Meteor blazes against the dark when Jellal calls it, too bright but he's too desperate to mute it. He soars out of Burnaby's home and into the night sky. In seconds, he's reached his target: Lucy.

Fire blazes from every window in Verity's home. It casts shadow ghosts onto the dry grass. They dance by darting toward each other, then away.

Jellal crashes to the ground in an ungainly fashion, merges with his projection, and then stalls by the treeline, torn between checking on Lucy, who lies prone on the ground—he can't say for certain if she's still breathing—and Verity, who he cannot see nor hear.

The front door of the Councillor's home bursts open and solves his dilemma for him. Verity emerges with Tweed levitated by her magic behind her. The councilman bobs, limp, bloody, and pale.

There's no time to think of what's happened to Tweed, though. Verity is running from her home, and Tweed is as safe as he can be behind her, and Jellal must focus on Lucy because Erza will kill him if anything happens to her.

Worse than kill him.

Leave him behind.

He makes it to her side and crouches down beside her. There's a burn across her face, just below her eye. It's a welt bad enough to scar. Her keys are several feet from her outstretched hand. They glint in the firelight.

Jellal grabs them. Lucy stirs beneath him, eyes parting just slightly, hand reaching for her keys.

As soon as she's touched them, her body bucks without warning and suddenly, Lucy is crying out in agony. Jellal searches frantically for the wound but can see none. She does it again, lifting off the ground this time, and throwing her keys wide once more. They land several feet away, at the feet of a newcomer.

Jellal looks up. he expects to see the eyes of a man but instead is greeted only by fire. It enshrouds the newcomer's toes, legs, torso, and face, making it impossible to identify them.

Jellal knows who it is, though. Without doubt. While Erza was busy worrying for Natsu's life, Eros was planning an attack against Lucy.

Eros overlooks Jellal and focuses on Lucy. She bucks again and this time when she lands, Jellal hears a bone break. Lucy cries out, and then she says nothing at all as she loses consciousness.

"Lucy is innocent. How far will you go to hurt Erza?" Jellal calls to the fire man.

"If it will make the girl throw off her façade, I will do a great many terrible things," Jellal is ensured. "Step aside, let me end the girl, and we'll see the beast."

It takes Jellal a moment to understand what Eros is saying. His voice is almost lost to the crackle of flames. See the beast. He's talking about Erza. Her iridescent scales and too sharp fangs, the wildness in her eye when the change threatens to overcome her. Part of Jellal wants to see it, too. He loves Erza best when she's dangerous, and she's never more dangerous than when the dragon is pushing against her skin.

But a small part of him screams very loudly, not like this.

Jellal thinks Jiu Leixing and nine swords made of magical lightning appear. They strike one after the other, some burrowing into the ground when Eros moves, but he cannot dodge them all. He cries out. The sharp tang of blood soaks the air. Jellal relishes in it, his will to fight renewed.

Erza will be mad if Jellal arrives in her bedroom with Eros' head hanging from his hand by the hair. Worse than mad. She will be furious. She will perhaps never fully forgive him for taking the kill away from her. But part of her will also feel indebted, and every time she touches him, he knows he'll feel some of that gratitude seeping in through her fingers, soaking into his skin, and it'll make the moment she destroys him so much sweeter.

Jellal is lost in fantasy when he feels his blood get hot. His skin itches. It feels like it goes on forever, but it's seconds. At first, he's confused, but then he remembers Erza's recounting of her run-in with Eros in the Beaches and he knows Eros is trying to explode him as he exploded Crang the thief.

Jellal can do nothing but bend his back and scream as the magic ruptures from his chest. Hot blood soaks the inside of his leather armour, stinking, sticky. He gasps. Has rarely felt anything more painful or violating. His magic is his and should never be used against him in such a way.

Before Jellal can recuperate, he's itching again, screaming again, bleeding again. He goes down on his knees. The dirt is hot and loose beneath his hands, and then it's wet as his blood sluices out from beneath the leather and soaks into it. Each breath he takes sears into his lungs. The fire in Verity's home is getting out of hand. In the distance, he can hear sirens wailing. The Authorities will arrive soon, and before that happens, Eros expects Jellal to be dead.

Jellal grits his teeth and lifts his head. He's faced worse villains than a ghost from his past. He starts to draw a circle in the dry dirt. Immediately, the clouds above his head get dense and black. Eros still blazes in front of him, his features covered by fire, but Jellal swears, he sees the other man's face fall.

"You'll kill your companion, too," Eros warns.

Jellal wants to say I'll protect her. But the truth is when Sema hits, sometimes, it's difficult to protect even himself.

In that brief moment of hesitation, Jellal is battered with the most powerful of Eros' spells yet. It uses the magic he's already summoned in his body and it bursts it outward until it feels like Jellal is bleeding from every inch of skin like his body is tearing itself apart. He's going to be like Crang, a red wet smear because his greatest strength has been turned into his greatest weakness.

Light shines beside him. In his agony, Jellal turns his head and sees Lucy has come around, in a fashion. She's on her knees and with her good arm, she brandishes two of her gold keys like daggers. From them pours two celestial spirits, Loki, and Virgo.

Jellal has the pleasure of watching Eros' eyes go wide before the ground beneath Jellal's feet is taken away by Virgo. She clutches him as if he weighs nothing at all, ferrying him away from the danger. When they surface again, they're closer to Lucy.

Loki fights Eros like he doesn't feel the fire, dashing in and hitting him with the kind of vengeance a loved one would exact. He's furious.

Virgo drops Jellal as unceremoniously as she picked him up and joins the fray and together, it seems like she and Loki are pushing Eros back.

Now that the man's focus isn't on Jellal, Jellal can gather his magic without fear of it burning a hole through his skin. He plucks a heavenly body from the sky and sends it crashing into Eros. There is no dodging the attack and Eros goes down, gasping, fires sputtering. Jellal can see his face for an instant, slicked in sweat, blood. They lock eyes and there is a lot of hate in that glare.

Seeking to end it, Jellal reaches for another meteor but before it can crash into their foe, both Loki and Virgo implode, dousing the surrounding area in magic and viscera. Lucy screams as though she feels the attack, too. She sways. Jellal grabs her before she can go down on the arm he's now certain is broken.

By the time he looks up, Eros is gone. The sirens get louder. He sits back with Lucy. She's passed out. Her head lolls on his shoulder and her eyelids are pale blue. She shivers from pain, he, from magic loss.


The next time Jellal awakes, he doesn't know what he's staring at. It's a pale ceiling. Featureless. Endless.

People are talking. Not loudly at first. But a voice raises and Jellal lifts his head up to see what the fuss is about.

Gray is standing over Lucy, who lays on a narrow cot, face pale, eyes closed, arm in a cast.

We're in an infirmary, Jellal thinks before the edges of his vision get blurry and he must lie back and close his eyes again. He falls back asleep without effort to the sound of Gray's furious whisper.


The next time Jellal wakes, it's because someone is shaking him. He expects the peak of his canvas tent, Ultear and her severe expression. What he gets instead is Gray sitting at his bedside.

Jellal tries to sit up. His chest hurts. He could push it, he thinks, but decides against it, and lies back down. "What's wrong?" His throat is hot and sore and dry.

Gray looks around the infirmary, checking for listening ears. His eyes linger on the bed Lucy occupied (empty now) for a beat too long before he turns back to Jellal.

Before he even begins, Jellal senses there will be trouble. He's looked at people the same way before he leaves them with a world of regret. Whatever it is that Gray has to say, Jellal suddenly doesn't want to hear it. He starts to rise in earnest now, his thoughts swirling toward Erza. He's been out for too long. What if something happened to her? What if—

Gray takes Jellal by the shoulder and holds him still. He doesn't have to try as hard as he usually might, Jellal is disoriented and sore and Gray holds the weight of some righteous conviction behind him.

"I saw you," Gray says with enough emphasis to make Jellal go slack. "I saw your spell," Gray reiterates into the quiet. "You killed that man." His hand tightens. "Why would you do that?"

"Gray." His name is spoken sharply.

Jellal dares to take his eyes off Gray and watch Lucy stalk across the room. Even with her arm in a cast and a burn slashing from her nose to her mandible, she's as fearsome as he's ever seen her, loose hair flying out behind her and her heels clonking decisively on the floor with every step. "Stop it."

"It was him," Gray insists.

"I already told you, he was with me the whole time," Lucy says over him. "He saved my life."

"After he ended Burnaby's." Gray isn't giving an inch, and every word he says only makes Lucy more furious.

"Erza wants to talk to you," she says instead of arguing with him.

Gray closes his hands into fists, looks down at them. "Does she know I'm here?"

"Of course she does," Lucy answers.

Gray pales just slightly. Jellal understands. When Erza wants to be, she is as unforgiving as a hurricane. You've no choice but to be blown over by her and ruined.

Gray stands and Lucy takes his place. She waits until he's out of the infirmary before speaking, though. "Thank you for helping. You did save me."

"You saved me," Jellal counters, remembering Lucy's spirits spilling from her keys and Virgo pulling him out of the line of fire.

Lucy flops down in the seat Gray vacated. Beneath her eyes are bruised. She looks exhausted. Her arm sits limply on her lap. "Wendy is travelling from Magnolia," she says, following Jellal's line of sight. "With her help, we'll be good as new."

"You don't sound very excited about that," Jellal notes.

She rolls her lips together in thought. "People are dying, and they're dying badly. If she didn't have to see them…" She sighs. "Wendy will blame herself for not being able to save them."

Jellal thinks he used to be like that in the time before Ultear and what he thought was Zeref. He would watch Simon put himself in the way of bad things and afterward, would berate himself for not being able to stop it. It's a simplistic trap, easy to fall into, potentially deadly. This world has no place for bleeding hearts.

"Natsu thinks he can protect her from the worst of it." Lucy uses her good hand to pleat the sheets. They're loose enough at Jellal's side that he doesn't feel her hand working. She doesn't look at him, either, making the whole thing seem impersonal. She barely notices he's there, in her own thoughts.

"Who else thinks I was at Burnaby's home?" Jellal asks. He doesn't have it in him to be subtle.

Lucy's eyes flit up to his, linger. "Gray's only told me." She explains, "Natsu's too much of a hothead to sit on that kind of accusation if he thinks there's even a chance it might be true, and Erza… Gray doesn't want to hurt her." She lifts her shoulder.

"Do you believe it?"

She looks at him directly, gaze steady and true. "Were you with me all night?"

Lying to Lucy, Jellal finds, is almost as difficult as lying to Erza. There's a sense of ingenue about her that he almost trips on.

Thoughts of protecting Erza and her interests, though, make his tongue like a snake's.

"I was," he affirms.

Without hesitation, Lucy says, "Then that's truth enough for me. I'll bring Gray around."


It's dark when a burly nurse comes in and tells Jellal he's well enough to go. He's stiff rising and requires her help pulling on his shirt. His chest, beneath layers of bandages and salves, looks like burned skin, bubbled and raw and red where his magic literally avulsed from his skin.

He limps down the hallway, thinking of Wendy and how good it will be to be the focus of her healing magic. He's often wished for a healer in his guild. Crime Sorcier is no place for a child, though. Exposed to all that bad, she would grow to be as odd and misshapen as the rest of them.

There is a carriage outside the hospital. Jellal pays the driver to take him to Erza's motel.

When he looks up from the ground, he worries she's left him to the wolves; the lights are off in her room and the window is closed. But then the wind blows, and he sees a flash of scarlet pushed from narrow shoulders. She's on the roof, sitting beneath the moon, as she is so often lately.

It's too difficult to play with magic right now, he still feels drained, so Jellal takes the stairs. Erza's door is unlocked. By the time he's made it inside, she's back through the window and looking at him, silhouetted by the moon.

"Should you be walking?" she asks.

There's a coolness in her voice and for the first time, Jellal wonders why she wasn't at his bedside when he woke.

"The nurse cleared me to leave." He can't see her face. He longs to.

Erza is the first to move, and she moves closer. She reaches for him, taking him by the arms and pulling him to the bed. He collapses more than sits. He's unreasonably tired.

Erza sits, too, and faces him. He still can't read her.

Erza whispers, "What happened at Burnaby's? Gray is acting strangely."

"He thinks he saw my spell," Jellal confesses.

Erza gnaws her lip as she does when she's anxious. "Damnit."

"All he saw was a streak of light," Jellal assures her. "He has no proof."

He can see she's unhappy about it. "This was too dangerous. We shouldn't have…"

He can't hear her say it. For weeks, he's loved nothing more than this hunt and he can't have her take it away from him. "Lucy believes I was with her all night. It's fine." It will be fine. Even if he must make it so.

If Erza sees the threat in his words, she chooses to ignore it and pushes on with another bit of bad news. "Tweed is dying."

Coldness shoots through Jellal's veins. "What?"

"They took him to the hospital," Erza confirms in a ragged whisper. "He was gravely injured in the attack."

For all the blood that soaks her hands, Jellal can see she feels guilty for this one innocent casualty.

"It was Eros," Jellal tells her. "He attacked Verity's home, and then Lucy."

Erza bunches the blankets between her fists. One by one, Jellal watches scales emerge from her skin, like claws sliding from sheaths. She bleeds a little; it must hurt. "He will pay."

Jellal realizes she's being so quiet to control herself, not because she's angry with him, but because she's furious with Eros.

"He's trying to seduce you into violence."

"He's done an excellent job." This time, Erza doesn't try to disguise the fury in her. Her eyes catch the moonlight, black, narrow pupils. Jellal is chilled to his core and intrigued. He leans into her without meaning to, just to bask in the danger.

"Will you hunt him?"

"I will destroy him for what he's done," she answers.

Jellal catches himself thinking reverent thoughts. He pulls back from her. Thinking it's fear, Erza comes back to herself and one by one her scales disappear.

"You don't have to be afraid of me," she tells him.

"I'm not." And it's the awful truth.

"Then what are you thinking?"

Jellal takes a fortifying breath. "Do you think I always need someone to worship?"

Erza considers him for a long time before eventually lifting her hand and laying it against his cheek. He can smell the iron tang of her blood drying on her knuckles; it overlays the fragrance of the lotion she's applied to minimize her scars. "Sometimes, we need something to believe in."

If it's her and not an evil like Zeref, she means.

As Erza kisses him, Jellal wonders about overlapping shadows, at times nearly sure he's traded one darkness for another. He's also almost positive, even when he feels the nubs where her wings press against her scaled skin, that it doesn't matter.

He undresses his beast and worships her.