betaed by WhatAreAllTheseTears

Living together wasn't as bad as everyone made it to be. By everyone Levy meant Mira, Laxus, Evergreen, Lucy, and Macao and Wakaba. They all complained about their partners, lamenting about the small habits they had, like not putting the toilet seat down or never putting away the milk. Though despite all of that each of them would swear up and down that they wouldn't have their living arrangements be any other way.

Bisca and Alzack, on the other hand, seemed to be the happiest about living together. They never seemed even slightly irked about the other's smallest habits. Before moving in Levy had taken Bisca in confidence and asked her if she'd had any tips on living with someone. Bisca had shaken her head and got that faraway look that she always had when talking about her family. She'd smiled and just said to Levy, "you know, after awhile, the little things just don't bother you anymore."

So with that under her metaphorical belt Levy was ready to move out of Fairy Hills and move into Gajeel and Pantherlily's homey cottage. Gajeel, Lily, Gray, and Natsu helped her move, carrying her boxes while Lucy and Levy made sure they were well hydrated and went over some of the finer points of editing in Lucy's own story. After all of her boxes were moved into the house Levy and Lucy treated the boys to dinner which… was mostly a mistake as they later realized the mages had eaten them into desperate need for more money. But as jolly as her first few days were there were a few apparent problems.

One of them was the lack of room for Levy's library. Gajeel and Pantherlily's house wasn't large but it wasn't small. The main room was a living room and a kitchen. It had two bedrooms, one for Gajeel (and Levy now) and the other for Lily but stuck between the two bedrooms was a small room which Gajeel had previously used for storage and extra iron treats he'd found. It had been cleaned out so that Levy would have a room for her books. They quickly realized that the small room wouldn't cover for a library as the shelves that they had made barely held up half of Levy's collection. So the three of them got to work building more bookshelves and they tried to find some wall space, but soon even that was diminishing and the books which Levy loved so much were not. So the project was put on a backburner until a surplus of money had been accumulated so that they could flesh out the project of building Levy a proper home for her beloved books, meanwhile they had found a home on Gajeel's floor which was fine until Gajeel needed to get up in the middle of the night and he stubbed his toe on a particularly large tome which made him stumbled and land on another and so on. By the time Gajeel had made it into the hallway he was exhausted and trying really hard not to curse loudly and wake up his partner who had somehow slept through his bumbling.

Another problem was the temperature. Living in a cottage was nice except that Gajeel had a tile floor and Magnolia was known for getting extremely cold during winter. Gajeel however liked the cold, he liked the burst of feeling when he rose in the morning from his warm bed. He liked the frosty window glass and aesthetically Levy couldn't really disagree. However waking up and feeling the temperature drop dramatically when she moved her arm outside of the blanket was not something she was fond of. After a few arguments which mainly centered around whether or not the couple should buy some rugs to cover the cold floor (Gajeel didn't want them because he'd have to wash them {which Levy promised she would do} and because Gajeel didn't like the feel of the rugs against his feet) they decided that Levy would just have to own many pairs of slippers. So the house was speckled with small fuzzy shoes so that no matter where Levy was in the house she could always put on a pair. (Gajeel did love the way she walked around the house during winter, piling layer after layer onto herself so she looked like a marshmallow, waddling around with a small cup of tea or cocoa in her hands.) Pantherlily even adopted the slipper habit, though Gajeel refrained.

The most prevalent one was the one of diet. Not that the food that Gajeel ate on a regular basis was unhealthy per say (it was, but apparently big appetites of solely fatty and meaty foods as well as some tempered iron for dessert were less damaging to an Iron Dragon Slayer than a normal mage) but it wasn't a very wide variety. Levy was the first to go grocery shopping once they began living together and she came home with a cart of vegetables and proteins. Gajeel raised an eyebrow at the foodstuffs.

"What is this?" He asked.

"It's a vegetable, Gajeel. People eat them. They're healthy."

Gajeel snorted and tossed the green thing on the table as he helped Levy unload the products she had bought. "What is this?"

"It's a smoothie maker."

Gajeel frowned before placing it on the counter next to him. "And this…?"

"Mavis Gajeel, you act like you've never eaten anything but carbohydrates and meat!"

Gajeel blinked at her. Levy rolled her eyes. "And I can't believe that you're the cook between the two of us."

"My food is good and it's filling!"

"Yes Gajeel, but it could also give Master Makarov a heart attack with everything you put in it."

Gajeel harrumphed and sniffed at the strawberries that Levy had picked up. "Fine." He said. "But I'm not cooking any of this stuff." He decided that he didn't like green food, that green was an unnatural color for edibles to be.

"That's okay, I'll just cook it-"

"Yeah, no."

"What do you mean no?" Levy argued, placing her hands on her hips.

"Shrimp, you can't cook for shit."

"Well if I don't cook it and you won't cook it then it'll just rot here!" Gajeel scowled. Levy knew how much he hated the smell of rot, it burned in his sensitive nose and even the word made his schnoz twitch. "I'll cook it and you'll teach me how in a way where I don't-"

"Burn down the house?"

Levy gave him a Look. "Yeah, sure. Aaaand you're eating some."

"Uh uh. You can eat it if you want but I'm going nowhere near it."

"Gajeel, your diet isn't healthy!"

"Green food isn't healthy."

"It's very healthy. It grows out of the ground."

Gajeel crinkled his nose in disgust. "So does fungus. We don't eat that." He argued.

"Look at the bottom of the bag." Levy responded. Gajeel sifted through the rest of the groceries and pulled out a bag of mushrooms. "Those are the healthy ones." Levy said with a sense of pride. Gajeel dropped them like he'd been burned before hesitantly sniffing them.

"Just try some vegetables. Tonight with dinner I'll make a salad. No cooking required just a knife and water to wash the vegetables. Trust me, you'll love it once you try it."

Gajeel grumbled but when dinner came he tried the new foods and decided that he disliked them. Pantherlily (traitor) applauded Levy for making such a fine salad and almost devoured whatever Levy herself didn't eat. It looked like Gajeel had lost that fight and that the scourge of flora would remain in his house.

But besides for those few arguments most of what Bisca said rang true for Levy. The little things like the fact that Gajeel always left hair in his hairbrush instead of throwing it out or that he didn't put the cap back onto the toothpaste after using it and let the excess toothpaste dry around the mouth of the bottle until there were multiple layers of crusted tooth-cleaner where there shouldn't have been had stopped bothering her after a while. After only a month living with him she felt at home, and she was.

This is the end! :'(

It was a great week, yall!

Until next time! :D

XOXO

~ Diana