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Grief, Gray had discovered, was far colder than ice.
It had the power to slice deep, leaving no external wound, while spilling open everything inside you into a gaping wound from which all hope and joy would bleed. It could leech away the slightest flicker of life and warmth, and wall off the future.
He’d thought that he’d known grief, had carried it as a familiar friend and enemy for so long after his parents, after Ur…after Tartarus and Silver. It had been a scar, healed but prone to aching in the right circumstances, a flicker of pain that he was never truly free from, but bearable. This grief was different, and not just because it was raw and fresh, and eating him up from inside out as he went through the motions of life at the guild, always one step out of pace with the world around him.
This was a grief that he couldn’t bear. A weight crushing him a little more every day. A wound that refused to knit shut, even as days became weeks, became months. Erza and the others had rallied around him, trying to ease the burden of grief, even as they wrestled with their own, and some distant part of him loved them for it. Loved them for staying by his side, even as he went through life as little more than a ghost. He couldn’t smile, even when old banter began to seep back in. He couldn’t let them close enough to hug him, because even that gentle warmth was enough to trigger memories of…him. He couldn’t reminisce with them, because the moment he tried to give voice to the life he had shared with Natsu through rivalry and friendship and more, his words turned to dust, and his throat closed.
“It’s okay if you’re not ready,” Erza murmured, one hand resting next to his on the table. It was clear that she was itching to reach out and touch, to soothe and comfort; but she had learned not to that. He blinked at her, a silent acknowledgement of her words. All that he could give her in that moment. Because it wasn’t a case of being ready… and even if it was, then he was never going to reach that point. That there was no way for him to find his way back to stable ground without the Dragon-slayer at his side? How could he tell her that two of them had died that day? That he lived and breathed and survived, was an afront to fate.
How could he tell her that he couldn’t live without Natsu…?
“Gray…” She was studying him now, eyes narrowed. In the past, it was a look that would have sent both him and Natsu onto their knees and confessing whatever plots had been brewing. Now, it was a spear that hit the ice encasing his heart and soul and bouncing off. There was nothing she could threaten him with now that could hurt half as much as the empty, cold seat beside him, that no one dared to take, as though they all felt the burning spirit lingering as much as Gray did. “…Natsu wanted you to live.”
Natsu wanted you to live.
Those words did penetrate the ice, but not with the comfort she had most likely intended. Instead, they were knives, wrapped in ice, that sliced deeper into his already tattered heart. The truth always did hurt. He knew that Natsu had wanted him to live, had heard it from bloody lips in those desperate, final moments as he’d realised that the Dragon-slayer had sacrificed himself for him. It’s not that simple, he wanted to say her, but his voice was still lost to him, and he merely bowed his head, letting her take it as agreement.
“I know he wanted me to live…but I need him to live too.”
That conversation, if it could even be called that had been the push he had needed. And from that moment on he had cloistered himself in the library, digging through old tomes and scrolls, and even travelling to Era and Crocus in search of more information. He refused to tell the others what he was looking for, even going so far as to carefully replace everything he took right where he found it after he caught Erza and Lucy interrogating Levy.
It took time. The answers he wanted weren’t written in plain sight, and he felt like he was collecting pieces of a puzzle. A line in one book. A throwaway mention in another. A rumour. A map. A fruitless journey. More hints. A riddle. A job that ended in failure.
The ice lingered, and he retreated further into its depths. As the months became a year since the Dragon-slayer had died. He knew he was worrying everyone. Had lost count of the number of interventions from his friends, from the Master… hell even Porlyusica at Makarov’s insistence had tried to get through to him, although that had been a short and less than sweet attempt that had ended with her proclaiming that he stank of ‘death’, which bizarrely had made him feel better, as though he was one step closer to Natsu.
Then the letter arrived. Innocuous apart from the seal on the front, of crossed keys over a skull. There had been a crack in the ice then, a sliver of memory threatening to be his undoing; but his hands had been steady as he’d snatched the letter away from prying eyes, careful to keep the seal out of sight.
Inside it offered hope…
Life…
At a terrible cost.
Gray didn’t hesitate. The scales had been unbalanced from the moment Natsu had breathed his last in his arms, the weight of that lost all-consuming in comparison to the losses he’d survived before. He’d slipped away in the dead of night – some irony in that, but it was lost to him, as he stole away before Erza and the others could realise, he was gone, because the last rational part of him knew that they would stop him. That for all their grief over Natsu, they wouldn’t be willing to follow this path. He understood, even as he hated them for it… and hated himself more for being willing to go so far.
Natsu would want you to live.
At least he was going to honour that.
**
Salvation came in the form of a small cottage crouched in the furthest depths of Fiore, hidden from all but those who knew it’s secret by dense, deadwood and paths that were constantly rewriting themselves. The ‘heart of death’ the letter had described it as, and Gray understood why as he wound his way through ancient, rotting trees, following paths that seemed to pulsate with bloody veins where the tree roots crossed his path. There was a shadow beneath the leafless boughs that made it feel as though he had walked into the midnight hour; and by the time he finally happened upon the dwelling, it felt like he had fallen into the centre of the world. No starfire or moonlight reached him here, and it was touch more than anything that guided him to the knocker shaped liked crossed keys over a skull on the door.
He knocked three times, as the letter had instructed and after a heavy pause, the door had swung open soundlessly. The room beyond had been dimly lit with flickering green candlelight, giving it an eerie countenance, and the Ice Mage resolutely ignored the way the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end and stepped inside.
Natsu, forgive me for this…
The door swung shut beside him, and the candles all flared crimson for a minute; and in the flash of light he saw that the floor beneath his feet was as veined as the path that had led him here, although no roots and trees grew here, and he followed the pattern to a circle etched in the middle of the room. He couldn’t read the symbols carved into the ground, but the press of death was everywhere and the urge to turn tail and flee was rising with the minute, with nausea building in the back of his throat.
It felt wrong to be here.
It was wrong to be here.
“You came…” The voice came from everywhere and nowhere at once, the crimson veins pulsing with each word, and Gray shivered but straightened.
“You said you can bring him back.” Not a question. Not a plea, even though part of him wanted to fall to his knees and scream and beg for the Dragon-slayer to be returned to him. No, it was a demand. A refusal to believe that he could have come this far, be stood surrounded by so much wrongness and have this last desperate hope stolen from him.
“I can… if you are willing to pay the price discussed?”
“I am.”
“Then step into circle.” Gray obeyed, nausea building and building as the crimson pulsed and stayed bright as he moved into the middle. “Did you bring an artifact of your loved one?”
“Yes,” Gray breathed deeply, and reached for the scarf around his neck. He hadn’t removed it once in the months since Natsu’s death, and he had never once cast it away with the rest of his clothes. It was a weight, a reminder, a memorial writ in blood-stained cloth. “This… he carried it everywhere.”
“Excellent.”
Shadow curled at the edge of his vision, tendrils reaching out from the darkness and encircling the circle that the Ice Mage occupied, until he could see nothing beyond the boundary of signals. “Hold it out and fill your mind with thoughts of your loved one.”
Gray obeyed.
It was so easy to bring up memories of Natsu. Silly little moments, bickering over the stupidest things, trying to outdo one another first as kids, and then as friends and later as lovers, falling about laughing at the ridiculousness of it… before promptly punching one another again. He remembered the grand moments – Galuna Island and the sheer terror that had been the moment he had realised the Dragon-slayer was more than a friend as the idiot had faced down Deliora. Hearing Natsu’s voice echoing across Crocus as the world seemed fit to fall apart around them, and Gray hadn’t even been a Dragon-slayer, but hearing his partner’s roar had bolstered him like nothing else could. To the sheer hope and faith that Natsu would prevail in the fight against the Celestial King.
Quiet moments early in the morning, where fire and ice had found an equilibrium, and they would wake coiled around one another. Kisses, hot and cold. Gentle touches and heated ones. Comfort when the nightmares stalked their sleep, or when memories crept into everyday moments. Laughter. Happiness. Argument. Tears. Contentment. Infuriation. There were so many emotions wrapped up with every moment spent with Natsu, and it hadn’t been enough. Perhaps no time would ever be enough, but Natsu’s life had been cut shut… their life had been cut short.
“Yesss….” The voice all but purred, and there was that pang of wrongness and the urge to flee again. But Gray was so close to what he wanted that he could almost hear Natsu’s voice, and spell the cinnamon, campfire scent that had accompanied every moment they were together. “And … your offering?”
“My magic,” Gray whispered, unfaltering but daunted by the closeness of all this. They had bartered back and forth in the letters. It had to balance the scales he had been told. It had to be something he held as close as the loved one… memories had been suggested, but Gray hadn’t come this far to forget the very person he was fighting to bring back to life. Years of his life had been another, but he couldn’t do to Natsu what had been done to him, the loss festering in his chest.
But his magic…
His magic had shaped him, had allowed him to resolve his past. Had led him to Fairy Tail and Natsu, had allowed them to fight together and win time after time. His magic that he loved, that he held as close as breathing, but not as close as he held the Dragon-slayer.
“So shall it be…”
They might have said something else, but if so, it was lost to Gray, as the circle blazed crimson and pain lanced through him. It felt like a thousand tiny hooks had settled beneath his skin, clinging to something more than flesh and muscle and bone, biting deep, and then yanking. He screamed, clawing at the scarf in his hands. He was being torn apart from the inside out. Coming undone at the seams. The ice was leaving him. His skin crystallising with it, and where the cold had never bothered him before, now it burned him, scorching him in a way not even Natsu’s fire ever had. Feverish heat pressed against him. Until it felt like he was embraced in an inferno.
He was weeping, begging for it to end… crying for Natsu. For his magic. For what was being lost, and what would be gained.
Screaming.
With an abruptness that sent him crashing to his knees, the pain disappeared. He quivered on the ground, feeling hollowed out. As though someone had taken a knife to him and cut out part of his soul. Like the moment when he realised, he had lost Natsu, but different. He reached for his magic and found only a void. He was warm. Burning still. Skin alight from where the cold had seared a path out of his body.
“The price is paid…and the life is yours.”
Gray closed his eyes. Tears trickling down his cheeks, burning streaks of lava over skin that still ran hot and cold. Please.
Movement.
A stumbling step. And then another…and a ragged, wheezing breath.
“G-Gr-ay…” A voice as familiar as own, and it felt like Gray’s heart was ablaze once more as he lurched upwards, fighting through the pain.
“Natsu! Natsu…I…” Horror stole his voice, his words…his hope, as his eyes landing on the shambling shadowy form that had stumbled out of the darkness.
It bore Natsu’s shape, right to the ghost of pink hair framing a face that was attempting to be human and falling short. Flesh roiled and shifted, tendrils of shadow seeping through where the form failed. It moved like a newborn fawn, stumbling and uncertain as it crossed the boundary of the circle, which flared briefly and then faded, as the darkness was sucked out of the room – to reveal plain stone walls, gouged deep with claw parks and stained reddish-brown with what he realised with dawning horror was blood. “What is this?” He shouted, but the voice was silent now and the Natsu…thing, flinched at his voice, focusing on him fully for the first time, burning crimson coals locking onto him. “What are you?”
“….Natsu?” It sounded confused…angry…hurt, tilting its head like a child. “I’m what you wanted aren’t I? What you paid for?”
“No…” Gray was shaking his head now, stumbling backwards as he reached for magic that wasn’t there. “I didn’t want this, I didn’t want….”
“Me?” It sounded sad, but the eyes burned bright.
“No…”
I wanted my Natsu…
I wanted…
The Natsu-thing snarled, and the shadows shifted, spiralling out from it, and ice bristled on the edges – Gray’s stolen magic – and then it sprang at him. Gray didn’t try to fight. He didn’t try to dodge. He spread his arms out wide instead, an invitation, an apology… a plea for this finally to end; and as the thing rushed into them, and fresh pain blossomed, for the first time since Natsu had died he felt a modicum of peace and warmth.
Natsu, my Natsu…I’m coming.