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“I suppose I should have seen it coming – I always just thought you were strange,” he leans his head back to see the last dregs of daylight leaving the sky between the trees hanging over them. “It’s what always made you interesting.” Perhaps it is the delirium brought by the chill that was washing over him, or perhaps he just wanted to say it. He couldn’t bring himself to care.
Arthur felt Merlin’s weight shifting behind him.
He rushed to fill the silence, “you have to know you did nothing wrong – you did nothing but make me a better king” he scrambled for a grasp on the freezing ground to push himself up to face Merlin
“You would have always been a great king”
“A great king, maybe, but not a good king, not a kind king”
“Now I wouldn’t go that far” – it should have been a gentle poke to break the tension, but Merlin’s face barely managed a grin. How long had Merlin been speaking like this, so without hope, so lifeless. Had it been the past few hours or the past few months that brought the dark rings under his eyes and placed the weight of the world in his mannerisms?
How had this happened without Arthur so much as suspecting a change? How did he not see the exhaustion?
“You’ve carried such a heavy burden, all this time, since the very first day you set foot in Camelot.” His voice is hoarse, stilted. He wished that Merlin would just speak, continue his against-all-odds enthusiasm in spite of everything, but it is too much to ask – and he has always asked too much of Merlin. He settled for scanning every inch of Merlin’s face, as if to commit it to memory, as if that would be of any use now.
Normally, his armour felt like an extension of himself, tonight it felt like he had grown a new limb, his movements clunky, the weight dragging him downwards against his will.
His hands found themselves on Merlin’s shoulders, a lacklustre attempt to stop the sway that was creeping into his body, the gentle fogging at the corners of his vision, telling him to lay back, to give in.
“I’ve seen bigger men buckle under smaller weights, I don’t pretend to not understand why you didn’t tell me, but I wish I could have taken some of it off your shoulders, even for a while. You must know you never did anything wrong.”
“If I had done nothing wrong, we would not be here, you would not be here.” Merlin grasped Arthur’s wrist, steadying, “I would not have done it for any other man.”
And there he was. Looking at Arthur with firm but weary eyes.
Disarmingly earnest. Honest in a way that Arthur would have usually brushed off with a joke and a light thump on the side.
“You have always been surprising, Merlin.”
Arthur placed an ear to Merlin’s chest, chasing the soothing rhythm of his heartbeat as he fell gently towards the other man.
Any other day he wouldn’t have dreamed of it, any other day.
They would be found a few days later – one lying still, the other asleep, one soothing hand still resting in golden hair.