion. What do you have to say for it, now that you’ve slept yourself away from the brink?”
Merlin’s somber expression flickers, eyes twitching beneath the lids as he shuts them for as long as it takes to suck in a breath. Then, blessedly, he smiles. “That I’m in love with you, too,” he mumbles, the words slurring together with softness, this time, rather than drunkenness. “I’ve been…for days, Arthur, trying to figure out if you meant it, if you even knew when you weren’t drunk or just—”
Arthur cannot stand it for a second longer. He pitches forward, catches Merlin’s blathering mouth with his own. Kisses it, kisses it again, tongues it open to suck the plush lower lip into his mouth as he rolls Merlin onto his back to feel the long line of him alive and electric beneath him. He tastes like wine, and sleep, and it’s perfect. “I knew,” he murmurs between desperate, spit-wet drags of their mouths, Merlin’s hands clawing through his hair to make goosebumps explode down the nape of his neck. “I knew, I just—I didn’t want you to know.”
“Wine is terrible, and I hate it, and I’m never drinking it again, no matter how much you bully me,” Merlin says, hissing and writhing as Arthur mouths his way down his neck, rasping his lips over the jut of his Adam’s apple, sharp and lovely. He tugs the collar of his tunic down, sucks a mark into the skin stretched over the junction that connects neck to shoulder. It’s insane how many times he’s imagined doing just that. It’s insane how much better it feels to do instead of merely fantasising about. “But I am terribly grateful it at least kept you from hiding this from me,” Merlin adds, voice a rumble beneath Arthur’s tongue.
“You know—likewise, I suppose,” Arthur says. And though he hasn’t had so much as a droplet since that banquet, he presses his grin to Merlin’s sternum over the thunder of his heart and realises that he has never, ever felt so terribly and wonderfully drunk.