Hey, guys! I think that this will be the last chapter if I can fit most of the stuff into it, I know it's gonna be sad for this to end so soon, but I have so many other ideas for the sequel. I hope you like this chapter, and there is going to be some real JeRza this chapter. Oh, and Hiro Mashima owns Fairy Tail and all of it's characters (Except Lillia), Not me!
A thin, red thread wound around the guild, wrapping around chairlegs and tables and went over the floor. The thin red line wound around everything that was there, any cups that were shined, all of the doorknobs, and went all the way around the building a and led into the streets a couple of times. When Kinana opened the doors that morning, she was surprised to see it everywhere, and went about trying to cut it so she could pick it up.
When Lillia came in that morning with Wendy and Charla, the three found several broken pairs of scissors and Kinana staring blankly at a wall. Wendy went over and waved her hand in front of the young woman's face. Kinana blinked a few times before she got up.
"What's with the thread?" Lillia asked, taking a strand of it with two fingers.
"It never ends and can't be broken," Kinana replied blankly as she went around setting up the tables as if the thread weren't there, although she had to do a few manuevers with some cups. Lillia and the rest of her group did as Kinana did, and pretended that the thread wasn't there, although something tugged at Lillia's concience.
The guild eventually trickled into the building after the initial few groups, and it was about noon that anything really interesting happened.
"I'm gonna burn it!" Natsu yelled, catching his fists on fire.
"What?! how do you know that it's not someone's lifeline?" Gray yelled back, ramming his forehead against the pink haired dragon slayer's.
"Who's lifeline would be wrapped around a chair?" Natsu retaliated, ramming his forehead back ot the ice mage's.
Just then, Erza ran into the room with an extremely angry expression on her face and a broken sword in her hand.
"Who did this!?" she roared, holding up her hand. The end of the thread was tied around her pinky. "I have been trying to get this-this thread off of my hand all morning, and whoever did this shall pay!" the knight screamed at the guild. "I have broken one of my swords on it, and this is not funny," she growled. The guild didn't think so, though. They all started laughing, and a few of them almost fell out of their thread-covered chairs, and caught themselves on the thread-tangled tables. Lillia sat there in thought for a moment.
"Have you ever heard of the myth of the red thread?" she asked her master.
"Of course I have, but that has never actually happened before," Erza replied irritably.
"Let's just assume that it has, and you have gotten 'tangled' up in it," the bluenette said, smiling slightly at her pun. Erza wasn't quite as amused.
"Student, if this is going where I think it is, then I am going to stop this conversation here," the redhead responded, putting her hand up. Lillia paused, but Mira caught her attention over the titania's shoulder, and gestured for the younger re-quip mage to keep going.
"This is only hypothetical, and whatever this thing is right here is just a prank or something, who do you think the other person on the other end of the string is?" she asked quickly. Erza put her fingers on her temple and stood there with the thread on her pinky.
"No one," the older re-quip mage replied. Lillia puffed out her cheeks and looked at the floor for a minute.
"Would it be okay if I saw if there was someone else at the other end of the thread?" the girl asked, looking up into her master's eyes.
"No," Erza replied curtly. Her student bit her lip and went to consult the barmaid.
When Erza had seen the thread on her pinky that morning, she had dreaded and she had worried and she had fretted on who would be on the other end. She had wished and she had hoped and she had feared that he would be on the other end. The thing was, she had a dream that he was on the other end. She refused to believe he was on the other end of the thread. The little knot tied around his pinky would be the confirmation. He wouldn't have the red thread on his pinky finger, it couldn't be. No, it was not there, and Erza had resigned herself to that, and now this child that reminded her so much of the one she wanted to ignore was asking to find the person on the other end. She didn't want to know who was on the other end, and she didn't need to. She didn't want to.
She didn't.
Lillia sighed and went over to Mira quietly.
"How are we going to find Erza's other half if she won't give me permission?" the small bluenette sighed.
"Simple, I can get a few people on the job easily and have them bring whoever's at the other end of the thread here," Mira started to explain.
"No!" Lillia exclaimed, waving her hands. She blushed at the sudden outburst and coughed, "I don't think we should do that. I have a fairly strong hunch that I know who it is... I just need to get to them first." Mira gave the small re-quip mage a funny look and nodded. "I think that I'm the little fairy who tied the thread, and if I tried to cut it now, I could... But only once I'm sure of something," she explained as she started out the door.
A few hours after the thread tracing began, Lillia stopped at the edge of the woods and stood in silence, taking deep breaths to steady herself. She could have sworn that she heard the faintest echoe of "Coward!" bouncing off of the trees in the distance as memories of her own raw throat screaming that word to the person she was looking for flooded the recceses of her mind. Zipping up her winter coat and pulling her scarf a little higher up on her face, she took a step into the barren forest. The woods were still dark, and the gnarled branches of the winding trees were naked of their usual leaves. Lillia blinked a few times as she walked after the thin red line. The thread took a sudden turn at one point, and Lillia started to run because she felt like she was getting close.
It was several hours of running in the lung-stinging cold air before she stopped to massage her aching yet cold legs. Blinking a few times, she let herself cough and cough and cough until she was sure she would lose the contents of her stomach from hyperventilating. Her eyes stung and the sun was getting ready to make the sky orange even though it was rather early in the afternoon. Lillia silently cursed the winter as she managed to bring down her hyperventilation by putting her scarf over her mouth to make it hard to get air.(Survivalists should now this, a surefire way to stop extreme hyperventilation is to give the victim something to cover their mouth with so that they get some extra carbon dioxide to calm their lungs... I know science!) Thank god at least one of Erza's doctoring lessons came in handy.
Her muscles calmed down from their cramping enough for Lillia to pummel enough warmth into them so she could keep running for at least another quarter of an hour. She cursed the winter yet again, because she would probably get frostbite if she put on her metal avis armor, so she kept running and passed by an oddly familiar bend in a stream, and Lillia could have sworn she had tripped over that gnarled root earlier that year, too. Lillia picked up the red thread from the ground as the sun tinted the snow orange, causing her glacier blue hair that was put up in a bun like always look unusually blue compared to the landscape that she was in. Standing up again, Lillia growled at the darkness devouring the places behind trees as if her noises could scare it away.
She managed to run for yet another hour, but by that time, Lillia was sure that she could see her fingers turning blueish black. Trudging home and getting back before midnight she was guessing, you young re-quip mage made some hot chocolate and warmed up her hands on the extremely warm mug. Wendy was asleep, so Lillia did her best not to wake anyone up as she prepared her drink. Snuggling into her warm bed that night, Lillia cursed the winter and Jellal and the world for being such idiots and thanked the covers for being warm.
The next morning, the guild was still tangled up in thread. Lillia ordered a latte and did her best to hide it from the sky maiden, but she got a firm and uncharacteristic scolding from her room mate anyway. Swallowing the warm drink and letting energy flow up to her brain, the bluenette smiled warmly as the small electrical fireworks went through her as she shuddered. Erza came in early that morning and was still peeved about the thread. The knight seemed not to have gotten much sleep the night before, and was hanging her head low. Nobody approached her.
After a while, Erza looked up and stared at the door as if something were telling her to go there. The knight ignored the voice in favor of her own fear of what lay at the other end. Lillia stood up and walked to the door after noticing Erza glaring at it as if the fact that it was there did her wrong. Throwing the doors opened rather theatrically, Lillia smirked at the man standing on the other end with a look of pure shock on his face.
His facial expression slowly went back to normal, and he coughed. He pushed some of his blue bangs out of his eyes with one hand, revealing a red tatoo. The other hand stayed behind his back.
"May I come in?" he asked in a very gentlemanly manner. Lillia stepped aside and pulled the doors closed. Everyone had been staring since the cold winds swept through the guild almost immediately after the doors swung open.
Erza had her head on the table for a while, completely ignoring anything anyone offered her. The guild remained silent for far too long. The knight had come for white noise, she could have sat in silence in her appartment before. She looked up with an angry expression on her face to see someone with blue hair standing in front of her table. His red tatoo was painfully clear against his pale features.
Erza blinked a few times before she felt a lurch in her gut. She felt like she should have run off and thrown up, but she didn't. She just sat there in silence, glued to her spot. Jellal waved sheepishly with a hand that he was holding behind his back before.
Erza almost cried.
Because there, on his pinky finger, was the small knot of red thread.
Lillia smiled drowsily, but sneezed, and then coughed.
For the next couple of hours, the length of the red thread seemed to shrink as the two people did a playful sort of dance around the guild getting it untangled from the furniture and everything else. Lillia would have been happy, but she had caught a cold and had to leave. What she missed of the small dance was when Natsu and Gray had gotten a hold of the string and accidentally tied Erza and Jellal together. The two still got kicked so hard that they made cracks in the walls, although the two getting untangled was a proccess that involved excessive giggling and a few unusually close moments.
When Wendy came back from the guild that night, Charla insisted that she didn't heal the other bluenette because she was stupid enough to do something to get herself sick in the first place. Lillia coughed a few times.
"You know, colds are contagious and Wendy will most likely get this bug if she doesn't heal me," Lillia pointed out. Charla huffed.
"She'll just have to have extra vitamin C, then," the white exceed said sternely. Lillia heaved an agitated sigh and fell back onto her pillow. Wendy gave her tea and they talked, although Lillia's voice was hoarse.
The next morning, Lillia had made a miraculous recovery over night, and both of the girls denied any accusations. The two of them headed back into the guild, and Lillia got Wendy and herself hot cocoa, her treat. There was still plently of thread around the guild, and Lillia found some that lead into a dark room. The bluenette decided against going in. Several hours later, Jellal and Erza came in from the back of the guild, and the path that they chose suspiciously seemed to have come from the direction of the darkened room.
Several hours later, something shook the guild. Everyone was in a fight except for the few stragglers who never got into the fight in the first place. But, the rumble of it all was enough to make even the spectators think it was just a byproduct of the large mass of fists and dust in the center of the guild hall. The second time, maybe the spectators noticed. Then there was a great lurch in the guild, and a few people fell off of their seats. It was then that a couple of the people lowered their fists to look around them.
Natsu and Gray still stood forehead to forehead, until even Natsu stopped the fight. Then it was just Gray who was still standing there, for some reason he still had on his pants. That part was miraculous.
"Do you smell that?" the pinkette asked, looking up. Wendy stood from her seat.
"It smells like the plants from Edolas," she said quietly. Lillia looked around, confused. Gajeel stayed silent, his arms crossed. Laxus looked like he wanted to say something, but his jaw was still broken because of Mira. Nobody moved as the guild hall jolted for the fifth time, and a large portion of the roof broke off. Above them was a large vortex, and everyone in the room began to feel weaker. A few people started to float into the air.
Lillia and a few others started to float away too. Jellal went up, but Erza stayed, calling like a lost kitten for him to come back down. Lillia looked at the man, and blinked a few times. He was smiling, to put it more adequtely, they were smiling. There were two Jellals.
"Ready?" one asked. The other one had the red thread, but the first one didn't.
"Ready," the one with the thread replied. The two fist bumped, but as soon as the two touched, a bright yellow light filled the air. The grey sky around them faded out as everyone stopped moving as if they were statues. Everything was white and bright, and suddenly the bubble burst.
The sky was grey and the air was cold and everyone was in the guild, but the roof was half blown off.
Lillia stood in bewilderment for a while before saying anything.
"What just happened?" she asked. Jellal had a grin, and he seemed to be the only one.
"Magic transfer. I am now technically Mystogan," he said proudly. Lillia looked at him in disbelief, but the thread was still on his pinky finger.
"You're part of fairy tail now, but you did it at the price of destroying fairy tail?" she asked, looking around.
"We'll be able to fix the roof," he said quickly.
Oh, great.
Hello and goodbye, minna! this is actually my last chapter, and I know you're going to hate me for it, but somehow this was the only way it seemed right to me! *dodges sharp projectiles* I knwo, I know, but please don't be mad that I ended it, be happy that I can finally start the sequel that I have been planning since the sixth chapter! Please don't hate me! I loved all of the reviews and favorites, follows and advice! I want to thank you for the support on this, but I have the first three chapters in my head for the next story. This was my first story that I have ever gotten past the third chapter on, so I want tot thank you for all of your wonderful support on this, and I promise to make up for all of this stupid stuff that I wrote in here in the sequel!