Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The first thunderclap came like a thrown stone against a shield—sharp enough to make the horses flinch and Arthur’s head come up. The second rolled across the hills with the long-bellied growl of an old lion, and by the third the sky tore open. Rain dropped in cold, hard sheets, knitting the air into a curtain that turned road and hedgerow and distant tree-line into one smeared charcoal stroke.

“Of course,” Arthur muttered, gathering his cloak tighter and peering through the slanting grey. “We are twenty minutes from the outer farms. Of course it waits until now.”

Merlin didn’t answer. He hunched in the saddle like a string too tightly drawn, fingers white around the reins. Even in the downpour Arthur could see him shiver. The boy had been too quiet since midday—no barbed commentary, no humming under his breath, no exaggerated sighs when Arthur asked for a waterskin or for him to check a track. The silence should have been its own warning, but Arthur had been chasing the thin line of a rumor and the rhythm of command can make even a prince deaf.

Another thunderhead cracked open. The horses sidled. The road had ceased to be a road and become a runnel, slick and shining. Arthur pulled his mount up beside Merlin’s and had to half-shout over the backlash of rain. “There’s an old charcoal-burner’s place near here. Disused. We’ll wait it out.”

Merlin’s answer was a cough swallowed like a confession. He nodded, eyes blinking fast, rain dripping from the end of his nose. He was pale, and the tips of his ears—always a tell—were flushed oddly pink.

“Try not to fall off,” Arthur said, more gruff than he meant to be, and turned his horse toward the hedgerow that, in better weather, would mark the path to the small stand of beech trees where the hut leaned against the world.

They found it the way one finds shelter in a dream—half-seen through the grey, then all at once there, squatting under the lash of the storm. It was little more than four walls and a roof with the memory of a chimney, a door that hung uncertainly from one hinge, and a blackened hearth.

Arthur swung down, boots sinking into the churned mud, and pushed the door. It banged back against the interior wall and let in a wind that felt like knives. “Inside,” he said, taking both reins. “I’ll see to the horses.”

Merlin was slower dismounting than he should have been. He slid rather than leapt, and when his feet hit the ground he teetered. Arthur felt a prong of irritation—he had told him to eat more at midday, not just pick at the bread and pickles like a monk with a vow—but the feeling was flanked immediately by something truer and heavier: concern, thick as the storm.

Merlin staggered in with the wind pushing at his back. The inside smelled of damp ash and old wood. It was dim enough that Arthur’s eyes needed a moment to adjust; he tied the horses to the sheltered side of the hut, checked the slope of the roof for leaks (many), and hauled in the soggy armfuls of kindling stacked in a lean-to that had no business still clinging to the wall but did anyway, out of stubbornness or memory.

By the time he ducked back inside, Merlin was at the hearth, kneeling, shoulders hunched to his ears. His hands shook as he tried to coax a flame out of the miserably wet tinder, and when he leaned closer a violent shiver ran through him so hard it clacked his teeth.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Arthur said, more hurried than harsh. “It’s all soaked. Step aside.”

“It’s n-not—” Merlin began, and cut himself off with a sneeze that had no right to sound as small as it did given the size of him. “Hh—hheh’TSCHuh!”

He turned away from the hearth to bury it in his shoulder, breathing catching, and then it was like the rain had jumped into his head: “Hih—TSCH!—uhh—heh’TSCHhuh!” Each one tilted him forward, damp curls flinging a fine spray, and when they passed he blinked, dazed and wavering.

Arthur’s mouth thinned. Some part of his mind cataloged the sound with the brisk efficiency of a soldier: sneezing, repetitive, forceful. Throat raw when he spoke. Shivering disproportional to the ambient cold. And that telltale pink flush making bright flags in his cheeks and ears. Blast it. “When,” Arthur said, squatting to examine the damp tinder, “were you going to mention that you were ill?”

Merlin stared at him as if baffled that his body and his choices could be brought into the same conversation. “I’m f—fine,” he managed, through the stutter of his jaw.

“You’re shivering so hard I can count it.” Arthur pushed him—gently—back from the hearth. “Take off the cloak. And the overshirt, if it’s soaked.”

Merlin’s eyes flicked to the door as if gauging escape. “It’s just a—hih—just a bit of a—heh—” He tried to fight the next sneeze and lost. “Hheh’KTSCH!—snnf—sprigg cold.”

“Spring colds,” Arthur said, “are still colds. Cloak. Now.”

Merlin obeyed, but slowly, as if every movement weighed double. When he pulled the cloak off, it made the sound of a river being rung out; the patched jacket underneath clung dark and heavy, and the worn linen of his shirt stuck to his skin. He folded his arms over his chest as if to make up for the lost warmth.

Arthur worked the kindling, stripping the damp twigs back to their drier, splintered hearts with his dagger, sheltering the cinderlike beginnings of a flame with his body. He had learned to make fires in weather that wanted to drown them; it was one of those small, unbeautiful skills a prince was grateful for when the court rituals fell away and there was only survival. Even so, it took time and patience, and by the time a stubborn little flame caught, Merlin’s shivering had become the pulse of the room—present, undeniable, wrong.

“Come closer,” Arthur said, without looking, and Merlin edged nearer, knees tucking up as he folded himself down into something smaller. He didn’t complain. That was—in itself—complaint enough.

Arthur fed the flame as if it were a skittish animal and judged the room with a soldier’s eye. The roof leaked in two thin streams along the left wall and a more enthusiastic drip over the far corner. The hearth was sound enough to keep smoke from funneling directly back into their faces, and there was a slab of low bench half-collapsed against the back wall. He could make it do. He had made worse do.

“Boots,” he said, when the flames had climbed to something like respectability. “Off.”

Merlin looked at him sidelong, head pillowed on his forearm where he’d leaned a fraction too long into the stones. “If I take off my boots my feet’ll fall off.”

“Your feet will stay attached and your boots will dry faster,” Arthur said. “And if you don’t get them off now, I will cut them off. The boots, Merlin,” he added, when Merlin’s eyes went theatrically wide despite the shivering. “Before you force me to commit an act that will make the castle cobbler weep.”

That earned the ghost of a smile. Merlin obeyed, fingers clumsy on the laces, breath lifting and hitching with each chill. When he got one boot free, he put his chilled socked foot almost directly to the hearth—too close, too fast.

Arthur caught his ankle before he could scorch himself, hand closing warm and sure. “Not that close,” he said, gentler, and tugged him back a hand’s breadth. Merlin’s bones were bird-fragile under his grip, and hot—hotter than they should have been.

Arthur let go as if burned—then, with the brutal honesty he tried to reserve for the field and for himself, admitted there was no point in pretending not to notice. He leaned in, palm to Merlin’s forehead. Merlin startled at the touch and then leaned, almost imperceptibly, closer.

The heat there was no artifact of the fire. It bit through the chill like a brand.

“Damn it,” Arthur said softly.

Merlin’s lashes drooped. “It’s—ngk—dnot that bad,” he said, nasals flattening the words until they sounded younger. “It c-came on this morning, it’s just a—”

“Just a spring cold,” Arthur said. His hand fell to Merlin’s cheek in a more awkward, less princely version of the same measure. “And yet you rode out with me in the rain.”

Merlin sniffed. It was—Arthur could admit in the privacy of his own ribcage—unreasonably endearing. “What was I supposed to do, tell you no? You’d have made me come anyway.”

“I would have left you to Gaius without a second thought,” Arthur said, and waited half a beat to add, “And then felt guilty about it the whole way.”

Merlin made a little puff of a laugh and then wrecked it with another sneeze. “Hih—TSCHhuh!—hah—TSCH!” He made a miserable face and scrubbed at his nose with the side of his hand. “I forgot my handker—”

Arthur had already fished a square of linen from inside his own cloak. He proffered it without ceremony. “Do not make me watch you wipe your nose on your sleeve,” he said, and then—because he could feel the eyes in the back of his head that did not exist and did not belong to anyone but himself—added, “And stop looking at me as if I’ve handed you a signet ring. It’s a piece of cloth, Merlin, not a proposal.”

Merlin’s ears—pink already—went scarlet. “I wasn’t. I—thank you.” He pressed the kerchief to his nose and turned aside.

It was like setting two gears and letting them bite. The tinny clatter of rain outside, the grudging cough and settle of the fire, Merlin’s breath catching and then spilling into a little run of sneezes that left him blinking and a touch dazed. Arthur felt his attention sharpen along to the cadence of it: count, assess, plan.

He stood and crossed to the ruined bench, testing the wood with a bootheel. Solid enough if he knocked the angled leg free and propped it. He did so, kicking the broken piece until it gave and wedging it under the plank until the bench stood true. Then he dragged it to the hearth’s best angle, a foot back from where the heat was honest and not hungry, and shrugged out of his own cloak to throw over the end like a rough blanket.

“Here,” he said, when Merlin’s teeth had stopped clicking long enough to notice movement. “Sit here. Lean against the wall. You’re going to get warm whether you like it or not.”

Merlin managed the ghost of a smirk as he shuffled over, his socks making a wet-slap sound against the floor. “Terrifying, sire. Truly a fearsome threat.”

Arthur ignored him and knelt again beside the fire. He had already stripped the horselines of their water-skins; he poured the last of one into his tin cup and sat it in the cradled heat among the coals. It would be weak tea at best if he put leaves to it, but even plain hot water could do miracles—so Gaius claimed, and Arthur had learned not to argue with the old man on matters of bodies.

“You’re not to fall asleep yet,” he said, as Merlin slumped onto the bench and pulled the cloak half-heartedly over his knees. “You’ll bake yourself. And if you stop shivering too quickly, I don’t trust it.”

“Dnot sleeping,” Merlin said, eyes already doing a half-closed drift that would have been convincing in a less transparent liar. “J-just resting my—” He yawned, jaw trembling. “—eyes.”

Arthur eyed him, set his jaw, and took his own jacket off. The chill licked up immediately, but it meant he could pull at the buttons of Merlin’s and urge it off, too. The linen shirt beneath was clinging and miserable. He glanced at the fire. They would need to dry what they could.

“Arms up,” he said.

Merlin stared at him through sleep-heavy eyes as if he’d just been asked to recite the lineage of the kings of Nemeth. “What?”

“Arms up. That shirt is soaked through. I’m not letting you sit in it.”

Merlin blew out a small breath of protest that turned into a cough, shoulders hunching around it. He lifted his arms, and Arthur took the hem and worked it up, careful where wet linen wants to grab at skin. Merlin had always been thinner than Arthur approved of, long-limbed and shifty, as if he’d been poured into himself too quickly and some of the substance had missed. But here, up close, with rain-razored skin and ribs you could sketch in with a blunt pencil—Arthur felt something stern and warm spread between his lungs, a protective anger with no good target.

He got the shirt off and spread it on a makeshift rack of snapped twigs near the hearth. He did the same with Merlin’s jacket and cloak, and then draped his own cloak over Merlin again, heavier and broader. The boy’s head tipped involuntarily toward the heat like a flower to the sun.

“Drink this,” Arthur said, when the water sighed into steam and the tin grew too hot at the edges to touch bare-handed. He used a corner of his own undershirt to hold it and put it into Merlin’s hands.

Merlin blinked down at the rising wisp as if it were a miracle. “You’re full of surprises,” he murmured, and then, with an effort that tugged at something in Arthur’s chest, added, “Thag you.”

Arthur grunted. “Don’t read more into it than is there.”

“Wouldn’t d-dream of it,” Merlin said, and coughed into the cup as he tried to drink and not drown in his own throat.

The storm outside had organized itself into a relentless rhythm: lash, pause, lash. When the thunder spoke now it felt further away, like a story retold in summer. Arthur measured their luck against the shape of the afternoon. If it eased before full dark, they could make the outer farms and beg a byre. If it didn’t, the shack would be their keep for the night.

Merlin finished the water too quickly and set the cup aside with both hands, careful as if it were precious. His shivering had not stopped, but it had slowed, the pitch less frantic. He sniffed again and then, more shamefacedly than Arthur had patience for, dabbed at his nose with the kerchief as if worried he’d been too ungainly with it.

“For heaven’s sake,” Arthur said, exasperated fondness making his words half-rough, half-soft. “Blow your nose properly. There’s no court here to impress.”

Merlin’s eyebrow made a valiant attempt at arch, but it was undermined by the way his breath hitched immediately after. He turned, braced, and sneezed three times with a kind of resigned violence that left him gasping. “Hheh—TSCH!—hah—TSCHuh!—hih—TSCHh!”

“Bless you,” Arthur said, almost before he knew he’d said it.

Merlin froze with the kerchief still half to his face, a pure and ridiculous surprise flitting across his expression. He recovered clumsily. “You’ve never blessed me before.”

“There’s a first time for everything,” Arthur said, staring so determinedly into the fire it might as well have been a dragon. “If you take the rest of my handkerchief with you, Gaius will have my head.”

Merlin smiled into the cloth. It made the small space feel briefly human. Then another shiver wormed up his spine and pulled his shoulders together against his will. He coughed, softer this time, and said, “You don’t have to—watch me. I’m not going to melt.”

“You look like you might dissolve,” Arthur said. He reached again, out of habit now, to brush damp curls back from Merlin’s forehead with the back of his fingers. The heat there had crept up a notch. The flush across the cheekbones had deepened. Arthur frowned. “You’re warmer.”

Merlin’s eyes slid away. “It always gets worse before it gets better,” he said, trying on a Gaius-ism like a tunic that didn’t fit. “He says.”

“I am familiar with Gaius’s sayings,” Arthur said. “He also says that if a stubborn idiot rides through a thunderstorm with a fever, he deserves the scolding he gets.” He hesitated, then swallowed the equal and opposite urge to say you should have told me. Merlin didn’t like to be handled. He did it anyway, carefully: “Why didn’t you say something before we left the city?”

Merlin’s lips pressed into a small, humorless curve. “Because if I said something, you’d tell me to stay behind,” he said, and then the truth tugged another word free: “And I didn’t want to.”

It was like being handed a weapon he had no intention of using. Arthur looked at him helplessly and then away. He was a prince, not a fool; he knew what it meant to be necessary in someone’s eyes and how much a person might swallow to keep from losing a place at a shoulder. “Next time,” he said carefully, “you will tell me.”

Merlin’s mouth made the shape of a scoff. “You can’t order my body to behave by decree.”

“I can order you to behave,” Arthur said, and, because the room was too small to hide anything as large as sincerity: “And I can tell you I’d rather turn back with you grumbling and whole than ride forward with you quietly falling apart.”

Merlin’s gaze darted up to his and then away, as if the look had come too close to something bare. His cheeks were too pink to read. “Bossy,” he said, and sniffed again.

“Alive,” Arthur corrected.

They sat with the fire and the weather for a time. Arthur fed it sparingly, not out of necessity—there was more wood than he had expected, tucked against the wall in a small, ungenerous generosity—but because the ritual steadied him. Merlin drifted in the seat the way a boat drifts at anchor—reeling out, tugging back—nodding off and starting awake with a breath-caught cough or a sneeze that took him unawares.

When the next run of shivers arrived—hard and ugly, rattling his bones—Arthur gave up on pretense. He shifted, sat on the bench beside him, and tugged Merlin in by degrees until shoulder pressed to shoulder. The heat of him could have baked bread. Arthur swore under his breath and wrapped an arm around him anyway, pulling the cloak more fully over both their knees.

Merlin went stiff for a heartbeat, as if contact were a trap, and then—pride crumbling, resolve sagging—he leaned. It was not a dramatic collapse. He simply reallocated his gravity until a quiet line of weight settled against Arthur’s side: temple near his shoulder, breath feathering the edge of his collarbone, a stubborn, small sound between his teeth that might have been mortification and might have been relief.

“Don’t make this a habit,” Arthur said. It came out ragged, but Merlin’s laugh acknowledged the attempted humor.

“Wouldn’t d-dream,” Merlin managed, and then, in a small, surprised voice that didn’t match his usual theatre: “You’re warm.”

“You’re boiling,” Arthur said, and pressed his cheek briefly to Merlin’s damp hair as if he could test for heat that way, too. It was an indulgence. He did it anyway.

Time thinned into a slow thread. The thunder softened from a threat to a memory. The rain stayed, a last stubbornness of the day. Arthur’s cloak grew warm to the touch where the fire and his own body made common cause. He could feel the shape of Merlin’s breathing alter—still too fast, still with the small catches, but less desperate. When the next sneeze built, he felt it telegraphed through the line of bone and muscle, the quick inhale and the small pause like a swallow.

“Hhh—TSCHh!” Merlin ducked hard against his shoulder, then pulled away as if to apologize, and then—traitor body—sneezed again. “Heh—TSCH!”

“Bless you,” Arthur said smoothly, as if this were court ritual. He palmed for the kerchief and pressed it into Merlin’s hand again without comment, and when Merlin tried to give it back, he closed his fingers around it stubbornly. “Keep it.”

“You’ll live to regret that,” Merlin murmured, voice gone papery and fond.

“I already regret most things that involve you,” Arthur said, a line both of them knew by heart and used as a way to look the truth in the face without naming it.

It got darker. The shack made a little world of the firelight—their hands and knees and the low gold of the burning, the walls taking on the warmth they didn’t have and reflecting it back. The smell of wet wool and smoke and a faint, human salt.

Arthur judged by the weight in his own eyelids and the tone of the rain that they were done for the night. He didn’t like the idea of sleeping here—too many ways in, too few ways out, a door that wouldn’t latch and a roof that apologized for its existence—but the horses needed rest, and Merlin—well. Even were the road bone-dry and the sky friendly, Arthur would not have put him back on a horse.

“You’ll eat something,” he said, pitching his voice into the small space Gaius left in a mind, the space where the order sounded like a kindness. He dug into his pack for the wrapped bundle of hard cheese, heel of bread, and dried meat he’d held in reserve. The bread had taken on a bemused damp, but it would do. He sliced a few pieces and handed them over.

Merlin took them without protest—which was more worrying than any complaint. He tore the bread into small pieces and ate them like a penitent. When the food hit, his body remembered how to be hungry, and he ate a little faster. He wiped his nose as if he didn’t want to, coughed into his fist, and murmured an apology as if for breathing.

“Stop that,” Arthur said quietly, because the apologies were a greater irritant than the cough. “There’s nothing to be sorry for.”

“I spread t-troubles like seed,” Merlin said, aiming for glib and landing closer to weary. “I’m just sorry I got you stuck in a—” He gestured vaguely at the shack. “—this.”

“This,” Arthur said, “is dry and warm and keeps out the worst of the weather. I’ve slept in worse places with better company and better places with worse. Tonight I’ll settle for good enough and yours.” He heard himself and almost choked; he cleared his throat and tried again, less revealing. “Settle for the fire and the roof and the fact that you haven’t sneezed your head off.”

Merlin ducked his head, and Arthur thought—absurdly—that if he were a cat he’d have purred. “You never know,” Merlin said, the words slurring around sleep. “It’s a very loose attachment.”

“Sleep,” Arthur said, because if he tried to ask for anything more complicated his sincerity would show again and neither of them had the strength for it.

Merlin blinked slow and then slower. “If I fall asleep,” he said, “will you wake me if—if I get too hot? Gaius says fevers—” He swallowed, and the swallow hurt. “—can get worse in sleep.”

“I will wake you,” Arthur said to the ceiling, to the rain, to the part of himself that had been keeping watch on this boy since the first time he’d gotten himself knocked across a training ring and laughed as if pain were a story he’d heard and didn’t believe. “I’ll wake you if you so much as breathe suspiciously.”

Merlin smiled, small and crooked and trusting, and it did something to Arthur that he was not prepared to examine with the lights on. “Bossy,” he said again, and let his eyes close.

Arthur sat a long time listening. Merlin’s breathing found a rhythm, but not an easy one. He coughed twice in his sleep and turned his face into Arthur’s shoulder with a soft, aching sound that made Arthur press his hand—carefully, absurdly—to the back of his neck until it passed.

The fire hummed. The night settled. The shack’s door sighed on its hinge.

When the fever crested, it came like a small tide. Arthur felt it in the way Merlin’s skin went from hot to furnace, in the way the line of his back dampened with sweat, in the way his face turned toward the fire and away from it as if neither choice were entirely his. Arthur woke him gently when his breathing went shallow and fast, lids flickering. Merlin came up hard from wherever he’d been, eyes wild for a heartbeat, and Arthur cupped the back of his head and anchored him with a voice. “You’re here. It’s all right. Drink.”

He made the boy swallow a few mouthfuls. He wiped his face with the edge of a mostly-clean cloth dampened in the least filthy corner of the room—Merlin flinched at the first cool touch and then sighed, head tipping into it like a sleepwalker finding a wall.

“Better?” Arthur asked.

Merlin nodded, then winced, then squinted at him as if he’d said something improbable. “Are you always this—” He gestured to Arthur vaguely. “You know.”

“Competent?” Arthur suggested, because if he was going to say it he might as well make it irritating.

“Kind,” Merlin said, without any bite at all, and Arthur had to look away as if he could shrug it off and let it fall behind him.

“Yes,” he said lightly, because anything heavier would crack the rim of the cup they were both drinking out of. “But only when the person in question is an idiot who failed to tell me he was ill.”

“I’ll put it on the calendar,” Merlin mumbled, and in the next breath toppled back into sleep as if some string had been cut.

Arthur stayed awake. The night and the duty and the warmth kept him steady. Twice more he woke Merlin and made him drink. Once—when a sneeze tried to wrench the boy out of sleep and into the cold again—Arthur put his hand against the center of his chest and said, “Easy,” and felt Merlin’s heart under his palm like a thing trusting a hand.

At some weather-certain time between midnight and the worst fatigue, the rain softened to a whisper. The roof stopped ticking. The silence that followed was so sudden Arthur felt it as a physical pressure. He risked standing, breath held, and Merlin settled without waking, a tired animal in a safe den.

Arthur stepped to the door to look out. The world beyond was an ink-wet wash with the edge of dawn somewhere behind it. The clouds were breaking to the east; the faintest suggestion of light pressed its mouth to the horizon and blew, pale and persistent. The farmsteads would be soggy and reborn, the castle lifted and dripping like a ship coming out of the sea.

Behind him, Merlin made a small sound—half cough, half question. Arthur turned back immediately. He could not have said when precisely the annoyance had burned off and become this—this tether he carried as if it had always been part of his harness—but it was there now, and he had no intention of cutting it.

Merlin’s eyes cracked open, bleary but clearer. He blinked at Arthur, and a sleepy relief moved across his face like someone had pulled a curtain back. “You’re still here,” he said softly, as if a person as rooted as Arthur could be anywhere else.

“Unfortunately,” Arthur said, which in their particular language meant, of course.

Merlin sniffed, then winced when it aggravated his throat, and then sneezed twice in quick succession, muffled into Arthur’s cloak. “Hh—TSCH! TSCHuh!” He lay there blinking, dazed by the force. “Ugh.”

“There’s a word,” Arthur said, “for people who ride into storms with fevers and then collapse in abandoned shacks sneezing themselves inside out.”

“Heroes?” Merlin offered, voice mangled.

“Idiots,” Arthur returned, very gently.

Merlin smiled and hid the shape of it in the kerchief. “This idiot still d-doesn’t want to make you late to the castle.”

“The castle,” Arthur said, and allowed himself the pleasure of saying it like a threat, “can wait until you can stand without ricocheting off the walls.” He checked the temperature at Merlin’s temple again and then his cheek. It had edged down; he could feel his own relief bending his shoulders away from his ears. “We’ll leave when the sun is well up and you’ve eaten. Until then, you will do as you’re told.”

Merlin made a face that meant obedience at great personal cost. “Yessir.”

“Do not ‘sir’ me with that tone,” Arthur said, unable to keep the smile from his voice.

Merlin’s eyes slipped closed again, but not into the thin, troubled run of fever-sleep—into something that looked a little less barbed. He sank another fraction of an inch into Arthur’s shoulder and let his weight be held.

Outside, the first light made a thin edge on the wet world. The room felt—briefly, incredulously—like a place rather than an accident. Arthur let himself breathe and counted the soft hush of Merlin’s breath in and out, inventorying it the way he would a wound: better here, worse here, watch this, wait.

He thought—not for the first time and not for the last—how infuriating it was that the kingdom’s safety could rest so often on the shoulders of a boy who insisted on wearing his heart on the wrong side of his sleeves and his secrets where anyone with eyes could see them, if they only looked. He thought how easy it would be—too easy—to pretend none of this was theirs to carry together. He thought, finally, that he was glad the storm had broken where it had, in a place with four walls and a door that wouldn’t latch, because it had made him stop long enough to see what was in front of him.

“Sleep,” he said again, not sure who he spoke to. The fire ticked its assent. The world waited.

Merlin, for once, obeyed.

---

When the sun had made itself a thin coin and the world had begun to steam, Arthur stirred Merlin with a careful hand and half a joke. “Up,” he said. “Eat and then we see if your legs remember how to behave.”

Merlin woke slowly, as if walking back from a long, wet field. His eyes had lost that fever-bright glare. He was still clogged and sniffling and sneezing at unhelpful intervals—“Hh—TSCH!—snnf—sorry,” “Stop apologizing,” “Habit”—but the worst of the burning had eased.

Arthur had saved the last of the better bread and broken it with a bit of cheese; it went down without protest this time. Merlin even had the good sense to look almost contented when the steam from a fresh tin of heated water fogged his face.

They packed slowly. Arthur insisted on Merlin putting on the dry shirt first and then the warmed jacket. He shook out the cloaks and settled Arthur’s heavier one over Merlin’s shoulders without inviting debate. The boy tried anyway, because he wouldn’t be Merlin if he didn’t.

“You’ll be c-cold,” he said, voice snagging.

“I’ll be fine,” Arthur lied, because the slow burn of caring had turned stubborn, and he intended to see it through.

When they stepped out into the washed morning, the world smelled like new leaves and clean stone. The horses were damp but steady; they stamped and blew in greeting. Merlin touched his mare’s nose with a tenderness that predated language and whispered something to her in that nonsense he used with animals that made them go loose-eyed and helpful. Arthur watched, caught sideways by it, then shook himself and mounted.

“Slowly,” he said, once he’d secured the door out of habit even though it would flap open again at the first contrary breeze. “Follow me. If you sneeze yourself out of the saddle, I’m not catching you.”

“Liar,” Merlin said, and smiled a little, and Arthur gave up on pretending to be offended.

They rode at an easy walk across fields that pretended they had never been wet. The castle rose out of the morning like a promise and a problem. Arthur made his plan out loud so Merlin couldn’t get lost in arguing—stables first for the horses, then straight to Gaius, no detours, no resting on half-warm benches along the inner wall while claiming he was fine. Merlin opened his mouth twice and shut it twice, which meant he was either too tired to make trouble or too grateful to risk it.

At the stable entrance, a groom came running with a blanket and a flurry of questions. Arthur fielded them with a single look and a clipped “Later,” and then turned to find that Merlin had already gone on foot, one hand on the wall as if the stone were more honest than his knees.

“Merlin,” Arthur called, and the boy paused, swayed, and then turned with that stubbornly apologetic face.

“I’m f—” he began, and Arthur cut across it with a raised palm.

“If you say fine,” Arthur said, “I will have you thrown over my shoulder in front of half the guard.”

Merlin worked his jaw and then surrendered with theatrical grace. “As my lord commands.”

“Better,” Arthur said, and fell into step.

They climbed the physician’s stairs together, Arthur a half-step behind and slightly to the side as if he could catch him without watching. The corridors were bright with the low sun and the swish of working day. A maid bobbed and smiled. A guard nodded. The kingdom kept its own rhythm, indifferent and merciful.

Gaius opened the door before they could knock, as if the castle had whispered to him in the voice of creaking stairs. His eyebrows launched into the rafters at the sight of them—damp, smoky, blear-eyed—and then they dove into the immediate.

“Sit,” he said to Merlin, which Merlin did with the tent-pegged obedience of the truly spent. “Arthur?” He turned to the prince with a physician’s rudeness. “Any injuries?”

“Only to my patience,” Arthur said dryly, and then—because it would be Gaius who would understand it for what it was, and not make a meal of it—added, “Fevered. Through the night. Worse toward midnight. Easier toward dawn. Cough. Sneezing. Sore throat. Ate. Drank. Slept in fits. Warm but not scalding now.”

Gaius’s glance was swift and assessing and not unkind. “You did well.”

Arthur shrugged off the compliment as if it didn’t fit, because compliments from Gaius always felt a fraction like being weighed and found not entirely wanting. “He did not,” he said, tilting his chin toward Merlin. “He rode out with a fever and kept it to himself.”

Gaius made a small noise and Merlin had the grace to look sheepish over the rim of the cup Gaius had already pressed into his hands. “I told him,” Merlin said feebly, “that he’d be cross.”

“Crossness is the least of what you deserve,” Gaius said, but fondness underwrote the scold. He laid a cool hand to Merlin’s forehead, much as Arthur had, and nodded once. “Hmm. It will be a few days of it, I think, but nothing your youth and stubbornness won’t grind underfoot. Rest, warmth, steam, and as much broth as your stomach will keep. And,” he added, turning to Arthur with the precision of a thrown dagger, “no patrols for at least three days.”

Arthur raised both hands in surrender. “From me you will get no argument,” he said, and then, because he could feel the day wanting to rush in and take him, he let his hand brush—brief, almost accidental—the back of Merlin’s shoulder. “I’ll be back after council.”

Merlin looked up at him through lashes still heavy with sleep and fever and something like gratitude. “Don’t let your father volunteer you for anything mad.”

“My father is always volunteering me for something mad,” Arthur said. “Stay put. Do as Gaius says. If you get worse—”

“I’ll tell him,” Merlin said, and then, because they were who they were and the day was what it was, added, “Bossy.”

“Alive,” Arthur said again, and left before he could drown in his own tenderness.

In the corridor, the castle was brighter, louder. A squire called his name and held up a bundle of messages. Arthur took them automatically and sorted without reading. He could still feel the heat of Merlin against his side, the weight of a head against his shoulder in a shack with a door that wouldn’t latch. He could feel, under his sternum, the place where worry had softened into something else and sworn itself to service.

He straightened. Duty clattered down around his shoulders like armor. “Council in an hour,” he told the squire. “Tell them I’ll be there.”

“And Merlin, sire?” the boy ventured, because gossip ran faster than even thunder.

“Merlin,” Arthur said, allowing himself a private smile only where the squire couldn’t see, “will be exactly where he should be. For once.”

He went to meet the morning, the storm behind him and, in its wake, a vow he would pretend he hadn’t made and keep anyway.

---

Chapter Text

Gaius’s chambers had a particular warmth that the rest of the castle never quite managed. Even when the hearth was banked low and the shutters stood ajar for air, there was a hum in the space—the clink of bottles, the whisper of herbs drying on their strings, the little thud-and-sigh of a pestle settling into a mortar after work. Merlin had once said that the room sounded like a body healing itself. Gaius, who pretended not to be sentimental about such things, had pretended not to hear and then found himself listening for the sound on quiet nights.

He heard it now under the scrape of a chair as he guided Merlin down to sit, under the wet cough Merlin tried to stifle in the crook of his arm, under the soft curse Arthur slipped out when he realized he’d just appointed himself witness and assistant.

“Off with that,” Gaius said, nodding at the damp shirt. “And the cloak. No sense in drying you on the outside and soaking you through within.”

Merlin’s mouth tugged. “I’m already soaked through within,” he said, the words flattened by congestion.

“Then we’ll dry you from both directions,” Gaius returned easily. He had learned long ago to answer Merlin’s misdirection with plainness. “Arthur, kettle. A good full one. And fetch that bowl from the shelf there—the blue one, not the cracked green. You know the one I mean.”

Arthur, who had been trained since childhood to command armies and in adulthood to pretend he’d been born knowing how to do it, took the order without bristle and moved with the quickness of someone who had already decided what mattered. He stoked the hearth, hung the kettle, and set the blue bowl on the table as if laying out a map.

Merlin shivered and made himself small on the chair, as if his bones had been replaced with poorly whittled sticks. Gaius set a hand between his shoulder blades and felt the jerk of those shivers, the heat seeping through thin linen. “You rode in a storm with a fever,” he said mildly, resting palm and familiarity there until the worst of the trembling passed.

“Wasn’t a fever when we left,” Merlin protested, and then, under Gaius’s lifted eyebrow, amended with something like honesty, “Much of one.”

“Hm.” Gaius lifted the boy’s chin with the knuckle of a forefinger, the way he had the first time a wide-eyed servant had come to him with scraped hands and a story about a bucket and a misjudged step. The face had changed since then—lengthened and sharpened—but the eyes had not. “Say ah.”

Merlin sighed theatrically. “Ah.”

Gaius peered at the throat, at the reddened pillars and the angry shine. “Sore,” he said, to himself and to Arthur. “Inflamed. Cough?”

Merlin nodded, tried to hold it back, failed. The cough rolled up through him in a rattle and left him blinking and abashed. “S-sorry.”

“For coughing?” Gaius clicked his tongue, not unkind. “If you apologize for doing what bodies do, I’ll set you to copying inventories until the fever breaks out of sheer boredom.”

Arthur’s mouth twitched in the corner where he thought no one could see. Gaius did not smile back. He took a cloth, warmed it by the fire, and then laid it—careful—along the back of Merlin’s neck. He felt some of the tightness there unlock at the first honest heat.

“You fuss,” Merlin murmured, and the edge between mockery and gratitude was so thin it broke Gaius’s heart a little every time.

“I care,” Gaius corrected. He said it as lightly as mending thread through cloth. “Hold this where it does the most good.”

He turned then to his work with the steadiness that had saved lives when there was no point in pretending a potion was a miracle. A spoon of ground coltsfoot to ease the cough. Thyme, crushed in his palm to wake the oils. Willow-bark scraped fine and bitter for the ache. Honey, warmed with a thumb over the jar’s rim, because he was not a monster and because Merlin grimaced as if the taste of medicine were an insult to his very soul. All this into a steaming cup, the heat captured from the bright, popping heart of the fire that Arthur had coaxed into something cheerful.

Arthur hovered. It was not his way to hover—when he stood he filled a room with purpose and broke it into tasks—but here he stood as if his armor had no place to sit. Gaius gave him the cup without fanfare. “Blow,” he advised, as if the prince did not know how steam worked. “Small sips.”

Arthur crouched and held the cup to Merlin like a vow. Merlin glanced at the hands and then at the face above them, read what was written there, and—miracle of miracles—did as he was told.

The first sip made him flinch. The second made his eyes close. Gaius watched the lines by the mouth soften by degrees, watched the throat swallow and feel relief and do it again. The boy tried to give the cup back too soon; Arthur shook his head and kept the weight of it steady.

“Good,” Gaius said softly, and Merlin, whose ears were good even when his nose was useless, turned slightly toward the approval.

The kettle sang. Arthur jumped to it as if a trumpet had sounded, poured water into the blue bowl, and looked for further instruction. Gaius opened the box that held the herbs he saved for steam—eucalyptus for the chest, mint for the head, a pinch of pine needle because he had learned that the smell of a forest could make someone believe his lungs were bigger than they were. The scent rose at once and unknotted the air.

He set the bowl on the table and put a chair before it, turned backward. “Up,” he said to Merlin. “Lean on your arms and breathe this. Slow in, slow out. Let it do the work.”

Merlin dragged himself to the table, the kind of tired that made the floor look tall. He folded over the chair back obediently and breathed as told. The first breath snagged. The second made him cough and sputter. Gaius put his broad palm between the shoulder blades and rubbed—long strokes, down and away—until the cough worked something loose. Arthur shifted, uncertain, and then reached for a cloth to drape over Merlin’s head and bowl, trapping the steam. He hesitated—too near? too much?—and Gaius nodded permission. Arthur lowered the cloth like a benediction.

“Good lad,” Gaius said, and if he meant both of them, neither called him on it.

Under the cloth, Merlin’s breath found a rhythm. He sneezed once, miserably, into the scented heat—“Heh—TSCH!”—fumbled for the handkerchief Arthur had pressed on him and found Gaius’s already there instead, which mattered more than it had any right to. He blew his nose as instructed—a proper blow, not the ridiculous sniffle he tried when he’d forgotten he was allowed to take up space—and then breathed again.

“Again,” Gaius murmured, hand moving in that steady arc. Merlin breathed. “That’s it. Slow.” He could feel the boy’s back under his palm—too thin, too often—and felt the old anger at the world in general and the particular fate that had built Merlin out of stardust and need. He rubbed until the breath came easier and then eased off, the way one eases off a frightened horse.

When the steam had done all it could for now and the bowl had cooled to merely warm, Gaius lifted the cloth. Merlin blinked out of the small tent, flushed and damp, hair gone into wild curls from the heat. He looked both younger and older, which was a trick Gaius had never quite learned to account for.

“Better?” Gaius asked.

Merlin nodded, eyes watering in a way that had nothing to do with tears. “I can actually feel air,” he said, wonderingly, and then, as if remembering himself, added, “You’re a menace with mint.”

“Drink,” Gaius said, hiding his smile in the word as he handed over a fresh cup of water. “Small sips. Arthur, fetch the blanket from the foot of Merlin’s bed. The thick one. And make up the bed proper while you’re at it; there’s no glory to be won in a chair.”

Arthur moved with relief. He had needed a job that was all hands and no thinking. He hauled the thick blanket over, shook it out with a crack that made Merlin flinch, then gentled it down. He remade the narrow bed with the brisk competence of a man who had made his own pallet in the field often enough. When he glanced up, Gaius caught him smoothing the pillow with a tenderness he would have died rather than name.

“Right,” Gaius said, once everything was ready. “Into bed. Boots off. Yes, both. No, you cannot negotiate for one.”

Merlin, whose negotiating skills could wring concessions from a block of granite, did not try. He let Arthur tug the second boot free and then leaned on Gaius as he stood—a casual leaning that did not feel casual at all. Gaius bore the weight as if it cost him nothing and eased him down onto the bed. He tucked the blanket in not because tuck mattered but because it felt like an old story, and Merlin had always deserved to be wrapped in an old story.

As soon as the warmth settled over him, Merlin’s face fell into those soft lines sleep keeps in a pocket. He fought it, stubborn to the end—eyes parting, lashes lifting, a word about not being in the way. Gaius sat on the edge of the mattress and put a hand in his hair, fingers tracing the temple where the pulse was too quick.

“You are never in my way,” he said, and felt Merlin still completely under his hand. He had said it before in other words—stop talking, drink this, I’ve got you—but perhaps never exactly like this. “Rest. That is your work today.”

Merlin’s eyes shone in the half light as if the sentence had been a spell. “Yes, sir,” he whispered, and Gaius had to swallow twice before he could trust his voice enough to say, “Good lad.”

Arthur hovered again. Gaius spared him a glance. “You have council,” he said, not unkind. “Go. If you don’t, your father will come looking and then I will have two fools in here and not enough bed.”

Arthur’s jaw worked. “I can send a page if—”

“You can come back at the midday break and again at last bell and I will tolerate your interference then,” Gaius said. “In the meantime, I will be here. Where I have always been.”

Arthur exhaled and gave in, though not entirely politely. “If he worsens—”

“I will send for you,” Gaius promised. The prince nodded, hesitated, and then did what Gaius had seen him do once before when Merlin had come back from the forest shaking and wet with fright after something he would not name: he put his hand on the blanket, near Merlin’s arm, and left it there a moment as if committing the shape to memory.

“Rest,” Arthur said, and it sounded like an order he wished he could carry out by force. Merlin managed a thin grin. “Bossy.”

“Alive,” Arthur returned, and fled before he forgot how.

The door closed on the prince and on the day’s obligations. The room settled back into itself. Gaius sat a while, hand a steady weight in Merlin’s unruly hair, and listened to the cough knock now and then at the back of his chest. When Merlin drifted toward sleep and then jerked up with a little gasp—the fever’s hand yanking at him—Gaius steadied him back with a touch and a small, foolish sound that no one had heard from him since he was a young man in love with the idea of curing the world.

“There,” he said, as if calming a colicky child. “There now.”

Merlin slept. Gaius rose, covered the bowl, and set about the small work of keeping someone through a fever: water by the bed, a basin ready, cloths folded and warmed, the pot set to simmer with stock and onion and a heel of bread to soften it. He wrote a note for Gwen—because Gwen always asked what she could do and always meant it—and left it folded by the door: if you have a moment, a bundle of clean linens would not go amiss. He ground more willow and murmured at the mortar as if it were an old friend.

Twice in the morning Merlin woke in the sharp, bright way a fever wakes you—eyes too wide, breath too quick, the room sliding. Gaius was there both times before the fear could take root. The first time he pressed the cool cloth to Merlin’s face and told him, plain: “You’re here, in my chamber, safe.”

“The rain—” Merlin said, voice gone small.

“Outside,” Gaius said. “Let it do as it likes. In here we have our own weather.”

The second time, Merlin’s eyes found nothing on the far wall and then too much. He tried to stand. Gaius put a palm to his chest and the pressure of it was both stop and stay. “No,” he said, not sharp, not even stern—just the tone a man keeps for a horse with more heart than sense. “Not yet.”

Merlin sagged back, frustrated and grateful too. “I hate this part,” he confessed to the ceiling.

“I know,” Gaius said, his hand still there, feeling the thrum of a heart trying to run while the body stood still. “Do it anyway.”

Merlin huffed a half-laugh and then ruined it with a sneeze. “Heh—TSCH!—TSCHh!” He groaned like a man twice his age and rubbed at his nose as if he could rub the cold right out. Gaius handed him the cloth, waited while he blew his nose, then swapped it for a cup and watched him drink.

By the time the soup was ready, the fever had settled into that stubborn middle ground where it could be bargained with. Merlin took the broth in careful mouthfuls and watched Gaius as if the act of eating were a favor done in both directions.

“You always make the good soup when I’m sick,” Merlin said, somewhere between teasing and truly moved.

“I always make the good soup,” Gaius said, feigning affront. “The trouble is you are too busy running about to come home and eat it.”

Merlin’s smile went soft and wobbly. He looked suddenly like the boy who had come to him all those months ago, all elbows and hope. “I do come home,” he said. “To here.”

Gaius, who had taken in orphans and fools and kings and, once, a hawk with a broken wing, had learned long ago not to gasp at tenderness in case it spooked. He reached across and cupped Merlin’s cheek with a work-rough palm and felt the boy lean, just a fraction, into it. “You do,” he agreed, and the words warmed the room in a way the fire could not.

They dozed in shifts. When Merlin slept, Gaius read a few lines and then lost his place watching the rise and fall of the blanket. When Merlin woke, Gaius fed him and scolded him into drinking water and—once—the barest sip of bitter tea that would quiet the headache he would never admit to.

At midday, the door swung open and Arthur came in like weather—eyes scanning, shoulders too tight. He arrested at the sight of Merlin asleep and Gaius with his hand on the boy’s arm. Something in his face uncoiled.

“Progress?” he asked in his council voice, stripped of ornament.

“Progress,” Gaius confirmed. “He’ll live.”

“Good,” Arthur said, and then, almost shyly, “May I…?”

“You may sit and be quiet,” Gaius said. “And if you wake him, you will chop wood for the infirmary till Michaelmas.”

Arthur, who could win a tournament and also keep silence when asked, took the chair by the bed and rested his elbows on his knees. He watched Merlin sleep the way a man watches a river thaw—worried it might break its banks, relieved at every inch of movement. When Merlin woke into a shallow fit of coughing, Arthur had a cup in his hand before Gaius could stand. “Easy,” he said, sudden and soft. “Drink.”

Merlin’s eyes found him and did that ridiculous shine again. “You’re back.”

“I said I would be,” Arthur replied. He did not add for once, because Gaius was in the room and because he had kept his word and it felt too clean a thing to mark.

They shared the next hour—the three of them—as if it were bread. Arthur told an edited version of council foolishness—how Sir Leon had diplomatically suggested that the royal granaries could not, in fact, accommodate one of Uther’s grand schemes without more grain than had been grown in the entire west in a season. Merlin snorted and then cursed his body for making it into a cough. Gaius applied another warm cloth and another measured dose and made them both drink water.

At one point, Merlin drifted and then startled, breath hitching, the old reflex toward fight sparking in his limbs. Gaius put his palm back over the sternum, the way he had earlier, and Arthur—without thinking—mirrored it at the shoulder, thumb finding the notch of collarbone. “Here,” Gaius said, and Arthur, oddly, said it at the same time. Merlin settled as if the two voices braided were a rope thrown to a drowning man.

When Arthur rose, finally, and made noises about duty, Gaius did not protest. “Come back at last bell,” he said, as if granting permission for a small indulgence. “You can bore him with more council.”

Arthur’s smile flashed, quick and real. “With pleasure.”

The afternoon stretched and folded. Gwen arrived with the linens and with a look that took in all the small details and filed none of them for gossip—the extra blanket, the bowl of mint steam, the prince’s cloak folded neatly over a chair. She brushed Merlin’s hair back with the back of one gentle knuckle, kissed Gaius’s cheek in thanks for existing, and left a small jar of her own remedy for sore nose—rendered fat and calendula, a trick from her mother. “It helps with the chafing,” she said to Gaius as if Merlin weren’t there. “He’ll refuse to use it unless you tell him to.”

“I will tell him to,” Gaius said gravely, and later he did, and Merlin obeyed, and made a face, and then admitted it helped.

Near dusk the fever tried one more time to climb. Merlin felt it coming the way you feel a storm in your knees. He went restless and clammy at once, kicked one foot free of the blanket, and frowned as if he could argue his temperature down. Gaius’s hand found his forehead and then his pulse. “Up,” he said quietly. “Slow walk. Only to the window and back.”

It wasn’t for the walking—Merlin was no use on his feet just now—but for the ways a body sometimes needs to believe it is not trapped. Merlin shuffled to the window with Gaius’s hand under his elbow, looked out at the last rinse of gold along the wall-walk, and knit his brows as if remembering the rain. “It’s not storming,” he said, surprised.

“It isn’t,” Gaius said. “Storms end. Even the loud ones.”

Merlin’s throat worked. Gaius could not tell if the swallow was pain or feeling. “I know,” Merlin said. He let himself be steered back to bed and under the blanket and did not fight when Gaius pressed a cool cloth to the wrists and the back of the neck and the bend of the knees. He did not fight when Gaius murmured nonsense while he worked—old words from an old tongue that meant nothing and everything. He did not fight when Gaius bent, in a moment that would have mortified them both if a witness had existed, and touched his forehead with a kiss as light as dust.

“Gaius,” Merlin said, startled and touched at once.

“Yes,” Gaius said, as if they discussed the time of day. “Drink.”

By last bell, the fever had retreated to something human. Arthur came as promised, and this time he brought a deck of battered cards with some of the faces smudged beyond recognition and a scandalized look when Gaius beat him two hands out of three while Merlin dozed and snorted awake at all the wrong moments. They did not talk about the shack or the storm or the way the world had been narrowed to the width of a bed. They talked about the bread in the lower town bakery being better this week and whether the new colt in Sir Elyan’s string would keep his manners and whether it would, in fact, kill Arthur to take tomorrow’s morning session of weapons practice light.

“It will not,” Gaius said dryly, when Arthur tried to argue. “Or if it does, I will write a pamphlet about the dangers of princes overexerting themselves and sell it for a tidy profit.”

Merlin laughed and then sneezed and then laughed again because Gaius said bless you without any of his usual mock severity and Arthur said it too a heartbeat later as if the three of them shared a script.

When it was time for Arthur to go—because even promises have to let a man sleep—he stood and looked for something to do with his hands. In the end he pulled the blanket straight and then—impulsively, awkwardly—brushed his knuckles across Merlin’s hair the way Gaius did. “Don’t make me come back to find you’ve relapsed out of curiosity,” he said.

“I’ll try to restrain my thirst for drama,” Merlin said, voice gone pleasantly hoarse with use and rest. He blinked slow. “Thank you. Both of you.”

Arthur made a face as if thanks gave him hives. Gaius accepted them without argument, the way he accepted pain and payment and herbs the castle garden had no business growing. “Sleep,” he said, and saw Arthur out.

The chamber breathed. Night settled. Gaius checked the banked fire and the water by the bed and the measure of the medicine that would be due if the fever tried again. He sat then, heavy and grateful, and let his hand find Merlin’s hair of its own accord, combing it back from the damp forehead in steady passes.

“You do fuss,” Merlin murmured, half-asleep, the old tease a homecoming.

“A physician’s duty,” Gaius said, and then, because truth did not always need a disguise, “A father’s privilege.”

Merlin’s eyes opened and shone and then, wisely, shut. He turned his face into Gaius’s palm as if seeking the road home. “’M lucky,” he breathed, words slurring into sleep. “To have you.”

Gaius stared at the ceiling so he would not embarrass them both with the sight of his face. “As am I,” he said to the beams, to the fire, to the young man who had made his chamber into a harbor simply by walking into it with that ridiculous heart of his.

He kept the vigil until the small hours were done and the fever, at last, loosened its grip with a sigh a man could hear if he had listened for such things all his life. He woke Merlin once more to drink, and Merlin came back from wherever he’d been with the ease of someone who trusted the voice calling him. “All right,” Gaius said, smoothing the blanket. “Enough of that. Sleep properly now.”

Merlin obeyed. The cough rolled now and then like distant thunder, but the breaths between were longer, deeper. Gaius rested his hand on the blanket, felt the rise and fall, and let his own eyes close for a moment on the chair.

In the morning—because morning always comes, however convinced a night may be of its eternity—Merlin woke with a sneeze and a sheepish smile and the overwhelming desire for bread with honey. Gaius allowed the honey with a lecture that would have wilted a laurel and then, behind the lecture, slipped a small, fierce gratitude into the day.

Arthur arrived early, was sent away to wash and eat and not hover at the bedside while Merlin did the same, and returned with a stack of complaints that resolved into his being pleased Merlin was well enough to be irritated by them.

Before the castle fully woke, with messengers running and bells clanging and some poor soul dropping a tray in the corridor, Gaius sat one last time and resettled the blanket over legs that were already trying to sneak out from under it. He pressed his hand to Merlin’s forehead, found only ordinary warmth, and sighed.

“You’ll rest another day,” he said, brooking no argument. “And then another half if I find you doing any fool thing involving buckets or princes.”

Merlin put on his best affronted court face and ruined it with a sniff. “Me? Fool things? Never.”

Gaius snorted. “Come back to me at dusk, idiot or not,” he said, as if this were as simple as remembering to close a window. He leaned down and pressed his lips to Merlin’s hair—there where the skull is soft in babies and soft in grown men if someone cares for them—because there were days a man should be allowed to do such a thing without commentary.

Merlin tilted into it, eyes closed, the kind of quiet that comes only when you are thoroughly known. “I always do,” he said.

Gaius sat back and let the day in. The chamber hummed. The herbs breathed. The old man and the not-so-young boy shared a look that held a thousand ordinary rescues.

Outside, the castle clock marked the morning. Inside, where it mattered, a father’s hand rested on a son’s shoulder, and the world—storm or no storm—felt briefly, blessedly right.

---

Chapter Text

By the time Gaius grudgingly declared him “fit for light duties,” Merlin was already climbing the walls. He insisted he was better — which was mostly true — and that he could manage a normal day in Arthur’s chambers — which was mostly a lie. His cough had faded to the occasional scrape in his throat, and the fever was gone, but the faint pink of a chapped nose and the way he occasionally muffled a sneeze into his sleeve told the real story.

Arthur, naturally, noticed both.

“Light duties,” Arthur repeated when Merlin arrived, cloak still buttoned against the early spring chill. He stood in the middle of his chamber like a man who had been rehearsing this moment since dawn. “Gaius said light duties. You do know what that means?”

Merlin brushed past him toward the table where Arthur’s armor sat in disarray from the morning’s training. “Yes. It means I do the usual work and you pretend you’re not watching me.”

Arthur stepped neatly into his path, one hand braced on the table. “No. It means you will sit — there—” he pointed toward the large cushioned chair angled toward the fire “—and you will perform only the tasks that can be done without you getting up.”

Merlin blinked at him. “You’re giving me a chair.”

“I’m giving you efficiency,” Arthur said, far too quickly. “You waste more time wandering about fetching things. This way, you stay put and I hand you what needs doing.”

Merlin tilted his head, the hint of a smile curling at his mouth. “Efficiency. Right.”

Arthur ignored the tone. “Fire’s already going. I had it stoked before you came up.”

“You’re very…prepared this morning.” Merlin hung his cloak and wandered to the chair anyway, drawn by the glow. He sank into it — and, traitor body that it was, immediately appreciated the way the heat soaked through.

Arthur gave a brisk nod, as though he’d won a negotiation. “Good. Stay there.” He dropped a small stack of tunics and shirts into Merlin’s lap. “Start with mending that seam you swore you’d fix three weeks ago.”

Merlin held up the top shirt, eyebrow arched. “You’ve been saving this for me?”

“I like to think ahead,” Arthur said. He sat at his desk — close enough to the fire to keep an eye on him — and began unbuckling the vambraces from his forearms.

For the next half hour, the chamber was filled with the soft crackle of the fire, the occasional scratch of quill on parchment, and the faint snick of needle through fabric. Every so often Merlin sniffled, tried to be discreet about it, and failed.

Arthur’s quill paused mid-stroke. “Handkerchief,” he said without looking up.

Merlin glanced over, caught the little square of linen Arthur had tossed in his direction, and smirked. “You keep these on you now?”

“You’re a liability,” Arthur said, dipping his quill again. “I come prepared.”

Merlin blew his nose — properly, thanks to Gaius’s lectures — and tossed the shirt he’d just finished into a small pile. “You know,” he said lightly, “if I didn’t know better, I’d think you were still worried about me.”

Arthur didn’t look up. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were fishing for a compliment.”

Merlin grinned into the next stitch. “Not fishing. Just observing. You’ve been keeping me in one piece for days now.”

Arthur’s mouth twitched. “Someone has to. You’ve proven you can’t be trusted with your own well-being.”

Merlin opened his mouth to retort, only for a sneeze to ambush him. “Hhhh’TSCHhhuhhhht! —hhhehhTSCHhhhhhhuuhhhuhhh! Snfffhhhghhhuhh.” He groaned softly and pressed the handkerchief to his nose again.

Arthur finally looked over, eyes narrowing. “Still sneezing.”

“Occasionally,” Merlin admitted, voice muffled. “Gaius says it’ll linger a few days.”

Arthur set down his quill. “Then you’re not carrying anything heavy, you’re not scrubbing the floor, and you’re not—” he gave him a pointed look “—hauling buckets of water up from the kitchens.”

Merlin threw him a look over the rim of the handkerchief. “What am I allowed to do? Blink?”

“Mend. Write. Polish small pieces of armor if you must. And drink this.” Arthur reached for the small pot of tea near the fire and poured a steaming cup, setting it within arm’s reach.

Merlin eyed it. “You made tea?”

“I supervised its making,” Arthur corrected. “Now drink.”

The ridiculous thing was — it was exactly how Merlin liked it. He sipped and tried to pretend it wasn’t oddly nice to have Arthur fussing without calling it fussing.

By the time the pile of mended shirts was done, Merlin had also written out a neatly copied version of Arthur’s patrol roster, polished two belt buckles, and been handed another cup of tea. Each time he’d tried to stand, Arthur had redirected him with an absurd amount of authority — passing him the next item, adjusting the chair so it was angled more toward the fire, even tossing him a small throw blanket at one point with a muttered, “You’re slouching, you’ll catch a chill.”

Merlin chuckled softly to himself. “You’re insufferable, you know that?”

Arthur, from his desk, didn’t even glance up. “And yet, here you are. Warm. Dry. Not collapsing in a shack this time.”

Merlin’s grin softened. “Fair point.”

They stayed like that the rest of the morning — Arthur working in his own efficient silence, Merlin doing “light duties” that somehow involved far more sitting than he was used to. And if Arthur kept watching him out of the corner of his eye every time he sneezed, well… Merlin wasn’t about to point it out.

---

By midafternoon, Arthur’s chambers smelled faintly of polish, parchment, and whatever herbal tea Gaius had brewed and sent up “for your master” (though Arthur had noticed Merlin drinking most of it). The stack of mended shirts was tidy, the patrol roster written in Merlin’s uneven but legible hand, and two of Arthur’s belts gleamed like they’d never been through a day in the field.

Merlin had also managed to sneeze at least seven more times, each one followed by Arthur looking up from his desk as if cataloguing symptoms for later.

“You don’t have to look at me every time,” Merlin said, setting aside the belt and rubbing absently at his nose.

Arthur leaned back in his chair. “You’re in my line of sight. What am I supposed to do, ignore you?”

“Yes!” Merlin said, exasperated. “Pretend I’m a normal servant, doing normal chores, not—”

“—recovering from a fever and therefore subject to my supervision,” Arthur finished smoothly. “Don’t forget who keeps you in one piece.”

Merlin gave a theatrical sigh, but before he could retort, the door opened and Gwen stepped in, balancing a small tray.

“Gaius sent this up,” she said cheerfully. “He said, and I quote, ‘If Arthur thinks tea counts as sustenance, he’s a bigger fool than I imagined.’”

Arthur muttered something about Gaius having too much time to think, but Gwen ignored him and crossed to the fire.

Her gaze landed on Merlin in the cushioned chair, a blanket draped over his knees, and her smile went sly. “Well, don’t you look comfortable.”

Merlin sat up straighter. “It’s not what it looks like.”

Arthur, unhelpfully, said, “It’s exactly what it looks like.”

Gwen laughed and set the tray — bread still warm from the kitchens, a bowl of thick vegetable soup — on the small table beside Merlin. “Eat all of that,” she instructed. “I promised Gaius I’d make sure it was gone before I left.”

Merlin gave her a grateful smile and reached for the bread. “You’re a saint.”

“Tell Gaius that,” she said, smoothing the blanket over his knees as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “I’ll let you two get back to your…efficient work arrangement.” She cast Arthur a knowing look on her way out.

Merlin tore off a piece of bread and dunked it in the soup. “You’ve recruited her into your overprotective scheme now?”

Arthur smirked. “I didn’t have to. Sensible people see the necessity.”

The rest of the afternoon passed in that easy rhythm — Merlin working through small tasks, Arthur occasionally assigning something new just when Merlin looked like he might get up. At one point, Merlin tried to stand and sweep the hearth, only to find Arthur already there with the broom.

“Sit,” Arthur ordered, in the same tone he used for unruly squires.

Merlin sank back into the chair with mock grumbling. “One day, someone will write a song about the brave servant who was kept prisoner in a chair by the crown prince.”

“They’ll call it ‘The Tale of Efficiency,’” Arthur said dryly.

---

It was near dusk when Gaius appeared, leaning on his staff. His eyes swept the room, landing on Merlin by the fire.

“Hm,” he said, in the tone of a man both approving and resigned. “I see my instructions about light duties were taken…creatively.”

“Creatively?” Arthur repeated. “He’s been right there all day.”

Gaius raised an eyebrow. “And yet you’ve still managed to keep him working.”

Merlin smiled over the rim of his cup. “I don’t mind. It’s warmer than the castle corridors.”

“That,” Arthur said, “is exactly the point.”

Gaius rested a hand briefly on Merlin’s shoulder — a silent check-in, the kind that passed between them without words. “Don’t overdo it,” he said quietly, then nodded at Arthur. “And don’t let him fool you into thinking he’s ready to carry anything heavier than that blanket.”

Arthur’s mouth twitched, but he only said, “Understood.”

---

When Gaius left, the fire had burned down to a comfortable glow. Arthur finally pushed back from his desk and came to sit in the chair opposite Merlin.

“You know,” Merlin said, “I could’ve done more today.”

“I know,” Arthur replied. “But then tomorrow you’d do too much, and the day after that I’d find you passed out in a hallway somewhere. This way, you’ll actually recover.”

Merlin huffed a laugh. “You’ve thought this through.”

Arthur met his eyes. “I’m not getting caught in another thunderstorm with you half-sick and too stubborn to say anything.”

Merlin’s grin softened into something warmer. “That wasn’t all bad.”

Arthur snorted. “You were burning up and sneezing like you were trying to prove a point.”

“And you didn’t leave me behind,” Merlin said, quiet now.

Arthur held his gaze. “I won’t. Not in a storm. Not in a shack. Not here.”

Something unspoken settled between them — the same thing that had sat in that broken-roofed shelter, and in Gaius’s chamber while Merlin slept, and now here by the fire.

Arthur stood abruptly, breaking the moment before it could grow teeth. “You can finish your soup,” he said briskly. “Then you’re going back to Gaius’s for the night.”

Merlin grinned and dipped his bread. “Yes, sire.”

Arthur rolled his eyes but didn’t look away until Merlin had taken another bite. The fire crackled between them, the room holding the easy, quiet proof of a promise neither of them had quite named.

---

Chapter Text

The next morning dawned clear, the kind of pale spring light that made even Camelot’s draftiest corridors feel welcoming. Merlin strode into Arthur’s chambers without knocking, as usual, carrying a fresh bucket of water in one hand and a folded cloth in the other.

Arthur, halfway through strapping on his sword belt, blinked. “You’re…early.”

“Back to normal,” Merlin said brightly, setting the bucket by the washstand. “See? Not confined to a chair. Not bundled in blankets. Capable of carrying things.” He made a little show of rolling his shoulders as if to prove the point.

Arthur eyed him skeptically. “And you’re sure you’re—”

“Yes,” Merlin said, cutting him off. “No fever. No chills. Only sneezed once this morning and it was because I walked past the laundry steam.”

Arthur’s mouth twitched, but he turned back to his sword belt. “Hmph. We’ll see if you last until midday.”

“I’ll last,” Merlin said, and it was only half bravado. He began gathering the scattered armor from its stand, moving easily, humming under his breath in that absent way he did when he felt well.

Arthur caught himself watching — not for signs of illness now, but in that habitual, unconscious way a man looks for confirmation that a worry has truly passed. Merlin caught the glance and grinned.

“What?” he asked.

“Nothing,” Arthur said quickly. Then, after a beat, “You’re less irritating when you’re not half-dead.”

Merlin laughed, the sound bright and whole again. “And you’re almost tolerable when you’re overprotective.”

Arthur rolled his eyes, but the faint relief in his shoulders stayed. “Just…try not to end up in another shack anytime soon.”

Merlin smirked, setting the last piece of armor on the stand. “No promises. But if I do, I expect you to bring the tea.”

Arthur huffed, but didn’t deny it.

Outside, the sky was a clean sweep of blue, the world washed and new. Inside, the prince and his servant went about their morning — arguments, banter, and all — as though the storm had only ever been a brief interruption on the road they walked together.

---