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Quench
1. to put out or extinguish (fire, flames, etc.)
2. to cool (something, such as heated metal) suddenly by immersion (as in oil or water)
3. to terminate by or as if by destroying
4. to slake, satisfy, or allay (thirst, desires, passion, etc.)
They meet on the battlefield, tooth and nail rather than side by side. Enemies rather than allies, demon and devil slayer rather than best friends. This is different. This is war. And no one will be the winner here.
They meet on the battlefield, tooth and nail rather than side by side. Enemies rather than allies, demon and devil slayer rather than best friends. They meet in a maelstrom of ice and fire, fury and betrayal and grief and the hopeless feeling that there's no way to win and nothing will ever be the same. They shake the earth with their storming.
They have always thrown their frustration at each other, bounced anger off each other like ideas, poured grief into fists and fear into magic. They have always absorbed it, reflected it, shared the burden through the touch of knuckles on skin and spoken volumes in their silence. But this is different. This is war.
Some rifts are too wide to cross and too deep to mend. Maybe this one would have been fixable, even if it left scars. Or maybe not. A secret demon and the slayer sworn to kill it make for strange bedfellows. Strange friends. But maybe if they hadn't met in the midst of fear and grief and rage, they could have pulled together instead of falling apart.
They clash, attack, repeat. Gray earns a swathe of blistered skin across his chest; Natsu earns frostbitten fingertips and bloody gashes. They freeze and burn and bleed. Neither cares.
What does anything matter when you've lost it all? Your humanity, your friends, your future. Juvia has sacrificed herself, and although Gray doesn't love her, he can't bear the thought that anyone else has died for him. He has just found out that his best friend is the demon his father asked him to kill, the one he has been hunting for ever since. Natsu has just been told he is a demon by the most powerful dark mage in existence, and that his life will end when Zeref's does. That he is the demon his best friend has been hoping to kill all along.
If they have always helped each other through crises by throwing and taking punches, then maybe it's inevitable that this will be the greatest, most catastrophic battle of all when the stakes are so high. And maybe, for one brief and blinding moment, it seems worth it.
They have already flayed open each other's flesh and descended beyond reason when Juvia and Lucy and then Erza appear and call for them to stop.
Gray falters at the sight of Juvia, just enough to wonder what in the world he's doing. This is still Natsu, even if his flames burn hotter than they should have and his savagery is startling.
"Flame brain?" he ventures, hesitating.
Natsu shows no such wavering, and Gray has to scramble aside. The rhythm has been lost, and he is hardly holding his own anymore now that his blind drive to destroy has been sated. He goes colder than his ice, as if a bucket of freezing water has been dumped over his head and quenched his ridiculous tantrum.
Natsu only lunges again, sending Gray reeling. His eyes show no recognition or mercy, and his dragon flames have been replaced by hellfire. With his face all twisted up and his eyes soulless and empty like polished river rocks, Gray hardly recognizes his friend at all. Natsu is blurring and twisting at the edges, becoming something a little less than human. He's losing control, and Gray can hardly blame him when he did so first. Except that Natsu isn't snapping out of it.
"Can't you hear my voice?" Gray asks, dancing away from the flames and crying out when the heat singes his side.
Natsu growls, a low rumble in the back of his throat that makes Gray's hair stand on end.
Maybe Natsu is gone for good, or maybe he could still snap out of it. Maybe it's the stress or the betrayal of his friend turning on him or the bleakness of their broken future stretching ahead of them. Maybe Zeref has done something to make him lose control and fully become E.N.D. Maybe it's Gray's fault, for losing control along with him until Natsu couldn't claw his way back.
They've both made mistakes, both fallen far, but Gray can't help but think it's his fault. If he had just kept his wits about him, told Natsu things would be okay, been a friend instead of an enemy. If, if, if.
But Natsu is gone now, and Gray doesn't know if he's coming back.
Lucy and Juvia and Happy are yelling. Erza is stepping forward as if she can crack the boys' heads together and force them to make nice, as if this is just some normal brawl and they aren't on the brink of killing each other.
Natsu turns on them, the humanity melting from his face like hot wax. Erza summons a shield just in time, but the hellfire melts it nearly in half and she cries out as the flames lick at her skin. The expression on her face is stunned. This isn't their Natsu, the one she could always defeat in battle and put in his place. This is the full might of a demon.
And as E.N.D. spits fire at them all, Gray realizes that Natsu isn't coming back even if he could. They don't have the time. Lucy is on her knees, clutching at her blistered skin. Happy's wing is twisted at a crooked angle, Juvia is scrambling to hide behind the rubble of what was once their home, Erza is barely hanging on.
Gray staggers forward, battered and bloodied. Maybe he could have held his own against a demon if he was still wielding his devil slayer magic without holding back. If he hadn't come back to his senses. If that demon wasn't his friend.
"Come back, Natsu," he says.
But Natsu doesn't come back. Gray's voice doesn't reach.
E.N.D. sucks in a huge lungful of air and stretches out his arms. The air shimmers with heat as the flames build.
'I'm sorry' are the words seared into Gray's mind, but 'iced shell' are the ones that leave his lips.
Magic explodes, fire and ice clashing in one last, blinding tempest. Someone screams.
And then there's only a statue frozen in ice, the suggestion of flames warping the crystal. Frozen in time, Natsu looks almost human again.
The fire is quenched, the threat contained. You could say that in the end, the ice beat out the fire. But no one would say that Gray has won.
No one is the winner here.