And we're not lovers. We're just trouble.


Seven years prior, almost to the date, Natsu's Grampy Igneel died of emphysema.

Natsu remembered it was late when his mother came into his bedroom with plans to take him and Zeref to the hospital to say goodbye. She had to crouch and pull aside the edge of his blanket fort to peer in. He and Zeref were sitting almost knee to knee, their Gameboys in their hands while they played Mario Cart. He remembered thinking it was serious because she didn't scold them for still being awake so late on a school night.

It started thunder storming on the way to the car. It was the first of the season.

He remembered thinking that the lights inside the hospital were far too bright. He remembered the distinct stench of death that clung to the Palliative Care Unit. He remembered the heavy toxic cloud of sad, too. He remembered trailing into the room behind his mother and behind Zeref, but in front of his dad. He remembered toeing to the cot and looking at his grampy's sunken face and he remembered shaking.

He didn't like death, it made him feel helpless. He felt like he should see it, though, so he watched Grampy struggling to breathe after the nurses removed the oxygen mask. His father put his hand on Natsu's shoulder and dragged him to his side. He felt safe there; like he could watch the end.

Natsu regretted that. There was something that left the body when a person died. Some people called it a soul; Natsu didn't like that so he decided that he didn't have a name for it. Once you saw it leave, though, it was something you never forgot. There was a definite moment when a person ceased to be a person and became just a body.

It was fucking horrifying.

It was horrifying to know, too, that the man that lay on his apartment floor was missing that piece of him, as well. He was gone.

The apartment was so quiet that, when Natsu's phone buzzed, his adrenaline spiked. Zeref jarred, too. Both of them stared at the offending object held loosely in Natsu's hand. Zeref spoke first. "Don't answer it."

Natsu heard himself say, "It's Lucy." Why she was calling so late, he didn't know, but that was definitely her smiling face looking up at him from the phone screen, a black bow in her gold hair. She looked so out of place in this morbid apartment.

"Don't fucking answer it," Zeref barked. "You'll flip out and she'll know."

Know. Know what, exactly? Natsu stared at the man on the ground. Then he stared at his brother. There was red on Zeref's hands. It was a colour his brother was used to, whether from fighting or from hurting himself to match his little brother when the occasion called for it. This was a whole lot of different, though. Someone was dead.

Dead.

Natsu's heart waited too long to beat and then fluttered against his ribs like a fly with only one wing. "Fuck," he whispered. Zeref stood; he was agitated, the emotion just rolled off of him and hit Natsu like it was a physical thing. He repeated, "Fuck."

"Get out of here," Zeref said.

None of his words made sense to Natsu. He could hear them, but his brain wouldn't put them in the right order. "What?"

"Leave." Zeref made to push him towards the door, then remembered the state of his hands and stopped. "You don't have to be involved. You were at Mom and Dad's; you didn't come home."

Natsu's brain engaged and he understood. Leave. Leave Zeref to handle everything.

He always handled everything.

Like it was a done deal, Natsu would obey because Natsu always did everything Zeref told him, Zeref crouched and picked up the man on the floor with a lot of stumbling and effort; blood got smeared on the wall and dripped all down Zeref's pants from a gaping head wound. He grimaced and clenched his jaw so tight, his teeth were in jeopardy. Natsu saw his brother in clear light, then. He, too, was scared. Knowing that made Natsu braver.

"You can't take him out like that."

Zeref's wide eyes met Natsu's; he looked honestly surprised to see him still standing there. "I told you to leave."

Natsu moved. His palms were sweaty as hell going to the rubber maid they had to keep their blankets in. He pulled out the first one he touched, a ratty retro Ghostbusters blanket, black except for Slimer on the front, large pink tongue lolling out of his gap-toothed mouth.

He brought it back to Zeref and laid it down on the ground. Zeref visibly warred with himself, then seemed to club to death all of his protests and hesitations and crouched so he could drop the man down. He was relatively small so it was easy to wrap him up entirely.

The only thing they had to keep the ends of the blanket closed was tape. Natsu used a liberal amount, wrapping it around and around while Zeref lifted the head and feet respectively. Natsu didn't like the way the man's eyes seemed to track him. They made him feel sick to his stomach, so he taped extra well up there.

Without provocation, Natsu got the keys off the key hook. The only thing Zeref told him was, "Be careful."

The night air was cool and refreshing. Natsu took it in but could only smell iron. Things swirled around him like in a dream. Dumpsters, garbage, cats, a car on the main road driving by.

He started his truck and didn't remember driving it to the front door and backing up so the bed was hanging over the concrete steps. When the time came to put the body in the back, Zeref said, "I'll do it myself."

Natsu resigned himself to keeping a lookout. His street had always seemed quiet before but now there felt like a hundred eyes watched him. Each second that went past made him more and more anxious.

Zeref huffed in the bed and slid the sheeted body all the way up to the cab. Two spade shovels went in after.

"Where did those come from?"

"Next door." Zeref nodded across the street where the neighbour's shed was open. "We'll put them back after."

"So no one can add robbery to the charge." Natsu almost burst out laughing. It was such a close, close thing. Zeref's glower saved him.

"I told you to disappear—"

Natsu shook his head and got in the driver's seat. He didn't get to stay there, Zeref came in after him and pushed him all the way over to the other side. He dropped a bag of papers between them before starting up the truck. Natsu had questions but they were all lodged in his throat until they were well outside of town and pulling down a Restricted Access road.

"What is this place?"

"A quarry."

A decommissioned one, by Natsu's best guess. There were huge craters in the earth, where excavating machines had dug up stone and sand but trees had since grown and filled the scars.

The headlights cut over garbage bags, big and small alike, as well as large item waste that people had thrown there over the years. The largest and most out of place objects was a burned out car missing its plates and VIN number and an ancient blue fridge, its door torn off. When Natsu glanced at it, he imagined Pennywise climbing out of its too-small-for-a-man frame, one twisted limb at a time. He thought about the dead man in the back of the truck and his heart beat faster. He checked over his shoulder and was both dismayed and relieved—he was still in the back of the truck. Good. But there was a dead man in the back of the truck.

There was a gross hissing noise coming from his lungs. Zeref looked at him. "Breathe."

Natsu gasped in a noisy breath; the one afterwards came a bit easier. Zeref bounced the truck over a few dirt mounds and parked, to Natsu's disgust, just paces away from the fridge. He shut off the truck and the lights and got out.

There was a moon in the sky, huge and silver. It cast enough glow on the newly greening grass for Natsu to see by. Zeref grabbed a shovel from the bed and came around to the hood of the truck. He dug the spade in right there and started working in silence.

Natsu's phone buzzed again and again. It was Lucy. She texted after saying, Please tell me you're okay.

There wasn't much emotion that could come through a text but Natsu knew she was anxious. He also knew Zeref was right, he couldn't respond to Lucy, he'd buckle like aluminum under pressure and spill his guts at her feet. He dropped the phone in the cup holder.

He kept his eye on the refrigerator when he got out of the truck. Of course, there was nothing actually in it, but one could never be too sure. There was a lot of weird shit that went on in the world.

The shovel had butted up against the dead man. Natsu took it out gingerly, half-expecting him to come alive, too, and start moving and talking. Holy, he thought dispassionately against his racing heart. Get it together. He should be worrying more about trespassers driving up this abandoned road, looking to get high or laid, and catching them digging a fucking grave.

The wheezing in his chest was back. He got over it by holding his breath until he was level with Zeref and the small hole he'd made, then he expelled it all in a question that came out too fast and too suddenly, all snarled up together like, "Whoishe?"

Zeref dug his shovel into the ground again and hit a rock; metal and stone scratched together to make an ugly noise that jarred Natsu into asking again, more calmly, "Who is he?"

Zeref didn't waste time dancing around is's, he went straight for the past-tense. He'd already accepted what he'd done. "His name was Wally."

Natsu wished he didn't know almost as soon as he learned that the dead man had a name. A name made him a person. He hadn't realized he was something less until that moment. Black spots appeared in front of his eyes. He tightened his hold on the shovel and they disappeared.

"What happened?"

Zeref's eyes were shadowed by a lock of sweaty hair that had fallen over his brow. "He came looking for you, Natsu."

Natsu processed that. Zeref continued shovelling. The blade sunk in, dug across rock and was yanked out again. All of the dirt was piled up beside the truck's bumper; it'd have to fill up the hole again.

"For what?" Natsu managed.

"He had questions about credit card receipts from a motel across town."

Natsu looked through the windshield at the bag on the bench seat. His throat was a tube filled with cement; he couldn't make any words come out.

"I told him to fuck off, he wanted you, though." Zeref dug his shovel in extra far while Natsu tried to imagine what happened after that. He didn't even know how Wally died (oh yeah, he liked it a lot better when Wally was just Dead Guy). Was he stabbed? Was he bludgeoned?

Natsu looked at Zeref's mangled hands tightening on the shovel's handle and realized it was so much worse than all that.

Fuck.

Zeref grunted and scooped out a large shovel full of dirt just as headlights washed over the trees. Both of them stiffened, Natsu watching in horror, Zeref with grim determination. He was in only one state of mind just then—protect what was his.

The headlights stopped only partway up the dirt road. There was a clanging of metal as a contractor sluffed off their debris in the No Dumping zone rather than spending two hundred at the dump to dispose of it properly.

The tension ran for too long—twenty minutes, at least, then the shrieking of metal stopped, a door slammed closed, and an engine garbled. The truck's taillights were visible through the trees, and then the driver turned out onto the road and the quarry was quiet again.

Natsu shook off his lethargy and squeamishness and dug his shovel blade in with vigor. He worked twice as fast as Zeref and their grave was dug within half an hour. It felt like it should've taken longer to till something so permanent.

He was the first in the back of the truck, too, grabbing Wally by the shoulders and shuffling him down to the tailgate. The blanket had soaked through by the head and was tacky. Natsu tried not to touch it but it was a losing battle.

Zeref grabbed the feet and together, they swung Wally off the back, shuffled him over, and dropped him down. He smacked with finality. Natsu barely looked down. He returned for the credit card receipts, set them on fire and threw them into the hole on top of Wally. They burned to ash.

All of the dirt went back on the pile, was smoothed out, but not so much that it would look suspicious, and then he and Zeref took the fridge and knocked it over on top of the grave to hide the disturbance. A salamander slithered over the ground and into the grass, his home destroyed, and disappeared.

On the way back home, Natsu ghosted Lucy again, deleting her number from his phone, deleting her from all social media platforms, and throwing the key he'd kept from their long-standing room out on the road where it bounced into the ditch.

Zeref watched everything with stoicism. The only way he knew his brother was bothered was because when they'd pulled into the parking lot, he reached into the glovebox and grabbed out a small vial of white powder. He snorted it right off his red-stained hand.

"Get the cleaning supplies. We need to wipe down the truck and the apartment, then we need to shower and clean out the drains, too."

"With what?"

"Bleach."

Natsu gathered everything together.

The sun was rising by the time he felt it was safe enough to go to bed. He couldn't sleep, though. Not for the ghost of Wally that haunted him, not for the pounding on the front door and then on his window.

There was a short scuffle outside. Natsu sat up and watched Lucy get dragged away by her cross-wearing cousin. Halfway to the car, she stopped fighting and started crying. Jellal looked back over his shoulder and met Natsu's eye. There was a promise in his gaze that Natsu couldn't misinterpret if he tried. It was time to start stepping lightly.


When noon came and he was still seeing dead men when he closed his eyes, Natsu picked up his phone and called the only person he could think of that would have what he needed and gave so little fucks that she wouldn't ask any questions.

Brandish met him on the park bench and Natsu gave her the rest of the money Angel had paid him and she gave him her best stuff. They smoked it in an old, closed down restaurant that people sometimes snuck into to do similar things.

He was right, Brandish never asked why he was looking for heroin or why he had the jitters before he even put flame to the gross blackened pipe she handed him. She sat in the booth across from him and traced the links of the chain Ultear had tattooed on her, down, down, past the hem of her shirt. She wasn't paying any attention, her eyes were closed and her head was tilted against the seat and she was lost in the euphoria of her own touch.

Though she was distracting, Natsu couldn't keep his attention on her for long, he was stuck in the ropes of gold sunlight trailing through one of the boarded up windows. He watched it cut through a swath of dust that glittered like the stars in the sky. He swiped his hand through it and pushed it all to the floor to break the spell.