Unexpected (Merlin)
It wasn't that Lancelot was a particularly bad person, he just had a strong affinity for flight and self-discovery. Merlin looked at the note he'd left -- Have won the counsel and time of a cloistered sect of Buddhist monks in Hainan, China, am off to climb mountain and rediscover my center. Oo mi tuo fuo -- and reflected that, at least, his loud and angry shouting about Lancelot faffing off to God knows where without even leaving a note was beginning to sink in.
"Fucking perfect," Merlin told the note, and then the rest of his empty apartment, and then to the pregnancy test in his hand and its blinking digital plus sign. "Just fucking perfect."
***
Day 1
(At least I think it's day 1, I haven't been to see the doctor yet, and I'm daft enough that I probably missed all the early signs; oh God you're going to turn into one of those crack babies that comes out of the womb with preexisting addictions.)
Gwen -- my best friend, your de-facto aunt; I haven't any siblings -- tells me writing a journal to you may be therapeutic, although I suspect she might be doing it just to get me to stop calling her and shouting in her ear. So! Hello, embryo/fetus, my name is Merlin, your father; your other father is hopefully falling off of a mountain on the southernmost tip of China, where apparently there are no telephones but plenty of monks.
***
Having spent a small fortune on pregnancy tests and bankrupted himself of all optimism otherwise over the weekend, Merlin dragged into work frozen and fecund (oh God) on Monday fantasizing about throwing Lancelot off the side of a mountain himself. The thought of Lancelot's baffled, handsome face twisted in zenlike wondering as he fell to his violent, painful, and fully-aware death comforted him in the elevator, and all the way up to the 34th floor, where as soon as the metal jaws of the lift opened he was assaulted on all sides by junior editors.
"Judy Stimson is threatening to kill herself unless she gets the same marketing roll-out that Twlight got," Edgar said, audibly panicked.
Unwinding his scarf, Merlin snatched a packet of files away from Andrea, who scuttled off, BlackBerrying frantically and holding another sheaf of documents between her teeth as she teetered on death-defying heels.
"Tell Judy Stimson that she can go right ahead -- her marketing was decided in-contract about a half-decade of revision and re-revision ago," Merlin said, taking a deep gulp of air through his nose to fight the sudden upwelling of nausea. From the corner of his eye, he could see Lakshmi zooming toward him, holding a marked-up copy of The Children's Book From Hell. Preemptively, Merlin said, "No."
"I've toned it down quite a bit," Lakshmi pleaded, falling into step with Merlin as he wound through the corridors toward his office. "And honestly, you can't have every single book for young readers being about bloody rabbits and penguins."
"Nor can you market anything titled Beezelbeb's Babes," Merlin replied, tartly executing a courageous dash into his office and slamming the door shut and locked before anybody else could dash in after him. Not that it prevented Lakshmi from yelling through it, "Fine! But you're abandoning the opportunity to be a groundbreaking children's editor!" or Edgar reminding him, "Meeting at 11, and Delphinia says Horace says Bronwen said his royal highness in a mood."
"Sod off, all of you!" Merlin replied, and collapsed behind his desk. The absolute last thing he needed was Arthur in a snit today, because Merlin could either be pregnant out of wedlock or deal with Arthur but he couldn't be pregnant out of wedlock and deal with Arthur's terrible mood.
There were a thousand emails awaiting his attention (all but three wallowing in his inbox were spangled with multiple exclamation points: URGENT URGENT URGENT) and the red light on his desk phone was blinking ominously. There was a pile of slush stacked by his chair and a half-dozen invitations for book launches and readings, themed parties for children's book series' about anthropomorphic objects and animals and a small mountain of trade paperback teen vampire romance novels awaiting his ritual burning.
"Right," Merlin said, resigned, and dived into it.
***
He was the last person in to the 11 a.m. meeting, having arrived at precisely 11:20 after being waylaid by no fewer than two interns, one hysterically-sobbing cover artist, two of their company lawyers and then being forced to take a long detour in order to vomit out three-quarters of all the food he had ever eaten.
"Nice of you to join us, Emrys," Arthur said from the head of the conference room table -- a feat for sure given that it was round specifically to foster an egalitarian attitude, an obvious relic of the old regime. "I hope our meeting isn't cutting into your valuable entanglement of personal business during work hours."
Merlin was frequently torn over whether Arthur Pendragon was more hateful for being devastatingly attractive or a bastard, and today he felt the latter fiercely, a sour burn in the back of his throat.
"Sorry, a little under the weather," he said, and slouched into the last remaining open seat -- the one immediately to Arthur's left. It spoke to Arthur's personality that despite his being golden-haired and blue-eyed and distractingly well-muscled, only the bravest, the sluttiest, or the least frequently trapped in close proximity ever volunteered to sit at his side, which usually left Merlin stuck with it. It wasn't that people didn't like Arthur -- that honor was held more or less exclusively by Merlin -- but he could be a bully and had a tongue nearly as sharp as his aim with binder clips, by which almost everybody above a certain management tier had been struck at least once or twice. Merlin once or twice daily.
Arthur gave him a brief, appraising look before turning back to the conference room at large.
"Returning to our earlier topic, Lakshmi, again and hopefully for the last time, no on the God damn Satan worship for minors book already.
Lakshmi turned a fascinating color red. "This is just like when you guys passed on Harry Potter!"
The meeting more or less deteriorated from that point, and Merlin zoned into and out of focus, hearing small snatches of conversation: the art-nonfiction editor making an impassioned plea about something that had to do with Danish rococo, someone from popular fiction asking about something about boys? Teenaged boys? Merlin kept drifting half to sleep and being seized by nauseating panic every time he remembered, oh God, he was pregnant! And Lancelot was unreachable! And he was unlikely to fall off of a mountain and die, even! And that Merlin was fucked utterly fucked.
"Merlin," Arthur snapped suddenly. "What on Earth is -- will you stop hyperventilating?"
"What? No I'm not," Merlin lied, and only then realized he sounded extremely high-pitched and breathless for somebody not at all hyperventilating. "Okay, I might be. But just a little."
Arthur gave him a look that would have tanned leather while it was still technically affixed to a steer as a living organ.
"Right," Merlin said, getting out of his chair and hooking a thumb toward the hallway. "I'll just -- I'll just go sequester myself in my office so as not to spread my disease, right?" he offered, and fairly ran from the room.
***
Lancelot, you fucking slapper! I have no idea where you are and neither does the British consulate in Beijing or in fucking Hong Kong. But look. Wherever you are -- please, please as soon as you get this message (dear God, tell me wherever the fuck you are has internet cafes) please, please call me post-haste because I could play coy with it or whatever, but sod that: I'm pregnant and I cannot bloody believe you've fucking abandoned me just after you've knocked me up.
Merlin.
***
He hid, for a while, in the men's room, staring at his reflection in the handicap stall sink mirror and feeling profound despair. But having not replenished his body's supply of things to throw up violently, Merlin was mostly trapped into a nauseated, indistinct sense of terribleness, and so eventually returned to his office to feel that way more privately.
The pile of slush and memos and trade paperbacks had somehow grown in his short absence, and nestled among them was a dark blue mug, a stark white ceramic chip on its handle, the peppermint tea inside steaming away inside. Merlin fell upon it.
"How do you even know that tea's all right to drink?" came Arthur's voice, and when Merlin looked up, the boy king was leaning against the doorway to Merlin's office, looking bemused.
"It would be fruitless to poison me -- everybody who might want to works for me," Merlin argued. "If I died, all this work would just be left to one of them."
Arthur smirked. "Maybe they wanted you out of the way. Get that promotion."
Merlin made a face. "Doubtful," he said, tone mild, and watched Arthur roll his eyes and walk away, striding purposefully down the corridor, expensive slacks molding around his gorgeous arse in painfully distracting ways.
His stomach made a strange, yearning flip, and Merlin glanced down at it, wondering if it was his digestive system or his brand new parasite.
"He'll only break your heart you know," he said to his embryo/fetus, just to be safe. "I know he's terribly attractive, but it's really, really not worth the years of therapy."
Edgar strolled in a bit later, divvying up a half of the slush pile, and Merlin smiled at him faintly and said, "Thanks, by the way, for the tea," and Edgar only gave him a hassled look and darted away, leaving Merlin to his panic and fast-cooling tea and no answer from Lancelot, no matter how many times Merlin refreshed his email or how hard he stared at his phone.
It was Wednesday, which meant naturally that Gwen was waiting for him in his flat with Chinese takeaway and a tape of that week's Strictly Come Dancing when he got there at the end of the day. Only this time she was also wearing a solemn, worried look on her face that could only mean she wanted to have a meaningful, serious conversation of the sort Merlin avoided with every fiber of his being.
"Gwen, I don't want to talk about it," Merlin snapped at her, throwing down his shoulderbag of multicolored pens and a laptop and digital tape recorder and six manuscripts he didn't feel compelled to burn.
"Now that you've had some time to think over this calmly, it's probably time to make some decisions," she lectured.
Merlin made a straight line for the takeaway bags. She'd ordered ma po tofu and egg foo young and those horrid (delicious) fried fake scallops Merlin felt were probably laced with cocaine and Merlin felt a moment of deep, intense love for her. "Well, I've decided that I'm obviously going to be forced to kill Lancelot," Merlin said, conversational.
"Not a chance," Gwen replied. "I've said it once, I'll say it again: as soon as you're done with him, I'm next in line."
Merlin stared at her until she blushed, and it bloomed over her pale, golden-brown cheek.
"I mean -- like, when I say that, I mean that of course, if you were ever sick of him, as a joke, I might give him a go. Only I mean, not like, "give him a go" in the classic sense, rather than as a joke-y sort of interpretation, since naturally Lancelot is your boyfriend and I'd never -- "
Rolling his eyes, Merlin said, "Right. Look, Gwen, can't I just eat first?"
"Will you keep the baby?" Gwen asked, flat-out.
Merlin choked on a scallop, and after Gwen came over and whacked him on the back a few times to get it dislodged from his trachea, he managed to croak, "Gwen, I'm not sure abortion is an appropriate dinner topic."
"You shouldn't do anything drastic until you've gotten in touch with Lancelot," Gwen plowed onward. "As, obviously, it's his baby, too." She paused. "It is his baby, right?"
"No, it's Arthur's," Merlin said, and Gwen began choking on her tongue, so he shouted, "Of course it's bloody Lancelot's! Gwen!"
"I'm sorry!" she cried. "It's just -- you do have that crush on Arthur and -- "
Merlin stabbed at his lo mein viciously. "I do not have a crush on Arthur."
Ruffled and looking thoroughly annoyed, Gwen said, "Look, whatever. I think we should make you an appointment with an OB, get somebody to run a last round of tests, yeah? Make certain that everything's all right and maybe talk about some of your options."
"I thought I wasn't supposed to coat-hanger the fetus until I could confirm with Lancelot," Merlin told her through a mouthful of tofu and felt immediately terrible about it because obviously his embryo hadn't ever done anything to deserve such ill will and tasteless jokes and even if he would be a terrible parent and shouldn't even be one, that was still a fairly shite thing to say. Also, Gwen was looking at him as if he'd just murdered a pair of the queen's corgies. "Er, sorry about that."
She gave him a suspicous look. "I'll write that off as hormones."
"That," Merlin told her, pointing, "that is going to become annoying very fast."
***
Merlin’s first day as an assistant editor at Albion Books he turned his ankle on a stack of slush, been an hour late for his appointment with HR, mispronounced the name of his direct supervisor and assumed that the admin—who of course controlled his access to office supplies, fax machines, printers and ruled his copying account—was a woman simply because his name was Leslie and he was very fey. Years later, Merlin was still convinced it was the worst first day of work possible, exacerbated by the fact that as he’d left the staff meeting, feeling helplessly exhausted already at just past noon, Arthur Pendragon himself had waylaid him in a hallway and said, “Well, you seem painfully dumb and underqualified for whatever position we’ve hired you—come with me.”
He’d spent the next eight hours making his way through Arthur’s cracked, deranged, incomprehensible filing system while Arthur sat on a phone and shouted at people in three languages, including appallingly accented Japanese.
Since, through a combination of accidental promotion and attrition, Merlin had moved from assistant editor to an associate editor to an editor and then senior editor. It was wasted effort and time on the part of HR and the printers to whom they sent away for business cards, because all of his official documents should have just written down his position as “Arthur Pendragon’s dogsbody.”
Arthur had a secretary of course. He had two. But it was Merlin who kept his schedule and who was obliged to join him for business lunches and travel alongside Arthur for particularly terrible business meetings and conferences at which Arthur invariably turned up in a terrible mood and required Merlin’s extensive coddling.
Worse even than that, instead of sympathizing with Merlin’s unendurable plight, almost everybody at Albion interpreted it as preferential treatment, and if it weren’t for the steady stream of gorgeous women and men that had decorated Arthur’s arm over the years, the gossip might have been even uglier.
Ah, Merlin thought with a rueful smile, and they were always gorgeous.
Over the years, there had been Sonia, with her ice-blonde hair and ice-blue eyes and pursed, narrow mouth as she’d surveyed the publishing office, dressed in a plunging black gown with diamonds dripping from her ears and down the white wings of her collarbones. Afterward, there was Gareth, who had a laugh even Merlin found charming, and dark, swallowing eyes and dark, curling hair. He had lasted almost two months before Arthur had appeared in a collage of society pictures in the Tatler with a redhead named Portia, who three weeks after that called Merlin a, quote, “bloody idiot!” when he had to interrupt she and Arthur as they were heading out to tell him one of their binders had gone into default and that Arthur was needed to sort it all out. Merlin never saw her again after that, but when he’d asked after her, mostly out of spite, a month later, Arthur had only said, “She’s not worth your consideration, Merlin,” and that had been the end of that.
Most recently, Arthur had been spotted at the opera and one of the more pretentious Gordon Ramsey kitchens with someone the two of the marketing girls had described as “stunningly gorgeous” and “the stuff of visceral homoerotic sex dreams,” so Merlin assumed Arthur was well over that broken heart, too.
It was late, evening twinkling into the time of night when the sky was midnight blue fabic overhead, when stars would peer out if London weren’t so filled with light pollution. From Merlin’s opened office door and from peering between stacks of discarded — form letter rejection — and perhaps interesting — likely eventual emailed rejection — manuscripts, Merlin could see Arthur pace around the inside of his office as he held court via speakerphone. His tie was loose and his sleeves rolled up, his suit jacket discarded and the cuffs of his impeccably tailored pants dragging on the carpeted floors, shoes abandoned in favor of toeing the wool loops with gray-socked toes. If the workload went much longer, Merlin thought, finishing off the last of his email inbox and reaching for the light on his desk, Arthur might check up and down the deserted hallways before slipping on a pair of glasses, settling in behind his desk to burn the midnight oil, and Merlin might find him the next morning, asleep in a slump at his computer, long lashes a shadow across his cheek.
He was still pulling on his coat by the time he walked past the flung-open door of Arthur’s office, and he paused a moment, leaning against the frame as Arthur said, “Right, thanks then,” and disconnected the call. His eyes looked bloodshot when he looked back up and then startled.
“Merlin,” he said. “What’re you still doing here?”
“Preparing entries for the Nibbies and the Branford Boase,” Merlin told him, fussing with his coat, his scarf. “We’ve got a half-dozen children’s and young readers I think have a chance.”
Arthur actually smiled at that. “Might be the most of any of our imprints.”
“I am exceedingly good at my job,” Merlin bragged, because something in Arthur made him unable to resist, and also he was happy — it was a long day but a good one, and filing out forms and agonizing over which books to nominate took his mind away from things over which he had no control, away from Lancelot and away from unplanned pregnancies and what his mother would inevitably say about the entire business.
The smile on Arthur’s mouth turned challenging. “You keep talking yourself up I’m going to dispatch you to snatch us a Booker Prize.”
“I said I was exceedingly good,” Merlin scolded, “not a miracle worker.”
It wasn’t often Arthur grinned the way he did now, madly, and so Merlin forgave himself for flushing bright red and finding himself suddenly at a loss for words.
“Noted,” Arthur allowed, and glancing at his watch, said, “Well, it’s half-ten, I’m done for the night — interested in getting dinner?”
Merlin’s mouth went dry. “Together?” he croaked.
Arthur paused, halfway through shrugging on his coat, a dark, gray-wool duster lined with gray-blue silk that had felt like water against the pads of Merlin’s fingers, when he’d taken it from Arthur’s hands once. There was, for a moment, a flicker of darkness in Arthur’s eyes before he recovered and smirked, saying, “How silly. Of course — you’ll need to be running home to your knight in shining armor, after all. Forget I said — ”
“Lancelot’s not around,” Merlin blurted out and didn’t know why he’d done it.
Arthur stared at him. “Not around,” he repeated carefully.
Letting out a fluttery, too-nervous breath, Merlin laughed. “China. He’s — he’s fucked off to some island in China. I haven’t heard from him in a week.” Merlin felt his fingers go tight in his scarf, nails in the loops of yarn. “He’s meditating.”
“In that case,” Arthur told him, sweeping Merlin from the room with one hand on the small of Merlin’s back — the sort of touch that happened often enough it felt both easy and alarming — turning out the office lights, “then I see no reason I shouldn’t require you to entertain me during dinner.”
They ate at Awana on Sloane Avenue, and Merlin laughed until his sides hurt, listening to Arthur issue absolutely and unforgivably cruel character defamations of Albion Books’ finance department. He grew shy when Arthur asked him with genuine interest in the award submissions, made Merlin to promise to set aside a copy of each nomination for Arthur’s perusal. They talked about Lakshmi.
“I can’t believe you hired that woman,” Arthur complained, sending their server — a blonde nymphette who’d favored Merlin with a number of jealous looks throughout the night — for coffee and a desert menu. “She’s clearly mental.”
“I did no such thing,” Merlin complained. “She was here when I got here, working as an unpaid intern or some such thing, and I only — ”
“Promoted her internally and gave her the agency to start pitching books about childhood Satantic worship,” Arthur interrupted, wry. “You’ve got to learn how to fire people, Merlin. Honestly.”
Scowling, Merlin said, “You know, sometimes I forget I hate you, and then.”
Arthur laughed, and took the menu when it arrived and ordered three different kinds of cake — over the top, as usual, and Merlin managed to stay angry an entire three extra minutes before they were brought two forks.
“Remember those books,” Arthur warned him, pulling up the curb in front of Merlin’s apartment block an hour later, and Merlin called out, “Thanks for the ride,” and “Of course, my lord,” over his shoulder as he forced himself out of the car and into the dark of the London street.
Gwen was wrong, Merlin knew, about his crush on Arthur. It’d gone beyond that ages ago, years ago.