Notes – nothing much, other than Fairy Tail is hard.

It starts when Erza manages to unearth old photographs of the celestial spirit mage's life pre-Fairy Tail – her Lucy Heartfilia life; the time she had spent drowning herself in architectural tulle skirts, and wore strings of pearl in her hair, and the white powder. And there had been that bitter fashion of tying silk ribbons around her neck too. If he had known anything about intentions, he could have said that the whole effect had been like glass. Crystal. Fragile.

Breakable.

But looks can be deceiving. She could have had stones in her pockets all that time.

But then again.

He angles one of the photographs against the light and then cants his head in the opposite direction. Turns the picture around again. And again. "Huh," he comments, "for some reason, she looks exactly the same."

And turns it again and again and again as if waiting for it to change or something.

He glances around the room for a response—but doesn't find anything. Erza is already caught deep in her own world, her own past maybe, chained down by the geometry of the diamonds crusted across one of Lucy's painstakingly (beautiful) make-believe dress. Like a princess, Erza thinks but doesn't say aloud. Can never say, maybe. It is not her place.

Gray just snorts. "She looks like money, dumbass."

"Maybe it's in the blood," Happy suggests somewhat more helpfully, pawing shamelessly through the sheets of film.

Natsu starts a staring contest with her faded snapshot smile. Maybe it's in the blood. He scratches his head. "I don't really get it."

The phrase sticks for a while anyway.

Naturally, when Lucy gets home later that night, she shrieks at them all to stop making themselves so comfortable in her room and immediately segues into a rant about making this month's rent deadline, not to mention the money she needed to cough up in order to fix the chimney that Gray had, for some still unclear reason, crystallized with ice and Natsu had promptly (and, admittedly, predictably) completely burned down and –

She suddenly shuts up. "I feel like I'm being ignored."

Erza continues to shamelessly peruse her closet, pausing only every so often to further examine the cut of a particularly racy top, and Gray is already half-dressed, half-asleep on her bed.

Lucy can take a hint. She turns to sulk at Natsu instead, but ends up taking a step backward upon catching the intensity of his stare. Nothing good usually ever came out of Natsu concentrating that hard on something. "What?"

Natsu squints into Lucy's face until their noses are less than an inch apart and Lucy actually starts to remember what self-consciousness feels like.

Natsu pulls back and looks up at Happy, remembering his conversation. "I think her blood changed," he says in a decisive manner and references the photograph he had been looking at earlier. "She looks prettier here."

"Aye," Happy agrees, before Lucy seethes and really kicks them all out of her apartment.

"This is not a hotel!" She shrieks down at them before locking her windows.

A week passes before Natsu thinks about it again.

Happy doesn't even have to point this one out. It happens when the dragon slayer is already sick to his stomach from the train ride back to Magnolia Town. Erza had ordered him to stop dawdling, pressed a quick-money solo job offering in his hands, and promptly directed him to the train station before he could even fully process what had happened. By the time he had realized what had been going on, the train had already started to move.

And that had been that.

The job had been easy, the reward money had to be almost fully compensated in lieu of post-destruction repair costs, and the train ride home had been the most excruciating thing ever.

"I think I might puke," he announces.

Happy sprouts wings. "We're already off the train," he informs Natsu.

Natsu adopts an expression of nausea anyway. "Doesn't make it feel any better," he grumbles off-handedly before a loud crash interrupts and fills in the air.

And then silence.

Happy flutters around. "What's that?"

Natsu perks up at the noise too. His first instinct is to panic and to think of whether he had missed some Fairy Tail festivity, but then he realizes that the sound had been too harsh, too sharp, too grating to be anything like that.

A scream tears out and confirms his suspicions.

Natsu pushes his way to the front. He taps an elderly man on the shoulder. "Hey gramps," he calls out. "What happened?"

The man just shakes his head, heavy, before shifting slightly to let the returning mage get a look for himself. "The poor fella here," he says, gesturing with his worn cane, "all a matter of bad timing."

Natsu cranes his neck and almost immediately wonders if it would have been better if he had held back.

The dog had been torn apart from the inside. A fountain of the darkest shade of red had exploded and cascaded in thin rivers down its thick matted fur. Imprints of bone jut out. The boy up front trembles. He picks at a jagged rock and one of the broken shards of glass—and drops them both from his hand. The shatter rings out harsh in the dead air and he falls to his knees and cries into the suddenly insignificantly small animal. There is no heartbeat to cling onto.

He chokes out, "I'm so sorry... I— I never thought—"

The train drowns the child out, whistling cheerfully, signaling to depart, and Natsu feels sick all over again.

It isn't just the train.

He is a dreamer.

He dreams.

But sometimes – sometimes, on the nights when the moon only is a slim crescent smirk in the sky canvas and the stars are only falling, his dreams consume him. It is on these nights when he imagines the silhouette of a familiar creature with thick red scales, and these incredible strong outstretched wings, and its hot, fiery breaths exhaling promises that only amount to smoke and fade away, forever unfinished. He sees the swing of a tail of a dragon flying farther and farther away from him and a taunting collage of the number 7 and the hardest rain he had ever felt and then a gravestone of a girl –

This is not a dream.

There are bits and bones in the sky.

He had never looked for much. But tonight he looks up hard at the constellations and finds that there are traces of blood mapped decidedly – strategically, even – between the cosmos. It is almost cruel.

There are a lot of things he feels like he should say. He continues to stare up instead. He's never been particularly good at being profound, or letting himself go.

"Gotcha!" A familiar voice calls out. "Everyone's looking for you, you know."

He counts to three before tearing his gaze away from the stars, and the blood. He gives her a weird look. "Why?"

Lucy blinks at him with those huge brown eyes before punching him in the head. "Because you were missing for the whole day, you idiot!" She pauses slightly. "Although, I think it was a good thing that I found you first, and not, like, Erza," she adds as an afterthought.

Natsu sees her point almost immediately and blanches slightly. "Oh god," he agrees.

She sits next to him on the blue grass. "What were you doing anyway?"

"Nothing much."

She glances at him curiously. She knows better. There are some things we inevitably keep to ourselves. It is not her place.

"Well then," she starts on a new tangent, unused to how to deal with this side of Natsu. "Were you looking at the stars? I can name all the constellations, you know!"

He gapes predictably. "You know all the constellations?"

She gives him a look. "Of course I do!" She insists. "I am like a gatekeeper to them, you know." She catches the still-doubtful look on his face and grabs his arm. "Look here," she says, and starts linking the path of dried blood until she establishes a simplistic figure of a could-be human with a hat. "Perseus," she pronounces. "It's beautiful, isn't it?" She says admiringly.

Natsu stares at the constellation mapped and sees nothing but blood patterns and shards of light. "I don't get it."

She strikes a pose. "That's why you can't be a Celestial Spirit mage!" She continues on a bit more seriously after catching the look on Natsu's face. "Each constellation is a pattern of the more prominent stars in the celestial sphere plane," she explains. "Being able to map them out is pretty much like understanding them. Or well, that's how I feel, anyway."

He squints up at the sky. "Huh."

Lucy takes his arm again and traces Andromeda and Taurus, and at this angle Natsu can see the deep purple swell of a bruise on Lucy's thin arm and the slight jut of the bone of her left wrist. Fragile, he thinks. And suddenly he remembers Lucy "Heartfilia", with hard diamonds punched red through her soft ears and ironic feathers stitched on her heavy dress. Lucy is still Lucy. Happy's words ring out again.

Maybe it's in the blood–

–and that broken dog, and that child's scream, and all that shattered glass finally stitch together with her flimsy photograph. She talks animatedly about Aries and Triangulum, glass stars that have been sacrificed and desperate. He listens to the subtext to her stories—and makes a promise to himself.

Nothing, he decides, is ever the same after it's been broken.

Sometime later, there are unclear intentions and anguish and the best thing he can do is to uphold his promise. He goes and catches the brightest night stars in a jar. Glass is a delicate object. A common one, to be sure, but still—delicate.

It is hard to avoid and easy to break.

He handles this one with more care than she'll ever know.