In August, when Camelot was hot and drenched in unshed rain, melted into the very air, Merlin said:

“Arthur, I need to go back to Ealdor.”

Arthur was lying flat on the floor of his quarters, heavy curtains drawn at the windows to block out the sun, pressing as much of his skin as possible to the cold stone floors.  It was undignified, and his nannies and nursemaids had condemned that sort of behavior even when he’d had them, but it was either strip down in the privacy of his own room with only Merlin to see or risk his father’s wrath by skivving off to the lake and jumping in naked.

“What?” he asked, dreamy with heat.  He felt like he’d been running a low-grade fever for days.

“Ealdor, Arthur,” Merlin told him, impatient.  “I need a few days away—I have to see my mother.”

Arthur launched himself upright, eyes clearing.  “Is Hunith all right?”

Merlin looked puzzled. “I—“ he started.

“Have Kanan’s kin come back?” Arthur demanded, his mind whirling through the possibilities already.  Ealdor sat at the furthest border between Albion and their neighboring kingdom; it wouldn’t be optimal, but if Merlin’s people were willing, Arthur would be happy to put together a small troop of knights and soldiers to help them move—Uther may be unwilling to start war but Arthur was happy to encourage immigration.  Camelot had fertile fields and safe borders, and Arthur could send his guard there with special warnings—Hunith would never fear again.

“No!” Merlin said, eyes wide.  “It’s just that my mother—“

“You must take Gaius with you if she needs any sort of medical attention,” Arthur scolded, remembering the last time Merlin had been ill and staggering around the castle until Gaius had conscripted Arthur and they’d collectively ordered Merlin off of his feet.

“Arthur!” Merlin finally shouted at him, smiling crazily in that way Merlin had occasionally.  It was equal parts fond and indulgent, and Arthur wasn’t exactly sure he liked the implications of that.  “She’s fine!  Ealdor’s fine!  It’s just that it’s her birthday, and I’d like to be there for it.”

Blinking twice, Arthur said, “Oh, well.”

***

“There,” Merlin told him, “is no way,” he said, “I am taking that,” he pointed, “with me.”

Arthur frowned at the small tokens he’d asked Merlin to include when he returned to Ealdor.

“Why not?” Arthur asked, frowning.  “Do you not think she’ll like the color?”

Merlin boggled at him for a bit before waving his arms at the gift Arthur had chosen, saying in a manner not at all befitting of a servant to the crown prince, “Arthur!  That is—that is neither a ‘token’ nor a ‘simple gift!’  That is sixty pounds of the finest beeswax candles in the castle and a half dozen of the best tapestries—commissioned for your father, by the way—and a violet ermine stole that I could swear belonged to Morgana!”

“You’re right,” Arthur agreed.  “I’ve completely forgotten the caskets of honey ale.”

Merlin clawed at his hair.  “Arthur, no.”

Crossing his arms over his chest, Arthur said, “Merlin, while you are the most crap servant possibly ever in the history of Camelot, I am still crown prince, and if I feel like sending your mother gifts, then that is my decision—understood?”

“Fine,” Merlin snapped.  “But I refuse to be responsible for hauling them to Ealdor.”

Which was how Arthur ended up leading the trip through the dark, cool mountain forests between Albion and Ealdor, dressed casually in his faded red tunic and hose, his most comfortable and battered boots.  Merlin had more or less tackled him into his armor, but Arthur had refused to put on the miserably heavy and hot chainmail and then wrestled a sword away from Merlin.

“I’m getting better with the sword,” Merlin sulked.

“You’re really not,” Arthur said, “which is kind of a mystery in and of itself.”

Behind their horses, Crow, the mule, trotted along with a wagonload of Arthur’s gifts, which Merlin seemed to despair at.  Arthur argued that if they were going to be taking a wagon, he might as well take along some supplies for the house, which had made Merlin cover his face and make soft, defeated noises of grief.

“Are you sure you can be away from Camelot for so long?” Merlin asked, and he sounded shy about it, a strange new occurrence Arthur had noted of late.  Merlin never grew shy at the usual times, when Arthur was resplendent in his court dress or flushed and covered in sweat after practices, after tournaments and gilded in victory—it was always in the quiet, unexpected moments, and Arthur had found himself trying to construct more and more of them just to watch Merlin’s eyes go fuzzy with something the same color as affection.

“Merlin, stop worrying about stupid things,” Arthur counseled him, although privately he knew he ought to have stayed in Camelot.

Merlin, with enough bullying, would have taken Crow and Arthur’s gifts along eventually, and Arthur would have no problem dispatching a knight or two to look after him along the way, but the court was suffocating with summer heat and associated lasciviousness, and he tired of escaping the clutches of determined countesses and barons, the daughters of his father’s most-loved knights.  What was more, Arthur found he missed Ealdor, and wondered how Hunith fared.  She had had Merlin’s same blue eyes and banked fire, his funny, nervous smile, but a fearless affection Arthur had never known before.

“Do you think she’ll like the gifts?” Arthur asked, sounding a little shy himself, and when he dared a glance to his right, Merlin was beaming at him as he said:

“I think she’ll like seeing you best of all.”

Arthur felt his chest puff up.  “Of course,” he said.  “Naturally.”

Merlin rolled his eyes, still smiling. “Although only the gods know why.”

***

By the time they reached Ealdor, they were both sore and a bit grouchy from when Merlin had demanded they stop to spare his delicate backside the bruising and Arthur had complained they were only another four hours’ ride away, and Merlin had cried, “Four hours, are you mad?” and Arthur had said, “You are the worst manservant in history,” and they’d ended up fuming at one another for the last leg of the trip.

The enmity had been hard to hold onto when they’d crested the hill and seen Ealdor, the village windows warm with candlelight and flickering orange with fires, the distant sound of pigs and chickens bedding down for the night growing louder as they drew closer, and Arthur stole secret, sideways glances at Merlin, watched his eyes grow sleepy with happiness, and felt something tighten sweetly in his chest.

He thumped at it, twice, where it itched beneath his clothes, and made a note to see Gaius when they returned.

“The village looks well,” Arthur said, voice soft, admiring the fields, the new-made fences and the well-thatched roofs.  Ealdor was filled with small, meaningful lives, and Arthur only wished he could fold them into Camelot’s care.

“Thanks to you,” Merlin answered in a hush, and added, blushing, “Come on—let’s go before it gets any darker.”

Hunith’s face, when she opened the door to find Merlin and Arthur, was brighter than all the torchlight and all the full moons Arthur had ever known.  She squeezed her son and kissed him on his forehead, dragging him down to her height, and before Arthur could tease him for it or feel a sting, she turned her attentions to him, wrapping her arms around him and cupping his cheeks with her rough hands, smiling at him widely.

“It is good to see you both,” she told them, kissing Arthur on the cheek before trying to drag them into the cottage.  “Have you put away the horses for the night?”

“Er,” Arthur said.

Merlin made a face.  “The horses,” he sighed, “are not the problem, mother.”

It took all three of them an hour to unload the cart, and by the time they were finished, Arthur and Merlin’s bickering had reached such a fever pitch most of the village had come out to see what the commotion was about, which of course had led to an impromptu celebration to welcome Arthur Pendragon back to Ealdor.

Arthur made a royal command for one of the casks of honey ale to be tapped and sent a trio of village boys off to search for the biggest knife they could find to cut one of the wheels of fine, Albion cheese he’d rolled into the wagon that morning, hidden beneath a large package of linen—Merlin shot him a dirty look when he saw it, and Arthur only blinked innocently—and found a dozen of the good, crusty rounds of Camelot’s bread himself.  The villagers were hesitant at first, but the shine on Arthur’s invisible crown must have worn off a bit once they noticed what an enormous sodding fishwife Merlin was being about the whole “hidden compartments in the cart filled with soap and dried meats” thing, and by the time the moon was high they were all taking turns teaching Arthur the foulest drinking songs they knew.

“I,” Arthur declared, after most of the villager men had been hauled off by their wives and all the children put to bed, “did not even know one could do that with a sheep.”

Merlin unlooped Arthur’s arm from his shoulder and set him down gently on the ground, where he’d laid out their bedding.

“Yes, well, you have lived a life of deprivation after all,” he said sympathetically, reaching for Arthur’s boots and sighing, “Arthur—I thought I put those away to be donated to the poor in the lower village.”

“They’re my favorite boots,” Arthur told the ceiling thatch before sitting up, resting his weight on his elbows and saying, “You know, they all called me Arthur.”

Tugging at Arthur’s tunic, Merlin caught his eye and asked, “Yes?”

“No one calls me Arthur,” Arthur answered, and paused to say, “Well, you do.”

Merlin smiled at him, teasing.  “I could stop.”

“No, no,” Arthur said.  “If you stopped being insubordinate how would I even recognize you?”

And the sound of Merlin laughing, the soft alto of Hunith’s voice, round with smiles, were the sounds that bore Arthur off to sleep, breathing in the sweet, wet smell of new hay and yeast smell of bread, the green scent of the rain that had started to fall—a steady patter outside the daubed walls of the cottage.

***

Merlin was still asleep when Arthur snapped to waking, which—really—just highlighted what a deeply shite manservant he was.

He was curled up on his side, his head tucked neatly in the space between Arthur’s chin and collarbone, near enough his skin radiated warmth through the light blankets Hunith must have tossed over them during the night.  The last time they’d slept here, on the floor of Merlin’s old cottage, they’d been head to feet, and Arthur supposed he didn’t mind seeing Merlin’s serene face and wild, dark bangs instead of his toes first thing in the morning.

It was still early out, that sliver of day when there was a fine mist and before it warmed and everything smelled new and of possibilities.  This time of morning, Arthur had usually just stepped away from his chambers to meet up with his guard for patrols, leaving behind Merlin, who usually just fell asleep in Arthur’s bed for another hour after helping him fumble on his clothes and armor.

Arthur allowed himself to study Merlin some more, to take in his fine, pale skin and the pink bow of his mouth, before he shook himself and sat up, picking quietly to his clothes and dressing before stepping out into the hush and taking long breaths—taking in the air without the smell of Camelot’s fireplace, the dank smell of stale rushes, the rank of too many people crowded in the market.

“Couldn’t sleep?” someone called, and Arthur turned to see Eron, the baker, across the dirt lane.

Shaking his head, Arthur walked over, rolling his shoulders.  “I’m usually running patrols this time of day.  Can’t sleep anymore,” he admitted.

“Merlin up?” Eron asked, gathering up an armful of tinder.

Arthur snorted.  “No,” he said simply, and Eron burst into booming laughter, sending birds scattering at a distance as he chuckled, “Oh, Arthur, he’s always been like that—Hunith used to despair of him.”

“Well,” Arthur said, long-suffering, “that is my job now.”

Eron smiled at him, something like approval on his ruddy cheeks, “Aye, that it is, my lord.”

Arthur, because it was bred into his bones, couldn’t resist ambulating the village, checking on the distant fences and the ditches he’d taught the villagers to dig—nothing to stop raiders on foot but plenty to disable their horses and make the whole effort punishing and without profit.  He examined the irrigation canals and looked over the bails of hay, piled in the fields, golden and glimmering and fine.  By the time he wandered back into the village proper, there were already a dozen children running to and from Eron’s hut, helping their mother’s fetch and carry, and he spied Hunith in the sty near the cottage, struggling with a fence post while trying to dispatch a particularly persistent sow.

“Off, off with you!” she scolded it, kicking with one mud-caked boot.

“Allow me,” Arthur said, and jammed the fencepost deep into the sucking mud.  The smile he saw on Hunith’s face afterward made him cough, embarrassed, and he asked, “So where is that layabout son of yours, anyhow?”

She laughed, brushing a few strands of dark hair from her face.  “Merlin’s taken half the village women on a trek to the forest—he’s determined we’ll be stocked with all the medicines and roots and herbs we can store before he leaves,” she said, and eyes twinkling, added, “I fear Gaius may be a good influence on the boy after all.”

Arthur bit back the immediate litany of things he wanted to say—about how Merlin was terrible at his job but good at being a person, and how he made Arthur laugh and worried incessantly about his armor, and endured the good (and not-so-good) natured ribbing of the other knights with grace—and asked instead:

“Is there anything I can do to help?”

***

Merlin tromped back into the village an hour later, carrying baskets and jugs and armfuls of plants and sticks and things and stopped, astonished, and stared at Arthur.

“What?” Arthur demanded.

“Are you drunk?” Merlin asked.

Scowling, Arthur barely resisted snatching up a handful of pigslop and throwing it at him.

“I am fixing your mother’s pig pen, you clod,” he answered and tipped his chin at Merlin’s load.  “What’s all that?”

Merlin listed off willowbark for pain and rosehips for swelling, wild strawberries for ill humors and dandelions, fennel for ailments of the liver.  Merlin had brought marigolds (“For that thing on your—“ and “Merlin!  Discretion!”) and chamomile for stomachs and coltsfoot for sores.  He—or his spoils—smelled like a garden at noon, warm and fizzy sweet, and Arthur breathed deeply of it and felt, strangely, at peace, leaning over a newly-repaired side of a pig pen, ankle-deep in mud in this backwards village with no minstrels or books or jousting.

“Now,” Merlin said, shifting his packages about clumsily, “why are you fixing my mother’s pig pen, and what have you done with your hand?”

Arthur ignored the first question and looked down at his fingers instead.

“My lady,” Arthur pleaded in Hunith’s general direction.  “Please make him stop—ow!”

Merlin did something else hugely painful to the cut on Arthur’s palm and rolled his eyes.

“Stop appealing to my mother for sympathy,” he lectured, “and stop acting like such a child!  I’ve seen you complain less after you’ve been stabbed in combat, much less attacked by a fence.”

Hunith leaned over where Merlin was cleaning Arthur’s cut with rose water and drizzling honey in the wound—an angry red gash but by far not the worse Arthur had gotten, not even the worse he’d gotten and shrugged off to heft his weapon once more.

“You’re right, Arthur,” Hunith intoned, mouth twitching as she met Arthur’s eyes.  “It’s a deep and dangerous wound for certain—you’ll be lucky not to lose the limb.”

But he couldn’t resist, here, the urge to sulk and tease, for there weren’t any men to impress or his father’s expectations to live up to, and he could indulge his need to indulge himself with Merlin’s attention, which was despite its frustrations always delightful.  He may be twenty, but he felt like a very young twenty.

“Oh God, mother, don’t encourage it,” Merlin complained, glaring up at his mother.

“She’s absolutely correct, Merlin.  If the wound becomes infected and black and my hand falls off and I am no longer fit to defend Camelot, it’ll be on your head,” Arthur warned.

Merlin peered up at him through his dark lashes and asked, cheeky, “Now will that be three days in the stocks or a day on the rack, sire?”

For a moment, the sight of Merlin, coy, knocked all the breath out of Arthur made his mouth go dry, and whatever clever remark he’d had prepared fell off the tip of his tongue into silence, and they stared at one another for a long moment before Hunith cleared her throat and said:

“If you’re done, boys—both of you have an appointment with the millpond.  You’re filthy the pair of you, and I need extra hands to do the baking this week.”

***

The millpond is perfect, shaded by ancient willows, dripping their branches like a cascade of hair over the water, a break from the unrelenting midmorning sun, and Arthur barely spares a thought before stripping out of his tunic and hose and boots and leaping into the cool water, scrubbing at the mud on his arms and face.  It felt wonderful, sluicing down his shoulders, and the sand crunched delightfully between his toes.  He wondered where Merlin was, why he hadn’t heard a second splash of water, and whipped his sleek wet bangs from his face to turn to the reedy stretch of land that banked the pond and saw the other boy there, standing at the edge of the water—fully dressed and his face pale with worry.

“Merlin?” he called out.

His manservant didn’t move or say anything, just stood there and stared to wring his hands.

Frowning, Arthur said, “Hey!  Idiot!  You’re going to burn up in this heat—get in the water.”

Looking miserable, Merlin finally said, “Maybe you should stay in the shallow part,” and continued to look ill about it.

Rolling his eyes, Arthur said, “It’s your skin,” and fell backward with a great splash, letting the water swallow him in and feeling it thread through his hair and wrap softly round his ankles and wrists, until he bobbed up and the sloshing noise of it faded to—to Merlin shouting:

“Arthur!  Arthur!”

The fearfulness in Merlin’s voice had tripped from whining to real, and Arthur spun round underwater to make his way back to the shore, but before he could find the bottom of the pond again—it was deeper there—Merlin had rushed in, and jerked him out, hands like vices on Arthur’s forearms and drenched head to toe, clothes clinging to him and hair in his eyes, wide and red.

“Arthur!” Merlin shouted again, right in his face, reaching up with one hand to scrub the bangs out of Arthur’s eyes and stare at him, panting, shaking like he’d just run a footrace.

Arthur stared back.  “What on Earth is wrong with you?”

Merlin made that face—that one he always made when he was trying to think of some convincing lie, and after a too-long moment he just closed his eyes and admitted, “I was afraid you were drowning.”

“Are you mad?” Arthur demanded, sputtering.  “I’ve been able to swim since I’ve been able to walk.”

But Merlin just kept staring at him, opening and closing his mouth with no words coming out, and Arthur thought maybe this was just one of those things, like how Morgana was terrified everytime anybody in the castle developed a cough, though they never lingered and worsened and killed the way her father’s had.

“I’ll stay in the shallow end,” Arthur promised, and Merlin nodded vigorously.

He did, and after he coaxed Merlin out of his drenched clothes, the boy even relaxed enough to allow Arthur to float on his back without panicking.  Arthur wondered, briefly, who in Merlin’s life had been taken from him by water, but every time he tried to look surreptitiously to his manservant, all he saw was gleaming wet, white skin from long days inside the castle and luminously blue eyes always turned to Arthur, and he went shy all over.  He’d grown up under everybody’s thoughtful or worried or calculating gazes, but nobody ever really looked at him as Merlin did.

“Arthur,” Merlin asked suddenly, out of nowhere, floating in the water nearby, “if William hadn’t been killed, what would you have done?”

William the sorcerer, who’d called up a storm and scared away the men destroying his village, who’d saved the baker and brewer and Hunith and Merlin and all the children from a winter of cold starvation—who had died and helped Ealdor to live.  Arthur knew what his father would say, and he could even guess what he would do if he were only his father’s son, but Arthur wasn’t—or wasn’t just—any of those things, and it took him a long time before he moved to touch down on the sandy bottom of the pond and watch Merlin’s drawn, frightened face, pale and still floating in the water.

“I don’t know,” he admitted, and wondered if Merlin knew what it cost Arthur to say those words aloud.  A king must never be uncertain, to hesitate or stray from his determined path, but Arthur knew Merlin’s guilelessness also made the admission possible.  “It would depend on what kind of sorcerer he was.”

Merlin laughed a little, and went, graceless, under the water for a moment before reemerging, water droplets gathering on his white, freckled shoulders.

“Sort of a hapless one,” Merlin said, grinning now, less shy, and Arthur couldn’t help but to respond.

“Then I don’t know,” he teased, “he could have been a danger to himself if no one else.”

Arthur could never kill someone for something he’d been born to, and although his father had never held anything but loathing for magic Arthur had never learned to hate it.  He didn’t know it very well, only that the same magic that had poisoned the water in the lower village at Camelot had hovered, incandescent and hopeful over his head, lighting his way to safety.

It had been more than a year now, since William had died and Ealdor had lived, and Merlin’s look was soft and sad but mostly rueful, which Arthur supposed he could tolerate.  For weeks Merlin had staggered around the castle looking on the verge of collapse, his eyes always red, and Arthur had been forced to sort out the warring grief and jealousy he’d felt fighting in the pit of his stomach, twisted like snakes.  Arthur had known anger and frustration and shame and hurt, but he’d never felt loss the way Merlin seemed to then, and it’d only made it worse to layer pettiness over his concern for Merlin, to wonder if—when—he fell and bled for Camelot, would Merlin look the same way.

“Magic can be good, too, Arthur,” Merlin told him, shy again, and Arthur had no choice but to say:

“Yes, Merlin, I know.”

***

They were horrendously late for breadmaking, owing mostly to Merlin having soaked all his clothing and Arthur taking the opportunity to have a good lieabout without feeling guilty or leaving tavern wenches to the aggressive groping of his guard while Merlin sulked, mostly nude, and picked dandelions.  Arthur pointedly did not stare at Merlin’s cream-white back, or the knobs of his spine prominent through his pale skin or to run a finger wonderingly over the pink burn that started on the back of Merlin’s neck and faded downward along the planes of his shoulders.

“I said bathe, not bathe, drain the pond and then refill it with thimbles,” Hunith said, giving Arthur a speculative look he wasn’t entirely sure he liked.  He had seen it before at court, on the faces of noblewomen whose daughters were simpering at him from across the dinner table—although Hunith looked a good deal less excited about it than the noblewomen had.

“It was Merlin’s fault,” Arthur volunteered, and Merlin glared at him.  “It was!”

Before hostilities could break out, Hunith laughed and said, “All right, all right—no more, now both of you roll up your sleeves and come along.  There’s a week’s worth of bread to be made.”

Merlin looked uncertainly to Arthur.  “Have you ever made bread?” he asked.

“How hard could it be?” Arthur said, recalling the cooks in Camelot’s kitchen punching raucously at bread dough and cursing at one another across the room.

An hour after that, Hunith forcefully took the ball of dough away from Arthur, directed him to the water pail to wash and instructed him to fix all the fence ties along the far side of the vegetable garden behind the house.

“No more baking then, Arthur?” one of the village women asked, pausing by the ill-repaired fence.  She had ginger hair and a smattering of freckles across the nose, a wide smile and Arthur thought her name was Una, but wasn’t certain.

He hammered a fence slat into place with more violence than was strictly needed.

“It’s women’s work anyway,” he said.

She laughed, and the sound echoed and sparkled in the wide open of the village as she said, “You’re right, your highness—it’s lucky then that Merlin’s such a quick hand at baking then, aye.”

Smirking, Arthur said, “Lucky indeed.  He’ll make someone a fine wife one day.”

Una tittered, color rising to her cheeks, and she said, “Aye, here’s hoping that Merlin makes a good match then?  To a fine, honest gentleman who’ll take good care of Hunith, too.”

If Merlin were a maid and came to ask for a dowry to marry some godawful smith or brewer or tanner form the lower village because he was a “fine, honest gentleman” Arthur thought he might be forced to either exile the bastard for soliciting the prince’s servants or seek counsel with Morgana—so it was for the best all around that Merlin was, despite the baking, unlikely to marry anybody.

And he was about to tell Una that when Merlin came out of the cottage into the late afternoon sun, carrying five dough rounds—slashes drawn across their curved tops—on an enormous piece of flour-dusted wood.  He held it in front of Arthur and stared at him until Arthur was forced to take it from his manservant just to do something to interrupt the stupidity of the moment.

“Could you run those to Eron?  He’ll bake them off for us and we’ve got at least another two batches to put together,” Merlin asked, eyes bright, as he dusted the flour off of his hands.  “If you think you could handle that, your majesty.”

Merlin was already trotting away, leaving Arthur gaping at the gall of it when Una’s laughter broke his righteous fit of anger and she observed, “Merlin’s betrothed will have to be a strong man indeed.”

“And merciful,” Arthur muttered, hefting the wood board easily and starting off toward the baker’s hut, wondering where this trip had gone all wrong.

***

Dinner was fresh bread from Eron’s enormous ovens, cheese, and some of the salted meat Arthur had packed, and they feasted with the new beeswax candles lit in the cozy center of Hunith’s cottage.

She’d gone into a tizzy once Arthur had opened the cartons and showed her all he’d brought on top of the ale and food, and Merlin had held his mother and leveled Arthur a knowing look when Hunith had started crying of all infernal female things, and then insisted Arthur hadn’t upset her and she was only so happy when he’d attempted to apologize.

“Breathe, Mum,” Merlin had advised.  “There’s more.”

She’d sobbed some more, and Arthur had debated how difficult it would be to break in a new manservant versus killing Merlin and hiding his corpse in the pigs’ trough.

“Er, it’s nothing, really,” Arthur had said, feeling stupid as Hunith hugged the stole to her chest and dabbed at her tears with her shirtsleeve.  But Merlin was looking between Arthur and his mother with a soft, happy expression, so more likely than not no grave missteps had been committed, and Arthur hazarded to say, “Anyway—happy birthday.”

“Thank you,” she told him, and leaned over to kiss him firmly on the cheek before kissing Merlin on his temple with equal affection.  “Thank you both—you’re such good boys.”

Arthur had always known the affection of women, from his nannies when he was a child to the court ladies when he was older, to the saucier wenches and knights’ daughters who were more free with their virtue once he’d gotten old enough to be interested in those things, but Hunith’s smile and her eyes were different than all of them.  Arthur wondered if it wasn’t something passed from mother to son, that Merlin should look at Arthur like no other, and that Hunith would as well.

“You will be a fine king one day, Arthur,” Hunith decided later, closing Arthur’s hand between her own, worn with calluses but soft with age.  The skin round her eyes crinkled and she said, voice wistful, “I only hope you’ll continue to be good to Merlin, and to be patient with him.”

For no reason at all, Arthur blushed and looked down at his knees.  “Of course,” he mumbled.

“Merlin adores you, you know,” she confided, and Arthur couldn’t help but look up at that and saw her smile was teasing. “He would never admit it, but he thinks the world of you.”

Arthur was hungry to know what ‘adores’ might mean, if Merlin’s love for him was childish and glossed with worship, tangled up with his awed feelings about Camelot in general or if it wasn’t something else, something more complicated.  They were questions that weren’t meant to be asked, and certainly not by Arthur, who had been taught to ask only if it was something that would have been offered anyway.

“What are you two talking about now?” Merlin asked when he came back to the cottage with two buckets of cool water from the well near the edge of town.  Eve  rything was harder in Ealdor—even water was an exercise in work—and Arthur wondered for a moment how it felt to be a peasant, to struggle for every farthing and every necessity and to pay endlessly into the pockets of your king.

Hunith gave Arthur a secretive glance, hushing him with a wink.  “Only how your studies of medicine are coming along,” she told him.

“Horribly,” Arthur supplied.  “By the way, was how I answered.”

Merlin flusehd.  “I’m getting better, Gaius said so.”

“Not accidentally giving me the runs when you’re trying to soothe my throat with an herbal tea this particular week is not the type of improvement that impresses anybody, Merlin,” Arthur shot back, and Hunith burst into laughter, deepening Merlin’s blush and his pout until he was as red as his tunic.

“Yes, but I have to take care of you when you’re abed and complaining like a child,” Merlin answered, “so I’ve been punished enough.”

Arthur turned to Hunith and said, “I think he spends more time in the stocks than out.”

“He would be so much less interesting if he were docile, don’t you think?” Hunith asked, rising to her feet and dusting off off her dress, ignoring her son as he said, “I hate it when you talk about me like I’m not even in the room,” to say to Arthur, “And now, I must away to bed—but thank you again, Arthur, for the lovely birthday, and for bringing my son home to me.”

She favored Merlin with a soft look before turning back to Arthur.

“Having you both here,” she said, “was the best of all the gifts.”

Hunith had disappeared behind a curtain to undress and Arthur was still savoring the moment, letting it soak into his pores with dignified appreciation when Merlin laughed and said, “Oh my God, Arthur—are you going to cry or something?” and Arthur was forced to cuff him, which led eventually to them banging around the cottage and Hunith throwing them both out, because if they were going to run round like hooligans, they could damn well do it outside without knocking over any of the furniture.

***

They ended up in the deep forest at the far fringes of Ealdor, and the cool August night was positively cold beneath the trees, with the Earth exhaling after a long day.  Merlin talked about growing up in the forest, gathering wild berries and mushrooms and wintergreen during cold winters where he felt like his fingers were frozen from November to March.

They passed the remains of a shelter, a dilapidated fence, and Merlin said it was where Nonny Warren had kept her pigs once long ago, when she’d let them run free in the forest during the year to get fat before bribing the village boys with soul cake to corral them back into the town for her.  It was before even Merlin’s time, but a story someone had told Will, who had dutifully turned it over to Merlin for safekeeping along with a particularly naughty poem about some woman named Aelith and a tax collector who got more than his fair share.

“Are all country boys so dirty-minded?” Arthur demanded and Merlin only grinned back.

“Usually, they’re worse,” he said.  “There’s not much to do out here.”

“I can’t imagine the village girls are very fond of it,” Arthur said mildly.

Merlin shrugged.  “Mostly, it was just me and Will,” he said, quiet, and before Arthur could investigate that further, Merlin glanced over his shoulder, grinning again, and said, “Up ahead—come on, I think it might still be there.”

‘It’ turned out to be a crude house, set on the thick branches of an enormous old poplar, among its first crown of branches, a corona of green leaves fanning out round it.  Arthur could imagine a smaller Merlin, with even thinner arms and legs, freckles across his nose, rushing through the lush green underbrush of the forest to this house as sunlight speckled the ground underneath his feet.  Arthur received his first lesson with weaponry at three; by four his father had him practicing with a wooden sword.  At five, he’d killed his first stag and walked around Camelot, chest puffed, for days, inflated with his own pride.  He’d never played in grass and wood houses, and he wondered if that was why he let Merlin get away with such insubordination and sundry foolishness, dragging Arthur along by the sleeve and tugging him up the stair-step branches of the tree until they were sitting together in the tiny house, looking through the naked branches of the forest toward the lake, where water lapped along the pebble beach in long mermaid sighs.

“Did your father build you this?” Arthur asked.

In the trunk of the tree near his hand, there were tiny carvings made by shaky hands, and Arthur traced at them with his fingertips, wondering if the memories in the bark were Merlin’s or William’s, or if maybe it didn’t matter.  It wasn’t the burn of jealousy at that thought which surprised him so much as the intensity.

Merlin was quiet for a moment before he said, “No—William’s did, before he died.”  He swung his feet a bit, shaking the branches around them, and said, “I never knew my father, and my mother never talked about him.  Growing up nobody around me said anything either—I always thought maybe he died before I was born.”

That was not what Merlin thought at all, Arthur could tell, but that was not a secret worth having if it put that look on Merlin’s face so Arthur set curiosity aside for a moment.

He wondered who’d almost drowned then, if it weren’t Merlin’s father who’d been washed away—another friend?  A sibling?  Had there been a flood?  Arthur had—since the beginning—wanted to know things about Merlin, not just to use them, but just to know them, and he didn’t quite know what to do with that realization.

“Why were you so scared?” Arthur asked, discarding any affects of coyness.  He was never good with diplomacy; Uther had managed to teach him courtly manners and war had taught him the value of peace, but anything that could be settled with blunt quickness was still preferable.  “At the millpond—why were you so frightened?”

“I wasn’t scared,” Merlin lied, stuttering.

Arthur glowered at him.  “I can still have you beheaded, you know.”

“For what?” Merlin argued.

“Now,” Arthur went on, “tell me the truth: it was only swimming—what had you so frightened?”

This time, Merlin went stiller than the night, draped like dark velvet around them, and it was a long, long time before he said, “If I tell you, your father might be the one to have me beheaded.”

It was barely an admission, just an insinuation, but Arthur saw the snakes from Valient’s shield and Merlin’s tired eyes after Lancelot had driven away the gryphon.  He thought about the beast poisoning the water and a thousand other little things—the light, floating above him in the cave, scraping away at the dark and guiding him toward escape as Merlin burned like reddened coal, babbling fever-sick words like gibberish, Gwen had said, like spells, Arthur thought.

Arthur thought about the duststorm the last time he’d been in Ealdor, and before the rage—he lied, how could he lie? I thought he trusted me—could eat its way up his spine, he forced himself to take a breath, exhaled it shaky and angry into the dark.

“What, are sorcerers afraid of water?” he spat.

Merlin’s shoulders tensed.  “No,” he whispered.  “I just—I saw you nearly drown once.”

In a dream? Arthur wanted to ask.  In your scrying dish?  Or were you plotting for it the way my father always says magicians are?

“In a dream?” Arthur heard himself ask instead, a note of fear in his voice.

“Awake, and before my very eyes,” Merlin bit out, and how his knuckles were white where they clutched at the branches of the tree, steadying himself.

Merlin laughed when the townspeople threw rotten fruit at him in the stocks and wasted hours teasing the littlest kitchen boys.  He knew the name of every stray cat and mangy dog in Camelot and had once—though he’d sworn Arthur to secrecy—allowed Morgana and Gwen to cover him in face powders and rouge.  If Merlin was a sorcerer—no, if Merlin had magic, then it had to be incidental, something that had just happened by a cruel twist of fate, Arthur thought.  Merlin could barely be trusted to remember a half-dozen-item long list of supplies, much less spells, potions.

“You had already been under the water for so long by the time I found you,” Merlin burst out, voice low and tense.  He was breathing in short gasps, pulling his legs up to his chest and putting his face against his knees.  “I kept diving, and diving into the lake, but I couldn’t find you—and you—your stupid chain mail—you didn’t bob up the way people normally do, and all I could think was that I was too late, and that Sophia had given you to the Sithe and they’d taken you and—“

“Sophia?” Arthur asked.  “What’s she got to do with—?”

“She was trading your soul in for immortality with the fairies, you prat!” Merlin shouted at him.  “And you’re just lucky I noticed she’d enchanted you or else I would have let the stupid Sithe have you, for all the time I spent in the stocks for you that time!”

For a moment, Arthur was torn betwen disbelief, feeling extremely foolish over the whole thing, and wanting to tell Merlin Arthur’s romantic affairs were none of his, but what came out in the end was, “I thought we had just tried to elope.”

“Well, you also thought I could clean your armor, sharpen your sword, launder all your clothes, exercise your dogs, brush your horses and muck out the stables by myself with no assistance, too,” Merlin muttered.  “So it’s clear you’re not terribly bright.”

“You can’t talk to me like that,” Arthur reminded him, irate.

Merlin looked away, down toward the ground beneath.  “Why not,” he asked.  “You’re just going to have me beheaded anyway.”

Arthur had watched exactly fifty-six witches and wizards killed.  The initial bloody purges, he’d been too young to witness, just an infant, but he’d grown up with the vivid memory of hangings, of beheadings in the courtyard.  He remembered the time his father had a girl, barely fifteen, tied to a post and burned.  He’d always asked their crime and the unifying condemnation was magic—never what kind.  He’d wondered what a skinny girl with dirty blonde hair could have been doing, wondered how much danger she could mean for Camelot with her skinned knees and luminously hungry eyes.  Arthur had seen war and the raided hulls of villages; he’d seen entire towns slaughtered by barbarians and women and children murdered in their beds, raped in the streets.  Arthur knew evil, and young girls sobbing into their dirty fists, hysterical and screaming as soldiers lit a fire under her feet weren’t evil—they were just girls.

He had never had the luxury of wondering if his father was a good man, a good king, but Arthur had always known that someday in the distant after, when he carried the Pendragon line and bore the kingdom on his shoulders, there would be no more burnings, no more beheadings, no hangings for magic—there was too much death already.

“Melrin,” Arthur whispered, because to deny Merlin his punishment alone was treason, “I would never tell my father.”

Looking at him dumbly, Merlin said, “You have to—it’s the law.”

“It’s also the law you are never allowed to refer to me as Arthur,” he pointed out.

Aghast, Merlin said, “You can have someone hanged for that?”

“I think you’re missing the point,” Arthur told him, feeling a smile start to tug at the corners of his mouth—because if Merlin were magic, if Merlin could do magic, then—“Was it you, then?  The one who sent me the light in the cave?  When I’d lost my torch finding you an antidote?”

“Maybe?” Merlin admitted, looking sickly.  “But it was an accident!  I wasn’t conscious! And—“

Whatever else he said was lost when Arthur leaned in to close his mouth over Merlin’s, to still the protest and tell him in something other than words—words were always so bothersome—that Arthur was grateful, that he wasn’t angry (not as much as Merlin seemed to think, anyway), that if it weren’t for that light in the crevass he would be dead, and that there’d been no malice in that magic.

Arthur had always wanted to know who’d sent it, who’d saved him, to whom he owed a debt, and there was something bubbling up in his chest, delirious and happy, to know that it was Merlin.

***

Merlin required extensive convincing he wasn’t going to be hanged—or beheaded, or burned, or poisoned, or anything else—and Arthur obliged mostly by cutting him off with a kiss.  After some debate, mostly one-sided, the arguments grew redundant, and Arthur concluded Merlin was probably doing it just to invite the interruption, at which point he said, “You know, you could just kiss back.”

“I wasn’t that kind of country boy,” Merlin protested, but did so anyway, and this time when Arthur brushed his tongue against Merlin’s lips they opened with a sigh, and Arthur thought he felt something glimmering that passed through him then, sliding under his skin like a sudden burst of heat, desperation.  Was it magic?  Arthur didn’t know, but it intensified when Merlin moaned into Arthur’s mouth, twined his fingers in Arthur’s hair.

Arthur broke away from Merlin’s mouth to explore the skin along his jaw.  He asked, “Is this magic?  Have you cast an enchantment?”

“Doubtful,” Merlin said, in between gasps, still carding his fingers through Arthur’s hair, dear, his fingers familiar and warm against Arthur’s scalp.  “I can barely get the grass stains out of your tunics with magic.”

This was nothing like tumbling a milkmaid or an agreeable lordling—there were no secrets here, hidden beneath their skin—and Arthur took his time, mapping the geography of Merlin’s neck, studying his newest territory.  He was not a scholar, but he was a dutiful prince, and Merlin was his now, to guard and learn and tend for, to be had for as long as Arthur had the strength to keep him.

Arthur laughed against the hollow of Merlin’s throat and said, “Typical—terrible manservant, appalling magician, too.”

“Careful, Arthur,” Merlin warned, smiling at him when their eyes caught, “I’ll turn you into a toad.”

“You probably don’t even know how,” Arthur scoffed.

“I could learn,” Merlin answered, catching Arthur’s mouth for another lush, lingering kiss.  “I’m sure it’s in a book somewhere.”

Arthur suddenly wished he knew where those books were—if Merlin had learned magic through words and pictures or if it had just flowed from him, like rain skated down the long fingers of willow trees.  His father had burned most of them, in bonfires that had sent smoke billowing over Albion for days.

“And what will come of you if you were caught reading one?” Arthur asked, and pressed his mouth over where Merlin’s collarbones hovered most prominently under his skin.

Shivering, Merlin grabbed at Arthur’s tunic and breathed, “I suppose I’ll have to hide away in your rooms to read them, then.”

Now he’d thought it, Arthur couldn’t shake it, the mental image of Merlin poring over a book of enchantments—and Arthur conveniently filled in the spaces of that picture with the trappings of his own chambers: the fire roaring, the remains of dinner on the table, and Merlin sprawled, all long limbs and fingers, across the red brocade coverings of the bed, murmuring to himself as he read.  Arthur knew his lot in life was first to spend it on Camelot, and that one day Camelot would need a queen and he would need an heir.  But maybe he could have Merlin, too, hold him close and keep him in a way he never could a woman sent by her father to seal a contract against the horrors of war, maybe that would be enough to keep at bay the fluttering beneath his breastbone.

“Only if I am there to supervise,” Arthur countered, and pulled away enough so he could study Merlin’s face—flushed and smiling, his eyes flashing in the dim light—and forced himself to say, “This isn’t an order, you know.  We could stop and I’d never—”

Now it was Merlin’s turn to interrupt him with a kiss, and instead of dignifying Arthur’s question with a response, he said, “If you were there to supervise me, I highly doubt I’d get any actual studying done, Arthur.”

“All part of my master plan not to be turned into a toad,” Arthur assured him, feeling giddy, over-hot, feverish with something not unlike triumph.  Merlin laughed and shoved him down on the knobby branch floor of their perch, his smile luminous in the moonlight, and said, “Prat,” as the endearment it may have always been between them.

Shifting beneath him, Arthur asked, “What kind of country boy are you, would you say?”

“I have to admit something, Arthur,” Merlin told him, solemn and sliding down the length of Arthur’s body, hands tracing along Arthur’s sides and down to the ties on the front of his hose.

“Yes?” Arthur gasped, trying to brace himself for whatever else his manservant might turn out to be in addition to an idiot and insubordinate and a wizard and a bit beloved.

Merlin peered at him with supernaturally blue eyes, his breath hot on Arthur’s cock through the thin cloth of his leggings, and he said, conspiratorial, “I lied—I was that kind of country boy,” and unlaced Arthur’s trousers to press hot, wet kiss beneath the crown of his dick.

Arthur cursed profusely and colorfully in every language he’d ever been taught, and after he managed to quiet Merlin’s laughing by shoving his dick more or less down his manservant’s throat, he went wordless and desperate and resorted to tugging at Merlin’s dark, soft hair instead, tangling the locks between his fingers and rolling his hips with the graceless need of an untried boy.

“That,” Merlin declared, pulling off of Arthur’s cock with a loud and utterly obscene noise, “was not at all a display of the royal dignity you claim to have at all times.”

Arthur stared upward, gasping, watching the sky fade out of its deepest blue into the blushing pink or morning, and said, “Right,” before grabbing his manservant and shoving him down, now, dragging down his battered-looking trousers and rubbing his cock along Merlin’s—hot, soft skin against hot, soft skin, biting ferociously at the place where Merlin’s neck melted into his shoulder, all white, inviting skin.

“Arthur, Arthur,” Merlin pleaded, mewling, throwing one leg over Arthur’s hip and sinking his nails into Arthur’s shoulder, thrusting up to meet him stroke for stroke and came, wet and messy all over their stomachs.  Arthur couldn’t decide what about that was more incendiary, Merlin’s unschooled and honest yearning or that it was the first time anybody had just called him Arthur like this, and he choked out, “Merlin,” and thrust hard against the other boy one last time before he froze, panting, spilling out over their already slick bellies.

“Arthur,” Merlin said, and he kept looking at Arthur in wonder, starry, and worrying his hands through Arthur’s hair like he was afraid Arthur was leave, and Arthur obligingly kissed him, swallowing whatever else he wanted to say, licking away all his doubts and worries, tasting himself on Merlin’s tongue.

And that was when the branches broke.

***

Merlin’s bedamned sorcery managed to keep them from dying horribly but couldn’t prevent a good deal of feeling stupid from being distributed to all and sundry.  Having their pants down round their ankles made it particularly difficult to disentangle themselves from the forestry and amplified the associated misery of the entire affair to a shocking degree.

“I blame you,” Arthur growled, lacing up his hose angrily.  He kicked at a branch and didn’t feel particularly afraid of Merlin, despite the fact that this would have been a prime opportunity to be terrified of an angry sorcerer.

“Me?” Merlin sputtered, irate.  “What have I got to do with this?”

“Before you came along,” Arthur spat, “I managed to have sex all the time without falling out of trees.”

Sniffing, Merlin pulled his trousers back up.  “I certainly wasn’t the one doing all the shoving and thrusting like a crazed barbarian,” he said primly before patting his backside with a frown.  “I think you’ve bruised my arse.”

“I think falling out of a bloody tree bruised your precious arse,” Arthur retorted.  “And excuse me—I wasn’t the one digging my nails into anybody else to encourage that ‘crazed barbarian’ behavior!”

Merlin scowled at him.  “Just wait till my mother hears you’ve despoiled me in a tree.”

Arthur’s mouth twitched.  “You could never bear to tell her,” he said, confident.

Deflating, Merlin sighed, “You’re right—that’d be extremely horrible and she’d probably just start crying again.”

Immediate disaster was somewhat of a downer on the post-coital afterglow, but Merlin was still flushed and his mouth still red from kisses, and Arthur found that despite his manservant’s extreme inability to respect the (altered) mood, he was still very endearing, which was just another sign Arthur was lost.

“And then she’d probably force me to make an honest woman of you,” Arthur said, smiling and reaching over to tuck a strand of Merlin’s dark hair behind his ridiculous ears.  He still looked disreputably disheveled, but Arthur liked it, for once, knowing he was the one who’d run his hands all underneath Merlin’s wrinkled clothes and made him smile like that, wide and like an idiot.

It grew even wider after Arthur took his hand, sliding their fingers together and tugging them back toward the village.  Hunith probably was worried, he thought reluctantly, and even if she weren’t, Arthur felt a surge of mortification imagining what she was imagining.  He might be the best warrior in all of Albion but he had a feeling his sword wouldn’t protect him from Hunith if she really did know he’d despoiled her son in a tree

Merlin blushed, allowing himself to be guided more or less meekly, a feat in itself.  “I’d love to hear your father’s opinion on that,” he sniped.

“Please, Merlin,” Arthur laughed.  “My father thinks I’ve been shagging you for ages.”

***

Merlin’s mother clearly knew of and had accepted her son’s easy virtue, because after they dragged into the village just after dawn, she pretended not to hear the way they failed to be quiet when sneaking back into the cottage.  Over breakfast, she gave Merlin a somewhat overcome look and then shot one over at Arthur before excusing herself to go do something violent to one of the hens clucking around in front of the cottage.

“Better them than you, I suppose,” Merlin said meditatively, and Arthur crossed his legs one over the other as he heard the chicken Hunith had captured begin screaming.  “Definitely better them than you.”

There was a ripping noise and the chicken shrieked again.

“Dear God,” Arthur said, “what’s she doing to it?”

Merlin glanced out the window, winced dramatically, hissed through his teeth, and then turned back round to Arthur, pasting  a smile to his face as he said, “Oh, nothing.”

Arthur considered throwing something at him, but Hunith would probably only make the chicken scream more loudly if she sensed Arthur was being discourteous to her son.  The absolute foolishness of his life since Merlin had been introduced as a variable was astonishing, Arthur reflected sadly, and ate the cold corn cakes she’d given them both that morning sadly.

He spent two more days eating corn cakes and feeling torn between guilt and wanton lust.  Hunith’s initial lackadaisical disregard for Merlin’s chastity vanished and she set Arthur to fixing the rest of the fencing around the vegetable patch, of weeding the turnips, of building a henhouse and then asking if he would mind terribly patching the roof while the weather was still kind.

“Mother,” Merlin said, looking alarmed, “if Arthur falls—”

“I’m sure he’ll be fine,” she said, and sent Merlin away to do another batch of laundry.

Arthur comforted himself that at least between the two of them, he’d been dispatched with the less embarrassing errands.  Merlin had spent more time with the village girls at the river scrubbing aprons than was good for any man—and then Arthur found himself hammering at the roof with newfound vigor thinking about Merlin smiling at those same village girls, who for whatever reason seemed to think he was adorable and clever.  Both of which were true but neither of which were supposed to be common knowledge.

“Idiot,” Arthur said, bringing the hammer down on the new shingle hard enough that he found himself staring down at  Hunith’s bemused face through the new hole in her roof.

“Er,” he said, “I can fix this.”

“You know, Merlin is my only family in the world,” she called up at him.

Panicking, Arthur told her, “In fact, I think I have a spare shingle right here.”

Hunith looked wistful.  “And he’s still so young,” she sighed.

“Oh, God,” Arthur said.  Where was that bloody shingle?

“When I sent him to Camelot, I hoped he would be happy, safe,” she went on, tipping her chin at him.  “That he would find a place to fit in, your highness.”

“I’ll—I’ll patch this right away.” Why had he never learned any carpentry?  “I’ll thatch over it—no one will ever know the difference.”

“I will,” Hunith told him, and Arthur thought that, naturally, they weren’t talking about the roof at all.  “I hope you will, too.”

Arthur’s mouth went dry, because he had been guilty of being careless with feelings in the past, but Merlin’s absence would be a slow burn in his chest, eat away at him like fire at the heart of a sheet of vellum.

“Of course,” Arthur said, finally, and Hunith flashed him her first genuine smile in days.  It felt enough like a blessing that he was still soft in the wrist and ankles with relief when he heard Merlin calling up to him:

“Er.  So.  I may have lost your underthings downstream.”

***

Before they left Ealdor, Arthur sent Merlin off to gather three impossible things, and found Hunith where she was packing cold chicken and cheese and bread into a basket for their journey back to Camelot.

“I wanted to give you something,” Arthur said, feeling awkward and torn between the prince he knew how to be and the young man Hunith brought out in him.  “Before I go.”

Hunith gave him a warm look, tying up a kerchief.  It had the same strange cross-stitch hem as all of Merlin’s scarves, and Arthur filed that away as another mystery finally solved.  “Oh, Arthur—you’ve already been far too generous.”

He shook his head.  “This is just for you, not to be shared with the rest of the village.”

She looked hesitant, and before she could protest, Arthur freed the pendant from his belt, folding it into one of her hands, cool against the heat of her skin.  It was black onyx, inlaid with a lacquer dragon fringed in gold, suspended from a heavy steel chain—a seal of Camelot, a vow of the Pendragon’s protection.

“Take this,” he said to her.  “If any trouble comes to pass on the roads next time you come to see Merlin, reveal this.  No one will touch you and risk the wrath of Camelot.”

Hunith stared at him, open-mouthed in wordless shock.

“Take it,” he said again.  “If not for me, for Merlin.”

She closed her hand around it, and searched Arthur’s face for something she must have found, because she drew him down to her height with a free hand and pressed a lingering kiss to his forehead—the same way she would with her son later as they left the village—and said, “Arthur Pendragon, you will be a great man.”

***

It was September by the time he and Merlin finally made it back to Camelot and all the leaves had changed into their finery and showered the villages and gardens in gold and red and fiery orange, a sudden shift from summer with no trace of its sticky heat remaining.  The harvests were in, and the castle was exploding at the seams with good things, hundreds of sweet pumpkins and squashes, acres of potatoes, game, prepared for the feasts to come when winter descended cold and dark in the land.  There were barrels on barrels of cider and ale and an ocean of fish and eel had been salted down in the kitchens.

Arthur had barely alighted from his horse before his father’s clerks kidnapped him to oversee the storage of all goods for the castle and the long winter months, and it was the middle of the night before he staggered back to his chambers, having been soundly lectured about court responsibilities by his father and wailed at by the castle chefs.

He found Merlin there, sprawled asleep in Arthur’s bed—the fire roaring and clean clothes laid out, a bath drawn and still steaming.

“Did you,” Arthur asked later, climbing under the covers and burrowing his nose in the back of Merlin’s neck, “magic that water to stay hot?”

Merlin hummed something incoherent, sliding backward until their bodies locked together like pieces from a puzzle box, and then Arthur was too tired and the room too warm and Merlin’s skin too soft for him to stay awake.

The last thing he saw before falling asleep was the curtains round the bed drawing shut—invisible hands tugging and tugging until he and Merlin were enclosed, safe, warm in the dark.

THE END.

***

Arthur had finally decided to be mollified by all the liberties Bernard had allowed and accept that this tragedy of a marriage was doomed to occur; to celebrate, he was at the village smith’s commissioning some sort of nuptial gift.

“Maybe a shackle,” Arthur mused.

Gwen’s father looked unconvinced.  “I thought you were happy about this marriage, Sire?”

“Who told you that?” Arthur demanded, fighting off an immediate need to blush, and before he could begin protesting how much he found Bernard *vile* and *impossible* and how he was an utter prat and wouldn’t their years together — years! — be terrible beyond words?  Perhaps the rule of thumb applied to husbands as well as wives, Arthur was about to muse, when Gwen’s father interrupted him, saying:

“Your majesty, how about something simple like a bracelet?”

“Bernard is not a *woman*,” Arthur told him acidly.

“We noticed, Sire,” the smith said, smiling.  “Trust me.”

And before Arthur could fight his dark blush and say something appropriately snotty, Gwen came rushing down the walk, shouting, “Prince Arthur!  Prince Arthur!  You must come immediately — Bernard is — !”

Whatever else Gwen said was lost to Arthur as he ran mounted his horse and felt the wind roar around his face, his blood roar in his ears.

***

When Arthur reached the castle again, there was chaos.

All of Bernard’s men were huddled in a far corner of the great room and Uther is at his throne, furious and white-knuckled where he gripped the arms of his chair.  He said, “You’ve come just in time, son.”

But all Arthur saw was Bernard was on his knees before the throne, and when Arthur drew nearer, pulling Bernard to his feet again, he saw a dark bruise spiderwebbing across his cheek and a split lip.  He flinched away from Arthur’s fingers at the corner of his mouth — Bernard tasted like the soul cakes from breakfast and belonging and no one, no one, had a right to hurt that which was rightfully Arthur’s, Arthur thought –  and there was fearfulness gleaming in his blue eyes.

Arthur couldn’t decide what made him more furious, that someone had hurt Bernard or that he was frightened.

“Father, what is the meaning of this?” he asked, trying to pitch his voice low to stem fury and panic and a churning *something* that was grinding through his guts.  Bernard had been sluggish to rise at his touch and wouldn’t meet his gaze, and for some strange reason, his tragedy of a manservant was standing alongside Uther, looking irate and somewhat sheepish.

“That boy is a fraud,” Uther said.

“You really must be lenient with him,” the blond servant said suddenly, still sounding every bit as irritating as before but much less deferential.  “I’m sure he was just overcome — but he most certainly took our little prank too far.”

Uther pinned him with a furious look.

“I’ll just amuse myself with my own silence now,” the blond offered.

Arthur looked at the servant and looked at Bernard again, and said, “I don’t understand.”

“Oh for God’s sake, Arthur,” Uther roared.  “*He*” — he pointed at the servant ” — is your prince and *he* — ” he pointed at Bernard, who was looking away now, out a window, eyes longing ” — is a servant and the Forsythe clearly have an extremely intolerable sense of humor.”

The ser — the *prince* looked mildly distressed.  “You see, I didn’t *mean* to mislead you all,” he explained.  “However your reputation throughout the lands has always been terribly fierce, Arthur and I just couldn’t run the risk of — ”

Arthur ignored him, and his hands closed more tightly around the dark-haired boys’ wrists.  Of course, how could he have ignored the obvious signs?  He was too thin, his hands too rough from work; and that laugh, unvarnished and without any polish, was not the laugh of a prince, but it had stirred something in Arthur’s chest that had tasted luxurious and sweet on his tongue, that had burned a fire down in his stomach.

“You are not Bernard,” he said, voice barely a whisper, ignoring the prince and reaching to tip his boy’s chin up, to try to catch his eyes.  There had to be some truth there, underneath the stolen identities, and Arthur knew enough about servants to know this hadn’t been his deception — he just hoped all the rest of it had been truth.  “Who are you?”

And when, finally, the boy met Arthur’s eyes, the smile he offered was sad.

“I’m Merlin,” he said, regretful.  “My name is Merlin.”

***

Camelot’s court accepted the entire debacle as the most amusing prank of the year, and the feast that night was merry as lords and ladies who’d fallen all over themselves to win Ber — Merlin’s favor grew coquettish before his now-revealed servant.  Uther was on his third flagon of willowbark cordial and roared at anyone who neared him something about how at least a greater disaster had been prevented.  Morgana and Gwen regarded Prince Bernard with extreme loathing, and Arthur wished — vividly — that he, too, could bury himself in ameliorates and sleep until winter.

The palace guards had taken Merlin in short order, thrown him deep underground in the freezing dungeons and Arthur had just watched, wordless.  He’d had arguments running under his tongue, protestations itching his palms, but all he knew for certain was that Merlin was not his prince, and all he’d ever known his entire life was his place in Camelot, his duty.

Arthur had never expected to marry for love or even fondness, he repeated to himself and tried not to look at Prince Bernard, whose golden hair shimmered now that it was clean, and whose features were very fine now that they weren’t covered in ashes and muck.

“I hope you will forgive me my deception, my prince,” Bernard said to him, lashes dark and shadowing his high cheekbones.

“There is no need to apologize,” Arthur forced himself to grind out.  “The fault is my own, for having such a terrifying reputation you felt the need to carry out such an intrigue.”

Bernard laughed, and it shined as brightly at his hair: practiced.

“I hope, my lord, we shall amuse our guests with this story for many years to come,” he cooed, and his fingers traced over Arthur’s where they clutched at the brocade tablecloth, shaking the beautiful horn goblets and stoneware plates, the gleaming knife he and Bernard shared.

“Yes, naturally, this will just become another story we tell,” Arthur said, and called for the serving wench, *any* serving wench — if Gaius would give him no herbs, he would take wine instead.

As such Arthur was well and truly shitfaced by the time he staggered down the extremely long and difficult-to-navigate — he didn’t remember their being so difficult to navigate before — steps to the dungeon.  Several guards tried to help him, but reconsidered wisely when Arthur waved his sword at them to remind them all he was extremely competent and mind you the *crown prince of Camelot*.

“You’re not going to savage the prisoner, are you?” one of the guards asked nervously.

Arthur balked.  “What!” he squawked.

“It is only that he is actually extremely kind,” another guard added.

Arthur waved his sword some more.  “Have I ever savaged a prisoner?” he demanded to know.

The guards continued to look unconvinced and extremely worried, which was irritating enough that Arthur banished them all the top of the stair where he said that they weren’t to come down even if they heard the worst noises of savaging they’d ever known, and they’d all paled in tandem.

It was only then there was a sigh from inside the actual cell, and Merlin’s long-suffering voice as he said, “My lord, that was cruel.”

“They besmirched my honor,” Arthur said sullenly, and sheathed his sword again after only two tries.  Merlin was sitting in a huddle of straw, settled in the singular beam of moonlight that spilled into the cell, looking thin and cold and sad, but serene in all these things.  “You lied to me,” Arthur remembered suddenly, and the hurt that burned through him was a surprise.  He’d forgotten the court could do that, anymore.

Merlin only stared down at his white fingers, gleaming in the moon.  “I did not want to — but Prince Bernard said I — ”

“I don’t want to speak of Prince Bernard,” Arthur snapped, pulling off his belt, setting away his sword.  He felt heavy suddenly, weighted down, and he was glad he’d imbibed so heavily at the feast now, to have that excuse for why he did what he did next.

Merlin looked extremely alarmed when Arthur kicked out the wooden bars of the cell and ducked inside, yelping, “Your majesty!  What are you — ” which Arthur found extremely trying when combined with his already-aching head.  He felt like he’d been in dim, slow-suffering pain since this afternoon and really he wasn’t convinced that willowbark cordial would do in his case.

“Oh, my God,” Merlin wailed as Arthur drew closer, pushing himself further away and pressing against the cell wall, “Look, your majesty, I recognize that I’ve angered you extremely and that this entire thing has been a sham but can we agree that I am probably to be executed anyway and that there’s no reason for you to be unduly physical about your irritation prior to my — ”

And Arthur was forced to cut him off with a kiss, dropping to his knees, and putting his mouth over Merlin’s, lips parted in invitation, and the feel of the other boy washed over him, a physical caress of comfort, and Arthur wondered if on top of the crime of dressing above his station, was Merlin a sorcerer, too.

“I hate Bernard,” Arthur admitted in a whisper when he pulled away.  “He’s a horrible prat.”

Merlin smiled at him, sweet, unafraid.  “He’s royalty, my lord.”

Arthur glowered at him.  “For that, I am docking a castle.”

Merlin laughed, but it wasn’t entirely happy, and Arthur knew that Merlin knew and that they both knew that this was impossible, couldn’t be, and that only made Arthur’s head hurt again, so he made the executive decision to put it away.  He drew his ermine-lined cloak around the both of them — he’d thought about having another commissioned for Bernard when Bernard was Merlin, so Arthur could run his fingers along the fringe and know Merlin was warm with Arthur’s regard — and kissed Merlin again, let Merlin tangle his calloused fingers into Arthur’s hair until they slept, swept away by dreams.

***

The wedding the next day was enormous and mortifying and extremely lavish.  Merlin would have hated the waste of it all, but Arthur had left him, asleep and still curled small underneath his cloak in the dungeon that morning and endured the extremely-disappointed looks on the faces of the guards, who obviously were under the impression Arthur had spent the better part of the night viciously raping his prisoner.

It felt like all the coffers of Camelot had been overturned for the occasion, and Uther had dispatched Gwen and a number of horrified-looking manservants to scrub Arthur and dress him in his finest clothes.  Despite their best efforts to make him presentable, he still smelled like straw and Merlin, and he more or less dragged through the breakfast feast, through the subsequent jugglers and minstrels, through most of the ceremony before the actual ceremony.

It was only when he found himself kneeling before priest that the *utter stupidity* of it all crashed down like a wave.

“Do you, Arthur, son of Pendragon, prince of the kingdom of Camelot, accept this man to be your lawfully wedded spouse?” the priest asked.

“Oh, what the fuck am I doing?” Arthur answered.

The priest looked put out.  “Your majesty!” he cried just the same time Bernard demanded to know, “What on Earth?”

Arthur turned to Bernard, who was making an awful, snivelly rat face of distress.

“I absolutely *loathe* you,” he told Bernard honestly, “and would rather be drawn and quartered than find myself leg-shackled to you for all eternity.”

“Oh,” he heard Uther say in the background, ripping up a marriage contract, “thank *God*.”

Bernard’s lower lip fluttered.  “But!  You were so charming!”

“Not to *you*,” Arthur clarified, got to his feet, and brushed off his knees.  “Now,” he told the priest, “if you’ll excuse me, I have some near-adultery to commit.”

***

“I must say I’m still deeply saddened that I am only to have two castles,” Merlin said, in one of those low breaths that never traveled further than the distance that existed between them in their bed, the fire roaring and keeping winter well at bay.

“That,” Arthur said, his mouth trailing over the ring he’d slipped onto Merlin’s finger — warm from skin now, a warm rose-gold over which Arthur had made hushed and meaningful promises — trailed over Merlin’s palm, dear, “is because of your smart mouth.”

Arthur, entranced with just the thing, decided to catch it in another kiss, sliding his hand down Merlin’s side in easy ownership.

“That’s no reason to become a miser,” Merlin told him.  “I imagine you have dozens of castles.”

Arthur had exactly 24.  He reflected with a growing sense of despair he would build Merlin another if he wished, and said, “It’s only expected for not having any regard for my station in life.”

Merlin laughed at him, and Arthur didn’t try to mask the curl of delight that wound in his stomach at the sound.

“No,” Merlin agreed, catching Arthur’s face in his hands and smiling at him as bright as an ocean of stars, until Arthur felt shy, suddenly, to be so loved, “after all, it is well known that it is not your *station* for which I have great regard.”

Oh, sod it, Arthur thought, maybe I *will* give him that other castle, Arthur thought, and pinned Merlin to the bed once more.

THE END.

It’s a perfectly wretched day in Camelot when Uther Pendragon announces Arthur’s betrothal, which is surprising to all but shocking primarily to Arthur, who was under the impression he would have at least a figurehead sort of say in who he’d eventually marry.

“Well?” Arthur demands, furious.  “Who is it to be? Someone with the pox or someone who is simple?  Does she drink?”

The king rolls his eyes.  “Your spouse is none of these things.”

“Then why hadn’t I been informed previously I was even to *have* a spouse?” Arthur bursts out, sending all of the servants scattering to the furthest perimeter of the room, which is unlikely to help them in the event he discovers his intended is wall-eyed after all.

“It merely slipped my mind, Arthur, my God, son,” Pendragon says, sighing.  “I’m sure you’ll come to enjoy one another or at least develop some kind of tolerance in time.”

Outside the gleaming, stained-glass windows, rain continues to streak downward, slicking most of the village into a living, moving pile of mud.

“Perfect,” Arthur snarled.  “Auspicious,” he added, and turned to stalk out of the room, coat flaring behind him.

***

He doesn’t feel much better about it later that night when his fiancee arrives, either, and from his vantage point, hidden in the clearstory looking down into the receiving hall, all he sees is a large band of people more or less entirely covered in mud.

“I’ll never manage an heir at this rate,” Arthur muttered to himself.  He felt his cock pre-emptively soften at the thought of this farce.

“Your highness,” one of the more wretched looking members of the group said, “may I present to you, Prince Bernard.”

“What!” Arthur said, to himself and very loudly.

Below, the man at the center of the group pulled down the cowl of his traveling robes, and Arthur only had time to take in his pale, smooth skin and dark hair, the very vibrant blue of his eyes before his dick had gone traitorous and interested.

“Don’t get too excited,” he told it.  “I don’t think effort is going to be enough to get a son out of that one.”

***

They’re formally introduced at the grand feast, and they’re barely past, “I’m honored to meet you, Bernard of Forsythe,” and “It is fine to make your acquaintance, Arthur of Camelot,” and the mutually unspoken, “What the fucking fuck are we to do about this fuckery?” when noblemen and women from both their lands start lavishing praises and congratulations upon them.

The frozen look of mortification on Bernard’s face more or less mirror’s Arthur’s as he says, soft and from the corner of his mouth so as not to inspire panic or anything in the great hall, “How long have you known about this?”

Arthur raised his cup to a group of embarrassingly drunk clerks in a far corner.  “Oh, I imagine as long as you have.”

“Fantastic,” Bernard pronounced, dredging up a smile for Morgana and Gwen, who were huddled in a far corner gossiping, obviously, Arthur thought with great loathing.  “We’re obviously bollocksed.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Arthur said, and he did.

Morning was only slightly more dignified than his blurry memories of the evening before — at some point, Morgana and Gwen had approached them and asked, extremely seriously, had they decided which one would be the wife, which had of course inspired another round of imbibing which may or may not have led to Bernard sniveling into a tablecloth that he wasn’t even supposed to *be here* and he had *wanted* to train to be a brewer — and improved only by the fact that when Arthur forced his eyes to open, the first thing he saw were Bernard’s lashes, dark against the delicate white of his cheeks.

Chastity was something only maidens in stories apparently could aspire to, Arthur decided, since somebody (not either of them) had obviously made the executive decision to dump the pair of them into Arthur’s bed at the end of the night.

Bernard made a whimpering noise and turned his face deeper into the down mattress, and Arthur had a startling moment where he considered that perhaps being trapped into inescapable matrimony against his will with Bernard might not be so terrible after all.  It was very affecting.

From outside the heavy brocade curtains that swept the light from his bed, his manservant called out, “Sire — just to ascertain, you haven’t despoiled one another, have you?”

“I take it back,” Arthur decided out loud.  “I pray for death.”

Bernard opened his eyes blearily.  “Yes, enough for two, please,” he begged, and pulled a pillow over his face miserably.

***

Pendragon had pulled Arthur aside and informed him he would be spending a week gaining better knowledge of his intended while the wedding arrangements were finalized, during which time Arthur was to be charming and extremely solicitous.

“I am always charming and extremely solicitous,” Arthur complained.

“Lying is a sin, Arthur,” his father reminded him, and went off to find Bernard, who seemed to have taken to hiding in small, dark corners of the castle as frequently as possible.

“Do you fight?” Arthur asked Bernard later, when they’d been corralled into the rose garden together in order to find love in each other’s arms.  It was going rather slowly.

Bernard looked horrified.  “No,” he said.

Arthur frowned.  “Hm.  Joust?”

“That’s *fighting while riding horses*,” Bernard told him, looking at Arthur as if he were slow.  “Which is yet another pursuit I do not pursue.  What about you?  Do you read?”

“Well,” Arthur said, “I *can* read.”

Bernard looked pensive.  “Right.  So I imagine the adultery will begin shortly after our wedding ceremony ends, then.”

“Probably,” Arthur agreed glumly.

Out of nowhere, Bernard frowned and asked, “Did you by any chance tell Lady Morgana last night that I’d be the wife in this relationship?”

Choking, Arthur asked, “Dear God — what?”

“She and Gwen have been sneaking me poultices and flasks of elderberry wine,” Bernard said, shuddering.  “Something about dampening the hideousness associated with our wedding night.”

“Excuse me,” Arthur said, rising from his seat on the grass and dusting off his leggings.  “I have a ward to murder.”

***

Gwen refused to let Arthur kill Morgana, despite his reminding her he was the crown prince of Camelot and he could kill anybody he liked.

“That’s entirely true,” she agreed with him, and then promptly contradicted herself by saying, “But you may not murder Lady Morgana today or tomorrow or any other day.”  She pointed back toward the hallway and said, “Now go on — you should be spending this time getting to know Bernard better.”

“He’s very sweet!” Morgana called out from one of the interior rooms of her suite.  “I think he’s extremely dear and obviously far too good for you.”

Arthur gave Gwen a look.

“No,” she repeated, and directed him gently back toward the door.

Bernard had fled from the gardens by the time Arthur made his way back there, and instead he saw the slight, sickly looking manservant Bernard had brought and then failed to command in any way.  As far as Arthur knew, the boy had been cowering in one of the guest quarters the entire visit.

“Where is your prince?” Arthur asked.

“Er,” the boy said.  “He’s gone with your father to explore Camelot’s library, I think.”

“Typical,” Arthur sighed.  He frowned at the servant and asked, “Tell me, does your prince engage in any sport?  Test his mettle in any way that doesn’t require the assistance of a candle and a knife to sharpen his quill?”

The servant looked like he might perish of terror at any moment.  “Sire?” he squeaked.

“Nevermind,” Arthur sighed.  “Vanish from my sight, peon.”

At that night’s feast, Arthur gorged himself on dolphin and peacock and eyed the various serving girls around the room, trying to remember which of them was the sluttiest and or had the lowest standards for commitment and tried very hard not to watch the way Gwen was lighting up at all of Prince Bernard’s jokes and his attention.

“My, Arthur, you’re not even married yet and you’re already cuckolded,” Morgana laughed in his ear.

He glowered at her, and said through a mouthful of pheasant, “Sod off.”

“Your job,” Morgana said.  “Not mine.”

They ended up in bed again together, slightly less hung over the next morning, and Arthur thought with some degree of sadness it was tragic that he hated Bernard and was fiercely against this marriage because the way the prince blinked awake, sleepy slow and unguarded, really was as sweet as Morgana had said.

“This cannot be proper protocol,” Bernard croaked.

“What, to put us into bed together?” Arthur asked.  “I haven’t the slightest idea.  The last time anybody managed to get married in the court she was already enormous with child.”

Bernard snorted a laugh.  “I can see Camelot is truly the paragon of virtue it claims.”

“We also have an extremely high rate of venereal disease,” Arthur said.

“It’s probably un-princely of you to defame your kingdom so,” Bernard chided him, and Arthur couldn’t help but brush some of Bernard’s dark hair away from his fine brow and say:

“It will be your kingdom, too, soon.”

***

That morning may have been a turning point, because the subsequent afternoon and evening are much improved from previous days.  Bernard condescends to watch Arthur practice with his sword, and an injury which initially had promise to be embarrassing became an opportunity for Arthur to allow Bernard to undress him and see to his wounds with surprising tenderness.  Bernard had clean fingernails and strong hands, and Arthur realized, watching the other prince wind gauze around his elbow.  They took lunch out of doors, underneath a pair of weeping willows with interlocking branches, and Bernard recited to him the Beowulf poem, with liberal substitution of actual prose with made up poetry for the bits (read: vast tracts) he had not managed to commit to memory.

“I cannot express to you how disheartened I am to know I am betrothed to someone foolish enough to memorize poetry,” Arthur teases.

“I have an enormous amount of spare time,” Bernard answered, grinning, all reckless and wild and not at all like a prince should look when contemplating the serious business of political marriage.  “I promise I shall try to forget it as quickly as possible once we are leg-shackled.”

“Excellent,” Arthur said.  “I look forward to your intellectual deterioration.”

Bernard laughed.  “Soon we’ll be communicating only in grunts,” he said, and then turned bright red with realization.

“That’s only if we’re doing it right,” Arthur said, unable to wipe the grin off of his face.

Bernard’s face took on a sudden look of distress.

It was actually nauseating how quickly Arthur found himself wishing he knew whom to murder with his bare hands in order to remove that look from Bernard’s face, and he found himself engaged in a truly embarrassing amount of handholding as he demanded, “What?” at his unwillingly bethrothed.

“It’s only that I’m not sure I’ll be any good at it,” Bernard said, wide-eyed and guileless.  “I’ve never had any real practical experience.” ‘

Arthur tried extremely hard not to come in his pants.

“I’m a good teacher,” he said hoarsely.

Bernard narrowed his eyes skeptically.

“No, you look like you’d be a terrible teacher and start shouting at your pupil almost immediately,” he decided, which was entirely true in almost every circumstance but this one.

“I shall grade you extremely leniently,” Arthur promised and leaned in until he could feel Bernard’s breath soft and wet against his own mouth to whisper, “Lesson one.”

Bernard’s breath hitched.  “Yes?”

And grinning, Arthur murmured, “Always letting me have my way,” and closed the last distance between them to capture Bernard’s lips in a kiss.

***

They had been well on their way to lesson three, “Ignore your bedamned instinct to contradict me at every turn,” when Bernard’s feeble wisp of a manservant had more or less tripped over them and made it extremely awkward for Arthur to continue unlacing Bernard’s pants.

“You’ll be hanged at dawn,” Arthur growled at the boy.

“Dear *God*, no!” Bernard argued, eyes darting toward the boy nervously as he said more or less in Arthur’s direction, “Sire — that’s hardly necessary for a simple mistake.”

Arthur continued to glower at the servant, who continued to make wheezing noises of distress until Bernard sighed and pressed an embarrassed kiss to Arthur’s jaw and whispered, soft and in his ear, “Your highness, consider it a favor to me.”

Bernard smelled like grass and sweet wine and lush, deep kisses, very good overall, so Arthur allowed himself this small and extremely princely capitulation and said with great dignity, “Fine.  But you’ll consider this your morning gift as well.”

“Like hell,” Bernard informed him.  “I want at least three castles for whatever you’re going to do to me as part of lesson five.”

Arthur considered this, bared his teeth at the servant (who wisely fled), and turned back to Bernard, who was flushed and whose mouth was swollen from Arthur’s possession.  He knew very clearly at that moment he would give Bernard as many castles as he liked.

“You’re going to be trouble,” he whispered, pulling Bernard closer to review lesson two.  “I can tell.”

***

TBC

“Oh, hells to the no,” Abby says.

Gibbs looks up at her, frowning.  “What?”

She turns bright red, whirls around from where she’s spying on DiNozzo via the camera she glued to his computer the other day, and lies, “Uh!  Nothing!  Nothing at all!”  She grabs his arm and beams at him, all sweetness and obfuscation.  “You should stay downstairs!  For — for the next hour!”

“Yeah,” Gibbs decides, extracting himself.  “I’m going back up.”

“Gibbs!” Abby wails from her computer.  “Don’t do it, Gibbs!”

He’s completely prepared for Tony harassing McGee and Ziva into helping him build towers of office furniture, of tormenting one another until there’s an open Post-It note wargame afoot, of McGee and Ziva getting into one of those silent arguments that seems to distress Tony to the point where he falls silent and wretched in a corner.

Instead, he sees a slim young man with a razor-sharp haircut in jeans and what looks like five t-shirts layered over each other.

“I didn’t know you were in town,” Tony is saying, leaning against his desk and leaning forward a little, smiling his sweetest smile.

“Just for the weekend,” the kid says, stuttering a little, and Gibbs looks at the back of his sunburned neck and figures, yeah, he could snap that one-handed.

Tony twists around, bending over to jot something down and turns back with the sticky note on his finger, holding it up.  It’d look innocent from just about anybody else, Gibbs figures, but coming from DiNozzo while he’s looking the kid up and down, it’s mostly foreplay.

“Look — I’m working the late shift tonight, but call me around 9, 10?  We should get some beers, catch up,” Tony offers.

The kid takes the note, fingers lingering way too long, and Gibbs catches his smile in profile.

“Can do, Agent DiNozzo,” he agrees.

Tony laughs.  “I told you you should just call me Tony.”

“Actually, you’ll just call  him Agent DiNozzo,” Gibbs says, and Tony and the kid both look like somebody got ahold of their spines and *pulled*.

“Boss!” Tony yelps, turning furiously red, which pretty much answers the question of whether this could have been innocent after all.

“Yes, sir!” the kid jumps in, and looks two seconds away from herniating himself, pulling a sharp salute, and offering to do 20 suicides as punishment.

Gibbs throws himself into his desk chair.  “DiNozzo, is this meeting work related?”

“Sort of?” Tony says.  “Corporal Packer and I met while I was agent afloat, boss — he’s in town for the weekend.”

Gibbs snaps the pencil he didn’t know he was holding.

The sailor swallows, hard, and giving DiNozzo a backward glance, he says, “Uh — I gotta run but I’ll call you…” and wisely trails off before finishing that sentence, beating a hasty retreat before Gibbs figures out a way to have security escort him out of the offices and straight to Leavenworth.

Tony actually has the chutzpah to *glare* at Gibbs afterward.  “You have got to learn how to be nicer to people, boss.”

“I’ll do that when I meet people, DiNozzo,” Gibbs mutters.

DiNozzo shakes his head, going back to whatever he was working on, mumbling to himself, and the only thing Gibbs manages to catch is, “…he’s such a *bear* these days…” but decides it’s probably best for everybody involved if he doesn’t tell anybody why.

***

Abby, of course, is Gibbs’ first stop after Tony leaves the office, grinning like a moron, at 8:30.

“Gibbs, no, I could never betray a confidence like that!” Abby protests, crossing her arms over her chest.  She’s wearing something that looks like it’s made out of electrical tape and DiNozzo’s out fucking a sailor, probably while doing cocaine and cheating at pool.  Jesus Christ, Gibbs thinks.

“Abby,” he says again.

“*No*,” she says, and poking him in the chest, adds, “Gibbs — you know and I know that firstly, you’re not allowed to ask and I’m not supposed to tell, and *secondly*, what Tony does in his free time is none of your business!  Especially if you’re the one who made him all lonely and sad anyway!”

Gibbs resists the urge to tear at his hair, but it’s hard.  “How did *I* make Tony lonely and sad?” he scoffs.

Abby actually gives him a pitying look.

“Oh, Gibbs,” she sighs.  “I didn’t know men *came* in this color of emotionally retarded.”

“Abigail,” Gibbs growls.

“Nope!” Abby crows, triumphant.  “Not even if you use my full name.  If *you’re* not going to play with Tony, you’ll just have to learn to share.”

Gibbs isn’t even sure what that means, but it sounds gay.

He points at her.  “No CaffPow.  For a week.”

“That’s so unfair, Gibbs!” she shouts at his retreating back.  “I *warned* you and *everything*!”

***

It takes six hours, but (im)patient waiting by the phone combined with the eternal stupidity of newly-enlisted men digs up a case.

The director’s about to hand if over to a probie team, but Gibbs more or less snatches it from their hands and silences their complaints with a glare.

“I don’t even want to know,” the director tells him, and walks away as Gibbs is dialing DiNozzo’s number from memory.

“Nrgh,” Tony says by way of hello.

“Up and at ‘em, DiNozzo,” Gibbs says.  “We have a case.”

There’s murmuring in the background, the shifting of bodies in bedlinens, and Gibbs hears the plastic casing of his cell phone creak in protest as he tightens his fist around it.  “What is is?” he hears somebody ask — not Tony — “What do they want?”

“Gibbs,” Tony yawns, “it’s 4 a.m.”

“Sorry if crime’s not conforming to your schedule, DiNozzo,” Gibbs snaps at him.  “Now get your ass out here.”

Tony sighs, long suffering, and Gibbs thinks that ever since he got back from agent afloat, he’s been more insubordinate than ever.  He’s going to kill the director; he’d just managed to season his guys just right.  “Right, boss,” Tony says, and hangs up without another word.

He’s there in record time, which makes it all the more embarrassing that the (more or less bullshit) case has (more or less) resolved itself by then: the suicide note is proven to be a fake and so is the suicide.

But murder is clearly on Tony’s mind.

“That’s it?” DiNozzo says.

Gibbs can’t seem to tear his eyes away from the bite on Tony’s neck, the stubble burn on the side of his face and his mouth, bruised and swollen.  He’s in an Ohio State t-shirt and jeans and Gibbs would bet good money that he’s not wearing anything underneath — just sweat and somebody else’s teethmarks.

Tony looks — not to put too fine a point on it — fucked out.

“Yeah, DiNozzo,” he manages to scrape out of his throat.  “We investigate every suicide as a homicide until — ”

“That is *bullshit*,” Tony bursts out, and looks as surprised as Gibbs feels.

Tony, for all the ugly things his previous managers have had to say on his evaluations in all the different places he hopscotched through on his way to NCIS, hasn’t even talked back or yelled at Gibbs, though to be fair Gibbs has more than deserved it sometimes.

Gibbs pushes himself to his feet, glad the bullpen’s empty and dark.

“You wanna say that again, DiNozzo?” he invites.

Tony still looks kind of stunned with himself, but he says, “I — you know what?  Whatever, I’m going back to bed.”

The vivid, stereo sound pornographic image of Tony shedding his t-shirt and jeans and crawling back onto his mattress, letting some sailor pin him down and touch him and bruise him up and fuck his ass is enough to make Gibbs reach out and grab Tony’s wrist as he turns to go, to pull him back, hard.

“Gibbs!  What the fuck!”

“What are you doing, DiNozzo?” Gibbs asks, pitching his voice soft.  It’s a dirty, rotten thing to do, but he says, “You know that kid can’t be doing this.”

DiNozzo’s eyes go wide and then they go furious, which Gibbs realizes, with less distress than he should be feeling, is hot as fuck.

He pulls his hand out of Gibbs’ grasp and says, “That’s none of your business, and what do you care, anyway?”  He takes a breath, like he’s weighing his options, and says, “You didn’t want in on this, fine, no hard feelings.  But you don’t get to do this.  I’m no hollaback girl.”

Gibbs stares at him.  “What does that even mean?”

Tony rolls his eyes and throws up his arms.  “I’m leaving now,” he tells Gibbs.

“Oh, fuck that,” Gibbs decides.

Tony sucks at covering his own six, which Gibbs makes a mental note to force him to work on the next time they’re at the gym, but mostly, he’s thinking about how he’s got Tony by the collar and how he’s jerking him toward the only camera blind spot on the floor — McGee’s desk.

This is going to cause all kinds of awkwardness on Monday, Gibbs figures, but at the moment all he can do is shove Tony up against the low, cube wall and kiss him, force Tony’s mouth open and try to lick the taste of somebody else out of him.

Tony fights him, for a minute, and then he goes still for another before a switch is flicked and it’s all hands on board, and Tony seems to have grown an extra three or four of them since the last time Gibbs checked.

“Never do that again, Tony,” Gibbs tells him when he finally pulls away, breathes it against Tony’s neck as he’s shoving the man toward McGee’s desk.  “Don’t make me watch you leave with some punk like that.”

DiNozzo actually laughs, bites Gibbs’ chin.  He’s pulling Gibbs’ shirttails out of his pants when he says, “I offered; you declined.”

“I was being an idiot,” Gibbs says, feeling religious all of a sudden, and shoves Tony down on the desk, dragging his jeans down over his hips — no shorts.  “Jesus Christ.”

Tony actually tenses up, the muscles in his back tightening, and he frames Gibbs’ face with his hands and says, “Uh, boss — not that I’m not extremely excited about fucking you on Probie’s desk but — ”

Gibbs pretty much has two guesses where that sentence is going.  “He’s got hand lotion here,” he says, and when Tony’s face doesn’t brighten, the surge of jealous insanity boiling its way through his gut goes four notches higher into DEFCOM DEAD SAILOR.  “Fuck,” he says.

DiNozzo actually looks away, looks shamefaced, and reaches down for the waist of his jeans when Gibbs stops him, shoves him back toward the desk and turns him around.

“Like I said,” Gibbs whispers, into the back of Tony’s neck, close to the skin so he’ll wear it like a reminder.  “Never again.”

He closes his hand over Tony’s throat — not tight, just possessing, and Tony swallows hard, and Gibbs can feel his Adam’s apple bobbing underneath his palm.  “Got it, boss,” Tony whispers, and Gibbs can tell how much he means it from the way blood is rushing underneath his skin, how his heart’s racing.

Later, Gibbs has plans on spreading Tony out across his bed, admiring the way Tony’s skin looks, warm and smooth against the stark white of his sheets and blankets.  He thinks he might spend a whole day mapping Tony’s wrists and ankles, the long lines of his body, and press a kiss to the inside of his knee, put his face in Tony’s sternum and listen to his lungs — healthy, working — breath in and out.

Later, he’ll put his handprints all over DiNozzo, until there’s nothing left for anybody else (there never should have been, anyway) and then just to be safe he’ll do it again, scour off the memory of anybody else who’s ever learned this geography.

Until then, though, Tony’s slick and fucked out between his legs, and the hand Gibbs has at his throat tightens involuntarily at that as Tony murmurs soothing things and apologies, slides his hands along Gibbs’ sides, encouraging and whispering, “Boss, come on, do it.”

Gibbs puts his face in Tony’s neck, to the place where it curves into his shoulder, and slides in, listening to Tony’s breath catch in his throat.  He puts his hand on DiNozzo’s belly, steadying him, and bends them over, and he hears Tony grabbing for the edge of the desk, bracing himself, before he shoves all the way in, until his balls are tight and hot against the cool skin of DiNozzo’s ass and Gibbs’ head’s about to fucking explode.

“Oh, God,” he pants, hot and wet into Tony’s shoulder.  “Fuck.”

Tony rolls his hips, purring.  “Oh, you were *such* a moron,” he says.

Gibbs figures he deserves that, so he just bites Tony’s shoulder in reproach before he starts pushing, groaning his devotion into the skin of DiNozzo’s back.

He can’t decide what’s making this so incendiary, what’s making this creep under his skin like a wildfire, but it’s making him a little wild, reckless, greedy and inconsiderate.  He can tell already Tony’s going to have bruises from where Gibbs is slamming his hips into the hard edge of McGee’s desk, and he’s gone from hungry to brutal, skin slapping against wet skin.  Gibbs can’t stop running his mouth and teeth along the skin of Tony’s spine, worshipful, earnest, trying to leave things to remind Tony after all of this is over — everybody can look (and they would anyway), but you’re mine, mine, you always have been.

Tony’s gone nonverbal, everything coming out of his throat just a long, keening, pleading noise, and Gibbs wants to give it to him, whatever he wants: time, attention, harder, more, whatever Tony wants.  Gibbs knows he’s not attentive, but he is lavish with his attentions, and Tony’s always had it, in one way or the other.

“Gibbs,” Tony croaks out, his voice shot.  “*Gibbs*,” he starts chanting, and Gibbs runs his hand down, down between Tony’s legs and starts fisting his dick, jerking hard and fast and with a twist.  He’s traded out depth for speed now, fucking DiNozzo in short, fast strokes, barely pulling out before he’s shoving back in, wanting more, and he can feel DiNozzo start to come, muscles fluttering around his cock when he leans in, closes his mouth over the bruise somebody else already left there — never, never again, Gibbs thinks — and bites, hard enough to draw blood.

“Oh, *fuck*,” is what Tony has to say about and comes hard enough to drag Gibbs over with him.  They knock over McGee’s computer and his desk lamp and the picture of his sister on his desk and Gibbs doesn’t even want to think about the spunk Tony just jerked out on the rug beneath them.

It takes a while — longer than recommended, actually — before Gibbs can bear to untangle them, to pull himself away from Tony and start to clean up.

DiNozzo looks dazed, starry.  He still looks fucked out (twice, Jesus Christ, Gibbs thinks) but now he looks happy, too, and Gibbs hadn’t known that the difference between Tony’s everyday handsomeness and his being beautiful was that extra measure.

He clears his throat, feeling stupid and shy, all of a sudden.  “You going to clean up?” he asks, and holds out McGee’s tissue box.

Tony bats his lashes innocently and slides up a little to sit on the edge of the desk, letting his legs fall open.  “I thought you could do it for me,” he says.

DiNozzo’s hole is red and puffy and — “*Jesus Christ*,” Gibbs says — there’s come dripping down the crease of his thigh and all in all, the tissues are abandoned and it’s another fifteen minutes before anybody manages to zip up their pants.

Gibbs drives DiNozzo back to his house, where he puts Tony to bed with deep, deep kisses, murmuring into his skin, running his hands through Tony’s hair.  He’s not fucking around, and Gibbs only plays for keeps, and he needs DiNozzo to know this.

“I got it, boss,” Tony says, eyes gleaming.  He still looks happy, and Gibbs wonders how long that’s going to last and thinks, Maybe, this time, it won’t go away period.

“Okay,” Gibbs agrees, and kisses him again, one last time.  “I have to go tie up some loose ends.”

Tony rolls his eyes and pulls the blankets up to his chin.  “Don’t scare him too bad, Gibbs,” he says.  “He’s a nice kid.”

Oh, hells to the no, is what Gibbs thinks, grabbing the shotgun he kept in the garage on the way out to his car.

THE END.

PS, I know, I know, Probie’s desk isn’t actually camera-blind, as according to SWAK, but COME ON.

PPS, Sorry, McGee.

Quick post-SWAK missing scene for NCIS, technically gen, but I mean, come on:

Room 609 was dozing, still too skinny and sallow, when an entirely new man in a (much more expensive) suit wandered up to the nurses station.

“Is Anthony DiNozzo here?” he asked, checking a pink slip he unfolded from his pocket.  He was older, handsome, and Julie briefly wondered if Nice Suit and Off the Rack weren’t going to fight for 609, which would be hot, in a wrong sort of way.  But anyway, it was ICU, and everybody was unconscious so you had to make your own fun.

“I’m sorry, he’s only receiving immediate family as visitors,” Julie said, and consulted her chart.  Off the Rack, who always answered the cell phone he was *not supposed to have* as Gibbs, was the only visitor 609 had had so far — but what 609 lacked in quantity Gibbs more than made up for with devotion, and he seemed to haunt the hallways.

Nice Suit smiled tightly.  “I am family,” he said.  “I’m his father.”

“Oh,” Julie said, eyes rounding.  “I’m sorry — I didn’t — ”

“That’s fine,” 609’s dad said, tense.  “Just — I’d like to see my son.”

Julie thought that if he really wanted to see his son, he should have probably rushed there as soon as 609 had been taken out of isolation and moved into recovery at the ICU.  His chart was three inches thick and his lungs would never be the same, and no matter how long Gibbs sat in silent guard at his bedside, 609 had mostly spent his time shifting into and out of feverish sleep.  He was alive, and he would make it, but he’d crashed three times, before, and Julie had personally put ice packs at his groin and underarms to push down his fever.

“He’s in room 609,” Julie said, hesitating.  “He’s still very sick.”

Nice Suit gave her a smile.  “That’s fine,” he said.

“I’ll come with you,” Julie rushed to say, circling the side of the counter and waving at Maurey in back to tag her out.  “I can answer any questions you have.”  And keep you from doing anything to make him worse, Julie thought to herself.

Anthony DiNozzo was still the same as she’d left him half an hour again, sleeping fitfully on one side, his breathing a painful rasp in the relative quiet of the room.  His heart monitor was beeping at regular intervals and all his pulmonary systems were acceptable for someone who’d just outrun a disease that claimed 2/3rds of Europe.

“He’s been having trouble resting,” Julie murmured, keeping her voice soft, standing in the doorway of the room with Nice Suit and watching his face transform from steady to shocked to wary as the machines and monitors whirred.  “We’ve been trying to let him sleep as much as he can whenever he can.”

“What happened?” Nice Suit asks, stepping into the room, and Julie resists the urge to drag him back into the hall.

“You don’t know?”

Nice Suit glares at her.  “My secretary handed me a message saying my son was in the hospital — I’ve been out of the country at a board event the last week and a half.”

When Julie got the flu, her mother drove the six hours from the next state to bring her chicken soup and tell her she was going to die single if she didn’t clean her apartment.

“He — he was infected with a variation of the plague,” Julie said, and wished that Gibbs were here.  There were rules, obviously, about family and what they were legally allowed to know and how much she should tell them, but she couldn’t help but think that Nice Suit was family in name only, and that here, blood couldn’t be thicker than water.

Nice Suit swallowed hard, fisting his hands at his sides.  “He’ll live?” he asked.

Julie smiled, genuine.  “He’ll be fine — his recovery will take a while, but he should be right as rain as long as he’s careful.”

“He never should have run off to be a cop,” Nice Suit muttered, charging to the end of the bed to grab Tony’s chart.  “That’s what — what does this mean?” he asked, pointing at something on the first page.

Julie tried to take it away from him.  “Sir!  You’re not allowed to — !”

“*What the hell is going on in here*?” Gibbs suddenly said, appearing out of nowhere and hovering just over Julie’s shoulder.  And as soon as her heart calmed, she felt a sense of enormous relief.

“Sir,” she said, “this is Mr. DiNozzo’s father and — ”

Gibbs favored her with a tight smile.  “I know who he is,” he said, voice terse, and turned back to glare at Nice Suit.  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“The better question is who the fuck are *you*,” Nice Suit said, his voice rising in pitch and loudness, and Julie waved at them frantically, watching DiNozzo stir on the bed, his eyelashes fluttering.

“Guys!” Julie hissed, both men froze, turning to the bed.

DiNozzo moaned a little, fingers sliding across the sheets, searching, whispering, “Boss?”

Gibbs’ face hardened, and with a deceptively soft voice, eyes never straying from Nice Suit, he said, “I’ll be right there, DiNozzo,” before grabbing Nice Suit by the collar and dragging him out the sickroom door, down the hall and around a corner.

Julie ended up having to piece together the fight from later hospital gossip accounts. They varied from Maurey’s, which included Gibbs’ declaration of love for 609 and his warning that Nice Suit had better leave them alone to Amy’s, which emphasized the way Gibbs had loomed in warning.  Henry from orthopedics said the important thing was that Gibbs had said, “You lost the right to wander into his life when you didn’t come running the minute I called to say he was hurt, you piece of shit.”

And okay, so, Julie was a little upset about missing that, because obviously her underwear would have spontaneously incinerated on the spot but she thought the trade off was probably fair.

After all, she was the only person who had been hovering around in 609’s room, changing his IV’s by the time Gibbs finally came back and took up his regular seat in the wretchedly uncomfortable plastic chair by DiNozzo’s bed.

“Boss?” 609 croaked again, opening his eyes just a sliver — hazel against bloodshot eyes.

Gibbs leaned in, close enough to touch his fingertips to 609’s on the bed linens, and ran his fingers through DiNozzo’s hair, tender, letting his palm cup the back of the man’s skull, and whispered, secret and dear and close:

“Yeah, DiNozzo — I’m right here.”

“It’s white cotton,” Holland said, rolling his eyes.  “They’ll have immediate flashbacks to all the girls they knew in the fifth grade, and the ones who get off on that are not the ones you want to be dating, Dr. Noreen.”

She gave him a dyspeptic look.  “Forgive me if I don’t trust your romantic judgment.”

“The last date you went on, you got nervous,” Holland said, numbering the points on his fingers, “you got extremely drunk, and then you fell down an escalator and destroyed your knee—I think anybody can give you better romantic advice than you give yourself.”

After she threw him out of her apartment, she went and sat in her living room to gaze out at the peaks of the city and the spikes of tall buildings.  Laila lived in a sprawling upper-story penthouse crammed between a piano bar that swept over the floor below and a manuscripts library that stretched out overhead, and so when she wasn’t listening to the echo of Holland’s voice in her hangar she was listening to the hush and murmur of feet above, the tinkling of music underneath her rugs.

It had been a little over five years since the war had ended, and every day, the Alliance patched yet another corner of itself.  The Babylonian Gardens had opened the second year after, the canals had been put back into work a few months after that.  A few weeks ago, there’d been a cheer throughout the galaxy after the curfews and document requirements for interplanetary travel had been formally dismissed.  The scars of the Twenty-Five Years’ War were still there, but they were fading, and each day the shattering memories were growing dimmer and dimmer.  People were back at their old jobs, opening stores and buying cars, traveling, falling into and making love—people were living again.

Laila had been born the day the first shot of the war had been fired, and all she’d ever known had been shaped by war.

She’d never known pleasure cruises of spiral galaxies or taken afternoon trips to resort moons, vacationed in the gray desert craters or swam in the hotsprings that welled up from still-molten cores.  She’d never gone to primary or secondary school or fretted over a junior high dance—the first time her heart had broken was at seventeen when the first love letter she got from her father’s best agent was also the last, his status always to be missing in action.  Laila had never known anything but Nibbana—it’s hugeness and its defenses that up like the wings of birds and sank as deep at the bottom of the sea, the entire city an articulated fortress.

She had grown up at her mother’s knee, crouched in an ocean of dangerous machinery and live wires, watching her mother feel through the guts of metal warships and weapons, as casual and unafraid with death machines as she’d always been with Laila.  Her father had been a cryptographer, and she remembered sitting in his lap as he worked over pages of dots and squiggles, plates of colors, a kaleidoscope of color and sound and images and languages that were all wartime secrets, the language of spies, her father had told her.  Despite the accolades and attention over the Ganymede, Laila had never bought into her own exceptional nature; she’d simply gotten an early start and extraordinarily good genes—the Ganymede warships had been written into her DNA as surely as her lactose intolerance and hair color.

Laila’s mother died first, killed by one of her own creations and her father had followed four months after, captured by Vorian guerillas while passing a message to their agents on the Northern Plain.  No one was ever old enough to be an orphan, Laila knew, because even though she’d never really been a child, she’d been too young nineteen to be completely alone, and it had been a year before she had gathered courage to open the deposit box her parents left her.  She was half-crazed from lack of sleep and burning for revenge, still hollowed out by grief, when the bank agent had handed her the container.

They’d left her a book of pressed flowers, the delicate lace of purple violets flat on the pages, peonies, roses, a daisy.  They’d given her their wedding rings—Laila had always wondered if they’d ever had them; her mother said they got in the way at work, and her father said he never wore one because he was susceptible to peer pressure—and she had cried and clutched at them, trying hard to breathe around the hugeness of the loss.

They’d left her a letter written in a mesh of Greek and hieratic and English and the shorthand of a mother and father to a child—written in apologies.

Laila drew her hand across the wide glass windows in her living room, touched the blur of lights outside and thought about everybody in their homes, laughing with their lovers and fighting with their husbands and teasing their siblings, letting the suffocation of war slide slowly from their shoulders.  Downstairs, the piano flirted with a trumpet, coy, and if she walked out onto her terrace, she could lie on the terrascaped grass and let the pink flowers from her neighbor’s magnolia trees drift into her face—she could take one and press it into her parents’ book, ready another bank box just in case.

She closed her eyes and leaned against the glass.

Laila had the sudden, silent thought that she hated war, that she would always wear it like an ugly scar on a beautiful woman, and that of everyone she’d ever met, Laila thought maybe Colonel Helion would understand best if she were to say it out loud.

*

The Faberge Eggs had been on the Telemachus for less than an hour before Egg 2 managed to corner Argent near the medical labs and confess his love, complete with damp eyes and trembling lips—sans glittery lip gloss today.
“I’m flattered, really,” Argent tried.  He could hear somebody trying to stifle high-pitched laughter just behind him in the infirmary and vowed to kill them with his bare hands after all of this was over.  “But I’m all old and grizzled from war, and you deserve somebody somebody better and smarter and other things.”

Holland made a bleating noise.  “But the way I’m feeling—it’s real, Colonel.”

Argent inched incrementally further away along the steel wall and narrowed his eyes.

“You don’t have some kind of strange military fetish, do you?” he asked, and then regretted it immediately when Holland seemed to consider it and then find the whole idea exciting.  “Forget I said that,” Argent commanded.

“Just give me a chance,” Holland pleaded.  “I’m the age of consent!”

“Not my consent,” Argent countered.  Where was Laila?  Wasn’t she supposed to keep a leash on this kid?  Did she just let him wander around strange warships and proposition commanding officers, destroying their sense of detached cool with their subordinates left and right?  No wonder General Zhang had sent that I Heard About Dr. Noreen; I’m So Sorry basket of fruit shaped like flowers.  “Holland, I’m sorry, it’s just not going to work out.”

The kid looked like he was two beats away from flinging himself at Argent and just hoping for the best and most nude outcome when Laila zoomed suddenly down the hallway, snagging Holland by his back collar as she went and calling back over her shoulder:

“I’m just borrowing him to fix your heat dispersion unit!”

“Colonel!” Holland wailed back at him.  “I’ll never love again!”

Argent called back, “Keep him!” before feeling a pang of sympathy for his engineers.

There was another muffled laugh from inside the infirmary and Argent decided that retreat was probably the better part of humiliation management here and sneaked away to the bridge to lick his wounded dignity and nurse his mortification.  More than gray hairs or falling asleep during the seven o’clock news or inexplicable joint pain, Argent thought the true sign you were getting older was that tipping point where getting sexually harassed by cute teenagers failed entirely to be flattering and went straight to creepy.

“Roy,” he said, pinging his second, “I think we’re just about ready for launch.”

“So you’re doing hiding from Egg 2?” Roy asked, sounding entirely too innocent.

Argent scowled.  “You know it’s technically illegal to monitor the ship’s security feeds  for fun like that and violate everybody’s privacy.”

“You’re right, sir,” Roy agreed, voice bright.  “I’ll just tender my resignation and leave your enormous pile of paperwork on your desk then.”

“Shut up and have a cup of coffee ready for me when I get to the bridge,” Argent muttered, and felt an increasing sense of despair about his ability to control his own crewmembers.  His entire engineering crew would probably be ready to mutiny by day two if Laila and Holland kept pulling, well, Laila and Hollands on them.

“What’s our progress?” he asked as soon as he stepped onto the bridge, heading for the Telemachus’ systems monitors.  Roy cleared his throat and handed Argent a coffee, saying:

“The Telemachus is fully loaded with armaments, the shields have been checked and rechecked, and all fifty-six fighters in the east and west hangars are functional and prepped in case of altercation.  All crew and civilians on board are present and accounted for and supplies are loaded, with payload coming in within the one ton margin of error.”

Argus took a sip of the coffee and winced.  “This is vile.”

“I made that, sir,” Roy said, frowning, and continued, “The rest of the escort—made up of the Orpheus and Tithonus cruisers—have also reported in and are ready to launch at your signal.  The grand council has pinged four times to ask what’s taking so long, and the head of the apprenticeship program at the ISA sent a fourteen page email detailing Holland’s potential food allergies.”  Roy glanced at his watch.  “Also, we’re now running thirteen minutes late.”

“Awesome,” Argent decided, tossed his now-empty cup at the nearest recycler, and said, “Let’s get this clusterfuckery on the road then.”

By lunch, Holland was trailing after one of the ship engineers, Private McLachlan, like he’d never felt such a timeless passion, and Argent couldn’t help but think the kid was a little bit of a shit for somebody who’d professed his hot, panting love just four hours ago.

Laila sat down next to him in the mess, knocking her shoulder against his.

“I wouldn’t feel too bad about it,” she counseled, smiling kindly.  “Holland’s extremely seventeen years old—they’re all like that, I think.”

Argent flushed.  “But he—”

“I know,” Laila interrupted.

“And he—” Argent tried again, waving his hands in the air.  “He cried.”

There was a blur of people around them: officers, enlisted men and women, scientists, diplomats, a wave of chatter in a dozen different languages and dialects rising up in a smog of talk.  His crew was friendly but always wary, and the lightheartedness on this trip, the lack of anticipation, was a good look on his people: they looked happy, proud, and he kept seeing everybody cluster in small groups to gossip about their first meetings with Laila, with Holland, and Argent couldn’t help but to feel happy and proud for them, too.  The Telemachus was the finest military escort in the Alliance—no other crew would have been trusted with the greatest mind in the four galaxies and her wayward ward.

“He does that,” she assured him.  “When he was ten, he became violently in love with me and beamed sonnets all over the sides of buildings in most of the North Quadrant weeping of his unrequited feelings—child protective services actually had to come and make sure I wasn’t like, molesting him.”

“He told me he would never love again,” Argent concluded, feeling stupider with every word that came out of his mouth.

Laila winced.  “I heard.  I have got to stop letting him watch so much TV.”

Holland’s addiction to bad television and the gossip rags was epic, and even having known him for less than a month Argent knew the kid was practically wired into an entertainment system.  Everybody who came into contact with Holland Rels heard either about the explosive sexual appetites of monarchs in the country of Naal on Abidine or started fighting with him about who deserved to win the latest cycle of Survivor: Menlo Ice Tundra.  (Holland said DaQuira clearly won it on dignity, vision, and the ability to scratch peoples’ eyes out alone; Argent privately thought Juu had more than fairly earned his tiara, but figured that clinging to what remained of his dignity as a battle-worn warship commander was more important than picking that fight with a seventeen year-old.)

“When does he even find the time?” Argent asked.  “Doesn’t he work for you?”

“Well,” Laila said, frowning across the room to where Private McLachlan was starting to look like she might break Holland in half if he didn’t leave her alone.  Holland simpered some more, and Laila sighed deeply.  “He does, and he works a lot, but Holland’s a genius—things that could take us hours or days only take seconds for him.”

Argent was unconvinced.  “You’re supposedly a genius, too.”

“I’ve peaked,” Laila said, risking another glance across the room to see Holland staring across a mess table—fatuous expression on his face—watching McLachlan pick at her food.

Argent snorted.  “Sure—because anybody could have designed the ship that ended the war with one shot.”

They’d all heard, anecdotally, that the war council had an ace up its sleeve, that the money he’d pleaded for his troops and had been denied was all being funneled into a project that might end the war.  “Might?” Argent remembered roaring at somebody in the budgeting office.  “We’re betting the lives of my men on ‘might?’”  But he also remembered the morning the rumors started circulating among the enlisted men—the murmur that had started from the frontline infantry up to the armored brigades all the way up the brass until one of Argent’s men had burst into the control room of the Telemachus and said, “Sir, you have to see this.”

“There were plenty of bullets before,” Laila reminded him.

“Laila,” Argent said to her, trying to temper the shiver he still got at the memory of seeing the Ganymede the first time.

“There’s a reason most soldiers salute when they see you in the street.  I wrote you a letter after that ship was unveiled.”

She blinked at him, looking very young.  “You did?”

He had.  He remembered the tense, silent thirty-four hours after the Ganymede had sailed into the ocean of stars in the last crags of the contested region.  It’d been enormous, hard to wrap his mind around the size and spectacle of it—gleaming and sharp-edged, dangerous as it prowled through the wargrounds, where other spaceships and warcraft had simply parted in its path.  Argent remembered being pinged by the Ganymede’s commander, standing on the prow of the Telemachus and feeling exhaustion to his bones after holding the front lines for a week and a half.  When the communication link had been established, there was just the image of General Hopper’s familiar face as he said, “Colonel, how about we tag you out?”

“Sir?” he’d asked, gaping at the stars and medals on the man’s chest.  They didn’t send generals this far out into the warzone and hadn’t for as long as Argent could remember.

“Don’t worry, Colonel,” the general had reassured him, winking.  “We got this covered.”

The Vorian faction ship had fired, and the Ganymede had fired back after sending one simple message to the rest of the Allied fleet:

Raise your shields to maximum power and take defensive cover.

There had been a few skirmishes after, mostly for show, and an agonizing diplomatic process into which he’d been conscripted by Hopper, who claimed he was “grooming” Argent but mostly felt like a punishment.  All in all, it’d been another six months after the Ganymede had destroyed the Vorians’ most deadly warship with one shot before he’d set foot back on Nibbana for any significant length of time, and the first thing he did was write Laila a letter.

“I did,” Argent confided, smiling at her.  “I wrote to thank you, for not making me send any more young men to die.”
She blushed and said, “Oh.”

Argent stared at her for a long minute, watched the pink creep down her cheeks and the smooth curve of her neck, disappearing underneath the white collar of her button-down shirt before he cleared his throat and turned back to where Holland was still sighing loudly, eyes starry with young love.

“Has he ever managed to scam anybody into returning his affections?” Argent asked.

“Not really,” she said mildly, “although he did harass one of the ISA’s legal interns into going to the New Year’s party with him last year.”

Argent smiled.  “Baby steps, Dr. Noreen.”

“Indeed,” she agreed, yelped, and leapt to her feet to run across the mess when she saw Private McLachlan make a grab for Holland’s neck, shouting, “Private!  Private!  Stop!  He has a sickness!  He can’t help himself!”

“Something about history and symbolism,” Argent said.  “Hey, do you think we can overclock these engines?  Dr. Noreen did it with a test cruiser and it was incredible.”

The chief systems engineer, a tiny woman named Veenya with champagne-colored hair choked out a distressed noise and stole her tablet computer back, giving Argent a deeply suspicious look.  She said something to him in her native language that sounded foul even to Argent’s ears and pointed meaningfully toward the mess hall.

“Go away,” she instructed him.

“I was just asking,” Argent muttered.

“Oh, God, no,” Holland told him a few hours later, horror marring an expression of abject love that Argent was actually starting to get used to.  It was weird what a person could get used to in a very short period of time, he mused.  “Absolutely not—who knows what would happen if you tried something that stupid with the R45 engines on the Odyssey class warships.  No, no, definitely no.”

Argent was unconvinced.  “You and Laila do stuff like that all the time.”

“In controlled conditions,” Holland reminded him, wagging a pomme frite at him and reaching for his bag of soda.  “And there’re whole different standards for Laila making a model cruiser and crash landing it with a remote on a dead moon somewhere than her letting you make dumb modifications to a ship.”

Frowning, Argent said, “You know, you’re much meaner than Laila.”

“Oh, she’s mean, too,” Holland said, shuddering theatrically.  “Trust me on this one.  I’m one of like, two people in the world who’ve seen her open her can of whoop-ass.”

Argent picked at the last of his grilled cheese sandwich and tried not to think about what might be contained in Laila’s can of whoop-ass if her right hook was mean enough that his eye was still faintly sore.  He’d left the Telemachus thoroughly convinced that by the time he returned the next day with their guests the whole thing would be spit-shined and been waylaid by a bright-eyed Holland who’d bought his company for the afternoon with the price of a lunch at the Urdu Café.  Either he was getting (even) easier in his old age or Holland really was as adorable as he seemed to think he was, but Argent had to admit it was nice to sit still on a passageway in Nibbana, to just stop and look around, at the tiered city that soared hundreds of stories up above the ground and to look over the railings and see the escalators and terrascaped sides of buildings, trees and miniature rainforests overflowing, dropping hothouse flowers onto the roof of the office below.

Nibbana, Argent remembered, meant the ineffable freedom from desires at the heart of Buddhist teachings, and it always made him think about the yellowing scroll paintings, of bodhisattvas, their red lips and long earlobes and their hands curled to say ‘no fear.’  Now, long after most people had lost the meaning behind the name, it was simply the most beautiful and largest city in the four galaxies, and it’s starscrapers clawed away at the dark of the universe around a planet that shared the city’s name.  Argent thought that at night it felt sometimes like walking through the swirls of Starry Night, luminous, flared, in many textures and shades of black and bright.  He was away so often he forgot sometimes what he fought for, and it was good to be reminded, to sit with Holland and humor an adolescent crush and eat sandwiches made with soy cheese because the war was over and he was alive.

He joked, but he knew the seriousness of this thing he was being charged with—Laila might live ignorant of her own chapter in everybody’s history book, but she was the only one.  She’d been the Alliance’s pet genius, the ISA’s greatest argument for its existence and ruling power, the girl genius who’d drawn out a warship and built it with her own two hands—the woman who’d ended the Twenty-Five Years’ War with one shot.  It wasn’t her help that was the diplomatic offering here, it was her mere presence, Argent knew.  Laila might worry about Holland, but Argent worried about Laila, about who might be waiting for them at the Western Fringe, and who might want her for their own.

“She doesn’t want you to go, you know,” Argent said, watching Holland’s face for any sort of reaction.  “She thinks it’s dangerous.”

“Well, I’m not letting her go by herself,” Holland said, a stubborn edge creeping into his voice, and Argent decided then that maybe Holland and Laila were bad influences on one another.  “And besides, if I’m not there to chaperone, she might go nuts on you.  It’ll be like Scientists Gone Wild—only with fusion.”

Argent smiled.  “The Franciscans don’t appreciate having that consistently revived as a cultural reference, you know—they abandoned sins of the flesh a dozen generations ago.”

“But their legacy of getting drunk teenagers to take off their clothes will live on forever,” Holland said with the fervent appreciation of a kid who’d sneaked more than a few peeks, and concluded, “For that, Colonel Helion, we will all be eternally grateful.”

Argent lifted his soda bag in a silent toast.  “Amen, Holland,” he agreed.  “Amen.”

*

“What are you packing?” Holland asked, sitting on her bed and digging through a pile of her bras and panties to match them up by color.  Sometimes, Laila questioned whether she had really grasped the finer points of this mentorship program; most times, she just defaulted to trying to prevent Holland from killing them all in a freak accident in her labs and gave herself a pass for the day.  “Do I need anything fancy?”

Laila had been on enough diplomatic missions that she knew the song and dance.  She’d packed an evening gown and a day dress; she brought clothes for a formal meeting and packed up a pair of lutra earrings—fine stone found on a planet on the Eastern Fringe polished until it gleamed like the cream pink of a pearl.

“Just one formal,” she told him, distracted.  “Nothing with zippers in strange places.”

She’d seen a real pearl before, in Nibbana’s central museum.  It’d sat suspended in a case with heavy security around it, hovering midair and drawing her eyes over and over again, set next to a painting of a girl with a blue headdress and a teardrop pearl earring, glancing over her shoulder.  The museum file said it was a Vermeer, that as an ancient artist, he’d studied light, and how it changed colors, noting mournfully that photographic reproductions hardly did the artist justice.

Laila didn’t have the porcelain skin of the girl in the painting, and her earrings were small spheres, without the warmth and depth of the pearl she’d seen at the museum, she thought, rushing between her suitcase and closet.  All the same, when she’d been younger, she’d wrapped up her dark, curling hair once in a bath towel and stood in front of her mother’s bathroom mirror and admired the line of her own nine-year-old neck.

“All my clothes have weird zippers on them,” Holland said, mostly to be difficult, and sighed at her underclothes, picking up one bra with his fingertips, saying with disdain, “Laila—what the hell is this?  You’ll never scam a man into your bed with this on.”

She snatched it out of his grasp.  “What’s wrong with it?” she asked.

“It’s white cotton,” Holland said, rolling his eyes.  “They’ll have immediate flashbacks to all the girls they knew in the fifth grade, and the ones who get off on that are not the ones you want to be dating, Dr. Noreen.”

“Do you think I missed out on anything by not going to normal school?” Holland asked, two weeks later.  He was hanging upside down in an underground hanger holding a laser saw and something that looked like an instrument of torture.

Laila tilted her head as far back as it would go, studying Holland’s long, dark red bangs where they hung down from his head.  He was a skinny kid, with gray eyes that always looked too big on his face and shined at her imploringly for as long as she could remember, always hungry for more candy or hours of television.  He was obnoxious and had a smart mouth and annoyed the living crap out of her, which was probably something that could have been bullied out of him (or—God forbid—amplified) during secondary school, if only he’d gone.

“I don’t think any amount of normal school could have fixed all the wrong in you.”  Holland threw a bolt at her, muttering, and Laila stepped neatly out of the way as it slapped against a lab table, adding, “Anyway, I guess the answer is more what you think you missed out on than what I think.”

Her voice echoed up in the cavernous room, bouncing off the gunmetal gray walls and off of the smooth, unmarked flanks of the Ganymede I and II.  Laila leaned against Junior, letting her fingers slide along the rivets and reading them like Braille.  She’d lived so long with the Ganymede ships, they’d always existed in three dimensions in her head—the mutt of warships of years past and cruisers from science fiction books and out of her imagination.  It’d taken her fifteen years to build the first one and another three to build the second; along the way, she’d lost friends to the war and her parents to age and Holland’s youth to time, but the ships had been her witnesses.

Overhead, Holland was quiet for long moments before he reached back into the guts of the Ganymede II and started rooting around for the frayed wire.

“I don’t know,” he admitted, embarrassed.  “I just saw all the graduation announcements in the news today and felt kind of weird about it.”

After the war, after everything that had been put on hold for so long, the Nibbana Treaty had triggered a sort of frenetic joyfulness in the people of the four galaxies.  Every weekend and every evening, everywhere in an ocean of stars and network of more than four dozen planets, people held small celebrations.  Anything could spark a party: weddings, anniversaries, memorials, holidays from every corner of the Alliance—graduations.  The ads had been scrolling, all week, down the gleaming lengths of buildings in the business district, hovering over the city on the liquid crystal screens, cut in between the weather alerts and the chatter about the most recent council elections and appointments, the ongoing debate over who owed what portion of the staggering debt accumulated by the war.

“Ignore me,” Holland decided.  “I’m just being dumb.”

But before he could get back to work, the pulley system holding him up to the ship dropped him—fast—down twenty feet until he was face to face with a right side up Laila, his heart more or less trying to rip its way through his rib cage.

“Don’t do that!” he shrieked, clutching the laser saw close.  “I nearly shit myself!”

“Holland,” she said, ignoring him in favor of being solemn, “You know I love you.”

All the blood drained from his face, so horrified by the conversation it was fighting gravity.  “Oh, God,” Holland said.  “Forget I ever started this—please.”

Laila went on, “And if I ever make you feel like you’re unimportant—”

“I swear I will never watch porn on the living room couch again if we stop talking about this,” Holland offered, hopeful until her affection melted away and Laila screeched:

“You do what on the living room couch?”

Holland flailed away from her, sending himself swinging pendulously out of her reach as he shouted, “Uh!  It was only the once! I totally used the fabric cleaner after!” which didn’t help but just made Laila moan, “Oh, gross!” and reach for something to use as a weapon. Whatever else she might have said was drowned out by the sound of Colonel Helion shouting down from one of the upper walkways:

“Am I interrupting?”

Laila looked up, cheeks still bright red.  “Only a homicide.”

Argent smiled down at them, and Holland felt something flutter in his chest that wasn’t just the mounting motion sickness.  Laila had been pretty clear about which of his body parts she’d remove if he pulled a stunt like breaking into Colonel Helion’s rooms and arranging himself attractively—and nakedly—on the officer’s bed, but what the hell did she know about true love, anyway?  The last date she’d been on had ended in a year of physical therapy.

“Good to know,” Argent said, and jogged down the long metal stair to the floor, his boots clattering against the riveted steel plate floor tiles.  “I’d hate for you to be short an assistant on our upcoming trip.”

“I would somehow survive just to make the journey with you,” Holland promised.

Laila rolled her eyes, shaking her head, and said, “Here, hold this,” to Argent, handing him her wrench-slash-murder weapon before hitting the pulley button and rocketing Holland back into the rafters, his scream of shock a long, high-pitched echo in the hangar.  “And stay up there!” she yelled up at him.

“You’re seeing this, right, Colonel?” Holland called down, voice tinny from a great distance, waving his laser saw.  “You’ll be a witness for me when she kills me, right?”

“You keep this up, I’m having you neutered!” Laila warned, and Holland fell silent.

Argent didn’t even try to hide the smile that stretched across his face.

“You two should really take your comedy act on the road,” he said, hopping up onto a metal lab table heaped with spare parts and dangerous-looking machinery.  He held up the wrench.  “What do I do with this?”

Laila took it out of his hands and tossed it in a perfect arc across the room, landing inside a square—marked off on the metal floor with blue painters tape—and stopping, three inches short of the ground without a sound.

“Ta da!” she said, beaming.

“That,” Argent said, frowning at the wrench, hanging midair, “is weird.”

“It’s magnetized,” Laila explained.  “It’s only in beta stage right now but it’s infinitely customizeable, and the theory is that if we can make it an efficient enough technology, we could remove the need for packing materials altogether on trade ships and transports.”

“Very cool,” he said, and noted the way there was a line of blue tape framing out the ground underneath Holland’s dark shadow.  “So admit it: you have one of those things set up in case he falls, don’t you?”

Laila smirked, reaching around his left side for a tablet calculator.  “Don’t tell him I care,” she admonished him.  “My only comfort is that one day, they’ll apprentice him his own horny teenaged prodigy.”

“Well,” he said, “I remember being seventeen.  It passes.”

“Not fast enough,” Laila sighed.  “Anyway, what brings you down?”

The labyrinth of halls and elevators and escalators and security checkpoints it required to reach the lab was so maddening Argent wasn’t even certain where he was, geographically speaking, and he was sure that was the point.  He always ended up making a few wrong turns whenever he made the trek out, and although Laila reminded him over and over again he could just raise her on her comm., there was no way he was giving up an opportunity to hang out in the coolest lab in the four galaxies.

Holland had taken Argent on his first tour of the lab almost a week ago, and he’d been almost every day since.  It never got old to be there, so dwarfed by the twin Ganymedes in a hangar the size of four football fields underneath the fringes of the city and whatever else Laila and Holland worked on each day. Sometimes he visited to find it deserted, and other times there were dozens of scientists hanging around shouting at one another and waving particle boards, like Laila’s workspace was the neighborhood dweeb bar or something.

“Final preparations,” he said.  He dug an xdrive out of his pocket.  “That’s the total passenger manifest and payload, itemized.  Everybody’s been vetted and everything for the trip has been triple-checked.  Last chance to add, subtract, or reorder.”

Laila set the drive on top of the reader and considered the display when it called up, hovering and translucent over her worktable.

“No chance I could convince them to let me leave Holland behind?” she asked.

Argent shook his head.  “It’s a goodwill mission, a gesture,” he reminded her gently.  “Not bringing your protégé would appear distrustful.”

“I am distrustful,” Laila murmured, reaching up to flip through the pages of the manifest.  She had bandages on half of the fingers of her left hand, and Argent wondered what the hell they did down here half the time.  “This is still a dangerous trip.”

“I’m there to mitigate that risk,” Argent said, and thought that from the side, she looked like a Baroque portrait he’d seen once, gauzy with an overlay of light.  “Everything’s going to be fine, Laila.  We’re taking every possible precaution and so are our Vorian ambassadors.”

“He’s only seventeen,” she said, catching his gaze.  Argent had noted Laila Noreen looked down for no one very early on, and he couldn’t help but think that his mother would have liked her for it—her unschooled sense of assurance.  “You wouldn’t let any other seventeen year old make this trip.”

Above them, Holland sent a rainbow of sparks flying, elbow-deep in the most terrifying warship ever created, and let out a string of curses that would make a soldier blush.

“Holland’s not exactly any seventeen year old,” Argent said wryly.

Laila stuck out her chin.  “He’s my seventeen year old.”

Argent raised his eyebrows at her.  “You’ve strung him up from the ceiling.”

“That’s totally different and you know it,” she argued, coloring.

At that exact moment, the laser saw—still engaged—arced down, slicing with a ‘zing’ noise through a nearby table and dumping its contents onto the floor in a heap, where it clattered with a thunderous voice without the benefit of Laila and her magnetic cushion.

“At least it didn’t hit anybody?” Holland whimpered from overhead.

Laila took a long, calming breath and said quietly, “I’ll kill him.”

The trip, Argent was sure, was still going to be a disaster, but at least it’d be a fun one.

*

The Telemachus was the flagship in a fleet two thousand strong that ranged from full scale warships to cruisers to fighters to jets and stealth flyers—all named after Greek and Roman myths and Gods.  It’d been officially handed into Argent’s care almost six years ago, and between the war, the training, and the inability to form social relationships outside of the military, it was official: Argent’s entire crew of four hundred and change were now freaks.

When he’d been recalled from peacekeeping maneuvers to Nibbana to oversee—and then join—Laila’s military escort, he’d given his people a week’s liberty.  He’d expected to come back and find the place kind of deserted and everybody quiet as they worked through their hangovers.  Instead, the ship was bustling, every crewmember, officer, and staffmember accounted for; even the cafeteria was fully operational, churning out perfectly awful meals breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

“Did you go home at all?” he asked a passing sailor.

“I went and visited my aunt for a day,” she said.  “But I wanted to get back and make sure the Telemachus was in ship shape.”

Argent scowled at her.  “You guys are really sick, you know that?”

“Yes, sir,” she agreed, and then her eyes went starry.  “Is it true though?  Are we leading the escort for the Laila Noreen?”

“She’s not that cool,” Argent lied.  The hero worship was sort of cute now that he knew Laila enough to know how utterly disconnected she was to her reputation—it probably helped she spent at least twelve hours of her day thirty-four stories underground with an insubordinate, uncowed assistant and technology that rebelled against her.

The sailor just kept beaming.  “Do you think she’ll like our ship?”

“How could anybody not like the Telemachus?” Argent asked reasonably, and sent her along back to whatever she’d been scrubbing or tightening.

“Man, I just met up with the captain of the Pan,” his lieutenant said, falling into step alongside Argent, “that ship’s moral fucking sucks.”

“They’re at the helm of a cruiser named after a goatherd with a musical soul, Roy,” Argent replied, snatching a tablet away from his chief systems engineer to take a look at the engines—they were at peak performance, of course, but after two weeks watching Laila overclock the Ganymedes, he wouldn’t lie, the Telemachus’ output felt lame in comparison. “It doesn’t exactly strike fear into the hearts of many.”

Argent held a moment of silent sympathy for the Aphrodite—a tiny, sleek, and killer-sharp stealth cruiser with a pilot who probably ate living animals for breakfast.  The Allied Guard had a sick sense of humor.

Roy blew his dark bangs out of his face.  “Remind me why we can’t rename them?”

“Something about history and symbolism,” Argent said.  “Hey, do you think we can overclock these engines?  Dr. Noreen did it with a test cruiser and it was incredible.”

The chief systems engineer, a tiny woman named Veenya with champagne-colored hair choked out a distressed noise and stole her tablet computer back, giving Argent a deeply suspicious look.  She said something to him in her native language that sounded foul even to Argent’s ears and pointed meaningfully toward the mess hall.

“Go away,” she instructed him.

“I was just asking,” Argent muttered.

“Riolaria’s a memory—a conspiracy theory at best at this point,” Laila said, elbow-deep in the guts of a computer console.  She was wearing gloves and three coats and still it was too cold, and not for the first time she hated that her predecessors laziness.  “How come we always end up talking about this?”

“I don’t know,” Holland said, “maybe because you always end up stealing my coat and the only way I can fend of hypothermia is by harassing you.”

Laila ducked out from beneath the computer and rushed to the space heater, tugging off her gloves and rubbing her aching fingers together to get blood flow back to the tips.  Scientists a dozen generations ago had spent a lifetime perfecting the pendulous beauty of quantum computers and then they’d damned all their offspring to a lifetime of trying to work on machinery that had to operate at -373 degrees Kelvin.

“It’s your sacred duty as my understudy to give me your coats,” she reminded him.

“It’s my civic duty to learn as your understudy,” Holland sulked, huddled by the heater half a room away.  The last time she’d let him work the guts of the system he’d come away with frostbite on three fingers—he was fast, but not fast enough—and she’d punished him to a month of busy work: boring, repetitive, safe.

“It’s indentured servitude,” she said, decisive.  “Embrace it.”

Laila glanced down at her sensors and pursed her lips.  It wasn’t optimal, but it was functional, and that was the best she could do with so few resources and so little time.  “Do you think this will hold them?” she asked.

Holland looked down at her screens and nodded.  “It’s more than enough for their needs—and the systems won’t sustain that much more exposure,” he said, adding, “I can forward you the article—you can read it while we ride the Suppository.”

“I thought I told you to stop calling it that,” Laila said, teeth chattering on the consonants, and scrubbed her palms together: her hands were ragged, red, calloused and cut up from the naked edges of metal inside computers.  “Go on—cover it up.  I think it’s done.”

Holland pulled the heavy cover over the system again, and all the systems died, briefly, rearranging themselves and refreshing to new quantum states before the near-silent whir of them revived, and Laila watched the monitors start to stream information again.

“Good work,” Holland said, bright, bolting the console shut once more.  “As usual.”

“Well, obviously,” Laila said.  “You okay to clean up in here?”

Holland stuck his tongue out at her.  “Go on, I’ll be ready in a jiff.”

In the hall, Laila picked up the phone.  “Tell Commander Zhang his substation is back online,” she told the operator at central command, “and remind him that if his soldiers keep frying my systems from downloading too much porn, he’s on his own.”

“I’ll translate that word for word, ma’am,” the sailor on the other end said faithfully, smiling so hard she could hear it through the line.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Laila sighed, and hung up, glancing out the airlock window to see the faint, soft-pink curve of a Benedictine transport out the window, suspended silent and gleaming from reflected starlight in the vast darkness.

“Oh—Holland, make it snappy, our ride is here.”

*

The Benedictines ran the only neutral transit in the four galaxies, operating enormous pink-colored pods of varying sizes but similar shapes which really did look like they belonged up somebody’s backside—worse yet, they were usually papered in the tackiest of tacky advertisements.  Their ride was selling a six-day treatment for herpes with an animated short of a woman beaming as she swam and road bikes and cheered, “Thanks to Herpi-Vax, promiscuity is fun again!”

“It’s ass-pill shaped,” Holland argued, dumping the last of their supplies in the empty galley.  “You can’t dispute that.”

“Holland, when we get back home, I’m going to give you a book about Sigmund Freud,” Laila said, curling up in a clamshell seat and turning to glance out the windows, at the inconsistent, blinking stars outside, the lazy crawl of interplanet railways.  “You’re going to learn about an amazing theory about developmental stages and how it pertains to you, and how you’re forever talking about asses.”

“I’m sure that’s somebody only extremely old people know about,” he said cheerfully, calling up a battered monitor and scanning the screen.  “Aren’t you curious though, about the planet?  Everybody else seems to be.”

Holland, like so many young geniuses who’d flowed through the Institute throughout the years, had been plucked from the rank and file of the galactic school system, and it showed.  It hadn’t helped that the greatest minds in the empire had sent an eight year-old into her dubious care.  The last time Laila had been politic was before the war started, when she’d been small and scared and hadn’t known what and who she’d be one day.  Either way, Laila wasn’t certain about the wisdom of letting a bunch of kids who were already predisposed to being awkward escape the natural socialization process.

“That sector of the galaxy was lost like, fifteen years ago, it can’t have survived,” she shot back.  “And if it did, why did nobody try to establish contact all these years?”

“Well,” he said, “there is that massive band of exploded planets and space mines in the way.”  Squirming, he added, “Besides, there is that theory—about the prince.”

Laila lay down across the seats.  “I can’t be hearing this.  It’s too stupid for words.”

“Nobody’s proven that he didn’t escape!” Holland protested, coloring darkly.  He’d never quite grown out of his blushing, and Laila couldn’t help but think of the boy they’d ushered into her lab for the first time all those years ago.

She’d been convinced it was a joke gone horribly wrong—she’d been looking forward to having an apprentice, not a child.

“Let the record show these historical documents are literal gossip rags, like with sparkling font,” Noreen sighed.  “Holland—you’re hopeless.”

“And you’re mean!” he said, pouting, just as the overhead announcement murmured, in perfect harmonics, “You are now arriving in Nibbana—you are now arriving at your destination: Nibbana.”

*

Holland stormed off to do whatever seventeen year-old foppish geniuses did, and Noreen was halfway out of her pants and shirt when the comm unit in her living room went off and Ten sighed, loud and staticky and miserable-sounding into her apartments and said:

“Noreen—your filthy protégé has just been sighted again in the city—can I assume that means you’re here as well?”

“No,” Laila yelled through the cloth of her sweater.  “It’s all just a hallucination.”

“I gave up recreational drug use when they started selling it over the counter,” Ten bemoaned, and with a deep, annoyed sound, added, “Come down to the meeting room on the command level, please, General Hopper would like to speak with you.”

General Hopper was equal parts fatherly and creepy.  The first time Noreen had met him, she’d been torn between telling him he didn’t quite look fierce enough to be a general or tell him off, for the pictures of the massacre on the eastern front that had come through the news—the grim and stark red and gray photographs of bodies in the dust.

She’d managed to stop herself before she’d done anything she couldn’t take back.  Besides, the hypocrisy in that sentiment had been fierce.

“I’ll be there in fifteen,” she said.

“You’ll be here now,” Ten informed her and hung up.

As a compromise, Laila showed up in five minutes, since she was equal parts disenchanted with authority and the thought of being left for Vorian scavenger ships on unidentified planets—if she even survived long enough to capture Vorian attention.  Last week, Helen Troy (the most grievously misnamed field agent in the entire trust, although only one other person had ever gotten the joke), had come home from some backwater wide-eyed, mumbling about cannibal pygmies.

“I’m here,” she said, darting into the conference room, “I’m even wearing pants!”

“For which we are all deeply, deeply grateful,” Ten said, unmoved and slouching in his seat.    “Dr. Noreen—say hello to General Hopper and Colonel Helion.”

Laila turned to General Hopper and the newcomer, and before she could say, “Hello,” her eyes widened in recognition and she said, “Oh, no,” instead.

*

“Let me make certain I understand this entirely,” General Hopper sighed, rubbing at his temples with an extremely tired look on his face.  “You, Dr. Noreen, are the reason for Colonel Helion’s black eye.”

She flushed an even darker shade of red, glancing over to where the said officer was casting her a speculative look.  He did have a black eye, but instead of making him look sheepish and ashamed of his deplorable behavior, mostly he just looked more rakish.  Laila hated him extremely and rubbed at her still-sore knuckles, even more bruised after an afternoon of doing emergency repairs on military outposts.

“Yes,” she admitted, “but to be fair, I didn’t know who he was at the time.”

At the time, all she’s known was that a handsome, sloe-eyed man who’d more or less been smiling at her with what could have been interpreted as intent all night at the overpriced club she’d been at had, instead, leaned over and asked if she would tell him her friend’s name and contact information.  Laila only realized she was scowling again when she saw a smirk make its way across Helion’s face.

“To be fair, also,” he said, “I didn’t know who Dr. Noreen was at the time, either.”

“Clearly,” she snarled at him.  She didn’t even try to keep the acid out of her voice.  “But I doubt that had you known, it would have kept you from flirting with me all night before leaning over to ask me about my friend.”

Helion winced.  “At the time, it seemed like a good idea,” he said, and it almost sounded like an apology when paired with the near-remorseful gleam in his eye.  Laila sniffed.

“You told me you’d been attacked by a roving Legalize Prostitution rally,” General Hopper said to Helion, who didn’t even have the good nature to blush as Laila felt herself gaping in fury, any generous-ish feelings for Helion vanishing.

This time, he at least colored.  “I assumed at the time she was—and nobody likes getting beaten up by a girl.”  He paused.  “Sir.”

Ten looked like he was battling a severe case of indigestion.  “As fascinating as all of this has been, can we please return to the original point of this bedamned meeting?”

“Agreed,” the General said, glaring at his charge before turning to look across the table and pin Laila with a thoughtful expression.  “Dr. Noreen—we need you to take on a mission.”

Laila forced herself to look away from where she was glowering at Helion to ask, “What kind of mission?”  Before Ten could open his mouth, she added, “Remembering, by the way, that I am actually certified as the highest nerd in the land.”

General Hopper flashed her a diplomatic smile.  “We’re well aware, Dr. Noreen. That’s precisely why your services are needed.  This isn’t so much diplomacy as pageantry.”

“Oh, well, that’s also something I’m terrible at,” Laila explained.

“Noreen,” Ten cut in, impatient, “what General Hopper is trying to tell you and failing at, spectacularly, is that rebel groups at the Western Fringe are attacking the perimeter, and as a goodwill gesture, we’ve like you and several phalanxes of highly armed military escorts to enter into Vorian territory and oversee the improvement of their security measures.  I’m sure you’ll be feted awkwardly and everybody will be extremely uncomfortable and that I will get no fewer than twenty insubordinate messages from you while you’re away, but if I can endure your whining, so can you.”  He held up a quelling hand as she opened her mouth.  “Yes, I know it’s a hideous waste of both your time and your mind but as the council impressed upon me today, it’s not really up for discussion.”

General Hopper raised his eyebrows at Colonel Helion.  “And on second thought, Colonel Helion—you won’t just be picking the contingent.  I’m sending you to supervise.”

“Sir,” Helion said, looking equal parts pained and alarmed, “I already apologized about the unfortunate incident with your wife.”

Ten looked almost pleased.  “See, you’ll have a friend on your trip,” he said.

“This completely and totally sucks,” Laila told them all.  “Just for the record.”

*

“Laila!”

She walked faster.

“Hey!  Dr. Noreen!”

She considered running, but weighed it against the always-hovering threat of her bum knee and the fact that everybody in the cream-white limestone complex of the grand council’s hive of offices hardly needed another excuse to gossip about her.

Sighing, she stopped and turned around, crossing her arms as she went.

“What,” she asked Helion, “do you want?”

“Aw, come on, don’t hold a grudge,” he said and smiled at her winningly.

Argent had already spent most of the week feeling more or less shitty for the weekend, and the more he’d replayed that godawful Friday night the more he’d wanted to bury his head under his pillow and never come out again.  He’d been in bar brawls plenty, but mostly he’d won and he’d never been decked with one swing by a woman half a food shorter than him holding a fluorescent pink drink in her other hand.

“I’ve been kicking myself all week and feeling like a jerk about it—forgive me?”

She narrowed her eyes at him, a fringe of black lashes thick around her green irises.

“You already gave me a black eye,” he reminded her, pointing at his face.  “It hurts.”

“A lot?” she asked, tipping her chin to the side.

Argent sensed capitulation.  “I cried myself to sleep last night,” he lied.

Laila frowned for a beat before she relented.

“Fine,” she sighed, leaning heavily against one of the columns in the walkway, and his gaze followed the line of it up, up, into the septpartite vaulting of the six-story ceilings, admired the way light poured into every inch of the complex.  It was gothic in a way that people only understood in the academic sense anymore these days, but it reminded Argent of churches he’d known as a child, light streaming in through multicolored glass.  “But I’m only giving in because this stupid story is just as embarrassing to you as it is to me,” Laila warned.

Argent recognized a stalemate when he saw one.

“Colonel Argent Helion,” he said, offering up a hand.  “Pleased to meet you, Dr. Noreen.”

“Call me Laila,” she told him, palms warm against his as she took his hand.  Solid, no nonsense, Argent decided.  “Nobody refers to me as Dr. Noreen unless they’re pissed at me or they’re trying to frighten the interns.”

Argent looked at the white tunic she wore over wheat-colored linen pants, the clothes looked years old and comfortable, worn in.  They looked nothing like the pencil skirt she’d been wearing at the club, the wine-red shirt with the plunging back, and her nails were flesh colored now, not the searing red from the previous weekend, and Argent thought all in all, he liked her better this way.

“Does it work?” he asked.

Laila looked thoughtful.  “Maybe if I had my lab coat on,” she mused before she grinned at him, raising her eyebrows.  “And what did you do to the General’s wife anyhow?”

He groaned.  “Let’s just say she gets amorous when she gets drunk, and I was unfortunate enough to get trapped in the coatroom at her at the last Solstice party.”

“Poor form, Colonel,” she laughed, and the sound seemed to alert a slight, red-haired boy, who darted over from the far end of the hallway to grab her elbow, lean his weight heavily on her and stare up at her, demanding:

“Laila—Laila, I just heard.  Tell me I don’t have to go.”

“Must you always act like you were raised by wolves?” Laila scolded, and turned back to Argent saying, “Colonel Helion, I’d like you to meet my living, breathing, bitching albatross, Holland.  Holland, I’d like you to meet Colonel Argent Helion, he’ll be joining you and I on our glorious trip into the Vorian badlands.”

Holland wrinkled his nose.  “I wish I’d been apprenticed to the sex workers, at least then I’d have known going in I was getting paid to be fucked,” he muttered before he turned to stare at Argent, eyes rounding and sharp blotches of color appearing at his cheeks.  “Colonel.”

“Nice to meet you, Holland,” Argent said, shuffling.

He’d heard about the baby geniuses of the ISA, but he’d never seen one up close, and he could only imagine whoever got paired with the council’s equal parts loved and loathed head researcher would have to earn his keep with brilliance and borderline neuroses.  He’d imagined thick glasses or bad skin and social awkwardness, downtrodden nerds who with translucently pale skin and mild cases of dissociative disorder—Holland was bright-eyed and barely-contained energy, all teenage charm.  Also, he was wearing sparkling pink lip gloss.

“It’s very nice to meet you, Colonel,” Holland replied, mouth curving up into a smile.

“Um,” Argent said, awkward.

Laila immediately slapped him upside the head.  “Holland, no,” she told him.  Turning to Argent, she continued, “And you—don’t even think about it.”

“Oh, God, no!  I would never,” Argent said immediately, horrified as Holland yelled, “Laila!  It wasn’t even like that at all!” and Laila shouted over both of them:

“Don’t think I’m not smart enough to see that hormonal gleam in your eye, Holland—you’re not even allowed to think about it, you little succubus!”

Now it was Argent’s turn to put his hands over his face.

“Oh God,” he realized.  “This trip is going to be a disaster.”