Chapter III: A Fairy Tail Wedding - Part One
The guildhall had not yet finished processing the announcement.
This was not unusual. Fairy Tail processed things the way it processed most things - loudly, collectively, and with a great deal of lateral movement - and the news that Gildarts Clive was getting married was the kind of information that required a certain amount of ambient noise to properly digest. Conversations were happening in at least six directions simultaneously. Someone near the back had already started crying, though whether from joy or sheer surprise was unclear. Wakaba had sat down heavily on a chair that he'd missed by approximately four inches, recovered, and was now pretending he'd meant to do that.
Makarov stood at the front of it all with the expression of a man watching a river he knows very well doing exactly what rivers do.
And Teilanne stood beside Gildarts, looking out at the chaos with a slight upward curve at the corner of her mouth, thinking: yes, this is going to take some getting used to.
Then she turned, and said quietly, to no one that anyone else could see: "It's alright. You can come out now."
The noise, by some instinct, pulled back slightly - the way sound does when people collectively sense that something is happening that they have not been briefed on.
From behind Teilanne, a small shape appeared.
He was perhaps six or seven years old, built with the particular solidity of a child who had been well-fed and well-loved and had consequently developed the unshakeable confidence of someone who has never had reason to doubt that the world was, fundamentally, a safe place. Red hair - distinctly, recognizably Gildarts' hair, though softer with youth. Eyes that were dark, almost black, that came from someone else entirely. A faint tan to the skin, and a build that seemed to be working through the question of whose proportions it was going to eventually settle on. His clothes were practical and slightly mismatched in the charming way of a child who has been dressed with love and some negotiation: black and brown shirt, blue pants, bandages wrapped around his limbs in a manner that was clearly inspired by someone he had decided to emulate.
And, unmistakably, a brown monkey tail curled close against his side - the way tails curl when their owner is uncertain about a situation but determined not to show it too obviously.
The guildhall went very quiet.
Not the quiet of shock, exactly - though there was shock in it. More the quiet of a large number of people simultaneously arriving at the same conclusion through different mental routes and finding, when they got there, that they needed a moment.
He was, beyond any reasonable doubt, Teilanne and Gildarts' child.
Gildarts' face and hair, arranged around Teilanne's eyes. The tail - hers. The jaw already hinting at his father's. The careful way he was looking at all of them, assessing without retreating, that was purely and entirely his mother's.
Makarov crouched down - a small and unhurried motion - until he was approximately at eye level with the boy. "Well, hello there, young one," he said, in the same warm and measured register he had used with Ginè. "And what is your name?"
The boy looked at his mother. She gave him the small nod that said it's alright, I'm right here.
"Cumber," the boy said.
"Cumber." Makarov tried it out with the thoughtful deliberation of someone who takes names seriously. "That's a fine name. It's very nice to meet you, Cumber."
Something in the boy's expression shifted - the careful assessment softening at the edges as he determined, with the speed that children often demonstrate in these calculations, that this particular old man was trustworthy. He looked at Makarov with growing confidence. Then, apparently having completed his evaluation and arrived at a satisfying conclusion, he said:
"Nice to meet you too, Gramps."
Teilanne drew breath. "Cumber, he's Master-"
"No, no." Makarov raised a hand, and there was something in his expression that could only be described as delighted. "Leave it. I don't mind at all." He looked at the boy with the specific warmth of someone who has grandchildren and misses the early stages of that. "Gramps is perfectly fine."
Cumber beamed at him.
Teilanne looked between the two of them and quietly decided that this was simply how it was going to be. She had made her peace with stranger things.
Makarov straightened and looked at the two of them - Teilanne, Gildarts, and the small red-haired boy now standing between them with his tail unwinding to its natural relaxed position, which apparently required considerably more floor space than one might expect from a child of his size.
"So then," Makarov said. "When are the two of you thinking?"
"Hitched?" Teilanne repeated, with the slight delay of someone cross-referencing an unfamiliar idiom.
"Married," Gildarts translated.
"Oh." She considered. "We were thinking in a few weeks. Several months have already passed since we discussed it, and we felt - the sooner, the better."
Makarov stroked his mustache. "A few weeks. That is soon. We'll need to prepare." He looked at Cumber, who had apparently decided that Makarov's mustache was one of the more interesting things he had encountered today and was regarding it with open scientific curiosity. "And I take it you plan to introduce this young man to his siblings and the rest of his family here soon?"
"Yes," Teilanne said. "Though not too soon. I would rather not create an awkward situation before we've had the chance to lay the proper groundwork, given that - well." She glanced at the boy. "Given the nature of the situation."
"Understood completely." Makarov nodded once, with the manner of someone filing information in a secure location. "You have my word. I will keep your secret until you decide the time is right."
Teilanne and Gildarts both thanked him - the former with quiet sincerity, the latter with the slightly awkward warmth of a man who is still adjusting to the fact that he is, once again, someone's father. Then they gathered Cumber, slipped out through the side, and found him a safe and unobserved place to wait, before returning to the guildhall with the careful composure of people who were absolutely not keeping anything from anyone.
Cumber, left in his temporary hiding place with some food and a very clear set of instructions, spent the time productively by practicing making his tail move in interesting patterns and contemplating Makarov's mustache.
One week later.
The summons went out in the morning - brief, non-specific, the kind of notice that the guild had learned over the years meant come now, we'll explain when you get here. By mid-morning the guildhall was full, which in Fairy Tail terms meant it was exactly the right amount of crowded to produce a low, constant hum of speculation.
The usual assembly was present. Natsu had arrived already worked up about something tangentially related to the walk over. Gray had arrived and lost his shirt somewhere between the entrance and the bar, which Ginè had noted with an expression of weary resignation before pointedly looking elsewhere. Erza stood straight-backed near the center of the room with the particular alertness of someone who is treating an assembly as a tactical briefing. The Strauss siblings had taken their customary positions - Mirajane near the front, Elfman beside her with his arms crossed in a way that indicated he was Prepared For Whatever This Was, and Lisanna in the space between them that she perpetually and cheerfully occupied.
The three Saiyan children had arranged themselves near the left wall - Kizuna with his arms folded, Uruk with his hands loose at his sides, and Ginè between them with her tail wound at her waist in the way she wore it when she was paying close attention. All three of them had a theory about what this was, built from twelve years of living with their mother and knowing when she was sitting on something significant. They were perhaps seventy percent sure.
Makarov called the room to attention.
"Thank you for coming on short notice," he said, in the carrying tone that cut cleanly through ambient noise. "You're all likely wondering what this is about. Rather than make you wait for it, I'll hand directly over to Gildarts and Teilanne - who have an announcement."
He stepped back.
Teilanne stood at the front of the room and thought, for just a moment, about what it meant to be standing here - in this hall, in this world, with these people, after everything - and then she set that thought aside for later and said:
"This has been a long time coming."
She paused, and Gildarts stepped in with the easy confidence of a man who has decided on a thing and sees no reason to make it more complicated than it is.
"This remarkable woman," he said, with a directness that made the room go very still, "has given me the opportunity to be a father again. She asked me to marry her." He looked at Teilanne briefly, something warm and clear in the look. "I had my doubts - not about her, but about myself. Whether I was ready. Whether I deserved it." His gaze moved out across the room, finding something specific in the crowd on the left side. "And then I thought about a certain young girl whose mother told me she has always wanted me to be her father. And when I held that thought up next to my doubts, the doubts didn't really hold up." He looked back at Teilanne. "So I am going to marry this woman and those wonderful kids of hers are going to be my family, and that is all there is to it."
The guildhall produced a sound.
It was not, technically, a word. It was the sound of several dozen people simultaneously arriving at the same point of surprise and expressing it with combined volume.
"Ehh?! EHHHHHHHHH?!"
"Congratulations, Gildarts," Erza said, recovering first in the way she almost always did - straight-backed and sincere. "Truly."
Mirajane pressed both hands briefly to her mouth. "I - this is quite the surprise." Her eyes were bright. "Quite the wonderful surprise."
Lisanna clapped her hands together with a smile that had been ready and waiting since the moment she'd heard the words. "But what brought this on? What finally-"
"Ginè, Uruk, and Kizuna," Gildarts said simply. "Their feelings. Teilanne's feelings. Laid out plainly and honestly, with more care than most people put into anything." He shook his head slightly, as though the memory still slightly overwhelmed him. "How could I have looked at that and done nothing?"
A small sound from the left wall.
Ginè had both hands pressed over her mouth. Her tail was moving in quick, involuntary sweeps that she was clearly not controlling. Her eyes, above her hands, were very bright indeed.
Kizuna looked at the ceiling with the expression of someone deeply committed to maintaining composure.
Uruk was looking at the middle distance with a carefully neutral face that was doing a great deal of work.
"When are you planning the ceremony?" Erza asked, bringing the conversation back toward logistics with characteristic efficiency.
"A few weeks from now," Teilanne said. "We thought something small and-"
"No."
The voice came from near the back - matter-of-fact, slightly husky, carrying the comfortable authority of someone who does not raise her voice because she has never needed to. Porlyusica stepped forward with the unhurried certainty of a person who has decided something and is merely informing everyone else. Her expression was its usual blend of mild displeasure at the general inconvenience of other people and something beneath that which was considerably warmer.
"Not small," she said. "Not when you've come to your family about it."
"She's right," Erza said, at once and without hesitation. "This is not a small thing. This is something to be celebrated."
Mirajane looked at Erza with an expression of mock-surprise that contained genuine agreement. "I don't often say this, and I want you to fully appreciate the significance of the occasion - but the tin can is absolutely correct."
"'Tin can,'" Erza repeated flatly, in the tone of someone who has decided to address this later.
"Later, Erza."
"Much later," Erza agreed.
Then Makarov drew in a breath that the room, by some collective instinct, recognized as the preliminary to something that was going to be significantly louder than everything preceding it.
"ALRIGHT, EVERYONE." His voice went up like a signal flare. "WE'VE GOT A WEDDING TO PLAN. LET'S SHOW MAGNOLIA WHAT A FAIRY TAIL WEDDING LOOKS LIKE!"
The guildhall answered with the kind of roar that probably reached the outer residential streets and gave several people reason to wonder what was happening over there.
Teilanne stood in the middle of it all and felt the specific sensation of something large and unstoppable beginning to happen. She looked at Gildarts, who was already being pulled toward what appeared to be a planning committee that had formed with suspicious speed.
He caught her eye over the noise and offered a slightly rueful, deeply affectionate shrug, as if to say: this is what we signed up for.
"You'll get used to it," he said, loud enough to carry. "It's always like this."
She looked around the guildhall - at the noise and movement and people already arguing enthusiastically about flowers versus decorations - and thought of Planet Vegeta, where weddings were functional ceremonies acknowledged briefly and moved past quickly, because Saiyans were fighters first and everything else as a distant second.
"It wasn't like this at home," she said, to no one in particular. Then, more quietly: "I think I could get used to it."
The weeks that followed were - there was no gentler word for it - busy.
Fairy Tail in full organizational mode was a force of nature that had no clear analogue in anything Teilanne had previously experienced, and she had experienced quite a lot. The wedding preparations generated a constant, productive chaos that pulled in everyone from the senior members to the newest recruits, each of them contributing according to their particular specialization and opinions, of which Fairy Tail wizards had many and held them with conviction.
Natsu, who threw himself into everything at maximum intensity and then looked surprised by the results, was genuinely delighted to help with anything physical - moving things, building things, carrying things that probably should have been carried by more than one person. He was also, underneath his cheerful assistance, clearly processing something. Gildarts getting married was the kind of information that didn't fit naturally into the shape of the world Natsu had built in his head, and he kept returning to it the way you return to a pebble in your shoe.
Gray found this absolutely hilarious. He said so, repeatedly.
Erza addressed this by being briefly and efficiently in two places at once - organizing the wedding timeline with one hand and removing Gray from Natsu's immediate vicinity with the other, in the interest of getting things done.
Ginè was, without question, the most enthusiastic person in the building about any of this.
She did not merely help with the wedding preparations. She inhabited them. She was everywhere - consulting on flowers with the specific authority of someone who has been mentally planning this for years, weighing in on colors with opinions that turned out to be both strong and, once people got past their surprise, quite good, and radiating the particular energy of a young girl who is watching something she has wanted for a very long time in the process of becoming real. Her tail moved constantly when she was happy. It had been moving constantly for days.
Cana, who had appointed herself Ginè's personal anchor in all large social situations, watched her friend's almost feverish joy with a warm, slightly awed expression. "You really did want this, didn't you," she said one afternoon, sitting on a table with her barrel while Ginè enthusiastically sorted flower samples by color.
Ginè looked up, and the expression on her face was one of those moments of complete, unguarded transparency that made her look younger than twelve. "More than almost anything," she said honestly. "Is that weird?"
"No," Cana said, with a quietness that carried something personal in it. "It's really, really not."
Something in the way she said it made Ginè look at her friend a little more carefully. But she didn't push. She had learned, in the short time she'd known Cana, that there were things Cana kept in a particular room that she only opened from the inside, and that the best thing you could do was make it clear you'd be there when she decided to.
She went back to the flowers. Cana went back to her barrel. And between them, the particular silence of two people becoming actual friends settled comfortably into place.
Kizuna and Uruk, for their part, handled the whole affair with characteristic composure - which is to say, they both clearly had feelings about it that they were expressing entirely through practical assistance and an unusually high tolerance for being asked to move heavy things. They had known, in the way that perceptive children know things, that this was coming for several years now. The arrival of the actual event was not a surprise so much as the satisfying click of something fitting into its proper place.
"You knew," Uruk said to Kizuna at one point, while they were moving chairs.
"We both knew," Kizuna said.
"Yeah." A pause. "Good though."
"Very good."
That was the entirety of the conversation. It covered everything that needed to be said.
It was a quiet afternoon, three days before the wedding, when Mirajane found Kizuna.
Or he found her. The accounting of who arrived first was something both of them might have described differently, but the outcome was the same: they ended up in the same slightly-removed corner of the guildhall, away from the ongoing preparations, in the particular pocket of quiet that forms when the noise around you is constant enough to become a kind of privacy.
She had been watching him for a while. Not in the way that required acknowledgment - just the way you watch someone you've been thinking about something to say to, waiting for the moment that feels right.
"So," she said, settling onto the bench beside him with a lightness that belied the fact that she was very deliberately sitting there. "How does it feel? Getting a new father?"
Kizuna considered this with the unhurried pace he brought to most things that deserved a real answer.
"Good," he said, after a moment. "Kinda quietly good." He looked at the far wall. "I don't remember much about my birth father. Most of what I know about him is what my mother's told me, which isn't everything - she guards some of it, for herself." A slight pause. "But what I can tell is that Gildarts reminds me of him, in the ways that matter. Not the same person. But the same shape, if that makes sense."
Mirajane looked at him. "It makes sense," she said.
"He's a good man." Kizuna's voice was simple and certain. "He didn't have to take us in the way he did. He didn't have to become what he became to us. He just - did." He glanced at her sideways. "How the guild's going about it is - enthusiastic - but it's good. It means something, when people who don't have to care about your things care about your things."
Mirajane was quiet for a moment.
Across the room, the preparations continued. Someone was arguing, pleasantly, about the arrangement of tables. Elfman's voice carried over everyone else's with the volume of a man who considered everything to be a matter of manliness, including table placement.
"Can I ask you something?" Kizuna said.
"You can try," she said, which was not yes but was not no either.
"Why did you want to know? What I thought about Gildarts becoming my father."
She opened her mouth. Closed it. The expression on her face did something complicated and then resolved into something more direct than she usually allowed. "No particular reason."
"Mira."
"I said no-"
"I know what you said." His voice was not unkind, but it was patient in the way that made it clear he was prepared to wait. "And I know that's not the actual answer."
A long silence. The guildhall moved and talked around them. Ginè's laugh rang out briefly from somewhere near the flower corner, bright and quick as a bird.
Mirajane looked at her hands. "Fine," she said, with the particular exhale of someone putting down a weight. "But I'm only saying it once, and after that you will never, ever bring it up again."
"On my honor."
"I was thinking about my father." The words came out quiet and even, in the way that means someone has had a great deal of practice keeping their voice steady around a particular subject. "I don't remember much about him, which is - it's its own kind of difficult. You lose people and you want to remember them properly and sometimes you can't, and that's almost worse." She turned the thought over. "I was wondering how he felt when he knew he was going to be a father. Whether he was ready. Whether he wanted it." A slight pause. "Whether he was proud of us."
Kizuna was quiet.
"I think," he said, carefully and without hurry, "that any man worth being proud of would have been proud of what you became. The three of you. Anyone who can look at you and Elfman and Lisanna - at what you are, at what you've built with each other - and not feel something like that, is someone I don't have a great deal of respect for." He met her eyes when she looked at him. "And I don't think that's the man he was."
She looked at him for a moment.
Then she looked away, and there was something in her expression that was too private to name and would have been rude to press on, so he didn't.
"You know," she said finally, to the middle distance, "you're alright, Kizuna."
"High praise," he said.
"Don't push it." But the corner of her mouth moved. "You're also-" She stopped.
"Also what?"
"Nothing. Never mind. We should head back." She stood, with the easy authority of someone reclaiming the situation. "We're going to settle this properly one day, you and I. When we're properly trained up and ready." Her eyes had shifted back into the register she wore when she was thinking about combat, which was considerably less guarded than almost anything else she used. "I want to see what this Ki of yours actually looks like in a real fight."
"Whenever you're ready," Kizuna said, without concern.
"You should probably be more worried than that."
"I'll keep it in mind."
She left.
Kizuna sat for a moment longer in the corner, and then became aware - without turning around - of the presence of approximately eight people on the other side of the nearby pillar who had been there for most of the conversation and were now attempting to relocate with the casual air of people who had absolutely not been listening.
"I know you're there," he said, to the pillar.
The shuffling stopped.
"I have been aware of you for the last ten minutes."
More silence.
"You can come out."
They emerged with varying degrees of sheepishness - Natsu without any, Gray with slightly more than usual, Uruk with the carefully neutral expression of someone who was absolutely his brother's brother, Ginè looking caught and unrepentant in equal measure, Elfman already composing something about manliness, Happy trying to look somewhere else, Lisanna wearing a smile that had clearly been growing for the duration of the conversation.
Kizuna looked at all of them. Then he looked specifically at Lisanna, who met his eyes with the expression of someone who is having an excellent day.
"Your sister talks to me because she wants to fight me," he said.
"Absolutely," Lisanna agreed, in the warm and entirely unconvinced tone of someone who has known her sister her entire life and therefore knows precisely what her sister's interested-in-a-fight face looks like versus her other faces.
Kizuna looked at her for a moment, decided this was a conversation with a ceiling he couldn't see from where he was standing, and stood up.
"Three days," he said. "We have a wedding in three days. Some of us should probably be helping with that."
He walked back toward the main hall.
Behind him, Lisanna watched him go with the patient, pleasant expression of someone who is entirely content to let a thing develop at its own pace, because she already knows how it ends.
Three days remained.
Fairy Tail had always known how to build toward something. In the streets of Magnolia, word had spread - quietly at first, and then less quietly - that something was happening at the guildhall. Flower deliveries arrived and were redirected with cheerful efficiency by whoever happened to be nearest the door. The scent of fresh-cut arrangements had settled into the stonework.
Somewhere in the building, Ginè was still talking to Cana about flowers. Uruk had finished moving chairs and was now in quiet conversation with Gray that had, against all odds, not yet become a fight. Natsu had apparently processed his feelings about Gildarts getting married and come out the other side at peace with it, or at least at a level of enthusiasm for the event that functioned as peace.
And Teilanne stood at the window of the upper floor - the building quiet around her in the particular way that buildings go quiet when everyone else has gone home - and looked out at Magnolia in the evening light.
She had arrived here crammed into a pod with three infants and the contents of a hastily packed bag. She had climbed out of a crater with no plan, no map, and no knowledge of where she was.
Twelve years.
Three children who had grown from people she carried into people who could carry her, if it came to it.
A town that had simply, eventually, accepted them.
A family that had found them in a guildhall and kept finding them, in all the ways that mattered.
And in three days - a wedding.
She pressed her palm to the glass.
Somewhere far away, a planet no longer existed. A man she had loved was gone. A best friend she had watched smile through a pod window had passed beyond any world she could reach.
She was alive. Her children were alive.
Ginè was planning flowers for a wedding. Kizuna was making a friend. Uruk was - probably still moving chairs, actually, because that was Uruk.
And Cumber, her secret and her joy, was waiting patiently in a warm room for the morning when he could stop being a secret.
Three days, she thought.
She let out a slow breath.
I can do three more days.
Next Time - Chapter 4: A Fairy Tail Wedding - Part Two