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The stench of its fur: musk and stale blood. Muscles bulging beneath its pelt as it moved, too quick for anything but a creature of magic. Obsidian claws, sharp and black, raking the ground beneath its feet as it watched him with all the intensity of a predator latching onto its prey. The serpent in the place of its tail, reared back and ready to strike.
Fangs sinking through his chainmail and into his sword-arm. A shout: Merlin's voice, rough over words Arthur did not know. His blood burning through his veins.
Merlin's eyes, dazzling gold.
Cold raked its talons across him, making him shudder, touching everywhere except the hot, heavy throb of the wound on his arm. He shivered, torn right through as fever consumed him. Maybe this was yet another dream. A figment. Nothing more than the shattered glass of his own addled mind, slicing at him.
He tried to rouse himself, to open his eyes and find Merlin.
Merlin, who had magic.
The thought skittered away from him, retreating to hide in the shadows. Arthur could not recall ever being so tired in all his life. He kept struggling to marshal his wits, only for them to slip through his fingers. Questions bobbed through his aching head, lost and untethered.
Was he back in Camelot? What day was it? Time was like air, impossible to catch, and whenever he dropped the thread of his thoughts, he could not be sure whether he fell back into slumber or merely lost a moment. His mind was wreathed in fog. Memories loomed from it, grim silhouettes that took on definition only to fade once more.
Merlin.
Magic.
A cool cloth blotted across his brow, dripping fresh water against his mouth. He licked at it, parched, but his request for a drink was little more than a cracked moan of sound: pained and wretched. He would be embarrassed by his own weakness if he were not too broken to care. Yet it did not seem to matter that he could not find the words. The mattress dipped. An arm slipped beneath his shoulders, supporting his weight as a cup pressed against his lips.
He drank greedily, rivulets running over his chin to collect in the hollow of his throat. Someone bade him to sip, not gulp, and he tried, but his body cried out for the water: feral in its thirst.
His stomach ached and clenched. There was one dizzy, awful moment where he thought he might just expel it all again, but he mastered the urge as he was eased back to the pillows' embrace, lain upon them as if he were something fragile, liable to shatter. His lashes fluttered, his eyelids too heavy to lift, leaving him in the strange, disjointed shadows between dreams and the waking world.
Those hadn't been Gaius' arms cradling him. It had not been the old man's strength raising him up. He did not need his burning, aching eyes to confirm it, not when he could smell the herbs-and-clean-sparks fragrance he knew always clung to Merlin's skin and hair. The perfume nestled in his clothes, too, mixed with laundry soap. It was familiar: comforting in a world that seemed to know only pain, and Arthur's fingers twitched against the blankets, grasping for something that seemed forever out of his reach.
' – delirious, Sire.' Gaius' old voice seemed to come from very far away. He sounded as if he spoke from another world, eerie and lost within the veils. 'The fever must break soon.'
'And if it does not?'
His father. Broken and bloody over the rack of his own guilt. Braced, as always, to rule and rule and rule despite his tragedies. Did he even see a son in the poisoned shell upon the bed, or was it merely an heir failing to live up to his duty? A dynasty in pieces?
'I fear the prince's strength will be spent.'
There was a noise then, a tiny crack of sound that Arthur suspected was a figment of his fevered imagination. Yet when his father spoke again, the strain in his voice was evident.
'Heal him, Gaius. There must be something you can do?'
'I will try everything in my power, Your Majesty.'
'Use any means necessary. Any means. No questions will be asked.'
If Arthur had the strength, he would have laughed at his father's hypocrisy. He knew what the King asked of Gaius. Once again it seemed that, when all else failed, Uther would turn to the magic he reviled. Now, it was not only the poison that burned in Arthur's blood. Rage blazed alongside it. It surged, rising ever higher in the name of those he had seen led to the executioner for no greater crime than trying to save a loved one from the vagaries of fate.
By his own laws, what Uther asked of Gaius was punishable by death, and still, he did not hesitate.
There was a whisper of cloth and the click of a door in its threshold. In its wake, the silence was punctuated only by the crackle of the fire in the grate. Someone shifted nearby, the mattress bobbing like a small boat in a calm harbour.
'Arthur saw you.' Gaius' voice was closer now. 'You're certain?'
'Yes.' That reply contained multitudes in a single word. Merlin should not sound like that – hurting, resigned: a man already condemned. 'He looked right at me. I saw him see.'
'He might not remember.'
'He will.' A hand rested on his brow: long fingers cool against his arid skin. They teased his sweaty hair back from his brow and brushed over the vault of his temples as if he were something fragile to be treasured. 'He'll know I've lied to him all this time about what I am. What I can do.'
Merlin's words hitched, wobbled, broke. A breath stuttered between his lips, crying out for comfort which Arthur was powerless to give. He could not so much as lift a finger, let alone stir himself back to awareness. It was like he was present but not, an unwilling eavesdropper to Merlin's grief.
'Yet you will heal him.' It wasn't really a question. Gaius said it as if he knew that any alternative would be unthinkable. How easy it would be, Arthur thought, for Merlin to do nothing. He could let him slip from life, vanquished by his fever, and take his secret with him. It was no small thing, after all: a death sentence. Perhaps his father had said no questions would be asked, but it did not matter. If Arthur awoke with accusations of sorcery on his lips, Merlin would not be spared.
He wanted to speak, to promise that it would not come to that, but he could not form the words. Only tiny, tight breaths escaped him, broken upon the blade of his pain. He was a prisoner in his own body: a captive in poison's chains.
'Yes.'
'I see.' Gaius sighed, a world-weary sound, full of melancholy. 'I will pack your bag, just in case.'
It took Arthur's tired mind far too long to unravel that statement. It wobbled in and out of the haze of his mind, baffling – until it dawned, cool, crisp and cruel: a winter's daybreak.
Gaius was packing in case Merlin needed to flee. Not from Uther, who would assume the spell was Gaius' work and turn a blind eye, but from Arthur. Until that moment, he had never realised the truth. He had thought Merlin was a permanent fixture in his life. A certainty. Now, there, in fever's haze, he saw that Merlin was instead always on the cusp of leaving. The secret he held was not simply words unsaid. It was a breach waiting to yawn between them. A precipice. A desolation.
Merlin had lived for years in Camelot with one foot always out of the door.
And Arthur ached for him.
'Clǣnsiġe besmitenblod.'
The magic came upon him, as soft as moonlight. It did not blaze and burn, but seeped across his skin, sinking to flow through his veins and nestle in his bones. It captured the sharpest edges of his pain, peeling them back until he was free of their clutches. His fever roiled, then simmered, ebbing in the tiniest of increments as Arthur lay before it: a victim of its ferocity.
Yet, at last, power's cool balm suffused him. The haze lifted and the shadows retreated, and Arthur's mind, exhausted and battered by a battle he could never have won alone, finally cleared.
He opened his eyes, gritty and disgusting, to blink at the canopy of his bed: a splash of crimson that may as well be as big as the sky. The blankets weighed him down, pinning him to the mattress, and his body panged with the bitter recriminations of flesh that had fought too hard for its own survival.
Merlin still whispered those same, soft words in a language Arthur didn't know, his voice broken with exhaustion and his eyes shining gold between the seam of his lashes.
Arthur twitched, and Merlin blinked himself awake from his reverie. The invisible net of magic that had woven itself through the chamber spun away to nothing, its gossamer fading from Arthur's senses. For a moment, they stared at each other, and Arthur saw the split-second when Merlin's courage – and he would never, ever again call him a coward – abandoned him.
'Don't.' Arthur gritted his teeth against the ache in his arm as he grabbed Merlin's wrist, stopping him before he could turn-tail and flee. Merlin could break away with ease if he tried, but instead, he hesitated, his body turned towards the door but his gaze, familiar blue now, taking in Arthur where he lay. 'Don't go. Please.'
He could feel how Merlin shook beneath the grasp of his fingers: a subtle tremor born of true terror. And how could he blame him? One word from Arthur, and the guards would come running. Merlin's life would be forfeit.
He had magic, and he had used it to save Arthur's life.
And this was not the first time.
'Merlin, please.'
Maybe it was that last word that did it. After all, Arthur rarely bothered with his manners outside of court. He was a prince, and he was to be obeyed. His father would be appalled to hear him almost begging a servant, and yet the words fled Arthur anyway, desperate and hollow. A strange dread had awoken in his chest, one that told him that if Merlin ran now, then he would never see him again – he would never get the chance to explain, or to listen, or to thank him.
'You should rest,' Merlin rasped, his grief like a bruise upon his voice. Any other man of Arthur's acquaintance would try to hide their feelings, but Merlin had never been one to bother with that. Not once in all the time Arthur had known him. He wore his heart on his sleeve, and it meant every emotion was there for Arthur to witness: guilt and terror, remorse and heartbreak. Yet beneath that, there was relief, as if some huge burden had been shed.
Cautious, Arthur increased the pressure of his grip, no longer merely hanging on to Merlin's arm, but tugging him towards the bed. He did not have the strength to sit up and face this. The aches careening through him warned him to not even make the attempt. Yet nor could he do it at this distance, held at remove. He needed to see Merlin, cast not just in the stark shadows and highlights of the fire, but right at his side.
'Come here?'
'I don't think –'
'I won't hurt you. I would – I would never hurt you.' Arthur swallowed hard, putting as much of his certainty into his gaze as possible. 'Magic or not.'
There. Confirmation, not accusation – but important all the same. In many ways it would be so much easier to pretend it never happened - to feign ignorance and let things carry on the same, but he couldn't do that. He did not want to do that. There, on the fading cusp of fever and delirium, all Arthur cared about was the man at his side. He wanted to know him, all of him, everything he put on display and all that he kept hidden.
That would never be possible if they couldn't face the truth.
He saw the moment of Merlin's collapse, saw it in the sway of his body and the tears threatening to spill over his lashes. It was no swoon. Rather, it was a body sacrificing all its strength beneath the flood of its own emotion. Merlin sagged to sit on the bed as if he couldn't stand a moment longer, his shoulders rounded and his head bent, one hand pressed to his mouth to stifle to the sob that threatened to tear itself free.
'I'm sorry.' It sounded as if it was punched from him, little more than a breath given shape in a scatter of syllables. 'I wanted to tell you, but –'
But his father was the bloody tyrant of Camelot, and Arthur had been taught his whole life to hate magic.
Arthur shook his head, stifling a grunt of pain as he plucked at Merlin's sleeve, tugging at him, nudging and pulling and shoving with all the pathetic tatters of his own strength until Merlin seemed to get the message.
He hesitated for a moment, indecision flickering over his tear-stained face before he sagged down to lie in the empty space at Arthur's left side. He did so on top of the covers, chaste and acceptable, though something in Arthur despised even that much distance. He had a feral urge to wrap Merlin in his arms and make sure he didn't slip away in the night. He still looked wary – a horse about to bolt – and Arthur scrambled through his sluggish mind for the right words to rein him in.
'You saved me.' He wet his lips, rolling on his side so they were facing each other, the space between them intimate and warm. They were like a pair of brackets, their knees knocking, and Merlin's hands clasped in the blankets. 'More than once, I suspect.'
He reached out, cautious, at first insinuating only his smallest finger into the lax curl of Merlin's grasp. Yet it was the leading force in a battalion. The others soon followed, until he was holding Merlin's hand in earnest, his fingertips exploring familiar calluses and the spaces between, the sharp angle of his knuckles and the occasional scar that painted his skin. It was easy to see, in retrospect, how wilfully blind he had been. Now, through the lens of magic, he could see the truth of so much of his good fortune.
'You saved me even though it would have been far safer to let me die.'
Merlin shook his head, and Arthur smothered a smile to see the gaze behind those spiky, wet lashes spark with outrage. Yet he didn't give Merlin a chance to speak. Instead, he squeezed his hand, ushering him back to silence with a simple pair of words.
'Thank you.'
A shivering breath whispered past Merlin's lips as he released it, closing his eyes for a moment and shaking his head against the pillow. 'You aren't... angry?'
Arthur pulled a face at that. He was. He suspected he would be, anyway, once his strength had returned and the full measure of all this had sunk in, though possibly not for the reasons Merlin assumed.
It stung that he had lied, but Arthur could not honestly say he would have done any differently in his place. Not considering how much was at stake. Instead, his anger frothed and simmered around the notion of Merlin taking one look at Camelot – at all its rules and risks – and deciding to use magic anyway. As if he thought anyone, anywhere, was worth the cost of his own life!
'A bit,' Arthur acknowledged at last, knowing that Merlin would catch him out in a lie. The truth was written all over his face, after all. He was too weak and spent for royal masks now. 'Later, maybe a lot, but Merlin, not enough to – to condemn you. Not enough to make you leave.' His voice cracked on that last word, thinning to almost nothing at the thought of him gone from Arthur's life, never to return.
In his youth, he had imagined capturing a sorcerer in Camelot. He had envisioned the adoration of his people and his father's pride as the fiend was dealt with. They were childish fantasies, of course, and he had grown out of them some time ago. Now, all he could think of was the need to protect Merlin, to keep his secret and hold it close, away from the prying eyes of his father and anyone else who would see him burn.
'Stay?' The word slipped out of him, small and hopeless, painfully young even to his own ears. Part of him felt he had no right to ask it of him. How could he, when every day Merlin lingered here, he risked his life merely by existing. Yet nor could he hold it back.
'I'm right here, Arthur.'
'I don't just mean now. I mean – the bag Gaius is packing for you.' He let his eyes roved over Merlin's face, the slant of his brow and the sharpness of his cheekbones, the pink of those full lips and the scatter of stubble across Merlin's jaw that suggested the depths of his vigil.
'You heard that?'
'I heard everything, including what my father said. He is – his hypocrisy is...' Arthur trailed off, unable to speak of it. It sickened him right down to his bones, and he forced himself to push it aside. This was not about his father, not really. This was about him and Merlin. He could not expect Merlin to peel aside all the shadows of his secrecy with nothing offered in return, and he tightened his grip anew, drawing his hand towards him as he made his promise.
'I will never let him hurt you, and I will never be like him.'
Perhaps it was the lingering veils of fever's ebb that dismissed his caution. Maybe it was simply that he was too tired to hold back his natural inclination, but the brush of his lips over Merlin's knuckles, soft and sure, sealed his vow.
He heard the catch in Merlin's breath and saw the hope – desperate and wild – that flared in his gaze. Yet there was belief there, too. Whatever else Merlin thought of him, whatever fears he harboured, he did not doubt him, and Arthur's heart swooped and thrilled in his chest to see it.
That was a sensation that intensified a thousand-fold when Merlin shifted closer, bowing his head over their joined hands and brushing his lips against Arthur's fingers. 'It's for you, Arthur. My magic, I mean, and I will never allow it to be used against you or your kingdom. I swear it.'
Arthur's throat clicked as he swallowed, feeling the noose of uncertainty loosen around his neck. He had not wanted to give credence to that subtle fear, and yet he could not deny it had pressed its mantle across his back. Yet in Merlin's eyes he saw the truth of what he said: loyalty and devotion on unapologetic display, irrefutable.
There would be time, later, to plumb the full depths of Merlin's secret. There would be the opportunity to learn all that he had done in Arthur's name, the good and the bad, but in that hallowed moment, they built the foundation of something new between them. It was writ in soft, shared breaths and the press of Merlin's brow against his own. It wove around them in the warm air and eased aside the aches in Arthur's muscles.
It began then, not with a kiss – which would come a little over a week later, hot and desperate and all Arthur had ever craved – but with two oaths shared, as solemn and certain as a hand-fasting.
And those were promises they would keep, day-by day and year-on-year, as Merlin led Arthur into the brightness of that promised golden age.