#though if you care it's vaguely inspired by a chinese myth about solar eclipses

[adhd-merlin]

delirium

Written for the May 2024 round of @merlinmicrofic, for the prompt: "It's you." Merlin & Arthur, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, 537 words

He’s hot. He’s too hot.

“Put it out,” he pleads, because there must be a fire in the room. Right next to his bed.

He’s going to burn. He never imagined it would be like this.

Something wet and shockingly cold touches his forehead and he hisses through his teeth, turning away. He tries to ask for it to stop, but all that comes out of his mouth is a pitiful whimper.

“Will he be all right?” Arthur asks.

Merlin doesn’t know whom Arthur is talking about. Perhaps it’s him. He cannot hear Gaius’s reply. There might not be one. Merlin sighs and sleep falls upon him, dragging him under.

It’s not a fire in the room. He’s burning from the inside. Like the dragon.

“What dragon?” a sweet woman’s voice asks him.

What a strange question. His mother was the one who first told him the story – she should know. The dragon who swallowed the sun when it fell off the chariot and only spit it back out when the thunder-god hit him with one of his bolts.

“The sky dragon,” Merlin wheezes.

His mother starts crying.

Oh. He must be dying. He tries to offer her a few words of comfort but he’s too weak to speak, or even open his eyes.

His mother wipes his brow with a cold, wet cloth.

Merlin has reached a strange sort of acceptance in the hazy space between dream and death. He licks his lips.

“Mother?” The hand on his brow pauses. Merlin finds that, with some effort, he can string a few words together. “The dragon song. Will you sing it to me?”

There’s a moment of silence. He half-expects his mother to start crying again – instead, she starts humming. It’s a deep hum, which doesn’t seem to follow any particular tune – it certainly sounds nothing like the song Merlin requested – but it’s still comforting.

He sleeps.

What feels like days later, Merlin wakes. He opens his eyes and looks right into Arthur’s face.

Arthur stops humming.

“It’s you,” Merlin croaks.

Arthur touches Merlin’s forehead with the back of his hand and peers into his eyes. “Merlin?”

Merlin clears his throat. “Yes. Hi.”

Relief floods Arthur’s face. “You look better. We weren’t sure–” He stops suddenly and takes his hand away.

“Was Gwen here?” Merlin asks, remembering a woman’s voice. 

“She was, yesterday,” Arthur says. “She needed some rest.”

“She was crying.” Merlin squints at Arthur. “And you… you were singing to me.”

Arthur looks down, fiddling with the hem of his sleeve. “You must’ve dreamt that.”

“Humming,” Merlin amends.

“I made noises at you,” Arthur says, his cheeks pink. “You seemed to find it soothing.”

“It was. Thank you.”

“Yes. Well.” The lack of teasing from Arthur is a disturbing confirmation of just how sick Merlin was. Arthur drops the wet cloth in a bowl and stands up. “I’ll go get Guinevere. She’ll want to see you.”

“I’ll wait right here,” Merlin says, with a smile that pulls at the cracked skin of his lips.

Arthur shoots him a look, as if Merlin were being very odd, and he leaves.

Before Gwen returns, Merlin falls asleep, dreaming of cloud-dwelling dragons and an old childhood song.