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Jealousy
1. an unhappy or angry feeling of wanting to have what someone else has
2. a feeling of unhappiness and anger caused by a belief that a loved one might be unfaithful
Sometimes it felt like Gray saw green half the time, and he hated it.
If Gray was a better person, a better friend, then he would be happy for his friends instead of jealous of them. To be fair, he was happy for them. He wasn't completely heartless. All the same, it felt like he saw green half the time and he hated it.
When Natsu could just brush off the most traumatic issues within a day or two and bounce back to normal without any lasting ill effects, Gray was glad that he could handle things so well without getting bogged down with grudges or depression. He was also jealous, because he knew that he wasn't half as resilient. His coping skills, quite frankly, sucked. Even though he could put on a brave face so that everyone else would think he was okay after a day or two of his tragedies, he probably wasn't. Definitely wasn't. Some things still haunted him years and years later, and he wished that he could just adopt Natsu's carefree attitude toward life.
When Erza could beat him and Natsu and anyone else into the ground, Gray was honestly proud of her. He was also jealous. Not so much because she could beat him without a problem, but because she was so strong, not only physically and magically, but in her heart. And Gray… Well, Gray didn't always feel like he was. And watching Erza, and even Natsu, pull off impossible wins and continue to get stronger and stronger and stronger sometimes made him feel like he was being left behind.
When Lucy had joined the guild and immediately fit in like she was born to be there, Gray was happy for her. He was also jealous, because she had found her place in the guild in a heartbeat and somehow seemed to belong there even more than he ever had. Sometimes he envied her ability to get along with everyone and fit in everywhere. She'd settled into the guild so quickly, and it had taken Gray years to get even half as comfortable there as she was now. Sure, that was mostly his fault because he'd been an angry, grieving mess after everything with Deliora and his family and Ur. Then again, Lucy's childhood hadn't been all rainbows and fluffy kittens either, but she hadn't let it cripple her the same way Gray had let his cripple him.
Then again…most of his friends had some kind of tragedy in their past, didn't they? And they were all pretty well-adjusted now. Not that everything was perfect or they hadn't had to deal with issues of their own, but they had coped far better than he had. They had moved on with their lives, while Gray was still stuck wallowing in the past. They were always moving forward, growing, getting stronger, becoming better people. And Gray was just…there. Or maybe half there. Sometimes it felt like he was only half alive anyway.
Out of everything, that was probably what he was the most jealous of. He was glad that his friends were flourishing instead of languishing like him, but he certainly envied that because he wanted… He wanted to be there with them, moving forward instead of being left behind.
There were also lots of other little, stupid things that he was jealous of, though. Sometimes he envied their genuine smiles and carefree laughs, their sunny dispositions and resiliency, their ability to make a home for themselves in a world that Gray had never been able to fully call his own.
It kind of made him feel like a selfish jerk.
It wasn't like these were things he was always thinking about, but they definitely crossed his mind from time to time, as much as he tried to ignore them. It wasn't a nice feeling.
But then something would happen and Natsu's smile would fade or Erza's armor would crack or Lucy's confidence would shatter, and all that jealousy would fly out the window. Those were the moments when Gray realized that he would give anything, do anything, to give them back the very things he envied. If he could, he'd give them his own smiles and armor and confidence, if only because he wanted to see them happy more than he wanted anything else. More than he wanted their resiliency or strength or sociability for himself.
In the end, he loved them more than he loved himself. And even when the jealousy made him want to take, take, take…in the end, he would still give up everything for them.
emmahoshi: I don't think there's anything wrong with it, but I do think that it's easy to feel bad about it when it happens because it makes you feel like a bad friend. And yup, you're totally right X) Just one more facet of the human psyche that isn't so black and white lol