A/N: Hey, everybody! I've been working on this chapter for a while now. It's one of the longest chapters so far! This is likely to be the last bit of "fluff" for a little while. Enjoy!

"Though rare, pre-adolescent juvenile dragons can lay claim to territory in the absence of related adult individuals. However these young dragons may run the risk of being pushed out by competing species or older dragons." ~ Dragon Historia, pg. 102

Chapter Twenty-seven: Deadfall

Gajeel's studded brows knit. "Whaddya mean the Master's not back yet?"

Before Team Gajeel and their tiny tagalongs set off for Shirotsume, Gajeel had wanted to stop by the lacriphone past the paved end of their road to leave Master Makarov a message.

Not to call for backup - he was sure-as-hell-certain that they could handle some rogue Phantoms. After all, Gajeel could have beaten all of those chumps to a pulp back when they were in the same guild. With his eyes closed. And with one hand behind his back, too!

No, there was something else that nagged him to call. Something he couldn't put his finger on. A walking-on-glass feeling. He was able to put more form to the unease he felt when Cobra commented that them leaving town with the Phantom Lord activity going on would have been suspicious. Gajeel definitely didn't want any more fingers pointed at him… at least, more than there usually were.

Mirajane shook her head. "Blackgate Prison is all the way in Crocus, so he had to take an overnight train. He's overseeing Mr. Porla's cell inspection today."

Gajeel snorted. Of all the times for the Elder Fairy to not be parked in his usual drinking spot at the bar! "Look, just leave a note for him or somethin'."

"What's in Shirotsume?" Mirajane asked, a placid smile on her face and her eyes gleaming sharply. It felt more like a polite demand.

"A lead on the Phantom Lord revival." He scratched at the metal studs on his chin. "And a family situation." It wasn't an outright lie, but it still felt weird to say. "Whoever's running Phantom now went after my kid brother." He only took a little satisfaction in the way Mirajane's too-thin eyebrows shot up at that, the sharpness dropping from her eyes. "I can't let that slide."

Mirajane gave a small nod in solidarity. "I'll let him know when he checks in later today," the usual, nosy lilt to her voice was gone, replaced by something more wise and understanding. The tone lasted only a second before it returned, a finger pressing troublesomely against her lips: "Oh! I was going through the guild's files recently, and I noticed that you and your teammate share the same address."

He eyed her. "Yeah…? We're roommates."

"Mhm," she hummed in obviously fake consideration. A dangerous sound. Every hair on the back of Gajeel's neck stood up as an angry blush splotched across his cheeks. "Roommates."

"Can I fucking help you with somethin'? Lot'sa people're roommates!"

"This is true. But, unlike lots of people, I grew up with two Dragonslayers in the same guild," she said with a sunny smile. Her eyes seemingly pierced beyond the lacriphone image. "Dragons don't usually like to share such close space for long, and since there's two of you under the same roof, I was wonderi-"

The call was ended when the glowing lacrima ball burst into shards after meeting Gajeel's iron fist. He shook the scales on his hand free of splinters before letting them sink back under his skin.

Probably not the best move with the guild's top gossip hound asking dangerous questions, but, in his own defense, he'd never had to deal with that kind of bullshit before!

Ryos was more bright-eyed after getting cleaned up, fed, and spending a safe night sleeping on their couch. Now the little shadow dragon was more keen to make himself known in the older dragons' space; much like in the quiet, unwelcoming way a ghost would haunt new residents of its home.

And though the shadow dragon could not be seen, the poison dragon heard and felt little eyes watching him from behind.

One of his pointed ears slid back under his white hood, silently tracking the kid's movements while he sat on the couch, half-paying attention to the open copy of Dragon Historia in his hands.

Cobra couldn't fault the kid for being wary after what he'd been through, but was a little less hostility too much to ask for? It was like living with a jealous little poltergeist; a ghost that was seriously peeved that Cobra was intimate with its brother… Which was not a sequence of words Cobra ever thought he'd have to put together in the same sentence.

He heard a pale hand creeping, reaching for the back of his hood, and sharply said: "Don't even think about it, Ryos."

Oh, he heard that Ryos was not the child's true name. But "Ryos" was what he wanted to be called, and Cobra was the absolute last person to judge someone for not wanting to be called a name they were born with. Even if that someone was a judgy little shadow person that was testing him and thinking very unkind thoughts in his direction.

Ryos, shocked that he had been caught, stilled as his form popped out of the shadows, tensing, before sinking back into the darkness, shamed and panicked thoughts racing through his little head.

"Why do you wear that," asked a warped little voice that came from the shadow of the coffee table.

"It's a secret," Cobra said, completely unphased, still looking at the book in his lap.

"It looks dumb."

Nonplussed, Cobra continued reading. "Yeah. It's inconvenient, too."

There was a small pause, before Ryos started up again, this time as a black mass peeking out from the shade of the curtains. "Then why do you wear it?"

"A secret's not much of a secret if everyone knows about it."

"Why is it a secret, though?"

Cobra lightly tugged on the hem of his white hood for emphasis. "Only your brother gets to see what's under here."

It was not the best answer to give a writhing little shadow dragon. Ryos actually growled - a high and nasally sound - before the sound of mewing caught his attention, making him pull out of the shadows and sit on a nearby chair. He gingerly pulled Frosch from his pocket, stroking the Exceed kitten reassuringly.

"Sorry," Ryos quietly apologized to the fuzzy green jellybean with stubby wings. "I know you don't like being in the shadows for too long."

They sat in silence - Cobra continuing his research, Ryos petting Frosch - until a distant smash sounded in Cobra's hearing range. His ears slid back, knowing exactly what that sound was.

There's literally an 'end call' button, you idiot! He rubbed his temples. His boyfriend couldn't hear him, of course, but that didn't stop him from wishing that he could beam his thoughts directly into the skull of the other man. Now she's going to be even more suspicious...

"You're why he's different," Ryos accused, breaking the silence. Cobra looked up from his book to see Ryos immediately avoid his gaze and instead play with the tiny paws of his cat friend.

To the shadow dragon, his brother's behavior was weird. And the kid wasn't sure yet if it was good weird or bad weird. It was definitely different. Alien. He'd never seen Gajeel acting so nice for so long, from what Cobra could hear.

Cobra let out a quiet breath. He closed the Dragon Historia in his lap. "I can't take any credit for that. He was working hard on that before we met."

"Why…?"

It was no secret to him that Gajeel wasn't satisfied with his life or himself while he was in Phantom Lord. Retroactively, Gajeel only bragged about formerly being S-classed - a testament of his strength - rather than being proud of being a Phantom. He didn't feel there was much to take pride in after the outcome of the Guild War and the iron dragon's faith in his former Guildmaster had dropped through the floor. That was the part Cobra understood all too well...

"You should ask him that," Cobra told Ryos. "He could give you the answer you're clearly looking for."

Being a hub for the northern train lines, there was no shortage of trains headed to Shirotsume. The express train from Magnolia to Shirotsume would take two hours. No transfers, no overnight trains through the mountains, no early-morning trains to catch while still groggy with sleep.

The young shadow dragon and his hidden Exceed sat across from Cobra, choosing his seat next to Gajeel, and now wore a slightly-too-big pair of tan sneakers that Cobra had "borrowed" from the guild's lost and found the night before. Neither of the older dragons had expected to need to find shoes for a twelve year old boy, and, even if the shoes were the wrong size, they were better than nothing. Plus, the kid wouldn't have been allowed onto the train with bare feet.

His chin resting in his palm, Cobra watched the world outside blur past the window. If he let go of his senses enough, he could distance himself from the sounds around him. A task that would have been easier if not for the two brothers chatting across from him.

The two were speaking - casually arguing at times, at least on Gajeel's half of the conversation - in another language.

Cobra couldn't say he was exactly surprised at his partner's bilingualism, though it did explain some of the unusual emphasis he put on the pronunciation of different words.

Four words kept coming up in their conversation: nagurru, fuul-fahi, logia, and yuuluvu. (It was a decent-length train ride with a chatty pair; Cobra didn't have much else to do than listen and keep count.)

While he could hear a person's inner voice regardless of the language they spoke, if it was a language he was unfamiliar with, it changed the sound and meaning of what he was able to hear. If anything, it was like watching a poorly-dubbed movie that had auto-translated subtitles; he could get a pretty general idea of what was being said, but most things just didn't match up.

From his own research, Cobra was sure "logia" meant "dragon". And from what he could guess of the two brothers' conversations, "nagurru" was something like "brother". The other words he had no clue of their meaning, other than they were spoken in a way that felt obviously directed at him.

Cobra rolled his eyes. Neither one of them is very subtle…

He didn't need his ears to know that the kid was trying to drag the conversation into another language on purpose - but being pointedly snubbed in another tongue beat being glared at from the shadows. Besides, Gajeel seemed almost happy to be speaking with someone else who knew the dragon language; someone other than Natsu, who would only use it when too excited or to hurl the rare insult, and Wendy, who didn't remember much of her mother tongue. Cobra could let it slide.

"What's wrong?" Ryos suddenly asked, reverting back to Fioran in his surprise.

"I'm okay," Gajeel dismissed. "I haven't been gettin' a lot of sleep lately."

Cobra frowned. That was something he wouldn't let slide. He tore his attention away from the window to glance over to his partner, who was trying to play off how nauseous he was - and had been since they'd left the Magnolia Station. The iron dragon caught his eye and sent a firm pulse through their bond, as if repeating the same thing to the poison dragon: I'm fine.

"As long as you're not coming down with what Salamander has," Cobra commented, giving the raven-haired man across from him a look that told him that he didn't buy that excuse, "Or else you won't be able to go anywhere ever again."

Gajeel's face scrunched as if he had tasted something sour. "Tch. Now you're just tryna make me vomit..."

The train pulled into Shirotsume Station and the three dragons stepped off the train and into a flurry of foot traffic - much more than there usually was.

Ryos stayed several steps ahead, every few steps looking back at Gajeel and Cobra, determined to show the older two the way to where his home, his small territory, had been encroached upon and disturbed.

And they followed him, pausing only briefly to exchange annoyed, knowing looks as flashes of white, gold, and dusty lavender hues in the crowds caught both their attentions - the Council's Rune Knights were starting to assemble on the scene.

A decent walk from the edge of the small city and up a steep trail, the Exceed colony was known to locals as Rockrose Village. Trees as wide as train cars towered high above the forest floor below, blanketed by pine needles, kinnikinnick, and - most notably, the village's namesake - alpine rockrose.

"It's right ahead!" Ryos told them eagerly.

"So is the Council's circus," Cobra quietly warned from beside Gajeel.

The Exceed had tucked their village away from unwanted eyes so well that it took Gajeel a moment to pick out the buildings, but when he spotted the first firm structure his eyes picked out the rest. Halfway up the thick trunks were spans of boardwalk streets crossing between trees, camouflaged by trimmed vines and built along natural branchways, hugging the circumference of trees, and dotted by small yurts and wood cabins half-way built into some of the wider trunks.

And it was at the base of the first inhabited trees that a tall chain-link fence spanned the forest floor, snaking around the outskirts of the cat village. Gawking Humans and a small dappling of Demon residents of Shirotsume crowded along the fence, warded back from the only visible gate by three Rune Knights.

Ah. So that's what his mate meant by circus. Gajeel grabbed Ryos's hood, tugging him back before he could get closer to the crowd.

"Looks like someone finally feels like doing their damn jobs," Gajeel observed bitterly.

"So?" Ryos frowned. "That dumb fence can't stop you!"

"I appreciate the vote of confidence, but I ain't exactly plannin' on going ta jail anytime soon, Ryos." Gajeel let out an exasperated sigh. "We'll definitely find clues these chucklefucks'll miss, but we gotta do it carefully."

Cobra looked up at the nearby boardwalk streets, observing the Rune Knights walking above the crowd below. His eyes narrowed in the tiniest way - it usually meant he was listening for something; if Gajeel had known the poison dragon any less, he would have missed that little expression entirely. "They're still in the beginnings of their investigation, so their focus is on this side of the village for now. Probably won't be tomorrow." He motioned to the fences loosely with his right hand. "I don't hear any rune barriers, but the fences sound like they have a perimeter enchantment on them. Likely the kind that sounds an alarm if someone climbs or jumps over it."

"Right." Gajeel looked at the fences. He was a little familiar with that type of perimeter enchantment; such fences couldn't be climbed over, jumped over, dug under, or torn through - an object like a board or blanket had to be draped over them, so that the fence would detect a non-living object instead of the person crossing over said object. "So we wait 'till it's dark and the Knights have gone back to town, then we drop a tree or something."

"That would be a little loud," Cobra side-eyed him. "They'd have an overnight guard that would hear it."

Gajeel stuck his nose up. "It'll be a tiny tree."

"And where exactly are you going to get a 'tiny tree' in a forest of giant ones?"

"There's a rolling bridge," Ryos mentioned, pointing a pale finger to the other side of Rockrose Village. "It's on a cliff on the other side, so people that need to walk can visit. Would... would that work?"

"Yeah. That should do the trick." Gajeel turned to him expectantly. "You know how it works?"

"Yeah. There's a lever on the side closest to the houses."

"Good," he said. "You can get there faster as a shadow than we can on foot. When we come back tonight, go wait for us there. Stay hidden until you see us, got it?"

"B-but-"

"No 'buts', Ryos," Gajeel interrupted. "We know how to deal with the Council if we're caught sneakin' in, but you're still a kid. You don't need that kind of attention at yer age. Trust me on that."

They locked eyes, a battle of wills playing out in the air between them. Finally, Ryos relented, his eyes sinking to the ground. "Fine."

The normal pitch-darkness of night in the woods would have been sufficient enough cover for them; dragons had moderate night vision, though their color perception faded the darker it got. Luckily, the night watchmen at the crime scene lacked such a sense and relied on the sparsely-placed lacrima lamps to illuminate their immediate surroundings.

If they stayed outside of that minimal ring of light, they would be practically undetectable. Hell, with so much plant coverage, they could take their time getting to the other side of the village. There was a darker part of the iron dragon that wanted to stay and toy with such unsuspecting and ill-equipped prey, have a little fun, but a light pull at his tunic and a flat look from a certain Elf brought him back to the hunt already in progress.

Gajeel gave one last glance in the direction the kid went. "Anyone out past these Council assholes?" he asked his mate in a hushed tone.

Following beside the iron dragon with silent steps Cobra only shook his head, confirming what Gajeel had suspected: the colony village was empty. The residents had likely been rounded up and kidnapped as a group. Or… was it catnapped...? They would be held as ransom or collateral… or worse, trafficked and sold off elsewhere.

"Figured as much," he quietly went on. "We're downwind of the village, but even from here I can tell there aren't any strong scents like you'd expect from a lived-in place."

"If Phantom Lord is working with Naked Mummy, they would have loaded them up on a vehicle of some kind and taken them to a secondary location."

"So we're looking for tire tracks. Those're easy to follow, at least." He idly rubbed his nose on his knuckles. Even if the dark mages had managed to cover their tracks, they would still leave a scent trail that reeked of oil and fuel. "We'll stop by the village, let the kid grab some of his stuff. Then we'll see which direction the bandits went."

A short silence passed between them, before Cobra asked: "Are you still sure you want to bring him all that way?" The words carried another meaning, one that Gajeel understood well: they might come across things that a child shouldn't see.

"Somethin' tells me he'd follow us anyways," Gajeel snorted. He crossed his arms and pretended to admire the underside of the boardwalk streets above. "Look. I get this thing with the kid happenin' is… a lot, 'specially on top of this Phantom bullshit. It's a lot for me, too. But… thanks. For not makin' a big stink out of it."

"I don't mind kids," Cobra told him. His eyes flicked up to look at Gajeel. "Though it seems your brother minds me a lot."

"Is anybody a fan of anything when they're twelve," Gajeel grunted. "But, yeah, I've gotten that feeling."

Ryos took issue that Cobra wasn't… exactly like them. That any dragon in the redhead was artificial. A result, Gajeel was sure, of his jackassed teenaged self bragging how to be a real dragon to the skittish whelp that looked up to him as a brother.

Gajeel sighed. "I admit it: I kinda fucked up with how I treated him. That's on me, not you. Things're just... different these days. There's other dragons around now, and one of 'em's my mate. He's just gonna have to suck it up."

"Hm," Cobra let out a short hum in thought. "That's a very mature stance for you to take."

Gajeel huffed: "Hey! I can be all mature n' shit if I wanna! Why is everybody so surprised by that?"

It was Cobra's turn to let out a sigh. "I meant that other people wouldn't own up to it so easily, or do what you're doing. Especially for someone you're not entirely sure is actually related to you."

The iron dragon eyed his mate skeptically. "So you're sayin' I'm turning into a big sap, is that it?"

Cobra rolled his eyes, lightly shaking his head. "I'm saying... that I'm weirdly proud of you, you idiot."

Heat flashed through Gajeel's body at the compliment as he tried to stifle the pink dusting his sharp features. "Y-ya can't just go saying something like that!"

"I have to say, though, you not being a dick to children anymore is a welcomed plus," his mate said, flashing a smug little smirk.

"If you're not careful, you're gonna find out how much 'dick' I can give to you later," Gajeel clicked his fangs in Cobra's direction, grinning. Before he got too distracted, he shook his head to clear his thoughts. "First we gotta get into the village, grab the kid's stuff, and find those tire tracks. What kinda place would these dark mages be holed up in, if trafficking's their game? You're the expert on this stuff."

The redhead's mood immediately soured; there was something tense, something gravely serious in the poison dragon's posture. "I'm not an expert," he quietly hissed. "Oracion Seis didn't work with the slave trade, it's… repugnant. There's a hierarchy in the dark, and the slave business is on the very bottom. The only time we even touched it was when we cleared it out from our areas of operation. But it's like a weed that keeps coming ba-" Suddenly, he froze in his tracks, mid-step, mouth half-way open, his expression hardening with horror. "We need to get to the bridge. Now."

Gajeel didn't need to wait for further instruction before taking off full-sprint, rounding the outside of the Council's fence perimeter. It was a warning of an attack if there ever was one; and he'd been so stupid to think waiting at the bridge was safer for Ryos than sneaking around the long way with them! "I thought you said there wasn't anyone else out here!" he barked back at Cobra.

"I didn't hear any thoughts coming from over this way!" Cobra sounded… almost worried. That wasn't good. At all. "Whoever, whatever it is, I can't hear their inner voice - I only heard them when they moved!"

Their path lead to a dirt road that crawled up an incline, towards the top of the cliff where two wooden poles stood fixed as markers of a roll-out bridge that still sat coiled on the opposite bank.

Ryos's feet kicked in the air, pitch black little claws straining and digging into the flesh of a hand that held his pale throat in a vice grip. A hand that was attached to a man in a long black cloak, who dangled him over the cliff's edge as if he weighed nothing.

Gajeel didn't get anything scent-wise from the man; he only caught whiffs of his own scent, likely due to the adrenaline pumping through his veins.

The figure in the long black cloak, half-gloved hand not lessening his grasp on Ryos's neck, turned around and gave the two dragons a lop-sided fanged grin through a long, wild mop of raven black hair.

A deep, animalistic, warning growl erupted out of Gajeel's throat at the sight of the other man.

There stood himself.