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Imaginary Friends

Wendy loves her new guild and her new friends, but sometimes she still misses Cait Shelter, even if she isn't sure she should be mourning people she never really knew. She's not as alone as she thinks. Mavis knows a little something about missing someone who never existed at all, and Fairy Tail was made for people like her.

One moment Wendy was laughing with Natsu about Happy's latest attempt to woo Charle, and the next she was turning to comment on it to Master Roubaul. Her mouth was already open, the words perched on the tip of her tongue, when she remembered that he wasn't there. That, in a way, he never had been. But at least more so than Magna or Pepel or the others, who she had never actually known. Who had died long before she was born and been nothing more than illusions.

The words caught in her throat like broken glass and stuck there, choking her.

"You alright?" Natsu asked, raising an eyebrow.

Wendy tried to say fine, but it was just one more sharp-edged shard of glass that caught on the rest and stuck. Instead, she nodded and smiled a wobbly smile. Natsu blurred as tears filmed her eyes, but luckily he had taken her at her word and was already turning away to tease Happy some more. One of the qualities Wendy admired him most for was that wide-open trust. When someone said something, he believed them because he assumed they were telling the truth. Some might call it naïve, but Wendy wanted to believe that too.

She drifted backwards, slipped around Gajeel and Cana arguing nearby, and crept out the back door of the guild. Fairy Tail was always in such high spirits, and they had done so much for her and Charle. It wasn't fair to subject them to her unjustified bad mood. Really, there was nothing to be upset about when they were so kind to her. She loved them, and Fairy Tail had quickly become her new home.

Still…

Maybe it wasn't right to mourn people who had never even existed when there was a whole guild full of people she loved right here, but sometimes it still hit her like a train when she least expected it. She missed Magna's laugh and Naoki's eye for fashion and Pepel's teasing and Master Roubaul's gentle advice. They had been her family first. Or maybe she'd had no family until Fairy Tail. It was all very confusing, when she stopped to think about it. She still felt a void yawning in her chest, even if she wasn't sure she had lost something she never had to start with.

Wendy sat down on the stone steps outside the back door. Maybe it was silly to mourn an illusion, but today she missed it terribly. Charle was the only one who might understand, but she had recovered quickly and Wendy didn't want to drag her back down. Charle was good at focusing on the present, the practical, the real, and didn't seem to struggle the way Wendy did. Things were the way they were, and it was best to accept that. Charle didn't question her emotions, just felt them and moved on. Wendy envied her that sometimes.

Things had been so busy lately that Wendy had barely had time to dwell on the past or think hard enough to brood, but now she buried her face in her hands and cried. She cried for Master Roubaul, whose spirit had been unable to find rest for centuries and had lingered alone with the guilt of creating Nirvana until Jellal—Mystogan?—had dropped a child on his doorstep. She cried for the Nirvit tribe, who had destroyed themselves with the weapon they'd created. She cried for her friends, who had died long ago. She cried because she'd had no friends at all, only illusory companions. And she cried for herself and Charle, who had lived a lie and had their whole world ripped out from underneath them in one terrible moment.

"What's wrong?" asked a voice from beside her.

Wendy looked up, startled, and scrubbed at her eyes with her fists. Mavis stood on the steps next to her, peering down with wide green eyes.

"Nothing," Wendy said. Her voice cracked, and she cleared her voice and tried again. "I'm fine."

Mavis sat down on the step beside her, wedging her elbows into her knees and propping her chin in her hands. "You don't have to be fine all the time, you know."

Wendy could feel the heat creeping to her face and felt very small and tongue-tied. It was hard enough to talk to friends and people on the street, much less the founding guildmaster of Fairy Tail.

"J-just thinking about my old guild," she stammered. "The one before Fairy Tail."

"Oh?" Mavis wound a curl of golden hair around one finger and blinked at Wendy with those inquisitive emerald eyes. "What were they like?"

"O-oh, they were, you know, my family," Wendy squeaked, twisting her hands together. "Mine and Charle's."

Mavis nodded encouragingly. "And?"

Wendy wanted to sink into the ground and disappear, but she didn't know how and couldn't very well run away from the founder of the guild that had taken her in.

"And they're gone now," she mumbled.

Mavis scuffed her bare feet absently along the ground, and the movement caught Wendy's attention. Wendy's gaze snapped back up to Mavis's face as a new thought occurred to her. Mavis was a little like Master Roubaul, a spirit still lingering in the physical world. And her magic was illusions too, wasn't it? If anyone might have some insight, it was her.

"That's too bad," Mavis murmured, pulling her hair tight around her fist. "It's never easy to lose people. It gets easier to bear, eventually, but it never goes away."

"I grew up with them," Wendy said, straightening up. "I didn't have any family of my own, but they took me in. And then when Nirvana– Well, there was a problem and a bunch of guilds teamed up to fix it, including me. That's how I met Natsu-san and the others. We won, but in the end… It turns out that Master Roubaul was a spirit tied to that place. He died a long time ago, and once Nirvana was destroyed, he was ready to go. And all the rest of Cait Shelter… They were all illusions he had created to raise me and Charle. I never knew. I loved them all, you know. They were my family. And then they all disappeared at once. Master Roubaul said I didn't need them anymore now that I had new companions. Real companions."

She ran out of breath and paused to suck in another lungful of air, but choked on it and felt the tears springing to her eyes again.

"They were all illusions?" Mavis asked with interest. "With their own personalities and everything? He maintained them for years, did you say?" Past the film of tears blurring her vision, Wendy caught a smeared glimpse of Mavis tapping her finger against her lips thoughtfully. "Very impressive."

"You're a spirit too, aren't you?" Wendy blurted out. She fisted her hands in her skirts and turned the force of her desperation on Mavis. "You make illusions too, right? Tell me, is it wrong to mourn people who never existed at all? I never even knew them, really. They weren't real. I shouldn't miss something I never had."

Mavis said nothing for a long moment, eyes large and startled, mouth pursed in a small 'o', and then sighed.

"Ah," she said. "Well. You are exactly the kind of person Fairy Tail was created for."

Wendy frowned and sank back against the step, the hard edge pressing sharp against her spine. Whatever she had been expecting, it wasn't that.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

Mavis hesitated, then sighed. "Well, I grew up on Tenrou. Details aren't really important, but my whole family was destroyed, and then my guild."

Wendy's eyes widened. "I'm sor–"

"It was a long time ago," Mavis said with a wave of her hand. She squinted out at the noonday sun glinting off the windows and roofs of the surrounding buildings. "Anyway, there was one other survivor. Her name was Zera, and we were both very young. We escaped and made it on our own. We grew up together for years, just the two of us. We weren't even friends, before. We didn't like each other at all, actually. So we had some scrapes and scuffles along the way, but when you're the only two people left on the island, you learn how to be friends.

"Then, a few years later, a group of treasure hunters ended up on Tenrou, and when they left, we went with them. Zera didn't want to—she was a bit shy—and the treasure hunters didn't really want us tagging along, but I wanted to see the world. I was tired of being shut up on an island with no one but Zera for company, as much as I loved her.

"So we tagged along with the treasure hunters, and it was a grand adventure!" Mavis grinned, eyes sparking with sudden enthusiasm. "We became friends, even though they didn't like us at first. It was marvelous," she added with a wistful sigh.

Wendy edged a little closer and regarded Mavis wide-eyed. She really knew very little about Fairy Tail's founder and, even for its lack of detail, her story sounded fascinating. Wendy could only imagine how much wilder the entire story would be.

"Did you join their guild?" she asked.

Mavis laughed, her eyes crinkling at the corners, and it was such a nice laugh that Wendy didn't feel stupid or silly for asking the question. "Fairy Tail isn't a guild of treasure hunters, is it? No, we made our own guild, Yury and Warrod and Precht and me and…"

"And Zera?" Wendy supplied when Mavis paused.

"Yes," Mavis said. Her eyes dulled back to embers and seemed to be looking off at something in the distance again. "And no. It's… Well, it was right around the time we formed the guild that Zera left."

"Where did she go?"

Mavis smiled a little, but it was bittersweet. "Well, Yury finally pulled me aside one day and said there was something he needed to tell me. He told me that he had never seen Zera. That none of them had. She was kind of shy, you know, and mostly talked to me. They didn't talk to her much, and she hid behind me sometimes. But it was still a ridiculous thing for them to say, wasn't it?"

"Was she a ghost?" Wendy asked, thinking back to Master Roubaul. She had never realized that he wasn't what he seemed either.

"Sort of. She was an illusion. One that I had created subconsciously, just for me. The real Zera died with everyone else when our guild was destroyed, when we were children. So that I wouldn't be all alone, my subconscious created an…imaginary friend, I guess. Yury and the others never saw Zera because she was never there. They listened to me talk to her and occasionally talked at her to humor me, but they knew she wasn't real. And once I understood she was an illusion, she could no longer be maintained by my subconscious. She disappeared."

Mavis leaned forward, her bittersweet half-smile disappearing behind a curtain of thick blonde curls. "She told me that I had friends now, so I didn't need her anymore. And maybe she was right. I founded Fairy Tail with Yury and the others, we had a lot of fun adventures together and became like a family, but still… I still missed her, you know?"

Wendy swallowed hard and looked down at her hands, neatly folded in her lap but laced together tight enough to leech them of blood. She thought she understood the feeling, even though her own closest and dearest companion was real after all. At least she had still come out the other side with Charle.

"Did your friends understand?" she ventured in a small voice. "That you missed her even if she wasn't real?"

"Yes… They were actually very good to me, despite our rocky start."

"But… Does it make sense to mourn her? If she wasn't real? Does it make sense to miss something you never really had at all?"

"But you did, didn't you?" Mavis asked. "You did have them, even if no one else did. We can debate philosophy all you want, but at the end of the day, you loved them and they were your family for years. They were part of you. And they still are, if you look deep enough. They were real to you. I don't think it matters so much if something is an illusion or a ghost or just a delusion of your mind, although I'm sure some would argue it does. Your feelings are always valid, either way. You loved and lost, just as much as anyone else.

"I loved Zera. I still do. I miss her all the time. She was the closest friend I ever had. But you learn to move on, just like you would when someone dies. Fairy Tail became a new home and a new family, but it didn't erase the one I left behind. You're allowed to love both. Your friends will understand that."

Wendy sniffled and dragged the back of her hand across her teary eyes. Maybe that was exactly what she needed to hear: that it was okay to be sad anyway, even if her loss might seem small and imaginary from the outside.

"Are you sure?" she mumbled. "Everyone has been so kind to me, and I don't want them to think…"

"Everyone suffers losses," Mavis said. "Many of your guildmates have tragedies of their own in their past, even if they haven't shared them with you yet. They understand loss. Whether or not they understand your particular loss… Well, whether or not they entirely understand what it means to you, they care about you and can see that you're hurting, so they'll support you. Why don't you try talking to your friend from Cait Shelter? Charle, isn't it? Maybe she's struggling with some of the same feelings you are."

"Charle?" Wendy asked with a watery laugh. "Charle doesn't worry about things like that. She's strong and practical and…"

Mavis's eyes glinted knowingly in the sun. "She can be all of those things and still struggle with the same problems as you, or similar ones. You're strong too. It's not a weakness to mourn your losses."

Wendy took a few deep breaths and dried her eyes. She couldn't stay hiding out here forever. Someone would be looking for her. And… She did feel a little better, now that she'd had the chance to grieve a little and find an understanding shoulder to lean on. It was a start, anyway.

"Maybe I will," she said, standing up. She managed a smile. "Thank you."

"Of course." Mavis stood as well, and she looked nothing like a child when her face hardened in determination, eyes glinting like steel. "Fairy Tail was made for people like you and me, Wendy. Zera and I made it that way. Don't you forget that."

And Wendy didn't.