The Scars That Make You Whole

By CrimsonStarbird

Hubris et Orbi, Epilogue

-You're Still Gone and I'm Still Here-

Ruins of the Village of Aster, The Present Day

"Anna knew," Zeref said, the words quiet and heavy. "She knew the Eclipse Gate would close when she died. She thought I had chosen to stay with her despite it… but the truth was, I just hadn't realized."

Lucy knew exactly why he hadn't realized. He wasn't the kind of person who could watch his best friend die in his arms and think about anything but her. He loved far too deeply for that.

But when she tried to say it, no words came out. Her throat felt weak, her presence out of place.

It had been so long since she had last spoken. She felt as though she had spent hours sat beneath the great dead oak with Zeref, yet her legs did not ache, tiredness had yet to sink its claws into her mind, and the sky was the same deepest black it had been when he had begun his tale. Neither time nor space held power here. This grove belonged to the stars, and the night would be exactly as long as it needed to be.

"She should have known I hadn't worked it out," Zeref reflected. "I would never have been so calm if I had. She must have known that. She tried so hard to hide her injury from me precisely because she knew I would fall apart if I found out she was dying."

And then, so quietly, he added, "And I did fall apart."

"What happened?" Lucy managed to whisper.

At long last, Zeref turned away from the enormous dead tree and to her instead. She had become able to read him so well as they had travelled together, and yet on this night, she found those dark eyes unfathomable – not because they were guarded, but because they were so open. They swirled with so many emotions that she did not even know where to begin.

"By then, the soldiers who had attacked us had fled or died," he answered. "I hadn't meant to kill them, but… watching Anna die was more than I could bear. My curse spared her because she was already beyond saving. Nothing else in the clearing where we built the Eclipse Gate was unlucky enough to be that lucky."

A twisted smile, quickly vanishing back into shadow.

"I took back my demons' books and I took back Anna's keys. She had ensured I would never be able to control her Spirits as I could the demons, but I made them swear additional oaths to prevent them from interfering or acting against my wishes. They had no choice. They knew I would have destroyed them had they refused."

"Could you have done, though?" Lucy wondered. Something dangerous shifted in his expression, but she had not meant it in that way; she shook her head hastily. "I mean, if the Gate was opened in the future to connect to your time, and the Zodiac keys were needed to open it, didn't that mean that they would survive… because, in a way, it had already happened?"

"Perhaps," Zeref allowed, tapping his finger upon the ground as he sometimes did when he thought, although it soon ceased. "But did they survive because I could not destroy them, or did they survive because they caved to my wishes, and thus were not destroyed by me? Not even they, creatures of time and space that they are, knew into which era the Gate had opened. It would have been possible, I think, to obliterate their living selves while leaving the keys with enough functionality to operate the Gate. They knew I would have done it. They knew what I asked was necessary, for them and for me."

Lucy bowed her head, wishing she had not interrupted.

After a moment's pause, he resumed talking in a near-emotionless tone. "I brought Anna's body back to Aster. I buried her here, beneath the Aureum Oak. Darryl watched, but he did not approach me, let alone ask what had transpired… it was, perhaps, the wisest thing he had ever done. Afterwards, I handed the eighty-eight celestial keys to him, to pass to Anna's daughter when she came of age. And I gave him until sundown."

"To… do what?" Lucy wondered.

"To get everyone and everything he cared for out of the kingdom of Carligne."

Startled, she glanced up, and the mirthless smile on his lips was one she needed no help decoding.

"You asked me, once, what became of the kingdom in which I grew up," he said. "And the truth of it is, I destroyed it."

"The whole kingdom?" Lucy inquired, before she could stop herself, but the question did not seem to bother him.

"Yes. Every village and every city; every castle and church and library; every soldier who had escaped that day, and those who had never been there at all; every dragon who got in my way; every stranger just going about their business; every man, woman and child with the misfortune to have been born into the kingdom of Carligne… I did not spare a single one of them."

She couldn't comprehend it. Her mind felt suddenly numb; she heard his words but did not know what to do with them. Weakly, she murmured, "You were so angry."

"No," said he. "I wasn't."

"You-"

"For a day, I suppose I was," he shrugged, as if it didn't matter. "Maybe even for a week. But it took months, what I did. Carligne was not a small place, and I was… thorough."

A chill ran down her spine. Somehow, he noticed it; somehow, that dark smile twisted further in on itself, becoming less recognizable with every word he spoke.

"With the demons behind me, I was unstoppable. As long as I lived, I could bring them back over and over with a snap of my fingers, and of course I could not die. We did not have to stop for food or rest, nor had I any need to fear insubordination from servants who could not comprehend the notion of disobedience. They knew how to win a fight. I taught them how to win a war."

Then he considered this, and amended, "No, it wasn't a war. A war would have ended in days; I would simply have marched into the capital and ripped the crown from that fool king's head. In truth, I wasn't trying to win – I was trying to make all of humanity pay for the mistakes of one man. And I did.

"There were… frighteningly few survivors. Almost incomprehensively so, given the scale of the undertaking. There would always be some, that much was inevitable, but not enough to truly understand what had happened. Not enough that historians wouldn't write the kingdom off as just another casualty of the Dragon Wars, never mind that no dragon had ever harboured enough hatred for humanity to destroy more than a city or two at a time. No one knew what really happened there, or why… but you asked me, Lucy, where the stories about me come from, nebulous as they are. They come from the final days of the kingdom of Carligne, and I can tell you that they are a gross understatement of what transpired there. They aren't vague because they are myths. They are vague because no one lived to tell the truth of them."

Slowly, he turned his hands over in the starlight, seeking out invisible bloodstains upon his unmarked skin.

"There was nothing emotional about it. No one driven by grief or anger could have done what I did. Certainly, I blamed King Carlos for Anna's death, almost as much as I blamed myself, and his death was… slow. But his soldiers had only been following orders. His pet scientists were as much his slaves as he had wanted to make Anna. And most of the population had nothing whatsoever to do with her death, and I killed them anyway. I wasn't doing it for her. I knew she would never forgive me for it. I saw, over and over, strangers holding their loved ones as they died, just as I had held Anna… but I still didn't stop."

"Then why did you do it?" Lucy dared to whisper.

"Because it seemed like the right thing to do."

At her sharp glance, she thought his smile became a little sadder, and a little more genuine. "I don't mean morally right," he explained. "I never thought that, not once. Nonetheless, it seemed like the appropriate response. The only appropriate response."

"I don't understand," she admitted.

"No… I suppose you don't." He was silent for a while, and the stars didn't turn and the horizon didn't brighten. "I didn't understand why I wasn't angrier. I wanted to lose myself in consuming, uncontrollable rage; to let go of thought and logic and burn with fury until either I or the world was no more. But I couldn't."

At last, starlight glimmered in the darkness of his eyes, caught by the tears hiding therein. "And how could I? She was my reason for feeling… she was my heart. When she died, I lost everything. I should have been so mad with grief that it would only have been right to destroy the world that took her from me. But I couldn't feel that way without her. I couldn't feel anything at all. So I did it cold, and the consequences were a thousand times worse."

For the first time in as long as Lucy could remember – although time no longer had the meaning it once did – silence fell over the grove. She stared up at the crooked boughs of the dead oak, black on black as they twisted through the night. Still the stars waited patiently.

Softly, Zeref prompted, "You must have something to say, Lucy."

Maybe so, but how could she put her emotions into words? When Igneel had lost his father and fallen into rage, Zeref – his friend – had been there to stand in his way. But by the time Zeref lost Anna, all his friends were gone. There was no one to bring him back. He had nothing left at all, and she struggled to imagine it.

Zeref added, "You told me, shortly after we started this quest together, that you would not judge me based on rumour, nor label me an enemy when you did not know me. You have more right than anyone, now, to make that call."

She met his gaze as bravely as she could, trying to determine from that soft darkness what he was hoping she would say… then she shook herself internally, annoyed with herself. After everything he had shared with her that night, how could she think about saying anything but the truth?

"You know," she began, "I thought it would be something like this."

"What do you mean?"

"When you were evasive over the fate of Carligne, the thought that you were somehow responsible seemed the most obvious explanation. In my mind, I came up with so many potential justifications for it. Perhaps the kingdom had sided with the mad dragons and attempted to wipe out humanity. Perhaps they were attempting to take over the world for themselves, or destroy all that was good in it."

"None of those," he said, with another twisted smile. "That could have made my actions understandable. But I didn't do it for any reason like that. I did it because I thought it was what I would have wanted, had I been capable of wanting anything."

"That's not the point, though. Even before I found out why, I was making excuses for you. I think I had already decided it didn't matter."

"It matters."

"I know," she nodded. "I don't have the right to tell you otherwise. To be honest, I can't even comprehend it, not really. It's too long ago, too remote, too abstract for me to grasp – maybe for any human being living today. I can only tell you how I feel." She looked up, making sure he was listening. "A lot of things you've told me tonight have changed my opinion of you, but that isn't one of them."

His expression did not change. "Then there is something very wrong with you, Lucy."

"Then tell me this," she challenged. "Have you ever deliberately caused death and destruction on such a vast scale since then?"

Genuine fright flashed across his expression – the fear that Anna might have seen as he came to understand his own power, the fear of knowing the truth about himself – but Anna would never have seen it disappear so quickly, nor without help, as the control he had been building for four centuries snapped back into place.

Still, he did not respond immediately. He leaned forward, pensive, and said, "That is not so easy to answer. There are those who would argue that I have, and I think they would not be wrong to do so. But there are also those who would argue on my behalf that it was good or necessary. My motives were usually constructive. I tore down what already existed in order to rebuild in its place – build something that, I think, has been vindicated by history. Not before or since the fall of Carligne do I recall being motivated by nothing but destruction."

She puzzled over this for a moment, and then asked, "What did you do, after the kingdom fell?"

"I ran," he said simply. "I ran to somewhere very far away, as if I could hide from myself there, and I started to build for everything I had destroyed. I think it was only possible because of what I had done in Carligne. It is very difficult for me to create these days, unless I can force myself into a mindset where it seems both necessary for my wider plans and irrelevant for me personally, but I was able to do it back then, I think, because of all the death that still hung over me. It is impossible to do something like that and come out of it believing life has any value."

His head fell forward again, no longer capable of looking at the stars, or at her. "But it would be wrong to look back now and say it was a productive, redemptive, good era for me. At the time, it was… I remember little of the years immediately following the fall of Carligne, only enough to know that I was as detached as I had ever been. Worse, even. I wish I could have gone back to feeling nothing. It would have been far safer. Instead, I kept waking up to the terrifying emptiness of knowing I would never see her again… that I was once more alone.

"On good days, I understood how fortunate I was to have met her. I knew that it was only because of her that I was able to do anything at all… and I did keep studying, and I did keep developing magic, and I did look to the future as I formed my plans. But there weren't many good days, and the bad days were… bad. Once, I had been content to simply drift through my own little world of nothingness. Now that I was aware of what I didn't have, there was only despair."

"I think that's a good thing," Lucy said impulsively. "Not that you felt that way, I wouldn't wish that upon anyone, but that you could feel that way."

After a worrying moment, he nodded slowly. "Maybe. But it didn't make it any easier." Then he shook his head. "But why should it have been easy for me? I had failed, after all."

"What do you mean?"

"By the time I returned to the land of my birth, about a century later, the Dragon Wars were long over. Dragons were extinct. With no one left to grant them their magic, the Dragon Slayers had died out too. Acnologia, with his ability to hide as a human, but impossible for a human to kill because of his draconic nature, was the only survivor."

"What did he do?" Lucy wondered.

"He went into hibernation, I think. He knew some of the dragons he had sworn to kill had escaped him through the Gate, though he did not know into which age. His obsession bound him. Without knowing the truth – that all five were already dead – he could not rest. He could only will the years to pass as quickly as he could make them."

Then he added, so very bleak, "Anna and I had all these grand plans. Saving the world, saving humanity, saving the dragons, bringing the war to an end with love… and every last one of them failed. Acnologia was the one who saved humanity. He hunted the dragons to extinction, and that is the only reason why there is any sentient life left on this planet. It wasn't the bond between the dragons and their children that broke the cycle leading the world towards disaster, but Acnologia's systematic annihilation of one link in that dreadful chain. In the end, Anna and I couldn't save anyone."

Lucy said, quietly, "I can think of five children you saved."

Zeref just shook his head again. She thought, perhaps, that he did not want to be consoled about this.

Instead, she searched for a safer topic of conversation. "When you left Carligne," she asked, "did you take the demons with you?"

"No. I could have done a lot of damage if I had, and perhaps that's one reason why I didn't. I ran from everything, them included. I abandoned them without a word of warning in the ruins of the kingdom we destroyed."

"But they didn't continue destroying," she reasoned, "or surely history would know about it."

"It's strange." He sounded almost as mystified as she did, and she was glad about that, for it was better than the raw pain of before. "The last command I had given them was to destroy for me. And yet they had just done that at my side for months, and I had abandoned them anyway. There were those who thought continuing to wage war against all of humanity would bring me back, but others believed it couldn't be what I really wanted, as faithfully doing so had driven me away. Some broke away and wandered – and were, over time, hunted to extinction by the humans they considered prey – but most of them stayed together, hiding away and building their own society just as I myself was building elsewhere."

"Tartaros?"

"Not quite. Not yet. But they did work together, and they developed a great deal of new technology in that time, including a device that could bring themselves back from death without requiring my intervention. I had no idea they were doing this; at the time, I did not care what became of them any more than what became of the world I left them in. But when I found out, I was… proud, I suppose."

There was something almost wistful in his expression. "I still had the Book of END with me. I don't know why. There was no comfort to be gained from it; Natsu did not exist in that time period, so it was lifeless. Sometimes, it served a reminder that all might not be lost, if only I could be patient… but the fact that I had access to it during the darkest of times turned out to be just another mistake."

She didn't think he was capable of continuing of his own accord, so she took the plunge. "Why did you make Natsu hate you?"

"I wanted him to kill me. I thought he might be able to succeed where all else had failed, in some future age where magic was stronger than ever before. Like I told you, I wanted him to be my enemy, and nothing but my enemy."

"I don't understand, Zeref. You'd lost Anna, and you'd lost Igneel, but you knew that you'd get Natsu back one day! Why would you deliberately cast away the only thing that hadn't been taken from you?"

"The wait was easier to bear without hope," he murmured. "And I did and still do want to die more than anything else."

"Has it occurred to you that it was precisely because you had abandoned your hope that you felt that way?" she countered.

Zeref's eyes flashed, but there was no colour here; that beautiful darkness became momentarily a stormy grey. "Do not presume that you understand this better than I do, Lucy, or I shall become very angry."

She knew he wouldn't – not here, not tonight. Still, she refrained from saying it, because it was clearly not going to help. Carefully, letting her gaze drop like a wolf might bare its throat to show that it meant no threat, she asked, instead, "So, that fire god ritual Arlock used…?"

"Just one of many things I tried to end my own life, or to ensure Natsu would be capable of doing so, once he returned to linear time," he answered, a little calmer than before. "Although, as I told you, I didn't go through with that one. But I also knew, if I kept hold of the book, that I would one day do it – or worse. So, when I saw what the demons had done in my absence, I decided to give it to Mard Geer for safekeeping. That was when he made his guild. It had nothing to do with me. I couldn't do what Anna wanted me to do – I couldn't change the very nature of the demons' existence – but from that day onward, I never issued a single command to them. I hoped that staying away from them entirely would allow them to find their own way in life, and in a sense it did, but…"

"But they never stopped trying to reach you," Lucy finished.

"Yes. It's sad, isn't it?" Tilting his head back, he gazed up at the stars. "Even for a night like this, I have far too many regrets."

If he wasn't worried about the stretching of time and night, then she wouldn't be either. Instead, she would take the opportunity it offered, knowing she might not get another.

"Tell me about the Celestial Spirit mages," she requested. "Tell me about the magic I inherited."

"What do you want to know?"

He had given those words to her once before, and they had felt like the hilt of an executioner's blade in her hands. This time, he did not sound so horribly resigned, and that gave her hope. Hope that it wouldn't hurt him as much as it once did. "What happened with the Eclipse Gate?"

"Anna had recorded all the information about the Gate in a journal, which she left with Darryl to pass on to her daughter, and I gave him the celestial keys. I cannot say for sure what he did, because I never saw him again – and that was yet another of my mistakes. I believe Darryl destroyed Anna's journal. He would have done the same for the keys, had it been within his power, but it was not. Instead, he scattered them. Hid them, buried them, cast them away in every godforsaken town he found himself in as he fled Carligne. Anna's daughter, heir to the magic we created and princess of the celestial sphere, lived and died without ever possessing a key of her own."

"That's awful!" Lucy burst out. "How could he do that? Anna gave her life for your plan, and he-!"

"I know." Instead of the fiery agreement she was expecting, though, Zeref simply gave a wan smile. "I never did understand him, and I certainly won't make excuses for him. Yet I also cannot find it in me to hold it against him, knowing that I did far worse in my grief."

"But to risk everything you'd been working towards-!"

"Mine and Anna's magic is not so easily broken," he reminded her. "The keys have always found their way into the hands of those of the bloodline, just as, for generations, our Gate drew to it those who might have been called upon to open it." Then, a sigh. "But at the same time, his actions and his resentment formed something of a curse. Not once since Anna's death has any Celestial Spirit mage held all twelve Zodiac keys, despite countless attempts to reunite them."

"I could have obtained them all," Lucy pointed out. "Yukino offered me hers during the Grand Magic Games."

"But you turned her down."

"Well, yes, but I could have taken them."

A faint smile. "Could you?"

"Of course!" At his patient expression, she spread her hands, arguing, "There wasn't anything stopping me!"

"There didn't have to be," he shrugged, and he was still smiling faintly, wonderfully, just like he did when he could see something she couldn't. "You, being who you are, offered the keys under circumstances such as those, would never have been able to accept them."

"But…" She floundered, looking for the words to express her innate certainty. "That's just a coincidence. It wasn't magic that made it happen."

"You have to understand, Lucy, that the magic Anna and I wrought is not magic as you know it. It was ritual magic of the oldest, purest kind." An achingly familiar frown touched his face as he tried to find a way to explain something that was, to him, as intuitive as breathing. "We wrote our intention into the fabric of reality. Things happened as they had to happen to make it come to be."

"What sort of things?"

"Keys being found by those with the power to wield them. The Gate surviving the years intact. The Heartfilia line enduring, unbroken, for four hundred years, despite war and famine and all manner of ills afflicting the world in that time. It was no coincidence that all these things played out as necessary. As you said yourself, when we opened the Gate in the past, it also opened in the future. In the moment we created this magic, it came into being in every one of those four hundred years at once. It is World Magic. It exists outside of space and time, just as this place does, tonight."

It made sense, in a paradoxical kind of way, right up until the moment she thought about it too much. It twisted her thoughts as effortlessly as it twisted nice, neat linear time. Out of curiosity, she asked, "Do you know how I am related to Anna?"

He nodded. "That's easy: you are her direct heir, down the female line. The eldest daughter of the eldest daughter, all the way back to her."

Lucy swallowed. There was something oddly nerve-wracking about having her own ancestry, which she had never considered to be important, stated with the clarity of kings and queens. There was a legacy to her name that she had never known before today. Anna's dreams and ambitions carried a weight for Lucy that neither her father's business empire nor her mother's dance through the circles of high society had managed to chain to her.

She thought of her own parents, one Layla Heartfilia and one Jude Ashley. Layla had been of the nobility, but had rejected that lifestyle to start over on her own merit; Jude had been a commoner with the drive to become something more, and although it had made social and economic sense to found what would one day be his business empire in his wife's name, he had chosen to become Jude Heartfilia privately as well as officially because he was young and so very much in love. The affection and sacrifice behind the Heartfilia name had not lessened over the centuries.

"Why only daughters?" she asked, trying to keep her voice light. "There are male Celestial Spirit mages too, aren't there?"

"Yes. All those who share Anna's blood, no matter how distant, have the ability to form contracts with any keys they might obtain. It is, however, the direct female line which has always carried the legacy of time."

"Why?"

A shrug. "It's just how it is. Heartfilia firstborns are always girls."

Lucy did a double take. "What do you mean?"

"I mean exactly what I said," he answered, clearly baffled by her reaction. "I don't think there's a simpler way of putting it. Down the direct line, the firstborn child has always been female."

"That's quite a coincidence, across that many generations," Lucy said neutrally.

"It isn't a coincidence. Just as it isn't a coincidence that every direct heir chose to have children of their own, and lived at least long enough to do so, or that they always chose to keep the Heartfilia name rather than taking that of their husbands. The magic we brought into being was a powerful thing. It is not at all surprising that it would have such a strong influence on those bound to it."

"So," she said, shortly, because he obviously wasn't going to get it otherwise, "you're telling me that I'm destined to have a daughter, whether I want to or not, all because you screwed around with magic four hundred years ago?"

Zeref opened his mouth, and then closed it again. If his temporary muteness was anything to go by, he had not considered the very pertinent implications of his and Anna's actions with World Magic at all.

He wet his lips, and then said, "Good question."

"Are you going to answer it?" she challenged.

"I don't know the answer," he admitted. "It could go either way, I think. On one hand, the Gate has been opened now, and the greater part of the magic we invoked has run its course. On the other hand, the Celestial Spirits still exist, the keys can still only be used by Anna's blood descendants, and you and Yukino were able to open the Gate again, albeit in a bastardized way, so… I don't know."

"Oh. Well, then."

"I'm sorry, Lucy." He sounded so genuinely apologetic, so very baffled, that she almost laughed.

"It's okay. I'm not angry, or anything." That wasn't the right word for it, so she tried to explain. "I am so fortunate to have had the Celestial Spirits in my life, and I cannot imagine a world where I had never met Natsu, Wendy, and the others. It's just… I've not even started to seriously consider whether I want children or not, and it's weird to think that the decision may have already been made for me, by forces beyond my control."

After a moment, he seemed to accept that she really wasn't upset – he had, she thought, spent a little too long thinking about Anna that night – and nodded. "That is why ritual magic should only ever be used as a last resort. Something is given, but something is always taken away. We brought World Magic into our reality, and by doing so, the shackles of time and space became a little looser… but the price was Anna's future, and the futures of her descendants."

"But I don't have to open the Eclipse Gate, do I?" she checked. "Natsu is here in the present, so it must already have happened."

To her surprise, the almost-normal mood that had been rekindling between them vanished at once. "Yes… it has."

"How? When? And if it takes all the Zodiac keys together to open it, but they've never been brought together since Anna's death, then…?"

He drew in a deep shuddering breath, heavy with a fear that not even the prospect of having to talk about his past had induced in him. "You have to understand, Lucy – I didn't know. I would never have let it happen otherwise. It wasn't until months afterwards that I found out the Gate had opened, and by then, it was far too late."

"Zeref…?"

"Layla opened it."

"My mother?"

"Yes. But she didn't have all the keys. She owned them all over the course of her life, but not all at the same time, and not when she needed them the most. When the time came to open the Gate, she only held eleven. I'm so sorry, Lucy. If I had known what she was going to do-"

"It's okay," she interrupted. "I believe you." She wanted to reach for him, to reassure him, but he was a little too far away, just as he had been all night. "What happened?"

"She found a way to open it without all the keys. But the cost… she made up the deficiency in magic with her own life. Opening the Gate killed her. I killed her."

"No, you didn't. It was her choice."

Lucy spoke the words with all the certainty that had deserted Zeref. Strange as it was to be consoling someone else over it, her mother's death was something that no longer had the power to hurt her. After all this time, learning why brought a small flicker of warmth to a sadness so old she almost considered it a friend. It wasn't just an illness. It was a sacrifice, one that had brought Lucy the greatest joy she had known in her life.

She continued, "And because she made that choice, Igneel and the others were able to save the Dragon Slayers, and who knows-? Acnologia didn't end the war, Zeref – he only prolonged it. But with Natsu and Wendy and the others, we might at last be able to beat Acnologia and end it for good. So you did succeed, Zeref. You and Anna did exactly what you set out to do."

Once again, Zeref shook his head and did not deign to respond out loud.

Shifting slightly on the ground, she allowed him his reticence. Everyone had their own way of coping – and of mourning.

"Zeref?" she asked, when enough time had passed. He did not look at her, although he made a soft noise of acknowledgement, enough to let her know he was still listening. "Why don't the Dragon Slayers remember you, or Anna, or even each other? Did you do that to them, too?"

"No." He drew out the word beyond its natural length. "Given that Anna and I were supposed to be here with them, having them forget us would have been counter-productive." Then his black gaze flicked up to meet hers, and he continued in a less defensive tone. "It wasn't intentional. I can't say for certain how or why it happened."

"You have a theory, though," asserted Lucy. "You usually do." When he did not answer straight away, she guessed, "Was it passing through the Gate, do you think?"

As she had known, he couldn't resist correcting her. "More likely, the dragon soul ritual I improvised. I think they retained memories of their parent dragons only because the dragons became a part of them, giving them a focus to latch on to. All else, I think, was lost in the merging of their souls. I do not know for sure, for I have not spoken to any of the Dragon Slayers to confirm it, but I believe that if you asked them for any details from their childhoods – places they visited, people they met, how they learned the things which dragons could not have taught them – they would not be able to answer you."

Softly, she whispered, "And so you lost Natsu for a second time."

If he heard her, Zeref gave no sign of it. "Let that be a lesson not to experiment with ritual magic. When I think of what the side effects could have been, memory loss seems almost like a blessing." Then he looked directly at her, and asked, "What did Anna give you? If it's magic, be careful. She was just as reckless as me when it came to experimental magic, only without the precaution of being immortal."

Lucy's eyes widened. She thought of the drifting star that had settled upon her palm after Acnologia had fled from the grove, which she had long since hidden away; she had not thought Zeref had noticed. She bit her lip. "It's not magic. It's…"

"You don't have to tell me," he assured her, when she tailed off.

"No, I want to."

It wasn't that she didn't want him to know – only that she wasn't sure how he'd react to it. Yet after everything he had shared with her that night, her sudden nervousness seemed so childish.

She retrieved from her pocket a chain of fine silver, starlight woven into physical form. She would not have been surprised, if she counted them, to find that there were exactly eighty-eight links in the chain. Hanging from it, like a pendant, was a silver-gold acorn. It was too perfect to have been made by man; it caught the light of the heavens and released it so slowly that it seemed to glow all on its own.

Although she deliberately held it out so it dangled above Zeref's hand, he made no move to take it. "Is it…?" she asked, needlessly, because she already knew the answer, she just had to say something.

"Yes."

"You said it could absorb magic, right? Will it protect me?"

"Not in this form," he told her quietly. "It requires intent. I could enchant it to do so if you wished. However," he added, shifting his gaze back to her, inscrutable, "if your question is, will it protect you from me, I would point you towards the tree with its many, many branches and acorns, which was barely able to protect you and still died the moment it took my cursed magic into itself. That does not mean it would not be useful against the magic of others, though."

"Wouldn't enchanting it like that go against the reason it was planted in the first place?" she asked. Zeref said nothing, and she shifted, uncomfortable, feeling the weight of everything he had told her pull at the chain in her hand. "I have no idea what to do with this, Zeref. You should have it."

"If she wanted me to have it, she would have given it to me," he said neutrally.

"Well, I have no idea what she was thinking, giving it to me! Does she not realize genius is not hereditary?"

His eyes softened. "Don't overthink it, Lucy. She gave you a choice. That's all. And you certainly don't have to make it now."

After a moment, she slipped the chain over her head. In her hand, it had seemed so heavy, but it settled weightlessly around her neck: not a shackle but a memento; not a duty but a choice.

"I want to plant it," she decided. "I wish I could say I had some noble goal, like Gregor Heartfilia did, but really, I feel as though it's just become a family tradition by this point. Though… I'm going to wait until this is over and Acnologia is beaten. It will be our symbol of freedom and of gratitude; it will mark the end of the Dragon Wars and the beginning of the age that Anna hoped for."

It was the first time that night that she had seen him smile – really smile, sad and sincere and truly, truly beautiful. "And that, I think, is why she gave it to you and not me."

She found herself smiling too. "What did she give you? On that day when you finished building the Eclipse Gate, I mean. I don't think you ever told me."

Without a word, he lifted the pendant from around his neck and handed it to her.

The metal was warm to the touch. She remembered thinking the same thing the last time she had been given it for safekeeping; a reminder that for all his magic and legacy and immortality, his body was just as human as hers. No longer had she a need for any such reminder – not after tonight, never again.

The pad of her thumb ran once more across the pearly covering of the locket. That rich, creamy shade glimmered with a breath of rainbow when it caught the light, yet it was harder than any material she had ever come across before, gemstone and armour plating combined. She hadn't recognized it the first time, but now, her breath caught in her throat. "This is-?"

"Yes. Anna fashioned it from Igneel's heartscale. She asked me for it once I had completed my experiments; I assumed at the time that she wanted to conduct some research of her own."

Lucy brushed the scale with new reverence, humbled by the thought of the mighty dragon who had given it to him, and by the strength of their bond. When Igneel had vanished before Natsu's eyes, she had felt her best friend's pain as her own, but he'd had the other Dragon Slayers to mourn with. Even when he'd turned away from them and the guild, he'd had Happy. How must Zeref have felt, watching his first and oldest friend fade to nothing, without a single living creature with whom to share the pain of yet another loss?

It was with a start that she realized he was still speaking quietly. "Usually, when a dragon sheds a scale, it loses its colour and its hardness within a few weeks. Heartscales are different. Just as they never grow back, so too do they never lose their magic. After four hundred years, this one remains impervious to all magic, including my own, else I would have destroyed it long ago in the midst of my despair."

"And he gave it to you," Lucy breathed.

"That's just what Igneel was like. Once he had decided he was going to help with my research, it didn't matter what the cost was to him, or how little he thought of me at the time. It was the thing that would help the most, and therefore he did it without hesitation." A moment later, he continued, in a voice like midnight's touch, "Just like he adopted Natsu without stopping to think about what it would mean…"

"It's beautiful," she said, impulsively; not the pendant in her hand so much as the love it represented.

"Open it," said he.

Her gaze jolted up to his. "Are- are you sure?"

"It won't tell you anything you don't already know."

He was back to being impassive. Instead, she was the one whose heart fluttered with butterfly wings as she regarded the pendant in her hand. A tingle ran over her thumb as she flicked open the miniature catch.

As she had expected, inside the pendant lay an image.

The first thing that struck her was the level of detail. No brush or pencil had produced it. Nothing but magic could have captured such a small image so perfectly. Tilting it slightly, she could catch a glimpse of the space-bending magic that let it exist within a locket far smaller than itself – a spell of Anna's own invention, she had no doubt.

Igneel was in the very centre of the scene. With his head raised proudly and his wings half-flared, like a crimson crown, he was as majestic as any mortal creature could be. Even the eleven-year-old Natsu standing atop his head, fist raised towards the sky, only added to the dragon's fearsome might. The victorious grin on Natsu's face was so achingly familiar. In the background, smoke was rising from a half-ruined castle, and Lucy realized that this must have been the day they travelled to the capital to confront King Carlos.

The other dragons flanked him, two on each side, but that orderly arrangement had proven no match for the chaos of their family. On the far left, Gajeel was shouting at a calm-as-ever Metalicana, who had no doubt deliberately said something to set him off right before the photograph was taken. From a frustrated Grandine's back, Wendy was reaching over to help Sting, who was hanging upside-down with his trouser leg caught on Weisslogia's fang; he had no doubt lost his balance trying to mimic Natsu, and Weisslogia's attempt to catch him before he hit the ground hadn't gone as intended. Skiadrum and Rogue looked almost normal – or, rather, they would have done, if they weren't trying so hard to look as if they didn't know any of the dragons they happened to be standing beside.

Lucy had seen the dragons only once, after the battle with Tartaros. They had been as solemn and as wise as she imagined from the old legends… but they had been ghosts. Echoes. Afterimages. A lingering memory of their duty.

The dragons she saw in that one frozen moment – dragons who argued and joked and made mistakes; who loved and were proud to love – they weren't anything like the noble sages of legend, and yet they were so much more real.

In front of them stood two people.

Even without ever having seen her, Lucy identified Anna at once. The physical similarities between her and her ancestor were striking – too striking for the number of generations between them, and she suspected that the magic bound to their bloodline was responsible for that. Anna was confident, she was glorious, and her grin was a challenge for all the world to try, just try, to take her happiness from her.

She had her arm around Zeref's shoulders.

He looked exactly the same as he did now, four centuries on, but at the same time, he didn't.

It wasn't the slightly uncertain way in which he was looking at the camera, enough to assure Lucy that this whole affair had not been his idea. It wasn't the way he seemed quite happy with Anna being so close, so physical, when Lucy was used to him pulling away from everyone.

It was the hope in his eyes. Like he was realizing for the first time that it was okay to be loved. That he had found his family again.

In all the time she'd known him, she had never, ever seen him look hopeful.

Because just as this had been the first time he had allowed himself to believe that he wasn't alone, it would also be the last.

It won't tell you anything you don't already know, Zeref had said, but he was wrong. She hadn't truly understood, until that moment, what losing them had done to him.

"I cannot begin to comprehend what you have lost," she whispered, setting the pendant back upon his palm.

He snapped it shut without looking at it. "Don't pity me, Lucy. Everything I have lost, I lost as a result of my own actions."

"I don't believe for a second that you're stupid enough to believe that," she told him levelly.

And he was the one who looked away, control fracturing again, apathy crumbling, dark eyes reflecting back a constellation of tears.

"I don't change, Lucy," he whispered miserably. "It doesn't matter what I do, or how hard I try. In four hundred years, I haven't changed one bit."

"That's not true at all," she argued. "You are nothing like the man Anna met. He didn't know who he was – perhaps he wasn't anyone at all! But you know who you are. You have done for as long as I've known you."

"I know who I am being," he murmured. "I am not sure it is who I am."

"Meeting Anna changed you," Lucy insisted. "I know-"

"Yes, Anna changed me," he overrode her sharply. "She found me, and she saved me, and she taught me how to live. And as soon as she died, I went straight back to how I had been before. I was only fooling myself. I hadn't really changed; I can't. Every time I try something new, the curse kicks back twice as hard. I was relying on her to tell me what was right, and when I lost her, all the progress I thought I had made was lost with her."

"No," Lucy said. "If that were true, you would not have mourned her, nor the dragons you loved. You wouldn't have tried to tear the world apart for her… nor refused to commit such an act ever again. You wouldn't have set the demons free decades after her death if her life and her ideals had ceased to affect you. You wouldn't have come to me, the last of Anna's line, when you began your quest to reform Fairy Tail."

And then, gentler, she asked, "Zeref, why did you tell me all of this?"

"You had a right to know," he responded shortly, as if there was obviously no more to it than that.

"Maybe, but so did my mother, and every Celestial Spirit mage before her. And that's nothing compared to Natsu's right, or that of the other Dragon Slayers, and you've not told them yet. I didn't demand that you tell me about Anna. I didn't need to know. You could have answered my questions about Natsu in thirty seconds, if you had wanted to. But after four hundred years of silence, you chose to tell me, because you are not the person you used to be."

"Because of you!" he burst out. "Because meeting you changed me too! And when you're also gone, none of it will matter!"

"You have, yourself, everything you could possibly need," Lucy murmured.

He recognized Anna's words; that was why his cry became bitter. "She was wrong! She told me to try, and I didn't! She told me to watch over her descendants, to protect the children we had both cared for, and not only did I refuse, but I didn't feel the slightest shred of guilt over it!"

"Until now," she pointed out.

He glanced away and said nothing.

She continued, "What makes you think it's too late to start caring now?"

"What makes you think it would matter if I did?" he retorted.

"In the grand scheme of things? I have no reason to believe it would matter at all. But to you, I think it would matter a great deal. Just as you chose to come to me on the day this quest began, even though you knew being reminded of Anna would hurt, accepting that you can change will mean accepting that you chose not to for a very long time. But, I know you'll pull through. You're stronger than this. Everything you have told me tonight is proof of that."

"I don't think I am."

"Only because you can't see what Anna and I can."

"Lucy…" Hopeless, because for so long, hope had been nothing but pain for him.

"You are conflicted and you are contradictory, but beneath all that, you're still you. The curse hides who you are because it knows it can't destroy you. It makes you doubt yourself too much to try to fight it, because it wouldn't be able to win if you did. You are more than what it makes you, Zeref. That's what Anna was trying to tell you."

Tears welled up in his eyes. "I miss her so much."

"I know." She knew he'd never been able to admit it before. She knew how long he'd been unable to cry for her. She knew how much courage it had taken for him to come here tonight. And as much as she wished she could shelter him from the pain of it, she knew, as Anna had done, how important it was for him to feel it, to face it, to accept loss and love and life in all its heart-breaking beauty.

But that didn't mean he had to do so on his own.

On impulse, she reached out to him. He didn't like being touched – he didn't like anyone getting too close – but she offered anyway, because he was human, and so was she. She murmured, "Please. Let me be with you."

His resolve broke. He had been as dispassionate as he needed to be throughout the longest of nights, but now that the barriers had been torn away, four hundred years of grief came pouring out at once. He crawled into her arms, and she held him there and let him cry for as long as he needed.

Even as the stars relinquished their hold on the grove, and the ever-distant sky began to brighten, still she held him tightly, so that even as he wept for everything he had lost, he would not forget that which he still had.

A/N: Thank you all for your support on the previous chapter! As you can see, the past arc has reached its end, and we're back in the present. The next arc is very much going to focus on Zeref and Lucy, and I hope that you enjoy it! ~CS