Note: Okay, I twisted the GMG event sequence a little. Instead of just running into Rufus in the final event, Gray faces him in one of those one-on-one matches earlier on. Idk, because I could and I thought it worked better.
Part 1
"Sure you don't want to yield?" Rufus asked. "Your magic is worth memorizing, but you don't stand a chance of defeating me."
Gray's lips curled in a sneer, and he threw himself aside to avoid the attack. "I don't think so. I never lose to the same opponent twice."
Rufus thought this a rather amusing, if naïve, assertion. "How charming, although in war it often only takes one defeat to lose your head. I suppose you're counting Hidden as the first defeat? It was a rather pathetic showing."
Gray's face darkened, and his eyes gleamed bright and angry like coals. One corner of Rufus's mouth quirked upward. It was far too easy to rile this one up. The entire Fairy Tail guild was full of firebrands and powder kegs. He could agitate them to the point of reckless action with little more than shrugging off his red cloak and waving it in front of them like a matador taunting an enraged bull.
While strong emotion could, in fact, aid memory and bring details into sharp focus, all too often it clouded the mind. Anger, grief, fear… People in the grip of emotion lost their sense, acted rashly, made mistakes. They could think of nothing else and forgot how to make rational choices.
Rufus did not forget. He prided himself on memorizing everything useful and remembering it when he needed it. He knew how to stay calm and rational and calculating, even when others faltered.
Gray launched another icy attack, which Rufus easily backhanded with a combination of fire and lightning attacks he'd memorized long ago. Gray went diving to the ground, the stench of ozone and a hint of charred skin clouding the air.
"You've already used that one," Rufus said, lazily recreating the icy lances and sending Gray scurrying to avoid them. "Do try to be less predictable."
Gray glared and wiped away the blood trickling from a cut above his eye. He ignored the myriad other cuts and gashes and burns littering his skin. Around them, the crowd roared and cheered, yelling encouragement and insults. A bloodthirsty bunch, even if they tried to cover their baser instincts with a thin veneer of civility. The Games might be couched in formality and rules and etiquette, but they were still held in an arena and the spectators still went wild at the sight of blood. That Minerva had gotten away with her brutalization of Lucy with only the faintest of slaps on the wrist more than proved it.
And while Fairy Tail tried to lord their importance and superiority over everyone, even despite having vanished for years and being left far out of their depth, their ire and bloodlust had been roused all the same by Minerva's cruelty. Righteousness aside, fury was fury. He could see the echoes of it in Gray's eyes, smoldering beneath his mounting frustration at losing this battle. It would make him clumsy and stupid. How sad, to see the once-great Fairy Tail guild laid so low.
Rufus supposed he'd put on a good enough show now. Perhaps not as flamboyant as he'd normally like, but Minerva had already made enough of a scene in her event. All he really needed to bring Master Jiemma was a victory.
He flipped through his mental catalogue, selecting spells from Orga and Sting and Gray himself that would combine nicely into a unique attack. A unique attack Gray had never seen before and would have no defense against. Memory-make was the purest form of creation magic, and Gray's ice had never stood a chance.
Rufus wove the memories together into a new magic, gave it a name, and sent it hurtling at Gray in a searing comet of blinding light. He smiled and narrowed his eyes against the flash.
"Ice-make: shield!" Gray called, but Rufus had seen his shields and was sure they could not stand against such an attack.
Sure enough, the shield was cracked and in pieces when the light faded, and Gray stood hunched over awkwardly, listing to one side and cradling his arm to his chest. Not a knock-out, then, but it would only take one small push to send him to the ground.
The crowd shrieked Rufus's name and cheered Sabertooth. He preened, reveling in the thrill of victory.
"What was that about never losing twice?" he purred.
Gray didn't move, and Rufus flicked his own ice lances at him disdainfully. Gray didn't even attempt to evade, and the lances arced around and slammed into him in half a dozen places. He toppled. Rufus smirked, ready to accept his victory with grace, but his mouth dropped open as Gray turned suddenly translucent.
"What the…?"
Gray exploded, shards of ice flying across the arena. Rufus stepped back.
"That's what I said," Gray growled from behind him.
Rufus started to turn, but was thrown halfway across the arena when ice slammed into his side. He scrambled to his feet, loath to be seen scrabbling about in the dirt, and hurriedly dodged around another attack that moved too fast for him to get a read on.
"You aren't naming your attacks anymore?" he asked, more to cover his surprise than anything.
He had thought Gray was down for the count, had been sure of it. Perhaps he had underestimated him. He didn't know how Gray had created an ice clone of himself and circled around behind Rufus all in the instant he'd been blinded by his own attack. Gray was fast, Rufus would give him that. Both his molding and his movements and, apparently, his thinking. Rufus would not have expected it of him. He seemed more the brash and reckless type.
"Seems like they'd be easier to remember if they have names," Gray said. His anger wasn't gone, but it had gone hard and cold in his eyes. He moved fast despite the injuries Rufus had inflicted on him. "I guess the trick is to hit you from behind."
"Not very honorable."
"But effective."
Rufus tossed Gray's own attack back at him. "I don't need a name to remember a spell. The backstabbing is an inspired, if dishonorable, strategy, but it won't be enough."
But again, Gray wasn't where he was supposed to be when the dust cleared.
"Wanna bet?" he asked from behind Rufus.
Rufus whipped around and leaped back. The tip of the ice sword grazed his cheek.
He lifted a hand to his cheek and felt the blood dribbling down, warm and wet against his skin. His gaze flicked to the side, where Sabertooth stood gathered in the stands. He took in Master Jiemma's scowl, Minerva's smirk, Orga's rolling eyes, Sting's smugness, Rogue's cold disdain.
He dropped his hand and curled it into a fist at his side. He had been taken by surprise and allowed himself to be struck. Gray shouldn't be able to touch him, shouldn't be able to humiliate him in front of everyone. There was certainly no sign he might present a real challenge when they'd first started and he'd charged around the arena with an abundance of overconfidence and not enough skill to back it up.
But Gray was focused now, and sharp. Rufus had thought his magic was admirable enough, but now he was forced to admit Gray also made a worthy opponent, at least under certain circumstances. He could not be allowed to get away with it. Now Rufus would have to make a grand spectacle of things to distract from his own lapse and injury, however minor. He would have to put his opponent in his place. When he was done with Gray, no one would remember the scratch along his cheekbone.
Rufus deflected Gray's next attack easily and reached out feelers toward his mind. The easiest way to defeat an opponent was to get in their head—sometimes literally, if they weren't fast enough destroying themselves on their own. He riffled through Gray's memories like a stack of playing cards moving by too quickly for him to catch much more than a blur of color on the faces, but didn't get far before running up against a hard, glassy wall. Digging through someone else's memories was never easy or straightforward, and his task was made all the more difficult by Gray's current focus.
Gray was no longer distracted or cocksure or clouded by emotion. He had hardened his mind and heart to the battle in front of him and thought of nothing but his next move and ever-shifting strategy. Plunging into the swirling morass of his mind would be unwise and dangerous, especially in a fight. Rufus was more likely to lose himself before ever latching on to anything useful. It was easier to catch a memory lurking close to the mind's surface. And once he had his hooks in that first memory, it was child's play to tease it out and follow the threads to related memories. He just had to catch that first one, and it needed to be a good one.
"Let me ask you something," he said with a smile as he danced around more lances. "What is the thing you fear most in the world?"
Gray faltered, his hands stilling and his magic along with it. "Excuse me?"
"What keeps you up at night and makes your heart pound until you're sick to your stomach? What are you afraid of?"
"I really don't see how that's any of your business."
But he had faltered for just a moment, thrown off balance by the unexpectedness of the question, and Rufus seized the opening. He slipped tendrils back into Gray's mind, sliding past recent memories of their battle and shuffling through the blurred glimpses of dark things his prodding had brought to the surface.
There.
Rufus caught the biggest, brightest, most fully formed memory and drew it out before he really had time to take a close look. Gray was recovering already, hands flying through the air, and Rufus needed to press his advantage.
A bellowing roar rang out, bouncing off the walls of the arena. Gray's memory took the shape of a gigantic beast that towered over them in the far corner of the arena. It glared at them with beady, glowing eyes and lashed its thick tail as it cracked open its jaws and released another deafening cry past rows of sharp, jagged teeth. Rufus had never seen its like before. Some kind of demon or hellspawn or just some dreadfully ugly creature roaming the wilds somewhere. In truth, it didn't matter what it was, as long as it did its job.
"What…?" Gray froze in place and went deathly pale. He stared at the creature wide-eyed, lips parted in a round 'o'. "H-how did you…?"
He darted a panicked look behind him. Rufus followed his gaze and scanned the stands until he noticed the white-haired man standing with his hands clenched tight around the railing, staring at the memory-beast like he was watching his world crumble to pieces around him. Lamia Scale. Rufus mentally flicked through his competitors' profiles and came up with the name Lyon. Obviously had some connection to Gray or his demon, but Rufus hadn't done as much research on the other guilds' representatives as he should have. No matter—he could do his research now.
The floodgates had opened at the sight of the memory-beast, leaving Gray's mind a frantic whirlwind of memory and emotion. Rufus dipped back inside carefully. Drawing out the memories was easier once the first had been cracked and brought a veritable smorgasbord of related images to mind, but it paid to be cautious. There was always the risk of falling too deep, wandering too far, and getting sucked in. The mind could be a dangerous, sticky place, easy to get lost inside and difficult to escape. The middle of a battle wasn't the time to get stuck in someone else's past.
It wasn't the time to be timid either. He seized the images of the demon and Lyon and searched for where they intersected, using their relation as a guide and focal point to keep him on track and allow him to quickly discard the majority of half-formed memories. Cutting down the number of potential paths to choose from lessened the chances of falling down a rabbit hole. Each memory opened up so many paths that it could easily become overwhelming, and he could happily get lost for days exploring if he had the time.
He latched on to the first relevant memory and drew it out, leaving Gray no time to recover even if he could somehow ignore the imaginary hell-beast rampaging around the other side of the arena.
The rubble of a hundred broken buildings littered the floor of the arena like a smoking, post-apocalyptic wasteland. A small white-haired boy and a woman with short dark hair picked their way through the ruins and gazed over the debris with grim expressions.
"Ur!" the boy cried suddenly. "Over here! I found a survivor!"
An equally small dark-haired boy lay pinned halfway beneath a fallen wooden beam, squinting at them blearily. Gray, of course.
Lyon and the woman called Ur dug Gray out of the wreckage.
"You'll be alright," Ur said, but her eyes were wide and worried. "Deliora—the demon—is gone. You're safe now."
"My parents…" Gray barely spared his rescuers a glance. He scanned the ruins with dark, hopeless eyes.
Lyon darted an uncertain look at Ur. "Do you think maybe–?"
"No," Gray said, the word heavy with finality.
Rufus let the illusory figures fade and unhooked his claws from this particular memory. It was obvious that Gray's parents were dead, killed by the very beast whose echo ambled about the arena. He could be cruel, but he would draw the line at shoving the visual manifestation of Gray's dead parents in his face— he would not follow the thread he knew led back to Gray's recollection of the moments leading up to their deaths. He would not force Gray to watch a recording of their last moments.
But the threads branching off from this memory were thick and snarled and numerous, a veritable spider's web of possibility. Scores of related memories clamored for attention. This demon was linked to far more than the demise of Gray's parents—Gray must have met it again to have such a rich web of memories. Rufus would certainly take advantage of those incidents, even if he let this one pass.
Gray stared at the empty patch of dirt where his memory had played out, eyes round with shock and horror, but his gaze snapped back to the lumbering demon as it bellowed again. Spectators screeched—in encouragement or dismay or fear, Rufus didn't know—but he tuned them out.
Maybe it would be enough to leave things here and take advantage of Gray's paralysis to end the fight, but Rufus was still feeling spiteful about the cut oozing blood down his cheek and needed a grand spectacle to save face with his guild. And, frankly, his curiosity had been roused. Surfing memories was addictive, and it seemed like a perfect opportunity to collect information on Gray and Lyon that he might be able to use against his opponents.
"What have you done?" Gray demanded. He swept his hands out and sent ice lances arcing toward the beast. Of course, they passed right through the image and slammed into the wall behind it.
"Don't be silly," Rufus said. "It's only a memory. How do you propose to fight that?"
If Gray was thinking clearly, he might realize the obvious: the only way to defeat such an illusion was to defeat the person casting it. He would reach that conclusion soon enough, if he wasn't kept off balance. Not that he had any real chance of beating Rufus, and even less of one now than he'd had when their fight first started. All Rufus had to do was toy with him a bit and then finish him off, as long as he was careful to keep an eye on Gray's shifting intentions and not allow himself to get distracted.
He reached for another memory. Childhood seemed like a minefield, and too far removed to be of much use.
This time, the images of Gray and Lyon that materialized seemed much older than before. Much closer to their current selves.
"What are you doing, Lyon?" memory-Gray demanded. "Ur wouldn't–"
"Don't you dare speak her name," memory-Lyon snarled back. He flicked a hand dismissively, sending what appeared to be a flock of icy birds at Gray. His eyes burned fever-bright with hatred, and his face twisted in a disdainful grimace.
Memory-Gray dodged around most of the missiles, but one hit him in the side and he went down on one knee with a grunt. Lyon carelessly threw up a shield against Gray's hurried return volley.
Rufus watched their fight with interest. It seemed at odds with the previous memory, although he supposed there had been plenty enough time between for anything to happen. He hadn't sensed that sort of deep-seated hatred between the men during Hidden either, although he'd hardly paid attention to rooting out every simmering rivalry.
He started and dodged out of the way when Gray—the real one, not an echo of the past—came charging at him with a sword of ice.
"Get out of my head!" Gray snarled.
"Really, what did happen to turn the two of you against each other, I wonder?" Rufus mused.
"None of your business!"
Rufus clicked his tongue as Gray took another swing at him. Didn't the boy realize by now that his magic was useless? Rufus memorized each spell the moment it took shape and could effortlessly reproduce it or combine it with other magics he had encountered over the years. Beyond that, he had noted and memorized everything about Gray's temperament and fighting style—strengths, weaknesses, habits, and cues—and countered them. How could you fight someone who knew you better than you knew yourself? Oh, Gray was a worthy enough opponent, as far as that went, but hardly powerful or unpredictable enough to pose a serious threat.
Pivoting on his heel, Rufus summoned up a sword of his own and parried the attack, matching Gray's strokes easily since he had already seen and memorized his technique. He sent Gray back a step, on the defensive, and followed up with a concussive blast of ice and lightning that sent Gray flying into the nearby wall.
So, Gray was not quite overwhelmed enough to lose his senses and yield, but Rufus was sure he could manage if he dug a little deeper.
Rufus wanted to know what had transpired between Gray and Lyon, even if it meant retracing his steps back to their childhood. Something to do with the woman called Ur, perhaps, judging by memory-Lyon's reaction to her name. Rufus left the memory of their fight raging back and forth across the sand—maybe he would go back and follow that thread further to see the outcome later—and dipped back into the roiling whirlpool of charged memories swirling around Gray. If the boy couldn't recover himself soon, he was liable to drown in them…and Rufus could push his head beneath the waves if he picked the right one.
He reached for a memory that included all three players.
The sand covering the floor of the arena on their other side disappeared beneath banks of fresh snow. A small wooden cabin sat amid the drifts, the door flung open wide. Child Gray marched away through the snow, while Ur and Lyon hugged the doorframe and watched him go.
"Come back here right now!" Ur called after him. "This is foolishness."
"No." Anger suffused Gray's small features, and his eyes burned with…something. Something more feverish than determination and harder than anger. Obsession, maybe
"If you leave now, you'll be exiled from your training. I won't teach you anything more."
"I don't care!" Gray said. "I won't be back. You should have taught me more to start with."
Ur's hand tightened on the doorframe, and she pressed her lips together in a tight, bloodless line as Gray scowled and squared his shoulders and trudged off.
"We aren't really going to let him go off on his own, are we?" Lyon asked in a small voice, barely audible as if Gray had only caught the barest whisper of it on the wind as he walked away.
Gray didn't seem to have heard or remembered Ur's response. The memory deteriorated into a solitary trudge through the snow.
Rufus lost patience and skipped forward so fast that things became a blur before releasing the pressure to see if they had reached a more interesting part of the memory yet.
The snow was strewn with rubble again. Buildings listed or fell or stood crippled in crumbling ruins lining the walls of the arena. Again, the devastation was recent, dust and smoke clouding the air. Amid the rubble, fires blazed and ate away at wooden timbers.
The culprit was obvious. The memory-demon roaming the arena had abandoned its aimless posturing and slotted itself into this new memory, tracing the steps it had taken many years ago—or at least the steps Gray remembered it taking. Rufus didn't see the need to make more work for himself, nor did he need two hulking beasts wandering about. One would be more than enough.
Lyon lay sprawled unconscious against the crumbling wall of a destroyed building. Gray crouched by his side, one hand on his shoulder, but his eyes were fixed on Ur as she stood several yards in front of them and faced down the demon. The boys looked positively tiny in the wreckage of the broken city, and their master didn't appear much bigger with the monstrous demon looming overhead.
Rufus wasn't sure when Lyon and Ur had caught up to Gray—or, in fact, why it seemed Gray had gone chasing after a demon on his own in the first place—but it didn't seem worth the hassle of retracing his steps.
"But what could you do?" Gray asked. His nose and cheeks looked raw and red, his lips trembled, and tears smeared his face. Gone was the anger and hauteur and stubborn determination. Now he was just a small, scared, trembling boy.
"Iced shell, I suppose," Ur said. Her eyes never left the demon as it slammed its fist into a building and dug out a chunk with its claws. "It might be the only thing I can do to stop it now."
"But Lyon–"
"Had the right idea, but it's too dangerous a spell for him to try. If he'd bothered reading the spell all the way through, he'd know that it turns the caster's own body into the unmeltable ice to seal the target."
Gray started, his eyes going wide and round. "You would die?"
"Well," she said, "I would become the ice."
"You can't!"
Rufus caught a flash of movement out of the corner of his eye.
Gray strode toward the hulking demon, grim-faced, and Rufus put himself back on guard just in case. But no, not the real one, after all. The real Gray still sat slumped against the wall where Rufus had thrown him, looking as if he might be sick as he watched the scene unfold.
This must be from the memory Rufus had left alone to play out while he kept digging. Curiously, this Gray was looking right at the demon too, as if it had bridged the gap between the two memories, a common element in both stories.
This memory's Lyon lay sprawled on the ground too, although he was conscious. His fists clawed at the rocky ground as he struggled unsuccessfully to push himself upright.
"Don't you dare!" he fumed. "You already killed Ur—do you really think killing yourself will make it better? You would steal my triumph too?"
"You can't even stand," Gray said flatly without looking back. Phantom water pooled around his boots, and he stared up at the demon unblinkingly. "You couldn't possibly defeat it."
"I can! Do you know how long it took me to melt that ice? I'll do it again, you know. If you seal it, I'll just melt it again."
Gray seemed unfazed. "Stay down. I'll clean up your mess."
Rufus's gaze darted between the two scenes playing out opposite each other. Ur in one memory and Gray in the other slid into identical poses. He couldn't feel the sudden surge of magic building in the air that he suspected was there—his memory recreations were visual and auditory only, without the supplement of the tactile senses—but an icy whirlwind suffused with light rose around each of them in a wild vortex.
"Make it stop."
Rufus looked back over his shoulder. The real Gray dug his fists into the dirt. They trembled. His eyes shone dark and raw and broken, but he didn't look away from the demon. No…from Ur.
A split second of indecision shuddered through Rufus as he wondered if he had perhaps pushed too far, but it was too late to turn back now.
"Don't!" child-Gray babbled through his tears. "I'll be good. I'll do whatever you say. Please stop. You can't–"
But Ur could. "I will seal your darkness," she murmured.
The second whirlwind faltered as the pink-haired dragon slayer Sting and Rogue found so interesting—Natsu Dragneel, Fairy Tail's infamous Salamander—stepped between memory-Gray and the demon.
"I'll fight it," he said.
"Move!" Gray said. "It's too powerful. You can't–"
Natsu's voice was dangerously quiet as he said, "I stopped you earlier because I didn't want you to die. Didn't my voice reach you?"
Gray hesitated, the spell on the tip of his tongue but unspoken.
The demon looked down at them and raised a fist. Gray's eyes went wide with horror as it plummeted towards Natsu's head.
"Natsu!"
"Iced shell!" Ur shouted, and the power swirling around her exploded in all directions.
The demon froze in place, its fist shuddering to a stop, and the figures of Natsu and Gray and Lyon huddled in a water-logged cavern seemed to flicker before winking out of existence. Sheets of ice encased the demon's limbs and torso in huge blocks. It let out one last blood-curdling roar.
Ur turned back to her pupils and smiled. One eye had gone an icy blue, and her skin was turning translucent where a crack spiderwebbed across her cheek.
"Ur!" child-Gray wailed.
And then Ur exploded into a thousand icy shards and was gone.
Ice raced across the floor of the arena, a thick sheet etched with frosted patterns. It climbed the walls and turned the air chill. Rufus didn't catch on immediately, although he had the niggling feeling in the back of his mind that something about the ice was a little off.
The ice encased the demon and encrusted seemingly every surface, and child-Gray's screams rang off it with a hollowed echo.
"Come back! Ur!"
And then memory-Gray and memory-Lyon and the ruins of the memory-city and the memory-demon trapped in ice like an insect in amber seemed to freeze and go crystalline for just a moment before shattering into icy dust like memory-Ur.
Rufus stumbled back half a step as the images vanished—he had not dismissed the memory—and went tumbling to the ground when his boot slid over a slick patch and shot out from under him. His elbow slammed into the ground, shooting jarring pains up his arm, and cold seeped through his pants. His palm pressed against the ice coating the ground.
That was what had been wrong with the ice: it was real, not something out of memory.
He shook his head, child-Gray's wails still ringing in his ears and bouncing around his skull as if they still ricocheted off the ice, and looked up. The real Gray was on his feet again, approaching at an unhurried pace. His expression was shuttered and unreadable now, and ice bloomed everywhere his boots touched the ground. The temperature plummeted toward frigid, until Rufus could swear his breaths fogged the air.
It was impossible. No one but Rufus should be able to warp or control the memories once he sank his teeth into them and drew them out. Especially not with how rattled Gray had been. He shouldn't be able to cut it short or freeze it solid and shatter it.
"Did you find what you were looking for?" Gray asked tonelessly.
"H-how did you–?"
"I thought I told you to get out of my head. Didn't anyone ever teach you that it's rude to go digging through someone's memories without permission?"
Rufus reached for Gray's mind almost automatically, but it was perfectly blank. Like scrabbling uselessly at a slick glass wall.
Gray tossed ice lances at him carelessly. Rufus blocked them with a shield and scrambled to his feet just as Gray darted across the intervening space and brought a sword of ice down over his head.
Rufus didn't have time to craft a unique and elegant spell to counter. He simply mimicked Gray's spell and parried the blow with an icy sword of his own. Gray's eyes stayed black and lifeless as he delivered a series of swift, punishing blows that sent Rufus back.
Rufus responded clumsily at first, like he'd suddenly found himself in the middle of a dance where he was half a step behind the tempo and stumbling over his feet as he tried to catch up. He was still rattled from the screams lingering in his ears, in disbelief that his magic had been thwarted, and off balance at the sudden changing of the tide. The ice wasn't helping—Gray was sure-footed as a mountain goat as he danced across it, but Rufus slipped on it more than once.
But as the shock wore off, Rufus found his feet again and caught up with Gray's predictable pattern of attack and defense.
"I don't know how you did that, but you're still not a match for me," he said.
"Then why bother digging through my head?"
Gray grunted as Rufus slammed the sword out of his hand and sent him stumbling backwards.
"It doesn't matter, does it?" Rufus couldn't afford to hesitate now, not when Gray had proven himself more resourceful than expected and things had gotten out of hand. The whole incident left a bitter taste in his mouth, like he had gone wrong somewhere along the way. "I memorize every spell you cast and every move you make and use them against you. How do you propose to defeat someone who knows your every move?"
Gray's eyes glittered coldly. He didn't glance at the sword in Rufus's hand, just met his gaze steadily.
"I suppose I'll have to make something you can't memorize, won't I?"
"You can't–"
Gray's eyes narrowed abruptly, and he slammed his hands together. "Ice-make: unlimited!"
Ice exploded in a jumbled mass of sharp edges and gleaming points, a spiral of swords and razor-blade weapons that moved too fast for the eye to track. It kept coming, more and more, and Rufus could find no beginning or end to latch on to or mimic.
He raised his own sword helplessly before the onslaught, but the chaotic whirlwind of dancing blades slammed into his chest and curled around him like a bear trap before he had the chance to summon any spell at all.
He must have blacked out for a moment. The next thing he knew, he was flat on his back and Gray crouched over him, one boot resting lightly against his neck in warning. Rufus blinked rapidly to chase away the spots clouding his vision, and Gray watched with eyes as cold and hard and glassy as obsidian. Rufus didn't bother searching his mind for advantage. It was surely still walled off, and he still heard a faint, ringing echo of a child's wails in his ears like a reminder that he had gone too far.
"Did you really think you could bring me to my knees by showing me the past?" Gray asked coolly.
Rufus found it difficult to draw in a full breath with a boot to his throat. "Well, it usually works," he rasped. "And you did seem pretty shaken."
A humorless half-smile curled Gray's lips. "I already faced those demons and buried them. Why wouldn't I survive them again? I told you: I never lose to the same opponent twice."
The boot disappeared and Gray stood. Rufus struggled to his knees. The arena was a riot of cheering and screaming, a wordless roar.
Gray walked away without a backwards glance, towards the exit. Sometime in the gap marring Rufus's memory, Gray had won the match.
Rufus darted a look toward Sabertooth's section of the stands. Master Jiemma's face was thunderous, Minerva wore a smug little smirk, and the other guild members showed varying degrees of anger, disbelief, and disappointment as they discussed the unexpected loss. He would certainly face the guild's wrath the second he joined them. He had failed in what should have been an easy win. What would have been an easy win if he hadn't decided to show off. Ironically, he had let his pride make him sloppy just after assuming Gray's anger would do the same to him. Stupid.
He had brought it on himself, really. Even aside from deciding to make a grand spectacle of things and letting his pride run away with him. Digging out personal memories during battle was something normally reserved for proper enemies: dark mages and cutthroats and murderous criminals where fights were life or death. It was a technique he normally only used against the most serious of foes. If he ever tried it against a less serious opponent, it was only to draw out a small fear to distract them, not to unearth childhood traumas.
As much as his guild hated Fairy Tail and wanted to win the Games, as far as they would go to win and as cruel as they might be getting there, Rufus felt a sudden stab of shame. He had gone too far. His magic was not meant to be used like that. It wasn't meant to humiliate and traumatize a worthy opponent. And even with fighting dirty, somehow Gray had won out in the end and found creative ways around Rufus's abilities. Rufus hated to lose, but he supposed that just this once, fair was fair.
He tore his gaze away from his guild—a problem for later—and watched Gray cross the arena. The air was still chilly and a thin layer of ice still coated the ground, and to Rufus the cold felt a lot like fury. Or some kind of unpleasant emotion, at least, even if none of it had shown on Gray's face and he'd kept it well out of mind, beyond where Rufus could touch it.
Rufus staggered to his feet and hurried after Gray, who had drawn to a stop just inside the arch of the arena entrance when his guild mobbed him. Lyon pushed his way through roughly and wrapped his arms around Gray.
"I'm fine," Gray grumbled.
Rufus found the exchange interesting since Gray and Lyon were currently opponents vying for the championship and clearly had a past, but he reined in his curiosity by reminding himself that it was none of his business.
Lyon and Fairy Tail fussed over Gray while he insisted he was fine, and Rufus felt a pang of nostalgia for a time when his own guild had been that protective of each other.
"What do you want?" Natsu growled as he noticed Rufus approaching.
He and Erza stepped in front of Gray and glowered. Rufus didn't see Lucy among the gaggle of Fairy Tail mages. He supposed she must still be recovering from Minerva's tender attentions.
Lyon's worried expression turned downright murderous. "Why, you little–"
"It's fine." Gray rested a restraining hand on his arm as he turned and met Rufus's gaze. His expression was still utterly blank, entirely at odds with how expressive and emotional he had seemed earlier. "What is it?"
Rufus drew to a stop, eyeing Natsu and Erza warily—they had been furious enough after Minerva's treatment of their friend, and he imagined they were even closer to a boiling point after his display—and then Lyon more curiously.
"You don't know everything, no matter how much you like to think you do," Gray said, as if reading the question in his eyes.
"I guess not," Rufus said, suitably chastened. "For what it's worth, I apologize. I didn't intend to push so far."
Gray didn't seem impressed. "You shouldn't have done it at all. It was supposed to be a fight, not an investigation into my past."
Rufus winced. "I got carried away. It's not something I'd normally do during a friendly fight."
"Ha," Natsu scoffed. "As if Sabertooth has been friendly."
Gray snorted. "You wanted to show off. You wanted to prove how superior your magic was in front of everyone. If I didn't know any better, I'd say you were put out that I landed a hit on you and didn't go down as easily as you expected, so you wanted to humiliate me and put me in my place rather than going for a clean win."
"…Perhaps."
"Don't look so surprised. You don't have to poke around in someone's mind to read their intentions."
"I suppose not. Listen, I don't want anything from you. I just wanted to say sorry that things got out of hand. And it was an impressive win. I underestimated you."
Lyon seemed to puff up to twice his normal height, eyes flashing. "You think that sorry means anything after that?"
"Don't do that to anyone else," Gray said. "It's not right."
"I won't," Rufus agreed. "At least not when it isn't warranted. It comes in handy against enemies sometimes, when all else fails."
Gray stepped forward, squeezing between Natsu and Erza, and crossed the intervening space. He leaned in close.
"If you ever put your sticky fingers in my head again or touch my friends' minds, I will beat you to a bloody pulp," he breathed into Rufus's ear.
Rufus bristled at the threat, but then nodded. He supposed it was justified in this case, and he did not intend to test Gray's resolve.
"Understood," he said. "And I won't."
"Good." Gray turned and walked away without another look. "Apology accepted, then."
"Sabertooth will still win the Games, of course."
"I expect you'll try."
Lyon hurried after Gray as he walked away. Natsu and Erza closed ranks again behind them.
"I'm on my last nerve with your guild," Erza said coldly. "It seems too keen on torturing mine."
"I didn't mean–" Rufus blew out a breath. "I don't control Minerva. But I don't intend to torture anyone else."
"Good. Play fair. I'll be watching you."
"And don't go near him again, or I'll torch you myself," Natsu snapped. "He's been through enough. Only a heartless asshole would rub his face in it."
Rufus held his hands up in a non-threatening gesture. "I'm planning to stay away. I'm not looking to be friends."
"Good. Watch yourself. You and that other bitch are playing a dangerous game."
"Don't hurt any more of our guildmates," Erza added. "I guarantee we can hurt you more. Come, Natsu."
They headed off with one last glare, and Rufus let out a breath. His guild was making no friends here. He waited a few moments to give them space and then slipped through the gate himself and headed for the stands, squaring his shoulders.
Time to face the music. Master Jiemma and the guild would be most displeased, and this would be an unpleasant homecoming.
Silver stared at the screen broadcasting the live feed from the arena long after Gray and his opponent wrapped up their fight and departed. He hadn't had more than a passing interest in the Games as he went about his business, but seeing Gray up there…
He'd thought he was mistaken at first, even when his son's name was announced. It just wasn't possible. His son was dead, or so he'd thought.
But Gray was alive. After all these years, all this grief, Gray was, somehow, alive. If only Silver had known… But he hadn't. And there wasn't much he could have done anyway, dead and bound to Keyes as he was. The hatred that had sustained him for so long might have been replaced with something softer. His grief might not have been quite so sharp. He might have escaped in the night and gone chasing after his son like any good father would. Or maybe not. Maybe he'd never know for sure.
He didn't even know what he would do now, but something had changed. Things were shifting inside him, making way for a new purpose.
His boy had become a man. A strong, clever man to have beaten the wily memory mage, and Silver couldn't help but be proud of his win.
It was bittersweet, though. However fine a man Gray had become, the difficult path he'd traveled to get there was not one Silver would have chosen for him.
The Sabertooth mage's tricks had been cruel and reprehensible, but they were something of a double-edged gift for Silver, who had missed his son's life since Deliora had ripped them apart. Silver's glimpse at Gray's life did not make him feel better about anything—worse, in fact—but at least he knew something about his son's past. Seeing Gray cry and rage and scream tied Silver's heart into knots. Gray had been so small. No child should be faced with so much heartbreak.
Still, Silver had glimpsed his guildmates running to him after. At least he had friends to look out for him. It wasn't as if Silver could.
But if there was anything, anything at all, he could do to help his son or ease old heartbreaks, he would do it. He would look for a way. Silver was not much of a father now, if he ever had been, and he was not free to do as he wished, but he would find a way to help Gray if it was the very last thing he did.
"Crazy world, Mika," he murmured as he finally turned away and blinked the mist from his eyes. "Don't you worry, I'll look after our son. At least for a moment."