A/N: A bit of Gray supporting Erza in a moment of weakness. Who else noticed the change of genres? I figured that since almost everything is angst, might as well change it. Enjoy~
Her hands shake as she scrubs them under the faucet. The water stains pink, and all she can think about is how she just killed a man, a civilian. She killed someone who possibly had a family, had a job, could have a business to run or fields to plow. She killed a man just because he was in her way.
All she can see is the way his blood splattered against her skin, how her clothes were still stained red from the sticky substance. She shuts the water off and grips the sink tightly, resting her head against the rim between her shaking hands and dropping into a squat. What if his family had seen her kill him?
"You okay, Erza?" Two hands grip her shoulders and she feels the thumbs draw circles on her tense neck.
"I killed a man," she breathes, leaning her head back and pressing the top of her head against a warm neck. "I killed a man because he didn't obey my orders."
The person behind her sighs and drops to the ground behind her, and she feels his hands pull her onto his lap. His hands, bloodstained as well, take hers. "He would've been the cause of everyone else's deaths, right?" He asks, though it's a rhetorical question. She would never take a life of a civilian if it wasn't mandatory. He takes her silence as a yes, and continues on. "One death is preferred over dozens," he tells her gently.
She stares at her hands, the way that their skin is cracked due to the harsh actions she puts them through. She hates these things, she decides, based off of what they have done. They are also ugly, with knobby knuckles and hangnails that bleed at any provocation. The nails have been trimmed and the beds are sore from the scrubbing that relieved them of their red tint. His hands are the same in appearance, but they aren't responsible for the murder of innocent people. They are stained with the blood of a monster, not of a person she could've protected.
"Your hands are pretty," she whispers, rubbing her thumb over the rough skin of her nakama's hand, watching as the dried blood flakes onto her lap. The blood of something that was not human. "Mine are the hands of a murderer."
"Don't say that," he tells her harshly. "We saved dozens of people today, and if we only lost one person, then it was a successful mission. You killed to save other's lives. There were kids that he put in danger." His voice is soothing, and one of his hands snakes to her neck again and his thumb continues the circles it was rubbing into the tense muscles earlier.
"I've killed before, too," she barely manages to squeak out before her throat constricts and she is forced back into the memories of her later adolescent years, when she was a slave and her magic was activated by the grief of losing the only adult figure she loved that was alive. She remembers the blood that had spilled on her because she wanted to save Jellal, and now she realizes that they could've had families, too. Gray pries his hand from her grip and moves his hands down her spine, working out the tense knots her muscles had formed.
She was a killer. She murdered for a living. She shouldn't have these hands that could work magic, because without it, she could keep people alive - "Erza, stop thinking like that. You do what it takes to keep Fiore safe. If a few lives are lost, doesn't it mean that everyone can keep living?"
She leans back against his muscular frame, indulging in the feeling of his warmth and his arms wrap around her torso. It wasn't romantic in the slightest; it was comfort being shared between two people. Gray didn't say anything, but she could feel her words having a slight affect on him, and his memories of how his mentor had died were stirring in him. He rested his forehead on her shoulder, and she took one of his hands in hers, and together they sat on the floor in the bathroom at a motel in a city somewhere west of Magnolia in silence, holding respect for the people they had lost due to their childhood ignorance.