A/N: Sorry for the delay! Real life blew up in my face again and burnt off my eyebrows. Thank you for your patience!

Chapter 22: Inverse

One minute Erik was sitting at the guildhall's bar with Cubelios's chin resting on his shoulder. The next he was waking up buried in something that felt like… flour? Erik clawed frantically at the fine, cool powder surrounding him as the pressing need to breathe made itself known. Seconds later his hands met cold night air and his head broke free. He heaved in a deep, gasping lungful of oxygen. A pair of sandaled feet were standing not very far anyway from him. Mystogan was staring down at him in surprise.

"A little help here?" Erik croaked when Mystogan didn't move.

"I didn't realize there was anyone else left." Mystogan offered Erik a hand and hauled him to his feet. Erik shook his hair and sent white powder flying. Whatever the stuff was, it made his skin feel dry and unpleasantly tingly. Everything seemed unnaturally quiet. Erik could hear Mystogan's heartbeat as well as his own but that was-

Oh no. Panic surged.

"Where's Cubelios?" Erik demanded. "Where's the rest of the guild?! WHERE'S CUBELIOS?!" Erik's hands fisted in the front of Mystogan's tunic and dragged him down so that they were at eye level.

"Taken- Anima- I was too late-" If he'd been in any frame of mind to comprehend it, Erik would have noted the unusually panicked look on Mystogan's normally unflappable face. Unfortunately for Mystogan, Cubelios was missing, and Erik really didn't care about anything else. The front of Mystogan's tunic now had holes in it where Erik's unintentionally summoned talons had shredded through the fabric.

"What do you mean taken?!" Erik snarled. Rationality had officially left the building.

"There a reason Magnolia is gone and you're tryin' to murder Ferandes's twin?" interrupted a new voice before Erik could actually wrap his hands around Mystogan's neck. Gajeel looked rumpled, annoyed, and had cat scratches on his face for some reason.

Mystogan looked equally surprised by Gajeel's arrival,

"How many people did I miss?!" he squawked and then made a gurgling sound as Erik took advantage of his distraction and grabbed him by the neck. Rough hands pried Erik's fingers loose, and Erik was lifted into the air by the back of his jacket. He thrashed and made a few more swipes at Mystogan.

"Calm down. He can't answer questions if you kill him." It was probably a bad sign that Gajeel was being the reasonable one.

There were rivers in the sky and floating mountains. The vegetation was like some bizarre sort of jungle. Cubelios would have loved it. Erik firmly squashed that thought down.

Gajeel was staring speculatively up at the floating mountains with an expression disturbingly similar to Natsu's 'yeah, I could break that' face. Erik rolled his eyes.

"You need to forget about the cat thing," Erik grumbled. He'd finally gotten his hands on a tin of rat poison and was busy stirring a heaping spoonful into his coffee. He and Gajeel had managed to lay their hands on some food at long last. Erik was willing to do almost anything to combat the fierce ache of emptiness in his chest that Cubelios normally filled – even talk about Gajeel's dumb cat obsession.

Gajeel scowled fiercely at him,

"The other dragon slayers all have them."

Erik scowled right back at him,

"I don't."

"Yeah, but you've got that flyin' snake."

"Her name is Cubelios." Erik took a deep breath and reminded himself that he still needed Gajeel's brute strength to get Cubelios back. Besides, they were guildmates. "Laxus doesn't have any animal companions."

Gajeel raised an eyebrow at him and smirked,

"Then what do you call the Thunder Legion?"

Erik paused, coffee mug halfway to his mouth, and considered this. That was actually a fairly good point. When they were younger, Master Makarov used to refer to Freed, Evergreen, and Bickslow as 'Laxus's Strays.'

Then his ears caught a stray thought from Gajeel.

"You just want to one-up Natsu."

Gajeel's fearsome scowl returned, but it was too late – Erik was already laughing at him.

There were now two Gajeels. Two Gajeels that were convinced that they were practically twins when it was clear that they were both just plain delusional.

"Wait, I knew I recognized your face," short-haired Gajeel was frowning thoughtfully at Erik now. "You're Erik Dorov. You're a Fairy Tail wizard!"

"Actually, it's Erik Zmeya."

"Well, either way, you're going to want to keep your head down unless you want Knightwalker chopping it off. The king's really been cracking down on the dark guilds."

"I beg your pardon?"

When this was all over, Erik was going to kill Gajeel slowly. Painfully. By inches.

Another Poison Dragon Roar failed to do much of anything.

"Oh, for the love of-! GAJEEL! You are the iron dragon slayer! Your specialty is hitting things! Stop fighting that damn giant cat that I could have knocked out in thirty seconds with one poison attack if you had let me, and COME PUNCH THIS STUPID LACRIMA ALREADY!"

Erik tried clawing at the lacrima. It did the exact amount of nothing that he had anticipated.

"Busy! Need to make him my cat!" Gajeel shouted back. His expression, though, said that he was having way too much fun brawling to stop any time soon.

Erik let out a snarl of frustration and tried another poison dragon roar. A teeny portion of the lacrima began to glitter. At last. It was finally work-

Erik gaped.

Well, they had said that everything in Earthland was imbued with magic.

"GODS DAMN IT!" Erik punted the barstool off the side of the floating island. When this was over, Gajeel was definitely dead.

Erik tied the cape around his shoulders and then glared at the fake horns Natsu was struggling to put on.

"This is dumb, and it's never going to work." He wasn't bitter that he'd been knocked unconscious during the epic quadruple dragon slayer final showdown with the king. Not at all. And besides, the horns were ridiculous.

"Nah, it's gonna be great!" Natsu beamed. "And besides, we can't let Mystogan take the fall! He's a Fairy Tail wizard!"

Erik half-smiled and then sighed and fixed Natsu's horns in one deft move.

"Yeah. I guess you're right." He'd always been closer to Erza, Simon, and Jellal than Mystogan, but he'd still been a little bit like a big brother to Erik, and if Natsu's dumb plan worked, then his heart would rest a little easier when they left.

"I'm not sure how good I'm going to be at this," Wendy admitted, fiddling with the edge of her cape.

"Just make an evil face and break a few things, and they'll run crying," shrugged Gajeel and then demonstrated a truly evil face. Nobody could do 'deranged' quite like Gajeel. "These people are wimps."

The pull of Anima returning them to Earthland felt almost as strange as floating above the ground with nothing to hold him there. And Erik was glowing gold. His skin felt like it was buzzing.

"Say goodbye to Jellal, Erza, and Simon for me," Mystogan murmured as he stared up at the rising Earthlanders and Exceeds, his voice so quiet that only Erik's sensitive ears could have ever caught it. Erik caught Mystogan's eye far below him and gave him a nod and a small salute. He would pass the word along. It was the least he could do.

"AAAAAAAAAAH!"

Whamwhamwham! Whamwhamwhamwhamwhamwham!

Erik landed in a wet heap on top of Erza. Bits of broken barstool rained painfully down on his head.

"Ow."

Erik blinked, slightly dazed, and then yelped as the mound of Fairy Tail wizards shifted, and he was unceremoniously rolled onto the ground. Mud squelched under his back. Ugh.

"We're back!" cheered Natsu.

He was right. Erik pulled himself up, clutching a piece of barstool in one hand, and there was Magnolia spread out below them. It looked as pristine and untouched as if nothing had ever happened.

"Everything's back to the way it was!" Lucy beamed.

"Hold on," Erza cautioned. "We don't know that everything is all right and where it should be for certain. We can't even see the people from up here. It's too soon to celebrate."

"They're all fine!" announced a high voice. "We've already been in Earthland a little while and checked up on everyone! They're all fine!"

Erik allowed himself two seconds to gape at the flock of Exceeds and wonder what they were doing there and then to decide that he honestly didn't care and book it down the hill towards the guildhall.

"No, wait! Erik, come back!" shouted Erza. Erik ignored her. He was going to make sure that Cubelios was fine for himself.

"Hey! Gray! Not you, too!" yelped Lucy.

"Fill me in on the details later! I need to check on Ultear and Lyon!"

Erik slid and skittered through the wet streets. He was running just a little too fast to corner safely in this weather. Gray was hot on his heels.

By the time Erik slammed open the guildhall doors, he was wheezing for breath and his face was bright red. He was in good shape, but he'd basically sprinted the entire way across town. As was often the case in Fairy Tail, everyone ignored the dramatic, door-slamming entrance in favor of an imminent brawl.

"Seriously!" Canna was standing on the bar, hands on hips, looking pissed as hell. "Who stole my stool?! You made me spill my BEER! Fess up and I might not permanently break your face!"

Erik glanced at the broken stool leg in his hand and quickly hid it behind his back.

"Gray!" Ultear waved from across the hall. Lyon was sitting next to her drinking tea out of a fancy china cup. "Where'd you go? You just disappeared all of a sudden! We were starting to get worried!"

"Getting sucked into an alternate dimension does that-"

Erik was distracted from Gray's explanation of what had happened by being body slammed by one hundred and fifty pounds of upset Cubelios. He hit the floor with a thuck and grinned as Cubelios proceeded to sniff every inch of him and hiss in concern.

It was good to be home.