Chapter Text
Merlin was quite proud of his ability to irritate his way both into and out of the galaxy’s smallest, shittiest drunk tank. Without even having to be drunk, either. He lay on the concrete bench and tried not to breathe in too deeply while they figured out what to do with him.
Having received a full tour of the facilities, which amounted to the cell he was in, he could see why the building was being shut down. The walls managed to be both dusty and damp at the same time, and even the regulars were starting to raise complaints about the smell. At least, that’s what he thought his cellmate had been muttering about when he arrived. He’d tried to involve Merlin, who had tolerated it silently for a few minutes before weighing up the options and deciding, for the second time that evening, to open his mouth and let his brain fall out. Which had promptly, and also for the second time that evening, gotten him punched in the mouth. The right hand side of his face throbbed.
“Get up.” The sheriff who had dragged him away from the tavern tapped the bars impatiently and he sat up. “You’re going upstairs, move it.”
“Why doesn’t he get moved?” Merlin said, gesturing at the snoring heap of rags in the opposite corner.
“He’s earned his place.” He sat up and swung his bag back onto his shoulder. He loved small towns. No one had shown even the slightest interest in taking it off him. “Move.”
The door screeched open and he paused on the threshold. “Hey, one question.”
“What?”
“Do they have room service upstairs?”
The impact made him stumble. He tasted blood and hid a grin. Three for three.
The bolt slid into place on the other side of the door, and the sheriff walked away, keys jingling. He hadn’t bothered to leave a light on when he’d thrown Merlin bodily into the first storeroom he could find.
He picked himself up and kicked at the cardboard boxes he’d fallen on top of, almost overbalancing in the dark. He focused, and blinked, and his night vision flickered on. It itched. Everything in towns like this ended up covered in dust.
The cleaning supplies had fallen in front of the door, and he moved them out of the way and pressed his hand flat against it. He tapped his fingers in the right rhythm and they tingled as the magnets kicked in. The door was thick, but not that thick. He could feel the metal of the bolt on the other side. He dragged his hand sideways across the bare wood, and heard it slide back. The door swung open as though it had been waiting to do so and he stepped out.
He ditched the night vision and tapped his fingers again to lose the magnetism. The corridor was dimly lit, and as he took a few steps, brighter fluorescents eagerly picked up the movement and flared to life, humming. It was silent up here. The cheap government carpet absorbed his footsteps with only a few token creaks.
The plans he’d acquired floated in his mind. The floor had single offices along one side, but the rest was the big, open plan one he wanted. He set off for the main doors, and had one hand on them when he stopped dead and turned around.
A vending machine. Someone, somewhere, had procrastinated just long enough on getting the machine picked up for it to be here, waiting on him. Laziness really did keep the planets turning. His stomach growled. He hadn’t had a decent meal in a few days, since the kind of transport he could afford or bargain his way onto didn’t tend to have restaurant service. A quick, hopeful squint at the gap between machine and wall revealed a tangle of unplugged wires, and he couldn’t sense any connections. It was a low-tech affair, not like the new ones they had now. He pressed a few buttons half-heartedly, then shrugged and kicked the glass in.
A cornucopia of garbage awaited. Crisps, drinks, bars whose messages ranged from the earnestly health-conscious to weirdly seductive. He filled his pockets. Good luck like this might not come around again for weeks.
The door into the main office creaked as it opened, and the lights flickered on. Desks had been stuck together in clumps here and there, probably in some kind of misguided attempt to socialise government employees. He dumped his snack bounty on one and pressed the power buttons impatiently before giving up and ducking under the desk.
None of the computers were plugged in. Like the vending machine, the plan had obviously once been for a swift and organised pickup as part of an efficient centralisation process. Like the vending machine, someone, somewhere plainly couldn’t be arsed. Merlin’s life would be so much more difficult in an organised five kingdoms.
The mess of plugs and wires on the floor had embraced its newfound freedom with gusto, and he banged his head twice and sneezed once before he found the right connection. He crawled out covered in what was at least a different breed of dust to the outside stuff, and threw himself back into the chair. The computer gave a positive little chirp as it powered on.
“Fuck off.”
A loading wheel spun. He sat back. If it had been his idea to come here, he might have approached things with a little more impatience, but as it stood he cherished any opportunity to make Morgause wait for something. His own jobs didn’t leave him bruised and covered in dust.
For someone so clever, she really had a fascinating blind spot for the fact he didn’t work for her anymore. She seemed to think she’d found some sort of loophole by sending her requests through Morgana. The information she wanted was always useful, but he figured a few extra hours here and there wouldn’t make or break her revolution, and more importantly, it made him feel better.
He cracked open the vending machine drink and winced as the weak fizz lit up the cut on the inside of his mouth. At last, the screen blinked a cheerful greeting and he held a hopeful hand to the box, but Morgana had been right, they were being more careful. These days that meant being very choosy what you connected up to any kind of external network, and keeping as much as possible stored locally. It was annoying, and the whole reason he even had to be here in person, but it was also largely his fault.
Logging in only took a few seconds of focus. The system was a relic, and the security barely up to scratch. He did a quick overview of the contents, files and records and message trails flashing before his eyes, before disconnecting and taking a slower look manually. The building might have been dead, but there was something about sitting in a big, unlocked room that still felt like it would be a good idea not to get caught visibly integrating with a government computer.
He only made it through a handful of arrest records before his eyes glazed over and his attention wandered. He remembered, dimly, a time when he’d thought being involved in resistance groups and illegal activity would be exciting. As it turned out, the exciting stuff was too exciting by far and best kept to a minimum, and the rest involved a truly unfortunate amount of files, figures, and sheer fucking boredom.
Someone else could sift through it. He’d only been asked to get it, and he’d even planned ahead and brought an honest-to-god physical storage device to copy it onto, like it was the dark ages. He set everything to copy, put his feet on the desk, and opened a packet of crisps.
One of Morgause’s weird little lackeys would get the job of reading it all. Mordred would probably volunteer to sort actual, physical rubbish if he thought it had been collected by The Great Emrys. The Great Emrys had already forgotten about the cut in his mouth again, and crumbs fell out of his mouth with a curse as the salt dug into it with glee.
The bar on the screen was inching forward at a snail’s pace, and he lost interest in the crisps and started opening drawers at random. Back when the town had been alive, the building had supported a decent number of office workers. One of them must’ve been secretly interesting, right?
The one whose desk this had been must have been the building’s staple hoarder. There probably wasn’t enough paper to even use them all. He tried a few more drawers before giving up and seeing how long a magnetic chain he could hold before it fell.
A fine bridge of them was suspended between his fingertips when a door banged in the distance and he jolted forward. He brushed them away hurriedly and tapped the magnets off, listening. Footsteps. On the stairs. Coming closer.
There wasn’t supposed to be anyone here. That was the whole point. The town was dying, the building was empty, and it was the middle of the night on a Wednesday. Why would anyone be here? Whoever it was, it seemed like too much to hope for that they’d be thrilled to find him there.
He could make out voices now, and the conversation as the footsteps came closer. Two of them, then, at least.
“It could be any one of these fucking rooms,” a man’s muffled voice complained. “Where are the others, anyway? Work-avoiding bastards.”
And this wasn’t even all of them. Better and better. Still, there were a lot of offices on this floor. Anything high value would be in one of the locked, private ones, surely. He’d have to be really unlucky for them to try this one first.
“Who the fuck are you?”
Three men crowded the doorway, staring suspiciously at him. Their hands were on the guns at their hips, and they wore unmarked black uniforms. The short, bald one looked most ready to leap into action, while the other two just looked unhappy to encounter anyone at all. He glanced back at the screen. The copy was almost done.
All three of them were well-muscled, but something in their stance said they didn’t know how to use it. Men like them relied on guns and intimidation, and it was unlikely it had been their idea to come here. That was good. They wouldn’t want trouble; they had something to do. Something that had nothing to do with him. They exchanged a wary glance and he realised he’d been thinking for too long.
“Tech support,” he said easily, leaning back into the chair. Abruptly he remembered the building was being decommissioned. “They, uh, sent me to wipe everything before—” He stopped as the bald one stepped forward into his space. It wasn’t working. “Seriously, I’m almost done, look, let me show you my ID.”
He clicked his fingers and reached for his pocket, and when the gun came up he was ready. He pressed an electric shock into the man’s wrist and caught the gun as it was dropped with a cry of surprise. In an instant he was standing, gun pressed to his hostage’s head.
Things had gotten a little out of hand. Baldy’s colleagues had their own guns up and pointing at him. His mouth was dry. He wasn’t much of a physical fighter. He was fast, but fast counted for less with every additional opponent and right now he was looking at three, unless he started shooting. Which would shorten the fight, but also probably his life. That was his problem, right there. He thought too much to be any kind of instinctual fighter.
He swallowed. “Look, I’m not hurting anybody. I don’t care what you’re doing here. We can just walk away. I never saw you, you never saw me.” The most convenient option was always popular, and he saw their grip relax on the guns. “They give your lot courses in turning a blind eye, don’t they?” he added, for no fucking reason he could think of. The guns stayed level. Well, that one was on him.
One of them frowned and opened his mouth to speak, but paused at the sound of more footsteps outside. Merlin’s heart sank. If this was the rest of them, he was going to need a new plan. Or any kind of plan, really. He pressed the gun to the bald one’s head harder as the door opened.
Two men stood there, surprise written clearly on their faces. They definitely didn’t belong with the others. They had no uniform, for one, and their clothes were old like Merlin’s. The tanned one with the longer hair was immediately, visibly on guard. He looked like he could fight, if it came to it. The dark-skinned one was assessing the room in a way Merlin was intimately familiar with, with the speed and calculation of someone used to being in Situations. His stance didn’t change as much as his friend’s, but his weight shifted subtly.
One of his two original problems turned his gun on the newcomers.
“We were told no one was here,” he said accusingly.
They looked at each other.
“We’re here to, uh—”
“Fix—”
Merlin closed his eyes in despair. Anything else. Anything but the same stupid fucking lie, and they might have gotten a few seconds out of it. He didn’t particularly want to kill his sweaty hostage, but he didn’t have any strong feelings about hurting him. He considered it, but the angle was awkward, so he shot one of the others in the leg instead.
He dropped, yelling in pain, and the newcomers took care of the one left standing with admirable coordination. They’d worked together before, and knocked someone out before, too. When they were done, they looked back up at Merlin.
“You got that one covered?” the darker one said. Merlin nodded. He shrugged and turned to leave.
“He doesn’t have to die,” the other one piped up. His friend rolled his eyes. “We have no problem with you, friend. Just knock him out, okay?”
Merlin eyed him, looking for a hint of insincerity or insanity or both. What difference did it make to this guy, with his soft, concerned eyes? He practically radiated earnestness. If Merlin asked to borrow money, right here and now, he looked like he would reach for his wallet.
“Right,” he said slowly. There was no point making unnecessary enemies, after all. He hadn’t really wanted to kill him, either. Kind Eyes waited. His friend cleared his throat. Oh, now? Merlin pulled the gun away from his hostage’s head. It had left an imprint, he noted with some satisfaction.
He raised it, intending to cause some blunt force trauma with it, but Baldy moved like lightning and elbowed him in the chest, wrenched the gun out of his hand and twisted, firing it back at him.
There was a loud bang. He jerked, stumbling back a step, gasping from the hit to the solar plexus. Bastard.
The two strangers stepped forward and did what he had been intending to do with brutal efficiency, and the third problem hit the ground like a sack of potatoes.
Merlin coughed and checked the file transfer. 99%. He sat down heavily. The screen blurred.
“Hey. Hey, are you okay?” Kind Eyes tapped him on the shoulder, his face creased in concern.
“Lancelot,” his friend said warningly. He was ignored.
Now that Lancelot mentioned it, Merlin was becoming aware of a burning sensation in his left shoulder. He looked down and noticed, with some surprise, a patch of red blooming at his collarbone. Huh. He touched it and looked at his fingertips. He was desensitised to his own blood at this point, it was other people’s he didn’t like. Still, he’d prefer his own didn’t leak out unexpectedly.
The loading bar crept along a few more pixels. Nearly there.
“S’almost done,” he informed the room, to general indifference.
“You’re going to be fine,” Kind Eyes said soothingly. God, he was cute. “I can patch you up, if you just—”
“Lancelot.” Louder this time. Still ignored.
Lancelot put a hand on his arm and Merlin pulled away irritably. The transfer pinged that it was done, and with clumsy fingers he extracted the memory drive and shoved it in his pocket.
“We need to go.”
His friend was right. Merlin did need to go. But where? It was night, still, so there wouldn’t be any transports until morning, not here. Maybe he’d head back to Mercia.
Lancelot was still talking. Merlin looked up at him. He felt bad he looked so worried. He was fine.
“Hey. S’fine. S’all good,” he said in what he thought was a reassuring tone. Lancelot’s face didn’t look like it was working, so he decided to prove it by standing up and passing out.
Arthur dumped another crate into the hold and pulled the straps across it. They looked like they were hanging on by a thread, and he mentally added it to the ever-growing maintenance list. That was the problem with older ships, you could never quite catch up.
Towns like this weren’t good for much else, anymore, but it really was an incredibly unsecure drop site. Not so much as an alarm. In fairness, the government was highly motivated to avoid long cargo hauls in open space, where crews like Arthur’s could, would and did intercept them. Their mistake was the assumption that information could only be obtained electronically. Elyan had never hacked anything in his life, but he knew someone who knew someone in every town in the five kingdoms, and attracted gossip like a magnet.
He slipped back into the building through the delivery door they’d propped open with a brick. For all jobs like this were safer and easier, there was something depressing about the uniformity of loading docks and warehouses and storerooms. This one was no different, except that it currently featured Gwaine climbing the metal shelves and rummaging through boxes.
Arthur wandered over to Gwen, who was sitting on a man’s chest while she carefully zip tied his hands to the railing. He was cursing in a vague, concussed sort of way, because while Gwen tended to stay out of the fighting parts, she was really very good at swinging heavy objects at people at the right moment.
“Does he know there’s a ladder?” he said, watching Gwaine throw things out of boxes. She gave him a look. Yeah, he knew.
“Tape!” Gwaine said, waving a roll of it in the air and almost losing his grip. He jumped down and flicked his hair back into place. The woman he’d just finished tying up glared daggers at him, and got as far as opening her mouth before the tape covered it. She glared harder and tried to speak anyway. It didn’t sound flattering. “Sorry, sweetheart, I don’t speak cop.”
He patted her on the head and threw the tape to Gwen, before lifting the last crate and heading for the ship. Gwen applied the tape and accepted Arthur’s outstretched hand to stand.
Arthur checked the time. “Where are they?”
She sighed. “Elyan’s probably met someone he knows.”
Arthur was a city boy; too much time in small towns and he started to get the creeps.
The internal door banged open, and he had his gun out before he realised it was them. He lowered it halfway, then raised it again as he noticed the third man, supported between them. They stopped dead, and Lance frowned at him. The man hanging from his shoulder was skinny and pale, with a mop of dark hair. He looked up, dazed, a bruise on his cheekbone. There was blood on his shirt, and Lance’s face was set and determined. Elyan just looked resigned. Arthur had a bad feeling about this.
“Who the fuck is that?” he said tightly.
The stranger frowned in Arthur’s direction. “Everyone keeps saying that,” he said, words slurring slightly.
Gwen snorted behind him and he shot her a look. The stranger seemed to sense his disapproval, and take it as a challenge. He hauled himself vaguely upright with all the belligerence of a wet cat. Something in his defiant expression reminded Arthur of Morgana, which in turn activated some distant, childish part of his brain that had to win staring contests.
Lance cleared his throat and pointed to the bloodstain. “Bleeding out here, Arthur."
Arthur wasn’t sure why this was his problem. The man looked down at his wound like he had just remembered it was there.
The back door slammed. Arthur twitched and nearly shot the guy again.
“Gwaine, I swear to God—”
“Yeah, yeah, door-banging wanker, I know.” He slowed as he drew level with them and took in the gun. “I was gone thirty seconds, what have I missed now?” He paused and tilted his head, squinting at the stranger. “Merlin?” he said incredulously.
Gwaine was very, very hard to surprise. He’d been in the game too long, and acted like everyone was predictable. If it wasn’t currently ruining his day, Arthur would have been amused that something finally shocked him. Lance looked at his charge too, but that could well have been clinical concern. Lance had a lot of concern to go around.
The day-ruiner in question was busy frowning and pressing a hand to his wound. “Who’s asking?” he mumbled. He rubbed his bloody fingers together with interest, then looked up at Gwaine and froze.
Arthur looked between them. “You know him?” he demanded.
Lancelot shuffled the awkward trio forward. “Look, I need to patch him up, can we just—He was stealing files, he’s not government, okay? He’s not with them.”
“He’s not with us, either,” Arthur snapped.
“He’s on our side,” Gwaine said suddenly. Arthur looked briefly at the ceiling in despair, then decided to turn, in the naïve hope of a helpful explanation. Gwaine shrugged and crossed his heart with the solemnity of an eight year old. Asshole.
“Seriously, can this wait until after I’ve stopped him from dying?” Lance said with some impatience. He moved Merlin’s hand away and replaced it with his own, pressing down hard. Merlin groaned and squeezed his eyes shut.
Arthur took a deep breath and lowered the gun completely. “Fine,” he said. “We fix him up, we drop him off. That’s it.”
Lancelot rolled his eyes and started forward. Elyan let the weight of Merlin drop and Gwaine moved to pick up the slack. They headed for the ship, Arthur and Gwen bringing up the rear.
Elyan held out a bundle of material. “His stuff,” he said. “The drive he was copying to is in there somewhere.”
Arthur accepted it and separated it into a jacket and bag, which he held out like they might be contagious.
Elyan ran off up the ramp, and Arthur was left standing with Gwen. None of this was part of the plan. It hadn’t been a very detailed plan, because they were an adaptable and resourceful team, but it had at least involved a fixed number of people. There were more than enough of them on the ship already, considering it had never really been intended for more than him. And Gwen, he thought with a guilty look to his left. Gwen was allowed.
He had a bad feeling about all of it. About Lance, and his saving people thing, and about Gwaine knowing the bleeding stranger instantly but not explaining why, and about what the hell he had been doing here in the middle of the night. He wasn’t staying, that was for sure. He was bad news. Lance could do whatever it was he did, and then they would drop him off at the next town and go on with their lives. He felt like he should say it out loud, speak it into existence somehow.
“He’s not staying,” he affirmed. He looked at Gwen for backup. She raised her eyebrows. “Not a word,” he warned. About Elyan, for instance. Or Lance. Or Gwaine. “He’s not staying.”
He would have set a course, but he didn’t know what they had picked up, yet, and therefore where they were taking it. There were plenty of towns and rest stops within easy reach, though, and it made him feel better just to be in the air and heading away, so that’s what he did.
He flipped switches and checked readings practically without conscious thought, and felt his agitation smooth out as the darkness of the planet’s night became real, true, darkness. The hum of the ship and the beeps from the instruments settled back into their place in the back of his mind.
Once they were stable and he could take a break, he picked up the jacket and bag from the floor and sighed. The bag was a scuffed, stained brown, and bore the evidence of years of incompetent repairs. He could feel himself making a face. Try as he might to scrub it out, there was still a trace of material snobbery deep in Arthur’s core, and he couldn’t understand why the bag hadn’t gone on to the big landfill in the sky yet.
The first thing to come out was a battered laptop that matched the bag perfectly. At least Liability Number One was a normal, manual, hacker, he supposed. It could always be worse. The next set of items all came out at once, in a literal handful of wires, screws and circuit boards, hopelessly tangled. He set them aside, and they formed the foundations of a pile of oddities which seemed to imply that the only reason the bag wasn’t in the bin already was because it was one. Scattered parts of a lock picking tool, a utility knife, a toothbrush, and an array of empty wrappers completed the pyramid of crap.
With some trepidation, he groped around the bottom of the bag, but received only crumbs, dust, and sand for his troubles. He frowned at his finds. No identification. Then again, he supposed he didn’t exactly carry any on jobs, either.
The jacket felt empty apart from the memory drive, but he gave it a quick run over, avoiding the bloodstains, and let it fall back to the floor. As it landed, something sounded off, and he knelt down and felt through it again, more carefully. There. In the lining. With the help of the knife – the first convenient thing that had happened to him today – he extracted what turned out to be a whole collection of ID chips, the kind designed to slot into a standard holder embossed with the name of your organisation.
The bad feeling was back. He fished in a drawer for a spare holder, liberated from some job or other. This one proudly declared its bearer something to do with interplanetary shipping. Carefully, he pried out the installed chip and inserted one of the found ones.
Sure enough, up popped the face of their guest, a little younger and healthier looking. Except, he realised with a deeper frown, the hologram listed his name as Will, and his occupation as a transporter of refrigerated goods. He tried the next one. The same face, with glasses and slightly longer hair, assured whoever was looking that ‘Simon’ was a law student at Camelot University. In one of the pictures he had stubble, in another hair almost to his shoulders. None of them had the name Merlin.
It was excellent work. The chips were designed to be difficult to make and impossible to edit. When it was done cheaply, as he had assumed from the bag and jacket, it was usually done badly. Arthur and Gwen’s had not been cheap, but they had been a necessary evil for using licensed rest stops, and Percival had gone into great detail about the difficulty and cost of them. Either this Merlin had some kind of in where the chips were made, like Percival, or these were all stolen and changed, which was supposed to be impossible. Maybe it was hypocritical of him to mistrust someone not using their real name, but there was something off here.
He left the chips to one side and tried the memory drive in the ship’s computer, remembering too late that he probably shouldn’t go around doing things like that. The drive didn’t shut down the ship, or anything, but it was very insistent on password access. He pressed a few keys and gave up, gathering the chips and the drive into his pocket and standing.
They couldn’t drift forever. He had something more pressing to find out, and it was in the hold.
Arthur stared at the contents of the crate. He wished he had stuck with mystery man. He looked up at Gwaine, who tried another box and let the lid fall to the ground.
“All medicine,” he said grimly. “Or med tech that doesn’t officially exist.” He held up a tiny vial of clear liquid and shook it, then examined the label and set it down carefully. “This shit is so controlled I feel like turning myself in just for handling it. No one can afford stuff like this.”
“Well, fuck,” Arthur said. A whole mind map of problems was unfurling in his brain. Usually, they had contacts for the stuff they found, or it was easy to disappear into a town or village. “Do we even—?”
“Know anyone who could shift this?” Gwaine said. “Elyan and Lance might, but half of this is really, really, noticeable stuff. The kind that gets people caught.”
The other half was pretty standard, and Arthur thought moodily that they would need it themselves after the new guy burned through their current supply. He sighed and picked up an inventory list that was noticeably devoid of detail. “Wonder where they took it from.”
“Some backwater like the town we just left, probably, where they get deliveries like this once a year. The kind where if they even bother reporting it missing they’ll get the blame.”
Problems multiplied and reached out with tentacles, looking for new places to go in his mind. They didn’t know where it was supposed to go, so they couldn’t take it back. Even if they could, they ran the risk of making it worse for the population if someone knew they weren’t actually supposed to have it.
Someone, somewhere was waiting on supplies this good. They weren’t going to get them, and Arthur didn’t know what to do with them, and it was probably one of a dozen shipments just like it this month.
He could see the direction his train of thought was taking, and he knew it well. Usually, he managed to reroute it. It was pessimistic and unproductive and sometimes he just couldn’t help it. Gwaine was waiting for him to join in with his complaining, to abuse the authorities and everyone who worked for them, but it just felt pointless.
“Arthur?”
He leaned back against one of the bigger crates and ran a hand over his face. “We really think we’re making a difference,” he said.
“Aren’t we?” Gwaine said.
Arthur didn’t know how to explain what he meant. It felt like writing messages in the sand and watching the sea take them away, like chipping away at a brick wall and someone coming along behind and filling it in. “It’s just—It feels like nothing changes. It’s like trying to stop the tide, all this…” He waved a hand at the cargo. “Are we even—” He stopped himself.
“You’re helping,” Gwaine said, uncharacteristically serious. Arthur looked up. Gwaine moved to sit opposite him, hands in his jacket pockets. “We’re helping. There are people less hungry because of you, because of us. That counts for something.”
“I know,” he said tiredly. “I just wish there was something bigger, something more concrete—”
“You only get to storm the palace once every couple of hundred years, mate.” Arthur snorted, and tried for a smile, but it slid away from him. Gwaine’s face was serious. “You don’t know how many people are on your side. I kind of wanted to meet you, you know. Excalibur,” he said with a flourish. “Before I actually did, obviously.”
“Obviously.” Arthur tapped the crate and stood up. He had to get a grip. The cargo needed moved. They would figure it out. They always did. He cleared his throat. “I still want you off my ship,” he offered.
Gwaine grinned and clapped him on the shoulder. “At the next stop, I swear.”
He didn’t always understand Gwaine. Everything about him screamed that he didn’t care, that he’d go in all guns blazing and come out laughing, but sometimes something deeper showed through. Something that didn’t fit. He understood how things worked too well. Better than the others.
One problem squashed back down into the recesses of his conscience, his mind happily went back to the previous one. It never fucking ended, did it? At least it didn’t matter where the other one got dropped off. He nodded at Gwaine. “Let’s go see if Lance has killed your friend yet. And don’t think I don’t have questions about that.”
Lance was just not that pleased to see them. The improvised med bay felt exponentially smaller with every additional person in it, and Lance considered it his space. Which was fair, since none of the rest of them could do more than slap a bandage on something and head his way.
It was usually funny, the difference between the gentle, noble fairytale knight that Lance usually was, and who he was when he had a patient and someone was getting in his way. It wasn’t quite as funny now Arthur was the one in the way, but he tried to ignore the disapproval radiating in his direction. He could bribe him with new supplies later.
His one and only patient lay pale and unconscious on the cot. There were dark circles under his eyes, and his clothes didn’t look like they fit particularly well. Everything about him was sort of rumpled, like he hadn’t slept, but the lines of his cheekbones and lips were straight and clear, if you looked past the bruises.
“Will he be okay?”
Arthur turned to look at Gwaine, who looked honestly concerned. “Seriously, what is your deal with him?”
“He should be,” Lance said. It was so nice to have a crew that listened to you. “It could take a while, though, we’ve run out of the good stuff.”
“Won’t be a problem,” Arthur said. Finally, something was working out in his favour. “Good,” he added, like he gave a shit about the man’s health. He started searching his pockets.
“Is there any point in asking you not to manhandle my unconscious patient?” Lancelot said.
“Not really, no,” Arthur agreed. “He could be dangerous.” He paused while they took in the injured, unconscious form before them. “Hidden depths,” he said, and kept going. He knew better than to judge by appearances. People used to think Morgana was just a pretty face, too. They only did it once.
There was something crinkling in one of the trouser pockets, and he pulled it out. A chocolate bar. Melted. He looked up at the others, who looked determinedly away. He pointed the chocolate at them threateningly. It drooped in his hand. “We are not a hospital,” he said. “Or a home for strays.” Lance’s eyebrows climbed at that one. “He’s gone,” he insisted. “As soon as he can walk out of here, he’s gone.”
“Great. I’ll just get back to work on that, then, shall I? If you’re done making him safe to handle, that is.”
Arthur shot a final suspicious look at the man, and took the dismissal. And the chocolate.
By the time he wandered back up to the common areas, he’d repacked and roughly organised the boxes in the hold, mostly for something to do. The kitchen-living area felt bigger and brighter after an hour in the hold, but that was really the only time it did. It bore all the marks of the ship’s age, from outdated turquoise cabinets to a table they couldn’t figure out how to remove without destroying the floor.
Lance and Gwaine were probably keeping watch on their new pet project, he thought grumpily. Gwen was there, though, at the table, holding a coffee cup in both hands. He could tell from the colour that it was from a batch Elyan had made, which meant the heat was probably the highlight of the experience.
She smiled at him, but her eyes were tired. The whole crew looked tired, really, when they stopped moving. And they hadn’t stopped much, recently, jumping from job to job on scraps of intel.
“How’s our guest?” she said.
“Our temporary hitchhiker,” he emphasised as he sat down, “Will be fine. And then he will leave. This ship is crowded enough as it is.” He thought about mentioning the ID chips, but decided to leave it for now. She didn’t need to worry about it tonight.
“And the cargo?”
“Med tech,” he said with a wince. She made a face. “We’ll sort it out. But we need a break. I’m going to find us somewhere to stop for a few days. Elyan in his bunk?”
She nodded. “Sulking. He feels bad he didn’t know the stuff was being picked up today. Thinks he should’ve known there would be people there.”
“He can’t know everything,” he said. Elyan prided himself on his contacts, on his information being good. What he managed was impressive as it was; things were bound to slip through the cracks, sometimes. Plans changed. “We handled it well. You did good,” he added.
“I did, didn’t I?” she said thoughtfully. She finished the end of her coffee with a grimace and squeezed his hand across the table as she stood. “Goodnight, Arthur.”
“Goodnight, Gwen.”
He fell into his bunk, ducking his head out of muscle memory that had taken months of bruises to acquire. Noticing the crew’s tiredness had reminded his own body what it was owed, but however desperate it was for sleep, his mind refused to stop. Coordinates and speeds and times and fuel reserves swirled behind his eyes. Twice he almost got up, convinced he’d forgotten some crucial task, before remembering it was done.
It weighed on him, all of it. The risky cargo, the unconscious stranger, all the things he knew and wished he didn’t. And there was the ever-present itch of not knowing the next job, of not having a plan. It would come, as it always did. Elyan or Lance would hear something, or meet someone, and they’d be off. And they’d do it again, and again, and again, and he didn’t know if it would ever end, or if he was allowed to wish it would, sometimes.
Irritated, he rolled over on to his back, as if he could dislodge the thoughts. So he was a little tired. Big fucking deal. He’d had twenty-odd years of peaceful, ignorant privilege, which was more than most people ever got. He could stand to be a little tired.
He stared at the low ceiling, with its ‘go to sleep’ written in luminous pen in Gwen’s handwriting. At least he wasn’t alone.
He closed his eyes and fell, swiftly and completely, into a dream of flying. Not this ship: something small and fast and frightening, like the ones he used to fly. No mission. No plans. Just him, and the stars.