"This is madness!"
Erza stared at all of them in shock. She was still pissed odd at Bickslow for having extracted her blood the wrong way (read: stabbed her hand instead of using a syringe) and she could hardly believe what the blood test claimed. Makarov, impartial as ever, had run the test himself. Erza's blood was a perfect match for Wendy's mother.
"Are you okay?" Lucy hesitantly asked, patting Erza's shoulder.
"I…" Erza stared at her wrapped up hand in disbelief. "How can I possibly be her mother?"
"Beats the hell out of me," Gray said, crossing his arms. He glared at the rest of them. "What's this going to mean for the guild when they find out? Knowing Natsu —"
"Hey!" Natsu angrily protested.
"— they'll find out eventually," Gray finished darkly. "What are we going to do?"
They were downstairs in the guild hall, deep in the archives to avoid being disturbed by the rest of Fairy Tail. Only Makarov, Siegrain, Wendy, Team Natsu, Hisui and the Thunder Legion were present.
"Well, that depends," Makarov finally said. "Is Erza able to take legal custody of Wendy?"
"It'll raise too many eyebrows," Hisui warned him. "Chances are it wouldn't be allowed."
"What about my dad?" Wendy asked quietly. "And Ultrear? What will happen to them?"
"Ultrear's a wanted criminal and the leader of a dark guild," Hisui gently reminded her. "She won't be allowed to run free."
"And as for my brother," Siegrain said, protectively wrapping an arm around his fiancée. "That's an entirely different issue. I don't want to hurt him, but at the same time…"
"I want to hurt him," Natsu cut in. "He tried to kill us! I want to show that jerk —"
Laxus shocked him just enough to get him to shut up, already irritated with things as they were to begin with.
"He's not a bad person," Wendy said, fidgeting with her hands. "He...without him…"
"You know," Caity put in, adjusting her glasses. "I hesitate to say this but Jellal could probably be useful in the sense that he knows the crime syndicates inside and out."
Freed turned to her in surprise. "That's brilliant! We could —"
"That isn't right," Erza said, scowling at them. "He's just barely recovering, by the sound of it, and doing that isn't fair to him."
"You yourself said he needs to prove he's changed," Caity smugly reminded her. "He wouldn't be in much danger, Erza. Besides, wouldn't it make things better for all of us?"
Erza clenched her fists. Usually, she wasn't bothered by things like this. Yet her mind was almost impossible to control and her emotions were threatening to get the best of her. With this knowledge, everything in her life had changed. She was the mother to a child she had no idea she had. Her daughter had been ripped away from a future in a world so much different from their own. It would be a severe understatement to say she was deeply conflicted. Nothing was right, not anymore.
"If he's been caring for Wendy, then he has changed," Erza said after a minute, her voice as sharp as her swords. "He doesn't even know she's his daughter and yet he cares about her. You just want revenge because he almost killed you."
Evergreen and Caitlin shared a dangerous look, which caused Erza to take a small step back. The Mariposa twins were a nightmare when they banded together in their anger. Lucy and Natsu kept glancing nervously at each other. Gray was so freaked out he kept his shirt on. Wendy stepped over to her mother and held onto her, startling Erza even though she didn't object. Freed and Bickslow both started to laugh nervously, having once been on the receiving end of the Mariposa twins' fury. Siegrain took his fiancée's hand, hoping to soothe her, while Makarov simply sighed. Laxus pulled Hisui a little closer in his arms, and she eyed the three women, expecting a fight.
"That little bitch tried to kill all of us, in case you've forgotten," Evergreen hissed. "Just because he's changed a little doesn't mean he's any less of an asshole."
Erza scoffed. "And Laxus is a dick to everyone. Hell, he's the one that got the entire guild into a fight a couple years back just so we could find out who's the strongest. Oh! And I almost forgot about the time he turned his back on us because Lucy didn't like him and Cana wouldn't strip!"
Freed ripped off one of his leather gloves and slapped Erza across the face with it. Makarov cringed. Whatever happened, it couldn't end well.
"We were all in the south on our own mission when that happened!" Freed indignantly reminded her. "And none of us — not Ever, nor Bickslow, nor Caity, nor Laxus, nor I — had anything to do with those crazies in Phantom Lord attacking us!"
Erza stared him down. "You're asking for a fight, Freed, and you know it."
Bickslow possessed the butterflies in Caity's hair the second he saw Erza re-quip and he sent them all to block her field of vision. Before the fight could get any worse, Laxus and Hisui slipped into the stairwell. Natsu, Gray, and Lucy had the same idea and nearly ran each other over as they fled the room. Finally, after far too long, there was silence.
"You were a lot different when I first met you," Hisui said quietly. "Weren't you?"
Laxus sighed. "I'm not proud of it, 'Sui. I've done a lot of things I regret. In some ways, I guess my father still lives in my head."
Hisui said nothing for a long time but tightly embraced him. She didn't want to ever let him go. They both knew how much had changed in his life in just the year they'd been together. She knew, too, that he needed her and that he loved her more than anything.
"But I'm not going to be like him," Laxus gently took her hand, reached into his pocket, and fell to the ground. "Hisui, I want to marry you."
She collapsed to her knees and hugged him tightly, tears biting at the corners of her eyes.
"Yes…" The princess of Fiore whispered.
Laxus could hardly believe it when he slipped the emerald ring onto her finger. "I love you so much," He murmured. "Hisui Dreyar…"
"I like that," She smiled as he brushed the tears away from her eyes. "And I —"
Wendy, who had run into the stairwell, gasped upon seeing them. She was quickly followed by her uncle, who seemed far more stunned by the sight than her. Regaining his composure, Siegrain shook his head.
"Sorry to interrupt," He said, smirking when they stood up and he could see the ring on her finger. "But you might want to stop your bodyguards before they or Erza or all of them kill each other."
Wendy glanced nervously to him. "Caity said it's a duel. I thought people didn't die in those."
"You've never seen a duel in Fairy Tail," Laxus told her. "It never ends well."
He and Hisui quickly slipped past them, running back down into the archives with them. Sure enough, when the four of them reached the balcony and the second set of stairs that overlooked the archives, there was abject chaos. Caity had climbed up onto the top of the bookshelves and was trying to hide up there. She was curled up in a ball and was holding a book over her head. Unusually, she had none of her butterfly adornments in her blonde hair. Bickslow had possessed all of them and, between the butterflies and his "babies," he was causing a bit of a mess. Erza was defecting everything with her swords around herself as shields, and she was doing everything she could to avoid looking at Evergreen, who was definitely trying to petrify him. Then there was Freed, who was trying to find the "best" way to curse Erza for having insulted Laxus and the Thunder Legion. Siegrain sighed, holding his head in exasperation and Wendy seemed both curious and uncomfortable. Makarov was the only other on the balcony, and he seemed particularly unconcerned. Hisui and Laxus exchanged a nervous look, and he squeezed her hand before turning to Makarov.
"Shouldn't you be stopping them, Gramps?" Laxus rolled his eyes upon Makarov merely shrugging. "You're the guild master, aren't you?"
"Let them have their fun," Makarov said dismissively. He did, however, raise an eyebrow when he saw Hisui rest a hand on Laxus' shoulder, exposing her engagement ring. "You finally did it? What pushed you over the edge, boy, when —"
"Gramps —" Laxus started, sounding far more embarrassed than angry.
"Let me have my fun!" Makarov chortled. He paused upon hearing a table crash against a bookshelf. Erza had knocked Evergreen over. "Don't kill each other!"
"He is having way too much fun with this, isn't he?" Hisui remarked, laughing a little.
Laxus smirked and kissed her cheek. "You know it."
More crashes resonated from below, and things began to fly everywhere. Per usual, it seemed. Wendy eagerly turned to her uncle, never more excited in her life and briefly forgetting that she would have to explain away her absence to Ultrear later.
"Please can I join them?" She smiled with wide eyes. "I want to fight with my mom."
Siegrain gestured to his fiancée, who was still holding a book over her head and trying to hide. "Just look at your aunt," He told her, finding it strange to say out loud. "Are you sure about that, Wendy?"
Before she could respond, Makarov, seeing Freed finally manage to trap Erza, intervened and shoved them all away from each other.
"Alright, maybe that's enough for now," He said, ignoring the dark looks they were sending him. "Come on. We have more important matters at hand."
If he had known what Ultrear would do when she put the pieces together regarding Wendy, he wouldn't have sent the little girl back there so soon after the fight and after she hugged her mother. They were coming and the Games on the horizon would certainly prove it all.