Notes: I used to like Cana. Right up until the middle of the Tenrou Island arc. So consider this something of a rant-inspired fanfic, not unlike "Bet Your Life" (though it doesn't end anywhere near that horribly). Just something I did to let off some steam over what I personally consider the temporary ruining of Cana's character.

Summary: Lucy vanishes during Grimoire Heart's invasion, and Cana is banished from Fairy Tail until she can provide proof of her partner's fate. But in her search, Cana finds that where light fails, darkness always finds a way.

Shine On

A Fairy Tail Fanfic by

Nate Grey (xman0123-at-aol-dot-com)

Chapter 1: Cana

She remembered the way her heart filled to bursting, the moment she first saw the grave. Cana Alberona had known then that all her effort, all her devotion, all her tears, had been worth it. Her dream was about to be realized. She would become Fairy Tail's newest S-Class mage, and even if she never neared the heights that Erza or Mystogan had, her life would be complete.

Then her fingertips brushed the oddly warm stone, and light, brighter than any Cana had ever seen before, and would ever see again, spilled out, filled the air, and then slammed into her.

There was no pain. Cana remembered thinking that odd, since the light was clearly attacking her. But it didn't hurt. It didn't have to.

The pain would come later.

When she woke up, the grave was dark. Even the stone seemed to have turned black. There was no light, no warmth, nothing.

And her black Fairy Tail stamp, once proudly displayed on her lower left abdomen, was gone. The skin was smooth and unblemished, as if there had never been a mark there to start with.

As if she had never become a Fairy Tail mage at all.

Cana thought it was a bad dream. She thought it had to be. So she simply stood by the grave, and waited for herself to wake up.

She never did.

Erza was the one who finally came for her.

Cana could see at once that Erza had been through a horrible battle. She no longer had the strength to support even her basic armor, and looked quite odd without it. Also out of place were the large amounts of bandages all over her body, and they only made Cana more aware of the fact that she herself was virtually untouched.

"Cana," Erza breathed in relief as she limped over to her, "thank goodness you're safe. We feared the worst when no one had seen you two. Is Lucy with you?"

"We got separated a long time ago," Cana murmured, recalling exactly how she had been the one to do the separating. She had even teased Gray into going it alone, just so she'd have the perfect chance to ditch Lucy.

Erza's face fell. "I see," she whispered. It was clear that she'd put all her hopes on Cana knowing exactly where Lucy was.

"Has... no one seen Lucy?" Cana asked, starting to get an intensely cold feeling in the pit of her stomach.

"Natsu was able to track her scent to where you two were last together, but the trail ends there. We can't find any other trace of Lucy anywhere."

Cana dug into her purse and pulled out her Help Lucy card, which she had designed to alert her if Lucy were in serious danger. The card had not activated at all since she'd left Lucy. Theoretically, that meant wherever Lucy was, she was either relatively safe, or somehow beyond the card's ability to detect her status. Neither possibility was comforting, because even if Lucy were totally drained of magical power, at least one of her Celestial Spirits would have found a way to alert the guild, even if they had to summon themselves.

"We should get back to the others," Erza said at last. "Master says the island is no longer safe for us." As she spoke, her gaze went briefly to the bare spot on Cana's abdomen and lingered there, but quickly moved away.

Cana followed her without protest. More than once, she tried to read Lucy's fortune as they walked, but the cards kept slipping out of her hands. After a few tries, Cana gave up and stuffed the cards back into her purse.

Once back at the guild building, Lucy's disappearance became even more real. Natsu was moody and quicker to anger than usual, Gray's clothes stayed firmly in place, Levy refused to leave her room, and for once, Juvia's tears had nothing to do with her beloved Gray.

Makarov demanded a detailed report from every guild member that had any contact with Lucy on the island. When it was Cana's turn to give her account, she left out the fact that she had put Lucy to sleep, instead saying they had split up to search for Mavis's grave. No one seemed to question this, and Gray's report matched hers up to the point where he had left them, so there was no reason to suspect Cana was lying.

There had been no mention of the exam since Lucy had vanished. Cana understood why, but felt it would be a waste, to have sacrified her partner and gained nothing. She approached Makarov privately that evening, and told him that she had been the only one to reach Mavis's grave.

Makarov gave her a long, considering look. "That is true," he said at last. "Erza confirmed that much. But you knew there was a strong enemy presence on the island. Did it never occur to you that your partner's safety was more important than the exam, which I must remind you, had already been cancelled?"

Cana knew what he wanted to hear. He wanted her to say that Lucy was smart, that she would have found her own way, since she had figured out the grave's location in the first place. He wanted Cana to say that she never would have found the grave without Lucy's help. More than anything, he wanted Cana to admit that she'd been wrong to prioritize the exam over Lucy.

But she couldn't do any of that.

"Master," she whispered, "I wanted more than anything to pass this exam. Lucy understood that when she agreed to be my partner. She promised to help me reach my goal, no matter what."

"Then there is no doubt in my mind that you have both the desire, and the potential to become an excellent S-Class mage, Cana," Makarov said slowly. "But I know now that you will never do so in Fairy Tail. You are hereby banished from this guild."

"For how long?" Cana heard herself ask.

"Until you can provide proof, either that your partner still lives, or that she has finished her journey in this life. Lucy was your responsibility, so it is the least you should have done, and the least you will do, before you set foot in this guild again."

No one said a word to her the day she left. Not one person in the guild where she'd spent twelve years of her life.

At the train station, she ran into Gildarts, already preparing to leave town for his next job. Figuring she would never see him again, somehow it was so much easier to say what needed to be said.

"I'm your daughter," she told him.

Gildarts looked at her, really looked, as if seeing her for the first time. "No," he said simply, "you aren't. Maybe you once were, but not now."

The words hurt, more deeply than silence would have. Cana had been dreading them, or perhaps expecting them, since the day she'd first seen Gildarts. Her reply was just as cutting.

"Or maybe I just grew up to be exactly like my father. Leaving is what you seem to do best."

Cana turned her back on him, all too satisfied with the glimpse of guilt and hurt she'd seen in his eyes, but her mood quickly soured. The one thing she wanted most in that moment was to not be like her father at all. Maybe then, she wouldn't have left Lucy and gotten into such a huge mess in the first place. Or maybe she would have done that no matter who her father had been. There was no way to be sure. But at least, as his daughter, she had someone else to blame.

There were other guilds in other towns, but Cana joined none of them. Admitting that she was the daughter of an S-Class mage would have gotten her a free pass into nearly any guild, but Cana no longer thought of Gildarts as her father. She had failed to earn the right, and even if it were given to her, she no longer wanted it. Aside from that, there had been a subtle but definite shift in her Card Magic: it no longer felt quite the same, and a battle would be the worst place to discover a technique that no longer worked as well as it once had.

She never bothered to search for Lucy. There was no point: Cana had no intention of ever going back to Fairy Tail, and she firmly believed that the only reason Griomire Heart hadn't bothered to leave Lucy's corpse was because the uncertainty would hurt the guild worse. If they had known for certain that Lucy was dead, they could eventually move on, and find ways to honor her memory. But being cursed to wonder whether she was dead or alive, whether she would ever return to them, that was true suffering.

Cana drifted around for the next few years, earning money when she needed it with her fortune telling. She still could not do a definite reading on Lucy's fate: the cards simply would not cooperate when she tried. She spent money only on food, drink, and hotels. The alcohol she had once guzzled to drown her sorrows had rapidly become useless: it tasted like little more than flavored water to her now, and only served to remind her that it was just one more thing in her life that had become dull and useless.

Fairy Tail's fame continued to grow without her. More often than she cared to admit, Cana overheard someone mention the guild, and each time, she made sure to leave town the following day. She seriously doubted she could outrun them forever, but she was going to try.

She even saw them, occasionally. But they either did not or would not recognize her as the Cana they had known. All except one, anyway, and Cana should have known it would be him.

Five years to the day that Cana left the guild, there was a knock on the window of her hotel room. Pausing to remind herself that she was on the sixth floor, Cana cautiously drew back the curtain, not entirely surprised to see the blue, winged cat beaming at her and waving.

After a long pause, she opened the window to let him in. He flew in at once, latching onto her neck and nuzzling her chin. "Cana!" he squealed. "I missed you!"

She closed her eyes and gently scratched the sensitive spot behind his ears. "I missed you, too. But why are you here, Happy? You know I can't come back to the guild."

"But you can!" Happy insisted with a big smile. "Natsu is the Master now! He says you can come back any time you want!"

Cana stared at him, unwilling to believe it was that simple. Natsu had probably loved Lucy more than anyone else. "Really? Is that all he says?"

Happy hesitated. "Um... he says you have to apologize. For leaving Lucy." He quickly shook his head. "But I told him he was wrong! You wouldn't have done that, would you? You wouldn't have left Lucy all alone! She's your partner!"

She smiled sadly. Happy had been well-named: always willing to see the best in anyone, never doubting his friends, convinced that Lucy still lived, and refusing to accept that people were actually selfish and cruel at their core. At least, that she was.

"Go back to Natsu, and thank him for me," Cana said softly. "But remind him that he wasn't the one who banished me, Master Makarov was. I'll come back when I've met the original terms of my banishment, and not a moment sooner."

"But you will come back, won't you?" Happy asked.

"Of course I will," Cana replied, kissing his forehead and giving him a little squeeze as she lifted him up to the window. She knew he would believe in her. He could do nothing else.

Happy gave her one last big grin before extending his wings and soaring into the sky.

Cana sighed and closed the window. "Sorry, Happy," she whispered, and then, more faintly, "Sorry, Lucy..."

Cana had many dreams of Lucy, though most were better classified as nightmares. The worst also happened to be the last.

In yet another hotel room, Cana woke up early one morning to find Lucy standing over her bed. She looked entirely unchanged from the last time that Cana had seen her alive, and was even wearing the same outfit.

Cana's first gut reaction was fear: she had been telling herself that Lucy was dead for so long, so seeing her alive and up close was pretty nerve-wracking. Aside from that, she fully expected that Lucy had risen from the grave to haunt her.

Both of these ideas proved to be wrong, as Lucy smiled and reached out, pressing a very real, very warm hand to Cana's cheek. "Cana," Lucy said softly, smiling down at her. "I finally found you, partner."

Even then, Cana was still willing to write it off as a hallucination. That is, until she saw something that convinced her that Lucy was all too real.

Lucy had reached out with her right hand, and Cana could clearly see that the back of it was unmarked. There was no longer a Fairy Tail stamp there, just as there was no longer one on Cana.

Continued in Chapter 2: Lucy

Left alone at the mercy of the Seven Kin of Purgatory, Lucy bears witness to the fall of Grimoire Heart, and the rise of the Children of Zeref.

Endnotes:

A couple of things I should probably point out, in case I don't touch on them later:

1) You will notice the lack of Acnologia (for now, anyway). That's done on purpose: I, for one, feel that if you're fully aware of yourself and your pals being in mortal danger, you don't stick around on an island now lacking divine protection so that killer dragons have the chance to show up. Maybe it's just me.

2) Since certain members of Fairy Tail seem so obsessed with the idea of becoming S-Class mages that they temporarily lose their already loose grip on common sense (I trust I don't need to name names), let us assume that a guild member going missing would be considered a big enough emergency to ensure the permanent cancellation of the exam. For EVERYONE.

3) Some people may scoff at the idea of Natsu becoming Guild Master so quickly. That's fine, I hesitated over it myself. Though for those who are against it, I have only one word for you: Macao.

4) I don't hate Gildarts. I do, however, think someone so powerful should pay much closer attention to whether or not he was impregnating any of the many women he apparently dated. Especially with the high chance of them producing equally powerful children, all pissed off at the world in general and their father in particular for giving them major abandonment issues. Any X-Men fan can tell you THAT scenario never ends well for anyone involved.

5) In case anyone was wondering why I dislike Cana so much, I'll probably include a rant at the end of the story. Though, to keep it short and simple for now: friends don't leave friends asleep out in the open to get crushed to death or worse. Especially not for the sake of an exam that's already been cancelled.