A King with No Title

Good Luck To Us Then

When they had arrived home that night, Arthur had made himself scarce as the rest of them shared drinks and watched recordings of the previous years "Strictly Come Dancing" that Merlin had accidentally set to record and he couldn't be bothered to remove all the episodes after.

Merlin had heard Arthur run the bath from downstairs, and decided to take the opportunity to go and get his clothes for the next day while he bathed so they didn't have to interact.

Just his luck, that Arthur didn't bathe for long and was back in his room before he had finished getting the rest of his supplies together for the next morning.

"I'll be gone in a second." Merlin says, keeping his back turned to Arthur, not wanting to see him. He heard the towel hit the ground as he started pulling on his clothes. He waited for Merlin to finish his business and leave.

"You can keep your room, I'll sleep downstairs." Arthur says throwing his towel over Merlin's head, "This is your house after all." With that he walked out of the room and closed the door.

"Okay then." Merlin says to himself pulling a box out of the bottom of his wardrobe after removing the towel from his head: he had kept some of his most precious things from his old life. These were the things that even if he hadn't been able to save anything else he wanted to keep.

He went and sat on his bed and took the lid off the box. Starting to take things out of the box and looking through, he had letters, old bits of jewellery, and the Pendragon crest, the old magic books including the first one Gaius gave him.

He opened the book and saw the small enveloped letter Gaius gave him before he had passed away. He had never opened it before. Correction he had never been able to. Not due to what people may have thought, like sentiment, fear, worry, that was not the case in the slightest. He had done every spell he could think, even tried to create spells to open it, but nothing worked. The letter wouldn't burn, rip, open it was an indestructible force through time and Merlin could never figure out what magic Gaius had embedded in it.

He spent a few minutes looking at the letter and then moved on to the letters he could read. The ones that Arthur had sent to him when he had not been in Camelot and he couldn't join him, due to "Emrys" having his own duties. It was still surreal to Merlin that Arthur had wanted to keep him updated on what had occurred when he hadn't been there to protect him. Something he had always hated.

He must have spent longer reading them than he realised because the sun was completely gone and the outside had been cast into pitch blackness. The only thing that drew him from the letters was the fact he was unable to read them anymore due to the lack of light so he had to resort to turning his lamp on.

He could hear everyone downstairs laughing and still drinking, it was actually nice not being in complete silence in his home every night. He had promised to join them again but he didn't think it was likely he would.

A small knock at the door and Arthur's head poking in, did surprise him however. "You need something?" Merlin asks not taking his eyes off the spell books in front of him. He knew every word of the book, from start to finish it, and he could most likely rewrite the entire book from memory if he felt he wanted to.

"The Knights wanted me to get you to come and drink with us." Arthur says, his hand on the back of his neck as he felt awkward from the interaction occurring in that moment. When he finally looked up and saw Merlin sat amongst some relics of the past his interest was sparked, "What is all of this?" He made his way over to the bed and climbed over stuff to sit behind Merlin, because it was the only way to avoid sitting on anything else.

Merlin watched as Arthur reached towards their old shared letters, recognising them immediately for what they were. He squirmed into a small space so he could be sat beside Arthur instead of in front of him. Arthur lay back on the pillows and read the letters with great interest, like Merlin had done so many times before. The reading of them lessened over the years as the box became too hard to open, due to the overwhelming emotion it always flooded into him.