A/N: For anyone who might be feeling a strange sense of déjà vu, this chapter picks up directly after the the flashback in Ch14. ~CS
The Scars That Make You Whole
By CrimsonStarbird
Hubris et Orbi, Part 1
-Long Ago and Far Away-
Somewhere in the Forests of Northern Carligne, X371
Darkness. It was sudden, it was suffocating; it silenced thoughts and logic and everything that had once made sense. Into the absence of light flooded the smell of smoke, not quite masking the beloved scent of old libraries.
And then, above it all, rose the voice of the stranger who had dropped the open book across Zeref's face: "Are you the moron who wrote this paper?"
The book slipped into his lap as he sat up, and there was light again. Just like that, the daytime was back, the golden meadow called Elysia was back, the air heavy with the blessings of summer was back, common sense was back, everything was the same as it was before – except that she was still there, still real, golden-haired and blazing like the dawn.
"I'm- I'm sorry?" he managed, still not entirely sure what was happening.
Huffing, she snatched up the book from his lap and rifled through it with easy familiarity. "Philosophical Transactions of the Mildian Academy of Magic, X339. 'Further Ruminations on the Theory of World-Magic, In Particular its Consequences for Time-Travel', by Zeref Dragneel – it was you who wrote that, wasn't it?"
Once, maybe, a lifetime ago or longer, but her question paled into insignificance next to the questions flooding his mind: who was she? How had she found him? Why?
He ventured, "Do I… do I know you?"
"We've not met, but you'll know my name," she asserted, snapping the book shut. "Anna Heartfilia, at your service."
He stared up at her blankly.
"Observations on the Seven Heavenly Spheres? The Significance of Celestial Mythology in Ancient Aktorian Ritual Magic? World-Magic and One-Magic: Framework for a Conceptual Synthesis?" she recounted. Silently, he shook his head at each one, and when she reached the last, she threw her hands up in the air. "Gods! I've had three articles published in the Journal of Natural Philosophy, Magic, and the Arts since January, and I'm not even eighteen until next week!"
She seemed to be looking for some sort of response, so he hazarded a guess at, "Uh… congratulations?" At her incredulous look, he shrunk back into the long grass. "I'm sorry, I… haven't really been keeping up with publications lately."
"Evidently!" Anna snorted. "Honestly, from how Grandad used to talk about you, I thought you were some big shot in the academic world – but you're not much of anything, are you?"
"Not really," he conceded quietly. "Your grandfather, he- he knew me?"
"As I literally just told you, yes," she huffed. "He said he had collaborated with you on a couple of projects back at the Mildian Academy. Interaction of medicinal herbs with the patient's latent magic. Comparisons of natural, plant-aided, and magical healing, and what each discipline can learn from the others. Ring any bells?"
A frown creased his face as he tried to remember. He had many memories of that place, most of them too dark to be brought into a place so full of life: death, guilt, failure. Not all of them, though; he'd known when he'd shoved them into that mental trunk of iron and stowed it somewhere too deep to stumble upon by accident that he might be losing something important as well as something catastrophic, but it had felt like a small price to pay. "Heartfilia… Gregor Heartfilia?"
"That's him."
"I do remember," said he, frowning further, deeper, darker. "He worked in many fields, but magical botany was his specialism. We were on the same medical research team, for a while, and stayed in touch afterwards… But what you say is impossible. He couldn't have told you about me, because he died at the Academy. It would have been years before you were born."
"No, he was at the family farm in Aster on the day of the massacre. He survived."
"I see." The shadow that had flitted across Zeref's features at the memory vanished. He looked past the golden-haired stranger, past the graveyard of a village far below, up to the brilliant blue heavens – and he didn't smile, not quite, but the world seemed to press a little less heavily on him, now that one more grudge-bearing soul had spread its wings and taken flight from his shoulders. "One thousand, three hundred and forty-one."
Anna's eyes narrowed, displeased by his wandering thoughts. "For the rest of his life, he believed he was the only survivor. With the great Academies toppling like dominoes around him, he had no choice but to give up on that life. Maybe things would have been different if he'd known he wasn't alone. Maybe, between the two of you, you could have kept that way of life alive. Maybe I could also have grown up in an age of science and magic."
"I doubt it," he told her quietly, sadly.
"So do I, if this is what the celebrated Zeref Dragneel, child prodigy, rising star of the Mildian Academy, is truly like!"
Zeref stared at his hands and said nothing.
That wasn't the reaction she had been hoping for, if the disdain swelling in her voice was any indication. "Grandad used to speak so highly of you. Said you used to see things in ways no one else did. Understood magic in a way that couldn't be described with words or numbers. Said you'd put forward such a compelling argument that even he believed time travel could one day be possible. Imagine my disappointment when I found what is probably the last surviving edition of the X339 Transactions in his attic, and read what drivel you'd actually written!"
Zeref gazed up at her uncertainly. "What do you want from me?"
Brown eyes flashed, not the warmth of hot cocoa but the mountain-moving fury of Mother Earth. "That's obvious, isn't it?"
Without waiting for an invitation, she sat down beside him. When he inched away, as if hoping the golden grass would hide him from this lioness, she just leaned in closer, flipping open the book and pointing to his article.
"You make a compelling argument for the existence of World Magic as a symbiotic opposite to the One Magic, and then completely ignore the consequence of those parallels for the rest of the paper. You assume a link between World Magic and the local timestream which even the prevalent theory of World Magic at the time didn't support, let alone today. You claim that creating a portal through time would be physically feasible, yet it took me all of three back-of-the-envelope calculations to prove that the required parameters exceed those of any metal in existence. And I don't know if it wasn't a requirement for peer-reviewers to be fluent in semi-intangible calculus back then or what, but this is a really basic error in your calculations. I can't believe no one spotted it. It renders the entire mathematical proof meaningless, and the proof-by-concept doesn't stand on its own."
Zeref looked at her, and then at the heavily annotated pages of the article, and then, uneasily, back at her. "So…?"
"What do you mean, so?" she demanded.
"Did you… come all the way here, just to tell me that?"
"Well, I did write it down, but you failed to leave a correspondence address when you faked your own death, and while I did consider sending it to the Journal, it's hard enough to get my own novel research published these days, let alone a commentary on an article which no one but me has even read. So, once I found out you were still alive, I figured I'd track you down and tell you in person."
"Why?" he asked, baffled.
"Why?" she echoed, equally baffled. "So that you would know you were wrong!"
"But… that doesn't matter any more. I wrote this thirty-two years ago. I barely even remember doing it."
"Oh, so you're distancing yourself from it now that I've shown you how moronic it is, are you?" she accused, as if the errors themselves had nothing on this new atrocity.
"No. Yes. No, I mean- it was never important to me, even back then. Researching time travel was more of a hobby than anything else. I wasn't trying to open up a new field of study in World Magic, or anything like that… I never intended to take it any further."
"Why not?"
"Because it wasn't going to do what I wanted it to," he mumbled, shying away, not sure how to react to such intense questioning. "I looked into the possibility of time travel, realized that it wasn't going to accomplish my goal, wrote up what I'd done, and then moved on. That's all there was to it. I'm sorry you've had a wasted trip, but… that paper really doesn't mean anything."
To his astonishment, she leapt upright and seized him by the collar, dragging him to his feet. "Doesn't mean anything? Are you insane? The most coherent, most persuasive thing anyone has written on time travel in recorded history, and you're saying you were just going to discard it? That you didn't care if the whole world forgot about it? That, in all these years, you have never tried to take those ideas any further?"
"So…" he said, uncertainly, when it seemed she had reached the end of her rant, "is my paper moronic, or is it persuasive?"
"Moronic," she told him flatly. "With the occasional, very occasional, flash of brilliant insight buried beneath more errors than I can count."
Then she seemed to realize what she was doing, and with a huff, she released him. He rubbed absently at his neck, watching with frightened eyes as she prowled back and forth through his meadow.
"Did you seek me out because you wanted to collaborate on taking it further, then?" he wondered. "Because I don't mind you using anything I've done so far, but I don't really want to be involved myself…"
"You don't want to be involved?"
His gaze darted around the meadow, although he already knew exactly what he would see: the cliff edge in front, the lethal thickets behind, no easy way out of this haven called Elysia. "I really just want to be left alone…"
"Have you no pride?" she shouted, rounding on him. "You're supposed to be the greatest genius the Academy ever produced! Where is your passion?"
"I don't know," he whispered.
She folded her arms. "Well, you're wrong anyway. I didn't come here because I wanted to work with you. And that was before I'd met you. For someone who doesn't bother to keep abreast of the latest publications in magical research, you think very highly of yourself, don't you?"
"I didn't mean…" he began, but tailed off, because what was the point?
"Is that all you have to say for yourself?"
"Yes."
"Fine. What a waste of time."
As she turned away in disgust, he reached for the book she had left beside him. The grass springing back into place beneath it seemed much more interesting than the precious tome itself, at first, but when it stilled, he found his fingers trailing over the annotated page.
He wondered about the man who had written that paper, all those years ago. If he had been like her. Time travel, mathematics, the theory of World Magic… he couldn't imagine feeling even a tenth of the passion she did for it all. The very notion of it was frightening.
Yet the words upon the page were his. The calculations and commentary deemed important enough to be printed in the most esteemed publication of the time were his. The name beneath the title had once been his. Zeref Dragneel.
Perhaps he had cared, once. Back when he wasn't much older than the children who had gambolled in the meadow which now belonged to him alone. When he'd been part of the symbolism rather than a mere observer. When he'd written up his notes for publication in the hope of keeping discussion in the scientific community alive until he had completed his work on resurrection and was free to study whatever he wanted…
He didn't care for himself, and yet he felt a strange urge to defend that person called Zeref Dragneel, who had not been afraid to be passionate.
"It's not wrong," he said.
A tiny tingle; a forgotten spark; something once lost, reclaimed.
The thickets surrounding the clifftop meadow were proving impenetrable to Anna. Perhaps it was because she had lost the drive that had let her fight her way through to meet him, or perhaps the walls of Elysia were simply easier to open with anticipation than resentment, but she hadn't managed to achieve more than re-opening the scratches on her hands when she turned back to him in frustration. "What are you blathering about now?"
"This isn't semi-intangible calculus."
"Of course it is," she snapped. "Nothing else even makes sense in that situation."
"Well, it is," he amended, "but not as you know it. Semi-intangible calculus wasn't formalized until a good six months after this paper was published. The principles are sound, but the notation is all over the place. I was making it up as I went along, as was everyone else at the time, each with their own way of transcribing it. If you ignore how it appears and rewrite the same concepts in modern notation, I think you will find that it is sound. Your other points I will grant, but subject to those assumptions and limitations on scope, the conceptual and mathematical proofs of time travel still stand."
"…Ah," came the curt response. "Very well, I apologize. Perhaps there is some small merit to your paper, after all."
"Why did you come here?" he asked suddenly.
"I told you. To tell you that you were wrong."
"Yes. But, why? You've made it clear that you don't want to work with me. You're not confirming your interpretation of my research before going off to further it yourself. And you're not particularly interested in the potential of time travel either, or you would have read more papers from those years when World Magic theories were all the rage, and you would have noticed the lack of any standard notation. So, why did you pick my paper in particular to scrutinize?"
"To prove that I'm better than you," she stated.
Whatever he had been expecting, it wasn't that. The change in mood that had risen in the wind abruptly dropped back down to the grass. "I'm… I'm sorry?"
"Until the day he died, Grandad never stopped maintaining that you were the greatest scholar of magic he had ever met. Always Zeref this, Zeref that, Zeref published a new response to some old classic that changed everything, Zeref proved that the sun will rise tomorrow, it's so great that I got to collaborate with Zeref on a paper… on, and on, and on. Well, guess what? I'm going to be the greatest. I'm not like you, hiding away and disowning my old work. The whole world is going to know my name."
"That's your reason? You wrote a commentary on my paper just to- to score some small victory over me?" His world had been so quiet before, but she had reminded him of incredulity and indignation, and both flared now in him as they rounded on each other. "That's unbelievably petty!"
Tectonic plates shifted in her eyes; the gold of her hair in the sun was the first spray of lava. "I don't want to hear that from someone who proved that time travel was theoretically possible, and then never bothered to do anything with it!"
"As I said, it wasn't going to do what I wanted it to; there was no point."
"Oh, yes, because gods forbid anyone might want to do research just for the hell of it! Magic must be developed to create weapons for the Dragon Wars; science must be studied to make inventors famous and patrons rich – and how dare anyone want to actually understand the universe; to learn about the world just because we can-?"
"You're a child!" he shouted. "You understand nothing! Go home, grow up, and I'll talk to you in ten years!"
"I'll surpass you in five!" she yelled back.
"Do it, then!"
Turning on his heel, he strode to the edge of the cliff and stopped there, taking deep breaths. The moss-painted graveyard that the village in the valley had become blurred in and out of focus beneath him.
His heart was hammering. It was such a common phrase, but for a man whose heart had kept a detached, regular pace for a very long time indeed, it was terrifying; leap after reckless leap along the line between life and death. How did those who weren't immortal deal with the fear of living?
"Hang on, what's that?" Anna was saying, and he glanced over. He had ceased listening to her outrage, lost it like the singing breeze and the snuffling wildlife somewhere in the peculiar thundering of his own heart, but she sounded different this time. Worried.
He followed her gaze out over the lost valley – and above it, to the bright blue sky made brighter by a streak of fire.
"Oh," he said. No longer would he have to deal with the unfamiliar pace of his heart; it had plummeted straight out of his stomach, leaving a pit of resignation in its wake. "Just when you think a day can't get any worse…"
"What is it?"
"A nuisance," Zeref told her tiredly.
"Wait- that's a dragon! We're too exposed here – we need to get into the forest!"
"He's not dangerous."
"Not dangerous? Are we looking at the same thing here? A member of a species which is currently trying to exterminate humanity, who also happens to have enormous wings, massive claws, and scales that can stop just about any kind of magic – and you're telling me he isn't dangerous?"
"Not unless stupidity is contagious," he shrugged. "If you talk to him for too long, your brain cells might shrivel up and die, but his attention span is so abysmal that he usually wanders off before it gets to that point."
"…Eh?"
"Look," Zeref sighed, tearing his gaze away from the sky and fixing her with a look so adamant it caused her to frown. "If we ignore him, he'll go away. If you absolutely have to talk to him, then do not, under any circumstances, humour him. We'll never get rid of him otherwise."
The flaming arrow broke into a dive. In a world of blue, green, and gold, he was an outrageous red, rubies and passion and the inferno of the damned.
Moments before impact, his wings snapped open. The roar of wind would have sent any animals scurrying for their burrows, had their argument not done that already. All serenity had fled the scene long before he had burst into it, and now the monstrous beast hovered quite calmly before them, perfectly still, wings not beating but outstretched as if to give two giant middle fingers to gravity.
"Lo, I have come!" proclaimed the dragon. "I, Blazing Justice, Prince of the Fire Dragons, am here to right wrongs and banish evil! Honour is my courage and my worth! Burn to nothing, children of the night!"
"…What?" Anna mouthed to Zeref.
"Ignore him," he mouthed back.
"Evil wizard, I warned you that you could not outrun justice for long!" the dragon announced, glaring fiercely at Zeref. "The time has come for you to pay for all the evil you have done! You may have got the better of me in our last thirteen encounters, but this time I will end your foul existence once and for all!"
"What?" Anna asked, out loud this time.
"Ignore him," Zeref repeated.
"Many months have I spent in search of a magic capable of destroying you, and at last I have created something more powerful than you have ever seen before! Behold! Blazing Justice: Fire Dragon Prince's Hyper Plasma Laser Jet Of Righteousness!"
"I'm sorry, what?" Anna demanded.
Groaning, Zeref raised his palm towards the dragon, as if he could hold back the white plasma furnace currently building in the beast's open maw with his bare hand. "Wait."
The dragon gave a pleased flutter of his wings that had no effect whatsoever on his altitude. "Aha! Begging for mercy, are you, Black Wizard?"
Ignoring this with almost professional stoicism, Zeref pointed to Anna. "No, I was just wondering if you were okay with her being caught in the crossfire."
"Ah!" The dragon gasped, slapping one claw to the side of his muzzle. "You kidnapped a fair maiden to use as a hostage! Are there no depths to which you will not sink, vile mage?"
"No one has kidnapped me!" Anna said loudly. "We were actually having a very civil conversation until you turned up! Or, at least, it was civil when he wasn't being stupid."
Little tongues of flame escaped along with the dragon's sigh. "Ah, I long to purge your darkness from this world, Black Wizard, but as always, my heart calls upon me to do what is right. Today, I must save the maiden fair, even if it means your escape. Enjoy your reprieve, villain, for the next time we meet will surely be your last!"
With that, the dragon snatched Anna up in his talons and soared down to the valley below – much to Anna's indignation, as her shouts of "Let me go!" and "Have you any idea how long it took me to get up there?" faded into the distance.
Zeref watched them go with a pleasant kind of surprise. It seemed that his two problems had managed to cancel each other out. It had been a while since he'd had that kind of luck. Not about to waste fate's generosity, he decided to get far away from here before either of them remembered his existence.
On impulse, he reached for the old tome in the grass. It would be a shame, after everything, to leave it at the mercy of the elements…
As he lifted the book, however, he noticed that the rectangle of shadow it was throwing onto the grass wasn't getting any smaller. That was odd. In fact, as he pondered it, the patch of shadow seemed to grow larger – a darkness cast by no distant cloud. A darkness he didn't recognize at first, and then, slowly, sadly, he did.
"Oh," he murmured. "It's happening again."
The dragon landed with surprising grace, considering that he only had three legs available, though it was less surprising to those who had noticed that the laws of flight seemed to be optional for him.
He very carefully set Anna down on the road – which was certainly deserted now, if it hadn't been before – and studied her intently, huge reptilian head turned sideways to bring her closer to his opalescent eye. "No need to worry, maiden fair. You are safe now."
Outraged, Anna shoved his snout away. "I was safe! Right up until the moment I was kidnapped by a freaking dragon! Take me back!"
"I cannot. It would go against the chivalry of my heart to return you to the clutches of that villain."
"Right," she huffed, "because being captured by a living, breathing dragon is far safer than having a conversation with another human being!"
"This is a rescue, not a capture," the dragon explained patiently. "And I am no ordinary dragon! I am Blazing Justice, Prince of the Fire Dragons, the defender of good and the eternal foe of greed and cruelty! I believe in the coexistence of dragons and humans, and I will put an end to the war between us! I am the sworn enemy of evil dragons and evil men alike, and I will never hesitate to protect the innocent, be they human, dragon, or the fairest of fair maidens!"
He flared his wings and exhaled a mighty flame towards the sky, as if waiting for applause.
Anna said, "If you call me a maiden again, I am actually going to punch you."
The dragon recoiled at this, blinking down at her in surprise. "Fair, uh, lady?"
"I prefer 'mathematician'. Or 'natural philosopher'. I'm rather fond of 'scholar' too, though it has rather fallen out of common usage since the great Academies crumbled. Though you could always, I don't know, ask me for my name? It's Anna, by the way. Anna Heartfilia."
"Anna Heartfilia." He rolled the name over his serpentine tongue, pronouncing the syllables with surprising clarity. "A pleasure to meet you, fair lady Anna."
"I wish I could say the same, Mister-" She cut herself off. The dragon sat back on his hind legs, curled his tail around himself, and waited expectantly. Dubiously, she said, "I mean… Blazing Justice isn't your real name, is it?"
"It is my hero identity!" he declared. "It is as much a part of me as my scales and my claws!"
"What do the other dragons call you?"
"…Igneel," he muttered.
"That sounds a lot less pretentious."
The dragon pouted. She wasn't quite sure how he managed it, but it was undeniable.
"Also," she continued, "I think I need to apologize to Zeref."
Fire lit at once in the dragon's eyes. "Why would you want to apologize to that foul being?"
"Because I called him a moron," she said flatly, "not knowing that I had not perceived true stupidity until this moment. I had heard the rumour that some dragons were opposed to the extermination of mankind, but I had just assumed they were, you know, competent. Are you really a prince?"
"Certainly! I am the eldest son of Hakaresh, the King of the Fire Dragons! My family have always been defenders of righteousness, and we have sworn to end this war by defeating the corruption at the heart of both sides – the mad dragons amongst my kind, and Acnologia amongst yours!"
"Well, that's a very noble goal," Anna said. The dragon preened, wings rustling, until she continued, "It almost makes me wonder why you've forsaken it in order to hunt down and murder an innocent man."
"Because he is a plague upon this earth!" One flaming claw punched into the ground; the ensuing crater scattered puffs of angry smoke around him. "The world itself rejects him! He is evil incarnate, and a knight of justice cannot let that be, whether he is a participator in the Dragon Wars or not!"
"…Right. Only, he didn't seem particularly evil. Detached, yes, and ignorant, and his sheer apathy is an insult to the memories of all who died in the Academy, but not evil. Not to mention," she added, with a pointed look at the dragon, "he has an excellent record in not kidnapping women."
"Or so he'd like you to think!" Igneel argued. "Death follows as his servant! Every touch of his hand brings despair! He hides behind his immortality, pretending to be an innocent youth while spreading destruction with impunity!"
"I really don't think we're talking about the same person."
"Don't be fooled by his appearance-"
"I'm not," she interrupted. "I know he's older than he looks; I've read his early papers. But, speaking as someone who spent the best part of three years trying to find him, I can say with certainty that there's no evil legacy surrounding him. Not even rumours. Acnologia is easy to find; just walk in the opposite direction to the fleeing dragons. Zeref Dragneel is a bloody nightmare. He couldn't be less involved with society if he tried. The nearest village is a good three hours' hike from here!"
"Ah, it breaks my heart to see the young blinded by innocence." Indignation stole Anna's response, and she hadn't managed more than an irate huff before the dragon suddenly lowered himself to the ground beside her. "Climb on, and I will show you why I strive to vanquish him from this world."
Spikes and scales as hard as iron each competed for the honour of holding her dubious gaze. "Where…?"
"Anywhere you like," he assured her, as if people flew on dragons all the time and this wasn't absolute suicide. "You shan't weigh me down. No, my soul will only be lightened by the company of a maiden so fair!"
Just for that, she made sure to dig her heels in extra-hard as she climbed up. "It's not like you're actually listening to gravity in the first place, is it?" she scowled.
"Even the forces of nature submit to a worthy heart," Igneel told her sagely, giving her the distinct impression that not even he knew how dragons were capable of flight.
They ascended back towards the clifftop meadow with alarming speed. So quickly were they moving that it wasn't until his crimson wings fanned out again, pulling them out of bolt-thrower flight and into an impossibly steady hover, that she noticed the changes that had come over it.
Darkness. Darkness, where there had once been life.
The meadow was blackened and withered, its gold transmuted into an alchemical poison which would forever taint the land. The fawns were dead, the rabbits were dead, the trees and flowers were dead; the very concept of life had fled this place, never to return. Around the little patch of meadow once called Elysia, the thorny brambles which she – and generations of children – had battled their way through had fossilized in an instant. That heartless stony barrier would seal off the glimpse of something celestial until the end of time.
Zeref was nowhere to be seen.
"What is this…?" Anna breathed.
"This is what he does," Igneel told her. "He leaves behind nothing but death. He is a blight on this world, the enemy of all who strive for peace and love. You'd be dead too, if I hadn't rescued you from his clutches."
She shook her head. The dragon would not see the gesture, but it was meant for the darkness – and for what was lost in it. "Why does he do it?"
"Because he is evil!"
"…You've not asked him, have you?"
"What, and let myself be corrupted by his lies?" the dragon blustered. "Look at the evidence! You can't deny that the world would be a better place without this foul darkness in it! That is why I have made it my personal quest to slay him! I spend my days developing stronger and stronger magic in order to find something able to kill him… in between fighting the mad dragons, defending justice, and saving damsels in distress like yourself, of course!"
Anna closed her eyes and counted to ten.
"Igneel," she said quietly.
"Yes? I mean- I don't know who you're talking about, ma'am, as I am Blazing Justice, the champion of righteousness, but if there is something I can help you with instead-"
"Can you take me back down to the ground, please?"
"I certainly can!" With a twitch of his wings, the dragon veered away from the once-idyllic meadow and soared back towards the ground. "Anywhere in particular? Where do you live? After your narrow escape, the least a hero of justice can do is see you home safely!"
"Well… oh, why not? I live in a village called Aster; do you know it?"
"I do indeed! I shall take you there at once!"
"Great, though I don't suppose you'd mind dropping me off a little way outside the village, would you? The sudden appearance of a fire dragon is bound to set off a mass panic."
"Sure thing," he agreed.
Already lost in her thoughts of the man she'd met in the meadow, Anna almost missed the dragon adding, softly, "Maybe one day, it won't."
After a moment's surprise, a smile touched her lips. "Maybe so."