Archive of Our Own

This is the problem with modern society, Merlin decides when he throws yet another ward over the entrance to his tower. The real problem, according to him, or at least the one that is bugging him most right this moment before the next thing comes around.

People just aren’t allowed to hide away in towers anymore.

“I am not interested in being rescued!” he shouts down towards the knight. His cloak billows all heroically, purple and, if Merlin’s honest, kind of an eyesore. The knight peers up dumbly towards the sound of Merlin’s voice.

Maybe he should have created a tower that wasn’t so high up. At the time he’d spelled it into existence—about two weeks ago, although Merlin has lost track of time a little bit—he thought that the higher up he’d be, the fewer people would bother him.

Oh, the naivety of two-weeks-ago-Merlin.

“What?” the knight yells up.

“Go,” Merlin calls out, waving his hand pointedly towards the exit of the campus of Avalon University, home of magic and witchcraft, “away!”

“Is there a princess there with you?” the knight calls out. Merlin groans in despair and lets his head drop in his arms; the way that he’s leaning against the window, one might well take him for a princess in need of help. In fact, Knight Number Three had gone ahead and done that.

The dragon wrapped around the tower doesn’t help, of course.

“They really aren’t the smartest types, are they?” Kilgharrah says disapprovingly. His tail swooshes against the bricks. He had been amused by the first four knights who tried to come and save Merlin from—an evil sorcerer on campus, or maybe just the dragon. Never mind that Avalon University would hardly allow an evil dragon to make home on their campus.

Down on the ground, Merlin watches as Elyan—thank God for loyal, kind Elyan—approaches the knight and explains the situation for him. Merlin waits thirty seconds for Elyan to be done, and the purple-cloaked knight looks up. It’s too far away to see, but Merlin likes to imagine the apprehension on his face.

“Bye now!” he yells as the knight turns on his heels and leaves. Elyan waves up to him, and Merlin waves back.

Kilgharrah blows out some smoke in his face. Merlin coughs and reels back into the tower, running his sleeve over his face.

“You locked yourself in here for a reason, Merlin,” Kilgharrah reminds him sternly. “Sit down and finish your dissertation, young man.”

“But I don’t want to,” Merlin whines, like the mature twenty-four-year old student he is. 

“Go,” Kilgharrah roars, and Merlin sourly closes the window and gets back to his laptop in the middle of the tower. All his papers and books are strewn haphazardly over the floor, while his desk is as neat as it is the day he created this tower out of fresh spellwork. He just doesn’t like working on a desk, really. He doesn’t think he should be penalised for that.

He just hopes that there aren’t any more knights coming by. He hardly needs to be considered a stuck princess in a tower—what do all these knights think, anyway? That their campus would just lock up some girl for them to rescue? Merlin isn’t sure what they think the state of women’s rights is in this country, but he wouldn’t be surprised if they’re stuck in some medieval state of mind.

Kilgharrah huffs at him again, a threatening wisp of grey smoke circling in Merlin’s room, and he quickly sits down in front of his laptop again.

~*~

Merlin’s still asleep by the time he hears rattling on the window.

“Oh no,” he says, sitting up with a sudden shock, as a man falls through the window and into Merlin’s tower. Judging by the red cloak, he’s a knight. Which, in itself, isn’t entirely unsurprising, since it’s mostly their type that has been interested in Merlin’s tower and the possibility of any princesses therein. No, it’s mostly the fact that he has succeeded that has Merlin reeling.

“Oh,” the knight says, rising to his full height. And really, that is just the knight that Merlin wasn’t hoping to see—ever again, that is. 

“Arthur,” Merlin groans, and jumps out of his bed. It’s past nine already, but Merlin has never been in the habit of working in the mornings. He tends to work on his dissertation until two in the morning, watch a YouTube video—although his Wi-Fi connection hasn’t been what he’d hoped of it, really—and fall asleep. 

But of course, Arthur Pendragon, son of England’s First Knight to the Queen, is right on time to annoy Merlin.

“They told me that a girl was stuck here,” Arthur says, a little unperturbed, as if it’s not really a surprise that he’s found Merlin instead. Merlin furiously grabs a sweater to wear over his cat pyjamas. They’re comfortable, and he’s not in the mood to be teased by Arthur Pendragon for them.

“That’s because none of you can think,” Merlin says, and adds, “and you’re clearly all nearsighted.”

Arthur raises an eyebrow at him. “You’ve certainly lost none of your spirit.”

“And you’ve clearly lost all your remaining brain cells,” Merlin says cheerfully. 

“So, Merlin,” Arthur says, and leans forward. Despite having climbed a tower that’s taller than the Big Ben, he doesn’t have a lock of hair out of place. Merlin despises him for that, a little bit. “What are you currently doing in a tower that seems to have no entrance and does have a large dragon on top, which really, that doesn’t help with being perceived as a princess, you’re aware?”

“How did you get past Kilgharrah?” Merlin wonders.

“Dragons sleep too, Merlin.”

Merlin blinks. “Right. Well. I’m writing my dissertation.”

There’s a moment of silence, and then Arthur cocks his head. He raises his hands in a gesture that universally means yes, go on, that’s not the whole story, and Merlin looks at him blankly.

Arthur sighs. “And?”

“Well, I’ve been working on it for half a year,” Merlin admits sheepishly. If he’d managed to follow a timetable, he’d have graduated by now. “And the thing is, I’ve got several job offers now, and I do want to take one of them—not to mention I need the money. And I have a lot of articles already, and I’ve done all of the experiments, so I have the dataset.”

“I don’t really see your problem,” Arthur says, which just goes to show what a prat he is.

Merlin crosses his arms, very well aware that the sweater over his cat pyjamas isn’t as good a look as he’d hoped to cut in front of Arthur. Moreover, it’s September, and it’s really rather warm for the season, and he’s already sweating his armpits off.

“I need to finish in time!”

“And your answer to that is locking yourself away?” Arthur asks, looking around himself properly for the first time. It makes his red cloak—signifying him as a student from Camelot University, the most prestigious place in the world for new knights—swirl behind him dramatically, and the wind from the opened window catches to make it billow.

Merlin just looks down. He’s wildly aware his tower is a bit of a mess too after his two weeks in it. It’s hard to focus both on the dissertation and on cleaning, admittedly, and he hasn’t had anyone over to make him think he needed to tidy up.

“Well,” he says, and runs a hand over his arm, feeling his cheeks burn. “Yes, actually. Do you have a problem with that?”

“No,” Arthur says, more quietly. Maybe he’s come to realise how bad Merlin is at taking care of himself, or taking care of his business. And it’s not as if Arthur had a high opinion of Merlin to begin with, he’s wildly aware.

They’d first met as first-years, as their universities have a longstanding tradition of matching up knights and sorcerers to teach them to work together. Of course, Merlin, the most promising sorcerer in his year—and, admittedly, the whole university—had been paired with the First Knight’s golden son.

It hadn’t gone well. They’d hurled insult after insult at each other, and Merlin had thought he’d never see Arthur again after that disastrous final test. He’d nearly blown Arthur up, and Arthur had actually sliced his arm. Maybe he’d felt a bit badly about his behaviour afterwards, but well…

Arthur had been a big prat too. He had deserved it.

“Anyway,” Merlin says, still wildly aware that Arthur is standing just across the room, five years older, his muscles all filled out and his voice deepened and generally having become a great deal like Merlin’s type, which he entirely doesn’t realise right at that moment, obviously. “What are you doing here? Haven’t you graduated by now?”

“A small mishap prevented me from graduating last year,” Arthur says dryly. “I’m having my final exams in two months. I don’t doubt I’ll do well.”

“Of course you don’t,” Merlin mutters, feeling very tempted to throw something at Arthur’s face. He only has a pillow on hand, though, and he doesn’t think that’d do the trick. This is exactly why he’d fought so much with Arthur last time they met—he is a self-involved, obnoxious prat, who could never guess someone might have so much trouble staying focused on their schoolwork.

“But I’m here because no one has been able to scale your tower,” Arthur says, “and on the off chance that there was someone entrapped here, I figure I’d come out to help.”

“Well, there’s me,” Merlin says, throwing up his hands. “And you can’t help, unless you can help me figure out how to accurately line up druidic symbols. It’s all me, just until I finish my dissertation.”

Arthur’s eyes narrow at him. He doesn’t wear his armour, but it doesn’t make him any less knightly. In fact, his tunic gives Merlin a better look at his chest—it’s very low-cut, but that doesn’t surprise him of Arthur, who must surely tumble girls into his bed every day. Merlin burrows down those thoughts and finally strides forward to push at Arthur. Even under his hands, Arthur feels solid and warm.

“What are you doing, Merlin?” Arthur asks, a whiff of humour in his voice.

“I need to get working,” Merlin says, “and you’ve verified there are no princesses in danger here, so I don’t see why you should linger. Goodbye, Arthur, I’m sure I’ll see you around, and good luck with your exams. Best scale down again before Kilgharrah wakes up and turns you into a pile of ash.”

Arthur pales a bit. “He does that?”

He doesn’t, but only because Kilgharrah is the type of dragon who thinks blowing fire isn’t respectable in this day and age. 

“Only to people I don’t like,” Merlin tells him, and smiles innocently. With that, he pushes Arthur towards the window again, and watches as Arthur glares at him before he starts climbing down. Fortunately for him, Kilgharrah’s still snoring away—he must have adopted Merlin’s sleeping habits, which really isn’t a good idea for a dragon who’s supposed to hold him accountable.

Although Merlin supposes they didn’t actually count on any knights really climbing all the way up. Arthur is singularly annoying like that.

~*~

It has been three days since Arthur’s appearance when there’s a knock on his window again.

Merlin, in those three days, has added a glorious five hundred words to his methodology, has deleted three hundred of them, and has, to procrastinate rewriting them, added two little figures to his results section. Of course, that section is still in shambles, and Merlin really needs to get around to ordering it and deciding if he really needs that final analysis on the spell-level curve that he’s been told shouldn’t make a difference in casting but he thinks actually might moderate a spell’s effect depending on age—

There’s a knock on the window, and it comes at a very inopportune time, Merlin thinks.

“Hello again,” Arthur says dryly. This time, he comes through the window a little more elegantly. He’s also not wearing his red cloak today. “I thought I’d come by during your office hours.”

Merlin scowls and brushes past Arthur to lean out of the window, craning his head up towards the dragon sitting on his roof. “Kilgharrah, why did you let him come?”

“I’m not your guard dog, Merlin,” Kilgharrah says impatiently, his tail curving around the tower. “I didn’t agree that I would refuse anyone entrance. I’m merely here to keep you motivated.”

“And you’re doing a great job,” Merlin huffs out, and throws the window shut with a bang, just so that Kilgharrah knows he’s being facetious. Actually, Kilgharrah probably won’t care, if Merlin knows him at all. Still, it satisfies that annoyed part of him, even though it comes back in raging force when he turns back on Arthur.

Arthur eyes him. “How is your dissertation going?”

“Great,” Merlin says, gritting his teeth. “Tremendous. Nothing’s ever gone better, really. Why did you think to ask?”

“I don’t see why you don’t get someone to help you with planning,” Arthur says, waving his head around at the mess on Merlin’s floor. “There are people whose job it is to assist you with this, I hope you know? Your supervisor should have mentioned it.”

Gaius had mentioned it, in fact, but Merlin doesn’t like to rely on it. Moreover, their kind of structure doesn’t actually work, and they have dozens of other students who need help. He’s in his last year, and he’s never struggled so much before. He is the most talented sorcerer of his generation, and he doesn't boast of it, but everything has been so simple to him.

And the fact he can’t write this dissertation, all made up out of parts he understands but that he just can’t seem to make fit together, is immensely grating. Even Gilli graduated before him, his dissertation written in the time slot he had for it, and that first graduation ceremony is coming up. Merlin will have to see his friends take their diplomas, and know that he was left behind.

All because he just can’t keep to a timetable.

“I’m doing fine,” Merlin defends himself, and knows it’s a lame excuse, and knows that Arthur knows it. That only makes it more bitter, because Arthur had been a bitter rival in his first year. To see that Arthur is still doing so well, still on top of his class and ready to graduate, while Merlin can’t make himself focus on some words…

He wants to hate him, but he’s just a little mad at himself instead.

“Look,” Arthur says, and winces as he puts his hands up in defence. This may be because Merlin is glaring at him. “I want to help you.”

That is enough to stop Merlin in his tracks. He turns his back on Arthur to pace for a second, because he needs to do something. He clenches and unclenches a fist, and rolls his shoulder, and counts to ten before he turns back to Arthur. “Help me?”

“I don’t know why your supervisor agreed with you building a tower in the middle of your campus instead of giving you proper help,” Arthur says, with a sort of determination in the tightly set lines around his eyes that Merlin hasn’t seen in five years, “but you’re not the only person to struggle with deadlines, Merlin. You just need some assistance, that’s all, and not to lock yourself away. It’ll make things worse.”

“You’re just worried other knights will be climbing up here soon,” Merlin says, his mind whirring with explanations. Arthur isn’t his friend; they’d left off things in an increasingly bad way. If anything, Merlin can admire Arthur’s work ethic and his clear passion for knighthood, but that’s about as far as their relationship goes.

Arthur’s jaw clenches. “Has anyone ever told you that you’re a bit of a moron?”

“Has anyone ever told you that you’re a supercilious arse?” Merlin fires back. Arthur just crosses his arms, but he doesn’t move. He does stand in front of the window—albeit closed—and Merlin thinks of three spells that would have Arthur flying out of it and back to the ground. Which is, unfortunately, a long way down, and he wouldn’t be able to guarantee Arthur’s survival.

He’s heard students contemplating murder before. He’d never thought it’d be him.

“Just tell me what you’re planning on getting done today,” Arthur says, and, to Merlin’s unending horror and consternation, sits down, cross-legged, at the far end of his tower, leaning against the wall.

“I’m not going to get you to leave, am I?” Merlin asks wryly.

Arthur shrugs. “If this truly doesn’t help you, I won’t bother you again. But until then, no.”

“Fine,” Merlin says heatedly, and sits down in front of his whirring laptop. “My dissertation is about the effect of spoken and written spellwork in druidic rituals. Well, there’s more to it than that, and there’s a whole array of factors that matter, but that’s the basic idea of it. I just need to get finished with my methodology section today, if I can. Then I want to get working on the theoretical background, and I really need to get my results section in order, and there’s this one analysis—”

“Just get started on your methodology now,” Arthur tells him, cutting right through Merlin’s explanation. There’s a certain lilt to his words that tells Merlin exactly why Arthur is a knight’s leader; this is someone burdened by the mantle of leadership far too often and elegantly in the face of other people’s uncertainty. Arthur continues, “The rest will come later. It’s one thing at a time.”

“Fine,” Merlin says, and feels Arthur’s eyes burning on him as he returns to his methodology section. He will just have to pretend Arthur is not here, and he’ll leave by himself. As soon as his patience runs out.

~*~

Arthur is a very patient man, as it turns out.

He sits there for about half an hour while Merlin gets his notes in order and makes sure to create a useful structure for his methodology section. He’ll just get started discussing his participants and his exclusion criteria—that’s all stuff he knows by heart, anyway, and with Arthur’s eyes heavy on him, he starts writing.

Then Arthur gets up to grab one of Merlin’s books. Merlin only has his academic books with him in the tower, so Arthur is forced to pick one of the introductory books Merlin brought along. He doesn’t actually need it anymore, but it has the helpful graphs of druidic rituals he can refer to right at the end, along with the pictures of the strokes used in the written rituals, and really—

He doesn’t need to justify himself. He straightens his shoulders and dutifully keeps typing when Arthur passes him to grab the book and leafs through it. But even when Arthur isn’t staring at him so intently, Merlin can feel the heavy pull of his presence. 

He grits his teeth and gets on with it, trying to ignore the broad-shouldered knight who’s sitting in the corner—well, metaphorical corner; the tower is round—reading the introductory concepts of creating druid marks and the lines they ought to follow for an optimal flow of magic. Merlin wants to ask him if he understands any of it, because when he chances a glance at Arthur, his face is lined and his eyes are intent, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t want to give Arthur the idea that his presence here is appreciated in any sort of way.

So he focuses on his participants section instead, and when he has all of that drafted out, he lines out his analyses. It’s actually a little helpful to write it out like that, and he goes through his experiments. It gives him a clearer idea of what he’s already done, and what analyses are unnecessary because they basically give the same details, and which ones work best. He even makes a mention of a similar study, albeit done twenty-three years ago, which had used a similar analysis. It’ll be a nice way to compare their findings.

“Here,” Arthur says, in the middle of Merlin sorting through his data. “You haven’t looked up from that in three hours.”

“Hush,” Merlin says, and mindlessly takes the toast that Arthur offers him, as well as the tea, balancing the cup on his knee. It burns a little bit, and he blinks, looking up at Arthur. “Did you make this?”

“No, I ordered,” Arthur says dryly. “The delivery man simply climbed up and asked your dragon to reheat the tea, and you simply didn’t notice—yes, you simpleton, of course I made this.”

“I didn’t know you could—” Merlin starts, winces, and then realises he’s gone too far ahead in this sentence not to finish it, “—make… tea. I take it with milk.”

“I’m not your servant, Merlin,” Arthur says, which feels like a sort of similar argument that Merlin had thrown at him, when they’d first met. He feels a bit bad for it now, and just looks down at his clear tea—no sugar, no milk. Arthur should be ashamed to call himself an Englishman.

Except he did bring Merlin tea, so… “Thank you,” Merlin says reluctantly, and takes a bite from his toast.

It’s burnt. Still, Arthur’s smile is a little smug, and he lies down on his belly on the ground to return to Merlin’s book, so Merlin doesn’t have the heart to tell him.

~*~

It’s six o’clock by the time Arthur finally stands up, stretching his arms above his head and grunting loudly. Merlin first looks up at the groan and then winces at the pop that follows; Arthur just looks satisfied and rolls his neck for good measure.

“Sometimes I worry about you knights,” Merlin says, although now that Arthur has done it, he sort of wants to roll his own shoulders. He’s been sitting here since—when did Arthur so rudely break in? It must have been ten in the morning. “I’m not sure your bodies are supposed to do—all that.”

“I do yoga every morning,” Arthur says.

“No, you don’t.”

Arthur raises an eyebrow. “It keeps you fast and limber. My strength lies in my speed and my agility, because I’ve faced much larger foes than myself.”

“Foes,” Merlin repeats. “You can just call them opponents. I don’t think we’ve faced an actual magical threat since—what was it, three hundred years ago?”

“Anyway.” Arthur comes to stand behind him, and Merlin’s still sitting, so he feels the heat of Arthur’s calves, and the muscle slightly pokes into his back. Arthur leans over, his breath warm on Merlin’s neck. “That’s an additional two thousand words, isn’t it? That’s impressive.”

Merlin’s eyes fleet over to his word count. Those are two thousand words—and three hundred twenty three, actually, if he were counting. Which he had been, and he isn’t ashamed to admit it, because he’d been stuck for so long. He hadn’t realised he’d been working so efficiently.

He hasn’t looked at his phone all day, he realises suddenly. He’d been so focused on his work with Arthur there, knowing that Arthur would have no issue throwing his phone right out of the tower if Merlin hadn’t worked on his dissertation.

He can’t believe he’s been tricked into being efficient.

“See,” he says, trying not to sound as if he’s surprised by it, too. “I can work. So I don’t actually need you to loiter around here, doing nothing but stealing my books all day.”

“I’m sure,” Arthur says, his tone laced with humour and something more indulgent. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Merlin.”

Merlin just stares at Arthur as he opens the window and sits down on the window sill. The wind makes his hair flutter, golden and soft, the strands brushing the pale skin of his strong neck, and then Arthur leans back, the sun catching the silhouette of his face—

“You arse,” Merlin calls after him, for no reason in particular but his heart beating very fast, and being more than a little mad that Arthur is more helpful than Merlin has ever managed to be to himself. He leans over the window, watching Arthur climb down with the agility of a squirrel—and the same amount of brain cells too, he tells himself—and feeling something catch in his throat before he’s able to shout out more insults.

Kilgharrah flutters his large wings, and peers at him with golden eyes. “You and him have a destiny together.”

“No, I have a dissertation to write,” Merlin snaps, and throws his window closed. He sags down his wall and looks a little desolately at his laptop, quietly whirring on the ground, blue light coming off the screen. He’s lost all his motivation, suddenly, and his stomach churns.

Dinner first.

~*~

Arthur does come back, as he promised, at exactly the same time. Merlin had spent an entire evening working himself in a fit because he wanted to work more on his dissertation—less out of need, and more to tell himself he didn’t need Arthur to be around for him to be productive—and had nearly bashed his head on the wall in frustration when he kept being distracted. 

Which means that Arthur has to drag him out of bed, and does make fun of his cat pyjamas this time, and Merlin ushers him into the bathroom so he can change. Arthur just smirks at him when he comes out, and tells Merlin to get to his work after breakfast, which Merlin proceeds to make for them—without burnt toast, this time, but with two omelettes the sunny side up, which apparently isn’t enough for His Royal Highness.

Arthur ends up eating them anyway, when Merlin makes it clear that he’s not making anything else.

He brought his sword this time, and he practises his stances. Merlin thinks that might be distracting as well, but the truth is that Arthur turns the steel on him every time that Merlin stops to look at him. Anyway, he’s finished most of his methodology the day before, so he’s stuck working on his theoretical background, which is actually a part he enjoys digging into.

Even if it means wanting to overthrow the world government to make all science free, when he stumbles over several paywalls and needs to pirate knowledge that he should have had free access to.

All in all, the day goes largely the same as before. Merlin struggles a decent bit more, but Arthur’s presence is a solid reminder that he needs to work, and it makes it easier to actually try and focus. After a while, it just sticks, and Merlin is happily typing away about several theories on the effect of individuals’ handwriting on druidic rituals without even really realising that he has properly been working for several hours.

Arthur is a strict teacher, who clearly likes his schedule. At exactly the same time as the day before, he shows up with toast—a little less burnt, but still black around the edges—and another cup of tea, unerringly without milk. 

And by six in the afternoon, Arthur climbs down the tower again, and Merlin is left standing at the window, wondering how he added a thousand words today. 

~*~

“So,” Merlin says, a little hesitantly, after Arthur has been coming by for four days in a row. “Not that I don’t appreciate—whatever you’re doing, but don’t you have somewhere else to be?”

“No,” Arthur says, and doesn’t stop the fluid movement of his sword. He takes up half of Merlin’s tower, doing it, but since Merlin rarely moves from his spot on the floor, it only matters when Merlin wants to go for a bathroom break. Last time, Arthur had insisted he was in the middle of one of the most important balancing practices, and Merlin had given him ten minutes, and then he’d forcefully shoved Arthur aside with magic.

Arthur had burnt his toast even worse, that day.

“Alright,” Merlin says slowly, and looks down at his theoretical background. After four days, it’s a lot of words that he thinks he needs to structure better, but he has the general outline and information all typed out. He’d promised Arthur he’d have this done by the end of today, but it’s three in the afternoon and he thinks he might be done. Which means it’s time for something else entirely, namely—badgering Arthur. “And why don’t you have anywhere else to be? Your own exams are coming up—don’t you need to be on campus? Where you have more space to train? And people?”

“The headmaster says it would give me an unfair benefit,” Arthur says, and slowly moves his arm down. He’s using his left arm today—his non-dominant one—because, in his words, it stimulates his control. Merlin thinks it’s very unlikely Arthur will ever have to fight with his left hand unless he’s lost his right one, and at that point he has bigger issues and will likely lose the fight anyway.

“Because you were supposed to have your final exams earlier?” Merlin prods. “But that’s odd. You still need to practise, don’t you?”

“That’s what I told him, until my father butted in,” Arthur says emotionlessly, his eyes resting on the glint of his sword, “and told me that if I required further practise, I didn’t have the skills that he thought I did.”

“Well, he’s an arse,” Merlin says, and Arthur drops his sword and swears.

There’s a moment of silence when Arthur bends forward and picks it up—with his right hand, this time, flexing his fingers on the left and frowning deeply at them, as if they’ve disappointed him. “It’s not that simple.”

“No, that’s just stupid,” Merlin continues, because that vulnerability does not belong on Arthur’s face. No matter what Merlin may think of him—and admittedly, after four days of Arthur hanging around and making him burnt toast and milkless tea, his opinion isn’t as low as it could have been—Arthur still is one of the most talented knights of his generation. “It’s not as if you stop practising once you’ve graduated. We all keep learning, even after we’re done. And you were guaranteed to pass, anyway, so what does a little practising matter?”

“You wouldn’t understand,” Arthur says, and eyes him. 

“Maybe.” Merlin shrugs. “Why did your original exam get cancelled anyway?”

Arthur sits down on the ground, his sword digging into the wood of Merlin’s floor. He doesn’t particularly mind, since it’s all just made up out of magic. Besides, Arthur sitting there, all dressed up in armour and with his hair a bit sweaty, makes the place feel a bit more homely.

“A small mishap.”

“You said that,” Merlin remembers. “What kind of mishap?”

“Aren’t you supposed to be working on your theoretical background, Merlin? Just because you are trying to avoid graduating in a timely manner—”

“Arthur,” Merlin says. “Just tell me.”

Arthur looks away, his jaw tense and his brow furrowed. He’s a bit unreadable, but mostly because Merlin rarely knows what makes Arthur tick—he’s never been able to figure that out. All he knows is that Arthur is very capable of pushing every button Merlin has, and doesn’t care to show his own.

“My father set me up with this other knight, two days before my final exam,” Arthur says. “I’d  never fought him before, but I’d fought knights like him—the burly type, very strong but rarely fast. We had a small audience, just professionals so I could get some last-minute feedback on my fighting.”

Merlin waits. “And?”

“And,” Arthur continues wryly, “my father had hired a sorcerer to make my sword heavier and my movements slower. He wanted me to be ready for the real world—for the threat of magic, since obviously all sorcerers don’t respect the nobility of knighthood.”

Merlin’s mouth is dry. He wants to protect himself, but from Arthur’s tone he can tell that Arthur doesn’t agree with the words. He must be paraphrasing someone—his father, presumably. The First Knight’s opinion on magic is well-known throughout England, and it’s not the first time Merlin has been insulted for the simple sin of having magic.

“And you lost?” he gathers. 

Arthur’s lip twists. “The knight knocked me out and gave me a concussion. My father tried to bribe Lord Aredian—the headmaster, you see—to let me fight anyway, but Aredian refused and set the date for my examinations back. Now my father’s blaming me for losing the fight that he sabotaged me in, and Lord Aredian thinks I am still too nervous to be a real knight, and neither of them will let me fight out of fear that I’ll injure myself. Again, apparently.”

“But it wasn’t your fault,” Merlin says.

“The world isn’t fair,” Arthur mutters. “So now I’m simply waiting to graduate, and if I’m to pass the time by making sure you can graduate—well. I do have a job lined up, so I’m not too anxious about it. I just want to be able to do something.”

“You’re not doing well at sitting still,” Merlin says. He’d noticed that.

“Not as bad as you,” Arthur says, and at least he’s grinning again, even if he’s back to being infuriating. “But I suppose that’s what you have me for. And your medication.”

“What medication?” Merlin asks blankly.

Arthur stares at him. “For your ADHD?”

“I don’t have ADHD.”

“My God, Merlin, you’re denser than I even imagined,” Arthur says, and puts a hand to his forehead. “Make an appointment with your doctor, will you? I’ll be glad to be your lifehack to graduating, but I can’t always be body doubling with you. I can’t believe you, you moron—”

Merlin tunes him out after that.

~*~

It’s a Sunday, two weeks after Arthur first climbed in, and Merlin is bored.

“Kilgharrah,” he says, peering down on the campus. There are a few people wandering around, but they’re too far away to talk to him, and anyway, he’s made a promise to stay in this tower until his dissertation is done. He is working on his results section, and the first draft is nearly there, really. He’s a fast writer, when it comes down to it, and he’d had most of his information sitting ready.

He might even be done before his self-imposed deadline. Which means he doesn’t have to force himself to work on it today; in fact, Arthur had whacked him across the head—with the blunt side of his sword, thankfully—to not do anything today and give himself some rest when Merlin had complained about feeling guilty for not working.

But Merlin doesn’t know what to do if he’s not forcing himself to work. He’s tired of scrolling on his phone, and he misses his friends. Gwen and Elyan are away for the weekend, and Freya is afraid of heights, and Will doesn’t live in London.

Which means that all he has left is his overgrown, grumpy lizard.

“Yes, Merlin?” Kilgharrah says patiently. It’s his fake voice, which means that he is actually impatient and is just pretending not to be for Merlin’s sake.

Merlin decides to take it as a win. “Do you want to play a game, maybe?”

“No, Merlin,” Kilgharrah says, with the same voice. If he were human, Merlin thinks, he’d be wearing that plastered smile across his face that one uses to ward off annoying children who keep asking why the entire time when you don’t want to piss off their parents. “I do not want to play a game. In fact, I want to sit here in silence and enjoy the afternoon sun.”

It’s barely a sun, but Kilgharrah has never left England, so Merlin doesn’t correct him. 

“I wish I could stretch my legs,” Merlin says mournfully.

Kilgharrah huffs. A puff of smoke comes out of his nose—only his left nostrils, actually. Merlin peers at him. Do dragons get stuffy noses? And if so, do they—

“You’d have to leave the tower for that,” Kilgharrah says, “and you created the spellwork. If you leave the tower, it will—”

“—disappear, yes, I know,” Merlin finishes. He isn’t entirely sure it’d be the end of the world to return to the library. He’s sure Geoffrey, the librarian, is thrilled that he hasn’t seen Merlin in weeks, but he misses his corner a little bit. It’s just that he’d never managed to get enough work done there, but then, he’s used to working alone. Perhaps if Arthur could come visit the library, and then they’d sit there…

It’s just that Arthur’s presence helps. It’s not that Merlin wants him around.

“Hello,” a voice says, and Merlin nearly falls out of the window sill. In fact, he whirls around so fast that he loses his balance, and since he’s talking to Kilgharrah, he’s hanging mostly outside. So he does slip, and his thigh hits the window, and then there’s suddenly a lot of air and he can see the sky hanging above him—

And there’s a strong hand on his arm, and short nails digging into his skin, and Merlin is reeled back inside, just to come face-to-face with a ruggedly handsome and broadly smiling face. To which Merlin’s reaction is, of course, to blink.

“How did you get in?” he demands, and that’s the second time that someone has been able to scale up his tower. He is almost starting to think he ought to have made it even higher, but there are strict rules surrounding magical buildings, and he’d been edging the flexibility of the rules already when he’d asked to build it on the campus of Avalon University—

None of which is important. The newcomer’s lips crook into a truly mischievous grin, and finally he takes his hands off of Merlin. “You realise you have another window, yeah?”

Merlin stares blankly at the window on the other side of the tower. He’d nearly forgotten, because Arthur always comes in through this one.

“Okay, other question,” Merlin says. “Who are you, and why did you come all the way up here?”

“That’s two questions.” Judging by the stranger’s easy-going expression, he doesn’t actually mind, because he immediately acquiesces and answers, “My name is Gwaine. Nice to meet you…”

“Merlin.”

“Merlin. A lovely name for a pretty sorcerer.”

Merlin blinks again. It seems that’s all he can muster up the energy for, and besides, he’s been stuck in a tower for more than a month. He’s a little unused to being flirted with in general, let alone when he’s locked himself up like a madman.

“Gwaine. You’re a knight, then?”

Gwaine laughs, throwing back his head. He really does have nice hair—a bit untamed, like the rest of him, and long and healthy. “No, thank God. I never could be a knight. No, I just figured—well, there’s a nice tower to climb, and there might be a princess at the end of it.”

Merlin sighs. “I’m not a princess. Historically speaking, towers are for—”

“For sorcerers and princesses?” Gwaine finishes. “Yeah, I figured. Not that I’m complaining, mind you. Except that I don’t know many people who’d willingly hide in a tower.”

“I’m finishing my dissertation,” Merlin explains, and feels the heat go to his ears. He quickly turns away, praying that Gwaine won’t ask too deeply about it. Ever since Arthur looked at him so quizzically, not entirely certain why anyone would need a tower to finish their dissertation in, he has been feeling a little bit self-aware about it.

“Ah, understandable,” is all Gwaine says, though. “You just needed a bit of quiet, then?”

“Exactly,” Merlin says, pointing at him. “I’m not insane.”

Gwaine just shrugs. “Well, perhaps a little bit, my friend. But there are worse things you could be.”

“Fine, okay,” Merlin mutters, and then perks up, because someone climbed up his tower, and it’s not even Arthur, who would have insulted him three times already in the time that Gwaine has been here. “Do you want some tea?”

“Do you have milk?” Gwaine asks cheerfully, and Merlin thinks it won’t be so hard to get along with him.

~*~

“So he thought you were a princess?” Arthur asks, when Merlin has finished telling him about Gwaine on Monday.

“Arthur, for the last time,” Merlin says in exasperation. Arthur is being wilfully obtuse or has really lost all his brain power over the weekend. In fact, he does seem a bit tired, and Merlin doesn’t think about what he might have done while he’d been so busy not visiting Merlin. “No one has ever mistaken me for a princess.”

“Well,” Arthur says, his brow knitted together as if Merlin is some severely complicated problem. Considering Arthur is a knight, everything is complicated to him, probably. “You do look like a girl, a bit.”

“A girl,” Merlin echoes, and throws a magic book at him. He’ll regret it later—magic books have a way of remembering these things, unfortunately—but for now it is completely and utterly worth the way Arthur flails. Merlin supposes he’s not used to things being thrown at him.

“From a distance!” Arthur argues. “With that angle! And what’s wrong with being a girl, Merlin?”

“Nothing, except I’m not one!” Merlin tells him.

“You’re hidden away in a tower!” Arthur says, crossing his arms. “People are bound to think you’re a princess. It’s not surprising, that’s all I’m saying.”

“I’m not a princess,” Merlin repeats, and wishes he had another book to throw at Arthur. “Wizards can hide away in towers! Historically speaking.” At least Gwaine had understood that. “I don’t need rescuing, and I don’t need another one of your lot to come crawling up the tower because you’re all so desperate to prove yourself—”

“I think you’re overreacting,” Arthur says, and Merlin feels his blood boiling. “I think it’s a very natural reaction of the knights of the kingdom to be concerned about a tower that suddenly appeared and a very girl-like figure appearing trapped in it, with a monstrous dragon sitting on top of it—”

“He doesn’t mean that as an insult, Kilgharrah,” Merlin says sourly. Kilgharrah, outside of the tower, huffs. A puff of smoke travels inside, and Arthur bites his lower lip. “And I’m not girl-like.”

Arthur’s expression twists into a smile. “You’re very dainty.”

“That’s it,” Merlin decides. “I’ll throw you out of the window you climbed through, and I can finally have some peace and quiet!”

“And how, exactly, will you finish your dissertation that way?” Arthur asks, crossing his arms. His expression has gone rather stormy, all of a sudden, and Merlin isn’t entirely sure what the reason for that might be. In fact, Merlin thinks that he is the one who ought to be mad, with the ongoing insults about him being a girl.

And Merlin has had enough of it, a bit. He has been working very hard lately, and although he appreciates Arthur’s assistance, he’s not a child. He doesn’t need his hand to be held while he goes through the tribulations of adult life, and Arthur is—

Arthur is obnoxious, and he’s the only one that Merlin has while he’s been here, and they both know it.

“Maybe I’ll ask Gwaine,” he says, his heart beating very loudly in his throat, and he hopes it won’t do odd things to his voice. “At least he doesn’t insult me. And he knows some cantrips, despite not even being a sorcerer. And—”

“Maybe I’ll throw him out of the window,” Arthur mutters below his breath.

Merlin points at him accusingly. “You’re jealous!”

“Jealous!” Arthur scoffs. “Of what? Your girl-like countenance and the way you’ve stuck yourself in a tower with no way out? If I wanted to spend time with a half-baked, neurodivergent sorcerer—”

“Of Gwaine,” Merlin says. “You don’t like that you’re not the only one who climbs up here to spend time with me. And you’re mad because he flirted with me, so you’re back to calling me a girl—”

Arthur huffs out a breath. “Don’t flatter yourself.” His cheeks have gone a little pink, though, and he doesn’t meet Merlin’s eye. Instead, he has stretched himself to his full length and keeps going up and down the hilt of his sword with his hand, as if he can’t make himself be still.

“Arthur.”

“In fact,” Arthur says, keeping his chin lifted high in defiance of Merlin’s words, “Perhaps you should ask him if he is willing to climb up every day to keep you company while you work. He must be very anxious to see you again, if he went to all the trouble—”

“How long does it take you to climb up and down each day?” Merlin asks curiously. He’s never really thought about it; he is too impatient to sit down by the window sill and watch as Arthur climbs the tower. He gets fidgety.

Arthur frowns, and there’s a deep dark line down on his forehead that Merlin wants to press his finger against. “About an hour. A little less when climbing down. But that’s—”

“Right,” Merlin says a little faintly. “You spend nearly two hours climbing to help me every day.”

“Merlin—”

“You like me,” he realises. He watches Arthur’s face carefully, which has gone very, very blank, which is really an answer on his own. Distantly, Merlin wonders when he learnt to read Arthur like this, and thinks it’s mostly that Arthur never shows the thing he wants to show, and Merlin should have realised this earlier.

“Don’t be preposterous,” Arthur blurts out. “Your tower is a mess, and you wear cat pyjamas. You cry when you watch Princess Bride—”

“That was a secret, you said you’d never mention it—”

“—and you can’t stop yourself talking about magic when you get going, and you hardly mention anything that’s actually relevant to the ongoing conversation, Merlin. Your hair is a mess, because you use product from Tesco, which you don’t see a problem with, and you are, quite frankly, the only person who has ever insulted me quite so often and so originally in a single day.”

“Because you’re a prat,” Merlin says weakly.

Arthur fixes him with a stern look. “You’re a lean twig with no muscle whatsoever with no sense of self-preservation. You’re possibly the most annoying person I’ve ever met, but you’re also… kind, I suppose. Somewhat witty. You have a decently nice face.”

“Oh, do I?” Merlin asks, and raises his eyebrows at Arthur. “Like yours, or…”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Merlin.”

“Right, how could I forget,” Merlin murmurs, and takes the two steps required to stand right in front of Arthur’s face. He has maybe just an inch or so on Arthur, height-wise, and that fact fills him with more glee than he could possibly put in words. Arthur’s lips part, pink, and Merlin can see him swallow.

“Possibly because you’re a very forgetful,” Arthur says quietly, “chaotic, messy person. But I suppose I can’t blame you.”

“You can’t?”

“You conjured a tower to overcome a failing that isn’t yours,” Arthur says, suddenly more strict. “Someone should have helped you before, Merlin. And this isn’t—I did want to help you, because I have known how hard you work since the first time I met you. And I suppose… I am sorry that things worked out the way they did, during our first year. I could have been…”

“Less of a prat?”

Arthur glares at him. “Are you insistent on making this hard on me, Merlin?”

“Oh, yes,” Merlin says agreeably. “I’m enjoying this tremendously. Is there anything else you want to apologise for? All those insults, maybe?”

There’s a moment of silence in which Arthur squints, and then he grins at Merlin. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Arse,” Merlin says, and in a sudden moment of bravery, lifts up his finger to Arthur’s cheek. His thumb runs over Arthur’s jaw, strong and set, and looks at Arthur’s lips, and the two little freckles on his cheek. “What if I got rid of the tower?”

Arthur stills. “But your dissertation—”

“The tower isn’t really helping,” Merlin says simply. “You are. Besides, I’m a little tired of the princess jokes. And I think Kilgharrah’s getting annoyed with being stuck on the roof all day long.”

They both look at the window automatically, but it’s closed, and no sound comes. Perhaps Kilgharrah is still sleeping, or maybe he’s pointedly ignoring them; Merlin will never know what goes through his dragon’s head, and he swirls his head back to Arthur.

Arthur just raises a single eyebrow. “Do you have an apartment outside of this tower?”

“Yes, actually,” Merlin says. “It’s on the fourteenth floor, but we do have an elevator. You don’t need to scale the outside of it, or anything. I mean, you can, if you want to.”

Arthur nods solemnly. “It’ll save me two hours a day.”

“I’m sure we’ll find another way to fill your time,” Merlin tells him, and Arthur hasn’t moved away from Merlin’s hand, and he hasn’t even acted as if it’s happening at all. So Merlin slowly moves in, unwilling to press his advantage, until Arthur yanks at him to close the distance, and they are kissing.

And Merlin can only think—he’s going to be so distracting now when I’m writing my dissertation.

~*~

Merlin graduates two months later, summa cum laude.