Levy wanted to know. What came first? The chicken or the egg. The snarly attitude or the matching thuggish appearance. It really did make a difference. She wanted to believe the best of people. Wanted to believe the chicken was a product of the egg and not the other way around.
The answer came out on a mission.
A bunch of cocky thugs had been attacking small villages, leaving destruction and terror in their wake. And they'd been leaving coded messages with clues to their next target, reveling in their power when not once were they prevented from reaching their goal. It was the perfect job for Levy and Gajeel. Levy decoded the riddle that pointed them towards Duckweed in no time, but she hadn't noticed the job until it had been sitting on the board for a couple days. The settlement was well on its way to obliteration by the time they arrived. But for one girl, they were just in time.
Gajeel smashed the head of one of the bandits though the wooden wall of a hut. Through the roar of fire, screams, and fleeing footsteps, his acute hearing picked up something else that made his blood run cold. Sobbing. Sobbing, scuffling, and choked "No"s. He chucked the unconscious body of the man he'd just finished with over his shoulder and onto the pile he was making in the city square before kicking in what was left of the wall and pulling the last of the brutes off of a small girl. She couldn't have been more than fourteen, her hands futilely fighting to push her attacker away and cover her body as well as she could at the same time. When the force of his body was removed, her tears cycled from terror to shock to relief and gratitude, and then back through shock to terror. Because this was clearly not a saviour, but the ringleader, here to take the spoils of war for himself. His eyes were bloody red and promised pain, his muscled were corded and hulking, and he was riddled with metal. She curled into the smallest possible ball, crossing her ankles and holding her hands out in front of her and whispered the only word she could think of. "Please." She hadn't expected it to work. But Gajeel turned and walked away.
He walked to a nearby clearing where Levy was handing out blankets and food to the villagers. He grabbed her by the shirt, stated "Job's done," and trudged off, slowing his pace a bit to allow Levy to point her feet in the proper direction.
Levy knew something was wrong, but there wasn't one word in her extensive and multilingual vocabulary that she deemed appropriate to broach the topic. So, she just ran around to face him, carefully planting her feet behind her he continued his forward trudge, forcing her onwards backwards. They continued like this to the nearest train station, she searching his face, and he staring resolutely past her to the horizon.
They settled into a train car. It quickly became a private one. Gajeel's mood soured further and Levy wondered if he realized how intense of an aura he was giving off. But her eyes never once left his face and to Gajeel, they just seemed to get bigger and bigger and fuller and fuller of curiosity and pain and something else that was just Levy. And then the train started moving and she leaned forward ever so slightly in her seat and tilted her chin up. He didn't have it in him to snap at her, not with the train rocking making his insides roil. So, he sighed and closed his eyes.
"I never meant for my face to look like this. I didn't fucking think about that. I was just fucking proud of my idea. Put metal in my body so it was always ready to be molded into armour. I couldn't just leave my face unprotected. Thought I'd just look the same but with some shiny bits attached. I didn't expect people to treat me any different but they did. So, I went along with it. I became what they assumed I was. But that wasn't... and now... I'd forgotten what it felt like to expect different..."
And Levy filled in the blanks, nodded, and smiled, wordlessly thanking him for opening up. She'd gotten the opposite of what she'd expected- the root of his troubles instead of the superficial incident that had opened the wound and a brush off. And then she thanked him for just being Gajeel by moving to sit beside him, resting her head against his bicep, and pulling out a book to enjoy on the long trip home. Every time she turned the page, she felt the muscle beneath her release a bit of tension until the dragon slayer finally nodded off to sleep.
'Now,' she thought wryly, 'the biggest puzzle is how to get him out of here when he pull into Magnolia Station.'