#and he can already sense she's attached but it doesn't work because she bond15's him anyway

[aestheticitii]

something about fairy godmother!merlin after gudako lets it slip that she thinks cindereli's dress is gorgeous and that she'd love to try it on makes me feral

so of course, when she wakes up in the middle of the night, she's in a beautiful castle, in a beautiful dress, staring at the mirror like she can't believe it's actually her

and then comes a knock at the door, and who appears but merlin himself, dressed up and ready to escort her to the ball

and there are tons of people there, mostly background characters with little bearing on her day to day life, but some of them are also the friends and family and classmates she hasn't seen in what feels like years

randomly, servants enter her dream and get put into appropriate costumes. abby and dantes are also there the entire time as bodyguards (abby is her lady in waiting/maid and dantes is her suave mercenary friend, it's in the script that merlin never ends up giving her), mash is there as a princess from a neighboring kingdom, and oberon is ALSO there, he forced himself there because he got no invite and he heard about it from castoria, and kind of miffed he didn't hear about this first because he can also do that. it's very important to him that gudako knows that, even if he'll never do it for her, obviously

she spends the night dancing away (always making sure to check on merlin, though he doesn't dance himself), until the clock hits twelve and merlin spirits her back to a room that looks like chaldea, but there are subtle touches to it that suggest its either OG chaldea or novum chaldea with the things she's missing from her OG room that sion couldn't replicate

and he makes her some hot chocolate, mimicking a certain someone (which causes a brief lull in the conversation after which merlin mocks the man mercilessly, but in a very frenemy way, and it gets a small smile out of her as she tells him not to make fun of the dead, but she's still agreeing with him), and they talk about how fun the night was

until gudako jokes about how she didn't have a prince charming. you can't have fairy tales without prince charming, who is the princess supposed to marry??

they end up debating whether she actually didn't have one or if she just isn't a princess who needs a prince charming right now (gudako rejects the premise that she doesn't want one—why does everyone else get knight kings, she says, pointing at shirou and hakuno for artoria and charlie), and she offhandedly says that if fairy godmothers looked like him, prince charmings would be out of a job

and that—

and that catches him off guard because the very next thing she says is "maybe prince charming was the fairy godmother who helped me along the way"

and he automatically says, "i'm not sure that's how the saying goes, my lord"

but anything else he can say dies in his throat when she stands up and asks him to dance with her and how can he say no when she's smiling at him so brilliantly

"shall we, o' wizard of mine?"

"as my lord commands."

and they live happily ever after

(when morning comes, gudako wakes up to a surprise in her bed. she figures out pretty quickly that he's just pretending to sleep, so she kicks him off her bed.

"my lord is a cruel master," he complains, cuddling her.

after they show up to breakfast like that, gawain straight up asks if she needs him to bail her out and is extremely disappointed when he finds that's not the case.)