Do not kill the author

BibiZero - That's a relief. It looked so choppy when I wrote it. But um... sorry if this one disappoints.

fairytail101 - Eh... heh... urf.

Yuki Kusanagi - Probably not but I still don't like them. Don't be mad at Lucy. She just wants what's best.

Beta5200 - ... How the heck am I supposed to respond to that?

Dear Jellal

I'm so sorry that I wasn't able to visit you. The council recently upped your security, but if anybody would already know that it would be you. I'll have to see when your trial starts back up. I'm not allowed to testify, but I can still support you.

They really are strict though. They stopped letting you received letters, didn't they? Angel-san agreed to deliver this for me. I included some paper, so you can write a response for him to bring back. He's a poltergeist that's been helping me recently. He won't give me his name, but his real sweet. Maybe he can keep you company, if you get lonely. He says he was from the tower too, but I don't think he has anything against you. He offered to do this.

I'm living with Gray right now. You never really met him, so you don't have to try and remember who he is. It was really just a precaution in case Angel-san was a pervert (he's not) but it got a girl who likes Gray really jealous. Usually her crush is kind of cute, but she actually hospitalized Natsu the other day to try and impress him. He's all right. She only bruised his pride, and one crazy job is all it will take for him to recover from that.

I had a really rotten job last week. The council tried to hire me to go undercover to expose a prostitution ring-as a prostitute! Can you believe that? They don't give you that sort of crap, do they? Probably not. I heard you're a model prisoner. If nothing else they must not give you extra grief.

I'm really looking forward to hearing from you again, Jellal.

Love
Erza Scarlett

Jellal sighed. Odd as it sounded, Erza was never so excited to hear from him. Competing with one's self was awkward.

Well, that letter did come with paper, but no pen. He'd have to hunt them down before he could write a response.

"First kiss?"

Erza flushed. She knew Angel-san and Gray talked a lot without her, but it hadn't occurred to her that they might be talking about her. Up until now it had been her job to give people the details of their dates. Er… no, only the last one had definitely been a date.

"Yeah."

"You sound excited." Gray almost took a seat on the couch next to Erza, but even if she had conceded that he had a right to be pantsless in his own home, she may not appreciate him sitting next to her wearing only boxer's. "What went wrong?"

"Nothing… He didn't eat any ice cream. It wasn't romantic." Erza shrugged. She was almost as bad a liar as she was an actor.

Gray played along. "What did you expect?"

"… A spark." Erza murmured.

"A…" Gray blinked in surprise. "Do you mean… the kiss was bad?"

Erza nodded

"It couldn't have been-"

Erza interrupted Gray with a giggle. "It's nothing. It's probably just that I always entertain the fantasy about Jellal being my first kiss. I must've played with the idea so much in my mind that reality couldn't compete with it."

Gray it is best not to cringe, and succeeded, if only barely. "So there wasn't really anything wrong with it."

"Well, I guess there was. Have you ever touched Angel-san?" Gray nodded. "It doesn't really feel like anything, other than this weird pressure on your skin. I was kissing him, and he was kissing back, but it mostly just felt like that pressure on my tongue."

"That's what you get for dating a ghost." Gray had meant it as a joke, but Lucy's words came rushing back to him. This time he couldn't stop himself from cringing.

Erza, who had completely blocked out memory of her conversation with Lucy, just laughed and said "How about you help me test that?"

There. That looked like a nice response. He showed interest in what Erza had mentioned without giving away any information that he shouldn't know, he confirmed her suspicions that the council had prevented him from responding to her letters, and even made up an interesting story about a mishap with one of the prisoners. It was worded perfectly as a result of being a second draft. He'd written the first one only to realize that he would have to forge somebody's handwriting other than his own.

Would Erza suspect something if he gave it to her early? Well, he was still looking for an excuse to force himself to tell her. Why not?

The walk back from Lucy's, the place where he felt most justified stealing a pen from, took a little time, but still not enough to make it believable that he really gone to Era and back. Oh well.

Gray's door was locked, so Jellal had to slip the letter underneath and walk through. When he stood up after retrieving the letter he promptly dropped it again, gaping at the sight of Erza and Gray kissing.

There had to be an explanation. Gray holding her in only boxers was one thing. He did that with everyone. But kissing on top of it? She couldn't be… He couldn't be… "Mm… Yeah." Erza pulled away "Kissing a live boy definitely felt better. That's too bad."

"So you're in for a lifetime of bad kisses. There's more to a relationship than that." Gray shrugged.

Jellal sighed in relief. Except…

He looked back down at the letter. So she thought he was a bad kisser? That would probably be forgotten if they ever got as far as bed. Maybe he shouldn't have stolen Lucy's pen after all.

Maybe he should've been a little nicer to Simon

He'd been so determined to prove them wrong. He knew he truly loved her, and that sometimes love was strong enough to cross the boundary of life and death.

Just... only sometimes.

Unnoticed by Erza and Gray, he slipped past them into the dining room and found another piece of paper and envelope. No longer careful with his handwriting, he focused on not being obvious as he snuck past them again to go to Erza's room, again walking to the door after slipping the letter under it.

No longer distracted by physical intimacy with a mostly naked man, Erza heard the sound of paper sliding against wood and looked over at her door.

Jellal set the letter down on her pillow, enclosed in an envelope with the location of his grave, just in time to hear the door click behind him. He spun to see Erza's face one last time as he vanished into the light.

Erza stood there, staring blankly for several long minutes at the spot where she could have sworn she saw Jellal, even if it had only been for a split second, then shook herself from her trance. Of course he hadn't been there. She was just getting eager about-the letter! Angel-san had gotten the letter for her.

She stared at the directions on the back for a moment, written in Angel-san's handwriting, then tore the envelope open and read:

Erza, I'm sorry for having misled you.

It would mean a lot if you came to visit me

-Jellal Fernandes

What the heck? This was Angel-san's handwriting too! Misled you… but it was signed Jellal. Maybe… maybe Jellal hadn't been able to write himself, and Angel-san was apologizing for that. He must have just written the gist of what Jellal had said.

Visit… Oh! The directions must have been to his new cell. No wonder she couldn't contact him from Era.

"Gray!" Erza called.

"Yeah?" Gray's voice drifted from down the hall.

"You have the house to yourself tonight. I have somewhere to go."

"It's awfully late."

"I'll be careful," Erza promised "but this can't wait until morning. I've been waiting to see him for months."

"Oh, Erza, you're back. Gray was worried, he said you were gone all night and… hey, are you okay?"

"You were right, Mira."

"I was… about what?"

"Poltergeists are usually convicts."

"Uh-oh. Did something happen with Angel-san?"

"Yeah. They spelled his name wrong. On his grave marker."

STA: Yeah... so... I wrote this story because an idea for a ghost romance randomly popped into my head and I was like "that would be cute if I actually wrote plain old romance (instead of that mpreg laced stuff)... oh... except for all these flaws with dating a dead guy. Hey, it would be kind of fun to write a story about ghost romance that fails at the end when they realize that! You know, I haven't done anything cruel to Jellal lately. I'll let the story focus on him." But then everyone was like "oh this is so cute" and I was like "Ah! I'm gonna be flamed if I finish this!

Yeah. Also, sorry this chapter took so long. I spent all last week putting together my plans for my next FT fic, then I had an online exam last saturday and I hadn't read any of the chapters it was on so that ate up my whole day, and sunday was spent letting my brain cool down, and then I just got stuck on how to make this play out after the letter reading scene.

Also, Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! Now there's a seven year age gap between Jellal and Erza! They already have enough barriers! They already have enough!