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'The Family Business' - BBC Merlin - Winchester!Pendragons - PG13
Maybe later I'll have put my brain and my heart back together enough to make a reaction post to last night's Poopernatural, but for now let's talk about Merlin Artword! Stupendous fun, that. Would Artword again. To the surprise of exactly no one, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
gwentastic and I collaborated on a Supernatural fusion with Dean!Arthur and Sam!Morgana. You can read it at ![[community profile]](https://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
camelot_fleet here, or you can also scroll down a bit.
Title: The Family Business
Author/Artist:lassiterfics & gwentastic
Fandom: BBC Merlin
Characters/Ships: Arthur, Morgana. AU fusion with season 1 of Supernatural.
Rating: PG13
A/N: Thank you tohivesofactivity and netgirl_y2k for the beta/Britpick.
Summary: When Uther disappears on a case, Arthur comes for Morgana at Oxford, and they fall back into the life she tried to leave behind. ~2100 words
Teaser:
They drive up the M1 with the windows down and Morgana snoring gently in the passenger seat. And she always gives him grief for snoring. She gives him grief for everything - leaving the toilet seat up, not picking up after himself, subsisting solely on a diet of chips and lager (untrue; sometimes Arthur also survives on takeaway and scotch) - and so he feels a certain smugness now, listening to Morgana rumbling away.
She's been out cold since Leicester, sleeping the bone-dead sleep of the completely fucking drained. Arthur can't help but think of how Morgana four years ago wouldn't have been so tired after fighting a handful of vengeful spirits, but he supposes she's out of practice. Still, even for someone out of practice, she was precise and brutal with her weapons. His weapons. Well, their weapons, now. The ghouls thought they would overpower Morgana, seeing the panic in her eyes, but instinct took over and in the end she was the last one standing.
"You did well," Arthur had told her, and she'd muttered something about how her blouse was ruined now.
“Thank you, thank you so much,” said Mr. Adney, because now his country manor is ghost-free and how could he ever repay them, would they like some supper or tea, perhaps a reward.
Arthur was about to answer with the usual, “The reward is the work itself,” when Morgana cut in, “Thank you, a reward would be generous.”
“Morgana--” Arthur said.
“Very kind of you,” Morgana smiled, ignoring him. It was her most charming smile, and Mr. Adney smiled back, and said, “Think nothing of it.”
Back in their room at the nearby village's cheapest B&B, Arthur reminded her, “We don't take money for what we do.”
“Once in a while's all right,” Morgana replied, continuing to fold her clothes. Her Zara jumpers and her Topshop jeans, her blouses and skirts and leggings that she had insisted on bringing, as if she might need to go to a trendy gastropub and drink overpriced beverages in the middle of a hunt.
“I suppose,” said Arthur, evenly. Then he pasted on an amiable tone. “Come to the pub, Morgana. Let's celebrate, eh? Your grand return, our first hunt in--”
“No, thank you,” Morgana said, as he expected she would.
And when he came back later, pleasantly buzzed and feeling better armed to face her, Morgana was waiting for him, both their bags packed on the bed and ready to be toted away at a moment's notice.
Arthur frowned. “Are those your clothes?”
They certainly didn't look it. The boots were actually sensible, and the jeans were not skin-tight. Her tank was simple and white, and the coat looked like it was actually capable of protecting her from the cold, as opposed to looking nice on the way to the club.
“They are,” Morgana replied, and held up the roll of notes from Mr. Adney, which looked slightly smaller. “I went shopping.”
“As if you don't have enough clothes--!” Arthur groaned, and caught the money she tossed to him.
Morgana rose to her feet and picked up her bag. “Let's go.”
“Wait... Didn't you have two bags?”
“Yeah. The second bag's in this one.”
And that was when Arthur noticed the stacks of folded clothes on the table, laid neatly side by side. He recognized the patterned blouse she wore when he accosted her at Oxford, folded atop one stack. Her green shawl atop another, the one that was miraculously the exact same color as her eyes.
Arthur said, “I think you're forgetting something.”
“I didn't forget anything,” Morgana said, and threw Arthur his bag. He caught it with an oof as it smacked against his chest. “Are we going or not?”
Morgana still isn't saying much these days, but she's begun to parry his teasing with actual insults instead of just glares, and Arthur supposes that is better than nothing.
+
Who the bloody hell does Arthur think he is, Morgana sometimes thinks. But she doesn't say it, because she has said it a hundred times before and she gets tired of arguing about the same thing. Sometimes it's unavoidable; they've fought twice about it since Oxford – once after that banshee just outside of Sheffield, and once when a disagreement about what to eat for lunch escalated to ridiculous proportions – and fucking boo hoo, the cross I bear is bigger than yours, you're the one who's selfish, you're the one who's afraid. They accuse each other of the same things, and there is a part of Morgana that thinks this is getting petty, but it is dwarfed by the part of Morgana that recognises this as habit. If they have not yet figured out how to be with each other the way they used to, then at the very least they can fight with each other the way they used to.
Arthur has not changed. Morgana knows that deep down inside, she hasn't either. She may have gone to university and learned about make-up and dressed in the clothes she coveted from the magazines she paged through as a teenager, curled up in the back of the Aston Martin as Uther shepherded them from one hunt to another. Morgana had not been completely terrible at fitting in, but one time she woke up gasping in the night because she had been dreaming about the time Arthur nearly died from a ghoul that ripped him open, and she knew she would never be normal.
“You have more scars,” Morgana murmurs now, as she stitches up the back of his shoulder. In the dull light of the motel room, the wound looks worse than it is.
“I've been keeping busy,” Arthur replies. “Someone has to.”
She doesn't take the bait.
This is the first time she has stitched him up in four years, and actually Morgana had expected wariness from him and more jibes about how she's out of practice, but as soon as they hobbled into their room, he collapsed into a chair and just told her where the needle and thread was in his bag.
Like many things on this unending road trip, seeing Arthur's old scars feels like coming home. Morgana recognizes the ones she stitched up herself. The jagged curve on his left upper arm, that was the first one Morgana did. His first from her, her first ever. The first wound Arthur ever stitched up on Morgana's body is now a long pink line on the back of her right leg.
When she finishes, she asks, “Arthur, do you think perhaps Uther doesn't want to be found?”
He turns to face her, then, and his eyes are hard. “Why would he do that?”
“Why else would he do this, then? Why would he--” Why would he break up the family even more than Morgana has?
“Why did you come with me if you don't think we're going to find him?” Arthur demands.
It's a good question. Morgana has no good answers.
+
Shapeshifter, ghoul, ghost, witch, werewolf: Morgana relearns them over the next several months, and sends them into that deeper darkness. At the end of the fight, she is the one blood-spattered with ichor on her boots, breathing hard and shaking just a little bit. With every hunt, she shakes a little less.
There is a hardness that settles into her that Arthur isn't sure what to make of. There is something reflexive about it, defensive, like a rechanneling of energy: if she is scared, she will make sure everything else is too. In a way Morgana is becoming the sister he always wanted growing up, but on the other hand, Arthur doesn't know this Morgana very well. He realizes he doesn't know a Morgana who isn't trying to leave.
She hasn't thrown out all her old clothes either, it seems. They're between jobs, eating a leisurely meal at some crap cafe, and she's wearing a wide-necked jumper and a short skirt, looking fashionably disheveled. She's even put on make-up. Despite the grand gesture of dumping her wardrobe after exorcising those spirits (and leave it to Morgana to make grand gestures through shopping), she has always been terrible at leaving things behind.
They're looking through his father's journal for the umpteenth time, trawling through the directory of monsters and how to kill them, looking for any clue at all. Morgana's hair falls over her shoulder and sweeps across the page, and he finds it distracting. They've become better at occupying the same space over the weeks, but Arthur finds it strangely difficult to adjust to not being alone. Even after his father disappeared, after the initial panic subsided, solitude already felt like an instinct; it felt like receiving something he didn't even realize he'd been expecting all this time.
“D'you think he's still in the country?” asks Morgana.
Arthur hates her questions. They are making this quest even more impossible.
“Dunno,” he says, and turns the topic to a news story he saw last night about corpses in Sunderland whose hearts have been ripped out.
Morgana leans forward and listens intently, asking clarifying questions and offering conjectures, wonders aloud if they need to stop for more salt. It's like she's never left at all.
+
Morgana feels the earth shake beneath her feet, and smells sulfur. She sees Arthur on a rack, and feels fire, and there is so much blood seeping out of him, too much, and he screams, his blood on her hands and she can't do anything, oh god, and--
--and she wakes up, mid-shout.
“Morgana!”Arthur is yelling, shaking her shoulders. “Morgana, it's all right. You're okay. You're--”
She reaches for him with a sound like a sob, touches his face and ascertains that he is still alive. He is there, they are here, nothing has happened. Nothing has happened yet. Morgana grabs the front of his shirt, and hangs on as he holds her, waiting in vain for the afterimages of hellfire to fade from her mind.
“Still with the nightmares, I see,” Arthur says softly. “It was just a dream. It's okay.”
It was not just a dream. She doesn't know how to tell him this. She never knew how to tell Arthur and Uther this, and had always kept her visions to herself in case the next body they salted and burned was hers.
“Do you want some water?” Arthur asks.
“No.”
“Do you want some scotch?”
“No. Yes.”
So he untangles himself from her grip, and Morgana huddles on the bed and watches his every move in the dark. He's alive, she tells herself. He's alive he's okay he's alive, thank fuck, thank bloody fuck.
One time, she dreamed of Uther in a warehouse with a broken leg, near death, and when Morgana knew exactly which warehouse to go to, knew exactly which floor, Arthur had given her a quizzical look and asked, “How did you...?” to which she replied, “I just knew.”
It was apparently an acceptable enough answer. To Arthur, his father is ubiquitous and fundamental, like air, and it didn't occur to him to question Morgana further because Arthur thinks that if Uther was in trouble, then he, too, would 'just know', somehow.
Arthur sits with her on her bed as she takes a long draught, and when she sets the bottle on the nightstand, he says, “Right,” and starts to get up when Morgana grabs his wrist.
He looks blankly at her hand.
“Arthur,” she says.
“What?”
Morgana doesn't know how to ask him. They aren't children anymore. She just looks at him instead, hoping that's enough, and it is, because Arthur's shoulders slump and he sighs, and then he moves closer to her, draping one arm around her as he settles parallel to her body. Morgana slips her arms around his neck and holds him close.
“Your heart sounds like it's about to explode,” he murmurs against her collarbone.
And she thinks isn't it funny how the only thing that inspires intimacy in this family is calamity? Just like the old days. Arthur falls back asleep almost immediately, and his hair tickles her cheek as she shifts to better fit against him. Morgana listens to the steady rhythm of his breathing, feels it against her body as she drifts off, and she wonders how she will save him from his fate.
+
“Where to next?” Morgana asks, throwing their bags in the backseat.
“There's a werewolf in Durham,” Arthur shrugs.
She nods. “All right.”
“All right,” he agrees.
They get in the car and drive.
gwentastic and I collaborated on a Supernatural fusion with Dean!Arthur and Sam!Morgana. You can read it at camelot_fleet here, or you can also scroll down a bit.Title: The Family Business
Author/Artist:
lassiterfics & gwentasticFandom: BBC Merlin
Characters/Ships: Arthur, Morgana. AU fusion with season 1 of Supernatural.
Rating: PG13
A/N: Thank you to
hivesofactivity and netgirl_y2k for the beta/Britpick.Summary: When Uther disappears on a case, Arthur comes for Morgana at Oxford, and they fall back into the life she tried to leave behind. ~2100 words
Teaser:
They drive up the M1 with the windows down and Morgana snoring gently in the passenger seat. And she always gives him grief for snoring. She gives him grief for everything - leaving the toilet seat up, not picking up after himself, subsisting solely on a diet of chips and lager (untrue; sometimes Arthur also survives on takeaway and scotch) - and so he feels a certain smugness now, listening to Morgana rumbling away.
She's been out cold since Leicester, sleeping the bone-dead sleep of the completely fucking drained. Arthur can't help but think of how Morgana four years ago wouldn't have been so tired after fighting a handful of vengeful spirits, but he supposes she's out of practice. Still, even for someone out of practice, she was precise and brutal with her weapons. His weapons. Well, their weapons, now. The ghouls thought they would overpower Morgana, seeing the panic in her eyes, but instinct took over and in the end she was the last one standing.
"You did well," Arthur had told her, and she'd muttered something about how her blouse was ruined now.
“Thank you, thank you so much,” said Mr. Adney, because now his country manor is ghost-free and how could he ever repay them, would they like some supper or tea, perhaps a reward.
Arthur was about to answer with the usual, “The reward is the work itself,” when Morgana cut in, “Thank you, a reward would be generous.”
“Morgana--” Arthur said.
“Very kind of you,” Morgana smiled, ignoring him. It was her most charming smile, and Mr. Adney smiled back, and said, “Think nothing of it.”
Back in their room at the nearby village's cheapest B&B, Arthur reminded her, “We don't take money for what we do.”
“Once in a while's all right,” Morgana replied, continuing to fold her clothes. Her Zara jumpers and her Topshop jeans, her blouses and skirts and leggings that she had insisted on bringing, as if she might need to go to a trendy gastropub and drink overpriced beverages in the middle of a hunt.
“I suppose,” said Arthur, evenly. Then he pasted on an amiable tone. “Come to the pub, Morgana. Let's celebrate, eh? Your grand return, our first hunt in--”
“No, thank you,” Morgana said, as he expected she would.
And when he came back later, pleasantly buzzed and feeling better armed to face her, Morgana was waiting for him, both their bags packed on the bed and ready to be toted away at a moment's notice.
Arthur frowned. “Are those your clothes?”
They certainly didn't look it. The boots were actually sensible, and the jeans were not skin-tight. Her tank was simple and white, and the coat looked like it was actually capable of protecting her from the cold, as opposed to looking nice on the way to the club.
“They are,” Morgana replied, and held up the roll of notes from Mr. Adney, which looked slightly smaller. “I went shopping.”
“As if you don't have enough clothes--!” Arthur groaned, and caught the money she tossed to him.
Morgana rose to her feet and picked up her bag. “Let's go.”
“Wait... Didn't you have two bags?”
“Yeah. The second bag's in this one.”
And that was when Arthur noticed the stacks of folded clothes on the table, laid neatly side by side. He recognized the patterned blouse she wore when he accosted her at Oxford, folded atop one stack. Her green shawl atop another, the one that was miraculously the exact same color as her eyes.
Arthur said, “I think you're forgetting something.”
“I didn't forget anything,” Morgana said, and threw Arthur his bag. He caught it with an oof as it smacked against his chest. “Are we going or not?”
Morgana still isn't saying much these days, but she's begun to parry his teasing with actual insults instead of just glares, and Arthur supposes that is better than nothing.
+
Who the bloody hell does Arthur think he is, Morgana sometimes thinks. But she doesn't say it, because she has said it a hundred times before and she gets tired of arguing about the same thing. Sometimes it's unavoidable; they've fought twice about it since Oxford – once after that banshee just outside of Sheffield, and once when a disagreement about what to eat for lunch escalated to ridiculous proportions – and fucking boo hoo, the cross I bear is bigger than yours, you're the one who's selfish, you're the one who's afraid. They accuse each other of the same things, and there is a part of Morgana that thinks this is getting petty, but it is dwarfed by the part of Morgana that recognises this as habit. If they have not yet figured out how to be with each other the way they used to, then at the very least they can fight with each other the way they used to.
Arthur has not changed. Morgana knows that deep down inside, she hasn't either. She may have gone to university and learned about make-up and dressed in the clothes she coveted from the magazines she paged through as a teenager, curled up in the back of the Aston Martin as Uther shepherded them from one hunt to another. Morgana had not been completely terrible at fitting in, but one time she woke up gasping in the night because she had been dreaming about the time Arthur nearly died from a ghoul that ripped him open, and she knew she would never be normal.
“You have more scars,” Morgana murmurs now, as she stitches up the back of his shoulder. In the dull light of the motel room, the wound looks worse than it is.
“I've been keeping busy,” Arthur replies. “Someone has to.”
She doesn't take the bait.
This is the first time she has stitched him up in four years, and actually Morgana had expected wariness from him and more jibes about how she's out of practice, but as soon as they hobbled into their room, he collapsed into a chair and just told her where the needle and thread was in his bag.
Like many things on this unending road trip, seeing Arthur's old scars feels like coming home. Morgana recognizes the ones she stitched up herself. The jagged curve on his left upper arm, that was the first one Morgana did. His first from her, her first ever. The first wound Arthur ever stitched up on Morgana's body is now a long pink line on the back of her right leg.
When she finishes, she asks, “Arthur, do you think perhaps Uther doesn't want to be found?”
He turns to face her, then, and his eyes are hard. “Why would he do that?”
“Why else would he do this, then? Why would he--” Why would he break up the family even more than Morgana has?
“Why did you come with me if you don't think we're going to find him?” Arthur demands.
It's a good question. Morgana has no good answers.
+
Shapeshifter, ghoul, ghost, witch, werewolf: Morgana relearns them over the next several months, and sends them into that deeper darkness. At the end of the fight, she is the one blood-spattered with ichor on her boots, breathing hard and shaking just a little bit. With every hunt, she shakes a little less.
There is a hardness that settles into her that Arthur isn't sure what to make of. There is something reflexive about it, defensive, like a rechanneling of energy: if she is scared, she will make sure everything else is too. In a way Morgana is becoming the sister he always wanted growing up, but on the other hand, Arthur doesn't know this Morgana very well. He realizes he doesn't know a Morgana who isn't trying to leave.
She hasn't thrown out all her old clothes either, it seems. They're between jobs, eating a leisurely meal at some crap cafe, and she's wearing a wide-necked jumper and a short skirt, looking fashionably disheveled. She's even put on make-up. Despite the grand gesture of dumping her wardrobe after exorcising those spirits (and leave it to Morgana to make grand gestures through shopping), she has always been terrible at leaving things behind.
They're looking through his father's journal for the umpteenth time, trawling through the directory of monsters and how to kill them, looking for any clue at all. Morgana's hair falls over her shoulder and sweeps across the page, and he finds it distracting. They've become better at occupying the same space over the weeks, but Arthur finds it strangely difficult to adjust to not being alone. Even after his father disappeared, after the initial panic subsided, solitude already felt like an instinct; it felt like receiving something he didn't even realize he'd been expecting all this time.
“D'you think he's still in the country?” asks Morgana.
Arthur hates her questions. They are making this quest even more impossible.
“Dunno,” he says, and turns the topic to a news story he saw last night about corpses in Sunderland whose hearts have been ripped out.
Morgana leans forward and listens intently, asking clarifying questions and offering conjectures, wonders aloud if they need to stop for more salt. It's like she's never left at all.
+
Morgana feels the earth shake beneath her feet, and smells sulfur. She sees Arthur on a rack, and feels fire, and there is so much blood seeping out of him, too much, and he screams, his blood on her hands and she can't do anything, oh god, and--
--and she wakes up, mid-shout.
“Morgana!”Arthur is yelling, shaking her shoulders. “Morgana, it's all right. You're okay. You're--”
She reaches for him with a sound like a sob, touches his face and ascertains that he is still alive. He is there, they are here, nothing has happened. Nothing has happened yet. Morgana grabs the front of his shirt, and hangs on as he holds her, waiting in vain for the afterimages of hellfire to fade from her mind.
“Still with the nightmares, I see,” Arthur says softly. “It was just a dream. It's okay.”
It was not just a dream. She doesn't know how to tell him this. She never knew how to tell Arthur and Uther this, and had always kept her visions to herself in case the next body they salted and burned was hers.
“Do you want some water?” Arthur asks.
“No.”
“Do you want some scotch?”
“No. Yes.”
So he untangles himself from her grip, and Morgana huddles on the bed and watches his every move in the dark. He's alive, she tells herself. He's alive he's okay he's alive, thank fuck, thank bloody fuck.
One time, she dreamed of Uther in a warehouse with a broken leg, near death, and when Morgana knew exactly which warehouse to go to, knew exactly which floor, Arthur had given her a quizzical look and asked, “How did you...?” to which she replied, “I just knew.”
It was apparently an acceptable enough answer. To Arthur, his father is ubiquitous and fundamental, like air, and it didn't occur to him to question Morgana further because Arthur thinks that if Uther was in trouble, then he, too, would 'just know', somehow.
Arthur sits with her on her bed as she takes a long draught, and when she sets the bottle on the nightstand, he says, “Right,” and starts to get up when Morgana grabs his wrist.
He looks blankly at her hand.
“Arthur,” she says.
“What?”
Morgana doesn't know how to ask him. They aren't children anymore. She just looks at him instead, hoping that's enough, and it is, because Arthur's shoulders slump and he sighs, and then he moves closer to her, draping one arm around her as he settles parallel to her body. Morgana slips her arms around his neck and holds him close.
“Your heart sounds like it's about to explode,” he murmurs against her collarbone.
And she thinks isn't it funny how the only thing that inspires intimacy in this family is calamity? Just like the old days. Arthur falls back asleep almost immediately, and his hair tickles her cheek as she shifts to better fit against him. Morgana listens to the steady rhythm of his breathing, feels it against her body as she drifts off, and she wonders how she will save him from his fate.
+
“Where to next?” Morgana asks, throwing their bags in the backseat.
“There's a werewolf in Durham,” Arthur shrugs.
She nods. “All right.”
“All right,” he agrees.
They get in the car and drive.
no subject
I'd been saving this link for a while now, and wanted to read the fic when I could a: actually appreciate it and b-need it (uni has been kicking my ass, so the timing was quite perfect)... in other words, the wait was so worth it.
I loved it.
I simply loved how you made everything fit and still made something completely new and that would be able to stand on it's own, apart from both SPN and Merlin.
It's simply amazing, beyond any praise.
no subject
I actually have more plot outlined for this fusion, yeah! I'm probably not going to write one continuous fic though, just bits here and there within the 'verse. I've been kind of wanting to write first-time Arthur/Morgana. I guess I have to figure out first if they're biologically related in this 'verse... I've been procrastinating dealing with that question. XD
Good luck with uni also!