A/N: This story was originally posted to AO3 last year, but I wasn't happy with the finished product, so I took it down and set about re-working the story. A lot of it has stayed the same, but there will be several changes and a lot of additions.

Disclaimer: Merlin and its characters are not mine. No money is being made from this.

There was a time when Arthur had thought he'd known what exhaustion was. He'd been to University, after all, spent dozens and dozens of sleepless nights either studying in the library or in his flat with any number of pliant female classmates (and if he were being honest, some male ones, too) he'd brought home after this party or that, everyone freshly dosed with alcohol or the latest designer drug the boffins in the chem labs had cooked up. He remembered enough of the good times to selectively forget how awful it was coming down from it all the next day.

Then there was that military stint in Wherever-it-was-istan, chasing down rebels and radicals for the requisite two years to find out what it was like to be a soldier so he could discuss such matters with generals and nominal leaders of the world's nations. His father had always said it was useless to talk the talk if he couldn't walk the walk. Or some paraphrasing of it. Uther Pendragon would never talk like that, but it boiled down to the same thing.

And always work. Endless work, and it never felt like he did enough to please his father, no matter how much success he achieved, how much sleep he sacrificed, or whatever else he gave up for the family business as he raced his half-sister Morgana up the corporate ladder, making it all the way up to Vice-President at the ridiculously early age of thirty. Some claimed it was nepotism. But the day after he'd been named to the position and finally had the chance to sleep in to the late hour of seven a.m. and take his first real day off in five years, he knew he had earned that position. And the time off. All twenty-two hours of it before the rat race began again.

After all that, Arthur thought he'd known what exhaustion was.

He didn't have a fucking clue.

Of course, he'd never attempted any of that while bleeding to death.

Walking was a complicated proposition when far too much of his blood was soaking into his clothes, turning his coat and his jeans- real wool, real cotton, and godawfully expensive- into a sticky mess that clung to his weary body like the chemical laden fog that hung over old London like a fever dream.

He hadn't indulged in any drugs since his University days. He'd decided they were too nasty a habit to keep up with after a particular holiday bender that had landed him in Berlin with no recollection of how he'd ended up there. But right now he wouldn't mind taking a few of them. Especially the uppers that might keep him on his feet long enough to make it… somewhere. Ephemera, Velocity, or whatever else was available.

Or, he decided as he stumbled over something slippery and rancid, staggered into a wall, and ignited a fire in his wounded shoulder, maybe he'd like a dose of Red Dragon to send him off into a dreamy haze and keep the pain at bay until he finally ran out of blood. Because in the hours after he'd sent that report off across the matrix and fled the Pendragon Arcology, been shot by his father's hired assassins, and somehow escaped to the bottom of the skyscraper-walled canyons of lower London, he hadn't heard a word from the woman who had gotten him into this mess to begin with.

Not that he could blame her. He'd dumped his glasses moments after making it out of the the arcology, disabled the locator chip in his arm, and tossed his mobile into the Thames the first chance he found. Maybe she could remotely enable the locator chip and find him, but he had to admit that he had disposed of any ability he'd had to communicate with her- Bastet- and whoever it was she'd sent to pick him up. And his unscheduled run-in with the assassins had made him miss his appointed meeting and sent him fleeing to God only knew where. Bastet might have a deft hand with anything digital, but she wasn't all-knowing.

Arthur stumbled forward a few more dizzied steps until he ran face first into something cold and hard. A wall. He reached out to steady himself and squinted up against the mist. There was a sign overhead. An all too telling one, since it read "Dead End". He giggled, edging toward an uncontrollable hysteria as he slid down to the glistening pavement and closed his eyes. 'You're all too right, sign'.

Things had stopped spinning when he opened his eyes again. The distant, garishly colored lights had faded toward gray. He shivered in spite of his bulky coat.

'Never thought I'd die in the gutter…'

Hands locked onto his shoulder and pushed him against the wall. Fingers under his chin tilted his head up. He blinked, trying to focus on the face under the hood, but a battered respirator covered half the shadowed face, and there was only a faint reflection off the smoky enhanced reality glasses.

"Shit, Pendragon. You just had to go and make things hard on yourself, didn't you?" A muffled male voice said.

Arthur blinked, watching with fascination as a gray tunnel closed around his vision. Twin flashes of gold were the last things he saw before the darkness became complete.

There was no water where she was, but she floated all the same, drifting along a tide of data, breathing in ones and zeroes like she would breathe air in the real world. Any other mind would be reeling from the ocean of information, sent spinning by the currents of world news and a thousand holovid channels broadcasting noise to minds that neither noticed nor cared that the hours of their lives were ticking away in a steady progression. Meanwhile, a few billion voices chattered away in conversations ranging from ridiculous to profound. She treated them like birdsong. Idle, decorative noise that meant nothing unless one could decipher the codes of sparrows' tongues.

She liked it there in the matrix. It was quiet in its way. There was no pain. She could wander where she willed, listen, watch, experience whatever she wanted.

Tonight though, in the midst of her digital dreams, there were only three voices of consequence. She swam in the binary space around them, taking in the view from optical implants, listening in on them via wristbound flex-mobiles, watching one of them watch the others through enhanced reality glasses. She led them, too, through the maze of streets and bridges and footpaths spiralling through old London like a thousand spiderwebs, directing them straight as possible to their lost and found again quarry.

"You have him," she said. It was a statement, not a question, spoken over commlinks and voiced aloud, for the watcher beside her and the seekers in the streets.

"Found, yeah. Wounded, though. He's unconscious. We're all okay otherwise." Through the glasses, Pendragon looked worse than bad. It looked like he was dying. She turned his locator chip back on just long enough to watch his vitals, take note of the beating of his heart, the rhythm of his lungs, watch the electric pulse of his brain spike and settle into dream state.

Not dying, then. He'd been healed enough to get him to safety.

"Bring him back. We'll be waiting," she told them.

"Have you cleared a way for us?"

Her voice was a warm purr across the digital space. "Of course I have. Be safe. I'll see you soon."

"Sooner than that." She heard the smile in his voice as he broke the link.

Freya swam up and out of the matrix, trading a pain-free unreality for the weariness of the real world, opened real eyes and saw real light. She sighed and relaxed against the cushions. A warm, dry hand pressed against her forehead. "Gaius?" she blinked up at him.

"I know. You found him." The old man smiled at her and tugged the blanket back over her shoulders. "Rest now. You've had a long day. They'll be home soon."

"Are you alright?"

It wasn't the question that brought Merlin fully back to his senses so much as the hands that hoisted him up off his knees and leaned him against the wall, and the fingers checking the pulse in his wrist, sending a blush of warmth to help fight off the feeling that an acid bath had washed through under his skin. "Yeah." He didn't nod. He was a bit too dizzy for that and didn't want to risk vomiting on Will's shoes. "Just give me a minute."

Will glanced over his shoulder, head cocked like he was listening to something Merlin couldn't hear. "Don't have too many of those to spare. How does two sound?"

"Fantastic," Merlin whispered. He'd only asked for one. He drew in a long breath and pushed his hood back, wishing he could pull the respirator off his face and toss it in the gutter along with the glasses that helped him navigate the dark streets. They were useful and stylish and he hated them. It would be better if he could use his own eyes, his own abilities, but even in this day and age you got the wrong kind of attention if your eyes suddenly started glowing gold without the benefit of bioware. "How is he?"

"Still alive, thanks to you," Will said. "Gwaine says the bleeding's slowed, maybe stopped. He's breathing alright, so he'll probably make it home. You didn't almost kill yourself for a dead man, so that's a positive."

"Yeah." Merlin rubbed the back of his neck and shivered.

"You okay?" Gwaine's voice crackled in his earbud.

"Everyone asks that," Merlin muttered. He passed a hand over his eyes and shook his head, noticing that he could actually shake his head without feeling like he was going to pass out or throw up. "Yes, I'm going to make it," he said more loudly, not bothering to mask the irritation in his voice.

"Great!" Gwaine chirped. "Now give me a hand with Pendragon. I don't fancy hauling his deadweight across London all by my lonesome."

"You're a real Samaritan, Gwaine. The best that ever was." Will shook his head, vaguely disgusted, and turned back to tug Merlin's hood back into place. "You did good tonight. Now let's go home."

"Is he going to make it?"

There was a harum scarum seeming fuss going on in the little bedroom-turned-infirmary. Too many bodies on hand in the too small space, all wanting to see the goings on and make sure the night's efforts hadn't been wasted on a corpse-to-be that they could have left lying in the dead end alley. Gaius might have shooed them out with a few harsh words, but his thoughts were on the body in front of him. He didn't like losing a patient. Especially not one so young to something like a bullet. It was, Merlin knew, an archaic sort of death. One that should have gone the way of petrol and real coffee.

"Gaius?"

"I'm working, Merlin." Gaius didn't quite snap at him, he never actually snapped at Merlin. But he was close to it right now. "Hand me that IV line."

Merlin took that as a good sign. Gaius wouldn't be worried about keeping Pendragon pumped full of fluids and painkillers if he were about to die.

"This wouldn't have happened if he'd just done as he was told," Will grumped from near the door. He'd been the one carrying most of Pendragon's weight on the way back.

If the meeting had gone as planned, they would have all walked home. But something had spooked Pendragon in the first minutes of his escape. If it hadn't been for Freya's skills with all things digital, they never would have found him. He would have bled out in a decrepit alleyway behind Mr. Hsu's restaurant, a place Merlin would have told Pendragon to avoid at all costs. You never knew what went into the food there, and it seemed like the resident rats were thinner on the ground thereabouts than they were anywhere else.

He started humming. A twentieth century showtune he and Freya used to waltz along to, dancing around Gaius's lab to annoy the old scientist during their aggravating teenage years. He could never decide if the two of them loved the song because of the catchy lyrics, or if it was because the macabre subject was as dark and as twisted as their own lives had been.

"And we have some shepherd's pie peppered
With actual shepherd on top!
And I've just begun -
Here's the politician, so oily
It's served with a doily,
Have one!"

They'd waltz in careful circles until Gaius finally had enough and yelled at them to stop, and so they would, halting their steps and laughing their troubles away before searching for some other distraction to keep their minds off reality.

They never should have stopped dancing.

Merlin silenced his humming and licked his lips. The dizziness and most of the pain had worn off by now. He may as well make himself useful. "You want me around for anything, then?"

He knew the answer before Gaius drew breath to say it. "No, Merlin, I have this in hand. Go and see to Freya, will you? Make sure she's still asleep. Today was hard on her. And make sure you get some rest yourself." Gaius waved a thin hand toward the door without looking back at him. Will gave Merlin a sympathetic look and shrugged as if to say, 'Sorry, mate'.

Merlin gave him a crooked smile and folded his arms across his chest, the fingers of one hand crawling up to his shoulder to massage the tense muscles and chase away the burning sensation under his skin. The seam of his shirt was starting to come apart there, and he promised himself he'd find a needle and thread later to fix it. But first, to see Freya.

He wandered down the hall and slid her bedroom door aside. It was dark, the only light came from the blue and green monitor lights, small and faint as they flicked on and off. Her breath was a quiet rasp, just discernable over the distant hum of computers and machinery. He could tell she was asleep, but only just, hanging onto the edge of consciousness by her fingertips.

"Freya?" Merlin pulled his shoes off and navigated the narrow room by memory. After so long here, he didn't even need the light to guide him. He knelt beside her bed and brushed a finger over her cheek, whisper light.

"Merlin...?" Her voice was hardly louder than her breathing.

"You okay?" He whispered.

The lights on the monitor flicked on enough for him to see her looking back at him. "'m tired. Are you okay? Is he okay?"

"Yeah, I'm fine. Pendragon's gonna be fine. I think he's gonna hate his life for a few days, but he'll live." Merlin twined his fingers around hers, suppressing a wince at how thin her hands were. He kissed the back of her hand. "We're all safe as houses thanks to you, O Beautiful One."

Her laugh was barely a laugh. "The Beautiful One was Nefertiti, not Bastet."

"Yeah, but you're still beautiful." He blew a warm breath over her hands. They were so cold. "Remember when we were kids, and we snuck into the British Museum and spent the night wandering around, and then when morning was coming and we had to go, I couldn't find you?"

"Because I'd been staring at the statue of Bastet for so long. She was so beautiful, lit up by the security lights, just a black shadow in the darkness." Freya sighed, and Merlin heard her smile more than he saw it. "I fell in love that night."

"With the goddess of love."

"And protection. And war, among other things." Her fingers tightened around his. "Curl up with me? I always sleep better when you're here."

"You think I'd say no to you?" Merlin kissed her on the cheek before slipping under the covers, being oh-so careful not to jostle her as he climbed over her and wound his arms around her. He snuggled up to her until his chest pressed against her back, then pulled the blankets around their shoulders. "How's that?"

"Wonderful. You're like that radiator Gaius used to have when we first got here." She folded her fingers around his arm..

"Is that all I am to you, then? A glorified heater?" He smiled and kissed the back of her head.

"You've found me out, then. Your body heat. That's all I want you for," she chuckled. Her body relaxed as she edged toward sleep again. Her fingers were lax against his arm.

"You beautiful liar," Merlin said. He nestled closer to her, breathed in her clean, medicinal scent.

She made a noise like laughter. "Show me what the lights were like up there."

"You saw them," Merlin said. "You probably saw more of them than I did."

"Through cameras. That's not the same thing," Freya said. "I want to see them the way you did. Will you do that for me?"

"Of course I will." Merlin let go of her hand and raised his own, stretching it toward the open space past the bed and whispering words of power. Motes of light pulled away from the monitors and all the little screens that dotted the room, coalescing in mid-air, swirling around each other in a glowing mist until they finally came together, forming the London skyline in miniature. The motes winked off and on again, buzzing about, tiny versions of the traffic and other signs of life Merlin had seen that night.

"It's beautiful," she sighed.

"Not as beautiful as you are," Merlin said. He let the illusion die and took her hand again.

"You're such a flatterer."

"I don't flatter you enough," he said. "I love you. You know that, right?"

"Of course I do," Freya said, her voice soft as silk. "I love you, too." She was quiet after that, sinking into sleep, her breathing quiet and even.

Merlin blinked back tears as he listened to her. He bit his lip to keep himself awake, despite how warm and comfortable he was, tried to forget how peaceful he felt with Freya in his arms. Because she wouldn't be there for much longer. She was falling apart, despite everything Gaius was doing. Merlin was tired, but he didn't want to sleep. He wanted to stay awake, wanted to imprint everything about Freya permanently into his memory- her scent, the feeling of her fingers against his skin, the sound of her breathing. He wanted all of it, to keep her locked up in memory, so maybe, just maybe, the memory of her would hold back the tide of agony that would wash over him when she was gone.

Arthur didn't wake up all at once. It was a slow process, one where he wasn't sure if he was dreaming or if he was hearing actual people making actual conversation. It would have helped if he hadn't felt like he was floating. But then, whatever was causing that odd sensation kept the pain at bay. He felt it burn like fire in his chest now and then. His heart would hammer in response, his breathing speed out of his control, and the voices would rise in response until something made it all fade away again.

He woke again, a long time after… he wasn't sure after what. His memories were cloudy and vague, like the film on his tongue had spread to his brain. He lay still, trying to sort through the foggy sensations and unfamiliar voices filtering into his consciousness. There was an older, dry voice from somewhere in western London and a younger, mellow voice with the lilting remnants of a Welsh childhood.

"He's waking up."

"I can see that, Merlin," the older voice said. There was a hint of exasperation there, and a bit of fondness, too.

There was no sense in playing dead since they knew he was awake, so Arthur opened his eyes. Focusing took an age, and the room threatened to start spinning around him until he dug deep and gathered enough strength to sort out up from down, right from left, and counted two men in the room with him. He had been right in his assessment of their ages. The older voice belonged to a man in his sixties who was staring at a bedside monitor. His gray hair was pulled back in a ponytail and his clothes were at least ten years out of date. Maybe it was the drugs talking, but Arthur felt like he had seen the man before, a long time ago.

"I think he's actually awake this time."

Arthur blinked and focused on the second man, a kid, really, perched in a nearby chair. He might have been twenty-two at most, pale-skinned and underfed. His clothes were worn and hung off of him like he was wearing his big brother's castoffs. The blue eyes were bright, though, and curious when they looked back at Arthur. "Hey." The kid- Merlin, he guessed- grinned at him. "Awake and aware at last. You've been out of it for a while. Had it kind of rough, though, when you got here. You want some water?"

His throat was too dry for speech so he nodded, a slight movement just enough to indicate 'yes'.

Merlin disappeared from his line of sight for a minute, then returned with a bright red plastic cup with a straw sticking out of it. "Let's sit you up a bit more, 'kay?" He didn't bother waiting for Arthur to agree before adjusting the head of the bed so Arthur could drink without choking. The water was cool and tasted of carbon filtering, though the kid only let him have a few sips before taking it away.

"Thanks," Arthur said.

"Yeah, no problem." The kid took the cup back and stepped aside so the older man could check on Arthur, a process that involved too much poking and prodding for his taste, but in the end, the old guy pronounced that Arthur was on the mend and would be up and around in a couple of days. "How do you feel?"

"Like hell," Arthur rasped. The pain in his shoulder had lowered to a mild throb that might have been bearable, even without the drugs. "Where am I?"

"Gaius's lab. That enough info?" The kid grinned and brushed at his face with a hand covered up by a too-long sleeve. "We're way below London, if that helps. In a set of old Underground tunnels that were abandoned a century or so ago, then got turned into one thing, then another and another until we got here and claimed it. It's safe. No one's going to find you down here."

"Oh. That's good." Arthur looked around the room and took it all in. The walls were made of old bricks painted white and washed with a warm light by the row of sun lamps mounted along the far wall over a double row of shelves stuffed with pots and tins of plants. Exposed pipes and wiring criss-crossed along the ceiling, while the floor was a jigsaw of mismatched tiles. Along the wall closest to Arthur's head, a table was covered with gadgets, monitors, and a holoprojector or two. All in all, the place felt a little like a mad scientist's lab crossed with a doctor's office, but somehow the blend set his mind at rest. Maybe it was the plants, or maybe it was the blue eyes he found himself staring into when he looked back at the kid.

"It's not really what you're used to, is it?"

"No." His eyes closed of their own accord. Too bad. He actually wanted to stay awake a bit longer, start to figure the place out.

"Arthur?" Merlin's voice sounded far away, and Gaius's response was even farther.

He drifted for a while, maybe a minute, maybe a day. He couldn't tell. But when he woke again Merlin was there still. Again? Same chair, same clothes, and with a tablet in hand with a video playing silently, sending a dance of color across the kid's face.

Arthur tried to raise his head to look around. It was one of his more ill-thought out plans, the movement pulling at damaged muscle and bones he wished he could forget. He groaned.

Merlin looked up and tugged at his earbuds. "You're awake again. You going to make sense this time?"

"Maybe?" He glanced around, eyes landing on a bottle of water on the table. It would probably be warm, and have that vaguely metallic flavor peculiar to filtering, and it would taste wonderful. Too bad it was out of his reach.

"Thirsty?"

He nodded and Merlin poured some of the water into a cup and dug a new straw out of a box before holding it for Arthur to take, one eyebrow quirked up as though asking, 'Do you need help?' He took the cup, and through sheer force of will he held it steady enough to drink it all down. "What happened?" Arthur asked after a moment or three of silence. "How did I get here?"

Merlin plopped back down on the chair, pulled his feet up, and wrapped his arms around his knees. "We waited for you at the rendezvous point until Freya realized something had gone wrong. She managed to find traces of you here and there, enough to get an idea of where you were headed until you made it to the lower city. Then she could follow you no problem. It's easier for her to ride the networks down there- fewer security protocols. You blacked out when we found you, so we got you stabilized, and then Will and Gwaine helped carry you down here." Merlin tapped his fingers against his knees, the kind of unconscious habit Arthur recognized from a place and time he couldn't quite recall. "That was a couple of days ago. You've been mostly asleep since then."

"Sorry to be a bother." Arthur rubbed his eyes with his good hand and sagged against the pillows, taking a long, careful breath. It only pulled at his shoulder a little, so he took another for good measure. "I don't know how they knew where to find me, but there were two guys waiting for me where we were supposed to meet. Guys with guns and bullets. How old-fashioned is that?"

"Just like the Old West," Merlin smirked.

"Yeah. Imagine my surprise." Arthur's already wan smile finished fading away. "I started running the second I realized they weren't you. Guess I didn't go fast enough. Not sure how I lost them or where. Must've, though, since they didn't finish the job."

"We didn't find anyone but you out there."

"Good." He sighed and blinked up at the ceiling. Things were getting floaty again. "Why'd you bring me here?" Arthur asked.

"What else were we going to do?" Merlin said. "Leave you there to die behind a lousy Chinese place? No, we couldn't do that. We've been talking to you long enough to know what sort of man you are. You wouldn't rat us out, even if you did know where 'here' is."

"Nice to know you care," Arthur said.

"Freya cares. That's good enough for me."

Arthur wanted to continue the conversation, find out more about Freya and the underground station they were in, but sleep was calling to him again, and he was too tired to resist.

A/N: The song Merlin recalls is 'A Little Priest' from the musical Sweeney Todd.