the greatest masquerade
Characters: Ultear Milkovich, Lyon Vastia
Summary: If you do not love me, pretend.
She should never have ended up in this position.
She is a strong and independent woman, far above loving someone who would never love her back. But for some reason, love had been designed to make a fool out of even the strongest and most rational women – if Erza Scarlet was any indicator – and so maybe, this had not been as unexpected as she wanted it to be.
She cursed her bad luck over and over as she remembered how this had started. The last time she had seen him had been when he had still trained under her late mother's tutorage along with Gray, then when she had helped him to undo the Iced Shell and when she had seen him out of the corner of her eye, her first instinct had been to turn her head – and she had been hooked. She had never considered him as the most attractive man on her but he was surely no bad looking and as a mature woman, she could appreciate that. Things had gotten slightly complicated when he had someone recognised her – but instead turning her in like he should have as a good little mage from Lamia Scale, he had let her leave.
When they had met again during the fiasco of the Grand Magic Games, she had kind of saved his life, technically evening their scores and yet, he had insisted on taking her out for dinner. It had been nice, very nice even, and before she had noticed it, she had fallen.
She had been in love before, hell, she had had a tiny little crush on Jellal before she had realised that he was still in love with Erza and thus, she had moved on. She had watched how love had hurt people, how it had made them bleed and how it had faded away, leaving behind nothing but despair as time showed that there was nothing left. Therefore, she had been careful. She had tried to watch out for love to avoid it properly but it had still caught up with her, twisted her and turned her into something different, something softer. He had taken away the armours she wore around her heart and for some reason, she had never complained because it had felt so right and real this time. She knew that he was no saint either, that he had done terrible things as well but she knew that everything he had done paled in comparison to her wrongdoings. She had been able to forget about her mission to atone for her sins because for a moment, she had been truly happy and she had felt lighter than ever before. When it was just like them, she had forgotten about her criminal record and everything else because when it was just them, magical prowess and rational minds, she could be happy.
She quickly figured out who really held his heart but somehow, she could not bring herself to care. Maybe, this was still a way to atone even though she loved someone who walked in the light as Jellal had put it ever-so-eloquently. Her sacrifice was to love someone who loved someone else. She could see where this would end: in a life of pain and broken hearts.
She liked Juvia, a lot even, but sometimes, she could not help but hate the water mage because the Fairy Tail mage had won without being a player in first place. This was unfair and yet, for a rational woman in love, this was not as painful as for a hopeless romantic. She knew that love was seldom fair and thus, she ignored it.
She ignored that she had made herself vulnerable, that this love had become her Achilles' heel because no matter how painful all of this was, this was the first time in her life that something was truly real to her.
She gladly accepted his love that was nothing but faked because it was the first time someone truly tried to deceive her.
He knew that she did not love him because, seriously, why would she?
Compared to her, he was just some second class mage, someone who would never be able to keep up with her. He remembered when he had been trying to catch up with his teacher, her late mother and he remembered how upset he had been when he had finally had had to realise that Ur had been so much better and smarter than him that all his attempts had not even scratched at her brilliancy and her skill.
Right now, he felt like this again because despite his better knowledge, he wanted to make her stay. He did not care about her past because his own was not glorious either but he wondered whether she could actually accept this because his greatest crime had been his attempt to destroy her mother's greatest achievement. He knew that she loved her mother, that all of her crimes had had the goal of creating a world where her mother was still alive and thus, she had to feel at least slightly betrayed at his former goals.
Therefore, it was established that she would leave as soon as he would admit that he needed her by asking her to stay and so he simply did not ask her to stay. He could not ask her if he would only chase her away and until he would find the right words to med what he had broken so long ago, he would not say anything.
But of course, it never worked the way he had assumed that it should work. She had disappeared without a word, probably off to chase some dark guilds because this was what they did and no matter how much he wanted her to be there when he came back from a mission, he also had to accept that as a mage of a guild, she had certain duties – and one of them was chasing dark mages and dark guilds to prevent that her fate would repeat itself.
And so he sat in his dark living room and he wondered why this kind of thing always happened to him and never to Gray. First, he had fallen for Sherry just when she had moved on from him to go after Ren. Secondly, he had been in love with Juvia – a battle lost from the beginning because she had always had eyes for Gray and for Gray only. And now, he loved Ultear who spent ridiculously much time with one handsome man, Jellal, while chasing after another, also supposedly attractive man who also happened to be a legendary black mage.
He sighed deeply as he finally went to bed in the early hours of the morning, still lying awake and inhaling her scent on his pillows and listening to the faint sound of the door being unlocked via her magic. It was too silent and yet, he strained his ears to pick up even the faintest sound.
He sighed deeply as he wondered whether keeping his feelings all bottled up was so healthy for him and whether keeping her close was really worth it that she did not know that he always hoped that she would be napping on his couch when he came home from a job.
This was worse than loving Juvia because he had known her to be safe because no matter how much of a fool Gray was at times, he kept his nakama safe at any cost – a possibly reminder from when Ur had died.
But he was scared because unlike it had been with both Sherry and Juvia, he did not feel like he could risk losing Ultear and so there was only one option: keeping the mask on his face and continuing to dance to a rhythm he did not particularly like.