A/N: Er, I promise not all of these are going to be clothing themed. This just came to mind. Set in an AU where magic was revealed and in due course, everything was fine.
. . . . .
At first, nothing changed at all. He wore the same worn jacket, the same two neckerchiefs, the same rough shirts. Of all the things on his mind at the moment, clothes barely registered, but looking back he might have thought that it had been good to have something familiar when everything else was changing, and it had reminded everyone that he was still the same person they had always known.
The changes started slowly. He needed an amulet to do his work, and there was no reason to hide it now, so he wore it openly and without really thinking about it. It was only after someone commented on it that he realized that yes, he was wearing magical artifacts in public now, and it was fine. He was allowed.
The rest crept in bit by bit. Some came in as need required (shielding amulets, staff to focus power, pouch for herbs) and others were to fulfill different kinds of needs, like the need to intimidate a delegation or the equally important need to pull a prank on Gwaine, but others were strictly for himself. Half defiant, half proud markers that yes, he was a warlock, and he wasn't going to be shy about it. Not anymore.
(When Gwaine had called attention to his first amulet, his hand had automatically flown to cover it, and he'd been stuttering for an excuse before he'd remembered that he didn't have to. His hand still automatically twitched towards it whenever Arthur walked into a room.)
He never wore the robes, the others would have laughed, and he wouldn't have been able to run in them, but when Arthur got him the hat, he wore it proudly. It was overdone and screamed magical in a way only charlatans would have bothered with before the Purge, but after it, he wasn't the only one going out of his way to proclaim his identity. Pointy hats quickly swept the magical population, the more ostentatious and gratuitously magical the better.
(There was a competition, once. There was one that sang, another with birds that flew out of it, and a beautiful one with dragons and a town on the brim. The one that danced with sparks gave him chills, though, and he had nightmares about the dragon burning Camelot that morphed into Uther storming into the festivities and fires that were not nearly so harmless as sparks.)
His hat was eventually sacrificed to an experiment induced explosion. Arthur yelled at him for an hour, and then thrust a new hat into his hands that looked like the night sky had been stitched into silk. He'd marched off grumbling when Merlin had beamed at him.
He died a month later. The hat was the last present he ever gave Merlin.
So Merlin shoved it on his head and marched forward, doing what he could and refusing to take it off, no matter how many dirty glances began to be thrown towards it.
He preserved it with magic for centuries until a plague brought back old fears and the villagers thought to burn the funny old man who was obviously magical at the stake.
Merlin was fine, but he lost the hat.
He missed the hat. He wanted it back.
He made another one exactly like it and went on.
It was his hat. He didn't care how dangerous things got, it was his.
Fear gradually turned to funny looks and words either gentle or mocking. Magic wasn't believed in any more. Merlin sniffed and made the stars stitched into it dance straight off the brim and into the air.
That shut them up for a while.
He wandered into the convention more out of amusement than anything, or that's what he tried to tell himself. It was not, he insisted, because of an unhealthy attempt to pretend he was living in the past or that magic was still common.
Also, he got 217 compliments on his hat and was told he did an excellent impression of some grumpy sorcerer or other that had been in the movies recently. He also learned that there was a costume competition.
Perhaps next year he should enter.
When Arthur finally showed back up, clothing trends had changed completely. Most of the world was entirely unrecognizable.
Most.
Merlin had kept the hat.
