The cave smelled like copper and wet stone.
Natsu pressed his hand against the wound in his side, feeling warmth leak between his fingers. His warmth. The only heat left in this frozen hell of collapsed rock and darkness. Each breath came shallow and rattling, steam rising from his lips in the damp air.
Above ground, the sky was blotted out by wings.
The Dragon Outbreak had come sudden and absolute—ancient beasts tearing through dimensional barriers, filling the heavens with scales and fire and death. Not Igneel's fire. Not the protective flames Natsu had spent his life searching for. Just destruction. Mindless. Endless.
He'd held the line long enough for the others to retreat. Gray, wounded but alive. Erza, carrying two injured mages. Lucy, her keys clutched in bloodied hands, looking back at him with those eyes that begged him to follow.
He hadn't followed.
Someone had to collapse the tunnel. Someone had to make sure the dragons couldn't chase them into the southern safe zones. So Natsu had stayed, fists blazing, and brought a mountain down on his own head.
The fire that had burned for a thousand battles was finally flickering into ash.
He tried to summon flames now—just a small light, something to push back the oppressive dark—but his magic sputtered and died. The wound was too deep. The blood loss too severe. He was cold for the first time in his life, actually cold, and the irony would've made him laugh if he had the breath for it.
He had spent his life being the sun for others. Now he died in a place the sun couldn't find.
Somewhere in the darkness, something scratched against stone. Cave mice, probably. Scavengers drawn by the smell of blood. Natsu's fingers twitched toward the sound, but he couldn't muster the strength to care.
The scratching grew closer. Patient. Waiting.
His mind wandered.
***
"Natsu! You're gonna burn down the guild hall!"
Igneel's scales, warm beneath his small hands. "You'll find me someday, Natsu. Keep looking forward."
The Fairy Tail mark burning onto his shoulder, Master's gruff voice: "Welcome home, boy."
Gray's stupid face, always picking fights. Erza's terrifying smile. Happy's laugh. The guild hall roaring with life and chaos and family.
Lucy. Always Lucy. Standing in Hargeon harbor with starlight in her hair, looking at him like he was someone worth following.
***
The memories came faster now, bleeding together like watercolors in rain.
He remembered Erza falling during the Battle of Crocus. Remembered Gray taking a dragon's claw through the chest at Magnolia. Remembered Lucy screaming his name as her spirits were torn from the Celestial World one by one.
They'd survived those battles. Barely. But each one took something from them—friends, guild members, pieces of their souls. The war had been grinding them down for two years, and Natsu had watched his family grow smaller, quieter, more desperate.
That's why he'd stayed in the cave.
Not because he wanted to die. But because the thought of them dying—of reaching the afterlife and finding Gray or Lucy or Erza waiting there, looking at him with betrayal because he hadn't protected them—was worse than any darkness.
Stay alive, he'd thought, bringing the mountain down.Stay in the light. Don't follow me here.
His vision blurred. The scratching was closer now, tiny claws on stone, moving toward his cooling body.
Natsu tried to speak. Tried to force words past his ruined throat. His lips moved, shaping sounds that never came, and the only warmth left was his own shallow breath misting in the dark.
"Lucy."
The word barely existed. A whisper. A ghost.
"I love you."
The cave didn't answer. The scratching continued. And Natsu Dragneel—Salamander, the guild's loudest voice, its brightest flame—died in silence.
***
The cold settled into his bones.
His hand slipped from the wound, falling limp to the stone. His chest rose once more, held, then fell and didn't rise again.
The fire went out.
In the darkness, the scavengers crept closer. Small bodies, hungry, drawn to the scent of cooling meat. They sniffed at his boots, his hands, the blood pooling beneath him. One brave mouse climbed onto his chest, whiskers twitching.
This was the end. The physical truth of death. Cold meat in a forgotten cave, with only vermin as witnesses.
The scratching of tiny claws was the only eulogy he would receive.
***
But something else stirred in the darkness.
A light. Small at first. Barely visible. Like a firefly trapped in the depths.
It grew brighter, warmer, pushing back the suffocating black. The cave mice scattered, squeaking their retreat into the shadows. And as the light intensified, the oppressive weight of stone and darkness began to lift.
Natsu's soul opened its eyes.
He stood—or something like standing, weightless and strange—and looked down at his body. It lay crumpled against the cave wall, hand still pressed to the fatal wound, face slack in death. The mice were returning, emboldened by stillness.
He should've felt something. Horror, maybe. Regret. But there was only a distant sadness, like watching someone else's tragedy.
The light pulsed gently, beckoning.
Natsu turned toward it and saw a figure made of pure radiance. Not quite human. Not quite spirit. It hovered at the edge of perception, wings of gossamer light folding and unfolding, and though it had no face, he felt its warmth.
Mavis. Or the spirit of Fairy Tail. Or something older, gentler, eternal.
It didn't speak. It simply reached out a hand of light, patient and kind, waiting for him to choose.
Natsu looked back at his body one last time. At the darkness. At the cave that would be his tomb.
He didn't regret the darkness here, because he knew they were walking in the light out there.
Gray. Erza. Lucy. Happy. Everyone he'd held the line for. They were alive. Moving toward sunrise. And that was enough.
Natsu took the spirit's hand.
***
The cave disappeared.
Not gradually—just gone, like a curtain pulled away. The wet stone, the scratching mice, the smell of copper and death—all of it dissolved into light.
And there, impossibly, beautifully, was sunrise.
Golden and endless, stretching across a horizon that went on forever. Warm on his face, his arms, filling the hollow place where pain used to live. The sky was clear. No dragons. No ash. No war.
Just light.
Natsu took a breath—his first real breath since the wound—and it didn't hurt. He flexed his fingers and found them whole, unmarked. The exhaustion that had weighed on him for two years lifted like morning fog.
"Huh." His voice worked again. "So this is what comes next."
The spirit of light hovered beside him, wings casting rainbow prisms across the golden expanse. It gestured forward, toward the sunrise that never ended, and Natsu understood.
This was the path. The one Igneel had walked. The one waiting for everyone who'd burned bright and true.
But as he started forward, he paused and looked back.
Not at the cave—that was gone, erased. But at something deeper. A connection, thin as spider silk, stretching back toward the living world. Toward people he'd left behind.
He couldn't see them. Couldn't reach them. But he felt them there, still fighting, still breathing, still walking in the light he'd helped protect.
"Stay strong," he whispered to the connection. To Lucy, especially. "I'll be waiting. But take your time getting here, okay? Live first."
The connection pulsed once, faint and warm, then faded into the distance.
Natsu turned back to the sunrise and grinned—the first genuine smile since the outbreak began.
"Alright, Igneel. I'm coming. You better have some answers ready, old man."
He walked forward into the light, into the warmth, into the peace he'd spent his life giving others and never thought to claim for himself.
Behind him, in a cave miles below the war-torn surface, a body grew cold. Mice claimed it. Stone buried it. The physical world was cruel and final.
But Natsu Dragneel—Salamander, protector, friend, the boy who'd chased his father across continents and never stopped looking forward—walked into an eternal sunrise.
And for the first time in two years of war, he felt warm.
End