#grayza drabble

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’.