Fairytale of Doom

By CrimsonStarbird

Chapter Thirty-Three – I Walked With You Once

Waiting.

It wasn't something Fairy Tail mages were known for at the best of times.

Lucy had made them promise to give her time to sneak into the ball. No doubt it had been motivated in part by the fact that she didn't want her friends to see her acting like a princess, but it was a sensible request nonetheless. If the Cinderella-themed infiltration was working, nothing would ruin it like a bunch of impatient Fairy Tail mages charging in through the front door.

And so, reluctantly, they were waiting.

Still, it was a poor show when Natsu Dragneel was managing it the best of all of them, Gray thought.

After eating a scarily normal amount of food, the Dragon Slayer had settled onto the windowsill in the corner of the grubby tavern, one cheek pressed against the warped glass. Maybe he was still recovering from their wild carriage ride; even Gray, who had never suffered from motion sickness in his life, was still having to look twice at the chairs and tables to check that they weren't moving. Alternatively, maybe some part of Natsu was struggling to find his place in this new equilibrium after everything he had revealed to the team (though Gray was refusing to think about what it meant that his friend and rival was the one he'd sworn on his father's grave to defeat).

It was only when Gray happened to glance out of the window for himself that he hit upon the most likely explanation for Natsu's solemnity.

There, in the distance, rising over the river just like it did at the start of the movies he'd watched as a child, was Cinderella's Castle.

Where Lucy was. Alone. Or possibly with Zeref, which, despite what Natsu said, was definitely worse.

Lucy had chosen to go, but she'd done it for Natsu, and they all knew it. If she didn't return, and he'd traded the life of his best friend for the slightest chance of getting his evil brother back…

Guilt wasn't an emotion Gray had ever seen Natsu struggle with before – but he wasn't the same person he had been before, either. That carefree, zany Dragon Slayer hadn't been END, or Zeref's brother, or the reason for this whole damn catastrophe in the first place. In accepting those things, in freely sharing them with his teammates, Natsu had had to face up to things he hadn't before – like the possibility that following his heart might lead to the wrong choice. The dividing line between good and evil, friends and foes and family, wasn't as reliable as he'd always assumed.

It was somewhat ironic that discovering he was a younger brother had forced Natsu to grow up.

It was almost enough to make Gray feel sorry for him. But Gray really didn't want to think anything about Natsu right now, lest it embolden the doubts and worries crowding the borders of his mind, so he left Natsu to his waiting, alone.

He left Erza to hers, as well. From the clattering chorus arising from the yard behind the tavern, she had misinterpreted the innkeeper's frightened stammering as consent, and was presently beating the living daylights out of his garden furniture assembled into the vague shape of a combat dummy. Gray thought he had seen Laxus head out after her, and, well, if Laxus wanted to disturb her while she was practising her own style of waiting, she was all his.

Still, at least Laxus was strong enough to stop her before she destroyed anything irreplaceable.

Probably.

Gray might have found a kindred soul in Levy, whose overly dramatic breakup had deflected the attention away from his final decision about Juvia, but she had already found something to distract herself with. When he'd left her, she and Jellal had been sat at one of the tavern tables, deep in conversation. What had started as an in-depth discussion of all the story elements from Cinderella – gathering all the information they could in case they needed to storm the castle – had evolved into an analysis of the narrative themes. Gray, well out of his depth in that scholarly debate, had floundered back to the surface and left them to it.

That just left Cana unaccounted for.

Which was never a good sign.

Erza was trashing the beer garden because she couldn't wait like a normal person; Natsu was waiting like a normal person and it was creeping them all out; but it was Cana who was the most likely to get their team into trouble. She had found a spot in the shadiest corner of the tavern, and was currently playing poker with four huge men who looked like they were used to killing more than just time.

To describe the tavern as a bit of a dive was an understatement. It had been down in the abyss so long that its native life had evolved into grotesque forms never seen on the surface. Cana's opponents barely had a full complement of limbs between them, having replaced missing hands and feet with whatever they'd been able to find around the house: hooks, knives, and cog-fired contraptions as capable of making soup out of people's innards as they were of vegetables. Scars were a fashion statement, and noses were no longer in season.

And there was Sleeping Beauty in her bright pink dress – but not her tiara, having wagered and lost it a few rounds back – cheerfully throwing down a full house of bad decisions onto the table.

"Read 'em and weep, boys," she breezed, as she scraped the modest pile of coins back onto her side of the table.

Knife-hands glittered. Scowls deepened further, chasms opening in rugged faces.

Honestly. She had no sense of self-preservation. They were supposed to not be drawing attention to themselves – that was why they had picked this dodgy tavern in the first place, since the stuck-up Lady Tremaine would never think to look for them here, even if she did hear that they had escaped from the besieged castle. What was the point if Cana was going to make an enemy of every lowlife in the city instead? They'd have nowhere safe in the whole realm.

There was something mesmerizing about watching her play, though. It wasn't just how her clever fingers darted over the cards, or the easy grin that gave nothing away about her hand. It was how their entire team had been thrown into this unpleasant, frustrating trap of waiting, and she was the only one who was actually having fun.

"All in," one of her opponents grunted. It was the most he'd said all game. His pile of coins was far smaller than Cana's, but he was the one who'd taken the tiara, and it glittered like the greatest prize atop a tower of copper and steel. "But I want your dress. Fairy-made gowns are worth a fortune with the right buyer."

"Ooh, strip poker, I like how you think," Cana winked back. "I'll see you for my tiara back. If you lot haven't got the gold to match the bet, I want all your clothes and your dignity on the line. Oh, and throw in that shiny mechanical hand you've got there. That looks like a neat bit of tech."

Suddenly, Gray felt very relieved that Levy was looking after the Fairy Godmother's wand.

He watched with bated breath as one card was revealed, then another… and then his eyes widened. Gestures and detail were everything to a maker mage, and he was sure he'd just seen that thug swap out a card for one concealed within a slot on his mechanical hand.

As the villainous lowlife prepared to throw down his cards triumphantly, Gray was at his side. He seized the fake wrist, nimbly pinning the mechanism to prevent the metal fingers from becoming a metal blade. "What's this?" he accused, with all the ice he could muster.

The thug snarled in response.

Gray hit the button on the side of his hand. A plate slid back, revealing extra playing cards concealed within. The ice mage mocked, "Can the four of you not beat one girl without cheating?"

"You-" the man spat, reaching for a knife, but Gray eyed him coolly.

"Do you think it's a good idea to make a scene? Do you want everyone in your local haunt – no, all the lowlifes in the city, once word of this gets out – to know how pathetic you are? They'll never respect you again."

Gray released the man's grip. "Get out of here. If you go now, I'll even let you keep your clothes."

They went, grumbling and swearing revenge all the while. So be it. If Gray and his friends were in this world long enough for their vengeance to come to anything, they had lost anyway.

He turned back to Cana – and did a double take. She was glaring at him with an expression that hinted at how she'd been playing on par with scary thugs. "What do you think you're doing?"

"Surely even you would care if he took your clothes!" Gray defended hastily. "Cana, he was cheating!"

"Yes, we're all cheating, Gray," she snarked, raising her right arm and shaking it. Three separate copies of the Ace of Hearts flopped out of her sleeve. "The whole point is to cheat the best, and I had those buffoons right where I wanted them. Honestly, I was relying on them underestimating the runaway princess in a dress, not my own guildmate."

"…Oh," said he, feeling foolish. "Well… you know you don't need to gamble for money. We have plenty that we took from the Beast's Castle."

"Of course I don't need to." She shook her hair back, then picked the tiara out of the pile of abandoned coins and slid it back onto her head. The contrast of the flawless gold with her raven hair was striking. Small and simple wasn't Cana's usual style – unless it related to skirts, in which case did she own any other kind? – but it worked. Somehow, despite being the worst drinker in this whole dingy tavern, she still managed to look like a princess. "Doesn't mean I don't want to. Why should Lucy get to have all the fun?"

"…Sorry," he muttered.

"Ah, well. Buy me a drink and we'll call it quits."

"You like this stuff?" he doubted, eyeing the sludge that clung to the insides of her tankard in a way that defied the normal rules of liquids.

"Sure. Good, authentic, fantasy home-brew. Can't go wrong."

He grabbed his own tankard and shoved it down the table towards her. "Then you can have mine from dinner. This stuff's disgusting."

"Gee, thanks," Cana grumbled, but she took it anyway.

Gray took her acceptance as an invitation to sit down. "Are you alright?"

"Well, I'm one mechanical hand short of where I wanted to be right now," came the pointed response. "I would say you'd have to have a match with me to make up for it, but if it's strip poker, you've already lost…"

One mad scramble under the table later, Gray was back with added shirt. "It's this damn Prince Eric sailor tunic," he complained. "Doesn't even do up properly…"

"You're fooling no one. Now, did you want something, or can I get back to cheating these lowlifes out of their ill-gotten gains?"

"Actually, I… wanted to talk to you."

She made no attempt to disguise her groan. "Thus started no good conversation, ever. I'm going to need reinforcements… landlord, another!" A tankard was slammed down sloppily in front of her. She picked up that one and Gray's, poised like boxing gloves, as if she was about to fight and celebrate victory at the same time. "Right. Hit me."

"It's… really nothing bad," Gray hedged.

At least, it hadn't felt like it, until her reaction had him second-guessing himself. Cana never took anything seriously – unless it was a drinking content, and to be perfectly honest, she didn't need to take those seriously to win.

As for what he wanted to say… well, one of the reasons why he'd found it so easy to recognize Natsu's guilt was due to the guilt he himself was feeling.

Guilt over leaving Juvia behind. Guilt over shooting her down so publicly – it had been necessary, to ensure she would finally get the message, but maybe he hadn't had to do it right then, with everyone watching, their whole team's bonds fractured enough as it was. Guilt over his continued refusal to confront the fact that he'd sworn to destroy a demon that had turned out to be his friend, even though every minute he ignored it was a minute he was letting his father down without explanation.

But he couldn't do anything about those. Couldn't turn back time, couldn't rescue Juvia from that doomed castle, couldn't forget everything Natsu had told them and let things just be simple again.

So he'd start with the things he could fix.

"Cana… you know how we used to watch all those movies together when we were kids?"

"How could I forget, given that we're now living them?"

"Well… I'm sorry I stopped watching them with you."

She was so still that even the oscillations of the tankards in her unsteady hands had quietened. "Seriously?"

"Uh… yes?" he hazarded.

"That was, like, seven years ago!"

"I still feel bad about it!" Oh no, now he was getting argumentative. He had been trying to find his courage to apologize, not expecting that the hardest part would be justifying his guilt. "Because… I secretly always enjoyed them. And I liked that it was our thing, a tradition that started when it was just you and me, before the guild was overrun with kids. But I thought that liking fairytales wasn't cool. That it would make me look weak to Natsu and the other guys in the guild. So I gave it up."

"Obviously," she yawned. "No biggie." She frowned down at the tankards in her hands. "You know, I think I might have overprepared for this conversation."

"But-"

"It was good that you stopped coming, anyway. It would have been a lot harder to sneak into the cinema with two people rather than one."

"…You used to sneak in without paying? No, wait, don't answer that; I don't want to be an accessory."

Her grin broadened. "Well, now that we've established that it was years ago and I'm not the kind of person to get hung up over something like that, maybe we can get back to-"

"I think you're exactly the kind of person to get hung up over something like that. Remember how you were depressed for ten years because your dad didn't psychically realize that you were his daughter?"

Oh, hell. He hadn't meant to say that. The words had just slipped out, and he hadn't even had any of the homebrew. Cana was the easiest to get on with of everyone in the guild. What was it about her laid-back attitude that was making him so confrontational?

"Okay, fine." Her tone was still light, but he didn't trust it. He hadn't trusted it, he realized, since this conversation had begun. "I do get a bit hung up over things that are actually important, like my dad. I hate to break it to you, but movie night with you isn't one of them."

"It's what it represented," he argued back. "You loved our movie nights. The fact that you sneaked into the cinema to keep watching those films is proof of that. But when Erza decided it was childish and the others followed suit, and I went along with them to save face… it must have looked like I was choosing Erza over you."

He'd thrown the words out there on a whim, like a dare.

Slowly, deliberately, Cana raised one of the tankards to her lips and downed the contents. She slammed it back on the table and eyed him over it. "So?" she dared back. "I always knew that was going to happen."

"You… what?"

She snorted. "Do you remember the day Erza first turned up at the guildhall? I was just starting to learn to channel my magic into card-based divination, and I did a reading for you."

"Yeah, I remember. You said it was going to be a lucky day for me. I thought you were a total charlatan, given that I'd already lost my wallet that morning, but it turned out you were referring to Erza's arrival. I can't count the number of times she's saved my hide since then."

"Right," Cana said flatly. "Except, as I said, I was just starting to learn how to do divination. Channelling the magic is easy. Interpreting the cards, not so much."

"…Okay?"

"I got it wrong. I didn't foretell a lucky day for you. I foretold an unlucky day for me. Cards were the wrong way up. Easy mistake to make on your first time. But it all made sense in retrospect. You see, Erza's arrival was the first step towards the guild becoming a full-on orphanage. You didn't have to stay with the boring, quiet, princess-film-loving girl any more; you had the mysterious, fierce Erza, and all the others who followed in her wake. That was the day it stopped being just you and me. The day I became the least important of many, many friends. From there, your waning interest in our shared hobbies followed naturally. But that's life, I guess. How many people stay best friends for more than ten years in the real world? We're not living a fairytale. Or at least, we weren't until we got here, and what's the point now?"

"Cana- that's not-" Gray's head was spinning. This was not how he'd expected his apology to go.

Her eyes gleamed the dull pewter of the tankard in the lamplight. He'd wanted her to talk, and now she had no intention of stopping. "You know, back then, I always figured we were going to get married when we grew up."

"You- what?"

"Sure. I had one friend in the world, and he was a guy. We hung out all the time and did everything together. That was basically marriage, right?" She tilted her chair backwards, laughter bubbling up through her throat. "Oh, look at your face! I'd have thought you'd be used to this by now, what with Juvia going on about your future wedding at least once a week."

He tried to scowl at her. It was, as she'd so kindly pointed out, a lot less effective with beet-red cheeks.

"But, you know, we were kids. I grew out of that notion a lot faster than Lisanna did, let me tell you – and I didn't even need to die to do it."

Gray shook his head numbly. His mind was wading through molasses, stuck on the idea of young Cana having ever thought such a thing. How did that match with the carefree, alcohol-guzzling woman who'd jumped from short-term relationship to short-term relationship throughout the decade or so he'd known her?

Then again, she had been disappointed in this world's lacklustre attempt at finding her a one true love, when he and most of their friends still resented it for trying in the first place.

Was that his fault? For never realizing how she felt, and then turning his back on her in favour of more exciting, powerful friends, and shaking her ability to trust…?

Surely not. They were kids. It wasn't even possible to break someone's heart at that age.

"Oh, come on, don't give me that wounded puppy look," Cana groaned. "Sometimes, I really think I dodged a bullet the day Erza turned up."

"Oi!"

She shrugged. "I'm no good at sharing, and you insist on sharing your bare skin with every man and woman out there." Playfully, she swatted his arm. "Besides, I have loads of friends now, instead of just one. Don't know what I'd do without Erza or Mira or Lucy… and I'd never have become friends with Juvia if I was standing between the two of you. So, you know, it is what it is. Some things worked out worse, some things worked out better. That's just life. No one really expects a teenage boy to love princess stories, so I really don't know why you're making such a big deal out of this."

Truth was, he didn't either. He didn't know why something he couldn't change – something that, as Cana said, he couldn't even really be blamed for – felt like such a big deal. Juvia and Gajeel were alone in that castle as a whole army bore down upon them, Lucy had waltzed – literally – into the heart of darkness, the whole situation with END was right there in his mind… and here, an exasperated old friend was making light of her childhood feelings so that he, who should have been the one apologizing, could feel more at ease.

That was what he liked about spending time with Cana. It was so… low-pressure. He couldn't say the wrong thing and set her off, like it was so easy to do with Juvia. Even if he kissed her like he'd stupidly kissed Lucy, she would just laugh it off, or talk about how she'd had it way worse with some of her past dates; it would only make things awkward between them for as long as he let it. He didn't have to always be strong or lively or up for a battle or banter, the way it sometimes felt around Natsu. He could be moody, or hung up over stupid things, and Cana wouldn't take it to heart. She, who felt those things more than anyone, and had perfected living freely with those chains around her ankles, just got it.

When everything in his life seemed so damn difficult – END and his father's legacy and Juvia and the uncertainty ahead of them – it was exactly what he needed. The thought of having to navigate through the climax of their story with only the highly strung Erza and creepily quiet Natsu for company sent a shiver down his spine.

In one quick move, he snatched the other tankard from Cana and drained it. Big mistake. That had been the warm one left over from dinner, and if he'd thought it was bad when it was freshly brought up from the cellar, he'd been living a sheltered life.

Nevertheless, he needed it. He was still learning the art of playing it light while emotion moved dark and heavy in his chest; she'd needed the help of alcohol at the start, too.

"Cana," he choked out. "You know you're important, right?"

"Obviously. Not only am I Sleeping Beauty, but also a part-time Fairy Godmother-"

"I can talk to you," he blurted out. "About things I can't tell anyone else. I don't know how I'd have found the courage to finally cut things off with Juvia if you hadn't let me talk it through with you first. We may not have been best friends for ten solid years, but that doesn't mean I didn't value your friendship at all. You've always been someone I know I can laugh with when I'm feeling down and spill my heart to in confidence when I need advice without judgement. I'm sorry if I've lost sight of that, these past few months."

His grip tightened on the table. "Seeing you doubting yourself so much when we were travelling with the fake Juvia bothered me. You've never just been there in the background. Knowing that I had your friendship to fall back on no matter what is a large part of what kept me moving forward… a larger part than I had realized, before we arrived in this world. And it made me recognize that I hadn't been doing the same for you, starting with walking out from those silly movie nights, and ever since. I can't change the past, so instead… thanks. Thanks for being a better friend to me than I was to you. I think that's what I was trying to say."

"Well, you're welcome," she shrugged. "Next time, maybe lead with that, rather than interrupting my poker game, stealing my drink, and wittering on about princess movies, yeah?"

Gray's mouth opened in annoyance – and then closed again. Deep eyes twinkled at him from underneath a tiara that seemed dull in comparison. That was Cana, alright. It wasn't that she didn't care, or didn't think it was important. She heard, she understood, and she refused to make a big deal out of it, thereby stopping him before he could tumble in too deep.

"I'll buy you another drink," he offered.

"Make it two. It's not like it's even your money."

Rolling his eyes, he got to his feet. "Still, though," he wondered out loud. "It was all such a long time ago, and so much has changed since then. Makes you wonder how different things would be now if we'd stayed as close as we were back then."

To his surprise, she laughed. "You say that like we're about to die, or something. We're still young. We've got the whole future ahead of us." She shrugged; no pressure, no judgement, just that soft quirk of her lips. "Maybe one day, we'll find out."

A/N: Merry Christmas to all! ~CS