The Scars That Make You Whole

By CrimsonStarbird

Stellar Constellations Rise, Part 1

-Here We Are, Here We Go-

The following morning, all the members of Lamia Scale and Fairy Tail in Marguerite who weren't confined to their beds by crippling hangovers met outside the ruined guildhall to see Lucy off.

It was a nice gesture, even if in practice it only resulted in a farewell party of six: the four who were too young to drink (Wendy, Carla, Sherria and Romeo) and the two who were still drinking (Cana, and a now-bankrupt Macao). The rest of Lamia Scale, despite having anointed themselves The Party Guild in Fairy Tail's absence, didn't yet have Fairy Tail's experience in dealing with the aftermath. Lyon heroically staggered in halfway through the farewells, hugged Lucy briefly, and then found a corner to huddle in. She appreciated the thought, even if just looking at him was making her feel queasy.

After the obligatory exchange of reminders concerning Fairy Tail's First of September reunion, the delegation of mages from both guilds smiled and waved until Lucy was out of sight.

Then their hands fell to their sides. Their smiles slowly faded. Macao and Cana made their excuses and retreated to their respective houses, and Romeo dashed off to the summer camp he was helping at, leaving only the Lamia Scale mages standing amongst the ruins.

Silence stretched, as dead as their guildhall, and, perhaps, their guild.

"What do we do now?" Lyon whispered bleakly. Every word he had spoken so far that morning had been bleak, but those five carried a pain far more powerful than any hangover; one against which aspirin and bed rest would prove ineffectual weapons.

It was easy, in the euphoria of victory, to forget what the cost had been. The battles lost before the war had been won came with their own consequences.

Wendy knew this better than most. Ten months ago, Fairy Tail had stopped Face and destroyed Tartaros and returned triumphant to a home that stood no longer. The guildhall had been the first casualty of the war; the guild itself had been the last. They had won, they had celebrated, and they had woken up the next morning to their reward: the disbanding of the very guild they had just given everything to protect.

It was a new experience for Lamia Scale. That was why Sherria had been staring wordlessly at the wreckage for several minutes; why not even mature and responsible Lyon had any idea what to do or say to make things better.

It was not a new experience for Wendy and Carla. And it was because they had been through worse that they could see the truth their friends could not: the destruction of the guildhall was symbolic, but the guild still existed, and that meant they got to choose how that symbol would be interpreted.

"No need to worry," Wendy spoke up courageously. "This happens about once a year at Fairy Tail. I know what to do. Carla?"

The Exceed gave her a determined nod, and they hurried away, leaving Sherria wondering what on earth was going on and Lyon wondering why on earth he'd got out of bed. Wendy soon returned – or, at least, they assumed it was Wendy. Either that or the large corkboard that had previously been hanging on the wall of Wendy and Sherria's apartment had suddenly grown legs and borrowed a pair of Wendy's shoes during its escape.

"Here we go!" announced Wendy's voice, and she set the corkboard down, resting up against what remained of the guildhall's outer wall. To this, she pinned a single sheet of paper, upon which she scrawled in oversized letters: LAMIA SCALE, OPEN FOR BUSINESS.

"We do exactly what we did before," she smiled. "We keep taking jobs, and we save up money to rebuild the guildhall. It's only a building we've lost. Everything important is still with us."

"Yeah," Sherria seconded. "And for our first job…" She took another sheet of paper from Wendy, scribbled on it, and pinned it up beneath Wendy's sign. Help Required, it read, to rebuild the guildhall in time for Wendy and Carla's leaving do. Where there would normally have been a reward, Sherria had drawn a heart.

Carla gave a pointed cough. "Or, on a more practical note…" Still in her cat form, she scurried into the ruins of the guildhall – after Zeref and Lucy had unintentionally collapsed the entrance, Carla was the only one who could still get in and out – and returned with a bundle of scrunched-up papers, which she began pinning up next to Sherria's note. "Here are all the job requests that were on our old noticeboard. We can make a start on them right away. If nothing else, it will show the town that we're serious about…"

Her voice faded to nothing.

"Carla?" Wendy wondered.

"This job," the Exceed frowned. "I don't recall seeing it in the guild yesterday."

She passed it up to Wendy, whose initial response – there's no way you could remember every request posted on the board – died on her tongue. Carla was right. No one would forget seeing a job with the words 'EMERGENCY REQUEST' written at the top.

Formal Emergency Requests were rare, and no one ever sent one when they needed extra help in their magical restaurant. The penalties for crying wolf were unforgiving.

Urgent Military Assistance Required in Alchemilla Town, said the request, and nothing more.

"It must have come in last night, during the parade," Sherria reasoned. "No one was here to process it, and then, with the attack on the town…"

"It says it's urgent," Wendy said. "Should we go? Now?"

"I don't know. Emergency Requests are usually only live for a couple of hours. If it did come in last night, it has probably been completed or withdrawn already."

There was an edge of steel to Wendy's voice, one made all the more powerful by its rarity. "Is there a way of checking that? If not, Carla and I are flying to Alchemilla Town right now."

"I guess we could call the Magic Council and ask them to check their records, but all our communication lacrima were in the guildhall when it was destroyed…"

A raspy voice interrupted; it took longer than it should have done for anyone to recognize it as hungover-Lyon's. "The Master has one at her house."

"Right!" Sherria immediately took the request and dashed off down the street.

In her wake, with Lyon still huddled half-dead in the corner, despair had returned to the scene of the ruined guildhall – but it wasn't quite the same as before. Sherria and Lyon's despair had been tied to the fate of their guild, and that was easily assuaged; if Fairy Tail could survive the destruction of their guildhall, so could Lamia Scale.

For Wendy, who had known this all along, her concern had a slightly different focus: they still didn't have a satisfactory answer as to why Lamia Scale had been attacked last night.

Upon interrogation, they had found out that the Beast Master and his minions belonged to a guild called Orochi's Fin, which had been Lamia Scale's rival for many years. That had been a good enough explanation for the unprovoked attack as far as anyone in Lamia Scale was concerned, but Wendy hadn't needed Carla's poorly hidden eye-roll to stir her own doubts.

Legal guilds didn't go Dark for no reason. Even Phantom Lord's attack on Fairy Tail had been prompted by a job request from Lucy's father. Old animosities may have fanned the flames – not to mention thrown on a steady supply of dry wood, and doused the whole thing in gasoline for good measure – but they hadn't tossed the spark in the first place.

Guilds who were already Dark were another matter, naturally, but even they had concrete motives. Grimoire Heart had attacked Fairy Tail because Zeref happened to be hiding on their holy land; Tartaros had made their move because their plan had finally come to fruition, and Fairy Tail was standing in the way. Neither had declared war simply because they woke up one morning and decided they couldn't co-exist with Fairy Tail any more.

Yet that was apparently what Orochi's Fin, before this day a Council-sanctioned legal guild, had done to Lamia Scale.

Wendy didn't like it one bit.

"Wendy!" Sherria was back, waving the rogue request over her head. "The Council says that the Emergency Request was retracted last night, so I assume it's all been sorted. Let's pick a real job and show the world that Lamia Scale means business."

Carla raised her paw. "I suggest that our first job be to take Lyon back to his house before he passes out in the middle of the street."

"Yeah, he's not really helping our image as a resilient and dependable guild, is he? Come on, Wendy – we have work to do!"

Lucy was in a good mood.

For the first time since her quest had begun, things were going right.

She had renewed her conviction during the battle for Marguerite Town, and this time, she had a concrete plan to back it up. She had the guarantees of every former member she had met that they would be at the old guildhall on the First of September for the reunion. Furthermore, it had been easy for her, as one of the heroes who had saved Marguerite, to hitch a ride on one of the many wagons heading home after the Day of Thanksgiving celebrations, and this one was going almost all the way to their next destination.

Best of all, Zeref wasn't being insufferable.

They had reached something of an understanding last night, no less powerful for being unspoken. She wasn't only here because of him any more. She would continue this quest with or without him, and that took away some of his leverage.

Most importantly, she had surprised him. She had done something he hadn't expected – and hadn't been able to understand. The fact that it was insignificant next to the power at his fingertips didn't matter. If he couldn't predict her, he couldn't control her; if he tried to push her too much, she would simply go off-script again.

Zeref would have to get used to not getting everything his way. Their partnership felt a lot more even now than it had this time yesterday.

It was different to travelling with Team Natsu too, and not necessarily in a bad way. She and Zeref had the back of the covered wagon all to themselves, while the owner and his daughter sat on the driver's bench. Lucy had one knee crossed over the other, providing her with an improvised table upon which to rest the notebook she was writing in.

Opposite her, Zeref had forsaken the bench to sit on the floor, the back of his neck pressed against the seat and his knees drawn up to his chest in a position that looked so uncomfortable it could only have been a centuries-old habit. His own notebook was resting against his knees like canvas on an easel. What he was writing, she did not know, and had not quite dared to ask (though she had caught him scrutinizing her as though she were a curiosity on display at a museum more than once, and she wasn't entirely sure how she felt about that).

It was the first time she had ever been on a journey that was so… civilized.

There was no Natsu throwing up, no Erza accidentally terrifying the other travellers, no Gray napping in the corner, no Wendy trying to lift everyone's spirits – in other words, none of the characteristic mix of chaos and excitement that usually accompanied the adventures of Fairy Tail's strongest team. She missed them terribly. She thought that she was allowed to admit it, now that her quest to get that life back had truly begun.

That being said, she thought she could get used to a style of adventuring in which her biggest concern was trying to write in a straight line despite the jostling of the wagon.

She stared down at the last paragraph she'd written. The words were all over the place – and not just in the literal sense. Sighing, she raised her pen and scribbled through the entire thing with more viciousness than was strictly necessary for editing. It was never a good sign when crossing out the words gave her more satisfaction than writing them.

"What are you writing?" Zeref inquired.

Her gaze snapped up from the page. He had never shown any inclination of starting a conversation with her before that wasn't directly related to their mission, and her eyes narrowed in suspicion. Was he mocking her? She had never quite broken free from the disapproval of her father towards her hobby, nor the light-hearted teasing of Natsu and Gray, who had never understood how serious it was for her.

Then again, he seemed to be waiting sincerely enough for an answer, and if anyone in the world was going to understand her hobby, it would surely be the man who also appeared to have brought a notebook on their quest.

"I… I thought I'd use this time to work on my novel." When he didn't laugh, she pulled herself together and explained, "I used to do it a lot when travelling back from guild jobs. I could write so much better when I understood what it was like to be on that battlefield or in the middle of that adventure – when I still had those feelings in my mind, rather than trying to recreate them at my desk. There wasn't much chance to do that while I was at the Weekly Sorcerer, but last night was- it was everything I've been unable to write for the past ten months, so I thought I'd have a go now."

Lucy heaved the sigh immediately recognizable to artists everywhere, staring down at line upon line of scribbled-out words. "I just thought I'd have the words for it in the aftermath… but I don't."

She glared at him, as if daring him to mock her, but he stated, simply, "You're not writing well."

"No. I haven't been for a while."

"It happens to the best of us."

"Knowing that doesn't make it any less frustrating," she snapped, a little harsher than intended.

"True," he conceded. "Don't think too much about it. Focus on our mission. It'll come back to you when you're not expecting it."

"You're just saying that to get me to work harder, aren't you?"

"…Might be."

Strangely, though, she didn't think he was. That disarmingly innocent look was doubly deceptive – not pretending to be innocent, as he so often enjoyed doing, but pretending he was pretending to be innocent, when in truth his words had been sincere. Something twisted in her gut. He actually understood.

She wasn't used to that at all. Even Levy, who had always supported her, had done so with sympathy rather than empathy; as a reader, not a fellow writer.

"I think it's because it's not over," she mused, encouraged by his reaction, turning the thoughts over as words to see if they felt like truth. "Our journey, I mean. It's only just begun. I don't want to risk getting lost in what's already happened and missing the more exciting things still to come."

"That's understandable."

Not wanting to lose that rare moment of companionship, Lucy remarked, impulsively, "You speak as if from experience."

It was an invitation, and at first, she didn't think he was going to take it. A book appeared in his hand, and she felt the faintest brush of spatial magic against her senses – a familiar sense of multiplicity, as if the world's façade had slipped for a moment and revealed a hundred other worlds beyond – and she suspected that the pocket from which he had retrieved it was not entirely in this dimension. Assuming it contained more practical things than just books, that solved the mystery of why he had embarked on this quest without any luggage. Well, not that Requip magic ever stopped Erza from bringing along ten times as much luggage as anyone else, but Zeref struck her as being more a supporter of common sense than her usual teammates, at least where travelling was concerned.

He flicked through it until he found the page he wanted, and began copying out the runes he found there. Only then did he say, without looking up, "I've done enough writing in my time, Lucy. I understand the sentiment well enough."

She gave him a bemused look. "When you say writing, you don't mean fiction, right?"

"No," he answered, glancing up again, as his reference book returned to his pocket dimension. To her surprise, he didn't look at all annoyed about the continued interruption. "Writing about magic. Just because it isn't fiction doesn't mean you can get away with sloppy prose."

"I thought the rules were different, for magic." Lucy thought about the strict structure that governed Freed's magic, which was based on the written word. That would surely go double for the Books of Zeref, which took those words and transformed them into a living sentient demon. "Doesn't everything have to be perfectly precise and constructed in accordance with runic laws? There'd surely only be one way of writing the runes that will have the effect you want, so the author's personal style is irrelevant. Right?"

Like a lone cloud drifting through the endless azure, confusion creased the other's face and then was gone. "Ah, you're thinking about my demons, aren't you? They are far more complex than any normal letter-based magic… that's not what I meant, though. I'm talking about academic writing. Mostly on magic and magical theory, and translations of ancient texts and spells, but I've also published the odd paper on political theory or military strategy, when I've felt like it."

"I didn't know you'd written actual books, as well as creating the demons," Lucy blurted out, to his evident amusement.

"There are good reasons for that. Namely, the fact that everything that can be reliably traced back to me has been banned by the Magic Council, and thus can only be found on the black market, in the hands of esoteric scholars, or sealed in the Council's Archives. Oh, and some of them have been adopted by various sects, or hidden in local churches and passed down as a shameful secret through generations of priests sworn to protect the public from them… you get the idea."

Lucy frowned; he sounded unreasonably cheerful for someone who was talking about the waste of his life's work. "Doesn't it bother you that everything you've published is banned just because you wrote it? I mean, I'm assuming that it's not all evil magic… is it?"

"Not all of it, no," came the easy response. "And not all of it is banned, either, because I happen to be smarter than the Council, and in the past I've published under no fewer than six names, only three of which have been reliably identified as me over four centuries of scholarship."

"Oh?"

"I haven't published anything under my own name since I left the Academy, and I went to great lengths to ensure that nothing from that time exists outside of my possession. I've also written under the names Anvor Skola and Parsifal Orion in the past, but convincing cases were put forward some years ago that both of them were me, and so all their works are now banned. My fourth identity is a scholar named Helvidius, through which I largely study ritual magic-"

"Ritual magic?"

"Something given, something taken away," Zeref explained matter-of-factly. "Rather than using the power within your body to work magic, which is a temporary cost, something permanent is sacrificed instead. In return, the effects of the ritual are far greater than any individual could achieve under normal circumstances. It's very difficult, very dangerous, very illegal, and hardly anyone remembers it any more, let alone performs it. It was a thing of myth even when I was young. I've always done that under a pseudonym, purely because of the controversy of the subject matter."

"I see." Lucy made a mental note to stay well away from that kind of magic. "Anyway, you were up to number five…?"

"Yes. As Perrin Dragonborn, I mostly do translations of and commentaries on ancient magical and philosophical texts, most of which are harmless, but would not be nearly as widely accepted if anyone knew I was the one doing them. There's a small but tenacious faction in academia which maintains that Helvidius and Perrin are connected in some way, but last time I checked, it hasn't occurred to anyone that either might be me. And the sixth… well, I'll keep that one to myself, but suffice it to say that I've never published under that name in Fiore, though the odd paper has made it across the border."

"And no one's caught on to the fact that all six of these authors just happen to be immortal?"

He shrugged. "It's not as much of a giveaway as you'd think. Most of society is unaware that I am immortal, don't forget. Longevity is one theory; another is that these authors aren't human at all, but magical creatures, such as demons or Celestial Spirits or some other manifestation of magic that possesses a human once a generation and forces them to write. Others believe that they are hereditary titles rather than names, passed on from master to disciple. I'm mostly used to that as… the sixth identity, at least as far as Fiore is concerned. It's rather entertaining, really. Every time someone gets close to the truth, I'll add a preface to my latest book that heavily implies the opposite, bind it in the style favoured by fifth-century Bosconian printers, and leave it in fourth-century Bosconian ruins for scholars to find and argue over – thus generating free publicity all the while."

"Right," Lucy said, at last. "I mean, pranking scholars probably isn't how I'd have spent my four centuries, but…"

"I suppose not," he smiled, although it soon faded, and when he spoke again, the joviality had vanished from his voice. "It's hard to publish books on magic these days, Lucy. Scholarly books, I mean. There isn't a market for them. The vast majority of magic-users are practising guild mages, like yourself and your friends, who are there to work, not to study."

"Well, yes, us non-immortals do need to eat. No one's going to pay us to sit at home and read books on magic all day."

She'd said it as a joke, but he didn't laugh, and she didn't think he was joking, not any more.

"Not today, no. Four centuries ago, though… back when the Age of Academies was at its zenith, magic was studied like the natural and social sciences are today, and there was no higher honour. It was only when the great Academies fell from grace that magic was reduced to a tool for practising mages, and higher education was reserved for the sciences, humanities, and arts."

"There are schools of magic, though," Lucy pointed out, and he snorted with the greatest derision.

"In a very generous interpretation of the term, Lucy. They're for kids; they teach them to use magic so that they can join a guild or work as an independent mage. They don't teach them about magic."

"Maybe they don't need to," Lucy countered. "There are plenty of people who know loads about magic, like the Master, or Jellal, or even Levy, from all her reading. None of them had to go to university for it."

"Those you think of as knowing a lot about magic – your Master Makarov, for instance – gained that knowledge through experience, not study. While I'm not saying that isn't important, it's a different kind of knowledge. The others are enthusiastic self-taught amateurs at best."

He raised a hand to forestall her protest. "And they know that, Lucy. That's why they – and the entire community – would give far more credence to magical texts they believe are relics from the Age of Academies than they would to anything I could convince a modern publisher to print today, under a fake name or otherwise. When we think of powerful magic, we think of ancient magic – Nirvana, or Dragon Slayer magic…"

When he tailed off, she quirked her eyebrow, half-teasingly. "And the R-System, and the Eclipse Gate, and the demons…?"

"Quite," he said, smiling. "The things which I consider my greatest achievements – my greatest magical achievements, that is – were all accomplished a long time ago. I don't write nearly as much as I used to, and when I do have ideas, I tend to keep them to myself, or discuss them with a handful of people I trust. The world is different, now. Things have moved on."

His voice fell away again, and she watched him in silence, more than a little bemused. She had never known him be so talkative. It was as if they'd found a safe topic – something not to do with Fairy Tail or the coming war or her friends, so there was no need for any kind of hostility between them.

"What changed?" she wondered. "If the Academies of Magic used to be so great, why aren't there any these days?"

He tapped his pen on the edge of his notebook, deliberating, and then gave an answer that shouldn't have required any deliberation at all. "Ask a historian. It's hardly a secret."

"I'm asking the man who was there," she rebuked, curious.

"What makes you think I had anything to do with it?"

"Because you care too much for it not to be personal."

He didn't dispute it, but didn't accept the challenge either. "The world is what it is," he repeated, in a tone of finality; the end of the conversation, the end of the argument, and the end of the first smile that perhaps hadn't been at her expense since their quest had begun. "No one person made it this way, and no one person can change it."

"Maybe so," Lucy conceded, though she wasn't willing to give up on the first real companionable conversation they had ever had. "Are you writing something academic now?"

Absently, without looking up, he replied, "No, not at all. I'm working out the theory behind that little stunt you pulled last night. Using Celestial Spirit magic without a key is impossible, therefore I'm missing something."

"I honestly don't see why you're so worked up about this," Lucy sighed. His reaction last night to her magic had been entertaining, but how seriously he had been taking it ever since was unnerving her a little. "Loke summons himself without the key all the time."

"Just because you're not using the key doesn't mean he isn't."

"Well, even if you're right, there're loads of ways of using Celestial Spirit magic that don't involve the keys," she blustered. "Urano Metria, for instance."

"That's not Celestial Spirit magic," Zeref told her calmly, not even looking up.

"Yes, it is."

"No, it isn't."

"I think I would know!"

"Oh, so you don't find it incredibly exhausting to use, then?" he asked archly, and she shuddered inside. If there were no real schools of magic in the present day, why was she feeling like she was in one, being lectured by the headmaster? "Celestial Spirit magic is unlike any other kind of magic, Lucy. Being born to that will make it far harder for you to acquire any secondary kinds of magic than it is for others. Urano Metria is closer to the kind of magic your friend Jellal uses than Celestial Spirit magic. I don't know why it has been consistently mislabelled over the years."

"How do you even know what kind of magic Jellal uses?" Lucy retorted, half in disbelief, and he gave her a cool look. "Spy network, right," she said flatly. That was a reminder not to trust this apparent new camaraderie if she'd ever heard one.

Then again, Jellal wasn't exactly a low-profile individual, either as a former member of the Council or an escaped convict. It wouldn't be difficult to find out what kind of magic he had from old newspapers. And for all that Zeref had known the addresses of her allies in Marguerite Town, he hadn't known that she had learnt Star Dress – or that she could do it keylessly. In fact, knowing the latter seemed to be causing him more trouble than not knowing.

There was an uncomfortable feeling rising in her stomach – the same thing she might feel being scrutinized half-naked for a beauty pageant she had not chosen to enter – but it was drowned by a spark of intrigue: what did it even mean to work out the theory behind her magic? "May I see?"

To her surprise, he handed over his notebook without a word. It took half a second for her to realize why a man who published his research under six different identities was suddenly being so forthcoming with his secrets.

It was a bad day indeed when the numbers were the most intelligible part of the page. The rest was covered in unfamiliar letters, an alphabet that looked as out of place upon recycled notepaper as modern slang would have done carved above an ancient tomb. Runes flowed between complex magic circles, webs of fine black gold woven by a spider fluent in alchemy. Much of it had been crossed out and reattempted, yet even she could see enchanting orderliness within the storm of symbols – a most lawful chaos. Compared to the few surviving half-sentences in her own notebook, it was fair to say that Zeref had had the more productive morning.

Lucy shook her head. "This means nothing to me," she admitted, handing it back.

"Naturally not," he smirked. "I wouldn't have shown you otherwise. Not until I had solved it, at least."

"What language are you writing in?"

"Loxarian. Magic is almost always written in Loxarian."

"Just out of interest," Lucy mentioned offhandedly, "if you're writing in a magical language and you get something wrong, is there a chance it might, you know, blow up? Because if so, I really don't think you should be sitting so close."

"No, no." He laughed, but there was nothing cruel about it. "There are magical runic languages like that; you'd use them if you wanted the thing you were writing to become magic – like my demons, or a ritual. Loxarian, by contrast, is a formalism… a written system through which any kind of magic can be expressed, manipulated, and understood. It is to magic what mathematics is to physics… you'll know a little of it, more than you think, but nowhere near enough to keep up with me."

Quietly, Lucy demurred, "For me, magic is… it's emotion and energy and hope. It's about trust shared with my Spirits and… and love," she added, feeling her cheeks begin to redden, but holding true to her mother's belief in the One Magic nonetheless. "I don't see how you can quantify – or even write – any of that."

"Magic is all of those things," he agreed absently. "But it is so in ways that conform reliably to patterns; to complex and mathematical underlying laws. The Loxarian construction of magic provides a way of expressing those laws, and thus of better understanding our universe, just as mathematics does."

"I've never thought about it like that," Lucy admitted, and he murmured in agreement, still writing. She wondered if it was a side effect of the altered dynamic of their team, or whether he simply enjoyed having a puzzle to solve, and it had left him in a friendly mood. "So, are you making any progress with your magical theory?"

"It's slow going," Zeref considered. "Which is to be expected, since I don't have the right reference works to hand, and I've only seen you do it once. Speaking of which, it would be helpful if you would do it for me again right now."

"Uh, no."

From the startled look he gave her, she might as well have announced that she was quitting their quest in order to establish the Church of Acnologia. "What do you mean, no?"

"Has it not occurred to you that, as your enemy, I might not be one hundred percent behind your attempt to understand my secret weapon?"

His mouth opened and then closed again. Apparently, it really hadn't occurred to him. Baffled didn't even begin to describe his expression; it made her reaction to his page of indecipherable magical theory look like the comprehension of a genius.

"I'm not doing this as your enemy, Lucy," he said, at last. "I don't need to understand your magic to defeat you or your guild. But you surprised me, and that doesn't happen very often." When she tried to shrug it off, he leaned forward, insistent. "I like knowing things, Lucy. I don't like not knowing things. You can't put a puzzle like this in front of me and expect me to just walk away!"

"I'm not trying to stop you," Lucy retorted. "I'm just not going to help you. Don't explain your magic to a self-professed enemy – there's a whole chapter on that in the Hero's Handbook. Even if the knowledge is of no use to you personally, it might help your minions."

"…I see. I suppose that explains why you chose to lose the fight on the road to Marguerite Town, when you could have won in a heartbeat if you'd been willing to show that ability in front of me. Unless… Aha!" He pointed his pen towards her as if sighting along the shaft of an arrow; one shot for victory. "You can't use it during the day, can you?"

"I can, actually," Lucy shot back, realizing a moment too late that even that gave too much away.

There was an intensity in Zeref's eyes, blackness shimmering with anticipation, and not even her most cynical side could believe it was faked. "You told me last night that you were using the constellation Scorpius as a substitute for Scorpio's key, but the constellations aren't visible during the day. Either you lied, or there's more to it than that."

"I didn't lie, but…"

They stared at each other.

It couldn't have been more different to the silent stare-down in her house on the day their mission had begun.

"Lucy, is there anything I can do to convince you that I mean you no harm by this? I don't want to miss the chance to study a magic that should by all known laws be impossible."

There he sat on the floor, no pretending to be innocent, no childish tricks; an earnest request from one adult to another.

And despite herself – or perhaps because she was herself, and not another member of her guild – she believed him.

"At night, I use the constellations to focus my magic, like I said," she explained. "This time of year, Virgo and Scorpius are visible on a clear night – along with Libra, but I don't have a contract with her – so I can use their forms. During the day… well, right now, the sun is in the sign of Cancer. If I focus on the sun, I can use it to channel Cancer's form as well without his key, though it's a lot more difficult."

"Hmm. That doesn't sound right to me."

Lucy threw her hands up in the air in frustration. "You asked, I answered; what more do you want?"

Zeref shook his head. "If you're truly channelling the constellations, why can't you always do all of them? It's not as though they cease to exist when the earth turns away from them. And why does the sun's position matter? You can't see that the sun is in Cancer. You only know it is because an almanac told you so, which could easily be wrong, and the designation of the astrological signs as arcs of the ecliptic have little relation to the constellations themselves these days. No, it's too contrived… which makes me think it's a mental limitation rather than a physical one; one you're unconsciously imposing upon yourself because it fits the explanation you've come up with."

"I don't know how it works, alright?" she huffed, before she could stop herself. "All I know is that I can do it!"

Not fazed in the least by her outburst, he tapped his finger against the floor of the wagon; he seemed to like counting out his own thoughts. "I suspect that you could take any form at any time, if you so wished. You find the transformations during the day harder because the explanation your mind has conceived is more tenuous, so you believe the transformations will be harder. You can't transform using constellations you can't physically see because you don't believe that you can. I think you could, if you tried."

"You're wrong."

Even as she asserted it, though, her mind was wondering. Had she properly tested it? When she'd achieved her first keyless transformation a few months ago, under the constellation Leo, had she looked up and assumed that was how she'd done it, without ever truly challenging that hypothesis? Had she thought, maybe I can use the sun as a conduit too, and only tested what she could do with it, rather than what she couldn't?

It irked her. She hadn't doubted herself before; why should she do so now, simply because this nosy man had told her without any kind of justification that he thought she was wrong?

Zeref requested, "Will you try it for me now?"

"No."

"Will you show me your Cancer form instead?"

"No."

"Suit yourself. I'll figure it out soon enough."

"Fine." She folded her arms. The shared companionship from the start of the journey, two writers embarking upon their own not dissimilar quests; his unexpected openness when discussing his interests, as opposed to his dark silence when it came to the future; her reluctant belief that he really did see her magic as an enticing enigma rather than a weapon to be turned against her – all those things had disappeared in a flare of stubbornness, of frustration. "If you think you know more about my own magic than I do, go right ahead and try."

"Lucy, I know infinitely more about your magic than you do," came the amused response. "Did you think it was a coincidence that my Eclipse Gate opened with the Zodiac keys?"

Lucy swore internally.

Between Future Rogue's plot and the battle against the dragons, she had forgotten that it was the man sat across from her who had built the Gate in the first place. Furthermore, she remembered the confrontation between the Celestial Spirit King and Mard Geer during the fight against Tartaros. They had clearly known each other, even though they fought on opposite sides.

Then again, Loke and her other Spirits had been around for centuries, hadn't they? If they knew Zeref, why didn't they say so as soon as it became clear that he had taken up arms as Fairy Tail's enemy? If the King had fought Mard Geer in the past, why had he not passed on strategic information concerning the demons when the battle against Tartaros began? If the Spirits themselves were integral to the creation and opening of the Eclipse Gate, why hadn't Loke told her what it would do as soon as they learned it was hidden under Crocus?

The more she thought about her magic, the less sense it seemed to make.

"I forgot about that," she ground out.

Zeref's eyes sparkled, voids lit by little diamonds. "So I gathered."

"You're not- I mean- you're not secretly a Celestial Spirit mage, are you?"

"Of course not. I can't be; I predate the bloodline."

"What bloodline?"

Lucy had forgotten how frustrating the I-told-you-so smile could be on the face of a teenager. "I know so much more about your magic than you do, Lucy," he repeated. "I've already figured out the other thing."

"What other thing?"

"How you're able to summon your Spirits so quickly."

"Is that so?"

"Yes. It was obvious when I thought about it the right way. It is categorically impossible for anyone to open a Gate that quickly; therefore, you're not opening a Gate at all. Your Spirits do it themselves. Which still takes them the three or so seconds it would have taken you, except time is fuzzy at the border between worlds. Causality is preserved on each side, so they can't arrive before you call them, but they can the instant after you've done so, and the time it takes to open the Gate is paid by their world instead of yours. You're not summoning your Spirits; you're telling them you need them and trusting them to come to you of their own accord. Once they have, you hold their Gate open using your own magic as normal… am I right?"

He was, and he knew it, whether she said so or not.

"I was curious as to why," Zeref continued. "For most Celestial Spirit mages, and for most of your own career, the time it takes to summon a Spirit has never been a problem. What happened, to make eliminating it a priority for you? And when I thought about it, I realized that that too was obvious."

Lucy's grip tightened on the edge of the bench. He did not notice.

"Only one thing changed: Fairy Tail was disbanded," he said. "Before then, you fought as part of a team. It was your hot-headed friends who opened the fighting, not you, so it didn't matter that it took a few seconds or so before you and your Spirits were ready to fight. Once the guild separated, that was no longer the case. You would have to fight on your own. That's why you devised a faster way of summoning. And, fundamentally, Keyless Star Dress is the same, isn't it? You learnt quick summoning so that you could fight without teammates. You worked out how to use Star Dress keylessly so that you could even fight without your Spirits. All your training revolved around the fact that you knew from now on you would always be alone-"

"That's enough!"

Some part of her registered his slow realization: the paradoxical way in which those black eyes seemed to become more human as they widened; a man understanding that he should have stopped talking a long time ago.

But it was a very small part of her that empathized – a lone star stripped of any meaning by the presence of the sun. And it was a black sun, a hateful one, one whose rise was marked by earthquakes and sacrifice and the useless, hopeless rage that resulted when the unstoppable desire to scream was met by the immovable need to cry.

It was the disappearance of her friends without a word of goodbye; it was falling asleep at night knowing that she would be alone the next day too; it was things will never go back to how they were, a self-fulfilling prophecy flung at her once-best friend along with a table and the remnants of her hope.

"Lucy-" Zeref was trying to say.

"Just don't," Lucy interrupted, and the ice in it would have made Gray proud. "Just… don't."

It was odd, she thought, how it hadn't hurt for ten months. Only now that she'd taken her first steps towards the light – towards not being alone – could she look back and see how deep was the chasm that yawned at her heels; how black the night flowing at its base; how fragile the glass ladder she was climbing. It frightened her, how much and how suddenly she wanted to cry.

"Lucy, I'm sorry," Zeref said softly. "I didn't mean to upset you."

It took her too long to process those words. They weren't right. He wasn't supposed to care. He was her enemy; he should be laughing at the worst memories his words had dredged up, or pretending it had been intentional rather than a consequence of the puzzle he had been caught up in.

"It's alright," she murmured, and the words were flat now, as if numbed by the very ice she had clung to for too long. "It's not your fault. You're the one who…"

The one who – for his own selfish reasons, and without the slightest consideration for her feelings – had nonetheless changed all that.

"Lucy."

She looked up and saw the notebook he was holding out to her; the one filled with calculations she wouldn't understand if she spent a lifetime studying magical theory, because they had been written by one who had had far more lifetimes than that to spend mastering it. "Take it. You can burn it, if you want. I won't do it again."

Try as she might, she could find no deception etched into his expression – nothing but uncertainty. Barely a minute ago, she would happily have snatched that book and thrown it from the wagon, but he had offered it to her of his own free will and that made it impossible to take.

"No, it's fine. As you can tell, I honestly have no idea how this magic works… I certainly don't see what makes it so different from normal Star Dress, but if you think it's a puzzle worth solving, then you can do what you like. Though," she added, as she pushed the book back towards him, "if you'd like to keep your theoretical calculations out of the realm of psychoanalysis, that would be great."

"As you said yourself, Lucy, emotions and trust and love are a fundamental part of magic – but not a part that needs to be spoken out loud," he amended, after one glance at her expression.

"That's better."

"…I don't suppose you'll show me your Cancer form now, would you?"

"Not a chance."

"Worth a shot."

"Although," Lucy added, "I might consider it, if you tell me how you know so much about Celestial Spirit magic."

His pen paused, hovered above the paper for half a second, and then wrote on as if nothing had happened. "I know a lot about many different kinds of magic, Lucy."

"I'm sure you do, but this is different. You're not freaking out over how Wendy spends half her waking life in Dragon Force or how Cana has been abusing Fairy Glitter, but just being able to summon a Spirit a little bit quicker than normal has you writing an emergency thesis. You sit there and hint smugly at things I've never even heard of, despite having known some of my Spirits for my entire life. You said it yourself: the Eclipse Gate wasn't a coincidence. This magic is special to you, isn't it?"

This time, Zeref said nothing.

She persisted, "If you're not a Celestial Spirit mage yourself, then someone must have taught you-"

"I'm done talking," Zeref stated, not looking up from his notebook. "I'm working now. Don't bother me."

And he didn't say another word for the rest of the journey, though Lucy noticed that he wrote even less.

Zeref had some nerve, Lucy decided.

It wasn't enough that he already knew more about her and her guild than she was comfortable with. He asked her personal questions and expected her to answer them, being surprised and even offended when she refused. He carelessly raised subjects that were painful to her, as if her trials and her tears and her loneliness were nothing more than data points in some great magical experiment. She had forgiven him for his thoughtless words, even though he had probably only apologized in the first place because he needed her on his side for the quest, and she had let it fool her into thinking she could tell him even more.

And then the moment she tried to learn something about him in return – that was it, the conversation was over, they were back to being enemies again. He deflected her innocent questions about the fall of the Academies. He shot down her justified curiosity about the magic she had wielded from birth. He was sympathetic when it suited him; talkative only when he stood to gain something from the conversation.

So much for the second part of their journey beginning on a more even footing.

Lucy wasn't going to let that stand.

That was why she was currently locked in a bathroom.

It wasn't easy for her to slip away from her teammate without arousing suspicion, so when the wagon pulled up outside its owner's farmhouse, and she and Zeref had disembarked to continue their journey on foot, she had seized the opportunity to use the loo before heading onwards.

There, protected by a locked door, a frosted window, and the code of human decency, she drew a silver key from the ring at her belt and summoned Crux, the Southern Cross. The Spirit appeared at once, and, even better, he had his eyes closed as usual, saving Lucy from having to explain why she had summoned him in a bathroom.

She thought for a moment about how to phrase her request. A long time ago, she had managed to get Karen Lilica's name by asking Crux about Celestial Spirit mages who were connected to Loke. That would give her a starting point, if nothing else.

"Crux, I need all the information you can get me on Zeref and his relationship with a Celestial Spirit mage in his past. If there's more than one… then just get me information on all of them. This is top secret – don't contact me before I summon you again, because I don't want Zeref to find out. Alright?"

A/N: Hello to everyone who is still with me! As you will have seen if you've made it this far, from the fact that it took me about 45,000 words to cover what was literally a 4-chapter subplot in canon, I wasn't joking when I said that a) the story is going to be long, and b) the romance is going to be sloooow! This next part of the story will continue to follow the reunion journey as per canon, but there's still quite a lot to happen before they actually encounter Avatar. I hope you enjoy what's to come!

Anyway, I only really wanted to say a massive thank you to everyone who has reviewed, favourited or followed this story so far. Every single notification I get means so much to me! Hope you're all staying safe and finding freedom in fictional worlds! ~CS