Chapter 5: A New Sibling and a New Guild Member
The Fairy Tail guildhall, in the deep quiet of late night, looked like the aftermath of a celebration that had meant every word of itself.
Bodies were distributed across the floor with the artless generosity of people who had simply stopped moving wherever they happened to be when the evening finally caught up with them. Bottles stood or lay in companionable proximity to their owners. Someone had contrived to fall asleep sitting upright against a support pillar with their arms still crossed, which was either impressive or concerning depending on your perspective. The decorations from the wedding still hung from the rafters and the windowsills, slightly askew now, petals scattered across the flagstones like the physical residue of joy.
Teilanne stood in the doorway between the main hall and the corridor, looked at all of it, and laughed.
It was a quiet laugh — the kind you produce when something is genuinely funny and you are the only one awake to appreciate it, so you allow yourself the private, full version. She looked at the sleeping faces of the people who had spent the better part of a day making sure this occasion was everything it should be, and felt the warm, settled weight of the word family in a way that was more complete than usual.
Gildarts appeared beside her in the doorway, looked at the same scene, and produced a sound of resigned affection that she had catalogued over twelve years as his standard response to Fairy Tail being entirely itself.
"We should probably make sure none of them choke on anything," she said.
"Already thinking it," he said.
They moved through the hall together — Gildarts with blankets retrieved from somewhere in the back, distributing them with the careful efficiency of a man who has spent years navigating spaces full of people he would prefer not to wake, Teilanne adjusting the occasional precarious bottle with the quiet practicality of someone who has raised three children and developed excellent instincts for potential hazards.
The three Saiyan children were still awake, which surprised no one who knew them. Saiyans slept when they chose to and not before, and none of them had chosen to yet. Kizuna was seated at a table, elbows on the surface, apparently thinking. Uruk stood near the window. Ginè had her tail around her wrist and was looking at the sleeping guild members with an expression of fond bemusement.
Gildarts caught Teilanne's eye across the room.
She caught his.
The look that passed between them was one of those silent communications that develop between two people after years of paying attention to each other — full sentences compressed into a fraction of a second. His said: it's time, isn't it? Hers said: yes. Go find him.
"Why don't you go get Cumber?" Gildarts said quietly. "I'd imagine he's been patient about as long as a seven-year-old can reasonably be expected to manage."
"Longer, probably," Teilanne said. She leaned in briefly — the small, unceremonious intimacy of people who are still, in some corner of themselves, slightly astonished at each other — pressed a quick kiss to his jaw, and turned toward the door.
She heard Ginè make a quiet, delighted sound behind her.
She chose not to acknowledge it, because if she did she would smile, and if she smiled she would lose the composed departure she was going for.
Gildarts watched his wife leave and then stood in the warm ruins of the celebration with an expression that he was fairly certain was not entirely appropriate to his general reputation and did not particularly care.
He shook his head once, with the decisive air of a man reasserting his priorities, and turned to find three pairs of eyes looking at him with varying degrees of amusement.
"Not a word," he said.
"I wasn't going to say anything," Kizuna said, in the tone of someone who absolutely was going to say something and is simply waiting for the right moment.
Gildarts pointed at him. Then he indicated, with a gesture, that the three of them should follow him. They fell in without question — which was itself one of those things that continued to quietly mean something to him, the simple readiness of it, the absence of any required negotiation.
They followed him out into the night.
Behind them, from the approximate direction of a particular window, four people who had been very carefully not sleeping shifted position. Natsu, Gray, Erza, and Mirajane had all, at various points in the evening, made the independent decision to follow the proceedings at a careful distance, for reasons that each of them would have described differently but that amounted, essentially, to the same thing: something was happening, and Fairy Tail wizards did not, as a rule, let things happen without being present for them.
They followed at a distance that they considered discreet.
The night air was cool and the streets of Magnolia were quiet in the way that towns go quiet after something significant — not emptily quiet, but with the satisfied quiet of a place that has been well-used and is now resting.
Kizuna walked beside Gildarts and did not ask where they were going, because the knowing look his mother had given him in the guildhall had already told him that something was coming that required arrival rather than anticipation. Uruk walked on the other side with his customary equanimity. Ginè was slightly behind them both, her tail in its thoughtful-medium-pace, her eyes moving between Gildarts and the direction of their house.
She was, of the three of them, the one whose instincts were most finely tuned to the emotional register of a situation. She had felt all evening that the wedding, wonderful as it was, had been building toward something else — something that the adults around her had been carefully carrying for longer than the day would account for.
She didn't say anything. She walked, and thought, and waited.
The Clive residence was lit from inside.
Gildarts opened the door and stood back to let the three of them through, which was unusual — he was not typically the sort of person who held doors — and Kizuna noted this with the portion of his attention he kept perpetually allocated to cataloguing things that were slightly off from the norm.
They moved into the main room.
Teilanne was there, seated, with an expression of careful and gentle composure. Beside her, asleep against her side with the total abandonment of a small child who has decided that wherever they are is safe enough to let everything go, was a small boy.
Red hair. The particular red of someone's father, undeniable as a signature.
A brown tail, curled loosely over the edge of the cushion.
The three of them stopped.
Ginè's hand found her own mouth.
The small boy stirred at the sound of the door — children who have spent extended time being kept out of sight develop light sleep as a matter of self-preservation — and came awake with the quick, complete wakefulness of Saiyan physiology, eyes open and body already in motion before he'd fully processed where he was. He scrambled upright, saw the three unfamiliar people in the doorway, and disappeared behind his mother's leg with the practiced speed of someone who had gotten very good at this.
Teilanne put her hand on the back of his head. "It's alright, Cumber," she said quietly. "That's your father coming in behind you. And those three—" she looked at her children, at the three expressions ranging from Ginè's barely-contained delight to Kizuna's very still, very focused attention to Uruk's carefully neutral face that was doing significant internal work — "are your brothers and sister."
A pause.
One eye appeared around Teilanne's side.
"Siblings?" the voice said, muffled and small.
"Yes." She smoothed his hair. "Your big brothers and your big sister. I know you've been waiting a long time to meet them."
The squirm that went through the small body was the pure, unedited physical language of nervousness — the kind you can't quite suppress when you're seven years old and the stakes feel enormous. He had only ever known two people in the world. Two people was simple. Three new people all at once, two of them bigger than him and one of them currently making a sound that was suspiciously like someone trying not to cry—
Ginè had both hands pressed over her mouth and her eyes were very bright and her tail was moving fast enough that it was practically a blur.
"Oh," she whispered, in the way of someone who has just seen something so fundamentally good that language is barely adequate. "Oh, he's a cutie—"
Teilanne smiled. "Glad you think so, Ginè. Because this is your younger brother."
The three of them processed this in their individual ways.
Uruk went very still.
Kizuna blinked once. "Younger?"
Ginè lowered her hands. "Brother?"
All three of them arrived at the same place simultaneously.
"EHHHHHHHH?!?!?!"
Cumber flinched behind his mother's leg. The volume had apparently not been part of his briefing.
"Shh," Teilanne said, to all three of them at once, with the particular shushing energy of a woman whose entire guild was asleep in a building not far away.
"But—" Ginè stared. "You mean that you were already — that you were—"
Teilanne's expression shifted into the particular composition of someone who has known this moment was coming for seven years and has still not developed complete immunity to its embarrassment.
"It is," she said, "somewhat mortifying to explain." She collected herself with visible effort. "Yes, Ginè. I was already expecting Cumber. Before Gildarts and I were married. Before we had even — properly — it was an incident that I can best describe as a significant and mutual lack of good judgment at a fairly early stage of things."
The color in her face was substantial.
Gildarts, from his position near the doorway, made the executive decision to not be the only one bearing this. "I think the lack of good judgment was equally distributed," he said, with the generosity of a man who has decided that if he's going down he's going down with dignity. "I include myself fully in that accounting."
Ginè's face had gone the color of her guild mark.
Her mind was performing operations that she appeared to have limited control over.
"Oh," she said. "Oh my."
"So," Kizuna said, with the careful tone of someone choosing their words with engineering precision, "you two did... and Cumber is the..."
"Yes," Teilanne said, in the clipped tone of someone closing a topic with both hands.
"I see," said Uruk, in the tone of someone who sees entirely and is choosing to be merciful about it.
A silence settled over the room that contained several different flavors of feeling — embarrassment from the parents, overstimulation from Ginè, the particular neutral-faced internal recalibration that was Kizuna and Uruk's shared response to surprising information — and then it was broken by the small, muffled sound of Cumber, who had been pressed against his mother's leg throughout all of this and had now apparently decided that the people on the other side of the situation seemed, on balance, acceptable.
He inched out.
First one step. Then another. His tail uncurled from its tight nervous position to something more exploratory.
He looked at Ginè.
Ginè looked at him.
She crouched down to his level — dropping from her full twelve-year-old height to something much closer to his — and opened her arms with the complete and unconditional warmth that was, at its root, the most fundamental thing about her.
Cumber ran.
He hit her like a small, determined projectile, arms going around her neck, and Ginè caught him with a sound that was half-laugh and half something that didn't have a name and wrapped her arms around him and held on. Her tail went around him too, the way it did when she was holding something she wanted to protect.
Kizuna crossed the room in three steps and wrapped both arms around his new brother from above, and Uruk came in from the other side, and for a moment the four of them were a knot of brown tails and dark hair and the specific warmth of people who have just discovered each other and intend to keep each other.
Gildarts looked at Teilanne.
She looked at him.
Neither of them said anything, because there wasn't anything to say that the room wasn't already saying better.
Ginè resurfaced eventually, Cumber still partially attached to her, and held him at arm's length with the assessing expression of a big sister conducting her first proper evaluation.
"Cumber," she said.
"Yeah?" he said.
"How old are you?"
He considered this with the gravity of someone being asked an important question. "Seven," he said.
The number landed.
Ginè looked at Kizuna. Kizuna looked at Uruk. Uruk looked at the ceiling. All three of them arrived at the same arithmetic simultaneously.
"Seven years," Ginè said slowly. "He's been right there for seven years?"
"Right under our noses," Kizuna confirmed, in a tone that could have been accusing and chose to be amused instead.
"Seven," Uruk repeated, with the quiet emphasis of someone reviewing a calculation they ran correctly but didn't expect to come out like that.
"Mom," Ginè said, "does anyone else know?"
"Master Makarov," Teilanne said. "And Porlyusica. No one else."
There was a brief collective processing of this, during which all three of them thought about the specific quantity of chaos that would have been produced if, at any point in the preceding seven years, this information had escaped into the general guild population.
"Good," Kizuna said finally, with enormous practicality. "Let's keep it that way until we figure out the best way to do this."
Outside the window of the Clive residence, in the shadow of the garden wall, four people were having a very quiet and highly charged reaction to the conversation they had just heard.
Natsu, to his credit, appeared to be working hard at understanding all of it and was perhaps sixty percent of the way there.
Gray and Mirajane and Erza were one hundred percent of the way there, and their faces reflected this comprehensively.
The red in their complexions was, under the circumstances, extremely understandable.
They departed into the Magnolia night with the coordinated urgency of people who have heard something they are absolutely going to pretend they did not hear, at least until a more advantageous moment, and scattered back toward the guildhall with exceptional quiet for a group that normally had very little.
The morning arrived the way mornings do after significant events — slightly brighter than usual, with the quality of a day that knows something was decided the night before and is presenting itself accordingly.
The Clive family gathered at the breakfast table for the first time as a complete unit of five, which produced the specific comfortable chaos of a family that has gained a new member and is still negotiating the geometry of itself. Cumber had woken up in the state of complete morning-certainty that is the exclusive province of small children, had immediately located Ginè, and had attached himself to her left side in a manner that suggested he intended to remain there indefinitely.
Ginè appeared entirely satisfied with this arrangement.
Gildarts, whose experience with small children was being rapidly refreshed, navigated around the breakfast table with the slightly dazed competence of a man rediscovering an old skill set, and found that Kizuna had materialized beside him with two cups of tea and an expression that said I know what I'm doing, just take the cup.
Teilanne watched all of it from her chair and thought that this was the table she had been building toward for twelve years, and that it looked exactly right.
After breakfast, she looked at Gildarts.
"Today?" she asked.
He nodded. "Today."
Makarov called the guild to assembly with his customary brief and non-negotiable notice, and the guild gathered with the compliance of people who have learned that when Makarov uses that particular tone, showing up is not technically optional.
It was, despite the previous evening's festivities, a reasonably complete assembly. Fairy Tail members had a remarkable recuperative capacity. Laxus had appeared, which itself was something — he occupied a spot near the back with his arms folded and the air of a man who was here because he chose to be, not because anyone asked.
When everyone was present, Makarov indicated the family standing at the front of the room with a brief gesture that said: over to you.
Teilanne stepped forward.
She looked out at the gathered faces — people she had been living alongside for the better part of a year now, people whose names and habits and particular brands of chaos she had catalogued with the attentive observation of a Saiyan who was trained from birth to read a room. She looked at the people who had shown up to her wedding yesterday and made it into something she would carry for the rest of her life.
Then she looked back at Cumber, who was stationed behind Ginè's leg with his eye showing and his tail at full nervous-curl.
"There is someone Gildarts and I would like to introduce to you," she said. "We ask only that you try not to overwhelm them — they're still finding their feet with new people."
She extended her hand.
Ginè put her hand gently on Cumber's back, the lightest possible pressure — not pushing, just indicating. "It's alright," she murmured, in the specific voice she had already developed for him over approximately fourteen hours of sisterhood. "Just go to Momma. It's fine."
He looked up at her.
She smiled at him.
He walked out.
He crossed the floor with his head slightly down and his tail still curled, and came to stand in front of his mother, who put one hand on his left shoulder. Gildarts put his hand on the right. The boy looked up at the assembled guild with the focused attention of someone conducting a very thorough assessment.
The guild looked back.
Then, in the way that large groups of people sometimes do, they all arrived at the same conclusion through different routes at approximately the same speed.
"Doesn't he look a bit like—"
"The hair is definitely—"
"And the eyes are—"
"He's got a tail like the others—"
"Macao," Wakaba said, in the tone of a man following a logical chain to its only possible conclusion. "Does that boy look to you like a small version of both of them?"
"He does," Macao confirmed.
"Which would mean—"
"Which would mean," Gildarts said, stepping in with the decisiveness of a man who has found that the most efficient approach to a difficult conversation is to simply have it, "that you're right. He's ours."
The room required a moment.
Teilanne provided the complete version with the measured grace of someone who has rehearsed the significant parts: "This is our youngest son, Cumber. He is seven years old. He is the result of — a rather significant lapse in judgment between myself and Gildarts, rather early on, before we had come to understand that we wanted to be married." She achieved this without her voice doing anything uncooperative, though the color in her face was eloquent. "He has been with us for some time. We kept him secret until after the wedding so that we could introduce him properly. This is him. Properly."
Gildarts, beside her, added with the candid simplicity that was his default register: "And Ginè, apparently, had a hand in us finally sorting out the marriage side of things. So some credit there."
"—EHHHHHHH?!?!?!"
The sound was, by the measure of Fairy Tail guild-wide exclamations, genuinely impressive — a full-register reaction incorporating the range from Elfman's bellowed astonishment to Lisanna's more musical version to the complex layered sound of several dozen people all expressing the same thing with different vocabularies. Tables were gripped. Someone sat down heavily. Someone else stood up. The general composition of the room became briefly architectural.
Cumber, who had not been briefed on the full scope of this, retreated back behind Ginè's leg at approximately the speed of sound.
Ginè, who remembered the feeling precisely, put her hand on his head without looking down and said, at the volume appropriate for the distance between them: "It's alright. They're just surprised. They're not going to hurt you. They're actually going to think you're wonderful, in approximately thirty seconds, just wait."
Twenty-eight seconds later, the initial wave broke into something warmer.
The women of the guild discovered Cumber.
This was, for Cumber, a somewhat intense experience. He was small and had a tail and had his father's face arranged around his mother's eyes and he was, there was no other word for it, extremely cute — a fact that the female membership of Fairy Tail expressed with a collective enthusiasm that he had not encountered before and was not sure he had the tools to navigate.
He solved this by returning to Ginè's leg, which he appeared to have designated as his primary defensive position.
She chuckled — a sound that had, underneath it, years of experience with the same instinct. "Cumber."
"There's a lot of them," he said, from behind her knee.
"There are quite a lot, yes. But they're friendly. Every one of them." She crouched down to his level, and he peeked at her from around her leg. "I used to do exactly this. Hide behind my brothers." She tilted her head. "Do you know how I got past it?"
He shook his head.
"I just decided that the people out there were probably more interesting than staying behind someone's leg was. And I was right." She held out her hand. "Come on."
He looked at her hand. Looked at the room. Performed his own private calculation with the focused seriousness of a seven-year-old determining something important.
Then he took her hand and stepped out.
"There," Ginè said. "Was that so terrible?"
He shook his head, very slightly, with the dignity of someone who is not going to give that admission a larger footprint than necessary.
She laughed and ruffled his hair, which he submitted to with the particular tolerance of someone who has decided that this person is allowed.
Lisanna reached him first, which was exactly right — she had the quality of someone who understands instinctively what another person needs from an approach, and what Cumber needed was someone who would come in small and warm and without the pressure of performance. She crouched to his level and introduced herself simply and waited for him to respond on his own schedule, and he did, and from there it went the way these things go when one person gets the first moment right.
Elfman followed, in his way, which was loud but sincere and ultimately made Cumber's tail uncurl slightly from sheer surprise at the volume.
Mirajane came next, and her particular brand of warmth — the real version, not the performed version — did something to the remaining tension in the small boy's shoulders that the preceding greetings hadn't quite finished.
Erza introduced herself with characteristic directness and a bow that she probably hadn't planned but produced anyway, as if something about the situation called for it. Cumber looked at her armor with the focused attention of someone cataloguing things of interest and storing them for later.
Natsu arrived with the full force of himself, which knocked Cumber slightly back on his heels before the boy rallied and looked at him with the calm assessment of someone who recognizes a kindred species of energy. They regarded each other for a moment in the way that people do when they are meeting someone whose particular frequency of being is very close to their own.
Gray said hello, shirtless, which caused Cumber to look at him, then at his shirt on the floor, then back at him, with an expression of polite but genuine confusion.
Ginè, nearby, said nothing. Simply patted Cumber's shoulder. I know. You get used to it.
And Cana — Cana, who had been hanging back slightly with her barrel, as she sometimes did when she was feeling something she was still deciding how much to show — came last, and crouched down, and looked at Cumber with an expression that was warm and slightly searching.
Cumber looked back at her with the same focused quality he had applied to everything else in the room, and then tilted his head with the small frown of someone who has detected something they can't quite name.
She felt familiar. Not like his parents, not like his siblings — different from that. Like something adjacent.
He would ask his mother about it later. She would know.
The guild dispersed back into its ordinary rhythms the way water fills a space — gradually, completely, and as though it had never been disrupted. Jobs were posted. Arguments that had been suspended for the announcement resumed. The particular low hum of Fairy Tail being itself reasserted itself over the hall.
The Clive family occupied a table near the windows, all five of them, and watched it all.
Cumber had worked his way through the introduction process and arrived at the other side of it somewhat exhausted and considerably more comfortable, with Ginè on one side and Kizuna on the other and Uruk across the table watching the room with his usual quiet attention. Gildarts and Teilanne sat at either end of the arrangement with the ease of people who have finally put down something they have been carrying for a while.
"He's going to need to join eventually," Kizuna said, looking at his new brother with the casual assessment of someone conducting long-term planning.
"When he's old enough," Teilanne said.
"He'll be the youngest member in the guild," Ginè said, and there was something pleased about the way she said it, as though this was a good problem to have.
Cumber looked between all of them.
"Is it — will I have to do the stamp thing?" he asked.
"When the time comes," Uruk said.
"Where would you put it?" Ginè asked, in the tone of someone who finds this an important question.
Cumber considered this with the gravity it apparently deserved, lifting his hands, inspecting his arms, touching his shoulder and then his collarbone and then looking at his sister with the complete seriousness of someone making an architectural decision.
The decision-making process was ongoing.
Gildarts watched the five of them from his end of the table and thought about a morning twelve years ago when he had walked into a forest because the locals said there was a monster, and had found instead a woman climbing out of a crater with three babies and the specific composure of someone who had run out of capacity for being afraid of the wrong things.
He thought about the version of himself from that morning — unattached, half-present, carrying his grief around the world at the end of a long series of jobs and not examining it too closely.
He looked at the table.
He looked at Teilanne, who was watching Cumber's deliberations with the expression she wore when she was happy and trying not to take up too much space with it.
He reached over and covered her hand with his.
She looked at him.
"Good day," he said.
She turned her hand over and held his.
"Good day," she agreed.
It was, in the end, an ordinary afternoon in Fairy Tail — which was to say, it was loud and warm and slightly chaotic and full of people who had chosen to be here, and therefore entirely extraordinary.
The Saiyan family from somewhere else entirely occupied their table by the window and were claimed by this world and this guild and this particular improbable life, and they let themselves be claimed.
The adventures ahead of them were considerable.
But that, as it always is, was a story for another time.
Next Time — Chapter 6: Seven Years Later and a Celestial Wizard