#merlin settles into friendship with gwaine like they've known each other for years

[panharmonium]

nobility is defined by what you DO -

- not by who you are.

sO LET’S TALK ABOUT GWAINE

and specifically about how merlin reacts to him in this intro ep, because this is another of those episodes that has more stuff going on under the surface than merlin is able to articulate out loud.

i said in an earlier post that gwaine is the person in merlin’s circle who most closely approximates will’s audaciously unapologetic spirit of “good morning to MERLIN and MERLIN ONLY,” and on a rewatch, it’s apparent that this episode actually takes the parallels between those two characters way further than that.

what is it with you and nobles?  he doesn’t trust anyone of nobility.

my father was a knight, in caerleon’s army.  he died in battle. his father was killed, fighting for king cenred.

you saved his life / if i’d known who he was, i probably wouldn’t have. you just saved my life / yeah, don’t know what i was thinking!

arthur’s a thoroughbred little braggart. when i first met [arthur]...i thought he was pompous and arrogant / well, nothing’s changed there, then.

people get sick of me too quickly. they’re used to ignoring him.

you livened the place up. this place has been boring without you.

the first time merlin and gwaine meet, gwaine bum-rushes some dude trying to kill arthur and gets stabbed for his trouble, and then the first conversation merlin has with him after that is about how if gwaine had known who arthur was, he wouldn’t have bothered to help.

“he’s a noble,” gwaine says, by way of explanation.  and then later, when merlin says “arthur’s not like that,” gwaine replies, “maybe.  but none of them are worth dying for.”

i mean.  

merlin looks at gwaine and sees something he recognizes.  of course he goes ride or die for gwaine three seconds after meeting him.  of course he instantly gravitates towards him.  of course he feels reflexively affectionate for him; he can’t help it - he feels like he already knows him.  

gwaine isn’t just friendly and fun to merlin; he’s familiar. 

so familiar, in fact, that merlin, having known gwaine for a grand total of twenty-four hours, completely drops every single scrupulous precaution he’s supposed to be taking with regard to his private personal information and immediately dishes up all the dirty details of his father’s situation, despite the fact that NOBODY IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW ANY OF THAT STUFF.  

like - merlin keeps the dragonlord part a secret, at least, but the things he does say are dangerous enough on their own.  in 2.08, merlin straight up tells arthur that he’s never met his father, that he doesn’t even know who his father was.  and that’s the impression arthur is still carrying around.  if arthur were to somehow get wind of the fact that this isn’t the case - if the subject happened to pop up one day and a confused gwaine was like, “uhhh merlin told me his father served uther and was banished; he told me he met his father before the man died” - it would prompt more than a few awkward questions.  how would merlin even begin to explain that?  when is he supposed to have discovered his father’s identity, or met his father personally, or learned that his father had died, without arthur being somehow involved?  merlin works for arthur all day, every day, from dawn til dusk.  there’s no conceivable way something this momentous could have occurred outside of arthur’s notice.  

the whole thing looks suspicious as hell.  it’s a dangerous hole in merlin’s cover.  

and yet -

merlin can’t help himself.  he hears gwaine saying, ‘yeah, my dad was killed fighting one of the king’s stupid wars and then the king left me and mine for dead, so fuck the nobility, amirite?’ and merlin’s mind short-circuits.  he goes OH?!?!??? and then he immediately fumbles every single shred of common sense he’s ever had.  he word-vomits his dad’s story all over gwaine’s lap.  

it’s like - look, merlin hears that and reflexively thinks I KNOW YOU, and he blurts out the thing he hasn’t been able to say for a year.  he temporarily forgets that he isn’t safe, because he feels safe, around someone who feels like this, like someone he used to know, like the only friend he had who was safe, for him, like the only person who would’ve known enough about merlin’s personal history to even care about an update on his mysteriously missing father to begin with.  gwaine feels like the one person merlin has been wanting to tell about balinor in the first place.  the confession is automatic.  instinctive.  and it’s not like it’s a little one time slip-up, either; it’s a mistake merlin keeps making, because he talks to gwaine about it again, when they’re polishing the army’s boots for punishment work, and merlin is going on and on about how no, his father didn’t have servants, he didn’t have anybody; he died about a year ago, and merlin wishes he’d known him better; his father could have taught him so much - and he’s just sitting there scrubbing those shoes, talking about things nobody else knows and nobody else is supposed to know, like it’s the most natural thing in the world.  

and he should know better.  if any of the things he said to gwaine ever got back to arthur, merlin would be up the proverbial creek.  none of these things are things he should be saying out loud, to anybody.  to this day, that whole conversation is a ticking time bomb waiting to blow up in his face.

but gwaine feels familiar to him.  he forgets.  

i say it a lot, but merlin spent something close to the first two decades of his life being known and loved, undercover and in secret, by exactly two people.  the feeling, elusive and impossibly rare, of what it was like to be safe and accepted and understood - that was something he could only get from two people.  and when everyone and everywhere else was potentially deadly - the magnitude of those relationships can’t be overstated.  it just can’t.  

so when merlin sees echoes of them in somebody else, of course he trips over his own feet trying to get close to that as fast as he can.  of course he tries to convince gwaine to stay in camelot; he literally puts himself in between gwaine and the door at the end to stop him from leaving.  of course merlin begs arthur “oh, you’ve got to speak to [uther], arthur; make him change his mind.”  

and it’s sad, at the end, when gwaine has to go, but the nice thing about it, in this case, is that gwaine is totally worth merlin’s effort.  merlin is chasing the right guy.  gwaine is exactly the kind of person that merlin’s (mistaken, yet somehow still accurate) mental associations assume he must be.  more so than any of merlin’s other friends, gwaine is the one who ultimately proves most likely to dump everyone and drop everything in defense of merlin’s interests.  he’s the one most likely to flip prince arthur pendragon the bird.  he’s the only one who comes to help merlin when gaius is framed for treason in season 4, after arthur turns his back on merlin and the rest of the court buys agravaine’s lies. 

i love that about him.  merlin needs people like that in his life.  merlin deserves people who put him first.  

and gwaine, for his part, deserves to have friends who appreciate him, people who want him around, people who are sorry to see him go.  when he says “i never stay in one place too long - people get sick of me too quickly,” gwaine deserves to have someone like merlin, who will respond, immediately and sincerely: “i didn’t.”