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Outside, the storm grew worse. The wind howled and pummeled the shuttered windows with sleet and ice, while inside Merlin's fever worsened. Bolstered as he was by the blankets and cushions he couldn't toss and turn, but a pained moan sounded with every other breath. All Arthur could do was keep bathing Merlin's head and neck with cool water, and hope. Prayers were too seldom on his lips to do anyone much good.
He draped the cloth across Merlin's brow and leaned back in the chair to stretch out complaining muscles and rub his gritty eyes. He was beyond exhausted but sleep would not come, despite the featherbed that called to him from the other side of the room. The fear that Merlin would slip away and die, unnoticed, while the prince slept just a few feet away was too real a possibility to let Arthur rest easily.
Then there was Morgana.
After Morgause kidnapped her, Arthur expected his father to send him out to search for her. He would have gone even if Uther hadn't ordered it. As much of a nuisance as the girl could be, he loved Morgana like a sister and it pained him to think of her in the witch's clutches. But as the weeks of searching stretched into months, he began to lose hope, while Uther's obsession only grew deeper. "Keep searching." "Keep looking." "Do not stop until you find her." Those were all the words on Uther's lips when Arthur reported to his father. He couldn't help but hear the unspoken words, "You have failed me," every time he looked into the king's eyes and told him Morgana was still missing.
He had lost nearly thirty knights on these futile searches, counting the five dead in the past week. Arthur knew all their names, had trained with all of them. He had been the one to tell their families that their sons, brothers, or fathers would not be coming home. Each of their deaths had been a failure on his part- a failure to protect the men under his command, a failure to foresee what he should have seen coming. And every time he returned to Camelot without Morgana, he knew Uther would send him out again. And again. And again. Until he found her or died trying. The king would settle for nothing less.
'Does he truly love her more than me?'
He dashed away the frustrated tears that welled in his eyes. 'I'm just tired,' he tried to convince himself. Better than admitting that he was a wretched commander and a worse son.
Arthur leaned forward again and focused on Merlin, dipping the drying cloth back in the water before bathing the boy's face again, trying to smooth away the lines of pain etched around his eyes. There was a new hitch in his breathing and every time it caught, a choked cough rattled out of Merlin's lungs. "Just breathe. You're going to be fine," Arthur forced as much confidence as he could into his voice as he continued the litany of reassurances.
He would not be able to ride to Ealdor if anything happened to Merlin. The prince of Camelot could not go to Cenred's kingdom to tell a peasant woman that he hadn't been able to protect her only child, would not be able to look her in the eye and tell Hunith that he had failed her so completely. Only a letter from a prince she barely knew would to go that unfailingly kind woman to tell her that Merlin had. . .
'No.'
He refused to let himself finish that thought. "You're not going to die, Merlin. You're going to get better, and we're going to find Morgana and go home and everything will be as it was before," he said, inwardly cursing the tremor in his voice and the lie on his tongue. Of course nothing would be as it was, even if they did somehow manage to find Morgana. But everyone, even a prince, had moments when they wanted nothing more than to indulge in a childish fantasy, and Arthur let himself imagine the world as it was before this nightmare had started, before Morgause had awakened the Knights of Medhir and turned his world on its head.
"Call me a dollophead, will you? Clotpole? Prat? Any one of the ridiculous insults you've made up. I promise I won't mind. Just this once." Arthur pleaded, "All you have to do is wake up, Merlin. Wake up, and you will have free reign to call me anything you like, and I won't say anything in return or throw anything at you. Only right now, though. If you're lazy and wait until morning your chance will be gone."
There was no response from the boy, just the raw scraping of each shallow breath. Arthur squeezed some of the water from the cloth onto Merlin's neck and back before replacing it on his brow. He took one of Merlin's hands in his own, mindful of the scrapes and bruises that marred the long fingers. Even his hands were too hot. "I know you're a lazy, stubborn idiot, Merlin, but even you can't out-stubborn me. I'm the prince. That means I can do everything better than you, and that includes being stubborn and irritating. So I'm going to stay right here and keep being irritating until you wake up. I might even start singing," Arthur tried to laugh, but it came out sounding more like a sob.
Dry fingers twitched against his. "Merlin?" he asked hopefully. There was another twitch, and suddenly Merlin's entire body convulsed, his hand jerking from Arthur's grasp, his chest heaving as he choked on a wet gasp. Then he shivered and fell still, his breath emerging in a long, rattling sigh.
He did not draw another.