Archive of Our Own ^beta

“If this was a time of war, I’d have have you flogged.”

The words, said so long ago now, or so it seemed, bounced around his head as the sharp cracks bounced around the walls. The dungeons were so awfully dreary, lined with stone so dark and imposing, that the room itself seemed to mock him with the echoes.

He really had let it go just that one time…

Merlin sucked in another breath through his teeth, the air much too cold for his bitten lips. The crack itself had fled long before that but that cursed echo remained just to torment him. And it was nothing to the sting upon his back.

It was as if wasps thrummed beneath his skin. Bleakly and with little humor, Merlin thought he might handle actual wasps stinging him than this phantom feeling. By the gods, it felt like the pinpricks along his calves had turned sentient and livid and itched to escape.

Oh, it itched like hell—

Crack.

The whip exploded against his back and, through gritted teeth, he’d admit that he cursed out the hand that held that thrice-damned whip. Mentally, he also cursed every hand that had ever held one and, as his pain simmered he turned it into rage just so he could have an outlet for it to pass through, he may have also wished death to the very maker of the things.

Crack.

“Stop! Stop! Fuck— Stop!”

It wasn’t in the forefront of his mind to be concerned with his own thoughts. They were outlets, just outlets, nothing more. All just to make the pain more bearable. He didn’t mean the things he thought or accidentally let slip.

Leon took in a shaky exhale anyway, as if he was the one being hit.

“Just three more, alright?” The knight, paradoxical and strange, tried to soothe him. Were it not for everything else, Merlin might’ve even allowed himself to laugh. “Just— Just three more and we’ll be done.”

How thoughtful of him, Merlin thought as liquid poured onto his cheeks and he had to try and parse if it was more tears or sweat, to speak in such a tone while doing something like this. To speak so softly, with such… care, that one might mistake this for an act between lovers and not what it really was.

When the next crack into the void didn’t arrive, the next sting into his flesh didn’t come, Merlin was overwhelmed with guilt.

His shame was all but steam now but his guilt was still fresh and simmering.

Leon hadn’t wished for this, hadn’t wished any of this upon him. They hadn’t more than a number of change meeting along the corridors and that faithful encounter where the knight had slammed him back into a wall while Merlin tried to scamper inside the council room and prevent regicide. But, though that conflict had mostly been Merlin’s fault, they’d remained amiably neutral since.

Though he supposed it didn’t matter what Leon really thought of him.

They were both being punished after all.

Crack.

“Three…”

He’d been counting each strike for him too. Tethering him to reality, assuring he was in the present and not somewhere distantly afloat.

Crack.

“Two…”

Now Merlin really felt bad.

Crack.

He ought to apologize sometime. Or make it up to him later.

“That was the final one,” the knight had choked out, whip clattering to the floor as he rushed forward. The sounds of it echoed through the dungeon but Merlin had already lost himself to unconsciousness.

Somehow, as if by magic or the rules of a fairytale, Merlin did not wake up alone. Not on a cold dungeon’s floor, not even in his own room.

Here he was, lying in, perhaps, the softest bed he’d ever been on. His chest to an impossibly plush comforter, his cheek smushed against something harder and warmer than the usual pillow.

Oh, now that he thought about it, it really was quite warm here. Definitely not his room then, the draft always killed him when he lied down…

Here…

Where was here?

“Shhhh- Shh…” there, from above — a voice. Deep with masculinity, melodious from youth, it trembled under the burden of guilt and inexperience at shushing people.

“Sleep.” Gentle fingers carded through his hair. Perhaps it was not only the pull of the earth that led Merlin to sink in deeper. “I’ll keep watch, you’ll be safe.”

“I’ll keep you safe,” that tone was so full of conviction, the conviction of a soldier. Merlin’s eyes tried to blink awake with revelation but couldn’t in the face of such formidable comfort. “…I promise.”

“It looks like the sun.” Leon’s voice sounded strained.

Within the confines of the knight’s room, the sounds didn’t bounce and echo. When Merlin breathed, it was to himself only. When Leon spoke, the stone didn’t steal his voice away.

“What does?” Merlin took the bait weakly, voice barely audible to his own ringing ears. Maybe the other man could.

“The scar on your chest.”

Ah.

Even a proper and composed man like Leon couldn’t refrain from commenting on it. Merlin himself hadn’t looked at it for a long while, had barely dared look at himself recently. Somehow, held within the gaze of a mirror, he was overwhelmed with disgust.

And, truthfully, he didn’t see the comparison.

“If you say so.” He was only replying to fill the silence, relishing in the lack of echo yet flinching at each reply.

“Does it hurt you still?” Leon murmured back, careful and soft and Merlin reeled from the strangeness of it. So much so that he forgot to ask whether he was referring to the old burn mark at his chest of the lashes he was in the process of bandaging for him.

And Leon, who had taken upon the burden to please a mere servant like he’d sworn upon it, spoke again.

“It suits you,” he said then backtracked in a way much alike Gwen, “Not that I wish for you to have a scar, not at all, I just— I hope it doesn’t hurt— What I meant is, now that it is here, it doesn’t make you look bad. It— Well, it’s a bit like those chapel works, if you’ve been to one—”

Merlin’s head ached, though he couldn’t pinpoint the exact cause. Leon’s efforts were nice, if misguided and wholly ineffective, but he shut him up by slumping forward anyway. His wounds throbbed, his head throbbed, his heart should’ve been throbbing because there was someone who’d looked at his scars and seen such obvious signs of his secrecy and was taking care of him anyway.

He wanted to do a number of things, the first perhaps being to thank this strange knight. The second being to ask if he’d hit his head.

Merlin closed his eyes instead and pretended not to think about anything at all.