More Jeltear…but more one-sided and angsty.
seven years of punishment
Jellal had always been special.
Even among the three of them joined together under their independent guild, under a common purpose, under similar ambitions and hopes and desires for the future, he was special.
And now he was simply sitting by himself, away from the campfire, alone on the edge of a cliff, looking out at the night sky, and he was still special.
He would always be special to her, so it was surprising to her that she knew what he was thinking about it, even before she walked over to the front of him and lifted his face to look at his tear-glazed eyes.
"Ul…" he said, softly, and she didn't berate him for forgetting the extra other syllables in her name.
"You love Erza," she told him, with a strong and confident voice.
His face twisted and he pulled away from her touch, covering his hands with his face. "No," he said.
"You ask yourself this question every day, and you never let yourself answer it truthfully." She said this with the pain and guilt of seeing him every day like this, pondering what was so obvious, and not being able to do anything about it.
"No," he stubbornly said. "I can't."
She wanted to slap the living sense into him. He was so stubborn for all the wrong things, and she knew that the dark unhealthy masochistic mind of his was the reason why he wasn't being honest with himself. He was punishing himself for the sake of punishing himself, telling himself that he was doing this because he had done so much wrong in the past, and that he needed to make up for with the rest of his life. And even as he lay down to die, he wouldn't have made up for all the hurt he had dealt by simply existing.
But she knew that even if he was immortal and spent the rest of eternity trying to fix the future from his past mistakes, he would never reach a point where he felt as though he had completely atoned for his sins.
He was hard on himself for no good reason, and he was chaining himself to a heavy weight, forcing himself to grow stronger from it, when it was really just dragging him down.
"You're not really dark," she reminded him, knowing that this was the sad justification that he had built to keep himself away from the light of his life.
The shadows had only reached him because she had been the one to cast them on him. He had always been on the path of light, and she had just forced him astray.
She should have been the one punishing herself, but he was punishing himself even more.
"Erza walks the path of light," he said, like he had repeated many times before. "I can only be in her shadows."
How many times would Ultear have to tell Jellal that good and evil, light and dark, day and night were two sides of the same coin? How many times would Ultear have to tell Jellal that he loved Erza, and that he should let himself love her? How many times would Ultear would to make him promise to her that when Erza did come back, the first thing that he would do was tell her that he loved her?
How many times would Ultear have to convince Jellal that he loved Erza when she herself was the one that wanted to hold him in her arms?
"You have to be with Erza," she persuaded him. "It's the only way you'll ever be happy with yourself."
His brown eyes grew irritated. "Why…" he asked her, with gritted teeth. "Why do you keep telling me that I love Erza?"
"Because you do," she reminded him, a hot ball of grief curling at the back of her throat. "Every day you lie to yourself that you don't, but you do, and your life will never be complete without her!"
"I can't—I can't be with her," he argued, his voice raised. "Stop telling me that I have to be with her!"
He stood up, suddenly, confronting Ultear. His eyes were torn between anger, guilt, regret—but one thing was clear, and that was that he knew that she was right.
"I can't think here," he told her, after a moment once he mollified.
He walked away from her, heading back to the campfire, where Meredy calmly flipped over the twig that she was burning for fun, pretending not to hear the entire exchange.
He walked away from her, but he didn't know that she watched his back with tear-stained eyes and a cracked smile. He didn't know that she was doing the same thing he was—denying herself of love and making sure that she would never be able to have it.
Her punishment would come when Jellal finally admitted to himself that he loved Erza, but until that day, Ultear would never be sure if what she was doing to atone for her sins was enough.
Hm…not sure how happy I am with how this came out. Meh.
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