Chapter Thirty-Seven
In My Heart
"The heart of a Dragon… Splendid." The voice of the Stargazer brought Natsu's focus back to reality. He could feel that his body was still in those metal lacrimal cuffs, but his mind was currently being occupied by the Stargazer.
"I did expect there to be more fire though." He added quickly.
"Dragons and Dragon Slayers have different elements, we don't all just have fire as our basis." Natsu sighed heavily.
"Oh? Then what's yours?" The Stargazer's voice sounded like he was pacing in front of Natsu.
"Well… Ok, mine is fire, that was a bad example." He admitted quietly.
After a tense moment of silence where Natsu couldn't see or sense what was happening, blurry images began forming within his mind, conjured by the Stargazer's digital wizardry.
"Maybe I should have asked for both of you Dragon Slayers, I could have tested to see who's stronger, but, well, we're here now." The Stargazer sucked his teeth before pressing on and delving deeper into the Slayer's mind.
"We did actually have another one but it wasn't common knowledge and he was excommunicated. He was also a huge asshole towards the end as well, though that wasn't strictly his fault." Natsu rambled casually.
"Do you always speak this much?" He could feel the intense glare the Stargazer was giving him.
"It's a defence mechanism to stop me from getting turned on by these binds." He said, grinning away, "Though I think I preferred it when Titania did it to me." He added with an immature laugh.
"Ah, the first one…" the Stargazer mused, "Titania," he said, rolling the name around his tongue.
"Yes, she is quite the impressive specimen," he concluded as the images got clearer and Natsu watched through the memory of his own eyes as he removed his fight against her on top of the old Fairy Tail guildhall. The same one that he had inadvertently burnt to the ground.
They watched from separate sources as the memory continued, right through to Erza requiping into her flame empress armour.
"Hot." Natsu grinned like an idiot, greatly enjoying this, much to the surprise of the Stargazer.
"This process might be appealing now, but when the extraction begins it will be like having your soul flayed and rubbed with salt." The old man stated dryly.
"That is word for word how I'd describe my roommate." He said, laughing again.
"Let's move on, shall we?" The man groaned.
The images faded and swirled into a mass of colour, trying to recreate another source from within the Dragon's heart.
"Must we? I'm quite happy watching her some more." Natsu's smile faltered as the image formed a perfect picture of him pulling her from the Etherion crystal at the Tower of Heaven, planting that kiss on her lips that had stayed firmly at the forefront of his mind ever since he'd done it.
He'd still been avoiding her and her insistence on talking to him about the event in question, which is why he'd taken this job in the first place.
"Not so talkative now, are you? Thought you could hide these things from me, foolish boy." The old man sneered.
"I…" the Dragon Slayer fell silent, watching the image frozen in time. He'd justified it as a last-second thought when Mira had figured out what had happened at the Tower, but looking back, it was no longer possible to fool himself.
He'd been waiting for the chance to do that since he'd first met her.
"Love is a funny thing." The Stargazer sighed heavily.
"Love is a strong word." Natsu almost laughed.
"This wouldn't be what the machine brought to the surface for us to watch if it meant nothing to you. You can lie to yourself all you wish, it won't change a single thing, but make no mistake, love is at the root of this." He promised. His footsteps continued to pace in front of Natsu.
"I was contracted to destroy Fairy Tail, I challenged her to a fight and never once did she cheap out on me, she saw me for who I was early on and treated me like a person instead of a weapon," Natsu explained, not wholly for the benefit of the Stargazer, but instead for his own thoughts on why he felt the way he did about Erza, or at the very least what had started it.
"Oh?" The Stargazer said with curiosity, "I thought we'd be done, but apparently not. There's more here."
As per his words, the images conjured up something else.
There he was, standing in a room with cameras and lights pointed at him while he held a scantily clad Mirajane Strauss close to his body, both of them posing for the Sorcerer Magazine photos.
"And who might this one be to you, eh?" He could tell that the Stargazer was stroking his beard. "Meero, no, that's not right. How does it sound? Ah, Mira, is that right? Mirajane." The old man nodded, agreeing that the information he'd summoned to the sphere in his hands was correct.
"Mirajane, the silver-haired she-devil of Fairy Tail. Yum yum." Natsu smiled devilishly, appreciating any reprieve from the raw emotion he'd been forced to face previously.
"Let it be said that you've certainly got some luck with women." The Stargazer gave his own soft laugh.
"They both almost kicked the shit out of me as well, even sexier," Natsu added, his grin almost impossibly wide.
"Your emotional bond to this one seems far more like lust than love," the Stargazer said, his tone exceptionally neutral.
"When we first fought, her magic was wildly unstable, for a very brief moment she far superseded what I was prepared for, and so I had to use a nullifying magic, double-edged sword that took my own away. That silver-haired beauty is the only person for nearly four centuries to actually see the darkness inside me, and she didn't treat me as anything less." Natsu sighed, hating the fact that he'd been forced to come to a reconciliation with his emotions before he was ready to.
"I'm seeing a theme," the Stargazer sneered.
"Wait until you see this one," Natsu chided, focusing as hard as he could to conjure up a specific image.
He could hear the Stargazer recoil in disgust as the images formed revealing Gray slowly taking his shirt off.
'Natsu,' the false memory sounded in Gray's voice, overly sensual.
"This…" the Stargazer stopped short, hesitating momentarily, "This is a false memory, you are fabricating this." He said.
"Cheap tactics to try and prevent me from discovering something key." The Stargazer grumbled angrily.
Much to Natsu's displeasure, the images swirled and formed in his mind, a jumbled mess of things that were past and present. Some were Anna, others Lucy. To the Stargazer, it would have been the same person, and he wouldn't have cared for the fact that there were four hundred years separating the almost identical women.
"Lucy." He drawled, clicking his tongue. "You have an impressive bond to all three of these women, but this one, this one you have the deepest emotions for. I would hazard a guess that she's in the town below, which is why you conjured the image of that hideous man." The Stargazer shivered.
"Hideous?" Natsu was caught off guard by that, "He's an idiot but he's far from hideous." he added, immensely amused by that.
"So-" the Stargazer cut in, ignoring Natsu, "If I give the orders for them to eliminate your friends, and bring me that girl's head, your emotions will kick the machine into overdrive and the extraction process will begin. Delightful."
"Anyone touches a single hair on her head and I will set the skies alight and bring hellfire on this town!" Natsu snarled, his own emotions breaching the usually cool facade that he held. He couldn't remember the last time his emotions had gotten the better of him.
"You can avoid that by simply allowing your magic to flow freely, the machine will begin taking it, and while it will still be painful, your consciousness will fade knowing that the people of Loduhn won't be burning your friends at the stake. I admit, I would choose the easy way out, but I'm very intrigued by how much a Dragon Slayer can resist having their magic rendered out of them, so I'm half hoping that you'll say 'Do your worst'." The old man said, flipping some switches on the panel across from the machine.
Slowly, bit by bit, Natsu's sight came back, no longer hounded by summoned images from his subconscious.
"OK, we'll do things your way," The Fire Dragon said, hanging his head in defeat.
"What, really?" the Stargazer spun on his heels, surprised after the things he'd seen so far of the Dragon Slayer.
"No, not really. Do your worst." Natsu's head lifted, eyes full to the brim with a fiery defiance that befitted a true Dragon.
Then the screams filled the air.
A/N: Things will begin heating up between the various interests in another few chapters, and then after the end of the Stargazer arc there are going to be some chapters just dealing with the beginning of the romances.
Chapter 38 is an X37- and already written, I'll probably drop that in a few days.