The ABCs of Moving On

Xenial

It takes a person a long time to recover from a traumatizing event.

For Natsu, he isolated himself in his room for a whole week. How he even survived that long without human contact and just eating the few leftovers in the refrigerator, he had no idea. But one day he just woke up and did his usual routine blankly as if it's just a normal day before everything happened.

He stepped out of his house and ran to school without a single thought on his mind. When he reached the entrance to the school building, he went on a different way than what he used to take. Eventually, he found himself entering the library — the last place a person like him would set foot on.

At first, he thought the library was empty except for the librarian. But when he sat numbly on a chair, he saw a girl sitting in front of him on the opposite end of the table. Upon closer inspection, he noticed she was reading a book — a book about the alphabet. It took him a few minutes to actually realize that it was the girl he saved from Loke in the club a week ago.

"What the hell are you staring at?" she asked without looking at him, her voice devoid of any emotion.

"It's you," Natsu breathlessly exclaimed.

The moment she heard his voice, she looked up immediately. Not knowing what to say next, they only gazed at each other for a long moment before she spoke up. "What... what are you doing here?"

"Not even a thank you?" he tried to smile, only one end of his lips curved upward slightly.

"Th-thank you for... for back then." As she was talking, her soft voice quivered, quite as if someone would attack her any second now. "But why?"

Natsu's eyebrows knotted. "Why what? Why was I there? Why am I here? Why did that happen? Why is the world a cruel place?"

She was silent for a few seconds. "Yes, I would like to know the answers to those questions."

Natsu laughed without a trace of humor and pursed his lips. "Darling, I wish I also knew."

He noticed how Lucy flinched in discomfort at the pet name. Before he could say anything, the phone in his bag vibrated for the millionth time this week. He had been ignoring the calls and texts he has been receiving from everyone he knew. But now it seemed particularly urgent to answer this one.

"Hello?" Just as he picked up the phone, a deadly calm voice of a girl greeted him. It was Mirajane.

"Natsu, Lisanna's funeral is in a week."

After a long week of numbness, a great deal of reality finally came crashing down on Natsu. Lisanna was indeed dead, and the body he saw at the bottom of the pond was her dead body and will soon be buried six feet under.

He refused to believe any of it.

"What was that?" Lucy asked Natsu as he calmly ended the phone call and flung it across the room with no expression on his face whatsoever. He was starting to notice how they had some things in common.

"You really want to know?" Without waiting for an answer, he bluntly told her, "My girlfriend's funeral is in a week."

"I'm sorry."

"So you and I are at the same page now, huh?"

His words somehow made Lucy look at him with a questioning look then at the book she was holding. "I-I never realized I was holding this until now. Probably found it lying on the table then just subconciously grabbed it."

Natsu shook his head. "It was an idiomatic expression, which I suppose you would've known under normal circumstances." Then he added, "But oh, if only things were as easy as ABC."

His eyes darted over to the page the book was flipped. Z for Zebra. "Z for Zero, more like," he muttered. "I'm feeling like zero right now."

"What would that be, the ABCs of heartbreak?" At last, Lucy cracked a small smile as she joked lightly.

Natsu looked at Lucy in a new light. Before, the only interaction he had with her was when they greeted each other in the hallways or at lunch despite being in the same group of friends.

But now he had been starting to feel a strange connection with her, because in the end, they were just a boy and a girl with broken hearts in the xenial atmosphere of the library, which was exactly what they needed.

-

dedicated to kairasuno because she's an amazing person (idk if she's still active but my thanks to her is long overdue)