Fairytale of Doom
By CrimsonStarbird
Chapter Twenty-Three – Darkness Inside
Erza… was lost.
Which was only to be expected, given that she was in a strange world far from home. The road signs insisted on referring to villages with incomprehensible names rather than something useful like 'fairytale castle' or 'army encampment'. Not to mention the fact that, thanks to the mix-up between Mulan and Beauty and the Beast upon their arrival, Erza hadn't even been in the right story to begin with…
Except none of that was the reason for her current predicament, and Erza knew it.
She was riding aimlessly through this random village in the midday heat all because she had stormed out of the imperial palace without stopping to ask for directions.
And she couldn't exactly turn around and go back for a map. Not after the way she'd left.
It was stupid and it was childish, making a mistake and being too proud to own up to it. It was exactly the kind of thing for which she would berate the rest of her team, such as when they'd rushed off to Galuna Island without thinking, or when Natsu had gone to face Zeref on his own.
But it turned out that she could be stupid and childish, too.
She didn't know what it was about Laxus that made her so angry.
It wasn't as though she had anything against him, not really. The Battle of Fairy Tail was surely water under the bridge by now. Magic or no magic, she acknowledged his power. Many victories against the Tartaros demons and the Spriggan Twelve wouldn't have been possible without him.
But.
But.
She would not be told what to do by a man who had stood there and done nothing.
He could have held the guild together when Makarov disbanded it, and he'd let it fall apart. She was the one who had stepped up to be Seventh Master, not him. He hadn't even been there. So many others had returned to the guild for the reunion, but he had only showed up after Cana and the others had personally gone to fetch him. If they hadn't, maybe he wouldn't have bothered coming back at all, or drifted back only when the war was over and things were good again.
He'd had more chances than anyone. More chances than some might say he deserved, after what he had put the guild through.
And he still had the nerve to lecture her on what she could and couldn't do.
Erza wasn't a fool. She knew full well that her desperate pursuit of Shan Yu only had the slightest chance of getting them out of this world.
But she didn't know what else to do.
Levy – who knew infinitely more than any of them about stories, and the magic inherent within a world of words – had advised Erza, right back at the start, to get to the end of her story. That was all she had to go on. And yet hour by hour that ending was getting further and further away, and she didn't know how to get things back on track.
She knew no more about this world than Laxus did, but they couldn't all take a back seat like him, quick to criticize her decisions but slow to offer any ideas of his own. So she kept ploughing on regardless, because doing something was better than doing nothing, and at least this way she had a chance of finding her friends – or some answers.
Someone had to make a decision. Someone had to take responsibility. And it clearly wasn't going to be Laxus.
It irked her. Irritation kept her riding onwards; pride held her tall in the saddle. Perhaps he'd see it and realize how he ought to be behaving: fearless, resolute, someone in whom the people of this world and her scattered friends alike could put their faith. What they needed right now wasn't someone who lurked in passive, snarky negativity. They needed someone to take action.
Her broken arm wouldn't slow her down any more than her lack of magic. She didn't need to turn around. It was more important that she pressed onwards to her goal, for all those who were relying on her. How hard could it be to find a massive army in a backwards country like this?
Harder than she'd expected, apparently. She'd tried to ask the townsfolk for directions, but they scattered when they saw her. Honestly. If they thought a woman wearing armour and mounted on horseback was a strange sight, they should try living in a town with a mage guild.
But her frustration was rising, and the sun was beating down, and she couldn't Requip to change her armour into something more weather-appropriate, and…
And she would never admit it out loud, but her arm hurt.
She must have jostled it on her flight from the palace. Or maybe her hard ride to the palace. Or maybe she had just never set it right in the first place, between the avalanche and her urgency to keep on the move.
It wasn't just the pain. She could deal with that. But her body kept stubbornly insisting that something was wrong, and that it was only getting more wrong with every metre she rode. Perhaps, in a world without magic, she had overestimated her own endurance.
Anger had driven her this far, but she should have known better than to draw her strength from negative emotions.
The first time she fell, she managed to catch herself. Her left hand was iron around the reins; the horse whinnied its displeasure at the unexpected force. Her head was banging in sympathy with the pain throbbing through her broken arm, and between the two opposing pressures squeezing and pounding she could barely find a moment to suck in a breath.
All the weight of her body lay in her unresponsive arm. Her head felt light enough to blow away. Though she tried to grip tighter around her horse with her legs, there was no strength in them. She couldn't remember when she had last eaten or drunk. She didn't know why she hadn't thought of that earlier, or why her stupid brain had decided to think about it now, as another wave of dizziness hit and she needed all her focus to stay upright.
She tried to grasp the reins again, but couldn't feel them at all. Was she still holding on? Had her traitorous fingers already let go?
She didn't know if it was the fall that knocked her out, or if she had fallen because she was already unconscious.
Briefly, she came round to the dim understanding that she was on the ground, surrounded by a cluster of shadows that spoke in unfamiliar voices.
"Isn't that-?"
"She's finally back!"
"Someone fetch Gaston!"
The sound of footsteps pounding through the earth beside her reminded her head that it was supposed to be aching. It promptly resumed its duties, and, cursing her own weakness, she blacked out once more.
Juvia was not convinced that Gajeel knew where he was going.
Yes, alright, it had been a bit tricky to keep track when they'd been trussed up by the irate furniture and thrown into the castle's prison, but Juvia was sure they shouldn't be going this far down. The alcoves here were dusty; the brass candlesticks were bereft of wax and life alike. Tattered curtains hung across windows so tightly shuttered that she must have been imagining the faint light that filtered through.
The grand hall had sparkled, and the dining room had been glorious – as one might expect from a castle where the furnishings could clean themselves – and this felt like the counterbalance, the other side of the coin, the shadow that guests were never meant to see. In a castle that was otherwise so full of life, this hallway of ripped portraits and broken furniture felt like a graveyard.
Worst of all was the feeling that Juvia had been here before.
Between arriving by nightfall and being hastily ushered in through the servants' entrance in the morning, neither she nor Gajeel had got a good look at the outside of the castle. They'd only glimpsed spires, gargoyles, gothic architecture in all its night-draped glory – enough to remind them that they were truly in a fantasy world.
But there was something slightly off about it, and the further they travelled from the dining room, the stronger that feeling became: a half-remembered nightmare; a whisper she couldn't quite make out; a creeping dread that melted back into the walls whenever she turned around.
She couldn't quite put her finger on it, and she wasn't sure that she wanted to.
She tapped Gajeel on the shoulder.
"What?" he huffed, turning round. "Yer the one who wanted me ta go and apologize as soon as possible, Juve!"
She did, but… but something wasn't right here. There was more to this castle than they'd bargained for – something sinister, to counteract the delight of the singing furniture. Wasn't that true of all the mostly forgotten stories she'd heard growing up: that great good and terrible evil were never far apart; that magic had consequences?
Hastily unfolding her scrap paper, she tried to find a blank space for her next message. This isn't the right way. Let's retrace our steps back to the cells and wait for Lumière and the others to let us out.
Hoping that his draconic eyesight was better than hers in the gloom, she held it up for Gajeel to read.
But Gajeel was nowhere to be seen.
She tried to shout his name, but no sound came out.
She turned her head frantically left and right, trying to catch a glimpse of movement. There was no door closing in the distance. The shadows were too shallow to hide a bulky Dragon Slayer. There was nothing but this run-down corridor in both directions.
Once again, she tried to call for him and couldn't. The walls of her own silence pressed in around her.
Stupid Gajeel, she thought. Running off and leaving Juvia alone in a place like this…
Except, that wasn't like Gajeel at all. In Phantom Lord, they had always been looking out for each other – a glance to check the other was keeping up, a spare bandage smuggled in under their former Master's nose, a worry about the other's future following the destruction of their guild that only faded when they were both together again. Fairy Tail was a welcoming family, a safe place, a home where they had no need to watch each other's backs and hide all signs of weakness, and they'd drifted apart in that peaceful lagoon… but the Gajeel who teased her for her silence and yet had come up with a way for her to communicate, who was on his way to apologize to a talking clock all because she had told him to – that was the Black Steel Gajeel who had formed a partnership of survival with the Rain Woman, an accord which had known better than to label itself friendship but had ended up there nonetheless, and he would never abandon her.
Something was very, very wrong here.
She swallowed. She thought about going back, but she no longer had any faith that walking back down this corridor would return her to where she started. Besides, if Gajeel was facing the same choice in some other shadowy corridor, he wouldn't go back.
Onwards, then, into the laughing shadows.
Cautiously, she wove her way between the heaps of ruined furniture that changed shape between glances, and the velvet drapes torn into a mockery of monstrous faces. Her footsteps were far too loud for a woman who had been silenced.
The corridor ended in a pair of grand doors. Ethereal silver moonlight danced across them. The fact that it should have been mid-morning had ceased to matter some time ago; she doubted the world beyond those slashed curtains and nailed-up windows was the same one she'd left. With nothing else for it, she put her palms flat upon the doors and gave a push.
They swung open easily. And in the room beyond… was darkness.
But it was a darkness unlike any she had ever seen before. This was a ravenous absence of light, consuming shape and form and reason. Maybe it filled a meter square, or maybe it was infinite, a borderless dark with nothing to restrain it. It swallowed the grey half-light from the corridor – and then kept growing, pouring out from those opened doors, washing away walls and ceiling and the wrong sky beyond until there was only her: blind, shapeless, and silent, in a world of absolutely nothing.
She opened her mouth to try and shout, but it was someone else's voice she heard.
"I wish I had yer resilience, Juve."
She froze. That was Gajeel's voice.
There was still nothing to be seen but nothingness itself.
"You've got a goal."
She didn't dare to breathe. That was exactly what Gajeel had said to her within the prison cell, a confession that none except him and her had heard. But even though his words had been insensitive, she couldn't recall him sounding so… mocking.
Gajeel's words. But not Gajeel himself.
"You know exactly what it is: yer gonna win Ice Stripper over," the echo persisted. "No compromises, no hedgin', no matter how many times yer knocked back – ya won't give up on it."
At her side, her fist clenched uselessly.
"After all," the voice continued, and it wasn't Gajeel's any more. No, it had shifted to a voice she knew better than any other, at once smoother and more jagged, far too cool for something that had lit fires in her since she'd first heard it. "You have to keep trying, even though you know you'll never succeed."
How dare it steal her dear Gray's voice? Pivoting, she lashed out at the source of the sound, but her fist sailed harmlessly through the darkness, and her magic failed to come.
This time, the laugh sounded from behind her. "Look at you," Gray's voice mused. No matter how she turned, it was always right over her shoulder, always out of reach. "So possessive, so quick to turn to violence. Are you sure that's the right guild mark you're wearing, Phantom girl?"
Juvia is a Fairy Tail mage! Juvia wanted to shout. The guild accepted her as one of them long ago!
She wanted to shout it.
The fact that she had traded her voice away to the sea-witch wasn't the only reason why she didn't.
"Ah. You're not sure, are you?" She'd heard such smugness in Gray's voice before, but only ever towards Natsu in the moments before the insults they traded became blows, and never any deeper than the fondness it hid. There was no fondness in this void. "I don't blame you. You spent a long, long time in that darkness. One day without rain was never going to be enough to dry up that oily well of it in your soul."
So absolute was the night around her that she could not tell if the memories flashed only through her mind's eye, or if they were spun across the nothingness for all the shadows to see. Picking locks, sneaking through the castle grounds, threatening the animated furniture – sure, she'd stopped Gajeel from breaking in, but it hadn't even occurred to her to knock on the castle doors and ask Lumière and the others for help. Gajeel had swiped Gaston's wallet without remorse, and even before they'd known he was a jerk, she hadn't raised any more than a token objection; certainly she hadn't made him return it when they'd fled.
Gajeel had got it right in his throwaway comment: we've done worse.
They had. Both of them. So much worse that it took a concerted effort for her to bat an eyelid at theft and brawling and breaking-and-entering. Teamwork and problem-solving hadn't exactly featured in Phantom Lord's version of the S-Class Trials.
But it was behind her, now. All of it. With her new guild's help, she had changed. She had become someone who stood up for the weak and defended her guildmates without hesitation. These formless words, these empty shadows, they held no sway over her. Not any more.
"Of course," that disembodied voice assured her. "After all, someone so driven by love must be a good person, mustn't they?"
Ice closed around her heart. It flailed, once, and then stopped trying to beat entirely. She'd come to adore the cold almost as much as she did the man who made it – the astounding beauty that arose when her and Gray's magic combined – and yet these words still had the power to chill her to the core.
Her dear Gray had shown her such mercy when they'd fought, but this voice didn't know the meaning of the word. "It's not about you or me; unrequited love or your… resilience in its pursuit." He mocked the quality Gajeel had professed to admire. "It's simple, really. Master Jose demanded that you be heartless. Therefore, you can prove you're no longer his Rain Woman by letting your so-called love for me dictate your entire character. You cling to me to prove you've changed."
No! Juvia tried to scream. Juvia truly loves her dear Gray! She is determined to win Gray's heart, the real Gray, so that they can live happily ever after-
"No, you're not." The cold amusement drained the feeling from her limbs. "On multiple occasions now, I have told you what I like and don't like. If you truly wanted to win me over, you would listen. There have been times when I could see it working out between us – times when you stepped back and provided unintrusive support when I needed it the most, and I thought I'd seen a side of you that I could fall in love with. But you never let that side show for long. Soon enough, you're right back to your over-the-top, possessive, humiliating antics, as though you're actively trying to push me away."
So numb was her body now that she wouldn't have noticed even if her flailing limbs had been making contact with the unseen speaker. She had to stop these lies. She had to.
And yet she had no voice with which to defend herself. No way of arguing back.
Almost thoughtfully, the voice mused, "Well, maybe you are trying to push me away. After all, it doesn't matter if I love you back or not. What matters is that the people you are hoping to impress see you try to win me over. You've carved out a new role for yourself as the goofy, hopelessly-in-love Fairy Tail mage so that no one will dig any deeper, and realize that you've never stopped being that selfish, cruel woman deep inside."
A silent sob escaped her. It wasn't true, it wasn't, she loved her dear Gray from the bottom of her heart…
So why did she never listen when he asked her to stop?
Why had she not taken his rejection after the Grand Magic Games as a prompt to reflect upon her actions and decide who she wanted to be going forwards, rather than redoubling her existing efforts?
"Because it's never been about me, not really," Gray's voice answered. "It has always been about you, and your attempt to prove that you are something you're not. I just happened to be a convenient target around which you could build your new image."
The voice gave a chuckle so chilling that the darkness seemed to shake against her skin. "I am in awe of the lengths to which you've gone. To think that you are so desperate to cut all ties with your past that you'd rather be seen as a foolish, shallow, gimmicky side-character than a real person. And to think that you thought it would make your guildmates like you more!"
The darkness was laughing, now, laughing in the voice of the man she- she did love, regardless of what it claimed!
"They see you as pathetic. Needy. Desperate. They tolerate you at best, each of them secretly glad that they are not the object of your affections. Do you think it was a coincidence that you were cast as the princess with no voice? Fairytale magic grants the wishes of the deserving – and thus your friends, who have patiently tolerated your selfish obsession, no longer have to listen to you obsess over the target of your affections. Haven't you noticed how Gajeel hasn't wanted to associate with you for months, and yet as soon as you cannot speak, he's suddenly happy to travel with you again?"
No. She couldn't listen to this. She was running now, or at least she thought she was, no feeling in her feet and no change in the darkness around her.
Laughter brushed like cobwebs around her fingertips. "You can't even love properly," it taunted. "Failure of a princess, failure of a hero, no wonder your feelings will never be returned-"
A light smashed through the darkness. Her eyelids automatically slammed shut against the brightness of it. Instinct kept driving her forward, but the light had reminded the world to exist; she was stumbling, falling, colliding with a rough carpet that didn't do enough to soften the stone beneath.
The laughter continued, but it was no longer the only sound in her ears. Over that mocking fantasy she could hear the coarse voice of reality, and-
"Goddammit! Ain't no rose gettin' the better of Black Steel Gajeel!"
And it appeared to be shouting at a flower.
She forced her eyes open, squinting towards the brightness. A muscular silhouette was wrestling with what looked like a bell jar, pushing back against the light as though it were a physical force. The closer he brought it to the source, the more the light dimmed, until at last, with a gargantuan effort, he slammed the bell jar down on the pedestal.
At once, the world righted itself. The alien laughter cut off as though it had never existed. Her body ached, but even that felt normal, like she had merely tripped and fallen on this ordinary stretch of carpet.
With shaking arms, she pulled herself into a sitting position. Now that the darkness had retreated, this room looked like any other in this part of the castle – furniture abused and abandoned, ragged tapestries hinting at secret passageways behind, walls not quite perpendicular and windows just a little slanted, but no longer moving, no longer alive. Daylight nudged at the edges of the curtains. Over her shoulder, she could see the double doors she had pushed open, unwittingly unleashing something sinister.
In the centre of the room, Gajeel was breathing heavily, one arm looped over the bell jar. Whether it was to hold the glass down or hold himself up, she wasn't sure.
Behind the glass hovered a single rose. Though its petals were as pink as the sky before dawn, and the stem as vibrant as the first growth of spring, the light it radiated was nothing short of malevolent, as if everything wrong with this place was somehow concentrated within it.
Lumière hopped back and forth in front of it anxiously, wiping melted wax from his brow. Behind him, Cogsworth had his stubby arms folded. "I know it has been acting up recently, but still! The sealing jar has never failed to hold it before…"
"What is this thing?" Gajeel grunted, giving the rose his evillest eye.
"Ze source of ze curse afflicting zis castle," Lumière explained.
"What curse?"
"Surely you didn't think it was normal for a castle to have talking furniture?" Cogsworth sounded personally offended by the insinuation. Gajeel just shrugged, and Juvia couldn't blame him; they'd seen far weirder things on their travels. "We all used to be human, until the Master antagonized an enchantress. She transformed him into a hideous beast, and we were trapped in these forms. This rose is the manifestation of that curse. It… warps things."
Suddenly, the clock hopped closer to Gajeel, shaking one brass flipper in his face. "This is why we tell our guests to stay away from the West Wing!"
"You never said nothin' about no West Wing," Gajeel huffed. "Don't tell me, you've got a song for that too?"
"Oh, uh, well, we would have told you if you were being a proper guest and enjoying the entertainment we put on for you," Cogsworth blustered. "Besides, I do believe you are supposed to be in the dungeons-"
Gajeel gave a loud cough and turned to Juvia. "You okay, Juve?"
Though his delay in checking on her may have seemed rude, giving her a chance to pull herself together and put her walls back in place was the height of Phantom Lord etiquette. The way he breezed through the words – downplaying the question, and therefore the consequence of her response – contained far more thought than it might have appeared to an outsider.
Her lips moved, though she couldn't speak to him, and neither nodding nor shaking her head would express the right answer.
After a moment, he strode over and helped her to her feet. "S'alright now," he said. "None of it was real. It was just that evil flower."
Was it, though? That seemed too sinister for a fairytale, even one where the household staff had apparently been punished for their Master's rudeness with a curse far worse than his own. Now that she could think clearly again, without the veil of fear obscuring her senses, she knew why she had felt a strange sense of familiarity when they had been wandering through the corridors: this place reminded her of the Tower of Heaven.
It bore the same sense of artful ruin, of torment woven into the very brickwork. Peeling wallpaper left blasphemous sigils on the plaster that, in another world, might have held the power to bring a fallen villain back to life, had he ever been dead in the first place. At the end of the chamber, behind the glowing rose in its jar, the dark tapestry did not depict a scene from a fairytale, but the dripping red eye that the cult had used as their emblem. When all else in the room had fallen still, the tapestry had continued to flutter, as if there was something behind it trying to escape.
She suspected that she and her friends weren't the only things that had been pulled into this world. Fragments of their pasts and presents, the locations that had defined their stories before the fairytale narratives had taken over, had come with them, merging with what had probably been a beautiful castle in its original form.
For the Tower of Heaven to have left such an impression upon this world, Erza must be here too, and that could only be a good thing. Enough for Juvia to try and brush off what the enchanted rose – twisted by the legacy of the Tower, and perhaps more – had done to her.
Then the implications of what Gajeel had said hit her.
None of it was real. How would he know that unless he had seen the whole thing?
All of a sudden, she noticed that Gajeel wasn't meeting her gaze. Her expression of horror asked the question in place of her absent voice.
"Uh, yeah. I dunno why it was only affectin' you, Juve. When I got here, you were thrashin' around blindly. Ol' Clockface there blamed the glowy rose and told me ta get it back in the jar, but as soon as I touched it, I could suddenly hear that fake Ice Stripper voice spoutin' a load of nonsense at you. It stopped once we got the jar back over it, though."
Biting back the whole waterfall of humiliating implications, Juvia focussed on bowing in gratitude to Cogsworth and Lumière. She couldn't thank them out loud, but it seemed they got the message.
"Always a pleasure to help a beauty like yourself," Lumière assured her grandly.
Cogsworth gave a pointed cough. "Besides, tone deaf or otherwise, you are still our guests. It would reflect poorly upon the Master of the castle if you came to harm under our watch. So, I must insist that you stay away from the West Wing in the future."
Juvia nodded. Still searching for something to distract her from the implications, she scrawled a question onto her paper: why did you disappear?
"Oh, right." At least Gajeel had the decency to look ashamed. "I saw somethin' I figured you'd like in the wreckage. Wanted it to be a surprise. But when I looked round, I couldn't find ya. Must've been that wicked rose's influence."
Curious, Juvia tapped a question mark already written on the page.
"Gehehe." With a grin, Gajeel whipped out from his pocket a small silver harmonica. "Ta da!"
Juvia's pen did not move from the question mark.
"Well, you can't talk, but you can still blow air, right?" he explained impatiently. "So I figured, if you had this, we could come up with some sort of code to communicate! Like, if you want to attract my attention, you can play a G for Gajeel. Or, I dunno, if you're hungry or somethin', you can play an E for Eat. Might be easier."
That… was actually quite a good idea, if they could come up with a more practical meaning for each note. She took the instrument from him. It had been a while since she'd played, but travelling with Gajeel had acquainted her with all manner of musical instruments, usually against her will. It would come back to her.
"Don't worry," he added. "I grabbed it from this part of the castle, so it ain't alive."
Juvia spat the harmonica out.
"I said it ain't!" he protested, at her glare. "Plus, the harmonica goes great with an acoustic guitar. With this, we can definitely put Candlestick and his singin' plates in their place durin' our lunchtime recital!"
As Lumière and Cogsworth erupted into a flurry of protests, Juvia smiled, her fingers curling around the instrument. Gajeel's thoughtfulness was touching. She had lost her voice in this world, but with that warm silver bar in her hand, she felt as though, at least in part, she'd been given it back.
And just in the nick of time as well, since Gajeel and the talking furniture were about to descend into an all-out brawl over the sanctity of music.
Raising the harmonica to her lips, she blew what she hoped was an E. The volume certainly did the trick, with all parties breaking off their squabble at once, and she adjusted the harmonica and blew again. That sounded better.
"Uh," said Gajeel. "So that one meant…"
She rolled her eyes. What was the point of having a code if he was going to immediately forget it?
She pointed to her stomach, and his expression cleared. "Oh, you're hungry!"
Nodding, Juvia gestured to Cogsworth and Lumière. The Dragon Slayer duly turned to the animated objects. "Any chance of somethin' to eat? Since we're technically still yer guests and all…"
They exchanged glances. "If you promise us that you won't start singing," Cogsworth said begrudgingly.
"Same to you!" Gajeel retorted.
They glared at each other.
"Oh, alright," sighed Cogsworth. "Let us leave this rose and the misery it symbolizes behind, and take heart in good company elsewhere. Come along, Lumière! We shall prove that we do not need a musical number to be gracious hosts!"
As they all filed out of the castle's abandoned wing, Juvia couldn't help casting a glance over her shoulder at the tainted rose. It was beautiful, for such a needlessly dangerous thing. Under her gaze, she could have sworn it shone a little brighter, its humming quietened but not quite silenced by the jar.
"Ignore it, Juve."
She shot a sharp glance at Gajeel, who stood in the doorway, arms folded and eyes narrowed to crimson slits. "It's just messin' with ya. What does a damn flower know anyway? I ain't stupid enough to believe a word it said."
He said it with such confidence, as if nothing in the world could matter without his say-so.
She appreciated it. Really, she did.
Still, as she followed them back into the happy fairytale part of the castle, one thought remained in its dark depths. Did it matter that Gajeel didn't believe the cursed rose's words, when she did?
A/N: Thanks for waiting everyone, I'm back! (Well, I'm still out of the country, but I'm back with my laptop at least.) There will be a chapter next weekend but I'm not quite sure what day or time, since I'm getting home and then immediately heading off again. But we're almost at the part of the story where all the characters are together again, and I'm looking forward to getting there! ~CS