For the next two weeks, Natsu gave excuses. It was easy at first. He could claim his head still bothered him, or that vehicles made him extra dizzy. Having been unconscious for three days meant people fretted over him far more than he liked, but it also meant they were more than happy to let him rest if he insisted that he wanted to.
After enough time had passed that he could no longer make up an excuse about his head without worrying people over how long it had been an issue, he got creative. He told his team mates that he and Happy had plans to look for a cave in the woods, then hid his scarf and spent the day pretending to look for it so Happy wouldn't wonder why they didn't go cave hunting. On the day Wendy went out of town to visit Chelia, he pretended to come down with a cold that was just bad enough for him to want to take it easy for a day. No one could ever tell the difference between his normal body temperature and what most people considered feverish anyway. Once, he even bribed Cana to give him a phony card reading about how disaster would strike if he went out on a job that day.
Throughout, he felt off. He continued to test his ability to lift the weights lying around his house or cast simple spells. At first he noticed himself recovering. He could cast multiple, stronger spells in quick succession. He could lift weights long enough that he would lose count. But when he paid attention he could tell he wasn't really returning to normal. He could only use half as much magic as before. He couldn't lift as much weight. When for most of his life he'd gone to sleep at night because the rest of the world did rather than because he felt tired, by the end of the day Natsu now always felt exhausted.
Ideally, he wouldn't have gone back to work until he was all better with none the wiser. He seemed to be on the road to recovery, after all. And since Wendy and Porlyusica had surely looked at him while he was unconscious, the most he saw himself accomplishing by mentioning his problem was to have everyone worry for no good reason. The guild's healers hadn't found anything wrong, so nothing was wrong. Probably. He just had to finish recovering from that head injury.
After two weeks he still didn't feel quite his old self, but he had run out of food money, and Gray was starting to tease him about being chicken after his last fight ended the way it did, so it was time to get back to work.
He wanted a light job. Something fun, with fighting, but not too far away. He hadn't attempted travel, but he was worried it might wear him out to need to ride a train to get to their client. And there couldn't be too much fighting. He didn't want to overexert himself in battle. The absolute last thing he needed was to collapse in front of an enemy and be knocked unconscious for three days again.
He found the perfect job for that. A request to suppress a gang of bandits only one town over.
Gray and Erza instead insisted on a job chasing a dark guild out of an abandoned manor three hours away by train.
"It shouldn't be too much more work," Erza told him when he complained about the distance. "The pay is more than four times what your job offers, too. You said you were running low, right?"
So they ended up on a train. Natsu, mercifully, found himself passing out early in the trip, stirring briefly whenever the train stopped in a town or outpost. He felt wobbly when they reached their destination and got off, but by the time they'd stopped to eat and set out from there to find the dark guild, he was back to normal. Something felt wrong, but other than that he was fine.
Something had also felt wrong right before he damn near collapsed fighting those monsters the other week. Natsu decided not to discount the feeling this time. If the feeling worsened, he decided he would back off from the fighting and admit to his team that he wasn't fully recovered. Even if it had everyone handling him with kiddie gloves again, or worse, if they took it badly to learn the issue had lasted so long. It was better than a repeat of how the last job ended.
"We can split up," Erza declared as they walked to the old manor where the dark guild had taken up residence. "I'll attack from the front. Natsu, you break into their base from the back. Gray, Lucy, you two will take the sides."
"And me?" Happy asked.
"You're with Natsu."
"How about groups of two," Natsu said. "Until we know what these people are capable of."
Lucy looked over at him, suspicious. She wasn't wrong to wonder what was wrong with him. He wasn't exactly known for being caution. But he wasn't fully recovered, and that nagging sense of wrongness wouldn't leave him. He wasn't the cautious type, but he'd been unconscious for three days earlier that month after a head injury and had yet to fully recover, and there were limits to how reckless he could be.
"That's not a bad idea. Alright. Lucy and I will go in the front. Natsu, you and Gray can take the back together. How often do manors have side exits?"
"Some have multiple hidden tunnels," Lucy, the girl who grew up in a large mansion, reported.
Erza cursed. "We don't have enough people to cover those…"
"Well… we wouldn't know where those tunnels come out anyway, if they even exist," Lucy pointed out.
"True, but still…"
"It'll be fine," Gray assured her. "These people will probably be pushovers."
They spent the rest of the walk discussing plans they knew they wouldn't follow. Lucy was the only one who ever really stuck to plans, but that didn't stop Erza from making them. She was going over what do to in the various circumstances where they might encounter the dark guild master—who used the same Titan magic as their own master—when they reached the top of a hill and the manor came into view.
"It's huge," Erza muttered.
"It's surprisingly modest," Lucy muttered in response. As the only one with first-hand experience with upper class life, the other three had nothing to go on but her own word.
"Remember the plan?" Erza asked.
"Nope," Natsu grinned. "Let's smash the place."
Gray laughed. "Now that's a plan. Come on!" He grabbed Natsu's arm. "Attack from the back, right? Let's go!"
Erza yelled after them about the dark guild master, but Natsu didn't pay her much heed. Even if he hadn't felt like he was at full strength, he'd begun to itch for a fight while putting off work. He might not have fully recovered, he might have planned to back off if that feeling that something wasn't right intensified, but he was looking forward to being back in action.
He and Gray didn't make it all the way to the back of the manor before someone launched from a side window and lunged for them. Gray stopped to intercept, creating a shield while Natsu dashed around the two and charged at the building.
One flaming punch took down the wall, revealing ten more mages inside. Instinct told Natsu to run. He was still recovering, and ten mages was a lot when magic wore him down easy. Pride told him to keep going. Gray got the first opponent, and if Natsu left the next ten for him, then Gray would never let him hear the end of it.
Luckily, Gray had been right, they were pushovers. Only one gave Natsu any trouble, and even if their water magic was good for blocking his attacks, they weren't able to do any damage to him.
Nonetheless, he was panting when he finished off the last of them. It hadn't occurred to him to keep track of exactly how much magic energy he had, and he was beginning to regret that. It felt like he had almost used up his stores already.
The dark guild was supposed to be almost a hundred and fifty members strong.
"Natsu?" Happy circled around him, "Are you okay?"
"Yeah. That water bastard was tougher than he looked," Natsu lied. He would admit to not feeling perfect if it got to truly hinder him, but he still had some fight left, so he wasn't to that point yet. "How's Gray doing?"
"Fine, thank you," Gray said, walking up to them. Peering around the ice mage, Natsu couldn't see what had become of his opponent. He didn't see Gray's clothes anywhere either. Sometime between when they had split and when they finished their battles, Gray had gone from fully clothed to shirtless.
With Gray watching, Natsu couldn't admit to having any trouble with such small fry. He forced his breathing to steady, and followed the ice mage into the next room.
He did his best to be subtle about holding back, trying not to make it obvious that he let Gray take larger groups of opponents, while he fought one or two people at a time to conserve his energy. In the distance, he could hear Erza fighting too. He hoped they met up before his strength gave out. It had to be good for him to get back to work, he reasoned, but this was a little more work than he'd needed to start back in with.
It occurred to him that he might want to tell Gray that he still wasn't feeling one-hundred percent after all. By the time they'd cleared three more rooms, his legs shook from fatigue. Two more opponents. He decided. He would take out two more opponents, and then he would tell Gray he needed to stop. More, if he lucked into fighting someone who used fire.
Naturally, he then found himself faced with three people.
Fine. He'd said two to be cautious. He could take out three if he had to. He could take them out fast.
He drew breath to use his roar, but stopped short of spitting out fire. That nagging sense of wrongness was growing overwhelmingly strong, and all of a sudden he couldn't help but remember exactly which spell he'd been attempting when the last fight he'd been in had suddenly gone horribly wrong.
But Gray was watching, and Natsu would rather take out a few last enemies then call it quits than he would chicken out in a fight against people who would normally be easy for him.
"Roar of the Fire Dragon!"
He didn't get to see the results of his attack. The same pain as before burst in his skull, even sharper than the last time, and he collapsed.
-o-
He never fully lost consciousness. Not really. He saw blurry doubles, and since he couldn't make out what he was looking at and the brightness hurt his head, he shut his eyes, but he was still awake. He could hear Happy and Gray saying things. Lot of things. Loudly. He tried to tell them to shut up, because they were making the pain in his head worse with all that noise, but it came out as more of a garbled moan, which only made them say more things.
Eventually, the pain in his head dulled enough for him to notice other sensations. The aching pain in the rest of his body, for example. At some point, he became aware of the fact that Lucy and Erza were there. He didn't know when they got there, but it was nice to have them there. Where exactly 'there' was, he couldn't say. He realized he'd been moved, but when he cracked his eyes open for a moment, the setting didn't look familiar. Granted, everything was still blurry, spinning and tilting and sometimes splitting into doubles. For all he could tell, his friends might have brought him home.
He lost the ability to pay attention again when nausea rose up in him. Had he been put on a train, or was whatever was wrong with him making him physically ill? He couldn't tell.
That passed after some time, and Gray carried him on his back. During the trip it had been too hard to keep his eyes open, but he was growing more alert. He could recognize the scents of Magnolia, and half the time when his teammates spoke, he could make out bits of what they said. It was mostly about him. They sounded worried, which was nice. He'd gotten to be a little worried himself, so it was good to have people looking out for him. That their being concerned for him was a given was something Natsu was too disoriented to realize.
Finally, he was set down in a bed in what smelled like the guild's infirmary. Home and safe, Natsu decided that even if he felt too awful for it, he should probably sleep. Wendy was there, and Porlyusica too. They'd fix things. He wasn't going to hide that something felt wrong anymore, and they would fix him up and have him good as new in no time.
-x-
STA: Natsu doesn't strike me as the most prideful person, but he also seems like someone who would try not to lose face in front of a friendly rival, or someone who would push themselves a little harder than they know they should. The setup for his condition was based on that second one. The barriers preventing him from getting help sooner were based on the first.
Anyway, apologies for this chapter being, on some level, a repeat of chapter two. There's a specific reason I wanted this to happen twice before they figure out what's wrong and I promise it'll be relevant later.
(Forgot to respond to reviews last time. Whoops.)
M.I: Eeee! Thank you! That made me blush!
Defendedclone: That potential pitfall is one I'm hyper aware of. I'm trying not to rush the story, but at the same time, I don't want it to be too repetitive. I definitely will put forth and effort to keep it from getting stale. (Feels a little ironic saying that on the second "Natsu goes on a job and collapses" chapter, but I really mean it.)
Daygon Yuuki: Hm... Google gives me nothing on pink hair for either term, and I like how roset/rosette sounds more, so I'm gonna with it for now. Thanks, though.