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Chandeliers dripped gold light over marble floors polished to mirror-shine, and the scent of lilies hung thick enough to taste at the back of the throat.
A string quartet in the corner played something slow, the kind of music that made the dancers sway a little without meaning to. Banners bearing the crest of the Royal Family hung from the rafters, gold and jade thread catching the chandelier light every time the doors opened and let a draft through.
Juvia had chosen her dress for tonight with great care.
Deep blue silk, cut close through the bodice and loose enough through the skirt that it moved like a waterfall when she walked. She'd done her hair up soft at the sides, left a few curls loose the way Cana had insisted looked the best and told herself the whole walk over that tonight didn't have to mean anything.
She had, of course, been lying to herself.
She'd stood near the edge of the dance floor, about five feet from where Gray was chatting with Lyon. He was dressed in a rented suit that fit him well enough to make her mouth go dry, hair still slightly damp like he'd rushed the last of getting ready.
He'd looked at her twice in the span of the first half hour, once when she'd laughed at something Wendy said, and once when she'd caught his eye across the room on purpose, just to see if he'd actually approach her.
Both times he'd found somewhere else to look within seconds, his ears going faintly red. He never crossed the floor to her.
Every time the quartet swelled into a new song and some new pair spun past her. Alzack dipping Bisca with theatrical flourish, Chelia dragging a giggling Wendy through an admittedly terrible waltz, even Guildarts making a spectacle out of dragging a deeply reluctant Cana into a father-daughter dance that was really more of a wrestling match set to music.
Gray stayed exactly where he was. Arms crossed and his gaze fixed very deliberately on absolutely nothing.
She counted three separate times he motioned like he might finally walk over, and three separate times he closed it again and took a very long drink instead.
It stung more than she wanted it to.
She thought about the little moments she'd been collecting. The way he'd started sitting beside her without being asked. The time he'd walked her home from a job even though he knew she'd be absolutely fine. The morning after Tartaros, when she'd woken in the house they'd found together and he'd been the one asleep in the chair beside her bed, his jacket draped carefully over her shoulders because they had no sheets or decor yet.
She'd built so much hope out of little moments like that. The moments the others didn't see between them. And she'd thought, that tonight might finally be the exception. That maybe, just once, he'd close the space between them himself instead of leaving her to build the bridge and walk across it alone, the way she always had before.
He hadn't.
She watched him take a fourth long drink of punch he clearly didn't want as Lyon elbow him hard enough in the ribs to nearly spill it, watched whatever Lyon muttered under his breath make Gray's cheeks go a deeper, more furious shade of red.
She couldn't hear the words, but she didn't need to. She'd seen most of their arguments enough times to know its shape by now. Lyon needling him and Gray taking the bait, both of them somehow still managing to have the exact same fighteverytime the met up.
But, he also hadn't danced with anyone else. Small merc and she hated a little how tightly she held onto that fact. The same way she held onto most things where Gray was concerned, with far more hope than the evidence probably warranted.
By the time the second hour of the ball rolled around, the heat of the room and the ache in her chest and the sheer exhaustion of pretending she didn't notice any of it got to be too much all at once.
She slipped through a side door onto a balcony, needing just five minutes where nobody was watching her watch him.
The night outside was cool against her bare shoulders, a welcome shock after the crushing weight of the ballroom.
Crocus spread beneath her in strings of lantern-light, the castle towers cutting pale, elegant shapes against the dark sky, a few stars visible even through the glow of the city. She braced both hands against the stone railing and let her head drop forward, breathing in slow through her nose.
"Didn't expect to see you out here alone."
She knew the voice before she'd even fully turned.
Bora was leaning in the doorway with his hands tucked into his pockets, dressed sharper than she remembered from her Phantom Lord days, dark formal wear that suited the line of his shoulders now instead of a cape hanging off him with his false swagger.
The smugness in his posture was exactly as she remembered it, though. Some things didn't change.
Her spine straightened on instinct, old defenses snapping into place before she'd consciously decided to raise them. "Juvia isn't in the mood for you."
He lifted both hands, palms out, in a gesture of surrender as he stepped forward and let the door shut behind him. "I'm not here to cause trouble. I needed some air, same as you it looks like." His eyes flicked over her face. "Can we call it a ceasefire?"
She studied him for a long moment, something in her posture loosened, just slightly, grudgingly.
".Fine," she agreed, and turned back to the view rather than walking away from him or causing a scene.
He came to stand beside her at a respectful distance, close enough to talk but far enough not to crowd, and for a while neither of them said anything. The music drifted faintly through the open doors behind them, muffled and slow.
"You look far too upset for someone at a royal ball," he said eventually.
"Juvia is fine," she tried to shrug it off and didn't look at him.
"Doesn't look like it, you're doing that thing with your eyes." A small, wry smile tugged at his mouth. "You've never once been fine when you do that. You forget how well we knew each other."
She almost laughed, an ugly sound that caught somewhere in her throat instead and came out closer to a huff of breath. She hesitated and turned her words over carefully in her head before letting any of them out, weighing whether this was a door she actually wanted to open. But the night was dark, and he was almost a stranger to her now and sometimes strangers were easier than the people who mattered.
"Juvia is upset," she said carefully and he tilted his head for her to go on. "Last time we were here, Gray-sama rejected Juvia's advances and this time she decided to let things play out on his terms."
"And his terms aren't enough for you?"
"It's not that," she shook her head and frowned down at her dress. "Juvia thought we were progressing, that this kind of thing between us were getting more… more." She shrugged and looked at him with a sad smile. "It's been four years of waiting for anything from him and she gets very little. She is happy to have love in her heart but the beautiful nights like this when he looks at her for a moment and then ignores her immediately after is… hard."
Bora was quiet when she finished, gaze fixed out over the city, something working slowly behind his eyes.
"Why not ask him for a dance?" Bora crossed his arms as he leaned beside her. "Anyone would like a pretty girl to ask for one at a night like this."
"Last time she did that was when he rejected her," she could've laughed at how desperate she sounded. "He said it was something he didn't like, so Juvia vowed to herself never to do it again and to wait for him."
"And you've been waiting for four years on this liking you back?" He raised an eyebrow when she cringed at hearing it out loud.
"Sort of." She shrugged. "He showed Juvia the sun for the very first time and she is so happy. But, loving him has been a long wait."
"Well, I'm sorry to hear that," he said at last, and he sounded like he meant it which unsettled her. "I'm happy that you finally got to see the sun and I mean that. But I'm sorry it's costing you like this." He exhaled, long and slow. "He's an idiot, I know what it's like to have lost you over something as silly as the weather and I wouldn't wish that feeling on anyone."
Juvia turned to look at him properly for the first time all night, "...Juvia didn't expect that from you."
"Yeah, well." He shrugged, rueful, a self-deprecating twist to his mouth. "People change. Some of us more than others, apparently." He hesitated then added, quieter. "You know, I helped look for you during the whole Tenrou Island thing. When everyone thought," he cut himself off before he could finish the sentence, jaw working. "I know it doesn't undo anything between us in the past. I just wanted you to know that I did think of you when I heard you might be gone."
She hadn't known.
She'd never once considered that he might have been among the people looking for her, not with how things had ended, not with how much of a villain she'd painted him as in her own memory for the sake of healing her hurt.
They talked for a while longer after that, it was easier than she would have expected an hour ago, catching each other up on years that had passed so differently for each of them.
He asked about about Fairy Tail, and there was no mockery in it, none of his old edge of jealousy.
She asked about his life since they last saw each other and found herself surprised again and again by how much of the old arrogance had simply worn away, leaving something much steadier underneath.
"I run a small crew now," he told her, elbows braced against the railing beside hers. "Nothing like in Titan Nose and it's legitimate work, mostly. Escort jobs, the odd bit of security for merchant caravans. Boring compared to what you get up to in Fairy Tail, I'd imagine."
"Boring sounds nice," she admitted and meant it more than she expected to.
"Yeah. I used to think that was a weakness. Wanting an easier day-to-day," he huffed a laugh at himself. "Took me a long time to figure out it's not."
That's when she found herself telling him more than she meant to about what happened with Tartaros, about Fairy Tail's brief, awful disbandment and the year that had followed it, scattered across the country with no idea if any of them would find their way back to each other.
She hadn't realized, until she was saying it out loud to someone who hadn't lived through it alongside her, just how frightened she'd been that whole year.
Bora listened without interrupting, which surprised her almost as much as anything else about him that night.
"You really do love him," he said, not a question.
"...Yes." There was no point pretending otherwise, not after everything she'd already told him. "Juvia has loved him for a long time now."
"I figured." A faint, self-deprecating smile.
Then his expression shifted as if he had a realization and turned to her with a curious look.
"I have a proposition for you," he said slowly. "You don't have to answer tonight, just hear me out first."
She turned fully to face him, wary. "...Juvia is listening."
"Marry me."
Her mouth opened on instinct, but he pressed on before she could get a single syllable out, hands raised again in that same surrendering gesture from before.
"My family's been on me for an heir to the Prominence Line or years now and it's a mess, it's very political and it's not romantic in the slightest, believe me. I know exactly how it sounds, but you and I loved each other once before. Real love, even if I ruined it in the end. We could learn to again and you'd never have to spend another night standing at the edge of a ballroom wondering if someone's ever going to love you back. Not with me because I already know I can."
"Juvia loves Gray-sama," she said immediately, the word out of her before she'd even finished processing his words.
"I know that." He said it without bitterness, which somehow made the whole thing worse, and much harder to simply dismiss. "I'm not asking you to answer me tonight. I'm asking you to think about it. That's all."
Her heart twisted into an unwelcome, complicated ache, equal parts guilt and exhaustion and something almost like relief at being offered anything at all after a whole evening of being deliberately unseen.
She should have walked away right then. She very nearly did.
But when she looked at him, offering her something that sounded, despite every alarm bell going off in her head, like safety, she felt herself hesitate instead of refusing outright a second time.
"...Juvia will think about it," she heard herself say, and hated how true it was.
The next day, half the guild had descended into Crocus for a day of sightseeing, spilling loud and chaotic through the market streets.
Juvia had mostly kept to herself throughout the day, idly following one friend or another who was near her at different moments.
Gray and Lyon were bickering again, some low-grade argument that had Juvia's name buried somewhere inside it, the two of them lobbing insults back and forth about who understood her better, who'd known her longer, whose guild she should be in.
Nothing new.
"You didn't even try with that one," Lyon was saying, arms crossed, clearly enjoying himself. "I would make sure Juvia would never have to so much as open a door by herself ."
"Well, it's not like she's weak." Gray huffed back. "Juvia can handle herself and unlike you I respect that."
"That is an over-exaggeration," Lyon shook his head. "Just because she is powerful doesn't make her less of a lady worth wooing."
"Would you drop that —"
For once she couldn't summon the energy to referee them the way she usually did when their sniping threatened to spill over into something with actual teeth.
Her mind was still on the balcony, still turning over the conversation and weighing it even as she walked through a city full of people who had no idea what was sitting in her chest.
They rounded a corner near the central fountain square and nearly walked straight into Bora with some of his men.
Natsu and Lucy, of all people, were already talking to him, something about a job they'd apparently crossed paths on months back, Lucy laughing at some story he was telling with his hands and Juvia blinked, momentarily thrown by the sight of it, wondering when exactly that particular connection had formed without her knowing.
Bora's eyes found her over Lucy's shoulder, and something in his expression softened.
"Juvia" he said gently in greeting.
"Bora," she nodded once back at him and felt her heart leap into her throat.
"You two know each other?" Natsu questioned and looked at Juvia with his eyebrows furrowed in confusion.
"Sort of," she blushed and looked away from Bora's gaze, briefly hearing Lyon elbowing Gray behind her.
"We go way back," Bora said cryptically as he stepped to her. "Any thoughts today?" He kept it like a code, like he was asking about the weather rather than the answer to a marriage proposal in the middle of a crowded street.
Juvia felt heat climb up her cheeks, "Juvia doesn't have an answer for you yet. Sorry."
"That's quite alright." He crossed the space between them, entirely unbothered by the eight sets of eyes now very much fixed on him, and lifted her hand to press a deliberate kiss to her knuckles. "Take your time, I'll be around."
He left with an easy wave a moment later, and the square exploded into noise the second he was out of earshot.
"What was that about?" Lucy demanded, rounding on her.
"And why are you talking to your shitty ex again?" Gajeel said, arms crossed, iron-hard irritation on the principle alone, before Juvia had even had the chance to answer Lucy.
Juvia glanced sideways at Gray, who had gone very still, his eyes fixed on the spot where Bora had disappeared into the crowd before she made herself answer.
"Well. Juvia was a little upset, last night. And we got to talking." She tried to shrug it off.
"I didn't realize you have an ex-boyfriend Juvia. My, my," Lyon smirked and was also side-eyeing Gray who was still gazing off.
"Hmm," she hummed absently. "It was from before I joined Fairy Tail."
"And he was a total dick," Gajeel scoffed, Juvia was about to open her mouth to retort. "If you tell me he's changed I will sock you in the jaw." She snapped her mouth shut again, knowing Gajeel didn't want to hear it.
"What answer is he waiting on?" Lucy asked innocently. "Are you two going on a mission together or something?"
Juvia gulped and decided against lying to her friends, "he asked Juvia to marry him."
They erupted a second time, louder than the first. Lyon made a sound like he'd swallowed his own tongue. Gajeel swore, loud and creative as Erza's eyebrows shot toward her hairline, one hand already grabbing Lucy's arm in shock.
Even Natsu, has an unnatural reaction when he realized what she implied.
"Why would he ask that?" Lucy emphasized as her eyes were so wide Juvia thought how they weren't dry.
"Juvia was… upset," she shrugged and continued quickly. "She hasn't said yes, yet but — "
"Yet?" Gray took a step forward, anger flashing across his face before he could smother it back down..
Something sharp and reckless lit up in her chest at his tone. She lifted her chin to look him in the eye.
"Well, he was being serious and he told Juvia to think about it." She paused deliberately, her eyes never leaving Gray's face. "And Juvia doesn't see any other offers on the table."
She saw Lyon shift out of the corner of her eye, saw him open his mouth and then, mercifully, close it again.
They'd talked, months ago, an awkward conversation in the guild kitchen during a party where he'd told her that he wouldn't make a real move on her again, not with the way Gray had started looking at her.
She was grateful now, fiercely so, that he kept his word even in a moment this loud.
Gray's jaw worked, a muscle jumping along the line of it. "Fine," he said, voice gone flat and hard. "Do whatever you want."
And he turned and walked back the way they'd come from, his shoulders rigid, leaving the whole group standing in stunned silence in the middle of the fountain square behind him.
"Well, that was… something," Lucy muttered into the awkwardness.
Juvia didn't answer. She was too busy watching his back disappear around the corner, feeling something in her chest crack straight down the middle.
They didn't speak for four days.
It was excruciating.
Mira tried subtle interventions by seating them near each other at the bar, sending them on the same supply runs, all of which failed spectacularly, both of them finding increasingly elaborate reasons to be somewhere else the second they clocked what she was doing.
Erza tried unsubtle ones, cornering each of them separately with a look that could have cracked stone and demanding to know what was going on between them now.
Even Gajeel, who complained the loudest about the tension hanging over the guild hall, made an actual effort to fix it with muttering "would you two just talk" at random intervals when the two would tense up at the others presence.
Neither of them budged.
Juvia went through the motions of those four days the way she imagined a ghost might move through a house it used to live in.
She took jobs she didn't need the money for, just to have somewhere to put her hands and her magic that wasn't the guild hall, wasn't anywhere Gray might be. She caught herself, twice, standing outside the ice-cream shop they used to go to together on slower afternoons, staring at the door blankly like he would show up.
The first night she cried into her pillow until she ran out of tears, furious at herself for the whole thing, furious at the small traitorous part of her brain that kept replaying his voice, do whatever you want, on a loop that wouldn't quit no matter how many times she told it to stop.
The second night she didn't cry at all, just lay staring at the ceiling of her dorm room turning Bora's offer over and over, weighing safety against longing until the two started to blur together in her exhausted mind before it turned into a night of crying again.
The third night Wendy showed up at her door with a plate of cookies and said she could hear her every night with her dragon slayer abilities, and Juvia let her in to be fussed over and comforted by the small girl.
By the fourth day she'd stopped expecting him to be the one to break first. That realization, more than anything else, was what finally moved her. Watching Cana fail to coax Gray into eating lunch at their usual table, watching him take his plate instead and sit at the far end of the hall instead.
She watched him for a long moment, something in her chest twisting painfully, and just looked away from him.
Juvia used the silence to think, in a way she hadn't let herself on the balcony. Bora's steady, careful voice made everything sound so simple.
She turned the proposal over and over in her mind, weighing the safety of it against the ache that never once went quiet, no matter how she reasoned with herself, no matter how many times she told herself that Gray's silence at that ball had been an answer in itself. Or that the blush on his cheeks meant maybe he was shy about it and she should have done it.
It had taken her four days to work up the nerve to do what she had to do.
She met Bora at a café two days later, her hands wrapped around a cup of tea she wasn't drinking, and told him plainly, before her courage could fail her.
"Juvia can't do it," she said softly. "You've been kinder than Juvia expected, honestly, after everything. But marrying you won't fix what's actually wrong. Juvia's future has always pointed toward Gray, even if he isn't ready yet. Even if he never is."
He was quiet for a moment, turning his cup slowly on its saucer, and she braced herself for something. Anger, maybe, or that old wounded pride she remembered from years ago, the version of him who couldn't stand to be told no about anything.
"Can I ask you something?" he said instead. "And you can tell me it's none of my business."
"...Go ahead."
"If he never says it. If four more years go by and he's still standing on the other side of every room and too scared to cross it to you, would you still choose that? Over what I'm offering?"
She thought about it for a second, rather than answering on reflex the way she might have a week ago. "Yes," she said finally, quiet but sure. "Juvia knows how it sounds. She's not asking you to understand it but yes. Even then."
"That's either the most romantic thing I've ever heard or the saddest," he said, not unkindly, something wry tugging at his mouth. "Possibly both."
"Definitely both," she let herself breath when he didn't erupt at her.
Bora studied her for a long moment across the small table. "That's a shame," he said, and then, with a faint, genuine smile. "But I had a feeling you would say no. For what it's worth, I hope he figures it out before he loses you for real."
"So, does this make us friends?" She offered, a little uncertain, testing the shape of the world between them.
"Exes as friends is a special kind of weird, especially if one proposed." He huffed a laugh, some of the tension easing out of his shoulders. "Allies. I can do allies."
"Sounds good," she giggled.
They chatted idly for a while longer and she gave him a warm hug as they said goodbye, and thanked him for being so patient with her.
She left the café lighter than she'd felt in days, right up until she remembered that she hadn't told Gray any of it, that four days of stony silence had left her no clean way back into a conversation neither of them wanted to start in the first place.
She was heading back to the dorms, when he stepped out of a side street so abruptly she nearly startled a wave of magic loose on instinct alone.
"Gray-sama?"
"You're actually seeing him again?" It wasn't really a question.
"What? No, she was — "
"Don't." The word cracked out of him like a whip, and she flinched despite herself. "I just saw you saying goodbye,"he broke off, dragging a hand back through his hair, and when he looked at her again his eyes were bright with something that wasn't just fury. "Were you even gonna tell me? Or was I just supposed to find out at the wedding?"
The unfairness of him lit something in her chest that had been simmering for four years, and for once she didn't swallow it down.
"You don't get to do that," she said, voice rising, sharper than she'd meant it to come out but wasn't sorry, not this time. "You don't get to stand there and act betrayed when you're the one who wouldn't even look at Juvia across a ballroom less than a week ago. You froze her out first, Gray, and then when she finally had one conversation with someone who was actually nice to her, you decided that made you the injured party here?"
"That's not — " He stopped, his jaw clenching and visibly furious at her.
"That's not what?" She pressed him, stepping closer instead of away. "Finish the sentence."
"I don't want to talk about the stupid ball right now!" His voice cracked up a full register, sharp enough that a bird burst out of the eaves of the nearest roof. "I want to talk about the part where you go on a date with your ex and let him kiss you in the middle of the street and then spent four days blanking me." He broke off, hands curling into fists at his sides, breathing hard. "So don't stand there and act like the silence was only mine to carry."
"He kissed her hand, don't be such a child." That landed for him harder than she expected, and for a second the anger in her chest wavered into something closer to guilt before she shoved it back down to stand her ground. "Juvia told you nothing because you walked away first. You said Juvia could do whatever she wanted and then you vanished for four days, Gray, what was she supposed to do, chase after you down the street?"
"Yes!" It burst out of him, immediate and unguarded, and he looked almost as startled by it as she was. "That's exactly what I wanted, that's how things go with us!"
"You can't be serious!"
"The second I open my mouth around you I turn into somebody who can't get a single sentence out right, and then suddenly you're there completely put together and telling me some guy is proposing to you and I don't… I don't know how to compete with that."
"Juvia isn't a competition to be won!" Her voice cracked now too, frustration and hurt tangling together until she couldn't tell which was driving her anymore. "She has never once compared you to anyone, because there was never anyone else worth comparing you to in the first place! Don't you understand that? For four years, Gray. Four years of Juvia making herself so easy to love and every single time you flinched away from her, and you still think this is about who else says the prettier words?"
"Then what else is it about?" he shot back, voice ragged now. "Because from where I'm standing, it looks like the second somebody else offers you something, you're willing to jump ship. So, what else could it possibly be?"
"You!" The word came out louder than either of them expected, echoing off the buildings on either side of the empty street, and something in his face cracked at the sound of her voice. "You are the one with a problem in all of this!"
"You're standing there telling me some other guy managed to say all the right things to you in one conversation after everything we've been through and I'm supposed to just, what, applaud him for it?"
"He didn't have to try as hard as you think," she snapped back, and immediately regretted the flash of hurt that crossed his face, though she didn't take it back. "He was honest. That's all it took. Do you have any idea how long Juvia has waited for you to be honest? Do you understand what four years of silence does to someone, wondering if you'll ever say anything?"
"Then why didn't you chase me?!" It burst out of him. "If it mattered that much, why did you let it sit for four days instead of coming to find me?"
"Because you told her to do whatever she wanted!" Her voice was rising now too, sharp enough to bounce off the buildings on either side of the empty street. "You made it very clear you didn't care either way, so forgive Juvia for taking you at your word for once!"
"I didn't mean it like that and you know I didn't!"
"How is Juvia supposed to know that?! You never say what you mean, you never have! You stand there and expect Juvia to just know what's happening, and she is so tired of guessing!"
"Well maybe I'm tired of watching you consider marrying someone else the second things get hard between us!"
"Things have always been hard between us! That's not new and that's not Bora's fault, that's four years of Juvia standing in the same spot waiting for you to decide she's worth the risk!"
"That's not what this is about, Juvia!"
"Then what is it about?! You don't want her but you don't want anyone else to have her either, and she is so sick of being something you'd rather keep frozen in place than actually claim!"
"That's not fair."
"NONE OF THIS IS FAIR!"
Neither of them noticed how loud they'd gotten.
"And if you'd just once let yourself want something without being scared, maybe Juvia wouldn't have to go looking for itsomewhere else — "
"You think this is easy for me?! You think watching some guy who hurt you offer you a ring is easy for me to just stand here and — "
"ENOUGH!"
A hand closed hard around Juvia's shoulder and hauled her back a full step, and another, Gajeel's unmistakably, all iron-edged strength locked around Gray's arm and yanked him the opposite way.
Natsu was grabbing Juvia to keep her back too. And Erza was physically wedging herself between the space where the two of them had been standing, hands up, looking between them both with wide eyes.
"What the hell is wrong with you two?!" Gajeel snapped, holding Gray back by the collar despite his attempt to shrug him off. "You're gonna wake the whole damn district."
Erza's gaze flicking between them both. "It is not like either of you to fight the other," she said, low and even. "So one of you is going to say, plainly, what is actually wrong."
Juvia's chest was heaving. Gray's fists were still clenched at his sides, Gajeel's grip the only thing keeping him from closing the distance again.
"I'm not the one marrying someone else," Gray finally bit out.
"You said Juvia could do whatever she wanted," she shot back, voice raw. "So why do you even care?"
He didn't answer. He just glared at her.
The silence stretched, and she decided to fill it. "You remind Juvia more than anyone else that she is single," she was quieter now but no less sharp, each word landing like a stone dropped into still water. "So why wouldn't she consider marrying someone who actually showed an interest in her?"
Natsu and Gajeel traded a look over the top of both their heads, the kind of look that said neither of them had any idea what to do with the mess they'd just walked into.
"You know that's not the point," Gray gritted out.
"Juvia told him no." For one second, something in his face changed, relief flickering across his features before he could stop it. "If you waited for Juvia to actually explain what you saw, you would have known that it was why she met up with him today."
Then it hardened again, faster and colder than before. "The fact that you even considered it at all is a fucking joke."
She would have preferred he punched her in the throat. All the fight draining out of her all at once and leaving something far worse behind it, exhausted certainty that there was no version of tonight where either of them won this fight.
"...Right," she said, voice gone strangely calm. "Of course it is."
She turned her shoulder, water rippling into her skin and slipped straight through the circle of Natsu's restraining arm before he could tighten his grip, reforming a step beyond them all, out of reach.
"Well then," she said, not looking back at any of them, tears finally spilling over even as her voice stayed level. "I guess that settles everything."
She walked away down the street without another word, shoulders shaking, and behind her she heard Gray's footsteps start up too but heading in the opposite direction, and neither Erza's voice nor Natsu's calling out for either of them to wait did anything to stop either one of them
Even after everything, he would rather walk away from her than toward her. That some instinct in him, however deep it ran, would always choose retreat over reaching.
Erza called her name once, voice filled with worry, but Juvia didn't turn around. She couldn't turn around, because she knew if she looked back at any of their faces, she would break entirely and she had exactly enough dignity left to want to fall apart somewhere no one could see her do it.
By the time she reached the end of the block, the tears had stopped being quiet.
She let them come freely then, the sound of her own footsteps the only thing keeping time with the ragged rhythm of her breathing, the lantern-light blurring into long gold streaks through the wet in her eyes.
Nobody followed thankfully. Nobody knew, in that moment, which one of them needed it more, both of them were too far gone in their own separate directions to be caught.
Juvia walked aimlessly and alone in the rain and did not look back once.