Natsu's sleep during that day had not been a peaceful one. He managed to sleep but he found himself feeling anxious and shock over the startling news that Wendy and him were related. Albeit distantly but they were still blood. He thought that he had seen the last of his biological family centuries ago. So much time had passed but he recalled every event with his parents almost perfectly.
His father Igneel was a wealthy and privileged man, so his early years were very luxurious. Their home was a glorious manner house stationed in Turkey. It had been filled with millions of rooms and corridors that he had loved to run through and play in for hours. They had servants but his mother insisted that she be the one to cook all his favorite meals, she just had away of making food taste in a way that no other cook could. Then after dinner they would sit together around the fire place and his father would read to them while he would take turns between sitting in his father's lab and his mother's. He was six when his father finally decided to teach him to read and that's the same age he was when his seemingly perfect life was shattered.
They were just getting ready to sit down by the fireplace and Natsu was situated to where he would read along with his father when suddenly the door to their house was broken down by Emperor Mard's troops. All three of them arrested and brought before the man who Natsu would forever believe had no soul. Igneel had been arrested for ignoring countless requests or rather commands that he join in Mard's army to raid places such as Armenia and the Roman empire. Mard said that Igneel's refusal would be an act of treason because he claimed that his cause was to defend their country and honor but his father saw right through the man's lies.
He boldly called out Mard on his lies, saying that his plans had no honor and that he wasn't asking his men to fight in a war to defend their country. He was asking them to commit genocide in order to further the tyrant's power. Mard then reminded Igneel of Rome's murderous crusades and Igneel responded that Mard had not been targeting crusaders. He had been targeting families, untrained and unviolent men, women, and even children. Slaughtering them, locking them in prisons, and or enslaving them. Igneel then swore by God that he would rather die a thousand deaths than serve Mard Geer's cause.
No sooner had those words been spoken, Igneel was then held down and stabbed repeatedly. Natsu tried to look away but both him and his mother were forced to watch it until the life went out in his eyes. Mard then declared that Natsu's mother would be moved to his harem. She spat in his face and said that she would prefer to join her husband in death. That request was granted and Natsu was forced to watch his mother die the same way. The whole time he screamed, cried, and begged God not to let this happen but nothing could be done. And while this event was not what triggered Natsu's hatred to God it would serve as a build up to it.
Mard contemplated killing Natsu but decided to keep him alive as a child slave and Natsu wasn't the only innocent child he enslaved. He had abducted many children before Natsu and forced them all to serve him, but if one good thing could be said about a man like Emperor Mard Geer it was that he never used any of his child slaves for sexual acts. Only hard labor like building statues, monuments, and temples. Still cruel and inhuman but at least hard labor wouldn't damage Natsu's sanity...Much anyway. Natsu had only been enslaved for a month before he was rescued but it wasn't the slavery that damaged him. It was being forced to watch his mother and father die slowly and painfully. It was his first glimpse of how evil the world could be and so long as he lived he'd never forget it.
He was awakened from his troubling memories by a knock on the lid of his coffin.
"Natsu?" A voice from the other side called. He recognize the voice to belong to Lucy. "Natsu are you awake? Erza sent me down here to wake you. She says that it's become dark."
He opened the lid of the coffin and immediately caught whiff of an unfamiliar scent.
"What's the smell?" He asked her.
"Oh it's your breakfast." Lucy said referring to the tray she was holding. "Your evening breakfast that is."
He looked at the tray and sniffed it. It looked like the usual. A raw pig's heart and liver with a pint of Erza's blood to drink on the side, but he could smell something different.
"I hope it's to your liking. Erza was busy at the moment and she asked me if I would prepare your meal for you. I heated up the pack of her blood like she normally does but Gray had to handle the heart and liver part. I just didn't have the stomach for it."
The source of that smell was wrapped in a napkin.
"What's that?" He said pointing to the napkin.
"Oh that! I added some hard boiled eggs. They're leftover from my breakfast. They made me too much and I didn't want them to go to waste."
"Hard boiled eggs?" He lifted up the napkin, grabbed one of the eggs, and sniffed it suspiciously. The smell was putrid and the shell was not as delicate. "Are these rotten?"
"No."
"Then why do they stink?"
"That's how hard boiled eggs are. Don't you know that?"
"No. I've never heard of hard boiled egg."
"Really? You've never eaten one?"
"I've eaten fried eggs, scrambled eggs, even raw eggs once when faced with extreme starvation but never hard boiled eggs."
"Well I think they're delicious and they're excellent brain food."
"Does that mean you think I'm stupid?"
"No. It's just a fact about them. But if you don't want to eat them I'll-"
But he already gulped one of them down. At first he wasn't sure about the taste but found that he liked it very much. Especially with all the salt she had added to it.
"Well they smell awful but they taste great. I can't believe Erza never fixed these for us before. Then again she doesn't like me to stray from the diet she keeps me on."
"You're on a diet?"
"She placed me on it years ago when she found out I didn't need food to survive. She said she wouldn't have one of her top agents become gluttonous and fat so she limited my diet to raw meat and protein, you know to boost up my strength."
"If you don't need to eat then what's the problem?"
"When you're a vampire bound by a contract to a person like Erza you don't get much pleasure in your life and what little pleasure I do get comes from food. Preferably ones with a lot of spice and flavor. Raw meat and protein however does not have much meat and flavor. See my dilemma?"
"Yes. I see. What about Gray? Does he still need to eat?"
"Unlike vampires and other living creatures, Devils don't typically need to consume anything to sustain themselves. I mean they'll consume souls but that's just because they're depraved. But Gray is a tricky subject. He's now a devil he still has a human body. A demonic looking one but it still craves what humans need for nourishment like food, water, and sleep but because of his devil nature he could go for days without all three. Days but not necessarily months."
"Does Erza keep him on a strict diet too?"
"No because to quote her 'Gray is not a hopeless glutton like you Natsu. He has the will power not to give himself a pot belly or diabetes.' Well newsflash I couldn't get diabetes even if I tried. My body no longer succumbs human ailments and health issues."
"It does sound silly." Lucy chuckled. "But you know her heart is in the right place."
"I guess. Sometimes I think she does it just to be mean or keep me in line."
"It may seem that way because you've been with her for so long."
"Too long. God she was a nightmare when she was a child. Back then she wasn't fond of us yet and she saw us merely as manservants to order about like a dictator."
"Oh come on it couldn't have been that bad. She was what, Wendy's age when she met you guys? And you two were probably twice her size back then."
"Size does not matter in terms of dictatorship. All the matters is if you have the will or the temper to do to it and she had both. She was a small but ruthless dictator who knew no definition of mercy."
"You know I'm curious. What was it like back then? Back when you were just getting to know each other?"
"There's a lot to tell and I don't think we have the time for it all."
"Then just skip to when you three started to be civil to each other. Tell me about when she started to like you two and you guys started to like her."
"Oh that story. That's an interesting one. Alright it was about eleven years ago give or take, as you would expect Makarov was none too thrilled that Erza had unleashed us and he spent days trying to seal us back up but it couldn't be done. Not as long as we were under contract and Erza stubbornly refused to terminate our contract until her needs were met. So like it or not, Gray and I were there to stay."
"So Makarov just accepted it?"
"He had no choice but to. It was Erza's call weather or not we got resealed. Not his."
"I guess that was a relief to you guys."
"You would think but not really. We were both miserable serving her and we felt that we had been better off in a comatose state for all eternity but then one day Makarov got called in for a case in his home country, England and he decided to bring his grandson Laxus with him. He was a teenager at the time and it was to be his first case, Erza was still considered too young so she had to say at the Bureau under the care of Makarov's son Ivan which proved to be a very poor choice in judgement because you see before he left he was reviewing his will..."
It's flashback time!