Fic: "Arthur watched magic"

[cyus]

Title: Arthur watched magic
Characters/Pairing: Merlin/Arthur
Rating: R
Warning: Character Death, disturbing imagery, violence, gore
Length: 600 words
Summary: Arthur just wanted to understand magic.

Arthur watched magic pool in Merlin's belly button, glowing bright and expanding with every exhale, gliding outwards across his chest and down to his groin.

"It's like you're made of it," he whispered as he crouched next to Merlin's head and traced soft and careful fingertips over the straining muscles of Merlin's arms, the stretched, pale skin that pulsed with magic as his fingers closed to fists and opened again and his eyes were wide and wider, only on Arthur.

His father thought it foolish but accepted it for alchemy. For Arthur it was more than that, something like love maybe, something metaphysical just like the magic infusing Merlin's every cell.

"I don't know how you do it," Arthur said again, as he did often.

Arthur had cleared part of his chambers and had laid Merlin bare, spread-eagled and pinned like a butterfly, his magic warming the room in winter and cooling it in summer, and while he sat over papers and studies the great wars, he couldn't help but glance up every few minutes and drop everything he was doing and step across where Merlin's toes were curling and uncurling, the sun played over the glow of his magic and his naked body and Merlin's dry lips whispered something like "Please," and something like "Love," and something like "Destiny."

"I only want to understand, Merlin, help me understand this." Arthur drew a knife through skin, peeling back layer after layer, leaving Merlin cut to the bone at the elbow, at the soft spot where groin met thigh and his penis hung limp. Magic seemed to pulse from everywhere, undefinable and impossible to locate.

"Help me understand," Arthur whispered into Merlin's ear at night, when he curled around him on the cold stone floor and patterned his fingertips over Merlin's eyelids and ribs and the sharp outline of his hipbones, smearing into blood where Merlin was bleeding and into tears where he was crying and into saliva, his own, when Arthur was kissing him.

The Secret Of Sorcery And How It Can Be Harnessed For Peace was the title of Arthur's manuscript on his desk, and he'd done crude drawings of Merlin, cursing his lack of artistic talent, and aborted descriptions of his findings, cursing his lack of knowledge.

"Have you done away with that thing yet?" his father asked when they took lunch in the Great Hall and when Arthur returned to his chambers and fed Merlin kisses, tickled his palms and the soles of his feet and rubbed slow circles over Merlin's heart, he couldn't bear to.

"Why won't you tell me?" Arthur whispered that night, his manuscript mocking him as much as his father's speeches and Merlin's silence.

Merlin's eyes were wide and silent in reply, following Arthur's steps through the room, from desk to bed and bed to window, magic pulsing in steady beats.

"Is it in your heart?" Arthur asked from the window, and when he turned Merlin had turned his face and closed his eyes.

"Destiny," Merlin murmured and Arthur wasn't sure if he was stating or asking or begging.

Arthur pressed a kiss to his hairline and a kiss to his jaw and his neck. "I have to know," he whispered to Merlin's lips. "I have to know if that's where it's coming from, if that's all it is. I can prove it's good, don't you understand? If that's what it is, I can prove that it's nothing to be afraid of."

Hours later, blood pooling around Merlin's opened ribcage, eyes wide and magic silent Arthur scribbled please and destiny and love under his drawings and his writings, and he sat at his desk and wept.

Comments

[chicaintcheap.livejournal.com]

So sad and disturbing, yet plausible given Uther's hatred of magic. Your writing is just so beautiful, I couldn't resist reading this. Thank you!

[cyus.livejournal.com]

Thanks very much, I appreciate you giving it a try despite the myriad of warnings it seemed prudent to but on there. Good to hear it's plausible, that tends to be what I try to go there, some interpretation of the characters that twists to the extreme but is not too far out to be absurd but could be plausible with the right set of circumstances and prior assumptions. So, yeah, glad that worked for you. Thanks :)

[cyus.livejournal.com]

Horrifying to see that this version of him would kill Merlin, and well, as misswinterhill mentioned below, I don't talk about how Merlin ended up in that position, how willing or unwilling he was to put himself there, but it's not a story about Merlin but about Arthur and yeah, I give you it's a bit of a disturbing story. Thanks for the comment, I appreciate it.

[b-b-banana.livejournal.com]

YAY for putting the little one out there. go fic, go! \o/

[cyus.livejournal.com]

LOL! Look at me being good about warnings, too. I didn't include 'creepyness', there already seemed to be enough warnings for 600 words :P

[starshine24mc.livejournal.com]

You could probably write an instruction manual for buttering whole wheat toast and still provoke shivers in me. Thanks for that! *L*

[cyus.livejournal.com]

HAH LOL. I doubt it! (Even if buttering toast reminds me of that one Jack/Ianto fic I wrote). Appreciate it, thanks :)

[sevedra.livejournal.com]

wow. that was very powerful for something so short. i enjoyed it so much, but it made me so sad!

[cyus.livejournal.com]

Thanks very much! Glad to hear you enjoyed it and that it, well, provoked emotions, I guess. Thanks for the comment.

[misswinterhill.livejournal.com]

This is disturbing, but quite dreamlike; probably all the more disturbing for that, and for the contrast of gentleness and violence. And Merlin; Arthur in this is a good deal darker than I prefer to read him, but there's this ping of wanting to fill in the gaps and know why Merlin is there -- whether he agreed in the first place, but it slipped out of his ability to stop when things became painful, or whether he was trapped and imprisoned, or whether destiny and love was enough to keep him there. I think that's the most disturbing thing, to me -- obvs if you did it in Merlin's POV it would be a very different story, and much harder to keep the dreamlike tone -- not knowing.

[cyus.livejournal.com]

Reiterating what I said elsewhere, but I guess this is me returning a bit to some of the type of fics I wrote for Ianto, of taking a specific characteristic or reading of a character and notching it up to the extreme, assuming a set of circumstances and prior events not shown in the story, and tell that story. You're right that if it was a Merlin POV story it would be a very different fic. For me, personally, probably a less interesting one in terms of losing that dream-like quality when motivations are unclear and so open to interpretation. As usual, it's me playing with the big words like love a lot because for me, it's a love story, for both of them, Merlin and Arthur's love for each other at their most twisted and fucked-up, if you will.

So in sum, the fic's a bit like comic art? Overenunciating the stark black lines and not being a naturalistic depiction of canon? Does that make sense? First time I've done that in Merlin, I guess, but it feels exciting, like I'm finally getting enough of a grasp on the characters to be able to manipulate them in more extreme ways and tell these kind of stories.

First time I wrote something not strictly naturalistic, if you will, in Merlin, so it's rather cool and exciting and now I can go back to writing some boy-meets-boy love so my WIP doesn't end on the abandoned-WIP-on-KMM list LOL.

[natanilik.livejournal.com]

Oh, from time to time I really, really like dark, twisted angsty stories and this one is great! I'm off to safe it for a disturbing read later - thanks for sharing^^

[cyus.livejournal.com]

Thanks for leaving that comment here! Hope you'll enjoy the story once you're in the right mood to read it :)

[kel-reiley.livejournal.com]

OH GOD.

i love this, LOVE!

[kel-reiley.livejournal.com]

to add to that, i like the somewhat clinical, yet single-minded, approach from arthur - and the interaction with both merlin and uther reads perfectly like the universe just twisted a little sideways

[cyus.livejournal.com]

It's the other side of devotion, in a way, yeah. I'm glad it worked in the universe-twisted-a-little-sideways way. There are a lot of assumptions going on before this could be canon per se but the potentials are there, in a way. Thanks for reading :D

[allwithwings.livejournal.com]

I read this the other day on my phone, but haven't had a chance to comment until now.

I think perhaps I'm a glutton for punishment, or just love having my heart broken, because I adore this fic. The violence/death/sex/love combination gets me every time, and you've done it beautifully here. I enjoyed this more than is probably healthy, given the subject matter, but it really got under my skin. The emotion and heartbreak of Arthur was incredible, as well as Merlin's sorrow at what was being done to him, by the man he loved.

*sigh*

Loved it. ♥

[cyus.livejournal.com]

Thanks so much for the comment. I'm glad to see people enjoy reading this type of fic that, well, it's stretching it a bit everywhere, emotionally and thematically and whatnot, but yeah, I'm glad you liked it and that the emotions came across. Thanks :)

[eldee.livejournal.com]

I'm having trouble coming up with the right thing to say about this! To say I loved it or even liked it feels a bit off, just because of the content, but it is such a beautiful piece and I'm in awe of it. In such few words you wrote something so very powerful. The way you approached it, with a dreamlike quality and as someone mentioned a contrast between the violence and gentleness and even confusion, just left me feeling sad and achy, and for the genre of the fic, this is stunning.

[cyus.livejournal.com]

Thanks! As I said somewhere here or in the other LJ, I've stuck writing a lot of regular stuff in Merlin so far, very straight-forward fics and such, so it was good to do something a little different for a change, and I'm glad to hear that it worked for people. I had the idea for it before I fell asleep actually, the whole pinned like a butterfly and Merlin's wide open eyes of love so... yeah... sad and achy hits it for me too. Glad you liked it, and thanks for commenting.

[sheswatching.livejournal.com]

ugh gtfo with this fucking sad story, nick. :( broke my heart entirely, cut it up and stuff. :(