It's Monday, and Lucy's on the move.
She bounces up Main Street on one leg, spins in a circle twice, and then flips over and crawls along the pavement—which is hot and sticky like her Hubba Bubba that one time she microwaved it—on her hands. It hurt the first time she tried, but her hands got tough-rough and gnarly, and now they're numbed down but so so strong.
Old Hag Porlyusica is brewing something on her porch, something with fungus and maybe the chopped up liver of Halloween cats. It smells poisonous. Lucy almost flips back to her feet, but she spots Erza on the porch, swinging her legs back and forth in strict metronome rhythm (tik-tok-tik-tok), and Lucy figures if Erza can breathe in the stuff it can't kill her.
Erza waves with one of her multicolored paring knives. Lucy wiggles an orange sneaker back in her direction.
"Erza! Smile!"
A shine of snaggle-teeth in Erza's grin, and Lucy beams back—Erza could always smile so pretty.
A smile of a witch's daughter brings good luck.
Check.
"How's the hag, Erza?"
"She's a witch. Okay? Witch. If you call her a hag again, she's gonna hex you." Erza makes a face and blows a bubble of something that looks like gum, except it's green, and warty.
"Witch, hag, pumpkin, bumpkin," Lucy sings. "Hey, I like whatcha did to your hair." She stills, balancing on her hands, teeter-tottering left and right like she's walking a tightrope. Wobbles later, she falls.
Shyly, Erza reaches up to touch her hair, sifting through the red to the little clovers braided into the strands of it. "Do you? It was your mom's idea. She said that if it would ward off any bad spirits from…"
"Ooooooh—from Jellal?"
"N-no! I didn't say anything about...um," Erza says, and her head shakes so the clover stems swing back and forth.
"Clovers in your hair," Lucy says. "Smart. Still, I would put a spider in his pocket, just in case."
"Gotcha covered." She points, and Lucy notices the hulking shape on the porch railing, peering at her with eight beady little eyes.
"Wolfy? Wow." Lucy whistles. "You must really love Jellal if you're willing to sic the Wolf on him."
"He's just a precaution."
"No, no, I'm not saying you shouldn't. Spiders are even better than four-leafed clovers. They're lucky little guys. Jellal'll be heavily fortified against spirits they won't even poke him." A pause, then: "Hold on, though—isn't he scared of bugs?"
Erza hardens. "Yes, well, we're all gonna have to make a few sacrifices. He'll just have to...handle it somehow."
"Sure thing." Distributing all her weight to one hand, Lucy uses the other to give Erza the two-fingered salute. "Tell Natsu hi for me! And remember—"
"Spirits can't do what we don't let them do," Erza finishes. "I know. Form an impenetrable medium and all that." The sticky thing she's chewing goes pop! "See you later?"
"Only if that's where the sideways way goes." Lucy grins, gracelessly tumbles back to her feet, skips backward seven steps and runs forward seventeen, and then speeds to the end of the street—a poof, she's gone.
Erza glances at the spider. She pictures Jellal's face. Ponders some—on wards for malevolent beings. Then stands up and gives the brew in the pot a big, good stir.
.
.
.
So, there are differences between everything.
Salamanders are small dragons, and small dragons aren't the same as large dragons.
Lucy knows that the devil lives in the details: if she'd collected Natsu's smile, for example, it wouldn't be the same, because the grin of a witch's daughter isn't the same as the grin of a witch's son.
And, maybe, she could point out that a seer isn't the same as a witch—and it isn't the same as a lunatic, because there's a difference between special and crazy, crazy and mad. A difference between "hey, she's kinda weird" and "why isn't she locked up?"
Chasms between spirits and hallucinations, because they're not the same thing, not, not, not, and spirits can breathe and think and plot and hallucinations are just bubbles—scary dreams, but when you dream of someone closing their arms around your throat, you always have a chance of waking up.
Neat things line up tip to tail, only spirits go roundabout. They're good crack-seekers. They find places where they don't fit and they squeeze.
Like breath out of lungs and life out of breath, they thrive on things that don't make sense—lopsided things.
Sideways things.
.
.
.
The kids at her school decide on eggs today. Hordes of them. Lucy approves: they're messy and make pretty good projectiles and they launch okay from slingshots. It's a thought-out choice: it's so sweet, Lucy thinks, and did they go through all that trouble just for me?
SPLAT.
They don't hurt, either. Too bad they didn't let her paint them first and then throw them at her—Easter eggs are lucky.
She goes home and lets her spirit-cat lick all the spatter off her, since Loke likes eggs (or he's been trained to, at least).
Drool of a spirit, tainted with unborn life.
Check aaaaand...check.
She yanks off her orange sneakers and uncaps the smile that she'd trapped inside, smears some of Loke's saliva on it. With a holler like bagpipes Lucy bellows, "MOOOOOOOOM!"
"WHAT?"
"I GOT YOUR STUPID GRIN, OKAY?"
When Layla half-stumbles half-crawls down the stairs with a roll of toilet paper in one hand and a silver coin in the other, Lucy's gotta admit: she's never seen someone look like such a wreck. Giant coat stained rainbow, snotty nose, eyes that look like they're bleeding. "What the fuck now?"
"What the fuck now? How about a 'thank you, my darling heart baby child precious flower girl, I love you'?"
Layla rubs her face and sighs. "Listen, darling heart baby—whatever, if you woke me up just to give me mouth then I'm gonna just go back to—"
"I said I got your grin," Lucy repeats.
Layla's bloodshot eyes widen.
"You don't mean…"
"A witch's grin? The spit of a spirit cat? Yeah. Meet Loke." She holds up the cat: a handsome ginger who wears an imperiously disdainful expression. "Do you know how long it took to find him? And to train him to like eggs? Cats hate eggs."
"That's funny; my cat used to love—"
"OH MY GOD MOM TELL ME ABOUT YOUR SIAMESE MIXIE WHO GOT RUN OVER BY YOUR ASSHOLE OF AN EX-BOYFRIEND LATER OKAY."
"Okay," Layla says meekly.
"And Erza finally gave me her smile today. I mean, she would've done it sooner, but it was hard to catch it. You need the right shoes." She kicks at her orange sneakers. "Thank god. These shoes were awful."
"Well, I always said you're challenged fashionably—"
"MOM."
"...Right."
"Anyway, the smile was the easy part," Lucy sighs. "The other stuff. God, how could anyone hope to find a three-legged toad specifically with seven tails? Or just with any tails? Basic biology. Toads don't have tails."
"Uh, well that's without thinking about spirit toads and all their…deformities…."
Lucy practically wilts herself to death right there.
"Oh. Spirit toad chasing, huh?" Layla makes a sympathetic coughing noise. "Don't want to talk about it?"
"Not even a little." She shuffles her feet as Loke meows, little fur face wrinkled; he's clearly expressing his distaste.
"So you've been...chasing after spirits," Layla says carefully. "Born spirits, not dead ones."
Lucy suddenly feels a burn, unfamiliar and unpleasant: guilt. Does rule breaking…always feel like this? "Um. Yeah. Just a few, you know, animals and—andsomeharmlesslookingpeople—"
"Lucy." Layla fists her hands on her hips and gives her best disapproving Mom-glare, but behind that there's something sharper, angrier, and a warning, too.
"It's fine!" her daughter says quickly. "I'm fine, Mom, I'm fine! Erza's fine, too. I taught her how to protect herself. And you know that they don't know how to handle people who can see them."
"Jesus, Lucy, they can learn." Layla claws her hands through her hair, and blonde strands fly in a spectacular gravity-defying way. "That cat could learn. I could learn something so simple as that. I could kill you, right now, just fly at you and snap—"
Layla stops.
Seconds trickle by, achingly slow, before she says, hesitant, "—I didn't mean that."
She half-expects to hear Lucy scream "MOM GOD" again, but she doesn't—Lucy's quiet, thoughtful, resting her chin in her hand and stroking Loke with the other. Her mother recognizes that face. She can almost hear the gears shifting in the girl's brain, thinking of a plan; a plan and a response.
"I know you've thought about it," she says finally.
"Lucy."
"It's okay, Mom. I thought about it, too. And I realized that if the ceremony doesn't work—"
"Lucy, shut up."
"—if the ceremony doesn't work," she says, louder, "then do it. Kill me. Make me like you."
"Ugh, I'm not having this conversation with you right now, you hear? Go...go find Erza and play or something. Just go."
"Mom—"
"Lucy, scat."
"Mom, come on, you can't ignore the fact that I'm still alive—"
"That's the point, you shit-for-brains kid! You're alive! God, Lucy Ann Heartfilia, I told you to it straight the first day; people are breathing and beating and living, and it's as it should be—"
"But you're suspended and dead and nothing changes, does it, Mom, because you died in that coat! You freaking died in that ugly coat and now you have to wear that thing every day, and how is that fair, Mom?" Lucy jabs a finger at the coat with its freakish stains. "I spilt my watercolors on the thing when I was two, and you should've gotten—you—people should be able to change clothes, okay?"
"I like this coat," Layla says.
"Yeah, well," Lucy stops, trying to think of a response that'll light the fuse and burn up the tension that's building, this whole conversation, except more like this whole three years; but she can't think with Loke rubbing against her legs. He's too tickly. "Yeah, well, I don't," she settles, and storms up the stairs.
From below, Layla wraps the coat around herself in a little rainbow-colored shell, eyes fluttering open and shut behind her blonde, barely-there lashes. Loke plops down on the sofa like a log, out in seconds.
"You. Cat," Layla says.
"Grr."
"...Filthy thing." She scoots closer, picking Loke up, pulling on his legs. "What," she sighs, "in the world have you done to my daughter?"
"Grr," Loke says.
"Oh, just—hissing felines. You're almost as temperamental as teenage girls." In a slow, melting way, Layla slumps down on the couch. "The living throw such temper tantrums now. See, a spirit wouldn't do that. You and me, we're nice, consistent creatures."
"..."
"Oh, come on, furball. I know you want to grr at me."
"Hiss," says Loke.
"You're doing that," Layla says, "just because you're a ginger little smart-ass, y'know? Oh, shoo." She flicks Loke away. "Go bother some poor single parent who isn't dead. Lord knows I have enough problems already."
Loke hisses, but even defiant cats can't disobey the direct order of a seer, much less a dead one. Tail up, tongue out, claws unleashed, he wags his kitty-hole in Layla's face all the way out the door.
"Now." She claps her hands together. "To sort out the rest of this mess. Come on, Layla, get your shit all packaged up—we got a ritual to stop."
She picks up Lucy's sneaker.
.
.
.
Once upon a time, when Lucy's eyes took up half her face because she needed all the room she could to look at things, a cat flew out of the ground.
Round-eared and blue-furred and soft like a rug; a small cat. She named him Happy. She gave him to Natsu with a pink bow tied around his paws for Natsu's ninth birthday; and Natsu loved him.
All things are different, and cats are not dragons, but Natsu liked to pretend. Back then Lucy pretended with him: they built him a tree-house in the Haunted Forest; and Erza used his nail clippings in a poultice that granted true love, and Happy sprouted up-and-uppity more (except his tummy, which went round and then out, a pillow of poofy white belly fur).
Happy had wings—white wings like his white belly. Once Lucy wondered: Did other cats have wings? And then Happy purred, and she forgot. She stroked his wings and felt very important when she did so, the way all kids feel when holding something fragile: a sense of trust stretched thin over Happy's delicate wingbones.
They bent when he flew, like they were just begging to be snapped.
.
.
.
"You're not cutting up the toad's tails fine enough," Erza chides. "It said 'thin slices', Lucy, not bricks, okay?"
Lucy makes a face. "His skin—it's like...sandpapery. You couldn't slice this thinly with a machete. I'm doing my best."
"Scoot. Lemme try."
"Hey! I thought you were distilling the essence of Loke's spit over there or something!" she protests. "Like...Erza, I love you and all, but…"
"Don't wanna trade jobs," Erza finishes. Then she adds, "Well, it's not like I would ever let you handle something so delicate as the saliva of a spirit, tainted with unborn life, given the way you're manhandling that toad. C'mon, Lucy, the poor thing is dead already. Leave it be, will you?"
"Then what can I do?" Lucy demands.
Erza points to a chair and raises her eyebrows meaningfully.
"Erzaaaaa—" Lucy whines.
"Sit!"
"But you're doing all this for me and I wanna—"
"Lucy, 'I love you and all', but"—Erza's tone is a perfect mimicry of Lucy's—"sweetheart, you're kind of...useless." When Lucy's face falls, she says quickly, "Not in general! You did a great job getting all this stuff for me, since, y'know, I'm total spider-balls with spirit animals. And I can't even catch a tooth of a witch grin. But...the witchery business. It's not your thing." She kicks an eyeball that's rolled across the floor back into a corner. "You're a seer daughter. A spirit-watcher. I," Erza says with a grin, "am good with the double toil and trouble thing."
"You did not just say 'double double toil and trouble.' Erza, I thought we were through with your witchy-cliche phase!"
"Guess not!" she chirps. "Here." Erza throws a pocket knife, blade folded in, towards Lucy. "Go...peel an onion or something."
"An onion?"
"It's to stuff the toad," she says patiently. "Onions are lucky, remember? You taught me that. Now go. Be useful."
Lucy catches the knife gratefully. "Thanks, Erza. I...I mean it. I need to help somehow. I—need this to work, I guess."
"It will," Erza says. "By all the nose hair and the seven-tailed toads in the world, I promise you, Lucy. It will."
"But what you're really saying is…"
"It has to," Erza says firmly. "We're gonna bring her back, Lu—for real this time. Real in a breathing way."
Lucy smiles weakly, but she doesn't respond.
.
.
.
Bubbles float and pop all throughout Erza's backyard. The air smells of magic; but maybe it's burning hair. Erza's eyebrows are singed half off from the flame. Fire is everywhere, channeled through Natsu, who closes his eyes and wraps a scarf around his eyes to block the smoke.
The scarf is delicate, fragile. It looks like it could be made of feathers—white feathers and white bone, stretched thin like the wings of a small, blue cat.
.
.
.
As the cauldron does its stewy thing, Erza mixes in her own smile (a weird feeling, using part of yourself in your own spell) and shouts out, "Yeah! I totally nailed this bit—"
"Erza?"
She stops mid-curse, but finishes it when she figures out she's dropped her glasses into her brew. "C-crap! My…"
"Oh, uh...sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt you." Jellal stands midway between the backyard gate and the sidewalk, hands mussed up in his hair.
"Jellal! Mah man!" Natsu crows. "Been wonderin' when you'd finally pop outa whatever hole ya...well, wherever ya go when you're not here."
They fist bump solemnly.
How, Erza thinks, is it possible that his hair looks even bluer today? (She pats the spider in her pocket in preparation.)
Jellal and Natsu complete their splappy-bro-hug whatchamacallit—they refuse, despite Erza's insistence, to call it a cuddle—before Jellal turns to her, mussing up his hair even more. His lips go all askew, sheepish.
"I'm sorry about your glasses, Erza. Um, you want me to get them out for you?"
"No...thanks, it's fine. Besides,"—she glances at the stew and then back at Jellal—"you really wanna put your hand in there?"
The pot belches from somewhere deep inside.
Jellal pales, but he says adamantly, "Sure. I'm not scared of...a pot...of—what's in there, exactly?"
"Pond scum, the saliva of a spirit cat tainted with unborn life, um, the tails of some toad, the larynx of a man who committed seven sins, a little bit of rope, Erza's grin, and—oh! And an onion," Lucy says brightly.
"...Oh. Well. Um, in that case—"
Lucy pats him on the shoulder. "It's okay. We'll get her new glasses. Plus," she adds, "when's the last time you've been by? Erza missed you, you jerk."
And suddenly his face is steaming more than the boiling mash of scary in the pot.
Normally, Erza's the easy blusher, but since he beat her to the punch she can't resist picking on him. "Yeah," she says gently. "I did miss you. Asshat."
"I'm sorr—"
"Save it," Erza swoons, hand on her forehead. "Oh, mine poor heart cannot bear such...such betrayal. Jellal, mine friend, I thought you would be faithful—"
"I would've come by!" he frets. "But I had a paper in History and—"
"Excuses," Lucy chimes in. "He's abandoned you, my dear sweet Erza. You've been...forsaken."
"Oooh." Natsu grins. "Forsaken. That sounds cool. Does that mean she's like a zombie or somethin'?"
"A zombie at heart, broken and bloodied in the mud; a bruised being; a poor, abandoned kitten left by her beloved—"
"Luuucy…" Jellal protests.
"Okay," she laughs. "Sorry. But Jellal, look at her."
He looks at her. She looks the same: long hair, brown eyes, scraps of weird patched all over her clothes, knife in hand. She looks kooky, and kindasorta pretty...like Erza, basically.
"What am I supposed to be seeing?"
As Erza turns around to stir the brew again, Lucy steals closer to him until he can feel her breath tickling his ear. "Listen," she whispers. "That ritual I told you about—it's tonight."
Jellal jumps.
"Sit still! I'm not supposed to be telling you, because Erza doesn't want you to worry—"
"Worry?" Jellal says nervously. "Why? I don't worry. I'm not a worrier. I'm down with Erza doing dangerous stuff. And blowing herself up. And hanging around poisonous materials all the time without proper gear, and all those adventures! I'm…"
"You're a darling, Jellal, you really are, but you tend to...um, disrupt things."
"Disrupt things?" He looks affronted.
"Y'know, spirit things. You're like...a magnet. For the bad ones, at least. And this ceremony, it's real complicated, so Erza doesn't want you here. There's a lot of summoning involved. You could get hurt."
"Spirit things," he repeats. "Spirit things like—like Zeref."
"Exactly," Lucy says. "So you do understand." She picks a lock of blue hair off his forehead and smooths it back, almost like a mother would.
It's just Jellal being Jellal, with people having the urge to play with him; and part of Lucy being a spirit medium, too. She can feel the attraction of the dark around him, in its little waves and pulses, an ocean sweeping on all sides towards one focal point—him.
So dark, and so cold is the air around him, that he lets her ruffle his hair and poke his cheeks, just to calm her down. Being around him is scary for Lucy. Just by association, she's caught up in that windswept storm of bad spirits around him.
But she loves him, too, because Erza loves him. And they understand each other that way.
"This ritual," Jellal says. "What's going to happen? Are you going to bring back your mother?"
She shrugs. "Hopefully."
"And...you're summoning Zeref? After...after all of that stuff we did to get rid of him?"
"Why are we talking about Zeref?" Erza interrupts.
Startled, they glance back at her.
"We weren't," Jellal says. "I mean, Lucy wasn't. I'm the one who brought it up." He clears his throat. "So. She...mentioned something about a ceremony. A summoning ceremony, tonight."
"Lucy."
"Sorry, Erza." At least she has the grace to look a little apologetic. "But, c'mon, he would've found out. You know how much spirits are attracted to him. We need him."
"No," Erza says firmly.
"I want to help, if I can," Jellal pipes up.
"NO."
"Erza, be reasonable; even with all this witching and magic it still might not be enough to summon someone like...him. Jellal is the kind of spirit magnet that only appears once in centuries—"
"—too dangerous—"
"—Erza, if it's for Lucy's mom, then of course I'm going to help—"
"No! No, no no, you're not!" she yells. "I worked hard to keep you safe, Jellal! Whaddaya think all the clovers were for and the sand dollars and...Wolfy! I gave up Wolfy to put in your pocket to protect you!"
"There's a spider in my pocket?" Jellal says with a wince.
"That's not the point," she sputters. "Just…doofus, you're shielded right now. Safe. If we stick you into a thunderstorm of summoning spirits…something might happen again."
"Something like Zeref?"
"No. Not that again. Zeref—he's gone."
Jellal's stomach flips inside of him. "If you're not summoning Zeref, then who else is there who can bring the dead back?"
Silence.
"Lucy. Erza," he demands. "I got a right to know."
"...The Celestial Spirit King," Lucy says eventually. "That's who we're summoning. And besides bringing my mom back, we're going to ask him to—to heal you. Fix whatever it is attracts the evil."
"And bring Happy back!" Natsu adds.
"—Yeah."
"Happy?" Jellal echoes. "Happy like the kitten?" The scarf around Natsu's neck catches the light, and Jellal feels even sicker than before. "Natsu?"
"I miss him, man," Natsu says. "I wanna give him his wings back."
They both know what the other is thinking, but they don't say it—that Natsu wants to restore the life that Jellal took, and the broken wings Jellal snapped, feather by feather by feather.
Or it was Zeref, maybe—but how could anyone tell when Jellal versus Zeref was such a blurry line?
.
.
.
Are nights supposed to be this dark? Somehow it doesn't seem right, even though proper witching always happens at night; but a king?
Kings are supposed to be bright and majestic, at least afforded some stars to see by. But it's black tonight, tar-black. Only Natsu's flames and the fluorescence of Jellal's hair keep the shadows away.
"Okay, guys," Lucy says. "Deep breath. We can do this. For Mom."
"For Happy."
"For Jellal."
"Damn," Jellal says. "We're out of people. For Erza, I guess—all the stuff she's done for me. I dunno what it'd be like without her."
He hears Natsu cough "sissy" under his breath and laughs.
"Does anyone want to leave?" Lucy asks them, eyes flitting from friend to friend to friend. "This could be dangerous. He's a spirit king. He could kill us all where we stand with the twist of his finger." She pales. "I...don't want you getting hurt on my behalf."
"It's to fix things," Erza corrects her, gently. "Things went wrong before. All we're doing is asking him for a second chance."
"Just press a back-button," Natsu adds. "Give us a redo. That so hard?"
"But what if—"
"Lucy. Your mom, remember? Your mom."
She takes a deep breath. "Right."
Jellal passes the brew around and they each take a sip (which to a spectator would look like partying teens drinking on a front stoop, but this is no drink, and this is no party). It tastes more like onions than anything else.
"Alright, Erza." Lucy points to her. "It's all on you. Ready?"
"Ready as I'll ever be."
"Erza," Jellal whispers.
"Yeah?"
"...Nothing." He swallows. "Just be careful?"
"Absolutely." She smiles and brushes back his blue hair with her pinkie. "I didn't get all those creepy lessons from Hag Porlyusica for nothing. We'll rock this."
"Yeah. I know." He breathes in deep and sighs softly.
"Guys!" Lucy interrupts. Her eyes are huge, discs of brown, taking up half her face again so she can look and look. "My god. Guys. Something's coming."
"What?! Already?" Natsu fumbles. "But—I thought we had—"
"We have no time," she says impatiently. "I know what the spell said, and I know we haven't even finished the summoning but—oh, god, guys—he's here, you understand? He's watching us. He's," she gulps, "waiting for us to come to him."
"And if we don't?" Erza whispers.
"Then I don't know how long he'll wait. This is—it. This is all we have. One shot."
They stand still as the sky, starless and windless, and oh-so-dark, as if something about this night isn't quite real.
Out comes the moon from a bank of cloud, and it doesn't look quite real either.
Stars, then, sprays of them, and the softening of the sky, as the whole world goes sideways in a crazy, dizzying tilt.
A/N: Deedle-dee-dum-dum-dummmm (summary from some regina spektor song I love)