Chapter II: Saiyans and Cana
Twelve years is a long time.
Long enough for three infants who had arrived on a foreign world with nothing but each other and a mother's arms to become something that could only be described, without exaggeration, as a minor natural disaster.
A beloved natural disaster. But a natural disaster nonetheless.
The backyard of Gildarts Clive's home had seen better days.
It had seen them, specifically, before three Saiyan children had taken to using it as a training ground every morning without fail, rain or shine, regardless of what the neighbors thought about the sounds coming over the fence at six in the morning. The grass had given up somewhere around year three. The fence post on the eastern side bore a scorch mark of uncertain origin that Uruk had never technically admitted to. And the old apple tree in the corner had developed what could only be described as a wary lean in the direction away from the training area, as though it had made a decision.
But on this particular morning, the backyard was alive with exactly the kind of focused, purposeful energy that Teilanne had spent twelve years cultivating.
Kizuna moved first — always Kizuna, who had never in his life waited for permission to begin anything. He was twelve years old and built like someone had taken the blueprint for dangerous and started early, all lean muscle and coiled purpose, with skin a shade darker than his siblings and eyes the color of hammered gold that missed absolutely nothing. He wore a black sleeveless shirt, dark blue pants, and green arm bracers that he had insisted upon despite his mother's mild skepticism, because he had seen them on a traveling merchant and decided they looked serious. The green boots matched. He had been very deliberate about the boots.
Three meters to his left, Uruk was running through a different sequence entirely — methodical where his brother was instinctive, each movement deliberate and considered, like someone working through a proof rather than a fight. He was a shade lighter in complexion than Kizuna, with black eyes that had a tendency to go very still and very focused when something caught his interest, which was often. The teal tank top over a long-sleeved blue undershirt was practical. The orange bandages wrapped around his knuckles — fingers left free — were his own addition, and he wore them with the particular conviction of someone who had decided, at approximately age eight, exactly what kind of fighter he intended to be.
And then there was Ginè.
Ginè, technically the youngest of the three — by a margin of roughly one month, which she felt should not count and had said so on multiple occasions — moved through her training forms with a light-footedness that always caught people off guard the first time they saw it. Purple shirt, grey shorts, brown boots, pink wristbands, and at her throat, a jade necklace strung with bear teeth that she had made herself and wore with the proprietary satisfaction of someone who had earned it. Where Kizuna was all forward momentum and where Uruk was careful economy, Ginè had a quality that was harder to name — something quick and bright and reading-three-moves-ahead that made watching her feel like watching someone play a game the other person didn't know had started yet.
All three of them, it must be noted, had brown monkey tails.
This was the sort of detail that had caused considerable conversation in the town of Magnolia for approximately the first two years of the family's residence there, and then had simply become part of the texture of daily life the way most things do when they refuse to go away. The tails were prehensile, expressive, and occasionally used as a fifth limb during sparring, which the children had discovered entirely on their own and refined with great enthusiasm.
They trained until the back door opened.
"Alright, you three."
Teilanne's voice carried the particular quality of someone who had learned, over twelve years, exactly what volume and tone was required to be heard over Saiyan children in the middle of physical exertion without raising it to a level that disturbed the neighbors. It was a skill she had developed with considerable practice.
All three of them stopped immediately. Some habits were simply too well-established to argue with.
She stood in the doorway looking — there was no other word for it — composed. Teilanne had changed over the twelve years since the crash landing in the forest, the way materials change when they're tested and find they're stronger than expected. Her black hair ran down to the middle of her back now, framing wing-shaped earrings that caught the morning light. She wore a dark blue dress in the style of a training karate gi, the upper portion ocean-blue with red stitching, stopping just above her ankles. The simple black shoes were practical. The overall effect was of someone who had found the precise intersection of ready to attend something and ready to handle whatever happens there, and had decided to simply live in that intersection permanently.
"You ready?"
Ginè's face lit up immediately. "More than ready, Momma."
Uruk tilted his head. "So today's actually the day?"
"The day we finally join the guild Mister Gildarts is part of," Kizuna confirmed, in the tone of someone crossing off the last item on a list they had been maintaining for some time.
"It is," Teilanne said, and there was something warm and certain in her voice that made all three of them stand up slightly straighter without quite realizing they were doing it.
A brief pause. Then Ginè, with the particular air of someone who has been sitting on a question and decided that this was as good a moment as any, said:
"Momma?"
"Yes, Ginè?"
"When are you going to tell Mister Gildarts how you feel about him?"
The silence that followed was the specific variety that forms when a question lands with more precision than the person being asked was prepared for. Teilanne opened her mouth. Closed it. A color that had no business being on the face of a Saiyan warrior spread across her cheeks.
"I — Ginè — that will come in time, I promise." She smoothed the front of her dress with a composure that was clearly being reassembled in real time. "I just don't know him well enough yet to—"
"Mom." Kizuna's voice was the specific flat tone of someone who has had this conversation before. Several times. "We've been living with the man for twelve years."
"That's — I am aware of how long—"
"You know what he takes in his tea. You know which floorboard he avoids so it doesn't creak at night. You made him a new cloak for his birthday last year because you noticed his old one was getting frayed at the left sleeve."
"I was simply being—"
"Mom."
A long pause.
Teilanne pressed her lips together in a way that could have been irritation or could have been her suppressing a smile, and was probably both. "I suppose," she said finally, with great dignity, "that you may have a point."
"Just find out when he's back next," Uruk offered, in the mild and reasonable tone that was his default setting. "Then tell him."
"...Yes. Yes, that is — I will do that."
All three children exchanged a look over her head that contained an entire conversation.
Their mother had it bad.
They had known this since approximately age seven, and had decided collectively that they found it charming and also that they would absolutely not let her forget it.
They set off for Magnolia.
The walk into town was pleasant, as it almost always was.
Magnolia had a particular quality in the morning — the streets still carrying the cool residue of night, the shop owners setting out their displays, the smell of bread from the bakery on the corner that Ginè still insisted on walking past slowly even when they were in a hurry. The townspeople who saw the family of four called out greetings, waved, exchanged a few words. Several of them had watched Kizuna, Uruk, and Ginè grow from confused and slightly overwhelmed children into people who walked through the town like they owned the cobblestones — not arrogantly, but with the easy confidence of belonging.
The tails drew no comment anymore. They were simply there, the way Macao's mustache was simply there, or the way certain members of the guild were simply loud — accepted, unremarkked-upon, part of the scenery.
Teilanne walked with her children and thought, not for the first time, that this was a good place.
Wherever it was.
The question of exactly where Earthland stood in relation to the planet she had launched herself from twelve years ago had been something she had made peace with gradually, the way you make peace with anything that cannot be changed — incrementally, imperfectly, and with occasional returns to grief that became further apart as the years passed. This was not Earth. She had determined that within the first month. The magic here, the guilds, the structure of the world itself — none of it matched any record she had ever seen.
But her children had grown up here. They had learned to walk here, had skinned their knees on these cobblestones, had argued with each other in the Magnolia dialect until it sat in their mouths as naturally as breathing.
Home, Teilanne thought as the roof of the Fairy Tail guildhall came into view above the rooftops, is apparently something that happens to you whether you plan it or not.
The Fairy Tail guildhall was, as it almost invariably was at mid-morning, loud.
Not dangerously loud, not yet — that tended to escalate toward afternoon — but loud in the comfortable, layered way of a large group of people who liked each other and saw no particular reason to use their inside voices. Conversations overlapped, someone was laughing in the far corner with the enthusiasm of a person who found something genuinely funny rather than politely funny, and there was the low bass undertone of a minor argument building in the middle section that had not yet decided whether it wanted to become interesting.
The doors opened.
Four people walked in.
The noise did not stop all at once. It degraded — first the people nearest the entrance, then rippling outward as heads turned and elbows found neighbors and the silence spread like something dropped into still water. Within approximately ten seconds, the entire ground floor of the Fairy Tail guildhall had gone quieter than it had been since the last time Erza had walked in wearing an expression that suggested someone was about to have a very bad day.
The reasons for this were as follows:
Three children with monkey tails, which was unusual even by Fairy Tail standards.
And one woman who, it must be said, had apparently decided to simply walk in looking the way she looked without any apparent awareness of the effect this produced, which somehow made it worse.
The male wizards of Fairy Tail demonstrated their range and depth of response with impressive uniformity.
"Hey — who is that?"
"Never seen her before. Never. I would remember."
Macao had apparently forgotten how his jaw worked. Wakaba's pipe nearly fell out of his mouth. Several people in the back stood on their chairs for a better view, which said something unflattering about their subtlety.
"She's gorgeous," Wakaba managed, with the conviction of a man stating a mathematical proof.
Teilanne continued walking forward with the particular composure of a woman who had been a Saiyan warrior before she was anything else and had consequently developed a very high threshold for things that were supposed to be intimidating, which apparently extended to guild halls full of staring wizards.
Among the female contingent, the reaction was somewhat more measured, though no less attentive.
Cana Alberona — currently occupying a bar stool with the practiced ease of someone who had claimed it through right of seniority — looked up from her drink, looked at the newcomer, and said simply: "She's so pretty." It was not envious. It was almost admiring.
Laki nodded in silent agreement.
Erza Scarlet frowned — not with displeasure, but with the specific frown of someone attempting to locate a memory. "Isn't that—"
"Who is she?" Mirajane Strauss asked, appearing beside her with that particular quality she had of arriving exactly where the interesting thing was happening.
"I think—" Erza's frown deepened. "Isn't she the woman who's often seen with Gildarts? The one he stays with when he's in town?"
The sentence landed in the brief silence like a stone into a pond.
The guildhall exploded.
"EHHHHHHH?!?!?!"
The sound was less a word than a phenomenon — three dozen wizards simultaneously discovering that the vague figure from Gildarts' domestic life was, in fact, this, and processing the implications in real time. Tables rattled. Someone knocked over a drink. The minor argument in the middle section abandoned its ambitions entirely.
Teilanne, for her part, navigated through the noise to the front of the room with her children close behind her and came to a stop in front of a short man with a magnificent mustache and the particular stillness of someone who was used to being the least rattled person in any given situation.
"It has been a long time, Master Makarov," she said, in a tone that cut cleanly through the ambient chaos. "It's me — Teilanne."
Makarov regarded her for a moment with those sharp, practiced eyes that had seen rather a lot over the years and consequently weren't easily impressed by anything. Then he smiled.
"So you've finally decided to join us, have you? How long has it been?"
"Twelve years, sir."
"Twelve years." He made a considering sound. "And I take it you haven't come alone?"
"Not at all." She stepped aside slightly, and the three children arranged themselves with varying degrees of willingness.
Uruk stepped forward with a directness that was entirely his own. "Nice to meet you, Master Makarov. I'm Uruk."
Beside him, Kizuna offered a short, confident nod. "Kizuna."
Makarov's gaze moved to the third child — and found her not where he expected. She had retreated behind her brothers with a speed that suggested considerable practice, and was now visible only as a pair of dark eyes peering around Kizuna's shoulder with the intensity of a small animal that had decided to assess the situation before committing to it.
Kizuna sighed. It was the sigh of someone who had been performing this exact sequence for approximately eleven years. "Sis." He turned his head. "We have been over this. Approximately one million times. You will have to meet new people at some point in your life — it is an unavoidable feature of existing. Now." He reached back, found her arm, and produced her from behind him with the brisk efficiency of someone who has no patience for prolonged theatrics. "Out."
Ginè stumbled forward two steps, caught herself, and stood in front of Makarov with the expression of someone experiencing multiple feelings simultaneously and not being sure which one to lead with.
"Hello there," Makarov said, and his voice had shifted into something warmer and more deliberate — the voice of someone who understood, without needing it explained, that some people needed to be spoken to at a different register. "And what might your name be?"
Ginè's chin came up slightly. "I-It's Ginè, sir."
"Ginè." He considered it with apparent pleasure. "What a very pretty name for a girl like you."
The color that came into her face was spectacular. "T-Thank you, Master Makarov sir."
"Well then," Makarov said, straightening with the air of a man who has assessed a situation and found it satisfactory. "Follow me, all four of you."
The bar counter had seen this ceremony many times.
The guild stamp was a small thing, as objects go — metal worn smooth by years of handling, the Fairy Tail mark precise and familiar. But there was something in the moment of its application that always carried a specific weight, as though the emblem understood something about what it meant to belong somewhere.
Makarov set it on the counter and looked at the family of four. "Who goes first?"
"I will," Teilanne said.
"Color and placement?"
"Purple. The forearm, please."
The stamp came down, and for one brief second the mark glowed — that particular luminescence that came with the application of a fresh guild brand — before it settled into the skin of her forearm as something permanent, something chosen, something hers. Teilanne looked at it for a moment with an expression that was difficult to read and contained rather more than she would have put into words.
Then she stepped back, and Makarov looked at Uruk.
"Black," Uruk said, without deliberation. "Left shoulder."
Done. The mark settled.
"Orange," Kizuna said next, before Makarov could ask. "Neck, just above my right shoulder."
Makarov paused. "Interesting placement. My grandson wears his in exactly the same spot."
Kizuna's expression did not change, but something in his eyes suggested he filed this away.
Last was Ginè, who had been watching the preceding three with the focused attention of someone conducting research. When Makarov looked at her, she had apparently arrived at a conclusion.
"Red," she said, with more confidence than she had managed since entering the building. "Back of my left hand."
"Excellent choice," Makarov said, and there was something approving in his voice that had nothing to do with the placement and everything to do with the decisiveness with which she had stated it. He brought the stamp down, and the red Fairy Tail mark bloomed on the back of her small hand like something that had always been meant to be there.
Ginè looked at it with an expression that, if you were paying attention, was rather complicated — the face of someone who had grown up between worlds and had just, for the first time, been formally told that this one claimed her.
Then the master turned to face the room.
"Listen up, everyone." His voice projected with an authority entirely disproportionate to his height. "Say hello to the newest members of our family."
The guild erupted.
The four of them stood in the wall of sound and noise and general Fairy Tail enthusiasm and performed the collective sweat-drop with the synchronized precision of people who had been operating as a unit for twelve years.
She appeared from the direction of the bar, moving with the particular ease of someone navigating a crowd they know well, in a yellow dress and with brown hair and the distinct air of a person who has decided, in a foundational way, that life is better when you're talking to someone.
She stopped in front of them and offered what was clearly her default expression: open, warm, with just enough sharpness behind it to suggest she was paying considerably more attention than her cheerful manner implied.
"Hi there," she said. "Cana Alberona. It's really nice to meet you guys."
Ginè looked at the girl for exactly one moment — the kind of moment where first impressions are made and sorted and filed — and said: "I really like your dress. It's very pretty."
Cana blinked. Blinked again. The unexpected directness of the compliment had apparently bypassed her social defenses entirely. "You — really?"
"Yeah, I do. Your name is pretty too. Cana." Ginè tested it like she was checking for the right weight. "It suits you."
"What's your name?"
"Ginè."
"Ginè," Cana repeated, and then she smiled — not the polite smile of social function but the real one, sudden and genuine. "That's a beautiful name." She tilted her head. "Do you want to be friends?"
The question came out with a directness that matched Ginè's own, and something in Ginè's expression shifted into something much warmer and considerably less defensive than it had been since they'd walked through the door.
"Yeah," she said. "I'd really like that."
Teilanne watched this from three feet away with the quiet expression of a mother who has worried, not always silently, about a child who finds the world slightly too loud and slightly too full of strangers, watching that child make a friend in under two minutes. Something in her shoulders came down a fraction.
She caught Makarov's eye. He followed her gaze to where Ginè and Cana were already deep in what appeared to be an extremely important conversation, and then toward the far end of the bar where his grandson stood doing his level best to appear as though he was not in the same room as anyone.
"Master Makarov," Teilanne said, "is that your grandson?"
"So you've noticed." He turned. "Laxus. Come here a moment."
The young man who approached carried himself with the practiced indifference of someone who had decided at an early age that the most effective defense against caring about things was to appear not to — which, as strategies go, is effective right up until it isn't. He was built tall and broad for his age, with the kind of presence that precedes him into rooms. He wore it with studied nonchalance.
"What," he said, which was technically a question.
"I wanted you to meet Teilanne. She's been staying with Gildarts — he's been looking after her and her children when he's in town."
Laxus's gaze shifted to Teilanne with the specific quality of someone performing an assessment and trying not to look like they're performing an assessment. "Sure. Hi."
"It's wonderful to finally meet you, Laxus," Teilanne said, with perfect warmth. "Gildarts has mentioned you quite a few times."
Laxus opened his mouth to say something entirely composed and nonchalant — and then his gaze dropped approximately three feet, where Ginè had apparently materialized at some point in the last ten seconds and was now looking up at him with an expression that could only be described as openly fascinated.
She had a faint flush on her cheeks that she seemed entirely unaware of.
"H-Hello, Laxus-sempai," she said, in a voice that was trying very hard to be normal and succeeding at approximately sixty percent. Then, apparently deciding that this was insufficient, she added a small giggle that made Laxus perform a sweat-drop so severe it was nearly visible.
Teilanne pressed her lips together.
Makarov made a sound of profound satisfaction.
"Aw," Teilanne said, at a volume pitched precisely to carry to Makarov and no further. "It looks like my daughter has taken quite a liking to your grandson."
"Heh," said Makarov. "So it would appear."
Laxus retreated with what dignity he could manage, and the rest of the morning proceeded.
Kizuna found himself flanked.
He had been standing near the far wall, cataloguing the guildhall with the systematic attention he brought to any new environment, when the two of them arrived on either side of him with the coordinated precision of people who had, perhaps, not coordinated at all but had simply arrived at the same target from different directions through independent means.
On his left: white hair, blue eyes, a smile that was pleasant and measured and contained within it the very specific quality of someone taking stock.
On his right: red hair in armor, a directness of gaze that suggested she considered eye contact a preliminary form of combat.
Both of them wanted to talk to him first.
He could tell.
He could also tell that neither of them was going to acknowledge that the other one was there, which meant this was going to escalate into something tedious very quickly.
"Hey," he said.
Both of them stopped.
"Does it actually matter," he asked, with the patient tone of someone settling this permanently, "who I talk to first?"
Silence.
"That's what I thought." He turned to the white-haired girl on his left. "You were about to say something, Mira Jane, wasn't it?"
Mirajane Strauss blinked — a rapid sequence that suggested she was recalibrating — and then smiled. "Right! Yes. I wanted to ask — what kind of magic do you all use? We haven't seen anything like you three before, and I haven't been able to identify it."
Kizuna considered the question. "It's not really magic," he said. "Or — it's not called magic, but I understand why you'd think of it that way. It's called Ki."
"Ki," Erza repeated, trying the word.
"Think of it like this — wizards have magical energy. Ki is similar in concept. It exists in everything — in objects, in living beings, in the air itself. With enough training and enough power, you can learn to sense it, draw on it, shape it. It helps you go past the limits of what a purely physical body can do."
Mirajane's eyes had sharpened with something that was no longer polite curiosity. "That sounds remarkably like magic power."
"Specifically," Erza added, with the tone of someone cross-referencing, "like lost magic. The description you're giving is unlike anything documented in Fiore that I'm aware of." A beat. "And I am aware of quite a lot."
"If she hasn't heard of it," Mirajane said, tilting her head toward Erza with a very particular smile, "then I feel fairly confident that no one else on Earthland has either."
Kizuna nodded. "That would make sense where I come from."
He spent the next half hour explaining Ki — not just the concept, but the application, the training, the way it felt from the inside, the different ways it could be used offensively, defensively, as a mode of perception. He demonstrated small controlled outputs that made both girls lean forward without appearing to notice they were doing it.
Mirajane was thinking about her takeover magic — the raw power she carried that had always felt slightly beyond her ability to direct cleanly. Ki's framework for internal energy control was speaking to something she hadn't found a framework for yet.
Erza was thinking about Requip — about how Ki-enhanced instincts could potentially eliminate the fractions-of-seconds that even her trained response time still required.
Both of them arrived at the same conclusion through completely different routes, looked at each other, looked at Kizuna, and said — separately, simultaneously — "Could you teach me?"
Kizuna looked at both of them.
Looked at the guildhall around him.
This, he thought with a kind of resigned clarity, is going to be a different kind of workout entirely.
"Sure," he said.
Ginè and Uruk, meanwhile, had been introduced to Natsu Dragneel and Gray Fullbuster, which was an experience.
Natsu was exactly what he appeared to be — all forward momentum and unfiltered enthusiasm, impossible not to like, exhausting in the way that forces of nature are exhausting, with a laugh that functioned like an invitation. Ginè liked him immediately and told him so, which he received as though it were entirely normal to be told this within ten minutes of meeting someone.
Gray was more complicated, in the sense that Gray had apparently made a lifestyle choice — specifically, the choice to periodically shed his clothes in a manner that he seemed to experience as completely unremarkable — that Ginè encountered without any preparation whatsoever.
She stared.
"Why," she said flatly, "are you in your underwear?"
"Huh? Oh." Gray looked down at himself with the expression of someone who has just been reminded of a minor administrative oversight. He reached for his shirt.
"That's so weird," Ginè said. This was not cruel. It was simply Ginè applying the same direct assessment she applied to everything.
Cana, who had been watching with the expression of someone who has front-row seats to a show she loves, did not laugh so much as collapse — folding forward over the bar with her barrel, shoulders shaking, making sounds that had moved significantly past language.
Natsu pointed at Gray with enormous satisfaction. "She's completely right."
"Who asked you?" Gray's eye twitched.
"Truth has a way of finding people," Natsu said, with the serene confidence of a man delivering a profound philosophical observation. "Doesn't it, Mister Walks-Around-In-His-Underwear."
"You want to go, flame-brain?!"
"Anytime, ice-pervert!"
The fight, when it started, was impressive.
Ginè watched it for a moment with the carefully neutral expression of someone taking inventory, then turned to find Cana still laughing loud enough that her stool was vibrating.
"Are they..." she started.
"Always," Cana managed, through the laughing. "Every single— snort — every single time, and somehow it never—" She dissolved again.
"...Hm." Ginè sweat-dropped with the measured energy of someone making a note. Then she looked at Uruk.
Uruk looked at Natsu and Gray. Uruk looked at the rest of the guildhall, where this was apparently happening in the background the way weather happens in the background — accepted, unremarked upon, part of the climate. Uruk looked at Ginè.
"This is," he said carefully, "going to be a very specific kind of interesting."
"Yeah," Ginè agreed.
Cana's laughter was still going. It showed no signs of stopping. The barrel beside her was approximately half-empty, which may have been a contributing factor.
Ginè watched her new friend laugh until her own mouth started pulling in the same direction, and then gave up resisting and laughed too.
Teilanne found him on the road back from the job.
She almost always did. It was not something she had planned — more something that had happened enough times over enough years that it had become its own kind of habit, the kind that forms before you notice it forming. Gildarts would be heading back, and she would find herself walking in the same direction, and they would end up walking the last stretch home together.
He looked up when he saw her and smiled in the way he had — slightly surprised, slightly pleased, as though it still caught him off guard a little, which she privately found more endearing than she was prepared to admit.
"Job go well?" she asked, falling into step beside him.
"It did. You?" He glanced at her. "You all join today?"
"We did. All four of us." She looked at her forearm, where the purple mark sat newly settled. "It felt like the right time."
"Yeah." He looked at it too, with an expression she couldn't entirely read. Then: "Teilanne, let me ask you something."
She looked up. "Yes?"
"Do you and your kids actually like it — living with me? Even with how often I'm away?"
The question landed with a slightly blunt sincerity that was entirely characteristic of him, and she took a moment with it — not because she was uncertain of the answer, but because it deserved to be answered properly.
"Gildarts," she said, "that is, with respect, a slightly silly question."
He opened his mouth.
"Of course we like it. We've loved living with you. You've been kind to us from the very first moment, without hesitation or conditions. We've learned to love you the way you love actual family — not the kind of love you arrive at gradually, but the kind that you look back on one day and realize has simply been there for longer than you can pinpoint." She paused. "And I should tell you — Ginè has said to me, more than once, that she wishes you could be her actual father."
Gildarts went quiet.
"She said that?"
"Several times. With great feeling." Teilanne watched his face. "She loves you. They all do. In different ways, with different expressions, but it's the same root."
The road stretched ahead of them in the late afternoon light. Somewhere behind them, the guildhall was presumably still producing impressive volumes of noise. The trees along the roadside moved in a light wind.
"Gildarts." She stopped walking.
He stopped too, and turned.
She had thought about this. She had thought about it more carefully and for longer than she was comfortable admitting, with more drafts and revisions and discarded openings than she would ever acknowledge to her children, who had been offering their unfiltered opinions on the subject for approximately five years.
But now that she was here, in the actual moment, she found that all the careful architecture of what she had intended to say had simplified itself down to what was actually true.
"Over all the years I have known you," she said, "you have been kind. Consistently, genuinely kind — to me and to three children you had no obligation toward whatsoever. You have treated them as your own. You have treated me as — as someone worth treating well." She met his eyes, and the thing she had been carrying for a long time was simply there in her expression, plainly and without ceremony. "I have grown to love you. I did not plan to. I am not certain exactly when it happened. But it did, and it is, and I know it partly because you remind me of Yuren — and partly because you are entirely yourself, and that self has become someone I cannot imagine being without."
She exhaled.
"So I am asking you, Gildarts Clive — please. Take us as your family. Not as a kindness, not as an arrangement. As your actual family. Nothing would make any of us happier."
He looked at her for a long moment.
Gildarts Clive had walked a great many roads. He had taken on a great many difficult things with easy confidence and put them down when they were done and kept moving, because that was the kind of man he was. He had carried grief too — real grief, the settled, permanent variety that doesn't go away but eventually agrees to share space with other things — and he had carried it without making it a burden for other people.
But there was something in what she had said that moved through all of that to something simpler and more essential.
"I never knew," he said slowly. "That you all felt that way."
"I know. I should have told you sooner. My children have been telling me exactly that for years."
A short sound that was almost a laugh. He reached out, and she let him take her hands in his — his left hand holding both of hers, his right settling at her waist with a gentleness that was, from this particular man, as eloquent as anything he might have said.
"How," he said, "could I possibly say no to that?"
"Gildarts—"
"I'll gladly take you as my wife, Teilanne. And those wonderful, ridiculous kids as my own." He looked at her, and there was something clear and certain in his eyes — not untouched by the grief he carried, but genuinely, plainly coexisting with it. "Nothing would make me happier."
She looked at him for a moment.
Then she closed her eyes, and breathed out something that had apparently been waiting a very long time to be put down.
"Thank you," she said, very quietly. "Thank you, Gildarts."
They walked back to the guildhall together.
Kizuna saw them first from across the room and raised a hand. "Hey, Mom — welcome back."
Near him, Mirajane turned. Looked at Teilanne. Looked at Kizuna. Did a rapid and visible recalculation.
"That's his mother?"
"She's so young," Erza said, in the tone of someone who has encountered something that defies their existing organizational system.
The three children had apparently already coordinated without discussion — they collected their respective new acquaintances and relocated them thoughtfully toward the back half of the guildhall, leaving a small island of space around the returning pair and the adults who were beginning to notice the particular quality of the atmosphere. Makarov watched from his usual position with the expression of a man who has been playing this game longer than most people have been alive.
Gildarts put his hand on the back of his neck. Teilanne stood beside him. They looked at each other once — that brief, confirming look — and then at the room.
"So," Gildarts said.
The guildhall waited.
"We're getting married."
For one moment, the silence was absolute.
Then it wasn't.
"EHHHHHHHHHH?!?!?!"
The sound was approximately equivalent in volume to the first one, possibly exceeding it, amplified by the fact that it was now coming from people who had had approximately three hours to build expectations and were now discovering that the reality had considerably exceeded them. Chairs scraped. Someone spilled something. The minor argument that had been circling the middle section all morning finally found its resolution in shared astonishment.
Makarov stood in the middle of it all with the expression of a man who saw this coming from approximately twelve years away and is experiencing the satisfaction of a thing arriving exactly on schedule.
"Well," he said, to no one in particular, loudly enough to carry to the people near him, "that is certainly something."
And then, because this was Fairy Tail and that was simply how things worked here, the party that had been happening all morning became a very different kind of party — the kind with a reason, the kind that burns brighter and longer and leaves you with the particular warmth the next morning of having been present for something that mattered.
Teilanne stood in the middle of it and thought, with the slight disbelief of someone still adjusting to their own happiness:
I have no idea what world this is.
But it is mine now.
Next Time — Chapter 3: A Fairy Tail Wedding