A/N: Well, well, well, what do we have here?


22

Moufe un wit me


Previously, on "How to Seduce a Lady": It was the door to the house. The house. I sucked in a breath of air, feeling my blood turn cold.
Wendy was already inside.


"I think I left the oven on."

I tried to make a dashing escape, but Lucy's grip on my shirt tightened even more. "You're not going anywhere."

My protests were barely audible compared to the loudness of her voice.

"Listen Dragneel, yes, you're risking a lot by coming here but won't you feel guilty if you just run away and make everything you've done until now appear completely meaningless?"

"Maybe I could do something about it if I was called 'babe' again." I teased.

"You can be called idiot again."

"Dragneel's fine." I laughed, feeling the tension ease up a tiny bit. But just one look towards the house made me stiffen once again. What was I even doing? Barging in on my birth parents like this and just harassing them like the jerk I was? I'd acted on a whim and just look where that lead me. I had no strategy in mind, nothing even close to a game plan. I didn't even know if they wanted to see me. I mean, we'd been living in the same town for God knows how long and they never even thought to contact me.

The thought stung more than I ever thought it could.

I spared a glance toward Lucy, wishing I could just evaporate into thin air and erase everyone's memory of my entire existence. But she didn't return my gaze. Instead, her expression was dead serious, her eyes fixed at something behind my back which I couldn't see. I turned around to see what was so important.

The blood in my veins froze.

Strange, when you come face to face with the father you've been searching for your whole life, it's not the big things that come flooding in your mind. It's not important stuff like the fact that this was your first impression of him, or that you'd spent all of your days without that man by your side. It's not the fact that his hair is the same weird shade of pink as yours, or that he's a lot different from what you imagined as a child. You don't even think of what you should say or how you should introduce yourself.

You think of small, unimportant details and blank out on everything else.

You think of the time you saw a girl crouching down on the ground during her PE lesson, and how you never asked what she was doing at that time. You think of the fact that your mother had a blue set of earrings that you almost swallowed as a kid because you thought they were candy. You remember the day you lost your first tooth and how you thought that a new one would never grow back.

You don't feel the anger you are supposed to feel when meeting someone who abandoned you while you were still just a small child. You don't feel the resentment, the hate, the accusations.

Instead you feel a small pebble at the bottom of your shoe and wonder how you never noticed it before. You feel an itch at the back of your neck. You feel the temperature on your left hand shift as someone grips it even tighter.

The man standing at the door must've experienced something similar because he hadn't said a single thing to me either. I turned to look at Lucy but she was still staring at him.

"Who is it, dear?" I heard, the voice coming from somewhere inside the house.

"I'm not sure," he replied, and I noticed his voice sounded deeper than I imagined it to be.

And suddenly, it was like all the feelings I lost before all came back to me at once. I felt angered, I felt hateful, I felt exhausted. But most of all, I felt disappointed.

I felt disappointed because he looked like a normal guy. I don't know what I was expecting but it wasn't this.

I opened my mouth but nothing came out of it.

"You should do something before he goes back inside," I heard Lucy whisper, but I just couldn't bring myself to do anything. I felt like my feet were glued to the ground.

"I don't know." I said, when I saw the man's expression change I understood that he'd heard me too. "I don't know what to do Lucy."

I'd always sort of known what I wanted out of my life. Even though I couldn't always figure out why I'd always known what.

I didn't know why I wanted to tease Lucy but at least I knew that I wanted to tease her. I didn't know why I'd invited her to live with me but I knew that that was what I wanted to do.

This was the first time that I'd ever been at a loss of what to do.

She stared into my eyes, searching for something but I didn't know what to give her. I didn't know what she was looking for.

And as thought that was what she'd been locating all along, a look of determination spread across her face and she nodded her head more to herself than to me.

"Excuse me sir," she started, and I felt the breath I took lodge in my throat, "Can we come in?"


I watched Lucy and Wendy both reach out for the plate of cookies that was set on the coffee table, and when their hands collided, they both giggled in a way that only girls could, and each grabbed one of the cookies with a smile. Both of their faces almost melted with joy as they took a bite. I wanted to try one as well, but I didn't think that my stomach could handle anything then.

"My wife is in the bathroom but she will probably be out shortly." The man—my father(?)—mumbled through his lips, refusing to meet my eyes.

After he'd allowed us to come in, I panicked. I thought about how it could all be just one big misunderstanding. So a boy that just happened to look like me was adopted long ago. That could mean anything. I could very well be embarrassing myself in front of some random people and coming in to cause them a whole world of trouble.

But now, seeing how the man did everything in his power to avert his gaze and look at just about anything else in the room made me more sure than ever.

Not to mention his pink hair.

The tension in the room grew with each passing second and I couldn't think of a single way to lighten the mood, and even if I did think of a way, I was much too distraught to do anything by that point.

"Are cookies your favorite?" Wendy asked, as she took another one from the plate. Her carefree manner suggested that she had no idea what had started to unfold before her.

"I'll have to go with ice-cream." Lucy replied, without even a second thought.

"I think we may have some in the kitchen," the man offered, clearly jumping at any possibility to leave the room.

"No, I'm fine, but thank you."

I let my eyes wander around the room. The furniture was not as expensive as the one at my house, but it still wasn't your every day cheap stuff, not to mention that it was arranged by someone with a lot of taste. There were a lot of items that indicated it was a comfortable home: the plate of cookies on the table, a small cat bed behind the door that probably lead to some sort of hallway, a fat paperback with a convenience store receipt marking the pages where it was last opened was comfortably sitting on the armchair, a pair of reading glasses topping it off.

"Is that a Stephen King novel?" Lucy asked, as though she'd read my mind.

"I um," the man shifted from one leg to the other, still not sitting down with the rest of us as though he was waiting for an escape opportunity to present itself. "I don't know. My wife reads books."

Lucy tried to think of a way to reply to the dry answer she'd been offered. "Oh, well I love King. Your wife has good taste."

Nothing.

She twisted around uncomfortably on the sofa. "They're all thrillers and horror books though," she tried again, "So I wouldn't make a woman that reads them angry." She managed a small chuckle.

Nothing again.

I felt bad for dragging her all the way over here just to see her try so hard to start a conversation with someone who didn't seem any livelier than a store mannequin.

"I think we made a mistake," I said, already getting up. I saw blondie panic and try to think of a way to get me to sit back down and give this all another chance. But I couldn't just watch her be miserable and put her through it more than I'd already had.

"Well nobody told me we were having a party!"

I turned around just in time to watch a woman enter the room, cheerfully wiping away her hands on the apron tied around her waist. Her gaze shifted from happy to confused once she moved from Wendy to Lucy, and finally landed on me.

I don't know why, but I counted.

One. Two. Three. Four.

It took her exactly four seconds to fall to the ground.


After rinsing my hands off for the fifth time, I turned off the faucet and just stared blankly at the water doing down the drain. Down, down, down it went in swirling motion. A perfect metaphor for what I'd been feeling the past few hours.

I was about to turn the water on again and wash my hands for the sixth time when I heard a light knock on the door. It was barely audible. My muscles tensed and pretended not to hear anything. Seconds went by and just when I was beginning to think I'd imagined it, it happened again.

"I'll be out in a minute," I mumbled, not wanting to leave this safe space. The bathroom was small but it had character. It was dark blue and even though no kids lived in the house as far I knew, I could see two yellow rubber duckies on the shelf.

"Alright, just wanted to check on you."

And all the defenses I built immediately evaporated into thin air.

I opened the door as fast as I could, grabbing her by the wrist and pulling her inside with more force than I thought was alright, but I was desperate.

I locked the door even though I knew if they found out we were in here together it would arouse a lot of questions and awkwardness, but I just couldn't take it anymore. I was at my breaking point and she was the only one who could undo that last button that was keeping me together.

I felt my whole body start trembling, but I couldn't stop it.

Lucy just stood there watching me with a concerned expression.

"I don't think I can do this." I said honestly, running a hand through my hair in an attempt to calm myself. "I think this was the biggest mistake I've ever made."

She leaned on the wall and kept her head down. "Maybe we overdid it a little," was her reply. "Maybe we should have asked for their number and called, or done something differently at some point, but we did what we did and this is where we ended up." Her eyes found their way back to mine, "I agree that we might have made mistakes along the way, but this in itself, is not a mistake. It's nothing more than a bad setting. But we can work through that. God knows we've worked through worse."

I nodded.

"Remember how you met me? I'd hardly call that a good setting." She tried to smile, "Unless you count me running away and crying through a shower of soup. I don't even think I had any lunch that day." She pointed toward my chest, "You still owe me one for that time."

Another nod, but this time with a small smile.

I approached her, placing both my hands down on her hips the way I'd done a few times before, but it still felt new. It still felt as if she might slap my hands away any second. But she didn't. She didn't do anything to invite me either, but she didn't shove me away.

I rested my forehead against hers, trying to contain my emotions as hard as I could. Our noses touched. I breathed in every time she did. My eyes closed. I could feel her lashes tickle me every time she blinked. I placed my mouth close to hers but didn't try anything. A small part of me was hoping that she would, but she didn't move.

I let my lips touch hers faintly, but got no reaction. I brushed them against hers back and forth, feeling the need to just kiss her already, but didn't. I knew what she'd been through with guys. I wasn't even sure she could handle a guy anymore.

"Do you want this?" I surprised myself by asking. I hadn't actually asked her something like this before, and yet she'd never turned me down when I actually did do it. But just because she didn't say no doesn't mean she hadn't been thinking it the whole time. Maybe she kissed me back because she was scared I would force herself on her if she didn't. I'd asked her if she liked someone that time and she said no, so I had no reason to get my hopes up. Maybe she just didn't want to leave my house and kissed me as part of her chores. The thought alone made me want to vomit.

"I'm not sure," she replied, her lips moving against mine with every word. But still no kissing.

"I don't think I can keep doing this if I don't know what you're thinking." I said, but I wasn't so sure my statement was true. By that point I was so deeply into her that I would take any chance I could get, even if it meant she was indifferent towards me.

"I'm sorry," she mumbled, still not moving away.

"You don't have to be. I shouldn't be pushing you." I said, but when I tried removing my hands from her waist I noticed that hers were coming up to curl around my shoulders.

"You're not pushing me. I don't exactly protest when you try something." She replied, "Its just… there are so many things I need to sort through, about my past and about now. And I'm just not sure you want to go down that path with me."

"I want to listen to everything you've got on your mind." My lips pushed up hard against hers, "Try me."

Her hands travelled to my chest and she lightly pushed me away.

"Well, for example, I'm not sure what this is. I don't know what's going on between us."

I'd wanted to ask her the same thing. What were we?

"But we can talk about this any other time of the day, Natsu." My stomach did a summersault every time I heard her mention my name, "Right now I think we should head back to the living room and see how she's doing."


For a while there, nobody said a single word. Wendy had been so scared that Lucy had offered to walk her home, and winked at me while she was leaving, as though instructing me to make most of my time alone with them.

The woman I'd seen collapse in front of my eyes was now very much awake, and had offered me a bite of the cookies for what seemed like a hundred times.

Her husband was a bit more reserved, still not quite ready enough to sit down.

I decided that since I was the one who started this whole mess, I should be the one to try and make sense of it.

"I'm sorry again for doing this completely out of the blue like that," I started, "But I just had to see you. I had to know what happened."

The woman's eyes pooled with tears but she tried blinking them away. She couldn't hold my gaze for more than two seconds and instead looked at her husband. "Igneel, maybe you should sit down so we can all talk. I think it's time."

I'd heard Wendy mention their names before and yet it still felt like this was the first time. Igneel. Annice.

I tried to say something but nothing came to mind. What were you supposed to say in a situation like that?

"Seems like I don't have to introduce myself." I mumbled, watching the person who was supposed to be my father slowly remove the book from the armchair so that he could take its place.

"We know who you are," The woman—Annice—started, "At least now we do."

"Oh really? What gave me away?" I asked, anger already bubbling up inside of me, finally taking over the confusion I'd been feeling the entire day, "Was it the pink hair?"

They looked at each other, unable to utter a single word. But I hadn't gone there for their silence. I needed answers and I needed them immediately.

"Could you at least give me a reason? One single reason why?" My voice cracked. I wished Lucy was still here and cursed myself for ever thinking I could do this without her.

The woman's eyes started tearing up again, but the only thing I felt was anger. She didn't get to cry. She didn't get to feel sad because she was the one who did that awful thing and if anyone was supposed to be crying it was me.

"We were too young!" She finally choked out, a sob following suit. The tears that had pooled in her eyes finally started overflowing, and I could see my supposed father running a hand through his hair and closing his eyes in frustration. I knew I was disturbing them, but if I'd gone my whole life without any answers, they could handle being disturbed for one afternoon.

"We were just seventeen years old!"

"So?"

"So?" She shouted, "So? Are you ready to have a child right now?! Do you think that if you had one you could give it everything it needs? I don't know what your financial status is right now but we didn't have the means for it! We were still in school! I didn't have a job or a house of my own! And we were seventeen for goodness' sake! My parents would have disowned me!"

"Well maybe then you would've known how it felt!" I shot back.

Her mouth slammed shut.

I didn't even know I was carrying so many negative emotions inside and I wasn't sure where all of that anger was coming from.

"I'm sorry." She whispered through her tears, but I didn't feel bad. I didn't feel bad at all. I know I was hurting them but it was nothing compared to the years I'd spent wondering just why I wasn't good enough.

After what seemed like forever, when her tears were dried up and the room's temperature dropped down a couple of degrees, she took a deep breath, and told me everything.

They'd only been dating for six months. They had no idea what the future held, hell, they hadn't even finished high school. So in order to hide the pregnancy, they were on a five-month student exchange program, something like the one Gray was on, and my mother gave birth to her child there. She gave birth to me.

"We didn't even see you. I thought that seeing you would make everything a lot harder and demanded that they took you away from me before I leaped out of that bed and chased down every nurse and doctor I could find. But I knew I had to have you. I couldn't stand the thought of abortion."

"She cried for two weeks straight and only calmed down because we had to go back home."

I turned around, a bit taken aback. I'd forgotten he was sitting there.

"You have to understand," the woman pleaded, "We didn't even know if we were going to stay together! We'd only known each other for six months!"

I don't know why, but the fact that they got married pissed me off even more. If they could've been a good happy family like this, why couldn't they have been a good happy family for me?!

A sudden knot in my stomach made me realize that if I was going to spend another minute in there I'd just feel worse.

I didn't need any more information.

When they saw me getting up, they both started panicking. I didn't know what they were expecting. They already let me go once. I didn't come back with the intention of spending the rest of my days here.

"Listen," my father tried, "We were promised that you would be taken great care of, and that the woman you were going to was one of the kindest people in the world!"

"Well you got that right. She certainly did a better job than the two of you."

No matter how much I wanted to make them miserable, they still trailed after me while I was walking toward the hall.

"W-we wanted to contact you!" my mother yelled, her hand finding its way onto the sleeve of my shirt, "But I couldn't! I knew that if I did I would just feel worse! You mother tried very hard! Your adoptive mother I mean! She used to call us every day and ask if we wanted to see you! She wanted you to have some sort of connection with us but we thought that it was better this way!"

I snapped and turned to face them.

"She called? She tried to make you come see me?!"

"Don't be mad at her!" The woman yelled, clearly taking my sentence to mean something completely different than what I was getting at, "She just wanted you to know who your real parents were!"

"It's you I'm mad at!" I shouted, "It's you who couldn't take the hit and come see me! Was I that much of a disappointment?" My vision started to blur, "You didn't know if you'd be together after al that time? Well you look perfectly fine to me. And even if you didn't stay together, I never would've minded that!"

"My parents would have killed me!"

"Well my parents should have killed me!"

Silence.

Sometimes you could hear it louder than any noise.

We stayed there unmoving, just watching one another with shifting expressions. I couldn't take it. I didn't want any of that to happen, I'd just went there for some answers. I didn't even know where all of those words came from.

Then it hit me.

I didn't even tell them my name.

My parents didn't even know that I was Natsu.

But that seemed fitting, because at the moment, I was as far away from being Natsu as I'd ever been.

The door shut so loudly I almost turned back to see if the house was still intact.


"She's in a deep sleep." I mumbled, not moving a muscle. "You don't have to be so quiet."

"Well I guess I'm not that quiet if you can still hear me."

I still didn't move.

"You turned your phone off."

"I didn't take you long to find me."

"I had a feeling."

I still didn't turn around. My eyes closed.

"I also had a feeling that you were hungry and got you a burger."

My eyes opened again. Food was the last thing on my mind but I needed it desperately.

I could even smell the burger as she inched closer to me. But still nothing. I couldn't bring myself to look anyone in the eyes anymore. I didn't know if I was proud or ashamed at what I'd done.

"It's funny how every time I visit her I wish she could be asleep so that I don't have to guess which sort of mood she'd be in. But this time, when I need her awake the most, she's sleeping."

"Some things come too late. That's why I don't wish for anything. I don't know just when I'm going to get it, and if I'd still want it at that point."

"But what if you know you'll want something for as long as you live?"

"I'm not sure such a thing exists."

"It exists for me."

I turned around in my chair, still not looking up to meet her eyes because I knew that I couldn't even begin to say all the things I wanted to.

Instead, my head buried itself into her stomach.

"Moufe un wit me"

"What?"

I shifted so that my mouth could be uncovered.

"I said, move in with me."

A small chuckle erupted from her, "In case you forgot, I'm still in your—"

"Move in with me."

"Natsu, I'm still living in—"

"You don't understand what I'm saying."

I pushed back, getting up to look her in the eyes. Funny, I'd never noticed how taller I was, and that she had to raise her head up to look at me. Cute.

"Not as a maid, not as a cleaner, not even as a temporary roommate. Not until you find a better place, and not until school is over. I mean the real deal."

"Move in with me, Lucy."

On the bedside table, the lamp flickered to a stop.


(A/N): Well.

Better late then never?

*dodging all the miscellaneous objects you're throwing at me* okay, okay! I give up! I'm sorry!

I'm really sorry that I haven't updated for... HAS IT REALLY BEEN ALMOST A YEAR !?

EEEK! I'M EVEN MORE SORRY NOW!

If anyone AND I MEAN A.N.Y.O.N.E. is still reading this please let me know in the reviews! I want to finish what I started, (I even have a new fanfic planned out but all in due time), but I won't have the motivation to do it if nobody's reading. So please, give me a siiiiiiign! hit me baby one more timeee!

*ahem* THANKS FOR READING!


with keys, through flames! aye!