Auri

On the top of the hill was Natsu's shack. Gray felt a renewed sense of anger about having to make the trip when he shouldn't have needed to. He stormed towards the building, going to pound on the door and knock. He always had to do this; Natsu was weird about nobody getting inside his shack. It was probably a bombsight inside, but Gray was pissed off, so he stormed in without knocking.

The inside was… unexpected.

It was a lot cleaner than Gray ever would have imagined. In fact, considering it was a run down shack in the middle of nowhere, it was as close to spotless as possible. And it didn't have the workout gear and dirty clothes he thought would cover the floor. Instead, it was… Gray didn't exactly know the word.

There were flowers, pastel covers, a deep and fluffy rug on the floor. His bed was well made and covered in pillows, everything was in order. Was this really the bedroom of the idiot flamebrain who he constantly got into fights with?

Maybe it wasn't. And, as Gray gaped, all anger leaving him, his eyes fell on a stranger. His stomach dropped; he'd actually walked into the house of a woman he didn't know, a woman who was going to think he was some damn pervert - where the hell had his shirt gone? - and was probably going to start screaming.

Except, it wasn't a woman. It was… no…

Squinting his eyes at the person in the corner of the room, he saw Natsu. But not Natsu as his battle ready self. This was a different Natsu entirely. He was wearing a light pink and black maid's dress, with high socks and heeled shoes. His hair, rather than the usual shaggy salmon mess, was a more pastel pink, flowed down to his lower back, and was in a plat style. At least, Gray thought that it was a plat; it might have been a braid. He didn't know the names of hairstyles for long hair!

What was most interesting was Natsu's lips. They were redder than normal, and the small tube of lipstick in his hand explained why.

He looked… cute. Natsu Dragneel looked cute.

For a moment, neither man spoke. Neither knew what to do.

Gray wasn't the most mature man, and he wasn't shy in admitting that, but he did know when to take things seriously. He closed the door to the shack so it was just the two of them, and slowly, wordlessly walked to Natsu's bed, sitting on it with enough space for Natsu to sit beside him should he want to. A quiet part of his brain noted that this was probably the longest Natsu had gone without speaking, but he pushed that to the back of his mind.

"You lose a bet or something?" Gray asked. Although he thought he knew the answer, he felt like maybe Natsu needed an out, if he wanted to take it.

"Yeah!" Natsu exclaimed, all too quickly. Gray knew that he was lying, and maybe it showed on his face, because Natsu's body tensed a little. "Leave."

"No," Gray argued immediately. The idiot annoyed him a lot, but Gray knew when to put that to the side. "Ain't anything wrong with what you're doing. Not exactly something I'd wanna do, but that's because I heard women's clothes are more expensive and with how often I lose clothes I'd probably be out of cash within a week."

Natsu didn't say anything. Gray wordlessly grabbed his hand, yanked him forward, and made him sit beside him on the bed. They didn't speak for a while.

"Don't tell anyone," Natsu requested quietly. "I'm not ashamed of this, but it's private. It's personal."

"I won't," Gray promised, not looking at Natsu for a moment. Every time he did he felt… weird? Natsu being cute had never been a possibility to him. "Can I talk about it now?"

"Yeah," Natsu said. "If you're a dick about it I'll kick your ass."

"It'll hurt more with the heels, I expect," Gray chuckled, but Natsu didn't. They weren't ready for jokes about this, apparently. Not yet, anyway. "Why do you do it?"

"Don't really know," Natsu said, but that felt like an automatic answer, not the real one. Gray let the room remain quiet for a while, before Natsu spoke again. "I've always been interested in it, you know? I'd see a dress sometimes and think 'damn, it looks awesome' then realize that it's for girls and not for me. Or I'd feel a piece of women's clothes and it'd be so soft and get pissed off because the stuff I wear is coarse and itchy. Never wore it before because, you know, boys don't do that," Natsu shrugged, then turned to look at Gray with fire in his eyes. Gray was trapped between his ferocious expression and his red, distracting lips. "And then I thought I'd saved the world loads of times and if I wanna look pretty then I should get to."

"Yeah, you should," Gray nodded. Nobody with a brain would argue with that. "And, it works. You look pretty."

"Don't be a dick, Ice-breath," Natsu snapped.

"I'm not, you look fucking pretty alright," Gray argued back, almost ready to start a fight. But then Natsu blushed - blushed hard - and it was like a punch to the gut. Natsu was pretty, and he was cute as all hell. Gray needed a distraction, and so asked the first thing he could think of. "The hair real? You use a spell or something?"

"It's a wig," Natsu explained, shifting it slightly before putting it back in place.

"It looks real," Gray said, before looking Natsu up and down quickly. Had he always been so… curvy? "Why the maid's dress? Was there a reason for it or did you just like it?"

"It's the first dress I ever got," Natsu explained, running his hands down the dress's skirt. "Got it from a costume place, thought that if anyone saw I could say it was for Halloween or something like that. Was kinda embarrassed about it. Still am, sometimes, even if I don't wanna be."

Natsu being embarrassed by anything didn't sit right with Gray. Natsu wasn't the kind of man who shouldn't feel embarrassed by anything, and Gray hadn't thought he could. In their time as friends, Gray could think of hundreds of times Natsu had done something that he would consider embarrassing, and he'd done it unashamedly and with a wide grin on his face. It was one of the things that Gray most liked about his friend, and yet buying a dress had been embarrassing for him? That didn't make sense. Especially when he looked so damn cute wearing it.

"Don't feel bad about this," Gray all but demanded. "Or embarrassed or anything. You're pretty as fuck dressed like this, and don't believe anything else."

"You're just saying that," Natsu scoffed.

"Yeah, because I'm always gonna try and boost your confidence, that's how our friendship works," Gray said sarcastically. Then, without really thinking about it, he grabbed Natsu by the chin and forced him to look at him. Gods, his lips! "You're pretty, Natsu. It's a fact. And If you wanna wear a damn dress then you-"

He was cut off, because Natsu had all but lurched forward onto him. For a second Gray thought they would be fighting, before Natsu's lips were on him in a kiss. It was needy, desperate, and soft. Gray melted into it without thinking, a hand moving up to lace in Natsu's hair - wig.

Maybe he should have been thinking about what he was doing, but he didn't. His lips were moving against Natsu's hand, his hands were roaming down Natsu's sides, feeling the ruffles of satin which was soft to the touch. He felt Natsu shift closer to him and a hand wrapped around the back of his neck to pull him closer. Gray sighed into the kiss, deepening it as best he could before pulling away for air.

He and Natsu looked at each other for a moment. Just like before, neither knew what to say. Again, Gray broke the silence.

"You wanna go out to dinner tonight," He said, voice barely more than a whisper. "Or maybe my place, if you want? You can, erm, wear whatever you want that way?"

"Yeah," Natsu was beaming, and Gray realized the only thing stopping him from falling in love with that smile for all the years he knew Natsu was the lack of lipstick. Now it was there, Gray felt everything click into place. This was always going to happen.

Natsu snickered, and Gray panicked, thinking maybe he'd said that out loud. "What?"

"You've got a little lipstick there," Natsu said, motioning to his own lips. Gray brought his hand to his lips and, indeed, there was a smearing of Natsu's lipstick on his own lips. Natsu was smiling. "Sloppy application, I'll have to teach you how to do it."