The Scars That Make You Whole

By CrimsonStarbird

Stellar Constellations Rise, Part 4

-Detours-

It was safe to say that Zeref was not a fan of Lucy's proposed detour to Alchemilla Town.

In fact, he was dead set against it, but this hard-line opposition was somewhat compromised by the fact that he had been tucking into a huge plate of blueberry pancakes when she'd broken the news. It was difficult to take even the Black Mage seriously when he had whipped cream on the end of his nose. Lucy had never felt so confident looking him in the eye and demanding, "Why not?"

"Because Alchemilla Town is irrelevant to our quest and out of our way," he explained, with a lot more patience than he was currently affording the bottle of coagulated syrup, whose fear of being eaten had apparently granted it the ability to resist gravity. "The deadline you set us for reuniting the entire guild is tight enough without factoring in detours every time a dark mage does something evil. We're going straight to Blue Pegasus, and that's that."

"There's no point in bringing Fairy Tail back together if we have to sacrifice our guild's ideals to do it," she retorted. "Fairy Tail wouldn't be Fairy Tail if we ignored those who asked for our help."

"Hmm."

She had been expecting a snarky response, not something so neutral it could even have been a concession. She had to struggle through a large mouthful of scrambled eggs and bacon (not that she had picked the most expensive breakfast the café offered just because Zeref was covering the trip's expenses or anything) before she could press her advantage. "Besides, I promised Juvia I would go."

"Why? Alchemilla Town was attacked the night before last. What's the point in going there now?"

"Because… well…"

She tailed off. Alright, so those black eyes could do unimpressed perfectly well over pancakes.

"Lucy, if this were a rescue mission, it would be a different matter. I am not an entirely unreasonable man, and if a small detour was needed to save the town and help regain Fairy Tail's reputation in the process, I would consider it. But there is no merit to your proposal. The culprits will be long gone. Going there now is not a good use of our time."

"I know," she sighed. "But I did promise Juvia, and it's only an hour away, so it won't take up that much time. There might be some clues as to who attacked the town, or why…"

"No. We're getting Fairy Tail back together, not going on a crusade against minor criminals. Any such detours are a violation of our agreement." Perhaps sensing her stubbornness, he added, "I'm sure I don't need to remind you that if you break your end of the deal, there would no longer be a reason for me to hold to our non-aggression pact."

"But…"

"We're going straight to Blue Pegasus, Lucy."

"…Fine."

After that, breakfast became a more sullen affair.

Well, it was difficult to stay cross at a man who was eating blueberry pancakes, syrup, and whipped cream for breakfast without any kind of shame – especially when he really wasn't being that unreasonable, given the circumstances. It helped that he didn't bat an eyelid when she ordered seconds. It sure was nice not having to worry about money for a change. She did wonder, briefly, how it was that he seemed to have limitless funds for their expedition, but she supposed it wasn't surprising that a four-hundred-year-old immortal had managed to amass some wealth over the years. He had to have been doing something in that time, and the histories were notoriously vague on the details.

"Zeref?"

"Yes, Lucy?"

"There was something I wanted to talk to you about, actually. Something unrelated."

"Well, this is a good time for it," he invited.

She thought it sounded promisingly amicable, so she took the plunge. "I've decided what it is I want from you in return for helping you with this quest."

"Oh?"

"So… I've been thinking. I don't know anything about you. You're a four-hundred-year-old immortal who likes sweet food, books, and rare magic, and that's about it. I don't know what you want with our guild – why you want to help us get back together, or what it is you're so certain we're going to end up fighting over afterwards. I don't even know what would count as victory for you in such a fight. I don't know what you've been doing for four hundred years; no one does. I've heard the stories, but they're all so vague… they call you the Black Mage, the darkest and most dangerous mage in the history of Ishgar, but they never say why, not in any way that stands up to scrutiny."

She paused, but his reaction was impossible to measure. He seemed, if anything, faintly amused by the lecture she had been working on for most of the night, though in retrospect the person she had really been trying to convince was herself. He simply sat there eating, allowing her to plead her case without interruption, so she swallowed and carried on.

"You're not like I expected. At all. And the more I learn about you, the harder it becomes to reconcile those dark myths with the person in front of me. Take your demons, for instance," she added, letting the thought that had haunted her mind for ten months finally come to the surface. She wouldn't have said it to her friends, in case they took it as making light of everything they had suffered through in the battle against Tartaros, but she could say it to him.

"I grew up hearing stories of the terrible devastation they caused in your name, and then I met Gray and learned about Deliora and, well, you know… but then one day we stepped into the story and fought Tartaros for real. And they were cruel and destructive and awful, yes, but there was also a reason for it. We learnt that you created the demons as instruments of your own suicide, so of course their powers were destructive – they had to be, to have a chance of killing you. Of course they had no regard for human life, or they wouldn't have been able to try! When you realize that there are reasons why they were like they were… things are a lot less black and white than the stories say."

"That's a very generous interpretation of the matter, Lucy," Zeref said mildly. "You are right on both counts, but you are overlooking another: I chose to let them run free. I may not have specifically told Deliora to go trampling around in Gray's hometown, but I knew it would be a very likely consequence of allowing him to do as he pleased, and I did it anyway."

Quietly, Lucy replied, "Given that the demons were sentient creatures, I think an argument could be made that doing anything else would have been inhumane."

"Oh?" There was some emotion at last, and it was surprise, genuine surprise; Zeref leaned forward, fork down, an entire pancake lying forgotten upon his plate. "You would say that, even after everything you went through?"

She glanced away. "I said that an argument could be made, not that I would make it."

"Fascinating," he murmured, as if she hadn't bothered mounting any kind of defence at all.

"But we're getting off topic," Lucy added hastily.

"Oh, yes. I believe you were rationalizing my life decisions."

Lucy scowled at him. "No, my point was simply that the stories leave so much out. How did I not know that your body is cursed; that your magic kills even when you don't want it to? Why did it not occur to anyone before the fight with Tartaros that your immortality, your present body, might not have been a choice? You know healing magic, of all things – and you used it to save my friend without being asked! You get upset when I accuse you of plotting the death and destruction of innocents! None of these are the actions of the Black Mage we've all been taught to fear!"

"So?" Skewering the final blueberry on the end of his fork, Zeref leaned back in his chair nonchalantly, as if doing his utmost to prove her words carried no weight. "I thought you were going to ask me for something. All you've done so far is state things that we both already know."

"I'm getting to that," she grumbled. "But I wanted to say this first: I am ashamed to have considered you my enemy when I didn't know a thing about you."

"That's very nice of you, Lucy, but I am your enemy, and the fact that I'm going to wipe out your entire guild come the First of September is all you need to know."

"No. It isn't. It absolutely, unequivocally, is not enough. That's my point."

"Okay, whatever you say," Zeref shrugged. "I'm still not seeing the relevance."

"This is my request: I want you to tell me about yourself."

"…What?"

Steadily, she repeated, "I want you to talk about yourself as we travel. Now, I know what you're going to say, so let me stress that it's up to you what you want to talk about. I know you don't want to tell me about your plans for my guild, and that's fine. We are still enemies, after all.

"But there are some things you can tell me. Like the areas of magic that interest you; the research you've done in them; what you studied in that Academy you mentioned. What have you spent four hundred years doing? What was the world like when you were growing up all those centuries ago? You must have seen so much that no one else alive even knows about! You already know far more than you should about me and my guild… so I want to know about you, too. What do you say?"

"No," Zeref said.

Lucy blinked. "No?"

"No. Ask something else of me; I won't give you that."

It was a flat and cold refusal, one which brooked no argument, and thus Lucy was immediately incited to argue against it. After all the time she'd invested in making her proposal as harmless as possible, she thought he'd at least do her the courtesy of thinking it over.

"I don't understand how I could possibly make this any fairer! I'm giving you complete control over what you choose to talk about – you don't even have to do anything, and your debt will be paid! Don't you dare tell me my request isn't reasonable!"

"It isn't reasonable." Again, cold; again, uninterested in debate. "I am not willing to talk about myself."

"You owe me!"

"I do. But we decided I would owe you one favour that we both agreed on. I don't agree to this."

"What's the point in you owing me if you're just going to veto all my requests?"

"Not all of them. Only the unreasonable ones."

"I don't see how this is unreasonable!"

"You would," he said softly, "if you knew the answers to some of the questions you would ask me."

"I just want to know a little bit more about you, Zeref. That's all."

"I'm not interested in being your friend, Lucy. I'm here to do a job."

"You're not going to budge on this at all, are you?"

"I am not. Find something else to ask of me."

Lucy shook her head, reaching for that condescending disappointment that seemed to come so easily to him, but it must have been a technique unlockable only through experience, because she could tell she wasn't doing a good job of hiding her hurt. What was so wrong about wanting to understand him? Even if they were going to be enemies come the First of September, why did that exclude them from being friends now? She had thought they'd been starting to get along well, all things considered… but no.

Every time she made a tiny bit of progress, he pushed her away again.

How was she supposed to deal with a man like that?

Yes, she'd argued more on this adventure with him than in all her time in Fairy Tail put together, but it wasn't because they didn't get on. She argued with him because, on some level, it felt like a worthwhile endeavour.

With Natsu and Gray and Erza, once they had their hearts set on something, that was it and nothing short of defeat could get through to them – irrespective of whether their goal was to save their guild or stick Lucy in a wedding dress and parade her in front of a lovestruck monster. It wasn't in any way malicious on their part. It was simply that they had all accepted implicitly that she didn't get to set the team's agenda: she was the newest, the least confident, the weakest in a fight; it wasn't surprising that none of them saw her as a viable leader. She loved them dearly, and more than a small part of her missed the exhilaration of being dragged from one misadventure to another by the whirlwind that was Team Natsu, but she didn't miss having her opinions repeatedly overruled.

With Zeref, it wasn't like that. They would disagree, they would argue about it, and then one of them would back down: she might agree that going to Alchemilla Town wasn't the best idea or apologize for her hurtful words, and he might concede that it was his duty to cover the cost of their trip or that it was acceptable to spend an extra night in Marguerite to help with the Thanksgiving Parade. Even when she was overruled, there was usually some logic to it that she could understand without having to agree with it.

Besides, the more she learnt how to deal with him, the more even their partnership was becoming. He may have known far more about magic and the locations of her guildmates than she did, but she knew more about adventures and the people they were going to find, and he acknowledged that. He listened to her, and that mattered.

But it lasted only for as long as they were both reasonable.

And right now, he wasn't being reasonable at all.

They didn't say another word to each other until breakfast was over and their journey resumed once more. Only then did Lucy manage to get his attention – namely by turning left into the street when Zeref turned right. She hadn't gone more than two steps before he shouted to her, "You're going the wrong way!"

"Nope. This is the way to Alchemilla Town."

"We're not going to Alchemilla Town," he pointed out. "We just agreed to go straight to Blue Pegasus."

"We did agree that," she replied evenly. "But I was acting under the assumption that you were my employer and I was your hired mage, and thus I deferred to your opinion. However, it has since come to light that you are not willing to pay for the service I am providing, and so I no longer see a reason to take your opinion into consideration. Sure, I'll go to Blue Pegasus eventually, because I still want to revive Fairy Tail. But if you're no longer my employer, then you don't get to set the terms. I'll go when I want to go, not when you want me to."

"Lucy…"

As if she hadn't heard the warning, she continued brightly, "And right now, what I want is to go to Alchemilla Town like I promised Juvia. So either we head straight to Blue Pegasus, and on the way you can tell me all about life in the Age of Academies, as you so quaintly put it the other day… or you can keep being stubborn, and we'll take a detour to Alchemilla Town."

Lucy stared at Zeref.

Zeref stared at Lucy.

Defiance and hostility.

Conscious walls of ice, and passion blazing against them; a deliberate attempt to break them down, to get close, to understand him-

"Alchemilla Town it is," Zeref said.

Lucy may have got her choice of destination, but the price was having to deal with Zeref's relapse into sullen teenager mode for the entire journey.

Even when she managed to hitch them a ride after a mere ten minutes of walking, he simply sat in the back of the cart, scribbled more magical calculations into his notebook, ignored all attempts to engage him in conversation, and sulked.

She had hoped he might cheer up when they arrived, but as she made her way towards the heart of the town, wondering if the intact buildings were a sign that Juvia had managed to scare the intruders off after all, he lagged behind and sulked.

When her hopes were dashed upon reaching the town centre, and she could do nothing but stare in horror at the circle of devastation, he slouched against the nearby ruin of a wall and sulked.

"You know," Lucy told him idly, "if I were the one wanting to wrap up this side quest as quickly as possible and move on to Blue Pegasus, I'd probably be offering my teammate all the help I could."

If he had pockets, he'd have stuck his hands into them, but the generation of scholars who had decided ancient togas were a fashion trend worth reviving hadn't had that foresight, and using extradimensional pockets for the same effect looked less like teenage rebellion and more like dismemberment. So he folded his arms, glared at her, and sulked.

"Suit yourself," Lucy sighed, and turned her attention back to the scene before them.

Under normal circumstances, Alchemilla Town would have been the least interesting of all the locations they had visited so far. It was larger than the quaint (and rainy) Helvola Village, but not as large as Marguerite Town, lacking a guild of its own. The buildings and old-fashioned marketplace were just similar enough to Marguerite's to be repetitive, right down to the pigeons which clustered atop some roofs and treated others as if they were made of lava, giving her wicked pigeon stares from their wicked pigeon eyes.

Only in the centre of the town were those stares replaced by a far more tangible evil. Before her lay the aftermath of a most unnatural earthquake: a perfect circle of rubble and half-houses and roads that jerked and tore and twisted with the vigour of a mountain range. Not a single building remained intact – not the offices, not the bakery, not the library, not even the church, which had been cut clean in two like a sword might bisect a watermelon, lavish statues and noble gravestones tossed aside with equal irreverence.

Nothing inside that perfect circle had been spared. Nothing outside the circle had been touched.

Nothing about this was natural.

Nothing about this was acceptable.

Lucy had seen worse in her time, but this was so senseless that it made her feel like a novice guild mage once again, exposed to the horrors of the world for the very first time.

In the time since the attack, the clean-up effort had begun. Those whose livelihoods had been spared – by virtue of their radial distance from the centre of town; nothing more meaningful than that – had found shelter for those whose hadn't, and were beginning to clear the rubble. Yet the mood was not one of hope, but of resignation. Taking stock of what remained was the only priority; rebuilding remained a far-fetched fantasy.

She wished that she could do something, but Zeref had been right. The villains were long gone. No one she spoke to seemed to know who had attacked the town or why, but whatever it was, three innocents had died for it: two had been killed by the falling rubble, while the pastor, who had been a powerful mage in his youth, had died buying time for his congregation to escape. The white stone of the church would be forever seared black by the divine flame he'd summoned forth to protect them.

Pigeons prowled amongst the rubble, seeking new nests amidst the jungle of stone and ruin. Their opportunistic nonchalance bothered her far more than the inauspicious vigil of crows.

"I hate this," Lucy whispered.

"Right, because you've never destroyed a town before," Zeref drawled.

Lucy bristled at once. Why, why, why was he like this? Sullen when she tried to be friendly; hostile when she tried to build bridges; mocking when she needed sympathy – did he not care at all?

"Not like this," she hissed. "Accidents happen when we're trying to help people. But this… this is senseless violence."

"It doesn't seem senseless to me."

"Just because you think violence is part of a healthy daily routine doesn't mean-"

"I don't think that," he said coolly. "What I do think is that three fatalities, two of which were accidental, doesn't qualify as senseless violence. Juvia's injury, and that pastor who died – the culprits only attacked in earnest those who tried to stop them. They struck at the town centre at night. Most of these buildings were already empty. It wasn't senseless and it wasn't their primary goal."

Lucy snapped, "What are you doing, Zeref?"

"Helping," he retorted, folding his arms. "So that we can get back to our real job. Can you not think of any reason why someone might go to all this trouble to destroy the town centre after most of the inhabitants had been evacuated?"

"What…?"

"I am rather good at this, Lucy. If you want me to help, you're going to have to at least try to keep up. How about this: church, library, tavern, bakery, offices – which was destroyed first?"

"How am I supposed to know that?"

"Precisely."

"…You think they destroyed everything in the town centre in order to hide their true target?"

"It's what I would do."

At long last, she dragged her gaze away from the severed church and towards her companion. His eyes glittered with life, four hundred years of it, which no teenage tantrum would ever truly be able to suppress. There was a part of him which seemed simply incapable of passing up a new puzzle.

"Zeref," she asked, "do you know what happened here?"

"I don't know any more than you do, Lucy. What resources I have in Fiore are at present devoted to tracking down your wayward guild; I am not interested in what happens in an insignificant town like this."

"But… weren't you the one who first mentioned Alchemilla Town to me?"

"I doubt it. I had not heard of the place until you decided that its fate was more important than your guild, and I shall endeavour to forget it as soon as I leave."

"That's odd. I know I've heard it somewhere recently…" She pressed her fingers to her forehead in a vain attempt to focus her mental energy. Zeref was quiet – far better behaved than the pigeons, whose foraging was accompanied by low coos and aggravated squawks, breaking through her concentration like the sharp ends of feathers through a pillowcase-

"The pigeons!" she exclaimed.

"What about them?"

"Both Marguerite Town and Alchemilla Town use trained pigeons as messengers! That's where I've heard the name before – Sherria had to deliver an urgent message here by hand after the carrier pigeons in Marguerite went wild!" She snapped her fingers. "Couldn't another reason for the destruction be that the dark mages failed, and were trying to cover their true objective so they could try again with their enemies none the wiser?"

"It's possible."

"If the military outpost in Marguerite was warning the one in Alchemilla Town, perhaps they removed the villains' target from the town in time!"

"That's quite a leap of assumption. If they knew of the attack, why not request the help of local mages in advance – or at the very least, warn the townsfolk?"

"Because…"

She grimaced at the counterargument, and yet his tone had been far too neutral for him to be truly mocking an error in her thinking. She'd heard him do that; he was never subtle about it. She wondered if he was playing Devil's Advocate.

Thinking, she put forward, "No one I've asked has any idea why dark mages would attack the town, so perhaps whatever they were after was a secret that the military didn't want to reveal? Or maybe they thought the chance of an attack was low, so they moved it just in case, but didn't want to draw attention to it by requesting reinforcements? Yes, I know it's an unlikely hypothesis, but here's the thing: it's testable. We can go to the military outpost and check their communication records!"

"…I don't suppose telling you that it's completely irrelevant to our mission and a total waste of our time will make the slightest bit of difference, will it?"

"Not on your life," Lucy grinned.

Alchemilla Town's military outpost was a dull, circular tower standing alone on the outskirts of town: too young to have any historical value, too short to hold a captive princess, and too not-attached-to-a-castle to be interesting. Its sole noteworthy feature, the handful of pigeons fluttering around the windows at the top, was hardly a mark in its favour. A lone guard stood outside, bedecked in the fancy chainmail and distinctive yellow-and-blue-striped shield of the Fiorean military. She could probably take him, but there might be more security inside – and besides, with her usual team out of the picture, Lucy thought she would give the pacifist approach a try.

After instructing Zeref to stay hidden – which he seemed happy enough to do, since it meant not having to help her – she approached the guard with the most innocent smile she could manage plastered to her face (which was, in the absence of any trouble-causing teammates, surprisingly convincing). "Hi, there."

"Good morning," came the stiff response.

Lucy groaned inwardly; he didn't sound hungover at all. Nonetheless, she clapped her hands together and cracked up the innocent charm a notch. "I don't suppose there's any chance you'll let me in, is there?"

"Let you in to the secure military outpost?" echoed the guard. "I don't think your odds are very good on that one, no."

"Here's the thing," Lucy pressed. "There's this soldier I have a crush on, and I got a bit drunk last night and my idiot sister convinced me to send him my confession via messenger pigeon from the outpost in Marguerite Town… and it was a stupid stupid stupid idea, and I absolutely have to delete it from the records before he reads it!"

"No."

"But it's so soppy and… ugh. I'll never live it down if anyone finds out… please let me in before he arrives for his shift!"

"No."

"Come on, help out a girl in need-"

"All military communications are recorded as a matter of course. Removing one from the record is sabotage and carries a charge of treason against the state. You should have thought about that before you illegally hijacked an army communications network to confess to a man you're not even bold enough to talk to."

Lucy gulped.

The worst part was that Zeref didn't look remotely surprised when she shuffled sheepishly back to him. "Don't say anything!" she cut him off, cheeks flaring red. "I'm not giving up yet! Just wait for the guard's shift to change – I'm already working on Plan B!"

"I don't know what's worse," Zeref remarked. "That you would dignify that disaster by calling it a plan, or that, by labelling it Plan A, you considered it the most likely of all your plans to succeed."

"Shut up."

Plan B.

"Good morning," Lucy announced, putting on a professional air that would have done her father proud. "I'm a guild mage hired to investigate the destruction done to Alchemilla Town the night before last. I have uncovered evidence indicating that the military moved something of great value to the attackers out of the town prior to the incident. I require access to all your military communications from Marguerite Town over the past few days in order to track down and apprehend the criminals."

The new guard gave her a dubious look. "The army's communications are confidential. Civilians need written permission to view the records."

"And how long do you think that will take?" Lucy countered. "The villains are getting further away as we speak! Don't you want to see justice done? Three civilians died! Does that mean nothing to you?"

"Well… I suppose if you really are from a Council-sanctioned guild, we could make an exception in an emergency… which guild are you with, again?"

Proudly, she raised her hand, flashing her guild mark. "Fairy Tail."

"No."

"But-"

"Get lost."

"Not. A. Word," Lucy hissed to a smirking Zeref.

Plan C.

"I'm an inspector from the Fiorean Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. We've received a report that you've been abusing your pigeons-"

Admittedly, the obvious lack of any identification had already relegated that plan from first place down to third, but panicking under the guard's interrogation and calling the birds wicked-eyed devil-beasts probably hadn't helped her case.

Plan D; the first of the no, I haven't really thought these through, I just don't want to be stood with a hysterical Zeref any more collection, found at the bottom of all good barrels.

"No, really, I do know Princess Hisui, I swear, just call her and ask, she'll give me permission-"

The D stood for desperate.

Plan E.

"I can't believe you thought that was going to work," Zeref sniggered, as Lucy tugged the neckline of her top back up to a modest height.

"SHUT UP."

"I don't suppose you'd like to contribute any ideas, would you?" Lucy sighed, once her so-called teammate had stopped laughing long enough for her to get a word in.

"What, and deprive myself of more quality entertainment? Not a chance. You're right, this was better than going to Blue Pegasus. We should take detours more often."

She narrowed her eyes at him. "You say that, but unless we can overcome this obstacle, Alchemilla Town isn't going to be just a detour – we'll become permanent residents."

"And even your disastrous attempts to seduce the guards would cease to amuse me after a few hundred years," he reflected. "I suppose we'd better move on, then. Do you want help breaking in properly, or do you think you can handle that one on your own?"

"I still don't want to use force, if I can help it," Lucy frowned. "Plus, the other guards are inside, and I've already annoyed them all. I have another idea."

"Ooh, does it involve more flirting?"

"You'd be so lucky," she shot back. "You stay here, keep out of sight, and put that popcorn away."

He gave an exaggerated sigh. "Alright, but if you're not back in fifteen minutes, I'm coming in through the front door. There's not much point in letting this farce continue if I'm not even allowed to watch."

The F in Plan F stood for Final (and not, as Zeref had suggested, Futile, Failure, Forlorn or Flirtation. The events of that morning had left him in an unusually good mood, and Lucy was quickly coming to realize that he was more bearable when he was sulking).

The Final Plan was simplicity itself.

In fact, it was so simple that someone else had already thought of it.

Lucy slipped round to the back of the tower, planning to climb up to one of the windows through which the messenger pigeons entered and left, only to find that that route was already in use by a stack of four people, each standing on the shoulders of the one beneath.

She stared.

Then she stared some more.

The person at the top made a grab for the windowsill and missed. The human tower swayed, but managed to recover.

Lucy couldn't decide whether this was the most audacious attempt to break into a homing pigeon base that she had ever seen, or a training session for the local circus.

It didn't help that the four thieves-or-maybe-acrobats in question looked identical. They all had the same young, female build, the same face – to a scary degree of similarity – and they were all wearing the same costume, a skimpy bikini-like outfit that lent a lot of credence to the acrobat theory. Perhaps they were a crowd-drawing quadruplet act.

Then again, Lucy had seen more competent displays of acrobatics during the Happy Hour scramble at Fairy Tail's bar, so maybe they were thieves attempting a more creative approach. Even as she watched, the topmost performer (because they were performing for an enraptured audience of one, whether they knew it or not) snatched at the windowsill and missed again. This time, the entire tower overbalanced.

Lucy leapt into action, calling out a single word: "Aries!" There was an explosion of what looked like pink candyfloss, into which the quadruplets safely plunged (a scene which would have fit so perfectly into a travelling circus that Lucy promptly revised her opinion of their profession yet again).

Sprinting forwards to help them, Lucy was startled to see that there was, in fact, only one of them after all. Three-quarters of the balancing act had disappeared, leaving a single young woman sitting up amidst the Ram Spirit's wool, murmuring, "What is this…?"

"Uh, are you alright?" Lucy called.

The stranger glanced up. Her chosen outfit revealed an awful lot of flawless skin, while her white-blonde hair stuck proudly up at the front, a statement of fashion – or perhaps defiance of it. She was beautiful to the point where some distant part of Lucy's mind wondered why she was bothering trying to enter the outpost by acrobatics rather than simply flirting with the guard, before she snapped at it to shut up.

"Was this your doing?" she asked Lucy, who nodded. "Thank you."

"Don't mention it," Lucy smiled, helping her to her feet. "Though, what happened to the rest of your team?"

"They were just duplicates created by my magic. I was using them to help me, uh…"

"Practise your circus routine round the back of this secure military outpost?" Lucy grinned.

"This isn't what it looks like, I swear!"

"Uh-huh."

"No, the thing is, I have this crush on a solider here, and I sent him this icky confession by pigeon last night when I was drunk and now I really need to get it back before he sees- hey, it's no laughing matter!"

"Say no more, sister." A giggling Lucy flashed her a grin of comradeship. This stranger was definitely not part of the circus, then. She was a woman after her own heart. "Okay, this is going to sound a bit crazy, but… we both need to get into this tower for, you know, boyfriend issues. So how about I don't report you, you don't report me, and we work together to get to the top… alright?"

"Sure."

"May I ask your name?"

"I'm Briar."

"And I'm-"

"Stardust," Briar interrupted.

Lucy blinked. "My name's Lucy."

"Stardust."

"…Whatever works for you." As nicknames went, Lucy had had worse. "Right, here's what I'm thinking for Human Tower v2.0. I'll put Taurus at the bottom – he's my strongest Celestial Spirit – and have Aries on standby in case we fall over again. Then two of your duplicates, and then if I climb to the top, I can summon Loke into the pigeon coop and he can pull us through the window. Okay?"

Briar nodded. By combining their resources, they made swift progress. Lucy only fell once – if a non-professional acrobat could do it, how hard could it be? – and Loke, after materializing into the top of the tower, pulled Lucy up, who in turn helped drag a duplicate of Briar in through the window. The other Briars vanished. Lucy wondered if one of them remained the original when she split, or if she could choose any one of them and re-form at that location. It was unusual magic indeed.

Fortunately for them both, the room at the very top of the tower was empty – empty, that was, of angry guards. By contrast, Lucy had never seen a room which boasted a higher pigeon density. All the walls were stacked with cages, each of which housed a sleek grey pigeon, far better groomed than their wild urban counterparts but with equally sinister stares. Lucy could have sworn that every single one of them was looking directly at her.

"Stardust!" Briar whispered urgently, gesturing to the desk in the middle of the room.

Lucy hurried over. The desk drawer was locked, and there were no keys in sight, but Briar touched the door and it split immediately in two. She pulled both halves away and threw them to the floor.

Several identical green logbooks sat within. Silently praising the diligence of the administration staff, Lucy flicked through them until she found the messages from Marguerite dated 7 July – and sure enough, there was only the one, courtesy of the Sherria Express.

Her heart leapt – and then immediately sank. The message meant nothing to her. She couldn't even identify the language it was written in. But it was the only clue she had, so in defiance of the rising tide of disappointment, she whipped her notebook from her bag and began to copy the message line for line; symbol for symbol; non-word for non-word.

Briar, meanwhile, was feeding the other logbooks one by one into her own bag. "Just bring the whole book, Stardust!"

"That's stealing! They might need those messages!" Briar gave her a look – I'm obviously going to take it anyway – but Lucy was used to that from dealing with Zeref; she stuck out her bottom lip and continued copying as quickly as she could. The last thing she wanted was for the only copy to end up in the hands of her partner in crime. "Besides, do you really need all of them?"

"Of course! I don't know which one my message is in. A maiden's heart is on the line here!"

A smile touched Lucy's face, only to vanish right away, prompted this time by the sound of footsteps. In a flash, Briar was at the door, propping it shut with the desk chair. Lucy kept writing, even when the guards began to pound on the other side of the door, setting the pigeons off into a frantic chorus. She gritted her teeth – and then the first tendril of white gas snaked under the door.

Poison? It was unlikely to be fatal; they wouldn't risk exposing the pigeons to that. It was probably a kind of knockout gas. And from the way it was completely ignoring the windows and choosing to gather in the centre of the room instead, she deduced that it was being generated by some kind of magic artefact.

Her Scorpio form had an innate resistance to toxins. That would buy her time. With no time to think – no time to reach for her keys – she drew upon her magic and slipped effortlessly into the changed form. Her senses sharpened; her aching fingers tensed; she did not dare to look up until she had finished copying the symbols.

Then and only then did she throw the book over to Briar, who was leaning out of the windowsill in an attempt to drag uncontaminated air into her lungs. She caught it, nodded in thanks, and jumped out, relying on Aries to cushion the landing. Lucy was about to follow, but paused after just one step. As much as she disliked pigeons, she didn't like the idea of them being drugged and separated from their handlers either.

Groaning inwardly, she tore away the chair and then sprinted across the room as the door slammed open. A crossbow bolt narrowly missed her shoulder – and then she was gone, out of the window and into the pink marshmallow fluff below.

By the time she rolled out of the softness incarnate, there was no sign of Briar. "Where did she go?" Lucy demanded of Aries, who apologized and indicated four different directions at once. If Lucy's hunch about Briar's magic was right, and she could re-form herself in any of those four locations, Lucy would never catch her.

At least she'd made her own copy of the message. In retrospect, perhaps she shouldn't have helped such a shady character to the top of the tower… but then again, Lucy's own intentions hadn't exactly been pure. Besides, with the magic she'd glimpsed splitting open the cupboard, Briar could have taken down the tower easily and retrieved the books from the ruins, yet she had chosen the non-violent circus stunt approach just like Lucy.

Well, it was unlikely they would ever meet again.

If only she could say the same about the guards.

The tower's front doors opened and the whole platoon spilled forth, led by the five angry men Lucy had failed to persuade, deceive, or seduce. She dismissed all her Spirits, scrambled to her feet, and cursed – not in that order – and, maintaining her Scorpio transformation for the added physical ability, began sprinting back towards Zeref.

He did not look pleased to see her, though she liked to think this was because of her current entourage rather than any personal animosity.

"RUN!" she shouted before he could protest.

"Lucy, what have you done?"

"Hey, you can't come on a mission to save Fairy Tail and expect to get through the whole thing without running away from law enforcement at least once," she breezed, hurtling past him as a blur of crimson starlight.

"Good grief." Zeref took one look at the horde of soldiers chasing after her and gave the sigh of a man who was far too old for these shenanigans.

Then he snapped his fingers, and the whole world went still.

Lucy felt it through her keys first. They vibrated suddenly upon her hip, as if tapped by a diamond hammer. She had known them to react to the presence of other Spirits – or to her emotions – but never so strongly; never like this.

She had never seen magic like this before, either. There was no colour in the world. Not any more. Sky and grass and town – all were as grey as the military tower; a landscape etched in black and white. Energy had disappeared when colour did. All motion was postponed, and all life suspended; she closed her eyes for several seconds and looked out upon an unchanged world. The soldiers had not taken a single step towards her.

"Come on," Zeref said, and she jumped. There should have been no sound in such a still world – and there wasn't, apart from the sound the two of them made.

When he began walking back down the street at his usual pace, she fell into step beside him, still trembling with nervous energy. Her limbs felt cheated of their terrified flight to freedom. "I can't believe you know magic this stupendous and you're using it so that you don't have to run anywhere," she grumbled.

"I can push you back into ordinary time if you'd rather run for your life."

"That's not what I said."

"Thought not," he smirked.

Lucy glowered at him. "You know, this magic would have been really helpful in breaking into a military outpost without being noticed."

"True, but it would have been a lot less entertaining for me. And, if you recall, I did offer to help."

It didn't occur to me that you might have been offering a pacifist solution, was the response that jumped straight into Lucy's mind, but this time, she managed to hold her tongue. She had learnt by now that those words would upset him. Maybe he would pretend they didn't, but they would… and that wasn't something she wanted.

Zeref continued, "So, after all that, were you able to get the message?"

"Oh! Yes. Here." She handed over the notebook. "What does it say?"

"…Why are you asking me?"

"You're the one who writes in weird languages!"

He gave her a look of despair. "Classical languages, Lucy; languages in which the ancients preserved their magical knowledge for future generations. This looks like some kind of military code."

"Well, can't you decrypt it?"

"I'd need a little more to go on than a single line of letters!"

"…Yeah, I didn't mean you personally," Lucy sighed. "What I meant was, don't you have people who can decrypt military code? Spies in the army and all that?"

"Huh. Come to think of it, I probably do." He ripped the sheet from her notebook and tucked it into one of his invisible pockets. "I'll get back to you on that."

"And you call yourself a Spymaster General…" Lucy lamented, shaking her head sadly.

"I have never called myself that. I am simply a very resourceful man. You're the one giving me strange nicknames."

"Actually, it was Cana- ow!"

She had gone to return the notebook to her bag, and her hand had brushed up against her celestial keys – and rather than the usual gentle glow of magic, what she felt instead was searing pain. There was heat, incredible heat, as if they had been removed from their forge in the heart of a red giant only moments ago. "My keys- they're burning-!"

"What-?"

"Ow!"

She could feel the heat against her thigh now, rising quickly through warm to unpleasant. Zeref touched the keys and drew his hand back with a hiss, fingertips sizzling. Perplexity shimmered in his eyes. "What's going on?"

"That's my question! You're the self-proclaimed expert!"

"When did it start?"

"I don't know!" She tried to ignore the pain and remember. "I think they started vibrating when you first stopped time-!"

His forehead creased, but he snapped his fingers again. Instantly, colour flashed back into the world, ten times as dazzling for its momentary absence. With it came motion and sound, light and life – and when the stillness left the world it returned to her keys. The vibration ceased thrumming against her thigh, and she could feel the keyring already beginning to cool.

Lucy's frightened breath left her all at once. "What the hell was that?"

"I haven't the faintest idea," Zeref said. "Have they ever reacted like that to temporal magic before?"

"Well, it's not like I've tested it – but they never did that around Ultear, if that counts? Not even when she turned back time after the Grand Magic Games."

"How strange."

"You really have no idea what caused it?"

"None whatsoever. But I don't think it bodes well for my calculations." He paused in the middle of the road, and a notebook materialized in his hand. "No, not good at all…"

"Sure, but since time's running again, I think we should probably keep moving if we want to stay ahead of the guards. Just saying."

Zeref's head snapped up at her words, but to her dismay, she was already starting to recognize that look. It was his I wasn't listening to a thing you just said expression, and he pulled it off exceptionally well. She got the feeling that he'd had a lot of practice at ignoring people. "Lucy. You're still in Star Dress."

"Oh… I forgot about that. I was dressed for a high-speed chase." Physical enhancements aside, Scorpio's outfit did look a lot like it had been designed by a personal trainer.

"You did it without your key, didn't you? I sensed it."

"I didn't have time to do it properly." She tried to shrug off his concern, and failed; it was never reassuring when she couldn't follow the reasoning behind his questions. "But I told you I'd show you whenever, and I don't think it's a good idea to start your experiments when we're right in the middle of a daring escape from the law-"

"Lucy, it's the middle of the day. The constellation Scorpius isn't in the sky right now."

"Oh." She thought about how easily she had slipped into the transformation earlier; how there hadn't been the slightest hint that anything was amiss. "I wasn't thinking at all. I needed the boosted poison resistance from my Scorpio form, so I just… did it. What does that mean?"

"It means that I was right, and your magic isn't coming from the constellations. But if it's not the keys and it's not the gates… then where are you drawing Celestial Spirit magic from?"

"Does it matter?" she asked. "I mean, it's just my magic. Why does it have to come from somewhere?"

There was a whole minute of silence as Zeref's calculations occupied his full attention, and the road down which Lucy was expecting to see angry guards any moment now didn't occupy nearly as much of her own attention as it should have done.

"It isn't just your magic, by any means," Zeref said quietly. "And I think that how you're accessing it may matter a great deal. Lucy, I want to do one more test, just to be sure."

"What's that?"

"I want you to try Keyless Star Dress for a key you don't own. Libra, let's say. Her constellation is high during the summer evenings, so you'll probably find it easier mentally, even though we've just proven that it doesn't physically make a difference."

"I can't do it."

"Have you tried?" he persisted, and she bit her lip and glanced away. Gentle, but all the more insistent for it, he continued, "I need you to try it for me, Lucy."

She folded her arms. "I can't. It's rude. I can't just try and use the power of a Spirit I have no contract with."

"You're on good terms with Libra's current owner, aren't you?"

"Yukino, yeah. She's with Sabertooth."

"Then let's go to Sabertooth and ask Yukino for permission to try it. If we head straight there, we'll probably arrive before sunset-"

"Hang on, hang on," Lucy interrupted, holding her hands up in bemusement. "You want to go right now? This morning, you were freaking out over a half-day detour to Alchemilla Town, and now you're proposing that we go entirely out of our way just because you don't understand my magic?"

"That depends. Will you agree not to attempt any kind of keyless Celestial Spirit magic until I've got to the bottom of it?"

"Of course not! That's my ace in the hole!"

"Then yes, I want to go to Sabertooth right now."

He met her semi-disbelieving gaze with utter seriousness. Black eyes swam with it, the concern and the resolution that came from four hundred years of finding fewer and fewer things he didn't understand about magic, until stumbling across a radical new unknown was more frightening to him than the possibility of failing their quest.

"You're serious about this, aren't you?" she asked weakly.

"Very much so. Although, Sabertooth isn't entirely out of our way. It's about as far as Blue Pegasus is from here, and we would have had to go there eventually, to pick up the Fairy Tail mage who joined them. Ideally, I would have liked to get Laxus on board first… but I suppose he isn't going anywhere. Blue Pegasus can wait until tomorrow."

Lucy stared at Zeref.

Zeref stared at Lucy.

No childishness now, just a sincere request from one adult to another for the sake of something that could be more important than either of them, and Lucy realized that she didn't have the reason – or the heart – to contradict him. "Sabertooth it is."

A/N: To clarify the Sabertooth scene in the last chapter: that was Natsu picking up the Avatar job from Sabertooth. In canon, after visiting Juvia, Natsu and Lucy go to Sabertooth and take the Avatar job from Rogue in order to protect Frosch. In this timeline, Natsu has taken the Avatar job on his own (for different reasons), and Lucy and Zeref are going on their way blissfully unaware of Avatar's existence (for now. As you may recall, Briar is a canon member of Avatar...). Sorry for the confusion - I got it into my head that Rogue's job doesn't name Avatar in the manga (turns out it does), so in retrospect I could have made it more obvious while still being true to canon.

Also - and apologies in advance for the long note - but I probably should be clearer about the point I tried to make in last week's A/N (and failed miserably). So far, this story has been very focussed on Lucy and the people she's meeting and the Celestial Spirits etc. But ultimately, this story isn't 'the adventures of Lucy'. It's an alternate ending to Fairy Tail. And that involves introducing some other characters and themes (*coughAlvarezcough*) long before they start having an impact on Lucy's side of the plot. This arc is the one where we start to see that coming in. In almost every chapter, I try to make sure that there's at least one scene of Lucy and/or Zeref driving the 'main plot' forwards. But there won't always be. Furthermore, the scale of this story is far bigger than anything I have written before, and sometimes the pay-off to a scene or setup won't come for a very long time. Everything that happens does happen for a reason, but that reason won't always be immediately obvious.

In short: after a few chapters focussing on Lucy and her quest, don't be surprised to see a scene or even a whole chapter narrated by an entirely new character. It will all come together, but there's a long way to go yet. I hope that makes sense, and gives you a better feel for what's to come. ~CS