Energy
Something had been niggling at the back of his mind ever since he came back from taking his lunch early so that he could get back to work. Not anything in particular, but a sense that something was off, wrong. Most people would push past that, dismiss it as silly paranoia, but that innate sense had saved Erik's life far too many times when he was Cobra of the Oracion Seis. So he went back to synthesizing his azides, routine busywork that wouldn't make him late for dinner, since he and Lucy had planned to celebrate their anniversary. Knowing the process by heart after so many times, he made the appropriate notes in his lab notebook before tucking it away in one of the drawers in the benches. If something happened to him in the lab, his former advisor would know where to look for the details of what he had been doing. It was their routine.
The sense of wrongness only intensified as he went about preparing the azide. Erik felt himself growing tenser, more ready to spring into action the moment he had concrete proof of what was bothering him. Part of him wondered if he shouldn't call Lucy, and tell her to be on her guard, or if he should call Macbeth and ask him to check out the house, but he decided to wait. Everyone else was at work, Lucy was at home all day today, so she was either on a cleaning spree or working on her novel, and would hate interruptions.
His phone ringing disturbed the silence of the lab, and Erik growled. He was so wound up that such a simple, familiar sound nearly had him dropping the flask that he had been working with. Finishing the procedure, he left the flask to rest in the rotary evaporator while he checked his phone. Usually, he would ignore it, but with how keyed up he was, he didn't want to risk missing a call from Lucy or Macbeth.
Stripping off his gloves, he set them by the bench next to his laboratory desk, where his phone rested. The call had cut off, likely going to voicemail or the caller having hung up, but he tapped the screen to wake it.
There was just enough time to register that it was an unfamiliar number before something exploded next to him, and Erik felt himself being propelled into the wall, his safety glasses sliding loose as the breath was driven out of him. The last thing he saw was a shower of glass fragments heading towards him.
When he woke up, everything was dark, his mind was fuzzy, and he hurt all over. Someone touched his hand, and he vaguely realized that Lucy was talking to him, but all he got out of the conversation was that he shouldn't open his eyes. Then there was someone else, talking at him, he thought irritably, not to him, and then Lucy was back, gentle touches on his hand.
She was saying something, but fragmented memories were coming back to him, and he heard Macbeth's name and knew that he needed to tell them what happened. "There was an explosion," he managed after a few tries. "Everything…hurts."
"Which lab?" Macbeth was asking, and then questions about what he was doing and Erik heard Lucy scolding the other man, but he understood. If it had been Macbeth in the lab, he would have been asking the same questions.
"Azide," he managed to convey. "Check…notebook." Then he was drifting off again, vaguely aware of what was going on around him. When they moved him, he came back enough to realize that they were transporting him by elevator, and then Lucy was asking if he wanted to see people, and he realized that he did, even if Sorano was going to yell at him for scaring her. And then the Seis and Kinana were there, and Lucy wasn't and neither was Macbeth and he knew there was something more happening. Something about the explosion in his lab, and they were all government agents so it wasn't actually that surprising that there was an undercurrent of things not being said.
For the rest of the afternoon, he slipped in and out of consciousness, the pain meds doing their job but making it hard to focus on anything else. He heard a familiar clicking of keys on a keyboard and knew that Lucy was there and on her laptop, and in a mood because nobody else hit the keys on their keyboard like that when things weren't going right. Macbeth and Kinana were there too, he knew that because others would address them when coming into the room, and he was pretty certain that Laxus was hovering by Lucy.
And then the typing stopped, and the room felt empty. Kina was by his side, he could hear her humming lightly over the constant hum of the machines, but he could somehow feel that Lucy wasn't in the room, and neither was her brother or Macbeth. The thought shocked him, spooked him. Lucy wouldn't leave. Even if it was just a cold, she hovered and fussed to the point where he felt more smothered by her presence than the congestion. It was because she lost her mother when she was younger, and she didn't want to lose someone again. With him in the hospital, there was no way she would leave for more time than necessary to use the bathroom.
"Lucy?" he rasped out, hearing Kinana's humming stop and fabric shift as she turned towards him. "Where is she?"
"She had to go downstairs," Kina said softly. "They're having a press conference."
"No," he growled, shifting uneasily. "They're not…dragging her out…'cause she's my…wife."
"It's nothing like that," Kina hurried to assure him, resting a hand on his. "She's there leading the press conference."
"Why?" he asked, unable to understand. Who would be that cruel as to make his wife give a press conference on the explosion that injured him?
"ATF and the DEA have opened a joint investigation," Kina murmured, gently touching his hand. "They needed to give an official statement, and Lucy was the only one not at an intern level that they had."
"Strauss?" he asked, remembering that Mira's sister worked with Lucy.
"On vacation this week," Kina said slowly. "Levy's at home sick with food poisoning, and they finally fired Realight yesterday. Lucy got called in to write the statement, and she's giving the press conference right now."
That explained the angry typing. "Alone?" he asked, knowing that Lucy had a backbone of steel, but on her own, with him in the hospital, in front of the press, a backbone of steel was nothing.
"Macbeth walked her down, and ATF and DEA each sent a representative. I think it's Fullbuster from ATF and Jellal for DEA."
Good. Lucy and Fullbuster went all the way back to their freshman year of college and that weird family their floor had created. He'd have her back. Jellal was the Seis's team leader, another ex-criminal turned to better things. If he didn't have her back, Macbeth and the others would slaughter him and frame it as an accident. It was hard to gain the Seis's trust, but once you had them in your corner, they wouldn't leave it for anything less than death or being betrayed.
It seemed like hours before Lucy returned, the clicking of her heels on the hospital floor a dead giveaway. Kina stood to greet her, and from the sounds, Erik thought that they hugged, and then Lucy was sitting down in Kina's chair, and reaching for his hand. "I'm here," she whispered, and Erik caught the jagged hints of brokenness that she tried to hide from everyone else. "I'm here now."
It was three days after the explosion before anyone actually talked with Erik about the investigation. Macbeth and Laxus had taken his statement about what had happened leading up to the explosion, but nobody would tell him anything about the investigation progress itself.
"What about the phone call?" he asked Macbeth when Lucy was out of the room, being hauled down to the cafeteria by Laxus. "Did you trace that?"
"Your phone got knocked around pretty badly," Macbeth said tiredly, and Erik was willing to guess the dark circles around his eyes were back. "You'll have to replace it, but Mest did us a favor and pulled all of the information on it. The last call you got was from a payphone in the library. No prints, no cameras, nobody remembers seeing anyone there. We're having someone go through all of the footage on the doors, but so far we haven't found anything."
"They probably would have left through the tunnels," Erik agreed, remembering that while the areas around the doors of the library had security cameras, the underground system of tunnels didn't. "I would have, anyway."
"That's the general consensus," Macbeth sighed. "ATF says that the explosives were pretty standard- no way to track him that way. Don't take this the wrong way, but putting the bomb under the shelves where you held all of the laboratory glassware was a stroke of genius. Malicious genius, but genius nonetheless."
"Do you think this was about me?" Erik asked softly, knowing that Lucy had to be on her way up soon. She barely left his side for anything, and her trips to the cafeteria were abnormally short.
Another sigh. "I don't know. Professionally, we're checking all possible options: personal grudges, professional grudges, terrorism…"
"But you think this is something different," Erik filled in.
A shift of fabric, like Macbeth had turned to look at him. Or maybe away from him. "It's a hunch," his best friend, closer than any brother, said slowly. "But I think this is an old grudge."
"Brain's in prison," Erik reminded him slowly. "The Seis are together, Grimoire Heart was put away two years ago, and they got Tartarus last year. That's the Balem Alliance all accounted for."
"People slip through the cracks," Macbeth said heavily. "I don't know anything for certain, and there's certainly not more than my gut to back me up here, but I think this is about us. About how we left the Seis."
"You think someone came after me because I worked with the DEA to get us all pardons and educations?" Erik said, sitting up. "That's what this is about?"
"Brain had another person working with him," Macbeth said slowly. "You probably never noticed because he didn't show off this guy, but since he kept me with him a lot, I saw the guy a few times. But I never got a name. The DEA never was able to track him down either. When we were busted, this guy was nowhere to be found. Eventually, I guess, the DEA wrote him off as a loss since nobody ever found any sign that he existed."
"You think this guy, Brain's buddy, might be out for revenge against me for blowing the whistle?"
"I don't know," Macbeth whispered, and Erik was shocked to hear traces of the fear that had been a constant part of his friend's life up until the moment they started to get their lives on track. "I really don't know."
"Damn it," Erik cursed as he lost his place again. A rustle of fabric, and Lucy was out of her chair and by his side.
"What's wrong?" she murmured, and he smelled her favorite shampoo as she leaned over to see what he was doing. Good. Someone got her to go home last night and at least shower there.
"Braille," he muttered in disgust, sliding the workbook away from him. "I know Freed's trying to be useful, but we don't even know if I'm going to be blind yet."
"It's always a useful skill to learn," Lucy countered slowly. "You never know when you might need it."
"How about we wait until they take the bandages off tomorrow and deal with it then?" he asked, knowing that he sounded like a petulant child, but unable to summon up the emotional strength to act any differently.
"They were pretty confident that you'd lost at least one eye," Lucy said shortly, and he turned to face her in surprise. While she had been quiet during the week since the explosion, he had attributed it to fear, to relief, to exhaustion…but this? This sounded a lot like bitterness.
"Eight years of work, and for what? Two years, just two years of research and then you get put out to pasture? Even if they keep you on, you'll never be able to work in the lab again. Not on your projects. All of those hours you spent writing your dissertation, the months of lab work…it's all down the drain. At best, they'll saddle you with graduate students to do your lab work. More likely they'll shunt you into doing lectures only, teaching bratty little freshmen general chemistry because it's a requirement to graduate. It's a waste, and it's all that little…"
Never before had he wished to see the expression on someone's face as much as he wanted to see Lucy's in that moment. Her words, the outpouring of bitterness…they shocked him. His wife was indignant on his behalf. Bitter on his behalf, and he didn't quite know how to respond to that.
Too much of his childhood had been spent living moment to moment out of necessity. Not knowing whether or not you'd see tomorrow because some two-bit dealer managed to get the drop on you tended to make you pretty casual when it came to things like life or death. Most of the time, you rolled with the punches, accepted that someone got the better of you, and planned to make sure they understood exactly why it was a bad idea to do something like that.
Macbeth and the others would make whoever set the bomb pay, he was as sure of that as he was that he would never stop loving Lucy. It wasn't his fight anymore.
Lucy was still raging, her words harsh and cynical, and Erik was amazed at how he had missed how much she was hurting. The initial hurt had festered, become a poison that was slowly eating away at her, and he hadn't noticed. Reaching out, gauging her position by the sound of her voice, he fumbled until he had his arms on her waist, and then lifted her up, pulling her onto the hospital bed with him.
Her words cut off in a startled squeak, and he cuddled her close to his chest, ignoring the wires connecting him to the monitors. It had been a week since he held her in his arms, and even if he was still covered in bandages in most places from where they had to remove the glass fragments during surgery, he wanted to hold her, feel her skin against the few places without bandages.
"Erik?" she breathed as he buried his nose in her hair, taking in the scents that made her Lucy.
"Shhh," he whispered, shifting her into what he presumed was a more comfortable position. "Just lay here with me for a while. I want to hold you."
She shifted a bit, probably making herself comfortable for a prolonged stay, and he tightened his arms around her, brushing a kiss across the top of her head. "I may be blind when they take the bandages off," he said slowly. "We don't know. If I am, there's going to be a lot of changes for me, and a lot of them are going to be around my lab. You're right, I probably won't be able to work with the azides any more. They're too unstable. But you know how interested I've always been in poisons, and they just hired on a new guy in the biology department who works on isolating poisons out of snakes for medical use. The chair and I were talking, before this even happened, about maybe getting him onboard for a joint project of sorts, working on synthesizing these poisons. Maybe the timeline for that just got moved up a bit."
"Second, there's no way in hell they'd keep me out of the lab for good. We'd all have an adjustment period, where I learned to work in the lab without my eyes, but you can bet that I'd find a way to make it work, even if I had to kidnap Wendy out of med school to use her as a lab assistant. They wouldn't dare inflict me on freshmen, but juniors and seniors might be an option."
"Third," he said, drawing back slightly, wishing that he could look into her eyes and make sure that she was understanding him. "I will never settle. Not for anything. If I don't have my eyes than I will make myself a life where I can do whatever the hell I want. Even if it means I have to study medicine and try and get myself my eyes back before I can go back to whatever it is I want. So don't worry. I don't plan on becoming someone else just because some bastard decided that I didn't need my eyes. I'm right here, and for me to do anything other than whatever the hell I want to do because of what happened is letting the asshole win."
She was drawing shuddering breaths, and then Erik felt the hot tears against the sliver of skin along his jaw that wasn't bandaged. Unable to do much more than hold her, stroking her back gently, he let his wife sob away her frustrations until she fell into a light doze against his chest.
"Okay Dr. Drake, let's try opening your eyes now."
Cautiously Erik let his eye drift open. The empty space where his other eye had been was a dark hole in his vision, but he could see just fine.
After a minute, the significance of that sunk in. He could see. No blurriness, no other signs that his undamaged eye might turn on him and leave him completely blind. Their worst fears had been for nothing.
In the corner of the room, he heard a hitched sob, and he saw Lucy there. Saw her mussed hair and yoga pants and the bags around her eyes and thought there was never anything in the world more beautiful than his wife.
"Hope you haven't been losing sleep over me," he said casually. "Or was Macbeth trying to give you makeup lessons again?" It had happened before. The man was a genius at doing his own makeup, but terrible when trying to do someone else's.
That startled a laugh out of her, and then her eyes widened. "You can see," Lucy breathed, and the look of joy on her face was so brilliant Erik was sure that the sun had just dimmed in comparison. "You can see!"
The doctor forced him to do a few stupid tests, but then they were left alone, and Lucy was still crying as she climbed into his hospital bed to curl against his chest, but this time they were tears of happiness. And if a few leaked out of his good eye, well, neither of them would tell.
Fixing the depth perception issue was easier said than done. For the first week of being home, he bumped into what seemed like every piece of furniture in the house.
Twice.
Lucy had started out the week by hovering anxiously nearby, bags of ice on offer, but he had snapped and snarled enough that she retreated to their upstairs study and locked herself in with headphones and enough snacks to feed an army for a month. He would have been offended or concerned, depending on his mood at any given moment, but he had learned that emotional times fed her writing muse.
Eventually he made it for over twenty four hours without bumping into things, and started to focus on other things. Like putting his career back together.
It took a lot of convincing to get Lucy out of the study during the daylight and into the car so she could drive him to work. Technically he could get behind the wheel at any time, but Lucy had talked him into taking a refresher course before getting out on the road for real. But as he walked into the chemistry building, he was met with the biggest surprise of the whole affair.
The first student who saw him started applauding. Slowly it spread through the students amassed there, waiting for classes, studying, or simply praying to whatever gods they knew that they might pass their test. People were hanging over the railings on the upper floors applauding until the entire building echoed with the sound.
Erik felt the tips of his ears burning. He had himself pegged as the least popular professor in the department. No paper crossed his desk without being covered in red ink before it left. There was that time he made a freshman cry. Despite the temptation, he stayed away from RateMyProfessor.
As suddenly as the applause began, it ended. He found himself being confronted by a flood of students, shaking his hand, clapping him on the back. A few girls even tried to hug him. Bewildered, he made his way through the crowd and up to the department office on the second floor, where he shut the door and locked it after checking to make sure there were no students inside.
A familiar face poked their head out of one of the open office doors, grinning as they saw him. "Erik! I thought I smelt your familiar parfum~"
He tried not to wince. Ichiya Kotobuki was arguably the most successful professor in residence at Magnolia University.
Because of that, he was the head of the Chemistry department, where most of his research was based. The man was a genius with scents, and most of the perfume companies came to him when they needed something. Most of the published work in the field either was written by him or cited him.
But he was eccentric. And that was putting it lightly.
Edging away from the door, Erik made a beeline for the door opposite Ichiya's. "Sorry sir, just need to talk with Dr. Broom about the expense reports for my lab…"
Once inside the office, he shut the door. Turning around, he found the assistant department head grinning behind the stacks of paperwork covering his desk. "I see you didn't miss our fearless leader while you were gone."
Dropping into the only open chair in the office, Erik groaned. "He filled the hospital room with flowers. I had to get the nurses to send them up to the pediatric ward to keep them from smothering me."
Doctor Brandon Broom, the real mover and shaker in the department laughed. "Be thankful that I kept him out of your lab after they started cleaning it up then. Now, did you actually have business with me or did you use me as a convenient escape?"
"Business, actually," Erik said, reaching into his bag for the thin binder he had used to store his recently revised research proposals. "I'm going to stop working with the azides, at least for a while. That was more Dr. Saunder's research than mine, and you've got Dr. Cubelios coming in next year. We talked about potentially working on some joint projects, but I think I'd like to move up the timeframe on that."
Broom took the binder and flipped through it, pausing at the section that detailed financial expenditures. "We did manage to recover about half of what you've listed here," he said mildly, tapping the page. "It wasn't a complete loss."
"I wrote up the worst case scenario," Erik replied with a shrug. "From the few pictures I convinced them to show me, the entire lab looked trashed."
"We can work with this. Do you mind if I hold on to this and send a copy to Dr. Cubelios, get her input on it?"
"Sure. How is the restoration going?" Erik asked after a pause. He wanted to know, but at the same time wasn't sure he wanted to hear how badly his lab had been destroyed. Macbeth and the others had been particularly cagey on that front.
"It's almost done. Most of the issues came from letting ATF and the DEA finish their investigation, and then getting contractors in there. But it should be all set by the end of term, ready for you to start in the new year. Have you thought about when you're coming back?"
He had, actually. It was getting a bit boring around the house with no students to scare. "Probably for the next term. I can take the classes we planned, and spend the time until then readjusting to navigating without my peripherals. It's not a big deal, but it is something that takes some getting used to."
"Why don't you go take a look at your lab, let me know if there's anything else that needs to be changed?" Broom suggested, rummaging in his desk drawer for something. "Here's the keys. We changed the locks, as a precaution. Only you and I have them at the moment. If you have any trash, let me know and I'll arrange a supervised pickup. Oh, and the new code is the day you graduated, but you'll have to change that."
Erik whistled in appreciation. "I've seen government labs less secured than this, and mine was already pretty secure to begin with."
Broom shrugged, shuffling some of the papers on his desk. "We don't like someone blowing up our laboratories. Makes our insurance rates go up and then EHS is on my case. Especially if one of my professors is caught in it. So now you have your own little Fort Knox. Appreciate it, Drake. I don't want to see your wife crying on TV again."
"Where did you see that?" Macbeth had gotten him every piece of footage that was shown about the explosion. Lucy had been in several, since she had been forced to do the press conference, but she was collected in each of them.
The assistant department head ran his hand through his hair, colored, Erik realized only now, just like broom straw. Only he would pick up on that particular detail after spending five minutes cursing out the broom they kept at home for tripping him. "I saw the press conference she gave. And I've known her for the past four years, since you two kept hanging out in the student lounges. I've seen her calm and collected, taking on that one grad student who tried to push her around, and that wasn't it. Everyone else may have bought it, but those of us who know your wife know that she was either about to burst into tears or start a rampage that would have ended only when the bastard was caught. Or dead."
With a grimace, Erik had to nod in agreement. Lucy, in the public eye, got colder and more collected the more emotional she felt. It was a defense mechanism, she had explained one day when they were talking about it. He had been able to see the heartbreak she was holding back, but he didn't know anyone else would.
A knock on the door interrupted their conversation, and a familiar dirty blond poked his head in. "Bran, you about…Oh, didn't see you there Drake. Good to have you back."
Dr. Max Alors, the Geology department's newest rising star was a familiar face in the Chemistry department. For one, he collaborated often with Dr. Broom, whose research focused on environmental geochemistry. But in truth, the bulk of the department was aware that the two men were dating and most thought it was adorable the way they tried to hide it.
"I was just leaving," Erik said, checking his watch as he stood. "I'll leave you two to your lunch date."
Chuckling as he listened to the indignant squawks that followed him out, Erik left the department office and headed down to his lab. The applause had stopped, which was a relief, but the students seemed to go out of their way to smile at him and tell him that they were glad he was back.
At the door to his lab, Erik stopped, fingering the new key. The door was brand new, the paint unmarred and shiny. From the window, he could see a brief glimpse of the familiar lab, but one far cleaner and newer than the one that he had nearly died in.
As he inserted the key, and punched in the familiar code, Erik tried to stop his hands from shaking. It was natural to be nervous about returning to his lab. With his history, he had an intuitive grasp of survivor psychology, gained the hard way and from the mandatory visits with the state assigned psychologist. But it didn't stop him from feeling wary of the lab.
He took two steps inside before stopping. Whoever Broom had hired to get the job done had done a good job. Everything was pretty much as he had set it up, shelves empty and waiting to be filled where they had to replace them, others still full of bottles and equipment that had survived the blast.
Macbeth had been hesitant to tell him, but the current working theory was that the bomb had been meant to kill him. Or at least do serious damage. It was only luck that the glass fragments hadn't cut an artery, and the fact that he always wore multiple layers had likely saved his life, if not kept him from having a lot more scars from the whole affair.
Now, standing in his lab, he took deep breaths, trying to force his heart rate down. Once he had gotten out of the Seis, he had thought that it was all over. A part of him still thirsted for the wonderfully senseless physical release he had gotten from the violence, but he had learned to redirect it. Harness it. But he was still dangerous, for all that he'd been out of the game. Erik spent as much time in the gym as any of the DEA or ATF agents he knew, and routinely kept up with them based on his own observations and friendly spars with his old gang mates. Yet he was retired from all that, finding his place in the laboratories that had become home until he met Lucy and made a home with her.
Erik had considered petitioning to join the investigation. It would satisfy his desire to find the sorry bastard that almost destroyed him. Yet he knew that they wouldn't allow him to participate, even off the record if Macbeth and the others would help him. Right now he needed to let the professionals take care of the matter, focus on Lucy and navigating life without an eye. It was a small price to pay when he looked at what the other alternatives had been.
He was in lab again when the feeling struck. The sense of unease that had churned in his gut during the hours leading up to the first bombing attempt. This time though, he didn't ignore it.
Stopping his lecture to the group of freshmen attempting to pass their second semester of general chemistry, he pulled his gloves off. "Get your damn glasses on, and put on your coats," he snapped, making sure his own safety glasses were in place. He didn't want to send them out, not before he knew if it was a false alarm or not.
Confused, but trained well enough to jump to follow whatever he ordered in that tone of voice, they huddled together around the tables in the teaching laboratory, safety glasses on and coats pulled over lab coats. Satisfied that they were as safe as he could make them for the moment, he motioned for his TAs to join the students. Alone, he walked the perimeter of the room, carefully sweeping for explosives or other foreign devices the way Laxus had taught him before the term started. Nothing showed up, and he breathed a sigh of relief. Going after him was one thing, but taking out students was a line he wouldn't have crossed even during his worst days.
Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out his cellphone. Hitting a number, he waited for it to connect.
Voicemail.
Swearing loud enough to make some of the more timid freshmen shrink a little in their seats, he tried again.
Five numbers in total. All voicemail.
Now even the most hardened of his TAs was shrinking at the viciousness his cursing had reached.
Six numbers. Still voicemail.
Seven numbers.
Opening the web browser, he looked up one more number, praying that it might get him somewhere but a deepening spiral of worry.
"Fairy Tail, how may I help you?"
He almost sagged with relief at the sound of Kinana's familiar voice. "Kina, it's me. Are the others there?"
"No, they're not here. Erik, what's wrong?"
"What about Sparky and his team?"
"They're not here. What's going on?"
"Nobody's answering their damn phones Kina. Not Sparky, not any of the Seis." His voice cracked. "Not Lucy."
"Why do you need them?" Kinana demanded, and he could picture her concerned face as she asked: "Erik, are you okay?"
"It's my gut Kina, I've got a feeling. Nobody's there? Not Tramp Stamp or Titania's merry band of psychos?"
"None of them," she said, and he could hear the tremble in her voice. "It's quiet here tonight."
"Tell the she-demon to get ahold of her boyfriend," he snapped, worry overriding his normal behavior with his oldest friend. "I'm going to try getting Dory to pick up his damn phone, but I'm heading for the house. Keep trying the Seis for me Kina. Tell them what I told you."
"Erik?" another voice said as a new line clicked in. "It's Mirajane. What's going on?"
"No time, she-demon," he hissed. "Get your boyfriend on the phone and tell him to call me." Hanging up, he looked at the group of students cowering in the center of the teaching lab. "What are you waiting for? Get your things and leave. TAs, one of you lock the door. Class cancelled."
Tossing his glasses to the side, he stripped off his lab coat, barely stopping to grab his winter coat from the hook next to the door on his way out. Lucy always picked up his calls, after his accident. Always.
A short drive, and he was bounding up the steps to the back door, forcing his key in the lock and wrenching it open without preamble. "Lucy, are you here? Lucy?"
The uneasiness in his gut got worse as he saw the clean kitchen. She was supposed to have been at work and be home by now. There should be dishes from her dinner on the counter next to the sink. Lights on.
Methodically he swept the house, looking for anything out of place, but everything was in its place. Just like Lucy left it in the mornings.
Opening the front door to see if she had picked up the mail, he found a package wrapped in brown paper on the doorstep. Warily he stepped over it before closing the door. If it was another bomb, he didn't want it to explode into the house.
Digging out his cellphone, he got Kinana on the line.
"Erik, nobody's picking up their phones," she said, breath coming in quick pants like she had been running. "Mira's trying her old contacts, but nobody knows anything. All we've been able to find out is that they got a lead…"
"On my case?" he guessed, carefully running his fingers down the sides of the package. "Figures. They're probably in ops mode- no personal calls until it's over. That would explain why all of them are gone, since Dory's on loan to them for this."
"What about Lucy?" Kinana asked tentatively. "Is she at the house?"
"No," he said hoarsely, pulling his pocket knife out of his back pocket and slitting the brown paper carefully open. "It looks like she didn't make it home yet."
"Her office says she left," Kinana murmured softly. "I asked if they had kept her to work on a project, since everyone else is apparently in the field, and they told me she left at her usual time."
"Have the she-demon trace her car," Erik grunted, delicately unpeeling the paper from the box it surrounded. "If she's not at work and she's not at the house, then something happened between here and there."
"You sound like you're doing something," Kinana asked suspiciously after she had called out to her fellow barmaid. "Where are you?"
"Trying to see if there's a bomb on my front porch."
"Erik!" she screamed into the phone. "Call the cops! Let them deal with it!"
"Lucy is missing," he said flatly, carefully opening the box, afraid of what he might see inside. "The cops aren't going to want to handle this on their own, not with ATF and DEA having jurisdiction, and Macbeth thinks it might be someone from our past. If that's true, than calling the cops isn't going to help Lucy." It might kill her.
Kinana seemed to know what he was thinking. "Oh Erik…"
The box was open.
It wasn't a bomb.
But it might have been.
Inside was a map, worn and well creased, with a circle around an old warehouse Erik knew well. On top of the map was a lock of blonde hair, a piece of paper, and a timer, its seconds counting down.
With shaky hands, he picked up the paper and unfolded it.
Come alone.
"I've got to go, Kina."
It wasn't that far of a drive.
Somehow, Erik thought it should be longer.
But as he parked his car on the same slushy streets he and the people he called his brothers and sister had once owned, he couldn't help but think that nothing really ever changed.
The same women in their short dresses and revealing tops prowled the street corners, too much makeup on their face but it still couldn't hide the desperation. Children cried from behind open apartment windows, the sounds bouncing off rusty fire escapes that probably didn't even come close to meeting city standards. Despite being plowed, the streets retained a thick layer of slush, just enough to be dangerous if you were trying to make a fast getaway. And in the alleys, you could feel eyes on you. Watching you to see if you were a threat to them.
He bared his teeth at the invisible watchers. They probably didn't remember him, but he had been more dangerous than most of them ever dreamed of being. His phone was in the car, locked safely in the glove box. With Lucy's life on the line, he wasn't going to attempt any tricks.
As he entered the seedy warehouse, he paused for a moment, letting his eye adjust to the dim light before moving towards the back room, where a light could be seen from the gap under the door.
When he knocked, someone called for him to enter.
The first thing he noticed was that Lucy wasn't in the room. Which was…smart, he supposed. Something he might have done, back in the days when he ruled the streets. But right now, it did nothing to appease him.
"Nice of you to drop by…Cobra." The man behind the desk was stick thin, with large glassy eyes that protruded slightly, skin stretched over his skull. "I see you got my message."
"If I didn't know better," Erik said, letting himself take a seat across from the man behind the desk. "You wanted that timer to run out. Watch enough cop shows to see what a bomb wrapped like a package looks like? Certainly made me take my time with it."
"That was an inspired touch, if I do say so," the man agreed, grinning. It was more like baring his teeth. "But it brought you here."
"Just because I have a few fancy pieces of paper doesn't mean I forgot where I came from," Erik replied coolly. "I've even picked up a few new tricks."
"From your government friends?" the man asked. "Oh, don't be surprised, I've been keeping an eye on you. On all of you, really. Midnight, Angel, Hoteye, Sawyer…and you Cobra. How could I let Zero's precious children out of my sight?"
"Easily," Erik answered. "We moved on with our lives. You're apparently stuck in the past. So, what did the bastard do to you?"
"Zero did nothing to me," the man said with another grin. "I was his right hand. Working in the shadows. How do you think he found you, all six of you lovely, wonderful, talented children? I was the one who did whatever he needed to have done, until you were trained enough to take over. Then I just watched from the sidelines, helping out when needed."
So there's Macbeth's missing man, Erik realized. Smothering the burn of anger he felt when the man's words reminded him of his training at Brain's hands (calling him by his real name is the first step towards making him human said the psychologist's voice in his head), Erik asked: "So what brings you out of the shadows now?"
"You're all moving on," the man whined. "Moving on and forgetting about who you truly are. I couldn't let you forget that."
"And your idea of a memory jog was to set a bomb in my laboratory?"
"You were always the most dangerous when wounded, Cobra," the man said almost lovingly. "Just like an animal."
He had enough of this conversation. "And taking Lucy?"
"You do know that she's an heiress, don't you Cobra? Street trash like you should never be with the likes of her. Zero and I had thought of matching you with Angel, or perhaps that little snake of yours from the gutters, when we were ready to raise the next generation, but you're quite unfit for an heiress. I'm surprised you haven't broken her yet."
Swallowing the bile at hearing about these plans to breed him and the others like they had been animals, Erik lunged forward. The man was caught by surprise as he vaulted over the desk, and it was easy to put him in a headlock, slowly strangling him.
"I'm still just as dangerous," he whispered as the man struggled in his hold. "But right now that heiress is my wife, and you made the worst mistake of your life touching her."
With an aborted gasp, the man slumped down. Erik released him, checking his pulse. Slow, but there. Rummaging around in the desk, he found a few zipties and tied the man to the chair. Now all he had to do was find Lucy.
A cold blade at the back of his neck made him freeze.
"Are you the one running the show here?" a familiar voice asked, though he had never heard it this cold.
"Away from me a few hours, and you forget what I look like, Starlight?" he managed to rasp out as his throat swelled with relief. She was safe.
"Erik?" she breathed, and then she was spinning him around, and he saw her bright brown eyes gleaming with unshed tears. "It is you. With the hat, and the light…"
Mindful of the knife still held in her hand, he gathered her up, holding her close. "I was so afraid," he whispered into her hair. "When I got home and saw that you were missing…"
At that moment, spotlights flooded through the windows, and a loud, familiar voice over the megaphone called: "Anyone inside, drop your weapons and come out quietly!"
Lucy giggled as she pulled away. "Sounds like Laxus is having a bad night."
"They must have gotten called away on a false lead," Erik agreed, crossing to the window and pulling his hat off. "It's about time you lot showed up!" he bellowed out the window after he forced it open.
Turning back to Lucy, he asked. "Was there anyone guarding you?"
"Nope," she said cheerfully, pulling a bobby pin out of his hair. "Apparently he was misinformed about the lock picking skills this heiress picked up along the way."
Chuckling Erik stuck his head back out the window. "I've got Lucy and the guy behind it all."
The aftermath, was…a bit of a letdown.
It turns out that the man they had captured had been Brain's right hand man, and had been attempting to revive the glory days. The doctors and prosecutors were trying to decide if they had enough to charge him as insane or not, but either way, he'd be going away for a long time.
Kinana had arrived with the cavalry, and spent the first hour repeatedly hitting Erik for going off without a word to anyone. She and Mira had finally managed to get through to Laxus and Jellal, who pulled their teams off a false trail and drafted Mest into finding Erik's phone and car. Both teams were unhappy to have arrived after it was all over, but nobody was complaining that Lucy was safe and sound.
By the time Erik got back to the house, the freshmen in his lab had managed to set the whole campus gossip mill afire, leading to more emails and phone calls than he wanted to think about inquiring about his safety, and Lucy's safety. For the rest of the semester, his freshmen were unusually subdued, almost in a state of respectful awe, when they dealt with him. It was highly unnerving. Apparently they had seen the news reports about his past.
Lucy seemed to have recovered without any ill effects, having received great praise for keeping calm and picking the lock on the door of the room she was being held captive in. When he teased her about pulling a knife on him, she blushed and swatted at him angrily, but he couldn't be too upset with her. If he hadn't been a friend, it was the right move to take.
Eventually, things settled down. The man went off to jail, the freshmen returned to being annoying little shits, and Lucy's biggest concern was over the plight of fictional characters.
Until, of course, she showed him the little stick with two lines showing in the window.
***And this is long overdue, but finally finished! Major kudos to my beta, who nagged, coaxed, and cajoled me through finishing. And thus ends CoLu Week 2016.
Now for the fun announcements.
First, I know I ah...disappeared. Whoops. Real life got a bit rough, and my muse took a vacation. It still keeps popping away for weekend trips. And to deposit new plot bunnies. So consider everything on a "when a chapter happens, you'll get it" update schedule.
Second, there might be a Chained Dragon update soon. Depends on if the beta okays it. We'll see. But if it doesn't happen before Nov 1, don't expect it until December. Unless there's a miracle. Or two.
Which brings me to the third (and final) announcement.
I'm doing NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). This is my ninth year (would be tenth if I hadn't skipped last year), and the second year I'm doing fanfiction. Now, in order to motivate myself (and to apologize for the long interruptions) I've decided that as soon as I get a chapter done, I'll post it. It may be daily updates, it may not. My goal is to finish the story, even if it goes over 50k. Title/summary/more details are still rather up in the air, but I've chosen to try something new: a Fairy Tail/Harry Potter crossover. What I can tell you is that it will be set post-415/416 in Fairy Tail and during Half Blood Prince for Harry Potter. More details to come, so keep an eye for that story whenever it posts. It's going to be unbeta'd, at least at first, so please forgive any errors in advance.
That's all for now, thanks for everyone's patience!***
