The Scars That Make You Whole
By CrimsonStarbird
Hubris et Orbi, Part 6
-Fly, Raven Child-
By unspoken accord, they reached a truce on the matter of dragonification. Zeref didn't mention it again after that night in Skartown, Anna never asked to see his ritual in detail, and both of them threw themselves head-first into the study of time travel as a compromise.
The ideas Zeref had tossed around while half-delirious from magical exhaustion were mad, unprecedented, and ambitious in the extreme. Anna struggled to understand them not because of their complexity, but because he, who had approached the One Magic and come back changed, saw the world in a very different way to her.
In an impossible way.
He insisted it wasn't impossible with fire in his eyes, an expression she was coming to see from him more and more often, and she would duly plough through the ever-more-complex calculations with him – and, more often than not, for him. Their theory of World Magic was taking form in an entirely novel branch of mathematics, the branch that she had founded, and only with her skills could it become a foundation for his outrageous ideas.
And, slowly, as they stopped being led by the numbers and began driving the project in the way they wanted, time went by, and other things progressed too.
In retrospect, Anna really shouldn't have expected Zeref to work it out for himself. He still had next to no contact with other human beings besides her, having expended a great amount of effort on creating demons who could do it for him, and his life hadn't exactly been normal even before he'd been cursed.
But there hadn't been a good time to tell him, either, and so she'd kept putting it off. It was only a matter of time before fate tutted at her and she heard the clunk of the key in her front door at very much the wrong time.
She had forgotten she had given him a key. They were together most of the time anyway, and when they weren't, it was almost invariably her seeking him out, whenever his prolonged absence began to feel less like a period of isolation demanded by genius and more like a relapse. It was just her luck that on this of all evenings he couldn't wait until the morning to share his discovery.
"Anna!" he exclaimed, waving a dragonhide tome over his head as he entered. "Look what I've found-"
He stopped dead at the sight of Anna and Darryl in a rather compromising position on the couch.
All the emotion fell away from his face. She almost thought she would have preferred shock, or laughter, or something.
"Oh," he said blankly. "Sorry. Should have knocked. I'll leave the book here for you." He set it down on the table and left, closing the door behind him.
"Oh, hell," Anna groaned. Jumping to her feet, she grabbed a long enough coat to allay the suspicions of her neighbours and sprinted after him. "Zeref! Wait!"
She didn't catch up with him until the very edge of town – and even then he only stopped because she grabbed his arm. He stiffened, and a vision flashed before her eyes of him grounding a dragon through the sheer force of his magic, but he didn't try to fight her off; just gave her that same oddly dead look. "It's fine, Anna," he said. "Don't stop on my account."
She ignored that. "Look, I can explain. You know his house was destroyed when Igneel went on a rampage, so I said he could stay with me for a while-"
"Yes, well, that was months ago, and there's a difference between letting a friend sleep in the spare room while he gets back on his feet, and- and that!" he burst out, and so much for it's fine, Anna. This was exactly why she had put off telling him about her relationship. It wasn't a conversation she particularly wanted to have in general, but she couldn't imagine much worse than having it with this man, who had managed to live nearly five decades without ever really growing up at all.
She closed her eyes briefly. "If I pretend I didn't hear that, will you pretend you didn't see it?"
No such luck. "Cat Rescue Guy? Why?"
"I like him," she shrugged.
"But he's boring!"
"Believe me, Zeref, you are all the excitement I need in my life," she sighed. "I like that he's so understanding. He makes an effort to change the worst parts of himself – unlike you – and he's there for me when I've expended all my energy being there for you. And that's despite the fact that he doesn't like you, because he's a good person."
None of which, unfortunately, seemed to matter to her research partner. "He doesn't understand magic, he can barely read – let alone appreciate anything you have written – and he wastes his time prolonging the lives of worthless animals!"
"You can tell a lot about a person by how they treat animals," she pointed out. "Besides, why do you care? No one's making you date him."
He gave a short, sharp shake of his head. "He will never understand how brilliant you are."
She shrugged. "That's what I've got you for."
"Well, precisely! You've got me, so why- why do you need-?"
Words whirled away from her so quickly that even she found herself silenced.
With another sigh, she sat on the low wall marking the boundary of the town, and indicated that he should do the same. Maybe it had been built to delineate the savage forest from wonderful civilization, or maybe it was to protect the settlement from an army of raging gnomes, but it was already neglected, several loose fragments resigning in protest at their combined weight.
"Zeref," Anna began, slowly, carefully, "are you jealous?"
He gave her a startled look.
"Because, I'm just saying, you've had years to ask me out, and you spent most of that time telling me to leave you alone."
"What? No!" Zeref sounded horrified by the implication. She might have been offended, if she hadn't agreed wholeheartedly. Theirs went far beyond a professional relationship – they meant far too much to each other for that – but it certainly wasn't romantic. Dating him would be like dating her own elbow: superfluous, weird, and thoroughly demeaning to the connection they already had. The confirmation that they were on the same page with that came as something of a relief.
"But, well," he was still saying, helpless, as if he didn't know how to stop. "Maybe… yes. If you're spending time with him, then…"
And then she did understand the reason for his reaction.
"Gods above, Zeref!" she cried, more out of sheer exasperation than anything else. "There is more to my life than just you! You're hugely important to me, you know that, but I've also got to put time aside for my friends, the dragons, and yes, a partner and a family if I want one-!"
None of which he had. None of which he even understood. No wonder he was freaking out over her and Darryl being in a relationship.
"You can't just depend on me, Zeref! If nothing else, you're immortal and I'm not! You do realize you're going to outlive me, don't you?"
From the look of sheer terror on his face, he hadn't considered this at all.
"At some point, you are going to have to do this on your own!" she reiterated. "After you stopped Igneel that night, I really thought you were starting to make decisions for yourself, but there's no point if you're going to panic and revert back to how you used to be every time I do something that doesn't involve you!"
Pain flashed through his eyes. He was on the verge of bolting, a rabbit discovering that his warren wasn't the safe shelter he had thought, and she would have let him, forced him into isolation until he understood the wisdom of her words, if she hadn't suddenly recalled Darryl's warning: you don't have the patience or the empathy to deal with his inconsistency in any way except by yelling at him until he falls in line.
It was easy for him to say. He never had to deal with Zeref; he avoided him when it was possible and was coldly polite when it wasn't. He wouldn't consider it a loss – maybe he would even consider it a victory – if Zeref were to retreat entirely from the world, and their lives, once more.
She would, though.
So maybe she needed to show it.
That was why she looped her arm around his shoulders, pulling him close. "Hey," she said, softly, "you know I love you very much, don't you?"
The sulky expression she got in return did not suit a genius of his calibre, and yet he didn't pull away.
Smiling reluctantly, she added, "Believe me, Darryl's going to be just as upset about this as you, but I still came after you first. I told him, when all this started, that my work with you would never be less important than my relationship with him. If he didn't listen, that's his problem. But if you can't cope with me and him being together, it'll be your problem too."
"I know," he whispered. "I'm sorry. I've never felt like this before… it's not nice, is it?"
"No," she agreed. "But it is good for you to feel these things."
"Maybe."
"It is. Learning how to act in spite of your feelings is the next stage. So, be nice to Darryl."
"I still think you can do better."
"That wasn't a request, Zeref."
He grumbled something, but leaned back into her.
"Still," she continued, smiling, "I do appreciate you looking out for me. I really do."
"Do you… do you want your key back?" he ventured.
"Absolutely not. This doesn't change the fact that you are always welcome in my life. Just maybe give me a bit of warning if you're inviting yourself over after work hours, okay?"
"Mm. Okay."
They shared the rest of the moment in silence – a moment not spent unravelling the mysteries of the universe or describing life in the language of mathematics, a moment unlike any other they had spent together, but an important one all the same.
Summertime.
A time of light and freedom with the world full of song, the breeze heavy with the syrupy scent of nature, the night a blink of darkness; when the number of children seen outdoors doubled, and the sound they made quadrupled; when living became a competition of brightest, biggest, best; when even Anna traded candlelight and ancient shadows for the torrent of golden sunshine, the eddies of wind laughing at the order of her papers, and the long, perfumed grass beneath her feet.
Or, at least, she normally did.
This year, she had all of the above, except for the grass of her garden, which was a little less perfumed than normal, and a lot less long.
This was nothing to do with inadequate rainfall or shabby sunlight, and everything to do with the fact that Darryl had bought a goat.
And by 'bought', Anna meant 'rescued'. No one in their right mind would have exchanged good coin for such a scrawny creature, not smart enough to have noticed the snare that had crippled it, but Darryl, bless his selfless, unambitious little heart, didn't have a right mind when it came to wounded animals.
Also, by 'a goat', she meant 'a herd of goats'.
Because, apparently, goats got lonely.
Darryl had built them a shelter in the yard, by hand, from scrap materials he'd scavenged from the run-down buildings of the Heartfilia farmstead – and the shelter really was for the goats, so Anna had learned, when she'd booted them out of it one night to carry out an experiment in a place where magical recoil wouldn't damage the house. She hadn't been aware Darryl was capable of that much anger. The shock, more than anything, had made her relinquish her new workshop back to the goats.
After the goats, there were chickens, and then a cow, and before she knew it, her home was looking like a small-scale version of the farmstead from which her grandad had once fled to pursue a career in magic. Anna was surprised to find that she didn't mind it. At least, she didn't mind as long as she didn't have to have anything to do with it. Darryl had taken it on as his own personal project, and that gave her more time to pursue her own projects in peace. Neither of them had broached the subject of when he was going to move out for several months now.
Even Zeref seemed resigned to this reality. As had become the norm, he was lying on the goat-trimmed summer lawn, a notebook open in front of him, his legs kicking back and forth with all the laziness of summer. There was no need for haste when the days were so long; even the forces of invention that drove human society ever onward could be tempted to kick off their shoes and nap in the sun.
Anna was sat in the shade of a nearby tree. Her own pen hovered over the page, too busy watching Zeref to care whether she was or wasn't making progress.
He looked so relaxed. She hadn't thought he would be keen on the great outdoors, but she had forgotten he had spent much of his life roaming the continent aimlessly before she had found him. It was the presence of other people, rather than nature itself, which he disliked. He still preferred libraries, and he wanted as little to do with Darryl and his animals as possible, but she thought he seemed happy, there in the summertime, with every day another unhurried step towards the truths of time and space.
Gone were the days when she had to threaten, cajole or taunt him into displaying any kind of interest towards their research. Gone were the days when she had worried that if she left, he would fall back through the cracks – and the days when she had believed it would be no great loss if he did.
He never mentioned dragonification.
She never asked about Natsu.
But when it came to World Magic – the theoretical formulations of a theoretical kind of magic that maybe, just maybe, could have very real consequences for the passage of time – they were in perfect agreement. They didn't know how they were going to do it, or what they were going to do with it once they had, beyond filling in just a little bit more of the vast universe with understanding, but they were going to do it.
"You're slacking, Anna," Zeref said, without looking up from his page. "There's no point if you don't keep up."
A smile of many colours; an unhesitant honesty that only true contentment could bring. "I can't keep up with you when you're like this, Zeref."
"Of course you can."
She smiled again at his absent yet sure denial, almost flattered that he believed it so absolutely. "I can't. You get an absurd idea in your head, and by the time I've even started to doubt its impossibility, you're already out of sight. After all, what would I need you for, if I could do all this on my own?"
Perplexed, he glanced up at her. His pen rolled off his page and vanished into the grass; Anna made a mental note to retrieve it before it ended up in a goat. The goat would probably be fine, judging by what she'd seen them survive eating in the past, but Zeref would have a fit.
"I see the numbers," she told him quietly. "I see them in my head, in front of my eyes. I see them dance. And it's my dance. I see it in the perfect waltz of the flock through the sky, in the phoenix-birth of fiery light from the scattering of the sunset's rays; where others see beauty, I see the numbers that make it. I hear its rhythm in the screech of friction when a wagon brakes and the turbulence of the river as it flows from boundary condition to boundary condition in a million chaotic ways. When grandad taught me about addition and subtraction, calculus and logarithms, all he was doing was giving me the language I needed to express what I had been seeing, understanding, using from birth. I see the numbers. But you, Zeref…"
"I see the magic," he murmured, wondrously.
She nodded; she had suspected as much for a very long time. "You don't see the numbers, but the effect they will have on the world. Not the process, or the reason, but the consequence. The meaning. The truth."
He didn't say anything. Perhaps he was processing her words; more likely, he was struggling with the fact that she and others didn't see what he did.
"Grandad always said what we do is like being dropped into an alien world, shrouded in fog," she continued. "If that's the case, then I'm the one with the compass, the utility knife, the rations, and the survival expertise. I'm the one who can hunt prey and hide from predators, navigate chasms, climb cliffs, and slay the dragons that get in our way. I will overcome any obstacle we encounter… but I can't see any further ahead than the next step.
"You, though… you can see exactly where we're going. You know which direction we need to take, and whether the shape that is only a blur of fog to me is a mystical castle, a vault of treasure, or a sinister trap. But you don't pay the slightest bit of attention to your surroundings. Left alone, you'll blunder over the edge of a cliff or be swept entirely off-course by a river. We need each other, Zeref. Tell me where we're going, and I'll get us there."
He listened as if it were a fairy tale she wove, head slightly tilted, seeing something more than the lawn and its animal houseguests and the no-longer-quite-so-rundown farmhouse, something special.
"Space, time, and the space-between-time…" he pondered. "Even with the new system of mathematics you've developed, they're still nothing more than theoretical concepts. World Magic is beyond us by the very fact that we are living creatures, born of and pledged to the One Magic instead. And yet, if we can develop something to bridge that gap – an interface, of sorts – we may be able to harness a fragment of World Magic in our reality, enough to achieve something that would otherwise be impossible."
"Like time travel."
He nodded. His attention drifted back to his page, though for once, it could not hold him. "I'll need a little longer with the concepts before we're ready to start formulating the mathematics, though."
"That's alright. I've got other things to do. My review work for the journals is really starting to build up. Besides, there are some important things coming up in my personal life soon. It probably wouldn't kill me to take some time off and focus on those for a while."
"Like what?" he asked the ladybird exploring the back of his hand, without any particular enthusiasm.
"Like the wedding."
"Whose wedding?"
"Mine."
There was no such thing as silence in the heart of summer, only a pause to let the cicadas and the songbirds and the goats and the fuzzy, shimmering heat take over.
Slowly, Zeref raised his head to look at her. "What?"
"Darryl proposed last night." She deliberately twisted the white diamond in its band of silver around her finger.
Zeref did not look. He was too busy staring at her, uncomprehending.
"It means we're getting married," she explained patiently.
"Oh," he said. "I thought you got married ages ago."
"…I'm sorry, what?"
"Well, you know, with how the two of you have been acting for the past year or so, I just assumed…"
"Oh, not you too!" she huffed, folding her arms. "How dare we live together without being married? I get enough of that from my neighbours, who'll still dream in archaisms a thousand years from now! I thought at least you were above the petty views of this backwards town!"
"I just thought that after living in your house, eating your food, renovating your farm, accompanying you to conferences, and grazing his stupid goats in your garden, the least he could do is propose!"
Anna opened her mouth, and then closed it again. "You know," she said, "I really wish you'd said that to him months ago."
"I would have done, if I'd known he hadn't," he scowled.
"You're not going to tell me he's not good enough?"
"I thought I'd already lost that argument. I don't particularly want to start it up again."
"Good," she grinned. "You're learning. Still, how on earth did you think I'd managed to get married without you noticing?"
"I just assumed you hadn't invited me to the wedding."
"Why wouldn't I do that?"
He gave her a curious look. "Am I invited?"
Yes, of course, was the answer on her lips, until she thought it through. "Do you think you can be civil to my husband-to-be for an entire afternoon?"
There was a moment of protracted silence.
"I suppose," Zeref said, "if you asked me nicely…"
"I'm not going to ask you at all. I'm going to expect it of you, because that is what people do for their best friends."
"I'll try," he grumbled, without much grace.
A smile twitched at her lips. "Zeref," she began, curiously, "have you ever thought about this?"
He snorted in disbelief. "What, getting married? Don't be ridiculous."
"I didn't mean marriage, obviously. But family doesn't have to be about marriage. It's about… having someone to care for."
"It isn't important to me."
"Not at all?"
He didn't respond, and from the way he rolled back onto his front, returning to orbit around the page of half-formed thoughts, she didn't think he was going to.
Later.
Away from the day, the sunlight, the claustrophobic everywhereness of summer.
Away from Anna, left to celebrate with her husband-to-be; away from anyone who might notice he was more than a shadow at the edge of a crowd.
Away from the demons who also called his lair their home – with a wave of his hand, he turned their minds away, so that their eyes would not register his passing, and their ears would hear all sounds except his footsteps. He could imagine Anna's disapproving expression well enough, but it had been a long time since he had felt so strongly the need to be alone, long enough that he felt no guilt about indulging it.
As he stepped into his study, hand reaching automatically for the book he needed, he paused.
A half-open door.
A blurred frontier where the lantern-glow of the library met the buzzing blue-white beyond it.
An ever-patient, ever-present hum. No expectations. No demands. Just politely waiting to be remembered.
"Not at all," Zeref confirmed, pushing the door shut, turning his back on the laboratory, and reaching for his book on World Magic.
That night, he dreamt in ultraviolet.
It had been a long time since Zeref had last encountered a dragon.
For over a year now, he and Anna had enjoyed a distinct lack of huge, scaly troublemakers in their lives. Well, he had enjoyed it. Anna, in rare moments of weakness, had been overheard wondering if the self-proclaimed hero of justice was alright, having not been seen since that fateful night in the burning city. A fragile soul might well be tempted to worry in those circumstances.
Not Zeref, though. Definitely not. His apathy was impervious to those flashes of human weakness – especially when it came to those irritating dragons.
Still, after a whole year without having his immortality checked by some new attack consisting of five synonyms for 'fire' in a random order, he did sometimes catch himself staring at the old heartscale in his lab and wondering which poor, unsuspecting soul its original owner was currently making miserable.
Then again, today was proof that Igneel didn't even need to be present to cause Zeref trouble.
It was difficult to enjoy the peace and quiet when, for the first time in his life, Zeref actually wanted to find the fire dragon. But, just as for the last year or so, Igneel was nowhere to be seen. And whenever Zeref had met dragons in the past, Igneel had always been the ringleader – the common connection between him, Anna, and their draconic allies in the ever-present war.
So, when Zeref found himself alone, facing an entirely unknown dragon, he wasn't quite sure how to act.
The dragon in question was curled up in the middle of the street – words which, when applied to a cat, might have invoked a sense of comfort and cuteness, but when applied to a giant metal-plated monster, probably explained why Zeref hadn't seen any fellow travellers for quite some time.
The dragon's scales did not gleam, like treasure might. They were flint-grey and indestructible; they were meant for battle, and considered reflecting light a thorough waste of time. Overlapping plates, sleekly mechanical, made it difficult to distinguish between neck, limb and tail. It was so still that Zeref wondered if he could edge around the coiled-up suit of armour and carry on unharmed.
Then again, asking a dragon was the one thing he hadn't tried.
And there was no guarantee that this dragon would know where Igneel was – no guarantee, in fact, that this wasn't one of the dragons who saw humans as bite-sized treats – but wasn't it worth the risk?
Zeref's eyes were always dark, a quirk of genetics that no one else in his family had displayed, but they seemed to grow darker still as he glanced past the dragon, up to the little hill with its little chapel and its little steeple, raised proudly towards the sky as if unaware that its insignificance was the only reason why it still stood.
Why should he care at all? She was getting up, moving on, leaving him behind, so why should he bother doing anything for her-?
"Why so glum, chum?"
Zeref jumped. The armoured ball had grown an eye, a perfect orb of black magnetism, peering out from amongst the interlocking plates in a way that left him even more puzzled as to the physical structure of the dragon. With the clutter-clack of shutter doors at the end of the day, the eye blinked slowly, expecting an answer, as if its inane question had been a heartfelt request.
Uncertainly, Zeref said, "I'm… looking for a dragon."
The heap of iron ore uncurled to reveal a dragon lying on his front in the road, his head resting philosophically on a claw propped up by an elbow. "You've found a dragon."
"I'm looking for a specific dragon."
Another long, loud blink. The metallic dragon continued to stare at Zeref as if he were the most curious thing to have ever walked the earth. "Which one?"
"Igneel. Sometimes he calls himself Blazing Justice. He's a fire dragon, but not the kind that's on fire."
"I know Igneel," the dragon rumbled serenely.
"Do you know where he is?"
"He wanders. He has been doing for a while."
"Why?"
"I don't think he knows. If he knew what he was looking for, he'd have found it by now."
"…Right," Zeref said uneasily. As it turned out, not all dragons were moronic. Some of them were just weird. "Well, thanks anyway."
He waited politely for the dragon to move out of the road. The dragon did not. In fact, the dragon continued staring, like a sphinx who had decided that asking travellers its riddles was giving them too much help, and now expected them to just know what was required of them.
"Why are you looking for Igneel?"
"It doesn't matter." Zeref stepped aside, intending to find a way around the dragon. The dragon rolled over onto his back and gazed up at him upside-down, waiting innocently for his answer.
Sighing, Zeref admitted, "It's… my friend is getting married today, in that chapel on the hill. She's quite fond of Igneel, for some reason, and I thought, if I could find him and tell him… well, it doesn't matter. I'm leaving."
These last words became a snap as his thoughts strayed again; darkness crept into his voice but not into the air around him.
"Good friend, is she?" the dragon asked pleasantly, choosing to ignore Zeref's attempt to walk away.
"Best friend." Anna's words, not his. They came out bitter, but he thought he preferred that to the way she threw them around without care.
"She's getting married today?"
"Yes."
"Not to you."
"Evidently." The pointless questions only stoked Zeref's irritation.
The dragon rumbled the noise of a distant mine shaft collapsing. "Why aren't you there with her, hmm?"
"I don't want to be!" Zeref burst out. "Why would I? There'll be so many people there, people I don't know, people I try so hard to avoid! Why do I have to be a part of this? Why should I have to pretend to be happy while she marries that stupid man and chooses to tether herself to his mundane life? She's everything! I can't lose her!"
He staggered backwards, hands clutching at his head. "But I don't… I want her to be happy. That's the most important thing, isn't it? And she'd be happier without me. So I'll… I'll just walk away. It doesn't matter what happens to me, as long as she's… she's… not that she'd notice. Not that she'd care even if she did!"
He fell back again with a moan. Thoughts whirled out of his grasp to dance among dreams.
"Ah, I understand," the dragon remarked.
Zeref thought that was an ambitious declaration, since even he didn't understand what was going through his head.
"That's why you wanted Igneel." An unquestionable conclusion, delivered with absolute wisdom. "You needed a hero of justice. A hero to swoop in and save your one true love from the altar of chains!"
Zeref looked up sharply. "No, wait-"
"Never fear!" the dragon assured him, rolling back the right way up and spreading metal wings in a rain of soil. "I will accept your quest, destroy your rival in love, and save your woman!"
"No!" Zeref shouted. As it turned out, nothing could cut through the mire of conflicting emotions in his mind better than sheer, unadulterated panic. "No, that's not what I said – wait, come back!"
With a clap of wings, the dragon was a speck in the sky. A speck winging its way towards the little chapel. A speck that was, in actuality, a huge, primed torpedo.
"Oh, no," Zeref whispered.
How could he have forgotten that all dragons were morons?
He ran.
Running had never been his thing, but there were some advantages to being stuck in a body which never changed – however much he neglected it, its physical state never got any worse. Somehow, the chapel was still standing. That sight spurred him onwards, offering just enough hope to counteract the growing despair at having lost sight of the dragon. He swerved around gravestones – not mementos of death to him right now, not mocking reminders, just plain old obstacles – and dived for the chapel's back door.
There she waited for her moment to walk down the aisle, alone. No one was there with her. She had no family left alive. She was more than capable of walking on her own, she had said, in a tone that brooked no argument – and indeed there was no argument, because Darryl's mother, sister, and the rest of the self-proclaimed wedding committee had learned not to mess with her after the very first afternoon of planning.
"Anna!" he shouted desperately.
She turned. She was an angel in white, all light and radiance, earthen eyes made soft by grace and concern as she took in his frantic appearance. "Zeref? I was wondering where you… what's wrong?"
"Anna!" he repeated, bending over, gasping for breath. "You have to cancel the wedding!"
Silence.
But it was a tense kind of silence, one that belied the vivid red dance of warning lights in the dusty air, the rapid flashing of radar, the insistence of all the monitoring equipment that the tectonic plates had shifted, and all that remained was to find out from which direction the tsunami was coming.
"Oh, Zeref, no!" Anna exclaimed. "Don't do this to me! You know, Darryl said you were going to run into the chapel yelling I object, and I said of course you wouldn't, you're a mature adult, you're capable of acting like it for one whole day, and he said, let's bet on it then. And he was right! You couldn't grow up for just one day! You had to try and sabotage my wedding, and now I've got to let Darryl get pigs! Pigs, Zeref! What the hell am I going to do with pigs? Maybe I'll make you look after them!"
"I don't want to sabotage your wedding, Anna!" he shouted back frantically. "I want you to be happy! I would never try and stop you from marrying someone you love – and even if I did, what difference would it make? You've never cared what other people think! If you want to marry him, marry him! But you can't do it today!"
Anna was so rarely lost for words that Zeref wasn't sure what else to do but wait awkwardly, wondering if he hadn't said enough, or if he had said too much.
When she finally found a voice, it must have been someone else's, for it sounded too bewildered to belong to Anna Heartfilia. "I've paid a lot of money to do it today, Zeref."
"You're in danger. Everyone's in danger. But most of all, your fiancé is in danger."
"Why?"
Zeref swallowed. "I might have accidentally set a dragon on him."
"ZEREF!"
"I said accidentally!" he cried, throwing up his hands as if she were about to start breathing fire. "I forgot they were all idiots, okay? I ran into this dragon earlier, and we were talking about your wedding, and I mentioned that I wasn't going to go-"
"You weren't going to go?" Anna screeched.
"Anna-"
"Zeref, you're telling me you weren't going to bother turning up to my wedding?"
"That's- that's not the point of the story! The dragon got completely the wrong idea and thought I was upset that you were marrying someone else, so he decided to be Chief Moron of Justice in Igneel's absence, and crash your wedding to defeat Darryl and steal you back for me…"
Suddenly conscious of the serenity, Zeref glanced around the antechamber. Bells tinkled from somewhere overhead. In the lull of their tidal argument, he thought he could hear the drone of the priest from beyond the door. "Odd… I don't see how I could have beaten him here."
"What was this dragon like?" Anna asked.
"A metal one. Iron, maybe?"
"Metalicana?"
"You know him?"
"As of about five minutes ago, when he introduced himself to me, yes."
"What…?"
She pulled him over to a window, twisted and thickened with age. A modest crowd of guests who had been too numerous to fit inside the small chapel – Darryl's friends, mostly – milled around outside, waiting for the happy couple to emerge.
At the back of the crowd there sat an iron dragon wearing a bow tie.
"What," Zeref said. It wasn't a question. Questions had answers, and answers required some kind of premise-to-conclusion logic that this world had clearly forsaken.
The dragon tossed a clawful of confetti into the air, much to the delight of the children gambolling around his feet.
"He apologized for turning up without an invitation," Anna explained, although if that was an explanation, he was the next King of Carligne. "He asked if I didn't mind him attending anyway, on behalf of Igneel and the dragons who couldn't make it, and said that he had brought along a present, it just hadn't arrived yet." An odd expression crossed her face as she looked at Zeref, and she amended, "I think it has now, though."
Zeref kept staring. The velvet bow tie accentuated the polish of the dragon's scales, making him feel uncomfortably underdressed. "I don't understand."
"Congratulations, Zeref," she grinned. "I do believe you just got pranked by a dragon."
"I… I'm sorry?"
"It looks as though you've come across a hitherto undiscovered phenomenon – a friendly dragon with some brain cells. Now, I'm just guessing here, but it looks like he took offence at your decision not to go to your best friend's wedding, and decided to prank you."
"But… I…"
Outside, the dapper dragon didn't glance away from the chapel doors, but Zeref could have sworn he heard the shutter-snap of one eye, winking.
Without warning, Anna wrapped both arms around him and kissed the top of his head. "Thanks for coming, Zeref."
"But you're right," he protested, trembling. "I didn't want to. I wouldn't have done, even though it's important to you…"
"Well, yes," she sighed. "But I'm used to your brain being a bit mushy when it comes to anything other than magic. And when you believed there was danger, you didn't hesitate, did you? You came straight here to warn me and Darryl. I know how much you care about those around you, no matter how much you pretend otherwise."
Silence lent her words a great weight. He knew she was talking about Darryl (who he tolerated for her sake) and Igneel (who he wasn't worried about at all), but his thoughts drifted to a body cocooned in ultraviolet, a boy who could have been sleeping, in that lonely place beyond life.
Stirring, he stepped away from her. "You should go. They'll be wondering where you are. If Darryl finds out I'm the one holding the ceremony up, I doubt he'll stop at just pigs."
"Ugh." She closed her eyes; an expression most unbefitting a blushing bride crossed her face. "You'd better hurry up with that theory you're working on. I'm going to need something to save me from my domestic bliss, and quick."
"I will," he promised.
"You don't have to stay for the rest of it. I know you don't like crowds or noise or… my very-nearly-husband."
A small shake of his head. "I don't want to go into the chapel, but… if you leave the door open a little, I'll listen from out here."
"Thanks," she smiled.
"Besides," he added, with a nice, safe scowl. "I can't leave just yet. I have a few choice words to say to a certain iron dragon…"
As all but the most childish part of Zeref's mind had been able to see a mile off, Anna's marriage had very little impact on their daily lives. All it really did was put a society-approved stamp onto that one small part of her lifestyle, and considering that she was also a female scholar, an intellectual rebel, a friend of dragons, and the research partner of the man who – admittedly unbeknownst to everyone else – was responsible for the obliteration of the Mildian Academy and the collapse of the Republic of Letters, it was barely worth noting.
Darryl had taken her surname. She had published far too much under the Heartfilia name to be bothered with changing it now, and he hadn't wanted them to have different names, so they had compromised. Or, rather, Darryl had given in and Anna had got her way, which was more or less the same thing. Darryl had tried to get her more involved in the farm he was reviving at the old Heartfilia household, but she had patted him on the back, given him an encouraging smile, and spent the next three days straight in Zeref's lab. She was very supportive of her husband's endeavours. From a distance.
Zeref had given up trying to understand how their relationship worked long ago. Anna seemed happy. Darryl seemed happy. As long as it didn't interfere with his and Anna's quest to realize World Magic in their reality, Zeref figured it didn't matter. Human beings were a mystery.
Yet Anna had repeatedly made it clear that Zeref would always be welcome around their house – made it clear, in fact, that she would sooner ban her husband and his furry entourage than her colleague. On this evening, like many others, Zeref sat out in their garden on his own, not so far from the glow of the hearth in the windows that he might forget it, but not so close that it might overwhelm him with feelings it was becoming harder and harder to avoid. There he sat in the crisp darkness, thinking about everything and nothing, when a blanket fell around his shoulders.
"You know you can come inside, don't you?" Anna asked. It was too dark for him to make out her raised eyebrows, but he could hear it in her voice as she sat down with him. "It'll only get colder."
"It doesn't bother me," he murmured.
She sighed and didn't argue. It was best to save her breath for when their arguments shaped life, death, and the fate of the universe. She remained as certain as ever that, one day, they would.
"What are you doing out here?" she inquired.
"…Stargazing."
"Oh? And what, pray tell, can be seen from my garden at this time of year?"
"Uh…" He pointed half-heartedly at an unassuming cluster of stars. "I think that one's Leo?"
"That's part of Pisces, Zeref." Before he could come up with another silly excuse, she went in for the kill. "You're studying the Aureum Oak again, aren't you?"
"I, uh…"
"I don't mind," she said, with a reassuring smile; her glare was reserved for the sapling itself. "Just because I won't study it myself doesn't mean I object to you doing it. You might be the first person in human history able to accurately track the growth of that plant, being immortal and all. I'd appreciate it if you were honest with me about it, though."
"Sorry," he murmured.
Satisfied, she glanced back up into the sky, dots of light in an ocean of darkness. "I'm surprised you don't know much about the constellations, though."
"Why? They're not particularly interesting."
"The sky's full of magic," she murmured. "Can't you feel it? The song that fills the void? The answers vibrating just out of reach? That's where World Magic is, Zeref. There, beyond the stellar sphere."
After a moment, he smiled. "That's a romantic way of looking at it. If the One Magic is born of the fiery coalescence of life and magic, perhaps World Magic is found at the point where reality ends and space becomes time… beyond the stellar sphere, where all is infinite. I do wonder…"
"Anyway," she prompted, gently, when he tailed off, "nice as this is, I didn't come out here to discuss poetry. There's actually something I need to tell you."
"What's that?" This was still directed to the stars, which held his thoughts, his ideas, his interest.
"I'm pregnant," she shrugged. "Darryl and I thought you'd probably want to know."
"Oh," Zeref said.
And then: "Oh."
Anna raised her eyebrows again, perhaps expecting something a little more eloquent from the man who had been waxing lyrical about the stellar sphere less than a minute ago, but his mind had blanked. He stammered, "Is- is that a good thing?"
"…Yes, Zeref, that's a good thing. Not entirely planned, I'll admit, but definitely a good thing."
"Oh," he said, again; the confirmation hadn't helped at all. His gaze dropped, as if searching for physical proof of her words. "Right. Okay."
With a sigh, she reached out and ruffled his hair. "Look, I'll let you off this time, because I know that you're probably the only person in the kingdom who knows more about zathrakan bridging matrices than normal family life, but just in case you happen across any other pregnant women this century, the appropriate response is usually some variation on 'congratulations'."
"Congratulations," he mumbled, unable to tear his gaze away.
The more he concentrated, the more he was sure he could sense something.
Life. Part of her, and at the same time, distinct from her. Magic born from flesh and blood; emotions and hopes and passions taking form from nothing, there at the intersection of life and magic. To the senses awoken on the day he had lost the ability to die, it sang the universe's song, and he thought in that one, complete moment, that this was why everything had ever been.
Without warning, he half-ran, half-sprawled back away from her, a shadow spooked by a light only he could see, a monster tripping over its own ungainly tails.
Her voice came to him from a long way away. "Zeref? What's wrong…?"
"Anna," he gasped. "I think- I think we will have to put our projects on hold for a while."
There was a pause. "Why? It's not like it's going to stop me from working on our calculations."
"No, I know you can do it," he whimpered, wrapping his arms tightly his knees. "But I can't. I don't think I can be around you, Anna. I think I'll kill you." There was no hope of seeing the stars now, not through the thin film of tears drawn tight across his eyes. "I think I need to go somewhere very far away for a while. Somewhere I can't hurt you."
He was expecting anger. He deserved it, for ruining all their plans. But the powder keg that was his best friend sometimes turned out to hold petals instead, and the explosion could be soft and warm.
"Okay. I understand." Anna tried to reach for him, but he shook his head, and she desisted. It was the meaning that mattered, anyway. After a moment, she added, "In a way, I'm glad."
"Glad…?" he echoed, wondering if he had misheard.
"Not that you have to go through this. Or that it might delay our work. But, you know… for a long time I've been worried that you've forgotten the value of the things that once meant everything to you: love and family. I can love you, and I do, very much, but I can't be your family; I have my own, now. You need to find yours again. That's important."
"Maybe. I don't know."
"I do," Anna said. "Do you think you'll be alright on your own, for that long?"
"I don't know," he repeated, then considered it properly. "I… I think I will be. I'm stronger than I was before."
"I think so too," she smiled. "Write to me, won't you?"
"I will. Be well, Anna."
Zeref was lonely that night.
He wasn't sure he remembered what it meant to have a family.
Had his parents loved each other the way Anna and Darryl did? Tolerant of each other's quirks, but not of their faults; neither understanding the other's passion for complex magic or belief that a household could never contain too many paws, snouts or tails, and yet neither seeing that lack of understanding as a problem; different in all the ways that didn't matter; happy in defiance of all expectations?
Maybe. He wasn't sure.
It scared him, how little he could remember.
The wounds within his magic could distort intentions and manipulate interpretations, but they couldn't change what had happened, couldn't draw over what was preserved on the canvas of his memories. With no need of those oldest paintings in his daily life, he had stashed them away in a mental vault, and hung ritual circles and technical sketches in the space freed up. He had thought them safely preserved in isolation. On the rare occasion his mind had skimmed over them, he saw the rosy glow and the presence of three figures, and thought them complete.
Only now, as he turned his full attention towards them for the first time in decades, did he realize how much they had deteriorated.
His parents hadn't understood him, nor he them. It hadn't been a clash of equals, like he saw in Anna and Darryl, respecting each other's differences. It had been the asymmetry of ordinary parents and an extraordinary child; they had always believed they knew better even though he knew he did.
It had already been causing trouble between them. It would have caused far more had they lived, and, realistically, he suspected they would have ended up as estranged in life as they were in death. Nonetheless, they had loved him and he them, and that was the glow that suffused the landscapes of his early childhood.
But it was just a glow, nothing more. A sensation without detail or proof. A certainty that became less certain, the harder he tried to pin it down.
How had they loved him? Did they hug him regularly, like Anna did? Did they sing to him at night, cook his favourite foods, buy him new books for his birthday? Did they take him to the library and sit patiently while he read? Did they whisper those words to him every night before he fell asleep, or save them so that they meant double when he needed them the most?
He couldn't remember.
He wasn't sure he could even remember their faces. They haunted the shoreline between the dunes of memory and the sea of dreams, and the tide had been creeping up for quite some time.
He thought he had been loved like Anna would love her child, but did it matter, if he couldn't remember it?
How isolated was he?
And how very alone?
It was sheer human stupidity that drove him to the upper levels of the tunnels he called home. Loneliness, and longing, and stupidity. The demons crowded him. They delighted in having him back among them for the first time in months, unaware that he spent at least as much time in his lab downstairs as he did with Anna, slipping back and forth unnoticed while they waited loyally for him to return.
They loved him. And they were so open in how they showed it: competing to be the first to show him the new curse power they had learnt; bringing him the foods he'd once told them he liked the best; asking for his latest instructions; presenting him with gifts, usually books, that they thought he would like.
It wasn't real, though.
Anna had objected from the moment she had first understood what the demons were, and he had dismissed her concerns, because he had needed them before he had her, and he found them useful to this day. Only now could he clearly see what she did. They loved him because he had made them that way. They couldn't comprehend anything else. They wouldn't contradict him unless he told them to, which defeated the purpose; they wouldn't argue with him, because his desires had been impressed into them, written between the lines of every page that made up their beings. They were sentient, conscious, living creatures, capable of independent thought in every way except the one which mattered to him right now.
He had made them out of a desire to end his life, not his loneliness. When that had failed, he kept them because he could not bring himself to end them, and because he recognized that they were useful, not because he wanted them around. On his worst days, they were the embodiment of his failure. On his good days, they were a reminder of his worst days.
Maybe that was why they couldn't help.
He loathed them no less and no more than he loathed himself.
When he ordered them to leave him alone, they did so with evident dismay, but the thought of disobeying did not – could not – cross their minds. How many times had Anna refused to leave him alone? And how it had changed him! What was the use of a devotion that never led to understanding; of a love that did not illuminate flaws, and by doing so, heal them?
No use at all.
I can't be your family, Anna had said.
He walked on.
There was one face he had never forgotten.
One that had not burnt to ash with his house and the bodies of his parents, but which waited beyond the laboratory door that never stayed shut, no matter how many times he closed it.
One that had not faded, because he saw it so often in dreams of liquid blue – dreams which were filled with such peace and patience that they left him feeling far guiltier than any kind of hatred.
Anna judged him for it. More accurately, she judged him for the fact that he had been stood on the precipice of scientific discovery for four decades, his back turned, his eyes closed, and his hands clamped so tightly over his ears that he could not hear the song of the world beyond. He had paid the price, yet stopped short of claiming his prize. That was something she could never forgive.
There was nothing Natsu would not forgive, it seemed.
He would wait as long as it took for his big brother to get his act together.
Infinite faith.
Infinite patience.
Zeref pressed his palm to the outside of that glass coffin, his hand as pale as death in the unnatural light. What he sensed from it was even less real than the attitudes of his demons towards him. Their emotions were artificial, but at least they had them. The dead did not feel. If they waited, it was only because they could do nothing else.
Still, while the emotions he dreamed his brother felt were only a product of his own imagination, the guilt they induced in him was real.
He couldn't remember how his parents had expressed their love for him, and it faded like the blackening orange of the late sunset. He couldn't forget how Natsu had loved him, and it was blinding. A distraction when he needed to sneak out of the house, or into the library; a pastry pushed under the door when he was up too late working; a warm hand when his had frozen solid around his quill; a disinterest in any kind of literature, unless Zeref was the one reading it to him, and then the little bundle of energy would quieten and listen with rapt fascination.
That smile, making his own insignificant life feel like the centre of the universe.
There was a lurch in his chest. His eyes slammed shut as his broken magic collapsed a little bit further, and a black tsunami broke against the walls of his laboratory.
His deep breath followed it, seeking calm in its wake. It wasn't as though there was anything living within these walls for it to harm.
He only had himself to blame for that.
As always, he tried to push such thoughts away, but stopped. What then? Would he push away the emotions he had painstakingly gathered over the last few years – the fear, jealousy, rage, pride, protectiveness, passion, understanding, love – and fade, fall, drift again as nothing, die in all the ways that mattered? But the consequences of keeping them…
Deal with the consequences, Anna would have said. Had said to him, many times, if only he'd had the courage to listen.
Deal with the consequences. Learn to navigate his own fractured mind. Learn to control the predatory death that hounded all lives but his own, and if control was not possible, structure his life and interactions with others so that it did not matter.
Deal with it.
Live.
Because he was more than just the punishment for his actions. He was the ambition and the ingenuity, the arrogance and the recklessness, the hope and the love that had driven him to those actions in the first place, and he was going to prove it.
When he raised his head towards the brother who waited so patiently, there was a new determination in his eyes. It was time to walk the path of life and death all the way to its end.