Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Arthur raises his sword to block the first blow as a tall, thin man with a jagged scar across his cheek bears down on him. He pushes his attacker back with more effort than is strictly required so that the bandit will be forced to step away. It’s enough to give Arthur a second to locate Merlin, who has no weapon and is dodging a man wielding an axe, before his opponent is on him again. 

“Merlin!”

The attack itself isn’t all that unexpected, not really. Bandits are a fact of life. The only thing particularly different about this situation is that the bandits have attacked the village with Arthur’s men present, instead of waiting until the patrol had passed. They have the numbers for it though, so maybe they don’t care. Either that or they’re too stupid to bother with a last-minute check, hadn’t realized that Arthur and his men were here until the fighting had already begun. The reasoning is of little consequence.

“I’m fine!” Merlin shouts, his voice sounding further away than he’d expected.

Arthur isn’t sure how, but the next time he manages another glimpse of Merlin, he’s the one with the axe, and the man that had attacked him is now sprawled on the ground. A stroke of divine luck perhaps. Then again, maybe not because heaven help them all, Merlin with an axe. He’s going to get himself killed. He’s not even holding it right. It’s like he thinks he’s about to go chop some firewood.

“Don’t try fighting with that thing, you idiot! Stay close to me!”

Before Arthur can do more, he’s pulled back into his own fight. It doesn’t take him long. These bandits are clearly organized. They’re all wearing the same sort of red and black fabric tied around their upper arm, but from what Arthur’s seen so far, they aren’t particularly skilled. These are just ordinary brigands, peasants turned desperate by poverty or circumstance. They’re not soldiers from a neighbouring kingdom looking to invade.

Arthur yanks his sword free from the corpse he’s just created. The dead man hasn’t even hit the ground before Arthur’s eyes are darting about in search of Merlin again. Arthur finds him, even further away than before, standing partially in front of a young boy, maybe 8 or 10 years old. He’s still got his axe, and surprisingly, he’s doing a decent enough job of fending off the bandit in front of him, manages to disarm the man, send him reaching for the ground to retrieve his weapon. What Merlin doesn’t see as he lifts his axe to deliver the final blow is the second man—a shaggy brute with a cudgel in one hand and an arming sword in the other—coming up from behind.  

It happens so fast, Arthur doesn’t even have time to shout a full warning. The boy goes down first with a crack on the side of his head, then the man swings his sword as if he intends to take Merlin’s head off.

Arthur charges over, runs his sword through the man that Merlin had been fighting off. Suddenly, Gwaine is there too, taking down the second man, the one whose sword is slick with Merlin’s blood.  Arthur’s never been so disappointed at seeing one of his own men bring down an enemy; he’d wanted to unleash his sudden rage on the bastard himself.

Merlin’s eyes are wide with shock and he’s clutching at his throat, but he’s still standing, and for a second, Arthur thinks maybe this isn’t what he’d assumed. That Merlin has somehow pulled off another of his unexplainable escapes, another of his miracles. Then he crumples to the ground, coughing and choking on his own blood, and everything around Arthur falls away. His sword slips from his fingers. The fighting all around him is meaningless. In the whole world, there’s only Merlin, on the ground, bleeding. Dying.

Arthur drops down beside him, puts a hand to the wound, knowing it’s useless. He’s no physician’s assistant, but he knows a mortal wound when he sees one. And yet, some small part of him still rebels against the knowledge, whispers in his head that this isn’t what it looks like, can’t be.

Blood seeps between his fingers, hot and terrible, and Merlin’s watching him, his brow twisted with pain and a deep sadness that Arthur’s not sure he fully understands. Something more than the loss of his life.

Arthur chokes down a sob, all the words he wants to say fleeing from his grasp. He wants to tell Merlin how important he is. Wants to tell him that he’s going to be okay without lying. He can’t quite manage to get anything intelligible to pass his lips.

Merlin fumbles for Arthur’s hand, holds it to his heart. He stares into Arthur’s eyes, tries to tell him… Arthur isn’t sure what. That he’ll be okay, that he’s a good king, that it’s been an honour to serve him, that he’s sorry to be leaving him. It must be something like that. He has that soft but focused look in his eyes that he always has when he tells Arthur these sorts of things.

“Merlin, I…”

Merlin nods his head in a small, jerky motion, as if he knows what Arthur is trying to say, but how can he? Arthur doesn’t even know himself.  Merlin’s fingers, wet with blood, slip against Arthur’s as he holds tighter, then weaker, and he’s gone.

“No.” This can’t be happening.

He pulls Merlin close, resting their foreheads together. Hot tears drop from Arthur’s eyes and roll across Merlin’s skin. He squeezes his eyes shut tight and screams at the injustice of it all, pounds his fist against the earth until he’s bleeding.

It isn’t as though he hasn’t seen friends die before. He has. He’s seen it a lot in fact, and in far more gruesome ways. Last month Caradoc had his belly sliced open by a wild boar during a hunt. Arthur had seen the man from only a dozen paces away, his guts spilling out while the knight fought unconsciousness and pain to hold them in with trembling hands. And back at the end of spring, Gaheris had taken an axe to the head in a border skirmish with Lot’s men. Despite the gaping wound and the visible brain matter, he’d held on for over an hour before passing on to the next life.

Arthur sits there, cradling Merlin’s body in his arms, while all around him, the battle continues. His knights must be defending him because no one interrupts his grieving. They should have been protecting Merlin this diligently instead.

It’s calm when someone says, “We’ll take care of him, sire,” and tries pulling him away.

Arthur throws his elbow back into the gut of whoever it is and struggles free of the grip. “No! I’ll do it myself.” He stands, takes a few moments to collect himself, then hauls Merlin’s body off the ground and staggers his way to a vacant hut.

One of the villagers, an elderly woman with a nasty bruise on her forehead and a notable limp, brings him a bucket of fresh water, a washing cloth, and a large linen sheet to wrap Merlin in when the dirt and blood are all washed away.

Merlin’s skin is slightly cool to the touch as Arthur begins the process of peeling away his blood-soaked clothes so he can be washed one last time. Normally, it was a person’s family that would do this—if you are a commoner anyway. People like Arthur have servants that handle this sort of thing when they die. Arthur had fully expected that Merlin would perform this service for him one day.

Arthur tugs off Merlin’s boots and his rough woolen socks. His feet are a mass of callouses, and a few tiny blisters had rubbed their way onto the little toe of his left foot. They look fresh, like Merlin had got them on this trip despite having ridden a horse most of the way. Were his boots really so ill fitting that such a small amount of walking had given him blisters? And why hadn’t he said anything? Merlin liked to complain about everything, but he hadn’t said a word about his feet.

It isn’t only Merlin’s feet that give Arthur pause. His knees are covered in bruises and all Arthur can think of are all the times he’d ordered Merlin onto his knees to scrub his floor clean.

Merlin must have had a full bladder when he died because the still warm liquid seeps out of his body, wetting his trousers. Arthur’s been around enough dead bodies to know this isn’t uncommon. He half expects he’ll have to deal with more than just urine, but he doesn’t. He clenches his jaw as he tries to remember the last time he’d seen Merlin eat and realizes that he can’t. That he doesn’t know.

Merlin had cooked Arthur breakfast that morning, had cooked breakfast for all the knights in fact, as though he were the army cook instead of Arthur’s personal servant. If Arthur had seen Merlin eat any of that food himself, he doesn’t remember.

He washes Merlin’s skin, wipes away the splatters of blood and spit dried on this lips and chin, the dirt from their journey on his hands and cheeks. He washes away sweat and rinses out his hair and applies a fragrant oil that is brought in after he’s already been working for some time.

Arthur removes Merlin’s ratty old neckerchief last, exposing the grotesque wound that had taken his life. He tries not to look too closely, but it gapes, exposing the dark red inner workings of Merlin’s neck. The blood is mostly dried by now, and Arthur has to press at the edges of the wound to get his skin clean.

He takes his time, does it right, and when Merlin is laid out clean and dry, he asks for a needle and gut to sew up the gash in his neck. He knows it doesn’t matter, but he can’t bear for Merlin to go to his funeral with a hole in his body like that. It isn’t something he’s done before, but he’d watched as Merlin stitched him up a few times after battles and so he knows what he is supposed to do. He doesn’t have any skill with it though, and his dexterity is further limited by a sore right hand that is scraped and bruised for some reason he can’t even remember. Each messy stitch irritates him more than the last.

“Sorry,” he says out loud. Even knowing that Merlin can’t feel anything, pressing the needle into his flesh adds another layer to his pain. “I’m doing my best.”

It takes more physical force than he’d expected. Merlin is made of tougher stuff than Arthur had given him credit for.

When the sewing is finally done, he redresses Merlin in a loose-fitting undershirt from Merlin’s pack and lays him out on top of the makeshift burial shroud. There’s not much Arthur can do about the arrangement of his limbs. Merlin’s joints had gone stiff before Arthur even pulled him off the ground, but his hands are still over his heart where they’d been when he died, and that is good enough. A little girl that Arthur had seen Merlin talking with before the attack brings a small spray of wildflowers, and Arthur slips them underneath Merlin’s hands before he begins to wrap the shroud around his body.

Arthur begins at Merlin’s feet and legs, moves up to his torso, then his shoulders and that poorly repaired wound, until only his head is left bare. He should just get on with it, but he doesn’t. He pulls out his dagger, cuts a small lock of Merlin’s hair, wraps it safely in a scrap of fabric, and tucks it into his coin pouch. Then he pulls up a stool, stares at Merlin’s pale, lifeless face. It looks so wrong. Merlin is supposed to be smiling, or brooding, or teasing, or… or anything but this. Arthur runs a hand through his hair on the pretense of working in into the fashion that Merlin usually kept it. But then he stops, rests his hand at the top of his head. It feels as though Arthur will never be able to move again. Like the whole world should stop with him.

Arthur sits with Merlin through the night, enduring short visits from others who want to pay their final respects. They’re quite for the most part, and Arthur ignores them when he can, but he’s still the king. He has decisions to make even at a time like this.

Leon brings news of the child Merlin died to protect. Seeing as the boy is still unconscious and no one in the village has any significant medical knowledge, Arthur charges Leon with seeing the boy safely back to Camelot. Gaius will know what to do. Arthur won’t allow Merlin’s sacrifice to be for nothing.

It’s not until Leon is long gone that Arthur heaves out a heavy breath of relief as he finally comprehends the unexpected benefit of sending Leon ahead; he’s not going to have to be the one to tell Gaius of Merlin’s death.

In the morning, the knights build a pyre. Most of the villagers are being buried, but cremation is what Merlin had done for that childhood friend of his, so Arthur wants that for Merlin as well.

The knights learn early on that Arthur is in no mood for the usual funeral day talk. He doesn’t want to hear stories of how Merlin did this or that. How he saved someone’s life or cheered them up in a moment of darkness. He is still waiting to wake up from this nightmare.

When it’s time, Arthur stands before the pyre, watching as Merlin’s body disappears into smoke and ash. He watches for hours, until the flames begin to die down. It’s painful, turning away. But then, everything is painful about this day.

A niggling thought keeps replaying in his mind, telling him he shouldn’t feel as bad as he does, because tomorrow or the next day, he’s going to be able to wake up and make a different decision that will fix everything—that he’s going to get another chance to do things right, keep Merlin safe and by his side.

Hours later, Gwaine enters the hut Arthur is using as his personal quarters carrying a clay jar. There’s a cloth stretched across the top and a leather thong keeping it tight so the contents won’t be lost.

“Thought you might want to take these yourself.” Gwaine sets the jar on the rough wooden table. “I can do it, if you’re not—”

“Thank you. Yes.”

Arthur takes a deep breath. He knows what’s inside, but doesn’t want to think about it. Doesn’t want to think about the fragments of bone that are the only thing left of his manservant—of his truest friend. He doesn’t want to think about it, but he does. They’ll have been cleaned so they’re not covered in ash. Arthur pulls the jar closer. It’s such a small thing to hold something as valuable as the earthly remains of his only true friend. He’ll have to send them to Hunith along with a letter that he has no idea how to write.

He is dreading it already. What can he possibly say? You bore and raised a brave, kind, loyal, and wise son. And I got him killed. Sorry.

Any financial compensation he could offer would be far too little. Offering her nothing doesn’t feel right either, but what could he ever offer that would even begin to atone for this?

Arthur turns back to say something to Gwaine, but the knight is gone now, and Arthur can’t say how long ago that happened.

Gaius is in the middle of brewing a tincture for Lady Enid when Sir Leon bursts through the door. He holds it open for Sir Percival, who rushes in behind him, carrying a limp boy in his arms.

“What’s this?”

“Head wound in a raid two days ago. Hasn’t woken since.”

“What has been done for him?”

“Just what you see.”

Gaius takes a moment to inspect the hasty bandaging caked with dried blood and dirt.

“Merlin knows better than this. He should never have allowed the boy to be moved. He should have treated the boy himself at the site, not sent him all this way to me.”

“It was Arthur that sent us.”

“I’ll have to have a word with him. Merlin is plenty capable, even if he doesn’t always let on.”

Percival and Leon share a long look between themselves.

“What is it?” Gaius says, already easing off the bandages and assessing the wound. There is a fracture in the skull, likely inflammation of the brain. This child will never fully be himself again, if he recovers at all.

Neither of the knights have a response, and Gaius is short on patience already. He snaps, “Well, out with it. I’m an old man with much to do.”

“It’s about Merlin.”

Gaius pauses. That tone… That tone does not bode well.

“I’m afraid…” Percival begins, and when his explanation doesn’t go anywhere, Leon steps in.

“Arthur and the rest won’t be returning for several days. There were casualties. Merlin was among them. I’m sorry.”

“When you say casualties…”

“His suffering was over quickly.”

Gaius pauses in his work, mind racing, trying to come up with an explanation for those words other than the obvious.

“No, that’s not possible.”

Merlin has so much left to do with his life. He’s the most powerful sorcerer to ever walk the earth. An ordinary man can’t simply kill him as if he were a common soldier.

“Did you see it happen?”

“No.”

“Arthur was with him at the end. He’s insisting on the full rites. He’s being honoured as a hero, as if he were a knight instead of a servant.”

Gaius clings desperately for a moment to the knowledge that Arthur had been with Merlin when it happened, that perhaps things aren’t as the knights believe. Perhaps Arthur had discovered Merlin’s magic and sent him away for his own safety until he could change the law and… and this story of his death is simply ruse to… He knows it is a ridiculous hope. Arthur is king. All the protection Merlin needs is Arthur’s word, no matter what the laws say. Still, it has to be something. Merlin simply cannot be dead.