Fiona and Erza sat on the public bench outside the apartment building.

The wood was weathered, painted green once but now chipped and faded by years of sun and rain. A small bush grew beside it, overgrown, its branches reaching toward their legs like curious fingers.

The afternoon light had begun to shift toward evening, the shadows lengthening, the air cooling. Somewhere down the street, a dog barked. Somewhere else, a child laughed.

Neither woman had planned to be here.

Erza had sat first.

She had walked to this bench as if drawn by an invisible thread, lowered herself onto the worn wood, and stared at the street with eyes that saw nothing.

She was not resting. She was hiding. Hiding from Yuuta, from the apartment, from the choice that waited for her upstairs like a blade suspended by a thread.

Fiona had followed without thinking. Her feet had carried her to the bench before her mind could object, and now she sat beside her enemy, her hands folded in her lap, her heart a battlefield of confusion and resentment and something she refused to name. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝐰𝚎𝕓𝐧𝚘𝘃𝗲𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝕞

For long seconds, neither spoke.

The silence was not comfortable. It was thick, heavy, swollen with unspoken words and unresolved tension. It pressed against them like a living thing, demanding to be filled, but neither woman knew how to begin.

Fiona glanced at Erza from the corner of her eye.

The dragon queen’s face was turned toward the street, her profile sharp against the fading light, her violet eyes distant. For all the weeks Fiona had known her, for all the terror and awe and hatred she had felt, she had always seen Erza as a monster.

Cold.

Ruthless.

Unfeeling.

The silver-haired demon who had frozen a port, who had Slaughter Human without blinking, who had stolen Yuuta’s heart and crushed Fiona’s own beneath her heel.

But now, sitting beside her, Fiona saw something else.

Erza looked human.

Not in form, her beauty was too sharp, too perfect, too otherworldly for that. But in the way she held herself. The slight slump of her shoulders. The way her hands rested in her lap, palms up, as if she was waiting for something she knew would never come. The way her eyes, those terrible violet eyes, seemed to be looking at something far away, something that hurt to see.

She is going to do something, Fiona thought. Something that will haunt her forever.

The certainty settled into her chest like a stone, cold and heavy and immovable. She did not know what Erza was planning. She did not know what decision had been made in the silence of the dragon queen’s mind. But she felt it, the weight of a goodbye not yet spoken, a sacrifice not yet named, a love that was preparing to cut out its own heart... No her Own Soul.

Fiona gathered her courage. The courage to ask a question she was not sure she wanted answered.

"Why are you doing this?" she asked.

Her voice was quiet, almost lost in the ambient noise of the city, but Erza heard it.

The dragon queen turned her head. "What do you mean?" Her voice was distant, as if she was speaking from somewhere far away, somewhere Fiona could not follow.

"Why are you Suggesting me to marry Yuuta?" Fiona’s voice cracked on his name, the sound of it breaking through the walls she had built around her heart.

"All of a sudden. After everything. After." She stopped, unable to find the words, her throat tight with emotions she could not name.

"Why don’t you want to marry him?" Erza asked.

The question was soft.

Almost gentle.

It was not an accusation, it was genuine curiosity, as if Erza truly could not understand why any woman would refuse the chance to be Yuuta’s wife.

"No. I never said that." The words came too fast, tumbling out before Fiona could stop them. She stumbled over the syllables, her face flushing, her hands gripping the edge of the bench. "I never said I didn’t want to, I mean, that’s not what I."

She stopped.

Her breath caught.

Her heart pounded.

She had almost admitted it. Almost said the words she had been holding inside for years. I want to marry him. I have always wanted to marry him. He was mine before she came. He was mine.

Erza laughed.

It was a small sound, barely more than an exhale, but it was unmistakably a laugh. Soft. Almost gentle. Fiona stared at her, stunned. In all the time she had known Erza, in all the weeks of hatred and fear and grudging respect, she had never heard Erza laugh. She had never imagined she could.

That was when Fiona saw the tear.

It was small, so small that a less observant person might have missed it entirely. A single drop, balanced on Erza’s lower lashes, catching the evening light like a tiny diamond. She was holding it back, fighting it with every ounce of her legendary control, but her eyes had betrayed her.

"Why did you decide to leave?" Fiona asked.

The question hung in the air between them, fragile as spun glass.

Erza looked at her. Her voice, when she spoke, was trembling, not with coldness, not with rage, but with something far more dangerous. Vulnerability.

"Reality has made me realize," she said quietly, "that I do not deserve love."

She tilted her head toward the sky. Dark clouds had begun gathering beyond the horizon, swallowing the fading light little by little. For a moment, she simply stared at them, as though searching the heavens for an answer that would never come.

Her throat tightened.

Her hands clenched weakly in her lap.

A single tear trembled against her lashes, refusing to fall. Centuries of discipline held it back with cruel stubbornness.

"For these hands..." Her voice nearly broke. "They are stained with the blood of my enemies."

Fiona’s expression softened.

"I was foolish," Erza interrupted softly. "Foolish Pathetic.. enough to believe I could live beside him as though I were a normal woman."

The wind brushed against her silver hair.

"While I dreamed of a peaceful life with him... I was still carrying the weight of billions upon my shoulders."

Fiona frowned in confusion.

"I don’t understand."

Erza lowered her gaze.

"That is because you are human."

Her voice was calm, but painfully empty.

"You still believe love alone can overcome reality."

Silence followed.

Then, slowly, Erza closed her eyes.

"But reality has finally shown me where I stand... and where my mortal stands."

For the first time, Fiona heard exhaustion in her voice.

"So I decided," Erza whispered, "to leave for good."

Fiona did not understand.

She knew Erza was from Nova, from another world, another realm, another dimension of power and magic. But she did not know what Erza truly was. She did not know that the woman sitting beside her was a dragon. Not just a dragon, but a queen.

The ruler of an entire kingdom. A being who had waded through rivers of blood to claim her throne and had spent centuries keeping it.

She did not know the weight Erza carried. The lives she had taken. The wars she had won. The enemies she had crushed beneath her heel so that her people could survive.

But she felt it. The sorrow beneath the coldness. The exhaustion beneath the power. The loneliness of someone who had been fighting for so long that she had forgotten how to stop.

Fiona said nothing.

There was nothing to say.

The silence returned, but it was different now. Not heavy. Not thick. Just... silent. Two women, bound by their love for the same man, sitting together on a weathered bench, watching the day fade into evening.

Erza broke the silence first.

Her voice was cold again, she had put her armor back on, piece by piece, word by word. But the coldness was thinner now, easier to see through.

It was a mask, and both of them knew it.

"How did you know about Yuuta’s nightmare?"

Fiona looked at her.

The question was not an accusation. It was genuine curiosity, tinged with something that might have been admiration. Erza, who held absolute power, who could shatter mountains and freeze oceans, had not been able to sense her own mate’s suffering.

Yet a human woman, barely twenty years old, had arrived at the apartment with Aether stones and knowledge of the curse.

"How did you detect it?" Erza continued. "How did you know he was trapped?"

Fiona’s hand drifted to her neck, her fingers brushing against the stone that hung there on a thin leather cord.

The Aether stone, small, dark, pulsing faintly with residual energy. She had worn it for years, ever since she had learned what it could do, ever since she had first sensed the darkness coiled around Yuuta’s sleeping form.

"It’s a long story," she said.

Fiona remained silent for a long moment, her gaze distant, unfocused, as if she was staring through the evening light and into a past she had spent years trying to bury.

Erza did not interrupt. She simply waited.

"I remember the day Yuuta transferred into our school," Fiona finally said, her voice quiet, almost reverent. "We were the same age back then. Same grade. Same world. At first, nobody paid much attention to him. He entered the classroom with his head lowered, his face hidden beneath a curtain of black hair. The teacher introduced him, ’This is Yuuta Konuari, please make him feel welcome,’ but Yuuta never looked at anyone. Not once."

She paused, her fingers tracing the edge of the weathered bench.

"I was the class president at the time. That meant I was responsible for showing new students around the school. That was the time I noticed something strange about him." Her voice dropped. "He looked terrified. Not nervous or shy. Genuinely terrified. As if he believed that everyone around him would eventually hurt him."

Erza listened without moving.

"Then he raised his head."

Fiona’s jaw tightened.

"The moment the class saw his red eyes, everything changed."

She turned slightly on the bench, her body angling toward Erza as if the weight of the memory demanded her full attention. Her voice grew softer, more deliberate, each word placed with care.

"Their faces changed. The smiles that had greeted him, the polite, practiced smiles of children taught to be kind, faded. Their eyes widened with something that was not curiosity, not confusion, not kindness. It was something older. Something uglier. Fear."

She paused.

"The students in the front rows trembled. They did not speak. They were good children, raised to be polite, raised to be kind. They did not know what to say. They only knew that the boy standing at the front of the room was not like them, and that frightened them."

Her voice hardened.

"The children in the back were not good children. They were not kind. They had been waiting for someone to mock, someone to hurt, someone to make them feel powerful. They found him."

Fiona’s eyes grew dark. The memory start appereing infront of her.

"’Monster,’ one of them said. ’Look at his eyes.’"

"’Demon.’"

"’Devil. He is a devil.’"

Erza’s hands curled into fists on her lap.

"Yuuta’s eyes began to glow," Fiona continued. "I did not know why. I did not know how. It happened later I found that, when he was sad, when he was scared. The light pulsed from his red eyes, faint and flickering, like a candle about to go out, and the children in the back saw it and laughed."

Her voice cracked. She pasued as she remmeber each word from past.

"’His eyes are glowing! He really is a demon!’"

"’Cast him out! How dare he.’"

"’How dare he betray Jesus.’"

"’The devil will be crushed beneath God’s feet.’"

Tears glistened in Fiona’s eyes, but she did not wipe them away.

"Paper balls flew through the air. They hit his face, his chest, his hands. He did not move. He stood at the front of the room, his hands at his sides, his eyes glowing, his tears falling. And he whispered something, so quietly that I almost did not hear it."

She looked at Erza.

"The teacher tried to stop them," Fiona said. "She slammed her duster on the desk. She shouted at the backbenchers to sit down and be quiet. They did not listen. They threw more paper, laughed louder, called him worse names. She could not control them. She could not control any of it."

Fiona’s voice steadied.

"And then I stood up."

A small, sad smile crossed her face.

"I was small, like him. I walked to the front of the room, past the whispering children, past the frightened children, past the teacher who was trying and failing to restore order. I stood in front of Yuuta, blocking him from the paper balls, from the laughter, from the cruelty of children who did not know any better."

She paused.

"’Enough,’ I said."

The classroom went silent.

"Even I was surprised at first, when I saw him," Fiona admitted, her voice softening. "But unlike the others, I could not bring myself to hate him. So I helped him."

The small, almost nostalgic smile appeared on her face again, soft, fragile, the ghost of a girl she had been before the world had hardened her. Then it faded.

"After that day, Yuuta never really left my side. He sat beside me in every class, followed me through the hallways, waited for me after school. At first I thought he was just clingy, but later I realized the truth. Yuuta was afraid of people... No more like human itself. He was terrified of being abandoned and even more terrified of being hated. He attached himself to me because I was the only one who had not rejected him. Not because he wanted to, but because he did not know how to survive alone."

Her voice softened further.

"The bullying never stopped. If anything, it became worse. The other children feared his eyes and treated him like something cursed. Rumors spread through the school constantly. Some claimed he was possessed. Others said his parents had abandoned him because he was born evil. A few whispered that he was not human at all."

A trace of anger appeared in her expression.

"And because Yuuta came from an orphanage, nobody cared enough to protect him. The teachers looked the other way. The principal pretended not to notice. The other parents warned their children to stay away from him. He was unwanted. Unloved. Alone."

Fiona lowered her gaze.

"I once saw a group of older students corner him behind the school building. They demanded that he cover his eyes. When he refused, they beat him until he collapsed."

Erza’s eyes darkened. The air around her grew cold.

"But what scared me the most was not the bullying," Fiona whispered. "It was the fact that Yuuta never fought back. Not once. Not ever. He just endured it silently like test subject, as if he truly believed he deserved every bit of pain they gave him."

Silence fell between them.

Erza felt something heavy settle in her chest, a strange, unfamiliar ache. She understood that loneliness. She too had been hated simply because of what she was. The Snow Forest. The hatchling who was too weak, too small, too unwanted. The cold that had been her only companion.

"In the beginning, I only pitied Yuuta," Fiona admitted honestly. Her voice was raw, stripped of pretense. "I thought he was broken. Fragile. Someone who needed to be protected. But the more time I spent with him, the stranger he became to me."

She slowly looked toward Erza.

"There were moments when Yuuta did not feel human at all. Sometimes I would catch him staring at the sky for hours, not daydreaming, not resting, but searching. As if he was looking for something far beyond this world, something he had lost and could not name. He barely understood normal human emotions. He did not know how friendships worked. Whenever someone showed him kindness, he looked confused. Almost frightened."

Her voice dropped.

"There were nights when I walked him back to the orphanage. Every single time, he would stop near the gate and stare at the moon. Not at the stars. Not at the clouds. Just the moon. That was the only moment he ever looked truly alive, like something inside him recognized it."

Fiona swallowed slowly.

"That was when I started feeling it. That strange feeling that Yuuta... was never meant to exist in this world."

For the first time, Erza’s calm expression shifted. A flicker of something, surprise, perhaps, or recognition, crossed her violet eyes.

"I know how ridiculous that sounds," Fiona said, letting out a weak, bitter laugh. "But no matter how much time passed, I could never shake that feeling away. It was almost like the world itself was rejecting him. Like he was a mistake that should never have happened."

Erza’s gaze sharpened.

"What made you think something like that?"

Fiona slowly lifted her eyes toward her. The evening light caught her face, illuminating the tear tracks that had dried on her cheeks, the exhaustion carved into her features.

"Because one day," she said, "I witnessed something impossible."

She paused. Her throat worked. Her hands trembled.

"Something that I still cannot explain."

Erza leaned forward slightly, her full attention fixed on the human woman beside her.

The streetlights flickered.

The shadows grew longer.

And somewhere above them, in a small apartment filled with the scent of blood and bread, the man they both loved clung to consciousness, unaware that the story of his past was being unraveled on a weathered bench beneath the fading sky.

To be contiuned...