Oh, lookie here! It's a Laxana fic that I've managed to get to be longer than 1000 words! I've finally escaped the realm of drabbles in the Laxana fandom!

And it's a good thing, too, because Laxana deserves the love.

So, without further ado, I give you Believe.

She hated him.

That was the only thing Cana Alberona thought or even believed she knew about her feelings for Laxus Dreyar. How could she feel anything else, when he was such an arrogant, self-centered, power-hungry jackass? He probably could have had anything he wanted, but then he ruined it all by attacking the guild. And the Thunder Palace…Cana would have murdered him for all of that if she didn't think he'd kill her first. As it was, Natsu effectively subdued him, with the help of Gajeel. And then Laxus was excommunicated, and that was that.

Or so she had thought.

Nothing was going right for Cana.

She had been selected for the S-Class exams for the fifth time, and she vowed that if she failed again, she'd leave Fairy Tail. Lucy Heartfilia had always been a kind girl, but Cana found out just how much the girl meant to the guild when she begged Cana not to leave. She even promised to do all that she could to help Cana, because she wanted the brunette to confess that she was the daughter of Gildartz Clive. And so the two made their way to Tenrou Island on the boat with the other S-Class hopefuls, not knowing the trials that lay before them.

They successfully reached the second task, but then things started to get rough. And Cana, Lucy, Natsu, Wendy, and even Master Makarov, as well as two of the Exceeds, had to be saved by Gildartz. And even then, they had only just barely been saved. And they had had no warning that there was worse to come.

Laxus had made a very timely appearance, protecting Natsu from Hades. But he hadn't lasted long and instead, Natsu got a boost that they were all sure would win. It wasn't enough, and even when the rest of the guild—those who were present on the island, at any rate—showed up, it didn't seem like it was possible to overcome him.

It was thanks to the Exceeds that they avoided death at Hades's hand.

Everyone laughed and talked together, and Cana couldn't help but resent how easily Laxus and her father got along. It was as if Ivan wasn't Laxus's father at all and that Gildartz was which wasn't right and Cana hated herself for thinking it. But Lucy was prompting her to go confess, and after a while, that's just what the brunette did. And everything she said to him, about not needing him to be like a father at all…it hurt. All of those words were blatant lies, and she wondered if her father hadn't seen right through it, because his arms were so warm and comforting when they wrapped around her.

Cana knew she'd never be alone again.

And everything was good again. Despite the fact that the man she hated was there with them, the guild's resident female drunkard was fine.

But then the fear started up again. They were Fairy Tail, though, except for Laxus, and so they didn't know when to give up. Oh, so a dragon had landed on Tenrou Island with destruction on its mind? Well, then, let's mobilize all units and blow that sucker up! We've got three dragonslayers—four, if you count the false dragonslayer that Cana loathed—so we should be able to kick some royal Acnologia ass and be home by midnight!

If only it could have been so simple.

It was useless. Everything they tried had failed and now that great hulking beast was in the air above them, preparing for what each dragonslayer confirmed as a breath attack…and everyone knew that their lives were going to end.

And then they came up with a plan—focus all the magical energy they had left to Fried, and he would do his best to create a barrier because, hey, isn't that what he's best at? So all twenty-one of them stood in a huge circle, holding hands with the people nearest to them and praying while they concentrated all their might on getting Fried enough energy to save their lives as the time passed ever-so-slow. It was nerve-wracking and although dread filled Cana's heart she did what she could. Any magic she had left was channeled through her father, down the line to where the green-haired Raijinshuu member stood.

Believe.

It's quite common for members of the famously infamous Fairy Tail to believe in things that didn't seem quite possible. Hello, three members had been raised by dragons, and the guild's motto was the question do fairies have tails?, so she thought that believing in survival was a little less farfetched. And still, Cana had never had more trouble believing in anything before.

The attack was upon them then, and it was to her chagrin that the last person her eyes fell on was that loathsome Laxus Dreyar.

Everything tilted and swirled and seemed to just explode around her.

And then everything went dark.

The brunette thought it was just some extremely sick joke when Droy prodded her awake, his eyes wide as saucers and his many chins trembling from the tears he didn't even try holding back. After all, Droy wasn't so fat, and he hadn't been on the island when the breath attack hit.

Cana sat up, rubble and dirt falling off of her back and dust drifting out of her hair. She was stiff and sore and wondered what kind of practical joke she was in. Ten feet away, she saw a pile of rubble start to lift and shudder and a second later, Gildartz Clive, her father, popped out of the debris. He rubbed his head and looked around, bewildered, as Visitar fawned over him. He then looked over at his daughter, his eyes widening, and they both scrambled to their feet, reaching out to each other as if the other would soon disappear. None of the others knew what was happening right then, because none of them knew that Gildartz was her father, but Cana didn't care.

She found out from Droy as his many chins continued to jiggle that seven years had elapsed since that attack.

Seven years.

Cana didn't know how such a thing could happen, but she somehow believed this so much easier than she'd been able to believe the possibility of survival when that dragon's attack finally hit. It was numbing, shell-shocking…but looking around at all her guild mates who were so much older than she remembered, she acknowledged that it had to be true.

She only vaguely remembered stepping away from her father and helping to unbury the rest of the twenty-one who had been on the island when everything had transpired. Many of them were in various states of wakefulness, coming to now that whatever odd sleep had come over them had been lifted. The uproar when Jet and Droy found Levy was almost like music to her ears—like some semblance of normality in a world she felt would never be the same again.

Hate had never seemed as petty as it did when she was the first to find Laxus. He was in the edge of the trees, slowly waking up with rubble and debris all over him. Cana would never fully forgive him for everything he'd done way back then, perhaps, but she couldn't hate him after he'd been there and lived through that catastrophe with all of them.

The brunette stepped forward and knelt down as she brushed rocks and twigs and dirt from his hair and he slowly looked up at her. Pebbles fell to the ground around him, as well as larger chunks of earth and wood, and Cana reached forward to help dust some of the residue off. When his striking eyes met hers again, she offered a wan sort of smile. Her heart wasn't really in it just then, and Laxus looked over her shoulder to see their aged nakama.

Cana explained it to him as softly as she could and stared at the ground when he'd forced himself to his feet.

She hadn't expected him to reach a hand down to help her up, but she took it wordlessly and let him haul her to her feet next to him. Cana realized then that she'd been childish, hating him with such a passion. The only thing wrong with him had been that he hadn't truly noticed how much all of the members of Fairy Tail had meant to him. He'd never realized that they were his family, but in light of all that had happened, she thought he knew now.

Maybe, she thought, he deserved a second chance.

Adapting to the 'new' Fairy Tail would take some time. Cana had understood this the minute the guild doors had been opened and she'd seen the state of disrepair, the forlorn looks, and the general addition of seven years to familiar faces. Most noticeable to her, at first, was how careworn and haggard that the object of her former affections had become. He was no longer quite as ruggedly handsome as she'd always seen him, and though she'd been willing to bridge the age barrier seven years before, now she couldn't allow herself to do so.

Age doesn't mean a thing in love, but she'd finally understood that she'd never quite loved him at all.

Everyone she had known growing up was now seven years farther along the path of life than she was, except for her comrades from Tenrou Island. It would take more time for some to get used to it, but Cana was fairly quick despite her previous misgivings. Jobs were scarce, for no one cared about the run-down has-beens that crowded the dilapidated building that was practically a shed that Fairy Tail had called home for the last few years.

Cana was willing to wait for things to return to normal. Whatever would happen would, and she couldn't do anything to stop it. So she'd let the jobs slowly start trickling in again and she'd get her life back on track.

She had never cheered so loudly in her life as she did for Laxus in the tournament. The fact that Master Makarov had placed the false dragonslayer in the Fairy Tail B-Team had to suggest that the blonde wasn't far from reinstatement, right? Cana wanted that. It was with a shock that she realized that fact. But, she reasoned, Fairy Tail just couldn't be the same Fairy Tail it had once been if it didn't have the master's grandson, Laxus Dreyar, as one of its elites.

The brunette wondered if she could ever be like him.

She felt weird when she got her first new boyfriend since they got back.

It had been a whole year since they'd returned from Tenrou Island. The year had seemed long at the time, but in retrospect it seemed to have passed in the blink of an eye. And Cana realized that she felt alone. She'd been doing a lot of realizing since they all woke up back on the island.

And so the brunette Fairy Tail card mage knockout hit the dating scene again. It didn't take her long to find a decent-looking guy who was nineteen, just a few months older than she was.

It also didn't take long for her to realize that she should have been the older one by six and a half years. When she had been frozen in time, the guy she was dating had been about eleven years old. Right now, she was supposed to be twenty-five instead of eighteen. She was a twenty-five year old dating a nineteen year old. She felt like she was robbing him of what he deserved and for a while she forgot that she really was only eighteen.

When Cana remembered, it was still awkward and she broke it to him lightly, saying that she just didn't want to lead him on. He took it well, but she felt like a horrible person.

Even surrounded by her friends and 'family', Cana Alberona could still feel lonely. And it seemed like no one noticed it, so she never even said anything about it. She wouldn't be responsible for putting a damper on everyone's day. After all, the guild had some of its former gusto back, and she wouldn't trade that for the world.

That didn't help the fact that she was alone in a crowded room.

Slowly, the brunette stood up and walked out of the guild. They had their old building back, right in the town rather than away on the edges, and everything was familiar again. Well, it was all similar on the surface, but since it had been eight and a half years since what Cana chose to call the incident, things had changed. They were the same and yet they weren't. Cana told herself that she would somehow get used to it all, and yet she didn't quite believe it.

She didn't notice she'd been standing still until a hand fell on her shoulder.

"Cana?"

For some reason, this felt like the first real human contact she'd had in weeks. Cana turned her head to meet the inquiring gaze of someone she had once hated. The look told him that she had heard him speak, and he took it as a cue to go on.

"You seem less like yourself lately."

He didn't ask what was wrong, but she knew it was implied. It was just how he was, as she'd discovered since she'd given up hating him.

"I'm still stuck on how different everything is," she said softly. She couldn't believe she was about to tell him about her thoughts on dating, but it came pouring out of her mouth before she could stop it. "I feel so alone and I can't bring myself to date anyone because I remember that they were around Wendy's age when Acnologia attacked us. I feel like an old woman compared to them. I feel like I'm keeping them from the people who really deserve them."

Cana took a breath, not chancing a look at him for fear that he'd be giving her an incredulous or disbelieving look.

"Sometimes I can go around like everything is like normal—and it kind of is, considering that nothing was ever normal for us because we were members of Fairy Tail. But then again, sometimes I stop and wonder what would have happened if even one of us hadn't been on Tenrou Island. Would the first master still have saved us all? And then I wonder what we missed over here in all that time. We missed Bisca and Alzack's wedding, and the birth of their daughter! What else did we miss?"

The fingers on her shoulder gave a comforting squeeze.

"It's a little disconcerting…" Cana finally continued again after a brief silence. "Sometimes I feel like maybe the person I was meant to be with died in those seven years, in some kind of tragic accident that maybe I could have stopped, you know?" The laugh that bubbled out was dry. "And then I wonder why I think about the person I'm 'meant for' when I don't believe that anything is predetermined. A fortuneteller that doesn't even believe in her craft. I'm a regular nutcase, eh?"

"Sometimes," came the reply. He seemed ready to say more, but her voice cut across.

"Laxus…?"

"Yeah?"

"How are you adjusting?"

The brunette thought she'd gone too far by asking him that, but she had really been curious. After a long pause, long enough to make her want to slink back into the guild and leave the silence hanging, he sighed.

"It's harder than I thought," he said simply, and then surprised Cana by lifting his hand and dropping his entire arm across her shoulders. "It's a lot harder than I thought, but…"

She looked up at him, surprised to find color in his cheeks that she knew was entirely unrelated to the weather.

"But…?"

"But it's easier to get through when you've got everyone beside you," he spat it out quickly, as though admitting such a thing was poisonous to him. "You know?"

"I know exactly what you mean," Cana told him, and she did. It wasn't always easy to fully comprehend just how comforting it was to be around their fellow guild members, but when even Laxus could mention it, Cana knew they had a huge impact. And right then, Cana had one of those startling realizations that can change the way a person thinks indefinitely and she knew, without a doubt, that her hatred of this man had been resentful, because she'd trusted him and he'd betrayed that trust.

Because she'd loved him.

And damn it all if it didn't take a whole bunch of crap and a dragon's attack and a seven year time skip to prove it to her.

The brunette hoped she wasn't crossing her boundaries when she wrapped her arm around his waist, tucking in closer to his side. He didn't shift at all, so she decided that it was all okay. And then he surprised her by giving her a light squeeze about the shoulders and holding it, effectively pulling her nearer to him, too.

"Did you ever think," Laxus asked, and the next words he spoke were so unlike him that Cana might have doubted his identity if they hadn't already been having an uncharacteristic heart-to-heart chat, "that maybe the one you were meant for, if you were one to believe in predetermined fate, had been on the island with you?"

Maybe she'd start to believe in predetermined fates, especially where love was concerned.

"I've started to," Cana answered him softly.

She didn't ask permission for what she was about to do, and she didn't need to because he was about to do the exact same thing. She turned out of his arm to face him head-on, and he leaned down from his considerable height almost as if he was reading her thoughts.

Somehow, Cana didn't care that her first truly meaningful kiss with him had happened before they were even dating or that it had been on the sidewalk just in front of the guild, which seemed to be such an unromantic place. All she cared about was the fact that his arms made her feel just as safe as her father's arms. And she found herself believing that there was a better future for them, and for everyone in Fairy Tail.

She started to believe in herself for the first time since she'd confessed her identity to her father.

And this Cana Alberona, the brunette who had her confidence and her love for alcohol back, meant more to Laxus Dreyar than anything else.

Who knew that Laxus was really such a softie? HAHAHAHA.

Anywho, I'm kind of excited about this one, since it's longer and I think it has a little more substance than my drabble-ish one-shots. GAAAAAH. This pairing is too fun for its own good.

Cana Dreyar.

Has a nice ring, no?