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They were all so, so drunk. Gray had lost track of exactly when got this bad, most of the guild was either dancing on and around the tables or slumped in a corner with their shoes off. There was no in between.
Gray was very still. He was concentrating very hard on being still, because the room did a slow, lazy spin every time he turned his head, and he needed to be steady for this.
Because he was going to tell her. Tonight.
Juvia was beside him, cheeks flushed pink with alcohol and humming along to a song that had ended a full minute ago.
He'd been practising what to say for the past thirty minutes. He'd made a whole speech and the end was the part where she said yes, but now he couldn't remember a single word of any of it.
Okay. Start with her name. Everything started with her name.
He opened his mouth. Closed it. Then picked up his glass, found it empty and frowned.
"Gray-sama, your glass is empty," Juvia giggled and lifted a bottle of wine from a nearby table to fill it for him.
"Yeah," he agreed and watched her clumsily fill it for him. "I really need to talk to you about something." It came out lower than he meant it to.
She turned to face him properly, "Juvia is," she hiccuped. "Sorry. Juvia is listening."
That was so cute.
"You're," he started, and then made the mistake of actually meeting her eyes, and the whole plan fell straight out of his head. "Woah."
Juvia blinked. "Woah?"
"You're so pretty." His breath had been completely torn from his lungs at the sight of her. "No, wait, that's not how it starts, but look at you. How do you just walk around like that all the time? Like it's nothing?" He gestured at all of her, nearly knocked over a vase, and caught it with clumsy precision.
Juvia pressed her fingers to her mouth to muffle her giggling. It didn't work.
This was going terribly. He scrubbed at his face with both hands. Behind them there was yelling and laughter, but none of it mattered, because Juvia was right here and he had one job.
But, what if she says no?
The thought came out of nowhere and sat down heavy in his chest. What if he had made her wait too long? What if she'd got tired of waiting, and she was only sitting with him because she was kind, and he was about to wreck everything they had and —
"Gray-sama?" Her voice had gone soft. "You look like you're about to be sick."
"M'not," he murmured. "Maybe. No. Can I —" He reached for her hand slowly, carefully, like she might pull it away. She turned her palm up and laced her fingers through his without even thinking about it, and something in his shoulders that had been clenched all night finally gave.
"Juvia," he breathed. "I'm in love with you."
Juvia made a small noise.
"I am," he pressed on, because now that he'd started it was all coming out at once and he couldn't have stopped it if he tried. "You're the first thing I think about when I wake up and the last thing before I fall asleep, every single day, and I used to think that was a problem. Like something wrong with me that I had to fix. And I tried, I really tried. It didn't work, and now I just think…" His throat went tight. "I think I'm so lucky that out of everyone in the whole world, it's you I get to feel like this about."
His face was burning red, he could feel it.
"So," his voice cracked clean in half and a drunken hiccup escaped him. "Will you be my girlfriend?"
Juvia's bottom lip was trembling and for one horrible second he thought she was crying, but then she snorted, clapped her free hand over her mouth, and he saw that her eyes were full of tears.
"Gray-sama!" She wheezed.
"Oh, no." He panicked. "Was it bad? I knew I should've done the speech. There was a speech. I just wanted to tell you I love you and that you're pretty, and that I really hope you'll accept my feelings even after all this time. Even though I took forever."
That finished her off. Juvia folded forward and held a hand against him for support, laughing so hard no sound came out at all, and when she finally surfaced she was flushed to the tips of her ears.
"Gray-sama," she managed, reaching up to cup his face with one of her hands.
He stared at her.
"This is our wedding," she said and hiccuped. "You're drunk at our wedding, silly."
"We got… I married you? Today? That was real?"
"Very real," Juvia lost it all over again. She lifted their joined hands between them and wiggled her fingers so the rings on their fingers caught the light, his and hers matching. "Juvia is still wearing her big white dress and everything."
Gray looked down at the ring on his own finger, then at her dress.
The grin that broke across his face was so wide it hurt, and his eyes went hot and blurry all over again.
"We're married," he said, he needed to hear it out loud to believe it.
"Mhm." Juvia nodded smugly.
"You're my wife?"
"She is," Juvia confirmed and she was still laughing when he lunged for her, arms wrapping tight around her as he pressed his face into her hair to breath her in.
"Best day of my whole life," he mumbled into her shoulder, thick and completely sincere. "I love you so much. We're married."
"Juvia loves you too," she giggled, holding him just as tightly as he swayed them both gently. "And to answer your silly question, of course Juvia will accept your feelings."
"Good," Gray said and pressed a clumsy, off-target kiss somewhere near the top of her head.