Archive of Our Own

The first time Arthur sees Excalibur out of the water, it is raining in the mean, needling way London has of making weather feel personal.

Not a storm. A storm would at least have the decency to announce itself. This is only wet air and grey light, the kind that gathers on the collar and slips under it, that turns rope dark and deck boards slick and masts into black score-marks against the sky. By the time Tony lets him through the gate, Arthur’s shoes are taking in water at the seams and his hands are cold enough that he keeps them in his coat pockets partly for warmth and partly to stop himself doing anything idiotic with them.

Tony knows him well enough not to say anything kind.

“She came in yesterday,” he says.

Arthur looks past him. There are too many boats in winter storage, white hulls under tarpaulin, rigging ticking in the wind, a yard full of things designed for movement made patient by necessity. It should take him a moment to find her among them. It does not. Excalibur has never tolerated being overlooked. Even braced on supports, her keel bared and her varnish dulled by rain, she has the old insolent grace about her, as though being still is a temporary indignity she will remember and punish later.

Arthur stops several feet away. He does not touch her.

That, at least, he can control.

His hands remember her anyway. That is the trouble with a body: it keeps its own records, indifferent to what the mind has decided to survive without. He knows the exact weight of her wheel in a crosswind, the half-second of slack before she answered a turn, the way she would heel until the rail kissed the water and then hold there, insolent, waiting to see whether he trusted her enough to leave her.

He had. Twenty-one years old off Cape Sounion with the light going and the wind turning treacherous, he had let her run when every cautious instinct said reef the sail, and she had taken the gust the way a horse takes a wall and thrown them across the line two lengths clear of the field. He had not been able to feel his hands for an hour afterward. He had laughed until Tony threw a towel at him and told him to stop frightening the crew.

There is no photograph of that. There is no letter. It is his, filed somewhere below the waterline where his father’s solicitors have never learned to dredge.

“How bad?” he asks.

Tony pushes a hand over the lower half of his face, an old habit from years of giving damage reports to men who wanted truth translated into something they could bear. “Nothing that can’t be fixed.”

“Father will be relieved.”

“I didn’t say cheap.”

Arthur laughs once, without any humour to it, and the sound vanishes into rain and rigging. Excalibur sits in the middle of the yard with all her secrets exposed, and Arthur has the ridiculous thought that boats, like people, are meant to keep their vulnerabilities beneath the waterline. He has respected that about them all his life.

“Did he come himself?”

Tony’s mouth tightens. “Yesterday morning. Signed papers. Spoke to Nicholson. Left.”

“With Catrina?”

“Aye.”

Of course with Catrina. His father’s new wife likes beautiful things best when they belonged to someone else first. Arthur has seen the photographs from Antigua: Catrina’s pale hand arranged around Excalibur’s rail, Uther beside her in linen, both of them smiling for a camera as though the yacht were backdrop rather than memory. He had closed the laptop with great care when he saw it. He had not slammed it. He had not thrown it. He had gone to work. There are whole years of Arthur’s life that can be summarized that way.

Arthur knows the house behind them without needing to see it: the white villa his father does not so much own as deploy, staffed by people who call Uther sir and have never watched him do a single thing with his own hands. That is the difference between them Uther has never once grasped. Uther owns Excalibur. Arthur sailed her. His father acquired the sea the way he acquired everything, by signature, and has never understood why the acquisition did not make it his.

“Nicholson still pretending he knows port from starboard?” Arthur asks.

“That is generous. I’m not convinced he knows water from pavement.”

Arthur almost smiles. Tony sees the almost and has the kindness to look away.

Rain gathers on Arthur’s eyelashes. He had been twenty-one when he won the Aegean Rally, raw with sunburn, bruised across both palms, salt dried in his hair and on his lips, too tired to feel the dock stay still beneath his feet. Uther had stood beside him for photographs afterward, hand on Arthur’s shoulder for one brief second, no more than a weight and a pressure and the ridiculous warmth of approval. Arthur had carried that second for years like an heirloom. He is old enough now to know it was an insult to jewellery.

“Morgana knows?” he asks.

“She rang this morning.”

“Naturally.”

“Asked if fire would complicate the legal position.”

“What did you say?”

“Yes.”

“That will only have encouraged her.”

Tony gives the kind of smile men reserve for familiar bad weather. “You could fight him.”

Arthur looks at Excalibur’s hull until the rain makes it blur at the edges. “I did.”

“Properly, I mean.”

The difficulty with people who have known him too long is that they remember earlier versions and insist on treating them as evidence. They remember Arthur at twenty-one on a deck in sunlight. They remember him belonging somewhere loud and expensive and wind-torn. They remember before the shop, before the surname disappeared from the sign, before Arthur learned the particular discipline of building a life out of things no one could take by inheritance law.

“Morgana can do what she likes,” Arthur says. “She usually does.”

“And you?”

Arthur draws a slow breath through his nose. Salt, oil, varnish, rope, rain. The smell of a life he has made himself stop asking after.

“I have work,” he says.

Tony does not argue. That is why Arthur still answers his calls.

There is a letter waiting for him when he reaches the shop.

Arthur sees the paper before he sees the sender: cream stock, heavy, folded with the sort of expensive precision that makes even bad news look bred rather than made. Pendragon Holdings is embossed across the top. Beneath it, in a solicitor’s tidy hand, are three paragraphs explaining that, in light of recent questions concerning Excalibur’s maintenance, storage, and competitive registration, Lord Pendragon wishes to remind Mr Arthur Pendragon that access to the vessel is neither implied nor granted. The phrasing is all polish. The meaning is all Uther.

He reads it once in the doorway with rain dripping from his coat onto the floorboards. Then he reads it again at the counter, because apparently he has not yet finished allowing the day to insult him. His phone rings before he can decide whether to laugh or feed the letter to the shredder.

Father, the screen says, which is absurd. Uther has not been Father in any uncomplicated sense for years, and yet Arthur’s thumb still pauses above decline as though manners have muscle memory. He lets it go to voicemail.

The message arrives while he is turning up the heat. Uther’s voice fills the quiet shop without apology. “Arthur. I understand you have been to the marina. I hope you will not embarrass yourself by making a scene over a matter already settled. Excalibur was never a toy, however much you enjoyed treating her as one. If you wish to discuss this like an adult, you know where I am.” There is a pause, long enough that Arthur thinks the message has ended. Then Uther adds, more quietly, “And tell Morgana that arson is still illegal.”

Arthur deletes the voicemail. Then, after a moment, retrieves it and saves it instead, because Morgana has been right about many terrible things in her life and because evidence, like grief, is less obedient than pride.

The shop is cold when Arthur unlocks it, holding the night in its floorboards and glass counter and the three uncomfortable waiting chairs that make clients sit as though awaiting judgment. He turns the heat on, hangs his coat in the back room, and stands for a moment beneath the ugly old bell over the door. He has meant to replace that bell for years, along with the door that sticks and the draught in the front window and the small wooden sign outside with Arthur’s painted in cursive because at twenty-four he had apparently retained enough vanity for a sign and enough pride to refuse the surname.

No Pendragon on the door. Only Arthur.

The shop sits on the wrong end of a street that cannot decide what it is: a launderette at one end, a shuttered building society at the other, and three doors down a coffee place that arrived eighteen months ago selling flat whites to people who work from laptops and will, everyone including the coffee place suspects, price the launderette out inside the decade. Arthur pays rent that is too high for the launderette end and too low for the flat-white end, which suits him precisely. He has spent his adult life becoming a man who belongs to neither end of things.

At half eleven, Gwaine appears under that sign with wet hair, a leather jacket, and the sort of grin that suggests several poor decisions have already been made and a few more are forming an orderly queue.

Arthur opens the door because ignoring him through the glass would be childish, and childishness has never once discouraged Gwaine. “No.”

Gwaine claps a hand over his heart. “You wound me.”

“Not today. I’m booked.”

“You’re empty until noon. I looked through the window.”

“That is not persuasive. That is evidence for a restraining order.”

Gwaine leans one shoulder against the brick with the easy confidence of a man who has been thrown out of better places than this and enjoyed himself on the pavement. “I’ve got someone for you.”

“I do not tattoo your drinking companions while they are drunk, after they are drunk, or in anticipation of them being drunk. We have covered this.”

“Not a drinking companion. Neighbour. Well, neighbour’s boy.” Gwaine sees Arthur’s expression and lifts both hands. “Not a boy. Legal. Eighteen, I think. Skinny thing. Ears like handles. Looks as if a strong wind could take him but wouldn’t because it would feel guilty. Draws, though.”

That last sentence makes Arthur pause despite himself. “Everyone draws.”

“Not like this. Birds mostly, what I’ve seen. Hands. Some very enthusiastic anatomy, unless I am much mistaken, and I seldom am about enthusiasm.”

“You are frequently mistaken.”

“Never about enthusiasm.”

Arthur should shut the door. He should make coffee, review the noon file, and avoid adding Gwaine-sponsored chaos to a day already holding Excalibur by the throat. “Does he know what he wants?”

Gwaine’s silence is answer enough.

“Of course he doesn’t,” Arthur says. “Tell him to bring ID.”

“That a yes?”

“That is an instruction about identification. Do not get sentimental.”

Gwaine beams as if Arthur has promised him a kidney and wanders back into the wet. Arthur locks the door for the pleasure of hearing it click, then unlocks it again because he is, despite public opinion, running a business. He makes coffee, wipes a spotless counter, checks the appointment book, and puts the sailing magazine into the drawer beneath the till.

Ten minutes later he takes it out again.

He does not read the article. He has read it twice: a restoration project in Cowes, three pages of varnish, money, and men using the word heritage when they mean expense. The photograph shows a white hull cutting through water so blue it looks invented. There is a particular kind of self-harm in looking at beautiful things one cannot have while pretending to assess their lines.

At noon, a banker comes in wanting something meaningful to commemorate his divorce and leaves with an appointment for something smaller, less visible, and less likely to make his soon-to-be second wife laugh. At two, Arthur sketches three swallows for a woman whose grandmother wore one after the war. At four, the light has gone flat outside, Morgana has called six times, and Tony has sent one message that reads, You know where she is.

Arthur is considering closing early when the door sticks. There is a shove from outside, a muffled curse, then another shove that makes the bell shriek in protest. The young man who stumbles into the shop catches himself before meeting the floorboards and straightens with such injured dignity that Arthur’s first impulse is to laugh.

Not a boy, he corrects, because the world is full of paperwork and consequences and Gwaine’s idea of legal may not be a standard any court would admire. Tall, dark-haired, wet at the cuffs, cheap coat over a school uniform, all elbows and defiance and enormous blue eyes already sharpening themselves for insult. There is ink on the side of his right hand, deep near the thumb, and under one nail. Arthur notices the ink before he notices the ears.

Interesting.

“What can I do for you, kid?” he says.

The chin comes up at once. “I’d like a tattoo.”

Arthur lets his gaze travel over the school tie, the coat, the stubborn mouth. Want sits on this one plainly, and want in a tattoo shop is dangerous when it has not yet been asked to explain itself. He reaches for the magazine, partly because he enjoys being rude when people expect it and partly because if he smiles this whole afternoon is lost. “No ID, no ink.”

“I’m eighteen.”

Arthur turns a page. “Of course you are.”

The ID lands on the magazine with a snap of plastic against paper, directly over the photograph of a yacht under full sail. Merlin Emrys, it says, which sounds like the name of a boy who should be found under a hill in a story, not standing in Arthur’s shop with wet boots and offended ears. The date is on the correct side of the law. Barely, but law is law.

Arthur puts one finger on the card and slides it carefully off the yacht.

Merlin’s mouth compresses. It is not a dignified expression, no matter how much he clearly intends it to be. His face is too open for disdain to settle on it properly. Arthur turns another page and lets the silence sit between them until Merlin’s irritation has nowhere to go but his shoulders.

Eventually, Arthur shoves the magazine aside. “Well?”

Merlin blinks.

“What kind of tatt are you looking for?”

“Oh.” Merlin looks around the shop, sees what everyone eventually sees: no flash sheets, no binders, no wall of butterflies and kanji and predrawn mistakes. The panic flickers, and pride leaps in to cover it. “I was thinking you’d have portfolios or something… this site I was on said—”

Arthur picks up the magazine again. “Go home, kid.”

Hurt flashes across Merlin’s face first, quick and hot, before anger covers it. Arthur almost regrets the sharpness. Almost. A tattoo is not a souvenir from a long bus ride through slush. It is not something one takes because a neighbour with excellent skin tolerance and appalling judgment has been encouraging. Arthur has spent years saying no where other artists would take the money and let regret scab over later.

“But I want a tattoo,” Merlin says, the words coming faster now. “I’ve been thinking about this for months. Look, my—” He stalls, which answers the question of Gwaine without asking it. “A friend told me to come here. That you were good.”

At that, Arthur looks up fully.

Gwaine may be an idiot, but he does not send strangers to Arthur because Arthur is convenient. He sends them because Arthur will refuse what ought to be refused. Merlin meets his eyes as though refusing to lose a contest he has only just discovered he entered. “I’m the best,” Arthur says.

“Well?”

The cheek of him should be more annoying than it is. Arthur closes the magazine. “Come back when you’ve figured out what you want and maybe I’ll do a pen trial on you,” he says, “if I like what you pick.”

Merlin looks as if he cannot decide whether he has been dismissed or challenged. Good. The distinction matters. Arthur takes the magazine and goes into the back before he can soften anything. The muttered “Prat” follows him anyway.

Arthur leans one shoulder against the wall out of sight and smiles at the floor.

Dangerous, that.

Morgana arrives the next afternoon wearing a full-length leather coat, heels entirely unsuited to London slush, and the expression she reserves for rooms she intends to conquer.

She has never knocked. Not as a child, not as a woman, not even after Arthur stopped living anywhere she could reasonably claim authority over the walls. The shop door fights her. Morgana punishes it with one elegant shove of her shoulder, steps inside in a sweep of cold air and expensive perfume, and smirks at the little wooden sign above the door as though she might have it arrested for presumption.

Arthur hears the bell from the back room and knows, even before he sees her, that the day has worsened in a familiar direction.

“Morgana.” He appears with a box of gloves in one hand and scowls because she would worry if he did not. “How lovely to see you.”

She is already flipping through the sailing magazine. Of course she is. Morgana has a gift for finding the thing he would least like her to hold and then holding it as if she were born with rights over it. Arthur plucks it from her hand and tosses it behind the counter.

“I want a tattoo,” she says.

“Fuck off,” Arthur snaps. “Shouldn’t you be shopping for a new bridal crop or something?”

Her smile opens slowly, dangerously, and then softens at the centre. “I’ve missed you.”

“Yes, well.” Arthur looks away because the alternative is worse.

Morgana taps one nail against the counter. She does not speak immediately. When she does, her voice has lost the theatrical edge. “She’s been dry-docked. Excalibur, of course.” She holds up her hand as if checking the polish, but Arthur knows her well enough to see avoidance dressed as vanity. “I thought you should know.”

Arthur’s hand closes on the counter before he tells it not to. He hates that she sees it. He hates that he cannot stop her seeing. “I heard.” His own voice sounds flat, and he prefers it that way. “Tony at the marina called the day Father had her moved.”

“He’s lost his mind since he married Catrina, Arthur, you must know that. And it’s only getting worse.”

“If you’re trying to get me to come home, I won’t,” Arthur says. “I’m fine with the life I’ve made here.”

Morgana reaches over the counter and snatches the magazine back so quickly Arthur nearly laughs despite himself. “And that’s why the only piece of reading material in this place is about sailing?”

There are half a dozen answers he could give. That clients do not read. That the magazine is new. That the trade journals are in the back. That Morgana can go to hell. He chooses the one that contains the least truth and therefore feels safest.

“I can still enjoy reading about the sport even if I’m not able to participate in it any longer.”

Morgana’s hand lifts in wordless truce. She has never been good at gentleness, but she has a talent for not pressing exactly when pressing would make him break something. “I am serious about the tattoo, though.” The smile returns, full of teeth. “I want the Japanese symbols for challenge tattooed on my right wrist.”

“Morgana…”

“I want Uther to see it every time I reach for my wine at Sunday dinner.”

Arthur imagines it: the pale flex of her wrist, the black characters exposed against a crystal glass, Uther’s mouth thinning with the effort not to react. It is petty, theatrical, and unnecessarily well-targeted.

“That’s… positively evil.”

“He’s a stubborn arse who refuses to listen to reason. Let him disown me next.”

The bell clatters again. Arthur turns just enough to see Merlin in the waiting area, or rather Merlin trying very hard to become part of the waiting area and failing because he is built out of elbows, wet scarf, and obvious attention. He has a sketchbook clutched against his chest. His cheeks are pink from the cold, his mouth set in determination, and his eyes, despite a truly heroic attempt to examine a knot in the floorboards, keep flicking toward the counter.

Morgana’s gaze follows Arthur’s and sharpens with obscene amusement.

“Do you know you have a kid in your waiting room?”

Merlin’s ears go red. Arthur notices and refuses to find it charming.

“Yeah. He wants a tattoo. I didn’t think I’d be seeing him again to be honest.”

“Be sure to check his ID.”

“Do you think I’m an idiot?”

Merlin snorts.

It is a small sound, quickly swallowed, but Morgana’s eyebrows rise with such majestic condemnation that Arthur has to bite the inside of his cheek. Merlin looks down at his hand and starts rubbing at an ink stain as if the floor might yet open out of pity.

“Well, I’ll leave you to it,” Morgana says, proving that she has no intention of leaving anyone to anything. “Book me for Friday next week. I’d like a couple days for it to heal before Sunday dinner with Father.”

“You’re certifiable.”

“Yes, but I’m on your side.” Cold air rushes in as she opens the door. “We’ll figure this out, Arthur.”

The door shuts behind her. Arthur watches it longer than necessary, because for a moment he can still see Excalibur in the rain and Morgana as a girl on her deck, bare feet and red coat and hair whipping into her mouth while she called him a tyrant for not letting her take the wheel.

When he turns back, Merlin is standing with his rucksack tight in one hand and the sketchbook in the other. He has been quiet enough to be kind. Arthur notes it unwillingly.

“Well? You’re back,” Arthur says, making his voice brisk enough to clear the room of anything that might have lingered.

Merlin lifts his chin. “I know what I want.”

The confidence in it sends a small, clean spark through Arthur. Not lust; not yet, or not only. Recognition. The boy who left yesterday angry has returned carrying something he is afraid to show and determined to show anyway. Arthur gives him a curt nod, because encouragement too soon can ruin courage as efficiently as cruelty.

Merlin sets the sketchbook on the counter, finds a leather strip marking the page, and opens it.

For several seconds Arthur forgets to be impressive.

The dragon dominates one side of the spread, huge and detailed beyond any sense of proportion, wings and claws and scales layered until Arthur can already feel the future blurring if it were reduced for skin. Around it crowd fragments: invented symbols, weapons, vines, thorns, creatures tucked into the gaps as if Merlin cannot bear a page to have unclaimed space. On the facing page a falcon spreads its wings, eye bright, body caught at the instant before descent. It is not polished. It is not trained. It is alive.

Arthur sees the flaws immediately. Of course he does. Line weight, skin translation, scale, the places where detail would bleed into mud and a client would have paid to carry a mess for life. Beneath all of that is talent. Not dabbling. Not a teenager copying something from the internet. A private hand trying to teach itself how want becomes shape.

Merlin clears his throat and reaches for the book.

“It was just an idea.”

Arthur holds the cover down before he can take it. He is staring at Merlin’s stained fingers, at the ink worked into the creases as proof that this was not prepared for his benefit like a school project. Merlin made these things because he needed them out of himself.

“Is this your work?” Arthur asks. “It’s… I don’t know what to say.”

Merlin hears the wrong thing. Arthur sees the exact moment it happens: the flush of humiliation, the mouth tightening, the shoulders curling in as if he has exposed too much skin without undressing. Merlin pulls at the book. “This isn’t going to work.”

Arthur grips the cover firmly. “Hey,” he says, catching at last the panic in Merlin’s eyes. “Settle down, Christ.”

Merlin looks away, biting his lip hard enough to whiten it, and Arthur feels an unexpected twist of regret. He is better with skin than with people, though the two are not as separate as he likes to pretend.

“Some of it’s alright,” he says, and immediately wants to kick himself because all right is a ridiculous insult for work this vivid. He corrects with his tone because words are failing him. “The dragon… there’s so much detail there, I don’t recommend it for a first tattoo and it’s probably more than you can afford.”

Merlin hides the frayed hem of his coat in his fist. Arthur pretends not to notice too obviously, which is perhaps the only mercy he manages.

“But these other pieces aren’t bad. They could be done as tatts.”

Hope returns slowly to Merlin’s face, suspicious and bright. Arthur looks down before he gives himself away by smiling.

“I could do any of these smaller ones for under £100. The dragon would easily be twice that.”

Merlin chokes.

“You’ve given it a lot of layers, all this stuff going on,” Arthur explains. “Very hard to reproduce on skin. I don’t want to get half through the dragon’s face and you decide you can’t take—”

“I won’t.”

It comes too fast, all pride and fear and absolute conviction. Arthur looks at him then, not the drawings, and makes the first deliberately kind decision of the afternoon.

“The answer is no, Merlin.”

Merlin startles at his name. Arthur remembers it from the ID, yes, but that is not the reason it sits so easily in his mouth. He has remembered clients’ names all his working life. This one feels less like recall and more like a line already drawn.

“If it means that much to you, you’ll still want the dragon tattoo five years from now when you have a bit more pocket money.

“But the other pieces are perfect for tatts. It’s really just a matter of picking which one. If you’d like, for twenty pounds I’ll pen a few designs right on your skin. Now that I have a sense of what inspires you, maybe I can come up with something you’ll like.”

Merlin’s hand lifts, fingers waggling because apparently language alone cannot contain him. “So you’ll just… freehand draw on me?”

Arthur closes the book. Merlin reaches instinctively for it, and Arthur tucks it under his arm before either of them can dwell too long on trust. “Follow me.”

The back room is clean, bright, and deliberately plain: instruments, chairs, long padded table, white sheet, good light. Arthur has seen clients relax at the sight of it, disappointed as often as relieved that artistry in practice looks less like a den of vice than a surgery with better drawings. Merlin stops just inside the door and takes it in with quick, anxious eyes.

Arthur smooths a fresh sheet over the table and lays out pens. He does not look over while Merlin watches him, though he is aware of the attention as physically as heat. There is a way people look at artists when they are about to give themselves over to the process: part hope, part terror, part appraisal. Merlin’s look contains all that and something else Arthur refuses to name.

“Where were you thinking of?”

“Um…” Merlin’s confidence stumbles now that his body has become part of the question. “Lower back?”

Arthur looks him over: school uniform, buttoned collar, tie, the gawky earnestness of someone trying to step into adulthood without tripping over the threshold. His brows rise before he can stop them.

“Tramp stamp?”

Merlin glares. “Can we just do this without the commentary?”

There it is again, that spark. Arthur smiles for the first time without meaning it as a weapon, and watches Merlin lose track of his annoyance for half a second.

“No,” Arthur says. His voice comes out lower than he intended. “Now strip to the waist and lay on your stomach.”

Merlin turns his back quickly. Arthur busies himself with pens, giving him what privacy the room allows. Coat on hook, boots under the table, shirt and jumper hung with the careful neatness of someone who has correctly guessed Arthur disapproves of piles. By the time Arthur glances over, Merlin is bare to the waist, arms folded across his chest against the cold and perhaps against being seen. Pale skin, narrow shoulders, the long line of spine, a body not finished with itself yet and already asking to be marked. Arthur picks up the sketchbook.

“You—” Merlin’s voice cracks. “You can’t look through that!”

Arthur knows he should not. He turns a page anyway, because the book is not only reference now but problem, and Arthur has never been any good at leaving problems politely untouched. “Can’t I?”

There are wrists. Throats. Hands opening and closing, bodies reduced to the parts Merlin finds worth keeping. Then a page of cocks rendered with mortifying attention and far more discipline than embarrassment can hide. Arthur lifts and turns the book so Merlin can see the page, partly to be cruel, partly to see whether the private work belongs to bravado or shame.

“Boyfriend?”

Merlin’s eyes press shut. His arms tighten across his chest. “No.”

The answer is small enough that Arthur closes the book sooner than he had intended. Desire on paper is one thing. The person who made it standing half-dressed and humiliated in front of him is another.

“Can you please…” Merlin buries his face in his hands. “They’re private.”

“They’re very good.” Arthur says it without smirk or tease and waits until Merlin looks at him. He wants no ambiguity there. He has mocked many things in his life. He will not mock this.

Some of the humiliation recedes from Merlin’s face. Not all. Enough.

“Up on the table, please.”

Arthur sets the timer for forty-five minutes because parameters are useful, because Merlin is nervous, because Arthur is nervous in a way that has no business entering the room, and explains the shape of the afternoon — two or three options, go home, look in the mirror, come back knowing which one you want — in the even voice he keeps for clients who need the hour to feel governed by procedure rather than by anything else in the room.

Merlin lies on his stomach with his hands folded beneath his chin. “All right.”

“Any restrictions — nothing visible when you are wearing a uniform?” Arthur asks, and Merlin nods. “What about under the collar? Back of the neck?”

“Hmm, that might be cool.”

Arthur chooses a pen and pops the cap, tells him the ink will fade in two or three days — the last entirely professional sentence he will manage for a while.

He stands beside Merlin’s torso and studies him properly now, with the professional permission of the table between them. Where skin meets line. Where muscle will shift. Where an eighteen-year-old’s idea of himself may become a twenty-eight-year-old’s regret if Arthur is careless. Merlin tries to hold still before anything has touched him.

Nerves make some clients silent. Merlin, evidently, fills silence with whatever surfaces first — does Arthur really do this, draw on people, is it always freehand — and Arthur answers on the automatic, the same worn sentences about stencils and mimicry and liking a design to belong to the person wearing it, patter given to a thousand clients and never once, before now, delivered while trying not to watch a spine fail to hold still.

Arthur presses one finger to Merlin’s lower back to steady the skin — and Merlin stops breathing.

Arthur notices because noticing bodies is his job and because this body, unfortunately, has become very noticeable. He draws the first line anyway, a cool curve of ink across warm skin. Broad, confident, not because he feels entirely confident but because the hand must never confess what the rest of him is doing. Merlin’s muscles jump under the pen and then settle.

The first design becomes a knot low on his back, not pretty but binding, something that looks held rather than decorative. The second sharpens into a three-petaled flower at the bicep, masculine because Arthur refuses to make softness easy. The third begins as vines and grows thorns down Merlin’s side until Merlin twitches hard enough that Arthur presses a steadying palm to his ribs.

“Still.”

“It tickles.”

“Then suffer artistically.”

Merlin huffs into his folded arms. Arthur likes the sound and immediately works faster in self-defence.

Forty minutes pass. The timer complains. Arthur silences it without looking.

He is not finished. He knew he would not be finished almost from the first page of Merlin’s book. The drawings have too many half-ideas, too many shapes looking for a home, and Merlin’s skin takes the temporary ink as though it has been waiting for an argument to become legible. Arthur asks him to flip over. Merlin sits up, misunderstanding.

Arthur huffs. “I said flip over. Which means lay on your back, Merlin.”

Merlin rolls his eyes but obeys, and Arthur has to take a breath before beginning the dagger below his left nipple. This is still work. The fact that Merlin’s trousers have become an increasingly poor hiding place for Merlin’s reactions does not change that. Arthur keeps his eyes on the line. Blade, hilt, shadow. He has ignored arousal on tables before. He is a professional. He is also, apparently, a liar.

The alarm goes again. Arthur smacks it silent and keeps detailing the handle.

By the time he has Merlin standing, Arthur has ink on his own finger and a smear near his cheek from where he rubbed absently with the back of his hand. He climbs onto the padded stool to work at Merlin’s hip, and when his elbow grazes the fine hair below Merlin’s navel, Merlin’s whole body reacts like plucked wire. Arthur does not comment. Commenting would acknowledge that he has noticed; acknowledging that he has noticed would acknowledge everything else he is refusing to do.

He takes breaks only when his hand threatens cramp. He stretches his fingers, cracks his knuckles, and — because an idle hand leaves the mind unguarded — thinks of the letter lying folded on the counter in the front room, cream stock and embossed heading, three paragraphs of his father waiting to be answered or burned. He returns to the sketchbook instead. The book is already starting to feel like a place he goes, not a reference he uses. Arthur hates the intimacy of that thought and turns another page.

His own first tattoo had been done in a back room above a shop in Marseille by a woman named Sabine who smoked through the whole consultation and told him, in flawless English, that rich boys usually chose lions when they wanted to disappoint their fathers. Arthur had been twenty-two, sunburned from the Aegean, still carrying Uther’s brief hand on his shoulder like proof of something, and drunk on the idea that what he loved could be made safe if he put the name of it into his skin. Sabine had laughed at him, taken his money, and inked Excalibur over his heart with a steadier hand than he deserved.

He had thought it was a rebellion then. Later, after the lawyers and the doors closed in his face and the yacht became an asset to be managed by men who did not know how she sounded under sail, he learned that rebellion and memorial could share the same line. He thinks of that now, looking at Merlin on his table with ink blooming temporarily and wild across his skin, and understands with sudden, uncomfortable clarity why the dragon must wait.

Merlin glances toward the darkening window. “I know you said you were only going to do two or three… and I can really only afford twenty quid for this if the tatt will cost a hundred.”

“Shut up, Merlin. I’m inspired.” The words come out before Arthur thinks better of them. They are also true. He pushes Merlin onto his back again, lifts one arm over his head, and studies the tender skin high on the underside of the bicep.

Merlin makes a startled sound. Arthur ignores it because he has just found the falcon’s place.

The bird changes as Arthur draws. It is Merlin’s, unmistakably, but the curve of the wing follows muscle now, the body tucked where skin will stretch, the eye sharpened into something smaller and more dangerous. It belongs there so completely by the end that Arthur feels, absurdly, as though he has uncovered it rather than made it.

Merlin twists to see, and his breath catches.

Arthur caps the pen and rubs at the soreness in his knees. Pride moves through him, cleaner than lust and therefore somehow more dangerous. He has made countless marks. Not many have felt like answer.

“How about legs?” he asks. “Below the belt off limits for tatts?”

Merlin goes still.

Arthur follows his gaze and sees what he has been courteously pretending not to see for at least an hour. The strained front of Merlin’s trousers. The flush across his chest. The way his body has treated inspiration as a group activity.

“If you’re uncomfortable… I just thought -” Arthur glances toward the sketchbook and regrets it, because there is no way to explain that he meant the anatomy, the lines, the fact that Merlin’s drawings have not exactly established him as prudish without sounding like the worst sort of man.

Merlin laughs a little wildly. “No. I -” He looks up at the ceiling as though seeking divine intervention, finds none, and reaches for his waistband. “Ah, Christ. Fuck it.”

Arthur turns away. It is not enough privacy, but it is what the room has. “On your belly when you’re ready.”

When Merlin says, “Ready,” his voice is muffled against his arms. Arthur turns back to find him face down on the sheet, trousers off, briefs an improbable purple. Arthur has handled enough stag parties not to comment on underwear as a general principle. With Merlin, silence feels more incriminating than speech.

“I have a few ideas. Something a little different than a tramp stamp, and in my opinion more erotic,” Arthur explains, nudging Merlin’s legs apart with clinical precision that fools no one, least of all himself. “Something right here.”

He traces the inside of Merlin’s thigh with his fingertips before replacing touch with pen. Fortune’s Wheel forms just below the edge of danger, close enough that Merlin has to bury his face in his arm and breathe like a man being asked a question he cannot answer aloud. Arthur thinks of line weight. He thinks of skin. He thinks very carefully of anything except the way Merlin shivers.

“Last one,” Arthur says, almost breathless despite himself. He lifts the edge of Merlin’s briefs just enough to expose the curve of one arse cheek. Merlin clenches instinctively under his hand. Arthur presses his fingers down over the elastic, steadying him.

“Don’t move, okay. Almost done.”

A serpent around an apple. A joke, almost. A confession, almost not.

Arthur gives the ink a moment to dry and pulls the briefs back into place. When he steps away, the room is too warm and his hand aches. Merlin is covered in black marks, not a tattooed man yet but the possibility of one, a story roughed in across pale skin. Arthur wipes his face with a towel and discovers he is grinning.

Merlin sees it and laughs in relief, bright and dazed.

“Do you have a favourite?”

Arthur looks at the falcon, then at the dragon he has rendered roughly over Merlin’s chest, then at the knot low on his back and the hidden serpent. The honest answer is useless. More alarming than useless.

He snaps his watch back onto his wrist. “Ten o’clock. Damn.”

“Fuck.”

The word lands like a return to earth. Merlin sits up, and the practical world reasserts itself: buses, darkness, a mother somewhere expecting a call, a young man covered in Arthur’s ink and glowing from touch and adrenaline. Arthur hands him his clothes and looks away from the evidence of what the afternoon has done to both of them. “You alright to get home?”

“Er — yeah. I think so.”

Arthur hears the question hiding under the answer. “Bus?”

“Yeah.”

Arthur rolls his eyes because irritation is more manageable than concern. “Get your coat. I’ll drive you. I could just imagine the buzz in the morgue if your dead body came in covered with my work.”

The drive is quieter than the room had been. Arthur puts on the radio because silence in cars becomes confession if one is not careful, and one of Journey’s power ballads fills the Audi, earnest and absurd, while Merlin gives directions in a voice scraped thin by adrenaline. Arthur keeps both hands on the wheel and does not think about every place his fingers have been allowed to rest.

Somewhere south of the river it occurs to him that he has not thought of Excalibur, or the letter, or his father, in almost five hours. He does not know what to do with a fact like that, so he checks his mirrors and keeps driving.

At Merlin’s house, the front window is lit. A small terraced place in a row of them, each with the same bay window and a different decision made about the six feet of front garden: paved over, gravelled, given up on, or — Merlin’s — kept, stubbornly, a square of dug earth with the ghosts of summer staked and waiting under the slush. Someone in that house grows things on purpose. Arthur thinks of his mother’s gardeners, three of them, and the roses she never once touched with her own hands, and finds the small dug square unaccountably harder to look at than anything Uther has sent him in the post.

Merlin unbuckles his seat belt and hesitates.

“Thanks,” he says.

“Wash carefully. They’ll fade in a few days.”

“Yeah. Right.”

“And Merlin?”

He looks back.

“Don’t pick the dragon.”

Merlin’s mouth twitches. “Bossy.”

“Correct.”

Merlin goes inside. Arthur waits until the door shuts because apparently that is the sort of man he is now, then drives back to the shop with the heater too high and Merlin’s sketchbook on the passenger seat.

He does not notice it until he parks.

For nearly a minute, Arthur sits in the dark and looks at the book. He should call. He should put it behind the counter and return it in the morning with a professional apology and perhaps a lecture on not abandoning one’s private art in the hands of strangers. He should certainly not take it upstairs to the flat above the shop with his keys still cold in his fingers and Merlin’s skin still so present in his hands that the book feels less like paper than evidence.

Arthur knows precisely what he should do.

He takes the sketchbook upstairs.

The flat above the shop is two rooms and a kitchen that were plainly one room until a landlord got greedy with a stud wall. Arthur has furnished it the way disinherited people furnish things, which is to say well but from other people’s lives: a good chair with someone else’s initials worn into the arm, a table from a house clearance, plates that do not match and were never meant to. There is exactly one expensive object in the room, a brass ship’s clock, salvaged, that keeps excellent time and that Arthur has never once explained to anyone.

It ticks while he makes tea he will not drink and puts off opening the book.

The drawings are better the second time.

That is the worst of it. In the shop Arthur could blame proximity, surprise, the heat of a room where Merlin’s breath kept catching under his hand. In his kitchen, with the city quiet beyond the window and a mug of tea going cold beside him, Merlin’s work still holds. Falcons again and again, each one circling the same private ache. Hands tied, hands open, wrists flexed. Throats arched. Bodies reduced to the parts Merlin cannot stop looking at, rendered with enough hunger to be embarrassing and enough restraint to be art.

Arthur turns the pages slowly and hates himself for every one.

He is not a prude; the word would make Morgana injure herself laughing. He has seen clients naked, near-naked, crying, aroused, drunk on adrenaline, frightened, ecstatic. He has drawn across skin in places most people only offer in the dark. Yet this feels different because Merlin did not hand him these pages for consumption. He handed over only the marked spread and left the rest by accident, and Arthur knows privacy when he violates it.

He closes the book.

Then he opens it again.

Near the back he finds a boat that is not Excalibur.

It cannot be. The mast is wrong, the angle of the sail impossible, the hull too narrow for anything Tony would allow near open water without swearing. But the line of it has longing in it. A thing made to cut. A thing sketched by someone who has never had enough money to be casual about beautiful objects and therefore understands, perhaps better than Arthur would like, that wanting them is not the same as owning them.

Arthur rests his fingertips beside the page, not touching the ink.

In the morning, he tells himself he is returning the sketchbook because it is responsible. Practical. Courteous. He tells himself nothing whatsoever about the fact that he drives to Merlin’s address and parks outside for two full minutes with both hands on the steering wheel, feeling ridiculous.

Merlin comes down the street in uniform, scarf crooked, rucksack dragging one shoulder lower than the other. He stops dead when he sees the Audi, which is almost funny enough to calm Arthur’s nerves.

Almost.

Arthur gets out and holds up the book. “I thought you’d be missing this.”

Merlin’s face moves through panic, relief, horror, and embarrassment with such speed that Arthur nearly misses the small flicker of pleasure beneath it. “I -” Merlin swallows. “I didn’t realise I’d left it.” He takes the sketchbook but does not look up at once. His thumb presses hard against the cover, as if checking that all of himself is still inside.

“Do I even need to ask if you looked?”

Arthur could lie. There are kinder lies. There are necessary ones. This would be neither.

“It certainly was … enlightening.”

“Oh God.”

Merlin crinkles his nose and Arthur barks out a laugh before he can stop himself. It is too loud on the quiet street. A curtain twitches in the house next door. Merlin, caught between embarrassment and delight, waves at it. “Um.” He nods toward the front door and pulls keys from his pocket. “Mum works until six.”

The invitation sits there, embarrassingly naked. Arthur should give the book, get in the car, and return to the life in which he does not follow eighteen-year-old clients into their houses because their eyes are blue and their sketchbooks have undone him.

He presses the button on his keys. The Audi’s headlights flash. Merlin lets him in.

The house smells faintly of washing powder, toast, and the lavender furniture polish Arthur’s mother used to call common while keeping it in half the service cupboards at home. There are photographs in the hall, a worn runner on the stairs, a neatness to the shared rooms that makes the explosion of Merlin’s bedroom all the more dramatic when the door opens.

“Thanks for returning this,” Merlin says, hurrying in and shoving the sketchbook under the bed with the reverence of a man burying treasure under enemy fire.

Arthur steps just inside the room and looks around. There are clothes on nearly every available surface, schoolbooks in precarious piles, old mugs, sketches tucked between textbooks, one sock on a lamp, and a uniform from the previous night scattered across the floor in a way Arthur deliberately refuses to interpret until Merlin kicks a pair of bright blue briefs under the bed and turns crimson.

He reads it the way he reads skin, which is to say for what the owner did not mean to show. The schoolbooks have their own geology: further maths at the bottom of one pile, a library book on the muscles of the human back nearer the top, its due date three weeks past. A torn-off notice is taped to the wardrobe — Saturday market, help wanted — folded and unfolded so many times the crease has gone soft, with a column of small sums pencilled beneath it that resolve, at the bottom, into roughly the price of a tattoo. So the boy has been costing this out for weeks, shift by imagined shift, the way people cost out the things they cannot simply be given.

There is a strip of photographs curling on the desk: Merlin and two others caught mid-laugh, a girl and a broad boy with an arm hooked round Merlin’s neck. And there are birds. Falcons, everywhere, the same falcon, pinned and taped and tucked into the frame of the mirror, drawn so many times that the drawing has stopped being practice and become something nearer to prayer. Arthur does not know what the bird is to him. He knows only that a person does not draw one thing five hundred times unless it is standing in for another he cannot say.

Arthur opens the cupboard door. “Look at this, Merlin. A place for you to put things.”

Merlin rolls his eyes, but the blush stays. Arthur should not enjoy the fact that his condescension makes Merlin look both furious and pleased. He does anyway.

He clears his throat. “So, have you decided which tattoo you’d like?”

Merlin brightens so quickly it is almost painful. “Oh! Yeah, I mean. No. Well, there are three. Well, more than three, really. But I think I can afford one now and maybe by the end of the summer another. I’m not sure what kind of summer job…” He clamps his mouth shut.

Arthur watches him with something between amusement and alarm. “Tsk, tsk. You shouldn’t be neglecting your studies.”

Merlin makes a face and tries to straighten the bed with absolutely no effect. Arthur decides not to tell him that this is worse.

“So? What’s caught your eye?”

Merlin pauses, then reaches for his tie with the doomed courage of a man stepping off a cliff because at least the view is interesting. “It’s easier if I just show you.”

There is no way Arthur could mistake the invitation this time. He does not move while Merlin strips to the waist and stands in front of the mirror on the cupboard door. The temporary marks have faded but not vanished. Ghosts of knots, vines, dagger, dragon, all of them softer now, the body beneath reasserting itself. Merlin lifts his arm.

“I like this one.”

The falcon remains high on the inner arm, blurred slightly but still fierce. Arthur steps behind him. In the mirror they look like a painting undecided between sacred and obscene: Merlin flushed, arm raised, Arthur dark behind him in his coat, face sharper than he feels.

Arthur touches the spot carefully. “The tattoo or the location?”

“Both,” Merlin says, and the word is suddenly breathless.

“It’s a nice spot.” Arthur stands close enough that the leather of his coat brushes Merlin’s back. He takes Merlin’s wrist and lifts his arm higher, testing how the skin stretches. “Look great like this.”

Merlin leans forward when Arthur moves him, head near the door frame, arm above him. The falcon darkens in the mirror against pale skin. Arthur’s chin grazes the nape of Merlin’s neck as he looks over his shoulder; Merlin inhales as though struck.

Arthur feels the last of his sensible choices take several steps back and refuse responsibility.

“Or like this.” He turns Merlin and presses him back against the cold mirror, trapping his arm overhead. The shock of it makes Merlin’s eyes widen. The way they darken afterward nearly unmans Arthur.

“Very versatile.”

“Arthur.” Merlin whines the name, fighting the hold only to prove it holds, and Arthur is not made of stone. He leans down and licks a stripe over the fading falcon. Merlin’s head thuds back against the mirror.

The room has gone blue-grey with the early dark. Arthur can see himself reflected over Merlin’s shoulder: pupils blown, jaw tight, a man who knows better and is considering worse. He bites Merlin’s lower lip, draws it into his mouth, then kisses him properly.

Merlin kisses as if he has been angry about not doing it sooner. There is nothing polished about him, no practiced seduction, only heat and enthusiasm and a sharp, delighted refusal to be overwhelmed. Arthur lets go long enough to push off his coat. When he reaches again, Merlin’s hand goes to his own belt buckle.

“I’ll show you my other favourite if you show me a tattoo. You must have one.”

Arthur stills.

Many clients have asked. They expect skulls, sleeves, the visible credentials of a profession they understand from films. Arthur usually lets them imagine what they like. The tattoo over his heart belongs to no one who asks idly.

Merlin, irritatingly, is not idle. He is looking at Arthur as if a mark is a kind of truth and he has already decided Arthur is withholding too much of both.

“All right,” Arthur says, and begins unbuttoning his shirt.

Merlin looks almost startled at the simplicity of it when it appears: one word over Arthur’s heart, black and stark.

Excalibur.

Merlin tilts his head, and Arthur can see the remembered conversation from the shop clicking into place. “Your boat?”

“My yacht, Merlin.” The correction comes automatically, because some reflexes are apparently fatal. “I won the Aegean Rally with her in 2010.”

He hears the pride in his voice. He hears the sadness too, and has no hope that Merlin has missed either.

Merlin does not ask. He only looks, not with pity, which Arthur would have hated, but with the same attentive care he gives his own pages. Then he lowers his zip, palming himself through orange briefs so bright they deserve their own weather warning, and turns.

Arthur meets his gaze in the mirror, unable to help the laughter in his eyes. “Like that one, do you?”

Merlin laughs. “A snake wrapped around an apple? On. My. Arse.”

Arthur throws his head back and laughs properly, the sound booming in the tiny room. “Subtle.”

He kneels before he thinks better of it, eye level with his own small joke on Merlin’s skin. “Suits you perfectly, I think.”

Merlin is drawing breath for a retort when Arthur puts both hands on his arse and kisses the mark.

“Christ, Arthur,” Merlin breathes.

A voice calls from downstairs. “Hello? Merlin? Are you home?”

Merlin’s entire body jerks. “Fuck, fuck, fuck and FUCK.”

Arthur is already standing, already buttoning his shirt, already collecting Merlin’s clothes from the floor because crisis, blessedly, returns him to competence. Merlin scrambles for his trousers, gets his head caught in a T-shirt, and looks for one glorious second like a ghost attempting laundry.

“I’ll be down in a minute, Mum!” he yells. “Fuck.”

Arthur cracks a smile despite the circumstances. “Please tell me you don’t want me to hide in your cupboard until your mum goes to sleep, because my car’s in the drive. It’s pretty obvious you’re not alone.”

“Fuck.” Merlin looks at the cupboard anyway.

Arthur leaves before that option can become persuasive.

Hunith Emrys is in the kitchen with shopping bags on the counter and surprise in her face rather than suspicion, which suggests either kindness or remarkable self-control. Arthur suspects both. He straightens his cuffs, summons every polished lesson Uther ever paid for, and becomes respectable by force of posture.

“Good evening,” he says, cultured and posh enough that even Morgana would have mocked him. “I was just dropping off a book for Merlin. I hope my car isn’t in your way.”

Hunith catches herself after only a second. “Not at all. I found a spot on the street. I’ll just pull in after you go.”

“I’m on my way now.”

“And you are?”

“Arthur Pendragon,” Arthur says at the same time Merlin blurts from the bottom of the stairs, “He’s the librarian!”

Arthur does not look at him. If he looks at him, his face will break.

He presents his hand. “Lovely to meet you, Mrs Emrys.”

Hunith shakes it and smiles with enough warmth to be unnerving. “Nice to see a friend of Merlin’s come around.”

“Thanks for the book,” Merlin says, eyes too wide, shirt absolutely inside out.

Arthur gives him the sort of grin that once got him out of a diplomatic incident in Monaco and slips out the door.

He makes it to the Audi before he laughs.

Morgana calls before the engine is warm.

“No,” Arthur says when he answers.

“I have not asked anything yet.”

“Whatever it is, no.”

“If this is about my wrist, I expect professionalism. If this is about the legal documents Elaine sent over, I expect gratitude. And if this is about the fact that you sound as though you’ve been laughing, I expect details.”

Arthur looks at Merlin’s house in the rear-view mirror. An upstairs light goes on. A figure moves behind the curtain and disappears.

“Friday,” he says. “Do not be late.”

Morgana’s silence is alert enough to have teeth. “Arthur.”

He hangs up.

On Friday, Morgana puts her wrist on Arthur’s worktable and says, “Is he pretty?”

Arthur adjusts the lamp. “Who?”

“Oh, good. Very pretty, then.”

“This is why people stop speaking to you.”

“No one has ever stopped speaking to me successfully. I take it as a challenge.” She flexes her fingers and studies the placement on her inner wrist. “Speaking of which, you are certain the translation is correct? I refuse to be that woman who tries to terrify Father with a tattoo that means soup.”

“It is correct. I also checked with two people who are not drunken sailors, which is more than you deserved.”

“I am touched.”

Arthur snaps on gloves and cleans her skin. The shop is closed for the evening, rain ticking against the front window while the sign outside moves in the wind. Everything in the room is bright and contained: needle, ink, stencil, the square of Morgana’s wrist. Uther will hate this. That is not, whatever Morgana pretends, the only reason she wants it. Their father has made a language out of ownership all his life; Morgana has decided to answer in one he cannot confiscate.

“This will hurt,” Arthur says.

“I’ve had worse.”

“That is not an aftercare plan.”

“It is an emotional philosophy.”

He begins. Morgana does not flinch. Arthur expects no less. She watches the first line open in her skin with satisfaction rather than fear, and Arthur, who understands the difference between pain endured and pain chosen, keeps his hand steady.

“Elaine thinks there may be a way in,” Morgana says after a while. “Trust language, maintenance records, Father’s failure to follow the holding company’s procedure before removing Excalibur from Antigua. It’s all messy, but messy is where solicitors breed.”

Arthur does not look up. “You have been busy.”

“One of us had to be.”

“Morgana.”

“Do not take that tone with me. I am not rescuing you from a burning building because you are too proud to leave. I am protecting a family asset from a man who thinks remarriage gives him divine right over everything floating.” Her mouth tightens. “And I remember winning too, you arrogant shit.”

Arthur finishes the final line before answering. He wipes away excess ink, and the characters sit black and sharp on her wrist.

Challenge.

“He will loathe it,” Arthur says.

Morgana smiles with all her teeth. “I know.”

He bandages her and gives aftercare instructions she pretends not to need. She listens anyway, which is one of the ways Arthur knows she is frightened.

When he has finished, she studies him over the edge of the gauze. “Now. Pretty boy.”

“No.”

“That was a yes.”

“It was quite literally the word no.”

“Your mouth said no. Everything else about you has been revoltingly informative.”

Arthur strips off the gloves. “He is a client.”

“Is he the client whose sketchbook you returned in person, or are there multiple beautiful children of chaos leaving private art in your shop?”

“He is eighteen,” Arthur says, then hates that those are the first words out of his mouth.

Morgana’s eyebrows rise. “I did not ask.”

“It is not what you think.”

“Arthur, I have an excellent imagination.”

“Tragically.”

She sobers, which is more alarming than mockery. “Do not make him another thing Father can use to wound you. If he is a distraction, leave him alone. If he is art, don’t turn him into evidence. If he is something else… be careful.”

Arthur looks toward the back room, where he can still remember the falcon forming under his hand. “He is not evidence.”

“Good.” Morgana stands and reaches for her coat. “Then don’t be an idiot.”

“You first.”

“Impossible. I am an artist of idiocy. You are merely gifted.”

Uther sees the tattoo on Sunday.

Arthur is not there, but Morgana makes sure he experiences the event properly. At half eight she sends a photograph of her wrist wrapped around a glass of red wine. At nine she sends, Father asked whether I had joined a cult. At nine fifteen: Catrina said it looked elegant. I may forgive her everything and then murder her last. At ten: He mentioned Excalibur. Elaine was right. He is nervous.

Arthur reads that last message twice. Then a third time, because he is apparently a man who now looks for hope in his sister’s punctuation. He should feel triumph. He feels something closer to hunger and cannot tell whether it belongs to the yacht or to the memory of Merlin’s hands trembling when he lifted his arm to show the falcon.

A week passes without Merlin. This is good. Sensible. It gives the temporary ink time to fade and Merlin time to decide in daylight, away from Arthur’s hands and the closed heat of the back room, whether he truly wants a mark for life. It gives Arthur time to behave like a professional man with rent due, clients booked, and no business thinking about the inside of a young man’s arm as though it were a private weather system.

Arthur thinks about it constantly.

He does not call. He also does not open the sketchbook, because the sketchbook is gone, which should make the matter easier. It does not. Objects leave impressions. Clients do too, if one is careless. On Monday he catches himself looking at the hook by the table where Merlin’s coat had hung. On Tuesday he moves the sailing magazine from the counter to the drawer and back again three times before lunch. On Wednesday he draws a swallow for a woman with steady hands and finds himself sharpening the eye too much, making it a predator instead of a memory.

Wednesday afternoon brings Marcus back for the third session on the sleeve of geometric patterns that will eventually cover the scar tissue climbing from wrist to elbow. Marcus never talks about the fire. He talks instead about his daughter’s school play, his neighbour’s dog, the price of train tickets, anything ordinary enough to keep the past from sitting up and demanding attention. Arthur respects that. Some people want their wounds named. Some want them given architecture and left alone.

“Ever regret yours?” Marcus asks while Arthur changes needles.

Arthur looks down at the black lines already mapping Marcus’s arm and then, unwillingly, at his own chest beneath his shirt. “No.”

“That was quick.”

“Regret is usually for the badly done or the poorly chosen. Mine is neither.”

Marcus hums. “That doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt to look at.”

Arthur caps the ink. “No,” he says after a moment. “It does not.”

Marcus has the tact to pretend not to understand him.

That evening, another letter arrives from Pendragon Holdings. Arthur leaves it unopened on the counter through two consultations and one walk-in who wants a Latin motto he cannot translate. At closing, he cuts the envelope with a scalpel because scissors feel too blunt for Uther. This one is less polished. A reminder. A warning. A suggestion that any further interference with the management of Excalibur will be considered harassment of company representatives. Arthur lays it beside the first letter and photographs both for Morgana.

Her reply comes in less than a minute: Excellent. Threats mean he knows there is something to threaten. Also I have told Elaine about the voicemail. Also, if you are sulking, stop. You sulk with your shoulders and it is bad for your posture.

Arthur sends back a single rude gesture. Morgana responds with a heart.

By Thursday morning, the temporary marks should be almost gone from Merlin’s skin. Arthur knows this because he knows the ink, not because he has imagined Merlin standing in front of a mirror mourning each fading line. He knows the falcon would linger longest where the skin is soft and sheltered. He knows the serpent would be gone by now unless Merlin has been very careful washing. He knows too much and not enough.

At half past four, the phone rings. Arthur recognizes Merlin’s voice before he is ready for the small, stupid lift in his chest. Nervous, trying for casual, missing by a mile. He wants an appointment. The falcon. Inner arm. Saturday, if Arthur has space.

Arthur looks at the afternoon he has left empty since Tuesday like a fool.

“I can fit you in,” he says.

“Really?”

“Do not sound so surprised. I run a business.”

“You run a dictatorship with needles.”

“I got the job, by the way,” Merlin says, in the tone of someone who has been waiting the whole call to mention it. “Saturdays at the market. Fish, not — not tattoos, obviously. It smells. But it’s twenty quid a day and I only need —” He stops, having evidently done the arithmetic out loud in front of the wrong person.

“Four Saturdays,” Arthur says.

“I wasn’t going to say that.”

“You were going to say it in about a week.”

“Also I sent the art foundation applications. Both of them. Mum thinks I should do something sensible instead.” He says sensible the way other people say prison. “I didn’t put you down as a reference. You’d write something appalling.”

“I would write that you are stubborn, unteachable, and better than you have any right to be. Which is a reference.”

There is a silence on the line with a smile in it.

Arthur looks at the two letters from Uther on the counter, at the sailing magazine half-hidden beneath them, at the place where Merlin had stood with his sketchbook open and his courage in both hands. “Saturday at two,” he says. “Eat first. No alcohol. Bring the drawing.”

“Yes, sir,” Merlin says, then seems to choke on his own words.

Arthur closes his eyes. “Goodbye, Merlin.”

He sleeps badly on Friday.

By Saturday afternoon, the shop is warmer than necessary. Arthur has blocked the calendar, cleaned the station, prepared the inks, laid out fresh gloves, and put two bottles of water in the small fridge because he is a practical man and not because he has arranged the room around a fantasy. He wears a dark blue T-shirt instead of a button-down because tattooing high on an inner arm requires ease of movement. That is the reason. There are no others.

When Merlin comes in, the door gives its familiar protest and Arthur looks up from the archway between rooms. Merlin has shed the uniform. Jeans, jacket, scarf, gloves stuffed into pockets, hair windblown from the walk. He is still too thin, still carries his rucksack as if it contains secrets, still looks at Arthur first and the shop second. The difference is not clothes. It is decision. He has come back because he chose to.

Arthur feels the fact of it land somewhere inconvenient. “I’ve got the afternoon blocked for this, so flip the lock,” Arthur says, and then takes in Merlin’s flushed, uncertain face. “Unless you’re having second thoughts.”

Merlin’s eyes sharpen. “No second thoughts. I know exactly what I want.”

Good, Arthur thinks.

Terrible, Arthur thinks.

“Good. We can head back, then.” Arthur turns into the back room because forward motion is better than staring. “This spot — you said your inner arm, right? — the skin’s tender there, so this is going to hurt. Did you…”

“I took two paracetamols already and I’ve got a couple in my pack for after.”

Arthur turns back. Merlin lifts his chin, clearly expecting approval for his research and equally ready to resent it if Arthur gives him none.

“You’re not on anything else?”

“I don’t…” Merlin waves a hand at the implication. “…whatever.”

Arthur nods. “All right.”

He motions Merlin to the table. Merlin hangs his coat, and the school tie is there again, half in a pocket. Arthur looks away from it too quickly.

“Did you bring the picture of the falcon?” he asks while Merlin fusses with his rucksack. “I’ll copy it with pen again and you can check it. Then I’ll go over that with needle and pigment. It’ll be yours forever.”

The words come out quieter than his normal client patter. It is a dangerous thing, forever. Tattoo artists sell it by the hour and pretend that makes it manageable.

“Okay.”

Merlin pulls out the sketchbook. He does not open to the falcon. He hands the book over with his eyes on the floor.

Arthur sees Excalibur.

For several seconds there is no shop. No hum of the light, no radiator, no traffic beyond the window, no Merlin standing before him with his weight shifting from foot to foot. There is only the page and the impossible fact that someone who has never stood on her deck has drawn her as if he has listened to her in a storm. The hull is right. Not merely accurate; right. The mast, the tension of rigging, the sail caught at the instant before speed becomes inevitable. Merlin has found photographs, obviously. Seven of them, perhaps, from old articles and search results. He has filled what photographs cannot know: arrogance, grace, the living forward hunger of her.

Arthur’s throat closes.

Merlin clears his throat. “I thought you might like it — um — if you want. You could … have it.”

Arthur cannot make his hand let go of the page. “Jesus.” It comes out like an exhale.

Merlin looks up at last, and arthur wants to say thank you, and how dare you, and where did you learn to see like this, and you should have had better paper for her, and no one has ever given me back something I lost without asking what it cost first. None of those words arrive in usable order.

“I can’t -” He chokes a laugh because otherwise there may be some other sound, and that is not happening in his shop. “God, Merlin. I’m actually speechless.”

Merlin’s face is anxious and proud and very young in a way that makes Arthur ache. “Speechless in a good way or in a wow, this is so offensive that I’m at a loss how to be polite right now speechless?”

Arthur sets the sketchbook down carefully because his hands do not feel trustworthy. Then he crosses the room in one stride, buries one hand in Merlin’s hair, and kisses him.

It is meant to be slow. It is meant, absurdly, as thanks. Merlin’s mouth opens under his and the intention burns down to its bones. Arthur presses him back until his arse hits the edge of the table and stands between his legs, and Merlin’s hands come up uncertainly at first and then with a courage that knocks the breath out of him.

Arthur deepens the kiss because he has already lost the afternoon and may as well be honest about it for thirty seconds.

Merlin pulls back, giddy. “So you liked it, then?”

Arthur looks over his shoulder at the page. “It’s her.”

“Yeah. Good.”

Such a small answer. No false modesty this time. Merlin has seen what the drawing did and is pleased, and Arthur wants him so sharply it nearly hurts. He gets Merlin’s shirt off because there are buttons under his hands and skin beneath the buttons and an alarming shortage of judgment in the room. They kiss again, shoulder to groin, Merlin warm and alive against him, and it is a long time before Merlin manages words.

“I still want a tattoo.”

Arthur closes his eyes. The work, thank God. The work can still save him from becoming entirely absurd.

“Fuck.” He takes a deep breath and steps away, going to the small fridge for water. He drinks too much too quickly and adjusts himself in his jeans with as much dignity as the situation allows. “Right. The tattoo.”

Work saves him. It always has.

Arthur washes his hands, gloves up, positions Merlin on the table, shaves the nearly hairless inner arm right to the top of the armpit, and reluctantly turns the sketchbook away from Excalibur to find the falcon. He stares at it as if he has not already spent a week carrying it in his head. This time matters. Temporary ink is a suggestion. Needle and pigment are translated into consequence.

Merlin lies on his back in jeans and socks, arm above his head. His throat works when Arthur brings the pen to skin. The first careful strokes make him writhe.

Arthur curses softly. “You need to be still.”

“I’m trying.”

“Try harder.”

“I can’t. I just… it’s hard.”

Arthur sets the pen down and flips up the metal bar at the head of the table, above Merlin’s hand. “Grip it.”

Merlin wraps his fingers around the bar. It helps, but not enough. Arthur can see the tension still moving through him, and the place he has chosen is unforgiving. A flinch at the wrong moment would ruin linework Merlin has trusted him to make permanent.

“Do you need more?” Arthur asks. He is looking at Merlin’s eyes now, not the body. “It’s going to hurt. Especially there. If you don’t think you can hold still, you need to let me know.”

“I don’t know.”

Arthur looks past Merlin to the coat on the hook. The tie hangs half out of the pocket as if planted there by fate, or Merlin, or the same impish god that has been arranging Arthur’s poor decisions since the door first stuck open.

“All right,” Arthur says. “I have an idea.”

He takes the tie, then pauses. The silk lies striped and innocent in his hand. Around a neck it is a uniform. Around a wrist it becomes something else, and Arthur is not such a coward that he can pretend otherwise.

“If you trust me.”

Merlin flushes hot. “Oh.”

“Just the one hand, tied to the bar. It’ll help. But you’ll still need to focus on keeping still.”

“Yeah, alright.”

Arthur ties the wrist carefully, firm enough to hold and loose enough to slide a finger under the knot. He checks the skin. Merlin’s eyes are closed, his mouth slightly open, his whole body answering the silk with humiliating honesty. Arthur shifts in his seat.

“Fuck.” The word escapes before he can catch it. His cheeks heat. “You don’t make this easy.”

Merlin smiles, relaxing by a fraction, and Arthur drinks more water because anything else is madness.

He returns to the falcon. The pen version takes longer this time, each line deliberate, each feather placed for the way Merlin’s arm will move when he grows, reaches, stretches, hides, reveals. Arthur is working in his own style and Merlin’s at once. He has copied drawings before. This feels like a collaboration Merlin has not yet realised he began.

When it is done, Arthur holds up the mirror. “Do you approve?”

Merlin’s breath hitches. His eyes go bright, but he swallows whatever rises there and nods.

Arthur prepares the machine. The first contact of the needle is always a shock. Merlin’s eyes shut tight and his jaw locks. Arthur works the first small line and feels the body under his hand try to decide whether the pain is danger or choice.

“You’re doing well,” Arthur says. “Relax your jaw if you can. You’ll end up with a nasty headache and I won’t be able to fuck you blind after this is done.”

Merlin gasps. The distraction lands exactly as Arthur intended and rather more effectively than is decent. Merlin’s hand tightens on the bar; the tie holds. Arthur keeps working.

He falls into the rhythm: stretch, line, wipe, ink, breathe. The machine hums against the room, a steady insect sound that becomes its own weather. Merlin drifts after the initial panic, breathing through the burn, eyes closed, mouth flushed from being bitten. Arthur watches the place the needle meets skin and watches, peripherally, every sign that matters. Too pale? No. Breathing? Good. Tremor? Manageable. Pride? Enormous.

The falcon takes shape feather by feather, black eye, open wing, fierce small body. Arthur understands before it is finished that this is not simply a bird. Merlin has not told him. He does not need to. The reverence in the room is enough.

When Arthur finally says, “It’s done,” his own shoulders ache. He sits back and takes a minute to look. It is good. Better than good. The linework is clean, the placement exact, Merlin’s drawing alive in Arthur’s hand and Merlin’s skin. Arthur lets himself feel pride for precisely two seconds before reaching for the mirror.

Merlin looks. His face goes still in a way Arthur does not mock, or touch, or interrupt. This mark has gone somewhere Arthur was only allowed to carry it.

“I need to clean it up and bandage it now.” He waits until Merlin nods. The cleaning makes Merlin’s eyes water; the gauze covers the bird too quickly. Merlin cranes his neck, trying for another look despite the bindings.

Arthur kisses him. He means it to be brief. It is not.

“I think I like you like this.” Arthur hears the roughness in his own voice and does not bother hiding it. His eyes move over Merlin’s body, the bound wrist, the white bandage, the unmistakable bulge in his jeans. “Helpless.”

“Yeah?” Merlin tugs at the tie. It holds. “A bit of a control freak, aren’t you?”

Arthur hums and kisses his neck, then lower, barely touching skin. “All it’s missing is a gag.”

“Christ.” Merlin’s head thuds back on the table.

“So much unmarked skin, Merlin.”

Arthur’s mouth closes above Merlin’s left nipple. The bruise rises slowly under his tongue. Not art. Not ink. Still a mark. He makes another beneath the ribs, another above the hip, places he can imagine finding later if there is a later, which is such a foolish thought that he bites a little harder.

Merlin squirms. “You know your pen’s a bit more artistic for marking.”

Arthur looks toward the desk. For one dangerous second he considers it: all that skin, the memory of temporary ink, the power of a line not yet permanent but more intimate because of its brevity. He shakes his head.

“I think my mouth will do just fine for today.”

He climbs onto the table awkwardly, cursing the narrowness under his breath, and kneels between Merlin’s spread legs. He licks a stripe across Merlin’s navel.

“Fuck.” Merlin’s hips buck. “Please.”

Arthur wraps his hands around Merlin’s waist. “What do you want, Merlin? Tell me.”

Merlin’s breath stutters. “I - I want you to suck me off.” Arthur smiles before he can help it. Merlin sees and pushes on, braver. “Then I want you to fuck me.”

For a moment Arthur’s face goes slack. Then he laughs, because lust and astonishment and the bright absurdity of Merlin Emrys are all occupying the same space in his chest.

“I like a man who knows what he wants.”

Merlin’s jeans are an enemy Arthur defeats with limited grace. They catch at his heels and Arthur huffs impatiently, then pauses at the waistband of the highlighter-green briefs.

“Really, Merlin? Purple, orange and now green – do you have a different colour for every day of the week?”

Merlin flushes, but his answer comes with a stubborn little laugh. “Yeah, I do.” He hesitates, then adds, “I wear a uniform every day to school. It’s stupid, I know, but I just need something of me, you know? Even if it’s just lame coloured y-fronts.”

It is a ridiculous answer. It is also brave. Arthur, who has spent years stripping a surname from a door so he could claim one unruined thing as his own, understands coloured pants more than either of them is prepared to discuss.

He nods and peels his own shirt off. Merlin’s gaze goes at once to Excalibur.

“That sketch, Merlin…” Arthur begins, and cannot finish. He kisses up Merlin’s thigh instead.

Merlin is hot in his mouth and already too close. Arthur means to tease him; he does, briefly, mouthing shaft and balls, brushing one finger against his entrance and feeling the whole body beneath him light in recognition of some private fantasy Arthur will ask about someday and perhaps regret surviving. When Arthur closes his mouth over the head of Merlin’s cock, Merlin’s control breaks almost instantly.

Arthur chokes in surprise and swallows on reflex, hand pressing Merlin down as he shudders through it. It is absurdly flattering. It is also very difficult not to laugh.

He pulls off and looks up, eyes crinkled.

“Not a word,” Merlin says.

Arthur chuckles.

“My front pocket,” Merlin says, which is either an instruction or an attempt at revenge.

Arthur finds lube and a condom. He holds them up with one eyebrow raised.

“I was hopeful.”

“Cheeky bugger.”

Arthur strips off the rest of his clothes and tries to climb back onto the table, only to discover what he already knows professionally and has somehow ignored personally: the table is designed for tattooing, not ambition.

“Fuck, there’s a reason why I’ve never done this here.”

“First time for everything,” Merlin says.

The words hit the room wrong.

Arthur sees it before Merlin can hide it: the change in his face, the sudden vulnerability of being naked and spent and tied by one wrist to a metal bar in a tattoo parlour with Arthur standing over him holding a condom. Heat drains from the moment sharply enough to leave Arthur cold.

“Merlin?” His voice is quiet. “Have you ever?”

Merlin bites his lip. “I know what I want, okay?” He holds Arthur’s gaze, though Arthur can see how much it costs him. “Please.”

“Shit.” Arthur sits back, lube and condom unopened in one hand. “This is a work table in a tattoo parlour, Merlin. You’re high from getting your first tatt. This isn’t right.”

Merlin’s free hand grabs Arthur’s wrist. “So make my second time a bed of roses, you berk. But this is what I want for my first.”

Arthur wants to say no because it would make him a better man. The instinct is clean and immediate: untie him, dress him, drive him home, let the wanting cool into something less dangerous. Arthur has refused clients for less. Drunk men with the exact tattoo they wanted. Women high on heartbreak. Teenagers with parental permission and eyes that said they were choosing a future version of themselves out of spite. He has made a career of knowing when yes is not yet ready to become permanent.

But Merlin is not asking for ink now. Merlin is naked and spent and still looking directly at him, one wrist bound, a fresh tattoo under gauze, fear and certainty braided so tightly together that Arthur cannot separate them without doing violence to both. Virginity is a fact. The consent is also a fact. Arthur is trying to determine which matters more and discovers, with some alarm, that the answer is not a hierarchy but a responsibility.

“Are you sure?”

Merlin nods.

Arthur presses his forehead to Merlin’s chest because if he looks at him too long he will either stop or fall completely. “I’m going to a special hell for this.”

Merlin grins and releases Arthur’s wrist to tangle fingers into Arthur’s hair.

They kiss for a while. Long enough for the room to settle around them again. Long enough for the practical world to return in manageable pieces: the gauze on Merlin’s arm, the narrow table, the condom packet unopened in Arthur’s hand, the tie biting into pale skin above Merlin’s wrist. Arthur unties him first, despite Merlin’s faint sound of protest, and rubs the skin beneath the silk until the pressure mark fades.

“If we do this,” Arthur says against his mouth, “you keep both hands unless you ask otherwise. You tell me if it hurts in a way you don’t want. You tell me if you want to stop. I will stop. I will be very calm about stopping, no matter how heroic I look suffering. Understood?”

Merlin’s expression softens in a way Arthur has done nothing to deserve. “Understood.”

“Good.”

“Can I still call you a prat?”

“I would be concerned if you didn’t.”

Merlin laughs, and the laugh clears enough tension that Arthur can breathe.

Preparation takes time. Arthur makes it take time, and not only because it should be slow. He wants Merlin to have space inside the wanting, to discover that wanting can pause without vanishing. One slick finger first, circling, pressing, waiting while Merlin’s body decides whether to allow him in. Merlin grips the edge of the table, then Arthur’s shoulder, then the back of his neck, as if moving through possible anchors until one holds. His breath comes too fast at first; Arthur stops, kisses him through it, and waits until Merlin curses him for being patient.

“Romantic,” Arthur murmurs.

“Stretched,” Merlin snaps, which is not an answer but is very much Merlin.

Arthur smiles and adds a little more lube.

The second finger changes the room. Merlin goes silent, not the soft drifting silence of pain accepted under the needle but a sharp inward silence that has Arthur watching his face before anything else. The fresh bandage is white against the rail above them; the rest of Merlin is flushed, trembling, stubbornly open. Arthur thinks of the falcon beneath the gauze, of the way the bird had become permanent line by line. He thinks of Excalibur over his own heart. He thinks that he has spent years making marks on other people because marks obeyed him, and here is Merlin teaching him that trust is not obedience at all.

“All right there?” Arthur asks. “I can–”

Merlin grits his teeth. “Shut the fuck up and get inside me, you fucking tease.”

Arthur pauses, startled enough that his mouth parts. Then the corner of it twists. He curls his fingers deliberately and finds the place that turns Merlin’s glare into a white-hot gasp.

“Ah!” Merlin’s hips jump. “Fuck.”

Arthur does it again, because he is only human and because Merlin’s face when pleasure overtakes annoyance is the sort of discovery men have wrecked fleets for.

“Now you’re ready.”

He withdraws and tears the condom packet open with less elegance than he would prefer. His hands are not entirely steady. Merlin notices because Merlin notices everything when it matters. He reaches up and touches two fingers to Excalibur, the contact light enough to ask and sure enough to answer.

“I still want it,” he says.

Arthur covers Merlin’s hand with his own. “I know.”

The first press in steals the room from both of them.

Arthur goes slowly. He has to. Merlin is tight and hot and tense beneath him, jaw open, eyes squeezed shut, one hand fisted around Arthur’s wrist hard enough to bruise. Arthur stops after the first inch, then the next, every instinct in his body screaming forward while every better instinct holds. Merlin curses, not prettily. Arthur kisses the curses off his mouth and keeps still until the rigid line of Merlin’s thighs loosens by degrees.

It is not graceful. There is no clean line to it, no elegant translation from want into ease. There is only Merlin breathing through the stretch, Arthur shaking with the effort of not taking what is offered too quickly, the table creaking under them in undignified complaint. Merlin laughs once, breathless and disbelieving, then shifts his hips in a way that pulls Arthur deeper and makes them both groan.

“Do not do that unless you mean it,” Arthur says.

Merlin opens his eyes. “I mean it.”

Arthur pushes in the rest of the way by degrees. Merlin’s skin goes damp under him. His thighs tremble. Arthur’s control narrows until the whole world is the discipline of staying still inside him and not ruining this by wanting too hard. Then Merlin moves again: a tilt, a testing lift, a demand offered through muscle instead of words.

“Bastard,” Arthur says, because affection has always found the ugliest doors out of him.

Merlin smiles like victory.

The rhythm comes unevenly at first, awkward around the table’s narrowness and Merlin’s newness and Arthur’s determination not to behave like a starving man. Then Merlin’s legs wrap around his hips and care stops meaning gentleness only. Arthur still watches him, still measures each change of angle against Merlin’s face, but heat finds its own language. Merlin gives back as much as he takes, mouth open, breath breaking into rough sounds that make Arthur feel marked in return.

There are better places for this. Beds. Sofas. The deck of a yacht under a warmer sky. Arthur thinks of none of them for more than a second. The shop is harsh light and clean metal and the smell of ink; Merlin is under him, newly tattooed, newly opened, alive and bright and no longer a client in any useful sense of the word but not yet anything Arthur knows how to name.

Arthur changes the angle. Merlin arches hard enough that Arthur has to catch his hip.

“There,” Merlin gasps. “Again.”

Arthur obeys. Once. Twice. On the third, Merlin comes with a raw sound that goes straight through him, spilling across his stomach, hand clenched in Arthur’s hair as if holding him to the moment. Arthur sees the shock of it on Merlin’s face - amazement, pleasure, the brief blankness of being remade by sensation - and it undoes the last of him. He lasts only a handful of thrusts beyond it, buries his face against Merlin’s shoulder, away from the fresh tattoo, and comes so hard his vision sparks white at the edges.

Afterward, the room returns slowly: the hum of the light, the cooling sweat on Arthur’s back, Merlin’s breath against his ear, the ache in Arthur’s knees from the cursed height of the table. Merlin’s hand moves uncertainly over Arthur’s hair, then settles at his nape as if he has decided to keep him there.

Arthur lifts himself before he crushes him. Merlin makes a displeased sound, then a pained one when Arthur slips out.

“Sorry,” Arthur says at once.

“Don’t apologize. It makes me think about things.”

“A tragedy.”

Merlin smiles with his eyes closed, exhausted and smug. “You like my thinking.”

“I like your drawing. Jury remains out on the rest.”

“Liar.”

Arthur deals with the condom, then comes back with water, wipes, and a damp cloth. Merlin accepts the water and drinks greedily, watching Arthur clean him with an expression that wavers between embarrassment and something softer. Arthur keeps his touch practical because there may be time later for worship and practicality is what he can offer now without terrifying himself.

“Sore?”

“Everywhere.”

“Too sore?”

Merlin considers. “No. Good sore. Mostly.” He glares at the table with personal betrayal. “Seemed like such a good idea.”

Arthur stands between his knees. “I think you said something about a bed of roses next time?”

Merlin snorts, then reaches out and traces one finger over Excalibur. This time he does not ask in words. Arthur gives permission by not moving.

The touch is light enough that Arthur almost wishes it were not. He has allowed mouths on that tattoo without feeling exposed. Merlin’s fingertip makes it feel like an opened letter.

“She’ll be mine again someday,” Arthur says. The words come without planning. “Morgana and I … we have a plan.”

He looks over at the desk, where there is a photograph of Morgana’s wrist with the Japanese characters black and new.

Merlin nods as if belief is simple. As if Arthur has said the future and not a wager against his father. His eyes move to the sketchbook, to Excalibur waiting on paper. “She’s yar.”

Arthur barks a laugh and cuffs him lightly on the back of the head. “You have no idea what that even means.”

Merlin smiles up at him, stubborn and luminous and entirely too pleased with himself.

Arthur rolls his eyes because he must retain some dignity. “She is yar.”

Merlin leans forward and kisses the stylised E.

Arthur’s hand curls at Merlin’s nape before he can stop it. “I’ll take you on her some day.”

Merlin’s eyes lift, wicked despite exhaustion. “Can we fuck in the Captain’s cabin?”

Arthur hums, eyes going distant before he can decide whether to let them. He can see it too easily: sunlight on teak, Merlin spread dark-haired and bare against polished wood, the sea lifting beneath them. “I won’t let you wear any clothes, and you’ll lie on the deck and I’ll use your body like a canvas.”

Merlin kisses him then, soft and chaste, which is somehow the most dangerous thing he has done all afternoon. “I’d like that.”

Arthur drives him home again because Merlin walking to a bus stop after that is not a proposal Arthur is willing to entertain. The city is dark and wet around them; Merlin sits carefully, wincing every so often and hiding it badly, and Arthur gives aftercare instructions with more severity than usual because it is either that or say something unmanageable.

“No baths,” he says. “Short showers. Do not pick at it. Do not let your friends touch it. Do not sleep with your arm trapped under you. Keep the bandage clean tonight. Call if it swells badly, bleeds through, or does anything that worries you.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Merlin.”

“I am listening.”

“Are you?”

“Mostly.” Merlin’s smile is visible in profile, small and private. “I’m also thinking about your mouth.”

Arthur keeps his eyes on the road by heroic effort. “That is medically unhelpful.”

“You said to call if anything worries me.”

“My mouth worries you?”

“Deeply.”

Arthur does not smile until the next red light, and then only because Merlin is looking out the window and cannot see.

At Merlin’s house, the upstairs light is on and the dug square of garden lies black and patient under the streetlight. Merlin unbuckles his seat belt and hesitates as he did the first time, but the air between them is crowded now, not empty. What they have done. What they have not said. Every possible consequence waiting politely for morning. “You’ll call,” Arthur says.

“If my arm falls off.”

“Before your arm falls off.”

“Bossy.”

“Correct.”

Merlin leans over and kisses him quickly, awkward around the gearshift and both their seat belts. It should be ridiculous. It is ridiculous. Arthur catches the back of his neck and makes it last two seconds longer anyway.

“Goodnight,” Merlin says.

“Goodnight.”

Arthur waits until the door closes behind him again.

On Monday morning, Morgana walks into the shop without knocking, takes one look at the framed drawing propped against the back wall, and says nothing. That is how Arthur knows he is in trouble.

He did not intend to frame it. He intended to keep the drawing flat between sheets of clean paper until Merlin could decide what he wanted done with it, or until Arthur found a proper portfolio sleeve, or until some undefined future in which he became the kind of man who knew what to do with gifts. Instead, on Sunday, he passed a framing shop on the way to buy coffee and went in because it was raining and because the drawing deserved better than a drawer. He chose dark wood, narrow, nothing ornate. The woman behind the counter asked if the yacht was his, and Arthur said yes before he remembered that it was not.

Now Morgana stands before it, wrist tattoo uncovered and healing beautifully, mouth uncharacteristically soft.

“Merlin?” she asks.

Arthur wipes the counter. “Yes.”

“He’s good.”

“Yes.”

She steps closer. “Does Father know?”

“About Merlin, Excalibur, or your wrist?”

“Any of the above.”

“Not from me.”

“Coward.”

“Strategist.”

“Ah, delusion. How traditional.” She folds her arms. “Elaine thinks we have a chance. A real one. Not immediate. Not clean. But a chance.”

Arthur sets the cloth down. Outside, people move through the morning with collars up and coffee in hand. Inside, Excalibur cuts across Merlin’s page as if no rain has ever touched her. “Then we take it,” Arthur says.

Morgana looks over her shoulder. “And Merlin?”

Arthur’s phone vibrates before he has to answer.

A message from Merlin: Arm still attached. Mum suspicious. Worth it.

A second follows almost immediately: Also your aftercare sheet has spelling errors.

Arthur laughs under his breath. Morgana’s eyebrows rise with unbearable comprehension.

“Do not,” he says.

“I have not said anything.”

“You are about to.”

Morgana sets her bag down again, which is how Arthur knows the theatre is over. “One thing, then. You remember what I said about evidence.”

“I remember.” Arthur looks at the drawing instead of at her. “If Father wants to make a weapon out of him, he will have to find him first, and then he will have to come through me. I have thought about it, Morgana. I am not giving Uther one more thing by walking away from it. That would just be him owning something else.”

She studies him for a long moment, and whatever she is looking for, she appears to find it, because she picks the bag back up.

“Good. Then I am free to enjoy this moment of profound personal growth.” She moves to the door. “You are going to hang the drawing, aren’t you?”

Arthur looks at the wall behind his station. Not the front room, where clients will ask too many questions. Not hidden away in the flat, either. The back room, where he works, where he can look up from skin and see the thing Merlin saw in him before Arthur had decided whether he wanted to be seen.

“Yes,” he says.

Morgana’s smile sharpens, but not unkindly. “Good.”

After she leaves, Arthur opens the shop properly. He answers a call, books a consultation, cleans the station though it is already clean. At ten, he hangs Merlin’s drawing on the back wall. It takes longer than it should because he measures twice, then a third time, then shifts the nail by a fraction no client will ever notice.

The frame settles into place.

Excalibur leans into wind that exists only on paper.

Arthur stands with the hammer in one hand and looks at her until the bell over the front door clatters and the day’s first client comes in. He does not take the drawing down, and he does not turn it toward the wall. He leaves it where it is — not on display, not hidden either — visible from the chair where he sits with other people’s trust under his hands.

Two and a half weeks later, Merlin comes back for the healed-tattoo check with his scarf tied badly, his hair damp from rain, and three pages of aftercare complaints written in the margins of Arthur’s printed sheet.

“You annotated it,” Arthur says.

“It needed work.”

“It is an aftercare sheet, not a dissertation.”

“Then why did you use a semicolon incorrectly?”

“Should you not be revising for your exams instead of my aftercare sheet?”

“I was revising. Two papers down, three to go.” Merlin lifts his chin. “Correcting your grammar counts as English practice.”

Arthur takes the paper from him and places it face down on the counter. “Arm.”

Merlin grins but lifts his sleeve. The falcon has healed cleanly. The lines sit black and precise in the soft inner arm, fierce when Merlin raises it, hidden when he lets his sleeve fall. Arthur checks it with professional fingers and a distinctly unprofessional feeling in his chest. No swelling. No blown lines. No infection. Merlin has cared for it properly, which Arthur expected, and somehow that makes him more difficult to endure.

“It’s perfect,” Merlin says, softer now.

Arthur keeps his eyes on the tattoo. “It healed well.”

“Arthur.”

He looks up. Merlin is not looking at his arm anymore. He is looking over Arthur’s shoulder, at the back wall. At Excalibur framed above the station.

For a moment the shop is very quiet.

“You hung it,” Merlin says.

“It was either that or let it get coffee on it.”

“Obviously. Very practical.”

“I am a practical man.”

Merlin’s smile is small and bright and devastatingly unconvinced. He crosses the room without asking, stops beneath the drawing, and studies his own work as if it belongs less to him now that Arthur has given it a place. Arthur watches him look at Excalibur and realises that the vulnerability beneath the waterline has not disappeared. It has simply learned that being seen by the right person is not the same as being stranded.

“You didn’t sign it,” Arthur says.

Merlin glances back at him. “It’s yours.”

“It’s yours until it’s signed. I don’t hang anonymous work.” Arthur takes a pen from the counter and holds it out.

Merlin uncaps it, hesitates, then writes M. Emrys very small in the corner, below the waterline. Arthur watches him do it and thinks of the sign over his own door — the surname he sanded off his life at twenty-four — and how strange it is, after everything, to want a name on something again.

The phone rings before Arthur can decide whether to say any of that, which is probably for the best. Morgana. Naturally. “You are on speaker,” Arthur says when he answers, because he has a sister and therefore survival instincts.

“Hello, Merlin,” Morgana says at once.

Merlin turns, delighted and horrified. “Hello?”

“Elaine has obtained the maintenance records. Nicholson is an idiot, Tony is a treasure, and Father’s solicitor has begun using phrases like without prejudice in a tone that suggests prejudice is all he has left. We have, as the peasants say, movement.”

“No one says that,” Arthur says.

“I say it. Keep up. Also, Merlin, if Arthur has not told you, he is unbearable when hopeful. Do not encourage him too much or he may start standing up straight.”

“Too late,” Merlin says. “He’s been doing that all morning.”

Arthur pinches the bridge of his nose while Morgana laughs hard enough to sound briefly like the girl on Excalibur’s deck again.

When the call ends, Merlin is still smiling. He looks at the drawing, then at Arthur’s chest, where Excalibur sits beneath cloth and memory.

“When you get her back,” Merlin says, and there is no if in it, “I still want to see her.”

Arthur leans back against the counter. “I remember.”

Merlin is quiet for a moment. Then, to the window rather than to Arthur: “It was my dad’s. The falcon. He kept one — flew it off his fist in the field behind the house, before I was born, before he went. I don’t remember him. I remember the bird.” He turns his arm so the healed lines catch the light. “Well. Mum’s stories of the bird.”

Arthur does not say he is sorry, because Merlin has not asked him to be. He thinks of the name over his own heart and understands, at last and completely, what he set into Merlin’s arm with his own hand. Not a bird. A memorial that has learned to look like one.

“He’d have liked it,” Merlin says. “I think.”

“He would be right to.”

“And before that…” Merlin rubs his thumb along the healed falcon, suddenly less cocky, which is always when Arthur should be most afraid. “I could draw on you sometime.”

Arthur feels the words land with the force of a hand over his heart.

“Temporary,” Merlin says quickly. “Unless you asked. I just mean — not because I think you need fixing or covering or anything. I wouldn’t touch Excalibur. I know better. But maybe around it. With it. Something that knows she’s there.”

Arthur thinks of Sabine in Marseille, of Uther’s hand on his shoulder, of Tony at the gate, of Merlin’s ink-stained fingers hovering over a mark Arthur has never let anyone read correctly. He thinks of the dragon waiting five years in the future because some things should be allowed to become sure. He thinks of the falcon under Merlin’s sleeve, hidden only until Merlin chooses otherwise.

“Not today,” Arthur says.

Merlin nods, accepting the boundary so easily that Arthur has to look away.

“But someday,” Arthur adds.

When he looks back, Merlin’s smile has gone very quiet.

Outside, rain begins again, soft against the front window. The bell over the door hangs silent for once. Excalibur leans into paper wind on the wall behind Arthur, private but not hidden, and Merlin stands beneath her with his marked arm bare and his hands already stained with ink.

Some marks are warnings. Some are memorials. Some are wagers against loss.

And some, Arthur thinks, are not finished becoming permanent.