As My Last Breath Goes Still

"LAXUS!"

That was probably Master. Fried really couldn't tell. The black mist had warped every sense, and sound was distorted and fragmented in his ears. The only certainty was the floor he was lying on and the fur cuff beneath his fingers – but even those were vanishing as he fell ever deeper into blackness and the cuff seemed to melt away, turning into burning tendrils that tangled around his wrist and burnt his skin as black as the mist.

"Fried, it's alright, you can let go now, you can let go, it's alright..."

The voices made no sense. He mustn't let go, not now. He couldn't lose Laxus. Somewhere above his head, someone was shouting for Wendy to run for Porlyuschia, for Jet to rewrite the hasty barrier to let the guild in.

No, that didn't sound right...

He knew he was dying. There was nothing he could do about it now; his magic was his life and his magic was poisoned. Even the clean air of the guildhall choked him. His skin burnt, flames he could not see peeling away layer after layer of flesh as the poison worked deeper. As he distantly felt his barrier collapse into fragments of blackened, broken letters, something tugged at his left hand and he tightened his grip, reluctant to lose his only anchor.

"Fried, sweetheart, let go," something crooned. "Come on, love, you're safe here."

No-one in the guild ever called him love, let alone sweetheart, so that was definitely a hallucination and like hell was he letting go of Laxus for a hallucination. Laxus was real, Laxus was right there, right next to him, Laxus was -

Laxus wasn't breathing.

Fear pulled his burning eyelids apart, ripping through veils of black smoke. By the mostly-white blur above his head, it was Mirajane (or was it Lisanna? No, Lisanna was dead, wasn't she? Why couldn't he remember?) who was trying to disentangle his fingers from the fur cuff.

"Fried," she was murmuring, apparently unaware that he was still conscious. "Come on, Fried, I can't help Laxus or you if you don't let go, come on..."

Her fingers were strong and insistent, and he trusted her more than most, but that still wasn't a good enough reason for him to let go, not of Laxus, not now. They didn't know, they didn't realise their own danger...

"Poison," he managed to choke out, and he felt her fingers loosen against his as she shifted to look between him and Laxus.

"What?"

But others around them had heard him, and the whispers rippled outwards: poison, poison, poison until they echoed in Fried's ears, dark waves at the edges of the night.

"Fried, what happened?" Someone placed a hand on his shoulder and he somehow suppressed the instinct to curl away from the sudden blossom of pain. "Talk to us!"

"Master, I don't think he can -"

"Wendy, hurry!"

"Where did they come from?"

"Hargeon, wasn't it? Yajima's - "

"Warren, can you - "

" - know if she'll make it in - "

" - vergree - "

The noise swirling above and around his head was too much – he could no longer tell the difference between Master Makarov's voice and Mirajane's, let alone anyone else's. A flare of white-blue light cascaded around him like feathers falling from a dying swan, but its focus was not him. A pain that was neither physical nor magical crackled out of existence inside his chest as through the cataclysm of sound he heard the slow, painful but unmistakable drag of Laxus' breath.

He was still alive.

"Fried, we need to know what happened to you. Warren can read your mind if you can't talk..."

The chatter around him was fading to a buzz, and it occurred to Fried in a distant, abstract way that perhaps it had been a little too long since he last took a breath himself.

"I can't read him!" The voice was frantic, coming from somewhere off to his left, beyond Laxus. "His mind's just a jumble of sounds and pictures and feelings, I can't make any sense of it!"

"Tartarus," someone croaked, and the name fell into the suddenly silent guildhall with all the weight of the world wrapped in its letters. "Tartarus... they did it. It's... magic barrier particles... Mashou Ryuushi." A ripple of agony shot down his spine as someone coughed – the speaker, perhaps. Their voice sounded so familiar. "Everything was... completely covered, but Laxus... Laxus saved the town."

Had Laxus saved the town? He had seen the darkness multiplying with every journey he had made, but surely the amount of poison that Laxus had sucked into his lungs had given the rest of the town time to get to safety? They would all be dead without Laxus, that was certain.

"That's quite enough," said a new voice that seemed to be approaching from the right. "I can't treat them in the middle of the floor, get them upstairs – carefully."

Another quick ripple of sound flickered through his awareness, and suddenly a shadow loomed over him. "Let go of Laxus, Fried. We can't get you to safety until you do."

He didn't recognise the voice, but he knew the tone. It was another direct order. But it was alright, wasn't it? He was in Fairy Tail. No-one could hurt them here. Master Makarov was there, Mirajane was there, Natsu and Gajeel and Grey and Erza were there, Wendy was there... perhaps, just this once, he could let someone else look after the ones he loved.

When Mirajane (was it Mirajane? He couldn't see anything more than splashes of abstract colour now. Her hands were so cold against his burning skin.) curled her fingers between his, he let her gently pull them open.

"You, you, you – help carry them. Be gentle, they'll be in a lot of pain."

"They'll be alright, won't they, Porlyuschia?"

Fried stopped listening. It was too much effort to concentrate on the voices. Darkness lapped at the edges of his mind, waiting for him to fall. Breathing was so hard now, each inhalation like ice in his lungs. There wasn't even the slightest fragment of magic left in him, and the tiny part of his mind that was not preoccupied with simply clinging to consciousness for a few seconds longer was praying that somehow the rune barriers around the guild would hold, that the only protection he could still give Laxus and his guild would not fail.

"Fried?" He was vaguely aware of a shadow over him, and dimly he felt someone lift him from the floor, raising him far higher than any ordinary person could have reached. "You've done a hero's work today, my boy." There was a pause, before the voice said softly "Thank you for the life of my grandson."

Fried did his best to smile at the Master, and managed to breathe four words. "It was an honour."

And then at last he allowed his eyes to close and ease him into the darkness, leaving his life and the lives of those he loved in the hands of his guild.

.

FIN

With regards to what I wrote at the beginning of the first chapter about this being one of the greatest feats of strength in Fairy Tail, I am not necessarily talking about things that the strong characters do (Master or Laxus casting Fairy Law, Mavis casting Fairy Sphere, Jellal casting Chariot or Sema etc.) because those characters already have that strength. I am talking about things that the characters do that by rights they should never have the strength for in the first place. As for Fried's rescue mission, I hold only a few things above it.

The first is Gildarts surviving a one-on-one battle with Acnologia because Gildarts is strong but that was insane. The second is Lucy holding open three Spirit Gates at once, and any time she casts Urano Metria solo and can still stand afterwards. Fried's rescue of the main victims of the Mashou Ryuushi attack takes third place on my list.

Since his introduction, Fried has wavered between being one of the more powerful fighters in Fairy Tail and being nothing more than Laxus' fanboy, and on top of this his strength has seen a sad but steady decline from the one who once (albeit temporarily) fought toe-to-toe with a murderous Demon Mirajane. For the man who struggled against a minor member of Grimoire Heart to suddenly manage to fight through his own poisoned magic to transport not one but four heavily injured people to safety many miles away whilst he himself is dying is nothing short of incredible.