So, couldn't stop thinking about the most recent chapter of Fairy Tail and wrote this oneshot as a response.
The weight in Zeref's arms is somewhat comforting to him as he walks through the forest, and he focuses on it, on the warmth, the quiet breathing of deep slumber…
It shifts, and Zeref looks down to find a small, pudgy hand fisting the folds of his white toga, a head full of pink tufts of hair burying itself a little more deeply into the crook of his arm. He gives the sleeping toddler a small smile that speaks of his fondness and says only a little about the doubt in his mind. He wants it to work this time, he wants that woman to be right about what she said, he wants her words to be the answer he's been looking for all these centuries.
He wants to die this time.
Zeref hears the beat of massive wings cutting through the air all around him before he sees the great beast that is generating the noise. The dragon's large shadow passes over him, and he looks up to admire the lustre of its dark red scales in the sunlight as it banks and turns with an earth-shattering roar, a few drops of flame spewing from its gaping maw. It lands before him with a mighty crash that sends powerful vibrations shuddering through the Black Wizard's bones and uproots the trees nearest the epicentre of the quake.
The dragon narrows its eyes and growls at him, but Zeref doesn't flinch. Instead, he smiles in greeting.
"It's been a long time…Igneel."
"Not long enough," the king of the fire dragons responds, and his gaze flicks down to the now awake child that is sitting up in Zeref's arms and staring at him with wide eyes.
"What—" Igneel cuts himself off, sniffs deeply, and hunches down into a defensive position, spreading his wings out wide in preparation for take-off as he bares his teeth angrily, "What is the meaning of this!? Do you intend to ruin this world again!?"
"Now, now, no need to be afraid of a mere child, Igneel."
"Don't play with me, mage, I'd know END's stench anywhere!"
"Ah, yes…he gave you that scar, didn't he?"
Igneel growls at the reminder, lowering his head to both invade the human's personal space and block said X-shaped scar from the immortal's field of vision.
"Answer my question!" The fire dragon roars into Zeref's face, hot breath sweeping back the Black Wizard's robe and hair. He expects END to either return to his true form and launch an attack—proving this encounter the herald of another era of destruction—or else start wailing like a true human child.
He does neither. Instead, he giggles ecstatically against the fierce hot wind, and reaches his hands out to place them on the warm scales of Igneel's maw.
The dragon freezes with surprise so quickly that Zeref almost finds it comical. In the next moment though, Igneel hurriedly withdraws, eyeing the pink-haired child warily, every muscle tense, as his throat rumbles with a different, more cautious question, "Why have you come seeking me?"
Once more, Zeref doesn't respond. Instead, he sets the now squirming toddler—leaning desperately forward to try and touch that great beast again—on the ground at his feet. The boy immediately begins walking towards the dragon with arms outstretched, babbling nonsensical things. Igneel stares distastefully down at him in response.
"This…" Zeref begins, voice sounding oddly tranquil as he smiles slightly at the boy's antics, "is Natsu Dragneel."
"The Etherious, Natsu Dragneel," Igneel corrects angrily.
"Well, yes," Zeref concedes, smiling serenely, "But he's not exactly an Etherious anymore…or at least, not at the moment."
Igneel's huff of hot air tells him the dragon would swallow him whole out of sheer frustration, if not for the fear of fatal indigestion as a result, "Speak forthright, mage, I have no patience for word games."
"I've made him human."
"Many of your Etherious have human forms, this is no diff—get off!" Igneel snarls and roughly shoves Natsu back with his foreleg in order to dissuade the child's attempts to use it as a climbing post. The boy lands on his romp and sits there stunned for a moment, and then he glares at the offending appendage before getting back to his feet and toddling towards it once more, a look of sheer determination on his face. Igneel lifts the target of Natsu's stubbornness above the boy's head, and glares at him with unadulterated irritation when he starts trying to jump up and reach it.
"Zeref, get your thrice damned creation away from me before I kill him."
"You wouldn't do that to a defenceless human child, would you Igneel?"
"I have no love for humans any more than demons," the great dragon reminds him with a growl and pointed glare, curling his tail around in the process, using it to push Natsu away from him once more, only for the demon in human form to screech loudly with excitement at the sudden motion and latch on fiercely to the scaly appendage.
The look of horror on Igneel's face is priceless, and Zeref watches with amusement—and no concern whatsoever—as the dragon hurriedly begins whipping his tail through the air, trying to shake the boy loose. He only succeeds in making the excited screeching louder than ever, with numerous giggles and laughter in between.
"GET. OFF!" Igneel roars, shaking the very roots of the forest trees as he gives one last mighty whip of his tail and sends the boy careening through the thicket, crashing straight into the trunk of a massive tree.
Natsu slides down to the foot of the tree without a sound and remains completely still.
"…Is he dead?"
"No," Zeref replies—purposefully ignoring the deflated look his response earns from the dragon—and carefully seats himself on the grass, glancing over in Natsu's direction, "It will take far more than that to kill him."
Igneel sighs with something suspiciously resembling disappointment before he fixes a serious gaze upon the Black Wizard once more.
"You've taken his memories, haven't you?" the dragon asks knowingly.
"I've sealed them into his book, along with the key to unlocking his Etherious form," Zeref confirms, and plucks a blade of grass, frowning to himself when it withers and turns to dust between his fingertips. He quickly puts a stopper on the train of thought threatening to follow, but he can feel it bubbling up—and the contradictory curse along with it—and it's all he can do to focus single-mindedly on this conversation and force the next words out, "he'll never get them back unless he opens it."
Igneel's gaze turns calculating as it narrows on him, the dragon growing quietly thoughtful. Zeref can feel himself being analyzed. The dragon then turns to study the still unconscious Natsu, and then he snarls at some distant memory that Zeref can tell has to do with the END of four hundred years ago.
"You created END with one purpose: to destroy you at any cost…have you forgotten what that cost was the last time you released him?" Igneel slams his right foreleg into the ground, causing the ground to tremble before his rage. Natsu begins to stir from his place at the foot of the tree.
Zeref feels the thought coming and he reaches up to clutch at his head as though he can stop it, but by the time his fingers are fisting his hair, it's too late.
Millions of lives…gone just because I was born.
One moment, the area around him is lush and green, and the next, it is dead and barren.
The king of fire dragons is far too dead already to falter at the touch of the powerful death magic, but Zeref sharply glances up and over at Natsu, panicking for a moment as he wonders if his creation's new form is more susceptible to the effects of the contradictory curse, even from such a distance. He's relieved to see Natsu lift up his head and blink blearily. Too relieved.
Zeref, credited as the most evil human being to have ever walked the earth, the father of countless demons, the murderer of millions and the man who toppled an entire kingdom four hundred years past, pulls his knees up to his chest and buries his face in them. Overwhelming sorrow and agony well up inside him, shaking his shoulders with their force because thank whatever god there may be, he isn't dead, there's still an end in sight.
"I would kill you myself if I could," Igneel suddenly remarks as though knowing what the mage is thinking. His words cause Zeref to look up, revealing the quiet tears of prolonged suffering streaming down his face. The dragon sounds almost—almost—sympathetic, if only for a moment, before his voice hardens, "but the power of your immortality has gone far beyond even a dragon's magic. Acnologia himself could not kill you."
"Only END can kill me…" Zeref whispers despondently, and can't help but feel the doubt that he even that might not be true. He hopes, prays, that it is, because he is so, so tired of being alive when he can't even live.
Igneel growls with anger at the claim, shattering the trunk of a dead tree with an agitated swish of his tail, "That was your reasoning for releasing him four hundred years ago, and still he could not even draw your blood! So cease your tears and tell me what could possibly be different this time!"
For a moment, Zeref says nothing, and Igneel seriously starts considering just destroying END while he's weak and vulnerable, and ridding the world—even those pesky humans he cares nothing for—of the most vile and destructive and hate-filled demon to have ever walked it. But Zeref's words interrupt his musings before he can turn them into action.
"He can love this time."
Igneel blinks uncertainly, "…what?"
Zeref wipes away his tears, and turns to watch Natsu happily toddling towards them with a smile on his face. In that moment, he barely resembles the horned monstrosity of END at all, twisted with hatred as that creature's visage always was. The boy picks up speed when he notices Igneel turning to look at him as well, and happily throws himself at the dragons foreleg—
—only to faceplant as Igneel swiftly removes it from his path.
"When I first created END," Zeref begins, even as said creature resumes his attempts to use the dragon before him as a playground, "I made it so that he could feel nothing but an overwhelming hatred for my very existence. I thought…" he pauses for a moment, looking sadly around at the devastation his curse has caused, "I thought that if he had the same loathing for my existence that I did, that his determination to see me dead, coupled with the powers I had given him, would make him strong enough to destroy me."
"It didn't," Igneel reminds him unnecessarily, "And did you even think about who or what could possibly stop END if you died?"
"I had measures in place," Zeref assures him, but Igneel doesn't look convinced, "As it is, I ended up sealing him inside his book after that last battle and decided that my Etherious project was a failure."
"But here we are, yet again."
Zeref chuckles, but it's a hollow sound that permits echoes of a pained existence to escape from him. He spends a moment gathering his thoughts before trying to justify his recent actions.
"Someone very recently told me that a desire to protect something you love will always overcome the desire to destroy something you hate…that love can be both fragile and weak, but is more powerful than any other force in the world when at its strongest. That she believed it was the original source of magic."
Igneel's brow furrows contemplatively as he finally decides to simply ignore Natsu in hopes that the child will lose interest in him soon, "So that's your plan? Give him the ability to love and pray that it's enough as you raise him to kill you? You make for a shitty father already Zeref."
"You're only half right. I hope that as he grows, there will be things—people—he comes to love and desire to protect with all his strength. I'm hardly the right person to teach him such things," Suddenly, Zeref stands up and brushes off his robes before turning around and—to Igneel's confusion—beginning to leave. He glances over his shoulder to see that Natsu has not even noticed him leaving. He's not surprised…he created END with an inherent dislike of him, after all. And yet, for some reason…ah, well, it's not important, he decides, and lifts a hand in farewell.
"That's why I'm leaving him with you, Igneel."
And then, suddenly, with one more step, the Black Wizard is gone.
The dead clearing is filled mostly with silence, interrupted by only the occasional giggle as Natsu continues attempting to scale Igneel's leg, only to repeatedly fall and try again. The great dragon himself sits there for a moment, blinking at the spot where Zeref has disappeared before the ramifications of his parting words suddenly hit him.
…
"YOU BASTARD!"
On a mountain side miles away, Zeref stands, listening to the disappearing echoes of a dragon's angry roar and smirking quietly to himself—he would've liked to see the look on Igneel's face…
The smirk disappears as he turns his gaze towards the blue sky, watching the white clouds dance lazily beneath the sun's warm, watchful rays. He's glad that at least those cheerful colours are beyond his reach, that he can't rob them of their brilliance like he does of everyone and everything else just by—
It happens again; the flowers at his feet crumble into dust and the grass grows dark and brittle, blown away by slight breezes as the trees wither and turn black.
He bows his head, leans against one of the dead trees, and buries his face in his hands, "Please, kill me soon Natsu."
What if he doesn't want to anymore? His doubts ask of him, what if he decides to value all life…even yours?
"Then I'll force his hand," he growls murderously back at it, and lowers his hands, now red eyes glaring unseeingly as his palms.
"We'll see how much he values my life when I threaten everything he loves."