The Scars That Make You Whole
By CrimsonStarbird
The Laws of You and Me, Final Part
-Lucy's Army-
For Bluenote, the chaos began when Lucy disappeared.
For Sherria, the chaos had started much earlier, when Bluenote destroyed the hill upon which she was fighting.
For Wendy, before the battlefield had been ripped out from underneath them, and long before a disarmed and defeated Celestial Spirit mage had vanished into thin air, chaos had come when a not-quite-girl with cat ears the colour of untrampled snow had landed next to the Beast Master.
Perhaps the moment was not as dramatic as impossible magic or instantaneous landscaping, but Wendy's stomach lurched all the same. She had known this was going to happen. She had known ever since she'd heard Carla and Lyon had gone to the guildhall alone – no, deep inside, she had known ever since she'd decided not to tell anyone that Carla had fallen under the influence of the Beast Master's magic.
Expecting it, however, was not the same as being prepared for it.
Prepared to see those beautiful warm eyes devoid of anything but hate. Prepared to see her twirling Lucy's keys around her finger, having stolen their dear friend's weapon simply because she could. Prepared to see that smug smile, which appeared all the time to tease Happy and never for any other reason, used to gloat. Prepared to see the only one who had never left her side, through two worlds and three guilds and too many adventures to count, standing as her opponent.
There was a part of her which knew that this was entirely the fault of their enemy's magic, but it was far too small and the pain was far too large.
She could take Acnologia, Zeref, a cult of evil mages. She couldn't fight Carla. Anyone but her.
"Wendy!" Sherria's telepathic shout crackled into her mind. "Stand back, I'll deal with-"
"No, it's okay."
It wasn't okay.
Wendy took a step forward anyway.
The Carla that wasn't Carla shot her a grin that her Carla would never have used, and everything she had learned about fighting from Natsu and Gajeel evaporated from her mind. They'd taught her so much, but not how to do this. Or perhaps they had, and it was lost somewhere in the tornado of emotion that threatened to whip her away from the ground with every broken heartbeat.
Sherria's voice came again, twice as insistent. "Wendy, I'll hold off Carla. You take the snake dude-"
"It's okay," Wendy repeated, though the fact that she had once again spoken out loud rather than via their telepathic headsets was not helping to project confidence. "This is my-"
Carla-that-wasn't struck her across the face.
She hadn't retracted her claws, and as Wendy reeled from the impact, blood began to run down her cheek. At the flash of pain, old instincts reluctantly bestirred themselves, and she dodged the follow-up strike. She twisted, sky magic gathering like a gauntlet of wind around her hand, and struck back – but the wind disappeared at once; her magic flickered and failed.
The human-form Exceed caught Wendy's fist in her palm. She was still smirking that artificially static grin. Then she tugged Wendy off-balance and kicked her, and the white magic blazing around her foot did not falter like Wendy's had.
Even then, even sprawled on the ground as Carla advanced mercilessly, Wendy knew she couldn't do it.
She couldn't hurt Carla.
So, don't.
Wendy did not know where those words in her head had come from, but there was one person she knew who had often sounded so haughty and disdainful towards everyone except Wendy… until they had both joined a new guild, a crazy guild, and that voice had thawed as its owner had come to care for the people there. Ever since, that tone only ever resurfaced during the times when Wendy couldn't, or wouldn't, see the obvious.
Could she fight Carla without harming her?
The obvious answer was no – or so it would have been to anyone other than a user of Sky Magic, the most versatile kind of Dragon Slayer magic in existence. Any offensive magic she tried to turn against her best friend would fail – she didn't have the willpower to see it through – and healing magic wouldn't help her here, but there was an entirely separate class of Sky Magic that she could use without hurting her target: support enchantments.
Arms, to increase power. Armour, to increase defence. Vernier, to increase speed.
That was what she was missing.
As Wendy staggered back to her feet, an idea cut through the chaos in her head – or perhaps it had come from that chaos, because she knew she'd never have attempted this under normal circumstances.
"Carla," she said, throwing her arms wide, and letting all trace of her most dangerous dragon-slaying magic disappear. In its place, silently, subtly, she called upon her support spells: Arms, Armour, Vernier. "I know you can still hear me."
Carla – no, she told herself, not Carla, it wasn't her friend doing this– paused. A low purr reverberated from her throat. She did not speak; perhaps she had forgotten how. A grotesque grin that no human would ever use showed off the primal sharpness of her teeth.
It's not her, Wendy reminded herself firmly. Arms, Armour, Vernier.
"This isn't you, Carla. The magic is doing this to you, and you have to fight it!" Arms, Armour, Vernier. With her empty palms raised, Wendy somehow made herself look even more harmless than usual. "I won't hurt you, because you're my friend." Arms, Armour, Vernier. "And I know you won't hurt me either."
One beautiful white ear twitched, as if trying to rid itself of a fly, or an irksome thought.
Wendy cast again, Arms, Armour, Vernier, and continued, "You're better than this, Carla. You've never listened to anyone's orders but your own." Arms, Armour, Vernier. "You're a Lamia Scale mage. A Fairy Tail mage. You're stronger than any stupid magic." Arms, Armour, Vernier. "You're my best friend, so hurry up and start acting like it again!"
A furious hiss was her only response.
Well, she hadn't been expecting that to work. If the enemy's spell could be broken by sheer willpower, Carla would have snapped out of it in point-one of a second. She didn't go in for this dramatic last-second nonsense.
Wendy closed her eyes and gritted her teeth and cast as quickly as she could: ArmsArmourVernierArmsArmourVernier-
If she had kept her eyes open, she might have noticed that the expression on Carla's face as she pounced wasn't hate or anger, but surprise.
After all, of the three support enchantments Wendy had been casting over and over, only Armour had been targeted upon herself.
As Carla shot forwards with a power that would have had even Gildarts saying whoa, steady on, and the recoil threatened to rotate the planet back into yesterday, Wendy couldn't help wondering if she should have raised her own defence twice for every stat increase she had given to the Exceed.
Carla crashed uncontrollably into Wendy, and the two girls went careening down the hill at a pace that put Cana's motorbike charge to shame. It took not one row of houses to stop them, but three, and it was a solid thirty seconds later that an armistice was finally signed on the Battle for Up and Down, and the ground and sky reluctantly returned to their own territories.
Only then did Wendy realize that this wasn't some sort of eternally spinning hell designed specifically to torment Dragon Slayers, but the real world. Her defensive spells had held out. She was still alive, somewhere in the streets of Marguerite Town.
"Carla!" She was shouting before she was even on her feet, glancing left and right so quickly that she could have sworn she saw the gates of Motion Sickness Hell opening once again.
"W-Wendy? What…"
Carla had reverted to cat form, lying bruised and battered but conscious in the middle of the street. There was pain in her eyes, and confusion, but none of that mindless hate. Sherria had destroyed the Beast Master's amplifier. Carla's charge, boosted by Wendy's magic, had carried them both outside that awful magic's range.
And as Wendy swept Carla up in her arms, vowing that she would not cry until she had healed every one of the injuries her friend had sustained during their fall, chaos turned its eye elsewhere… and the hill exploded.
If Wendy's chaos was an emotional one, which she had overcome by staying calm and executing a clever strategy in the face of heart-breaking panic, then Sherria's chaos was a physical one, and staying calm wasn't helping her one bit.
It was bad enough that she had to deal with one Beast Master, one incredibly venomous snake that was exactly the same colour as the soil, a dozen wolves under her enemy's control, and a dozen more wolves that were unpredictably wild – and that she had to do it all while protecting a stable but unconscious Lyon. Taking away the ground as well just wasn't fair.
Her first instinct when the hill exploded was to create a shield of wind. Her second instinct was to immediately dismiss that shield of wind. Centring any kind of vortex upon herself when the air was full of dirt and rocks and roots and everything that had once been a hill was a recipe for disaster. At best, she would blind herself; at worst, the projectiles launched randomly by the twister would put her out of the fight at once.
Not that, then. But that was okay – Sherria was staying calm, and she had plenty of ideas. As she fell, she reached behind her, grabbed Lyon's collar, and unleashed a mighty blast of wind from her other palm, using the recoil to send her and Lyon flying out of the explosion.
The plan would have worked perfectly… if she'd had any idea where the ground was.
But between her own freefall, Bluenote's magic running rampant, and that unique quality inherent to chaos, it transpired that the direction Sherria had thought was sideways was in fact vertically upwards in disguise.
She did break out of the turmoil, momentarily. She rose above the noise and the madness and the danger and entered the world the moon saw: a silver world, a silent world, a world in which logic and order existed and were beautiful, enshrined in Newton's laws.
Then chaos flexed its will – somewhere out there, Bluenote began to crush Lucy to death, and the ripples of gravity magic caught Sherria too; chaos was not picky about the agents it chose – and Sherria and Lyon began to fall again. Beneath them yawned that maelstrom of disrupted earth and broken gravity, of lethal rocks and twisted winds… and of flying wolves. She hadn't noticed before, when she'd been blindly fighting for a way out, but there had been wolves on the hill when it had erupted, and they'd also been conscripted into this madness.
That was when Sherria decided she had had enough of being calm.
She had tried to be sensible. She had tried to tackle her predicament with logic. She had tried to come up with a strategy, like Wendy had done to rescue Carla.
But sometimes one had to fight madness with madness, and it turned out that being plunged into a tornado full of live wolves was one of those times.
Sherria felt relief, in that moment, that Wendy was far away. It would not do for the younger of the Sky Sisters, who had come up with a rational solution to her chaos, to see the example that Sherria was about to set.
(She had forgotten, of course, that Wendy had once been a Fairy Tail mage, and in Fairy Tail they ate madness for breakfast, usually with a side helping of recklessness and some mayhem done sunny side up.)
"Sorry, Lyon," Sherria muttered. Vowing to go back and heal him later, she kicked him away from the storm, using him as a springboard to launch herself straight towards its heart.
The Beast Master stood on the other side, having managed to scramble outside the region of confused gravity. He thought he was safe from her there. He thought wrong.
Through pandemonium she went: bouncing from rock to root to wolf's back to empty space, and then altering her direction with a burst of wind. She was both far above the ground and within it, as soil and stone whirled around her. She dodged snapping jaws with the precision of a hummingbird and the grace of a leopard; she struck down anything that came too close with a fist cloaked in black wind. Gravity couldn't make up its mind whether to help her or hinder her, so she ignored it, and found a way under her own power.
Something furry caught her square in the back – but it was a tail, not a claw, and she pressed onward without pause. She ducked under a branch, only for it to twist, alive, and sink its fangs into her wrist. The snake.
Sherria simply grinned. Wendy's enhanced senses would have made traversing the storm much easier, but Sherria wouldn't trade her God Slayer's self-healing for anything the Dragon Slayer could do. The venom seeping into her veins was immediately washed away by a tide of magic, and in the next moment, tar-black feathers like slashing blades ripped the beast to shreds.
That's for Lyon, she thought.
Then she broke out of the remnants of the explosion, and gravity was normal again, and the ground was solid beneath her feet, and she was charging across the grass towards the astonished Beast Master with her heart soaring in triumph.
Then a single ash-grey feather drifted through the air in front of her.
She had forgotten about the pigeons.
Bluenote's chaos came as silence.
It couldn't have been any other way. As a man of immense power, any physical chaos would have been quashed at once; as a man not much given to outbursts of emotion, any mental chaos would have failed to gain traction.
Instead, chaos had calmly and quietly done the impossible, and made Uninteresting Girl vanish.
There was one long moment of incomprehensible, chaotic silence.
Then another.
Bluenote risked a glance at Girl With Fairy Glitter, but she looked as stunned as he would have done, had his facial muscles not agreed that displays of emotion were a waste of energy. No, she didn't understand what had just happened either.
It was calm, yes; it was quiet, yes; but it defied all the laws of logic and magic in the way that only chaos could.
The thing was, he had watched the cat disarm Uninteresting Girl. In fact, he had almost prevented it. If he'd thought she would have been a more interesting opponent with her keys than without them, he would have done so, but he already knew that she couldn't fly either way, so why waste the effort?
Common sense said that Uninteresting Girl had simply been hiding teleportation or some other such power as a secondary magic, one for which she did not need her keys. That would have been his response to the story had he heard it from anyone other than his own magical senses.
He knew what he'd sensed, and what he'd sensed had been unequivocally Celestial Spirit magic. In fact, the light pouring from Uninteresting Girl had felt more like Celestial Spirit magic than anything he had ever experienced – as if all the Gates he'd previously seen opened were plastic replicas, and now, at last, he was standing in front of the real thing. It was so obviously right that he wondered how he had ever thought normal summoning to be true magic.
Maybe he should give Uninteresting Girl a new nickname.
Once he'd found her, crushed her, and beaten the secret of that magic out of her, of course.
"Wendy? Are you alright?" Carla asked. Or, rather, tried to ask – Wendy was hugging the little cat so tightly that the question failed to come out at all. Realizing her mistake, Wendy let go, and a somewhat indignant Carla repeated her questions, having thought of even more in the meantime: "Are you alright? What happened? How did we get here?"
"Umm…" Wendy began weakly. "Maybe it'll be faster if you tell me how much you remember…"
Carla's brow furrowed, human-like, as she thought. "I was watching the parade with Lucy… wolves attacked, and other monsters too… I flew off with Lyon; I was going to take him to the guildhall… and now I'm here?"
Her glances around became frantic. The town had been evacuated, and the beasts had dispersed following the destruction of the amplifier, but thanks to Carla's own out-of-control attack, the street in which the two girls sat did not look like it belonged to a town that had been saved. That was the reason for her panic: "What happened? Wendy!"
Wendy had spent the entire time that she was healing Carla carefully working out what she was going to say, but at that tone, she immediately spilled everything in a jumbled rush of words: how Carla had fallen victim to the enemy's magic not once but twice; how Wendy and Sherria had managed to save Lyon, thanks to the arrival of Lucy and Cana, who were taking on Bluenote; how Sherria was fighting the Beast Master while Wendy had lured Carla out of his magic's range.
Carla was silent throughout this rushed tale, but her expression had cycled audibly enough from stern to worried to more distraught than Wendy had ever seen her before. "I did that…? I hurt you- I kidnapped Lyon- I put the whole guild in danger-"
"It's not your fault, Carla! It was the Beast Master's magic-"
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"What?"
"We knew there was a Beast Master threatening the town, and you knew he could make me into his weapon – Wendy, why did you keep quiet about this? We should have had Lyon tie me to one of the parade floats until all this was over!"
"Because… I knew that it would hurt you, and I didn't want you to feel guilty…"
"What, guiltier than I'd have felt if I'd regained consciousness to find that I'd strangled Lyon to death?"
"I…"
"This is your problem, Wendy! You always try and protect people without thinking about the consequences! Why didn't you just tell me the truth?"
Before she knew it, Wendy was shouting too. "Well, why didn't you tell me you wanted to go back to Fairy Tail?"
A minute passed in silence.
"I don't see what that has to do with anything," Carla snapped.
"You can't expect me to tell you the truth, especially painful truths, if you don't do the same for me!" When Carla said nothing, Wendy continued, almost desperately, "You told me you didn't care whether you stayed in Lamia Scale or left. But Sherria knows you want to leave, and Lucy too… why am I the only one you lied to?"
"You're no better!" Carla shot back. "Everyone can see that you only turned Lucy down because you're worried about leaving Sherria on her own! You mustn't always try to please everyone, Wendy. We are stronger than you give us credit for!"
Wendy felt as though she'd been punched in the gut. By Natsu. No, by Laxus. The only thing stopping it from being Gildarts-level was the fact that she knew, on some level, that Carla was right; she'd known it ever since she and Sherria had run up the hill to rescue Lyon together.
"Sherria was so angry with me," she whispered, without thinking. "I could feel it in her magic… we couldn't work together at all. And when we found Lyon, Sherria went ahead with this really reckless plan, which she'd never have done if she wasn't so angry… that's why Lyon almost died…"
She sniffed, and Carla rested her paw upon her friend's hand. "You have to do what's right for you, Wendy. That's all Sherria wants for you."
"But it's not as simple as that! Everyone assumes I want to go back to Fairy Tail, but… honestly, I really don't know if I do. And if it doesn't make a difference to me either way, why shouldn't I pick the option that's best for Sherria?"
"Because it's not best for Sherria, to live the rest of her life knowing she was the one who held you back," Carla said, and just as she could be more acerbic than anyone else in Fairy Tail, she could also be more gentle. "Just like not telling me what I did to you wasn't best for me. You can't make those decisions for other people."
There was another moment of silence, a moment they didn't have to spare with the battle raging outside town, but which was more important in its own way.
"Carla," Wendy whispered, at last. "Will you tell me, truthfully, why you want to go back to Fairy Tail?"
"Do you remember when we left Cait Shelter?" Carla asked, and Wendy gave a tight, unnecessary nod. "Master Roubaul made Cait Shelter for the two of us. It had the appearance of a guild, but it wasn't one – it was a home, because that was what you needed when he first took you in. By the time we met Natsu and the others, you were already starting to outgrow it. We couldn't have stayed there forever – there was no real challenge; no way for us to grow or learn; no future for us there. That's why Master Roubaul knew we had to leave.
"To me, Lamia Scale is the opposite. It's a great guild. We could stay here forever, working and going on adventures, with every day bringing new surprises, and in time we'd become truly great mages. But… it doesn't feel like a home. Great as they are, these people are colleagues, not family.
"Fairy Tail is the only place I've ever been that has felt like both guild and home; like present and future. In Lamia Scale, I only feel at home when you're around, Wendy – but in Fairy Tail, I feel like that with everyone. That's where my friends are. That's where I want to be."
"I understand. Thank you for telling me, Carla."
"But…?" Carla prompted, when Wendy hesitated.
"But the Fairy Tail you're describing doesn't exist any more, does it?"
Carla frowned at her. "Of course it does."
"It can't! If it did, everyone would have stayed together, not abandoned us-"
"Wendy," the Exceed interrupted her, in her best no-nonsense tone.
Wendy fell silent at once. And sat up a little more formally in the road. If she'd been wearing a tie, she'd probably have straightened that too.
Carla continued, "Did you or did you not just tell me that, a few minutes ago, Cana saved your life by throwing an exploding motorbike at Bluenote Stinger?"
"…I did."
"There you go, then. As long as one person is doing outrageous things to save their friends, Fairy Tail is still alive."
"But-"
"Don't you want to be part of that again, Wendy?"
A smile, steady and true, and it was as if the sun had risen in the middle of the night. "Yeah, I do."
"Well, either way, Lucy says you have until the First of September to think about it. You know how I feel, and you should talk to Sherria about it too. Right now, though-"
The last of Carla's words were drowned out by a crackling through Wendy's telepathic headset. "Wendy! Is Carla okay? If she is, I could use a little help here-!"
"I'm on my way," Wendy sent back, and then, to Carla: "I need to go help Sherria."
"Very well," Carla agreed. "I'll take these keys back to Lucy; she must be in trouble without them-"
"No! You can't go back there, Carla. You need to stay away from the Beast Master. I know you want to help, and it's not because you're weak or anything – this just isn't your fight, okay?"
The cat's expression darkened momentarily, and Wendy thought that this was precisely why she hadn't just politely asked Carla to stay away from Marguerite until the Beast Master was caught, but in the end, Carla nodded and tossed her the keys. "I'll stay away from him."
"Thanks," Wendy said, and she meant it. "Stay here, alright?" And she headed back towards the ruined hill.
"No, that's not what I agreed to at all," Carla huffed, as she flew off in the opposite direction.
The first time Sherria had lost to a bunch of pigeons, she had been holding back.
And with good reason: highly trained homing pigeons, used to convey messages between Fiorean military outposts, didn't come cheap.
Because Sherria wasn't a Fairy Tail mage, she had tried to minimize the collateral damage, which meant using as little magic as possible and trying to wrestle each of the pigeons back into their cages by hand – even if it left her wide open to attacks from the rest of the flock. Admittedly, these 'attacks' mostly consisted of ripping off strips of her skirt with which to reinforce the nests they were building in her hair, but her wounded pride had to concede that the birds had got the better of their exchanges.
But these pigeons weren't important military assets. They were wild. Sherria didn't particularly want to hurt a flock of birds whose only crime had been to stray too close to the Beast Master's magic, but she wasn't above using force to repel them, either.
Thus, she had taken on the second flock with the power designed to bring gods of magic to their knees.
And it wasn't making the slightest bit of difference.
Swarms, so it transpired, were a real pain to fight. Physical attacks did nothing, yet all the minor scratches she was receiving in return were beginning to add up (her self-healing abilities, sadly, did not extend to repairing the increasingly embarrassing gashes in her idol outfit). She had been relying on her wide-range God Slayer magic to take down the aggressive flock… but that wasn't having much of an effect either. Wind-based attacks weren't much use against creatures that could fly.
Besides, for every ten she blasted out of the way with a Secret Art, there were another twenty to take their place. She was going at almost full God Slayer power now, and they just kept coming from all directions at once.
The more advanced the magic she used, the less effective it seemed to be. The problem was that thinking outside the box wasn't her speciality – it was Wendy's. Months of keeping up with Natsu and Gajeel, despite being physically weaker, had ensured it. No one but Wendy would have thought of using support enchantments as a weapon against Carla. Sherria couldn't think like that.
She needed another point of view.
She needed Wendy.
Sherria hesitated. There was a part of her that was still angry with Wendy. More than that, there was a part of her that wanted to prove she was capable of doing this on her own, so that Wendy would stop doing what she thought was best for Sherria and do what was best for herself.
But her guild came first. Her town came first. Breaking through the angry flock of pigeons and defeating the Beast Master before he could reach the backup amplifier came first.
So she activated her headset and called for Wendy, and then resumed running for her life against the unbeatable swarm of pigeons.
And she ran.
And she ran some more.
And just as she began to fear that her tattered idol outfit wasn't going to hold out much longer – she might survive its fall, but her dignity certainly would not – she heard a silent shout through her headset: "Sherria, get down!"
Sherria threw herself face-first onto the grass, hands over her head, knowing that the sadistic caws of victory from overheard, the last remnant of some vicious evolutionary ancestor that should have remained extinct, would haunt her nightmares forever if Wendy didn't do something fast-
Then the soundtrack of defeat was gone, and in its place came the roar of an almighty tempest; a volcano blasting out pure sky. Through half-shut eyes, Sherria saw an immense twister, the largest Sky Dragon's Roar she had ever seen, bearing down upon the flock of pigeons. Before it, they did not seem like wicked instruments of destruction, but little specks of dust swept up by heaven's own vacuum cleaner. Wendy utilized the resistance of airborne targets to turbulence-based attacks to push the entire flock out of range of the Beast Master's magic without harming them.
Her vantage point outside the swarm had let her target all of them in one go, which Sherria had been unable to do from inside, but she knew the difference between Wendy and herself was more than that. Glimpsing Wendy stood there, in full Dragon Force, throwing around so much power so confidently… she had always told herself that gods of magic were superior to dragons, but it was at times like these that Sherria knew all her authority as the leader of their team came from her age alone.
Wendy was fantastic, she really was. And she needed to be amongst those who would challenge and encourage her. Amongst Fairy Tail.
As Sherria staggered to her feet, she saw the fleeing Beast Master whip the canvas off a nearby cart, revealing an orb of crystal glittering like the one she had already destroyed – the reserve amplifier. But Wendy was there too, a blur of pink motion. The orb shattered into dust and was carried away by the wind, along with all the Beast Master's cruel intentions.
"That's enough," she said. The words were quiet, but hers was the voice of a dragon, and it carried far beyond the ruined hill.
The snake-man quailed before her. The beasts had fled; the dragon stood victorious; Marguerite Town was saved. Their part in this battle was over.
"Thanks, Wendy," Sherria grinned. "You really helped me out there."
"You too." Wendy stepped back, and she reached out her hand to her friend. "Sherria," she began seriously. "On the First of September, I'm going to become a mage of Fairy Tail. Until then, I am a mage of Lamia Scale. Is that alright?"
Smiling, Sherria took her friend's hand, and the air flowed black and silver around them. "Of course. I can't wait for Fairy Tail to return. And until then… we are going to have a great few weeks together, Wendy. Let's set guild records that will last until the Sky Sisters are reunited."
Thousands of years ago, when History was still living happily under the same roof as its parents Myth and Legend, the world's greatest hunter had boasted of his aim to slay every beast in existence. Mother Earth, fearing that his ambition was within his power to achieve, sent a giant scorpion to stop him. After a long and brutal battle, the scorpion lay crushed to death by the hunter's club, and the hunter had succumbed to the poison of the scorpion's tail. The gods, honouring both with a celestial burial, wisely set the mortal enemies at opposite points of the heavenly sphere: Orion was to reign over the earth in winter, and Scorpius in summer.
Twelve years ago as Lucy counted it (or nineteen, as the world turned), long after History had stormed out and slammed the door behind him, a Celestial Spirit mage called Layla Heartfilia had sat by her daughter's bed and recounted the tale just as that ancient civilization had told it. And her daughter, who loved reading stories and would one day love writing them too, had listened with wide and shining eyes.
What relation existed between the myth of Orion and the eccentric yet dependable magical entity that could be summoned through the Gate of the Scorpion, Lucy did not know. In all likelihood, there was none. Every ancient culture drew its own lines between the stars and named them for its own gods; she did not know why any magic that formed naturally would favour the myths of her civilization over any other, nor why the keys happened to correspond to the constellations the astronomers of her own kingdom traditionally saw in the heavens. It was, to her, just another of magic's countless quirks.
Regardless, ever since she had first become able to use the power of Star Dress without needing her keys to do it, some secret part of her had delighted in drawing parallels between her new abilities and those stories of old.
Maybe it was because the part of her that silently filtered all her experiences for anything that would make a good novel element admired the poetry of it. Maybe the part of her that had never stopped being a Fairy Tail mage just liked the drama, the heroicness, of being able to trace her magic back to ancient legends, like Natsu had his dragon father.
Maybe some unheard part of her mind had simply clung to anything that might explain away the impossibility of doing Celestial Spirit magic without any celestial keys.
In that moment, though, as she shone with the light of the burning red star, she recalled those stories for no greater and no lesser reason than that it felt right.
Contrary to the belief of almost everyone on the battlefield, Lucy had not teleported away. Instead, under the cover of the star's dazzling radiance, she had slipped underground. Bluenote had crushed the hill, churned up the soil, and reduced stone to sand, and it was through this that she moved as easily as if it were water.
No, not water – for although she felt as weightless within the earth as she would have done in the sea, despite Bluenote's best efforts, she needed nothing so mundane as swimming or burrowing to move. The soil flowed around her, impossible currents without source or substance, conveying her to where she needed to be: the blessing of Mother Earth, which once had guided a mythical scorpion into battle for the sake of animalkind.
Then again, Scorpius probably hadn't used nature's blessing to sucker-punch Orion in the groin.
That was the sort of detail unlikely to be found in any legend in which both combatants were honoured by the gods, but Lucy was going for victory in the here and now, not glory in the ever after.
Besides, she really, really didn't like Bluenote.
Lucy burst out of the ground beneath her opponent, and her knee connected in a blow that felt far more satisfying than it should have done. Bluenote let out a howl of pain – so he wasn't entirely expressionless after all – and he lashed out blindly, doubling the strength of the gravity around him. She let it pull her down, and the earth welcomed her, swallowing her completely and spitting her out an instant later behind her opponent. Her aerial spinning kick caught him square in the back.
Bluenote staggered round. Furious didn't begin to describe the expression on his face.
To his credit, he had learned. This time, he swept his hand upwards, reversing gravity and launching her up into the air, away from the earth that protected her.
It wasn't enough. It wasn't even close. There was power within her, and it surged to the steady pulse of the Scorpion's Heart, blazing hundreds of light years away and right here. It was the nerve to stand against the greatest hunter of all and the might to fight him to a draw.
She flicked her wrist and a river of dirt rose out of the ground, forming a great sweeping arch above her. Adjusting to the reversed gravity in an instant, she ran along its underside, and an instant later her fist connected with Bluenote's chin.
It was the first time since her reappearance that Lucy had slowed down enough for any member of her astonished audience to get a good look at her. As with her normal Star Dress transformations, her appearance had changed. Most of her hair was drawn into a long ponytail, while a sweatband kept the rest from obscuring her vision. Complementing this was an athletic outfit, the kind one might wear to learn a long-lost martial art at some forbidden dojo, complete with plate armour bracers around her forearms and shins. A short chain formed a replica scorpion tail in steel, complete with vicious stinger.
That much was unremarkable – she had used the normal form countless times before – but there was a counterintuitive vitality to it, as if performing the transformation without Scorpio's key had added a piece of the puzzle when it should have taken one away. Light flowed around her, a carapace of crimson starshine. It deflected the greatest force Bluenote could produce as easily as it had the great Orion's club, much to the incredulity of those who had never fought a demigod.
She twisted, and the blade at the end of her tail, moved by her will and therefore impossible for something as trivial as gravity to stop, cut a deep gash in Bluenote's chest. He stumbled, and she took the chance to knock him back with another spinning kick. The poison in her tail wasn't fatal, but it would remove any chance he may have had of turning the tables on her-
"Fairy Glitter!" a voice yelled.
Lucy jerked back in shock as the golden light of the fairies descended from the heavens a second time, stripping the battlefield of any shadows the pale moonlight had failed to disperse.
The magic lasted longer this time, several seconds of Bluenote struggling and shrieking, but in the end, the second casting of Fairy Glitter broke just as the first had under his power. There he was in the ruins of the hill, gasping for breath, but clambering back to his feet.
Astonished, Lucy wheeled round to confront Cana. "What do you think you're doing? I had a good combo attack going there!"
"You can't hog the boss all to yourself," Cana retorted. "I've got a score to settle with that guy!"
The tension upon the battlefield spluttered and died.
"He already beat you!" Lucy pointed out. "Stand back! I'm dealing with this!"
"Nah, I just needed a distraction to break out of his gravity! Now that I'm free, I can handle this battle myself!"
Lucy sighed. She was the one who had revealed her hidden power to snatch the golden tooth of victory from the jaws of a particularly vicious dragon of defeat. By any and all dramatic criteria, the battle was hers to win.
Then again, having to be saved by her father last time hadn't been a great experience for Cana, so maybe she was owed this chance to finish Bluenote with her own two hands.
"Fine, he's yours!" she shouted to Cana. "You'd better have a way to actually win, though!"
"Of course I-" Cana retorted, although that was as far as she got.
A streak of violet flashed across their vision. Both girls stared, open-mouthed, as a flaming missile shot from the sky and smacked straight into Bluenote. The eddies of torn spacetime left in its wake swirled and stretched, and for one elongated moment both Lucy and Cana could clearly see the last thing they had been expecting: a middle-aged man with slate-blue hair and a matching moustache punching Bluenote in the face with a fist of purple fire.
"Hands off my guild!" Macao roared.
"Hands off my boss fight!" Cana yelled back. "He's my enemy! Mine!"
"Oh, honestly," Lucy muttered, reflecting wryly upon the fact that not having Natsu and Gray in the mix clearly didn't make a Fairy Tail frontal assault any less chaotic.
Even with a crooked and bleeding nose, Bluenote managed to fix his new opponent with an unimpressed look. Gravity roared, and Macao was flung away from him, falling too fast and hitting the ground too hard. Still the purple fire blazed; still he rolled and managed to get back to his feet, and he would have charged their enemy again if Cana hadn't jumped in the way.
It wasn't a heroic, self-sacrificial jump. It was designed to stake her authority: this is my fight. Her right arm was once again afire with Fairy Glitter's radiance.
Bluenote glared at her. "Still you cannot use that magic at its full potential. It is an insult. I would rather lose to him-" He jerked his head in a rather derogatory way towards Macao "-than to you."
"Too bad for you," Cana breezed. "Well, it's not as though you don't have a point. This magic is far too complicated for me to use properly. And though I inherited a ton of magic power from my old man, I can't just use it like he does. The Master said it was because I spent too long forcing it into low-powered forms like Card Magic. My magic's too accustomed to using rapid low-power spells to be able to release everything in one huge explosion. That's my dad's fault too, you know, since I only learnt Card Magic to try and find him."
Then she shrugged, completely at ease amongst her own flaws.
"But, you know what? The First Master knew that when she gave me this magic. You're so obsessed with whether we can or can't fly that you've forgotten we don't all fly in the same way. Some of us can do it through brute force, like my old man, and those who can't go on to invent hot air balloons or biplanes or space rockets and go even higher. Yeah, I'm never going to be able to use Fairy Glitter properly. But, at the same time… there's no rule saying I'm out of the fight just because my greatest magic didn't knock you out in one go. That's where I went wrong the first time we fought, you see. I gambled all my hopes on one single use of a magic I didn't truly understand, and when it failed, I gave up."
With an impish grin, Cana stretched her right hand towards the sky once again. "But, you know, you don't win a drinking competition by being the first to down a pint. Endurance has always been more my thing. Not giving up on the S-Class Trials, being the first to start drinking and the last to finish every day, that sort of thing. Rather than focussing on trying to knock the enemy out in one blow, like my dad, I decided to play to my own strengths. Once I stripped all the complicated stuff out of Fairy Glitter, I found that it suited me a lot better. It's nice and easy to use, as well. I could keep this up all day."
There was, floating above her, was an enormous golden halo of magic, no weaker for having been summoned twice already that evening.
"You've taken two of these already, and you're not looking too good," Cana pointed out. "But even though I may not be able to release much of my magic at once, I still have an awful lot of it. I have a feeling you're going to hit your limit long before I hit mine. Still think you can fly, Bluenote? I'll beat you back down to earth."
After that, the battle didn't last very long.
To his credit, Bluenote did make Cana hit him with another two Fairy Glitters before gasping a surrender and promptly passing out. A group of sensible Lamia Scale mages shortly arrived to take him and the Beast Master into custody.
In the meantime-
"How dare you show up out of nowhere and try to steal my kill?" Cana was yelling, quite oblivious to the hypocrisy of that accusation.
"I reserve the right to defend my guild in any way I deem necessary!" Macao yelled back. "As Fourth Master, all enemies of the guild are my enemies!"
"You're not Fourth Master any more, old man! You can't be Master, even ex-Master, of a guild that doesn't exist! Therefore, since I was there first, that final boss was mine!"
"You were taking too long!"
"I'm sorry for actually fighting the battle!" Cana retorted. "We can't all just rock up at the last minute and expect to get the finishing blow!"
"Well I'm sorry for prioritizing the evacuation of the civilians over rushing straight for the enemy boss, like some people!"
This had been going on for quite some time.
Watching them, it was impossible to believe that, mere minutes ago, one had been protecting citizens against an unknown and potentially limitless enemy, and the other would have died against the boss whose defeat they were arguing over if not for Lucy's intervention. You can't be Master of a guild that doesn't exist, Cana had just shouted, but this, Lucy thought – the paradoxical liveliness born from the darkest of situations – this was proof that Fairy Tail would never die.
She should have been frustrated at the two drinking partners bickering like Natsu and Gray, but instead she was grinning like a fool, like she hadn't in ten months.
That grin was still plastered to her face when Wendy ran up to her, Carla fluttering at her shoulder. Wendy was still in Dragon Force, as if it had become so familiar to her now that she had forgotten she was using it. She handed Lucy her celestial keys, and checked, "Do you need healing, Lucy?"
"No, I'm fine, thanks. Though," she added, with a pointed glance at the bickering duo, "I have a feeling that one or both of those will in a minute."
"That's the one part of our guild I haven't missed," Wendy sighed.
"Agreed," said Lucy.
They looked at each other; they both knew the other was lying; they laughed.
Carla folded her arms. "I will admit, I didn't expect this outcome. If I had, I would probably have left you to it."
"What…?" Lucy wondered, but it was Wendy who answered.
"Once Carla was free of the Beast Master's magic, she flew straight to where the Lamia Scale mages were looking after the evacuees. She told them that the threat from the beasts was over, and the real battle was going on at the far side of town. Apparently, Macao demanded that she take him there at once. Romeo did too, but she could only carry one."
"I couldn't risk getting too close," Carla muttered, embarrassed. "But Macao told me to fly high enough to be out of range of the Beast Master's magic, and then throw him at Bluenote from there."
Lucy thought about this, nodded, and then-
We came to Marguerite because we were scared.
That was what Macao had said to her, earlier that very day, when she had tried to recruit him into her revived Fairy Tail. And yet he had just made Carla quite literally throw him into the most dangerous situation Marguerite Town had faced in ten months.
"Why?" she wondered.
She must have spoken louder than she had intended, from the way that even Cana and Macao broke off their squabbling to look at her. Because she no longer had a choice, with them all watching her expectantly, she finished her thought in words: "Why did you rush here and dive into a fight it looked like we were going to lose?"
Macao shrugged; to him, the answer was obvious. "There was danger. There was evil. Where else would I be, except at my guild's side? I am the Fourth Master, you know."
"But…" She knew it would sound insulting, but she had to ask, to understand. "You told me you were scared. That was why you came to Marguerite, because it was safer to be with Lamia Scale. So why would you…?"
"I am scared," he said simply. "We all were, when the guild disbanded. But not of dark mages; not of the evil that has it in for our guild."
He tugged down the shoulder of his jacket, revealing the guild mark that he, like so many others, had refused to erase upon the guild's disbandment. "When there's a threat to my family or my friends or my home, I run towards it, just like we did with Tartaros. That's why I'm a Fairy Tail mage. My fear is that when I do, I'll be alone. I came to Marguerite Town not so that Lamia Scale would protect me, but so that I would have a guild to stand with when the time came. But if Fairy Tail's getting back together, I'd much rather have them at my side."
And just like that, Lucy understood what she'd been missing.
Cana and Macao resumed their argument, despite Wendy's vain attempt to broker a peace, while Carla gave it up as a lost cause and went to see if Sherria had managed to bring Lyon round yet.
Lucy stayed and said nothing, overcome with emotion and her own foolishness.
She watched from afar as a deal was reached (Cana would accept that Macao had done the right thing, and Macao would buy all her drinks for the rest of the night – which, given the celebrations that were sure to follow a victory of this magnitude, and the fact that Lamia Scale had apparently stepped up to prevent the inevitable collapse of the alcohol trade in Fairy Tail's absence, seemed awfully harsh on Macao). She watched as Romeo showed up, escalating the almost-settled argument once again by blaming his father for snatching what should have been his heroic chance to prove himself equal to Wendy and Sherria.
And she was still watching as-
"HOW DID YOU DO THAT?"
-as the one person she had not missed during the entire battle finally made it onto the field.
Zeref seemed more out of breath than anyone who had actually been fighting, perhaps because he had sprinted across to her at the first available opportunity, once everyone's attention had turned elsewhere.
"How?" he repeated, reducing the volume of his shout a little, so as not to be noticed by the dispersing group of warriors. "How did you do a Star Dress transformation without your keys? It's not possible! It goes against all the rules of Celestial Spirit magic!"
Lucy beamed at him. She really hadn't wanted to reveal her secret weapon to her guild's greatest enemy, but the expression on his face made it so totally worth it.
"No!" His eyes flashed fierce in the moonlight. "I know this magic, Lucy, better than anyone! It has rules for a reason, and whatever you are doing to get round them may well have consequences you can't possibly imagine! So, what did you do?"
Smiling, Lucy raised her hand and pointed towards the southern horizon.
Zeref looked, saw nothing there of any import, and looked back at her. "What?"
Oh, it was fun having this much power over him. She could see, now, why he did it to her. With deliberate, amused slowness, she raised her hand once again, and pointed towards the beautiful red star hanging low in the sky. "Antares."
There was so much impatience in the look Zeref shot her that she wondered if explosions of suppressed emotion could kill immortal mages.
With that same steady pace, she located another, dimmer star, barely risen above the dark earth. "Lesath." And to the left, its neighbour. "Shaula."
Now there was comprehension, though it did not, paradoxically, lessen the confusion saturating his every word. "Scorpius? You… used the constellation itself, instead of a key?"
"Uh-huh."
His eyes widened, dawning like the moon's twin. Just as his confusion had been childlike and unadulterated, so too was his awe unrestrained, as if he didn't know or didn't care that it was an enemy he was speaking to. "Lucy, that's brilliant!"
He stared at Antares. He stared back at her.
"No, wait, that doesn't make any sense at all!"
"Welcome to Fairy Tail," Lucy grinned.
"No! You can't turn the laws of magic on their head and get away with a pseudo-explanation like that!"
"Get used to it," she smirked. "It's not like I'm the only one. Did you see Cana throwing out Fairy Glitters like she was downing pints?"
"That was reckless," Zeref muttered. He looked downright disapproving now, like an old schoolmaster. "Magic of that magnitude is not supposed to be used in quick succession. She is fortunate that she cannot use it properly; it would likely have killed her if she could."
"It's not about fortune; it's about turning weaknesses into strengths," she reprimanded him. "How about Wendy, then? I don't think she's even noticed she's still in Dragon Force; it's just that easy for her now. Were you watching when she fought and saved Carla purely through the creative use of support magic? Or Carla herself, who, upon realizing she couldn't fight against the enemy's magic, still found her own way of contributing – namely, by launching Macao torpedoes at the enemy from a distance? And Macao!" She laughed in beautiful disbelief. "Back on Tenrou Island, Gildarts was the only member of our guild who could stand up to Bluenote, and yet Macao of all people just went and punched him in the face!"
Lucy's eyes were shining, and there was light in her voice. She had buried her love for her guild so very deep in its absence, but it had only gone and sent out roots and sprouted a hundred times larger than before. She gazed down upon her friends, her incredible, impossible, inimitable guildmates, and marvelled that there had ever been a time when she had been willing to live without them.
Zeref was going to attack Fairy Tail as soon as it was back together. When Lucy had realized this, she had been so worried that she was luring her friends into danger under false pretences that she had almost called off the entire mission.
She understood, now, that she'd had it backwards the entire time.
If she told her friends that returning to Fairy Tail meant fighting Zeref, and by extension all the darkness that remained in the world, no earthly force would be able to stop them from signing up.
Zeref stood beside her on what passed for the top of the ruined hill, watching the former Fairy Tail mages with his arms folded. "So," he mused. "This is Fairy Tail, then?"
"Terrifying, isn't it?" Lucy grinned, echoing back the same words he had said to her on the day their journey began. "I'd be making the most of this truce if I were you, Zeref. The moment it's over, we are going to crush you."
He looked at her, amused, and she met that black gaze unflinching; met it with a smile and star-bright defiance. On that night, upon that extinguished battlefield, two enemy generals acknowledged each other as equals for the very first time.
"The First of September," Zeref said. "That is the day Fairy Tail falls."
"No," Lucy promised. "That is the day Fairy Tail rises."