@merthurmicrofic
prompt: Change + Bite
Words: 1128
Merthur Microfic Bingo fills: past tense, future tense, pov third person, hurt/comfort, first kiss
‘I don't want you to change. I want you to always…be you.’
‘When I said I didn't want you to change. This... this isn't what I meant.’
The snort Merlin responds with is weak and suspiciously wet with the tears he hasn't bothered to wipe from his face. His young face. His ridiculous, boyish, fae, beautiful, apparently immortal face, painfully unchanged after more than a millennium but for the ghosts behind his eyes.
‘Figures the one time I listen to you, you find something to complain about.’ The jest is a pale rendition of simpler times, hollow in the middle, like biting into an apple to find only skin and the barest meat wrapped around air. Still, Arthur latches onto it, aching for something familiar in this devastatingly unfamiliar world to which he’s woken.
There are monstrous metal boxes moving at unconscionable speeds and giving off strange, acrid wafts of smoke. There are people dressed in materials Arthur has never seen before (he’s even wearing some of them now, a curiously soft set of loose breeches and even softer short-sleeved shirt with some written phrase on it Arthur doesn’t understand), and women showing vast swaths of skin so casually it would have had even Gwaine blushing. There are infinite sights, sounds, and smells that spark no recognition in Arthur's sensory receptors– he would have easily believed himself transported to some alternate plane had Merlin not been there to explain that this was, in fact, the far-flung future of Albion.
And then there’s Merlin. Arthur’s anchor in a foreign sea. Sitting across from Arthur at a small table in what apparently passes for a kitchen now, in Merlin’s little cottage by the lake. Merlin, gripping a mug of tea with both hands, white knuckled around the vessel while its untouched contents grow cold along with Arthur’s own mug which rests before him with its strange, too-shiny smoothness he can’t seem to stop running his fingers over. Merlin, looking tremulously at him from a face frozen in time, as if it were only yesterday he’d sent Arthur off on a funeral bier and not fifteen hundred years, give or take.
‘Not complaining,’ Arthur shakes his head while his mind is circling something vast and terribly important. ‘Just… All this time. You’ve just been. Here.’
He can see Merlin’s Adam’s apple bob as he swallows before nodding slowly.
And maybe Merlin has changed, because he never would have crumpled so easily before, not at a single word. Never would have broken open like dropped pottery from clumsy hands. Never would have caved in on himself and begun weeping anew with these awful, choking sobs. He curls over his tea in an effort to hide the shattering of his perfect, eternal face, and that’s what breaks Arthur from his stunned inaction.
In a breath, he’s out of his chair and kneeling before his oldest, truest friend, gripping his shoulder with one hand and reaching with the other to cup Merlin’s jaw and gently stroke at the endless rivulets of tears carving caverns down his cheek.
‘Hey, shh,’ he murmurs, a tightness in his throat that makes his words come out shaky. ‘It’s alright.’
He's unused to offering comfort– careful embraces to Guinevere on occasion, stoic shoulder grips and encouraging platitudes to his knights, but this is different. It strikes Arthur that Merlin has so often been the one offering Arthur comfort, bolstering his faith in himself when it faltered and permitting (sometimes insisting on) moments of weakness, safe and unjudged. There is a debt of unwavering support that Arthur fears he may never hope to repay.
And so he forces the words out, even as his instincts are to bite down on them before they can adhere to his reputation, a voice that sounds like his father warning against this softness, especially with a man, with a sorcerer no less. Quiet, he tells it. This is Merlin.
‘I– You don't– this doesn't feel real,’ Merlin chokes out. ‘Please, tell me it's real, Arthur. If I wake up and you’re gone again, I won't– I can't.’
This is what a heart breaking must feel like.
Suddenly, the words pool in Arthur’s mouth as naturally as any banter ever has and he lets them flow with no force necessary.
‘It's real,’ he swears, squeezing the shoulder in his grasp. ‘I promise it’s real. I’m here. I’m with you. Just breathe, Merlin. Breathe, love.’
One of Merlin’s hands comes up to grip Arthur’s forearm, holding Arthur’s palm to his jaw like it will vanish if he doesn’t. The hold is so tight it may bruise, but the ache is nothing compared to the one in his chest that twinges to observe the desperate hope bleeding from his friend’s visage. He watches closely as Merlin draws in one trembling breath after another, sees the way he latches onto the reassurance like a ship-wrecked man to shore.
On his life, Arthur vows to never again bite back a single word if it’s one that Merlin needs to hear.
‘It’s alright. You're not alone, Merlin, not anymore. I’m with you. I promise.’
And Merlin shudders out a closed-eyed sigh, his face so terribly precious in its exhaustion, the phantom of his grief warring with a tentative, breakable hope that shimmers crystalline on his tear-flushed cheeks and quivers on his perfect mouth.
There will be days ahead where Arthur will struggle with the weight of his own grief, where the ghosts of Camelot past will haunt him, where he’ll rage against the changes the world has wrought while he slept in Avalon. There will be days that will feel heavy and complicated and tangled like kitten-toyed yarn in his head. There will be days where Arthur will have to sort through the layers of emotion in his heart, peel apart the differences in his affections towards the people closest to him, rethink the decisions he’s made about the roles those people should fill in his life.
There will be days of reckoning ahead. But those days can wait.
For now, there is Merlin before him, outwardly unchanged and yet different still, bowing beneath the weight of a millennium spent waiting, shattered and yet painfully strong, and it is the simplest thing to lean up and capture that perfect mouth with his own.
A sudden inhale. A stiffening that has Arthur momentarily flaring with panic. And then Merlin melts against him, pressing into the kiss with a sound not quite a whimper, not quite a moan, but something in between.
It's not chaste, but neither is it expectant. It simply is.
As Arthur parts his lips and takes his first taste of Merlin’s tongue, he thinks that this is one change to which he’ll be happy to adjust.
