Lucy started regretting her impulse decision to run away from home an hour after she got lost in a forest.
She didn't even remember why she decided it was a good idea to run into a forest when her sense of direction was virtually non-existent. The fact was, it was getting dark and she was lost in a forest.
She had resigned herself to sleeping on the ground with the insects when she heard it.
At first it was the voices and the raucous laughter that lifted her spirits, as voices meant people which meant help. Then she heard strains of music, oddly mystical and lively at the same time.
It sounded like a party.
Somehow, it never occurred to her to wonder why there was a party in the woods at night that she hadn't heard before.
She followed the sounds of the party cautiously at first, then not so as her curiosity got the better of her, as she strained her ears to hear more of the music.
She was dimly aware of approaching a large clearing. Somehow everything felt like she was moving underwater. Her movements were too clumsy and sluggish. The music was too muted, her vision dimmed. She wondered that she hadn't noticed it before.
So distracted was she that she didn't notice that she had stepped into the light of the clearing.
And suddenly everything was bright and clear at once, it was almost disorientating, the change so sudden like drawing back a curtain.
The party goers didn't notice her at first, so caught up in their revelry they were, but to Lucy's eyes they were similar in that they were all terribly beautiful, all impossibly graceful and elegant.
Something nagged at the back of her mind, perhaps from an old half-forgotten book of fairy tales. Something about fair folk in the woods...
Her musings were interrupted when one of the revellers noticed her. A man who had been laughing wildly turned around and paused at the sight of her, and she froze in a sudden terror. She didn't know to attribute it to gate crashing someone else's party, or something she couldn't place.
The nagging was back at the back of her head. Something warning against dancing with fair folk...
But then the man (Lucy then realised his hair was pink and he had an interesting scarf, and didn't even question it), smiled and stretched out his hand to her, and her niggling worries (now getting more urgent at the back of her head) seemed unimportant and unfounded and she pushed them down.
She stretched out her hand and took his.
Immediately she was swept up in a flurry of dance and song. It was disconcerting at first, but the feeling faded quickly and she forgot her wariness. What did she have to be afraid of, when she was having such a good time?
She danced with the pink haired man first, who danced with fiery passion. Then he was replaced by a man with a touch as icy as a corpse's and a pale blue haired blue eyed woman who moved like flowing water. Then there was a small elfin like girl who giggled and scampered away to join a long black haired man, and a young girl with long hair in pig tails who hummed while she skipped around.
A trio of silvery haired siblings weaved their way through the crowd, a man with electric hair and his fur coat that waved in the breeze behind him, a woman with a fan to hide her smirk, a girl with long flowing platinum blonde hair who practically floated around, Lucy danced with them all. They all shared an ethereal, otherworldly beauty, but it didn't seem important to Lucy. The only thing important to her now was the dance.
She realised she had circled back to the pink haired man again and he was pointing and shouting. She could barely hear him over the cacophony of the frenzy.
She caught his meaning well enough though. 'The king and queen!' he was shouting. 'Oberon and Titania!'
(The names really should have tipped her off but they didn't and even if they did she wouldn't have cared.)
She followed his gaze upwards and spotted to great thrones woven from the living bark of the surrounding trees and blooming with wildflowers. On the thrones sat two regal figures crowned in vines and flowers. The man was blue haired and had a strange tattoo over his right eye. The woman was stern looking and had long red hair. They both held decorative chalices in slender, elegant hands.
Then they were gone as she was swept around by the pink haired man in a new manic frenzy.
Her steps blurred together. Did the glade look different or not? Had they moved? She couldn't tell, she had never looked hard at her surrounding in the first place. Where was she? She didn't know. She didn't care.
How long had she been dancing? It felt like forever, and no time at all. She didn't care about that either.
In fact, as she looked while dancing, the glade looked more fair and mystical than before, which somehow only made it feel more at home with her fair and wonderful dance companions, and the dance never grew slow or tiring.
And with that her gradual realisations and worries pieced themselves together despite her pushing those thoughts away. She was truly away with the faeries now, spirited away with their song and dance forever, long after everyone she had known and could have known had lived and died and her memory in that world forgotten, which was in itself a scary thought. But a thought more frightening was that she simply did not care. She was destined to dance with the fair folk forever under their spell, destined to become just another fey girl and invite other lost travellers to their frenzy, and she wouldn't have it any other way.
A/N: I think (hope) this interpretation of the fey is in line with their descriptions in mythology as TB has been attributed to dancing with them all night in the past(?) but I'll admit that I have mostly been inspired by The Mortal Instruments series on this depiction. Then I compared it to the events of Lucy's coming to Fairy Tail and realised they were similar in a rather dark way and here I am. I hope you enjoyed!