Work Text:
Day 10 — Long Distance | romantic
The playlist had started as a joke.
Percy — whose full name was Percival, which he never used, which had led to several months of Merlin referring to him only as "Gwen's long-distance rugby player boyfriend" before being corrected — Percy had made Gwen a playlist at the end of last summer when he'd moved temporarily to Edinburgh for a coaching internship. One playlist. Sixty songs. Things I'd play you if you were here.
Gwen had added forty songs. Percy had added thirty more. There had been negotiations — Percy had added a song from a band Gwen found genuinely unlistenable and she had removed it and he had put it back and she had put a response song directly after it and he had retaliated and at some point this had become a bilateral communication in musical form that now occupied most of the car.
Four hundred and twelve songs. Ten months. A year of morning texts and night calls and care packages that always arrived slightly battered by the Royal Mail but somehow always included the right things.
The arrivals board said: Edinburgh, EH — ON TIME.
Gwen had been at this airport for forty-five minutes. She had arrived early because she couldn't stay in the flat without walking around it in circles, and Merlin had driven her because she'd started to say I'll take the bus and he'd said I'll drive you and that had been the end of that discussion.
He was sitting beside her on the bench outside arrivals with a cup of tea he'd bought her and which she was not drinking because she'd forgotten it was there.
"He's landed," she said, checking her phone for the fourth time. "It says landed."
"It said landed twenty minutes ago," Merlin said. "He has to get through arrivals."
"What if something—"
"Gwen."
"I know. I know." She picked up the tea. Drank some of it. "It's stupid. I talk to him every day."
"It's not stupid."
She'd talked to him on the phone last night and the night before, and she could describe the Edinburgh flat to you in accurate detail because he'd given her a video tour in September, and she knew he took his coffee too strong and always lost his left glove specifically, never both, always the left — but here was the thing about long distance that she'd never been able to fully articulate to people who hadn't done it.
You could know someone completely and still miss them like a physical absence. Those were not contradictory things.
The arrivals doors opened. People came through in the standard disorganized way of arrivals — efficient businesspeople, families with overloaded trolleys, students with too much luggage. She was watching the doors.
And then Percy came through them.
He was taller than she always slightly forgot between visits. He was carrying a duffel bag and a carrier bag of what she could already tell was a gift of some kind — he always brought her something, always something small and Edinburgh-specific — and he was looking at the crowd with the focused attention of someone looking for a specific face.
He found her face.
He smiled.
She was already moving, because her feet had decided on her behalf, and then they were standing at the arrivals barrier and she was hugging him with both arms and he was hugging her back with the same quality of completeness — not tentative, not half-hearted, the kind of hug that meant yes, this, you, specifically, I have been waiting for this.
"Hi," he said, into her hair.
"Hi," she said.
She could feel him laughing, slightly, and she was probably crying slightly, and behind them she could hear Merlin making a quiet sound of the kind he made when something was genuinely nice and he didn't want to interrupt it.
She didn't let go for a little while.
"Your playlist," she said finally, still mostly into his shoulder. "Four hundred and twelve songs."
"Four hundred and thirteen," he said. "I added one last night."
She leaned back to look at him. "Which one?"
He told her. She laughed. It was exactly right.
Merlin was standing a respectful distance away, deeply invested in his tea.
"Merlin drove me," she said.
Percy looked at Merlin with the slightly wary fondness he'd developed over many video calls. "Yeah?"
"He was hovering in my flat," Merlin said.
"I was not—" Gwen started.
"She was walking in circles," Merlin told Percy.
"I know," Percy said. "She does that." He said it the way you say things about someone you know extremely well, comfortable and fond, and Gwen felt the thing that had been held tight in her chest for ten months slowly, gratefully, release.
She took his hand. They walked to the car.
Four hundred and thirteen songs. Ten months. A year of building something careful and real across distance.
They were home now. Both of them.