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The Fairy Tail guild hall never truly slept, it only learned how to breathe quietly.
Long after the last cheer had rattled the rafters and the final toast had sloshed onto the scarred wooden floor, the hall settled into a low, familiar hum. Chairs sat crooked where they’d been abandoned mid-laugh. A few tables bore the evidence of celebration, rings from mugs, crumbs from whatever Erza had decided was festive enough.
Somewhere near the back, a candle guttered, flared, and steadied again, casting long shadows across the bar.
Cana leaned against that bar with the comfort of someone who had earned the right to be there.
She wasn’t drunk. Not tonight. She had a glass in her hand because the glass belonged there, because ritual mattered, because the guild hall made more sense when she was braced against its familiar grain. Her cards lay fanned near her elbow, ignored for once. The future could wait. Tonight was about the present, about the quiet that only came when Fairy Tail finally ran out of noise.
Behind her, footsteps scuffed across the floor, unhurried, uneven, unmistakable.
“Everyone left already?” Natsu asked, peering around as if the room might
answer him.
Cana didn’t turn. She took a slow sip instead. “It’s past midnight. Even idiots need sleep.”
“Hey,” he protested, offended on principle. “I don’t need…”
She cut him off with a glance over her shoulder. Natsu stopped mid-sentence. Not because he was intimidated, he never was, but because Cana’s look had a way of slicing clean through noise.
“Sit,” she said, nodding to the stool beside her.
He did, scarf still looped loose around his neck, posture relaxed but alert, like he might bolt the second someone suggested quiet. He smelled faintly of smoke and cold air, winter clinging to him stubbornly.
They sat like that for a moment, the easy kind of silence that didn’t demand filling. Outside, snow tapped against the windows in soft, patient rhythms. Inside, the guild hall held them both.
“You didn’t leave,” Cana said at last.
Natsu shrugged, staring into the empty room. “Didn’t want to.”
That was the truth. He offered it plainly, without ornament or bravado.
Cana smiled into her glass. “Good answer.”
She slid him a mug without ceremony, something warm, spiced, grounding. He took it without comment, fingers curling around the heat. This was how they worked: no fuss, no asking permission for the small things.
The unspoken understanding had been there for years, woven through jobs and injuries and mornings-after when the guild felt like the only stable thing in the
world.
“You clean up nice,” Natsu added, nodding toward the tinsel still caught in her hair.
She snorted. “You say that like I don’t
always.”
He grinned. “I say that like it’s still true.”
Their banter rolled easily, sharp and familiar. They’d honed it over time, over missions gone wrong, over shared flasks by dying campfires, over nights when laughter had been the only thing keeping the dark at bay. Cana watched him from the corner of her eye as he drank, noticing the way his shoulders loosened, the way the constant edge of readiness dulled.
“You’re quieter than usual,” she observed.
“Am not.”
“You are.”
“Am not.”
She tilted her head. He sighed, defeated.
“Okay,” he conceded. “Maybe.”
Cana set her glass down and turned to face him fully, bracing her elbows on the bar. “Why.”
Natsu opened his mouth, closed it, then huffed a laugh. “Everyone was loud enough for me.”
She accepted that without pressing.
Another thing she’d learned, Natsu talked when he was ready, not when he was cornered.
They shifted, closer without acknowledging it. His knee brushed hers. Neither moved away.
Above the bar, half-hidden behind a sagging garland someone had forgotten to take down, hung a sprig of mistletoe.
Cana noticed it first.
She didn’t point it out. She didn’t smirk or tease. She just watched Natsu’s reflection in the mirror behind the bar, waited for the second his gaze lifted and stilled.
He followed her eyes.
“Oh,” he said.
Not loud. Not joking. Just recognition.
Cana raised a brow. “You gonna make a speech?”
He snorted. “You’d hate that.”
“True.”
They stood there, the space between them charged but steady. No rule demanded anything of them. The mistletoe didn’t matter because it told them to kiss; it mattered because it named what had already been circling them for years, every half-second linger, every hand on a shoulder that lasted too long.
Natsu leaned in first, not rushed, not hesitant. Cana met him halfway.
The kiss was warm and sure, neither tentative nor reckless. Natsu’s hand settled at her waist with the familiarity of someone who knew exactly where it belonged. Cana’s fingers curled into his scarf, grounding him, pulling him closer.
There was no rush to deepen it, no need to prove anything. Just contact.
Choice.
When they broke apart, it was because they needed air, not because the moment had ended.
Cana breathed out a laugh. “Took you long enough.”
Natsu grinned. “You didn’t complain.”
She tipped her glass toward him in a mock salute. “Didn’t need to.”
They lingered under the mistletoe a beat longer, close enough that the world felt narrowed to the steady thrum of the guild hall around them. Somewhere, a floorboard creaked as the building settled. The snow kept falling.
Natsu rested his forehead briefly against hers. “You okay?”
Cana didn’t answer right away. She studied him, really looked. The concern was real, uncomplicated. No bravado, no second-guessing.
“I’m good,” she said finally. “Better than good.”
He nodded, satisfied.
They moved back to the bar together, easy and unspoken. Cana poured another round, lighter this time, deliberate. Natsu accepted his mug and clinked it gently against hers.
“To not making a big deal out of it,” he said.
She smiled. “To knowing when to.”
They drank. They talked about nothing and everything, about jobs they might take once the roads cleared, about the snow piling up outside, about how the guild always felt different when it was quiet. Natsu listened more than he spoke, which Cana noticed and didn’t comment on.
At some point, Cana slipped away from the bar and returned with a small plate of leftover food, setting it down between them.
“You haven’t eaten,” she said.
“I had, like, three beers earlier.”
“That’s not food.”
He laughed but didn’t argue, picking at it anyway. The warmth settled him further, the edge gone from his movements. Cana watched him with quiet satisfaction, not hovering, not fussing. Just there.
When the candle finally burned low and the hall felt ready to sleep, Cana stretched and straightened. “We should lock up.”
Natsu followed her to the door, scarf swinging as he moved. At the threshold, he paused and glanced back at the hall, the tables, the bar, the mistletoe catching the last of the light.
“Same time tomorrow?” he asked.
Cana considered it, then nodded.
“Same time.”
They stepped out into the cold together, breath puffing white into the night. Snow crunched beneath their boots, the world hushed and clean.
Natsu reached for her hand.
She took it.
And for once, neither of them felt the need to say anything more.