Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The storm found them faster than the castle did.
One moment the path back to Camelot was a ribbon of damp leaves and whispering trees; the next, the sky rucked up like a grey cloak and shook out rain in hard, slanting needles. Thunder rolled across the hills and made the horses flinch. Arthur hauled his mount round and glanced over his shoulder.

“Keep up, Merlin!” he called, pitched somewhere between command and exasperation.

“I am,” Merlin said, which was true, if you counted “keeping up” as clinging to his horse with wet fingers and blinking rain out of his eyes as quickly as it poured in. He’d been sniffling since dawn, brushing it off as spring and pollen and Arthur’s relentless insistence on taking the longer route for “better vantage.” Now the cold he’d been denying crouched between his ribs and pounced every time the wind pushed through his coat.

He tried to stifle a cough and it came out a scratchy, betraying thing. Arthur looked back again. “What was that?”

“Wind,” Merlin said hoarsely.

“Wind doesn’t sound apologetic.”

“I’m not apologetic.”

Lightning cracked, stark white through the branches. Both horses spooked. Merlin’s went sideways with a spray of mud; he held on, heart banging, and then the itch in his nose that had been nagging for miles blossomed suddenly and irresistibly. “Hh—hih—” He turned his face away, rain streaming past his lashes. “—tshh! Heh—tshuh!”

“For the love of—don’t sneeze off the horse,” Arthur snapped, though his voice softened at the edges. “There’s an old woodman’s hut not far ahead. We’ll wait this out there.”

Merlin nodded, which set a cold run of water off the edge of his hood and down his neck. He sniffed, then winced because that seemed to make everything itch more. The next sneeze tore out of him with a weary inevitability. “Hehh—tCHH!”

“Bless you,” Arthur muttered, more out of reflex than anything, and kicked his gelding into a careful canter.

The shack crouched under an oak at the edge of a clearing, half-sunk into the ground and listing, but it had a roof and three walls, which to Merlin’s blurred eyes made it the most beautiful building in Albion. Arthur dismounted, handed off his reins with the easy trust of a man who forgets when his servant last slept and jumped down in a squelch. He shouldered the door; it creaked open on a rush of stale, leaf-musty air.

“Inside,” Arthur ordered. “Tie the horses under the eaves.”

Merlin fumbled knots with numb fingers. Rain ran off his sleeves and splattered his boots. His breath had turned into faint, visible puffs even inside the hut. The air smelled of damp straw and old smoke. Arthur stamped across the dirt floor, prodded at a blackened hearth with his boot and then tossed his sodden cloak down.

“Fire,” he declared, with the unshakeable optimism of a man who has never personally had to coax damp kindling into flame.

Merlin tried to smile and only managed a shiver. “Always with the easy tasks, sire.”

Arthur fished a small pouch of tinder and a wrapped lump of oiled lint out of his saddlebag. “You mock, I note, while I do. Typical.” He shot Merlin a look. “You’re shaking.”

“It’s f-fine,” Merlin said, which would have sounded more convincing if his teeth hadn’t chattered halfway through. He knelt on the cold stone, the damp seeping through his trousers at once, and reached for the tinderbox Arthur tossed him. Sparks leapt, died, caught reluctantly on the oiled fluff. Merlin fed them slivers of bark with shaking hands until the coals took and a small, honest flame licked up and began to glow.

“Good,” Arthur said briskly. “Get your cloak off. It’s useless like that; you’re just keeping the rain in.”

Merlin’s fingers fumbled at the clasp. The cold had made him clumsy, and the sudden light of the fire made the rest of the hut look even darker. He sneezed again, not quick enough to catch it. “Hhh—tchh!—ngh.” The sound pulled at the back of his throat and left a wet burn. He scrubbed at his nose, embarrassed, eyes watering. “Sorry.”

Arthur was already unbuckling his own cloak, expression marked by that familiar line between annoyance and concern. “You could have said you were ill,” he said, and because thunder boomed again at that moment, it almost sounded like the sky agreeing with him.

Merlin set his wet cloak over a broken chair near the fire and then nearly swayed into it. The room tilted for a heartbeat. Arthur’s hand landed on his shoulder, steadying and firm.

“I’m—not,” Merlin tried, but his voice rasped.

Arthur’s brows shot up. “You’re not? Shall I fetch a mirror so you can argue with your own face? You’re pale. Your lips are blue. Your nose is…redder than usual.” The corner of his mouth twitched. “Sit.”

“I c—” He meant to argue out of habit. He sat, because warmth was pooling at the hearth’s edge and he could feel it in his bones like a remembered kindness. He folded down onto a small heap of old sacks and drew his knees up, shuddering as the tremors shook loose in him, finally allowed. The fire popped, showering tiny sparks. His eyes slipped closed and he pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose. The next fit ambushed him, fierce and ticklish. “Hehh—hih—heh—TSHuh! —eh—tchh!—hah—TSCHH!”

Arthur, halfway through unsaddling his pack to look for anything vaguely useful, glanced back at the crescendo of sneezes and made a soft noise he would have denied under torture. “Bless you, you idiot.”

Merlin sniffed. “Thag you.” The words came thick. He coughed, trying to keep it quiet. It rattled. Arthur’s mouth tightened.

He moved without ceremony: hauled Merlin’s boots off, set them near the fire, and then reached for the edge of his sleeve. “Strip your shirt, too.”

“My shirt?” Merlin squeaked, half in indignation, half in mortified surprise.

Arthur rolled his eyes. “You are incorrigible. Your undershirt will do. It’s soaked through. You’ll take a fever if you keep it on.” He paused, and the irritation drained away into a softer note. “More of a fever.”

“I don’t—” Merlin started, then caught Arthur’s gaze. It was very direct. It saw him. The argument died in his throat. He peeled the sodden fabric off his back, suppressing another shiver. Cool air skated over his skin and then Arthur’s cloak—thick, warm, faintly smelling of leather and smoke and cedar—landed around his shoulders like a tent.

Arthur fussed in those clipped, efficient movements that meant his mind had already decided: pulled Merlin closer to the fire by an inch, dragged a saddle blanket over as an extra layer, set his own damp cloak to steam and hiss behind them. He poured water from his skin into a dented tin cup and held it out.

“Drink,” he ordered. “Slowly.”

“Bossy,” Merlin muttered, but the water was heaven and he hadn’t realized how parched he was. He tried to swallow carefully. It still sent a spike of ache down his throat. “We should—” he began when he caught his breath. “We should keep going. We’re close enough that if we hurry—”

“We are not riding into that,” Arthur said flatly. Rain hammered on the roof until the planks thrummed. Wind slipped its cold fingers under the door and across the floor. “And we are certainly not riding anywhere with you like this.”

“Like what,” Merlin said weakly.

Arthur leveled him a look. “Like you. Feverish. Soaked. Sneezing as if you mean to shake the shingles loose.” He reached, unthinking, and set the back of his hand against Merlin’s forehead. The touch was cool and startling. Merlin blinked at him. Arthur’s frown deepened. “You’re hot.”

“The complement of earlier,” Merlin tried, and smiled because it was easier than admitting he wanted to lean into that hand.

“Idiot,” Arthur said again, but the word had shed most of its bite. He left his hand there for a beat longer than necessary and then tugged the cloak closer around Merlin’s throat. “Why didn’t you say something this morning?”

Merlin stared into the fire. Embers shifted. “You were focused on the mission,” he said after a moment. “Didn’t seem worth…making a fuss.”

“I make the fuss,” Arthur said. “That’s my job.” He knelt to prod the fire with a stick until the flame licked higher. “Yours is to actually tell me when you’re falling apart.”

Merlin huffed, which was almost a laugh, almost a cough. “Yes, sire.”

“And to clean my boots,” Arthur added, because the balance demanded it. “Don’t think this gets you out of that.”

“Yes, sire,” Merlin echoed hoarsely, eyes sliding half-shut. His head dipped, then jerked up again. “S-sorry.” His breath hitched. “Heh—” He pinched his nose, eyes watering. The sneeze tried to barrel through his hand anyway, muffled and fierce. “—nxtchh!”

Arthur found himself saying “Bless you” before he could stop himself. He pretended to be busy with the kindling afterwards so Merlin wouldn’t see the way his mouth softened around the words.

The storm settled into a steady roar. Time stretched thin in the heat-washed space by the hearth. Merlin drifted, swaying in the saddle of sleep and waking into little shivers. Arthur, restless with the kind of worry that wouldn’t let him sit still, made a circuit of the shack, checked the corner where the roof leaked, shifted their little pile of supplies out of the trickle. He came back and found Merlin huddled smaller around the cup, eyes glazed, staring through the fire as if seeing distant, private things.

“You’re not to fall asleep like that,” Arthur said, too brisk to be entirely convincing. “You’ll topple into the flames and singe my cloak.”

Merlin’s mouth tilted. “Perish the thought.”

“Exactly. Here.” Arthur crouched beside him and, after a moment’s hesitation, slid an arm around Merlin’s shoulders. The line of him under the cloak was all angles and tremble; the heat at his temple was unmistakable. Merlin made a soft noise—surprise, gratitude, both—and let himself lean. His head settled, cautious at first, then easier, against Arthur’s shoulder.

“Better,” Arthur said, because it was, not that he intended to admit it aloud. The contact quieted something fretful in him. He could measure Merlin’s breathing, feel the tiny catches at the end of each inhale, the flickers when a cough threatened and subsided. He rubbed Merlin’s upper arm through the cloak with the brisk practicality of a stablehand warming a chilled foal. “Gaius will have my head if I bring you back worse.”

“Gaius likes you,” Merlin murmured. His voice had gone thick with drowsy fever. “He says you—” He cut off to sneeze again, smothered against Arthur’s shoulder this time. “—hh—tchh! S-sorry.”

Arthur made a dismissive sound and tightened his arm. “We’ll wait until the worst of the storm passes, then ride in. Slowly. I’ll take the lead.” He glanced at the door, judged their chances, forced his jaw to unclench. “You’ll go straight to Gaius. I’ll…deal with my father.”

At that, Merlin stirred faintly. “Uther will be cross.”

“Uther is always cross,” Arthur said dryly. “It’s his natural state. He’s less cross when I tell him why I altered the plan. He is least cross when I’ve already succeeded. The latter relies on you not collapsing face-first in the courtyard.”

“I’ll try not to,” Merlin said, and then, dreamily earnest: “Didn’t want to slow you down.”

Arthur looked at him. He could have said a dozen things—about idiocy, about duty, about the ways in which Merlin already slowed him down in every possible way and how he minded none of them. What came out was simpler.

“You don’t slow me down,” he said, steady and a little fierce. “You keep me standing.”

Merlin’s lashes fluttered. He didn’t answer, but a little tension flighted out of him, like a bird leaving a branch. He dozed properly then, breath evening under Arthur’s hand. The tremors eased as the fire did its work. Rain still battered the roof, but the thunder had rolled farther off, sulking deeper in the clouds.

After a time, Arthur eased Merlin down onto the makeshift pallet of sacks and blanket. He tucked the cloak close and set his own damp one as an extra layer at Merlin’s feet, then sat with his back to the fire, sword across his knees partly because habit demanded it, partly because it made him feel less useless. He watched the door and the dark trees beyond, the ghostly rain-silvered clearing, and listened to the soft, uneven rhythm of Merlin’s breathing.

When Merlin stirred, he did it all at once, awakening with a small gasp and a cough that pulled painfully in his chest. Arthur was already there with the cup.

“Easy,” he said, holding it while Merlin drank so he didn’t have to lift his hands. “You’ve nothing to prove.”

Merlin blinked, bleary and grateful. “Since when did you start saying sensible things.”

“Since I discovered what happens when I don’t,” Arthur said, and because Merlin’s mouth twitched at that, he added, “You can mock me later. When you’ve got your breath back.”

They waited the storm out together, Arthur’s arm a steady line, Merlin’s weight warm and real against him, the small fire a stubborn, bright heart in the old stones. When the worst of the rain relented to a steady patter and the sky outside softened from slate to pewter, Arthur roused them both.

“Up,” he said quietly, and then—because the fever had left Merlin heavier, slower—he bent and hauled him gently to his feet. “Slowly.”

Merlin swayed, caught himself on Arthur’s sleeve. “Head’s—” He tipped a hand side to side.

“Yes,” Arthur said. “It is, regrettably. Is that all? Everything else attached?” He looked him over with an unconcealed thoroughness that made Merlin flush, if only because it felt oddly like he mattered. “Boots. Cloak. Put your shirt back on; it’s dry enough not to do harm. Take mine over it. I’ll survive being slightly damp.”

Merlin obeyed, a little sheepish, a little wobbly. Arthur slung the spare saddle blanket over his shoulders for good measure and then, at the door, paused and met his eyes.

“If you feel faint,” he said lightly, “do me the courtesy of warning me before you fall off the horse.”

Merlin managed a small grin. “What, you don’t want to catch me?”

“I’m not carrying you all the way to Gaius,” Arthur said, and it was only half a lie.

The air outside smelled washed and green. The path to Camelot shone with puddles like shards of dull metal. They mounted carefully. Arthur took the lead and kept it slow, throwing glances over his shoulder so often he nearly rode into a low branch twice. Merlin’s sneezes came less frequently now but with the occasional stubborn, breath-hitching insistence.

“—hih—tchh!” he sneezed, muffled into his sleeve.

“Bless you,” Arthur said without thinking.

“Thank you,” Merlin said, and when Arthur looked back, his eyes—fever-bright, but steady—held a look Arthur could not quite name. Trust, perhaps. Or simply relief that he didn’t have to pretend, not here, not with him.

The castle’s red banners were only just visible through the last ragged sheets of rain when Arthur spoke again, pitched low enough that it barely carried over the hoofbeats. “Next time,” he said, “tell me.”

Merlin’s mouth tilted. “You’ll only make a fuss.”

“Yes,” Arthur said, and let the word be what it was. “I will.”

They rode on, the wet stone of the bridge ahead glistening like the promise of home, the storm breaking behind them into harmless, grumbling distance. And if Arthur matched his horse’s pace to Merlin’s and took the long, easiest way round to the infirmary instead of the quick one, that was between him and the morning and the boy at his back who, infuriatingly and indispensably, kept him standing.

Chapter Text

They clattered into the lower courtyard while the sky was still wringing itself out, rain slanting in tired, silver cords. Arthur slid from the saddle and was at Merlin’s stirrup before the stableboy reached them, one hand steady at Merlin’s elbow as the servant’s boots hit wet stone.
“I’ve got it,” Merlin said, which fooled neither of them. The moment his feet took his weight, the world tilted. He swayed once, twice, then caught on Arthur’s arm like a ship snagging a mooring.

“Mm,” Arthur said, an eloquent sound that meant sit still and let me. He tucked the saddle blanket tighter across Merlin’s shoulders and steered him through the arch toward the physicians’ tower.

The corridor up to Gaius’s chambers smelled of warm stone and drying herbs. It was quiet except for the shuffle of their boots and the soft drip from the ends of their cloaks. Merlin’s breath scraped a little. Arthur felt it more than heard it, under his hand.

“Nearly there,” Arthur said, low. “Mind the step.”

Merlin nodded and then lost the thread of it because his nose prickled with cruel inevitability. He turned away from Arthur, breath hitching. “Heh—hih—hehh—TSCHH!” It snapped through the corridor, bent sharp to his sleeve. It pulled at the sore place in his throat and left his eyes stinging.

From behind the closed door ahead came Gaius’s voice, instant and fond and scolding all at once: “Bless you, lad!”

The latch lifted. Gaius stood framed in the doorway, eyebrows already halfway to his hairline. He took in the damp, the pallor, the way Merlin listed toward Arthur like a sleepwalker finding the only solid thing in the room, and all the lines of his face rearranged into fuss and purpose.

“Oh, heavens above, look at you,” he said, moving forward in a rustle of sleeves. “In with you. Sire, mind his shoulder—there we are. Gods save us, boy, you’re soaked through to the soul.”

“I told him as much,” Arthur said, half-defensive though no one had accused him of anything. “There was a storm. We found a hut. Fire. Cloaks. He—” He cut himself off and sent Gaius a look that somehow asked for both absolution and instruction.

“Yes, yes,” Gaius said, already herding Merlin toward the bed with a gentleness that brooked no argument. “You did very well, I’m sure. Sit, lad. No, sit. Arthur, shut that door before we drown the whole stock of comfrey.”

Merlin sat. Only then did he let the shivers claim him properly, small and insistent. Gaius’s palm was on his forehead before he could look up, the old, practiced touch that always found the truth first: back of the hand, a sweep at the hairline, the slower press of a cool palm to compare.

“Oh,” Gaius murmured, and tutted like a dove. “Hot as a kettle left too long. When did this start?”

“This morning,” Arthur said. “Last night,” Merlin rasped, stubborn and honest.

“Of course it did,” Gaius said, gentling the words with a thumb’s sweep across Merlin’s temple. He lifted the fringe and checked again, as if the fever might have changed in the last heartbeat. “Bless you, lad,” he added without looking away when the next sneeze, inevitable and miserable, barrelled through Merlin’s breath.

“Hh—tchh! Hh—TSCHH!”

“Bless you,” Arthur echoed, the reflex outpacing any desire to maintain princely distance.

“Boots,” Gaius said briskly. “Off. Cloak—no, keep Arthur’s for now. We’ll warm you by the fire first. Sire, stoke that—no, not with the damp wood, for pity’s sake; try the split oak there. Kettle on. Honey on the shelf to your left. And fetch me the elderflower and thyme, top cupboard. The meadowsweet too.”

Arthur, who so rarely received orders delivered in quite that tone, obeyed with gratifying speed, pulling off Merlin’s boots in two firm tugs and setting them to steam by the hearth. Merlin made a small hum of gratitude that turned, shapelessly, into a cough. Gaius’s hand slid from his forehead to the back of his neck in the same breath, fingers spreading along the nape, steadying.

“Easy,” Gaius soothed. “That’s it. Breathe. There’s a good lad.”

Merlin hated that the word lad only ever made him feel seen and not small. He leaned, without thinking, into the hand at his neck. The room swam; then the bed was under him properly, blankets tugged up and tucked by practiced hands. Gaius’s cool fingertips came back to his brow, pressing lightly, taking measure. It should have been ridiculous, being read like this, skin to skin. It felt like anchor and air.

Arthur returned with the honey and an armful of jars, scattering a few dried sprigs of herb in his haste. “What else?”

“The blue crock for compresses,” Gaius said, eyes still on his patient. “And the clean cloths. The kettle will take a moment. Merlin, look at me.”

Merlin blinked heavy eyes up. Gaius’s thumb smoothed the crease between his brows, then resumed the steady, almost absentminded pattern of stroking his fringe back and laying his palm to check the heat. Forehead feels. Again, and again, the simplest medicine that always told Gaius the truth.

“There you are,” Gaius said softly. “You’ve half a furnace in you, but it’s the sort we can coax down. Throat?”

“Sore,” Merlin admitted.

“Chest?”

“A bit…” He coughed to demonstrate and regretted it immediately. It rattled low and pulled a wince from Gaius.

“Mm. Nothing settled too deep yet, thank the stars.” Gaius glanced over his shoulder. “Sire, if you would be so kind as to wring that cloth in cool water.”

Arthur dipped the cloth and wrung it with soldier’s efficiency. For one breath he hesitated, then stepped in close and set the compress on Merlin’s forehead himself, gentling the edges back from the hairline like he was afraid to startle him. The cloth hissed faintly where it met heat. Merlin sighed, tension slipping away like knots coaxed loose.

“Better?” Arthur asked, and hated how hopeful he sounded.

“Mm.” Merlin’s eyes dipped. “Don’t stop.”

“I don’t intend to,” Arthur said, almost to himself, and smoothed the cloth cool again with the backs of his fingers. His hand drifted, almost uncertain, to gauge with his knuckles what Gaius had already checked. The heat under his skin made his mouth draw tight. He cleared his throat and found tasks. “You mentioned thyme.”

“And elderflower and meadowsweet,” Gaius said, moving to the worktable in a swirl of sleeves while still, somehow, maintaining a constant orbit back to Merlin’s brow every few heartbeats, as if the act of touching reassured his own hands as much as the patient. “They’ll ease the fever and the tickle in his throat. A little coltsfoot for the cough. And a sliver of willow bark in case that head of his is thumping, which I’d wager it is.”

Merlin made a noise that was either agreement or a complaint about being so readable. The kettle began to hum. Arthur poured. Steam rose, herb-scented and sweet. Gaius measured, steeped, stirred, all the while pausing to lay the back of his fingers against Merlin’s temple again, to swipe away the thin sheen of sweat at his hairline with the edge of a cloth, to murmur another, “Bless you, lad,” when an ambush sneeze bent him forward beneath the compress.

“Hh—ISHH!—heh—TSCHH!”

“Bless you,” Gaius repeated. “And again, bless you. Enough to shake the rafters, that.”

“Sorry,” Merlin mumbled.

“For what? Having a nose?” Gaius said, fondly acerbic. “Drink.”

He propped Merlin with one hand, guided the cup with the other. Arthur hovered at the shoulder, ready to help, knuckles ghosting the edge of the compress as if the cloth were some fragile treaty he meant to uphold. Merlin drank, mouth twisting at the bitterness until the honey chased it. He closed his eyes on a grateful breath.

“There,” Gaius said. “That’s the worst of it done. Now we let the herbs take their work. You’ll rest. You will not argue.” His palm settled at Merlin’s forehead again, the cadence of a litany. “You will keep that cloth where it is. You will not sneak off to the prince’s chambers to pretend you’re fine. I will know if you try; I’m a very old, very clever man.”

“He is,” Arthur said dryly from just above Merlin’s ear, and then, because habit had its claws in him, “Don’t you dare.”

Merlin’s answer was a sleepy, agreeable hum, interrupted by a soft, desperate little hitch of breath. He turned his face aside. “—hh—ktchh!”

“Bless you, lad,” Gaius said at once, like a benediction. He swapped in a fresh cool cloth with the neat speed of drill. “Sire, your hand.”

Arthur blinked. “What?”

“You’re hovering,” Gaius said, not unkindly. “If you must hover, be useful. Fresh water, keep the compress cool, keep him in one place. There—lift his hair; we’ll cool the back of the neck as well.”

Arthur obeyed, drawing the damp dark fringe back, baring the vulnerable nape. The fine hairs there stuck to Merlin’s skin. Heat bled into the cloth. Arthur’s mouth went grim. He pressed the back of his wrist to Merlin’s forehead—awkward, tentative, and then firmer when Gaius nodded approval.

“Still too warm,” Arthur murmured.

“As I said,” Gaius replied, though the softness of it took the sting from the words. “It will come down. Bodies remember how to heal, given the chance and a fussing old physician.”

“Not just the physician,” Arthur said under his breath, and smoothed the cloth again, a rhythm now, like keeping time for a drummer.

Gaius caught the tone, the way Arthur had planted himself between Merlin and the world with all the stubbornness of a drawbridge lowered. He hid a small smile in the cup as he set it aside and came back for yet another forehead check, as if to convince himself the heat had not crept higher while he wasn’t looking. Palm to brow; back of the hand; the quick, comparative brush of his own cheek to Merlin’s temple. Forehead feels upon forehead feels, reassuring as a heartbeat.

Merlin’s lashes fluttered. “Gaius?”

“I’m here,” Gaius said at once.

“’M sorry,” Merlin tried. “Didn’t mean—mission—”

“Hush,” Gaius said, and stroked his hair back, thumb warm at the hairline. “You mean to live, that’s what you mean. Which you will. Drink again in a little while. Sleep now.”

Merlin breathed, slow and obedient. The fever pulled him under to the shallow doze of the unwell. His face smoothed. The shivers ebbed as warmth seeped back into bone.

For a long time, the room held a practised quiet: the purling kettle, the soft tear of bread when Gaius thought to press a heel of it into Arthur’s hand and say, in the tone of a man who had fed this boy on scraped soup and exhaustion for decades, “Eat.” The drip of rain outside dwindled. Arthur kept the compress cool, traded it out, checked with his knuckles and the inside of his wrist like he was learning a new sword grip he meant to master. Every time Merlin’s breath hitched—those little pre-sneeze hums that betrayed him—both men glanced down in the same instant.

“Hh—tchh!”

“Bless you, lad,” Gaius said before the last consonant faded.

“Bless you,” Arthur echoed, softer each time, as if saving the force for the next draught, the next cloth, the next small, necessary action.

When Merlin stirred more deeply, blinking up, heat-glazed and muzzy, he found Gaius’s palm waiting at his brow like a pledge and Arthur’s hand already halfway to refresh the compress. He tried to smile for both of them. It came out crooked and dear.

“How’s the head?” Gaius asked, the question for the body, and then, gentler, “How’s the rest of you?”

“Floaty,” Merlin admitted, and then, because truth had found its way into the room on the back of fever, “Better, though. Feels—” He touched the edge of the compress with clumsy appreciation. “Feels nice.”

“Good,” Gaius said, and finally let the breath leave his chest that he’d been holding since the first sneeze in the corridor. He replaced his palm with a new cloth and smoothed it down like setting a seal. “We’ll keep you that way.”

Arthur adjusted the blanket up beneath Merlin’s chin, an indulgence he would deny remembering later. “You’re to stay where Gaius puts you,” he said, trying on sternness and finding it fit oddly like concern. “By royal decree.”

Merlin huffed a small laugh that dissolved into a cough; Gaius’s hand was at his chest at once, bracing, his other gathering the cloth back to the fevered brow, the ritual never stopping. “Breathe,” Gaius coached. “In. Out. That’s it. Bless you, lad,” when a tiny, wrung-out sneeze followed.

They settled again. Time thinned. Gaius brewed another infusion, the room fogging with the clean, green smell of herbs. Arthur learned the exact weight of a cool cloth when steeped and wrung, the way Merlin’s skin cooled under it a little, then warmed again, the small, satisfying moment when the fever finally yielded half a degree.

“See?” Gaius said at last, after another round of forehead feels and a fresh cup of honeyed tea. He tipped his head toward Arthur without looking away from his patient. “I told you. It comes down.”

Arthur’s shoulders loosened. He rested the backs of his fingers at Merlin’s temple one more time and found not the burn of a forge but the gentler heat of banked embers. “Good,” he said, and couldn’t quite keep relief from softening the word.

Merlin looked between them through heavy lids, caught by some hazy gratitude so big he couldn’t shape it into words. He settled for letting his forehead press into Gaius’s palm as the old physician checked him yet again, leaning into that steady warmth, and for letting his eyes close when Arthur smoothed the compress with the familiar, careful stroke he’d somehow learned in an afternoon.

“Sleep,” Gaius murmured, another benediction, thumb at the hairline, breath a promise. “Bless you, lad.”

Merlin went, at last, easily. And between the old man’s ever-returning hand to his brow and the prince’s quiet vigil at his side—cloth cool as river stone, fingers sure, a presence like a rampart—he slept through the gentle end of the storm and into the first safe blue of evening

Chapter Text

Morning came like a mercy: blue and thin through the high window, the rain traded for birdsong and the quiet hiss of drying stone. The fire was banked low. The kettle, dutiful as ever, began to purr on its hook.
Merlin woke under a weight of blankets and something gentler—peace, maybe. His head felt woolly but not pounding; his skin, warm but not burning. He blinked, and the room came into focus: Gaius’s shelves of stoppered vials, the splay of herbs drying on twine, Arthur asleep in a chair with his chin on his chest and his hand still perched on the edge of the bed as if he’d fallen asleep guarding a rampart.

Gaius, who could hear the shift of a patient’s breath the way a hunter hears a twig snap, turned at once. He came over in two quick strides, sleeves whispering, and laid the back of his hand to Merlin’s brow before the boy could do more than lift his lashes.

“Oh, that’s better,” Gaius breathed, the relief so frank it warmed more than any fire. Palm to forehead—he couldn’t help himself—then a comparative brush at the temple. “Mm. Fever’s broken.”

Merlin exhaled, a small, unguarded sound. “Feels like it.”

Arthur jerked awake with a swordsman’s start, hand going to the hilt he wasn’t wearing; then he focused, found Merlin looking back, and all the fight left his shoulders in one soft drop. “You’re cooler,” he announced, proving he’d learned something from the last twelve hours by sliding his knuckles to Merlin’s brow and checking for himself. He tried very hard to do it as if it were merely a practical assessment and not the second-best feeling he’d had all night. “Good.”

A tickle, sneaky and unrepentant, kindled behind Merlin’s eyes at the mention of good. He drew a breath that caught on the prickle. “Hh—hold—” He twisted into the crook of his elbow, shoulders hunching. “—hh-TSCHH! Hehh—TSCHh!”

“Bless you, lad,” Gaius said at once, one hand steady at the nape of Merlin’s neck, the other smoothing an errant tuft of hair back from his damp forehead. Reflex and ritual, both.

“Bless you,” Arthur echoed, softer but no less certain.

“Thag you,” Merlin sniffed, embarrassed and oddly content, because if he’d had to pick the first words he heard this morning, those two arranged like that would do.

Gaius pressed his palm to Merlin’s brow again—forehead feels, a habit older than Merlin’s time in Camelot—and nodded, more to himself than anyone. “Right. Tea to keep the fever honest, broth for the strength, and bed rest until you can go longer than five minutes without sneezing your head clean off.”

Merlin’s face fell. “Five minutes is—mean.”

“It’s medicine,” Gaius said, cheerful as a gaoler. He plucked an hourglass from a shelf—small, with fine pale sand. “And merciful. I could have said ten.”

Arthur’s mouth curved, traitorously delighted. “Oh, we’re timing it?”

“We are,” Gaius replied, handing the hourglass to him like a baton passed to an eager apprentice. “If Your Highness requires purpose, you may be my official timekeeper. But you don’t get to bargain the minutes down.”

Arthur arranged his face into princely solemnity and turned the glass. “Five minutes begins…now.”

It lasted one minute and forty-two seconds.

“Hh—heh—” Merlin’s breath stuttered; his eyes pleaded with his own nose as if he could argue it into obedience. “Wait, I—heh—hh—TSCHH!”

“Bless you, lad,” Gaius said, unruffled, and rotated the hourglass back to the start with the benevolent cruelty of a man who had raised a hundred colds to the ground. “Again.”

Merlin flopped back on the pillows, defeated and oddly amused. “This is entrapment.”

“It’s convalescence,” Gaius corrected, thumb sweeping Merlin’s brow because he could, because the skin there was cool and he hadn’t yet gotten over the pleasure of that. “Drink.”

Arthur handed up a cup—thyme and elderflower tamed with honey—and watched Merlin sip like he might start sneezing and drown himself in it. When Merlin finished, Arthur slid the cup away, flipped the hourglass, and assumed his role with the fierce dedication of a knight defending a keep.

They made three minutes and twelve seconds the next round, interrupted by a pair in quick succession—“heh—ktchh!—TSCHH!”—that had Gaius tsking kindly and Arthur muttering, “Unfair,” as if the castle rules might be petitioned.

“Bless you, lad,” Gaius intoned as predictably as morning. He set the back of his hand to Merlin’s forehead again—the man could no more pass a patient without a forehead feel than he could pass a pawnshop without peering in the window—and smiled at the cool touch. “There we are.”

“Does it count if I’m asleep?” Merlin asked hopefully, the minute the next trial began.

“No,” Gaius and Arthur said in chorus.

“What if I hold my breath?”

“No,” said Gaius, and Arthur, trying not to laugh: “Also no. Also I’ll tell on you.”

They tried distraction. Arthur recounted, in great and fully embellished detail, Sir Leon’s hopeless attempt to teach three squires the difference between a thrust and a peel. Merlin snorted at an ill-timed pun and immediately paid for it: “heh—TSCHH!” Gaius’s hand lifted, landed again with almost comic inevitability. “Bless you, lad.”

They tried quiet: just the rustle of Gaius fussing at the workbench, Arthur sorting through a drift of neglected reports at the table with all the grace of a man who would rather fight a wyvern than do sums. Merlin drifted on the edge of sleep; his breaths lengthened, the itch receded—

“—hh—tchh!” He startled himself awake, eyes watering. Arthur sighed, turned the glass. “That one ambushed you,” he allowed, as if it mattered to the law.

It went like that for most of the hour: small victories, foiled by treacherous tickles; the soft cadence of “Bless you, lad” and “Bless you” following each as faithfully as shadow follows step. And between every reset—Gaius’s palm, cool and certain, to the brow; Arthur’s knuckles, testing, unconsciously mirroring; the shared, private little glances of relief that Merlin’s skin stayed cool under the touch.

When the tray came—a bowl of savory broth, a heel of good bread, more tea—Merlin made it halfway through his spoon before the sand ran out and so did his nose’s patience.

“Heh—heh—TSCHH!—TSCHH!”

“Bless you, lad.” Gaius caught the spoon before it dripped on the blankets and traded it for a cloth for Merlin’s hands, then for another reflexive, approving sweep of palm to forehead. “Eat. Slowly. You’ve nothing to prove.”

“Except that I can go five minutes without sneezing,” Merlin muttered around a smile.

Gaius’s eyebrows climbed. “I did not say today.”

Arthur smirked into his own cup. “He’s right,” he said, solemn and pleased to be on the side of sense for once. “We’ll start with three. Then four. Then five. By royal decree.”

“You don’t make medical decrees,” Gaius said without heat. “You enforce them.”

“That I can do,” Arthur replied, and took up the watch with fresh zeal.

Somewhere around late-morning sun, they hit four minutes and fifty-six seconds. Merlin’s eyes were streaming with determination. Arthur, bent over the hourglass like a priest at a relic, counted the last grains. “Three…two…one…”

Merlin’s breath hitched on one-and-a-half. “Heh—hih—h—”

“Don’t you dare,” Arthur whispered, as if the itch respected titles.

Merlin lost, explosively and apologetically. “—TSCHH!”

Arthur sagged in theatrical despair. “That should count as the next round.”

“It does not,” Gaius said, unmovable as bedrock. Then, gentler: “Bless you, lad.” And, because he’d been inching back again in the last ten minutes: his palm, to Merlin’s forehead, the smallest smile when it met only healthy warmth. “Stubborn as a mule,” he added fondly.

“It’s catching,” Arthur said dryly.

Gaius made up a light chest rub—something camphor-cool and thyme-sweet—and worked it into Merlin’s upper chest with brisk, careful hands to ease the cough. “Deep breath,” he coached. “Good. Again. And don’t scowl at me, Arthur; you’ll get your turn on the next campaign when you refuse to take a cloak.”

“I always take a cloak,” Arthur said, wounded dignity personified.

Merlin’s mouth twitched. “He does,” he admitted, and then, traitorously, “—hh—ktchh!”

“Bless you, lad,” Gaius said, not missing a beat.

By noon the sneezes were further apart, if still frequent enough to keep the hourglass in high demand. Merlin’s color had returned to his cheeks; the shadows under his eyes looked like themselves again. Every time he shifted to sit up, though, Gaius’s hand landed on his shoulder with astonishing accuracy while the other—inevitably—went to his brow.

“Bed rest,” Gaius said, the way one says sunrise. “Until you can last the five.”

“I’m going to turn to stone,” Merlin complained.

“You’ll turn to sense,” Gaius countered, smoothing his fringe back once more because it pleased him. “Another nap will help. Healing’s a greedy business.”

Arthur stood, stretching the kinks out of a night in a chair. “I’ve council,” he said reluctantly, as if confessing to a crime. “An hour. Two at most. I’ll be back.”

Merlin, traitor to his own independence, looked momentarily alarmed. “You don’t have to—”

“I know,” Arthur said simply. His hand, of its own accord, checked Merlin’s brow once more—habit now, learned in a storm—and found it reassuringly cool. He let his knuckles linger a heartbeat. “You’re to stay here. Under Gaius’s tyrannical rule. By my order, for whatever that’s worth in this room.”

“In this room,” Gaius said, utterly unmoved, “it’s worth precisely as much as I allow.” He winked at Merlin. “Which is, today, conveniently, the same as mine.”

Arthur rolled his eyes and set his cloak within reach of the bed as if leaving a standard to mark his intent to return. At the door he paused. “If you need me—”

“I’ll send,” Gaius said. “Go. The kingdom will not run itself. And neither will this sand.”

Arthur left. The room exhaled, not with relief but with the kind of ease that comes from knowing precisely what the next hour requires. Gaius flipped the hourglass and perched on the edge of the bed like a watchful old magpie, fingertips already sliding to Merlin’s brow again.

“Still checking,” Merlin murmured, amused.

“I’m an old man,” Gaius said, not looking the least chagrined, “and I like to be reassured. Close your eyes.”

Merlin did. He drifted in that drowsy, mending way, the sneezes spacing themselves out like wary birds. When one arrived—“heh—tchh!”—Gaius blessed him with a hum and a hand, reset the glass, and smoothed the fringe back into order. When none came for a few long minutes, Gaius watched the last sand tumble and allowed himself a nod.

“We’ll call that four,” he said to no one, because keeping his own counsel had never stopped him talking. “And later, perhaps, five.”

Merlin woke to the soft click of the latch and Arthur’s boots on stone. Afternoon had spilled warm across the floor. The hourglass sat triumphant and empty on the bedside table. Gaius, humming, wrung out a cloth in cool water and set it aside, visibly satisfied with a dozen small victories only he was counting.

“How long?” Arthur asked, low.

“Four minutes, thirty-eight seconds on the last,” Gaius said, pride like sunlight in his voice. “We’ll win by sundown, I think. He’ll stay abed today either way.”

Arthur came to the bedside and, because he was beyond pretense now, set the back of his fingers to Merlin’s brow in a greeting as natural as speaking his name. “Cool.”

Merlin smiled up at both of them, hazy and grateful and wholly himself. The itch announced itself with impeccable timing; he rolled obediently away, breath hitching once, twice. “Heh—hehh—TSCHH!”

“Bless you, lad,” Gaius said, swapping in the cloth just to soothe. He didn’t need it, not for fever; perhaps he needed it for reassurance.

“Bless you,” Arthur said, and then, with a princely gravity that failed to hide relief, turned the hourglass. “All right. From the top.”

They watched the sand fall together: the physician’s fuss, the prince’s vigilance, the servant’s stubborn breath. And when the last pale grain slid home and the room stayed blessedly quiet except for the steady, easy rhythm of Merlin’s breathing, Gaius’s hand—inevitably—found its way to Merlin’s brow yet again.

“There,” he murmured, thumb warm at the hairline, voice a benediction. “Five.”

Arthur’s grin, when it came, was quick and boyish. “By royal decree,” he said, “you’re still staying in bed.”

Merlin huffed a laugh that didn’t catch at all. “Yes, sire,” he said, and let his eyes close under the gentle certainty of Gaius’s palm, the soft weight of Arthur’s presence at his side. Outside, the castle went about its day. In here, they had their own small kingdom: an hourglass, a hand to the forehead, and the luxury of taking all the time they needed