It's 31st May, 11:59pm. Dangling on the precipice over a new month. It's cold, and promising to get colder. With nothing but a pen, paper, and a niggling sadness, Erza sits at the table and tries to write a letter to someone who she has not seen in a long time. She tries to forcefully push the words out of her. Her pen still hovers over a clean sheet of paper. On it are only two words.
Dear Jellal…
It's not something that can be expressed so easily on paper. Her thoughts, pent up for so long within an armour of steel, have been nurtured into something deeper, something that cannot be captured in a few simple strokes of kanji. No matter how carefully she tries to choose her words, they collapse, fall apart. Her thoughts reduced to still-drying ink and meaningless strokes.
She caps her pen with a click and climbs into bed. On the wall, the hands of the clock twitch. It's a new month. Erza closes her eyes.
()()
As usual, the guild is awash with high-spirits. For some reason, Natsu jumps from table to table, laughing uncontrollably while Lucy chases him angrily, shaking her fist at him.
"Will they ever grow up?" Erza says to no one in particular.
"Probably not," Gray yawns and stretches. He's wearing nothing but his briefs.
"Should you even answer that question?" Erza says and looks pointedly at his naked state.
Gray yelps in surprise, apparently just realizing that he has discarded his clothes somewhere in the guild. "Probably not," he says and walks away to find his clothes.
()()
It's Thursday and a free day for Erza, who has opted to take a day off after that particularly unpleasant incident where she accepted a job with Natsu, Gray and Lucy and nearly destroyed a city in the east of Magnolia.
"Where are Natsu and the rest?" She says while slipping a spoon of strawberry cake into her mouth. She makes a pleased noise at the taste: soft, creamy and sweet.
"They're on a job. They're supposed to find and destroy a love potion." Mira replies, towelling off a mug behind the counter.
"Sounds like fun," Erza says. "I wonder what would happen if you gave it to Lucy and Natsu, though."
Lucy and Natsu have been skirting around each other for the past few weeks or so. It's so obvious, the way Natsu breaks into Lucy's house under the guise of not having enough hot water in his own house. Or how Lucy appears to be annoyed with Natsu's constant antics but is always roped along with them.
"I don't think anything would happen. They're too dense," Mira laughs.
The doors of the guild fly open. Erza swivels in her seat to look at the visitors. Her heart stops.
On hearing the doors open, the master stands on the bench with a large cup of beer in his hands. "You're here!" He exclaims, his voice giddy and drunk. He hops off the bench. "We'll settle things in my office."
The master climbs up the stairs, a hand rested on the railing to support him. In his drunken stupor, he misses some steps along the way and it's a slow climb but he manages to reach his office nonetheless.
Jellal pushes back the hood of his cloak. Mira waves kindly at him. Erza stares.
"Hi!" Meredy greets. She looks better than before. There is a pink rosy hue to her cheeks and a sparkle in her eyes that Erza doesn't remember seeing the last time they met.
Jellal nods at the both of them, his eyes lingering on Erza. "Hi," he says.
"Hey." She returns. It's strange, she thinks. The person that stands in the guild now is a mere remnant of the fantasy she had in mind while writing the letter. He's much more well-built, there's more colour in his cheeks, but most significantly, he looks much happier. There's no more brooding look staining his features, but still Erza can sense a niggling sense of loss from him, like he's missing something.
He disappears up the stairs and past the door of the master's office, with Meredy trailing behind him.
"What," Erza says. She continues eating her strawberry cake but doesn't taste its sweetness anymore.
He comes back down in half an hour. The master stands at the foot of the stairs. "Thanks for doing this for us. You really saved us a lot."
"It's only right for us to do so. The members of Fairy Tail have helped us so much. We're just repaying the favour." Meredy smiles brightly.
Erza's picking at the remains of her cake, listening in on the conversation that's going on behind her. "Hey, Mira," she says. "What am I supposed to do?"
She gets an answering half-smile. "Right now," Mira says pensively, "You should probably look up."
"Hey," Jellal says, sliding into the seat beside her. She's stricken by how sudden this turn of events is playing out.
"Hey."
"How are you?"
Erza almost laughs. After all the dragon-fighting, near death experiences, lethal flutes, psychopathic men,
"I'm fine," she says. "How are you?"
"I'm doing great. I'm starting to settle down. In fact, I got a house."
This raises her eyebrows. "Where?"
"Just a few blocks away from here, actually." He says, and she wants to kiss him so badly right now. His lips are prettily pink. She thinks it would be nice to trace the inked pattern on his face with her fingers and feel the softness of his skin.
"The yellow house with the blue roof. I got it cheap."
"That's great! It's great that you're finally settling down." Erza says. (It's great that you don't seem that much of a mirage anymore. Untraceable, transient. Leaving as quickly as you come. Whenever I think I'm grasping onto something solid, you slip through my fingers so easily, so painfully.)
Jellal looks at her for a while. Shadows move behind the darkness of his eyes, like he's thinking carefully and hard.
"I better go now then." He slips off the stool.
She's becoming familiar with his back, she thinks, as he walks away from her yet again. Erza aches.
()()
"I need you to find Jellal Fernandes," the master tells her one day. There are only several reasons why he would call someone to his office and this definitely wasn't on the list. Erza's heart skips a beat on hearing the name.
"What?"
The master leans back on his chair and crosses his fingers over his stomach. "The last time he came here, he forgot to sort some stuff out. I need you to retrieve Appendix 2 from him. He'll know what it is."
"Okay," she says. Her face is carefully schooled into one of indifference. The master eyes her carefully. She hopes he can't sense the anticipation filling her, like a sparkling flood threatening to sweep her off her feet.
"Be back soon," he reminds.
()()
A few blocks down from Fairy Tail, Erza can see an eclectic combination of blues and yellows. It's a house that resembles Lucy's, except smaller and the added presence of a rusty postbox in front of it, stuck there more like an afterthought than a necessity. She knocks twice. The door opens. Meredy smiles at her, surprised.
"Oh, hey Erza! I didn't know you were coming."
"The master sent me to get some documents. An Appendix 2?"
Meredy chews her lip. "Oh. Well, I wouldn't know anything about that. Jellal handles all the boring stuff but he's out buying food. You wanna come in and wait? He should only be a few minutes."
Erza slips her shoes off at the front door and walks in. It's small - there's a table and a couple of chairs pushed to the middle of the house, two doors leading to bedrooms, and other than this sparse ensemble, that was it. Perfect for anyone who needed to make a quick getaway or disappear with a flick.
Meredy sits on a chair and pulls her legs up to her chin, looking at her curiously. Erza sits opposite her.
"How is Crime Sorciere doing?"
"Great, actually, we've managed to clear all the dark guilds in West Magnolia. We're moving on to South Magnolia. That's why we got a house here." Meredy looks around, then wrinkles her nose. "Although it's not much and it looks terrible. But Jellal refused to let me decorate this place. He thinks my style is tacky. You should see my room, though, he doesn't know what I did to it."
She smiles impishly, which in turn, makes Erza smile.
"It must be tough to dedicate your life to getting rid of dark guilds. It's a noble purpose."
Meredy lets out a surprised gust of laughter which ends as quickly as it starts, like a brief flicker of orange.
"It's not as noble as you think, Erza-san. It's more of a selfish reason. The members of Crime Sorciere all carry something with them, a consequence from the entire Zeref business. Fucking Zeref. Because of him, my hands are stained with the blood of a hundred people." She wiggles her fingers, slim and smooth with a row of neatly cut nails. "But I'm trying to get it out. Maybe a cheap version of redemption.
"But I guess it gives me some worth to my life. I feel better about myself than before, when my life purpose was to find Zeref. I guess I'm mending myself, stitch by stitch. We're all on the road to being mended. Maybe not perfect, but it's good enough."
A key whittles noisily in the lock and the door opens. Jellal stands bewildered, looking at Erza with his hands filled with groceries.
"Erza?"
Erza stands quickly from her seat. "Master sent me for the Appendix 2."
Seeming to consider this, Jellal kicks the door close with his foot and places the bags of groceries on the table. "I must have forgotten to give it to him," he mutters, mostly to himself. He shoots a quick glance at Meredy.
"Put those in the fridge," he tells her. He turns to Erza. "I'll go get it now."
He opens a door to one of the bedrooms, Erza trailing behind him. Like the rest of the house, Jellal's bedroom is plain: no posters, no picture frames, nothing that allows a glimpse into his personality. The bed is folded neatly. There is a distinct lack of a cluttered mess, or perhaps it is because there is a lack of items which is why there is no mess. Maybe standing at the front door for the first time, the house may seem cold, untouched, unlived in, but Erza sees the minute details, like how people look at an object and never notice its shadow: the way all the books lined on the bookshelves are Encyclopedia Brown novels, the way the alarm clock beside his bed looks dented from too many beatings in the early mornings.
"Nice house," she says.
"Thanks."
While Jellal opens a drawer and begins rifling through documents, Erza looks around, and she catches something out of the corner of her eye. A clean sheet of paper. Two words.
Dear Erza...
A sudden vision comes to her.
It's 31st May, 11:59. Dangling on the precipice over a new month. It's cold, and promising to get colder. With nothing but a pen, paper, and a niggling sadness, Erza sits at the table and tries to write a letter to someone who she has not seen in a long time…
And in a small house teasing the edges of South Magnolia, the ugly blue and yellow colouring barely visible in the low light, a boy straining for words - the same words that Erza yearns for, to put on paper as easily as the splay of a hand. All the pent up thoughts, folded and kept within a silver cage of steel. A message which comes in the form of:
Two children, a tower, a dark magic, blood spilled, manipulation, isolation, more blood spilled, a final act of redemption, and the boy turning to the girl, but can only shield himself with a hand because the blinding light which outlines her figure in molten gold is too bright for a boy who hides in the shadows.
And no matter what the world throws at them, at the end of the day, they're still two children - a boy and a girl, living in the same town, sitting on desks, writing letters to each other they know they will never finish, and they know will never send. In the end, it has all boiled down to this.
At her silence, Jellal turns and sees her staring at the incomplete letter. His eyes widen in horror.
"I -," he tries to say. "I didn't mean - "
He doesn't get to finish whatever he's saying because she walks over to him in two steps and kisses him. Jellal lets out a noise of surprise, putting his hands on her shoulders to push her away. The weak protest he puts up collapses in on itself, and he capitulates, parting his lips for hers and running his hands up and down her body. Like a breath of fresh air, she thinks dazedly. The closeness, the proximity of Jellal pressed against her body, after turning and walking away from her again and again and again -
It's a while before they part, breathing a little hard with flushed faces.
"Erza," he says. His eyes are shining. Only when he swipes a thumb along her wet cheekbone does she realise she has been crying. "You are good. You are so good and kind and warm, and I could never be with you. You're an amazing person. You deserve so much better than me."
"Listen, Jellal," Erza says, her voice clear and loud in the tiny room. "Maybe you've done some pretty screwed up stuff. Maybe there's no turning back the clock to fix it, maybe there's no erasing the fact that many died at your hands, but that doesn't rule the concept of redemption out."
"Sometimes the idea of redemption seems so far away. Even though I've set myself on this path, I can't help but feel I'm walking to nowhere." His words are so soft that even in the quiet room, she has to strain to hear them.
"Don't forget the things you did in the past, but also don't let them condemn you. You're stronger than this, Jellal. I know there's more good in you than bad."
Jellal presses his forehead against Erza's and lowers his eyes. Erza watches his long, sooty eyelashes flutter almost delicately against pale skin, like two flaps of a butterfly's wings.
"Thank you for believing in me," Jellal says and looks up. His eyes are a blaze of brown, filled with gratitude and hope and a fleet of other emotions. It is not that Erza has forgotten that on closer inspection, his brown eyes are flecked with golden around the iris, not even after a decade, when the tower was dark and she first peered into them and saw a glimmer of golden calling out to her like a beacon, calling her home. "Wise and kind and strong. This is the Erza Scarlet I know and love."
The word doesn't come to them as a surprise. It falls out of Jellal's mouth and simmers in the atmosphere, perhaps a little like energy. To be never destroyed, only to be changed – to the close press of bodies, to a warm hand on the small of her back, and to her lips whispering silent words against his cheek.
"I love you, Jellal."
His fingertips are rice-paper light when he unhinges her armour off her shoulders and unbuttons the first of the buttons on her shirt.
()()
Even though they take an inordinately long time in Jellal's room "fetching a document" for the master, Meredy doesn't knock on the door. She seems to know what was going on because when they finally emerge from the room, both looking a bit rumpled with red lips, she looks up from the book she was reading and smiles at them with her feet kicked up on the dinner table. "Got what you needed?"
Erza nods and holds up the document to show. "Thanks," and she turns to Jellal. He exchanges a silent glance with her.
"I'll show you out," he says.
Erza kicks on her boots. Come to the guild tomorrow, she wants to say, but Jellal beats her to it. "I'll be there in the morning."
It is only after a moment's hesitation that she leans forward and presses her lips to his. She listens for the sharp intake of breath. The kiss is soft and slow and promising more. The cool Spring air bites at her skin and begin to numb the tips of her fingers just a little. When she pulls back, Jellal makes a small demurring noise, then catches himself before he can continue.
"See you," she says and she doesn't even bother hiding her smile at this point. Turning away before she can hear the sound of the door click close behind her, Erza realizes that the sky is a brilliant blue, the most vivid it has been this whole month.