Arthur woke to ringing in his ears and a blur of black and white clouding his vision. After blinking away the dizzying spots, he recognized Merlin's face directly above his. The servant was unusually close, and as worried blue eyes blinked down at him, Arthur couldn't help but mockingly mumble, "Let's have you, Lazy Daisy…"
"What?" Merlin's voice was too sharp and loud. Arthur's leg was on fire. The blond bit back a groan and tried to stay as still as possible. He knew his servant was still watching him intently so Arthur smiled tightly to reassure him.
"Nothing, Merlin. Why are you looking at me like I just ate your berry tart?"
"Because you just collapsed on me after yanking an arrow out of your leg, you git!" Merlin tried to look angry, his face red and his hands clenched. But the furrow in his brow and the waver in his voice gave him away.
"Still can't talk to me like that… by the way."
"And honestly," Merlin interrupted, "that's not even comparable to being robbed of a berry tart. Even though they are my favourite!"
"Yes, I'm aware they're your favourite. Why else do you think I always get two? I'm not that fat!" Catching his admission too late, Arthur flushed and grumbled a silent curse to whatever had inspired him to say that.
"You get one for me?" Merlin grinned devilishly and playfully pawed at his chest. "So you do care for me then, sire?"
"I do not!" Arthur hadn't been aware his voice could even reach that pitch anymore./p
"Oh yes, you do!"
"No, no, I most definitely do not!"
"Yes, you do!" Merlin cackled annoyingly, "You even apologized to me!"
"I recall no such thing."
"Well, I do! You were dramatic about it as well. You said something like, 'Oh, I'm so sorry, dear Merlin. My best friend Merlin. My favourite person Merlin. I'm now going to faint like a damsel in distress because I saw fit to rip an arrow out of my leg. Catch me!" Merlin reenacted the moment exuberantly, lifting his wrist to his forehead and swooning to lie by Arthur. He laughed hysterically at his own joke. Arthur tried his hardest to act offended.
"You'd better have a new appreciation for my 'excessive' packing skills, too! I brought enough of Gaius's supplies to patch up your leg. Call me useless all you want but without me, you'd be short a leg and arm by now! At the minimum!"
"I would be just fine! I survived 20 years before you, Merlin, believe it or not!" Arthur snapped halfheartedly, tired and lacking any heat to his words.
"And how you managed to accomplish that is a mystery to us all. Were you some sort of homebody till I showed up? Then you decided that charging into danger at any available moment was entertaining? Do you enjoy giving me grey hairs?!"
Arthur twisted his head to look at Merlin, eyes wandering over his scalp to find evidence of such offensive strands. He found none. "Oh, stop whining, Merlin. Your hair is fine."
"I thought it was ridiculous."
"It is ridiculous! You look like you tried to cut it yourself. But it's all one color! Black. Now shut up!"
"Well, actually, I think it reflects brown in the sunlight."/p
"Shut up, Merlin!" It did, in fact, reflect bits of brown in the sunlight. Not that Arthur had noticed. This entire conversation was rather exhausting, and he realised that Merlin only talked this much when he was incredibly happy or incredibly nervous. And Arthur doubted it was the former. "Where are we?"
"Stuck in a cave. All thanks to you, clotpole!"
"In a cave… right… and the horses? Where is the light coming from? It's not fire."
"Horses are tied over there at the end. I don't know about the light. I was too worried a fire would fill the cave with smoke."
"Right, well unless it was a bonfire, I'm sure we would have been fine, Merlin. It's cold if you haven't noticed." It wasn't cold, Arthur just needed something to complain about. He didn't actually care, he'd been bundled up in blankets while unconscious. He tried to swallow back a blush when he noticed Merlin had tucked him in like a small tot.
"Nothing ever pleases you, does it? Do you even know how to be grateful? Are you physically capable of being anything other than a complete wanker…. Arthur? Are you even listening to me?!"
Arthur was, in fact, not listening at all. Per usual. The warlock groaned and pinched his nose.
"I've been here before…" Arthur mumbled, staring intently at the wall past his servant's head.
"What?" Merlin looked up confusedly.
Arthur had been here before. There was a beam of light shining through the darkness of the cavern, and it illuminated a small drawing on the walls. Merlin twisted to follow Arthur's gaze. Two little figures painted to hold hands, the first sporting some odd squiggly lines, hair supposedly, and the other a little crown. Arthur slipped out of his bedding carefully and limped towards it, mumbling to himself.
"Morgana drew this..."
"Are you sure it's safe, sire?"
"What? No, I mean - not recently. When we were little. I've been here before with her, and I remember her drawing this. It's been years though. I can't believe it's still here."
Merlin rose too and hung back awkwardly, not quite sure what to do with himself. "Did you two often escape into the woods to paint self-portraits on cave walls? Seems like an odd hobby for a couple of royals."
Arthur didn't respond, but he jerked as if tugged on a line and spun wildly. He seemed to be searching for something, and he pushed his feet around oddly in the dirt. When his toe caught on something, he let out a laugh and started digging.
"Have you been possessed? I'm far too tired to deal with some sort of demon right now."
"Shut up, Merlin. Look! It's still here."
Merlin crept forward and knelt by Arthur's slumped form. He tucked his head out of the way to let the light beam through. It danced through the king's fingers down to the ground. Arthur was digging away at the outline of a box before gripping it at its lip and yanking it up. A puff of dust shot up, causing them to cough, and Merlin sneezed violently. He blinked the dirt out of his eyes and barely caught the carved label on the box before Arthur swung it open. "What is that?!"
ARTHUR'S TREASURE CHEST
"When we were little, Morgana and I ran away. She packed all sorts of useful things: food, water, weapons. She kept teasing me because all I brought was this..."
Arthur poured out the box and laughed to himself with a childish glee Merlin didn't see often. He sorted through the objects before landing on one to hold up into the light.
"This was my toy. I got it from a nobleman's son when I was tiny, perhaps four summers old? It was his least favorite, but I loved it, so I stole it. I went to bed that night terrified the King's guard was going to drag me to the dungeons. It was the first time I ever stole anything!" Arthur pushed the little figurine towards Merlin. It was a black sculpture in the shape of a jousting knight and horse. It was simple and a little messily made, and the servant wondered why Arthur had liked this toy so much. A prince had surely owned better. And so he asked.
"I wasn't allowed many toys. Uther wasn't much into useless games and silliness. I got some for presents occasionally, from the staff or another child. Eventually, Father found all of those and destroyed them. I can't believe this little thing is here, I thought it was lost forever!"
Merlin's eyes widened at the odd revelation Arthur had unintentionally provided him. Not allowed toys? Arthur said he was four when he stole the little knight. Why would Uther be so against his young son having toys that he'd take away any that he found? Before Merlin could voice his questions, Arthur gasped loudly. He fumbled with the ties on a small canvas wrap and rolled it out with impatience.
"So this is where this went?! I looked for this for weeks!"
"What is it? It just looks like charcoal sticks."
"Well, it is charcoal sticks, Merlin. Sybil gifted them to me after she caught me watching Thomas sketch out weapons designs..." Arthur trailed off after remembering the implications of his story. Sybil and Thomas were dead now. Sybil must have been Gwen and Elyan's mother. Merlin had heard she worked for Leon's family household. It was news to him that Arthur knew her as well. And knew her well enough to be smuggled art supplies. Merlin wondered why Arthur hadn't mentioned it before. Catching the blond's depleting mood, Merlin snorted a laugh and poked the king with his elbow.
"Didn't peg you for an artistic soul, sire! Now you're telling me you can draw? Hopefully better than whatever Morgana doodled on the walls."
Arthur shot Merlin an unamused eyeroll but pushed a bound notebook to him all the same. Merlin pursed his lips and carefully opened it. The bindings were brittle, and some pages slid out, Merlin fumbling to catch them. When he did, he whistled quietly and looked up at Arthur and back at the page in rapid succession. Arthur could draw... incredibly well. He flipped through the pages and gazed at them with wonder. Some of the drawings he instantly recognized. A detailed sketch of a horse's head. A simple outline of a hut on a hill. But as Merlin got further into the book, the drawings became grander and grander.
One depicted Morgana, with her features sharp even as a child, gazing out of her window to the courtyard. Another of Gwen's face, her eye's closed and smiling gently. An old man with a long beard with a cloak pulled over his head. A woman kissing a child's forehead. He flipped through the pages enthralled by their contents. When he got to the end, he found a paper ripped out and folded in half. He looked up at Arthur questioningly, who had averted his eyes to avoid Merlin's reaction to his work. Getting no response, he pulled the page out and opened it.
This drawing was different than the others. With the rest of his art, Arthur had painstakingly created tiny details and gentle shading. This one... the face of a young boy, was haphazard and roughly made from jagged lines and harsh shadows. Merlin ran his fingers over it and then raised it to the king.
"Who is this?"
Arthur slowly lifted his eyes from his fidgeting fingers, and his lips dropped apart when he saw the paper. He broke out of his shock quickly and pulled it gently out of Merlin's grasp.
"I wasn't very good. Anyhow, now that you've had your merry way with the book, you have plenty of blackmail on me. You can run off and tell all of my knights how I scribble and scrawl roses and daisies in my spare time or something."
"Who is it?" Merlin asked again. He looked back down at the book as if it would somehow provide the answers.
"It was supposed to be me. Wasn't very good obviously, it's not like you could tell just by looking at it."
"All of your other drawings were so clear. I saw Gwen, Morgana, Geoffrey, horses, knights, servants. But that one doesn't look at all like you. How come? You spend enough time preening in the mirror, you ought to know your own face." It shouldn't bother him as much as it did, but something nagged in Merlin's chest.
Instead, Arthur just nudged Merlin with his foot and tried for a snotty quip, "Yes well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Perhaps I just perceive myself differently than you do."
Arthur's gaze suddenly blazed defensively as if daring him to continue his interrogation. So rather than step into treacherous waters, Merlin reached for the piece of leather twisted in Arthur's fingers. "Alright, fine, you big baby! What's this then? It looks like a piece of an old boot..."
"It's a collar. It used to be for my dog when I was a boy. A hunting dog got bred with a stray accidentally. They drowned the other puppies, but I snuck off with one. I was young and naive, and I didn't understand why they would hurt something tiny and innocent. I thought it was barbaric!"
"It is barbaric!" Merlin exclaimed hotly, "It's a waste of perfectly good lives. All because of some ridiculous need for pure bloodlines. As if the castle couldn't afford to feed a few more mouths. And they would have been just as good for hunting anyways!"
Arthur shrugged but smiled at Merlin's passion. The servant always cared for animals in a way that used to annoy him, but now he finds it rather endearing. He'd never met anyone who viewed other creatures as any more than food, weapons, or tools. But Merlin saw every living thing, even the spiders in the halls, as little beings. Life to be cherished. And Arthur wished he could be as good and pure as Merlin.
"It's just the way it is, Merlin. They wanted to drown Veela, too. Tried to pry her from my hands when they found her under my bed. But my nursemaid shooed them away and told me she needed milk or she was going to die. We kept the mother dog in my antechamber. Poor thing had been crying horribly for her pups. I felt I'd done something right when I showed her I'd saved Veela."
"Oh..." Merlin imagined the poor mother's whimpers as she watched her babies drowned. This cave seemed to have a spell of some sort on it, for Arthur had never been this candid before. Merlin couldn't think of a single childhood story Arthur had told before now. He felt trusted and hungry for more."Veela? That's what you named her? Like the magical women? That seems a bit -"
"Yes, I realise," Arthur cut in looking uncomfortable, "my nursemaid used to tell stories about them. I thought the puppy looked like one because I'd never seen a white dog before."
Merlin hadn't either, and he tended for Arthur's hunting dogs often. It was one of the chores he pretended to hate so Arthur would give it to him more often. There wasn't a white dog. But before Merlin could ask Arthur sighed, "It was a long time ago."
He started to pack the trinkets back into the box gingerly and smiled tiredly at Merlin. In the silence, Merlin noticed a rather important piece of the story was missing. Why were these things, these precious belongings of Arthur's, buried in a cave in the middle of the woods?
"Why did you and Morgana run away?"
Arthur stilled and tried to seem aloof, "I don't know. I was young. I don't remember, honestly."
"So you remember everything you just told me, but not why the prince and ward of Camelot ran away from home? What happened? Were you being hidden for safety? Did you just get sick of three square meals a day and decided to live it rough for a vacation? How long were you gone? How old were you?"
Overwhelmed by Merlin's questions and the stabbing pain from his leg, Arthur slammed the chest shut and snapped, "We were children, Merlin. We were stupid and ungrateful and unrealistic. You know how Morgana could be when she set her mind to something. After some fight with Father, she said that she was running away and never coming back. We stayed in the woods for a few weeks, months, maybe. We hid in this cave for a little while, but then they found us and brought us home. They rescued us from..."
"You ran away for months?! Morgana, I could understand, but you're so hellbent on duty, and... why would you go with her? Rescued you from what?"
"Merlin... there's a monster in the cave."
The room suddenly got ice cold. The light beam had faded, and the room had gone dark as they'd talked.
"It comes at night."
Merlin shot up to his feet and whirled around. His hip caught on Arthur's propped up shield, and it crashed to the ground. A loud clanging echoed through the cavern.
Followed by a terrifying, shrieking roar.
