Hey everyone! This is a rewrite! Hope you all enjoy! I do not own Fairy Tail or any other stories/movies/music, etc that I might mention. Thanks!
Natsu was dead.
As she sat on the train looking out the window, Lucy cried. Silent tears streamed down her face. She hung up the lacrima with the Master. Happy curled up in her lap in a state of disbelief.
They had been on a job because Natsu burnt Lucy's kitchen to ash. The reward was unusually high for a normal job, 1 million Jewels, but Natsu wanted to do something nice for Lucy. It was his fault that she had to replace the whole kitchen, and since he was constantly so destructive, he might as well get some extra Jewels to help Lucy pay her rent for a few months, or for future reconstruction.
The job had been to destroy a monster that was terrorizing farms about an hour outside of Clover Town. It was straightforward in the description. Nothing should have gone awry. Giant monster, hit it a couple times until its dead, get the money, and go home. Sadly, fate had decided it would end differently this time.
Upon their arrival at the clients house, something felt wrong. A storm had started as soon as they arrived, even though no clouds had been in the sky. There were smoking craters in the field, and the barn was crushed. The farmer begged them to get help. He said that he had seen the monster the night before and that it was too big for two people to handle. Natsu wasn't going to back down from the challenge. They set off into the woods to find the beast.
It wasn't hard to find. The monster's roars were deafening and echoed through the forest. Natsu smelled dark magic in the air, its source... The Beast. Its skin was black and blue, and its eyes were an eerie silver. Its teeth were as long as dragons, except sharper. Blood dripped from its mouth. Half of a sheep lay on the ground at its feet. Lucy froze. The situation felt wrong.
The rain came down harder and lightning flashed through the sky. Natsu tried in vain to attack the beast; not even his roar punctured its thick hide. Lucy had summoned Taurus and Loki, but their attacks couldn't accomplish the task either. Both of them were exhausted, and Lucy was close to her magic limit. She looked over to Natsu to see if he could possibly keep fighting, but instead of finding him, she heard him scream, "LUCY RUN!"
She was thrown to the side. When she looked back, Natsu stood where she had just been. When she looked closer, Natsu wasn't moving. A long black nail had been driven through his chest. His eyes lingered on where she was as he collapsed. Happy flew to her side, picked her up, and flew her away as fast as he could. She looked in her hands and found Natsu's scarf. Then, she started to cry.
Both Happy and Lucy sat like that for the rest of the train ride back to Magnolia. The sky darkened, then started to cry with them as they arrived at the station, met with the sullen faces of their friends. Together, they slowly made their way back to the guild hall. All the citizens closed their doors, and turned on their porch lamp outside, a tradition only done when a mage of Fairy Tail died.
Natsu watched as his friends grieved. He tried to call out to them, but they couldn't hear him. He was stuck. A spirit in the world of the living. A spirit that only a powerful celestial mage could set free.
I will be spreading this story out more and making it progress more slowly than I had planned originally. Thanks for reading! Leave a review if you can! Thanks!