For nearly one whole year, this story has been on Hiatus...but no more! My dear fans and readers, "A Quincy's Fairy Tail" has returned! Admittedly, this has taken much longer than expected, and unfortunately, I wasn't able to finish the entire arc ahead of time as I hoped. This was due to a variety of factors but mostly stress and anxiety. But good progress has been made, as several chapters ahead of this one have indeed been finished.

Truth be told, the chapter you are about to read was once part of a much larger chapter, but I was so proud of it that I decided that it needed to be uploaded by itself. Draconichero once again wrote this chapter and I can't thank him enough for the amazing work he put into it. Truth be told this content was originally meant for chapter 40, but it was cut because I figured it would have a much better purpose here for "The Tower of Heaven" arc. Why is that? Well, you'll just have to read to find out.

Rest assured that I plan on uploading the much larger chapter up in May, but I really wanted your thoughts on this stuff specifically so nothing was lost in the grand scheme of things. I truly do hope that you enjoy it, however, and I am eager to once more read your reviews. They truly do mean so much to me.

Bleach is owned by Tite Kubo and Shounen jump. Fairy Tail is owned by Hiro Mashima and Weekly Shounen Magazine. I own NOTHING. This is all just for fun!

Liltotto stood in the foyer of a two-bedroom London house. Some awful men wearing wool masks with the eyes and mouth holes cut out were standing behind her. Her mother sat on her knees in tears, hands-on Liltotto's tiny shoulders.

Liltotto too was crying. "Why? I don't understand."

"I'm sorry, Lil," her mother said. "Please be good for these people. I promise we'll buy you back. I really promise. Mommy and daddy just don't have enough money. We'll buy you back once we're rich. Honestly, we will. Just be a good girl!"

Liltotto was a child when her parents had sold her on the Irish slave trafficking black market. Her parents were in crippling debt, always had been. Looking to gain some leverage on her father, a once-wealthy British businessman, some Irish terrorists took advantage of him and offered him a loan. Then they came to collect…in triple, with interest.

The debt and the loss of her sister had made Liltotto's father verbally abusive and broken her mother. The last thing Liltotto remembered before being dragged from her own home and shock collared, was her mother's crazed, broken smile and wave and her father's glare and venomous stare.

The card ride to the Irish farm was long. It was long just to get to Ireland by both car and ferry, and then even longer to get to the destination. Fortunately, Liltotto was allowed to sleep in the car. It was the last good sleep she was going to have for a very long time.

Sort of.

She was abruptly woken up by the sound of a shotgun blast. She jolted upright and was pulled out of the car by the chain of her collar and found herself stepping barefoot out onto some muddy grass. The gunshot had been used to shoot what Liltotto presumed to be a cow inside the barn judging from how a farm hand brought the shotgun out of said barn and then locked in a chest next to the wall.

Liltotto's handler smacked her back, albeit not too hard. "Come on, kid. We need to find out where the old bastard who runs this farm wants you stationed."

Liltotto was escorted around the farm, taking in the sights, smells and sounds. Okay, working on a farm might not be that bad. Sure, on the one hand bad conditions in slavery. On the other hand, fresh food? She was desperate to make the best of a bad situation.

She took in the sights of all of the other slaves working their backs in the fields on various tasks. Tasks Liltotto thought could be done by machine mostly these days, but apparently old fashioned was still a thing in seedy parts of the world.

That was when she saw two men hunched over part of the field. They didn't appear to be pulling weeds or picking vegetables. What they were doing was placing a dead body, judging from the limp arm Liltotto saw, onto a stretcher.

Oh, so they're going to burn a slave that died of exhaustion, Liltotto thought in passing.

At first, it was just a grim reminder of the fate that awaited her should she fail to meet the harsh conditions likely expected of her. However, the men then had to pass right by her and her handler and that's when she saw the face of the dead girl they were carrying.

She knew that face. She knew that face anyway. "L…L…L…Loria?"

What had started as a bad situation had quickly turned into the nightmare of all nightmares.

Liltotto screamed at the top of her lungs and began flailing about in fear, panic, and anger. She was quickly gagged and sedated, though she managed to smack several people with her clenched fists.

When Liltotto woke up, she was in a barn. She was still gagged and her feet and wrists were roped up separately. She had nothing on except a ratty garment to cover her underside and a raggedy gown to preserve her modesty and protect her from the elements. A scruffy old man in overalls and graying red hair stood in front of and nearby her.

"You caused quite a bit of trouble, lassie. I don't take kindly to wee little rats like you hurtin' people over a dead body."

Liltotto tried to shout "That was my sister" into the gag, but it just came out as muffled incoherency.

"See I got a system in place, lassie." He kicked Liltotto hard in the stomach, causing her to cry out in pain. "You do your work or you get punished." Each emphasized word was accentuated with a quick kick to the stomach, resulting in many squeals of pain and tears. Liltotto was reduced to a sobbing mess. If he kicked her again, she knew she'd pee herself just out of pure fear.

He picked her up by the head and lifted her off the ground and carried her all the way to a butter churner. "This here's gonna be your station. You're gonna churn all the butter we collect on this here farm and package it yourself." He carefully showed her how to handle each part of the butter churning process. It was a lot of work for just one girl, but Liltotto already knew from her dead sister's corpse and the pain in her stomach the price of failure. "From sunrise to sunset, you're gonna do this task. And you're not gonna complain or else. Understand, lassie?"

"Y-yes."

"Yes, what?"

"Yes…Master?" Liltotto wanted to throw up just from those words leaving her lips.

"Good girl. Now get to work."

He slammed the door and left Liltotto to her job. She cried as she grabbed the wooden dasher and began to churn.

Day in and day out, regardless of the weather and regardless of the temperature, Liltotto was expected to churn and package about 200 pounds of butter a day or more. It was thankless work and if she came up just a little bit short, she got a full whipping of the master's belt, one lash for every pound she came up short.

Liltotto quickly learned to adapt. The bread and plastic cup of water she was given only at noon or in the early afternoon was her only granted sustenance and sometimes she wasn't given anything, usually because the taskmaster forgot, not that it was of any concern to the farm owners.

Liltotto however, refused to die like her sister. She tried to see the positives of the situation. The constant churning, she believed, was making her stronger. Sure, her diet was abysmal, but Liltotto quickly found a loophole. Nobody watched her during the churning process. They just expected her to be done by dusk and up by an hour after dawn. Since she often finished her tasks with time to spare before inspection, once the butter of a batch had been solidified, Liltotto would, on occasion, scoop up some of the butter with her hand and eat it raw before resuming churning. The fat, greasy calories far from filled her up, but it was better than going hungry.

That guilty pleasure soon turned into sneaking out at night. Liltotto knew where they kept the ladders for fruit picking on the apple and plum trees. She also knew those ladders were not locked up at night. And since all the masters slept inside the house and the only guards surrounded the very far perimeter of the farm, nothing stopped her from going outside and plucking a plum or an apple or two from a tree and rushing back to her abode to snack on them before mashing up the cores into paste and burying them behind the building, digging her hands through the dirt and rinsing them off with the hose her master used on her at the end of the day to clean her off.

She didn't turn the hose on all the way, just some dribbles to clean her hands off over the pile of hay she squatted on next to it. Liltotto thought her plan was foolproof. No matter how many years she was stuck here, she would survive.

Unfortunately, this wasn't to last. Because, one day, she was caught red-handed with butter in her mouth.

One of the paid maids had to come into the butter room for a package to give to some guests because the house was low on butter and she caught Liltotto with butter all over her face and alerted the masters.

All Liltotto remembered for the next several hours after that was pain. Nothing but pain. She was dragged out into the field, thrown to the ground, and beaten with straightened, whittled sticks over and over again all over her body by several grown men until she was numb to the blows. Over and over again, Liltotto thought for sure this would kill her as she cringed and tried to make herself as small as possible.

Declarations of "Thief!" echoed until the word was said so much it lost all meaning to Liltotto's ears. She was then left there in the middle of the field next to a single stick to suffer silently, too injured to cry or even move her mouth. Bruised and battered, she was reminded yet again of this nightmare, this hell she was forced to call home.

Escape was impossible. Survival? Trivial. She sort of wished she could die right there and join her sister.

But that mercy never came…

Liltotto recovered the slow way—the body's natural repair system—and was never quite the same again after that horrendous beating. It started with her being moved to a new station. She was brought inside the house.

At first Liltotto thought this was some sick joke…and it turned out it was, but far from the reason she thought. She was told she was going to work in the kitchen with the head chef Madame, a portly lady in charge of making all the meals for the men that owned the farm and oversaw the slaves.

The smells in the kitchen were to die for. Meat. Potatoes. Fruit. The smell of freshly cooked bread. The Smorgasbord on display was a feast for the eyes that made Liltotto's mouth water and stomach growl.

And thus started the beginning of the cruel joke. She wasn't allowed to touch any of it. Her job now, under strict supervision, was to cut the meat off the bones of the dead, decapitated cows in the adjoining room, fur and all. Any attempt to eat the raw meat, however ill advised it would be, was met with a smack to the face with hand or with a wooden spoon.

Sure, the hours were less strenuous, but Liltotto's meals had been cut to just a single slice of cheese and a single glass of water per day. And, if there were no cows to slice up, she was just to sit quietly and wait for work. It was so…boring. And torture. It was pure and utter agonizing torture to smell and stare at food all day and not be able to touch or eat any of it.

And day after day, week after week, month after month, Liltotto's hunger grew. It grew into a raging monsoon of anger and hate until finally she could take no more.

Dazed and crazed from the constant abuse and the most recent spoon smack to the cheek, Liltotto saw her salvation. It was a knife. It lay on the drying rack next to the sink. It was one of the sharper knives used in the house to slice and dice vegetables. Liltotto's heart beat inside her head. The temptation grew. She needed that knife. She craved that knife. All she needed was that knife and all her problems would be solved.

Her body reacted on its own. She got up from her chair in the corner and picked up the knife without thinking about it. Silently, she drove the knife into the base of the back of head chef. Strength left the overweight woman's body as she tumbled to the ground. Liltotto then began to stab her over and over again with the same crazed look in her eye her mother had given her when she first was sold to this hell.

But the stabbing did not remain silent forever. The sound of a single chirping bird echoed in the kitchen. It was odd for a live bird to be near the kitchen let alone near it. However, Liltotto quickly realized that the sound wasn't coming from a bird. It was coming from her own mouth. Liltotto was laughing. She was enjoying stabbing this woman to death, revenge for all the suffering she caused her. Tears pooled from her eyes as she continued to stab the woman well after she'd shed the mortal coil. Blood pooled around the kitchen and Liltotto didn't care one inch. She just continued to stab the juicy corpse before standing up, turning on the sink and hooking her mouth to the faucet to drink as much water as she could to wash away the taste and smell of blood.

Liltotto then fell backward, knife still in hand, laughing in a pool of the chef's blood. Sanity had left her. There was no going back. She picked up the knife and looked at her animalistic eyes in the reflection of the blood-crusted blade as blood dripped onto her rags.

And then, by her own hand, she plunged the knife into her chest. And then…silence.

When Liltotto opened her eyes after that, she was in a white gown with a chain inside her chest. She was standing over her dead, lifeless body and the body of the cook. She was free. She was dead and free. She'd done it.

However, a claw that grappled her entire body made it clear it was too early to celebrate.

A large monster with a plum-colored body and a white mask shaped like a cow loomed over Liltotto. "You…you killed meeeeeee!" the voice behind the mask growled.

Liltotto screamed, despite the pointlessness of it all. After all, who would help a dead girl?

However, she was saved. And this time her savior was not a mere knife, but a man. A tall man in a black cloak with thick mutton chops and long, dark hair. He decapitated the monster holding Liltotto causing no harm to the girl herself. His weapon of choice? A broadsword.

Liltotto fell on her butt to the ground. Underneath the man's waist, between his legs, she could see the door to the kitchen had been broken down. No, it had been sliced in two cleanly and on the other side, all of the masters were decapitated. Blood filled the living room and kitchen. She hadn't just been saved, she'd been rescued and for some reason, this mustached man could see the dead.

He smiled at Liltotto, standing taller than even her now deceased master. He took, but one step towards her, his boots clacking against the wood. Only then did he open his mouth to speak.

"If you find your life so worthless, give your life to me, little one," he said with a smile. "In exchange, if you follow me, you can eat all of the food you desire, read whatever you want, and be whatever you wish."

I couldn't answer him verbally, but I can still remember what I did. I reached for his hand that extended towards me…

…And the shiny red apple he held within it.

Liltotto gasped, eyes flying open. She woke up on the train with the other members of Fairy Tail, her head nestled into Erza's lap. Judging from the low light outside, dawn had broken barely fifteen minutes ago. Liltotto dragged herself out of the train car and into the space between cars, getting fresh air as she sat down, with her hands around her knees.

The rattling of the train against the tracks was so loud, she didn't notice when Erza came outside to join her.

"You all right?" she asked.

"I don't want to talk about it," Liltotto said.

Erza stared at her, but thought it best not to pry. She herself had her own demons to bury after all. "Let's go to the dining hall," she suggested. Food as a distraction was the best way to snap Liltotto out of her doldrums. "They're serving bacon, eggs and sliced potatoes. We can eat together. It'll be nice."

Liltotto got up, but didn't outright bolt to her feet. Still, she was never one to turn down food.

However, she'd barely been paying attention to when Erza mentioned the menu. Food was food to Liltotto. It almost always tasted great and it all came out the same way. So, when she and Erza were served, she didn't think anything of it until she forked a potato wedge and began to bring it to her mouth.

That's when the trauma button in Liltotto's brain got slammed without mercy. The brown skin of the potato made Liltotto pause and a rush of buried memories came to her head. She dropped her fork onto the plate, as the word "Thief" was chanted in her head and she could almost feel the sticks smashing her body. Her blood chilled and she broke out into a cold sweat.

Erza could quickly tell Liltotto was having a full-blown panic attack and calmed the small girl down by putting her friend's head in her lap.

It took more than ten minutes before Liltotto was finally able to gain her sense of self. She then sat up. "S-sorry," she said and then forked a potato wedge and ate it without a second thought, reaching for her glass or orange juice.

"Will you talk to me now, Lil?" Erza asked.

Lil cast her head down at her lap. She really didn't want to.

Erza bit her lip. She knew how hypocritical the next words out of her mouth would be, but…she couldn't bare to watch Liltotto suffer. No…maybe…maybe they could confide in each other. "If you tell me what's bothering you, I'll tell you a secret about me no one else in Fairy Tail knows, a dark secret I've tried my hardest to hide."

This got Liltotto to pick her head up and stare at Erza. The red head looked serious. However, she turned her head away and tried to remain silent.

Erza figured she might have to be the one to begin proceedings. "When I was a little girl, growing up as an orphan in a village no longer around today, I was captured and dragged to a place called the Tower of Heaven where I was forced to help build and construct it in the name of the evil mage, Zeref. I was basically a slave, Lil."

The word echoed inside Lil as she gasped.

I knew it, Erza thought. Yes, perhaps she and Liltotto could confide in each other.

"You…were a slave too?" Liltotto asked.

Erza nodded. And that was the only gesture needed for Liltotto to finally break down.

Tears poured out of her eyes as she hugged Erza with all her might, crying into the red head's shoulder. Another 10 plus minutes passed in order for Liltotto to calm down and dry her eyes.

She told Erza everything, how she'd been sold on the black market, how she'd arrived to find her sister's corpse, the butter churning, the stabbing of the chef, all of it. She left out the part where she stabbed herself. She didn't know if Erza would quite understand about the whole life after death thing, so she just made it sound like Yhwach had shown up after she stabbed the chef and suckled the tap water.

"You got lucky," Erza said with a smile.

"Lucky? How?" Liltotto asked. "My life has been horrible, even after my former guild master showed up…in the end I—"

Erza rubbed the top of Liltotto's head and then pat the back of it. "You're lucky because even though you left your own guild, you were saved from your pain, maybe not by your master, but by your friends. You have Bambi here and Candi too. And Fairy Tail has become your new home and your new family. I've seen how you live among us, you're safe and happy now, Lil. Maybe you believe you don't deserve happiness, but I believe you've done nothing wrong. You're free. Free to eat, free to love, free to live and free from your pain. And that's the difference between us," Erza told her.

"What do you mean?" Liltotto asked. She watched Erza get up and turn around as the red head walked away.

The only answer Liltotto received was "My pain still exists."

Liltotto didn't know what to say to that. What could she say to that? She certainly hadn't expected Erza of all people to have the slave by origin story. Erza was a paragon among paragons to her, a true knight errant at her core. She took nobody's shit and was the kindest and gentlest…okay maybe not the gentlest, that was putting on too many airs, but still. Aside from Natsu, if there was one mage Liltotto thought fit Fairy Tail's code to a T, it was Erza Scarlet.

Unfortunately, Erza didn't give Liltotto the chance to ask more. She had left the room, having taken her food with her. It would've been awkward to resume the conversation later and Liltotto knew it. She'd missed her chance.

Liltotto was about to sit down and finish her own food, but the train lurched. She turned her head to the right to see if a monster had attacked the train, but she quickly rationalized that it was just a banked curve or a downhill incline taken too swiftly. However, Liltotto still didn't sit down. Outside the window of the train was the visage of a woman that looked a little bit like Lucy, albeit with a much smaller chest, and red eyes instead of brown. The floating girl in the white dress gave a bright smile to Liltotto before vanishing into particles of light.

"Oh dammit, Natsu's throwing up again!" She heard Candice shouting from down the hall.

Liltotto shook her head and smiled. Erza was right. She wasn't in pain anymore. She had no reason to be. She'd been saved by Fairy Tail. She stared out the window, the visage of her sister long gone. She picked her hat up from off the ground—it had fallen when she had her first panic attack—and placed on it her head, pulling on the brim. She then clenched one fist. She gave the rising sun a tough look.

It's time to stop feeling sorry for myself and time to stop living in the past. Sis is gone, but I'm still here and there are still things I can do. You showed me that, Bambi. You and Fairy Tail taught me what it means to live. Erza, you helped chase away the last of my demons. So, no matter how long it takes, I'll do my best to chase away yours.

Liltotto picked up her plate and just slid the contents into her mouth, chewing them before belching. She then headed for the exit of the dining car. She then looked over her shoulder, almost expecting to see the ghost of her sister one more time, but she didn't appear.

I guess…starting today…I really am free.

And with that, Liltotto marched out of the dining car. And for some reason, as she did so, the world around her suddenly looked warmer and brighter.

She saw Candice nursing Natsu's back as he heaved into a barf bag and saw Bambietta, Candice and some of the others looking at her as she approached. They were all smiling. Liltotto couldn't help but smile back to them. And then, as the sun finally got above the horizon, only one thought came across Liltotto's mind.

…This is my true home.

I sincerely hope that this chapter brought the proper feels for you all. As you can see, Erza and Lil have both had quite the rough childhoods and you can bet that this will play a very important role with their characters in the chapters to follow.

Now fret not, like I said, I have about 5 more chapters worth of content already written and by the time that is all up I'm quite positive the rest of the arc will be finished. That said, it would truly mean the world to me to get your reviews for this chapter. I really want your thoughts on this back story. I hope that you were all just as moved as I was when I read it for the first time.

Till next time!