Work Text:
Halfway through June, they've settled into a pattern. The lazy, loose pattern of long days and warm evenings that the season brought long before the calendar declared it officially summer.
Wednesdays looked like this:
Merlin had taken a GA position that gave him hours in the library; on Wednesdays he was there from noon until four o'clock. Arthur tended to do his research in the morning and early afternoon so he'd be finished in time to meet Merlin for a light meal. Usually, he fixed sandwiches or salad and they'd eat on the lawns in front of the library, stretched out on the grass or on an old sheet if the weather had been damp. Afterward, Arthur headed over to fulfill his noble duty to try and assist the English department's ill-fated intramural soccer team, with Merlin playing some weeks, others just watching and shouting to Arthur to not be a prat to the rest of the team.
Today, Wednesday looked like this:
Grey, rainy, and with the heavy, hot gloom that accompanied a few days in a row of summer storms. It also had Merlin working an earlier shift at the library to fill in for a friend on vacation. Arthur drove him there at eight o'clock, sat in the building reading until noon, when they walked to the university center for lunch, ducking beneath awnings and shivering in damp tee shirts after having escaped the steamy summer midday.
The showers held off for a while after lunch, yet the sky remained a dull grey and tension hummed in the air, signs of an oncoming storm. Merlin disappeared into Arthur's bedroom when they got back, mumbling something about hating mornings, and left Arthur to his spread of early modern drama textbooks and old syllabi in the living room.
Somehow, Arthur had managed to inherit the survey of Medieval and Renaissance Drama summer course from Gaius, who'd managed to obtain research funding and was spending the summer in England. Not that Arthur wasn't grateful for the summer teaching opportunity, though he did suspect his destiny was to teach classes with very large, very heavy, very expensive anthologies for their text books.
So far, he had a makeshift syllabus, written on a legal pad, and nearly every Medieval and Renaissance drama book he owned open on the coffee table. The Bevington edition of Medieval Drama he'd wanted for the class was out of print, and while the Blackwell anthology he'd ordered would do fine, his desk copy hadn't arrived from the publisher yet. At least he had his own copy of the Norton's English Renaissance Drama to work from while he waited for the books to come in.
Balancing the legal pad and syllabi from three courses on drama he'd taken at different points in his academic career, Arthur looked up to see Merlin standing in the doorway between the sitting room and the corridor. He had on dark green boxers with tiny white penguins on them and a tee shirt left over from Arthur's own undergraduate years at Villa Alba University. Combined with his mess of rumpled hair and bewildered expression, the effect was rather endearing.
"I thought you'd sleep longer than forty minutes."
Merlin blinked at him. "Too hot to sleep."
"I can turn on the air conditioning."
"Hm. No. Because then it's like an icebox."
"You're grumpy when you fall asleep in the middle of the day." So Merlin couldn't catch the smile on Arthur's face, he ducked his head and went back to fiddling with essay due dates.
Arthur got a grumble in reply to his statement and Merlin wandered into the kitchen. He returned with two glasses – one of ice water and another of orange juice – and shoved a few books off the sofa to settle in next to Arthur.
"Wait. Is that the one with the sheep?" Peering over Arthur's shoulder, Merlin nodded toward the handwritten list of course readings.
"… the sheep?"
Merlin nodded, drank about half his glass of orange juice, and pointed to the middle of the page. "Yeah. The one they steal? And there's… they think it's a baby? And then there's the baby Jesus?"
"Ah. Right. Yes, that's the Second Shepherd's Play."
"Leave that on."
"Really?"
"It's hilarious." Merlin downed the rest of his orange juice and leaned in closer to Arthur. "Your handwriting is atrocious."
"So you've mentioned. And it's not. You just can't read script."
"Not when it's minuscule. Nobody can read it when it looks like that."
"Grumpy," Arthur muttered, turning to nuzzle into Merlin's rumpled hair and making a curious sound when Merlin tensed next to him. "What?"
Merlin shrugged. He put his glass down, picked up Arthur's copy of Middleton and Dekker's The Roaring Girl to flip through, and tensed again at the sound of low, distant thunder. "Is this one funny?"
"Well, it's a comedy."
"So was The Shoemaker's Holiday. Supposedly." Merlin turned to read the back of the book. "No sheep?"
"There's cross-dressing."
"No cross-dressing sheep, though?"
"Only the Middle Ages put sheep in any sort of clothing," Arthur pointed out. The tension kept Merlin's shoulders stiff even after Arthur slid an arm around him, though he didn't move away from Arthur on the sofa. "All right?"
"Yeah, fine."
Arthur frowned, but didn't say anything else, and instead took to stroking Merlin's hair while he started to annotate his syllabus draft. They probably could do with putting on the air conditioning, what with how hot and humid the afternoon was getting, and how Merlin was slowly curling himself in closer to Arthur. Close enough that Arthur could feel how he was relaxing enough to doze off, his breathing slow and his head heavy against Arthur's shoulder.
A clap of thunder, loud and sudden, jerked Merlin away from Arthur. The scared, wild look in his eyes stopped the amused laugh from even forming in Arthur's throat and he reached out to touch Merlin's hair again.
"Hey… "
"Hey, sorry." Merlin looked bashful for a moment before his gaze flickered to the window. He tensed against Arthur and stayed that way until the next clap of thunder passed. "Hate that…"
"Thunderstorms?"
"The thunder part, anyway."
There was a minute, maybe half a minute, during which Merlin took a few sips from his glass of ice water and Arthur watched Merlin. Watched the curve of his back as he leaned forward in his seat, watched the pale skin at his throat as he drank, watched and thought just how endearing things like his penguin boxers and incredible bed hair had become over the past few months.
Arthur pressed the side of his hand to Merlin's back and slid it slowly down the length of his spine, rubbing his hand more firmly at the center, and smiled at the quiet, chest-deep sound of pleasure it drew from Merlin.
Before Merlin could say anything, before he could offer any explanation about why he hated thunderstorms or any comment on the way Arthur was touching him, before the slow, approaching rumble of thunder turned to another crackling in the sky above their heads, Arthur pressed his lips to Merlin's shoulder.
"Just relax…"
"Yeah, I'm all right." The bashful look was back on Merlin's face again, tempered by a smile at the edge of his lips and the corners of his yes. "It's stupid."
"It's not. Well, maybe a bit." Arthur kissed him on the shoulder again and put his legal pad aside. "Unless it's some sort of deep rooted, childhood trauma?"
Merlin laughed, the sound deep and warm, and brushed his bare foot against Arthur's. "No. I just… I hate it. It's loud and scary."
Arthur would be lying if he said he didn't sort of love this, the way their lives had fallen into a pattern with each other and how that let him learn what scared and soothed Merlin. How, for example, sliding his hand up Merlin's tee shirt to stroke his stomach would have Merlin melting against him. Or how, sitting here on his sofa, in the middle of the gloomy, rainy summer afternoon, Arthur could thumb the hollow of Merlin's hipbone beneath the waist of his boxers, and that would melt something inside him, too.
"Why don't I turn on the air," Arthur murmured the words into Merlin's neck, "and we can both go into the bedroom?"
"And, what, cuddle?"
"If you like."
Merlin tilted his head, started to reply, and gave a little shudder as the storm rumbled outside. He curled into Arthur's touch. "Maybe. Just to start with. Then we can move on to other, more distracting things."
"Or we could start with the distracting things."
Merlin laughed again, then his mouth covered Arthur's, warm and not at all bashful, and his hand settled at Arthur's waist. "We could do that."