Title: Merrily On High
Pairing(s)/Character(s): Morgana/Gwen; background Merlin/Arthur
Warnings: consensual kink
Spoilers: none
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 16,363
Summary: Modern day AU; Morgana falls in love with her best friend. She finds the experience decidedly unpleasant.
Author's Note: My camelotsolstice  fic! It was originally meant to be for seakisst  but she pulled out of the fest  so my poor fic was orphaned! Oh well - people seem to have enjoyed it anyway. Plus it was fun to write a good long Gwen/Morgana fic for once! Beta-ed by the ver-awesome clanne .

“Back!” Morgana dumped a bag of last minute groceries (bread, milk, king size Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut, trail mix and some disgustingly cheap wine) on the floor in the hall, and began to peel off her gloves. “Bloody freezing out there.”

“Right,” Gwen’s voice came from the living room, slightly muffled, “great.”

“You hungry yet?” Morgana shrugged her jacket from her shoulders and shook it, trying to rid it of some of the beads of moisture clinging to its exterior. “Only the chip shop’s closing early with it being Christmas Eve and all – so if you don’t want that now we’re just going to have to have whatever’s in the freezer.”

This didn’t garner an audible response, so Morgana rolled her eyes, kicked off her boots and, picking up the shopping bag, padded through to their kitchen.

“Anybody call whilst I was out?”

“No.”

“No sign of Merlin and Arthur, then?”

“Mm.”

“Well that’s helpful of them, isn’t it?” Morgana sighed. They were meant to be doing Christmas lunch the next day. “When am I meant to know when to put the turkey on? Merlin had better be here early to help – wouldn’t be Christmas without his chestnut stuffing and that takes a good hour to do properly before anything else.”

“Mm.”

Morgana paused, sliding the milk into the fridge next to the champagne, putting the bread in the freezer. Something about Gwen’s voice sounded a little… off. “You okay, babe?”

“What? Oh – yeah,” she still sounded sort of muffled though. Morgana quirked one eyebrow at herself in the reflective surface of the oven’s top. Picking up the Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut, she headed towards the living room next door. “Talk to me, Gwen.”

“I’m fine.” Gwen was hunched over on the sofa, face in her hands, watching the credits for The Snowman scrolling across the TV screen and looking miserable as sin.

She had, most definitely, been crying.

Morgana sighed. “Oh, Gwen…”

“I’m fine,” Gwen’s assertion of this fact was, if possible, even less convincing than it had been the first time around. She managed a quick, watery smile and then scrubbed her eyes with the back of her hand – which really only served to redden them.

“You’re an idiot,” Morgana informed her, fondly, before dropping into the sofa next to her and pulling her close. “A total idiot.”

“It’s just a really sad film,” Gwen informed her, now muffled by Morgana’s arm – before breaking down completely and beginning to sob.

“Yes, I’m sure it is,” Morgana agreed, placing a gentle hand on her back and beginning to rub in soft, soothing circles, “nothing to do with your dad, and this being the first Christmas you’ll have without him, and you feeling so wretched about it you could puke, and me being an insensitive arse who can’t tell when you need a hug more than you need chocolate and trail mix.”

Gwen managed a quick, shaky snort of laughter through her tears. “Nothing to do with it,” she mumbled, huddling closer to her girlfriend and sighing damply into her shoulder.

“I know you always used to watch The Snowman together on Christmas Eve,” Morgana pointed out, “but did you really think it would be a good idea to break it out now?”

“I always watch it on Christmas Eve, though,” Gwen told her, miserably, “every year since I was a baby – I can’t not this year just because – because he isn’t here – ” she gasped and shuddered again, squeezing her eyes closed.

“I know,” Morgana planted a tender kiss on the top of her head, “it’s okay. Come on, come here – ”

They rearranged themselves on the sofa so that Gwen could get more firmly ensconced in Morgana’s arms, curling up together in one corner – Morgana taking care to fit her limbs around and about Gwen’s; holding tight, as if she could contain her grief with her own body.

“I’m sorry,” Gwen mumbled – she had her cheek laid against Morgana’s collarbone, and had curled her fingers about the neck of Morgana’s T-shirt like a child. “It’s been nine months – I thought I would be okay, you know?”

“Nine months is nowhere near enough time for you to be okay,” Morgana assured her, gently. “Grief happens for years, Gwen. You’re going to be allowed to be in bits on Christmas Eve for a long time yet.”

“But I don’t want to be!” Gwen moaned, “I love Christmas – it shouldn’t make me sad! Something is very wrong with a world that has sad Christmases.”

“You wouldn’t be sad all the time,” Morgana promised her, “just take it on a sort of hour by hour basis, okay?”

“Mm,” Gwen sighed, turning up her face to kiss Morgana’s jaw. “I just… I hate feeling like this. I hate how… I hate how it keeps coming back – I’m okay for weeks and weeks and I think I’m finally getting back to normal and then something happens and I’m just a mess…”

“That’s normal.”

“I know, I know…” Gwen huddled closer to her. “Sometimes I think I’m okay and I can accept how – how my life is now. And other times I just… I want him back. I want my dad back, you know? I just want him back and I get all – it seems so unfair – ”

Her voice cracked and she shut her eyes again – Morgana hushed her, gently, feeling her shoulder’s shake, those deep, anguished sobs bubbling up from somewhere dark and hidden. “It’s okay, Gwen,” she promised, softly, “it’ll be okay.”

“No, no it won’t,” Gwen insisted, harshly, “nothing’s ever going to be okay ever, ever again and – ”

“Oh, shush,” Morgana admonished, not unkindly. “How are you ever going to convince me to have sex with you again if you’re getting all melodramatically emo?”

“You’re a horrible girlfriend,” Gwen informed her, hugging her a little tighter.

“I know.”

It took about half an hour for Gwen to calm down and really regain a semblance of her normal self. Morgana was used to her having these bouts of deep, wretched grief – she’d been having them at irregular intervals over the past six months, after the first few weeks of intense mourning has gradually petered out. Gwen’s father had fallen down in a car park one day nine months ago and then never got up again (brain haemorrhage, the doctors had said – a vessel that had burst – undetectable, unpreventable; tragic, the doctors had said). It had broken Gwen so thoroughly that for a long time Morgana had been truly scared that she was never going to see even the vaguest semblance of the woman she knew (and loved beyond reason) ever, ever again.

Eventually, however, she had begun to re-emerge – in a very Gwen-like way, just trying to pick herself up and get on with things as if nothing had happened. Sometimes she managed it so well that Morgana forgot how fragile she still was – it was just when little things like this tripped her up, and opened that yawning chasm of bereavement in her soul, that she remembered that Gwen was still grieving. At least once a month she would be awake (as she always was at odd hours of the night, usually in the kitchen, feverishly trying out new recipes for gravy or scones or something), and she would hear Gwen desperately trying not to be heard crying in their bedroom.

Sometimes, she let her cry on her own – sometimes, she knew, grief just needed to be experienced in isolation and held close; being, as it was, the last pearls of the person you had lost, sticking to your soul and making you wretched. But most of the time she would turn off the stove and go and climb into bed beside her girlfriend, and wrap her up as she was doing now, and Gwen that she was still alive – still close and real and warm – and that for now that could be enough.

“I love you, Morgana,” Gwen’s voice was a little shaky but reassuringly devoid of tears.

“I know, babe.” Morgana pressed her lips to the other woman’s temple, “I love you too.”

“Thanks for putting up with me being all…”

“Oh, shut up. Clearly I’ll just have to shag some sense into you tonight.”

Gwen giggled.

***

Morgana remembered very well the first time that they had kissed.

They’d both been fourteen, and had been pedalling round the local park on their bikes. It had been late summer, almost the end of the holidays – the last week, in fact – and they’d been making the most of it. Arthur, Morgana’s little step-brother, had been ill so they hadn’t been forced, as they usually were, to let him tag along, and it was just them, and everything had felt all glorious and free.

Morgana’s mum had married Arthur’s father when she was twelve, and they’d all moved to Bath, from Ireland and London respectively, into the house next door to the one where Gwen and her dad lived. Morgana had not been particularly happy with the arrangement at first, because she’d had to move school, and she didn’t want a new dad and she definitely didn’t want a new little brother – but the presence of a nice girl her own age next door had significantly softened the blow of the upheaval.

She had determined from the day they’d moved in to make Gwen her best friend, and Gwen had never seemed to have any major objection to such a plan. They walked to school together every morning and walked home together every afternoon; they weren’t in many of the same classes at the local comprehensive, but they did usually have PE together and so they could muck about at the back practicing hand stands instead of what the teacher told them to be doing.

They shared lunches and sweets and secrets, and they braided each other’s hair and they got each other into trouble. They had sleepovers every other weekend and they slept in the same bed, folded together like kittens tucked in a basket.

Gwen’s dad called them the twins, and Morgana liked going round to their house because they always had fun things for tea like baked beans and sausages, or potato smilies, or spaghetti-os. Mum and Uther always made her and Arthur boring normal stuff like soup and ratatouille and couscous. Plus at Gwen’s house they could watch TV straight after school instead of having to do their homework, and they could stay up till ten instead of nine.

But yeah – they were fourteen, the first time they kissed.

Morgana had known what lesbians were – she knew what ‘gay’ meant – but such labels were alien and distant. They were playground taunts and they were people on the news and they were words used in sex ed. Nothing to do with her.

She didn’t know that she wanted to kiss Gwen until they were both off their bikes, at the top of a steep, grassy slope that led down to the duck pond. It was starting to get close to teatime – Morgana’s stomach was rumbling, and most of the people at the duck pond were going home. But she and Gwen dropped their bikes anyway and raced each other to the bottom.

Realising that she was losing, Morgana had tried to grab at her friend and hold her back, and Gwen and yelped and shrieked and laughed at her – and then they’d both lost their footing and ended up tumbling and tussling in the grass, each trying to escape the fall before the other, in an attempt to get up and start running again.

They ended up sprawling two thirds of the way down, with Morgana – who had always been the taller and stronger of them – straddling Gwen’s hips and pinning her wrists above her head.

“Gotcha,” she had said, triumphantly, and Gwen had been laughing.

“Bitch! Let me up!”

“Fuck off,” Morgana always took great pleasure in swearing when she was with Gwen – because it was something she was never allowed to do at home.

They’d continued to giggle at each other for a moment, and then Gwen had tired of the game. “Are you going to let me up, or what?”

“Um…” Morgana had said, and then she’d kissed her.

It hadn’t been a particularly elegant gesture – a quick, clumsy press of her mouth to Gwen’s – quite hard.

Gwen had just gaped at her. “What did you do that for?”

“Dunno,” Morgana had shrugged, honestly. “Just wanted to, that’s all.”

“Are you gay or something?”

“Don’t be daft.”

And that had been that.

It had not been until about a year later, when Morgana was starting to notice the older girls at school – the way they rolled the hemlines of their uniform skirts up to show their bony knees, and the way their eyes were harsh under their mascara, and their lips always looked wet with gloss, like a doll’s – that anything truly sexual happened between them.

Mostly by accident.

Gwen had found her dad’s stash of dirty magazines in the shed. She had, of course, immediately called Morgana, who had come running over (it was a Saturday afternoon – Gwen’s dad was at the garage where he worked), and they’d sat amongst the cobwebs and the upturned flower pots and shrieked and giggled at the naked women.

“Oh my god – look – look at this one,” Morgana had flourished the first to really catch her eye, “look – they’re all tied up – ”

Gwen had yelped, appalled, “oh god – Dad’s kinky – ”

And they’d both collapsed into giggles again.

But Morgana had stuffed the magazine into her bag, later, when Gwen wasn’t looking, and taken it home, and studied it in more detail that night under the bedcovers with a torch.

It had sent something shivering between her legs, looking at those women – looking at the ropes and the gags and the whip marks… she poured over each and every image every night for weeks afterwards – and then she brought it back over to Gwen’s on her next sleep over.

“Is that one of dad’s old – oh, yuck, Morgana – why did you nick it?” Gwen had groaned. “That’s my dad’s porn!”

“Shut up,” Morgana had flushed but managed a quick grin, “it’s kind of interesting, okay?”

Gwen had looked at her funny but not said anything else – just put the magazine back with the others, and they hadn’t talked about it again.

Later that night, tucked up like usual in Gwen’s bed, Morgana had said, “Gwen? Have you ever kissed a boy?”

“Nope,” Gwen had shrugged, “besides, you know that. I would have told you if I had.”

“Just thought I’d check.” Morgana had paused, rubbed one eye to take away a phantom itch, “what do you think it’s like? Kissing? Do you think it’s wet? I always think it must be wetter than the movies make it look.”

Gwen had giggled. “You kissed me once, remember? Was that wet?”

“No, but I dunno whether that really counts. You’re a girl.”

“Well – it’s still mouths and stuff.”

They’d both giggled at the idea. And then Morgana had felt something in her stomach curl up tight, and she’d taken a breath. “Can I kiss you again? Just – just to see.”

“Mm, okay,” Gwen had shrugged. “No tongue, though. Yuck.”

Morgana had laughed, breathless. “Okay.”

Gwen had rolled onto her back, and Morgana, lying beside her, had leant down before her nerve could fail her, and gently, gently pressed her lips to her friend’s. She’d mostly gotten Gwen’s lower lip – had felt her twitch and squirm a little – and then she’d tried to move – but it was dark and she was never quite sure how it happened, but suddenly, Gwen had tipped her head back and she got more of her mouth. Her whole mouth, really – and she was so soft, and she smelled nice, and it felt a bit weird but not bad and –

“Oh,” Gwen had whispered, a moment later, as Morgana realised that she was laying almost completely on top of her, and that they were both a little short of breath. “Do you want to – um – ”

“Yes,” and Morgana had kissed her again – and it was real, all of a sudden, and rushing, and brilliant. She felt funny and fierce and excited, but there was nothing more important than Gwen, who was perfect and sweet and funny and her best ever friend, and who was tugging gently at the collar of her pyjama top, kissing her back.

She skimmed one trembling hand down Gwen’s side to the tops of her pyjama bottoms and held on there. Gwen had pushed her, gently, and they’d ended up on their sides, pressed close together, hot and sweaty beneath the duvet – Morgana had used her free hand to very delicately touch Gwen’s nose – skim the outline of her lips.

“Gwen…”

“Mm?”

“Gwen, um – ”

“Do you love me?” Gwen had asked, abruptly, “do you, Morgana? I mean really – properly – like adults love each other?”

“I don’t – I don’t know,” Morgana’s head had been spinning – Gwen’s breath was hot on her cheek. She’d wrapped her arms about her and held on tight. “We’ll always be best friends, won’t we?”

“Yes,” Gwen nodded, and kissed her again, just softly. “Promise.”

But the next morning Gwen had slipped out of bed without a word – giving her only a quick, shy glance – and Morgana had thought that perhaps she hadn’t liked being kissed so much after all, and now her friend was embarrassed, so she didn’t mention it again.

After her GCSEs, when she was sixteen, Gwen decided to leave school and go to the technical college down the road. She wanted to become a mechanic, like her father. Morgana was angry with her.

“What do you want to do a stupid thing like that for?” She demanded, when Gwen told her, “you can’t drop out without your A-levels, for god’s sake!”

“I can get A-levels at college!” Gwen insisted, only a slight twitching of her brow betraying how much Morgana’s words stung, “and it’s not like I need them – if I want to become a mechanic – ”

“But I thought you wanted to study French!”

“What I am supposed to do with French?” Gwen asked, “it’s great and all but it’s not going to make me a living! Not unless I want to be a teacher and I want to be a mechanic.”

“A French-speaking mechanic.”

Gwen did not look amused.

Morgana began to see less and less of her after that summer. The college took up a lot of her time, and Morgana got the distinct sense that she was being avoided. Which hurt. They stopped having sleepovers.

Morgana threw herself into her A-levels, and into her first dalliance with a girl in the year below her, who was happy to be told what to do and just smiled and blushed a lot when Morgana felt her up behind the bike sheds. It was easy and it was pleasantly distracting.

She told Arthur that she was fairly sure that she was gay. Arthur blinked at her stupidly over his cereal for a moment (they were in the kitchen, having breakfast). He opened his mouth, then closed it again, then said, “better not tell Dad.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“I got into Oxford,” Morgana told Gwen, when it happened. She was standing in her back garden, and had just seen Gwen walk into hers.

“Oh,” Gwen smiled, “that’s good.”

“Yeah,” Morgana agreed.

“What are you going to study?” Gwen quirked her head, and Morgana felt that yawning sense of loss. A year ago, such a gap in Gwen’s knowledge would have been unthinkable.

“Law.”

“Wow,” Gwen looked down, then up again, “I thought you wanted to be a chef.”

“I did – I do,” Morgana shrugged, “it’s just… law’s a better option, stability wise.”

“Yeah.”

Morgana had taken to cooking when she couldn’t sleep. She’d had trouble getting to sleep ever since her father had died, when she was seven (at least, that was the first time she could remember truly going for long stretches without going to bed), but it had started to happen more systematically as she hit her teens. Her mum had taken her to doctors about it – even to a special sleep clinic, and a neurologist – but they all mostly just said vague things about stress and hormones and that she would grow out of it. Also that she should stop getting up to cook (and by proximity, eat) in the middle of the night.

Morgana had not stopped doing this. She liked to bake, in particular – liked the mess and ordered chaos of it – patting the dough to the right consistency – putting it into the oven as one thing and taking it out as another. Like magic.

But she liked all sorts of cooking. She began to experiment with soups, and then with meat. She hung around the supermarkets after school, spending her money on new, interesting looking ingredients. Dragged Gwen with her, when they were still properly friends. She began to write down recipes. She thought, idly, about what it would be like to own a restaurant – top quality, five stars, written up in all the papers, hundreds of pounds for a meal, all the celebrities coming to dine there…

She never told anyone about it, though. No one but Gwen.

It was just a silly dream.

She left home for Oxford, and immediately hated law, just as she had known, deep down, that she would. The pressure to do well was immense and the stress of the workload was compounded by homesickness and the growing sense that she had no wish to be where she was.

She began to go for days at a time without sleep, and she wished she was still close enough to Gwen to phone her.

Late one night, in the kitchens in the halls she lived in, having just perfected the art of short crust pastry with her first ever successful steak and kidney pie, she met a boy called Merlin, who had been attracted by the smell.

“Do you like to cook?” He had asked, looking sleepy and befuddled in blue and white stripped pyjamas and Doctor Who slippers, smiling vaguely.

“Yeah,” she’d replied, feeling oddly self-conscious, given that she had flower all over her dressing gown and it was half three in the morning and she had another essay due in two days that she hadn’t even started with.

“Me too,” he’d told her, brightly, and suddenly she’d had a friend.

Merlin was studying English, but, like her, preferred cooking. He had been afraid to admit to such a thing, though, because he was trying hard enough to hide the fact that he was frequently attracted to men as it was from his parents – he thought the idea that he wanted to spend every waking moment of his life in the kitchen might be a step too far for his already suspicious father.

Late at night, they would sit up in the college kitchens, cooking four course gourmet meals and plotting their escape from Oxford. Morgana stopped going to lectures and started writing up new recipes. She pursued a number of pretty girls and slept with as many of them as would let her spank them before she fucked them. She slept with Merlin, a couple of times, as a sort of experiment. He wanted to find out whether he really could still be attracted to women as well as men, and she was curious.

She’d never slept with a bloke – never even thought about it before – and she wanted to know what it was like. And Merlin was nice – sweet. He had an intensity and a drive about him that made him good at a lot of things, including sex. He didn’t have much experience but he had plenty of passion and imagination and it was pretty damn good, all things considered. She was fairly sure she didn’t want to sleep with any other men – but she could make an exception for Merlin. He even let her tie him up a couple of times.

Within a few weeks of their first meeting, Merlin had discovered a cookery school across town. A one year certified course, acting in conjunction with an agency to funnel graduates straight into jobs. Highly prestigious – known to attract people from Europe and America as well as from up and down the country. Astronomical fees, of course – but there were a couple of scholarships going, and, by Morgana’s calculations, one year of full time employment would be enough to pay back any debts incurred in paying the fees.

She took a deep breath, and filled out the application form at four in the morning whilst seated next to Merlin in the kitchens again, watching her chocolate soufflé’s rise in the nearest oven. Then she lived a week of abject terror at the thought that she might get in – and it still shocked her when they phoned up and asked for an interview.

They interviewed Merlin, as well. And by the end of their first term at Oxford, they both had full scholarships at Gaius’s School for the Culinary Arts, and were scrambling to arrange accommodation, formally drop out of university and keep what they were doing from their respective parents.

Morgana had no idea how to explain the situation to Uther and her mother. She hadn’t even so much as mentioned Merlin to them – let alone hinted that she was unhappy with law or wished to pursue something outside of university altogether. The fact was that people like her were meant to get a degree after they finished school. She wasn’t like Gwen, whose dad worked in a garage – Morgana’s mum was a dentist, her father had been a GP and Uther was headmaster of a posh boy’s school. Everyone in their family had been to university – every one of her parents friends had been. She had serious doubts about their ability to understand how much more she would rather be conjuring miracles out of a bowl of flower, milk, butter and eggs than earning a law degree from Oxford.

Merlin left a couple of days earlier than she did, heading back to south Wales, just as nervous as she was about trying to explain to his mum and dad what was going on.

He turned up at the door to her room less than twenty four hours later, with a horribly swollen split lip and his rucksack, looking sheepish.

“Well – I told them.”

“Oh, God…” she’d looked him up and down – there was blood from his lip on his t-shirt; his trainers were soaked and covered in mud. “What happened?”

“Um…” Merlin scratched his head, swaying a little alarmingly. “I might also have mentioned that I wanted to shag one of the blokes in my hall… Dad wasn’t exactly thrilled…”

“I’m sorry,” Morgana sighed, letting him in and taking his rucksack off him. “Did they chuck you out?”

“Mum didn’t want to – but I think it’ll be easier this way – give Dad some time to cool down,” Merlin still looked sheepish, “do you think they’d let me stay in halls for the break?”

“Come back with me,” Morgana suggested, suddenly liking very much the idea of having someone with her to hold her hand when she told mum and Uther what she’d done. “My parents won’t mind.”

“Are you sure?”

“Well… after dropping out of uni I don’t think me bringing a stranger back to the house is going to be high on their list of things to be unhappy with me about.”

Morgana packed the last of her stuff into her car and drove them both back to Bath. On arriving she used her most gently concerned expression and explained that Merlin’s parents had thrown him out because he was gay and she couldn’t possibly have left him with nowhere to stay over Christmas.

Uther seemed reluctant but Morgana’s mum was sympathetic and Arthur just shrugged, glancing up from a football magazine in the living room as they stepped into the hall and grunted something that might have been a greeting.

Because Merlin was ‘gay’, he was allowed to sleep on the floor in Morgana’s room – although of course, he very quickly migrated into her bed. They didn’t have any condoms so they just used their mouths, and it was good, and afterwards Merlin curled up next to her, all pale, clammy skin and bony limbs, and pretended not to cry into her pillows.

Morgana wrapped herself around him. “I’m sorry about your parents, Merlin.”

He didn’t reply for a bit – but he did stop crying.

“You’ll be okay,” she promised him, “see – I’m not going anywhere, am I?”

He nodded, and kissed her. Then he asked, “is your brother single?”

She waited until Christmas Eve to tell her parents that she had dropped out of uni. She did it deliberately, so that she could then insist on preparing Christmas dinner to prove to them that she knew what she was doing.

Uther shouted several choice words and her mum went a colour Morgana had never seen on any human being before. But she folded her arms and stood her ground and Arthur, abruptly, suggested that it was better a chef than a boring lawyer anyway.

She and Merlin spent the next twenty four hours in the kitchen, preparing what Morgana was determined must be a masterpiece.

And all in all, it was. Merlin had made chestnut stuffing like he’d come out of the womb preparing the stuff; the turkey was a little dry, but that was mostly because neither of them were used to working with such a large roast. Everything else was almost entirely perfect – and certainly Arthur stuffed his face at Christmas dinner. Uther, at least, did not say anything more on the subject, and Morgana’s mother only smiled wearily and gave her arm a squeeze. “…I suppose, so long as you’re being productive…”

That was blessing enough, for now.

Sleeping pressed against Merlin in her bed every night, as she had once done with Gwen, Morgana began to wonder about her childhood companion. She thought with distant bemusement about kissing Gwen in the park – and then again that time after returning her dad’s kinky magazine. She remembered how it had felt to run her hands over her friend’s pyjamas, and the soft little gasps Gwen had made around every kiss. She’d been so soft and so sweet and so warm…

But there was the sting, too, of her silence in the morning – that shy, embarrassed look. The way she had scurried from the room and never spoken of the encounter again.

Morgana felt a little wash of shame about it, really. However much Gwen had her own mischievous streak, she had always been just that little bit subservient – doing exactly as she was told the vast majority of the time. She’d probably only kissed Morgana because Morgana had started it to begin with – gone along with it because she didn’t know how to say ‘no’. It had been a shameful thing to do, to foist herself on her friend like that.

She had half a mind to go next door and attempt some kind of apology for the entire incident. But her mum had said that Gwen and her dad had gone away for the holiday – something about visiting relatives in Birmingham.   

She and Merlin started cookery school in the new year, under the tutelage of an ancient and terrifying chef called Gaius, and a number of other instructors. Morgana slept first with the red headed one called Nimueh – promised herself she would not make the mistake of sleeping with a teacher ever again and then promptly got drunk and shagged Morgause, the other one. How on earth so many lesbian cookery instructors had congregated in one place, Morgana had no idea, but it made for some awkward moments during the last few months of her time there.

By the following Christmas, however, she had graduated with glowing commendations (from the instructors that she hadn’t slept with) and had just begun to work as a pastry chef in a small patisserie near Oxford street; she needed the work experience so that she could find a kitchen that would take her on as a commis. Merlin, of course, had almost immediately found himself a place as a commis in one of the best French restaurants in London. But he was a lucky bastard like that.

His parents still weren’t talking to him, however, and so Morgana couldn’t quite find it in herself to envy him. His birthday was spent with her, eating what they’d made in training that day and watching old episodes of Doctor Who, and at Christmas she once again brought him up to stay with her parents.

It wasn’t until the New Year’s party that she saw Gwen, though.

Uther and Morgana’s mum held a party like they always did and this time Gwen and her dad hadn’t been away, so they came, like normal. But somehow, Morgana hadn’t been expecting to see Gwen. She came out of the kitchen, dusting icing sugar off her jeans, having just put the finishing touches to the cake Mum had asked her to make for the occasion – and there, at the bottom of the stairs talking to Arthur – there was Gwen.

______
pt.2 here.