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Day 14 — Chosen Family Reunion | fluffy
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.