Merthur One-shots

Chivalry And The Modern Alpha

Smut

Summary: Arthur Pendragon was a hopeless romantic. He had dreams of choosing his own mate, someone who loved him and that he would love back in return. A soulmate, perhaps.

But Arthur was the Prince of Wales, and his father was determined he would take an omega from a suitable noble household. Threatened with an arranged marriage, Arthur ran off in search of his destiny. But maybe his destiny would find him instead.

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It wasn’t easy being the Prince of Wales.

For one thing, everywhere you went, you had someone sticking a camera in your face, or asking you deeply personal questions.  Or standing next to you, leaning right in your personal space and then taking a photo.  Because, like, look! The POW has photobombed me!  Lolz!

POW.  That was what they called him on social media.  It hadn’t escaped Arthur’s notice that it used to be the term for a prisoner of war.

Sometimes Arthur felt a bit like a prisoner.  Oh, he had a gilded cage and all the material possessions he could ever wish for.  But he wasn’t free to do as he wished, and he wasn’t happy.  Worse, as Camelot’s most eligible alpha, he was expected to take a mate soon.  That was in fact the topic of most of the deeply personal questions.  How much longer?  Which of the noble families was he going to choose to breed with?  Was he going to exert his royal privilege and take more than one?  Arthur was just about done with it.

“Arthur,” his father had said.  “We’ll hold a ball, all the country’s most suitable omegas will be invited and lined up before you.  It’s time you took a mate, it’s not good for an alpha to be solitary.”

Which was rich coming from King Uther, who hadn’t taken another mate since his beloved omega Ygraine had died giving birth to Arthur twenty-one years earlier.  But Arthur had far too strong a sense of self-preservation to say as much.

And so, the ball was held.

It wasn’t really a ball.  A ball would have involved dancing and music, and possibly would have been fun.  What Uther actually arranged was more like some sort of cattle market where an endless stream of omegas were paraded past Arthur, most of them making some attempt to entice him. 

The omegas were beautiful, every last one of them.  Even the ones who clearly didn’t want to be there, the ones who barely smiled at him and moved on as fast as they could.  Those, in many ways, were the ones he preferred.  They weren’t any happier than he was about their being paraded like cattle in front of him.  But those were few and far between.  Most of the others gazed at him, doe-eyed and appealing.  Some obviously hadn’t bathed for days, the ripe omega scent hanging over them more alluring than any artificial perfume ever could be.  They’d taken hormone supplements too, most of them right on the edge of their heat to make them even more desirable. It was a heady thing to breathe in and Arthur could see more than one of the palace guards paying far more attention to the omegas than to their job.  If ever there was a chance to assassinate the royal family, that would have been it.  Arthur knew he could probably have bled out on the floor long before anyone noticed.

“See anything you like yet?” the king asked.

His father had been commenting on the various merits of each omega as he or she passed by.  Arthur had mostly managed to tune it out, but when Uther spoke to him directly he had no choice but to acknowledge the king.