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The thing with living a sheltered life is that when you’re finally on your own to live your life, you experience your firsts in a way that is a little less than conventional.
Lucy’s lived an abnormal life in every sense of the word. From heiress to guild wizard, she’s experienced things from two vastly different walks of life that most people can only dream of. While she has spent her life doing the extravagant, the daring, and the fantastical, little of her time has been spent doing the mundane. She doesn’t regret the life she’s chosen for herself, but some days, as she walks into her adult life as a twenty-something-year-old without having experienced some of what she had expected from her teen years, she wonders if she has been missing out.
Guild life makes her much too busy to find love, she discovers quickly, and getting a boyfriend falls to the wayside for the first few years in Fairy Tail. She doesn’t have the time to think about love and romance of her own when she’s busy fighting in wars and saving the world. While perhaps a younger Lucy would have been devastated heading into 20 without so much as having kissed a boy, those concerns felt trivial compared to all the things she had faced since leaving the Heartfilia estate she once called home.
Perhaps one day, in another timeline, missing out on those teenage firsts would be something that she would come to regret, but here, in this timeline, knowing who she gets to experience those firsts with, she knows she wouldn’t want it any other way.
The knock on her apartment door comes just as she’s putting on her lip gloss, and the timing couldn’t be any more perfect.
“Coming!” She calls out as she puts on her final touches.
That doesn’t seem to be enough for the man on the other side of the door, as he continues to rap at it, louder and more annoying this time.
“I said I’m coming!”
With a quick smack of her lips in the mirror, Lucy makes her way to the door, opening it to be met with Natsu on the other side. He doesn’t usually dignify her with knocking, but this is a special occasion, denoted by the way he’s donned in the single button down he owns and the droopy bouquet of flowers he holds in his hand.
“Hi,” she says, her cheeks set with a rising blush.
It’s just Natsu, but the circumstances are different from every other time he’s shown up at her front door, and even though she’s spent all afternoon trying to calm her nerves, she can’t help the way that her heart begins to beat faster in her chest at the sight of him.
“Hey,” he replies, and she swears that she sees the heat rise in his cheeks too.
It falls quiet between them for a moment as they both figure out what to say. Lucy purses her lips.
It’s just Natsu, she repeats to herself. It’s just Natsu.
This is the man she’s spent almost every day with since leaving home, her best friend in the whole world, and it shouldn’t be weird just because they’re going on a date.
It’s a long time coming, or so everyone around them says. It feels inevitable in some ways—not because he’s a guy and girls and guys can’t be as close as they are without falling in love, but because he’s Natsu. He’s certainly not the prince charming she had always imagined herself with, but now she can’t imagine herself with anyone else.
Now, as he stands at her door, ready for their first date, it feels like something that was always meant to be is coming to fruition.
“I got you these,” he says, holding the flowers out to her, his gaze flicking away bashfully for just a moment.
A few of them are a little droopy, and you can see at the bottom of the stems where they’ve been pulled from the ground, but it doesn’t matter because it’s a thoughtful gesture that’s getting their date started on the right foot.
“I saw 'em, and they made me think of you.”
It’s an assortment of pinks with a few white and pink petals in there too, and it’s all so sweet and so perfectly Natsu that all the nerves and embarrassment that had bubbled up below the surface dissipated in an instant. He grins at her with that wide smile that he always has, and she knows that there was never any reason to worry in the first place.
The gentle rush of the river besides them is a familiar sound, as is the soft blanket beneath them, but the way her head rests in Natsu’s lap and his fingers run through her hair is all new to both of them.
She can count on one hand the number of real first dates she’s been on, and she can safely assume that Natsu has been on even fewer, but somehow not even their combined lack of experience makes things awkward. It feels like the natural progression of things, like the soft tenderness and intimacy, is what has always been missing from their relationship.
That doesn’t mean it comes easy. It’s awkward for the first few moments as they try to figure out where boundaries lie, what makes this different from every other picnic by the river, and what lines they can or cannot cross. They hold hands on the way there, but Lucy’s flushing so hard that she can’t even look at him until he finally lets go to set out their blanket. She can see the implication of a blush on his face when he looks her way, and it makes her feel better to know that she’s not the only one who feels this way.
Awkward small talk, as though they hadn’t been best friends for years before now, quickly transitions into the same comfortable banter that they have become so accustomed to. It feels strangely… normal, like just any other day for them; the event only differentiated by their semi-formal attire and hand-picked flowers held in plastic picnic cups.
Had you asked her a few years ago, normal would not be the word she would have wanted to describe her first date as, but nowadays, Lucy’s normal is a bit different and everything she would have wanted it to be. When their post-lunch walk down the river ends with a splash, she can’t quite find it in herself to be upset.
There’s a period of awkwardness that Lucy feels at the beginning of the relationship when it comes to affection. Natsu has always been a handsy guy, but the transition from years of fighting off his affections to suddenly accepting them doesn’t come as easy to her as it does him. They move at her pace, which Natsu is happy to comply with, even if it might be slower than one expects.
The first few weeks, they don’t push it further than hand-holding and the occasional arm around the waist. It breaks new ground when she finally initiates cuddles on the couch, and Natsu quite literally welcomes it with open arms. Cheek kisses aren’t uncommon for them, usually initiated by Lucy. She’s not quite sure if she’s ready to commit to the lips yet.
A first kiss is special, and even though she knows she’s found the right person, she doesn’t know if she’s found the right time yet. She wants it to be magical and romantic, like it reads in every romance novel she’s read. She wants to feel fireworks in her chest, and she wouldn’t be mad if there were real fireworks too. She’s planned a million and one scenarios in her head; it’s just a matter of which one she wants to play out in real life.
They’re still not quite there yet, but Natsu is content to have his arms wrapped around her as they laze around on the couch together. What began as his desire for her touch as she quietly read eventually transitioned into tangled limbs and soft affections. His hand gently rubs up and down her side—an action she has grown quite fond of since he first did it—and she listens intently as he tells her some story of a job he and Happy recently went on without her. She likes listening to him talk, enjoys it when he gets excited about the things he’s telling her. His passion is one of the things that draws her to him, and she’s lucky to see that the flame inside him never dwindles. He’s so cute in moments like this that it just makes her heart ache.
In a moment of infatuation, she leans over to press her lips against his cheek, the way she has become increasingly accustomed to in the past few weeks. She aims just above the line of his jaw, but going that low proves her fatal flaw, as in that very moment Natsu turns his head and she finds her lips accidentally pressing against his.
The feeling of it practically has her jumping out of her skin, and she immediately pulls away in shock. The action seemingly catches Natsu off guard too, based on the wide-eyed look he gives her when she desperately pulls herself away from his grasp.
“What the hell?” he says to her, bewildered. “If you wanted to kiss, you could have just asked.”
“T-that wasn’t what I was trying to do!” She exclaims.
Her cheeks are flushed a deep red, and she doesn’t have to see it to know because she can feel the heat spread across her face. Her heart is pumping so fast, and her entire body is filled with adrenaline to the point where it takes her a moment to process what just happened.
“I was trying to kiss your cheek, and then you turned around, and I accidentally kissed your lips!” She tries to explain, but the words tumble out of her mouth haphazardly, and she can only hope that Natsu understands.
It might possibly be the most mortifying moment of her entire life, and even as she stutters out her explanation, she can’t quite find it in herself to meet Natsu’s gaze.
There are no take-backs on first kisses, so instead she just has to accept the highly characteristic one she got and hope that maybe part two will be more characteristic of her than him. She will get over it someday, but she just needs to mope about it for now.
The feeling of her nails dragging along Natsu’s scalp elicits a contented whine from his lips that gets swallowed up by Lucy’s own. His hands rest on her back, holding her close to him as they rest chest against chest. Their legs are intertwined in the sheets, while their lips meld against each other.
She’s past the point of being shy about it, much to Natsu’s delight. She had quickly come to learn that kisses are Natsu’s favourite form of affection, from gentle pecks to something a little more involved, like now. He’s a little bit sloppy, a little bit primal, but behind closed doors, it’s something she’s grown to love because it is so quintessentially Natsu.
In a moment of fervour, he bites down on her lip, and it’s enough to have her jolting back from the kiss. It was ever so gentle, but she can taste the blood drawn from her lip and feel the small wound as she runs her tongue over the affected area. He seems to notice her affliction, and a look of soft guilt crosses his face.
“Sorry,” he murmurs, and he leans back in to kiss it better.
He’s softer and gentler this time, littering her bottom lip with lots of small kisses. It makes her smile, and he takes that as permission to return to their steady pace of fingers tangled in hair and crescent moons marked on skin.
His chest presses against hers, and in the moment they both fall backwards, her back hitting the mattress and Natsu on top of her. It’s not a position they’ve never been in before, so it doesn’t change the pace or interrupt their rhythm. An earlier Lucy, a much more innocent, inexperienced Lucy, may have been mortified by their current position, but the current Lucy, the one locking lips with her lover, doesn’t seem to mind all that much.
He's a little more handsy than he usually is, but she chalks it up to a growth in his confidence. She’s not the only one learning things in this relationship. Each day together, Natsu learns more about love, affection, what he likes, dislikes. He may be more eager to jump in the deep end than she is, but that doesn’t mean he knows how to swim.
His hands explore beneath the hem of her shirt—not uncharted territory, but somehow this time it feels more intentional than the last. There’s a sense of hesitancy that she feels when he pulls away for just a second, but when she grabs his hair and pulls him back down, he lets them roam along mazes of scars on her soft, supple waist.
A surge of confidence must overcome him when his fingers dip below her waistband. A surge of something else must overcome her when she doesn’t stop him.
In the moment, all of it feels so natural to her that it almost doesn’t occur to her the step that they’re taking. Even when it sinks in as his jacket falls over his shoulders, she makes no move to stop it. There’s a part of her that’s scared of the ritual, years of fear instilled into her in whispers of shame, but when Natsu looks down at her with adoring eyes, any apprehension melts away in an instant.
She doesn’t mind if it’s with her best friend.
There are many milestones one hits in a new relationship, but as Lucy finds out, not all of them are exactly ones that one might want to experience.
Disagreements between her and Natsu are not uncommon. They’re two very different people who both have very different ways of doing things, and while that is something that often brings the two together, sometimes it causes them to butt heads. It’s small things, mostly things that are generally inconsequential, that they can move on from rather quickly. They’ve been friends long enough that a minor disagreement isn’t going to cause any type of long-term fracture, but as Lucy comes to find out, not all disagreements are minor.
It happens for the first time a few months into the relationship after they have been lulled into a false sense of security that nothing could possibly go wrong.
She doesn’t remember what prompted it really. It happens in a blur of dirty dishes and unfinished laundry, and it feels like it’s all too much and yet nothing at all, but before she can even process it, they’re standing in her kitchen arguing like they’ve never done before.
Her nails dig into the palm of her hand, leaving crescent moon-shaped indents as she balls her hands up in fists by her side. Her hand quivers slightly in anger, but she tries to hold it in because, even though she’s frustrated, she doesn’t want to be angry at Natsu.
His arms are folded across his chest defensively, and his gaze can’t quite meet hers when she speaks to him. He doesn’t quite look like he’s even listening to her, and that kindles the flame of her discomposure even more. Though he starts out angry, he quickly shifts to disconnected and dismissive, and any attempt at productive conversation is dashed in that moment, and frustration boils over. She’s sure she’s drawn blood from the way she clenches her fist to try to stop the tears from falling, because she is not about to cry in front of Natsu over some stupid argument. Instead, she turns on her foot and leaves, cutting their argument off in its tracks.
To try and centre herself, she lets herself get lost in the ink of her journal to give them both space, but by the time she comes back to reality with the intention of smoothing things over, Natsu is nowhere to be found in the apartment.
It’s not like she’s necessarily surprised by it. Natsu’s never been good with emotional confrontation, but for some reason, looking over her shoulder from her desk to not see him there makes her heart ache.
She’s not even mad anymore; she just misses him.
It’s in that moment that she lets herself cry for letting this happen because, god, she loves him so much, and it shatters her heart that they can let something as stupid as this get between them. Her heart aches in her chest, but the only thing she knows can fix it is Natsu’s arms around her, and he’s not here, so instead she tries to find his comfort in the pillow on her bed that smells just like him.
The rest of the day is wasted away in tears until the evening, when a knock on the door draws her out of her self-pity.
Natsu’s attempt at reconciliation comes with the same droopy, handpicked flowers that he came with for their first date, and she meets him with all the love in her heart when her lips meet his.
When he sleeps on the couch that night, so does she.
Lucy thought she already understood the phrase time flies when you’re having fun, but it doesn’t quite hit her until she’s flipping the page of their shared calendar and she finds a date marked in red. Scrawled in Natsu’s handwriting reads an almost legible anniversary, and for the first time, the passage of time smacks Lucy in the face like it never has before.
It feels like an eternity and a single day all wrapped up in one. The fact that it’s nearly been a whole year they’ve been together together doesn’t quite feel real because, on one hand, it feels like it only began yesterday, but on the other, it feels like it’s always been like this. She feels like perhaps she can attribute both to the long game of will-they-won’t-they that had them teetering on the verge for far too long.
It becomes real when they’re holding hands walking down the bank of the very same river they found themselves at one year ago today. Their hands swing between them, and the conversation flows between them as naturally as the water through the river besides them. He makes some stupid comment, and she laughs like it’s the funniest thing she’s ever heard, and he looks at her with such adoration in his eyes that one might think he’s falling in love with her all over again.
When he spots a stray flower sprouting among the grass, he gets on his knees and plucks it from the ground to give to her, and it’s just as romantic as the first time he did it. He collects each flower they pass until she’s got a whimsical bouquet in all the colours of the rainbow.
When sunset finally comes upon them and they make their way home, her anniversary bouquet is given a special spot in her apartment in memory of today. They sit proudly on display in a small vase by her bed to greet her every morning with the sunrise until they simply cannot any longer. The flutter of petals to the floor doesn’t bring her down because she knows inevitably they’ll be replaced with new ones, accompanied by the same grin she’s grown so fond of, plastered across Natsu’s face. A flower may not last a year, but she knows their love will last many more, and that’s enough for her.
As she watches Natsu make himself comfortable in her bed, she reflects back on the past year and thinks about how this is only the beginning. This is the start of what she knows is going to be the rest of her life, and when he catches her eye and smiles at her with all the love in the world, she knows that in finding her first, she’s also found her last, and she wouldn’t want it any other way.