I wrote this one fairly recently, but I felt it needed to be shared sooner than some of the others because... I had a point to make with it.
Disclaimer: I do not own Fairy Tail.
Title: Clipped Wings
Pairing: Erza x Sorano
Requester: boogey56
Prompt: Wings
This wasn't freedom.
Sorano knew it wasn't, knew it was a huge mistake, that she'd chosen wrong, the instant the new chains fell around her. She could not see them, but she felt them, and they dug bloody furrows into her soul just as surely as any iron shackles. Grasping, pinching, rubbing against the tender parts to form new callouses where she'd only just begun to scrape the old ones off.
But she had chosen this, she reminded herself.
Freedom - true freedom - would be hers if she could just endure this. If she just put in her time, shed enough blood, enough tears. Then the chains would loosen, and she would be released. Free at last.
She had chosen this. Of her own... free... will.
...Hadn't she? She had... right?
Some days, it was hard to convince herself of that, remembrance and bitterness keen-edged daggers between her ribs.
And her. Sorano couldn't hardly stand to look at her.
The one who was free, was not forced into chains alike to hers. A woman with footsteps in scarlet that treaded lightly where Sorano's dragged with weight, leaving deep impressions in the muck to show her passing. Where Sorano's were hunched by the weight, her shoulders were straightened, no longer bent by her own chains.
How Sorano envied her her freedom. Weren't they the same, in so many ways? Hadn't that place (that horrible nightmare Tower) been both their starting points, their lives stretching beyond? So why was hers a path, while Sorano's was a pitfall?
From long ago, Sorano remembered her mother telling her that women were born with wings, wings that could take them far away from everything that troubled them. What was the point of clinging to those words, Sorano wondered these many years later - the words of a woman long since dead? (It wasn't as if her mother had managed to find her own sky, in the end, anyway.) But cling Sorano still did, to the whispered promise of the sky.
Looking at the other woman, as she moved about the campsite speaking to Sorano's brothers, her closest companions, she remembered again her mother's words, and saw wings. Scarlet, sprouting from corded muscle - tattered around the edges, but strong and proud.
And Sorano couldn't help but feel her own, bound against her skin and clipped, no longer able to soar.
Not that they had ever gotten the chance to in the first place.
I have severe issues with Jellal's handling of the Oracion Seis, in case you couldn't tell.
I am actually going to write a short companion piece to this, so stay tuned.