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Sometimes it's a good thing that Arthur doesn't pay as much attention as he should. It makes it easier to kill things that are about to kill him or help win battles or make sure his arrows hit every time, and also makes it easier to generally insure Arthur won't die before Merlin gets to figure everything out.
Sometimes, though, it's not a very good thing. Especially in cases where Merlin is trying not to die, (because he needs to figure everything out before he dies, it's a common theme,) and, is also trying not to slow everything up.
"Come on, Merlin," Arthur says, with a mild amount exasperation for about the tenth time since they've been on the trail, pushing the horses forward to ensure they create a wide berth between the -- completely insane group of, well, assassins isn't even an apt term since they don't seem to care who they kill, even though they generally want to kill Arthur the most -- and themselves. Merlin doesn't particularly want Arthur to notice how much he's bleeding until they get somewhere safe, but as his eyes shut for progressively longer periods of time he wishes Arthur would just notice instead of riding forward without looking back.
"Yeah," Merlin calls, late because it's about all he can gasp out, each gallop of his horse sending blurring sparks of pain down from his ribs, and because he's trying to keep up, really. It's just that with each forward motion his shirt is soaking through with more blood and he's falling further onto the body of the horse, the trees around them turning into nothing more than blurry spots of varying green, Arthur before him a straight-backed red line, the only thing Merlin can steer towards.
He makes it over an hour, enough that he starts gasping for breath, louder and louder until he can't actually breathe right at all. He puts his hand to his ribs, where he'd tried his best to patch himself up as they were running from the spray of arrows, pulling the head of one out of his side while Arthur ran blindly forward, trusting Merlin to follow, always follow, and he comes up with a stained and slick palm. He'd numbed the pain as best as he could with a short press of his palm against his side and some words he barely remembered, not with the shock of actually being hit. It wasn't doing much, though.
Except as soon as he presses his hand there an hour later, looking at the way it stains his fingers and drips down his wrist even an hour, maybe two later, Merlin takes another gasping breath and looks up just in time to catch Arthur spinning around, eyes wide and unfocused dots that Merlin catches before he falls off the horse, the impact of the ground barely feeling like anything at all.
He wakes up at some point, once, expecting to be upright or expecting his head to be on a root, he can't decide -- can't remember which one he is supposed to feel. Instead, though, when he looks up he sees Arthur's chin, the line of his neck, and he realizes with some difficulty that he's in Arthur's lap, and that above him Arthur is shaking his head and peeling the skin off berries. Then he closes his eyes at a rush of pain in his side and doesn't wake up.
He stirs again, without knowing how much time has past, only that his breathing is constricted and he vaguely feels like he's been pummeled with stones instead of fruit for hours in the stocks. He blinks up, first at the trees above his head, the sunlight filtering through gold-red like it's late in the evening or early morning, and he turns his neck to see Arthur stomping around, a sword in his hand, crouched near bushes at the end of the clearing Merlin seems to be laying in. He looks sort of like he's trying to hunt without much success, which always makes him annoyed in a childish way that always ends up being more amusing than irritating to Merlin.
He tries to say Arthur's name, but nothing much comes out. The croak of his voice, though, makes Arthur turn around, a look on his face that Merlin rarely gets to see and one he can't actually name, especially with the way everything hurts.
"Merlin," Arthur says, the beginning of the word starting out hard and then softening, his face going soft with it. A little bit of Merlin's ache fades away just at that, which is idiotic, but Merlin has felt worse, un-nameable things around Arthur before.
Arthur comes closer, setting his sword down near the horses that Merlin has to crane his neck up to see. He crouches down first near Merlin's side, and then kneels after a moment of hesitation -- Merlin doesn't think about how hard it will be to get the stained mud out of the knees of Arthur's linen pants, except for how it's sort of a default thought.
"You," Arthur says, frowning down at him, "are incredibly stupid."
Merlin laughs at that, the sound coming out a little better than before now that he's had time to wake up and figure out how this throat words. It hurts his side.
"Really," Arthur continues, emphasizing the word, "You are so -- I don't know anyone like you, Merlin."
Which is truer than Arthur knows, but Merlin doesn't say that. "I know," Merlin agrees, instead, smiling just a little because the top bit of Arthur's hair is down in his eyes and Arthur hasn't even bothered to push it out of the way.
Merlin tries to sit up and gets about a third of the way off the ground before he's constricted -- when he looks down he can see the individual bandages wrapping around his torso, the entire left side of them stained with blood. When he tries to back up against the tree he can sense is behind him he ends up feeling light-headed and slides back down towards the ground, too fast.
Arthur catches the back of his head quickly, reflexively, his palm curling into Merlin's hair, sore where his fingers press in, a vague reminder of where Merlin must have fallen on it.
"You should have said something," Arthur says, more seriously, bending down to look at Merlin's chest. Merlin looks up at the trees and the light and then at the side of Arthur's head, the line of his jaw. He thinks about how Arthur must have carried him to the clearing and led the horses, how he would've had to strip Merlin of his shirt, how Merlin wasn't there to help fix things so they could keep moving. Less in the forefront of Merlin's mind, but there in a way that makes him want to close his eyes and keep them like that until Arthur leaves, is the fact that Arthur had to touch him, had to have Merlin's blood on his fingertips, how his face might have looked with Merlin unconscious in his lap as he smeared anesthetic berries onto Merlin's side before he bandaged him.
Merlin turns his head to the side to look at the ground below him, met with dirt and pine-needles and he feels lightheaded when he does. Arthur's hand is still resting against the back of his head, his fingers slowly curling into Merlin's hair, the dip of his neck. The ground is red too, dried flecks of blood that Merlin can barely make out, and Arthur's other hand is on the ground where he's using it to lean, dried blood along the ridges of his fingernails where he -- really did, and Merlin wasn't awake for it -- touched Merlin's side, his ribs, and patched him up.
It feels good to close his eyes, to relax back into Arthur's palm on his scalp, so he does. When Arthur starts to move away, Merlin frowns, even though he doesn't mean to actually move the muscles around his mouth.
"Arthur," he says, slowly, the words dry, "thanks." He pauses. "For not going on without me." It doesn't seem like the words he meant to say, because he knows instinctively that Arthur would never leave him behind, at least not for long, and hopefully not even when he was having a bad day, but -- it still feels like he should say something. Like it's important with just the two of them.
Arthur hesitates and Merlin cracks one eye open to watch the expression on his face, looking somewhere over Merlin's head. "I wouldn't," Arthur says. He clears his throat. "Leave you behind at all."
Merlin hums a little instead of responding, everything going a little fuzzy again, a little hard to breathe.
Arthur curls his fingers around Merlin's head with a bit of brief pressure. "You don't really think that, do you?" Arthur asks, somewhat contemplatively like he's saying it more to himself, and maybe he is, because Merlin isn't really listening -- his bones feel tired and sore and he's content to just lay there unmoving.
"'Course not," Merlin says, probably after too much time has passed to justify it, the words slurring out of his mouth. Arthur doesn't remove his hand on Merlin's head but Merlin can feel him shift on the ground, backing up to lean against the tree behind them, and Merlin falls asleep, ready for Arthur to fix him up and make everything okay, if only for a day or two.
Merlin shifts back into Arthur's palm, body tense but mind relaxed, and he vaguely hopes Arthur will notice if they are in danger -- he will, Merlin knows he will -- and save them without Merlin's help, because he's not sure what would come out of his mouth as far as magic goes in his state. Probably an embarrassing confession towards Arthur that would scare away their enemies as much as anything else.
He wakes up once while the sky is dark behind the tree branches above him, and when he blinks his eyes open slowly, careful not to move, he only has to turn to the side a little before he's met with Arthur's face, asleep right above his own, one of Arthur's hands resting gently against the bandages on Merlin's ribs -- his jacket over Merlin's torso.
Merlin stretches, aches, but he turns as best as he can into Arthur's side because in the morning it won't matter, and right now it makes Merlin feel like nothing hurts as much as it should.