A/N: Thanks again to EffervescentAardvark and KrisEleven for their helpful, request-filled reviews! Hopefully this is something like what they asked for…

…

Problem 59: apparently, Gwaine would sleep when he was dead, and not a moment before. They had barely gotten him settled into the cart, and Gaius had just begun assessing the damage, when Gwaine, after dropping unconscious and without hardly a moment's pause to regain his strength, grew restless once again—

Dreaming. Hallucinating. Remembering.

"You go on to bed now, boy, me and your mother have things to do…"

Anna didn't look happy. Gwaine, at the tender age of nine, didn't know what 'things' were, but he didn't like the sound of them.

"No!"

"Gwaine, go to bed, sweetheart. Mummy's—"

"Not til he leaves! I don't want him here, he's not my dad!"

Gwaine hadn't understood then why his mother had married the mean old man. He suspected then that she had done it so Gwaine would grow up and leave the house sooner. He later learned that the man had money and title, and could offer Anna and the young Gwaine protection after the death of her husband, Loth. But by the time he realized that, it was too late. And the man, though noble by birth, hardly behaved so.

Some protection.

"Get out of here, runt!"

"No! You leave my mother alone!" Gwaine shouted.

There was a chorus of shouts and curses as Gwaine lunged upright, shoving Gaius back. The old man stumbled, but Arthur caught him, unhurt, while Percival and Leon rushed in to calm Gwaine.

"Easy, easy, son," Leon was saying, as he and Percival gripped Gwaine by the shoulders and, gentle but as unyielding, guided him back down. Gwaine whimpered in frustration but not defeat, his eyes open but unseeing.

The man lifted him up like he was nothing, carrying him, kicking and screaming and crying, to his own small, windowless room.

"He's just a boy," his mother had protested, and the man's hand lashed out like the sting of a snake, striking her full in the face so that she fell back.

"I'll kill you!" Gwaine was suddenly incensed. Lancelot rushed in now to help, and Elyan, to try to hold him down. Gwaine was fighting like a rabid animal—and, somehow, shockingly, against them all, winning.

"Gwaine, wake up!"

"Stop it, mate, you're scaring us!"

"Gaius, what's going on? He can't be dreaming this, can he?"

"Easy, son, you're all right! Stop squirming!"

"I'll kill you if you touch her again!"

The man didn't even dignify the young boy's threat with comment. That was the first time in his life Gwaine had ever made such a threat, and the first time he had made good on it. Gwaine did not boast: he guaranteed. It was the first of many such guarantees, for with this man's blood on his hands he would flee, an outlaw, alone. So to remain.

There was, among the scuffling and the shouting as they tried to hold Gwaine down, the sliding sound of weapon leaving sheath. A moment of confused panic—who had drawn a weapon? who would draw a weapon?—and then a cry of pain. No one knew whose knife Gwaine had gotten a hold of, and Gwaine certainly didn't know, he saw only victory at the flash of blood.

"Agh!" Percival leapt back and let go, holding the fresh wound on his arm, and, more confused than scared, and having lost their strongest asset, the others also let go. It reminded them, strangely, of the time when Leon had dropped his knife while sharpening it, and while most of them had taken the instinctual and wise step back to avoid the falling missile, Gwaine had been the only one whose instinct had told him to try to catch it (he had missed, slicing his thumb open, and they had laughed at him). This was like that: the others too smart, Gwaine alone.

Alone. Not trapped. No one holding him down anymore.

Freedom achieved, Gwaine had only one goal in mind:

Run.

…

Merlin was sick of this.

What had, for the past two days, made his heart hurt so much was now making him feel ill, and also very, very angry.

He was sick of watching his friends in anguish. He was sick of Gwaine's pig-headed, machismo stubbornness in refusing to lie down and give up the way normal people did. He was sick of seeing Arthur look lost. And he was sick of seeing Gwaine look so haunted.

Merlin's eyes flashed gold—he was unafraid of anyone seeing him or even hearing him, as their focus was clearly elsewhere—and Gwaine, though he made it free of the cart, slipped in the mud and went down hard, right behind the cart. Merlin wasn't even sorry. (Okay, he was massively sorry, later, but right now he was too angry to care.) He scanned Gaius' kit for the potion that was strong enough to knock out a horse, and snatched it up. Gwaine, in that second, had rolled, floundered, tried to get up, but Merlin was on him in an instant. He had been the only one able to get him to snap out of his delirium before, and he was going to be that same one now, or else he was going to hit the dumb oaf with a rock.

The others, perhaps sensing Merlin's errand, or themselves still at a loss as to what to do, let him.

The first thing Merlin noticed was that even covered in mud as Gwaine was, wearing only trousers, unprotected by blankets, he was burning, his fever at a dangerous level. His eyes were wrong again: unfocused and bleary. His breathing was very labored. He smelled awful—like sweat and blood—but also a sickly-sweet odor that, if Merlin thought about it, smelled like something dead—though he definitely did not think about it.

"Gwaine. Wake. Up."

The Dragonlord voice again. The strong, commanding voice that might have had everyone wondering a bit at him if their thoughts had not been so otherwise preoccupied. The voice that you listened to if only because it was so different from its owner's normal tone.

It shook Gwaine a bit, or else here his strength gave out. He had lost the knife in the fall—it had skidded out of his hand—and Gwaine now focused on it, as if willing it to return to him or planning to lunge for it.

"You don't need that, Gwaine," Merlin anticipated, his voice warning. "It's done."

Gwaine looked around, searching for someone he thought he had just seen. "Where's my—" he stopped, flushed red in embarrassment, and tears welled up in his eyes: he couldn't say it. He looked so vulnerable Merlin thought he felt his heart break. Gwaine shook his head. "No, she's…she's gone." He blinked. Merlin steadied him, for Gwaine's face paled and he wobbled. A few tears fell.

"Easy, Gwaine," Merlin whispered.

Gwaine blinked again, seemed to understand himself a bit more. "I'm sorry," he blurted out. "Tell them I'm sorry." He looked at Merlin. "Tell them all that I'm s-sorry." His muscles gave, and he toppled, then, into Merlin's waiting arms.

Gwaine was heavy, but Merlin held him tight, though Gwaine's skin was so hot it was actually uncomfortable to hold him. "I need you to drink this, Gwaine," Merlin said, taking advantage of Gwaine's docility and holding the potion to his lips without waiting for an answer.

Gwaine seemed to suspect what this was, and "Please don't make me go to bed now," he whined, sounding more like a lost little boy than a knight, but he drank the potion. His muscles twitched faintly, still wanting a fight that the rest of him had given up on.

"It's all right," Merlin soothed.

Gwaine began to pant, his eyelids fighting sleep, voice beginning to panic. "Please," he said. "Don't want to see her—hurts—"

"You won't dream," Merlin said, hoping that was right, was what Gwaine needed to hear. There were about seventeen thousand problems with this, but he ignored them all in favor of getting Gwaine to rest voluntarily.

Gwaine froze at this, unbelieving: he wasn't sure how Merlin could make such a claim, but he clung to it. No dreams. That was good.

"Promise?"

"I promise."

When Gwaine's head fell against Merlin's shoulder, he was sleeping like the dead.

…

"Are you all right?" Merlin asked Percival as they hoisted Gwaine back into the cart.

"What?" Percival seemed distracted, but at Merlin's prompt, checked the cut on his arm, tied in a hasty bandage. "Oh. Just a scratch."

"Sire," Gaius said. Arthur stood from where he crouched in the mud, clutching something in his hand. "Do you think you and your knights could give us a few minutes of privacy? We will be ready to move within the hour."

Arthur nodded. "Absolutely. What do you need from us?"

"Just space, if you please, sire."

Arthur looked relieved. "Of course. We'll just go…do…" he trailed off: it didn't matter what. They needed space as much as Gaius did.

When the physician and Merlin were quite alone with the unconscious Gwaine, Merlin burst into tears. Gaius held him and shushed him. "You've done well, Merlin," he said, "you've done well."

"It's my fault he got so sick, Gaius!" Merlin was shaking as the terror and adrenaline of a moment ago wore off. "Well, and his fault, the blockhead. It's not even normal, the way—"

"Anything about him?" Gaius supplied, and Merlin laughed a bit, wiping at his eyes. He let Merlin compose himself before getting down to business: "Tell me what you've done for him."

"Not much," Merlin said, as Gaius took a pair of scissors and cut the knight's few remaining clothes off of his body, caked in mud and blood as they were. "We didn't have any supplies, and no herbs to be found. I got the wounds as clean as I could but—boar tusks. Do you think they're poisoned?"

"Might as well be," Gaius said. "Such an injury is a particularly nasty one to sustain."

Merlin nodded. "He said—I mean, we never know, it's Gwaine—but he said he'd been through this before. I didn't know what he meant."

Gaius pointed to a set of white scars high up on Gwaine's leg. They looked like the younger brothers of the wounds in Gwaine's stomach. Merlin gulped. Actually, now that Gwaine was lying unmoving and naked before them—which was awkward, and Merlin tried not to stare—Merlin noticed that his friend had a lot of scars. Deep ones, too, many quite large, and others of various shapes and sizes. It was becoming more and more obvious that what Gwaine hadn't been through would probably be a much shorter list.

"And—and he just now broke his wrist, I think. I mean, just before you came. He was pretty out of it. I don't—I don't know where he thought he was, but it wasn't here."

Gaius was checking the bandages around his middle, now. "Perhaps you should ask him about it, later?"

"Ha." Getting useful information out of Gwaine was a science he hadn't mastered yet. If Gwaine was drunk, that helped, or if Merlin also opened up. Gwaine may have liked talking, but he didn't like talking. He loved to talk about himself, but it was always superficial: conquests of barmaids, how wonderful his hair was, how annoying Lancelot was; never about his thoughts or his problems, and certainly not his past.

Which, fair enough, Merlin had his own secrets. But still.

Merlin watched Gaius' face as he unwrapped the bandages: Gaius knew he was watching him, so he schooled his features into a mask of neutrality. "And you tried magic?" he asked, trying to sound nonchalant.

Merlin was not going to cry again, but, "Yes," he squeaked. "It didn't work—no surprise." He groaned in frustration. "Healing spells are hard."

"I know, Merlin," Gaius said. "I have a salve which will bring the swelling down and, I think, reduce some of the infection. We should get him to ingest some Aconitum Napellus and St. John's Wort when he wakes."

"How long will that draught last for?"

"A few hours. It should get us back to Camelot without incident."

"Gaius?"

"Yes, Merlin."

"Will he be all right?"

"I certainly hope so, Merlin."

…

A/N: Wow, so, sorry that wasn't funny at all. Apparently this was the dark night of the soul chapter or something, I dunno. Hopefully Gwaine's backstory made sense, but fear not: Merlin will make him talk! Angst, sap, magic, and two kinds of "reveals" to come! And of course, since I've now decided to own the title: more problems!

Also: fair warning. I have family coming into town as well as school gearing up. I will be very busy in the next few weeks, but will still update when I can. Thank you in advance for your patience until this fic is done. The end is in sight! (At least there is an end now!)