Ice-Wrought
by Contrail

Disclaimer: Fairy Tail belongs to Hiro Mashima, and is being used without permission. No profit is being made from this story.

On the day of Juvia's funeral, Erza had to physically force Gray to get out of bed and get ready. He didn't cry, or start raging at the unfairness of it all, that yet another person he loved had been taken from him. Either might have been preferable to the way he silently watched the whole affair with a hollow, empty gaze. When the funeral was over, he turned to leave, ignoring all of his friends' attempts to talk to him. Natsu, refusing to let Gray ignore him, grabbed him by the lapels of his jacket and started shouting at and shaking him, trying to get some sort of rise out of him. But Gray just let Natsu do whatever he wanted to him until Erza made Natsu let go of him, at which point he just continued walking back to his dorm room.

After that, Gray shut himself up in there and refused to come out for any reason. Natsu had to be restrained from breaking (or burning) down Gray's door and forcing him to come out. They probably would have let him if Gray hadn't been making enough noise in there that they knew he hadn't die. As the days stretched on, it became more and more tempting to let Natsu go ahead and do it. Needing to grieve in private was one thing, but shutting himself off so completely from everyone else for such a long period couldn't be healthy. A dismal mood, completely understandable under the circumstances, permeated the guild.

That's why everyone was surprised when, a week after the funeral, Gray entered the guild with a sincere smile on his face. His next words caused everyone in the room to go silent. "Juvia's alive. She came back to me! It was all just a rotten trick…" Uneasy glances began to be exchanged between members of the guild. They all knew Gray had taken Juvia's death hard, but…

Erza stood up and started walking slowly towards him, a sympathetic look in her eyes. "Gray…" He ignored her to turn to look back towards the door he'd come in through, still smiling. "C'mon, Juvia. You don't have to feel nervous. They won't care how you look."

The sound of footsteps coming from the other side of the doorway made Erza stop in her tracks and many other people held their breaths. Maybe Gray wasn't in denial after all. Maybe Juvia really was…? The questions going through all of their minds when a figure stepped through the doorway. Lucy covered her mouth with her hands, her eyes filling with tears once she understood what she was really seeing.

The hair, the clothes, everything - it all looked just like Juvia. The movements, the mannerisms, they were all perfect. What gave away its true nature, in the end, was the way they could see through its form. It was made of ice, after all. Exquisitely detailed, manifested from loving memory, it was a masterpiece of Ice-Make Magic. An exact duplicate of Juvia Lockser down to individual strands of hair, unconsciously animated by the power of the man standing beside her.

Gray tilted his head towards his creation, as if listening to it speak. After a moment he spoke, answering words only he could hear. "I'm sure they're as happy to see you as you are to see them. They just need get over their shock, first."

Wordlessly, Erza resumed walking towards the pair. His smile widening, Gray had just started saying something to her when her fist pulled back and then flew forward to impact the back of his skull, the surprise attack knocking him out cold. The Juvia doppelgänger froze as soon as Gray was no longer able to control it. In the silence that enveloped the room as Erza stared down sadly at her dear friend, Lucy came to the realization that they lost not just one friend the day that Juvia died, but two. One to death, the other to madness.