A/N:
This story is a Pat reon request for Eleeka
If you're interested in reading other work by me, you can find me on Pat reon under Kaitlin Corvus.
Housekeeping: Rated M(A) Violence, sexual content, allusions to mature subject matter (sexual abuse, rape, other, terrible things that I will try to handle as tactfully as possible).
This is semi-canon, set after the one-year time gap but before the final battle. Annnnd Erza knows Eileen's her mother. K. That about sums it up. I'm rusty on this canon FF thing. Bear with me.
Beauty the Beast
Erza has built her life on patience. When she was small, abandoned to the streets of Rosemary Village, she relied on the patience of villagers and their children to feed, clothe, and accept her; captured to build the Tower of Heaven, she relied on the patience of the occult members, praying they didn't wring her for all she was worth and leave her a husk. As an adult, she's relied on the patience of her friends and those she's dubbed her family, hoping they won't cast her aside if they catch a peek at the ugly beneath her armour.
It's all been worth it, she tells herself. She has learned to pose with the patience of a skilled hunter. Instead of trees and leaves and the soft forest floor to hide her movements, pad her steps, she has concrete and buildings she never remembers being as tall and as imposing as they are.
Deep laughter ricochets off brick. Erza slinks low into the shadows of the alley. She feels like a cat with a mouse in her sights. Her heart is slow and steady, her breathing even and quiet, and her grip on her sword is tight with grim determination.
At one end of the alley is a gold-trimmed carriage, hooked up to a horse that stomps his feet. At the other end is the Council building, where its hoards of evil people slither out like larva from a stinking corpse.
One at a time, Erza tells herself when her revulsion rises so high, it nearly chokes her. One at a time.
Louis Hemming is a beautiful man. She can admit that as he rounds the corner. He has high cheekbones and a kisser's mouth and lots of thick, dark hair that he must condition every day. It glitters like strands of zirconium in the fading light.
He likes to present himself as rich, as he once was. His clothes are tailored and pressed, and his shoes are leather embossed with silver leafing. Yet, he's behind on his rent and has eaten daikon all this last week. The day she arrived in the city, she found the remnants in his garbage, along with an empty can of sardines.
Louis raises his hand to wave to a co-worker one final time before facing forward again. He walks slightly hunched over, and fast, like he can feel there's a threat in the air, the way a rabbit can before an owl swoops down and releases it from its earthly toil.
Something dark and wicked and familiar uncoils in Erza and just quickly, she thinks she's not much better than these other corpse flies. She needs them to suffer to make her rich. She doesn't deal in money or jewels, though. What she gets is so much more valuable.
Justice.
When Louis is so close, she can smell is excessive use of the cologne he's watered down to extend its life, Erza lashes out. She grabs him by the head and slams him into the brick wall. He's so shocked, he can't scream. Blood dribbles out of his mouth and ruins his shirt. Two of his teeth have come loose and he is no longer so beautiful.
Justice, that dark creature inside Erza croons. Justice.
She breathes it in, holds her breath and the stench of blood in her sinuses.
"He-help!" Louis mewls, too quiet to hear.
Erza tightens her hold on him. "Silence."
He quiets.
His eyes are fish-big and fish-dull, Erza sees as she turns him around to look him over. She likes doing this, though the faces sometimes haunt her in her dreams. She needs to see that the monsters look just like her. Just like everyone. No one thing that makes them stand out. It helps her to remember to always be cautious. If she's always cautious, she's never the victim. Not again.
"What do you want?"
"Recompense." She doesn't know her voice when it gets low and dangerous like that. It gives her chills, but in a good way.
"I don't have any money," Louis stammers, "but you can take my jewellery—"
"Once, you were approached by men," Erza speaks over him. He shuts up to listen to her. "They offered you a piece of paradise if only you'd reroute some of the building material going across the Straight."
Louis gets paler, the longer she speaks.
"Remember?" Remember the salt in the air and the way it burned your skin when you tripped out onto the beach? Remember the steel cutting into your bare hands as you and hundreds like you, too weak to carry heavy steel like that, were forced to drag it up the slope and then up the side of the Tower of Heaven? Remember the broken fingers and infected cuts, the peeled toenails because you didn't have shoes? Remember, remember, remember?
Every day.
"They threatened me," Louis says lowly.
Erza doesn't remember deciding to hit him, but his head cracks back into the brick with a dull thud and she must wait a moment for the consciousness to come back to his eyes. "They paid you. And you said yes."
He sniffles. "I didn't know what was happening in that tower."
"I don't believe that." Even if he didn't know exactly what was going on, he knew it wasn't anything moral. People don't get rich because they're doing good things. Money—lots of money, easy money—is a dirty man's game.
Blood and snot wick on Louis' upper lip. Some of it threatens to fall on Erza's armour but she's a million miles away from caring.
"Did you think no one would punish you for it?" Erza breathes.
Louis just stares at her and his expression is like so many others'. Awed horror. Reverence. She is a capricious god. She is their punisher. She is the last thing they see before she walks them into the dark night.
"When you close your eyes, do you see the lives you've ruined?"
Louis doesn't answer. He can't. She's squeezing his throat too tight for him to make a sound.
"Do you think about the people that died, broken, so you can squander your riches?"
Pissed it away on useless things. Silver filigree leather shoes. They were tramping gum right now. They've probably been through dog shit and vomit. Mud and garbage.
She wanted them to go through spilled blood before Louis Hemming departed from this life.
"They took my eye," she tells him. Could almost feel the beating that knocked it from its home. "And that's not the worst of what they did." The Tower of Heaven was horrible well before Jellal ever took it. In the shadowed hallways, boys and girls cried and would come back with welts on their bodies in places Erza was told not to let anyone touch. Most of the times they were the older ones, but not always.
Beatings and murder for disobedience, bodies were disgraced when they'd fall where they stood, too exhausted to move on, and worse things that only come to the forefront of Erza's mind in her nightmares.
"You deserve worse," she says, and the words reverberate way deep down in her bones, where she can't tell if she means them or if she's just said them so many times, they've become true. In her heart, she knows wrong after wrong after wrong doesn't make it right, but she's as restless as a banshee and will not be satisfied until everyone has paid, and the only currency her demons are interested in is blood.
Louis gurgles. She takes her short sword and turns it around, pressing the point against his chest. The only mercy she will allow him is a quick death, and slides it through his expensive clothing, straight into his heart. His body jars and quivers and bleeds over her steel. The ends of his lustrous hair get wet and its colour dulls.
Erza holds him until she feels the last breath leave his lungs, then steps back. Her sword slides out as easily as it slid in and Louis collapses in the alley, cold and dead. The beast inside Erza purrs its content and settles once more.
"How many will you kill?"
Erza doesn't react immediately. She pretends like she's unaffected and magics away her sword. Her armour, too. She's covered in blood. When fresh clothes cover her sin, she feels equipped to turn on her mother.
Eileen Belserion is beautiful in the same way a tiger snake is. She's cold. She's deadly. And when she speaks, Erza wants to break everything pretty about her.
Erza makes her back straight. She used to be ashamed, and afraid, that someone else knew her secret. No longer. They've not become allies, her and her mother, but there are so many secrets kept between them, they are as old acquaintances. "All of them."
"I could destroy them all right now if that's what you wish." Eileen snaps her long, clawed fingers and out on the street, a man drops, bleeding from his nose and mouth for no obvious reason. People flock to his side, panicked.
Erza recognizes Irving Grog, one of Louis Hemming's accomplices. He owned the ship that brought most of the stolen material to the Tower of Heaven. Erza has tracked him for months, deciding where and when he should pay, and her mother took it from her.
She snarls and steps into the fading sunlight, toward Eileen, a sword in her hand. "How dare you? They're mine."
Eileen's mouth curls into a cruel smile. "Careful, darling, your dragon is showing."
Just like Mommy, her tone suggests. It's true. They are alike in more ways than Erza is comfortable with.
Erza does what she imagines not many people are brave enough to do and turns her back on her mother.
People are gathering around Irving Grog's corpse; their yells have turned to hush whispers. She sidles around them, counting on their horror to keep her anonymous. It works. For once, she's not the centre of attention and can cross town without suspicion.
The hotel was Lucy's idea. Erza would have been just as happy to sleep on the ground in the forest for this job but admits it has its perks when she sneaks away from her teammates to play murderess.
Judge, Erza corrects. It's not murder when you take the lives of horrible people whose greed ended so many others'. And if they did something terrible once without consequence, they're apt to do it again.
She turns on her shower and strips off her clothes in her usual way, wasting magic for the sake of convenience. She avoids the mirror, afraid of what she'll see there, and steps beneath the hot spray. It works to unwind her muscles and ease her cold fever. By the time she's done, the bathroom is so steamy, she can't see her reflection.
She knows she has a visitor as soon as she opens the bathroom door. She can smell the road on him, dust and blood and tired.
She sees him looking for a place to sit where he won't dirty anything. He looks up when he hears her and looks her over, head-to-foot, almost like he's forgotten how much he likes the sight of her.
Erza's smiles are in short supply, but Jellal's never needed that from her.
Jellal reaches for her and Erza folds around him like origami. He kisses her and she doesn't care about her damp skin on his filthy travel clothes. She doesn't care about the sand in his hair or the dirt smeared across his cheek. He takes the ugliness in her, the beast, and smooths it into something almost pretty again, some shiny piece of glass he can cut himself on because Jellal is always ready to be a martyr and pay for someone else's sins.
He trails his fingers down her spine until he reaches the edge of her towel and then flattens his palm against her skin. He's warm through his leather gloves and she's cold. His kiss deepens. She tastes ginger on his tongue as she curls into him and presses her palms against his chest. She can feel his lungs rise and fall, his body responding to the nearness of hers.
"I've missed this," he whispers against her lips.
"Me, too." It's been too long.
Erza wriggles and her towel slides free to puddle at her feet. She shivers; it's the cold, but it's also his voice, his hands grazing down her front, over her collarbone, to the tips of her breasts, sliding over them gently, and continuing past her ribs and her waist to her hips. He rolls his thumbs over her skin, drawing closer and closer to where she desperately wants him to be.
It's torture, but Erza closes her eyes and lets Jellal take the time he needs. Eventually, he stops patiently relearning her body and it's Erza's turn.
Jellal's armour is softer than hers, made of sand and sewn material, belted together with leather. His skin beneath is damp with sweat when she kisses it.
Naked from the waist up, he lets her push him back on the bed where she undoes his pants. He's at attention, hard and enthusiastic. Erza settles over him, eager to fill her body with another sensation, something different than steel sliding through flesh, and rage. Jellal takes it all from her, eager to feel them again. The him that lived in the Tower of Heaven is a ghost haunting this Jellal, the one that walked free. He is as scared of it as he is intrigued. Amazed by its violence.
Erza never is. Violence is the one language she speaks flawlessly, day in and day out. She knows herself best when she's lying in wait in alleys for men and women who make their riches off the backs of the innocent dead.
She used to think Jellal wouldn't love her if she told him her secrets, but one winter day, beneath a snowy sky, it just bubbled out of her. She'd turned to him and said, "I want to kill them all," and Jellal only nodded, solemn.
Sometimes, like now, when he's feeling her body around him and he's approaching orgasm, he holds his head back, neck exposed like he's imagining one day, she'll put her blade against his throat, too, and make him pay.
Erza takes him by the neck, squeezing gently, feeling his moans and staccato breaths. Jellal opens his eyes and looks at her between his thick lashes. She doesn't always see the sinner of the Tower of Heaven, unlike Jellal, but sometimes, when she looks at him from the corner of her eye, she catches a glimpse of who he once was.
She squeezes tighter. Jellal's hips move faster, meeting hers. Erza's body starts to tingle. Jellal plants one hand between her breasts, half cupping one, and holds her hip with his other hand.
The sex turns rough, and in the roughness, she feels closer to him. His quiet moans turn fevered and his pleasure pushes Erza into her own. He comes when she does, spilling inside her. Afterward, Erza leans down and kisses him again, the apology Jellal doesn't want.