The Scars That Make You Whole

By CrimsonStarbird

Hubris et Orbi, Part 4

-Cry Just a Little-

"Come on, come on!"

Overhead, the skies were the darkest grey Anna had ever seen this side of sunset. Trees were bent double against the wind, their roots threatening to tear through centuries of packed dirt. The road was a river of bouncing, flowing debris. The gale did not dispel the humidity in the air, but wound it even tighter, thick with friction as it pressed down upon the earth.

She glanced over her shoulder. Zeref was struggling even more than she was in the wind, possibly because of his smaller stature, or possibly just because of the disproportionately larger stack of books he was carrying. She shifted her own stack to one arm and held out her free hand, testing the air. Almost immediately, an orb of water smacked into it. She would have thought it the attack of some cruel water mage, if not for the dark spots that began appearing on the ground, surely too large to be raindrops but too frequent to be anything else.

Impatiently, she beckoned her companion onwards. Zeref gave her a baleful look that rivalled the darkness above; she shrugged it off.

"I told you the storm would break tonight," she reprimanded him. "If you had remembered that, and applied some self-control, we'd have been home by now."

"I still don't see why we couldn't have stayed in the library until the storm blew over," Zeref sulked.

"Because," Anna pointed out, "those of us who aren't immortal actually need to eat to stay alive."

He muttered something that probably translated to that's the last time I ever go to a library with a mortal, and she rolled her eyes, even as she grabbed his wrist and pulled him onwards. Thus tethered together, they successfully fought the wind all the way to the house at the end of the street. Only then did she let go of Zeref and set her books down on the porch – he did the same – so that she could devote both hands to getting the key into the lock despite the crosswind.

The door slammed open of its own accord, and she dragged both piles of books across the threshold, followed by herself, just as a flash of lightning knocked the first brick out of heaven's great dam, and all the world's water deposited itself upon the village of Aster.

"Made it," Anna sighed.

Only silence answered her.

"Uh-oh…"

Her first thought was that Zeref had been blown away by the wind. Her second thought was that he had been washed away by the deluge. Both had seemed like very real possibilities thirty seconds ago, but he wasn't that small, and she bristled at the thought of a mere storm having done what had taken her months and months – namely, shifting that apathetic soul.

She wrenched open the door. Sure enough, through the thunderous grey veil, she could make out a familiar black and white shape crouched at the bottom of the garden.

"Zeref!" she shouted. The storm laughed at the feeble capacity of her lungs.

Gritting her teeth, she plunged into the downpour and fought her way through the garden. Zeref didn't notice her presence until she grabbed his shoulder, and even then, the look she received in return was not the look of a man who comprehended his situation. Though sheets of water slid down his face, his eyes were brighter than she had ever seen them, the only source of light beneath the storm.

"You have an Aureum Oak!" he exclaimed, gesturing to the earth behind him.

The tiny silver sapling was made even tinier by the driving rain, but it was still standing. Anna wouldn't be surprised if it still lived even after all of humanity had become fertilizer at its roots. Her lips thinned.

Zeref didn't notice, of course he didn't; why would he care when even the divine thunderstorm wasn't worthy of his attention? "This is incredible! I thought they were extinct! Why didn't you say-?"

Anna grabbed his arm and dragged him towards the house, not stopping until the door was bolted behind them.

That should have been the end of it, but no. Heedless to the puddle slowly being fed by his clothes, as if the rainstorm were contagious, Zeref rounded on her again. "We should have been studying this! A real Aureum Oak – that's more important than half the things on our to-do list! According to the myths, it's capable of absorbing and storing any kind of magic! Just think about what we could do if we were able to fashion an acorn into a protective amulet-"

"That's enough!"

He took half a step back at the whipcrack of her shout, but no more than that, tilting his head and looking at her in puzzlement. "You don't want to study it…?"

"I'm not studying it, you're not studying it, it's not important, and I wish it would just disappear!"

Zeref stared at her, baffled. A lot of things baffled him, especially relating to human behaviour, but it had been a while since she was one of them. For some reason, it irked her almost as much as the sapling itself.

"Drop it," she ordered, turning away. "I don't want to talk about it."

"Oh. Right. Okay."

With a shrug, Zeref found himself a spot in front of the fireplace. Then he retrieved some spare parchment and one of the books they had obtained that day, and resumed working.

Anna stared. Zeref continued to ignore her completely.

She went to find some dry clothes, and when she returned, he was still silently writing, apparently not having noticed she had left or come back.

With a huff, she sat down beside him. "You know," she began, "usually, when people tell you they don't want to talk about something personal, it's because they really need to talk about it."

"Oh," he said, puzzled. "See, when I say it, it means I really don't want to talk about it. Is that why you always try to force me into it anyway?"

She gave a weighty sigh. "No. That's…"

"If it helps, if you're not going to change your mind, I'm not really interested in hearing why."

"It doesn't help." Even after all the progress they'd made, he was still so difficult, sometimes. She ground out, "Look, I'm going to talk about it anyway, so just sit there and be quiet."

"Okay, but I'm not going to listen," he warned her.

"Even better."

In the stubborn silence, the sounds of the world around her filtered in. The crackling fire, the scratching of the pen, the rustle of pages, the not-so-distant drumming of rain – they were all appropriate for this place, but they weren't familiar, not to her. Too much time had passed since Evelyn Heartfilia's word had been law here, and longer still since Gregor Heartfilia had overruled her with a whisper and a wink; too long since this shelter from the rain had been a home.

"Grandad found the acorn," she spoke, at last. "Well, I say 'found' – he spent years piecing together long-lost manuscripts and panning for golden nuggets of truth in mythological accounts. He determined that the ancient Nuita tribe had managed to cultivate an Aureum Oak, and they'd hidden a single acorn in a vault that the barbarians had missed when they eradicated the tribe. More importantly, he found out where. No one believed him, of course, so he embarked upon a one-man expedition into the wilderness… and he found it. He brought back the treasure of the earth."

As promised, Zeref said nothing. The tip of his pen flicked back and forth in time to the dancing flames. There was something hypnotic about the black-inked numbers flowing from its nib. That, and the fire, and the rain.

"No one knows how long it takes an Aureum Oak to produce its first acorn," she mused. "Longer than the lifetime of any human being, that's for sure. Speculative studies estimate it at about four hundred years, but it has never been measured, because no matter how diligently the botanists of the past recorded its progress, not once have both tree and records survived four hundred years of humans killing each other. Grandad had the last one. That, I can say for sure."

There was a pause. Zeref decided that sitting up made it look too much like he was paying attention, and lay down on his front, facing the fire, monitoring his own penmanship with one lazy eye.

"It was the kind of opportunity that only comes round once in the lifetime of a civilization. Like you said, the defensive properties of the Aureum Oak's acorns are unmatched in science and myth: absorbing magic, storing it, and holding it without change to its properties. If we could figure out how, perhaps we could replicate it. Imagine if every city had one! It would draw the mad dragons' magic like a lightning-rod. No one would have to fear the collateral damage from battling dragons ever again! And even if its natural abilities could not be replicated, we could at least use it. As you said yourself, creating a protective amulet out of it was the obvious choice. In the right hands, it could turn the tide of the war!"

Not even referring to Zeref's own comment was worthy of a glance in her direction, apparently. She pressed on.

"And do you know what Grandad did? He planted it. Said that we could have one Aureum Oak acorn now, or infinite when it was grown. Never mind that we would both be dead by the time the tree matured. Never mind that we'd be lucky if humanity survives another fifty years against the dragons, let alone a few hundred! He made his greatest discovery useless. He cast away its potential and its power for the sake of legacy."

She spat out the word. It tasted foul upon her lips.

"And what good will that do, when people are dying every day? They need it now. He needed it now." She shook her head in disgust. "Two months later, Grandad was on another expedition when he was ambushed by rogue mages. They murdered him. They took his money and left him to rot in the gutter. If he'd let me enchant the Aureum Oak, it would have protected him from their magic. But he put it in the ground, and went to join it himself. Now I've got nothing but this stupid, worthless sapling. I wish it would just disappear."

Then she looked directly at Zeref and asked, "Well? What's your opinion?"

"I don't know," he replied, still writing. "I wasn't listening."

"Yes, you were," she corrected coolly. "You've made two mistakes in the last thirty seconds."

"What? Where?"

She tapped the offending lines of script. "For one, you can't apply Elvira's Theorem unless the critical dispersion of void pressure is less than zero. For another… the square root of sixty-four is not four."

With a curse, he amended the latter mistake, found the former several lines back, considered it, and tossed the entire page into the fire.

"So?" she prompted, as he started to write again. "What do you think?"

Zeref thought for a moment, and then, without looking up, he answered, "I don't think Gregor was wrong."

Getting interest out of Zeref was difficult. Getting sympathy out of him, so it seemed, was nigh on impossible, and Anna bristled at once. "You don't think he was wrong to take the Aureum Oak away from me, him, and all the people who could have been saved by its powers here and now – all for the tiniest chance that the survivors of our dystopian future can one day repopulate a bunch of stupid trees?"

A shrug. "Yes."

"Aren't you remotely interested in researching it? Imagine what we could do if we truly understood its abilities! I bet it would be able to absorb your magic if it ever went out of control again, for a start!"

She knew he wouldn't be able to resist responding to this, and indeed he didn't, but not quite in the way she had expected. "That is impossible," he explained, calmly enough to tell her that he had considered the matter long before she had. "Even if it could absorb an outburst, it couldn't remove the broken magical core from inside me. It would be a temporary measure – and temporary indeed, for once it took my magic into itself, its life and its powers would be extinguished."

"But you don't know that for sure! That's one thing we could have determined through our experiments-"

"A single sample is not enough for the kind of testing you want to do, and you know it," he countered. "As I see it, Gregor wanted to do an experiment that couldn't be done in his time. Rather than wasting it, he planted the acorn in the hope that one day, someone else would be able to carry out the experiments he couldn't, and thus the study of magic might be advanced by it."

"There won't be any humans left alive to care," she said, bitterly.

"Maybe. Maybe not." Zeref looked directly at her. She was too used to him avoiding her gaze, except for his ephemeral moments of excitement, and now she found herself subject to the same intensity that pierced to the heart of nature's secrets. "Are you upset because you think he was wrong, or are you upset because he died, and might not have done otherwise?"

Her traitorous lip trembled. "Can't I be both?" she blustered.

"I don't know," he said. It was honest, innocent, and entirely free of judgement. "You're the one who always tells me how to feel."

"Of course I'm upset that he died. It's supposed to get easier, I know, but the older I get, the more it hurts. I was so young when he died. How much more could we have done together if I had known him as an adult, capable of as much as I am now? He was my tutor and my inspiration. I wish I could show him everything I've achieved…"

Then she wrapped her arm around Zeref's shoulders and pulled him close.

He yelped and tried to pull away. "What are you-?"

"Stop wriggling," she told him crossly. "This is what people do when their friends need consoling."

"…Oh."

Lukewarm response notwithstanding, he did stop trying to escape. She rested her head on his, eyes closed, and murmured, "Thanks."

Anna would have stayed there as long as it took for her unshed tears to evaporate back into the clouds, but Zeref's attention still had the tendency to wander, and it wasn't long before he was shifting restlessly in her embrace, looking for something else to occupy him. "Do you live here on your own?"

"Yes," she admitted. "It was Grandad's house, then my mother's, and now it's mine. There have been Heartfilias in Aster since forever."

She would much rather have lived somewhere convenient, like the royal capital, but she hadn't been able to sell the house. No one wanted to move to a place like Aster, and no one already living there wanted to take on the homestead of the outcast Heartfilias. The property was fit for habitation, but the land had grown wild since Evelyn's passing, the ploughs and equipment sold to buy books, the livestock traded to someone with the time to look after them, the outermost fields sold off to neighbouring farms for a fraction of their true value, because to Anna, they had no value at all.

"It's nice," Zeref said vaguely, having decided that she must have been waiting for him to say something, and she couldn't help snorting.

"It's too small, too boring, and too tame. It's a place to raise a family in, not a base from which to tame the universe. I suppose we can't all live inside giant semi-sentient lumps of flesh."

"It's not flesh," he told her, a little crossly. "It's living magic. And I don't really live there. I don't really live anywhere… I suppose I have been spending more time there recently, though."

"Because you need your desk and your books, now that you've decided to do something useful with your endless time?"

"Because it seems like the only place in this kingdom where I can get some peace and quiet. At least when I tell my demons to leave me alone, they do so."

She ignored the jibe. By this point, she thought it was habit more than anything else. If he really meant it, he wouldn't be here. "What about your family?"

"I told you what happened to them, didn't I?"

"You told me your brother died, that's all. What about your parents?"

"Oh… they died when I was eight. My whole family – my mother, my father, and Natsu."

"How?"

"Two dragons got into a fight in the sky over our village. I don't know why, or who they were, or if either of them survived. They weren't trying to destroy the village. I doubt they even realized it was there. And by the time they were done, it wasn't."

There was a pause, and then he murmured, "There was no meaning to it. No one gained anything. It was just senseless… well, that's war, I suppose."

Anna supposed that explained his paralysis when Igneel and Weisslogia had fought Acnologia in the harbour. The blind destruction, the utterly meaningless conflict, had stirred emotions he was only just learning to feel again, and thus did not know how to cope with.

She changed the topic: "How's the research towards resurrecting your brother going?"

"Fine."

She had hoped that this would prove to be a less melancholy subject for him, given that it combined the only two things he ever seemed to care about: his research, and his brother. It seemed that was not to be.

What was more, she recognized that hesitation. Suspiciously, she pressed, "You're not doing it, are you?"

"I'm… busy with other things."

"Like what?"

"Preventing dragonification, for one. I think I'm almost there. The transfusion method is theoretically sound; if I can just work out how to stabilize it-"

"And that's more important to you than seeing your brother again?"

"I don't know!" he shouted. He snapped out of her grip, and would have gone further to get away from her, if not for the storm pounding at the shutters. "I don't know if I even want him to come back! I don't know… I don't know what I want. I never do, but it's harder than usual, when he's involved."

"Why?"

"I don't know, do I?"

"Then figure it out!" Anna retaliated, twice as fiercely. "I've shown you how enough times! It's not your contradictory mindset that's the problem; it's the fact that you've let it rule your life for so long without doing a bloody thing about it!"

"What if I screw it up?" he yelled back. "I have to use his body! I only get one shot at it! What if I fail? What if I bring him back, and he comes back different? What if he doesn't remember me? What if he isn't capable of killing me? What if he is?"

"Zeref Dragneel," she snapped, and he flinched back as if she'd slapped him. "You are a great many things, seemingly at random, and I could make a small fortune taking bets on which aspect of your fragmented personality we will have the pleasure of dealing with each day, but cowardly is not one of them. In fact, it may well be the only thing you're not. You gambled everything to reach into the heart of magic. And yes, it may have cost you half your sanity, and any hope of being able to make a decision for yourself ever again, but you're alive, aren't you? That means you've got another chance!"

He shook his head in anguish. "I can't do it."

"Zeref-"

"Leave it, Anna. Please."

He beseeched her with wavering eyes, just like the puppies at Darryl's animal shelter. She hadn't seen the appeal of those either, but at least they had the excuse of being animals. They didn't know any better. He did.

But he'd let her hold him when she'd needed comfort earlier, and she couldn't have imagined him doing that a few months ago. One step at a time.

With a sigh – so he'd know this wasn't surrender, but her indulging him just this once – she said, "Fine, I'll drop it for now. But, Zeref, I hate to see you not trying."

"Why? What difference does it make to you?"

"You're brilliant when you try, Zeref. Almost as brilliant as I am. And the world doesn't have enough brilliant people in it."

"Hardly," he murmured, gaze dropping to the paper he had been working on. "I can't even calculate the square root of sixty-four."

"We all make silly mistakes. And you wouldn't have done it if you hadn't been listening to me at the same time. So, thanks, even if it is the last time I ever ask for your opinion on a personal matter."

"I didn't mean to offend you-"

"Let's just never mention it again," she overrode him, clear and loud, and he quietened at once. To show that she didn't hold any hard feelings, she patted the floor beside her, and he shuffled a little closer.

Softer this time, she added, "You are brilliant, Zeref. You just need more help than most to see it. That's why I want to give you this." She pressed a copper key into his hand.

"What…?"

"It's a spare key for this house. You can use it even if I'm not here. I don't particularly like this place, but at least it's not alive. And my neighbours may be ignorant jerks, but even that's better than being surrounded by demons to whom your word is absolute – and who, therefore, are incapable of telling you what you need to hear, or of provoking you to think, or of keeping you in line. You can consider this your second home."

For a terrifying moment, she thought he was going to hand it back. But she knew him as well as she thought she did, or better; the key disappeared into a hidden pocket. "Thank you," he whispered.

"Now, are you going to tell me about the progress you've been making with dragonification, or what?"

In retrospect, Zeref shouldn't have answered the door.

He had been given a spare key, not partial ownership. He was no more in charge here than the person outside knocking. Even on his good days, he had no desire to interact with other people, and certainly no reason to volunteer to do so on behalf of someone far better at it.

He should have called for Anna. He should have waited.

But he had been confused when the knocking had roused him, and for very different reasons to normal.

There was no unforgiving ground beneath him, no cutting wind, no mocking rain; not even an ache in his neck from falling asleep at his desk. The armchair was tender beneath him, the walls like safe arms around him, the light not the perpetual white-blue of his brother's liquid coffin, but trails of post-storm sunlight, as if the sky had realized that a caress was far more effective against the shutters than the rain's brute force.

The last time he had woken in a place like this, his mother had been baking bread downstairs, his brother had been giggling from his place on the worktop, and the world had been too small for him, rather than too large.

So, he had moved automatically to answer the door.

At the sight of three armoured soldiers, pikes pointed towards him as if they had been expecting a dragon to answer the door, the last of the dream fled.

"Hello…?" he wondered.

The first of them, a bald, iron-eyed man, looked him up and down disdainfully. "Where is Anna Heartfilia?"

Zeref glanced over his shoulder, hoping to see her charging down the stairs to take control of the situation, but quiet reigned over the rest of the house. "Can- can I help?" he tried.

"Fetch her for me," the soldier ordered.

Zeref's gaze was caught by the tip of the soldier's pike. He did not recognize the red and black crest of the current king; it changed too often and had too little relevance to his own existence. But although names and eras changed, some things didn't – and too often, they were the lethally sharp things, and the people who liked to point them at others.

Without looking up, he whispered, "Why?"

"Useless servant, you are," spat the soldier, to the amusement of his fellows. "I'll fetch her myself."

Or, he would have done, had he not hit an invisible barrier at the threshold of the door. The sniggering stopped immediately. Surprised, the soldier rapped his gauntlet against the solid air. His eyes narrowed alarmingly.

"So," he scowled. "The runt thinks himself a sorcerer."

An equally startled Zeref stared at the barrier, though it was not invisible to him, gleaming with the rainbow sheen of magic against his senses.

He knew it well; it was his go-to containment spell for exploding experiments. He just… hadn't meant to use it. All he had done was see the soldier try to enter Anna's house uninvited, the sanctuary to which she had given him a key, and knew with the same certainty she had about everything that he didn't want that to happen.

His hands were shaking, so he held them behind his back. "Please- please leave."

The soldier bared the yellowing daggers of his teeth. "You don't seem to understand the situation, runt. We have orders from His Glorious Majesty King Carlos III to bring the wench named Anna Heartfilia to his palace. Lower the barrier and fetch her, or you will regret it."

Lips pressed together, Zeref shook his head.

"Fine." Not unduly concerned by this development, the soldier turned to his compatriot. "Break it down."

With a flick of his hand and a green arrowhead of force, the soldier complied, or tried to.

Zeref only felt the impact at all because he was looking out for it. Braced for the explosive fury unleashed by a self-destructing experiment, it took several awkward moments for him to realize that the faint brush of butterfly wings against the walls of his mind had been the collision between the soldier's magic and his own.

He was still tense, waiting for the real attack to follow in the wake of that feint, when the soldier turned to his leader and shook his head.

"If he's blocking the door," the leader growled, "then make another one."

Before any of the soldiers could move, the barrier was encircling the entire house. Zeref hadn't asked it to do that either, not that he could recall, but nor could he recall ever wanting anything as much as for them not to damage Anna's house.

"Please leave," he repeated, in a trembling voice.

But their blood was up, now; their leader bared his teeth once more. His hunter's eyes surveyed their surroundings, a garden so torn up by the previous night's storm that one could barely tell it had been neglected beforehand, let alone that it held something as precious as the sapling Aureum Oak.

"Start a fire," he ordered. "His barrier won't hold forever."

"No!" Zeref cried. "Please don't- it's important to her-"

"What she knows is important to the king," he shrugged, taking the torch his subordinate offered and lighting it with a spark of magic. The flame gleamed like a crocodile's eye in the dawn. "If she won't come, she has no importance at all."

He turned the torch towards the garden of Anna's house, and Zeref screamed.

The torch exploded. Fire surged outwards, ignoring the overgrown lawn and the precious sapling Gregor Heartfilia had planted in favour of tastier prey, which it found in the startled soldier. Tentative amber flames grew darker and darker as they devoured his arm, through blood-red to sacrilegious black.

And the hotter they burnt in reality, the hotter they seared in Zeref's blood. He hadn't meant to do it – wasn't entirely sure how he had done it– but he wasn't unhappy about it. When he stepped over the threshold of the house, slow but not cautious, there was one detached question in his mind: if he could do that without even meaning do, what could he do if he really put his mind to it?

Magic crackled around him in response. The sheer volume of it, the rawness, brought with it a surge of satisfaction. The soldiers must have felt it, for they tried to run. He stopped them with a thought; a thought that wasn't a command or a spell, but a question of himself: why should he let them talk that way about Anna? Why should he let them threaten her home? Why should he let them get away with doing this, when he clearly didn't have to?

It had been too long since he had last had any emotions to act upon.

He did not know how to control them.

And why should he control them? Mercy couldn't stop them from coming after her again, but he could. Without conscious thought, the force holding the soldiers in place slowly began to constrict as the black flames approached. It was easy. He had this cursed magic, he had suffered so much because of it; why should he not use it to get his way-?

"That's enough, Zeref," a voice whispered in his ear.

A pair of arms wrapped firmly around him, pulling him back against her, against Anna. A wordless cry was born and died in his throat.

She continued lightly, as if she were watching a very different scene from the one to which he was violently awakening: "You can let them go now."

With an anguished cry, he did. The magic vanished from the air. The suffocating flames faded from the world, and from inside him, leaving a dead, empty wasteland in his mind and grey clouds about to break above it.

The strength vanished from his body, and he would have fallen to the floor if she hadn't been holding him. "I'm sorry," he babbled. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry-!"

"Shush," she murmured. "It's alright."

No one ever said that when things truly were alright. The stormclouds duly broke, and to his astonishment, she held him without complaint through the floods of tears, gently stroking his hair until everything had been washed away.

But still an echo of that fear remained: fear of the world, fear of the people in it, and most of all, fear of himself. He whispered, "I can't do this. I don't think I should do this."

"Why not?" Anna inquired. There was something patient about it, but not forgiving. She never was, when it came to his flaws.

He swallowed, but he knew she would wait forever if that was what it took to make him face up to it. "I would have done it, Anna. I would have-" His breath caught on the memory of unmarked bodies in an undamaged Academy. One thousand, three hundred, and forty-one of them. "I would have killed them. It would have been so easy. I… I was so angry. I don't ever want to feel like that again."

"Zeref!" she snapped, and her arms were gentle but her patience was drawing thin. "As much as I am in favour of you not killing people, especially soldiers out looking for me, because we both know who would have got the blame for that – the fact that you are capable of feeling anger when the people you care about are threatened is a good thing!"

"Not like this." He just shook his head. "I react in the wrong way to things all the time, Anna. You're always telling me so. I don't care enough about the things that are important, and I don't understand things that are obvious to you. But that's okay, because when I try and do things that are wrong, you stop me. But those men knew I was doing something wrong, and they weren't able to do a thing about it! They physically couldn't stop me!"

There was a pause. "That's what scared you?"

He recognized that tone. It was the one that emerged whenever a calculation returned an entirely counterintuitive result.

"Zeref, just out of interest, do you ever use magic for anything other than experiments?"

"No?" His answer came out as another question. Not being able to follow her line of questioning always made him uneasy.

"You don't fight back when Igneel attacks you?"

"You know I don't."

"You don't ever, I don't know, spar with your demons or train with magic?"

"No. Why would I want to do that?"

"Have you ever fought in magical combat?"

"No?"

"…Zeref, you do realize how powerful your magic is, don't you?"

"What?"

"Gods, I thought you were supposed to be smart! You're, what, forty-six years old? In purely numerical terms, I mean. Not physically, and definitely not emotionally."

"About that," he mumbled.

"And you know that magical strength doesn't accrue evenly over a person's life. It increases most rapidly during the teenage years… Zeref, you haven't just experienced forty-six years of magical growth; you've spent about thirty of them physically locked into the point of fastest increase! I wouldn't be surprised if, dragons excluded, you're already the most powerful person in the kingdom in terms of raw ability! How have you not realized this?"

He looked away. "I don't feel very powerful."

"That's because magic responds to emotions, and you don't have any," she told him matter-of-factly. "That doesn't mean it wouldn't be there, if you had a reason to call it – as evidenced by the fresh manure those soldiers donated to my garden as they fled." He winced, and perhaps she sensed it, because she ruffled his hair reassuringly. "Look at it this way. How many demons do you have at the moment?"

"A few," he prevaricated.

"Eight major ones, about a hundred minor ones, and that giant thing you live in. Igneel keeps tabs," she corrected him. He closed his eyes and tried to pretend she wasn't right. "All of which are kept alive by your magic, along with gods only know how many other experiments you've set up and forgotten about. Come on, Zeref, you're smarter than this!"

He whispered, "I don't want this. I'm dangerous enough just with my curse. I don't want to be able to do those awful things through choice as well. It would be better if I went back to not feeling anything at all."

"Over my dead body!" she retorted. "Do you have you any idea how much time I have invested in you? Don't you dare back out just when you've started to become useful!"

"But I don't want this to be who I am. I don't want…"

He could practically hear her rolling her eyes. "Have you considered that your passion for magical research might do more good for humanity than your anger will do them harm? I told you, you're brilliant when you try. And for that, you need to live. Yes, that means taking the negative emotions along with the positive ones, but every other human being is the same, and they all cope. You just need to learn how to manage them."

"How?"

"The same way we got you to start applying your brain properly," she stated, as if it was the most obvious thing ever. "Empirically, through trial and error."

Then she heaved an exaggerated sigh. "Look, I'm not asking you to do this on your own, am I? I'll be right here, to rein you in when you go too far, drag you along when you're not going at all, and stop you from committing any murders that can be traced back to me."

He didn't smile at this, but he appreciated the attempt. "Why were those soldiers after you?"

This time, Anna didn't have to fake one bit of the frustration in her sigh. "Because," she huffed, "His Moronic Majesty King Carlos III has stumbled upon a new get-rich-quick scheme: namely, requisitioning every magical artefact and rare text he can get his grubby little mitts on. Ostensibly, it's to help him rid the land of dragons, but mostly it's so that he can sell them back to the desperate scientific community at horrendously inflated prices."

"Do you have many rare artefacts?" Zeref asked, tilting his head.

He had a great many himself, but she didn't have a hideout like he did, and her house wasn't exactly stacked to the rafters with ancient tomes. He hadn't meant any offence by his question, though he probably deserved the scowl she shot him in response.

"Of course I don't. But part of the king's scheme involves coercing those with brains but no money into servitude, in order to claim ownership rights over anything they might discover or invent in the future, all under the guise of patronage."

"How did he hear about you, though?"

She shrugged. "Don't know. Maybe he read my latest paper."

"What paper?" he asked, trying not to sound as apprehensive as he felt.

"You know, the one I published last month in the Mathematical Reviews of Carligne and Norland." Zeref didn't know, in fact, and she threw her arms up in frustration. "I thought you had started getting the academic journals again!"

"I try to pick them up when I can, but I don't have a permanent postal address. At least, not one that anyone is willing to deliver to…"

"You know, I thought your congratulations had been a bit thin on the ground. Wait here." Anna ran into the house and emerged a minute later clutching a book bound in thin cloth. There was a bookmark already in the required page, and she thrust it in front of his face, too close for him to make out anything but the title: A Complete Mathematical Framework for World Magic, by Anna Heartfilia.

That was as much as he needed to read. "You published our research?"

If her scandalized expression was anything to go by, King Carlos had just been ousted from the top of her list of personal villains. "Absolutely not! I published my share of our research, being careful to avoid anything to which you had contributed. Of course I wouldn't publish anything you had done without your permission!"

"That's not the point!" he shouted back. "This is- it's supposed to be secret!"

Her jaw dropped. "Zeref, this is mathematics! It belongs to the entire scientific community! Granted, most of them are too dumb to realize how important the completed framework is, judging by the dearth of responses I've had, but that's beside the point! Knowledge does not belong to any one person!"

"It should! Anna, what do you think people are going to do if they realize that we're researching time travel?"

"Give us some sorely needed funding?"

"They'll want to control it, Anna! Control it or destroy it! What we're doing could change the world!"

"I bloody well hope so," she retorted, folding her arms.

Zeref shook his head. "The king, the mad dragons, even Acnologia – every faction with a stake in this endless war – if they catch wind of what we're doing, they won't sit around and wait for conclusive experimental results before acting!"

"So you think I should not publish anything until, what, we're finished?"

"Yes."

"And how do you propose I afford to eat until then?"

"What?"

"I don't have any money, Zeref! I own a run-down farm in a backwards village surrounded by semi-literate farmers; I have already sold everything else I inherited to buy the books I need to be able to do peer-review. It costs me as much to travel to conferences as I ever make speaking at them. I don't have a wealthy patron because the only ones willing to take on a penniless woman with no connections are the ones with ulterior motives! And it's not like there are any Academies willing to provide me with food and board while I unravel the mysteries of nature, because there are no Academies any more, all because some hypocrite couldn't keep his research to himself until it was complete!"

Zeref glanced away. The one good thing about not being able to forget what happened that day was that it didn't hit as hard when it was mentioned outright.

There was a long silence, though not as long as he wanted, and then she muttered, "Sorry."

"It's fine."

"I didn't mean that."

"It's fine."

"It's just," she continued, as susceptible as ever to the lure of the last word, "sometimes, you seem to forget that some of us need to eat to stay alive, and we have bills to pay, and it's not easy, you know?"

Quietly, he offered, "You could come and live with me."

"I don't want to live with you!" she burst out, quickly enough to tell him that not only had she considered that solution already, but wished he hadn't offered, so that she could have remained bitter about it. "Your home is gross, and it's inconvenient, and you're surrounded by creatures who can't comprehend saying no to you! I don't think it's healthy for even you to live there, Zeref! That's why I gave you my key!"

"I know," he whispered.

"Look, I'm sorry, okay?" Exasperated, Anna folded her arms. "I'll try and be more careful with what I put out into the community. I'll avoid allusions to any potential application of our theories that is likely to draw the attention of our pig-ignorant king… at least until he's picked some other profession to bleed dry. Alright?"

The king would only turn his attention away from mages when the Dragon Wars ended, one way or the other, but Zeref recognized an olive branch when he saw one. Tentatively, he nodded. "I'm sorry. I'm just… worried."

Because what if he hadn't been there today? Anna didn't know how to keep her head down. At least he had only scared off some soldiers. Anna would have done much the same thing – albeit with her temper and her wit instead of magic – only, she'd have made sure they dragged her before the king first, so that she could give him a piece of her mind. That would have been the last he'd seen of her. And when he thought of her vanishing from his life…

Wincing, he turned his whole body away, fingertips pressed tightly against his forehead. One deep breath, and then another; he counted between the ins and the outs to the exclusion of all else.

When it had subsided enough to let him do so, he spoke. His voice was steady, if not strong. "I'm worried, because if they take you away, I won't be able to study magic any more."

"Then I suppose I shan't thank you," Anna responded, understanding perfectly, a crooked smile upon her face. "Since we both know that you were only standing up for me because you'll revert back to being useless if I leave you, and then you'll never find the answers to magic, time travel, and everything else."

Weakly, he tried to smile back. "And that's the other reason why starting to feel things again is a bad idea…"

"Fortunately for myself and ignorant soldiers alike, your scientific curiosity remains unbridled, unbiased, and above such petty things as appreciating other people's lives."

"Mm. Speaking of which, can I read your paper?"

"Sure. You'll like it."

With a nod of thanks, he took the journal from her and headed back towards the house, content to put the events of that morning behind him.

He hadn't quite reached the safety of the door when she called, "Zeref?"

"Mm?"

"Do you think that, if you, me, and your demons all worked together, we could overthrow the king?"

He gave a sigh. "I think there's quite enough death and destruction in the world without you at the head of an armed insurrection, Anna."

"I notice that's not a 'no'," she remarked, but he just shook his head.

"There will always be another greedy king to take his place. Unless you were to take on the role yourself, which could be an interesting social experiment in its own right, but…"

He tailed off deliberately, and she did not disappoint. "Ugh, no thanks. I'm far too busy browbeating Mother Nature into submission to save the general public from their own idiocy at the same time."

"I thought you'd say that," he smiled.

A/N: Thank you all for your feedback and encouragement! It honestly means so much to me, and I love hearing all your comments!

Also, the wonderfully talented Ilit015 has drawn the scene from Ch50 in which a windswept Lucy wishes she'd worn an archaic toga like Zeref - it's easy to find on deviantart by searching the username, and is well worth checking out!

In other news, we're entering exam season now, so there will probably only be one chapter posted over the next two weeks. I don't yet know whether it will be next week or the week after - ideally I'll post next week and then be free to focus on revision, but Ch56 is a long and vital one, and I don't know if I'll manage to sort it before next Sunday. But basically, don't worry if I don't post anything for a week. Thanks for your patience, and see you on the other side! ~CS