Epilogue


He'd never been a smoker but the breath from his lungs hung in the cold air all the same. It bothered him. He didn't care for smoke. Not the smell. Not the taste. Not its malignant nature that seeped into anything and everything regardless of a person's efforts to mask it. Nothing could do that. He would know. For the first thirteen years of his life he'd tried to hide the scent of tobacco and the way it permeated the air in a home to the point of taste. He could smell it a mile away. Sometimes he wondered if his own son thought he was fooling anyone. An open window couldn't disperse the smell of a cigarette any more than the cherry tobacco in a pipe could distort the flavor into something palatable.

Acnologia Fernandes had shelves and shelves of boxes in his mind that never touched. Cigarettes were completely avoidable. Cocaine? Trashy maybe but a means to an end. He'd seen enough addicts in his time lowering himself into Igneel's gutters. The dip was controllable. Nothing moved an inch without his knowledge. He loved the control. He needed it. Jellal was out of control. Out of hand. Out of pocket. Jellal made him feel like every step he'd taken since leaving his father's decrepit and dying body behind in their hovel of a house – never a home – had been for nothing. Jellal could be brought to heel, though. Acnologia was sure of it.

His shoes crunched in the late snows of spring. The dusting of white would be gone by afternoon next but he enjoyed the gleam. Soon it would be coated in ash.

He told himself he was doing this for his family. For Anna. For Jellal. Even for Lucy. Acnologia remembered well every pinched smile of his wife while her mother still lived. Every seemingly careless slight. Every shrug of Layla's shoulders that said, I love you but not enough to take your side. Anna deserved better. So he'd tried to fortify her with something new. Something stronger. If she couldn't be the Heartfilia her mother demanded, she'd be a Fernandes. Jellal would be a Fernandes too. The new family he built for her would eclipse the old one. She would sit elevated as Jude and Layla begged for her attentions the way Anna groveled for her mother's.

Jude ruined everything, though. After the matriarch's death he'd taken too many right turns and steered Love and Lucky aground. Acnologia thought he hated Jude more than he'd ever hated his father. But he did the rough work. He skulked in the shadows of Magnolia. He'd accepted a partnership with a man who gazed at Anna every Christmas with a wistfulness that told Acnologia everything he needed to know about Igneel. In truth, he understood. Loving Anna was a thing he could not have understood more. He did these things with the promise that one day he'd be the pillars on which Love and Lucky towered. But like most promises, these were hollow and shattered easily.

Love and Lucky was dying. Acnologia needed to cut out the cancer. He needed to burn it away.

The explosion hurt in his ears but he didn't inch a single step back. He watched the fire consume the theater and decided this smoke he could inhale. By the time sirens choked out the quiet of the night and police lights reflected off the now blackened crust of snow, Acnologia was gone.