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Kleptomania

the recurrent inability to resist urges to steal items that you generally don't really need and that usually have little value

When Lucy writes, she borrows, steals, and swipes. It never seemed important until someone caught on.

Lucy was not surprised to return home and find Gray sitting at her desk, one leg hanging over the arm of her chair as he perused her latest manuscript. Annoyed, yes. Surprised, no. It was better than walking in to find someone soaking in her tub, she supposed. Natsu had no boundaries, and Gray wasn't much better.

"Really?" she asked as she tossed her keys onto the table. "Haven't we already had this conversation like eight thousand times?"

"Hey, Lucy," Gray mumbled, and she scowled at the back of his head. He could at least have the grace to look ashamed. Or, at the very least, to put down the story and talk to her.

"Earth to Gray," she said, walking over and snapping her fingers in front of his face. He startled in a very satisfying way, and she snatched the pages from his hand.

"Hey!" he said. "I was reading that." And, belatedly, "Ow. Paper cut. Why do you have to be so violent?"

Lucy rolled her eyes as he stuck his finger in his mouth. "Boo hoo. I thought I told you to stop reading my story."

"But you won't let me see it if I ask."

"That's the point."

"But you're writing us!"

Lucy regarded him curiously. "Excuse me?"

He scratched at his nose. "Well, you write characters with a lot of our traits, anyway."

Lucy turned pink. She had been hoping he might not realize.

In truth, she was a bit of a kleptomaniac. Building well-rounded, fully fleshed-out characters was a challenge at the best of times. She knew the important parts, the backstories and main personality traits, but she didn't have enough patience to build them each a repertoire of mannerisms and quirks unless they were directly related to the plot. So she borrowed them, sometimes.

She swiped Natsu's obsession with dragons and Happy's love of fish, appropriated Cana's drunken antics and Loke's flirtatiousness, burgled Erza's wide-eyed excitement at silly things and Gray's dry snark. She stole Freed's uptight reliance on rules and Evergreen's love of beauty, swindled the Master's creativity for horrifying punishments and Laxus's all-consuming pride, borrowed Mira's cheerful love of gossip and Lisanna's kindness. She stole smaller things too: a little static charge from Laxus's lightning, Elfman's verbal tic for manliness, Erza's glare when the boys started acting up again, Gray's sly half-smile when baiting Natsu, Natsu's dire motion sickness, Levy's book smarts, Gajeel's awful guitar playing, Happy's teasing, Mira's ability to cry on command, and a thousand other little quirks. And that was only the guild. She squirreled away little gestures and mannerisms from other mages she met and pedestrians she passed on the street, anything from a stock catchphrase to a nervous habit.

They were meaningless little quirks she collected without even thinking about it, and she doled them out to her characters like candy. It was second nature now, to automatically catalogue and recycle behaviors she ran across.

She liked to combine them in novel ways and the characters themselves weren't carbon copies of the people she knew, so she didn't see anything wrong with it. Still, it was a little embarrassing to be called out on it. She had assumed the additions were subtle enough that no one would notice. Had she gone a little overboard?

"I don't know what you're talking about," she said primly.

Gray rolled his eyes. "Oh, please. Motion sickness? Constant talk about being a man? Holding everyone at sword point until they agree to be friends?" He rolled his eyes again, so far back that Lucy thought he must be looking for a brain back there somewhere. "If nothing else, the stripping habit would have given it away. That's not exactly the most subtle of character traits."

Lucy buried her face in her hands. She didn't know how to dig herself out of that one, and couldn't remember how she thought she'd get away with it in the first place. To be fair, she'd thought she had thrown Gray off the trail by leaving out a dummy manuscript. He was just too nosy for his own good.

"Okay, I'm sorry," she mumbled through her fingers.

Gray snorted. "You don't have to be sorry. It's kind of nice to see little bits of all our personalities all over the place. Just…maybe you should make reasons too."

Lucy dropped her hand to eye him curiously. "What do you mean?"

"Well… A character that's randomly stripping every time he enters a room is pretty much going to look like a pervert or exhibitionist, whether that's what you want him to be or not." When Lucy raised an eyebrow, Gray rolled his eyes again. "Yeah, yeah. But that's a habit I picked up from my training, not something I do for fun."

"Training?"

He frowned at her. "You didn't know? I thought that had come out on Galuna… Ur used to make us strip down all the way to our boxers in the cold. Becoming one with the cold or some such nonsense. Toughened us up and brought us closer to our ice magic, anyway. We did it so often that it became kind of a habit, one that at first I couldn't stop and then wasn't sure I wanted to let go of. You know, once she was gone.

"I'm not saying you should take all of our reasons for why we are the way we are or why we do the things we do, but maybe consider why your character is that way. It'll fit in better with their personality, plus you can give them some more depth."

Lucy regarded him with no little surprise. She didn't remember hearing that before, and it was the kind of thing she would remember. Had she missed a memo somewhere along the way?

She looked at Gray with new eyes, weighing his past behavior and silly habit against this new tidbit of information, and thought that maybe she understood him just a little bit better.

And maybe that had been his point.

So the next day, she went out and did some research. She watched her friends, searching for hints about why they did the things they did, and she asked questions when it seemed appropriate. While some quirks didn't seem to have much of an explanation and sometimes the ones that did weren't so easily uncovered, she learned a lot about her friends. She learned that Cana always looked over her shoulder when the door opened because she was automatically checking for Guildarts, that Elfman's catchphrase stemmed from the feelings of powerlessness and weakness he'd felt when he was unable to protect Lisanna from himself, that Erza's wide-eyed wonder at the simplest of things traced back to when she'd lost an entire childhood to the Tower.

She wondered why she had never thought to ask before.

Now when she borrowed a warrior's childlike innocence or a dragon slayer's fanatic love of the mythological or a stripper's sly half-smile and shadowed eyes, it was something special. Something more than a habit picked up there or a mannerism culled for later use. Suddenly, the things she took meant something. Instead of simply throwing them at the skeleton of a character and calling it a day, she held them close and treasured them.

Note: Sometimes I like using Lucy to explore metafiction lol The writing process can be painful, difficult, and complicated, but it's also so rewarding and makes you look at the world and people in a different way.