Jellal blinked awake. It was unpleasant. His throat hurt. His arm hurt. His whole body felt achy and sore, like he'd gotten in a fight with a very large and unhappy animal. His head ached like someone had taken his brain out and squeezed it..
He didn't remember where he was. He didn't remember what had happened. Had he had a seizure? Was Erza nearby? Could he call out to her? No, trying to remember how to form words was going to be too difficult still. And anyways, his throat ached horribly.
Eventually, he realized that while he was awake, his eyes were still closed. He should…open them, probably. He remembered how to do that. Yeah.
Opening his eyes was terrible, and he immediately regretted it. He was somewhere very bright. Probably not with Erza then. She wouldn't do this to him. He wished he could remember what had happened a little better. All he had was fractured memories of…what? He couldn't even remember what he had memories of. His brain had been put through a blender.
He tilted his head to the side, steeled his will, and slitted his eyes opened again. Before the light got too intense, and he was forced to close them again, he definitely got a glimpse of a woman. Lucy, not Erza. Which was…weird. But it also made sense, because he was pretty sure that he definitely remembered that Erza had been dealing with…something. And that something was….
Everything in Jellal's body seemed to clench.
Gray.
Jellal had fractured, disjointed memories from the graveyard. He remembered Gray's body, could kind of picture trying to cast the resurrection, the clouds filling up the sky….
And then, nothing. He had no idea what had happened, how much time had gone by. If it had worked.
Jellal opened his eyes again. This time, he was prepared for the brightness, and that made it a little easier. His head pounded sickly, and that made a wave of nausea wash over him. God, he felt like shit. And he still didn't know where he was.
But now that his eyes could stay open a little longer, he could actually see Lucy. And she was…asleep. Sitting up, hair halfway over her face, but definitely asleep. Great.
Jellal tried to call out to her. It didn't work. His brain still didn't seem very well connected to the rest of his body, and opening his eyes seemed just about all he could manage in that department. Also, his throat felt like he'd tried to drink a smoothie made of sandpaper, although he still didn't know why. About all he could manage was a strangled sort of croak, which did absolutely nothing to wake Lucy up.
This was…not what he wanted to be happening. He felt weird, almost kind of numb, and sort of disconnected from the world around him. Somewhere in a corner of his mind, Jellal recognized the sensation and knew that if he was really and truly awake, he would be in a lot more pain.
But even despite the vague sense of detachment, Jellal was starting to get panicked. He needed to know if he'd brought Gray back. His head was pounding, but he kept cycling through the fractured memories from the graveyard, hoping desperately to get some flash of clarity.
It was no use. The whirl of scattered images was making his head hurt worse, and his stomach turned over. He couldn't remember, and he couldn't call out to Lucy. He was stuck, and one thing he could remember was that he hated being stuck.
Without really planning to, Jellal was trying to sit up. Before he'd even really realized what he was doing, his muscles had already given out. He hadn't even gotten far enough to fall backwards. Everything in his body felt drained, if not outright sore.
Jellal didn't try to move again, although the dull sense of panic was rising. He twitched his fingers, hoping that Lucy would somehow see the movement, and found that his right wrist was encased in a heavy plaster cast. Right now, he was too weak to move it.
Jellal's eyes slipped closed without his permission, and he wrenched them back open. He needed…he needed Lucy to wake up. He needed to ask about Gray. He was too confused to figure out exactly how he was supposed to do that if he couldn't even talk, but he couldn't think about that right now. That didn't seem like the sort of problem he could solve.
He had no idea how long it was before Lucy's eyes fluttered and she sat upright with a sniff. He'd almost fallen asleep at least three times, but with the fogginess around his brain, that could have been anywhere between four minutes and four hours.
"Aww, I fell a-AAAAH!" Lucy shot backwards out of her chair, tumbling onto the floor and out of Jellal's vision. He blinked a few times, waiting for her to reappear. There wasn't much else he could do.
"Jellal?" Lucy came back into view, walking towards the side of his bed. "You're…awake?"
Jellal couldn't see her anymore. She was still talking, but it was very fast, and he was having enough trouble sorting through the thoughts in his own head without adding more. Slowly, he concentrated all of his effort on rolling his head to the side.
"Jellal, can you understand me?"
He could, but nodding seemed like it would be excruciating right now, and he wasn't sure he even had the strength. He furrowed his brow slightly, and hoped that that conveyed the same thing.
"Don't worry too much if you're confused," she said, patting his hand. "You've been in a coma. A coma, Jellal. It might…it might take a little while for your brain to start working very well again. There's no need to push it, alright?"
A coma. Huh, that was new. Definitely different from a seizure, and also explained why he felt so much worse.
"Don't worry if everything is overwhelming, Jellal. You're safe here. You're safe, and me and the doctors are going to take care of you. There's nothing you need to worry about aside from feeling better. We'll take good care of you, and you're…and you're going to be just fine. Feel free to get some more rest if you want. That's just fine."
Jellal was rather overwhelmed, but what he needed was answers to his questions, not more rest. He frowned.
My throat. That wasn't as pressing as the result of the resurrection, but definitely the next most pressing thing. Because his throat still hurt very, very badly, and he was starting to realize that was going to prevent him from talking.
Jellal made a strangled sort of sound, the most he could manage right now. Thankfully, Lucy seemed to understand, at least a little.
"Yeah, your throat might hurt," she said soothingly. "We had to intubate you."
Intubate? That was a relatively unfamiliar word, and Jellal's brain was still processing very slowly. It took him a second to sort through his knowledge and understand what she had meant. They'd had to use machines to keep him breathing. Weird.
"I don't know if you remember, but last time you woke up, you ripped out your intubation tube. It's not supposed to come out that way, the doctors said. So your throat is going to be pretty sore. Probably for a couple of days. Maybe longer. It's alright if you can't talk."
Jellal did not remember that, but ripping out the tube did sound like him. It also explained why his throat hurt so badly. He could hardly swallow.
But he needed a way to communicate, and he needed it now. With a monumental effort, he managed to extract his uninjured hand from under the blankets, and open and close his fingers a little. Lucy, to her credit, seemed to sort of understand.
"Oh, do you want a pencil? Sorry, Jellal, I'm not totally sure what you're asking. If you can't communicate yet, don't worry. Don't try to push yourself too hard. But if you can write…well, I'll see if I can find you something, at least. But again, the doctors said it would take…some time for you to recover. So don't worry about it if you can't write yet. And…I'm sorry if you're asking for something else."
Lucy disappeared from his view for a minute, and returned with a pencil and a pad of paper.
"Take it slow, okay? And don't worry if you can't manage it yet. That's okay."
Jellal didn't know what Lucy was so concerned about, but it was starting to make him feel stressed too. All he wanted was to know whether or not Gray was alive. This shouldn't be so hard, and it shouldn't be taking him so long.
Lucy handed him the pencil, and Jellal closed his fingers around it, at least as well as he could. It felt off, so he fumbled it around in his hand a bit, trying to find something that felt more natural. How did he normally hold a pencil? Did his hands always feel this slow and clumsy? Even after a seizure, he didn't think they'd ever been quite this bad.
Jellal was getting frustrated. He'd assumed that writing would be easy - at least, easier than talking. But this was beginning to seem very hard indeed.
Eventually, he just clamped his hand around the pencil as securely as he could. Lucy gave him a piece of paper, looking somehow more worried, and Jellal put the pencil down in the middle of the page.
There. That was good, that was the first step to writing. Yes, his right arm was in a cast, and yes, he couldn't hold the pencil very well, but he was sure he'd be able to get something legible down.
If he could remember how the hell to form letters. Jellal blinked at the page. Even now, as frustrated as he was, he could feel sleep tugging at him every time he closed his eyes. He wrenched them back open, staring down at the paper. He'd never really thought about how to write before, he'd just sat down to do it and it had happened naturally. It was more like breathing, or at least, it had been. Now, he was reaching for the information and finding only blanks where it should have been.
He managed a squiggle. Hopefully, Lucy could tell that it was an angry, desperate squiggle, as opposed to all the other types of squiggles. If she couldn't, Jellal wasn't really sure what else he could do to get his point across.
"Are you…. Let me help you, okay?"
Lucy plucked the pencil out of his hand, which didn't seem very difficult for her. Jellal felt like he'd been using pretty much all his strength to hold it upright, but that probably didn't mean much at the moment.
"I'm just going to try something," Lucy mumbled. Jellal could hear her scribbling on a fresh sheet of paper, which was probably good. At least she wasn't telling him to go back to sleep.
After about thirty seconds, in which he almost did go back to sleep, Lucy leaned back into his field of vision holding a piece of paper. Jellal blinked a few times to focus on it, suddenly afraid that he wouldn't be able to read any more than he'd been able to write.
But then, the shapes on the paper focused into letters, and he relaxed slightly. His brain always took a few hours to fully boot back up after a seizure. This was scary, but it wasn't wholly unfamiliar. Things would just take him a little longer.
Along the top of the paper, Lucy had written the letters of the alphabet. Below that, she had written "yes" and "no." She seemed to be slightly overestimating his fine motor skills, even now - the letters were a little small, and he doubted he'd be able to point. But this…this was a way he could communicate.
He managed a very small nod. Lucy lowered the pad of paper onto the bed, in easy reach of his uninjured hand.
Jellal touched the G with the pad of his index finger. Not completely sure Lucy had understood, he looked up at her.
"G? Was that a G?" she asked excitedly.
Jellal slid his hand down to the yes.
"Alright, keep going. But remember, you can stop at any time, we don't have to do this if you're tired…."
Jellal ignored her. He brushed the R with the tip of his finger.
"Okay, G, R…."
He moved his hand over to the A. His heart was speeding up - he could feel it in his chest, and hear it in the faint beep of the heart monitor too. If this had all been for nothing…Jellal didn't even want to think about that. He couldn't…it must have….
But if everything was alright, why hadn't Lucy already told him? And where was Erza?
"G, R, A…oh, Gray!"
Jellal couldn't breathe.
"I'm so sorry, I forgot you didn't know," Lucy whispered. "He's alright. He's back. You did it."
Jellal had just about gone into another coma when Lucy had started with 'I'm so sorry,' and it took him a minute to really process what she had said.
He's alright. He's back. You did it.
Jellal started dragging his finger across the piece of paper again, Lucy reading the letters aloud as he went. "W…H…R…E? Oh, where? Is that supposed to be where? Where's Gray?"
Jellal tapped the yes.
"They…they had to leave," Lucy said, looking suddenly ashamed. "To go after Magnus. Gray and Natsu, Erza, Wendy. They took Laxus, too. They're…not here. But Gray wrote you a letter."
A letter. A letter from Gray, who was alive. Alive enough to write Jellal a letter. Even though he still felt more dead than alive, and every muscle he had was sore, Jellal couldn't help but smile.
Lucy's face split in a smile too, but this one looked a little wobbly. For a moment, she looked like she was going to cry. "You're really in there, aren't you? You're…still you."
This made absolutely no sense to Jellal, at least at first. He didn't know what Lucy could possibly mean, or why it might be cause for tears. Where was "there?" In the hospital? Surely that much was obvious.
But she was still looking at him with slightly tear glazed eyes, and slowly Jellal began to understand what she meant. Lucy was asking him if he was still Jellal. Maybe that was the sort of thing you were supposed to ask people who'd just come out of comas, but Jellal was pretty sure that the answer to that question was obvious, too. With as much force as he could muster (which wasn't very much), he moved his hand back to yes.
"The doctors thought you might have suffered brain damage," Lucy explained. "From the seizure. Or the magical drain, or both…."
Jellal wished he could roll his eyes. But he couldn't quite remember how to, and even if he could, it felt like that might make the top of his skull split right off. Instead, he moved his hand to no, then tapped it again.
"I'm so glad," Lucy whispered. Now, she really was crying.
Jellal didn't have any way to comfort her, or to stop her. All there was left to do was to let her cry whatever tears she needed to. He didn't mind. Gray was alive. Jellal had succeeded. Everything else, even Erza, could come later. And for now, Jellal thought that it was finally time to give in to sleep.
"Hey. Wake up."
Erza shot awake with a gasp that was muffled by a large hand over her mouth. She glared, considered biting it, and then decided not to give Laxus the satisfaction. Even after being woken up out of a dead sleep, she knew that Laxus was the one who had grabbed her. No one else would dare.
"Release me," she hissed instead, and the hand was taken away from her mouth. "What's going on?"
"Loke is here. Says it's about Jellal."
"What? Did he say what-"
"Shhhhh. No, I don't know what the news is yet. Figured I should wake you."
"The others?"
"I thought they could use the sleep."
There was something just the slightest bit tense in Laxus's voice. The others could use the sleep, that was definitely true. Especially Gray. But…that wasn't it. He wasn't sure if Loke was going to deliver news that Erza wasn't going to like. And he didn't want her to have an audience if that happened.
That made Erza actually wonder if she was about to get bad news, something her half-asleep brain hadn't really processed until then. All of a sudden, it was hard to swallow. She pulled herself to her feet and followed Laxus a little ways away from her makeshift campsite, trying as best as she could not to let her thoughts race until she had more information.
Loke was sitting on the ground, which was in and of itself a little strange, considering he probably hadn't been here for long. He was still wearing his suit, but he looked disheveled - Erza thought his hair was messier than she had ever seen it. There were dark circles beneath his eyes. He was so exhausted-looking that Erza was caught off guard - momentarily distracted from Jellal.
But not for long. She knelt down next to Loke.
"Tell me," she whispered as Loke looked up at her.
"He's awake," Loke said. "Really awake, and he's communicating."
The world seemed to slow down and then speed up again. It had been so long since they'd had a win that Erza had kind of forgotten what it felt like.
"What?"
"I haven't actually seen him awake yet," Loke clarified. "Lucy said he couldn't really talk or write yet, but she figured out a way for him to communicate, at least in a very basic sense. He's still weak, and it'll take him some time to really be normal again, but there doesn't seem to be anything permanently wrong with his brain function."
"Hey, that's great!" Laxus said. He socked Erza on the shoulder. If she had been anyone else, he probably would have knocked her off-balance.
Erza ignored him, with every shred of dignity she could muster. "Loke, do you have any other news?"
"I have a note," Loke said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. "It's from Jellal. For you."
Erza took the paper with suddenly clumsy fingers. She unfolded it, not entirely sure what to expect. Loke had said that Jellal was communicating, but that he couldn't write. She didn't want to get her hopes up.
Even so, Erza felt a stab of disappointment when she opened the note to find a series of misshapen letters, highlighted with a few loopy looking squiggles. It was completely incomprehensible, even considering Jellal's notably terrible handwriting. For a moment, she thought that maybe Loke was wrong, and that Jellal wasn't going to be okay after all. Was this…really supposed to be legible?
"Are you…sure?" she asked, staring at the paper. But before Loke could speak, she'd already answered her own question. She couldn't really tell what the note was trying to say, but she could see something at the top that looked kind of like her own name, and an almost recognizable J where a signature should go. She might not be able to read it, but it was clear that Jellal was making a real attempt to communicate. There was meaning there, even if Erza couldn't translate it.
"If it's for you?" Loke asked. "Yeah. Definitely." With a slightly shaky hand, he pointed to the squiggles at the top of the note. "I'm, uhh…pretty sure those are supposed to be boobs."
Erza frowned at the paper for a few seconds, then turned it upside down. Her eyes widened, and she felt some of the worry actually dissipate. "So they are. He really will be okay."
"Hehe. Nice." Laxus chuckled, peering over her shoulder.
Erza considered telling him off, but she knew that whatever he claimed, he and Jellal were close. For now, she contented herself with a small glare and folded the note, putting it carefully into her pocket.
"Okay," Loke said, taking a deep breath. "Um, I guess I'll head back now. I'll keep going back and forth as long as I can."
"Don't overdo it," Erza told him, finally taking in just how exhausted he looked. "Be careful."
"Yeah, yeah." Loke waved a half-hearted hand. "Okay. Anything else you want me to tell Lucy? Or Jellal?"
"Tell him he's an asshole," Laxus put in. "Just, like, in case that's one of the things he forgot."
"Actually, if you don't mind waiting another minute, I would like to write something for him," Erza said. "Do you have a pencil and paper? I'll be quick."
Loke nodded, and pulled the tools she would need out of his pocket. Erza had written him a letter explaining the situation before she'd left, but that had been when it seemed like he wasn't even close to waking up, and it had frankly been hard for her to imagine him ever actually reading it. Now, she wanted the content of the letter to be rather different. She blushed red as she started writing, but even Loke and Laxus watching her curiously wasn't enough to stop her.
Once she was done, she folded the letter up into a very small square, and handed it solemnly to Loke.
"Do not read this," she said. "Under pain of death. If you so much as peek, I will cut you with my sword."
"I…wasn't planning to peek," Loke said delicately. "But I don't believe he can read yet. Whatever you put in there, Lucy will read aloud to him. You…do realize that, right?"
Erza had not. But no matter. Her husband was suffering, and Erza was far away, and she wasn't about to deprive him of the only kind of comfort she could really provide. Maybe by the time Jellal got the letter, he would be well enough to read it himself.
"Tell her she need not bring the contents up with me after she reads it," Erza said stiffly. Laxus made a sound that could best be described as a giggle, albeit a rather mean one. Loke stuffed the letter in his pocket.
"I'll tell her. I'll be back as soon as I can," he said, and vanished.
Once Loke was gone, Erza turned back to Laxus. "I appreciate you waking me. Now that I am awake anyways, I would be happy to finish out the watch for you."
"Nah, that's fine," Laxus said. "Get some sleep."
"Are you…?"
"I said don't worry about it."
Was Laxus trying to be…kind? That was a little strange, but Erza didn't want to discourage future kindness by being cruel about it now. She nodded, and made her way back to her bedroll to lay down. The whole interaction had taken maybe five minutes. Everyone else in their little group was still fast asleep.
Once Erza was away from Laxus, she reread Jellal's note again. She could see where he'd labored with the pencil, the shaky, unsteady scrawl that reminded her a bit of the few times he'd tried to write too soon after a seizure. He would surely need some time to recover, but he was there, he was still in there, and he was still her Jellal.
To her dismay, she found that there were tears prickling at the corners of her eyes. After everything they'd been through, and all the pain and worry of the last few weeks, it felt a bit stupid to be crying over happy news. Still, the relief was so sharp that it almost hurt, and Erza couldn't quite control herself.
Erza turned over, curling up inside her bedroll so that no one could see her. She clutched Jellal's note to her chest, and that helped her drop off to sleep almost as quickly as if he'd been there with her.
