Gajeel looked over at Levy who was sitting by Jet and Droy. She was reading another book in another language that he'd never seen before.
Whatever, he shrugged it off and continued to square his other guild members in their faces. During the brawl, every once in a while, he'd look over at her to see what she was up to. Every time it was just the same old boring thing: reading. But how could she know so many languages when he only knew one? It seemed to him that she could understand anything given to her in some weird idiom at any time.
After taking an elbow to the back of his head from Laxus, Gajeel was out unconscious. The next thing he knew, he woke up under a table after being kicked and shoved to the side by his loving guild mates during the fight. Groaning, he got up and looked around. The sky outside had gotten dark and it appeared to be the time when most people started leaving.
"Haha! Remember that time when you got so frustrated over a language you couldn't figure out that you started crying?" Gajeel's ears perked up as they caught the sound of Cana's voice.
"Oh, please. How about that time you started to cry because you didn't want to put on a bra?" he heard Levy's voice reply. Gajeel looked across the lobby and saw the two reminiscing about their childhoods.
"Hey, to be fair, that bra was itchy. Besides, how long ago was that?" Cana said.
"It's been quite a while, hasn't it? The irony still makes me laugh," Levy chuckled as she leaned her head on her right hand. Gajeel groaned from the headache he still had and stopped eavesdropping to go home. Opening the front doors, he felt the chill of the imminent winter. For some reason, the imagery of what Cana said kept poking at his mind. Levy cried over that stuff even as a kid? Geez, she has nothing better to cry about, he thought.
As he walked home, he kept imagining what it would have been like to see her all frustrated over something so menial. He won't lie to himself, he loved annoying her with a passion. It was kind of cute to see such a little thing get pissed. Then an idea came to him. He stopped in his tracks in the lantern-lit road and gathered his thoughts together. He puffed into the chilly air and saw steam come out of his mouth. With that, he smiled a toothy grin and started to snicker.
Oh boy, that would be a sight to see, he thought. What just came up in his mind was him giving Levy a paper with a language that he made up and watching her trying to figure it out. Maybe she'd even pull out every book she had to look for it! He could already picture Levy groaning and sighing while he watched her frustration take on a physical form in the steam that came out of her mouth in the cold weather.
It was genius. He ran home with a stupid smile on his face and already started to make fake symbols up in his mind. As soon as he flung the front door of his home open, he grabbed anything he could write on and write with, then started to come up with his own concocted dialect. Drawing circles, squares, criss crosses and whatnots, he spent the entire night and morning trying to make his writing look authentic.
He wrote and rewrote his work onto different pieces of paper until he was finally finished. When Lily woke up and was about to head out to the guild, he took one look at Gajeel, who was savagely writing stuff down, and left. Lily figured it was something ridiculous that he was doing and just went with the "don't ask, don't tell," approach.
When he finished, Gajeel took one last look at his work of gibberish and ran out the door with it clutched in his hands and bags under his eyes. By the time he reached the guild, it was already about the time when Levy would have been there chatting with someone or reading a book. But where the heck was she? He scanned the room looking for the little bundle of joy until he realized that he couldn't even smell her or the other Shadow Gear members. Annoyed, Gajeel went to the bar.
"Oi, Mira. Where are the Shadow Dorks?" he asked gruffly to the barmaid.
"They went out on a job earlier this morning," she replied with her signature smile. Meanwhile, Gajeel felt all the life get sucked out of him. He worked so hard all night just to find out that his target wasn't even there to play victim. He face planted onto the bar in defeat and a negative aura began to seep out of him. With a sly smile, Mira looked behind Gajeel.
"Hi, Levy! Back already?" she said. Immediately, Gajeel's head turned.
"What the hell, woman!?" he growled at her when he didn't see anyone behind him. Mira innocently chuckled after pulling a joke and went around the bar to get her other guild mates drinks. Gajeel laid his head down on the bar again and just kept it there. All he could think about was when the little blue squirt would come back. This was the first time he'd ever waited for someone to come back from a job, and it was driving him insane already. Of all days, she just had to go out today.
Bummed from the fact that his clever plan would have to wait, he turned his head slightly while still leaning on the bar and looked out the window. It was finally snowing.
The guild doors creaked open and the chill of the weather barged into the building.
"Levy, Jet, Droy! Back so soon?" Mira called out and asked.
Not falling for that again, evil wench, Gajeel thought.
"Yeah, the trains are backed up in Clover Town from the snow," someone said in a sweet voice. Gajeel quickly turned around and smelled the familiar scent of the three that entered. So it's snowing heavily in that town, huh? Well that's too bad, he grinned sarcastically.
"Actually, I'm gonna head home for now, guys," Levy told her two teammates. They nodded as she left the building. Following suit, Gajeel headed out subtly minutes later and looked for blue hair under the snowing sky.
"There she is," he mumbled when he saw her quite a distance away. He began to run until he realized how much of an idiot he looked like running after a girl like that, then slowed down to a power walk.
"Oi!" he called out. Levy heard him and turned around. With a light smile, she walked back towards him.
"Hey," she greeted him. As soon as that word left her mouth, a wrinkled sheet was shoved to her an inch away from her face. "Uh... what is this?" she asked.
"I uh, found this somewhere. Was wondering if you could read it," Gajeel answered, trying to sound as natural as possible. Levy took the paper from Gajeel's hand and examined the symbols on it while frowning slightly in concentration. She let out a sigh and he saw the puff of steam.
It's working! Gajeel thought as he managed to get a puff out of her. He could feel a knot in his stomach from excitement, ready to see how Levy would react to a dialect she'd never seen until-
"Oh, I know this language," she said with a straight face.
...?
Gajeel's face dropped all emotions that it previously held. How could she know this "language" when he made it up not even a day ago?
"Here, let me show you what it says. It's really easy," she told him. Gajeel hesitantly leaned in to share a look of the paper with her. "You see these symbols here?" she asked while pointing to the first two on the sheet. "They mean, 'You are.'"
Dumbfounded, Gajeel just nodded and went along with it.
"The next two words mean, 'an idiot.'"
Uh huh... Wait a minute.
He looked down at her and saw her giving him "the look." Yes, the look that signified her distaste and uninterest for whatever antic he was up to.
"Well, I'll leave the rest for you to decipher," she told him as she returned the sheet and started to walk away.
"Hold up, what?" he asked her retreating figure. The small mage sighed as she turned around and went back to snatch the paper from his hands.
"You know, I can tell your stupid handwriting even if it's in another so-called language," she said.
"... How?" his eye twitched.
"Look," she said as she pointed to some of the symbols, "you tend to press hard on the pen when you write. There are obvious smudge marks from pressure on most of these. The paper even dented a little with every letter."
"So? A lot of people press hard."
"You also draw circles counterclockwise since you're more of a righty, and look," she said while pointing to some symbols with circles, "it's obvious that these weren't drawn clockwise with the slight gaps on top. Not only that, you have a habit of not completely closing your O's."
Before Gajeel could protest, she continued. "Let's see... any parallel lines are slightly slanted to the right just as you write in our normal language... and when you draw any lines downwards, you don't just stop the pen when the length is enough, you scratch it down so that the ink trails off a little bit," she confirmed and looked up at him victoriously, knowing she didn't need to provide any more evidence.
Gajeel couldn't do anything but stare at her like an idiot. Levy knew his handwriting better than he did, which was kind of sweet but also unbelievable at the same time. "How'd you know all of that, Shrimp? I don't ever recall writing to you," he said with a slightly shaky voice.
Levy paused a bit to come up with some kind of answer. "I don't know, honestly," she shrugged. Then, she suddenly snapped her finger in realization. "Ah, now I remember! A long time ago you put up wanted posters for a cat!"
"Eh? Why would I do that?" he started to suspiciously sweat.
"No, no, I clearly remember now. Before you got Lily, you were looking for an exceed like Happy and Charle!"
Gajeel recoiled. He thought no one knew about that dark phase in his life.
"I was passing by and saw you putting those posters up. You wrote that you were looking for a cat. And now that I think about it... your drawing was also pretty pathetic," she chuckled from the memory.
"Oi, my drawing was a masterpiece," he defended himself. He squatted down and started to draw an exceed in the thin layer of snow that had already piled up to redeem himself. "See?"
Levy also crouched down beside him and took a good look at it. "Pfff-hahahahaha!" she bursted out laughing.
"Let's see you do any better!" he yelled at her with his pride on the line.
"Yeah, yeah," she said as she wiped a tear away from her eye from laughter. In all honesty, his cat looked like a five-year-old had drawn it. The head was a plain circle (not even a complete circle, from Gajeel's habit of not connecting the ends properly), the ears were just triangles, the whiskers were straight lines, the body looked like a potato, and the legs were too big for it.
When she toned down her laughter a bit, Levy started to draw lightly in the snow. Gajeel watched as her fingers delicately outlined her drawing by gently pushing away some snow. Her version of an exceed was a tad smaller than Gajeel's rather large one, but it looked a whole lot better. In the end, with her exceed juxtaposed to Gajeel's, hers looked like it had been drawn by someone with artistry. From years and years of practicing her own orthography while learning to draw new symbols, alphabets, and hieroglyphics, she ended up unintentionally becoming skilled in depiction.
A vein popped in the dragon slayer's head as he saw that Levy both knew of his secret of looking for a cat and drew an exceed way better than he did. Grumbling, he got up and stomped away in the snow that was building up to return to the guild. He was mumbling something along the lines of, "just you wait, I'll show you a cat drawing much better than that."
Levy's eyes trailed him while she was still squatting down. Looking back at the two exceeds that were drawn in the snow, she let out a heartfelt smile. After staring at them a bit longer as if trying to save a picture into her memory, she drew a small heart in between the two cats. She then got up, dusted some snow off of herself, and went home.
The End.
A/N: Thanks for reading! I know it's very out of season, but I just had to. Hope you liked it :)
9x2