Chapter Text
Prologue
(In which Natsu finds a flower.)
Walking—stumbling, really—away from Gray's grave was one of the hardest things Natsu had ever done. Not because those terrible memories were still clawing at him in a desperate bid to keep him trapped, although they were. It was because Natsu felt like he was leaving Gray all over again, even if his friend was dead now.
(And he was dead. Natsu had the memories to prove it.)
But he couldn't stay forever because he had promised Lucy and the others that he would come back, so he eventually dragged himself out of the never-ending nightmarish cycle and stumbled out of the valley.
He felt like he needed something from this place to bring back with him, as if that would somehow let him keep a piece of Gray. What a stupid idea. But regardless, there was nothing to take. Gray was gone and there wasn't anything left of him here but a gravestone and an unceasing torrent of terrible memories.
So Natsu left.
(Again.)
He was still hazy and disoriented, his mind torn between the memories of the past and the present, and the curse-memories still fighting him for control the whole way, so his escape from this valley of death passed as a foggy blur and a mindless struggle to leave. He collapsed when he reached the top of the hill, panting in exhaustion and grief as he leaned against the wooden sign whose warning he had ignored earlier. Natsu took a few moments to collect himself before he staggered to his feet.
He had been too out of touch with reality to be very aware of the thorny vines scratching at his skin as he escaped the valley, but now he could see the numerous scratches and beads of blood that littered all the exposed areas of his body. Hissing softly in pain, he carefully detached some of the vines and spiky branches that had ripped out of the ground and stayed snagged in his clothing. As he pulled off the last of them, he noticed that one of the vines had a small white flower growing on it.
Natsu gently detached the blossom from its vine and studied it. A flower was a stupid memento to take from a gravesite, but it wasn't like he had a lot of options here. And besides, something about its almost translucent petals reminded him of ice.
(And ice reminded him of Gray.)
So he took the flower back with him, careful to keep it hidden from the others when he met up with them. Because he did, after all, go back to the others. And Fairy Tail was reformed and Natsu moved back into his house with Happy and everything should have been okay, except that Gray was still gone.
Natsu kept the flower on the windowsill in his bedroom, and over the next few days he watched as it slowly withered and died, its once-crystalline petals curling up at the edges and fading to an ugly brown. He decided that it had never really looked that much like ice after all.
(Because ice reminded him of Gray, and this dying brown monstrosity did not.)
And even though it was just a stupid flower and absolutely did not remind him of Gray, Natsu waited until night when Happy was sleeping and then crept out of the house with the silly thing held carefully in his hands. He took it out to the little garden outside his window and spent a few minutes studying its desiccated petals in the moonlight. Even the soft moonlit glow couldn't disguise its ugliness.
(Death was ugly.)
He shook himself out of his reverie, disgusted with himself. It was just a damn flower. But still…He silently knelt on the ground and set the object of his attention aside. Digging through the soft dirt with his fingers, he made a small hole and placed the flower carefully inside before he covered it up again. It seemed like a silly thing to do, but dying things made for good fertilizer. And putting the flower in the dirt would…make it fertilize the rest of the garden better than if he just dropped it on top of the dirt. Obviously. That was gardening 101. It wasn't like he was burying it or anything.
(He hadn't been there to bury Gray.)
And even though it wasn't a funeral, Natsu sat in the dirt for several long minutes, staring at the tiny mound in silence. At some point he realized that a few stray tears had begun rolling down his cheeks and he hastily wiped them away, not caring when he swiped dirt across his face. That was the last straw. He stood up abruptly and briskly walked back into the house. He was not going to cry over a dead flower.
(Not even one that reminded him of Gray.)
So in the end, he didn't bring anything back from the grave. The flower rotting away in the ground didn't count, even if he spent quite a bit of time gazing at its barely visible mound out his window. He didn't bring anything back, but it wasn't like he needed a memento to remind him of Gray's death. The curse had given him memories to take back, and that was quite enough. In a way, Natsu supposed that he had brought something back after all, even if it was only a set of haunting memories.
Those memories brought gifts of their own. They brought him depressing thoughts to get lost in and terrible nightmares full of blood and death. In fact, they took over his life for quite some time. Natsu might go through the motions of daily living in an attempt to throw his friends off the scent, but he was a sleepwalker. Flashes of memories that weren't his held his attention throughout the day and kept him captive at night. They were terrible enough to keep him shackled for the rest of his life, and they very well might have if something didn't snap him out of it.
He supposed that he should thank the damn flower, because it was the flower that gave him the idea and reminded him of what was important.
(Gray had always done that.)
It was after he finally let go of the memories for a moment that he came to the sudden conclusion that Gray was not dead after all.