It only took a day for Erza to visit the first time after learning about his condition, but she hadn't come nearly as fast the time after that, for which Jellal was both relieved and disappointed. On the one hand, he did want to see her. On the other, he didn't particularly want to be seen. Especially by her. And she must have picked up on that, because over the next three weeks she'd only come twice more.
Two of those times, Jellal had made a point of going out to scout for and Rune Knights who might have caught wind of their location. Ultear and Meredy had let him slip away as they saw her approaching their camp, so he'd assumed they were alright with this. It was hardly their business anyway, whether he and Erza were intimately close or not. They'd already agreed on a way for her to see the baby, and how she would help them get supplies, and it wasn't like the nature of his and her relationship was going to change either of those plans much. Beyond that, it had no impact on his companions.
This had been a rather foolish assumption, he realized, when the three of them all went out together. Distracted with thoughts of what he would need to do in order to properly care for a newborn while on the run, Jellal paid precious little attention to where they were, until Ultear and Meredy both split off from him, pressing a note into his hand.
The paper roused him from his thoughts, and he could see he'd been left at Magnolia's outskirts. It was early enough at least that not too many people were out, but he'd be best off not lingering too long. If he were spotted, they would have to move further from town. Much further.
But if there was anything important he had to do there, he needed to do it first. So he unfolded the note and read it.
Jellal, we're moving camp across town. Will be back for you after dark. See you tonight.
-Ultear
He stared at it, unsure how to react, until someone tapped his shoulder.
As a wanted fugitive hanging around the outskirts of a town he didn't want people to know he was near, Jellal jumped and whirled around, and was relieved to see it was only Erza.
"I had a letter," she told him, showing a sheet of paper. "Meredy said I was supposed to pick you up."
So that's what they'd been doing, leading him to town. They were going to pay for this. Erza, however, had done nothing to earn his fury. So Jellal forced himself to smile for her.
"We should go," she said, looking over her shoulder. "If we wait much longer, you're more likely to be spotted."
What did Erza's letter say? Jellal wasn't sure how to get her to tell him without giving away that they'd been set up, which meant he would have to wait for Erza to carry out everything it instructed of her instead. He pulled the hood of his cloak up over his head and hoped that nothing she'd been told to do would in any way take advantage of the fact that there was no longer a fake fiancée between them.
Walking through town with her felt surreal. He'd seen Erza a few times now since he was broken out of prison, but it was always business. Mostly. Requesting her help with the Grand Magic Games, trying not to be killed by dragonspawn, arranging how she would be able to visit their child. Even if they walked quickly to minimize the stretch of time in which he might be seen and reported by some good samaritan, to walk through a town with her on a pleasant morning felt nice. It was almost like they were a normal couple.
What he'd gathered by talking to Erza's comrades was that she and most of the girls in the guild stayed in a dorm outside of town, so he was taken by surprise when she suddenly took his arm and turned him towards the door of a small townhouse. In the interest of not lingering outside, he waited until she'd unlocked the door and pulled him inside before asking, "When did you move in here?"
Luckily for him, the fact that he knew she'd lived somewhere else until recently slipped past Erza's notice. "Just in the past few weeks. I had some savings, and the location was nice. I was lucky to find it right away. There was even a second place down the street where I could store my spare armor. Meredy said you only need a place to hide for the day, but there's a guest room. It isn't furnished yet, but I can pull out a sleeping bag. I think I know where one is. There's a lot of boxes I haven't had the time to go through yet."
There was armor lined up along every wall Jellal could see, and likely more stored away with Erza's magic. He couldn't imagine how many suits she must have owned, if she needed a second house just to hold them all.
Would that be tactless to ask? He cleared his throat and addressed the boxes pushed to the middle of her living room instead. "You've been busy, I take it?"
Erza locked the front door, then gestured for Jellal to follow her into the kitchen. "A little. Our guild is getting jobs again, so we've been taking advantage of the ability to work more. Pull up a stool. I can make you breakfast."
"I can…" Jellal paused. He was good with cooking over a campfire, but it had been a long time since he'd needed to handle a stove. How well exactly could he cook?
Taking his silence to mean he would eat her cooking, Erza pulled a pan from her cabinet and started searching for eggs to fry. "Alright. How about an omelet then? I'm pretty sure I have the ingredients for that."
She wasn't sure she had eggs and oil? "How much time have you spent not working?"
"Not much," Erza admitted. "But work is fun. The other day we got to hunt selkie. And also I was thinking… Um…" She paused in the middle of pulling out a carton of eggs and glanced Jellal's way.
He waited while her cheeks turned pink for her to say something.
"Well, it doesn't matter," she muttered, turning back to the food.
But as she cooked, she kept pausing for a moment to glance over at him, which might have made Jellal less uncomfortable if she could actually make eye contact when she did so. At the fourth glance, he managed to figure out where exactly her gaze was going, which only made him less comfortable, and he put an arm self-consciously around his stomach before asking, "Was there something you were wondering about the baby?"
Saying 'the baby' to describe something inside of him still felt wrong.
Erza dropped her spatula and turned to look at him, still blushing. "I was thinking… with all the traveling you must do… that is… I wouldn't mind having times arranged to visit, but it might be better if the child stayed in Magnolia with me."
Thus the new living space, Jellal realized. A house with suits of armor lining the halls was hardly childproof, but staying in one place with a reliable four walls and a roof—not to mention someone who could legally work—would be better for a child. He would never have dared ask Erza to take their baby, but if she was offering, he saw no good reason to refuse.
"That might be a good idea."
"Right." She looked like there was something else she wanted to ask, but instead of saying it, turned back to make sure the eggs didn't burn.
That was alright. He was pretty sure she'd already given away what is was. "We can stick with the meet-up schedule we arranged, still," Jellal told her. "If you're the one who raises the child, then I'll be the one who needs to come when possible to see how they're doing. As the mother…" Erza shot him a glare. "As the father, I don't want to be completely absent from our son or daughter's life."
His son or daughter was still an abstract concept to him that he would be happy not to deal with. Especially since, hungry as he was, the smell of those eggs fried in coconut oil made him feel a little queasy. But at least Erza was smiling now.
The omelet was finished and placed in front of him, and he forced his own smile while slowly eating it. It wasn't bad, probably. It wasn't burnt, at least. But most things hadn't tasted good to him since morning sickness set in. Erza, distracted with making her own breakfast, didn't notice the two or three times Jellal almost failed to keep the food she'd prepared for him down. She might have noticed when, after he finished eating, he had to sit for a minute and take a few deep breaths, but she didn't comment.
-o-
Not commenting, it turned out, was something they were both interested in doing a lot of. Jellal didn't comment on how many suits of armor Erza had. She didn't comment on how unsure he seemed of what to do while in an actual house. He didn't comment on the fact that she'd rushed to try and accommodate for a child before she even knew for sure that she would be raising on. She didn't comment on how easily distracted he became by reminders that he was pregnant. He didn't comment on the care she'd put into looking nice that day. She didn't comment on how she wished he'd come more often.
It wasn't until noon that they found a casual topic that one or the other of them wasn't trying to dodge.
"The spare room you mentioned I could stay in," Jellal said, searching for a subject that would be appropriate for their situation, "Is it going to be the baby's?"
Erza's eyes lit up at the question. "I thought it would make a good nursery. If you were willing to let me have the child."
This time his self-consciousness couldn't overpower the reminder that he was carrying a child, and Jellal rubbed his stomach. "May I see it?"
"Well, it isn't furnished yet…" Erza paused to see if Jellal might express disinterest in light of this admission. He didn't. "It's upstairs. I'll give you a tour of the whole place."
It wasn't much of a tour. He's seen her living room and kitchen, and a small dining room that led out to an equally small backyard had been visible from the kitchen counter. Upstairs she skipped over her own bedroom, which left only a bathroom and a largely empty second bedroom to be shown around.
"I meant to move out of my old dorm eventually," Erza said, "But before I knew for sure whether or not I would be the main on raising the child, I didn't think I should look at cribs. Starting tomorrow I'll keep an eye out for something I like. And paint! You have to let me know as soon as Meredy finds out the gender so I know what color to pain the room. I don't know if the walls should be my…" She caught herself, then realized what she'd been about to say wasn't too awkward. "I don't know if that walls should be my hair color or yours. Give or take a few shades."
He cast her an amused look. "More than a few." There was quite a difference between a baby's shade of pink and that brilliant scarlet of hers.
"When will she be able to tell the gender?"
"Reliably? Not for a bit longer. She already has her suspicions, but she refuses to tell me until she's sure."
"You have to let me know when she finds out. Send a letter first thing. I don't want to know if it's he or she as soon as I can." It felt odd to say that, and Erza blushed. "Does this feel strange to you? Talking about a baby? In less than a year there's going to be another person."
"Sometimes. It doesn't help that neither of us did much to cause that."
The thought made them both blush.
"W-well!" Erza turned to the bedroom door. "It's almost lunch. I… I should get something for us to eat! I'll make something special to. Just to… um… celebrate?"
"Y-yeah. Sure. That sounds nice."
-o-
It took a bit of coaxing from Erza to convince Jellal that it was safe to go out in her backyard while she made her 'something special'. She knew which of her neighbors would be busy with work and when they could be relatively certain that no one would look of a bedroom window and see Jellal in her yard. He still pulled his hood up, out of habit, but if Erza thought it was safe for him to sit out in her backyard for a bit, then he felt relatively safe out there. And after years of traveling outdoors, it felt weird to have spent so much time in someone's house.
Come to think of it, wasn't that a little sad? To not be comfortable spending a single morning in someone's house? Granted, that it was Erza's house specifically might have had something to do with it but… it really had been a long time since his life in any way resembled something stable. Much less normal.
He was staring blankly at her fence, wondering just how disappointed his childhood self might be with him—any aspect of him—when Erza slid open the backdoor and gestured for him to come back inside.
"You didn't need to put the hood up," she said for the fifth time that afternoon.
"I would rather not have you get arrested for hiding a fugitive," Jellal replied, but his attention was no longer entirely on her. Having been made to wait while she cooked, he'd missed having lunch at a reasonable time. Like any normal, non-pregnant person who missed a meal, this meant that he was hungry, and that the sandwiches set out on her kitchen counter, for all their simplicity, looked delicious.
However, as a pregnant person, Jellal had learned that any comments about being hungry invited 'eating for two' jokes. So he held his tongue and tried not to stare at the food too obviously.
Erza still noticed him looking, and smiled. "Eat up. I cobbled together what variety I could. I didn't know if you were craving anything or not, but if you are I probably don't have it stocked right now anyway."
He'd seen her digging through her near empty fridge like she thought there was some back wall she might be able to pry off that would reveal a trove of foodstuffs, and had to agree that nothing would have been accomplished by mentioning he wanted anything specific.
That was fine. He could see cheese and lettuce and some sort of cold cut in her sandwiches, and with his morning sickness having gone away after morning, the food was making his mouth water.
They sat and ate, Erza recounting her selkie hunt for Jellal to keep conversation going. He nodded along, asking trivial questions when it seemed appropriate to reaffirm that he was paying attention. The idea did cross his mind to mention his own escapades, but he held back. Erza learning that he was still going out and helping hunt down dark guilds, even if he stayed in the rear and used projectile spells, could wait until he knew that Erza wouldn't be upset with the idea of someone pregnant with her child running off to fight the morally bankrupt.
Things were awkward enough between them. If she gave some order for him to play it safe, how awkward would it become if she caught him defying her?
She didn't comment on him eating more than her. Again for the sake of not being told he was eating for two, Jellal hoped that meant she had some mundane explanation. Like having eaten as she cooked. Or maybe she was trying not to look like a glutton.
That thought struck him later than he'd have liked, and he found himself regretting that he hadn't showed a bit of restraint himself when eating in front of her. Suddenly, the idea of blaming his behavior on the need to eat for two was alarmingly tempting. But of course, since she didn't comment on how much he ate, there was no opportunity to defend himself.
No. Instead of giving Jellal a chance to excuse his behavior. She instead opened up a cabinet and pulled out a cake.
Jellal had just a moment to appreciate the realization that Erza was also missing enough kitchenware to use her cabinets for hiding food before the smell hit him. The scent of strawberries and premade backing mix and much too much sugar filled the room. Jellal's stomach lurched, which gave him just enough warning to bolt outside before vomiting.
Erza looked, horrified, out her backdoor, then guiltily stuffed the cake back into its hiding place. After a moment she also went around opening windows to let the scent air out. Once that was taken care of and she couldn't think of another immediate task to busy herself with, she went out into the backyard to see if Jellal was done coughing up his lunch.
He wasn't, and after a moment's hesitation she put a hand on his shoulder. It was a moment longer before Jellal could summon the energy to give her a grateful smile.
"Sorry," she said.
"No," he managed. "It's not… I didn't know that would happen either."
"I wasn't even thinking about morning sickness," she admitted. "I can make something lighter for dinner. Is there anything you know won't bother you?"
The only things he could list off the top of his head that were almost certainly safe were all bland, but he told her them anyway. Then he chanced going back into the house and, at her insistence, settled back on her couch while she ran out to buy groceries.
He'd only meant to rest a moment. Just while she was out. For as rare as seeing Erza was, and for as much rarer as he thought it would be to be a guest in her house, Jellal didn't intend to sleep through any of the time he had to spend with her. But he shut his eyes while she was gone and only opened them when she tapped his shoulder and said, "Hey, dinner's ready."
Embarrassed, wiping a bit of drool from his cheek that must have appeared in his sleep, Jellal got up and followed her to the table.
Dinner was indeed bland. Boiled chicken, dumplings, and rice. But breakfast had hurt to eat and he hadn't kept his late lunch down, so he wasn't about to complain about the taste of food that he could actually stomach.
The meal was awkward and uncomfortable, a description that Jellal had come to decide described the whole day. Erza didn't even look at her food until she'd watched him take a few bites without getting sick. And after having eaten too much at lunch, Jellal was self-conscious enough of his intake to eat dinner slowly.
They were halfway through the meal before Erza spoke.
"Is it common? For foods to bother you, I mean?"
They'd been silent long enough that the question took Jellal by surprise. "I guess. I don't usually bother with breakfast anymore."
She nodded. "There's a boy living with Natsu right now who's in the same boat as you, but I don't see him get sick so often. Bisca said her morning sickness was never terrible either. I'd started to assume that people just exaggerated how bad morning sickness could be. And also that it was a thing that happened in the morning. Not mid-afternoon."
"It's mostly a morning thing," Jellal assured her. Although his focus was now on the fact that he was at least not the only pregnant man in the country. That other man didn't get sick so often? How envious.
"Oh. Right. Because you don't… I mean, you should still try to eat breakfast, Jellal. It's not good for you to starve yourself."
"I'm not starving." Overall. Just then it was taking a lot of self-control not to inhale his food.
Erza nodded. "Alright. Good. I'd hate for the baby to not get enough food to grow properly."
Satisfied with the information she'd managed to procure Erza returned her attention to her food, thus missing Jellal uncomfortably rubbing his stomach. The slight bump beneath was too small to be seen through his clothes, but when he'd noticed it earlier he'd been less than pleased. In an abstract sense, he wanted his offspring to grow as it should, but the child was still an abstract idea to him, and the beginning signs that his own body, something he most certainly did not want, was about to grow was something he could observe with little difficulty.
But he'd be a terrible mother to not want his child, abstract as it was, to grow up healthy, so Jellal didn't mention as much. It would probably make Erza ask to see his stomach, anyway.
The subject of his pregnancy, mercifully, didn't come up again. Erza did dishes after dinner and was prompting Jellal to share a story of one of his guild's exploits when someone knocked at the door.
She gestured for him to stand out of sight of the doorway, which proved to be a waste of effort, as it was Ultear who turned out to be waiting when she opened the door.
"We're done relocating camp," she said. "I bet Jellal would be more comfortable here, but if he doesn't want us to come back for him in the morning—"
"I wouldn't want to impose any longer than I already have," Jellal insisted, shooting Ultear a warning look. They had already duped him into spending the day at Erza's, and all that had come of that was that he felt less comfortable. If they made him stay the night he might end up too embarrassed to show his face to her again.
Erza glanced from Ultear to Jellal, who assumed a normal expression when she looked his way, and shrugged. "Alright. The spot from the letter? I'll come visit next time I can make it out." Casting a smile Jellal's way, she added, "We should do this again some time."
-o-
Ultear waited until they were just outside of town to speak, which Jellal was grateful for. It meant the woman didn't want to get Meredy involved and team up on him. "You didn't even kiss, did you?"
"No, but I did throw up in front of her."
"What a waste."
"I know." Jellal sighed. "She made a nice lunch."
"Not that. You had all day with her. You didn't talk about anything important to the two of you?"
He glanced at her. With her hood up most of her face was obscured, but then the way she'd stressed the words he still knew what she meant.
"We discussed who would raise the child, and both agreed that it would be a better idea for her to be the primary parent," Jellal said before addressing Ultear's actual question. "Nothing is going to happen between us. I'm already saddling her with a baby on top of everything else. She can do better than me."
"Are you sure she wants to?"
"If she doesn't, that's all the more reason not to give in. I won't let her settle for less than she deserves. And I won't accept anything more than I deserve either."
Rolling her eyes, Ultear slung and arm over Jellal's shoulder and pulled him closer. "Look. You're pregnant. You get sick just often enough that, if we could, I'd have you checked out at a hospital. And you're not even to the part where you're uncomfortably large yet. If you really insist on being tortured, your body will take care of that for you in the coming months. So until then, maybe don't torture Erza quite so much and lighten up a bit on that front, okay?"
