Author Notes: *Manaical laughter* Third chapter out before the end of the month! I am on a roll! And that roll will come to a screeching halt in a week or so. Another smaller chapter - it's a meh kinda chapter, but I want to get it out because I actually really like the next chapter coming up. But hey, it's done. I will take that as a win. Thanks again to everyone reading and posting comments - it really helps to keep me motivated, and I'm glad that people are enjoying the story. For those of you who are Jellal and Lucy fans, I know this chapter and previous ones don't paint them in the best of lights, but have faith - all of the characters are still growing. How they're written now isn't how they'll be as the story progresses.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Chains to the Past

Every sinew in every muscle screamed murder at Juvia as she emerged from the confines of the Charms classroom. Even muscles she hadn't even known existed prior to that afternoon swore vengeance for the torture endured. Reeking of disinfectant and her hair, face and clothes caked in dirt and dust, she prayed that this late in the afternoon, the Charms tower would be empty as she trudged down the stairs. She didn't need to have her current state witnessed by anyone or it'd be circulating through half of Hogwarts come dinner time.

How the hell did any room in Hogwarts manage to get that dirty? And how did any one person drink their way through that many bottles? It felt like she had just scrubbed the floor of a brewery.

With a weary sigh, she stretched out her back and released her hair from the haphazard ponytail she had placed it in. Somewhere on the castle grounds, a clock rang four. Gajeel, if he managed to get free of his round of incarceration before her, would likely be in the Common Room. Groaning softly at the thought of the long trek ahead of her, she pushed open the great oak door that would lead her out of the Charms tower and out onto the ramparts that led to another of the castle's towers.

The frosty November air greeted her, a welcome change from the overbearing warmth of the Charms tower. The ramparts, luckily for her, were as vacant as the Charms tower itself had been, nothing but the lonely wail of the wind as it swept over the castle walls to be heard. Thankful for the relative silence and isolation, she stepped onto the ramparts, but she wasn't allowed to enjoy the chill or the silence long. She had hardly taken ten steps out of the Charms tower when a voice called to her.

"Detention again, Lockser?"

Juvia started at the sound but quickly recovered, schooling her reaction back to the neutral expression she had managed to perfect over the last year. Slowly, she turned to face the source of the sound, Jellal Fernandes, the tattooed Slytherin boy seated on the rampart, his back pressed against the tower wall and a book set open on his lap. His focus was on said book, and he didn't speak again until he had flipped to the next page of his text. "That's what? The third one this month? Trying to keep up with Redfox?"

Juvia stayed silent, trying to decide what to make of the tattooed boy, trying to decide what to make of his tone. His voice lacked scorn or ridicule - she was well familiar with both by this point. All she got from it was just idle amusement. She couldn't even remember a time when he had ever spoken to her directly before then. He had spoken a couple of times to Gajeel about Quidditch while she was around, but he never even directly acknowledged her. Gajeel spoke of him as a "decent sort", which was the closest to a compliment the boy would give to another Slytherin. Juvia, however, had yet to form an opinion of her own.

For his part, Fernandes was content to let her take her time to respond, saying nothing else as he kept reading.

"It wasn't her fault," she said at last.

The boy snorted, still not looking up from his book. "Ah, the Dragneel Defense. Not horribly effective against professors, is it?"

"It wasn't her fault," she insisted again. "Those Ravenclaws attacked Juvia and the others. She hadn't done anything to start it. Juvia just may have retaliated a little more strongly than she should have."

"So I heard. They manage to get that fifth year off of the Astronomy spire yet?"

Juvia flushed. "That wasn't her. Well, not all her. Aria just happened to time his spell poorly. It carried the boy in her water lock a little further than she had meant."

The fourth year finally looked up from his book, an incredulous expression on his face. "A little? The Astronomy tower, Lockser. If that's your definition of a little, it's not a wonder half the school's afraid of you lot."

"No, they aren't," she replied with a frown.

"Why do you think you're getting caught in so many fights lately?"

"She's friends with Gajeel. There's not much mystery in that."

He smirked. "True enough, but it's not just Redfox." He set his book aside at last, setting it down on to the parapet beside him, and swung his legs off of the parapet so that he finally was facing her. "Did you know they've given a name to your little group? The Elemental Four."

"There are five of us."

"Yes, well. Redfox is a nightmare all his own. Don't think anyone is all that eager to throw him into any group in case he get offended by their choice."

She studied him a moment in silence, trying to decide if he was telling her the truth or simply having a joke at her expense, but she couldn't read him. Just the same quiet amusement. "If the other students are so afraid of them, why are they starting fights with Juvia and the others?"

"For the same reason Dragneel's always butting heads with Redfox - to prove they can. Everyone knows you and your group are Jose's favorites, and Jose leads the Phantom Lords. That makes you lot among the strongest students in the school, at least in Jose's eyes. The thought is that if they can defeat you, they'll be Jose's new chosen ones."

"They're welcome to it," Juvia muttered. "Being Jose's favorite isn't anything to be envious of."

"Probably not. But it shows you're among the best and that's all anyone wants to prove. We're all auditioning for parts in the only play that matters, even now. The only questions is who we're auditioning for."

"Juvia hasn't seen you fighting before," she said. She had seen the tattooed boy in the Common Room often enough - he was rather hard to really miss - but he had always been separate from the rest of the House, too absorbed in his texts and training to get involved in anything around him.

"Because my part was decided when I was born. Just like it was for Belserion, Redfox, Dragneel, Strauss. We know what side of the line we'll be on."

"That's not true!" Juvia protested. "Gajeel is nothing like his father. He isn't going to be like them. He is his own person."

"And I'll wager his father thought the same thing when he was at Hogwarts. We all want to believe we can change the course of our life, but it's just a delusion. You can denounce your family like Redfox or change your name like Belserion, but in the end, the die's already been cast. The only interesting question is where people like you end up." He tilted his head, studying her, and Juvia glared back at him, not liking the conversation or the boy's belief system. "Where do you plan to end up? Do you follow Redfox down his path or do you make your own? Which side of the line will you fall on?"

"This is an idiotic conversation. Gajeel's future is his own. Juvia's is her own. If your future has been set, it's because you've decided it. Not your family." When the boy only smirked at her in response, she turned and stormed away.

"I don't get why it's so urgent," Natsu complained as he sat on the foot of the cot, idly gnawing his way through a box of chocolates meant for Gray. Gray didn't mind the filching of the chocolates - he couldn't even remember the name of the girl that had dropped it off, one of a few hurriedly deposited gifts brought a half hour earlier - but if the ash-for-brains didn't get off his cot, he was going to jinx the chocolates with laxatives.

"It's my mother's pendant, ass! Go back and find it!"

"Why do I have to go back and look for it?"

"It's your fault I lost it!" Gray snapped from the infirmary bed, the newly applied cast to his right arm keeping him from taking a swing at Natsu. Not that a cast was any sort of deterrent to throwing a punch at Natsu. He imagined that cast would have made an ever so lovely crack over Natsu's head. The deterrent was Madame Porlyusica hovering about the Infirmary. If she saw him so much as twitch, he'd end up needing a cast on both arms. And maybe a leg too for good measure. As it was, she was casting dark glares over to the bed he had been consigned to while she tended to Redfox's broken leg, apparently not appreciating the gaggle of Gryffindors around his bed.

He couldn't blame her - they were giving him a headache too.

Judging by Redfox's scowling face, he didn't much care for the chatter either. It was odd - the Slytherin boy was on his own. A couple of his teammates had accompanied him to the Infirmary but didn't stick around long afterwards, and since then, no one had stopped by to see the Slytherin. Not that Redfox had many admirers, but Gray had half-expected Juv - the Infirmary door groaned to announce the entrance of another visitor for the inmates within. He turned just in time to see a flash of blue hair dart into the Infirmary as Juvia entered, on her own for once. Nowadays, she was almost always flanked by the rest of the Elemental Four, a name for their group that had taken hold in most of the school over the last month or so, but now she was alone save for a black Kneazle trotting on her heels. She carried with her a number of magazines, fetched for Redfox, he imagined. He caught Juvia's eye for just a second but she quickly looked away as she passed his cot. She said something to Redfox as she joined him, but with her back to him, Gray couldn't hear. All he heard was Redfox's irritated response, "Quit fussin', Raindrop. It's a leg, not my neck."

Redfox's assurances didn't seem to satisfy Juvia. She turned to Porlyusica who repeated the same assurances about Redfox's health with far more kindness than she had shown either him or Redfox. Not that that was a difficult bar to clear, but she certainly did seem to be more willing to suffer Juvia's questions though her answers were still provided with all her normal charming bedside manner.

Natsu's voice pulled him back to his current predicament. "And just how the hell do you figure it's my fault you can't hold on to your necklace?"

"Pendant!" Gray growled, debating whether Juvia's entrance was enough to distract Porlyusica enough to let him take a quick swing. "You were the one who was supposed to keep the Bludgers off of me. I lost it because you couldn't even manage that!"

"This isn't Natsu's fault," Lucy protested, predictably coming to Natsu's defense as usual. "It's his," she said with a glare towards the Slytherins at the other cot.

Redfox scowled back at her while Juvia just quietly watched with her usual detached expression. Even the Kneazle glared at them from its spot on the cot next to Redfox. "Would ya explain t' yer girlfriend how this all works. I ain't there t' make ya tea."

"You purposely sent that Bludger at Gray!" Lucy accused him.

"Uh, yeah. That's the point. Ya should really stop hangin' around Dragneel, Heartfilia. He's makin' ya stupider by the day."

"Shut it, tin head."

"Mister Redfox," Madame Porlyusica said, looking up from the cast. "If you don't stay still, this won't set right, and if it doesn't set right, I'll need to break your leg and start again. Would you like me to just skip straight to the re-breaking of your leg?"

Redfox grimaced. "No, ma'am."

"Then stay still and stay quiet."

Natsu snickered while Redfox was forced to resort to just glaring back at them.

"Natsu, pay attention, dammit," Gray snapped. "Go back there and find it."

"Look, we'll just get your necklace -"

"Pendant."

Natsu ignored him. Ass. "- necklace in the morning."

"What if it gets stolen before then?"

"Who the hell's gonna steal that?"

"Just go get it!"

"Gray, look, we'll all go out in the morning," Erza interrupted Natsu from saying anything further. "It'll be safe enough where it is until then. We just can't go out tonight. It's nearly curfew. We can't sneak out after hours." Behind her, Lucy and Loke exchanged nervous glances. Nightly excursions out of the Gryffindor tower were common enough occurrences for their party, minus Erza. Always minus Erza. Erza knew about a handful of times that they had sneaked out, and her wrath after each was normally far more terrifying than the detentions that usually followed. Rules, to Erza, weren't just meant to be followed. They were meant to be revered. Anyone who dared to defy those rules was never granted mercy.

Of course, Natsu never had much sense of self-preservation. "At least not for a reason as stupid as this."

Erza turned slowly to him. "What was that?"

Realization on what sort of danger he was facing dawned slowly Natsu. "Nothing!" he eventually chirped back.

"Giihii!" came the laugh from the other cot. Gray glanced back over at Redfox, apparently free to talk again once Porlyusica finished with the cast. "So much for that Gryffindor bravery. 'Fraid of a girl."

"Perhaps you should focus on your own recovery, Redfox," Erza said flatly, not bothering to even look back to the Slytherin.

"Nah, not as much fun as irritatin' you lot, Belserion."

The mere utterance of the name had an immediate and unifying effect. Erza tensed. The rest of them glared at Redfox, quiet, seething. Redfox only smiled back at them with his normal predatory smile, a smile Gray had seen often enough when Redfox and Natsu were about to start another fight. Juvia stayed silent beside him, expressionless.

Lucy found her voice before the rest of them. "Her name's Scarlet. Erza Scarlet."

"Yeah, sure, it is. Must be nice havin' everyone pretendin' ya ain't who ya are. Perk of bein' in the right House, I guess. Only Slytherins have t' carry their name. Or maybe we're the only ones not coward enough to hide from it."

Natsu and Loke seemed ready to reach for their wands, and if he hadn't a cast on, Gray would have joined them.

Porlyusica, seeming to sense which direction the argument was going and how much damage it was likely to cause, took that moment to stand between the two groups. "As all of you can't control yourselves, visiting hours are over. Anyone not already in a cast will soon be in one if they're not out of the Infirmary in the next minute."

"Well, that's my cue to get out of here. See ya, Gray!" Loke said, practically out the door before Porlyusica finished her threat. Lucy left with a little more dignity, though she still wasn't far behind Loke. Natsu proved to be a bit more difficult to get out of the Infirmary, opting to use his remaining minute to trade as many insults with Redfox, and had to be dragged forcibly from the room by Erza. Juvia was the last of all to leave. She looked once more at him before hurrying out the Infirmary, leaving him to the two surliest residents of Hogwarts.

The groan of the Infirmary door stirred Gray out of the hard won sleep he had just managed to fall into, Redfox proving to be as irritating while sleeping as he was awake. The bastard actually argued in his sleep. With who, he wasn't sure, but it made him actually miss Natsu's snoring. With a soft sigh, he shifted onto his side as much as his cast would allow, trying to fall back asleep. He heard someone padding by the cots. Porlyusica, he assumed at first, but whoever it was seemed very interested in making as little sound as possible and Porlyusica had already proved to have little regard for the sleep of her patients. When the visitor paused by his cot, he tensed, and when he felt the visitor's hand pass by his head, he grabbed at the wrist. However, instead of hearing a shout from Natsu or Loke as he had expected, all he heard was a quiet eep. He opened his eyes to stare into Juvia's wide and startled blue ones, the unexpected motion from Gray causing her to fall back and sit on the edge of his cot.

"Juvia? What are you doing here so late?" he whispered to her as he released her wrist, glancing over at Redfox's cot to make sure the boy was still asleep. Last thing he needed was another broken bone because he scared the blunette.

"Sorry. She didn't mean to wake you," she replied, flushing pink. "She just wanted to return this." She turned her fist over and opened it to show him the familiar sword cross pendant and chain in her palm.

"My pendant!" he said, a little more loudly than he meant. After shifting awkwardly to sit upright, Juvia seeming to want to help him as he did though not being sure how, he took the pendant from her hand and quickly put it back on. He heaved a relieved sigh, both for the returned pendant and the fact that Redfox, though currently shouting obscenities, appeared to still be asleep despite Gray's exuberance. "Where did you find it?"

"On the pitch, by the Gryffindor stands," she replied. The girl, having delivered her parcel, seemed interested in looking at anything but him. She was mostly interested in the movements of her hands as she folded them together in her lap.

"You went looking there? It's late. You snuck out to the pitch?"

She shrugged her shoulders, the movement only barely visible in the moonlight that flooded through the open curtains. "It's not the first time she's snuck out after hours. Gajeel's not much for curfews. Of course, he's usually heads for the kitchens to get a late night snack, but it wasn't that much harder to get out to the pitch."

He smiled at her, one that she didn't fully return before looking back down at her hands. "Thank you. I appreciate it. A lot. But it would have been okay. You didn't need to go out and look for it. Erza would have had all of them out there before breakfast until they managed to find it."

"She knows, but she didn't want you to worry. You seemed very upset earlier. She figured it was important to you."

"It is," he admitted, holding the pendant in his hand and running his thumb over the sword. "It was my mother's. It had been part of her family's crest. She wore it every day until she died. It's one of the things I remember most about her." He didn't add how much else of her he had started to forget - the sound of her voice, the color of her eyes, how it all started to fade when she wasn't even ten years gone yet. But he remembered the necklace. The way it always gleamed in the sun when she walked with him in their garden, his hand in hers. His grip on his pendant tightened. When he looked back up, Juvia was watching him, her expression understanding. He caught a glimpse of her own necklace, the seashell pendant that she usually had covered by one of her little ghost-like totems just barely visible. "Was that your mother's too?"

Her hand seemed to drift up towards her pendant almost without thought, but she winced slightly before she touched it, pulling back her hand and returning it to her lap. She shook her head lightly. "No. Well. Maybe. She's not sure, to be honest. It was just the only thing that anyone left for Juvia when they abandoned her. But it is important to her too. She feels like as long as she has it, whoever left it for her, whoever left her can find her again someday. If she lost it, it'd be like losing the last link. She'd never be able to find them again. It's silly, she knows..."

"It's not. I feel like as long as I have mother's pendant, she's not really gone. Like she's still watching over me."

She smiled weakly at him, but anything she might have said back was cut off by Redfox suddenly taking that moment to threaten to stuff Natsu into a cauldron. Glancing over to make sure that the boy was in fact still asleep, he shook his head and sighed. "I can't believe you're friends with that ass."

The smile faded, her expression guarded. "He can be difficult at times, but he doesn't mean any ill. He did not mean to upset Scarlet. He just doesn't understand. No one lets him forget his family. He finds it unfair that they let her forget hers."

"Erza hasn't forgotten anything," Gray snapped back, harsher than he had meant though she seemed unfazed by his reaction. The early days of their friendship had been difficult ones for Erza. Makarov had been determined to help her form relationships with her future classmates, with the children she'd have to grow up with even though her mother had helped make orphans of more than a few of them. Gray was ashamed that, at first, he despised her as much as some of the others did, shunning her, insulting her. But in the end, she was just another kid who had lost her mother, just as he had lost his. Grief helped bridge the gap between them, but it still took years for her to mend bridges with others around her, something she had to fight tooth and nail to do but something she never shied away from doing. And still Redfox dared to call her a coward. "She's just not responsible for what her mother did. Anymore than Redfox is."

"You know that. Juvia knows that. But there are far more who don't see it that way. She doesn't even think Gajeel sees it that way."

"Well, then, Redfox is an idiot."

The only noticeable change in her expression was a slight tensing of her jaw. "Juvia doesn't think all your friends are much better. Heartfilia certainly seems to agree with Gajeel."

Gray winced, some of the irritation dulling a little with the admittance that she wasn't entirely unjustified. "Lucy is... just hurting at the moment. Her mother didn't die during the fight at Raven's Hollow, but she never walked again. She never even left her bed after that. She died last summer. It was hard for Lucy to watch her suffer like that. Hard to lose her. Lucy is a good person. She's just trying to make sense of things. She misses her mother."

"At least she had one." Juvia scowled, finally unable to maintain her neutral facade. "One that she loved and who, Juvia assumed, loved her. Juvia didn't have that. Gajeel didn't have that. Gajeel may be difficult and hard to take, but he's honest and doesn't judge others without knowing them. It's more than most Juvia's met."

"He's still an ass."

"Not to her." She huffed, looking away. After a moment, she seemed to calm. "She is sorry, though," she said, still not looking back at him. "For what he did. Hitting you with the Bludger."

He chuckled softly. "As much as I hate to admit it, Redfox was right earlier. It's just a part of the game. Don't worry about it. I am kinda glad the Bludger circled back and knocked him out right after, though."

She groaned. "Juvia's not. She's going to have nightmares for weeks about this. She's going to be really relieved when the Quidditch games are over."

"Well, on the bright side, the Gryffindor/Slytherin game is done for the year. I don't think Redfox is going to have many issues with Ravenclaw or Hufflepuff."

Juvia smiled softly at him. After a quiet moment, she stood up. "She should get back to sleep. Good night, Gray."

"Good night, Juvia. Thank you again. Oh, and if you see any of my friends, don't tell them you found it. I'll let Natsu suffer for a couple of hours," he said with a grin. She giggled quietly and, after one last parting wave, snuck back out of the Infirmary.

Once the Infirmary door shut close, Gray leaned back onto the cot. Finding that even Redfox's latest sleep-arguing tirade was easier to ignore now that he had his pendant once again, he quickly drifted back to sleep.