The Scars That Make You Whole
By CrimsonStarbird
In the Centre of the Universe, We Are All Alone
It wasn't with dread that Lucy regarded the gathering rainclouds, but fond resignation. After all, they had been rather lucky with the weather on their adventure so far. At some point, they were bound to get rain – and she'd much rather it came when she was within walking distance of home than when camping out in the middle of nowhere.
Home.
The word prickled uncomfortably in her mind. As she passed through the streets of Crocus, a bag of groceries in each hand, like she must have done a hundred times before, it all seemed so… unfamiliar.
It had been a week since Zeref had turned up with his implausible demands and ill-planned quest. Only a week. Before that unexpected encounter, these streets, this routine, this sheer domesticity had been her entire life for ten months. This should have been a return to welcome normality, but it wasn't.
That one week of chaos and adventure, of excitement and triumph, blazed so brightly in her memory that the entire ten months preceding it were an unreal blur.
Whether she got her guild back or not, she knew she would never be able to go back to this life.
The one consolation to that sobering thought was the sight of the Black Mage sat on the bench across from her house, assuring her that her life was not about to become ordinary any time soon.
Not that he looked quite so pleased to see her. "You took your time," he grumbled. "I was beginning to think that I should have physically put you on the right train before we parted ways."
"I was on the right train, thanks," Lucy retorted. "I just had to make a couple of stops between the station and here, that's all."
"You and your detours," Zeref sighed.
"Well, I'm sorry for having the foresight to realize that there would be no edible food in the house after a week away. Us mortals have to eat, you know."
Rolling her eyes, she headed towards her house – and stopped at once.
Her front door wasn't fully closed. At a glance, it looked shut, but it was battered and shadow-stained and the edges weren't quite parallel with the walls – almost as if it had been broken down and then wedged back into the frame.
Old fear thudded in her heart. Her hand was already curled around her keys' faint warmth.
"What is- oh." Zeref noticed her reflexive movement towards her keys first, before a glance at the door answered his half-asked question. "Do you want me to…?"
He was already stepping forward, though it took her a moment to realize why. He, the immortal, was volunteering to enter first, in case there was danger inside.
"No, I've got this," she responded quickly, and then winced. She hadn't meant the words to come out so sharp, but the unexpected gesture had thrown her. Even now, her thoughts were whirling, trying to deduce his ulterior motive. "It's fine," she added, shoving her uncertainty behind a false confidence. "Hired mage, remember?"
With more courage than she felt, she strode past him and gave the door a push. Sure enough, it fell in on itself with a groan.
Her hand didn't move from her keys as she stepped gingerly over the threshold. It wasn't that she was scared, but… there was something about having a house she had always implicitly assumed was safe broken into that made her glad she wasn't alone.
No sooner had she entered the living room than she stopped again.
She could tell from a glance that nothing had been stolen.
No, the intruder had been too busy destroying things for that.
Scorch marks radiated out from where her rug had once been, forming a many-pointed star on the floorboards. The coffee table looked like she'd bought it flat-pack and never got round to assembling it. Walls had been dented, plaster cracked, curtains disintegrated into ash, and everything that had managed to escape unscathed was streaked with zebra-stripes of soot.
Lucy fell to her knees. "My landlady is going to kill me…"
"Ah." At her side, Zeref crouched down and ran his hand through the soot on the floor. "Lucy, I'm so sorry; I think this might be my fault."
"Yours?" Lucy blinked, taken aback by the fact that he wasn't finding this situation hilarious. "You didn't set fire to my house, did you?"
"No… but I think this might be the result of Natsu being very angry with me."
Come to think of it, the destruction did look a lot like the Fire Dragon Slayer's handiwork (though she might have been extrapolating from quite a biased sample, given that most of the destruction she had seen in her life had been done by Natsu). "Because of what you did to stop him from following us?"
"Yes. I suspect he had to burn away the enchantment. I really am sorry, Lucy."
"Don't worry; I'm used to it. It's an occupational hazard of hanging out with Fairy Tail mages," she smiled, unexpectedly touched. "Though, I don't suppose there's anything you can do to fix it…?"
"I could call a plasterer for you?" When she laughed, he grimaced apologetically. "Sorry. I don't know any magic that's good for repairing furniture. I'll put a ward up around the door, though; the house isn't secure as it is."
"Thanks."
Still surprised by his eagerness to help, Lucy watched as he picked up the door and wedged it back into the frame, then placed both palms flat against it and concentrated. A black-violet film spread across the inner surface – a forcefield that would block the draught and keep out any more uninvited guests. The warm vitality of his magic glowed at the edge of her senses, a feeling that made her feel safer than looking at the forcefield with her own eyes.
She turned away from it before he could notice her reaction, busying herself with sorting through the post that had arrived in her absence.
"Oh, here's some good news," she remarked, tossing all the bills over her shoulder unopened and holding up the only letter remaining.
"Isn't that the royal seal?" Zeref asked, curiosity piqued.
"It sure is. This must be Hisui's answer to my letter." Flipping open the envelope, Lucy grinned as she retrieved a glossy slip of paper, marked with the same seal in shining silver. "Here we are: one invitation to the Summer Ball at the palace, for Lucy Heartfilia plus one. Told you the Heartfilia family had connections."
She glanced smugly at Zeref, hoping for some kind of awed response and receiving a disarmingly innocent look instead, which immediately prompted the well of dread in the pit of her stomach to resume operation. "Plus one?" he asked sweetly.
"Well, yes. There's not much point in me investigating what remains of the Eclipse Gate mechanism on my own, is there? I wouldn't know what to look for."
Zeref tilted his head. It wasn't fair that a man so dangerous could look so darn innocent. Not fair at all. "Does that mean you're inviting me to the ball, Lucy?"
Huffing, Lucy folded her arms, trying and failing to find a way out of this situation. "You know, if you were any kind of gentleman, you'd be asking me."
"Yes, because everything else about the two of us attending the Summer Ball together in order to infiltrate the palace and find out how you're destroying the fabric of reality is entirely orthodox," he smirked.
"Fine." Lucy closed her eyes. Took a deep breath. Wondered where this ranked in the list of most surreal things she had ever done – because if asking the Black Mage to the ball wasn't up near the top, she needed to seriously rethink her life. "Zeref, will you go to the ball with me?"
Black eyes sparkled, impossibly bright. "It would be an honour, Lucy."
"Are you done teasing me now?"
"I don't think I'll ever be done teasing you. It's too much fun."
Lucy heaved a sigh. "Well, anyway," she muttered, sticking the royal invitation in her bag and glancing around for something sensible to do to cancel out that. "Might as well make the most of being at home. I'll put some laundry on; if you want anything washing, stick it on that pile."
Zeref frowned at her as if he didn't understand the concept.
"Or sort yourself out," she shrugged, unfazed. "I'll see if I can clean up a bit, and then I'll cook something, it'll make a change from eating out… and in the meantime, you are going to take everything that isn't absolutely essential out of your Requip Space and leave it here."
"What?"
"You heard me. I'm not being your personal packhorse any more. You don't need that many books with you all the time, but you do need some space in case we come across any important quest items, so store what you can here. You can come back and pick them up at any time."
"Your house doesn't even have a front door!" he whined.
"Then put them in a safety deposit box or something, I don't care, as long as you apply some common sense," Lucy sighed. "You could always set up some protective runes or something, couldn't you? There's an empty cupboard in the bedroom you can use."
Zeref grumbled something suitably childish and sat down with his back to her. "Alright, fine," he muttered. "Pass me those books you were carrying for me."
"…Ah."
"Lucy?"
"Well, about that…"
"Lucy, what did you do?"
"I, uh… I may have bribed Freed with them so that he'd help me corner Laxus." As he continued to stare at her, almost disbelieving, she added, "Look, I'm sorry, I know I should have asked you first, but I was getting desperate – and it was all in aid of our quest! And besides, you didn't even know those books still existed until we stumbled upon them in Avatar's hideout. How important can they be, if you've managed just fine without them for four hundred years?"
After the longest moment of her life, that glower turned away from her again, and her heart tentatively resumed beating.
"Very well. I suppose I did give you the least important of the books I had with me… and Freed strikes me as the kind of person who knows how to take care of a book. Just don't do it again without consulting me."
"I won't be able to, because you'll be carrying your own books, won't you?" she retorted.
He conceded the point with a sigh and returned to sorting through his library.
Lucy busied herself with her own chores, occasionally checking over her shoulder to see how he was doing. Despite his obligatory petulance at being told what to do, he must have seen the logic in it, because he was soon pulling books from his personal dimension with little ripples of magic. Before long there were several piles of books around him, and it did not escape her notice that he was spending far more time reading than he was organizing.
Smiling to herself, Lucy let it slide. Surrounded by piles of books – that was one happy Black Mage.
She caught herself wondering if he would pull the Book of END out of his pocket dimension, and bit back the thought as fast as she could. Of course he wouldn't. There was no doubt that he'd be keeping that one in his possession, where it was safest.
Besides, the last thing she wanted was for Zeref to realize how much she was drawn to that book, when she should have despised everything that it stood for. It was bad enough to imagine what he might have gleaned from her reaction when she'd first held it.
So she left him to get on with it and focussed on cooking… and then, without warning, she burst out laughing.
It took a while for Zeref to come out of whichever magical world the open book upon his lap had transported him to, and he blinked at her for several bleary seconds before asking, "What is it?"
"Eight hours ago, I was fighting Laxus. Now I'm cooking and doing laundry, and you're re-organizing your library. How has our quest become so domestic so suddenly?"
A faint smile touched his lips. "If it helps, this is all very surreal for me as well."
"Then it's good to know I've been able to provide you with a new experience, after so many years," Lucy laughed, and then sobered. "You know, Zeref, you're really not like I was expecting."
"So you've said," he agreed. "Many times, in fact. I thought you'd be over it by now."
"About as much as I think I'll ever be."
She had thought that would be the end of it, but he frowned, giving the matter a consideration she hadn't thought he ever would of his own free will.
"When we met," he volunteered, unbidden, "you didn't know me. That meant I didn't have to behave in a certain way to justify my position or maintain my reputation. You had expectations of how I would act, I'm sure, but it even worked in my favour to subvert those, because it made it harder for you to deal with me. And, ultimately, whether you were frightened of me or whether you respected me didn't matter. I could act however I wanted. I didn't have to take things too seriously; I could be… free, I suppose, while I still could."
Then the wistful light fled from his eyes. His shoulders slumped; his head fell forward. "It has been a very long time since I've been so foolish. I should have acted like the person you expected me to be."
"Maybe it would have been more effective if you'd been an evil, intimidating Black Mage, but…" Lucy paused, trying to find a way to frame her words that wouldn't be too intrusive. "You seem like you've genuinely been having fun on this quest. You've definitely been having fun teasing me. Why would you want to force yourself to act differently – to be someone else – when you know it would have taken that away?"
"Because it would have made this whole thing less real," he said simply. "It would have stopped me from becoming too caught up in our quest. I suppose, also, it would have prevented you from coming too close to the real me… both from a strategic point of view, as your enemy, but also with your safety in mind, since I needed you alive. Need you alive." Disgusted with himself, he shook his head. "So much for that."
She understood what he was really saying – acting, rather than being, was yet another of the ways in which he suppressed his curse. She understood, further, that drawing attention to it, let alone trying to argue against it, would only push him away again. So, smiling, she suggested, "Like I told you before, I do things for my friends without needing to be asked. Isn't it therefore objectively beneficial for you to act as you have been doing and win my aid, rather than being all serious and evil and making me hate you?"
"I suppose," he conceded, and the shadows seemed to press a little less heavily upon his shoulders. "Though it would be much easier if you didn't, well…"
"If I didn't what?" she inquired when he tailed off, too curious to let him leave it at that.
"If you didn't respond so well." That wasn't much of an explanation, and she was about to tell him so when he met her gaze with startling clarity. "You bring out a good side of me, Lucy. You are right to say that I am having fun on this quest. So many things I would not otherwise care for are enjoyable to me because you make them so."
"…Because I'm good to tease, you mean?"
"It's a very rare skill," he assured her, eyes sparkling. "It's a precise balance between being able to take most things in your stride, and not being afraid to tell me when I've crossed a line."
"Gee, thanks," she grunted. That sterling commendation, however, did not detract from the underlying sentiment – or the fact that she'd been touched by it. "I like travelling with you," she ventured impulsively. "I like the way you listen to me."
"Is that such a big deal?" he wondered, bemused.
"Honestly? Yes. I love my team, but they do tend to drag me around a bit… and overrule me… and ignore me… well, surely you know this," she fumbled, feeling a wave of embarrassment sweep over her. For the first time, she appreciated how awkward he must have felt answering her prying questions. "You're the one who has collected an obsessive amount of information on my guild, after all."
"True, but I'm more interested in your fighting abilities and secret weaknesses," he told her shamelessly. "Interpersonal relationships are only of interest to me if I can use them to my advantage. Your team dynamic is irrelevant… though, knowing what I do about them, it doesn't surprise me. Your teammates are very loud and astonishingly bright. However, if they were a little quieter, a little less proud, then perhaps they would be able to see that you have all the qualities of a good leader."
Lucy snorted. "Don't be ridiculous."
"I'm not," he responded, offended by the implication. "You understand people, you inspire confidence in others, and you can stay calm and be decisive in a crisis. If given more of a chance, I think you'd be able to show the world that."
"Calm in a crisis? You've not forgotten the part where I panicked and challenged Laxus to single combat, right?"
"I didn't say there wasn't room for improvement," he smirked. "But after you made a humongous fool of yourself, you kept your head, used your resources to your advantage, and overcame the challenge, winning him to your side in the process."
"I got lucky. Besides, I'm terrible at understanding people. You're the one who had to explain Avatar's behaviour to me!"
"That's because you don't try to understand your enemies," he countered calmly, as if he had been expecting that very argument. "Not at first. Once you do start trying, things are very different."
She wondered if he was thinking of that night in the forest after their failed raid on the black church, and her doubts hovered on her lips, heavy but silent.
"I still can't do it like you can," she grumbled. "Any of this nonsense you're going on about."
"Naturally not. I've had four hundred years of practice. And, to be honest, it's only been in the past century or so that I've really got the hang of this whole leadership thing. I had to work hard at it; even now, it doesn't come naturally to me. You'd have to work at it, too – but I have no doubt you'd get there, if it was what you wanted."
Pausing, he drummed his finger upon the cover of a book that had ceased to hold any interest for him. "I didn't want it, but I needed it. Perhaps you are the opposite."
"I don't think I am," she considered. "Yes, sometimes I think it would be nice if my old team listened to me a bit more, but… it's not as though I wasn't happy, the way things were. It would take away a lot of what makes our adventures fun. Maybe there's a happy compromise somewhere."
"Maybe." It wasn't an agreement as much as agreeing to disagree, but Lucy would take it.
She asked, instead, "Why aren't you in charge of this mission?"
"I think you'll find I am in charge."
"Well, you're the one deciding where we go and what we do, but whenever an obstacle comes up, you're happy to sit back and let me deal with it. Yes, I know the whole point is that you're paying me to do the legwork, but you could be enforcing a strict way of doing things, and you're not. You're leaving it up to me. Even if my way of doing things isn't maybe as efficient or… as certain of success as the way you'd do things."
Casual suggestions to obliterate Lamia Scale and Blue Pegasus flashed through her mind, and it was all she could do not to roll her eyes as she continued. "You said yourself, you had no plans for how to complete this mission beyond getting me involved. The only restriction we have – the end date – was set by me. You may be technically in charge, but you have no qualms about delegating all your responsibilities to me. That's not really what I was expecting either."
"That's because I wanted to see how you did things. Not you, personally – but as a guild mage on an adventure. I've never done anything like this before."
"Never?"
"No. Well, I've gone out searching for particular artefacts or books plenty of times in my life, but it's different. These unpredictable events, the strange colleagues of yours we run into, your utter lack of regard for any kind of planning, the side quests we get dragged into… they don't tend to happen to me when I'm on my own, believe it or not."
"Hang on, it's not as though I'm the one responsible for Avatar's creation," Lucy interrupted hotly.
"True, but I would never have come into contact with them had you not talked me into that crusade of a detour. Some mage guild would have put an end to them – probably yours – and I would never have known that they even existed."
"Right up until they succeeded in their mystical ceremony to summon you, and you woke up one morning in a living nightmare," she teased.
"Quite." He scowled; it didn't last. "It's nice to just drop all responsibilities and dash off on a grand adventure with someone, isn't it? I wish I could do this more often."
"Why can't you? It's not difficult. You've seen me do it – it's mostly improvisation, really. If you travel enough, and listen out for those who need a mage's help, adventure will find you."
Zeref smiled and said nothing.
"Well, guilds are always the best place to pick up this sort of life," Lucy persisted. "In four hundred years, you've really never tried joining a guild?"
"You know I can't," he said steadily. "I can't belong to a group like that. I can't form meaningful attachments. Sometimes I think I can only manage this because I know it's only going to be a short time before I stand against you and all the friends of yours we're meeting as an enemy."
"I know, but…" It was the dispassionate way he said it that threw her, every single time. Fumbling for the threads of her thought, she continued, "Well, what about the people you sometimes talk to? Your… spies? Aren't they people you could go travelling with?"
"They're not really the questing type. You should see the grief I get from them just for this mission."
His tone was as light as she'd ever heard it, but she could tell he was deflecting. "But you'd have said the same about yourself a week ago, wouldn't you? How do you know, if you don't ask?"
Something flashed in his eyes, though his voice was as neutral as before. "It's not like that."
"How come? They're your friends, aren't they?"
"No. They are not. They are people who do things when I want things doing. I am not remotely interested in what they do when they're not doing things for me, and they behave like they do around me purely because of my position. There's nothing more to it than that."
"Zeref-"
"That's enough, Lucy."
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to… well… upset you."
"I'm not upset," he assured her, a faint smile and ten tonnes of iron-clad emotional control. "I just don't want to talk about this. I shouldn't have brought it up."
"Right. Sorry."
Awkwardly, Lucy turned away and let him get on with his book-sorting in silence.
She knew she'd pushed him too far. She'd asked a lot of impertinent questions, and really, she should have stopped while she'd been ahead.
She was far too used to travelling with people who weren't easily offended. No, it was more than that – she was far too used to travelling with people who valued the same things she did: her guild, her friendships, her way of life. Zeref didn't see things that way. Whether he couldn't, or whether he wouldn't… well, that she couldn't easily tell, and every time she thought she had him figured out, she overstepped her bounds or clashed with his curse, and everything was flipped upside down again.
Yet if he was truly resentful about what she'd said, he would simply have left. She'd seen him hurt, and he was too calm, too normal, for that right now.
And silence, she thought, wasn't all that unusual for two people who had spent so much time in each other's company recently – let alone two people who were rather better at understanding each other now than they had been a week ago.
After eating, Lucy helped Zeref shift the books he had reluctantly agreed to leave behind into the spare cupboard.
Well, helped might not have been quite the right word. The process cycled between Lucy doing all the work herself, because it was the only way anything was going to get done, and Zeref twitching every time she so much as touched a book, until his overprotectiveness reached critical mass and he would insist upon doing the whole thing himself.
Which would last about thirty seconds, until he started wavering yet again over whether he might need Elementary Fire Rituals in the field (she pointed out that people who attended university at eight years of age did not need any text labelled 'elementary') or whether it was really safe to leave his four-hundred-year-old copy of Alchymie of the Grave in her house – a question she also asked, because if a Rune Knight happened to find it, how many years in prison would that one earn her? Zeref had taken great offence at this, and said that if she valued the Council's laws more than true knowledge, he wouldn't leave any books here at all… causing her to grab them herself, shove them in the cupboard, and begin the cycle all over again.
Despite herself, she loved the frustration of it – the frustration that meant things were completely normal in their team once again.
Thus it was almost embarrassingly late by the time they'd finished, and Zeref sketched no more than a single layer of runes around them before closing the cupboard door. "That will do," he said, somewhat unnecessarily. "I'm going to find somewhere to spend the night."
"Stay here," Lucy offered at once.
A long, impenetrable look. Choosing every word carefully, Zeref said, "That's not a good idea. You know what will happen if I do."
"Yes." Memories flashed: him thrashing in the grip of a nightmare; cold sweat and helplessness. She met his gaze evenly. "I want you to know that you don't have to be alone because of something you can't help."
Another long, long silence. Why was this more nerve-wracking than challenging Laxus to a duel?
She persisted, "I think it's worse because you're on your own. It might not be so bad if you stay here with me."
"Upon what evidence are you basing that entirely illogical hypothesis?"
"When you stayed near me last time, you were calmer," she pointed out. "It could happen again."
He turned his head away. It was only a slight gesture, but he was the first to break eye contact. "I would rather you didn't see."
Such an admission of vulnerability almost broke her resolve, but she dug in her heels and attacked from another angle. "I am hurt that you think it would affect my opinion of you."
"Well," he conceded, finally, "I have warned you against it, and you know what the consequences will be, but if you still want me to stay, I'll stay."
"Thank you. Hang on, I'll see if I can find a blanket Natsu hasn't immolated…"
She did find one, in the end, and she tossed it over to where he sat upon the singed sofa. He caught it without looking, but then stopped, bringing it to rest still bunched up in his lap. His unfocussed gaze was turned towards the ruined floor. Detached. Lost, a thousand miles away from here.
Impulsively, Lucy sat in the armchair opposite him. "Zeref?"
"Mm?"
"Will you continue your story from before?"
"What?"
"When you were telling me about your childhood."
"Oh… must I?"
Lucy shook her head vigorously. "Of course not. I'm not going to blackmail you into it, or anything like that. But if you are willing to talk… I'd like to listen. After all the time you've spent alone, sharing it with someone else might help."
"Help how?"
"I don't know. But… do you feel any worse, for having told me what you did last time?"
"I suppose not." Zeref was silent for another eternity. True to her word, she didn't push him, and her patience was rewarded when he asked, "Where did I get to?"
"You were going to tell me about life at that Academy you attended at some stupidly precocious age."
A smile flitted across his face. "I suppose that's harmless enough to talk about," he pondered. "As you've probably guessed, the Academy took me in after my village was destroyed. Even amongst the other students, there was no one even close to my age, but that didn't matter. I could look after myself easily enough."
"No offence, but I find that hard to believe," Lucy pointed out mildly. "You don't know how to look after yourself now, and you've had four hundred years of practice."
"Hmm… well, I certainly wasn't worse at it than some of the airheaded professors I worked with," he amended. "But I would have stayed there as a student anyway, so it simply meant that I moved in a little sooner, and could spend that otherwise-wasted time in the Academy's libraries. By the time I had officially enrolled as a student, there had been no fewer than seven fistfights over which professor would become my personal tutor, which was something of a record…"
"I can't believe they weren't put off by your insufferable smugness," Lucy teased, and was relieved to see that tiny smile emerge from hiding again in response.
"In truth, most of them had never met me. None truly understood what I hoped to achieve by being there. I think, rather, that they were drawn to the story of the poor, orphaned prodigy, and what becoming my mentor would do for their own images…"
Shaking his head, he leaned back on the sofa. "Well, it's easy to be cynical now. At the time, it was everything I had hoped for, and more. The Mildian Academy of Magic… you have to understand, Lucy, there is nothing quite like it in today's world. Mages gather in guilds, and at the Council, and they further magic through the practice of it, but they don't study it. Not in any organized, collaborative way. Magic is a tool used to support society; it isn't something to be understood for its own sake.
"Imagine the most knowledgeable mages in the world, not scattered across the continent in guilds, but all in one place – supported by extensive experimental facilities and comprehensive libraries. Imagine a network of letters and publications and information and debate connecting Academies between countries which didn't even have trade agreements. Imagine an institution of magic where some of the most distinguished professors weren't even mages! Either they couldn't use magic, or had never felt the need to learn it – because you don't need to be able to use magic to study it; to understand the theory; to design revolutionary spells and incredible artefacts! The division between mages and non-mages was anathema to everything that the Mildian Academy stood for… as was the idea that magical strength is proven through battle. Mages didn't go to the Academy to learn to fight – most couldn't.
"And you have to remember, this was a time of war. The dragons battled amongst themselves, and humanity was caught in the middle. What happened to my village was by no means unusual. Everywhere, survivors lived amongst destruction and death.
"This was the world in which we pursued knowledge for the sake of knowledge. We studied magic not to win the war, not even to end it, but because it was there to be understood. The frontiers of the unknown were every bit as important as the front lines of the war. That was everything the Mildian Academy of Magic represented."
Lucy didn't need to hear the conviction in his voice. She knew, simply because she knew him, how much a place like that must have meant to him.
"That sounds so much like you," she said, and he made a quiet noise of agreement.
Only when it seemed he had fallen too far into memory to speak again did she prompt him, with what she hoped would be a harmless question: "This was where you worked in the hospital, right?"
His eyes brightened. "Yes, in the Academy's teaching hospital. I was there as a researcher, not a doctor, mind. I was there to observe, to measure, to understand… even back before the curse, my goal was not to save lives."
And then, so softly, he added, "I did, though. A great number. I could think in ways others couldn't. I could take risks they wouldn't dare consider, because I wasn't so personally invested, or bound by their codes, or slowed down by failure… and often, it paid off."
"If you were at the Academy with the intention of bringing your brother back to life, why did you spend so much time working in the hospital? How would that have helped?"
Zeref was quiet for a long moment, but she knew him well enough now to be reasonably certain that he wasn't offended by her question, merely contemplative.
"Let me ask you a question, Lucy," he said, and she nodded. "What do you believe the One Magic to be?"
Lucy blinked. A pop quiz on the nature of magic was not what she'd been expecting from this conversation. "Seriously? You're asking me that?"
"I want to hear your take on it."
She gave him a dubious look. He met it evenly, a silent indication that he wouldn't continue his story until she gave an answer.
"Well… my mother always believed that love was at the heart of magic. The more I learn about it, the more certain I am that she was right."
"Love," Zeref echoed thoughtfully. "I suppose I should have known. Still, it's far from the worst answer I've heard."
"Now you're going to tell me it's darkness or something equally sinister, aren't you?"
"Of course I wouldn't. Why would you think that?"
"Grimoire Heart were pretty certain that you were going to unleash the darkness at the heart of magic for them…"
"Were these the same people who genuinely believed that the only reason why I hadn't massacred all non-magic-users was because there was some kind of seal preventing me from doing so?" Zeref asked, amused. "The ones with whom I got a little bit upset because their activities were giving me a bad name?"
"…Yeah, that's them," Lucy admitted sheepishly.
"Between you and me, Lucy, I'm not sure they're a particularly reliable source of information."
She countered his patronizing tone with a teasing one. "Better or worse than Avatar?"
"Do not mention that cult of morons-!" Zeref began, before thinking better of it, and relenting. "Better, because at least Grimoire Heart realized they had to come and find me rather than convincing themselves that some imaginary ritual could summon me to them. I'm a human being, not a manifestation of magic." Another sigh. "But only a little better. I have never understood why groups like those treat me as they do. Certainly, I have never maintained, at any point in my life, that darkness is the source of all magic."
"Then what is?"
"Life."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that if one were to reach the heart and the origin of magic as you know it, they would find not light or darkness, not love or hate, but the very force of life itself."
"I still don't think I follow," Lucy frowned. "How do you come to a conclusion like that?"
Zeref made a swift twirling gesture with his hand, just as he had done before when trying to encourage her to change her approach. "Consider it from another angle. Why do you believe love is the origin of magic?"
"Because…"
It was at times like this that she could fully believe he'd spent years as an academic. She'd asked him an innocent question on a topic for which he was quite possibly the leading authority, and he'd managed, effortlessly, to flip it so that she had to answer first, and no doubt make a fool of herself in the process. It was startling how easily he fell into the role.
"Because nothing is as powerful as love," she said bravely. "No one is stronger than when they have something to protect. I have seen people do impossible things out of love – defeated opponents they should never have been able to beat, or created new magic, far too powerful for them, which they have never been able to use before or since. Magic is born from love and friendship and hope…"
"Yes," Zeref affirmed, when she tailed off. "True, all of it. But that explanation is insufficient. What of those who do not love?" His raised hand forestalled her predictable protest. "What of me, Lucy? Am I not living proof that one can be powerful and indifferent? Even if my curse makes me an anomalous case, many of the most powerful mages in history have drawn their power from elsewhere. What of Acnologia? Hate is the source of his magic, and if he ever had the ability to love, he lost it long before he became what he is. Great magic – great deeds – have been born from grief and pain; from fear and desperation. You are lucky indeed that your magic is developing in an environment so filled with love. The world was not always so kind."
"Even so, it has always contained love," said Lucy, softly.
"Yes. But it is not to everyone the power it is to you and your friends. I do not contest that it forms a fundamental part of magic, only that if you accept that, you must also accept that hate, pain and fear are equally fundamental."
Lucy took a moment to think this over. It didn't feel right to her, after everything she had been through, but at the same time, she wanted to hear what he had to say. "Okay, for the time being, let's say I buy that line of reasoning. What next?"
"What are emotions? Where do these feelings come from; what are they to magic? They are, Lucy, expressions of life, the proof that we are living it. Or, to put it another way – can we really say we are living, if we do not feel?"
"I don't believe so, no," she murmured.
"Why does so much magic spontaneously develop when we are in mortal peril? Because it is when we are closest to death that we are most alive. That is when we become truly aware of the importance of our survival, for ourselves and for those we are trying to protect. I have seen exhausted mages on the brink of death generate magic from nothing but their determination to live."
"True," Lucy agreed, wondering how many times she had seen Natsu do just that.
Zeref nodded. "But crucially, it also works the other way. If enough magic accumulates in one place, it can become alive."
"Living magic?" Lucy asked, startled, and then her brain caught up. "Oh – you mean like the Etherious demons?"
"In a sense," he frowned. "They are living creatures formed entirely out of magic. Likewise, gods – in the sense of God Slayers – are manifestations of magic in its purest form, temporarily granted a physical existence through the use of ritual magic. But both of those are deliberate. They only happen when magic is consciously used by a caster to create life out of other magic, and will only last as long as the magic forming them is sustained – gods until the sacrifice that feeds the ritual is spent, and the Etherious demons by drawing power from me. What I am talking about is when the conversion happens entirely of its own accord, inexplicably and irrevocably. Magic just… becomes alive."
A quick skim through her own adventures turned up no obvious instances of this having happened, so Lucy's tone was slightly dubious as she asked, "And when has that happened?"
"When the Celestial Spirits came into being, for one."
"What?"
He smiled at her obvious surprise. "What did you think the Spirits were? The circumstances of their creation are complex, but… as I tried to explain before, an exceptionally powerful magic was developed to act as an interface between physical reality and a kind of magic that is truly beyond human comprehension – a magic that is, in a way, the very opposite of the One Magic. This interface utilized eighty-eight gates, each one representing a constellation, through which the other magic could be accessed and manipulated. However, the interface itself became so powerful so quickly that it developed sentience, which fragmented into multiple living beings of pure magic: the Celestial Spirits."
"I've never heard anything like that before," Lucy breathed. "You were there when it happened, weren't you? That's how you know, even though the Spirits can't speak of it. You saw it." Then, on impulse, she added, "And Anna. Was she involved too?"
"Yes. Although once we understood what we had witnessed, the importance of keeping their origins a secret was self-evident. Regardless," he added, a firm reminder that he was no more willing to talk about Anna now than he had been before, "it has always been my belief that life is magic and magic is life – and that is the answer to the question you put to me earlier. I spent so much time as a medical researcher because I wanted to understand life. Why people lived, and why they died… that, to me, was the origin of all magic in the world. The hospital fascinated me. More died there than anywhere else in the city, and yet it was so full of life! Surely there I would find the answers I sought."
After that, he was quiet for a long time. He sat hunched over, his elbows on his knees and his gaze turned towards the ground. Lucy knew that posture; knew better than to disturb him right now.
"I pursued many lines of enquiry while I was at the Academy," he resumed, at last. They had turned away from the theory of magic, and his tone was once again sombre. "I designed the R-System and the Eclipse Gate, although I built neither at the time. The first seemed promising in theory but was unfeasible in practice; many believed the second uncertain even in theory, and I considered it little more than a curiosity to puzzle over in my spare time. And every day, from a hundred different angles as I progressed in a hundred different fields of study, I drew closer and closer to the One Magic… to a complete understanding of life and of magic.
"I was almost there, Lucy," Zeref continued – a lament, as he slumped backwards on the sofa and closed his eyes. "I had delved deeper into the heart of magic than any before me. I still had my brother's body, preserved with magic. I was more certain than ever that the One Magic, the power of life itself, could bring him back to me. But… people had started to notice."
For the first time since he had agreed to tell his story, the emotion was fading from his voice. There was no one he could hold responsible for his family's death, nothing to blame but ill fortune, yet if the story was to have an antagonist, this was it.
"I had never been secretive about my goal, Lucy. I was at the Academy for a reason, and I was happy to tell that reason to any who asked. I assumed, therefore, that those I worked alongside had accepted it… but that was a mark of my naivety. In truth, they saw me as a child; they had not yet learned to take me seriously. The closer I got, the more they began to realize that I fully intended to do this… and they became scared."
He hissed the word like it was a cardinal sin.
"They tried to talk me out of it. They said it was too dangerous. They said no one was meant to do what I wanted to do; that I was trespassing in the domain of the gods… yes, I was!" Zeref said suddenly, his gaze snapping to hers with such intensity that she recoiled. "I was, because I am human and that is what we do! We strive, we explore, we conquer, we reach out into the unknown! Nothing is beyond us, no goal, no dream, no dare; we will push back the boundaries of what is known until the entire universe is ours! Fear and ignorance are our enemies, and we will not yield to them!"
He exhaled slowly, oxygen feeding the passion in his eyes. "Even knowing everything that happened as a result of my actions, I still say this, Lucy: they were wrong to try and stop me."
"What did happen?" Lucy ventured.
A bitter smile. "In short, the Dean informed me that I would be expelled from the Academy if I did not stop pursuing this line of research."
"And you refused to stop."
"Of course. His demand went against everything that the Academy was to me – that magic was to me. I do not know how I could have submitted to it and still found the nerve to keep living. But I couldn't leave, either – without the Academy's contacts or resources it would have taken me decades to complete my work. So… I did the only thing I could. I tried to prove him wrong by reaching into the One Magic then and there."
Zeref shook his head slowly. "I wasn't ready. I knew I wasn't ready, but I had no choice. I'd come closer than anyone to the truth at the heart of magic; I'd developed new runic and numerical systems with which to describe it; I knew what needed to be done and how to do it, and the results of the early tests looked so promising… but I hadn't been able to run the calculations all the way through to the end. It was decades later that I finally completed them, and understood that it would never have been possible, what I tried to do on that day. At the time, all I knew was that it had gone wrong, so wrong…"
His head was in his hands as his voice tailed off. She would have hugged him if she thought he would have appreciated it, but all she could do for him was listen.
"Failing with experimental magic is bad," he murmured. "Failing with experimental magic that draws from the heart of magic itself is disastrous. I touched the magic at the core of everything, and… there was recoil."
She barely dared to breathe the words. "What happened?"
"There were one thousand, three hundred and forty-two people in the Academy complex that day," Zeref recounted flatly, a figure from a history book; a number that had stayed with him his entire life. "Some of them, I liked. Some, I admired. Most, I didn't even know. There was no damage to the buildings – no sign that anything out of the ordinary had taken place within. Just one thousand, three hundred and forty-one unmarked corpses, and me. So I ran."
"What else could you have done?" Lucy whispered. He didn't hear her.
"At first, I thought it was a mistake. The One Magic had meant to take my life as punishment, and become confused somehow. I felt so certain that if I died, it would cancel out the debt, and return everyone else to life. I just…" He swallowed, and had another go. "I tried, but I didn't die. Again and again and again… until at last I understood. Life for me, death for everyone around me. And so it has been ever since."
"Zeref…" Lucy started, but didn't know where to go. What could she say to something like that? What could anyone?
That black gaze flicked to hers; he understood perfectly. "By the time I returned, a few days later," he continued, "the Academy had been burned to the ground. Not a trace remained."
"Why?"
"Because everyone inside an Academy known for its pioneering magical research had inexplicably dropped dead," he said, in the same tone of voice he might have used to describe the weather. "A magical curse or disease accidentally unleashed by experimenting mages was the most likely explanation. They wanted to ensure there was no chance of it spreading to the city. It wasn't an unreasonable response even before you realize that all the experts who might have been able to reassure people that it was safe had been in the Academy when it happened.
"But the cost was enormous," he continued, letting out a heavy breath. "I cannot begin to convey to you how much was lost on that day. The books that went up in smoke, the experiments left unfinished, the greatest mages of the age – old masters and young prodigies alike – wiped out in one blow… and instead of ambition, instead of a hunger for knowledge, there was nothing left behind but fear. Fear of what they didn't understand. Fear that it would happen again. The very same fear that had driven the elders who tried to stop me now reigned supreme… in death, they finally got their way.
"The governments and wealthy patrons who had previously thrown funding at the Academies now wouldn't be seen dead associated with one. The children like myself, who had grown up dreaming of a career in magic, put their skills to more practical – to more respectable – uses, and began to form guilds instead. It was the beginning of the end of the Age of Academies. The Mildian Academy had been the nexus of the entire Republic of Letters, and with its life and legacy obliterated, all hopes of its spirit being carried into the next generation vanished.
"They did not stop to identify the bodies in the Academy before setting the blaze. Everyone believed that all members of the Mildian Academy had died – including me. I wasn't exactly unknown at the time, but this let me and my early work disappear from the gazes of contemporaries – and of history. By the time I began to acquire the reputation I have today, decades later, no one associated me with any of the many, many researchers who died at the Academy."
Then, thoughtfully, he amended, "Except for one. Her grandfather was a professor I'd worked with at the Academy. On the day it had burnt down, he'd been away visiting family, having taken with him a copy of the Academy's Transactions in which I had published a particular paper – one of the few copies that survived. His granddaughter found it amongst his possessions when he died, and once she'd made the connection, she spent three years tracking me down… but too few copies of my early published works survived, and too much time elapsed in between, for anyone from more recent times to have worked it out. As I said, by the time I started acquiring renown once more, it was for an entirely different reason."
"But if more people knew what had happened to you," Lucy burst out, "don't you think they would treat you differently? If they knew the truth about the Academy – that you were only trying to help your brother – that what happened was an accident-"
"Then they'd want to be my friend?" Zeref finished, with a twisted smile.
"Well – no, but they might understand why you turned against the world, rather than blindly labelling you as a villain…"
As she tailed off, Zeref glanced at her, confused – and then, to her utter astonishment, he burst out laughing. "Oh, no, that's not why I… how did you put it last time? That's not why I went evil and swore vengeance against the world."
"…It isn't?"
"No! My contact with the One Magic had left me with this curse, and I'd lost my home again, but my goal was closer than it had ever been. Since I no longer aged, my research was not constrained by time; since I couldn't die, experiments that had been too risky to attempt had suddenly become feasible. I had to live in isolation to suppress the curse, but I'd never been particularly good at working with others anyway… and everyone I might have wanted to communicate with about my research was dead.
"I hated myself for it," he confessed, more softly; a cloud of perplexity drifting into his eyes. "I felt so guilty for what I'd done – and worse, for seeing such horror as an opportunity. I would try over and over to end my life, until eventually I'd realize that I was just wasting time. My life wasn't going anywhere, so I might as well do something with it. I'd touched the heart of magic, and I suffered for it every day, but as a result I had seen things – understood things – that no one else could begin to imagine. This was research only I could do. And thus the cycle would begin again…"
Zeref thought for a moment, and when he resumed, his voice was sharper, more in control. "What I had thought to be the most promising method of bringing my brother back to life had failed, but what I had learnt through that failure opened many intriguing avenues of research, and as I said, time was no longer an issue. I learnt to create life from magic, and I approached the task that way."
"This was when you made the demons," Lucy guessed.
"Yes. They were as paradoxical as me. They were a manifestation of my hope and my despair; my twin wishes to understand all life and end my own. At times I had them test their abilities out on me, in the hope that I could create a being powerful enough to overcome the curse or creative enough to circumvent it. At other times, when those dark phases passed, I had them run errands for me: maintaining my laboratory equipment and living space, fetching supplies from towns so I didn't have to go near, helping me with my experiments… I had no intention of hurting anyone. Not by myself, or by using the demons. I just wanted to be left alone."
"I understand that," Lucy said, and she meant it. "But, well… if you don't mind me asking… if it wasn't becoming cursed that made you, well, go evil and end up with the reputation you have, what was?"
A sigh. "There came a time when I began to think it would be a good idea for me to use my immense magical power and accumulated knowledge for the benefit of others," said he. "That turned out to be a mistake."
"Why? What happened?"
To her dismay, Zeref just shook his head. "That, I do not want to talk about."
"Maybe some other time?" Lucy ventured hopefully.
The noise he made was disappointingly non-committal.
Lucy tried not to let her dismay show; she knew how privileged she was that he had shared anything with her at all. "Thank you for telling me," she said instead, meeting and holding his gaze. "I appreciate it. I know it wasn't easy for you."
"Yes. Well… that's alright. Thank you for listening, I suppose." He frowned as he spoke, as though the words were strange to him.
"Is there anything I can do for you?"
"No. Though… I would like to be on my own for a while."
"Of course. I'll say goodnight, then. We'll set off for Point Nova in the morning."
Lucy hadn't quite fallen asleep – her mind drifted through a dream-world painted with fire and someone else's anguish – when a loud noise jolted her straight into wakefulness.
Her first thought was that Zeref was caught in the grip of another nightmare, but as she dashed into the lounge, she could see him also getting to his feet with deliberate, controlled purpose. His attention was homing in on the front door.
"What happened?" she asked. "Did something trigger your wards-?"
Before he could speak, something hammered against the door. It caught and rattled against the forcefield Zeref had raised earlier that evening. Lucy tensed, one hand on her keys. Was it Avatar, here for revenge? Old enemies of Fairy Tail?
The rattling came again. There was something far too regular about it – it sounded less like an attempt to break in, and more like… knocking. Frantic knocking, but knocking nonetheless.
It was worth the risk. She strode to the door and pulled it open, Zeref's barrier dispelling at her touch.
A dark shape loomed before her. The spraying rain caught the glow of the streetlights and gave the silhouette a crackling orange aura. Soaked black hair was plastered to a ghostly face. Dilated eyes shone red – not with demonic light, but swollen blood vessels. One hand swung uselessly at the air where the door had been.
"Lucy," he croaked. "Avatar… Levy's in danger…"
Gajeel fell forward and collapsed at her feet.
A/N: Thank you all for your continuing support of this story, it means more to me than you know. However, work and studying have really started to get on top of me this week, and therefore there will not be a chapter next week as I try to get my life back under control.
It's typical that exam season happens to coincide with the arc that has caused me more trouble than all the others put together in this story - I've already re-written the upcoming arc multiple times and there's still a lot of work I need to do on each chapter before they're ready to go, and I really need to be spending that time revising for my exams. As a result, updates are likely to slow down until after my exams. If I promise you a chapter, you'll definitely get it, but I may not promise more than one every other week until mid-November. Thank you for your patience and I hope to see you all again in a fortnight. ~CS