Chapter Text
“The king is dead.”
Arthur announces—to himself or to Camelot, he doesn’t know. All he knows is that there’s a flare on his tongue and he has to bite down on it, that there’s a bone-deep ache and he has to stand still through it. After all, Arthur Pendragon has never truly belonged to himself, he belongs to his people, and if that is what Camelot needs, if the price of its peace is his knuckles white and his heart war-torn, then so be it.
The courtyard is soon lit with candles, their fire a blade cutting into the starless night. It would have been beautiful, wondrous, had it not been for a cause of grief. In it noblemen and commoners stand united; some wept, but the most just stared, eerie, wondering who Arthur will be—his father’s son or a page ripped out of a legend. For a moment, Arthur isn’t certain. Couldn’t be. There’s just piercing pain and the flat of Merlin’s palm almost touching his own.
“But his legacy will not die,” Arthur goes on, and amongst the ache there’s undeniable spite. “The killer, the sorcerer, will be caught, and he will perish in fire and blood.”
It comes to him in a flash; the half-burned man at the courtyard offering what he claimed to be a ‘remedy to cure all ills,’ and how Arthur himself had been desperate. Had it not been for that gnawing desperation, he would have realized it sooner, that Morgana falling bedridden on a perfectly sunny morning when she was arguing with him just the night before—and winning, although he’d never admit it—was sinister sorcery at work.
It was Edwin all along, the serpent who slithered into the palace, who planted the enchanted beetle in Morgana’s head to eat it out then ended up healing her: a patriotic hero of all the wrong sorts. He’d accused Gaius of incompetence when his treatment fell short, replaced him as court physician to access the king’s medicine, to kill him with the same fatal beetle, with the same blinding hatred.
“The Law upholds,” Arthur adds with an air of finality. “Camelot will not ally itself with a force that only steals and takes, that poisons good and flowers evil. Magic is rotten, and so are those who practice it.”
Magic is rotten, and so are those who practice it.
There are things etched into Merlin’s mind, deeper than memory or name; when he’d first bloomed a rose in the gloomiest autumn atop Hunith’s head, and how she’d laughed for the first time in long sombre weeks; when he was old enough to ask about his father and watched the light die out of her eyes, how he swore he’d never speak of him again; the first time he’d arrived in Camelot, the taste of fresh air and air shared with a condescending prince he’d later slice his heart open for, Gaius telling him to heed the king and his executioner—the driving machinery of it all; that Merlin is rotten.
Beside him, Gaius stands still as a statue, solemn, and had it not been for Merlin and Arthur’s grief, perhaps they’d have sensed it, the murmurs, the faces turning a deepening dark.
–
One day earlier,
In this pit, the Great Dragon grows impatient. In this pit, he lures.
“Well, well,” it gloats. “Old Gaius, how the tides have turned—you come withering, pleading, to the same thing you turned your back on.”
“I do not come for myself, I’m here for the boy.”
Gaius’s confrontation with Edwin is still sharp as a whip. Edwin, the child who ran to his parents’ burning stake during the Purge, who tried to save them from unjust fire and ended up twice as burnt, face forever scarred, heart even more so. Gaius had treated his wounds then, had smuggled him out of Camelot before Uther could trail him. Ever since his return, Gaius has been trying to remember, to scratch over the fog of age and memory. He finds it all too odd, Morgana’s abrupt illness, the perfect timing in which he has appeared as if out of thin air, all the strings pulled taut in his favor.
Gaius has pieced the puzzle together after Edwin treated her. Morgana has never been the real target, just an instrument—the plot is for Uther’s own life. When Gaius has confronted him, threatening to reveal his true identity to the king, Edwin told him that he learned of Merlin’s magic, that he befriended his foolish apprentice. Either Gaius remains silent and lets Uther die, or Edwin will expose Merlin.
Gaius presses. “Must Uther be sacrificed for Merlin?”
“You have grown quite fond of the boy, haven’t you?” The Great Dragon smiles, peculiar. “He’s young and bright and pure of heart. What a waste it would be, for all that youth and goodness and power to be lost.”
“Lost?” Gaius echoes; in the torchlight, terror creeps onto his face, slithers onto his weary spine. “But he’s destined for—”
“Greatness,” the Dragon replies. “He and the young Pendragon will one day unite the land of Albion, but their time cannot come until Uther’s has passed.”
“But is that time now?”
For once on this bewildering night, there are no riddles. “Yes.”
“If Uther survives, Merlin’s magic will be revealed. He will bring the boy’s doom, and neither you nor Arthur will be able to prevent that,” the Great Dragon explains. “And Arthur will grow bitter and defy his own. What do you think, oh-so-wise Gaius, will happen to a kingdom with divided allegiances?”
Gaius swallows. “But won’t Arthur grow bitter towards magic if it kills his father?”
The Great Dragon flutters his wings. “The young Pendragon is bound to see light, even after an hour of dark; too much of his heart lies in magic.”
“But—”
“Let it be, old man, turn a blind eye or Camelot will fall.”
And a blind eye Gaius has turned, retreating from the castle after Edwin has been appointed court physician—allowing others to think of it as bitterness, ill-judgment—leaving behind a crestfallen Merlin, who hasn’t known of Edwin’s scheme, of Gaius’s compliance. Or otherwise he’d have saved Uther, spared Arthur. Gaius didn’t return except when Uther was dead.
_
From the window, Arthur watches. Camelot is stretched wide and prosperous, bathed in bright morning light. For a moment, he doesn’t understand how this can be.
Out in the wild, sunlight is warm, the warmest it has been for months, as if—impossibly—rejoicing. It slants on his gloved palms, and Arthur waits. He waits for their tremble to cease, for the cold to tire like winter is relenting to spring. But it never comes to that, coldness is a seal over his chest, the cords of his heart, all the places which have once dripped love and ease, now full of alien frost.
The birds chirp a love song, the leaves rustling along. Merchants set up their stalls, the market vibrant once more as if there’s nothing wrong with the world, as if it hasn’t fallen off its hinges and not yet come back together.
“My Lord?” Merlin calls with rare deference in it.
Atop the things Arthur can’t decipher right now is Merlin. No less than an hour ago Arthur emerged from the throne room, where he’d sat with his father’s corpse till dawn, expecting the corridor to be vacant save for the guards, and found Merlin on the floor, insomnolent.
“What,” Arthur presses, half-bewildered, half-indignant. “The hell are you doing here?”
Merlin springs to his feet. “Arthur, I was just—”
“Lounging around and doing nothing,” Arthur interjects, the bite in his response unfair and he knows it. “The usual.”
Then he’s pushing past a stunned Merlin and onto his bedchambers. It occurs to him behind its closed door that perhaps Merlin hasn’t been at all idle, that he’s just been waiting for him. All night his hand has been reaching out to Arthur’s to soothe and hold—a lantern in the dark, as if to say ‘you are not alone’—when others have shrunk theirs from him. And Arthur has done what he knows best; he’s swatted kindness down to its last drop.
Or he thought so.
Infuriating, disobedient, caring fool—
“I thought I made it clear that I wish to be left alone.”
“You haven’t eaten for over a day,” Merlin says as if that explains it, ignores the ice in Arthur’s tone, how he still wouldn’t turn around. “I have brought your favorite food, sausages without even nicking one of them.”
There’s a lilt of lightness in Merlin’s voice, its tug all too familiar. Had the circumstances been different, Arthur would have given in, retorted back about stealing a prince’s—a king’s—meal, or even said something foul he’d regret later, when Merlin’s shoulders would slump and he wouldn’t—truly—talk to him for days, unless coaxed out with a half-baked apology or a valiant uproar to save his neck.
“I don’t have an appetite,” is all Arthur replies with.
“But—”
“Leave me,” Arthur commands, frustrated. “I would like some sleep.”
“You can’t sleep like this,” Merlin says matter-of-factly. Arthur realizes belatedly he’s still in his chainmail, the entirety of his armor, in fact.
In his fit of relief, when Morgana has recovered, Arthur took her out on a stroll; a change of scenery reinforces a recovery, Gaius has said. He’d raced her into the heart of the Darkling Woods, wild with laughter, because Morgana was competitive, and she’d almost beat him. She’d certainly beat the Knights and Merlin, the last to trail behind them.
Neither Arthur nor Morgana were in the castle when it happened, and Arthur is half-grateful (people said Uther died screaming) and half-wanting to punch a hole into a roof. He should have been there, should have protected him. In the end, it was Arthur who brought his father’s doom, who opened the palace doors for Edwin, who vouched for the stranger till the king yielded, who—
“Arthur.”
Arthur doesn’t know if hours have slipped by, or if it has been minutes prolonged into just that; guilt has a bargain with time, to do with it as it pleases, to stretch and dawn and trick.
He can’t recall when his insolent servant has gone from peeking through the chambers’ door to standing by his side, sunlight turning his irises an incandescent blue, alluring—or how Arthur has even allowed this, for Merlin to be near enough, for him to witness the fall. A prince on the prime of kingship, in shambles. In no world does a king crumble in front of his subjects, Uther often insisted, in no world he is not made of cobblestone.
“Arthur, look at me.”
Arthur wants to tell Merlin he isn’t a teacup that may shatter if pressed too hard, that he need not speak with such lingering concern. It’s all a figment of his lovesick imagination; Arthur’s shallow breathing, his fogged mind. The cursed tremble.
Yet up this close, when Arthur does look—because why on earth he wouldn’t—Merlin could see it, how he has clenched his hands into fists and not known how to unclench.
It’s a slow, deliberate movement, a white banner in Arthur’s minefield, Merlin reaching out to encompass them between his own; the leather of Arthur’s gloves is his last shred of dignity, his last wall. It isn’t clumsy or awkward as it was months ago, when Merlin knew little to nothing of a prince’s clothing, let alone a warrior. It is steadfast and warm, and the prospect sends a jolt up Arthur’s spine—involuntarily, that warmth lies in the palm of a peasant boy from Ealdor, and no amount of gold or power would otherwise suffice, that for this he’d spend his every coin.
Merlin knows he’s closer to losing his head than he even was when he first arrived at Camelot, chasing the king’s son with a mace. Arthur has made his stance on physical affection clear from the beginning; if he touches someone, it’s for a purpose—a light kiss to the hands of noblewomen, a firm handshake with foreign kings, a polite welcome, a pathway to an alliance, offering no more.
“Get on with it,” Arthur grits out, and Merlin just hums, withdrawing his hands to take off Arthur’s gloves, tender to a fault.
The quiver doesn’t stop, hasn’t stopped since Arthur saw Uther on his deathbed, and he wonders if it’ll be a chronic illness of some sort, if Gaius would have a draught for it. The last time Arthur’s hands shook like this he’d raided a druid camp under his father’s orders, spilled innocent blood like it cost him nothing. He couldn’t wield his sword for a month.
In plain light, there’s no hiding it, no pretense; Arthur is trembling like a leaf, and it’s humiliating to the bone. He blames it on the gnawing guilt, the shadow of Uther’s death, haunting, the shadow of his own doubt, innate as sin and all his love for Camelot. He didn’t even get to be a prince, not officially, before he’ll be shoved onto the throne and crowned in a matter of a few hours. People will expect, and he’ll have to provide, and there will be no other way of spinning it. There will be no moment left for weakness.
“Let go this instance,” Arthur demands the moment Merlin interlaces their fingers. Again. The audacity. To a passerby, if there was one, it’d have seemed like a real threat, a death sentence. But Merlin has had months to read Arthur, to know him blind.
“Steady, Arthur,” Merlin tells him, kinder than Arthur has ever been told. “You’re with me now.”
I’m with Merlin now, I’m with Merlin now—
“Merlin, I swear to God if you don’t let go—”
Merlin refuses to do so. Can’t do so. Not when Arthur is shaken like that, not when he thinks he is alone. He muses instead. “The stocks?”
“For a week,” Arthur vows, and yet he doesn’t pull away himself as if he isn’t Camelot’s finest knight, as if he can’t run Merlin through.
Merlin caresses his knuckles, one-by-one. “Sounds fair.”
“Actually,” Arthur adds. “A fortnight if you don’t cease this girlish nonsense right now.”
“A fortnight it is,” Merlin agrees, smiling softer than the turn of the season. He presses his thumbs into Arthur’s inner wrists, drawing circles.
Arthur is horribly aware of the tremor in his voice. “Not just the stocks then, no.”
“Abusing our kingly powers already, are we.”
“I will send you to be—”
“Belted with fruit?” Merlin raises an eyebrow, smile turning into a mischievous grin. “I have become quite popular with Camelot’s children. Wouldn’t want them to miss me.”
The rapid thud-thud-thud of Arthur’s heartbeat is overshadowed by Merlin’s nonsensical banter. “Are you saying you don’t care, Merlin?”
“I’m saying you’re becoming too predictable, my Lord.”
It re-circles at last, the teasing, and Arthur is more aware of it than he would have been a few minutes ago. With a final squeeze, Merlin lets go of his hands, and to Arthur’s surprise—and perhaps horror—there is no shudder in them. It’s almost as if the world has been muted, as if it has been narrowed down to loss, and now there’s vibrance again, a placid heart, a fresh rush of air.
Merlin doesn’t expect a ‘thank you’ or a pat on the back; he expects exactly this, Arthur’s forefinger raised, adamant, because otherwise the acknowledgement of something real would send them both spiraling, “If you speak a word about this to anyone—”
Merlin shrugs, deadpanning. “Whatever it is you’re talking about, sire? I don’t have the faintest clue.”
It doesn’t continue for long, there’s the tiniest, stupidest smile on Merlin’s mouth as he bows his head a bit and works the straps of Arthur’s arm armor, and Arthur doesn’t understand it, isn’t sure he even wants to—how the trail of Merlin’s fingertips is starting to sear into his skin what he dares not name; chain-mail and gambeson losing the fight.
“You’re going to make a fine king, you know,” Merlin interrupts when silence settles in, chases it off before it would chase Arthur into somewhere dark again.
Arthur pauses. “My father would have never left the throne for me now if he had a choice. I’m too—soft, he’d argue.”
“I would argue otherwise,” Merlin replies as if he’s not talking about the late king, working Arthur’s right arm armor. “You hit me all the time.”
Arthur laughs, full-on arrogance and stupidity tearing through the grief. Merlin looks as if he’s just won the trophy. “Don’t be ridiculous, Merlin. It’s horseplay.”
“Horseplay my ass,” Merlin retorts, and there it is again; Arthur’s grin. “But so what if you’re—occasionally—soft? It doesn’t make you a bad king.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Arthur admits. “It makes me a weak king, however.”
“Kindness is not weakness, and neither is compassion. Your people revere you for it, if anything,” Merlin insists, stops himself from saying that Arthur’s love balanced Uther’s hatred out. “Do you not know what they call you?”
“What?”
Merlin moves to Arthur’s pauldron, circling his right shoulder. “The Prince of Camelot’s hearts.”
There’s almost a sad smile on Arthur’s face. “That’s generous.”
“And you,” Merlin adds as he takes off Arthur’s shoulder armor with a grunt. “Will be the king of their hearts as well, fear not.”
“It is not just about love, Merlin,” Arthur objects, gesturing with his hand. “There will be times when I will have to cast it aside, when I will have to make decisions that do not please me. My father was a strong ruler, he thought with his head and shunned his heart.”
Merlin promises. “We will figure it out then.”
“A king must rule alone,” Arthur says in a monotone that sounds more like Uther than him.
“No king ever rules alone,” Merlin protests. “Even your father had his council.”
Arthur mocks. “You would like to join the council, Merlin?”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Merlin groans. “All that chatter and snapping men. I either fall asleep or get a headache. What I’m talking about is different.”
“How so?”
“We can make a pact,” Merlin explains as he helps Arthur out of his chain-mail. “Between you and me.”
“A pact?” Arthur repeats, bemused. “You’ve certainly gotten comfortable, Merlin.”
Merlin ignores him. “When the day is over, and the doors of these bedchambers are closed, you don’t need to pretend with me. You don’t need to shun your heart.”
Arthur scoffs. “I don’t pretend, Merlin.”
“You are doing that just now, talking as if I need you to be strong. I don’t. Or as if I would judge you, and I wouldn’t,” Merlin objects, untying the laces of Arthur’s red gambeson. “You’re not only a king, Arthur. You’re also a man, and you can ache like one. There’s no shame in that.”
Arthur looks at him as if he’s grown a second head, gone six different levels of mad. “And you’d rather bear all that, all my aching?”
Merlin takes off the gambeson at last, the final piece of sheathing. “I would,” he replies, mind set. “I will have you without armor, Arthur Pendragon, or I will not have you at all.”
Arthur doesn’t reply instantly, debates biting back something in the lines of what is this utter gibberish or have you been on the cider again, but Merlin doesn’t give him the chance, and Arthur doesn’t fight his way through it, stunned, realizing Merlin doesn’t mean literal armor. Instead he lets Merlin dress him in his white tunic, and prepare his bed in uncommon efficiency, exiting the chambers right after.
As Arthur falls asleep, he understands it for what it is—that this is yet another way of Merlin demanding nothing of him. He knows Arthur all too well to know he would not respond with something affectionate, or come close to verbally agreeing, yet he also knows that in the depth of this imprudent, self-sacrificing, righteous king’s heart, a door has opened, and Arthur has left it ajar.
Later that evening, the knights, Merlin, Gaius, Gwen and Morgana stand in the front lines as the coronation begins. Arthur holds the crown with phantom warmth on his hands, its weight less heavier, and the room is instantly filled with ever-so-loving chants of “Long Live the King!”