Merlin -- Rosemary
Title: Rosemary
Fandom: Merlin
Pairing: Arthur/Merlin
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 5,753
Warnings: bizarre humor, brief language, fantasy violence, monster gore, crappy editing
Prompt: "And it had seemed like it was going to be such a normal day…"
Summary: In which Merlin and Arthur commune with rosemary and end up in a fight with a horrific monster. Maybe this is a normal day.
Author's Note: A rather late birthday present for the wonderful richelle2972! :D Hope you enjoy, my darling! It got a bit out of control. XD' Also, my dearest, most beloved readers, I'm a lame Yank who hasn't seen any of the second season yet, so PLEASE don't spoil me! ♥
ROSEMARY
At precisely three o’clock in the afternoon, everyone in Camelot froze in their tracks.
Merlin, who had been bringing a bushel of rosemary back to Gaius, went in a single breath from being one figure moving amongst the crowd in the square to being the only figure moving amongst the crowd in the square.
Bewilderedly, he paused, but the others weren’t pausing-they had stopped.
Merlin swallowed, clutching the rosemary to his chest, and turned in a slow circle, looking for movement. Maybe this was an extraordinarily elaborate joke, and any moment, everyone would jump at him and cheer when he screamed at the shock.
Actually, that didn’t sound particularly pleasant either.
Merlin shifted the rosemary to one arm and waved his hand in front of a woman’s face, wiggling his fingers for good measure. When her glassy eyes stayed wide open regardless of his efforts, he went to peer curiously at a motionless mule, its tail tilted in mid-flick. There was a fly suspended in the air just above its nose.
This was very bad.
Merlin extended a finger and prodded the floating insect.
It dropped out of the air and hit the ground with a dull sound that was strangely loud in the unnatural silence.
A huge, horrible ripple shuddered through Merlin’s body, racking his bones and rattling his teeth in his skull-something so Disturbing that it merited the capital D.
This was very, very bad.
Merlin shaded his eyes with his hand and craned his neck, looking up. He then decided that he should probably get inside before an errant breeze displaced one of the birds frozen in flight and brought it down onto his head from a long way up.
Struggling with his limbs’ tendency to disobey his intent, Merlin scampered for the castle, dodging people right and left lest they end up in the dust like the infelicitous fly.
And it had started out as such a normal day.
It had-he’d dragged himself out of bed for breakfast, somehow managed to hold up conversation with an eyebrow-wielding Gaius, and then headed to Arthur’s room, where the prince was still passed out after the grueling training exercises he himself had mandated and conducted the night before. Merlin had good-naturedly rolled his eyes, then approached the bed and rolled them slightly worse-naturedly, because he had then been able to see that Arthur had snuggled up with his sword.
Not only was this an extremely bad idea as far as cutting one’s face to ribbons, Arthur had been drooling on the blade.
If that wasn’t a recipe for rust, Merlin didn’t know what was.
And who would have been blamed for rust on Prince Pratty-Pants’s sword? Not Arthur; that was for sure.
Thus it was that Merlin had spent that portion of his morning creeping up, lifting Arthur’s bare arm with a smidgeon of magic, and cautiously sliding the sword free to set it aside.
Merlin paused partway up a staircase.
Oh. Of course. Arthur.
Merlin held the rosemary even closer and ran.
The familiar network of passages and halls felt labyrinthine as Merlin careened around its turns, racing down the straightaways. His heart pounded in his ears and his chest in bothersome unison, and all he could think as the soles of his boots skidded on the stones was, What if Arthur’s frozen, and he doesn’t wake up?
All right, he also had a moment of Worse yet, what if some princess has to wake him with a kiss?
He slid around another switchback. What about Gaius? Oh, hell; what if Gaius was frozen, too? There would be no one to go about analyzing things slowly and rationally, and no one would salvage them all from danger with a bit of eyebrow aerobics and some deft employment of herbs-
Merlin slammed into something.
Actually, given the relative momentums involved, something slammed into Merlin, and Merlin accordingly ended up sprawled on the floor, head spinning like a flail in Arthur’s capable hands.
Speak of the devil and his appendages, a leather-coat-clad Arthur was looking perplexedly down at Merlin, who lay dazed, haloed by the spilled and scattered rosemary.
“Well, then,” Arthur said by way of a greeting. “Everyone in the castle isn’t enspelled after all-everyone useful in the castle is.”
He gave Merlin a hand up anyway, after which Merlin immediately knelt again, gathering the pieces of his rosemary bouquet from where they’d been flung all over the floor.
Maybe that proved Arthur’s point.
“Merlin,” the prince began slowly, as if he was speaking to someone who was slightly hard of hearing. “Do you have any idea why this happened?”
Merlin snatched up another bough, fumbling for the next and for a suitable lie.
And then he had both at once.
“Rosemary,” he said.
Arthur stared at him.
Merlin waved the latest leafy acquisition towards him.
“Rosemary,” he repeated. “I have all this rosemary, and-well, Gaius put rosemary in that draught he gave you last night, after the training.” He paused. “Lots of it. It was pretty much rosemary tea.”
Arthur frowned down at him and his shaky excuse.
“Well, Merlin,” he conceded at last. “What should we do?”
Merlin considered their options.
Number one: Weep piteously. Number two: Wait and see. Number three: Run away howling at the top of their lungs.
Number four: Follow the terrible, wrenching twinges yanking at the center of Merlin’s ribs and the pit of his stomach, two steel wires pulling him out, out, and away.
He didn’t know where they led.
“Well,” he managed, slowly, “you said it yourself that it’s clearly magic-strong magic. But if it’s tied to the rosemary…”
Sighing inwardly, Merlin tossed the whole bushel onto the floor again, making sure the pieces fell in various directions, crisscrossing each other at random. Before Arthur could comment-or, more likely, criticize-he crouched before the arc of herbs, ducked his head too low for his eyes to be visible from Arthur’s vantage-point, and twisted every branch of rosemary to point towards the source of the tugging in his chest.
After a long moment of silence, Arthur cleared his throat.
“I don’t like this, Merlin,” he announced.
“Neither do I,” Merlin answered truthfully.
-
Merlin really hoped that the sorcerer responsible-for this was much too pointed and direct an assault not to be deliberate-wasn’t very far away. They hadn’t been able to find any unfrozen horses, though Merlin had managed to topple Alfric the stableboy, to whom he had apologized profusely as he seized the teetering body and settled it safely on the ground.
Alfric had been immobilized in mid-yawn anyway, so he probably wouldn’t even notice the difference.
Merlin had caught Arthur hiding a smile.
That had certainly marked the highlight of their departure, however, as everything since had been characterized by sore feet, a dusty throat, and a great deal of getting in touch with the rosemary.
They had commenced tromping through a dense wood, and Merlin’s instinct-and his trepidation-was getting stronger by the minute. The ember in his chest grew warmer with every step, and the fishhook in his gut pulled him along a steady, unhesitating course.
He was understandably concerned about where that course might lead.
That was the trouble, though, inescapable trouble at that-Camelot was endangered, and he and Arthur had a chance to set it right. It didn’t matter where they were headed or what might ensue when they arrived-they would go, and they would try, and they would die there if they had to. There wasn’t any question of it, not with the pair of them together. Risking their lives for Camelot was a given, and neither of them would have had it any other way.
Well, Merlin might have done, if he’d been in an intelligent mood, but something about Arthur’s willingness to plunge headlong into mortal peril always summoned a hazardous magnanimity in him.
He held out the rosemary, tilting it in the direction his resonating intuition indicated.
“I don’t like this, Merlin,” Arthur said again.
“It’s not very likable,” Merlin agreed.
It was probably even less likable for Arthur, who was wearing armor and hauling his (not-rusted, thank you) sword.
“I feel like we’re walking into the dark,” Arthur muttered.
“We will be,” Merlin responded glumly, “if we don’t get there soon.”
“Why do I listen to your suggestions?” Arthur sighed.
“…rosemary?” Merlin guessed.
Even as he spoke, Merlin felt the ground beneath his feet go kind of… insubstantial.
Then Arthur and his armor put their collective weight on the dubious patch, and all three of them-four if you counted the rosemary-broke through a thin leaf-covered lattice and tumbled into a tremendous hole.
Rosemary rained down on Merlin, and he cracked his head on something sharp and cold, though it was getting warmer by the second as he lay watching the hazy, inaccurate constellations that twirled before his eyes.
There was a groan.
“That was stupid,” Arthur said, through a wince by the sound of things.
Merlin opened his mouth to tell him that Yes, it had been, and could he have a hand?, but nothing came out.
“Merlin?” Arthur prompted, accompanied by a rustling and a soft clanking as he struggled to get up. “Merlin, are you all right?”
Merlin’s mouth said something completely incoherent-possibly warning Arthur not to touch the blood that was slowly soaking into his hair-and then gave up on clinging to consciousness.
-
When Merlin awoke, he saw marble tile.
Shortly, he realized that he was crumpled facedown on the tile in question, which explained its monopoly of his attention. His head ached fiercely-so much so that it took him a moment to notice that his chest no longer felt like it was attached to a taut string.
Carefully, gritting his teeth against the flaring pain, Merlin pushed himself up off the floor, looking blearily about him.
He was in something like a temple, columns, tile, and arches all carved of gleaming white marble, polished and bright. A panting, dirt-smeared, dark-eyed, slightly battered Arthur stood not far away, half-bent as if waiting for a battle to begin.
Opposite him stood a very pretty girl in a white dress-blonde, smiling, and lifting Arthur’s sword as if it was a twig.
There were so many things wrong with this image that Merlin didn’t know where to start.
Perhaps that was part of the reason that he started by sitting up and coughing weakly.
This was not quite the omen he would have hoped for.
It did serve the purpose of getting both Arthur and the girl in white to look at him, the former with worry, the latter with amusement.
“He is very cute,” the girl mused, “but I don’t see why you brought him.”
“He’s the worst servant in the known world,” Arthur kindly informed her, eyeing her easy grip on his sword. “I bring him everywhere.”
“I’d gathered that,” the girl remarked, “but I can’t think why you would drag him around to investigate rather sensitive material if he’s so bad a servant. Surely you could find another.”
Arthur looked a bit stuck.
Merlin swallowed and raised his hand.
“It wouldn’t be as funny,” he volunteered.
“Merlin,” Arthur ground out, “shut up.”
“See?” Merlin persisted. “That’s exactly what I mean.”
“Shut. Up.”
“Yes, Sire.”
The girl’s pink mouth curled into a smile, though her dark lashes lay low over her pale eyes.
“You must be fonder of him than you’re willing to admit, little prince,” she said.
There were so many things wrong with this sentence that Merlin was once again at a total loss.
At least he was getting used to it by now.
It was hard to tell given all the recent strenuous activity-Merlin was beginning to understand that there had been a scuffle in which the girl had somehow overpowered Arthur and taken his sword-but it looked like Arthur’s face had transitioned to a slightly deeper shade of pink.
The girl offered a winsome smile.
“I can’t imagine,” she added, “that you’d let just any servant speak to you that way.”
Arthur focused intently on the repossessed sword that she wielded as if it weighed no more than a feather.
“Who are you?” he demanded, a question Merlin had been meaning to ask since this whole strange scene had unfolded.
The girl tossed her hair over her shoulder idly.
“Who I am isn’t as important as who you are,” she noted, pointing the blade at Arthur’s chest. “You, my dear prince, must have very strong magic indeed if you’ve followed it here.”
The color that had recently migrated into Arthur’s face proceeded to drain from it rather precipitously.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” he snapped.
Merlin put his hand in the air again.
“If I might,” he interjected, “why in the name of all that is holy did you freeze everybody in Camelot?” He paused. “Also in the name of all that is holy,” he amended, “where are we?”
The girl ignored him in favor of tormenting Arthur, which was not as enjoyable to watch as it should have been.
“You’re evidently a prince,” she went on contentedly, “and from Camelot-which must make you Arthur.” She paused, tapping one of the fingers of her free hand against her lips. “But I can’t conceive of Uther Pendragon allowing magic of this caliber to flourish under his thumb-not even if the source was his beloved only son.”
Arthur’s eyes blazed, and his hands clenched and unclenched, missing his sword’s grip.
“I don’t have a thing in the world to do with magic,” he seethed, “precisely because people like you use it to do things like this.”
Merlin cringed.
Arthur wasn’t looking at him, but the girl half-turned, her eyes widening.
“Why did you do it, anyway?” Merlin cut in hastily. “Why would you do that to people-to so many people?” Frantically he tried to think of what he could do with that kind of power-what horrific opportunities it would present. “Were you… siphoning off their energy, or something? Or for something?”
The girl smiled, though there was a hint of caution alongside the amusement in her eyes now.
“Very good, servant boy,” she commended idly. “You can’t think my young Mister Pendragon would have come to me, with you draped over his shoulder, and asked for my help if he’d seen how I usually look…”
Merlin didn’t like the sound of that.
Neither did Arthur, if the mortified expression on his face was anything to judge by.
Merlin’s worst suspicions were confirmed as a searing, shrieking wind gathered around their adversary, kicking up dust Merlin hadn’t seen on the spotless floor, and the girl ceased to be a girl and became something… else.
Gaius might have had a name for the old woman-scorpion hybrid that emerged from the heart of the settling wind, but Merlin was wordless. Ragged locks of dirty silver hair cascaded down a shiny, segmented back, and glinting black exoskeleton melded strangely with human skin where the two species mixed. Two of her arms were largely unchanged, protruding incongruously from the glimmering scales, and one of them, draped in the shreds of the white dress, still firmly held the prince’s sword.
Speaking of Arthur, he stepped slowly backwards towards Merlin, who gathered himself to his feet, trying to block out the raging pain building at the back of his skull.
“Fuck this,” Arthur decided disgustedly.
The statement summed up Merlin’s feelings quite eloquently.
The woman-if that was still a viable way to describe her-scuttled horrendously closer, her various feet clicking on the tile. She bent down towards her pair of potential victims, slashing her thick, barbed tail, and leered at Merlin in a way that sent a shudder through the whole of him.
“When are you going to tell him, little warlock?” she asked.
Merlin curled his fingers into fists.
Arthur’s shoulders went just a little tighter where he stood, unarmed but immovable, between Merlin and the creature.
“What does that mean, Merlin?” he inquired.
Merlin swallowed and slowly opened both of his hands.
“It means I’m sorry,” he said.
He stepped forward, drew a concentration of fierce power around each palm, and fired twin beams of white light straight at the misplaced female face amongst the insect.
The energy exploded as it collided with its target, who screamed shrilly and swiped the smoke away, charging forward to swing Arthur’s sword and the deadly tail at once.
They dove aside, then scrambled to their feet.
“How did you do that?” Arthur managed faintly.
“Magic,” Merlin supplied, hastily backing up. “Just like she-it-said.”
“Can magic get rid of ‘it’?” Arthur cut in, poised for defense as he, too, stepped warily away.
“Well,” Merlin said.
The advancing creature shrieked and struck with Arthur’s sword, steel singing in Merlin’s ears, silver streaking past him, narrowly missing his left shoulder as Arthur hauled him clear. Arthur winced heavily as the blade roused sparks on the tile, but there wasn’t time to do much more before the tail slashed to follow up, tip skittering on the marble when Arthur snatched the knot of Merlin’s neckerchief and dragged him out of its path.
“What can magic do?” Arthur demanded.
Merlin thought fast-almost as fast as their hissing adversary descended with both weapons, human face hideously contorting. Arthur still had a death grip-not a pleasant turn of phrase-on Merlin’s scarf and was heaving him to either side, preserving him from a variety of unsavory fates.
“Oh,” Merlin said when his brain cooperated at last.
He spun, clapped a hand on either side of Arthur’s neck (because he needed bare skin, and the prince was wearing gloves) and looked into Arthur’s eyes (because… they were blue, and there, and still too scared to hate him) and spat out the spiky words of the spell.
And then they were invisible.
Sadly, he didn’t get an opportunity to punch the air, as Arthur snatched for his wrist, found it, and towed him into an alcove of gleaming marble, the creature’s howls of rage echoing deafeningly after them.
“You can let go,” Merlin whispered in Arthur’s direction.
“Not a chance,” the prince fired back from slightly further to the left than Merlin had estimated. “I can’t see you, and you’re the only weapon I’ve got.”
The sword clanged against something sword blades weren’t meant to hit-it was trying to draw Arthur out by wrecking his weapon; that was charming-and from above them came a slow and terrible rumbling.
Arthur’s grip on Merlin’s wrist tightened. “What the hell is that?”
“A very bad sign,” Merlin answered.
Arthur shifted, transparent armor plates scraping softly. “Can you kill that thing?” he asked quietly.
Merlin peered around one of the columns concealing them. The creature was smashing every architectural feature in sight-trying to drive them from hiding, trying to bring the ceiling down. He swallowed, his concentration wavering, Arthur rippling momentarily into sight before Merlin hid him once more. “I-I think so. Maybe not.”
Arthur sighed. “Let’s hope for the best, then.”
Merlin frowned. “What’s that supposed to m-”
Arthur released his arm, so suddenly that Merlin dropped the spell and brought him flaring back into color and form, all darkly-focused eyes, set shoulders, and indestructible resolve as he stormed into the center of the room.
Merlin was even more desperately in love with Arthur Pendragon at that moment than he’d ever been.
The touted prince was currently shouting, “Hey! Hey, ugly!” to get their enemy’s attention.
Merlin was about to be slightly offended on the creature’s behalf before deciding that “ugly” was actually a rather lenient assessment.
Which was a nice thing; killing the ugly ones was a whole lot easier.
It was unfortunate, however, that the ugly ones were always so well-armed.
The creature settled its grotesque body lower to the ground, and then it seethed forward towards the prince, employing both hands now to wield the sword.
Fortified with a breath so deep it made his aching head spin, Merlin raced out after it.
Arthur flung himself to the floor, tucking his limbs into a graceful roll, and hopped up again, grinding his teeth. He leapt back from the whipping trajectory of the tail, and his eyes caught Merlin’s for a split-second-more than long enough to express Any time you like, then; I’ll try not to die while you stand there gaping.
Merlin had to admit to being a bit impressed with Arthur’s ability to convey layered sarcasm in eye contact.
He could compliment it later, however: a few slightly more pressing issues currently required his attention.
Merlin twisted his tongue around another spell as he ran, and a concentrated wind picked up against his back-strong enough to lift him when he jumped, buoying him higher in the air, carrying him to land soundly on the creature’s back. The gaps between the segments gave him footholds, and he clung tight as the creature snarled and whirled about in an attempt to knock him off.
Merlin was not, perhaps, the brightest of all men, but he wasn’t stupid either.
Gaius had even called him a genius once-that had to count for something.
He ducked as the creature swung wildly with the sword, steel glinting madly as it whistled past his head, close enough that he feared for his ears. The tip of the blade lodged itself between two shiny black segments of the creature’s back, and, instinctively, it let go, scrabbling for Merlin manually now, craning its neck to look for its target.
Merlin snatched the sword free, clasping it in both hands like Arthur had taught him, heart pounding in his barely-safe ears, steadied his footing, and raised the blade.
The creature recalled its other weapon, and the tail flicked violently back, aiming impeccably for Merlin’s chest.
Merlin shifted his weight like Arthur always did, imitating clumsily, executing a hacking stroke with none of the prince’s polished strength-but with enough force to lop the bulbous tip right off of the scorpion tail.
Black blood spurted, ushered skyward by another of the ear-shattering screams that seemed to characterize communication for the creature’s form.
To be honest, Merlin missed the creepy little girl.
A massive tremor shuddered through the whole of the building, and a fluted column crumbled to the floor. Tile cracked, jagged shards of marble clashing, and the walls shook like leaves in a breeze.
The creature gave a rumbling growl to match and dove for Arthur.
Merlin whirled, gritting out the same spell he’d used to help Lancelot against the griffin, angling the sword-there was a searing glow of blue, and then it sliced effortlessly through matted gray hair and leathery flesh.
More dark blood sprayed, and the creature’s frighteningly humanoid head rolled to a stop at Arthur’s feet.
The lifeless body crumpled to the fissure-ridden tile, and Merlin stumbled off, trying to keep his throbbing head level, and offered the prince his dripping sword.
Gingerly, Arthur took it.
There was a seemingly-endless pause, and then the thunderous sound returned, and Merlin jumped.
Arthur cleared his throat and gestured to a heinous black bloodstain on his tabard.
“Please tell me that this will come out,” he said.
“That will come out,” Merlin answered dutifully, his voice shaking as much as Arthur’s hands, “Sire.”
“Good,” Arthur decided. “Now what the hell is that noise? It sounds like the whole place is falling apart.”
For the first time in many minutes, Merlin had the leisure to remember what had brought them here.
The floor tiles trembled.
“Maybe it is,” Merlin said slowly. “Stairs-?”
Arthur pointed, looking slightly reluctant to take one hand off the sword, and Merlin kicked up his heels and ran off again.
All this exercise couldn’t be doing his bashed head any favors, though it was probably good for building up endurance.
There was an ungodly quantity of white marble stairs-they would have been smooth and straight if not for the new cracks that split them everywhere, including some serious breakages that Merlin skirted as best he could. Arthur’s steps started up behind him as Merlin headed onward, following the curve of the wall.
At last the stairs gave way to the top floor and a wide-open room-plain, airy, and white.
In the center of the space stood a tarnished bronze frame, which held a vast opalescent sphere of… energy-energy crackling in constant flux, faces he recognized flickering in its center and darting out of view. A pale, eerie light emanated from it, illuminating rows and rows of tall objects stacked against the wall.
Bodies.
Merlin’s knees quavered threateningly, but he locked them and moved closer.
Not bodies-well, not corpses. Dummies. Life-sized dolls.
Golems.
Merlin drew a deep breath, turning to the sphere again even as Arthur topped the spiral stairs. Cautiously Merlin reached one hand towards the shimmering surface-would it be solid? It looked like glass, but the transformation its maker had performed earlier made him mistrust appearances here-
“Merlin.”
He paused. “Yes?”
Arthur’s eyes were keen. “Don’t touch that,” he said.
Merlin wiggled his fingers, which Arthur did not find amusing.
“Don’t,” the prince repeated, approaching warily, the better to bat Merlin’s hand aside. “Think about it. She took all of this from the people of Camelot, and she contained it here-right? There must be a way to release it, for whatever purpose she meant, and there must be a reason we were exempt from the effects. What if those two things are the same?”
Merlin shoved his hands in his pockets instead, curling his fists, striving to disregard the itching of his fingers for the wealth of power laid out before him, close enough to touch. It wanted him to have it.
“You mean,” he responded slowly, “that she spared the sorcerer hoping that he’d show up here, because this’ll only work-the power she stole will only go towards what she wanted-if I get too close to it, and it gets a last bit of help?”
Arthur nodded, and Merlin glanced towards the wall.
“It’s those,” he realized, stomach twisting unhappily. “It’s them-I’d be channeling all of Camelot’s life into those things. It’d animate them instead.”
Arthur went to examine the golem figures, life-sized and featureless, built meticulously of carved wood and unrefined cloth. Their blank, smooth faces hosted only indentations for eyes, a single interruption of uniform expressions, at odds with the five perfect fingers on each hand.
“You shouldn’t get too near these, either,” Arthur warned him needlessly.
“Yes, Sire,” Merlin absently replied. He thought he’d seen Gaius floating in the ether, staring urgently back.
“I swear I can’t let you touch anything,” Arthur muttered, and it took all of Merlin’s self-control not to snicker.
Maybe Arthur had a point-anyone who would laugh at that in a situation like this probably oughtn’t be responsible for the fate of the world quite so frequently.
Merlin tried to think of a way to earn his position fair and square or close to it.
“Maybe I should try a spell on it,” he suggested of the pulsing orb bathing him in pale light. “It would put a little bit of a barrier between me and its intention to pull me in, right?” He considered the faces drifting just beneath its roiling surface. “Maybe I can figure out how to send them all back to Camelot.”
Arthur returned, looking first at the globe and then at him, equally dubiously.
“I don’t know how this works,” he admitted slowly. “Is it safe? I mean, do you think that you can do that without hurting anyone or yourself?”
Helplessly Merlin lifted his shoulders in a shrug.
“Start with something very small,” Arthur told him. “Just nudge it a bit. Don’t let it get a hold of you.”
The prince had discovered the very existence of Merlin’s magic half an hour before, and he already deemed himself qualified to give specific advice.
The sad part was that this was typical Arthur.
The really sad part was that he was probably right.
Merlin took a deep breath and raised one hand, flexing his fingers gently.
“Wait,” Arthur cut in.
Merlin gave him as scathing a look as his tortured head would allow his face to make.
Arthur stepped closer, reached up, and grabbed a handful of Merlin’s neckerchief securely.
“Just in case,” he said.
Merlin’s brain was much more conducive to ‘bewildered’ than it had been to ‘scathing,’ possibly because it had much more practice with the former.
He tried to shrug it off-without actually shrugging, as Arthur was close enough to notice that-and focused on the task very literally at hand.
Slowly, carefully, he sent out a soft tendril of magic, probing, pushing, to discover and identify.
There was a great and curious-and perhaps unsurprising-gravity pulling from the globe’s dense center, tugging again on that point in his chest. He pulled back, refusing to be drawn to it, keeping himself steady, anchoring his physical body by Arthur’s hand at the back of his neck. He would not fall in. He would not cross over. He was not prey, and he would not be fuel for whatever design he’d stumbled upon.
Voices assailed him as his presence pressed deeper into the well of captured consciousness-he was inundated by their fear, their outrage, and, most of all, their intense confusion.
Slowly, slowly, he crept forward-one thought, one mental-magicked step at a time.
The absolute center of the sphere was a small, pulsating mass, gold shot with white in Merlin’s hazy magical perception, seething and spinning just before him.
He drew yet another deep breath, distantly feeling Arthur’s grip tighten as he swayed, and concentrated all of his energy on ripping the nucleus apart.
It resisted-it twisted; it writhed away from his struggles to pull at its brilliant, bleeding seams; it fought him, and he gritted his teeth and fought back, harder. He dug his fingernails-his proverbial fingernails-the magical equivalent-into the gaps where that blinding light escaped the core, prying, prising, wrenching pieces of the shell apart-
All at once, the tension yielded, and it gave.
Things went very vertiginous very fast-there was a rushing, a whirling, a howl, and the sigh of a hundred souls suddenly freed.
Merlin opened his eyes and discovered himself in Arthur’s arms.
Apparently, his knees had also given way.
Arthur submerged the worry that had surfaced on his face, shoved Merlin to his feet, and let go, pointedly clearing his throat.
“I told you it was dangerous, Merlin,” he said.
Merlin stared at the strange, glowing wreck of the globe’s base, excess energy pooling on the floor.
“Well,” he concluded faintly, “I guess it worked.”
The floor quavered. He’d diverted the energy that had set it to shaking, but the damage had been done, and the whole building was structurally unsound.
Arthur folded his arms, then dropped them at his sides, and then set his hands on his hips.
“Now we just need to get back,” he noted, glancing out the broad window. Merlin followed his gaze and saw that the sun was slipping behind silhouetted hills, flaming orange, gaudily painting the sky.
It was kind of romantic.
Evidently, Merlin had left his brain inside the shattered globe.
He considered their current dilemma-with difficulty, given the persistent ache still assaulting his skull.
“I might be able to transport us back to Camelot,” he offered tentatively. Arthur didn’t quite seem to have taken to magic yet, which Merlin supposed was to be expected with someone who had had its dangers drilled into his head every day of his life.
Arthur went back to folding his arms. “I-is it safe?” he asked.
Merlin paused. “I hope so.”
Arthur sighed, swallowed, and shifted his weight again.
“Let’s try,” he suggested, with a quiet, fist-clenching courage that made Merlin go a little bit melty inside.
Attempting to summon reserves of strength worthy of the prince’s bravery, Merlin collected himself and held out both hands.
Arthur blinked at his palms, then at his face.
“I need your hands,” Merlin explained, trying very hard not to go pink. “Your bare hands.”
Arthur hesitated, peeled off his gloves, and tucked them into his belt, and then he ceded Merlin a pair of strong, warm, slightly clammy, faintly trembling fingers.
Merlin clasped them, forced himself to concentrate, and channeled the flooding power that swirled within him into a directed stream.
He closed his eyes against the flash of discomfort on Arthur’s face at the Gold Iris Effect, and when he opened them again, it was to the inside of Gaius’s workshop.
“It did work!” Arthur cried, more outright ecstatic than Merlin had ever seen him. He then did something else entirely unprecedented-he yanked Merlin into a rib-cracking hug.
All the breath went out of Merlin’s lungs, not that he would have been able to breathe anyway, pressed so close to Arthur’s chest-near enough to taste the scent of sweat and horses, to feel the tingle of the unconscious, instinctive, overarching nobility that always hummed softly around the prince.
“If you ever need anything,” Arthur was muttering into his ear, “I swear to you, Merlin, that I will do everything I can-”
“…Merlin?” a familiar voice inquired.
Arthur released him all too soon in favor of a manly cough, a hand on his sword’s hilt, and a serene and stately look in Gaius’s direction.
Gaius stepped forward, stopped, and frowned.
“Merlin,” he said slowly, “why did it go from morning to evening when I blinked? And where the hell is that rosemary?”
“Arthur,” Merlin managed, unable to look away from Gaius’s accusing eyebrow, “I need a distraction.”
Arthur grabbed him by the shoulders, whipped him around, and kissed him so hard that blacking out was a distinct possibility.
Momentarily, the prince drew back, and Merlin stared at him, fingertips trilling helplessly up and down the grooves in Arthur’s armor.
“I don’t think that helped,” he managed to squeak.
Arthur flushed.
On the upside, Merlin didn’t think he’d ever seen Gaius’s eyebrow go so high.
Fandom: Merlin
Pairing: Arthur/Merlin
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 5,753
Warnings: bizarre humor, brief language, fantasy violence, monster gore, crappy editing
Prompt: "And it had seemed like it was going to be such a normal day…"
Summary: In which Merlin and Arthur commune with rosemary and end up in a fight with a horrific monster. Maybe this is a normal day.
Author's Note: A rather late birthday present for the wonderful richelle2972! :D Hope you enjoy, my darling! It got a bit out of control. XD' Also, my dearest, most beloved readers, I'm a lame Yank who hasn't seen any of the second season yet, so PLEASE don't spoil me! ♥
ROSEMARY
At precisely three o’clock in the afternoon, everyone in Camelot froze in their tracks.
Merlin, who had been bringing a bushel of rosemary back to Gaius, went in a single breath from being one figure moving amongst the crowd in the square to being the only figure moving amongst the crowd in the square.
Bewilderedly, he paused, but the others weren’t pausing-they had stopped.
Merlin swallowed, clutching the rosemary to his chest, and turned in a slow circle, looking for movement. Maybe this was an extraordinarily elaborate joke, and any moment, everyone would jump at him and cheer when he screamed at the shock.
Actually, that didn’t sound particularly pleasant either.
Merlin shifted the rosemary to one arm and waved his hand in front of a woman’s face, wiggling his fingers for good measure. When her glassy eyes stayed wide open regardless of his efforts, he went to peer curiously at a motionless mule, its tail tilted in mid-flick. There was a fly suspended in the air just above its nose.
This was very bad.
Merlin extended a finger and prodded the floating insect.
It dropped out of the air and hit the ground with a dull sound that was strangely loud in the unnatural silence.
A huge, horrible ripple shuddered through Merlin’s body, racking his bones and rattling his teeth in his skull-something so Disturbing that it merited the capital D.
This was very, very bad.
Merlin shaded his eyes with his hand and craned his neck, looking up. He then decided that he should probably get inside before an errant breeze displaced one of the birds frozen in flight and brought it down onto his head from a long way up.
Struggling with his limbs’ tendency to disobey his intent, Merlin scampered for the castle, dodging people right and left lest they end up in the dust like the infelicitous fly.
And it had started out as such a normal day.
It had-he’d dragged himself out of bed for breakfast, somehow managed to hold up conversation with an eyebrow-wielding Gaius, and then headed to Arthur’s room, where the prince was still passed out after the grueling training exercises he himself had mandated and conducted the night before. Merlin had good-naturedly rolled his eyes, then approached the bed and rolled them slightly worse-naturedly, because he had then been able to see that Arthur had snuggled up with his sword.
Not only was this an extremely bad idea as far as cutting one’s face to ribbons, Arthur had been drooling on the blade.
If that wasn’t a recipe for rust, Merlin didn’t know what was.
And who would have been blamed for rust on Prince Pratty-Pants’s sword? Not Arthur; that was for sure.
Thus it was that Merlin had spent that portion of his morning creeping up, lifting Arthur’s bare arm with a smidgeon of magic, and cautiously sliding the sword free to set it aside.
Merlin paused partway up a staircase.
Oh. Of course. Arthur.
Merlin held the rosemary even closer and ran.
The familiar network of passages and halls felt labyrinthine as Merlin careened around its turns, racing down the straightaways. His heart pounded in his ears and his chest in bothersome unison, and all he could think as the soles of his boots skidded on the stones was, What if Arthur’s frozen, and he doesn’t wake up?
All right, he also had a moment of Worse yet, what if some princess has to wake him with a kiss?
He slid around another switchback. What about Gaius? Oh, hell; what if Gaius was frozen, too? There would be no one to go about analyzing things slowly and rationally, and no one would salvage them all from danger with a bit of eyebrow aerobics and some deft employment of herbs-
Merlin slammed into something.
Actually, given the relative momentums involved, something slammed into Merlin, and Merlin accordingly ended up sprawled on the floor, head spinning like a flail in Arthur’s capable hands.
Speak of the devil and his appendages, a leather-coat-clad Arthur was looking perplexedly down at Merlin, who lay dazed, haloed by the spilled and scattered rosemary.
“Well, then,” Arthur said by way of a greeting. “Everyone in the castle isn’t enspelled after all-everyone useful in the castle is.”
He gave Merlin a hand up anyway, after which Merlin immediately knelt again, gathering the pieces of his rosemary bouquet from where they’d been flung all over the floor.
Maybe that proved Arthur’s point.
“Merlin,” the prince began slowly, as if he was speaking to someone who was slightly hard of hearing. “Do you have any idea why this happened?”
Merlin snatched up another bough, fumbling for the next and for a suitable lie.
And then he had both at once.
“Rosemary,” he said.
Arthur stared at him.
Merlin waved the latest leafy acquisition towards him.
“Rosemary,” he repeated. “I have all this rosemary, and-well, Gaius put rosemary in that draught he gave you last night, after the training.” He paused. “Lots of it. It was pretty much rosemary tea.”
Arthur frowned down at him and his shaky excuse.
“Well, Merlin,” he conceded at last. “What should we do?”
Merlin considered their options.
Number one: Weep piteously. Number two: Wait and see. Number three: Run away howling at the top of their lungs.
Number four: Follow the terrible, wrenching twinges yanking at the center of Merlin’s ribs and the pit of his stomach, two steel wires pulling him out, out, and away.
He didn’t know where they led.
“Well,” he managed, slowly, “you said it yourself that it’s clearly magic-strong magic. But if it’s tied to the rosemary…”
Sighing inwardly, Merlin tossed the whole bushel onto the floor again, making sure the pieces fell in various directions, crisscrossing each other at random. Before Arthur could comment-or, more likely, criticize-he crouched before the arc of herbs, ducked his head too low for his eyes to be visible from Arthur’s vantage-point, and twisted every branch of rosemary to point towards the source of the tugging in his chest.
After a long moment of silence, Arthur cleared his throat.
“I don’t like this, Merlin,” he announced.
“Neither do I,” Merlin answered truthfully.
-
Merlin really hoped that the sorcerer responsible-for this was much too pointed and direct an assault not to be deliberate-wasn’t very far away. They hadn’t been able to find any unfrozen horses, though Merlin had managed to topple Alfric the stableboy, to whom he had apologized profusely as he seized the teetering body and settled it safely on the ground.
Alfric had been immobilized in mid-yawn anyway, so he probably wouldn’t even notice the difference.
Merlin had caught Arthur hiding a smile.
That had certainly marked the highlight of their departure, however, as everything since had been characterized by sore feet, a dusty throat, and a great deal of getting in touch with the rosemary.
They had commenced tromping through a dense wood, and Merlin’s instinct-and his trepidation-was getting stronger by the minute. The ember in his chest grew warmer with every step, and the fishhook in his gut pulled him along a steady, unhesitating course.
He was understandably concerned about where that course might lead.
That was the trouble, though, inescapable trouble at that-Camelot was endangered, and he and Arthur had a chance to set it right. It didn’t matter where they were headed or what might ensue when they arrived-they would go, and they would try, and they would die there if they had to. There wasn’t any question of it, not with the pair of them together. Risking their lives for Camelot was a given, and neither of them would have had it any other way.
Well, Merlin might have done, if he’d been in an intelligent mood, but something about Arthur’s willingness to plunge headlong into mortal peril always summoned a hazardous magnanimity in him.
He held out the rosemary, tilting it in the direction his resonating intuition indicated.
“I don’t like this, Merlin,” Arthur said again.
“It’s not very likable,” Merlin agreed.
It was probably even less likable for Arthur, who was wearing armor and hauling his (not-rusted, thank you) sword.
“I feel like we’re walking into the dark,” Arthur muttered.
“We will be,” Merlin responded glumly, “if we don’t get there soon.”
“Why do I listen to your suggestions?” Arthur sighed.
“…rosemary?” Merlin guessed.
Even as he spoke, Merlin felt the ground beneath his feet go kind of… insubstantial.
Then Arthur and his armor put their collective weight on the dubious patch, and all three of them-four if you counted the rosemary-broke through a thin leaf-covered lattice and tumbled into a tremendous hole.
Rosemary rained down on Merlin, and he cracked his head on something sharp and cold, though it was getting warmer by the second as he lay watching the hazy, inaccurate constellations that twirled before his eyes.
There was a groan.
“That was stupid,” Arthur said, through a wince by the sound of things.
Merlin opened his mouth to tell him that Yes, it had been, and could he have a hand?, but nothing came out.
“Merlin?” Arthur prompted, accompanied by a rustling and a soft clanking as he struggled to get up. “Merlin, are you all right?”
Merlin’s mouth said something completely incoherent-possibly warning Arthur not to touch the blood that was slowly soaking into his hair-and then gave up on clinging to consciousness.
-
When Merlin awoke, he saw marble tile.
Shortly, he realized that he was crumpled facedown on the tile in question, which explained its monopoly of his attention. His head ached fiercely-so much so that it took him a moment to notice that his chest no longer felt like it was attached to a taut string.
Carefully, gritting his teeth against the flaring pain, Merlin pushed himself up off the floor, looking blearily about him.
He was in something like a temple, columns, tile, and arches all carved of gleaming white marble, polished and bright. A panting, dirt-smeared, dark-eyed, slightly battered Arthur stood not far away, half-bent as if waiting for a battle to begin.
Opposite him stood a very pretty girl in a white dress-blonde, smiling, and lifting Arthur’s sword as if it was a twig.
There were so many things wrong with this image that Merlin didn’t know where to start.
Perhaps that was part of the reason that he started by sitting up and coughing weakly.
This was not quite the omen he would have hoped for.
It did serve the purpose of getting both Arthur and the girl in white to look at him, the former with worry, the latter with amusement.
“He is very cute,” the girl mused, “but I don’t see why you brought him.”
“He’s the worst servant in the known world,” Arthur kindly informed her, eyeing her easy grip on his sword. “I bring him everywhere.”
“I’d gathered that,” the girl remarked, “but I can’t think why you would drag him around to investigate rather sensitive material if he’s so bad a servant. Surely you could find another.”
Arthur looked a bit stuck.
Merlin swallowed and raised his hand.
“It wouldn’t be as funny,” he volunteered.
“Merlin,” Arthur ground out, “shut up.”
“See?” Merlin persisted. “That’s exactly what I mean.”
“Shut. Up.”
“Yes, Sire.”
The girl’s pink mouth curled into a smile, though her dark lashes lay low over her pale eyes.
“You must be fonder of him than you’re willing to admit, little prince,” she said.
There were so many things wrong with this sentence that Merlin was once again at a total loss.
At least he was getting used to it by now.
It was hard to tell given all the recent strenuous activity-Merlin was beginning to understand that there had been a scuffle in which the girl had somehow overpowered Arthur and taken his sword-but it looked like Arthur’s face had transitioned to a slightly deeper shade of pink.
The girl offered a winsome smile.
“I can’t imagine,” she added, “that you’d let just any servant speak to you that way.”
Arthur focused intently on the repossessed sword that she wielded as if it weighed no more than a feather.
“Who are you?” he demanded, a question Merlin had been meaning to ask since this whole strange scene had unfolded.
The girl tossed her hair over her shoulder idly.
“Who I am isn’t as important as who you are,” she noted, pointing the blade at Arthur’s chest. “You, my dear prince, must have very strong magic indeed if you’ve followed it here.”
The color that had recently migrated into Arthur’s face proceeded to drain from it rather precipitously.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” he snapped.
Merlin put his hand in the air again.
“If I might,” he interjected, “why in the name of all that is holy did you freeze everybody in Camelot?” He paused. “Also in the name of all that is holy,” he amended, “where are we?”
The girl ignored him in favor of tormenting Arthur, which was not as enjoyable to watch as it should have been.
“You’re evidently a prince,” she went on contentedly, “and from Camelot-which must make you Arthur.” She paused, tapping one of the fingers of her free hand against her lips. “But I can’t conceive of Uther Pendragon allowing magic of this caliber to flourish under his thumb-not even if the source was his beloved only son.”
Arthur’s eyes blazed, and his hands clenched and unclenched, missing his sword’s grip.
“I don’t have a thing in the world to do with magic,” he seethed, “precisely because people like you use it to do things like this.”
Merlin cringed.
Arthur wasn’t looking at him, but the girl half-turned, her eyes widening.
“Why did you do it, anyway?” Merlin cut in hastily. “Why would you do that to people-to so many people?” Frantically he tried to think of what he could do with that kind of power-what horrific opportunities it would present. “Were you… siphoning off their energy, or something? Or for something?”
The girl smiled, though there was a hint of caution alongside the amusement in her eyes now.
“Very good, servant boy,” she commended idly. “You can’t think my young Mister Pendragon would have come to me, with you draped over his shoulder, and asked for my help if he’d seen how I usually look…”
Merlin didn’t like the sound of that.
Neither did Arthur, if the mortified expression on his face was anything to judge by.
Merlin’s worst suspicions were confirmed as a searing, shrieking wind gathered around their adversary, kicking up dust Merlin hadn’t seen on the spotless floor, and the girl ceased to be a girl and became something… else.
Gaius might have had a name for the old woman-scorpion hybrid that emerged from the heart of the settling wind, but Merlin was wordless. Ragged locks of dirty silver hair cascaded down a shiny, segmented back, and glinting black exoskeleton melded strangely with human skin where the two species mixed. Two of her arms were largely unchanged, protruding incongruously from the glimmering scales, and one of them, draped in the shreds of the white dress, still firmly held the prince’s sword.
Speaking of Arthur, he stepped slowly backwards towards Merlin, who gathered himself to his feet, trying to block out the raging pain building at the back of his skull.
“Fuck this,” Arthur decided disgustedly.
The statement summed up Merlin’s feelings quite eloquently.
The woman-if that was still a viable way to describe her-scuttled horrendously closer, her various feet clicking on the tile. She bent down towards her pair of potential victims, slashing her thick, barbed tail, and leered at Merlin in a way that sent a shudder through the whole of him.
“When are you going to tell him, little warlock?” she asked.
Merlin curled his fingers into fists.
Arthur’s shoulders went just a little tighter where he stood, unarmed but immovable, between Merlin and the creature.
“What does that mean, Merlin?” he inquired.
Merlin swallowed and slowly opened both of his hands.
“It means I’m sorry,” he said.
He stepped forward, drew a concentration of fierce power around each palm, and fired twin beams of white light straight at the misplaced female face amongst the insect.
The energy exploded as it collided with its target, who screamed shrilly and swiped the smoke away, charging forward to swing Arthur’s sword and the deadly tail at once.
They dove aside, then scrambled to their feet.
“How did you do that?” Arthur managed faintly.
“Magic,” Merlin supplied, hastily backing up. “Just like she-it-said.”
“Can magic get rid of ‘it’?” Arthur cut in, poised for defense as he, too, stepped warily away.
“Well,” Merlin said.
The advancing creature shrieked and struck with Arthur’s sword, steel singing in Merlin’s ears, silver streaking past him, narrowly missing his left shoulder as Arthur hauled him clear. Arthur winced heavily as the blade roused sparks on the tile, but there wasn’t time to do much more before the tail slashed to follow up, tip skittering on the marble when Arthur snatched the knot of Merlin’s neckerchief and dragged him out of its path.
“What can magic do?” Arthur demanded.
Merlin thought fast-almost as fast as their hissing adversary descended with both weapons, human face hideously contorting. Arthur still had a death grip-not a pleasant turn of phrase-on Merlin’s scarf and was heaving him to either side, preserving him from a variety of unsavory fates.
“Oh,” Merlin said when his brain cooperated at last.
He spun, clapped a hand on either side of Arthur’s neck (because he needed bare skin, and the prince was wearing gloves) and looked into Arthur’s eyes (because… they were blue, and there, and still too scared to hate him) and spat out the spiky words of the spell.
And then they were invisible.
Sadly, he didn’t get an opportunity to punch the air, as Arthur snatched for his wrist, found it, and towed him into an alcove of gleaming marble, the creature’s howls of rage echoing deafeningly after them.
“You can let go,” Merlin whispered in Arthur’s direction.
“Not a chance,” the prince fired back from slightly further to the left than Merlin had estimated. “I can’t see you, and you’re the only weapon I’ve got.”
The sword clanged against something sword blades weren’t meant to hit-it was trying to draw Arthur out by wrecking his weapon; that was charming-and from above them came a slow and terrible rumbling.
Arthur’s grip on Merlin’s wrist tightened. “What the hell is that?”
“A very bad sign,” Merlin answered.
Arthur shifted, transparent armor plates scraping softly. “Can you kill that thing?” he asked quietly.
Merlin peered around one of the columns concealing them. The creature was smashing every architectural feature in sight-trying to drive them from hiding, trying to bring the ceiling down. He swallowed, his concentration wavering, Arthur rippling momentarily into sight before Merlin hid him once more. “I-I think so. Maybe not.”
Arthur sighed. “Let’s hope for the best, then.”
Merlin frowned. “What’s that supposed to m-”
Arthur released his arm, so suddenly that Merlin dropped the spell and brought him flaring back into color and form, all darkly-focused eyes, set shoulders, and indestructible resolve as he stormed into the center of the room.
Merlin was even more desperately in love with Arthur Pendragon at that moment than he’d ever been.
The touted prince was currently shouting, “Hey! Hey, ugly!” to get their enemy’s attention.
Merlin was about to be slightly offended on the creature’s behalf before deciding that “ugly” was actually a rather lenient assessment.
Which was a nice thing; killing the ugly ones was a whole lot easier.
It was unfortunate, however, that the ugly ones were always so well-armed.
The creature settled its grotesque body lower to the ground, and then it seethed forward towards the prince, employing both hands now to wield the sword.
Fortified with a breath so deep it made his aching head spin, Merlin raced out after it.
Arthur flung himself to the floor, tucking his limbs into a graceful roll, and hopped up again, grinding his teeth. He leapt back from the whipping trajectory of the tail, and his eyes caught Merlin’s for a split-second-more than long enough to express Any time you like, then; I’ll try not to die while you stand there gaping.
Merlin had to admit to being a bit impressed with Arthur’s ability to convey layered sarcasm in eye contact.
He could compliment it later, however: a few slightly more pressing issues currently required his attention.
Merlin twisted his tongue around another spell as he ran, and a concentrated wind picked up against his back-strong enough to lift him when he jumped, buoying him higher in the air, carrying him to land soundly on the creature’s back. The gaps between the segments gave him footholds, and he clung tight as the creature snarled and whirled about in an attempt to knock him off.
Merlin was not, perhaps, the brightest of all men, but he wasn’t stupid either.
Gaius had even called him a genius once-that had to count for something.
He ducked as the creature swung wildly with the sword, steel glinting madly as it whistled past his head, close enough that he feared for his ears. The tip of the blade lodged itself between two shiny black segments of the creature’s back, and, instinctively, it let go, scrabbling for Merlin manually now, craning its neck to look for its target.
Merlin snatched the sword free, clasping it in both hands like Arthur had taught him, heart pounding in his barely-safe ears, steadied his footing, and raised the blade.
The creature recalled its other weapon, and the tail flicked violently back, aiming impeccably for Merlin’s chest.
Merlin shifted his weight like Arthur always did, imitating clumsily, executing a hacking stroke with none of the prince’s polished strength-but with enough force to lop the bulbous tip right off of the scorpion tail.
Black blood spurted, ushered skyward by another of the ear-shattering screams that seemed to characterize communication for the creature’s form.
To be honest, Merlin missed the creepy little girl.
A massive tremor shuddered through the whole of the building, and a fluted column crumbled to the floor. Tile cracked, jagged shards of marble clashing, and the walls shook like leaves in a breeze.
The creature gave a rumbling growl to match and dove for Arthur.
Merlin whirled, gritting out the same spell he’d used to help Lancelot against the griffin, angling the sword-there was a searing glow of blue, and then it sliced effortlessly through matted gray hair and leathery flesh.
More dark blood sprayed, and the creature’s frighteningly humanoid head rolled to a stop at Arthur’s feet.
The lifeless body crumpled to the fissure-ridden tile, and Merlin stumbled off, trying to keep his throbbing head level, and offered the prince his dripping sword.
Gingerly, Arthur took it.
There was a seemingly-endless pause, and then the thunderous sound returned, and Merlin jumped.
Arthur cleared his throat and gestured to a heinous black bloodstain on his tabard.
“Please tell me that this will come out,” he said.
“That will come out,” Merlin answered dutifully, his voice shaking as much as Arthur’s hands, “Sire.”
“Good,” Arthur decided. “Now what the hell is that noise? It sounds like the whole place is falling apart.”
For the first time in many minutes, Merlin had the leisure to remember what had brought them here.
The floor tiles trembled.
“Maybe it is,” Merlin said slowly. “Stairs-?”
Arthur pointed, looking slightly reluctant to take one hand off the sword, and Merlin kicked up his heels and ran off again.
All this exercise couldn’t be doing his bashed head any favors, though it was probably good for building up endurance.
There was an ungodly quantity of white marble stairs-they would have been smooth and straight if not for the new cracks that split them everywhere, including some serious breakages that Merlin skirted as best he could. Arthur’s steps started up behind him as Merlin headed onward, following the curve of the wall.
At last the stairs gave way to the top floor and a wide-open room-plain, airy, and white.
In the center of the space stood a tarnished bronze frame, which held a vast opalescent sphere of… energy-energy crackling in constant flux, faces he recognized flickering in its center and darting out of view. A pale, eerie light emanated from it, illuminating rows and rows of tall objects stacked against the wall.
Bodies.
Merlin’s knees quavered threateningly, but he locked them and moved closer.
Not bodies-well, not corpses. Dummies. Life-sized dolls.
Golems.
Merlin drew a deep breath, turning to the sphere again even as Arthur topped the spiral stairs. Cautiously Merlin reached one hand towards the shimmering surface-would it be solid? It looked like glass, but the transformation its maker had performed earlier made him mistrust appearances here-
“Merlin.”
He paused. “Yes?”
Arthur’s eyes were keen. “Don’t touch that,” he said.
Merlin wiggled his fingers, which Arthur did not find amusing.
“Don’t,” the prince repeated, approaching warily, the better to bat Merlin’s hand aside. “Think about it. She took all of this from the people of Camelot, and she contained it here-right? There must be a way to release it, for whatever purpose she meant, and there must be a reason we were exempt from the effects. What if those two things are the same?”
Merlin shoved his hands in his pockets instead, curling his fists, striving to disregard the itching of his fingers for the wealth of power laid out before him, close enough to touch. It wanted him to have it.
“You mean,” he responded slowly, “that she spared the sorcerer hoping that he’d show up here, because this’ll only work-the power she stole will only go towards what she wanted-if I get too close to it, and it gets a last bit of help?”
Arthur nodded, and Merlin glanced towards the wall.
“It’s those,” he realized, stomach twisting unhappily. “It’s them-I’d be channeling all of Camelot’s life into those things. It’d animate them instead.”
Arthur went to examine the golem figures, life-sized and featureless, built meticulously of carved wood and unrefined cloth. Their blank, smooth faces hosted only indentations for eyes, a single interruption of uniform expressions, at odds with the five perfect fingers on each hand.
“You shouldn’t get too near these, either,” Arthur warned him needlessly.
“Yes, Sire,” Merlin absently replied. He thought he’d seen Gaius floating in the ether, staring urgently back.
“I swear I can’t let you touch anything,” Arthur muttered, and it took all of Merlin’s self-control not to snicker.
Maybe Arthur had a point-anyone who would laugh at that in a situation like this probably oughtn’t be responsible for the fate of the world quite so frequently.
Merlin tried to think of a way to earn his position fair and square or close to it.
“Maybe I should try a spell on it,” he suggested of the pulsing orb bathing him in pale light. “It would put a little bit of a barrier between me and its intention to pull me in, right?” He considered the faces drifting just beneath its roiling surface. “Maybe I can figure out how to send them all back to Camelot.”
Arthur returned, looking first at the globe and then at him, equally dubiously.
“I don’t know how this works,” he admitted slowly. “Is it safe? I mean, do you think that you can do that without hurting anyone or yourself?”
Helplessly Merlin lifted his shoulders in a shrug.
“Start with something very small,” Arthur told him. “Just nudge it a bit. Don’t let it get a hold of you.”
The prince had discovered the very existence of Merlin’s magic half an hour before, and he already deemed himself qualified to give specific advice.
The sad part was that this was typical Arthur.
The really sad part was that he was probably right.
Merlin took a deep breath and raised one hand, flexing his fingers gently.
“Wait,” Arthur cut in.
Merlin gave him as scathing a look as his tortured head would allow his face to make.
Arthur stepped closer, reached up, and grabbed a handful of Merlin’s neckerchief securely.
“Just in case,” he said.
Merlin’s brain was much more conducive to ‘bewildered’ than it had been to ‘scathing,’ possibly because it had much more practice with the former.
He tried to shrug it off-without actually shrugging, as Arthur was close enough to notice that-and focused on the task very literally at hand.
Slowly, carefully, he sent out a soft tendril of magic, probing, pushing, to discover and identify.
There was a great and curious-and perhaps unsurprising-gravity pulling from the globe’s dense center, tugging again on that point in his chest. He pulled back, refusing to be drawn to it, keeping himself steady, anchoring his physical body by Arthur’s hand at the back of his neck. He would not fall in. He would not cross over. He was not prey, and he would not be fuel for whatever design he’d stumbled upon.
Voices assailed him as his presence pressed deeper into the well of captured consciousness-he was inundated by their fear, their outrage, and, most of all, their intense confusion.
Slowly, slowly, he crept forward-one thought, one mental-magicked step at a time.
The absolute center of the sphere was a small, pulsating mass, gold shot with white in Merlin’s hazy magical perception, seething and spinning just before him.
He drew yet another deep breath, distantly feeling Arthur’s grip tighten as he swayed, and concentrated all of his energy on ripping the nucleus apart.
It resisted-it twisted; it writhed away from his struggles to pull at its brilliant, bleeding seams; it fought him, and he gritted his teeth and fought back, harder. He dug his fingernails-his proverbial fingernails-the magical equivalent-into the gaps where that blinding light escaped the core, prying, prising, wrenching pieces of the shell apart-
All at once, the tension yielded, and it gave.
Things went very vertiginous very fast-there was a rushing, a whirling, a howl, and the sigh of a hundred souls suddenly freed.
Merlin opened his eyes and discovered himself in Arthur’s arms.
Apparently, his knees had also given way.
Arthur submerged the worry that had surfaced on his face, shoved Merlin to his feet, and let go, pointedly clearing his throat.
“I told you it was dangerous, Merlin,” he said.
Merlin stared at the strange, glowing wreck of the globe’s base, excess energy pooling on the floor.
“Well,” he concluded faintly, “I guess it worked.”
The floor quavered. He’d diverted the energy that had set it to shaking, but the damage had been done, and the whole building was structurally unsound.
Arthur folded his arms, then dropped them at his sides, and then set his hands on his hips.
“Now we just need to get back,” he noted, glancing out the broad window. Merlin followed his gaze and saw that the sun was slipping behind silhouetted hills, flaming orange, gaudily painting the sky.
It was kind of romantic.
Evidently, Merlin had left his brain inside the shattered globe.
He considered their current dilemma-with difficulty, given the persistent ache still assaulting his skull.
“I might be able to transport us back to Camelot,” he offered tentatively. Arthur didn’t quite seem to have taken to magic yet, which Merlin supposed was to be expected with someone who had had its dangers drilled into his head every day of his life.
Arthur went back to folding his arms. “I-is it safe?” he asked.
Merlin paused. “I hope so.”
Arthur sighed, swallowed, and shifted his weight again.
“Let’s try,” he suggested, with a quiet, fist-clenching courage that made Merlin go a little bit melty inside.
Attempting to summon reserves of strength worthy of the prince’s bravery, Merlin collected himself and held out both hands.
Arthur blinked at his palms, then at his face.
“I need your hands,” Merlin explained, trying very hard not to go pink. “Your bare hands.”
Arthur hesitated, peeled off his gloves, and tucked them into his belt, and then he ceded Merlin a pair of strong, warm, slightly clammy, faintly trembling fingers.
Merlin clasped them, forced himself to concentrate, and channeled the flooding power that swirled within him into a directed stream.
He closed his eyes against the flash of discomfort on Arthur’s face at the Gold Iris Effect, and when he opened them again, it was to the inside of Gaius’s workshop.
“It did work!” Arthur cried, more outright ecstatic than Merlin had ever seen him. He then did something else entirely unprecedented-he yanked Merlin into a rib-cracking hug.
All the breath went out of Merlin’s lungs, not that he would have been able to breathe anyway, pressed so close to Arthur’s chest-near enough to taste the scent of sweat and horses, to feel the tingle of the unconscious, instinctive, overarching nobility that always hummed softly around the prince.
“If you ever need anything,” Arthur was muttering into his ear, “I swear to you, Merlin, that I will do everything I can-”
“…Merlin?” a familiar voice inquired.
Arthur released him all too soon in favor of a manly cough, a hand on his sword’s hilt, and a serene and stately look in Gaius’s direction.
Gaius stepped forward, stopped, and frowned.
“Merlin,” he said slowly, “why did it go from morning to evening when I blinked? And where the hell is that rosemary?”
“Arthur,” Merlin managed, unable to look away from Gaius’s accusing eyebrow, “I need a distraction.”
Arthur grabbed him by the shoulders, whipped him around, and kissed him so hard that blacking out was a distinct possibility.
Momentarily, the prince drew back, and Merlin stared at him, fingertips trilling helplessly up and down the grooves in Arthur’s armor.
“I don’t think that helped,” he managed to squeak.
Arthur flushed.
On the upside, Merlin didn’t think he’d ever seen Gaius’s eyebrow go so high.