CHAPTER 42: THE BREACH
A/N: Extra gore warning for this chapter
The month of Frostfall got its name from the thin layer of frost that covered the earth in the morning, melted away during the day and fell again in the night. But now, instead of frost, the grounds were covered in blood.
I would've been here today.
That was the only thought in Natsu's mind as they rode across the battlefield. Lucy leant close to the horse's ear, softly speaking the frightened animal through the carnage, as it was the only way to get to the road that led to Riften. But for Natsu, there was no comfort as he beheld the mournful sight.
The sunlight was fading from the world, a sign they'd have to stop soon. The horse was exhausted and would collapse if they wouldn't find clear water for it to drink, but there just wasn't any spring, any river nearby that hadn't been dyed red with blood. And with the faint red light of the sunset, everything was stained in a crimson shade: the mountains far ahead, the trees, the fields. Especially the fields.
Natsu could only look down from the horse for short amounts of time. Whenever he lowered his gaze to the ground, to the bodies their mount had to step over, he wanted to throw up. He usually didn't get sick on horseback, but now he did. He had surely seen death before. He had seen blood and guts and broken bones and splattered brains, but nothing had ever been as horrendous as this. If he'd dismount the horse, he'd be standing knee-deep in parts of human bodies. Severed limbs, heads, lonely eyeballs, almost like a stew the gods had made from flesh and pieces of metal, armour and swords and spears.
He knew not when the battle had happened. They were in the outskirts of Whiterun, the smoking city only barely visible on the horizon. The mountain they had descended from, the Throat of the World stood on their right side, across the bloodied rivers and burned bridges. They had arrived somewhere around here when they left High Hrothgar, but nothing of the landscape was familiar for him to recognize. The farms had been turned over, buildings and trees consumed in fire, the lively sight they had seen before was completely gone.
Lucy reeled the horse to the south, to the upstream of the river where it hopefully wouldn't be stained red. Reluctantly, the animal followed her order. Its steps had grown weary as it swayed from side to side, panting heavily.
"I don't think it can keep going much longer," Lucy said and straightened her back. Natsu turned his eyes from the ground to her – the first pleasant sight in a while. "It's getting dark soon. We must find a place to stay for a night."
Lucy turned her head around. There were bodies in the south, in the north, in the west, in the east. This had to be where the first battles were fought, where the Stormcloaks had pushed through the defences and proceeded to the city walls. Natsu was now sure they were Stormcloaks. Bits of blue cuirasses were still visible among the red, which ironically was the colour of the Empire. Their banners and standards, blue flags with the head of a bear, were stamped in the mud, yet some were still standing upon the carnage, flaying in the faint wind.
Though the battle had moved forward, the scene wasn't silent. Not at all. The birds had come to feast upon the dead. Thousands of blackbirds, ravens, crows, and vultures were flocked here. They flit away when the horse trotted on their way, but then returned to their spots as if on a laded table. Their hollow creaking filled the dusk, but wasn't enough to fill Natsu's mind. How he wished he could replace his thoughts with the singing of the greedy, hungry birds.
"Any ideas?" Natsu asked, cold sarcasm in his raspy voice. Both of them had been quiet for so long. They had barely said anything to each other for the entire day.
Lucy knit her brows into a frown. "We could try to reach Riverwood."
"That's too far," he answered. "Our best chance could be the place we camped when we returned from High Hrothgar. We could reach that before nightfall." Natsu squeezed his eyes shut. The smell of rotting flesh was giving him a headache. "I just hope this fucking battle didn't spread to there, too."
"Probably not. They were going to Whiterun, after all, not to the mountain."
Natsu nodded slightly. Lucy turned back to the horse, trying to hush words of encouragement to the animal, to push through the last paces before it could rest. While it was a trained, well-bred warhorse, it had been carrying two people for hours. Though they two combined possibly didn't even weigh as much as a fully-armoured soldier with heavy weaponry, it had its limits. Sitting on the back of the saddle was getting extremely uncomfortable for Natsu too, but while his thighs hurt like Oblivion, he forgot the pain as soon as he looked down to the ground.
How Lucy was handling it, he didn't know. Natsu held onto her cloak to maintain his balance – it would've been easier and more secure to just wrap his arms around her waist, but he didn't dare to. Once, when the horse had gotten scared of a flock of ravens, and almost thrown both of them out of its back, he had shortly grabbed her to keep himself from falling to the meat stew below. Then, when the animal had calmed down, he had let go.
The bodies on the ground were dispersing. They still littered the landscape, but they weren't gathered into a horrendous rug upon the field. They were slowly reaching the edges of the battleground. In the far distance, the battle was still raging, and far from over. Catapults kept firing their bolts into the city, and the black clouds of smoke hovered above Whiterun like a thunderstorm. Natsu no longer wondered why the folks were preaching about the end times. But if the world would be brought down in flames by men or the dragons, he couldn't tell yet. Maybe both would act as heralds of the apocalypse.
Perhaps once he had thought there was glory in war, in avenging a dead friend by fighting in the rebel ranks, but now he knew there wasn't. There was just gore and grief. How close the strings of his life had been from being woven into this carpet of the dead. And he just couldn't get rid of the haunting thought of knowing he would've been here today. He had already decided to join the rebellion, but fate decided otherwise.
The only reason why he and Igneel were caught by the Legion was that Ulfric Stormcloak had been ambushed and captured nearby, and they were just passing through the burning village of Shor's Stone. If not for that, they would've escaped, or been caught by hold guards, possibly served some time in jail, but they would've lived. It had been the Legion who decided to execute them along with Ulfric and his rebels. The Empire had no need for outlaw mages who'd be too dangerous to be left alive, as they had said.
But now, as Natsu witnessed the horrors caused by Ulfric and his rebellion, he finally understood that joining this madness would've had nothing to do with avenging Igneel's death. It struck him like a warhammer straight to the face. He had once thought he would've gotten to kill Imperials, the same soldiers who cut off Igneel's head, but no. Not a single one of the dead was a Legionnaire. They were citizens of Whiterun, guards and bannermen, trying to defend against an overwhelming army of blood-thirsty fools. This blood wouldn't bring Skyrim freedom. And most importantly, this blood wouldn't bring Igneel back.
And when they faced death, they were all the same. No right or wrong, no rich or poor – good or bad, they were just the same, food for the crows to feast on.
The creaking of the birds was left behind them, and the echoes of the battle faded into the distance. When they reached the upstream of the river, Lucy pulled the reins and stopped the horse. It whined and snorted as if trying to shake them off with its last strength. Natsu looked down again, and was surprised to see grass and moss and rocks and frost. A white frost covered the rocks, gentle flakes of snow, almost blinding bright after all the blood he had seen.
Relieved by that, Natsu dismounted the horse. It was harder than he had thought, his legs stiff and achy as he turned himself sidewards in the saddle and slid down. There could've been an easier way to do that, but he had no experience of riding. He bent his knees as he fell to the ground, but the pain in his ankles still made him curse. Quickly, he stood up and helped Lucy out of horseback as well. She groaned as circulation returned to her legs when he put her to the ground.
Lucy stretched her arms and back, loud snaps sounding from her spine and wrists. Then she gathered the horse's reins again and guided the animal to the stream. Gladly, the water was clean here. While Lucy made sure the horse would drink enough, Natsu took a small walk around. They had ended up on the crest of a hill from where they could see all over the battlefield they had just ridden through. The wind carried the stench of corpses and shit and death to him, almost making his eyes water. From here, the flocks of blackbirds looked like mats of decay over the remains of a giant.
Natsu glanced over his shoulder. Lucy was still there, kneeling by the riverside as she washed her face and hands in the running water. The horse's head hung low as it drank directly from the stream. Natsu doubted it would be willing or able to carry them a single pace further today. From here, they'd have to proceed by foot. Whether the horse had belonged to the Stormcloaks or Whiterun, Natsu didn't know, but maybe it would return to them after this.
Trusting she would be okay for a moment, Natsu paced down the hill. The tingling in his legs was agonizing, but he pushed through the pain, knowing it would get better soon. He had attached his waterskin to his belt this morning and hadn't taken a single sip since. There was no way he'd be able to eat anything today, but he'd faint if he wouldn't drink, and so he pulled out the cork and brought the waterskin to his lips. Did he ever eat the mudcrabs they caught? He couldn't remember. Probably not.
After the first sip, he poured the water to the ground. He watched it fall as a thin line, purling as it hit the rocky ground. The taste of death had seeped through the hard-boiled leather, making the water undrinkable. As he put the cork back and tied the empty waterskin back to his belt, he noticed something ahead of him. The water rippled downhill closer to the thing – someone's legs behind a larger rock. Natsu gulped. A wounded soldier?
Carefully, circling far around, Natsu walked closer. There was indeed someone lying behind a boulder, someone who made no sound. No other bodies nearby. Natsu stopped by a distance and observed the legs for a good while. They didn't move. Only the blue-dyed, ragged cape that was loosely wrapped around them swayed in the wind. Remaining cautious, Natsu approached the body until he could see it fully.
His heart shrunk at the sight.
It was a young man, just a boy somewhere around Natsu's age, perhaps a year or two older, but very fairly dead – a Stormcloak, judging from the blue cuirass, probably a Nord. His horned helmet was placed to the ground beside him, his blonde hair glued to his scalp by sweat and blood. Tears had washed clean trails on his mud-smeared face, and as Natsu's gaze moved down on the body, he saw his left arm was missing. Cut below the shoulder, a leather belt tied as a tourniquet around the wound. A few arrows were stuck in his calves, reminding Natsu of the time when Igneel was shot through the leg. He grimaced as he wondered what terrible pain this boy had gone through before he died.
He must've been wounded on the battlefield, and then he had run here. A trail of crimson spots marked the frost-covered path he had come from, and the rock he rested against was dyed in red. How he had survived that long with a severed limb, Natsu didn't know, but it hadn't been long enough for him to return home.
When they had ridden through the field, all he had seen was a bloody mess, a den of slaughter, but this was a single fate. It struck much deeper. Stiffened by death, the boy's fingers were squeezed around something white. A piece of paper, a note. A letter? It didn't seem he had been attempting to write anything in his last moments, more like reading it over and over again. Natsu crouched by the body and picked it up, the paper slipping through cold dead fingers. He unfolded it. Though most of the paper was stained in bloody fingerprints, he could still read the last lines.
'… and the old maids say that the child is a girl. I hope you'll come back home before she's born, so you could hold your daughter when she comes to this world. May Talos be with you, my love. – Helgi.'
Natsu bit his trembling lip as he folded the note and put it back into the dead soldier's hand. Same old story, told a thousand times in this cruel land, but only now he could really comprehend what it meant. Every soldier promised to come home. Even those who kept bragging about entering the great mead halls of Sovngarde, they too had people waiting for them at home. For a moment Natsu thought that if he would've joined the Stormcloaks, he would've been different – he had no home, no family, no friends, only the College where the only person who cared about him was already dead, but as soon as the thought entered his head he realised he was wrong. Even then, he had Lucy. He had promised her he would get back.
We can surely hang out more when I get back. It's not like it will take long, he had said, as every fucking soldier did. She had asked if he was scared of dying. Why should I be? It's not like I can decide when I'll die. There ain't no use worrying about the things you can't change. And Lucy had known it was a lie. He had believed there was some sort of fate laid upon his path, divine protection, but at the end of the day, there was none.
Humbled, Natsu stepped back, but couldn't tear his eyes away from the dead soldier just yet. The last rays of the sun reflected from the dim chainmail and steel boots the man wore. Erza had said that it was much worse for those whose fathers returned from the war, but that thought didn't bring him any comfort. There was still going to be another child who would never know her father, another father who would never know his daughter. And just one more was too much.
Yet, despite all the darkness, one thing became bright all out of a sudden. There had been a fault in his thoughts. I would've been here today, he had been thinking for the entire day. It was a truth, yes, but only a half of it.
I would've died here today.
It struck him with the strength of lightning. This dead young man could've been him. It would've been him if he had chosen a different path – no, if Lucy hadn't guided him there. He had already chosen a path that would've led to this. It was Lucy who made him turn away. It had been so clear, so bright that he'd grown blind to it. Without her, he would've died here today, if not earlier. She always spoke how he had saved her from Helgen and all the other troubles that had followed after that, but it was the other way around. She had saved him.
If there was fate laid upon his path, it was her. Only her.
Natsu looked down as his vision was blurred with tears. He wiped his eyes into the sleeve of his robes, sighed as he forced himself to stay together. As his thoughts sifted from the dead soldier to Lucy, the discussion he had with Erza this morning began to replay in his head. It felt like it had been years since. You're being a coward, and a liar. Man up, Natsu. Man up and tell her the truth.
He wanted to believe what Erza had said. She had been right – he was afraid of losing Lucy, being banished, exiled from her side. He just didn't know what he'd do if she wouldn't forgive him, but again, he knew the only way she would forgive him was if she'd hear the truth from him. He had once assured himself he could take the secret to the grave, but he was just disrespecting Lucy by believing she wouldn't notice he was hiding a betrayal so big. It wouldn't only eat him up from the inside. It would eat away their friendship as well.
"I've got to tell her," Natsu whispered to the dead man, as if he'd owe it to him for dying here in his place. "I'll tell her the truth. I just…"
His words died into the chilly air as he heard Lucy's voice, coming from a small distance away.
"Natsu? Where did you go?"
Natsu turned away, walked a few paces to where he had come from, but halted as he saw Lucy standing atop of the hill. Lucy's eyes were on the legs of the corpse, as they were seen behind the boulder. Then she moved her gaze to him, as if piercing right through his heart, reading all of his thoughts. Lucy stood there in silence for a moment, then glanced at the legs again.
"Are they –"
"Dead," Natsu filled up and nodded. He forced himself to look away from her before she'd figure out everything he had just gone through, and began to walk up to the hill.
Lucy kept looking at the body for a while until Natsu reached her, then she turned. Natsu saw that the horse was lying down beside the river, its front legs crossed beneath its head. Either it was too exhausted to keep standing, or Lucy's presence had been soothing enough for the animal to trust it could lay down safely. Lucy said something about that, but Natsu wasn't listening, and as she saw how dazed out he was, she fell quiet too.
In silence, they walked back to the horse. Lucy knelt beside it and kept stroking its head gently as she watched the sun setting behind burning Whiterun, the black clouds of smoke painted orange and crimson by the last light. Natsu saw no beauty in that sight. Men were still dying out there – but despite all that, he was glad, relieved that he wasn't there. Another close call, another avoided death, but he was here with Lucy. It was all that mattered.
And then, it was all so clear. Unlike everything he had believed earlier, now he knew he had to tell Lucy about his 'deal' with Jellal if he didn't want to lose her. And he didn't, not ever. Carrying the secret to the grave would only mean he'd end up there faster than he'd like. There was still a chance she wouldn't take it so bad, a risk he had to take – and even if she'd hate him for it, then it shall be so, but he couldn't carry on living in a lie. He couldn't look her into the eyes and lie to her anymore. She deserved someone who was honest and true, not a coward and a liar.
When she had said that she wouldn't want to go to Sovngarde, the paradise afterlife of Nordic heroes if he couldn't be there too, he had told her not to go where he couldn't follow. Now, he felt different – if she would just have him, he'd follow her to the edge of the world and beyond, through all the planes of Oblivion if that's what it would take to just be with her.
As he watched at Lucy as she sat there peacefully next to the sleeping horse, gazing into the blood-red horizon, he made his decision. He'd tell her the truth tonight, no matter what it would cost him. It felt like he was standing on the edge of something unknown, so infinitely vast, and that leap of faith would either kill him or chance him completely, tear his world apart or bind him forever.
The time had come to breach the walls he had built.
They stayed with the horse until nightfall, but then Lucy decided it was time to go. The over-exhausted animal hadn't shown any signs of waking up soon, and even if it was dangerous to leave it sleeping out there in the open, they couldn't stay there either. So, with their Magelight as their guide, they searched for a place to camp. However, the cries of battle sounding in the distance sent a mournful chill through Lucy's body, and she knew she wouldn't be able to sleep tonight.
Soon they found the same spot, the open area amongst the trees, where they had stayed when they had returned from the monastery, when she had broken her ankles. And in a strange way, the voyage circled back to the start. It was just eighteen days ago when they last were here, but she felt a century older than then. So much had happened. If they had known all along that the Horn had been stolen to Riften, they would've gone straight to Ivarstead and been to there and back already, avoided all this trouble, but somehow Lucy recalled the words Gray had said.
There is no destination – there is only the journey.
Lucy sat on a mossy tree stamp while Natsu gathered branches to put into the fire he was making. Last time, he had surrounded the fire pit with rocks, and those were still in place. Soon he returned with an armful of deadwood, placed them into the pit and quickly set them on fire with his magic. The flames lighted his grim face as he watched them grow upon his command. Then, still in silence, he seated on the opposite side of the fire.
Lucy warmed her hands above the flames, glancing at him again. Still as a stone statue, he kept staring into the fire – there was nothing new about that, but something in his silence bothered her. He was thinking something, and something had changed. Lucy wondered if there had been something disturbing about the body he had found behind the boulder that she hadn't seen. By the gods, this whole day has been disturbing.
While they were riding through the battlefield, Lucy had focused on keeping the horse as calm as possible. The horse had already freaked out once, almost thrown them out of its back, but as she kept talking to it softly, it was able to push through the slaughter. It had helped her, too. She didn't dare to look down so much. The terrible smell of death was enough for her to envision what had happened – and as much as she hated it, her nightmares were starting to make her grow numb to the gore. Even when she glanced at the bodies scattered across the field, she couldn't feel anything. Anything at all.
Maybe numbness was a blessing Natsu hadn't been blessed with.
"What are you thinking?" Lucy asked finally, her voice soft and quiet.
Natsu didn't answer, as she had expected. Lucy kept her gaze on him. His eyes were sorrowful as the flames danced in them. He stayed so scarily still, as if fearing to move an inch. He had brought his knees close to his chest, his shoulders were tensed like a string on the verge of snapping. A tight knot formed in Lucy's stomach.
"You can talk to me, whatever it is."
Still, no answer.
Ever since Morthal and the vampire ordeal he had been put through, he had been quieter than before. As if he had only talked so that she wouldn't worry about him, but such a strategy wasn't working. Lucy's best guess was that it was about what the vampire woman had said to Natsu about his brother. She had called him 'Lord Zeref', after all, and recognized Natsu from the cruelty, not from the outlooks.
Had his long-lost brother become some sort of an overlord of the undead? Knowing, or even thinking about that must've been wrecking him. Even though he never admitted it, Lucy knew he missed his brother, wanted to see him, wanted to know what happened to him. His disappearance had indirectly killed their mother, after all. This was, after Clavicus Vile's pestering, probably the first proper clue he had.
Natsu kept tapping his fingers to his knees as the fire in between them crackled and popped, a veil of smoke rising to the sky. The stars were visible from here, but most of them were covered by Throat of the World, as the mountain rose mightily above them. The silhouette of the monastery contrasted against the dark-blue velvet, and for a moment, Lucy longed to be back there. In High Hrothgar, they had been safe, like eagles in the eyrie, out of reach of all the darkness and evil of the world. Now shadows crept right behind them, danger lurking in each and every corner.
"I hope Erza's going be okay," Lucy started as Natsu didn't seem to be ever answering her question. Sometimes it needed some digging up to get him to talk. "She promised to take me with her to some kind of a girls' night at Jorrvaskr, did you know? With her and Cana and Aela and the others, bathing and drinking mead." Lucy sighed wistfully. "I was really looking forward to that."
Though Lucy wished with all of her heart that everyone in the Companions would survive that battle, a part of her knew it was just false hope. The city was burning, an army was raging against its gates. They could all be dead already. Her chest felt tight and it hurt to breathe, as if an iron golem of sorrow was crushing her within its cold, grief-stricken fist. While she might feel numb about the death of the strangers on the battlefield, she still couldn't stand the thought of losing someone she knew and cared about.
"She's gonna make it," Natsu finally said, but his fist covered his mouth, mumbling his words. He bit into his finger as he looked into the fire. "It takes more than war to kill that beast."
Lucy chuckled softly, but there was no joy in it. Was Natsu worried about Erza? It wasn't too long ago when he would've probably rejoiced at the news of the warrior's death, but that had, thank the gods, changed. Whatever dispute they had between them seemed solved, old grudges forgiven. Lucy wondered what those two had discussed this morning. Could that be the reason behind Natsu's grimness? But with the situation around them as dark as it was, everything could be such a reason.
"I hope so," Lucy answered. "What about the healer girl at the Temple of Kynareth? Or the scholar? His research is still important for us. After all, we didn't find out anything new about fighting the dragons, except that Skyforge steel is effective against them. I'd still say he'd be impressed to hear you brought a dragon down from the skies with a dagger…"
Suddenly, Natsu flinched. Could it still be bothering him? How he recklessly overpoured everything into that spell? While it might've been dangerous, it had saved their lives. Lucy never blamed him for overdoing it. She trusted he knew the limits of his fire, his magic, and –
"Lucy," he whispered then, after a long silence. "I must tell you something."
She blinked as she stared at him. The way he still avoided her gaze made her heart fall to the bottom of her body. It was as far as her numbness could reach – it was almost relieving to feel something, to know she hadn't completely lost her heart.
"What is it?"
Natsu leaned his forehead on his knees, placed his hands on the back of his neck and dragged them over his hair. He sighed deeply, lifted his head again and looked straight into her. At that moment, she couldn't see anything but pain in his eyes. He was trying to hide that, hide the insecurity, but failed.
"That scholar..." he began, faltering as his voice died. He cleared his throat, pressed his mouth into a thin line as if the next words he'd speak would be just utter venom. "He's an assassin from the Dark Brotherhood."
…what?
Lucy couldn't understand. Dumbfounded, as if somebody hit her head with a log of deadwood, she opened her mouth to ask if she'd heard right, but no words came out. She had heard right. Mystogan was an assassin? From the Dark Brotherhood? How? Then it meant that… Her mind couldn't finish the thought. She just kept staring at Natsu in perfect silence as she slowly worked over the information, questions upon questions blooming within her head.
The pieces slipped through her fingers as she tried to put them together. It just didn't add up. If the scholar was an assassin from the Brotherhood, then… then an assassin knew she was the Last Dragonborn. She had told him herself. She had trusted him. But how could he be? The scholar was Erza's childhood friend from Rorikstead, the one who left to Cyrodiil to study, and then returned to help Whiterun's court wizard with the return of the dragons…
Then she realised that the man had possibly never even been in Cyrodiil at all – instead, he had joined the Brotherhood to become an elite killer. And if such an elite killer knew who she was… it wasn't good. Not at all. Lucy turned her dazed gaze back to Natsu. He was shivering as he waited for her answer.
"How… How do you know?" she managed to stutter. As her teeth clattered, she realised she was trembling too. She brought her legs close to her body and wrapped her arms around them. "Have you known… all the time?"
Natsu nodded faintly.
"Then why… Why didn't you tell me?"
"I tried," he answered, his voice shaking. "But you wouldn't let me tell you. The morning after the feast at Jorrvaskr… I… I tried to…"
Lucy held her hand over her mouth, traced her chilly fingers over her lips. He had tried to tell her that? She sighed as she pressed her forehead into her knees, mumbling a silent curse. He had said it was important. And she had refused to listen.
"Oh, gods…" she muttered against her knees. "I… I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I thought… I thought you'd still want to join the rebellion and leave me alone, so I… Fuck, I should've listened to you! And now because I didn't, I told a fucking assassin that I'm the Dragonborn –"
"No, Lucy," Natsu interrupted her. The sharpness in his tone caused her to lift her head and look at him. His hand covered his trembling chin and his eyes glistened as he stared into the flames. Tears? "I told him."
"… what?"
"I told him that you're the Dragonborn."
Natsu took a deep breath to suffocate a sob, but a lone teardrop rolled down his cheek. As he shielded his face with his hands, Lucy began to wonder if this was just another messed-up dream. Lucy pinched the skin on her palm. The pain told her that it was real. She wasn't dreaming. Still, she couldn't comprehend it at all.
"I know," Natsu began, his words now fully cracked and quiet, "that you'll hate me now, but… Please, Lucy." He swallowed the tears, as if swallowing a chunk of pain so massive that he'd choke on it. "Let me at least tell you what happened."
Hate him? Lucy looked at him again, and even in all the shock and confusion she felt, there wasn't a single crumb of hate. She didn't think she could ever hate him, no matter what he'd done. It just tore her heart apart to see him crumble down before her. He had never cried in front of her, but now he did.
"Go ahead," she whispered, trying to sound as soft as she could. "Tell me."
As if assured by the calmness of her voice, Natsu dared to lower his hands from his eyes. He crossed his fingers below his trembling chin, kept staring into the fire as he regulated his breath. He was still fighting back the tears – Lucy just wanted to tell him that there was no need to. It was okay to cry, just easier said than done to make him believe it.
"You remember that story of how I met Erza two years ago, when she was paid to beat me up? And I was already too drunk to fight honourably?"
Lucy nodded. "Somehow."
"Well, she decided to stay with me and Igneel and beat me up the next day, when I'd sobered up. Igneel kept fetching her some strong Dunmer drinks and she ended up, well… fairly drunk, too. I don't know why, but she basically shared me everything about her life. About how she never knew her father, how her mother left her as a child, how his friend's family took her in… and how that friend, a current lover, joined the Dark Brotherhood."
Unable to say anything, Lucy stared at him in silence as he continued.
"I didn't… I didn't really care about that. Well, she beat me up the next day, and I swore I'd never want to see her face again." Natsu chuckled dryly. "But then, when we met her on the road past Riverwood, I remembered all of that again. She threatened to arrest me. Do you remember that?"
Lucy shook her head.
"Well, I threatened to tell the Jarl about her connections to the Dark Brotherhood if she'd arrest me," Natsu said. "And later, you asked me what it was all about. I told you that she's in the bed with an assassin from the Brotherhood. You probably don't remember that either."
Lucy shook her head again. Her memories from the first days after Helgen were scarce and faded. The only things she could fully recall was killing the bandit woman in Embershard mine and getting captured by a troll. Everything else was shrouded in fog.
"That was nothing, really," Natsu said and knit his brow together, as if he was having the worst headache ever. "But, the morning when we were heading to Kynesgrove, me and Erza talked while you still slept. Somehow this Brotherhood thing popped up again, and she… she was just so upset for not being able to see the one she loved, and I… I think I pitied her. It didn't matter to me who she was with, whether it was a vampire, an assassin, a fucking Daedric overlord… that just wasn't my business. So, I came up with this… stupid idea."
"What kind of an idea?" Lucy wondered. It was needless to say that Erza had never meant to tell that to him, but if they had openly talked about that, it meant she ended up trusting the knowledge would be safe with him. There were still parts left untold in this story, and fear began to build up in her chest.
Natsu dragged his fingers through his hair again. "I thought that if they'd disguise him as something he is not, then they could meet, and do… whatever they wanted to do together, without the fear of being publicly executed. Give him a fake name, a fake job, a little fake backstory. I never thought they'd actually do it." Natsu sighed and squeezed his eyes shut. "But then that dumb bitch told him about it."
The way his voice cracked again made her wince. It took everything he had to keep himself from fully breaking down, Lucy could see it, and it hurt her too. It hurt her that this all had been happening below her blind eye, woven underneath the story she'd been forced to live.
"Did she tell him she got the idea from you?" Lucy asked.
"He figured it out," he mumbled. "And he wasn't happy about it."
A lump formed in Lucy's throat. Had Natsu been carrying all of this alone? Upsetting an assassin from the Dark Brotherhood was the last thing a man ever wanted to do. Then, Lucy's eyes widened as she realised that the attacker in the woods probably had nothing to do with the tormented boy they had talked to. It had been about this all along. Slowly, Lucy began to comprehend it all.
"He hired the Wood Elf to kill us?" she wondered.
"No. That girl was supposed to capture us so that he could interrogate us in peace. Or rather, figure out if our lives were worth sparing. But since that failed, he came up with another plan."
"What happened then?" Lucy asked so softly her voice was barely heard.
Natsu was quiet for awfully long.
"He came to me in Jorrvaskr," he whispered then, and fought back another sob. He closed his eyes as tears rolled down his face – and as he cried, tears welled up in Lucy's eyes too. He hadn't even told her everything yet, but she just couldn't stand to see him so sad. "It was… after the stupid drinking game, when I left to cool my head, when he…"
And then, he broke down.
Lucy rose from the tree stump and crouched beside him, placing her arm on his fiercely shaking shoulders. He flinched from the touch, buried his face deep into his palms as he just cried. The only time she'd seen him like this was at Helgen when they had killed Igneel right before his eyes, but not for once after that. Lucy just didn't know what to say. She rubbed his shoulder and gazed into the fire, wiping the tears from her eyes as she waited for him to be able to carry on.
And at that moment, she felt so angry. So angry at herself for not noticing anything. She had been right fucking there that night, but drunk as a horker, messing up with Cana while Natsu had gotten deep into trouble. She could've helped him, but she didn't even know Mystogan – or whatever his real name was – was there until he walked in from the front door. Lucy bit into her lower lip until it hurt.
"He… He held a… blade at my throat and asked me… he asked me which one of us is the Dragonborn," Natsu mumbled finally through the tears. "He said we wouldn't be walking out of the hall alive if I didn't tell him. He wanted knowledge for knowledge. I knew… I knew something important about him, and he had to know something about us in return. He had a feeling that the Dragonborn was either you or me. If not for that, he would've just killed us already."
Lucy nodded in silence, allowed him to continue. Unease churned in her stomach and the lump in her throat was strangling her, but she didn't let that show.
"I… I tried to speak my way out of it. I fucking tried, but I failed. I just kept failing," Natsu sobbed, sniffed and wiped his runny nose into his sleeve. "If someone finds out that he's an assassin of the Dark Brotherhood instead of a damn scholar, he and Erza will be executed. He can't let that happen, and I'm the only person who knew about that, so he had to make sure I'd stay forever quiet. And he fucking figured out how to make it happen."
In a certain way, Lucy could understand that. The knowledge Natsu held was equal to a knife held to their throats, yet they had found something equal to point the knife back at him as well. A tremor of disgust ran through Lucy's body. With bright eyes, she had believed every lie Erza had fed her. She had been so happy for them, but their selfish love had made Natsu suffer. And she didn't think if she could ever forgive Erza for that. Not to even talk about the so-called scholar. Erza had assured her he could be trusted, and Lucy just wanted to spit on both of their faces.
"What did he do?" Lucy asked then.
"Told me to imagine the Dragonborn would be you," Natsu said sharply and lifted his head from his hands to glance at her. "If I told anyone about him, he would give your name to the dragon cult." He swallowed another sob. "And then they'd hunt you down, no matter where you'd try to hide. Then they'd capture you, and break you apart, no matter how you'd try to fight them. Then they'd kill you, no matter how I would try to prevent it. It was his special wish that I would have to watch all that before they'd kill me, too."
A hint of anger flickered among the pain in his eyes, and Lucy felt it so strongly within her own heart as well. She felt so bad for him. It broke her from the inside, but now she understood why he reacted so strongly when Gray learned she was the Dragonborn – everything made sense now. He had used almost exactly the same words, and now she knew those were the words of the assassin. The cruelty of the Dark Brotherhood was unmatched – it showed through this evil, yet ingenious plan Mystogan had plotted. And he deserved a dagger in the back for that good.
"And he fucking figured it out when I said I'd turn him into ashes if he'd lay a bloody finger on you," Natsu mumbled as he shook his head, burying his face into his hands again. "Because of that, Jellal knows that you are the Dragonborn." So, that was his real name. Jellal. "And if his cover ever blows up, he's going to blame us for it. He's going to get us killed in that fucking horrible way. And it's all Erza's fault, and his fault, and my fucking fault, and I just –"
"Natsu –"
"I don't need your sympathy, Lucy, I just want for this silence to stop killing me –"
"Natsu," Lucy whispered softly to cut him off as his voice began to rise into a desperate wail. "Come here."
With the arm she held around his shoulders, Lucy pulled him into an embrace. His whole body tensed as if he was scared to be held by her, but she wrapped her arms around his back, his face pressed sideways against his chest. Lucy leant her chin on the top of his head. Through his cloak, she could feel the sharp bones of his spine and shoulder blades as she caressed his back. Slowly easing into the hug, he clutched his fingers into her robes, holding onto her as he'd never let go.
"No one is going to hurt us," she said while she swayed him gently in her arms as he cried. "We've killed dragons together. No cultists or assassins can harm us. We're stronger than them. We'll always be."
As her eyes began to water again, she pressed her face in his hair that smelled of smoke, letting the dark-pink strands dry her tears. But while she cried too, she didn't let herself crumble. She'd be his rock when he needed her the most. She knew there was so much more behind this, too many tears he had been holding back for way too long, bottled up along all these years.
The passing of time was forgotten while she held him until his shivering ceased, until he no longer wept, until his warmth had banished the cold from her bones.
"I'm sorry, Lucy. I'm so sorry. I was just so scared," he mumbled against her robes, wet from absorbing his tears. "Scared of telling you, scared of not telling you, scared of what you'd do when you'd eventually find out one way or another –"
Scared? Natsu, who hadn't been afraid to save her from a dragon, had been afraid of telling her this? While he probably thought he had broken her trust and betrayed her, Lucy didn't think so. It had to take an enormous amount of courage to finally tell that and shatter the naïve illusions she had. He had tried to protect her from monsters she believed to be her friends. At the end of the day, he was the only friend she had left standing. Of all things, it hurt her the most that he had thought she would hate him because of that.
Lucy shushed him. "It's okay. You never even asked to know about him, and you just wanted to help Erza. It's all their fault," she said and stroked the back of his head. She had never known his hair was so soft. "I'm sorry for not listening when you tried to tell me. I really am. I… I thought you'd still want to join the rebellion, and –"
Suddenly, Natsu pushed himself away, so he could look her into the eyes. His were bloodshot from crying, but she didn't turn her gaze away.
"If I did, I would've died here today," he told and pointed towards Whiterun. "It's a fucking complete slaughter out there. It doesn't even have any reason, any purpose anymore, it's just madness. But I would've been here if not for you. And I would have died. I would be dead without you, Lucy."
Her heart ached, wrenched apart, for she knew it was true. Among all those faceless, nameless soldiers that meant nothing to him, he would've been, lying just as dead as the rest of them. He would've never come back, as she had known. But he was here, alive and breathing, even if it was only because she was the Dragonborn and he'd been tasked to –
"Don't ever think that you're just a task to me," he whispered, his voice cracking again. "Because you've never been."
Lucy flashed him a broken smile as tears fell from her eyes. How long she had needed to hear him say that, and how could've he known? He flinched as he saw her crying, guilt shimmering in his features as he thought he had hurt her, but he hadn't. Perhaps for the first time since Helgen, she didn't cry from sadness or fear or anger.
Natsu tried to say something, probably to ask her not to cry, but she just shook her head and pulled him back to an embrace, infinitely grateful for his mere existence. She wanted to thank him, but no words came out of her mouth, so she just held him in silence as they both cried. But there was no weakness in that, only strength of a bond that couldn't be broken by dragons, cultists, or assassins.
If this hadn't torn them apart, then nothing ever would.
A/N: Hi guys, hope you enjoyed this chapter!
So, after all the carnage and death, here's some Nalu fluff for you. I think after all this bloodshed they deserved to have one sweet moment, and you readers deserved it too. I could write one hell of an analysis of this chapter and psychology behind Lucy's behaviour, but to put this shortly, I don't think Lucy is capable of feeling the full spectrum of emotions at the moment. There's going to be a lot more about that later.
For Natsu's emotions here, I spend a long time looking for a good song to fit the atmosphere. I found Machine Head's "Deafening Silence" from my old playlist and I'll post that to my Tumblr with its lyrics. I took a lot of inspiration from that, even though the scene was told from Lucy's perspective. "Don't need your sympathy/I just want for this silence/To stop killing me" was a literal quote from that. We'll visit his point of view or at least his thoughts of what he was going through in the next chapter.
My goal was to reach Riften chapters this year, and looks like I'll arrive there right on time. There's approximately two chapters before we get there, and I'm already loving my plans for the Riften arc! I've even planned "special christmas gift"-kind of a chapter for you with some extra Nalu :D I'll give you one hint: Drunk Lucy
Next up: Daedra's Best Friend.
Guess what's gonna come to bite their arses? ;)
