*Violet's POV*
Erza returned to her original seat a few minutes later. Grey seemed a little more relaxed now that he had spoken with her. Perhaps what he said were all things he'd been needing to get off his chest. I was glad that Erza could help him with that, especially since I couldn't.
As far as I could tell, we still had more than an hour before the train arrived in Hargeon. For lack of anything better to do, and with Grey's emotions no longer distracting me, I found my body relaxing. After a few minutes my mind followed suit, and soon I was drifting into darkness.
As expected, I dreamed of fire.
I found myself thrown into a circle of dying grass, bordered on all sides by garnered, ugly trees. It was too dark to see far, as the night sky above me seemed to be missing it's moon and stars.
I didn't want to be alone in the darkness, but I could see no sign of company. I called out to the trees, hoping my voice could make it through them, and someone would come to join me. A moment later the underbrush shifted, and a muscular man with pink hair entered the ring of trees.
I stood up at once, preparing to run and meet him, but the movement was too fast, and Natsu took a step back, threatening to disappear back into the underbrush, and leave me all alone once more.
"I don't want to hurt you!" I called.
"But that doesn't mean you won't."
And even as he said it, I noticed that there were thin strings coming from my arms and legs, as if I was some kind of marinate. Without permission, my arm rose with a knife that had not been in my hand a second before. Natsu took up a defensive stance.
"I don't want to fight." I sobbed.
"Then don't."
But I didn't have a choice. The strings forced me forward, and as soon as I took a steep, the trees were engulfed with fire.
The smoke burned my eyes and throat. I blinked as hard as I could in a vain attempt to see Natsu.
"You did this to yourself." he said, and turned his back to me, and walked through the flames to safety. As soon as he left the trees and flames began to close in, and I knew that soon they would crush me, but all I could do was hang from the strings and wait.
Slowly, the trees came closer, close enough for me to touch if I had control of my arms. And then it stopped. I held my breath, waiting for death, and all at once, a hand emerged from the fire and grabbed my shoulder, I let out a shriek and fell against something. Hard.
When I opened my eyes I was staring at Grey's knees, having just fallen off my seat on the now stationary train. For a moment I was trapped between dreaming and awakening, and forgot exactly where I was. But once the realization came that the trees and the fire had not been real, the horror of my current situation came to replace my original fear.
I scrambled up from the floor, almost knocking Grey over in the process. He had woken me, I was sure of it now. That meant we were in Hargeon . I swallowed hard, not looking at him, I had to come up with a response.
"Sorry you had to wake me." I said, "I didn't mean to fall asleep."
I prayed that this was an adequate greeting and moved out of the competent before he had a chance to say anything else.
Behind me I could hear Grey's gears turning. He had been frozen for a while until I spoke, but now he seemed to be connecting dots that I felt were best left separated. I didn't dare look back at him.
A little ways down the train car I saw Happy and Lucy attempting to drag a non cooperative Natsu out of their compartment while Erza offered instructions. I turned away, making for the door at the other end of the car. I could wait for the others on the platform, and hopefully give myself time to regain my composure.
The dream was already fading from my memory, but even as the information slipped away, the feeling it had left me with seemed to be getting stronger. Definitely not a good start to what I knew would be a stressful journey.
As I stepped out onto the platform I was faced with the same smell and sounds that always accompanied train stations. With them came the memories of what they had meant to me only a few short weeks ago, when a trip by train ment the beginning to a new job. And escape from the daily training grind at the compound, and the promise of a new adventure with August. Or on the other hand the return journey, where we would walk down the train car's with our head held high, preparing for a debrief where we would boast of our skills.
No such feeling came to me now. The sense of victory and adventure was no longer being refreshed, only recalled, and the remnants of past happyness bounced around my head, echoing back all of the good times with August that I would never experience again.
I watched the doors to the train carefully, not wanting my guards to think that I had flown the coop. A moment later Grey emerged from the same door that I had come out of. I waved to get his attention, and he came to my side.
"Might take a while to get Flame Brain out of the car." he said conversationally, "when I left they were dragging him along the aisle."
I took his choice of conversation topic to mean that he wasn't going to mention my obvious nightmare, though I could sense that it was still on his mind. I figured that I must have cried out when he tried to wake me, not to mention falling over. I knew that Grey was smart enough to realize what must have happened, especially since the knowledge that I had not taken the sleeping pills had been recent in his mind after his conversation with Erza.
But I also noticed the way he was watching the doors of the train, silently begging for the others to come out. He wanted them to come rescue him from the awkward situation I had put him in. I knew that meant he was unlikely to bring it up on his own, and started to relax. That was one more thing I didn't have to deal with, enough I knew I wasn't out of the woods yet.
Both of us were waiting for the others to get off the train, and then we would head forward into uncharted waters. I had been to Hargeon a few times for connecting trains and occasional jobs, but the only time I had left the train station had been in the dead of night, and had been August leading the way.
My current company didn't make me nearly as comfortable. It was one thing to be stuck with the near strangers that had been my guards last night. But they were not the only ones I was waiting for. Any moment now, Natsu and Happy would be stepping off that train, and I would no longer have motion sickness as a shield between me and Natsu's feelings.
Things were going to get complicated.
"There they are," Grey called, not hesitating before sauntering forward to meet them.
It took me a little more will power to get my feet moving towards the group of wizards, but I knew I couldn't stop. As I had told myself before getting on the train, the only forward, was onward.
