Chapter 6: Seven Years Later and a Celestial Wizard
Seven years is long enough for children to become something else entirely.
Not different, exactly — the essential architecture of a person tends to establish itself early and hold — but more. More settled in their own skin. More certain of the particular shape they intend to occupy in the world. More capable, in every direction, of being exactly what they were always going to be.
The five figures moving through Hargeon's marketplace on a bright midday in early summer were not the children who had joined Fairy Tail seven years ago. They were something the guild had spent seven years helping make — and something the guild had spent seven years slightly struggling to keep up with.
Hargeon was a port town in the way that all port towns are port towns — salt-bleached and sun-warmed, with the permanent undertone of fish and rope and the particular kind of commerce that happens when the sea meets the land and both have something to offer. The marketplace was full at midday, the crowd moving in the compressed, jostling way of people who have somewhere to be and have decided that the most direct path there runs through whoever is currently in front of them.
Through this, five figures navigated with the characteristic ease of people accustomed to far more complicated environments than a busy port market.
"Are you actually certain about this information?" Kizuna asked, with the tone of someone who has phrased this particular question in this particular way many times and has not yet received a satisfactory answer.
At nineteen, he had grown into himself with the uncomplicated directness of a person who had decided early what kind of man he was going to be and had put consistent effort into becoming it. The dark hair was tied back now — a concession to practicality that he had resisted for approximately two years before the evidence became overwhelming. The Fairy Tail mark on his neck, just above his right shoulder, sat exactly where he had placed it seven years ago, unchanged. He moved through the crowd with the particular awareness of someone who is always, on some level, reading a room.
"Happy said it was reliable," Natsu insisted, from approximately half a step ahead of everyone else, where he perpetually existed in his relationship to any given direction of travel. His scarf was doing something dramatic in the sea breeze. He appeared unaware of this. "Igneel could be here, Kizuna. Here. We have to check."
"You have said that in seventeen different towns in the past two years," Uruk said, from Kizuna's left.
He was eighteen, and looked it — not in the soft way of someone still working out their proportions, but in the settled way of someone who had done that work and arrived somewhere. The battle armor their mother had given him on his birthday was lightweight and functional and bore the marks of having been actually used, which was its own kind of testament to the past year. He walked with the deliberate economy of someone for whom motion and stillness were both conscious choices.
"And yet," Natsu said, with the serene confidence of someone whose stubbornness has become, over time, something very close to philosophy, "I haven't found him yet. Which means I haven't been wrong. Just early."
"That," Kizuna said, "is a remarkable way to frame repeated inaccuracy."
"Thank you."
On Kizuna's right, Ginè — seventeen, carrying herself with the easy confidence of someone who had grown into it rather than performed it — caught her brother's eye over Natsu's head and offered the small expression that meant: you walked into that one.
She had changed in the way that people who were always themselves change — not into something new, but into a clearer version of the thing she had been at twelve. Quicker, sharper, more present. She wore her hair down to her shoulders now, and the Fairy Tail mark on the back of her left hand was the first thing you saw when she moved, which she did constantly and with an attention to aerial angles that had become second nature. The pink wristbands were different ones — the originals had not survived training — but the jade necklace at her throat was the same one she had worn since she was old enough to make it. Some things didn't change because you didn't want them to.
Beside her, nudging her elbow: Cumber.
Fourteen, recently official, his red hair refusing every attempt at discipline with a cheerful persistence that was entirely his father's. Gildarts' jaw, Teilanne's eyes — dark and bright and missing nothing — in the face of a boy who still carried the particular energy of someone who finds the world genuinely and comprehensively interesting. His tail swished behind him with the frequency of someone whose anticipation is outrunning their composure.
"This is my first real mission outside Magnolia," he said, to Ginè, with an attempt at casual delivery that did not quite succeed.
"It's not exactly a mission," said Happy, from his position floating above Cumber's left shoulder, with the mild precision of someone providing accurate information to an enthusiastic audience. "It is, technically, following a rumor."
"Still counts," Cumber said firmly.
Happy considered this. "Arguable."
"Still counts."
Happy appeared to decide that further engagement was not worth the investment and turned his attention to a fish stall they were passing.
They heard the crowd before they saw it.
A particular quality of noise — high and collective and generated, specifically, by a group of people experiencing something they found overwhelming in the direction of delight. The kind of sound that in Kizuna's experience preceded either something genuinely wonderful or something that wanted to be mistaken for it.
"What's that?" Ginè wondered.
"Let's look," Natsu said, already going.
The crowd had formed in a ring around a man who was performing the very specific theatrical work of existing in a way that invited attention. Dark blue hair. An ornate cape that had been selected to be noticed. A smile that was doing significant structural labor. He was introducing himself to the assembled audience with the practiced ease of someone who has said the same words so many times they have acquired the effortless quality of truth.
"Salamander," several voices breathed, in the tone of people repeating something they have already decided is magnificent.
Natsu stopped.
Kizuna felt it before he identified it — a subtle pull, the edges of his attention softening in ways that attention doesn't soften on its own, a warmth toward the figure in the cape that arrived without the usual prerequisite of the figure in the cape doing anything to earn it. His awareness sharpened in the opposite direction immediately, the way it does when something is trying to be unnoticed.
Charm magic, he thought. Layered. Sustained.
He looked at Uruk, who gave a slight nod. He had felt it too.
Beside him, Natsu had gone very still — which, for Natsu, was its own kind of alarm signal.
"Igneel?" Natsu said, uncertainly, in the tone of someone who has been hoping for something for a very long time and is now standing in front of something that might be it, and is applying hope to the data before the data is ready.
Then he blinked.
"Who are you?" he said.
The spell, interrupted by Natsu's complete and genuine non-participation in it — he had not been charmed, Kizuna realized, simply because Natsu's orientation toward the world was already so entirely his own that there was nowhere for the magic to take hold — broke slightly at the edges. Several women in the crowd blinked, uncertain. The uniform adoration fractured.
On the far edge of the circle, in the small gap that a person creates when they are present in a space but not participating in what the space is doing, a young woman stood with an expression of someone who had already worked through the problem and arrived at the answer. She was watching the fake Salamander with the specific displeasure of someone who dislikes being manipulated much more than they dislike being disappointed.
She was, in other words, the most interesting person in the crowd.
"Who am I?" the blue-haired man repeated, as though the question were an insult that required addressing. "I am Salamander. The great Salamander, renowned throughout—"
"Oh," Natsu said, in the flat tone of someone having something confirmed that they had suspected. "You're not Igneel."
The disappointment in his voice was so sincere and so total that it briefly did what Kizuna's Ki pressure and Uruk's analytical composure could not — it made the assembled crowd feel a little strange about what they had been doing.
"Kizuna," Ginè said quietly.
"Charm magic," he said. "Yes."
"That is," Uruk said, with the mild precision he brought to moral assessments as much as tactical ones, "quite illegal."
The crowd had fractured into its component parts now, some moving away, some demanding apology on behalf of the man they had been charmed into revering, most simply uncertain. The fake Salamander pivoted to salvaging the situation with the smooth efficiency of someone who has done it before — pivoting to invitations, to his yacht, to an evening party, to the performance of generosity as a substitute for the genuine article.
Kizuna watched him and noted: the smile never reached the eyes. The charm magic was still running, more carefully now, aimed at volume rather than intensity. The ring on his finger was visible if you looked, which people under charm magic do not think to do.
He filed this.
The young woman had drifted to the edge of the dispersing crowd. As the fake Salamander made his exit with his reconstituted admirers, she turned, and found herself looking at the five of them — one of whom was being retrieved from the ground by his blue Exceed companion — with the expression of someone assessing whether an approach was warranted.
Kizuna watched her make the decision. It was, he thought, an interesting decision-making process — quick, visible in the slight changes around her eyes, arriving at yes without apparent sentiment and with apparent reason.
She was perhaps sixteen or seventeen. Blonde hair in a loose side-tail. Eyes that moved with the attention of someone who observes rather than merely looks. And at her hip, visible once you knew what you were looking for, a ring of celestial keys — silver and gold, several of them, each one containing its own specific gravity.
"Thank you for that," she said, to the group, with a smile that was direct and a little shy in equal measure.
Natsu, being assisted upright by Happy, looked confused. "For what?"
"The charm magic," she said. "The spell broke when you interrupted. I'd managed to see through it, but — I was still near the edge of the effect. The interruption helped." She paused. "I'm Lucy."
Ginè stepped forward — Ginè, who had always been the person in a room who decided when an introduction was warranted — and extended her hand with the warm directness that was simply her natural register. "Ginè Clive. These are my brothers — Kizuna, Uruk, and Cumber." She indicated each in turn with the fluid ease of someone who has introduced this particular arrangement often. "And Natsu and Happy, from our guild."
Lucy's eyes moved across them — landing briefly on each, cataloguing something, moving on. They stopped at the Fairy Tail marks visible on various parts of their persons.
"Guild?" she said. "You're — are you wizards?"
"We're from Fairy Tail!" Cumber announced, with the full enthusiasm of someone for whom this fact has not yet lost any of its charge, and pointed to the mark on his forearm as evidence.
Lucy's hands flew to her face.
The reaction was, Kizuna thought, entirely genuine — the specific, slightly overwhelming joy of someone for whom a thing has been significant for a long time suddenly becoming present in the room.
"Fairy Tail?" she said. "Really? That's — that's the guild I've been trying to get into. That's been my — that's the guild I've wanted to join since—" She stopped herself, apparently aware that she had accelerated past the level of composure she intended. She took a breath. "That's my goal."
"You're a wizard?" Natsu said, apparently noticing the keys for the first time, which was consistent with his general relationship to contextual detail.
"Celestial Spirit magic," Lucy said, and touched the ring at her hip with the unconscious proprietary warmth of someone indicating something that matters to them. "I'm — I'm still developing. But I have several keys, and I've been working on my contracts."
"Celestial Spirit magic is rare," Kizuna said. "Genuinely rare, not rare in the way of things people call rare to make them sound important."
She looked at him briefly, and the expression she produced was something he filed alongside his earlier observation about her: she noticed when something was honest, and it registered differently for her than when something was merely kind.
"Thank you," she said. "That means something."
"You should let us buy you lunch," Ginè said.
"I — really, it should be the other way around, I—"
"Lunch," Natsu confirmed, already oriented toward food.
"Lunch," Happy agreed, with finality.
The restaurant was the kind of establishment that serves its purpose without calling attention to itself, which made it remarkable primarily for being exactly the right choice. They took a table near the window, which Kizuna chose because it provided the best overview of both the interior and the street beyond, a habit he had developed young and saw no reason to revise.
Lucy's eyes, once they had stopped being wide with the accumulated impact of Fairy Tail wizards, here, now, multiple of them, settled into the more focused mode of someone who observes carefully and remembers what they see.
What they saw, currently, was Natsu, Cumber, and Ginè conducting what could only be described as an industrial relationship with the menu, making decisions with the speed of people who have never once struggled with indecision about food. Kizuna and Uruk ate with the efficiency and composure of people who have learned, through proximity, to occupy the space between enough and spectacular without comment.
"You're all really from Fairy Tail," Lucy said, to the table in general, in the tone of someone testing whether a thing is real by saying it again.
"We are," Uruk confirmed.
"I've read about the guild. In Sorcerer Weekly. For years." She paused, clearly aware that this might sound a certain way. "Mirajane's column. The reports on missions. The S-Class wizards." She looked at Cumber, who was on his third plate. "You mentioned your parents were S-Class?"
"Mom and Dad," Cumber confirmed, without looking up from what he was doing. "Teilanne and Gildarts Clive."
The name produced its usual effect.
"Gildarts Clive?" Lucy said. "The Crash Magic user? He's—" she appeared to be editing herself toward a more measured register and not entirely succeeding — "he's a legend. There are entire articles about his jobs. The solo missions that nobody else would take. The—"
"That's my dad," Cumber said, with the complete and uncomplicated pride of someone who has had seven years to arrive at a settled relationship with this fact and has found it entirely satisfactory.
"And our mother is Teilanne," Ginè added. "She's the one who trained us. Gildarts is Cumber's biological father — he's also technically our stepfather, but the technically has never mattered much."
"Not at all," Uruk agreed.
Lucy looked between them, assembling a picture from the pieces as they arrived. She had the quality, Kizuna thought, of someone who processes information vertically — not just what is said, but what the way it's said means, what the relationships between the pieces imply. It was a useful quality. He noted it.
"What brought you to Hargeon?" she asked, after a moment.
Happy looked up from his fish. "A rumor about Salamander. Natsu thought it might be Igneel."
"Igneel."
"His father," Uruk said. "He's a dragon."
"He was raised by one," Kizuna amended, with the precision of someone who has learned that the distinction matters when you're talking to someone encountering it for the first time.
Lucy stared at Natsu, who was currently doing something to a plate of spicy food that was not entirely describable.
"A dragon," she said.
"A fire dragon," Natsu confirmed cheerfully, apparently having followed the conversation from a distance while primarily attending to lunch. "He disappeared seven years ago. With all the other dragons. So I've been looking for him."
"We've accompanied him on seventeen iterations of this search," Kizuna said. "Which we do willingly, because that's what you do for people you travel with."
"But we've told him, on each occasion, that the evidence was not strong," Uruk added.
Natsu appeared to experience none of this as criticism.
Lucy laughed — short and genuine, with the slight edge of nervousness that sits at the borders of everything when you're doing something new. "You all seem very close."
"We've had time to get there," Ginè said, and there was something in the way she said it — something that placed the seven years and everything before them in the same breath — that made it mean more than the words on their own.
They parted in the afternoon with the warmth of people who have had a good lunch and enjoyed the company, which is its own kind of simple sufficiency. Lucy was heading to the party on the yacht — the fake Salamander's invitation still in hand — and the Fairy Tail contingent was supposed to be heading back toward the coast road.
Supposed to.
It was Cumber who stopped.
They were halfway down the harbor road, Natsu muttering to Happy about the disappointment of false leads, when Cumber simply halted. His tail had gone from its usual pleased-medium-speed to full alert — upright, still, the way it went when his body was responding to something his mind hadn't named yet.
"Hey," he said.
The tone he used stopped all of them. It was not the tone he used when he wanted to share an observation. It was the tone — and Kizuna had learned, in fourteen years of being Cumber's brother, to distinguish between these with precision — that came before something had happened and not after.
"That yacht," Cumber said. "The fake Salamander's yacht."
"What about it?" Ginè asked.
"I have a bad feeling about it."
Natsu made a dismissive sound. "It's just some guy with a fancy boat and charm magic—"
"Natsu." Kizuna said his name with the specific flat weight that meant I am asking you to listen. Then he looked at Cumber. "What kind of bad feeling?"
Cumber's tail twitched. "The kind where I don't have a reason yet but I know I'm not wrong."
Kizuna considered this for approximately two seconds. He trusted Cumber's instincts with the same practical confidence he extended to his own — not blind trust, but the calibrated trust of someone who has seen the same instrument prove accurate enough times to have earned the benefit of the doubt.
Then two women passed them on the harbor road, talking.
"—Salamander-sama's yacht—"
"—did you hear? Apparently he's a Fairy Tail wizard—"
The five of them went still.
The two women, unaware of the effect they had produced, continued on their way.
Natsu's expression had gone somewhere that was past disappointment and moving rapidly toward something considerably less patient. A small flame was flickering at the corner of his mouth and he appeared not to have noticed. "Did she just say—"
"Fairy Tail," Ginè confirmed, her voice quiet and precise as a door closing.
"That man," Uruk said, with the measured calm of someone who saves heat for when it's warranted and has just determined it is, "is using our guild's name."
"Our family's name," Kizuna said. He looked at the yacht in the harbor. He thought about a blonde girl with celestial keys heading toward a party on a boat belonging to a man who was almost certainly not doing anything that resembled what he had claimed to be doing. He thought about the ring the man wore and the charm magic and the way his eyes had not matched his smile.
"Happy," he said. "Can you carry Natsu over water?"
"I can," Happy confirmed.
"Cumber."
"Already ready," Cumber said, with the focused readiness of someone whose instincts had just been vindicated and who is fully prepared to act on that.
Kizuna looked at the yacht. Then he looked at his siblings. Then he turned toward the harbor.
"Let's go," he said.
The night sea was very dark, and the yacht was very lit, and the distance between one and the other was most efficiently covered by people who could use Ki to propel themselves across water — which the Saiyan siblings could, with varying degrees of elegance and at speeds that left no time for anyone on the yacht to notice they were coming until they had already arrived.
Kizuna landed on the deck and straightened, and was followed within the same second by Uruk on his left and Ginè on his right, and then by Cumber slightly behind, and then — considerably less gracefully, owing to the ongoing water-adjacent nature of the travel — by Natsu, who hit the deck at a slight angle and immediately confirmed that his relationship with maritime environments had not improved.
The scene clarified quickly.
Lucy — her back against the railing, her celestial keys absent from her hip, her expression containing approximately the right amount of fear for her situation and also, beneath that, the particular core of someone who is afraid but not defeated. The henchmen arranged in the geometry of people who have been told to do something and are doing it. Bora — which was, apparently, the real name of the fake Salamander — standing with the confidence of someone who has never had a plan interrupted before and is not yet fully accepting that one is being interrupted now.
"Actually," Kizuna said, into the moment of silence his arrival had created, "someone does know what's happening."
"Several someones," Uruk said.
"And we are," Ginè said, with the bright precision of someone placing a word exactly where she wants it, "considerably displeased about the part where you're using our guild's name."
"Our family's name," Cumber said.
Lucy made a sound that was recognition and relief folded together.
"How—"
"Happy," Natsu explained, from his position on the deck where he was having a relationship with his own nausea.
Happy, who had appeared from above and located Lucy's keys in the water with the focused capability of an Exceed who knows his job, descended and dropped them into her hands with the quiet efficiency of someone completing a task.
"My keys!" Lucy clutched them against her chest with the specific fervor of someone who has felt without them and does not intend to repeat the experience.
Bora recovered from his surprise with the speed of someone who has learned to pivot. "You've miscounted, children," he said, with the smooth condescension of a man deploying children as a weapon. "I have a dozen men. You have five. And one of your five is already on the floor."
"The floor and I are just working something out," Natsu said, without getting up.
"Cumber," Kizuna said, with the calm tone of someone suggesting an option at a planning meeting. "Would you like to demonstrate what you've been working on?"
"Please," Uruk said. There was something in the word that, from Uruk, was essentially a standing ovation.
"Yes," Ginè said, with feeling.
Cumber stepped forward.
He was fourteen, and he was Gildarts and Teilanne's son, and he had spent the past seven years in a guild that contained some of the most gifted wizards on Earthland and a mother who had trained Saiyans since before he was born, and the past three years in particular working on something specific — a question about what happened when Saiyan Ki and Crash Magic occupied the same body and tried to do the same thing simultaneously.
The answer, it turned out, was considerable.
The golden shimmer of Ki aura built around him with the specific quality his mother's had — warm and deeply alive — but threaded through it, in crimson fracture lines like cracks in something that was trying very hard to hold together, was something that was his father's. His father's magic, channeled through his father's son, filtered through a framework that Gildarts himself had never had access to.
The henchmen charged.
Cumber planted his feet, drew his fist back, and put it into the deck.
The effect was not a break. It was not an explosion. It was a disintegration — the wooden planks beneath the leading henchmen resolving themselves into precise cubes that then departed in controlled directions, propelled by Ki, leaving holes in the deck through which approximately half of Bora's men disappeared into the lower levels before they had processed what was happening to them.
Lucy stared at the deck, and then at Cumber, and then at the deck again.
"That," Ginè said, with the tone of someone who has watched this particular ability develop from its earliest stages and has never gotten tired of seeing it fully deployed, "is what happens when Saiyan power and Crash Magic are the same person."
"He can break anything," Kizuna confirmed, "and decide where the pieces go."
Bora looked at the holes in his deck and at the boy who had made them and was performing a rapid recalculation that his face was not designed to conceal.
"Attack," he said, to the remaining henchmen, which indicated that the calculation had not produced a useful result.
What followed was, from a technical standpoint, a demonstration.
Uruk moved through his opponents with the specific quality of water moving around obstacles — not aggressive, not showy, simply finding the path of least resistance and then being precisely where he needed to be, when he needed to be there, in a way that made four people feel like they had been addressed by something that was finished before they understood it had started. He straightened his sleeve after the last one sat down and looked as though he had not moved at all.
"Saiyan Analysis," Cumber told Lucy, helpfully, from across the deck. "He reads how you move and gets ahead of it. With Ki enhancement, he doesn't waste anything."
Lucy watched Uruk's opponents on the deck and thought that doesn't waste anything was possibly the most significant understatement she had heard in recent memory.
Ginè, meanwhile, had decided that the ceiling was more interesting than the floor, and was conducting operations from approximately ten feet above the deck with the uninhibited enthusiasm of someone whose natural element is the air. The blue aura that wrapped her in Ki had the specific warm-cold quality of sky, and when she descended it was not with the predictable trajectory of someone falling but with the angled intent of someone choosing where to land. Her opponents had spent most of the engagement looking in the wrong direction.
And then there was Kizuna.
Kizuna, who had not moved.
Who had simply allowed, with the careful precision of someone opening a valve a specific measured amount, a portion of what he carried to become present.
The deck cracked under his feet.
The temperature around him dropped in the localized way of something absorbing heat.
The four henchmen who had been assigned to him faltered — not because of anything he did, but because of the sensation of standing near something that was making a studied, deliberate choice not to do anything more than it was doing, and understanding that the studied deliberateness was the thing they should be afraid of.
He took one step forward.
They sat down.
Not dramatically — there was no drama in it, which was somehow more effective than drama would have been. Simply the weight of what he was barely containing being enough, at this proximity, to make standing up feel like the wrong choice.
Lucy, watching from the railing, felt the edge of it from several meters away and experienced the particular sensation of understanding something in the body before the mind has caught up with the articulation.
"He keeps it controlled," Cumber said, quietly, appearing beside her. His voice had the specific quality of someone saying something they mean. "He always has. We've never seen what happens if he stops."
"And?" Lucy asked, though some part of her already knew the direction of the answer.
"And he works very hard," Cumber said, "to make sure we don't have to find out."
Bora, who had watched his twelve men be addressed by four people with a thoroughness that left no ambiguity about the outcome, chose this moment to demonstrate the specific decision-making quality that had made him a successful trafficker for several years: he attacked the person who appeared least protected.
"Red Shower!"
The fire came in a spread pattern, aimed at Lucy, which was tactically coherent if you were trying to take a hostage and had not looked carefully at the man on the deck floor.
Natsu moved.
He moved badly — with the unstable gait of someone whose inner ear was still conducting its own argument with the sea — but he moved, and he got in front of Lucy, and the fire hit him and surrounded him completely.
Lucy screamed his name.
The fire cleared.
Natsu stood in the middle of where it had been, chewing, with the expression of someone who has just had something approximately as complicated as a meal arrive and dealt with it accordingly.
"Thanks," he said, wiping his mouth. "I was feeling a little empty."
He looked at Bora.
He looked at him with the specific quality of someone who has been seasick for twenty minutes and now has fire in his stomach and a number of things to say about people who claim to be from his guild.
"Fire Dragon's Roar," he said, and the fire that came out of him was not the contained precise fire of someone using a technique. It was the fire of someone who has been waiting for the nausea to end and has been given a reason to stop waiting.
Bora moved.
He was fast, and he was experienced, and he managed to not be directly in the path of it. But around the path of it, he discovered, was where the Saiyan siblings had been standing.
"There's one more thing we should mention," Ginè said, landing on the deck to his left.
"Our mother trained us to hold back," Uruk said, from his right.
"Saiyans have a tendency toward collateral damage when unchecked," Kizuna said, from behind him.
"We've been doing that," Cumber finished, appearing from above, "this whole time."
The combined release was not a complex technique. It was not named. It was simply four people who had been holding back, deciding simultaneously and in coordination to hold back somewhat less, and directing what they released at a single target.
The mast came down.
Bora followed it, and then stayed there.
The yacht, which had already been absorbing more structural argument than it was designed for, offered its opinion on this development through the medium of accelerating disassembly.
"Oh," Ginè said, looking at the deck. "We overdid it a little."
"Again," Uruk said.
"The ship is sinking," Cumber confirmed, with the calm objectivity of a damage assessment.
"We should leave," Kizuna said, already looking at Lucy with the expression of someone making a rapid practical calculation. "The harbor authorities respond quickly to fires visible from shore, and the questions they ask about property damage are extensive."
"But—" Lucy looked at the water spreading across the deck. "How do we—"
She stopped, because the answer was already in her hand. The golden key had been there before the thought finished — the instinct of a Celestial Spirit wizard who knows her arsenal.
"Open — Gate of the Water Bearer!" The key turned. "Aquarius!"
The spirit that materialized was a mermaid of significant presence and an expression of someone who had agreed to be available but was drawing careful lines around the circumstances under which this constituted fun.
"You dropped my key in the ocean," Aquarius said, not as a question.
"That wasn't—"
"Don't explain it. I am going on vacation with my boyfriend directly after this, and I will not be available." The emphasis on boyfriend had the quality of a comment directed at someone specific. "One wave. Don't waste it."
The wave that came was not a small wave.
It picked up the sinking remains of the yacht, and everyone on it, and approximately twenty cubic meters of harbor water, and relocated all of them to Hargeon's beach in a continuous motion that was more or less controlled and left everyone coughing and making inventory of their persons.
The beach settled.
The yacht settled, in pieces, in the shallows.
In the distance, alarm bells.
"We should definitely leave," Uruk said.
He helped Lucy to her feet with the practical ease of someone who has made the transition from meeting to assisting without requiring an intermediate step.
She stood, and looked at Bora and his crew washed up on the sand around them, and then at the harbor road, and then at the five people she was standing next to.
"Come with us," Natsu said, and grabbed her hand with the directness of someone who has identified a solution and is implementing it.
"To Fairy Tail," Cumber clarified, with his best attempt at a welcoming rather than alarming presentation of the idea. "You said you wanted to join."
"I—" She looked at their faces. At Ginè's warm certainty. At Kizuna's measured, quiet nod. At Uruk's simple, patient acknowledgment. At Cumber's uncontained anticipation. At Natsu already pulling her toward the road. "I — yes. Yes, I — yes."
"Good," Ginè said. "Our parents are going to like you."
"Our mother especially," Kizuna said. "She has strong opinions about strong-willed women. They are all positive."
The bells behind them were getting louder.
"Moving," Uruk said.
They moved.
The road out of Hargeon ran north, through coastal grassland that smelled of sea and late-summer warmth, and it was a very good road for running along in the company of people you had met five hours ago and already felt like you had known longer, which was the particular quality of Fairy Tail encounters that Lucy would come to understand only in retrospect, because you couldn't see it clearly until you were already inside it.
Natsu and Cumber were arguing, with great enthusiasm and no malice, about whose contribution to the evening had been more significant. Ginè was adjudicating with a bias that she did not try very hard to conceal. Uruk was contributing occasional dry observations that made everyone laugh and that he delivered with the expression of someone who finds nothing particularly amusing, which made them funnier.
Kizuna was walking ahead, and Lucy found herself in step beside him without quite planning it.
"Thank you," she said. "For coming back."
"Cumber had a feeling," he said. "We've learned to listen to those."
She thought about that. "You trust him."
"His instincts are generally accurate. It would be wasteful not to use accurate instruments."
She looked at him, at the way he said that — not warmly, exactly, but with a specific solidity that was something better than warmth in some respects. Something you could put weight on.
"Your guild," she said. "Is it really like — the articles make it sound like—"
"It's loud," he said. "And occasionally structural. And everyone in it is working through something, or has worked through something, or is about to." A brief pause. "But it is, as Uruk once said when asked to describe it, home. And I think that's the word that covers all of it."
She looked at the road ahead, where Cumber had launched himself onto Natsu's back in the middle of a point he was making about the relative effectiveness of Ki-enhanced deck strikes, and Ginè was laughing at the result, and Uruk was watching them with the expression he wore when he was privately satisfied.
She thought about the years she had spent planning to get here. The careful preparation, the celestial keys, the reading and re-reading of guild profiles and mission reports, the version of Fairy Tail she had built in her imagination from the outside.
She thought about what it felt like to be on the inside of something, running away from harbor bells with people who had come back for her without being asked, on a road that was heading toward a place she had wanted to reach for as long as she could clearly remember.
It felt, she thought, like exactly what she had hoped for, and also like something she hadn't known how to hope for yet.
Both of those things at once.
"Thank you," she said again, to the road ahead more than to anyone in particular.
The road continued north, and the evening settled into night around them, and somewhere ahead of it all was Magnolia.
Next Time — Chapter 7: Welcome to Fairy Tail