Because I Need You to Stay

by Mnemosyne's Elegy

Sequel to "Because You Told Me to Go". Memento Mori had never been meant to kill, and an idea begins forming in Natsu's mind on a way to get Gray back. Because even though everyone still retains the memory of the ice mage's death, Gray may not actually be dead after all.

25. Ch 24-Both FT & Gray continue the search

Note: Everything here is derived from things in canon, although I expanded some things and didn't feel bad about taking a few liberties since we mostly just get hints about some of the things from Gray's childhood. I have reasons for writing it the way I did, even the parts in Gray's hometown. As a warning, there are a couple parts that are a little dark.

---

Chapter 24

(In which both Fairy Tail and Gray continue the search.)

---

He didn't know where he was going, exactly, so in that way he was lost. But he had a map of sorts, even if it was a torn and fragmented thing that gave as many questions as answers. He would just have to hope that it would be enough.

After taking a quick detour to ensure that Natsu wouldn't be able to follow his scent—he wasn't exactly sure how he knew the best ways to fool the dragon slayer's nose, but he supposed that Gray must have known—he had gotten on a train. The only challenge had been in deciding what ticket to buy with some of the leftover jewels from the food stash. He had some vague idea of where he was going first, but he didn't know any of the specifics. He had a general direction in mind and he had written down that the thing holding these torn pieces together was the word 'Isvan', which had confused him at first until he concluded that it was a place. A big place. Maybe he could get to this 'Isvan', but he wasn't sure if he would be able to find what he was looking for once he got there. He would cross that bridge when he came to it.

For now he was train-hopping, aimlessly drifting from train to train every time he reached the end of the line. He had managed to pick up a general map in one of the stations and he could see Isvan labeled on it. It worried him a little because it was such a big, blank space. He had tried overlaying his own map on top of it, but the memories didn't connect and he still didn't know where the places on his map fit into that yawning expanse of white. He had eventually given up on that endeavor, instead carefully marking off every station and town he passed through on his journey if he could find its name on the map. That way he could make sure that he was still going in the right direction and he had some idea of where he currently was. He'd worry about the rest when he got to Isvan.

But in all honesty, that map wasn't nearly as useful to him as the other things he had brought, so he tucked it away in his bag. He had a long train ride ahead of him, so he pulled out his own map instead, carefully spreading some of its more important pieces out on the empty seat beside him. He studied the drawn pictures and written words carefully, looking for any spark of recognition or sudden knowledge. These were the things that had originally helped him fit the pieces together for a moment so that he could be briefly be Gray, but nothing clicked into place this time. He was a little disappointed, but not surprised.

One of the pictures in particular caught his eye and he picked it up to get a closer look. It was one of the drawings he had shown Natsu back when he had first shown the dragon slayer the sketchbook, the one with the whole team together. The one where he had really been able to see Gray's love for his friends bleeding through.

He ran his fingers across the surface of the page, lingering briefly over each person's face for a moment as he studied them wistfully. They looked so happy. Natsu, Erza, Lucy, Happy. It was funny, but he didn't have such a hard time using their names anymore. He had told Natsu that part of the reason he had such difficulty with names was that he couldn't seem to connect all the memories and feelings and characteristics of each person into a cohesive whole, and that was true.

But something had changed, because while he had been Gray, he knew these people. And even though he wasn't Gray anymore, even though he had lost most of Gray's memories again, he had been able to fit the people back together again in a way that he almost, almost understood. Before, this whole puzzle of life had been broken down into its barest elements and he hadn't been able to figure out how they fit together, but now he had at least been able to jigsaw some of those elements into people. Now the basic elements he had to work with were people rather than random characteristics or memory snippets. He knew that the people all fit together too, all pieces in a bigger puzzle, but he hadn't figured out that part yet. He thought that it had something to do with the groups he had been organizing the pictures into.

Well, he hadn't managed to fit the people together yet, but that's what he was hoping to do on this journey, because…

His thoughts trailed off for a moment and he brought the paper a little closer to his face as he squinted at the drawing of Gray.

"Who are you?" he whispered, ignoring the odd looks the couple sitting a few seats away was giving him. "Where are you now?"

This man who looked like him but wasn't…Just who was Gray Fullbuster? He didn't know. He could make out some of Gray's personality from the drawings and from the memory flashes and from those few brief minutes where everything had made sense, but it wasn't enough. Natsu and the others kept telling him that he was Gray, but that wasn't exactly true, was it? He didn't know—didn't know—

He let out his breath in a sigh and replaced the drawing with the other sketches. He was going on this journey to find Gray, so to speak, but sitting here staring at the picture wasn't going to do any good. There were better things he could be trying to sort out now.

Pulling out three specific pages, he held them side by side to study them. These were new drawings that he had made after his brief stint as Gray. There was one for each of the three groups that he thought were important. One was for the people he knew to be Gray's parents, one for Lyon and Gray's dead master, and one for Fairy Tail. Each page had a wealth of material, from sketches to hurried scribblings of important information that he had managed to write down before losing again.

Perhaps most relevant to this particular situation, each group had a place or places as well, and these were what had set him on the trail to Isvan. There were sketches of a couple cities, both looking somewhat the worse for wear, a little house on a snowy mountainside, and the Fairy Tail guild hall. He didn't know everything, but he could arrange the groups in the order of Gray's parents, Lyon and Ur, and Fairy Tail. He logically knew that this was the chronological order of how these different groups had played out their roles in Gray's life. And since he had a chronological order, he was going to follow it in terms of where he was going first. The ruined city associated with Gray's parents was first. The cabin and city associated with Lyon and Ur were next. The Fairy Tail guild hall had been first, in a sense, since that was where he had been these past months, but it would also be last on this particular trip.

He still had a long way to go until he got there, so he took this time on the train to flip through the pictures and read through the notebook and try to figure out how these three groups fit together. He was searching for any clues he had missed, hoping that maybe something would jump out at him, waiting to see if anything would trigger a half-formed memory.

By the time he reached the borders of Isvan, he was no closer to figuring it out. He stood in the train station just inside Isvan's borders and looked around uncertainly. Where was he supposed to go now that he was here? He could board another train into the interior and hope for the best, but that would just be a shot in the dark.

Pulling out the page for Gray's parents, he studied the drawing of the burning city intently. Then he looked around and found an information desk that had some maps. He grabbed one of each and sat down on a bench to look through them. They mostly just showed different views of Isvan's interior, some more detailed than others. If he had a name to work with then he would be able to find his destination relatively easily, but he didn't.

Sighing, he made to fold up the map he had been studying, but then something caught his eye. He didn't know why, since the spot wasn't even labeled as a city, but something was calling him there. Gray was calling him there. Which sounded silly, except that Gray had called him to do things before. Gray had called him to go after Natsu and bring back the lost scarf when the dragon slayer had run away after the debacle with the memory mage's magic, Gray had called him to go after Erza and comfort her after he had made her cry, Gray had even called him to do little things for some of the others on occasion, when they seemed particularly melancholy.

It was an even subtler thing than the curse—just a slight tugging sensation, a quiet feeling that this was the right thing to do or the right place to go. Following Gray's instincts had worked out for him in the past, so he saw no reason to abandon them now.

He looked at the train schedule and saw that no train was going directly to that point—which would make sense, he supposed, since there was no city listed there—but he could take the one that would get him the closest and then walk the rest of the way. He nodded sharply and went to buy his ticket, new resolve shining in his eyes.

He was going to find Gray.

---

They knew where they were going—well, at least Lyon did—so they weren't exactly lost. But at the same time, they didn't know if Gray would even be there, so they could very well be on a fool's quest and end up with nothing to show for it.

It chafed at Natsu that he didn't even know if they were going in the right direction. Well, it would have chafed at him more if he wasn't currently dying of motion sickness. Strangely, the sickness didn't seem to be as overwhelming as usual once the train had started moving. He suspected that might be because he had already been feeling rather fearful and nauseous before the idea of the train had even crossed his mind, so his sickness could only increase so much.

He sat slumped against the window, his eyes closed as he rested his forehead against the cool glass. Across from him Lyon and Happy were talking in low voices, but Natsu was too heartsick and nauseous to really try paying attention. He absently reflected that those two were getting on much better than they had in the beginning. He supposed that it came from being stuck living together for so long. Then again, Natsu was getting along better with Lyon as well, and that had started even when he was still living with Gray instead of at his own house with Happy and Lyon. Just as well, he supposed. They made a better team when they weren't in a competition over who got to do what in regards to Gray.

The train lurched and Natsu suppressed a groan. His hand automatically went to tug at his scarf since sometimes it helped him feel a little better to be able to hold on to something he cared about, but as his fingers brushed against the dragon scales, they slipped underneath the folds of the scarf and caught on the chain underneath. Natsu opened his eyes and looked down as he deftly tugged Gray's necklace out into the open from where it had been hidden beneath his scarf.

He stared at it blankly for a few moments, absently rubbing his fingers across the cold metal pendant. This necklace had been Gray's equivalent of Natsu's scarf, and although wearing it brought the dragon slayer some small comfort, it also felt wrong. This was Gray's and Gray should have it.

Natsu had lost his scarf a couple times over the years, but he had always gotten it back. In fact, Gray seemed to be the one who usually brought it back to him. He had lost it during Tartaros and Gray had found it and returned it. He had been an idiot that one time after the disastrous attempt to revive Gray's memories with a combination of Rufus and Meredy's magic, and Gray had once again found it and brought it back. He had given it to Gray once as well, after his friend had fallen through the ice on their job up on Mt. Hakobe, and Gray had returned it once they had gotten back to the guild.

On the other hand, Gray had only lost his necklace twice, and each time it had been because of a tragedy. The first time, someone from the guild must have removed it from his body after he 'died', offered it to Lyon, and then held on to it for Natsu until the dragon slayer had returned, when it had then sat and gathered dust in the kitchen cabinets after Happy had hidden it. The second time, Gray had given it to Natsu as a farewell before he had slipped away again.

Maybe that was part of the reason why looking at it now made Natsu's heart hurt so badly, because nothing good had ever come of him having this necklace. He needed to give it back to Gray. Well, first he needed Gray to regain his memories and remember its importance. Gray had always been there to remind Natsu of what was important, had always been there to return to Natsu the important things that he had lost, and Natsu needed to return the favor. He couldn't let Gray go. Gray would never have given up on Natsu, so Natsu wouldn't give up on Gray. No, Natsu would definitely not abandon hope now, because Gray needed him.

Natsu closed his hand around the little metal sword and closed his eyes again. The movement of the train and the desire to escape the nausea eventually lulled him to sleep, but his fingers stayed clutched around the necklace the whole time.

They were still wrapped around it when the train ground to a halt and woke Natsu from his restless slumber. He silently slipped the chain back beneath his scarf and followed Lyon and Happy off the train. It hadn't been a short trip. It had, as a matter of fact, taken over a day, including a train ride through the night, and they had had to switch trains a couple of times since no train would go all the way from Magnolia to Isvan.

"Where are we now?" Natsu grumbled, waiting for the last of his motion sickness to die down as he stepped off the train and glanced around the station.

Lyon's eyes flashed with something akin to sympathy and Happy fluttered protectively by Natsu's shoulder. The dragon slayer eyed them warily for a moment, before figuring that perhaps they had noticed what he had been doing on the train. That might explain their odd behavior.

"We've actually been in Isvan for a little while now," Lyon said, glancing around. "But we're getting close. Now we just have to go the last few miles to Gray's hometown."

"When does the next train leave?" Happy asked.

Lyon was already shaking his head. "We aren't going by train."

Natsu breathed a sigh of relief. "Oh good." Then he frowned a little. "Why?"

Lyon's eyes clouded over and he looked away. "The city Gray grew up in was completely annihilated by Deliora. It was such a terrible tragedy that the city was basically turned into a graveyard. It was never rebuilt—it's just ruins now. Trains used to stop there at one point, but none have gone there in well over a decade. Actually, even the tracks were moved to give the city a wide berth. We'll have to walk."

The nausea Natsu had finally started getting rid of began creeping back again. Happy looked similarly horrified. It wasn't that this was completely surprising, per se, but it was a harsh reminder of Gray's past. And Gray had never really gone into a lot of detail about what had happened, so Natsu hadn't known it was this bad, even if he had suspected that it wasn't great.

"Well, I guess we might as well start walking then," he said quietly. He frowned over at Lyon. "You do know where you're going, right?"

Lyon turned away and began walking out of the station, his eyes fixed on the ground. "As if I could forget."

Natsu and Happy hesitated a moment longer and exchanged glances before following him. Natsu pushed aside his nausea and fear and grief for the moment. All he needed to do was focus on the present. He couldn't afford distractions right now, because he had a mission.

He was going to find Gray.

---

His first reaction at the sight of the ruined city was disappointment. Yes, he had gotten the feeling that Gray's birthplace was no longer really standing—the sketch he'd drawn while he had still retained some of Gray's memories made that obvious—but he had been hoping for something a little more impressive. Something that would trigger a wave of memories and emotions and finally give him a clue about who Gray had been. But he supposed that he should have known better, because the memories rarely worked like that.

It was snowing, and a dusting of white covered everything, partially obscuring it from view. All that was left of the city was rubble, crumbling chunks of brick and stone strewn across the ground in a wide radius, going as far as the eye could see. The city had apparently been a pretty decent-sized one. Occasionally a rotted, blackened piece of wood could be seen poking out from beneath the remains of a building, but although there must have been a lot of wood used in the construction of the city, not much could be seen here. He supposed that most of it would have rotted away by now, because although he wasn't sure how long ago this city had been destroyed, he was aware that it had been a long time.

Carefully picking his way through the rubble, he prowled the remains of the long-dead city, his eyes carefully searching for anything familiar or recognizable. Not much was coming to him, but then he paused beside one nondescript fallen building. It was crumbling with age, its bricks were lying cracked on the ground, and whatever wood had once supported it had long since rotted away. In short, it looked like every other building.

But something about it tugged at his memory. Or rather, something about it tugged at Gray's memory. For a moment he could feel the curse resisting, but then it seemed to give up without much of a fight, which puzzled him. Perhaps it was weakened because of how much they had fought earlier when he'd been Gray. Did it work like that? Usually the curse would—

The memories hit him hard and fast.

He could hear the screaming and the pleading and the roars of the demon slicing through it all. He could see the fire devouring the buildings, its smoke rising to cloud the sky. The blood was everywhere, thick pools of crimson congealing on the ground and bright spatters of red painting the walls and streets. The bodies of people he had known and loved were lying in the rubble, while the demon towered above them and roared in triumph.

And now it was coming towards him and he was too terrified to move. This was it, how he was going to die. But then suddenly his parents were there again, yelling at him to run as they pushed him out of the way. He stumbled to the side and turned back, desperately calling for them.

And then the demon tore into them and he screamed as their blood spattered him.

The demon turned clumsily, its large frame crashing into the building beside him and knocking it over. The structure groaned and started to collapse. He tried to get out of the way, but it was already too late. A support beam followed by a barrage of bricks fell down on him, and everything went dark.

The memory finally dissipated, leaving him gasping for breath, eyes wide. He shuddered and wrapped his arms around himself. That had been terrible. He felt a little bad that Gray had experienced something like that.

Oddly enough, this memory didn't fade the same way as the others. He waited for the curse to sink its teeth into it and drag it away, but for the moment the vicious little beast seemed uninterested in removing that particular memory. He didn't know why. Maybe it was worn out from all the memories it had been tearing away from him lately.

It should be a good thing because it gave him something to work with, but the truth was that no matter how much he thought about it and turned it over in his head, he still couldn't connect to it. It was terrible, but it was something that had happened to Gray. It must fit into this puzzle somewhere, but no matter which way he twisted and turned it, he couldn't jam it into place.

He sat down heavily on a nearby chunk of wall and stared blankly at the building that had triggered the memory—the building that had collapsed on top of Gray, he supposed. He sat there for what seemed like hours, not willing to give up on this newest lead but also unable to break out of the dead end it had led him into. Why couldn't he connect to this?

He thought back to when Natsu had been trying to get him to remember. In the void, Natsu had made him feel all the negative emotions, the pain and fear and grief, and that had jolted him into awareness in a way that the other emotions had not. While they had been using Rufus and Meredy's magic, Natsu had turned to showing him negative memories and emotions, and although it had eventually made him snap, it was also what had given him a breakthrough so that he started remembering bits and pieces. Natsu had thought that he needed to see and feel the bad things, and this newest memory could definitely be considered bad. It was horrible, terrible, and far worse than anything Natsu had shown him or made him feel before. So why didn't it work now when the same strategy had worked before?

It was a long time before it occurred to him that although Natsu had shown him the bad things, the dragon slayer had shown him the good ones as well. Natsu had shown him the good memories and feelings first, and when that hadn't worked, that's when the dragon slayer had turned to the bad ones out of desperation. He had just remembered that it was the negative memories and emotions that had triggered his progress, and had ignored the fact that he had seen the positive things as well, because they didn't seem to have worked.

But perhaps they had.

He stood up and looked around uncertainly, not sure what exactly he was searching for. Letting out a breath, he let himself relax. He began walking through the snow and rubble, and although he didn't know where he was going, his steps were certain and unfaltering. He would just have to trust Gray's instincts again.

Because it occurred to him now that perhaps it wasn't the negative things that had pulled him out of his void-apathy or started the cascade of half-remembered memories. Perhaps it had been a combination of both the good and the bad. In the void, nothing had meaning. What was the meaning of life if there was not also death? What could existence possibly mean if there was no non-existence to stand against it? It was funny, but when he thought about it, few things had meaning without their opposite. But the converse was true in all cases as well, because if you couldn't have the good without the bad, you couldn't have the bad without the good either. Everything was just a flat, meaningless shade of gray otherwise.

He had wanted to focus on the bad because he had thought that was what was triggering his progress, and he also suspected that Gray may have had an exaggerated tendency to focus on the bad as well, perhaps because of all the tragedy he'd faced. But to get the full picture, to really understand Gray, he needed to know about the good things that had happened to Gray as well, because Gray had been as happy as he had been unhappy, had had as many good times as bad. He would never be able to understand Gray if he only had half the story.

Here.

He paused and peered at the destroyed building in front of him. It didn't look like much, but something about it felt right. He hopped over the remains of an outer wall so that he could stand on what had once been the inside of the building—the house—even though what had once been a clear interior was now strewn with debris. He brushed some of the snow off the wall beside him, letting his fingers graze the rough, pock-marked stone as he studied it with interest.

This ruined shell, he realized, must have been Gray's house, once.

The memories didn't come as easily this time. The curse hadn't put up a fight with the memories of the destruction of Gray's city, but it wasn't going to give up the happy memories so easily. It hadn't been as active since that last sweeping attack on his memory, but it was starting to stir again now. But he was determined and he would fight, so he sat down right there in the middle of the ashes of Gray's childhood and fought for the memories that must have been made here.

There was nothing as dramatic as that last tragic memory, but maybe that was to be expected, because not everything in life was overly dramatic. Gray must have had some quiet moments too. Still, the longer he sat there, the more he could remember. He could see the smiles and hear the laughter and almost feel that sense of belonging that he hadn't really been able to feel since the void. And he felt like he was so close to being able to fit together Gray's mother and Gray's father and Gray. He could almost see how they connected, could almost feel what they had meant to each other, but not quite.

Not quite, because of that stupid curse. It hadn't bothered trying to pull away the earlier memory, but it was fighting to yank these ones back into oblivion. He wondered briefly what it did with the memories it stole. Could it destroy them entirely? Lock them in the void where he'd never be able to find them again? Sure he had been able to find pieces of Gray's memory from time to time, but once they'd been pulled away again…He didn't know if maybe the curse was capable of erasing the memories entirely. Maybe there were already pieces of Gray he'd never be able to find again because they no longer existed. He didn't want to think about that.

He wondered if maybe the reason the curse was fighting him more on the happy memories than on the tragic ones was because it liked nothingness and death—its name meant 'memory of death', didn't it? If it had perhaps been weakened enough from their earlier clash that it had to pick and choose which fights it pursued, then maybe it was just choosing to focus its efforts on removing anything positive. Because if he had to remember anything, it wanted him to remember the death and bloodshed. And if that was all he remembered, he would never be able to find Gray again.

He didn't really have time to speculate on all this now, not when he needed his full concentration just to fight to hang on to the faint whispers of memory that lingered here, but he scowled anyway. Hadn't the curse already done enough? He had accepted its presence and its effects because he hadn't thought that he had a choice in the matter, but he had come too far to give up now. The curse did not belong here, and he wasn't going to let it win again.

He needed to find that one thing that would give him some purchase and let him snap the pieces together so that they wouldn't fall apart and slip away again. He had managed to assemble some pieces into people and his knowledge of those people hadn't been lost again because he had found something to connect each individual to itself. If he could do that here, then he could hold together these people in their group.

Jumping to his feet, he hurriedly left the abandoned house behind and trudged through the rest of the city. He walked all the way to the edge of the ruins before he ran across what he thought he must have been looking for. In the snowy field beyond the perimeter of the wrecked city there were rows upon rows of wooden crosses and stone markers sticking out of the ground, and his first thought was 'graveyard'. But that couldn't be exactly right, because he rather thought that the whole city was a graveyard. Besides, if these had been from the time of the city's destruction, the wood would have been long gone, weathered by the elements and rotted away into nothing. These markers had obviously been replaced over the years, so someone must still care about what had happened here. Perhaps relatives of the deceased still came here on occasion to pay their respects? Well, maybe the word he was looking for was 'memorial', then.

A heavy silence lay over the area, and he moved as quietly as possible, wincing when his feet crunched over the snow or he stumbled over a hidden piece of debris. It felt wrong to break the silence, and even his breathing sounded too loud here. He bowed his head respectfully and silently drifted among the uneven rows of what he assumed were grave markers or at least some kind of memorial for the dead, occasionally glancing up to read the names and inscriptions that were carved into some of them.

A lot of memories must be held here, but not Gray's. Taking one last glance around, he shook his head and walked away, realizing that it was something else that he needed to see. Maybe Gray had had a marker here once, but there had to be another one, because that sense of connection wasn't strong enough. He let his feet carry him back through the rubble, not sure where he was going, but trusting that Gray was leading him there.

Wherever it was he was going, something else caught his attention before he'd made it. Pausing, he took a half-step back and peered at the cross he'd almost missed, hidden among the crumbled stones and fallen snow. It wasn't with the others, but it also wasn't Gray's. So why…Why did it have Gray's name on it?

He crept over to it and frowned. Reaching out, he let his fingers brush over the names carved on the wooden surface: Mika and Gray. Mika was certainly Gray's mother. He could feel that. But Gray couldn't have died here. Maybe that was why Gray's name was crossed out. But who would have…? Oh. He still had a few snippets of knowledge from the memories he had gotten of Gray's father before everything had fallen apart. Gray's father, who had thought that Gray was dead for years. Silver, his mind supplied. Once Silver had realized that Gray wasn't dead, the older man must have crossed out Gray's name.

He grimaced and wished that he could somehow magic those scratches away. Dragging his fingers across the gashes in the wood, he sealed them over with ice. It didn't have exactly the desired effect, but it was something. But the ice would melt, the scratches would remain, and Gray would stay dead anyway.

He averted his eyes and walked away, wishing he hadn't stumbled across the silent memorial. Forcibly pushing it out of his mind for the time being, he focused on the task at hand again. He kept on an unwavering course, and soon found what he had been looking for.

Funny how Gray's cross looked awfully similar to Silver's. The only thing different was the names. This one said Mika and Silver, and there were no out-of-place scratches marring its surface, although he could practically feel the invisible ones scribbled all over Silver's name. But they stayed invisible, because in the end, Silver had been dead again after all.

He studied the cross for a moment. In some ways it was a sign of death, but it was also a little like life in some ways too, wasn't it? Because he was here and he was alive, and Gray must have come here before to bridge the gap between those who were gone and those who were still here. Gray must have come back to bridge the gap because…

Because they were Gray's family, he realized. 'Family' had never meant much to him before aside from the dictionary definition of one's biological relatives, but here, staring at this last remembrance of Gray's family, the pieces finally started clicking quietly into place. It wasn't like he suddenly remembered everything, but he had finally found that bit of purchase to stop the curse from being able to pull away the things he had already found here, and he finally understood how that first group—Gray and Gray's parents—really fit together. This was Gray's family, not just in the biological sense, but in that loving way that he hadn't fully understood. Because how could he have really felt the sense of belonging and love that came with family if he hadn't even been able to understand the people who were supposed to make him feel that way?

The brief jolt of euphoria, that glimmer of love and belonging, faded quickly. The revelation made him feel suddenly numb and cold instead, because although he had finally figured this out, he had figured it out much too late. These people were long dead and gone. Even Gray was gone. Only he was left, and that seemed unbearably sad.

Without fully realizing what he was doing, he sank to his knees in front of the cross. Curling over on himself, he buried his face in his hands and cried, his earlier resolution crumbling away. He didn't know if these were Gray's tears or his own. He didn't know if he was crying for Gray's parents or for Gray or for himself or for something else entirely. But still, as he huddled in the snow with the ghosts of a past he couldn't quite remember swirling all around him in this city of the dead, he mourned for what had been lost and what had yet to be found.

---

Natsu's first reaction at the sight of the ruined city was faint horror. There really was nothing left. Nothing except jagged slabs of crumbling stone and other debris, and even that was mostly covered in a blanket of snow. Maybe when the snow melted the devastation would be more obvious, but for now the white powder gave the ruins an almost charming, fairytale-like quality that certainly didn't belong here.

And although Natsu had already known that the city had been destroyed by Deliora, seeing the devastation firsthand really hit close to home. At one point this had been Gray's home. At one point Gray had lived here with his family and he had been happy and he had been a child. And then the demon had come and torn it all away, and Gray had had to grow up much too fast, had seen and experienced things that no child should ever have to. Yes, Natsu had already known that, but seeing this made his heart ache for his friend all the same.

"Wow," Happy whispered, his eyes wide as he surveyed the scene.

"Yeah," Lyon replied, his voice subdued. "He told me once that it only took Deliora a few hours to completely destroy the city. And this was never a huge city or anything, but it was fairly large. A lot of people lived here. Maybe there were some survivors in other parts of it, but out of all those people who lived here, Gray was the only one we found alive."

Natsu winced and averted his eyes from the ruin. It was terrible to think that an entire city could be wiped out so thoroughly in such a short time. For the first time, he truly realized exactly how close he had come to never meeting Gray at all, because the ice mage could have easily been one of the thousands of other victims here.

Then he let out a breath and shook his head sharply. He couldn't afford to get distracted by such dark thoughts now. They had work to do. His original plan had been to ask Lyon if he knew where Gray's house had been or even where he and Ur had found Gray, but he could see that that wasn't going to work here. The city was basically all just debris and hunks of old rock, to the point where it was difficult to make out one building from the next. Everything was so broken up and scattered that he doubted Lyon would be able to pick out any useful landmarks at all.

"Well, I guess we might as well search the area," Natsu said, trying to direct everyone's attention to the task at hand. "Happy, you search from the sky. It's been snowing so footprints would have been filled in if they were ever here, but you can look for any sign that he might've come through here. I'll sniff around, although I'm not sure my nose will be much good with all this snow. Lyon, you might as well just poke around and see if you can find any clues."

The others nodded and moved off into different directions, but no one said much. Something about the dead city seemed to discourage too much noise. Leaving Happy to scout from the air, Natsu walked in the opposite direction as Lyon, figuring that they'd cover more ground this way. What had once been roads were now strewn with rubble and debris, so picking his way through the city was something of a challenge and Natsu tripped more than once on a crumbling brick hidden beneath the snow. Once he couldn't catch himself in time and face-planted right into a large piece of rock, but he just picked himself up and kept going.

His keen eyes searched for any sign that Gray had passed through and he kept sniffing around to see if he could pick up his friend's scent, but it wasn't easy. For one, although the snow had stopped now, it had been falling pretty heavily the previous day and it had still been lightly snowing on their trek over here. If Gray had been here, all traces of his passing had been obliterated by the snow.

He inhaled sharply in another vain attempt to pick up Gray's scent, and immediately cursed and rubbed at his nose as the frigid air tore through his sinuses painfully. As if it wasn't already cold enough in this godforsaken wasteland. Natsu sniffed a little more tentatively, being more careful this time. He spent quite a while roaming the city as he searched, the ruins looking less charming and more grim as time wore on, but the snow had made this an almost impossible task. Once or twice he thought that he might have picked up a faint trace of Gray's scent, but he couldn't be quite sure that his brain wasn't just playing tricks on him.

"I didn't find anything," Happy said morosely, fluttering down out of the sky to perch on a rugged piece of broken wall in front of Natsu. "We've been here for hours. If we haven't found anything yet…"

Natsu blinked at him in surprise for a moment, not realizing that they had been searching that long. Then he sighed and shook his head. "Let's go find Lyon."

They found the Lamia Scale mage nearby in the crumbling maze, and he looked no more optimistic than they did.

"Nothing," Lyon said with a sigh. He looked over at Natsu. "You didn't smell anything?"

Natsu bit his lip as he considered that. "It's really hard to be sure with all this snow," he answered slowly. "I thought that maybe I picked up his scent a couple times, but it was so faint that I might have been imagining it. I've been so focused on him and I want to find a sign of him so badly that it could just be a trick of the mind. If I could find a place where he stood around the same spot for a while and he touched a bunch of stuff and there wasn't too much snow covering everything up, then his scent would be stronger and I might be able to tell for sure, but…"

Lyon and Happy looked torn between being hopeful and being disappointed.

"It would be impossible to tell if he stopped for long anywhere here," Happy pointed out, his ears flattening. "Everything looks the same."

"My thoughts exactly," Natsu replied unenthusiastically. "It's like looking for a needle in a very cold haystack."

He didn't want to admit to himself that this entire journey was basically the same thing. Trying to find Gray in such a huge place as Isvan really was like finding a needle in a haystack, and that was assuming that he had even come here at all.

"There might be one other place here that he would have gone…" Lyon said slowly, frowning thoughtfully at the ground. He didn't seem overly enthusiastic either.

"Where?" Natsu asked.

Lyon grimaced faintly. "Come on, I'll see if I can find it again. I don't know if it's even still here after all these years."

He took off walking without even looking back to make sure they were following. Natsu and Happy exchanged puzzled glances before shrugging and trailing after him. Natsu got the feeling that Lyon wasn't in a very talkative mood, so he stayed quiet as the other mage searched through the wreckage.

They walked the length of the derelict city, and when they finally broke free of the crumbling ruins, Natsu's eyes widened slightly. There were uneven rows of weathered wooden crosses and cracking stone markers all over the place.

"This is a graveyard?" he asked in horror, his voice barely louder than a whisper. "Are Gray's parents buried here?"

"Not exactly," Lyon said, his lips tightening involuntarily as he paused to survey the scene. "This isn't the graveyard—the entire city is. Maybe some of the residents who had family outside of the city were buried later, but for the most part…You don't understand how gruesome it was. There were so many bodies that it would have been impossible for us to bury them all and a lot of them were mutilated pretty badly. They stayed where they fell in the city. I think that people must have gone through to bury everyone eventually, but…It really is a city of the dead. It's no wonder Gray was so messed up."

Lyon's eyes clouded over and he crossed his arms over his chest as he stared blankly at the ground. "Gray's parents aren't buried here. He was in shock when we found him and we didn't want to go digging through corpses with him to look for his parents. I think he might have looked a little, but…He didn't find his father, and his mother was…Well, I think he might have found some of her."

Natsu felt sick at the thought of that, and he stared at Lyon in horror. Lyon also looked slightly nauseous and Happy didn't look much better.

"This was—This was just supposed to be a memorial of sorts, I think," Lyon said, clearing his throat. "I mean, most of the people were eventually just buried where they were found since there were so many of them and a lot of them were so torn up that they weren't recognizable and couldn't be claimed. Some of the people who came here afterward—the family and friends of the residents, I suppose, who were looking for their loved ones—started up a sort of bodiless graveyard. I didn't really know about it at the time since we took Gray and left, but I heard about it later.

"It started off as just finding some of the things lying around—broken boards and pieces of rubble, mostly—to set up as grave markers for missing loved ones. Some people might have found who they were looking for and buried them here, but a lot of people didn't. No, Gray's parents aren't buried here, but he had a specific marker that he set up for them, although that was before outsiders came in to set up all the rest of these. I think that's how most people did it: they would set up a marker in remembrance of their dead, even if they never found the actual bodies.

"I haven't had any reason to come back here over the years, but someone must have been maintaining this place. I suppose it's possible that some of the people who lost loved ones might come down here every once in a while if they still live nearby. I don't think most of these crosses and things were here before. Whatever original markers were here would have rotted away by now since most of them were wood, but some of these look like they're still in fairly decent shape."

The three of them stood there in silence for several long seconds, staring out at the field of empty graves. Natsu automatically reached up to tug at his scarf and wrap his fingers around Gray's necklace. They didn't bring him much comfort.

"That's horrible," Happy whispered finally, his voice cutting through the dead silence.

Lyon let out a breath. "Yeah," he said. "It is." He glanced around. "I don't remember which of these was Gray's and I don't know if he would remember that either at this point, but we might as well take a look around before we leave. It's hard to tell since the rest of these weren't here before, but I'm pretty sure his marker was alongside the city, so it was probably over there somewhere. But we also might be in the wrong place entirely, because I suspect that he might have set up a new one later."

He gestured vaguely ahead of them and then started trudging through the snow. Natsu followed more slowly, still feeling sickened and numb. Hearing about what had happened here made it all seem so real. Gray had always talked about the tragedies he had faced in the broadest possible terms, never going into much detail about the specific horrors. Natsu couldn't really blame him, but it was something of a shock to finally hear some of those details laid out so bluntly.

The rows of crosses seemed to close in around him, making it hard for him to breathe, but he forced himself to focus on looking for Gray. They eventually ended up just wandering aimlessly through row after row of markers since Lyon couldn't be sure which one they were really looking for. It was pretty depressing, to be honest. Natsu had originally started off reading some of the names and inscriptions on the markers to look for clues, but it wasn't easy to see the names of so many long-dead people. Many of the markers didn't have anything at all written on their surface, and that was almost even worse. It made him wonder about all the people who hadn't had any loved ones survive them, the entire families obliterated here with no one to remember them. Natsu eventually averted his gaze so that he didn't have to look at them anymore.

"Maybe he wouldn't have come here," Lyon said finally, coming up behind Natsu and Happy after they'd spent several minutes searching. "I think he must have made something more permanent later, but I don't know where it might be and I doubt it was here. I don't suppose you saw anything while you were wandering around the ruins?"

Natsu shook his head, but Happy hesitated.

"I thought I might have seen something that looked like a cross while I was flying," the Exceed said carefully, "but I didn't bother checking it to see if it had names or anything, because I figured it must be normal to have some of those around the city. You know, with how many people died here."

"Do you think you could find it again?" Lyon asked, cautiously hopeful but mostly pessimistic.

"Probably."

Natsu and Lyon followed Happy as the Exceed went about the chore of trying to remember where he'd seen one nondescript cross in a sea of wreckage. It took a while since there weren't a lot of landmarks to go by in this ruined city, and because Happy hadn't thought the cross was important at the time and so hadn't paid much attention to it. Mostly they just wandered around for a while until Happy flew down excitedly and pointed.

"Over there!" the feline said.

They hurried over to the weathered marker half hidden by snow and debris. Natsu sucked in a breath as he saw the names Silver and Mika scratched on the wood. Silver had been Gray's father, so Mika must have been his mother. And as he sucked in that breath, he could taste Gray in the air.

"He was here," Natsu said excitedly, leaning forward and inhaling to confirm that Gray's scent was all over this area, partially obscured by the cold and snow.

"Really?" Happy asked in surprise, some of his earlier horror leaking away in the face of this new excitement.

"Yeah. Well, I guess you were right, Lyon. It's not like he would have made this when he was here last. It must have been here before," Natsu added.

"Yes." Lyon grimaced. "It wouldn't surprise me if Gray still comes up here occasionally. I mean, it's possible that it was traumatic enough that he never wanted to come back, but…it seems likely that he's been up here at least once or twice."

Natsu frowned a little as he considered that. "He never said he was coming up here."

Lyon gave him a scathing look. "Do you really think that he would have told you that?" he asked dryly. "This is Gray we're talking about. I'm sure he's taken plenty of solo jobs over the years, and if he occasionally took a detour to come up here while he was out…This is all just conjecture, but it wouldn't be that surprising."

Natsu nodded slowly. Gray had taken mostly solo jobs before they had formed Fairy Tail's strongest team. Even now that they were in a team together, he had still taken solo jobs fairly frequently. And Lyon was right that Gray wouldn't have told them if he had planned to come up here. But Natsu wished that he would have, because this seemed like a terrible place to come to alone.

"Well, he was definitely here relatively recently," Natsu repeated, more subdued now. "I'd say not for several hours, but I think we might have made up a little time on him. It's hard to tell exactly how long it's been with all this snow muting everything though. And before you ask, no, I can't follow the trail. It already faded too much, and it wouldn't have been that strong to begin with."

"If it's been that long, then I doubt he's still hanging around here now," Lyon said with a sigh. "But it's good that we know we're on the right track, and it seems to indicate that he really does have some grasp of places that were important to him. Hopefully that means he isn't just wandering off to random places after all."

"Where are we looking next then?" Happy asked.

"Unless there's some place I don't know about that was important to him before I met him…Probably Brago. Or maybe the house we stayed in with Ur," Lyon replied.

"Which one is he the most likely to go to?" Natsu asked impatiently.

Lyon scowled again. "How am I supposed to know?" he snarled irritably. Then he took a deep breath to calm himself down and seemed to consider the question. "Ur's house is closer," he said finally. "We can go there first and then stop by Brago afterwards if we don't find him. We'll end up taking a much longer route if we pass up her house to go to Brago first and then have to come all the way back."

"I'm all for saving time," Natsu said with a shrug. "Lead on, fearless leader."

Lyon rolled his eyes and turned away, but he hadn't gotten more than a few steps before he paused. He didn't turn around, but when he spoke, his voice was quiet. "I'm sorry for snapping at you, Natsu. This place puts me on edge."

It put Natsu on edge too, but the dragon slayer imagined that it must be even worse for Lyon since the older mage had been around here at the time of the city's destruction and had seen it firsthand. Natsu didn't doubt that the place held unsavory memories for Lyon, and he wouldn't be surprised if the ice mage got even more wound up when they explored the places that had connected him to Ur. Putting that on top of the fact that Lyon was already terribly worried about Gray…Well, Natsu wasn't surprised that Lyon wasn't in a great mood.

"I know," Natsu said. "It's okay."

Lyon nodded slightly and started walking again.

"Natsu, I'm cold!" Happy whined.

Natsu considered telling the Exceed to fly it off to get some blood flowing, but instead he snatched the little cat out of the air and hugged him to his chest. He loosened his scarf so that he could partially wrap it around Happy as well, and after his initial exclamation of surprise, the Exceed sighed in contentment and burrowed into Natsu's arms. Natsu held him close and followed Lyon silently. As they left this city of the dead behind, he quietly mourned for what Gray had lost and prayed that they would find him again soon.

---

He had two places to choose from for the second group: the other city or the house in the mountains. Something told him that the city held all bad memories, so the good ones would have to come from the house. He obviously needed both, so the real question was which place he would go to first. Ultimately he decided that it would be better to go to the city first, because he'd rather get the bad stuff out of the way. He had seen the bad memories first here too, for Gray's family, before he had seen the good, and that had worked out fine. He didn't see any reason to change that pattern now.

So once he picked himself up off the ground and quietly slunk out of the silent ruins, he set off back in the direction from which he had come. Pulling out the second page with all the information about Lyon and Ur, he took a few moments to look it over, searching for any clues he might have missed. The word 'Brago' came to mind, and he hurriedly scrabbled around for the pen he always kept on him and wrote the name down in case the curse spirited it away. His suspicions about the word were confirmed when he pulled out the map of Isvan and found Brago listed as a city there. Since it had an actual marker on the map, he guessed that trains must still run there.

He hiked back to the train station he had used previously, bought a ticket to Brago, and settled back to wait, his body vibrating with anticipation and anxiety. He hoped that he wouldn't have to do too much more train hopping, because he was going to run out of jewels if this kept up. But this was important and money was the least of his problems right now.

When he arrived at Brago, he was pleasantly surprised to see that it was a fully-functioning city and not a ghost city at all. His sketch of it had shown it as a ruined mess, similar to the first one, so he had been a little apprehensive. But things couldn't be all bad if the city was still here and alive, so some of his anticipatory dread slowly seeped away and he relaxed a little. Maybe it wouldn't be as bad as he had feared.

He drifted through the bustling streets with something like detached contentment, searching for anything even vaguely familiar. It occurred to him that if Gray had seen this place as a ruined shell then it might be harder to find the memories now that the city had been rebuilt and looked completely different. If any specific part of this place had held important memories for Gray, it would be hard to find. Sure enough, nothing was coming to him.

But then, after he had been wandering the streets for what felt like hours, he turned a corner and a demon suddenly seemed to appear out of the corner of his eye. His head jerked around and it was gone, but it rattled him. It must have been a whisper of a memory, but it had seemed far too lifelike, as if the demon had walked straight out of his head and into reality. He recognized this demon from the memory in the other city, and even from a few of the vague memory flashes he'd gotten over the past weeks. He wasn't sure that he wanted to see any more memories with it. The incident made him skittish and nervous, and he kept a wary eye out as he continued walking.

It was a little while later that the memories resurfaced fully. One moment he was frowning at a strange-looking building, and the next, the demon was back. It was the same demon from before—Deliora, something in his head whispered. Even the name made him shudder.

The bustling city seemed to shimmer and fade before his eyes, leaving only a desolate wasteland of broken buildings and leaping flames. And Deliora was there, tearing everything apart, but Ur was there too. All he knew was that he had to stop her because this was not supposed to happen. This hadn't been the plan at all. She shouldn't even be here.

But there was nothing he could do because this had already happened. So he watched her use iced shell and he watched the ice seal the demon and he watched Ur die. And he didn't know why he felt so guilty—why Gray felt so guilty—since he wasn't sure what exactly Gray had to do with Ur using the spell, but deep down he knew that this was his fault—Gray's fault?—and he felt like screaming or crying or running away.

But she was gone, and there was nowhere to run to. And then Lyon woke up—where had Lyon even come from?—and was yelling and telling him that it was all his fault, and it was, he could feel it in his bones. But what could he do about it now? She was gone and Lyon was leaving and he was left here all alone. He was alone again and he was crying and he didn't know what to do now that he had killed—Gray had killed?—Ur.

He surfaced with a gasp, the memory sliding away to reveal that he was still in the heart of a very-alive Brago. His head was whirling and he was breathing much too fast and he could feel tears on his face. He stumbled backwards unsteadily until his back slammed into the wall of a building behind him, and he stared at the ground with blank eyes and tried to calm his hyperventilating, but it wasn't working.

A concerned passerby stopped to ask him if he was okay. He stared at her for a moment.

"No," he said.

And he ran.

He ran through the city, his feet pounding against the brick in time to his too-fast heartbeat. He wasn't sure where he was running to. He thought it might be more that he was running away.

This had been different. This had been scary. This wasn't just a half-forgotten memory of Gray's. This time it had felt like he was there, almost like he was Gray, and it frightened him. It had been so real.

But at the same time, it didn't make a whole lot of sense. How could Gray have killed Ur? Ur had used iced shell of her own free will. So why did he feel so guilty? Why did Gray? He had felt it before, that feeling that he—Gray—had killed Ur, but he still didn't understand why he felt that way. Maybe there was still something he was missing here.

And where did Lyon come into this all? He had been vaguely aware that Gray had known Lyon as a child and that they must connect to Ur. He'd even seen flashes of memory and randomly remembered snippets of knowledge from that part of Gray's childhood, especially that time when they'd been on Mt. Hakobe and it had triggered all sorts of things. But the Lyon from those memories and the Lyon he knew now wasn't like the Lyon he'd seen here. The Lyon he knew now was trying to take care of him and was sad that he didn't remember, not screaming hateful things and leaving him all alone.

He didn't understand—didn't understand—

But maybe if he could find the good memories that went along with these terrible ones, then maybe he would start to understand better. That seemed to have worked before. He had been able to figure out Gray's family eventually. He could figure this out too.

He needed to go to the little house in the mountains.

---

They had two places to choose from: Brago or Ur's house. For the sake of efficiency and time, they went to Ur's house first. Lyon had been able to lead them to it without any problem, and Natsu was a little surprised that it was still in such good repair considering its owner had been dead for well over a decade now. When he commented on it, Lyon just gave him a flat look.

"We take care of it," the ice mage said tonelessly.

"What do you mean?" Happy asked uncertainly.

Lyon huffed out a breath and pushed the door to the house open, turning away so that he wasn't looking at Natsu and Happy. "I mean that I come up here occasionally, and I know that Gray does too. I didn't come back until years after Ur's death, but eventually I came back looking for closure. Didn't find it, obviously, but I fixed the house up since it had started falling apart by then, and after that I began stopping by once or twice a year to make sure that it stayed maintained.

"I don't think Gray ever came back until after Galuna though. Sometimes I see that things have been changed or fixed, so I know he must come up every once in a while, but I didn't start noticing those little inconsistencies until after we'd patched things up with each other. Maybe he came back after Galuna to look for closure or because it stirred up memories or something. I never asked. We came here together once though, on the anniversary of Ur's death."

Natsu's automatic reaction was to say that Gray had never told him any of this, but he bit it back, not wanting a repeat of what had happened in Gray's hometown. Besides, he wasn't really surprised that Gray wouldn't have told them this. And come to think of it, he couldn't say that he was surprised that Lyon still made sure this place was maintained either. After all, hadn't Lyon continued paying to keep Gray's apartment for over a year after the younger ice mage had 'died'?

So Natsu said nothing, opting instead to follow Lyon into the house silently. Their steps disturbed the light coating of dust on the floor, making it swirl up around them. Happy sneezed, and Lyon gave him an apologetic look.

"Sorry," the ice mage said. "I've been distracted with Gray these last few months and I haven't had time to come up here like I usually would. Although, to be honest, I never came back here after I thought he died."

"It's okay," the Exceed assured him.

They moved through the house quietly, searching for any sign that Gray might have been there. It was a pretty small building so it didn't take long to come to the conclusion that no one had been there in a long time, likely since Lyon had been here last. The thin layer of dust sprinkled across the objects in the rooms was undisturbed and the only footprints in the dust on the floorboards were from the present company's passing. Although Natsu could smell the barest hints of Gray every now and then, the scent was old and faded, only lingering in the upholstery and other cloth objects that were the best at capturing and holding on to odors. It was barely there at all. If Gray had ended up around here, he certainly hadn't come inside.

At one point Happy opened his mouth to ask if Natsu had found anything, but closed it again when he saw the dragon slayer's face.

"Happy, why don't you go fly around outside and see if you can spot any sign that he might be in the area?" Natsu asked quietly.

The little cat nodded and disappeared outside, leaving Natsu and Lyon to finish their hopeless search in silence. Natsu knew that Lyon knew that Gray hadn't been here, but he didn't comment on the fact that the older mage continued wandering around anyway. Lyon didn't say much and Natsu left him alone, figuring that this place must bring back memories.

It was only when Happy returned half an hour later with nothing to report that they finally admitted defeat. Natsu was discouraged. They knew that Gray had been in his hometown for at least a little while, so it would make sense that he would have come here too. But again, finding Gray in Isvan was like finding a needle in a haystack. Still, Natsu had been so sure that they would find some sign of Gray here.

Lyon glanced over, saw the glum expressions Natsu and Happy were wearing, and sighed. "There's still one more place we can try," he said, his lips tightening for a second before relaxing again.

Natsu stared at him for a moment and then nodded. He almost suggested that they wait here to see if Gray showed up, but he had never been a fan of waiting and there was no guarantee that Gray would ever come here at all. Better to go chasing after their last lead.

"Are we going to have to walk again?" Happy asked anxiously.

Natsu perked up a little. The less trains the better.

But Lyon was shaking his head. "No, it was rebuilt. The trains still run there."

Natsu sighed. Of course it was too much to ask for. But at the same time, he also wanted to get there as quickly as possible to search for Gray, so he would put up with the train for the sake of speed. Lyon was watching him with a raised eyebrow, and Natsu rolled his eyes and nodded.

They needed to go to Brago.

---

He paused outside the door of the little house for a moment, silently hoping that he would finally find what he was looking for here. He needed to find something to wash away the memories that Brago had left him with, something to offset the horror and make it all make sense. The city had raised as many questions as answers, and they weren't pretty questions.

It had taken him a long time to calm down after he had gone running out of Brago as if a demon was on his heels. The strangeness and realness of the memory had thoroughly shaken him, and there was something about running away that had let him vent his fear and eventually calm down once he was too tired to run anymore. But it had taken him a long time to reach that point, and since he had been more focused on running than on paying attention to where he was going, he had ended up somewhat lost and had had to wander around until he found the next city over. Maybe he could have retraced his steps back to Brago, but he did not want to go back there.

So he had found a different town that wasn't haunted by demons, and had realized that he still had another problem. Namely that he didn't know where he was going. Not that that was much different from how the rest of this trip had gone, but once again, he only had a hint of where he needed to be. All he had known this time was that he needed to go to mountains, so he had gotten a ticket to a town at the base of the closest range of mountains.

Once he had gotten there he hadn't been able to tell if these were the right mountains or not, so he had spent much too long aimlessly exploring them. And even though it had taken a long time and nothing had jumped out at him at first, he had eventually made it here. He wasn't sure if it was dumb luck or if he had had a little help from Gray, but it didn't really matter as long as he found the place.

He pushed the door open cautiously. He thought that this house held more of the good memories so it shouldn't be nearly as bad as the other places he'd been to, but he couldn't be sure and he was still skittish from what had happened in Brago. The house was small enough and didn't take long to explore. Nothing much caught his attention, although he felt memories starting to stir a couple of times. The curse was holding them back, and he wasn't surprised. He had expected this to be something of a struggle after what had happened in Gray's birth city.

So he settled down in one of the dusty armchairs in the living room and began the long, arduous process of fighting the curse for any snippets of memory he could find. He worked to hold on to them for as long as possible as he tried to piece them together. He worked at it with determination for a while, and after a couple hours he had finally begun making some progress.

The memories he found here weren't as innocently happy as the ones at Gray's old house. There were still good times to be found, but most of them had a dark edge that belonged to Gray. He suspected that it had something to do with what Gray had experienced with Deliora, because he couldn't imagine that Gray had been as carefree and innocent after that. All the memories of Gray's rebelliousness and simmering anger seemed to confirm that. He also found a faded wisp of memory where Gray was leaving and Ur and Lyon were telling Gray not to go, and he instinctively knew that this was a bridge to what had happened in Brago. He didn't pursue that memory too far, because he wasn't sure if he really wanted to open up that can of worms again.

He focused more on the good times. There were plenty of those to be found too, full of laughter and snow and ice. The mix of good and bad puzzled him. What had Gray really thought of Lyon and Ur? Because he thought that Gray had really cared about them, but that anger and grief was always lurking below the surface as well. It was an odd combination, and it made it harder for him to fit the pieces together.

Then he forced himself to really think about how Gray had felt in Brago as compared to here. The fear and pain and guilt Gray had felt when Ur used the spell, combined with the grudging love and admiration that lingered here in the house, suggested that Ur had been important to Gray. She had been—she had been—

He scowled in frustration. He felt like he was so close to figuring it out. It was somewhat similar to Gray's feelings toward his parents, but it was different too. He wasn't exactly sure what to make of it. Wasn't exactly sure what Ur had meant to Gray.

It occurred to him that part of the problem might be that he wasn't looking at the bigger picture, because Lyon had also been included in this group. He still didn't know what to make of Lyon. Gray's feelings toward Lyon ranged from irritation to anger to bitterness, but there was also a lot of respect and friendship and…something a little deeper than friendship that he didn't really understand. The positives surely outweighed the negatives here, which should be a good thing, but it only confused him more because the Lyon in Brago had seemed like an entirely different person.

He thought that he was maybe starting to understand Ur a little bit, but he couldn't put the pieces together because Lyon had also been a part of this puzzle and he couldn't reconcile the Lyon here with the Lyon at Brago with the Lyon he knew now. And he didn't know how to figure that out, but—

He paused. Everyone else he had been searching for was already dead, but Lyon was still alive. If he went and found Lyon now, maybe he'd be able to solve this mystery already. Lyon would be at Fairy Tail. This was convenient, because he needed to go back to the guild anyway—they were the third group, after all. So he would try to puzzle out Lyon and this second group, and then figure out the third. He nodded sharply, satisfied with his plan.

It was time to go back to Fairy Tail.

---

Natsu paused on the outskirts of Brago for a moment to take in the bustling city, silently hoping that they would finally find Gray here. Beside him, Lyon was tense and jittery. Natsu considered asking him if he was alright, but brushed it off. He supposed that this city held a lot of bad memories for the other mage, even if it looked different from before.

"It's big," Happy said doubtfully, his tail drooping in discouragement as he studied the city.

Natsu heard what the Exceed wasn't saying. If Gray was here, it would be damn near impossible to find him. Brago was larger than the dragon slayer had expected and it looked like there were thousands of people out and about. His heart sank, but he wasn't going to give up without at least looking around first.

"We've got a lot of ground to cover," he agreed neutrally, rather than voicing his own concerns.

"It's bigger than it used to be," Lyon muttered. "It must have grown over the years."

"I guess we had better split up," Natsu said unenthusiastically. They'd never be able to cover the whole city if they all stuck together.

"We'll need a meeting point," Happy replied immediately.

Natsu shrugged, seeing the truth in that. "Why not right here?" he suggested. They were just outside the city so it wasn't as crowded as the inner city, and it wouldn't be so hard to find again since they could just walk straight out of Brago and then skirt around it as needed until they found the meeting spot. "Guess we should set up a time to meet too," he added with a sigh. "It'll take a long time to search. We'll need hours."

"If we haven't found him in four hours, meet back here," Lyon said shortly. "We're running out of time as it is. We're supposed to be heading back to Fairy Tail already."

Now with a plan in mind, the three of them split up to search different parts of the city, each realizing that their task was almost impossible. Happy was searching from the air as usual, but Natsu knew that it would be difficult for him to spot Gray amidst the throngs of city dwellers on the streets, even if their friend was here. Lyon had about a snowball's chance in hell of magically stumbling across Gray, and Natsu wasn't much better off. His nose wouldn't do much good here. It was already clogged up with the mingled scents of hundreds of pedestrians and the wafting odors from the food vendors lining the streets. Gray could have walked through here five minutes before and Natsu wasn't sure that he'd be able to pick up his scent. It would be masked completely within moments.

The hopeless search of the city was one of the most discouraging experiences of this whole desperate trip. Natsu wandered for hours, looking for any sign of Gray, but he found nothing other than a couple false alarms when he glimpsed someone with black hair who had Gray's approximate height and build. He trudged back to the designated meeting spot despondently, his sandaled feet dragging wearily along the ground as he walked.

He ended up leaving Brago by the wrong exit, and had to walk around the outside of the city until he finally spotted Lyon and Happy waiting for him. Happy looked tired and miserable, and Lyon was standing with his arms crossed as he surveyed the city with unreadable eyes. The ice mage's face was pinched and tight, and he didn't even look up when Natsu stopped beside him.

"Nothing?" Happy asked.

"Nothing," Natsu confirmed with a sigh.

Lyon still didn't move and Natsu considered trying to prod him into speaking or moving or something, but he thought that might be a bad idea. Instead, he picked Happy up and watched Lyon in silence, waiting for the other man to break himself out of his reverie. They were standing there for a few minutes before Lyon finally spoke.

"I was unconscious when Ur used iced shell," he said flatly, "because I had tried to use the spell first without fully realizing the consequences, and she knocked me out to stop me. When I woke up, Gray was just sitting there crying. I asked him where Ur was, and he told me that she was dead."

He paused and Natsu stayed silent, waiting for him to say what he needed to say. It must be hard for him, being in the place where Ur had died.

"I didn't want to believe him at first," Lyon continued after a few seconds. "I said he was lying, but he obviously wasn't. And it was so goddamn unbelievable that I didn't know what to do with myself, so I pushed him over and yelled a little bit, and all he would say was that he was sorry.

"And you know what I did?" he asked, a hint of bitterness creeping into his voice. "I told him that it was his fault. I told him that he killed Ur. And then I left. I just…left. It didn't matter that I knew that he had no one left, that everyone he had loved was dead. I was angry and grieving and I blamed him, so I walked away and left him there crying."

He lapsed into moody silence. Natsu bit his lip, finally realizing that it wasn't just Ur's death that had been bothering Lyon since they had come to Brago. Maybe with how caught up they all were with Gray these days, it wasn't so surprising that Gray was still on Lyon's mind even now. And with all the things left unsaid and all the past tragedies that had been stirred up over the past few days, perhaps it wasn't entirely surprising that Lyon was regretting what he had done to the other mage. But what struck Natsu most about the story was that Lyon had the same regret that Natsu himself did: they had both left Gray when their friend had needed them.

"It's not really your—" Happy started sympathetically, trying to make Lyon feel better.

"Happy," Natsu interrupted, his voice quiet but firm.

The Exceed broke off and looked up at Natsu with puzzled eyes. The dragon slayer shook his head slightly, and although Happy didn't look like he understood why Natsu wanted him to be quiet, he didn't try speaking again.

The situations weren't really the same, but Natsu had some idea of what Lyon was feeling. He had felt something similar when he had come back from his training trip and was told that Gray was dead. Everyone had told him that it wasn't his fault and that Gray would have understood, but he hadn't wanted to hear that. He hadn't wanted the comfort and sympathy and all the sugarcoated half-truths. He hadn't wanted to be treated like glass and hadn't wanted to be told what was and wasn't his fault. He had just wanted to mourn in peace, maybe have someone listen to him quietly without continually interjecting that it wasn't his fault and that there was nothing he could have done. And although he wouldn't admit it out loud, he and Lyon were very similar in some ways.

"That was a pretty terrible thing to do," Natsu said bluntly.

Happy hissed out a protest, but Natsu ignored him. He wasn't going to sugarcoat things. It wouldn't help Lyon any, and Natsu rather thought that if the other mage had wanted them to tell him that everything was alright, he wouldn't have presented the facts so baldly.

"Yes," Lyon replied quietly. He didn't seem to take offense at Natsu's words, instead opting to gaze out at the city sightlessly.

"I left him too," the dragon slayer continued, his lips tightening slightly. "I didn't know what the consequences would be when I left, but there were definitely repercussions. We both screwed up and our actions had consequences for Gray, whether we meant them to or not. There's just no getting around that.

"But…" He sighed. "Do you remember that one time when Meredy and Jellal were first leaving, when I tried to be clever and Gray totally shot me down and told you guys that I had stolen the quote from his landlady?"

Lyon finally looked over at him with a faint frown. "I remember it vaguely, I guess," he said slowly, obviously unsure of what this had to do with anything.

"Do you remember what it was that I said?" Natsu asked.

Lyon shook his head slowly. "Not really."

"When she dropped by to check in on us, she could tell right away that I was feeling guilty about something," Natsu said, narrowing his eyes as he stared at the ground. "And I told her about how I had left Gray to die. And what she told me was that she had lived long enough to come to the conclusion that people always left for one reason or another, but you could tell who cared about you by whether or not they came back again."

Natsu looked back up at Lyon. "And we came back, didn't we? It doesn't erase the choices we made or get rid of the consequences of those choices or make everything better again, but it's something. It doesn't magically fix what happened, but it gives us the opportunity to try making up for it, to try cleaning up the mess we made. We could have chosen to stay away, but we came back, and we fought to make things right because we cared about him.

"And before you bring up the whole thing with Galuna Island as an excuse, it doesn't change the fact that you eventually came back to try making things right," Natsu added. "Yeah, you really hurt Gray. He was really shaken up after Galuna. But… I don't know if you ever apologized or said that you forgave him, but he figured it out. He knew that you were trying to make things up to him, and he was a lot happier once you came back into his life to stay. I know you two are always trying to pretend that you annoy the hell out of each other and don't really like each other that much, but we can all tell that it's mostly an act. He'd get really excited every time you came to visit. He always tried to play it off, but it was nice to see him like that since he could get moody sometimes. He was always happy to see you because he still cared about you a lot, and I think that he was a lot happier when you finally made it clear that you still cared about him too.

"Yeah, you left. You had your reasons for leaving just like I had mine, and they were valid reasons. And like every other choice, the choice to leave had consequences. But we're back and we're fighting for him and there's no point wasting energy regretting the past when we could put it to better use trying to fix things now. He understood why you left and he forgave you for it, just like you forgave him for his mistake that ultimately resulted in Ur's death. Now it's time to put the past behind you and focus on the present."

Natsu and Lyon stared at each other wordlessly for a moment, and then Lyon's eyes misted over and he looked away.

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, you're right."

"I know I am," Natsu replied. "I'm always right."

Lyon laughed breathily and ran a hand through his hair. "Well, we aren't going to find him here," he said, his voice suddenly steady and businesslike. "We need to go back to Magnolia."

Natsu's eyes widened slightly and he shook his head. "No, we haven't found him yet. We can't go back. We know that he was in his home city at least. He's around here somewhere. We can't just leave him here."

Lyon sighed tiredly. "We told everyone that we'd meet back at the guild in five days. As it is, we're already going to be a little late getting back. We can't just ignore the scheduled meeting."

Natsu opened his mouth to protest, and Lyon hurried to forestall him.

"Besides, you know how impossible it is to find him up here. We're just running around blindly in the hopes that we'll randomly stumble across him. But if we go back and tell the others what we've found, we can regroup and bring backup. We have a better chance if we get the rest of the guild to help us in the search."

Natsu clenched his hands into fists reflexively, knowing that Lyon was right but not wanting to admit it. Going back now felt like giving up.

Lyon's eyes softened. "This time it's Gray who left," he said quietly. "We just have to trust that he still cares about us enough to come back. And despite everything that's happened and all the trouble he's been having, I believe that he still cares about us and I trust that he'll come back when he's ready. Do you?"

Natsu let his breath out slowly. Yeah, he did trust Gray and he did think that his friend would come back when he was ready, because he couldn't imagine Gray—even a Gray with few memories who wasn't quite sure what to make of Fairy Tail—ever abandoning them. He did trust Gray, it was just that…Well, he never had been very good at letting go or giving up.

But he had also expressed trust in Gray, hadn't he? Last time, Gray hadn't let him fall through the ice. Natsu would just have to take that first step out and trust that the ice would hold again.

"Yeah," he said finally. "Okay."

It was time to go back to Fairy Tail.

---

Note: I tend to get annoyed by the whole "and they just missed each other thing", but I liked how the parallel POVs worked here. Originally I wanted Gray to do all this on his own and get back before FT sent out search parties, but Isvan didn't seem like a day trip. I'm hazy on the actual geography and stuff, so I left the travel and timeline deliberately vague. That being said, Natsu and co. would have actually passed Gray up at some point, probably around the time they went to different places, so they'll get back to FT first. There are a lot of places where Gray would have fallen behind - it's just not super obvious because the alternating POVs don't switch to show the shift.

Yeah, the part with Gray's hometown got kind of dark. The graveyard thing was based on something I saw in canon, although I expanded it a lot. During the flashbacks on Galuna in the anime, we see Gray putting flowers by basically a board sticking out of the ground, which I originally thought was a grave until we later found out that Keyes ran across Silver's body so Gray's dad couldn't be buried there. There were similar-looking markers in the background so I just kind of assumed that maybe other people had done something similar. Probably I read too much into it, but eh. Whether Gray ever went back afterwards is debatable, but I switch back and forth depending on what better suits my needs. I wanted him to have come back here because it's a kind of poignant contrast, I think, seeing a sort of physical sign of how connected he was to his past before as compared to how out of touch he is with it now that his memories are gone. And I wanted him to start putting pieces together because of some kind of marker that he had set up himself, so regardless of whether or not that cross was set up after Tartaros in canon, I wanted it set up beforehand here.

emmahoshi: Yeah, I hate when people are in the same place but miss each other by minutes just to increase the drama. That wasn't exactly what happened here and I didn't want it to come off like that, but I know that's what it sounds like when I do alternating POVs like that. I like the quote, and I do think it can apply to Gray quite nicely, poor thing. And yeah, my knowledge of FT's geography is patchy at best. It's partly my fault because I don't pay attention, and partly Mashima's because he sucks at showing it well XD