Chapter 9 - This is Home

A/N: I'm back! I'm really sorry about the long wait. I could give you a lot of excuses and reasons, but I doubt you want to hear any of that. But maybe you'd like to read the new chapter…?

Lucy barely had time to appreciate that the guild hall looked the way it should, before a furry blue missile hit her square in the chest.

"LUUUUCYYYY!", the loud cry rang out, and she couldn't help laughing as she caught the little blue feline in her arms.

"Happy!", she said with a grin, and cuddled him close.

"You're back! We all thought you were…" Happy sniffled, and there were tears in his eyes. "I'm so glad you're back!" he wailed.

Everyone in the guild hall was staring at them, and she had a feeling it wasn't because Happy was being so loud. Because really, what else is new?

"I got a little bit lost", she said, finally taking some time to look around. It looked right. The people all had a dumbstruck expression on their faces which wasn't their best look, but other than that they looked right.

The decor was right (except for that demolished bench in the corner, but that fit pretty well, too). And the smell was right, too. She didn't have a sense of smell that could nearly rival Natsu's, but smelling something specific had a way of reminding her of things.

"Looks pretty good", Loke said next to her with a smile of his face, and Lucy was embarrassed to admit (not that she would out loud, mind you) that she'd almost forgotten he was still there.

Well, one thing was off. It was way too quiet, and it began feeling a little uncomfortable.

Not that Fairy Tail could ever stay quiet for too long. All of a sudden everyone started talking over each other, erupting into a wall of noise that almost knocked Lucy off her feet. She heard people asking her questions, calling her name, cheering, but she couldn't actually make out anything specific.

Suddenly people were crowding around her, and she knew she answered some of their questions, barely remembering what she said, afterwards because she was so busy listening to everyone else that she didn't have any time to listen to herself.

She recognized who was standing around her, and then realized that there was someone missing. She looked around, and finally found the head of rosy hair she'd been looking for.

He was staring at her, frozen, eyes wide and mouth slightly open. It looked a little worrying, to be honest, and Lucy tried to break the tension by giving a tentative little wave.

And then he broke out into one of his huge, dazzling, Natsu grins, and seeing that chased all the remaining doubt from her head.

She'd finally come home.

She broke out into a breathless laugh, too relieved to put it into words, and clutching Happy to her chest spun around in a tight circle.

"You know what?", Cana called out, waving a tankard into the air. "This calls for a party!"

Lucy, seeing Erza's wide blue eyes, and Natsu hopping over tables to get to her, couldn't help but agree.

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Lucy wasn't sure there'd ever been a bigger party at Fairy Tail. Maybe the one when Lisanna had come back from the dead (sorry, Edolas), but Lucy hadn't been nearly as drunk, then, so from her perspective this one was bigger. As Loke led her back to her apartment, she couldn't stop grinning.

"It's finally over", Lucy said breathlessly. Now, looking back at her adventure, it didn't feel nearly as long, she hadn't even visited that many worlds, but not knowing if she'd be stuck getting chased by zombies until the end of time had made it feel infinite.

"Congratulations", Loke said. "No, you're not going to balance next to the river, you'll fall in." She'd hardly even started directing their step towards the edge, how could he tell?

"I never fall in!", she protested, but secretly agreed with him. The walkway seemed to have started rocking with the waves of the river. Funny how it did that.

"I believe you, you don't need to prove it", Loke said. For some reason that made Lucy giggle. She didn't really know, why, herself. Almost everyone had offered her a drink and she'd been way too happy not to accept most of them.

She'd been busy the entire evening telling stories of all the worlds she visited, but after a while she'd probably mixed up some of the details. Well she'd be able to clear up any questions tomorrow.

"Loke?"

"Yes, princess?"

"Thank you. For everything, I mean", she said. Hopefully she wasn't too drunk for him to take the sentiment seriously.

"You know I'll always come when you call me", he said with a faint smile on his face. "Welcome home." And he vanished in a flurry of light back into the spirit world, leaving her standing in front of her house.

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The first day back Lucy decided to take it easy. How could she not, really, when being back in her own fluffy bed was so welcoming that she didn't even want to get up when she woke up at noon. Too bad there was no one to bring her breakfast in bed.

But then an image of Happy carrying a tray of eggs towards her and managing to mysteriously trip over something mid flight, throwing all of the contents onto her blanket, leaving her to clean it up and get up even sooner popped into her head. Maybe it was better this way.

Discovering that she had no food left in her kitchen, except for some foul smelling glob that she couldn't even identify anymore almost drove her to leave the house, but before she could do that she still had to take a bath…

And that ended up being so heavenly that she spent way too long sitting in there, until she smelled like a flower inside and out and was so pruny you could probably squeeze her out and she'd loose all shape just like Plue.

Really, you'd think that the thing she missed the most being lost amongst the worlds and not knowing if she'd ever make it back, would have been her friends, but, well… rediscovering the luxuries of her own home seemed much nicer right now.

Of course the silence couldn't last.

"Lucy!", a shrill voice called and suddenly her bathroom door swung open. She let out a shriek and tried to hide herself further down in the water, but all the bubbles were long gone.

"Good morning!", the little blue cat called out, despite it probably being three in the afternoon by now.

"Ha…" she tried answering, but sort of forgot her mouth was still underwater and she just let out a stream of bubbles instead. She pushed herself higher and tried again. "Happy what are you doing here? Bathroom, privacy, remember, we had that talk with you and Natsu?"

"But you weren't in the living room", the Exceed said and dropped down on the edge of the tub, completely disregarding Lucy protests.

"No, and remember what we said about knocking?"

Happy scratched his chin and looked towards the ceiling thoughtfully. "Uh… no?"

"Always knock before you enter a room! Especially one where people might be naked!", Lucy yelled, and pushed Happy off the tub. He let out a little shriek and landed with a dull thud, too slow to catch himself with his wings.

"Ow!", he complained, rubbing his head.

"What's going on in there?", a voice called out, and before Lucy even had a chance to protest, the door swung open again, and there, in all his pink haired glory Natsu appeared.

While she was in the tub. Stark naked, and the water was completely transparent by now.

The resulting scream would leave all of their ears ringing for hours.

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She locked both of them in the bathroom, after Natsu had handed her a towel with eyes squeezed shut, which had been much more difficult than she'd expected. Hunting down her clothes actually took a little bit longer than usual, because she had trouble finding her underwear drawer. She'd thought about moving her underwear, just so that her friends would stop rifling through it every time they came over, and had apparently already done so, without remembering where the new spot was.

Still, she managed to find everything, and was finally able to open the door to the bathroom and properly smack Natsu over the head.

"Ow. What was that for?", he asked, rubbing the spot.

"The bathroom thing, still, I just didn't want my towel to drop, so I didn't do it before. Now, once again, for the record, for both of you. Instead of breaking in through the window, you can just ring the doorbell if you want to visit. But no matter what happens, you do not enter the bathroom without knocking to see if it's okay. Never! Understand?"

The both nodded at her rant, both looking quite unhappy.

"Good, now that we've cleared that up" (she wasn't naive enough to believe that this would be the last time she'd have to give them that particular speech.) "What are you two even doing here?"

"Well, you didn't come to the guild today, so we thought we'd come to you", Natsu said, sunny demeanor back in an instant as if she'd never even scolded them. "We want to go on a mission!"

"What? I just got back and you guys want to leave already?" She wasn't sure if her face showed it, but she was a little hurt. Sure life had gone on while she wasn't there, and of course they had to work, but they could at least spend a little more time with her now that she was back.

"Huh?", Natsu looked at her oddly.

"Well, I just thought you guys could stay for a little longer…", Lucy said.

"What do you mean? Don't you need to pay your rent?"

Just the mention of the word made her feel hot and cold at the same time. She had completely forgotten about it while she was traveling, and now the reality hit her like a sledgehammer. She wasn't quite sure about the time differences between the worlds, but in her time she'd been away for at least two months. If you took the spirit world into account…

"Oh god the rent…", she said, wide eyed, sinking onto her bed in shock.

"Yeah, so let's go on a mission", Natsu said with a huge grin on his face.

"Huh?" Now it was Lucy's turn for not understanding. "I thought you guys wanted to go."

"Not without you, stupid!"

Well, not realizing that they meant to take her with them probably was stupid. But she hadn't even considered going back on missions this quickly that it just hadn't occurred to her. After all she'd just been caught in an adventure that didn't look as though it would ever end, why go on a new one right on the next day?

"What? I just got back, I'm barely even settled back in, and you want me to leave already?" Nevermind that her toes still felt a bit pruny, she didn't want to leave the apartment containing the glorious tub.

"Well, we gotta make up for lost time. Come on, it'll be fun!", Natsu declared and stared at her with one of his blinding grins. Lucy was torn for a moment. Launching straight from one adventure to another wasn't really her favorite pace… but she did need money.

And she had to admit that she'd missed that sort of spontaneity that came with being a member of Fairy Tail.

"Okay, fine. But I need to find my shoes first."

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After three days of sitting in a ditch waiting for bandits to dispose of, Lucy was really starting to doubt the wisdom of agreeing. After the fight with said bandits that left her with a face full of mud and a torn up skirt she was starting to doubt her sanity.

At least it was pouring rain so the mud washed off her face rather quickly.

What a freaking relief.

"…Never should have listened to you… and what did you pick such an annoying mission for, anyway? … Could've been security at a ball, or helped out at a magical clothing store…" To be honest, she was barely listening to her own rant, and all the whining seemed to roll right off her partner who was smiling contently. He walked along next to her without a care in the world, and Lucy fought the urge to hit him for being so cheerful. She doubted she'd stay successful for long.

Happy had flown on ahead to alert the local authorities of the location of the now incapacitated bandits. Lucy had asked him to carry her, so she didn't have to walk back all the way through the miserable weather. He'd babbled something about speed and weight, and vanished more quickly than she would've thought him capable of.

Little blue traitor.

As nature was conspiring against her at that point, she didn't realize that she was about to step into a hole in the ground before she was already tumbling down. "Kya!" she exclaimed, trying futilely to regain her footing. Holes in the ground were excellent traps, nevermind the naysayers.

"Lucy? You okay?", she heard Natsu's voice call out over the edge of the hole. It was deeper than she'd realized, but giving herself a quick once over, she found herself more or less okay, except for some new scrapes and bruises.

"Yeah, fi…", she started calling out, just as she was wondering how she'd landed so softly. Feeling around with her hand she found herself lying on top of something covered in fabric.

Her voice died in her throat when she realized that the cotton covered thing was an arm. Connected to a person, cold, unmoving with graying skin… undoubtedly dead for a while. Before she even quite realized it she was scrambling back as fast as she could, putting as much distance between herself and the body as was possible in the small ditch.

Then she looked further and saw the corpse's face.

She screamed.

"Lucy?" a concerned voice called out to her, but she barely heard him. Blood was rushing in her ears and she felt hot and cold at the same time, staring into those large, glassy eyes. She wanted to look away, run away, put as much distance between the gruesome sight and herself as possible, but she found herself unable to move, unable to stop screaming and unable to form a coherent thought.

Her partner slid down the hole next to her. She turned to look at him, and as his face went slack and his eyes widened she knew that she wasn't going crazy.

The blond hair with the little bow. The short pleated skirt. The keychain attached to her belt. It was unmistakable.

The body in the ditch was Lucy.

Her brain had shortly stopped working, but now it was kicking in full force, thoughts tumbling over one another as she processed what exactly she was seeing and what exactly it meant.

She turned to Natsu, who was still blinking at the body, and said in a low voice, "You knew."

He winced a little, and looked from the dead Lucy to the living one. His face told her what she already knew. She was right.

"You knew", she repeated, breathlessly. "You knew, you must've."

He opened his mouth, closed it again, and looked away guiltily. But that wasn't good enough. She hit his leg and yelled, "You knew!"

"N… not exactly", he said dazedly. "I wasn't sure."

"It didn't fit. My story, you…" The puzzle pieces fell together in her brain. Little inconsistencies she'd ignored when she was facing them, but now… now she couldn't understand how she'd been so blind so stupid. "Erza's eyes aren't blue! I didn't move my underwear drawer, I never bought any strawberry shampoo!" Had there been more? Thinking back to the party she realized there'd been more. Cana had been sitting there with a barrel of beer, not wine. Levy's headband had been tied on the wrong side.

"I should've known…", she concluded, cursing her own stupidity. She'd been drinking and so happy, so she'd been willing to ignore it all. She'd been away for so long, things might've changed… people's eyes didn't change color. "Nothing changed, it was never right in the first place."

Natsu grabbed her by the shoulders. "Lucy, calm down."

"Don't touch me!", she yelled at him, pulling away. "You lied to me!"

"I… I wasn't sure, it could've fit." But she knew he was lying. She couldn't explain why she was so sure, but there wasn't a doubt in her mind. She wasn't his friend, she wasn't from this world, and there was no way he hadn't realized it right away, or at least earlier than her.

"No. I was talking about an explosion, and travelling through worlds, while she was lying dead in a ditch, and there's no way my story fits with anything you knew about her", she said accusingly. He blinked at her, looking sheepish. "You did know", she said again.

"… her eyes are green", he finally said quietly, looking down to the ground, carefully avoiding the body. The admission didn't make Lucy feel any better. She dropped back, sitting on her butt in a muddy ditch and she couldn't care less. She suddenly felt very very cold.

"I'm not home. It's still going on." She didn't feel like she was about to cry, none of the regular symptoms manifesting. But she dimly realized that her cheeks were starting to wet with moisture that didn't come from the sky. "I have to go through more worlds. It's…"

"No you don't", Natsu suddenly said, more forcefully than before.

"This is the wrong world", Lucy said darkly. She thought he'd understood that already.

"Well… yeah, but you don't have to leave."

"Yes, I do, I have to find my way home", Lucy said, glaring at him as if he was stupid. Which he was, incidentally.

"But why? You could just stay here. You don't have to go anywhere", he argued.

"Aren't you listening to me?"

"I mean it. You don't have to go. You're missing a world and we're missing a Lucy. It's obvious." He had a hopeful look on his face, and for a moment, a short moment, Lucy could see his point. It would be so simple. Stay here, move the underwear to the other drawer and pretend she belonged. No more travelling, finding a home…

"No!", she yelled, and wished her voice was steadier. "No I have to go home. To my home. They're waiting for me!"

"They don't even know you're still alive. And what if you never get there? It won't make a difference to them if you're staying here or stumbling through other worlds forever." He knelt down next to her and looked at her imploringly.

"I will get home. I will find them", she insisted. Of course there was no way of knowing that. She had no idea if it was true, she couldn't have. But she had to believe in that, had to convince herself at every moment of that journey, because she knew otherwise she'd fall apart.

"Well maybe. But do you really think 'maybe' is worth more than finding friends and a home here, for sure? You can just stay."

"This isn't the right world", she said.

"Yeah well, maybe it's not perfect. But it can be good enough." His eyes were open and vulnerable, and she had to force herself to look away, because if she looked at him too long she knew he'd convince her. It was too tempting.

"No", she said weakly. "I can't just give up. I can't just stop looking. What if the next world is the right one, and I never know because I've stopped trying?"

"But what if all the other worlds are even more different, and you never find a nice one again? What if you get stuck travelling, and don't find any home at all? We're your friends. We love you, and we'll take care of you. So some colors are different, big deal. You could be happy here."

"I'd never stop wondering about home", Lucy said. But she wasn't quite convinced of her own words. If she was really happy there, could she forget about her real friends? If she replaced them with people that were almost them, would she stop caring about the real ones? Maybe. And that was the scariest idea of all.

"And what about her?", she suddenly asked, gesturing toward the dead Lucy lying just a few feet away from them. He flinched a little as he followed her gaze, and quickly looked away again. "Does she mean so little to you that you can just replace her? Do you just want to replace her with me, and forget about her? Make her whole life meaningless if no one even cares that it's over?"

"What? No! She's my best friend!", he yelled, eyes wide at her accusation.

"But you don't mind switching her out and pretending nothing's changed? Doesn't seem like she's that important to you, as long as you have somebody else." Her words came out more venomous than she intended, but she couldn't bring herself to care. Dying was one thing to be afraid of, but dying and no one even cares? No one even remembers?

"She is important to me! That's why I don't want to loose her!", Natsu yelled.

"You already have. Look at her! That's your Lucy, that's your best friend, and nothing I do, whether I leave or stay is going to bring her back. We might look alike, but we're not the same person, and you know it. You'd always know it if I stayed, and maybe said something or do something she wouldn't you'd always know that it was wrong, and you'd always be reminded of what you lost. Isn't that worse than facing it? That way it's never going to stop hurting!"

He looked like she physically struck him. For a moment he opened and closed his mouth without saying anything. Lucy hadn't even realized that it had stopped raining, until she saw his eyes swimming with tears. He looked back and forth between Lucy and her counterpart, and then, ever so slowly, the tears spilled over.

"Please don't go", he choked out. But she knew he saw her point. She wiped away her own tears and shook her head.

"I have to", she said, and felt for her magic. The portal power was easy to reach and ready to go. If she was right it could lead her back home. If he was right it would keep throwing her into places she didn't mean to be for the rest of her life, and she'd never find what she was looking for.

Staying would be easy, and it might at some point in some other bring her happiness and make her stop missing her friends. But that would be an even greater loss. Giving up on them was the worst thing she could do.

Her own friends would never give up. Not on her, not on anyone.

So she couldn't give up on them.

"I'm sorry", she said, as she waved her hand in a sweeping arc, forming a new glowing portal. It stood out strangely in the desolate landscape. It would vanish as soon as she stepped through.

He held out his hand, close to her arm as if to stop her, but he didn't grab. "Please stay", he repeated.

She didn't answer, just looked at him one last time, and stepped through the portal.

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She stumbled out into a completely white corridor, leaving several muddy footsteps that looked very misplaced.

Next to her was an open doorway, and a strange blue light was spilling from it. Intrigued, she took a step toward it, but before she even put her foot down, a voice called out.

"Halt! You're not authorized to be here. You're under arrest."

And the handcuffs closed around her wrist before she even saw the man clicking them on her.

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A/N: Big thanks to everyone for your support! I was really happy about all of the reviews, and I really wouldn't have expected that many. I'm really happy about all of them, and I hope you still enjoy reading this. It's far from over, and I'll do my best to close the updating gaps again.

The chapter title is based on the song "This is Home" by Switchfoot.

I'd love to hear your thoughts, and see you next chapter!