Only Two Tragedies (1/4)

[ifeelbetter]

Title: The Only Two Tragedies (AU 1/?)
Author: ifeelbetter 
Rating: PG-13 (for the presence of alcohol—shock!)
Pairings: Merlin/Arthur (eventually), slight Gwen/Lancelot
Word Count: 4,245
Disclaimer/Spoilers/Warnings: Don’t own, won’t ever. It’s all a lie. And it has no spoilers.
Summary: Merlin is a young British artist living in New York but has, of late, lost his inspiration. While he’s looking for his missing spark, he winds up challenging Arthur, wealthy son of a PR mogul, to a drinking competition. Will he win himself a less-than-enthusiastic model or will he end up walking Paris Hilton’s dog?
Notes: The title comes from Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan: “In this world, there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.” This story started with a prompt by callista_mythola couple of weeks ago. I don’t know why I’ve done this, having not written a thing for the past two years since a splurge of Harry Potter fics under the name Yorkshire Pudding (which I chose because I was seriously craving it at the time) that I am somewhat ashamed to acknowledge mine. I usually run out of steam without encouragement so be warned: if you don’t comment, you kill this fic.


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Though early mornings were not the daily trauma they had been during his time in school, primary through university, they continued to be a nuisance. Merlin could not train himself to be the morning person he knew his mother was, had always been, and could never understand why he wasn’t the same. In those early school days, she would have been awake for hours when he could finally drag himself out of his childishly deep sleep, dream-laden and surely weighing thousands of pounds more than usual—surely, there could be no other explanation for the way his feet refused to lift from the ground and his eyelids could not be pressed to open more than slivers—and there would Hunith be, having been out for a run already and already halfway through her first project of the day. And all this before breakfast. Merlin, on an internal clock that seemed to be the reversed reflection of his mother’s, would stumble through all the AM hours and would only begin to start feeling human sometime after noon.

Art school had been different, obviously, and not just for the lack of his childhood companion. Hunith still had the depressing habit of “forgetting” her son’s preferred hours—how, after spending his entire life with her, could she actually forget—and phoning him in the single digit hours of the morning. But he still managed to have a late morning most days and careful scheduling had insured afternoon classes for most of the four years he had spent in training. Then the move to New York had become the most effective preventative for early morning phone calls from his mother as she never quite remembered the time difference and tended to call later in the day, thinking it must be morning for him.

Which left Merlin waking up on his own steam now and that, naturally, left him always on the verge of tardiness. Gwen, his beatific roommate, could sometimes be counted on to do the requisite pinching and shoving to get him out of bed for his shift at the coffeehouse but only if her shift conveniently overlapped his.

Alas, this had not been one of those convenient mornings.

Merlin slowly realized, as the strains of morning radio filtered into his dreams, that the numbers had shifted during his over-use of the snooze button and that, tragically and irrevocably, this meant that he would be late. Again. He jolted awake and had a toothbrush lodged in a cheek and his jeans halfway on before he even registered the charcoal smudges across his face and all down one arm. Cursing and—as the toothbrush was still in place—spitting toothpaste across the bathroom mirror, he split the available two arms between the three tasks of toothbrush, jeans, and scrubbing out the black smudges. The guilty sketch was stuck to his foot as well, which gave an extra level of difficulty to the jeans task. He gave up on the toothbrush for the time being in favor of devoting an arm to the gathering of the dozen or so sketches that littered the floor – the usual detritus from his evening’s work.

Unfortunately, the past couple of weeks had found Merlin in a rut. If he had been a poet, he would have claimed writer’s block. A writer always has to option of using the block as inspiration that the artist does not have – you can write a poem about how difficult it is to write a poem but no one would want to see a badly executed portrait of yourself badly executing a portrait of yourself. Somehow, that lacks the romanticism of the navel-gazing poet.

So the sketches that covered his floor were decidedly Not Good. He had drawn everything in the apartment a couple of times over and Gwen thousands of times but nothing seemed to be quite it. Gwen’s smile was off, the curtains were lifeless, the bottles were dull, and everything left him smudged and dissatisfied.

Lacking time for the emo moment his artistic blockage warranted, he was out of the apartment and jogging down the street within a matter of moments. His cell started to ring as he neared Legal Grounds, their appallingly—and adorably (if he was being honest with himself)—named coffee shop. It was Gwen, which meant that the dulcet tones of Beyonce’s helium-high claim to the state of Diva-hood currently serenading the neighborhood was her fabulous idea from the last time she had toyed with his phone, claiming British phones were subtly but drastically different but also deeply afflicted with a love for gadgetry.

Holding his ringing phone before him as he pushed the door open, both as peace offering and accusation, and was halfway through his usual scalding critique of her music choices (“Really, Gwen, that’s not at all what the dictionary says ‘diva’ means”) when he noticed the two men in front of the register. One he recognized and one he did not but that wasn’t unusual. What was unusual was that Arthur Pendragon, already a chiseled god delivered fully formed out of the recesses of every fantasy when alone, was joined by a man who also bent attention around himself, dragging eyes (all six of the ones that graced Legal Grounds that morning, including the four that belonged to our intrepid employees) in his direction.

“It's not like I don’t have the references or the experience,” the man was saying to Arthur.

“And I never said you lacked any of that, Lancelot. What I said,” Arthur said, beginning to enunciate in his best You’re-An-Ignoramus voice, “My father won’t hire you. He won’t hire you when you ask, he wouldn’t hire you if I were to ask, which is also not going to happen.”

“But—“ Lancelot tried to interrupt but Arthur but he got beaten to the punch.

“No. There really is nothing else to say on the subject,” Arthur said, his eyes flashing with anger and complete and utter disdain.

“Sorry to interrupt, I’m very sure this is completely important,” Gwen said, indicating the space between Lancelot and Arthur with the bottom of the coffee cup and, Merlin sighed, beginning to stammer and blush. “I mean, it must be important, you’re a very important person—not that you’re not as well, but I don’t know who you are—but here you are buying coffee so, you know, the coffee—that’s sort of important too because it’s why you’re here and—“

“Yes, Gwen, thank you,” Arthur said. He pocketed the change and poured a packet of sugar into his coffee. As Lancelot opened his mouth to offer one final attempt, he was pre-empted again. “And, thank you, Lancelot, for the excessive whining but I’m done here.”

When Arthur turned and saw Merlin standing in the doorway, his disgust at Arthur’s condescension written in bold across his face, something inexplicable flickered across Arthur’s face. If Merlin didn’t know better—and he did, Arthur had started coming into Legal Grounds a couple of years back when his stepsister, Morgana, worked there as a summer job and he had spent every ten minute visit since bestowing his lordliness upon the masses—he might have, for a moment, thought it was guilt. Maybe even shame. For a second.

“It’s a wonder this place stays open when the employees can’t be bothered to show up remotely on time,” Arthur said with a sneer as he pushed past Merlin. “And you’ve got some dirt on your nose, Beyonce.” Merlin’s hand was halfway through flying to his nose when the final dig re-directed it to the still-ringing phone.

“Prat,” Merlin retorted, albeit not brilliantly. Arthur rolled his eyes.

“Brit,” Arthur said over his shoulder.

“You know that’s not actually an insult, right?” Merlin shouted as the door closed behind him.

Lancelot heaved a sigh and pulled his tie loose.

“There goes three hours I won’t get back in a hurry,” he said. He stuck a hand in Gwen’s direction and said, exceedingly charmingly they both agreed later over popcorn and piss-poor wine, “Hi. I’m Lancelot. Sorry about all that.” Something about his voice, really, just dripped with charm. Merlin found himself pre-disposed already to side with Lancelot over Arthur, on principle alone, and Lancelot being made of pure sex appeal didn’t help Arthur’s case.

“Hello, Lancelot,” Gwen replied with startling self control, “I’m Gwen. Well, Guinevere but, you know, that’s really a mouthful and all so it’s—you know—more convenient to just say Gwen. For simplicity.”

“Which we all know you’re so concerned with,” Merlin said rolling his eyes, “I swear, if you could say anything simply—no stuttering, no run-on sentences—just to the point, I might just fall over dead. Or eat my hat.” He turned to Lancelot, “I’m Merlin, let me get you a coffee. On the house, alright? After a meeting with Arthur, I bet you need it.”

“Thanks, I really do. Could I have a latte with an extra dozen or so shots of espresso?” Lancelot said, undoing the top button of his shirt. From the way he was fidgeting in his suit, it obviously wasn’t his usual garb.

“So, you do PR, then? I assume, that is, from the fact that you were looking for a job with the Pendragons,” Merlin said.

“Yeah, though I’m apparently not very impressive in resume form,” Lancelot said. “And here I thought that just being good at the job would be enough.”

“Yeah, when pigs can fly,” Merlin scoffed. “Since when has talent been sufficient for anything?”

“You’re just bitter since you’ve lost that magic touch,” Gwen said, handing Lancelot his coffee. “He’s an artiste,” she continued, drawing out the last word sardonically, “But he has of late, the wherefore he knows not, lost all his mojo.”

“In case you couldn’t guess, Gwen majored in Literature and can’t stop the spontaneous overflow of Shakespeare,” Merlin explained. “She’s getting her PhD at NYU at the moment and has been for the past—what? Six years?”

“Mock me if you want, mister, but I still got my mojo,” Gwen teased. Lancelot laughed with them and, somehow, the group felt completely natural together. So much so that they ended up spending the next three hours—a slow time between the breakfast/commuter morning rush and the 3PM slump-crowd—laughing and talking as if they had all known each other from childhood.

Merlin ended up telling Lancelot all about his artist’s block and Lancelot, in turn, told them about trying to break into the New York PR scene after being born, raised, and trained in a small town outside of Toledo. Gwen regaled them with the hijinks of graduate school, including the story about the time she ended up drunkenly imitating a dinosaur on a bar stool (to illustrate a parallel between Titus Andronicus and Jurassic Park) and found herself face-to-face with her advisor in mid-snarl.

It was the sort of afternoon that bonded, despite the brevity of the acquaintance. When Lancelot eventually heaved a sigh and said he had to go, he left with ample invitation to repeat his visit to the café and the more immediate plan to meet at a bar around the corner that evening.

Merlin and Gwen passed most of the day in the languor that only a restaurant-type establishment can know. In the last two hours of their shift, they invented a customer Bingo that they became so engrossed in creating that they never got around to playing it. Morgana stopped by at the tail end of Gwen’s shift, which ended an hour before Merlin’s, and chatted with them at a table until Merlin also had finished.

“So, Morgana,” Gwen said as she tugged on her gloves and Merlin pulled his boho-chic scarf from under the bar, “How is Harvard treating you these days? And, more importantly, do I want to know? You’re not going to tell one of your gruesome cadaver stories, are you?” Morgana laughed.

“Hardly appropriate for mixed company, I think,” she said, indicating Merlin, “The lady might have to hurl again.”

“Oh no, you don’t get to attack my manliness without rebuttal,” Merlin retorted. “First of all: I was drunk at the time so my ‘hurling’ probably had more to do with that than your story. Second of all,” he continued, holding up the appropriate number of fingers, “Med school provides you with some very gross stories. I mean, must you really tell us about what a cancerous lung looks like? Ever?”

“Excuses, excuses,” Morgana said. “You boys all go green in the face when I start recalling my day. Arthur’s no better and, when you work in the New York PR world, you know a good deal about bloodbaths.”

“Speaking of whom,” Merlin said, locking up behind them, “Your brother was here being a prat to this poor bloke this morning and Gwen and I are off to meet up with him for cheer-up drinks. You in?”

“Well, he’s sort of my responsibility if he’s the carnage from Early Morning Arthur,” Morgana sighed. “He was getting so much better at mornings in the past few years, I really thought he might have turned over a new leaf.”

“Far be it from me to agree with Arthur on anything at all,” Merlin began and the two women exchanged Looks, “But I have to say mornings are decidedly awful. The opposite of good, even.”


“I thought maybe the leopard could change his spots. For the past two years, almost, Arthur has been increasingly pleasant in the mornings,” Morgana said. “It started about the same time as me getting that summer job here, now that I think about it.”

“Obviously, it’s our coffee,” Gwen said. “The beans are grown in Never-never-land. We use fairy dust instead of sugar.”

They were still laughing and riffing on Peter Pan coffee (“But is the fairy dust fair-y trade?”) when they pushed open the door of the bar, an old favorite and their frequent destination after a day at Legal Grounds. Lancelot was already there and, once he was introduced to the joke on the table, joined in the hilarity. It was not the sort of joke that would fly with a group of anything other than the closest of friends and, even though Lancelot was a fairly recent addition, it seemed to go over well. The conversation flowed freely, though a bit stilted at first between Lancelot and Morgana. She apologized for her brother’s rudeness and berated him so thoroughly that even Lancelot eventually felt the need to defend him.

Conversation was still flowing easily as they neared the end of their second round. When Merlin rose to fetch a third, Arthur and a band of PR cronies sauntered through the door.

Arthur’s eyes met Merlin’s in mid joke—no doubt something hideously frat boyish, Merlin thought—and Merlin found his face embarrassingly flushing. Honestly, bodily reactions are such a bugger, he thought. Arthur is fit, yes, but he’s a prat so no blushing allowed. And there was something in the way Arthur was looking at him that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. It lasted only a couple of seconds but it gave a hitch to Merlin’s breath before it suddenly broke and Arthur’s eyes settled on the drinks in Merlin’s hands, flitted over to the group at the table, and glared at Lancelot.

“Ah, Lancelot,” he drawled, “I see you have no shame, whatsoever. My sister doesn’t even work with us and she really, really can’t get you a job.” Lancelot’s face clouded over.

“I wasn’t—“ he began but Arthur interrupted him imperiously.

“And this is why you’re just not Pendragon material,” he said. “Shady and ashamed. If we’re ever looking for pussies, I’ll be sure to pass your oh-so-impressive—and by ‘impressive’ I really mean ‘sucky’—resume on to my dad. Oh, wait. I guess we don’t actually ever need pussies soooo. . .” Arthur trailed off amid his friends’ laughter. Lancelot blushed but didn’t rise to the bait, which left Merlin with no choice.

“Oy, mate,” Merlin said, “Aren’t you a little old for this sort of thing? I mean, ‘pussies’? Really, what are we—five?”

As Arthur turned around in that obnoxiously slow, we’re-about-to-have-a-rumble American way, Merlin remembered what his other choice had been: not to say something.

“Since when are you and I ‘mates,’ Coffee Boy?” Arthur said. “Since when are you anything other than another person I pay to provide me with things I want?”

“Yeah?” Merlin said. “And since when are you anything other than another prat whose coffee I gob into every morning?”

One of Arthur’s friends started to laugh but was glared into silence.

“You don’t gob into my coffee. No one ever gobs into my coffee,” Arthur said and ended with obvious satisfaction, “I would know.”

“Oh, so you’re an expert on saliva, then? Know what spit tastes like so well that no one slips a gob by you?” Merlin asked in faux-innocence.

“Arthur, I think he just insinuated that you eat spit,” Morgana teased.

“Actually, I think he was just clarifying what Arthur said,” Gwen chimed in. She blushed as Arthur’s intense glare shifted to her briefly. “Well, I mean—that is what you said.”

“I didn’t say I like to drink saliva,” Arthur sulked. “I like to drink beer.”

“It’s a shame then,” Morgana said, taking a draught from her beer bottle.

“What’s a shame?” Arthur asked, because he always fell for it when Morgana played him—which she always did.

“It’s a shame you can’t handle beer when you like it so much,” she said. Merlin laughed.

“I should have known you’d be a lightweight,” he crowed. “You Yanks can’t drink for shit.”

“Now you’re insulting my country,” Arthur said, pulling a chair up to their table and—of course—sitting in it backwards, like he thought he was in some old Western film.

“I do believe I am,” Merlin retorted, reclaiming his seat. Arthur’s friends seemed a bit at a loss about what to do with themselves. There wasn’t room for them at the table and there were no nearby tables empty that they could pull up. They ended up trudging off to the far end of the bar, the only empty space in the place. Arthur barely seemed to notice their absence.

“You shouldn’t insult my country like that,” Arthur said. “Not without being able to put your money where your mouth is.”

“Oh, I think I can take you, American Boy,” Merlin said.

“I really don’t think you can.”

“I’m British. My nation could take your nation in a drinking contest and drink you all, stars and banners and all, under the table.”

“In what parallel universe?”

“You really want to add ‘sci-fi geek’ to your autobiography at this moment? When you’re so far into ‘lightweight’ territory? Or do you want to just skip straight to ‘girl’?”

“OK, that’s it,” Arthur said, “Bring it, you English poof. We are putting this to the test right now.”

“Yeah? You want to take a nice nap under the table? Cuz that’s where you’re heading.”

“Enough with the trash talking, boys,” Morgana interrupted. “Let’s talk terms.” She paused when four blank faces turned to her. “What? Drinking contests are boring for the spectators unless you’ve made it a little interesting.”

“What would you have me do to prevent your boredom, milady?” Arthur asked, rolling his eyes.

“I’ll speak slowly for those who can’t handle polysyllabic vocabulary: Arthur, if Merlin succumbs to your superior skill, what do you want from him?” Morgana said. Arthur nearly choked on his beer but quickly covered. And then paused an embarrassingly long time with his head cocked thoughtfully to one side.

“Don’t think too hard, you might break,” Morgana teased. “You know how you have that job and everything? It must include some menial service that even a ‘Coffee Boy’ could handle and be sufficiently humbled for his loserness?”

“I’m thinking.”

“That’s what concerns me. The novelty of it.”

“As exciting as this is for the laymen,” Lancelot said, sliding out of his chair, “I think chatting with Arthur’s minions might even be more fun. Gwen? Can I get you something?” She blushed and opened her mouth to answer but Merlin saw the telltale signs of a major Gwen-prattle.

“Gwen, show the man the way to the bar. He’s from out of town,” he said, moving his chair back to give her room to get by. Gwen slid past with a silent thank-you mouthed at Merlin when her back was turned to the rest of the table. That left the two Pendragons and Merlin alone with their pissing contest.

“Ha! I’ve got it!” Arthur said suddenly, slamming a fist onto the table in his enthusiasm. “In recompense for the serious ass-whupping education you are about to receive, you will have to be Paris Hilton’s dog walker for two weeks.”

“How would you even arrange that?” Merlin asked, nearly flabbergasted.

“I have connections.”

“I would love to hear that phone call.”

“Oh, you will.”

“Maybe in your dreams, but there’s no way that call happens in reality. Plus, you would look a lot like a douche having to ask Hilton for that kind of favor,” Merlin said, feeling he had made the victorious point.

“It’s not a favor to offer someone a cute dog-walker, temporary or otherwise. Also, you’re all British and stuff—“

“No ‘stuff,’ just British.”

“—and chicks dig that sort of thing. Hell, if she called me and offered me some British tart for a dog walker—“

“You did not just call me a tart!”

“—I would be all over that shit,” Arthur ended triumphantly.

“You don’t even have a dog, I bet. Also, it will never happen cuz you’re the one that’s going to be eating floor by the end of the night.”

“Again, the slightly homoerotic trash talk is fabulous for the spectator, but what about your end of this, Mer?” Morgana cut in. “Let’s say Arthur passes out first, what prize do you claim?”

“Model for me.” The answer was so quick that even Merlin was surprised. He blinked as confusion clouded Arthur’s face. “I’m an artist, I need models, I don’t have the money for models, therefore. . .”

“Fine.”

“Fine yourself.”

“Right,” Morgana said, looking with increasing curiosity at the two men, who kept leaning towards each other across the table, getting in each other’s space. “Shall we begin then?”

There were so many empty glasses, of all shapes and sizes, on and around the table by 4 AM that both Arthur and Merlin were having trouble figuring out which one was the current round. Merlin had to admit that Arthur, for a Yank, he was holding out pretty well. Merlin dreaded, absolutely dreaded, the morning but had gotten hazy about that a few dozen or so beers in. And then vodka had occurred and then other drinks and he had no idea what the green liquid he was swilling at the moment was but could only hope he hadn’t actually been served absinthe.

“Still standing, ass-face,” Arthur mumbled, his head cradled in his elbow to meet his current drink (something blue? Maybe bubbly?) halfway to his mouth, for convenience’s sake. His friends had been plenty raucous for a while but had gotten inevitably bored by the tame haunts Gwen and Merlin naturally chose and so had scampered off to a club. Or something. Merlin had been pretty soused by that point. Lancelot and Gwen were still at the bar and standing much closer. Or, at least, from Merlin’s perspective there were multiple versions of each but they all seemed to be getting along pretty well. Morgana was dozing at another table, also covered with the discarded detritus of earlier rounds, and had been rewarded for her vulnerability with a moustache that Arthur had drawn during the pause between having already drunk everything they had ordered and getting new alcohol shipped in from the bar.

“Y’not though,” Merlin countered, “I can see you. You’re sitting.”

“Could though. If I wanted to.”

“Bet you couldn’t.”

“Ha. Show you, dog walker,” Arthur said and put his theory to the test. He had been incorrect in his premise however: he really couldn’t stand. His knees buckled the moment they left the safety of the chair and he slid to the ground, passing out almost before he hit bottom.

“Ha, yourself. Rule Britannia, bitch.” Merlin slammed his glass down and Morgana shook awake at the clatter. “I am victorious!” Merlin told her seriously.

“Excellent fellow,” she conceded. “You’ve got yourself a model.”

“Gwen, d’you hear that?” Merlin called over to the bar. “He’s my bloody model, he is.” He indicated the empty chair vehemently. Gwen rolled her eyes.

“Now that you’ve thoroughly hosed the decks with testosterone, do you think we’d better go home?” she said, pulling her coat off the back of a chair. Lancelot rubbed the back of his neck in embarrassment as he said something quietly to Gwen that Merlin couldn’t hear. She blushed in response and nodded, not quite meeting his eyes.

Morgana went with them back to their apartment and crashed on their sofa, not an unusual occurrence. Merlin attempted some sort of change of garment appropriate for slumber but found himself equal parts incapable and uninterested.

He scratched a note to himself to remind him the next morning: “Britons never will be slaves. Arthur can kiss my ass. Model!”

Comments

[tama_abi]

Hey !

I'm loving it a lot, but I just thought to let you know that maybe putting a link to the next part at the end of each part should be a good idea ^^