They came for Erza the next morning.
No warning, no explanation needed beyond what everyone in that cell already understood — someone had to answer for the rebellion, and the guards had apparently decided who that someone was going to be.
Two of them grabbed her by the arms before she’d even finished waking up properly, and she didn’t fight it, didn’t scream, didn’t do anything except go rigid and silent in a way that was somehow worse than if she’d struggled.
“Erza!” Millianna’s voice cracked on the name.
“Stay back,” one of the guards said, not even bothering to sound threatening about it.
Just bored.
Routine.
The door slammed shut behind them, and then it was just the rest of us, staring at an empty space where she’d been a minute ago.
Do something.
The thought arrived fast and useless, the way it always did in this body — a six -year-old’s fists and a mind that still remembered, distantly, what it had felt like to be old enough to actually do something with them.
I’d been nearly a grown man once, in another life.
Old enough to have made real choices, carried real consequences.
And here I was, small and powerless, watching the door close on a girl Go after them.
Say something.
Do something.
I didn’t move.
I told myself it was because there was nothing I could do.
Told myself a small body against trained guards would just mean one more kid dragged off, no better outcome, no point.
All true.
All perfectly reasonable.
None of it was the real reason, and I knew it even as I sat there not moving.
The real reason was simpler and uglier than that: I was scared.
Plain, simple, gut-deep scared, in a way that no amount of “I used to be an adult” made any easier to shake off.
Coward.
Nobody in the cell said it out loud.
Nobody needed to.
I said it to myself plenty.
She came back that night.
I wish I could say it wasn’t as bad as we all feared.
It was worse.
They half-carried, half-dragged her back in, and set her down like she was something they were done with rather than someone they’d hurt, and by the time the door locked again, Millianna already had her arms around her, sobbing, and Sho had gone white and silent, and I just stood there uselessly staring at the fresh bandage where one of Erza’s eyes used to be.
She didn’t cry.
Didn’t say anything, for a long while.
Just sat there, letting Millianna hold her, one remaining eye fixed on nothing in particular.
“Erza,” Jellal said eventually, quiet, kneeling down in front of her.
“Erza, look at me.” She did, slowly.
“This isn’t your fault,” he said.
“None of it.
You hear me?” “I led it,” she said, voice flat, hollow in a way I’d never heard from her before.
“I planned it.
This is exactly my fault.” “No,” Jellal said, and something in his voice had already changed since yesterday — quieter, harder, more certain of itself in a way that made my stomach twist, because I knew exactly what that certainty meant, even if none of the others did yet.
“It’s not.
And I’m going to fix it.” “Jellal—” “I’m going to tell them it was me,” he said, standing up.
“That I planned it.
That I forced everyone else into it.” “That’s insane,” Simon said.
“They’ll—” “I know what they’ll do.” Jellal’s voice didn’t waver.
“Better me than her.
Better me than any of you.” Nobody could talk him out of it.
Erza tried, hoarse and desperate, grabbing at his sleeve with what strength she had left, and he just gently pried her hand loose and told her, almost gently, that it was already decided.
Stop him.
Say something.
I opened my mouth.
Closed it again.
What was I going to say?
That i have a dragon sealed in my body , who could help me awaken magic .
There was no version of that sentence that didn’t sound like the ravings of a traumatized six-year-old, and worse — even if I somehow made them believe me, I didn’t actually know how to stop what came next.
Coward.
Again.
Twice in two days.
Really building a track record here.
The guards came for him in the morning, and he went without a fight, without a single complaint, looking back at all of us one last time with something in his expression I couldn’t quite name — resolve, maybe, or the last shape of the boy he’d been before he decided this was worth becoming something else for.
The door closed.
And once again, all I could do was sit there in the silence he left behind, useless, small, and furious at exactly how little either of those things had changed since the day before.
You couldn’t have stopped it, big brother said quietly, that night, before I even had to ask.
Not the way you are now.
Not yet.
Yeah.
Yet.
Keep telling myself that.
I mean it.
Fear isn’t the same as failure, kid.
But I understand why it doesn’t feel that way from where you’re sitting.
Doesn’t help Erza’s eye.
Doesn’t help whatever Jellal’ No.
It doesn’t.
I didn’t have anything to say back to that.
Just sat there in the dark, listening to Erza’s too-quiet breathing across the cell, and promised myself — for real this time, not just the useless kind of promise I’d already broken twice — that the next time this tower asked something of me, fear wasn’t going to be the thing that decided my answer.