Work Text:
Erza hated going home for the holidays. The past three years, she had not gone home, instead inviting herself over to her friends’ houses or just spending the holidays alone in her apartment. But her mother became sick and Irene never was one to not milk an illness to convince Erza to do what she wanted. Erza never learned how to say no in the end, did she?
So she’d gone home to her mother’s too-big, too-warm house and cleaned up the place and put up with her mother’s mood swings and grew increasingly upset. And when the tension became too great that it exploded with a screaming match on Christmas Eve, Erza ran out of the house into the snow. Irene stood at the door with a glare that could wipe out an army, but refused to yell, instead ordering Erza to get back here now, you’re not a child anymore, stop acting like one. But Erza ignored her, instead slamming her car door and driving off.
She didn’t know what she expected. For something to be different, maybe. But it wasn’t and there she was, back doing her old high school habit of driving away from her problems. She remembered doing that all throughout high school with Jellal. Jellal got his driver’s license first. It was just a quick text and he would be there with his old pick-up and some stolen booze. He would blast old jazz or rock from his radio, so that there was something else to think about or so, after especially bad fights, she could hide her tears. Eventually, she got her own car and she didn’t have to wait for him, but sometimes she had.
But what does that matter now? Jellal wasn’t in her life anymore, even if the habit started by him was.
She ended up outside a coffeeshop, the only building other than the Chinese restaurants still open. As Erza sat in her car, cold air seeping through her window, she shivered. Small snowflakes, like small glass dots illuminated by the artificial light against the night sky, fell. The cold wetness on the windows of her car did not help and she realized that, for better or worse, she had to go inside or else she’d freeze. Sighing, she picked up her phone and, coatless because she had ran off in a huff, opened the door to the frigid air.
Her fleece-lined leggings did little to brace against the wind. She sprinted to the coffeeshop, opening the door quick as she could, as snow whipped in and the wind slammed the door shut.
There was a lone barista in the brightly lit coffee shop. Her old friend. Former friend. Jellal Fernandes.
Quick as she entered, she wanted to leave. The last thing she felt like doing at that moment was confront the boy who broke her heart. But she supposed he wasn’t a boy anymore -- a man now.
She took a deep breath and decided it doesn’t matter. It’s been seven years. She can pretend nothing happened. She walked up to the counter.
Jellal glanced up from the cash register and did a double take. “Happy Holidays! How may I help you?” he said though, customer service voice present.
Erza smiled thinly. “One peppermint mocha, please.”
He had sloppily dyed blue hair now, but the intricate tattoo over his eye was still the same. His jaw had filled out though and he looked healthy, like he’d been eating. Not so thin.
“Erza?”
She’d zoned out. “Sorry?”
“What size drink?”
“Right. Uh, medium.”
He nodded. He looked like he wanted to say something, his eyes flicking away and back at her incessantly, but instead he followed his work script: “That’ll be $4.86. You can insert or swipe whenever you’re ready.”
Her hand went to her back pocket and found emptiness. She cursed, realizing she left her wallet in her winter coat, which was back at her mother’s house. “I – Do you accept Apple Pay?”
He stared at her pityingly, just a second too long. “No, we don’t have it.”
At that moment, she could cry, but instead, she sighed. “Cancel the order then. I just need somewhere to stay for a little bit.”
He didn’t move, just examined her with his too-observant hazel eyes. She remembered that stare and she hated it and loved it and fuck, she could not deal with this right now.
“It’s on the house,” he eventually said, going through with the transaction. Before she could object, he continued, “We’re about to close in five minutes and if you really need a place to stay, you can sit in here while I close up. My boss isn’t here and I don’t mind someone staying.”
Erza exhaled a small oh in response. Jellal smiled softly again, then turned around to make her mocha. She moved to a small corner table and waited, trying not to get caught in her memories.
It didn’t work.
Jellal looked so similar to how he did in high school and also completely different. He looked well-fed for one, not scrawny with his one meal a day, booze, and cigarette diet. He did not smell like alcohol or sway the way he often had or oscillate between saccharine (Erza, you are so beautiful, I cannot live without you) to irate (why do you leave me, Erza? Why don’t you give a shit about me?) Instead, he acted like a typical service worker, quiet and following a script. He did not match the last time she saw him, eyes rimmed red and behavior manic. If she did not know him as she had in high school, she would have called him serene. She would have called him handsome.
(That’s a lie. Even having known him in high school, she considered him handsome. He has always been beautiful to her.)
“Peppermint mocha,” he called.
She grabbed the mocha.
“How are you?” he asked, as he washed out the metal mug, which had held her drink.
“Alright. Home for the holidays.”
“How’s Irene?”
“She’s … herself.” A pregnant pause. He put the mug away and exited the barista workspace. “How was your holiday?”
“I’m working.” He locked the door to the shop and switched the sign, so that the “CLOSED” was displayed in bold letters. “But I went to Ultear’s house for Christmas Eve and Christmas morning. They let me stay the night.”
“Right.” Erza knew that already – Gray had told her that Jellal and Ultear were still close.
“We’re not dating, by the way. In case you were wondering.”
“I wasn’t,” Erza lied.
“Well, thought I should clarify.”
“What’s the point to this?” Jellal, who had grabbed a rag, didn’t flinch at her sudden question, simply began to wipe down the wooden tables.
“I’m making small talk.”
Erza took a sip of her mocha. “Small talk,” she repeated, something bitter seeping into her voice.
“Yeah. How was university?”
“How’d you know I went?”
“You’re you. You always could do the things I couldn’t.”
“Jellal—”
“I mean I went to community college eventually.”
“There’s nothing wrong with community college.”
“But can you believe I wanted to go to an Ivy? I was supposed to follow you.”
“You could’ve, if—” She couldn’t finish her sentence, but she didn’t need to. Jellal finished it for her.
“If I hadn’t self-medicated my mood disorder through alcoholism?” Her table was the last one and so, in one clean sweep, he wiped it. He did not meet her eyes. “I know. I’m sorry, by the way. For how I treated you.”
“You were ill.”
“I put a lot on you. I’ve regretted– I regret–“ Jellal couldn’t seem to figure out what he wanted to say. He put the rag away on a counter behind the cash register. “I forgot so many important things.”
The conversation made Erza antsy. Remembering her friend spiral brought the pain she had felt then right into the back of her throat. She eventually had had to leave, end their friendship, and he let her. At the time, she didn’t know which hurt worse. She still did not.
“Can we not talk about this?” she asked. “I’m grateful you’re apologizing, but it’s been a rough day.”
Jellal nodded and sat down in front of her. She sipped her mocha again. He distractedly eyed her lips and the way she tossed her hair over her shoulder. He was looking at her the same way he did in high school. That look accompanied so much: their first kiss, the way they fell into bed when they snuck off alone during Gray’s birthday party, how he had eyed the skin of her collarbone and undressed her, her fingers trailing over the red of his tattoo and him kissing her palm. One of their last happy memories together and it was of them making love.
She had wished for so long that she could forget him; but here he was again and she remembered once more, the good and the bad.
Erza twirled a strand of hair between her fingers.
“You haven’t dyed your hair,” he said. She used to say she wanted to change her hair, dye it black or bleach it. Erza looked so much like her mother, it made her uncomfortable.
“I couldn’t,” she replied. Because you like it, she thought. Because I was never truly angry at you.
“How are things? Really?”
Erza shook her head. “I’m in a coffeeshop on Christmas with no winter coat or wallet after being at home for the holidays for the first time in three years.”
“Argument with Irene?”
“Isn’t it always that?”
“Not always.” They stared at each other, long and hard. “Do you want to go to Winter Nights?” Winter Nights was the holiday name of a neighborhood that always put up extravagant Christmas lights.
“I don’t have a coat.”
“I can lend you mine.”
“And your car?”
Jellal grimaced. “Broke down. ‘tear dropped me off and I was going to walk back to my apartment.”
“It’s nearby?”
“It’s near enough. You don’t have to come with me to Winter Nights, especially since you’d be driving.”
Erza knew that some of her friends would tell her to not reopen this old wound, to not reengage with the boy who broke her heart. But Jellal seemed different now. Erza didn’t know if she minded the man he was now. “I’d like to go,” she said. “It’d be a good distraction.”
Jellal smiled, soft and relieved. “Let me sweep and mop the floor then and I’ll be ready to go.”
She watched him do that, as she finished the creamy mocha. She watched him methodically clean the coffeeshop floor, the way the muscles in his arms and back shifted with each new motion. The repetitive sound of each sweep of the broom and then, each swirl of the mop was soothing in its own way, as well as Jellal’s presence. Erza remembered why she enjoyed being around him.
It was almost the New Year. Perhaps this meeting was fateful. A chance at new beginnings.
But at that moment, there wasn’t a need for fate. Not really. Amidst the outside snowstorm and internal blizzard of her own after-argument thoughts, she needed only the companionship and quiet refuge of Jellal’s coffeeshop.