[✔] Sides (a merthur soulmate au fanfiction)

Chapter 4

His fingers caught at Arthur's steel vambrace. It was directly under his nose, fitted on Arthur's forearm, and Merlin couldn't see it properly without crossing his eyes at a painful angle, but he had cleaned it too many times in the past to know that its embossed dragon figure had a considerably large ruby for an eye.

He clawed it open, but when the steel left Arthur's arm and fell down to the stone floor, it rang hollowly without any magic.

"Arthur, you're not yourself," Merlin rasped, his attempts to remove Arthur's hand from his neck getting weaker and weaker as his strength began to wane out. Arthur's blood red eyes were boring into his eyes, and Merlin let out a quiet hopeless cry. He was growing desperate. He needed to save his best friend, he must save him, but it would seem impossible with Arthur being very determined to kill him like that.

"I can kill you, right here, right now–" Arthur began hissing, but in the midst of his panic, Merlin landed his eyes on the boar head decorating the wall directly above him.

No. No, impossible–

He couldn't use magic in front of the Crown Prince of Camelot, it would be suicide! It didn't matter if Arthur was being enchanted or he was merely trying to save himself from suffocating, if Arthur was still conscious in there somewhere, he would discover Merlin's magic–

Arthur's grip tightened and black spots started to invade his sight. Any second now he would lose his consciousness, if not die altogether; if he didn't do it now, he would just die in Arthur's hands.

"Feall!" [2]

Merlin just had enough strength to cause the boar head to fall on Arthur's form, landing squarely on his chest and trapping him on the floor with its tusks. He just hoped to the gods above that Arthur thought it was merely a stroke of luck that a wall decoration should land square on his person, or simply wouldn't remember it.

Arthur fell, the back of his head hitting the ground hard enough to send someone into comatose, but he merely groaned and shook the butterflies out of his head. Merlin himself almost toppled down to his sides as soon as Arthur's hand left his throat, coughing and gasping for air, burning his throat as he did so. He barely had the time to cushion his fall with his arm. Falling on his sides, Merlin continued coughing.

Arthur groaned and moved weakly under the weight of the boar head, pulling Merlin back to the present. He leapt to Arthur's arms and began stripping off all of the jewels on his person. His other vambrace, his dagger with an emerald adorning the hilt, the four rings that snaked around his four right fingers–

At first he thought it was merely ink– Arthur probably knocked a bottle of ink over his hand and forgot to wash under his rings– but then it read like something along the lines of 'of the same coin', written in a handwriting so familiar to Merlin it could've been his own.

Merlin averted his eyes –focus, they had to deal with a serious business here, he couldn't exactly busied himself over some trivia such as the inappropriateness of glimpsing the Soulpoetry of the Crown Prince of Camelot, focus– but still threw the rings across the room where they joined the other jewelries.

Merlin brought out his hands and hoarsely yelled, "Brecan!" [3] There was an explosion, sending pieces of steel and precious stone across the room.

Another bang followed. The boar head that was pinning Arthur to the ground was now crashing against a cabinet, knocking over vases and splintering the wooden furniture itself. The enchantment still held; Arthur had single-handedly thrown it himself.