A/N: what can I say. I love my baby Laxus, but I can't write him at all.

.shadows of me.

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The meteor shower is beautiful against the near black canvas of the sky. The shooting stars fall down between the real ones, their tails illuminating the blackness and sending the superstitious people of this town into close-eyed prayers.

Laxus, on the other hand, watches the shower from the veranda of the hotel, his back against the wall and one of his legs dangling off the edge of an oaken railing as his hands cradle a jug of cold beer.

His lips dangle between content and weariness, but the former wins eventually, and Laxus takes in a breath of humid, hot air of the summer night.

Peace has never been so close to him and his heart than right now, this moment of falling stars and sparkling dust – if there's one thing that he regrets, it is that he cannot share this moment with the guild and the old man.

He lifts the jug up once more and downs the rest of the beer, his golden-orange eyes shut and lips in a half-smile as the beverage goes down his throat, Adam's apple bobbing when Laxus swallows the bitter drink.

He remembers one of the times when Gramps took him out to watch shooting stars like these – "if you wish hard enough, the wish will come true, Laxus" – and the memory, while it stings at some part of him, brings the odd fuzzy feeling from Fantasia festival back to him.

All the anger, the bitterness, the spite – Laxus feels none of those emotions that once controlled a great part of him as he gazes up to the sky, thoughts wandering to Fairy Tail as they often do when he isn't doing his search for himself.

An image of Natsu flashes somewhere in his mind, the part he never did dwell in on too much when he had been a Fairy Tail mage, and he laughs – a soft sound reverberates behind the lips that used to sneer and mutter spiteful lines at everyone and everything that had been within his rage's range.

With that memory, others begin to pour in – Gramps, Freed, Evergreen, Bixlow, Mirajane – and his laughter dies and his peace twists into something restless.

How're those idiots doing?

Laxus's eyes sweep the now dark sky, looking for that one constellation Gramps had showed him during one of their family expeditions.

("Even when there's darkness around us, there's light to guide us through that dark.")

Somehow, the memory makes his throat constrict, and Laxus lets out a choking sound that is heard by no one and will be remembered only by himself.

He lets the empty jug slip from his fingers, and the sound of breaking glass soothes his peaceless thoughts. He's gonna pay for that glass, though, since honesty might as well be his saving grace.

"You'd be lecturing me real good too if I didn't, old man," Laxus says to no one, his eyes slipping shut as he relaxes again with a touch of longing in his mind. Melancholy is the most bitter enemy of all; it longs for the past that is already gone, and desires things that can't be returned.

"It's ok, isn't it?" he asks. "The way I am now, old man..."

He doesn't expect an answer, and so he opens his eyes again and looks up at the stars dancing in the sky; somehow, he thinks of fairies and stardust and that warm, fuzzy feeling he had earlier.

And somewhere in the deepest part of himself where memories of past lie dormant, he has hope.