Hello dear reader,
I am not the best of writers, honestly here for a glass of wine and a good time but I do hope you like reading this weird short story I've made. Fairy tail is owned by Hiro Mashima and bless him for doing so. This is the only author's note you'll see at the beginning of a chapter.
Chapter one
Ace of Cups
-•-
Fate knows she's been hated, she knows she's been cursed by many and yet, she still has a few admirers who believe in her strength of dragging through somehow leading to their destiny. She has several strings to pull, each of them a different reality.
And it is very rare when two realities accidentally coincide, stopping time in one when it flows by in the other.
But even when that happens,
One must remember.
This, too, is fated.
-•-
"And the world changed in a single glance."
Lucy hadn't meant that sentence to come out literally when she was reading the last line of a bestselling book in her bakery shop at Rutherford Avenue.
She had to blink thrice as she tentatively closed the book, she kept it down on the wooden table, registering with a very unclear mind just how different everything around her was.
There was a large, fluffy bed in the room where the walls were painted creme and brown.
Instinctively, Lucy travelled to the window that gave her a splendid view of the night sky and somehow presented the fact that she was no longer in her bakery shop in London.
Heck, she didn't even think she was in Britain anymore.
"Jesus Christ," she muttered.
Utter confusion radiated in her head and it took a lot more for her to hush the screech that came over her when she saw her reflection in the mirror of the wooden dressing table.
Her hair blonde hair was longer, up to her tail bone if she really was searching for accuracy but she wasn't. She was wearing a loose floral dress and she looked older, at least older than the twenty-year-old adult whose face she had seen just that morning. And it wasn't that which pulled her heartstrings, it was the fact she looked like her mom and that just made her lungs dry of air.
What kind of a sick practical joke was this?
One moment she was crying into a book in a coffee shop and the next she was transported into a room that didn't-
And her eyes fell over a photo kept on the dressing table and Lucy almost forgot to breathe.
Put in a clean, silver frame was her picture in a white dress, resting her head peacefully on the shoulders of a pink-haired man that Lucy didn't presently recognise.
She seemed happy, more peaceful and the unknown man looked happier, grinning at her with the brightest of smiles; like she meant the world to him. They seemed to show their hands to the cameras and Lucy saw why; their ring fingers were wrapped in metal.
Lucy looked down at her finger and it wasn't for the situation, that would be the kind of wedding ring she'd like.
But she simply stared at it for two straight minutes because what?!
Alright, she was ready to beat whoever it was responsible for this and possibly kick them hard enough to land in the seas.
"What the fuck?!" A voice squealed.
She snapped her head to the direction of a man emerging from the washroom, the same man in the picture.
"Is this some sick kind of joke to you?" He growled at her and Lucy felt undercurrents of fury brush over her, enough to ignore that his eyes seemed to be blotched.
"I should be asking that to you." She retorted with the same intensity and it made the man count his breaths to calm down.
"Look, lady, it's all fun and chill seeing it's my birthday but cut the act out." He said, drawing a bit closer and Lucy thought she should be threatened with the way he said it but for some odd reason, she wasn't.
"Dude, screw you." She spat out. "I am just as confused as you are and you have no right to use that tone on me."
The man looked at her, feeling his anger melting away because he didn't want to be angry at her which was funny because he had just met the blonde like ten seconds ago.
"What's your name?"
She glared at him before offering it. "Lucy, Lucy Dragnee-"
She cut herself short, wait, that wasn't her name so why did her mouth default it to, well, whatever it was she was going to say.
"You're definitely not a Dragneel, I'd know if you were." He stated, crossing his arms as he accused her of what? Stealing a surname?
"But anyway," he continued. "This game needs to end now, I'm too tired-"
"-I beg your pardon!" Lucy interrupted. "But I have no clue who you are either or this room."
He stopped and examined the room, frowning as it didn't match with the one he was in before. "This isn't the room I had been in."
"A+ for observation skills, Sherlock." She snorted derisively making him scowl at her.
"Why am I here?" He asked, narrowing his eyes at her. "Did you kidnap me or something because this is serious and my brother will slaughter you-"
"-Woah." She said, throwing her arms in surrender. "I am not your kidnapper, you weirdo. If anything we both have been kidnapped."
"Why would you be kidnapped?"
"Look, I don't fucking know okay? All I know is it seems like I'm married to you." Lucy grunted out, clasping one side of her hair and bunching it up in her hand.
She hated that she was swearing, hated that this situation made her too and didn't really acknowledge the fact she had slipped out the fact that they were possibly married.
His onyx eyes sharpened at the mention and Lucy almost felt like she should've brought that fall out more gently to the guy which was ridiculous because she didn't even know him so why would she even care?
"What do you mean married?" He demanded, coming closer. "I have never seen you in my life before and I have definitely not been drunk enough to be married to some stranger on the street."
She didn't answer him as he noticed his own reflection in the mirror and had the epiphany she had just a few moments ago. He widened his eyes to diameters that would put saucers to shame.
He went to the photo frame and he walked right past of her. Lucy couldn't help but breathe in the scent she had never had before but it brought her body to relax.
"We're married." He said though there was no emotion in it, only plain bewilderment as he slowly turned to her. "Who are you and why do I look at you like I love you in this picture?"
Not that she knew the answer to his query but it felt like Lucy agreed with him. She somehow knew that he loved her but she wasn't sure why she knew that or whether it was true in the first place.
But she had read about this kind of situations in the those drab of TV soaps and fanfictions that she nibbled on all day.
"I think," she said sluggishly. "We're in an alternate reality."
"What?"
And Lucy didn't blame him, she was confounded with the suggestion but it was the only one that made any sense to her or maybe she had read too many books.
"Okay, I don't know what kind of crap you're sprouting but I'm leaving." He said before taking long strides to the door and Lucy didn't stop him while every part of her body asked her to and a slam of the door made it clear that she was too late to anyway.
She bit her lip, trying to make sense out of the disarrayed information in her head. She tried to hold herself steady as she sat down on the chair, she blinked away hoping it would go away as well but it didn't. She was stuck in this awful place with a life she didn't recall and a husband who she had no remembrance off.
Yet, somehow it all seemed better than the reality she had been living in which now looked like a faraway dream to her.
She had a fight with her parents regarding where she lived at the moment, they wanted her to come back home.
Lucy loved her parents, she really did but they were backward and ten out of ten times would thrust their decisions on her which finally resulted in Lucy working part-time while studying to afford a rent; finally, she moved out.
The thing about loving someone was that it takes a while to realise what kind of an adverse effect it has.
Lucy was one of the people who realised it quick.
And they called her again and how could she tell them that the reason she couldn't live with them was that they had made no attempt in understanding her as their daughter?
It all turned messy very fast and she couldn't bake for the rest of the day
The last thing she could bring from memory was finding a book to read and falling into the story to avoid the breakdown she would inevitably have if she didn't calm herself down to the inky words.
Finishing the ending line of the book, Lucy hadn't even taken another breath and she ended up in this room.
It really had been all within the blink of an eye.
Lucy sighed.
Still, even if she did have that raucous fight with her parents it wasn't that she wished this to happen, given the chance she'd still undo it all but it seemed as for the moment, she was stuck here.
C'mon lu, let's figure this out, she thought to herself wearily before clapping her hands against her cheeks mildly.
By the looks of it, she might have been around thirty or so.
Lucy nervously went out the door as it led to a small hallway which had several photos framed.
Mainly him and her, she passed them attempting not to feel the strange nostalgia. She didn't find any children but was glad at the failure of that discovery; it would make this all the more complicated.
There was a particular photo in which she seemed to be grinning smugly with a shampoo that oozed purple liquid.
Behind her was the pink-haired man who was supposedly her husband staring daggers at her but there was affection in them as his hair had been brightened to pastel purple.
She simply moved forward without a stop.
Lucy wandered into the hall, it was small but cosy. There was a sofa and it was furnished with several furnitures that she knew how to mind but no memory of why.
What kind of madness had it been that landed here? She released another audible sigh. And she was stuck with a husband who had just run out the door. Excellent.
She opened the cupboard nearby, hoping to find something to start with. However, as soon as she opened the cupboard, multiple carefully placed photo albums and several books fell out as Lucy stared at the mess on the floor.
Huh.
It looked like she had a lot to wade through.
|••••|
What fuckery.
Was one among the first things that Natsu thought when he observed the flicker of absolute change to the bathroom tiles and the decor used to accessorize it.
It was his birthday and he had been hiding out in the bathroom in hope of avoiding any annoyance that might seek him out. London wasn't exactly the place he'd like a birthday party to be held but whatever, Ajeel and the rest had planned it out for him.
He really didn't know at what point it was that tears ran out in frustration.
Realising it might have to do something with his mother's death during his birth, Natsu tried to calm himself down. He really did but it was easier to break down when no one was watching, it provided safety from the kind of humiliation he would never get through if Zeref caught him.
His dear brother was the only reason he came to the party but had been held back a little due to some work that spontaneously came out regarding his firm.
Honestly, if it was up to Natsu, he'd like to cut the birthday cake with his brother and father but he tried not to ask that of them; after all, he was the reason Serena Dragneel was dead.
No matter how many times his brother told him that it wasn't his fault.
But when someone passed by and whispered it to him at the party, he steeled his face, pretending as if he hadn't heard it as he casually disappeared into one of the million rooms of the hotel the had booked.
Coming out of the washroom, his sights fell on a pretty blonde, a bit old albeit but he had an odd longing of going over to her and wrapping his arms around her. Natsu shrugged the feelings away as they grew stronger, the closer he moved to her even after her claim of being married; it rang true in his ears but his head refused to believe it.
All efforts against his resistance melted away when he saw his own reflection.
It tilted everything he knew as his sights then set upon the picture, their picture, the day of their wedding. He looked happier than he had ever seen himself and so in love that Natsu would almost convince himself that it wasn't him but the similarities were blaring.
How the heck could he love someone and marry them while retaining no memory of it?
How was that even possible?
Natsu didn't know but he could see it in the pictures hung in the hallway. That blonde could have meant the world to him if he allowed her to get away unscathed after dying his hair purple.
He'd beat the crap out of his own brother if Zeref ever tried that.
So he walked out of the house and into the concentrated cobbled streets with the sweet-coloured houses and wooden beams. Wait. He felt like he had known this place. In a painting of his mom and dad.
France? He thought incredulously.
He looked around and it reminded him strongly of German heritage in its architecture though and the only reason Natsu knew that was because Zeref was a bit of a Francophile and would bring back these crazy memoirs when he returned.
Natsu observed his surroundings and it was quiet, he guessed it must be late at night as he continued to stroll out until he came across an inn with a board on which was printed:
Auberge la destinée
Well, at least that gave him a clue of where he was; Destinée, a small town in a corner of Alsace.
He looked back at the house he had just come out from, it was painted newly in beige with flowers jutting out from the balcony. His body was asking him to go back, warning him that it was too late at night and he should go back home.
Home? He thought with disbelief. What even.
He looked down at what he was wearing, a loose blue shirt and dark trousers which weren't as soft as the ones he was used to and he looked older in the mirror. This was obviously not his body but it still was him and Natsu realised, perhaps that blonde was talking sense.
Wait, if he's inhabiting this body then where was the actual owner of it?
Most probably exchanged with his original body.
Natsu slapped his forehead lightly at what kind of catastrophe that would bring out but for some reason, he was not very averse to staying in this version of reality. Just for a little longer, just for a little while.
It was cowardly.
But damn it, he didn't care right now.
Especially when the Natsu in this reality was clearly happier than him.
"Fire brain? Is that you?"
He jerked forward at the nickname that had generally been used by his not so close rival in his original life.
"Fullbuster?"
Gray stopped at the mention of his surname with a brow raised in question. "Something wrong, Natsu?"
Were they friend in this reality? Great. How was he going to go about that now?
"Uhh, nothing. Just wanted to catch my breath here." Natsu said.
"Outside? In the dead of the night? Barefoot?" Gray asked, dubiously as he looked at his feet.
"Could say the same for you, you're here without your shirt or pants."
The man ignored his comment on his stripping habits. "Did you leave Lu alone? Tch, Natsu you, better than me, know she still has nightmares sometimes right?"
About what? Natsu wanted to ask but that would evoke a lot of suspicion in Gray who he still had no clue how he was friends with.
"Yeah, I do. But she's asleep right now, I'll just go back." He said, planning to turn tail and run back to the apartment but a hand on his shoulder made him still his movements.
"You know I don't really voice this out because I think you know it well enough already but," Gray paused as he looked at him. "If something goes wrong, you know, you can come to me right?"
Natsu would pride himself on the amount of self-control he had on his body for not immediately flinching and he simply nodded before Gray let him go and he would not admit it but he quite literally sprinted back to the house where he came from.
Panting as he reached the beige house with flowers jutting out, Natsu shook his head, why? Why was he friends with Gray in this life? Why the fuck-?
He stopped himself, reminding himself that there was nothing he could do about it. He closed the door behind him with a small thud as he rubbed his feet on a mat to drive out the coldness.
"Hello to you too."
He looked up at Lucy who was in the hall, sitting cross-legged, around a pile of photo albums and a book in her hands. Natsu voted for not saying anything in reply as he casually sat down on a chair.
"We've been married for five years, are ridiculously in love with each other."
"Figured that out," Natsu said, sharply.
"Oh, it speaks," Lucy said in a disparaging tone as a response to his own.
"Don't get lippy with me."
Lucy tightened her jaw as she glared at him in one of those staring competitions that she had never once indulged in because of its puerile character.
But when he sighed and she saw just how tired he had been with bag-crested eyes and a withered wrinkle coming on his forehead, a very minute particle of her anger melted away.
"I-I know how wrong and er. . weird this seems, I feel the same as you okay?" She said, eyes lingering on the floor but she knew he was watching her. "But we're stuck here and I don't know for how long."
"You're suggesting we go with it?" He asked at the underlying implication.
"I don't think we have a choice," Lucy said, shrugging at him as she handed him an album. "The people in these photo albums look like our closest friends and I think it wouldn't take them a second glance to figure out that something is really wrong here."
Natsu nervously opened it the yellow album. It had been titled the Menton Lemon Festival, true to its name inside were pictures of a parade of fruit-covered floats and statues which were ten feet tall made of all citrus fruits. He found a picture of him chucking a lemon at Lucy because it seemed like a fun thing to do at least for the Natsu in this life.
And then there was a red-hed who he recognised in a blink of an eye, Erza was here too? She held her arms around a blue-haired man who he recalled was her fiance in the actuality he was from. A picture of him and Gray came up with a woman he didn't know but she smiled affectionately at the pair of them, more at Gray so Natsu took a hunch that she was his wife.
He shut the book, watching himself so happy was an odd concept in itself.
Natsu had never been jealous of himself but his other counterpart really seemed to have a wonderful life out here while he was mopping in his own one and it really felt very, very unfair to him.
And then a question deposited itself in his head.
"Wait. Where's my brother? Our families?"
"Dead."
"What?!" Natsu leapt to his feet. "What do you mean dead? They were alive in mine-
"-but aren't here," Lucy said. "We both were brought up in an orphanage." She cautiously approached him as he shivered at the thought of losing Zeref or Igneel.
Lucy had panicked when she read it in her diary but then she told herself it was a different reality and the way the other Lucy had written the details, it seemed like she was over it.
Though she still felt like she was sucker-punched because she did love her parents and it was difficult to think that in some other life, they weren't there.
"Hey." She said, softly, flinching so tight to make sure her hand didn't automatically reach out to comfort him. "It's not actually happening to us, our families are still alive in the other reality."
"And how do you know that we'll ever go back there in the first place?" He said, raising his decibels. "What if we don't and we're stuck in this crazy world where our families are dead forever?!"
Lucy paused.
She hadn't thought of that but to her, it seemed unlikely. Clearly, this thing was a mistake, an accidental error which would be rightened at some point. At least, that's what she was hoping for because Lucy didn't want to imagine what would happen if it was the other way round.
"We will go back. At some point."
"How do you know that?!"
"I don't!" She shrieked back at him, annoyed at the incessant bouts of faithlessness. "But I do know that sobbing around will make no difference whatsoever. So let me hold on to the hope that probably everything will go back to right at some point."
"And until then?" He challenged.
"Until then we pretend."
Natsu let out a laugh of utter disbelief, surely she wasn't serious.
They were married for God's sake, how was this going to work? And how would he pretend that Zeref and Igneel were dead? Hell, how was she going to pretend that way? Not that Natsu cared about her but still, coming into a world where your families weren't dead should be quite the shock, right?
He shuddered again at the thought of losing his brother or family.
But they're fine, a part of him said, placating his fear. When you come back, they'll still be there. It just this crazy world. It made his release the wedged sigh in his throat, nodding very subtly to himself. It was going to be fine when he came back.
And Natsu shifted his stare to her.
"Do you expect me to consent to this?" He said cocking his head to the side at the blonde.
"No," Lucy said, shaking her head. "Because I don't consent to it either. What I do want at the moment is we agree to behave civilly."
He plopped himself back on the chair, leaning his head back as his gaze settled on the white ceilings that had little red butterflies painted at the corners. He took in a deep breath before rolling his eyes back at the blonde. She has pretty brown eyes, he noted to himself absently. And he reckoned they would be prettier if there wasn't a twirl of worry and mayhem rounding in them.
It's when Natsu realised that amongst this situation, the complete package of fuckery that was screwing with both of them for God alone knows what, the only aspect that made sense was her because they were stuck in this together whether he liked it or not.
Well, better her than no one at all.
Even if she was a complete stranger.
"You know," he said, watching her closely. "This can turn into a gigantic clusterfuck pretty quickly right?"
"Yes."
"And how are we going to wizzle our way out when shit hits the fan?" He asked, feeling the wear and tear of the events in a single day take a toll on him.
Lucy bit her lower lip gently as she thought about it, Natsu contemplated the glimpses of quandary drown her will by a little and a little more she would probably snap. To his surprise, she raised her head, meeting his gaze with a lightness that now consumed her face.
"We'll cross or burn that bridge when we come to it." She said, resilience sounding in her voice.
He had to check himself before in order to not be blatantly surprised at the hope she had in her voice and her strong refusal of letting it go.
"So, truce?" She said, edging only a bit closer. "I can't do this alone."
Neither could he but he stared at her outstretched hand longer than necessary. Well, there was nothing more logical than this at the moment, was there? Natsu had lived a very reckless life, no telling if he wasn't going to screw this thing up one fine day because he was just that impulsive.
"I might fuck this up."
"Not with me there."
"You can't be present all the time."
"I'll try."
Natsu swallowed thickly, he hated making decisions, really not his favourite past time. But there wasn't one to make here, there was, however, a request to an agreement.
He let his hand tenderly shake hers and the way she brightened was probably the only reason he thought he could work with this.
Even if this whole thing was a sham.
Hi.
This story is the result of a very oddly placed wager between me and another writer on ffn.
It's a short story and my friend convinced me to publish it in parts instead of doing it all in one which I still don't get the point of but yeah, whatever. So updates are going to be every four days.
I hope you enjoyed the first chapter and it's okay if you didn't either, your audience has been noted and appreciated.