Sneaking onto the train was the easy part. Almost as easy as convincing Happy to help him tag along in secret. Maybe Happy hadn't liked the idea of Natsu following his old team all the way into danger, but he'd easily agreed that there was no problem with Natsu following their friends far enough to hang out with them in the town their work took them too.
Well, their friends sans Lucy. She'd earned her rent for the month—apparently she could do that faster when Natsu wasn't there to break everything—and volunteered to stay home while Gray took what jobs he needed to make it through the month. She was supposed to take over looking over Natsu until Gray came back, but Lucy practically went to the other extreme trying not to be Gray. Natsu had declined to sleep over at her's for the weekend, and he doubted she'd check for him until at least noon the next day, when people wondered why he wasn't at the guild.
Sneaking along without needing Happy's aide would have been ideal. If nothing else, Natsu was confident that he could still do as he pleased without Happy physically forcing him to stop, but he wasn't sure that he would be able to defy Happy without wearing himself down too much to safely follow everyone on the job itself. Happy was still necessary. Natsu needed someone to help him off the train when they reached their destination—a small fishing town that a gang of demons had taken over—and even if Happy was a potential obstacle, he was still Natsu's best buddy. Besides, having a partner in crime was fun.
It really did feel like a crime. For as much as he'd been forbidden from and all of Gray's worrying and everyone else's efforts not to upset him with his condition, there was some part of Natsu's brain that screamed at him to go back. He wasn't supposed to be there. He wasn't supposed to take any more risks. He would be a burden. A load. He needed to turn around sit back at home and be bored while everyone else got to have fun.
Last spring, he'd have led the charge on a job like this. His stomach did a flip when he thought of that, which only served to make the lingering nausea from the train ride worse. He could have taken down a demon with ease. Now he had to sneak around to prove that he could safely watch from a distance while others handled it.
"Natsu, can you walk yet?" Happy asked. "We're going to lose track of them soon. How will we know where to stay?"
"I'll follow their scent," Natsu assured him, although he didn't plan to follow religiously. He'd promised Happy that when they found where the team planned to stay for the night, they'd reveal themselves and beg to be allowed to stay there. If the trail he followed just happened to skip to where they planned to fight, however, then it wasn't his fault if they missed the chance to ask to hold down the fort.
Lying to Happy was part of the reason it felt like a crime.
With a groan, Natsu pushed himself up, then bent over on the ground, sniffing the train station floor. Gray's scent popped out at him, and he crawled along, following it halfway across town, then pausing to listen.
In the distance, he could faintly hear Erza telling Gray and Wendy their plan of attack. The details were hard to pick out in the crowd, but her voice was unmistakable, and Natsu steered Happy that way.
Eventually, he had to stop pretending to smell. Bending down over and over while recovering from motion sickness wasn't comfortable, but it gave him an excuse to slow down, making it easy not to catch up too fast. Not that he needed to do anything to keep himself from gaining ground on the group. They got off the train one stop away from their destination, and it was something of a hike to reach the town they were to liberate. He could go neither fast nor far, and alternated between walking, resting, and letting Happy carry him.
"It seems like the would have stopped by now," Happy mentioned at one point.
"Maybe they're going to set up camp," Natsu said, rather than admit that he'd heard Carla mention once or twice that she would have liked to wait a night back in town rather than run headfirst into battle.
Gray had joked when Carla said that, saying that running headfirst into things was more Natsu's style. After two months of effectively being unable to run, Natsu was surprised that anyone, much less Gray, might still think of him that way.
By evening Natsu felt thoroughly worn down. Between the train and all the walking, not to mention having gone without his tea since morning, he found himself sharing Happy's sentiment that it would be nice if they could stop and sleep soon. At the point that his feet started to drag and he tripped over everything, Happy took to carrying him non-stop.
This might not have been the best idea. Yawning, Natsu resigned himself to follow the plan he'd laid out with Happy after all. If everyone walked this far out of town, they were sure to have brought camping supplies. As soon as they stopped, and he hoped they stopped soon, he would go up to their camp and admit to sneaking along. They'd send him home in the morning, and if they only planned to camp for three, he was sure his addition would be burdensome, but it was getting dark, and Natsu struggled to keep his eyes open.
"Can you go a little faster, Buddy?" Natsu asked. "Maybe we can finally catch up."
"Aye."
Happy beat his wings harder, picking up the pace as they wove through the field they traversed towards his team. For the first time since Natsu snuck onto the train, he caught a glimpse of Erza's scarlet hair just before a demon attacked her.
-o-
With the information that they'd received, Gray's assumption was that they wouldn't enter the demons' turf for another mile or so, but he wasn't about to complain when they were attacked early. They'd vastly underestimated the walk between train stops, and the sooner they were done fighting, the sooner they could go back to the inn.
There were seven involved in the attack, and the report the guild had been sent claimed nine total. All were identical in appearance, looking like large, black apes with white markings all across their bodies, and matching the description of two other clusters of demons that guild members had fought off in order to protect towns. Rumor had it that someone found a Book of Zeref, and was mass-producing the things. Gray took two, leaving another two for Wendy and Carla, and three for Erza.
They were dumb brutes, possessing little in the way of cunning, but making up for it with the sheer force of their attacks. After two attempts, Gray gave up on making an ice shield that would only shatter when struck and made more of an effort to dodge every attack.
It was when one punch forced him to bend back and drop so abruptly that he fell on his back that Gray spotted the absolute last thing he wanted to see on such a mission: Natsu peeking out from behind a tree only twenty feet away.
His blood went cold, and his first reaction was to try and convince himself that he imagined it, but he could still see Natsu there, and Happy sitting on a branch a little higher up. It didn't take much imagination to guess as to how Natsu had followed them so far.
Distracted by the sight, he didn't even see the fist that came down and smashed into his midsection.
Gray screamed in pain, clutching his stomach and barely managing to roll out of the way of another attack. He pushed himself onto all fours, and pushed himself out of the way as the second demon tried to take advantage of his momentary distraction.
Staggering to his feet, Gray did his best to resist the urge to glance back at Natsu and potentially draw the demon's attention to the idiot. He failed, and felt sick seeing that, perhaps in reaction to seeing him take a hit, Natsu had stepped out of his hiding place and moved several feet towards them. Worse, Natsu was trembling. Whether that was from fatigue or the strain of trying not to jump in and help, Gray didn't care. It was bad news either way.
"Happy!" Gray choked out. It felt like a few ribs broke where that demon hit him. "You two get out off—"
Something collided with his side, and Gray was sent sprawling across the field.
He coughed, tasting blood, and tried to push himself up again. Pain shot through him, and he had definitely broken a rib now. Struggling to his feet again, he tried to stand up straight, but it was all he could do to keep upright.
"Gray!" he heard Natsu shriek. He looked up just in time to see not only the black fist flying towards him, but the flaming kick that knocked it just enough off course.
A jumping kick like the one Natsu pulled used to be easy for him. He would have landed on his feet laughing, and followed it up with a punch. Now Natsu crashed to the ground, and struggled to push himself up before going rigid.
"Get out of here!" Gray snarled, but he could already see that Natsu wouldn't. He must have taken the train and walked a long way to have followed after them, and magic wore him down so fast. The way he'd stiffened, Gray was sure he was on the border of another attack. "Happy! Happy, grab Natsu and go! You two—"
He broke into a coughing fit, hacking up blood.
"Gray?" Natsu tried to push himself up. Tried. His arms gave out beneath him, and he was clearly at his limit.
"I've got him!" Happy cried, zipping down and lifting Natsu. "We're sorry!"
"Just… just get him out," Gray said. "Before those things… can…"
Happy nodded, focused on Gray, wings stretched to fly away. The second he took off, Natsu's arm shout out, hand hooking around Gray's and holding on with all its might.
For a split second Gray tried to pull away, lips already forming words to snap at Natsu for trying to stay. Natsu was sick, weak, and his grip wasn't supposed to be that strong, but Natsu held on for all he was worth, and with Happy trying to speed off, it was enough to pull Gray back a foot.
Something whizzed by behind him, and Gray glanced over his shoulder to see that an attack had just barely missed his head.
A sharp inhale of pain from behind him, but Gray knew better than to look away from the enemy again. He only gave a slight grunt of acknowledgement when he heard Natsu gasp out, "Sorry," and threw himself back into his fight.
-o-
It hurt.
It hurt.
Natsu had thought it had to be magic that set an attack off, but after he'd used that spell, he still hadn't felt his worst. Sirens had been blaring in his head telling him that something was wrong and he thought he had no strength left, but he knew he wasn't having another attack. Then he saw that thing coming for Gray. Right for his head. And it had clearly hurt him so much the last time that landed an attack on Gray. Natsu acted without thinking and used strength he didn't know he had to try and help, to try and do something to make up for ruining everything, and Gray fought against him. Tried to resist him when he wanted to help. Then everything hurt and his vision blurred. He didn't know if he'd pulled Gray to safety or not.
Happy said something, but Natsu couldn't tell what. Every sound he managed to notice sounded like it had passed through five feet of mud to reach his ears. Everything hurt so badly, he could barely think to try and make sense of what he heard anyway. It was a struggle for Natsu to keep his thoughts focused long enough to worry about Gray. He didn't have it in him to linger on his own situation beyond to realize that he'd burdened Gray with it. He certainly wouldn't have been able to process what Happy said, even if he could hear it properly.
Without warning, pain exploded along his backside, and a loud noise pierced through the haze. Only after the sound died off did Natsu realize that was himself screaming.
He tried to get up, tried to get away from whatever made it hurt so bad, but when he pressed his palm down pain shot through it all the way up to his shoulder.
The ground? The ground hurt? All that pain because Happy laid him on the ground?
If that demon had struck Gray in the head, then Natsu envied him. If only someone would bash him into blissful unconsciousness. His first attack had been so much easier to bear.
-x-
STA: And then he died. The end.
Nah. I'm not killing anyone in this story. Yet. If I randomly decide to kill someone later on, then Natsu and Gray are pretty safe. I promise not to kill them. I also promise this will be the last attack. Just needed this one last one to force some behaviors out of Natsu.
Asuka1920: This comes up later in the story, but there's been no official information put out about Natsu's illness. Most of Magnolia has picked up on the fact that he's not well, and obviously there are rumors that travel beyond town borders, but outside of the guild no one knows what exactly is wrong with Natsu, and the other guilds aren't entirely sure that anything is wrong.