Chapter Text
“How terror-struck a thing it is. To love like this,
to dig his fingers so deeply into another soul
and only ever find it reaching back,
instead of recoiling as it ought.”
— how almost unbreakable (x)
Merlin hadn’t expected it would happen like this. This kind of wanting wasn’t for him, so he’d thought.
Destiny was a maze. Letting it move him as it willed, Merlin had come to assume—via loss and self-sacrifice—that he was not a man for courtship. Never would be. Merlin was not someone who stirred hearts awake. He was plain and clumsy, well-hidden by necessity, but not the kind of person anyone would spin poetry for, nor want to kiss.
But then there was Lancelot in the night, all his desire spilling out.
Over their last stretch on the Ice, following the keyhole-pass, they sledged, and supped. And in the evenings, they wrapped around each other, trellis-and-vine. Lancelot’s lips were everyplace—on the junction of Merlin’s shoulder and neck, at the base of his skull, gentle on the rounding of his ankle. Merlin received it all with wonder. His own curious fingers swooped down Lancelot’s nose, tested the give of his mouth. Lancelot whispered reverent things to him at night, and his voice filled Merlin like a music hall that had never known a concert. Every small thing made him giddy and full of light.
The keyhole cut through white-steel cliffs, and the snow became stickier. Merlin sensed that soon they would reach the borders of Ismere. Their last night on the Ice, Lancelot was stirring the fine hairs at the base of Merlin’s neck, crescented at his back. They breathed like they sledged, in tandem, in synchronicity.
“This is so much,” Merlin whispered, overwhelmed.
“Too much?” Lancelot said. “Have I imposed?”
“No.” He rolled over, saw Lancelot up close: the curvature of his face like the massive crests of ice and mountains that they were leaving behind. Elegant, immovable, handsome. “Not too much. Everything is…” and he remembered what Lancelot said before they kissed, “…everything is grand.”
Lancelot sipped another kiss from him. “You can’t know how long I’ve wanted this.”
Merlin thought perhaps he’d wanted this, too, and hadn’t realised how much until now.
Another day later, they were off of the Ice. The timberline came upon them faster than they expected. Snow turned to slush, melting into pebbles and mud. Here, the sledge could go no farther. It was mid-afternoon when they stopped and sat on it, flushed from labouring. Merlin unlaced his cloak, and Lancelot wiped sweat off his face. They were still lost, had landed in foreign woods of larch and yew, the terrain weedy and veined with crisp-cold streamlets. They sat together, breathing sweetness off the air.
Lancelot turned his face up to the sky and had a certain fresh-stone quality to him: like a castle buttress in the spring, weathered but newly cleaned. Firm and proud and steady, seen in new light.
“Did you know,” Lancelot said, “travellers come downstream to Camelot by the River of Bassas, every spring. In boats, from Annis’s lands. The currents take them to the shores of Lake Avalon, and they can go no farther.”
“Mm,” Merlin said. “How do you know this?”
“I’ve heard stories on my quests,” Lancelot said. “One man told me that he and several others in his party were forced to leave their boats at the shore, and continue on foot. And he’s not the only one to whom this has happened. It’s why there are so many, abandoned around there.”
Merlin hmm’ed and took his point, and after a discussing it a few moments longer, they bid farewell to their own ‘boat’, and carried what they could away. Merlin felt a strange melancholy as he hoisted a bedroll over his shoulder. The Ice, and all that had happened on it, was behind them.
They walked aimlessly in the general southern direction of Camelot, navigating by the sun, and found the woods uninhabited. Streamlets turned into a proper creek, and they lingered to drink and wash. It was peaceful. At night, they camped—finally able to light fires without fear of burning down their tent which, for its unwieldy size, they had abandoned with their sledge. Merlin played with the fire, painting shapes with sparks: a sunrise, a mountain, a sea-creature.
“You’re a show-off,” said Lancelot. Merlin made a face at him, and invited him to show his own skills. Lancelot drew two stick-figures in the dirt, and gave one of them a little t-shaped sword.
“It’s us,” Lancelot said.
“Oh, now that’s putting me to shame,” Merlin deadpanned.
Three days after they abandoned their sledge, they ran out of rations. It was pre-dusk, and they slowed in a dense slash of wilderness—a wide valley where the trees were thick, and underbrush tugged at their ankles. They were contemplating where to stop and camp, discussing the possibility of hunting or trapping some game, when they heard a noise through the trees: a man’s laughter.
After a moment, it was unmistakably Gwaine’s.
“Is that…” Lancelot said.
Merlin was certain. “Gwaine.”
A chorus of voices joined Gwaine’s—shouting indistinctly and laughing with him.
“They’re laughing,” Lancelot said; his face lit up. It was a good sound: it meant their spirits were high. Likely no one was badly injured, or missing. Well, except for them.
“That’s rude,” Merlin said. “For all they know, we could be dead.”
This was—somehow—endearing to Lancelot, because he dove for a kiss.
Merlin made a soft, startled noise and stumbled back into a tree trunk, then couldn’t help melting. He’d never been kissed the way Lancelot did it—it made him weak. Merlin draped his arms over Lancelot’s shoulders, shivering when Lancelot teased his lips apart, just then to pull away.
“What’s that for?” Merlin was semi-breathless as they detached.
“You’re beautiful.” Lancelot gazed down at him. “You’ll torment me.”
And Merlin understood he was taking his fill before they had to be in the company of others.
He surged at Lancelot again: kissing him, tugging his hair. Reckless. He felt Lancelot laugh as their lips connected. After that first night, Merlin thought everything ought to feel changed. But falling together wasn’t strange. Lancelot was still Lancelot, and Merlin was still Merlin, and they were still them. Lucky as they had ever been.
After a long indulgence, Lancelot pulled away—nipping at Merlin’s lower lip, tilting his chin up to kiss Merlin’s closed eyelids.
“Let’s give them a fright,” he said. And Merlin snorted.
Yes, he did love playing tricks together, as stupid as they always were.
*
They snuck closer, scoping the camp as if they were enemies. It was more difficult than they had anticipated, because their friends had picked a spot with good visibility—precisely to avoid being ambushed. By the time they realised this, they were too committed to their plan to give up.
At a crawl, they wedged into some wild hedges.
In the clearing before them, the knights were in a ring: Arthur was sitting on a log, Leon knelt by the fire, prodding it. Percival stretched out, rubbing mud off of his boot. Gwaine was pacing around, in the middle of some ramble about the most respectable way to knot a girdle, and Elyan—sitting next to Arthur—kept interjecting to heckle him. Merlin was relieved to see them all safe.
Their targets within sight, he and Lancelot exchanged a glance. And Lancelot shouted,
“Knights of Camelot!” He’d attempted to deepen his voice, and was half-heartedly putting on a foreign accent. Merlin shot him a look—stifling his laughter in his elbow. “We have you surrounded! Surrender to our demands… or suffer!”
In the clearing, they all stopped talking, and Arthur stiffened. He was alarmed for all of one moment before recognition dawned on him, and he cast around for where they were hiding. Merlin couldn’t help smiling—he had missed him, all the days apart.
“What are your demands?” Arthur scoffed. “I trust they’re reasonable.”
The hedges snapped and shook as Merlin and Lancelot climbed out of them, stumbling into the camp with branches and leaves in their hair.
“We demand a day off for your servant,” Merlin said.
“Merlin!” Arthur said. “Lancelot.”
Their friends echoed him, rising to greet them. Arthur was grinning in that way of his: unguarded and boyish, and it filled Merlin with fondness. He came as if to embrace him, then only stuck two hands on both of Merlin’s shoulders, and shook him hard, once.
“Well now,” Arthur said, “that’s entirely absurd.” He clapped Merlin on the shoulder, and turned away to greet Lancelot with a knight’s clasp. Gwaine wanted to hug Merlin next, and crushed him into a complete and unreserved welcome—a happy reunion all around.
After days on the Ice eating only unseasoned stew, sitting around the group’s large fire and sharing roasted venison was a welcome change. Apparently, that had been Leon’s earlier success with a spear. As they ate off of whittled sticks, the fresh meat juices dripping down their wrists and into the dirt, Arthur asked after their story. Lancelot told them all of surviving the fall into a ravine, and of rescuing Merlin from Morgana’s pit. Arthur’s face darkened when Merlin added that Morgana had meant him to be bait for Arthur, and had meant him to die.
“She didn’t count on one thing,” Merlin said, disliking how Arthur looked, troubled and grim.
“What’s that?”
“You don’t care nearly enough to come after me,” Merlin said, and shrugged. To his relief, Arthur laughed.
“That’s right,” Arthur said. “Honestly, Merlin. I hardly noticed you were missing at all.”
The knights broke out into overlapping quips and riffs, enjoying that one for its evident ridiculousness.
The story went on: stealing the sledge, escaping into the blizzard. Merlin intuitively picked up whenever Lancelot floundered or slowed. This was their way. Since tipping the Cup of Life together, they’d gotten good at making up tales in tandem, covering the gaps of Merlin’s magic. They were deft at it, after years of practice. They spoke of sledging, pitching the tent night by night, and of seeing the creature that Morgana must have been after swimming peacefully under the Ice. Merlin knew somehow that Morgana would never find what she was seeking, would never see its majesty. What he and Lancelot had found was for them alone.
“Sounds harrowing,” said Percival.
“It’s quite the amazing tale,” said Leon.
When they were through, the knights turned to telling their own story: how they’d been split up in the ambush, and were forced to backtrack out of the cold or else freeze to death without supplies. Arthur and Gwaine had been a pair for some days, driving each other mad. Though, from their time together, they had collected a handful of inside jokes—Gwaine kept tossing Arthur witticisms that made him roll his eyes: exasperated and charmed. They’d regrouped with Elyan, Leon, and Percival who’d been sheltering in a cave before Leon had picked up Gwaine and Arthur’s trail. As Elyan told the tale, Merlin and Lancelot met eyes across the fire and shared their secret.
What they wouldn’t say was what happened in the last tempest.
Merlin wouldn’t tell their friends about the heat of Lancelot’s skin, or the way his breath felt up close on his cheek. He wouldn’t tell them of holding each other to sleep, or how he’d trembled when Lancelot tasted his throat.
*
That night, Merlin dreamed of the Ice.
He fell asleep with Lancelot’s steady deep breathing next to him, bedrolls side by side. After the close quarters of their tent, the distance between them now seemed huge.
Sleeping, he slipped back into the darkness: canvas wings and fur-pelt blankets, with the Ice beating its long, slow click of music beneath them.
“It’s lonely up here,” Lancelot whispered. “Don’t you think?”
Lancelot’s eyes were dark. Everything, blue. He held out his hand, and Merlin took it. Between them sparked a shocking grip of heat.
“No,” Merlin said. “It doesn’t feel that way.”