Chapter Text
The wagon dropped him at the crossroads two miles outside Ealdor on the afternoon of the third day, and Merlin stood in the road and watched it trundle away and felt the full weight of everything he'd been moving too fast to feel catch up with him all at once.
He'd been lucky with the wagon. A farmer heading roughly the right direction, a price paid from years of coin he'd never had much cause to spend. It had cut the five-day journey to three. He'd spent most of it asleep in the back amongst the hay and two disinterested goats.
He was still exhausted. The bone-deep kind that sleep had barely touched. His back hurt with the same low ache it had for weeks, nothing making it worse or better, just ever-present. The satchel on his shoulder felt heavier than its contents warranted.
He picked his way up the road towards Ealdor.
The image came without warning, the way memories had been since the feast. Arthur at the high table, turned toward the girl. Her laugh. Her hand on his arm. The easy uncomplicated rightness of the two of them together, both exactly what the other was supposed to have.
He stopped walking. Bent over with his hands on his knees and retched into the long grass at the roadside, bringing up the bread he'd eaten shortly before reaching the crossroads and very little else. He straightened up slowly, pressed the back of his hand to his mouth, and waited for the world to settle.
Travel, he told himself. Three days of constant rocking movement. Surely that was enough to make anyone ill.
He picked up the satchel and walked the remainder of the two miles to his mother's door.
Hunith was in the kitchen when he arrived.
She turned when he came through the door and looked at him, that shrewd assessment that had been accurately seeing through his deflections since before he could speak. Then, just briefly, her eyes dropped to his middle and paused there.
Something in her expression shifted.
She crossed the room and put her arms around him without a word.
"Sit down," she said, when she pulled back. "You look terrible."
"Lovely to see you too," he grumbled mutinously.
She gestured at the table.
He sat.
She heated the rabbit stew — leek and potato, his favourite since he was small — set a bowl in front of him, and sat across from him, quietly watching with the patience that only mothers have.
He managed four mouthfuls. They were good mouthfuls. He'd missed her cooking in the way you missed things that were attached to feeling safe.
Then he was up and out of the back door with a hand over his mouth, depositing all four mouthfuls into the garden. He crouched in the dirt and breathed through his mouth and waited for his stomach to finish its piece.
When he came back inside his mother was standing with her arms folded and an expression he couldn't quite read.
"Travel," he said, preemptively. "Three days on a wagon. My stomach—"
"Merlin." She said it gently. "Come and sit back down."
"I'm fine, it's just—"
"Sit down." More firmly this time, each word deliberate.
He sat down.
She sat across from him and folded her hands on the table and looked at him with the clear steady patience that had always, without fail, eventually gotten the truth out of him.
"So," she said, when it was clear he wasn't planning on breaking the silence. "Who is he?"
Merlin blinked. "Who is who?"
"The man." She said it simply, without accusation. "You're not mated. But you have clearly been—" she paused, selecting her word carefully, "intimate."
With a warm flush rising up his neck, Merlin stared at her. "I don't know what you—"
"You've been sick since you arrived." She nodded once toward his middle. "And Merlin, I have eyes."
He looked down at himself. At the roundness sitting below his navel, firm and present and apparently visible to his mother within approximately four minutes of his arrival, when he had been explaining it away to himself for months.
"That's not—" He stopped. "I can't be. I'm not. I took the tea."
His mother's expression shifted into something careful. "When did you take it?"
"The morning after my heat. It was right there on the bench, I brewed it straightaway—"
"Merlin." She reached across and put her hands over his. "The tea prevents pregnancy. But it must be taken before. Or at the very latest, within hours of copulation." She squeezed his hands. "Not the morning after."
The kitchen went very quiet.
He was going to be sick again.
He made it outside, which he considered a personal achievement.
When he came back, she had poured him a cup of water and was waiting with an air that said she would outlast whatever resistance he was planning.
He sat down. He wrapped his hands around the cup. He stared at it.
"It's Arthur," he said.
The name sat in the kitchen between them. His mother's expression didn't show surprise, just settled into something quieter, more careful.
"The prince," she said slowly.
"Yes."
And then, because his mother was his mother and the kitchen was warm and he was so tired of carrying it alone, he told her all of it. The heat in the forest, the ride back, waking up alone in Arthur's chambers in clothes that weren't his. The weeks of careful distance and then the wall at the training ground and the way it had become a thing without ever being named as one. Arthur's hands on his waist in the stables — he neglected the details; she was still his mother. The things Arthur said in the dark. The feast. Guinevere, perfect and soft and everything Merlin wasn't. Leaving.
His mother listened to all of it without interrupting as he cried, which was one of the things he loved most about her.
"He's not a bad man," Merlin said, when he'd run out of story. He felt wrung out, slightly lighter, and still entirely terrified. "He's actually, he's a good man. He was kind, during the heat. He didn't have to be and he was. And after, he was—" He stopped. "He has another omega now. A proper match. Uther arranged it. She's exactly right for him."
"And what does Arthur think about that?"
Merlin looked at the table. "It doesn't matter what he thinks. He'll do what's right."
His mother made a small sound that could have been interpreted as agreement if you didn't know her well, but to Merlin it sounded like contempt.
"Mum." He pressed his hands flat against his middle, feeling the firm roundness of it. "This week, my stomach has been — it keeps feeling like something is moving. I thought it was nerves. Or the new suppressants."
His mother looked at him with an expression of profound, gentle patience.
"Oh," he said, drawing it out slowly.
"Yes."
"That's the—" He couldn't finish the sentence. He could feel the blood leaving his face.
"Yes, Merlin. That's the baby moving." She traced gentle, calming patterns on the back of his hand.
He sat with that for a moment. With the fact that what he'd been attributing to anxiety and his suppression tonic and the general chaos of his body staging some sort of ongoing revolt had been, was, something else entirely. Something that had been there for months, moving, while he'd been ignoring it.
"Do I have to stop the suppressant? Have I hurt the baby by taking them?" he asked, his voice small and horrified. Saying the word baby out loud still felt foreign.
His mother nodded. "They'll be part of what's making you so ill. Your body can't be properly suppressed while you're—" She paused. "While you're with child. They're working against each other. It shouldn't have harmed the child, but you'd best ask Gaius, he would know more than I."
He looked at her. "And if I stop them?"
"You'll probably feel better." A pause. "You'll also smell like what you are. More noticeably. Although I can't imagine you'll be in much danger — it's clear even unmated that you belong to someone else."
He absorbed this. "Right."
They sat in silence for a moment. The fire was warm. The kitchen smelled of the stew he couldn't eat. Merlin looked at his hands on the table and thought about the size of what he was sitting in the middle of, the sheer scale of it, and felt something happen in his chest that he hadn't expected.
He wanted Arthur.
Not in the way he usually wanted Arthur, not the wanting that was carnal and filled with lust. Something that had nothing to do with the heat or the dark or Arthur's hands on his waist. He just wanted him there. He wanted the certainty of him, the safety he felt in his arms.
He wanted someone to tell him it was going to be alright in a voice that held authority.
He had never in his life felt like an omega wanting an alpha. He'd spent his entire life being specifically and deliberately opposed to the concept. And here he was, sitting in his mother's kitchen, round with a soon-to-be child and desperate for someone to come and take away all his troubles, to wrap him in a blanket of protection.
He looked up. His mother was watching closely.
"Come here," she said.
He went around the table and let her put her arms around him, and he stood in his mother's kitchen and held on and felt, for a moment, very young and very small in a very large world.
"I don't know what to do," he said in a small voice, into her shoulder.
She held him tighter. "You don't have to know tonight."
"I'm frightened."
"You have been through bigger. No alpha will abandon their child; it is entirely against their nature."
He stood there for a long moment. Outside the window the valley had gone dark and the first stars were coming out over the hills and Ealdor was quiet around them in the way it had always been quiet and familiar, and none of it was big enough to contain the thing he was standing in the middle of.
"What do I do?" he said quietly. "About Arthur. About — all of it."
His mother pulled back and looked at him, hands on his face, clear and steady.
"First," she said, "you stop the suppressants. Then you sleep. Then we take each day as it comes."
"And Arthur?"
She looked at him for a long moment.
"That," she said carefully, "is a question only you can answer. But Merlin." She held his face between her hands. "He'd want to know."
Merlin closed his eyes.
"I know," he said.
He did know. Arthur, for all his being a prat, was always good. He would do the right thing by Merlin and the right thing by this child. Merlin couldn't help but wonder if it would be the right thing for Arthur himself, given how much he stood to lose, how much Camelot stood to lose.
"Tomorrow," his mother said firmly, as if she could sense his wandering thoughts.
He agreed and let her steer him toward his old room and his old bed and the temporary mercy of not having to think for a few hours.
He lay in the dark and put his hand flat against his middle and felt, faintly, the flutter of movement against his palm.
He stared at the ceiling for a long time before sleep found him.
Arthur had never liked George.
This was not George's fault. George was competent and punctual and entirely without personality, and under normal circumstances, Arthur could appreciate competence and punctuality in a manservant without requiring anything further. These were not normal circumstances. George appeared at his chamber door at the usual hour with the usual efficiency and Arthur looked at him standing in the space where Merlin was supposed to be and felt something in his chest do something uncomfortable.
"Where's Merlin," he said, which was more of a demand than a question.
"I understand Merlin is indisposed, sire. I've been asked to—"
"That'll be all, George."
George withdrew; he seemed rather accustomed to being dismissed and Arthur sat on the edge of his bed and stared at the door and thought about the garden. About Merlin's hand slamming against his chest. About the scorched earth and the things Merlin had avoided, and Arthur suspected.
He went to find him.
Gaius's chambers were quiet when he pushed the door open, the old man at his workbench, which was where he always was. He looked up when Arthur entered with an expression that gave nothing away, which was an expression Gaius had clearly been practising.
"Where is he," Arthur said.
Gaius set down what he was holding. "He has surrendered his position."
Arthur looked at him with horrified outrage. "I beg your pardon."
"He feels he no longer has a role here." His voice was careful and even. "He left this morning."
"He—" Arthur stopped. Breathed through his nose. "He left. He's gone. He walked out of Camelot."
"He found a wagon for part of the journey, I believe."
"The journey to where, Gaius—"
"Ealdor."
Arthur went very still.
Ealdor. His mother's village. Two days' travel at minimum, probably more on foot, along roads that Arthur knew were not as clear of trouble as they should be because he'd been meaning to address that for months and hadn't yet.
There was always something more pressing and now Merlin was on those roads. Merlin, who was an omega without a claim. Merlin, who had been getting rounder at his middle for week, Arthur couldn’t decide if Merlins continued denial was from a stupidity or secrecy. The firmness of it. The way it sat. Arthur had pressed his palm flat against that roundness in the stables, and he had not pushed, waiting patiently for Merlin to reveal his secret and now Merlin was on a road to Ealdor alone.
A sound not distant from growl passed between his lips. How dare he, Merlin knew he belonged with him, more so now than ever if Arthurs suspicion about his swelling middle was correct.
The thought arrived fully formed and with some force and Arthur slumped down in the chair by the door. A cocktail of emotions waring within him.
"He just left?" he asked.
"He was in some distress." Gaius looked at him steadily, the gaze was unnervingly penetrating. He hadn’t flinched at Arthurs little outburst of feeling. "As I imagine you're aware."
"I was going to—" He stopped. He had been going to do something. He had been standing in the garden looking at the scorched earth where Merlin had been and the something had been large and obvious and he had not quite gotten to it before Merlin had disappeared through the castle door. "I had to fix everything first."
Gaius said nothing. The silence was eloquent.
"I'm going after him."
"I thought you might be."
"After I've fixed everything, I can’t bring him back with Gwen still waiting for me... No that won’t do." He stood up. His jaw was tight. "A week. Give me a week."
Gaius looked at him with a look of slight confusion as to why he was being proffered a time frame. "Of course, sire."
Arthur turned at the door. "He's an omega, Gaius. Alone on those roads." He stopped, hand on the frame. Something in him wanted to say the rest of it, the thing that had been sitting at the back of his throat for weeks, every time Merlin had deflected a question about how he was feeling or tugged his tunic down over his middle with pink ears and a woefully inadequate explanation. He didn't say it. "If anything happens to him—"
"I'm aware," Gaius said quietly. "You two have a special bond, Merlin is powerful, more powerful than you realise. He can protect himself”
“It’s not just him I’m worried about” Arthur murmured under his breath as he walked out.
The situation with Guinevere resolved itself with considerably more grace than he deserved, which he attributed entirely to her character rather than his own. She was a good person, he had established that quickly, warm and sharp-minded and entirely wasted on him.
The conversation had been uncomfortable and honest and she had taken it with a composure that had made him feel appropriately terrible, and then Lancelot had appeared in the doorway of the antechamber where she was waiting and something had happened to both their faces simultaneously that Arthur recognised immediately and found, under the circumstances, to be the most useful thing that had happened all week.
He'd left them to it. He had a feeling it would be fine.
Uther had been another matter. Uther had been several matters, delivered at considerable volume, none of which Arthur had particularly enjoyed and all of which he had stood through. There was to be no changing his mind he simply had to weather this storm until it passed.
He left early on the eighth day.
Merlin had a head start of a week and was presumably safe in Ealdor with his mother, and Arthur was only going to collect him, which was a straightforward thing and not in any way the desperate retrieval it felt like from the inside. He set a pace that was sensible and not frantic. He maintained this for the first day and a half.
He was perhaps half a day's ride from Ealdor when he saw the figure on the road.
He knew it was Merlin before he could have explained how he knew. The way he stood, even at distance, that slightly too-long-limbed arrangement of him that Arthur had always been able to pick out of a crowded training ground from across the yard. But there were men around him, four or five of them, and the way Merlin was standing was defensive, not the way you stood when you were having a pleasant conversation on a country road.
Arthur dug his heels into his stallion's side.
The horse surged forward into a canter and he kept his eyes on the group ahead, on Merlin's stance, on the way the men were closing in, and he was still too far, he was going to be too far, and then the air cracked.
He pulled up instinctively as the world rearranged itself ahead of him.
It was not like the forest. The forest had been a wave, clean and decisive, five men deposited into the undergrowth with the force of something that knew exactly what it was doing. This was larger and far less controlled. Merlin must have been frightened and acting on instinct, the magic that left him took half the sky with it, a single enormous black cloud opening above the road with a crack of lightning that sent the men scattering in all directions and left the road empty cracked and smoking where the force had struck. Merlin lay crumpled in the mud like a puppet with the strings cut. In the middle of a supernatural rainstorm spanning less than 100 meters in diameter.
"No," Arthur roared, and dug his heals in spurring the horse forward.
He was off the horse before it had fully stopped, down in the mud beside Merlin with his hands on his face, rain running down his chin, turning him over, checking—breathing, he was breathing, his pulse was there when Arthur pressed his fingers to his throat, fast and thin but present. His face was white. He was soaked through, cold to the touch, and he was—
Arthur's hands stilled.
He sat back on his heels and looked at him. At the unmistakable roundness of him, more pronounced now than it had been a little over a week ago, the swell of his belly clearly visible through the soaked fabric of his blue tunic where his brown jacket had fallen open.
His jaw worked at the intensity of the emotions he was feeling.
He got Merlin onto the horse.
It took longer than he would have liked, Merlin's weight limp and greater than he remembered, his own hands not entirely steady, but he managed it, hauling him up and settling him in front, the way he'd ridden back from the forest except this time with a different kind of difficulty.
Merlin wasn’t squirming against him this time begging him to mount him, and Arthur having to supress every urge just to throw him into the nearest bush. This time Merlin's back is slumped against his chest and his arm across his middle. Merlin stirred as they got moving, not quite conscious, his head lolling back against Arthur's shoulder.
Arthur kept his arm where it was and looked at the road and breathed through his mouth, trying to avoid inhaling more of the delectable scent rolling off him in waves. Told himself very firmly that he was not going to have any feelings about this until they were somewhere that wasn't a road in the middle of the countryside with several hours of riding ahead of them and possibly about to be attacked by bandits.
He made it approximately twenty minutes.
"You should know," Merlin mumbled.
Arthur looked down at him. His eyes were barely open, glassy and unfocused, present clearly only by sheer force of will. "Don't try to talk," Arthur said. "We'll talk when we're back."
"No, you should—" He shifted against Arthur's chest, made a vague limp gesture toward himself, toward the roundness of him. "We're having a baby."
Arthur looked at the road.
He looked at his own arm, already spread across Merlin's middle, his hand curved around the swell of him. He noticed, very distinctly, the flutter of movement against his palm.
The road blurred slightly. He blinked it clear.
"Bloody hell, Merlin. Now is the time you choose to tell me?" he said.
His voice came out rough and low and he pulled Merlin closer against him, tightened his arm across his middle with a gentle care, and turned his face toward Merlin's hair for a moment.
Merlin had gone loose and heavy against him, unconscious again, his breathing slow and even.
Arthur swore under his breath as he looked at the road ahead. At the miles between here and Camelot. He set his jaw and pulled Merlin in closer still.
"I've got you," he said, quietly, to the top of his head. "I've got both of you. Just—" He breathed out. "Just stay with me."
The horse moved beneath them and the road unrolled ahead and Arthur held on.
They stopped at a town halfway to Camelot as the light was failing.
Merlin had been conscious for the last two hours of the ride, which was progress, but he was clearly managing himself very carefully, jaw set, eyes fixed on the middle distance, not speaking. Arthur had initially attributed this to the situation, to the enormity of what had passed between them in approximately thirty words on a country road, but the greenish quality Merlin's complexion had taken on around the second hour suggested it was more immediately the motion of the horse.
He got them a room at the inn. Got Merlin sitting down with some plain broth and bread in front of him. They did not talk. Merlin ate slowly and with concentration and Arthur watched him without speaking, there was too many things to say, and a taproom was not where he was going to say them.
"I'll be back," he said, when he was convinced, Merlin had eaten a reasonable amount
Merlin looked up at him. His eyes were clearer than they'd been, a touch of concern in his expression. He nodded once and took another slice of bread.
Arthur went outside pausing at the bar to tell the keeper that Merlin could have anything he asked for and threw a handful of coins over the counter.
The night air was cold, direct and exactly what he needed. He stood in the yard with his back against the inn wall and breathed it in and tried to locate his composure, which had been somewhat displaced since approximately the moment on the road when he'd felt the movement against his palm.
He'd been thinking about it since it happened, turning the thought over in his mind. The flutter. Small and unmistakable, there for only a moment, Merlin unconscious against his shoulder and entirely unaware of what he'd just done to Arthur's ability to think in straight.
He'd ridden the rest of the way with his hand spread flat across Merlin's middle feeling the occasional movements against his palm.
He could tell himself that was practical. Steadying. The most efficient way to keep an unconscious person on a horse. He was aware this was not entirely honest. The truth was that once his hand had been there he had not wanted to move it, had felt something animalistic settle in him at the contact, at the firm warmth of it, at the fact of what was beneath his palm. His. In that moment Arthur knew there was nothing he wouldn’t do to protect Merlin and their unborn child.
He had noticed the changes before Merlin left, had been noticing them for weeks with a slightly dazed attraction. The softening at his middle that had over the months expanded. The new flare of his hips. The way his centre of gravity had shifted almost imperceptibly, a different more careful quality to his movement. Arthur had found his new figure unbelievably arousing even before he knew what it housed.
He had told himself it was fantasy. The kind indulged in secret. With his hands on that firm roundness in the stables, his thumbs tracing slow circles across it, and underneath the wanting there had been something else, a thought he had not permitted himself to finish. That the swell of him was his. That he had put it there. That Merlin, who argued about everything and submitted to nothing, was growing round with his child. Now the fantasy had become actuality and Arthur was having trouble controlling himself.
Because the changes he had catalogued over those weeks were nothing to what he'd seen since finding him on the road, full rounded swell of his belly has become visible, pronounced and unmistakable and not the modest roundness of a few weeks ago. Proper. Obvious.
He pressed the heel of his hand to his sternum and breathed out slowly.
Merlin was carrying his child. Merlin, who had walked three days to get away from him, who had stood in the garden and said I can't do this anymore and meant it with every part of himself, was also apparently carrying his child, and had been on the road back to him when the ambush had happened.
He had been coming back. He reminded himself of this, trying to regulate his response.
Arthur looked at the sky. Breathed out again, slower.
He pushed off the wall and went back inside, and if he crossed the taproom slightly faster than was necessary and put his hand briefly on Merlin's shoulder when he passed him, and if Merlin looked up at him with an expression that was too filled with exhaustion to be guarded.
Arthur sat down across from him and stole a piece of bread from his plate.
"Oi," Merlin said, without heat.
"You weren't eating it."
"I was getting to it."
"I just haled your sorry ass half-way across the country. I think I deserve some dinner."
Merlin huffed at him. Then in a low voice so no one sitting around them could hear. “I always thought you enjoyed my ass”
Arthur stifled a groan and sat back watched him eat his hand on the table close enough to Merlin's that their knuckles were almost touching.
They didn't stay long in the taproom after that.
Merlin finished what was in front of him with slow concentration that seemed forced, like he was eating because he knew he should not because he wanted to, and Arthur watched him and said nothing and kept his hand where it was on the table. When Merlin set down the last piece of bread and looked up Arthur was already standing.
"Bed," he ordered.
"I'm not an invalid," Merlin said, but he said it without heat and he was already pushing back from the table, and Arthur was there before he'd finished standing, hand at his back, which was becoming a familiar position for him.
They went upstairs.
The room was small, warm and the inn's best, which Arthur had apparently specified, and there was water heated by the fire that had been left waiting. Merlin looked at it and then looked at himself, at two days of road and the ambush and the mud and the general accumulated evidence of the past fortnight and felt something in him sag with the wanting of it.
"Sit," Arthur said, pulling the chair close to the basin.
“You should go first sire”
Arthur snorted and did not dignify him with a response, just gestured at the chair again. Merlin gave up on the fight quickly sinking down into the chair.
What followed was done in near silence and with a care that Merlin had not anticipated ever getting to experience. Arthur's hands were gentle and thorough, working through the road dust and the dried mud, and Merlin sat with his eyes half closed and thought distantly how nice if felt to be washed, Arthur's hands on him in service rather than possession, the role of it reversed, Merlin felt too tired and too grateful to say any of it out loud.
Arthur's hands found his middle at some point, as they always seemed, washing slowly across the firm roundness of him with a careful interest.
"I don’t think it’s going anywhere," Merlin said sleepily, referencing his belly, without opening his eyes.
His hands stayed where they were for a moment against his naked skin, both of them warm and still, and Merlin felt the baby shift against them and heard Arthur exhale slowly.
"Come on," Arthur said, after a moment. "Bed."
Getting Merlin to bed had also become a process, dressing him into soft night things purchased from the keeper at an exorbitant price, settling him against the pillows and pulling the blanket up. Arthur sat on the edge with his hand on the curve of his middle. He knew he was being too much, obsessed even but he couldn’t help himself drawn like a moth to a flame.
Merlin was asleep in minutes. He felt it arriving, the edges of consciousness softening, and the last thing he was aware of was Arthur's hand still on his belly and the warmth of the room and for the first time in weeks, somewhere that felt safe.
Arthur stayed where he was.
The inn settled around him, the sounds of the taproom below fading as the evening wore on, and he sat in the half dark with his hand on Merlin's middle and looked at Merlin's face, relaxed in sleep in a way it hadn't been in weeks, the tension gone out of it.
His hand moved in a slow circle.
"You need to be easier on him," he said, very quietly, to the small life that was beneath his palm. "He's tired. He's been tired for months and he’s hiding it, and you've been making it considerably worse." A pause. "I'm not angry about it. I understand you have your own requirements. I'm asking you, as a personal favour, to be gentler about them."
Merlin didn't stir.
"He carried you to Ealdor and back," Arthur continued, in the same quiet tone. "That's him. He’ll do anything to protect the one’s he loves. So, I'm asking you to be kind to him for the next few months. Let him sleep. Let him eat." Another pause. "Please."
The flutter came against his palm, small and unmistakable.
Arthur looked at his own hand, broad and certain against the warm curve of Merlin's middle.
"I'm very happy," he said, simply. "I want you to know that. Whatever comes next, whatever we have to sort out when we get home, I am—" He stopped. The word felt insufficient and was also the only one that was accurate. "Happy. I didn't know it would to feel like this." He was quiet for a moment. "Your father will tell you I'm not sentimental. He's wrong. Don't tell him I said that."
Merlin's breathing was slow and even.
Arthur pressed his palm flat and felt the stillness of it, the small person apparently having taken his request under advisement and felt the corners of his mouth move.
"Good," he said softly his voice a little cracked with emotion. "Sleep. Both of you."
He stayed where he was a while longer, until he pressed his lips to the taught skin Merlins belly.