Work Text:
Day 11 — Nonbinary Joy | fluffy
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.