winterknights | FIC: The Longest Night (Merlin/Arthur - 2282

Title: The Longest Night 
Author/Artist: ANON
 Pairing(s): pre- Merlin/Arthur
 Prompt: I didn’t end up using one of the prompts! 
Word Count: 2282
 Rating: G 
Contains (Highlight to view): *Illness*
 Disclaimer: Merlin characters are the property of Shine and BBC. No profit is being made, and no copyright infringement is intended. 
Notes: This fest is so wonderful, I’m very glad I got to participate! 
Summary: They’re lost, the sun is setting, the horses have bolted, and they’re both soaked to the bone from a mishap with some thin ice and a stream, but at least they don’t have to contend with bandits.   “Just a quick trip, Merlin,” Merlin sing-songs in his prattiest voic“We’ll bring back more meat for the feast, Merlin.” “Shut up, Merlin,” Arthur stutters, his teeth clacking together.

 

Arthur’s chainmail rattles as he shudders, and he wraps his arms around himself to stifle the noise. It seems unnaturally loud in the stillness of the frost-coated woods, but no sound of pursuit follows. They’re lost, the sun is setting, the horses have bolted, and they’re both soaked to the bone from a mishap with some thin ice and a stream, but at least they don’t have to contend with bandits.

“Just a quick trip, Merlin,” Merlin sing-songs in his prattiest voice. “We’ll bring back more meat for the feast, Merlin.”

“Shut up, Merlin,” Arthur stutters, his teeth clacking together.

“Come on,” he replies, tugging Arthur to his feet. “We’ll find a place to camp, get you warmed up.”

Arthur lets himself be pulled, then abruptly throws his whole weight into Merlin’s hold with a sharp hiss. Merlin staggers but braces him, looking down. “Your ankle?”

“Twisted it when my foot went through the ice,” Arthur grits out.

Merlin glances around; there isn’t any particularly large open space to sleep, but it’s clear of snow and they’re sheltered from the wind. “Let’s camp here, then.”

Between them they manage to get Arthur back down to the ground without pulling Merlin completely over. Hurriedly he builds a fire, lights it with the flint Arthur keeps in his boot for emergencies, then strips Arthur’s armor off him and shoves him as close to the flames as either of them dares. “We’d better not take your boots off,” he says, carefully shifting Arthur’s feet nearer the fire. “Your ankle will just swell up and we won’t be able to get that one back on again.”

Arthur just nods. He’s been unusually quiet through this entire operation, a stoic expression covering how miserable Merlin’s sure he feels. He’s not normally this pliable, either, letting Merlin take charge of things and tell him what to do. It’s possible he’s embarrassed--usually it’s Merlin who trips or flails or needs rescuing, but in their desperate flight it was Arthur who misjudged his weight on the ice and Merlin who was forced to drag him out, vomiting up water and in shock from the cold.

Merlin would just as soon have had it the other way around. Hearing that crack, seeing Arthur go down like a felled tree, crashing through the surface and disappearing, is a memory Merlin could live without.

When he’s stacked up enough wood to last them the night (and, out of earshot, cast a spell to trap the heat in their little camp and keep it from dissipating), he flops down next to Arthur, holding his numb fingers toward the heat in the futile hope of being able to feel them again.

“Here,” Arthur says, tugging his gloves off finger by finger. “They’re pretty dry now.” Then, instead of just offering them, he holds one open. Merlin blinks at him, then slides his hand in; the leather is still damp, but warmed from the fire and Arthur’s skin. When Arthur holds the other glove open for him, he doesn’t hesitate. It’s oddly intimate, and completely Arthur--a thank you without actually saying the words. Merlin scoots closer, until their shoulders touch.

“You were right when you said I need a warmer coat,” he admits, because Arthur has his shirt and his padded gambeson and his torn and muddied cloak, and Merlin is shivering in his thin tunic and perpetual jacket that’s starting to thin at the elbows. Arthur nags him about it whenever he complains on cold weather patrols.

Arthur sighs heavily. “I had one made.”

“You...what?”

“I had a coat made,” he repeats, looking resolutely into the fire. “For you. For Yule.”

Merlin stares at him for a moment, at the light flickering across his face and the tightness of his mouth. “Thank you,” he says at last.

“Doesn’t do you any good if you freeze to death before I can give it to you,” Arthur mutters, and he sounds so gloomy and frustrated about it that Merlin wants to laugh.

“I’m not going to freeze to death, and neither are you.”

***

In the morning they fight over Arthur’s armor. Merlin wants to leave it behind and come back for it later--the metal is freezing cold, and it will only weigh Arthur (and subsequently Merlin) down. Arthur is loathe to leave it and risk running into any enemies with nothing protecting him but a sword. When Merlin points out that he can’t fight off bandits if he can’t even support his own weight, he relents, and straps his sword belt on over his gambeson. His waterskin is nearly empty now, and Merlin’s was lost--they’ll need to refill soon, though at least there’s some snow for that.

Merlin tucks the armor out of sight inside a hollow log, hoping against hope that they will be able to find that particular log again. Then he shoves the borrowed gloves back onto Arthur’s hands, slings arm across his shoulder and gets him upright, and they set off south toward the castle.

They’re both stiff and the day is still cold, and Arthur’s ankle clearly pains him; most of his weight is on Merlin, and at their hobbling pace, they would be lucky to reach home in a week’s time.

“They’ll send a search party,” Arthur tells him when he points this out. “We won’t have to walk the whole way.”

“Then why are we walking at all? You should be off your feet, and we could have another fire. Find something to eat.”

Arthur shakes his head. “The closer we can get to home, the easier we’ll be to find.”

Merlin scowls, but relents. There’s steel in Arthur’s voice today--the pliable attitude of the night before has entirely vanished.

They don’t stop until the sun is beginning to sink below the trees, and Merlin’s stomach is growling audibly. “Imagine how good the castle must smell right now,” he muses dreamily, to distract himself from Arthur’s increasing weight. “They’ll be sitting down to the Yule feast soon.”

“Shut up, Merlin,” Arthur growls, but at last he pauses in his relentless hobble. “And get a fire going, would you?”

“Anything you say, sire,” Merlin replies gratefully, and levers his burdensome lord to the ground. Once the fire’s started, he glances around the barren woods with a sigh. “We need to eat.”

Arthur snorts. “I’d like to see you catch something in the dead of winter without a weapon. Even I’d have trouble with that, you have no chance whatsoever.”

“Just stay put, all right?” Merlin snaps back, like he’s talking to a toddler or an unruly dog. He regrets his tone immediately when Arthur stiffens, but he can’t take it back, so he just grabs the empty waterskin and slinks off into the trees.

Arthur’s right--without magic, Merlin has no hope of catching any game, and it would be too suspicious to bring something back. He sets about gathering what he can instead, roots and winter berries, leaves they can chew and suck on when his foraging can’t fill their stomachs. He thinks longingly of the bread and dried meat and cheese in his pack, still strapped to the back of his horse. His medicine bag is with it, likely both back at the castle by now, if Cora had the sense of direction to bolt toward home. Instead, he has the meager offerings of the winter woods bundled up in the bottom of his shirt, letting the freezing air underneath to scrape the skin of his abdomen, and their waterskin stuffed with snow slowly melting into icy water. On his way back to Arthur, he nearly trips and loses it all over the downed branch of an ash tree; on a whim, he hefts it and drags it back to camp with him.

They eat some of what he gathered raw, and bake some roots in the fire to eat in the morning. The ash limb he places in the fire. “Not much of a Yule log,” he says, and at last the barest hint of a smile crosses Arthur’s face.

“Not bad, in the circumstances.”

Too soon, the food is gone, and Arthur holds open the side of his cloak in invitation. Merlin curls himself beneath it, pressed up all along Arthur’s side; the proximity warms him more than just body heat warrants. Arthur is uncharacteristically quiet, and Merlin lets him be; there’s something nice, just this once, about being quiet together on the longest night of the year.

***

When Merlin wakes, the sun is just barely up, the fire is slowly dying, and Arthur is coughing violently in his ear.

They’re curled together on the ground still wrapped in the cloak, Merlin’s head resting on Arthur’s chest. Beneath his ear he can hear the wet rattle of Arthur’s breath as he sucks it in between fits. Merlin lifts himself off to ease the pressure, looks up at Arthur’s face; his skin is pale and clammy with sweat, and there are spots of red on his cheeks.

When the fit subsides he lays a hand on Arthur’s brow--too hot.

“Merlin,” Arthur rasps, perhaps annoyed, but it comes out a miserable wheeze.

Merlin scrambles to his feet. “Come on,” he murmurs, “we have to get you propped up so you can breathe.”

“Breathing hurts.”

“I know. It’ll hurt less if you’re sitting up.”

It takes some doing to lever Arthur against a tree without dropping him or hurting his ankle, and Merlin is sweating by the end. He wraps Arthur up tight in the cloak, and digs out the roots they baked before building up the fire. He lets them sit until they’re cool enough to lift, then breaks them into soft pieces. Arthur tries to glare when Merlin kneels next to him and holds a bite to his mouth, but after a moment’s struggle it’s clear his chest pains him too much to move.

“Just eat it,” Merlin grouses. “I’m your physician until we get you to Gaius, you have to do what I say.”

Arthur snorts, coughs violently again, and at last submits to being fed. He accepts his breakfast and Merlin’s too, such as it is, and tips his head back in exhaustion when he’s finished. It’s worrisome, how exhausted he’s become overnight, and Merlin can’t help testing the heat of his face again, brushing the sweaty fringe out of his eyes. “Get some rest,” he murmurs, and Arthur’s eyes slide open and fix on him. There’s pain in the set of his face, and frustration, and shame--but his eyes, bright with fever, convey the entirety of his trust. “Shut up, Merlin,” he sighs, and his eyes slip closed again.

It’s disturbing, how tempted Merlin is to press their faces together, to press his mouth to the flush of Arthur’s cheeks and the pallor of his eyelids. He gets to his feet again instead. They need more food, more water; he needs rue, if he can find it, and feverfew, and something to boil them in. He needs Arthur to fall asleep, sink deeper into his illness for just long enough to be insensible to all the healing magic Merlin wants to throw at him.

By the time he returns, his hope has been fulfilled; Arthur is asleep, though restless. He sets the herbs to boil in a bowl made out of bark--made with magic, but there’s at least a hope that if Arthur sees it, he’ll just think Merlin has been paying attention to his many supercilious lectures about woodcraft--and crouches by Arthur’s side. By pure lucky chance he found mistletoe in his search, still fresh on a downed tree, and he opens the ties of Arthur’s gambeson to lay a sprig against his sweat-damp chest. Merlin’s still not terribly confident with medicinal magic, and the allheal might help focus the spell.

“Ic þe þurhhæle þin licsare,” he breathes, his hands and the mistletoe pressed to Arthur’s chest beneath the open wings of his outer layers. Merlin can feel the spell flow through him, feel it work its way into Arthur, and his shallow, wheezing breaths ease just a little. Merlin bends low, presses his forehead to Arthur’s breastbone to speak softly against his body. “Ic þe þurhhæle þin licsare.” He whispers it over and over, like a secret, like a prayer.

***

Arthur wakes to a gently crackling fire, a faintly steaming bowl of something herbal that he’s probably meant to drink, a scratchy bit of a plant stuffed in his shirt, and Merlin passed out on his chest like an overtired toddler. He’s not burning with heat or shaking with chills though, and his lungs actually expand without much pain, so he counts it a win.

The bowl is near enough to his hand to reach; he lifts it to his mouth and carefully drinks. It’s pleasant and warm, if a little bitter, and he downs it all and tosses the makeshift bowl aside. Then he glances down again at Merlin, his nose and ears gone red in the cold, lines of tension in his forehead. His hair is everywhere, and it tickles Arthur’s chin. Most people look younger when they sleep, but Merlin looks older--his jaw is shadowed with stubble and the skin around his eyes looks thin as paper. Carefully Arthur tugs the edge of his cloak out from between them, wraps it and his arm around his servant’s thin frame. Merlin doesn’t wake, just slowly relaxes into the pocket of warmth.

“I’ll give you that coat, as soon as we get home,” Arthur murmurs into his hair. “I think I’ll give you anything, Merlin.”

He receives no reply, and eventually the slow gusts of Merlin’s breathing lull Arthur back to sleep.