Punch the Stars | Fairy Tail

Body Snatcher

There's a time in life where you hit rock bottom and getting up seems impossible. 

She'd been there before, multiple times - after every bad breakup, after getting fired, etc etc- but she's absolutely sure this time was different. After all, you only die once. Then again, she's pretty sure you're not supposed to wake up after. 

She woke up with rain dropping in her face, her body so cold she could feel her bones freezing. She opened her eyes and found herself leaning against a stone tablet in the middle of the night. She used her hands to push herself up and that's when she noticed the size of her hands. They were so tiny, she had always been small for her age but she was twenty years old, and these were the hands of a child. 

She frowned and looked around to make sense of what the fuck was happening. If this day wasn't creepy enough, then it was getting worse because from the look of it she was in a freaking cemetery. She was pretty sure she had died, hit by a taxi no less, but waking up in a cemetery was giving her the walking dead vibes. Hopefully, she wasn't a walker. 

She finally looked at the grave she had been leaning on, it was dark but she could still read the inscription written on the stone. 'In loving memory of Layla Heartfillia, beloved wife and mother X748-X777'

She stared at it for a few long minutes, wondering if this was a dream. Unfortunately for her, she had never been one to ignore what was right in front of her eyes. She pinched herself, touched and smelt the grass beneath her feet and took a large breath. 

Everything was telling her that this was real, even if she knew the name Layla Heartfillia belonged to an anime character. There was the possibility that the taxi put her in a coma and that this was a very realistic dream, but something told her that wasn't an option. She didn't know the year Layla was born, sure her mind could come up with a date but it seemed so real. 

If it looks real, feels real, smells real ... she was pretty sure it was freaking real. 

After much hesitation, she pulled her small hand up and pulled her hair to the corners of her face. She looked down and found blonde sparkly hair. She let out a shaky breath and looked down to see she was wearing a black ruffly dress, and from the size of it, she was a small child. If everything was pointing towards something, the metal ring with three gold keys and two silver keys said it all. 

For some impossible, completely mind-blowing reason she was in the body of freaking Lucy Heartfillia. 

--

Finding out you basically body-snatched the body of an innocent nine-year-old child can be more traumatic than finding yourself in a fictional world. At least that was her opinion. If she had woken in her body it would have been scary but still ok. If she had been reborn as a newborn she would have had time to deal with it. But basically killing a child, who would grow up to be one of her favorite characters, was not ok. 

She didn't want to die, but she sure as hell didn't want to kill somebody off to live- especially not a child. As the days passed by she realized something, Lucy was amazing. 

Apparently, Layla had just died and nobody really cared if she hid in her apparent room crying her eyeballs out. Any child who managed to grow up in this sort of environment and managed to be as kind and good as Lucy had been was a freaking miracle. 

Before she died, she had been a twenty-year-old university student studying psychology who liked her solitude. But living in this mansion for less than a month actually showed her what loneliness felt like. 

The mansion was huge, it had about a hundred servants plus her new 'dad'. Her 'mother' had just died and, for a whole month, she hadn't received an ounce of affection or comfort. The maids came in the morning, dressed her and feed her with little to no words and came back during lunch and dinner time, before preparing her to sleep.