Mavis beamed at Natsu when he stepped into the guild the next morning, which meant she had good news about Zeref. It could be anything from him remembering to feed himself to noticing that she did her hair up differently to deciding on his own that it wasn't a good idea to draft blueprints for a drill powered by stolen souls that could dig into parallel universes and potentially shred the fabric of space and time.

Afraid to hear that his brother really had come up with such a terrible idea, Natsu returned her smile and waved, but rather than go up to her, scanned the guildhall for Jellal. His eyes passed over Elfman and Evergreen, who had given up on denying that they were a couple and now denied that they'd eloped, Lucy and Wendy playing cards, Gajeel talking to Laxus while his son waved, Levy showing Asuka a book…

Where was Gajeel's daughter?

"Na-suu!"

Natsu looked down and saw Shutora tugging at his pants leg. Despite his eagerness to recruit Jellal, he couldn't help but smile at her and swoop her up off the ground.

"Hey Shutora. Does your daddy know where you are?"

She put a finger to her lips and gave a comically loud "Sh."

Her daddy had good hearing, and turned to fix Natsu with the flattest look he possibly could. Natsu grinned back and stuck his tongue out. Gajeel's kids loved him, and he loved them, and he loved that Gajeel couldn't stand that.

"Let's take you back to your daddy before he gets mad at me," Natsu said, heading towards Gajeel's table. Gajeel was already mad, so there was no rush on that front, but Natsu didn't have time to babysit when he was supposed to be taking care of Gray.

"Noooo! Pway wit Na-suu."

"Soon, kiddo. I promise. Just not today."

"Meanie! Poopy! Fuckuh!"

Shutora struggled in his arms, but Natsu held her tight until he was within range of Gajeel's waiting arms.

"Thanks," Gajeel growled.

"Yeah. Watch what you say around her. I don't think it'll end well for you if Levy hears her repeat that last one."

The way Gajeel's scowl deepened, Natsu suspected that Levy had already heard and laid into her husband. "I'll keep that in mind."

Natsu left Gajeel with his snickering guildmates and swearing daughter and resumed his search for Jellal. Gradually, the former fugitive had been coaxed away from the corner and out from under his hood, which ironically made him harder to spot. Now he could be anywhere in the building, and his vibrant, disheveled hair blended in with everyone else's in a way that his old thick hood never had.

An excited squeal from Erza turned Natsu's gaze up to the second floor, and he hurried upstairs to find her thanking Mira profusely for a slice of apple pie. Strawberries, hilariously enough, had not been to her taste since conceived. That she had suddenly stopped caring about her favorite cake should have been everyone's first clue that something was going on with her.

Jellal sat at her side, smiling at the simpleminded pleasure she took in her sweets. He stopped smiling when Natsu waved, but at least Erza waved back enthusiastically.

"How's the baby?" Natsu asked.

"Kicking," Erza reported.

"So she claims," Jellal added. His tone was light, but since his actual fiancée wasn't looking at him, he made no attempt to mask the glare he gave Natsu.

Lately, it was easier to talk to him in Erza's presence. Since he couldn't explain why he had it out for Natsu without going against Gray's wishes and telling the guild too many secrets, he had to play nice or else be smacked for being unduly rude to Erza's friend. Her friend who saved her from him when he was mad, no less.

Oblivious to the daggers her fiancé was glaring, Erza said, "He's not strong enough that anyone else can feel him yet, but he will be. Porlyusica says he's so active because I keep feeding him sugar."

"You feed him more than sugar, right?"

"Well, I have to now." Erza threw Jellal an accusatory look, and he made a show of rolling his eyes.

"That's very brave of you," Natsu sincerely told Jellal. Not many people would dare to tell Erza that she had to eat better.

"I've already been called in too many times to make sure Meredy looks after herself properly," Jellal said. "I had practice coming into this."

For the first time in weeks, the look of displeasure on his face had nothing to do with Natsu. It was no secret that he hated Meredy's husband for the simple crime of being her husband. Any failing on Lyon's part was regarded as a monumental and irredeemable sin worthy of capital punishment. Meredy was far easier to manage than Erza, but from Jellal's intervention alone, Natsu suspected that Lyon had it the roughest of anyone the guild knew with his wife's pregnancy. It must have taken a great deal of courage on Lyon's part to come to Jellal's town in order to check in on Jellal's pregnant friend.

"Actually, I was hoping you could put your practice to use on a friend of mine who's having a kid," Natsu said.

"Not me, right?" Erza asked. "He already spends enough time nagging me."

"Helping you. Do you want us to talk about your friend in private, Natsu?"

"I think they'd like it if we talked in private."

Jellal pushed himself up, leaned over to give Erza a quick kiss, and let Natsu lead him down into the basement. Gray was the one who handled record keeping at the moment, having excused his dropping from active duty by saying he injured himself on a job and Porlyusica ordered him to take it easy, and with him still at home the basement was empty.

Still, Jellal scanned between shelves of the guild's archives before satisfied with their privacy. Only once he locked the door and searched the entire room for signs of life did he ask Natsu, "What did you do this time?"

"Enable him too much? I don't know. He's holed himself up. It's no good for him."

"He is trying to hide a pregnancy."

"But he doesn't look pregnant yet. Even when he strips, he just looks a little out of shape, and he's been freakishly good about keeping his clothes on lately. That's what has me more worried for him than anything. Besides, when was the last time you saw him?"

"Two days ago, and he didn't look pregnant then," Jellal admitted. "I would be there as often as you if Erza didn't need me. He's doing better now than when he first found out about what you did, but he's seen better days. What happened yesterday?"

"Nothing. He cried over pickles, but I think it was a mood swing thing. He started giggling over ice cream a minute later."

Jellal shook his head in disbelief. "You brought him pickles and ice cream. You're impossible, Natsu."

"No one told me it was a pregnancy joke! And he asked for the ice cream. Which is half the problem. Most of what he eats is junk."

"So stop bringing him junk."

"But he gets upset when I don't."

"Then… Just…" Jellal sighed, running both hands over his face and through his hair. "Okay. I'll talk with him about his diet the next time I'm over. I'll see if we can get him out more too. Maybe I can pretend Meredy's mad at me and I need him to go and make sure Lyon is taking care of her properly."

"You could also just ask Lyon to invite him over."

Jellal balked as if that option as unfathomable.

"Okay. I'll ask Lyon to invite him over."

"Fine. You do that. And in the meantime… No, wait. Would it be a good idea to get Meredy involved? She's been more on the spastic side since becoming pregnant, and she does like to gossip with Juvia. If she found out about the pregnancy… Maybe I could drag him along the next time I go to see her and say I need him to keep Lyon distracted so I don't have to deal with him while Meredy and I catch up?"

"That might work."

"We'll try that then. He can't be that bad, though. He still comes to the guild."

"He's been here four times since he found out about the baby. Once in the past week. You might not have noticed, but he used to be here every day."

"Oh. I… I had noticed that some people are here more often."

Leave it to the guy who looked for reasons not to show up to think that Gray's absence was normal. Natsu looked around. The basement had been left in Gray's reliable hands, but there was a stack of books waiting to be returned to their shelves as tall as Natsu was. Gray didn't do half the work he'd been trusted with, and he hardly socialized anymore either.

"You can still push him when he's being stubborn without it turning into some 'you're just trying to manipulate me for your own aims again' type fight. You gotta get him up more."

Jellal leaned against a dusty bookshelf and crossed his arms. "You know, there's a reason why he doesn't listen to you anymore."

"Nooo. Really? What would that be?"

Jellal glared.

Sighing, Natsu threw up his hands in defeat. "Okay. Okay. Fine. I get it. Really. The reason Gray can guilt me out of making sure he looks after himself is because I feel guilty, okay?"

Jellal's arms stayed crossed.

"Look. I'm trying my best here. I don't know what more you want."

"You could go back in time and tell yourself to pick a better way of stopping Gray that didn't leave him feeling betrayed and stripped of all control."

"I mean, I can make Zeref build me a gate for that, but it's never gone well before when anyone does that. Him especially."

"He sent you to this era just fine."

"Yeah. And got himself cursed with immortality in the process. I'd like to not kill Gray by getting too close to him."

Technically, Zeref was cursed for intending to use the gate to stop Natsu from dying in the first place, and faced no penalties for sending people into the future, but Natsu wasn't taking any chances. Jellal spent too much time avoiding Zeref to know the details of how precisely he was cursed, and would never endorse a project involving Zeref anyway.

The mere mention of his brother was enough for Natsu to free himself from Jellal's bitter gaze. The former fugitive looked away, crossed arms tightening as if he needed to hold himself together.

"Let's… not do that, then."

"Yeah. Like Zeref said, what's done is done. Just gotta go forward from here."

Jellal turned further away from Natsu, who determined that if he kept invoking his brother's name, it would be overkill.

"Well, anyway, just in case that situation arise again… maybe you could teach me how to argue?"

"What?"

"Teach me how to argue," Natsu commanded.

"I think you have more experience arguing than I do. Especially with Gray."

"No. That productive arguing thing."

"Debate?"

"Yeah. Don't you do a lot of that?"

"With who? Erik? There's no debating Erik. He gets in your head and derails the conversation with all your embarrassing thoughts. Macbeth doesn't even respond half the time when I try to talk to him. And Erza… You can either convince her right away or not at all."

"Okay. Buy what about when you were on the Council?"

Jellal looked back at Natsu, eyes wide with innocent confusion. "What Council?"

"The one you served on when you voted to blast all of us with Etherion. Didn't you do that debate thing then? How did you convince everyone to vote to blast us?"

"I think I would remember something that major."

"You cited a law you voted to enact last week to help Mavis get us all off the hook over that melted train station. How do you… Are you just trying to get out of teaching me?"

"Anyway, I'll see what I can do for Gray."

Natsu grabbed Jellal by the arm as he walked back to the stairs, calling on his E.N.D. form in order to hold him steady when Jellal tried to pull away.

"Look. I get it. You don't like me right now, and I'm not fun to argue with on a good day, and I'm so bad with lessons that my brother who screwed his own life over just to save me gave up on taking care of me himself and left me in the woods with a dragon. What I'm asking of you is not fun. But you're the one who got on my case for not trying to talk Gray down, and I'm asking you to teach me how to do that without turning the conversation into a bitter fight."

Jellal glared back at Natsu, not at all intimidated by the scales or claws, and said, "Fine."

Natsu released him and suppressed his Etherious form, scales dissolving back into skin. "Thanks. Do you need to see Wendy?"

"No." Jellal tugged at the sleeve of his shirt, which wasn't long enough to hide the hand-shaped burn mark. "I need to see Porlyusica later. I'll ask her for a salve while I'm there."

"Sorry."

Jellal shrugged. "At least you're trying."

-o-

Mavis was waiting for Natsu at the top of the stairs when he came up.

"Zeref received development funding," she blurted out before Natsu could say hi.

"Is this supposed to be good news? Who's funding him?"

"The Council, believe it or not."

Natsu didn't believe it, actually. The Council had tried twice to penalize both Fairy Tail and Twilight Ogre for not running Zeref out of town, and then pressured the royal family to cut off trade with Alvarez if the empire didn't stop giving Zeref whatever resources he asked for to conduct his research.

"It's for the Archive Lacrima. Mest mentioned to an old coworker how it was easy to dig up research people logged with Archive magic without needing to learn Archive for himself, and how I could keep tabs on all of Zeref's projects without having to go all the way out to the lab to make sure he wasn't doing anything too reckless, and they mentioned it to more people and someone realized how much work it could save if they could set his lacrima up in different research facilities. There's no way to keep information private using the lacrima or only share it with select groups, so they wanted him to find a way to build on the existing Archive spell to make it do that. But nevermind that. The Council is willing to work with Zeref, Natsu. Isn't that great?"

"Maybe."

It could be encouragement Zeref didn't need, but it could also lead to more direction with his research, and more monitoring to make sure he didn't come up with any ideas that could be too damaging. It wasn't that Zeref never asked himself what could go wrong with a project. The issue was more that his genius didn't extend to coming up with answers for that question.

Mavis's smile faltered when Natsu didn't return it, so he forced a grin.

"Are you two fighting? He said he hasn't seen you too much the lately."

"No. I've been busy. I'll see him again soon."

"When you do, could you maybe… make him do something about all the frogs?" Mavis made a face. "I don't mind one or two, but they're everywhere. He wanted to make sure for Gray that nothing weird happened for a certain number of generations out. Although what Gray would need so many frogs for is beyond me."

She paused, peering past Natsu into the basement, and hummed in disappointment at the stack of books still waiting to be shelved.

"Sis?"

Mavis swatted him on the arm. She looked too young for anyone to call her Granny or Auntie and continue their tradition with Makarov, so most people stuck to Master or First or, jokingly, Ninth. Natsu, as a jab at her anchored relationship with Zeref, liked to speak to her as if she were a sister-in-law.

She hated it.

"You heard Gray was injured, right? I'm worried he might have downplayed it. He was supposed to help around the guild while he recovered, but he's barely here. Would you be able to check on him? He's your teammate."

"Yeah." Natsu tugged nervously at his scarf. "I'll let him know you were worried."

"And tell him that Zeref is pleased with how his frogs are doing."

"I'm sure he'll love to hear that one." It was more news for Natsu than Gray. Gray had no reason to worry about how they baby would turn out when he didn't even want to live in the same country as it. But that Mavis was worried about his wellbeing was a good message to pass on.

-x-

STA: There's this one trilogy where one of the main villains, in the first book, has a scheme that involves stealing souls and using them to fuel a drill that can pierce different universes. I haven't been able to take him seriously since, because how comically evil must you be to build a soul powered drill?

Oh. Also, the frogs. The frog thing is… something that kind of kept coming up as a shorthand to reference Zeref's serum research, but I like what it turned into.

Kori no Koibito: Glad you think so :)

M.E: Revision would probably help with pacing, but I don't usually write an entire fanfic and then go back and rewrite it neater. That's just... That's a little more dedication than I'm willing to put into this kind of a project. I think I can guess as to what part of the story might not be holding your interest, and if so, then that's alright. I don't want to say much about what's to come, but I hope it holds your interest and won't take it personally if it doesn't.