A/N: Oops.
He's shivering.
The ground is frozen solid, cracked and blasted in the places where their traded blows had decimated, harsh and precise, and there's a wintry chill in the air that's the residue of their magic, but Gray, who's used to thriving in such an icy atmosphere, is shivering uncontrollably.
Everything is cold. And yes, that's an obvious statement, and yes, he is an Ice-Make mage in his element, but despite that, he knows the longing for a warm hearth or a strong drink burning its own path down his throat and warming his gut from the inside out.
Deeper still in his mind is the echo of sensation—soft arms wrapped around his middle, and a delicate hand gripped in his own.
He spits out a mouthful of snow, forcing himself up on shaking limbs from the drift that he'd been sent sprawling into. His clothes, amazingly enough, are still on his body, heavy with meltwater. It's freezing. Not quite upright yet—he's managed to struggle to his knees—Gray turns and looks over his shoulder and allows himself a brief moment of envy.
Juvia is still standing, arms spread wide and feet planted firmly on the icy ground, unyielding in her defensive stance. She isn't without her wounds; her hat is gone, dress torn and dirtied, and deep purple bruises are already blooming beneath the surface of her skin. She looks exhausted, and when Gray thinks of the way that she's been covering him, flinging scalding jets of water out at their enemy—this cold man with the scar on his face, 'Absolute Zero' stamped on his breastplate—as a distraction when Gray's not moving out of the way quick enough, he's amazed that she still has the energy to stand there, in front of him, protecting him with her body while her magical energy has already been so drained.
She's still boiling. Not as strongly as she had been at the outset, but still.
"I'd move out of the way if I were you, sweetheart," the demon says, a mocking smirk on his lips and, surprisingly, not that much of a threat in his voice.
"You won't hurt him," she snarls back, not budging an inch. Steam rises from her fingertips, and her hair is caught somewhere in between solid and liquid, rippling at the crown and bubbling between the strands. Her body, not her voice, hisses.
Gray is started out of inaction when he feels something shift under his knees, and he's up and pitching himself forward—out of the way of a large spike of ice breaking through the earth and spearing the air, the empty space where he'd just been. Out of reflex, he reaches for Juvia and tugs her with him, the pair of them tumbling down and hitting the ground with enough force to knock the breath from their lungs; his is a cool puff of vapor, and hers is steam.
She's warm.
His name is on her lips, concern pinching her brows, but there's another rumble, another shift he can feel like the chill in his bones, and another spike of ice drives up and between them, the force of its appearance knocking them apart.
Gray can't help that his ears are listening for her grunt of pain and the thump of her body against the ground rather than his entire being preparing for his own impact, or readying a retaliation. He falls, a hard collision with the ice stealing his breath yet again as his head cracks back against the ground, a throb of freezing pain moving through his skull.
"I warned you, sweetheart."
Gray grits his teeth, stiff fingers clenching into fists; the way he speaks to her makes him see red, makes him want to see red. Blood in the snow. Dripping from the ice. Don't talk to her like that.
"What?"
The question doesn't sound surprised. It doesn't even sound all that much like a question.
It's a taunt. And it makes him burn.
"I said," Gray growls, managing to sit up. Only one of his hands is a fist now, and he readies the other. "Don't talk to her like that."
Gray doesn't get the chance to lift his hands from the ground, to smack his curled fist into his open palm and call forth the magic—the attack—before a surge of freezing air gusts over him and ice shoots up to encase his legs, his arms. The blast of cold wrapped around his skin is so utterly unforgiving and absolute that it sears him, tearing a shout of pain from his throat.
"Gray-sama!"
Blinking through the involuntary tears—it's ice, but it feels like he's burning—Gray turns to see Juvia up and running, one hand transformed into a boiling whip that's aimed for the enemy. He panics. "Juvia, don't!"
In the blink of an eye, her whip—her hand—is caught in a punishing grip and turned to ice, sparkling as he twists his hand and sends her up, flying through the air, and brings her down before he lets go, slamming her into the ground.
There's an ominous crack followed by a shriek—Gray's heart freezes in his chest—and he watches, horrified, as Juvia struggles to morph back; her whip slowly becomes her arm, ice cracked and looking on the verge of shattering before she manages to shift it back to normal, but the cracks—
Her skin is broken, blood pouring onto the snow. He shouts her name. He's watching her—she is his only focus. Her wound. Her.
So he misses the way the enemy isn't looking at her, but him. He misses the raising of his hand and the stony determination in his eyes. He misses the flurry of snow that drifts over them, the drop in temperature so sharp that he'd be violently shivering in seconds if the enemy had any plans to allow him to live that long. And he misses the obvious course of action—redirect the ice, redirect the magic, take it in and turn it back on the enemy—that would free him in time to move.
Because he is watching her.
And he sees the way she sees the enemy. He sees her eyes widen in horrified realization and fear—not for herself, but for him. He sees her drop her bloody arm, the necessity of nursing her wound completely forgotten as she rises to her feet and moves forward, towards him, urgent. She's reaching out, and Gray's mind is so scrambled that for one confusing moment, he thinks that she means to embrace him. She is in front of him, arms outstretched—they're not reaching for him, he realizes, they're spreading out, they're shielding—and his name is on her lips.
"Gray!"
The temperature drops along with his heart. He can't see the enemy anymore; Juvia blocks him from sight. But he sees the glow of magic and feels the air being sucked from them, tugging her hair back. He sees her face clearly. Pale skin, pink lips, deep eyes.
Sometimes in battle, he gets the feeling that time slows. The spike of adrenaline feeds his concentration to the point where everything around him seems to grow sluggish, and he's always been able to use this to his advantage—to dodge the blows and land his own. To turn the tide. To win.
Now, all this phenomenon does for him is ensure that he doesn't miss a single detail about the moment that breaks him.
No sound reaches his ears when it happens, but the glow behind Juvia brightens and bursts, and Gray feels the magic when it comes; Juvia's hair blows forward, the tresses tumbling towards him almost like they're reaching for him, and she lurches from the invisible force of energy.
And then it hits her.
He watches her body bow back, arching away as it's struck by an impact that he doesn't see directly, but the effect is unfolding right in front of him. There is sound now—a soft gasp of surprise from her mouth as her lips turn as blue as her hair while her eyes widen and frost over just before her body locks and crackles and then—
'No.'
—she freezes.
And he's seen this before, he knows what damage had been done to the Sun Village, and—he knows. He knows that there is no more Eternal Flame. And Juvia is water.
But now she is ice. She is a cold statue, rooted in front of him, arms thrown wide to shield him. Unyielding. Unmoving.
Blue lips frozen around the shape of his name. Unseeing eyes fixed on him.
All Gray sees is blue—the blue of her dress, the blue of her hair, the blue of her skin, her lips, her eyes—everything fucking blue and hard and cold and frozen, covered in ice that only the flame of a dragon that's been dead for 400 years could melt, and then—
—and then Gray sees red.