Where Prayers Go
In which Natsu had an epiphany.
At first he didn't know what it was he was hearing. It sounded like his phone was talking to him from his pocket, or someone was whispering behind him.
But his phone was still locked, and there was never anyone behind him. Less so now, as he had gotten in the habit of whipping around quickly to try and seen someone who wasn't there. People had started to give his crazy-looking ass space on the crowded sidewalk. Which suited him fine. Anything to keep people off his back while he figured this out.
It didn't take him too long to figure out that the woman's voice he kept hearing was Lucy. It threw him off a bit that it was only sometimes, when he wasn't thinking about her. And it was almost indecipherable.
So the next time he heard it, he stepped away from the group he was walking with back to the house and told them he'd catch up with them in a minute. Instead he ducked off to a shaded place between buildings and focused on listening, trying to determine why he could hear her at those odd moments, when he wasn't trying to hear her.
As he focused on the faint words, they became clear, like a volume dial being steadily turned up.
"-and I don't know what to do. Mama, it's like I'm being pulled between my head and my heart. In my head, I know I need to be free. I need to experience life, while I can, and I'll never get to experience dating and trying out people if the only person I ever date is my soulmate! Right? How will I know what we have is really it? How will I be able to appreciate having a heart full of love, if I never know what it feels like to have it broken? Oh Mama, what should I do? I wish you were here. Help me find the strength of will to make the right decision. And to keep him safe until I can choose what to do."
Natsu leaned back against the building behind him, letting his connection to her fade into the background as she lapsed into silence, hearing three or four of her breaths before his mind tuned them out.
Why was he 'hearing' a conversation with her mother? Why was THAT of all things getting through to him? Was it because she was thinking of him? Or talking about him? But that surely couldn't be the only time she'd spoken of him to anyone...so what was the trigger? He hiked his bag higher on his shoulder and stepped back out into the evening light, making his way slowly to the frat, not ready to rush and rejoin his friends. He wished there was some way to experiment with this, but it seemed to be something she was doing that triggered it. And he wasn't too keen on telling her that he could hear her talking about him to her mom. He didn't want her to stop talking about him, if that was the trigger. Just those few sentences had opened up a whole new angle on why she still wouldn't meet up with him. He could understand her so much better this way. Natsu just wished he understood it better.
But to figure it out, he had to wait.
He hated waiting.
As it happened, he didn't have to wait long. The next morning, as he was waking up, he caught the tail end of another conversation.
"But he was being impossible! How could I possibly have stayed? I hated it there. But I miss you. I haven't gotten to visit you once since I left. Why does dad have to be like this, Mama? Why can't he just love who I want to be, instead of that image in his head of what he thinks I am? Why doesn't he love me for me? Can you help him see it? You were always the only one he listened to. Maybe, even now, you can to do. Please, help me."
Natsu felt ashamed of listening to her conversation this time. It wasn't about him at all.
So, he realized, that couldn't be it. But it was a conversation with her mother. Was it just when she talked to her mom that he spontaneously heard her? Why her mom though? Was it because it was deeply emotional for her? Was she sending out a stronger 'signal' than usual because her emotions were stronger? He didn't know.
And he had to get to class before Erza kicked his ass again for being late.
The next time he heard her, he was in the middle of a group project and couldn't just drop what he was doing. But he sure as hell tried. Excusing himself as soon as he feasibly could in the conversation, he ran to the bathroom and locked himself in a stall, turning up the volume on Lucy the way he had before.
"Mama, I miss you. Why did you have to go? If you had stayed, if you hadn't been forced to leave me, none of this would be happening. I would have had a normal childhood. It's been so much harder this week, even than normal. Because you died this day, all those years ago…" Natsu lost her next words as his heart bled for her, drowning them out. How had he forgotten? His mind flashed back to the articles he had seen on Gray's computer. Layla Heartfilia killed. She wasn't just talking to her mom. She was praying to her. Asking for something from her, wherever she was. And instead of her mother hearing and answering her prayers, Natsu was hearing them. He didn't know if the signals were getting crossed, or it was her soul's desperate cry out into the void that his just couldn't ignore, but when she prayed, he heard.
He thought back to his brief flirtation with religion, right after Igneel died, leaving him alone. When he had finally accepted that Igneel was really gone, and after he had stopped being angry at his father for leaving him when he still needed him, he had ended up in a random church, trying to figure out who he had to talk to in order to get Igneel back where he belonged.
The hours of praying to whatever was out there hadn't done anything. And he had assumed it was because there was actually nothing there. No one with the power to answer his prayers. That realization had thrown him into a funk that only Gray and Erza had been able to drag him out of. Literally, dragging him to the gym to fight them every day for a month before he finally had enough fight back in him to resist their forced exercise.
But what if he had been wrong. What if prayers did go somewhere? But maybe they weren't heard by deities, or other benevolent beings that chose only those prayers that came from the righteous and pure of heart to grant. Maybe that wasn't their real purpose. Maybe he could hear Lucy's prayers because she was feeling alone, and needed someone to be there for her. Maybe when her mother, arguably the person who loved her most out of anyone, was gone, maybe...by default, they went to someone else. Someone who had the potential to love her just as much. Or more.
Maybe her prayers were finding him, because it was up to him to give her what she needed. To pull her up out of the hole she had fallen in.
So, he did the only thing he could think of to help. The only thing he knew made her happier 100% of the time.
Lucy knelt on the ground in the little grove covered in lily of the valley she had stumbled into a week ago. It had seemed like a sign when she had found it. The late afternoon light streaming perfectly through the leaves of the trees of the copse tucked behind a building on the corner of campus, making the whole area glow. Her mother's favorite flower had bobbed at her in the breeze and she had immediately fallen to her knees, feeling as close to her mother as she had since she left Acalypha for Magnolia.
So today, on the anniversary of her mother's death, she had returned to the little grove and prayed to her. Like she had been doing all week, hoping that maybe her mother would send her a sign. Or tell her what to do. She felt so uncertain about so much, that it sometimes made her feel crazy, like her own mind was warring with herself. Lucy missed the certainty her mother had always given her. Her mom had always known what to do and just what to say to make her see that whatever was getting her down, whether it was the juice she had spilled on her pretty new dress in front of Daddy or her missing plushie, was small stuff. Stuff that would turn out ok in the end if she let it.
Without that force in her life, everything just seemed so drastically important. Every little thing could make or break her. And she had no way of figuring out what was the small stuff. What decisions were worth stressing over.
So she prayed. And she felt like her mother heard her, but like Lucy herself was deaf, watching her mother tell her what to do, in her mind's eye, but not being able to hear the sage advice.
But today, she couldn't feel her at all. She was truly gone.
Lucy sat back on her ankles and felt numb. She was alone again.
But then she felt the tingle of pen on her arm.
She looked down to see a flower blooming on her wrist, a perfect lily, down to every detail.
When the lily was done, a rose sprouted up next to it, each petal appearing from the inside out, until it rested, bursting and plump, next to the lily. Next came a daisy. And then another lily, the bundle of flowers beginning to take a familiar shape.
Lucy sat on her knees in the copse for another hour as Natsu added flower after perfect flower to a bouquet that stretched across her arm. She didn't know how he knew, but with each new flower, she could tell he was drawing her mother a bouquet. That he was helping Lucy cope with not being able to bring her mother the flowers she wanted to.
Tears rolled silently down her cheeks as she watched him pay tribute to a woman he had never known, and she mourned the mother who would never hold her again. The woman who would never again light up the world with her glowing smile.
When her whole forearm was covered in a drooping arc of flowers, that seemed to carry it's own weight it looked so real, he finished the drawing with a ribbon, threaded through the flowers and trailing down to her wrist. And then he stopped. Because only she could add what he couldn't say.
Taking a pen from her purse, she carefully wrote in the neatest handwriting she could manage inside the trailing ribbon.
For Layla
And she finally felt at peace.
So, I'm sort of in love with this one. Really happy it came to me.
