Notes: This is, dare I say it, serious. I don't actually know how it happened. AU in which Lucy goes home, like she almost did in that one arc.

Like Slow Motion

There is a week in which they all sit around, waiting for her to come back. It is a very long week, and Erza does not smile. When they'd gotten to Lucy's manor, they'd made it maybe three feet in before a swarm of butlers and body guards and other men and woman clad is stoic black suits swarmed them.

They could've taken them, no problem. It's just that, well, it was Lucy's house and Lucy's stuff, and it'd be rude to, you know, break it. Except they didn't feel all that polite just then, so maybe it's a good thing Lucy showed up in the shadow of her father and asked them, very quietly, if they'd please leave.

It didn't stop Natsu from attacking her fiancé, though. Gray had to do that. And he felt a little bit like a traitor, even when her eyes welled up with gratitude and she turned away to compose herself. He wondered what had happened to make her like that—what had happened to the girl who used to cry in her friend's necks. She looked very alone, then.

She doesn't come back. And after a while, they stop expecting her to. And just when they'd stopped sitting so they faced the door, she walked through it. She was a little different, perhaps, a little more somber and a little less girl, but she was still Lucy. She just had a ring.

"It's not that bad," she tells Erza, "I mean, I don't love him or anything, but he's not a bad person. And I never see him, anyways." She smiled a little, "It's gotten me out of my father's grip, anyway. So, I can do whatever I want now."

None of them say anything for a moment.

"Well, good," Natsu says loudly, and pulls her down to sit between them, "Just so long as you don't have a kid or something."

Lucy makes an appalled squealing noise—she is only seventeen, after all, married or not—and where her arm touches his, the skin is very warm.

This is weird. He doesn't say anything. She looks at him and smiles kind of shyly, "Hi, Gray. Still no shirt, I see."

"I'm celebrating," he says, and is careful not to move his arm. She blushes and looks away, and he spends the rest of the evening through peripheral vision.