Chapter 4: A Fairy Tail Wedding — Part Two
Magnolia had not seen anything quite like this in a very long time.
The town had a particular relationship with Fairy Tail that could best be described as resigned affection — the kind that forms between a neighborhood and its most colorful residents, wherein everyone involved has made their peace with the fact that things are occasionally going to be loud, occasionally structural, and almost always entertaining. The town had rebuilt after guild-related incidents. The town had learned to keep a certain quantity of replacement windows in stock. The town had, on more than one occasion, watched a building change shape slightly and decided not to ask.
But this — this was different.
When word had moved through the streets that Gildarts Clive was getting married, it hadn't traveled the way news usually travels. It had moved the way warmth moves — gradually, thoroughly, until you couldn't find a corner of Magnolia that hadn't been touched by it. The flower stalls had done unprecedented business. The bakery on the corner had quietly begun planning a cake without being asked, on the grounds that some things are simply what you do. Children who had grown up hearing stories about the guild's strongest mage had become inexplicably invested in the proceedings. Shop owners who had watched Teilanne and her tailed children walk through town for twelve years found themselves unexpectedly moved in ways they couldn't entirely articulate.
It had become, without anyone formally deciding it, something very close to a town holiday.
And so when the preparations entered their final weeks, Magnolia did not stand back and observe. It participated.
The wedding stores had been Ginè's idea.
Or rather — it had been Porlyusica's organizational authority and the combined enthusiasm of the younger female guild members translated through Ginè's particular talent for being the person in a group who everyone instinctively follows without quite knowing why. The result was that Teilanne found herself swept into a current of cheerful purpose that was extremely difficult to redirect, being navigated from establishment to establishment with the gentle but inexorable momentum of a river that has decided where it's going.
She appreciated it. She did. The female members had taken to her with a warmth that she still found, after twelve years, slightly surprising — not because she doubted their sincerity but because she had grown up in a culture where warmth was expressed almost exclusively through sparring, and the Magnolia variety required some recalibration.
It was simply also, at times, a great deal.
"This one," said the youngest member of the current party, holding up something that appeared to have been constructed primarily from ambition and an optimistic quantity of fabric.
"No," said Porlyusica.
"What about—"
"Also no."
"But the color—"
"Is not the question." Porlyusica moved through the shop with the efficiency of someone who has already performed the relevant calculations and is now executing. She stopped at a display near the back and considered it with the focused attention she brought to most things — which was, in Teilanne's experience, the same attention she brought to medicinal compounding, which meant it was very focused indeed.
"Try this one," she said.
Meanwhile, in the kitchen of the Fairy Tail guildhall, a very small person was engaged in the delicate operation of acquiring food without being noticed.
Cumber had, in the weeks since his arrival in Magnolia, developed a fairly sophisticated understanding of the guildhall's rhythms. He knew when the kitchen was empty. He knew which floorboards announced themselves and which could be trusted. He knew that the side door was quieter than the main entrance if you lifted it slightly as you opened it, a technique he had discovered empirically on day three and refined to an art.
What he had not fully accounted for was Makarov.
He came around the corner into the kitchen moving at the Saiyan pace that was, for him, simply walking fast, and found the old man sitting at the preparation table with a plate of food already set out and a cup of tea for himself and an expression of mild and unsurprised welcome.
"Wah!"
Cumber's tail went fully vertical with alarm before settling back down as his heart rate caught up with the situation.
"Oh," he said. "G-Gramps. You — you scared me."
"Did I?" Makarov said, with the tone of someone who did not entirely believe this was his fault. "Sit down, Cumber. I thought you might be hungry."
The boy looked at the plate. The evidence was clear and the conclusion straightforward. He climbed onto the stool across from Makarov and pulled the plate toward him with a speed that confirmed the hunger hypothesis comprehensively.
They sat in comfortable silence for a moment — the old wizard with his tea, the small boy with his food, the kitchen quiet around them in the way that spaces go quiet when they're being put to proper use.
"Gramps?"
"Mm?"
"Can I stay here for a while?" The request was delivered into the plate with the casual dignity of someone who doesn't want to appear to care too much about the answer. "It gets lonely up there. In the attic."
Makarov looked at him for a moment — at the red hair bent over the food, the tail moving in the slow, self-soothing way that tails moved when their owner was working through feelings they hadn't fully named yet. He thought of other small people in other years, climbing onto guild bar stools and asking variations of the same essential question: is there room here for me?
"Of course," he said. "Stay as long as you like. I'll make sure no one comes back here until you're ready to go."
Cumber looked up, and the relief that moved across his face was the kind that children produce when they haven't yet learned to hide it. He smiled — a wide, real, Gildarts-shaped smile wrapped around Teilanne's eyes — and went back to his food.
Makarov reached over and ruffled the red hair with the ease of a man who has done this for more children than he can accurately count and intends to do it for several more.
He let his thoughts wander while the boy ate.
He had noticed it early — that particular quality in the child's energy that wasn't quite like anything he had catalogued before. Magic, certainly, in the way that most people born into magical lineages carried it. But beneath that, or alongside it, something else. Something that pressed against his awareness the way certain natural phenomena did — not aggressively, not asking for anything, simply present and very, very large. The way a mountain is present. The way deep water is present.
He recalled what Teilanne had told him, not long after joining the guild. About where she came from. About what her people were. About the energy that Saiyans could project outward — that could carry a person into the air, that grew with the individual, that responded to something that was less calculation and more will.
He thought about that energy, and he thought about this boy, and he thought: interesting.
He filed the thought away for later and poured himself more tea.
The forest outside Magnolia had, over the past weeks, become something of an unofficial training ground for Kizuna and Gildarts.
This had not been planned. It had simply emerged from the fact that both of them tended to be up before most of the guild and both of them found that mornings without some form of physical exertion felt incomplete, and the forest was convenient and had the additional advantage of not disturbing anyone. The training itself was more collaborative than competitive — Gildarts with decades of hard-earned technique and a power that could rearrange geography, Kizuna with Ki and the specific edge of someone still in the accelerated phase of growth where improvement comes so fast you can almost feel it happening.
They made each other better. They had both noticed this without discussing it, because they were both, in their respective ways, people who acted on observations rather than narrating them.
This particular morning they finished with the light still young, and Kizuna straightened and looked at the direction of Magnolia and said:
"We should head back. You're needed in town."
Gildarts stretched his shoulders. "Yeah, probably."
"You have to pick out a suit."
"I know."
"For your wedding."
"I'm aware of what the suit is for, Kizuna."
A pause.
"You're nervous," Kizuna said, with the flat certainty of a statement rather than a question.
"I am not—" Gildarts stopped. Started again. "Maybe." Another pause. "Yes. Fine. Yes."
Kizuna regarded him with an expression that contained, in roughly equal measure, exasperation and something considerably warmer. "You have fought things that would have removed most people from the general category of alive, without apparent concern. You are bothered by a suit and tie."
"That is completely different."
"How."
"It just—" Gildarts ran a hand through his hair, which was already doing something complicated and hadn't been improved by the morning's training. "I haven't really done this before. Not — not like this. Not in a very long time."
Kizuna was quiet for a moment, looking at the man who would, in a matter of weeks, be his father in every way that actually meant something. He thought about what his mother had said over the years, in small pieces at different times, about the man she remembered. About Yuren, who had run back into the fire without hesitation because that was who he was. About the shape of the loss she still carried and had learned to carry lightly because there was no other option.
"She's going to think you look handsome," Kizuna said. "Whatever you pick. She will look at you and think that."
Gildarts looked at him.
"I know her well enough to be certain," Kizuna said, without any softness intended to make it easier to hear — just the plain, direct certainty of someone stating a fact they have excellent evidence for. "So you can stop worrying about the suit."
They stood in the quiet forest for a moment.
"You're twelve years old," Gildarts said.
"Yes."
"You're very confident for someone who is twelve years old."
"I come by it honestly."
Gildarts made a sound that was absolutely a laugh, and they turned together toward the tree line and began the walk back to Magnolia.
The townsfolk, it turned out, had opinions about suits.
This should perhaps not have been surprising. Magnolia had strong feelings about most things, and the impending wedding of one of Fairy Tail's most celebrated members apparently qualified as a civic matter warranting input from a wide constituency. By the time Kizuna and Uruk had steered Gildarts into the third shop of the morning, they had collected a small informal advisory council of shopkeepers, a tailor who had apparently been waiting for this specific commission, two elderly gentlemen who disagreed fundamentally about the relative merits of pocket squares, and Freed Justine, who had appeared somewhere around the second shop with the quiet efficiency of someone who had heard there was an aesthetic problem in need of solving and had considered it his responsibility to attend.
Gildarts stood in the middle of this with the expression of a man who has faced Laxus in his prime and finds this somehow more taxing.
"Simple," Kizuna said, to the room in general, from his position near the door where he had the best overview of the situation. "She likes simple. Clean lines. Nothing that calls attention to itself. If the suit is thinking too hard, it's already wrong."
The tailor nodded with the vigorous approval of a professional recognizing good direction.
Uruk, from his position near the display of ties, held one up without comment — dark red, clean, no pattern.
Kizuna looked at it. "That one."
Gildarts looked between his almost-stepsons and felt, not for the first time and certainly not for the last, the very specific sensation of being managed by people significantly younger than himself who were better at this than he was.
He decided to find it endearing rather than undignified.
The suit that emerged from the process was, in the end, exactly right — dark and simple and unshowy, the red tie the single point of color, the whole thing amounting to a version of Gildarts Clive that was recognizably himself and also, somehow, the best version of the argument for himself. The tailor made the final adjustments with the focused satisfaction of someone whose work has come out exactly as intended.
"Right then," said one of the elderly gentlemen, who had resolved his disagreement with his companion by the pragmatic method of both of them agreeing the pocket square was unnecessary. "That'll do nicely."
Gildarts looked at himself in the mirror.
He thought: Teilanne is going to laugh at me looking this formal.
Then he thought: and I'm going to like it when she does.
The tension in his shoulders came down a fraction.
Back across town, Teilanne emerged from the fitting room.
The dress was silver and navy blue, consistent with the palette she had always been drawn toward without particularly thinking about it. The crimson red trimming at the hem caught the light in a way that moved when she did. Small white pearls dotted the lower edge in a pattern that was precise without being fussy. The crystal necklace sat at her collarbone and the jade earrings — the shape of them, the color — made something in her chest pull briefly and warmly toward a name she still wore like a piece of herself. Silver gloves. White heeled shoes that she was going to need to practice in.
She came out into the shop floor and stood there in the particular uncertainty of someone who has put on something they aren't accustomed to wearing and is relying entirely on external feedback.
The silence lasted approximately one second.
The store employee made a sound that was not quite a word.
Porlyusica, who expressed approval through the medium of stillness — she went very still when something was exactly right, in the way that critical instruments go still — went very still.
Ginè's hands came up over her mouth. Her tail, which had been moving at its usual pleased-medium-speed, went to full velocity. "Momma," she said, slightly muffled by her own hands, "you look like an angel."
"You look absolutely gorgeous," said the store employee, with the fervor of someone who has been in this profession long enough to know when they are witnessing the correct answer.
Teilanne's hand came up self-consciously toward the necklace. "It doesn't look — it's not too much?"
"It's precisely enough," Porlyusica said, which coming from her was equivalent to anyone else producing three paragraphs of enthusiastic praise. She walked a slow half-circle, assessing with the systematic attention she gave to anything that needed to be correct. "Mr. Clive will not be able to look at anything else."
"That's—" Color climbed Teilanne's face. "That's very kind of you, Porlyusica."
"It's accurate. There's a difference." She stopped. "We're done looking. This is the one."
Teilanne turned to the mirror.
The woman looking back at her was — she took a moment with this, the way you take a moment with things that require it — not what she had expected to become, when she had been a young Saiyan warrior on a planet that no longer existed. Not someone who wore silver and navy blue in a flower shop in a town called Magnolia, in a world she had arrived in through a crack in reality with three infants and nothing else. Not someone who was, in a matter of weeks, going to walk down an aisle toward a red-headed man with kind eyes who had once extended a hand into the smoke without being asked.
But she was, apparently, precisely this person. The journey between those two points was not something she could have predicted or planned or prepared for, and she found, looking at her own reflection, that she was not sorry about any of it.
"Yes," she said. "I'll take this one."
"On the house," said the store employee, firmly and immediately.
"I absolutely cannot—"
"Your guild has done more for this town than we could ever repay," the employee said, with the pleasant immovability of someone who has made a decision and is merely informing you of it. "And honestly? It feels like a holiday. You'd be doing Magnolia a genuine favor."
Teilanne looked at the woman for a moment. Then at Porlyusica, who offered nothing except the slight tilt of an eyebrow that meant take the dress, Teilanne. Then at Ginè, who was nodding with the vigorous enthusiasm of someone who considers this an excellent resolution.
"Thank you," Teilanne said. "Very much."
She changed back into her ordinary clothes and had the dress boxed and wrapped with care, then thanked the girls individually for the afternoon, which produced a variety of pleased responses across a range from Ginè's immediate and effusive return of the sentiment to Porlyusica's curt nod that meant exactly the same thing.
Then she and Ginè collected a job posting from the guildhall and went to work, because Saiyans did not, as a rule, sit still well, and there was still time before the boys would be done.
Two weeks passed.
The morning of the wedding arrived with the specific quality that significant mornings sometimes have — a slightly heightened clarity to the light, a feeling of the ordinary day arranging itself around something that isn't ordinary at all. Magnolia was up early. The cathedral at Kardia had been dressed for the occasion, which had required several days and the cheerful labor of what appeared to be a significant portion of the town. Flowers were everywhere. The pews were filling before the hour.
In the back room of Kardia Cathedral, Gildarts Clive was discovering that ties were his enemy.
"These things are — they're designed to be terrible, I'm convinced—"
"Hold still," Kizuna said.
"I am holding still, it's the tie that's—"
"Young Master Kizuna," Freed said, appearing from the left with the serene efficiency of a man who has already solved the problem and is simply waiting for the right moment to deploy the solution, "allow me."
There was a brief, expert series of movements.
"There," Freed said. "That should hold."
Gildarts touched the knot at his throat with the slightly resentful acknowledgment of someone whose problem has been solved by someone else's superior competence. "Thanks, Freed."
"We are guild family," Freed said simply. "There is no need for thanks."
Uruk, who had been standing near the wall with his arms folded in the patient posture of someone who has positioned himself as backup and expects to be needed, gave the finished result a brief evaluative look and nodded once.
Kizuna circled his almost-stepfather once — not critically, but with the systematic thoroughness of someone completing a checklist. The dark suit. The red tie, exactly right. The hair combed back with more discipline than it usually submitted to. The trimmed stubble that had transformed from habitual into deliberate. The shoes.
"You look fine," Kizuna said.
"Fine?"
"You look good. You look like yourself, but dressed up. Which is what she wanted." He met Gildarts' eye with the particular directness that was his primary mode of communication. "She's going to be happy."
Makarov, from his chair in the corner, watched the exchange with the expression of someone who has lived a very long life and has consequently become a connoisseur of moments worth keeping.
The organs began.
Gildarts walked to the altar.
He stood with his hands folded in front of him and looked out at the cathedral, which was full — genuinely full, Fairy Tail members and Magnolia townspeople filling the pews on both sides in a balance that said something true about what these twelve years had built. He recognized faces. He had known some of these people for decades. Others he had met once and they had remembered him because that's what people do with Gildarts Clive — you meet him once and you remember it.
Near the front, mostly hidden behind Porlyusica's considerable presence but not entirely, a small red-haired boy was watching everything with the intent focus of someone for whom this was the most important event in recent memory. His tail was wrapped tightly around his own wrist, the way it did when he was working hard at being still. He was watching his father with an expression that contained rather a lot for a child of six.
The younger guild members who had noticed him were filed in a pew across the aisle, and several of them had questions. They were, for the moment, setting those questions aside, because the music had changed.
The doors opened.
Teilanne appeared at the far end of the aisle.
Gildarts had known she was going to look beautiful. He had known this in the practical, factual way that he knew other practical, factual things — the way you know that a particular technique works because you've seen the evidence. He had braced for it, in the way that you brace for things you know are coming.
He had not, it turned out, braced quite enough.
The dress caught the light of the cathedral windows the way it had been made to. The crystal at her throat. The jade earrings that she had chosen, he knew, for reasons that had nothing to do with aesthetics and everything to do with the name she carried for someone she had lost. The veil framing a face that was — he was aware that he was staring and was genuinely unable to stop — more than he had found the vocabulary for, which for a man who had never been particularly given to vocabulary was saying something.
Beside her, Ginè walked with the posture of someone doing the most important job she had ever been given and executing it with total commitment. Her tail was perfectly still with the effort of being composed, and the expression on her face was one that she would remember for the rest of her life. She walked her mother down the aisle the way she had always, in some unspoken and never-quite-acknowledged way, always meant to — and when she had delivered her mother safely to the altar and stepped back to her place, she folded her hands in front of her and her tail finally moved, sweeping slowly in the silent language of someone whose heart is full.
Teilanne reached the altar. She looked at Gildarts through the veil.
The color that had been climbing her face since she'd entered the doors deepened when she saw him.
"You look very handsome today," she said quietly, in the way of someone stating a private thing in a public space and choosing not to be embarrassed by that.
He made a sound that was approximately a laugh. "You're — I was going to say something sensible but—" He shook his head slightly, which was not the dignified response he had planned. "You're breathtaking. I was prepared for that and it still—" He exhaled. "Once I can actually see your face, I think I'm going to be in even more trouble."
She laughed — short and genuine, catching herself — and they both turned forward toward Makarov, who had positioned himself at the altar with the vestments of an interim priest and the expression of a man who is, right now, in the precise place he is meant to be.
He looked at the couple before him. He looked at the gathered faces of his guild and his town. He looked, briefly and with private warmth, at a small red-haired boy hiding behind his oldest friend, watching his parents with eyes that contained the particular hope of a child who knows something good is happening.
He cleared his throat.
"Good people of Magnolia," he began, and his voice rose and carried in the way it always did — effortlessly, naturally, with the authority of someone who has earned it. "We are gathered here today to celebrate the union of two people who have, between them, given this guild more than they likely know." He paused. "One is among Fairy Tail's finest wizards. The other arrived here twelve years ago in circumstances that I will leave to her own telling, and has become one of its most beloved members. We are grateful — all of us, this guild and this town — that both of them found their way here."
The applause that followed was long and warm and entirely genuine.
When it settled, Gildarts and Teilanne turned to face each other.
Lisanna came forward with Ginè, and between them they presented the ring box. Teilanne's fingers were steady as she opened it and lifted the ring — not grand, not showy, silver lined with blue and green stones and a single gold band, chosen precisely because it was exactly the right amount and no more — and looked at it for a moment before looking up at the man in front of her.
Makarov spoke the words.
Teilanne answered: "I do."
Gildarts answered: "I do."
Then Makarov said: "I ask you now to complete your vows to each other."
Teilanne went first.
She took the ring and slid it onto his finger with steady hands, and then she looked at him and said what she had spent a very long time — longer than she had told anyone, longer than she had fully admitted to herself — learning how to say.
"Gildarts Clive." Her voice was quiet and clear, the way still water is clear — not loud, but reaching everywhere. "I give you everything I have. All my joy, all my grief, my anger and my fear and whatever else I have not yet learned to name — it's yours. But more than any of that, I give you all the love I am capable of giving any one person, and I want you to understand that when I say all of it, I mean it without reservation."
She took a breath.
"When my children and I first arrived here, we had nothing. No plan, no map, and no particular reason to believe that the first person we encountered would be anything other than a stranger. You extended your hand into the smoke of that crater without being asked, without knowing anything about us, without conditions. You could have asked where we came from, what we were, what we wanted. You didn't. You simply made room." A slight pause. "I have been trying to find a way to thank you adequately for that since the first day, and I have come to understand that there isn't one. The only thing I can offer you that comes close is my heart — completely and permanently and without reservation. It is yours, and it will always be yours. My love."
There was a silence in the cathedral that was not empty but full — the particular quality of silence that settles over a large group of people when they have all arrived at the same feeling simultaneously and no one wants to be the first to break it.
Somewhere in the pews, someone was not managing to be quiet about crying. Several people were in the same situation. Makarov was performing a careful operation that involved blinking at a slightly elevated frequency and looking at a point above the couple's heads.
Then Freed stepped forward with the second box.
Gildarts took the ring — silver, blue and green gems covered by diamonds that caught the cathedral light and scattered it, the gold band in the center beneath a flower-cut quartz that was everything Teilanne was: precise and lovely and more than it first appeared. He slid it onto her finger.
He looked at her.
"Teilanne." His voice was lower than usual, the way it went when he was saying something that came from the place he didn't usually open. "Just as you've given everything to me, I give everything I have and am to you and your children. My strength, my stubbornness, every bit of magic I possess, and whatever is left underneath all of that which has nothing to do with strength or magic at all." He paused. "I didn't think I was going to do this again. Not truly. I had made a kind of peace with that. And then you arrived — from a direction I didn't expect, with three children and no explanations and apparently an unlimited capacity for patience with me — and you showed me, very slowly and very quietly, that a heart I thought was full was actually just waiting."
His voice was steady. His eyes were not entirely dry.
"I want to be the father your children deserve. I want to be the husband and the man that you deserve — which is going to require more from me than most things I've taken on, and I know that, and I intend it." His hand closed over hers, the ring settled. "I am only understanding now, standing here, looking at you, how much I wanted this. I love you with everything I have."
Makarov let the words settle for a moment in the way of someone who understands that certain things need space.
Then: "By the power vested in me, I now pronounce you husband and wife." He looked at Gildarts with the warm, exasperated, thoroughly affectionate expression of a man who has known this particular wizard for a very long time. "You may kiss your bride."
Gildarts reached up and drew the veil back from Teilanne's face.
She looked at him. He looked at her. The distance between them had always been something she had maintained with careful, practical intention — a space built from grief and uncertainty and the particular wariness of someone who has loved and lost and isn't sure they're ready to do it again. She found, standing here, that the space was simply gone. She wasn't sure when it had gone. Sometime in the past twelve years, in the ordinary movement of daily life, it had quietly dissolved.
She stepped forward. Her arms went around his neck, and she looked up at him — at the eyes that had been kind to her from the first moment, the eyes that had looked at her children with something that wasn't obligation — and he cupped her face in his hand with a gentleness that was, from this particular man, enormously eloquent.
He kissed her.
It was sweet, initially — the first kind, and then something warmer underneath it, something that had been waiting for its appropriate moment, until Teilanne eventually had to create some small distance for the practical reason that she needed to breathe.
"Are you alright?" Gildarts asked immediately, with genuine concern.
"I'm perfectly fine," she said, with the slight breathlessness of someone who is in fact perfectly fine. "You simply surprised me a little. I was slightly short on air."
The relief on his face was visible and endearing.
She leaned forward and kissed him again — shorter this time, simpler, the punctuation that concludes something rather than the sentence itself.
When they separated, they turned.
Makarov spread his arms.
"People of Magnolia!" The voice rang through the cathedral with the resonance of a man who has been projecting into large spaces for decades and has never once lost the knack. "I present to you — Mr. and Mrs. Gildarts and Teilanne Clive!"
The town came apart in the best possible way.
They walked down the aisle through confetti and flower petals, through the sound of cheering that didn't stop so much as follow them — out through the cathedral doors and into Magnolia itself, which had apparently been waiting. The street was lined. People called out things that were warm and loud and occasionally quite funny. Children who had been held up by parents to see better waved with the particular commitment that small children bring to waving.
It felt, Teilanne thought, walking through all of it with her hand in Gildarts', like being in a river of joy that had no intention of ending soon. She looked at his face. He looked at hers. There was nothing to say that hadn't already been said, and they both knew it, and that was exactly right.
Behind them, somewhere in the procession, Ginè was crying happy tears while Cana patted her shoulder. Kizuna walked with his hands in his pockets and the expression of someone who is privately very satisfied with how things have turned out and is choosing to express this through composure. Uruk walked beside him with precisely the same expression.
They were, Teilanne thought, their fathers' children, both of them.
The guildhall received them with every intention of celebrating this properly.
Fairy Tail parties were, in Teilanne's now-twelve-years of experience, a specific category of event that did not map cleanly onto any other kind of social gathering she had encountered. They were loud in the way that things are loud when everyone involved is genuinely happy. They were chaotic in the specific organized chaos of people who know each other well enough to be unpredictable together. Food appeared and was consumed and more appeared. Drinks were had in volumes that Teilanne had learned not to worry about because the people having them were, for the most part, functionally indestructible.
It was wonderful.
There was, as there always was, a point at which the party began to feel slightly incomplete — not in the way of something missing, but in the way of something anticipated. Anyone who had spent significant time with Fairy Tail developed a sense for it. The particular quality of a celebration that is working toward its natural form.
The plate arrived without announcement.
It left someone's hand — it was never established whose, because the investigation that followed was complicated by the fact that everyone had opinions about who it might have been — and traveled across the guildhall with the committed trajectory of an object in motion, and connected with the face of Gildarts Clive with a sound that stopped the room.
A moment of absolute silence.
Gildarts stood with food on his face.
He reached up and removed the evidence. He looked at it. He looked at the room. He looked at the nearest available plate.
He threw it.
It hit the wrong person, who had not thrown the first plate but was now deeply invested in the matter regardless. That person threw something back. Someone else interpreted this as directed at them. Someone else had an opinion about this interpretation. The opinion was expressed physically.
The Fairy Tail wedding reception became, in approximately forty-five seconds, a Fairy Tail reception in the fullest and most complete sense of the term.
Chairs became projectiles. Drinks became involuntary aerosols. Someone overturned a table, which was treated by three separate people as an invitation. Natsu, who had been waiting for the permission of chaos without quite knowing it, entered with enthusiasm. Gray lost the rest of his clothes immediately and didn't appear to notice. Erza was in four places at once. Elfman said something about manliness that was lost in the general noise.
Teilanne stood in the middle of it.
Then a plate went past her left shoulder, and without thinking about it she snatched it out of the air, assessed the room in approximately one second, and returned it to sender with the calm accuracy of someone who grew up on a planet where this kind of thing was considered a reasonable way to spend a Tuesday.
Gildarts, who had been watching her from two meters away, started laughing.
She looked at him. At the food still in his hair. At the guildhall erupting around them with all the enthusiastic chaos of people who are genuinely, completely happy. At her children — Ginè laughing and already involved, Kizuna navigating the chaos with the efficient calm of someone who had decided to enjoy this on his own terms, Uruk handling something near the back that she chose not to look at too closely.
She looked at all of it.
Then she picked up another plate and smiled at her husband.
"I wouldn't have it any other way," she said.
And she meant every word.
Next Time — Chapter 5: Siblings and a New Guild Member?