This fic will be a series of connected shorts for Lahcy Week 2018.
I hope you enjoy them.
Day 1: Princess
Her file first crossed his desk as a missing person's case.
At the time, Lahar honestly hadn't thought too deeply on it, aside from giving it a casual glance over. The parent had failed to report the girl missing for quite some time, and bore all the signs of a runaway case. Her bags had been packed, a clearly unobservant parent, and a carriage driver that had attested to driving her to the train station made it seem a fairly open and shut case.
That it had reached Lahar at Era was proof of her father's clout, regardless of his daughter's status as a mage, but it really wasn't Lahar's jurisdiction, so he passed it along to the intelligence division to handle.
It wasn't long before they came back with the response that the girl was more than fine, and already causing quite a bit of trouble as a member of the infamous Fairy Tail guild. Just a week or two prior, she reportedly, in conjunction with Natsu Dragneel, Gray Fullbuster, and Erza Scarlet, had managed to level two cities, completely destroy a railway and train, and was implicated in the wide scale flooding in Hargeon a month ago with Natsu Dragneel.
As far as debuts as a working mage went, this was fairly spectacular, all told. Lahar resolved to keep an eye out for reports on this girl. She seemed to have the potential to become the princess of the troublemakers in her guild.
Still, there was the matter of her father. Given that the girl was of legal age, and was clearly operating as an independent individual, Lahar was under no impetus to return her to Jude Heartfilia. So he formulated a terse report regarding the situation, and he thought that the end of it.
He could not have been more wrong.
In his defense, it was the first time he'd ever heard of someone hiring an entire guild's worth of mages for a job. And the fact that Phantom Lord would then proceed to not only break the rule of nonaggression to other legal guilds, but that it would go to the extreme lengths that it did in pursuit of one heiress, was completely unprecedented.
The medical reports that came in later about the girl's treatment at the hands of Phantom Lord's members made him wince.
His misgivings about the girl being at the center of a great deal of trouble had been spot on, and yet Lahar only had himself to blame for not taking precautions regarding it. Everything that had happened had been preventable, and it was a guilt he would have to learn from if he was to accomplish his goals with the Rune Knights.
It wasn't too long after that that Era became swept up in the madness wrought by Siegrain… no, Jellal Fernandes, and his co-conspirator Ultear Milkovich. Wild restructuring and the rebuilding process pushed the Phantom Lord incident from Lahar's mind for the immediate while.
But even so, Lahar knew deep down in his soul that this was far from the last that he'd hear about Lucy Heartfilia.