#shirohunter

When he’s moving, he doesn’t have to think.

It’s the easiest way to deal with battles - knife fitting snugly in his hand, sniper rifle solid against his back, quick feet clattering against the ground. There’s a scratch on his cheek. He almost wishes it would bleed.

Normally, he tries to stay out of battles, really. But his division is responsible - Schwarzer’s son, he thinks to himself, bites his lip and raises his knife and shouts ‘Screamer!” in a way that rips his throat raw. The sky above him is heavy and gray and the ground shudders.

“Dammit,” Mikhael mutters, voice sore.

This shouldn’t be a threat, he thinks, slipping out and up near the gate, knuckles white around the knife. He thinks about the other’s safety. Thinks about Schwarzer for a moment. Keeps running, listens to his feet and his heartbeat instead of the sounds of battle.

It’s easier to block out the screams.

There are voices he recognizes, and there is a rumble, the sound of collapsing, of unsteady ground and NLA paying the price. His breath is unsteady. He doesn’t turn to the sound, but runs for the gate, feet faster, please-be-safe-please-be-safe an under-his-breath mantra.

The sky opens up and spills rain over his shoulder, and it sticks to his glasses, runs down his cheeks like tears.

The sounds of battle slowly die, and he turns back to NLA with a clench in his chest. He grips the fabric of his shirt tightly in his hand and pretends everything’s fine.

The ground squelches under his feet. He lets it suck him down.

There is screaming in the distance, a strained and pained voice he wishes he didn’t recognize - “Let me go back! He’s still in there, please, please, let me go! You have to let me go!” It cracks with every line, and Mikhael feels he could be sick from fear, from anxiety, from every step he takes closer.

It’s Erza’s voice.

Rourke has one arm over Erza’s shoulders, the other around his waist, keeping the screaming boy (and really, that’s all he is, fifteen years young - how could he ever fault him?) back, back from running into a collapsed hangar. His face is slashed and bloodied, dripping into his vision, and his cheeks are equally stained with blood and tears.

Mikhael wants to say something. He wants to say “no”, deny this all, run back away into Primordia. His feet won’t move. His voice won’t work.

“Schwarzer?” he croaks finally, doesn’t meet Rourke’s eyes.

Rourke doesn’t look at him either, gives a sad nod.

“Papa!” Erza wails, and Mikhael swears his heart shatters.

It doesn’t hit him, fully, not yet, Schwarzer being deadgonenothere without him ever having gotten to speak to him, someone whom had never known his name - he curses his own cowardice, and his fingers dig into his palms. He wishes they would bleed.

“I can’t leave! We can’t, can’t, we c-”

Erza’s voice cracks into sobs, his struggles against Rourke’s restraint becoming weaker.

“I, ah….” Mikhael shifts from foot to foot as Rourke’s grip on Erza shifts from restraining to supportive.

“We need to h-heal...heal Erza’s face….”

He feels like he can’t breathe. None of them can breathe. Time has stopped in this rain, this bloodied rain. When he reaches for his knife, it clatters to the ground, skitters across it. He laughs anxiously - Rourke picks it up and hands it back to him with a smile that is meant to be warm but is filled with as much as need to cry as any of them.

(he doesn’t even realize he’s crying until he feels the wetness against his neck.)

It’s two weeks before Erza talks again - whether his silence is traumatic or willful or both - does anyone know? He looks just enough like his father to make it so Mikhael can’t speak to him, can’t see him, throat clenches and heart drops and his eyes sting.

Erza is not his father. Maybe he’ll never understand that.

Rourke tells him the news, when Erza begins speaking again - he understands, somewhat, Mikhael thinks, that hollowed feeling. But isn’t this invalid, since he never could speak to Schwarzer, never knew him, only knew his warmth. Still, he goes to see Erza anyway, fumbling with his knife the whole time.

Erza is slumped over in a bed, looking weak. There’s no light in his eyes and a bandage across his face.

“How are you feeling?” Mikhael asks, his voice barely a whisper, cracking in the middle - he’s checking on a subordinate from his division, nothing more.

The boy’s fingers grab at the blanket on his bed. His eyes are brimming with sadness, too much, someone his age.

“Fine.”

The boy’s voice is cold. He wonders where the life is, the life they’d known he had.

“Has - er - uhm. Rourke saw you earlier, right?”

A nod.

“Are you returning to duty?”

Management of the division. Nothing more, nothing less. Erza is not his father.

His hair is orange and red like Schwarzer’s, the blood over his face, rain falling on a crumbling district.

Another nod.

“Once I’m healed.”

Erza sounds so old, so weighted. Mikhael wants to wrap his arms around him - there’s a chair beside Erza’s bed, which he settles into.

“Erza.”

He’s not his father. He’s not his father.

“Do you - ah. Can I help you?”

A shadow passes over Erza’s face and he bites his lip. When he speaks, his voice is fangs and claws and teeth.

“I don’t need your help! You let him - you all - you left him!”

He lurches to jump out of his bed, and Mikhael is out of his chair in an instant, pushing Erza back down gently, putting a gentle arm over his shoulder.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Erza. I couldn’t be there. I ran away.”

(he always ran. and now schwarzer’s gone, isn’t he? is there a heaven, on this planet, was there ever?

maybe from there, he’ll notice him, thank him.)

Erza flinches at the touch, but his face leans against Mikhael’s chest, and his hands clench at the hem of his shirt. Something in him has shattered. Mikhael thinks he might understand. Neither of them feel like they can breathe.

“He’s not coming back.”

The way the words fall off Erza’s lips hurt, sting against open ears - an acceptance.

“No.”

(at the barracks, he turns a paper over in his hands, a sealed letter.

he takes a journey to cauldros and throws it into the volcano, watches it burn to ash and smoke, and thinks it must reach schwarzer, if his spirit is still out there.

‘erza’s strong,’ he tells the unforgiving sky, the brimstone rain, burning against his skin.

‘i hope you’re proud of him.’)

Three months, and Erza is on duty again. Rourke thinks it’s too soon, takes so many of Erza’s duties onto himself - Mikhael notices it, sees the schedules. Wonders if that’s how Rourke is coping. Their wounds are healing, but they’re still only barely scars.

Erza’s steps are shaky. They don’t let him into combat, send him on missions meant for other divisions, chasing strawlennies instead of battling. He’s quiet, made of ice and crystal, and there’s a new layer around him that no one can pierce (save perhaps Weiss.)

It’s raining in Oblivia, lightning splitting the sky. Mikhael brainjacks indigens with a numbness inside his chest. He doesn’t have to focus like this, and that’s no longer a blessing, because his thoughts don’t know where to go beyond blood and rain and mud.

He sees Erza, off in the distance, crouching in the red-wet-dust, small form shuddering. The striking scar across his face makes his chest stir.

“Erza! D-do you need help?”

The boy stands, hair flattened with water.

“No. I was just finishing up.”

He seems very focused on the ground, watching the water pool into footprints. The crackle of lightning accentuates the hollowed look in Erza’s eyes. Even now, there is something about him that doesn’t feel quite alive - more methodical and robotic than human.

Isn’t that ironic, the flesh-and-blood body?

The roar of an indigen cuts off Mikhael as he opens his mouth, and Erza spins around, hands on his guns. Before the boy can draw his weapons, Mikhael has sprinted, faster, pushed Erza over, oh god never let him get hurt Schwarzer’s face in his name protect him like his father.

“Black Bane!”

It only takes seconds for the fight to end, for Mikhael to slip his knife back into his sheath. When he turns to Erza, his eyes are wide, and he’s shaking, trembling, hands clenching into the dirt.

“Are you alright?”

Erza isn’t here, his eyes are empty, unseeing - reflected in them is three months ago, Schwarzer’s body impaled, stepping in to defend him, someone who wasn’t strong enough. His hands clench. He blames himself.

They stand there in the rain until Erza can stand. Neither of them speak, the silent walk back to the city, wet and cold.

(he tells rourke about this, later.

they both smile and pretend it doesn’t hurt. they’re all thinking about what they could’ve done.)

Mikhael likes to sit in Primorida and watch the sky - or he did, still does, but when there’s nothing to occupy his thoughts he thinks too much. Thinks about not running. Wonders if Rourke blames himself, too, wonders if they all do.

He tugs a knee to his chest, hugs it, and in a lapse of safety, a lapse of responsibility, doesn’t notice someone come up behind him. A shock of red hair settles beside him, looks up at the sky, sitting up stiff and cooly.

Erza looks less like Schwarzer now, older, colder. He wonders if the ice will ever melt.

“Mikhael, sir,” he asks, and his voice sounds still childish in this moment.

“Forgive me if this is perhaps too far of a question - where do we go when we die?”

The question shocks Mikhael for a second, and he laughs, laughs despite the tears stinging at his eyes.

“There was a legend, I heard, once,” he says, a soft smile on his face, a light in his eyes, a feeling of moving on.

“The stars are the spirits of heroes.”

Erza trains his eyes off of Mikhael’s face and up to the sky, squinting close at the shifting galactical mess of the Miran night sky. His brow furrows, and Mikhael almost laughs in the childishness of it.

“I think he’s up there. Er, his spirit - I mean, well, he’s watching over you.”

Erza nods as if he were acknowledging an order.

“I’m sure he’s proud.”

“I wasn’t strong-”

Mikhael cuts him off before he can finish that thought.

“It’s not about being strong or weak. You can’t change the past, but you can - um, well, this is a bit cheesy - you can pave a new future. And as long as, well, you’re working on that, on our new home, then I’m sure he’s proud.”

Erza’s lip quivers.

(mikhael takes out his star chart, his project since they had landed on mira, and shows erza the constellations he’s found, the knit of four stars they dub ‘a hero’s sacrifice’.

there is a bright star at the tip. ‘schwarzer’, erza says, and mikhael doesn’t argue it. he’s the brightest light in all their skies, after all.

mims don’t need to sleep - don’t dream - but mikhael swears he sees schwarzer in a dream, a schwarzer who smiles at him, ‘thank you, i wish i’d gotten to meet you properly’, and he smiles too, and there are tears on his cheeks. and this is it, isn’t it?