Chapter Text
Merlin was attempting to figure out how he was going to balance three plates of food and a pitcher of wine with one hand when the Basilisk was born.
He was in Arthur's chambers, far from the source of the magic, but he felt it all the same, the sudden wave of nausea and dread and wrong that made the world tilt dizzily before his eyes, and before he knew it, the floor was alarmingly close to his face and Arthur's voice was echoing distantly in his ears, confused and panicked in a way he rarely heard before.
"- Merlin? Merlin, answer me, what's wrong -"
So many things were wrong. Merlin gritted his teeth, forcing himself to his feet so abruptly it almost sent him reeling again, and grabbed onto Arthur's wrist for support.
"Sorry," he gasped out. "Um. I have - um -"
Arthur's face came into view, blurred and distant. He felt his hair being brushed away from his face, a cool hand pressing to his forehead.
"Are you sick? Where's the guard - send for Gaius immediately -"
"What?" There's a hissing, echoing around his head, a snake-like noise that he shouldn't be able to hear from all the way up in the King's chambers. "I mean, yes, of course, I'm sick, I want to go to Gaius -"
Arthur immediately picked up the fact that something was amiss, and caught Merlin's other hand.
"There's something you're not telling me," he said lowly, and Merlin opened his mouth to protest, but another wave of sickness snatched the words from his mouth, and he staggered, almost falling against the wall. Arthur, his eyes dark with worry, made a small noise of frustration.
"Never mind - just go to Gaius, get help. Listen to me - do not go outside the castle and do something stupid. Understand?"
"Of course, Arthur," said Merlin, flashing him an innocent smile, then stumbled hurriedly out of the castle and did something stupid.
Well. It wasn't entirely stupid, at the time. He hadn't known that it was a Basilisk that had been born, he had just known that some powerful magical entity had appeared out of nowhere in the middle of Camelot and that if he didn't do something now, people would get hurt. He ran through the streets, following the trail of malicious intent and whispered hissing in his ear, and skidded to a halt in front of the butcher's.
He probably should have knocked first, but malicious magical entities appearing out of nowhere in the middle of the town seemed to justify a mild breaking-in-and-entering, so he politely asked the door to unlock with a thin stream of magic, and ran out into the small patch of grassy land just behind the building, where the hen coops were. For a moment, he didn't see anything wrong. Just a few chickens sitting silently in the grass, a couple of eggs in the straw, and a monstrous looking baby snake with gleaming yellow eyes.
It took an embarrassingly long time for Merlin to realise the chickens were dead.
"Oh," he said.
That hadn't been a good idea either, because the baby snake startled at the noise and whipped around to face him. Merlin had just enough time to recall a passage from a book on monsters he had read once -
A Basilisk — otherwise known as the King of Serpents — is a bright green snake, which can grow to an enormous size -
and remembered with a swooping feeling of dread that whoever looked directly into a Basilisk's eyes died immediately
born from a chicken egg hatched beneath a toad
(well, that explained what the frog was doing in the chicken coop)
and then everything went dark.
He woke up with a start, and ended up accidentally headbutting the person who was leaning over him anxiously.
"Ow," they said simultaneously, and Merlin remembered what happened. In a flurry of panic, he scrambled to his feet, and cursed when his legs promptly gave out.
"Ow," he said again, and he looked up to see Matthew, the butcher's son, rubbing his forehead and looking at him in a mixture of shock and fear.
"How - what -" Matthew looked ready to faint. "You were dead -"
Right, the Basilisk. That explained why he was freezing - dead bodies didn't exactly have the ability to regulate their own temperature. Merlin shook his head, shivering, trying to clear his thoughts.
"Was I?" he replied mildly. "I don't remember."
"You weren't breathing," said Matthew hysterically, and Merlin suddenly thought of something that made his heart stop.
"Oh, no. Did - did you tell anyone? About me dying?" Gods, if Arthur had found out -
"I thought you said you didn't die!" Matthew cried. "And no, of course not! What do you think the guards would do if I turned up on the castle steps with your dead body, saying that I just found it in my back garden? They would behead me on the spot! The king would execute me! The servants would tie me to a bunch of horses and rip my body apart!"
Sagging back against the wall with a sigh, Merlin closed his eyes. "Yeah, you're probably right."
Matthew looked at him in disbelief.
Now that he was sure that Arthur wouldn't come crashing through the door with a small army, Merlin began to formulate a plan.
"It may have caught your attention that there is something rather ... odd, in your chicken coop," he began cautiously. Matthew scoffed.
"You mean the Basilisk that killed all my chickens and almost killed you? Yeah, I think that's rather out of place."
Merlin's mind stuttered to a halt. He stared up at Matthew, wide-eyed.
"How -?"
Quickly, Matthew hushed him, a cheeky smile playing over his lips.
"My grandmother," he said. "She lived before the Purge, and she used to tell me about all these magical creatures. Um - you won't tell, will you? I swear I'm not practising sorcery, I just heard about them -"
"I won't," said Merlin, grinning. "But, uh - you probably shouldn't go around saying that. Just in case."
"... Right." Matthew cleared his throat, looking towards the garden. "I used a poker and shut it inside the chicken coop. I think, if we go there now and find a way to kill it ..."
The crow of the rooster is fatal to it, Merlin remembered. That would come in handy, then. Now, where could he get a rooster ...?
Matthew trailed off, and Merlin looked towards the chicken coop. The door was open.
"Are you sure you locked it?" he said, frowning. The door seemed a bit battered, now that he looked at it, small splinters of wood hanging off the frame. It almost looked as if -
Matthew went pale.
"It broke out."
Arthur had been hanging out with his men, minding his own business, in the knight's quarters, when Merlin burst into the room.
He hadn't seen Merlin since that morning, when he had suddenly collapsed, and now that he thought about it, it had probably been a little naive of him to assume that Merlin would have listened to him and gone straight to Gaius. Merlin skidded to a halt, red in the face and looking like he'd just run the entire length of the lower town.
Arthur watched on in utter confusion as Merlin said something he'd never thought he would hear him say in his life.
"Gwaine," he gasped out. "I need a rooster. Stat."
What?
Besides him, Gwaine beamed, unfazed, threw back the rest of his drink, and reached underneath his bed and pulled out a wriggling sack of something, tossing it to Merlin.
"Righty-ho, here you go."
The sack hit Merlin in the face and almost knocked him over. Arthur watched it all unfold in bewilderment.
Merlin cautiously opened the mouth of the sack, and a cloud of scarlet feathers immediately flew up into his face, accompanied by some very affronted squawking. He coughed, waving the feathers away, and closed the sack hastily.
"Cheers, Gwaine," he said, a relieved sort of grin on his face. "I'll buy you a drink tomorrow, yeah? And, uh - Arthur, this is sort of a life or death situation, so please don't fire me for this."
"I'll hold you to that," Gwaine replied cheerfully, going back to his drink like he hadn't just pulled a rooster in a sack from underneath his bed. Merlin waved and sprinted out of the door again, the sack bouncing uncomfortably against his back. Arthur stared.
"What just happened?" asked Leon, echoing his confusion.
When Merlin stumbled into his chambers later that evening, jacket askew, the hem of his trousers pecked to shreds, and rooster feathers in his hair, Arthur couldn't even think of anything to say. He heaved a sigh.
"Did anyone die?" he asked eventually, deciding that it would be a waste of effort to bother to ask for an explanation. Merlin blinked at him dumbly.
"Um," he said. "Er - no?"
"That's fine, then," said Arthur, yawning. "Come back to bed. Oh - for goodness' sake, wash up first, why you smell like chickens -?"
(Needless to say, if anyone noticed the rooster feathers in Arthur's hair the next morning, nobody said anything.)