A/N: First fanfiction! So excited.
The first Fairy she meets is a girl, pretty, all coffee-colored eyes and sweet smiles and bright, glowing keys.
It's the keys themselves that capture Juvia's attention, the way they glint golden against the plain brown of the wallet they are tucked into. That is the token she is directed to look for, and she knows who this girl is even before she looks up. A flash of sunny yellow hair is all she needs to advance.
She tilts her umbrella to the right and begins to walk.
The target is surprisingly young, maybe no older than Juvia herself. She's dressed in commoner's clothes (a rather obvious disguise) and holding a bagful of groceries, threatening to spill out of her arms at any moment. She looks up in wonderment as the rain pitter-patters over her sunny, yellow hair, spoiling her flour and milk, seeping into the leather of her wallet to tarnish those pretty keys, and voices a thought aloud, "Where did this rain come from?"
Answer: it comes from Juvia.
Juvia is the rain woman. It's always with her. And what sort of woman is this new acquaintance, pray tell?
The target answers, nervously, "Oh, um….I'm just the normal kind."
Is that so? Juvia is pleased to meet this normal kind of woman, but if this normal kind of woman will excuse Juvia, she must be going. Goodbye.
"Well, take the rain with you!" The target lifts one hand uncertainly, as if wondering whether or not to wave.
Juvia gusts past her, like wind sleeting the raindrops away from their path.
"Attendez, Mademoiselle!"
She halts.
The soft mud underfoot roils, and from a spiral of sediment emerges Monsieur, a short, springy little man with a monocle and a penchant for torture. He's amusing, she supposes, the way he boing-boings with every step, like an animate pogo stick, as if afraid to stay on the earth for too long because it might suck him back under.
Yes, Monsieur?
"Non non non, mademoiselle, you must not keep on your way! This is the one we have been looking for, n'cest pas? This is our cible!"
Is it? So she is the one. Very well.
"That means target," says the target.
Monsieur introduces the pair of them to their target, merely out of politeness.
The blonde girl looks angry, eyebrows drawn down tight over eyes the color of mud, whirlpools of it — as if she thinks she can trap Monsieur with his own element. Bitterly she hurls pebbles of insults at them, calling them monsters and traitors and all other kinds of people who would dare hurt her precious friends. The names glance off of them, barely denting their hide; she's not telling them anything they don't already know.
Juvia tilts her head towards the rain, listening, as the pressure of the water builds inside her, she bides her time, waiting for the perfect moment to strike.
Drip drip drop.
It's time now.
She coaxes the rain out of her body and plays with it, molding it into different shapes until she finds the one she likes. It's a deceptively pretty trap — a big dome of of water, imbued with oxygen — so she releases it and it flies, blue and bright, to encompass the target in a gentle embrace.
It is all over now. Monsieur applauds Juvia on her job. Quick, clean, very neatly done. It is a talent all of Phantom Lord envies: the precision with which she sins.
As she walks away, bubble of water containing the target floating behind her, Juvia feels a flash of pity for the keys left behind in the soil, poor, abandoned things. The clink of rain against the metal adds an accent to the song the world always plays for her — the drip-drip of rain, the splish-splash of her footsteps, the low, steady hum of big, fat clouds pressing themselves into the sky to screen her from the sunshine.
It's funny how the world has yet to realize she hates this song. It's an orchestra of tears.
Lucy Heartfilia cries within her prison, and Juvia sighs, allowing the girl's sobs to add an interweaving melody to her music.