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The chain ran from Gray's neck to Juvia's, a length of pale, frosted links that neither of them had seen form. It hadn't been there, and then it was. Juvia had pulled against it hard enough to tear the skin of her palms and it hadn't so much as flexed.
"The spell will only release when one of you dies," Invel said as he adjusted his glasses.
Gray could feel it working in him like a second pulse, the order Invel had pressed into his head through the chain, urging him to kill her. He'd been fighting it for what felt like hours. He'd hit her twice already, screaming at himself to stop in his own head after his fist collided with her face.
Then once in the shoulder, once in the ribs. Both times she'd taken it and hit back just as hard. Her leg coming up to kick him in the ribs as hard as she could.
There was a very simple end to this, he'd decided. The ice formed long and sharp and he pointed it at his own chest and felt something like calmness.
This, he could do.
He'd watched it done over and over again on his behalf. Ur had done it for him. His father had done it for him. Ultear had done it for all of them. He knew exactly how it went.
And Gray knew in his heart he would do anything to protect Juvia.
He pressed the sword into his torso and looked up to tell her not to watch as she said, "you awakened the best part of Juvia."
And she was smiling at him.
It was a small smile, a little crooked, the one she used when she'd done something she knew he'd be annoyed about. She had her own magic in her hand, a blade of water and had pressed it through her own torso.
He didn't remember much after that in any order that made sense. He remembered the chain coming apart as the both fell to the ground. It didn't shatter; it just stopped being there as they lay in pools of their mixing blood.
The one thing he would never forget was the initial feeling of her magic pumping through his veins and her weight in his lap as he begged her to wake up. The way her head fell back when he lifted her into his arm.
He remembered screaming for her, unable to contain the incredible loss running through him.
"Please, just wake up," he sobbed and has his face pressed to hers as he steadied her lolling head. "Juvia, please."
His heart had shattered in his chest when she didn't respond to anything and her eyes didn't even flicker.
Ever so gently he leaned down to press his lips against hers, feeling the awful coldness of her against his own and choked out another sob.
"Please kiss me back," he whispered as one of his tears fell on her cheek.
The dust hadn't even settled when the cheering started.
Gray was on his knees in the wreckage of Hargeon, one hand braced against a slab of shattered stone, and he couldn't make himself stand.
Acnologia was finally gone and Fairy Tail had won the Alvarez war all at once.
Natsu was the first to whoop, fist thrown into the air as he Lucy and Happy rose from where he'd knocked into her. Somewhere behind him Gray heard Erza's voice also joining into the cheering.
Gray didn't move.
His whole body was shaking, and at first he thought it was just the adrenaline bleeding out of him. He tried to breathe and found he couldn't get a full one in, like someone had closed a fist around his lungs, and his sight went blurry as tears filled his vision.
"Gray!" Natsu's voice was closer now, and he was absolutely delighted. His hand slammed onto Gray's shoulder. "We did it! We actually — Gray?"
He couldn't answer. He opened his mouth and nothing came out except a broken, airless sound he didn't recognize as his own.
"Gray, what's wrong? Are you hurt?" That voice was Lucy, crouching in front of him now, her hands hovering like she didn't know where it was safe to touch.
He couldn't stop shaking.
"Gray, breathe," Erza said, and there was something careful in her voice. "We won. It's over. You don't need to panic now."
He heard himself make the sound again, worse this time, and he couldn't stop himself from crying again.
"Come on, man," Natsu laughed awkwardly. "Winning usually mean we laugh instead of — "
Gray's hand went to his pocket without him deciding to move it at all, fingers fumbling in his pocket for the small piece of fabric he had kept with him.
He pulled it out shakily.
Blue and fur lined with a delicate little yellow flower on the side, slightly worn from battle but unmistakably Juvia's hat.
For a second nobody around him understood. Natsu's grin was still half on his face, Lucy's mouth was open on a question and then Gray brought it to his chest and folded himself over it and the sound that tore out of him didn't belong to any battlefield triumph.
He cried like he'd never cried before in his life. Sobbing loudly and his breath catching as he struggled to breathe with the intensity of his feelings now that the adrenaline of war had simmered down.
Erza's voice had gone very quiet. "Gray, where is she?"
He couldn't say it. He physically could not make the words come out. He just held the hat against his face, against his mouth, like if he breathed it in hard enough it would undo the last few hours, undo the moment she'd sacrificed herself so that he could go on and finish the war.
Juvia's life belongs to you, Gray-sama.
Gray didn't know how long he stayed on his knees in the ruined field. Time had stopped meaning anything the second he felt her lifeless body turn cold and blue in his arms.
People moved around him, he was aware of that much. But he couldn't place who was there.
None of it could get past the aching in his own chest, the place where his heart used to beat steady and sure and now just didn't anymore. And it made it worse that it wasn't even his own blood inside of him now, it was her magic.
He'd give anything, everything, to see her run into the celebrations and join everyone. He knew she'd have so much fun hugging all their friends and family. Probably starting and ending with him so that she could have two excuses for a hug from him.
She would say his name like it was something precious to her. He'd never told her how much he loved hearing it in her voice paired with the sweet nickname she'd always used for him.
He'd never told her a lot of things, because he'd always thought there'd be time, because she was Juvia and she was always by his side. Juvia Lockser could not just… stop existing.
She loved him with a devotion so total it used to embarrass him, and he had let himself believe it was just a permanent fact of his life.
The others were saying his name. Someone, Erza maybe, or Mira, was crouched in front of him now, saying something gentle about getting him up, about needing to move him, and he understood that there was a war to finish cleaning up and a guild to put back together and a hundred small necessary things that would need doing in the coming hours.
He also understood none of it applied to him yet. He couldn't make his legs work. He couldn't make anything work except the tight grip of his fingers in the fabric of her hat, and the endless, useless replaying of the half-second where he placed his lips gently to hers as she lay lifeless in his arms.
The worst kiss he'd possibly every experienced, because of all people, she was supposed to kiss him back. It was supposed to happen when he gave her his answer, in his mind he would have told her he wanted to give it a shot, because why not?
The girl was so in love with him, and he couldn't deny that he had enjoyed the attention he got from her. He also couldn't deny how pretty she was, and that he cared for her in a much different way than their other friends.
Along the way they had become close, she was the only person he had ever cried to openly or told in whole about how his past had affected him. She had once told him he had sought her out ever since she joined the guild and teased him for it when he made the excuse of wanting the new guild members to fit in "Gajeel never got that treatment from you. She doesn't remember you taking solo job with Wendy either," she had sang happily.
Maybe he was bad at concealing his feelings for her as much as he would've liked.
Somewhere above him the sun breaking weakly through smoke, and it felt like the cruelest joke he'd ever been shown, the world going beautiful in her favorite way.
He was so tired.
The thought of the days stretching out ahead of him, none of them ever again containing her voice or her arms wrapping around him out of nowhere or the ridiculous, wonderful way she used to look at him like he'd hung the sun in the sky just for her.
He didn't know how he was supposed to live the rest of his life without her.
In the infirmary that night, one they'd set up in the half-collapsed church, Gray did the math.
He was lying on his back on a narrow cot looking at a crack in the ceiling. He was twenty. His father was also only twenty one when Deliora attacked and he had lived alone with a necromancer for nearly two decades after that. But Makarov had made it past eighty.
That was another sixty years.
He tried to picture it and couldn't. Sixty years was twenty-one thousand days, roughly. Twenty-one thousand times he'd wake up, and she'd still be gone, twenty-one thousand times he'd have to get up anyway and go through the day without talking to her.
He turned onto his side to face the wall and didn't sleep.
In the morning they let him out, he took his shirt off in front of the cracked mirror in the church washroom, because he couldn't stand to have it on him any longer.
He looked at himself.
He'd always had scars. He didn't usually notice them any more than he noticed his own hands. But he looked now, properly. The x-shaped slash in his side from the Tenrou fight with Ultear. The mark on his forehead from Lyon. A thin line on his hip where his fathers ice had caught him during their fight, right before he told him how proud he was before Juvia had to do what he couldn't to end his own fathers suffering.
He knew who every one of them belonged to. He'd been carrying them all around for years like a tally.
And now hers.
A gigantic slash going through his body in a failed attempt to make sure she made it out of the fight. Little had he known she had a trump card to always be able to save him no matter what.
He stood there with his palms braced on the sink and his head bowed and thought that it was the cruelest thing anyone had ever done to him, and that she'd done it out of love.
The only thing he had left of her was his own heartbeat and a missing chunk of his torso that would scar over like all the rest.
The funeral was held on the hill behind the cathedral, more people came than any of them had expected.
Gray stood at the front, because someone had put him there. He didn't know who'd decided that, or what anyone had decided he was to her. He didn't know what to call it either because he'd never let things get far enough to get a label.
Seeing the dark wood coffin getting lowered into the ground was the hardest thing he'd ever experienced. The past few days where he got to sit beside her open coffin had been a light comfort to him, because he could still see her at the very least. But she was in there, and he would never see her again.
Lyon came, and stood with him through all of it without speaking. He gripped Gray's shoulder hard at the end and walked away before either of them had to say anything. Gajeel stood at the very back with his arms crossed and didn't move once. Levy leaned into him and he didn't seem to notice.
The stone said JUVIA LOCKSER, and FAIRY TAIL, with two dates underneath that were far too close together.
Afterwards, people came up to him one by one. He nodded at them. Lucy hugged him and said something he didn't really listen to. Natsu stood next to him for a long time without saying anything at all, which from Natsu was all Gray needed.
When everyone had gone, Gray stayed.
He didn't know how he was going to do twenty-one thousand more days of this.
He did the first week by not doing anything. He slept, or merely lay down with his eyes shut, which was the same thing to him. Lucy came by and left food outside his door. Some days he ate it but most he left it to go off.
He did the second week by taking a job.
It was nothing. A forest beast bothering a lumber camp two towns over. He went alone, because he couldn't stand the thought of anyone looking at him on the train. He finished it in an afternoon, and on the way back he stopped at a market stall because there were pastries in the window, the flaky ones with the custard that she always loved so much.
He'd bought two before he realized what he had done.
He stood in the middle of the street holding the paper bag, somebody bumped into him and apologized but he didn't answer.
He gave both of them to a kid sitting on a fence outside the station instead because showing up to guild with two would have been too much for him to handle.
Erza gave him the key to her room in Fairy Hills a month after the funeral.
"Someone needs to go through her things," she said gently. "The girls offered but I thought you might want the choice first."
He took the key and didn't use it for nine days.
When he finally did, the room still smelled like her. He stood in the doorway with his hand over his eyes for a long time before he could go in.
There were so many dolls. He'd known there would be. Rows of little Grays on the shelf above her bed, the early ones lopsided, the newer ones had more details. There was a notebook on her desk with his name on the cover with a little pink heart. He didn't open it, but he did put it inside his coat pocket.
At the bottom of her wardrobe was a knitting basket with a sweater in it. Dark blue, nearly black. The body was done. One sleeve was done. The second sleeve stopped halfway down, the needles still threaded through the last row, the yarn tucked in beside it like she'd meant to pick it back up that evening.
It was his size. Of course it was.
He sat on her floor with it across his knees and ran his thumb over the last row of loops. He didn't know how to finish it. He didn't know the first thing about knitting but he knew if he pulled the needles out, it would all come undone.
He left the needles in, folded it carefully so they wouldn't slip out, and put in the bag he had brought along with some of her sewing and knitting books.
The next thing he found, in her beside drawers, were a bunch of photos he knew she liked to keep. Most of them being silly moments around the guild that she said were memories, ones that weren't beautiful enough to display but important enough to keep forever. They also went in the bag.
One thing he would never be able to explain, was that he lifted her hair products, her shower gel and her perfume. He knew the girls would want something like that too. They would want something from her make-up or her jewellery to keep and use in honor of her. So he left those, and he took her other products for himself, so he could use it on something to keep the scent of her in his life somewhere.
When he lifted one of needle boxes, he saw two more dolls behind it expect this time she had made one of each of them. She had made littler versions of them both wearing the matching jackets she had bought for them last Christmas.
His heart broke all over again as he looked at the small plush before putting it in the bag too.
The guild learned how to be around him the way you learn to walk on a bad ankle. Carefully at first, and then without thinking about it.
"Have you eaten today?" Lucy would ask, sliding onto the bench across from him.
"Yeah."
"What'd you have?"
He'd have to think about it. "Toast."
"That's not a meal, Gray."
"It had butter on it."
She'd sigh and push half of her sandwich across the table, and he'd only eat it to make her stop looking at him like that, and she'd talk about the book she was working on or Natsu burning another part of her rent away, or how the council had sent the guild three separate letters about property damage in one week.
He'd listen. It helped, a little. It was something to put in the hours.
Mira noticed he'd stopped taking his shirt off. Nobody said anything about it for months. Then one night, closing up, Mira said to Lucy that she thought it was because Juvia had always been the one to pick his clothes up and hand them back to him.
Lucy looked across at the corner table where Gray sat most afternoons and didn't answer.
The truth was simpler than that and worse. He'd started keeping it on because he didn't want to look down and see the scar left behind from his failure with her.
The first year went.
He didn't know how. He kept waiting for the moment it would get easier, like it had before from his other loses, but it never came. What happened instead was that he got better at carrying it. The weight didn't get lighter; he just stopped dropping it in front of people.
Levy and Gajeel had their daughter in the spring. Levy asked Gray to come to see her a few hours after she was born, before anyone else had yet. He went and he held the baby when Levy put her in his arms. She was small and furious and had a full head of dark blue hair.
"Her middle name is Juvia," Levy said quietly, next to him. Her eyes were wet. "I wanted you to know that first."
"She'd have made her dolls of you and Gajeel," Gray smiled gently at the little girl and Levy laughed, surprised into it, and then cried a little. He was sat at the side of the bed, holding her daughter while she did and he lifted one arm carefully to give Levy a comforting hug.
On the walk home he thought about the life he hadn't let himself want out loud. He'd never told anyone about it. He'd barely told himself. But it had been there for years.
A house somewhere near the canal. Her in the kitchen humming, being unbearable about the dishes not being washed right.
Kids, maybe.
Gajeel and Levy's daughter was a different hind of heartbreaking, because Juvia had once told him if they have a daughter she would want her to have Gray's dark hair and Juvia's pale skin.
Part of himself he never looked at directly, that he'd adore a daughter who had her smile.
Five years went by in a blink.
Natsu and Lucy got married in the guild hall, loudly, with lots of fire and a cake Natsu ate a third of before the vows had even been said. Gray stood up for Natsu. His toast was short and dry and made everyone laugh, and when he sat back down Erza squeezed his arm under the table and didn't say anything.
Cana tried around the four year mark, very carefully, to set him up with a girl from Blue Pegasus. "It's just dinner," she said. "Just for you to talk to someone who's not us."
"No," Gray said bluntly.
"You don't even know what she's like."
"She's not — " He stopped. Picked his drink up and put it back down. "No. Thanks, but no."
Cana looked at him for a long moment and then let it drop, and she never brought it up again. He was grateful to her for that.
He took jobs and he was good at them. He made S-Class in year six because of it. At the ceremony Laxus clapped him on the back and said she would have been proud, Gray said thanks and meant it. Then he went home to his apartment and sat on the edge of his bed in the dark for an hour, because he'd turned around at the ceremony without thinking about it, to try to find her in the crowd.
To see her face when they called his name. She'd have cried. She'd have been the loudest person in the whole room.
The sweater sat folded in the top of his wardrobe. He took it down sometimes when he couldn't sleep to hold it close.
On the tenth anniversary, he went up the hill alone.
He went more often than anyone knew, but today he'd put the sweater on. He'd never worn it before even after he had learned to finish it.
He sat down in the grass in front of her gravestone and pulled his knees up tight.
"Hey Juvia," he whispered.
He'd gotten used to talking to it. He hadn't at first. It had taken him most of the first year before he'd said anything out loud up here.
"Little Kuro Redfox started at the academy yesterday. She's a nightmare and already bit a teacher." He a hand over the grass. "Natsu and Lucy are having another one too. Lucy says this is the last time and Natsu says that's what she said last time. So, I'm meant to be godfather again. God knows why they keep asking me."
A breeze went through the trees behind him and somewhere down in town, a bell rang the hour.
"I can't believe it's been ten years."
He sat with that for a while. Ten years, and somewhere in the back of his head was a clock he couldn't turn off. Three thousand six hundred and some days sine he'd last seen her. He'd gotten up for every morning and gone through the day on his own without her.
He didn't know if she'd be proud of that or furious that it had been so hard to do.
"I keep thinking I'll get used to it," his eyes traced her name on the stone. "And I do, sort of. I don't forget you're gone anymore. I don't set out two cups or accidentally buy you a pastry in the bakery anymore. I still turn around in crowds." His voice caught and he let it. "But I think about how much is left. I'm thirty now so,I could have fifty more years of this. That's the part I can't… I don't know how to do fifty years of this."
He looked down at the sleeves of the knitted jumper.
"You did this on purpose," he told her. "You knew I was going to do it. You knew, and you prepared for me to do something like that for you."
He had to stop then. He put his forehead down on his knees and breathed into the dark wool until he could speak again.
"I promised you an answer," he said muffled. "You waited for years and I told you to wait more and more, and you did."
He lifted his head. The name on the stone swam as his vision went blurred.
"I had it planned. It was so stupid. I was going to do this whole big thing to prove to you that I could protect you no matter what," his voice broke as he let himself cry all over again. "Then I would have taken you to the canal, that place with the lanterns. I was going to figure out the right thing to say by then too." He laughed and it came out wet and cracked. "Ten years and I still don't have a clue what I would've said other than 'let's just do this' because even now I get nervous at the idea of getting it wrong for you."
He reached out and put his hand flat against the grass above where he knew she was laying.
"But you never minded when I said stuff wrong." He closed his eyes. "I've loved you for longer than I ever let you know and I'm sorry you never got to hear it. I'm so sorry."
Nothing answered him. He hadn't expected anything to.
He moved his eyes to the stone again. At around the two year mark he remembered getting upset at her name.
Rightly so, her grave read JUVIA LOCKSER.
One of the first jobs they'd gone on as a duo she had smirked and signed it as 'Gray and Juvia Fullbuster' to get a rise out of him. Ever since that day she had done it over and over again to the point where he stopped reacting out loud and just gave her an unimpressed look as she giggled.
She had been Juvia Fullbuster on countless pieces of official paperwork because of it, that now it killed him he didn't make that name a reality.
He stayed there for a long time, with his hand pressed to the cold granite of her name, until the sunlight slid off the stone and onto the grass beside it.
Then he stood, because that was the hardest thing he'd learned to do in the last ten years. Every day for ten years, he'd stood back up and walked away from her.
He'd do it again tomorrow. And the day after that, and the day after that, all the way down the long, long journey of however many days he had left without her.