Chapter Text
The December air bit at exposed skin with the kind of sharp, persistent cold that had a way of creeping under collars and sleeves and settling into bone. Despite that, the midmorning sun hung bright over Magnolia, casting long golden streaks across cobblestone streets still damp from an overnight frost. Shopkeepers were already out sweeping their storefronts, stringing colored lanterns between awnings, and arranging window displays of tinsel and glass ornaments that caught the light and threw tiny rainbows onto the sidewalks. The whole city had been swept up in a kind of festive mania ever since Master Makarov had announced the first annual Fairy Tail Christmas Ball two weeks ago, and the excitement had bled out far beyond the guild walls. Every cafe seemed to have a chalkboard sign advertising holiday specials, and the bakeries had gone completely overboard with their window displays of frosted cakes and gingerbread.
Gray Fullbuster walked at the center of the group with his hands shoved deep into his coat pockets and a scowl fixed firmly on his face — a coat, it should be noted, that he was still wearing, which was something of a minor miracle given his track record. Beside him, Juvia had attached herself to his arm with both hands, and every few steps she leaned her head against his shoulder with a contented little sigh that made the tips of his ears burn. Ahead of them, Erza walked with the easy authority of someone who could clear a sidewalk just by existing, while Lucy and Cana flanked her on either side, the latter already nursing a flask despite it barely being past ten in the morning. Natsu strolled with his hands laced behind his head, looking bored out of his skull and occasionally kicking a loose stone ahead of him on the road like a restless child. Gajeel brought up the rear, looking about as thrilled as Gray felt, his studded arms crossed over his chest and his jaw set in its default expression of vague annoyance, while Levy walked beside him, occasionally stealing glances up at the Iron Dragon Slayer that she clearly thought were subtle. They were not.
“How the hell did we get dragged into this?” Gray muttered. He jerked his chin toward a boutique they were passing, its window crammed with mannequins in sequined gowns. “We could’ve just gone and picked something up on our own. This didn’t need to be a whole production.”
“Juvia and Gray-sama must pick out their outfits for the Christmas Ball!” Juvia replied brightly, as though this were the most obvious thing in the world. The excitement practically radiated off of her. She turned her face up to him, dark blue eyes shining, and her grip on his arm tightened. “Juvia has been looking forward to this for weeks. Gray-sama and Juvia will look so wonderful together!”
Gray opened his mouth to argue, then caught the look on her face — that unguarded, hopeful brightness that she wore so openly it almost hurt to look at directly — and whatever retort he’d been preparing died in his throat. He exhaled through his nose, looked pointedly away, and said nothing. The faint pink creeping across his cheeks, however, said plenty.
“Oh, come on, it’s not that bad, is it?” Erza asked, glancing back over her shoulder at them. There was a hint of amusement playing at the corners of her lips, which was its own kind of unsettling. A smiling Erza was an unpredictable Erza. “We’re all together, the weather is nice, and we have a purpose. Think of it as a mission.”
“A mission to buy clothes,” Gajeel said flatly, from the back of the group.
“A mission is a mission,” Erza replied, in a tone that made it very clear the discussion was over.
“Eh, if they don’t want to see us girls trying on outfits, that’s their loss,” Cana said, waving a hand dismissively. She took a pull from the flask she’d produced from seemingly nowhere and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Next to her, Levy’s cheeks went pink.
“C-Cana!” the petite script mage stammered, her eyes darting involuntarily toward Gajeel before snapping back to the ground. Cana caught the glance. A slow, knowing grin spread across her face, and she opened her mouth to say something that would almost certainly have made Levy want to crawl into a hole and die — but Lucy spoke up first.
“C’mon, you guys.” Lucy’s voice carried a fondly exasperated edge as she looked around at all of them. Her gaze lingered on Natsu just a beat longer than on anyone else. “I just thought… well, it’s rare that all of us actually get a chance to do something like this together. Someone’s always out on a mission, or busy with something, or… I don’t know. It’s a nice day, we all need outfits for the ball anyway, so I thought…”
Her words trailed off, and her gaze dropped to the cobblestones at her feet. For a moment she looked oddly small, like she was bracing herself for someone to tell her it was a stupid idea. Then a hand landed on her shoulder, firm and warm, and she looked up to find Erza standing beside her.
“I think it was a great idea,” Erza said simply. “To get everyone together like this.”
The tension bled out of Lucy’s shoulders, and she broke into a grateful smile that lit up her whole face. Natsu, who’d been watching the exchange with his arms still folded behind his head, tilted his chin down and regarded Lucy with an unreadable look. It passed quickly, and he went back to staring at the sky.
* * *
“So,” Cana said, as they turned a corner into the heart of the shopping district, where the street opened up wider and the storefronts grew taller and more ornate. “Speaking of the ball — who’s going with who?”
The question landed like a stone dropped into still water. Ripples of discomfort moved visibly through the group. Gajeel suddenly found the roofline architecture deeply fascinating. Natsu scratched the back of his neck. Gray stared straight ahead with the focused intensity of a man trying very hard not to exist.
“Juvia and Gray-sama will be going together, of course!” Juvia volunteered immediately, releasing Gray’s arm just long enough to press both palms to her flushed cheeks. A dreamy, faraway expression overtook her features, as though she were already there, spinning across a candlelit dance floor in his arms. She turned to beam up at him. “Right, Gray-sama?”
Every pair of eyes in the group swiveled to Gray. He felt the collective weight of their stares like a physical pressure against the side of his skull. His jaw worked. “Er… y-yeah,” he muttered, his own cheeks flushing a deep, traitorous red. “Sure.”
Natsu’s grin was immediate and merciless. “Haha! Gray, you’re actually blushing!” he cackled, leaning in close enough that Gray could smell the residual smoke that always clung to him. “What’s the matter, Ice Princess? Got a fever?”
“It’s the wind!” Gray snapped, shoving Natsu back a step. “It’s cold out!”
“Oh, right,” Natsu drawled, his grin widening. “Because cold has always been such a big problem for you, Mr. Strips-Down-To-His-Boxers-In-A-Snowstorm.”
“That’s got nothing to do with anything!” Gray shot back, turning fully to face Natsu now. “That’s a habit! I don’t even realize I’m doing it half the time! It doesn’t count!”
“Does too.”
“Does not.”
“Does too! You wanna go, Ice Perv?!”
“Bring it, Flame Brain!”
They were nose to nose now, foreheads nearly touching, teeth bared — the same routine they’d been doing since they were kids, as automatic and well-rehearsed as breathing. A vein had begun to throb at Erza’s temple. Lucy, recognizing the warning signs with the practiced instinct of long survival, moved quickly.
“Hey, hey! Knock it off, both of you!” she said, inserting herself between them with both hands up. “Do you want Erza to step in? Because that’s where this is headed!”
Both boys stiffened. They separated without another word, though they continued to glare at each other from a safe distance. Lucy let out a breath, then seemed to steel herself for something. Her cheeks colored again, and she turned toward Natsu, her voice dropping.
“Actually… Natsu.” She hesitated. Drew in a breath. Let it out slowly, the warmth of it meeting the cold air and producing a thin curl of vapor that drifted between them before dissolving. “Is it really so bad? Being asked to this ball?”
The question hung in the air, fragile and exposed. Natsu blinked, his expression shifting from combative to confused in the span of a heartbeat. Gray, sensing something delicate happening, had the rare good sense to keep his mouth shut.
“I…” Lucy’s hands twisted together in front of her. She wasn’t looking at him anymore. “I was going to ask you. To the ball. If… if you wanted to go. With me.”
A beat of silence fell over the group, during which the sounds of the street around them — the chatter of other shoppers, the distant ringing of a bell above a shop door, the creak of a wooden cart — became suddenly, almost absurdly loud.
Cana broke it first. “If you say no and break my girl’s heart, Natsu, I will never forgive you,” she declared, slinging a protective arm over Lucy’s shoulders and leveling a stare at Natsu that could’ve curdled milk.
“Geez, Cana, what is that face?!” Natsu recoiled, then looked back at Lucy. His expression shifted, grew thoughtful, and he regarded her carefully for a long moment. Under his gaze, Lucy’s face turned so red it was nearly luminous.
“I-If you don’t want to go with me, that’s totally fine!” she burst out, shaking her head so fast her pigtails whipped back and forth. Her eyes squeezed shut. “I just thought I’d ask, and it’s not a big deal if—”
“What are you talking about, Lucy?” Natsu said, looking genuinely confused. “I never said I didn’t want to go with you.”
Lucy’s head snapped up. Her lips parted in a soft, startled breath, and for a moment she just stared at him, as though the words needed a few extra seconds to travel the distance between his mouth and her brain. The beginnings of tears that had been gathering at the corners of her eyes — preemptive tears, prepared for a rejection she’d been so certain was coming — spilled over.
She burst into tears, and through them, she was smiling. She threw her arms around him, burying her face in his neck, and his arms came up around her, a little awkward and uncertain, but holding her close. His cheeks were red, and he looked slightly panicked by the crying, but he didn’t let go.
“C-Crap, Lucy—” he said, trying to peer down at her face. “You okay? Did I say something wrong?”
She pulled back, swiping at her eyes with the heel of her palm, and shook her head with a watery laugh. “I’m fine,” she said. “I’m really fine.” Their friends smiled, and even Gajeel’s usual scowl softened by a fraction.
“Now who’s blushing?” Gray remarked, his smirk lazy and satisfied.
“Bite me, Gray,” Natsu shot back, but there was no real heat in it. He was still holding Lucy, and the tips of his ears were practically glowing.
Lucy finally stepped back from him, and the two stood apart, neither quite able to look at the other. She reached up to tuck a loose strand of blonde hair behind her ear. “Sorry,” she said, her voice still a little thick. “I don’t know what came over me.”
“Alright, enough of this mushy crap,” Gajeel cut in, his rough voice slicing cleanly through the tender moment. “Weren’t you girls going shopping? Let’s get this over with. Sooner we get done, sooner we can leave.”
“You guys need to shop too, you know!” Levy reminded him, crossing her arms. “You can’t just show up to a formal ball in your usual clothes.”
“Tux, shirt, tie, pants, shoes,” Gajeel listed, ticking each item off on his fingers. “How hard is that? Twenty minutes, tops. You girls, on the other hand? We’re gonna be here till the sun goes down.”
“He has a point,” Gray admitted with a shrug. “I’m out the second I find something.”
A small, wounded sound at his side made him glance down. Juvia’s head was bowed, her fingers loosening their grip on his sleeve, and her lower lip had begun to tremble with a vulnerability that was so plainly genuine it made something in Gray’s chest clench uncomfortably.
“Gray-sama’s not going to stay and see Juvia’s outfit?” she asked quietly. “Juvia hoped that… that Gray-sama would help Juvia with picking out her dress, and… and help her try it on…”
“I— I can’t do that!” Gray sputtered, gaping at her. The words, innocent as Juvia probably meant them, sent a cascade of images through his head that he immediately and aggressively tried to suppress. Heat flooded his face. His heart hammered so hard against his ribs that he was half-convinced the entire street could hear it.
“Forget it, Juvia,” he said firmly, looking away. He felt her grip loosen further, and the absence of her warmth against his arm was… noticeable. Against his better judgment, he glanced down at her. Her head was bowed. Her eyes were fixed on the cobblestones.
Damn it.
“…Fine,” Gray muttered, expelling a long-suffering sigh. “I’ll stay. But I am not helping you try on the dress. That’s where I draw the line.” He eyed her warily. “You’re scary, you know that?”
“It’s okay,” Juvia said softly, and when she lifted her face, the smile that bloomed across it was so radiant and warm that Gray had to look away again. “Juvia is just glad that Gray-sama will stay by her side.” And somehow, despite the fact that he’d held his ground on the dress thing, Gray had the distinct and nagging feeling that this had been Juvia’s aim all along.
* * *
They spent the rest of the morning and the better part of the early afternoon working their way through the shopping district, and Gray quickly discovered that shopping with this particular group of people was its own unique circle of hell. True to Gajeel’s prediction, the guys found their outfits with ruthless efficiency. Gray settled on a dark navy suit with a charcoal vest inside the first store they walked into, paid, and was done. Natsu grabbed a black suit jacket off the first rack he saw, held it up against himself, declared “Yeah, this works,” and was at the register before anyone could suggest he at least try it on. Gajeel was similarly decisive. In and out in under thirty minutes, garment bags slung over their shoulders, the three of them congregated on a bench outside the row of shops and waited.
And waited. And waited.
The girls were another story entirely. They ducked in and out of dressing rooms in an endless rotation, emerged in outfit after outfit, twirled before full-length mirrors, solicited opinions from each other, rejected those opinions, changed their minds, changed them back, and started the whole process over again from scratch. Gray watched through the shop window as Lucy held up two nearly identical dresses — one in ivory, one in cream — and engaged Levy in what appeared to be a deeply passionate debate over which shade was more flattering, while Cana sat on a velvet ottoman in the background, drinking from her flask and offering commentary that kept making Lucy’s face turn red.
Erza alone tried on eleven dresses in a single store, each one accompanied by a full-body requip pose in the mirror that drew alarmed stares from the other customers. A shop attendant tried to tell her the fitting room had a three-item limit, took one look at Erza’s face, and quietly walked away. Cana, for her part, rejected everything that didn’t have a slit up to mid-thigh, and when a saleswoman suggested a more modest cut, Cana laughed so hard she nearly dropped her flask. Levy agonized over hemlines, necklines, whether navy or emerald looked better with her hair, and whether she should go for something bold or something understated, a decision she seemed to be making entirely based on what she imagined Gajeel might notice — though she would have died before admitting that out loud.
Lucy kept gravitating toward a pale gold gown that she’d tried on three separate times. Each time, she’d study herself in the mirror, chew her lip, put it back on the rack, and walk away. Five minutes later, she’d be back in front of it, running her fingers over the fabric. On the fourth visit, Cana physically took the dress off the rack, shoved it into Lucy’s arms, and said, “Buy the damn dress, Lucy. Natsu’s not going to know what hit him.” Lucy’s face went scarlet, but she bought the dress.
Juvia, meanwhile, insisted on modeling each potential dress for Gray and Gray alone. She dragged him by the wrist to a secluded corner of whatever store they happened to be in, disappeared behind a curtain, and emerged each time with her hands clasped beneath her chin and her dark blue eyes wide and hopeful. “What does Gray-sama think of this one?” she would ask, turning slowly so he could see the full effect. Each time, Gray’s response was some variation of a gruff mutter and an averted gaze that Juvia somehow read as encouragement. By the fifth dress — a deep sapphire number with a sweetheart neckline that made Gray temporarily forget how breathing worked — his ears had gone permanently pink, and he’d stopped being able to form complete sentences.
“That one,” he’d muttered, still not looking at her. “That one’s… fine.”
The smile Juvia gave him could have melted glaciers.
Finally, mercifully, everyone was satisfied with their choices. Purchases were made, bags were gathered, and the group set off down the winding road that led back toward the guild hall. The sun had shifted lower in the sky, painting the world in warm amber and gold, and the frost that still clung to the bare tree branches caught the light and glittered like spun glass. The girls chattered excitedly about their dresses as they walked, comparing notes and already making plans for how they’d do their hair. Everyone except Juvia, who refused to reveal any details about her final selection, declaring with absolute seriousness that Gray-sama would be the first and only person to see her in it. Lucy tried to get her to at least describe the color, but Juvia shook her head firmly and mimed zipping her lips shut.
It was Natsu who stopped them. He halted mid-stride, one arm shooting out to his side in a silent signal for the others to do the same. His head turned, and his eyes narrowed as he peered behind them, back the way they’d come. The laughter and conversation died immediately. They all knew that look.
“Someone’s been following us,” he said quietly. “Ever since we left the shopping district. I wasn’t sure at first — too many people around, too many scents — but now I’m sure of it.” His nostrils flared. “There’s definitely someone in those trees.”
He jerked his chin toward the thick growth of shrubs and overgrown trees that lined the right side of the road. The foliage was dense enough to hide a person easily, and the shadows between the trunks were deep and still.
Lucy shifted closer to him, her hand instinctively moving to the ring of keys at her hip. “Are you sure?” she whispered.
“Positive.” Natsu was already moving, his posture shifting from relaxed to coiled in the span of a breath. He raised his voice, directing it at the trees. “Oi! Who are you?! Show yourself!”
Silence. The late afternoon breeze rustled through the branches, but nothing else moved. The group exchanged uneasy glances. Then Natsu scowled, cracked his knuckles, and marched straight into the undergrowth. Branches snapped and leaves crunched underfoot. “Get your ass out here!” his voice rang out, muffled by the foliage.
A heartbeat later, a large fireball erupted from within the treeline, scattering leaves and sending a flock of startled birds screaming into the sky. Lucy yelped. Gray’s hands dropped to his sides, frost already crackling at his fingertips. Erza’s expression went flat and dangerous.
Then Natsu reappeared, shouldering his way through the brush, and he was dragging someone with him — a boy, small and scrawny, gripped firmly by the back of his shirt. The kid was thrashing and kicking, but against Natsu’s grip, it was useless. Reaching the road, Natsu dropped the boy unceremoniously onto the gravel. The kid hit the ground hard, wincing as the rough stones bit into his palms.
They all stared. The boy couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen. He was filthy from head to toe — dirt caked into the creases of his knuckles, smeared across one cheek, ground into the knees of pants that were at least two sizes too big for him and held up by a fraying rope belt. His hair was a matted, tangled mess that might have been dark brown underneath all the grime. He looked like he hadn’t eaten a proper meal in days, maybe longer; his cheeks were hollow, his collarbones jutting sharply beneath the stretched-out collar of a threadbare shirt that had probably been white once. His shoes were held together with what appeared to be strips of torn cloth wound around the soles, and his thin arms were covered in scratches and bruises in various stages of healing. Whatever story this kid had, it wasn’t a happy one. Even Gajeel’s scowl softened by a fraction at the sight of him.
But it was his eyes that made them all draw back. One blue. One green. Both staring back at them with a fierce, burning defiance that seemed far too large for the small, starving frame it was housed in.
“Alright, kid,” Natsu said, folding his arms. “Start talking. Who are you, and why were you following us?”
The boy turned his head to the side, jaw clenched, and said nothing.
“Talk,” Gajeel stepped forward, and his shadow fell over the kid like a wall. His voice dropped to something low and grating. “Or I’ll make you.”
The boy flinched, but held his silence for another stubborn beat. Then, slowly, reluctantly, he raised his mismatched eyes to meet theirs.
“Wait.” Levy’s voice was barely above a breath. She crouched down until she was at eye level with the boy, studying his face with growing recognition. “You’re Xander… aren’t you?”
“Xan-who?” Gajeel raised an eyebrow.
“Xander,” Levy repeated, her eyes not leaving the boy. She straightened slowly and turned to the others, lowering her voice. “Remember that request that came in a few weeks ago? A couple looking for help finding their runaway son? They described the child as having heterochromia — each eye a different color.” She looked back at the boy. “This is him.”
“They’re not my parents!” The boy’s voice cracked as it tore out of him, raw and ragged and loud enough to make them all flinch. His small fists clenched at his sides, and his face twisted with something that went deeper than anger — something wounded and desperate and old beyond his years. “They— They…!”
Whatever he’d been about to say died on his lips. His hands flew to his head. His fingers dug into his scalp, knuckles going white, and a low, guttural sound — not quite a scream, not quite a moan — ripped from his throat.
“No…” The defiance was gone. All of it, stripped away in an instant, and what was left was naked, visceral fear. His eyes were wild when he raised them, and his whole body had begun to tremble. “Not again… no, no, no…”
“Kid—” Gray started, taking a step forward.
“Leave!” Xander screamed at them, and his voice broke on the word. His teeth were clenched so hard the muscles in his jaw jumped. “Please… you have to go… now, before it’s too late. I don’t want to hurt you… not like I hurt them… but I can’t… I can’t hold it back…!”
The air changed. It was subtle at first — a pressure, like the atmosphere before a thunderstorm, heavy and electric and wrong. The hairs on Gray’s arms stood on end. A metallic taste flooded his mouth. Then the ground beneath their feet began to vibrate, a low, deep tremor that he could feel in his teeth, and the temperature around them dropped and spiked simultaneously in a way that made no physical sense. Gray’s breath caught. Beside him, he felt Juvia stiffen and clutch his arm hard enough to bruise. Erza’s hand was already on the hilt of her sword, and even Gajeel had dropped into a fighting stance, iron scales beginning to ripple across his forearms.
“Everyone, get ba—” Erza didn’t finish.
The boy arched backward, his spine bowing at an unnatural angle, and a massive shockwave of dark purple energy erupted from his body. It hit them like a wall — not heat, not cold, but something else entirely, something that reached past skin and muscle and bone and gripped something deeper, something fundamental. The force flung all eight of them off their feet. Gray was airborne for what felt like an eternity, Juvia’s scream ringing in his ears, the world spinning around him in a blur of sky and road and the blinding purple light that seemed to be everywhere at once, inside him, passing through him, rearranging something at his very core—
He hit the ground hard. The impact drove the air from his lungs. Above him, the sky tilted and swam.
Then everything went black.
* * *
When Gray opened his eyes, the first thing he registered was pain — a dull, throbbing ache that radiated from everywhere and nowhere at once. The second thing he registered was that the sky above him was the deep indigo of early evening, which meant he’d been unconscious for at least an hour. The third thing he registered was that something was very, very wrong.
He sat up slowly, his head swimming, and immediately noticed that his center of gravity was off. His body felt different — lighter, more compact, less familiar in ways he couldn’t immediately articulate. His limbs felt shorter. His chest felt heavier. The air against his skin registered differently, as though the nerve endings themselves were wired wrong. He raised a hand to press against his throbbing temple, and froze.
The hand before him was smaller than his own. More slender. The fingers more delicate, the nails longer and neatly kept. He stared at it for a long, uncomprehending moment, turning it over slowly, examining the palm, the knuckles, the way the fading light caught on skin that was softer and paler than his should have been.
Then long, blue waves of hair fell across his face as he looked down, and the bottom dropped out of his stomach.
Gray’s blood went cold in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with his magic. He scrambled to his feet, staggering as the unfamiliar body responded to his movements with a half-second delay that felt like wearing someone else’s skin, and looked down at himself. Curves. A smaller frame. Juvia’s Russian-style coat. Juvia’s boots. Juvia’s hands. He lifted those hands in front of his face, turned them over, and the tremor in them was visible.
“What… the hell…”
His first instinct was to find Juvia — if he was in her body, then she had to be in his. He whipped around, scanning the road, and spotted his own body about ten feet away, slowly sitting up from the gravel. Relief flooded through him. He took a staggering step toward it, Juvia’s voice already forming her name on his lips—
And then his own body looked up at him, and the expression on its face was all wrong.
It wasn’t Juvia’s wide-eyed adoration or her breathless concern. The face — his face — wore a look of pure, open-mouthed horror that was distinctly, unmistakably Lucy’s. Brown eyes that should have been dark blue stared down at broad, masculine hands with mounting panic, and then Lucy’s voice came out of Gray’s mouth, pitched high with alarm.
“Why— Why am I— oh my God,” his body said, in Lucy’s cadence, Lucy’s intonation, Lucy’s escalating hysteria. His body looked down at itself, patted its chest, and let out a strangled yelp. “WHY AM I IN GRAY’S BODY?!”
Gray’s stomach lurched. If Lucy was in his body, then where the hell was—
“Gray…sama?”
The voice came from further down the road. It was Natsu’s voice — rough, deep, distinctly male — but the word it spoke, and the trembling, desperate way it spoke that word, belonged to only one person in the world. Gray turned slowly, a new kind of dread pooling in his gut, and saw Natsu’s body pushing itself up off the gravel with shaking arms. Salmon-pink hair hung over a face that was contorted not in Natsu’s usual brash energy, but in Juvia’s wide-eyed devastation.
“Gray-sama!” Natsu’s body cried out again, and the sound of Juvia’s soul calling through Natsu’s vocal cords was one of the most profoundly unsettling things Gray had ever heard. Natsu’s body staggered to its feet, looked down at itself — at the scarf, at the scaled vest, at hands that were larger and rougher than her own — and a look of absolute anguish crossed Natsu’s features. “This… this isn’t… Juvia is not… why is Juvia in the Salamander’s body?!”
This wasn’t a swap. Gray’s mind raced, cold logic cutting through the panic. He was in Juvia’s body. Lucy was in his body. Juvia was in Natsu’s body. Which meant Natsu was somewhere else entirely, and whoever was in Lucy’s body wasn’t Lucy. This wasn’t a simple switch. They’d been scrambled.
As if to confirm this, a furious bellow erupted from the far side of the road — Erza’s body, unmistakable in her armor, picking herself up and slamming a fist into the ground hard enough to crack the cobblestone. But the voice that tore out of Erza’s mouth was all wrong. Too loud, too reckless, too Natsu.
“WHAT THE— WHY AM I— WHY DO I HAVE BOOBS?!” Erza’s body roared, looking down at its own chest with Natsu’s trademark gracelessness. “AND WHY IS MY HAIR RED?! WHERE’S MY SCARF?!”
Meanwhile, Gajeel’s body stood a few yards away, having risen from the ground with a controlled, deliberate precision that was deeply alien on that hulking frame. It brushed the dirt from its sleeves methodically, rolled its neck once, and surveyed the chaos with a calm, assessing gaze that could only belong to one person.
“Everyone, stop panicking,” Gajeel’s body said, and Erza’s commanding authority rang through every syllable, despite the rough baritone delivering them. Gajeel’s pierced face wore an expression of steely composure that Gajeel himself had never once managed. “We need to assess the situation. Calmly.”
Across the road, Levy’s petite body sat on the ground, legs splayed, staring at its own tiny hands with an expression of abject horror. “You have got to be kidding me,” it growled, and Gajeel’s rough, gravelly voice came out of Levy’s small mouth in a way that was so jarring it was almost funny. Almost. Levy’s body tried to stand, wobbled, and had to grab a nearby tree branch for balance. “I’m tiny. I’m a damn pixie. This is a nightmare.”
A few feet away, Cana’s body was staring at its own reflection in a shop window with an expression of quiet, academic fascination that was entirely unlike Cana and entirely like Levy. “Fascinating,” it murmured, turning its head from side to side, examining Cana’s features with detached curiosity. “The transference appears to have affected our physical forms but not our cognitive—”
“LEVY, THIS IS NOT THE TIME FOR SCIENCE!” Levy’s body — Gajeel — snapped at her.
And then there was Lucy’s body. It had pulled itself up to sit against a low stone wall, and it was looking down at itself with an expression that shifted from confusion to disbelief to slow, dawning appreciation in a way that made the real Lucy — trapped inside Gray’s body — go instantly pale.
“Holy crap,” Lucy’s body said, in Cana’s lazy, husky drawl. Cana-in-Lucy’s-body looked down at her borrowed chest, then back up, and a slow grin spread across Lucy’s face that Lucy herself would never, in a million years, have worn. “Lucy, you have been holding out on me.”
“DON’T YOU DARE!” Gray’s body shrieked in Lucy’s voice, and immediately — without warning, without the slightest conscious intent — Lucy felt Gray’s hands reach up and start unbuttoning the coat she was wearing. She looked down in horror. “WHAT— WHAT IS HAPPENING?! WHY ARE HIS HANDS— I’M NOT DOING THIS!”
“That’d be the stripping habit,” Gray said, from inside Juvia’s body, with the weary resignation of a man who had long ago accepted this particular humiliation. “It’s involuntary. Good luck with that.”
Scattered across the road in the fading light of a December evening, eight Fairy Tail mages slowly, painfully took stock of their situation. Natsu’s soul raged inside Erza’s body. Erza’s soul commanded from Gajeel’s. Gajeel’s soul seethed inside Levy’s. Levy’s soul analyzed from Cana’s. Cana’s soul lounged in Lucy’s. Lucy’s soul panicked inside Gray’s. Gray’s soul stood frozen in Juvia’s. And Juvia’s soul wept openly from inside Natsu’s, devastated not by the body swap itself, but by the fact that she was now further from Gray-sama’s body than she had ever been in her life.
None of them were where they belonged. All of them were beginning to realize that untangling this was going to be far, far more complicated than simply finding your partner and switching back. This was a chain, not a pair. A knot with eight threads, every one of them tangled through someone else.
And the boy who had tied it was gone.