You are all things, and you are nothing.

It was only weeks later that Arthur noticed the way Merlin rolled one shoulder before reaching for fresh parchment, the faint tightening around his mouth whenever he leaned too long over the desk, the almost imperceptible hesitation before standing, as though every joint required negotiation before agreeing to move, and once he noticed he could not stop seeing it, because Merlin hid pain with the same stubborn competence Arthur hid his reading, disguising discomfort as clumsiness, exhaustion as absentmindedness.

"You've been rubbing your neck all evening," Arthur said one night.

"I've also been listening to you complain about tax reform all evening. One of those things is considerably more painful."

"I'm serious."

"So am I."

Arthur watched him flex his fingers around the quill before setting it down with unusual care.

"Merlin."

"It flares sometimes," he admitted quietly. "My shoulders. My back. Some mornings it's barely there, other days it feels like someone replaced my bones with rusted hinges. I'll survive."

Arthur frowned.

He disliked those words.

People always said them when surviving had somehow become the highest thing they expected of themselves.

Merlin reached for another blank page.

Arthur caught his wrist.

"You've written enough."

"The correspondence—"

"It can wait."

Merlin looked ready to argue, then blinked in surprise as Arthur stood behind his chair instead.

"What are you doing?"

Arthur rested both hands lightly upon Merlin's shoulders.

"Repaying a debt."

Merlin barked out a laugh.

"You cannot possibly know how to—"

"I've had enough knights come back from patrol unable to lift their swords. I've learned."

"You learned?"

"I am capable of learning things."

"I thought books were involved."

Arthur rolled his eyes.

"Keep talking and I'll stop."

"You weren't doing anything yet."

"I was considering it."

Merlin's smile lingered even as he surrendered, inch by reluctant inch, allowing the tension to leave his posture without seeming to realize he had done so, and Arthur pressed his thumbs carefully into the muscles gathered along the base of Merlin's neck, expecting complaint, expecting flinching, expecting instructions.

Instead Merlin inhaled.

Arthur continued more carefully than he had ever held a sword, discovering beneath his palms the astonishing hardness of muscles that had apparently forgotten softness existed, every knot another silent record of mornings Merlin had risen anyway, afternoons he had spent hauling buckets or carrying armfuls of firewood or sitting bent over Arthur's endless paperwork because Arthur himself could not make sense of half the words upon it, and with every slow movement he became increasingly furious at himself for accepting so easily the effortless version of him that had never truly existed.

"You should have told me."

"You should have told me."

Arthur paused.

Merlin smiled without opening his eyes.

"About the reading," he elaborated.

Arthur resumed.

"I didn't want you to think less of me."

"I suppose neither of us did."

Silence settled around them, not awkward but heavy in the way evening rain was heavy, carrying things that had waited years to fall, and Arthur realized with a strange sort of grief that they had spent so much time protecting one another from imagined disappointment that they had each carried burdens the other would have accepted without hesitation, Arthur believing words would make him smaller in Merlin's eyes, Merlin believing pain would make him inconvenient, when all along the only thing either of them had truly feared was becoming difficult to love.

Arthur squeezed his shoulders once before continuing more gently.

"You read for me."

Merlin hummed.

"You write for me."

Another hum.

"So the least I can do is make sure you can still move afterwards."