Work Text:
Spring cleaning, for Lucy at least, is less of a fun seasonal event and more of a necessity. With all the trinkets, novels, equipment, and gifts she accumulates, it’s prudent of her to clear a few days of her week in the first month of springtime to shuffle through all of it.
After tackling the absolute mess that had become her desk while she’d lifted smaller furniture and décor to scrub at the floor, she lifts a small wooden box shoved behind her desk. She grimaces at the layer of dust that’s made its home on the lid: what on Earthland could she have stashed in here?
Shuffling on her knees backwards from the study nook and further into her living area, she brushes the dust off, and suddenly she remembers.
How could she forget!
Opening the latch of the box, she finds various knick-knacks and stationery supplies she’d used during a period where she’d scrapbooked obsessively, collecting stickers and expensive papers and buttons and patterned tape, the odd postcard or stamp.
Lucy lifts one of the small pocketbooks and gasps when something slips out between the pages onto her hand.
The petal in her fingers, though dried and obviously having been left loose in the pages of the book, is in remarkable shape. Smooth, if a bit crusty from age, with its colour only slightly dulled. And the smell! Oh, how nostalgic!
She flips through the book until she finds the pages she needs, and rests the loose petal beside two more—still secured to the page tightly, above a brief handwritten entry.
Lucy remembers the day clearly.
She’d been bedridden with illness following a job gone horribly wrong; wracked with fatigue and joint pain and a high fever and a chill she wouldn’t completely shake for nearly a week. Horologium and Plue had done their best to console her, but Lucy wasn’t ready to be helped, or comforted, so when the sun began to kiss the horizon, they relented, bidding her farewell for the night.
Through all of that, the idea of not seeing the tree was the worst part.
The beautiful, sturdy, healthy trunk, wider than a carriage and taller than the building she lived in. Hundreds and thousands of stunning leaves sprouting from thick branches, reaching out towards the sun as if in prayer—as if they were hands trying to scoop the rays of light right out of the sky. Each delicate petal a new hue, each one catching the lights of the lanterns steadied onto canoes and of hand-held candles, projecting their own glow into the cool evening air. It was supposed to be breathtaking, inspiring, an experience that even the toughest and blandest of Magnolia Town would brag about attending.
She remembers that she’d cried, when she realised that she’d be too sick to leave her apartment. She’d sunk down to the hard floor and dry sobbed, too dehydrated to even produce proper tears, simply heaving with the force of her cries against the cool wood.
So, after about ten minutes of that, and another five trying to get her bearings and stay upright, she’d hoisted herself into the shower, changed into her comfiest pair of pyjamas and the stupid fuzzy socks—she’d bought them half as a gag and half because they were the cheapest pair in the store—and resigned herself to a night of restless, sweaty, dreamless sleep.
She remembers being confused and annoyed when the light and the noise had woken her; clambering out from beneath the blankets and duvet and the pillow that had somehow ended up at the wrong end of her double mattress, and steadied herself against the windowsill, and pushed at the window until it opened.
And there it was. Heaped into a canoe—roots, soil and all—and meandering down the canal, guided only by the gentle evening current.
The Rainbow Sakura.
She’d cried again, that night, but not in heartbreak, or frustration, but in pure elation. Surely bolstered by her fever, she wept into the sleeves of her pyjamas with a grin. When she slipped into sleep in the small hours of the night, she dreamed—not of the tree—but of pink and blue and yellow, all muddled together.
When she’d woke the next morning—early only because of her dehydration—she’d briefly wondered if the whole thing was a genuine fever dream. If, when she’d bathed and dressed and headed into the guild hall, recovered and ready for a quest, she’d hear only stories of the Hanabi, of breathtaking sights and unforgettable celebrations and wishes that Lucy had been able to attend.
Instead, after Lucy had performed her morning ablutions, locked up, greeted her neighbours, when she entered the Guild Hall, she heard Master Makarov screaming—with a ferocity which surely meant something had gone awry in the two days she’d been cooped up in her flat. He’d yelled and hollered about the Rainbow Sakura, which had been stolen right out of the ground by unknown assailants late yesterday evening, paraded through the canals of Magnolia Town on a canoe, and returned mysteriously before dawn that morning, no trace of their identities, and the tree perfectly intact.
It was then that Lucy had known for certain that it hadn’t been some dream, or hallucination, and as she turned to find Natsu and Happy in the crowd of her guildmates, she knew.
Even if she'd forgotten about her scrapbooks, she’d never forget that night, not for anything.
Hindsight is better than foresight, after all; and, looking back, it wasn’t simply the night following a catastrophic job, where she’d secured her rent for the week but at the cost of her health and her pride. Holding the dried petal in her hand, breathing in the faint scent of cherry blossom which had remained even after all these years, Lucy knew.
It was the night she fell in love with Natsu.