"What did you find in the journals?" Laxus asks one day, when the entire Guild is passed out and they're the only two awake. Laxus is not long for the world of wakefulness; his eyes are heavy-lidded and rimmed red, but how much of that can be attributed to the scotch curled in his grasp, he does not know.
Mard looks at his team leader closer than he ever has before, searching for the bits of Yury that he'd come to know over the months. He sees the power, yes, and the downfall - the same downfall. Pride, that he is familiar with. Too familiar. But he knows Yury, knows him more than anyone here, more than Makarov himself because there are some things a father would sooner tell a journal than his own son, and softens a little.
He will survive. He will survive not because he is Yury's great-grandson, or Makarov's pride and joy. Not because he's survived Ivan, and his Kyuukimon, but because he is Laxus Dreyar and he thrives.
So Mard opens the book and his translations, and begins softly. "Mavis was returned to me a year after her disappearance, by the Black Wizard Zeref, in a state of almost complete homeostatic shutdown…"