There was never a dry moment in Fairy Tail. That much was clear even though I had been a member for a short while.
Natsu and I were completely destroyed, twitching pathetically on our bench. Happy poked my head, asking me why I had motion sickness too. I tried to give him my best glare from my position on Natsu's lap, but it probably looked a bit more crusty, pale and pathetic than I intended it to. In summary, I likely looked as threatening as a wilted sunflower.
In my motion sick mind, it took a bit to process things. Especially when it took me a full two minutes to realize that my head wasn't on the seat of the train. It was on Natsu's lap.
Suddenly, on top of being motion sick, my face flamed red.
"Uh-oh," Happy said, still poking my head. "Lucy, you have a fever again."
"Sh-Shut u-up, cat…" I mumbled, closing my eyes and trying to fight the frown that wanted to float onto my face from the horrible feeling of acrid bile and chunky puke climbing up my esophagus.
"Lucy-san, you get motion sickness, too?" Erza asked, crossing her arms, almost smiling wistfully.
"O-only a-a-as o-of r-r-recently," I stuttered, my cheeked blowing up at one point when I thought I was going to hurl. Erza nodded, as if filing away the fact.
"Lucy, I don't think Natsu would appreciate it if you were to throw up on him," Happy said, settling down on my bare stomach. My hand twitched; Happy was adorable, in his own right, but sometimes I wanted to skin him and turn his pelt into an adorable set of silent mittens.
"Oh, I bet you want to know what magic everyone uses, right Lucy?" Happy said. "Erza's magic is beautiful. Plenty of blood comes out in the end. Her opponent's blood."
"Morbid cat," I mumbled. Because blood was totally beautiful. Though Erza didn't look like much, honestly. A pretty girl wearing armor. If it weren't for the fact that I saw her drag in a horn that was at least twenty times larger than her, than I would've boasted being able to take her in a fight.
"Lucy-san, I hope you're not thinking anything disrespectful," Erza intoned ominously, cracking her knuckles.
I blanched and shook my head from my spot on Natsu's lap, twitching when I head Natsu's grown of displeasure and his mumbling of, "L-L-Luce, you're h-h-hair is itch-itchy."
"Anyway, my magic is nothing special…I think Gray's magic is more beautiful."
I opened my eyes and looked across the bench at Gray expectantly, he seemed to have gotten the message seeing as he grunted then put his hand out palm up and slammed his fist onto it. When he released his fist, a small figurine of the Fairy Tail insignia was in his hand.
"It's ice magic," he said simply, putting the figurine closer to my head so I could inspect it.
It was just so pretty. The light danced off of it in a way that no normal ice-sculpture would reflect light, and it was so perfectly crafted that no one would doubt that it was made by magic—it was just so pretty.
"D-doesn't s-suit y-y-you, t-t-t-too p-pretty," I mumbled, trying not to move my head too much to irritate Natsu.
"Who cares?" Gray shrugged, trying to seem indifferent. I found this slightly comical, considering that the exhibitionist of the guild was supposed to be the aloof one. "Anyway, let's get ready, Erza. What's going on? You asking for help doesn't happen that often."
"Yeah…let me explain. I was on my way back from a job, when I stopped by at a bar in Onibas, where mages gather, some folks there caught my attention…One of the men were speaking about not being able to break the seal on an object, and then letting someone know that they would return with the Lullaby in three days."
"Lullaby?" Gray asked.
"I don't know…but since it is sealed, it probably contains some powerful magic," Erza said.
"I don't get it…so you came across some folks who wanted to break the seal of some unknown magic…maybe that's all it was, their job…nothing special," Gray replied, the leather seat making a creaking, farting noise as he leaned back in it.
Above me, Natsu cracked a smile. I opened my eyes, and looked at him, his bangs hiding his face from everyone else. He looked pretty pathetic before, but now he seemed a bit cute, giving a horrible smile at the noise Gray's seat was making, bullets of sweat coursed down his body, his face green.
Sadly, I probably looked almost exactly like him.
"Yeah…that's what I told myself, too. And didn't give it any more thought…until I remembered the name Erigor," Erza said, her voice dropping until it acquired a "no-nonsense" type of tenor. "The ace of the mage guild Eisenwald, Shinigami Erigor."
Shinigami? I thought, looking up. I could totally kick a death god's ass.
My eyes connected with Natsu's black ones for one second, and I swear I could see a wall of fire dancing in his pupils as the word "Shinigami" was spoken, I looked away, my face heating up.
"It's a nickname people gave him because he kept taking up assassination requests," Erza continued. "The council prohibits mages from taking assassination requests, but Eisenwald chose money."
The train halted, and as soon as it stopped moving, Natsu and I jumped up, suddenly alive. I cracked my neck and followed Erza out, staying away from the stupid train that made me want to puke an ocean's worth of vomit. When Erza got her luggage, she continued the story, unloading her small house's worth of things. "So then, six years ago…the guild was ousted from the Mage Guild League…and is now categorized a dark guild."
"Dark guild?" I said, smirking. I looked back at Natsu and whispered conspiratorially, "Psst, Natsu, do you think we can destroy an entire dark guild?"
He flashed me a devious grin, "Hell yeah! I'm all fired up!"
Erza looked down, the serious look on her face never leaving though, "It was a blunder on my part…if only I remembered the name Erigor back then at the bar…I would've brought them to justice."
I blanched; she said that now but could she back it up?
I turned on my hell and grabbed Natsu's waistcoat, fixing it up, taking a furtive little whiff of his special scent, my mouth watering just a bit.
"Luuuuuce, what the hell are you doing?" he asked, trying to escape, making the fabric tug in my grip.
I smiled murderously, bringing him so close to me I could feel his breath fan across my lips, "Isn't this was sister's do for their little brothers?"
He started sweating bullets again, his eyes widening up like dinner plates, "Aye!"
Anyways, it wasn't like I really wanted to listen to Miss I'm-so-full-of-myself.
"Lucy, why do I get the feeling that you're being a hypocrite right now?" Erza said, side tracking and appearing right next to me.
I jumped, my skin crawling, could this woman freaking read my mind or was I just that much of an open book? I shook my head at her and hid behind Natsu, who was scrambling to get out of the way.
"Right…if it were just the folks at the scene, you probably could handle them all by yourself, Erza. But when it's the entire guild…" Gray continued, quirking an eyebrow at me.
I swear if he did that one more time I was going to wax his pretty little eyebrows right off his face.
This was too much; it was like having an entire army of Stelliana's around to annoy the crap out of me.
"They got a hold of this magic called Lullaby and are plotting something. I judged that we couldn't overlook this matter. We'll march into Eisenwald," Erza concluded, looking back at us with a determined face that no one would be able to say no to due to the sheer amount of command it held.
"Sounds interesting," Gray said, smirking.
Natsu and I jabbed our heads down in a nod.
"Lucy, you're weird," Happy said, randomly plopping down on my head again.
"Shut up, cat!"
"Hey, Erza," Natsu called, flexing his hand. "I'll help you out with this under one condition."
"Condition?" she said blankly. "Say it."
"When we return, fight with me. I'm different from back then," he said, puffing his chest up.
"H-HEY! DON'T RUSH INTO THINGS! DO YOU WANNA DIE!" Gray yelled.
I smirked, "I want in on this fight too! I would like a chance to fight against someone truly strong from Fairy Tail, to measure my strength!"
"Two dragon slayers against me, huh?" she smiled and rand her hand through her red hair. "You've really grown up Natsu. I'm not very confident in myself…but okay, I accept."
"WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU'RE NOT CONFIDENT! FIGHT ME SERIOUSLY!" Natsu said, his hair flying up when he conjured flames of magic to his fist.
"Hehe, I know…. but you're both strong…I just wanted to say that. Gray…do you wish to fight me too?"
Gray only shook his head like a pansy.
Then I noticed something weird and Natsu started jumping up and down, his back bare. "Um, Natsu, where's your sleeping bag?" I asked, slapping his back.
He stumbled forward with my slap and coughed a bit, then perked up, and jumped toward the train, "MY SLEEPING BAG!"
"WAIT, NATSU YOU IDIOT, THE TRAIN IS MOVING!" I yelled, and then turned around, my face flushing green with nausea.
"Don't get nauseous just thinking about it, Lucy!" Gray yelled, trying to pull be back up from where I was doubled over in the puke-y feelings again.
When I was younger, I would run circles around Stelliana, yelling at her about how great of a mage I was going to be, how I was invincible.
She usually only had to clothesline me as I charged at her for me to get the picture that I wasn't as strong as I thought.
Stelliana would sit me down on the ground with her, our legs crisscrossed as we meditated.
Sometimes she would whip out a giant branch and smack my head when I wasn't paying attention or when I would start fidgeting too much.
She enjoyed making me fall on my ass.
And the best lesson she ever taught me was about how I wasn't all-powerful.
"Look, Lu-tan," she had told me one day, while we floated on our backs in a stream in our underwear. "The best thing, during a battle, or even life, is to make yourself seem like you have all the power in the world, okay?"
"But isn't that lying, Stelliana?" I asked innocently, twiddling my fingers in front of me, squinting at the glare of the sun.
"No, it's bluffing. You may not always be the strongest one out there. Sometimes, you'll have opponents that you can't beat with brute force, and I know you get scared when you fight someone, Lu-tan—"
"DO NOT!" I insisted, blushing.
"—Yes you do, but when you fight someone, it's alright to be scared, okay? Just tell yourself that you're scared on the inside, but you're the all-powerful Lucy! No one can beat you!"
I frowned at her and brought my legs down and bobbed over to where she was, "What if I can't really beat them, though?"
Stelliana only opened her eyes then, the amber iris honing in on me in the sea of the black sclera of her eyes, her orange hair floating around her like a halo. "Then you run, Lucy. You run like hell," she said, the most serious look on her face that I had ever seen.
At the time, I hadn't really liked that look on her face. So I wrapped my small arm around the middle of her scaly waist, and sunk her to the bottom of the stream with me, grinning all the while as she flailed.
"PUNK!" she yelled, treading water.
I giggled as best I could underwater and swam away.
But of course she caught me.
She always would catch up to me.
"Dammit, Natsu, why did you have to run on to a moving vehicle, why?" I asked the sky, roughly grabbing my hair and yanking.
"How could I have done that! I was too focused on talking, and let Natsu leave his things on the train! He's not good at dealing with transportation, either!" she turned to me, gritting her teeth and looking horribly ashamed. "It's all my fault! Hit me, will you!"
I put my palms up, trying to calm her, "Uh, I don't think that's necessary. Maybe we all need to calm down some."
Not that I didn't want to hit her, just to see if I was as strong as I thought.
She marched on over to one of the men of the train station and sliced her hand through the air, explaining to him the situation, "SO, THAT'S WHAT'S GOING ON! I'LL STOP THE TRAIN!"
The man only began sweating a little bit, "Wh-What's going on?"
It only took two minutes of me having my head turned, imagining what it would be like to beat Erza in a fight, for Happy to suddenly fly away and put the emergency stop to the train.
I drooped; this guild was tooweird.
"Let's go after Natsu!" Erza yelled, then turned to a random pair of peopled and asked them to deliver our stuff to Hotel Chili.
I sighed, "What a freaking mess."
"Indeed," Gray said, suddenly clothes-less.
Which led to us getting on a magical four-wheeler—barf—and Gray catching Natsu as he flew out of the train.
I felt kind of envious from my place slouched against the window, green in the face, as Natsu and Gray smashed into the ground.
"Natsu! Are you okay!" Erza called from her seat up front.
I revived myself as soon as she stopped the vehicle and jumped the hell out of the cart, making a beeline to Natsu and Gray.
"Ouch—! What the heck are you doing, Natsu, you punk!"
Natsu only glared at him blankly. "I lost my memory from the shock just now! Who are you? You smell."
"WHAT!"
"Happy! Erza! Lucy! You're terrible! How could you leave me behind!"
Erza barely got to mutter, "I apologize," before I tackled Natsu back onto the ground. "You flaming retard! When I say you forget something, you don't just run back onto the train, dammit!" I said, shaking his collar so much he started turning green again.
I didn't get that much time to throttle him before Erza calmly picked me up and pushed me aside, hugging Natsu to her breastplate. "I'm happy that you're safe."
"It's hard!" Natsu said, his face flushed against the metal. "How am I safe! A weirdo tried to pick a fight with me! What was it…? Ei…sen…wald?"
And then Erza blew up, her red hair swinging as she slapped Natsu so fast that I couldn't even track it with my eyes, "IDIOT! EISENWALD IS WHAT WE'RE AFTER! WHY WEREN'T YOU LISTENING TO MY STORY!"
I bopped Natsu's head, "Idiot."
"He was in the train earlier, right? Let's chase it!" Erza said, cracking her knuckled. "What did he look like?"
"Nothing special," Natsu said, glaring. "He carried a flute with a skull on one end of it. A skull with three eyes."
Then I shivered. It couldn't be thatLullaby, right? "If that flute is the cursed song…lullaby…sleep…death…!" I turned around and swung my arms out to get everyone's attention. "That flute is the lullaby! Lullaby…the magic of "death"!"
"What?"
"Cursed song?"
Natsu only gave me a weird look.
"I've only read about it in a book…. but among forbidden magic, there is such a thing as "murder by curse," right?"
"Yeah…just like the name, it'll curse the target and cast "death." It's a black magic," Erza said, sitting back down on the magical four-wheeler.
"Lullaby is worse than that," I said, crossing my arms and nodding.
Natsu had a nice body.
And that was the only thing I could think of, as my head landed on his lap once again, as Erza speeded along side the train, to the next train station.
All I saw were little stars in my vision, as we continued on.
"Oh, I think I'm going to be sick," and for just that moment when Natsu said that, I revived, propped him up at my window seat and swung my arm across his back, then flopped right next to him, my eyes crossing when I saw the green vomit fly by.
Was the vomit on fire too?
Oh well.
When Erza finally for to the station, you better bet your ass that Natsu and I practically flew out the window, scrambling on all fours to get the hell off of the four-wheeler. We pushed through crowds, while Erza raced ahead and started attacking the staff, knocking everyone out who didn't answer her questions immediately.
Then we rushed in to the train station, seeing the bodies of a military platoon strewn all over the place.
"The opponent is a guild, which means they're all mages," Erza said. "A military platoon wouldn't stand a chance."
"Hurry up, the platform is this way!" Gray called, his shoes slapping against the floor in synchrony with the rest of our shoes.
And what met us at the end of the hall way was not at all pretty.
The whole guild of Eisenwald, standing there, with a guy with a scythe, which I assumed was Erigor, sitting on an outcropping above them.
I leaned back into a defensive position.
"I knew you'd come, Fairy Tail," Erigor said, smirking. "We've been waiting for you."
All I could say to describe Erigor, is that he was an extremely tall asshole, wearing a ton of rags around his hips, a bastardization of a black ragged scarf around his neck, bandages on his arms, sandals, gloves and horribly floppy hair, some suckish tattoos and a face not even a mother would want to kiss.
"We've been waiting for you," he growled, looking like a clown with black makeup.
"You're Erigor, aren't you?" Erza asked.
"Come on, Natsu, it's time to beat some people up," I said, flashing my own smirk, as he came up closer to me, flames jumping to his hands.
Magic started flowing all around Erza, making her red hair fly widely about.
"What do you intend to do? Depending on your answer, I might have to make you pay for it."
"We just want to fool around," Erigor said, halfway laughing. "We've got no job and we're really bored."
With that comment, the whole guild started laughing.
I don't know why, but it just ticked me right the hell off.
"Don't you understand, yet?" he said, jumping off the outcropping and flying off in the air. My jaw dropped; he could fly? "What do they have inside a train station?"
"Station?"
Erigor only flew up to the speakers that were up on a big pole. "Time is up."
And then Erza got it, "YOU'RE GOING TO BROADCAST THE LULLABY!"
"What!" I yelled, as the dark guild burst into laughter.
"There are hundreds… No, thousands of people gathering around this station now. If we broadcast it loud enough, maybe even the entire town will hear…. the Melody of Death."
"Indiscriminate mass-murder!" Erza said, glaring at the bastard that flew around like a demented ragdoll.
"We are simply cleaning up those fools who live their lives enjoying their rights, not knowing that there are people who have been revoked of their rights. Living a life oblivious to the unfairness of the world is a sin. Thus, the Shinigami has come to punish them! A PUNISHMENT CALLED DEATH!"
What an idiot, if he did that, his rights would never be returned!
"Now that we've come this far, it's not the rightthat we seek, we seek authority. If we have authoritywe can simply wipe the past and control the future," Erigor snickered, his face twisting into cruel cackles.
"YOU'RE SUCH A FREAKING DUMBASS!" I yelled out, bringing magic to my hand, "Celestial Gauntlet!"
I charged into the crowd, not caring that Erza and Gray were yelling behind me, or that Natsu had jumped up to punch a shadow guy in the face with a fist that trailed flames.
"Come on, guys, it's time to kick ass!" I called back, as Erigor disappeared.
"This time, we're on a real battle ground!" Natsu added, seeming to notice how many enemies I was taking on. "LUCE, BE CAREFUL DAMMIT!"
"I CAN TAKE CARE OF MYSELF NATSU!" I yelled straight back, hopping up in the air and kicking enemies in the face left and right, "SECRET CELESTIAL MAGIC: CELESTIAL ARMOR!"
With that, stones started flying to my body quickly, and I heard the alarmed yells of my comrades as they stopped their own fighting to look back on me. It made sense. Considering they had never seen me battle, that they would think I was being crushed to death under all the rocks, but I was really just in my element.
And as I stood in the middle of all the enemies, beckoning them forward underneath my two feet thick armor of stone, glaring murderously, I knew that we could win, with the strongest team in Fairy Tail.
