A/N: I've wanted to write something like this ever since reading the Erza vs Irene battle, but it has taken me all these years to work out how to frame it. It ended up being a lot more about Jellal than I was expecting, but then again, you can't have Irene's ultimate attack be the exact same as Jellal's and then do literally nothing with the comparison... ~CS
Apophis
By CrimsonStarbird
X792 / Present
It is the most difficult battle Erza has ever fought.
Maybe Irene isn't as terrifying as Acnologia, or as mindlessly cruel as Kyôka, but she possesses a sheer mastery that none of Erza's previous opponents can match. At her command, the sky moves aside and the ground changes its nature, fire protects her with the solidity of steel, the weapons of her enemies crumble beneath their fingers. Space distorts for her; landscapes carved by millennia of divine processes yield to her every whim. Inanimate objects come alive at her touch, and the living who cross her will not stay that way for long.
Irene is a peerless mage at the very top of her game.
And Erza…
Erza has nothing left but the sword in her hand.
She doesn't let it show. Won't grant the enemy her fear; won't let her resolve break in front of Wendy, who fights alongside her.
She knows why Irene has sought her out, and she doesn't let that show either. Those eyes, that voice, the colour of her hair. It doesn't matter. If Erza cared, she'd have asked those questions long ago. The only thing she does care about is winning this fight and, with it, halting the Alvarez army's advance.
And she will win.
Even though her fastest armour and Wendy's strongest support spell barely managed to earn a look of surprise from Irene, let alone an actual wound.
Even though the High Enchantress turns aside her blades like they are flower petals.
Even though Irene has yet to unleash any of the truly cataclysmic magic at her command, still undecided as to which apocalypse would be most fitting to wield against Fairy Tail's last stand.
Erza vows to destroy this overwhelming threat and save everyone, no matter what.
X776 / Tower of Heaven
The darker the world is, the more stars are visible, so it is of little surprise that from the top of the Tower of Heaven, the midnight sky is silver with them.
Rivers of light, swirls of creation, treasures left over from the dawn of time. All that brightness, too far away to be of any practical use for the children trapped here. Erza has never seen much point in stargazing, but someone seems to think otherwise, given that this is the third time just this week that she's tracked him out here.
Everything is grey in the starlight. The shadows are distorted, the falls deceptively close. She picks her way across what is currently the top floor of the Tower of Heaven. Come the morning, she'll be back here with beams and cement and the slavers' shrieks in her ears, and then this won't be the top floor any more, just another indistinct foothold on the cult's skyward climb.
For now, though, it is open to the stars: the closest to heaven that they will ever get.
And there Jellal is, lying on his back upon the rough floor, staring up at the universe which sprawls lazily overhead.
Isn't he scared of being caught? Sure, the overseers don't usually bother coming up here once the day's shifts are over, but it would only take one regulation-abiding patrol to find him, and then he'll be dragged off to that room and he'll come back different, if he comes back at all…
Perhaps she is more worried about losing him than he is of being lost.
She hears a voice that isn't his, and her heart lurches with the fear of discovery. But it's old and wise and calm, and it crackles like no human voice does, and she realizes it's only the lacrima speaking.
The lacrima is something that he stole or found or borrowed from one of the overseers' stations – how he describes it depends on whether reckless Wally or innocent Millianna or noble Grandpa Rob is listening. He calls it a radio, and although Erza lost interest in it when she discovered there was no way of using it to communicate with the mainland, he remains fascinated with the broadcasts it picks up, especially this live stargazing show.
She doesn't like it. It encourages him to risk punishment each night just to see stars that aren't going anywhere.
Before she can ask him to come back inside, he spots her and waves her over. Her reprimand dies on her lips, swallowed by the smile on his. He belongs out here, beneath the endless sky.
He is of the stars, she thinks.
Against her better judgement, she lies down beside him. The unfinished ground is hard, the construction dust settles at the back of her throat, but when she glances at him out of the corner of her eye, it's easy to forget all that.
The crackling voice is talking about the Big Bang and the start of the universe, but he reaches over and switches the lacrima off. His hand falls between them. Would it be wrong of her to reach out and take it in her own? She'd been so worried when she'd woken to find him missing from their cell. It's not the first time, recently, that she's found him far away, his thoughts or his body or both growing more and more distant.
She'd like to hold him and never let go.
She doesn't dare, though. It would be… improper.
The stars are so very far away, but his hand is further still.
"It's a beautiful night, isn't it?" he says, watching the stars while she watches him. "Clear. As though we can see right back to the beginning of time."
She's not so sure about this. Compared to the Tower that is their past, present and future, the gilded skies are deep and nebulously dark.
"Doesn't it make you feel small?" she whispers uncertainly.
"I am small, Erza. The stars remind me that so is everything else." His eyes do not blink as they drink in the starlight. "It doesn't matter how high they build their stupid towers. In the end, we're all equally insignificant."
She doesn't notice, then, what Ultear will notice in three days' time: the darkness and the cynicism and the sheer adult bitterness that will lead her to change her plan on a whim, and choose this slave boy to play host to her dark magic rather than the leader of the cult that abused him.
Or maybe Erza does notice. Maybe that's why some small part of her finds the courage to cross the gap and wrap his hand in her own.
It won't be enough to save him in three days' time.
It might be enough in eight years, though, when she takes a broken man's hand atop Nirvana and leads him into the future.
But right now, the future is an uncertain thing for her, too, and it's all she can do to hold his hand tightly as they struggle through the present.
"Say," she speaks up, suddenly, because it's him she likes, not the silent constellations. "Do you know any of their names? The stars, I mean."
"Most of the ones they talk about on my show can only be seen through a telescope," he deflects, more downcast than she'd hoped. "And it's hard to find them just based on spoken descriptions, when you don't have any precise way of telling where north is… o-oh, but I do know some of them, though!" he adds fiercely, flustered. "There, close to the horizon, can you see that bright reddish star? That's Antares. That's part of Scorpius, and if you look to the right, you can see its head and claws. And the Summer Triangle, that should be visible somewhere…"
She's still trying gamely to work out how he was getting a scorpion's claws out of that jumble of lights crawling along the horizon when he says, "And then there's my favourite one. Apophis."
There's something about the way he says the name that gives her pause. A tremor, a reverence, hesitantly breathing out a word he's never spoken aloud before, and isn't yet sure if it's allowed. It's the same reverence with which he'll say Zeref's name three days from now, but there and then it sounds wonderful to her, so she asks, "Where?"
"Can you see that square of stars right above us?" When she can't, he raises their joined hands skyward, gesturing to a patch of sky. It looks the same as all the others, though she's not really considering it with much care. She's distracted by the easy way he holds her hand when she can barely dare to brush his. All the stars can see them now.
"…There," he's saying. "Just below the top right corner of the square, there's a little speck. It's too dim to see with the naked eye, but it's there. The presenters on my show talk about it all the time."
Their hands fall back to the ground and she sneaks a glance at him, but he's still gazing up at the non-existent light.
"What's so special about that star?" she asks, too quickly, wondering why she feels jealous of a celestial object.
"It's not a star. It's an asteroid. A big rock that orbits the sun. There are loads of them out there, but they're far away and they don't emit light, so we can't see them. Most of them don't even have names."
"But Apophis does?"
"Apophis does," he confirms softly. "It's named after an ancient god of chaos." Then, in that same soft tone: "It's coming straight towards us. In three days, there's a high chance it will hit the Earth."
"What?" Erza squeaks. "But- why don't people know about this?"
Jellal shrugs. "People do know. Astronomers. Scientists."
"Then why aren't they doing anything about it?" she demands.
"What can they do? An enormous asteroid slamming into our planet at deadly speed – that's a mass extinction event, Erza. Although," he adds, almost thoughtful, "it's not confirmed yet. There's something up in the sky called a gravitational keyhole, and it's too small, and our measurements too imprecise, to say for sure whether Apophis will pass through. If it does, it'll hit the Earth and civilization will be wiped out. If it doesn't pass through the keyhole, it'll miss the planet, and we'll be safe until it comes round for another go in seven to eight years' time."
"That's horrible," she shudders.
All this time, she and her friends have been struggling to survive, scavenging food, trying to meet the quotas and avoid the attention of the overseers and excavating a little more of the secret tunnel that she hopes will be their salvation – after everything they've done to stay together through this hell, the thought that it could all just end in three days, that she'd lose her friends before they'd even made it to the outside world, shakes her to the core.
"I think it's wonderful," Jellal breathes, his eyes still alight with the glow of the stars. A thousand pinpricks of hope, and one set to kill. "They think they're so powerful, looking down at us from the top of the tower they're building out of our corpses, but they can't stop a meteor impact any more than we can. Slave or master, rich or poor, friend or foe – none of it matters. If Apophis hits, we all die. All of us."
Erza sits up suddenly, fiercely, her heart pounding so loud that it's a wonder it doesn't shake the Tower of Heaven to its foundations. "I won't let that happen! I will protect us from the meteor!"
"Oh? How are you going to do that?"
"I'll…" She clenches her free fist. "I'll steal a sword from one of the guards. Then, when Apophis gets close…" She mimes swinging a club at an invisible target. "I'll smash it into a million pieces! So, you don't need to worry!" she adds, rounding on him. "I'll protect you. I'll protect everyone, I promise."
After a long, long moment, he rolls over to face her, their hands still joined, his eyes still shining, even though there are no constellations here to reflect. That's the smile she loves, back on Earth again, back with her.
"Okay," he promises softly. "You can destroy Apophis for us, Erza. I know you'll keep us all safe."
She beams at him.
For tonight, he is still hers.
Three days later, the uprising in the Tower takes place beneath that same ominous sky.
Apophis hasn't even entered the atmosphere yet and her world is falling apart. So much for her promise to protect everyone; it's Grandpa Rob who dies protecting her. She can't save anyone.
She'd have faced down a meteor for Jellal, but when he himself is her opponent, the stolen sword falls from her trembling fingers. To her, for whom innocents are there to be protected and natural disasters must be averted at all cost, he is a sharp distortion between the rigid lines of good and evil, throwing her head and heart into disarray. Even had she suspected possession magic could exist, she, who would never in her life succumb to it from her world of black and white, has no comprehension of the greyness that had spoken of a world-ending meteor as he now speaks of Zeref.
She flees from the Tower alone, and the guilt of leaving her friends to a terrible fate will ensure that hers is even worse.
It's another three days before she glances up at the night sky from the abandoned beach where she has washed ashore and realizes, suddenly, sharply, that Apophis must have missed.
It's another three years before she stops wishing it hadn't.
X784 / Tower of Heaven
There's no such thing as freedom, Jellal had crowed as he'd flung her from the Tower, and she gets it, now.
She's no longer a slave, but she's still a prisoner. Her arm is branded with Fairy Tail's mark but her heart belongs to the Tower. All the light and laughter and booze-filled parties in the world cannot banish the shadow that looms over her.
She's free in the same way that the Earth is free, whirling through the vastness of space on the end of gravity's chain. All of eternity is open before it, the universe so bright and large, but for all that potential, it will one day find itself dragged back into Apophis's path.
Eight years later, the Tower comes for her again.
And as she stares up at the completed Tower of Heaven, her nightmares finally taken form in reality, she understands why she has survived all this time. Why the terrible monsters she hurled herself at on quests that shouldn't have been undertaken alone never managed to defeat her. Why she was able to take a Jupiter Cannon blast head-on and live to tell the tale. Why Master Makarov had arrived at just the right moment against Jose to stop her own sword from driving through her heart.
It wouldn't be right to die anywhere other than here.
The focus of her orbit, the holder of her gravitational chains.
Awakening as a prisoner of her former friends, she starts to walk, slow, numb, apathetic, down the path that Newton's Laws have laid out for her. Even discovering that her teammates have pursued her here doesn't change what she must do. Changes her, perhaps. But not her path.
She tells Gray and Lucy and Juvia the story she has never told anyone, so that they will understand, and then she goes to face her death.
She's damn well going to take Jellal with her, though.
She runs willingly, now, down the path between the planets. She owes that much to those who stepped into the dark void of space with her. For Gray, who was there the very first time she cried but still kept coming back. For Lucy and Juvia, who barely know her and yet are risking everything to reach her. For Simon, who never stopped believing in her, even as he gave his life for hers. For Natsu, who stepped in for her against Jellal when she could no longer fight.
It's for them that she hurls herself towards catastrophe.
And that's the difference between her and Jellal, as they face each other at the end of the world.
Thanks to Natsu, the Tower of Heaven is broken beyond repair, and the trapped light of Etherion is screaming for release. Jellal's dark ambitions are crumbling around him. The roof has been ripped away; the top of the Tower is open to the heavens once again, but it is no closer to them as a completed R-System than it was when they'd crept up the scaffolding to watch the stars together.
Jellal does not look at the stars any more. He stands among them, his back to the endless potential of space, blazing bright and terrible with the light of Abyss Break in his hands – the light that will destroy the Tower and everything in it, for if he can't have this world, then neither can anyone else.
Eight years on, and Erza has come face to face with her Apophis again.
There they stand: a boy who had welcomed the meteor strike that would wipe out the slavers and enslaved equally, and a girl who had promised to stand up to the disaster, protecting friend and foe alike.
And he falls. By Natsu's persistence and the crucial wound Erza had dealt him, Jellal falls. By the hand reaching out to her in the lacrima, and the prayers of those waiting back home, those she has saved, Erza rises.
Somewhere far above, Apophis misses the gravitational keyhole again on its second attempt, and sails harmlessly by the Earth. She, too, is past the Tower of Heaven, with all the universe once more open before her.
X792 / Present
Irene is telling her the story of how she was born, and to her surprise, Erza finds that she just doesn't care.
Erza as she is today was born on the day she gave her hiding place to Kagura, letting the slavers take her instead. She was christened inside the Tower of Heaven, the colour of her hair, the colour of defiance, life forged in the crucible of pain and fear. In Fairy Tail, they named her the Fairy Queen Titania; she's never cared much for the title, but it is satisfying to be recognized for her achievements as an S-Class Mage.
Those are the moments that define her.
She has travelled so far across the universe that where she started from simply doesn't matter.
It's almost embarrassing to see how much it matters to Irene.
Oh, she claims she doesn't care, but of all the Fairy Tail mages advancing on their captured guildhall, she's chosen to engage Erza, even though she and Wendy are too exhausted to be much of a threat. Erza didn't ask for the story of her birth, didn't show any interest in it, but Irene tells it anyway, not seeming to notice how it's giving her and Wendy a chance to get their breaths back.
Erza's refusal to engage doesn't dissuade Irene in the slightest. Even as the clash begins again, Erza hurling her steel into a battle between two High Enchantresses, the Scarlet Scourge continues to reference their blood relationship in her challenges and her taunts, never passing up a chance to point out just how much it doesn't matter to her.
Irene cares so much that Erza's starting to feel guilty that she doesn't.
She tells the story of her past with the enthusiasm of one who has never had the chance to tell it before. Erza can't recall seeing her with any of the Spriggan Twelve; not a moment of encouragement or banter in between the orders. The only two people she seems close to are two swords enchanted to have human-like personalities. If that is the best Irene can do for friends, no wonder she fixates on their shared blood to give this battle some meaning.
By her side, Wendy is mastering new magic on the fly to give Erza the best chance of victory, and she wonders why Irene can't understand that this is what makes a family; why the last thirty seconds of Wendy's ardent determination matter more than Irene's four hundred wandering years.
Erza wonders why Irene is even fighting this war. If her story is true, she lived in peaceful seclusion for centuries as a dragon, so remote that no one ever realized such a creature still lived.
It can't be for Alvarez. It's not her home by birth or, so the absence of bonds would indicate, by choice.
Nor does she seem to care much for Zeref. His cause isn't hers. His 'gift' of a human body was nothing more than the trigger of her own downward spiral; she owes him nothing.
Maybe she thinks she does. Maybe this is what the dreaded Black Mage does: finds their weaknesses, tempts them, twists them, condemns them, and then instils a sense of indebtedness for pulling them back from the edge to which he pushed them in the first place…
But Erza doesn't think that's right. Irene is smarter than that; older, wiser.
When her last hope came to nothing, and baby Erza lay abandoned on the doorstep of some forgotten orphanage, Irene left that peaceful life of her own free will.
Some people, Erza thinks, just want to watch the apocalypse strike.
X784 / Nirvana
Jellal is alive.
Jellal is alive, and Erza doesn't know how to feel about it.
It's too soon. They're supposed to be on an eight-year cycle, her planet and its promised catastrophe, but it has only been a few months since the Tower fell; Apophis is out there amongst the stars, too far now to be detected from the Earth. Maybe that's why the Jellal that stands before her as Nirvana looms behind doesn't seem all there either.
It's just not the missing memories. It's how much of the boy she knew vanished with them.
His first thought is to end his own life and retreat back into nothingness: quietly, unobtrusively, without so much as a goodbye. There is nothing in him of the boy that would have brought down the heavens in his quest for revenge. There is nothing much in him at all.
He clings to her, and fights for her, but he doesn't know her. She thinks he would have done the same for anyone who had shown him kindness upon his awakening.
His love for her is so simple, and her feelings towards him are so complex.
She can't blame him for something he doesn't remember doing, but it doesn't absolve him of it, either. He is a changed man, but not through his own volition. Not through his own strength. No, she does not think she knows this man at all.
It is far from a serendipitous reunion. Fate has not sanctioned this. Without gravity to bind them, they are drifting, lost, shadows between the stars.
She's not surprised when the Rune Knights turn up to take him away. Agents of terrestrial law, acting on behalf of the universal ones.
Still, that doesn't make it fair. He isn't the Jellal she used to know any more than the Jellal who was possessed by darkness, and yet they are holding him responsible for Jellal's crimes. Maybe she should fight for him. Fight, like her friends are doing. Fight, against common sense and unbeatable foes and the will of the universe itself. Fight, as she once promised she would do if Apophis dared to break the atmosphere.
But she has more to think about than just herself. She has to protect those she promised to live for – protect them from their own recklessness. The world in which they can overwhelm the Magic Council with pure force and ride off into the sunset is nothing but a fantasy.
Jellal, or the ghost of a man left in his body, understands this as well as she does. He goes to the Rune Knights and she doesn't let her friends stop him.
It isn't meant to be. He's not…
The colour of your hair.
Or maybe he is.
Maybe he's recovering himself, slowly but surely, and she's just sent him away-
She breaks down where no one else can see.
Life goes on, though. For better or worse, they sail onwards through the oceans of time, carving distant arcs through unfathomable space, waiting to see if gravity will bring them back into alignment.
X791 / Beach at Akane Resort
And here they are.
Here they are.
Walking along the deserted beach at sunset, as the flamboyance of the day in which her guild reigns yields to the night where he has always been at home. The dark is soft and muted and even the dangerous things in it are beautiful.
It's been seven years. She wonders if one of those diamonds twinkling down at her is an asteroid preparing for final impact, slung back into the Earth's path by the same ruthless calculations that have brought her and Jellal together again.
There is so much time and space between them now – but there has to be, she thinks, to fit in all the life and death and betrayal and redemption and cowardice and faith that fills their story.
He is himself again, but the few hours he spent as someone else beneath Nirvana have scarred him. The boy who never hesitated now second-guesses himself at every turn; the spark of anger that had once ignited supernovae is buried beneath so many layers of merciless self-deprecation that it might never see the light of day again. But it's still there. A warning light in the sky. A gravitational keyhole, an invisible deathtrap, harmless as long as no stray asteroid gets too close.
It has never been the strength of his magic that makes him dangerous, for it started long before he had any magic at all.
She says, "You remember, don't you?"
"Yes."
"It wasn't in prison, like you told the others. It started at the end of the Nirvana incident, didn't it? No one knows the significance of what you said but me. No one else knew your memories were already returning."
He shifts without speaking on the rock where he is sat, gazing towards the horizon as it darkens, darkens.
She thinks about the man with the stars at his back and the apocalypse in his hands, who would have destroyed the Tower of Heaven and all of them along with it before accepting defeat, and she asks, "Why did you let the Rune Knights take you?"
The question surprises him, but his answer is steady. "For the same reason you did, I suppose."
She thinks on this long and hard, turning it every which way in her mind to try and fit it into the puzzle that was this man as she remembered him, but to no avail.
"I did it for my friends," she states simply, clearly. "If they had kept up their course of action, they would have ended up facing the same punishment as you. The whole guild would have been dragged down. Even had they won the battle against the Rune Knights after Nirvana, there would have been more Knights, more battles, and every victory would have pushed them a little further from society. Never again would they have known safety – as I imagine is the case for you now, except without a single guild to meet with them as friends."
"Quite so."
"And you?"
As calmly as before, he says, "I did it so that your friends would not be condemned for trying to protect a man who was guilty of everything of which the Rune Knights accused him."
"They were my friends," Erza points out. "My guild. You didn't even know most of them. So why would you-?"
"I'm not sure I want to hear that from the woman who once promised to smash a meteor to bits to save the Tower and all the slavers in it," he says mildly.
"You're not like me."
"No. But I wasn't happy, either. Eight years spent in the pursuit of vengeance, and I never once smiled the way you did every day when you were with your guild. I thought that perhaps I could do with being a little more like you, Erza."
And she knows he's going to be okay, she knows it. For all the forced isolation of his guild, despite the vicious, wilful misunderstanding of the authorities towards him, he's going to be okay. He's strong. He'll live. He knows what he has done and what he must yet do to make up for it, and he doesn't shy away from it.
Somewhere out there in the darkness of space, in the time between them, all on his own, he'd brought himself to the place it had taken her eight years of her guild's support to reach. With or without her, he'll keep moving on, because his path is set by his own strength.
She wants it to be with her, though.
She shouldn't.
It's so selfish. Wanting the whole world to forgive the unforgiveable things he did so that she can be with him. Expecting those who lost more than she did because of him to hurry up and move on. Demanding that they believe in a change of heart that only someone who knows him as well as her could possibly see.
And Simon.
Even though she knows Simon would want her to be happy, would want Jellal to see a future in helping others rather than falling back into darkness, would tell Erza as he always did to follow her heart… she knows she should feel guilty.
She shouldn't be doing this.
Jellal is looking at her like he wants to kiss her.
With an effort, she wrenches her gaze away, pretends she's more interested in the sky, in the shyly emerging stars. As if the heavens have ever been more than a way for her to reach him.
The sky that soars above them now is the same sky that hovered over the Tower of Heaven, the one he watched while she was watching him. Each little spark is a crystallized memory, some good, some bad, all of them together spinning the tapestry of their lives through the chaos of the universe. Once, it had made her feel so small. Now, she is not frightened. She was never alone in that vastness. The tethers of gravity have brought them both back home, here, together.
She shouldn't.
"They're beautiful, aren't they?" she mumbles, words without meaning, trying to turn his attention away before her better judgement loses the fight.
"Yes, they are."
He's still looking at her, though.
"It's been seven years. Does that mean one of them is Apophis, on its way back to Earth?"
Now, at last, he looks out into infinity. "Oh… I suppose it must be."
"You suppose? Surely someone is monitoring it!"
"Oh, you won't have heard, will you?" The smile on his face is the same one he wore as an eleven-year-old astronomy lecturer, gazing up at the stars from the world's dark heart in wonder and malice and a scientific, dispassionate understanding that outstripped them both. "On its last pass, the astronomers were able to get more accurate observations of its size and velocity, and recalculated its trajectory. The odds of it striking the Earth in the next century have been revised down to one in three hundred thousand. It's no longer an object of concern."
"…I see. It seems my services are no longer required." She releases her grip on the hilt of her sword.
Now she has his full attention again, eyes sparkling with more joy than he has ever shown the stars. "Erza, you do realize that if an asteroid that large was going to strike the Earth, breaking it apart with your sword is about the worst thing you could possibly do, right?"
"I beg your pardon?" Because if, after everything, he was going to tell her they should leave the planet to its fate-
"What makes an asteroid impact so dangerous isn't its size, but its speed. That's what gives it its devastating momentum and kinetic energy. If you smashed the meteor into pieces, all you'd do is end up with multiple meteors, all travelling at nearly the same speed as the original, except now going in entirely unpredictable directions and hitting the Earth in multiple places. You'll have made the problem many times worse."
"I won't leave any pieces intact!" Erza argues. "I'll grind the whole asteroid into dust!"
It might be the first time she's ever heard him laugh. "Even putting aside the question of how you're going to get you and your sword into space in the first place, Apophis is around three hundred and fifty metres long. These things move at ten, twenty miles per second – and they reach temperatures of thousands of degrees as they burn through the atmosphere. You're the strongest person I know, Erza, but for the love of all that is holy, please promise me you'll never try to stop a meteor with nothing but your sword."
Erza thinks about this for a moment, and concedes. "In my haste to defeat this foe, it seems there are a great many things I did not consider."
"That's what I love about you, Erza," he says, all light and fondness, finding beauty in her flaws.
"But I still have much to learn."
"There are many dark nights when one lives like I must," Jellal agrees. "They are the best for learning about the stars. I could show you, if you'd like."
She would like that very much indeed. Her brain is already devising ways that she can sneak away from the guild without arousing suspicion. But she shouldn't, she knows she shouldn't, even though she can't bring herself to reject the open invitation, and changes the subject in the hope that he might not remember to close it.
"If breaking the asteroid doesn't work, what can we do if Apophis comes back?"
"It won't," he assures her. "The only reason why the probability of impact is stated as greater than zero is because of limitations in our measuring equipment."
"Nevertheless, I wish to be prepared."
"Hmm… I suppose the best chance we as a planet would have is to knock it off course."
Frowning, Erza draws her sword and swings it like a baseball bat. She points out, mildly offended, "I could do that."
"Not with force. You'd just break it apart. Besides, the aim wouldn't be to reverse its direction – you can't fight that momentum, there's no point in trying. No, the best plan would be to send something up there to nudge the meteor off track. A small spacecraft, perhaps. Something a fraction of the size. It only has to be a glancing blow."
"Something so small would do it?" she demands, still offended on behalf of her beloved sword.
"Oh, yes. That's the point. These things are travelling so far so quickly that the tiniest tweak in its direction can throw it entirely off course by the time it reaches the Earth."
"But what about the pull of gravity?" she argues. "The pre-determined orbits; the iron-clad mathematics-!"
"Mathematically speaking, the Solar System is chaotic," he shrugs. "Changing one variable early on is enough to change everything. Sometimes," he adds, and he's looking right at her, now, the texture of his voice changing, "far more can be achieved by changing the path something is on than by destroying it."
Her breath catches in her throat. "That's all it takes?"
It's no longer a scientific query of the stars, but a heartfelt question to the man for whom seven years of persecution had not been enough to stop him from seeking redemption; the man who had taken to heart something a foolish, naïve girl had said to him fifteen years ago.
"That's all it takes," he confirms softly.
She shouldn't, she knows that, but screw it, they're here, they've found their way back to each other, and she's not going to lose that-
"I can't," Jellal says quickly.
And he makes up some nonsense about being engaged to cover his shame for being the only one of them sensible enough to think about what this would mean for her reputation and her future.
She knows he's right.
They can't be together. Nothing is ever so simple. Not when it's them.
Still, she's standing on that moon-drenched beach long after he has left.
She thinks about Apophis, once feared as the bringer of the end, now just one amongst a million other celestial objects, no one even bothering to track its position now that it is no longer dangerous.
Maybe they are prisoners of gravitational law, after all: not blessed to always find each other, but cursed to always miss.
"Guess we'll do this again in seven years, then," she murmurs after him.
X792 / Present
The planet isn't going to last another seven years, though.
It isn't going to last another seven minutes.
The world has been unfair to Irene, has left her friendless and alone, and therefore she is going to destroy it. All of it – the evil that has hounded her and the good she refuses to see.
Far, far above them, there is a light. It might have been a star of hope, except Irene does not know the meaning of the word. It's an ugly and screaming thing, not part of the fated dance of the Earth and Apophis, not meant to happen at all, an asteroid wrenched from its own harmless flight through the universe and hurled towards them with spite.
Orbital doctrine is nothing compared to the magic of a High Enchantress. With the power of a dragon behind it, her meteor far outstrips anything Jellal could have summoned. Though it is so very far away, Erza knows better than anyone how quickly the vastness of space can be traversed.
All across the battlefield, the combatants on both sides are starting to notice. They've done well to survive the war so far, though they'll soon wish they hadn't.
A mass extinction event.
Friend and foe, rich and poor, master and slave.
Better to destroy the good along with the evil than to let this unfair world thrive.
For the first time since the battle against Irene began, Erza is calm, because she knows exactly what she has to do.
From the ground, her one working hand closes around the hilt of her sword. No one else realizes the danger: the heat, the pressure, the killer speed. Her body is broken, but thanks to Wendy, the magic of the Sky Dragon is with her; the air itself is on her side. If she can just get herself up into the sky to meet it-
She doesn't move.
While everyone else is looking at the sky, Wendy hurries over and fixes her broken bones. Erza stands, slowly, drawing her sword. She is stalwart, the defender. She is of the Earth, and the Earth is where she belongs.
He is of the stars.
Up in the heavens, a second streak of light hits the first.
It doesn't look very spectacular from down on the ground. The most powerful meteor Jellal can call with his own heavenly magic is nothing compared to the sheer strength of Irene in her dragon form. Distance shields them from the forces, the temperatures. They only see the much smaller meteor glancing off the larger one, disintegrating, and leaving the other to gallop unimpeded towards the Earth with the apocalypse at its back.
Irene is laughing. Her magic is unstoppable, her opponents are pathetic; their best attempts to destroy her trump card couldn't even scratch it. She gloats about her great impending victory – because for those who consider the destruction of all to be victory, it now seems assured.
Irene Belserion, Erza thinks, doesn't know very much about astrophysics.
She's still laughing when her meteor hurtles clean past the Earth.
Barely even grazes the atmosphere.
Careens off into the emptiness, into the space between the stars, until the distance becomes too much for Irene's magic and it winks out of existence.
"That's im-impossible," Irene is stuttering. She's human again; perhaps she had committed too much magic to an attack that had come to nothing. "Deus Sema can't be stopped! It's the most destructive enchantment ever created!"
"That's why he didn't try to stop it," Erza corrects her, echoing Jellal's own words. "Far more can be achieved by changing the path something is on than by destroying it."
It is a mark of Irene's disbelief that she has not yet tried to follow up with another attack. "That puny meteor redirected my magic? That's all it takes?"
"All? You would not say that if you knew how far that meteor had travelled. Not long ago, Jellal's spell would have been racing yours to be the first to annihilate life on Earth."
"What nonsense is this?" Irene snaps, unsettled, shaken, like she is discovering the delicate balance of the Solar System for the first time, like she has not appreciated before just how flimsy the wheels of their existence are.
Erza isn't looking at her. She's watching the figure standing on a nearby hilltop, starlight his cloak and magic the gravitational field around him, who did not hesitate to save the world that persecutes him, just as she did not hesitate to leave her battle to someone who understands this more than her. His words can't reach her from this distance, but distance has never meant much to two people in mutual orbit, and she knows he trusts her to finish this.
The blade in her right hand vibrates with Dragon Slayer magic. One last gift from Wendy.
"It's not as easy as Jellal makes it look," she says to Irene. "Surpassing your own history. Changing who you have always been. Moving on when the laws of physics are working against you. Every step along the road out of the darkness takes more strength than I can possibly imagine. I do not blame you for living your life until now in gravity's thrall, drifting along your predetermined path of hate and despair."
She glances once again at the man who took her words to heart, and gave her wisdom of his own in return. The man who embodies a strength beyond any she possesses simply by standing here with her.
Because this was never inevitable. An asteroid's orbit is a fragile thing, so easily perturbed by large hidden objects, by solar winds, by limitations in the observational equipment. The equations are only ever as certain as the variables slotted into them.
He's not here because a roll of some god's dice at the beginning of time determined it would be so. She's not here because she couldn't fight the inverse square law dragging them towards each other over and over.
They're here, on this battlefield, standing together, because he wants to be forgiven and she wants to forgive him.
They're here because, after everything that has happened between them, and all the trials still to come, they want to be in each other's lives.
And one day, he'll be ready to admit it, even if she's got to petition Princess Hisui for a pardon first and release him from his misplaced guilt. He's hated himself for long enough, and hell if the whole population of Fiore didn't just watch him singlehandedly avert an extinction-level catastrophe.
"In truth, though, it isn't the universe you are fighting," Erza continues, tearing her eyes away from the man she loves and to the enchantress who stands scared and lost in a battlefield that has stopped. "The numbers are just numbers; there is no term for justice in the equations that govern motion. The laws of the universe are neither fair nor unfair, they just are. What comes of the situation they give you is no more and no less than what you make of it.
"It may seem as though the universe is a cruel place," she adds, "but those laws will help you as much as they hinder you. Sometimes, a tiny asteroid will happen to drift into the path of a world-destroying meteor… and sometimes, you'll be fortunate enough to come across a person who wants to protect the world more than you want to destroy it. Someone to show you that the good matters more than the bad ever will."
She considers her white-shining sword, and then casts it aside, offering Irene her empty hand.
"I don't care about you," Erza admits. "But it's because I know nothing about you other than your blood, which has never meant anything to me. I am, however, willing to get to know you. I already have a family, but there's always room for one more."
"You insolent child," Irene scoffs. "I've already cast you aside once, and you still think you're important enough to make me throw away everything I've worked for-"
"I am no more important than anyone else." Erza shoots her down firmly. "I do not believe that my skills amount to more than being in the right place at the right time… or being born to the right parent. But you, like someone else I could mention, seem to have decided that my actions have great significance to your life, and all I can do is endeavour to live up to that. If you are willing to try, I am willing to support you."
There's silence.
Then hesitantly, shakily, a claw-like hand reaches out and grasps Erza's own.
A path changed, not a life destroyed.
"And sometimes," Erza says, "that's all it takes."
The stars turn, turn.
Beneath them, the war rages on. It is only for one person that the universe has changed completely. The hatred and desperation run too thickly here for one mage's indecision to sway.
But the Solar System is chaotic, mathematically speaking, and nothing is moving quite as it was before.
It may take months, years, decades for the changes to become visible. It may not be until the peace treaty with Alvarez is agreed and pardons are issued to those who fought for a side that treated them as an enemy; it may not be until Erza asks both her adoptive father and her birth mother to walk her down the aisle together; it may not be until Erza can sit together with her own daughter and point up at Apophis as it soars harmlessly by on its many-year cycle.
But change it will.
This battle is a beginning, not an end.
She'll never be alone, Erza Scarlet. Always will she have those she inspired by her side, as she charts her own course through the universe, bringing light to its darkest corners.
And for the rest of her life, she will wield her sword with as much empathy as she does might – and face down meteors with as much wisdom as she does courage.
A/N: Apophis is a real asteroid that has a close encounter with the Earth every 7-8 years or so (2021, 2029, 2036 etc). It caused a stir when it was first discovered because of the significant chance that it would hit the Earth on a future pass, although subsequent observations have since reduced the probability of this happening down to virtually zero.
I am well aware that, once magic is thrown into the mix, it doesn't really make a difference whether you started from actual scientific principles or just made it up from the outset… but writing it this way honestly feels like a weight off my chest. Hope you enjoyed. ~CS