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Chapter Text

The Dales in the morning light were ethereal. Less ethereal was the flat tyre which Merlin received, courtesy of a nail which some berk had jettisoned from their flatbed and left in the road for such innocent recipients as a man barreling along at the speed of It’s a Bloody Nice Day, and singing accompaniment to Lady Gaga. So what had started off as a day of impossible sun, which brought out every colour there was, now was a little more dingy; now had assured that the lustre was off not only his mood, but his person, which had to crawl about under the truck to get on the spare with some cursing as multihued as the hillsides. There was a reasonable expectation of muck in his line of work, but he had not thought to be wearing it before getting down in it with whatever animal was ailing, and especially not before he had made an impression of youthful competence on some clients who had been used all these long decades to that shuffling figure of experience which had been bringing their livelihood into the world and seeing it humanely out for all their working lives.

So he had had to wipe off the worst of it with the paper towel in which he had carried his breakfast, holding the toast in his mouth whilst he used its wrapper to make himself vaguely presentable, and then going along in a slightly more subdued manner, for the sake of the spare, in the sunlight which urged him to speed. He made the drive for Pendragon Farm Stud fifteen minutes later than he had meant to make it, and parking outside the stables, got out of the truck with his kit and his wellies, turning back his sleeves and kicking the door shut with his heel. 

There was a man coming on down the drive, bearing the presence of Ownership; a blonde and rather fit-looking man round Merlin’s age, when he had thought to meet with one near Gaius’. The man stopped at the same moment Merlin stopped. He was dressed in tailored slacks and jacket, and looking at him as if Merlin had done something dreadful to him. Now he was closer Merlin noticed he was not rather fit but extremely fit; and his jawline was modelled from stone. In the sunlight his hair was one with the dazzle, as if he were wearing a cap of it; and then he opened his mouth, and spoke from the depths of Eton, turning himself, immediately and alarmingly, into one of those posh precious bollocks whom Merlin had brawled at uni. 

“Who the hell are you?” the man demanded.

“Er, Uther? Pendragon? I’m Merlin. My uncle Gaius said he’d told you to expect me? Sorry. He swore to me he remembered to tell you.”

“I’m not Uther, I’m his son, Arthur. Where’s Gaius?”

“Back at the clinic. He’s sent me to do his rounds.”

“So Gaius has sent some--lackey to check on our multi-million pound horses?”

“No, he’s sent his nephew. I’ve come to help him with the practice. He’s reducing his hours. He’s going to have me start picking up a lot of the livestock work.”

“Why on earth is he doing that?” Arthur snapped.

“Because he’s old as fuck?” Merlin replied, shifting the bag in his hand to the other hand. He would have liked to hit Arthur in the nose with it. It was a rather big nose; shaped for his face, and also for punching.

“He’s what?”

“He’s really old!” Merlin shouted, enunciating helpfully. “So he’s sending me, his far younger, more charming nephew, to start picking up the work that’s getting too hard on him anymore.” And he dimpled, to show that the charming bit was not mere empty wind.

Arthur ignored the dimples. “And what exactly are your qualifications?”

“Six years at the Royal College of Veterinarian Surgeons, like every other qualified vet. And about five years practising.”

“You look young.”

“I’m nearly thirty. I’ve been out of school nearly six years.”

“Well,” Arthur said imperiously, “Gaius has been practising thirty years. So he’s just handing off his life’s work to some…little--upstart… baby?”

Now the urge to punch him was not only fomenting but seething; he had a little height on Arthur, and practical muscle, gotten from wrestling pigs who did not want to be castrated, rather than the gym, and fancied he could give this bloke some manners before his fat head had registered there was any such lunacy as politeness being drubbed into it. He shifted the bag again. “Yeah, you sure look like you’ve got ages and ages on me; or is that just posh skincare? Are you actually an old, withered knob, or just acting like one?”

“Am I what?” Arthur blurted out, and spontaneously invented a new shade of purple; then there was a woman wedging her way between them, and saying, “What’s going on?”

“He called me a knob!” Arthur cried.

The woman looked at him from out of a face that turned his bisexual heart for a moment heterosexual; if she had stabbed him, rather than spoken to him, he would have graciously thanked her. “Hello; the new vet, I assume?”

“Yeah. Merlin.” And he held out his hand, as he would have done to Arthur in the spirit of human civility; except that Arthur had met neither the standards for humanity, nor civility, which included such difficult requirements as not being a rotting limp prick. 

“Morgana,” she said, giving him a small, smooth hand, which crushed out the life from his bones. And to Arthur she said: “Were you being a knob?”

“He was,” Merlin offered helpfully.

“Well, there you go. No surprise, really. Terribly sorry Arthur was your first impression of the farm, but you can always ignore him, and if that doesn’t work, run him over a little with your truck.”

Arthur was outraged. “You’re just going to take his side? He’s a complete stranger; I’m your brother.”

“Yes, but his claims are in line with your behaviour. Why don’t you run along and look at yourself in a mirror? I’ll show Merlin where to start.”

“How about the bloody gate where he came in?” Arthur snapped. 

“Gaius isn’t coming out. So I can look at your horses, or nobody looks at your horses till you find a vet who doesn’t mind changing your nappy to put you in a better mood.”

“Oh, excellent,” Morgana said gleefully. “I didn’t realise I’d be witnessing a murder today.” And then she put her arm through Merlin’s, and led him away, a thrilling experience, full of her perfume, and side breast. So he had got the flat tyre, and nearly come to blows with a twat; but otherwise the day was looking to be lovely.

Arthur had come down the drive to see a man who was not Gaius, getting out of Gaius’ truck; that was what he had registered, firstly: the dark head where there ought to have been a grey one, and the unfolding of a body at least a head taller than Gaius’ body. Then the man had turned back his sleeves from some forearms which had taken their shape from honest labour, rather than dumbbells, and looked up, and Arthur’s brain, very nearly audibly, had shut down its seething processes. He had been thinking about one of the mares to be sold; and then he had been thinking about nothing. He felt that all his systems had hiccoughed. He was stood in the centre of the drive, waiting as if for a reboot, whilst the man waved his face about in the sunlight. It was under a good head of black curls, with a few of them wild on his brow; and he had cultivated for some cheekbones that would have stood out on a model enough stubble to meet those standards which Arthur had heard were the standards of godliness. 

Then the man had lashed out at some perfectly reasonable questioning, and showed that those minor advantages of genetics were the only advantages of his person; and now he had taken himself off on the arm of Morgana, to subject the poor mares in their delicacy to his personality and fumbling. Whilst they were nearing their foaling, he would be putting the ungainly hands on them, where they had been used to the graceful touches of Gaius, who had known not only how to handle a horse, but how to handle society. This man had arrived from the backwoods, without his bearings, or manners, and thought he could treat regular men the same as he treated what sows or sheep that he housed with. 

Arthur stormed into the office, and took off his jacket, and very reasonably threw it. It brought the lamp down on the floor, and Uther down on him.

“What was that?” he demanded.

“Nothing,” Arthur said. “I missed the coat hook, is all. Why didn’t you tell me there was a new vet coming?”

“I’d forgot,” Uther said dismissively, and turned back to his own office, and paperwork.

“Are you sure he’s qualified?” Arthur demanded, bulling through the door he rarely dared even to enter, let alone storm. “He’s very young.”

Uther was turning over some pages on his desk, looking at them, rather than Arthur, the same division of attention which Arthur had been getting all through his childhood, expecting it was manhood would make him worthy of eye contact; and feeling now, though the anger was still hot in him, the same smallness of being which he always had standing before the work that was Uther’s true love and only love. “He’s Gaius’ nephew. I’m sure he’s adequate.”

“He’s only been out of school a few years.”

“Gaius tells me he’s practised for nearly six years, Arthur. If you have concerns after seeing his work, then bring those to me. Otherwise your reservations are pointless. They’re horses. They’ll make do with anyone competent enough to keep them alive and healthy.”

So that was the matter, done and dealt with; and he had to go back into his office feeling troubled in himself, in his reaction to the lean figure getting out of the truck instead of the squat; and his reaction to his reaction. He had possibly behaved a bit abysmally. He had possibly made a small but reprehensible knob of himself, because some strange man had come to see to his loved ones. He sat down at his desk, and picked up a pen, and fiddled it round in his fingers, and set it down, and picked it up, to fiddle it some more; and then because there was still a boiling in him, because he was still unsettled in the roots of him, he went out the door and into the sun with his hands in his pockets, and made for the stables at the very casual pace of a stroller, out for a walk, and not an apology. He heard Morgana laughing, and strange laughter following it; and stopped outside of the barn from which it was emanating, thinking to turn back, or go on as if in oblivion. And he turned and walked into the opening, where the daylight turned itself in a flash of brilliance to dimness, and he was amongst those cool black pockets of solitude in which the horses drowsed or nosed at their fodder. He saw Morgana at the far end of the aisle, leaning on one of the stalls, and speaking, and laughing, over the partition which was between her and the cheekbones which apparently had blinded her to the wretchedness of their owner. Then she was tearing herself away, to give him a look; or rather, to slap him with it. “Be polite,” she said. “Or I’ll toss you out on your arse.”

He scowled at her. “I’m twice your size.”

“Yes, but so are all of the grooms, and they like me better than you.” But she had shifted aside to make room for him, so that he could see over the door and into the workspace which Merlin had set up in the hay, where he had laid out the ultrasound machine, and now was lubricating the probe and his glove. 

“Be careful,” Arthur warned.

“Oh, crap. I guess you don’t know; the schooling’s changed since Gaius went. Yeah. They teach you just to ram it up there and stir it round a bit. Really, if the horse isn’t shrieking, you’re doing something wrong.” He looked up from under the curling fringe, going round behind the mare, and speaking to her in a far lovelier tone than he had used on Arthur. “Someone want to hold her? And by someone, I mean the person who didn’t call me a useless infant baby who has no business touching his precious capitalist wet dreams.”

Arthur frowned at him. “I just said you looked young, is all.”

“You literally called me a baby, which is ironic, considering you were acting like one.” He gave the mare’s hindquarters a little firm pat. “What’s her name?”

“Something dreadful like Enchantress, but Arthur and I call her Mellie,” Morgana replied, whilst Arthur with his hands still safely in his pockets continued to look over the scene with a critical eye, to see whether and where Merlin was failing her. But he was saying in the accent which Arthur couldn’t quite place, “Mellie, ok, you look like a Mellie don’t you, no, we’re not anything dreadful like ‘Enchantress’ are we; why are the humans giving us these silly little names, hmm?” and giving her a fond enough stroke down the spine, to quiet the flesh that was flinching there. Then to Morgana, he said, “Would you hold her, please?” And Arthur, slipping in through the door before Merlin could do anything more than make a face which people did not make when they were about to be gifted with Arthur’s proximity, said, “I’ll do it.” He had taken hold of the halter already, and was rubbing the fine velvet nap of her nose. If they had been alone he would have kissed the soft tip which he was soothingly stroking, and murmured to her as if they were confidants; but here under the judgement of one of the blue eyes, and the eyebrow doubtingly pointed at him, he gave her the little scratch, and some wretched trite rallying, which he did by clearing his throat, and saying in a firm voice, rather than a tender one, "Good girl.”

“Just so you know, I’m the haunting type. If you let this horse kick me to death, I’ll come back. You’ll never know a moment of peace again. I know every sea shanty there is, and I’ve invented some of my own.”

Arthur wrinkled up his face. “She’s not going to kick you to death, you great girl’s blouse. And why are you inventing sea shanties? Can we expect you to be going to sea any time hopefully soon?”

“To prepare for haunting, obviously. You don’t want to be roaming round in the afterlife without the means to annoy people.”

“You don’t seem to be in any danger of that,” Arthur said, giving the lips which roamed over his palm a little fond tickle. 

And Merlin, giving him a face of exasperation which hinted at the dimples, at their depths in the depths of the stubble, moved aside Mellie’s tail, and said, “Hold her,” and with a care that was almost like tenderness, eased in the probe, talking her through the procedure in a soft voice which gave Arthur’s stomach a strange unease in itself, that danger which the sixth sense scents like a hound feeling out the hare through the wind. He looked down at her blaze, instead of the head working over her, moving round as he moved round the probe, looking from the screen to his patient. “We’re just checking if you’re going to be a mum again, don’t worry; I heard the last one was a bit tricky, so we’ll just keep a close eye on you, yeah? We’ll make sure it comes off better this time,” he said to the horse, and then generally, to the stall, rather than to Arthur, and beyond the stall, to Morgana, who apparently merited personal address, “Yep, I’m seeing a little guy, right there.” He pointed at the screen with his free hand. “She’s about thirteen days out from ovulation?”

“Yes,” Arthur said, giving her nose another little tickle. The whiskers tickled him back. “She never had any trouble, till the last birth. The foal was all turned round and she couldn’t get her out. We called Gaius out in time, and he saved the foal, but it was touch and go, and he didn’t think she ought to be bred again, because of the damage it caused.”

“And yet here she is, up the duff anyway,” Merlin said, and looked down her back at him, with a little frown.

“Our father made that decision, not Arthur,” Morgana piped in, as if he were in need of defence, against an opinion in which he was utterly disinterested. Then her phone went, and looking down at it, she wandered off to answer it, leaving in the stall and the fraught silence in the stall the two men to balefully eye one another, till Mellie delivered the moment a single derisive blow from her nose, breaking it, and Arthur’s hold on the halter. She had broken the quiet, and the eye contact, so that Merlin turned away from him at last, taking out the probe, and discarding the plastic sleeve on his arm, and saying to him without looking at him, “I’ll talk to Gaius about her tonight. But I trust his opinion, and your dad should have too. If he said she oughtn’t to be bred again, she oughtn't to be bred again.”  

“I know,” Arthur said, swallowing, and stroking her lightly with the backs of his knuckles. 

“I’ll keep a close eye on it. The embryo might not take properly anyway, and then we won’t have to worry about it. She’s only just barely started. We’ll just have to monitor her. Really, if your dad wants to keep breeding her, then you ought to be doing it via surrogacy.”

“No; he won’t,” Arthur said, touching one of the ears, and getting a flick from it. “We’ve done it before, and my father doesn’t like the results as much. He thinks it affects the size and temperament of the foal too much.”

“It can. That’s why it’s best to transfer the embryo to a mare of similar size and temperament. You’d have to work with an actual reproductive specialist, though. They’d be able to advise you better on surrogate selection.” He was packing up the ultrasound machine as he spoke, looking at it, rather than Arthur, and making him feel almost wretched. Into the stall came the sounds of beyond, where men spoke and beasts spoke, and even the winds struck up those arboreal natterers; so that Arthur felt in the quiet between three living creatures he was living unnaturally. He had made a little island of himself, with the outburst in the drive, and now felt he was stuck on it, with the silence making a sea of what could be crossed in a step. He looked round Mellie’s head, at the dark head bent over the ultrasound, and cleared his throat, to clear his conscience: but the strong skilled hands were packing up the last of their work, and now Merlin was saying, giving Mellie a little farewell thump to her flank, “Someone needs their teeth floated?”

“Three stalls down, on your right,” Arthur said.

“Yeah. Thanks,” Merlin said, and opened the door, and was gone.

“Why didn’t you tell me Arthur Pendragon is an utter twat?” Merlin asked that evening when he had got round at last to the practice, too tired to have taken off his wellies or coveralls, and going straightaway to the counter on which he could prop up his carcass. 

“Because he isn’t,” Gaius said reasonably, bringing him out some tea and digestives, and giving a Look to the mud on his floor, and a Look to the footsteps which led him straight to the criminal, now pouring in the biscuits as easily as the tea. “Arthur’s a bit standoffish at first, but he’s actually a lovely young man, though he wouldn’t like you to know it.”

“We’re talking about a different Arthur,” Merlin said confidently. “This one’s a total bellend.”

“Merlin, what did you do to him?” Gaius asked.

“Nothing!” Merlin protested. “Nothing he didn’t deserve,” Merlin amended.

“Merlin. The Pendragons are the largest client this practice has. I don’t need you bulling in here and telling off one of them your very first day, and losing us half our business.”

“I didn’t. Lose any business, anyway. Look, it’s fine, I didn’t get sacked, I won’t get sacked, I promise. I’ll just deal with Morgana from now on out. She’s actually lovely.”

And one of the eyebrows was loaded, was discharged, and after the shot came the voice like another to finish it: “Not that lovely, my boy.”

“Look, don’t worry; I’d let her run me over with her car if she asked, but I’m not going to piss off Uther by chatting up his daughter.”

“See that you don’t,” Gaius warned very sternly, and taking away the rest of the biscuits, said, “Clean up, and we’ll just go round the corner; there’s a pub there does a very good stew.”

The weather now was heading down that long, miserable slope to fall, when the sky was more rain than air, and the wind uncreated the world. In the fields which lay like postcards under the suns of August, there was an unrest. All summer they had had only livestock to ruin their lines, which stood out on the hillsides like sunspots stand out on clear flesh. Here and there that green irreproachable broke out with some cows, or came down with a ewe; but whilst the sun was getting out of the clean patches that brilliance which is won from wild grasses in daylight, no one could be harsh on what had been dappled in calves, or what came from calves. But now as September started up in its complaining, and the wind crawled out from the crevices which had been storing it for safekeeping, and in which it had been winding itself up, all that long and pleasant summer, for vengeance, the grasses yielded to infighting. They were going this way and that: combed over first by those great buffets which the North Sea was birthing from spite, and then flattened by the rain which drove them like sledges into the fen violet. The fen violet fled; though the wood spurge, at least, was hanging on mightily. 

All this is to say that the rain was slapping Merlin about as if it had bought him a nice dinner, and felt it was entitled to some specialties. If it were a date, he would have told it he was a very nice girl, and did not do that sort of thing till the third date. He was out nearly every day in the elements, against God and God’s fine, fair, farting creatures, who sometimes bit him, or slammed his head in the mud, like a man at sea is alone with the void. Occasionally there was a farmer, or a farmer’s daughter, in the wild grey abyss, where the hills surged out of the veil as if he were creating them, by nearing them; but very often he was alone with the field, or the field’s inhabitants, trying to bring them out of the rain and into a shed that leaked as much as the sky. He lost one of his wellies at a sheep farm, and though he cursed at it till the sky all round him was restored from grey back to blue, the boot would not come loose from the muck, and he had to limp back to the truck, pecking awkwardly in the mud, and nearly losing the other. Naturally his next rounds were the Pendragons’; and the first Pendragon he saw was the arsehole one, instead of the beautiful one. He had got out of the truck quite literally wrong-footed, with his bag in his hand, and looked up to see Arthur looking at him. 

“What happened to you?”

“Sheep happened to me,” Merlin said, and hobbled into the first barn. He had said the ‘sheep’ in the same tone which a zealot says, ‘Satan’ and expected that even a testicle like Arthur would understand there had been an ordeal, and leave him to bitterness, and fuck words. But whilst he was checking one of the mares for thrush, there was a throat cleared outside the stall, and a thump on a day not kind enough for it to be Arthur’s head: and he looked up from her frog to see a Wellington wobbling on the floor on the opposite side of the stall from the man who had thrown it. Arthur lifted his eyebrows.

“Your feet are small,” Merlin said, though he found on slipping in his foot the size was just about cosy, for his own uncosy 11s. He thought that Arthur must be one of those blokes who had Thoughts and Bloviations on those tired old cliches of foot size and hand size which meant nothing to no one but frail men: and he thought right.

“They’re not small!” Arthur snapped.

“Yeah, I think it’s pinching off my circulation, actually. Are you sure this is yours, and not Morgana’s?” He wiggled his foot theatrically. “It’s fine. It’s not your fault. We’re born with what we’re born with, right?”

“I’ll show you what I was born with!” Arthur snapped again, and then stopped, whilst the innuendo processed in him; and went off down the aisle, possibly to hang himself.

He was often shut up in his office with his father, so that by the time Merlin had got out for his rounds, he saw, possibly, a flash of the blonde head across a pasture, or over the stall in which he was working when it leaned in in passing to say what he was doing poorly, or piss-poorly; but generally it was Morgana, earning the designation which he had given her immediately, as the superior Pendragon, with whom he dealt, whilst her brother was off doing whatever Daddy allowed him to do. Meanwhile he was settling into the house down the road from the practice, taking over the loft in which Gaius had installed him, and getting together in the mornings a proper breakfast when he could manage it, because Gaius in the usual spirit of permanent bachelorhood could cook himself a little burnt water.

“You could have taught yourself to make eggs, at least, old man,” he said, flipping the eggs in the pan with a little sharp flick of his wrist, and crowing to see he had not broken the yokes. “Did you ever think you didn’t marry because women don’t like useless men anymore?”

“I think I never married because I was too busy helping my sister to bring up the feral rat which someone switched out with her son whilst she was recovering in hospital,” Gaius said drily, leafing through his paper. “And speaking of feral, Merlin, I haven’t had any complaints from the Pendragons. I hope that means you are behaving yourself as well as you are able to behave yourself.”

“My manners are so impeccable I’m surprised they haven’t invited me to dinner. Except I wouldn’t know which fork to use.”

“Well, see that you sustain those impeccable manners. And if any of the cows can spare you today, I could use some help in the office; one of the techs has called out sick.”

So he had a little respite that day, working several hours in the clinic with a few cats who hated him, and a dog who imprinted on him, and then in the afternoon girding himself once more in the hazard wear of his profession, which is to say a rain jacket which would be torn or have to be taken off before he was broiled in it, and the wellies, now no longer perfect replicates of one another, but black on the right, green on the left, because he had kept the one Arthur had thrown at him, deciding that Arthur’s personality entitled him to be their owner rather than borrower. He spent all the wind-lashed day and into the evening on a hillside extracting a cow from some wire, irrigating the wounds whilst the rain irrigated him, and arriving, two hours late for the horses, who looked up with some interest when the little wet lump blew into their haven, shaking out his own pitiful mane.

“You look like a drowned rat,” Arthur said helpfully from a stall near the entrance, draping his arms over the door, whilst the mare draped her head out afterwards.

“Piss off,” Merlin gasped, blowing into his hands. “I need to concentrate on finding my testicles.”

And whilst Merlin was settling into the house, and settling into his rounds, Arthur was determining how to apologise. It was ludicrous to simply go up to Merlin and apologise; firstly, because he would have had to go up to Merlin; and secondly because he would have had to apologise. He had made a few peripheral attempts, by slinging the wellie at him, and not running him over with his car, though Merlin’s personality had laid down under his tyres, and begged for it. But it was going on very slowly, because Merlin seemed to be that breed of incomprehensibly thick which in that grand old time of Bedlam would have seen him committed for idiocy. He seemed not to even have noticed about the wellington, but merely carried it off on his foot into the wet night, as if the foot had brought it in, rather than Arthur’s thoughtfulness. 

He was coming round later, now the weather, and the animals’ pettiness in the weather were delaying him, so that by the time he had made it to the Pendragons’ climate-controlled barns, he was already beyond their help, so miserable in the shoddy jacket and mismatched wellies that even Arthur, who did not care for such rubbish as caring, thought that it might have been nice for someone to be nice to him. He could see him from the office window getting out of his truck, stomping his feet to get back the feeling in them, and then clumping off through the rain which was driving at him as if to kill him. He had up a hood, so that Arthur had to mark him by his gait and outline, still strange to him, still some remarkable alien blown in from his home shores, when all these years he had looked out to see the small, stooped shoulders fighting the wind or their age. 

He vanished through the barn doors; but already Arthur was recreating him from memory, the little rituals which Merlin observed, and which Arthur had observed him observing, of scraping off his feet by the door, and then sitting with his hands under his armpits, till they had made all that long, hard journey from stumps back to flesh. He would be cosseting them, and blowing on them, trying to coax them to feeling: and then the bag would return to the hand resurrected, and he would call out in the strange hybrid accent to the animals looking for the carrots and candies with which he had stuffed up his pockets.

Arthur sat back in his chair. He turned a little in it, swinging it back and forth whilst the wind fired the rain like a salvo at his window. He turned round in it fully: and then inspired by the momentum, got out of it and went to the tea cabinet at which the chair had coincidentally pointed him. The electric tea kettle he switched on, merely by habit; and then because he had started it, and unfortunately could not unstart it, he waited with his hands in his pockets whilst the water boiled, looking over the choices in the cabinet, and trying to determine whether plain black would do, or if he ought to get out the Earl Grey; even the cream Earl Grey. Then the kettle was howling, and prompting him to action; and he knocked down the box of Twinings English Strong Breakfast into his hand, thinking not to go wrong with the old stalwart, whilst the cream Earl Grey might be too newfangled for such primitive types as ran round with some flocks in the hillsides as if numbered though naked amongst them. He brewed the tea in a travel mug which he had taken down also from the cabinet, then dumped in a little milk, and a little more sugar; and sealing himself into his jacket, carried the tea down to the barn as if he were carrying an infant. He had handled it with more care than he had handled himself, so that by the time he arrived at the barn, his hood had blown back, whilst the tea, already protected by the lid and his hand, also was protected by his body, which had made out of itself a shield for the rain to be angry with. 

Merlin was still warming himself when he came in, trying to speed the procedure by hopping a little on his toes, and rubbing his hands together, and looked up from under his wet fringe, curling wildly now on his forehead. He looked at the mug in Arthur’s hand with frank jealousy; and Arthur in a panic almost drank it himself. Merlin had seen it, and assumed it was Arthur’s: and now Arthur would have to reveal he had been decent, or confirm that assumption which Merlin no doubt was making, that Arthur was the sort of man who brought one mug of tea on an arsehole of a day, for two men; not because he had intended to share it, but because he had intended to hog it. It was humiliating to have been considerate; to have brought the tea out in his own frozen hands for the purposes of sheer unselfish philanthropy. He was a young man, with the red-blooded life hotly in him; but he felt for the one moment which Merlin looked at the tea, and looked at him, that it would have been better to die. He could be mortified, or mortifying safe in his grave.

Finally he handed the tea over in a rush, saying, before Merlin could be pleased or thrown by the gesture, “Morgana made it for you. She didn’t want to get her precious hair wet, so she sent me out with it.”

“Really?” Merlin said, taking it, and warming his hands on it a moment before drinking it. “So she made me tea, and browbeat a thoughtless twat into bringing it out into the rain for me? You know, your sister’s quite a woman. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone like her before.”

Arthur scowled at him. “You know, just so you know, Morgana is probably a serial poisoner. I’ve long suspected several of her ex-boyfriends are buried somewhere on the grounds.”

“Yeah, but there are some women you just risk getting poisoned for.”

“Well, I wouldn’t bother, she’s--a lesbian.”

Merlin raised an eyebrow. “A lesbian? You just said she had loads of ex-boyfriends.”

“Youthful--experimentation,” Arthur said, pocketing his hands in his jacket.

“Hmm.” Merlin took another sip. “She doesn’t seem like a lesbian.”

Arthur had the sudden numbing image of Morgana having taken him already for a whirl. She had seen the dimples, not repulsive, Arthur assumed, and the forearms which he was always taking out of his sleeves, muscled, though mildly, and had him behind one of the barns, or snuck him round to her room. Whilst Arthur had been dithering over giving him the tea, Morgana had been giving him--not tea. He felt that he would be sick for the sake of her chastity. “How would you know?”

“She just doesn’t ping my gaydar.”

“Have you ever considered that possibly your gaydar is rubbish? It being yours, and all,” Arthur said snobbily.

“Oh, no, it’s excellent, and that is not a gay woman, trust me.”

“But how would you know?” Arthur pressed, afraid to go on, afraid not to go on. 

“She’s pretty amazing, but she’s crap at making tea,” Merlin said, drinking thoughtfully, swirling round the tea as if he were testing some wine, and making a face which told of his judgement.

“It’s tea. You can’t muck up tea.”

“Well she managed to.”

“And you’re an expert, are you?”

“Not an expert, just more expert than Morgana, which isn’t difficult, according to this tea.” He jostled it a little in the mug, and took another drink. “Firstly, the milk to sugar ratio’s all bollixed.”

“It is not,” said Arthur, who had a certain responsibility, as her brother, to ensure there were never any hard words said of her, unless they were said by him. It was none of his business whether Morgana had taken home a little wretched man with some unimposing back muscles which rippled occasionally, at that height of the extremest duress, when there was nothing to be done, but show even their paltry definition; but he would have to step in if she were being denigrated. He would have to abide by that unspoken law of the sibling, which said, quite clearly, you could do anything you liked, whilst the outsider could do nothing. “It’s perfectly decent tea. Excellent, even.”

“Needs more milk.”

“So you take milk, not tea?” Arthur asked derisively, lifting his eyebrow.

“No, I’m just a civilised man.” He finished, and tossed the mug underhand to Arthur. “But tell her thanks anyway.” And he turned with the bag in his hand, and went off along the row of stalls, calling out to his patients, and stopping alongside his favourites to hand out the treasures from his pockets, whilst Arthur fiddled the mug round in his hand as he watched the no more than broadish back disappearing down the aisle. 

He passed Morgana on the way into the barn with Lady, and stopped, and gave her a look to plainly indicate she was most and fervently unwelcome. “What are you doing?”

“Merlin wanted to have another look at her foot; I told him I’d bring her over to him. What are you up to? The usual stalking?”

“I don’t stalk him. Are you mad?” Arthur snapped. “He’s our vet. I don’t care what he’s doing outside of the horses.”

“That’s not what your internet search history tells me,” she said, and smirked horridly at him. There was no responding to slander. He was quite completely above it. He turned, and bulled out into the rain, furious there would be the two dark heads, working together, on the foot, on the defamation, and blew in to and locked his office.

Arthur had, for the sake of the horses, made one or two inconsequential searches of Twitter, of Instagram, of Facebook, and even that terrible rubbish fire Tumblr, to find out who was to be in charge of their welfare: and on Instagram he had found that his horses were to be looked after by a man who liked to be shirtless in the presence of some other man; a dangerous and no doubt indicted being, who was wearing some hair setting the standards for all hair. He had his arm round Merlin in a number of photos, and in others was marching in step with him along or up a trail, where they were alone with the infinite and cameraman, sharing their smiles and their nipples. 

He had noticed in passing that Merlin was possibly strong enough to manage if there was a horse being feisty, and if there was any wind to garnish the struggle, he would be like one of those romantic heroes with which the BBC tarts up its historicals. Because he had a few curls coming down on his forehead, and enough stubble to make him that tortured being of the moorland, who has been tormenting himself over his rich employer’s daughter since the beginning of time and of moorlands, women were coming by to look at him as if he were for sale rather than the broodmares. He was not putting out there what he was putting out there on Instagram, but they were coming by all the same, and looking at him sweating in trousers and wellies, with the forearms like an advert for the rest of him, and taking up his time with such inanities as could be invented in that muddled miasma of horniness. They were asking such stupid questions Arthur was embarrassed for them. Merlin was so clueless as to be nearly comatose; but Arthur, of no middling intellectualism, noticed they were verging on ruining his schedule, and escorted them off on a tour, or round to his father.

“We’re DEFRA approved for EU export of semen,” he told Mrs Brown very unnecessarily amicably, taking her off to the lab, and leaving Merlin to do what Uther was paying him to do. “Your husband was asking about that last time; I’m happy to take you round our facilities,” said Arthur, who was also happy to leave her there. 

So he was keeping off the hordes, though Merlin seemed never to notice, or be thankful, and peeping in occasionally on him in one of the stalls, whilst he worked over a hoof with a pick, or checked on the burgeoning bellies waiting like the poppies for spring to fruit. He had brought out a second mug of tea on a night when the barn rose from the rain like a ship from a trough out at sea, also from Morgana; and leant on the stall door whilst Merlin drank it, and maligned it, though he had a very marginally more favourable view of it this time, possibly elevated by the fact that Morgana had wasted on him a good dose of loose leaf from Harrods. 

“Still not enough milk,” Merlin said, setting aside the mug on the stall floor, and patting Mellie on the hindquarters. 

“Do you want me just to bring you out a cup of milk, like you do for a child you’re putting down to sleep?” 

“Look, it’s not my fault Morgana is perfect in every way except for this one glaring defect. Really astonishing, actually. I can’t imagine being that flawless, and making such rubbish tea. Oh well. I’d still marry her. Or be murdered by her, if she wanted that instead.”

Arthur ground his jaw round. He was very minorly, almost completely unnoticeably perturbed, by the persistence of such a poor and unlearned opinion. He was wrong about the tea, he was wrong about Morgana, who was flawless only insofar as being a horrid little malignant torturing shrew. 

“How is she?” Arthur asked instead of acknowledging such a blatant fault, in a man with so many of them as to be riddled with them. It was astonishing that there was one even distinguishable; that out of that miscellany of rudeness any one such flaw should not only rear but distinguish itself. He nodded at Mellie.

Merlin moved one of the big hands over her belly, and the other over her back. He had already put away the probe and discarded the plastic sleeve, and now was rounding off the consultation with a little crooning. He scratched her ears, and frowned. “Well, we’re at about day 24 post-ovulation, and it’s coming along so far. But I talked to Gaius, and he was upset she was bred again. He said he warned your dad not to last time. She could still miscarry; we’re still within the first 45 days, when that’s most common. But I dunno. She could carry all the way to term, but I don’t think the birth’s going to come off well. It might kill her, based on what Gaius told me. But there’s no saying for sure. If she carries it to term, though, I want someone to ring me as soon as she goes into labour.”

“Right,” Arthur said, and scratched the back of his neck. “If she did miscarry, though, it’s the end of the breeding season. Would buy some time to try to bring my father round to surrogacy again.”

Merlin met his eyes over Mellie’s back. “Right. And it happens, especially this early, especially in mares with previous issues. Nature’s just like that sometimes.”

“It’s a shame, but nothing to be done sometimes.”

Merlin held the look. He was still petting her, and making Arthur feel, with the eyes on him, that he had a little frisson in him, as Mellie must have had in her from the light touch on her spine. “Nature would have to bring the shot round tomorrow. He doesn’t have it on him right now.”

“Right,” Arthur says. “See that he does.” And he went off with his hands in his pockets, glowing a little from the collaboration, and eye contact.

So that sad accident of fate which has happened to mothers all over time and the globe happened also to Mellie, whose body put out, entirely by coincidence, the foal which it had been struggling to bring up to term. In the corner of the stall was that little extraterrestrial which all mammals try to convert into one of their own, which she nosed and promptly ignored. Arthur gave her a little peppermint candy for her troubles, gloved himself alongside Merlin, and cleaned up the straw and the embryo, which he bagged and took off for disposal. 

“Hey,” Merlin said, over the stall door after Arthur had slipped through it. “Thanks for making that call. I can’t--ethically I can’t, you know. Just make that decision for the owner. But that’s what was best for her. And if you need help trying to talk your dad round, let me know.”

“Right,” Arthur said. “There’s really no talking my father round when he’s decided on something, but I appreciate the support.”

“Yeah,” Merlin said.

“Right,” Arthur said.

“Well, let me know. My charm doesn’t just work on Mrs Brown,” he said, and dimpled rather not at all brilliantly. 

That Arthur bloke is mostly but not completely irredeemable , Merlin texted Gwaine that evening after he had come in from the rain to toast his feet at the fire. So at least it oughtn’t to be completely miserable. I thought I was going to have to drown him in their pond.

mate this is like the 8th time this week u’ve texted me about him, Gwaine replied, as if he did not care what damage he had just done to Merlin’s impeccable character.

He had made, over those long drowned weeks whilst the Dales were letting in the fall like a lion, a very few and reasonable complaints, what he had imagined Gwaine was asking for, when he was asking for updates; but certainly not eight of them. He was sending off those little missives which best mates send to one another, making of Arthur a common enemy and target for memes. He devoted what time Arthur deserved and was deserving of, which is to say that he fired off, every so often following a grievance, What a twat or I wish his personality was worthy of his arse. Then he left Arthur, and all mentions of Arthur, in the dregs of his mind where they belonged, occasionally prodding them back when they surfaced. He was going round to the farm every day, and seeing Arthur most days now, when he came out for the absurd little ritual with the tea, and loitered round afterward, to disparage his character or work. 

“Where are you from?” Arthur asked one evening whilst they were cleaning up after a ringworm case, hauling out the bedding to be destroyed, and going in afterward to wash the stall down with the fungicidal disinfectant. He was nearly always in that formal get-up in which he had charged down the drive at Merlin, though often without the jacket, and his sleeves rolled up, whilst he performed those tasks which no doubt he usually left for the proles; but tonight he had gone in for the peasant’s get-up, by wearing some jeans and a fleece jumper, which he had taken off shortly upon taking up the pitchfork. There was a worn henley under the fleece; and under that several muscles. 

“Oxfordshire. Aston, to be exact.”

“Before that,” Arthur said, wiping the sweat from his forehead.

Merlin eyed him from where he was crouched over the heap of tack they had dragged into the stall and which he was now rinsing down, flipping over the saddle one-handed to get at the underside. Then, stretching out the vowels which he had learnt through time and distance from his motherland to clip off or round, he broke out in that mangled cousin to the Scots which Hollywood and even the Republic were still cheerfully butchering right in front of his Northern Hiberno salad. “Belfast. But I’ve been here ages. Tried to keep hold of the accent, but it’s all gone muddled after being too long amongst you dirty colonisers,” he said cheerfully. “I’ve a mate who’s a Dubliner, though, so when we’re together I try and top up my Irish. I was only ten when mum and I moved, though.”

“You know you’re amongst enemies?”

“Proddies? I might have known,” Merlin said, flipping the saddle back. He wiped his own forehead. “What about you? Where are you from? Finishing school?”

“Here,” Arthur said drily.

“That is not a Yorkshire accent.”

“That’s what public school is for.”

“Does that mean there was a brief point in time where your accent didn’t have a stick up its arse?”

Arthur flicked a little of the cleaner in his direction. “No.” Then, pausing, to examine the reins which he was rubbing down, he said, “My family’s been here a long time. My father bought the farm before I was even born. My mother liked horses.”

“Past tense as in--”

“Cancer.”

“Ah. Sorry about that. My dad too. That’s why we came over here. Mum wanted to be closer to Uncle Gaius, and she couldn’t really stand it there anymore. I think she couldn’t really bear to stay in the house where he died.”

“My father’s not quite so sentimental, I’m afraid,” Arthur said, turning over the reins again, though he had gone over them thoroughly, looking the bit in the eye, rather than Merlin.

“So this is where she died? That must be hard.”

“Well, it’s not as if I were around to witness it. She got diagnosed whilst she was pregnant with me. She passed away shortly after I was born.”

“Oh.” Merlin scratched at his neck. “That’s still hard, though. Not knowing your mum. I’m going to rend my garments and all that when mine goes, but I can’t imagine what it would have been like never having even met her.”

Arthur stood up with the bridle in his hand, saying to it, “Right, well, I’d better be off. My father’s away in London for the next couple of weeks. Lots of paperwork to take over.” And he went out into the blowing night, leaving Merlin with a little inkling of danger.

He had not noticed he was in trouble; he had been getting into it, possibly for weeks, whilst the tea was being brought round: but he had no notion of it, till he walked out of the barn one morning, and saw that beyond the truck was Arthur at the end of the drive, stretching for a run in a pair of joggers that left the important bits to an imagination worthy of imagining them. But there was no need to woolgather over his arse, which in the joggers retained only that faint though worthwhile mystery of colour. Everything else he could see. Merlin was watching it, instead of the truck, when he opened the door: and walked forehead-first into the edge of it. “ Fuck !” he yelled. 

Arthur’s head snapped up. “Just your head, yeah?” he called, shifting to his other leg, and stretching out the inner thigh of the left, which Merlin imagined briefly and sweatily would now be limber for fucking. “So no harm done?”

“Well, it wasn’t your head, so some harm done, but nothing permanent, I don’t think.” Then he had gotten into the truck, and sped past Arthur, and Arthur’s thigh muscles, going on in the burgeoning rain, still in its innocent infancy, as if he were going to his freedom from hell. 

Next time it was, “What got you interested in veterinarian work?”

“Dunno. I like animals, and mum used to ship me up to spend my summers with Gaius, so I was running round the clinic since I was only little. I never even really thought about doing anything else.”

There was a long pause; and then an explosive, “Were you that kid who bit me?”

“What are you talking about, you lunatic? I never bit you.”

“There was a kid at Gaius’ clinic who bit me.”

“That could have been anyone. You’re very inspirational for that kind of reaction.” He let loose the hoof he was holding, and looked up: and seeing the face looking in at him over the stall, felt suddenly that flash which is like the strike of lightning or revelation. “ Oh . I think I know what you’re talking about. I did bite some twerp one summer whilst I was staying with Gaius.”

“What do you mean you ‘think’ you know what I’m talking about?” Arthur demanded. “Are you going round biting so many clients you can’t remember individual incidents?”

“Yeah. I mean, not clients, usually, but definitely people generally, yeah.” 

“I can’t believe you bit me!”

“You can’t? You seem like the type to have been an absolute unabashed arsehole as a child.”

“I wasn’t even doing anything!” Arthur seethed.

“Oh no, I never bite anyone without very good provocation. I’m not an animal.” Merlin clicked his fingers. “You said something about my ears, didn’t you?”

“I may have noticed them. It’s not like you can’t,” Arthur said peevishly.

“No, no, I remember; you said something about them, and I said something like, ‘Better to be big-eared than a big cunt’ and you grabbed my hair. I remember now because I got in loads of trouble for saying ‘cunt’ in the waiting room where any of Gaius’ clients could have heard me.”

Then Morgana was sticking in her head over the stall, and saying cheerily to him, “Well, how goes it?”

“He’s the kid who bit me,” Arthur said sourly.

“Which one?”

“The one at Gaius’ clinic!” he shouted. 

“Oh, lovely,” she said. “Feel free to do it again, if the mood so takes you.”

“I will do, thanks.”

And then he had come round to the farm after a wretched afternoon putting down a beloved Labrador, and taken the tea from Arthur, and wordlessly finished it, and wordlessly gone round to the stalls, seeing his patients in silence, till finally Arthur had burst out, “What’s wrong with you?”

“I had to put someone’s dog down today,” he said, running his hand over an inflamed hock, and lapsing once more into himself, where he had gone all those long, miserable hours of the family’s terrible deliberations and even more terrible good-byes, and where now he was stuck, as people get stuck in sadness as if it is mire. He was turning over the image of the poor old grizzled muzzle in its human’s hand, and the final humbling minutes, when the vet is both God and undertaker; and now he will have to burn or wrap up the skin out of which he has taken the soul.

“Oh,” Arthur said.

And Merlin had come out of the stall with nothing more to say or be said: and taken a sound punch, soundly delivered, on his shoulder. He reeled back a bit. He looked at Arthur, looking at him. “What the hell was that for?”

“Just, you know.” Arthur gestured with his hand.

“No, I don’t know. Is this why Uncle Gaius wanted me taking over rounding here?”

“I didn’t punch Gaius,” Arthur said, rolling his eyes. “Just.” He cleared his throat. “I’m sorry to hear. About the dog.”

And Merlin realised he was not seeing some errant cruelty, poorly or purposely timed; that the act of minor violence was no act of violence at all; that Arthur was making a genuine if stunted gesture of compassion; and this was the only gesture he knew. It was in his face: that he had reached out of himself in a blind panic because he had seen that Merlin was alone. He had been stood there with the dog’s death like something he could not get out of his throat, and now the punch had jogged it briefly but blessedly free. There was a little lurching in him; and the wind of premonition was blowing in his stupid little heart.

“Thanks,” he said. He had brought it out whole, though it felt as if it were in pieces.

And Arthur, as embarrassed as if Merlin had wept on him, or he on Merlin, cleared his throat, and went away down the aisle and into the sounding world.

“Your brother’s a bit of a weirdo,” he said to Morgana one afternoon whilst they were in one of the paddocks together, and he was watching the stride of a stallion suspected of lameness.

“Oh, do you feel a bit sad and embarrassed for him?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s trying to be your friend, then.”

So there was to be a little trouble, a minuscule and undeadly trouble, because he had been adding, perfectly accurately, that saving qualifier of but-he’s-an-almost-irredeemable-bellend to Arthur’s unnecessarily good looks; and now he was having to amend it to include the tea on shite nights, and the gormless punch, and the throat clearing which was the signal that Arthur was about to be more than a peerless dick. He had been overlooking the fact that Arthur was a wet dream personified, because Arthur had been sustaining the metaphor of moistness by having his personality throw a bucket of cold water over Merlin’s penis. And now he was getting clear of the wreckage which he had made of their first meeting with an arse that had been made for a sculpture. Because the majority of Merlin’s company was some sheep or cows on a hillside, conversing in lows or flatulence, Arthur was standing out, purely from the advantage of comparison. And Merlin’s penis, a discerning penis, which had got over straight men when it had got over puberty, now had got muddled. Now instead of that cursory appreciation which it had for a build well-built, it was lingering, with consequences. It had walked Merlin’s head into the truck door; and next it cut his hand on a hoof pick when Arthur came down the aisle in his riding gear, which consisted of some trousers that showed he was not only facially endowed. It was whispering to him in that sirenish voice which is the homosexual’s cross to bear till he is smarter; if he is smarter; it was pitching to his brain whilst it was pitching in his trousers that impossible delusion of pornography: the heterosexual brought low by the right dick, in the right orifice, moving at the right speed to breathlessly unseat his sexuality. He was imagining, or at least his penis was imagining, that in some distant future there was the possibility, even the probability, of fucking Arthur: even the very near future, when Arthur had bent over to retrieve a bridle he had dropped, and Merlin’s dick, faster than his brain, imagined that he was having him against the stall in the riding trousers. 

So it was not anything fatal; but merely some unprofessional daydreaming, which very often Arthur disrupted to remind him he had brought the tea, and given him the wellie, and the blundering punch which he had meant to be an actual conveyance of human humanity: and he was still first and foremost an absurd little aggravating cock.

Arthur in the meantime was not in any trouble whatsoever. He was going round to the barns occasionally to have such exchanges as the following:

“I can’t believe your name is Merlin.”

“Well of course it sounds weird if you say it like a weirdo.”

And checking in to see whether Merlin was rooting for Man U, or whether he was wrong; and occasionally offering up his jacket when Merlin had torn his, by hurling it rather than handing it, in case there was some mistake about his consideration, which he had for the steadiness of Merlin’s hands, whilst he was tending the horses; and no other tender reason. 

“What’s this?” Merlin had to ask, clawing it off his face, whilst Arthur, sticking his hands in his pockets, marvelled at his ability to run his mouth without his brain. All that old scientific claptrap of the interconnectedness of the body, the human machine which was piloted and puppeteered by synapses, and here was a wholly unremarkable vet in the countryside, driving along seamlessly on idiocy.

“It’s a jacket. You put your arms through the little holes there.” He nodded at the sleeves.

“I meant ‘what’s this’ as in why are you giving it to me?”

“Because yours is ripped and you’re shivering like a girl.”

“You know feeling the cold is not a gendered thing? Not gendered at all. It’s literally your body contracting and relaxing muscles to generate heat. So you can live.”

“Well, I’m fine. But then I don’t have the constitution of a 14-year-old girl.”

“You probably also don’t have a brain, which helps. Nothing for the body to preserve,” Merlin said cheerfully, putting on the jacket over his own, and returning it later by the same method of hurling it into Arthur’s face, so that Arthur had to notice, casually but suddenly, that he was getting it back smelling like Merlin; that whilst the prevailing odour was the odour of horse, there was also some fickle aftershave, which came and went when it was least convenient for either. 

And occasionally he brought out, by coincidence, some breakfast in a napkin, because he had forgot Merlin would be there in the morning instead of the evening, and stuffed himself on as much as he could, before he had given Merlin the remnants. 

“This is a whole sausage roll,” Merlin said on one such occasion.

“Morgana’s forcing me onto a vegetarian diet with her, so I can’t eat it. It’s just till she finds something else to nag me about.”

“I saw you get out of your car with it. I’m pretty sure it’s from the tearoom in town. Gaius took me round the other day for breakfast.”

“Well--why were you watching me get out of my car, you--psychopath? Don’t you have horses to look after?” Arthur snapped.

“Why did you drive all the way down to a tearoom for a sausage roll you can’t eat?”

“Why did you--” Arthur started, and stopped, because he could not think what was a brutal enough rejoinder to get Merlin off the accusation. He had driven round to the tearoom, not for the sausage roll, but for their specialty coffees, and he had come away really quite nearly accidentally with the sausage roll, and thought to casually divest himself of it. There was no meaning to it; and there was no loneliness in it. He felt a little sick, because the scent of the roll was tormenting his empty stomach, but there was no trouble about what had not been any sad, silly little gesture of pitiful friendship. Then Merlin broke the roll in half, and gave him the one bit, and shovelled in the other, saying through it, “Don’t tell your sister; I bet she could kill me with her bare hands.”

“She could, and she’d be happy to.”

He was not in any trouble, because he had not been attracted to men since his father had caught him with some curiosity and a misconstrued but compromising video link. If he had been prone to that sort of thing, he might have been using Merlin as fodder for his longer showers; but as it was, he had noticed, merely by dint of counting the female staff who suddenly needed help with the animals, that Merlin was apparently a bloke in some good standing with his face. There were the ears; but apparently they were a garnish, rather than a blemish. 

So when the day had bollixed itself by blowing his tyre three miles from home in the rain, and he had raged himself out of the car, and was going along with his head down and his hands in his pockets, he did not clock there was anything extraordinary about the face which put itself out the window of the truck that slowed and stopped beside him. Some flighty woman hobbling along with her dreams might have felt herself properly rescued by that vision of romance which women are always envisioning for themselves; Merlin would have been like one of those knights in a poem, who are always sweeping off the maiden, and never abducting her. But Arthur looked on the truck with heterosexual casualness. He saw, instead of a rescuer, simply Merlin, with his head out the window, grinning at him. “Hey. Need a ride?”

“What would give you that impression, Merlin? Was it the abandoned car you passed a mile back? The bucketing rain?”

“I actually only let people in my truck if they’re nice to me. Sorry, but you’re going to have to say one flattering thing.”

“Your truck looks very warm.”

“About me, you cock.”

Arthur squinted through the rain at him. “It’s too dark out for your ears to stand out nearly as much as they do.”

“People will say we’re in love,” Merlin said, and leant across to fling open the passenger door.

Arthur ducked in hastily, and set about that long, strenuous process of dethawing, by aiming the vent at his legs, because he would have liked to feel them, and what was in proximity to them. Merlin shifted into gear, and sent them rattling off into that great grey abyss, which now was so alien that it might have belonged to the Fae, rather than those good people of Yorkshire yore, who had tamed it, by putting the road through it. “What happened to the car?”

“Flat,” Arthur answered, blowing into his cupped hands.

“No spare?”

“Not exactly,” Arthur hedged, rubbing at his nose.

There was a moment of quiet in the truck; what quiet there is, when the wilds have risen up like revolutionaries. Then Merlin burst out laughing. “You don’t know how to change a flat, do you?”

“Well, who does?” Arthur said, scowling a little at him, and blowing again on his hands, to have something to do with them.

“People who don’t have people to do that sort of thing for them.”

“Right. Well, I’m sure it’s a very useful skill,” Arthur said, in a tone which implied he very well doubted it.

“It’s useful if you don’t want to walk home for miles in the rain, trusting that someone will pick you up in spite of your personality.” And now Merlin slowed, and whipped the wheel round skillfully, to nudge them against but not over the ditch, and turn the truck back the way they had come.

“What are you doing?”

“Taking you back to your car. You’re going to learn how to change a flat. It’ll be good for you to not be so useless.”

Changing a flat, Arthur discovered, was something people did to embarrass themselves. They wrestled out the spare, the wheel wrench, and the jack from the boot in the driving rain; and then the thing was to wriggle round on one’s back in the muck, trying to place the jack according to the instructions of a proper arsehole, who was laughing whilst giving them. Then the wheel wrench was attached to one of the bolts sticking out of the tyre rim, and he turned it, thinking to find it revolving easily in his hands, which after all were great big rugby player hands. But it had lodged, firmly, in front of a man who sometimes had to kneel on an unhappy calf, whilst fending off its harried mother, and very likely had never known defeat from a little bit of metal. He strained at it, putting in all his not inconsiderable muscles, and getting not so much as a shiver out of it. There was nothing but indifference to his horror. Merlin would think he was some kind of milksop, and the bolt was implacable.

“Try cursing lots,” Merlin said. “That usually helps me.”

But he could not get off the wheel nuts, though he called them every name he could think of, and a few which Merlin had suggested. 

Then the incredible humiliation of being shouldered out of the way, so that Merlin could have a go at it himself, whilst he stood back, feeling like a child who has got too far ahead of themselves. But though the forearms struggled mightily and aesthetically, they did not have any more success than Arthur. Merlin straightened, panting a bit. “All right. Next thing to try is to stand on the wheel wrench and jump up and down. And tell whoever services your bloody tyres not to put them on so tightly next time.”

“Are you serious?” Arthur demanded.

“Yeah. You have to use your body weight to loosen it if you can’t do it by hand.”

“I could have done it by hand.”

“Yeah, sure.”

So the exercise in tittishness, the ridiculous jarring up and down on the thin metal stick, which did what any stick does under the weight of a grown man, and gave, and hurtled him backward, into the mud and Merlin. There was a body pressed briefly against him, which a woman would have noticed, being the sturdy sort, but which he barely perceived. Then the muddle of putting on the spare, which consisted of getting rained on, and laughed at, and finally of yielding up what had been all his hard work, for Merlin’s credit, which he stole by nipping in at the last moment, and testing the wheel nuts Arthur had put on, yanking at the wrench with some arms which his sleeves had been rolled up to show off admirably. They seemed to be doing all right for themselves. Arthur looked at them, briefly, to establish a point of comparison; to be sure he had fulfilled that primaeval necessity of sizing up one’s opponent in that immortal rat race of human propagation. If he had wanted the same woman as was wanted by Merlin, he might have been evenly matched, till Merlin opened his mouth; which was useful to know.

“Don’t want you hurtling off into the ditch and dying because you’re a soft rich boy who doesn’t know how to change a flat,” Merlin said cheerfully, giving a verifying tug at all the wheel nuts, which emphasised that he had been training up the arms by wrestling creatures far larger than the wrench. His forearms bulged, very nearly invisible to Arthur’s indifference. 

Then he had simply tossed in the flat, the wrench, and the jack, and shut the boot on them, and gone off whistling to his own vehicle, whilst Arthur scrambled into his, feeling a bit tremulous in himself, because of the rain.

“What happened to you?” Morgana asked, when he had rolled up at last to the farm, and got out, covered in as much muck as the drive. Merlin was already parked, and out of his truck, gathering up his kit with his wellies, and said, before Arthur could phrase it more reasonably, “He’s a fancy posh public school boy who doesn’t know how to change a flat. I found him a mile down the road from his car, and made him go back, and muck up his manicure.”

“I don’t have a manicure!” Arthur cried.

“Aw. That was very kind of you, Merlin. He was in grave danger, trekking about in the rain like that.”

“Yes, I’m sure I’d have been murdered in the middle of the day, in the middle of Emberford.”

“Just walking down the road like that, where any fortunate passersby could run you down in cold blood? Of course you were in dire straits. You owe Merlin your life.”

Arthur rolled his eyes.

“She’s not wrong,” Merlin said. “First, for not running you over myself, and then for checking the wheel nuts, which you didn’t tighten properly. You’d have thrown a tyre for sure.”

“I wouldn’t have.”

“That’s what you get for sitting at a desk all day,” Morgana pointed out. “It’s a good thing you had a big, strong man to sort you out.” And she smirked horribly; he was not sure whether it was meant for him, or Merlin, as a kind of sexual come-on, like the praying mantis comes on to her unassuming partner, whilst he is in the blind throes of courtship.

“I play rugby! I could sort Merlin out with one hand tied behind my back.”

“You could try,” Merlin said, and gave him a look which produced a strange little squeezing in his stomach. He felt momentarily disordered in his innards. He had to look away from the look, which suddenly was setting off those ancient premonitions of danger in him.

“I’m going into town for a coffee. Want anything?” Morgana asked Merlin.

“Another of those sandwiches you brought me last time would be lovely, thanks; I haven’t had time to eat.”

Arthur left their flirting, quite indifferent to it; but quite pressed for time, since the flat had made him late for some brooding at his desk, which he was engrossed in when Morgana, some time later, popped into the office with lunch, slinging it with characteristic violence onto his desk.

“Do you like Merlin or something?” he demanded whilst she was helping herself to his tea cupboard. It was worrisome to have seen the flirting, to know his sister, to whom he had certain obligations of protectiveness, was swanning about in front of a character of that sort, whose positive attributes seemed to be horribly limited; to be, in their sum total: 

1. Kindness to animals
2. Forearms

“Not as much as you like Merlin,” she said, and this time the smirk was for him.

“Why didn’t you get into veterinarian work?” Merlin asked one afternoon, when Arthur had happened across the same stall in the same aisle in the same barn which Merlin by some great coincidence also was occupying. Arthur leant on the door, watching him running his hands over Teddy’s broad back, searching out the lump which Arthur had mentioned to him.

“What do you mean?”

“You asked me what got me interested in veterinarian work. What got you into the business side of it all? You obviously love animals, and you definitely know more about them than most of my clients.”

“Well, if you work with horses long enough, you develop some familiarity with common issues.”

“Sure, but your dad, who’s been doing this longer than you’ve been alive, didn’t come to me and say, ‘I’ve a stallion with what I think is an epidermoid cyst, but I’d appreciate it if you’d confirm that.’” He began to palpate a spot on the broad back, narrowing his eyes in concentration.

“Pendragons don’t go into veterinarian work.” He scratched at the back of his neck. “I enrolled in a course at RVC, actually. Thought I might be able to talk my father round to it. Well. I thought Morgana might talk him round to it. Couldn’t budge him, I’m afraid. So I did Business Studies at Cambridge.”

“Could go back. They have a gateway programme, and you’re only young. We had a bloke who was forty in my class.”

“That would be akin to treason, to my father. I’m not sure he’d let me come back.”

Merlin met his gaze over Teddy’s back. “Do you need the money? I mean, could you make tuition fees and support yourself if you had to, or are you dependent on the farm? Look. I’m not saying for sure, but I could probably get you a job at the clinic. As an assistant; we’re looking for another one. And there are scholarships.”

There was a kind of turning over in Arthur. He felt suddenly that it was difficult to swallow; that he had brought up something from his chest, and it had stuck fast, instead of going back down, as was proper. “I have my own money.”

“So think about it. Go back to school. You could still have a job at the clinic. Gaius is just cutting back his hours for now, but he’ll probably retire completely in a few years or so. The village will need another vet.”

Arthur slipped his hands in his pockets. He looked away, his throat working with difficulty. “I couldn’t do that. I have to think about--what’s expected of me. And my mother loved this place. Not sure I could let her down like that. Whether she’s here to see me do it or not.”

“Well, here’s the thing about mums: if they’re good ones--and let’s assume she would have been, since she isn’t here to defend herself, and since it seems she was a nice lady--they just want their children to be happy. Mine’s put up with all kinds of rubbish.” Merlin moved his hand over, murmuring a few soft words as he did so, and then feeling out with the long fingers the next section of flesh which he had determined warranted further investigation, pressing gently but firmly, and murmuring again as he did so, in that tender voice which he used for his patients’ fear. “Will you get the thermometer out of my bag there? He’s definitely got a cyst; I want to check for fever.”

Arthur ducked into the stall, and retrieved it for him. “Your mother must be a very strong woman,” he said, and then: “What makes you think my mother was a nice lady?”

“Gaius has mentioned her before. He was obviously really fond of her. And you are almost but not quite a complete testicle, whereas your dad is definitely one hundred percent all-natural irredeemable bollock, so you must have got it from somewhere.”

“Did you ever think you ought not to talk about a client like that?”

“No. Not if it’s true, which it is. Just because someone’s contributing to my paycheque is no reason not to insult them, if they’re a wanker.”

“I’m sure Gaius would be happy to hear that.” Arthur crossed his arms, and leant his hip against the wall. “How many times have you been sacked? Is that why you’re here? Did Gaius take you in because no one else knew how to handle someone who calls his first client, on his first day, ‘an old, withered knob’?”

“Actually, Gaius asked me to come down, and I’ve been sacked surprisingly less than you’d imagine. I am banned from a Starbucks in Camden, though. Worked parttime there whilst I was studying.” He slipped out the thermometer and patted one of the nervously flinching flanks. “No fever. Pretty confident it is an epidermoid cyst, so I don’t see the need for any imaging. We’ll just put some cream on it, and keep an eye on it.” He turned back the cuffs of his gloves, pulled them off, inside out, and disposed of them over the door of the stall, into the rubbish bin just outside it.

“Let me guess: dumped a coffee in a customer’s lap?”

“Yeah; he was being a creeper. But I don’t think they would have sacked me for that. Yeah. It was probably the headbutting.”

Arthur lifted an eyebrow. “Headbutting?”

“He had two mates with him who didn’t like the coffee being dumped on him. Was a bit of a scrawny kid in a rough neighbourhood; not my first time being outnumbered by large men. You’ve just got to be crazier than the other guy.”

“Can’t imagine you lost many fights, then.”

“Oh, a few. But there were always slashed tyres and that sort of thing to make up for it.”

Arthur huffed out an incredulous laugh. “Good to know I can always consult you for any local five on one pub brawls.” He had a sudden flash of inspiration, not at all prompted by the forearms, apparently never to be put away, when they could instead be indecently flaunted. “A few blokes and I play rugby most weekends. You wouldn’t be interested in joining, would you? Could use someone with a complete lack of regard for their own physical safety in the presence of large men.”

“Pretty rubbish at most sports, to be honest. No hand eye coordination. Kicking a football round a bit is usually the extent of my participation in sports.” He squatted down to pack up his kit, tossing Arthur a little jar which he rooted out whilst replacing the thermometer, and saying, “For his cyst. Twice a day, and let me know if you’re not seeing any improvement in a few days.”

“Right.” Arthur juggled it from hand to hand. “Well. If you change your mind about the rugby, we play Saturdays at Aireville Park, round about nine, if the weather looks to be holding up. It’s just down the road from the clinic, actually.”

“Dunno,” Merlin said in a voice of faux concern, clasping his hands between his knees, holding the crouch over the open bag, and looking up with furrowed brow under the dark curls. “You English are a soft lot. Wouldn’t want to break you over my grubby working-class knee.”

Arthur raised an eyebrow again. “ Soft ? We conquered a good portion of the entire world.”

“Colonised, you light-fingered British prick.”

“Hate to pop your anti-authoritarian bubble, but you’re also British.”

“Right, but I’m from the part that was oppressed by your part. And whilst you lot were running round, only managing to nick everything that wasn’t nailed down because of superior naval forces, some of us were beating the piss out of you with three men and a potato.”

“But you are from the part that lost. We kept those six counties, and your potato, didn’t we?”

“Oh, it’s like that, is it?” Merlin asked, lifting both his eyebrows.

“It’s like that,” Arthur said.

“Ok, Proddie. See you Saturday, then.”

Which was how Arthur learnt what Merlin looked like in shorts. It was an unremarkable look. He threw a jersey into Merlin’s face, and called over the wet grass, “Hope you came prepared to cry like a girl.”

“Hope you came prepared to bleed like one,” Merlin said, catching the jersey. 

Several of the men, already acquainted with Merlin, who was of that type which enters a new situation, and immediately procures for himself several friends, and at least two archenemies, threw back their heads and roared; and then the side which was wearing the same jersey as the one Arthur had thrown at Merlin began amongst themselves to deliberate on whether they would be saddled with or enhanced by him. He was a rank newbie; but one who was known for that pure, perfect madness of the lunatic. He mightn’t know the Laws, or how to aim, but he knew to put his head down, and bull over his opponent with sheer, unmitigated madness, and farm muscles. He was to be the outside centre for the opposition, on account of his long legs, and aggression; whilst Arthur, the well-rounded athletic, was the loosehead prop for the other team. 

The weather had turned out nicely for the event, as if it were a kind of spectator itself, and keen to see how the little inconsequential dots under its clouds would comport themselves: which currently was to break off into little clusters, and wait for Morgana, their referee, by visiting with their heads together, or taunting one another mercilessly. Arthur was carrying, admirably, all the weight of the latter on his own shoulders, by ribbing Merlin whilst he stretched.

“You talk a lot of rubbish for a man who’s about to get absolutely wrecked.”

“Oh, am I?” Arthur lifted his eyebrows. “By some bumpkin who spends all his days with sheep and milk cows? Give you lots of trouble, do they? Do you even know which way to kick the ball?” He warmed up his shoulders with a few wide circles, and pulled his right arm across his chest, to stretch out the triceps. Merlin was limbering up the not-inconsiderable thigh muscles, which Arthur sized up discreetly, as the sportsman is always sizing up an enemy soon to be met. They would carry Merlin along at speed, no doubt, and if he were in range of them, he would possibly be in danger of them; but he would not be in range of them. “A tenner says you never touch the ball.”

“A tenner says I wipe your pasty English face in the mud. I don’t care about the ball,” Merlin said cheerfully. “This is for Ireland, and all she’s suffered at your colonosing arsehole hands.”

“You know I didn’t actually colonise Ireland?”

“Yeah, but I figure some of your rich Protestant cockwomble relatives must have popped over at some point.”

“Well, I’m sure your rabid, bedlamite relatives promptly bit them back to the motherland.” He stretched out his left arm. “A tenner if you can so much as touch my jersey whilst it’s whipping past on my way to the umpteenth try of the day. A try’s a touchdown, by the way. A touchdown is when you score? Which you won’t be doing.”

“Try not to be such a cunt, Arthur,” Morgana called over the pitch, having swanned in at last, in sunglasses and a scarf.

“On your own time, then,” Arthur griped at her.

“Obviously,” she said. And then, to Merlin: “It’s not strictly allowed, but if you wanted to kick his bollocks instead of the ball, that would be really quite lovely.”

“You’re supposed to be enforcing the rules, not openly encouraging people to break them.”

“If he kicks anyone else in the bollocks, I’ll be sure to punish him properly.”

“That’s exciting,” Merlin said, with a little flirty smile for her that turned Arthur’s stomach. He threw his arm roughly round Merlin’s neck, and shoved him toward the huddle which his team had made in the centre of the field, with Percival in their midst, and Elyan with his head out of the mix, to indicate to their newest member he had better be along.

Then the kickoff, which Arthur lifted his forward to intercept, and the mad scramble down the field, with Morgana screaming encouragements to violence, the thundering rush all round him whilst men strove against or through one another for the little white speck in the fume. There were large bodies all round him, already sweating in the breeze, where they frequently met with or incited violence. He had lost sight of Merlin, who no doubt in the crush had backed off, as new players often did, whilst there was still self-preservation in them, before the bloodlust was in them like it had been in those warriors of antiquity, who had met one another baldly in the fields of their deaths with no dispassionate gun between them and infinity. Then Arthur caught the ball, and found him. He was a brief smudge in the multitude. Then he was hitting Arthur so hard he flipped. Arthur landed on his back, with no wind in him; and the ball landed somewhere in the scramble, which surged round and in some cases over him whilst he lay breathless in the stampede. He felt as the jockey must feel having come off his mount in the turn: a tremulus, tender thing of humanity to be killed or spared by the mob. Then Merlin was sitting on him, which was a different kind of riding altogether.

“Yes! Yes !” Morgana screamed. 

“Get off me,” Arthur said breathlessly. It was no brief brutality in a game infamous for it; he ought to have tackled Arthur, and rushed up, to join the rush. He ought to have made it that impersonal clash of athletes pursuing their disparate goals: but he was pinning Arthur’s arms down with his knees, and straddling him. He was pressing in with the muscular thighs, so that Arthur thought his chest would burst. They had been made for those titanic clashes with livestock refusing their shots, and were not hardly fussed with one little man in a jersey. “I’ve got to earn my tenner,” Merlin said, and then ground a handful of mud into Arthur’s face. It was something which Arthur had to let happen to him. He tried to strain at the knees on him whilst spitting up the mud, but they were made as fast as the thighs. So he had to lie under the very thin shorts being quite roundly humiliated, whilst Morgana bellowed encouragement.

“I can make change, if you’ve only got, like, rolls of hundreds in your wallet,” Merlin said, and patting his dirty cheek, got up at last, and barrelled back down the field to wherever the action now was fulminating.  

“Are you all right, though?” Morgana asked when he had got up at last, shaking out his hair.

“Fuck off,” he said, and jogged off only a little shakily down the field.

After that it was personal; he was not after the ball, he was after Merlin. He was no good at kicking or throwing, but if he had managed not to fumble the ball, and tucked it into his chest, he could sprint down the field with decent enough agility, hurtling people, or dodging round them: or lowering his shoulder to heave them over it. But now there was Arthur, to thwart him at every turn. Arthur was too civilised to avenge himself on that slow, torturing embarrassment with reciprocal eroticism: he made the tackles quick, neat things of callous efficiency. It was a bit too suggestive, even in a sport full of bum touching and ball handling, to sit on another man longer than the requisite few seconds which it took to reassemble oneself into his limbs and their limbs, which doubtless Merlin did not know, because he was from that squalid backcountry where people were lucky to copulate with anyone other than a sheep, or relative. Probably he was starved of humanity, and ignorant of its etiquettes, and that was why he had sat on Arthur in the thin shorts, all those innumerable, astounding moments. But Arthur, a staunch observer of homosocial propriety, knew to take him down quickly, with minimal touching and homoeroticism. 

But once he laid him out flat on the field, and Merlin would not give up the ball. They were face to face for a moment, with the ball clasped sweatily between them.

“Give it up, you idiot!”

“Make me,” Merlin said. And then his legs were round Arthur’s waist. He did not know how it had happened. One moment he was wrestling for control of the ball, as gentlemen did, with decency and decorum, by engaging with only his upper body, whilst his groin politely avoided Merlin’s groin. And now Merlin had muddled them into this gross bastardisation of lovemaking, in front of the lads, and Morgana.

He flipped Arthur over, smacking his head on the ground; and mashing his chest into Arthur’s face, hollered, “Percival!” and slung the ball as well as he could from that awkward confusion of limbs and hormones which briefly but horrifyingly mistook Merlin for something of interest.

“Don’t worry, I take it as a compliment,” Merlin assured him.

“That just happens sometimes!” Arthur snapped. 

“Yeah, I’m aware. I also have a penis. Which you probably just became very aware of, so now it’s awkward.” And he scrambled up at last, leaving Arthur again on his back in the mud, with the game thundering over him.

It was best not to bring up Arthur’s penis, or Merlin’s response to Arthur’s penis. Merlin had found that straight men were rather self-conscious about the biological whims to which they and their embarrassment were subject; they did not like to be reminded that they had had an inopportune boner, for no other reason than the boner’s mischievousness. The homosexual, if he had been out for a while, and was amongst people he trusted, might be perfectly at ease with the realities of penis ownership; those strange unknowable notions which some blind Creator, inebriated, or lunatic, had programmed into a little harmless appurtenance of skin. He did not have to question his sexuality, because he had already answered it; and so he did not have to dissect the meaning of some wood in a locker room as if he were analysing human existence. He did not have to go after his penis, and demand its intentions, as if he suspected it of criminal activity. Straight men, on the other hand, drew Conclusions; or worried that others had drawn Conclusions. So whilst Merlin knew and readily accepted that penises did what penises do, even on a rugby field, even if you were heterosexual, Arthur was avoiding him. Merlin had been in and out of the barns, and loitered near his truck, for three endless days; and though it had steadily bucketed on him, there had been no one to bring him tea, except the office secretary, Gwen, who had come out one evening to shyly linger near Lancelot, and noticed he was shivering. She had brought out the tea openly, instead of inventing the absurd workarounds which Arthur had used to circumvent his thoughtfulness. He said when she handed it to him, “I suppose Morgana made this, then?” hoping Arthur had made it, and held poor Gwen to his stupid secret of decency. But Gwen gave him a little confused look, and said, “No? I made it? Morgana isn’t even here” and dashed his hopes mild interest in whether or not they were communicating through medium. 

On the fourth day, whilst he was checking over the cyst on Teddy, he heard the plummy voice out in the aisle, talking to Percival about the feeding schedule; and his heart, though it did not thrill, sped a little. He went round the stall as stealthily as he was able, soothing Teddy in whispers, keeping his voice low and soft, so as not to scare Arthur or the horse. He was afraid to be overheard, to send the blonde head whipping round in suspicion, and then away down the aisle in the opposite direction of danger. It was not entirely honourable: but when he heard the voice turn, calling back to Percival about the hay, and realised it was heading straight for him, that it would go on innocently past him, if he could contrive to lure it in near enough to be ambushed, he tucked himself into the corner of the stall.

“Don’t fuck this up for me, Teddy,” he said softly to the horse, who had given him a startled look. Then the footsteps were outside the stall; were on their innocent trajectory past it: and Merlin popped over the door, casually, to bin his gloves, and asked, “Do you read?”

Arthur froze. He gave Merlin a look which people give to snakes, or growling dogs. Then, slowly, he asked, “Is this you having a go at my literacy?”

“No, I’m asking if you do it as a hobby. It’s small talk. It’s a kind of thing normal people do when they’re getting to know someone, instead of bringing round tea from their ‘sister.’” He made the little air quotes as obnoxiously as possible.

Arthur ignored that, and stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Yes.”

“What kind of books?” Merlin asked, and casually returned to packing up his kit, looking into the bag instead of Arthur’s eyes, so that Arthur had time to forget, or at least to violently suppress, that last time he had looked into them, it had been over a rugby ball so hotly contested it had stoked more than the fires of violence.

“Mostly nonfiction. Business books. That sort of thing. Expect you’d find it horridly dull, but some people are grown-ups who don’t have time for Harry Potter.”

“No,” Merlin said, and now he did look up, draping one of his arms over the stall door.

“No?” Arthur asked, raising one of the blonde eyebrows.

“I think that’s what you’re supposed to say. I don’t think that’s what you read. Except maybe in front of your dad.”

Arthur looked away with a little laugh; that incredulous noise, more breath than joy, that the beleaguered makes in the face of his tormenter, whose actions are so unexpected, or appalling, there is nothing to be done but scoff at them. “You think so, do you? Be careful with that; I expect thinking is dangerous for you. Wouldn’t want you damaging anything.”

“Come on. What do you tuck into ‘Capitalism for Dummies’ so Uther thinks you’re being a good little Tory?” Merlin goaded him.

Arthur rolled his eyes; but he was struggling not to smile. “You know, we do things occasionally aside from kissing the Queen’s arse.”

“I don’t need to know where else you’re putting your lips on that colonising old bag.”

“Very funny.”

“I usually am.”

“Right,” Arthur said, and rubbed the back of his neck. “How’s the cyst?”

“It’s good. Looks great. Yeah. Just a few more days of the cream, and I think we’ll be grand.”

“Glad to hear it,” Arthur said, and shifted his weight to his other foot. Then he said, when Merlin was sure he was to walk off, possibly not only out of the barn, but out of Merlin’s acquaintance, “Swashbucklers. You know, those old adventure stories, Three Musketeers and the like. Rafael Sabatini. That’s what I read. But if you tell anyone I know more about Captain Blood’s sea exploits than investing, I’ll have to kill you.”

Merin held up his hands in surrender. “I would never. Not technically a swashbuckler, it’s historical fiction, but it’s got that kind of feel, plus bonus espionage: you ever read the Aubrey and Maturin series by Patrick O’Brian?”

Arthur scratched his nose. He had ducked into himself a bit, lowering his head so that he was smaller, so that there was less of him in the world, and looked round for a moment, as if he were worried to be caught enjoying himself. “‘Jack, you’ve debauched my sloth!’”

Merlin felt that he had lit up. He could not see his face; but he knew the shapes that it made in joy, and felt that it was making them now. He was in that moment of perfect humanity which binds heart and trembling soul those readers who have found and loved the same treasure. “I love that scene.”

“I’ve read the entire series three times so far. Should listen to the audiobooks, if you haven’t; Patrick Tull is a fantastic narrator. Not usually keen on audiobooks, but I put one on whilst I was mucking out a stall once, and got on surprisingly well with it.”

“I haven’t,” Merlin said, and realised he was smiling gormlessly at Arthur over the stall door, with Teddy judging him from the corner. “Which is your favourite?”

“Master and Commander, probably.”

“Really?”

“It’s a good one,” Arthur said a bit defensively.

“Yeah, but it’s the first book of a twenty book series. The story and the friendship gain so much as it goes on.”

“Sure, it’s a consistently brilliant series, but you can’t beat challenging your future bestie to a duel because he’s enjoying a music recital too much.”

“Good point. Mine’s Desolation Island, I think. ‘My God, oh my God, six hundred men’ gets me every time. And O’Brian’s brilliant at action scenes.”

“And humour. I laughed so hard I choked reading the bit where Jack says the men are lining the rail in their shore-going rig with their eyes staring out of their heads and their pricks a yard long, and then the ladies flouncing off and him bawling out that they needn’t hurry because they won’t be off till the evening gun.”

Merlin burst out laughing. “Really?”

“Literally. Morgana had to perform the Heimlich manoeuvre on me. I learnt the hard way not to snack whilst reading them.”

He’s read the Aubrey Maturin series. Three times, Merlin texted Gwaine later that evening, after he had come into the house where Gaius was pottering about in the kitchen with the kettle, and taken off his shoes, and thrown himself gratefully onto the sofa.

Gaius?

No, Arthur.

oh my mistake. just thought you might have wanted to talk about someone else for a change.

Merlin frowned at his phone.

I don’t talk about him that much.

There was a pause, a bit humiliatingly brief, for Gwaine to gather his evidence: and then he released it, all in a flurry of texts which pinged at him, endless vibration after vibration whilst Merlin was sat, trying to watch the telly, and finding continuously that he was being dragged away to look at yet another screenshot which showed he had mentioned Arthur no more than marginally a bit slightly excessively, possibly, from the perspective of a man in Dublin, who was not there to see he and Arthur were together nearly every day, and accordingly had chatted; and accordingly Merlin had passed it along, in the spirit of openness between long distance mates.

You tell me what you had for breakfast , he typed defensively. I’m just telling you what I’ve been doing with myself.

yeah but i haven’t fantasised about me and breakfast in a little country cottage with a labrador and a vegetable garden where we drink our morning tea and make slow sweet love.

Fuck off, Merlin replied, and tossed the phone facedown on the sofa.

He had never pictured the vegetable garden, nor the Labrador; and the only sex which he had imagined, briefly, by quite unfortunate accident, was a kind of brute fornication, because Merlin was only human, and Arthur was only fit. Not overly fit: but that fortuitous sort which has only to be somewhere in that ordinary realm of Not Hideous, One Supposes, because the population has elevated him, by being comprised of a few old men and some cows. All Arthur had to do was have a face like a frontside, rather than a backside, and suddenly he was Henry Cavill. Merlin didn’t see it, of course; but some of the female employees chatted occasionally within his earshot, and out of Arthur’s: and so he had learnt from them that he was moderately above average. 

They were talking again, so Merlin noticed occasionally, in passing, whilst they were ribbing one another, that Arthur’s shoulders stood out under his jumpers, or jackets: and that when he threw back his head to laugh, it showed how the snaggle-toothed smile was contributing to the effect, rather than detracting; all quite ordinary remarks made by a mind whose livelihood was oriented to detail. He had to spot where a foot turned over wrongly in its gait, or a spot was breaking free of some hide; and so he did notice, without especial notice, all these small plodding mundanities of what was slightly more handsome than middling.

He was a little concerned for his reputation for taste when Morgana asked him one evening, “Why are you wearing my brother’s clothes?”; but he was not concerned about wearing the clothes. 

“I’m not,” he said, and bent over the hoof he was examining.

“That’s his wellington, the green one. And that’s his jacket.”

“Oh, erm, well.” Merlin scratched at one of his hot ears. “The wellie I stole because I figured it might as well have a decent owner, and I lost mine. The jacket he just threw in my face. Mine’s got a tear. And he hurled it at me, and I figured if he’s going to be an arse, I might as well get something out of it.”

“It’s very saccharine boyfriends of you.”

“Is it a keratoma?” Arthur asked him, coming up to the stall at precisely the wrong moment with the tea, and glaring at Morgana. 

“Yeah, looks like.”

“Why is Merlin wearing your clothes like he’s your absent-minded husband who never remembers his own rain gear?”

“Like he’s my what?” Arthur barked. “You’re talking utter rot.” He scratched his nose, and turned to Merlin. “So: keratoma?”

“Yeah. I’ll x-ray it and take a wee tissue sample to be absolutely sure, and determine exactly how big it is, but I’m pretty confident that’s what we’ve got. Just need to determine if it can be removed under local anaesthesia, or if we’ll have to do general.”

“How’s your tea taste, Merlin?” Morgana asked in a tone of immense innocence. “Like it’s steeped in tender love and care?”

“Will you shut up?” Arthur barked.

“I was only asking a question.”

“You’re only being annoying.”

“It tastes like arse,” Merlin interjected helpfully.

“It does not,” Arthur argued.

“How would you know what arse tastes like?” Morgana asked in the same tone in which she had enquired about the tea.

“I don’t,” Arthur snapped. “But I do know all the secluded spots on these grounds where a murder can be both carried out and covered up with no one ever the wiser.”

“You don’t have the stomach for it,” Morgana replied disdainfully. “He cried once because I killed a spider. Didn’t want it on him, but made a fuss like I’d shot the queen because I squashed it.”

“I was six. And I didn’t cry.”

“You were six and still doing human emotions?” Merlin shook his head. “What a cream puff. By the time I was two I’d done away with all that. Every time something upsetting happened to me, I would simply just pound my chest, or punch an adder in the face. Like real men do.”

Arthur rolled his eyes. “Well, I didn’t cry; Morgana is an infamous and habitual liar.”

“I’ve got loads of other childhood stories, if you want to hear them, Merlin. I think the most embarrassing one, if I have to pick, is when he was fifteen, there was a footie match where he--”

Arthur grabbed her. “You promised to take that to the grave .”

“Oh, I will; but now Merlin knows there’s some story about a footie match when you were fifteen that’s so humiliating fifteen years later you’re still holding me to a childhood pact sealed with some spit and a tenner to never speak of it again. And now he can imagine anything he wants. Any possible scenario is open to him. Possibly he might even come up with something worse than what actually happened, and then you’ll have to tell him, risking the humiliating ordeal of being known, or the humiliating ordeal of letting it simmer in his imagination, where you could be doing God knows what at that footie match.” And she smiled beatifically, and patted Arthur on the cheek, and left them with that tremendous gift she had just bestowed upon Merlin.

“She is pure evil,” Merlin said admiringly.

“I know,” Arthur said drily.

“So what’d you do?”

“None of your business.”

“She’s right, you know. You’re going to have to tell me. I have a very good imagination.”

“I’d rather be kneecapped,” Arthur said pleasantly, and pocketed his hands in his jacket, and went off, temporarily, till Merlin had packed up his kit and gone out to the truck, and Arthur had invented some excuse for why it was imperative he also be at the truck, helping to haul in the equipment, and forgetting to demand back his jacket, though he had remembered everything else, including the hoof testers Merlin had forgot, and a rare insult about an incompetent whey-faced nestlecock.

“It’s a good job you have books to quote. Otherwise you’d have to resort to your own brain, and then I shudder to think what sad little jibes you’d get in. I’d have to spend the rest of my employment being called an idiot or a moron or, if you were really feeling naughty, a tit .”

“Fuck off,” Arthur said, pushing his head as he ducked to climb into the truck.

“Oh, I love it. I didn’t know you had it in you, you old maid. Say it again. Call me a cunt.”

“You’d like that, would you?”

“Yeah, typically, but really I only get off on it if someone attractive is insulting me, so you don’t have to worry about making it weird between us.”

Arthur looked away with his mouth open on the smile which showed the slightly but not overtly adorable front teeth, and said, “Get out of here.”

“You going to ring the coppers?”

“I’m sure you’ve done something to warrant it.”

“Yeah, I’ve got to go anyway. Got to nip home and start internet shopping for something to bribe your sister with so I can have that footie story.”

“Good luck. She likes tormenting me with the idea that she might just be on the verge of telling it, in front of a girlfriend or large audience, far more than she’ll like anything you could ever purchase with all the money in the world.”

Then Uther returned from London, and Arthur was sealed back into the office, and Merlin felt that he, or time, or meaning, had gone out of joint. They had worn a little groove into the mechanisms of time-taking; the day would pass, and bring Arthur down the drive in the fury or calm of the elements, to those little rituals on which lives are sustained in the entropy of being. It had been comforting in the meanness and madness of the world to see the same face, coming into the same barn; to know that whilst the foundations are ever rumbling under us, whether we hear them speaking or no, he could rely on the face, on the solid warm being under it, whether there was rain or sun or war. It was why he felt a little discomfort in himself; because we are not creatures of change, though we have been sentenced to live and fume constantly amidst it. He was out of step with himself and the world because he had suddenly fallen out of habit, which is like falling through the looking glass. 

“What’s wrong with you?” Gaius asked over dinner; and he had answered not what was truth but what he wanted to be truth: “Nothing.”

He had Morgana, and the grooms who often stopped by to check on or chat with him, so he was never alone, but with the strange little space which Arthur had left in him. He felt not that the companionship was lacking; but that he was lacking. They were bringing to the table wit or kindness or beauty, whilst he had dragged in a sad wet lump from the rain. 

So he watched the office whilst he was going in and out amongst his patients, or roaring off in the truck, till one day he saw that the tall figure was moving about casually in jeans once more, instead of the fitted trousers, all round the paddock with the mums, who hurried over as if he were a celebrity. 

“Uther gone back to London, then?” he asked Morgana casually. “He’s usually in a suit if your dad’s here. And rarely out of the office, unless he’s showing a client round.”

“That’s very observant of you,” Morgana said.

“Oh, yeah, you know, I just. See little things. You get used to it. Part of my job. To spot things.” He ducked into the truck for his equipment.

It was nearly an hour before Arthur wandered into the barn on his mobile, into which he had apparently been speaking, or getting spoken at, for some time. He gave Merlin an exhausted look, and leant his elbows on the stall door to watch whilst he nodded along at the phone, and mimed shooting himself in the mouth.

“Yes. I’ve personally seen to it. Yes. Yes. Personally, I assure you. Of course. Well, we value your patronage very much. Right. I will do. Yes. You too.” He stabbed at his phone with his finger, and when the call had safely disconnected, blew out his cheeks, and said, “My God.”

“Pain in the arse client?”

“She breeds some of her mares with us. We keep outside mares onsite fifty days after the breeding as part of a guarantee, to make sure the pregnancy’s taken, they’re through the high risk bit, etc. One of hers is still being boarded here because she’s decided she’s too precious to be moved in her condition, even though we do it all the time, have done with this specific mare before. So she’s still here, and I’m expected to make a daily report on how it’s all coming along, and by daily report, I mean, it’s five minutes of me giving her a little rundown of the mare’s health, and twenty minutes of her demanding to know if I’m really doing such and such properly, as if I don’t know how to take a temperature or fill a bucket of water or notice if she’s suddenly cocked up her toes. And she’s got imported hay for her. Not to eat, mind you, but for bedding.”

Merlin wrinkled his forehead. “Where’s it imported from?”

“France.”

“Oh my God.”

“Yes. English bedding isn’t good enough, apparently, or any anywhere within the UK, so we get it from France, and she doesn’t want the grooms mucking about with it, she insists that I do it, so every day I’ve got to change this special French bedding and report back to her.”

“Why the hell would you do that?”

“Why else?” Arthur rubbed his forehead. “She pays us lots of money.”

“Make your dad do it if he’s so keen on keeping her business.”

“Oh, she doesn’t want him doing it either, she wants me, for some reason.”

“Maybe she likes you. Can’t imagine why she would, but mental illness services are severely underfunded, so you never know who’s wandering round with untreated problems.”

Arthur rolled his eyes again. “I dated her daughter. And by dated, I mean, I took her out to dinner, once, because we both wanted to shut up our parents on the matter. And now she thinks she’s my overbearing mother-in-law.”

Merlin laughed. “I can’t believe you charmed somebody’s mum. You’re not the best at first impressions.”

“Right, and I’m sure you’ve left a string of besotted parents in your wake, devastated that their precious daughters didn’t manage to rope you into marriage.” Then, in a strangely careful voice, Arthur said, “You are single, aren’t you? You never said, but there’s no ring, and I assumed if you had a wife and two kids in a semi-detached somewhere, you’d have mentioned them once or twice.”

“No one’s that lucky, unfortunately,” Merlin said, and dimpled at him.

“Good for women,” Arthur shot back.

“Good for single women,” Merlin retaliated. He thought about outing himself with a casual, “And men”; and bit, for once, his tongue, thinking that to suddenly come out with his bisexuality in a moment of friendly banter not far removed from the Rugby Incident might be interpreted, by Arthur’s small, internally-focussed mind, as flirting; might be seen as some sad attempt on Merlin’s behalf to test the waters with his bachelorhood and gender-inclusive penis. He cleared his throat. “So, your dad’s gone back to London?”

“Yes. For a few weeks.”

“So you’re probably really busy, then. What with your French bedding and all.”

“Yes, but I can’t be in that office any longer; I’m about to chew through the walls. Thought coming out to harass you might be a nice change of scenery.”

“Oh, well, if you wanted a change of scenery--if you had time--I’m just finishing up here, and then I’m heading out. Probably be ready in about twenty minutes or so. I’m going round to see Old Man Simmons and his cow next. Bloody thing’s always got footrot. Absolutely hates me. Old Man Simmons and the cow, actually. Could do with some help rounding it up.” He made sure to make it an invitation of impeccable nonchalance. He was looking over the mare as he said it, running his hand and stethoscope along, as if he had quite forgotten Arthur even existed; as if he had said it into a void beyond the stall simply to hear something come back to him from the empty wastes.

“Sounds like a man and a cow with impeccable taste,” Arthur said. He pushed himself off the stall door, and slipped his hands into his trouser pockets. “Suppose I could help you out. If you can’t get on without me.”

“Well, I could, but it would be nice if the cow had someone else to focus its seething hatred on.”

Somehow that did not deter Arthur, who after Merlin had finished with the horses, helped pack up the truck, and then clambered into the passenger seat, from which he griped about Merlin’s driving, because they had set out at marginally over the speed limit, in a vehicle without those posh, newfangled shocks, to cosset the delicate-bodied.

The day had been dithering over what to do with itself, unable to resolve the dilemma whilst they were in the climate-controlled barn; and now when they were to be loose in a field with the Antichrist, knew suddenly what was the verdict: and began, harrowingly, to dump on them. Arthur’s fringe went dark and flattened to him; and Merlin had to live that cold, hard reality of the man who has forgot in his apprehension to zip up his jacket, so that he is now nothing more than the small, humble victim of the rain. It went down his back, and down his trousers, and into the unmentionable hinterlands which are below the trousers.

“She’s got the footrot again,” Simmons said to him from under the roof of the little lean-to under which he and most of the cows were sheltering, and which of course the patient was not. “You didn’t treat it properly last time. You know I don’t pay you to come out here and piss about and then go away having done nothing but contributed to your pocketbook.”

Merlin ground his jaw. “I told you, you have to get these cattle into a clean, dry environment. They’re scrambling round these rocks and cutting themselves up, and then standing round in the muck all day, which is where bacteria flourishes. Did you include some iodine in the mineral mixes, like I suggested last time?”

“I don’t hold with that sort of thing.”

“Then you don’t hold with your bloody cows not getting bloody footrot,” Merlin snapped. “Give me the damn halter, so I can nearly get myself killed, as usual, because you can’t be arsed to bring her in yourself.”

“She doesn’t want to be brought in.”

“Oh, well, don’t worry; I’ll handle it. You just sit back and make suggestions whilst she tries to kick me to death.”

“You can’t approach her like that,” Simmons called out predictably, whilst Merlin with the halter in hand, and Arthur at his side, inched out over the field, within proximity but not peripheral vision of the cow. “She doesn’t like it.”

Merlin ignored him. “We have to try to drive her into the pasture there, and shut the gate so we’ve got her penned in. With some cows you can just walk right up and slip the halter over them, but she’s possessed, so.”

“Wonderful,” Arthur said. “I hope you realise that if I die because you made me wrestle a murderous cow, Morgana will kill you in the most horrific way imaginable. She’ll find out whatever your worst nightmare is, and make sure it’s realised, over and over again, before finally allowing you to succumb when it pleases her.”

“Your sister’s so sexy,” Merlin said, and the cow looked up, and froze.

“It’s just me. Your friend. Merlin. And this guy. He’s got molasses.”

“I haven’t.”

“She doesn’t know that. Just tell her whatever you told that lady with the special French bedding to get her to throw her daughter at you. Maybe it works on lady cows too.”

“I have a lot of money,” Arthur told the cow in a friendly tone.

“Oh, fuck off.” Merlin unfurled the harness. “Here, cow.”

“‘Here cow?’ Don’t you have a nickname for her or something?”

“Yeah, it’s ‘fucking nutter cunt.’”

“No wonder you’re single.”

“Oh, well, here, come on, then, love, my darling sweetheart, dear,” Merlin said, and the cow lowered her head, and charged him.

Arthur caught her round the neck. She was mildly annoyed; but not hindered. She bulled on toward Merlin, with Arthur stumbling along in her wake, trying to dig in his heels for purchase, as if she were an opponent with the rugby ball under her arm, and he had fumbled the tackle, but was still in hope of bringing her over with sheer, unsoiled stupidity.

“Let her loose, you idiot, she’ll kill you,” Merlin shouted. 

Arthur held on. He forced himself into her side, swinging her hip round toward the fence, and hitting the bars so hard they quaked, and he slipped. Merlin saw the murderous hooves flattening his thick head, and darted in, catching her hip with his hip as she spun to try and kick Arthur, and slipped himself: so that instead of Arthur under the stampede, it was to be him under 600 kg of fury. He was underneath her for a cold, eternal moment, in the freezing mud from which they would have to collect what was left of him: and then there were hands under his arms. Arthur yanked him free so hard he staggered back, with Merlin still in his arms, into the fence, hitting it so that the shock went through the both of them. He was breathing hard in Merlin’s ear, fast, scared breaths whilst the cow bellowed in regret.

“Thanks,” Merlin gasped.

“No problem.” Arthur slapped him on the chest, and let him go.

“Shouldn’t be doing that. Better to approach her left side,” Simmons called.

“If I strangle him, are you going to rat me out?” Merlin asked, sliding along the fence, feeling his way toward her by little surging inches, and stopping after each to check if she had noticed, and meant to sort him out.

“I didn’t see anything.”

“Good man. Ok, she’s close to the gate. If we can just get her-- go!” he screamed suddenly as she slipped through it, and they both lunged forward, and reaching it nearly simultaneously, slammed it behind her, and leant on it for safety, as Arthur hastily latched it.

“You’ll have to put the halter on now,” Simmons said, in a tone that very much doubted they were capable of it.

“Thanks!” Merlin called back. “I hadn’t thought of that bit.”

They wrestled her finally into the halter, by herding her, with surprisingly minimal casualties, into a corner of the fence, and then slinging it over her face with such speed it startled her out of her bloodlust. Then Merlin looped the lead round the post, and tied it fast, and saying, when she tried to bite him, “Oh no, you will fucking not ” he pulled her head round by the ear, bracing himself in a wide-legged stance, and leaning back against the great neck, inserted a finger into either nostril, whilst Arthur, a little wide-eyed, watched. “It’s called nosing,” he panted, having forced the submission at last, and now having a little breath to talk, rather than simply to curse. “Ideally, we’d put her in a crush, which is a kind of metal chute you can drive them into and lock up. They can’t move, so it’s the safest way to examine them or do anything they don’t like, like vaccines, or, in her case, breathe. But Simmons doesn’t have any, so every time, I’ve got to just try not to die till I can get her in the halter.”

“Should pull her head round more. You won’t hold her like that,” Simmons called out.

“You come put your fingers up this damn cow’s nose, then!” Merlin snapped. He tightened his grip on her ear. “Can you grab my bag out of the truck?” he asked Arthur. “I’ve the antibiotics in there.”

“Don’t be using the same antibiotics as last time. They don’t work. Bloody colleges turning out these young radicals; don’t know a bloody thing about cattle, but they can talk about their feelings and pronouns till the cows come home with the same bloody footrot.”

“Oh, fuck off, you nasty old sod. I won’t treat your damn cow, then, especially as the only problem it’s got is a stupid bloody owner, and there’s nothing I can do about that.”

Arthur ducked his smile into his hand, and coughed. 

They got the antibiotics into her, and then scrambled over the fence, where Merlin undid the knot in the lead, and let her loose, trailing the lead after her as she plunged over the field, seeking her abusers; or some satiating replacement.

“You want me to drop you back at yours?” Merlin asked when they were back in the truck.

“Are you done for the day?” Arthur replied, combing the wet fringe out of his eyes, whilst Merlin, not a precious bollix, simply shook his head like a dog, spattering the truck, and spattering Arthur. “Thanks,” Arthur said, drily.

“I’ve got to take a look at a sheep, and then I’m done.”

“Might as well finish out your rounds, then.”

“I promise the sheep won’t try to kill you. And if it does, it’s probably only about 20 kg or so. So you can just kneel on it and feel bad for it.”

So together they diagnosed urinary calculi in the ram which Merlin had been called out to examine, and he showed Arthur how to administer the ammonium chloride, giving it over, under a watchful eye, when Arthur wanted to have a go himself, and standing back with crossed arms to supervise his assistant whilst advising the owner how to change up their feeding. And then the brisk drive home in misery, with the clouds pouring out their woes, and the truck heater desperate to compensate. He dropped Arthur back at the farm, and himself back home at Gaius’, where he had a blazing shower, and then dragged himself at last to bed with his phone, too tired for supper.

All right, I think I might have a slight crush on him. A really, really tiny one. Really almost unnoticeable. Like. Minuscule. I know I’m not nineteen and there’s no excuse anymore for being hung up on straight men, but if it’s just a tiny, tiny, wee little crush, then I think that’s fine, he texted Gwaine.

mate i know his favourite footie team, his favourite book, his favourite colour, that his mother died of cancer right after he was born, that his front teeth are crooked, and that your boners accidentally but electrically touched during a rugby game. you think you have a crush? you’re having his babies. 

Chapter Text

So now as November banked itself over the Dales, and the sun slowly died out of the memories of men, now anything other than rain, or that fine, mizzling cousin of rain, survived only in eulogy or mythology, Arthur was running about the hillsides after stray sheep or cattle or pigs, and huddling together in sheds which kept out nothing more than hope, drinking tea or poor coffee, and blowing on his fingers to resuscitate them. They had put together and pored over some plans for how to tackle Simmons’ cow without dying, and by the third visit had the routine down pat, getting only one bloody nose (Arthur) and a jammed finger (Merlin) out of the practice run, whilst Simmons called out recommendations from the sanctuary of his lean-to, and Merlin called back recommendations from the middle of a piss-wet bloody field in the bloody bucketing rain with a bloody mad lunatic owned by a bloody old bellend.

He was going out whenever Merlin could manage it, or he could manage it, waiting, sometimes, barely for his father to have left for the train, before rushing over to his detached cottage and whisking out of his suit and stumbling into proper jeans and T-shirt and jumper, and then heading out at a sedate jog for the truck before Morgana could misconstrue what he was doing. Then the rattling surge down the drive, and the friendly argument over the radio, which lasted usually till they had pulled up at the next client and got out with kit and wellies in hand and headed into barn or paddock to see what was the trouble. 

Merlin showed him how to detect the inflammation related to mastitis, how to diagnose by the consistency and colour of the milk that common complication of dairy cattle, and talked him through using the intramammary tubes, not unlike he talked the cow through it, in the soft encouraging tone which he used to calm the nervous animal. “So, if you have a herd with a contagious mastitis pattern, you want to be able to identify that as quickly as possible, so you can separate the cow. So we’ve got her isolated in the parlour here, and we only milk affected cows here. We don’t want them or the equipment getting mixed up with the non-affected cows. If it’s only a mild or moderate case, you can delay treatment whilst you assess the cow’s history and cell count. But that’s if we’re only seeing a few flecks in the milk and little to no swelling in the udder. See the colour of the milk and significant clotting? That we’ve got to jump on right away. So the other thing I want to do is review with the owner, make sure all the staff know how to spot the symptoms quickly so we can catch it earlier. She’ll need a longer treatment course now, and a longer withdrawal period, since you can’t have a cow in production till the antibiotics are out of their system.” He ducked in, and held out his hand for the syringe with which Arthur was armed. “So break the top of the cap here.”

Arthur raised his eyebrow. “Am I actually going to give it to her?”

“Yeah; you’ll be fine. Though you should probably word it a different way.”

“Oh, ha ha.” Merlin passed the syringe back to him, and knelt on the ground beside the cow’s udders, guiding Arthur’s hands in, and saying, as he made for the tube, “Gentle, gentle! Be careful when you insert it. She’s a lady.”

“Do we have to make sexual jokes about the cow ?”

“Yeah, because you turn bright red.”

“I do not,” Arthur said, and squeezed, whilst Merlin monitored the infusion, and then massaged her teats with his gloved hands to disperse it, saying, to Arthur, “Good job,” and to the cow, “There we are, sweetheart. You were brilliant.” 

“I did all the work, and she gets the majority of the praise?” Arthur complained.

“Yeah; I like her. But if you need more endearments in your instruction, I can do that. You weren’t a completely useless wanker, you massive pillock.”

Arthur wrinkled his nose. “How is ‘massive pillock’ an endearment?”

“”Massive’ means ‘attractive’ in some contexts. You might say, ‘You look absolutely massive’ and it means you’re looking right sexy. Just because you English are limited to raping and pillaging doesn’t mean the rest of us sat round on our hands being uneducated illiterate pilfering wankers.”

“So you’re saying I’m an attractive pillock, and that’s your idea of an endearment?”

“Oh no,” Merlin said solemnly. “I meant ‘massive’ as in absolutely colossal, titanic: gargantuan, even. Not the sexy kind.”

“Then that’s just insulting me.”

“Yeah.” He beamed at Arthur.

Fortunately, Arthur was not bothered over whether Merlin did or did not find him attractive; of course he had eyes, and so he had to have noticed that Arthur was something of an exemplary of the gender, and even the whole inferior species: as he had noticed when Merlin exchanged a soaked shirt for a dry one which he kept in the back of the truck that there was something like a plethora of muscles in his shoulders and all down his back; that he was that lean, but carven figure which doubtless appealed to women and men undiscerning. Some observations were simply inevitable, so that whilst sitting in the passenger seat as Merlin was changing in the driver’s, chattering all the while, Arthur perceived, in passing, that his stomach muscles rippled whilst he got into the shirt, all the way down to where they disappeared into his jeans, where there was the black hair, accidentally guiding his eye to the waistband; and that probably only a very few staunch or asexual individuals would have avoided feeling a bit hot about it. Arthur was only human; only one of those low, feeling creatures of the sexual race, driven at times by a smaller head than the one which had been fashioned for thinking. And so through that accident of instinct, he did imagine, for a moment, the route which the hair would have taken him, over the abdominals, and into the jeans, if he had followed with hand or tongue along where it was taking the eye.

“Naked Scarlett Johansson.”

“What?” Arthur said. He blinked.

“Just testing if you were listening to me. I thought that bit would get your attention. What did I say before it?”

Arthur scratched at his neck. “You said--something about milk fever.” He rubbed his nose, and looked out the window.

“What about milk fever?”

“It’s--a fever. That affects dairy cattle.”

“You know, you should try actually listening to me once in a while. I actually know stuff.”

“I very much doubt that,” Arthur scoffed.

The half-nudity was not the only astonishing thing. Sometimes they had finished up at the same time as the sun, and stood watching it sink whilst they leant on what barn or fence was available, passing back and forth the flask of tea whilst time was erased. The same old revolutions of the planet had brought the same old miraculous non-miracle to the flat-affected fields, and burnt them and Arthur up with feeling. There were the great black monoliths of the clouds, and through the chinks in these towers the little dribs and drabs of light which found and fired the grasses like poppies in season. There were the Dales, made entirely anew; the same country in which he had lived and his mother had died; the same old earth under his young feet, keeping time and the bones of his ancestors. He had forgot sometimes that he loved it; that a country which seems only a miscellany of hills and flattops and cliffs returning ledge by ledge to their Maker can be to a person a kind of person itself; that to go away from it or come back to it can be like the pain of grief or joy. Some humans, carried away by time or migration, have found their way to new homes; but the old one is burning in them still, like a lamp left out for those travellers in darkness; and they will feel, on coming back to it, or coming to it for the first time, the inexplicability of love, the sudden rush and bluntness of it, what is both the storm and the calm of the storm. He loved the Dales like he would have loved a child. He was smiling, to see them coming up like this in the world; to see that they were there, unchanged in the ever-changing century, capable in their great immovability of moving beauty.

When they were not watching the sunset, or arguing over the radio, or speaking heatedly of Parliament, they were carrying out those small tragedies and triumphs which were Merlin’s daily duties. They were helping where they could; which is the most that can be said of humans. They were going out in the rain to see what could be done, and doing it; or seeing that what was beyond them went safely into eternity, with a few kind words and caresses to accompany them.

They had gone out on a Thursday to the latter, after getting a call there had been a dog in a duck enclosure, with the expected results, and rolling up to a small house with a trim back garden, to find there were three children waiting to hear about the small victims which had been strewn round the pond. They were not the wild things which waddle in and out to snap up human offerings or forgettings, but some beloved pets which the children had raised like children themselves.

“I’m so sorry to have called you out,” their mother apologised, sticking on her wellies, and coming out into the yard to greet them, whilst the children swarmed solemnly round her. “My husband’s taken the car to work, and I didn’t have any way to bring them into the clinic. There’s the two still alive, there, and I couldn’t bear to leave them till he got home. There was a third got carried off, I assume, poor thing.”

One was going round in confusion, dragging his wing, and looking, with some prescience, at the man with a bag in his hand, sensing here was some worldly chap with some drugs. The other was on his side; what was left of his side. It had been scattered about underneath him, so that he was lying in a puddle of himself. Arthur blocked off one of the girls who tried to run to it. “You don’t want to disturb him, do you?” he asked as Merlin squatted over it. “Merlin’s just going to give him a look-over and see what can be done for him, all right?” He gave her mother one of those looks which are passed over the heads of children to other adults; and she took the little girl round the chest, and held her back.

There was nothing to be done, but see that he was given a more pleasant death than his last hours living. Merlin took out a bottle and syringe from his bag, whilst the lone boy in the trio of children questioned him closely.

“Is that medicine for him? To make him better?”

“Well,” Merlin said, and turned to the children, and knelt so he was at eye level with them. “Medicine is for making things better, and sometimes what’s better is for them not to be here anymore, because it would be too painful, or bad for them. I’m sorry, but your wee ducky’s not going to make it. But you wouldn’t want him lying there like that, would you? He won’t be able to play anymore, or swim in the pond, he’d have to stay there all the time, like that, and he’d be very unhappy about it.”

One of the girls began to cry a bit. “He loves the pond.”

“I know he does,” Merlin said softly. “So it wouldn’t be very fair to him, would it?”

“What happens to him?” the boy asked.

“He gets a little poke from the needle here, which won’t hurt him. He’ll just slip off: not even like going to sleep. He’ll be here, and then he won’t. But all wee duckies go to a ducky heaven, and it has a great big pond, and everything he could want.”

The girl sniffled. “How do you know?”

“Because I’m the vet. I checked. You think I’d send your ducky somewhere he didn’t have a great nice pond, and loads of bread to eat, and other duckies to get on with? I made sure everything is in tip top order. I talked personally with the ducky god. And then when we’ve seen to him, we’ll make the other’s wing all better again, and you’ll have to love on him even more, because you’ve all lost your friend here, and you understand one another, right? He’ll be a bit sad, and you’ll be a bit sad, so you’ll have to be very kind to one another, won’t you?”

So the poor broken thing whose spirit was beyond the capacity of his body had the injection, and let go at last; and Merlin bound the broken wing on the other whilst Arthur watched with a lump in his throat. The big hands, callused, scratched, the implements seemingly of violence, moved with infinite gentleness; and he spoke to the duck and the children as if they were worthy interlocutors; not down to them, but, simply, to them. It was striking to see; and that was exactly the word for it, for it did something physical to Arthur, left some quivering in him as if there had been a blow; the resonance of violence, which sometimes kindness does to us, if we are not used to it.

Then back at the truck, Merlin sniffed, and hastily wiped his eyes, and said, “I know it’s only a duck, but I hate that bit. I hate seeing the little faces, expecting me to undo what I can’t undo.” And he looked up with a little smile, not showing the dimples, but hinting at them: “You’re not going to hit me again, are you?”

“No,” Arthur said; but he did ruffle the dark curls. He did it by putting Merlin’s head under his arm first, so there was the veneer of laddishness over the feeling that was in his throat and in his stomach and in his chest. 

There were other emergencies, and not only in Arthur’s heart. They had already finished up one evening, and were nearly back to the farm, when Merlin’s phone went; and he pulled the truck over to take the call, a brisk affair which he ended with, “All right. I’ll be there in just a few minutes.”

Arthur raised an eyebrow.

“Colic,” Merlin said, wriggling the phone back into his front pocket, leaning back to do it, so that his shirt rode up a bit, a gesture of accidental eroticism which barely registered to someone so unflappable as Arthur. “I’ll drop you off at the farm and then head back out. Gonna’ be a long night.”

“I could go with you.”

“You could do, if you wanted to stand round for possibly most of the night in a draughty barn instead of having a proper supper and going to bed in your fancy gold four-post whatever.”

“It’s emerald, actually,” Arthur quipped. “I’ve got nowhere to be.”

“Could do with someone to keep me awake,” Merlin said. “And you’re annoying enough to do the trick.”

So when the truck pulled up outside the barn with the suffering patient, it disgorged them both, Merlin with the bag in hand, and Arthur with the ultrasound machine. They were met by a little worried middle-aged woman clutching a jumper about her, and calling into the wind, “God, what an awful night, sorry to have you out so late, but I’m really concerned. He’s been off his food and he really seems to be in quite a lot of pain, poor lad.”

“That’s ok,” Merlin said. “I knew the hours when I got into this work. Keeps me on my toes. What have we got for the vitals, and where’s he at normally?”

“Oh God, sorry, I dunno.” She put her hands to her face.

“It’s all right. We’ll just nip in and take a look. I’m Merlin,” he said, and held out his hand for a proper introduction, giving her the smile which undoubtedly had soothed any number of clients; and disturbed an equal number of their excitable counterparts. “This is Arthur. He’ll be helping me out a bit. Don’t worry; total horse girl; no one better to be looking after him.” And then to the horse, as they were borne in on the wind, through the doors of the rather shabby little barn, whose merits could be summed up, in their totalty, as Still Standing, “Hullo, there. What’s the trouble, you? Get yourself mixed up in something you shouldn’t have, hmm?” The horse was restrained in some cross-ties, and even now kicking at his flank, and making little noises of distress, which went straight to Arthur’s heart as the child’s cry goes to its mother’s. Merlin set down his bag on the concrete aisle, and went round to the horse’s head, giving him a quick lookover as he stroked the nose, and began to fire off what questions he needed answered for his assessment: “Reduced faecal output?”

“Yes.”

“Are the droppings dry?”

“Yes.”

“And you said he’s been off his food? How long? Has he had any changes in his food recently?”

“No changes, and I noticed yesterday morning he wasn’t eating as well as usual, but just figured he was being a bit picky. He is, sometimes. Then earlier today I noticed him pacing and rolling, and then he was pawing, and nipping at his flanks, and so I took him round for a little walk thinking it might clear, and he just seemed so poorly. I’m sorry; I didn’t want to walk him anymore. I thought it wasn’t fair to force him along whilst he was obviously in pain.”

“No, that’s good. Walking can clear up a little mild case, if it’s gas he can’t get up. If there’s an impaction, no walking is going to sort that out. I’ll have to take a look to see what’s going on. If there’s an impaction in his small intestine, there’s a good chance he’ll need surgery. But most impactions we can clear with some water and laxatives. So let’s see what we’ve got, yeah? What’s his name?”

“Princess,” she said, looking a bit embarrassed for him. “We let my granddaughter name him.”

“No, that’s grand; Princess, nothing wrong with that,” he crooned to the horse, scratching under its chin. “My friend here is called Arthur, like an old man. Could have been stuck with some crotchety old pensioner name, but no, you’re proper royalty.”

“‘Arthur’ is the name of multiple royals, including one so famous people are still telling stories about him. And you’re named after a wizard.”

“No, I’m named for a poem. ‘Myrddin Wyllt.’ He was a bard in some Welsh legend. Mum knew people would mangle ‘Myrddin’, though, and he was an inspiration for the Arthurian legend. You could say I’m like the OG Merlin.”

“Arthur and Merlin? Oh, that’s very cute. I didn’t clock that earlier,” the woman said as Merlin crouched over his bag, fishing out the plastic sleeve and the lubricant. “What are you doing there?”

“Well,” Merlin said cheerily, applying the lube with abandon, “I have to stick my whole arm up his arse. And I’ve found, generally, except in some niche internet videos, it’s preferable to make that as comfortable as possible.”

Arthur’s face went very hot. The woman stared at Merlin a moment, and then suddenly burst into laughter. “My God, I can’t believe you’ve said that!”

“Spend a bit more time round him,” Arthur said drily. “Then you won’t be surprised at all.”

She had to nip up to the house to see to her granddaughter and put on the kettle, leaving them alone in that little doubtful structure with the wind shouting in like the damned whilst Merlin completed the rectal examination, and Arthur held the horse quiet in his stays, talking to him, whilst Merlin was absorbed in his task, with his forehead to the horse’s forehead. Over the wind, over that sound which is heard amidst desolate moors on long nights, when the world is suddenly naked in its grief, Merlin went on with his lessons, explaining the most common site for obstruction to occur was the pelvic flexure, the large U-bend at the end of the bowel, where the gut contents slowed to turn that cramped corner, and often lodged where they were. “Because,” he said, slipping out his arm, and discarding the sleeve, “horses can kill you with a single kick they didn’t even have to put any effort into, but then they’ll step wrong and break their entire fucking body. I don’t think there’s any other animal built so weirdly. Everything in it is designed to fuck the horse over. I’d have a word with someone, if I were horses.” He swiped his forearm under his nose. “Won’t need the ultrasound, thankfully; doesn’t look like she’s got anywhere to plug it in. Definitely an impaction there.”

The woman had entered the barn, then, and caught that bit, and been transformed by it. She was stood holding two mugs of tea, with a little pained look on her face, that strange effect which fear has on the features, of making them suddenly young in themselves. “What does that mean for him, then?”

“Well, he’s an obstruction, but it’s in a very common spot, so that’s good. What I’m going to do is pass a wee little tube through his nose and into the oesophagus, and that way I can administer a mix of water and some electrolytes and laxatives, and they’ll work away at the obstruction, till he can finally pass it. I can give him something for the pain, too.”

“But he’ll pass it?” she asked in a thick voice, handing out the tea, and wringing her hands.

“Usually. If it’s very large, and very stubborn, then sometimes we have to do an intravenous drip, and that usually requires hospitalisation. If that’s the case, it could take several days to clear.”

“Oh God. Do you think it’ll come to that?” she asked.

“We’ll give it our best go right here, and see how it gets on. I think there’s a good chance we can clear it up. I’ll get him sorted either way, all right? I’ll have to check him several times anyway to see how it’s progressing, so Arthur and I will just stay here with him, and you can go back up to the house. I’ll send Arthur round if there’s any change.”

She had gone again when Merlin said, quietly, “I hate colic. I’ve lost horses to it before.” He pressed the heel of his hand into his eye, looking for a moment as if he would collapse; and Arthur realised suddenly how tired he was, that he had been propping himself up for the sake of a woman worrying for her horse as if he were her child, and now was like the remnants of a person. He was huddled in his coat, with the dark and curling head nodded over it in the howling night, which the barn doors were valiantly keeping at bay as if they had battened themselves against a horde. And Arthur set down the mug in his hand, and moved round from the horse’s head to its flank, where Merlin was stood, and gripped the back of his neck. He had needed to touch him; that was all. So he stood with the warm neck under his palm, giving him a little shake, to show that he was not alone in the night, and said to him, “All right?”

“Yeah.” Merlin looked at him; and Arthur saw suddenly that they were in that close, warm space which humans make on ugly nights, when they have to be for one another a kind of barrier against the world. Then there was a smile brought out for Arthur, a smile which had been made for that moment, which had been made by the moment, that soft, helpless thing which humans bring out of themselves because they have got to do it; because a feeling has got too large for them.

So Arthur held the horse, which in his head he had renamed merely Horse, for his dignity, and Arthur’s, and Merlin sorted the gastric tube, and then they were sat together on a hay bale whilst the wind made the old, draughty barn a kind of sanctuary; made the space between them also a kind of sanctuary, because there was another warm body in the night, keeping out the dead, dread voices of it. Their client came out at flustered intervals to bring them various things which she had forgot (her name, Maddie) or made up for them (spaghetti) or brought out for them to hold (her granddaughter). She had made that third harrowing campaign to the barn in the wind with her granddaughter on her hip, and whilst chatting with Merlin, said suddenly to Arthur, “Oh, will you hold her for a moment?” and extended the child to him. He took it under the arms. He stared at it. There were two owlish eyes, staring back at him. She was only tiny; a member, to judge by her size, because Arthur could not see her teeth, of that demonic species Between Three and Five, when the infant, that small, helpless sac of pink extremities, harmless enough, suddenly emerges from the cocoon capable of speech, and a freakish speed on the stunted legs.

Merlin and Maddie were laughing at him.

“She’s not a bomb, Arthur,” Merlin said. “You don’t have to hold her like she’s about to explode.” He held out his hands. “Give her here,” he said, and taking her in his own arms, slung one of the forearms under her thighs, bouncing her on his hip as he turned slowly, to entertain her, Arthur assumed, or possibly disorient her, in case it got into that narrow animal brain by which children operate that it would be marvellous to bite him. Arthur watched him bouncing her on his hip, and talking to her in the voice he used on the horses, and felt something unnecessary in him. It was a kind of squeezing thing; a sort of exquisite pain: so that he thought he understood suddenly what women were saying, when they said their ovaries hurt. He remembered Morgana’s friends expressing just such a feeling as he thought he was feeling now, in the presence of large men coddling small children; and looked away.

“So you like kids, then?” he asked when Maddie had gone, taking the grandchild with her, and leaving them with the far more safe being. The horse was only an animal, whilst children were a kind of hodgepodge, closer to the creature than his master.

“Yeah, I love kids, when they’re not mine.” He unclipped Horse from his cross ties. “I’m going to walk him up and down a bit, to help stimulate his gut.”

“So you don’t want your own, then?” Arthur asked, walking in step with him, their shoulders nearly touching in the narrow aisle.

“Probably not. What about you?”

“I’m sure I’ll have them.”

“That’s not ‘I want to have them.’”

Arthur scratched the back of his neck. “I just meant, eventually, I’m sure I’ll be married off, and children will follow.”

“What a bleak take that is,” Merlin said, clucking to the horse, and jiggling the lead. “‘I’ll be married off and have kids.’ Are you a horse Uther’s breeding?”

“Not far off, I’m afraid.”

“Ah, right, have to keep the bloodline intact. Wouldn’t want a non-Uther approved match. Your family tree might grow a branch.” He gave Arthur a little sideways smile which was not tremendously upsetting to Arthur’s equilibrium. 

“If you like kids, why don’t you want them?”

“I like lots of things I don’t want in my house. Tigers, for instance. Look, kids are grand, I’d adore being an uncle or a godfather or something of that sort, but nephews, nieces, godchildren--those I can hand back as soon as they start screaming. I get the fun bits, and the parents change the nappies. Plus, with the hours I work, I don’t think it’d be very fair to a child, or to whoever I was raising the child with. I work long hours. I come home at the end of them, tired, and smelling like cow. There are loads of nights I have the capacity to shower, eat, maybe, and then die in my bed. That’s it. That’s why I’d want a partner who understands how I feel about the animals; I’d love someone who worked with them, too, and knew what it was like to lose them, and why some nights I’ll just want to come home, and get in bed with them. Maybe someone who works in the field too, and could take over the practice with me when Gaius retires.” And suddenly he shut up, and walked the horse on in uncharacteristic silence. “Or, you know, erm, like, not like that, I mean, they wouldn’t have to, maybe I’ll end up with--a brunette estate agent. Who doesn’t even like horses.”

“Who doesn’t like horses?” Arthur said doubtfully. “What would you want with someone like that?”

“I dunno. It’s just theoretical. I haven’t had a proper long-term relationship in ages. I don’t even know what my type is anymore. I’m just saying. Who knows what you’ll end up with, yeah?”

“Get better theoreticals,” Arthur said.

They traded off walking the horse, and when they had put him back in the ties, returned to the hay bale, where Merlin lapsed into a nap which he could pick up wherever he had left off, by crossing his arms, and tucking his head to his chest, and simply dropping off into the abyss. He woke at intervals, as neatly as if he had set an alarm, rubbed his face with both hands, and then got up to check how the obstruction was coming along; and returned to the bale, and the nap, breathing softly beside Arthur in the dark, whilst the night went on boundlessly, and Arthur began to feel alternatively as if he were dying, and wide awake. He said when Merlin had got up yet again to check the horse, “I don’t know how you can sleep, in the cold, with the wind going like that.”

“You learn to sleep wherever the hell you can. Look, I’ll teach you how to do it. Turn your back to mine,” he said, sitting back down once more.

“What?”

“Turn round, and press your back to mine, and lean your head back against mine, and just let yourself down into the grave. You already look like you’ve got one foot in it, and you’re about to put the other in, but you can’t work up the bollocks.”

“Why would your pointy head help me sleep,” Arthur grumbled, and turned round, and leant back as Merlin leant back, feeling the broad warm back against his, where the shoulders moved, momentarily, under the jacket, and the soft black curls touched like feather or sly finger his reactive nape: and then he was jolting awake when Merlin got up again, surfacing for a moment in that broad, still black infinity which was the barn. They got one another through the night like that: resting on one another, sometimes drooling on one another; and coming at last to that absolving final hour, when the horse would either turn the corner, or have to be taken to hospital. Merlin did not sleep now, but walked him up and down whilst outside all was dim purgatory, and they were struggling to keep one more tormented soul from it.

“I’ll take him; sit down, and drink your water,” Arthur said when Merlin had swayed on his feet, and shoved him toward the bale, and went on up and down the barn, in that same eternal rhythm, the same cyclical, plodding hope, on a night that was hopeless. 

“I’m so bloody tired. Maybe I’m fucking up. Maybe I’ve got the dosing wrong.” Merlin pressed the heel of his hand into his eye again. “Christ. I am going to kill this horse.”

“No, you’re not,” Arthur said calmly. “You are doing everything you can for him. You’re only tired. Take a few breaths.” He squeezed Merlin’s shoulder. It was trembling suddenly under his hand. He shook it. “Merlin. Take a deep breath, splash a bit of water on your face, and we’ll get back to it. He’s fine for now. He’s not worsening. It just takes time.”

“I know, but I thought it’d be cleared by now. Maybe I’ve misdiagnosed it, or, I dunno, I just can’t--I can’t think.”

“Nothing new there,” Arthur said, and gave him a little smile. “Take the water, and dump it all over your numpty head.”

Merlin did. “How’d you get smart all of a sudden?”

“The company I keep,” Arthur said, and smiled at him again. “Does wonders for making me look good in comparison.”

“Yeah, me too,” Merlin said, and flicked some of the water at him.

And, finally, near sunrise, the steaming miracle: “He’s shitting!” Merlin crowed. “You great big beautiful cunt. I could kiss you.”

“I hope you’re talking to the horse.”

“You could only hope to be so lucky,” Merlin said, and did begin kissing the horse, great obnoxious little smacks on his nose, which the parent gives to a child trying to get away from them.

They had little spats when they were already tired, and cross, and keen to have a go at one another over something stupid, which Morgana fixed by going afterward into the barn where Merlin was working, and saying, “Did you two have a domestic? My brother’s despondent.”

“Your brother’s an arsehole.”

“Yes, I know, but he only allows himself one emotion at a time, and right now it’s moping, and it’s driving me insane, so could you please just make it up?”

Merlin rubbed his chin. “Fine. I’ll pop round to the office when I’m done.”

“He’s not even in his office, he’s shut up in his house like he’s in mourning.”

So he went round to the cottage, and knocked at the door, and when it had been opened by Arthur, in a pair of tatty joggers and T-shirt, said, “Morgana says it’s time for your nappy change. Apparently that’s my job now.”

Arthur shut the door in his face.

“Fine!” Merlin shouted at the door. Then the usual course of action was to storm back to the barn, and for Arthur to storm after him, and then to stand round in front of it, whether it was threatening to pour, or making good on the threat, arguing over who had been the first to act the testicle, with each prepared to swear on his life it was the other; and ending somehow back in the office with tea, though they had come very near to killing one another in front of witnesses. 

They had Christmas Eve together by accident, because Gaius had only Merlin to cook, and Merlin had only some crankiness for inspiration, which he had got by being called out to examine a ewe who had foundered in a mud pit; and so they had gone round to the pub for dinner, instead of trying to unleash Merlin on some chopping implements, where Arthur coincidentally had been drinking: and they had left Gaius to that maundering speech which old men make at one another, standing in the corner with their heads together and laughing whilst Gaius and the bartender revisited that palaeolithic era in which they had come to fruition. 

“What are you drinking?” Merlin asked.

“You’re going to buy me a drink? Seems suspiciously thoughtful of you.” Arthur squinted at him.

“Oh no, I wasn’t going to buy it, I wanted to know so I could make fun of it. 200-year-old something served at a very specific temperature, with a twist of plebian tears, I assume?”

Arthur threw back his head and laughed. “IPA. You cock.”

In January Merlin decided he would need to have sex with someone who appreciated dick. It was no use spending all one’s thoughts and spendings on a straight boy. It was all very titillating to have, in that fantastical place of fantasy, Arthur on his knees or in his riding trousers; but there was always the terrible come down, the surging in of reality when, instead of begging underneath him, the broad, sturdy body simply got into the truck, or came into a stall with him. He never said, in the plummy voice, breaking with urgency, “Come on me”, but only such banalities as, “Pass the hoof testers, would you?” It was all quite fine, quite remarkably fine, not to have reciprocated the small, unobtrusive, nearly invisible wee infant crush; but there were the residual hormones knocking about, not understanding he had scarcely noticed that Arthur would have made a fine, sweaty repository for his cock. And so he had downloaded Grindr to his phone, and thumbed through the prospects till he found one that was in his vicinity, and snogged him on Gaius’ couch, till the bloke was gagging for it, and then in his loft had some sex about which could be said that he had got off, eventually; and the bloke was not a serial murderer. 

“I hope you’re being careful, Merlin,” Gaius said after Merlin had seen off the man, having done nothing more than raise his eyebrow when they had come down with their hair askew.

“Please, don’t. I’ll be thirty in a month. I don’t need the safe sex talk from my uncle.”

“No, I expect you don’t,” Gaius said, pushing his glasses up his nose. “But I expect you do need the ‘this isn’t London’ talk. This is a small town, Merlin.”

“Oh. The ‘you can be a queer, just not where anyone can see it’ talk. Yeah. I’ve spent most of my life in either A. Belfast ghettos or B. Tiny little English towns. No one’s kicked in my head yet. It’s not like I can’t handle myself.”

Gaius sighed, and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “You also weren’t trying to cultivate a clientele in those Belfast ghettos. Of course you can handle yourself. That’s what concerns me. I want to hand off the practice to you when I retire. There’ll be no practice to hand off if you go round fist fighting clients over perceived homophobia.”

“Right. Because most homophobia is ‘perceived.’”

Gaius frowned at him, taking off the glasses now, to rub at his eyes. “That isn’t what I meant, Merlin. Only that these are a lot of traditional folks. They’re not going to come after you with pitchforks, but very many of them wouldn’t like to think they’ve One of Those looking after their animals.”

“Yeah. It’s not 1950. I know it’s been illegal most of your life, but we gays can even marry now. So if anyone’s still stuck on some rotten laws they can piss off. It’s none of their damn business where my dick is after working hours.”

Gaius pressed a hand very tiredly to his forehead. “You haven’t told Arthur, have you?”

Merlin frowned. “No. ‘Your horse has thrush; oh, by the way, I also do guys’ hasn’t really come up. Why? Are you trying to say he’s a bigot? He told me Morgana’s a lesbian and didn’t seem to have any issue with it.”

“Morgana Pendragon is not a lesbian.”

“How would you know?”

“Because if she were, the whole town would know of it. She’d be rubbing it in Uther’s face constantly. There would be nothing but endless scandals. And I’d be very surprised to learn he was a bigot, but Uther certainly is very traditional.”

“So? What, during Uther’s weekly berating, Arthur’s going to go, ‘Thanks for the emotional abuse; by the way, did you know our vet shags women and men?’”

Gaius sighed. “I’m only asking you to try and be a bit judicious.”

Uther had returned once more, and so Merlin was condemned alone to those cold wet hills which in Arthur’s presence had felt, not necessarily smaller, but less vast: vast in the old, Brittonic sense of scale, the illimitable wilds, when the world was a few scattered lights in the fen. Now the hills were those dim lumpish creatures of folklore, lurking behind veils of rain, and looking to do mischief. He was colder, literally, because Arthur always remembered whatever hodgepodge of gear he had forgot, or ruined, and chucked it in his face before getting in the truck; but colder too in the metaphorical sense, when the absence of one particular human suddenly recalls the world to what are all the lone hollows of it, where the wind is shrieking into the terrible nothing. He was wrangling sheep by himself, and diagnosing white line disease by himself; and when he tripped over a stray bucket or smacked his head on a wooden beam, there was nothing but concern, rather than mocking. He fell over his own x-ray machine, and thought how much Arthur would have liked to see it, and when he had got the truck bogged down in a field, and had to push it out using only his own stubbornness, and some advice from a farmer, there was no one to say, “Just come from your natural habitat, then?” when he emerged from the ordeal as muddy as a pig, or bog creature. 

He was turning over the matter of his bisexuality all the while. Because Gaius had told him not to, the natural urge was to fly immediately to the farm, and announce, in front of Uther and God, “By the way, I fuck men.” He had thought when Arthur was released back into the barns, he would make some casual mention of it, trotting it out, nonchalantly, when Arthur made that heteronormative assumption of gender-exclusivity in mocking the taste of Merlin’s past and future partners: but for weeks he worked out in the paddocks and barns and hovered round the truck hopefully before hope was extinguished. He had not even seen him briefly whilst he was taking a client round the facilities, or glimpsed the blonde head through the rain whilst it was going from the lab to the office.

“He had a big fight with Uther,” Morgana told him whilst she was restraining a stallion, and Merlin was examining it. “Someone was all set to purchase one of our mares who’s produced several stakes winners, and backed out because Arthur disclosed some information Uther didn’t want him disclosing.” 

“What kind of information?” Merlin asked, straightening, and stretching out his back. “Just a little fungus. We’ll just need to apply a hoof dressing.”

“That she’d produced multiple winners, but she’d had some difficult births, and her last was a stillborn. Uther thinks she’s still a few good breedings in her, but didn’t want to risk them himself.”

“How much did he lose out on?” Merlin asked.

“Nearly a million pounds.”

Merlin whistled.

“She’ll go to auction, but he’ll probably get less now than he was hoping for, and naturally that’s all Arthur’s fault.”

“Seems a bit, you know, ethical to disclose something like that to a potential buyer about to drop a million pounds.”

“Uther doesn’t like people being ethical if it costs him money. Anyway, there was a huge row. Uther said some very ugly things, in front of an audience. Arthur came down to the barns the other night after you’d already gone, and Uther had a go at him, and they had it out again, in front of the grooms. I wasn’t here, else I’d have clocked the old man, but I heard about it later. He got absolutely torn to pieces for being a failure. Brought his mother into it even. She died, all so Arthur could be a huge disappointment, etc.”

Merlin felt there was a little cold feeling of homicide in him. “He said what ?”

“Oh, common theme here. You know she died of cancer shortly after she had him? She was diagnosed during her pregnancy, and delayed treatment because she was worried it would harm him. It mightn’t have saved her anyway, if she’d started it immediately; who knows. But she delayed treatment with plans to start after she gave birth, but it had metastasized and in the end she opted for comfort measures and passed away when he was only a few months old. Uther uses it to control him whenever he feels Arthur’s slipping through his fingers. If you can make your son feel that he killed his own mother, the great love of your life, it makes it far more difficult for him to tell you to piss off.” She stroked the horse’s nose. “Arthur’s been trying to make up for that all his life.”

“That’s…fucking psychopathic to tell your child he killed his mother by being born.”

“Oh, he never says it outright; he lets implication and Arthur’s self-esteem do that for him.” She looked at him over the horse’s head, her face bracketed by the fine velvet ears, and said, very solemnly, “He’s very easily hurt. So don’t hurt him. I like you; I’d hate to add you to my list.”

“Ok?” Merlin said in confusion. There was nothing that could be done, so far as he could see, by a bisexual to the heterosexual on which he had a very small but inadvisable crush; but she was staring at him, and seemed a capable murderer: and so he said, “I wouldn’t. I like him. When he’s not being a complete testicle.”

She gave him a look which he felt was too knowledgeable for his comfort, scratching one of the flicking ears whilst he turned away to rummage about in his bag, under the guise of treating the hoof, so that she would not see his ears had gone hot, which he could not see, but expected had manifested as a kind of unseasonable strawberry on either side of his head. He had been careful not to make the ‘I like him’ anything more than an offhand comment on the passing acquaintance; there was nothing burning in it, but only a little observation that Arthur was a member of the human race whom Merlin, occasionally, did not completely abhor. But as he stood he saw that she was looking at him as if he had said, “I am on one knee; I am proposing to your brother; I am taking him away from his rubbish father”; not only an unfair imputation, but an inaccurate one. “Arthur’s fine. He’s ok. Sorry about his shit dad,” he said, in defence of himself, because his mouth had never met a situation on which he could have improved by simply not talking, and simply not bloody talked.

Morgana smirked at him, and he gave her the instructions for the dressing, and hurried away into the rain.

He did not see Arthur finally at the Pendragons’, but at the clinic, where he was sitting behind the desk on a rare slow day, faffing about with his phone, and eating the biscuits which Gaius had renewed in the cabinet; and when the door bell went, he looked up with the habitual smile, and felt suddenly that it had transformed into the genuine. “Hey! Prison break?”

“Resettlement release,” Arthur said. He had a carrier in his hand, which he plumped down on the counter to reveal a pair of luminous eyes, staring unblinkingly at Merlin.

“Day release, or overnight?” Merlin asked.

“Who wants to know whether I’m available for the evening or not?”

“Oh, I dunno; I heard some people, for some reason, find your company occasionally not completely repulsive. I don’t see it, personally, but I can pass it along if you’re free.”

Arthur smiled crookedly at him. “Just here to drop off one of the barn cats. For spaying.”

“Ah. Been fucking too much, have you, then?” Merlin asked the cat. “We’ll get you sorted.”

“Gaius here?”

“Yeah, in one of the exam rooms. Did you need to talk to him?”

Arthur shook his head. “Was just wondering if anyone else was around, or if he was getting a bit doddering in his old age, and had trusted the clinic alone to you.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “Not going to bite me, are you?”

“Going to make a comment about my ears?”

Arthur pursed his mouth. “Suppose I can be civil.”

“Then only if you ask nicely.” Then, realising he had just flirted, Merlin hastily added: “Not that I would. With you. That kind of biting’s reserved for, you know, interesting people.”

“Good. I expect you haven’t had your rabies shot.” He sneaked a couple of biscuits from the open package in front of Merlin, and then said, “I’ll be back for the cat. Going to nip into town for some lunch.” The biscuits went from hand to hand instead of his mouth. “If you had someone to watch the front desk, you could come with. I wouldn’t mind hearing about how you’re getting on with Simmons’ cow.”

“Is there a dress code?” Merlin asked.

“No, though probably they’ll implement one after seeing you.”

“Just so you know, I am not some cheap date. It’ll take more than bits of refugee in expensive sauce or whatever you people eat to get me to put out,” he said, because he did not know how to help himself.

“I’ll be sure to request the baby refugees then; much more tender.” Then Arthur, realising their banter had strayed into that deadly territory of theoretical fucking, coughed, tossed one of the biscuits at Merlin’s head, and demanded, “Are you coming, or not?”

“I’ll just take the cat back and see if one of the techs can mind the phone. It’s about time for my break anyway.” 

Arthur took him to a café round the corner, where Merlin’s pulse mistook the outing for a date whenever Arthur bumped his knee against Merlin’s under the table, or laughed till his water came out his nose, which very obviously horrifically embarrassed him; never mind the fraught exercise in dessert theft. 

“What have you been doing with yourself, then?” Arthur asked, looking briefly at his phone, which had vibrated obnoxiously, and then turning it over on its face.

“Oh, nothing much. Just the usual. Getting kicked, getting shoved into the mud. Getting bitten. All whilst old men tell me, from under the roof of a shed, whilst I’m stood in the bucketing rain, what I’m doing wrong. Actually, today’s my birthday; though I’m not really doing anything about it till the weekend. Going to pop down to my mum’s Saturday.”

“Ah,” Arthur said. He picked up the phone, and fiddled it round in his hands, not looking at the screen, but merely turning it over and over, till finally he interrupted the fidgeting: “Well, happy birthday. Actually, I vaguely remember Morgana mentioning your birthday was coming up, now that you’ve said something. She ran into Gaius in the chocolate shop a few days ago and chatted with him a bit.”

Merlin cocked his head. “Morgana told you about my birthday, and you coincidentally showed up at the clinic on the very day to take me out to lunch in an unrelated gesture of completely random thoughtfulness?”

“No, I showed up at the clinic because the cat was ‘fucking too much’, as you so eloquently put it,” Arthur said. “And you happened to be at the clinic.”

“Have you ever once tried saying, ‘Yeah, I did something nice, what of it?’” Merlin asked.

“No,” Arthur said, very firmly.

Then whilst Arthur was sorting out payment for the spaying, Merlin made a little spectacle of himself, because he had the warmth of the pudding which he had consumed sitting in him, and the warmth of having seen the crooked teeth unselfconscious in laughter, after the long, cold dearth. “I just wanted to say, you’re great with the animals and it’s clear you always do what’s best for them, and no business practice should ever come before that. You’re one of my most knowledgeable clients and I think you’re talented, and capable, and you’d make a great vet, and I just think--you have a lot to be proud of. If your mother cared about those horses as much as I’ve heard, then she’d be so happy to know you’re looking after them.” The words were simply falling out of him, whilst Arthur looked at him with a little furrow in his brow. “Anyway. Just thought I’d say. I think you’re doing great. You know. In between being a wretched knob.” He had tacked on the insult hastily, to save face. He was concerned the diatribe might have sounded more like a confession; as if he had poured out of himself all the little quivering feelings, outing himself not as a gay but a disaster; in fact as the dread amalgam of both. He stood behind the counter, waiting for the machine to process Arthur’s card; waiting for the saving message to announce it had finished, so he could hand over the card, without touching Arthur, and then go back into one of the exam rooms and take something euthanistic. 

“Thanks,” Arthur said at last a bit faintly, a bit softly; and took the card, and the cat carrier, and was gone.

“Thanks,” Arthur said, and thought all that evening about the look which had been given to him from under the curling fringe. He put together a little supper for himself in the cottage which howled round him in the grip of the wind, and sat with it on his sofa, and ate it with the telly black and voiceless before him. He had his socked feet up on the table, and was processing what it meant to feel that he had swallowed something rather hot. It was not the supper; it was Merlin. He felt that Merlin had got into or put something in his chest. He had stood in the clinic, before the desk, whilst the chatter came at him, feeling what he thought men felt when they were on the verge of proposal; when they felt they had come to the end of loneliness, and found what was made for them. He put away the supper, no longer able to eat it, and showered, and put himself to bed, to think in the long black hours before dawn, when the ceiling is most conducive to revelation. He was frightened of the feeling in him, as he was always frightened of feeling in him.

There was nothing to be done; he was heterosexual, Merlin was heterosexual. He would have to do away with these romantic notions, which he did not really hold, but had fancied, in a moment of loneliness, he held, and which might have been construed, by outside, maniac minds, as being in the vein of love, instead of a passing, past sensation of having wanted to run away with a man who seemed to be perceived, by the blind, as someone of remarkable handsomeness.

He did not have any romantic designs on Merlin, but he did set down the phone which he rarely had set down all that hassling Friday when he saw the dark head emerging from one of the barns, and sped, at the speed of casualness, out to the drive, where Merlin was loading up his equipment, and smiling, blazingly, at him.

“Hey!” Merlin said, packing away the x-ray machine into the backseat. 

“Hey,” Arthur said, with unnecessary feeling in it; or what he perceived to be unnecessary feeling, which was to say, any feeling. He thought that he might have imbued his voice with what was in his chest; which anyway was nothing much whatsoever, aside from a kind of choking. “Back to Gaius’, or another job?”

“Gaius’. I’ve got to shower and head out; going down to my mum’s for the weekend.”

“Right. For your birthday.” Arthur scratched the back of his neck. “Well. Good luck to her.”

And the dimples came out, not unlike knives: for they were similarly deadly. Then Merlin straightened, stretching out his neck, and fishing round in his pocket for a moment, he drew out a folded slip of paper which he handed to Arthur. “Here.”

“What’s this?” Arthur asked, unfolding it.

“My number.”

“I have your number.”

“You have my work number. It’s my personal,” Merlin elaborated, and Arthur felt his heart give a little unsteady lurch. He looked at the messy scrawl, with the numbers linking them not only professionally, but personally, and felt nothing so dramatic as elated. Then Merlin went on: and everything that had surged in him suddenly deflated. “For emergencies or whatnot. I usually have my work phone on me, but just in case. You know. Something happened. Then you can get hold of me still.”

“Right,” Arthur said. He refolded the paper, and shoved it into his pocket. “Good to know.”

“Yeah. Just for emergencies.”

“Right,” Arthur said again, thinking it would be nice to get under the tyres of the truck, and be mown down callously by them. He had the sickening idea that Merlin was reiterating the relationship as it ought to have been, the cold, severable association between client and professional; that he had seen there had been a very little, very brief, confusion in Arthur over the nature of it, and misconstrued it, as Morgana would have misconstrued it.

“Or memes,” Merlin added.

Arthur raised his eyebrows. “Are memes an emergency?”

“Yeah, sometimes, if they’re really funny. Or really disturbing. Kind of an ‘If I had to see this with my own two eyes, so do you’ sort of situation.’”

“Right.” Arthur laughed. “Well, if I find something traumatising, I’ll be sure to pass it on,” he said, and waved, and went with perfect indifference back to the office.

“What’s a funny meme?” he asked Morgana that evening whilst they were lounging on his sofa with their Friday supper, and wine, and the movie which Morgana had bullied him into inattentively watching. He had his laptop on his thighs, and was frowning his way through Reddit, which so far had yielded for him some politics, and cats; and nothing which he felt warranted contacting the personal phone, rather than the professional. 

“Why?” she asked.

“I just need a funny meme.”

“Why?” she asked again.

“Because,” he said.

“Because why?”

“Because none of your business,” he snapped.

“Then find your own meme, you crotchety tit.”

“Fine,” Arthur said, and sank back grumpily into the sofa, and shut the lid of the laptop, prepared, out of instinct and his current mood, to ruthlessly mock her choice for the evening. “In what world is Heathcliff a romantic hero?”

“He isn’t; only idiots think that.”

“Then why are you watching this?”

“Because it’s fun to watch insane people make their own lives miserable. Why do you think I enjoy watching you hovering round the barns waiting for Merlin to show up and give your life purpose?”

“Don’t be a lunatic,” Arthur barked. “Just because you’re always flirting and carrying on with him doesn’t mean everyone else is obsessed with him. Some of us do things that have nothing to do with Merlin.”

“That’s very true. But you’re not one of us.” She smirked, and sipped at her wine.

Arthur scowled at her. And Morgana, as unconcerned as she ever was with her own poor behaviour, took out her phone and began, unconcernedly, to text on it. His own phone vibrated.

“Send that to him,” she said, when he had opened the text to find a picture of the queen shooting lasers out of her eyes. “Then he’ll think you’re funny, and anti-monarchist, and maybe you’ll have a chance with a feral Catholic boy who would have been bombing royal carriages in the 19th century.”

“What do you mean ‘maybe you’ll have a chance’? What’s that supposed to mean?” Arthur demanded. 

“Well, you’d know if you weren’t so stupid,” Morgana pointed out, in an almost kind voice.

“I don’t like him,” he snapped.

“Yes, getting touchy about the subject and yelling, ‘I don’t like him’ usually does indicate exactly that,” she said, with such a perfect execution of sarcasm that it was almost admirable.

“Watch the movie on your own, if you’re going to be weird,” Arthur said, and stormed off very reasonably to his room.

And in Aston, at his mum’s, Merlin checked his phone every few minutes, to see whether something hadn’t come through in that brief interval between checking the phone, and waiting to check the phone: and laid it over on its face each time, so as not to bear the crippling disappointment of his empty notifications.

“What are you fussing over your phone for?” his mum asked, turning off the hob, and sliding the pan in which was their dinner onto a cold one.

“Nothing,” Merlin said. “Just checking to see if I had any texts.”

“Every two minutes?”

“Not every two minutes.”

“Fine, every three.” She gave him that very specific look which only mothers give to their children. “Are you seeing someone?”

“No.”

“Is it that Arthur you’re always talking about?”

“I’m not always talking about him, I said I’m not seeing anyone, and even if I were seeing someone, it wouldn’t be Arthur; he’s straight.”

“Well, do I get to meet him, at least? Gwaine thinks we ought to meet him. Make sure he’s suitable for our boy.”

“He’s not. He’s straight. I just said. And no, you don’t get to meet him. He’s not my boyfriend. I’m not going to bring him home for everyone to come sniffing round him. He’s my client.”

“Well, weren’t you taking him out on all your house calls? I thought you were friends, at the very least.” She shook a little parmesan cheese over the pan.

“Yeah. I suppose. That doesn’t mean you get to meet him.”

“I’ve met all your other friends.”

“Mum. He’s a heterosexual rich boy who grew up on a massive, multimillion pound farm where he was probably brought up on caviar-flavoured formula and mushy peasant. If I said to him, ‘Hey, you want to go home with your vet to his mum’s; we have a whole spare bedroom with a twin in it’ he’d probably laugh in my face.”

“No he wouldn’t,” she said reasonably. “Get out the garlic bread, instead of sitting there like a useless lump.”

“How would you know?” Merlin complained, getting out the bread.

“Because if he were a mean-spirited rich boy who looked down on people with less money than him, you wouldn’t like him.”

“I don’t like him,” Merlin replied quickly.

“Oh for God’s sake, Merlin; Gwaine talks to me nearly as often as he talks to you. Last Saturday we chatted nearly three hours about you. He doesn’t want to see you hurt.”

“You two are like a couple of old, nosy busybodies. I won’t be hurt. He’s not leading me on or anything.”

“Oh, so you mean he’s not encouraging the crush you don’t have on him?” she asked with perfect innocence.

“Shut up, mum.”

She threw a piece of the garlic bread at him. “Don’t speak to your mum like that. You might have a foot in height on me and six stone in weight, but those are no advantages.”

So he went to bed in the little twin, slightly too short for him; and slept fitfully all that long night in a place that time had made new to him again, and went next morning to do the shopping, feeling he had embarrassed himself by offering up the number as the texts came through, from Gwaine, from Gaius, from old friends at uni; but never in the whole endless time, from Arthur. He thought miserably that he had outed himself in giving up the private number which he had never given to any other client; outed himself for the poor, pining sod which he had tried not to be or seem to be, and now would have to go back to the farm, to the new barrier which Arthur would have to erect between their disparate feelings, his stolid ones of professionalism, and Merlin’s seething ones.

He was helping his mum with lunch when his phone buzzed again, and he took it out of his pocket and looked at it in confusion, expecting to have seen the continuation of a debate which he had been having with Gwaine over how Ireland would do against France in the qualifying match: and seeing instead a picture of the queen with red lasers for eyes. The number was unknown to his phone; but not to his pulse, which leapt up immediately. He blew up the picture, to read the text; and then leaning on the counter, typed out, Is this you trying to make sure I spare you when us poors rise up and eat the rich?

There was a pause of some innumerable minutes, during which he returned, feverishly, to chopping up celery, paying more attention to the phone than the knife, so that at regular intervals, his mum had to shout, “Merlin! You’re going to take off your thumb, you silly git.” His fingers survived; though his nerves were in bits, when at last the phone went again.

Just putting it out there in written record that I made fun of the queen, in case the Revolution would like to make note of it.

I can’t make any guarantees, Merlin typed. You ARE very rich. Morgana I’ll vouch for, though.

Morgana is just as rich as I am.

Morgana will be the first into Parliament to cut off MPs’ heads, though. I don’t think you have it in you. You did cry when she killed that spider, remember.

You should really stop trusting anything she says about me, ever. They’re all the nasty inventions of the most sick and twisted mind of our generation.

And so it went on, all of Saturday, till his mum finally cried out in exasperation, “You did come down to see me, you rude little cock, not your phone” and he had to put it sheepishly away till after dinner, when they were only sitting round basking quietly in one another’s company, and tea. Then out came the phone surreptitiously once more, onto his thigh under the blanket she had thrown across him, where he could send off in that blissful black privacy such tender missives as, Brentford is going to kill Man U next Sunday. Can’t wait to pop round to the farm Monday and see you crying into your piss-poor tea.

He was going on in that vein, waxing mean about Arthur’s taste in footie, in tea, in short, everything, when a sudden and violent toe jarred him to earth, by kicking in his rib. “Ow! Mum!”

“Who are you ignoring your poor old mum for?” she asked, looking at him over the mug in her hands with a raised eyebrow.

“No one,” he said, very quickly.

“Catch yourself on!” she scoffed; a phrase which he remembered from those dim recollections of childhood, where reigned a man whose death had disembodied him, so that now twenty years on he was resigned to these scraps of slang and gestures in which his son and wife kept him. “‘No one’s’ made you smile like that, you lying sod?” She looked at him very knowingly over the mug. “Arthur, is it?”

“No.”

“Oh, you are such a terrible liar. I looked up his Facebook. He’s very handsome, if his profile picture’s up-to-date.”

“If you thought he looked very handsome in it, then I’m sure it isn’t,” Merlin replied sweetly.

“He has a kind face,” his mum said, not to be deterred at all, taking a sip of her tea.

“He’s a bit young for you.”

“Don’t be cheeky.” She poked him with her toe again. “Does he want to be married and have kids? Does he like Yorkshire, or is he desperate to escape to somewhere posh and metropolitan? Does he like to travel? Or is he more domestic?”

“I’m sure he’ll be married one day, to a woman. He loves Yorkshire; he’s back and forth to London with his dad for business, but he doesn’t like London much. I don’t think he travels much; he just works. And, yes, mum, I’m sure a man raised by nannies can regularly be found in an apron slaving over the hob and afterward pottering about in his garden,” he said, though he knew Arthur cooked, which fact he had learnt by Morgana saying it was a shame about his face and personality when he made such a lovely beef wellington, whilst Arthur threw bits of hay at her. “Mum. It’s my birthday weekend. You can’t ask me about my ill-advised crushes on heterosexual people.”

“I thought you didn’t have a crush?” she asked with the lilt of flawless innocence in her voice.

“I have a tiny one. Totally unnoticeable,” he conceded.

And taking the tiny, unnoticeable, microscopic crush with him to bed that evening, he texted the object of it till it was gone midnight, and then woke in that feverish arising from sound sleep which is like the surfacing of a creature in bogland, looking blearily at his phone to find that he had not only dropped off with it clutched to his chest, like a kind of security plushie, but left his last message half-realised in the texting box, so that Arthur had gotten in the last word: a despicable, vile, even criminal act.

Sod off, you rich prick, he replied, at 3.01 A.M., and laid the phone on the bedside table and rolled over onto his face and was gone. And he came to at that nebulous hour of Sundays, when the godless have nothing to do but blissfully continue in sin, which he did by going back to sleep, instead of going to church. When he came to permanently this time, it was to the phone showing it was just gone 8.00, and a text which had come through hypocritically at 3.02 with a lecture on the hours he was keeping: For God’s sake, Merlin, it’s 3.00 in the bloody morning. Go to bed.

The texting did not get any more reasonable. Merlin had the phone in his hand all through dinners, and BBC News, and even his teeth cleanings: and inadvisably later beyond that, when he should have been mumbling to his dreams.

“Mum,” he lied to Gaius’ eyebrow.

It was not a sustainable lie, because they had taken to watching footie matches together, by sitting Arthur in front of his monstrous flatscreen, and Merlin in front of Gaius’ modest, and texting various scathing opinions on one another’s teams, always opponents. They had a little bet on one of the outcomes, which ended, very unfortunately, with Merlin yelling, “Fuck!” at a volume to prise Gaius out of his nap. He startled in his recliner, aiming a sleep-riddled but no less dangerous look at him.

“Sorry,” Merlin said. “It’s just, I have to do all the manual evacuations on any calls now.”

“Is that Arthur?” Gaius demanded, nodding at his phone. And answering himself, he continued: “And you ought to be doing all the manual evacuations anyway.”

“He can handle grunt work like that. It’s good for him. Rich people should have to dig shit out of cows’ arseholes occasionally. It gives them a personality.”

“My point is he shouldn’t be doing any of it. He’s not an employee of the clinic, Merlin.”

“So? He has his own free will. If he wants to tag along and freeze his bollocks off in the rain the same as us poors, that’s his choice. And he’s good at it. With the animals, I mean. Not sure about his bollocks.” 

“Merlin.” Gaius frowned at him. “I hope you are behaving yourself with Arthur.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked, a little defensively. And then, more defensively: “Don’t worry, I’m not being the weird gay, rubbing up against the aghast heterosexual. I won’t get us sacked from the Pendragon Farm.”

He was not getting them sacked from the Pendragon Farm; but he was, possibly, broadening the crush a bit, now Arthur was going out on the rounds with him once again, and he was having to witness, on the regular, the gentle way in which Arthur set aside his tendency to bellendedness, to address a frightened mother in her labours. They were getting into that season now when mums in distress were the majority of Merlin’s patients, and going round to sheep shed or cattle farm to withdraw from the struggling bodies the children which they could not get out of themselves. There were lambs untangled from the disaster they had made of themselves, and calves in the ropes which would bring them into the world: and Arthur, showing through an unnecessary amount of sweat in a thin T-shirt that he was a poncy rich boy not unequal to traction. They relieved, between the two of them, a number of distraught mothers with living children, working at speed to deliver the burdensome births, before they were deaths; and finding in the process that they had a rapport which Merlin thought was like very good marriages: meaning they knew, before they knew, what the other was going to do, and how to supplement his efforts. Prior to Arthur, he had had techs or farmers on hand for assistance, with varied results: sometimes those tragical ones which are the consequence of living. But with Arthur on the other rope, he knew he had a partner strong enough to pull out the distressed little body, prepared to drop himself, before he dropped the rope: so that in those difficult moments, with the sounds of the mother in fear and agony, frightening and agonising Merlin himself, he knew the outcome was to be a little bundle alive in the straw.

He was struggling, one day, on a day too nice to be lying on a barn floor with his cheek in some mud, and very likely not-mud, to grasp a leg which had caught up in the depths of the vagina, whilst the head and other leg preceded it; and having, at last, pushed back the head and foreleg inside of the mother, now was groping about for the lost leg, cursing liberally, to help himself. 

Arthur, squatting beside him, asked, “Is there anything I can do to help?”

Merlin blew out his cheeks. “She’s pushing really hard. It’s a big calf; I might need to give her an epidural. But I’m right there--I can feel the damn hoof. So just try and keep her calm for now, and I’ll see if I can get the other leg.” He dropped his head back, scrunching up his whole face, his feet scrabbling somewhere far away in the aisle, across which he was stretched, and blowing, again, as the cow bore down, on the calf, on his arm.

Arthur lifted his eyebrow. “All right?”

“Yeah,” Merlin gasped. “She’s just squeezing me really hard. But it’s fine; I have another arm.”

So Arthur went back and forth between the mother, and her quite literal deliverer, checking to see how each was getting along, and bringing with him on one such visit one of the water bottles they had stowed in their kit, and holding it out, asked, “Where do you want it? In your mouth, or over your head?”

Merlin looked up at him. He saw that dawning of realisation which comes, not unlike the dawning itself, in those drear, drowned regions of colonisers, too late to be of use to anyone. He hurried to get in his contribution, before Arthur could get in his correction. “I really prefer it in my mouth. Hate getting it in my hair.”

Arthur unscrewed the cap, and dumped it over his face instead. The water made even more alluring what he knew was a face reddened, and sticky, by running up his nostrils, and carbonating itself on his snort.

“Too much for you, is it?” Arthur asked.

“No,” Merlin coughed out, when he could. “Just took me by surprise. If that’s all, that’s sad. I can take twice that.”

“Right,” Arthur said. “Have you got the hoof?”

And he found, straining terrifically, that he had; and cupping it, to protect the uterus from its edges, he brought it forward at last, bracing his feet as he pulled, and calling for the rope, which Arthur brought round immediately, to be looped round the fetlocks.

There were a few such exchanges, because heterosexual men were a bizarre, homosexual lot, oblivious of what effect provoked their absurd, sweaty bodies in those unfortunates attracted to men; so that Merlin, occasionally, by accident, said, whilst they were nearly nose to nose in the straw where a sheep was fighting to birth, “Yeah, feel that? On the sheep, but thanks, I’m flattered,” because Arthur, concentrating on the cervix above him, had braced himself with his free hand high up, rather high up, on Merlin’s thigh. And Arthur said, an erotic one inch from him: “Maybe in your wildest, most fortunate fantasies”; and then Merlin was forced, strong-armed really, into responding by wiggling his eyebrows, or looking up from underneath them, or flicking his tongue; all those perfectly acceptable and even expected acts of homoeroticism between platonic mates. He had to say, if they were crammed in closely together, something like, “Is that a hoof tester in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?” because it was the done thing; and because Arthur was slightly embarrassed by it. And of course there were as many dick jokes as could be made, about any object vaguely phallic. 

Merlin was beginning to feel uneasy about the exchanges, because he knew that Arthur was participating in them under the assumption of heterosexual community; he was making that innuendo, ultimately innocent, between men of similar persuasion. Because straightness is always presumed of a man of masculine presentation, and because daily he was dirtying his hands, quite literally, in labour, because farmers expected to see what they saw when he emerged from the truck, conventionally strapping, and stubbled, it was never considered that possibly he was using the thighs not only to wrestle lady or lamb. And because he had that respectable veneer of conventionalism from dating women, he knew that any mention, or vague implication of his bisexuality landed as if on the head of the newly enlightened. He had told straight men before, who could not reconcile their comrade in footie with what concepts of homosexuality were in their commonplace minds: and lost, occasionally, their friendship for it, because he had come on them by surprise, instead of having the grace to announce himself by lisping. He had seen deep bigotry in men he thought were better than it; that quiet traditionalism in which there is neither blaze, nor froth, but the same result all the same, for men who stand by for the torch are the same as those who are carrying it. He did not think there was bigotry in Arthur, because he did not want there to be bigotry in Arthur. He thought, because Arthur spoke to the animals with a kind of exquisite gentleness, that he could not be harbouring, lower down, beyond that, beyond what was decent in him, under what was decent in him, the old, nasty ideas for which men had killed or been killed. And he knew, because he had been amongst them all his thirty years, that humans were exactly such paradoxical animals; that they would give the proverbial shirt or even their lives to someone who was of the common species: and betray him immediately, when it was discovered he had betrayed first their expectations of type.

But he was keeping it to himself as if he were ashamed of it; and he was not ashamed of it. He was a little frightened, of what Arthur would do to it or to them; but it would be, if it went badly, some flaw in Arthur, and not some flaw in he.

And so he brought it out, casually, one day, whilst they were on familiar turf, whilst he was checking the pregnant mares of Pendragon Stud, and there would be no strained ride in the truck, but only he alone in the cab to take him home. He had shown Arthur one of the pictures he was contemplating for his Match profile, at which Arthur squinted doubtfully, looking between the picture, and Merlin, and saying finally, “I dunno. Why aren’t you smiling? Bit grim, isn’t it? Don’t you have any with a nicer outfit?”

“That’s a nice leather jacket, and the jumper under it is a dressier one. And I do have a more formal one, and one of me out hiking in just shorts. Have you never used one of these apps before? You’ve got to have a variety of photos, so people get a good idea of what you look like.”

“One of you hiking in just shorts?” Arthur asked, lifting his eyebrows. “Are you looking for a relationship, or some kind of tawdry--booty call?”

“Are you a hundred fucking years old? ‘Tawdry’?” Merlin snapped the cuffs of his gloves as he slipped them off and binned them. “And it depends upon the person, and whether we get on, or whether it seems like it’s just going to be a one-off. Which is fine. Not every like on a dating profile has to come from the greatest love of my life.”

Arthur frowned. “How many of those have you had?”

“None. That’s what ‘greatest’ means. It’s kind of a singular thing. Other people can be great, one person gets to be ‘greatest.’”

“And you’re going to meet the greatest on Match.com, looking like a serial murderer?”

“How does a leather jacket, jumper, and not smiling add up to serial murderer? Besides, I’m smiling in other pictures.” He showed Arthur.

Arthur frowned again. “Your hair’s a bit messy in this one.”

“My hair’s always a bit messy. That’s an accurate representation of what I actually look like.”

Arthur thumbed through his profile, and held out the phone, to show the one in which he was standing in front of some sea caves up Blackhead Path, with the rare sun on his red shoulders. “This just shows you’re too irresponsible to put on sunscreen before swanning about half-naked and Irish on a nice day. Who wants a partner too immature to look after himself?”

“Because I didn’t put on sunscreen?” He took the phone back. “You think someone browsing Match.com is going to see all those profiles where people out themselves as obvious cunts in their About Me section, then come to my photo, and go, “Oh no, a mild sunburn? What an unsuitable wanker.”

Arthur snatched the phone back. There was a long silence whilst he scrolled, and Merlin packed up his ultrasound machine. “What about this one?” he asked at last, handing over the phone.

“Those are my nostrils. I was faffing about with my phone and accidentally took a picture up my nose and obviously didn’t realise or forgot to delete it. Why would I put that on a dating profile? You can’t even see my face.”

“Seems an obvious advantage over the other photos, then.”

Merlin flicked him in the head. 

“Do you really think women are going to look at these pictures and tinder with you, or whatever you do on these things?”

“That’s not even the right dating app. It’s right in the name, Arthur. But, yeah. Women. Or blokes.”

There was a laden pause. “What do you mean, ‘Or blokes?’” Arthur asked.

And Merlin, bending over the bag of equipment with his heart in his mouth, said, in a voice quite out of rhythm with his pulse, “I mean the literal words that came out of my mouth.”

There was another pause; no longer merely heavy, but corpulent. He went on packing up his kit, waiting as if for the executioner, to see whether the next moment would end or absolve him.

“Are you gay?” Arthur blurted out.

And Merlin looked up, no longer in anticipation, but with that need which is in the human animal, to gawp at what is terrible: though he was looking at stupidity, rather than a car accident. “No,” he said, enunciating very slowly. “I said ‘or’. Or is a conjunction; it’s used to link alternatives. ‘Tea or coffee.’ ‘I’ll cycle, or walk.’ Meaning both are acceptable, possible choices.” 

“Thank you,” Arthur said with such withering sarcasm he very nearly elevated the response to art. “I’m aware what words mean.”

“Then why did I have to explain it slowly and with very careful articulation?”

“Because you talk like you’ve a mouthful of gravel.”

“That’s from you colonising pricks standing your jackboot on my face and forcing it into the ground.”

“You grew up in England .” Arthur looked away, and scratched his nose. “So you’re--bisexual? Pansexual? I don’t know that many of the--of the sexuals.”

There was a weight coming off him. He realised Arthur was going to be stupid, not bigoted, and said, “I don’t really care that much about the label, but bisexual’s what I tell people.”

There was another pause whilst Arthur dithered about, trying to decide where it was appropriate to put one’s hands in front of men who liked men; and stuffing them in his pockets, asked, sounding extraordinarily casual about it, “What kind of men do you like?”

“What?”

“Well, if you like my sister, I assume your taste in men is similarly atrocious. I was only curious.” He scratched at his nose again.

“Erm, well, I don’t have--a list or anything like that. Fit men, who aren’t total berks.”

“What does that mean?” Arthur demanded. “‘Fit men’ could mean anything. Especially coming from someone with no standards.”

“Fine. Percival. He’s an example of someone I’d climb like a tree.”

“Percival?” Arthur’s hands came out of his pockets, and grabbed the stall door between them, as if he would need it for support, in his time of need. “He’s too big.”

“All right, fine, you’re so good at being attracted to men, pick someone fitter. You think you can be a better gay than me?”

“Well, apparently, it’s not difficult.” Arthur leant his upper body on the stall door, whilst Merlin finished packing up the bag, holding out his hand for it to be passed over to him in the aisle.

“Ok, if you weren’t straight, what kind of guy would you find attractive, then?”

“Well, I haven’t really thought about it, of course, but I’d have to say, someone athletic, good with horses, roots for Manchester U, like a correct person, good-looking. Sophisticated.”

“Blonde? Blue-eyed?” Merlin asked, leaning on the door beside him, so that their elbows nearly touched.

“Can’t go wrong with that.”

“So you’re saying you’d be gay for yourself.”

“I’m only saying anyone with objectively good taste would be.” 

Merlin cupped his chin in his hand, and looked up from under his lashes, which he used as a signal to indicate he was about to flirt, and the other person had better be ready for it. Then, instead of flattery, he delivered a little fine ridicule: “Except you forgot the bit about being a knob. ‘Aryan ideal’ isn’t really much of a selling point.”

“I also said, ‘good with horses, roots for Manchester U, sophisticated, good-looking, athletic.’ Could add ‘funny’--”

“Looking,” Merlin interrupted.

“Funny, good taste in books--”

“That’s the only one I don’t take issue with.”

“Would you stop interrupting me whilst I explain why you’re wrong and you should feel bad about it?”

Merlin held up his hands. “Sorry. Do go on. Why exactly am I being bisexual wrong? Could use the enlightenment. I’ve been doing it a while and never knew I was bollixing it.”

Arthur ticked off points on his fingers. “I can cook, I’m actually properly proportioned--”

“You are so jealous of Percival. He could put your head in the crook of his arm, flex, and stove in your fat head, and you hate it. Next to him, you look like you’re seven stone soaking wet.”

“Are you blind? I’m twice the size of you--”

“You’re shorter, and I wrestle cows for a living, office boy.”

“Add ‘delusional’ to your long list of faults. The only reason you’re bisexual is because you had to expand your options beyond a single gender, or else you’d die alone. You had to add several more million fish to the sea in hopes of finding a single one deranged enough to not flee on sight.”

Merlin dangled his hands over the side of the stall door. “Sounds like projection.”

“What?”

“I said, ‘Sounds like projection!’” he shouted, as if Arthur were old. “I’ve never had any trouble getting anyone to climb on a dark-haired 6’ manual labourer whose job is to treat sick animals. If you’re having problems, maybe it’s your hair?”

“What’s wrong with my hair?”

“Nothing, really, just assume you get prickly when it’s mussed. Can’t imagine women like hearing, ‘For the sake of my hair, it’s missionary, or nothing, you will not touch my hair in the throes of passion, you will not, in the throes of passion, mar my delicate posh boy skin, which I bathe daily in La Mear and caviar--’”

“It’s La Mer.”

“I knew you’d know that.”

Arthur pushed his head with the tips of his fingers. “And what, exactly, are you offering up? ‘I have dimples and I need to be committed’ aren’t quite the attributes you seem to think they are.”

Merlin flashed the former. “Yeah, but the dimples will make people overlook most other things.”

“Right,” Arthur said, and looked away, and cleared his throat. His shoulders showed by their tension that Merlin had got perilously close to actual flirting, rather than that platonic mockery of it, by having aimed at him the dimples of renown, a mere few inches from his face. He had Merlin’s equipment bag still in one hand, and moved away now, as if to set it aside; and Merlin, frightened suddenly once more, afraid not that Arthur would be bigoted, but that he would be idiotic, that he had let slip in the gesture, or various others, that he was like one of those sad starter gays, dashing themselves on the common heterosexual, because he was there, and handsome, said, “Don’t flatter yourself.”

Arthur looked up from under his fringe. The look wobbled in him. Merlin felt that everything in him had slid sideways; and, lying through his teeth, went on: “I’ll tell you the same thing I tell all straight men who think too much of their faces: you’re not my type. So don’t worry about it getting weird. Just because I fuck men, doesn’t mean I want to fuck you.”

There was a long stare out of Arthur, which Merlin felt narrowed the distance between them in the echoing barn; that strange contraction of time, and space, in which exist people, together, for a moment, outside the worldly planes. He swallowed. He felt there was something rising in him; a kind of portent, almost as unpleasant as the weather.

“Right,” Arthur said, hefting the bag in his hand. “Well, we’ve already established you’re unstable, so.” And down the aisle he went, away from Merlin, into the rain where there was a truck to take them away from one another. 

Arthur was a little concerned that Merlin did not find him attractive, because it was indicative of untreated illness; and he did not know whether it was safe for him to be operating such complex machinery as x-ray equipment, or those deft, quick hands which he needed for surgery. He was sometimes awake in his bed, turning over that amendment which had had to be made to heterosexuality requited: now no longer reciprocal, but antithetical. He was at one end of the spectrum, and Merlin at the other, which he did not like, because he had felt whilst they were on the ropes together in that fraught partnership of traction which required the same tension at the same speed to bring the endangered infant to fruition that they were in tandem; that they had come out of their discordant childhoods to be what very old couples are to one another. It was too much to say that he liked Merlin, with any great emphasis; but he did find him to be a passable companion with whom to spend most of his waking hours: and so he was alarmed, very mildly alarmed, was all, to find they were in some way polarised against one another, the comfortable bisexual, opposite the extraordinarily comfortable heterosexual. 

He went over it in the long, slow hours before dawn, wondering if it was quite all right to allow a man who was so disturbed as to be attracted to men but not attracted to Arthur round his sister, and horses, and scrolled through the Match.com profile which he had attempted to better with advice from a sane man, trying to stop that headlong careen of the madman, who felt it was all right to post such rubbish as the picture of him in the leather jacket, with curling fringe, and trousers a bit tight for the internet, that haven of weirdos, and murderers, who might feel inclined to infer more than what he was offering. The jacket was the feature of more than one photo, over the jumper, in the one, and a dark purple shirt, in another, a colour which did that miraculous duty of making him look not entirely, or even at all, revolting: and when Arthur came to the one with the suit, in which was displayed that same unfortunate tendency to closeness in tailoring, he put down his phone, and splashed his face with some cold water to herald the start of his day.

Fortunately Merlin did not wear suit trousers into the field; but he did wear some jeans which tightened when he bent to examine a hoof: and came off altogether when they were in the truck, and he felt it was proper to exchange them for dry ones, right in front of Arthur’s apathy. He saw the thighs come out, inappropriately defined, now Arthur knew he occasionally wrapped them round other men’s heads; they were all right for cows, but he thought it was a bit tremendously much, to be inflicting them on people. If Arthur were gay, he could have stood it; but very likely Merlin was picking out men equal to nothing other than nothing.

“How would you like it if I just whipped it out in front of you?” he snapped one day, whilst they were in the truck, with the rain battering them from all sides. The weather had blinded the windows, and enclosed them in that small, hot space, with Merlin’s inconsiderateness.

“Whipped out what? Bare legs?” Merlin asked. “I’d be fine with it, because I live in the 21st century, not the 19th.”

Arthur looked out the window out which he could not see. He said, with great levelheadedness, “Where to next? Back to the clinic?”

“Afraid not. I’ve a client wants me to swing in and take a look at one of her ewes.”

“Then why did you bother changing your trousers?” Arthur asked, with perfectly understandable incredulity. “They’re going to be wet as soon as you step foot out of the truck again. It’s pissing.”

“Because it’s a twenty minute drive, and I’m not sitting in wet jeans for a twenty minute drive.”

Apparently that settled it; apparently it was no use whatsoever, expecting some compassion out of him; expecting that reasonableness which could ordinarily be expected of rational men. Arthur did not need to know what was his choice of undergarment; and he especially did not need to know it was boxer briefs. He would have to see them unfortunately in those long, studious intervals between waking and sleep, that haunted otherland of the insomniac, where the dreamer is still slave to earth.

But Merlin was not entirely wretched to him. Whilst Arthur was struggling with the boxer briefs which had been shown to him for no reason whatsoever, they were going round the farms that needed them, and helping in rain promising or driving, where Merlin was occasionally as considerate of him as of the animals.

“Aren’t you going to glove up?” Arthur asked on one such excursion, putting on his own plastic sleeve, whilst he examined the poor squinched face, lodged at the vulva.

“Not yet,” Merlin said. He was stroking the cow’s back, and murmuring to her. “You know what to do.”

Arthur’s heart dropped. He looked round to the competent hand on the flinching back, apparently to be left where it was only marginally more use than useless. “You’re going to have me deliver it?”

“I’m going to have you get the calf in proper position, attach the calving ropes, and then we’ll pull it out.”

Arthur felt that the sleeve was suddenly flooded. His hand, formerly flush to it, now was swimming in it. “I don’t think--”

“Arthur,” Merlin said, and looked at him, over the cow’s back, over the scant distance between them, where the air was warm, and quivering. “What’s wrong with the presentation?”

“There’s the head and only one foreleg; the other leg is retained.”

“Ok. What do you do about it?”

“Lubricate the head and leg, and push them back, till I can reach the other leg, then extend the retained leg through the pelvic canal, till both the legs are at the vulva and we can get the ropes round them.”

“Ok, good. Do that, then.”

His heart pounded all through the lubrication, and doubled whilst he was grasping the little helpless foot, and the head with the tongue grossly protruded; trebled whilst he was easing back the body which he could break, or smother, into the cow. There was sweat coming off his fringe, into his eyes. If he left the calf too long, it would suffocate; he could neither linger, nor rush it; he was suspended in that eternity of feeling round in the quivering body where there was a living thing in thrall to his skill, hearing that his breathing was heralding his failure; hearing that it was going too quickly for a role which required of the player nerve and competence. He had forgot, and Merlin had forgot, he was regularly deficient of either: and now he was up to his elbow in the cow, suddenly he remembered on how many banal things he had fallen down; how many times his father had had from the squalid red thing which shortly on exiting his mother had killed her nothing but disappointment, over far lower stakes than these. He felt the calf’s nose, still the wet, seeking nose of the living, felt with his other hand round for what would be saviour of calf and of him.

“I can’t find the other leg,” he said in a strained voice. He looked over the cow’s back, to the calm look which came back to him; saw the large hand, steady on in its stroking; saw there was neither concern nor regret, but only a kind of sure faith in him.

“No, you’re doing great, Arthur. It’s ok. It takes a bit to locate it. Talk yourself through it,” Merlin said, in the same voice which he used on the cow.

“I’ve got the calf back, and I’m feeling round for the other leg,” Arthur said, taking a deep breath through his nose. The voice was bringing him through it. It came down the spine of the cow, nearly as gentled as he, under the big hand on baulking skin.

“Yeah, good, go on, keep feeling round for it. I bet you’ll have it any minute. But if you don’t, don’t worry, ok? I’ll help you if you need it. But just take a deep breath, and do your best, and that’s the best that can be done.”

“Ok,” Arthur said, feeling for a moment there was more than fear in his throat: and then he had the hoof. “I’ve got it! I’ve got it!”

“Good! Great, Arthur, cup your hand round the hoof; it can tear the uterus.”

Slowly he drew the leg round, and forward, whilst the cow shifted about, and Merlin continued in the same reassuring way, dividing his attentions between cow and Arthur, till they were both relieved of the worst, and the forelegs were neatly together at the opening. Arthur secured the ropes to the fetlocks: and then the blind confidence in one another, the shoulder pulling against his the slow, incremental inches to freedom, till at last they could help out the slippery body onto the floor, where Merlin cleaned out the amniotic fluid with swift proficiency, and the calf, heretofore silent, released its first breath and Arthur’s held breath.

“That’s your first proper calving,” Merlin said, and beamed at him.

He took off the sleeve shakily, and wiped his forehead on his forearm. “I think I’ve sweated more than the cow.”

“Yeah, I threw up my first time. After I got the calf out, at least. Was so nervous I went into the corner of the barn and heaved up my breakfast as soon as I saw the calf was breathing.”

Arthur put an arm round his shoulders, and briefly thumped him on the shoulder. He had thought to take the arm away, immediately afterward; but it was of independent will, and remained. Merlin smiled at him over the living creature in the straw, which Arthur had helped, instead of failed.

So they stood, whilst the mother greeted her offspring, content to have been of service to her.

There were a few other small concerns of Arthur’s: literally small, because they were a woman called Freya, who was disproportionately threatening. Physically, she ended at his shoulder; but he could see, on seeing Merlin with her, that she had a kind of metaphorical looming. She was the owner of a sheep farm, and a regionally compatible accent.

“You’re from Northern Ireland?” Merlin asked, and lit up, utterly unnecessarily. Arthur felt, thanks to the ham sandwich he had earlier eaten too quickly, that he would be sick on his shoes; or Merlin’s, for the greater satisfaction.

“Yes!” she cried. “Armagh.”

“Belfast,” Merlin replied. He was still smiling at her. Arthur thought it was unusually wasteful, when there was nothing which he could see to warrant such gormless attention. She had that same miscellany of limbs and of features which all the female race had: none to distinguish, but only to classify her as belonging to that part of humanity which wielded some breasts for the dazzlement of idiots.

Merlin apparently did not notice that Arthur was taller, and objectively better-looking; so they were going round to the farm regularly, to help with what seemed to Arthur a more than natural occurrence of sickness, on a farm which seemed to be operating in all other respects perfectly typically.

“Your sheep seem to have a lot of problems, till we get here,” he remarked innocently one day, whilst Merlin was examining a ewe she had thought might be lame.

Freya flushed; but she did not look away from Merlin, who doubtless was wearing the boxer briefs under the grubby jeans; and doubtless was creating in her, whilst he bent over, the same image in the same detail as was retained by Arthur, who had actually beheld it. He crowded in, to block out the sight of Merlin’s arse and thighs whilst he was engaged in professionalism. It was not much less than harassment, to be going over him with the slow, red-faced look, when he was there for her sheep. “See anything?” Arthur asked.

“Looks ok,” Merlin said, straightening. “But I’ll want to watch her walking round.”

“Could we have some tea?” Arthur asked, in the same innocuous tone.

“We have some, in the flask,” Merlin replied, and held it out to him.

“It’s cold,” Arthur said, without taking it.

“Oh. Sure. Any preferences for either of you?” Freya asked, in her obnoxiously pleasant voice.

“Well, he takes too much milk, and I take it like a normal person.”

“You don’t take anything like a normal person.”

“I take things just fine,” Arthur snapped: and saw Merlin struggling not to make, in front of a client, and crush, the innuendo which was natural to him.

“What’s your problem?” Merlin asked when she had gone into the house to put on the kettle, and Arthur was walking round the ewe, whilst Merlin watched the smooth stride sure in the mud.

“Nothing. She’s a bit of a weirdo, is all.”

“You’re a weirdo. She’s nice.”

“I’m a weirdo--she’s--ogling you whilst you’re working! Isn’t there some kind of law against that?”

“No,” Merlin said calmly. “There’s a law against coming onto me, whilst I’m at work. If I don’t want her to.”

“Do you want her to?”

“Yeah; she’s really cute.”

Arthur ground his jaw round. “Well, good for you. Many dark-haired babies who need to be hospitalised for genetic insanity to you both.”

“I don’t want babies. You freak.”

Then because Merlin was thinking with his penis, they were both nearly killed on a cliff ledge at the edge of the farm one day, where a ewe had wandered whilst they were deworming some sheep dogs, and now was too frightened to sort out that it could get out the same way it had got in: which discovery was made by Freya in rounding up the sheep, whilst the dogs were otherwise occupied. Merlin saw the look on her face, stood, and said, “What’s wrong?”

“One of the ewes, she’s got down on the ledge somehow, I don’t know how--I can’t reach her. She’s going to go over the edge.”

“No, she’s not,” Merlin said. “Do you have a rope?”

So Merlin was on one end of the rope, and Arthur the other, monitoring where it was secured to the tree it had been made fast to, watching the black head inching over the side, where at intervals it checked itself, breathed deeply through its nose, and went on again, a fumbling, ungainly progress, which stopped every few trembling steps, whilst the rope shuddered with the stress of it.

“What’s wrong with you?” Arthur asked.

“I have a problem with heights.”

“Then why didn’t you let me go down, you idiot?”

“Because, you’re the idiot, and you’d do something flashy and fall off the cliff and break your neck.”

“Just come back up,” Arthur said in exasperation.

“No, I can make it. I’m nearly there. This stupid thing looks like it’s going to jump any-- fuck!” Merlin cried out, and the rope rose taut from the bole, trembled, and horribly slackened. 

Arthur slid to the edge, nearly going over it; and looked down with his heart in his mouth, expecting to see sheep and Merlin shelled on the stones, fatal fathoms below: but there was the pale face looking back at him, cheek flat and tremulous on the cliffside. “I’ve got hold of the sheep with one hand. I can’t pull myself up the rope with the other.”

“Then let go of the sheep,” Arthur said.

“No!”

“Merlin.”

“I just need a second.” The breathing had gone shallow, and rapid; there was moss in the clutch of it, where his nose was intimate with the crevice. 

“Give me your arm,” Arthur said.

“You can’t pull up me and the sheep.”

“Give me your bloody arm,” Arthur said through his teeth. “You moron. These cliffs are made of shale.”

“Yeah, I noticed, actually. I’ve got about two inches I’m standing on. The rest crumbled when I hit it.” He shifted a little: and Arthur heard that terrible noise of a land uneasy in itself. There were little clatterings away in the valley, where stones fell to their deaths. 

“Give me your arm, Merlin.” He was properly frightened now. He couldn’t see well over the black head, but he had a glimpse of the boots uneasy somewhere below it, trying to seek out where there was sanctuary. The sheep swayed into his peripheral, noisy, and pendulous.

“I can’t. I’ll have to let go of the cliff.”

“Just reach straight up. My hand’s right here.”

“Arthur, I can’t. I’ll fall.”

“You won’t. Just give me your arm; I won’t let you fall,” he said, trying to say it in the same tenor which Merlin used on his patients. He leant down, gripping with one hand the edge of the cliff, till he cut himself, and extending the other, till Merlin could find it after a little tremulous groping. It was clutched; and that was all the farther Merlin got. He latched onto Arthur, his breathing high, and whistling in his nostrils.

“Your hand’s too sweaty,” Arthur said, as calmly as he could.

“Sorry,” Merlin snapped. “I’m sure you’d be the picture of stalwartness, two inches from falling to your bloody death.”

“No, I meant, you’ll slip if I try and pull you up this way. Do you think you can hold onto the rope whilst I pull it up?”

Merlin took a shuddering breath. “I dunno. I don’t think so. Not with only one arm, and the weight of the sheep.”

“Then you’re going to have to let go of the sheep. I’m sorry. I know you don’t want to, but if you both go over, what was the point?”

“Please get back from the edge,” Merlin said: the first time Arthur could ever recall being addressed so politely. It frightened him more than the sound of the stones. “The edge might not be stable. Just go for help, ok?”

“I’m not leaving you.”

“Get back from the edge,” Merlin ground out through his teeth. “Just because I’m dumb enough to go off a cliff for a sheep doesn’t mean you need to.”

“Then let go of the sheep. Is this some kind of Hippocratic veterinarian oath?”

“No. I just can’t drop it and watch it smash open on the rocks, ok? I can’t do that. It’s scared. I can’t do that to it, Arthur.”

Arthur let go of the hand clutching him. He could tell it did not want to: but it let loose, and fumbled back to the cliff, to the rope which was useless to it. And Arthur, leaning out farther, half over the side now, passed his arm under Merlin’s arms, and round his chest.

“What are you doing? What are you doing? You’re going to fall, you idiot.”

“I’ve got the rope in my other hand. I’m not letting go of you. If I can’t pull us up, then we’re all staying here till someone comes to help. Freya went back for some neighbours. Someone will come.” He tightened his arm. “Just stay as still as you can, all right?”

Merlin’s toe fumbled, found where else the cliff was compromised: sent into the abyss the bits of stone which reduced his perch from ledge to paver. He was almost into that same animal panic as the sheep: and Arthur, pulling him in a bit, said into his ear, “It’s all right.”

“Yeah,” Merlin said. He wrapped his free arm round Arthur’s arm. 

And Arthur, tightening his stomach muscles, pulled simultaneously on the rope with one arm, and Merlin with the other, using his abdominals to try and leverage himself onto his knees, gradually coming off his stomach as Merlin and sheep rose, inch by excruciating inch. Everything hurt; the rope was burning him, and the shoulder which was taking the strain of a grown man, and grown Blackface, felt as if it would come off. The weight was too evenly distributed to dislocate the arm which he had round Merlin: but the arm which was doing the incredible work of raising them all was too hot in its socket; and the rope too mobile in his raw, wet hand. He was too scared to risk it further: and let himself carefully back down onto his stomach, saying breathlessly, “I think it’s safer to wait.”

“Ok,” Merlin said with uncharacteristic docility.

And so they did, quietly, in the rain, which now was bucketing on them, whilst the land gradually dissolved into mist. He was looking past Merlin’s ear, into the depths of what had been some hills distinguishable from sky or abyss: now only that dim presumption of land which the human brain superimposes over the fearful extinction. He could not now really see the vast fall beneath them: but there was the feeling of it in the air, the sensation of void where the flightless creature knows he is nothing but fodder for gravity. 

They had one exchange, after some innumerable moments, when Merlin said, “If you feel at any point the edge won’t hold you, let go, and get back” and Arthur said, resoundingly, “No.”

“You stupid bastard,” Merlin said.

“You’re the one trying to die for a sheep.”

And they lapsed into silence once more, recognising there was no sense in fighting to another draw over who was dumber, and more stubborn. 

Then there were voices coming out of the dark, and hands, and ropes, and men bringing up he, and Merlin, and sheep, into some blankets, and tea, though the sheep was ungrateful, merely shuddered, shook itself, and ran off down the hillside toward the farm for its dinner.

“You lads all right?” someone asked them; there was a large man, squatting in front of him. “That was a good job you did.” He grasped Arthur by the shoulder, and shook him a little. “Do we need an ambulance?”

“I don’t think so. Probably just the tea. And a hot bath.”

They had an escort back to the truck, where Freya hugged and wept on them, and Arthur as soon as he was able exchanged the hysterics for the truck, where he turned up the heat till he had to take off the blanket still round him.

“Two things,” Merlin said, when he had got into the truck and sat for a moment without starting it, his seat collecting his runoff. “Thank you.” He looked at Arthur in the warm space, scant, between them: as tangible an eye contact as if they were touching. “And also, we never tell your sister, who will drag me back up to that cliff, and yeet me off it.”

“Agreed. Me too.”

“She’d avenge your almost-death and then kill you herself?”

“It’s very much her style,” Arthur confirmed. “I can’t believe you didn’t let go of the damn sheep.”

“I can’t believe you didn’t let go of me.”

“Next time I will,” Arthur promised.

“Good. I was worried we were all going over together, and then we’d be stuck haunting the bottom of the ravine for all of eternity.”

“No, I’d kill you,” Arthur assured him.

“I’d be a ghost. You couldn’t kill me.”

“I’d find a way.”

“I’d call you a prick, but I suppose there’s a moratorium on that now.”

“Yes, you have to be nice to me for at least…two hours.”

“At least,” Merlin agreed. “Maybe even three.” He reached out for the keys in the ignition with a shaking hand.

“You all right?” Arthur asked.

“Yeah. Adrenaline’s just wearing off now, and now my body is very abruptly aware I just almost fell off a cliff.” He inhaled shakily, and rubbed his hands down his thighs.

“You ok to drive?” Arthur asked.

“Yeah; just need a second.”

“Good,” Arthur said. “Not sure I could stand just now to switch places.”

“You too? You were pretty dumb. You weren’t on the ledge. You could have just fucked off, like a rational person.”

“You could have not climbed down the side of a cliff with only a single rope just to impress a woman. She wasn’t even there to watch. For future reference, you don’t get laid if you fall to your death.”

“I wasn’t trying to get laid,” Merlin said, and started the truck. “I actually am stupid enough to risk my life for a stupid sheep.”

Arthur was not bitter Merlin was still invested in Freya; but he hadn’t seen her on a cliff ledge, committed to mutual death. Whilst Arthur had risked smashing himself on some stones, she had risked only the notoriety of owning the stones on which he had smashed himself. Still, remarkably, she was reaping all those feelings which come of such fraught circumstances, whilst Arthur, apparently, was a little chopped liver. She appeared to be twice as attracted to Merlin following the incident, when it did not even make sense to be once attracted to him; and they could frequently be found, though the weather was fouler, even, than Arthur’s mood, with their heads together over the sheep, dreaming of the homeland. They two Irish had found each other in this dread land of the oppressor, and could not stop talking about it, whilst he, the descendant of tyrants, waited with patience for their reminiscing to have done, by saying, in a normal tone of voice, “Are you going to check if this sheep’s tongue is blue or not?”

“Don’t you think she’s coming on a bit strong?” he asked Merlin one afternoon when they were back in the truck. “Bit desperate, if you ask me. What was that bit about the tea?”

“Her asking me if I wanted some?” Merlin asked, arching his eyebrow as he wheeled the truck onto the gravelled drive, to take them, finally, from the white cottage amidst the green hillsides, which Arthur was very glad to exchange for other green hillsides: there being, in them, a notable shortage of petite Northern Irish women.

“She wanted to have you up to the house.”

“So?”

“So,” Arthur said, going slowly, so that Merlin could follow him, “she wanted to have you up to the house.”

“Clients invite me in for tea and whatnot sometimes.”

“Well, she was inviting you in for--for--she was inviting you in for nefarious purposes, you half-wit.”

Merlin burst out laughing. “You make it sound like she was going to lure me inside and chop me up for her stew.”

“Well, didn’t we conquer you because you were--savages or whatever?” Arthur asked somewhat less than not grumpily, slumping down in the passenger seat.

“Don’t be racist.”

“I just think it’s lovely that you two can bond over not being English. Even though you grew up here and you probably have less in common with her than you have with any one of us dirty, pillaging--was it ‘potato pincher’ you called me?”

“Pillaging, potato pinching minger pillock.”

“Right. Why not leave it at ‘pillaging, potato pinching pillock’ and not ruin the alliteration?”

“Because I wanted more rude words in there but couldn't think of another ‘p’ word that wasn’t ‘prat’ or ‘prick’, and I’d just called you those. Don’t want to be predictable.”

“Plonker,” Arthur suggested.

Merlin shook his head, and flipped the indicator. “No. That’s too nice. I’d call my mum that.”

And it continued like that, with such wanton and escalating behaviour as bringing out biscuits, till Merlin took him aside one evening and said, “Look, I’m thinking about asking Freya out. But I wanted to tell you first, because you’ve been really weird about me paying attention to her, and it seems to me you like her. So if you do, don’t be a dissembling moron about it, just tell me, and I won’t. 

“You think I like her?” Arthur burst out in disbelief. “Where on earth did you get that idea?”

“Dunno. Maybe because you just bit my head off right after I told you I was planning to ask her out? Maybe because you act like a complete arse when she brings me tea or biscuits or breathes near me?”

Arthur was horrified. Merlin’s lack of grey matter had led him to many an errant assumption; but this was abhorrent. “I am not jealous.”

“Yeah, ok, sure, I believe you,” Merlin said. He said it like a lying person.

“I’m not,” Arthur protested, and left for the truck, where he could be alone with his superior intelligence: which he was, whilst Merlin exercised his inferior on leaning against the shed, and looking down at Freya with the dimples which for some reason, on some people, worked a kind of charm; and apparently had worked it now, because Freya went into the house smiling, and Merlin came to the truck smiling.

Arthur huddled into his seat as he got in. “I assume she hasn’t got the sense to say ‘no’ then? I worry about people that unbalanced bearing responsibility for the lives of actual living creatures.”

“I didn’t ask her out,” Merlin replied, starting the truck.

Arthur sat up a bit straighter. “Why not?”

“Because you’re a lying tit. Besides, if I ask her out first, what hope have you got?” Merlin asked, and turned the dimples, this time, on Arthur, who would not be taken in by that sort of nonsense.

So he, or common sense, had halted Merlin’s descent; though Arthur was still struggling to come to terms with Merlin’s poor taste, on which he had improved only very marginally, by restoring Freya to her rightful place of the tangential which he saw only in the course of making his living.

“Do you prefer women, or something?” he asked one evening whilst Merlin in his head lamp was palpating the mandible of a stallion, and he was leaning on the side of the stall.

“No,” Merlin said, making a note on his chart, and then handing it off to Arthur. He squatted down to level himself with the horse’s drooping head, and prising open the slobbery lips, slack with sedation, began to feel and count the incisors. 

“I was just curious. You’ve only really referenced dating women. And it would make sense for you not to have very developed taste, if you’re after someone like Percival.”

Merlin moved the loose lip, and tilted his head to point the lamp down the black gullet, moving his gloved hands with tender efficiency in the dribbling mouth, whilst the horse looked at him, on account of its wooziness, with something of awe and affection. “If this is you fishing round to see if I’m basically straight, let me just nip that in the bud: I’ve fucked plenty of men. Don’t be an arsehole.”

Arthur was stung. He felt that the chart which Merlin had handed to him was sat now on something like a block of wood. He flexed his numb fingers round it, looking down at the notes which Merlin had made in his rubbish hand. He had to clear his throat, to get out his next sentence: “I wasn’t meaning it like that.”

Merlin looked up briefly. “Ok. Good. Sometimes people do. They feel better if what I mean by ‘I’m bisexual’ is ‘I date exclusively women but I can recognise when a bloke is fit.’ So, no, I don’t prefer women, I don’t prefer either. I like men, I like women. It’s just that. But, yeah, I’ve dated more women. Easier to find women who will date men than men who will date men, especially in small villages.” Now he placed the speculum, checking to see that neither lips nor tongue were caught up in it.

“So Percival,” Arthur said; and could not think how to elaborate. It was not that he cared; but rather that he had those simple, noble concerns which the intellectual feels for the imbecile.

“Here, come and feel this,” Merlin told him, and taking one of Arthur’s hands, guided it back beyond the speculum, and to the wet gums. “There’s irregular wear here, feel that?” He probed round with Arthur’s fingers. “It’s early, so it’s all right now, but we’ll need to touch them up with a file. If you let it go, it’ll cause abnormal gaps between the teeth, and then food gets trapped in there, and then gum disease. A hand rasp will do it.” He moved Arthur’s hand again. “Do you feel the difference? This side is looking good; he probably chews all his food on the other.” 

“Yes,” Arthur said, frowning. He did not like that Merlin’s hand was very warm, and large. 

“All right; get the rasp for me. I’ll just touch it up before I move on with the rest of the exam.”

So he did; and Arthur, whilst watching the dark head bent over its task, suddenly blurted out, “You know Percival’s straight?”

“Yes. That’s why I said I would climb him like a tree, not that I’m going to climb him like a tree. A theoretical climbing, in an alternative scenario, under circumstances of mutual gayness.”

“So you like straight men?” 

The rasp kept on. “No, I look at straight men who are attractive; I don’t like them. That would be stupid.” He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his wrist.

Arthur did not like to ask it; but he had to know exactly how stupid Merlin was. “So you look at straight men, and appreciate them in an aesthetic sense, and you just didn’t notice you’re hanging round one of the most attractive ones?”

“I am?” Merlin asked innocently. “Who is he? Oh--Lancelot, yeah? You’re not wrong, but out of respect for Gwen, I keep it all very professional. They’re going to be married one day, when he can work up the nerve to talk to her.”

Arthur rolled his eyes. 

The rasp stopped, and was handed back to him, and then the exam proceeded, under that louring cloud of ignorance.

And once more Arthur’s mouth outpaced his brain: “So you don’t like blondes?”

“Hand me the rasp again; I’ve another bit here I want to file down.”

Arthur gave it to him, in only the most literal sense, though Merlin’s dreams ought to have made it into vulgar allusion.

The rasp took up once more, and Merlin said, finally, over it, “There’s nothing wrong with being blonde. But who doesn’t prefer a tall, dark, and handsome man?”

“I don’t,” Arthur said quickly.

“I know you don’t, Straighty McStraighterson.”

Thus was it settled, for the moment; though Arthur tried him again when they were going over one of the mares with the ultrasound machine, giving him a chance at his redemption arc, by saying, “So, you don’t like men who are well-dressed, can cook, are athletic, good with horses, have excellent taste in literature, and are rich and good-looking, to boot.”

“Are you auditioning, or something?” Merlin asked, moving the probe round. “Look, you’re going to have to pop into my DMs on my Match profile like every other hopeful, and try and butter me up with bad puns and something about how you wish you were the horse in the picture of me holding a foal.”

“I’m not auditioning!” Arthur cried.

Then he lost all hope of bringing Merlin round to sanity, by vomiting in front of him. 

They were discussing the vaccine schedule in Arthur’s office one afternoon, with Merlin’s hip leant casually on the desk, and Arthur sitting back in his chair, when the headache he had been nursing all morning began to expound upon itself. He felt a little dizziness at first; nothing which could not be fixed by some future lie-down with a little bad telly, and tea. And then he realised, rather abruptly, that his body was in dire straits. It was striving to turn itself inside out: and all his bones, and those ligaments attached to his bones, suddenly were great, hot, grating things in him; and his stomach, not to be outdone, wobbled and heaved in its fixtures. He was in nice trousers, and a shirt which complemented his eyes, and had thought even an ignoramus like Merlin must have noticed; and now thought only how he had endangered them. He would have to get past Merlin, and into the loo, before the only sanctuary he could make was the rubbish bin: a rapidly approaching probability. 

He could not throw up, in the nice shirt, in front of a man whose preferences he had been hoping to better; and so he stood, and said, steadily enough, “Sorry; just got to nip to the loo,” and left Merlin chatting with Gwen. In the toilet, he threw up out his mouth and his nose, horrifically loudly; making of the private moment a spectacle, for the voices in the next room had stopped abruptly, and now was only the ringing silence, and sweat. He leant his head on the toilet, and then heaved into it again.

When he came out, Merlin said, “Christ, are you all right?”

He was almost ill enough not to be embarrassed. He imagined Merlin listening to him be sick, and wanted to die only a little. “Wonderful,” he said, and sat down in the chair; and then, realising he could not sit upright, had to convey himself, by clutching at the chair and desk, to the sofa, where he laid down with his arm over his eyes. There was a hand laid lightly on his brow, and Gwen’s voice, saying to the room, “Oh, you’re burning up, Arthur. I’ll get you some water and see if I can find some paracetamol. I think I’ve some in my desk.”

“I’ve got to finish checking on a few of the mares; I’ll be back in a bit to make sure he hasn’t died,” Merlin told her; then came the sound of the door, which in his haze he vaguely registered, and forgot. 

He threw up the water Gwen brought him, and the tea; and afterward lay sweating in the grasp, hopefully, of death, whilst her soft voice in the background of his misery reminded him he was still, momentarily, of this mortal world. He passed in and out of the murk, hoping at last to be subsumed by it; and then innumerable moments after the ordeal had begun, there was the low, familiar voice beside his ear, not to end it, but at least to improve it, by saying, “Come on, then; I’ll get you to your bed.” He was brought up off the sofa by a strong hand under his armpit, and left the office like an old man, shuffling along through the gravel, whilst Merlin said to him, “I’d prefer if you didn’t vomit on me, but I stick my arm up animal’s arses for a living, so I’ve had worse. Don’t hold it in if you have to.”

He did hold it in; but only as far as the entryway, where he was sick all over the floor mat, whilst Merlin rubbed his back. Then again, properly this time, in the toilet, beside which he was laid, shaking, with Merlin’s jacket folded up under his head, and left to die alone, in ignominy; or so he assumed, when Merlin said to him, “You’ve got sick in your hair,” and the hand that had been on his shoulder vanished whilst he sought to perish, if not of the illness, at least of humiliation. Then the hand was back with a washcloth, and cleaning out what was unmentionable from his fringe; and it disappeared once more, and came back to him once more, to leave the cloth, saturated in cool water, on his raging head. He sensed there was a body kneeling next to him, but could not open his eyes to confirm it.

“I’ll put the kettle on. Tea cupboard?”

“Over the oven,” Arthur said weakly.

“Have you got any ginger tea or anything like that? It’s good for nausea.”

“No.”

“All right. We’ll make do. Don’t die whilst I’m gone, yeah?”

“I’m actively praying to,” Arthur replied hoarsely, and turned his head to cool his cheek on the tiles.

There were the mysterious noises of ambulatory people; and then Merlin returned, collected the jacket, collected him: and half-carrying him again, got him into the guest room where there were the cool, laundered sheets, no impossible hike across the wilds of the cottage, to the far-flung master, but only round the corner, where he could be laid, at last, to rest. The kettle shrilled; and Merlin vanished again, materialised again, turned him over (he had died on his face, with his legs awkwardly over the edge of the bed), and took off his shoes.

“Ok. It’s sitting up time, now,” Merlin said, and hooking him under both arms, pulled him up with ease, so his back was against the mound of pillows. There was a warm mug stuck in his hand. “You’ve got to drink a bit.”

He threw up the tea again, this time into the rubbish bin.

“All right, you’re going to be like that, are you?” Merlin asked cheerily. “We’ll let your stomach rest a bit, then, and try again. If not, I’ll just hook you up to one of my IV fluid pumps. See if you think you can get away with not being properly hydrated then.” He took out the rubbish bin with the vomit in it, and came back after flushing it, and said, “Do you want to lie there wearing half a suit, or have you got pyjama bottoms I can fetch?”

“Third door down the hall, second drawer on your left in the chest of drawers.”

So the clothes were brought to him, some tatty joggers, and a t-shirt well-worn with washing, and a little listless wriggling about on the bed got him, somehow, out of the dress trousers and shirt, and into what was that natural habitat of invalids. 

“Well, that was sad,” Merlin said afterward, when Arthur lay exhausted amidst the wreckage. And he took away the clothes which formerly had been nice, and now were only sweaty, and came back when Arthur felt that he had been abandoned. He was sick, and so already sorry for himself; and so when Merlin left with the grotty clothes, having seen him rejecting from his person everything which once had gone into it, Arthur assumed he was to wait out the rest of the illness in isolation, with the mysterious wrongdoings at work inside him. He was lonely, under the most pleasant of circumstances, because it is always lonely to try to be pleasing; and now that he had been gross, and Merlin kind enough about it, he thought that was to be the end of the companionship; now Merlin had discharged the duties of ensuring he did not die on the office sofa with only poor Gwen for witness, Arthur would be left to dabble mutedly in that realm of pseudo-death which is the haven of the vomiter, who does not have to dwell on what he has done, at length and in front of a fit man, because he is on the verge of the void. 

But the muddled voice with the strains of Ireland which he had held onto out of pure spite sounded softly away in the cottage, with pauses enough for an interlocutor; and then Merlin came back into the room with his phone in his hand, saying, “Sorry; just had to reschedule some plans. Want to have a go at the tea again?”

“If there’s cyanide in it,” Arthur said pitifully.

“Nope, sorry; you can’t die on my watch. For one because it’s a point of pride, you being my first human patient and all, and for two because when Morgana gets back from York, she’d kill me.”

Arthur curled up miserably, on top of the covers, because he hadn’t the energy to get under them, and lay shivering till Merlin, having gone off with the cold mug of tea, came back in with a steaming one, and pulled up the comforter folded at the foot of the bed over him. “Sit up enough so you don’t choke,” he said, and gave Arthur the mug in little careful increments, till they had got down, with teamwork, a good quarter of it, Merlin holding the tea, and his head, and Arthur staunchly not vomiting over them all. He would have liked the hand to continue to perform such basic tasks for him; but eventually it went away, and he had to hold up his head himself, or lay it back down. He laid it down. Merlin squatted next to the bed, his hands clasped between his knees. “I’m gonna’ run into the village for a few things, because in your medicine cabinet you have some expired paracetamol, some Night Nurse, also expired, and a razor. Do you want anything specific?”

“Death,” Arthur croaked.

“I’ll get some cream crackers and electrolytes.” Then there was a silence, but still the presence beside him, static but somehow busy in the quiet: and he heard, finally, the voice of Patrick Tull enter the room, with the old, beloved words, “The music-room in The Governor’s House at Port Mahon, a tall, handsome, pillared octagon, was filled with the triumphant first movement of Locatelli’s C Major quartet.” He opened his aching eyes to see Merlin lay his phone on the table beside the bed, and felt that he would be sick again: not from the illness this time, but from the kindness, which raised the same hurting in his throat. “I’ve still my work phone on me, if you need me. I’ll be back in a bit to check on your corpse,” Merlin said, and was gone.

All that afternoon and through the evening, Arthur washed in and out, not of sleep, but unconsciousness, coming out of it, briefly, to find there was a body beside him in the bed, quietly fussing with its phone, and going away once more in the feeling of safeness. He felt he was to be looked after: not only physically; that whilst he would have to sort out the illness himself, there would be the kind voice, or the hand coaxing him to drink in the long hours of pain and confusion, taking away from him the alienation which he felt in trying to be loved; feeling that he was loved; feeling that the hand which sometimes was there not to lift him for the tea, but to wheedle his pounding head beyond its anguish and into the blind relief of sleep by massaging it was loving him; that there was the same feeling in it as was in Arthur. He couldn’t have stood it if Merlin was performing a kind of rote tenderness; and so whilst he was ill, and weak, and all his feelings were those poor, tremulous, naked things which build everything out of nothing, he ignored what they would have to go back to; ignored that Merlin was a person of incredible decency, who would have done for anyone what he was doing for Arthur. He was brought a little tea, and water with the electrolyte powder in it, and crackers when it was felt his stomach could chance them, and he looked up at Merlin quite, he assumed, as the animals looked up at him, with the same dumb love in him.

And Merlin, at 7.30 next morning, having napped fitfully in the guest bed beside Arthur, propped up against the headboard, which he learnt, on getting up from the headboard, he was too old for, stumbled into Gaius’, replied, “I’m off today” to Gaius’ eyebrow, and dragged himself up to the loft, where he pitched face first onto his bed and was gone. He woke in a temper round noon, fed himself toast, and tea, and dropped off once more on the sofa, from which he was trying to watch an episode of Friends, and woke once more to the sound of his phone.

“What?” he answered, not entirely pleasantly, because it was Gwaine, and not Arthur.

“Hello, Sunshine,” Gwaine said. “How’s our posh straight boy doing?”

“A lot better this morning. I’m back home now.” He ran a hand over his face.

“Why so grumpy?”

“Because I cancelled a date last night to watch Arthur throw up all over himself numerous times and realise I’d rather be cleaning up his sick than on a date with someone else, and I’m a knob,” Merlin snapped.

There was a long pause. “Go and have a bite to eat, you hangry little man.”

“I’m not hungry, I’m an idiot,” Merlin snapped again.

“Go and have a bite to eat and ring me back, so we can talk when you feel better and I’ve got all the ‘I told you so’s out of my system.”

“Fine,” Merlin said, and hung up, and ate, and did feel vaguely more human; and rang Gwaine back, who said, far too brightly, “I told you about the vegetable garden and the Labrador.”

“You said you were going to get all of the ‘I told you so’s out of your system whilst I ate.”

“It was just the one left over. Really, though, mate, I can’t believe you didn’t notice earlier. You registered for his and his hand towels and matching hoof testers months ago.”

“Fuck off,” Merlin said. “I don’t want to talk about it, actually.”

“Well, look, what business has he got anyway, being heterosexual?” Gwaine asked, sounding offended.

Merlin rubbed his forehead tiredly. “People are heterosexual. You’re heterosexual. It’s not like he did it to spite me.”

“Right, but if you were like, ‘Gwaine, I’m mad for you’, I’d give it my best go, because you deserve that. I’d trust that you could show me a good time, and not let my personal preferences get in the way.”

“I’ll be sure and tell him that. ‘Don’t you concern yourself with the straight thing; I can give you such a good dicking you’ll forget all about it.’” He took a sip of his cold tea. “Tell me about that mare you mentioned yesterday; how’s she doing?”

“It was a retained foetal membrane.”

“Fuck me, really?”

“Yeah; owners hadn’t a clue what they were doing. First foal; first horse. Had no idea there was anything supposed to come out of her, just noticed she was still acting like she was in labour long after she was in labour and clocked something wasn’t right.”

“They didn’t know about placentas? Do they not have children?”

“Five of them,” Gwaine said. “Didn’t know horses had the same thing.”

“What did they think the foal was doing in there? Just patiently waiting to get out and get life-sustaining nutrients?” Merlin asked, genuinely confused.

“Dunno, mate.”

He was still angry next day, because Morgana was back from York, and absolutely resplendent; and he was still in love with Arthur. And Arthur, though Merlin had prompted him by text about the new foal which had just been born, did not even emerge from the office, but kept himself battened down tight in it, though Gwen was coming and going, to mind the phones, and baby talk the new baby. Merlin looked round from the paddock in which he was monitoring mother and child every time the office door went, and saw always it was Gwen with her hands balled up under her chin, as if she were spotting the colt for the first time all over again, and could not bear there was anything so wibbly.

“I just love foaling season. He’s so darling, my God. Is he all right? Has it all gone well? He’s healthy?” she asked, as if she were the mother herself.

“It’s gone perfectly, Gwen, don’t worry. She didn’t even need me.”

“Oh good; I was worried about her. She’s a new mum.” She leant on the fence beside him with her hands clasped under her chin, giving the foal the same heart eyes he apparently had been giving to Arthur, from ignorant to ignoramus. Then, as if she had read his stupid little mind, which couldn’t have taken very long, Gwen added, “It’s been very busy today, and he’s still a bit under the weather, but I’m sure Arthur will be out any minute.”

“He won’t be,” Morgana said, leaning on the fence on the other side of him. “He’s hideously embarrassed you saw him throw up.”

There was a black rage in Merlin. He pictured the numpty in his office, grieving his dignity, and found that the image was endearing. He was too angry with himself even to speak. There was Morgana beside him in the sunlight, showing what fine breeding, and fine skincare could accomplish in concert, and he was hung up on some brittle heterosexual, humiliated to have been human. He decided it would need to be taken out on someone; and naturally decided upon Arthur, who deserved it for having overthrown his reason. He banged into the office, and said loudly, “Don’t be so precious; could have been coming out the other end.”

Arthur, who had been lurking in a cup of tea, staring very listlessly into it, snapped up his head. “What?”

“Look, next time there’s vomit coming out my nose, you can clean it up, and then we’ll be even. You going to hold Beezlebub for me, or am I going to be kicked to death because you’re too busy hiding in here all day?”

“He’s not evil, he’s just misunderstood, and I am not hiding.”

“Morgana said you were embarrassed I saw you throw up.”

“Morgana’s a liar!” Arthur snapped.

“Just come and help me with the horse, you tit.”

“I’ve my tea to finish,” Arthur said peevishly. 

And Merlin, knackered, frustrated, rejected, looking at the miserable face under the untidy fringe, and suddenly feeling that it pained him to see it when he was so near to his revelation, said sharply, “Fuck’s sake, never mind; I’ll get Percival to do it.”

But Arthur left the tea to make itself unpresentable, and followed him out into the day with his hands in his pockets; silently, and with a vague air of malice; and his hands settled the offender, who his first day on witnessing Merlin had bitten him without warning, and now whenever he was within sight raised the ominous lip, to show he was frothing to do it again. They did not talk, aside from those ambiguous murmurings which adults use to soothe the animated animal, or infant, and parted after he had finished the examination with a little stunted muttering at the truck. 

And he crept that night into the dark house, at nearly midnight after a bad job, taking off his boots in the entryway, and going on careful tread up the stairs to the loft, undressed and assembled his freezing limbs under the shower head, and had a little cry, because he had had to put down a horse alone, and he would have liked to have had the warm body beside him in the paddock, or afterward in the bed; and when he came to it, there was only the lumpen pillow, making a shape but not a warmth like a body.

Chapter Text

But Merlin had to get on with the feeling, as if it were very normal; as if he were very normal. He tried to help out the feeling by going more and more into the field alone, and leaving the texts to collect unreciprocated in their chat; but he saw on going out to the Pendragons’ that Arthur, on noticing Merlin talking to Lancelot, or Percival, or Elyan, instead of talking to him, gave him a kind of sad Dachshund look, and then Merlin, who had been making some very fine decisions, suddenly cancelled his plans with a woman who was actually attracted to him, and took Arthur, instead of her, out to the pub for beers. 

He could not hold out on the field work either. There was a vastness to the farms he visited which made him feel alone with the elements. Without the rain gear which Arthur brought with complaints for him, without the tea to be split, without the face wet with rain or sweat looking at him fondly or in exasperation, he felt the work was harder than it ought to be, that it wore on him more, that he came home, more muddy, more wet, more tired, more out of pace with the human world, which did not understand why he cared so much that there had been a prolapsed sheep, or lame cow. He had the farmers to talk to, or their attentive daughters; but he felt still he was outside them, who were worried for the business, whilst he was worried for the soul. No one wanted to listen to their veterinarian over a pint whilst he mourned a lamb he had spent half a day in some muck trying to save; and though kind owners had brought him hot tea and dinner when there was weather as miserable as his task, they had not spent the night on a barn floor with him resuscitating a foal and guarding it into the day: not in wellies, or jumpers, never mind 1500 quid worth of suit. So he went on stupidly against his own interests, taking out Arthur when he had time, and not only to the farms. In the evenings, when they had finished up at the Pendragons’, or some other needful facility, they could be found down the pub, talking over stew or blood sausage, sometimes till Morgana rang to see were they dead in some dyke. 

He had thought to date his way out of the feelings; or at least to refocus them: but he was not doing that either. He had cancelled the one date to look after Arthur whilst he was sick, and another simply to be with him. He was spending almost more time with Arthur than he was spending with himself; or very nearly the same, since they were together most of his conscious hours: and those that remained he spent justifying himself, whilst Gwaine said such reasonable and unappealing things as, “Mate, I just don’t want to see you hurt.”

“It’s fine. I’ll just keep him company till he marries some heiress, and then I’ll die alone.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Gwaine said.

“I’m just taking the piss. I’ll get over it,” Merlin said.

But he was not getting over it. He felt at times that he had come to the apex of it; that he must have gone as far as he could, and finally, like a sickness, now was in the trundling recovery. Then Arthur smiled at him over a lamb he was bottle feeding, or touched him, very briefly, and almost abashedly, on his shoulder after a wretched day, and he felt that he was deeply fucked: and not to satisfaction. It was a very sad kind of fuck. He would have told it nicely, after dressing, that it was all to be a regrettable one-off. 

He was not getting over it, but he was getting on with it. He was resigned to pitifulness, and covering up the pitifulness, with some jeering, and examples of men he would rail, which he showed to Arthur whenever he felt that the love had come up in his throat, and he was in danger of vomiting it everywhere. He showed Arthur what men were in his DMs with no resemblance to Arthur, though the tepid flirtation he had been carrying on was with a bloke of suspicious resemblance. 

Then his mum came down for the week, and ruined what pathetic progress he had made, by wheedling out of him a promise to see about taking her round to the farm. She had come down on a Sunday, and every moment she was out of Gaius’ presence, prodded him about seeing the Pendragons’ marvellous facilities.

“You don’t give a fuck about horse breeding, mum. You want to size up Arthur.”

She whacked him with the spoon she was holding. “Mind your language, you cock.”

“Mind yours,” he said, and dodged her next swing. “It’s a massive, busy farm. Arthur doesn’t have time to shuttle you round,” he insisted, though Arthur took prospective clients round the farm all the time, and even, once, a group of first years whose teacher had arranged for a visit.

He had not intended even asking; but his mum was so aggravating he gave in, on Tuesday, and said whilst they were out to see Princess once more, thankfully for ringworm, instead of colic, “Erm, my mum is in town all week, and she was wondering if she could come round and see the farm. You can say no. She’s just nosy; she’s heard me talk about it a lot.”

“You talk about the farm?” Arthur asked, retrieving Merlin’s bag from the backseat. 

“I do spend somewhat of a good portion of my time there, so, yeah, I have mentioned it a time or two. You can say no,” he repeated, leaning on the last sentence, so that Arthur would know to prioritise it. 

Arthur pursed his lips. “It would be interesting to meet the woman who survived raising you.” He darted a glance sideways at Merlin. “Can’t imagine what you’ve told her about me, though.”

“Not much,” Merlin blatantly lied. “I mean, I’ve mentioned you; she knows Morgana has a brother.”

“You talk to her about Morgana?” Arthur blurted in outrage. 

“Yeah. Trying to figure out how to bring your sister round to accepting a poor, humble veterinarian who has only good looks, and wit, and stuff you don’t want to hear about as her brother to offer her. Mums are good for that kind of advice.”

Arthur punched him in the arm.

“Ow! Don’t do that; I’m going to be family, soon as I can talk your sister round. I mean to be buried on your property with the rest of the luckiest bastards in the world. I’ll make a great first husband for her.”

“Merlin and Arthur!” Maddie called out to them from the barn, and Merlin, waving to her, started up the drive. “Anyway, I’ll tell mum she can see the farm some other time.”

“No, bring her round,” Arthur said. “I need to counteract whatever propaganda you’ve been feeding her about Morgana.”

So Arthur did not save him, as might have been expected, and on Wednesday, because she could not be put off any longer, he drove her out after work, and dinner, hoping to impose himself at an inconvenient hour, and hurry along the tour. But when he pulled into the drive, he saw Arthur was already waiting near one of the barns with his hands in his pockets, and his mum, immediately, blurted out, “Oh, is that him? Merlin, he’s so handsome!”

Merlin rubbed the bridge of his nose.

“Oh he’s so nicely dressed.”

“He dresses like that all the time,” Merlin replied, shutting off the truck. “Could you not embarrass me, please? I have to work with him every day.”

“Oh, that’s so darling, he looks so nervous, Merlin. Oh, he looks so lovely. Is he lovely?”

“No,” Merlin said. 

His mum hit him in the shoulder with the back of her hand. “Don’t be such a grump. Honestly, Merlin. He’s got all turned out to meet your mum, and you’re sitting here like a lump. Haven’t you got nicer trousers you could have worn?”

“Mum.”

It was not any better, out of the truck. She got out as Arthur was walking down the drive to meet them, shut the door, and called out, “It’s so lovely to meet you, Arthur. I’m Hunith. It’s absolutely lovely here; I can see why I can never get him back home.” His mum would have hugged him; but Arthur, who very obviously was extremely nervous, stuck out his hand, possibly in a panic, and replied, “Hunith. Lovely to meet you too. I’m Arthur Pendragon.”

Merlin could tell she was charmed by the handshake. Arthur was accidentally endearing himself to her, by being so worked up for the meeting, and now Merlin would have to hear all the drive home about his wedding tuxedo.

Morgana emerged from one of the barns whilst Arthur, with his hands back in his pockets, was making small chat, loosening up a bit as he went, and clearly in the process of imprinting; and calling out, “Hello! You must be Merlin’s mum,” she gave his mum the hug which Arthur’s anxiety had denied her, saying as they pulled back, “We adore your son. He’s so good with the horses. Are you going to have Arthur take you round?”

Merlin decided it would be less awkward to be absent. He had thought on the way over to dog his mum’s heels, monitoring her for slip-ups, and speeding the experience along so that it was over before it was harmful; and now realising if there was anything humiliating to be said, it would be said whether he was there or not, decided he would rather clean up afterward, than be present for the blunder. He left them on the pretence that he wanted to look over the foals, though he was scolded, by Morgana and his mum, for working when he was meant to be visiting, and sloped off with his hands in his pockets one direction, whilst the rest of the party headed off in another. He was forced, for torturous minutes, to pretend he had anything to do for some perfectly healthy foals, till Gwen spotted him, and came out to accompany him through his facade.

It was just gone 8.00 before his mum was returned to him, quite clearly charmed, though he could not see how Arthur had done it with only his own personality and face. Merlin, before he got in the truck, briefly conferred with Arthur on what time he was to pick him up next morning for the rounds; and then, getting in, said, after the doors were all safely shut, and his mum was belting herself in, “Well?”

“I love him, Merlin.”

Merlin sighed. “Am I going to be able to look him in the eye next time I see him? Or did you give him the boyfriend interrogation?”

“My darling boy,” she said, and cupped his face in her hands, and smiled fondly at him, stroking his cheek a bit. “You are thick as shit.”

He pulled back a little, looking at her in confusion, and starting the truck. “Ok?”

“He likes you.”

“No he doesn’t.”

She tilted her head in exasperation. “Merlin. He dressed up to meet your mum--”

“No he didn’t. That’s how he dresses for work.”

“He wears a tie and cologne for working in a barn?”

“He works in an office.” He scratched the back of his neck, and turned out of the drive, onto the road.

“Merlin. If we’d had him over to mine, he’d have brought me flowers and done all the washing-up. He was trying to impress me.” 

“I’m sure he was. I told you about his mum dying when he was a baby. He’s never had a mum, and so he has a bit of a thing about mums. That’s all. He just wants someone’s mum to like him.”

There was a long pause, whilst she digested that he was correct, and she had gotten ahead of herself. Then she said: “That’s very sad. But it’s not why he was trying to impress me.”

“Mum.”

What he had not told his mum, because it seemed a betrayal, was that Arthur was lonely; that he had a shit father, and shit self-esteem; that he had thrown himself bodily into the friendship for no other reason than it was there, and he was not to be alone. But she had raised a little hope in him, and so he looked, in the days following, for any faltering in the heterosexuality: and found, predictably, that Arthur was the same clueless straight, bumbling along in the presence of Merlin’s love, accidentally inciting it, by smiling at him, or clapping his shoulder, or breathing, whilst Merlin burnt up silently in his stupidity. 

Arthur wanted to know, in the days following, nothing about Merlin, but all about his mother, beginning with a little unsubtle probing the day after their meeting, which he opened by saying, “So, is your mother enjoying her stay?”

“Yeah.”

“Did she enjoy the farm?”

“Yeah.”

“When’s she heading back?”

“Thursday.”

“Should take her round to the chocolate shop before she goes.”

“I will.”

And finally, after noticeably working himself up to the question, with a lot of unnecessary dithering round the halter he was gripping: “Did she say anything about me?”

“Yeah. But I won’t repeat it because it’s all hideous lies.”

“What kind of lies?” Arthur asked.

“Hand me the hoof tester.” Arthur did; and Merlin, returning to his task, tried to absorb himself in it, and so end that dangerous line of questioning. 

But Arthur would not have it. “What did she say?”

Merlin squinted up at him. “She thinks you’re lovely. I told her the truth, of course, but she wouldn’t listen.”

“So she has better taste than her son. That’s a relief. Maybe the insanity isn’t hereditary then, or it comes from the other side of the family.” 

Merlin scraped a bit at Lucky’s hoof. “Oh, no, it’s hereditary, and all from her. Mum’s been arrested nearly as much as I have.”

There was a long pause. “How many times have you been arrested?”

“Dunno. Three or four? I think? Mum was there for two of them.” He moved the hoof tester carefully along, inch by inch, working from heel to heel, and remarking her reactions, or lack thereof. “Environmental protests. And immigration. That sort of thing.”

“Blocking the roads and such?”

“Not exactly.”

“What did you do?” Arthur asked, giving up altogether the pretence of minding the horse, and openly staring at him.

“Smashed an egg in that cunt Rishi Sunak’s face and was arrested for assault. Erm…then there was the protest outside Parliament, that was about climate change. It was mostly laid-back for a bit, then the coppers started harassing people.”

“And you…rugby tackled the lot of them, I’m assuming?”

“I only yelled at them a bit, the cream puffs.”

“Right. What else?”

“I blocked an immigration raid. There were a few of us; there was a long stand-off between us and the police, and eventually they arrested us for public order offences. But the blokes they were detaining got released. Mum was there too, handing out water and snacks and whatnot to the protestors.”

“And they arrested her for that?” Arthur asked, arching his eyebrow.

“Oh, no, they arrested her for threatening a government official. I laid under the immigration van and told them they’d have to run me over if they wanted to take them off, and they threatened me, and mum came blazing in and said if there was a single hair touched on my head, she’d smash up their bloody van and the lot of them afterward.”

Arthur stared at him. “You’re actually mad, aren’t you?”

“Yeah.” He dimpled.

“Did you put that in your Match.com profile?”

“No, I usually trot that sort of thing out on the third date or thereabouts. By then they already know what a good kisser I am, and it doesn’t matter.”

Arthur looked away. “Right. I don’t think anyone’s that good a kisser, but keep telling yourself what you have to.”

“Oh, I am, trust me,” Merlin said; and because he had lost his brain in an unfortunate accident, added, “You’d switch teams for me.”

Arthur stared at him. And Merlin, with pounding heart, went on attending to the hoofs, to show he had meant it as a passing jest; that it was not a come-on, but merely a put-on.

“I like to think if I were going to cross the divide, it would take more than you,” Arthur replied at last.

But actually Arthur had contemplated, briefly, crossing the divide for exactly that unesteemed personage; he had taken out his feelings after the illness, looked at them, and put them away once more. He had seen they were messy, and hurtful, and had not wanted to know them anymore. And they came out regardless, whenever Merlin was showing him the Match.com profile, with people queuing to fuck him, or chatting up clients, or Morgana; and once after a reluctant return to the rugby pitch, because they were short a man, and Arthur had had to put aside his complex emotions on incidental erections, he realised Merlin and one of the blokes were getting on , and felt that he would be sick. 

He tried out some mental acrobatics which he found to be satisfactory in getting him through the trouble of noticing, whilst identifying as heterosexual, that Merlin’s shoulders were quite broad, or his hands rather large, or his dimples rather distracting. He could simply say to himself that it was a side effect of being comfortable in one’s sexuality; that one could notice such things, precisely because one was straight: and so for a while he was able to continue on in artificial bliss, chalking up the fact that it bothered him that occasionally Merlin took off his trousers in front of him because he was concerned he would be cold, and attributing his dwelling on the muscles which worked under Merlin’s shirt when they were assisting a calving to the athlete’s appreciation for the able body. And though it was a more complicated manoeuvre, he got himself also through imagining, whilst Merlin was extolling his own kissing, what proof of his claims could be enacted against the stall door. He pictured Merlin sometimes whilst showering, because such are the idle dreams of men with nothing more interesting to look at than some cream tiling; and when the weather showed an inclination to summer, hoped that he would take off his shirt for the annual exams, only because it would be more comfortable for him.

Then one Saturday whilst he was watching Netflix with some wine, his phone buzzed on the sofa beside him, and he unlocked the screen to find that Merlin had sent him a picture of an erect penis: presumably, his erect penis. Arthur stared blankly at it. As a man with his own penis, and therefore a proficient judge of them, he determined it was a good one. It rose from some but not too much hair, and looked to be perfect for taking: not awkwardly-shaped, nor thin, nor short, nor too much of the inverse: simply a well-made piece, if you will, of fulfilling but not overwhelming dimensions which he could have had comfortably, kneeling or on his back begging. There was no time for those grand mental feats which would have brought him safely beyond revelation; his imagination came upon him too suddenly. He was on the sofa, with the phone going: and then he was on his knees, with the hand in the photo feeding him inch by inch the hard white flesh.

He flipped the phone over on its face. He took another drink of the wine, to see if it would help the fact that suddenly he was uncomfortable, though he was wearing loose joggers. It did not; he finished the wine, to see if there was any relief in that, set the glass aside on the table, rubbed his face, sat back, rubbed his fringe, sat forward once more, with his hands clasped between his knees, and felt the phone go again. He stared at it. He did not know what to expect from it. He felt it was a kind of living thing beside him; possibly a dangerous one. 

It vibrated again, and he snatched it, and fumbled at it, and unlocked the screen to find there were two follow-up texts, deflating him; though not, unfortunately, literally.

WOW. That was a hell of a fail. That was not supposed to go to you.

And the shattering companion: Sorry. I was texting a bloke called Archer and didn’t check the names closely enough on my chats.

Arthur rubbed his face again. It had been too much to expect that Merlin had had some kind of revelation about his personal preferences; that he had gone against his inclinations to madness and recognised that if he wanted men, he had better want Arthur. But of course he was still a lunatic; and Arthur was sat in the dark, feeling altogether stupid, and even dirty, for having been aroused by the image of a mate. Merlin had established and reiterated those platonic ties which kept Arthur far farther than penis-length: and now like the creeper he had obliterated them by sitting alone in the dark, and picturing parts of Merlin in parts of him.

His phone buzzed again. Could you respond so I know I haven’t just bollixed things? I swear I am not a pervert and did not mean to send that to you. And, look, if I crossed a line the other day with the comment about you switching teams, I’m sorry. I was only joking. If I ever make you uncomfortable, just tell me to fuck off. I don’t mean it. I just let my mouth get ahead of me.

Arthur pressed the heel of his hand into his eye. He realised, seeing the texts, seeing that the picture had been sent in error, that the joke had been made in pure jest, that there had been no delicate testing of the waters, that he had never meant Arthur for anything more than a friend, that he was actually, truly, not mostly attracted to women, not too busy for dating, not uninterested in sexual pursuit or attainment, but simply, really, not attracted to Arthur: and felt that his eyes and his throat were a bit hot. He had not known, till he thought there was some reciprocation, if an inappropriate, shocking, and ill-advised one, that there was so much for Merlin to reciprocate. He was sat in the dark, in front of Bridgerton, verging on tears because he had had an unsolicited dick pic, and felt that he was an incomparable idiot. He wanted Morgana, because he could not have his mother; but she was in her own home, on a bollocks night, separated from him by pastures as nasty as the rain could make them: and he was frightened that any sympathy would bring up the hotness in his throat, out into where it was unbearable.

Archer’s a twat’s name, isn’t it? he replied with great restraint.

Don’t know yet. Seems a decent enough bloke.

Well, I would hope so, since you’re already sending him naked pictures. Arthur hoped there was enough scorn in it. He was on that tremulous pendulum whose only arc is between grief and rage.

It’s only a bit of sexting. If he’s a twat I got off with once or twice, I’ll live. Wouldn’t be the first time.

Arthur wondered if he should throw the phone. You’ve already slept with him? How long have you even known him? You’ve never mentioned him till now.

I haven’t slept with him, I’ve sexted with him; that’s what the dick pic was for. You send slutty texts back and forth, you get off. You should try it some time. No one will notice the stick up your arse if all they can see is your dick.

Arthur stared at the phone in his numb hand. 

Not with me. Just to clarify. That also wasn’t me trying it on. Just to make that clear. Since you did just see my penis.

Are you still going to send it to him? Arthur asked.

Yeah. It’s not like I’m going to get anything out of sending it to you. The whole point was to send it to someone who will tell me what he wants to do to it.

Arthur put the phone down next to his thigh. He rubbed the palm of his hand with his thumb. He stared at the screen, till it shut off. There was the sudden wild urge in him to say what he had thought on first seeing the picture; to seize the phone, and type out, whilst he was well ahead of his common sense, What if I told you what I want to do to it?

But Merlin swept in, to save him from his absurdity: Unless you think there’s something wrong with it. The picture, I mean; not my dick.

Well, it’s yours , Arthur replied. Which already is a point against it. And the lighting’s rather rubbish.

Sorry, I’m not going to leg it down to the sitting room where there’s better lighting and get out my cock where God and Gaius could see me. Imagine him walking in to find me, dick in hand, like, ‘Sorry; just getting some shots for my internet lover.’

Now he’s your lover?

I’m just trying to think of words in his old man vocabulary. ‘Digital fuck buddy’ probably doesn’t mean anything to him.

Arthur shut off the telly. Why do you need a ‘digital fuck buddy’ anyway? Can’t you get the real thing? Or do people show up for your dates, take one look at your ears, and leave?

Do you have a fetish or something?

Arthur blurted out, “What?” aloud, jolting forward in his discomfiture, and banging his knee on the table. “Fuck!” What on EARTH are you talking about?

Nobody else mentions my ears. Nobody notices them. They stick out a bit; so what. So unless that’s like what you’re into, or something, I don’t know why you’d even notice them.

I am NOT an ear fetishist!! That’s not even a thing, Merlin.

It’s a thing somewhere on the internet.

Well, it’s not MY thing.

“What is your thing?” Merlin asked Monday morning when they were going over that day’s plans in Arthur’s office, out of the rain, and in where the tea was accessible. 

“What?”

“I have to disclose all this stuff about my love life and what I like and what kind of lighting I’m using in my dick pics, and you’ve never even said what your deal is.”

“What do you mean, what my deal is?” Arthur asked. He was beginning to sweat, though the rain had moved the day firmly into jacket territory. Merlin was still wearing his, though the office was temperate, leaning his hip on the desk, and forcing Arthur to notice, after he had made him look at his penis, that it was attached to some very long and not unmuscular legs. 

“What kind of women are you into?”

“I don’t know,” Arthur said, and looked back at his laptop.

“What do you mean, you don’t know? Don’t you have several ex-girlfriends?”

“Not several; some of us aren’t slags,” Arthur replied pleasantly.

“Just because I send pictures of my dick to strange men on the internet is no reason to slut shame me. So you’ve dated several women, and you don’t know what your type is?”

“Ones who don’t talk my ear off,” he said, just for the pleasure of being rude, closing out the program he was in, and leaning back in his chair. “Tell me we’re not going out to Simmons’ today, in that.”

“Of course we are. You know on the most miserable days of existence, we’ll be chasing round after Satan’s right hand cow whilst he tells us from the comfort of the shed how we’re doing it wrong. And come on,” he prompted, leaning a little over the desk, toward Arthur. “Blondes? Brunettes? I bet it’s brunettes. I still say you ought to have asked out Freya, by the way. She’s really nice. She could have been a good influence on you.”

Arthur pulled back slightly. “Brunettes,” he said, sourly. “Stupid ones.”

“Oh, so they don’t notice about your face? Good idea.”

“They don’t seem to notice anything, actually,” Arthur replied, with maximum bitterness.

They were back to texting that evening, through supper, and sporadically throughout the book Arthur was reading, in which he had halted, and then forced himself on, at grating intervals, for the sake of having finished the thing. 

Good video on white line disease , Merlin sent him, and a link. Also, I have an extra copy of the Merck Veterinary Manual lying about, if you want it. 

Yeah.

Ok; I’ll bring it round tomorrow. Also, I didn’t send the pic to Archer. Think you were right about the lighting.

Would you say that again? The bit about me being right, I mean.

Yeah, you should savour that. I bet it’s the first time you’ve ever been right about anything in your life.

Arthur rolled his eyes, and rolled over in the bed, onto his stomach. What are you up to tonight, then?

Trying to take another picture. No, I’m joking. Just pissing about on my phone.

Be careful with that. Last time you pissed about on your phone, it was traumatic for me.

Was it? Never had any complaints before.

That’s because you’ve rubbish taste and I doubt anyone you’ve ever pulled is exactly a connoisseur. 

He had barely sent the text when his phone went; and he answered it to hear Merlin laughing. “A connoisseur of penises? No one’s a connoisseur of penises; they’re ridiculous.”

“You’re the one who’s attracted to them,” Arthur retorted, very neatly ignoring that only nights ago he had had an erection on account of them; or at least on account of one of them.

“Not to them, really, just to what they do,” Merlin replied casually, and dried out Arthur’s mouth. He cleared his throat with difficulty. 

“I’ll take your word on it.”

“How was Blackberry when you checked her tonight?”

“Doing well.”

“Good. Just keep an eye on her, and ring me, any time, if there are any issues. Bit worried about how the foaling’s going to come off, but if we just keep an eye on her, it’ll be fine. You turning in soon?”

“Think so. Trying to get through this rubbish book, and I just can’t get any farther.”

“What is it?”

“Some detective novel. ‘A Great Deliverance.’ By Elizabeth George. Set in Keldale; thought I might like it for that reason.”

“Oh, yeah, that book’s arse,” Merlin said. “Chuck it in the bin, trust me.”

“I guess I could trust your taste in literature, if not in dodgy romantic preferences.”

“Oh, yeah, definitely don’t trust those.”

Blackberry foaled at 3.03 on a Saturday, poorly enough for one of the grooms to rouse him, and for him to rouse Merlin, who appeared, unshaven, and in woolly hat, as Arthur, very nearly in tears, made another try at getting hold of the lower jaw, and bringing the head up into proper position. “The head’s down to one side, and I can’t get hold of it,” he said thickly; and Merlin touched his shoulder and gloved up, and said, “It’s all right; let me have a go. How long since labour’s started?” he asked Percival, who was holding her, lubing up his arm.

“Twenty minutes at least,” Percival said.

“All right; we’ll just go quickly then. Top job, mum; I know you’re tired. We’ll have your baby out in just a minute, then, yeah?”

But he was struggling, Arthur could tell, and there was sweat standing out on his forehead, though it was mizzling, and miserable. “She’s contracting really hard,” he said tightly, his face contracting itself when she bore down on him. “You tried with a rope?”

“Yes,” Arthur said. 

“Ok. Give it here. I’ll have another go with it. If I can’t get it, I think we’re going to have to get her down to the clinic for an emergency c-section.”

Arthur’s stomach dropped. He handed over the rope blindly, and stood back, out of the way, where he ought to have stayed in the first place. Now he had properly bollixed it, Merlin had only an infinitesimal window between living and death; and whether the latter was only to take the foal, or mother as well, was to be the province of gods. “Lancelot, bring one of the trailers round, in case we have to load her up quickly. Arthur, ring Gaius. Tell him to get the surgical suite ready. It mightn’t come to it, but if it does, we want to make sure everything’s ready to go as soon as we need it.”

But within a few minutes came the cry that stopped and restarted his heart: “I’ve got it! I’ve got it!” He held out his free hand. “Pass me the chains. Now . Arthur, on the other leg. We’ve got to get him out immediately. Pull as hard as you can when I say.” And Arthur did, straining in the bedding with the sturdy shoulder against his own, swearing as she paused, exhausted, and there was no help for them but the help they gave to one another. “Go on; go on,” Merlin said. “Come on ,” he said between his teeth. “Fuck, fuck--there it is!” And he dropped into the straw, almost simultaneously as the words dropped from his mouth, and tickling the little motionless nostril with a piece of straw, paused for the breath which the foal ought to have drawn; and then slapped it on the ribcage. Gently, he rolled the poor thing onto its side, extended the head and neck, and holding mouth and one nostril shut, began to blow into the other. Arthur watched with his fist to his mouth the little chest rise, and fall, that nasty simulacrum of living which brings hope to the actual living. Then he saw that Merlin had sat back. He saw that he was standing; and then there were the strong arms round his shoulders, and the big hands clapping him all about, and the glowing face mere inches from his own. There was the foal, breathing at their feet, and Merlin hugging him about it.

“Brilliant,” Percival said, his face almost as bright as Merlin’s, and took Merlin by the shoulders as he let go of Arthur, and shook him with friendly violence. 

“Did I hurt her when I was trying to get him out?” Arthur asked as Merlin went round to check on her, taking over from Percival, who had gone off to tell Lancelot they wouldn’t be needing the trailer, and slipping off the halter when Merlin was finished with lumbering hands which bollixed undoing the buckle, and bollixed taking it down from her ears, and bollixed getting it over her nose. He banged her head about every which way, and then sat down in the corner of the stall, because he had realised the trembling was not only in his hands.

“Hey,” Merlin said, discarding the plastic sleeve, and getting clear of the mother as she turned round to welcome her child. “Hey, hey, hey, what’s wrong? Here you’ve got a live foal, and a live mum, getting on grand because of you, and you’re going to sit here and have a little breakdown about it?” He crouched in front of Arthur, bracing his hands on Arthur’s knees for balance. He wiggled them a little in his warm palms. “You didn’t hurt her. You did brilliant.”

“I didn’t get him out. He would have smothered if you hadn’t been here.”

“And I barely got him out, and only then because you were helping. It’s a tricky position to correct. You didn’t do anything wrong, Arthur. You did exactly what you should have.”

“Did I?” he asked, pathetically, because it was 3.00 in the morning, and he was cold, and tired, and he had held a life in his hands.

“Yeah,” Merlin said. “I’m proud of you. And I’m glad the horses have someone who cares so much.”

“Oh,” Arthur said, and realised that he was thoroughly, wholly, fucked.

He was very stoic about it. He would have to grow old with the love, and die of it, which he was prepared staidly to do; though he had to let out a bit of it, by telling who could be trusted with it. Unfortunately, that was Morgana, who responded as irrationally as could be expected, by saying, after he had awkwardly, on his fourth attempt, announced, over their Friday dinner, “I think I might have feelings for Merlin”, “No you don’t.”

Arthur bristled. “You can’t tell me what I think!”

“Of course not, considering you don’t do it. But you don’t ‘think’ you have feelings for him, you’re arse over tit and you’ve finally noticed, or you wouldn’t have said anything at all.”

“You’re not surprised?” Arthur demanded.

And Morgana, almost gently, laid her hand over his hand, and said, “Arthur. You dear, sweet, daft, plank. You’ve been living in his back pocket for several months. And I found his dick picture on your phone.”

“Stop going through my phone!” he snapped. 

“You don’t have to get so touchy about it; congratulations, it’s very nice.”

“He didn’t send it to me, he sent it by accident. It was meant to go to some man he met online.”

“Did you send him one back?” Morgana asked calmly, taking the wine glass he handed to her.

“No! You don’t reciprocate accidental dick pictures.”

“How are you meant to compete with some man who’s cosying up to him with naughty texts whilst you’re an old maid?” she demanded. 

“I am not an old maid, and are you actually suggesting I send him lewd photos out of the blue, just because some man online is doing it?”

“Firstly, I suggest you not refer to them as ‘lewd photos’ because it makes you sound like a granny. Secondly, it’s not out of the blue; he sent you one first.”

“Accidentally. And I didn’t tell you this to talk about--dick pictures, I told you because--because I just needed to say it,” he trailed off miserably. “I’m not going to do anything about it.”

“How about, instead of being a wet dishrag, prepared to annoy me about this for the rest of our lives because you’re too much of a sad, undescended testicle to take the initiative, you ask him out.”

“I am not going to ask him out. He has made it very clear he’s not interested.”

“Oh my God; I thought you were the denser of the two of you.”

“I’m not!” he cried. “He’s--”

“Just ask him out, Arthur. He’ll change his tune right quick.”

He eyed her suspiciously. “Why do you think that?”

“Because I could have half my brain removed and still be smarter than the two of you combined. If he’s said you’re not his type or that he’s no interest in you or whatever, it’s because for some reason he thinks you might be smart enough to notice he has a massive, raging crush on you that’s embarrassingly obvious to everyone except you.”

“So he didn’t tell you that,” Arthur confirmed. “You’re just assuming. Last time you assumed someone liked me was Year 10, and I got laughed at by all her friends when I asked her out.”

“Oh no, I knew she didn’t like you, I was being mean because you were a wretched little tosser at fourteen. And her friends laughed at you because you’re the most awkward, cringey loser there ever was when it comes to interacting with women. You have all the charisma of that man I dated once who fell asleep whilst we were at the cinema, do you remember him?”

Arthur scowled at her. 

She took an unconcerned sip of her wine. “I’d warn him off because he doesn’t deserve that, but he’s had plenty of time to realise what a massive knob you are, and still hasn’t been deterred, so it’s on no one but him.”

“I’m not asking him out.”

“Fine. Be a miserable, sodden old cow, then, and die alone. I won’t be coming round to your sad bachelor flat to watch you internet stalk his wife and photoshop your head onto all her pictures, by the way. You’ll have to eat pizza for the fifth night in a row and whinge about the one that got away to someone else. Gwen; she’s nice enough to listen to it and not tell you to sod off.”

“I’m not asking him out,” he snapped.

“If I were to ask him out,” he said to her, three days later, after a good think on it, and some fraught close contact in a frigid milking shed, “how would I even go about that?”

“Oh, that’s a tough one.” She thought for a moment, pulling her lips this way and that. “I’ve heard something like, ‘Would you go on a date with me?’ will do it, but that seems a bit out there, so I’d only try it if you’re really desperate.”

Arthur scowled at her again. “Very helpful.”

“I know.” She beamed at him. “I don’t know what you’d do without me, really.”

He was not really considering it; but it had passed through his mind, in that idle, finicking way of intrusive thoughts, which come and go beneath the surface of the mind like salmon in water, that theoretically, hypothetically, if ever he got some inkling that Merlin was possibly not as stupid as he seemed, was Arthur to act on it, and how was he to act on it. But there were no inklings; and though it felt for a moment that the world had shifted in its traces, they went on in the same old plodding. If Merlin changed in front of him, Arthur averted his eyes; and if he chatted up some loose housewife whose cow was not nearly so sick as she’d claimed, Arthur helped him out of the trouble, by putting his arm round the broad shoulders, and glaring at their hopeful molester; the same cyclical living, with only a little self-awareness to flavour it. Now he knew why he was averting his eyes, and seething over the housewife, and could do nothing more than some more textured brooding, with layers to it, which previously he had never explored, to save himself from knowledge.

Summer was getting on, though it was not always noticeable, to men whose outings sometimes included bad calvings in the bad hours of the morning, when there ought to have been only things foul or phantom abroad in the darkness; and he was getting on as well with the new revelations, mostly by doggedly ignoring them. He found it was best not to look his sexuality in the eye. It was bad enough to have fallen for Merlin, a monstrous thing to have done to his intelligence; and there was no need to worsen it by following the thread of his attraction back to its turbulent source, which had been striving all its childhood and manhood to make him a better son for the heritage. He would have had to confront his own prehistory. That murky time which for the thirty-something can be summarised merely as the Foetus Years  (0-23) would have to be gone into, and rummaged round in, and things brought out which he did not like to see. He would have to remember the video he had been caught with at sixteen, a not entirely heterosexual depiction of lovemaking, which had embarrassed him, but worse than that had embarrassed his father; and afterward the long toiling (and it had felt like toiling) for devotion to the acceptable sex. So he was attracted to Merlin, a singular man: no plurality to be indicative of his preferences, but merely the one, lone, individual aberration, who had ruined what was some otherwise (almost) immaculate heterosexuality.

But of course he had picked the worst of the aberrations with which to mar his record, who might have done, in exchange for the favour of Arthur’s attraction, something rational like reciprocation: and instead he was running round talking about that Gwaine bloke whose hair was the other star of the picture with Merlin’s nude torso, and who was coming to visit, and causing a hysterical flutter. Whilst it would have been sufficient to hear that dreaded name less than once, he was having to hear it, on a bad day, no less than a dozen times, always in connection with some praise, or anecdote, none of which, Arthur noticed, were necessary to share, still less to recount with breathless emotion. 

Then there was the dreadful scene with Mrs Brown, who had them out for a look at an elderly horse, in an elderly barn. Those venerable ancients, all three of them, were standing together, with the backs all bent by time or wind, when Merlin turned the truck into the drive, and got out, still taunting Arthur for his superior taste in music; which at least was nothing to do with Gwaine. They got out the bag, put on their wellies, and jogged up to meet her, before she could go limping down the drive, and would have to go limping back up it. She seemed to be in more agony than the horse, who had rearranged his weight to coddle his left front foot, and said, before Merlin had even opened his mouth, thereby breaking some kind of land speed record, “He won’t put his foot down. Do you think there’s anything terribly wrong with it?”

“Well, we’ll just take a look,” Merlin said, and put down the bag, and calling out to the horse, “All right, sir, let’s have a look at you,” picked up the hoof. He was bent over it for only a moment. “It’s thrush.” 

“What’s that? He’s not dying is he, poor dear?” she asked, sounding as if it would have killed her herself.

“Well, if left too long, it can lame a horse, but it won’t kill them. Although if he’s not vaccinated against tetanus, that can get in through a damaged frog.” She gave him a blank look. “Thrush is a bacterial infection that eats away at the tissue of the frog, so if it damages it too severely, it leaves the horse vulnerable to other infections.”

“Oh dear. What’s this business about a frog? Nasty, invasive buggers.”

Merlin’s face looked like Arthur’s felt. “Erm. First horse, I’m guessing?”

“Oh, yes. He was a neighbour’s, and they were going to pack him off to the slaughterhouse, can you believe that, so I said, ‘You will not, I’ve a lovely barn for him right here’ and I talked them round from murdering the poor old chap, and here he is. We’re getting on, the pair of us, a couple of old buggers seeing out our last years together. Just like a big dog he is, lovely, honestly, aren’t you, love?” she asked the horse, who butted his head against her hand. “He’s the most perfect gentleman there ever was, and they were going to murder him without human feeling! I don’t believe this world we’re living in.”

Arthur scratched his nose. He had housed enough horses of other owners to know that people viewed their animals rather like they viewed their children: little respectful darlings who had never gone or spoken awry, because of the simple qualification that they were theirs; and so if they had appeared to have done wrong, it was because of some flawed perception in the mistaken perceiver. If she had called him a dog, it was very likely he was a demon: and they would have to cut the bad tissue out of his hoof, and wash it down with treatment, a practice discouraged by even the most genuinely gentlemanly of equines. He looked sideways at Merlin, who was looking sideways at him. They both had that natural perception of accomplished horsemen: and knew looking at the presently placid figure it was shortly to be one of strife. He had let Merlin pick up the hoof without any protest; but whether he would consent to beyond that was still to be seen.

It was Arthur’s job to keep the horse from killing Merlin, which he did by letting the fellow get a good sniff at him, and talking to him in a low voice, in the hopes of earning his esteem. He had handled his share of unruly horses undergoing procedures they did not care to be part of, and decided to start with a neck twitch, after they had led him into his stall, where he would have less room to manoeuver, and Merlin could work, hopefully, in relative safety. Arthur grabbed a roll of loose flesh on the neck, and squeezed it, getting a surprised look in return: but no other sign of upheaval. 

“Maybe you should pick out his hoof,” Merlin said, getting out his instruments, and rolling up his sleeves. “If he kicks you in the head, it won’t make any difference.”

“Oh right, because your head is the one at greater risk.”

Merlin eyed him as he picked up the hoof once more, and tucked the horse’s leg between his own. “If I die, tell your sister I’m sorry I couldn’t be her first victim for the insurance money. It would have been great, up till she killed me.”

Arthur rolled his eyes.

Then the horse, sensing this was to be a different thing altogether, jerked the hoof in Merlin’s hands, and thrust his whole body straight up, almost a kind of levitation, whilst Merlin clung to the hoof, and Arthur clung to the halter, pushing into the huge body as it tried to swing round on Merlin, and their observer said in abject delight, “Oh, he’s like a young man again! I’ve never seen him move like that.”

“Right, it’s a bloody miracle,” Arthur said through his teeth. He was putting his whole weight into his task. He was between Merlin, scraping determinedly at the hoof, and Merlin, smashed to bits on the stall wall. 

“Where are you lads from?” she asked, leaning on the stall door whilst he fended off the horse’s teeth. “I’m from Manchester, myself. I can’t place your accent, young man,” she said, to whom he did not know; and not waiting for the unknown young man to state his origins, began to expound upon hers. The horse tried to rear; and Arthur, holding the halter with everything he was, inserted a strained “Mm hmm” where she obviously expected one to be; and Merlin, restraining a truly incalculable number of curses, said, “Oh yeah, lovely country up there” whilst he was retrieving the antibacterial solution, which he did by leaping sideways, to get out of the way of the hoof he had abandoned, flinging himself against the side of the stall as Arthur pushed the horse away from him, and the horse, robbed of his victim, bit Arthur instead.

Fucking fuck fuck cunt, said Arthur’s brain, whilst his mouth was the inviolable stalwart of chivalry. “Lovely, yeah,” it said to the woman, whilst her precious goblin was standing on his foot, and she was asking whether he wasn’t the dearest old dear of existence.

“Now you’ll be coming in for tea; I want to hear all about you,” she said, and left them, after listening to Merlin’s instructions on cleaning the hoof, to gather their equipment and meet her in a sitting room which looked to their exhausted bodies a kind of Promised Land: and into which they heaved themselves, having cleaned themselves up as well as they could with a water bottle and bad language. She gave them little frail teacups on saucers, which looked absurd in Merlin’s large battered hand, and laid on the table a startling array of biscuits, saying as she did so, “You eat as much as you like; I’d have you for supper as well, if I didn’t know you two were hard-working young lads who needed to get on with their day. And tell me, how did you meet, and don’t worry, I always vote for the Liberal Democrats, so you don’t need to worry about anything here. I may be old, but I’m not old-fashioned.”

“Erm. Well. Arthur runs a breeding farm. My uncle has a veterinarian practice and he’s getting on, so I’ve come down to take over the field work that’s harder on him. Arthur and I just kind of transitioned from client-vet to assistant-vet.”

Arthur had stiffened on the sofa. He did not know how she had spotted what were his seething but subtle feelings; but she had clocked them, and was about to innocently out them.

“Oh, no, that’s not nearly as romantic as I’d hoped--”

“I think we had better get on to Freya’s, hadn’t we?” Arthur asked, something he had never before suggested with such (or any) enthusiasm. Merlin looked at him. Then he looked at Mrs Brown, and went horrifically pale.

“Oh. Oh, no, we’re like, you know--professional partners. Not partners partners. We’re not--yeah. Arthur’s--and I’m not. Interested in that sort of thing. With him. That’s--we’re friends. He’s more like--a brother. You know. Yeah. Erm. It’s--professional. Our. Partnership.”

“Why didn’t you just say, ‘Oh, not that horrid old toe rag’ and be done with it?” Arthur asked as they returned to the truck, not through his teeth, though it might have sounded that way.

“Well, what the hell did you want me to say? She thought we were fucking, for some reason. I can’t have something like that following me round.”

“Right, you wouldn’t want to sully your heretofore impeccable reputation for madness with good taste,” Arthur snapped. He did not slam the door of the truck after he had got in; but he did think about having been reduced to the non-sexual realm of family, and shut it with enthusiasm. “Your brother.”

“Well, look, sorry, but sometimes there’s just nothing there, whatsoever, I mean, it’s not like you’re--horrid-looking, I guess, but you’re just not my kind of bloke. At all. Even a bit.”

“I don’t think you need to belabour the point,” Arthur said, this time most definitely through his teeth.

“I don’t think you need to be offended by the point,” Merlin said, most definitely not through his own. “You know, straight men who just expect all gay men to be attracted to them are obnoxious.” 

Merlin escaped, through a bit of timely wit, and outright deriding, anything getting loose from his love, and expressing itself in phrasing even Arthur could understand; though it had been a near thing, with that nosy old woman: and now Gwaine had come to convolute his efforts. 

He had been sitting up as if with a fever, waiting for the sound of the old Focus, which Gwaine was still driving, through some miracle, or ritual sacrifice; and hearing it finally on a Wednesday evening when he was still at table with Gaius and some stew, leapt up, with a piece of bread in his mouth, and was on the front door step to call him a bastard, and hug him. The hug was a kind of flying thing, which nearly took down them both; and which Gwaine answered by picking him up, off his feet, and saying, “Hello, you sexy fuck,” and kissing him obnoxiously on the forehead. They went in with their arms round one another, and commenced the formal introductions, which meant that Gwaine picked up Gaius in the same manner, and kissed him respectfully on the forehead, instead of obnoxiously. 

He was put up in the guest room, fed, and chatted at all through the night, which they had not been able to do since RVC; and in the morning went off with Merlin on his rounds, to see how the beasties were getting on in Yorkshire. Arthur had already texted Merlin the night previously to say he would not be round to any of the calls, owing to a mix-up with some sperm they had shipped to a client in Wales; and so when Gwaine asked where he was keeping his fella, he was able to say, whilst they were unloading themselves at a pigsty, “There’s some kind of jizz problem at the farm.” He was so pleased to have kept them apart he was whistling, though he hated pigs, who keenly reciprocated the sentiment; and had Gwaine back to the clinic by 3.00, where he could safely be stored, whilst Merlin finished his rounds at the Pendragons’.

“I’ll take you to the pub tonight,” he said, rolling to a stop outside the door, and waiting for his passenger to be out and safely away.

“Where are you going?” Gwaine asked.

“Just a couple of little things to finish up. Should be back in a couple of hours.”

“Your posh boyfriend’s horses now, is it?”

“No.”

“Yes it is, or else you’d be taking me.”

Merlin tapped his fingers on the steering wheel; and then consciously stopped the little telegraphing bastards, which he had forgot were a tell that Gwaine knew. “All right, yeah, fine, but I’ve just got to nip out there quickly and then I’ll be back. He probably won’t even be round. There was some fuck-up with a shipment of sperm that he’s got to sort out. I’m sure he’ll be shut up in his office the whole time.”

“Then you won’t mind me coming,” Gwaine said, resolutely still belted into his seat. He had not even pretended he was going to get out; or ever in all his years had even considered it.

Merlin draped himself over the steering wheel, and gave him a firm look, which he tried to inject with some murder. He was not used to threatening anyone other than bigots, and he was threatening a man now who once had fought off a mugger with a teapot. He was not quite sure how to sharpen the look, and stick it where it would grieve; but made what he thought was at least a creditable effort of glaring, and said, “If he comes out of his office, you don’t say a word.”

“Mate, you know I can’t promise that.” 

“Yeah, ok, fine, unrealistic expectation, but .” And now he stuck his finger in Gwaine’s face, almost resting it on his nose. “You say one bloody word that even so much as hints at the fact that I’d elope with him and I’ve already named our dogs, I’ll fucking neuter you. The animals get anaesthesia. Yours I’ll snip off whilst you’re screaming.”

“What are your dogs called?” Gwaine asked serenely.

“Fuck off,” Merlin said, pulling away from the clinic, and checking over his shoulder before leaving the car park, and joining what traffic there was on the main road. “Albann and Domnall.”

They made the farm in excellent time, and pulled through the gate to see that Arthur, because it would have been convenient for him to have been in the office, was outside talking to Percival, in suit trousers and complementary shirt, though there was no jacket, and the sleeves were rolled up to show the reason for Merlin’s departure from sanity. He had his back to the drive, and turned when he heard the tyres on the gravel, and gave the little smile which sometimes he gave, when he saw the truck. There was the usual hiccough in Merlin’s chest; and then Gwaine validated his sad little feelings by saying, “Oh my God.”

“I know,” he said, shutting off the truck. “See, it’s not my fault.”

“Not him,” Gwaine replied, undoing his belt as if mesmerised. He did not even look at it, but unlatched it in a kind of dream state. “Who’s that?”

Merlin looked up to see that Morgana had just emerged from one of the barns, and pocketing his keys, said, “That’s Morgana. I told you.”

“You didn’t do her justice.”

“What did you think I meant when I said, ‘Could stab me and I’d thank her?’” He grabbed Gwaine by the shoulder, and with muscles which had been developed by cows, slammed him back against the seat, and held him there whilst Arthur with a nod left his conversation with Percival, and began to saunter down the drive with his hands in his pockets. It was his usual casual speed, to show he was not particularly arsed about Merlin’s arrival, and gave him the time which he needed to say, under his breath, “Think of your bollocks, Gwaine.”

“I’ve got to do right by you, mate. Got to have a peek at this bloke, see what he’s about.”

“Ok, mum; have a gawp at the straight boy I’m fantasising about; he’s a real threat to my virtue.”

“I’ve never worried about your virtue; not sure you ever had that. But if he breaks your little gay heart, I’ll have to kill him to death.”

“Ok, fine, have a good look at him,” Merlin said through his teeth. “Just don’t fucking say anything.” And he opened his door, now Arthur had almost reached it, stepping out with his bag in hand, and going to jibe him, and finding he was jibing a man not even looking at him. Arthur was staring, in a not acutely friendly manner, at Gwaine as he departed from the other side of the truck, running a hand through his hair in preparation of meeting Morgana, who also was walking down the drive, with a riding crop over her shoulder, and an expression which said how lovely it would have been to use it.

“Hey,” Merlin said. “Get your splooge sorted?”

“Is that what’s-his-face?” Arthur asked.

“It’s Gwaine. I told you about him, yeah?”

“Yes,” Arthur said flatly. He kept his hands in his pockets, though Gwaine, whose hair had stopped Morgana in her tracks, was coming round the truck to shake one of them.

“Gwaine Greene. Best mate, at your service.”

“Arthur Pendragon,” Arthur said. And that, apparently, was it. The rest of his greeting was conducted by glower, which Merlin dispelled, by thoroughly stomping his foot. 

“What the fuck’s your problem?” he asked in a low voice whilst Morgana and Gwaine began to get down to the business of eye fucking. He had not thought to defend his love for a straight man; but he had at least thought to explain it: and here was Arthur to ruin it, by acting the wet cat in a suit. 

“You broke my foot!” Arthur snapped.

“I didn’t break your foot, you great baby. Why are you being such an arsehole? I mean, aside from natural inclination and all.” Morgana and Gwaine had left them beside the truck, and vanished into the barn, where presumably people were not being incomprehensibly rude little bollocks.

“It’s been a busy day. I don’t think it’s appropriate for you to bring your boyfriend round.”

“He’s not my boyfriend.”

“So your platonic, heterosexual friends just put their hands all over you?” Arthur asked with a frown. 

Merlin, dumbfounded, had to think back over the exit from the truck, which had involved, in the following order of sexiness:

• Gwaine coming round from the passenger side, and clapping his shoulder in passing

“He’s not going to be touching the horses, is he?” Arthur went on, looking suspiciously toward the barn where the intruder had disappeared with his sister.

“No. He’s just come along to spend time with me and to see some of my regulars. But you do know he is also a fully qualified vet, yeah? With the same amount of experience as me? He’s a good vet.”

“Well, he’s not my vet, and I don’t want him touching anything.”

“Fuck’s sake, he’s not going to muck about with your bloody horses!” Merlin snapped, and left him there in the drive, feeling, as he marched along resolutely to the barn, a rising tightness in his throat. There had been nothing to crush: but he felt nevertheless that something had been broken; some nebulous approval which no best friend was going to give for a bi mate’s infatuation with a hetero: but which Arthur might have overcome, by being the same man Merlin took out on his rounds, instead of the one who had flown down the drive at him that first disastrous meeting. He might have given Gwaine a reason for Merlin’s dissolution of his intelligence; and had opted rather to be its strongest refutation.

They did what was prudent to do, and ignored Arthur, who trailed about behind them like a cloud come to ruin their picnic. He never took his hands out of his pockets, but strolled along the stalls as Merlin worked his way from one to the next, looking in on the patients, presumably to be sure Gwaine was not accosting them, and contributing to the conversation nothing but the occasional tendency to disdain, by saying whenever Gwaine had ventured an opinion, “Well, Merlin and I think Trimediazine is more appropriate for these sorts of situations.” It was as embarrassing as if Merlin had taken him to Tesco, and had to abandon the shopping trolley in the centre of the shop, because Arthur had thrown himself on the floor as soon as he was denied a lolly. He had thought he was introducing a grown man to Gwaine, and now had to show him he had been taken in by some snotty, monarchical child. Arthur spoke to contradict Gwaine, and otherwise not at all, following them down those fragrant corridors like one is sometimes followed on dark moorlands, by that old primordial feeling of presence: though Merlin would have preferred to be on the moorland, with nothing but his instincts telling him what was unseen in the night. He kept up a good chatter, hoping to cover up Arthur’s lack with whatever rot he could think of; but of course there was no covering up one whole entire adult man saying, “Right, well maybe that’s what you do for your animals, wherever you’re from, but here we actually care about them.”

“I’m so sorry,” he said when they had finished and returned to the truck, and he had thrown his kit silently into the backseat, and belted himself in, and sat, breathing in slowly through his nose, with his hands on the steering wheel, to push down the feeling of murder. “He’s not the best at first impressions. You remember how our first meeting went.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “I really didn’t think he was going to act like that. Look, he’s not always like that. I don’t know what crawled up his arse. He was probably just stressed about the mix-up with the sperm or whatever. His dad’s going to blame him for it.”

“Yeah, he sure can act the jackass when he’s jealous.”

Merlin started the truck. He had done it in a bit of a haze, and almost missed the response.

“What? What do you mean? Because you were chatting up his sister? He’s very protective of her, by the way. I mean, worth taking the risk, I’d say, but I’m pretty sure they have some posh hunting rifles and whatnot so you might remember that.”

“Fuck’s sake, mate,” Gwaine said as they rolled down the drive through the gate and turned onto the main road. “Your mum told me he was gay as a spring day for you, but I thought I might give you the benefit of the doubt despite your historically shite gaydar, but Jesus, Mary and Joseph, as me granny would say.”

“What?”

“What part of that disaster suggested heterosexual to your little brain? The following you round like a puppy dog? The longing looks? The fit he pitched over your handsome mate? The bit where he shouldered his way in between us anytime we were standing round in front of one of the stalls?”

Merlin was gobsmacked. “Arthur’s not gay.”

“Well, the label’s his business, but he’s as straight as a coastline. I can’t believe I’ve had to listen to you whingeing for months about your tragic gay love, and here I’ve come to find out the recipient of it’s English Oscar Wilde.”

“What?” Merlin repeated. It was the only thing he could get out. He drove the truck out of sheer instinct. If he had tried to think about it, he would have stopped in the middle of the road, or driven them over the side. His brain attempted a kind of churning try for competency; and stuck as cogs sometimes stick in their turnings. “You and mum are mad. He knows I’m bisexual and has never once made a peep about anything other than his history with women. If he wanted to--I mean, he might have hinted, or something--”

“Yeah, to the man who told me he’s got his feelings locked up tight and has made sure to cover his tracks by talking about his internet dating profile and preference for literally anyone who isn’t the actual object of his sad homosexual longing?”

“He can’t be interested in me. Because then I’d be a huge arsehole.”

“Well, won’t that help? Ah, wait, forgot about that time I walked in on you and that footie captain. I guess he’ll need to be the big arsehole. But he seems to be managing that just fine.”

Merlin punched him in the shoulder.

And whilst the truck was pulling away, Morgana turned to Arthur in the drive, and said, “Why didn’t you simply pee on him? It would have made far less of a scene.”

He scowled at her. “He’s the one bringing round strangers to have a gawp at our horses, and I’m the villain?”

“Firstly, he’s not a stranger, Merlin’s known him a decade. Secondly: yes.”

“I haven’t known him a decade, and Merlin’s taste is notoriously dodgy.”

“Yes it is,” she replied serenely, and then simply walked off, leaving him to brood in the twilight. He went into the office, where at least there was tea, and Gwen to be kind to him.

Gwaine had started something in Merlin’s head. It was too much to call it a sign of life; but at least it was a hint at one. There was a kind of stirring. In the sludge a little movement started, and communicated itself to the oblivion. Where all had been still now was the trembling of jelly when touched; or the quivering of puddles against the threatening footfall. He could not see it: but if his mum had seen it, and Gwaine had seen it, possibly there was something to the theory.

He was too angry to test it that first day after the ugly introduction, and went round his tasks in the barns silently in fury, whilst Arthur followed almost humbly in his wake, handing him in the silence whatever equipment he called for. He had a contrite look, as if he had got into the rubbish bin, or Merlin’s makeup; and now was trying to make it up by being the unassuming duplicate of the hellion who had ruined his lipstick and wallpaper. 

“How’s Gwaine settling in?” he asked stiltedly, after they had gone on like that, for twenty tight minutes.

“Oh, pretty well. Aside from this one total berk, his stay’s been lovely. Took him round to the pub last night for a couple of pints and conversation with people who aren’t the most colossal arseholes there are.”

Arthur stuck his hands in his pockets. “Glad to hear it,” he said, and left, not to marinate in that environment which he had created. Merlin could tell he had done it miserably, and felt a little prickling in his heart, because he knew that Arthur had taken the fight to his; but it was his job to mind the horses, and not an overgrown baby.

The apology came, predictably, without any acknowledgement of what it was for, and was brought out in a tupperware container which Arthur handed to him when they had convened at the truck for the excruciating farewell. 

“What’s this?” Merlin asked.

“Yorkshire pudding. I remember you said once you still hadn’t tried any. I made too much, so you might as well take it home. I expect Gwaine’s never tried it either, seeing as you’re both from the same backwoods.”

“You know we have the internet in Ireland. And shops. With all sorts of non-potato items.”

Arthur’s hands had gone back to his pockets. He was in jeans and light t-shirt, and his hair was fuddled with fussing. He shifted from one foot to the other, making firm eye contact with the tupperware. “Well, it’s homemade, at least.”

“Did Morgana make it?”

And finally the look was raised to him, with such menace that it thrilled the hairs on his nape and forearms. 

“You know you could just say sorry.”

“You know you could have just warned me he was coming.”

“Really. So forewarning you about seeing a man I told you was going to be in town would have made you act like a human instead of an ass?”

Arthur frowned down at the gravel in which his toe had made a little crater. “Well, I thought you might have brought him round to help with the examinations, and you know I don’t like people I don’t know mucking about with the horses.”

“And I told you he wasn’t going to be mucking about with the horses.”

“Well, he certainly had a lot of opinions about them.”

“He’s a practising vet. Did you expect him to just sit round with his thumb up his arse whilst watching his own profession?”

“He didn’t need to give you any advice. You know what you’re doing.”

“He wasn’t giving me advice, we were discussing things like two professionals.”

Arthur’s frown propagated. Somehow he was doing it in the multiples, though he only had the one face. “I expect he’s going on your rounds with you.”

“Oh,” Merlin said. “That’s what this is about. Don’t worry, you’re still my favourite lackey.” And he tried out the dimples on Arthur, to see if there was soundness to Gwaine’s outrageous claim. But no dimple is an effectual dimple when it is one which is ignored; the sad fate of his own, which he had cultivated for angry clients, or mums who had caught him halfway through their daughters’ windows. Arthur looked at the gravel, instead of his smile; and soon afterward ended the interaction, by using his paperwork for his excuse.

So Merlin drove home no more enlightened than he had ever been, and left the puddings for communal use on the table, and went up to his room, to strip, and shower, and be accosted afterward by his friend through a mouthful of pudding: “You’ve got the right idea, getting yourself some little totty who can bake.”

Meanwhile the little totty was in misery. He had hoped to see Gwaine the one fraught time, and never to cross words or paths again; but all that week he stayed with Merlin, he was coming out to the farm, in the battered Focus instead of the truck, and going round to wherever Merlin was working in barn or paddock, and blowing him showy kisses, or cinching him round the waist with assuming arm or embrace. 

And Arthur had to stand off to the side, and endure it. He had to watch the stubbled face light up when it was in the presence of its apparent beloved; and the smile which he had felt to be his brought out for someone else. He felt watching them that someone had let out the air from him. He had built for himself some airy structure out of their own interactions, feeling that it was solidly founded; and seeing now how Merlin was with the old established friend, realised he had been fashioning those same deluded castles which all foolish men construct amongst clouds. He had taken his own regard, and dressed it up as Merlin’s. He had had to fancy the friendship somewhat reciprocal, to live in it; and now saw that he had been roaming amongst his own dreams. He went over, whilst he was at his desk or in his bed, every moment of the friendship, picking it apart the way lonely people do, till it was nothing but dross; and finding now he had unravelled it all himself, that there had never been anything of substance, but only the little sad pile; never whole cloth but only its elements. He had built it up the same way he had built up his father’s love. He had thought, because love was a kind of fury in him, that it was a thing which could be done hard enough, for long enough, till it exhausted its quarry; as if it is something to be got like a goal. He had practised at it till he wanted to lie down for a nap. And he thought, in horror, that everyone must have seen, and laughed at him; that surely Merlin had noticed Arthur had taken to heart what was given in pity: and he had been muddling along out of a tortured compassion.

So he tried to keep to his office, to keep out of it; thinking now to try and undo the damage by isolating himself, and saving what was left of his face. He thought by staying in the office, whilst Merlin was in the barns, he could project a saving air of nonchalance. 

But by Monday he could not bear it anymore. He saw the truck pull up, and the Focus maddeningly after it; and grabbed his jacket from the coat rack, and exchanged the warm office for the wind. He waited till he felt he could do it in safety, and then went into the barn, when there had been enough time for their exchange, and he would not have to see the aggravating sight of Gwaine. Merlin was alone, preparing the ultrasound machine for Bonny when Arthur stepped into the aisle, and he looked round, with a blaze of undoing for a smile. It had come out for only a moment, and wiped away Arthur’s progress. 

“Hey. Where have you been?” Merlin asked, straightening over his bag. “Still sorting out your jizz?”

“It’s not my jizz, and if you could stop referring to it as such, that would be lovely,” Arthur said, and then cleared his throat. “Look, I need to talk to you for a moment. Obviously it’s none of my business, what you’re doing outside of the farm, and obviously you’ve not got the sense to listen to any advice I might have on the matter, but. Well. Look, Merlin. It’s obvious there’s something going on between you and Gwaine, and I don’t think it’s entirely--professional to be having him round to the farm like this. You’re meant to be looking after the horses, not your--whatever he is to you.”

Merlin had crouched back down over the equipment bag, and now stared up steadily at him, whilst an unfortunate shaft of sunlight dressed up his already unnecessary cheekbones.

“He’s fucking your sister,” Merlin said casually.

Arthur blinked. “Excuse me?”

“He’s fucking Morgana. They’ve been going at it like rabbits since he got here. He’s not coming here to see me, he’s coming here to slip one to her.”

“What?”

“Why would he be coming to your farm to fuck me when he’s already staying with me and we could rail to our heart’s content in my own bed?”

“Well, that’s, because--he was--he can’t do that with Morgana!”

“Tell that to them whilst I’m trying to sleep, then, because last night she was round to ours and they kept me up half the night.”

“Why would she do that with him?” Arthur demanded.

“You saw the hair and the face, right? And Gwaine’s a top bloke,” Merlin said, and went back to rummaging in his bag. He was not upset. In fact he was whistling, very much as if he were burdened with nothing. 

Arthur stared down in bewilderment at the dark head bent over its equipment. “You’re not upset?”

“About what?” Merlin asked, looking up from the lubricant. “Morgana and Gwaine? No. I’m only taking the piss about marrying your sister and all that. Mostly. I mean, if she offered.”

Arthur scowled at him. “I meant about Gwaine. Aren’t you?” He coughed, hoping it would complete the sentence for him.

Merlin raised an eyebrow. “You know how I saw you throw up out your nose? Multiple times? And it was in your hair? And you sadly changed into some joggers I brought you by flopping round listlessly on your bed and then lying there in your own sweat and vomit smell begging for death?”

“You don’t have to keep listing details.”

“Yeah, anyway, compared to some things I’ve seen Gwaine do, that was one of the sexiest things I’ve ever seen. So please don’t ever again try to imply that I wish I were in Morgana’s place. He’s basically my brother.” Merlin held out one of the plastic sleeves to him. “You want to do the ultrasound?”

“All right,” Arthur said, rolling up his sleeves. It was his pleasure to help, now he knew that Merlin’s probing was purely of professionalism.

Some of the late lambs gave Merlin, in the common parlance of British Understatement, a spot of trouble. Gwaine had gone home, and Arthur was snug in his; and so he was alone at 2.00 in the morning, in a wind which gave lie to the month, ostensibly June; but nearer brethren of January, when one has, at the hour of Arse, one’s arm up a ewe. There was a mess about some twins, who had decided they would come out together, or not at all, whilst the poor mother strained in thwarted agony. She was giving out little grunts, and switching about her tail; and rolled back at him a soft, imploring eye, pleading with that odd denuded deity who always appeared in his strange coat, and his cap made of her brethren, whenever her kind were hopeless.

It was the Smiths’ farm, beyond the village proper, where the wind came straight off the moorland, with nothing between it and Merlin’s testicles. There are few things worse than to have external genitalia at 2.00 in the morning, whilst you are kneeling in some damp grass, and trying to fish out some children from a sac of mucus; but the wind was trying to compound all these things, to make them even more than they were, by bulking up the experience with some little tendrils which cut straight down his collar where it gapped in the struggle, and down his back and along his arsecrack and to the vulnerable nether. He felt the wind had come straight out of the sea for him, who had never done anything to it. There are hackneyed descriptions of the wind as a knife for a reason; and this one was cutting him up as if he were a roast.

“I told him that one was going to have trouble bringing them out, I did,” Alice Smith told him, now her husband Jim had gone back to the house for some tea.

“Yep,” Merlin said, squinting as he felt along one of the little legs, trying to determine to whom it was connected, and gritting his teeth as the mother moved round, bringing him round with her, because he could not let go of the hoof, and lose his progress, where moving round meant a kind of seesawing of the body in the grass, as if it might help the process, to convulse like a worm, and grind his face in the mud. He had eaten more of the mud than breakfast, which he had dashed down, half-asleep, on his way out the door, knowing he would have enough vigour after he was done on the fell to drive home, take off his boots, die; and be up at 7.00 to be like an automaton running his programme. 

“He never listens to me. Jim, I said to him, that ewe is going to be trouble, she is, but he says, ‘Oh, she’s a good ‘un, Alice, I can tell’ but he can never tell, the silly sod.”

“Uh huh,” Merlin replied. He had hold of another leg, and was trying, at two o’clock in the morning, to math his way out of the knot. He had two legs, and two lambs; and now the muddling third leg, which must have been one or the other’s: but seemed to have come out lonesome from the ether. He tried pushing it back, and felt as he did so another limb, making the conundrum four.

“Well I’m proper sorry about this, but you know my Jim, he doesn’t listen, and now I’m afraid we’ve had to put you out. I hope you’ve a nice girl to go home to, with a full English laid on for you.”

“Right,” Merlin said, and finally the legs were all separate entities: and he pulled out the first little wet bundle onto the grass, and looked up in time to be kicked by the second, who had shot out as if he were leaving a flume in a waterpark.

Next morning it was one of Freya’s, this time at a leisurely 3.30, and he put himself, wellies, and kit, into the truck in a fog, and drove out into the rain, where his truck navigated some switchbacks, whilst he made a few sleepy gestures of aid, by occasionally gentling the brake or the wheel.

It was an undilated cervix, about the worst news he could receive, at the hour of God Fuck Me, and he scrubbed his face with his hands whilst Freya looked on in pity. Then he squatted down in the mud with the animal, and fished out of his bag some Dexamethasone, and speaking softly to the frightened patient, gave her 10ccs, and settled in to wait. It was the work of several hours, during which he nodded off, under the shed, with the flock parted nervously round the invader, who never did anything threatening, but sat in their field as if he were one of its stones, occasionally reanimating when the master brought out for him to drink something small, and white, which breathed out a breath like their own. Then he lubricated generously, and forced the cervix to dilate himself, that slow, fiddly process which demanded exacting pressure.

“If I can’t get it, we’ll have to do a caesarean,” he told Freya, a prospect approximately as charming as a headbutt, in the wind, on four hours of sleep; but the lamb was out, shortly after he had made his grim warning, and placing some Terramycin scour tablets and a mattress suture to keep the uterus from prolapsing, he drove the truck (or the truck drove him) out to the Pendragon Farm, where he fell asleep with his ultrasound machine, a surprisingly cuddly companion; and woke to find Arthur staring down at him, with crossed arms, and derisive eyebrows.

“Why are you sleeping on your ultrasound machine?”

“Because I was up at Fuck You Merlin for a sheep birth.” He rubbed his eyes. “You try it before standing there all awake and smug. By the way, didn’t you say you had posh hunting rifles or bird guns or whatever? Would you shoot me with one?”

“Don’t be so dramatic,” Arthur said, and picked him up, by hooking one arm blokeishly under Merlin’s arm, and then hitting him about his body, to get the straw off; about as romantic a gesture as Merlin had never seen. 

“I’ll show you dramatic,” Merlin said; a hair-raising declaration, which he followed through by lying down on the sofa in Arthur’s office that afternoon when he had finished with the horses; and waking up to a lake under him, whilst he was under Arthur’s jacket. He wiped the drool in confusion from his chin.

“You were snoring, too,” Arthur said from behind his laptop. He was staring very intently at it, with his chin in one hand. 

“How long was I out?”

“Long enough for Morgana to ask if we should bury you and claim we’ve never heard of you when the coppers come round.”

Merlin buried his hands in his hair. “What time is it?” he murmured sleepily.

“Nearly 6.00,” Arthur said, and then, loudly: “Dammit!” 

“What? What is it?” Merlin asked, sitting upright in a little lurch, and throwing off the jacket from him.

“I just lost at solitaire again.”

Merlin laid himself facedown on the sofa; a proper position of expiry, he thought, with his arm dangling over the side, and a foot dandling in the void. “Tell Morgana she can bury me if she wants; I won’t tell anyone,” he slurred, and was off again; and woke again, this time to the jacket upgraded: there was a fleece over him, and a pillow as soft as Arthur’s brain. He stretched luxuriously; that wanton arse-up stretch, which the cat has the right idea about, and checked to see if Arthur was checking: but he was steadfast behind the computer, and in his iron heteroness. So because Arthur was not going to look at his bum, and it was time to sleep in a bed, he extracted himself from beneath the blanket, and made for the door, picking up the wellies which he had abandoned beside the coat rack, flicking Arthur in the head as he passed; and getting, finally, some movement out of the statue behind the screen, which snapped its head away, and then said, as if it were offering an afterthought, “You know, if you need someone to keep you up, because you’re too much of a milksop to wake up at a normal hour, you could ring me for some of the early morning rounds.”

“I was out at Freya’s at 3.30 this morning. And 2.00 at the Smiths’ yesterday.”

“Well, unlike some people, I’m not a wimp, and I’m often up at that time anyway.”

“All right, then,” Merlin said.

And at 1.15 on the following Tuesday, when Tim Robinson rang him to ask would he come out for a calving, Merlin completed the circuit with glee, by ringing Arthur; and said, as soon as he heard the hoarse voice on the other end, which most certainly had not been strutting round in some ankle weights, “Get up and meet me at the Robinsons’. Unless you can’t take it.” Thereby ensuring that he cantankerously would; which was what he was doing, on the floor of the barn, where Merlin was sprawled, sorting out a transverse presentation. “Well, no wonder you had to ring me for this one,” he said cheerfully to Tim. “Nasty business, this. Arthur, what do you think?” 

Arthur, who thus far had been communicating through a complex series of grunts, turned on him a look as black as the morning. He had been on some of those late calls which sometimes segue messily into early ones; but he had never been prised out of his warm bed like the grub come blind into the cruel world. He was not coping. He seemed to blame Merlin personally for the fathoms between him and dawn: as if Merlin had the sun on his own meandering schedule, and liked to let it wander a bit, before settling in for work.

It was a sticky job, but not a monstrous one, not that callous sort which ended with him in the truck, crying with his hands on the steering wheel. He had the calf positioned properly after a little struggle on the floor of the barn, pitting the strength of his arm against the strength of the vagina: a better strongman than any to ever have bested a barbell. Then it was time to pull, and bring the confused thing into the world. It was the same satisfaction, the same thrill of creation; not a miracle, but the same methodical propagation by which the bovine kept off the fate of the mammoth. The calf had been born in blood, and slime, and swear words: but at near on 2.00 it was irrelevant. Even the atheist or villain saw that the gangling thing who had caused such trouble for a cluster of wet hide and eyelashes was as magical as the comet to the Neanderthal. He turned, and saw that Arthur was in love with it. The little face with the good, guileless, stupid eyes looking far up to its friends had wiped off the hate from his own face. He was beaming as if he were the father; or had been the one to stick his arm into a vulva before the invention of dawn, and now was seeing the fruits of his painful expedition.

Merlin cleaned up, took some tea, and chucked his kit back into the truck; and turning to the silent form beside him, which had reversed its divine transfiguration from bastard to man, now the baby was out of sight, asked: “Do you want to take a nap?”

“God, yes,” Arthur said.

So they went a little ways down the road, to get down from the hilltop, where the wind was moaning in agony, and the furze laid cheek to the sod. 

He pulled over the truck, and the car pulled in behind him, with a questioning gesture from its driver, who rolled down his window to shout into the gulfstream: “What the hell are you doing?”

“Sleeping,” Merlin shouted back. “Unless you want to drive all the way back,” he said, and abandoned Arthur for his dreams.

He came up periodically to check his phone, though he had a new parent’s ear for its ringer, and found when he surfaced that the blonde head in his rear view mirror was still dead still on the steering wheel; and at 6.30 trundled over to check on it, which he did by banging on the window, till the head on the levitating body banged itself on the roof.

“How’d you sleep?” Merlin asked.

“On a steering wheel, you tit. How do you think I slept?” Arthur snapped.

But he was out next time one of the mothers was struggling with her dawdling progeny, wearing a bit of scruff, like a proper working man, and drinking that good, stiff variety of tea which Merlin’s granda had recommended for chest hair. They worked like that into July, through all the lambing and foaling, and cleaned up those few stray calves which the dairy cattle put out whenever they please, and he was more admiring of Arthur, but no more elucidated by him. He did not see what Gwaine had been talking about. He tried a bit of flirting, by putting on the dimples, and resuming the innuendo which he had laid by the wayside whilst Arthur was oblivious to his nature; but all that flew over Arthur’s head, which might have been because he was thick, or staidly hetero. They were living pretty well in one another’s pockets, and sometimes on afternoon calls taking away whatever the farmers had given them, to eat it on the moorland, amidst the sea sounds of grass and the things which dwelt in the grass: more romantic, on some days when the sun chequered the bracken with amber, and the hills were nothing but green infinity, than some dates on which he had been laid. He could look out over the countryside, suspended between air and grass, his head in the ether, his legs in the nether, and feel that the country was absolute; that they had thrust back the volcano of industry to that Elfland beyond the moors, which felt to him under the sun a concoction of fantasy. Then his phone would ring, or Arthur’s, and they would have to separate their elbows, and he would have to go away, unsure in himself, and hurting a little, because he had been next to the big warm body, and feeling that he was far away from it.

He was starting to think it was only the same blind pride, the same bias, the same good-hearted but ass-headed conviction, which was that everyone was or ought to be inclined to their Merlin. It was the same blind spot for Gwaine and his mum, who felt it was personal when someone did not love him as they loved him. It was possible Gwaine had projected; had taken his own platonic affections, and twisted them, and superimposed them on a man who was desperate for feeling. Arthur did have a kind of love for him; but he was beginning to feel it was that quiet sort which people hold onto all their lives for a friend they think of in fondness, whilst he was sick with fury. His own love was not placid. It was threatening him with a future aloneness. It was building to that terrifying permanence which makes bachelors of perfectly eligible mates. He thought of Arthur meeting someone else, and was sick. He thought of himself meeting someone else, and was sick. He could not bring about, in the level head of a working man who each day battled the elements, and battled the blind doom of creatures in thrall to chance the idea that he would stop loving Arthur. He could not see beyond loving him; though he had loved men before, or thought he loved them, and gone on past the fleeting ache. He felt himself grasping hold of Arthur as he had held onto his father, whom he still missed, twenty years on; whom he had never got over, but only damped down a little, so he could live without burning.

Then the truck got stuck. 

It was Merlin’s fault. This was because, firstly, he had driven the truck; and secondly because Arthur needed to take out his ire on more than some unfeeling muck.

They had driven out to the Hall farm round about 6.00, to fetch and suture a ram who had bashed open his leg on a rock, a decent enough proceeding, from every but the ram’s perspective; there was only a fine drizzle whilst Merlin stitched, demonstrating with slow, expansive movements what he was doing to Arthur, knelt observing in the grass. Then they had let the fellow loose, with instructions for the farmer, and stood round chatting after ram and farmer had scarpered, realising at last they were getting progressively more wet, and scrambling back into the truck with Merlin’s equipment.

It was a relief to get into the truck, not only because he had got out of the damp, but because he had got out of that dangerous territory into which he had been straying, by being subjected, for no discernible reason, to the dimples which already Merlin was in the habit of bringing out too often. He had been flinging them about haphazardly, and threatening Arthur’s good reason, locking him into that hazardous cycle of gormless smiling which in Merlin’s case was merely his resting smile; and which in Arthur’s case was a sign of impending delusion. When he had the dimples too often, he felt that they were his; that they were not the mere accidents of genetic inheritance, but a deliberation, on the part of their bearer, to hint at a feeling of significance; the same feeling which was boiling in Arthur; the same troubled hurting, looking to give vent or seek solace. 

He had belted himself in, and felt that he was regaining some equilibrium in himself from the broken eye contact when Merlin wheeled the truck round, going on all right through the soggy moorland, till he hit what was softer than it looked, and bogged down. It seemed to Arthur they would come through it, because Merlin was still chatting as he backed up a little, and gave it a good run, with the engine scaling up with its efforts, and one hand draped over the wheel: not an affected pose to trick his passenger into false ease, but the genuine comportment of a man who felt he had the thing by the testicles. The tyres spun, and threw into their wake the dirty flotsam, the bits of muck, and grass, and the leavings of animals, giving every appearance of competence. They were Doing Something. They were still moving, bit by bit in the plain which rapidly the rain was transmuting to sea. 

Then Merlin began to curse.

“What?” Arthur asked. “Are we stuck?”

“Yeah. Hold on. Let me try backing up a bit again.”

But he tried and the truck tried: and there was nothing to show for it but mud.

“You’ll have to get out and push,” Merlin said.

“Are you insane?” Arthur demanded.

“Well, do you want to be sat here the rest of the afternoon?”

“Why don’t you push?”

And so it went on, for valuable minutes, whilst the muck lapped at the tyres, and Arthur finally got out, out of sheer ire, and slammed the door, and took up his position at the bumper. He put his considerable strength to it, and the accomplishments, after innumerable curses, were thus: that he was now as filthy as the truck; that he had torn a nail; that he hated, as passionately as he had loved, Merlin in the warm dry truck, in his warm dry undergarments.

So the next phase was to argue over who was to hike back to the farm, over a good mile of moorland, in a direction which could not be agreed upon, and under the bucketing rain: a task which Merlin felt was Arthur’s responsibility, and which Arthur with equal fervour felt was Merlin’s.

“I already got out and pushed whilst you sat round being useless.”

“Right, so you’re already wet and muddy and won’t notice if you get a bit more wet and muddy.”

“Do try being useful, Merlin; you might like it.”

“Do try not being an arse, Arthur; you might like it. Though I doubt it.” He had tried to cop Arthur’s accent, and bollixed it, likely with savage purpose, so that what came out was a nasal whingeing, instead of a decent approximation of the smooth, cultured bass.

The rain was as loud as their argument, and though it did not drown it out, it wore down, with its grim persistence, the feeling that they ought to be doing or trying something, till they fizzled into a strained silence, staring out the windows at what was now a sort of hinterland. The rain had ironed out all the individuality from the land, and made it that bleak grey steppe of the hackneyed author’s apocalypse. 

“We could wait a bit and see if the rain lets up, and then walk back. And I can try texting Gaius, but he’ll be in and out of appointments and probably won’t even look at his phone for a while.”

“I’ll try Morgana,” Arthur said, and did; and got only her unhelpful voicemail.

“We’ll just wait a bit then. It ought to let up a bit at least eventually. And then you can go back.”

“I’m not going back.”

“Well I don’t see why we should both look like pigs who rolled round in the sty.”

Arthur rolled his eyes, and reached forward to adjust the heat.

“What are you doing? It’s too hot already in here.”

“Well some of us aren’t sat in nice cosy dry trousers.”

“Don’t be a baby.” 

“You’re the one who wouldn’t even get out of your own damn truck that you got stuck.”

“I’m out in this kind of weather all the time, and you don’t hear me complaining.”

“I don’t hear you complaining, but I do see you immediately change into a dry set of clothes when you’ve five minutes to your next case where you’re going to get out into the same weather and soak the new set all over again. But God forbid you endure five minutes of driving round in wet pants.”

“Fine,” Merlin said, and leant over the console between them, into the backseat; and coming back a moment later, he threw a piece of fabric into Arthur’s face. “Sorry. I can’t do anything about the wet pants. You’ll just have to take them off, or keep whingeing. And don’t worry; I’ll attribute anything unimpressive to it being cold.”

Arthur clawed the shirt out of his face, and thought about hitting him; not seriously, though more than playfully. Instead he peeled off his wet jacket, and murderously began to do the same to his wet shirt. He yanked at it as if he were fighting it; which he was, really, because the mud and rain had formed a kind of paste, so that he could not draw it smoothly over his head by grasping the neck, but had to wriggle about, unsticking it at intervals from the bits of his torso which were trying to keep it. He had it off and had thrown it down with the jacket, and bunched up the dry shirt in his hands to bring it over his head when he felt a pressure on him; and turned to see that the pressure was Merlin’s eyes. It was the kind of stare which had weight: a crushing weight, in the small, hot interior of the truck, with only the console between them. He froze: and Merlin in concert froze with him. There was a flicker of sidelong eye contact, that furtive look when both parties dart out a quick glance, to see if the other is noticing them. Arthur’s eyes had gone sideways: but Merlin’s had had to come up the long, hard way from Arthur’s chest. There was not any mistaking the look. He had been getting gawped at, which he might have expected, though not from anyone of Merlin’s mental capacities. 

Merlin turned back to the front windshield, and draped his hands over the wheel; and Arthur, still frozen with the shirt bunched round his arms, turned dumbly in time with him, to look at the rain. He did not know where else to look. It was knocking about the world, which must have felt much the same as Arthur’s mind. He was trying to compute the situation when Merlin turned to him again, with his hands still on the wheel: and made a slow surveillance of him, by going from his stomach up to where the shirt was covering his nipples: and over that, a slow, hot look of physical lingering, which made it, at last, by excruciating intervals, to Arthur’s eyes.

Then Merlin made a little dart at him, and he jumped.

And Merlin retreated to the steering wheel, as abruptly out of Arthur’s space as he had gone into it.

“What were you doing?” Arthur asked, his heart rushing in his ears.

“Nothing.” Merlin scratched the back of his neck. “I think I dropped my brain. I was just looking for it.”

Arthur had been kissed by plenty of reasonable women, and though Merlin qualified as neither of those, it was the age-old gesture. The stubbled face had come at him at the appropriate angle for snogging; and now had pulled back to that reasonable distance of mates. He watched one of the big hands rubbing the neck where the black hair terminated and the white flesh disappeared into the shirt collar: and numbly put on his own shirt. He did it mechanically. He did not know what to do in that strange shrunken space, but moved about as if he were automated. He realised with dread that he had placed the onus on himself by jumping when Merlin had come at him; that he would have to gamble on having judged correctly what at the time had seemed to him the inarguable precursor to romance: and what seemed now it had passed an invention of the longing body. 

Then Merlin got on his phone, and began to casually type with one thumb as if nothing had happened; so convincingly that Arthur feverishly wondered if nothing had. He went over the look which he had felt to be unmistakable; the same look he got sometimes from women admiring his riding trousers: and the brief, fell swoop which his leap had fatally truncated.

He ran his wet palms over the knees of his wet jeans. He tried to say something; but the words ceased to come, or had never intended to come. He looked out the front window. He looked out the side window. He tried to imagine reversing the attempt Merlin had made; crossing the divide himself with the same look on his face, and the same purpose, which in Merlin had been driven by experience, and which in him would be driven by desperation. 

All this was going through Arthur whilst the rain went through the land. He was turning over the technicalities in him, trying frantically to calculate how to bring together the known, kissing women, with the unknown, kissing men, to marry the knowledge and innocence in harmonious unity, so that if he had miscalculated, and Merlin had been trying to pick off some lint from him, the technique would carry him off in amnesic lust. 

Then Merlin said, “I think I’m going to just walk back to the farm and see if they can give us a tow” and Arthur panicked and blurted out, “Wait” and lunged across the console at him. He put his hands tremblingly on the bristly cheeks, terrified to feel where they differed from the smooth ones he had been touching all his dispassionate sex life. He kissed him anxiously; a small trying kiss, with no technique but heart in it: and then, overwhelmed, he moved in, with Merlin’s face in his hands.

But the jaw was set under his fingertips, and the mouth was like a facsimile of itself. There was marble under him, instead of man.

And his stomach plummeted like a stone through the depths, and he snatched back hands, and face, though he felt he had left his stomach, and tried to retreat to the sanctuary of his seat, where at least there was space, if not reason between them.

Merlin grabbed him by the front of his shirt, and pulled him over the console. Arthur went, more out of shock than longing: and found the breath was being snogged out of him. He was shocked by how strong Merlin was. Previously he had been manhandled by partners half his size, trying to get some passionate rise out of him; and now he was being thrown about by someone whose living was to disgruntle cattle without dying. Merlin had yanked him over the console as easily as if there were the same disparities in their physiques as those which separated Arthur from the women. He felt as if he were back on the rugby pitch, trying to struggle up from underneath the thighs: except this time, presumably, he was allowed to have hardened in his trousers, which he had done with blinding speed. Whilst the women had had to try those increasingly desperate combinations of lingerie, ingenuity, and friction, he found that all Merlin had to do was hold Arthur in place, and put his tongue in him. He gave up trying to be practised, or showy, and simply clung to the front of Merlin’s jacket, making embarrassing noises. 

Then Merlin pushed him back into his seat and scrambled over the console and straddled him, and reached round, a blind fumbling in that abyss which was all desperate mouths and breath, and jerked at the lever, to bring the seat back with a startling jolt that laid Arthur as flat as he could be laid with the backseat pushing back. He stared up muzzily for a moment. The movement had separated them, but only at the mouth: there were hands running over him, down his shoulders and along his heaving stomach where the hem of his shirt divided the bare flesh of his belly from the bare flesh of the callused hands. Then they were under his shirt, feeling his stomach, feeling his chest, getting out little startled gasps from him whilst Merlin, back to kissing him, gave him the slow, hot tongue, no longer frenzied, but maddening, getting up a kind of unease in his stomach, that fidgeting arousal which went all through his belly and back and in a blind white haze to curl his toes.   

“I haven’t had sex in a long time,” he blurted out when the black head dipped and he felt the agonising mouth moving with warm exploratory leisure along his neck. He squeezed his eyes shut, and felt the head rise, the hair graze his nose, and kissed back when he was kissed, a kind of desperate hurling of himself into it. He did not know if he was doing it right: only that he had to clutch at the hands which slid now along his arms and into his hands, gripping with a kind of bungling love at the fingers, to keep them in his own.

“So?” Merlin said, right against his mouth. “Me neither.”

“So,” Arthur said, between kissing him, “I’m. Not going to last. Very long.”

“Yeah, me neither,” Merlin breathed against him. He seemed to be spurred on by the reminder, though he couldn’t have needed it, with Arthur poking him in the thigh, that they were in the home stretch. He let off one of Arthur’s hands to suddenly fumble with Arthur’s jeans, undoing the button with little trembling jerks, and then yanking down the zipper, and yanking down the jeans with them, and slipping his hand between them to touch Arthur maddeningly through his boxers. It did not last very long. He kissed Arthur once, twice, long, breathless takings from his mouth: and then moved the boxers out of his way and wrapped the strong hand round him and began to stroke him to incoherency. Arthur’s breathing transferred to his nose: high, desperate snatches which he had to take in through his nostrils, because he was biting his fist.

“Jesus Christ,” Merlin gasped, and pulled his hand from his mouth and messily tongued him whilst somewhere below them there was some artless wriggling about, and then startling hot flesh against his cock. Merlin thrust roughly on top of him, curling his hands under Arthur’s thighs, to fix him in place whilst his hips worked and Arthur tried to find his way back to the kissing by a kind of blind disjointed stumbling along the rough chin. He grabbed Merlin’s face in his hands again. He had seized on it in agony: and realising he must be hurting it, snatched his hands away in embarrassment.

“No,” Merlin said, and raised one of the hands to his cheek with his own hand firmly round it, and kissed the palm, furious, short little kisses, which he went on doing till he was moaning. Arthur felt a wet spurting where his shirt had ridden up, and realised fuzzily that Merlin was coming all over him. The hand not holding his slid down between them, where they were slippery with Merlin’s come, and jerked them both, at a rhythm which made Merlin cry out through the hot few final pulses, which Arthur endured with shocking mettle. Then Merlin sucked at his palm, and bit it, and Arthur arched off the seat with a cry, and came violently all over the hand stroking him, long, wrenching pulses which left him limp and quivering on the seat. There were black spots on the roof of the truck; and the heavy body on top of him no longer sustained its own weight, but let itself down as if dead. He put his arms shakily round Merlin’s back, too stunned to wonder if he was being too tender.

The head lay on his chest for a long moment, with the rain beating mercilessly at the windows. He was looking down at it, trying to decide if it was all right to stroke it, or kiss it, when his phone went.

It was Morgana ringing them. There was a mad scramble when the phone went, and accomplishments innumerable. They were driven by the feeling that she would know why they had dawdled in answering, and had returned to their respectable places pants, trousers and seat back before the last buzz packed her off to voicemail, which Arthur answered as Merlin was scurrying frantically back over the console. He was sat in a pose of innocence with both hands on the steering wheel when Arthur said, “Yeah?” and realising, with those muggish firing of synapses which happen after sex, that he still had Arthur’s come all over him. He had wiped his hand on the trousers which had had far worse done to them, and whisked up his jeans, and buttoned, and belted them: and now as Morgana’s voice innocently filled the truck with concern for them, it occurred to him that her brother’s jizz was drying on his cock.

Things were very loud between Arthur’s responses, and Morgana’s responses, when there was nothing, ostensibly, but the rain asking to be let in at the windows. He imagined that he could hear Arthur’s brain (what there was of it) turning over the same as his own, going over, forensically, what had occurred in a fog. Now he was out of the miasma, and looking on the thing as if it were all in floodlights, to show the crude thing as it was in its coarse and sticky reality. He had done something which had rendered the other participant unable to look at him. Arthur was making some solid eye contact with his phone, which he had put on speaker, and clutched in a white hand. The conversation concluded with a promise to send Percival round with a winch; and some deafening silence.

‘Percival’s coming to help,” Arthur said unnecessarily, to a man who had heard it himself.

“Yeah. That’s good,” Merlin said, too loudly.

He was saved by his next case ringing, to see where he was, and the explanation, protracted due to the client’s hearing, got them through a good ten minutes; then there was the rain again, and the stifling cab, which previously had fitted two grown men comfortably.

Arthur was going to be horridly awkward about it. The impassioned eye contact with the phone had heralded it; but now he said, into the dense quiet, “Nice weather” with every impression of sincerity. He fiddled his phone round in his hand; and Merlin turned in astonishment, to see whether he could really be sat next to a living, breathing consumer of oxygen.

“It’s literally not.”

“Right.” Arthur coughed.

They were saved, at the end of the millennium, by Percival, who came out in one of the sturdy farm trucks and pulled them out, though probably he could have freed them by lifting the truck in one hand, and setting it down considerately on solid land. After they had been loosed Merlin said, with his hands on the wheel, “I’ve still several cases to finish up before your place, so if you needed to get back, you could ride with Percival. If you wanted.”

“Right. Of course,” Arthur said, and bolted casually from the truck.

Merlin completed the rest of the afternoon in a daze, attending his patients as a somnambulist. Then he could not put it off any longer, and went round to the Pendragons’, where the rain had let up at last, and took himself and his equipment up to the barns in a strange silence free of jibing or help. He felt off-kilter carrying the bag himself, and lifting out the ultrasound machine without commentary, and going along to the stalls where his patients were waiting with that placid resignation which was typical of broodmares accustomed to the indignity. Morgana came round, and Lancelot, and Gwen with tea for him, because she had seen him come up the drive soaked from previous excursions, and brought it out in a fit of compassion.

The office of course was shut. He did not expect that it would be any more animated than a sepulchre until he was safely off; but when he was hauling out his equipment once more, and counting his hoof testers, because he did not have Arthur to produce the inevitable straggler from his back pocket, he looked up, briefly, and for a moment was immobilised: for the figure which he had expected to be a sighting as rare as a unicorn was now coming down the drive with its hands in its pockets. Arthur pulled up beside the driver’s door, looked at the door, looked at Merlin, and said, with surprising steadiness, “Everything look good?”

“Yeah. Yeah, everybody’s great.  Rosie’s looking good. Everything’s coming along. Well.”

“Good.”

“Yeah, it is good,” Merlin replied, and wondered if the Pendragons’ poncy shotguns were accessible. He would have liked to put one in his mouth.

It struck him that they were alone, though it should not have felt like it; there was the expanse of the drive and the expanse of the fields, and all those vanishing points of the world where the grey sky touched the green hills, and they were but modicums in the infinity. It was the look which Arthur was giving him which did it; which made them their own little island in the coursings of the world. It was that frightened look of determination which means that the wearer of it is about to change something. He had taken his hands out of his pockets, to show he meant business, and leaned his shoulder suddenly against the truck door. He was in Merlin’s space, which now they had put their hands down one another’s pants, crossed a kind of threshold.

Merlin found his mouth was very dry. He had that flittery feeling which you get before the goodnight kiss. There was a little hollow in his stomach, which the love was filling in like a bathtub. 

Then Arthur reached out, in a gesture of blind panic, at the moment Merlin expected them to fall on one another, and seized his hand, and shook it as if he were transacting a sale. “Well, thanks,” he said, and turned on his heel, and left.

Merlin went to the truck.

And Arthur, for his part, went to the cottage, had a shower, a shave, and an existential crisis.

They did not talk for three days.

What they did was blunder about their routines, miserably, in Arthur’s case, and confusedly, in Merlin’s case. Neither of them could bridge that abyss of stupidity: and so all their feelings had to be swallowed, or ignored, when they could have realised them by that simple friction between working brain cells. Even their shabbiest would have produced a spark on which they could live; but there was nothing more than a little wind in a hostile environment. 

Then on the fourth day whilst he was lying about on his bed, trying to get up the enthusiasm to sleep, Merlin opened a text to find that it read: Was it terrible or something?

He stared at his phone. He thought that giving it a good, stern look might be of use to him; but the same words were there, in the same native language which supposedly he spoke, though he had had to squint at them as he might have tried to suss out some Cyrillic.

Finally, brilliantly, he wrote back, What?

What do you think, you idiot?

He rolled over onto his stomach. He felt that he had to move, that he was all hot jolting, and would be burnt if he stayed.

What I think is you’re a moron.

Oh very helpful.

Exactly how long has it been since you were laid?

None of your damn business.

Merlin, regrettably, could not throw the phone at his head; but texted with the same force of violence. I meant did you forget what actual live humans act like when they’re fucking? What do you mean ‘was it terrible.’ For future reference, if someone climbs up on you in a truck that’s stuck in a mud puddle on public property it’s because they’re keen.

Funny. I thought you said you were exactly, categorically the opposite of keen. You mentioned it several times. What was it you said? ‘We’re professional partners, not partner partners. Arthur is as physically repulsive to me as a sibling.’

I didn’t say that.

You might as well have.

Merlin ran a hand through his fringe. He felt a bit sick; but Arthur had reached out first, with salt in his heart: and so after a long moment of trying to get down the lump in his throat, he typed out, I might have been laying it on a bit thick for a straight man I was inappropriately attracted to.

There was a long pause, during which Merlin contemplated the demise of his brain, of which he had thought there was nothing left to destroy; and then the phone went again, and he turned it over, where he had laid it anxiously facedown on the bed, and read, with his lips moving in time with the text: I might have been laying the straight bit on a bit thick.

I think if you said ‘no homo’ under your breath you’re fine.

If I didn’t, does this give me official membership?

Of the gays? Not really. One gay handjob is experimentation. Two, now that’s when you get inducted. His heart was in his ears. He threw down the phone on the bed beside him, so he did not have to wait for the vibration in his hand, so that he could attribute any pause or hesitation to missing it whilst it was muted by the bedcovers. But he ruined the game by picking it up half a second after he had put it down, and then laying it aside, and then picking it up again, all whilst the phone was silent, and the last response was his lonesome own.

Then, at last: Well, you need to try anything more than once, don’t you, to sort out whether it’s really for you or not?

Is your dad still in London? Merlin asked.

And the answer, scant seconds later: Yes.

Chapter Text

Arthur opened the door at just gone midnight to find Merlin, with hair still damp from his shower, on his front step.

“I parked the truck down the road so nobody would hear it pull up,” Merlin said. He had both hands in his jacket pockets, and spoke as lightly as if he were there for tea: and then he stepped through the door and shut it behind him, and untied the knot on Arthur’s joggers with slow, methodical purpose. Then he went to his knees without even taking off his jacket.

Arthur thought of saying, as he had said for his girlfriends, “Oh no, you don’t have to”; and then Merlin had the joggers down and was licking him. He had gone to half-mast just seeing the dark head at that tantalising height; and three hot passes with the tongue, whilst a rough thumb worked itself on his tip, and he was fully erect in the sitting room with his pants around his ankles. He felt absurdly exposed. There was cold air on him wherever the tongue left him, the muddling contradictions of the hot breath, and the brisk draughts, which crept in through the vulnerabilities which all structures have in the ruthless moorlands.

The licking went on for some time, whilst his knees liquefied. He grabbed for the sofa which fortunately was within his reach, using the back to hold himself up as the tongue dabbled in his slit, and gave a long teasing stroke to the underside. It seemed to know what it was about, and even ran down, over his bollocks, and on a bit lower than that.

He was trembling by the time Merlin swallowed him, barely upright, though the sofa was still assisting, and let out a little frantic breath through his nose when the lips came hotly down, and down, till he was seated in Merlin’s throat. He felt it was only polite to be still, and let the mouth determine its own limitations: but there were hands on his arse, gripping him, and moving him, so that he slid, shallowly at first, in and out whilst the hot tongue mimed the same rhythm. Then Merlin pulled off with that obscene sound of spit and flesh and said, “You can go harder than that if you want.”

“Oh,” Arthur said weakly. Then he was inside Merlin again. He stared down dumbly at the head bobbing in front of him, tightening his hand on the sofa, and leaving the other to artlessly dangle. There was a long, desperate interval of what seemed to be endless heat, and wetness, and tightness, and then Merlin surfaced again, sucked lightly on his head, and said, “Arthur, fuck my mouth.”

Which he did, a few messy thrusts, easily countered by the hot mouth pushing back at him: and then he clutched at the sofa and came with his head back, and his nose frantically seeking for air.

“Do you want me to--reciprocate?” Arthur asked when he had finally got up pants, joggers, and the breath to ask it, which took quite some time, because Merlin kept sucking him after he had come, till he was nothing more than a kind of sack full of quivering whose only attribute was a threadbare resistance to begging.

“Yeah, sure. Let’s go to the bedroom, though,” Merlin said, a little breathlessly, and took off his jacket at last, and laid it over the sofa back.

But in the bedroom he merely kicked off his shoes and crawled up onto the bed and took Arthur in his arms and kissed him, not as he had in the truck, no mindless coming together of flesh, and breath, and blind need, but a kind of slow finding. He ran his hands under Arthur’s shirt, went over his back, his stomach, his chest, sucked at his lip and his neck and sought with his tongue for where there was pleasure he had not even known about. All those ticklish bits where the frisson is verging on torture the hot tongue found and the lips moving after brought to restless cresting. He had come too recently to come again; but there was the strange liquid movement in his belly, the hot coiling and uncoiling which is the kin of nerves and of lust. He slid his hands under Merlin’s shirt, felt the body as he had not really felt it in the truck, the strange familiarity and foreignness of the flat furred chest like his own: no soft sloping of a figure he felt he had to be gingerly with, but thigh and arm in breadth like his own. There was a hard cock rubbing against his thigh, and then Merlin took Arthur’s hand in his, and guided it down between them, so that Arthur was touching him through his trousers. He was breathing hard against Arthur’s mouth, but still kissing him, still going on in the slow, maddening way with his hips and his tongue whilst Arthur’s refractory period was speeding toward distant past. They kissed so long he was hard again; and then Merlin, feeling him against his thigh, reached his hand down, and rubbed him through the thin joggers which were meant to be nothing but a layer between Arthur and his sheets. He rubbed his thumb over the tip, passing the thin material of Arthur’s pants over and over it whilst his tongue coaxed and riled him into some breathless grinding and one of the big hands stole round his hip, and manhandled him as if he were chaff. He was rolled over onto his back, and then Merlin pulled his t-shirt over his head and licked his nipples and down his stomach and to the flinching skin of his waist where the flesh was divided from Merlin’s mouth by only some tatty elastic. Fuzzily he realised there were thumbs hooked in his waistband, and pulling it down, pants and joggers together, till he was completely starkers.

It was embarrassing to be the sole nudist in the presence of a man who had doffed only his trainers. He felt that his cock stood out absurdly, which is the only way a cock can stand out; and there was not even the relief of it being in Merlin’s mouth, where it was no longer exposed, and he was too turned on to wonder if he looked the tit. Merlin was kissing his thighs, going all round where he would have liked him to be, but never so much as looking at it. And then he dipped his head, and licked Arthur’s balls, and there were hot tremors all through him, and his legs locked themselves rigid inside his tight skin.

He did not quite know how to feel about having his bollocks sucked, except madly turned on. 

“Do you not want me to--?” he managed in a hoarse voice miraculously whilst it was in progress, getting up on an elbow, so that he could watch the dark head working between his legs, plying its trade with tongue and careful teeth.

Merlin pulled away briefly to say, “Suck my cock?”

“Yes,” Arthur gasped, dropping his head back.

“Sure. Eventually,” Merlin said, and then ran his tongue down between Arthur’s bollocks and arsehole. He jerked, and grabbed a fistful of the sheets.

“Does that feel good?” Merlin asked, and did it again. “Do you like being rimmed?”

Arthur held onto the sheets. “I’ve--never done that before,” he said, not at all primly.

“Oh yeah, I forgot straight men are weird about their arseholes.”

“I am not weird.”

“Turn over, and get on all fours,” Merlin said, pulling back finally, and grasping his shirt by the neck, yanked it over his head. He unbuttoned his jeans, and pushed them down his strong thighs, and Arthur for a moment fixed on the bulge in the boxer briefs which had been so callously inflicted on him.

“For what?” he asked, a little warily.

“What do you think? So I can stick my tongue in your arsehole.”

“You’re going to what?” Arthur asked, feeling as if he were too hot. Merlin was standing now so the jeans slid down his calves, and the boxers went slithering after them. He had not really seen his cock since that ill-fated picture, but only felt it, hot on him in the hot truck, and then the pulsing all over his belly. He imagined Merlin forcing his head down on it, the smooth blunt probing of it, whilst the hand tightened in despair on his hair. Merlin knelt on the bed, and said again, “Turn over. If you don’t like it, just use your words like a big boy and tell me to stop licking your arsehole.”

So he did turn over, at least not to face him whilst he felt that he was possibly a little red, feeling how the cold touched him everywhere, and clocking every shift in the bed which he knew to be Merlin coming on over it, lining himself up in the rumpled covers so they were arse to face. He was horrifically tense. He could not imagine having anyone there, though he was freshly showered and there had been no squeamishness in the apparently carefree gifter. He felt the bed dip behind him, and the hot breath on his spine, and the lips its wet successor. There were hot little kisses all down his back, gradually lower, and lower, whilst he felt that his bones were dissolvent. Then Merlin nudged his thighs apart and licked his bollocks again, ran the slow, considering tongue over them and over the flesh between them and his mark until there was a little trembling in him and he was thinking of pleading when Merlin made it suddenly needless. He hooked his arms round Arthur’s thighs and began to eat him out. The tongue circled and flicked and even, pointed, entered him whilst he could only breathe raggedly on all fours. Merlin went over and over what was some skin too reactive to be borne: but he did bear it, too winded to even cry out, though it was well deserving of yelling.

“Do you like it when I do it slow or fast?” Merlin asked roughly, and went back to sucking on him, as if that would be any help to Arthur’s attempts to answer.

“Slow,” Arthur got out finally. “Like that. Yes . Merlin .” He pursed his lips, embarrassed by what was haphazardly leaving them; but the choked name had spurred on something, which it took him a bewildered moment to place. One of the arms had unwound from his thigh, and now the shoulders pressed to the backs of his legs gave odd little twitches, a kind of rhythmic but jagged movement which his rusty brain put together, after a sad little fumbling, with the noise of flesh on flesh. It was the rough hand stroking Merlin whilst Merlin’s tongue lost its poise but not its enthusiasm. Merlin gave up trying to impress him, and resorted simply to filthy tonguing. And all the while Arthur could hear his hand moving on his cock, could imagine, whilst he was staring at the headboard, the hand which had jerked them both moving now with urgency on itself, the white flesh moving in it, when it might have moved in him.

“I’ll finish you. With my mouth,” he said raggedly. He had had to move one of his hands up to the headboard, and gripped it till it creaked.

The tongue was still going, and the shoulders still butting his legs; then Merlin sucked at him, blew a hot and shuddering breath over him, and said, “You want my cock in you?”

“Yes.”

The tongue delved in him again.

“Yes.”

“Turn over again,” Merlin said, but did not help him whatsoever, by moving his tongue in and out, making the little noises which he had made in the truck, which meant that shortly he would be coming all over his own hand, instead of Arthur’s mouth.

Arthur pulled away, and laid on his back, and then Merlin was straddling his chest, and Arthur was swallowing him from his elbows. He did not have much leverage, but realised as he opened his mouth and slid the hot, slippery head into him that he did not need to pull at the hips, or drive himself onto the hard wet flesh. Merlin had got himself to the brink; had swung a leg over him, in fact, holding the base of his cock, to keep himself in check till he was inside Arthur, and making little spasmodic quivers. “Oh fuck. Oh fuck.”

There was come hitting Arthur’s tongue. He wrapped his hand round Merlin’s cock at the base, holding the head in his mouth, and urging it on with frantic strokes, as if he could wring out of Merlin more than what had already rendered him speechless. He made a blind grab for Arthur’s hair with one hand; and with the other reached back to jerk him with long, rough strokes, meant to bring him off in haste. Arthur lost his tenuous hold on decorum, and began to moan round Merlin’s cock and push his hips up into the hand, thinking only to come, whilst Merlin was still coming in him. Then he did, pulsing all over the hand and his own thighs, pulling off to say, “Oh God; oh God ,” and taking the last of Merlin’s orgasm on his chin.

And finally Merlin swung his leg over his chest again, and collapsed in a little pile beside him with his arm over his eyes, and said when he could say it: “Don’t shake my hand this time.”

Next evening he rimmed Arthur again, and rubbed himself off in his arsecrack, and shot all over his back.

And next evening after that, Uther was back from London, and they had to be two very casual inhabitants of that professional rapport, owner and vet, speaking with authority on colic, when just previously they had been speaking on cock. Arthur thought, no more than half a dozen times, on the hour, that that staid professional who went round extracting wolf teeth and reading the lives in the sonograms had put his tongue in Arthur’s arsehole; and that staid professional, in his place of employment, no more than the exact number of times Arthur’s plummy voice commented or asked on a case, thought that that staid owner who went round watching the extractions and handing over the ultrasound probes had got Merlin’s tongue up his arsehole. They had to occupy that odd space which the sexual being is expected to inhabit once he has got back into his clothes; that absurd amnesiac farce of work or tea which he has to go back to, as if he is not using the tea to swill out some come. Last night he had put his cock between Arthur’s arsecheeks, not in the penetrative act, but in the furious imitate of it which happens when there is too little lube or reason: and now he was saying, “Yeah, I’d say about six weeks along” and giving him gloves instead of a dicking.

So they were very cordial, and afterward in Arthur’s office discussed a mare who was struggling to get in foal: and went that evening to be respectable men alone in their sovereign homes.

At 7.00 Arthur, who was in proper get-up of joggers, t-shirt, and chastity, felt his phone buzz on the bed beside his thigh, where he was lying with the Merck Veterinary Manual, as unsexy a thing as he could be doing; and then he turned over his phone and saw that the vibration had been a text which said: When you wank, what do you like?

Excuse me?

This is sexting , Merlin clarified helpfully. I send you a dirty message and then you send one back. 

Arthur set aside the Manual. It was too confusing to read about heartwater whilst the text was trying to instigate his trousers.

What do you mean, what do I like? It’s not like there’s a lot of variety to be had.

Jesus, it’s like pulling teeth. I mean do you like it slow, fast, do you put a finger in yourself, do you get off to a certain kind of porn?

Ever get off to the dick pic I sent you?

No! You sent it accidentally. That would be weird. I’m not some kind of pervert.

Well, I’m the owner of the dick, and the pic, and I say it’s all right for you to wank to it. Also, are you going to answer any of my questions, or am I better off chatting up Siri?

Arthur pursed his mouth from side to side. There was no one to see him, but he felt absurd lying in bed in his tatty joggers, prepared to have been lulled off to sleep by some footnotes on immunologic diseases, and now, so close to an entry on an impacted oil gland in sheep, was poking a little out of his boxers. He stared at the phone, at the little box where he could contribute, and dabbled a hand nervously in his fringe.

All right fine. Slow, I guess. Unless I’m getting close. 

So you like to draw it out?

Sure.

What do you think about? Or watch?

I don’t know.

So your mind is just a blank. You touch your dick, and go into some kind of fugue state? Your brain’s just floating in a void, waiting for you to come so it can go back to what it was doing? I mean, I guess that isn’t so different from what it’s usually doing.

Ha ha. No, of course not, you idiot. I guess I think about women. Anyway, he tried to think about them, and keep the other thoughts at bay. He decided, in a sudden rush, to be honest; if not exactly with himself, then at least to Merlin: That’s what I try to think about.

Have you ever thought about me?

Yes.

Do you think about me now when you do it, now we’ve hooked up?

Well, it’s not really like I’ve had much time to. Do it myself. Since then.

Well, I went home that first night and wanked. I felt a bit weird about it because you ended getting each other off in the truck with shaking my hand, but it WAS one of the top five wanks of my life, so.

Really?

Yeah, I never would have guessed I was that turned on by morons.

Arthur rolled his eyes.

Do you want to touch yourself now?

He felt a hot kind of shrinking in his belly; that tremendous surging unease which comes when the body anticipates what the hang-ups are fighting.

Yes.

Ok. Do that. Are you dressed for bed?

Yes.

In what?

A t-shirt and joggers. 

Ok. Don’t take your cock out yet. Rub yourself through your joggers. And tell me what you’re doing.

Tell you what I’m doing? As in, the exact act you just told me to do? What exactly is there for me to narrate now?

Oh for fuck’s sake. Just touch your dick and tell me about it. 

Arthur rolled his eyes again; but the tone which he could hear even through text relaxed him a bit, eased him back onto that familiar territory of mutual bollocking, so that he did not have to look too closely at the changed and continuously changing dynamic, but to see that it was only Merlin, though that version of him which lately had been making Arthur yell with something more than pique. He switched the phone to his left hand and slid the right down, over his thigh, to what was embarrassingly bulked, for only some words from a twit. He pressed the heel of his palm into his cock, giving it a few strokes like that, not taking it in hand, but toying with a kind of promise of touch, listening to the changing of his breath. Then he curved his fingers over the head, and rubbed a few light circles on it, feeling the little twitches as he hardened whilst Merlin was on the other end of the phone, possibly hardening himself.

Are you touching yourself?

Yes.

Still through your clothes?

Yes.

If I were there, I’d be throat fucking you. You should think about that whilst you’re touching yourself. And you’re supposed to be telling me what you’re doing.

Touching myself.

Specifically, you wanker.

Arthur began to stroke himself through the thin fabric, trying to coordinate his typing with his off hand whilst the other was running the rim of his head. He bit his bottom lip. I’m stroking myself through my joggers, he typed, and then started when the phone went off in his hand: not the apparatus which he had expected to go off in his hand. Bit by bit his not overly coordinated brain put together with the not overly coordinated hand that it had been jarred by a still incoming call.

“Does that feel good?” Merlin asked, in a voice unnecessarily low when he fumbled the phone up to his ear.

“Yes,” Arthur got out.

“Your voice goes all hoarse when you’re turned on, and it’s really hot. Do you have lube nearby?”

“Yes,” Arthur said, and left off stroking himself to flounder about the table beside the bed, feeling round where he knew there was a drawer, and opposable thumbs to grip and open the drawer. He had to put the phone on speaker, on the bed beside him, and concentrate all his powers on getting open the drawer, and getting out the little bottle whilst the voice, a little tinny now, but no less provoking, said, “Get out your cock.”

“Do you want to video chat?” Arthur asked hazily. He pushed his joggers down his thighs, watched his cock spring out from under the elastic. Shakily he opened the lube.

“No, I want to listen to you wank and imagine what you’re doing whilst you get increasingly more desperate and then when you come, I’m going to have a furious go at myself thinking of you lying there with come all over your hand.”

Arthur took himself in hand, gave himself a brief, distributing stroke, and then ground his palm in slow, dissatisfactory circles on his head, where there was no need to give it slip. He spread out the precome with his thumb, dropping his head back as he went all round and under the head with the little lewd noise of friction eased by lube and come. He thought of Merlin listening to it, the unmistakable squelching of his hand moving now, a little faster, up and down the shaft, a sound which ought to have been small, and furtive, and secret: and which now filled the room with his breathing, whilst the breathing on the phone began to speed in time with his hand.

“You’re not touching yourself?” Arthur got out with difficulty.

“No, but Jesus, I want to.”

“Then do it,” Arthur gasped. He arched up into his hand, came up onto an elbow to thrust with his hips into the tight and slippery grip, giving his wrist a break, and fucking himself with little fast, hot lunges into his fist, watching his slick cock head bobbing up and out of the circle of his fingers, and imagining the dark head bent and waiting to take it. 

“Do you want to edge a bit?” Merlin asked tightly. “You’ll come really hard. I’ll tell you when to stop and start. You’ll have to sit there waiting for me to say go before you can wank yourself, and stop when I say, even if you’re right on the edge. Do you want to?”

“Yes.” He was working himself almost to the edge now, imagining the head working over him, or the tongue hot up in his arse.

“Stop,” Merlin said hoarsely. “You’re close, aren’t you? I can hear it in your voice.”

“Yes,” Arthur ground out. He had felt almost unable to stop, and gripped himself tightly now at the base of his cock, feeling the low and warning throbbing.

“Ok, just sit there for a second,” Merlin said, and then there was a rustling sound on the other end of the phone, and Arthur, having resumed some of his speaking capabilities, asked: “What are you doing?”

“Getting my kit off.”

“So are you going to--whilst I--”

“No. I’m just lying here, listening to you get off.”

“So you’re just--naked, on your bed.”

“Yeah. Start touching yourself again, but go slowly,” Merlin said, and Arthur did, for three luxurious strokes, and then the brisk “Stop!” and he dropped his head back on the pillow, panting. He lay there holding his cock in the dark, waiting for the voice to come, and release him from that tortured stasis: which it did at infuriating intervals, sometimes letting him go on till his thighs were trembling, and sometimes halting him at scarcely one full stroke: but always halting him, always saying in the low rough voice that he could not go on, that he would have to lie there, quivering, fevered, despairing; that he would be the same trembling, molten being, a helpless confusion of liquid limbs and back. 

“How badly do you want to come?” Merlin asked roughly.

“Very,” he ground out. He was splay legged now, his knees falling as open as they could whilst the joggers bound them. He tried to reach down with his free hand and push them a little lower, but the movement moved his cock, minutely, in his shaking hand: and he realised he would have to lie as still as he could, until the game was up.

“Yeah?’

“Yes.”

“Don’t start again yet. Just touch your balls a bit.”

Arthur did. He massaged them lightly, squeezing and stroking with a careful hand, whilst his cock lay tight in the other. He slid a finger down between bollocks and arsehole, where Merlin had explored with his tongue and laid his hot breath on the strident nerves, and stroked himself, a little tentatively, feeling the same jolt which Merlin’s mouth had wrung out of his tremulous body.

“What are you doing now?” Merlin asked breathily.

“What you told me to,” Arthur groaned.

“Yeah, you like it, whatever you’re doing. Your breathing went up. Keep touching yourself like that. If I were there, I’d suck on them, and stick my tongue up you, and finger you, if you wanted that. Would you?”

“Yes,” Arthur moaned.

“Yeah?”

“Yes.”

“Do it to yourself a bit. You don’t have to push in or anything, if you haven’t got enough lube on your finger or you’re not ready. Just run your finger over it like I did my tongue.”

Arthur forced his knees against the joggers, and slid his hand lower, pushing between his cheeks with one slippery finger, feeling how the flesh reacted there, how a hot little ripple jerked his knees together and pushed out of him a noise which he might have made in pain. He dropped his knees open again, getting the joggers, somehow, tremblingly down to his ankles, and spreading his legs so there was room for the fingers which he had not meant to be anything more than idling passersby. But the little tremors which went through him, the shaking which pulled his thigh muscles painfully taut, and the strange liquidness of his dissolving body, alternatively strained, and pliant, as he brushed his fingers over where the tongue had circled and flickered and breached him and dissolved not only bones and quivering belly urged him onward. He was too gone to be self-conscious about it, or to feel strange, and slid in one of his fingers to its knuckle.

“Are you doing it?” Merlin breathed.

“I’m--” He was moving the finger, and could not go on. There was a hot juddering, all the way down to his toes.

“I want to listen to you come.” There were vague noises from the phone, which muggily Arthur registered as the sound of Merlin finally giving in in the dark room across the Dales, where he was starkers on his bed, with his own legs parted, and the big callused hand working the cock which had been in his mouth and in his hand and tantalisingly near to his arsehole. Arthur stroked himself twice, and then embarrassingly was moaning. He came, noisily but still within the bounds of dignity: and then he was crying out. He arched up off the bed without even the ability to grab any sheets or grounding pillow. He still had the one hand between his legs: and the other, frantically, was emptying his cock. He came all over his stomach and all over the joggers and all over the hand plunging between his arsecheeks. There were hot little waves going all through him. And the violent pulsing in his hand and between his legs and in his convulsing thighs went on so long, with his own come hitting him everywhere, that all he could do when it was over was lie sweatily in the aftermath.

“Answer your damn phone,” Merlin said through his teeth, and he looked over, and with a blink, tried to make the two phones he was seeing the rightful one. He reached out with great effort to accept the video call, trying to sit up, and then subsiding back onto the pillow.

“Move the phone so I can see you,” Merlin demanded, and he did, angling it so that what he normally would have been ashamed to show was on full outrageous display. His cock had not yet gone down, so what Merlin was wanking to, what he could see that Merlin was wanking to, was the half-naked body with the shirt ridden up and the joggers thrust down and the cock in the midst of its own ridiculous mess.

“Were you fingering yourself whilst you were wanking?” Merlin asked tightly.

And Arthur used what he had regained of his breath to say: “Yes. That’s what you were listening to. I was fucking myself on my fingers and thinking about your tongue in me.” It had a galvanising effect on Merlin’s hand. It jerked him in a fury: and then his cock was jerking, shooting out long spurts of come which pulled out several loud pleas to a deity. His belly was heaving as he shot all over it and his hand and the screen.

Next day was some tuberculin testing, which Arthur wanted to attend, and Gaius wanted to attend, so that he could not say, “Come is a pain in the arse to clean off your phone,” which he had not done till it was heart-rendingly dried. He had driven out separately from Gaius, because he had later appointments to keep, and from Arthur, who had to be back by noon for those enigmatical things which he did with horse semen. And though he had arrived at the farm alone, with enough time to pull out his equipment, and paperwork, they two had accidentally coordinated, and drove up at nearly the same moment, so that whilst Arthur was getting out of his car, Gaius was shutting off the second truck; and Merlin had time only to see Arthur shut the door, and remember what they had done last night. He shot Merlin a wide-eyed look of impending dumbarsery.

So he had to stave off any hand shaking by getting straight away to business, and saying, “Hold my bag whilst I check I’ve got all my forms” to give Arthur a task that was not going over, in his slow, simple way, those images which he had seen and projected onto the screen. He consented to be loaded up with Merlin’s equipment. Actually, he had put out his hand, as if it were on a kind of puppet string, and had things put into it, whilst Gaius was tottling toward them on his rickety knees, which gave him a perpetual listing, as if he were going into a wind, or trying to follow a ship in hard seas. Merlin had enough time to say, whilst he was rooting round in his paperwork, “Your dad out of town again?”

“No, he’s at the farm.”

“So what did you tell him?”

“That I had some shopping to do and would be back in time for a meeting with a client later this afternoon.”

Merlin burst out laughing. “You’re the only man I’ve ever known who’s snuck out like a teenager creeping off to a party to test some cows for tuberculosis.” Then, passing over some skin callipers, he brought out the dimples in their glory, now knowing that he could use them like a stone on a head to clobber out the good sense from him. “The vet must be really cute.”

Arthur coughed, to show he had not been embarrassed, now, or in all the history of time. “Well, I have only thrown up in my mouth one whole time whilst looking at him.”

Then Gaius was next to them, and saying, “Good morning, Arthur. Merlin, I hope you recall that only a certified veterinarian can perform these tests.”

“Yeah, I know. He’s just here to watch,” Merlin assured him, and Arthur turned away, faintly pink, though they were then out of the pink dawn which might have excused it, and amidst the blue innocent day. 

It was a small herd he was testing, but with limited crushes, so that only a few cows at a time were stood in the metal contraptions awaiting their fates, which was to be poked in the caudal tail folds, which they felt, no doubt, to be too perilously near their arseholes, and moved about their hindquarters as restlessly as the crushes would let them, whilst Merlin patiently held their tails, and kish-kished them till they settled. He had Arthur man the notebook, calling out to him the numbers on the ear tags, and on which side he had placed the test, moving along with speed and efficiency to impress Gaius, who gave a few pokes himself, but mostly stood back chatting to the farmer, and letting the young blokes get on with the next generation of cattle. In between the staff herding in the next cattle to be tested, he looked over the passports and previous records, and took back the notebook from Arthur to jot down a few remarks for himself, and then back to it with the needle and the bottles he removed one at a time from the cooler. “See how I’m going up, almost parallel, with the needle? We have to do an intradermal injection for these. Oh, hang on there, miss,” he said, and let go of the syringe, to let the cow move about as she pleased. “It’s easier just to let go if they start moving, otherwise you might pull the needle out. Anyway, you go all the way in, and then back off just a bit, and then inject the antigen. With an intradermal injection, there’s not really anywhere for the liquid to go, so it should be just under the skin here. You can palpate and feel a little bump if it’s been done properly.” He demonstrated, to show Arthur where to feel, when it might have been too sexy to guide him by the hand himself, whilst Gaius was looking, and expecting there would be nothing of those sorts of homosexual shenanigans.

Then, after a long period of being perfectly normal, and never once undoing Arthur’s belt with his teeth, it was time for Arthur to get back to his car, which Merlin walked him to under the guise of retrieving the second cooler of antigen from his truck, though he was not yet through the first.  

“How likely is it your dad will shoot me if I sneak over to your house tonight?” he asked, leaning his hip on the side of the car as Arthur opened the door and stood with it in his hand. He had out his keys, as if he meant business, but made no move to get out of Merlin’s personal space, or into the car.

“Depends upon whether you get caught sneaking over to my house. And how quickly he can get to his hunting cabinet.”

“Sounds worth the risk.”

“Not if it will leave us without a proper vet when Gaius retires.”

“Ok, you can come over to mine, then.”

“Right, and be caught by a man I’ve known since my childhood sneaking over like a teenager to bugger his nephew.”

“Ooh, buggering, that’s ambitious,” Merlin said, and watched the words colour Arthur all the way to his ears. “But really, he goes to bed pretty early. We could just sneak you over after he’s in bed, and then pack you off before he gets up. My room is upstairs, his is downstairs. We’ll just have to be quiet.” 

“All right,” Arthur said, joggling his keys in his hand. 

“Ok. Good.” He smiled down at Arthur. “Is this the bit where I shake your hand? Sorry, I don’t know the etiquette.”

“Fuck off,” Arthur said, and got into the car and disappeared into the switchback road, where he was a brief shimmer between the matte hills.

So all afternoon Merlin had to go on testing, and then about his endless rounds, and finally at the decent hour of 5.30 back to the house, where he stripped, showered, and bounded down the stairs to the kitchen, where there was some leftover stew, and Gaius patiently whittling away at the teapot.

“Merlin,” he said, folding his hands on the table as Merlin got himself down a bowl from one of the cupboards, “is there anything you’d like to tell me?”

“No? Uh.” He rummaged in his memory. “Oh, Joe’s calf is doing well. I know you were worried.”

“No.”

“That colt with the hernia? Good. It was an umbilical hernia, and it’s reducing nicely. Think it’ll be a pretty standard recovery.”

“I’m very happy to hear that,” Gaius said, looking down his nose at Merlin, though there were a good several inches between their standing heights, let alone whilst the shorter of them was seated. “But I was talking about Arthur.”

“What about Arthur?” Merlin asked innocently, popping the bowl with the stew in it into the microwave.

“Merlin.”

“What? I’m sorry; he wanted to come see the testing. You saw; I didn’t let him do any of it.”

“It seems to me he came out to see you.”

Merlin punched in the time on the microwave as nonchalantly as he could. “Well, yeah, me, doing the testing.”

“Merlin,” Gaius said, very sternly. “I’d prefer it if I didn’t have to remind you once again that Uther Pendragon has been a client of mine for nearly thirty years.”

“Oh, sorry. Did you want a cake or something?”

“I want my nephew to mind himself round Uther’s son.”

“I am!” Merlin protested. “We haven’t been arrested in one single pub brawl!”

“Well, I suppose that’s progress,” Gaius replied drily. “Mind you are similarly subdued in every other aspect of your relationship.”

“Yeah. I will. We haven’t really even seen each other very much lately anyway. Practically strangers, what with my hours, and his hours. I mean, Arthur who, really,” he said, and finished his dinner and at 11.00 sent off the breathless text to summon that practical stranger to his doorstep. They went in and up the stairs and through to Merlin’s room, where the door was shut and locked behind them, and they could proceed with the mauling. He took off Arthur’s jumper, and shirt, if ‘took’ can ever be a synonym for what he did, which was to yank off the jumper so hard other accoutrements nearly came with it.

“That was my ear!” Arthur hissed. 

“Do you want to whinge, or do you want to screw?” Merlin asked, sucking on his neck. “Besides, you’ve got another ear.”

It was too good an argument; and Arthur, succumbing to it, laid down on the bed and pulled Merlin on top of him where they snogged until the situation was emergent, and they had to push aside the offending bits between flesh instead of taking them properly down.

“That’s good, yeah,” he breathed in Arthur’s ear as Arthur, uncoordinatedly kissing him, and stroking him, twisted his hand, getting a little shiver out of him, and then lunged up to kiss his chin. Merlin turned his face into the pillow whilst the hand went on touching him to and over the crest; and came, his hips jerking against Arthur’s, with a muffled, “Fuck.” He ducked down the sweaty, heaving stomach, and took the whole load in his mouth, barely in time to get it in his mouth, instead of on his chin. 

Afterward they sat up late in their pants, poring over the manual, and talking over a case of abomasal displacement on which Merlin had recently operated, till at last Arthur looked at his phone, and ran his hand over his face, and said, “I should probably leave; it’s two o’clock in the morning.”

So they dressed themselves, and wandered out to where Arthur had parked his car, a little down the road from the house, and suffered through that ridiculous procedure of the good-night kiss: mainly whether it was or wasn’t going to happen, and who was or wasn’t going to initiate it. They stretched out the conversation to incredible limits. They went after the abomasal surgery like the proverbial blowhard whaling on the horse corpse. Finally there was nothing in all the world left to be said on abomasals, or surgeries, and they would have to shake hands, Arthur’s preferred version of dumbarsery, or snog the lights out of one another, Merlin’s preferred version of dumbarsery. They stared at one another instead: but Arthur did it with the soft, crooked smile which came out though it was obviously frightened to do so. And Merlin reached out, and pulled him up slightly, to emphasise their almost imperceptible height difference: and snogged the actual hell out of him. 

Arthur’s favourite part of doing the rounds, aside from the bit where Merlin took him home afterward, and did him, was watching the competent hands with incredible care soothing or administering to their patient; and then the smile that came out all over the stubbled face, when it saw what good he had done for those helpless creatures who could not help themselves.  It made Arthur feel a bit helpless himself. The animals loved Merlin easily, because he had come out into the ugly elements, to do what no other human had done for them; and so it was a simple matter of reciprocating some kindness, whereas Arthur loved him rather desperately. He was afraid there was too much love in him, or coming out of him; that Merlin would be overwhelmed by it, or, more likely, embarrassed by it; that he would notice Arthur had responded to the kindness as pathetically as any baby cow; which at least had the excuse of being a baby cow.

Then Merlin, when the farmer had left the barn or lean-to, would sneak a kiss, whilst Arthur was putting away the equipment, dimpling at him afterward, so that Arthur felt, not flustered, but possibly not as steady as he could have been, though he was mostly unaffected. And when they were in the pissing rain or howling wind, he would put his hands down the collar of Arthur’s jacket, or even sometimes in his trouser pockets, when he had flashed the dimples first, to show that Arthur was to read into it exactly the innuendo his penis had read into it; so that he felt, finally, as if possibly Merlin were of sufficient intelligence to want to date him, and that he might as well test it, by bestowing on Merlin the honour of asking him out properly, instead of round to his for some nudity in between work. This he accomplished by brooding on it for several days and making little flow charts in his head; he had various questions, and all the myriad answers which they could possibly inspire all worked out by the end of the week, and knew what to do in the event of any of them, up to and including leaving the country under a false name. He had elected to be suave about it, so that if Merlin said no, he could be a bit derisive, but otherwise unruffled. He would have been a bit disbelieving, that a man with enough working brain cells to drive all about the countryside ministering to those fiddly species and conditions which stumped their experienced owners could be anything other than stupefied by such great and dazzling luck; but he would have taken it very well, with only a little pity for Merlin’s neuro deficiency. 

So as not to startle Merlin unnecessarily with his good fortune, he followed him round all day Friday whilst he checked the mares, rehearsing the question, till it was so smooth he could have skated on it; and then sat on it for innumerable hours determining the right time for it, till at last it was time to lug everything back round to the truck, and he would have to ask, or watch the truck roar off into the evening with Merlin’s thwarted chance at euphoria.

He put the ultrasound machine into the back seat.

He pulled out the hoof testers Merlin had forgot, and one of the plastic sleeves which had been passed over to Arthur and never used.

“Oh, no, keep it or bin it. I’ve got loads,” Merlin said.

“Right.” He crinkled it up casually in his hand. It made an absurdly loud sound, and was so hot as to make his palm feel sweaty, as if he were nervous. “Well.” He thrust his hands into his trouser pockets, forgetting the plastic sleeve, so that it was awkwardly balled in his fist, and the pocket awkwardly bulged. He shifted from foot to foot. 

Merlin gave him a little confused smile, not especially different from his normal smile, and opened the truck door. “I’ve got to get home. Text you later?” he said, already halfway into the truck. And Arthur, whilst he was turned away, blurted out, “Actually, I was thinking--there’s a--Yorebridge House. In Bainbridge.”

“What’s a Yorebridge House?”

“A restaurant. A hotel. And restaurant. That I heard was quite good. I was thinking about popping round.” He jiggled the sweaty bit of plastic in his fist. “If you wanted to come with.” It had been two and a half seconds, and Merlin had said nothing; he rushed, quite nonchalantly, to fill the humiliating void. “Obviously, if you already have dinner plans with Gaius, or something like that, never mind, it was just a thought. I heard one of the grooms mention it today and remembered I’d been meaning to try it.”

“No, that’s fine. My plans were ‘make sure Gaius’ good intentions don’t poison us.’ He’s a shit cook. But he can go round to the pub tonight. Where’s Bainbridge?”

Arthur, who had not noticed he was in difficulties, till his breathing was eased in him, said, horrified that his voice skipped a little, like children do when they are pleased, “Fortyish minutes or so from here, so it’s a bit of a haul.”

“Can we get there before closing? I’ve still got to nip home and shower and change.”

“They close at eight, so plenty of time, unless you really dawdle.”

“Ok; meet you there, or here?” Merlin asked, ducking into the truck, and starting the engine. 

And Arthur, feeling they might as well observe the traditions, by going over in the same vehicle, instead of meeting like two strangers from the internet choosing the neutral, non-murderous territory, said, hoping he did not sound too thrilled to say it, “Here. I’ll drive.”

“Grand,” Merlin said, and popped his head in and shut the door and was off.

He went home to the detached cottage, showered, pulled out every shirt which required a hangar, tried on each, discarded each, checked his phone, checked his email, pulled on one of the blue shirts again, pulled it off again: and went out, quite beyond flustered, into the kitchen, to have a glass of water, and a think. Then he decided it would be best to shave again, in case he had grown somehow unkempt between that morning, and this evening, which he did in his undershirt, whilst thinking about his overshirts.

He was in the blue one, with grey trousers, and loafers, when the knock came, and combed out his fringe with his fingers, and then his comb, till the knock went again; and he had to go out at last to answer it, before the complaints began to roll in on his phone.

Merlin was on the front step, shaved, not thoroughly, and dressed in some clothes of which could be said were clean, with no holes in them; and not much else. He froze. He had taken in the whole groomed length of Arthur, and looked almost as bad as Arthur felt.

“Oh. Erm. Is this a date?”

“Of course not,” said Arthur, who had not only shaved, but put on aftershave, his best shirt, and most of his deodorant. “What on earth gave you that idea?”

“I dunno. Maybe because you smell like a teenage boy taking a girl round to the cinema for the first time? And I think you put more thought into your shoes than I did my entire outfit.”

“No change there, then,” Arthur said, not at all waspishly. “And all I’m wearing is a bit of aftershave, for God’s sake.”

Merlin shoved his hands into his jacket pockets. They were stood awkwardly on the step, which Arthur now felt was something he could not cross. All his limbs felt too big or ungainly; and he would have liked to walk straightaway into oncoming traffic.

“Do you still want to go?” Merlin asked. 

“Do you still want to go?” Arthur asked. He was hoping with a hope nigh unto praying that Merlin would go back to his truck, and leave him to the empty flat, rather than the car where Arthur’s mistake would be like a third and portly passenger between them.  

“As your date?” Merlin asked. “Or somebody you invited along as an afterthought, because you didn’t want to eat alone?”

“I didn’t invite you along as an afterthought,” Arthur said in exasperation. 

“Oh, ok, sorry, ‘I was thinking about doing this thing if you wanted to come along’ means something different in Ireland and literally every other place I’ve ever been to than it does in Yorkshire, where apparently it means you’re asking someone on a date to a nice restaurant and they’re expected to understand that by osmosis because you’ve been out to dinner with them loads of times and it’s never been a date before.”

Arthur scratched his nose, and looked away. “Look, if you want to go, fine. If you don’t, fine.”

Merlin looked to be on the verge of throttling him. “Just ask me out, for Christ’s sake.”

“Fine. Would you like to go to dinner with me?”

“That is literally the least gracious tone I have ever heard, ever, from anyone who ever wanted to date me.”

“I’m sorry, did you require boot licking?” Arthur asked, leaning his shoulder on the door frame. 

“Yeah. And a little bollock tickling. I want to know you really want it. You driving?”

“Yes,” Arthur said, and ducked back in to snatch up his keys.

It was forty-five minutes through the Dales, which they passed in competition, by counting up all the cows on either’s side of the car, and tallying them up at the end, to see who had won, and who had dreadfully cheated.

“I didn’t cheat,” Merlin said. “You just can’t count.”

“I was trying to concentrate on driving.” 

“You should have concentrated more on winning.”

“Right, well, next time, I’ll ignore the road, shall I, and we can all die in a terrible, fiery crash.”

“At least you wouldn’t have to live with your humiliating defeat,” Merlin said as they were rolling up to a manor on a lawn so perfectly maintained it would not have been out of place on a postcard. “Oh. So like a you’re expecting me to put out afterward kind of restaurant.”

“Well it would just be good manners of you.”

“I don’t have those.”

“True,” Arthur said, shutting off the motor, and getting out of the car; and feeling, now they were out of town, and it had been firmly established they were, after all, on an actual, verifiable date, a kind of giddy playfulness, offered his arm to Merlin with an exaggerated flourish.

Merlin took it.

It was a decent walk from the parking spot to the restaurant, where they separated, having walked across the lawn with their arms linked, and the shit talk in full swing, which they interrupted to be seated, and then resumed whilst they were looking over the menus, though Merlin’s foot, which was going up and down his shin, somewhat took the wind out of its sails. “What is a dill emulsion?” Merlin asked.

“It’s just a mixture of two liquids that wouldn’t ordinarily mix together. Oil and vinegar, for instance. It can be anything from a vinaigrette to a hollandaise sauce to mayonnaise. It’ll just be some kind of sauce, with dill in it.”

Merlin squinted at the menu again. “Girolles?”

“A kind of mushroom.”

“What’s the difference between Yorkshire rhubarb, and regular rhubarb?”

“It’s rhubarb grown in Yorkshire,” Arthur said, helpfully.

Merlin kicked him.

They had the cured salmon with the dill emulsion for Merlin, and the duck egg for Arthur, to start, and swapped back and forth with their forks, complaining when the other had eaten too much of his dish, and musing on how it was a bit morbid to be helping the animal, and then to be eating it.

“Though I’ve never had to treat a salmon before. Someone did bring in their goldfish once, though.”

“What was wrong with it?” Arthur licked his fork. 

“It was dead.”

“I suppose that made your job easy at least.”

“Not really. Someone was stupid enough to bring in a dead fish and ask me to have a look at it. Guess how much better the interaction got from there on out? They spent nearly an hour arguing with me that it was only sleeping, and there was a kind of racism against fish, because they weren’t cute like cats or dogs, and they had brought it in, and were a customer, and I had better bloody well have a look at their bloody fish.”

“So what did you do?”

“Swapped it out with a live one to get rid of them.”

Arthur burst out laughing. He sprayed out a bit of the duck egg, and would have been pleased to die. Merlin in turn burst out laughing at him. “Oh, yeah, half-chewed duck egg, that’s the worst thing I’ve seen come out of anyone. I’ve seen worse come out of you personally.”

“It might be nice if you didn’t talk about vomiting over dinner.”

“Well, it would be nice if you didn’t spit it at me, but we can’t have everything we want.”

With timing that brought the topic from rather inappropriate, to wholly inappropriate, their main courses were brought out, and they switched from vomit to putting their arms up cows’ arses, which gave the waitress such a start as she was laying out dishes that Merlin said, “Oh, it’s not like a kink, or something. I’m a vet.”

“Well, that’s a relief, then,” she said with a laugh, and left them to their Wensleydale lamb.

They were through that, and musing on dessert, when Merlin, scratching at his nose, asked, “Erm. Would it be all right if I held your hand or anything like that? You don’t have to. Obviously. If you didn’t want to or weren’t comfortable. I just thought. There’s no one we know to see us.”

“Oh,” Arthur said, and suddenly was too nervous for the amount of food he had consumed. It turned over in his stomach, rather acrobatically. 

“Yeah. That’s fine,” Merlin said, and sat back in his chair with his dessert menu. “What’s an arctic roll?”

“I don’t know,” Arthur replied, and rubbed at the back of his neck. He leaned forward a little in his chair, with his elbows on the table, and clasped his hands on the table, and looked at Merlin’s on the menu. 

“Do you want to find out?” Merlin asked, still looking at his menu.

“Sure.”

The roll, a sponge cake in which was enfolded some vanilla ice cream and a raspberry pistachio sauce, was duly brought, and silently chipped away at from opposite ends, till Arthur blurted out, “That would be--fine.” 

“What?” Merlin asked, and Arthur shot out his hand and grabbed Merlin’s and held it over the table in a kind of cold terror. He felt that everyone was watching him do it wrong. He felt that every eye present had pivoted suddenly from its business, to his, and now stood coldly assessing his pitiableness; then Merlin’s hand turned over, palm up, and clasped him back, and the fork in the other dandled ineptly in the sponge, which he was now prodding in blind expectation whilst his smile went blazing across the table. He was looking at Arthur instead of the cake, and assuming where it was at, instead of confirming, and stabbing the plate as much as the cake.

The handholding persisted through dessert, and into the after-talk, not because Arthur had any regard for it, or felt at all very warm in his extremities, but because there seemed no reason to deprive Merlin of it. The sun was going out, and the river holding on tenderly to the last of it, when they were kicked out for closing, and Merlin said, in a low voice perilously near to the waitress, with the dimples which warned he was about to spring some impropriety on an innocent, “It’s too bad we’re not staying at the hotel. Now I have to wait forty-five minutes to rip off your shirt.”

Arthur swallowed a very little amount of his tongue. And he said, clearly, though it felt as if he ought to be choking on it, “We could. If they had a room available.”

But they didn’t, which was just as well, because in the interests of certain extremities, he had forgot he had not brought with him clean pants or toothbrush, and would have had to be one of those barbaric subcultures of men who merely turn inside out the pants, rather than laundering them.

“Too bad,” Merlin said. “Would have been nice to lounge round a hotel room for even a night. I haven’t had a proper holiday in ages.”

There were some little gears set turning in Arthur’s head at that. But they hung up, because they had a little wander round the countryside before getting into the car, and Merlin, instead of waiting to be back to Emberford or even in the car, blew him in a field.

They had a bad batch of weather after that, and some wind which came out personally to brutalise them. The one solitary date which Merlin felt had not come off too badly, considering he had not even known he was on one, remained a singular phenomenon, because they were running round servicing the livestock, instead of each other; and the cases were those nasty tricks which occasionally the profession enjoyed playing on those gobsmacking muppets who subjected themselves by choice to such ordeals as rumenostomies in power cuts. 

In the old days there might have been a paraffin lamp over him, and the corners seething with shadows like creatures; but here there were Arthur and Jim Greenwood crowded round with the torches on their mobiles aimed at the incision he was making, whilst a third employee restrained the bull calf whose bloat had prised them out of their beds. Beyond the shed in which they were working, there was an unholy racket; they were on one of the fell tops, instead of in the lee of it, where former winds had worn the hill down to the bone, and the present was having a go for the carcass. Underneath, where the green miles were folded like beautiful fabric into one another, and there were species beyond the stalwart heather standing up to the backdraughts, all was heaven, all was dream: but here was hell, and all the devils that were in it. There is a kind of whistling which happens when the wind seeks out every stalk in the earth, and calls it to service, so that the air resounds as the rafters in cathedrals do with rapture on earth; but in the cathedral there is a certain implication of holiness, whereas at 3.00 in the morning, on a desolate moor top, with a stomach in your hand, you are going to be eaten by ghosts. He would have liked to be deep in his jacket, but had taken it off, to keep the cuffs out of his business, and now was shivering in the morning, with all of the planet shrieking at him, wondering why he could not have gone into literature. His teeth were chattering, and he could feel his body, feeling round for sleep, as if he might have set it down somewhere, and presently could go back to it. The procedure was careful but not physically testing work; but he could feel that strange wibbliness of the muscles, which at 3.00 in the cold, not unreasonably, do not want to do any work. His hands in the latex gloves were warmer than ice: but not noticeably more so. He flexed the one gripping the forceps, transferring them for a moment to the other hand, and trying to remind it it was a living thing, by flaring it out a few times, and then making a fist. Then Arthur, with maximum obnoxiousness, said, “On your own time, then, Merlin.” And he proceeded to be so goading that it was warming. Whilst Merlin pulled the rumen out of his incision and secured it to the external abdominal oblique, Arthur annoyed him. Whilst he was placing his sutures, Arthur was placing his jibes, and getting them back, over Merlin’s shoulder, whilst Jim, one of those large, good-natured types, who feel it is their job to gently wind up young men, for being young men, joined in on the taunting. Merlin noticed that both of them were in their jackets, whilst taunting him for shivering out of his.

“Ah, ye young lads, think you’re fit as a bull and then ye leave your parlour with the nice tea and biscuits.”

“I notice you’ve got a jacket and jumper on. Is it very cold, on the peak of manliness? Because down here, us girls are freezing our bollocks off, but then we’ve not got five layers between the wind and our delicate bodies.”

“Well, go on, then, Arthur, you’re a gentleman, give him your jacket.”

“Nah, I don’t need it. I’m actually working more than my gob.”

There was a roar of laughter, almost as loud as the wind. “You’re nearly as mean as my wife.”

“Oh yeah? She single?”

“She will be when I get myself killed fighting some cheeky bastard half my age for her hand. But I’ll be sure to take ye with me,” he replied cheerfully.

Merlin stopped his stitching to laugh, and then resumed, in the lights which were being held as steady as they could be; which meant, in that maelstrom, he was operating almost in a kind of strobe light, whilst the house beyond, and all the hills on which human abodes ought to have been keeping off the endless night were in that dimensionless black nothing which exists when technology no longer does. Even the moon had gone, so that they were like four little specks in the eternity, and the torches were all that was between them and extinction. 

He finished finally, by inserting the cannula, which had had to soak in room temperature water now there was no power for hot, and was not as pliable as he would have liked, though a little stubborn struggling got it placed as he wanted. Then he went over the aftercare with Jim, smeared some Vaseline on the flank to keep the rumen juices from scalding the calf, and collected, in the following order of importance, his jacket, his equipment, his Arthur. 

“Christ, I wish I’d gone into something sensible, like humanities. I could be on the dole right now, eating Tesco ramen in my council flat.” He said it through chattering teeth, whilst Arthur helped his stiff fingers do up his jacket. He worked his hands awkwardly out of the gloves, like he was manipulating two blocks of wood. 

“You’d start whingeing three minutes into your crap Tesco job about how not a single customer had required an emergency c-section in the rain,” Arthur replied, zipping the jacket to his chin, and slapping him on the shoulder.

“True.”

It was a grim drive down from the fell, with only his own headlights to show there was life in the world. The truck was creating the planet as they went: cutting out with its lights a wedge of stone wall from the void, and discovering on the turns where the Dales lunged away in waves of black furze. Presumably, there were still the houses, and live souls at peace or at tea in them; but from the road they could see only that they were driving from nothing into nothing; that where they were was black and where was beyond was black and they would have to trust that they were not the last survivors of calamity.

He dropped off Arthur at the farm; or intended to drop him off, because the blonde head popped back into the cab half a second after it had gotten out of it, and asked him in to tea; and because the wind and the drive had driven from him all but the fond memory of sleep, and he was now in that obnoxious state of awake which can be summarised as I Am But I Don’t Want To Be, he shut off the truck, and followed Arthur into the little house, which fortunately the power cut had overlooked. He did not get out of the jacket at once, but gradually felt that he was thawing, and was going to be human, whilst Arthur was pottering amongst the cabinets, and taking down the kettle, and fiddling with the gas, and asking him what he wanted, which between normal conversationalists would have been the work of a moment, and between them was the work of several. Finally he was given some earl grey with the correct amount of milk in it, not very graciously, which he sipped at the counter, whilst Arthur leant his hip on the other side of it, and drank his plain black. 

They were talking about how the surgery had come off, which he had not expected to lead to anything other than some nitpicking of his technique, which he liked to go over in detail, to identify where he could have bettered it; but they were doing it on the sofa, with their feet up on Arthur’s coffee table, and at some point transitioned to snogging. It was getting on pretty well, Merlin’s penis felt, till Arthur pushed him off and sat up, his fringe sticking out, and said, struggling a bit for it, “I’m going to shower.”

“Right this very second?” asked Merlin, who felt that possibly it could be put off a bit.

“Yes, right this very second, before we go any further after coming in direct from a cow surgery.”

“Are you trying to say we smell like cow?”

“Yes.”

Merlin extracted his legs from Arthur’s. “You know, you would save on water and be doing your bit against climate change if you shared the shower, instead of keeping it all to yourself and making me go after.”

“Really?” Arthur raised an eyebrow. 

“Yeah. But you are pretty rich, so I suppose you’re on the side of twirling your moustache and killing the earth.”

Arthur frowned exaggeratedly. “I’d have to grow a moustache.”

“Yeah. I don’t think you’d look very good with one.”

“No,” Arthur agreed. “I suppose there’s nothing else for it, then,” he said, and led Merlin back to the bathroom, where he started the shower, and then dawdled round not stripping off. 

“Did something pop up between now and the last time I saw you naked that I’ve never seen before?” Merlin asked, and reached out to undo the belt Arthur was taking his leisurely time with. 

“Of course not,” he scoffed, so hard he had probably pulled something; but it was clear he was going a bit shy again, waiting for Merlin to get off his own kit, before anything more than his shirt joined his socks on the floor. Merlin, already in nothing but his pants, pulled them down, and stepped over the tub edge, under the spray, turning his back to Arthur, so that he could get in without feeling scrutinised. He felt the solid body squeeze in after him, and set about getting out the shampoo from the bottle, letting Arthur come to him in his time, like he would have done for one of those patients who cram themselves into the back of their carrier. He had shampooed his hair, and already moved on to soaping his chest hair, when he felt a little kiss on his shoulder, and tried not to be too fond of the hesitating way it had stumbled over him. He turned round, and squeezed some of the shampoo into Arthur’s hair, and worked it into a little mohawk. “I’ll check Annie’s dressing before I leave. What about George’s cyst?”

“Healing up nicely.”

“And Monday I want to do the tetanus boosters for any of the broodmares who a month or so postpartum.” He ran his soapy hands down Arthur’s chest. Arthur did it back to him, a little falteringly, as if he might cock it up, or was presuming too much, by touching a naked man who had gotten voluntarily into the shower with him. Merlin leaned in, and sucked on Arthur’s neck, which he had found got a fine little shudder out of him. He grasped one of the wet hips, and pulled Arthur in, till they were flush against one another, and Arthur’s breathing had gone a little rattly in him. He ran his thumb slowly up the underside of Arthur’s cock, over the head, giving him a little tongue as he did so, and feeling how the breath from Arthur’s nose stuttered on his cheek. “Turn round,” he said, and kissed his chin. “I’ll wash your back.”

He did wash his back, though by the somewhat unorthodox method of running his foamy hands over the firm muscles in the broad shoulders and along the spine whilst he thrust between Arthur’s thighs. He nudged Arthur’s legs closer together so the muscular thighs were firm round him, pushing in between them with slow strokes, and working over one of Arthur’s ear lobes with his teeth, whilst Arthur braced his forearm on the wall and braced his forehead on the arm and shivered in great endless waves.

He had worked himself up nearly as hard as Arthur’s breathing by the time he sank to his knees, and began to work over Arthur with his tongue, using the slow laps and little inward pulses with the tip of his tongue that he knew Arthur liked, fucking him a little with his tongue, and then sucking at him, alternating excruciatingly back and forth, at the same maddening pace, till the water was cold on his back, and Arthur’s legs were trembling. They had to get out of the shower before it began to shrivel, if not their ardour, at least its delivery method, and stumbled still wet into the bed, where Merlin, breathing shortly, pushed Arthur down onto his hands and knees, and picked up where he had left off. 

There was lube brought out after some clumsy rifling through the bedside table, which he used on his fingers, before using the fingers on Arthur. He took a little more into his hand, awkwardly, trying not to pull the other away from where it was doing excellent work, and stroked himself, watching his fingers disappearing into Arthur, watching the firm arse pressing back into him, the shaking thigh muscles, the muscles moving in the back, all the little movements in the firm, fit body, shuddering at what he was doing to it. He slid his hand down and ran it over his bollocks, giving them a little tug, and moving back to his cock, began to stroke himself now with a little desperation. He slipped his fingers out of Arthur, and, grabbing him by the hips, thrust between the tight, shuddering thighs again, saying in a strangled voice, “Tighten them up a bit--yeah, like that.” He could feel every time he nudged Arthur’s bollocks there was a little jerk in him, in his whole body, and breath. He dug his fingers in, and began to thrust as if he were fucking him, his belly slapping wetly against Arthur’s arse.

Then Arthur backed onto him, or he moved into him: and suddenly the head of Merlin’s cock was inside him, and Arthur was gasping out, “Keep going.”

“We need a condom,” Merlin gasped back, and pushed in, almost against his will, it felt so good, trying to recall, in the fuzzy jumble of sensations which robbed him of all but the sensations, why he would need to pull out; why he would need to do exactly opposite of what seemed to him his body’s perfectly reasonable desires. The foreplay had relaxed Arthur so that he didn’t give out any cry of pain, but only pushed back on him, panting, “Don’t stop, oh God ,” which seemed to Merlin far more sane than stopping.

“This feels so good, Arthur, Jesus Christ.” He pressed his lips together. He was trying to find in doing so the willpower to pull Arthur off him, and root round in the drawer where the lube had been; and kept thrusting into him instead, using his knees now to leverage Arthur’s legs apart, so that his weight was evenly distributed across both hands and knees, and he was taking it in force.

Merlin had the heroic idea of at least not coming in him, after failing to pull out of him; but he was getting so close, and Arthur was getting so close, that even this noble goal was slipping away from him. “Are you close?” he asked breathlessly. “Because I am so close, and I’m going to have to pull out.” He had hit, whilst he was talking, that spot which made Arthur’s head dangle down loosely between his braced arms: and went after it now with fury, thinking to drive him over the edge, before reaching it himself. But it made Arthur cry out, and claw up the sheets, and push back into him, so hard that there were little white spots floating in front of Merlin’s eyes, and he had to hold onto Arthur’s hips, not to brace for pushing, but for support. He was half-draped over Arthur’s back, and kissing his spine, and murmuring, “Oh fuck oh fuck” and trying merely to hold on, till Arthur no longer could. “Christ, Christ,” he panted, his belly, his bollocks slapping against Arthur’s arse whilst his cock drove into it, little tremors going all through him, all through Arthur, and that hot white tension in his gut beginning to warningly unravel. He licked his palm and reached round and grasped Arthur, getting his spit all over his cock, head, shaft, bollocks, twisting his wrist as he stroked, and moaning as he felt Arthur’s bollocks tightening and felt his arse tightening and suddenly, shudderingly, was coming, half a second before Arthur was coming.

Arthur shot all over his hand and cried out his name and tightened on him so hard that Merlin, his sweaty cheek pressed to Arthur’s sweaty back whilst the little hot white ripples went over and through and down him, shouted so loudly it startled him. He was halfway through his swearing before he even knew that it was his swearing. He bit Arthur’s shoulder and pulled at his nape hair and gave him three more hot, messy strokes of his cock whilst Arthur shudderingly took them. Then he collapsed in a sticky pile on him. 

It was a long time before he could talk properly, though he at least was able to move enough to roll himself off Arthur, who turned over on his back and ran a shaking hand through his fringe. He said, when he could, finally, “Well, that was stupid. Now we’ve got to go and get tested.”

Arthur tensed a bit beside him. “Why?”

Merlin turned his head to look uncomprehendingly at him. “Because we just had unprotected anal sex? I get you’re not super familiar with gay sex, but I kind of assumed you knew that much.”

“No, I mean, you’re not getting anything from me, so are you saying you’ve been having so much sex I need to worry about catching something? How many people did you hook up with from Tinder?”

“Well, none, since I was on Match.com. But I didn’t hook up with anyone from there either. There was just one bloke a while back, and it was only the one time, and we used a condom.”

“How long ago?” Arthur demanded.

“Several months ago. Like at least six.”

Now Arthur relaxed, marginally, back into the bedcovers he had hopelessly snarled. “So before we…?”

“Yeah, of course. But when’s the last time you were tested?”

Arthur rubbed at his nose, and looked away. “Round three or so years ago.”

“Yeah, you’re supposed to be getting tested way more often than that if you’re not in a monogamous relationship.”

Arthur rubbed his nose again. “You’re supposed to be tested more often if you’re not in a monogamous relationship and you’re--sexually active.”

Merlin sat up on his elbows. “You haven’t had sex in three years?” he blurted out.

“Obviously I’ve had sex in three years, we just had sex.”

“Obviously I meant ‘you haven’t had sex in three years till me,’ you pedantic tit.” 

Arthur rolled a malevolent eye at him. “Well, that was--when I broke up with my last girlfriend. I haven’t been with anyone since then.”

“Why?” Merlin asked. He was trying to imagine looking like Arthur, and having Arthur’s money, and not getting it on the prompt and sweaty regular. 

“Because I--work a lot and I am very busy and--because…I didn’t really enjoy sex.”

“Oh,” Merlin said. “Well, erm, you’re very good at putting your whole back into it anyway.”

“I didn’t enjoy it with women , you idiot.”

“Oh,” Merlin said. “Christ, I could be dead and have a more functional gaydar.” 

The Dales were going into fall, which meant that they were making his outdoor cases a little progressively more miserable; though now on more occasions than not he was properly outfitted for them, in a hodgepodge of kit which Arthur exasperatedly threw into the truck or clapped down on his head, depending upon whether he was heading out into the rain, or already stood in it, with only his own hair against the elements. 

They were now such a regular sight amongst his clients that he was asked even by those newcomers who had seen him only once or twice where was ‘t’other fella,’ and on one occasion was interrogated so thoroughly by a four-year-old on the absence of his friend that she had to be removed by her mum from the premises. Arthur was the especial favourite of children, who could sense that they disturbed him, and immediately came flying to greet him when the familiar truck pulled up in front of their home; and pulled up themselves whenever they saw it was only the dark-haired man who was not remotely afraid of them.

But Arthur was there for Princess’ immunizations, and every question there ever was from Maddie’s granddaughter, who went down them as neatly as if she were reading from a checklist.

“Do you have a wife?”

“No.”

“Does Merlin have a wife?”

“No.”

“Do you like potatoes?”

“Yes.”

“Does Merlin like potatoes?”

“Yes.”

“Do you like the red ones?”

“Yes.”

“Does Merlin like the red ones?”

“Yes.”

“What about the yellow ones?”

“Yes.”

And on and on, through the entire panoply of vegetables and animals that had ever populated the earth, whilst Arthur gave him increasingly lengthy and desperate stares across the barn, and he gave the stares increasingly cheerful cold shoulders. 

“Merlin, don’t we have another case?” he asked, finally, when the enquiry had looped back round to his personal relations, which she was methodically going through, all the way from aunt to third cousin.

“Oh, it’ll keep,” Merlin said, scratching under Princess’ chin. “Just have to check one of the Thompsons’ sheep to make sure the cut on its leg is healing up properly. It’ll just take a second.”

“My grandfather’s dead. Is your grandfather dead?”

“Yes.”

“Is your brother-in-law dead?”

“I don’t have one.”

“Do you have a sister-in-law?”

“No.”

“Well do you have any in-laws?” she demanded.

“No.”

“Charlotte, let that poor man alone,” Maddie broke in at last. “I’m sorry. One of my sons was married recently, and she just learnt that word.”

“Why doesn’t Arthur have in-laws?” she asked Maddie.

“Because he isn’t married and his sister isn’t married.”

“If you got married, you could have them,” Charlotte informed him sagely.

“Good to know,” he replied, awkwardly.

“Probably going to be the Windsors, yeah?” Merlin asked as they were at last getting into the truck. “Your in-laws?” He started the truck. “You rich people do hate sullying the bloodline with anything that would dilute the incest. Then you might have to grow a branch on your family tree.”

Arthur rolled his eyes. “Yes, I’m sure I’ll be going straight away from a horse farm in Yorkshire to Buckingham Palace.” He looked out the window. “What about your in-laws? Godspeed to them.”

“Probably won’t have any,” Merlin said, turning onto the road.

“Why? You don’t fancy being married?” Arthur asked, in what sounded to Merlin a very casual tone of voice.

“It’s not that,” he said, very carefully. He did not say he was arse over tit for a closeted man whose difference in society was not so much a strata as a stratosphere; but settled instead for, “Just can’t see things falling out that way.”

He had not said it; but he had thought about it. They were in, by mutual and silent understanding, a monogamous sexual relationship, which they had not defined aside from it being something which could be safely explored without the use of prophylactics. He was sleeping over any night he could get away with it, sometimes in only the most literal sense, because he had come in too knackered to get off anything other than his boots, and going to the food markets in the market square for the ingredients which Arthur turned into lovely dinners for them, and deepening those fantasies which he had had of the garden and the semi-detached and the dogs, all whilst there was a little clock in him, counting down to the inevitable. He thought in those moments when Arthur was smiling at him that they would come through his father all right; that they would not have a fair-weather jaunt of it, but that together they had created one of those things for which Arthur would risk Uther’s cold disappointment. And then he would see the smile go to Uther when he had been praised, he would see there was a glow to him, he would see the puppyish look which he gave when hurt change to the puppyish look which he gave when in love, and he would see that it was for his father’s love, that it was striving for his father’s love, till it was inside out with trying, that Arthur would turn himself inside out or into knots for whatever approval could be had from a man who was not going to give it to a son who was shagging his vet. There was a timer in the background of the relationship, which felt to him like those mornings when he woke before his alarm. He was in that terrible suspension where the jolt though expected is still tremendously jarring. He went to bed with Arthur expecting that he would not wake up with him. He went round to the little cottage with the light left on for him on nights when he had to creep in at that hour when even the wind is asleep expecting that the light would be out, or there would be a hard face waiting for him at the door, to say it had all been all right, and now was conclusively over.

He had not even told Gwaine, whom he told everything, because he was afraid he would be lovingly scolded, and told what he knew but did not want to know. Gwaine would tell him he had better call it off, before he was too deep, which would have been like telling the drowned man he had gone out a bit too far for his skill. 

But it came out anyway, accidentally, one night after he had stayed up late drinking a bit of wine with Gaius, and giggling over a case of elephantine dog’s bollocks which had driven the prim owner mad with embarrassment. It came out in a kind of gush, with some of the red wine fumes, whilst they were chatting about their days.

“Please don’t tell me you told me so because I already feel like shit but I’ve been fucking Arthur and I kind of wish I never had because eventually his dad’s going to find out, or he’s going to be more concerned about his dad finding out than he is about getting his dick sucked and I don’t know what to do.”

There was a long silence on the other end.

“You know who doesn’t have the answer to this conundrum? Me. You know who does have the answer to this conundrum? Your fella,” Gwaine said at last.

“You know I don’t like it when you’re right,” Merlin replied.

But he was; and so Merlin went over next evening to Arthur’s full of confessional intentions, and accidentally let Arthur put his cock in his mouth, and because he was so keen, Merlin did not feel it was altogether entirely polite to say to him, “Hey, take my dick out of your mouth for a second; I’ve got something to say to you.” Instead he said, “Oh God, yeah, like that” and slid himself against Arthur’s tongue and pulled at his hair and came on his face; and after that it would have been rude not to reciprocate, and after that it would have been rude not to lie round on him, kissing his chin, and mocking him; and later still, when it might have finally been appropriate to look at him very seriously, and brush at the messy fringe on his forehead, and ask if he couldn’t tell Uther to go fuck himself, it was the end of their refractory period, and Arthur was underneath him, and he did not feel it quite right to ignore that when they were two busy men.

And the day after that it was that Arthur, after putting away the equipment in their truck stuck his hands in his pockets, took them out of his pockets, stuck them in his pockets, shifted a bit from foot to foot, and said, “Do you think you could get Gaius to cover the emergency cases this weekend?”

“Yeah, I’m sure he would. Why?”

“That hotel we had dinner at has rooms available for this weekend. Or I found a holiday cottage in Goathland near the North Moors National Park that would be a good spot for exploring the moors; good hiking out there. Anyway, you said you hadn’t had a proper holiday in a while.” He looked as nervous as if he were appealing for a stay of execution, and expected to be shot immediately; so that it would not have been very good form to say anything other than, “The holiday cottage sounds grand” and relieve him immediately, and get the crooked smile which made Merlin feel that to say anything other would have been madness.  

But next day he had Gaius out with him on a stubborn case of bovine mastitis which had been resisting his antibiotics, and on the drive back to the clinic casually broached the subject of coverage for that weekend, not looking at Gaius as he asked for it, but keeping his eyes on the road, so Gaius would know it was not very important to him, but that it would have merely, mildly pleased him to go. “Yeah, some friends in Goathland wanted to go hiking for the weekend. I thought it’d be nice to get away for a bit.”

“Some friends?” Gaius asked. “Plural?”

“Yeah. That’s what the ‘s’ at the end means.”

“What I meant by that tone, Merlin, was ‘some friends, plural, not Arthur, singular?’” 

He fumbled with the indicator. “Uh, no. It’s--”

“It’s Arthur, and we have put off this conversation for too long,” Gaius said, sternly.

“Ok,” he said, with uncharacteristic quietness, because he could hear in Gaius’ tone there was the warning that had been in his own head; that he was going to be told precisely what he had been telling himself; and that he would have to hear it whilst the Dales were rolling serenely all round them, and not even the wind was in the right mood. 

“I am well aware of what you and Arthur have been up to; I’m afraid to say it has kept me up many a night.”

“Oh, great, wonderful, yeah, just what I wanted to hear.”

“You, my boy, do not get to complain about what you do not want to hear,” Gaius said drily. “I was hoping you might come to your senses on your own, but there doesn’t seem to be any sign of that.”

“Look, I was going to come to my senses, but Arthur--”

“Arthur is not going to leave his father for you,” Gaius interrupted him, quietly; and with a kind of infinite gentleness. “Merlin, I have known Arthur all his life. And he has spent all of it feeling that he has to make it up to Uther for his mother’s death. It is tragic to have watched him putting aside everything he has ever wanted the moment he feels it might not be pleasing to Uther; but I have watched him put it aside. He wanted to go to the RVC, and here he is, years later, still toiling away at some paperwork on a desk across from his father’s. He has money. He has a great love for animals. He could have gone at any time; he did not, because Uther did not care for it. He has dated a string of women, some of them no kinder to him than his father, none of whom he loved, none of whom he even particularly cared for, because it would disappoint his father not to. He will fight his father for what he feels is morally right; he will not fight him for his own happiness. And I do not want to see you be something he will not fight for.”

Merlin rubbed his wrist under his nose. He had felt that it might be running a bit; and his eyes were suddenly hot. 

Gaius sighed. “I am not saying this to hurt you, but to keep you from being hurt.”

“Yep. I get it. Thanks,” Merlin said tightly. “He’ll chuck me like some rubbish.” He rubbed his nose again. “Will you drive, please?” he asked after a long moment of silence, because there were two of the road, and though he had rubbed his eyes much the same as his nose, it had not got any clearer which he was to drive on. 

Meanwhile Arthur had gone to Morgana, and after putting a glass of wine in himself, said, “I’m--sleeping with Merlin.”

“No wonder you’ve been almost bearable,” she said.

He scowled at her. “Is that all you have to say?”

“I’m so sorry,” Morgana said, with every indication of sincerity. “Congratulations on losing your virginity again; it grew back a while ago, didn’t it?”

“Oh, piss off.” He leant his elbows on the counter. “I’m telling you because--I’m going to have to tell father.”

She raised an eyebrow. “That’s very sexually progressive of you, but I’m not sure Uther is open to those kinds of father and son talks, considering he isn’t even open to the regular ones.”

“No.” He ran a hand through his fringe. “I mean--I’m fairly confident I’m--probably gay and…Merlin’s openly bisexual and happily--headbutting anyone who doesn’t agree, and I don’t imagine he’s going to want a closet case for the rest of his life.”

“Oh my God, you little soppy romantic--”

“Shut up,” Arthur said, and drank her wine as well, for good measure. He set the glass down in front of her glare. “I don’t want to get him sacked, or hurt Gaius’ practice, which I imagine our father is not going to want to keep patronising if he finds out I’ve been shagging Gaius’ nephew. But.” He swallowed.

“But you love him.”

“But I’m--fond of him.”

“Oh, you’re fond of him. ‘Merlin, I don’t want you to get any ideas, but I am willing to come out to my despotic cunt father for you, and also I’ve already taken your last name and named all our future children after me.’”

“Piss. Off,” he said through his teeth. He rubbed the back of his neck. “Look. What am I--what do I do?”

“Well, before you go running off to Uther, you might tell Merlin you’re fond of him, because I expect you think yearning at him is sufficient to get the message across, but you actually have to open your mouth and say whole words about your feelings.”

“Like what?” he demanded.

“Would you like me to jot down a little script for you? ‘Merlin, I’m in year 3, so do you like me, check the box for yes or no and then hand it back to my mate here.’ Tell him you love him, you knob.”

“What if he doesn’t?” he asked, swallowing. 

“Then you might want to find that out before you blow up your life for him. But as you know, I know everything, and I’m confident he does.”

“How do you know?” Arthur demanded. 

“He’s the ‘get you a man who looks at you like that’ meme. It’s very embarrassing for both of you. If I were as thick as you, or as pathetic as him, I’d throw myself off a cliff.”

“I don’t see why you have to have such stringent standards for that,” Arthur replied pleasantly. “Or any at all.”

She gave him the finger. “Fuck you very much. And just tell him, Arthur. I promise it will be all right,” she said; and when she left, she touched his cheek, and made him feel it would not be so frightening after all. 

Next day was Thursday, and he did not want to leave it till Friday, till the trip, till they would be inescapably in the car, or cottage; and meant to ask Merlin round, as soon as he could get free of the office: but Merlin was free first, and came in from one of the barns with his hair sticking out from under his knit cap. “Hey. You done, or almost done?” 

“Yeah, just about,” Arthur said. He had gone cold all over when Merlin walked in, and then abruptly hot; and felt for a moment looking up at the stubbled face that he would be sick. It seemed rather grim to him; and there was not so much as an inkling of dimple. “Is something wrong with one of the horses?”

“No.” Merlin scratched the back of his neck. “Is Gwen here?”

“No, she’s gone home for the night already.”

“Oh, ok. Good.” He pushed his hands into his pockets. Then he said, into the quiet, into the little pocket of peace which the office had carved out of the wind, “Look, we need to talk.”

He had heard it from Sophia, from Vivian, from Mithian; and knew what was to be the subsequent phrase, variable only insofar as to dump him kindly, or nastily. Merlin had locked the door after him, which meant it was to be a nice little letting down which he did not want anyone else to hear: not a courtesy which every other partner had afforded him. He felt, horrifyingly, that he would not be able to get anything out; that he would be sat ludicrously still in the chair whilst the little platitudes came across the desk at him: those horrid, clumsy, hurting little things which we have got to offer, when we have not got love to offer.

“I think if we’re not serious about this, we shouldn’t keep doing it,” Merlin said. 

“Oh,” Arthur said. It would have been too sad, too small, too stupid to say: “But weren’t we?” with something like a little hiccough in it, to mark out where he had stopped being able to talk. So he said the stunted little ‘oh,’ and then, because he felt he had to get Merlin out of the office quickly, “That’s fine.”

“It is?” Merlin looked taken aback.

“Yeah. Of course. No hard feelings, mate.” He went back to his laptop.

“Oh. Ok. Yeah. I guess that. Settles that, then.” And hovering stiffly for a moment, with his hands still in his pockets, Merlin said, to his bent head, rather than his face, because he had to get it out of that cold line of sight, “See you tomorrow then? Here. At the farm,” he clarified, as if Arthur might have been so sad as to assume they were still going to be sat before the fireplace in Goathland with some wine and caressing.

“Yes. Tomorrow. Have a good evening,” Arthur said politely. He had got it up, like a miracle, in one whole unbroken piece. 

“Ok. Erm. Yeah. Good night,” Merlin said, and unlatched the door and went out into the shrieking night and shut the door resoundingly after him. And Arthur, listening for the truck to pull away, hearing it go, got up, shut off the computer, shut off the lights, and went out into the night, not after him; but resolutely down to the cottage with the light he had left burning against the end; now not only of the day.

Then he sat down on his sofa and put his head in his hands and burst into a few angry tears. He would have kept them back, but felt he had been so stupid as to deserve them.

Merlin, meanwhile, went into the little house which he shared with Gaius. He went into the kitchen, where there were the sounds of pottering about, and said, from the entryway, because he was afraid he might be touched if he went in any farther, or even, catastrophically, hugged, “Hey. I went round to talk to Arthur and yeah, you were right. He didn’t even really let me get all the way through it. So. That’s over. And you don’t have to worry.”

“I’m sorry, Merlin.”

“Yeah. It’s fine. Really. I mean, I pretty much knew.” He cleared his throat. “Do you mind just popping something in the microwave for yourself? I know I said I’d cook, but I’m a bit knackered. And I’m not very hungry myself.”

“Go up and have your shower, and I’ll bring you some tea,” Gaius said kindly.

And he did and Gaius did and though he had promised himself he wouldn’t, he said, “I actually did think he might. Like me enough.” And he ended after all in Gaius’ arms which went solidly round him, and even tenderly rocked him a bit.

Arthur tried washing his face throughout the night, to see if it would stop the crying, which he was not very familiar with; but he found he was only a bit angrier after discovering that apparently it could not be stopped, and wet. He even pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes, as if he could get it back into himself that way, and did a few press-ups and threw one of his tea mugs on the floor, and not only was he no less sodden and miserable, now he had to clean up the teacup. He went to bed round 2.00 and stared at the ceiling and felt terrifically foolish. Round 3.00 he remembered to cancel the booking, which he did by emailing the property manager to say that his plans had changed, feeling all the while that they would feel quite poorly for him; that they would know, and everyone would know, that he had been the worst kind of muppet there was, the lovelorn one, who never had been loved, and had gone on anyway with his sad little dreams.

Next morning he texted Gwen to say he was too ill to come into the office, and sat round in his joggers on the sofa with a few desultory digestives, and naps; and round 9.00 jolted awake to the sound of his door opening, and Morgana yelling back over her shoulder, “Well, he’s moving, so he’s alive. You can go back to the barn.”

He sat up, blinking. “What are you doing?”

“Gwen said you were sick, so Percival and I came round to check on you. I assumed if you had copped to being sick, it meant you were actually dying. I didn’t want to have to haul your body by myself.”

“Well, I’m alive, so you can go,” he said peevishly, and laid back down and pulled the pillow he had snagged from his bed over his face.

“What’s wrong with you?” Morgana demanded.

“I’m sick,” he snapped. “Go away.”

“No you’re not.” She snatched the pillow off him. “Have you been crying?” 

“No.”

“Yes you have. What’s wrong?” She sounded almost frightened.

“I. Have. Not. Been. Crying.”

“All right, fine, you petulant cock, die of being miserable, then, and see if I care.”

He ground his teeth; but he was too miserable to let her go without having got at least a little tea out of it, and possibly even a fringe stroke, though afterward they would have to pretend she had not done it, and steel themselves to do what would have to be done to any witnesses. “Fine,” he said from under the pillow. “If you must know, Merlin broke up with me last night. Though I wasn’t crying about it. I just find him stupid, annoying, and offensively lacking in taste.”

“What?” Morgana blazed out, and snatched the pillow off him again. “Why?”

“I don’t know. I guess he was just--mucking about.” The ‘mucking’ caught in his throat a bit, where it balled up into a kind of hot and soggy lump. He swallowed against it.

“Was he?” Morgana asked coldly.

Arthur sighed. He had given up trying to get the pillow back, and flung one of his arms across his eyes. “Don’t kill him. He still needs to look after the horses.”

“Gaius can do that,” she said, and he heard her heels going thunderously across the room to the cupboards, which she began to root round in. “Which tea do you want, and do you still have your cricket bat?”

“Just the breakfast, and no.”

“I can break his kneecaps with anything, I just thought the cricket bat would make a cleaner job of it.”

“Don’t break his kneecaps.”

“I can do what I like!” she snapped. 

“He didn’t do anything, Morgana. It was my fault. For--” Here he faltered, thinking over what he had done, which was to go about after him like a dog, hoping to be given anything at all. He did not think Merlin was so cruel as to have laughed at him, but he must have been terribly sorry for him, and spent all those innumerable hours with the animals in fine weather or foul going over the conundrum of how to be kind to him. He had come into the office last night looking quite sombre, tired out not only by his hours, but by that exhausting task which it must have been to keep Arthur on out of pity for him. “It was my fault,” he said again; and let that stand, the solitary conclusion to be drawn. He could feel that Morgana was looking at him; could feel that the presence of her pity in addition to his self-pity was bringing up in him the old, problematic heavings which he had had last night whilst he was trying to get away from himself in sleep. And he said before they got out of him again, “Could I be alone, please? Don’t bother about the tea.”

And she heard in it something which made her stoop over the back of the sofa and touch his face softly and go away even more softly, shutting the door after her, where normally she would have slammed it.

At noon Gwen came round to apologise profusely. “Sorry, I know you aren’t feeling well, I’m really sorry to bother you, but I was just wondering--if you needed anything? I could just pop into the village, if you needed me to, or--even sit with you a bit?”

“No; I don’t want you to catch it,” Arthur said, as if it were contagious to be a sad, miserable, pathetic little sack, and sent her away with an assurance that he just needed sleep, when really what he needed was not to be himself; was not to be that incredible little assemblage of failures and disappointments which made him such a hindrance to loving. 

At 1.00 his stomach decided he needed to feed it more than some biscuits and self-loathing and roused him from some reruns of Bake-Off which he had been watching to bring himself out of those hopeless circuits which the mind runs when it feels it has got to go over the history of itself, to find every little 20-year-old interaction, and dwell on it, and flagellate over it. He brought out some Charlie Bigham’s Cottage Pie; but it was for two, and made him feel that the world was against him. He pictured some happy little couple eating it together, in togetherness, and hated them with a hot passion.

He had Instant Noodles.

Then he went back to the sofa and curled up in the blanket he had dragged from the guest room, where he could seethe quite comfortably in himself, because Merlin did not love him, and because the lemon macarons which his favourite had made were so disappointing to the judges they might as well have been Arthur.

At 3.00 there was another knock at the door, which he ignored, because he did not want anyone to bother him, or be kind to him; but it did not go away, and even began to get louder. Still, he was dedicated to ignorance; and expected that eventually the visitor would either exhaust their patience, or be Morgana, at which point the door would be kicked in, and he would not have to get up.

Then his phone went. He frowned at it, and looked at the screen, and saw a brief flash of a text with Merlin’s name on it.

He sat up. He unlocked the phone with feverish heartbeat; and saw what he had dreaded: Are you in your house? I’m at your door

He was unwashed, unshaven, unviewable; and Merlin was at his door, with only that little bit of wood between Arthur, and confirmation of Merlin’s rejection. He would see the shambling creature with stubble all over it, and eyes shot with red from indifference, and realise how rightly he had chosen, not choosing him. He frantically flattened down his fringe, which had had his fingers all through it, and the pillow all over it, and the blanket over top of it, and wondered if there was any time to wedge in a shower between the text and a reasonably timed response; and then there was another knock and he panicked and yanked his shirt over his head and got down to do several press-ups and answered the door sweaty from his workout, instead of his misery, and the noodles, which had been too spicy for his sadness. 

Merlin startled a little on the front step, and looked at his chest, and back at his face, which he was towelling down very casually. “Sorry about that. I was working out.”

“Oh. Uh. Gwen said you were sick, though?”

“I’m feeling quite a lot better, actually.”

“Oh. That’s good.” Merlin scratched the back of his neck. “Look, sorry, I wouldn’t have bothered you, but I wanted to get the tetanus booster sorted for Toby, and Gwen and I couldn’t find his immunisation records. We poked round your desk a bit and some of the filing cabinets and couldn’t find it. One of the cabinets is locked, and she thought they were probably in there, but couldn’t find the key for it. Your dad’s out of the office again, so.”

“Is it the one with the ‘Fuck the Tories’ stickers on it?”

“Yeah.”

Arthur tossed the towel over the back of the sofa. “I’m not sure where my father keeps the key for it in the office, actually, because he’s always moving it, but I’ve a spare here. I decided to keep a set separate from the office, because he kept losing the keys for the office and then we’d have to break into the cabinet again, and it’s not much use having your important paperwork locked up if you have to keep breaking the lock,” he rambled, and prayed he would stop talking.

“Yeah,” Merlin said shortly.

Arthur went straight away to the kitchen drawer with the keys in it, and tossed them underhand to Merlin, who snatched them, surprisingly, out of the air; though his face did not alter to show it had been startled by the sudden lobbing of them, or his own even more sudden coordination. “Thanks,” he said. “I’ll bring them back round in a bit.”

“Right,” Arthur said, and swallowed. He realised here were to be his days; the old, beloved face intruding on him, till he was sick with the wanting of it.

And Merlin pocketed the keys and left him feeling worse than he had ever felt; worse than when he had gone out of the office and Arthur had gone, not after him, because it would have been the act of a man too desperate to be borne, but to the cottage which now felt to him haunted by someone still alive. And he realised here too were to be his days, in the house where Merlin had been, for too little a while, at home in his bed or on his sofa, and now would have to keep always between himself and Arthur’s sad little hopes a kind of stranger’s kindness. 

He wanted to lie down again. He wanted to be under the blanket, with his feelings; and would have to be out in the world with them, as if it were perfectly normal to have them, and not to die of them.

He expected Merlin would be back presently with the keys, and hovered round nervously, trying to look as if he were the most all right anyone had ever been about anything: but time stretched, and stretched, and the little bit of sunlight on his kitchen floor stretched with it; and finally shortened so that he thought perhaps Merlin was never coming back, but had left the keys in Gwen’s keeping to keep them from the embarrassment of Arthur’s assumptions. He had showered, but been too tired to shave when the knock came back: not, decidedly, Gwen’s timorous one.

He smoothed his wet hair and opened the door. 

“Here,” Merlin said, and tossed the keys back to him. 

“Thanks.” He fussed them from one hand to the other. “Everything all right? That seemed--a longer round than normal.”

“Yeah. Toby’s got his booster now.”

“Ah. Good.”

“Yep. All the ultrasounds look good. I’ll see you Monday.”

“Right.” He shifted from foot to foot; and, horrifyingly, before he could stop it, his mouth was in operation. “Did you want to come in for--tea or anything like that? Bit of a rubbish day, isn’t it? Surprisingly sunny, but all day I’ve heard the wind knocking about, so I could put the kettle on, if you wanted.”

Merlin stuffed his hands in his pockets and looked at him with deep judgement. “Arthur, I don’t want to come in for tea.”

“Right,” he said. He felt horridly stupid. He had even mucked up his indifference, which he prided himself on, and which he had thought to show off till Merlin felt it had been silly to have coddled him with such unnecessary consideration. “Sorry. You just looked a bit tired.”

“I am tired. I only had maybe an hour of sleep last night.”

“Oh.” Arthur shoved his hands into his trouser pockets. “Early call? Was it the Shaws’ cow again?”

And Merlin tightened his jaw and ground it round a bit and suddenly burst out with: “No, you fucking wanker, I didn’t have an early call, you broke up with me last night!”

Arthur was thunderstruck. The words had been shouted in English; but he had understood them as if they were in Latin. “What? No I didn’t!” he said indignantly. “You broke up with me!”

There was a long silence. There was the wind, trying to impose itself; but Merlin maintained it so impeccably that Arthur felt he had never heard any world quite so quiet as this.

“You tit!” he snapped, and pushed Arthur inside and shut the door after them and shouted: “Is that why Morgana materialised in the doorway of the barn and stared at me with the coldest stare I have ever seen? She’s going to cut my fucking brake lines because you fed her some sob story. What the hell do you mean I broke up with you, you bellend?”

There were still the words coming at him in the incomprehensible jumble, which he had to pick through till he came across something of use to him. He seized on the bellend, and threw it back. “You’re the bellend!” he shouted; the only reasonable response there was. “You said--”

“I said if we weren’t serious about it we’d have to stop, meaning to tell you how I felt, and you just cut in, and said it was fine, and there’d be no hard feelings, mate.” He pressed the heel of his hand into the bridge of his nose. 

“So you weren’t actually--ending things?” Arthur asked, a little bit dazed by the notion.

“No. You. Cock,” he said sourly. “Maybe you should listen to people sometimes, you posh, overriding prick.”

“Well, you…what were you going to say?”

Merlin looked at him with the look of deep exasperation; not a very fair look, because it was actually Arthur who ought to have wielded it, and Merlin it ought to have been levelled at. “That I am serious, you berk,” he said, a little more softly now. “And are you, and are you willing to--do anything about it? Because the sex is ten out of ten, but I can’t--” He stopped, and looked at Arthur with a face that was tired, and afraid, under the stubble, and shouting. “I can’t be in a sexual relationship with you if that’s all it’s going to be. I’m not saying you have to sort yourself out right this second, or go running to your dad and tell him you’re shacked up with the vet, I understand this is kind of a fucked-up situation, I just need to know that you would be willing to. Someday. It doesn’t even have to be soon. Just.” He scrubbed his hands over his face, and when he took them away, he looked more tired still. “It’s fine if you don’t feel that way, Arthur. I’m a big boy. I can take it. I just need to know. And then I’ll have to move on with my life.”

“No,” Arthur said, thickly. “Don’t do that.”

“Christ, it’s always pulling fucking teeth with you. Don’t do what?”

“Move on!” Arthur snapped. And then when the anger had stumbled, and faltered: “I couldn’t--bear it.”

He had not realised exactly how frightened Merlin was till he smiled. Not only the dimples showed, but his whole lightened being. He was so relieved it had transformed him. There were still the circles under his eyes, and the stubble which was more than normally untidy; but he seemed to have transcended those petty concerns which are made on the insomniac’s decaying body.  Where before he had looked about to drop, now he looked about to run at Arthur.

But he didn’t. He said, “We should probably tell Morgana before she sticks a hoof pick in my head, shouldn’t we?”

“We should have told her before we told us,” Arthur agreed.

Which they did, by going out into the wind, and advancing along the drive toward the nearest barn with Merlin holding onto the back of his shirt, and thrusting him ahead like a kind of shield, so that Arthur was between a six-foot livestock veterinarian and a five-foot five woman: who came out of the barn upon spotting them with a look as deadly as the hoof pick.

“We had a bit of a misunderstanding,” Merlin called out, jerking Arthur round in case she tried to come at him sideways, so that Arthur would take the brunt of her, and give Merlin what time he needed to flee. “Because your brother doesn’t let people finish their sentences--”

“That was a whole sentence, unto itself that you said; it’s not my fault you--”

“You are literally interrupting me to explain how you don’t do things like interrupting me.” He swung Arthur round to the left; and he was hunching, a little, as if he were taller than Arthur, which he wasn’t, except in those broad realms of fantasy. “Anyway, even though he’s so thick you wouldn’t expect it, we’ve made it up. Is it safe for me to get in my truck?”

“I suppose it can be,” Morgana replied coolly. 

“Thanks. Appreciate it,” Merlin said. He let go of Arthur carefully, and stepped out, even more carefully, from behind him. Morgana did not look entirely certain that he should live; but she did not lunge for him.

“What are you two going to do now, then?” she asked.

“Er. Well, that depends upon how contagious he is,” Merlin answered.

“Oh, he wasn’t sick, he was sad. Probably spent all night weeping and rending his garments.”

“Morgana,” he said through his teeth.

“Oh, like when you killed the spider?”

“Exactly like that, I expect.”

“Probably as embarrassing as the footie story. Can I have that now, by the way?”

“No,” Arthur said. He was, he supposed, somewhat extraordinarily glad not to have been let down for being unlovable; but he was also thinking of killing Merlin. Now it had been confirmed that Merlin was not (entirely) insane, and Arthur was not (entirely) undesirable, it seemed appropriate to end it on that high note; very likely a height which Merlin would never achieve again with those common implements of his regrettable brain. 

“So what do I have to do to get it?” Merlin complained. 

“It’ll be my wedding present to you,” Morgana replied.

“Ooh, tempting. Is it really worth that, though? He snores.”

“I do not.”

“What else do I get if I take him off your hands?” Merlin crossed his arms over his chest, and leant in conspiratorially toward her. 

Arthur grabbed him by the scruff of his neck, and pulled him back. “A nice little grave in our back garden,” he snapped. 

“Well, you’d better at least weed it regularly,” Merlin whinged, and then his phone went, and he turned away and walked down the drive a bit to answer it, and came back with a look of resignation to announce that it was Old Man Simmons with the same old problem with the same old satanic cow.

“Sorry,” he said to Arthur. “I’ll be back quick as I can.”

“No,” Arthur said. “I’ll go with you.”

And working together they had the demon contained and treated and turned back out onto her domain, which they exited at speed, by 7.30.

“You probably cancelled the cottage in Goathland, didn’t you?” Merlin asked as they got back into the truck.

“Yes.”

“See if it’s still available for the weekend.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Would you rather have make-up sex an hour from where anyone knows us, or would you rather do it where my uncle might overhear it, or your sister might walk in on it because it seems like it’s going to take her something like that to learn a valuable lesson about knocking?”

“It’s 7.35 now, and over an hour drive out to the cottage. And we’d still have to pack. That’s if it’s even still available.”

“So?” Merlin said. “What are you, eighty? Do you need to be in bed right now?”

“I didn’t sleep very well last night,” Arthur said defensively; and added hastily, “The wind kept me up.”

“I didn’t sleep very well either, but you don’t see me thinking about anything other than my dick.” He leaned in, over the console, and dropped his voice. “Which I will put in you till you’re begging for it. Would you rather be gagging for it here, or up in the moors where there’s nobody to hear you taking it till you’re desperate?”

Arthur rang the property manager.

They were on the road a little after 8.00, having dashed round to Merlin’s, and then dashed round to Arthur’s, and put all their toiletries, and spare clothes, into a jumble in a tatty rucksack, in Merlin’s case, and a nice wheelie bag in Arthur’s, which did not look like it had been through a commercial meat grinder. 

The cottage was a converted stone barn, with wood burners outside and in, and a bed equal to the master set-up, with an ensuite which had both roll-top bath and rain shower: and on which Merlin, whose insults had spent all the drive growing increasingly more slurred, flopped down face first, with his legs sticking out over the end.

“Who is it who’s eighty?” Arthur asked drily, kneeling at the end of the bed, and unlacing his boots, and easing them off onto the floor whilst Merlin mumbled vague insults into the covers. “At least take off your jacket; you were just wrestling a cow in it.” But he had to take off that too, because Merlin was singularly useless, and when he had yanked it down his back, and manipulated the unresisting arms out of it, he rolled Merlin over, braced his hands on either side of his head, and said, “Just wanted to point out that it is 9.31, and only one of us has turned in for the night like a pensioner.”

“You can do whatever you want to me,” Merlin mumbled with his eyes closed. “It just has to be a scenario where I get to just lie here and moan.”

“No thanks,” Arthur said, ruffling his hair. “You haven’t showered.”

“You posh people are so demanding,” Merlin murmured, and was asleep.

Next morning he made it up by showering, popping into the village for breakfast, and then having Arthur on the table, instead of it. 

There were little pathways all over the property which they wandered aimlessly in the sunlight, till Merlin wanted to go back, for the indelicate reason of ‘fucking each other stupid.’

“Actually, no, never mind--I’ll have to be really careful. If I fuck you even more stupid, you’ll have to go into some kind of care home.”

“Very funny.”

“Oh, it’s no laughing matter,” Merlin said sombrely. “I’ve heard some of them are bloody awful places. Though I suppose you’re rich enough to get a nice one.”

Arthur slapped him across the back of the head.

They were out back on the swinging bench with some wine, and looking out over the pond which could be seen, wrinkled in the breeze they had donned their jackets against, from the outdoor dining space when Merlin said, almost quietly, for him, “What are we going to do when we get back?”

Arthur frowned into his wine. “I don’t know. I suppose we had better talk to Gaius first. Figure out how to approach my father without blowing up his whole business.”

“Well, Gaius knows already, at least.”

“You told him?”

Merlin squinted off toward the pond. “Well, turns out I didn’t have to, because he’s. Heard us. Several times.”

“Oh, wonderful,” Arthur said. “I’ll be sure never to look him in the eye ever again.”

“We have other clients.”

“I know, but I also know our farm is one of the largest. And.” He scratched at the back of his neck. “I don’t really want anyone else taking care of the horses.” He looked up at Merlin in time to see the dimples, not showing now for the purposes of enticement; but merely because his whole face had softened, and there was a little helpless smile which had brought them out where they in turn made Arthur helpless himself. Arthur leaned in: almost, this time, without fear, and got a kiss without even any tongue in it; one of those slow, tender things which are sometimes between humans in need. 

“You know I might not be able to, though. ‘Turned my son gay’ is probably what your dad considers a completely valid reason to seek a restraining order.”

“Well, you didn’t turn me gay.”

“Yeah, but you people are always blaming the Irish working class for everything.”

Arthur rolled his eyes. “You’re English. You’ve spent two thirds of your life here.”

“Thus far,” Merlin said, and took a sip of his wine.

Arthur’s heart dropped, and rolled out at his feet. “You wouldn’t leave, would you?”

“No, not even if your dad tried to run me out of town. People have tried to run me out of towns before. I like it. I think it’s very sexy of me not to go.”

“I don’t even know if that’s a joke.”

Merlin laughed, and kissed his neck. But he was not done being serious. He said, “What do you want to do? Actually, really, properly want to do? You know your relationship with your dad is going to change. So if you can’t work with him anymore, what do you want to do? We can get you back into school, if you want to do that. Or--you don’t have to go to school to be an assistant. Obviously you wouldn’t be qualified, and you couldn’t go out on your own, or perform certain procedures, but you could. Keep helping me. You’re good at it, and it’s--easier when you’re there.”

“Right, because I carry everything and you actually have proper cold weather kit,” Arthur said drily.

“Yeah, and I know when I have to euthanize an animal or I’m going to be on the floor of somebody’s barn for hours in the cold or I’m having a shit day because every single one of my patients bit and/or kicked me, I’m not alone. Even if I’m not alone with a little mincing freak who punches me in the shoulder to show he’s sorry I’m sad.”

“I think I’d want to do that,” Arthur said, looking away, because he felt a bit unsteady, even about somebody who had called him a mincing freak. He swallowed; and it was tremendously difficult. “I’m--scared, Merlin. I don’t think he’s ever had the son he wanted. And now I’m going to tell him not only that I wasn’t, ever, what he was hoping for, but I can’t be, even in future. I don’t know--how to say that.”

Merlin kissed his shoulder; and left his chin there. “I know it feels like it,” he said, into Arthur’s shoulder, kissing it again. “But any kind of approval you have to run after isn’t worth it. There’s nothing you can do, because it’s not about what’s lacking in you, it’s about what’s lacking in him. Do you think if you do what he wants for another thirty years it’ll make any difference?”

“No,” Arthur said; which he had never said before, even to himself. He had had to put it out of his mind, because it was too difficult to have tried, ceaselessly, heart-breakingly; and never to have gotten or be going anywhere.

“So do what you want for the next thirty years,” Merlin said.

And not very long after that, he did, by going into his father’s office and shutting the door, and saying, with his heart in his throat: “I need to talk to you.”

“That mare is going to auction, Arthur; it’s not up for discussion.”

“No. I’m gay.”

His father looked up from his desk. “We sorted that when you were a teenager, Arthur. You were confused.”

“No,” Arthur said. “I was hiding.”

The Dales that winter were under several feet of snow, which certain people who made their living by being the plaything of the gods and their whims had to get down in to wheedle on or off the chains from his truck. No one was courteous enough to schedule their crises for when the roads were passable; and so whether he had to putter along them because there was fog which made the Dales those inscrutable lumps which at sea are the knells of ships, or because there was ice which would make the stone walls the knell of his truck, he had to putter along them, cursing till he felt himself marginally better. He had not chosen a reasonable profession, with reasonable hours, or heating; but he could recite, with perfect enunciation, every variation of f word there was in existence.

He gentled the truck round the curves of the fells and coaxed it through where the snow was like felting on the starved grasses and beyond that, where he had to abandon the truck altogether, and bend the snows with sheer grit to his will, by punching at them with the wellies till the ice had given way to its innards. 

And he did not get any greeting after stomping or swimming out to his patients, but only, “Where’s Arthur?” which he had already answered, patiently, repetitively, end upon end, for weeks: “He’s busy with the move, and training the new office assistant at the Pendragons’.”

“Oh, bless him; give him this, as a little housewarming gift, then, will ye; good lad,” inevitably said every older woman he met, whom he noticed never in all their lives had blessed him. 

“I’m moving, too,” he protested.

“Well, you ask him nicely, I’m sure he’d be happy to share that bit of pudding with you,” said Mrs Thompson; though she did give him some tea, and scones, and take him down the hall with all the pictures of her grandchildren. “And you tell Arthur to come round next time, and I’ll make him some of those ginger biscuits he likes,” she insisted, ecstatic at the prospect of feeding them to the only human who would eat them. 

“I will do,” he promised, and on his way down the drive, rang him, to warn him: “Mrs Thompson wants to feed you some of those biscuits again.”

“Oh God,” Arthur said.

“I told you you shouldn’t have pretended to like them. They taste like arse. No, wait, I like arse; they taste like--feet.”

“Well, what was I supposed to tell her?”

“‘Mrs Thompson, these taste like if hell were something you could eat.’”

“She’s a nice old woman, I’m not telling her that.”

“I did, and she survived.”

“You’re a cock.”

He did have Arthur with him round to the Watsons’, those stubborn hold-outs who felt that the traditional method of lambing in winter was best, and got to watch, for once, and drink tea, whilst Arthur wriggled round on the barn floor, because the lambs had been too tight in the ewe for Lewis Watson, who had held up what looked to be some shovels on the ends of his wrists, and said he was sorry to call them out, but he could not get in the bloody thing. And then Merlin had had a go with his normally sized hands, and found that it was also too tight a squeeze for him; and with vicious glee suggested that Arthur’s smaller hands make a go of it.

“My hands are not small,” Arthur said.

“I said smaller . Just have a try,” he suggested; and Arthur did, and found that, though it was hard going, he was very slightly less endowed; and could get in, with some bad language, and scrunching of his face, whilst Merlin said cheerfully, “It’s a good job we didn’t have to bring Jan out into this; lucky Arthur was dainty enough,” and sipped, serenely, from his tea.

“I’m going to kill you,” Arthur said through gritted teeth.

“You say that all the time. I’m starting to think you’re not even serious about it,” Merlin said, squatting over him after he had finished bringing out the lambs, and smushing up his face with one hand, kissed the absurd fish pout after Lewis had left for the house and more tea.

He had numerous calls whilst he was out on his rounds and Arthur was finishing up at the Pendragons’ or lugging boxes out to the detached cottage they had found just outside the village that went something like the following:

“I found a cat.”

“No.”

“Well, I had to bring it into the clinic, to see if it was chipped.”

“Was it?”

“No.”

“Then take it to the shelter. Or put it in a box and sit at the clinic till you find someone who wants to take it home.”

There was always a pause at this moment, and then the inevitable: “When I say I’ve found a cat, what I mean is I’ve already brought it home.”

“You haven’t even got all your stuff in the house, but you’ve got three bloody cats already there.”

“Well, what did you want me to do?” Arthur demanded. “Leave them on the side of the road?”

“No, any of the reasonable alternatives I suggested,” Merlin said, and hung up, and sighed, always loudly enough to draw sympathy.

“What is it, love?” Mrs Haigh asked on one such occasion. 

“My boyfriend’s brought home another cat.”

“Oh, my husband’s always trying to do that, the bloody softie. But you’ve got to put your foot down,” she said, very firmly.

“Yeah, but they sit on his shoulder when he cooks dinner and it’s cute and I don’t have any willpower. Don’t tell him I said that, though.”

He did not have any willpower, which meant that by the time they had formally moved in, they had four cats, and no compassion at all from Morgana, who merely remarked, “I told you. Where do you think all the barn cats came from?”

“Well, I didn’t think he’d fill up the entire house with them.”

“The entire house is not filled up with them.”

“But I didn’t think the leopard would eat my face, sobbed boy who shagged the face-eating leopard,’” said Morgana.

“What?” said Arthur.

“Get on the internet once in a while, old man,” said Merlin.

On Christmas morning they had a nice cuppa in front of the wood burner; and did not even finish it before the inevitable emergency, which had them out for a torn milk vein at 8.30 in a freezing fog, though they were compensated generously with ham, and Arthur kept him warm from the draughts by blocking them like a gentleman, which he afterward attributed to accident. They were back, miraculously, by noon for some shagging so vigorous they had to attend Morgana’s dinner with a limp and sprained wrist, which they blamed on the emergency call in shit weather.

“Yeah, I slipped on the ice and he tried to catch me.”

“Right.”

“Arthur tried to catch you?” Morgana asked incredulously. “I’ve seen you fall over your own ultrasound machine whilst he watches with glee.”

“Well, he thought I was going to hit my head.”

“And he couldn’t afford the extra damage.”

Gwaine nipped in for a glass of cider, and said, through the turkey he was already eating, “They were shagging. Not the first time our friend Merlin here has injured himself doing that.” He clapped Merlin resoundingly on the back.

Arthur frowned at him. “Who did you injure yourself shagging?”

“People I’m not shagging anymore, because I’m shagging you, you jealous knob,” Merlin said, and shoved a roast potato in his mouth when he opened it to whinge.

On New Year’s Eve they had a breech calf, which they fought for some time in the field into which the cow had somehow escaped; and afterward they went home, to the little house on the edge of the village, and fell asleep in a pile of wet clothing which they were too tired to get out of, and slept beyond midnight and into the fresh new time beyond that.