Chapter 1: Intoxicated

The wood grain of the weathered table below her head had begun to blur an hour ago, but someone (Cana?) had kept putting drinks in her hands anyway. And Lucy wasn't one to turn away the distraction – what did they call it? Drowning your sorrows? She guessed that was what she was doing. And, it was easy enough to blend into the background while yet another bout of merriment about their return from Tenrou Island raged around her. Not that she wasn't happy to be back, and thankful that those seven years hadn't snatched these evenings of raucous laughter and chaos away from her, like they'd taken her father…

So much had changed, disappeared in the blink of an eye for her – it had been seven years and ten days since she'd stood in her circle of friends, clutching Natsu and Gray's hands, feeling the bond that linked them all together burning in the emblem on her hand. She'd squeezed her eyes closed, not wanting any more tears to well up and shame her, and had taken one last breath, leaning a little to her left to catch Natsu's wood smoke and salt smell, the way he always smelled after battle. It reminded her of home.

Then…BOOM. The calamity of a lifetime – it clicked into place, an eighth of a moment before Fairy Sphere activated and sucked seven years from her world. She thought she was going to die and her last thoughts were of Natsu – how he'd never find Igneel, how Romeo would be heartbroken if he never came back, how she would never know a future with him, never see his smile again. And how grateful she was that, at the very least, they would die and face oblivion side-by-side. It hit her like a dragon of the apocalypse: she was in love with him.

But, mercifully, there hadn't been any time to sort through things then. Achnologia saw to it that the realization was all she got, one thing for which she could be thankful to the monster. Unfortunately, she woke up seven years later playing a huge game of catch-up, only made bigger by…this thing. This big, awful, wonderful thing she couldn't talk about, for fear that he would find out, and then even more would change, for the worse she was certain. She knew Natsu didn't think of her that way.

So, she kept drinking the acrid, bitter liquid Cana filled her glasses with, watching Gildarts hang on the other woman with a weird sort of jealousy. What she wouldn't give for a few more moments with her parents. But they were gone, and unlike what happened to all of her guildmates on the island, she knew they weren't coming back.

"Lucy! Watch out!" Gray shouted from the other side of the guild hall – much smaller and rattier than the one they'd left behind. She turned to see Natsu's back, blurred to multiples she couldn't count, hurtling towards her with alarming speed, an icy trail in his wake.

She screamed something unintelligible as she tried to drunkenly throw herself out of the way in time. Natsu landed with a crash, taking her slow legs, and what was left of the rickety bench she'd been sitting on, with him.

They ended up half under the surprisingly intact table, a tangle of limbs and broken wooden pieces. Natsu's head was wedged under her armpit, and she heard a muffled, "Sorry, Luce."

She sighed, "It's ok," and began wriggling away from the all too welcome press of his body.

She took to her feet unsteadily, gripping the table for support with one hand while she brushed the debris from her clothes with the other, silently thanking the heavens that she hadn't worn a skirt that day. Natsu scrambled out from the mess he'd made to stand beside her, forehead creased in confusion.

"Is something bothering you?" he asked openly, head tilting to the side the way it always did when he was trying to figure something out.

Her lips pursed in the ghost of a smile as she shook her head. "No," she lied. There were so many things bothering her, so many things she could've mentioned besides…that one, but she just couldn't bring herself to open up to him, to expose herself, with this unfamiliar secret festering behind all the other woes. Her drunkenness didn't help matters – how could she be certain that it wouldn't all coming rushing out, word-vomit style, once she started? No, it was better to stay silent.

Natsu's face split into his signature grin. "Oh, good. Cause usually you freak out when we do stuff like that." He jerked a thumb at the ruined bench, almost hitting Gray, who had come up beside them, in the face.

"Watch it, flame brain!" the ice wizard barked, shoving Natsu's hand away.

Natsu immediately changed gears again. "You want a piece of me?"

"You wanna eat another bench?"

"So you like trying to hurt girls now? Guess you really are a pervert!"

"Is this bimbo trying to hurt my darling?" Juvia appeared, jealous glare narrowed on Lucy, whose mouth fell open at the insult and accusation.

"He was the one who—"

"You will not take him from me!" the blue haired woman insisted, interrupting.

"I don't want him!"

Though no one else had seemed to notice her error, her face flared in a brilliant blush. She tried to hide it by placing a faux-exasperated hand over her eyes, but the damn cat had caught it of course.

"What does that mean, Luuuuucy?" Happy crooned mercilessly, swooping down from overhead. "Does that mean you like someone else?"

Juvia, to her credit, dropped the issue then and went to follow Gray as he and Natsu tumbled about the guildhall. Lucy shook her head in exasperation, stopping quickly when she realized it was making the room spin again. It was going to be difficult to get home like this.

"Are you drunk, Lucy?" Happy plopped down on the table she was still using to support herself, looking up at her with big, innocent eyes. She wasn't known to indulge very often, preferring to spend her money on clothes rather than drinks she didn't like the taste of, but this was a special circumstance. Also, she was fairly sure Cana had paid for most of what she'd had that evening.

"Nope!" she replied, trying to sound chipper and normal. Happy wasn't fooled.

"Natsuuuuuu!" he cried, leaping into the air and extending his Exceed wings. "Lucy's druuuuunk!"

She grabbed for his tail, but wasn't nearly fast enough to catch him, and she almost fell flat on her face trying to do so.

"Natsuuuu!" Happy called again, this time more insistently, kicking his little feet at the shouting ball of fire and ice that was Natsu and Gray. Splitting apart long enough to send Gray flying into the nearest pillar, making a long vertical split in the wood, Natsu finally turned his attention to flying feline.

"What's up, little buddy?"

Lucy was doing her best to sneak across the guild hall before the damned cat could rat her out, though she was not nearly sober enough to do it gracefully, slamming into corners left and right, knowing she could add those to the bruises she'd already have from Natsu's bench-breaking stunt. She stifled a groan of relief when she finally made it out into the cool night air, which soothed the nausea that had surfaced when she decided to try walking.

Breathing deeply, her hand over her eyes to ease the dizziness, she didn't notice him until she was being lifted off her feet, one arm under her knees, the other cradling her head and shoulders to a partially bare chest that radiated heat. She let out a little yelp of surprise, feeling her face redden at Natsu's easy smile. "Come on, Luce. I'll take you home," he said softly, a slight rasp in his voice that usually only came out when he was really, really worked up about something in a fight. She wondered why she would hear it now.

"I'm fine," she responded weakly, half-heartedly struggling to free herself as he started walking in the direction of her home. In truth, she didn't want him to stop holding her, and she knew she wouldn't make it home herself. Maybe if she called one of her spirits, but she wasn't even sure she could focus her magic power enough to do that. "I can walk!" she insisted, knowing it wasn't true.

He laughed, gripping her a little tighter. "I saw how you walked out of the guildhall just now."

"I…"

"And, I don't know why, but Mira was really mad that you left I guess. She got that creepy, sweet look on her face that she always has just before she uses one of her she-devils, and went over and took away Cana's wine barrel. I didn't hear what she said to her, but even Guildarts looked a little freaked out! Ha ha!"

"Oh no," Lucy groaned, putting both hands over her face again. "Cana's gonna kill me."

"Huh?"

"She's the one who got me so drunk, flame brain!"

Natsu furrowed his eyebrows. "Ohhhhh. But why would she be mad?"

"I don't know, maybe because I got her in trouble with the maternal she-demon?! Mira hates it when we try to drink underage!"

Natsu shook his head. "Ah, I bet she doesn't even remember it tomorrow!" He grinned, cheered by the thought.

"Yeah," she sighed, not so easily convinced, but comforted by his smile. She realized it was a dangerous sort of comfort, but that only made it more precious. There wouldn't be many moments like this in her life, she knew, so she'd have to take what she could get.

When Natsu returned to the guildhall after placing Lucy in her bed, Erza's sharp gaze caught his, the intensity making him fidget uncomfortably. "What's your problem?" he muttered as he made to walk by her to the table where Happy, Wendy, and Carla were sitting.

An iron hand on his arm stopped him. "I hope nothing untoward happened when you took Lucy home. You were gone quite a while," Erza said, a scarlet eyebrow arching accusingly.

"Un-untoward?" Natsu stuttered, not entirely sure what she was trying to imply, but somewhat terrified by the steel in her eyes and voice. Erza usually looked like that when she was about to beat the shit out of something; he really didn't want to be that something.

"Yes. If you took advantage of her drunken state and damaged her honor in any—"

Oh.

"No!" Natsu interrupted, raising his hands in denial. "No, no, no, nothing like that!" He grinned in what he hoped was a reassuring way, knowing his face was turning red with embarrassment.

Erza was un-swayed. "Then what, exactly, took you so long?"

Sweat began to bead on the back of his neck as he tried to think of an excuse that didn't sound as lame as the truth. It didn't help that Erza's accusation had conjured up images of him and Lucy entangled and...

Agh! Stop thinking about her like that! he ordered himself, trying to turn his mind in a more savory direction.

"Well," he mumbled, scratching the back of his neck out of sheer awkwardness. "She… she asked me to stay and talk to her until she fell asleep. Something about Achnologia keeping her up at night. She said…"

You make me feel safe. That's what she said. He didn't know why, but he didn't want to tell Erza that. He wanted to keep that secret, warm feeling it gave him for himself.

"…her mom used to tell her stories about her adventures as a wizard when she was a kid and she couldn't sleep," he continued, blush deepening as he focused his eyes on his feet. He just knew Erza was going to laugh at him.

But she didn't. "What story did you tell her?" Her voice had softened, and, looking back up at her, he saw the ghost of a smile in the corners of her mouth.

"The time Happy and I had to rebuild a whole post office in Aster because we wrecked it chasing this mail thief," he grinned.

Erza's smile widened. "Mail thief?"

Natsu laughed. "Yeah, some weirdo kept stealing people's letters and replacing them with letters that said something else. He liked chaos or something, I guess."

She breathed a light laugh. "Very well, I believe you." She released his arm, returning to the tea in front of her as if nothing had happened.

And he knew that he would regret it and he knew that it was stupid, but his mouth was asking before he could stop it: "Uh, Erza, why would you think that I would ever…uhhh…dishonor Lucy?"

He watched her lips pull up in a slow smile, though she didn't look away from her tea. "Oh, I don't know. I'm probably just being overprotective."

Natsu knew that wasn't much of an answer, but it was better than a fist to the face, so he hurried away before she could change her mind.

Hi all!

This is my first fanfic in a long time, so I hope you enjoyed the first chapter! NaLu is just such a favorite pairing of mine, and I don't think there are enough really good fics (although there are a few) celebrating their relationship. Hopefully mine can join the other good ones, but we'll see :)

Most of this will be off-canon, but they'll head to the grand magic games around chapter six, so some canon elements will enter the story then.

I love feedback, even if it's criticism, so please leave me a review if you have any comments, questions, or concerns!

Thanks for reading,

Adrianne