Gajeel sat in the hard, plastic chair that was far too small for his large frame, clutching at the blankets that covered Levy. He didn't dare touch her for fear he would hurt her, and the covers were feeling his wrath. He had been told that everyone's magic had been returned, and it was Cana's theory that it was returned as soon Lin had been knocked out. Jet, Droy and Pantherlily had all been and gone, leaving with a promise that Gajeel would call them as soon as Levy awoke.
The nurses had told him he wasn't allowed in the room with her but had relented due to a mixture of the fear he tended to cause people and Cana's logical arguing. He wasn't going to cause any of the residents of the room any harm, why bother to keep him out? Plus he would be an excellent warning system if anything changed in her state. He would keep a much closer eye on her than any machines could.
The script mage was sharing a room with Lisanna and Kinana, all three girls hooked up to a variety of tubes and sensors that told the nurses about their condition. Gajeel tried not to read the screen, although the incessant beeping told him that her heart rate was much lower than it should be. His senses were assaulted by the smell of chemicals, almost obscuring Levy's scent altogether, and he vowed that he would never find himself in such a position again. His eyes fixed on her face, bandaged from the cut across her cheek and bruised where the man had preferred brunt force rather than the slicing power of Erza's blades. An oxygen mask covered the bottom half of her head, and occasionally he could hear the hum as it activated. But she was still Levy, and she was still his.
"How is she holding up?"
The voice was familiar, and Gajeel knew that he would be forgiven if he didn't turn to look.
"Stable. She'll live. She'll need a lot of therapy both for the physical and mental pain, but she'll live."
He heard a chair being pulled up next to him, and sense the small man struggling up onto it. The Master could easily grow and allow himself to get onto the chair easier, but he never did. Gajeel placed his head on the bed, careful not to jolt it, and looked over his shoulder at the older man.
"She's incredible, isn't she? Always has been. Much braver and stronger than outside appearances show."
Gajeel snorted. As if he hadn't noticed that. His Shrimp was the most fantastic woman he had ever met, in so many different ways. But in others...
"She's fucking stupid too, and reckless. She could have been killed. She lied to me, and if one tiny part of her plan hadn't had worked I couldn't have got to her in time."
Makarov tutted, sitting back in the chair and closing his eyes. Gajeel took it as a clue to close his too. The bright white of the hospital lights was hurting his eyes anyway.
"And how often have you done something stupid and reckless?"
The Dragon slayer turned his head away, refusing to answer the man. This close to Levy he could smell her over the chemicals that had blocked it out before.
"How long did you spend spying on Ivan? You must have known that was danger…"
Gajeel growled deep in his throat. He didn't mean to, but he was losing the argument and the Dragon wasn't appreciative. It had been staying much closer to the surface since the basement, and it was getting harder for him to swallow it down.
"That's not the issue we're having here and you know it."
Gajeel could hear the man lean forward in his seat, the plastic squeaking under even his tiny weight. The Dragon Slayers fingers started to pick at the edge of the blanket, pulling apart the fibres as he did.
"It's exactly the issue. She did what she had to do to protect the guild. But right now, she's out of danger. That's all that matters. Now it's the long road to recovery, and she's going to need someone by her side."
He allowed the sentence to hang in the air before Gajeel heard him hit the floor. He didn't bother raising his head again as the man walked over to Lisanna and Kinana in turn, before making his way out of the room. The Dragon Slayer was exhausted, but he couldn't allow himself to sleep. He couldn't risk missing her wake up.
For the first time since she could remember, Lucy woke up cold. She tried to stretch out, but her blankets were wrapped around her too tightly. She opened her eyes, feeling far more sleep in them than normal. A mop of pink hair hung in front of her, and some small voice in the back of her brain forced her to sit up, arms shooting out as she hugged the body close to her. The noise that it made was much more feminine that she expected, and she blushed as the woman in front of her gently removed Lucy's hands from around her waist.
"It's great to see you awake."
Lucy finally took in her surroundings. She was in a hospital bed, sensors and wires littering her skin and connected to a steadily beating machine at the side of her. The nurse was young, a bright pink pixie cut that had confused her framing her smiling face.
"Your guild was attacked, you…"
It came flooding back to Lucy all at once. Lin. The journey to an old church in the middle of nowhere. Evergreen lying on the floor, and two bright green eyes that were the last thing she saw. The vision of Evergreen's eyes, thread looping through her eyelids and through her cheek would be burned into her memory forever. She shook her head, before forcing herself to take in her surroundings.
"Yes, I know. I was there."
Her voice came out a lot snippier than she intended, but she was busy looking around the room. Erza and Jellal lay to her right, an equal amount of sensors on each, and a hulking body she could only assume was Elfman was in the bed to her left. A shock of white hair that she couldn't tell whether it belonged to Mira or Lisanna was at the end of the room, and Gray lay opposite her with the guild's Water Mage to his right. The last two beds in the room were taken up by what she could only assume were the exceeds, the lumps in the blankets far too small to be human. But the man she was looking for wasn't there. She looked at the nurse, who had started to pull equipment from the table next to her in order to start running more tests.
"Where's Natsu? The Dragon Slayer?"
The nurse was prepping a thermometer and indicated for Lucy to open her mouth. She did as she was told.
"Which one? We have five here right now."
The thermometer left Lucy's mouth, and the Nurse noted down the number that it had shown. Lucy pushed herself back on the bed, leaning up on the pillow. She felt weak, but nothing hurt per se.
"Fire. He's got pink hair like yours. I need to go and see him."
The nurse was still arranging instruments on the table next to her, her back turned. Lucy took to looking around the room again, anger rising up in her when she did the maths in her head. Five Dragon Slayers? Who else had the bastard got to?
"You're not strong enough right now, you need to…"
The anger that had built inside her came to a head, and she started to swing her legs off the bed. She needed to see him, needed to make sure he was ok. He would have done the same for her if he had awoken first.
"No! I need to see him! I'm plenty strong enough!"
The nurse looked on in shock as the blonde girl on the bed started to pull on the sensors. As soon as the first one left her skin, an alarm sounded to inform the hospital that a heartbeat has been lost. The nurse tried to settle her back down, but the mage wouldn't have any of it. More wires came off her skin, and the alarms beeped louder. Lucy looked down at the last tube, attached to her through a needle in her hand. She took a deep breath, before grabbing hold of the wire.
"Lucy!"
Her hand froze as she looked up. Cana was stood at the entrance to the room, wearing her usual shirt under what Lucy recognised as Bacchus' jacket. She looked tired, and as soon as their eyes met tears started to fall from her eyes. Lucy thought she could see a man turn his back and walk away, but her attention was pulled away by the card mage running up to her bed.
"Cana?"
Cana had jumped onto her bed, arms wrapping around the celestial wizard's neck. Lucy could feel her sobbing into her neck, tears starting to soak through her hair.
"Thank fuck you're OK, Lulu. I've been so worried."
The brunette pulled away, stepping off the bed and picking up some of the sensors to pass over to the nurse. The woman looked on in confusion, but Lucy had too many questions to allow her to speak.
"Cana, I need to see Natsu. Where is he?"
Cana sat down on the bed and took Lucy's hand in hers, stroking her thumb over the guild mark she found there. The anger had gone out of her system now but had been replaced with the gnawing feeling of worry at her missing Dragon Slayer.
"He's safe. He's in the next room along. How about we let the nurses do their tests they need to do, then we can ask if we can put you in a wheelchair and take you over there, ok? We need to make sure you get better too."
Lucy looked up at the nurse and sighed. Cana was actually speaking sense. There was no point of her running off to find Natsu if it was just going to injure her further. She held out her arm and the nurse started to reattach the sensors, causing the alarms to quieten one by one. Relaxing back into the bed, she closed her eyes and before long she was back to sleep.
"Are they all going to be this bad?"
Cana looked up to the nurse, before laughing softly. She put Lucy's hand down on the bed before standing up and moving to walk out the door.
"Oh honey, everyone else is going to be so much worse."
The first any of the nurses knew about the exceeds going missing was when they were doing their rounds of the Dragon Slayer's room. They had been checking the youngest patient when they saw something move underneath the blanket. Under further investigation, they found a small white cat curled up next to her stomach. They hadn't been able to put any sensors onto the Exceeds, their hearts beat far too quickly and caused the alarms to go off consistently, so it was easy for them to sneak out of their beds. It didn't take long before they found a blue cat hidden at the bottom of one of the others Slayer's beds. The nurses tried to pick the little blue cat up, but he panicked and scratched at their arms. It wasn't until another exceed walked past, spotted their predicament and walked in that they had their problem solved.
"I'll take them back to their beds and make sure they stay there. They get protective over the Dragon Slayers, don't worry."
The nurses were about to protest, not sure how the exceed could carry his two guildmates all the way back to their beds, but before their very eyes he grew until he was taller than even the tallest of them and picked both Exceeds up in his arms. He carried them out of the room, and one of the nurses followed in order to make sure they were returned to the bed properly. The remaining nurses all looked at each other and shook their heads. Not much worse that the issues they had had with the first mage to wake up and they were beginning to think the card mage had been exaggerating.
Wendy's eyes blinked open, trying to block out the bright lights that had been shining down on her. She could barely move before some type of wire tugged at her skin, and from the bottom of her vision, she could see an oxygen mask clasped over her mouth and nose. With each inhalation of air, she felt herself getting stronger, and she lifted her head to look down at her body.
She had an IV going into each hand, and sensors were stuck over almost every inch of skin she could see. She moved her eyes to the right and could see Natsu lying there, a heat from a continuous flame burning next to him. She couldn't see past him, but on the opposite side of the room lay the Twin Dragon Slayers from Sabertooth, along with… No. It couldn't be.
The purple hair and scar across his eye told her it was the Poison Dragon Slayer who had joined Crime Sorciere not that long ago. He had obviously come to help them, but now he was in danger. If the Rune Knights saw him, he would be arrested and taken back to jail and then who knew what kind of treatment he would get. She could see some odd purple liquid being pumped into his veins and knew it was poison, but the medics at the council may not know what's best for him.
She moved ever so slowly, lifting herself carefully off the bed and leaning over to the machine. She had seen them before when she had been training with Porlyusica to get better at healing, and she knew exactly which switch she had to flip to turn off the machine. She held her breath, hoping it wouldn't set off alarms, and sighed in relief when the beeping stopped and wasn't replaced by a wailing signal that she was awake and moving. She hurried to pull the wires off her skin, wincing as she slowly removed the needles from her skin and felt the pinch of pain. She swung her legs off the bed, testing her own strength as she stood up. She had enough energy to stand, and took a few more breaths from the oxygen mask in order to gain some more strength before she moved across the room.
The other Dragon Slayer was covered in just as many wires as she was, and she hovered his hands over his body. As soon as she realised that he didn't have any physical injuries she started to pour her magic energy into him. She felt her energy start to wain and started to eat more and more air. The man stirred, and Wendy renewed her efforts.
"You shouldn't be doing that."
The voice made her jump, breaking her concentration and the stream of magic was stopped. She could tell that her magic was depleted as she hadn't even heard him enter. She turned around and saw the Master stood in the doorway. For a moment she thought he was going to shout at her, but he looked more worried than angry. She started to stumble from the lack of magical power she had but managed to steady herself.
"But we need to get him out of here! If they see him they'll…"
"Leave that to me." He walked over to her and took her elbow before leading her back to her bed. "You need to get your rest. I know you want to help, and I'm sure that the nurses are going to appreciate it when you're fully back on your feet but right now you need to rest."
Wendy sat back down on her own bed, and Makarov made sure she had put all of her sensors back on correctly, except the IVs, before walking over to the other side of the room. He sat facing away from her, hunched over a bed she could not see the occupant of. She put the mask back over her mouth and breathed in as much air as she could in order to regain her magic as quickly as possible. After a few minutes, she watched Makarov sitting silently at the other end of the room, and swung her legs off the bed again. She knew that her magic was back up to where it should be, but she knew that if she spoke to the nurses they would make her go through tests first and there wasn't enough time for that. She needed to go and find someone who she could help.
She was sure that if it wasn't for her heightened senses, she wouldn't have heard the groan coming from the room along the corridor. It didn't sound like a groan of pain, but instead, it was fear. Pure unadulterated fear. She moved over to the door, and if she couldn't smell who was in the room a hand-scribbled sign someone had tacked to the wood. No entrance without eye protection. She grabbed a pair of glasses and slid them onto her face before she creaked the door open.
The Raijinshuu were lined up in beds opposite the door, each of their faces almost fully covered in oxygen masks. Freed's right eye was covered by a bandage, but his normal eye looked like it was undamaged. Evergreen lay in the middle, bandages wound tightly around her head to obscure her eyes. Wendy could feel that both of them were fully unconscious, but Bickslow was moving around in his bed. His eyes had been bandaged as well, but she could see the magic shining through them as she walked over to his bedside. She could feel that he was asleep, not unconscious but not fully awake either. His hands were clenching and unclenching in his blankets, and his head tossed from side to side. The moans coming from his throat were louder now, and she ran over and stood next to him, holding her hands over his chest. She could feel the physical injuries dotted across his body, but that wasn't what she was focusing on. Even since she had been in the room he had started moving around more, her sense of smell telling her that he his fear was growing by the second and she knew he was at risk of hurting himself more if he continued. She tried to focus on what was making him panic, what was making him move. But no matter how much magic she poured into him, the fear simply increased faster and he started to move more. Wendy paused for a second, wondering if she was making things worse, before realising the increasing of fear was not slowing down and started to try and heal him again. Her eyes were closed as she poured more of her magic into him, and tried to calm him down. She could feel her power flowing through her arms…
She screamed as something grabbed onto her arm, and her eyes shot open. The flow of magic stopped as her concentration broke, and she saw Bickslow grasping onto her arm. The glow of his eyes was almost brighter than the white light from above and tinted all of the bandages green. She tried to tug away, but the man was so much stronger than her.
"Where are they?"
His voice was crackling from the lack of use, but it still sent shivers down her spine. He pulled her closer towards him and she almost stumbled off her feet. The next time he spoke it was raised in a shout, and Wendy could feel the waves of fear rolling off him.
"I can't feel them! Where are they?"
Wendy tried to pull away as she felt tears start to roll down her face but he was too strong. She would never have thought of Bickslow as being strong, but here he was stopping her from moving an inch. She kept trying to pull her arm free, but the hand on her wrist continued to constrict.
"I can go get them, I can…"
Wendy felt the arms around her before she could finish, and looked up to see Jet stood behind her. A few seconds later a nurse rushed in and pushed a needle into Bickslow's IV, before the man's muscles relaxed and he dropped her arm. Wendy turned around, eyes filling up with tears as she finally started to cry. Jet pulled her close to his chest, simply letting her cry.
"I thought I could help, I thought…"
"Unfortunately the thing that's wrong with him isn't physical. Your magic cannot help him any more than our medication can."
The nurse spoke softly, but Wendy could hear a trace of annoyance underneath. The little Dragon Slayer couldn't help but think that in her trying to help she had made the woman's job so much more difficult. Wendy started to sob, and Jet patted at her back. She was feeling weak again, the amount of magic she had poured into Bickslow had really taken it out of her.
"Come on, Wendy. I'll take you back to bed."
Wendy tried to turn and walk, but her legs gave out from under her. Jet caught her as she fell, and lifted her up into his arms like she weighed nothing. The nurse nodded to the both of them as she started to tend to the Raijinshuu, and Wendy buried her face in Jet's shoulder as her tears refused to stop.
She felt her back hit her bed and Jet pulled away, but he made sure to keep a hold of her hand. He grabbed some tissues off the table and passed it to her as she wiped her eyes.
"I'm useless. I couldn't fight off Lin and I can't even help my guildmates now they're in the hospital…"
Jet squeezed her hand tightly as her words were cut off by sobs again. She pulled the blankets around herself and grabbed a hold of her oxygen mask, sticking it back onto her face.
"You're not useless, Wendy. You heard what the nurse said, nothing could have helped him. You need to wait for your magic to replenish, properly this time, and then if we speak to the nurses they should be able to tell you the best thing for you to do to help out."
Wendy continued to sniff, blowing her nose into one of the tissues. Jet stayed at her side, shifting from foot to foot like he always did. Watching his impatience gave Wendy an idea, and she tugged on his hand to get his attention.
"I think his babies might calm him down. He asked me where they were, so maybe if he knows they're safe he won't get so worked up."
Jet nodded. It was a good thought, after all. He had never seen Bickslow without his totems for an extended period of time before, and it made sense for him to freak out as to where they were. Even thought Jet wasn't sure what exactly his totems were, he knew they were souls and that Bickslow was ridiculously attached to them.
"Do you know where they are? Do they even exist while he is unconscious?"
Wendy nodded, taking the mask off her face so she could speak more clearly.
"Gajeel and I got them from out of his apartment. They're in little purple bottles behind the bar at the guild, do you think you can go and get them?"
Jet nodded. The girl looked so tiny in the huge hospital bed, wrapped up in blankets. He passed a glass of water to her before preparing to set off back to the guild hall.
"On one condition. You stay in bed until the nurses agree you can go and help them."
His statement was met with the nurse from before walking into the room and starting to attach all of Wendy's sensors back to her. The Dragon Slayer nodded, and with one last squeeze of her hand, Jet sped out of the room, almost blowing Wendy's blankets off as he did. Wendy scrunched her eyes shut as she felt the needles enter her skin, and she hoped that Jet would be back soon.
Linzi Conners was stood at the nurse station going through the notes that she had on all of the wizards in her care. So far two wizards had woken up, along with the two exceeds that had been brought in at the same time. She had been told by one of the few awake members of the guild that they should be expecting trouble from all the wizards waking up, but apart from one of them that freaked out at not knowing where one of her friends was and another sneaking out of bed to try and heal her guildmate, they had both been pretty easy to get back into their own bed and back to being treated.
She was preparing to start her rounds again when she heard screaming from the Intensive Care Unit. It was a male voice, and she knew there were no males staying in that unit. She sighed, knowing that the card mage that had been running the operation since she got to the hospital had been right. It really was not going to get easier.
A/N - a massive thank you to Kurahieritr JIO for reminding me I had to put something about them regaining their magic in this, and as always the biggest amount of thanks possible to Gajeelswoman for being such an incredible person.
See y'all next week!
