Submission for CFLA Love Love Fest. We are doing this promotion for our love for the unique and under loved pairings of the Fairy Tail fandom on this wonderful Valentine's Day.

This is going to be a two-shot, by the CFLA-members' demand.

Song Used: "Move Into Light" by Juventa feat Erica Curran, Koven Remix.

Disclaimer: I do not own Fairy Tail – it belongs to Mashima. I don't own the song, either – it belongs the lovely artists that created it.

In Your Eyes

The day Natsu left to train for a year – without her – broke something inside of Lucy's soul.

She could hear it, feel it crumble and fall. Leaving a gaping abyss where her surety and belief that her family wanted her once resided.

Emptiness filled her, at once making her light of head and heavy of feet. She couldn't move. Couldn't tell Natsu and Happy not to go, to not leave her behind, to take her with them. The tears that slipped down her cheeks later were noted, but the blonde woman felt no need to address them. She let the droplets of saltwater rest upon her cheeks, yet another agonizing reminder of friends lost and beyond her reach.

We Are All That Remains
Of A World In Chaos Broken By Change

Juvia witnessed her Love Rival's despair for the vanished Fire Dragon Slayer, and the rising tides that accompanied water magic left unchecked.

A pinprick of light returned to the abyss of Lucy's soul when her blue-haired friend offered to help her learn to harness her newfound abilities. The pair became nigh inseparable almost overnight, Juvia's stalking habits all but ceasing while she concentrated on making sure Lucy was okay. Lucy smiled and shared her pain over Aquarius with the water woman. They sobbed and mourned together over the loss of the violent mermaid.

So long as Juvia was nearby, Lucy felt she might be able to make it through the year of separation intact.

But that feeling and her slowly returning happiness weren't to last long.

We Are Light In The Dark
Calling Out For Something To Spark

The day Gray left to train as well destroyed what remained of the Celestial Mage's soul. Not just because another member of her team was deserting her, but also because Juvia was going with him.

Juvia had apologized over and over to her friend for choosing to follow Gray, but explained as best she could that she couldn't let Gray disappear. She left unsaid that she didn't want the same, pervasive sorrow that plagued Lucy to befall her as well.

And Lucy understood. She loved Juvia, and didn't want the water mage to be left behind as well. So she consented to abandonment once more.

Gray at least had the decency to look like Lucy felt when he said his farewell to her. "I'm sorry, Luce. But I need to do this." He reached out and ruffled her hair fondly. "I will be back, and so will the Flame-Brain. Even if I have to drag him back by that silly scarf. And I'll truss up the stupid cat for you."

The blonde tried very hard to give him a smile, but she feared it trembled with the same intensity as her heart.

As she waved goodbye to the departing mages, something slick and foul began to well up in the previously empty space within Lucy's soul – worse than even the hollow dark.

Lucy welcomed it, for it was company. And it would not – could not – leave her of its own volition.

And We'll Hide In The Graphite

Wendy and Erza, though they tried to reach out to Lucy, could only watch as their friend slipped further away from the carefree, cheerful person she had once been. Smiles from the blonde were few and far between, and even the tears no longer ran.

Erza missed the girl that would go shopping with her and debate endlessly on which style of strawberry cake was the best (the redhead was of the firm belief that strawberry mille-feuille took the cake, pardon the pun. Lucy disagreed and insisted it was cheese cake drowned with strawberry syrup). The Titania found the loss of Lucy's smile and vibrant animation almost unbearable. She suspected that the blonde turned her down whenever she invited her to spend time together because being with Erza reminded Lucy too much of their broken team.

Wendy mourned the fact that her Sky Dragon Slayer Magic couldn't heal shattered hearts. If she could, she would expend every last drop of energy she had in making her older sister whole again. She turned to Carla for help, but all the cat could advise was to let Lucy work it out on her own. Wendy disagreed, but no matter what she tried – from inviting Lucy on jobs, to just asking to spend time with her – the Sky Dragon Slayer felt her friend's very essence floating through her desperately grasping fingers to join Grandeeny at her place in the sky.

Numb, Lucy floated through life. If such a state of existence could even be called life at that point.

There were things to be done, and a city to rebuild. Lucy fulfilled all that was required of her and more in the reconstruction efforts. It kept her preoccupied. She needed the busywork. If she wasn't kept constantly moving, she would stop. Just… stop

But something was still missing, and no amount of busywork could change that fac. That which had held her to the ground, a smile that outshone even her own, was gone along with so many other loved ones. Un-tethered, Lucy could no longer even care that she was drifting from the others.

Until the day that he showed up, and colour began to fill in the edges of Lucy's grey, hazy world once more.

Deep Inside The Earth

It was coming up due again. Rent. Lucy had to take a mission soon that paid enough Jewels to make the half-payment her still scary landlady had reduced it to. Which Lucy was grateful for – vaguely. The apartment was missing half a wall, but she'd gotten used to the draft.

Her eyes skimmed the large number of flyers. Most involved the reconstruction efforts – even if Fairy Tail was assisting for free there were still things to be done outside the normal purview that required payment. A lot of such requests involved locating personal effects hidden amongst the devastation, though some involved procuring needed supplies from distant places.

Buried beneath the others, a faded red notice, almost pink in colour, caught Lucy's attention. Interest piqued for the first time in a long while, she unearthed the old job flyer. A faint smile tugged at her lips as she read it.

A monster hunting request in a cave thought to be haunted.

It was just the sort of job Team Natsu had taken, with Juvia (stalking Gray) as accompaniment, before… before…

The wave of inky loneliness washed over Lucy once more, as she stared at the job flyer.

Dejected, she made to hang it up again. It wasn't a new one – the requester probably didn't need it fulfilled anymore, if they were even alive.

Before she could place the final tack, a silence behind her drew her attention. Her guild mates, the few that were in at the moment, had all ceased their chattering and directed their attention to the same spot.

In the middle of the sparse guildhall stood a familiar person, looking just as adrift as Lucy felt.

As soon as her mind made the observation, the man's head whipped towards her. He directed a baleful glare at her with his single eye.

A diminutive old man walked up to the dark-skinned interloper, weariness and countless stories writ in every wrinkle upon his skin. Instead of demanding for the dangerous individual (now glaring at him) to explain his presence, Makarov merely smiled up at the young man.

"Where would you like your stamp?"

Something changed in the demeanor of the former criminal. Lucy recognized it for what it was – the draining of tension held for far too long.

"Left shoulder. Red."

Once he had the Fairy Tail mark emblazoned upon his skin, Cobra glanced down to inspect it thoroughly.

"Did it pass muster?" Makarov asked, his grin widening as Cobra jumped a little. "Oh my, I didn't think it was possible to surprise a mind-reader."

Cobra gave him a half-hearted snarl, more out of habit than true enmity. "It's Soul-Listening Magic. And I was listening to someone else."

"You mean eavesdropping on someone else?"

"Screw you."

Makarov clucked his tongue at the other mage. "No, my boy. Now that you're a part of the guild, you're going to have to show some respect to your Guild Master. Instead of, 'Screw you,' it should be, 'Screw you, Master Makarov.'"

"SCREW YOU, MASTER MAKAROV."

Unbidden, a light laugh popped like a bubble from the Celestial Mage watching the pair.

It brought warmth to Makarov's heart to hear it.

Cobra just gave her a profoundly unamused facial expression as his response.

Lucy swiftly turned away, heat flooding her cheeks for the first time in a month that had nothing to do with tears. Grabbing another flyer with an appropriate reward amount, she tromped up to her Guild Master and shoved it in his face.

"I'm going on this one!"

She pretended that she didn't notice Cobra staring at her as she left.

Though his snort did let her know his opinion on that.

And Wait For The Fires To Start
In Your Eyes

A week or so after that debacle, Lucy found herself at the board once more. Although the job she'd randomly taken the day Cobra joined Fairy Tail had been enough to cover her rent, she was still short on food money and other basic necessities.

She briefly glanced at the old flyer, still untouched. Almost reaching for it, she stopped herself and grabbed the one next to it.

Brow furrowed, she contemplated the paper in her hand. It involved capturing a band of thieves preying upon the less fortunate of the city. This was too difficult a job for her to do by herself. But her stubbornness wouldn't allow her to return it to the board. Maybe she could ask Erza or Wendy for assistance? It had been a while since she'd worked with either of her female teammates that had remained behind.

Glancing up, she caught sight of maroon hair. Lucy took the opportunity to observe Cobra for a second, as his attention was directed firmly elsewhere. The tension had returned to his shoulders, and a grimace curled around his lips.

Following his gaze, she spotted Kinana some distance away giving an impassioned goodbye to her beau that she had met and fallen head-over-heels for during the reconstruction. A man that, while not a mage, was good, and kind, and reliable. Everything Cobra wasn't.

Lucy had been aware of Cobra and Kinana's friendship on a small level – it was a fact made obvious in the lack of surliness the Poison Dragon Slayer directed to the purple-haired woman. Now she wondered if it had gone deeper than that for the former criminal.

Before she knew what she was doing, or that her feet had even moved, Lucy was beside Cobra's chair.

His eye snapped to her, guarded and clouded with wariness.

She held the flyer out to him. "Want to come?"

'Please don't reject me,' her soul whispered.

Cobra threw one long, final look at the happy couple at the other side of the guildhall.

Both he and Lucy had people that had gone beyond their reach.

He nodded at the Celestial Mage, and she smiled brightly at him, the darkness within pushed away just a little bit.

In Your Eyes

Mirajane jolted in surprise when Lucy thunked down in a salvaged barstool and demanded a strawberry milkshake from the barmaid. In shock, the white-haired woman made it for the blonde and placed it before her.

With more animation than Mirajane had seen from her in a long time, Lucy glowered at the vacant air while she drank.

"Is everything… alright, Lucy?" Nearly grimacing, Mirajane immediately regretted her choice of words. Of course Lucy wasn't okay – she hadn't been ever since Natsu had left.

But Lucy didn't even seem to register the faux pas. "I just finished up a mission with Cobra," she growled by way of explanation.

Eyebrows shooting up, Mirajane inquired, "Did something happen?" She would murder the Dragon Slayer in cold blood if he had done something to the vulnerable Celestial Mage. With all the rubble and wreckage, it would be a veeeeery long time before all the pieces of him could be recovered.

"He's such an asshole. The likes of which Gajeel and Laxus can only aspire to." Lucy waved her smoothie animatedly to emphasize her point. "I get that we were supposed to capture the thieves. But he didn't have to act the way he did when we interviewed the victims! He insulted, and subsequently pissed off, literally EVERY SINGLE PERSON WE CAME ACROSS. Including the bandits! And ME!" Another wave of the drink sent small pink globs flying, but again Lucy didn't seem to notice. "I think he's subtly trying to undermine the foundations of civilization itself!"

Despite the snarly tone, there was a bright spark of life within Lucy's eyes.

Mirajane decided to temporarily postpone Cobra's homicide.

We Are All That Remains

A couple of weeks later, Lucy walked into the guild to see Cobra waving a disturbingly familiar-looking, faded, off-red flyer in Mirajane's face for approval.

"Bright-Eyes and I are taking this one!"

Swiftly stamped, Cobra smirked maliciously as he approached Lucy. "Move your ass! I'm not waiting around all day for you to get your shit packed!"

She stared at him in dumbstruck silence for a moment longer than he liked.

"MOVE!" he snapped at her, sharp fangs on display.

Squeaking, she scuttled back to her apartment to pack.

When Lucy reappeared at the guild several days later sporting very little in terms of clothing with a large number of scratches and beetles in her hair, Mirajane already had the blonde's favorite drink ready for her.

"HE'S STILL AN ASSHOLE!"

Of A World In Chaos Broken By Change

"What happened, Lucy-san?!" Wendy worriedly tutted as she healed the shivering blonde's latest wounds.

"W-w-w-w-w-well I t-t-t-t-told C-C-C-C-Cobra," the blonde started, rubbing a little warmth back into her limbs. "F-f-for our mission, w-w-w-e had to find a bracelet someone d-d-dropped near a cliff."

"And then what happened, Lucy-san?"

Lucy sighed in happiness when Wendy settled a blanket around her shoulders. "He insisted that we climb down the cliff to see if it had fallen to the bottom. I told him, 'The only way I'm going down this cliff is if you push me.' Then he did."

Restraining a laugh, Wendy nodded sagely. "I see. How come you're all wet, though?"

"Apparently, there was a lake beneath the cliff. What I thought was grass was actually pond scum. Though it would have been nice to know that beforehand…"

That explained the green slime in Lucy's hair, then.

"And then he laughed at me! That bastard knew the whole time that there was a lake there! Then he told me that since I have water magic, it was up to me to find the bracelet! He just stayed up on the cliff where it was dry! The whole time!"

Then Lucy grumbled under her breath, "Though he did have a fire and food waiting for me when I finally got back up there."

And though she couldn't exactly condone Cobra's methods, Wendy was pleased to have her vivacious older sister back.

We Are Light In The Dark

Three months into their unofficial partnership, Cobra had all but moved into Lucy's apartment.

Lucy had protested the intrusions at every turn.

Though, they eventually fell into a pattern. Most days, she would wake up to him napping on the couch, quietly cursing out various other guild members in his sleep. When asked about it, he told her that he sometimes wandered around Magnolia in the middle of the night, and when he finally became tired, her place was closer than his.

Soon he had removed all her items from one drawer of her bureau and starting storing a couple sets of his own clothes there. An extra toothbrush and shower products for men appeared in her bathroom.

Then, probably through coercion, he somehow managed to expeditite the repairs to her apartment building. Because he claimed that the draft was bugging him (to which she told him he could always just go home instead).

Those things she could handle. It was when he decided to rearrange her refrigerator and add his 'snacks' – aka various cleaning products and poisons – that she drew the line. Eventually, they worked out a system for making the situation work, since he clearly wasn't going to be leaving.

She grumbled about it at length to both him and her friends at the guild, but Lucy secretly liked the friendship and familiarity she and Cobra were beginning to share.

And he knew it, too, blast him.

Calling Out For Something To Spark

Cobra growled at the mage that dared to approach his blonde friend. The former criminal didn't care that Sabertooth was friendly with Fairy Tail. He didn't care that all Rogue wanted to do was apologize to the Celestial Mage for the latest prank Sting had pulled upon the guild. Which had involved setting up firecrackers all around the guildhall, set to all go off at once – terrifying the Post-Traumatic-Stress suffering guild members to no end and inciting mass panic. (Cobra had found it all rather hilarious, actually – at least until Lucy kicked him through a wall for laughing. The other guild members had left the hole there for several days, and took many photographs of this incident for posterity – and to remind the morons that you don't mess with angry blondes.)

Striding up to his friend, Cobra grabbed Lucy's arm and pulled her away from the Shadow Dragon Slayer. "I need to talk to you about something, Lucy."

Bewildered, both at Cobra's actions and at the fact that he'd used her name, she gave a small wave to Rogue. "Sorry, Rogue! I'll talk to you later?"

Rogue openly stared at Cobra like he was a crazy person (kind of inevitable, really, given that he was now a member of Fairy Tail – it came with the territory).

Sting completely lost it from his observation spot (the time-out corner) at the sight.

Then Rogue stared at his friend and wondered why he even bothered.

And We'll Hide In The Graphite
Deep Inside The Earth

It had been almost ten months since Natsu had left, Erza realized suddenly one day. She had missed him dearly, but the time of reunion was fast approaching. Natsu and Happy, Gray and Juvia. Her team would be complete again.

She cast a glance at Lucy and Cobra in their shared corner of the guild. The smile upon Lucy's face was devious as she traded barbs with her, now official, partner. For his part, Cobra cheerfully insulted Lucy right back. If they stayed true to pattern, the pair would soon switch to making commentary on the actions and thoughts of the other guild members. Then Cobra would say something insensitive (because he always did), and Lucy would do her level best to kick him through a wall again (which only occasionally worked – he was now wise to the destructive force behind the oncoming blow).

A pang filled Erza's heart. Although she had Cobra to thank for her reconnection with her best female friend – for it had been him that had insisted Lucy unload her girly thoughts upon some other poor sap – Erza was afraid that their team would never be the same.

But then, Erza realized, when the boys had left it had forever erased the possibility of things returning to how they were. Lucy had nearly drowned in the toxic, fetid depths of the darkness that had taken up residence in her soul when they left her behind.

Cobra had been the one to push back those dark, poisonous waters.

He was the antivenin Lucy had needed to survive.

Every once in a while, Erza would catch Lucy softly smiling at the poisonous man while his piercing gaze and keen, eavesdropping mind were otherwise occupied. And the looks that he would cast back at her when she wasn't looking were just as telling.

Erza surmised that it was only a matter of time before the half-smitten Celestial Mage came to the realization that she needed the Poison Dragon Slayer as more than just a friend.

Cobra shot the Titania a smug look, catching the mien of the Requip Mage's thoughts.

He was simply waiting, too.

The boys were in for a hell of a surprise when they returned.

And Wait For The Fires To Start
In Your Eyes
In Your Eyes

I will probably post the second half later in the week.

Here's a list of the submissions, slated to be posted throughout the day. Please check them all out! They are fantastic!

Chrys Stone: LLF- Secret Admirer (NaYu, RuLu)

Leoslady4ever: LLF- Begin Again (ErLo) (tentative title)

Paname: LLF- The Proper Way to Spend Valentine's Day (RoLu)

Dragon'shost: LLF- Vignettes for Valentine's (shorts); LLF- Field Trip (TotoMary, CocoRomeo); LLF- Antivenin (CoLu); LLF- Friend's Day (FlaLax, RoLu)

GemNika: LLF- Admirer of Frost (WendEve)

Eien no Touko: LLF- Of Hangovers and Jail Cells (RoCa)

LittlePrincessNana: LLF- Stay (RoFla)

Kairrie: LLF- Only With You (RoLe)

NIchiki: LLF- Chocolates Are So Overrated (ElfLu)

Have a wonderful holiday, everyone!