#grayxerza

Ooooooh, Anon, you are so right! I love me some Jerza to death, but multishipping is where the fun’s at, am I right? 

I really like the idea of Gray and Erza together because they have one major thing in common- they have low self-confidence in the love department. Gray desires to be worthy of his partner and doesn’t ever think he’s good enough, while Erza is just shy and guarded in general. I think these two would be so cute together because they would just fluster the hell out of each other! All the blushing and embarrassed looks away! ~heart eyes~ However, because of that I think these two would be able to voice their feelings to each other more easily because they both know they aren’t good with love and would work at it together. Plus, they are both hella strong, so imagine the Unison Raids- Erza’s swords plus a rain of Gray’s ice swords? Magnificent potential. 

Quick Draw 

She can feel it. She can feel it in the trembling numbness of her hands as she grips her arms hard, can taste it in the bitter words that toss and turn in her head, awaiting escape. She can see it in the blank, fragile eyes that stare back at her from the glass, can trace it in the thin line that adores her face, that seals the scream she wishes to simply let go.

She is going to break, is already breaking, and she knows it.

So she leaves. She retreats from the crowd, from the only home she’s ever known, from the only distraction from her dark, dark, thoughts. She leaves because they are the light that chases her darkness away, but blinds her, engulfs her, burns her. And one, just this one time again – please please please – she wants to protect herself.

Footsteps echo from the hall, wood creaking, a door is slammed shut.

The silence that follows is deafening.

Not that it is quiet, he muses. The guild is never quiet, but for some reason something is missing. Something is wrong. He feels…he feels that feeling when Happy’s trying to tell a story but gets cut off, or when Lucy takes the pages of her novel away just as he’s about to read the resolution. He feels as if a certain red haired mage’s exit didn’t have proper closure.

…what?

He’s not sure what compels him to push his seat from the table, bidding a hasty farewell to the people around him, to his teammates, to the blue-haired mage who had wrapped herself around his arm. He gives a flimsy excuse about needing to be somewhere, when really he isn’t sure where. He’s not even sure why.

But something was missing, something was wrong. And he feels the need to correct it, to point it out so they can move on, so that it doesn’t weigh on his mind. This isn’t a new feeling, he considers. He’s felt it before, this missing-ness, this wrong-ness, before, and it is after a few moments that he remembers scarlet with that feeling too. He doesn’t like it.

He has to find her.

She cannot find herself.

She wants to rage. To scream. To summon a sword and hack away at…something. She wants to fly, up up up and feel the wind as she falls down down down. She wants to see red, taste iron, feel searing pain. She just wants to…feel. Feel something. Anything.

Anything but this emptiness.

Something is wrong with her, she tells herself, gripping the side of her head, eyes wide and wild. Her eyes refuse to focus on the water, refuse to see on her reflection, refuses to see herself. She refuses – she’s afraid – to see herself like this, broken and fragile.

She’s fragile. She knows she’s fragile. She knows that people don’t see it, don’t see her, and maybe she likes that they don’t see that side of her. But she knows, deep deep down, in the abyss in her heart, she knows the truth. Denies it, fights it, tries to overcome it. But you cannot change who you are.

And who she is, is fragile. Who she is, is broken. Who she is, is –

“Erza?”

He sees her freeze, sees her entire frame go rigid as he approaches, like she hadn’t even noticed he was there. He freezes too, caught off guard with her reaction. She is never one to be surprised, never one who knew less than he did, and he’s not sure what to do. Her name hangs in the air in the stillness of the moment as his icy nerves attempt to function again.

A thousand moments pass in two seconds.

“Gray.”

It is not a greeting, a question, or even a statement. It is a word, a person. Someone is here. Someone who knows her. She is breaking, right in front of that person.

She can’t.

She hasn’t moved. Warmth may have returned to his nerves but he can still feel the chill in the air, can still see the ice wrapping around her, freezing her. Turning her cold.

“Er – “ He’s about to say her name again, but notices how her hands – they’re clutching her hair? – tighten, a tremble running up her arms and disappearing behind scarlet. It’s was just like when –

Suddenly, he remembers. Remembers when he felt this wrongness before, a long time ago, a lifetime ago. The Tower of Heaven. Erza appearing when it was they who went to save her. Erza, ordering them to leave. Lucy had pleaded with her to let them come, scarlet hair being the only image of the person they conversed with.

Her hand had trembled then, just a little, clutching tighter at her swords  as she ordered them yet again to leave her. He had felt something was wrong then, too – hell, he had called her out of it. But when she turned…

Her gaze is torn away from the murky water as she feels hands gripping at her shoulders, turning her. In her surprise, she focuses on the first thing in front of her, only to see black black black eyes staring back at her. She knows them.

“Gray, what’re you – “

They’re dry, is the first thing that he thinks as soon as he sees her face. He thinks that that should be a good thing, but it’s not. It’s not, because what else he sees speaks – screams – louder than he’s ever seen before. He sees the tremble of her lips, the paleness of her cheeks, her short but deep breaths. He sees the emotion in her eyes, her brown, brown, eyes. He sees the pain, the turmoil, the fighting emotions he never knew – should’ve known – she hid behind her armor. Behind her mask.

“Erza, you – “ he begins at the same time she does, and they both falter in what they’re supposed to say. Instead, they stare, black on brown, an arm’s length between them, one’s hands gripping the other’s trembling shoulders.

‘The pain…is too great…’

They’re not sure who leans in first, who takes the first step to close their distance. They don’t try to think, to remember, to consider the details. They don’t try to make sense out of it, or question why it happened.

The tip of her head rests itself below his shoulder. His arms wrap around her frame. She presses her palms to his back. He puts a hand behind her head.

And slowly, very slowly, his shoulder becomes wet. He secures her head in the crook of his neck.

She can feel her heart throbbing painfully, and presses herself closer to him.

He can feel her beginning to shake. He tightens his arms around her.

She tries to hold back her screams, and instead they come out as little sobs.

He feels her getting heavier, so he sits them on the grass before her knees give way.

She tries to pull away, so she can hide. She tries to push him away, so she can be alone.

He won’t let her.

She knows that something is wrong, that there is something missing with her. She’s afraid that it was never there to begin with, that the darkness has consumed her, swallowed her, trapped her.

He knows she isn’t fragile. He knows that she isn’t broken. But he’s afraid that she’s been strong for too long, that she’s retreating into herself, that she’s forcing herself to not cry so much that the tears refuse to shed themselves.

She needs to cry. She needs to feel, to acknowledge, to understand, to accept. She needs to know darkness, to see in darkness, to live in darkness, before she can go back to the light. Before she can become herself, her true self, the person everyone sees – the person he sees, but she doesn’t.

But until then, until she has yet to overcome the darkness –

“I won’t leave you.”

She was having a nightmare again.

Before the last time she woke up, Gray had noticed how her fingers had twitched in her sleep, how she tossed her head a bit too uneasily as she mumbled something incoherent, how her breathing would become just a little bit more ragged even though she was supposed to be resting.

It tore his heart every time he tried to imagine what she would be having nightmares about. She had gone through too much, felt pain so much deeper than anyone deserved to feel in a lifetime. He doesn’t know the exact details, since she always kept those as vague as she could, simply describing what slaves did as if it were in a history book. She never spoke of what she felt, the pain. She never spoke of what it did to her.

But Gray doesn’t need to hear it – he already knows. She was never one for words and he was never one for listening anyway. Communication for them was always between glances and glares, shared looks and eye rolls. It was a gentle brush of the arms, a reprimanding elbow to the ribs, a supporting hand on the back, a tear streaked face on the shoulder. The only words they ever said to each other were those between the lines.

He doesn’t need to hear it – he already knows, knows of the pain she had to go through. He knows when she asks to be hit when she makes the slightest mistake. He knows when she roughly but affectionately pulls someone’s head to her chest when she’s worried. He knows when, the few times he tries to make physical contact, she flinches, jerks away, closes in on herself as if she was –

He halts his trail of thought right there, because he doesn’t want to think about it, doesn’t want to look at her and see her as a weak, abused child. He reminds himself that she is Titania Erza, Fairy Tail’s strongest female wizard, but at the same time shaking his head at that image. He doesn’t want to see her as that either.

He wants to see her as Erza. Just Erza. The broken girl who grew up to be the strong but tender woman that is his team mate, whom he trusts and lov –

Where that thought came from, he isn’t sure. But it came naturally, even if it was just in his own head. He hadn’t really given it much thought lately, what she was to him. Things had just been so crazy and hectic lately, Tartarus and his father, living with Juvia, the Avatar guild…that word, he had always associated with a blue-haired water mage, whom he couldn’t help but care for in return for her devotion to him.

And yet, that was just the word. The emotion, the feeling, that warm, burning sensation he was feeling in his chest…

A mumble, quiet but desperate, snaps him from his thoughts, and he finds himself rushing beside the unconscious woman whom it came from. Sweat is coating her forehead, and her battered hands curl into fists at her sides.

He knows she is in danger of running a fever, so he does the first thing that comes to his mind. He breaths deeply, infusing just a little bit of his magic in his breath and in the air. He places a cool hand on her forehead, his other hand wrapping around her own clenched fist.

Almost instantly, her mumbling stops, and she seems to relax a bit more. He feels her hand loosen in his, and he’s about to pull away awkwardly when instead she wraps it around his palm. She moves her head just slightly towards him, and if Gray didn’t know any better he’d  say that she was leaning into his touch.

He feels his body relax at seeing her calm down and sleep soundly again, until the only sensation he can feel is his own heartbeat, thumping slowly but steadily. He remembers, not too long ago, when they were so scared because of all the blood Erza had lost, that her heartbeat was too slow, too painfully slow. They were worried that it would fade, that she would lose her heartbeat at the same moment they would lose her.

Putting his thumb on her wrist, he tries to find the heartbeat he knows is still too slow, but stable, at the very least. What he finds at first alarms him, for it is weaker than what he expected, but then he realizes that it is steady, and beating at the same time his does.

He understands almost instantly, with a tenderness he never knew he could feel, what she is trying to tell him, even as she dreams in the unconscious. ‘I am with you’.

The fact that the same Fairy Tail guild members that were there for the Tower of Heaven arc are the same characters that are together right now may already be a nod to whose personal story will be expanded on in the following chapter/s. 

In other words, I cannot WAIT for Erza’s character background to be expanded on after so long, and that idea that the rest of team Natsu, the people closest to her, are there with her for it, and that those who know what she went through in the Tower of Heaven arc - Team Natsu and Juvia - are there to back her up, but most importantly...

Gray is there.

I’m not really sure what I’m waiting for - Erza to wake up remembering Eileen with Gray right beside her to notice she’s shaking, Eileen confronting them and demanding Gray give Erza to her while he defends her, or Erza showing vulnerability as her past yet again comes back to haunt her and Gray noticing just the slightest bit of unease with her.

It’s just that, in terms of character relationship (romantic or otherwise), Gray and Erza’s have a lot of missing bits and is generally open for interpretation when the Tower of Heaven arc implied that it was deeper than those shared by Fairy Tail nakama. It feels...lacking, especially for those of us who recognize that they share a bond that’s only ever revealed subtly every few chapters, or off panel. If there was ever a time for Hiro Mashima to address or put a close to the development of their bond, their relationship (again, romantic or otherwise), what they truly are to each other, now is the best time for it. 

First attempt at a Grayza drabble. I’ve been wanting to write for these two for a long time now, but everything just comes out rubbish. Trying something out this time.

She knows. She knows in the deepest parts of her soul that she cares for him. She knows in the way her breath hitches every time he comes back hurt, she knows when his black hair is the first thing her eyes looks for in the guild. She knows when somehow his presence near or far relaxes, her, calms her, but at the very same time makes her feel alive.

She acts. She acts like it is nothing, that he is just another one of her guild mates, her nakama. She treats him, everyone really, the same way. She is strict but kind, fierce but calm, loyal but oh so very weak in front of him. She tries to act the same way around everyone else, or be who she is whenever she is around him, but…

She knows that she thinks of him different. He is still her nakama and she will protect him like she would everyone that she holds dear, but it is different. She wants to keep him safe, to make sure nothing hurts him, but at the same time, she wants him to be him. And he is someone who is like her – someone who will fight, fight for himself and for their guild, their cause. She respects him, his strength and his character, and she knows this feeling, at least, is mutual.

In the deepest, most intimate well within her heart, she knows she loves him. She loves him. She loves the way he’s both calm and chilling, like the magic he wields. She loves how he has defended her countless time, she loves how he is not afraid of her, afraid of the person she masks herself to be. She loves him for caring about her, for being the first to see through her and not recoil in disgust. She loves that he has never once pitied her when she walked into the guild in tattered clothes, but can only admire her for the strength she has years later.

She loves him, because he is the first person to love her.

But she is a fool. She is a fool for thinking they can ever be together. She is a fool, because she had once thought her past could never let her imagine a life with him, and when she did, it is another who has him, whom he cares for. She is a fool, because now, after everything has happened, she has lost the right to reveal her true self, the self she has denied for so long, the self that can love, truly love. She cannot be that self, her self, because it is that which loves him more than anything, beyond kisses and dates and rings and family and intimacy and –

She never really does know what he truly thinks of her, if he had ever once felt for her what she does  him. She is not sure she wants to know, because if he ever did, it is gone now. Gone, and replaced by something else, something that is not for her, but for her. And if she actually had his love and lost it in the whirlwind of fights, feelings and emotions they have gone through together, she might just close herself off again, crawl back into the armor he had unchained her from, refuses to be someone he will see as a stranger more than a friend.

She loves him still, and even if he does not love her, she owes him that much.