Camelot’s Sweethearts Author: [info]mariana_oconnor Movie Prompt: America’s Sweethearts (can you see where I got the title from?) Pairing: Merlin/Arthur overall with Will/Merlin, Arthur/Sophia, past Arthur/Morgana (they aren’t related), background Morgana/Lancelot, background Gwen/OMC Rating: R Word Count: Just under 63000 … don’t look at me like that. Spoilers/Warnings: Uhm, let’s just say the whole of series one, for good luck Author's Notes: This is the little fic that ran away with my inner editor and killed them, brutally. Many, many, thanks to [info]wrennette who did a spectacular job of betaing every part of it and checking for continuity errors and everything and [info]binglejells who gave another part a thorough looking over during my ‘aargh deadline!’ panic. Any mistakes left are my own. Also – I know nothing about the film industry. Third I do not own any of the things mentioned in this fic. Nor do the opinions of the characters on anything from religion to John Barrowman necessarily reflect my own. Thank god it’s over. Summary: Arthur is a film star, Merlin is his personal assistant who might, possibly be head over heels in love with him. However, Arthur’s more interested in his ex, Morgana, and then the mysterious Sophia to notice… Oh, and Will is awesome. Everyone knows that the lives of film stars are glamorous. The glitz, the parties, the endless stream of people trying to worm their way into your affections. True, the life has its down sides; the paparazzi, the insane fans… but everyone knows the pluses outnumber the minuses and everyone envies the riches and the fame. The lives of film stars’ personal assistants – or slaves as they are affectionately known – are not quite so glamorous. Every film star, to quote a cliché, is like a swan: it glides beautifully on top of the water, but hidden away, the legs are kicking frantically. There’s just one thing that no one ever mentions: Those legs never belong to the film star. The legs that we are interested in belong to one Merlin Emrys. Son of Hunith Emrys, born in a small village in the Peak District called Ealdor, not that anyone really cared what his name was. All they cared about was the man he worked for: Arthur Pendragon. Yes, that Arthur Pendragon. Yes, star of Valiant and also that curious little indie film whose name no one ever remembers. Golden boy of Hollywood. Most famous British actor in years. On the cover of every magazine you could be on the cover of. That Arthur Pendragon, who couldn’t get dressed in the morning without his personal assistant selecting his outfit and making sure his breakfast was cooked exactly right. Merlin was best known for being ‘that guy with the sticky-out ears who lurks in the back of photos’, if he even got that much recognition. He too had graced the cover of many trashy tabloids (most of which pictures were stuck on his mother’s wall, to his mortification) but no one really seemed to care about that. In fact, all people ever asked him about was Arthur. “Can I have Arthur’s autograph?” “Is Arthur going to go for the role in his father’s new film?” “Will Arthur be ready by five?” To which the answers were, in order: no, yes and highly unlikely, given that some idiot had decided to let Arthur do his own hair, which always took him forever. And if he wasn’t answering questions about Arthur, he was answering questions from Arthur, which was a challenge in and of itself. Screaming teenage girls and weak-kneed middle aged women lined the streets at any event Arthur was going to. He was charming, smiled in a way that made any sane person’s heart (gay, straight, bi, asexual) skip a beat and never swerved from his ‘golden boy’ image. None of the public knew that, behind the scenes, he was the most demanding, pig-headed, arrogant, bloody-minded son of a bitch who had ever walked the earth. Most of the time. Those people who did know offered Merlin as much pity as he could handle, mixed with a certain amount of awe. He knew that he was the first PA (whipping boy) of Arthur’s to last more than a year, and he also knew that every one before him (without fail) had ended up in some sort of therapy afterwards. But considering most of them had been the type of Hollywood wannabe that clung desperately to Arthur’s coat tails to try and make it on their own, he was not entirely surprised. Merlin, on the other hand, had just wanted a job with reasonable compensation for his time, a roof over his head and the possibility of travel, someday, perhaps. The ‘on call’ 27 hours a day, eight days a week part was an undesirable side effect. He had been meant to work as a cleaner in the studio where Arthur was filming his latest epic, The Labyrinth of Gedref, but he had stumbled into the wrong room by accident and narrowly avoided a low flying glass of water. It turned out that the room he stumbled into was Arthur’s dressing room and the glass of water had been meant for Gregory, his predecessor, but Merlin had not found that out until later. He had berated the man sitting across from him without even looking up, and proceeded to clean up around the broken glass, telling Arthur (and in his defence, he had not known it was Arthur at that point, not that he would have done anything differently if he had known) that if he was going to throw glasses deliberately then he was going to clean up his own mess. The ensuing argument had lasted a good half an hour, during which time Gaius, the publicist for the studio, had come in and watched in amusement. Ten minutes later Merlin had been promoted without having any say in the matter and his life had taken a turn for the decidedly bizarre. If he’d known arguing would get him a job, he would have tried it in his first hundred or so interviews. He had currently been working for Arthur for three years, although it seemed like more, and he really could not imagine being anywhere else. Arthur was a self-centred arsehole, but… – and it was a really big but – Merlin was sort of, kind of, slightly, maybe a little, head over heels in love with him, which sort of, kind of, sucked. But that was the way it went. Arthur was annoyingly handsome and had the most irritating habit of being fundamentally a good person beneath all of the self-obsessed bullshit, and Merlin was his harassed PA. Fairytale endings only happened in the rom-coms. Not a genre Merlin had ever had an affinity with. All of which sort of explained what Merlin was doing walking down a corridor towards Arthur’s current dressing room at seven am on his birthday when he had had many far better offers (okay one far better offer, involving his friend Will and a pack of beer). There was a cup of coffee in each of his hands, a handful of letters tucked under one of his arms and a brown paper bag containing a croissant hanging from between his teeth. “Merlin!” There was a familiar voice behind him and he turned, paying very careful attention to the coffees he was carrying. He groaned, Gaius was walking towards him down the corridor and the expression on the older man’s face indicated that this was going to be a bad birthday. From that first instance where Gaius had seamlessly convinced him to take the job, he always got that look on his face when he was about to talk to Merlin about something truly terrible. “Mmph,” Merlin mumbled around the brown paper in greeting. Gaius nodded absently and waved a newspaper front page in front of his eyes, too fast and too close for him to read it. That was also a bad sign. Nothing ever flustered Gaius; there was never a grey hair out of place in his, admittedly slightly disturbing, hairstyle (Merlin had tried telling him once that he should get a haircut, but had only received the Gaius-eyebrow-raising-of-doom for his troubles). If the contents of this paper were enough to get the publicist agitated, then it would be enough to put Arthur into one of his sulky moods. Merlin hated Arthur’s sulky moods. They usually ended up with everyone yelling at him because no one dared to yell at the superstar. “Have you seen this?” Gaius demanded dropping the paper to his side to glare at Merlin as though the headline, whatever it was, was his fault. “Nhn,” Merlin replied with a shake of his head. The brown paper bag was beginning to get a little damp with saliva, despite his best efforts, and he knew Arthur was going to complain. “It’s not good, Merlin,” Gaius intoned, and his heart dropped. ‘not good’ usually meant catastrophically bad. “Read it.” He held the paper out for Merlin to take and the only response the younger man could give was an unimpressed look, and it took Gaius a second to realise that his hands were a little too busy, and he held it up for Merlin to see. Lovebirds Back Together? The headline read and, before Merlin even looked at the picture he knew that this was every bit as bad as Gaius had implied. The black and white photograph depicted a man who was definitely Arthur sitting in the back of a car, and a woman, who could be no one other than Morgana Le Fay, his ex-girlfriend and fellow superstar, getting in next to him. Internally, Merlin let out a string of expletives, externally, he tried to look as innocent as possible. He should have known this would come back to bite him in the arse. Avoiding Gaius’ gaze, he read on. The break up two years ago of heart-throb Arthur Pendragon, star of The Moment of Truth and Valiant, and Morgana Lefay, Valiant and To Kill the King, had fans around the country… he skipped that bit, he knew that bit. Not only had he been there for the whole of that ill-advised romance, he had also read all the coverage of it, and its aftermath, in the papers, and seen it on TV, and the Internet. …Yesterday, our reporter caug...
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