The Scars That Make You Whole
By CrimsonStarbird
Church of Blood and Stone, Part 4
-Stigmata-
The first thing Lucy felt was the realization that she hadn't been feeling – consciousness defined by the absence of its absence. Warmth surrounded her, and solace; beautiful things she wondered how she could ever have forgotten.
Most of all, there was magic. Hers, yes, but someone else's too, so tightly entangled with her own that she could not tell where her presence ended and the other one began. She had never truly seen it before that day, for its owner kept it tightly hidden, but it was so much like the man she had come to know as they travelled that she recognized it at once. It was vaster than the universe and rich with the depth of time, careful because it couldn't be compassionate, patient because it couldn't be kind, and it held everything that she was so gently within its ebb and flow.
She opened eyes she did not remember closing and Zeref was right there, his forehead pressed to hers, his eyes closed. He was closer to her than he had ever deigned to come before, a proximity that might have frightened her had it not felt so natural in the drifting dreams of magic. He looked so peaceful in concentration, and so very alive.
A sob escaped her lips and she pulled him into a tight embrace.
There were no words in that moment for how much she needed him there – to feel the warmth of his body; to hear the swirl of breath in his lungs; to let every certain beat of his heart sound its existence to the world.
He was alive after what she'd done, and that was everything.
She buried her head into his shoulder and could not stop the tears from spilling forth.
"Let go of me, Lucy."
His voice was so cold it refroze her thawing heart mid-beat.
Some part of her railed against the order – she didn't want to let go; she needed to feel him there, alive; she needed that warmth to stop her from slipping back into the darkness – but there was no warmth. Not any more. There was only hostility. Revulsion. Her arms were around him, but he was entirely rigid, defensive, not returning her one-sided embrace.
And when she hesitated, he wrenched himself forcibly out of her grip and stalked to the other side of the clearing without a backwards glance.
All at once, the world seemed far too big. The solace, the sheer relief, had vanished with the fading of his magic. Perhaps they had never existed at all. Perhaps, as she had awoken from the darkness, she had only imagined kindness reaching out to her, because there was no way a friend would have walked away like that.
Then again, there was no way a friend would have made her do what he had done in the first place, so why was she surprised?
She wiped her eyes dry with the heel of her hand, and then murmured, "Why did you do it?"
"Do what, exactly?" The campfire crackled between them, and yet the voice that soared over it to reach her was as icy as she'd ever heard from him. "Save you from a night of torture? Or get us both out of that prison, unharmed?"
"You know what! Why did you make me-?"
"It was the best tactical move for us to make at the time. If you hadn't overreacted and attempted some kind of untested, uncontrolled magic on your own mind, our escape would have had no negative consequences whatsoever."
"No consequences-? Did you even think about what it was you were making me do?"
"Did you even think about how little it means when I can't die?"
Lucy shook her head, bitter. Still he was using the same old arguments, as if she hadn't just passed through hell because of what he'd done and barely come out the other side. If she had thought, logically, that his point of view was wrong before she'd been forced to go through with it, then now she had felt the pure, undeniable abhorrence of it.
"Tell me you're sorry," she said quietly.
"I won't, because I'm not."
Her fingernails dug painfully into her palm. "Then promise me you'll never do that again."
"No. There may come a time when me not dying is once again the optimal solution to a problem. There is literally no reason for me to rule it out. If anything, you should be promising me that next time you'll just get on with it."
Lucy practically screamed her response. "There will be no next time! There exists no earthly force capable of making me do that again-!"
There should have been no force capable of making her do it in the first place, and here, in the coldness of the night and his unyielding silence, broken only by a fire which had long since ceased to shed sound or light, she could see with a clarity her turbulent emotions had missed.
"What happened to Natsu?" Lucy asked.
"What do you mean?"
"He wasn't in the church, was he?"
"No."
"You knew that from the start, didn't you?"
"I suspected as much."
"You lied to me," Lucy said flatly. "You told me he was in danger. You knew I would never have done what you asked of me otherwise."
"Yes."
"Why?"
When he said nothing, she persisted, dangerous, "There was no need for us to escape so urgently. Like I said, I would rather have spent the night at the torturer's mercy and been rescued by Erza in the morning than do what you made me do. So tell me, Zeref – why?"
He didn't answer immediately, but she would wait until the end of time if she had to, and at last he seemed to realize this. "It was infuriating," said he.
"What was?"
"You were. You refused to do what I said without even thinking it through. You wouldn't apply logic to the situation – wouldn't even try to see beyond your immediate emotional response. You would not listen to my reasons nor give my proposal the consideration it deserved. You just thought you knew best. It infuriated me."
"You manipulated me into doing that because-" She cut off with an incredulous snort, unable to believe the words coming out of her own mouth. "Because you don't like it when people don't do what you tell them to? You tricked me into killing you as some kind of power play?"
He said nothing, only turned his dark gaze towards the forest.
"Zeref, that is not acceptable-!"
"I do not care for your opinion."
"Zeref!"
She was done with trying to be calm; done with trying to understand. Nothing he had been through justified his behaviour towards her. Nothing.
She got to her feet. "Fine," she snapped. "If that's how you're going to act, then we're through. I will not work with a man who-"
"I couldn't have done anything else!" he howled, so sudden and unexpected that she flinched back.
"What do you mean?"
"I couldn't have watched you being tortured, Lucy. Maybe you are strong enough to have withstood that, but I know I am not."
"Zeref…?"
Zeref let his head fall into his hands. She didn't know if his shoulders were shaking, or if it was an illusion caused by the dancing firelight, but the coldness, the bitterness, the strength – all of it had vanished from his voice when the truth had finally entered it.
"I don't know what kind of man you think I am, Lucy, but I couldn't have sat by and watched that. You're my teammate; my-" He cut himself off, dragging in a deep breath. "It is very possible that it would have triggered the other side of my curse. The shackles would have broken just as surely, but in such a confined space, I am the only one who would have walked away."
As she stared, speechless, he wet his lips and continued, "But even if I had managed to keep control… I would have been so angry, Lucy. I do not know what I would have done when I got out of those chains, but it would definitely have been the end of our quest, and likely the end of a lot more things as well. You couldn't sit idly by while you believed those things were happening to Natsu somewhere else; what made you think I would be any different if you were the one suffering right in front of me?"
Because you're not supposed to care, she thought, baffled. Because you've never given me any indication that you do. Because, as you keep telling me, you're not my friend, and if you didn't need me to help you reunite Fairy Tail, you wouldn't care one bit if I suffered and died at Avatar's hands.
The words tasted horrid on her tongue, and she didn't say a single one of them.
Zeref curled up tightly into himself, a little black ball hiding from the forest too vast for either of them. "I'm sorry, Lucy. I really am. I know what I did hurt you and I understand why you are upset. But it would have been far worse for both of us if I'd let it play out the way you wanted it to- don't come near me!"
Lucy had stepped forward without thinking, knowing only that she didn't want to have this conversation from so very far away, but he had somehow known without raising his head. "I wasn't-"
Another cry cut her off – one so desperate that she would have stopped anyway at the sound of it, regardless of the words it contained. "Don't! I'm not… I'm not safe right now."
That was when she finally noticed.
The trees were too bare for summer, the forest too silent. The hollowness was almost tangible. This forsaken place, this woodland devoid of life, this darkness that would hound him wherever he went… She could feel the anguish radiating from him. It was all his doing, but none of it was his fault.
She wanted to hug him, but if she got that close, she would die.
She wanted to tell him it would be okay, but she finally understood how painful it would be, coming from someone as naïve, as insensitive, as her.
So convinced that he didn't understand friendship, so convinced that he didn't care about what it meant to her, she had taken everything he'd said at face value.
And so she'd got it completely backwards.
It wasn't that he didn't want to be her friend. It was that he couldn't be her friend. The curse wouldn't allow it – not in the way she wanted, not like the bold and honest bonds she shared with her guild. He had rescued her from the church, and from the nothingness of her own mind; she had forced him to admit that he'd acted as he had because he cared more about her than he'd been able to let on… and there was nothing left alive in the clearing. Just because of that.
How much had it hurt him, when she'd blindly insisted over and over that they were friends?
"I'm sorry." The words slipped out before she could stop them.
"Not your fault," he said.
"Is there anything I can do?"
"No. Just stay over there."
She did so, feeling a hundred times more useless than she had as Avatar's prisoner – though perhaps there was something she could do. She had never seen him so thoroughly vulnerable before, but she had seen flashes of fragility she had never fully understood, as he'd fought against emotions he could not risk letting loose.
And every time he had won that fight, his hand had gone to the chain around his neck… the very same pendant he had given to her for safekeeping.
Lucy pulled the chain over her head and stared at it uncertainly. She couldn't detect any magic from it at all, let alone something capable of suppressing the kind of power she was sensing from across the clearing. It was nothing more than a small silver locket on a chain. Rather than metal, the front bore a white iridescent sheen that looked a little like mother-of-pearl, but was harder than any substance she had ever encountered. There wasn't a single scratch or dent in that strange surface to hint at its no-doubt-significant age.
On impulse, she moved to flick open the catch – and paused. This was clearly something very precious to Zeref, and it felt so wrong to exploit his moment of vulnerability to try to learn his secrets. She might never get another chance like this, but then again…
What made you think I would be any different if you were the one suffering right in front of me? Zeref had said.
With a regretful smile on her lips, she called, "Zeref? Will this help?" And she threw it across to him without opening it.
His hand shot out and caught it at the very last minute, and it vanished underneath his clothes with a shimmer of silver. He remained curled up, unapproachable, painful just to look at, but his shaking seemed to ease.
She felt emboldened enough to ask, "Does it help calm your magic down?"
"Yes… a little."
"How?" This earned no response, so she persisted, "Only, I couldn't sense any magic from it…"
A sigh, tight with familiar exasperation. "Yes, but you're not supposed to say it, Lucy. That rather defeats the purpose of a placebo."
"…Oh. Oops."
"It's just another coping mechanism… holding it is the first in a chain of actions that ends in a state of stability. Running through those mental actions, and thus reaching that state, has become such an ingrained habit that it can override ephemeral emotions… sometimes, anyway. Nothing works perfectly against my curse. My locket, it… it doesn't help control my magic as much as it reminds me why trying to control it is worthwhile."
As usual, explaining something logically seemed to calm him even more effectively than the symbolic pendant around his neck, and yet he was still a million miles from the confident man she had come to know. When she gazed at him through the shadows, sounding almost like himself again but still curled up like a wounded animal, something inside her twisted painfully.
"I've really hurt you, haven't I?" she whispered.
"Don't flatter yourself, Lucy," he rebuked her. "I've been broken for a very long time."
Then, to her surprise, he added dryly, "Although, you do like to make things difficult for me, don't you?"
"I don't mean to-"
"I know. It's just who you are. I really ought to have taken that into account when I chose you for this mission."
At last he uncurled from his ball and lay back on the ground, arms spread wide. Above, a starless sky awaited, clouds the same unwelcoming shade as the void beyond them.
Zeref reflected, "I can't believe that we completed another whole side quest and don't have a single new member of your guild to show for it."
"Are you sure Natsu wasn't in the church?"
"Quite sure."
"But Gray said he was."
"And between Gray Fullbuster and myself, you think that I am most likely to be wrong?"
Lucy blinked. "Well, yes. Even aside from the fact that you should be amazed I still trust you at all after what you pulled today, your statement seems based on some mystical power to locate Natsu, whereas Gray's is based on the fact that he has infiltrated Avatar and actually knows what's going on. Which of those sources sounds more reliable to you, Zeref?"
"My source is infallible, naturally, but I grant that your doubt is reasonable." Zeref thought for a moment. "Consider this hypothetical scenario. If Fairy Tail was at war with a dark guild, and you suspected that one of your friends was secretly working for the enemy, what would you do?"
"That's easy," she said at once. "That would never happen."
Zeref went to all the effort to sit up to ensure she felt the full might of his exasperated stare.
"Hey, I'm not saying that betrayals never happen, or that I'll never be betrayed," Lucy clarified. "But no member of Fairy Tail would ever willingly work for a dark guild. If they were being blackmailed, they would seek help, and if they were being controlled through magic, someone would notice."
"…Your guild is not going to stand a chance come the First of September." Zeref shook his head in despair. "Well, I'll tell you what I would do. Assuming the suspect was too valuable to execute outright, I would set up a test: leak them false information upon which they would feel pressured to act, and monitor whether or not they did so."
"You mean, let slip to Gray that Natsu was a prisoner in the Mikage Branch when he's actually being held elsewhere…?"
"That's one theory you might want to consider."
"You always say that," Lucy pointed out.
"What do you mean?"
"That it's something to consider. Not that it's what you think happened."
Zeref seemed to think this over. "I don't know what happened, Lucy. Sometimes I do, but this time I don't. All I know is that Natsu wasn't in the church. I wouldn't have gone near if I'd thought there was a reasonable chance he was."
"If you knew he wasn't there from the start, why didn't you tell me?"
"Would you have believed me?"
"Not without some demonstration of how you knew it."
"There you go, then," Zeref shrugged.
"Zeref, why did you really agree to come on this raid with me? If it wasn't about Natsu, or about protecting me…"
"Oh, that." Fortunately, this time, his gaze remained clear, free from the confusion that had prevented him from answering in Avatar's prison. "Well, it was a little because I resented the thought of you dying on some fool's errand entirely unconnected to the job I'd actually hired you to do. It won't do any more damage to admit that to you now. Mostly, though, I hoped we might run into the swordsman you fought back in the diner. I would be very interested in obtaining his sword."
Lucy rolled her eyes. "I should have known. Of course it was about some rare magical artefact, and not about me."
"Of course," he agreed amicably.
"Well, this is one instance where you'd have been better off stating your ulterior motive up front. That way, I could have told you that Jellal confiscated the sword after we won the battle, and you'd have saved yourself a trip."
"…Ah. Yes, you're probably right there." Reluctantly, Zeref drummed his fingers upon the ground. "Avatar will go after it again, and soon. I can guarantee it."
"Jellal knows what he's doing."
Zeref did not respond to that.
Lucy continued, "Does Avatar hate Crime Sorcière so much because they openly oppose you?"
"Most likely," he answered. "For what it's worth, I don't have anything against Jellal or his guild. He tries awfully hard; I can't help feeling sorry for him. I think he and I have rather a lot in common."
"Shame about the part where he's devoted the rest of his life to destroying you."
"Well, yes, that is the main reason why I've been keeping well out of his way. And it is rather unfair, considering that I was in no way responsible for what happened to him. Still, of all the injustices I have endured in my life, that one is relatively minor, so I am content to overlook it for the time being."
"Speaking of Crime Sorcière," Lucy spoke up, remembering another conversation she'd had with them before Erza had received a transmission from her spy. "Jellal told me they had been working with Mest to try and restore order in society, but he disappeared three months ago. Do you happen to know where he is?"
And just like that, the brief moment of companionship was gone. Zeref warned, "Don't ask me about him, Lucy."
"Why not? What have you done to him?" There was no response. "Zeref, tell me, is he still alive?"
"That's not an easy question to answer."
"What's that supposed to mean?" Dark rebellion shifted in those eyes, as far away as galaxies, and she sighed. "Answer me, Zeref, and answer me honestly, or you know I won't stop looking for him, and won't that stall our quest nicely?"
"If you insist." He spread his arms in surrender, absolving himself of any rage or hurt she might feel as a result of the answers she wanted. "Your friend Mest came looking for Makarov and found me. Suffice to say, he wasn't expecting that, and in a display of panic entirely unbefitting an undercover agent, he decided to try and solve the problem then and there by altering my own memories to stop me from being a threat to your guild."
"…Oh." Despite herself, Lucy shuddered. Fighting an enemy was one thing, but to try and erase their memories, their very identity… she could imagine little worse. No matter what the consequences for her guild would be, she found herself glad that Mest had failed.
Perhaps Zeref sensed this, for his voice had thawed a little by the time he resumed. "As someone who has to live with the uncertainties this curse inflicts upon me, I abhor magic like that. His plan – if one can call it that – failed for two reasons. The first is that my cursed magic is very possessive. Just as it will not tolerate changes to my body, it has absolute jurisdiction over my mind, and it threw off Mest's magic immediately. The second is that I happened to be travelling in the company of an ally of mine, who has a remarkable ability to nullify and reflect magic. He also realized what was happening and countered your friend's attempts to escape. And then, once Mest had finished answering my questions satisfactorily, he turned Mest's own magic upon him at my orders.
"So, to answer your question, Lucy, the man you knew as Mest no longer exists. Johann the florist, however, is quite content living a peaceful life somewhere my people can keep an eye on him."
Lucy was silent for a moment. "But he doesn't know who he is."
"On the contrary. He doesn't know who he was. His recollections of his past may be fake, but his life for the last three months has been quite real, and a lot more pleasant than the fates generally granted to those who attack me without provocation. That being said, he will not be returning to Fairy Tail. He is entirely unaware that he possesses magic – in fact, he recalls trying and failing to learn the skill as a child – and while his magic may be dangerous, it is neither strong enough nor sufficiently in tune with his emotions to ever resurface on its own."
"So the man I knew is gone," Lucy considered. "And yet you expect me to believe you are keeping the Master alive and well?"
"Makarov is quite well, I assure you. He has never tried to attack me unprovoked."
Still, she shook her head. "I don't know how you can claim to abhor Mest's magic when you were more than happy to use it on him."
"I do not believe I am under any obligation to explain my actions to you," he countered coolly. "However, since it does not appear to have occurred to you, I will point out that I could have altered his memories to make him believe he worked for me, and therefore claimed that magic for myself to use in the upcoming conflict. Instead, I elected to remove it from the battlefield entirely. Do you believe that was the wrong decision?"
She didn't. She couldn't, as much as she wished it had never come to such an ultimatum.
"What you did to him," she ventured, instead, "can it be undone?"
"Yes. But only by myself or the one who did it for me in the first place."
"Then, Zeref, if Fairy Tail beats you in this fight, I want you to give Mest back to us."
He raised his head, surprised; she met his gaze evenly, proud and unafraid. He had no reason to agree, and it made her all the more determined to stare him down.
"Very well," said he. "I shall leave orders to that effect in the event of my defeat. By then, I rather think I shall be beyond caring what becomes of him."
"Thank you."
His gaze flicked to her and then away again, dismissively, but she smiled anyway, because she thought that things were a bit better between them, and the night returned to peace.
"Zeref?"
"Mm?"
"Are you alright?"
"I'm in control of my magic again, if that's what you're asking." There was a pause in which she considered telling him that no, it wasn't what she was asking at all, but he spoke again before she could. "How about you?"
"I'm…"
Lucy had thought she was better, right up until the moment he had so unexpectedly asked. But if she said she was, would he leave? And if he left, taking all the light and distraction and companionship with him, would she really be alright? She hadn't forgotten what she'd done to him a mere few hours ago. It hadn't gone away, just because she understood his reasons for it. Without him, on that night, she would have to face it on her own.
"Your coping mechanisms aren't as refined as mine, hmm?"
His words cut through her muddled emotions with alarming clarity. Startled, defensive, she raised her head to protest that she was fine and caught a glimpse of his small smile; a flash of sympathy in the shadows.
"Okay," said he. "Well, we might as well use this time productively."
With those slightly disconcerting words, he got to his feet. A flick of his hand increased the brightness of the fire, and – somehow – shifted it from a natural red-orange to a purposeful white-yellow. It didn't return the trees to life, but it seemed to transform them from repulsive skeletons to unfrightening plastic replicas, just as he himself had transformed from so vulnerable it scared even her to being in total control of the situation.
"I've been giving some thought to the way that you're tearing the universe apart with the magic you refuse to stop using, and I came up with an idea that might encourage you to reduce your dependence on it," he explained, coming closer, so that he was no longer on the opposite side of the fire. As he had assured her, his curse was entirely back under his control. "There's a little piece of magic I want you to learn."
A little thrill ran through her. "You're going to teach me magic?"
"Nothing so formal," he corrected hastily, firmly, as if determined to avoid the exact sentiment his suggestion had induced. "We are enemies, after all. I'm only willing to make an exception this once for the sake of the structural integrity of the universe. Honestly, Lucy, don't make such a big deal out of it."
She gave him a bemused look. If she didn't know better, she would have said he was embarrassed… in rather the same way she was when her friends asked to see her novel-in-progress. It was surprisingly endearing.
He was saying, "In essence, it's a minor enchantment you can attach to a physical object, which will enable you to summon it into your hand whenever you wish. It's a useful trick that everyone should know, that's all."
"Huh, that does sound useful. I can finally say goodbye to those days of struggling to find my purse underneath all my adventuring supplies."
"…Or, you could attach it to your celestial keyring," he corrected archly. "Then you'd have no reason to ever use Keyless Star Dress, and that nice little rift you've managed to tear in the universe might not get any bigger."
"I was kidding, sheesh," Lucy grumbled. For someone adamant that this wasn't him teaching her magic, he fell into the role of teacher so easily.
"It has some limitations, of course. Unlike Requip or similar magic, the item you bind to you must be something of deep personal significance, and you can only have one item under the enchantment at any given time. Its range is large but not infinite, and it is physical magic, not dimensional magic. It won't function across dimensional interfaces – so you can't summon your item from someone else's Requip Space, for instance. Although, if you decide to put the enchantment on someone else's weapon, I rather think you've missed the point of it."
"With you so far. So, how do I do it?"
"It's simple enough. I'll show you mine, and when you've got the sense of it, I'll have you replicate the enchantment. Catch."
Lucy was not expecting the sudden instruction, and if he'd thrown anything smaller or quicker at her, there was a good chance that it would have ended up in the fire and she'd have been fleeing the clearing as quickly as her legs could carry her. Fortunately, it was a sizeable tome, and her reflexes were sufficient to counteract her surprise.
Not that it should have come as a surprise to her to learn that Zeref's most valued possession was an old book.
Thus, her first reaction was to roll her eyes, and it was only after she'd welcomed that feeling of fondness that she looked down and saw something to shatter it completely.
She was holding the Book of END.
Throw it in the fire.
That was the first thought that flashed across her mind: to do what Gray had intended to do at the end of the battle with Tartaros; to destroy the greatest of Zeref's demons while it was vulnerable; to do what any sane person would do-
And it was stupid, stupid, stupid, because you couldn't destroy a fire demon with fire – no, you probably couldn't destroy the book of the strongest demon with anything. Zeref was no fool; he wouldn't have removed it from the safety of his Requip Space if there was the slightest chance of any harm coming to it. Not to mention, the Black Mage himself, the creator of the demons, who had indirectly just declared this book to be his most valued possession and who was also incidentally the most powerful mage in the world, was stood literally right in front of her.
None of that was why she hesitated, though.
She wanted to be as repulsed by the magic emanating from the book as she had been by the shock of finding it in her hands, but she wasn't.
It should have been enveloped in the darkest, foulest, most twisted magic imaginable, and instead, it was… entrancing. Beautiful. As mysterious and impenetrable as the man who had made it, and whose magic flowed through it as dancing undercurrents, shaping the whole without being the whole. She couldn't be scared of anything that felt so much like him. In it, there were swirls of the magic that had reached out to her when she had been lost, imprints of the dedication invested in it across the centuries – and something else too, something strange and so very familiar, something that wasn't like Zeref's magic at all, but felt like…
Like home.
Like, if she held it tight and did not let go this time, she would get back everything she lost ten months ago.
And she knew, not through logic or deduction but the same intuition with which she spoke and breathed, that she would be able to cast the magic which only bound items of deep personal significance upon this book she had never seen before in her life.
That understanding didn't scare her. It just felt right.
And then the book was gone, and she glanced up sharply to see Zeref holding it.
"That's how it works," he was saying, and it took far longer than it should have done for her to realize that he was talking about the magic. "Look again."
He threw it to her once more, and this time she remained focussed, and was able to detect the taut snap of magic as it dematerialized from her hands and reappeared in his. He showed her how to distinguish the minor spell from the immense and convoluted (and comforting) magic that comprised the book itself.
All the while, she was trying exceptionally hard not to give away anything she felt whenever her hand brushed against it.
She thought he might take it away again if he knew.
Despite that monumental distraction, it wasn't a difficult spell to learn. Once she could replicate it to his satisfaction, she set it upon her keys. Zeref was right – she should have learnt it years ago, especially with magic like hers. If she'd known about it, she probably would have done.
It was a connection, quiet but ever-present; a reminder that her Spirits were always with her. Not that she needed reminding of that. Their bond was stronger than any kind of magic.
She wondered what it would be like to have that connection to the Book of END instead… and pushed the thought firmly away. It wasn't like it would matter anyway; the connection wouldn't remain open when the book was in his Requip Space, which seemed to be pretty much always. Not to mention, that should not have been her first argument against the idea…
Yet, as soon as Zeref was happy that she'd got the hang of the spell, Lucy found herself asking, tentatively, "Can I see yours again? Your enchantment feels different to when I do it."
"It will be different," he warned her. "The Book of END draws power from me to sustain its existence, and I can't fully isolate that link from the one I wanted to show you."
"Even so…" she wheedled, wanting to hold it one last time, and he withdrew it from his pocket dimension and handed it to her without another word. It probably wasn't trust – it wasn't as though she'd be able to harm it with him there watching – but it was surprising all the same.
At once, that warmth washed over her hands, calling to mind the immense kindness she had felt from Zeref when she had awoken – the kindness and the sense of belonging, of safety, that had been absent for ten months of her life. Her fingers twitched with the urge to run over the cover, to learn the scars and scorch marks pressed into it, to remember everything that she had lost. If he hadn't been watching it so very closely, she would probably have done so.
Impulsively, she ventured, "Zeref, can I ask you something?"
After a moment – and as she had hoped – his gaze flicked up to meet hers. She thought he was going to be defensive, but instead, he merely said, "You may always ask, Lucy, as long as you appreciate that I may choose not to answer."
"Okay. Well… what happened to me? I don't remember anything between – well, you know – and waking up here."
"In truth, I am not entirely sure," he said heavily. "I believe that a combination of many unfortunate factors – your desperation, your ardent opposition to what you were being forced to do, your helplessness, the magic-suppressing handcuffs that bound you – triggered a response from your magic governed not by conscious will at all, but by pure, primal emotion."
"I didn't know that was possible."
He shrugged. "Ordinarily, I would have thought the same, but magic acts in strange ways at the boundaries of life. My belief is that your magic was desperate to act, yet was prevented from taking form outside of your own mind, and so it sought to fulfil your need to escape the situation in the only way it could. I dare say the circumstances were extreme – and, fortunately, would be near-impossible to replicate, intentionally or otherwise."
"How did you bring me back?" she asked, softly, for she had no doubt that he had done so.
"I reasoned that if it was an entirely subconscious response, it would be possible to reverse it by appealing to the opposite of the emotion that induced it in the first place."
She thought about how safe, how warm, how protected she had felt when she'd returned to reality – how he'd never lowered his guard around her like that before; how he'd let her in. How she'd felt wanted. How she'd felt like she was home. He hadn't been pretending; only someone who truly understood those sentiments could have shared them with her like he had. It was a real part of him, hidden away. That, she realized, was the part of him she felt the most in the book beneath her palms – the book that was the most important thing to him.
At last, she understood why he'd had to act so cold to her the moment she was back. Either of them acknowledging it would have made it so much harder for him to pretend it wasn't real. How fine a line did he walk between caring and not caring, all to keep her alive?
"Thank you," she murmured.
His expression did not change. "Don't do it again."
"Don't you do it again, either."
After a precarious moment, he gave a short, tight nod, the closest to a promise she was going to get. "May I have my book back now?"
"Oh. Right. Yes, of course." She handed back the Book of END, and kept her face as static as possible as he returned it to his Requip Space.
"It's getting late," Zeref said. It had been late for a while, but she appreciated the move towards a mundane topic of conversation. "We're a long way from any settlements. Would you rather keep travelling through the night, or make camp here?"
"Here. I don't really have the gear to camp out, but… it's not as though I haven't done it before. Will your fire burn all night?"
He nodded once. "If I will it."
"Then I'll be fine."
"I'll leave you to it, then."
"Don't go."
The words surprised her more than they did him; he glanced back at her with a worryingly unreadable expression. "Lucy…"
"Don't. I know what my nightmares will be tonight, and the only thing that's going to help will be seeing you alive and well. You're only going to go somewhere else in the forest, aren't you? Stay by the campfire with me, just for tonight."
His mouth tightened. "It isn't a good idea."
"Please." And behind that word was something else – something she would not have spoken out loud, but that on tonight of all nights, she thought he heard anyway: that this was his fault, and that she would forgive him for it, but only if he showed that he truly understood why he had hurt her.
"Very well. I will stay."
Zeref returned to his spot on the far side of the campfire. The logs below had burnt a little, but not much; magic was the fuel for this fire. She thought, though, that she might not need it to stay warm tonight.
Pulling a blanket from her bag, she curled up by the campfire, and the exhaustion of the day overtook her in seconds.
Lucy awoke once, jolted out of sleep by the palpitations of her own heart, a half-formed scream upon her lips and fists clenched around an imaginary chain.
And, true to his word, Zeref was still there: lying on his front beside the campfire with his legs kicking lazily back and forth, writing into one of his notebooks.
Perhaps she had screamed in the grip of the nightmare, for he looked up at the same moment her frantic gaze found him, that reassuring black shining with reflected light.
"Still here, still alive; go back to sleep, Lucy," he sighed.
"Yeah," she murmured, and this time sleep came a little less restlessly.
The second time she awoke, the fire was burning low, soaking their clearing in a twilight the ink-stained sky did not mirror. Zeref had given up trying to work and fallen asleep with his notebook still open. A page half-covered in text served as his pillow, every unfamiliar letter graceful until the moment his pen had slipped in exhaustion. A few reference books were stacked equally neatly nearby. His back was turned to the fading heat, curled up in a way that only cats and children – and the eternally young – could possibly find comfortable.
It was so blessedly, unexpectedly normal that she was smiling as she closed her eyes and returned to a world finally free of nightmares.
On the third instance, she plunged out of sleep to the sound of whimpering.
Immediately, Lucy rolled into a crouch, one hand upon her keys, scanning the clearing for any wild beasts which had strayed too close while she and Zeref were asleep…
Nothing. Not even the most fearsome nocturnal hunter had dared to approach the circle of dead trees. The only things alive in the clearing were her and-
And Zeref.
She turned her attention inwards as the distressed sound came again: "No… please… don't leave me…"
"Zeref?" she whispered.
He gave no sign that he had heard. His neck was twisted at an awkward angle, his fists balled; his books lay scattered all around him. "No… we were supposed to go together…"
Lucy took a step towards him and his entire body convulsed, thrashing like a leaf in a gale. "Zeref?"
A wordless sob was the only response she got. He twitched again and was still.
Taking a deep breath, Lucy eased her hand away from her celestial keys and edged towards him again. The dying embers of the fire bathed his face in a sickly glow. Sweat clung to his forehead like beads of blood and amber.
"Zeref, are you okay?"
Still no response. His body heaved with each jagged breath he took. The smallness of it scared her. He was always reliable – rarely helpful, but somehow still reassuring. Even when he was hurting, even when he was vulnerable, even when his curse was going out of control, he always knew what was going on and how to deal with it… and she had no idea at all, only that she couldn't let this go on.
"Zeref, come on, please. Wake up."
And she shook him as hard as she dared.
He burst through the veil with a shriek too terrible for the air to contain. It took form as a vicious black wind, snarling around his body with all the sentience he himself was missing. Eyes opened and did not see her.
And then she could see nothing, either. All the light had been stripped from the world. Something roared in her ears, a waterfall of shadows, life passing a thousand times too quickly-
Something collided with her stomach with enough force to knock her back into the world of colour and light.
Her back hit the ground, then her shoulder, then her knee, and then she gave up trying to keep track of which way was up and which was down, for both were equally hostile and equally unforgiving. She stopped only when a particularly sturdy tree trunk got in her way, which she slumped against as a storm of fireflies whirled in her vision.
At the far side of the clearing, Zeref was bent double, shoulders heaving. "Lucy, what were you thinking?" he shouted. "I could have killed you!"
"I'm sorry!" she exclaimed automatically. "But you were suffering, and I couldn't just sit back and watch! I had to at least try!"
"Try to do what?" he accused, eyes flashing a momentary crimson in the darkness. "Startle me into attacking you? I barely have control over my magic at the best of times, let alone when I'm half-asleep!"
"Don't you think maybe you should have warned me about that?" she retorted. Her heart was still going at a hundred miles per hour. She didn't know if she was only alive because he had regained control in time, but she was shaken, and his anger wasn't helping.
"How many times do I have to tell you to stop trying to get close to me?" he snapped back.
In both senses. If she hadn't wanted to help him, it would never have happened.
Lucy huffed and glanced away.
After a moment of mental struggle, he asked, brusquely, "Are you hurt?"
"I'm fine. You?"
"Never been better," he said bitterly.
"I'm sorry," she murmured – for having seen him like this, and thus having forced him to acknowledge the fragility he tried so hard to hide. "Zeref, you knew this would happen, didn't you? Or at least you guessed. This is why you've been sleeping out on your own, isn't it?"
After a moment, he gave a tight nod. "One of the reasons." She thought he was probably grateful for the darkness settling around them, and wished she could convey that she wasn't judging him for it, only trying to understand. He explained, "When you asked me to stay, I decided I would just stay awake all night, but in the end, the magical exhaustion was too much for me."
"Magical exhaustion?" Lucy frowned. "How on earth did you manage to use up all your magic, and in the time since escaping Avatar's dungeon no less?"
Rather than answering, Zeref picked up one of the least-burnt branches from the dead fire and thrust it into the ground, whereupon the free end ignited with a white flame – a substitute for the absent moon. Lucy shuffled as close to it as she thought he'd let her.
"Does this happen a lot, at night?" she asked.
"I have good days and bad days," he hedged. "It's not usually this bad, but since I started travelling with you, it's been getting worse and worse."
A shiver ran down her spine. "Why?"
From far away, he studied her disconcertingly; a silent stare she was coming to understand. He wasn't going to tell her, and she wasn't going to be able to guess.
"Is it something that I'm doing, though?" she persisted. "Because if you tell me, maybe I can stop doing it-"
"It's not something that you're doing. It's just… who you are. I knew that, when I decided to recruit you for this mission… but I suppose I underestimated how much it would still get to me, after all this time."
He was staring at the ground somewhere between them, seeing something a million miles away from somewhere even further, and she changed tack. "You were alright the day we met, though, right? You slept on my sofa, and I think I'd have noticed if you were… well, suffering like that."
"Oh… I didn't sleep that night."
"…Right." A dubious note wound its way into her voice. "So, you're telling me that you spent all night in my house, and you weren't asleep? Would you care to tell me what you were doing?"
"You had no problems with me keeping watch tonight," Zeref evaded. "You even asked me to."
No way was he getting away with that. "I know you now. I didn't know you back then. Which makes what you did really quite creepy, unless you have a very good explanation for it…"
She waited.
Zeref tucked his knees up to his chest and watched the silver flame waver in response to a wind neither of them could feel.
She waited some more.
"I was setting a magical diversion," he muttered. "To prevent us from being followed. It was a complicated spell; it took me all night to get the runework right."
"You were expecting us to be followed?"
Zeref said nothing; a heartbeat later, a sharp intake of breath signalled that Lucy had figured it out for herself. "Natsu. You knew Natsu would come looking for me. Did you hurt him?"
These last four words were an unbridled accusation – one to which Zeref responded with a tired shake of his head. "I merely made it impossible for him to track us using his Dragon Slayer abilities."
"…Fine. I guess I believe you."
"The truth is the truth whether you believe it or not," he pointed out, with a hint of the good humour she was used to; a sign that he was coming out of the darkness a little. "I thought you'd be angry. Are you not?"
"I'm not angry that you did it. I wouldn't have wanted to run into Natsu back then, either. I am a bit annoyed that you didn't tell me until now, though."
"If I'd known you'd thrown a table at him earlier that evening, I would have told you at the time," Zeref agreed, smiling faintly. "Why did you do that?"
"I…"
She hadn't wanted to talk about it then, and she didn't particularly want to talk about it now, but it didn't feel right to keep secrets on a night like this. Not after she'd accidentally barged in on so many of his.
"If you've been tracking the guild," Lucy began quietly, "you'll know that Natsu has spent the past ten months training in the mountains."
"Yes. Because the guild disbanded."
"No, that wasn't it. He left the night before Fairy Tail was disbanded. He didn't even know Fairy Tail was gone until I told him so, that night in Crocus."
"Oh…? I didn't know that."
Zeref sounded intrigued. How much was genuine curiosity and how much mere politeness, she couldn't tell, but it encouraged her all the same.
"It was in the aftermath of the battle with Tartaros. Everyone was struggling with what they'd lost, and with the guildhall in ruins too, we needed each other more than anything. It was difficult, but we'd get through it if we were together… or so I thought. But it was that very evening that Natsu disappeared.
"He didn't tell me what he was planning. He left me a letter. It's probably the only time he's put pen to paper in the entire time I've known him. It was so… impersonal. If he needed to be alone, I'd have understood, but he should have told me so. After so many months as his friend and teammate, I thought I had earnt that courtesy, but just like that, he was gone.
"The very next day, the guild was disbanded. Gray and Juvia had already gone off somewhere together; Gajeel and Levy were next; Erza had been drifting towards Crime Sorcière since the end of the battle. Laxus went off with his team, Mira went off with her sister, Cana went off to look for Gildarts, Wendy and Carla made tracks for Lamia Scale… well, I'm sure you know what happened better than I do. Everyone had somewhere to go, and someone to go there with… except for me. My teammate, my very best friend, had chosen to leave me behind, and now I was all alone."
It was strange how easy it was to keep talking once she'd started. Deep black eyes watched her all the while, absorbing every word and giving nothing back.
"That's not why I was angry with him, though. Well, it was a bit, I suppose – he had Happy, and I had no one. But that wasn't his fault. He had no way of knowing that the guild was about to be disbanded, or that I would have ended up on my own even if it was. He'd just lost his father, and he wanted to deal with it on his own. The fact that I wanted to deal with my loss by spending time with my closest friends doesn't mean that it was wrong for him to want the opposite… I could understand that, even back then. No, the reason why I was so angry with him, the day that he came back… it was the way he acted as if nothing had changed."
"How so?" Zeref prompted.
She took a deep breath; let it out again.
"It didn't even occur to him that leaving so suddenly had hurt me. Not even after I told him about the guild disbanding. I'd really struggled for those ten months, but even when I told him about it, he still didn't realize the part he'd played in it all. I could have forgiven him easily if he'd acknowledged that his decisions had had that impact on me… but, no."
Another deep breath, this time to calm her quavering nerves. "But even that wasn't why I threw a table at him."
"Then what was?"
"It was when he asked me to accompany him on a quest to revive Fairy Tail."
"Oh?" Now Zeref sounded amused. "Should I consider myself fortunate that I only received an arrow to the shoulder?"
Lucy laughed despite herself, though the moment of mirth didn't last. "I didn't have a prior reason to be angry with you. And besides… I say ask, but that's not what Natsu did. Rather, he stated his intent to embark upon said quest, and just assumed I would be coming."
"…Ah. I'm starting to see it, now."
She nodded. "It wasn't just that he didn't realize the impact his actions had had on me. It was the way he disappeared without a proper explanation for ten whole months… and then came back expecting to just pick up where we left off. He thought he could do whatever the hell he wanted, and it wouldn't change anything between us. He thought I'd spent the past ten months just waiting for him. Not finding a new career, not learning how to deal with loss on my own, not trying to make the most of my new life in Crocus – he just assumed I'd put my life on hold for him, so that he could waltz right back into it when he was ready and carry on as if nothing had happened."
In a whisper that carried like a roar through the dead clearing, she added, "But something had happened. Those ten months were nothing to him, but to me… they really, really weren't okay. How could he just act as if nothing had changed?"
There was silence for a moment as Lucy's shoulders shook with the effort of holding back her tears, and she was grateful for what little privacy the darkness afforded her.
Zeref said, unexpectedly, "Natsu has never been alone. He doesn't know what it's like."
"Yeah," Lucy sniffed. "He's always had people there for him, hasn't he? First Igneel, then the guild, and Happy never leaves his side… Maybe he just doesn't think that way."
There was little point to the night's concealment if her voice was going to crack beneath the weight of her tears anyway. She wiped her eyes and tried to continue.
"I was so angry with him," she sobbed. "But I could never hate him… he's an idiot sometimes, but he's still my best friend. And even after everything I said to him, even after I threw a table at him, he's still throwing himself into danger in order to rescue me from you! I just want to know that he's okay. I want to talk to him again… to tell him I'm sorry…"
"I'm sorry, Lucy," Zeref said, when she tailed off. "I really don't know what to say."
"That's okay." Swallowing, she ventured, "Zeref, if I promise not to ask any questions, will you use whatever mysterious method you have at your disposal to find Natsu?"
He glanced away, and Lucy's heart sank; if he was going to agree, he wouldn't have needed to think about it.
"It doesn't work like that," he sighed, at last. "I can tell how far away he is and in which direction, but not with enough accuracy to pinpoint his location on a map – at least, not at the kind of distance we're talking about. I suspect either he attacked a different hideout of Avatar's in the first place, or he was moved to one after he was captured."
"You'd be able to find him, though, if you followed the signal you described," Lucy argued.
"Yes, I would. But it isn't an appropriate next step for our mission. We must press on to Blue Pegasus as planned." He forestalled her protest with a raised hand. "I can tell you that he isn't hurt, and it is my honest belief that if Avatar intended to kill him, they would have done so already. Will that do, for now?"
She hesitated. "Are you telling me the truth this time?"
"If I was going to lie to you, I would have told you that Natsu was currently at Blue Pegasus," he pointed out mildly.
"Point taken, but don't think I didn't notice that you didn't actually answer my question."
"It's the truth, Lucy. I don't believe Natsu's life is in danger."
"Alright. We'll find him sooner or later, won't we?"
"I am sure of it."
Sighing, she leaned back, trying to find some glimmer of dawn in the darkness above. "Our mission hasn't been going very well recently, has it? We still haven't found Levy or Gajeel, Natsu's a prisoner of Avatar, and Gray could be in serious danger if they've worked out from our botched rescue attempt that he's a spy."
"Not to mention, we still haven't reached Blue Pegasus. Which, may I remind you, we are doing first thing tomorrow morning."
"Once I've reported back to Jellal and Erza," Lucy countered.
"Fine, but if you're with them longer than fifteen minutes, I'm coming in to get you."
Lucy scowled, but conceded the point. She didn't want to get dragged into anything else either. Zeref had allowed the detour to Avatar's church, so she would make reaching Blue Pegasus her top priority – that had been their deal.
And that reminded her of something else she'd been meaning to ask.
Trying to sound innocent instead of threatening, she said, "Zeref, since I told you what happened between me and Natsu, will you tell me a little bit about yourself?"
His attention leapt to her immediately. "I don't want to talk about myself."
"I know. I really do. But… I keep making mistakes around you, and if I don't understand why, it's only going to keep happening. After everything that has happened tonight, I think it might help me understand you a little better."
Her heart leapt in the silence that followed. Cautiously, she pressed, "We'll go to Blue Pegasus tomorrow, no matter what. I don't want this to be payment for the mission – I want it to be because I care about you and I want to get to know you better. As you like saying, you're not an unreasonable man, not at all…" She remembered vividly the pain in his voice as he'd told her he couldn't have sat and watched her be tortured – as he'd admitted to being no less human than anyone else. "So why does everyone think you are?"
"I have been unreasonable enough times in my life to answer that question without the tale you're hoping for," came the heavy response. "But, I suppose… It's a long and unpleasant story, Lucy, and I've never told it to anyone."
"Not to anyone? In four hundred years?"
He shook his head. "Anna knew a lot of it, and Igneel too… but they themselves are part of the story. Ever since then… either there wasn't time, or it wasn't appropriate. So, no, I haven't told it before."
"Do you think it would help, to talk about it?"
"Why would it?" he retorted.
"Don't you want to find out?" she countered. Then, softer: "I'll listen, like you listened to me."
It was her turn to wait and his turn to think, and she did so with a patience that belied her nerves. And just as she began to worry that he wasn't going to take her up on it, he spoke.
"I was born in a small kingdom called Carligne, which is now part of north-western Fiore," he began, as if easing himself into it with simple facts. "There were four of us: my parents, myself, and my little brother, living in an insignificant town long since lost to history. I was happy enough, I guess… I don't really remember. It was so very long ago.
"I suppose it all started on the one day I've never been able to forget. It was the day before the deadline for new student applications to the Mildian Academy of Magic, the world's most prestigious magical academy. It accepted new students only once every three years, and it attracted the best scholars from across the continent, even though the Dragon Wars made travelling incomprehensibly dangerous. I could count on my fingers the number of notable mages who hadn't studied or taught at the Academy at some point in their lives, and half of them had learnt magic from dragons instead, which hardly counts."
A tiny smile flickered across his face. "Needless to say, I had decided that I was getting a place at the Academy no matter what. Thus, the story you want to hear begins with the most minor conflict imaginable. It was the day before the application deadline. I wanted to work on my paper to submit. My brother wanted to play in the woods. My parents wanted me to go and keep an eye on him. I refused."
"That… seems perfectly reasonable," Lucy volunteered into the silence. "You could have spent time with your brother whenever, but you had to do the application on that day, right?"
"Right," Zeref confirmed flatly. "Only, I'd been using that excuse every day for the past six months. I must have written fifty papers in that time, and every one of them was good enough to get me into the Academy… but, the thing was, the paper you submitted wasn't merely a demonstration of what you could do – it was a project proposal for your next three years of study. I wrote about spatiotemporal magic; about potential ways of mitigating the side-effects of Dragon Slayer magic; about hypothetical new kinds of magic which might have circumvented a dragon's innate resistance without needing a Dragon Slayer… all of them would have made a huge difference to the world, but none of them were what I wanted to specialize in. I didn't know what I wanted to do. I just kept reading and writing, waiting for it to hit me.
"My parents didn't understand that. Well, they didn't understand much about magic in the first place, let alone what the Academy meant to me. When they weren't trying to talk me out of my dream of studying there, they were busy insisting that I just submit something I had already written and get on with it. I had my whole life to spend studying, they said; it was no big deal.
"Well, it didn't really bother me. I was used to not being understood. The only one who supported me was my little brother, and honestly, that was enough for me. I think he really believed that I could do anything. He used to come with me when I sneaked into the Academy library, you know? He couldn't read any of those books himself, but that never bothered him. We'd evade the porters together, and he'd creep around to fetch books for me, and return them to the shelves when I was done…"
His smile was gone so quickly she thought she must have imagined it.
"But he was young, and sometimes he just wanted to play, and I didn't have time for him that day, or for anyone who told me it was more important than my entire future. So I ran up to the Academy, and I sneaked into the library again, and I spent the day trying to find a research topic worth devoting my life to. And I thought no more of it, until the library closed and I returned home. While I was gone, my village had been caught in the crossfire between two battling dragons. There were no survivors. My entire family was dead."
"I'm sorry," Lucy whispered.
"It was a long time ago," Zeref shrugged. "Though, it was the start of everything to come. Everything that I did… everything that I became."
"But none of that was your fault!"
"Oh, I know that." The reflections of the silver flame in his eyes flickered with exasperation. "I'm not stupid, Lucy. If I'd been there, I'd have died too. Would it have been any less terrifying for my brother, if I'd been there holding his hand as the ceiling caved in on us? Maybe so…" he pondered, his gaze growing distant once again. "But then again, knowing him, he'd have been far happier knowing that I'd survived. I had had a very narrow escape."
"So… that's not why you went evil and swore vengeance against the world?"
Zeref laughed out loud. "Of course not. I was only eight; what sort of eight-year-old swears vengeance against the world?"
"I don't- wait, hang on, didn't you tell me that you were applying for university? At eight years old?"
"Sure. I had tenure by twelve."
"Was it normal for eight-year-olds to attend magical academies back in the olden days?"
"No more so than it is today," he assured her. "I'm an evil genius, Lucy. It's not my fault that the history textbooks tend to leave out the second half of that epithet."
"I don't think you're very evil, either."
"Then you clearly haven't read enough textbooks," he yawned, lying down again and linking his fingers behind his head.
"From what I hear, they're not worth the paper they're written on," came her cool rejoinder. "So, if you didn't immediately become a world-despising megalomaniac, what did you do?"
"Well…"
Zeref stopped almost immediately, gazing up at the sky; a velvet void never quite as black as his eyes.
"Don't misunderstand me," he continued softly. "I was very upset… but for me, it wasn't despair and apathy that it brought, but motivation. I stayed up working all night, and the following morning, I submitted to the Academy a paper entitled Researches on Life and Death. I had decided that I was going to bring my little brother back to life."
Lucy's eyes widened. "Did you manage it?"
The invisible stars might have turned a whole lap around the planet in the time it took him to reply. "Yes… and no."
"Well, that explains literally nothing."
"Serves you right for trying to skip to the end of the story," he smirked, and she hadn't realized until that moment how much she'd missed that expression. Maybe talking had helped him, or maybe it was simply the distraction from the events of that day, but he was starting to look more and more like the man she knew again.
"Fine." Lucy pouted to hide her grin. "We'll go the long way round. Tell me what happened at the Academy."
"No. I'm done talking." He rolled onto his side, his back turned towards her, and only then did he add in a barely audible mutter, "For tonight."
"Alright," she conceded. "Thank you for talking to me. And… for everything you did for me today."
No response.
She smiled; she hadn't been expecting one.
"Zeref, are you going back to sleep?"
"Yes. Oh… I should go somewhere else." He sounded confused, as if wondering how he could have been relaxed enough to make that mistake.
"No, it's fine. You shouldn't have to be on your own. I promise I won't come near you, or… do anything stupid."
"Lucy…"
"I mean it." After a night of arguing and understanding, of wounds hidden for eons in the mist, of friendship offered and trust received, sending Zeref away to deal with his thoughts and his curse alone was unthinkable. "I don't think I'll be able to sleep anyway, so… it's really fine."
When he still looked dubious, as if he was genuinely trying to work out what her ulterior motive was, she added, as if the matter was settled, "Oh, and I think you should have this." She held out the single blanket they had between them, Lucy not having packed for camping out and Zeref not seeming to care for such mundane, practical things.
"I don't need it."
"I think it will help."
There was something bitter in his eyes: that, not satisfied at having seen him like this, she seemed determined to make him talk about it. "Lucy, I am not having nightmares because I am cold."
She was all too aware of that. It was a minor hardship compared to what his curse made him go through every day – but unlike the curse, it was entirely unnecessary. Rather, it was an insignificant symptom of a monumental problem: his inability, or perhaps his unwillingness, to look after himself; his belief that the fact that he could survive like this meant that there was no problem in him doing so – and that it would be wrong for him to want otherwise.
But if she said all that out loud, he would find a hundred logical reasons to refute it, so she locked eyes with him and said, "Humour me."
And although he shook his head, although he sighed in clear dismissal, on that night, she knew he would not refuse her. He took the blanket from her and stalked to the far side of the clearing – and then, like it was the most arduous task in the world, he wrapped the worn blanket around himself and settled down to rest.
She smiled to herself and let his childishness slide without a word.
She'd meant exactly what she'd said to him earlier – there was far too much going on in her head for her to even think about sleeping.
She thought about the young prodigy of magic, misunderstood by his parents, idolized by his lost brother, a victim of tragedy… and the boy she pictured was one who loved magic, loved learning, and carried with him a terrible sadness. She could see glimpses of that boy in the man she had come to know, far more clearly than she could see the heartless villain she had assumed he was before she met him.
She thought about how he had never told anyone; how alone he must have been all this time.
She thought about how unfair it was… and how there was nothing she could do.
Except, perhaps, to be there for him, as much as he'd let her.
At the far side of the clearing, one small hand closed around the top of the blanket, and he uttered not a sound for the rest of the night.