Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“There you are,” Merlin said, looking stricken and exhausted and full of relief all at once. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

It seemed unwarranted given that Arthur was exactly where he ought to be, tending to the farm, but when Merlin surged forward to grasp at his shoulders Arthur lost the heart to point that out.

“Here I am,” Arthur agreed. He let Merlin hold onto him, though it was far too hot outside to be making extended physical contact with anyone, and he let Merlin subject him to that searching blue gaze, though Merlin always gave the impression that he was seeing more than Arthur was letting on and that kind of thing made Arthur twitchy.

But he didn’t twitch now, and Merlin kept looking at him like he was drinking him in, like Arthur was a welcome sight even though they’d seen each other yesterday. As Arthur blinked the sun out of his eyes with fond bemusement, he reflected that it was not such a bad thing to be sweaty and too warm under Merlin’s hands.

“Give me a hand with the corn, will you?” Arthur said.

Merlin blinked. His grip loosened. “Hold on. The what?”

Arthur gestured, shaking himself free gently in the process. “The corn, Merlin,” he said, patiently. “Isn’t that what you’re here for?”

Merlin, apparently struck dumb by the sweet corn Arthur had been religiously cultivating, didn’t say anything.

“For Hunith,” Arthur prompted, but it was no use. Merlin had turned to the watermelon patch, then to the tomatoes, and was now looking in the far-off distance at Arthur’s house with his mouth open.

“I came here for you,” Merlin said at last, in that horrible demonstrative way of his. There was something perilously awed and gentle in his voice, like wonder, and something sad, too. “But I guess the corn will do as well.”

--

Arthur hadn’t meant a literal hand but Merlin provided no explanation for why he was feeling like doing physical labor today, so Arthur didn’t pry.

There was clearly something on his mind. Arthur might have been more offended if he couldn’t see so plainly how Merlin was wandering around as if in a daze, twisting his neck to give everything a second, third glance.

And anyway, Arthur didn’t mind the work. It was soothing, comfortingly thoughtless. Merlin had been spoiling him lately.

“So you’ve lived here — all your life,” Merlin said, sounding disbelieving, turning around again to gawk at the fields as if this was the first time he’d helped Arthur through a harvest. He kept peering at Arthur and then at his surroundings as though either of them would change if he looked hard enough.

“Watch the cart,” Arthur ordered, because for some reason neither of them had tried to fix the loose wheel still, then: “Yes, Merlin. As have you.”

“Right. Naturally,” Merlin said, blinking hard. He rubbed at his eyes. “All my life. With you.”

“The cart,” Arthur said again, meaningfully, and Merlin’s arm obediently reached to steady it, though Merlin himself did not appear to be aware of it.

Satisfied that Merlin would keep it steady for now, Arthur returned to his harvesting. He said thoughtfully, “I mean, saying it like that is kind of —”

“So we’ve known each other that long then,” Merlin said, talking right over him and staring into the corn — inside the cart, this time — as if it contained the answers.

Arthur twisted another ear of corn free and emerged from the stalks to raise his eyebrows. “If you’ve hit your head, you can just tell me,” he said. “It would explain a lot, actually.”

Merlin scowled. “You prat, I’m serious.”

“I’m serious too — don’t throw the harvest at me, Merlin! What are you, five?” Arthur squinted at him, irritation tempered by concern. “Seriously, are you alright?”

Merlin laughed, a bit nervously, which was generally concerning on its own but in this situation, such a regular Merlin thing to do that it was almost soothing. He looked well, at least, if bewildered, and was dressed in the usual purple tunic that always made him look just this side of regal. Though, Arthur couldn’t help noticing, watching how Merlin swallowed, perhaps he was a bit flushed.

“I’ve just — not been feeling like myself, lately. My memory is going.”

Merlin had the annoyingly selective memory of a person who’d never forgotten a single one of Arthur’s wrongs, but Arthur eyed Merlin’s pathetically over-bright smile and decided to let it go.

“You could say we’ve known each other for all our lives,” Arthur told him. “But I don’t think we really knew each other until recently.”

“Ha,” Merlin said, almost nostalgically, which was a lot of nerve for someone who’d apparently forgotten his entire early childhood. “I bet you hated me when we were children.”

Arthur scoffed. “If only. Would’ve saved me a lot of trouble.” He reached for another stalk and inspected an ear of corn. Good. The husk was nicely green. He was only half-thinking when he added: “There was something about you, Merlin, even then.”

He went back to the cart, which was only a third full, and clicked his tongue; they’d have to be more productive in the next hour. Merlin stared at him with wide eyes.

“You really mean that,” Merlin said.

“Obviously,” Arthur said, and now he was beginning to feel twitchy, because Merlin was looking at him with something tremulous in his expression again, like he didn’t know what to make of him. Like he was realizing right at this moment that he didn’t have Arthur as figured out as he thought he did.

Arthur coughed, feeling awkward, and shoved Merlin with half-hearted force, which made him feel a little better. “I just said it, didn’t I?”

“Yeah,” Merlin said, that half-ghost expression still on his face, and the beginnings of a smile underneath it, warm like sun. “You did.”

--

Hunith hugged Arthur first, ignoring Merlin’s affronted squawks, and as always something about the way she held Arthur made him wish he could step out of his skin and be small again. He didn’t think often about when he was younger, but it always made something good-bad pulse in him, making him restless. He was glad to be who he was; he wanted to do it all again; could he be better this time, with someone like Hunith to hold him when he cried?

“Mother,” Merlin whined, and the feeling went away.

“I see you everyday, child,” Hunith said with fond exasperation, but she went to Merlin and kissed him on the cheek. She turned to the cart, put her hands on her hips, and Arthur earned his own amount of good-matured scolding. “Now Arthur, I do hope that isn’t all for me.”

“I tried to stop him, I really did,” Merlin said.

Arthur sniffed. “Lying is unbecoming,” he informed Merlin, and grinned, a bit sheepish, as Hunith inspected the sheer amount of food he’d brought her with a sort of dawning resignation.

There was corn, of course, but there was yesterday’s bread too, and the eggs and some goat milk. Merlin hadn’t helped push the cart at all, so Arthur’s sore legs were very aware of just how much he’d brought. “You can give some to the neighbors?” he tried.

“You silly boy,” Hunith said, but she was smiling as she cuffed him gently on the ear. “Well, come in then. You’re staying for dinner, of course.”

Arthur had to duck his head to hide a smile. “If you’ll have me,” he said, feeling good. As light as a feather.

When he turned, Merlin was looking at the two of them fondly. Perhaps he realized how openly affectionate he was being, because he proceeded to roll his eyes at Arthur and to ignore how Hunith sighed at him.

“You’ll stay,” Merlin decided, and Arthur should have balked at this, but he found that he didn’t mind it so much, Merlin ordering him around.

--

Merlin boggled even more at the inside of his house than he had at the streets and accepted Arthur’s offer of a tour, though Arthur had clearly been joking.

“It’s literally your house,” Arthur told him, baffled. “Your childhood home. Your memory can’t be that unfathomably horrible.”

There were other things to do, like go to the river and fish or pick something up from the market, but now that the idea had been fed into Merlin’s head he held onto it like a child with a new toy.

“You offered,” Merlin said, the smile he gave to Arthur tinged with something strange. “Lead the way.”

“There’s still some time before dinner will be ready,” Hunith called from the kitchen, which sealed Arthur’s fate.

“Alright,” Arthur sighed, and he led the way.

There was the kitchen, obviously, which nearly always smelled of bread, and then the dining table in the room with the hearth, which caught the light streaming in from the windows perfectly during the late afternoon. Hunith’s bedroom was the first along the hall — “We’re not going in there, Merlin, obviously.” — and Merlin’s was at the end.

“I’ve my own room?” Merlin mumbled, clearly thinking himself much quieter than he was.

Arthur sighed at him, bemused. “Of course you have your own room,” he told him.

Outside was the coop. Merlin’s chickens liked Arthur better than his own did, maybe because Arthur brought them treats and his own chickens were too spoiled now to appreciate it anymore. Today, Arthur had brought an ear of corn to shuck for the hens to peck at.

Merlin crouched down next to him, close enough that Arthur could feel Merlin’s breath ghosting over his ear. He gestured for the kernels, murmuring a quiet thanks when Arthur passed him some, and scattered them in front of him.

The crowd that had been clustering around Arthur abandoned him. “You’re stealing my bribes,” Arthur said, frowning, ignoring that they’d been given freely.

Merlin grinned, unrepentant. “Aha. So you admit that they’re bribes.”

“Oh, shut up,” Arthur said.

Merlin laughed at him, and then grew a little more somber. Their elbows, forearms, kept knocking against each other. He was watching a little chick, white with down, peck valiantly away at the bare cob when he said to Arthur, “You’re around a lot then, aren’t you?”

Arthur shrugged, recognizing that Merlin’s overly casual tone meant that he ought to get his guard up, but he could muster only a faint air of nonchalance himself. “Ealdor is small,” he said. “Don’t flatter yourself.”

Ealdor is small, Merlin mouthed, shaking his head. Aloud, he said, “I mean, you bring corn for my chickens and they like you better than me. And you know your way around my house, and my mother loves you.”

“Your house is small too,” Arthur argued. “And Hunith loves everyone!”

Sighing, feeling suddenly exposed and lacking the bite to be properly defensive, he acquiesced to add: “Someone’s got to keep you alive. I may as well shoulder the burden.”

It came out uncomfortably sincere. Merlin was quiet for a long moment. Arthur turned his attention to the chick, and it was almost a relief when Merlin attempted to flick hay into his eyes, lightening the moment into something bearable.

“Funny,” Merlin told him, knocking their shoulders together. “If I didn’t know better I’d think you were trying to kill me half the time.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Arthur said, and whatever warm feelings he might have had about the situation dissipated when Merlin tossed more hay at him.

He gave as good as he got, crawling over Merlin to shove whatever mixture of hay and feather he’d grabbed down his shirt. Naturally, Merlin scrambled until he got enough of the upper hand to push Arthur’s head into the hay, and Arthur couldn’t let that stand, which was all to say that they arrived to dinner late and smelling distinctly of barn animal.

--

That night Merlin was on dish duty, partly because Arthur had lugged the cart here and Hunith had made the evening spread, but mostly because Merlin jumped at any opportunity to spare Hunith any pains.

He’d cleared several plates before realizing that Arthur and Hunith were staring at him.

“Um,” Merlin said, hovering over the remaining cutlery on the table. “Yes?”

“You were right,” Hunith murmured to Arthur. “He is acting stranger than usual.”

“How is this strange?” Merlin protested. “I’m being a good son. Clearing the dinner table.”

Hunith smiled indulgently at him and laughed a little. “You can use magic to speed things up and still be a good son, Merlin. Don’t you remember how you’d whine whenever I made you do anything by hand?”

The cutlery clattered to the table.

“Erm,” Merlin said.

“Really, Merlin,” Arthur sighed. “You’re the clumsiest person I know.”

To Hunith, he said, “He’s been a bit magic-shy today.” Arthur was about to tell her about how Merlin had performed actual physical labor to harvest the corn — though barely any by Arthur’s usual standards — when he noticed how pale Merlin had gotten. “Merlin?”

“I thought,” Merlin said, and he swallowed, though it did very little to keep his voice from coming out as a squeak. “Magic?”

“You would have thought you’d forgotten how to use it,” Arthur said. “Are you sure you’re fine? Maybe you should lie down.”

“I’ll make some tea,” Hunith said, smoothing a comforting hand over Merlin’s hair as she rose to put the kettle on. She kept her worry light-hearted, which was a relief, because Arthur could feel his own seeping under his skin and clouding his judgement already. “Why don’t you go rest a bit, dear?”

Merlin blinked at them, as if he were in a dream, and waved Hunith off. “I’m alright,” he said, faintly, and waved a hand before they could protest. The cutlery sat itself upright and the plates stacked themselves, and then everything floated merrily to the sink.

Merlin, eyes still faintly golden, watched Arthur the entire time almost warily. “You don’t care?” he asked.

“Why would I care?” Arthur said, genuinely confused. Merlin had been magic all his life, and unfortunately for Arthur, if Merlin’s constant disrespect wasn’t enough to deter him, magic certainly wouldn’t do it. “It’s just magic. It’s you.”

He reached forward and Merlin jolted, and Arthur tried not to feel hurt. It must have shown, though, because a guilty look settled into Merlin’s eyes next to the thing that looked almost like hope, wild and on its way to becoming unfettered, and he grabbed Arthur’s hand in his clammy one.

“Um,” Arthur said.

“Just — do whatever you were going to do,” Merlin said, a bit strangled. He still looked tense, but at least the color was returning to his face. He didn’t flinch this time when Arthur reached for him, but Arthur was careful to move slowly and deliberately.

He felt Merlin’s forehead, which was almost too cool, and he frowned.

“You’re cold,” Arthur said, wracking his brain for all the symptoms of the common illnesses. Chills in the middle of summer? “That can’t be good, can it?”

Merlin frowned back at him. Arthur let Merlin put his cool hand on Arthur’s forehead, and stayed still when Merlin drew back to frown even more and then pressed their foreheads together gently.

“I’m not cold,” Merlin said slowly. “You’re warm, Arthur. More than warm, you’re burning up.”

“What?” Arthur said, but now that Merlin had pointed it out, he could feel it. An uncomfortable heat that seemed separate from the sticky summer humidity, burning away from somewhere internal.

It was overwhelming, suddenly. He was hot, too hot. He felt cracked and dry all over, and somehow overflowing, too, in the way that only rivers could be.

“Arthur, sire,” Merlin said, panicked, reaching for him because Arthur was falling now, tipping backwards.

Impossibly, Merlin caught him with his cool hands. Arthur blinked blearily and saw that Merlin had used his magic to sweep the table and chairs away to get to Arthur in time, and then he blinked again and his head was in Merlin’s lap and Merlin’s concerned face was over his.

“Boys?” Hunith called, voice rising. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s Arthur!” Merlin yelled back. “He’s got a fever, or something!”

He lowered his voice and pushed Arthur’s hair away from his face for him. “Arthur,” Merlin said again, oddly desperately. “I’ve got you, it’s alright.”

“Merlin,” Arthur mumbled. His throat was dry.

“I’m here,” Merlin said. “You just stay here too, okay?”

“You called me sire,” Arthur informed him, and Merlin froze. “I don’t know why.”

“Oh, Arthur,” Merlin said miserably. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“What for?” Arthur wanted to ask, though — impossibly — he felt almost like he had an idea, but by now he wasn’t sure if his words were forming properly anymore.

He wanted to try to say it again but it was far easier to sink more into Merlin’s lap. The heat soothed itself down a little, enough to be less intensely uncomfortable, enough that a sense of exhaustion pressed up from underneath it. Merlin swept his hand over Arthur’s hair again; he was saying something, and Hunith was there too, but Arthur couldn’t make anything else out. He closed his eyes.

--

Merlin hovered, of course.

He always hovered — when Arthur was hurt, when Arthur was well, when Arthur was well and Merlin was inanely convinced that he could get hurt at any moment — but he was a constant presence at Arthur’s bedside. Which to be clear was Merlin’s own bed, because Merlin had prescribed bed rest and Hunith had backed him up.

It had been an uneasy sleep, apparently. Arthur had remained lucid enough to remember waking at random intervals during the night, to see Merlin’s worried, waxen face faintly illuminated by a lantern from where he’d pulled a chair up to keep watch over Arthur, with a compress on Arthur’s forehead that remained perpetually cool.

He remembered dreaming, too.

“There is just no way you’re feeling better,” Merlin said incredulously, when Arthur had the gall to posit that maybe he could return home to his own bed so Merlin didn’t have to sleep on a cot in his own home.

“I am,” Arthur said, with as much energy as he could summon, but the effect was ruined as Merlin viciously spoon-fed him more soup before Arthur could get his mouth closed. “Argh.”

“You fainted,” Merlin continued relentlessly. “Passed out. Fully swooned away —”

“Alright,” Arthur said. “There’s no need to go that far.”

Merlin huffed self-righteously. “You’ll stay the night, at least.” He peered closer at Arthur. “You really didn’t feel ill until you fainted?”

“I felt fine,” Arthur said honestly. “I feel fine now.”

And he did, if more worn than usual, but there was none of that horrible heat, and he felt like it would do him good to get up and walk around, if only Merlin would let him. The difference between them was that Arthur was simply glad to be feeling like a human again and Merlin was determined not to rest until he was sure that Arthur would stay that way.

Arthur thought this news would reassure Merlin, but his mouth only flattened anxiously. Arthur didn’t think he was imagining the strange guilt that had shrouded itself around him, and Merlin had always worn guilt the way he wore all his other feelings: in plain sight, with abandon, because Arthur didn’t think he was capable of really, truly hiding them.

“Well,” Merlin said, guiltily, “I think you should take it easy, anyway.”

Arthur watched how his slender hands worried at the sheets and asked slowly, regretting it already, “Do you know what’s wrong with me?”

Merlin did not answer. It wasn’t yet noon but the sun had already gone behind a sheet of clouds. There would be rain soon, though Arthur couldn’t say when it would come. Merlin watched the grey sky with his eyebrows knit together and he took a long, deep breath.

“Did you dream last night?” he said finally, turning to Arthur.

It was Arthur’s turn to fall silent. He’d dreamt of many things, of a castle with tall walls and a familiar room, and half-remembered faces that hurt his head to think of — even his sister’s laughter, though he didn’t have a sister, did he? — and a sword. He’d heard muffled conversations of things he shouldn’t understand, though in the moment they’d made sense, and he was relieved that at least those secrets didn’t stick in his memory.

And he’d dreamt of Merlin, of course. Merlin, who called him sire, in muffled conversation with a familiar voice. His voice was frustrated as he snapped, “I know, it’s not right! But Gaius — you didn’t see him. He looked happy! At peace!”

There had been magic too, though in his dream it had evoked a kind of animal fear that he’d never felt before when he’d watched Merlin draw out streams of fire from the hearth in their youth. He’d been ashamed; he’d been afraid; he’d been sorrowful; perhaps his only saving grace was that underneath that pile of ugly things was a sense of wonder, resilient beyond meaning.

Merlin nodded to himself, in a kind of wretched, self-satisfied way. “You talk in your sleep, you know,” he told Arthur, and Arthur could not speak, and Merlin’s hand came down to rest on Arthur’s arm gently.

Arthur must have fallen asleep again because the next time he awoke Merlin had gone, Hunith was in his place, and it was dusk, or at least the sky was on its way to becoming dark and quiet.

He must have made a sound because Hunith looked up from her mending — she’d done it by hand, always, even when Merlin volunteered to speed up the process — and smoothed Arthur’s hair back.

“Merlin’s just gone to get some ingredients for a tonic,” Hunith said, in a low, soothing voice. Arthur should have resented that this was the first thing she thought he might want to hear, but he didn’t have the strength for it, and maybe even the inclination to. “Are you feeling better, Arthur? Your fever came back.”

Arthur blinked, bleary, and tried to will himself more awake. “Yes, thank you,” he managed, though honestly he wasn’t sure that was true. His throat rasped and she helped him sit up so that he could sip at some water, and his head ached. He was worried that Merlin was out of sight and that only made his head hurt more. “Sorry for all the trouble.”

Hunith laughed, quietly, a little sad. “You’re never any trouble, dear.”

She sat by him, though Arthur couldn’t have been good company, half-delirious as he was, and remained even when Merlin returned with worried eyes and a bag full of herbs, stroking his hair until Arthur had been lulled back to sleep.

--

Arthur put his foot down on the third day of his affliction — he’d spent enough time taking advantage of Hunith’s generosity and he was well enough to head back, thank you very much — and Merlin put his foot down, too — “You’re the stupidest man I’ve ever met, Arthur, did you know that?”

So on the fourth day, Merlin packed both of their bags and put them in the cart, and announced that he was taking Arthur home.

“A disproportionate number of your belongings are in my cart,” Arthur said helpfully, operating under the delusional guise that Merlin would come to his senses eventually and realize that there was no need to temporarily move into Arthur’s house. “Don’t think I should be taking your — my god, Merlin, what is this, an entire apothecary in your bag? — with me.”

“That’s for you, idiot,” Merlin said, who was stalwart in the worst situations. “I’m not letting you go by yourself so you can pass out next to your beloved tomatoes.”

There was always an air of insulting disbelief when he talked about Arthur’s crops and Arthur’s love for them.

“They need tending,” Arthur told him again, and Merlin replied again, with vitriol, “You need tending.”

But he did fix the wheel of the cart, with magic, and had the cart push itself so that he could turn his attention to steadying Arthur if he fell, so Arthur supposed there was worse company to be had.

Arthur lived on the edge of Ealdor, where the neighbors didn’t live so close together and he’d had to build fences to keep the wild animals out, and it was a trek every week to get to the market. It had been foreign land, once, but Ealdor had flourished in the past years and sprawled out over the surrounding brush, brush that technically included Arthur.

It wasn’t a horribly far journey from Merlin’s house, but maybe there had been some merit to Merlin’s worry because Arthur tired far more easily than he usually did. They took it slow, but by the time the familiar door drifted into view Arthur’s breath was coming in short, strained bursts.

“I’m alright,” Arthur said, which did nothing to deter Merlin from half-carrying him straight to bed, though the sun was still up. They compromised on Arthur being carried to the cot on the floor, which was usually reserved for when Merlin slept over. In his youth he’d transformed it occasionally into a bunk, so they could sleep together in Arthur’s room, but the wood was too weak for that now. “Overexerted myself, that’s all.”

“Overexerted my ass,” Merlin grumbled. “Maybe if you’d agreed to stay at my house for longer you wouldn’t have — overexerted yourself.”

He murmured something under his breath, tongue slipping into words that were sweeter and less violent — and this had always fascinated Arthur, when Merlin needed to use incantations and when he didn’t — and the cart unloaded itself.

The herbs floated to Arthur’s kitchen, smaller than Hunith’s and not half as well stocked. The cutting board still in the sink was washed with a floating rag before Merlin enchanted a knife to begin chopping the ingredients.

Merlin seemed at home here. His eyebrows had only jumped a little when he’d surveyed Arthur’s home and something like recognition had settled into his face, and the corners of his mouth had even drawn up when he’d seen Arthur’s bedroom.

“Your memory seems to be fine here,” Arthur observed, watching the pull of fabric against Merlin’s back as Merlin hunched over to flip through an ancient looking book.

“What?”

“You’ve been forgetting an awful lot of things,” Arthur clarified. “But you seem to know your way around here just fine.”

His voice was a little accusing, though Arthur couldn’t say that he knew exactly what he was accusing Merlin of.

Merlin brought over one of the concoctions he’d been working on, and Arthur straightened up a bit more against the pillows he’d propped himself up against as Merlin knelt next to him.

“My memory is still dodgy,” Merlin reassured him, mouth hanging half-open as he stirred what looked like threads of golden magic into the bowl. It was evasive. “Your house is just — familiar. Here, try this, will you?”

Arthur tried, then tried not to gag as it went down. It was slippery, which was not a particularly appetizing trait for a potion. “You couldn’t have made this any less bitter?”

“That’s how you know it’s working,” Merlin said cheerfully, then he frowned. “But you don’t feel any better?”

“I feel hydrated?” Arthur supplied, which didn’t help the expression on Merlin’s face at all, and Arthur’s next words only made it worse. “So. Back to the house thing. Shouldn’t everything be familiar to you?”

“You would think that,” Merlin hedged. Arthur whacked him and he sighed. “There’s — something wrong.”

Arthur could not help that he sounded strangled. He gestured at himself and then to Merlin incredulously. “Well, obviously.”

“But,” Merlin ignored him, determination settling into the set of his jaw, “I’m working on it. On finding a cure.”

“And then you’d remember everything?” Arthur asked, realizing too late that Merlin was probably referring to the random flashes of heat Arthur was getting.

But Merlin didn’t make fun of him. “It would fix everything,” he said instead, a bit ominously, which wasn’t really an answer at all. He crooked his fingers, eyes flashing, and another bowl of something floated over. “Now, try this. I added more petals to this one.”

--

They settled into a sort of routine.

Arthur didn’t seem to get worse or better — the heat came occasionally, and when it did he was prone to long naps, but he didn’t pass out again and Merlin consented eventually to letting him back to the fields. The fever was a bit more unpredictable, but Merlin was rapidly making an overly large stock of fever-reducing tonic so it was a treatable issue, at least.

“You’re sure you can’t tell me what you think is wrong with me?” Arthur checked dubiously. “Or wrong with you, for that matter?”

“Gaius — I mean, someone — advised that it might make things worse,” Merlin told him. He looked immediately regretful, as if he wanted to bury himself into the ground right there, in the watermelon patch.

Arthur nodded thoughtfully. If Merlin didn’t want him to know something, it was probably important.

“Gaius, huh,” he mused. “I don’t know a Gaius.” But even as he said it there was something buried way down below, prickling at his memory.

“You don’t,” Merlin agreed, a little too readily. “I don’t know why I said that.”

“Hmm,” Arthur said, non-committal, and he frowned.

He was still dreaming these days, strange things that sometimes felt more real than the pleasant summer haze of the waking world. He’d never seen Gaius there, or maybe he had and just hadn’t recognized him, but he’d heard Merlin talking to him again, about fevers and enchantments and draughts.

Merlin frowned back at him. “Arthur?”

“Hmm,” Arthur said again. He bent to check the underside of a watermelon — it wasn’t ripe, not quite — and felt Merlin’s worried gaze on his back.

Last night, he’d dreamt that he’d been in the castle once more. He’d gone down a series of empty halls until he’d come to the caverns, and then he kept going until he came to the opening of an enormous cave. There’d been a low laugh as he’d drawn closer and a weary voice.

“Ah, young Pendragon,” it had said, and abruptly the dream sharpened. Things suddenly had weight to them, took up space in new ways. “You’ve been asleep for a long while. I did not think this part of your destiny.”

Arthur said something back, but he didn’t remember now what it was. It had been swallowed up, anyway, by the sound of wing-beats and the glint of scales, a sudden flash of light in the dark.

--

By the ninth day, Arthur had woken up feverishly the past three middle-of-the-nights to increasingly realistic dreams about sword fighting and ordering Merlin around and standing in throne rooms, and Merlin had woken up the past three middle-of-the-nights to shake Arthur awake.

Arthur wasn’t entirely certain that Merlin wasn’t just moving his cot outside Arthur’s door every night. He’d been extra fidgety because Arthur had been tiring more easily lately, regardless of how much he did during the day, and was dozing off before the night was completely dark in inconvenient places: at dinner, in the bath, and once, memorably, the chicken coop.

Tonight Arthur woke up on his own, but when he opened his eyes to the gloom of his darkened room — and what a relief that was, the dark — Merlin was already pushing the door open and letting in a stream of light from the ball of fire levitating in his hand.

Whatever he said came through like white noise. Arthur caught his breath, felt it stutter, and focused on the scratch of the blanket against his palms, the sweat on his back. His throat hurt. He dug his fingernails into the soft of his palms until he was certain they were his own.

Merlin was by his side immediately. “Arthur,” he said, clearly now, reaching out gently with the hand that was alight.

Arthur couldn’t help it; he flinched.

He could tell he’d hurt Merlin’s feelings. Merlin snuffed the fire out, but not quickly enough so that Arthur couldn’t see how his expression had crumpled.

Arthur shook his head. “It’s not — whatever you’re thinking, stop it,” he said furiously. He reached for Merlin, getting ahold of his sleep shirt, and Merlin let himself be manhandled so he was sitting on the bed, though he was limp as a rag doll in Arthur’s grip.

“Are you afraid of the magic?” Merlin asked quietly, swallowing hard. “You were — you were screaming my name, in your sleep. Did I — Arthur, look at me, please.”

Did you dream that I hurt you? is what he meant. Do you think that I would ever do it?

Arthur looked, wordlessly, and Merlin seemed to relax at whatever he saw in Arthur’s face, though he was still holding himself like he was ready to flee the moment Arthur released him.

“I haven’t just been having ordinary dreams, have I,” Arthur said quietly. Merlin didn’t respond but took a long, shaky breath, which was as good as confirmation.

He waited, heart still beating wildly, but Merlin remained silent. Arthur felt the soft of Merlin’s shirt in between his fingertips, smooth under his palms.

“In my dream there was fire,” he said finally, and Merlin shrunk with self-loathing and recognition written all over himself, like he thought it had been his, so Arthur forced himself to continue: “And you were burning.”

It took a moment. There was an awful kind of realization dawning on Merlin’s face. “Burning,” he repeated slowly. “What —”

“Because that’s what they do to sorcerers, apparently,” Arthur continued wearily, “in Camelot.”

That was where the castle was. He’d learned that much, at least, from his increasingly uneasy nights.

Merlin fell into a stunned quiet and Arthur let his head fall back. He stared glumly up at the ceiling, thinking of how strange Merlin had been acting when Arthur saw him use magic in Hunith’s kitchen. Pieces were putting themselves together and the picture they made wasn’t particularly optimistic. Either Arthur had gone mad or was about to undergo a massive shift in worldview.

“I wouldn’t burn,” Merlin told him finally. His voice was sure and determined. “Never for real. You wouldn’t let me.”

Obviously Arthur would never. But there was something awful crawling in his throat, anyway.

“But you never told me,” he said, voice cracking despite his best efforts, overwhelmed with emotions that he didn’t understand.

He was not entirely sure of what they were talking about, of what it was that Merlin hadn’t said, but he remembered the stinging betrayal he’d felt watching dream-Merlin go to the pyre, how he’d thrown himself at the pyre anyway, and how they nearly hadn’t been able to hold him down.

But they had, and Merlin had burned, and Arthur had screamed.

Underneath it all, Arthur recalled with sickening guilt that first dream and how magic had made his skin crawl and his heart pound, and he thought he could probably understand whatever it was Merlin hadn’t told him. There was the taste of ash in his mouth.

Merlin’s voice went wobbly, a terrible confirmation that whatever they were talking about was a big deal, and Arthur only resisted a little before he let himself be pulled upright, into Merlin’s chest.

“I’m sorry,” Merlin said, fiercely, and drew away only enough so that he could hold Arthur by the face, fingers curled gently underneath his jaw. “I was scared. But I wanted to, believe me. That’s all I’ve ever wanted, for you to know,” and now it was Merlin’s voice that was catching, growing thick. “It was always going to be you, alright?”

“Alright,” Arthur choked out, and he had to screw his eyes shut. He couldn’t have said anything else with Merlin looking at him like that. “Alright.”

It took a long while for Arthur’s being to return to a state that wouldn’t embarrass him — which was just as well, because Merlin seemed to have sent himself into a flustered stupor — but eventually he remembered himself enough to unhook his fingers from Merlin’s shirt, palms sweaty, and Merlin’s hands fell from his face to hang awkwardly at his sides.

Neither of them made to move away from one another. The sounds of their breaths were almost too loud in the quiet.

Merlin’s throat bobbed when he swallowed. His eyes flitted to Arthur’s, then away, and Arthur found himself staring with great interest at a spot vaguely in the direction of Merlin’s right shoulder.

“Well,” Merlin said, clearing his throat awkwardly. “Your fever’s gone up. Drink some water. I’ll go make another dose of medicine.”

He made to leave, straightening up, and Arthur wasn’t thinking when he reached out to curl his fingers around Merlin’s wrist.

Merlin stilled, mouth slack with surprise. His eyes were their regular blue, which were not actually regular at all, the way Merlin had them, and under the moonlight coming in from the curtains Arthur had neglected to close properly they were shining faintly.

“Would you,” Arthur fumbled clumsily, “would you — stay, first, for a bit?”

Merlin didn’t move for a moment, as if checking to make sure he’d heard Arthur correctly, then got back on the bed. “Of course,” he said, sounding as if he might start to cry again. “How do you want to —”

“Just come here,” Arthur told him hoarsely, “please.” And Merlin did.

He lied down next to Arthur and turned to glance at him, quietly alert in a soothing kind of way. Arthur thought about how they’d called him a prince, in Camelot, and if he was a prince then surely he could be brave, and he propped himself up enough so that he was hovering over Merlin’s startled face.

“I think,” Arthur confessed, stilted, “that maybe in Camelot I am afraid of magic, a little bit. But not — I’m not afraid of you, do you understand? And I’m not afraid because I fear it. It’s — the burning, I think.”

It was the most poorly articulated statement Arthur had ever tried to give in his life, and he didn’t think he knew the Arthur in Camelot fully, really — and he did not want to unpack, at all, how there appeared to be both an Arthur in Camelot and an Arthur in Ealdor, and a Merlin that used magic freely and a Merlin that was a sorcerer — but he knew that this had to be true. It was suddenly horribly important that Merlin understood this.

Arthur waited a few terrible, wordless heartbeats, and then Merlin shuddered underneath him, with something like relief, and he was pulling Arthur down closer so Arthur’s nose was tucked against his neck.

“You don’t even know what you’re saying,” Merlin said, marveling, holding him tight. “You don’t even remember everything.”

“I don’t care,” Arthur told him, wholly convinced. “I know you, Merlin. It doesn’t matter at all.”

Skipping out on the medicine would hurt, later, and Merlin would tell him mercilessly that his fever would have gone down if Arthur just let Merlin make a dose for him earlier, even as he enchanted a compress colder for him. Arthur wouldn’t be allowed to check on his crops and Merlin would grow fed up enough with his complaining to do the watering himself.

But for now there was just Arthur and Merlin, in the dark. Arthur arranged himself so his head was on Merlin’s sturdy chest and Merlin curled his arm over his back; he listened to the steady thrumming of Merlin’s heart — strong, alive, right beside Arthur’s — and he slept dreamlessly.

--

The next day, after they’d cleared dinner away — or rather, Merlin cleared the table with magic while Arthur was being an invalid, and then gave Arthur medicine so he couldn’t keep using that excuse —Merlin sat Arthur down at the kitchen table.

Arthur eyed the look on Merlin’s face, which indicated that Arthur probably wasn’t going to like this conversation very much, and asked, without hope. “Are you sure we can’t just go to sleep and leave this for tomorrow? Didn’t Gaius say explaining would make it worse?”

“We can’t get much worse than this,” Merlin told him grimly, and Arthur sighed. So they were having it out, then.

The thing was that as Merlin talked it was beginning to sound a little familiar: there’d been a disguised sorceress, again, and of course she’d been targeting Arthur because of something Uther had done — “Your father, the King,” Merlin supplied helpfully, which hadn’t been as much of a surprise as it should’ve been — and naturally Arthur had fallen prey to the cursed object she’d slipped in his chambers because he never listened to Merlin.

“I’m sure that last part can’t be true,” Arthur said. “If you were a better manservant you would have stopped her.”

“I should have never given you that piece of information,” Merlin sighed, but it did what Arthur had intended; for a moment, Merlin lifted out of his air of despondency long enough to whack at him.

Arthur must not have whacked back with enough force because whatever Merlin was recalling made him go solemn again, eyes dark and jaw clenched. “The spell she cast — she wanted you gone, Arthur. For good.”

“What did she do?” Arthur asked warily. Poison was apparently quite popular. Love spells, too, which were not nearly as fatal but almost worse. He contemplated being married off and shuddered.

“She sent you into an endless, enchanted sleep,” Merlin told him, sighing, looking at him almost nervously.

Arthur felt a headache coming on and thought about how Merlin had said that the dreams Arthur had been having weren’t normal. “And here in Ealdor — this, right now…”

“That would be the sleep,” Merlin said. He tried for a smile, but it was pained and flat. “Ealdor isn’t actually this big in real life, you know. You’ve been dreaming for a long time. Surprise?”

Chapter Text

Arthur was not proud of it, but he got a bit existential.

It was a lot, to be fair, to be told that he had been sleeping for an entire fortnight, and most likely wouldn’t even fully remember waking life until a cure had been found.

Perhaps the one relief was that he now had an explanation for the strange dreams he’d been having — glimpses into real life? — but honestly Arthur was not particularly comforted by the thought that everything that had once been known to him was now so painfully unfamiliar.

Or, if the situation was turned another way, that everything that had once been known to him was apparently not real at all.

They got some of the more obvious questions out of the way before Arthur let the dread hit. Yes, Merlin was sure that Camelot was a real place; no, Arthur’s physical body was actually miraculously fine, outside of being, well, asleep. Time worked differently here, yes, and so did magic, and honestly Merlin still wasn’t too sure about why dream-Arthur knew about his magic in the first place — no, Merlin hadn’t meant to call him dream-Arthur and he was sorry he’d said that.

The Camelot dreams were weird, Merlin admitted, but his best guess was that since he’d never been supposed to be able to infiltrate Arthur’s sleep in the first place the spell was doing strange things. No, he wasn’t just asleep all the time and he didn’t know why he was always there in Arthur’s dreams but it was possible, Merlin said, that Arthur’s dream was engineering itself so that Arthur was not aware of when Merlin was gone.

Yes, Uther knew that Arthur had been ensorcelled. No, he did not know Merlin was using sorcery to fix that.

“I’m real,” Merlin told him, over and over again, as Arthur stared morosely into the empty hearth. Arthur must have exhausted his scant supply of sympathy because he’d started to get exasperated. “I swear it. Do you really think you’d just organically dream about me for this long? Did I not just explain, in depth, how I’m real?”

“This is exactly the kind of thing I’d dream about,” Arthur said despairingly, putting his head into his hands. “You and farming. Oh, god.”

When he looked up again Merlin had gone pink and silent. Arthur only got a moment of blissful confusion before the implications of what he’d said caught up with him; he didn’t quite bury his head in his hands, but it was a near thing.

Merlin coughed, and ignored his lapse into honesty, blessedly. “Your head couldn’t come up with a scheme this convoluted,” he said, which was insulting but honestly pretty reassuring.

Not that Arthur couldn’t have come up with it. He could be very imaginative when he had to be, evidently.

Arthur was a bit less reassured when Merlin went on to explain that the spell itself was so convoluted that he and Gaius had gone through just about every possible cure in Merlin’s spell book with no evident success. The knights were off looking for the sorceress, but nobody really had any hope anymore that she’d be found.

Arthur processed this, nodded to himself resolutely, and resolved to bear this gracefully. It was an unfortunate situation, all things considered, but at least he wasn’t dying or anything, and honestly for an enchantment it was very relaxing. It was promising that Merlin had told him this much already with no apparent ill effect. And there were worse places he could have dreamed of, anyway.

Well. Perhaps he would investigate that earlier part.

“This, uh, sleep,” Arthur hedged. “It’s not dangerous or anything, right? Past just putting me out of commission for a while?”

Merlin’s face fell and Arthur groaned. “Seriously?”

“I don’t think it was originally,” Merlin said, and winced. “But when we started trying to get you out, the spell wasn’t too happy about it.”

He saw the look on Arthur’s face and amended hastily, “Not that you’re going to die! It’s just — I don’t think you’re supposed to be getting dreams about Camelot. Or fevers. Or fainting spells.”

“No, probably not,” Arthur said glumly, and resisted the urge to thud his head into the table. “Is there anything else I should know about?”

Merlin pinked, which was intriguing, and then hesitated, which was not at all promising. “Don’t worry about it,” he said, shiftily, and refused to say anything else about it even under duress, so Arthur prodded and poked without result, and he worried.

--

Memory returned gradually, in odd half-shades, so subtly that sometimes Arthur only recognized that it was happening when he said something and turned to see Merlin watching him with a half-surprised expression on his face.

They continued life as usual — or what was as usual as life could be, now that Arthur was aware that none of it was real — so Arthur farmed, Merlin made potions for when Arthur lapsed into his increasingly worse bouts of illness, and they visited Hunith, who didn’t seem very bothered at all that Merlin had basically moved into Arthur’s house.

Merlin had reassured Arthur that Hunith was a real person, so Arthur was trying not to think too hard about if real-Hunith would have reacted like this or if his mind was doing a whole lot of projecting.

The snippets that Arthur remembered were usually never very comprehensive, or even significant, but he was slowly learning to match names to faces and faces to voices, and now when he did dream of Camelot he was more curious than anything about the faint recognition he was already beginning to feel, ghosting in and out at the back of his mind.

Merlin helped too, of course.

How he talked about someone said more than what he actually said: his face pinched when he spoke about some of the nobility; to relax him again, Arthur only had to ask about Gaius and Merlin’s whole demeanor would soften. He did not like to speak of Uther, which filled Arthur with an odd mix of discomfort and understanding.

When he spoke about Arthur, underneath all the jibes and witty retorts and insolence, he was almost — reverent.

“You’re a good prince, you know,” Merlin said to him, out of the blue.

Arthur did not know what Merlin had seen in him to say that just then; they were at the market. The watermelons had finally been ready to harvest and Arthur had been feeling well, and Merlin admitted that he was curious about what it was like in this Ealdor.

Real Ealdor was not only not nearly so big as this Ealdor, apparently, but also not as prosperous or welcoming of magic — though certainly both Ealdors were better than Camelot when it came to sorcerers. Explained why Merlin had been gaping about everywhere at the beginning; Arthur’s subconsciousness had expanded Hunith’s house and put down cobblestone streets, and Arthur’s own home appeared to be a mixture between his palace chambers and Gaius’s workroom.

“You have your moments, to be clear,” Merlin continued thoughtfully. “You can be downright awful sometimes — oh, like that time you got enchanted and left me for the stocks, and then that other time I got sent to the stocks —”

Arthur huffed. “Alright, I get it —”

“But you’re — you’re good, Arthur. When it comes down to it.”

And Merlin sounded so sure, so certain, that Arthur wanted to bask in his confidence as much as he wanted to shrink away from it. As he was, he couldn’t even remember the names of his knights. But it felt absurdly good to know that Merlin thought of him like this.

Arthur stared down at his hands — did they look like this, in Camelot, calloused from days spent in the earth? — and felt the sun bearing down on his hair and the crowd moving around them, and his throat thickened as he failed to summon an appropriate response.

When he looked up Merlin was glancing at Arthur, sidelong, and it was that look again, the one that said he would like to figure Arthur out, tinged with something bittersweet.

“You really like it here, don’t you,” Merlin said, each word punctuated with slightly more disbelief than the last. “Ealdor. Farming.”

“It’s not so bad,” Arthur said defensively. He rather liked being Farmer Arthur, though he’d told Merlin that once and Merlin had sent himself into a fit of poorly disguised, incredulous laughter, though he’d then entered into a depressive, introspective haze that lasted the entire evening.

Arthur did enjoy it though, truly, even if he had no real reason to work anymore, though it was getting harder and harder to ignore that things had started to feel — flimsy. Sometimes too flat and sometimes luridly bright. It was like being dunked occasionally in a pool of cool water and being shocked into awareness any time the grass was too green or the wind didn’t blow quite right, which surely was evidence that whatever Merlin and Gaius were doing was working.

“That’s not what I meant. It’s just I had no idea,” Merlin said, mouth taking on a wretched, upset hitch. “I thought you hated this kind of thing. Next time, when you’re back, will you come back to Ealdor with me?”

He continued, when Arthur failed to reply, “We’ve got to go home to Camelot, but it doesn’t mean — everything has to be as it was before,” and now Merlin sounded oddly shy, peering at Arthur from underneath his lashes, and Arthur wasn’t sure that they were talking solely about going to visit Hunith anymore.

Arthur considered this, the situation of Merlin’s magic, which was treason that Arthur was now implicated in, and how Merlin had held him that night and how he’d thought he’d die, for a moment, before he’d realized that the pyre was only a dream; and now, the pink flush high up on Merlin’s cheeks and the red of his mouth and Arthur’s own rapidly beating heart.

“No, I suppose it doesn't,” Arthur said, and he swallowed, gainfully attempting some sort of levity. “Well, I suppose a trip can’t hurt. Need to perfect my fantasy Ealdor for the next time I get ensorcelled.”

“God forbid,” Merlin muttered, and he wasn’t quite smiling, but there was pleasure simmering easy at the upturned edges of his mouth and in the shine of his eyes.

When he spoke again it was more to himself than anything. “Yes,” Merlin said, satisfied, nodding, and then his voice wasn’t entirely his own anymore; there was something else, humming, singing underneath, like it was bigger than the both of them. “You’re a good prince, Arthur, but you’ll make a great king some day.”

--

The rest of market day passed pleasantly in a warm, sweet haze.

They made a good time of it: Arthur haggled for jam and honey, Merlin charmed an old woman out of half her stock of medicinal herbs at half price, and though Arthur’s strength started to fail him near the end of the day, they made it all the way to his doorstep before he toppled over.

Merlin lectured as he drew him a bath.

“I told you to let me know if you felt sick at all,” he said, which was negated by how he kept checking to see if the summoned water was an acceptable temperature.

“And I did,” Arthur said blithely, tugging off his shirt. “I said I was feeling a bit faint.”

There was a violent sounding splash. “Next time you tell me that before you faint, not as you’re doing it,” Merlin told him. “I swear —”

He turned away from the tub, eyebrows jumping up a bit when he saw Arthur, and whatever he was swearing went unfinished. The cloth he’d been wringing into painful submission went limp in his grip.

“The privacy screen is in the corner,” Merlin said, but he did not reach for it. His tongue darted over his lips when he swallowed, and he was not looking at Arthur, exactly, but he wasn’t not looking, either.

Arthur didn’t tell him to set it up. “I know,” he said, surprised that his voice didn’t shake, and Merlin came over wordlessly to unlace him out of his boots.

Merlin bathed after him, sinking into the water with a kind of sigh as his collarbones jutted delicately out from his skin, and the privacy screen did not go up then, either.

It was dark outside when they’d both finished, but inside Merlin had lit lamps in the corners of the bedroom so that everything was covered in a faint wash of warm light. He refilled the cup of water next to Arthur’s bedside and then came back with a vial of sleeping draught, in case Arthur woke up during the night, and by the time he got around to straightening things in the room that neither Arthur or Merlin had ever touched before, Arthur realized that perhaps Merlin was lingering, and that perhaps he was lingering for a reason.

Perhaps the reason was just that Arthur hadn’t sent him away.

Arthur took a deep breath and sat on the bed. “Merlin,” he said.

Merlin unfolded himself from the chair in front of the empty hearth and raised his eyebrows at him, but did not move otherwise. “Sire.”

“It’s late,” Arthur told him.

“It is,” Merlin agreed, a shifting combination of warm color under the shadow, and looking at him with an expression that was fond and bemused. “Are you tired?”

“I am,” Arthur said, as if he couldn’t hear his heartbeat in his ears, and he settled more into the mattress. He flipped the covers on the other side of the bed open and watched how Merlin’s eyes widened imperceptibly, like he was surprised even though he’d been expecting it, and swallowed. “Would you turn out the lights?”

Merlin’s smile came slowly, like the sun coming into view. “The cot isn’t that bad, you know,” he said to Arthur, and Arthur would have been more insulted if he couldn’t see how his ears had gone red.

“Just come here,” Arthur sighed, and Merlin laughed quietly and disbelievingly, like he was shrouded half in delight and half in shock, and he went.

They hadn’t slept in the same bed since that other night, and Arthur couldn’t decide if he was horrified or pleasantly surprised at how simple it was to lie down and let Merlin arrange them however he wished.

Merlin’s hair was still a little damp and curling at the ends, and it tickled the underside of Arthur’s chin since Merlin had decided to tuck his head into Arthur’s neck, but it was a surprisingly inoffensive feeling and one that gave Arthur an excuse to smooth Merlin’s hair back. He sprawled over Arthur as if Arthur was a mattress and not a person, agreeably drowsy and boneless, and Arthur held him around the waist to keep him in place. It was all wholly new but felt not all that unfamiliar at all.

Arthur wondered when the panic would come, and if they would ever talk about whatever this was. Merlin’s breath began to slow.

“The lights, Merlin,” Arthur prompted, a little amused despite himself.

“Lazy,” Merlin mumbled into his chest, as if he wasn’t ninety percent of the reason Arthur couldn’t get up to do it himself, and snapped his fingers obediently.

There was a hiss as the candles went out, and darkness covered them, sweet. Arthur felt Merlin’s weight on top of him, drowsy and warm, and thought that if no place like this Ealdor existed in Camelot, at least Camelot should afford him this.

--

Perhaps they should have made more out of market day, because Arthur spent the next days in awful, feverish delirium.

The onset had been near instantaneous. It seemed that in one moment Arthur was tripping over Merlin’s misplaced boots to get to the kitchen and in the next his head was spinning and Merlin had teleported himself to his side, hands not sure of where to place themselves and a horrible anxiety in his voice.

There was a lot of blank space after that, though Arthur registered that he’d been brought to his bed. He surfaced to consciousness occasionally, usually to Merlin’s drawn face in the chair by the bed and a stack of spellbooks littered around him, but mostly Arthur just dreamt.

There was Merlin and Gaius, in Gaius’s workroom, and honestly this was a little confusing because Arthur surfaced in this to also see Merlin sitting with a drawn face and a book, and it took realizing that he had no mouth — or even body — to understand that he wasn’t really there.

“If I leave now,” Merlin said, a little desperately, “maybe the spell will return to what it once was and Arthur will recover. The dream can rewrite itself without me.”

“If you leave now,” Gaius told him firmly but not unkindly, “Arthur will sleep for forever. There’s no turning back now, Merlin.”

Merlin sighed and rubbed at his eyes wearily. “I shouldn’t have meddled. Maybe then…” he said, and trailed off.

Gaius pushed a cup at Merlin. “We’re close to a cure,” he said. “Here, drink some water and take a rest. You’re no use exhausted. And I mean rest. Take a break from going into Arthur’s dreams.”

“I’m no use when I’m not exhausted,” Merlin muttered, then shifted guiltily under Gaius’s displeased gaze. He did not address the last bit Gaius had said but he took the cup, and the line of his throat was made delicate by a stream of lantern-light when he tipped his head back and drank.

There were the training grounds then, and in this place it was completely opposite: Arthur had his body back, and he had control over his body to a ridiculous degree. His body moved like a weapon — or maybe it was the weapons that were like his body: sword-arm, dagger-wrist — and even in the half-sleep state the dream impressed upon him he knew instinctively how to move and how to dodge, and when to press forward.

When he and the faceless knights broke for a midday meal, Arthur stopped for water before entering the castle, bloodrush and adrenaline still teeming beneath his skin. He took his helmet off, drenched his hair for a reprieve from the heat and as if the coolness of the water might quell the strange restlessness, and the sun’s shine off of a spare shield caught his eye.

There was his blond hair in the reflection, plastered to his forehead, and his proud jaw, and his unsmiling mouth that looked more perplexed than unhappy. Arthur stared for a long moment. For a brief instant as he’d been walking to the shield, the sun’s reflection had shifted into his eyes and whited out his vision, and he hadn’t known himself at all.

But the moment had passed, and it was him again, undoubtedly.

Arthur blinked at Camelot’s red-gold crest, how the gold shone even more brightly than the mail. He watched as the Arthur in the shield smoothed his hands over it, felt it coarse and warm beneath his touch, for a second a living thing as it rose and fell with his breath.

And there was the dragon — because undeniably, that was what was there, in the cave — who had not deigned to be physically present in front of Arthur, but seemed to be invested in its habit of saying cryptic things from afar so that they would echo throughout the underground.

“I have given everything to the boy that needs to be known,” it said, sounding almost disappointed.

“You don’t mean Merlin, do you?” Arthur said warily, oddly unsurprised that he was able to speak to it this time, and having the looming feeling of resignation that the dragon did, in fact, mean Merlin. Of course Merlin was talking to dragons. There could be nothing more or less absurd.

The dragon hummed, a low amused rumble. “Who else could it be?” it said, which was fair.

It was always Merlin. It always had been.

--

And then there was Merlin himself, in the flesh, though Gaius’s workroom didn’t look quite right and Gaius himself was nowhere to be found, and he made a wounded noise when he saw that Arthur was conscious.

Arthur tried to get up and was able to rise a little, though his body felt leaden, and Merlin pushed him back down. The room swam and then resolved itself, then swam again.

“Am I dreaming?” Arthur mumbled, mouth feeling like it was full of cotton. His head hurt rather vividly.

“I mean, technically yes,” Merlin said tearily, “but also no. No — don’t get up, idiot. Let me.”

Arthur stopped, flopping limply like a fish, and Merlin propped him up with pillows and supported the back of his head as he tipped water into Arthur’s mouth.

“How long have I been out?” Arthur said.

Merlin looked like he hadn’t slept in weeks, but he regularly looked like that, so it wasn’t the most reliable metric. It was another cloudy day and the grey was making it difficult to place what time of day it was; it was washing Merlin out too, making him look even more bleak and concerned than usual.

“Two days,” Merlin said. “You’ve been in and out but —”

“Not conscious until now,” Arthur guessed ruefully, and Merlin nodded tiredly.

He felt Arthur’s forehead. “Your fever’s broken for now,” he said, and though he didn’t look quite happy, he looked less now like he might snap into a million pieces if Arthur prodded him wrong. “How do you feel?”

“Eugh,” Arthur told him, which summed it up pretty well, but when Merlin continued to frown at him he elaborated: “Tired. Like I’ve been run over with a cart drawn by four horses. My head feels miserable.”

Merlin’s frown deepened. “You’ve been talking in your sleep again,” he said, which was not reassuring. “Here, take this and then drink some soup. Should help with your head.”

“Did I say anything interesting?” Arthur asked, half because he was curious and half to distract Merlin from how though he was hungrier than he’d expected and Merlin’s cooking seemed to have improved while Arthur was away, he still couldn’t get a substantial amount down.

Some humor returned to Merlin’s face, though he fixed his eyes meaningfully at the soup bowl. “My name,” he said, as if he was commenting on the weather. “Many times, in fact. I fear you’re obsessed with me.”

“Absolutely not,” Arthur said immediately, discovering with horror that upon thinking about it, it did seem that Merlin had been a rather large fixture in his sleep. “I’m ill and delirious, and I’m going to willingly go to my grave if you keep that up.”

Merlin patted him on the shoulder, none too sympathetically. “You also said Gaius’s name,” he said helpfully. “And something about a cave?”

Arthur frowned, recalling it. He was upset that Merlin had thought of going away, obviously, but there was something else too. “There was a cave,” Arthur said, remembering slowly, passing the bowl off to Merlin, “and a dragon.”

It was like rolling down a slope, syrupy slow and then suddenly exponentially faster. Now that he’d gotten started, it was coming back clearer and clearer.

“A dragon,” Merlin repeated, a little faint. “You don’t say.”

“It spoke to me,” Arthur said pointedly, “and implied heavily that it also spoke to you.”

“Oh, right,” Merlin said. “That dragon.”

Arthur put a hand up to stop Merlin from launching into what was probably an explanation and a false admission of innocence, trying to repeat the exact phrasing. “It said that it had given you everything that you needed to know.”

Merlin looked at him incredulously, forgetting to play dumb. “What? He told me to add coriander and lavender to the cure, which evidently has not worked!”

“You haven’t added any coriander to anything!” Arthur said, making a face. “Trust me, I would have known.”

Merlin rolled his eyes and sighed at the same time, which was very impressive. “Obviously I meant the cures I’ve been giving your physical body. It’s not like it’s you in the dream that’s been spelled —”

And then he paused, an odd expression waving over his face. “Or,” he said, slowly. “Maybe it is like that.”

“Like what?” Arthur prompted, not completely able to ascertain what Merlin was thinking and hating the feeling.

“I haven’t tried to cure you of the sleep here, just the fever,” Merlin said wonderingly. “I didn’t think — but why not? This is a part of you too, isn’t it?”

“Well,” Arthur said, a treacherous hope welling up in him at how all the exhaustion seemed to have miraculously left Merlin at his epiphany; he was flushed all of a sudden, alive, purposeful, like dry brush catching flame. “I should hope so.”

--

“It takes a while to brew,” Merlin said defensively, though Arthur hadn’t said anything.

It was horribly simple in the end, though the pessimist in Arthur reminded himself that they wouldn’t know if this was the end quite yet. Merlin turned out to have everything he needed, after the market, and after all the measuring, chopping, and magic had been done, now it was just a matter of being patient.

And a matter of sitting in the kitchen, in chairs pulled up next to the pot over the fire, to make sure it didn’t boil over or anything equally horrible.

“You can’t speed it up?” Arthur asked, mostly to antagonize Merlin.

Now that the adrenaline of discovery had worn off, he was remembering how nice it had all been; he was not sure that he’d ask Merlin to speed it up even if he could. But there was some anticipation too, fluttering in odd places: the pit of his stomach, the base of his neck where the fabric of his tunic was scratching at his skin.

Merlin ignored him with the long-suffering air of someone well-used to Arthur, gave the mixture a stir, and set the lid back on the pot. “Aren’t you excited to get back?”

“Of course I’m excited,” Arthur said. “We never got to eat the tomatoes though.”

He waited for Merlin to make fun of him, but worse occurred: his mouth wilted sympathetically and he looked at Arthur the way he sometimes did in the dreams where Uther yelled at him.

Arthur put his face into his hands. “Oh, stop it,” he said.

“You said it!” Merlin protested hotly, ears tipped red. “Can I help that I’m an empathetic person?”

“I don’t care that much about the tomatoes,” Arthur huffed imperiously, mostly serious. “We’ll be going to Ealdor, anyway, when I’m back. And they’ll be in season again.”

A mixture of surprise and something warm crossed Merlin’s face, as if he hadn’t expected Arthur to be serious about it. “It won’t be the same,” he warned. “You were — erm, very generous with your imaginings.”

“It’s no matter,” Arthur said, and was convinced that he meant it. He frowned at himself. “I don’t even know how I managed it.”

Merlin met his eyes then, smile slipping into something nebulous and fleeting, and his expression was tinged with something Arthur could not place. Arthur remembered that there had been something about the spell that Merlin had insisted on keeping from him, and Merlin took a bracing breath, though Arthur could not have said what for.

“Arthur,” Merlin said, “do you remember what I said when I first found you?”

“You told me you’d been looking for me,” Arthur said slowly, the day coming back to mind like a key slotting into place. How hot it had been, the sun on the crown of his head, and how hot then Merlin’s grip, when he had held onto him.

“For about two days,” Merlin said, answering the question before Arthur could ask. “Your dream wasn’t just Ealdor. I got caught up in your version of Camelot, for a bit. Do you know why I went there first?”

“Because I’m the prince,” Arthur said.

“Because you’re the prince,” Merlin agreed, and he sighed.

“Out with it,” Arthur said flatly, beginning to get nervous. Maybe his father had finally had enough and disinherited him in this world; maybe it was foreshadowing for when he would finally wake. “It can’t be that bad.”

“There’s something I didn’t tell you about the spell,” Merlin said — “Oh, god,” said Arthur, because perhaps it could be that bad after all — and then Merlin sighed again, words coming out stilted. “It was — supposed to be a trap. By being something so good you wouldn’t want to wake up at all.”

Arthur nodded slowly. “Yes,” he said, somewhat pointlessly. It was good. That was the problem, wasn’t it?

Merlin made a frustrated noise. “Something so good you couldn’t imagine anything better,” he said, meaningfully, staring intently at Arthur as if he could will understanding into him with his eyes. “Something near perfect, close enough to real life that it was achievable but enough so that you wouldn’t want for anything. That’s what the spell was meant to create, from whatever you were feeling when you were enchanted. So you — you can see why I might have looked for you in Camelot. But you were here.”

Mouth set in a determined line, Merlin fell silent so that Arthur might process this in exquisite, pained detail.

Idly, Arthur wondered if it was too late for him to go knock over the pot so that he could stay asleep forever, actually. He’d always felt mortification strongly; right now, heat crawling up his neck and his ears and his face, he wouldn’t be surprised if it killed him and he keeled over, right then. It was preferable to facing Merlin, who was apparently essential to Arthur’s happiness.

They had spent so much time in this half-lived, easy space that Arthur didn’t even know how to navigate them out of it; Arthur did things like invite Merlin to bed and said his name in his sleep and Merlin looked at him like he wasn’t even aware of how he was doing it, and it was its own, unspoken situation. It was a whole other thing to know that Merlin watched them build that space knowing that it slotted right into what Arthur’s subconscious wanted.

But Merlin had followed him here, Arthur reminded himself, and came to bed, and he was here in front of Arthur now.

Well. Arthur had never been one to do things half-heartedly when he’d committed. And honestly, it was nothing he hadn’t told Merlin already, in some way or another.

“You said you didn’t know why I knew you had magic here, earlier,” Arthur began, heart clenching uncomfortably when Merlin tensed at the mention of it, as if he thought somehow that he was still at risk in Arthur’s care. “Ask me, when I’m cured, when I found out — because you’re about as subtle as a horse painted blue, Merlin, and I’m sure that I must have known.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Merlin asked, voice thick and rising.

“It means that I knew and that this is what my subconsciousness wanted anyway,” Arthur told him. “A place where I was happy and you were safe, and we could be at peace.”

He wanted to curse the spell for not having created a Camelot where magic was legal, or even a Camelot where being the crown prince required less responsibility. He was suspecting rather dismally that the reason it hadn’t was because Arthur knew, in the part of him that had been preparing to be king his whole life, that he was not supposed to feel what he felt for Merlin in any variation of the theme. He didn’t want to leave Camelot for real, obviously, and even now knew that he would die for his people but —

He thought of what it meant to be prince, and he thought of what might change when it came to what it meant to be king, and Arthur thought that it wouldn’t be so bad, to be selfish sometimes.

Merlin’s eyes were glittering as he swallowed. “You said you’d hate it in Ealdor once,” he said, almost challenging, so much emotion in him that Arthur couldn’t even begin to pick it apart.

“None of it has been about Ealdor,” Arthur confessed, exasperated. “It’s only been about you.”

He couldn’t look at Merlin, had to look away when he heard how the words sounded, stripped bare and so ragged that surely even Merlin could hear the truth in them, so he startled when Merlin got up abruptly, the chair skidding against the floor as he rose. Merlin was leaning over in the next moment; Arthur didn’t have the time to wildly consider all the ways that he could orchestrate his own disappearance before Merlin was taking Arthur’s hands in his own.

“They say we’re two sides of the same coin,” Merlin said, absurdly, peering at Arthur like he couldn’t believe his eyes.

“What?” Arthur said, distracted by how Merlin had crowded closer now, how he’d pinned Arthur down with his gaze, how there was something a bit wild in it.

Merlin’s entire body was breathy and weightless and wavering, like he was in danger of shaking apart if Arthur did not hold him together, but his hands were hot and sure when they spanned the small of Arthur’s back. His voice was low when he said, “It means you’re my whole life, Arthur,” and he saved Arthur the trouble of trying to find a normal way to react to such a proclamation by kissing him soundly on the mouth.

Which Arthur supposed, luxuriously dazed under Merlin’s warmth, was where they’d been heading the whole time after all.

Shockingly, in the end it was Arthur who kept his head. They’d gotten themselves horizontal somehow, on the tabletop, and Merlin was sucking a bruise into his pulse point. Arthur managed to wrench his eyes open for long enough to glance over at the pot through sheer force of will, at which point he remembered himself enough to pull Merlin’s head up when he saw how dangerously it was bubbling.

“What?” Merlin said, sounding like he’d gotten himself drunk on Arthur’s skin, glancing at him half-lidded with irises so blown-out the dark nearly eclipsed the blue in his eyes.

It was harder to keep his head at that, though Arthur persevered manfully.

“The pot,” he said, sounding drunk himself, and Merlin looked and then sighed as his head fell forward onto Arthur’s chest.

“Damn the pot,” Merlin said mulishly, even as he was getting up to tend to it, and Arthur watched him go with so much fondness in his chest it was a wonder his breastbone hadn’t snapped with it.

--

When Arthur woke up at last, for good, he spent five minutes staring up at the red underside of the canopy above his bed and registering that he was in his own chambers, the real ones.

There were the red-gold curtains and the writing desk and the table, in the room, and someone, likely Merlin, had dressed him in Camelot red while he’d been asleep — he remembered now, he’d been wearing white before — and Arthur let this all sit quietly in the air. It was morning; by appearances, it could have been any ordinary morning in Camelot.

He sat up, wincing at how sore his back felt and breathed, once, twice. The door creaked open.

Merlin stared at him, eyes full of surprise, as if he hadn’t been the one insisting last night that this time the cure would work; there’d been something in the look they’d shared when Arthur took the draught last night, a little wistfulness and a lot of hope but mostly just something imbued with a sense of finality, that made Arthur certain that somehow, they’d both known that this would be the one.

“Have you forgotten how to knock?” Arthur said, unable to keep all the amusement out of his voice.

Merlin set the tray he’d been holding down on the table — Arthur hoped dearly that he hadn’t been bringing him breakfast after every curing attempt, as that would have made all those failures too depressing for words — and was over in moments.

“I didn’t realize you’d already be awake,” Merlin said, the shock in his face giving way to an overwhelming kind of naked relief, though he was also looking at Arthur like he wasn’t entirely convinced that Arthur wouldn’t just fade away at the first opportunity.

There was something else too, a new secret thing that hummed and sang in the air between them. It had Arthur looking at the set of Merlin’s shoulders, stuck in the blue of his eyes and feeling his pulse well up in his neck as Merlin pressed closer and then wavered, as if he wasn’t sure if he was allowed.

It made Arthur awkward too. He wanted to hold Merlin and was suddenly wretchedly unsure of how to go about doing it, though he had done it before, and he settled for tugging at Merlin until his face cleared and he crawled onto the bed, arranging himself over Arthur gingerly as if Arthur would shatter under the application of too much force.

“I’m hardly going to break, Merlin,” he said.

“Oh, no,” Merlin said, nodding agreeably. “You’ll just touch a magical artifact and fall asleep for three weeks.”

Arthur didn’t dignify that with a verbal response, though he did pinch Merlin in the side to vindictively watch him squirm.

“I expect I have about a thousand things to catch up on,” he said, testing the words out to see how they felt. They didn’t weigh as he thought they might have.

Merlin hummed, seeming to have taken it upon himself to conduct an impromptu survey of Arthur’s health by ghosting his hands everywhere. “On the contrary,” he said, “you’re not to do anything until Gaius is certain that you’ve fully recovered.”

“By your orders?” Arthur asked, only half-joking.

“The king, actually,” Merlin said, pushing a stray strand of hair out of Arthur’s eyes. “Though I really wouldn’t mind it either.”

He shifted so he was looking at Arthur, propping himself up a little, and eyed him consideringly. “I could call Gaius now, if you like.”

Arthur remembered Gaius now, obviously, remembered past the snippets he’d gotten of Camelot in that enchanted sleep all the way back to Gaius bandaging the first serious cut he’d ever gotten, from a disastrous training exercise. He remembered Morgana and feeling fiercely protective and irritated in the same breath, and he remembered how the court had looked at him when he’d been sworn in as crown prince, and he remembered the first time he met Merlin, for real, all cock-sure words and petty squabbling and a horrible intrigue that sank itself into his skin.

And of course, he remembered the first time he looked at Merlin and really saw, saw the twist of his mouth and the sheen of his eyes and gold all around him, and knew that there was something about him, indeed.

“Perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to be asleep for a little longer,” Arthur said, significantly, heart pounding, and he didn’t fully relax until he saw how realization sparked in Merlin’s eyes, how those eyes dipped down to his mouth. “Close the door, would you?” he said, low, and kept ahold of Merlin when he attempted to draw away.

Understanding came slowly, smoothing the furrow of Merlin’s brow. “You’re sure?” he asked quietly.

“Within reason, obviously,” Arthur said. “I’m not trying to get you executed.”

Merlin laughed, low and disbelieving and delighted. He bent down to kiss him, eyes glinting, and his mouth was searing hot, his smile brilliant against Arthur’s own and then brilliant against the line of Arthur’s jaw, his neck. Arthur was sure that those thousand tasks would catch up with him eventually but he couldn’t muster the care for it now; there was gold everywhere, in Merlin’s eyes and in the air and underneath Arther’s skin, like fever, like wildfire, like water waking under the sky.

Merlin’s name was more a sound in his mouth than a word when Arthur spoke it, and Merlin’s smile when he drew away softened — sharpened? grew — into something strange and wondering and aching.

“Arthur,” Merlin said, all kinds of reverent as he curled down again, molten, “my lord,” and the door clicked shut.