This chapter has: sleeping (of the boring kind); Gajeel's inappropriately placed hands (can't keep them in a safe spot); Dragon Slayer pillows (fun for the whole family!); Lucy's wandering fingers (on our hunk of Slayer man-meat); ponderings (upon the nature of Slayers); embarrassment (Lucy thinks she's a little too familiar with Gajeel)
You there. Yes, you - you reviewers. I love you. Thanks for all caring so much about my illness and wellbeing.
This chapter is for Oddball Punk. Yes, they shall both be dragged kicking and screaming into love, whether they like it or not. (*´ω｀*)
Yes, it has taken until now to get a little romantic interaction between these two, but here it is. A little romantic entanglement. Will possibly make it more romantic as I go along. Or not. Probably not. They don't do romantic very well.
Song by Counting Crows
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Chapter 8 – Accidentally in Love
Lucy felt fabulous. They had deposited Leeroy Jenkins at the Office of Magic Affairs, snatched up their something-hundred-thousand reward jewels, and retreated quickly to their hotel room for sweet, glorious, mind-blowing sleep. Both she and Wendy had gone into auto-pilot the moment they crossed the threshold to their shared hotel room, and Lucy was too exhausted to care that she would be 'sharing' with Gajeel right now. As it was, Lucy just barely managed to stay awake long enough to shower, then thrown on her overly large shirt that had once been Natsu's and crawled into the bed beside Wendy's.
The young Dragon Slayer was already out like a light, and Lucy contemplated staying awake to check on Gajeel, who was in the lobby 'talking' to the management (presumably), but she was just too damned tired. She'd had so much trouble sleeping as of late without regular assaults from Natsu in bed - he kicked and punched in his sleep - and the only way to get him to stop was to either knock his head in, or let him snuggle up to your back. Then, whenever they travelled, she'd find herself pressed against Gray's side, the ice mage's arm wrapped around her casually as he talked with Erza. Sometimes it would be Erza in her bed, the older woman forcibly maneuvering Lucy so she could cuddle her, and Lucy was always under threat of suffocation from the redhead's breasts.
It was a far cry from curling up by yourself in a hotel bed near the mountains, but Lucy hoped that the exhaustion of their little excursion was enough to tire her into a restful sleep. And it had worked.
She had no idea what time it was, and really didn't care, because she was so blissfully hazy right now that she was only vaguely aware that Gajeel had come back a long time ago and crawled into his own bed. Well, he less crawled and more dropped - loudly - but it was all relative. Lucy had only gotten up once some time after Gajeel's return to go to the bathroom, then dropped herself back into the bed and sighed happily. She had dozed on and off, but very deeply, so now she was hovering between asleep and awake very blissfully, refusing to move from her considerable comfort.
The bed was a little harder than she remembered, but she was so content right now that moving seemed overly arduous and therefore wrong. Instead she cracked a yawn and stretched out her limbs a little, uncurling her legs from where they were wracked up to her chest to wiggle her toes. She had completely forewent pants once again, and she couldn't bring herself to care - Gajeel had already seen her in her knickers before, what was once more if she decided to get up? But there was no point in getting up – their job was now complete, which meant both rent money and food money, and there was nothing on her agenda other than sleep.
Wendy was somewhere nearby, making cute little snuffling sounds, and Lucy grinned sleepily and arched her back in a languid stretch. Someone grunted. A heavy weight settled over her hip.
It took longer than usual for Lucy's sleep-addled mind to put these things together, and when she cracked her eyes, all she could see was flesh. Blinking herself rapidly into a state of semi-awareness, Lucy craned her neck to check - yes. She was asleep on Gajeel, and his arm was thrown over her hip, hand resting along her bare thigh. Lucy was fairly sure that she would have had a heart attack if she wasn't so drowsy, and instead could only react by blinking like a stunned fish.
She had woken up in a similar state before, cuddled up to Gray, but there had been no awkwardness there except for when Natsu had insinuated himself against her back in her sleeping roll. By morning her legs were over Gray's waist, Natsu was cuddled up to her back, and Erza had an arm over them all - and there had been no awkwardness except for Natsu punching Gray in the head in way of greeting. She had gotten so used to it that it didn't even bother her anymore; it had just become of their normal interactions for Fairy Tail's strongest team.
But this, this was very different. Gajeel wasn't very close to her - figuratively, she would say, because physical evidence said otherwise - and this was her first time even working with him. Way to go, Lucy, making yourself seem like a whore. She wanted to either beat her head in against the wall, or if possible, beat in Gajeel's until he forgot this nasty mess she had gotten herself into. She couldn't stop the tremor running through her limbs from freezing so suddenly, and set about trying to delicately wiggle her way off of the Dragon Slayer and just make it back to her own bed…
"Stop fidgeting."
Lucy felt her face flush at the deep yet quiet command, and the arm over her hip readjusted itself a little to hold her down tighter. She wondered if she was still asleep and this was a dream, or if the Iron Dragon Slayer had suddenly developed a sense of humour and decided to torment her. She really couldn't believe that Gajeel's hand was so damn close to dangerous territory, and yet the Slayer didn't even register it - where was Erza and her swords-of-fury when you needed them?
Her limbs had locked up again to freeze her in place, her cheeks a very unhealthy red, and she couldn't help but slowly lift and turn her head. Gajeel's face was perfectly lax, his eyes closed and his usually tense jaw completely relaxed, one arm curled behind his head while the other was very well known on her hip and thigh. She wanted to screech and hit him, a good and normal reaction, but she just couldn't reach that necessary anger and anxiety - she felt much too good and sleepy to, she realized with delayed horror. Lucy had no intentions of staying sprawled out atop the Iron Dragon Slayer now that she knew, but Gajeel seemed perfectly content with keeping her there, arm and all.
Lucy shifted a little again, and his arm tightened that little bit more.
"Umm," she muttered.
It was enough for Gajeel to crack open an eye, their crimson depths surveying her lazily; he could probably see the blush staining her cheeks, her wide-eyed something at being in the position she was, but at least he didn't grin. Well, she had his attention, at least, now what the hell was going on.
"How…why…?" Lucy managed to splutter out.
Smooth, Luce, real smooth.
Gajeel's lips twitched, and Lucy realized she was in prime range for elbowing that cocky fucker if he did. Perhaps Gajeel realised this and that's why he didn't crack into a very toothy amused grin, or maybe he was just too damned drowsy.
"You decided to sprawl out over me," Gajeel told her.
She must have thought she was with Gray, because in all her recollection, the ice mage was the only one that Lucy had ever actively sought out to use as a travel pillow. Gray was oddly comfortable to rest against - or on, she guessed - and because of his magic, he was always cool for the heat of Fiore. Gray was a good friend, and didn't mind in the slightest; he always kept room on his travel roll for her to slink into once she couldn't sleep by herself.
Why she had drowsily decided that Gajeel would be that substitute, Lucy had no idea - there weren't even cursory similarities between Gray and the Iron Dragon Slayer, and Gajeel was a hell of a lot larger and built than Gray was. Lucy briefly wondered about his injured ribs, and craned her neck a little - no, she was more on the opposite side of them. It was his injured arm thrown over her, considering that the arm behind his head was unscathed aside from the bruised knuckles she could see peeking out. He really should get those seen to - no, she wasn't going to play nicey-nice while in this particular position.
An odd snuffling sound issued from behind Lucy, and she had to twisted her head back enough to catch a glance of dark hair at Gajeel side. Apparently, Wendy had decided to insinuate herself in beside Gajeel; from the brief looks of it, her back pressed up along his side, Charle cuddled in her arms as always. Lucy found her sleep-addled brain ticking along at an odd pace with the revelation; they had turned Fairy Tail's feral Dragon Slayer into some kind of body pillow, and he didn't seem all that put out by it. If ever there was a time for her head to explode, it would be now.
"So, what? We just decided to use you as a pillow?" Lucy mumbled.
"Seems so," he replied.
His eyes were closed now, his breathing steady and…ah. She had turned her head to stop the oncoming crick in her neck and to wheedle her escape, but that made her pause. It was something so simple and unexpected, and she never thought she would be in a position to feel it. His heartbeat. Everybody had one, of course, but she had never thought that she would ever be close enough to the Slayer to hear his - it was strong and steady and all the tension drained from her body. Ah, so that was why she couldn't sleep anymore; she missed the sound of another's heartbeat.
It was pitiful that something like Team Natsu going off without her was enough to interrupt her sleep, but it wasn't as bad as crawling into a man's bed and sleeping with them - on them. She damn missed them so much that she was now subconsciously seeking out nearby people to crawl into bed with and just sleep. Gajeel seemed to be taking it rather well, though, which wasn't something she expected of his temperament or personality, which often leaned towards outright hostility and irritation. But Wendy was out like a light, calm and serene, and Charle wasn't raising a fuss, and the Iron Dragon Slayer was more relaxed than Lucy had seen him in a while.
What the hell, when in Rome. She maneuvered herself, Gajeel letting up his grip a little, so she could delicately roll onto her stomach and fold her arms across his chest, resting her chin on her forearms. Despite being a mass of hard muscle, Gajeel was surprisingly comfortable - Gray didn't have the bulk for her to be able to do something like this without suffocating him, but Gajeel's sheer strength and muscle mass didn't even let him miss a breath under her weight. Her changed position meant that his hand couldn't rest along her thigh, so now his injured arm was draped back across her waist and his hand resting on her hip. She could feel the rise and fall of his chest beneath her arms, and hear his heartbeat if she closed her eyes, and it was like some kind of sedative to her - she suddenly felt tired again, despite being in the embarrassing position of using Gajeel as a pillow.
"And you're just fine with being used as a pillow?" Lucy mumbled.
His heartbeat really was hypnotic. Getting too tired…
"As long as you stop elbowing me," he muttered, and that was the end of conversation.
If anyone had told her before that within 24 hours, she'd be invited on a mission with Gajeel, subsequently groped by him and then used him as a pillow, Lucy would have hit them for being idiots. But here she was, abnormally comfortable on his chest, his arm wrapped dangerously low around her hips, Wendy snoring beside them, and Lucy was content. What kind of screwed up situation were they in that she felt perfectly fine with sleeping atop the man, even if she still was a little nervous and blush-y about it? The Dragon Slayer wasn't exactly the cuddly type; in fact, out of the five Dragon Slayers she had met and interacted with, he was easily the most feral of them all - and that included Cobra from the Oración Seis.
Lucy unfurled her arms and stretched them out, grazing her fingers against his collar bones, and she felt Gajeel's muscles twitch under her hands. There was a scar bisecting his left collar bone that was about the size of her finger, thin and pale with age - she wondered what had been strong enough to pierce through his iron scales to give him that. She touched a finger to it, feeling the raised skin absently as she rested her cheek right over his heart, and she could have sworn that it sped up a little bit. Actually, looking better at his chest now (how couldn't she, she was lying on it), Lucy could see thin white-line scars crisscrossing along his torso all the way to the edge of her vision.
Natsu only had a scar on the back of his neck, hidden by his muffler at the most of times, and one on his shoulder blade from where he took a bad hit when fighting Jellal. Gray had the obvious one on his forehead, just above his eye, and another one on his left hand from where it looked like it had been run through - and Erza's skin was completely flawless, minus the calluses on her hands from swordplay. Gajeel had the biggest collection of scars she had ever seen on a person, let alone a mage - and they told her of every battle that he had scraped through. How many battles must he had gone through to get all those scars?
Her fingers brushed against his clavicle again - how close had that blow come to his heart? A few inches down, and it would have pierced through his heart, and they never would've met. Okay, so Lucy would have preferred to have met the Iron Dragon Slayer in a very different way, but it was part of their history, what had sculpted them into the people they were now. Lucy drew her eyes up to his scar, where they caught a flash of red, and raised higher. Gajeel was looking at her, his sharp red eyes pinned on hers, his slit-pupils drifting from her fingers to her face, and Lucy sudden realised that, not only had she been lying here checking him out, but she had been stroking him.
Kill me now.
"You have a lot of scars," Lucy mumbled in defense, blood rushing to her cheeks.
He blinked, and it was actually quite surprising that there was no anger or irritation in his eyes, just knowing. It was a completely different side to him that Lucy had never even glimpsed, let alone theorised about - the calm and collected side of the battle-lusting Slayer, the relaxed and tranquil state that they never saw that he was lulled into. She had seen him at his worst, beaten and dropped in an alley unconscious, she had seen him high on the carnage of battle against Natsu back in his Phantom Lord days, but this was the first time she had ever seen him like a human.
She let her eyes drift away, suddenly more embarrassed, and turned so her temple was against his heart, and her eyes were resolutely on the wall. Stars, she had just been staring at him, thinking, and he had been staring back at her - it was all so awkward and nerve-wracking that Lucy wanted to crawl back into her own bed and die. But Wendy groaned, stretched, and wedged herself further, if possible, into Gajeel's side, and she could feel the younger girl's hair brushing against her thigh. They were all huddled in together - she could see a tuft of Lily's dark fur sticking up from underneath Gajeel's crooked arm - and cuddled up to Gajeel like he was a hot water bottle.
And how didn't this bother Gajeel? Lucy wanted to ask, but she wasn't about to question her luck at finding him so calm and content. Instead, she closed her eyes, calmed her own rapidly beating heart, and let his own send her off to sleep.
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He wasn't quite sure how it happened - how he had gotten so comfortable with the woman that she could get away with this. Gajeel had always been comfortable with Wendy. True, he'd never actually intended to take her under his wing, thinking that because of his style, that Natsu would be a more appropriate teacher for Wendy than he was - they both used elemental-type attacks as opposed to his physical ones. She had already started to imitate Natsu's attacks, but then the flame-brain had run off, leaving him with two women. He wasn't quite sure if he was lucky or doomed for that.
Wendy was easy enough to adapt to. As timid and shy as she was, she was a Dragon Slayer, and as such, understood him on a base level. Everything in her instincts said that she should cow down to him - the older and the stronger Slayer - and his own instincts said to protect the young girl. Gajeel explained it to her, slowly and carefully before his run-in with Tartaros when they accepted the job, and she had listened with wide-eyed fascination. Grandine had never explained this to her, either out of negligence or the Sky Dragon never thought that Wendy would encounter another Dragon Slayer.
Lucy fell into a very different and much less black-and-white category. His instincts towards her were very muddled - as a Dragon Slayer, it said that she was a woman that was harmless to him; as a Fairy Tail mage, it said to protect her; as a man, it said that she was a fine woman. As such, his senses drew somewhere between the three, mostly that she would not harm him or cause him harm, and thus should be protected while in his company. As the stronger ranking mage among them, even if he was former S-Class, it was his responsibility to ensure both women's safety and wellbeing while on a job together. But that part in the back of his mind, the little part that was still a human man, said that she was beautiful and available and right there, under his hands already.
Needless to say, he ignored that.
She had proven in their earlier scuffle that she didn't need him all that much for protection - in fact, she had tried to protect him, as much as he didn't expect or need it. Gajeel wasn't use to anyone having his back before Panther Lily, let along the bunny girl; and damn if she wasn't efficient with that lion spirit of hers. She had been a surprise there, darting into his peripheral vision, whip arcing light before them to drill apart the enemies flanking him. His senses had been clogged with the scents and sounds of many people all rabbling around him, and the bastard he was exchanging blows with had kept his attention, and not on the sneaky little fuck that was creeping up.
Lucy had saved his ass then, because if he got a surprise hit in on his injured side, then Gajeel knew he would have crumbled, however briefly, but that was all it took. But the bunny girl had his back - or side - and stayed there for the remainder of their fight, covering his slight handicap. Her whip was actually more useful than he thought, and it moved in ways that shouldn't be possible, winding and whirling as it arced before him and drove enemies back by force. The lion she had summoned was a powerful fighter, and a determined one at that, tapping into his rage every time he was separated or driven away from the bunny girl. The two made a good team, covering for each other's faults and strengths, even if Gajeel thought the lion coddled the blonde woman too much.
But all this didn't explain why having her sleeping atop of him was so damn agreeable to him. Maybe it was because she really was no threat to him, or it had been so damned long since he had a willing body along his without it ending in violence, but his arm was very comfortable tossed across her, and she seemed content to doze where she was. When she had first fallen atop of him none too gently, he had paused under her weight, wondering what the hell was going on, but then she had let out a rumbling snore and made a little huffing noise. He had strongly considered just dumping her back in her own bed, but then Wendy had padded over, peeled back the covers and slunk in beside him. It had softened something in him to the point where he let it go, and before he knew it, he had fallen asleep with the two women alongside him.
Panther Lily had sprawled himself in the crook of the arm hooked behind his head soon after, and he suddenly found himself surrounded by people. Gajeel knew that he had all the social graces and knowledge of a teacup - he had been raised by a dragon, not a pussy-cat - and because of that, he was perfectly accustomed to being alone. The only time he ever shared a bed was for the obvious reasons, but that was only as long as necessary to bring himself off, then he went back to his own, solitary existence. But now he was surrounded by people, by heartbeats, that all depended on him and saw him as nakama.
And the heartbeats were spectacular. Lily's small heart was beating beside his ear, rapid in its timing because of how small he was. He could hear Charle's own little heart going, nestled so near Wendy's that the small pitter-patter of the Sky Dragon Slayer's almost merged with it. Lucy's heart was steady but strong, indicating how at peace she truly was as she muttered against his chest, and the warm breath tickled his ribs from where her blonde hair was splayed out. She was soft and warm atop of him, like a living, breathing blanket that blushed every now and then when she started exploring his scars, and Gajeel was feeling amazingly calm right now.
He closed his eyes contently, his fingers pressing against her bare hip, and drifted off.