Mirajane - POV
Magnolia, three days before the festival, smelled of freshly cut wood, wet paint, and fried food.
It was a smell I knew well. Every year, when the stalls began springing up along the streets like mushrooms after the rain, when the traders squabbled over inches of space with the intensity of generals negotiating borders, when children started gathering on street corners just to watch things being put up, when all of that happened, I knew the festival was on its way.
And every year, the Master brought me along with him.
"That stall is three paces too far to the right," Makarov said, standing in the middle of the high street with his hands behind his back and an assessing look that would have intimidated an architect. The man in charge of the assembly, a tall fellow in a leather apron with the expression of someone who had heard that observation before, began moving the structure without questioning it. "Last year Natsu came running through here and knocked the whole thing over."
"You could simply forbid Natsu from running during the festival," I suggested, jotting down the correct position in my little notebook.
"Already tried that. Three years running." He paused. "It worked for about eleven minutes, the first year. That's still my record."
I noted that down too. Not because it was useful, but because it was the sort of thing I kept. Small maps of the chaos Fairy Tail produced, which only made sense when you looked at them all together.
We carried on down the street.
Magnolia transformed in a very particular way before the festival. It wasn't a dramatic transformation, the town didn't become something else entirely. It was more as though it remembered itself. The golden paper lanterns residents hung in their windows, the colourful rugs the older ladies laid across their doorsteps, the tables that appeared outside restaurants with embroidered cloths kept aside all year just for this occasion. It was as though Magnolia took a deep breath and smiled.
And at the centre of it all, every single year, stood Fairy Tail.
"Don't set the fireworks up near the parade route," Makarov told a group of young people carrying boxes of coloured pyrotechnics. They stopped. Looked at him. "I know it sounds obvious. But it isn't."
"But, Master, last year—"
"Last year was an accident."
"With all due respect, it was four accidents."
"Four accidents that looked like a planned show to anyone far enough away," I chimed in, with my most diplomatic smile. "Which was, somehow, a positive outcome for the guild's image. But let's keep the fireworks away from the parade regardless."
The young people nodded and carried on. The Master glanced sideways at me.
"You're good at this."
"At lying to keep the peace?"
"At finding the right angle." He took another step, and I noticed, not for the first time, that he was walking a touch slower than he had the year before. Not much. Just enough for me to notice. "There's a difference."
We carried on.
The town moved around us with that particular energy of something being built. Hammers striking. Voices overlapping. The smell of dough being fried at some stall that had already started operating before the festival officially began, because in Magnolia certain people simply couldn't wait to start celebrating.
A child ran between the two of us, clutching a red balloon with the Fairy Tail emblem printed on it. Didn't slow down to apologise. The Master laughed, a low, genuine sound.
"Do you know why this festival matters so much to them?" he asked, and I understood the question wasn't rhetorical.
"Because Fairy Tail is part of the town," I answered. "Not just a guild that happens to be here. It's... it's as though we're the loudest, occasionally most destructive neighbourhood, but the one no one round here can actually imagine not existing."
"More than that." He stopped in front of a flower stall. The woman running it waved to him with familiarity, and he waved back with a smile that was different from the one he used inside the guild. Quieter. "To these people, Fairy Tail is a promise. That if something goes wrong, someone's here. That they're not alone."
I bought a sprig of lavender without thinking, just to have something in my hands whilst I processed what he was saying.
"And the festival," I continued, "is their way of telling us they know that."
"Precisely." The Master resumed walking. "That's why the guild takes part every year. Not out of tradition. Out of responsibility."
We walked another stretch in silence. The street opened out into the central square, where the parade stage's framework was being raised by a team of carpenters who knew the process by heart. Every year, the same stage. Every year, the same square. And every year, something turned out slightly different from the plan, because Fairy Tail was involved.
"Do you know why I bring you with me every year?" Makarov asked.
The tone was different. Not the tone of someone correcting stall positions or issuing instructions to prevent a possible explosion. Another tone entirely. Quieter. Carrying a weight I recognised without immediately being able to name it.
"Because I've got neat handwriting for the spreadsheets," I answered, "and because you can't talk the traders round anymore after three tankards."
He laughed. The genuine laugh, not the Master's laugh.
But then he stopped.
"That too," he said. "But not only that."
He waited a moment before continuing, and I had learned, over the years, not to fill Master Makarov's silences. He chose his words with a care that people who only knew him superficially never noticed, because he wrapped them in humour and gesticulation and that way he had of always seeming slightly distracted. But underneath all of it lay a precision I deeply respected.
"Being a guild master," he began, stopping at the edge of the square to watch the carpenters at work, "isn't about being the strongest."
"Many would disagree."
"Many are wrong." He didn't say it with anger. He said it with the specific weariness of someone who had had that argument more times than he could count. "Strength keeps enemies from coming through the door. But only love keeps children from walking out through it."
I stayed quiet.
"Fairy Tail has produced extraordinarily powerful mages," he continued. "Some of them are still here. Others left. And the ones who left... almost always did so because no one noticed they were going. No one paid attention." He paused briefly. "No one saw them."
I thought of Cana, who drank more than she should and who sometimes went so quiet she seemed nearly invisible in the middle of the chaos. I thought of Loke, who would vanish for days and come back with a smile that was too easy, the kind I recognised because I'd worn it myself for years, the smile of someone saying goodbye in instalments, so slowly no one notices. If it hadn't been for Lucy, he would have left for good, and none of us would ever have known why. I thought too of Gray, who took his clothes off and pretended everything was normal when nothing was normal at all.
I saw them.
I always saw them.
It was impossible not to, when I stood behind a counter every day, serving tea and beer and, occasionally, a shoulder that no one needed to know had been borrowed.
"Laxus," Makarov said, and the name shifted the air around us in a way I couldn't quite explain. It wasn't anger. It was closer to grief. "My grandson looks at Fairy Tail and sees proof. Those who make the cut, stay. Those who fail, leave."
"I know."
"You know because you pay attention." He turned to look at me, and his eyes were serious in a way I rarely saw. "He isn't wicked, Mira. I need you to understand that. He's... he's a boy who learnt that the world only respects strength, and that no one ever taught him there are other ways to earn respect... Part of that failing is mine."
I said nothing. It wasn't my place.
"But," he continued, "what he wants to do to the guild, cast out the weak, turn Fairy Tail into an elite structure, that would destroy everything we've built. Not the buildings. Not the reputation." He gestured vaguely towards the child with the red balloon, who was now on the other side of the square showing the balloon to her grandmother. "That. That would be destroyed."
"You're afraid he'll inherit the guild."
"I'm afraid of dying before I've made certain that doesn't happen," he said, with a simplicity that struck me harder than any speech could have. "I'm old, Mira. And tired. And the two, at some point, become permanent."
The afternoon sun was beginning to set, and the lanterns residents had hung in their windows were starting to matter against the fading light. Magnolia looked lovely like this, in the late afternoon before a festival. Like a town tidying itself up to receive guests.
"Why are you telling me this?" I asked, because I needed to ask.
The Master didn't answer immediately. He walked over to a stone bench at the edge of the square and sat down with the discreet care of someone whose knees weren't what they used to be. I sat beside him.
"A few months ago," he said, "when Phantom Lord destroyed the guild hall, I had to leave to deal with matters with the Council. Remember?"
"I remember."
"When I got back, the guild was being rebuilt. The accounts were in order. The members who'd been hit hardest had been given appropriate missions to keep their income steady without overburdening anyone who was still emotionally fragile. The suppliers Erza had intimidated more than necessary had received visits of apology and reparation negotiations." He looked at me. "There wasn't a single member left not knowing the guild was still standing, and that they had a place in it."
"I only did what needed doing."
"Precisely," he said, with the same voice he'd used before, when I'd said I served drinks and organised paperwork. "Precisely that, Mira."
I understood, then, what he was doing. And something inside me went very still.
"You already look after this guild," he said. "You know who's struggling financially before they need to ask. You know who's had a falling-out and needs to be assigned separate missions for a while. You know when Gray is hiding something and when Natsu is genuinely in trouble rather than just being Natsu. You know every single person in that hall and what each of them needs to keep being part of the family."
"Master—"
"You think you're behind the counter, Mira." He looked at me with a gentle firmness that was so very him. "But for years now, you've been at the very centre of this guild."
I stayed silent for a while.
Across the square, a group of boys were trying to help the carpenters raise one of the stage's beams, getting in the way more than helping, but with a determination that made one of the carpenters laugh and hand them a smaller task they could actually manage. The child with the red balloon had found two friends, and the three of them were sitting on the fountain steps, watching the stage take shape with the particular anticipation of someone who is seven years old and still believes festivals are magic.
They weren't wrong.
"There's something else I ought to say," the Master continued, quieter now, "and it isn't an easy thing to say."
I waited.
"I worry about what happens to the guild if I go without having chosen someone. Not because Fairy Tail couldn't survive on its own. It could. But because, in the vacuum of leadership, Laxus... he would try to fill that space. And he would do it by turning Fairy Tail into something none of us would recognise."
"You could leave behind a formal structure—"
"Formal structures without people behind them are just pieces of paper," he said. "And Fairy Tail has a very specific tradition of creatively ignoring paperwork."
I couldn't disagree.
"So you want me to..." I stopped. Finishing the sentence felt too large. "You're telling me that—"
"I'm not asking you to accept today." He was direct, but with a gentleness only he could produce. "I'm not asking you to start seeing yourself differently tomorrow morning. I'm asking for just one thing."
"What's that?"
"That you begin to look at the guild as more than just your home."
"And as what?"
"As something that, one day, might need your hands to keep existing."
The silence that followed was filled by the town. Hammers. Voices. The smell of something being grilled at a stall further up the street. A child shrieking with joy for no particular reason beyond it being the eve of the festival.
I thought about my own past. The creature I had been, before nearly losing Lisanna. But even though I had managed to save my family, the "nearly" hadn't gone away. The "nearly" had stayed, and it had changed something in me in a way that couldn't be undone. I never went back to being the reckless, arrogant girl I had been before, but I also stopped being trapped in the darkness. I became someone who was present in the lives of my siblings and of the guild's members.
I thought of the mornings behind the counter, of the cups of tea I knew exactly how each person liked, of the disputes I smoothed over before they escalated into buildings being demolished. I thought of the guild's reconstruction, the spreadsheets, the meetings with suppliers, the nights the Master was away and I simply... looked after things.
I thought of Erza, who carried the weight of the world on her shoulders with a stubbornness that was sometimes painful to watch, and who had only recently learnt, with the stubborn help of a certain white wolf, that she didn't have to carry everything alone. I thought of Azra'il, who had arrived here so young and yet already seeming to have lived more than any of us could imagine, and who I saw, little by little, allowing the guild to become something real to her. Not just a place. A reason.
I thought of Lucy, who had asked me out with a courage that had cost her an hour of rehearsing in front of the mirror.
I thought about what sort of guild I wanted to exist for her. For Lisanna. For Elfman. For Levy. For all of them.
"Mira."
I looked up. The Master was watching me with something I could only call fatherly affection, the sort he reserved for moments when he thought no one was paying close enough attention to notice.
"You're afraid you're not good enough," he said. It wasn't a question.
"I... I am, Master."
"Good." And his smile was small, but genuine. "Leaders who aren't afraid of failing usually fail in much bigger ways."
I looked at the lanterns.
At the stage framework being raised.
At the children by the fountain.
At the town that, every single year, dressed itself up to celebrate a guild that knocked down buildings with a frequency that ought to have been alarming, and wasn't, because deep down everyone in Magnolia knew Fairy Tail also showed up when the building coming down was theirs.
And I realised that was exactly it. It wasn't about strength. It wasn't about completed missions, or defeated enemies, or Magic Council rankings. It was about those children by the fountain waiting for the parade. It was about the lady at the flower stall who waved at the Master with the familiarity of someone who knows he'll turn up every year. It was about Magnolia knowing, deep down, that Fairy Tail was there.
That was the weight he was offering me.
Not the title. Not the authority.
The responsibility of making sure that promise kept existing.
The Master got up from the bench with the care of his old knees, and I stood with him. I opened my notebook and jotted down: the sweet stall partially blocked the view of the stage. I also noted a reminder to confirm the musicians' set list. Last year's funeral march incident remained officially classified as "a communication error."
"Master," I said, before he started walking.
He waited.
"I'm not going to say yes today."
"I know."
"But I will... I will think about it." I looked at the lanterns one last time. "About what my hands might need to do."
The Master nodded, and said nothing more on the matter.