Entitled: The World Ends With You
Fandom: Fairy Tail
Pairing: ErzaJeral
Length: 3000 words
Disclaimer: Hiro Mashima owns Fairy tail, not me.
Notes: For Keely, my flash-fic buddy extraordinaire. Thank you.
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Wake up.
Erza whispered, turned on her side and pressed her face into her pillow, as if to smother herself back into dreams. Any awareness leeched away and down her limbs, sapping into her tangled blankets.
Wake up!
She hissed, softly, shrugging away before peeling her eyes half open.
She was up and swinging before the next second had drawn air, grinding past the sword her opponent thrust at her, shouting a warning to her companions. Confusion and adrenaline set her heart into an uneven spike, which soon quieted as the deathly stillness of a battle cooled her.
But when it was over, when she'd comforted a shaking Lucy and yelled at Gray for leaping out at the poor girl from dark corners, and kicked Natsu a few times when the brat slept through the entire thing, Erza lay down and stared blankly at the ceiling.
She knew that voice.
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The days passed without it happening again, though she'd been in plenty of equally dangerous situations. She kept waiting, full of hope. She wasn't sure what for—that it'd vanish, or that'd come again. But hope was rare, and so she kept it close just the same, nurturing the unnamed child.
When it'd been nearly a month, whatever faith she'd initially had was diminished to a tiny star in the bottomless black sky, and she'd almost fully convinced herself that she'd been dreaming.
It was a rainy kind of day, grey and cool. She sat just under the cover of Fairy Tail's roof, legs neatly folded and eyes closed, smelling the rain. Piece by piece she cleared her mind, listening to the raindrops build to a crescendo, and in turn, burn away.
Erza…
The whisper was so faint, she had barely felt it. Jarred by the alien presence in her mind, it took her several minutes to return to her state of deep, dark water; utterly still.
Are you scared of me?
The spike was softer this time, and she chased the fleeting thought down, pinned it mercilessly.
She tried forming the thoughts in her head, envisioning each pen stroke on a blank bit of parchment, then grew frustrated as the picture grew too large for her to keep up.
"Get out of my head," she said aloud, viciously, more to herself than to the voice she heard. She never wondered if she was insane. Nothing within her was capable of such cruelty.
There was only the echo of triumphant laughter, before he faded out.
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When it was just her and the night, Erza imagined all the other endings she might have had, and tried to navigate the one fittingly picturesque. If only he hadn't soured, rotted. If only he had run from the darkness. If only he had been different.
But in the end, the boy she stood by couldn't have ever been Jeral, and she hated herself for never giving up. She hates herself for so many things.
She hated herself for being so weak. She hated herself for losing him. She could see all the mistakes, all the splintering paths of fate, every cosmic flaw and all the odds that had been stacked against them, and hated herself for losing.
She hated him for dying.
She hated herself for having survived.
Death is so relative, he whispered, touch sweet and comforting and so very different from what she knew, but everything she wanted to believe in.
She rolled onto her stomach, pressed her face into her pillow and screamed her lungs bloody.
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She didn't let her hauntings, imagined or otherwise, affect her life. If that had happened, she would have been the first to cry the warning, and some horrible, needy part of herself was too scared of loosing whatever bound them together to risk it so.
And for the most part, he was quiet.
Except when he wasn't.
She went a whole week without the faintest word, before the echo came back to her on the brink of sleep, pressing and urgent and louder than she had ever heard it before.
When he invites you into his house, it ordered, terse and hard and so sharp she could almost hear it in the air around her, Don't refuse him. But don't let him get you alone.
"What?" she muttered, and sat half up, the blanket sliding down around her waist. At her side, Lucy squirmed deeper into the couch, sighing in her sleep. The T.V. was still playing, the movie on a fervid repeat, muted. Eyes glazed, Erza stared at it wordlessly, trying to find the answers in a film so vapid, she could guess the ending without sound.
The clock ticked, snapping and loud.
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The next day she took a mission for fast money, going in solo to swindle an undeserved purse from an idiot of a nobleman. His house was more of a castle, cut imposingly into a cliff by the sea. The servant who met her at the door showed her into the parlor room, and left her there with an absentminded promise of refreshment.
Hands clasped behind her back, Erza paced patiently through the elegant room, eyes skipping over handsome leather books and polished chests disinterestedly, before stopping before an unpleasant portrait. She tipped up her chin, squinting uncomfortably into a face harshened by the lines of cruelty.
She licked her lips and glanced away, then back again, meeting the cold, haughty gaze painted there.
You stupid girl! he hissed, and then Erza slipped and stumbled, hands flying up to brace herself awkwardly against the wall, fingers half curled and knocking painfully against the stone.
The back of her neck burned as the razor blade snuck over it, smashing into the wall just above where she had staggered.
Erza spun, lips quick and hands quicker, knees driving into her would-be assassin's stomach and slamming him back away from her, scarlet hair dancing as she whirled, weaved herself between the flurry of her assailant's blows and shattered his jaw with the hilt of her sword.
Erza took two quick steps backwards as the Lord of the Manor struggled back up to his feet, than smashed through the high windows just as reinforcements burst through the double oaken doors.
She didn't stop running until she tripped over her own exhaustion and slammed painfully into the ground, breathing in the smell of dirt. She curled in on herself, trying to work out what had just happened.
Because she could have sworn that, along with his words, Jeral had pushed her. Saved her.
But that was impossible. Jeral was dead.
She'd felt him die.
Because even when he was dying, he was still saving—
She closed her eyes, biting down on her lower lip.
"I'm not a little girl anymore," she whispered into her knees, furious and shaking and feeling anything but adult, "Why can't I ever save you? Why am I always the one left standing? Why do you always leave?"
The sun's still there behind the clouds, Erza repeated to herself, over and over again inside her head, you just can't see it.
You shouldn't believe in the things you can't see with your own eyes, Jeral advised, and Erza sat sharply upright, screaming to the birds that fled from their trees, blotting out the sky.
"What about you, huh?!" she yelled to the heavens, "You were still there! You still saved me! You've always done it and I'm sick of it! It's not fair! It's not—why'd you have to leave me?!"
She sat on the forest floor for over an hour, but the clouds never parted, and it wasn't until she'd turned to leave that the sun broke out again.
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It was four in the morning when Natsu burst into her rooms, shaking her rudely awake. She hit him for good measure, scratching the sleep from her eyes. "What?" she mumbled, frowning at the clock.
"The council's put out a warrant for Jeral," he rushed, dark eyes narrowed in the cool blackness of night. His hair was more rumpled than usual, and he'd forgotten to put on a shirt. He was staring at her strangely, and she found that for the first time in her life, Erza couldn't tell what Natsu was thinking.
"He's killed some nobleman and he's—he's back," he finished, somewhat lamely, and Erza could only stare.
She licked her lips twice, and started to rise only to have Natsu push her back down. "Don't go after him," he snapped, something harshly protective about the slant of his lips, and Erza reflected that she really never should've cried in front of him.
"I—" she stopped, and then changed the subject, "Wait outside for a second. We should get Gray and Lucy, and then I'm going to see what Master's orders are."
"Erza," Natsu insisted, eyes hot, "You shouldn't take the job."
"You don't know that it'll be left to the guilds," she returned calmly, and stood, "I mean it, Natsu. I want to get dressed."
When he left she shut her eyes and sat back on the bed, searching, looking somewhere deep within herself, deeper even than the center of her magic, towards some distant, fleeting place she didn't fully understand.
"I thought you were dead," she whispered, and didn't have to wait long for a reply.
Yes, that was quite the inconvenience.
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She didn't take the job.
She couldn't bear to hurt her friends that way and—and she wasn't sure if she wanted to see him. She didn't know what she wanted at all, could only swallow the nervous tension, feel it build in the joints of her fingers, setting them curled and claw-like.
In a way, she supposed it wasn't such a surprise. He had studied and labored the art of human resurrection for years; it would have figured that he'd have found some trick to cheating death.
More than anything, she wondered what he'd become; if he was the boy in her memories, or the monster in her nightmares.
She wondered what he wanted.
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Erza was almost twenty when she finally ran into him. She'd been in a bad kind of fight, the kind where her chest was burning and she'd had her hands pressed to the holes punches through her, trying to keep the life from leaking away, hissing and spitting and blind on white.
She'd finished most of them off by the time he arrived, and chose to take the blade through her shoulder than her heart, shifted and braced herself for the cutting sever of muscle of tendons, and the sharp agony that never came.
"Still playing war, Erza?" he asked in his cool, just-laughing voice, than started picking off the survivors with a sort of disinterested professionalism—like it was a game he was quickly losing interest with.
She managed to stay on her feet until the fight was over, gripping her sword with sweaty hands and leaning heavily on it, sinking slowly into unconsciousness, watching his back with something like exhausted resignation.
He glanced back at her, smirking patronizingly, and she focused on the sound of his footsteps drawing near.
"I told you," she said thickly, words all slurred with blood and dizziness, "I said I'm not—don't—why do you always…"
Her legs simply fell away and she plunged head first into the darkness, limply collapsing at his feet, again extending her hand to Death's door and wondering whether to knock.
Don't, he ordered distractedly, It takes a long time to build a tower.
She let her hand fall back to her side, and then turned away, wading back through the thick, dark rivers. She still had unfinished business to attend to.
When she peeled her eyes back open, she'd been dragged to the side of the road, her wounds bandaged, and Jeral was gone. Summoning what little strength she had left within her, she made her slow, painful way home. She didn't tell anyone what'd happened.
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When she'd healed up enough to fight, Erza set out adventuring again. She gathered her information, tracing his patterns carefully. He attacked, he plundered, and he vanished.
She pressed her lips into a hard, thin line. There was something she was missing—it wasn't about the money. It'd never be about money, not with him, not for a man as wicked as the devil, and possessed by the hatred of thousands.
She spent so much of her time thinking about what she'd do if she saw him again, that he actually showed up one day, slipping through her bedroom window like a shadow, noiselessly stretching out on her bed alongside her, as utterly at ease with her as he has always been.
"You could have chased me a little," he sighs, regarding her with half-lidded eyes and a lazy smile, "Really, I'm hurt."
Erza watches him gravely, though the idea of fear never enters her mind. Some base part of her will never be afraid of him. When she speaks, her voice comes out flatter than she had intended, "I don't know you anymore."
He snorts. Their shoulders are just barely touching, and he is impossibly warm—almost feverishly hot, so violently alive. "You're right. We aren't the same as before."
She stays quiet, her questions stuck somewhere at the back of her throat. She watches the idle way he toys with a lock of her long, scarlet hair.
"Why are you doing this?" she asks softly, "Are you building another tower? Are you collecting funds to—"
"The tower?" he blinks, than laughs a little, "That game's been dead a while, you know."
She can't stop herself from the wild flare of stupid, young hope, and whips around so they're facing one another properly, propped on one hip. "So you're—are you free?"
When he smiles at her, there is something very dark about the way he does, but the hand on her face is gentle, even if his eyes are coolly scheming.
"Maybe you should trust me," he said, with a serpent's smile and an indulgent kiss to her brow, before he was up and on his feet again, "Don't think too hard, Erza. Just keep on fighting."
"Don't treat me like I'm a stupid little girl," she snapped, and threw her legs over the edge of her bed, expression dark. "I'm not something for you to play with."
"What makes you think I'll come back?" He crossed his arms and leaned against the ledge, one foot in the darkness, one foot with her, "Maybe this is our farewell."
"I don't know what you're plotting," she admitted, but still stalked towards him, "But the first nobleman you attacked was the one who tried to kill me."
Half his mouth crooked, "Are you suggesting that I killed him out of spiteful revenge? I took every last penny he had, just as I have with all the others."
"I'm tired of you lying to me." she said quietly, and on impulse reached out to take his hand. She wasn't a particularly small girl, but her own hand looked thin and delicate entwined with his.
He didn't reply for a long moment, and when she looked up, she caught him staring at their joined hands, features oddly tranquil. And then he looked up, slipping away with a last, condescending smirk.
"Okay," he admitted, and left her as he always did, "I might've wanted him dead for reasons other than those strictly business related."
She leaned out over the window ledge, watching him drop gracefully to the ground below. "Wait—" she blurted out, and he paused, turning back up towards he.
She could only just see his smile flashing through the darkness, "Do you love me, Erza?"
She looked him in the eye because she would always be too proud to run away, "No," she said calmly. Her heart was like a jackhammer, and her eyes felt hot.
He looked away, "Yeah. Right, that'd be right."
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In the morning, she woke up crying, and so horribly unsure.