"Ehee, our newbie's a Celestial Spirit Mage, huh?"
Lucy startles at the voice suddenly much too close to her ear. She had been perusing her keys at the bar, slotting in Nikora's key in its spot and reminding herself to make a contract later.
Cana leans over, already high and smelling of fermented grapes. She smiles drunkenly and her voice slurs at every word. She sits down beside Lucy and drapes a heavy arm over Lucy's shoulder.
"You're already drunk?" Lucy asks, incredulous.
"Never too early!" she giggles. "That's a rare magic! I think Levy was pretty interested in that one. Uhh, Extraterrestrial Ghosts?"
"Celestial Spirits, but close enough." Lucy keeps an eye skeptically on the two empty barrels on the ground, and the third one Cana was hugging. "Aren't you drinking too much?" she asks, a little repulsed.
"I'm never drinking too much," Cana insists. "Gets my mind off things. I like it."
Lucy raises an eyebrow,but she accepts it as a quirk of Fairy Tail nonsense and sets her keys down on the table. "My mother was a Celestial Wizard, so I had a natural affinity for it. She gave me her old keys too, so I didn't really have any reason not to use it."
Cana blinks at that, eyeing the keys curiously.
"From your mother, huh," she considers, raising her stack of tarot cards with a goofy grin. "Guess we have something in common."
Lucy doesn't miss that. She jumps at the chance for a conversation. "Hey, don't you think Celestial Magic and Card Magic are, theoretically, pretty similar? The stars, the galaxy, and they're both written in the language of Castor, too!"
Cana's face morphs into a mischievous smirk.
"Wanna see how those two can work together, then?"
Lucy blinks. Cana points at the request board.
"Let's go on a mission together, Lucy!" she grins, taking the girl's hands in hers.
"Eh?"
"It's girl time!"
"EH?!"
"Macao!" Levy yells, "Macao, please, get a hold of yourself!"
Nothing's looking good now.
Team Shadow Gear soldiers on in the blizzard, finally reaching the peak where the Vulcans had their nests.
Long story short, Macao got taken over. And when they finally got him free, Macao had wounds hard enough to kill a proper man.
"Droy, any luck with the call card?"
He shakes his head immediately. Droy snaps the card in his hand, shaking it desperately, but it just blinks stubbornly like a faulty buzzer.
The blizzard had only gone from bad to worse at this point. Levy was lightly clothed, but she could care less about that.
Pressing Jet's coat on the largest wound on Macao's side, Levy couldn't even begin to imagine how they could get out of here. The cloth was soaking up quickly, bleeding, bleeding, getting worse and not at all getting any better.
Jet can't run out in this weather. Even if he could, there was no way he could bring someone back with him without losing his way.
"Damn, if only we'd come earlier!" Jet punches the wall, frustrated.
"Enough, Jet!" Levy says. She willed magic into her hands, but she couldn't gather it up well. She's flustered and her magic power can't coagulate.
Think, think, think! They need to do something-- first aid without proper tools, there has to be something they can do.
Levy's supposed to be smart. She can handle this pressure. Throw rationality out the window-- there has to be a way. Any way…
There's enough ice in their surroundings. She can't make anything that's a liquid, and she can't make anything too small, meaning thread and needles are a no.
Droy can't call upon specific plants, so they can't just summon medicinal herbs out of nowhere, not that they would know which they could use to begin with.
So their priority is to leave Mt Hakobe.
But Jet can't run through the blizzard. There has to be another route they can go for--
"That's it!"
Jet and Droy flinch when she suddenly yells. Droy takes off his coat to help apply pressure to the wound, but Levy is reaching a blood-coated hand to her back pocket.
"What did you realize, Levy?"
"This," Levy holds up the golden gate key. "Virgo can…"
And Jet immediately reaches over to grab her hand out of the air. His fingers collapsed tightly around hers in a panic.
"No!" he yells. Levy turns to him almost startled, and Jet frowns. "You can't use it! Celestial Spirit Magic isn't like every other Holder type magic, you can't just feed magic power to it and hope it works!"
"He's right, Levy," Droy interrupts, putting his hand on Levy's as well. "It's reckless!"
Levy bites her lip. "But-- what else can we do? Virgo's our only hope right now!"
She feels the tears run down her cheeks and she smears it aside with the blood on her hands. She can't do this right now.
Surely-- surely the key would respond. Even if it took all the magic she had, it had to.
She gathered magic into her hands, and prayed.
Natsu stops abruptly with his fork in the air. His ears twitched at a vaguely familiar music far, far, away.
Looking around, he tries to discern what that bad feeling in the air could have been. It's not here-- but he can't smell much past the thick salt of the sea.
"What's wrong, Natsu?" Happy speaks up, noticing his distracted state before the rest of the table. "If you don't eat quickly, Bickslow's gonna steal-- nevermind, there it goes."
Natsu frowns. A cruise ship's horn blares in the distance, and he could no longer hear the distinct melody. When the horn ends, the sound is gone.
Something's wrong. Something bad, something familiar, and something dark. But he can't quite put a finger on what it is.
Evergreen chuckles, "Natsu, if you hate getting on the ship that much, you can ask your big brother Laxus to swim with you."
"I'm NOT swimming!" Laxus insists, teeth grinding.
Natsu's eyes are stuck on the scenery outside. "It's not that, it's just…" he mutters, "...something smells wrong."
Smell isn't the right word for it. It was more like a feeling, a distant pulse of darkness, a little too far away for him to distinguish, but it's there .
Darkness? Ah. That's it-- that's what it is.
No wonder it was familiar to him. Somewhere in the distance, one of Zeref's old pieces of junk must have been discovered by the humans.
(How troublesome. Natsu might have to take a detour to deal with that nonsense. He's not sure if the humans are capable of handling this…)
"What, you smell a fart or something?" Bickslow asks with a smirk, and Evergreen immediately backhands him right in the mask. "Ow! What was that for?!"
"Don't be so vulgar in a restaurant! Geez, this is why I hate eating with you goblins!"
"Did you just call us goblins?!"
"Yes, Goblins!"
Evergreen opens her fan, turning away almost disgusted to be on the same table. Bickslow looks more playfully offended than anything-- but his dolls were chanting an annoyed 'not goblins, not goblins!' from behind..
Freed sighs longsufferingly, having to deal with the misfortune of sitting between them. Setting down his cutlery, he raises his fingers-- "whoever fights within these runes will--"
Bickslow and Evergreen instantly pale. "Stop! Stop! We apologize! Don't do that! Freed!"
"Then sit down and eat quietly," Freed says curtly, as if he hadn't just threatened them.
"Bicks started it!"
"You hit me out of nowhere, Ever!"
Seriously, who put the terrible three on the same side of the table? Happy watches the scene with fond laughter, holding his fish protectively as he warned them about not destroying the restaurant.
Laxus, nursing a headache, decides that he'd ought to invest in a pair of noise-cancelling earphones.
"Seriously, the mission hasn't even started yet and we're about to fall apart," he groans.
"Aye," Happy agrees.
Laxus keeps his gaze on Natsu, who's still looking out the window and thinking deeply to himself. It's not too rare to find Natsu staring out in melancholy, but he usually does that when he's alone, not in the middle of a meal with the rest of the gang.
(It's worrying.)
"What is it, Natsu?" Laxus prompts, knowing very well he might not get a straight answer from Natsu-- no one ever does, not even LIsanna could pry honest answers out of him when he's like this.
Natsu glances at Laxus with a contemplative look-- and Laxus knows, that's the look Natsu gives him when he's juggling trust around his fingers, wondering if the information was worth spilling. It never is.
It's the look Natsu gives everyone when he's not sure how to act.
(Laxus knows better than anyone how it feels to not have someone you can trust with everything.)
(It's not as if Natsu doesn't trust them-- Natsu believes in the guild with all his heart. It's the other way around that was questionable, and it always makes him think twice.)
It only lasts a second, because Natsu eventually notices his missing chunk of meat. He's confused for a moment before he locates it right between Bickslow's teeth
"My meat!!" he howls , demanding the disgusting thing returned somehow. "GIVE IT BACK!"
"I already ate it, you slowpoke!" Bickslow laughs, his obnoxious dolls echoing 'stupid, stupid' in the vicinity just to be a bunch of miniature menaces.
Laxus sighs fondly.
(One day, Natsu will learn to give his heart to the guild.)
(Even if he doesn't, that's fine too.)
(They're guildmates. They'll help each other even if they don't understand each other fully. Because that's what families do.)
For Cana, hearing about Macao was nothing short of an absolute nightmare.
They come home from their mission, and there's a crowd before the guild. It's raining, and the guild is oddly quiet.
And Cana knows this situation.
It's just like that day two years ago when Lisanna died.
So she drops her bottle of sake and runs. Runs all the way past the district, her eyes fixed before her and her mind set on only one thing.
"Cana?! Hey!"
She leaves Lucy behind.
And she crashes into the side of the guild doors when she gets there, her breathing erratic, her eyes running wildly across the room.
Someone's crying.
Other people look at her, surprised. They haven't thought of how to tell her the news yet.
Cana feels her heart sink. "Wh- Where's Macao?" she asks, almost too scared to hear an answer to this question.
It can't be happening it can't be--
"Cana!"
--there he is.
Cana immediately feels all the energy leave her limbs. She collapses in a heap, the breath finally coming in warm and sweet. She sighs in relief, feeling Levy crouch down at her side to lay a hand on her shoulder.
"I'm home!" Macao hollers, his stupid smile on his face.
There's an eyeptch over one eye and way too many bandages over everywhere else, but he's alive and smiling that stupid smile and he's alive .
"Welcome back to you too!" Macao says.
And Cana can't help but smile.
"You stupid geezer, I was worried!"
Macao came home with a near-death injury, slightly weakened eyesight, and a medical report that spelled his left leg's paralysis for life.
To say everyone was shocked would be an understatement.
Wakaba and Mirajane started off with flustered lectures and angry reprimands on the importance of not overdoing your job.
Romeo cried, and cried, and cried some more.
Team Shadow Gear, exhausted from their missions, fell fast asleep. The boys were sprawled over each other and Levy lay her head over the bar counter.
Beside them, Master smiled in relief.
That day, they had a party. Cana, Romeo, and Wakaba sprawled over Macao in their sleep, drunk and hazy and carefully keeping their weight away from Macao's wounds.
Lucy watched her very first Fairy Tail all-out party, and decided to summon Lyra to play them all a gentle tune for the sunrise.
Lucy clutches Plue in her arms, heading toward Fairy Hills with her luggage.
Cana had told her about the lodgings, so after spending a couple of nights in the guild's infirmary, she was finally going to get a room here.
She had enough for a month's rent with the job she had just finished, anyways.
"It's pretty sad, the thing with Macao-san," she talks to Plue, as you do when walking alone in the daybreak. "But I'm glad they have the guild to help them through this. He seems like a good dad."
Very much unlike her own father, huh.
It's still startling. It's only her second day in, but being in a guild isn't as bright as colourful as she'd imagined. Sure, it was lively and fun, and eccentric, but the dangers were also much clearer than they had been before.
She fought bandits today with Cana. They weren't a big deal, so it wasn't tough.
But what happened to Macao could happen to anyone. They were lucky today, strong enough today. But one careless move and their entire life as a mage is over.
It's a little scary, but there's no job without risks.
She came out into the real world to see those thrills with her own eyes. She can't back away from just this much.
"I'm a member of Fairy Tail now, so I've gotta get stronger, right?"
And Plue cheers, probably agreeing.
"Lucy!"
Lucy squeaks.
She had been unpacking in her new room when Levy Mcgarden burst right in with a little more than stomping of feet and one panicked knock that might've just been her head crashing into the door.
Levy fixes her glasses on her head and smiles sleepily.
"Sorry, sorry!" she says, "I'm Levy! Sorry I couldn't greet you yesterday, apparently I slept until just now!"
Lucy quickly straightens. Levy-- she's heard Cana mention her before. "I'm Lucy, it's a pleasure to meet you."
Levy blinks momentarily in a sort of curiosity before quickly turning to the view of her room. "I'm next door, by the way! So you can come ask me if there's anything you need help with."
"Really?" Lucy smiles, her right hand coming up to rest at her cheek, "this is my first time living in a dorm, so I'm feeling a little nervous. It's strange to think that I have neighbours now!"
Levy's eyes drift to Lucy's fingers-- but she once again dismisses it.
"Right!" she says, "is it true you're Celestial Spirit Mage?"
At Lucy's curious look, Levy retrieves the key from her back pocket.
"Tada!"
Lucy's jaw drops. "No way!" she beams, hands held together in gleaming fascination, "that's a golden gate key!"
"It is!" Levy says closing the room door behind her. She steps over a stack of books to sit down beside Lucy on the bed. "I got it as collateral from my previous job. You can have it, Lu-chan! Think of it as your guild initiation gift."
And that-- that makes Lucy's jaw drop once more.
"No, no-- I really shouldn't!" she denies, flustered. "They're expensive and I'm penniless! I should at least buy it from you once I have enough money to afford it."
Levy pouts, "just accept it, Virgo is strong, you know?"
Lucy hesitates. She could definitely use a new strong spirit in her arsenal, but gaining it just like this just sounded wrong-- like she was cheating her way through something that should've been difficult.
"Hmm, to tell the truth, Lu-chan, I managed to summon Virgo on the way back from saving Macao."
"Eh?"
"It surprised me too!" Levy says, setting down the key for the story time. "We were trapped in a blizzard, Macao was in trouble! So she took magic from me, Jet, and Droy-- we're called Team Shadow Gear, by the way-- and came out to help us! We were really tired later though."
Lucy gapes, "I've never heard of a spirit doing that before!" she says, "coming out of their own will, without a contractor…"
"Right? That's when I thought that Celestial Spirits are amazing!" Levy looks at Virgo's key again. "They're summoned creatures, yet they're so much more compassionate than humans can be. Isn't that interesting?"
Lucy's eyes seem to sparkle.
"Exactly," she says, stressing the word. "Spirits, you know, they look like humans, you know? They have things they like and dislike-- Aquarius even gets mad at me when I interrupt her dates with her boyfriend! When I get a new key, it's like I'm getting a new brother or sister!"
"Brother or sister? That's a cute way to see it!" Levy fawns, "That's right! Could you summon Virgo? I couldn't talk much to her just now because of the rush."
"Sure!"
Approximately two seconds later, Lucy realizes she got tricked into making a contract.
"Well then, thank you for your time, Princess. I shall take my leave. I also wish Macao-san a quick recovery."
"Ah, right. See ya!"
And contract done. Lucy somehow ended up making it anyways-- simply because Virgo seemed eager to make one and Levy didn't want to sell the key anyways. Lucy could probably treat Levy to a meal next week or month for it? Hmm.
Wait.
"Levy?" she turns around, suddenly realizing that the girl isn't beside her anymore. Where could she be in this tiny room when the door isn't open?
"Oohhh!!!"
And Lucy shrieks, noticing Levy at her desk, holding up a stack of very familiar-looking papers, shifting through the pages at a mile a minute.
"NOoo!"
Lucy's breathing heavily by the time she manages to snatch the novel from the girl.
Levy is beaming happily, a smile wide on her face. How much has she already read? Lucy wants to cry.
"I knew it!" Levy says, reaching over to pick up Lucy's right hand. "You have a writer's bump and it's worse than mine! Are you writing a novel, Lu-chan?"
Lucy's face proceeds to heat up.
"Uh-- yeah. Maybe, I am. Yes, I guess…"
Levy sparkles . "That's so cool! I love reading, but I'm terrible at writing!" she says. An idea blooms in her head. "That's it! Lu-chan, instead of paying me for the key, can I read your story once you're done with it?"
"Eh?" Lucy blushes. "I mean, that's fine…"
"Then it's a promise, okay? I want to be the first person to read it!" Levy says.
Lucy chuckles at that. "Sure, if you're fine with just that."
And that's that.
It hasn't been too long since she joined, but Lucy has gained a room, a debt, a new key, and a number one fan.
She loves it already.