Homeward Hours

By CrimsonStarbird

Chapter Twenty-Six – Not Yet Lost

Bring her back.

It was both a plea and an order, a request and a dare.

Slowly, Zeref got to his feet. Still, silent, Natsu watched him with eyes that burned steadily, nothing more he needed to say. Natsu never wavered, and this unforeseen tragedy hadn't changed that; he stared Zeref down with a certainty that his cursed and troubled brother had never known.

And yet Zeref didn't waver either, as he looked him in the eye and answered, "No."

"Why not?" Natsu shot back at once. "You obviously know how. You brought me back. And Lucy doesn't care that I'm technically a demon; she's not gonna mind being one at all! So what if it's what cursed you the first time? You're already cursed! You've got nothing to lose!"

"Natsu-"

"And if you're scared," Natsu cut in, pre-empting the response, "that's fine, I'll do it. You just have to tell me how. I don't care about some pathetic curse! If you can cope with it, so can I! I'll still be able to see her and speak to her, even if it's just from behind the Fairy Sphere!"

"Natsu," Zeref said tiredly. "Stop it. Please."

Natsu did stop, for a moment.

Then he exploded.

"So, you're the only person who never has to lose anyone, is that right? I bet you love it, don't you? Playing god, getting to decide who lives and who dies, laughing at us mere mortals from within the home we made for you!"

Something shifted in Zeref's eyes, though he did not speak.

"You know, I didn't think you'd do it for me," Natsu spat. "You've made it very clear how you feel about me. But I thought you'd do it for her. I thought you loved her, I really did. I should have known you weren't capable of feeling something like that."

Zeref's fist smashed into the barrier with enough force to break every bone in his hand. "Of course I loved her!" he bellowed. "She did more for me than you could possibly imagine! She was the one who believed in me, who reached out to me; the only person I met in four hundred years who not only tried to save me, but succeeded! She was more of a family to me than you will ever be!"

Natsu took a step back, not denying it, but not understanding it either. "Then why won't you-?"

"She's gone, Natsu," Zeref told him bluntly. "The dead don't come back."

"You brought me back."

A bitter smile twisted its way across his face. "I didn't, though, did I?"

"Sure you did," came the baffled response. "I'm right here."

"You are, yes. But you are not my Natsu."

"But you've always said I'm-"

"How can you be?" Zeref asked rhetorically. "You don't remember our parents, or the house where we grew up. You don't remember the stories of our era, or the magic I taught you when you were still learning to walk. You don't remember me. All the things we did together, the things that made us family – to you, they never happened. My Natsu, my little brother, who believed in me when no one else did… he died four hundred years ago, and all his memories and experiences died with him. He never came back."

Whenever he'd spoken of it before, Zeref had been met with anger and denial, but there was no place for that here. In the absence of his go-to emotions, unease swam across Natsu's face.

"And if I bring back Lucy," Zeref continued, merciless, "she won't be your Lucy. She'll be a version of Lucy, an imposter in her body, knowing nothing of your Lucy's past. She won't have run away from home to join Fairy Tail. She won't have spent all those years fighting against impossible odds at your side. She won't have said yes when you asked her to marry you; she won't have raised two incredible daughters with you. She won't even know you, Natsu."

"So- so what?" Natsu blustered. "I don't love her because of all that crap we happened to go through together. I love her because of who she is – who she was, and who she will always be! We can start over and make new memories! I don't care if she remembers me or not; I will always love her!"

"I know you will, Natsu," Zeref whispered, and there was so much heartbreak in those words. "But just because she loved you once doesn't mean she'll do so again."

"Luce will-" he tried to retort, but Zeref simply shook his head.

"Maybe she'll love you," he continued softly. "Maybe she'll give you the chance to rebuild what you had. Or maybe, surrounded by people who constantly expect her to be someone she's not, she'll want nothing more than to leave and find a new family – one that loves her for who she is, not who you want her to be."

Natsu automatically opened his mouth to protest, but the words didn't come.

In that one moment, he understood more about his brother than he had ever wanted to.

"It is the worst torment you can possibly inflict upon yourself, Natsu," Zeref told him gently. "You have suffered enough. Let her go."

After a moment, Natsu raised his gaze to meet Zeref's.

"You could have brought him back, though," he challenged. "Your Natsu." He spat out the word. "At the end of the Alvarez War, you beat me, and you had the portal to the past open right in front of you. All these years, everyone has believed that I stopped you from passing through it, thereby saving the present. But I didn't. You chose not to go through it. You could have gone to that world where your brother still existed, but you turned it down. Why?"

Zeref closed his eyes. Ultear had asked him the same question, when they'd met in that place between space and time, and he'd refused to answer her. He wouldn't refuse his brother. "I realized that it didn't matter whether I stayed in the present or returned to the past. I couldn't have what I wanted either way."

"I thought you wanted your Natsu back again."

"I did," Zeref agreed simply. "But then I met you."

A bark of startled laughter escaped Natsu. "What?"

"I fought you, and you were incredible. At long last, I could see with my own eyes everything that you had achieved. Your friends fought so valiantly by your side. Mages all over the kingdom put their trust in you to save them. People were willing to die for you, and you for them. You were their hope, their courage. You, who had been ripped away from Igneel and flung four hundred years into the future entirely alone – and still you had become a wildfire blazing your own path to the future, bringing destruction and rejuvenation in equal measure. I thought that I would have been so proud, had my Natsu grown up to be like you."

Natsu shuffled uncomfortably from foot to foot. "Yeah, well, maybe he would have done."

"Would he?" Zeref echoed thoughtfully. "Without having met the people you met, or faced the hardships you faced? Because with me at his side, with my memories of the future and experience with magic, there would have been no hardships. I would have protected him, I would have sheltered him; I had given up so much for him to live that I wouldn't have taken any risks."

So deep and dark were his eyes that even the flames burning in Natsu's were swallowed by them. "And I would have doubted everything I did with him. Were my actions correctly pushing him down the path that would lead him to become you? Why wasn't he as powerful, as brave, as you? Why wasn't he known across the kingdom yet; why didn't he have so many great friends?" He shook his head. "I would have crushed him beneath the weight of my expectations. How could he live up to that? How could anyone? I would have destroyed him, and myself. I would have thrown away the pasts and futures of everyone in this world, and for what?"

Quietly, Natsu reminded him, "You wouldn't have been cursed."

"Yes. I would have been mortal. And I have no doubt it wouldn't have been long before I took advantage of that fact. Like I said, I couldn't have got what I truly wanted either way."

Sudden, sharp, Natsu glanced away. "I'm sorry that I'm not him."

"Don't be," Zeref said, surprised by how much he meant it. "It's all in the past." After a moment, he added, "It's taken a very long time, but I've been happy here these last few years, Natsu. I have finally learnt how to stop chasing ghosts and move on. I don't want to see you make the same mistakes as me."

"…Yeah," he murmured. "Okay. Yeah. I get it."

And then, a whisper: "Thanks."

As soon as Natsu left, Zeref tried to return to the safety of his house, but he didn't quite make it to his front door before he broke apart.

He stumbled; he fell. His skeleton was being pulled out through the soles of his feet, and he tumbled bonelessly to the ground. Sobs clawed their way out of his throat and took to the air. He curled up into a ball as they beat at him with devilish wings and tails.

He'd been so strong when Natsu was here.

Alone, it was far too much to bear.

But he didn't have to be alone, did he? If Natsu could come to him for help, then surely he could…?

He fumbled for the lacrima in his pocket. His first thought was to call Levy, but she'd been Lucy's best friend; she was undoubtedly struggling as much as he and Natsu were. That was okay, there were others, and he urged his lacrima to reach out to someone whose relationship with Lucy had been purely professional, but who might, just might…

Warrod answered at once. "Zeref?"

He sounded so worried. For him.

And yet the words just wouldn't come. Shaking, he clutched the lacrima like a lifeline, unable to say what he needed to say – help me, please, I can't do this on my own. Not even to Lucy had he ever said those words, though he'd never had to, because she'd always just known, and now she was gone.

"Do you want me to come over?" Warrod asked, with surprising softness.

He managed to choke out an affirmative.

"Okay. Hold on just a little longer. I'll be right there."

Strangely, Zeref thought he could hold on a little longer.

When they'd first met, him and Warrod, one had already been ancient and the other had been little more than a child. In the hundred years since, the latter had grown beyond comprehension, while the former had remained, at least in part, perpetually the age of his physical body: never quite an adult, understanding so much about some things and so little about others; so much about other people and so little about himself.

And as for Warrod, he knew when to be the prankster that surprised people meeting him for the first time, and he knew when to be the sincere mentor that surprised people who knew him well. He had acknowledged long ago that choosing to merge with his magic would mean outliving everyone he knew. He'd learnt how to accept death and feel grateful for life, which in four hundred years of immortality, Zeref had never managed to do.

And there they sat, on opposite sides of the Fairy Sphere, not talking, but not needing to talk in order to understand each other, to find comfort, to help.

The funeral was always going to be a difficult affair.

Given that the longest Zeref had managed to go without losing control of his curse since Lucy's death was about twenty minutes, him being able to attend was out of the question, and they all knew it. They also knew that, without that defined moment of grief and solidarity, it would only make it more difficult for an immortal already struggling with the idea of mortality to find closure.

They had toyed with the idea of holding a memorial in the forest clearing, where Zeref could watch and listen, but he had shot them down.

He told them to get on with what they had to do, and stop trying to work everything around him.

He told them that their concern for him was becoming an annoyance.

He told them that they were wasting their time; her husband and her daughters needed their support more than he did, a pathetic immortal who couldn't cope with loss like a normal human being.

The funeral was always going to be a difficult affair, not least because their expectations and their overthinking had all but ensured that it would be so.

Zeref was prepared for that.

What he wasn't prepared for was Natsu turning up at his house just before the funeral was supposed to start, Felicity and Emilia in tow.

Okay, fine. Maybe the guild had advised Natsu to drop by on the way, a small token to show they were thinking of him, in the hopes of mitigating his inevitable crash. Or maybe Natsu wanted him to supervise the girls. They were a bit young to be attending a funeral, though Zeref thought the guild had had this conversation several days earlier and agreed they could go if they wanted to.

Whatever the reason, Zeref wasn't in the mood to deal with him, and stayed stubbornly within his house. Today of all days, he just wanted to be left alone.

Natsu didn't leave him alone, though. Casual as anything, he started unloading boxes onto the table in the covered outdoor area of the guest house, while his daughters gathered round eagerly. Not seeming to care that he was trespassing, he sat down with them on their side of the Fairy Sphere, and… well, from inside his house, Zeref wasn't entirely sure what they were doing, but it looked a lot like they were playing a board game.

One minute, two minutes, five minutes – and not only did they show no signs of leaving, but all three of them looked like they were settling in for the long haul.

Zeref was not dealing with this today.

He struggled to deal with Natsu on the best of days, and today, he shouldn't even have to.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" he all but snarled as he stormed across the lawn towards them.

"Beta-testing Max's latest board game, Chaos Mage Dominion," came Natsu's calm response. "Do you want to join in? The girls have bagsied the Warlock and the Dragon Knight characters, but the Hag is still available. Perfect for you-"

"What – about – the – funeral?" Zeref hissed.

"What about the funeral?" Natsu asked.

"Has it been postponed?"

"If it has, no one's told me," Natsu shrugged.

"Then why the-"

A raised hand stopped him in his tracks. "That's not you about to start yelling in front of the girls, is it, Uncle Zeref?" Natsu's voice was light, but his eyes flashed, and danger danced along the word.

With a glance at them – Emilia's gaze was bright with intrigue, but Felicity looked apprehensive – Zeref managed to rein in his fury enough to jerk his head towards the guest house itself, grinding out the single word, "In."

Natsu drew out the roll of his eyes for as long as he possibly could, but followed Zeref inside from his own side of the barrier. As soon as Natsu had closed the door behind him, Zeref snarled again: "Why aren't you at Lucy's funeral?"

Natsu shrugged again. "I've never really seen the point in funerals."

"No," Zeref hissed, in barely constrained rage. "That's my line – the line of an immortal who is above death; who has never loved anyone enough in four hundred years to want to celebrate their life or mourn their passing. You, who have known nothing but love from the moment you were born – you do not get to say that to me!"

"It ain't about immortality, or whatever." Natsu folded his arms, looking as though he was enjoying the reversal of their usual roles immensely, being cool and steady while his older brother fumed. "I just don't see the point in standing around a hole in the ground and watching them shove a box in it. Especially when there's rain forecast."

"The point, Natsu, is to say goodbye to your wife!"

"That is not my wife!" A crack in the words, there and then gone. There was wildness beneath them, oh yes, but sheer pride melted and re-fused the bedrock of his control, the stubbornness that would lend him all the power in the world if it meant he could get one up on Zeref. "That… lifeless… thing they are burying isn't her. Lucy is right here." He touched the Fairy Sphere shimmering as always between the two of them, letting this entire conversation happen. "And she's here." He nodded his head towards the window, where the children were patiently setting up the game while they waited for the adults to grow up. "And she's here." With a brief, almost dismissive flick of his hand, he indicated between himself and Zeref. "So, y'know, I think I'm in the right place to celebrate her life after all."

"That's irrelevant, and you know it," Zeref spat. "It's not supposed to be logical; it's a custom. Society expects it of you."

Natsu flashed his Fairy Tail mark proudly. "Screw society."

"Are you a complete idiot? What do you imagine people will think if Lucy's own husband doesn't turn up to her funeral?"

"Why should I care what other people think?"

"Surely you care about what Lucy would think!"

A snort of sheer disbelief. "Zeref, if you think Lucy would want me to be anywhere other than here right now, you never knew her at all."

"Goddammit, Natsu!" Zeref howled. "Don't you dare not go to Lucy's funeral because of me! I am not going to fall apart just because I've been left alone for one afternoon!"

"WELL, I MIGHT!" Natsu howled back.

Zeref took a startled step backwards.

This time, seeing that Zeref finally understood, Natsu's wild laugh escaped his best attempts at control. "I can't do this!" he exclaimed, almost maniacal in his glee. "I can't stand there and pretend to be sad or grateful or whatever the hell society expects of me! I depended on Luce for everything! She'd know what to say to make it hurt a little less. She'd know how to inspire me. But now? I don't even know where to start. Everyone expects me to be strong like usual, for the girls, for the guild, and I just don't know how!"

"Natsu-" Zeref tried, concern stealing all his earlier rage from the word, but once Natsu had started, he couldn't stop.

"They don't get it," he spat. "All of them, with their wives and their husbands and their still-intact dreams. I was so happy, and now, all of a sudden, that's it. It's over. And now I have to sit and watch as all my friends with their happily ever afters tell me they understand and they're here for me and that things will get better – and I just want to scream!"

He almost did so, on that word, but laughed instead, finding something hysterical about the tears in his own eyes.

"I can't stand it," Natsu breathed, in a whisper that was a hundred times more terrifying than his shout. "I just want my pain to be heard. But I can't even do that, because it's just me and the girls now, and they're old enough to understand the pain but too young to understand what it's doing to me."

It might have been a laugh, it might have been a sob; the human body had no way of expressing a fatal amount of grief. "Everyone's trying so hard to help, and yet I've never felt so alone. I don't know how I can do this. Not even for one afternoon more."

And then, the last whisper of an ailing heart: "I need you, Zeref."

Softly, so very softly, Zeref pressed his palm to the inside of the Fairy Sphere. "I am here, Natsu," he promised. "I am here."

It was completely illogical, Zeref thought, how things that were impossible to do for oneself became suddenly possible when doing them for others.

Every time he saw Natsu's gaze drift with devastating loneliness into the middle distance, it seemed to ground him a little bit more. Whenever he caught one of them on the verge of breaking down, it calmed him, steadied him, let him – who had never got a handle on his own emotions in four hundred years – be the stability Natsu and the girls needed right now.

Had he been alone, the afternoon of the funeral would have been a blur of pain and screaming. Had they stayed with him out of pity, it would have been a day of fury followed by an ever-widening rift of resentment. But they were here because they needed him, and that made all the difference.

It wasn't as if the darkness had gone away. He could feel it in the back of his mind, lurking, swaying, ready to rush in like the tide the moment he was alone. Nevertheless, while they moved their characters around the board and argued over ambiguities in the draft rules and commented on the guild in-jokes written into the game, it could gain no traction.

Maybe he was stronger than he'd thought.

Or maybe he'd never really tried before. With the Fairy Sphere and his immortality and his isolation to rely on, he'd never needed to rein in his moods. Lucy, who had been so much stronger and so much kinder than any of them, had always adapted to him, fighting her way through the cursed maelstrom of his being to reach him, not even asking him to meet her halfway.

She was no longer here.

He couldn't rely on her any more, just like Natsu couldn't.

But maybe Natsu could rely on him, just a little.

They played games and talked about pointless things and watched films until it was late. Zeref thought they'd go home – was braced, mentally, for the dark wave straining against the tidal barriers in his mind – but instead, Natsu put the girls to bed in the guest rooms of the shared living space, and then slumped back across the sofa, fixing Zeref with a baleful look. "You got any booze stashed away in that house of yours?"

Carefully, Zeref said, "I don't think that's a good idea, Natsu."

Natsu snorted, a little of the dragon's wildness resurfacing once more. "You do realize that if you don't let me drink here, I'm just gonna go and drink myself into oblivion at my own house, right?"

"Yes, and if I could stop you from doing that too, I would," Zeref told him. Then, considering, he added, "Well, maybe I can stop you."

Only on the day of the funeral would Natsu take those words with apathy rather than instant animosity. If anything, he seemed morbidly curious as Zeref approached the near-invisible Fairy Sphere between them.

Zeref pressed his palm flat against the barrier and closed his eyes. The guild's power seeped into him at once. Today, he knew it would not deny him. When he stepped back and raised his hand, his eyes were momentarily liquid gold – and then a second Fairy Sphere shimmered into existence. Unlike the original, which enclosed his house and half of the guest house, this one was centred entirely on the guest house, imprisoning it as he himself had been imprisoned. Zeref stood in the area of overlap between the two domes, robes ruffled by a resonance that was well within expected parameters.

"Nice trick," Natsu commented. "Not gonna work, though. You seem to have forgotten that, as a member of Fairy Tail, I can walk through the barrier any time I like."

"Not this one," Zeref returned coolly. "This is the new version Levy and the others rushed through development after the incident with the escaped prisoner. In order to ensure it can still protect against my magic, it removes the exemption built into the original for members of Fairy Tail. It simply blocks all magic – except for another version of itself, it seems – and that includes the mages themselves."

Softer, he added, "If not for that, I would not have been able to speak to anyone today, Natsu."

"So, you're just gonna keep me here, in the same prison as you?"

"Are you going to self-destruct if I let you leave?"

"Probably," Natsu shrugged.

"Then yes, I am."

To his astonishment, Natsu just nodded. "Why do you care?"

"I'm sorry?" It wasn't the question that threw Zeref as much as the lack of hostility in it.

"I always figured you were in denial, y'know?" Natsu said thoughtfully. "Like you couldn't accept the fact that I wasn't your Natsu, and kept hoping that one day I'd remember you, or want you. But that's not true, is it? You've always known that would never happen. You knew it when you couldn't bring yourself to kill me in the guildhall. You knew it when you turned down the chance to die with Mavis, knowing that your death would also cause mine."

Zeref glanced up in surprise – he hadn't realized Lucy had shared that with Natsu, or that he would ever admit to it even if she had – but Natsu didn't seem to notice.

"So," Natsu resumed, "if you know that there isn't and never will be anything between us, why do you still care?"

"Would you rather I didn't?"

Natsu's eyes narrowed, a flash of the firelight burning low. "You already know the answer to that. Stop deflecting."

"It's better to care than not to care," Zeref murmured. "It's better to love unrequited than not to love at all." He stared at his hands, pale and twisting and always unscarred. "I… am not a good person. I can't, I won't, defend the things I have done over the last four hundred years. But there were times, when I thought there was no point even trying to be a better person after all this, that I looked back at everything and thought that, if it was love that set me on this dark path, perhaps I wasn't the worst person I could possibly be. If I could make one impulsive, irrational decision at the end of everything to ensure that you – who was not and would never be my brother, but who I so dearly wished was – got to live on… then maybe I wasn't yet lost."

Natsu said nothing.

The world they shared was still.

Zeref said, quietly, "If I hadn't made the decision to care about your life, none of this would have happened. Not meeting Lucy, or becoming part of the guild, or even spending an afternoon playing board games with you and the girls while we all tried our hardest not to cry. I don't care if it's rational or not. How can it be wrong to care about you, when it is the only thing that has ever made me feel human?"

"I see," Natsu stated, his expression inscrutable. "So, it's mostly selfish, then?"

"I suppose it is."

"Huh. That actually makes me feel a lot better."

"…It does?"

"Sure it does. If you're getting something out of it, I don't have to feel bad for not reciprocating," Natsu laughed. "Though, I guess I was wrong earlier, wasn't I?"

"What about?"

"It simply isn't true that there's nothing between us. My daughters see you as family. My guild sees you as a mentor. My friends, for reasons that are entirely beyond me, seem to like you. Hell, we're only doing this at all because neither of us can face up to Lucy being gone on our own. Disentangling our lives at this point would be impossible. Yeah, I'm not your Natsu, the one who remembers you and loves you. But we're stuck with each other, so I guess we might as well make the most of it."

As Zeref stared, unable to speak, Natsu leaned back entirely unfazed and waved his hand. "So, about that booze, yeah?"

Zeref frowned at him.

"I want to talk about her," Natsu explained, still flippant, but also not flippant at all, like neither of them had been since this conversation had begun. "I need to talk about her. But I don't think I can do it sober, not the first time."

"…Alright," Zeref surrendered, getting to his feet. "But I'm regulating how much you drink, and if you start displaying self-destructive behaviour, I'm calling Erza to come and deal with you."

"Yeah, yeah."

Zeref knew, as he walked back to his house to see what Warrod had left from one of his prior visits, that he probably shouldn't have been facilitating this. At the same time, however, it would be painfully hypocritical of him not to. He was the master of unhealthy coping mechanisms: from constructing a whole empire as his plaything when he needed a distraction to taking his anger out on another country; from rewriting the laws of the universe in denial of his brother's death to trying to undo the past four hundred years of history all because he couldn't face the consequences of his own choices.

But then there had been Lucy, and Makarov, and Warrod, and the guild. They had shown him that he needed help and taught him how to ask for it… and, somewhere along the way, perhaps he had come to notice when someone else needed help, too.

There was a fine line between coping and self-destruction. One misstep could be the difference between the road that led forward and the one that went nowhere. After all the time he'd spent deep on the wrong side of that divide, Zeref knew it intimately.

He'd walk it with Natsu tonight. Keep him on the right side.

Maybe somewhere along the way, they'd figure out where they were going, but for now, it was enough just to walk.