The Scars That Make You Whole

By CrimsonStarbird

Church of Blood and Stone, Part 3

-In Chains-

It wasn't a proper quest until the heroes were caught by the antagonists and thrown into a cell.

That narrative certainty was one small silver lining to Lucy's current situation. Not that a wafer of white cloud was particularly visible amidst the solar storm of amusement that was watching Zeref interact with his fan club, but she couldn't exactly tease him about that until he regained consciousness, so ticking off another box on the hero's to-do list would have to suffice.

As far as prison cells went, she'd seen better. There wasn't even a token piece of furniture behind the floor-to-ceiling bars. It certainly wasn't going to knock the Central Crocus Police Station from the top spot any time soon, but then again, the evil cultists probably had to pay for these facilities out of their own pockets rather than the taxpayers', so it wasn't really a fair comparison.

She sat with her back to the wall, accepting the chill of the stone in return for a modicum of support, while her cellmate lay sprawled across the floor where the cultist had dumped him. A black chain stretched between her manacled wrists, and from there to the wall – long enough to give her an illusion of freedom, for their purpose was to bind her magic, not her body. With her power suppressed, the simple iron bars separating them from the rest of the shadow-drenched cavern presented an insurmountable obstacle.

What really differentiated this prison from her previous ones, however, was the silence.

The usual soundtrack to captivity – whether that was the frantic bustle of law enforcement officials cursing the manager who had scheduled their shift for the worst night of the year, the lively chatter of drunks in neighbouring cells, or even the wind as it scratched and howled at the walls of the tower in which Master Jose had held her – was entirely absent from Avatar's dungeons. The earthy walls sucked up sound with ravenous efficiency.

When she thought about it, the whole hideout had been silent. Too silent. Other than Gray, and the cultist she had dubbed Mr Tea, she hadn't encountered a single other minion. And yet, from the size of the workshop and library, she estimated that the church was designed to serve around a hundred cultists. So where were they all?

There was no sign of Natsu, either. There were other cells in the dungeons, but they were all empty.

Perhaps Avatar no longer had a use for him… no, she couldn't think that. She wouldn't. It was more likely that they'd moved him when she and Zeref had been dragged down here. Keeping powerful prisoners apart was simply common sense.

That meant she had to focus on escaping first, and then resuming the search. With any luck, she'd soon be able to put this black church and its deranged inhabitants behind her.

As if on cue, there came a groan from the other side of the cell. With a clink of chains, Zeref pushed himself up with both arms and fixed Lucy with a bleary stare. "I don't suppose," he croaked, "that you're going to tell me it was all just a nightmare, are you?"

"Nope, sorry. You really do have a fan club, and it is both creepily obsessive and hilariously clueless at the same time," she assured him cheerfully.

He slumped back down to the ground. "That's it, I'm done. I've had enough of this adventure."

"On the plus side," Lucy ventured, grinning, "for all that Avatar are a little bit hopeless, they did actually manage to capture the legendary Black Mage, so… really, you should be proud of them."

"This hardly counts," he grumbled. "I'm not equipped to deal with imbeciles. And besides, you can't just hit people like that. It's rude."

"…Uh-huh."

"Oh, don't give me that look. You got caught too."

"Only because, once you were taken out by that dastardly surprise attack, the cultist pushed his spiked mace against your throat and made it very clear what he would do if I didn't surrender."

He looked at her as if she was as imbecilic as their captors. "You should have let him do it."

"Don't be ridiculous."

"I'm not being ridiculous at all. You do remember the part where I'm immortal, right?"

Lucy's mouth tightened. That thought had crossed her mind, one icy slash of strategy in the haze of bemusement, and she might well have done it if her brain hadn't kept processing, running the simulation through to its end, rendering with perfect clarity a vision of that steel spike driving through yielding flesh, of a panicked, choking final breath sputtering through the torrent of blood… and the strategic part of her brain had immediately been outvoted by the rest of her.

Tactical advantage or otherwise, she was never going to let that happen to a friend.

Perhaps he deduced most of this from her silence, because Zeref sighed as he sat up, weighed down by exasperation. "Like I told you last time you foolishly tried to save my life, Lucy, I would greatly prefer it if you took the strategically optimal decision, regardless of the consequences for me. We could have been at Blue Pegasus by now if you'd just focussed on beating the enemy."

"Your preference has been noted; I look forward to disregarding it in the future."

"Lucy-"

"No, this isn't a discussion, Zeref. This is me telling you I'm not going to do it. End of."

It was clear from his expression that this was not the end, as far as he was concerned, and she cut in before he could drag out the argument. "If you have a problem with that, you should start by addressing the part where your actions force me to make such a decision in the first place. The irony of the fact that you came here to protect me, and then proceeded to have a mental breakdown which caused us both to be captured, is not lost on me."

"To protect you…" he echoed, with a curious tilt of his head. "Is that what I said?"

At first, Lucy thought he was mocking her, but as she opened her mouth to snap some meagre defence, she caught the lustreless black of his eyes. They weren't teasing, they weren't enigmatic; they were merely… dull. A shiver ran down her spine, colder than the manacles, colder than the dim-lit dungeons, colder than the eyes of the Evil Warlord Version of Zeref, whose fanciful likeness had led an entire evil cult to forsake their real deity for a fantasy. She remembered, like a blow to the gut, that night outside Jasmine, when he'd been inconsistent and contradictory and entirely unaware of it until she'd pointed it out.

Carefully, she said, "Yes, you thought it was too dangerous for me to go on my own, so you came with me."

"No, that doesn't sound like the sort of thing I would do. That can't be it." The dazed tone had not left his voice; he spoke abstractly, as if puzzled by a mystery of mathematics rather than a decision he himself had made less than two hours ago. "There must have been some other reason…"

"But presumably you'd know if you lied to me," she pointed out, bemused.

"Presumably," he echoed.

"Zeref, are you okay?"

She hadn't meant to blurt it out. His attention snapped to her like a diving hawk, awareness plunging out of the mist. Rather than an explanation, though – or even an acknowledgement – he just said, "I don't much like being imprisoned, Lucy."

"Then let's do something about it," she asserted. "First of all, because I'd rather look like a bit of a fool now than an enormous one later, I've got to ask: you can't use your magic either while those handcuffs are on, can you?"

A faint smile, so familiar after the blankness, so alive, that her heart lurched with relief even though his words should have had the opposite effect: "If I could, would I still be here?"

"I'll take that as a no, then."

"You would be wise to do so."

"Okay… well, that pretty much wipes out all of our options. Hopefully, once Gray hears I've been captured, he'll come back and rescue us…"

"Gray is here?"

"Yeah, I ran into him earlier. He's infiltrated Avatar as a spy…" Then she frowned as she remembered precisely what he'd said. "Though, thinking about it, he also said that he couldn't help me without blowing his cover, and so he intended to leave rather than get caught up in it. I guess that's why he couldn't just let Natsu out either."

"Hmm. Interesting."

"Still, even if he doesn't come back, Jellal and Erza will probably storm the place if they haven't heard from me by morning," Lucy suggested, optimistically.

A sly smile quirked at the corner of Zeref's mouth. "Yes, I imagine Jellal's expression when he discovers who you brought along as your raiding partner will be rather amusing."

"Hmm, almost as amusing as his reaction to discovering that you were imprisoned by your own fanatical cult, I reckon."

His smile immediately became a glower. "Well, as fascinating as it would be to watch that situation play out, your friends are unlikely to show up any time soon. They won't want to jeopardize your stealth mission, and they won't know that anything has gone wrong until you fail to report in tomorrow."

"True…"

The dungeons returned to that eerie, oppressive silence as she tried and failed to find a solution to their current predicament. Every clink of chains, the auditory embodiment of their captivity, came as a relief rather than a torment, proof that there was life in this empty place.

"There really wasn't as much fighting as I was anticipating," Lucy remarked. "For an evil base, this church is very… empty."

"Oh? You haven't worked out why that is?"

"No?" She groaned inwardly as the word left her lips. He was condescending enough without her admitting that she hadn't properly considered the matter. Hastily, she added, "Well, maybe they've all been sent out to attack a town or something. Or maybe the inner circle is really small, and they just happened to pick a large, ancient church for their base…"

Her bluffing didn't fool him for an instant. "You're thinking about it all wrong. Stop treating them as though they're fundamentally different to you… as though the fact that they're labelled as an evil cult somehow prevents them from acting as human beings."

Lucy thought of the swordsman who, unprovoked, unknown, had attempted to cut down Macbeth from behind while he was trying to surrender. That was why there was ice in her voice as she said, "I don't follow."

Perhaps Zeref noticed her coldness, he usually did, but he did not comment on it. He made a swift twirling gesture with his hand. "Reverse your thinking. If I told you Magnolia was about to be attacked by powerful enemies of Fairy Tail, what's the first thing you'd do?"

"Evacuate the townsfolk," Lucy said at once.

"Right."

She stared at him. "Are you saying that they suspected they were going to be attacked, and moved the weaker members out of the church? Leaving just Gray and the tea guy behind?"

"I'm saying it's one theory you might want to consider alongside the others you suggested," came the measured response.

"But that doesn't make any sense," she argued. "First of all, that's not what dark guilds do. I've fought the Balam Alliance, remember? To guilds like that, their weaker members are less than worthless. They're only there to raise money and do menial jobs and die slowing down enemies they can't possibly beat. They're not supposed to be protected. And second, and perhaps most important: Avatar are a cult of morons. How can they possibly plan ahead like that? They can't even tell that they've imprisoned their own idol!"

Zeref made a non-committal noise.

She stared at him, disbelieving. "Oh, warming up to your fan club, are you?"

"Absolutely not. However, I do think there is a danger of oversimplifying the situation." He settled back against the stone, looking up at her with an enigmatic expression. "Imagine that you are an enemy of Fairy Tail, researching the guild in order to predict how they fight. What conclusions would you draw from Fairy Tail's reputation? That they fight recklessly? That they are likely to jump in without thinking? That they work well with the allies in their immediate proximity, but are unlikely to be coordinated overall?"

"I guess so?" Lucy echoed back, unsure where he was going with this.

"Exactly so. Which is why the manner in which your team won on the final day of the Grand Magic Games came as such a surprise to your opponents."

Lucy heaved a sigh. "Zeref, I don't know the details of what happened in that battle. As you may recall, I spent the entire time in the dungeons of Mercurius because someone couldn't keep a proper eye on their evil artefacts."

"Ah. I see."

When nothing else seemed forthcoming, she prompted, "So, would you like to try another analogy? Or perhaps, I don't know, just tell me what you're getting at?"

"Mm, I could, but on second thoughts, I don't think it will help my long-term goals to give you too many insights into how I might be preparing to fight your guild… so on balance, I probably won't."

Slyly, Lucy goaded, "Of course, by not telling me, you are tacitly helping to protect your fan club's secrets, so…"

A shudder seemed to pass through him. "All I'm saying, Lucy, is that it didn't matter that your winning team weren't in the habit of thinking things through, because they were following the instructions of someone who was very good at that indeed."

For a moment, Lucy's vision seemed to split in two: the bunch of Zeref-obsessed lunatics who couldn't tell when their so-called saviour was standing right in front of them, and the dark cult who had evaded detection by Crime Sorcière for months. The cult which Gray had deemed so dangerous he had cut all ties and spent several lonely months infiltrating. The cult whose swordsman had taken six powerful mages to subdue, three of whom would still be incapacitated if Zeref hadn't worked out how to undo the blade's curse.

"Zeref-" she began, but he held up his hand to stop her, jerking his head towards the stairs. She caught the sound of ponderous footsteps, the confident tread of a hunter who knew his prey wasn't going anywhere. Soon enough, the bald, bobbing head of Mr Tea entered the dungeons and approached his prisoners.

"Ah, I see you are both awake. Good." He gave an approving nod. Lucy's eyes narrowed. "Perhaps," he continued, "you would like to start by sharing who you are working for?"

In a single angry gesture, Lucy leapt to her feet and pulled the chains tight. "Where's Natsu?"

Pain burst suddenly in her shoulder. The manacles were moving of their own accord, forcing her hands high above her head, too high. Her elbows were bent awkwardly, her back arched; there was an awful moment of stretching – and then she was in the air, suspended by the sharp edge of black metal pressing into her wrists. She bit her lip and did not utter a sound.

"I don't think you fully understand your situation here," reasoned Mr Tea. "This is not a tea party. Not for those who defile our sacred shrine. I will ask you again: who are you working for? The dark-hunting guild, Crime Sorcière? The Magic Council? Some other faction?"

"I won't tell you anything!" Lucy spat. "What did you do to Natsu?"

This time, she felt the cultist's magic despite her deadened senses, and it swept across her skin like a swarm of spiders. The manacles moved again. Her wrists and ankles were wrenched apart until her spine was screaming in protest.

Through eyes watering from the agony, she glimpsed Zeref in the corner of the cell. He might as well have been watching Lucy and her interrogator conducting a pleasant interview for the Weekly Sorcerer, for all the concern he was expressing. She knew that if Natsu had been here, he would have been raging against their enemy for daring to harm her in front of him, roaring challenges and fighting against his shackles with all he had…

And not having any effect at all, interjected the snarky part of her brain, which, it transpired, had not quite forgiven Natsu despite her decision to rush to his rescue.

Better ineffectual rage than quiet acceptance, she argued back. What sort of person can sit and watch without even a token protest…?

One who has told you repeatedly that he is not your friend.

"Now, what shall be your penal-tea?" hummed Mr Tea. "The iron maiden? The rack?" A wave of his hand brought each device into existence, cloaked in the same nauseating magic still pouring down Lucy's arms from the manacles. "What about the wooden horse? It's been a while since I last got to use that…"

Zeref leaned forwards suddenly, and a spark of hope ignited in Lucy's heart, because he was going to fight for her after all-

Clapping his hands together excitedly, Zeref requested, "Ooh, can you do the foot-licking torture?"

If Lucy had control over her feet, she'd have kicked him.

"Hmm." Mr Tea stroked his chin. "I can't remember the last time anyone asked for that. It's been outlawed since ancient times…"

Zeref nodded with the delight of a child set free in a sweetshop. "It was even illegal when I was young, and you could get away with all sorts of things back then. I've always wanted to see it in action!"

"Foot-licking? What kind of perverted torture is that?" Lucy shrieked. "And whose side are you on, anyway?"

"No, you're right. I can't pass up this chance, especially with an audience who will appreciate its beauty," Mr Tea said gravely. "Foot-licking it is. Wait right here."

And, leaving Lucy in stunned silence, he dashed back up the stairs.

With his disappearance, the magic affecting Lucy's manacles vanished, and she dropped to a crouch. Slowly, disdainfully, she stood up and brushed herself down.

In a voice that would have had an ice mage reaching for a hot water bottle, she said, "Zeref, you are a traitor and a pervert, and I'm not entirely sure which is worse."

"Maybe," he agreed easily, a slight tilt of his head, a glimmer of light in lively dark eyes. "Or maybe I noticed that our enemy's magic, foul that it is, only seems to affect torture devices. Maybe I then recalled reading that the foot-licking torture somehow involves a live goat, and correctly hypothesized that his magic would be incapable of creating a living creature from nothing, thus forcing him to go and obtain one from the closest village… and buying us some time in which to make good our escape."

"…Oh."

"Not that I would object to watching-"

"DO NOT FINISH THAT SENTENCE."

But she was grinning despite herself, because that, in a nutshell, was the difference between her current and previous teammates.

If her friends were here, they'd have raged in pure fury against their captor for hurting her, and though she'd have loved them for it, it would have achieved nothing. Zeref, however, would sit and watch, utterly unaffected by anything Avatar did to her… and then he'd do something clever that would make all the difference.

Of course, a second chance to escape wasn't going to do much good if escape remained impossible.

"That's all well and good," she told him, "but we're still both trapped in here, so if you've got some sort of plan for breaking out of magic-suppressing handcuffs, now would be a good time to make it known to the floor."

"I do," came the calm response. "You have to kill me."

"I'm- I'm sorry?" she choked.

"Kill me. It will force my curse to activate, which will shatter the restraints and free me." That beautiful humour from a moment ago had entirely vanished from his voice. There was nothing but polished gravity, the unblinking void, waiting with patience for her to comprehend his words.

"I thought you said you couldn't use magic with those handcuffs on…"

Without that often-childish playfulness, even his half-smile seemed unfamiliar. "To which the correct follow-up question would have been, if that were the case, why do I not wear them all the time?"

She opened her mouth and then closed it again. Her eyes narrowed in suspicion, and he shrugged.

"Well, I didn't lie to you. These restraints prevent me from consciously using magic, just as they would anyone else. What they can't do is suppress the curse upon my body."

At her continued glare – how else was she to react, after what he'd so casually suggested? – he sighed, and patted the stone. "Sit. I'll tell you what I know about how my curse operates."

When she hesitated, he added, "If all you're going to do is stand there and glare at me anyway, you might as well listen, no?"

Reluctantly, she did as he said.

"I suppose I shouldn't really call it a curse," he began thoughtfully. "That word implies intent – as though it was done to me deliberately, by someone or something with the ability to make decisions. That isn't strictly true. It's just easier to think of it that way: easier for those who have witnessed it to attribute it to an old superstition, a pagan god, than to try to understand it; easier for me to phrase it in my mind as if there's someone else to blame."

"Then how did it happen?" she inquired, curious despite herself.

He gave her a pointed look. "I never said I'd tell you that."

"Fine," she grumbled, even as she realized that she could no longer pretend not to be interested, no matter how macabre the declaration that had triggered the conversation.

"In truth, I only discovered a lot of this very recently, myself. From what I've been able to work out, there is an anomaly within me. A fragment of something that shouldn't be. A singularity in the field of my magic, right here." He tapped his chest once, over his heart, and then let his hand fall back to the stone. "It isn't supposed to exist in reality. It can't exist. And yet it does. Thus, its power is not constrained by the ordinary rules of what is and isn't possible. It is, in essence, a source of limitless magic."

"Limitless?" The startled word slipped out before Lucy could stop it; a wry smile touched his lips.

"Don't get so excited. I can't use it. My actual magic is perfectly normal, and perfectly finite; if it is greater than anyone else's, it is so purely because I have lived longer, and pushed my magic further, than anyone before me. The singularity at the very core of it, by contrast, contains both no magic and magic without limit. If I try to tap into it to fuel a spell, it yields no energy to me. However, it has two purposes: to keep me alive, and to take the lives of those around me. When it acts to fulfil one of those two aims, with or without my permission, it becomes exactly as powerful as it needs to be."

"Which means what, exactly?"

"The death magic of my curse cannot be blocked or resisted, else I would simply surround myself with strong allies, who could throw it off as they might any other magic. Rather, when the singularity activates, it does so with just enough power to ensure that the death it brings cannot be stopped. If the strongest mage in the world put all of his power into an invulnerable shield, the curse would clash against the shield until its caster ran out of magic to sustain it, and then have just enough power left over to kill. Certainly, the curse has limitations – a short range and my practised ability to control it being the most useful ones, and it can't affect creatures that are naturally immune to magic – but lack of power is not one of them. In that respect, it is functionally limitless."

"And your immortality is the same?" Lucy guessed.

"Yes. It does not matter how much magic is invested in killing me. The curse always has more, and so it always succeeds in preventing my death. The power any mage possesses is finite; that anomaly alone is infinite."

"So how does that help us?"

Zeref raised his hands, letting the torchlight glitter upon the magic-suppressing manacles, before that too was sucked into the gloom of the dungeons. "These work by forming a barrier, so to speak, between a mage's magical core and physical reality, stopping them from manifesting any magic. It is indestructible, undefeatable, and capable of restraining the most powerful of mages with as little effort as one with no magic at all."

He shifted into a more comfortable position; chains clinked and fell silent too quickly. "At the moment, the anomaly at the core of my magic is bound in the same way. Currently it is dormant, but if it were to activate, it would come up against the barrier created by the manacles. What do you think would happen then?"

"An unstoppable force, an immovable object," Lucy murmured. "Two infinities, each unable to surpass the other, just endlessly generating and suppressing magic…"

"Correct," Zeref confirmed. "Except, that's not what happens in practice. The singularity is perfect, an error of magic itself. It is infinite. These shackles are imperfect. They are man-made. Metal which binds magic can be refined through the generations by man's techniques, but it will never reach perfection – whether one part in a thousand, or one part in a million, some impurity will always remain, some flaw in the design. It does not, in actuality, present an immovable object, but a flawed barrier. To any ordinary mage, that barrier is so high that the top will never be visible… but it is finite. If it tries to stop my curse from activating, it will be annihilated."

Then he looked her in the eye, and finished, still in that same neutral, academic, factual tone, "That is why you have to kill me."

She floundered. "You're actually serious about that?"

Zeref closed his eyes, exasperated. "Lucy, you do realize I can't actually die, don't you? All it will do is kickstart my immortality and shatter these restraints in the process… meaning we can get out of here before the cultist comes back. I may have been joking about the foot-licking torture earlier, but it really is rather unpleasant."

"Isn't there another way of doing it?" she asked desperately.

"Certainly, there's another way of getting my curse to activate," he mused, and his eyes glittered with danger. "But as your death would be permanent and mine merely temporary, I do believe my way is better."

"But… won't it heal you from non-lethal damage, like that time Sagittarius shot you in my house…?"

"Yes, but it's a side effect of my immortality, rather than its true purpose. Merely harming me won't cause it to come forth at full power… not unless a certain threshold is crossed, and honestly, it would be faster and easier to simply die."

It was the way he said it that got to her. So calm. So casual. Like he genuinely thought there was nothing wrong with it.

That was more horrifying than anything Mr Tea could threaten her with; it froze the words in her throat. That same ice stole lower, wrapping around her heart, holding it motionless for one, two, three seconds, until she managed to choke out the word, "No."

"Why not?"

"What do you mean, why not?" She almost laughed. "It's wrong, Zeref, like I told you earlier. The entire way that you talk about your own death is abhorrent, and I won't have any part in it."

"You're making this into a much bigger deal than it is, Lucy. Only one death in the length of time we've been on this quest is actually fairly good going for me."

"And don't you think there's something wrong with that?" she snapped.

"What, with utilizing our team's unique assets in a way that will result in both of us ending up alive and free? No, Lucy, I don't think there's anything wrong with that."

"Well, you'd best keep thinking, then," Lucy retorted. "Because you have yet to present me with any feasible methods for breaking out of here-"

"I've told you exactly how we're going to get out of here. We could have been back in the forest by now if you'd just got on with it-"

"Just got on with it – Zeref, you are talking about me killing you!"

"So? If an enemy was about to kill you, and I stepped in the way, you would be thanking me. How is this any different?"

"It's entirely different! You're asking me to do it in cold blood, heedless to the fact that I can't and won't do so!"

Darkness flashed in his eyes, a greater-than-usual absence of light, stolen away by anger. "Lucy, stop being so stubborn-"

"I'm not being stubborn! You're asking me to do something that I physically can't do! Maybe, if I just had to hurt you a little, I could do it if there was a good reason for it… but I'm not like you! I don't go around killing people!"

"This should suit you perfectly, then, because I won't die!"

"THAT DOESN'T MATTER!" She was on her feet now, shouting down at him with a fury few of her enemies had ever seen, and fewer still of her friends; a fury that made the madness which had thrown a table at her best friend seem like a warm hug. "You want me to try, and FRIENDS DON'T DO THAT TO THEIR FRIENDS!"

"We are not friends, Lucy."

"YES, WE ARE!" she howled. "I don't care what you say! You're my friend, and the last thing I want is to see you get hurt! If you think I'd agree to something like that, then you don't know me at all!"

"You are a fool, Lucy Heartfilia. We are enemies. Not only should you be jumping at this chance, you should be hoping that it somehow ends me permanently."

"Shut up, Zeref."

There was something darkly satisfying about those words. She sat down again, this time with her back to him, gazing out across the empty dungeons with a peculiar lightness in her chest. Silence fell, but it wasn't as complete as before. Their argument had saturated the stones, and then some; echoes of her defiance still bounced back and forth as wordless murmurs.

She wondered how long it would take their captor to return. A shudder ran through her at that, but it was nothing compared to the dread that sparked up inside her at the thought of the man she had spent so much time with suffering, thrashing, dying…

Zeref said, "That's it, then. We no longer have a chance of escaping from this place."

"Jellal and Erza will come and rescue us when I don't report in," came Lucy's firm rebuttal, and she was pleased by how steady her voice sounded. Being a prisoner was bad, but being willing to hurt – being prepared to kill – her friend was simply wrong.

"The morning is a long way off. Our captor is far more interested in you than me, and a man whose magic is specialized for torture is unlikely to make for a pleasant host."

"Fine. I'd much rather be hurt myself than watch you suffer."

Zeref did not deem that worthy of a response.

It didn't matter. No response could have changed how she felt. If this was what it took to stay true to herself, if this was the price her values demanded of her, she would gladly pay it-

"It is one thing to gamble with your own life like that," Zeref said. "It is quite another to do the same with Natsu's."

A tremor. A crack.

Not so perfect after all, her certainty.

"What… do you mean?"

Before she could stop herself, she had twisted to face him. He was sat back against the wall, shrouded in shadows, eyes gleaming in a way that nothing so black should have been able to gleam; a million miles away from her in that moment.

"Why, hasn't it occurred to you?" he mocked. "All this time, we've been sat in the dungeons awaiting torture – and, what, you just assumed your dear friend was having a nice friendly chat with Avatar's leaders?"

"I- I didn't-"

"You didn't think," Zeref finished for her, with horrible amusement. "He's been in Avatar's clutches for hours, now. And you want to subject him to another full night of their hospitality, when it's within your power to save him right now?"

"I don't-"

Her voice caught. She couldn't make the words come out.

"The enemy is dangerous, Lucy." Less mocking, now. He didn't need the tone to cut into her; the words he chose were managing that all on their own. "The enemy doesn't think like enemies you've fought before. If keeping Natsu alive will draw foes like us to them, they will kill him. His power means nothing; he is already caught."

Still she could not speak.

Quieter, but no gentler for it. "If you would rather suffer than do what you need to do to escape, that is your choice. But you have no right to make that decision for Natsu. The one to suffer the most for your childishness will not be you, but him."

Natsu.

Memories grappled fiercely for her attention.

Herself, standing in utter shock on what should have been the day of their happy reunion, right before the table she'd thrown had smacked him in the face; not so much the end of an era as a refusal to begin another that was exactly the same.

The horror he must have felt, when he went to her house and found that Zeref had been there; the awful, awful guilt, that he had let her be taken by an enemy; how much he would blame himself, because he should have been there with her that night, would have been if he hadn't chosen the wrong words in a crowded restaurant.

The desperation that had driven him to Sabertooth; to steal a job far too dangerous for anyone to take on alone; to rush headlong into danger, gambling everything he had on the hope that Avatar would lead him to Zeref, and Zeref would lead him to her…

It was her fault.

All of it.

She had only been thinking of herself when she'd rejected Natsu's request to reform Fairy Tail together, and then gone off with Zeref without so much as a note explaining her whereabouts. And she was only thinking of herself now, when she'd refused to do what was necessary to escape, and sentenced Natsu to countless more hours of torture in the process… all because she didn't want to do something that Zeref had explicitly asked her to do.

The waver of her voice matched her tear-blurred vision. "Promise me that you won't die."

"I am immortal, Lucy," he told her patiently.

"How should I-?" she whispered.

"Given the situation, and the resources available to us…" He raised one hand, so pale it already seemed like a ghost in the dark, and rested it against his neck. "I suggest using the chain."

That was real, too real. She jerked away from him, shaking her head violently. "I can't, Zeref, I can't-"

"Yes, you can." That conviction, a thousand times stronger than her own – how she hated it. "We're getting out of here together, right now."

"But if you die for real-"

"I won't!" he snapped. "I can't! The curse won't allow it!"

"What if this is the one time it fails?" she shouted.

There was a pause. Something flashed through his eyes – something he hadn't intended for her to see; a single fish slipping through the jaws of the whale that was his emotional control.

And it was gone just as quickly, back to that perfect darkness, and his words were every bit as flat and as cold as before. "Then you will have done both me and your guild a great service. But it won't happen, Lucy. I neither expect nor hope to die today – you have my word on that."

"Zeref…"

Ignoring her, he tugged aside his collar, baring his neck. His hand brushed the chain that had been hidden beneath. His fingers curled briefly around his pendant, hesitating, and then he pulled it over his head. "Ah," he said, regarding the pearlescent oval sat upon his palm. "All my pockets are extradimensional. I can't access them right now."

"I'll take it."

Again, that moment of hesitation, before he leaned forward suddenly and slipped the pendant over her head. "Thank you."

"…Yeah." The metal was warm upon her skin, warm with the heat of a body that would very soon turn cold.

That done, he shifted so that he was sat with his back to her, his hands demurely in his lap, just waiting.

Her heartbeat echoed in the space between her ears. She thought she might pass out – she would have given anything to do so in that moment, to fall into nothingness and leave this horrific reality behind – but the dizziness passed, and he was still waiting patiently to die.

It might as well have been her stood on the steps of the gallows. The horror in her stomach had crystalized into lead. She saw her arms move like they were a puppet's arms, manoeuvred into position by someone else entirely – crossing over, forming a loop of black chain, laying it around his neck. Hands too heartless to be her own gripped at the ends of the chain, just above where it locked around her wrists.

All those hands would have to do was pull.

And he wasn't resisting. Wasn't struggling. He was perfectly still, and she was the one shaking. It was nothing out of the ordinary for him, but for her…

She had been right all along. She couldn't go through with this.

"Don't think, Lucy," Zeref murmured. "Just do it. The faster the better."

How could he say that so calmly?

It wasn't fair.

It wasn't fair, it wasn't fair, it wasn't fair-

She tried to think about Natsu, tried to summon up the feeling of guilt that had forced her to agree to this in the first place, but it was too difficult. Maybe Natsu was suffering and dying somewhere, but he wasn't suffering and dying right in front of her. Her fault, maybe, but not her hands tightening the chain; not her strength crushing his windpipe; not her arms holding him down as his throat filled with blood and he struggled-

Don't think.

She closed her eyes. In her mind, she pulled back from the brink she had been stood upon, clamping down on every thought that tried to stray towards that edge and reaching for others instead. Pointless words. Snatches of poetry. Old, quirky memories. She grasped at everything that wasn't… well, the situation in front of her.

She distanced herself from those thoughts; pushed them away. There was a lingering aftertaste – sadness? – but the source was gone, and when she couldn't remember why she felt sad, it slipped away.

It wasn't as hard as she'd thought. It was almost like meditation, like falling asleep. A sensation of calm welled up from her magical core. It couldn't manifest in reality, the manacles prevented it, but it was still within her mind, her soul, sweeping all the thoughts she couldn't face right now up into its ever-present glow.

She pulled back further. Assorted nothingness blanketed her mind, a barrier between the one she wanted to save and the one that was her tool for doing so – she couldn't, in that moment, recall their names, if they even had them – and her own self.

Further. There was something she needed to do. She was going to do it.

Further still. There might be consequences. They might be horrific. They would probably be nothing. She couldn't remember them; couldn't remember what had scared her.

On three, she thought.

One. She vaguely recalled being frightened, but her fears were so trivial, so far away.

Two. She opened her eyes. There was a stranger in front of her, waiting. Some coloured emotion tried to raise its head at that, but she slammed it back down, hand around its neck, and it whimpered and didn't try again.

Three.

She pulled. There was resistance. She pulled harder and something gave, chains sunk deeper into flesh, something inside ruptured.

Nothing worth noting.

His back arched, further than should have been possible. His body jerked. Choking.

Nothing worth noting.

Thrashing, too weak to shake her rigid arms. Weak, and then weaker still, fading, feeble.

Nothing worth noting there, either.

And then nothing full stop.

It was easy.

It didn't feel good.

It didn't feel bad.

She didn't feel anything at all.

Zeref snapped back to consciousness mid-convulsion.

The twist of his body was wrong, the arch of his back was wrong, his balance was wrong; there was an inch or so between him and the ground and he didn't fight the fall. He sprawled on the stone, drawing deep breath after deep breath through teeth that had yet to unclench. Pain sloshed back and forth through his body like a staggering drunkard, desperately seeking some sort of injury to justify its persistence, and upon finding none, it retreated into the mire from which his thoughts were currently hauling themselves out.

His next heartbeat resounded like a thunderclap. He took a tentative breath, and the air billowed in his lungs, the final proof his body required to accept that death, which had seemed frightfully inevitable to every ounce of his human instinct mere seconds ago, remained barred to him.

No, he wasn't merely alive – he felt powerful, invigorated, victorious. The tension evaporated from his muscles along with the spectre of death. He all but bounded to his feet.

Magic was winding affectionately around his ankles, burning gentle warmth at his fingertips now that his shackles lay in warped pieces on the floor. On impulse, he thrust both palms towards the cell bars, which shattered at once. A smile touched his lips. He stretched leisurely, shedding the last echo of his death and rebirth – although his body would always too young, too supple, to make any satisfying cracking sounds – and he said, "See? Told you I'd be fine."

There was no response.

"Lucy?"

She sat unmoving upon the stone, outstretched hands still clutching the ends of a melted chain, staring at nothing.

"Lucy." He crouched down before her, noting the way her pupils did not react to the motion, and waved his hand in front of her face.

Still no response.

Zeref felt a lot of things in that moment, and then, as was his wont, he felt nothing at all.

In the silence, he processed his options with detached and clinical efficiency.

"I will carry you out of here," he decided. "And then…"

Well, he didn't need to think about the then right now. He only needed the first step of a plan to begin to act on it. The consequences were unimportant until they unfolded. That was something he had mastered over the years; the keystone to many of the mental barricades that held his curse at bay.

Lucy would not stand on her own. Her limbs hung useless; her stare remained blank. The shackles binding her disintegrated at his touch, but the return of her magic did not bring with it awareness – rather, he thought there was something odd about the golden light rushing around her body, something distant, before the sense of it receded from his mind. Grimacing, he was about to lift her when he heard her murmur something.

"Lucy?" he asked, leaning in closer, wondering if the brief flicker of consciousness that had soared across her eyes would reassert itself-

From her lips, a soft whisper: "Where's… Natsu…?"

Zeref's eyes closed for an extended second – not much of a reaction, but far more than he would have allowed himself had she been able to see it. He flicked his free wrist and a book materialized in front of him, as if propped up on some invisible podium. Old, worn, treasured – it was all those things and more, but he did not waste time studying it, when he already knew every scratch in the leather, every burn mark upon the pages, every thread sprung free from rich bindings.

The instant he touched his palm to it, a pulse streaked out in all directions, soaring down corridors and twisting under arches and returning to the book a heartbeat later, unchanged. No response from within the church.

"Thought not," Zeref remarked, and returned the book to his pocket dimension.

That settled, he lifted Lucy's unresponsive form and left the black church behind.