#ft stuff

Lucy Heartfilia is one of the few who does, and it is for this reason that she drops to her knees and cries when she sees that her library, her haven, and a home she knows she shares, is burning and skewered with iron.  There’s a warm hand on her shoulder, then—she thinks it must be Natsu—but as Lucy looks up and into the air, she can swear she sees the stardust of spirits no longer bound to anything and cast adrift into the world.

The fire dies eventually, and later, Lucy will be grateful to Natsu for eating the flames that remained.  Later, Lucy will be angry at Phantom Lord, the mercenary group who dared to leave their emblem burnt in the foundation of her library.  But in the moment, all she can feel is a cosmic kind of emptiness as she reaches into the ashes and the cover of a book crumbles, lifeless, in her hands.

 Later, Gajeel of Phantom Lord will be glad he snatched this book from where it laid open on a table before making a burning, iron skeleton of the Fairy Tail library.  Later, he’ll feel bad for the destruction.  But in the moment, all he can feel is irritation as the tome in his crushing grip seems to jerk from his hands and onto the dusty forest ground.

“Tch.”  He grits his teeth and goes to pick it up again, unwilling to be defeated by a bunch of parchment shoved inside a leather case, and one of the pages flips under his palm, slicing unevenly through its callouses.  Gajeel blinks, looks at his palm, and then back at the book.  He shakes his head and tries again, and a second page viciously turns itself, and an X is marked in his skin.

A growl bubbles in the back of Gajeel’s throat and he cracks his knuckles. “Who the fuck put a spell on you,” he seethes behind his teeth.  

The book, horrid thing that it is, does nothing but lie there open, sunlight dancing over its pages as the forest shifts in the wind.  

Gajeel scoffs again and rolls his wrist, feeling magic begin to well inside his arms as he prepares to skewer the book as he did the library hours ago.  He tells it as such: “Reading is for whelps anyway.”

“Ah!”

The iron pin streaks through the air and impales the tuft of pages, but it doesn’t sound like the slicing of parchment.  It is, instead, a sound that Gajeel is intimately familiar with.  It sounds like the pin hit flesh and bone, and when he deigns to look back at the book, there is a moment where the ripped pages look to be bleeding ink.

There is another moment, a much shorter one, where Gajeel sees the spectral image of a person lying atop the book on the forest floor with a ghostly iron pin in her stomach.

He cocks his head to the side and a dark smile creeps over his face.  Slowly, Gajeel reaches forward with one hand and pulls the pin from the book.  “Hey there,” he drawls slowly.  “What are you?”

The image of a person—definitely a girl, he sees now, with what looks like blue hair—flickers twice into existence before blinking out.  The creature (thing, perhaps?) is still lying on the ground, now bleeding something silver and strange from the place Gajeel’s pin used to be.

Again, however, it vanishes, and Gajeel sits back on his haunches, blowing a piece of his dark hair from his eyes.  “Look,” he lies, “I’m sorry I hurt ya.  I didn’t know y’were there.”  

Birdsong answers him from some distance off in the forest.

“I’m going to pick you up now,” he says very slowly, as though speaking to a child, “and take you to the next town t’ see if someone there can fix ya.  Okay?”  He does not voice his wonder over how much he could sell this book for.  

When the book again does nothing, Gajeel reaches slowly forward and slips his fingers under the front cover.  The leather there is worn smooth and catches the rough skin of his hands as he slowly starts to ease it closed.  With an oddly satisfying plffffb sort of sound, the undamaged pages on one side fall on top of the others, and Gajeel is barely a finger’s width away from closing the cover completely when he smirks and slams it down.  “Gihi,” he snickers, watching a tiny puff of dirt burst from the ground as he does so.

“Hey!”  A stream of faded color and cold mist bursts from the book as though it were a fountainhead, before slowly settling into the shape of a blue-haired young woman with her legs crossed and her cheeks indignantly puffed out.  The book itself vanishes into the shadows beneath the hem of her short, sunset-orange dress.  “If you’re going to pick me up, be more gentle!  What a brute.”

Never in a millennia will Gajeel admit to falling backwards onto his ass upon seeing her, but the spirit herself could confirm that he most assuredly does. “The hell are you?” he asks again, leaning forward with an appraising gleam in his eye.

“A spirit who does not appreciate being stabbed and then thrown around,” says the girl.  “I don’t know who you think you are, but you’ll bring me back to my library right now if you know what’s good for you!”

“What’s good for me?”  Gajeel chuckles, the kind of laugh where shadows seem to creep from every curve of his mouth.  “What’s good for me is getting a job done and finding a magic book to sell on top of it,” he says.

It’s satisfying to see the spirit flinch away as he speaks, and as she moves her arm, Gajeel can see that the orange whatever-kind-of-fabric-spirit-clothes-are-made-of is stained with what looks like silver blood on the left side of the spirit’s stomach.  Oddly, it glitters like metal in the sunlight, or stars in the night sky.

The spirit seems to notice Gajeel looking at the wound and moves to cover it up again, brow furrowing in ghostly anger.  “You’re not going to sell me,” she says bitterly.  “I’ll stay right here if I have to.”

“Oh,” says Gajeel, feigning defeat for a moment.  He watches the spirit relax before he smirks and draws more magic into his hand.  “Well, in that case…”

His hand is encased in iron as he punches the book partially into the ground and hears something crack.  (Later, Gajeel will realize this was the glue that held the book’s spine stiff.  But in the moment, he is merely surprised that books can crack.)  The spirit cries out again and her image disappears, flickering in the air.  She appears briefly to be lying on the ground again, but then disappears and falls entirely silent.

Gajeel lets another, “Tch,” sound fall from his lips, and reaches to pick up the book, hoping it wasn’t damaged enough to be made less valuable.  He is surprised to find that working his fingers underneath it now is difficult, as if the book weighed as much as ten bricks of equal size.  Eventually, he pulls it off the ground and close to his face.  “Now, listen here,” he says.  “I’m gonna just go ahead and guess that I can’t do that too many more times before ya just disappear for good.  So either you’re gonna come with me nicely, or I’m gonna leave your pages all over this forest.”

A second passes.  The book becomes lighter in his grasp, and Gajeel sighs before smiling and packing it away in his traveling sack.  He thinks tiredly that this magic book had better be worth it.

 It takes two days of walking before Gajeel starts to notice his bag becoming heavier once more.  He stops that night, throwing together a tiny campfire before he pulls out the book and feels that yes, in fact, it is starting to weigh much more than it ought to. He sets it down in front of him and stares at it as though he can burn the spirit away if he glares with enough disgruntled fire.

She doesn’t.  Instead she appears again, still sitting cross-legged, but this time cradling one arm over her chest.  Her eyes do not look at him, but instead up at the sky.

“Wh—”

“I wanted to see the stars,” she says, trying to keep her voice very matter-of-fact, but Gajeel catches the barest hints of emotion.  Sadness, he thinks, and promptly ignores it.

However, he can’t stop himself from asking, “Why?” as he, too, lifts his head to stare at the night sky and sees random pinpricks of light through the trees.

The spirit doesn’t answer.  In fact, she vanishes after a few moments, and so Gajeel goes to pick the book back up and put it away.  It remains disproportionately heavy in his hands, and a voice says, Not yet, in his head.  

Gajeel scoffs, but lets go and leaves the book there.  For the next couple of hours, he alternates between staring into the forest, staring into the fire, and staring at the book.

The forest is quiet save for the occasional bird call or wolf howl (distant howls, he notes, pleased).  The fire is warm but small, and at one point Gajeel climbs to his feet and looks for more kindling.  When he comes back, he realizes he half-expected the book to be gone.  But it continues to lay in the dirt, non-descript and slightly battered cover like a playground for the fire’s shadows.

Eventually, Gajeel sighs and stares hard down at the book.  “I’m tired now, short stuff,” he says.  The book does not answer, and he continues, “Hope ya got yer fill of the stars or whatever,” with absolutely no sincerity.

The book lifts into his hands easily and goes back into the back without complaint.

 The next night, and the next, and the next all pass in similar fashion. Around the end of the day, Gajeel feels his bag get heavy, so he finds a spot to camp, lights a fire, and pulls out the book.  The spirit doesn’t appear again, but she also won’t let him lift the book again until she’s had her fill of the stars, at which point Gajeel shoves it back inside his bag and falls asleep.

On the sixth night since Gajeel destroyed the library, he is staring at the book and finds himself asking, “What’s yer name?” before he can remember that he isn’t supposed to care.  But really—Gajeel isn’t an expert on books, but he’s heard they’re supposed to have titles and shit on their front.  This one has nothing.  Its cover is made of blank, slightly faded and scratched leather (except for the part where he punched it, which is more than slightly scratched up).

He honestly expects no response, which is definitely why he is surprised to see the spirit sitting atop her book again, head tilted to the side and hair falling like comet trails over her cheeks and neck.  “My name?” she asks.

“Yeah, yer—yer name, y’know.  Books are s’posed to have titles on the outside, right?” Gajeel crosses his arms, feeling embarrassed.

“Oh,” says the spirit.  Her voice sounds flat again, and Gajeel is smart enough to realize this is the tone she uses when she doesn’t want him to know she’s upset because she’s being stubborn. He wonders why, but then she’s telling him, “This book doesn’t have a…name on the outside anymore.  They had to re-do the binding because it was starting to fall apart, so Lucy made me a new—”  She catches sight of his lost expression and stops.  “…It’s called Kiss of Curse.  The title’s inside the book.”

Gajeel thinks he hums in acknowledgement, but his brain gets stuck on the fact that of all the books he could have stolen, not only did he pick up a magical book, he picked up a magical book about romance.  

A few minutes pass, and Kiss of Curse (no, the spirit, Gajeel decides, because that title sounds stupid) stares up at the sky but doesn’t disappear.  It’s then, as Gajeel is pondering what a dumb name that is for a spirit to get stuck with, that he realizes what she didn’t say.  

“My name…”

“I am…”

He scrunches up his face and asks, “Wait, your name’s not really Kiss of Curse, is it?”

He thinks she looks surprised for a second.  Then she answers, and it sounds like she kind of wants to laugh at him. “No, it’s not,” she says.  She bites her lip.  “My name’s Levy.”

“’Kay,” says Gajeel.  “I’m Gajeel.” He doesn’t know why he feels obligated to tell her this, and in fact, later, he regrets it because this makes him feel like he knows the spirit.  And that would be weird, since, after all, he plans to sell the book that she’s attached to.

Neither of them says anything for the rest of the night.

But the next night, Gajeel finds himself curious and asks what the hell a story called Kiss of Curse could be about.

Levy tells him, or starts to, and he tries not to act surprised.

 Gajeel notices, as he starts to count down the days until he arrives at a town big enough to sell a magic book, that the spirit isn’t healing.  Every night now, even without Levy nagging him by way of weighing down his back, Gajeel pulls out the book and sets it by the fire.  Sometimes the spirit will appear and sometimes she doesn’t, but Gajeel honestly isn’t sure since he’s gotten in the habit of just leaving her there until morning and then packing the book up again.

However, every time he sees her, he notices that one arm cradled protectively up to her chest and the silver stain in her dress that doesn’t ever change.

When they (he, Gajeel reminds himself) are four days out from a good place to look for a buyer, Gajeel doesn’t pout, but may purse his lips a little bit as he watches Levy watch the stars, rubbing her wrist very delicately and almost unnoticeably as she does so.  He feels something then, something like when he turns his body into iron, but localized in his chest.  There is a heaviness about him, and it pulls him forward so he’s leaning towards the book, towards Levy.  His heart is most assuredly not made of iron now, though, as he can hear its organic beat in his ears.  An inexplicable nervousness has taken root in him, as he reaches towards that spot on the book’s cover, the one he broke.

His hands are powerful, fingers thick and calloused and large enough to wrap a good third of this book in their grasp alone.  He wonders if he can touch the book without hurting—causing more damage. He wants to try.

The feeling of leather under his fingertips lasts only a blink.  As soon as Gajeel touches the book, Levy shouts, and he looks up in horror.

The spirit seems no more injured than before, but instead, her eyes are terrified and she’s pulled herself as far away from him as she can.  Gajeel thinks, as that heavy feeling inside him winds around his lungs and anchors his arm to the grassy floor, that this it what Levy felt when he first struck her book with a pin.

“What are you doing?” she asks, holding her arms in front of herself like they could stop Gajeel from getting closer.  

“I was just—I wanted to see if I could…fix it,” he answers, trailing off towards the end as it dawns on him what a stupid idea that was.  He doesn’t know the first thing about books.

Levy shakes her head.  “You’re lying again, aren’t you?” she says, voice empty and vast like the cloudy sky above. “You don’t… You’re lying.  Don’t touch me.”  And her form vanishes like mist.

Gajeel lets go of his breath slowly.  He doesn’t think the spirit is watching the stars anymore (there aren’t any tonight), and he reaches out to put the book away.

He doesn’t touch it, stopping short by a few inches and then pull back as Gajeel reaches into his bag and pulls out a bedroll instead.  He lies awake for longer than he wants, remembering the story Levy had been telling him of a black mage cursed to destroy the more he loved, and the young mage to whom he taught magic.  He remembers the last thing she told him, of how one of the young mage’s friends had become a beast and she summoned all her magic to bring him back, but how it cursed her in return with the same horrid contradictions as the black mage.

Contradictions, huh.  He stares at his hands in the dying firelight, big and meaty and strong and trembling with the emotions he keeps off his face.  

Gajeel wonders if the story has a happy ending.

 Levy doesn’t tell him.  The book is too heavy for Gajeel to lift out of the pack.

 He arrives in town silently and alone a few days later.  Gajeel passes several bookstores as he walks around, and at each one he stops to look inside.  Once, he even lifts Kiss of Curse from the pack and holds it up to the window, but something still feels wrong and he puts it away.  The bag doesn’t gain any weight when he pauses, but Gajeel thinks his heart is heavy enough for both of them.

As night begins to fall, Gajeel huffs at his own demeanor and begins to walk around in earnest, looking for a tavern or inn at which to spend the night, but as it turns out, this place seems to be preparing for a festival of some kind.  Unless Gajeel can find a way to magically triple the money he carries, he lacks any kind of room here.

Turning away from the last warmly-lit tavern at which he has the patience to be condescended, Gajeel walks back through the humid night air and onto the main road.  Bright paper lanterns line some of the streets, casting a homely glow over the well-beaten roads and elongating the shadows into the alleys.  As several children nearly barrel into him, Gajeel dodges off into one of those shadowed side roads to avoid the crowds.  

He just needs to work his way out of town and camp out.  Shouldn’t be a problem.

“Hey, buddy.”

Except then it is, because Gajeel is aware of a steady knife point in the small of his back about the same time he becomes aware of the crawling feeling of paralysis magic taking over his body.  His muscles lock up as though turned to stone and the night air suddenly feels cold on his sweaty skin.

“Don’t mind us,” says the voice.  “Just taking a looksie in yer pack.”  Indeed, from behind, the bag is worked loose and Gajeel hears it clink and spill onto the dirty stones under his feet.

You’ll be taking a looksie up yer own ass if ya don’t shove off, Gajeel wants to say, but he can’t speak.  This kind of paralysis won’t last forever on him, he knows. These assholes only have a few more moments…

“Ohhh, there she is,” the voice says brightly after a moment.  Gajeel doesn’t hear the jingling of coin as the mugger stands up again and shakes something in his grip.  His mind flashes an image of Kiss of Curse, of Levy, through his head, and for a second, his lungs freeze up as though the paralysis was becoming stronger and not weaker. “My friend here saw this beaut’ earlier when you were wavin’ her around, and oh, does she have some powerful juice.”

Gajeel hears a second person behind him scoff.  “Don’t matter,” says the second voice.  “It’s broken anyways.  Not worth a damn, much less any money.”  The paralysis tightens like a chokehold and anger flushes through Gajeel’s body.  His fingers slowly curl into a fist, but he can’t turn around.  Not yet. The stone skeleton holds.

“Eh, alright,” says the first.  “Hurry up and fry it then.”  The hair on Gajeel’s neck stands on end as the air suddenly charges to make way for a lightning spell.

He sees it happen in his mind.  A horrific, conjured idea of that sickly yellow blast ripping through the book like gun magic, the leather catching and shriveling away… And a burst of silver stardust.  

Gajeel cracks with a roar like thunder, for once in the natural world preceding the lightning as he whips around and casts his arm, transformed into a pillar of iron, out towards the attackers.  The mages’ eyes go wide as the one’s lightning spell arcs away from the ground (away from Levy) and up into Gajeel’s arm, coursing through his shoulders, his chest, his legs, and finally into the now-smoldering earth. It’s a tidal wave of force and the pain ripples through his body with a ferocity only matched by the rage of an angered Iron Dragon.

There’s shouting now, from the main road, and Gajeel thinks the dipshits have run off, but his vision is going dark as the sounds draw nearer.  

“Gajeel!”

It’s mostly a jumbled clamor as his eyes slip closed, but Gajeel hears. She’s never said his name before, so he thinks he might be imagining, but the last thing he sees is shocked hazel eyes framed by cosmic blue hair.  “Y’gotta go home,” he slurs as the armored footsteps gather around.  “G’back t’ Fairy…Tail.”

Gajeel falls, shielding the book with his torso as the world blurs out of focus and into darkness.

 Waking up has never quite been this much of a struggle, Gajeel thinks, as he groans and wonders when Phantom Lord could afford pillows this nice.

“Hey-hey-hey, take it easy!” says a loud voice nearby, belonging to a person Gajeel has never seen before with obnoxiously pink hair.  

I’m dreaming, he tells himself.

“Look, I still think you’re a dick for what you did to our library, but Gramps and Lucy specifically said I was supposed to look after you and not beat you up,” the pink-haired man continues, oblivious to the pounding headache building inside Gajeel’s head, one that’s really reminding him of the lighting—

“What happened to Levy?” he asks suddenly, trying to crane his head around the room and shortly giving up because…well, ow.  “Where am I?”  That’s when the unfamiliar smell of this place really hits him, like dust and wood and traces of smoke and old paper, like Kiss of Curse.

Oh.  He doesn’t need to wait for the man in the room to reply, but listens anyway, mostly because he has no choice, as he’s told, “You’re here, in Fairy Tail.  You know, that place you tried really hard to wipe out, but failed.”  Gajeel doesn’t think he’s imagining the taunts in this man’s voice.  “Levy’s here, too,” he adds like an afterthought, as though he was considering not telling Gajeel this.  “The guards from that other town thought you both lived here.  Dunno why.”

“Let me see her,” Gajeel demands, then bites out an added, “please.”

“What?  No,” comes the reply.  “No, no way in hell do you get to come in here, burn our home to the ground, steal Lucy’s best friend, and then just demand to see her like we owe you shit. Nope.”

“Natsu,” calls another, more feminine voice from somewhere beyond this room. “I need your help for a second! Get your butt out here!”

The pink-haired man clicks his tongue in Gajeel’s direction but walks out of the room hurriedly.  Finally left in silence, Gajeel fears that the sheer number of things he doesn’t know or no longer understands is going to consume him. However, it’s barely a minute later that a shorter, much older man walks into the room and hops up on a stool by Gajeel’s bed.  He clears his throat.

“My name,” he says sternly, “is Makarov.” His eyes seem to glint like knives, and Gajeel can feel the magic pouring off the man.  Another mage then.  This one, powerful.

Gajeel says nothing.

After a moment, Makarov breathes and speaks again. “You destroyed my home,” he says, “and hurt my family.  I must say, most people in your position would still be in jail right now.”

“Tch,” Gajeel says with a sigh.  “So why aren’t I, old man?” he asks boredly, preparing for the inevitable speech about these people wanting their own revenge.

He’s shocked into silence and out of his bitter glare, then, when Makarov produces a familiar worn, leather-bound and title-less book from behind his back and places it across Gajeel’s thighs.

“Because you also saved one of my children,” he replies very simply.  For a few heartbeats, Gajeel thinks he sees something like respect in the worn eyes of this old man—Makarov—but then it fades back into seriousness.  “Don’t mistake me—you and I need to have a good, long, talk about your future.  But I think that can wait a few minutes.”  

And he hops off the stool and walks solemnly out the door, closing it firmly behind him.

A slight burn begins to build in the muscles of his shoulders before Gajeel is able to look away from the door and down to where his hands hover above the worn bindings of Kiss of Curse.  It still looks almost the same as it did when he last saw it, but the dent in the binding has been smoothed over a bit.  Gajeel wonders if the pages inside have also been fixed.  He wonders if they can be, or if Levy will always have that strange scar of stardust on her stomach.

Gajeel’s own chest clenches at the thought and he pulls his hands back.  Then, quickly, he sets the still-lifeless book back down on the stool nearby, tearing his grip from it as soon as it’s securely set down as though the leather had burned him.  He falls back into the bed with a sigh.

“Hey.”  Gajeel blinks and looks to the side of his bed.  Sure enough, a specter of a girl with eyes like the forest canopy and hair like comet dust is perched there, knees drawn together to support her arms, which are ramrod-straight as she leans ever-so-slightly forwards.  Gajeel notes with a feeling  of…relief, he thinks, that the silver stain is not a scar on top of her orange dress.  “Sorry.”

It’s only as she apologizes that Gajeel realizes he’d been silent too long.  He gapes at her.  “What’re you sorry for?” he demands.  “All of this is my fault.”

“I guess you’re right,” Levy says, sighing.

Neither of them say anything for a long while, then, too wrapped up in the strangeness of this whole encounter, seeing too many broken bridges to cross the awkwardness.  Levy swings her legs absently, almost kicking the bed each time.  Gajeel wonders if her feet can bump into it or if they would slide right through the solid wooden frame.  He wonders a lot of things about Levy.

“You never told me,” he says at last.

“Hm?”

“How the story ends.”  Gajeel nods towards the top of the stool, even though he can’t see the book right now.  “There’s gotta be a kiss at some point, right?  If it’s called Kiss of Curses.”

Levy puffs her cheeks out.  “Well, yes,” she says, “but first… I mean the black mage—Zeref—and Mavis aren’t even together yet, where we left off.  That has to happen first before they kiss, I mean, it’s only natural.”  She’s smiling now as she adjusts her posture.  “Okay.  Where were we…”

Gajeel grins and settles back against the pillows. As he listens to Levy speak, watches her misty form move and sway and animate with the force of her story, a foreign feeling of serene warmth suffuses his tired body.