Homeward Hours

By CrimsonStarbird

Chapter Seventeen – The Best Part of Him

Despite the certainty in the minds of every single person who had watched Lucy break up the fight at the wedding, Zeref actually did go straight home.

It wasn't as though he had anywhere else to go.

Not that it even looked like home right now. Without the Fairy Sphere surrounding it, the house in the clearing seemed far too vulnerable to be his usual sanctuary. The absence of that golden glow left vividly unfamiliar colours in its wake. Listlessly, he wandered through the rooms, finding nothing to interest him in half-finished magical experiments and carefully bookmarked tomes, the walls too close, the halls too empty.

In the end, he lay on his back in the dead grass, staring up at the sky. It would have been nice to see the stars without Fairy Sphere's light to mask them, but nightfall was a long way off, and though the crisp sky was becoming blurrier as clouds condensed somewhere far away, it showed no sign of growing darker.

Maybe he'd wait.

What else did he have to do?

A strange hollow had settled in his chest, consuming anything that might have distracted or entertained him but never becoming any less empty.

It didn't hurt. His immortal body had long since healed from Natsu's attacks. The only permanent damage done by the brief clash outside the cathedral had been to Lucy's deposit for renting his Rune Knight uniform.

It did hurt, though.

He had known how Natsu felt about him long before this day. Ever since the war had ended and his new life as Fairy Tail's prisoner had begun, Natsu hadn't been shy about it. The Dragon Slayer pretended he didn't exist at the best of times, hiding their blood relationship from everyone except Lucy, and when Natsu did deign to visit him, it was only ever in rage. Truth be told, Zeref had thought he was used to it. What else could he expect after attacking Natsu's beloved guild?

Hearing his brother's feelings spelled out like that, though – it had hurt.

More than he'd thought possible, for a man who had had four centuries to say goodbye.

He didn't know how long it was before he heard footsteps. A handful of hours, perhaps. Not enough for night to have fallen, nor for himself to have started feeling any more human.

He certainly didn't feel up to talking to Lucy, so it was something of a surprise when the voice that addressed him wasn't Lucy's at all. "Here. I brought you some cake."

Gratitude and sadness were both beyond him right now, but it seemed confusion wasn't, and he half-sat up to confirm with his own eyes the sight of Levy, still bedecked in her floor-length white dress, unwrapping a slice of wedding cake from a napkin and setting it down on the newest iteration of the picnic bench like it was the most normal thing in the word.

"I'm fairly sure you're supposed to be somewhere else," Zeref said, with a pointed look at the leaves clinging to the hem of her dress.

Levy shrugged it off. "Oh, the ceremony finished ages ago. No one will even notice that I've sneaked out for a few minutes. It's actually quite nice to get away from all the people I barely know, watching me not drink and silently judging me for it."

"Serves you right for inviting them," Zeref said neutrally.

"I suppose it does," she sighed. "On the plus side, it does mean I'm currently the only member of the guild sober enough to cast Fairy Sphere properly, so I figured I should be the one to check on you." There was a pause, and then she rephrased her intent as a question: "Do you want me to restore the Fairy Sphere? I won't if you say no."

Zeref thought about it. Even his own reasoning seemed detached, like it was someone else's eternal imprisonment at stake. Once the Fairy Sphere was restored, it wouldn't come down again, not after the display he and Natsu had put on during the wedding – the first time he had been allowed out in good faith.

But what was the point in fighting to keep it lowered? It wasn't as if he was going to go anywhere.

It wasn't as though seeing the stars would magically make things better.

It wasn't as though the hollow in his chest made him any less dangerous.

"I would feel more comfortable if you did," he said.

"Okay."

Levy restored the golden dome in the way Lucy had taught the entire guild to do, just in case. He thought that would be the end of it, but she lingered, more uncertain with the barrier protecting her than she had been without it.

"Lucy said you'd be here," she blurted out. "Everyone else was convinced that you'd be off destroying a town or something, but she knew you'd come back home. Are you… are you alright?"

That wasn't a word that had been used to describe him in four hundred years.

"No," he said, letting the answer ring out emptily. Still sat amongst his dead garden, now distorted by the rippling light of the Fairy Sphere, he drew one knee up to his chest. "I do not know why, between me and her own boyfriend, Lucy always expects me to be the bigger person."

"Because usually, you are," Levy pointed out.

"You've not forgotten how I tried to destroy your guild, have you?" he shot back, but there was no energy in it, and she just shrugged again.

"That was a long time ago. Maybe other people haven't seen how you've acted since, but I have, Lucy has, the old Master did too. You don't fight like this with anyone else. You'll bait Jellal a bit, sure, but not to the point where he'll spontaneously try to kill you in the middle of a friend's wedding. Why did you do it?"

Even now, he wasn't sure. "I wanted him to pay attention to me, I suppose."

Levy frowned. "I've never known Natsu act like that before, either. That wasn't the kind of harmless brawl he has with Gray. It's as if you two bring out the worst in each other."

"He is supposed to be the best part of me," Zeref murmured. "The only good thing I have done in my loathsome life. So much for that."

"What is with the two of you? This goes far beyond him being the one who stopped you from destroying the guild, doesn't it? Natsu is usually so easy-going. His hate is only ever a protective one; he is angriest towards those who threaten the guild. But you're not a threat to the guild any more. He's never held a grudge like this against anyone else – just ask Gajeel or Laxus. How he feels about you is different, isn't it?"

"You'll have to ask him that," Zeref deflected, chin still resting on his knee as if he didn't have the energy to hold his head up without it.

"You don't know?" she asked sceptically.

"Of course I do. But while I don't care who knows the truth, Natsu wants it to stay a secret, and I suppose I shouldn't give him another reason to hate me."

Levy considered this for a moment, looking rather like she'd come across an interesting puzzle in an ancient tomb, inappropriate attire notwithstanding. "Lucy knows this secret, doesn't she?"

"Yes."

"Perhaps that's why she's so harsh on you."

It was probably true, but it wasn't as though there was anything he could do about his and Natsu's history. The past couldn't be changed. He had had the chance to do that, but he had let Fairy Heart's power go without using it. He had made his choice; he would stick by it until the end.

"I'm sorry," Levy said suddenly. "For what happened today."

Zeref looked up in surprise. "I got into a fight before your wedding had even started, a wedding you had gone to great lengths to allow me to attend, and you are apologizing to me?"

"Yes. And once Lucy has sobered up a bit, I have no doubt that she will do the same."

"Don't be ridiculous. I provoked Natsu. What happened is entirely my fault."

"Sure, but it's nothing out of the ordinary for a Fairy Tail wedding. The most astonishing thing is that Lucy was able to stop you before anyone did any irreparable damage to the cathedral. It wasn't you picking a fight with the guild – it was just a personal disagreement. We shouldn't have made such a big deal out of it."

He wasn't sure what to say to that, so he didn't try.

"Anyway, I should probably get back to the party, but-"

The distant sound of an explosion cut her off. It was so muted that it could have been something as mundane as a firework, but fireworks didn't shake the ground nor reverberate along the outside of the Fairy Sphere. As a grey plume rose over the trees, Zeref found himself regretting his haste in allowing Levy to raise the barrier. No matter how he strained his senses, magical or otherwise, he could perceive too little outside of his prison.

The thought of asking Levy to release the Fairy Sphere so that he could glean an idea of what was going on flashed across his mind, but he didn't think she'd agree after what he'd already done that day, and before he had made up his mind, she had already turned towards the city with a sigh. "See? Nothing out of the ordinary. And that explosion looked too big for Kardia Cathedral to have survived intact, so I can guarantee that by tomorrow, no one will be talking about your and Natsu's little brawl. Anyway, I need to go and sort this as Fairy Tail's sober representative, so I'll have to catch you later."

The dazzling white of her dress slipped ghostlike through the trees as she hurried back down the path.

After she had gone, Zeref raised his gaze once more to the cloud of smoke accumulating over the town. The hollowness had vanished when Levy had been distracting him – but it seemed as if that space had been filled by something akin to worry, and he wasn't sure that was any better.

Levy had brushed off the explosion, so why couldn't he?

He paced back and forth inside the Fairy Sphere. Half an hour ago, he had felt overwhelmed without it; now, it was far too small for him. Last time he'd felt so acutely claustrophobic, it had driven him to threaten Lucy and break out, but there was no chance of that with the entire guild at the wedding – and besides, it hadn't solved the problem then and he didn't think it would solve the problem now.

And he hated it.

Why should he care what was going on at the wedding?

They were his enemies. His captors. Oh, he wasn't so arrogant or stupid to deny – in his better moods – that he bore them no ill will; that he cared about them as much as he had ever cared about anything, as little as that was by other people's standards.

He had accepted that. Acknowledged it. It was fine.

But they didn't feel the same.

Natsu had made that very clear, and Lucy had taken Natsu's side.

They didn't want him around. He made things difficult. They sought his help when they needed it – Lucy and previously Makarov with managing the guild; Levy with her runic research; Jellal when he needed something impossible doing with magic – but in ordinary life, in the normal course of their relationships, careers, and hopes, he was an awkward anomaly they would prefer not to have to think about.

It shouldn't have bothered him. It was how he'd lived most of his life, after all. And it would be a lie to say that he had never intentionally sought that response: when the Fairy Sphere prevented him from laying a finger upon them, being a deliberate inconvenience was one minor way in which he could take his revenge.

But it bothered him now.

When the lacrima began to buzz at him, he almost ignored it. After all, if he was at the wedding with them, where he was supposed to be, they could just talk to him rather than needing to go through the lacrima.

He let the sphere rest loosely on his palm, applying just enough pressure to stop it from rolling free. Something was wrong. He could feel panic roiling below the lacrima's surface, a nightmare encased in crystal, a fear only one hairline fracture away from bursting out into reality.

It was so alien to him. He could not remember if he had ever felt anything so strongly, so purely. The flash-fire of his brief clash with Natsu had burnt itself out long ago, leaving that cavernous space within him, able to absorb the primal fear radiating from the lacrima and siphon it off into nothing.

He let it connect. Tiredly, he asked, "What is it, Lucy?"

"Zeref- help- it's Natsu-"

Lucy's words were caught somewhere between a sob and a scream; it was exhausting for Zeref just to hear it. "What has he done now?"

"Not him- someone set a trap- a curse- there was fire, black fire- he tried to eat it all, to protect us, but it- I don't know- I don't know what it's done to him!"

"Lucy."

She wasn't listening. "I don't think he can hear me- he's having seizures, they won't stop, Wendy's magic isn't working- I don't know what to do! Zeref, what can I do? Tell me! Please!"

Zeref stared at the lacrima in his hand, an innocuous bauble of crystal and magic, a window into a different kind of life. One where everyone cared so much for each other. One where a threat against another person could flip someone as resilient as Lucy into desperate hysterics. One he had always known existed, and had often manipulated to get his servants to fall in line and his enemies to fall apart, but he did not belong to it.

Never had.

Never would.

"Lucy," he said, quietly, too drained from listening to her outpouring of emotion to muster any of his own. "I can help, but I need to focus, so I'm going to hang up now."

This time, her words were a sob and nothing more. He snapped the connection before they had a chance to become more, setting the lacrima down on the bedside table and walking to the far end of the house. Distance helped. He could sense it ringing again, but it couldn't activate without touch, and with two closed doors between him and it, Lucy's attempts to re-forge the mental connection were easy to ignore.

He breathed in.

Breathed out.

A book appeared in his hands, and he set it down on the kitchen table.

It was in a bad way. So much so that he would have wondered how he hadn't noticed sooner, if not for the fact that any thoughts of Natsu would have been quickly swallowed by the black hole in his chest.

The book was shaking, making frantic little hops along the table, as though it was caught in an earthquake only it could feel. Even as Zeref watched, apathetic, a coil of darkness rose like smoke from its surface, drifting skyward.

Someone else's curse, he thought. Dark magic. A few minutes of pain, and then death; slow enough to cause anguish, but not so slow that the victim or their friends could do something about it.

Zeref found himself wondering who the intended victim had been. Natsu? Levy? Gajeel? Or had it been a random attack, unprompted, barely planned, against the guild that stood as a bastion of light and freedom?

He wondered if they'd caught the perpetrator.

Wondered if it mattered.

Wondered if the stranger Natsu had thought was a fake Rune Knight was the one behind it – wondered if Natsu would have confronted him then and there, long before the imposter had had a chance to set his trap, if he hadn't been so preoccupied squabbling with Zeref.

Wondered if that made this his fault, too.

Slowly, he opened the book.

It came to life immediately. Released from their confines, words written in no language used by man snaked out with a life of their own, coiling and looping through the air. Some of them seemed to recognize him, flowing around his arms and chest with an alien affection; others shot erratically in all directions, seeking freedom until he stopped them with a thought.

They were alive, those words, much more so than he was.

They were his greatest work. Quite literally his life's work, in fact: everything he was, everything he had become, everything he would yet be, his cursed eternity, his reason to stay.

The best part of him, he had said to Levy.

But Natsu didn't want to be part of his life. Natsu resented him, resented the history tying them together. Makarov had reached out to him and Lucy had worn down his walls and Levy had wanted him at her wedding despite the risks, but Natsu, the one for whom he had given up more than anyone could imagine, did not want anything to do with him.

What more do I have to do for you? Zeref had asked him.

The truth was, it didn't matter what he did or didn't do. Natsu's mind was already made up.

But so was Zeref's. He had made his choice when all of time and space had stretched out before him, Fairy Heart's power in his hands, and he had turned his back on it.

He placed his hand atop the open book and closed his eyes. Magic blazed in that cottage in the forest. It took him mere seconds: sorting through the living, changing, flowing words he had penned an eternity ago, finding the anomalies caused by the curse afflicting Natsu's physical body, and crushing them.

The dark magic had locked onto Natsu's heart, dragging him down to an inevitable demise, but Zeref simply rewrote the ending. This was his domain. Natsu would not die like this. He would not allow it.

It was almost gently that he closed the cover again. The words disappeared back into the pages where they belonged, though the magic still hung heavy in the air around him.

His head fell back; he closed his eyes. Rewriting the book had taken more out of him than he thought. Or perhaps it had simply been difficult to scrape together that much energy when most of himself had drained away into that endless void.

At first, he tried to fight the urge to sleep. He thought Lucy would come to visit, or at least call him again, and he felt as though he should be awake for that… but there was nothing.

Well, of course there wasn't. She'd been convinced that Natsu was about to die; of course she would want to be by his side for the rest of the night.

Besides, Natsu might not have been the only one hurt. She might have other injured friends to worry about, or complaints about a destroyed cathedral to fend off, or the culprit to track down.

Maybe, for all her intuition and her intelligence, she hadn't realized that Natsu's miraculous recovery had anything to do with the one who held the book that gave him life.

All perfectly good reasons.

Still.

He curled into a ball under the duvet, the dormant communication lacrima cradled tightly to his chest, and he hated the fact that it hurt.

Some time later, Zeref awoke from a slumber that was as empty as his conscious moments had been. There was no clear demarcation between sleeping and waking – no lacrima blaring out like an alarm clock, jolting him awake with someone else's concern. Only the numbness of the arm trapped beneath his body gave any indication that time had passed.

Exhaling long and deep, he sat up in bed, the covers huddled around him. A flu-like ache had settled into his muscles. The ever-present gold through his windows made it difficult to tell the time of day at a glance, but he suspected it was late morning. Not late enough for anyone to worry about him, it seemed.

Sometimes, no one was more annoyed by his own unpredictable moods than he was.

Too long he sat there, deliberating, the warm crystal clutched between his hands. And in the end, the decision was more of an accident, his magic dancing so close to the familiar pattern of activation that it wasn't much of a surprise when it just tumbled into it. Cancelling the call would have taken more energy than he had.

Instead, he turned the lacrima idly in his hands, wondering if she would respond.

He had his answer before it had even rung out twice. "Zeref! Are you alright?"

Why did people keep asking him that? Didn't they know what his existence was like?

"I'm so sorry I didn't call you earlier," she was saying. "After everything that happened at the wedding, I wanted to talk to you, but I couldn't just leave halfway through- and then with Natsu and the chaos that happened after- we're still trying to sort everything out- I'm sorry, I didn't want you to be on your own last night, I just-"

"Stop it, Lucy," he said heavily. "Just… stop it."

"…Okay."

It wasn't okay, but it would have to be.

Such had been his life for four hundred years. There was no point wishing for anything else now.

"Tell me what happened yesterday," he suggested.

As he had thought, she seized the change of topic eagerly. "We'd just finished dinner, and the dance floor was opening for business, when there was an explosion from one of the side rooms – where we had been keeping the gifts that some of the guests had brought Levy and Gajeel. An orb of dark magic had been gift-wrapped and sneaked in amongst the toasters and books. Natsu – I think he must have felt it a split-second before anyone else. He threw himself at it, trying to protect us in any way he could, to consume the cursed fire even as it began to kill him… It was horrible, Zeref."

She all but whispered this, and he made a soft noise of agreement; he had felt the wrongness of it as he had purged it from the Book of END.

"There was chaos: guests trying to flee, allies trying to find the culprit, and Natsu was just screaming on the ground. Nothing helped him. I didn't know what to do, no one did; it was so sudden… then he went still for about thirty seconds – like he was gone but also not – and when he came to, he was absolutely fine. As if whatever had been afflicting him had just… quit."

There was a pause. He suspected that Lucy was waiting for an explanation, but he didn't want to talk about it, so it pushed the conversation elsewhere. "Did you catch the culprit?"

"Yeah. Gajeel was the one who found him. The Rune Knights have taken him into custody – or, what was left of him after Gajeel was through teaching him why ruining his wedding had been a terrible idea."

"Who was he? An enemy of your guild?"

"Not even that," she answered sadly. "None of us had ever run into him before. According to the Rune Knight interrogators, he was a member of a local dark guild who had been repeatedly passed over for promotion. He thought that taking out a handful of Fairy Tail mages was the best way of making a name for himself in the underworld. That's literally all it was about."

Zeref could hear the effort she was putting in to make her voice sound brighter, to force a smile he couldn't even see. "Well, I guess that's what happens when you're as famous as we've become. It was pretty stupid of us to think that all dark mages would just go away because you were defeated. There were villains before you, and there'll be villains after you, right?"

"Mm."

There was another silence, shifting in the emptiness, and Zeref knew that his diversionary tactics hadn't worked. From somewhere, she dug up the courage to ask, "Zeref… the way that Natsu suddenly recovered like that… that was you, wasn't it?"

"Yes."

"How?"

"You know perfectly well how. You know what he is."

"…Yeah."

It wasn't really what she had wanted to ask. Zeref could feel her discomfort as clearly as if she were stood in front of him. Idly, he wondered if he was becoming better at sensing emotions through the artificial link, or if she was restraining them less and less around him with every passing day. "Why don't you ask me, Lucy?"

"Well…" Not emboldened by his invitation so much as no longer able to hide her cowardice behind silence, she blurted out, "If you can rewrite everything Natsu is in an instant using the Book of END, even from inside the Fairy Sphere, then why haven't you made it so that he doesn't hate you?"

Despite himself, he almost caught himself smiling. It was a question he had never once asked himself, not in four hundred years of separation nor during the war and imprisonment that had brought them back into each other's lives, for the answer was so self-evident to him that even his darkest, most heartless moods could not shake its certainty.

"If I made him act or think in a certain way, he would no longer be Natsu," he said simply. "It would defeat the purpose. Who, exactly, would that person be that artificially liked me?"

"I suppose…"

"Besides, you make it sound so easy. Removing an external influence from his body or mind is one thing, but being that influence is quite another, let alone trying to control him physically or mentally. He is only part demon – so small a part it barely matters most of the time. He is quite firmly, frustratingly human, is our Natsu Dragneel."

"Yeah," Lucy said, and it was the most heartfelt thing she had ever said.

"Not that he understands that, I imagine," Zeref added.

"…No," Lucy admitted. "He's glad to be alive, but… well, I think he's scared, and he doesn't know how to express it except by being defensive. He… struggles to accept that you mean him no harm. You and I both know that you wouldn't use that book to hurt him, but he is finding it hard to get past the fact that you clearly could."

"You don't need to tell me that."

A pause.

He could almost hear her thinking, and he did not like it.

"Lucy," he warned, "stop it right now."

"But-"

Her automatic protest only confirmed that he had guessed correctly. "If you try and interfere between me and Natsu, you will only make things worse. For you, him, and me."

"But-"

"Please," he murmured.

That did it. "Alright," she sighed, shattering. "But don't forget, I am here for you, Zeref. You can always talk to me. Natsu's family is my family, whether he likes it or not."

It should have helped.

Should, at the very least, not have hurt.

But somehow, her bold acceptance of him made his brother's lack of it all the more painful.

After four hundred years, it shouldn't have hurt – but he was coming to think that the hurt would never stop.

He snapped the connection before she could hear the anguish in his voice. He couldn't remember the last time he had prayed so fervently for the curse to shuffle his moods and take all these thoughts away.