some cruel irony
Characters: Sherry Blendy, Lyon Vastia
Summary: They have learned to pick their battles.
Lyon halted his steps as he reached the golden doors. Her house in the Garden was over the top, of course it was. It was all white marble and gleaming gold with black roses engraved into the stone. He sighed as he opened the doors with ease. He was still welcome in her house after all.
He continued his way, stepping over the shredded armour in the entrance hall. He flinched as he remembered how the attacker's sword had pierced her, how she had nearly collapsed before he had been able to grab her and keep her safe, but he pressed on, nearly tripping over Sherry's spear which lay discarded on the ground, still stained with the blood of their enemies. He found her sandals next, pretty golden shoes she had bragged about for weeks. Now, they were bloodstained. He sighed, kicking her cloak out of his way.
"Sherry!" he called out before he knocked at the door.
Silence. He had expected nothing else. He exhaled as he opened the door.
She sat by her mirror, of course, and her usually so expressive face was unreadable because she concealed her emotions as pink sparks danced through the air and closed the last remaining scratches on her face after they had previously healed the deeper, more threatening scar on her stomach.
"You okay?"
She flinched after having been too lost in her thoughts which had been probably rather dark.
She was no airhead, no matter what so many said. He knew this. She was no outstanding genius like other people, people who had been forced to create strategies and emergency plans for more than a thousand years. People often underestimated her. Goddess of Love, Goddess of beauty. Useless, some said. They were wrong. Oh, so very, very wrong.
She had bloodstained hands as well – and so many had forgotten that she had been collaborator extraordinaire in many of the bloodiest wars. He had seen the city of Edolas fall at her feet. He remembered burning towns, towns that had been erased within a few days – erased in her name.
He reached out and helped her up the way he had always helped her back up for so many years that even his mind did no longer possess the ability to realise the time that had passed.
"Are you fine?" he inquired again.
"…I will be," she said after a moment. "What about you?"
"I am uninjured as you know."
"That's not what I asked."
He sighed deeply. Sometimes, he wondered whether he had been with her for too long, whether she knew him a little too well. She had arrived in the Garden shortly after him and so they had grown closer along the years, along the centuries and millennia that had passed since then.
He knew her abilities, the way she could manipulate everything with ease. This abilities were dangerous. She was dangerous. Everyone forgot about this, forgot about the way she could destroy people's lives so easily, the lives of deities and mortals alike.
She nodded slowly. "All of us have," she said softly before a pink spark mended the scar on his forehead. She was the goddess of Beauty and she fixed imperfection wherever she went.
He nodded, his throat all choked up. Indeed, they had always been together, had weathered great battles and had never wavered in their decision to stay faithful to the Garden even though they both missed their respective homelands. He longed for frozen lands, for eternal emptiness – for his mother's presence. And she missed endless skies and the oceans and the beaches of the place of her origin. She had been born from the ocean after all and she longed to return to the eternal power that had always been in synch with her trembling soul.
"It will end badly," she mused aloud as she reached out for his hand before she led him upstairs into her picture perfect living room. He now noticed that she had shed off her torn tunica she had worn for the battle and that she now wore a pink silken dress.
"Of course," he said as he sat down and massaged his temples. "What will happen now?"
"Your sister will be punished," she said, her voice heavy with sorrow and pain – the pain she felt radiating from him. "Your mother … she might be upset."
He snorted.
Urania would not be upset. She would be downright furious and might destroy her own garden once more in her anger. Gray would be equally angry, of course. And everyone would blame him because he had failed to save Ultear from herself. But he was safe from the anger and wrath of his fellow gods once again because he was in Sherry's house and no one would find them here.
The Garden might burn down within the anger of a certain Natsu or fall under thick layers of ice, under his mother's and his brother's anger – and he would still be sound and safe. He was safe from people who would blame him for today's events.
Sherry sat down next to him and rested her fingertips on his temples. "You are stressed," she stated quietly as her keen senses picked up on his inner tension. "They won't find you here. And even if they knew, I would chase them away."
He smiled for the first time in a few hours. She chased away the negative thoughts. "Thank you," he told her quietly and he remembered how he had held her hand a century or so ago when she had fallen in love with Ren who had been a mortal and how she had suffered when he had been finally struck down by an enemy and died – only to be resurrected as a star where he had fallen for another fallen-warrior-turned-star called Karen.
She rose, still holding onto his hand, and they took up walking. They walked further then the Garden reached, crossed through worlds and dimensions until they stopped in the Realm of the Mortals. Behind them, back in the Garden, powers clashed. They knew this but this was not their war. They had come too far to turn back now and they knew it. But they did not care for the new separation of powers because it would not concern them. Whether Cana or Ultear would have to carry the burden of the Future now, whether it would be Kagura as Goddess of Justified Revenge or Erza as Goddess of War or rather said of war that served the cause of protection would have to deal out punishment – that did not touch them. Sherry would still be the Goddess of Love and Beauty and all those things and he would still be Lyon, God of Ice.
They stood on a beach, her hair slowly escaping the bun and him smiling as he released the pink mess from its confinement. He wrapped one arm around her, maybe to support her in a way and she rested her head against his chest.
"I don't want to go back," she whispered as her toes bury themselves in the sand. "I want to stay here. Forever. If we go back, we will end up choosing sides. I don't want to, you know?"
He silently entwined his free hand with hers and sighed. "We will have to go back sooner or later," he said calmly. "I know how you feel, I don't want to either. I wish we could stay here forever, that we could hide here and be happy. However, we have a certain duty to the others."
"They don't understand," she snapped, a little too harsh for her usual behaviour. "As if anyone of them knew what it is like to want to go home more than anything else. I do not regret being a lesser goddess, a relatively normal one."
"There is nothing about you that I would call lesser," he interrupted calmly. "Yes, I will never regret being no hero. I will never regret staying out of most fights within the community – but I will never stand for you being called a lesser goddess. You have destroyed Edolas."
"Not alone," she said with a gaze that reminded him that he had played a part in this as well.
He sighed, remembering the way they had gone to war. It had been her war, her fight – because she had been insulted by the way, true love had been betrayed so easily, so willingly. And he had followed her. He had followed her because she would have, if things had been different, followed him as well. It was difficult to understand for the others but this did not make it any less right. They did not understand why Lyon's sole loyalties were dedicated to his mother and to Sherry.
Then again, no one ever really had asked him – probably because they knew that they would not like the answer. Not at all.
He remembered the way the sky had darkened even though it had not even been past noon. The sun had drowned in the black, black sky when they had gone to war. He remembered her hardened face, the way she had clung to her spear – the spear she had used to cause the war and the spar she used then, a little later, to end it. She had betrayed herself back then, when she had given in to all the people who had told her to erase Edolas from the map because their behaviour had insulted her. Lyon had known that she would hate herself a few years later for the war and yet, he had followed her. This was when he had realised that his mother had been right when she had claimed that the bond between the Goddess of Love and the God of Ice had not been simply friendship for a very long time. And so he had lied for her. He had lied to make her feel better, to ease her guilt. He was good at lying, too good. This came from spending time with Ivan, he mused with a thin smile.
He pulled her closer, his face an unreadable mask of sadness and remorse. "We shouldn't have done this," he said, not for the first time in the past centuries, his eyes wary and tired. "We should have ran away from that responsibility. They wouldn't have found us."
She smiled back at him, her blue eyes regaining their old gleam, a gleam that had disappeared during the earlier battle. "Thank you for taking me here," she said calmly. "Thank you for taking me home."
He let go of her second hand and they started walking again but this time, she ended up leading. They leave this world – her world, her realm, her private heaven – after a few steps and after a while, he registered how everything seemed to get darker and colder. He was the God of Ice, he did not feel cold, but he knew that she had to be freezing in her thin dress.
"Where are we going?" he asked as he undid the buttons of his cape to wrap it around her.
She looked at him over her shoulder and smiled a secretive smile. "I am bringing you home, too," she said and his voice died. He did not want her to. Well, he liked having her by his side in battle and out of it but he did not want her in the coldest realm. His garden was beautiful, perfect for ice skating and snowboarding. So was Gray's actually. But his mother's garden – and this was where they were headed for – was an entirely different story.
But this was Sherry and he had long learned that Sherry always got everything her way. It was a part of her, he often believed. She was a born manipulator, a seductress as some would way and so she got what she wanted all the time. And while he had the power, he never had the heart to deny her anything. He had known her for too long to believe that she was an angle. She had a dark side as well but he did not mind this as much as he minded it when she dragged him to some party (that damn puppy-eyed-pouting-number of hers) and then got sidetracked by all her other friends, leaving him to stand in the corner with the others who disliked socialising but had been dragged there by their better halves.
"Thank you," she said as she smoothed out his cape. She had known Lyon since her first day in the Garden when she had been at the Master's house to get her instructions and he had barged in, only to have been tasked by the Master to show her around a little. At first, she had been confused by the swirl of cold air that had surrounded him – but he was the God of Ice (or at least one out of three) and she had learned to deal with it. At first he had always taken of whatever shirt or coat he had been wearing when he had realised that she was shudder. "Can't have you get ill, huh?" he had said gruffly.
No, he had not been nice. But she had just left her beloved home and she had been rather desperate for a companion in the strange land. And soon enough, she had learned that he missed his own home – or rather his mother's garden – as well. And so she had bought the one-way-ticket to Lyon's friendship.
When she had fallen for him, about a century ago, after the fall of Edolas, after the thing with Ren, she had not been able to believe it. She was the Goddess of Love. She was not meant to fall like that – and especially not for someone who was sometimes rather grumpy and rude. But somehow, she had found herself unable to walk away from him. He was never as rude as he was with others to her, maybe because he was scared of her when she was upset – and many were. Erza on a bad day when her cake had been stolen by someone had nothing on the cold fury of a woman who could make people fall in and out of love as she pleased. (Not that she actually did it. But the threat was always there.)
"Being ill would be anything but lovely," she remarked with a smile as she hurried up, entering the cold area that was under Urania's control. She had met Lyon's mother only a few times before and each time, she had been impressed by the strength and the loneliness of the woman. Urania was strong, stronger than anyone else but maybe Gildarts, the Destroyer of Worlds. No one but them could extinguish a world's life this easily, this quickly. To them, everything but a prolonged visit of the Garden was possible.
Yet Sherry did not envy them.
She was happy with what she had, with her friends and her family. She was happy being by Lyon's side in times of peace and in times of sorrow. She liked his sense of humour, his sarcasm and his wry smirks. Many did not believe her when she said that she stayed because she wanted to because many assumed that he had asked her to, no, most even claimed that he had begged her to stay at his side at some point. Them again, the people believed many weird stories. So they believed that Cana drank wine for breakfast to wash away her nightmares and visions – though this rumour might have some truth in it.
She looked at Lyon, again. Sometimes, she felt like he was one of those people who just needed a hug and a pat on the back to feel better but doing so would mean to overstep boundaries. Holding his hand and dragging him along was already daring enough.
Among gods – and especially among those as old as them – betrayal and backstabbing was a just too common event. Yet she trusted Lyon blindly, turned her back at him because she trusted him not to ram a knife into her. Especially since she knew that she could not betray him. In all his craziness – which had thankfully subsides millennia ago – she had stayed by his side.
"Are you scared of facing your mother?" she asked softly, referring to the fact that they would be the heralds of a rather unpleasant message.
"Why would I?" he asked, his face showing a genuine smile. "You are there, aren't you?"