(Originally posted to Tales of the Romeoverse on 12/13/19, reposted 3/19/20)

Hello! And welcome to my kinda-not-new story, Time Comes Around!

This story was originally a part of Tales of the Romeoverse, but thanks to your guys' wonderful support, I've decided to make it its own story! So thank you all for that.

This is certainly one of my more "out there" story ideas as far as my fanfics go. It's a time-travel based plot, so it's already confusing right from the get-go. Still, it's an idea I happen to like a lot, so I hope you do as well.

I would like to note that, by the end of the time travel stuff, ROMEO AND HISUI WILL BE THE SAME AGE! I cannot stress that enough. Romeo is currently 13 years old in the year x790, and will remain such when he jumps back to x784 and gets stranded. Hisui in x784 will be around 12-13 years old, therefore making them the same age.

There will also be some RomeoXChelia going on briefly for these first few chapters.

Big thanks to Iket45 for beta-ing this chapter.

And huge thanks to chaosphoenix123 for helping me with the story in general. I really hope this one takes off, because I've got some big things planned for it.

The End of a World (With Fireworks)

July 20, x790

Deep below the depths of Crocus slept a hidden treasure, the kind capable of altering the fate of the entire world should it be awoken. Yet for hundreds of years, it remained lost in time, buried beneath ruins that were buried further by Fiore Royal Magic Academy, never to see the light of day again.

At least, not until now…

"Ethernano containers at a hundred percent, holding stable…"

The boy had been shocked when he just accidentally stumbled upon this treasure. He'd simply been messing around with his more-than-friend, Chelia, after class, trying to impress her with an—in his opinion—incredible display of fire magic. But one stray fireball and a near-death fall later, he ended up with something so much more.

"Pseudo-keys in position…"

Thankfully, he was good on his feet, even when his feet were falling at very high speeds towards a solid stone floor. He managed to catch himself in a beanbag-sized Purple Bubble, saving himself from splattering all over the ground. He freaked at first, not just because he was stuck but also because he was afraid of losing the scholarship his old teacher had given him.

But with no way back up and no hope of being rescued for a good while, he figured he might as well go exploring.

"Ravines of Time located…"

And that's when he found them. In the ruins of what looked to be an ancient school, he managed to find what must've been one of the greatest treasures in the world: research notes, written by none other than Zeref himself.

"Preparing the Gate..."

The boy had learned plenty about Zeref, both in school and from his late older brother. He knew the man was pure evil, and anything that even vaguely related to him should be burnt on sight. But at the same time, the man's genius is pretty undeniable...

Besides, what was the worst that could've happened from a little peek at his old notes?

And that's how it started. Every day for the last year, Romeo studied and followed the notes like a religion. A majority of the blueprints and projects he found held no use to him, such as the prints he found for Magic Amplifiers. Or they terrified him, like the plans for the R-System and Thunder Palace. But there was one set of research notes in particular that stood out to him.

He wished he could say building it had been difficult, but the majority of the groundwork had already been laid out for him. Yes, the device he built wound up being pretty rudimentary, mainly due to a lack of resources, but who cares if it looked pretty? He just needed it to work. And seeing as he'd already perfected all of Zeref's theories and understood each of his equations within the first month, it would.

The real tricky part was just getting power for the damned thing. He was broke, so it wasn't like the boy could buy whole stores' worths of Lacrima Batteries (not that he'd want to or that it would actually work). Luckily, an alternative source of power sat right above his head. For the past year, he'd been slowly, steadily draining magic particles from his classmates. Not enough for them to notice, but still enough for him to get his little project done at a reasonable time. Day after day, his machine would build up more ethernano, all while he spent his time waiting;

Waiting for this moment.

The newly-appointed 13-year-old lifted the lacrima device in the air and pressed the button.

BOOM!

Green flames lit up the dark cavern, melting away its stone ceiling to allow the moonlight to pour in. Small chunks of rubble, some of it marked with the lines from the school's sparring fields, fell to the ground.

'Maybe I should've built this thing above ground…' the boy thought, before staring back up at the brilliant green explosion made from his own flames. He grinned, 'Then again, I'm a sucker for nostalgia, and what's a sendoff without some fireworks?' He wasn't too worried about all the damage he was causing. After all, in a few minutes, it will never have existed anyway.

A faint light poured down from the new hole in the catacomb's ceiling. The boy grinned, removing his coat and scarf and revealing a variety of sloppily made tattoos. Zodiac signs ran across his body, all connected by a series of runic symbols. Taurus, Virgo, Sagittarius, and Cancer were divided amongst his arms; Aquarius and Leo rested on his shoulders; and Gemini, Scorpio, Aries, Pisces, and Libra spread out across his back. His left palm held the image of the moon, and his right held the sun. Finally, tying the whole operation together was the image of a circle with an upside-down, horizontally-bisected triangle in the center of his chest.

He stepped into the middle of a large, circular platform made from lacrima, the power source for his Gate. Resting equidistant from each other on the platform's edge was a total of twelve false keys, each bearing the symbol of a Celestial Spirit. They couldn't actually summon a Spirit, but at the same time, they didn't need to. All they needed to do was open up the portal to the Celestial Spirit Realm. The pieces didn't need to look good as long as they were in place.

Glancing up, he saw the final piece of his device hanging right above him in the night sky:

An eclipse!

Laughter escaped from the boy's throat. Six years of suffering and three years of work had finally built up to this! "Alright, Romeo," the boy said to himself, "It's finally time. Everything you've been working for..." He looked over to the six-year-old x784 calendar he had hung up on the wall, where a specific day in December had been violently circled in red pen. Nerves began to bite at his heels, but he hid them away with a wicked grin. "...has led to right now!"

One by one, the keys surrounding him began to glow and levitate off the ground, causing the corresponding marks on his body to burn with them. The boy felt a strange and immense power enter him, energizing every cell in his being. The circle on his chest lit up a vibrant green, a secondary but necessary spell for this all to work. The sun and moon on his hands burned gold and silver, as did the respective eyes. He spread his arms apart, then brought his hands together into a thunderous CLAP!

Light flooded throughout the entirety of Crocus, blinding its inhabitants and making the night seem as though it were day. No one could move, and no one could feel a thing. Everything was as still as a picture. An old, purple-haired man stopped reaching for his drink. A young teacher held still his letter of resignation. A heartbroken girl's heart beat one final time.

And the sun never rose again.

If anyone is confused, the thing Romeo built is an Eclipse Gate, though it's a very rudimentary one that doesn't look at all like the one Hisui or the Dragon Slayers used. It will still function for time traveling, though, as these next few chapters will show.

Thank you all so much for reading! I hope you enjoyed it. Please follow if you enjoyed it. Favorites would also be nice, since they might expose other people to this story.

And please, definitely leave some reviews. Feedback is something I love to see. I want to know what you like about these stories, and I want to know if you think there's something I can improve on. If you don't leave a review, then I will literally manifest my physical form inside of your house and lick a random object without telling you which one.

So once again one final thank you for reading, and I hope to see you all next time!