Fairy Tale

He wasn't anything like the princes in the books her mother read to her before bed each night as a child. The first time she saw him, she was scared to death, almost died, and he hurt her friends. His armor was a bad attitude and instead of a horse, his animal companion was a giant purple snake. But when you looked underneath the underneath, he was actually a bit like the princes.

Once he stopped committing crimes, he was actually a good guy. He couldn't stand slavery and supported anyone who was trying to make their own decisions. Lending a hand came naturally, if he liked you that is. And since he didn't like just anyone, to have his mark of approval meant you were something quite special. Very special indeed. But to the rest of the world, he was irritating, standoffish, blunt, and venomous. Yet, he was the closest friend you could ever have, and if he decided to watch your back, you'd be ensured the best effort possible.

But if you thought about it, she wasn't a princess either.

Sure, her spirits called her princess, and she certainly looked the part. But it was kind of hard to ignore her temper, and her ability to kick people through walls. Add the skimpy clothes, her tendency to usually end up half naked after a fight, and her choice of companions, and the resemblances were pretty slim.

Yet she had something about her, some type of quality that drew others to her like a moth to a flame. Her heart was bigger than anyone else's, and very few people remained her enemies for long. She had a way of seeing past everything and into a person's true self, finding the good that was there like a light shining into the darkness. It was no wonder that her magic had its roots in the stars itself, and that she was friends with the Celestial Spirit King. Nobody had ever said a bad word about her, or at least nobody who had lived to tell the tale. Because of her personality, her friends and family were fiercely protective, to the point of wishing to chastise anyone for looking at her the wrong way. Still, they teased her, and frustrated her to no end, but she was still their family, and she'd fight just as hard to protect them as they would her.

When they got together, everyone was surprised. Even they were surprised. If anyone had been surveyed about who the two should have been paired with, it would have been their best friends: the bar maid and the pyromaniac. They couldn't really explain what brought them together either. It wasn't a common courtship. He insulted her, she kicked him into the wall, and five minutes later they were both laughing as they repaired the wall he dented. She put poison in his food, he asked for seconds, and she bragged about her recipe when he raved about it at the guild, even though the poison was her most carefully guarded secret. Of course, given his magic, he knew what it was, but he pretended not to know, and she pretended not to see him pretending. The farce made them both chuckle.

It was the quiet moments that they loved most though. He, because it offered him a break from the pandemonium that was their guild. She, because even though she thrived in the rambunctious atmosphere, she valued the peace of solitude just as much. Together they could sit in silence for hours, or just talk about everything and nothing. To them, it was the same. Just enjoying each other's company and learning about the other.

The day he asked her to marry him wasn't scripted. It wasn't even planned. They had just been sitting together and talking when the question just popped out. She stared at him for a moment, and he stared back, caught off guard just like she was. Then they laughed, and she said yes, and they went back to their friends and family, both afraid to face the music.

Her redheaded friend threatened him with a sword until she was promised the position of maid of honor to distract her. Promising the right to walk her down the aisle pacified their guild master, which put a lid on the majority of the guild's reactions. Coupled with threats of violence from the white haired barmaid if the two were not allowed to get married, and have little red haired brown eyed babies, most of the guild simply accepted and began to plan.

He bought his former slave master and then guild master's support by promising best man. Bribing the guild's drunken card mage with the promise of an open bar made her subdue his fiancée's overprotective older brother figure before he could freeze him. Which in turn brought his stalker out into the open, giving him a few too many things to handle at that point. It was also necessary to remind him of his missing clothes.

However, the most difficult was her partner and his exceed. The two of them had to be pacified with what amounted to a written contract, signed by a member of the guild who had formerly been a member of one of the iterations of the Magic Council, stating that in no way was her impending marriage to disrupt their usual partnership. He was glad when she included the provision that she'd still be free to make her own decision about what jobs she would or wouldn't go on, but slightly irritated at the clause about fish that the exceed insisted upon. In his opinion, the feline troll could go get his own fish. But she smiled and laughed, even if the pair annoyed her, so he resigned himself to putting up with the pair and resolved to ask the resident rune mage to put up barriers around their residence, preventing unwelcome entry.

Their home wasn't a castle. It wasn't even a house per say. Calling it a cabin would be being polite.

Calling it a shack would be accurate.

But the two of them fell in love with it, and set to work making it habitable. Together they fixed the rotten floorboards, put in new windows, installed the first plumbing that the little building had ever seen, and by the time the guild was ready to send them down the aisle, it was a quaint little one room domicile. Instead of going away for their honeymoon, they fed the guild six different rumors about destinations, got on a train, and jumped out a window once they were sure that the others weren't watching. After they snuck back to their house, they went to work again, laughing as they turned the one room house into two rooms plus a bathroom.

Renovations went on for years, hindered by the weather and their own schedules, often at the tender mercies of her partner's destructive habits. By the time they had their first child, the loft they had been sleeping in had been turned into a proper second floor, complete with two rooms and a second bathroom, and their stove was no longer next to their couch. When their third child was born, seven years later, there was a room waiting for her, as well as her own bathroom. Her siblings complained of course, but when their parents pointed out that they now had their own bathrooms as well, the mutterings died down.

They may not have been a prince or a princess, and their beginning might not have been a 'once upon a time'. The prince had been born a slave, and the princess ran away. At their first meeting, he nearly killed her best friend, and she beat his companion. In between there were definitely some dragons, some pretty nasty demons, a seven year gap, a prison sentence, and one particularly persistent flirt who happened to be one of her spirits. But in the end, as they sat and watched their children play, there was only one phrase that could be used to describe their ending.

And they all lived happily ever after.

That was their fairy tale.

Fairy Tail.

***I struggled a bit with this one, trying to think of how Fairy Tale fit with Lucy and Cobra. And then when I was at work (which is actually where most of these were born), I started thinking about how these two did and didn't fit the typical fairy tale roles. And then this one went a lot smoother.***