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‘What am I supposed to write?’ She thinks, staring at a blank page.
Just moments ago, her mind teemed with inspiration, thoughts and feelings ready to be put to page. Now, as she holds her pen in her hand, the noise of them runs together, becomes as indistinguishable as nothingness. The roaring of hundreds of ideas becomes a mass of white noise, impossible to listen to and yet unable to be heard.
A familiar despair taunts her, the overwhelming blankness of it all threatens to encompass any determination she had to write in the first place.
She forces out a sharp sigh, throwing her pen down and pushing back from her desk to look at the ceiling. If she keeps looking into the void, it will surely look back, and no writing will be done after that. She needs a spark, something to kick her into motion so that the momentum of her inspiration can bring her to the holy land of writing, a flow state of ideas running from the mind and onto paper.
Lucy furrows her brow with determination, giving herself a hearty slap to the cheek to dispel the rest of the hopeless feeling that blank page gave her. She stands, turning to her closet to get dressed before she’s really even decided what she wants to do.
If a spark is what she needs, though, there’s really only one place for her to be.
Fairy Tail.
-
Dainty shoes with sturdy soles, a tough brown leather in thin strips racing up her calf, hit the pavement in rhythm. Stone, rough, stalwart, unforgiving, time-tested, sentiments that spill from her mind at the feel of it reverberating through her bones as she walks. The wind ruffles her skirt, a deep blue like ocean, midnight, grief, nobility, complexity, wrapped around her thighs like it's just a bolt of fabric, like the color alone doesn’t spin her in circles. Her shirt is barely a shirt at all, a strapless, simple wrap of white fabric tied around her boobs, her line of cleavage on display. Her skin rushes with blood, sings to have eyes on it, has stood the test of so much power most people in Magnolia couldn’t even comprehend it.
Her hair is down, just so she can feel it flowing against her face, so she can see it block her vision and remind her of wheat fields and gold and herself. Days like today, when she can’t seem to stop philosophizing, feel like poetry in motion. It’s an addicting feeling, seeing the beauty in the world, letting her artist’s mind truly absorb it all, but the guild is only just coming into view and she’s already got half a headache.
She needs Natsu. She wants this, and doesn’t want it at the same time. She always needs him, to a point she wonders if she’d be capable of standing on her own, and needing him for even this makes her jaw ache and her gut turn.
She lingers on even that, in this moment staring at her guild hall, unable to look away from the dancing fairy on their banner.
“-gonna fucking kill you, I swear on your ugly fucking face, jackass!”
‘Yeah, that’s what I need.’ She thinks.
“Lucy, hey!” Lisanna. She’s carrying a tray of drinks, which she does really quite often, Lucy realizes. Does she go home with an ache in her shoulder, a tightness in her bicep that makes her feel accomplished, exhausted, worried? When she’s old, will one arm fail her before the other, making her remember all the time she’s spent serving them? Will she ever forget the faces people show her when she brings them drinks, are they insignificant to her?
“Lisanna. How’s it going, has it been busy today?” Lucy makes sure to turn her whole body Lisanna’s way, plants herself in front of her and makes sure all of her attention is on the way white hair falls softly around a young face.
Lisanna looks slightly surprised, but smiles and turns into Lucy all the same, tucking her tray under her arm. She wonders if it chafes. “Oh, you know it! Saturdays are all the same, seriously, I can almost predict it down to the minute.” She laughs, like Lucy didn’t loose her breath a bit hearing that.
“Have you really memorized everyone’s routines so well?” She asks, not bothering to keep the wonder from her voice, she leans closer to Lisanna, leaning against the rail dividing the main hall from the front walkway.
“Yeah, haha!” She reaches up to rub her neck, Lucy looks at her nails, “It’s kinda creepy, but I dunno, I just like knowing everyone so well, honestly! Makes the rush a bit easier, too,” she giggles, and Lucy tilts her head at her, staring unabashedly.
“Wow,” she breathes like a sigh, “you’re incredible.”
Lisannas eyebrows raise, she leans away a bit before her eyes seem to widen in realization. There’s a very slight grimace growing on her face, but Lucy is already speaking.
“You’re like a conductor, listening to the unique melody of each instrument, memorizing it’s tune and directing the piece delightfully into the night. Or, no, you’re an entire audience, all on your own, bearing witness to the majesty of our family, you know? Like, we’re all putting on a beautiful performance of life and love, and you get every scene and line poured over you like a waterfall of emotion. Oh, stars, we’re a rushing river of joy, and you’re just one tiny canoe about to fall over the precipice of-” Lucy’s hands have been in the air for a few sentences now, but the pure literature of it all is beginning to overwhelm her ability to reign herself in.
“Oh, hm, okay, um, so, Lucy?” Lisanna tries bravely to get a word in edgewise, but Lucy is beyond hearing paltry words now.
“It’s like- it’s, we’re all a beautiful story okay, and, and, the soul of it all, the pure- the fucking magic-” Lucy may be tearing up. She’d wipe her eyes, but her hands are busy crading Lisanna’s cheeks with all the delicacy in the world, really, all of it, it all exists right here, in her palms, between her fingers like Lisanna’s beautiful hair, like Lisanna, Lisanna is literally delicacy herself. Lusy knows this like she knows words. Many words.
“Yes, Lucy, so many words! Imagine if none of them existed at all. Imagine that, huh?” Lisanna’s eyes are wide, and she’s speaking slowly as if to a child, or a person with a head wound. Thinking of a world without words makes Lucy feel like she has a head wound.
“I’m not entirely sure you don’t. Natsu!” Lisanna has to grab Lucy’s wrists and detach them from her face to turn her head and shout into the guild hall. Lucy looks at Lisanna’s hands, so lithe against her own wrist. She holds them gingerly, like they might burn her if she grips too tight. The thought of such a powerful beauty makes her press them gently to her forehead, bent before Lisanna like she’s her god.
“He’s busy!” Gray shouts back, and Lucy turns her head, still bent and now butting Lisanna’s stomach. Gray seems to be attempting to make Natsu eat his own fist, one hand on the back of Natsu’s head and the other pushing his elbow. Natsu might be trying to dislocate his jaw, Lucy isn’t really sure what he’s supposed to be going for.
The stupidity of it all makes her straighten, a profoundly annoyed look beginning to form on her face. There’s nothing poetic about trying to eat your own fist.
Lucy looks to Lisanna to confirm, but she finds a blank space where she stood, her detachment from Lucy'grasp having gone somehow unnoticed. It’s not uncommon when in the guild for conversations to end quite abruptly, so she pays no mind to it and walks into the hall proper. By the time she makes her way past all of her beautiful friends and gets to Natsu’s table, Erza is shoving her own fist against Natsu’s teeth, and with far more power.
“Erza! Don’t knock his teeth out, he’d complain forever,” Lucy chides as Natsu protests despite knowing she’s right. Erza sighs, rolling her eyes and laying off, though not without giving him a good shake first.
“Fine. Just for you, Lucy.” Erza seems more willing to smile once she turns Lucy’s way, but Lucy can’t help but notice how she doesn’t face anyone directly, always seeming to slant toward the nearest exit, or master Makarov. Lucy lingers on the memory of Erza crying when she found out he was alive during the battle with Acnologia. Her chest hurts just to glaze over the thought of Erza’s devotion to him, and Lucy isn’t in a place to be glazing over any thoughts at all right now. Her lip can’t help but wobble, her eyes wide.
Before she knows it, her arms are flung all the way around Erza’s neck, their cheeks pressed tight together, their chests both squished against Erza’s breastplate. Lucy doesn’t wail, but some tears do spill, and immediately Erza’s gone stiff.
“Lucy? Lucy, what’s the matter, what’s gotten into you?” Erza sounds worried, but in no panic. Even the boys seem to be staring at her oddly, but she just can’t help it.
“Erza, I just love you so much! You’re so beautiful, and strong, and you’ve stood through so much for us, and you’ve always been there, and your hair is like a manifestation of true honor, as red as blood, like the blood that flows through a knights veins, nay, every vein there is, they've all got blood just as red as your hair, Erza!” Lucy babbles like a child, pure Erza the only thing on her mind.
“Did you just say ‘nay’?” Natsu’s judgmental tone sends a streak of pink through her beautiful scarlet. She’s also catching a glimpse of him from where she’s buried in Erza’s hair, but the metaphor is all she can think about anyway.
“Don’t listen to him, he’s stupid and no one appreciates you enough!” Lucy is shouting now, which she knows because Erza flinches away from her and Lucy remembers ears are a thing.
“Okay. Um, how about we get you something to eat, huh?” Erza tries to pull back, to nudge Lucy toward the bar, but the thought of eating makes her fling herself right back into Erza’s arms.
“I can’t handle Mira’s masterful cooking, right now, Erza, I’ll fucking explode! The love will literally make me fucking explode!!” She’s glad Erza is wearing iron, or she might have squeezed the life out of her already.
“Okay, okay, let’s just sit down then, alright? Why don’t we go over to one of the couches? Natsu, Gray, come along now.” She herds them like puppies over to the more comfortable couches, even as Natsu and Gray grumble about opportunities for escape and the All Seeing Erza Eyes.
There are other people in the guild, some turn eyes toward them, some don’t. Spectacles in the hall are a vital part of the ecosystem, pure expression and emotion bursting forth in messy confessions, or heated arguments, or outbursts of joy, or whatever Lucy’s got going on right now. They serve an essential purpose, keeping them all completely entrenched in one another, exposing parts of themselves to their guildmates that they’ll never unsee, tying them together further and further every day. They fall into each other so they do not fall into themselves.
Lucy is fully sobbing by the time she’s settled into Erza’s lap, her legs over Natsu’s knees and Gray sitting on the floor beside her, staring at her hand. She’s grabbing him by the head and pulling him into her chest before she can think twice, wrapping both arms around his midnight hair and babbling through the tears about the many things the color brings to her mind.
It helps her stop sobbing, at least, though her eyes are still wet and she can’t stop sniffing. She opens her eyes and looks down at his, where they sit awkward and avoiding her gaze. “Your eyes are so pretty, you know? They have so much, so much expression and feeling in them, they’re cold, but they’re not at all, you know? Like, there’s this sense of just- seeing, and, and like you just know, know everything! Like even if you don’t know everything, you could totally know it all without flinching, you know? You know.” Words barely come to her, but it feels like too much of a release to get the emotions out from under her skin so they can burrow under Gray’s and make a home. Natsu’s staring at her like she’s speaking a different language, she can just feel it, but all she’s looking at are Gray’s eyes, set over flustered cheeks and a sheepish mouth.
“You’re so pretty.” She falls against Erza’s chest with an overwhelmed pout, bringing Gray with her so he has to lean awkwardly over her legs.
Two voices go, “Hey!”, but Natsu doesn’t even matter right now at all, because Juvia!
“Juvia!” Lucy gives Gray a sharp pull so he goes tumbling over their bodies awkwardly, but mostly so he gets out of Lucy’s line of sight to the sea herself.
The lady in question is stomping toward her, a look of pure vindicated anger on her face, one Lucy’s seen plenty of times before. “Juvia does not appreciate your grabby harlot hands-”
“Juvia, Juvia, Juvia,” as soon as she’s in reach, pointing an accusatory finger in Lucy’s face, she’s being pulled by the wrist to join the frankly painful pile of limbs spilling off the couch. “You are literally water.”
Juvia’s angry face freezes into one of off-guard befuddlement. “What?”
“Like… the ocean.”
Juvia blinks. She’s got one knee braced on Natsu’s thigh, her elbow digging into Gray’s shoulder where Lucy tugs on her wrist. Slowly, her frown deepens, and as her hand moves gingerly into Lucy’s field of vision, like one might approach a baby deer in the forest, she lays the back of her hand over Lucy’s forehead and pauses for a moment before bracing it on Lucy’s knee with thin lips.
“You don’t appear to have a fever.”
“Juvia you are literally fucking water, I can’t-” Lucy’s voice becomes strained with emotion as she grasps at the air like she might be able to pull the paragraphs from nothingness.
Juvia frowns some more, pulling her hand from Lucy’s grip so she can push Gray back down from where he’d been attempting to get up. “Juvia is worried.”
“Don’t be, she’s just being loopy, it’s no big deal,” Natsu rolls his eyes from where his head is draped over the back of the couch, idly blowing sparks into the air as far too many people climb over his body like it’s a piece of furniture.
“Don’t call Lucy names, Natsu, she’s just having a bad day.” Erza chides him, but Lucy frowns and knocks her head into Erza’s jaw gently. Gray has found a place to kneel and leans his cheek against the back of the couch, looking at her with a soft pout she doesn’t know how to decipher.
“I’m not having a bad day. I’m having… a beautiful day. It’s just-” she frowns, curling up tighter, on top of Erza and Natsu and under Gray and Juvia. Safest she’s ever been, and it makes the tight seal over her heart crack open with warmth. “It’s too beautiful. You’re all too beautiful and I love you too much, is all. And I’ve got crazy writers block right now, which is not helping.”
Her eye’s find Natsu’s after a moment of vulnerability, automatically. He’s tucked his chin into his palm to hide what seems to be a very fond grin, and he’s looking at her with knowing, almost teasing eyes. “Sap.”
Erza starts laughing behind her, giggling at first before it seems to open up and come from her gut. There’s a surge of magic, and for a few milliseconds Lucy blushes to feel power-warmed skin pressed against her before Erza requips into something much less metal, adding an essential element of comfort to the equation.
Before Lucy can resettle, Erza wraps her arms tight around Lucy’s abdomen, lifting her slightly into the air before she swings her legs into Gray’s side, kicking him and Juvia into tumbling off the couch, then shoves her feet under Natsu until he jumps up to crouch on the opposite arm. Effectively having cleared space, she sprawls out and plops Lucy into her lap, wrapping around her like Lucy’s got her very own Erza-shaped armor.
Lucy can’t help but wrap her up too, squeezing tight and burying her face back into a scarlet curtain. Safest place in the guild, right here, she knows it in her bones.
“You are beautiful, Lucy,” there’s so much warmth, so much love and affection in her voice, Lucy can’t even cry, she just sighs so deeply, from the depths of her soul something far, far down inside of her curling up to rest.
She hears Natsu hum contemplatively, but Gray and Juvia seem to have gone quiet. Probably sharing some kind of look, if she knows them, and she does, and that almost takes her. Then she hears the most awful, grating noise of wood scraping against wood, Gray shouting something at Natsu, probably, then the noise again, then the couch shakes a bit.
She peeks over Erza’s shoulder to see he’s moved the opposite couch, and the table that was in between them, so that both couches are pressed together, front to front to make what could almost be a bed, enclosed by back and arm rests like a nest. Her heart grows three sizes in her chest, and it already felt fit to burst, so she’s sure some of her ribs must surely be broken by now.
Her eyes are on his, stuck like a planet orbits a star, as he crawls like some sort of freaky lizard over to the back of the couch behind her. He shoves his hand between her back and the couch cushions, and she unwraps one arm from around Erza to gesture at him dumbly as she fails to say anything to stop him from awkwardly squeezing himself between her and the couch instead of laying behind Erza on the other couch like a normal person would have done after dragging over an entire separate couch.
She can’t really complain though, as he molds himself to her back, snaking his arms between Erza and her own stomach, wrapping her up tight enough to grab his own elbows in a vice. His face nestles itself into her hair, like she’d done to Erza a moment ago.
She looks back at the redhead, unsure of the expression on her own face, but Erza’s is peaceful. Fond, and loving. Her bangs have fallen over her right eye, so Lucy reaches up to move them, pressing their foreheads together as they can’t help but chuckle at him breathily.
“You’re an idiot,” she feels the impact from Gray thwapping Natsu upside the head, before the couch dips as Gray extends his entire leg over the back of the couch and crawls over all three of them to get behind Erza. Freaks, she swears. “Juvia, c’mere.”
Lucy expects to feel the couch dip again, but Juvia doesn’t appear to move. She breaks comfortable eye contact with Erza to look over, but she doesn’t see her. Lucy has to look up and over the arm of the couch to catch Juvia bent at the waist over their heads looking sheepishly but intensely down at them.
“Juvia is still pretty worried.” Oh.
Juvia is so kind, it makes her want to split in half for how she was when they met. She’s come so, so far, gotten so much more expressive, grew stronger, became someone Lucy's really, truly honored to know. Of course she understands what Lucy is going through, she too becomes overwhelmed by herself so easily.
Lucy smiles up at her like light is spilling from her pores. “Oh, Juvia. I love you, you know that?” Lucy reaches up to ghost the back of her fingers over Juvia’s cheek, all she can do from where she’s pressed into her friends. She hears Gray sigh quietly, and her heart threatens to break.
Juvia seems to be on the verge of her own tears, mouth left open just slightly, enough so Lucy can hear the shake in her breath. Lucy can’t even help the way she grabs Juvia by the bicep and pulls her into the pile, heedless of where or on who she’ll land. Juvia flails, attempting to find literally any way to make her body fit in this situation, plenty of couch open to enjoy but kept from her by the limbful mass. Lucy slaps her hand over Erza’s back until she finds Gray’s arm, sliding down it until he gives her his hand.
She just needs to be touching everyone she can right now. She feels the ghost of Wendy’s tiny knees against hers, Levy’s poufy hair getting in her nose, Mira’s soft touch over her side, Laxus’ mean hands rested anxiously against her shoulder, Gajeel’s sturdy back pressed against her own. So many more, so many wonderful cats curled into the small spaces where warmth is maximized. She holds onto those ghosts like they’re enough, like they’ll get her through anything if she can just imagine them vividly enough.
She just needs to lay here a while, that’s all.
Then she’ll stop avoiding her stupid book.