hey bby! here's toni! i maybe wanted to ask for a competent!merlin one-shot in regard to his abilities as a physician? we barely get those in the series considering he has been getting taught for 10 years. bonus points if several people from around the castle get to appreciate his knowledge, especially arthur! ily!!!!! so much!!!!
hey!!! tyyy for the request it was very fun <3 lyl
*
The knights were… baffled.
It made sense, really. How long had Merlin been training as a physician under Gaius? Ten years, or around that. That he would be good at it would be a reasonable assumption. Still though, watching his hands, swift and sure and nimble, unwrap gauze and expertly apply it was extremely confusing. As was fumbling to follow his sharp requests for herbs and essences and all sorts of ingredients that were entirely foreign to them.
“No,” Merlin sniped, focused and impatient, “Their flowers are yellow, not blue. At the end of the second shelf down, over there.”
He was doing a tincture now, sniffing it quickly and shaking it a little. His brows were pinched in discontent. Gwaine handed him the flowers and he immediately crushed them with all the swiftness and surety of someone who definitely knew what they were doing.
“Get him on his side, quickly,” he said with a sharpness edging his words. They did so wordlessly, and he held the young knight’s chin with a firm grip as he slowly administered the solution, drop by painstaking drop. He dipped a cloth into a bowl of water, dabbing at the wound in his head and gently moving his hair to get a good look at the wound. While bloody, the wound did not appear deep or fatal. He turned away from the knights, eyes flashing gold for a fraction of a second to make sure. It didn’t seem like there were any fractures…
“How long has he been ill for?”
The knights glanced at each other, still reeling from the way he’d zipped around the chamber, asking how he fell, where, how long he had been unconscious for. The demands had been rapid fire, one after the other, as he opened cupboards and filled a basin with water and cut a strip of bandage faster than they could blink. After a moment, Elyan finally answered his question.
“About two weeks.”
Merlin muttered, placing the back of his palm against the boy’s forehead again to see if the fever had gone down a bit. His shoulders slumped—it had.
“When he wakes up, let him know that he’s not to do any knight nonsense. He should only leave his bed when absolutely necessary. I’ll make a batch of medicine for him once I’ve sorted this.”
And then he was brushing past them with a bowl of bloodied water and speeding down the steps without a single drop falling out, in order to empty it. The knights stared at the door he’d left through as it hung ajar. Silence fell over them like a thick blanket.
“I didn’t know he could do that,” Gwaine said, awed.
Arthur was utterly perplexed. Since when—how had he never seen that—what? Merlin wasn’t a complete idiot? His entire world felt off-kilter.
“Well…” Leon said slowly, “I have a patrol to do.”
A weak murmur of similar sentiments rippled through them, but none of them made any start to move. Lancelot watched the boy in concern. He trusted Merlin to do his job well, gods knew how many times he’d been there while he worked, but the worry thrummed within him nonetheless. It was Percival who finally gave voice to what they were all thinking.
If you're a writer and you see this post, stop what you're doing.
WHENEVER YOU SEE THIS POST ON YOUR DASH, STOP WHAT YOU’RE DOING AND WRITE ONE SENTENCE FOR YOUR CURRENT PROJECT.
Just one sentence. Stop blogging for one minute and write a single sentence. It could be dialogue, it could be a nice description of scenery, it could be a metaphor, I don’t care. The point is, do it. Then, when you finish, you can get back to blogging.
If this gets viral, you might just have your novel finished by next Tuesday.
i wanted you to be the one to stay • an arlance playlist
by @nextstopparis and @once-and-future-gay
this playlist is a narrative one—it tells a story. each song is a progression. the entire playlist is 63 songs, but below we’ve listed our personal favourites from each part:
