The Scars That Make You Whole
By CrimsonStarbird
Sacrimony, Aftermath
-Sing For Me, Angel of Afterlife-
Just let her go.
Long after Lucy's footsteps had faded to nothing, Zeref stood unmoving amongst the rubble and the ash, staring at the starless sky.
Just let her go.
It was always going to end this way. If anything, it was a wonder they had managed to stay on this journey together for so long. Their outlooks on life were too different, their thought processes incommensurable. She was suffering because some people she'd never even met had died in a town she just happened to be visiting, and he… he hadn't exactly wanted them to die, but trying to save them had almost cost him her life, and that was unacceptable.
But it was over now. She was alive, her friends were safe and recovering in another town, and yes, they might have failed to save Bishop's Lace or capture Arlock, but his plan to summon a fire god had been thwarted. Weren't they meant to pick themselves up and learn from their mistakes and vow to stop Avatar for good next time? Wasn't that the pragmatic, the heroic, the Fairy Tail thing to do?
Instead, she had taken the blame for all those deaths upon herself. It didn't matter that she owed these people nothing; that she, a total stranger, had almost lost her own life trying to save them. She had decided she was responsible for all of it.
How could he understand that? How, when he knew what it was truly like to be responsible for the deaths of so many, and had more authority than anyone to tell her it wasn't her fault?
Just let her go.
It would be so easy to fall back into that apathy. To forget everything again; to go willingly into the labyrinth of thought that had imprisoned him earlier, lost in the contradiction of his own being. To not have to be himself any more – because being himself required the constant and strenuous preservation of an incredibly delicate mental balance, with the death of others if he went too far one way and the death of his own sense of self if he went too far the other.
The nothingness would take him back. It always did.
And when it came right down to it, very little would change. Lucy had made it clear that she would carry on her quest with or without him. Fairy Tail would still be reborn. Everything would play out as he intended, and by the time the endgame began, he would be ready to take the stage once more as her final enemy.
He didn't need to keep supervising her to ensure that she kept her promise. There was no need for their team to continue.
He should just let her go.
Walk away and stop caring.
He'd done it so many times before.
But every time he closed his eyes, he remembered the disgusted expression on Leo's face as he'd seen through the façade of myth and magic to the truth of who he was… and in his accusatory eyes, he saw her disdain. How disappointed would Anna be to see him now? To know that after four hundred years, he hadn't changed one bit; to see everything that she had done for him thrown away as soon as it became difficult?
The still-smoky air settled in his lungs, steadying his magic, strengthening his mind, reaching through the ache and the frustration for the space between intent and reason, between action and consequence, between motive and justification, the point of intersection where his cursed magic could gain no traction, and grounding himself there.
He should just let her go.
But he didn't want to.
Not like this.
It wasn't supposed to hurt so much.
Lucy had experienced defeat before, but never like this. Failing to protect the guildhall from Tartaros's assault or winning only through Aquarius's sacrifice was different. Those losses had been her team's to bear, and because of them, mages across the whole continent had been free to continue their lives of magic.
This time, she herself was fine. The price of her failure had been paid by those whose only crime had been living in the wrong town on the wrong night.
The one time Fairy Tail hadn't been there to back her up, the one time it had all depended on her, the one time it really counted, she hadn't been able to do a thing.
Every time she closed her eyes, the void within filled with visions of what might have been.
She imagined arriving in Marguerite Town on the first day of her quest only to find that Wendy had been killed when dark mages had demolished half the town, and Lamia Scale, despite being right there, had failed to stop it.
She imagined discovering that there was one last twist in Arlock's plan, and it had never been Bishop's Lace he intended to sacrifice, but the nearby town where Gajeel had taken the poisoned Levy and Pantherlily.
She imagined going through the list of dead and finding that Romeo had been in the town visiting his grandparents. Or Freed had been there researching ancient magic to cure Laxus. Or Elfman had been purchasing rare ingredients. Or Natsu had been caught up in it while looking for her…
It was too much, and she could not bear it.
She remembered little of stumbling into the next village, finding the small inn, or staggering up to the room she was given. She might as well have been lying on that bed forever. Her failure pressed down upon her like a blanket which no amount of tossing and turning could shed. The tears came hot and violent, and breathing through them was a battle she was slowly losing.
And all the while, memories kept hitting her like shovelfuls of soil landing on the lid of her coffin. Losing to Gray – no, losing to the darkness that had seized him. Trusting the military when she should have known there was a traitor. Not realizing Avatar's plan until Levy had already collapsed. Unable to stop Arlock. The town destroyed for nothing.
It was then that there came a gentle tapping at the door.
No. She couldn't deal with anyone right now. She remained silent, hoping that the innkeeper or whichever staff member he had sent to check on her would just go away. How must she have looked, hauling herself through the corridors? Distraught? Dying? Responsible for the deaths of thousands? In need of a hospital or a therapist or both?
"Lucy," a soft voice called out, and it was certainly not the innkeeper's voice. It was both too young and too old for that. Too unsure of itself.
She gripped the pillow in a python's embrace. Not a sound escaped her lips. If he couldn't hear her, perhaps he would think she wasn't here and leave.
But he must have spoken to the innkeeper, or perhaps he just knew, because he persisted, "Lucy, may I come in?"
Her body shook with the effort of keeping her scream internal. Hadn't she made it clear that she didn't want to be around him? Him, and his you couldn't have saved them, there was no point in even trying…
And his hand pulling her out of the exploding rune circle.
Probably the only reason why she was still alive.
"I don't think you should be on your own tonight," Zeref continued in a whisper. "Please, Lucy. Tell me I can come in."
Still shaking, still biting down on her lip hard enough to draw blood, she continued to throttle the pillow as if it were her own battered heart, and willed him to go away.
She could almost hear his shoulders slump from here.
"Alright," he said quietly. "I'll be in the room next door if you need me. You can come and find me at any time."
His footsteps faded from her hearing.
The rush of satisfaction she had been expecting never came. If anything, the emptiness seemed more frightening than before, and she wondered if there wasn't a part of her that had hoped he would break down the door to be with her… but why would he? He wasn't like her friends from the guild. He valued and respected privacy. He'd asked for her permission, and she hadn't given it; what was she expecting from him?
In the aftermath of Tartaros, when she'd been reeling from losing Aquarius, her closest friends, who were always breaking into her apartment for the most trivial reasons, had been too busy dealing with their own problems to be her uninvited – though desperately desired – company. She hadn't wanted to bother them by asking. She had thought she would recover on her own, in time. Then Natsu had left to find his own kind of solace, and her guild had all too willingly drifted apart.
Last time, she should have asked for help, but she hadn't.
This time… she had been offered help. Was she really too proud to accept it?
Before she knew what she was doing, she was on her feet, drawing back the bolt of the door. Outside, Zeref stopped turning the key in the adjacent door's lock. Their eyes met silently. He looked so anxious. For her.
She couldn't bear it any longer, so she turned and fled back into the room. She threw herself face-first onto the bed, grabbing the bedraggled pillow like a lifeline, like she could hide herself away in it, like she could bury the last five seconds within it and pretend they'd never happened.
The door clicked shut behind him. Between sobs, she heard his quiet footsteps as he crossed the room, and after an awkward moment – as if he hadn't realized all rules had been suspended, all professional and personal boundaries already dissolved – he perched on the edge of the bed.
Stiffly, as if he'd not done this in years, or perhaps as if he'd never done this, he reached out and let his hand rest upon her trembling back. Slow at first, and then with increasing confidence, he rubbed slow circles on her back, regular and comforting as the uncontrollable shaking of her body began to ease.
He didn't tell her that things were going to be okay. He knew better than that.
But he told her that she wasn't thinking clearly right now.
He told her that things would look different in the morning.
He told her that her emotions were clouding everything right now, and although there was nothing wrong with being emotional, the Lucy he knew was the best parts of passion and common sense combined, and when she was that Lucy again, she would understand.
And she believed him.
Enveloped by the kindness found in the least likely of places, she cried for the dead, and he stayed with her until she had fallen into an exhausted sleep.
Something given, something taken away.
That was the fundamental truth of ritual magic.
It wasn't like other rune-based magics. They used the languages of magic to temporarily alter reality: to enforce new laws upon a bounded space, to inflict pain upon an enemy, to protect a building. Mages wrote the changes they desired onto the walls, the air, the bodies of their foes, and their magic persisted for as long as the runes did.
Ritual magic wrote its changes into the fabric of the universe.
Nothing sacrificed to it could ever be regained. No changes wrought by it could ever be undone.
Once set in motion, the only thing that could stop it was a perfectly calculated counter-ritual – and devising one took years of dedicated study and experimentation. They weren't spontaneously created on a battlefield, the way a lesser mage could stumble across a new spell… or so Colonel Arlock Lydiatt had thought.
Perhaps, then, it had been fortunate that things in Bishop's Lace had played out the way they had.
His plan had failed, and yet it seemed he had stumbled upon something far greater.
Cross-legged in a still-burning street, the tip of his sword danced back and forth, inscribing calculations into the air with an elegance most scholars could not accomplish with a pen. Runes swirled and numbers waltzed; the readings from his diagnostic spell mixed with his imagination and filled the pages of his mind with fascinating possibilities.
"This is where our tale truly begins, O mighty Zeref," he grinned.
He might have laughed out loud – he certainly felt gleeful enough for it – but at the sound of footsteps, the soft crunch of boots in ash, he decided against it. Still, he did not turn to acknowledge the newcomer, and the funeral footsteps were shortly replaced by sharp, hostile words: "Lord Zeref didn't come."
A smile twitched at Arlock's lips, but he made no attempt to repel the accusation.
"Your ritual didn't work. All those people died for nothing." The voice rose to a shriek. "He was supposed to come, he was supposed to hear our prayers, that was the only thing that justified all this-!"
"How strange of you to shy away from killing now, Jerome," Arlock remarked idly. "Is this why Crime Sorcière still live? Did you lose your nerve at the last minute?"
"I would gladly cut down all traitors such as those," the other spat. "I will not cease praying for Lord Zeref's forgiveness for my defeat at their hands. But the residents of this town weren't our enemies. No, many of them would have supported the changes we wish to bring! But the operation was a failure, and their lives were thrown away for nothing. We are no closer to Lord Zeref, to our dream!"
At last, Arlock turned to face the speaker. Lucy would have recognized the shaggy hair and half-unbuttoned shirt of the swordsman who had almost annihilated her and Sorano during the diner battle, though there was no cursed blade at his hip that night. It seemed his confidence had been misplaced along with his weapon; when Arlock's gaze met his, the swordsman visibly flinched back, his moment of rebellion shattering.
"Operation Purify was no failure, Jerome. It has shown me the way forward. Zeref will come to us, and the whole world will change."
"You're going to do this again?" the swordsman challenged. "More sacrifices? More innocents? What if your ritual fails once more, and Lord Zeref still does not come?"
"Oh, he'll come, I have no doubt of that. If it will help to allay your conscience, Jerome, I can assure you that this time, the ritual will be different. We won't need any more deaths. Once word of today gets out, the mere threat will be enough. Instead, I will require something else: your sword."
"My- my sword?" Jerome stammered.
"Yes." Calm, careful, dangerous. "The cursed relic I lent to you as a token of my generosity, giving you the chance to fight on equal terms with the greatest mages of our age. I require it back. It is fundamental to my new plan."
"I…"
"After everything I have done for you, Jerome, would you deny me this, and condemn the entire world we are fighting for in the process?" It wasn't a request. It was a warning, and the swordsman heard it loud and clear. The last flicker of his rebellion drowned in its cold.
"Of course not, but- I can't give it to you, O Holy One."
"You can't?"
"I no longer have it. Crime Sorcière stole it from me during our battle."
Arlock's words lashed out, as charged with danger as any rune he had ever drawn. "Why did you not tell me this at once?"
"I- I did not know it was so important to you, O Holy One… I had hoped to get it back before you… well…"
Flames crackled, ash fell like ineffectual rain, and a long, metallic hiss escaped Arlock's lips. The runes he had drawn in the air crumbled with his hopes. Not his own failure, not a flaw in his own brilliant mind, but let down by the incompetence of those around him…
Well.
He'd found his way forward, now.
He only had to keep up this lie for a little bit longer.
"You are a failure, Jerome. You always will be, no matter how many gifts I bestow upon you."
"Please, give me another chance to prove myself to you- to our Lord Zeref-"
"Our lord is not merciful, so why should I be? I shall send someone more competent than you to retrieve the blade from Crime Sorcière. As for you… I suppose you have always been devoted to our cause, despite your failings. Perhaps I will permit you to assist our efforts elsewhere."
"Thank you, Holy One! Thank you! I will not let you or our Lord Zeref down again!"
"No," Arlock spoke softly. "You will not."
The fire seared as it poured down Natsu's gullet.
His eyes were watering, his tongue was burning, his belly was already overflowing with hot coals, and yet he continued to inhale the flames, more than he had ever tried to consume in one day. The fire may be causing him pain, but it would kill the people trapped inside.
The last of the flames reluctantly flowed into his mouth, leaving the school building barely clinging to life, but clinging nonetheless. "Get out," he gasped, hands on his knees, dragging smoke-filled air into his lungs in the hope that it might bring some relief from the burning. "Get away from the town. The fires are still spreading. I can't stop them all."
Shadows began to emerge from the blackened building: parents with their children in their arms, families and friends holding tight to one another; no one wanted to be apart from their loved ones as a chaos they couldn't understand continued to swirl around them. The younger ones turned to look curiously at the bruised, exhausted, still-smoking man who had saved them, but the older ones pulled them swiftly on. Their sanctuary had very nearly become their tomb; the soldiers who had tried to help them had led them into a trap; no one was prepared to trust a strange magic-user, saviour or not.
Natsu couldn't blame them. He wouldn't have trusted himself either.
How had this happened?
He should have stopped it. He should have been here from the start. Infiltration or no infiltration, even if Avatar's plans reached far beyond the destruction of a small town, his cover didn't matter if he couldn't use it to prevent something like this.
No wonder Avatar had been so happy to let him guard Levy, a member of his own guild. If he was keeping an eye on her, he wasn't in the centre of the town… and that meant he was too far away to stop their ultimate plan.
All around him, the world continued to blaze, buildings he had had to forsake in order to save the families sheltering in the school. The agony and the inevitability of it clung to this place, the town that had been touched by a god and turned into hell. He didn't need to understand the complexities of ritual magic to know, deep down inside, that there would never again be life in this part of Bishop's Lace. Those who had survived wouldn't return, wouldn't rebuild, wouldn't repopulate these scorched streets. This place had been claimed by Arlock's ritual; it would remain anathema to life until the end of days.
Only one person remained here. Someone close enough for him to smell through the foul smoke, someone still living, someone whose presence should have been more reassuring than it was: Gray. If it even was him. Just like the sickening smoke, his smell was wrong too. It was becoming harder and harder to hold back the animalistic growl building in his throat every time Gray appeared.
From the sound of Gray's casual sauntering footsteps, it seemed he was perfectly at ease within the shattered town. So he should be. After all, he had helped destroy it.
Not even deigning to look at him, Natsu spat, "How could you let this happen, Gray?"
A quiet sigh. "I didn't know what Arlock was going to do, Natsu."
"You're in the inner circle! Knowing this stuff is the whole point of all the dodgy things you've been doing!"
"Arlock didn't trust anyone with the true plan except himself. Now that I've proven my loyalty by fighting alongside him, next time he strikes, I will know the plan ahead of time."
Natsu stared. "You're going back to work for them? After this?"
"Of course. I have Avatar's trust; I can't jeopardize that now."
"What's the point of infiltrating their cult if it's just helping them get away with things like this? Now that we've seen what they're capable of, we've gotta oppose them with everything we have!"
Another patronizing sigh. "I wouldn't expect you to understand, Natsu. You always have been too dense for the long game."
"You-"
"Do you know how many people consider themselves members of Avatar, Natsu?" Gray interrupted. "There are over five thousand of them, all across the kingdom – and beyond. Some are mages and priests and scholars and full-time devotees, but most of them aren't. They're ordinary people with ordinary lives, and a call to something greater – and they won't go away just because some hero has saved a tiny town no one has heard of. Yes, the side of light lost the fight today, Natsu, but because of it there is still a chance to win the war."
Natsu's boot connected with the wall, and the ensuing shockwave brought down the entire building. It wasn't as though anyone would be using it again. "Yeah, I'm gonna win it right now!" he snarled. "Screw being undercover; I'm gonna find Arlock and- what the hell happened to you?"
Because Natsu had finally turned to shout into Gray's face, and while the ice mage's shirt was back on, hiding the crystalline growth across his chest, it couldn't hide the fresh bruises blooming across his neck and cheek in earthy red and violet. His one ice-blue eye was swollen almost shut. Natsu had to wonder if the uneven gait his draconic hearing had interpreted as a saunter had really been a painful limp.
"Lucy happened to me," Gray answered, amused. "She took pretty much the same line as you, only with more punching involved." Then he seemed to consider what he'd said, giving Natsu a curious look. "You two haven't swapped bodies or something, have you?"
In another time, Natsu might have laughed. There and then, however, he slammed his hands down on Gray's shoulders and demanded, "You've seen Lucy?"
"That's what I literally just said, yes."
"Where is she? Is she okay? Is Zeref with her? Has he hurt her? Is she still his prisoner?"
If Natsu hadn't been too busy trying to exhale his storm of questions, he might have noticed Gray's blood-red eye narrowing slightly, processing information far faster than Natsu had ever been capable of doing.
"I'm so sorry, Natsu," Gray said slowly. "But you're right. Zeref has Lucy."
"What does that mean? Is he here? What has he done to her?"
"I don't know what he's done, but she was on his side. She was fighting to save the town at first – that's when we clashed, while I was maintaining my cover – but as soon as Zeref told her to stop opposing Avatar, she did. She wasn't capable of resisting him. She completely belongs to him now, Natsu."
The growl was building again in Natsu's throat, and this time, no force on earth could stop it.
"So put that righteous crusade against Avatar on hold for just a little longer, and come back undercover with me," Gray pressed. "If we want to get Lucy back, we need to reach Zeref. Avatar can't lead us to him if they're dead. Don't lose sight of that."
"I don't need you to tell me that," Natsu snarled.
"I know. Let this go and come back with me, Natsu. It's the only way we can stop Zeref."
"I ain't gonna stop him. I'm gonna kill him."
"And I'll be with you every step of the way," Gray promised him, and his smile only extended to one of his eyes.
Zeref was still there when Lucy awoke.
She'd known he was, somehow, before she had even fully returned to consciousness. Although his presence was hidden as always, she would have sworn she could feel something – some gentle reassurance granted by the simple truth of not being alone.
So certain was she of this that it took her longer than it should have done to realize he wasn't right beside her, as he had been when she had fallen asleep. Instead, he was sat in a chair in the corner of the room, with his eyes closed and his knees drawn up to his chest. Not even he could make it look comfortable, and she wondered how he had managed to fall asleep like that.
She couldn't help feeling guilty. It wasn't as though she'd have minded sharing the bed when she'd practically cried herself to sleep on top of him as it was. Surely any sane person would have stayed there… in fact, any member of her old team would have done so regardless of the special circumstances.
But he wasn't like that. For all that he liked to tease her, he was the kind of person who wouldn't even have entered her room that night if she hadn't given him explicit permission. Boundaries were so important to him that he always respected them – or what he assumed they were – in others.
She still didn't know what to make of it when she saw him stir. His eyes slowly opened, searching through what little light the curtains let in, and only slid shut again once they'd found her, awake and safe. A strange feeling washed over her at that, and she didn't know what to make of it, so she shoved it aside.
"You could have slept here, you know," she pointed out, saying it just for the sake of saying something and immediately regretting how brusque it sounded. Trying to ease off a little, she added, "I mean, the bed is plenty big enough, and I don't think the armchairs in cheap inns were designed with comfort in mind…"
After just long enough for the silence to have become awkward, he opened his eyes again, fixing her with a look she couldn't read. "It wouldn't have been right."
"It would have been fine. Believe me, I'm used to it. If I can handle collapsing onto my bed to find Natsu already asleep in it, I can handle this."
He shook his head. "It would have felt like taking advantage."
"Right, because I wasn't taking advantage of you at all last night."
"That's different."
"Different how?"
"I offered."
"Well, for future reference, I'm fine with sharing, especially under circumstances like these. You look worn out this morning… and considering you've been sleeping outside almost every night since we started our quest, that's saying something."
He stared at her for a long moment without speaking, and then glanced away, as if merely looking was a violation of her privacy.
She knew exactly how she appeared. The state of her hair, her tear-mutilated eyes, and the fact that she was one huge failure. Everything had gone wrong in Bishop's Lace. Every single thing. She'd lost the town, she'd lost Gray, she'd lost to Arlock, she'd lost her faith as a mage and her pride as a member of Fairy Tail… and just in case she needed proof, her travelling companion, the one who had done nothing but tease her since their journey had begun, now believed her too fragile for their usual banter.
"I'm an absolute mess, aren't I?" she muttered, drawing her knees up to her chest, still wrapped in the blankets that offered no comfort.
"You've seen me worse," he stated.
Her mind lurched to the night after they'd broken out of the black church, but it wasn't the same. It was one thing to be afflicted by horrible nightmares and an uncontrollable curse. It was another entirely when it came as the result of her own actions.
"Lucy." Sensing her silent rejection, he pressed, "What happened wasn't your fault. Be upset if you must, but do not hold yourself responsible for Avatar's actions."
"I should have stopped Arlock."
"You almost killed yourself trying. Does that not count for anything?"
Lucy shook her head. This wasn't some logical thought to be reasoned away, it had never been logical; it was a living pain drilling deep into her heart. "We fight dark mages. We save people. That's what we do. I was there, so the townsfolk should have been safe. But I made mistakes over and over and over. It's my fault."
"Of course it isn't. You weren't the only one there, and you certainly weren't the only one who made mistakes."
A crisp impatience was edging its way into his voice. Gone was the gentleness of the previous night; it was a new day, now, and he wanted to move on. She wondered if that was why he'd stayed: to ensure that she remained focussed on his quest.
"I was in charge, though, wasn't I?" she retorted, bitter and yet so satisfying. "You made that very clear. You even said you'd thought I would be good at it. But guess what? You were wrong. I let everyone down."
"If you're going to blame yourself, you have to blame us too," he snapped. "It's Levy's fault for not identifying the killer rune circle. It's Gajeel's fault for failing to smell the poison hidden by the spices in Arlock's cake. It's Leo's fault for not coming after me sooner. It's Gray's fault for falling in with an evil cult. It's Jellal's fault for not informing the world about Avatar's existence in enough time for them to do anything about it. It's Natsu's fault for not even being there-"
"But I can't change their actions!" Lucy burst out. "I can only change my own! And the fact that I didn't is my fault!"
She hadn't meant to shout, and the whole inn seemed to shudder with it, long after the sound itself had faded.
"That," Zeref stated, "is without a doubt the most self-centred thing I have ever heard."
Drawing the blanket tighter around herself, she shook her head angrily.
Unperturbed, he said, "So, in your view, you are the only person with any agency in this world? You're the only one whose choices have consequences, and the rest of us are just playing to some divine script?"
"You don't understand," she snapped.
"You're right, Lucy, I don't! By your reckoning, you would make yourself responsible for every life lost, every good deed, all the cruelty and generosity that exists in mankind – all because you alone possess free will in a population whose actions are, what, predetermined by their personalities, their environment?"
"That's not what I'm saying." Other people acted as other people always did. Even with everyone else doing what they had, she could still have won, and hadn't. That was why the blame lay with her.
"Why don't we talk about me, Lucy?" Quieter now, and all the more dangerous for it. His eyes shone with black light, diamonds forged under centuries of pressure. "Do you think nothing I could have done would have changed the outcome? I should have recognized Arlock's rune circle for what it was the moment I set foot inside the town. I should have considered the details of the ritual I myself invented long before you prompted me to do so. I should have negated the self-destruct circle around the evacuation zone as soon as you asked me to do it. I could have done. I had the opportunity and the means."
"Then why didn't you?" she demanded, before she could stop herself. He had assured her he would counter the circle. Instead, he had come to her: stopping the summoning of a god but not the spell which turned innocents into sacrifices for it; saving her, but only at the expense of everyone else.
"I don't know," he said, not an evasion but a confession, holding eye contact the entire time. "I wish I could answer your question, but the truth is, I remember very little of yesterday. Rather, I remember exactly what happened, but not where I was during that time, what I was doing, or why I was doing it."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"I am not quite sure how to describe it, Lucy. The very nature of the problem prevents me from being able to see it clearly myself, yet whenever others have described it to me, I do not feel that they have got it quite right. Anna had her opinion, and after yesterday, I am sure that Leo has his own, but I think that what outsiders gain in objectivity they lose by not having ever lived through it. Leo was quick to blame me for it, not realizing, I think, that there is little that can be done to stop it when your own mind is working against you."
He was quiet for a moment, considering how best to proceed.
"I've become too good at finding ways around the death my curse brings, Lucy. My own emotions, my own mind, are the triggers for it – so by training myself to automatically shut down dangerous thoughts, by externalizing my reasons for doing things, by finding excuses to do good things and convincing myself to believe them, I can keep my death magic under control while retaining some form of concern for the lives of others. I've had four hundred years to get good at it, after all.
"But the thing is, Lucy, the curse doesn't just affect my magic and body. It gets inside my head – it infiltrates my best defence against it and tears it down from the inside. It fills my mind with contradictory ideas until I can't tell what's right and what isn't; what I want and what I don't. Ever since Gajeel turned up on your doorstep, and I healed him, it's been getting worse and worse. I kept losing focus yesterday. I couldn't remember why I was even in that town. It felt like I was only half-awake, the answers just out of reach."
"I noticed," she murmured.
Because she had noticed how distant he was. How trying to get that brilliantly insightful mind to appear had been like enticing a flighty squirrel down from frozen branches. How he gravitated towards bookshops – not because books were more important to him than stopping Avatar, but because they were all he could remember; they didn't involve saving lives; they wouldn't trigger his curse.
And all that time she had thought him merely uncooperative, failing to draw the connection between his detachment from their present situation and the previous flashes of disassociation that had scared her so.
She had noticed.
She just hadn't bothered trying to understand.
He wasn't finished yet. "Usually, I can deal with it. Being aware of the curse's effect on my mind, and accepting it, is the key to overcoming it. I taught myself to doubt and to question; not to act on my gut feeling, but to slow down and monitor the consistency of my own thoughts and desires against an ever-growing database of memories. Besides, although it is difficult for me to detect myself, it's obvious enough to others. Over the years, I've learnt to use the reactions of those around me as a barometer for the trustworthiness of my own internal logic. When it got the better of me yesterday afternoon, you were there to bring me back. You were grounding me, Lucy."
"You asked me to stay with you," she whispered. "When you were going to disarm the self-destruct circle. I assumed it was because you didn't want me running into danger, but it wasn't, was it?"
Slowly, painfully, he shook his head. "I didn't want to hold you back. I thought, maybe, that I could stay focussed without you… but I couldn't. From the moment we parted ways, I was lost. If Leo had not come after me, it might have been days – months – before I remembered what I was supposed to be doing that day."
"That was the curse's fault," Lucy told him stubbornly. "Not yours."
"That crude assignment of blame conveniently ignores the part where I knew full well what it was doing to me and decided not to tell you that my ability to help you was severely compromised."
Lucy shook her head. Her fingers were woven so tightly into the rough blanket that it was a wonder the old thing didn't tear. "I should have realized what was happening. I knew-"
"No, you didn't." He laughed, and it was a twisted sound, too close to self-loathing. "You've been dealing with this for- what, a week? I've been dealing with it for four hundred years. I know the signs, Lucy. I should have warned you the moment my control started to slip. I should have told you why I needed you to stay with me and let you make your own decision whether or not to do so. Instead, I promised you I would be able to dispel the rune circle, knowing full well that even considering saving lives in that way would leave me susceptible to a curse already far more active than usual."
"I still should have-"
"But in the end," he overrode her, "it wouldn't have made the slightest bit of difference. I still could have done it, Lucy. After Leo brought me back, I had enough time to negate Avatar's death circle. But if I had done so, Arlock would have killed you."
"I would gladly have died if it meant saving the town-" she began hotly, but it could not thaw his cold, cold words.
"I am well aware of that, Lucy. But the thing is, I don't need this town. I need you. You were arrogant indeed to think that the choice as to who lived and who died was ever yours. It was always mine. I made my decision, and I don't regret it."
She stared at him – at his dark certainty; at the eyes that pinned her down; at the confidence daring her to challenge him, to get angry, to tell him exactly what she thought of that decision – and then, with that castigation still on the tip of her tongue, she suddenly understood exactly what he was doing.
"Why are you doing this?" she accused.
"Doing what?" he challenged.
"Trying to make me blame you for last night instead of myself?"
His eyes narrowed at being called out, an admission of guilt if she'd ever seen one.
Her voice rose to a shout. "Why would you do that?"
"Because I don't care!" he shouted back. "What's a few more lives on my conscience? If it would help you move on from this, Lucy, you can blame me for all the evils of the world!"
"No, I mean- why are you doing this, all of this? Why did you stay with me last night? Why are you still trying to help me now? You know I'm going to do your stupid quest either way, so why the hell are you going to such lengths just to be nice to me?"
"I like you," Zeref said.
"You… what?"
"I like you," he repeated. "It makes me unhappy to see you upset like this."
Lucy stared at Zeref. Zeref met her gaze guilelessly, not explaining himself, not taking it back, waiting with divine patience for her to say something.
What came out of her mouth was: "No, you don't!"
He blinked. "I don't?"
"No! You're… you're you! The Black Mage! My enemy! You're going to destroy my guild in just over a month! You wouldn't be with me at all if you didn't need me for your stupid quest! You get annoyed with me just for calling you my friend! That's ridiculous; of course you don't-!"
"Oh… maybe you're right." Dimming starlight; a fragile frown. "It's not as though I haven't been wrong before."
"But… that's…"
That wasn't the response she had been expecting, either. The Zeref she knew dealt in unveiled threats and dry comments; insightful judgements rendered after deep thought and a touch of empathy when she least expected it. Not… not whatever the hell this was.
"I think you're right," he reflected sadly. "I think maybe this is all wrong. It's so hard to tell, sometimes. I should probably go."
He had made it to the door before the useless flapping of her mouth finally managed to regurgitate some words. "I didn't mean- you don't-"
But she didn't know what she was trying to say.
"I don't think I should have stayed last night," Zeref said. "I thought I had got the curse under control again, but it seems not. I need to be on my own for a while."
And then he was gone.
Silence fell with the passing of his footsteps, but the emptiness didn't make any more sense than his presence. Gentle birdsong filtered into it, harmonizing with the innkeeper's muffled tones from the floor below, but both were far too normal, and they jarred with her state of being. Nothing here made sense. Nothing, from the moment she had fallen asleep with her enemy watching over her to waking up with him still here, still trying to comfort her…
She should, at least, have thanked him.
Instead, she had yelled at him and stretched his patience to its limits and driven him away even after he'd said-
Her heart stopped in her chest. She had a dim awareness that that wasn't good, but circulating blood had suddenly been superseded in her mental list of priorities.
Because when he'd said that, he hadn't meant- he couldn't have meant-
But if he had, curse or no curse, and her response had been to tell him he was being ridiculous…
"Zeref!"
She was out of the door before she'd consciously decided to follow him, and long before she'd worked out what to say. To her surprise, he stopped straight away… but it wasn't hope on his face as he half-turned towards her.
His lips twisted into a shriek: "Don't come near me!"
She responded to the tone before she'd even registered the words. The panic in it commanded her. She froze mid-step – not so far away that she couldn't see him shaking, or feel reality starting to convulse around him.
"Zeref-" she tried.
"DON'T!" he screamed again. "Get away- Lucy-!"
It was already too late.
Maybe she'd pushed him too far, or maybe he'd done it himself, trying too hard to reconcile three mutually exclusive elements: his curse, his mind, and her.
A wave of magic pulsed out from his body. It tore up the floorboards like a dragon's claw, pulverized the wood, dyed the dawn a tombstone-grey. There was a thunderous crack from overhead. The walls were gone, the floor was gone, the air was rent by splinters and screams… and at the heart of it all, she slipped through the tendrils of chaos and into a sublime nothingness.
A/N: I've said it before, but I have to say it again - thank you so much for all your follows, favourites, and especially your responses to the last few chapters. November has been a difficult month, overlapping with by far the most difficult part of the story to write, and your support has made all the difference. You guys are the best. I hope you continue to enjoy the story going forward! ~CS