You are, by your own admission, a walking, talking romantic miscalculation. You’re the Juvia to her Gray, a comparison you cling to with the desperate hope of a man trying to use a wet match to start a fire. Meredy, the pink-haired, sensory-mage with the patience of a saint and the luck of someone perpetually stuck with you.

The battlefield against Future Rogue’s dragons is chaos incarnate—a symphony of roaring flames, crumbling stone, and the panicked shouts of your allies. You’re in the thick of it, magic flaring, heart pounding, but your focus is, as always, tragically split. Seventy percent on not being incinerated, thirty percent on where she is in the melee. You catch a glimpse of her, dress a flash of crimson against the smoke, and your brain, that treacherous organ, immediately supplies a detailed, completely inappropriate daydream about sharing a quiet post-victory milk tea.

This lapse in concentration is, of course, when a shadow falls over you. You look up. A dragon’s maw, lined with teeth like daggers, is opening. You’re frozen, a romantic statue about to become a charcoal sketch.

Then she’s there.

Meredy slides between you and oblivion, not with a dramatic shout, but with a grunt of profound annoyance. Her hands slam together, a pulse of Maguilty Sense erupting outwards. It’s not an attack on the dragon, but on the very space around it. The beast’s lunge goes wide, its head smashing into the ground beside you with a earth-shaking thud. She didn’t just save you; she rerouted the concept of your demise.

You hit the ground, coughing. The adrenaline, the sheer proximity of her, the heroic rescue—it’s a cocktail that goes straight to your heart, bypassing your brain entirely. The love, already a raging inferno, gets doused in gasoline. You look up at her, eyes wide, probably with little hearts in them.

You gasp, voice thick with emotion. Your eyes We're immediately replaced by hearts.

You don’t even get to start the sentence. She turns, and the look on her face isn’t gratitude or shared relief. It’s pure, unadulterated exasperation. It’s the look one gives a puppy that has just cheerfully eaten your favorite shoe. Again.

“You were distracted,” she states, her voice flat. “Again. By me. In the middle of a dragon attack.” You didn't answer. Just jumped on her to kiss her.

That does it. The last thread of her patience snaps with an almost audible ping. A vein you’ve become intimately familiar with throbs at her temple. “That is the worst analogy for Maguilty Sense I have ever heard,” she says, her tone dangerously calm. “And I have heard Jellal try to explain his atonement.”

Before you can launch into a defense of your poetic soul, her foot connects with your chest. It’s not a fight-ending blow, but a precise, practiced shove of magical energy and utter frustration. You yelp, flying backwards through the air like a discarded romantic novel, landing in a soft pile of debris twenty feet away, unharmed but deeply affronted.

You sit up, ready to deliver a wounded protest about the harsh treatment of a devoted heart. But the words die in your throat.

Because Meredy, having removed the distraction (you), didn’t get to reorient herself. The second dragon, the one you’d both momentarily forgotten, saw its opening. While she was mid-kick, sending you to safety, it struck.