Work Text:
Thirty Days of Light
Day 1 — Coming Out | hopeful
"The Wrong Speech (The Right Words)"
Merlin had been rehearsing since February.
He'd written the first draft in the margins of his Intro to Biochemistry notes, small careful letters between diagrams of cell membranes. He'd revised it at 2 a.m. in the university library, hunched over his laptop while Gwen slept in the armchair opposite him, her highlighter still loosely clasped in her hand. He'd practiced it in the shower, in the mirror, while walking the long way around campus to avoid the shortcut past the rugby pitch where Arthur Pendragon and his horrible, loud, objectively attractive entourage trained on Tuesday and Thursday mornings.
The speech had a structure. An introduction. Three supporting points. A conclusion that left room for questions.
The speech was, objectively, excellent.
He had left it entirely in his room.
What happened instead was this: it was the first of June, and his mum had come up to Camelot University for the bank holiday weekend, and they were sitting in the little café on Albion Street with the peeling paint and the genuinely criminal scones, and she'd asked him, very casually, how things were going — really going, Merlin, not the version you put in your texts — and he'd opened his mouth to say fine, great, totally normal, please stop looking at me like that —
And instead what came out was: "I think I'm gay, Mum. I'm — yeah. I'm gay. I've known for a while, actually, since I was about fifteen, and I've been meaning to say it, I had this whole — I had a speech, it was really good, I left it in my room, the point is I'm gay and I think that's probably, you know. A thing."
Silence.
The café made its café noises. The coffee machine. Someone's spoon against a ceramic cup. A door opening and the brief intrusion of traffic.
Hunith Emrys put down her tea. She looked at her son — his ridiculous ears, his nervous hands, the way he was bracing like she might throw something — and she said, "I know, love."
Merlin blinked. "You—"
"Since you were fifteen, you said." She picked her tea back up. "Try thirteen. Possibly twelve. There was a phase where you were very intensely interested in that footballer on the telly."
"I watched football for other reasons."
"Merlin."
"I watched football for him specifically," Merlin admitted. "He was very — anyway. You knew."
"I was waiting for you to tell me." She reached across the table and squeezed his hand once, firmly, the way she'd done when he was small and frightened of things. "How does it feel? Saying it out loud?"
He thought about it honestly, which the speech wouldn't have allowed him to do — the speech had a planned answer for this question, something measured and grateful. What he felt instead was not measured or grateful. It was enormous and strange and a little like standing up too quickly, the world rearranging itself around a new axis.
"Like I've been holding my breath for three years," he said slowly, "and I've just — stopped."
She smiled, and it was the smile she'd always reserved for things she thought were genuinely good. Not the polite smile, not the tired smile. The real one. "Then breathe, sweetheart."
He laughed. It came out a little wet, which was embarrassing, but she didn't comment, just passed him a napkin across the table like this was perfectly ordinary and the world was not, in fact, entirely rearranging itself around him.
Later, walking back to his dorm in the early June evening — golden light on the old stone buildings, the smell of cut grass from the quad — he passed a group of students hanging a rainbow banner across the entrance to the student union. Pride Month. He'd known it was coming; he'd watched it approach all year from a careful distance, like a comet he wasn't sure was a threat.
He stopped.
He looked at the banner.
A girl with paint on her hands looked down at him from the ladder. "You right?"
"Yes," he said. "Sorry. I just—" He gestured vaguely at the banner, at the street, at the whole of it. "Happy Pride."
She grinned. "Happy Pride." Then she went back to hammering.
He stood there another few seconds, hands in his pockets, three years of held breath finally gone.
Then he walked home and retrieved his speech from his desk and put it in the bin, because it had been a good speech, but it had not been his.
Day 2 — Enemies to Lovers | romantic
"What He Did With His Hands"
The thing about Arthur Pendragon, Merlin had long maintained, was that he was objectively the worst person at Camelot University.
This was not a controversial opinion. It was simply accurate. Arthur Pendragon was the kind of person who corrected lecturers in front of the whole seminar and was right about it. He was the kind of person who took up too much space in corridors and didn't notice, because he had never once considered that the world might not be arranged for his convenience. He was captain of the rugby team, president of the debating society, and possessed of a jawline that Merlin found both irrelevant and deeply annoying.
They'd had four arguments in the past year.
The first was about lecture theatre seating, which should not have been a source of conflict and yet somehow was. The second was about a collaborative philosophy essay that Merlin had objected to on moral grounds which Arthur had called "dramatic." The third was about Arthur's rugby team blocking the bicycle racks for forty minutes while they had what appeared to be a team meeting about nothing. The fourth had been two weeks ago, overheard gossip that Merlin might have misrepresented slightly in his telling of it, and he would not be revisiting that.
The point was: Arthur Pendragon was the worst.
Merlin was on his way back from his mother's when he passed the pub on the corner of Albion and Market Street. He wasn't paying attention. He had been cycling through the memory of the afternoon — I know, love, and the way that had felt — and so he almost walked past the window entirely, except that the raised voice cut through his thinking.
Not loud, exactly. Aggressive-quiet. The kind of voice that makes a scene while performing the act of not making one.
He stopped.
Inside the pub, visible through the window: two men at the bar, one of whom Merlin didn't recognize, both of whom were directing their aggressive-quiet voices at a couple three stools down. A young man and his boyfriend, from the look of it — holding hands, the way you do when you've forgotten you're doing it, the way it's just the resting state of being near someone you love. The kind of thing Merlin had watched other people do from a distance his entire adult life.
The two men were saying things Merlin couldn't hear through the glass. He didn't need to hear them. He could see the couple's faces — the careful stillness, the way they'd let go of each other's hands, the way that hurt like a physical thing to watch.
And then he saw Arthur Pendragon.
Arthur was sitting at the bar — he hadn't noticed him, hadn't been looking for him — and he was watching the same scene Merlin was watching. Merlin braced, stupidly, for Arthur to laugh or to look away or to contribute. He didn't know why he was standing here watching this. He should either go in or go home.
Then Arthur stood up from his stool.
He moved with the deliberate ease of someone who was very large and knew it and had decided to deploy it. He placed himself between the two men and the couple. He said something, his back to the window so Merlin couldn't see his face. Whatever it was, it was not quiet. The two men's expressions went through something — surprise, then irritation, then the specific recalculation of men who are not sure they want the problem they're looking at.
They left.
Arthur didn't watch them go. He turned back to the couple, said something short, and they said something back, and one of them smiled the way you smile when you're still shaking. Arthur nodded, returned to his stool, and picked up his pint like nothing had happened.
Merlin stood on the pavement.
Something moved in his chest. Not attraction — he would inventory that much more inconvenient feeling at a later date — but something like revision. The rearrangement of a belief he hadn't known he was still holding.
Maybe Arthur Pendragon wasn't the worst.
Maybe Arthur Pendragon was someone he'd been afraid to look at properly.
That was, if anything, more annoying.
He walked home faster than necessary, and he didn't examine the ache in his chest, and he absolutely did not think about the specific way Arthur had positioned himself — solid, deliberate, unconcerned — between cruelty and someone who needed a wall.
He thought about it the entire way home.
He would deal with that later.
Day 3 — Trans Joy | fluffy
"His Name"
The thing about Elyan Leodegrance was that he had always known.
That wasn't the easy narrative — it wasn't the tidy kind people liked to tell, the one that began I always knew from the very beginning and progressed smoothly to a revelation and ended with an unblemished future. His story had detours and reversals and years of vocabulary he hadn't had yet. He had a mother who had needed time. He had a father who still called him by the wrong name at Christmas, which was why he spent Christmas at Gwen's now, mostly, which she made worth it with catastrophically good cooking and an extremely aggressive approach to board games.
But he had always known. Down underneath all the detours. And now he was twenty-two years old and studying mechanical engineering at Camelot University and he had been Elyan for four years and a boy for all of them, even the ones where nobody else knew it yet.
It was Gwaine who said his name like that for the first time.
Gwaine, who was arguably the least likely person to have this effect on anyone — Gwaine, who was a disaster in approximately eleven different categories, who had once set off the fire alarm in the engineering building while making noodles in a room that contained no stove, who referred to literally everyone as "mate" because he couldn't be trusted with names.
They were in the student union common room, three weeks ago, studying for finals, which for Gwaine meant lying on the sofa making up increasingly elaborate stories about what the structural members in the textbook diagrams were feeling emotionally. Elyan had been ignoring him efficiently when Gwaine had looked up and said, without any particular preamble: "Elyan. D'you reckon this column is in compression or denial?"
And Elyan had stopped.
He'd heard his name thousands of times by then. Obviously. It wasn't a strange word anymore, it had stopped feeling strange years ago, it was just his name, the way your name becomes yours through repetition until it's simply a fact about the world.
But there was something about the way Gwaine said it — no caution in it, no careful pause before or after the way there still was sometimes with Gwen's aunties, no performance of acceptance. Just: Elyan. Like it was the most natural thing in the world. Like it had always been his name and Gwaine had simply always known it.
He'd had to look back at his notes. He'd had to blink several times.
"Compression," he'd said, when he trusted his voice.
"Yeah," Gwaine had said, "same, mate," and gone back to his catastrophic interpretation of load diagrams.
Today it was the first day of Pride Month and Elyan was in the bathroom of Gwen's flat, which was technically their flat — he'd moved in in September when his landlord had raised the rent and the spare room had materialized like a gift — and he was looking at himself in the mirror while Gwen put on a record in the kitchen and the smell of something actually good drifted under the door.
He was wearing his own clothes. This sounds like nothing. For years it was not nothing — for years getting dressed was a negotiation, a compromise, a management of the distance between what he looked like and what was actual. Now his clothes were just his clothes. His face in the mirror was just his face. He had a patchy beard that Gwaine found hilarious and he found he rather liked. His shoulders were solid. His hands were his.
"Elyan!" Gwen called from the kitchen. "Come tell me if this needs more salt!"
He looked at his face in the mirror one more moment.
He was just a person. Getting ready for a Saturday. In his own flat. With his own face. And somewhere in the next room someone was making him lunch and would call his name again without thinking about it, the way you call someone by their name when their name is simply what they are.
He took a breath.
He went to tell Gwen about the salt.
He was, and had always been, Elyan, and it was a perfectly ordinary and absolutely extraordinary Tuesday in June.
Day 4 — Secret Relationship | angsty
"Third Person in the Room"
They had been together for six weeks when Leon found the mug.
It was a stupid thing to nearly get caught on. A mug — Arthur's mug, the one from the rowing club with the chipped handle — left on Gwen's kitchen counter on a Tuesday morning because they'd been in a hurry, because Arthur had a nine o'clock seminar and had grabbed his bag and his jacket and his keys and had not grabbed his mug, and Gwen had meant to put it away before Leon dropped by and had simply forgotten.
But Leon had come by early, while Gwen was still in the shower.
And Gwen had emerged from the bathroom in her robe to find Leon standing in the kitchen, holding Arthur's rowing mug with the expression of someone attempting a very difficult piece of arithmetic.
"That's—" Gwen had said.
"Arthur's," Leon had said.
The pause had lasted approximately four seconds. They both knew it was Arthur's. They both knew Arthur had not been to Gwen's flat, to their collective knowledge, for any particular reason. They both knew the mug had a chip in the handle from the time Arthur had used it to gesture and knocked it against the kitchen counter at 11:30 p.m. on a Thursday.
"He left it," Gwen said, "when the group came round for Morgana's birthday."
Morgana's birthday had been in March. It was June. This was, objectively, a long time for a mug to be somewhere.
Leon looked at the mug. He looked at Gwen. He was Leon, which meant he was careful and kind and sharp as anything underneath the careful and kind, and Gwen watched him arrive at the edge of an understanding and then, visibly, choose to step back from it.
"Right," he said. "Do you have coffee?"
She breathed. "Yeah. Yeah, sit down."
Later, after he'd gone, she rang Arthur.
"Leon was here," she said.
A pause. "How bad?"
"He found your mug."
Another pause, shorter. "What did you say?"
"Birthday. March." She leaned against the window. Outside, the street was doing its June evening things — cyclists, a dog, someone laughing loudly from a window she couldn't see. "He didn't push it."
"He knows," Arthur said, which was probably true. Leon was Leon.
"Yeah." She closed her eyes. The flat felt too quiet. It always felt slightly too quiet when Arthur wasn't in it, which was a thing she had started to notice and was not sure how to hold. "Do you ever think we should just—"
"Gwen."
"I know." She did know. She knew all the reasons. Arthur's father, who didn't know yet that his son was bisexual and who had already-established opinions about Gwen that she tried not to take personally and mostly failed. Her own family, who loved Arthur and would make it Strange. The friend group, who would make it the only thing they talked about for six weeks minimum. "I know."
"Do you want to?" he asked. The question was genuine, not deflecting.
She thought about it. She thought about how it felt to be in this flat with him here — ordinary and private and theirs. She thought about the four seconds in the kitchen with Leon and the mug, the almost-caught feeling that had gone right through her.
She thought about how she hadn't felt relief.
"Yes," she said quietly. "But I'm also scared."
"Yeah," Arthur said. "Me too."
The silence between them was not comfortable. It was the silence of something needing to be resolved, put off again, delayed. It sat in the room with them like a third person who wasn't going anywhere.
"Tomorrow?" she said.
"Tomorrow we'll talk about it properly."
They would. They would put it off again tomorrow, and the day after, and tell themselves there was time, there was time, there was always more time — until there wasn't.
But not tonight. Tonight she set Arthur's mug on the shelf, and she sat on the sofa and called him back, and they talked about nothing important for forty-five minutes, and that was enough.
Day 5 — Found Family | hurt/comfort
"Everyone Showed Up"
The plan, such as it was, had been simple: Merlin would go to the uni's Pride march with Gwen and Elyan, and afterwards he would ring his mum, and that would be the day.
He had not anticipated ringing his mum early, standing in the car park behind the student union at 11 a.m. while Gwen held his hand and he listened to his aunt — his mother's sister, who he'd always been closer to than made sense geographically — explain in the careful, flattened voice she used for bad news that the family Pride gathering they'd all planned to attend together in their hometown was not going to happen, because there had been an argument, because his uncle had said something at the dinner table that his mother had refused to let stand, and now the gathering was cancelled and his mother was upset and his aunt thought he should know.
"She's fine," his aunt said quickly. "She's not — she just needs a bit."
"Right," he said. "Right, okay."
"You know how she is. She'll be all right."
He knew. He did know. And his mother would be all right — she was Hunith Emrys, she was fundamentally indestructible — but he also knew what it meant that she'd been looking forward to this, to having something together and celebratory that was his, that marked this year as different from every year before where she'd known and he hadn't told her and the knowing had sat between them unspoken.
He rang her. She was fine. She told him to have a wonderful day. Her voice was a little careful in the way that meant she was managing something, and he loved her so ferociously in that moment that it ached.
He hung up and looked at Gwen, who was watching him with the particular quality of attention she had when she was deciding whether to ask or wait.
"Family thing," he said. "They weren't — they won't be able to."
She nodded slowly. "Okay." She squeezed his hand once and let go. "Let's get you home first."
"I'm fine, I don't need—"
"I know you don't need. I didn't say you needed. I said let's go home."
His room, when they got there, was small and slightly chaotic. He sat on the bed. Gwen sat beside him. He was not going to cry, because there was nothing to cry about, because his mother was fine.
He was still sitting there feeling determinedly fine when his door opened and Elyan came in carrying a plastic bag from the corner shop, because Gwen had apparently texted him. Elyan set the bag on the desk without a word, pulled out a packet of biscuits and a can of something fizzy, and sat on the floor with his back against the wardrobe.
"What happened?" he said.
Merlin explained. Elyan listened. The biscuits went around.
His door opened again, and this time it was Freya — quiet Freya from his Biochem seminar, who lived two floors down and whom Gwen had also apparently texted — carrying a houseplant she'd clearly just grabbed as a reason to knock on the door. She presented it to Merlin with great solemnity.
"I thought you might want this," she said. "I'll take it back after if you want."
"I don't need a plant."
"You look like you need a plant," she said, and sat on the floor next to Elyan.
Gwaine arrived seventeen minutes later with takeaway bags from three different establishments because he had been unable to decide, and immediately got into an argument with Elyan about whether this room could fit everyone, and Lance appeared behind him with what appeared to be an entire box of craft supplies — glitter, card stock, ribbon, inexplicable googly eyes — because Lance had been making Pride decorations all morning and had simply brought them along.
Merlin looked at his room, which was now full of six people and an apparently superfluous houseplant and four different types of takeaway and Lance's catastrophic craft supplies, and felt something he didn't have an immediate word for. Something that started in his chest and went all the way out.
"I had a speech," he said, "about how I don't need any of this—"
"Where is it?" Gwen said. "I'll put it in the bin."
"I already threw it away."
"Good."
Gwaine was attempting to glue googly eyes to a piece of card that read WE LOVE MERLIN in glitter letters that were already slightly wrong. Lance was helping him, ineffectually. Freya was arranging the plant on the windowsill like it had always lived there. Elyan had opened the first takeaway bag and was distributing food with the systematic calm of someone who had done this for many people many times.
This was not the day Merlin had planned. This was better.
"Happy Pride," Gwen said, very quietly, from beside him.
"Happy Pride," he said. He meant it completely.
Day 6 — Asexual Identity | reflective
"A Hundred Different Things"
The conversation happened by accident, which was the only way Freya had ever had the important ones.
It was past midnight — properly past, not the respectable kind where you can still say I should go without embarrassing yourself. They were in the twenty-four-hour library because Freya had a paper due and Merlin was not so much studying as providing moral support, which mostly meant sitting across the table from her and scrolling through his phone while occasionally reading out sentences that had no context and expecting responses.
"'The inherent drama of the cell cycle,'" he said.
"That's actually true," she said, without looking up.
"Do you think cells are dramatic? Like, individually?"
"Mitosis is incredibly dramatic. It's a whole performance." She turned a page. "Is this helping you study?"
"I'm not studying."
"I know. Is this helping me study?"
"Marginally," he said, and she laughed, which was why she kept him around.
She didn't know how they'd ended up on the topic. Possibly it was the lateness, the library's specific 1 a.m. quality of stripped-back honesty. Possibly it was that Merlin had come out to his mum that week — he'd told Freya about it, quietly, in the way he was starting to tell people, like he was testing out the sound of it in different rooms. Possibly it was that he'd said, almost as a footnote, that he'd been scared for years he was broken somehow, not feeling things the way he thought he was supposed to feel them.
She'd looked up at that.
"Broken how?" she'd asked.
He'd explained, hesitant and honest, the way he was learning to be honest now. The years of performing an interest he wasn't sure he fully felt. The way desire had seemed to arrive in him differently than it did in everyone around him — present, yes, but not urgent, not constant, not the driving thing they seemed to describe.
She'd been quiet through all of it.
"That's not broken," she said.
"I know that now. Or I'm — I'm getting there."
She looked at her paper. She thought about what she was going to say and whether she was going to say it, because she didn't talk about this, she'd never talked about it, it wasn't a secret exactly but she'd also never had the words that quite fit and she wasn't sure she had them now.
"I don't really—" she started, and stopped. Started again. "There's a word. Asexual. For not really experiencing sexual attraction. Or experiencing it very differently, or less than—" She gestured vaguely, which was not linguistics but was the best she could do. "I read about it once. I read about it a lot, actually. I kept reading about it and then putting the tab away and then reopening the tab."
Merlin was watching her. He had put his phone down.
"I never said it to anyone before," she said.
"Okay," he said, carefully, the way he was learning to be careful about the right things.
She looked at her hands on the table. Something was loosening in her chest that she hadn't known was tied. "It's just — I always thought I was waiting. Like something would switch on and I'd be like everyone else and the waiting would end. But I think I've been waiting for ten years and there's nothing to wait for, and I'm not sure whether that's sad or just." She paused. "Just true."
"It doesn't have to be one or the other," he said.
She considered this. "No?"
"I've been figuring that out this week, actually. That it can be a bit sad and also fine. The two things don't cancel each other out."
She looked at him across the table — this boy she'd met in seminar eight months ago who'd sat next to her and said, unprompted, this lecturer writes on the board like she's being charged per letter, and made her laugh on a day she'd badly needed to laugh.
"I've never said that to anyone," she said again. "Asexual. Out loud."
"How does it feel?"
She thought about it honestly. "Small," she said. "Like a small true thing. The kind that sounds like not much but weighs something."
He nodded. He seemed to understand this specific kind of weight.
They sat with it for a while, the word between them on the table, small and true and newly real.
"Can I tell you something?" he said eventually.
"Yes."
"I'm really glad you did. Tell me." He was earnest about it, that specific guileless Merlin earnestness she'd clocked immediately and trusted ever since. "I think it matters, saying it."
"I think so too," she said. She turned back to her paper, which was still waiting patiently for her.
She was asexual. She was twenty-one years old, sitting in a library at one in the morning, and she had said it out loud, and the world had simply continued, and she was not broken, and the word was hers.
"'The inherent drama of the cell cycle,'" she said.
"I know, right?"
She smiled and kept reading.
Day 7 — First Date | fluffy
"Duck and Cover"
The date was Merlin's idea, which meant it was, technically, Merlin's fault.
He had asked Gwen about it, in the way he asked Gwen about everything that involved emotions and decisions — with great uncertainty and slightly more detail than was necessary — and Gwen had said, with the patience of someone who had been answering this category of question for twelve months: "Merlin. If you want to ask him to lunch, ask him to lunch. It's a meal. Food is involved. This is a known quantity."
"But what if—"
"I will not be taking follow-up questions."
He'd texted Lancelot. Lance, whose full name Gwen deployed when she was being formal about something and whose shorter name everyone else used, who was in Merlin's Biochemistry cohort and had the most alarmingly attentive quality of stillness Merlin had ever encountered, the kind that made you feel genuinely heard.
Hey, do you want to get lunch this weekend? Not — I mean, yes, as like a date? If that's something you'd want. He had deleted "if that's something you'd want" three times and put it back each time because otherwise it sounded presumptuous.
Lance had replied: I'd like that. No qualification. Just affirmation, clean and simple.
The restaurant reservation was not correct. This was not anyone's fault — there had been a booking system glitch and their table had been given to someone else and the maître d' was apologetic but firm, and by the time Merlin had accepted that the restaurant was, in fact, not going to produce a table from nowhere, it was raining.
Not light rain. June rain of the committed, theatrical variety.
"The park is ten minutes," Lance said, which was not a sentence Merlin had expected.
"The park," Merlin repeated. "In this."
"I have an umbrella."
"You have one umbrella."
Lance looked at him with an expression of mild amusement. "I'm aware."
The umbrella was adequate for one person. It was perfectly functional for two people standing close enough together that their shoulders were touching and Merlin was hyperaware of the specific warmth of Lance's arm against his and the particular problem of not being taller, which meant Lance had to angle the umbrella down on Merlin's side, which meant Lance was slightly rained on, which he did not seem to mind in the slightest.
They bought sandwiches from the supermarket on the corner of the park. They sat on a bench under the umbrella and ate them while the rain conducted its enthusiastic business around them.
The duck arrived approximately three minutes after the sandwiches.
It was a mallard of confident temperament and extraordinary neck extension, and it appeared to have decided that Merlin's sandwich was, in fact, its sandwich, and it communicated this view with the sort of sustained eye contact that Merlin found genuinely unsettling.
"Can you," Merlin said.
"He's just looking."
"He's been looking for four minutes straight. That's not looking, that's a statement."
"What is he saying?"
"He's saying that's his sandwich, Lance, he is clearly saying that."
Lance was laughing. It was the thing about Lance that Merlin had not been prepared for — the way he laughed, open and unguarded, like he'd forgotten to apply any social management to it. Like something was genuinely funny and he was genuinely delighted and he saw no reason not to show it.
The duck obtained a corner of the sandwich, ultimately, through sheer attrition of will. They walked the rest of the park in the rain, umbrella tilted impractically between them, talking about nothing important — his summer plans, her sister, whether the ducks in this park had a hierarchy, the Biochemistry paper they both had due on Thursday, a film they'd both seen separately and had opposite opinions about.
It was nothing. It was everything. It was the best sandwich Merlin had ever eaten in the rain under an insufficient umbrella while being judged by a duck, and by the time they were back on the pavement, both slightly damp and Lance still laughing at some variation of the duck situation, Merlin felt the enormous, uncomplicated pleasure of being exactly where he was.
"I'm sorry about the restaurant," he said.
"I'm not." Lance said it simply, clearly meaning it.
Merlin looked up at him — at his face, which was doing the unmanaged honest thing — and thought: yes. This. Obviously.
"Same time next week?" he said.
"Yes," Lance said. "Though maybe—"
"Check the booking system. Yes. I know."
They said goodbye at the park gate. Merlin walked home in the rain, which was still going, and did not mind it.
Day 8 — Identity Crisis | angsty
"The Map That Stopped Fitting"
The word Merlin had used, for years, was gay.
He'd arrived at it at fifteen in the way he'd described to his mother — not a revelation but a recognition, the way you recognize a word you've been circling for years without being able to land on it. Gay. Yes. That. He'd turned it over for a few weeks and then quietly incorporated it, and it had fit, and he'd stopped thinking about it.
He was not thinking about it now, at 11 p.m. on the sixth of June, sitting on his bed after getting home from a student union event and trying to work out why he felt so wrong.
The event had been great. He'd gone with Gwen and Elyan and Freya, and it had been the good kind of crowded and the rainbow lights had been properly done and a drag queen had done a set that was legitimately excellent, and he'd danced, which he was embarrassing at but did anyway because Gwen believed in dancing as a life philosophy and he'd absorbed this over twelve months of friendship.
He'd danced, and at some point he'd looked across the room — the hot, coloured, music-filled room — and caught himself watching a girl who was laughing at something her friend had said, and felt something move in his chest.
Not an enormous thing. A small thing. A quiet, puzzled thing, like a door opening an inch in a room you thought was sealed.
He sat with it.
He was gay. He was fairly sure. He'd been fairly sure for seven years. The boys at his secondary school, the footballer on the telly, Lance, Arthur — Arthur — the specific quality of attention he paid to certain people, which had consistently been certain men. That was a data set. He trusted the data set.
But there had been a girl in his Biochemistry seminar last semester. And that actor in the film he'd seen with Freya last month. And now this woman at the event, laughing, and the small puzzled door.
He got out his phone. He stared at it.
He typed bisexual and then stared at that for a while. He typed sexuality fluid. He typed can gay men find women attractive and then deleted that immediately because the search results would be terrible. He typed sexuality changing and then closed the entire browser because he felt slightly insane.
The thing was — and here was the embarrassing part, here was the part he couldn't quite say aloud — he'd built something on the word gay. He'd spent three years working up to saying it. His mum knew. Gwen knew. He'd started to tell a few others. He'd assembled an entire identity out of a word that had taken him so long to choose and so long to say, and now there was this small door, and the small door was suggesting that maybe the word didn't cover the whole picture.
Which felt like losing something. Which felt ungrateful, even, which he knew was irrational — he was not obligated to have arranged himself correctly on the first attempt — but the feeling was there anyway.
He texted Gwen: Can you call me when you're free
She rang in forty seconds, which meant she'd been awake.
"What happened?"
"Nothing happened. I'm just." He stopped. "I've been gay for seven years."
"Yes."
"What if it's not." He stopped again. "What if that's not — what if that doesn't cover all of it."
A pause. Then Gwen said, carefully: "What makes you think it doesn't?"
He explained. The small door. The embarrassment of having built something and then not being sure it was the right shape.
She was quiet for a moment. Then she said: "Merlin. Do you know how long it took me to stop trying to fit myself into other people's categories? Three years. I was nineteen when I found the word pansexual and cried in the uni library at ten o'clock in the morning because I'd finally stopped auditing my own feelings."
He was quiet.
"You're allowed to update," she said. "You're allowed to have been right with the information you had and then have new information. That's not a failure, it's just—" She paused, choosing. "Paying attention."
"It feels like losing something."
"I know. It'll feel like that for a bit. And then it'll feel like having more room."
He lay back on his bed and looked at the ceiling. The door was still there, small, not demanding anything of him yet. Just open.
"I don't know what I am," he said. It was the first time he'd said that and not felt it as a deficiency.
"That's okay," she said. "You've got time. You've got the whole rest of your life to figure it out, actually."
"Very helpful."
"I know."
He was quiet for a bit. She stayed on the line.
"Gwen?"
"Yeah."
"You're really good at this."
"I've had practice." A pause, gentle. "Go to sleep. The identity crisis will still be there in the morning and you can work on it then."
He laughed, which had been her intention.
He went to sleep. The small door stayed open, comfortable and patient, waiting for him to walk through at whatever pace he needed.
Day 9 — Bisexual Visibility | humorous
"The Presentation"
The worst thing about the incident — and Merlin had catalogued all the things that were bad about the incident with great care — was not that it happened.
It was that Arthur Pendragon was in the room when it happened.
The context required some explanation.
Gwen had been compiling what she privately called her evidence document for approximately four years. She had started it as a joke. She had added to it during every period in which someone expressed scepticism about the reality of her bisexuality — you just haven't met the right man, but you're dating a woman, doesn't that make you gay, so are you gay this week or straight this week, which do you prefer, really — and it had grown, over four years, into a truly staggering repository of receipts. Photographs. Anecdotes. Annotated timelines. A statistical breakdown of her romantic history by gender that she'd made during a particularly irritating finals period.
It had never been intended for human eyes.
She was presenting her Sociology dissertation research at the undergraduate conference — a good cause, one she was proud of, research on queer identity formation and social belonging — and she had been switching between documents on her laptop while setting up the projector, and she had selected presentation.pptx and clicked present—
The opening slide read: BI VISIBILITY: A PERSONAL CASE STUDY (OR, WHY I'M TIRED OF THIS ARGUMENT).
The second slide was a timeline.
The third slide was a pie chart.
There were twenty-three people in the room.
Gwen had the specific experience of watching the slide appear on the screen behind her, turning to look at it, processing what she was seeing, and performing an extremely detailed calculation of how long it would take to close the laptop versus how many people had already seen it.
She closed the laptop.
"So," she said, into the silence. "Some of you have now seen my personal organizational system."
Arthur Pendragon, who was sitting in the second row because he was there to support her dissertation presentation because he was, confoundingly, a decent person when he tried, raised his hand.
"Was slide three a pie chart of—"
"Yes."
"The orange segment was labeled—"
"We're going to move on now," Gwen said. "I'm going to open the correct file. You're all going to forget what you saw. Those are the terms."
"The fourth column in the timeline appeared to be—"
"Arthur."
He raised both hands in surrender, but he was laughing, and the laughter was genuine and not unkind, and somebody in the third row who Gwen didn't know said, completely deadpan, "I think we need to see the pie chart again, actually," and then the room had laughed properly and the moment had converted from disaster to something else.
Later, in the corridor, Merlin appeared at her elbow.
"I'm going to need you to know," he said carefully, "that I will never bring this up again."
"Thank you."
"Slide three was exceptional, though."
"Merlin."
"The data visualization was genuinely—"
"You're banned," she said. "You're permanently banned from this conversation."
He was smiling, and it was the good one, the one that meant he was also making sure she was okay. She was. She was mortified and also, underneath the mortification, something much stranger — something like the same loosening she'd heard Freya describe, the door opening an inch. Because twenty-three people had seen those slides. Twenty-three people now knew, without ambiguity, and the world had continued, and Arthur had laughed, and someone in the third row had asked to see the pie chart again.
"I'm bisexual," she said, to the corridor, to no one in particular. "Fact. Real. Documented with extensive data visualization."
"Extensively," Merlin agreed.
She took a breath. She went back in to give her actual presentation, which was also good, and which she managed without incident, except that she could see Arthur's expression in the second row doing something complicated that she would have to deal with later.
Day 10 — Long Distance | romantic
"Flight 209"
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.
Day 11 — Nonbinary Joy | fluffy
"The Person in the Photo"
Gwaine had found the photo by accident, which was the only way Gwaine ever found anything significant.
They'd been looking for the charger — specifically Gwaine's charger, which had a habit of migrating to surfaces that were not Gwaine's desk — and had opened the wrong drawer in Gwaine's desk and found, under a receipts and old concert tickets and what appeared to be three different travel-sized shampoos, a photograph.
It was a school photo. The stiff formal kind. A twelve-year-old in a blazer that didn't fit right, hair done in a style that was clearly not their choice, expression arranged into the specific performance of normalcy that Gwaine recognised with the deep, bone-level recognition of someone who'd spent years doing the same performance and finally stopped.
"Oh," they said.
Elyan looked up from the other side of the room. "What?"
"Nothing, sorry — found the charger." They put the photo back. They found the charger, which had indeed migrated. And then they sat on the bed for a moment with the feeling the photo had given them, which was specific and odd and not unpleasant.
The thing about being nonbinary — for Gwaine, specifically, your mileage varied enormously — was that it was less a revelation than a decompression. A slow unpacking of something compressed for years. They'd spent so long as a performance of gender, doing it loudly and confidently because confidence was easier than accuracy, and then one afternoon in second year they'd encountered a word and thought: oh. Not a loud oh. A quiet one. A recognition.
They went to change, because Elyan was taking them out for lunch — just lunch, the ordinary kind, I'm going to the good sandwich place, come if you want — and stood in front of the wardrobe.
Today was a soft day. Not in a bad way — in the way of certain days where you want your clothes to feel like themselves, all of you pointed in the same direction. They pulled out the loose linen shirt they'd bought last month in the market, pale blue, the kind of garment that felt like belonging to yourself. Earrings. The necklace Merlin had given them for their birthday, silver, a small crescent moon.
They looked in the mirror.
The person in the mirror looked back, wearing clothes they'd chosen, with a face they'd grown into, in a body that was today — on this particular Tuesday afternoon in June — theirs. Not the body in the blazer. Not the twelve-year-old performance. Just Gwaine: messy-haired, impractical earring-wearing, genuinely terrible at keeping track of their own charger, spectacularly enthusiastic about sandwiches.
"Ready?" Elyan called.
"Two seconds."
They took a photo of themselves. Not the posed kind — just a quick one, phone at arm's length, sunlight from the window. They looked like themselves. Like a person having a Tuesday.
They sent it to the group chat.
gwaine ur earring, Merlin replied. looking excellent, Gwen replied. are we getting lunch or what, Elyan replied, from the other room.
Gwaine laughed and pocketed their phone and went to get a sandwich with their friend on a perfectly ordinary, golden June afternoon, which was better than any performance they had ever managed.
Day 12 — Hurt/Comfort
"Staying"
The thing that was said was said by a stranger, in the queue at the shop.
This was the infuriating part, Merlin thought later — that it had been a stranger, not even a coherent confrontation, just a man in a queue who had looked at Gwaine's earrings and their clothes and made a comment to the person behind him, just loud enough, just casual enough to establish deniability while ensuring it landed.
Gwaine had been mid-sentence. They'd stopped.
The man had paid for his things and left. The person behind him had looked at the floor. Merlin had been three steps away with his arms full of groceries and his brain slightly behind the situation.
Gwaine had smiled. Not a real one. The practised kind, the compressed kind, the kind that said I'm fine and we're all going to pretend that didn't happen.
"Ready?" they'd said.
He'd said yes. They'd walked home.
Back in the flat — Gwaine's flat, where Merlin had been spending an increasing amount of time because it had good light and Gwaine made excellent tea and the company was, when Gwaine was being their actual self rather than the loud public version, genuinely easy — Gwaine put the groceries on the counter and stood there for a moment.
Merlin waited.
"It was nothing," Gwaine said.
"It wasn't nothing."
"I've heard worse." Which was true, and also not the point, and Gwaine's expression said they knew it wasn't the point.
Merlin did not say the right thing. This was because there wasn't one — he'd been in this position enough times now, with enough people, to understand that the right words didn't exist, that the space after someone says something cruel is not a space that words can fill. He'd been in it himself and he knew.
He put his groceries down and sat on the sofa.
Gwaine looked at him.
"You don't have to—" they started.
"I know."
He turned on the telly. Some cooking programme that was always on at this hour, the kind where people made very complicated pastry and the host was supportive to the point of implausibility.
After a moment, Gwaine sat beside him.
Not close. Not the way that would make a thing of it. Just: present. Two people on a sofa, and a cooking programme, and the afternoon light doing its afternoon things.
He didn't say: it doesn't matter, people are idiots, you'll be okay. He didn't say: that man was wrong. He didn't say anything, because Gwaine knew all of those things and they didn't help right now.
He was just there. That was all.
At some point, Gwaine leaned slightly sideways and their shoulder was against his, and he didn't move away, and the programme went on, and the pastry chef got eliminated which seemed harsh, and outside the window the day continued without them for a while.
"Thank you," Gwaine said eventually. Quietly.
"I didn't do anything."
"No," they said. "That's what I mean."
He understood this. He passed them the tea that had been cooling on the coffee table.
They stayed for the next episode.
Day 13 — Slow Burn | romantic
"Finally (In Three Parts)"
The betting pool had started in April.
Gwen denied having started it. Elyan denied having started it. Gwaine claimed it had been their idea while simultaneously insisting they hadn't known it would get this far, which was a characteristically Gwaine position on their own decisions. The pool currently stood at sixty-three pounds and was being managed by Lance in a small notebook he kept in his jacket pocket and tried not to pull out where either Merlin or Arthur could see it.
The agreed parameters: the pool would pay out when Merlin and Arthur acknowledged they were into each other. Not acted on it — just acknowledged, out loud, to each other, that something was happening.
It was June thirteenth.
They had been happening since at least November.
Part One: Arthur
Arthur was aware — had been aware, actually, since he'd looked up from the philosophy essay in the library in October and noticed that the person arguing with him was very annoying and had very good eyes — that he was operating on borrowed time.
He was bisexual, which was not the complicated part. He'd worked that out at seventeen and it had been, relative to everything else in Arthur Pendragon's life, not that difficult. His father didn't know and would have opinions, which was a separate and long-postponed problem. The point was: that part wasn't new.
Merlin Emrys was new.
He was new in the way of things that were technically in your life for months before you noticed them, like a slow leak or a subsiding wall — you look up one day and there they are. Merlin Emrys, who argued with him constantly and was nearly always right, which was deeply irritating. Who had ears that were slightly too large for his face in a way that Arthur found inexplicably winning. Who had, last week, loaned Arthur his notes from the lecture Arthur had missed without being asked, with annotations in the margins that were more interesting than the original content.
Who was, right now, across the library table, doing the thing where he read with his chin resting on one hand and argued quietly with the text, which Arthur had watched with increasing lack of subtlety for approximately forty minutes.
"You're staring," Merlin said, without looking up.
"I'm not."
"You've been staring for forty minutes."
"I was thinking."
"In my direction."
Arthur looked at his own notes. They were not helpful. They said nothing about this situation. "Your annotations last week," he said, "were actually very good."
Merlin looked up. He appeared to be recalibrating. "...Thank you?"
"The one about the Kantian objection. That was interesting."
"I know it was interesting, I wrote it."
"Obviously."
Merlin was now looking at him with the expression of someone who had expected a different kind of conversation and wasn't sure how to navigate the one they were having. Arthur understood this, because he also wasn't sure.
"Why," Merlin said carefully, "are you being nice to me."
"I'm frequently nice."
"You argued with me for six minutes on Monday about the philosophy of library seating allocation."
"That was a legitimate philosophical position."
"Was it."
"Kant would have agreed with me."
Merlin looked at him for a moment longer. Then, in a different tone — quieter, but steady: "Arthur. What's happening right now."
Arthur looked at his notes. He looked at the table. He looked at Merlin, who had his chin back on his hand and his eyes on Arthur and was, with absolute maddening patience, waiting.
"I think," Arthur said, very carefully, "that I might find you quite — interesting."
A pause.
"Interesting," Merlin repeated.
"Yes."
"Like the Kantian objection."
"Don't make this worse."
Merlin laughed. It was the honest laugh, the one without any performance in it. "Okay," he said. "I think I might find you quite interesting too, actually. Have done for a while."
The library around them continued. Somewhere, Lance's notebook gained a date.
"That's a terrible confession," Arthur said.
"You started it," Merlin said, and went back to his reading.
But he was smiling.
Part Two: Later That Week
Gwaine paid Lance four pounds out of the pool in advance, because the full resolution would take longer and they were an optimist, and Lance accepted this with the dignity of a man operating a sophisticated betting enterprise.
Day 14 — Chosen Family Reunion | fluffy
"Too Much Food"
Percy had been back for three days before Gwen organized the gathering, which was three days faster than everyone had expected.
The gathering was not technically a formal event. It was, officially, just everyone coming over to Gwen and Elyan's flat on a Saturday, not for a reason, just because Percy was back and the year had been long and it had been since Christmas since everyone had been in the same room.
"Just a casual thing," Gwen had said.
The flat now contained: three different types of pasta, a whole pavlova, what appeared to be an entire wheel of brie, bread from two different bakeries because someone (Merlin) had bought a loaf and then forgot he'd already bought one, the ingredients for a cocktail that Gwaine claimed to have invented and could not fully remember, a truly unhinged quantity of snacks, and eight people.
This was Gwen's casual thing.
Percy was on the sofa being slowly besieged by Gwaine, who had many opinions about Edinburgh to share and was sharing all of them at once. Elyan was in the kitchen with Lance, where there was an ongoing, good-natured, deeply wrong argument about whether you needed to salt pasta water, which Lance had decided opinions about and Elyan was testing. Freya was reading on the armchair in the corner, technically part of the gathering, comfortable enough in it to also be reading, which was the specific quality of belonging Merlin found the most moving. Gwen was somehow everywhere.
Merlin sat on the kitchen counter, which was his natural habitat in this flat, and watched the room.
He had not grown up with this. He'd had a good childhood — his mum, a handful of close friends, a village small enough that everyone knew you which was either very good or very not depending on the context. He had not had this: a flat full of people who had accumulated into something intentional, who had chosen each other repeatedly until the choice became a fact.
Gwen was crying.
This was the thing about Gwen's gatherings: she always cried at them, not out of sadness but out of the specific joy of having everyone in the same room, a joy too large for the container she had available. She was crying while arguing with someone across the room about the pavlova and laughing at the same time, which Percy was watching with an expression of enormous fond exasperation.
"You okay?" Elyan said, appearing beside Merlin.
"Yeah," Merlin said. "Really yeah."
Elyan handed him a bowl of pasta and took a bowl for himself and they sat there together watching the room.
"Percy seems good," Elyan said.
"He seems really good."
"Gwen's going to cry again in about twenty minutes."
"Definitely."
They ate their pasta. Gwaine was now telling Percy about a structural engineering problem using increasingly dramatic hand gestures. Lance had apparently settled the pasta water argument to his satisfaction and was looking pleased. Freya had put her book down and was listening to Gwaine's story with the patient expression of someone who knew it was going to take a while.
Merlin thought: I came to university to study Biochemistry and I accidentally accumulated a family. He thought: this is what Gwen said. This is what she meant.
He thought: I should text Arthur.
He did not examine this impulse. He put his phone away. He watched Gwen cry about the pavlova and try to hide it.
"Hey," he said to Elyan, because there was something he'd been wanting to say and hadn't yet. "I'm really glad you're here. In the flat, I mean. This flat, specifically."
Elyan looked at him sideways.
"I mean — as my friend. In my life." He was making it weird. He was extremely good at making things weird. "I just wanted to say it."
Elyan was quiet for a moment. Then: "Yeah," he said. "Me too."
The evening went on. Gwen cried twice more. The pavlova was excellent. Gwaine's cocktail was extremely strong and only slightly wrong. They stayed until midnight, and then past midnight, because nobody wanted to be the first one to leave.
Day 15 — Trans Coming Out (Later in Life) | hopeful
"After All This Time"
Professor Gaius Stanhope was sixty-seven years old.
This was not, he thought, the expected age for revelation. His colleagues in the Biochemistry department would probably agree, though he had not polled them and did not intend to. He had been married once, briefly, in his thirties. He had been a professor for thirty years, a researcher for thirty-five, a person puzzled about himself for longer than either.
He had, over the course of many years, arrived at the word trans in the way that one arrives at a destination one has been approaching from an unusual direction. Not quickly. Not in a straight line. With much doubling back.
He was not young when he put the name to it.
He had allowed himself, for a while, to mourn that.
He still had the mourning sometimes — the years where the name existed and he hadn't had it yet, the years where the world would have made it very hard, the years where he had been a version of himself that was not quite right and had not known how to be righter. The mourning was real and he did not try to dissolve it. He let it be what it was: grief for time, not for who he was now.
What he had now was this: a Thursday afternoon in his office, the window open to the June air, and Merlin Emrys sitting across the desk from him with lecture notes and a question about the paper they were working on together — Merlin, who was his student and had been his lab assistant for a year and in whom he had noticed, with some interest, the same careful becoming-process he'd spent decades navigating.
He had not told Merlin. He had not told anyone here yet, not formally. He had told his sister last year, in the cautious way of someone testing weight-bearing capacity. She had taken it in, and taken a week, and then had rung him and said: I'm glad you told me. What do I call you now?
What a question. What an extraordinary gift of a question.
Gaius, he'd told her. That's always been mine. The name had been easy — he'd been going by it for twenty years as a nickname, long enough that it had simply become true.
Merlin had finished his question. He was waiting.
"That's a good point," Gaius said. "The Pertwee method would account for that. Let me show you."
He showed him. They worked through it. Outside the window, June went about its business.
Before Merlin left, Gaius said — quietly, not a big thing, the way the true things had started to want to come out: "Are you planning to go to any of the Pride events this month?"
Merlin paused at the door. He looked slightly surprised, and then, after a second, not at all surprised. "Yeah," he said. "The march on the twenty-first, I think. Are you?"
"I may," Gaius said. "I'm considering it."
He was sixty-seven years old. He had mourned the years lost and he had let the grief be real and he had refused, ultimately, to let it eat the years ahead. He had a sister who asked the right questions. He had a name that had always been his. He had a June afternoon and a window open to the air.
It was enough. It was, in fact, more than enough.
"The march is good," Merlin said, warmly. "You should come."
"I'll think about it," Gaius said.
He was already thinking about it.
Day 16 — Rivals | humorous
"Suspicious"
The rivalry between Gwen Leodegrance and Morgana Pendragon was documented, respected, and extremely well-lit.
It had begun in first year over a student council position that Gwen had won and Morgana had declared unconstitutional on the grounds that the voting procedure had a flaw, which was technically correct but also deeply convenient. It had continued through two opposing dissertations, three public debates, a student newspaper argument that had run for four consecutive issues, and what Gwaine referred to, in awed tones, as the Great Charity Bake Off Incident of second year, details of which were disputed by both parties and therefore extremely interesting.
They had not spoken properly since March.
Morgana showed up at Gwen's door on the sixteenth of June at 8 p.m. with a bag of Thai takeaway and an expression of someone performing magnanimity at some personal cost.
Gwen opened the door. She looked at Morgana. She looked at the takeaway bag. She looked back at Morgana.
"No," she said.
"I haven't said anything yet."
"You're here with food and that face. That face means you want something."
"The face is a genuine apology."
"The face is the face you make when you're deploying charm strategically."
Morgana's face did, in fact, shift — the performance going briefly offline — and she said, slightly less smoothly: "Okay. Yes. It's a bit of both. But the pad thai is real."
Gwen looked at her for another moment. The thing was — and this was the infuriating part, the part she had discussed with Percy at length — Morgana was not actually malicious. She was competitive and sharp and sometimes used those qualities like elbows in a crowd, but the cruelty was never the point. The point was something else that Gwen hadn't fully decoded yet.
"What did you do?" she asked.
"Can I come in first."
She stood aside.
Morgana came in. She set the takeaway on the table with the slightly formal care of someone who was trying hard. She sat down. She was wearing a jacket that Gwen had privately admired the cut of for two years and had never mentioned.
"I told Arthur about us," she said.
Gwen, who had been getting plates, stopped.
"I mean — I told him I'm gay," Morgana said. "He knows about you only in the context of the rivalry. I didn't— he doesn't know we've been..." She stopped. The word hanging there: been. Been what, exactly. Been circling each other for two years in a state that was neither enmity nor friendship and was, probably, something neither of them had been ready to name.
Gwen came back to the table. She sat down. She looked at Morgana Pendragon, who was, under all of it, someone she had spent two years fighting instead of talking to.
"How did that go?" she asked. "With Arthur."
Morgana looked briefly, nakedly uncertain — a flash of it, quickly managed. "Fine. He was fine. He said he already knew."
"He would say that."
"Yes." A pause. Something passed across Morgana's face. "He said—" She stopped.
"What?"
"He said that being afraid to tell someone doesn't mean they'd judge you." She said it carefully, like she was still figuring out what it meant. "He was talking about himself, I think. As much as me."
Gwen thought about Arthur, who she suspected was figuring things out in his own slow, stubborn, private way. She thought about Morgana, here with takeaway and an honest face.
"Okay," she said. "Tell me why you're here."
Morgana looked at her directly. "Because I've spent two years arguing with you when I could have been talking to you. And I'd like to stop doing the first and start doing the second." A pause. "Also the pad thai is genuinely excellent."
"I know," Gwen said. "I've been to that restaurant."
"Of course you have."
The takeaway went between them. The evening began.
Day 17 — Queer Friendship | fluffy
"Armour"
The best thing about Gwen, Merlin had decided, was that you could say anything.
Not anything in the sense of cruelty — the anything of safety, the kind where you could hold up the worst, most confused, most embarrassing thing in your own head and simply show it, and she would look at it honestly and not flinch and not perform. She was the friend who would tell you if you were being unfair. She was the friend who would also, in the same conversation, hold your hand while you figured out how to stop being unfair. Both simultaneously.
They were at the market on Saturday morning, the one on the square by the cathedral, doing the thing where they bought food they didn't technically need because the market existed and it was good. Gwen was examining tomatoes with the focus of a professional. Merlin was eating a piece of free sample fudge and thinking.
"I think I like Arthur," he said.
"Yes," she said, without looking up from the tomatoes.
"I mean — I like him. Like, properly."
"Merlin." She put the tomatoes down and looked at him with the expression she deployed when she was being patient about something obvious. "Do you remember in October when you spent forty minutes telling me about how objectively terrible Arthur Pendragon was, and you kept using very specific details about his face to make your points?"
"I was illustrating—"
"You kept describing his jaw."
"For the sake of—"
"As evidence of his terribleness."
He ate more fudge. "The point stands," he said. "I like him. And he said that thing in the library — the interesting thing — and I don't know what we are, we haven't done anything, we're still just — whatever we are—"
"Orbiting," she said.
"Orbiting," he agreed. "And I don't know how to stop."
She looked at him for a moment. Then she linked her arm through his, the comfortable automatic way she did it, like it was just a fact about walking beside someone you loved.
"Here's what you do," she said. "You ask him to get coffee. Specifically coffee, not a meal, something with an exit built in, low-stakes. You say 'do you want to get coffee sometime' and he will say yes."
"What if he—"
"He will say yes. I've seen the boy's face when you're talking."
"What's his face—"
"Not mine to describe. Ask him to coffee."
He walked beside her through the market. Someone's dog tried to steal the bread they'd just bought. The cathedral was very old and very solid in the blue morning, and the June air was warm and slightly sweet, and Gwen was beside him, and this was what he meant when he thought about the people who had made this year survivable and more than survivable.
"Gwen," he said.
"Mm."
"You're my favourite person."
She smiled. Not the polished one. The real one. "I know," she said. "You're mine too, actually."
"Percy—"
"Different category." She picked up another tomato. "You're my armour-friend. The one I'm not afraid in front of."
He understood this completely. He thought about Freya, who he could sit in silence with. About Elyan, who told him things straight. About Gwaine, who was chaos but the honest kind. About this group of people he hadn't known he was going to find.
"All right," he said. "I'll ask him to coffee."
"There we go."
"If this is terrible—"
"It won't be."
"But if it is—"
"Then you come here, we buy excessive food, and I listen for as long as you need. That's the deal. That's always been the deal."
He already knew that. That was the point.
Day 18 — Internalized Shame | hurt/comfort
"Not That"
The comment happened on the stairs outside the student union.
It was Merlin's own voice. That was the thing about it. That was what Gwaine couldn't quite let go of.
They'd been walking up the stairs together — Merlin talking about something, some event that was coming up, and he'd said, in that particular casual dismissive tone people used for self-deprecation: "—I mean, it's a bit much, isn't it, all the pride stuff, I know it's supposed to be — I just sometimes think I make such a big deal about—"
And Gwaine had stopped.
Merlin had gone up another two steps before he realised. He'd turned. "What?"
Gwaine was looking at him. Not angrily — they didn't have that particular reaction to this thing, they had a different one. Something quieter and more precise.
"Say that again," they said.
Merlin blinked. "I just think sometimes I—"
"That you make a big deal. About being gay."
A pause. "...I just meant—"
"No, I know what you meant." Gwaine came up the two steps so they were on the same level. "You meant that you're doing too much. Being too visible. Making it too central. Right?"
Merlin looked at his shoes for a second. "I just don't want to be annoying about it."
"Who told you that you were annoying about it?"
"Nobody told me—"
"Then where did that come from?"
The stairwell was not private. There were people going past them, mildly curious, and Gwaine didn't particularly care, but Merlin's face was doing the complicated thing, the bracing-for-something thing.
"I just feel like—" He stopped. "Sometimes it feels like a lot to put on people. Being a whole thing about it."
Gwaine looked at him for a moment. Then they said, carefully and clearly: "Merlin. You spent three years not telling your own mother. Three years. Because you were worried about being too much."
A longer pause.
"And now you're here, you're out, and you've found your people, and you're saying it feels like a big deal to celebrate that. Like you should make yourself smaller." They held Merlin's gaze. "Where is that coming from, d'you think?"
Merlin opened his mouth. Closed it.
"Not from us," Gwaine said. "Not from anyone who knows you. So it's coming from somewhere that got in before we did, and it's still in there talking, and it's not right."
The stairwell went about its business around them.
"Okay," Merlin said, quietly.
"You're allowed to be a big deal," Gwaine said. "Actually. The whole thing you are — you're allowed to take up space with it. You're allowed to celebrate it. If it's a lot to put on people, you're putting it on the wrong people."
"Yeah." He was quiet for a moment. "Yeah. I know. I just—"
"I know," Gwaine said. "It gets in when we're not watching. That's why we have to watch for each other."
Merlin looked at them. The expression on his face went through several things before settling into something that was tired and grateful and more honest than the casual dismissal of two minutes ago.
"Thank you," he said.
"Any time," they said. "Also come on, we're going to be late."
They went up the stairs together. Gwaine talked about something else for the rest of the walk, letting him land back in himself, and he was quieter than usual but the comment didn't recur, and that was enough for now.
Day 19 — Domestic Bliss | fluffy
"Sunday Morning (or: The Dishwasher)"
The toast was on fire.
This was Merlin's fault, technically — he'd put it in and then got distracted reading something on his phone and now it was entirely the wrong colour and Arthur was standing in the kitchen doorway with an expression that communicated a great deal about this situation without requiring language.
"I know," Merlin said.
"You said—"
"I know."
"You specifically said you would watch the—"
"Arthur. I know. I'll make more."
Arthur came into the kitchen, picked up the charred toast, and put it in the bin with the specific resigned efficiency of someone who had done this before. He had. He had done this before, twice since Merlin had started spending weekend mornings here — not here officially, not with anything official yet, but here in the way that had slowly become comfortable over the past two weeks since the library, since the coffee, since the slow unkinking of the particular tension they'd been carrying around each other for a year.
"The bread's on the counter," Arthur said.
"Thank you."
"For the second time."
"Thank you for the second time."
He made new toast, this time with the focus the task required. Arthur poured coffee into both mugs — he'd started knowing which was Merlin's without asking, which Merlin was trying not to read into too hard — and went back to the table with his laptop.
"You're loading it wrong," Merlin said.
A pause. "I'm loading what wrong."
"The dishwasher. The bowl in the top rack — you put the opening facing up."
"The opening should face up."
"It should face down. The water comes from below—"
"The water comes from everywhere, Merlin, it rotates—"
"The spray arm goes—"
"I have been loading dishwashers since before you developed strong opinions about dishwasher loading—"
"That doesn't mean you've been doing it correctly."
Arthur gave him a look that was meant to communicate authority. It was undermined by the coffee mug in his hand and the fact that Merlin had, over the course of a year and a half, developed a nearly complete immunity to Arthur's authority communication.
"I will demonstrate," Merlin said, "that the bowl placement affects the cleaning outcome."
"You will do no such thing."
"I'll do a controlled experiment."
"This is my kitchen."
"This is a shared kitchen for the duration of Sunday morning, I'm a guest—"
"You've been here every Sunday for two weeks."
"Provisional arrangement. Subject to review." He ate the toast, which had come out correctly this time. "Possibly becoming permanent."
The kitchen was quiet except for the coffee maker finishing its cycle. Sunlight was doing its Sunday morning thing across the table, slow and unconcerned. Arthur was looking at his laptop with an expression that meant he was thinking about something other than what was on the screen.
"Possibly?" he said.
Merlin looked at him. At the table, the kitchen, the Sunday. "Probably," he corrected.
Arthur looked at the bowl in the top rack, then at Merlin, and said nothing, which was what Arthur said when he was pleased but not ready to admit it.
"The bowl is still wrong," Merlin said.
"I'll adjust it."
"When?"
"Eventually."
"That's not a—"
"Merlin," Arthur said, with the particular exasperated fondness that was different from his other exasperation, "eat your toast."
He ate his toast. Sunday morning continued. The dishwasher remained incorrectly loaded.
It was, objectively, the best Sunday Merlin had had in living memory.
Day 20 — Pansexual Identity | reflective
"Just Feeling It"
Gwen had found the word when she was nineteen and she had cried in the university library.
She was twenty-two now and Morgana Pendragon was sitting across from her at the kitchen table at eleven on a Sunday morning, which was a development that had occurred in stages too gradual for Gwen to have identified a precise beginning. There had been the Thai takeaway. There had been the conversation that followed it. There had been several more conversations, and a walk along the river, and an afternoon at the gallery where Morgana had strong opinions about a Miró that Gwen had agreed with and disagreed with in more or less equal measure, and then somehow it was June nineteenth and Morgana was here on Sunday mornings.
Gwen had not told the group yet. She was waiting for a moment to present itself that wasn't the incident with the presentation, which she was still recovering from, and which Arthur brought up at every available opportunity with the enthusiasm of a brother who had found new material.
She was thinking about this and about many things, which was her habit on Sunday mornings, and Morgana was reading something on her phone with the focused stillness she had when she'd genuinely gone somewhere else in her head.
The thing about Morgana — the thing Gwen was still calibrating her understanding of — was that she was not what Gwen had expected. She had expected someone who was always performing, always in the public mode, and what she'd found instead was a person who was very good at performing and also, underneath that, exhausted by it. Competitive because something in her needed to win things to feel safe. Sharp because being kind had historically not been received well.
Gay, which she'd said quietly to Gwen like she was testing whether the ground would hold.
It had held.
Gwen thought about the word she'd found at nineteen. Pansexual. The relief of it — the end of three years of trying to audit her own feelings and fit them into categories that didn't quite work. The feeling of finding a thing true enough to rest in.
"You're thinking loudly," Morgana said, without looking up.
"Sorry."
"Don't be. What are you thinking?"
Gwen looked at her across the table. At this person who had been her rival and was now — was now something else, something evolving, something Gwen was allowing herself to feel without auditing it.
"I'm thinking that I spent a long time trying to figure out what I was before I just let myself feel it," she said.
Morgana looked up.
"And it's better this way," she continued. "Just feeling it. Letting it be what it is." She held Morgana's gaze. "I'm pansexual. Which means the person across the table from me is more interesting than the category they're in."
A silence. Not uncomfortable.
"Right," Morgana said.
"Yes."
Morgana looked back at her phone. Then, after a moment, back at Gwen. "The Miró thing," she said.
"Which one."
"The argument about whether the use of primary colour was ironic or sincere—"
"It was sincere. Obviously sincere."
"It was not obviously—"
"Morgana—"
"I have a degree in art history—"
"And I have correct opinions," Gwen said, "which are different."
They had the Miró argument again. It was good. The Sunday morning went on.
Gwen stopped auditing. She let herself feel it.
It was enough.
Day 21 — First Pride | hopeful
"What He Didn't Expect"
Merlin had driven past the Pride march three times in three years.
The first time was first year, when he hadn't come out to anyone yet and the march felt like something he was not yet allowed to claim. The second was the year after, when he had an essay due and was lying about the essay being the reason. The third was last year, when he'd promised himself he'd go and then found an extremely elaborate excuse that Gwen had seen through immediately and not pushed.
This year he went.
Gwen was on his left, holding Percy's hand, and Percy was talking quietly to Elyan over Gwen's head about something to do with structural engineering, and Gwaine was somewhere ahead doing what Gwaine always did in crowds which was exist at maximum volume, and Freya was beside Merlin in her quiet way, watching.
He had expected: crowds. Noise. Colour, obviously — the colour was everywhere, flags and banners and painted faces, a float with a sound system doing something from the nineties that he knew but couldn't place. He'd expected all of that.
He had not expected the crying.
Not his own — or, actually, yes, briefly, his own, which was embarrassing and he would never discuss it. What he hadn't expected was to see it everywhere: people crying in the good way, the overwhelmed way, the I have been waiting for thisway. An older man with a small pride flag who was standing very still on the pavement and watching the march go by with an expression of such open, quiet emotion that Merlin had to look away. A teenager being hugged by their friends. A couple who'd stopped walking and were just looking at each other.
He had not expected to feel the specific thing he felt, which was: we were always here. Not as a statement about himself — he knew that, logically — but as a physical, real, in-the-chest thing. All of us were always here, and we are all still here, and nobody has ever fully managed to make us not be.
Freya had stopped walking.
He stopped beside her.
She was looking at the march. Her face was very still, and her eyes were bright, and she was doing the thing she did when she was feeling something large and not sure what to do with it.
"You okay?" he said.
"Yes." She paused. "I didn't — I wasn't sure this would feel like anything to me. I know it should, I know intellectually it's mine too, but I wasn't sure." She looked at the march. "But it does. It feels like mine."
He understood this. The long distance between knowing something in principle and feeling it in your actual body.
"It is yours," he said.
She looked at him. "Yeah," she said. "I think so."
They walked on. Gwaine found them and gave them both a flag without explanation and returned to their position at maximum volume. The sun was very bright, the kind of June sun that felt like a decision rather than an accident.
Merlin held his flag. He thought about driving past three times. He thought about the three years of careful distance, the speeches he'd written and the excuses he'd made and the version of himself who had stood on the pavement and not quite been able to go in.
He walked into the middle of it.
He did not drive past.
Day 22 — Forced Proximity | romantic
"Absolutely Fine"
The conference was in Leeds.
This was relevant context: the Biochemistry departmental research conference was in Leeds, the train was cancelled due to flooding on the line, and the conference hotel had lost their bookings due to a system error that the receptionist apologized for extensively while being entirely unable to fix.
They had one room left.
Arthur looked at the receptionist. The receptionist looked at Arthur. Merlin, standing behind Arthur, looked at the ceiling.
"We'll take it," Arthur said.
"Excellent," the receptionist said. "One bed, doubles—"
"Fine," Arthur said. "We'll take it."
Merlin continued to look at the ceiling. He was absolutely fine about this. He was handling it excellently. He wanted that on the record.
The room was a perfectly normal hotel room. It had a window overlooking what was technically a courtyard and practically a car park. It had a desk and a small television and an acceptable bathroom and a double bed which was an ordinary double bed of standard dimensions and was in no way an obstacle to two adult professionals sharing it without incident.
"I can take the floor," Arthur said.
"Don't be ridiculous," Merlin said. "The floor is carpet. Share the bed."
"You're sure."
"We're both adults."
"Yes."
"With a shared interest in not sleeping on carpet."
"Right."
They were extremely professional about it. Arthur worked at the desk. Merlin worked at the other end of the desk. They ordered room service with the careful efficiency of two people who were definitely not overthinking this. They watched something on the television that neither of them would later be able to name.
Merlin was absolutely fine.
He was fine when Arthur said I'll take the left side if that's all right and he said yes, the right is fine. He was fine when the light went off and the room went dark with the heavy dark of hotel-curtained rooms. He was fine when, at some point in the actual night, he became aware that the space between them on the bed was measurably smaller than it had been.
Arthur was warm. This was observable fact, not editorialising.
"Merlin," Arthur said, in the dark.
"Yes."
"You're not asleep."
"Neither are you."
A pause. The car park outside was very quiet.
"I'm going to—" Arthur started, and stopped.
"Going to what?"
"I'm going to—" Another stop. Which was unusual, because Arthur was not someone who lost his sentences, as a general rule. "I've been thinking about—"
"Arthur."
"Yes."
"Are you trying to say something that is not about the conference?"
A very long pause.
"Yes," Arthur said.
The room was very dark and very quiet.
"Then say it," Merlin said.
He did not say it immediately. He said it after a moment, in the careful way of someone who had been rehearsing a speech and had similarly abandoned it, but what came out instead was: "I think you should know that I've been in a specific kind of trouble since about October and I'm fairly sure you know what I mean and I'd like to stop managing it and start doing something about it."
Merlin lay there in the dark.
"I think," he said finally, slowly, "that I have been in the same specific kind of trouble since at least October. Possibly before."
"Right," Arthur said.
"Yes."
Another long pause.
"We're going to have to do something about it," Arthur said.
"Yes," Merlin agreed.
They did not immediately do anything about it. It was late, and the conference was in the morning, and there was a conversation that needed to be had properly, in daylight, with full use of language. But there was the knowledge of it, warm and settled, in the dark between them.
Merlin was absolutely fine.
He was, in fact, much better than fine.
Day 23 — Intersecting Identities | reflective
"Both At Once"
Elyan's mother had a line she used, unintentionally, that had always scraped against something.
The line was not cruel. That was the thing about it. It was said with love, said by a woman who was trying, said by a woman who had taken time and then come around and who called him by his name every time now without hesitation. The line was: you're still my child, no matter what.
No matter what.
He knew what she meant. He knew she meant: your being trans does not change how I love you. He knew she meant it as reassurance. He also knew that it contained — sideways, not intended — the implication that there was a what, a deviation, a qualifier. No matter what you are.
He'd never said this to her. Maybe he would, eventually, when he had better words for it and when the conversation wouldn't fall apart on them.
He thought about it today because he was at the community centre on the east side of the city, where there was a Pride event specifically for queer people of colour — Gwen had found it, Gwen found everything — and he was standing in a room that was not a room he usually found.
The queer spaces on campus were good. They were welcoming. They were also, often, predominantly white, in ways that were sometimes noticed and sometimes weren't, and he navigated them with the specific low-level vigilance of someone who was welcome in most of the room and not quite all of it.
The cultural spaces — the community centre, his family's church, gatherings on his mother's side — were his too. They were home in some ways. They also sometimes did not see this part of him, or saw it as the what his mother's line contained.
He was standing in a room where both parts of him fit.
It was such a simple thing. It was enormous.
Gwen was beside him, and she was feeling it too — he could tell by the particular quality of her quiet. She was pansexual and Black and she knew this specific math, the way spaces added you up and sometimes left remainders, and the way this room was doing something different.
"Yeah," she said, to the room in general.
"Yeah," he said back.
He thought: this is what I'm going to build, eventually. This is what I want to make for people younger than me. He was studying engineering because he wanted to make things that held. He wanted to build rooms where the math didn't leave remainders.
He thought about his mother's line. No matter what.
No matter what I am was the wrong framing. Because of what I am was closer. I love you because you are this specific person — not despite.
He would tell her that eventually. When the words came.
For now he stood in the room that held both of him, with his sister beside him, on a June afternoon, and let it be enough.
Day 24 — Proposal | romantic
"None of That Matters"
Arthur had a plan.
The plan involved: a restaurant that required a booking three months in advance, a speech he'd worked on in his notes app over six weeks, a ring he'd chosen carefully and picked up yesterday and which was currently in his jacket pocket like a small, significant weight.
The plan did not survive contact with the evening.
The restaurant called at four to say there was a kitchen emergency and they were closed for the night — sincere apologies, full refund, they'd rebook for next month if he liked, which was helpful but not what Arthur needed. He'd stood in his flat holding his phone and done a rapid reassessment.
The speech was fine. He could still give the speech. He'd give the speech somewhere else. He'd cook dinner — he was capable of cooking dinner, he'd done it before—
He could not find the pasta. He was fairly sure he had pasta. He had apparently consumed all the pasta and not replaced it.
He went to the shop. He bought pasta and several things to put on it. He came home and cooked with the aggressive focus of someone converting catastrophe into competence, and he texted Merlin: dinner at mine, 7, and Merlin had said okay what happened to the restaurant and Arthur had said later which was not an answer but would have to do.
Merlin arrived at 7:02 and said, "Your face is doing something," immediately.
"My face is doing nothing."
"Your face is doing the thing where you're managing a situation."
"I'm always managing a situation."
"Is the situation me?"
Arthur plated the pasta. He set it on the table. He sat down. Merlin sat across from him and ate the pasta, which was actually good — Arthur was a competent cook when he applied himself, which Merlin periodically found unfair and said so.
They talked about the day. Merlin had a seminar. Arthur had a meeting. Gwen had texted Merlin something about Morgana that he was still processing. The evening was ordinary in the way of evenings that were theirs — the specific grammar of two people who had learned each other's rhythms, who knew which silences were comfortable and which weren't.
The speech was in Arthur's pocket, in his notes app, where it had been living for six weeks.
He looked at Merlin across the table. Merlin, who was now telling him about the seminar with both hands moving, the way he did when he was actually interested in what he was saying. Who had been the most annoying and the most interesting person in Arthur Pendragon's life for two years running. Who had made the specific trouble Arthur had mentioned in a Leeds hotel in the dark three weeks ago and which had been resolved in the way that trouble of that kind gets resolved and which Arthur had no intention of revisiting except in the sense of continuing indefinitely.
He put his fork down.
Merlin stopped talking. He looked at Arthur. "What?"
Arthur said: "I was going to do this at the restaurant. Then I was going to do it with a speech. The speech is in my phone. I have a ring." He took it out of his pocket and put it on the table, because performing it felt wrong and just showing it felt more true. "I had a plan, and none of it happened, and we're eating pasta in my flat and you've got sauce on your shirt, and—" He stopped. Looked at the ring. Looked at Merlin. "None of that matters."
Merlin was looking at the ring.
"I want to do this for a very long time," Arthur said. "All of it. The Sunday mornings and the dishwasher arguments and whatever comes next." He held Merlin's gaze. "That's the speech, actually. Reduced to its necessary components."
Merlin was quiet for a long moment. His face was doing several things.
"You have sauce on your shirt too," he said finally.
"I know."
"Okay," Merlin said. "Yes. Obviously yes."
Arthur put the ring on his finger. Merlin looked at it. It fit, because Arthur had measured correctly, which was not a small thing.
"The speech was probably better," Arthur said.
"I don't know," Merlin said. "I think reduced to necessary components was pretty good."
He was smiling, the unmanaged honest one. Arthur was too.
The pasta went cold. Neither of them minded.
Day 25 — Coming Out to a Parent | angsty
"Six Seconds"
The call lasted forty minutes. The silence that followed the words lasted six seconds.
In the six seconds, Gwen did the following: she breathed, once, slowly, the deliberate way. She looked at the window of her bedroom, which had the back garden view, which she had always liked, which she had been looking at her whole life. She thought, in no particular order: he's processing, he just needs a moment, it's fine, it's fine, he loves me, that has always been true.
She thought, underneath that: but love can come with conditions, and I don't know what his are, and in six seconds I am going to find out whether this changes anything.
She thought: if it does, I will survive it. I have people. I am not alone in this.
She thought, in the last second: please.
Her father said: "Okay."
She waited.
"Okay," he said again. Then: "So — Morgana. You're saying — Morgana Pendragon, Arthur's sister—"
"Yes."
"Who you've been arguing with for two years."
"Yes."
A pause that was not the frightening kind. "So was that— was the arguing not— was it—"
"Dad."
"I'm just—" He stopped. She could hear him thinking, which she had always been able to hear, the specific quality of her father trying to figure something out honestly. "Gwen. Are you happy?"
She thought about Sunday mornings. The Miró argument. The way Morgana looked at her when she thought Gwen wasn't watching.
"Yes," she said.
"Then." A breath. "Then that's what matters."
It was not an immediate, effortless yes. She would be honest about that — there were more conversations ahead, there was a learning curve, there were things he would need to understand about words and visibility and what it meant for her to be pansexual, and some of those conversations would be hard.
But what he had said, when he understood what was being asked of him, was: are you happy?
And when she'd said yes, he had chosen that.
She sat on the edge of her bed after they hung up. The garden was doing its garden things in the afternoon. She picked up her phone and sent Merlin a voice note: "He was okay. He asked if I was happy. He was okay."
Merlin sent back: "I told you."
She laughed. It came out a little wet.
She was going to tell the group. She was going to tell Elyan, who would nod with the quiet certainty of someone who understood the specific terrain. She was going to tell Morgana — which was a conversation she was looking forward to in a particular way — and she was going to stand in the space of having been honest with her father, and it was going to be fine.
Are you happy?
Yes. Yes.
Day 26 — Genderfluid Identity | fluffy
"Nothing That Needs Saying"
There were days that were different from other days.
Morgana had found this was the clearest way to explain it, when she explained it — which she had started to do, carefully, to a small number of people, now that she had found the word and the word fit well enough to use. The word was genderfluid, which she'd encountered in an article at 2 a.m. on a Tuesday, and she'd sat with it for a week, and then sat with it for another week, and then told Gwen, who had said: oh, that makes a lot of sense.
There were days she was firmly herself in a particular way — the way she'd always performed, the way that was easy to read. There were days she was something softer, something that didn't want the performance, something that wanted to be called they and left to be quiet about it. There were days she couldn't have told you and didn't bother trying.
Today was a quiet day. She'd woken up and known immediately — the particular texture of it. She'd got dressed in things that felt right for today: softer things, less armour. She'd texted Gwen, because she told Gwen when she could, because Gwen had been the first person to understand this without requiring a detailed explanation.
soft day, she'd sent.
got it, Gwen had sent back. they today?
yeah
cool, same plan for lunch?
yeah
That had been the whole conversation. The whole adjustment. A two-word confirmation and the day continued.
At lunch, Gwen called her they without thinking about it — not in a performance, not with the slightly careful edge that people sometimes had when they were trying and were aware of trying. Just: "What are they having?" to Percy when Percy was looking at the menu, and Percy — who had been briefed some weeks ago and had said yeah, okay, easy in the way of a person who had many things on his mind and this was not one of them — had said, also without thinking about it: "I think they're getting the soup."
The meal continued.
She thought about what it had taken to get here. The years of not having the word. The years before Gwen. The coming out that had gone several different ways — her father, who was a separate and still-complicated story; Arthur, who had said I already knew because Arthur had in fact always known; her mother, who was gone, and who she imagined the conversation with sometimes, in the quiet of herself.
Today is a different kind of day than yesterday, she thought, and the people I am with simply adapt.
She didn't know another word for this but home.
"The soup was good?" Percy asked.
"Very good," she said.
"They'll want dessert," Gwen told Percy.
"Obviously," she agreed.
Gwen smiled at them across the table. Not a significant smile — just a regular one, the kind that meant nothing except: you're here, I see you, everything is fine. The ordinary miracle of it.
Day 27 — Reunion | hurt/comfort
"Better Than We Were"
The last time Morgana and Arthur had spoken properly was at Christmas, before everything, in the house that had felt like a performance for both of them. It had ended with the specific kind of argument Pendragon siblings had — architectural, both of them using the whole structure of the relationship as ammunition — and they'd separated into their respective corners and the months had accumulated.
She found him in the engineering library by accident. She'd been looking for Elyan. Arthur had been looking at his laptop with the expression he used when he was stuck and wouldn't admit it.
He looked up. She stopped.
"Arthur," she said.
"Morgana," he said.
A pause of significant length.
She sat down across from him, because standing there seemed worse. He watched her do it. He was wearing a jumper she didn't recognize, which meant time had passed, which was obvious but somehow personal.
"I heard," he said carefully, "from Gwen, that you've been well."
"She mentioned me."
"In context." He looked at the table. "She talks about you."
She processed this. "How?"
"Like someone who — like someone important." He was not looking at her. Arthur, who was always so sure where to direct his attention, was looking at his hands. "I'm not good at this."
"I know."
"I want to be." He did look up then. "I'm better than I was. I've been — this year has been. Something." A pause. "Merlin."
"I gathered."
"And other things. I've been thinking about—" He stopped. "Dad. The conversation I keep not having."
She went still.
"I'm bisexual," he said. To the table. To her. Testing the sound of it, she thought — not for the first time, but the first time to her. "Have been for years. He doesn't know. I keep finding reasons."
She thought: I told Gwen and I told you, and you told me and not him, and we've both been carrying things in the same house. She thought: that's what the architecture was built on.
"I'm gay," she said. "Also fluid, some days. I told Gwen in October."
He nodded slowly.
"I'm sorry," she said, because it needed saying. "About Christmas. I was — I wasn't being honest about what was actually wrong, I was making it about you, which was easier."
"I know," he said. "I was doing the same thing."
Silence. Not the bad kind. The after-the-thing kind, where something has been put down.
"I like Gwen," he said finally. "She's — I think she's very good for you."
"She is." A pause. "Merlin. You know he talks about you in ways he thinks are not obvious."
Arthur's face did the thing where he was pleased and not ready to say so. "He thinks he's subtle."
"He's not."
"No." A pause. "Is it strange? That it's — that we're both—"
"It's not strange," she said. "It's just what we are."
She looked at her brother across the table. They were both, as she'd heard someone say recently, more themselves than they'd been before. It made some things harder — the selves they'd been before had fit better into the spaces their father had built for them. But the fit, she had decided, was not worth the cost.
"Coffee?" she said.
He looked at her. Something settled in his face. "Yeah," he said. "All right."
They were not fixed. They would not be fixed in a morning. But they were both more themselves, which meant they had more to bring to the fixing, which was a start.
Day 28 — Queer Grief | angsty
"The Eulogy He Gives to No One"
Professor Gaius Stanhope retired the following spring, but the loss Merlin was thinking about was different.
It was a boy he'd known at secondary school. He hadn't thought about him in years — and then he'd seen the notification on a social media platform he barely used anymore, posted by someone in the year below: Rest in peace, Sam. Gone too soon.
That was all.
He hadn't known Sam well. They'd been acquaintances at best, the kind of distant familiarity you had with people you shared the same building with for five years. Sam had been quiet. Sam had been, Merlin realized now, with the knowledge he'd accumulated this year — Sam had been very carefully invisible.
He lay on the bed in the flat he now shared with Arthur, and he did the math, and the math came out wrong.
He did not know the circumstances. He didn't ask. The notification had a specific quality to it — gone too soon, the closed-casket tone of it, the way nobody in the comments said anything except condolences.
He thought about being fifteen and not having the word yet. He thought about the performed normalcy. He thought about the school corridor, the careful invisibility, the management of being seen only in the approved ways.
Sam had been doing all of that, probably, quietly, in a school where nobody talked about it — where Merlin had also been doing all of that, quietly, nearby, and they'd never once found each other.
He wanted to say: I see you now. I should have looked harder then.
He wanted to say: the word I found at fifteen — someone would have given it to you eventually, if there had been more time.
He wanted to say: you were not alone, even if you never knew it, even if we never told you.
He lay there for a while. Arthur was at rugby. The flat was quiet.
Eventually he got up. He texted Gwen: you okay? — not about Sam, just the check-in, the one they sent each other on the days that felt heavy. She replied yes, you? He replied yeah. This was true and not entirely true and they both understood that.
He thought about what he'd learned this year about the community he'd been afraid to claim. About the people who held history — the elders who'd fought for things that now existed, the ones who were gone, the ones for whom the word had come too late or not at all. About Sam, who'd been fifteen in the same corridor.
He went to his desk. He opened his laptop. He started writing — not for anything, not for publication, just for Sam, just for the private record of the grief. You were here. You were one of us. The years ahead would have been different. He didn't know this. He hoped it anyway.
He wrote until the grief had somewhere to live that wasn't just inside him.
Arthur came home. He found Merlin at the desk and put his hand on his shoulder briefly — no questions, just that. Merlin leaned into it for a second.
"Okay?" Arthur said.
"Getting there," Merlin said.
That was honest. That was enough.
Day 29 — Aromantic Identity | reflective
"Nothing Missing"
Lance had spent a long time thinking there was something missing.
This was the default narrative. You grew up with it — in films, in songs, in the particular urgent message of every story about finding the one, the person who would complete the picture. Love as the thing that made everything else make sense. Romance as the arrival point.
He was twenty-two years old and he had excellent friends and a flat he liked and work he found genuinely interesting and a life that felt, on most days, quite full.
He did not want what everyone else seemed to be waiting for.
He'd found the word during second year — aromantic, the specific designation of not experiencing romantic attraction. He'd sat with it for a while. He'd read about it, quietly, at the kitchen table, while Merlin made tea in the background and didn't ask what he was reading. He'd thought: this is mine, and the thought had been clear and clean and without ceremony.
He hadn't told many people. Not because it felt secret but because it felt simple — like a fact about himself that didn't require announcement. He'd told Gwen, who'd said oh, that makes sense, and Merlin, who'd said I think I understand that better than I expected to (and had then gone slightly thoughtful for about a day, which was its own thing). He'd told Freya, who'd nodded in the way she nodded at things that resonated.
Today was a fine day. An ordinary day. He had gone for a run in the morning because he liked running. He'd had coffee with Merlin and Arthur, who were insufferably settled into each other and didn't notice, which was fine. He had an afternoon free and he'd spent it reading and then walking to the river, which was doing its river things in the June light, and sitting on the bank for a while with no agenda.
He was not waiting for anything to arrive.
That was the thing that was hardest to convey to people who asked — the waiting was not in him. He was not running from it or deferring it or being self-protective. He was simply not built for it, and this was not a sadness, it was just a fact, and on most days the fact sat lightly and peacefully in him.
There were harder days. The days when the world insisted — loudly, collectively, without meaning to — that the thing he didn't feel was the most important thing there was. The days when the insistence got in, and he found himself performing the waiting, or questioning the fact. Those days were real. He didn't dismiss them.
But today he was sitting by the river, and the June air was warm, and he was full of his own life — his friendships, which were deep and real and not a consolation prize for anything; his work, which mattered to him; himself, which was a specific and knowable person who knew what he was and wasn't.
Nothing missing. Nothing missing.
He sat by the river until the light went long and amber and the evening came on. Then he walked home, and texted the group chat that he was making dinner if anyone wanted to come over, and Gwaine said already there, which meant they were already at his flat somehow, which was not a surprise.
He went home.
Day 30 — Full Circle | hopeful
"The Letter"
June 30th
To the person I was a year ago —
I don't know exactly where you are right now. Probably in your dorm room, probably arguing with yourself, probably rehearsing something. You were always rehearsing, back then — the speech to your mum, the reason you didn't go to the march, the careful explanation for every avoided thing. You were the world's most competent avoider of yourself.
I want to say: it gets better. And it does — I'm not lying, it does — but I don't want to tell you it like it's a thing that happens to you. It happens because you do things. Terrifying things, mostly, that are small from the outside.
You tell your mum. You don't use the speech.
You make friends who become something closer than that. You find out that being found — that having people who see the whole of you and don't flinch — is one of the better things in a life.
You go to Pride. You hold a flag. You cry a little, which you will never admit to anyone, but I'm telling you now because it's fine. It's fine to cry at belonging.
You figure out that the label you had wasn't quite the whole picture, and you don't fall apart about it. You just update. You learn that identity is a living thing, not a form you fill out once and submit.
I should tell you something about Arthur, but I'm not sure you'd believe me. You're currently at the stage where he's the worst person at Camelot University. I will say: you have a flat together, and there is an ongoing argument about the dishwasher, and you have never been happier about anything.
I should tell you about Gwen, who is going to be your armour-friend. About Elyan, who will tell you the truth when you need it. About Gwaine, who will notice when you're making yourself small and refuse to let it slide. About Freya, who will sit in silence with you on the bad nights and whose silences are never empty. About Lance, who will be the most quietly honest person you've ever known. About Percy, who you will refer to as "Gwen's long-distance rugby player boyfriend" for three months before being corrected. About Gaius, who will be the unexpected thing.
I should tell you about the community you were afraid to claim. The people who held it through the years before you, who made it possible for you to walk into a march and hold a flag and cry privately and belong. They were here before you. You are here now. Someone behind you is watching from a safe distance, the way you did, the way we all did.
The letter doesn't have to be happy, I said to myself when I started writing. It just has to be honest.
Here is the honest thing: there was a year when you found out who you were, and the finding out was hard, and it was also the best thing. Not despite the hard parts. Not in spite of them. With them, and through them, and at the end of them, something real.
You are gay, and maybe more than that, and still figuring it out, and that is not a contradiction — it is just how it is. You are loved by people you chose, who chose you back. You are standing at the end of June holding a flag you earned.
You are going to be fine.
Come and find us when you're ready. We'll be right here.
— Merlin
P.S. — The duck won, but the date was excellent. You'll see.
[ End of Thirty Days of Light ]
Happy Pride.