gwaine’s devotion to merlin is not loud. there’s no grand declaration that you are my other half.
not once. not in a moment of dramatic revelation. but over and over and over again.
he chooses him in the easy moments, when merlin is just some scrawny servant with a sharp tongue and nothing to offer but a drink and a laugh. he chooses him in the harder moments too—when merlin is caught in things he doesn’t explain, when he disappears and reappears with that same evasive look, when there’s clearly something wrong and no one else bothers to ask. gwaine notices. gwaine always notices.
and more importantly, he doesn’t press.
that’s the thing about gwaine: his loyalty is never conditional on understanding. he doesn’t need the full story to stand beside someone. merlin is strange, secretive, occasionally infuriating—and gwaine shrugs like that’s just part of the package. like of course you’re odd. i like you anyway.
there’s a kind of reverence in that.
because what is devotion, really, if not the act of saying i don’t need you to make sense to me to matter?
gwaine trusts merlin in a way that feels almost reckless. he’ll back his play in a tavern brawl, in a dungeon, on a battlefield. no questions, no hesitation. if merlin says “come with me,” gwaine’s already halfway there. not because he’s foolish, but because somewhere along the line he decided merlin was worth the risk.
and gwaine is not a man who gives that lightly.
he knows better than to hand his loyalty over without a fight. but with merlin, it’s almost effortless. like he took one look at him and thought, oh. there you are.
and maybe that’s the most devastating part of it.
because merlin—who is carrying the weight of magic and destiny and a future he can’t explain to anyone—gets this one person who doesn’t ask him to justify himself. who doesn’t need him to be anything other than what he already is.
gwaine doesn’t see a servant.
he doesn’t see a mystery to be solved.
he sees merlin, and he stays.
and in a world where love is so often tangled up in obligation—where arthur’s bond with merlin is written in prophecy and inevitability—gwaine’s devotion feels almost radical in its simplicity.
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