005. Selfishness
Gray/Juvia – She slips through his hands like the element she commands.
The skies sing to them a requiem in drips and drops.
Battered knees hit the ground hard by her side, splashing into puddles of diluted crimson water while incoherent, horrified mutters spill from his lips. "Oh no… No, no, no, no, no, dammit- Stay, stay with me, you hear?" Gentle hands lift her upper body up, one encircling her shoulders and the other making frantic motions over the bloody mess that is her torso. Funnily enough, there is no pain, only the vague awareness of a feeble cooling sensation, and she watches through blurred eyes as if far away, feeling wet dots pepper her cheeks from the dim clouds. "Ice Make-… Ice Make- Shit, why isn't it working?! Ice Make-!"
"…Gray…-sama."
His tone is harsh, commanding, yet overflowing with that passive kindness she has always loved, always known. "I told you to stay with me, Juvia!"
She smiles beatifically up at him, slowly reaching for his rain-streaked face, and his hand catches hers when it begins to fall with a quiver. Perhaps it is selfish of her, to ask such a thing now.
"Gray-sama…"
He wants to punch something in his frustration, in his helplessness, in his complete inability to ever, ever do anything when it matters – is he the only thing she is thinking of, when it is entirely his own goddamn fault that she is here lying like this and slipping somewhere farther and farther each second? "Shh. Don't try to talk. I'll fix it." His voice cracks strangely on the last word, drawing the syllable out with a shuddering jump. "I'll fix it," he repeats, as if he expects to see her body mend before his eyes.
She presses on disjointedly, interrupted only by soft gasps for air. Did breathing ever used to be so difficult?
"Gray-sama… W-Will you… do something for Juvia?"
The response is immediate. "Anything," he breathes, almost drowned out by the dull drizzling, clutching her pale hand so tightly that blood squeezes its way from between their interlaced fingers, trailing over whitened knuckles and wrapping like a watery red string around his and her arms.
"…Please tell Juvia… you love her."
She does not miss the way his dark eyes widen, pupils dilate in surprise at the impulsiveness of her request, of a silly, selfish little wish that she needs fulfilled, just this once. His mouth opens and closes several times in a row without sound, an eternity of hesitancy compressed into a split second – a split second long enough for her to see and realize.
…Oh.
"I-I… I love you."
He says it abruptly, haltingly, black bangs shadowing his expression. A shaky breath is exhaled and he swallows before continuing, throat dry and shoulders trembling.
"I love you. I love you."
The fragile words rise to a feverish pitch, each one spoken more strongly than the last, shot through with tiny fractures in the fervent sound of his voice and vibrating, vibrating the very air with bitter notes and the unfairness of it all.
"I love you. I love you. I love you!"
Her smile grows wider and wider at each repetition, at each breathless, desperate declaration. Finally, after so very long, she's received her answer, in-between the lines of all the words she never listened to.
A small, subdued little laugh - the musical running of a stream - slips out even as it sends aching tremors throughout her body, and she lets her eyes drift shut with a faint sigh. Rain trickles from the corners of closed lids, the clear drops disappearing into limp waves of ocean-deep hair.
"…That's… not true, Gray-sa…"
She does not hear him call her name with increasingly panicked urgency; she does not see the way his expression crumples in disbelieving grief; she does not feel the way he presses his forehead against hers or the rush of insubstantial, choked whispers playing out a broken record of three desperately apologetic syllables—over and over again to a showering audience of deafening silence.
A/N: I was pretty surprised to see the theories about Juvia dying – I actually think Gray might be more likely to die than her, but this rolled out somehow. The ending is supposed to be ambiguous by the way, on whether he actually loves her or not. The three syllables can be anything the reader wants to think.