Even in the detainment chamber in the basement I felt the building tremble. What were they doing this time? Last week they'd taken a snip of my hair and tried to create an animated doll by sewing the strands in. The week before they'd wanted to create a new celestial spirit. That had ended even worse, and hurt a bit for me too when the king came out in a fury over them 'tampering with the natural order.'

I'd made myself small and hoped he didn't notice the most unnatural thing in the room.

This time it didn't sound like a spacial rift. I saw no magic hinting towards yet another underworld demi-demon having been called up from the earth to possess that dumb doll again either. It looked like… time magic? Maybe. They'd never demonstrated time magic in front of me, but sometimes when I reached into his mind I saw it. I saw things through his eyes when I did, and everything looked strange and barren, but I'd figured that time magic would normally waver and ripple like this energy did.

I couldn't think of anything those bastards would want to test that used time magic, but I could never guess what they were going to do next, even after six years of being at the mercy of their whim-and their whim was not merciful.

Another crash. This time a piece of the ceiling came down, clipping my arm. I gritted my teeth and clutched the injured area, backing up into the part of the room that was beneath the stairs. The knowledge I got from him said it was the safest place for me to be.

It never takes long for pain from regular objects to fade, but the building collapsed in even less time.

I looked out at all the rubble that had fallen into my room for the past six years staring and waiting… waiting… waiting…

Waiting for what? For one of them to come back for me? Did I want that? No. Did they want that? Yes, and that was an even more compelling reason to get the hell out of there.

…but then where did I go. What I learned from his memories was random. I knew about a few towns here and there, but not how they connected, or if they were close by, or even where I was. That was something to worry about when I got to it, though. First I had to make sure I was far away before those idiots got organized and realized that collapsing their whole lab on themselves had given me a chance at freedom.

Freedom? The word rung a bell so hard my ears rang.

One of his memories. I tried not to dwell on the useless, fragmented information. I just had to get out before they found a new box to keep me in.

Climbing over the rubble wasn't hard at all after the obstacle courses from hell I'd been asked to run. A few sections of wall that had been enchanted to keep me from breaking them myself burned my hands as I crawled over them, leaving blue tinted skin and blisters that would take their sweet time fading away. That was fine. Probably. A meal and a few days rest was usually all it took to recover from a real injury, but if I wasn't staying in the lab then those bastards wouldn't be supplying me with food whenever I got hurt. I could live without it, but having injured hands for longer because of it would be a nuisance.

I'd only seen the woods surrounding the lab once, from the back of the van I was brought in on. Following the trail was the safest way of getting to civilization without getting lost, but it was also the easiest way to get caught. If I strayed too far trying to keep track of it I ran the risk of mistaking another clearing for the path. From a distance grass and dirt look the same if I don't squint.

It was too late in the day for the grass to still be damp, but I found a cool stream to rest my hands in after walking a ways. Where there was water there was civilization, his knowledge told me, but from what information came with that phrase it seemed that didn't literally mean everywhere there was water. Following the path was a better bet than following the small steam of burnt-hand-relief.

Actually… walking all on my own felt… awful. There was a voice in my head that was singing for joy over my liberation, growing louder with each step I took away from that hell hole, but I'd only been completely alone once in my life, after the large man with the second nature inside him and the staff that was full of life took him away. Even then, that had only been for a few days after my birth before the Council found me and had me sent to the lab.

I didn't see another soul on my walk down the path until the sun had sank. Surely those bastards hadn't taken so long to reach the lab every day. I didn't remember it having taken as long to get from the nearest place where they might live to the lab on my way into the lab either. There must have been more to vehicles there than I'd thought.

The woman just outside of town watched me come out of the woods. I smiled at her and watched her features go from frozen shock to complete horror. She squeaked and ran and I just watched, frozen myself. Why…? She must have realized I wasn't normal. Wasn't natural. Wasn't human. Would they all react that way? I hoped not. If I couldn't find anyone who would help me figure out where to go from there then I didn't know… well… where to go from there.

People never ran away from me before. They always leaned in way too close and stared right. In. To. My. Eyes. It was a foreign situation. How was I supposed to know she'd freak out if I chased her?

I'm not so socially inept that I can't recognize a shriek of terror when I hear one. I stopped, wondering why she'd done that when I only meant to explain my situation, and found myself surrounded by a group of wizards.

No anti-mages in the bunch. I put up a mild resistance when they attacked me, but not enough to give them a real reason to be upset. Once one got my arms behind my back I waited for them to ask what I'd been doing so I could explain that I'd done nothing wrong.

"What's this lowlife doing here?" One of the wizards demanded.

"Nothing good. Someone contact the Rune Knights!"

"I wasn't-"

The fist that slammed into my stomach didn't hurt too much, but it did startle me out of what I'd been saying.

"Don't let him cast any spells! Get Barner while you're at it. He just came back from his last job. We need an anti-mage to hold him while the Rune Knights get here."

Anti-mage? Screw explaining myself. I twisted, yanking the lighter of the two men holding me off of his feet and sending him tumbling to the ground. The larger man, the one who wanted the anti-mage, did some twisting of his own, but he couldn't do any serious damage to my arm no matter how loud the sound of joints snapping was. Using him as my anchor I swung up and kicked. I didn't have the most flexible body out there, but with my body in midair it wasn't hard to reach his face. He fell backwards with me on top of him. The jolt of landing on my broken arm did hurt, but I could already feel the bone knitting back together. Exactly as it had been. Always as it was.

"Bastard," the smaller one spat at me. The girl was screaming like a creature possessed. All I'd tried to do is ask for help and defend myself.

"Barner!" Someone cried. I hadn't noticed a crowd forming. "Barner over here! Stop him!"

Crap.

No more time to go easy, I pulled out the first big spell that came to mind, blasting a wave of black magic through the crowd. It wasn't my specialty, but that meant I wouldn't harm them enough to give reason to chase. Before the anti-mage could catch up I charged up a spell that came much more naturally and flew through the path I'd opened up, darting between buildings until I was a ways away from the town. My spell held up for a good 90 seconds before my body remembered that my hands were burned and I'd had no recent meals to help me charge up and I crashed into the ground.

For a while I lay there, wondering where the situation had gone wrong. Chasing the girl, maybe, but when I'd tried to explain myself the men had acted as if someone like me was automatically a threat. Automatically something to expose to anti-magic.

Someone like me.

Someone as unnatural as me.

Something as inhuman as me.

If I was human, would they have welcomed me? Would the bastards in the lab have treated me as kindly as they had one another? I'd never even considered it.

If I was human…

-x-

STA: I'm again filing The Spell's identity under THIS SHOULD BE REALLY FRICKEN OBVIOUS, but for the sake of lying to myself and pretending I can subtly reveal information I'm not stating his name until everyone else finds out that he's a thing. Or… maybe it would be better to say not until everyone else finds out that he exists.

Gr… Mashima. I tried to stretch my non Sting chapter writing time so he'd have plenty of time to explain what happened at the Sabertooth lodging, but then he went and did another chapter that completely ignored that it happened. This is the point where I decided to just go "okay, Lector's dead" which it turned out he wasn't. sigh. Well, nothing to do about it now. It's not like I can go back and edit the story so he's there without wasting a lot of my time to make everyone go back and reread stuff just for the small differences.

The question was raised, and I don't know if I mentioned this before or not so I'll say it now, this is just a general fic. There really aren't enough of those on this site. I'll try to keep my bias from showing when I get Jellal and Erza in the same scene. That being said, some of the shippy type stuff that's common in the manga may appear here. Juvia will still fawn over Gray and so on, but I'm not going to seriously hint at anything that doesn't get hinted in canon, and there will be no romantic developments. The closest the story will get to Sting/Rogue is maybe a not-what-it-look- like type scene for purely comic effect. The Rogue-is-gay-for-Gajeel stuff from a few chapters back was just for comic effect. While I'm mentioning that, I'd like to throw out that I interpreted the bonus story in volume 33 (with the nude shots in the magazine) to mean that Freed is at least bisexual, so one sided Freed/Laxus will make a brief appearance later on.

Next chapter:Sting can't breathe