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Mavis’s memories started under a fluffy blanket, surrounded by a warm voice of her mother. The exact words had long faded, as did face of a person who spoke them. The blanket could be purple, yellow or blue, for what she knew, and a plush toy she was hugging kept shifting between fox, cat and squirrel – but she remembered safety of her home, the cosy presence of her mum, and a hypnotizing power of bed-time stories.
She loved those stories the most – loved how they were never quite the same, even when it was the very same one she heard the last evening. Sometimes it was something small and silly, like colour of the shoes – but sometimes a good fairy turned into an old willow, and a mermaid didn’t found happiness at the side of her prince, but in heaven instead. She could ask why a hero didn’t do something, and then mum would change the story, and they would talk, and figure out what would happen, and the plot wouldn’t make sense any more, but they would talk, an laugh, and Mavis would dream about children who ended up living with a witch in a candy home and about princes who rode dragons home victorious because of might of their words, not sword and spear.
Those not-stories made her hearth beat the fastest. They made her eager to go on her own adventure, to go and overcome her own struggles; to earn her own happily ever after.
Dad would laugh at her. Say that life was an endless stream of small adventures, and deeds unworthy ballads. But then mum would slap his ear, say to let her dream big, and then they would all laugh together.
“I will find fairies!” Mavis announced during one of those scuffles, determined to prove her point. “And I will figure out if they tails, and then everybody will know for sure!”
“Fairies don’t show up to cry-babies,” Mum scolded her sometime later, serious in an over-the-top way. She hadn’t truly meant it, Mavis have thought many years later, but her child self took those words to hearth and clang to them in the years to come.
It was about chopping onions, she half-recalled.
Mum and Dad would be proud of her.
Even during the funeral, she didn’t cry. She didn’t cry when mean adults came and said they had to take her home, because her parents were in debt. She didn’t cry buried in hay, in a barn the guild master owned, surrounded by farm animals. She smiled when swiping the floor, when doing dishes, and scrubbing potatoes in the kitchen. She smiled when a mean adult shoved her, when Zera laughed at her poor clothing, when other kids didn’t want to play with her.
A black hole was when her hearth used to be, but she still didn’t cry. She still could meet fairies.
Besides, there wasn’t even all that much to cry about, she came to realize. Finding food was easy on Tenrōjima. She had a dry place to sleep, and fluffy animals to cuddle with. Library was free, so she could go there to read wherever she had free time – and the librarian was so nice, too!
(It still wasn’t the same as mum’s bed-time stories)
Being an orphan just meant she would go on an adventure later on for sure. Protagonists seldom had parents, and were liked even less often; she would grow up, and find her true friends, and her own super-skilled, grumpy mentor, and she would learn his awesome skills, and everything would end with and they lived happily ever after.
So Mavis smiled at yet another mage who yelled at her for getting in his way, said hello to Zera (who snorted in disgust), and kept swiping the floor.
She was going to be awesome and soon, they would take all of this back.
They weren’t taking this back.
Mavis wasn’t going to see fairies
At least Zera became nice. She would smile at Mavis, say hello, chat about silly things with her.
It wasn’t who Mavis thought her first true friend would be. In her fantasies, Zera always fell into a role of a fairly insignificant first enemy. Maybe a nemesis. Being nice to her had always been hard, knowing she was likely to join some awful person in the future.
It was alright. Bad characters switched to the right side often enough, didn’t they?
“Why are you even reading this book?” Zera huffed in annoyance.
“It may be useful,” Mavis muttered defensively, hiding her shaking hands. It didn’t particularly help, as she was still huddled close to Zera, even though it was still early afternoon. “You never know what nasty tricks dark mages will have.”
“What dark mages? We’re on a deserted island!”
Mavis sunk back into her copy of Dark Curses Through Ages. A few minutes later, she shuddered and grabbed onto Zera’s shirt.
Her friend gave her a look.
A few years later, Mavis was studying the very same book on a tree, swinging her legs contently.
She was right, she was right, she was right-
The adventure was coming, and she managed to outsmart a real treasure hunter, and now they were going together to take the treasure of Tenrōjima back! It was all just like a beginning of a story. She knew life, wasn’t a book, of course – she didn’t have a convenient protection of the main character, or scripted plan to follow, but still-
It was just like a book.
No, better; it was just like when she had been making stories up with her mother.
Stories didn’t convey quite right how much losing a battle hurt. They didn’t explain properly how hard it was to stay cheerful when one of your friends just lost an eye, and the struggle of keeping morale up when nobody could see any hope of winning.
Lost and unable to figure out a way out, she went to fetch water. That was the least she could do.
There, she met him.
Their mysterious mentor.
He didn’t tell them his name. He didn’t bother explaining to the others why he never joined them at a campfire. He still taught them magic, just like he promised. He was also the one to figure out what Zera is - but that, he only told the treasure hunters.
It wasn’t his call to decide if a she should live or die, he explained quietly.
He vanished without a word after they decided they were good enough to try again.
They stood in front of the newly built guild hall. And maybe Mavis would never grow, and Zera was no longer here, but she earned it; her own Happily Ever After.
Happily Ever After didn’t exist, Mavis realized when the war had started. It wasn’t for the sake of defeating a villainous foe; the side Fairy Tail joined wasn’t all that different from their opponents. It wasn’t to gain glory; what was glorious about slaughtering their fellow mages, who’s only fault was standing on the opposite side?
Those weren’t thoughts befitting of a general, so she never expressed them. Deaths on their side were losses, soldiers of the opposite side little more than pesky beasts to be rid of. Yet another battle was fought for the sake of their fallen comrades, not because their employer would lose money had they stopped, and all her speeches were words from the bottom of her hearth, not a cold-hearted manipulations she learned to how to use from psychological books.
She didn’t like it, but it was necessary. Fairy Tail wouldn’t survive otherwise.
For the sake of her guild, she would turn her hearth into ice and battlefield into a chessboard. She knew better than to hope for a miraculous solution, for yet another mysterious mage to pop up out of nowhere to aid them at just the right time.
The war had ended, and most of her friends remained alive.
By all sense and logic, the world should be alright now. They had a party. She laughed alongside everybody else, drank, joked and played games.
It didn’t make her feel any less empty.
She smiled and laughed. When she ran into the black mage, it was easy to act like she was grateful for his help all those years ago, on an adventure she now barely remembered. To chat cheerfully with him about the past ten years. To speak about Yuri becoming a father with excitement, not dull indifference that clouded her hearth somewhere during the war.
The first true emotion to pierce through wasn’t disbelieve on her being supposedly cursed. It wasn’t fear for her friends.
You don’t understand the true value of life, Zeref had said.
But that was impossible. She couldn’t have possibly not realize something so important. Her guildmates were her precious friends, not pawns on a chessboard, not nameless tools-
Yuri lying in a hospital bed, badly wounded. After two weeks, he have recovered enough to spar. The doctor said he should take it easy for another two weeks at least. That if he won’t, his wound would reopen and might not heal properly.
“We need you,” Mavis said. The situation was bad. They couldn’t afford to loose one of the most important fighters. Not now, not for another two weeks.
Yuri trusted her. He went back on a battlefield.
That was just an emergency. Yuri was strong. She knew he would win and survive.
“Precht, you will take squad three and five, and take the centre. Make sure the line won’t break, at any cost.”
Like in many other battles, her people had died. Like in many other battles, they had won. Unlike in many other battles, nearly the entire front line had been decimated.
Precht survived by a pure coincidence.
In the end, Mavis managed to prove her love for her friends. Rita did die by her hand, after all.
The bitter irony of her situation didn’t escape her. As she wandered the wilderness for ten long months, whatever was left of her childhood fantasy of adventure, heroes and happy ending vaporized, leaving only a sour aftertaste.
If she came back, all her friends would die.
If a young girl had buried her brothers, the king would have executed her.
If she didn’t, she would be left lonely and abandoned for the rest of eternity.
If she hadn’t, the gods would punish her for not fulfilling her duty towards the dead.
Right here and now, she lived an ancient tragedy, condemned by fate to fail no matter what she chose.
She barely registered Zeref’s arrival. He was the incarnation of the fatum haunting her; the narrative device which enabled the catastrophe to happen. Maybe by using him, she could undo it as well. Maybe the beginning of her personal nightmare could be also its end.
He claimed it impossible. He also tried to make her feel batter about it. She wasn’t sure if he believed it, or if he just craved company too much to even consider the possibility of losing her.
Mavis didn’t know if the last hours of her life were an act or not. Didn’t trust herself enough to say that the hope she felt was real; that the warm, encouraging words she spoke were any more genuine than pre-battle speeches and praises she gave her friends during the war.
Zeref could kill her, it turned out. He just needed a small push.