notes: someone requested this ot4 back in the day and this is definitely one of the requests that I've been putting off for the longest time by far. this is one of the most interesting requests ive received yet and needless to say I had a lot of fun playing around with it. so thank you for asking and I hope I deliver!
to warn, this is super AU, and unforgivably so. if it's confusing, that's my fault.
tw: mentions of suicide
falling like scarlet leaves at the end of autumn
By the end of the day, Erza realizes that Jellal will never smile so carefree again.
It's Friday night and there should be nothing to count except the stars lying in the dark skies above them. He's always loved space and she isn't one to deny him of the one thing that he most definitely loves to watch for hours on end—even if she's the one visiting him after a two-hour long drive from her home in Magnolia.
He's there—only a few inches that separate their hands, and every minute, she reaches out a little bit to see if he'll close the distance on his own, without her trying.
She's optimistic, but she doesn't hope for very much. After all, ever since that day, she has never seen his eyes clear from death, instead filled with some kind of guilt that he can't seem to wash out of tears he doesn't cry in front of her. She thinks that once he sheds the dark cloud, he'll let himself join her—but for now she can just wait for him.
She could also wonder why it's been a childhood and half his life and he's still making up his mind when she's been standing there right beside him all along, but instead she chooses to believe that they have a future together and that he just isn't ready yet.
She isn't ready to admit maybe he has his eyes set on someone else—a set of digits that he keeps unnamed on his phone—and that perhaps his idea of a happy ending isn't one that she'll share with him.
.
chilly like the first snow of the impending winter
Every now and then, Gray can feel Ultear's eyes watching him and it's colder than any snow that has slipped down the back of his shirt.
He doesn't know why she's moved to this city. He hates to think that she's trying to reach out to him after her mother's funeral because he's the only other person besides his asshole of a step-brother that remembers who her mother was.
He doesn't blame her. He'd probably do the same thing if he actually knew who his mother was.
Besides, he had practically invited her to find comfort in him. When he first discovered that his godmother Ul passed away, he felt so terrible for never having officially thanked her—for taking care of him and his step-brother Lyon when his coward of a father was busy drinking off his troubles—that he attempted to pay his gratitude forward to the next generation.
He sent flowers that would soon die and promises that he soon would discover he couldn't keep, and now that she sends him texts every now and then, can he really blame her for trying to talk to him?
He shouldn't have kissed her. Sadness is worse than alcohol at containing feelings, and their regrets for not saying a proper goodbye to Ul left them in a tangled mess of limbs in her apartment one night.
He thinks he probably tasted her lips because wanted something new, someone new that didn't know anything about him and could just take him from the face value of what he is and not what he was.
But now—as he silences his phone from her—he realizes after some soul-searching, that what he needs isn't someone that doesn't know what a shithole he grew from and that what he needs the most is someone that can just understand.
He wants familiar. And it's half the reason why he moved back to Magnolia in the first place. He thinks that he could perhaps bump into some scarlet-haired girl of his past.
.
trying to blossom like the other pretty flowers of spring
She's still crying about her mother when no one is looking.
Moving was a mistake. She's not sure why she thought it was a good idea. She thinks that past her thought it would be better to move away from the city her mother is buried in so that she doesn't visit the grave as often.
She also suspects that she forgot that moving wasn't just putting things into boxes but also taking things back out.
And so now she's miles from her old apartment into her new home in Magnolia and she's still falling apart when she sees her old photo albums that she's packed at the bottom. She thought she got over her mother and cried her heart out during the funeral—and then again when Gray told her that it was okay to do so in his arms.
Gray. Gray is here, in Magnolia, she heard.
But she doesn't want to think that hearing that he was here was the original reason she searched for new places to stay in this city. She doesn't want to think that after months of visiting her weekly to ask how she was doing after her mother's death, she became dependent on him to feel alright.
Because after all, she knows what it is like to be leaned upon—
Jellal is still texting her, and she just can't say no when it comes to him.
She's the one that enabled him to come to her after that horrific accident. She's the one that encouraged him to come to her when he felt like he didn't want to live anymore.
She's the one placing responsibility on herself to keep Jellal alive and now that he is alive because she stopped him from taking his life in the first place, she just can't say no.
.
shielding his eyes from the red hot sunshine of summer
With apologies to the love of his past life, Jellal does not think that he can ever join Erza in the light.
Erza knows him better than anyone else, and he didn't have to say a word for her to find out that there was manslaughter on his record. And bless her, the angel, she doesn't look at him any different—even if he can no longer look at himself in the mirror without wanting to strangle himself.
She's pure and innocent and everything good in the world, so he's doing his best to make sure that Erza doesn't know the one awful thing that he's been keeping from her, and that one awful thing is only something that Ultear knows.
Ultear…Ultear moved to Magnolia a few days ago, didn't she? He's trying to keep in contact with her—because he knows that she's carrying dark secrets and he wants to be able to share some of those with her because she so gracefully helped him unload his secrets onto her.
Ultear took half his guilt and she wasn't meant to—she just happened to find him slumped over a garbage can outside drunk the fuck out of his mind and just a little overdosed.
And then after an ambulance ride to the emergency room and a discharge later, she just happened to offer him her number and demanded that he call her whenever he was feeling the same way he did that instant before she entered his life. And then she just happened to be the first number that he would actually dial—because heaven forbid Erza ever found out that he had such terrible thoughts.
He would never want Erza to know.
She was and still could be his everything and he would absolutely hate to lose her.
Now, lying here in the grass, face-up to the night sky, he thinks he owes it to both Erza and Ultear that he's still here and alive, looking up at the stars.
He's having a hard time figuring out which of the two women he is more indebted to, but if there's one thing he knows, it's that he is not quite ready to tell Erza everything.
So he texts Ultear instead. But only when she finally—often weeks later—decides to text him back.
ugh what a mess.
thir13enth