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i. clingyness.
"Does that not bother you, man?" Macao nodded at Gray's left side, where Juvia had been attached since roughly four in the afternoon.
They'd started at the bar, her stool pulled flush against his, and was currently sitting sideways in their booth with her legs over his lap, one arm looped loose around his neck while she read a request flyer over his shoulder.
Gray didn't look up from the flyer. "Does what not bother me?"
Macao gestured, a vague circular motion meant to encompass all of it. "All the… clinging. All day, every day."
"No."
That was it. He said it the way he would have answered any other question, and then he shifted his arm so it sat properly around Juvia's waist instead of just resting near her, and went back to reading their papers.
Across them, Cana had her chin propped on her hand, watching with interest. "You know he used to flinch when she stood too near him."
"I remember," Macao nodded. "How things have changed…"
Cana took a drink. "She's like his human blanket now."
She wasn't wrong.
When Juvia tipped sideways to press her face into his neck, Gray's only response was to tilt his head so he was resting on her more and keep reading. When she laced her fingers into the hand that wasn't holding the flyer, he laced his back without appearing to register he'd even done it.
"Juvia?" Addressing the top of her head. "You getting tired?"
"A little." She kissed his shoulder through his t-shirt and did not move an inch.
"Okay," Gray said quietly and went back to the flyer. "I'll walk you home in a bit."
Erza, passing by with a slice of cake, paused just long enough to take in the whole vision Gray absently rubbing his thumb along Juvia's hip. Juvia humming something under her breath against his collarbone, both of them just there and ignoring the world around them, "why is it worse now that they're official? I thought it would calm down."
"It got so much worse," Cana agreed, delighted. "I feel sick just looking at them."
Gray still didn't look up. "We can still hear you."
"We know," said the entire table.
ii. over-gifting
Juvia showed up at the guild the next afternoon with two shopping bags, a paper-wrapped parcel under one arm, and an expression of pure joy.
"What is that?" Gray asked slowly, helping her set everything down on one of the tables.
"Presents!" She jumped, completely giddy. "To thank you for dinner last night."
"It was just stew…" Gray flushed and watched her move around.
"It was delicious stew!" She brought out a new set of kitchen knives, still in the box. A handmade Juvi-doll with a cute apron. A set of matching ceramic mugs with gray and blue hearts on them. A book of different recipes to try. A second, smaller box that turned out to contain three different kinds of chocolates for him that she had handmade. And finally a fresh bento box with a breakfast containing all his favorite things she made for him.
Gajeel, drawn over by the sheer volume of stuff, took one look at the table and let out a short bark of a laugh. "He made you stew and you bought him all this?"
"No, she made about half of it for him," Juvia said dreamily, her hands coming up to her cheeks as she swayed side to side.
"You don't gotta do this every time he's nice to you," Gajeel said and scratched his head. "That's just… that's just what dating is."
"Juvia is aware of that," she rolled her eyes. "She just wanted to do something nice in return."
Gray, for his part, smiled nicely at her and wrapped an arm around her shoulders. "I appreciate it," his tone was silky smooth. "Thank you, Juvia."
He placed a kiss on her head and she snuggled into him with an excited squeal.
"Anytime, Gray-sama!" She beamed and wrapped her arms around his waist in return. "Juvia loves to make things for you."
"I know," he chuckled and pulled her in by the waist to kiss her lips gently, and that seemed to be all the couple were going to focus on.
Gajeel made a gagging noise and left. Neither of them noticed.
iii. fangirling
"GRAY-SAMAAAA~"
"Yeah?" Gray said quickly, jumping down off the ice statue he had just made near the pool to help everyone cool down in the summer heat.
"That was so cool!" She had both hands pressed to her cheeks and looked at him adoringly. "And even there when you landed after jumping off! So cool!"
"Really?" She blushed and nodded at him.
"So cool." She said it like a confession, breathless, eyes bright, and grabbed his arm with both hands when he was close enough. "Juvia has seen you do that move eleven times today and it is cool every single time."
He should by now have developed some kind of resistance to her constant fawning.
He hadn't. There was a satisfaction that burst out of him every time she looked at something he'd done a hundred times before like it was the first time she'd ever seen it and fawned, he'd stopped pretending that it didn't get him a little.
"C'mon," he said, slinging an arm around her waist and steering them both back toward the guild hall before she could start listing everything she liked about him, which she absolutely would if given the opening. "Let's go get some lunch."
She went, still vibrating slightly, "and the way you made the second structure was amazing! How do you come up with so many ideas, Gray-sama?"
"I guess I'm just creative like that," he flushed and let her lean right up against him.
"Wow!" Her eyes were almost sparkling as she was gazing up at him.
iv. yapping gf
It started as a normal conversation about a hat.
Specifically, a hat Juvia had seen in a shop window on Strawberry Street with a pale blue, wide-brimmed, "the exact color of the sky the day Juvia's rain stopped for good," she'd said, which should have been Gray's first warning that this was not going to be a short conversation.
Two hours later, they were still on the porch of the guild's back steps, and the hat had somehow expanded to include: the shop it was in, the woman who ran the shop and her excellent taste, three other hats in the window that were almost as good but not quite, whether the brim was too wide for her face shape, whether it was too pale for his skin tone for when she's beside him hypothetically, what she'd wear it with, a full accounting of every hat Juvia had owned since moving to Magnolia, and a tangent about a specific rainy afternoon in Phantom Lord that connected back to the color of the sky on the day they met, which connected back, somehow, to the hat again.
Levy had wandered past twice and given Gray a look each time, the second one openly asking, are you okay, and both times Gray had just shrugged and let Juvia keep going.
" — but Juvia thinks, if she got the darker blue one instead, she could wear it on missions that aren't fighting missions, or when we go to the market, because it is very practical for sun as well as very pretty — "
"Yeah, that makes sense," Gray agreed, his arm was around her. "I think you'd look pretty no matter what one you pick."
"Is Juvia talking too much?" she asked suddenly, catching herself and glancing up at him like she expected to find him bored or waiting for an exit.
"No," he shook his head calmly. "I'm not going anywhere. Keep going."
She looked at him for a second too long, and then she smiled and picked the thread right back up, this time about whether the shop would still have her size in a weeks time, and he listened to every word of that too.
v. the journal
It fell out of Juvia's bag when she set it down too fast, sliding under the bench in a way she didn't notice until it was already too late because by the time she turned around to see what fell, Cana had it in her hands, reading the cover with open curiosity.
"Juvia," Cana read the over aloud, tracing the little snowflake drawn under the name. "This yours?"
"That is! Cana, please give that back," Juvia's voice had gone thin with panic and she was already moving to grab it, but Cana had flipped it open before the sentence finished and half the guild hall was close enough to hear her start reading.
"Gray-sama prefers black coffee, no sugar, but will drink it with milk if he thinks no one is watching him." Cana looked up, delighted. "Juvia, did you write a whole book about Gray?"
"Give it back!"
By then Levy had drifted over, and Lucy, and even Wendy, peering over Cana's shoulder as she turned another page, reading half to herself and half to the small crowd gathering. "Gray-sama's shoulder makes a small sound when he doesn't move it often enough, something from an old injury." A pause, then a laugh she couldn't hold in. "There's a whole page on his voice whenever it gets after 10PM."
Juvia had gone the deep, mortified red of someone watching years of her notes get handed around a table like a party trick, hands half-raised like she couldn't decide whether to lunge for it or give up entirely out of embarrassment, and that was the moment Gray reached the table.
He didn't ask what was going on. He just held his hand out to Cana with an unimpressed look on his face.
"You sure you want to see this? There's a doodle of you sleeping in here that's honestly pretty good — "
"Cana."
She handed it over with an eye-roll and muttered that he was being boring. Gray didn't open it again. He just snapped it closed in one hand, and looked at Juvia, who still hadn't moved, arms wrapped around herself now, waiting nervously for whatever came next.
"You don't want it back?" he said, before she could apologize or explain.
"You don't think its weird?" She looked up at him and bit her lip.
"Nah, it's cute," he shrugged and everyone's jaws dropped around them.
"But everyone was reading it!"
"They read three lines." He held the book back out to her, cover first. "Plus, I found this back when we lived in Rain Bringer Village. I know you've been keeping it."
"Oh," Juvia said, quieter now, "she didn't want Gray-sama being embarrassed of Juvia keep notes on him."
"I'm not." He said it flatly. "They're pretty good. I liked the color-coding you went with."
"Juvia wanted to be able to find certain parts easier," she explained, still a little red in the face but steadier now, taking the journal back and holding it against her chest instead of hiding it in her bag.
"Cool." He put an arm around her, right there at the table, in front of whoever was still watching. "Maybe a should start a Juvia journal now."
+1 Gray's turn
The article ran in Sorcerer Weekly, in the section covering the upcoming Grand Magic Games in Crocus, under was a photo of Juvia on a short black dress she wore when the guild had gone to a club one night in the city a few months ago, with a headline calling her "the tournament's most underrated view" and a full description of what the journalist would do with Juvia, everything that had nothing to do with her magic and everything to do with things Gray was not going to repeat, even in his own head, without wanting to put his fist through something.
So he found the man who wrote it, and he put his fist through him instead.
Repeatedly.
The guard who hauled him in wasn't even that rough about it, all things considered, mostly just tired and not surprised by the ordeal after having dealt with the Fairy Tail wizards before. Gray sat in the Crocus holding cell for six hours, arms crossed and smirking because he was not remotely sorry, until Makarov's bail money hit their system and he was escorted back to the guild hall.
"I'm not even going to ask if it was worth it," Makarov said as Gray's hand cuffs were released, his head buried in both of his hands, "because I already know what you're going to say."
"It was so worth it."
"Yup." Makarov grunted out and shook his head but had a half-smile on his face when he looked up again.
Juvia pushed forward the moment he was free, and she threw both arms around his neck and held on hard enough that he had to plant his feet to steady them from stumbling backwards together.
"Juvia heard what happened," she said into his neck. "News like that travels fast when it is about yourself. Are you okay?"
"I'm fine, don't worry yourself so much." He said it into her hair, one hand flat against her back and rubbing up and down to soothe her. "Wasn't even a real fight, the guy didn't hit back at all."
"She is so glad you're okay," she pulled back just far enough to look at him, eyes bright and a little wet at the edges.
She stayed there, tucked against his side, which was how she ended up standing right next to him when Mirajane brought over a small box with his name on it along with the Crocus city crest.
"The guards kept your confiscated items in here," she explained and let him take it from her hands.
He opened it and found his wallet had been emptied completely and was spilling out a fan of photographs across the top of the pile of money mixed with receipts.
Every single photo was of Juvia, dozens of times over. Juvia at the guild, laughing. Juvia asleep on a train, mouth slightly open, undignified and clearly taken without her knowing. Juvia mid-battle, soaked and furious and radiant. Juvia in a candle-lit restaurant, caught turning to look at something off-frame, hair catching the golden light.
At a glance it looked like he was creating a scrapbook dedicated to her face.
He was gathering them back into his wallet and tucked them behind the actual money in a stack thick enough that the wallet didn't close properly. He kept one of her smiling directly at the camera in a little plastic window at the front so it would always be on display when he opened it.
Natsu was the one who actually questioned it as the others gawked in silence at his collection.
"How many pictures of Juvia do you carry around?"
"Uhmm," Gray thought about out loud, not looking up as he arranged them openly so the they wouldn't crease too badly. "All of these ones usually, I'm not sure how many it is honestly."
"Seriously?" Natsu and Lucy shared a look.
"Mhm." He handed Juvia something from his wallet and she smiled widely before kissing his cheek.
"Where did you even get them all?" Lucy leaned in a little to see the stacked wallet.
"I took them on my lacrima and got the printed," he shrugged and handed the wallet to Lucy so she could go through them. "The next batch should be here next week, I think."
"Batch?" Erza's eyes went wide.
"Yes," Juvia chimed in gleefully. "Juvia is also getting some of her favourite Gray-sama photos printed too for her bathroom mirror."
"You barely stay at Fairy Hills anymore," Wendy sweated and awkwardly laughed as Juvia blushed.
"Well, its for the days when Gray is away on a mission and she wants to see him," she bit lip and looked up Gray.
"I get it," he replied to her. "That's why I have those too."
That was when Levy, sitting nearby with Gray's lacrima screen open to check fro damages, made a small strangled noise and said, "Why does your locator ping only have Juvia's lacrima's location?"
"So I always know where she is, obviously." Gray scoffed.
The hall went quiet.
"You have a tracking app on her," Gajeel snorted as his voice turned into a laugh at the whole situation.
"She has one for me too," Gray said with a shrug.
"Yes, but that's… kind of expected," Levy sent Juvia an apologetic smile when the girl frowned at her.
"I like knowing where she always is," Gray tried to play it off calmly. "It's a safety thing, right?" He looked at Juvia and she nodded firmly in confirmation.
"You know you're supposed to use it for your keys and stuff, right?" Levy scrolled through his app slowly. "You only have Juvia's location in your phone."
"Yeah, I know," Gray rolled his eyes.
"You always know where she is?" Gajeel grumbled out and was looking over Levy's shoulder. "This is insane, man."
"No way, it keeps her safe." Gray shook his head. "And it eases my anxiety about knowing that she's alright."
"As sweet as that is, it doesn't make it less insane, especially after all of this," Lucy crossed her arms and looked between the couple rapidly.
"It's not insane, it's practical." He said it so confidently, with no room in it for embarrassment. "We both work solo missions sometimes, and I want to know if something ever goes wrong and she wants the same for me. We set it up together about a year ago."
"You've… only been together for like six weeks," Cana snorted at them when they looked between themselves in confusion.
"And we were very close friends for like a million years before that," Gray rolled his eyes.
"Gray-sama suggested it after we came back from Akane Resort last year," Juvia explained sunnily. "He said it was better than wasting her magical energy, that Juvia could have a real Gray-dar on her lacrima instead."
"You suggested this?" Natsu pointed at Gray.
"Yeah, what's the big deal? I really don't get it," Gray scrunched up his eyebrows.
"You just beat a man half to death over a magazine article and got arrested for physical assault and battery because you were so jealous that another man thought she was sexy," Erza said, arms crossed, though the corner of her mouth was fighting a smirk. "You carry a wallet full of almost only photographs of her, and now you have a tracker of her constant location so you can constantly see where she is. You don't see how crazy that is all combined?"
"Well, I love her like crazy," Gray said, simply, and looked at them all blankly. "So, whatever."
Juvia, who had stood through the whole thing pressed against his side, went very red, very fast, and looked up at him with hearts in her eyes.
"Gray-sama got arrested," she said with giggle, "for Juvia's honor?"
Everyone blanched at how quickly Juvia spun things with her Gray-centric fantasies.
"Well, I wasn't going to let him write that about my girl without facing consequences!" Gray scoffed. "No one gets to think about you like that, except me."
"Juvia's hero," she fawned, and her voice came out soft, like she hadn't quite meant to say it out loud but she didn't take it back either, her cheeks going redder as she said it and looked at him expectantly and bit her lip.
"Well, if I'm your hero... then where's my reward?" He bent down, hooked an arm behind her, and scooped her into his arms completely.
She let out a startled little sound and grabbed his shoulders. He kissed her there in front of the whole guild and she melted into it, one hand curling into his hair as he gave her exactly what she wanted after voicing her day dreams about him.
Natsu, watching this with a slacked jaw as he watched Gray slide his tongue into Juvia's mouth in front of them all as she just giggled and did it right back, then he slowly turned to Erza. "I think he's just as crazy for her now as she is for him."
"No," Erza shook her head, not looking away from the two of them. "He's so much worse."
Nobody argued with her statement.