• No words are exchanged as they untack and unpack the horses, but by the time they get back inside, Freya is gone and the kitchen is spotless.
• Mordred leans against the table in the formally bloody room, his long forgotten injured arm being softly cleaned and bandaged, magic free, by Merlin; they mutter to each other quietly, in a volume that’s barely a whisper, with hesitant smiles on their faces. The whispers and the smiles alike drop when the others enter, and Mordred nods wordlessly to the other room. They pause for a moment, Arthur at the helm of the gathering, but Leon once again gently encourages him through the door with a hand to the shoulder, to what appears to have been a storage area. Lancelot is just finishing up with his rearranging of the furniture; a table and several crates and boxes and chests have been pushed to the walls, and a pile of blankets waits in the corner to be distributed.

• It’s dark and cold, where they are, The King and his servant, and the end is coming. They know it’s coming, no point denying it, or fighting it; they’ve been locked up for so long that their wrists, once strong and thick and soft, rattle in their chains. The mould is getting to them, making their heads ache and their skin crawl, but they have each other, and in the darkness they each have a light in the form of the other’s exponentially bony fingers intertwined with their own:
• “Merlin,-”
• The King coughs, and this one word—this name that now means everything to him, and perhaps always had—quiet and rasping and so very very pained, saps almost all his remaining energy. His companion comforts him the only way he can, a cold, damp-wrinkled thumb scraping the back of his hand, and waits patiently until The King’s chest calms enough to allow him to continue:
• “-in the next life,-”
• Merlin interrupts him, his voice more quiet, more rasping, more pained, but far, far more determined:
• “I’ll serve you. Always, Arthur.”
• “No.-”
• His dismissal, his order, is the loudest noise either of them have heard in days, and Merlin flinches, moaning quietly as the pounding in his head, which he had managed to forget about, magnifies significantly:
• “-no, Merlin, no.-”
• Arthur’s continuation is so quiet, so soft, Merlin has to think for a few seconds before he can process what he’s said:
• “-In the next life, Merlin, I... I...-”
• He sighs, or sighs as well as he can when every breath he takes in is as shallow as a puddle on cobblestones and painful as a knife to the chest; his eyes close, though he couldn’t really tell they were open before, his vision having become so blurred he couldn’t tell his thinning legs from the rotten floor. There’s a long pause, and the only evidence Merlin has that his King hasn’t passed on between one word and the next is the rattling breaths he hears from beside him. 
• Breathing is what he focuses on, what he holds on to. It had been a cacophony before; an orchestra of inhalations and exhalations had surrounded them, before the candles they’d been left with had burned to nothing and the others had stopped breathing, one by one.
• Merlin has always known his King well, so when he stops speaking—stutters, stutters, stops—he doesn’t worry, Merlin knows Arthur is just searching for the right words. Always, always searching for the right words, and never quite finding them. Always searching, always being too afraid of settling for something subpar, so never saying anything at all. Every time it happens, it breaks his heart a little, but every time Arthur tries again... it mends him.
• He lets him think.
• Think.
• Think.
• Think.
• Another stroke along the back of his hand prompts Arthur to continue. He’s not sure he’s found the right words, but he thinks they’ll have to do:
• “-In the next life, Merlin, you will not serve me for a second. Not for a second. In the next life, I’ll find you, you won’t have to find me, I’ll find you, and I’ll tell you that I... that I love you, and we’ll spend our lives together again, but... but better. I promise, Merlin, next time it will be better.”
• His voice cracks and crumbles and falls apart as he whispers his secrets to the darkness. He wonders, for a moment, if Merlin were really alive. If perhaps he’d died days ago like the others and he was just imagining the squeezes, the strokes. The hand he’s holding is cold enough and stiff enough to be from a corpse. He thinks maybe the breathing and coughing were just echoes of his own, that maybe he is alone in the depths of the earth. The silence—other than the rasping rasping rasping breaths so similar to his own—stretches long enough that Arthur is halfway further to being mad when Merlin finally, really, replies:
• “Ok. I... Ok. Just... promise me one thing?-”
• Arthur hums, and the choking noise is something terrible, but it gets the point across, and he figures the clicking sound coming from his right is Merlin twisting his head, so he can at least pretend that they’re able to look at each other; Arthur follows his lead, and he likes to think that, when he opens his tired, dry eyes, and squints through the pitch blackness, that he can see something blue peering back at him:
• “-Have better timing, next time?”
• Arthur can hear the smirk in his voice, and he thinks, if he’d had enough energy, he could cry and wail and scream at the prospect of the next life not being promised, and even if it where, their meeting in it not being guaranteed. He can’t conceive of a world, or an unworld, whatever comes after he stops hurting so much, in which he doesn’t have Merlin’s smirk. As it is, the only reaction his starving mind can manage is a single, small tear slipping down his cheek as he tactically twitches his pinkie finger in Merlin’s grip, and mumbles back:
• “Promise.”
• The silence descends once more, and when Merlin speaks, or, more accurately, when Merlin forces his last breath to take the form of words, he realises, in his last spark of thought as his tongue collapses over the very last syllable, that his last remaining companion may not have remained long enough to hear him:
• “I love you too, Arthur.”

As a shaking hand reaches out blindly in the dark, large and calloused and shaking—Gwaine’s—Arthur considers the legacy he’d built. He limply lets Gwaine squeeze his wrist and then tentatively move down to intertwine their fingers, comforted and annoyed and indifferent, as he tries to think clearly but just can’t can’t can’t. He knows somewhere in the back of his mind that Gwaine would normally be the first to blame him and punch him and curse his name. But he also knows that Gwaine is feeling guilty just like the rest of them, and the warmth of Arthur’s hand in the darkness is just as much a comfort for him as it is for Arthur.