The Pink Dragon and His Princess (NaLu)

Chapter 8; Even Dragons Have Nightmares

~Even Dragons Have Nightmares~

~Present~

Right now Natsu was asleep.
Buried deep within her covers with Happy curled on the pillow above his head. She used to yell at him and kick him off her bed, but after a while of him ignoring her demands, she dropped it. She noticed he slept better there anyway. Natsu and Happy usually slept in the afternoons so they could be up at night. Mavis only knew why he did that. Yet another stressor for Lucy, not getting enough sleep. Sometimes, to get him to settle down, she would read to the hyper Dragon Boy. She would weave tales of Knights and Princess, and yes, even Dragons.

He always loved those.

One night, as Lucy was telling Natsu a brilliant story of a Knight riding to save his Princess, the Dragon spoke.
"Why is it always a Prince?"
Lucy stopped reading just as the Prince found the Dragon's cave.
"Huh?"
Natsu lay on his back beside her, his eyes looking past her ceiling.
"Why is it always a Prince or a Knight rescuing the Princess?" He muttered.

Lucy closed the book as she thought.
"Well, there has to be a villain to create a problem within the story."
"I know that," he waved it off.
"But, why does the villain have to be a Dragon?"
"It has to be a Dragon because-"
Lucy didn't know. She never questioned as to why the fire breathing Dragon had always been the one who had taken the Princess and had tried to kill the Prince.

She had been always been so immersed within the story itself that she never even thought about it.
Why would she?
The Dragon looked and acted like a villain anyway. Why would Lucy think anything else?
"I...I don't know, Natsu."
She sighed softly as she looked over at him. Natsu's dark eyes were far away, as if he was still in the Fairy Tale.

"They have it wrong, you know." He finally said. "How they describe and portray Dragons."
"Oh?" Lucy put the book down as she listened.
"They aren't all that bad. They take care and protect their own. Sure, they may look scary, but that doesn't mean that they act according to their looks. I should know." He looked as if he was about to add something, but decided not to. "Dragons don't betray or hurt their own. They stay with their friends in a big nest. Where they would die to protect their home. In that nest there isn't one Dragon that isn't loved."
A faint smile came to his face.
"Because each Dragon, related or not, is a part of something bigger;
a family."

Lucy hung on to every word. The emotion imbedded in every word pulled at her heart. "Despite how the humans see them, and how they think they know them, they don't know a thing." His dark eyes went to Lucy and there was a fire in them.
"I wonder if the writers ever thought that maybe the Dragon was the one that would save the Princess?"

And Lucy began to imagine.

After that night, Lucy began to write again. She hadn't in a long while. It was so nice to open her mind and let her imagination take ahold of her.
This time, instead of writing stories about Princes being the good guys, she made the Princes evil. Then she took the monster of so many stories and instead made them good.
After she was finished writing each small tale, she would read them to Natsu. Who adored them. He would listen to every word that Lucy had written and now read.

Now, as Lucy read the ending words in her own Fairy Tale, she heard the soft snores of Natsu and the purring of the sleeping Happy. Lucy smiled tiredly as she folded the parchment with her newly written story on it. She slid open her drawer beside her bed and put that story with all the rest. After she closed it she went back to bed and snuggled under the covers. As Lucy began to drift off to sleep, she couldn't help but think,
The villain in all children books had been another little boy's hero...
Darkness came quickly to snatch her away.