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Arthur drags himself up onto a ledge, resting his face for a second on the cold metal. He has to keep going. He can’t stay here for long.
There had been a close call recently. Few bandits had caught him. He’d managed to kill them before they could alert Nimue, but it reminded him how slim his chances were. The odds were stacked against him. Merlin had told him so. But still, no matter how bad a situation he ends up in, he can’t let go of the conviction that he has a chance, that the world couldn’t be all bad, that he could fix things and help people.
He’d been ambushed. They’d been fighting hand to hand and he’d been shoved back into the water hard enough his head hit the bottom and held there. A raw moment of panic as he started to run out of air, the repressed thought I am going to die here. Gone unconscious a few times, mind had gone blurry enough that he’d tried to breathe but choked on water for his struggles. He’d kicked out in hope that he’d be let up and it had done nothing- he’d ended up ducking down, staying underwater as his lungs screamed and his vision started to blur out, but getting away from the hand holding his collar. Got far enough away they couldn’t get at him and loaded his gun, fired. Ran like hell after that, bullets were far too loud and he’d have to rely on the hope of Nimue assuming it was a skirmish between bandits rather than someone come to usurp her place.
Been fucked up after that. It’d happened- a while back, maybe yesterday? He’d been losing count of the days, slipping through his fingers like jagged pieces of rusted sand. ‘Course, the lack of sun didn’t get rid of the heat. It was stifling in such close quarters. He felt like he was buried, chest seized up tight and crushed under the weight of the air. He couldn’t breathe.
He didn’t know how long he’d been lying on the ledge now. Time was something fuzzy and indistinct, and trying to clutch onto his thoughts felt like taking a centuries-old piece of fabric in hand and having it dissolve. He has to get up, he has to keep moving, but it’s so tempting to just let himself fall away into slumber.
Has to take a moment to cough. Even in his delirium, he tries to mask the sound. There is the ever-present thought that he is not safe, but he cannot conjure the will to move on.
He’s far too cold to make sense for the oppressive heat of the world. Tries to curl up around himself to preserve the heat, but it doesn’t work the way it should. Coughs again, moves his head so it’s into his shoulder and it’s quieter, whole body shaking with that one movement. Lost track of what’s going on. A moment of senseless vertigo, like he’s fallen down in the water and is being carried off to some sun-dried oceanbed.
He can’t let himself drift away into fantasies. Pulls himself up, limbs shaking and gun threatening to slip from his hands. He has to keep going. There's work to do.