lili_pad | Mothers Always Know

Mothers Always Know

Monday, February 23rd, 2009 05:20 am

Title: Mothers Always Know
Author:

lilithilien
Fandom/Characters: Merlin, Bradley/Colin
Word Count/Rating: ~500 words/PG
Summary: Bradley can't tell his mum about Colin.
Disclaimer: LIES! This is completely made up and has nothing to do with the real actor or his family!
A/N: I went to bed thinking about the Merlin cast making their way down to France and suddenly this appeared. It then refused to wait until morning when it could be properly written and betaed. So here it is -- it's just a wee thing, but it wanted to come out, and I hope it amuses you.

"So Bradley," asks his mum the night before he leaves, while folding the crumpled shirts he's turfed into his suitcase, "what are you most looking forward to when you get back to France?"

He knows she only wants to hear about the haute cuisine and the fine wines and the people who were so friendly to him, and she wants to hear that he'll take out the fragile French he's been studying and make himself understood, somehow, without relying on wild gestures and the smile that seems to work no matter what country he's in.

He can't tell her that, most of all, he looks forward to seeing Colin. He can't explain how eager he is to hear that first tentative knock on his door after they've checked into the hotel, or how he wants to see how long it is before that knock becomes a mere formality as Colin pushes his way through, and then disappears altogether. He can't tell her how much he misses going to sleep wound up in tangled sheets and Colin's limbs, and waking up beside him on a cold morning when only his dark tousled hair peeks out above the covers. And he can't tell her how he longs for them to race up to the turrets of the Chateau in the morning's pinky dawn, before the tourists arrive and out of the eyes of cast and crew, just so he can hear Colin say something ridiculous like we really might be in Camelot.

And he certainly can't tell his mum that he even looks forward to the awkward conversation they're bound to have soon after arriving, that are you sure then? and yeah, well, if you're sure... and it was okay before, yeah?, before they slip back into that comfortably unlabelled thing that they had last year when Colin would enter his room without knocking, and sleep beside him like a well-stoked furnace, and wrap the sheets like fishermen's knots around his legs. If he can't explain even to himself why he wants them to both say yeah, no strings and pretend that it's casual when every night they prove that it's anything but, how could he hope she'd understand?

So instead he tells her of the fantastic andouillette sausages that Colin could never taste because of his vegetarian nonsense, and of the flamiche tarts and Picardy chevre that Colin practically lived on instead (and that were really quite good), and about the extensive experiments they conducted to find the village's cheapest drinkable wine, and how Colin thinks his French is much better than it really is. And even though he can't tell his mum that what he looks forward to most is seeing Colin again, when she slips a package of warm scones into his bag and whispers, "they're for that boy you work with," he thinks that she might somehow have figured something out.

~~~ The End ~~~

Tags:

Navigation

Page Summary

Expand Cut Tags