It is not that you do not love him. It is that you can't.
On the surface, there is no distinction between the two. Either you love someone, or you don't. There are many shades of affection, but love is always a startling white: every colour and yet no colour at all. It is acceptance, companionship, forgiveness, desire, and a hundred other things; and yet, you cannot choose one single facet that overwhelms any other.
To love is to know – to learn every inch of the mind and every fragment of the soul.
That is why you will never be able to. There are parts of him you will never understand, never comprehend; not because you have not tried—oh, how you have tried—but because you are not like him. You are not like anyone.
You are something not-quite-whole, something distorted, a mockery of a human being, and what's worse is that you don't even care. You are Erza Knightwalker—and isn't that an irony, that something like you could ever be associated with chivalry—and you are a monster.
It's one of the reasons you hate your counterpart—weak, pathetic, perfect Erza Scarlet—even though, sometimes, you wish you were a little more like her. She is not a psychopath, a sadist, a killer – she's like a hero from a storybook, all noble justice and fierce, furious righteousness. You doubt she's ever hurt someone who didn't have it coming (your morality might be as broken as you are, but you've spent enough time around your King to model his own).
In short, she is the sort of woman that he should love, and you are little more than her broken-glass-and-bleeding mirror.
The fact he loves you instead is yet more proof that you will never understand him enough to return the favour (and the rational part of you knows it is a favour, because it's the only reason you're still Captain Knightwalker and not rotting somewhere in an unmarked grave like most think you deserve).
Of course you can tell. You may not know of love—you may be incapable of feeling it—but you have always been observant, and you know what it looks like. Well, that, and there's the fact he's also told you. More than once. That might have helped, just a little.
It was after one of Edolas' national holidays; the Festival of Kings, to be precise. Naturally, a ball had to be thrown—probably Coco's idea, if you've judged her correctly—and, as both the commander of Edolas' army and the King's official bodyguard, you had to both attend and stay near him the whole time.
It was so incredibly boring that when you started drinking, you had no intention to stop – and, as the night wore on, neither did he. Oh, the King did as the King must, socialising and dancing and fending off half a hundred suitors, but whenever you offered him a glass of wine, he didn't refuse.
It was late, somewhere close to midnight, when the alcohol and your own, incredible boredom (you hadn't killed anyone in close to two weeks, and you needed something to take the edge off) combined to think up possibly the stupidest idea you'd ever had. You could see men and women—any combination thereof, in fact—sneaking kisses, and stumbling away, probably toward the closest empty room they could find, and you remembered the time you'd overheard soldiers regaling one another with tales of how good sex was better than a good fight.
So you thought you'd try it.
Another bottle of wine later—and this time you didn't drink any of it, switching cups back and forth right under the King's nose—and the excuse that you were 'escorting the King back to his rooms', everything was perfectly in place.
You locked the door to his study, turned around, and kissed him.
Three hours later, you collapsed onto his chest for the fifth or sixth time, and, just like he'd done every other time you came down from your high, he whispered it in your ear. Three words. I love you.
This time, though, he fell asleep soon after; it didn't take you fifteen minutes to get dressed, clean up the bedroom and the study—of the obvious evidence, anyway—and leave. You only ever entertained the thought of staying long enough to wonder if that was the second-stupidest idea you'd ever had.
Naturally, he didn't remember a thing the next day – the King had never been renowned for his tolerance of alcohol (whereas you'd learned to drink soldiers under the table by the time you were sixteen), and the only reason he never complained about his hangovers was because the last time he had, you'd started listing off what it was like to be on your period in the middle of a warzone every time he brought up how much his head hurt.
It was a trick you'd learned from one of the army's nurses, interestingly enough; the woman had used it to distract injured soldiers as she cared for their wounds. Crude, perhaps, but undeniably effective – and you'd built an entire career on a similar principle.
But perhaps the worst part of the fact you'd fucked your King was that it was better than a good fight; he'd taken the edge off by the third time, let alone by the last. And that scared you, how something that could be mistaken for affection satisfied you more than death. You mostly ignored the fact that he'd told you he loved you – the only thing that made you feel was anger, because how could he be so stupid?
You know you'll ruin him (really, you already have), and even if sex with him is better than even good, plain old-fashioned murder, you don't want any excuses to spend more time with him than you already have to. As the King's bodyguard you're supposed to protect him from every possible threat. Including yourself.
You never repeated the experiment—not with him, and certainly not with anybody else—no matter how much, at times, you might want to. The King is a far better negotiator than his father had ever been, and Edolas didn't have magic any longer, so peace is the norm far more often than war. It is stifling, and horribly so – you've started hunting down some of the more violent criminals just to get a chance at killing somebody, though, of course, it is all officially part of the King's plan to cut down on crime.
You've never hated him so much for anything else, because every time you come back from another successful hunt, basking in the memory of blood like a tiger in the sunlight, he's there. His expression is neutral, but his eyes are so, so incredibly sad and angry, but what's worse is that he's not even looking at you.
You should disappoint him; you are a murderer, a monster, a creature of death and pain. A wild dog without a chain. But you don't. He's not sad about what you've done, and the fact that killing gets you off doesn't make him angry. He's sad because the fact you had to do it means he still hasn't figured out a better way to help you – he's angry because of what the world has done to you—and what you've done to yourself—to make killing get you off.
It's pathetic, and you hate him for it. You know you're broken, and you don't care (a part of you knows he knows that, but you've never understood love so you don't understand why that makes him even angrier).
But that's not the worst of it. No, the worst of it is that he knows exactly why you're 'helping apprehend and summarily execute those who have forsaken the Laws of Edolas', and that's why he let you do it in the first place. It was his idea. He knows what you are—what you have always been—and when he realised he had no way of fixing you, rather than tossing you to the wayside like he should have done, he decided to enable you.
It goes against everything he stands for as King; against every justice reform he's made, every principle of the piece of shit 'Magic Guild' that Scarlet belongs to and that he used to, everything he fought his own father for.
When it comes to you, he abandons everything he ever has been without seemingly a second's thought, and you hate him for it. You hate him for loving you too much to try to change you, and for refusing let you go.
If that's what love does to even a man like him, you're quite happy to be incapable of it.
(The saddest thing is that you are, but you're just so broken that you don't even recognise the way you feel about him. The second-saddest is that he already knows).
Well. That happened.
I wrote this in less than two hours, on the train up and back from university (don't ask me, I don't get it either), which is probably why it's fragmented and weird. But I love broken characters, I love Mystwalker (I'm not that keen on Jellal/Erza, but I really ship Mystogan/Knightwalker, which is kinda odd), and I love pseudo-tragedies, soo...
Thanks for reading this mess, I guess?
P.S the title comes from Honeythief by Halou, which has some rather fitting lyrics, I feel.