Disclaimer: Fairy Tail is not mine!
Chapter Four: Forgotten
Now that it's over,
I just wanna hold her;
I've gotta live with the choices I made,
And I can't live with myself today...
It was dark.
It was dark and lonely and hot and hard to breath and Lucy was beginning to panic when she couldn't move more than a centimeter on either side of her shoulders.
Where am I? She wondered as she consciously slowed her erratic breathing. Lucy lifted her arms from the elbow and her knuckles slammed against the lid of whatever she was in.
The only thing she remembered was going on that last mission…and being overwhelmed by Herule…and…
Dying.
Her eyes widened in astonishment but couldn't see anything because of the darkness surrounding her. Lucy closed her eyes to keep from panicking and wriggled her hips around to listen for the comforting sound of her keys but none came.
Frowning to herself, she began to sort out in her head the possibilities of where she could be. It seemed highly improbable that she would still be in the forest where she was shot, and the people who found her wouldn't just leave her there, right?
Her heart sunk at the realization of where she was.
Buried alive.
Just stay calm, Lucy. Someone will come…because…I won't go to the guild and—wait. They all think I'm dead. God damnit!
A pink haired boy's smiling face formed beneath her eyelids.
"Natsu…" She whispered.
Tears collected at the corner of her eyes and her stomach growled. She could remember the last desperate look on his face right before consciousness was lost to her. Just how long had she been under there?
Frantically, she searched as well as she could the contents of what was buried with her. Coins, jewels, dresses, what felt like shriveled dead flowers…useless, useless, useless!
Thunk!
A knock on the top of her coffin startled her and made her heart beat fast. Could someone have figured out that she was alive? Lucy opened her mouth to call out for whoever it was, but her voice was hoarse from disuse and all that came out was a quiet whisper.
"Yes! Even the coffin is fancy and gold trimmed!" A muffled voice cried from above her.
Lucy's eyes narrowed. She didn't recognize the voice, but she did realize the greedy undertones in it. They weren't here to help her; they were there to steal from her supposed "dead body".
"Well help me pull it out, you idiot." The other growled.
The celestial mage tried to support her weak body inside the tumbling contraption she was trapped in. Lucy felt as if she was inside a washer machine and couldn't get a grip on anything; instead objects were pelting her in the most annoying places—namely her face.
Irritated but quickly planning her escape (she didn't know if these men were psychos) Lucy closed her eyes and made her breathing shallow as the men halted in moving her and the top of her coffin was unlatched.
XxX
"Natsu…"
The dragon slayer bolted upright in his hammock and fell to the ground as he got tangled up in it. He rubbed his eyes blearily and sat up on his cold floor.
He frowned. Natsu could have sworn Lucy had called out to him, but he guessed that it could have just been left over thoughts from a wistful dream.
Shaking himself out of his stupor, he rose to his feet and shuffled to the kitchen to get something to drink. Leaning against his counter, Natsu sipped his drink and looked at the blackness outside, his mind traveling back to the guild he had just left a couple of hours before.
After explaining himself, a weight seemed to have been lifted from his shoulders; instead of trying to carry the burden of Lucy's death by himself, speaking to the others and getting their points of view helped disperse and lessen the grief, though he would never forget that day.
Every night when he closed his eyes, he would see her smiling faintly up at him after he kissed her for the first and last time. When he went to her house to get his daily dosage of her presence and scent (which was almost completely faded now) he would occasionally see her out of the peripherals of his eyes or hear her voice.
He refused to go into her room.
He kept the rest of her home clean and tried to leave things as they had been before the mission, but that room was not to be touched by anyone. He wondered what he would do when her rent was up. Makarov had already forbid him from paying the rent to keep it, saying that it would just make his guilt last longer for no good reason.
At first Natsu thought he was going insane, but when he spoke to the others about it that night, they said that they too would think they heard her voice or see a girl blonde hair, only to realize that it was not their Lucy.
Wishful thinking, Mira had called it.
Natsu placed his cup in the sink and sat down on his hammock and was about to lay down to sleep, but there was a feeling in his gut that something was wrong. He didn't know with what, or why, but the nagging feeling was there.
Scrunching his eyebrows together irritably, he crossed his arms and leaned back into his bed, staring up at the ceiling.
Whatever it was, it could wait until morning.
XxX
"Wow, for a dead person, she looks very…fleshy. Shouldn't she have decayed slightly at least?"
Someone poked her in the cheek and she heard a dull smack, indicating that whoevers hand had touched her was knocked away.
"They probably put some kind of spell on her. She's a wizard after all! Now, stop dallying around; we've got to move her and take what we can that's valuable."
He paused and the other man chuckled. "Her clothes look valuable as well, should we take those?"
Lucy could imagine the sly grin creeping over the other man's face as he affirmed that they would indeed be taking her clothes.
Like hell I'm just going to lay here as they strip me naked! Lucy thought frantically, beginning to carry out her plan.
Lucy kept her breathing even, but began to position herself where she believed she could lash out at the men's faces so she could run away. She could hear rustling around her indicating that one of them wasn't paying attention to the other whose hands were beginning to pull at the first layer of fabric around her waist but was rummaging around in her things in the coffin.
Just as her hand was about to move in the direction of the man, the other grunted irritably. "Will you move the body out of here? I need to get to this stuff as quickly as possible and this dead weight isn't helping me any."
The blonde girl struggled to keep her breathing even as she was hauled over the shoulder of one of the men and mentally grinned. This was perfect! She could easily reach up and…
Thump!
Lucy's back collided with the ground harshly as her mugger threw her down and she tried to control her panic. Apparently, her time spent in her tomb wasn't a short amount of time. She realized for the first time how skinny and exhausted her body was. The dress she wore hung incredibly loose on her tiny frame and she could barely move.
At all.
Lucy mentally screamed in frustration as the man kneeled next to her 'dead' body and began tearing at her clothes once again. When he moved to her corset, her heart beat faster. All that was between her bare body and this strange man was a thin under layer black skirt and undershirt, covered by her corset.
Pop.
The man sliced off the first wire holding the front of the corset together and Lucy's resolve was steeled. She would get out of this.
Lucy focused all of her waning energy on moving her body. Quickly, she slid her eyes open to scan her surroundings before moving. She could see the night sky and waited a few heartbeats for her eyes to adjust. Blinking as minutely as possible, Lucy could make out the outline and face of the man trying to jerk her corset off with a hungry look in his eyes.
Swallowing, Lucy moved fast.
Her knee struck the man in the side of her head with all of her force and Lucy shakily scrambled to her feet. The other man whipped around and his eyes grew wide as he took in his partner sprawled on the ground holding his head and then slid to the now standing supposed dead girl.
Lucy turned on her heel and tried to force her wobbly knees and legs to propel her forward as quickly as possible, but she knew she was much too slow.
A body was flung into her back, crushing her into the ground and making her unnourished body to scream in pain. Lucy let out a huff of air and panted. Her body was not used to the physical exertion she was putting it through at the moment and she could feel her mind trying to go back to sleep, but she couldn't allow herself to pass out now, with this man on top of her!
"Just what the hell are you, pretty girl?" He chuckled as he shallowly panted on top of her. Lucy weakly struggled against the grass she was being held in and tried to get out from under him, but that just made him push down on her even harder.
"You're not going anywhere until you tell me where all your money is." The man growled, flipping her over and brandishing his knife as he smiled, "Or I'll just have to…" He trailed off, cleanly slicing through the front of her corset and leaving a shallow cut on her skin through her thin shirt, "Take it from you." He finished, smiling a twisted smile as he yanked off her corset and tossed it aside.
Lucy's heart hammered against her ribcage and she tried to scream once again, but the man just shoved a hand over her mouth and began planting wet and disgusting kisses on her throat as he slowly trailed down.
Tears began to prick at the corners of her eyes. She had just died! And now she was waking up to some asshole assaulting her?
The same pink hair invaded her mind's eye once again. Natsu. Where is Natsu? She thought despairingly.
Lucy narrowed her eyes as the man's other hand began to wander, causing a new flush of anger to overcome her and she opened her mouth, biting as hard as she could into the man's palm and drawing blood.
The man howled in pain as he moved to cradle his palm, giving her enough time to slide her body away from him and begin to stand. However, the man grabbed her foot, yanking him towards her but she wouldn't lose her chance this time. Taking a deep breath, she yelled the one name that came to mind.
"NATSU!"
The man growled and slapped her hard across the face, whipping her face into the ground and causing her to smack her head. He grabbed her by the arm and lifted her up to a standing position, bruising wherever he touched and striking her where he could before throwing her down and spitting on her body.
Lucy heard the sound of an enraged voice shouting curses and the distinct sound of flesh colliding with flesh, but she didn't really care at that point. Her dress was in rags around her, her body was beaten and exhausted as it lay curled on the ground and all she wanted was to curl up and sleep.
Fire burst into her bleary peripheral vision and Lucy squinted in an attempt to see who it was. Her ears were stuffy and she felt as if she was underwater, but she could hear the anger coming from a man's voice that was not her attacker.
Lucy closed her eyes in exhaustion and the fight faded into the background. After drifting in and out of consciousness for a couple of heartbeats, there was silence around her. Someone brushed a piece of her hair away from her face gently and cupped her cheek as they chanted her name quietly. Lucy looked through the fog of her mind and saw a pink blob in front of her.
Suddenly, the slight chill she felt from being on the ground was gone as she was cradled to his chest and hefted into his arms. The blonde girl could hear the questions and demands people were directing at her savior, but he either ignored or threatened them to get them out of his way.
Lucy was pressed against his chest and could hear his quiet reassurances reverberate into her ear when they got away from the crowd and closed her eyes in content.
"Natsu." She whispered, and darkness overtook her.
XxX
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Erza's eyes snapped open to the sound of someone beating at her door and she rubbed her eyes blearily as she sat up and requipped into her usual armor.
Stretching, she hauled her legs over the side of her bed and popped her neck as she stood, wrenching open the door a little irritably. Gray stood there, wide eyed with a fist raised to knock once again when Erza opened the door with a questioning look in her sleepy eyes.
For a second, the two just looked at each other, Gray opening and closing his mouth like a dying fish and Erza blearily blinking at him until the blue haired boy dropped his raised hand, "Erza…"
Gray stopped speaking and Erza raised an eyebrow in silent question as she leaned against the doorframe until the red headed woman got impatient with the boy's silence and ground her teeth together in frustration. If he was trying to be funny by interrupting her sleep…
Shaking her fist at the blue haired boy threateningly, Erza stepped closer, "I swear, if this is some kind of prank Gray, I'll PUNCH YOU SO HARD—"
"LUCY IS ALIVE!"
XxX
Gray sat sulking in the waiting room of the hospital wing in Fairy Tail nursing his black eye while Erza continued arguing with the nurse about being unable to visit Lucy.
"We are her teammates, we have full rights—!" Erza began, bristling in anger.
"I'm sorry, but you don't. We've never had this sort of thing happen…we're waiting for Makarov and Wendy to arrive before we let anyone see her…."
The nurse's voice faded into the background and Gray removed the ice pack he held to his right eye and let the hand clutching the ice fall to his knee. As if hearing a bell only she could hear, Erza whirled around in the middle of berating the young woman to glare at the ice mage who quickly smacked the ice pack back into place.
The nurse used this opportunity to try and inch away, but to no avail. Gray scoffed quietly to himself; Erza could probably smell her fear.
Sweeping his eyes around the room, Gray noticed the pink haired blob that seemed to never stop moving around the small waiting room they were being held in. Multiple nurses and doctors had tried to get them to go home and wait for them to call them back to see her, but Lucy's team refused to budge.
After Gray had given Erza the news about Lucy, the fierce warrior mage had automatically assumed that she was playing some kind of sick joke on her. The flustered woman clocked him in the eye in response to the boys rushed words, armored fist and all. Once Gray picked himself up from the dirt in front of her home, he stomped back to the enraged requip mage and argued until she consented to follow him to the hospital where they currently resided.
"Natsu. Sit down!" Erza commanded, pointing to a chair the dragon slayer hovered around. The dazed boy robotically followed the orders thrust at him, but as soon as the red haired warrior turned her back he was back to pacing around.
Erza yelled over her shoulder once again, but the boy ignored her and continued to march around causing the warrior woman to bristle in irritation. Arms tense at her sides, she stomped over to the boy and began forcibly dragging him to a chair, disregarding his flailing arms and shouts of ire in his attempts at freedom.
The nurse used this opportunity to flee back behind the safety of her desk, watching Erza berate the shouting boy. Gray flopped his head over the back of the chair he sat on to stare at the ceiling as he held the compress to his face and sighed in frustration and exhaustion.
This was going to be a long day.
XxX
She awoke to blaring hospital lights shining in her sensitive eyes, causing her to squeeze them shut once more in agitation.
Lucy could feel the aches in her body, but was no longer exhausted or in any kind of incredible pain as she had been when she first opened her eyes. Remembering with a jolt that she had just been dead, curiosity piqued at the corners of her consciousness, willing her to open her eyes and get answers.
Cracking open one brown eye discreetly, Lucy let her eyes glance around the room. For all she knew, that sick bastard had captured her and locked her up in some kind of torture chamber. Her body didn't seem to be in any restraints as far as she could tell, but when she tried to move her left arm, something kept it down.
Something heavy, warm and oddly familiar.
Lucy peeked through both eyelashes and her eyes rested on a familiar head full of pink with his cheek pressed against the back of their linked hands. His mouth was slightly open in his deep slumber and she smiled faintly as strange relief coursed through her with the knowledge that Natsu was there.
Her smile quickly turned to a frown when she took a closer look at the boy sleeping next to her. Even in sleep, she could see the dark circles under his eyes and the sadness etched into his face. His body seemed to be the same, but the knotted muscles and bruises indicated that he wasn't treating his body the way he should. Her eyes drifted to his hands, noting the swollen knuckles there.
Lucy carefully ran her free hand through his shaggy locks and quietly tried to calculate how long she had been…unconscious.
Was that even what she should be calling it?
"He's not even supposed to be back here, but he snuck in anyway."
The blonde girl's eyes snapped up to see a blue haired girl rounding the corner of the curtain surrounding the bed with a small apologetic smile as she took in Lucy's shocked expression.
"Sorry, I didn't mean to sneak up on you," She began; her eyebrows scrunched together in confusion as Lucy brought a finger to her lips and gestured to Natsu. After a second of pause, understanding dawned over her features and she smiled sweetly. Giving Lucy a thumbs up, the girl quietly opened the curtain surrounding her bed the rest of the way seeing as how Lucy had the entire room to herself and opened the window to let the moonlight shine through.
On her way out, the blue haired girl flicked the lights off and glanced over her shoulder to get one last look at her dear friends before leaving. Her heart clenched in joy at the sight of Lucy tenderly massaging the pink haired dragon slayer's hair as she gazed out the window in thought; a blissful smile on Natsu's lips.
Smiling to herself, Wendy closed the door quietly behind her and went to join Erza, Gray and the rest of the Fairy Tail guild in hunting down the rest of the men who had a hand in digging up their Lucy. Wendy's face melted into a twisted and menacing smile.
There would be hell to pay. (1)
XxX
Shortly after the door clicked shut behind the well-loved medic, Natsu stirred and blinked in confusion before realizing where he was. Arching his neck up without removing his cheek from her warm skin, Natsu warily looked up to the girl he'd missed so much.
Lucy hadn't noticed his awakened form and so he took the opportunity to marvel at her beauty. Blinking the sleep sluggishly out of his eyes, his blurred vision of her finally came into focus. Her hair was pulled back loosely into a braid and the silhouette of her face was outlined in the moonlight shining in from the window, giving her pale skin an angelic glow.
Natsu's eyes trailed away from her face as she stared out the window and took in the shirt he had demanded Gray bring from the dragon slayer's house. The black shirt's collar was slightly stretched out from all the abuse Natsu put it through, but the elongated neck space was appreciated and gave the pink haired teenager ample view of the top of her chest as it steadily rose and fell.
The sight of her breathing was almost enough to send the dragon slayer into a fit of happiness, but he did not want to shatter her thoughts or this peaceful moment between them.
Am I dreaming? He wondered. Natsu's heart gave a painful clench at the thought, but he froze when he saw Lucy's head snap in his direction.
Apparently, the words meant to be kept in his mind had come out of his mouth without his knowledge and had gained her attention. Lucy's wide brown eyes followed his movements as Natsu sat up from lying on her hand and instead perched on the edge of the bed carefully. The dragon slayer kept his hand intertwined with hers in his lap, but his eyes refused to meet hers and instead focused on the floor in front of him.
Silence had never been so deafening to Natsu in all of his eighteen years of living. Was she mad at him for not being there when she needed him most? Natsu would hold no grudges against her if that was the case. He was a miserable excuse for a human being. Any punishment that she deemed necessary, he would follow. If it was for him to never see or speak to her again, he would leave and become mute, because if he couldn't talk to his Lucy, then what was the point in speaking at all?
Maybe she was disappointed. Disappointed and disgusted. His hand clenched in hers tightly. Why was he even there with her? Maybe he was being insensitive by crowding her so early; after all, her death was entirely his fault, wasn't it?
"Natsu." Lucy croaked sternly. When the boy flinched but did not turn around, the blonde girl cleared her throat and repeated herself louder and more clearly.
Stiffly, Natsu turned at the sound of her voice, his haunted eyes searching her own and finding nothing but intense confusion.
Lucy searched the boy's face in front of her thoroughly, her blonde eyebrows scrunched together in concentration as she opened and closed her mouth in an attempt to find a question she wanted answered first.
"Natsu...I..." She began, her eyes flickering past him and widening as a haze seemed to settle over her.
"Who are you?"
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(1) Thank you to Where's the mayo for this idea : )
...my updates will get slower after this one! But since I am an attention whore and need reviews to make me all warm and fuzzy on the inside, I decided to post this today.
Don't worry guys, this story WILL HAVE A HAPPY ENDING. I just wanted to make that clear, but I'm not giving away anything else!
THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR ALL OF YOUR LOVELY REVIEWS, PLEASE KEEP WRITING THEM. THEY ENCOURAGE ME TO WRITE MORE FOR YOU GUYS!
…..REVIEW AND ALL SHALL BE ANSWERED IN TIME!