woke up to find Erza hugging me like I was the last stable thing left in the entire world, which, given everything that had happened, was maybe not far from the truth.
It took me a second to piece together where we were — the boat still rocking gently, morning light spilling weak and grey across the water, and land, actual land, close enough now that I could make out shapes of trees along the shore.
Close.
Almost there.
Okay.
Good.
Great, actually.
Now, small problem.
The small problem was that Erza was very much still asleep, arms locked around me with the kind of grip that suggested her body hadn’t gotten the memo that the danger was over yet, and every attempt I made to gently extract myself just resulted in her tightening her hold further, mumbling something incoherent and burying herself deeper instead.
She lost a lot of blood last night.
Let her rest.
I’ve just got some cracked ribs — not exactly in a position to complain about comfort.
But land was close, and closing that last stretch mattered more than my own bruised pride about how this looked, so eventually I gave up on subtlety entirely.
“Erza.
Erza, wake up.” Her eyes fluttered open, disoriented for a second before focusing on me, and then — mercifully — she seemed to notice the hug situation on her own and let go, looking almost as embarrassed as I felt.
“We’re close to land,” I said, before either of us could dwell on it.
“I’m going to get us there faster.” I stood, testing my balance against the rock of the boat, and started climbing over the side.
“What are you doing?!” Erza’s voice cracked with panic, grabbing for my arm.
“We don’t have oars,” I said, like that explained everything, which honestly it kind of did.
“I’ll get in the water, push the boat the right direction, use my magic to close the distance fast.
We’ll hit shore in minutes instead of hours.” “I’ll do it,” she said immediately, already trying to shove past me toward the water herself.
“No, you will not.” I planted myself in her way, which given the height difference was more symbolic than actually effective, but I said it with enough conviction that she paused anyway.
“Your shoulder’s still an open wound, Erza.
Sea water gets in there, it gets infected, and infection out here with no healer for miles could cost you the whole arm.
Or your life.
I have cracked ribs.
You have a wound that could kill you.
Do the math.” She opened her mouth to argue, found nothing to argue with, and shut it again, glaring at me instead like this was somehow my fault for being right.
I jumped in before she could think of a counterargument.
The cold hit like a slap, but I pushed the boat forward with one arm while distorting the space between us and the shore with the other, folding the distance down step by step, and what should have taken the better part of an hour took less than five minutes instead.
I climbed out drenched, shivering, looking — by Erza’s own unhelpful commentary — “like a half-drowned rat,” and spent a few minutes wringing out my shirt and letting the weak morning sun do what it could before we picked a direction and started walking.
“Get on my back,” I said.
“I’ll carry you.
Faster this way.” “Absolutely not,” she said.
“You carried the boat.
I’m carrying you now.
That’s fair.” “You have a shoulder woundand you also have cracked ribs ” “I don’t have cracked ribs , You have cracked ribs, .” “I can distort space to cover a hundred meters in a single step.
You cannot.
Get on.” That logic, at least, she couldn’t argue with, so she climbed onto my back — and that was when the actual problem revealed itself, because I standing came up to about erza’s chest, and Erza on my back with her legs wrapped around my waist meant I was suddenly supporting most of her weight while barely coming up past her own heart in height.
I staggered under it for the first few steps like a newborn deer that had made several poor life choices.
“You’re shaking,” she observed, unhelpfully, from somewhere above my head.
“I’m fine,” I said, through gritted teeth, legs already screaming in protest.
“Enhanced my physique.
To the absolute max.
Barely holding together, mind you, but fine.” “You sound like you’re dying.” “I am thriving.
This is thriving.” We swapped roles about every twenty minutes after that — me distorting distance while she walked, then her carrying me on her back once my legs gave out entirely, using the size gap the opposite way it had failed for me — and between the swaps and the arguing and the general indignity of two children stumbling toward civilization, we made it to the outskirts of a town by early afternoon.
A few careful questions to a farmer working a field near the road told us where we’d actually washed up: the coast of the Caelum Kingdom.
Fairy Tail, according to what Rob had told us — and what I already knew — sat well north of here, in the kingdom of Fiore.
Which meant a real journey ahead of us, and a real journey meant money we very much did not have.
“We could steal some,” I suggested, watching a well-dressed group of merchants pass by the town square.
“Nobody would even notice a few coins missing from that lot.” “No,” Erza said immediately.
“They wouldn’t even feel it.” “No, Jack.” “It’s not like we’re taking their whole purse—” “We are not stealing,” she said, in a tone that made it very clear this particular argument was over before it started, no matter how many angles I tried to come at it from.
We went back and forth on it anyway for a solid ten minutes, me pointing out the practicality, her pointing out that we were trying to become the kind of people who didn’t have to steal to survive, until I finally threw up my hands and let her win, mostly because I was too tired to keep debating ethics with an eleven-year-old who fought dirtier in an argument than she did with a sword.
Which left us with option two: the town’s small church, tucked at the edge of the square, and an old priest who looked like he’d spent his entire life being kind to strangers and hadn’t quite learned to stop.
“We were separated from our family,” I told him, doing my absolute best to look like a helpless, tragic orphan, which — to be fair — wasn’t that far from the literal truth.
“A dark guild raided our village.
We got split up in the chaos.
We think our family made it to Magnolia, in Fiore — we just need enough for train fare to get there and find them.” Erza, standing beside me, had gone completely, mortified silent, apparently too embarrassed by the sheer audacity of the lie to contribute a single word to it.
The priest studied us for a long moment — two bruised, exhausted, clearly traumatized children — and whatever suspicion he might have had didn’t stand a chance against what he was actually looking at.
He pressed a small pouch of coins into my hands, along with a soft blessing and a hope that we’d find our family safe.
We didn’t speak until we were well clear of the church.
“You lied to a priest,” Erza hissed the second we were out of earshot.
“I told a version of events that got us train fare,” I said.
“The dark guild part was true.
The family part was just…
optimistic phrasing.” “We are never going to be able to pay him back.” “We might.” “Jack.” “Okay, fine, probably not,” I admitted.
“But he knew that.
Or close enough to knowing it.
Nobody hands over that much jewels to two random kids actually expecting it back.
He gave it anyway.
That’s not me tricking a fool, Erza — that’s just someone choosing to be kind, knowing full well he might not see a copper of it again.” She didn’t have an immediate response to that, which I counted as a win, even if her expression made it clear the argument wasn’t fully over, just tabled for later.
The train ride north took the better part of two days, most of it spent watching unfamiliar countryside blur past the window, trading turns sleeping against each other’s shoulders, and slowly watching Erza’s exhaustion give way to something that looked almost like nervous anticipation the closer we got.
By the time we stepped off in Magnolia, the town itself was more than either of us had really braced for — bright, bustling, ordinary in a way that felt almost offensive after everything we’d just crawled out of.
We asked around twice before someone finally pointed us down a particular street, toward a building that even from a distance looked like it belonged to a world entirely separate from the one we’d left behind.
Fairy Tail’s doors stood in front of us at last, worn wood and old stone and, somewhere beyond them, the promise of everything Rob had ever told us this place could be.
Erza glanced at me.
I glanced back at her.
Neither of us moved for a second, the weight of everything it had taken to get here finally catching up all at once.
“Ready?” she asked.
Not even a little.
Let’s go anyway.
“Ready,” I said, and pushed the door open.