. Who We Are .
"Up on the mountain,
Down in the king's lair,
Pushing these boxes in the heat of the afternoon.
Oh, afternoon.
~x~
We were never welcome here,
We were never welcome here at all.
No.
~x~
It's who we are."
~ "Who We Are" by Imagine Dragons
Making a face as he finished shoving the box out of the shadowed corner and into a nice sunny patch in the attic, Natsu Dragneel paused to push his pink hair out of his eyes and looked down at it before looking out of the attic window at the front lawn, where his youngest cousin was sprawled out on the lawn, enjoying the warmth before it was gone. His heart twisted in grief as he tried to not think about his father, whose familiar chicken scratch was scrawled onto the side of the box in black Sharpie.
Junk, it read, and Natsu snorted as he began to pry the old box open. Junk. As if anything his father had left behind could be considered junk.
As Natsu began to sort through the box's contents, he thought of how when he was younger, his father had denied him access to the attic. "When you're older, I'll show you what's up there in those boxes," he'd been told. "Until then, you can wait."
Not that it had ever stopped him from creeping into the dusty old attic at every chance he got. Even as young as three, Natsu had been found scrambling up that rickety old ladder to try and pry through the boxes as he did now. Igneel had always managed to snag him before he could get into anything, dragging him down with the threat of a good ass-whooping should he try and go back up. He'd never done anything like that, naturally, but the threat had worked.
For about an hour, and then Natsu would be back up and at it, scrambling up the ladder with the determination of a child who knew what he wanted and how to get to it.
A voice - the grating voice of his oldest cousin - shouted his name up the ladder, but Natsu ignored it. His cousin could screw off for the time being. If he left the attic now, he'd never build the courage back up to come back. It had taken him nearly fifteen years to get up there as it was. Of course, eleven of those years had been spent in what he compared to an evil orphanage in movies. He'd hated it there more than anything, and so had his other cousins. The second Gajeel had turned eighteen, he'd been granted custody of his younger cousins and they'd left without looking back.
They'd been lucky that the house had been paid off and left in a will for Natsu. He wasn't supposed to be able to have it until he turned eighteen, but the circumstances had given them the ability. Naturally, Gajeel and Wendy had moved in with him. Gajeel liked to complain about it a lot, but they all knew Gajeel preferred to know where his only family was.
A spike of grief raced through him and for some reason, he found himself reaching for his throat. There was nothing there, though, and he furrowed his brow in confusion. Why would he do that? He never did that.
Still confused, he climbed to his feet, giving up on even going through one box when he realized he'd been sitting there long enough for Wendy to come inside and yell up for him, demanding, "Natsu! Come on! We have to go, and Gajeel said we're leaving without you if you don't hurry up!"
With reluctance, knowing he wouldn't be back up in that attic for a while, Natsu pushed the box back to where it had been originally and studied it before snagging a picture he saw from the top of a stack just inside, looking at it as he headed for the attic entrance. "I'm coming," he called down to the impatient girl glaring up at him. He began to clamber down, trying to look at the same time, and a hesitant smile slid onto his face. "Look what I found, Wendy," he said, offering the picture.
She lost her attitude and looked, and a mournful sound left her mouth. "Mom," she mumbled, biting her lip. For in the picture stood their parents. Wendy's mother, Natsu's aunt, was at the center, her face warm as she smiled at the camera. Beside her, to her left, was Igneel, his own gaze irritated as he glared over her head at Gajeel's father. Metalicana was firing a nasty look back at him, while the two uncles Natsu had never met looked at the pair in exasperation.
"It was in one of Igneel's boxes," Natsu said quietly.
She looked at him in surprise, brown eyes wide. "You were looking through them?"
He shook his head. "I got stuck on the first one. This is the only thing I really touched. Do you want it?"
Wendy nodded, and with a final look at the familiar face of Igneel, Natsu handed it over.
Rewritten as of April 9th, 2018!
Here we are. A second one. Enjoy.
