A/N: this is a mess and I kind of love it. If you follow me on tumblr then you know that I've spent basically every moment between the first chapter of Father to this update writing for the papalogia au, so I find that I'm now comfortable enough to update this. I love this family so much.

Serena hadn't been exaggerating when he had said that Acnologia owned two shirts.

One was what he had dubbed his 'fancy shirt', which was really just a cheap black button up he had bought at a liquidation sale fifteen years ago, and the other was a plain grey top with what appeared to be either a ketchup or a blood stain near the bottom. The shirts he had pawned off to the gremlins were less 'shirts' in his mind and more along the lines of 'box liners' considering how old they were. Nevertheless, they were good enough to work as night clothes while the apparel they had come with was being cleaned.

Acnologia sighed, tapping his index finger against the hanger of the black button up. Last he had checked it was generally frowned upon to visit the store in nothing but tattered pants, so he would have to cover up a little. While the grey top was more comfortable, the stain would cast a negative impression upon him. Stains meant uncleanliness and that meant people would perceive him as dirty and unable to look after himself. Lazy, even. Four centuries had done nothing to lessen his ego; Acnologia was a proud man and did not take well to being judged, so he sighed and pulled the shirt off the hanger and slipped it on. He frowned as he reached the last button. It was a little tight…

It was the increase in muscle, he told himself. There was no way someone as rigorous in diet and exercise as himself could be getting fat.

After finding a pair of black pants hidden behind a box of old magazines and yanking those on with little difficulty, he moved to the kitchen to prepare breakfast. Idly, he wondered if they were allergic to anything. It would be a pain in the ass like no other if he had to make a concentrated effort to keep certain foods out of the house. He was aware that peanut butter was a huge allergen and that people could die if they ingested it. There was a boy in the Guild - Rudolf? Randy? Richard? - who he knew carried around one of those pen-things because of his peanut allergy. Mentally, he shrugged it off. If they had survived time travel, they could survive a couple peanuts, and if they couldn't, then that was just natural selection doing its job.

"...shit," he cursed quietly. The fridge contained exactly one carton full of eggs, one bag of milk, and what appeared to be an expired jar of marmalade. He eyed the half empty bag of bread on the counter and the cupboard above it.

Would they consider coffee an acceptable breakfast…?

Unbidden, the image of the Dreyar brat hyped up on caffeine at the tender age of six came to mind. He blanched and shook his head.

Milk and scrambled eggs it was.

Capitalism, Acnologia decided, was the definition of true evil.

It accounted for a lot of horrible things in life, including the invention of that godforsaken Monopoly board-game. But his qualms had nothing to do with the infernal pastime (today, anyway). No, today it had everything to do with inflation.

Since when had a simple, white sundress gone up from 600 Jewel to 1500?

"This looks nice," the girl (Winona? Windy?) said. She pawed through the dress rack, eyeing the different colour variations of the same design. Settling on a dark blue one with a frilly yellow trim, she looked up at him expectantly. He shrugged and tossed it in the cart.

"Look for something more practical," he instructed her. "Daily wear. Like the other brats."

Wanda - or was it Willow? - blinked owlishly. "Um, A-Acnologia-san...I don't see the others."

"Motherfucker," he snarled. A woman nearby with her son shot him a scandalized look, and her jaw dropped when she spotted Wendy standing next to him.

"You should be ashamed of yourself, swearing in front of your daughter like that!" she scolded. "She's young and very impressionable! My word, parents these days…"

Acnologia wasn't sure what he needed to address first: the fact that some random woman had just scolded him in public and he hadn't ripped off her limbs in retaliation, or the fact that someone had mistaken Whitney as his own flesh and blood. Either way, it didn't matter as whatsherface had just moved down to the pampers aisle and he was more preoccupied with finding four extremely young and destructive dragon slayers in a crowded store.

"Winnifred," he called the girl. She tilted her head in confusion and pointed to herself. "M-me?"

"Who else is standing in this vicinity, kid."

"U-um. My name is W-Wendy...sorry!" she squeaked. He almost winced. How could he have forgotten? Windy Wendy. Grandeeney and her stupid puns.

"Right. Where did the gremlins go?"

Wendy sniffed the air carefully. He raised a heavy brow in vague surprise. She was what, four, five? Scent-tracking was an incredibly difficult feat for any slayer given how overwhelming it could be to the olfactory receptors, especially with a slayer so young. Though it was true that older, more experienced slayers were more proficient at scent-tracking, it was the younger slayers who managed to pick up more. That posed a severe disadvantage, however, as they couldn't handle the overload that they had yet to learn to tolerate and sift through. He supposed she was at a biological edge, given her magic. He'd only ever met with three or four air-based dragons and their respective slayers and he found that they had an easier time scent-tracking because they were so used to manipulating the air around them that it was only natural for them to manipulate the air to focus on whatever scent they happened to be looking for.

This one could be quite formidable if she grew a backbone.

"U-um...I think they're by the food aisle," Wendy said meekly.

"Which is where?" Oh, he could read the signs, all right. He knew it was three aisles down the left, but he was curious as to how proficient she was with her heightened senses. Wendy paused for a second and then pointed in the correct direction. "That way?"

"Hn." She brightened at his affirmation. He almost rolled his eyes as he pushed the loaded cart down to the food aisle. Grandeeney was never one to cut back on the praise, so why this kid looked so happy at his simple agreement was beyond him.

Any further contemplation was cut short when he caught sight of Igneel 2.0 stacked on top of Metalhead, trying to grab a packet of chicken thighs off the second level of the freezer.

"Oi!" he barked. Startled, Igneel 2.0 toppled backwards into blondie's waiting arms. Blondie then proceeded to buckle under the unexpected weight, only for the quiet emo one to catch him from behind. Balance was only restored for the two seconds between emo catching him and Metalhead slipping back and knocking everyone down.

Blondie whimpered for all of three seconds before Acnologia's blank stare shut him up.

"What the hell were you idiots doing?"

Igneel 2.0 pointed to the chicken. "Why is it in packets?"

A man across them gave the boy an odd look until Acnologia said, "They're from Bosco." The man's face relaxed and he nodded, going back to his business. It was common knowledge that people from Bosco had some odd traditions, so never having seen packaged meat in a store wasn't beyond the scope of what was possible. Acnologia knew for a fact that they hunted fresh meat and salted it over the winter for preservation, so it wasn't sold in stores. The only thing Bosco really sold was people. Every market was just a face for some illegal trafficking.

Even he found the practice vile, and that was saying something.

"It's how it works here," he answered him. "You don't hunt meat. You just buy it."

"Oh, okay," Igneel 2.0 said. Emo (Rodney?) furrowed his brows. "What is a Jewel?"

"Currency," he said shortly. When all five stared up at him in confusion, he amended, "Instead of bartering items, we use paper and metal of an assigned value in exchange for these goods."

The only people who seemed to understand were Wendy and Roy, but he counted that as a win regardless.

"What's that?" Gerald pointed to a carton of Jell-O. Acnologia hesitated before providing the name. Jell-O had sugar and sugar was the bane of every adult who looked after a child. Sugar meant no sleep and bouncing off the walls and he had neither the time nor the patience to reign the little bastards in. He almost groaned when George put the Jell-O in the cart. If he took it away then Gerry would start throwing a fit and he didn't want to deal with that. He resolved to hide the snack as soon as he could to avoid the sugar-hype.

"A-Acnologia-san?" Wendy tugged his pant leg lightly. "N-Natsu and Sting ran off…"

"Motherfucker!"

"If you little fucks ever pull a stunt like that again I will personally see to it that you never leave the house without a leash on," Acnologia snarled. Natsu and Sting had twin pouts on their face, but it was only because they were the only two who hadn't gotten cotton candy on their way out of the store.

After a swearing fit that had Gajeel's eyes glinting in a way that promised he would soon come to regret cussing in front of him, Acnologia had dragged the remaining three brats over to the side of the store he could smell the troublemakers at. His desire to keep them on permanent house arrest only increased when he saw the two covered in bright pink cotton candy. Sting had coated his hair so thickly that if it weren't for the difference in eye colour, he and Natsu could have passed for identical twins. The cotton candy spinner tried to get him to pay for the wasted confection, but one dark glare from the dragon of the apocalypse had him waving them away (but not before Acnologia had demanded that the other three get full sticks of it, just to punish double trouble, as he had dubbed them).

"It smelled yummy!" Natsu protested. "Why can't I jus' take it? 's what we did back home!"

Because back home was four-hundred years ago, you absolute dumbass, and back then grocery stores and capitalism didn't exist, he thought to himself. Well, capitalism probably did, but that's besides the point. I killed people back then and nobody tried to stop me. If I kill people now, I'll be on the six o'clock news and awaiting trial. I miss the X300's.

"Because Fiore is different, now shut up," he snapped. "Here, you two can have a Jell-O if you stay quiet." Gajeel almost dropped his stick. "Tha's my Jell-O!"

"I paid for it, so I decide what gets done with it. When you start earning and buying shit, you decide what you wanna do with it," Acnologia replied. As Natsu and Sting eagerly dug into their sugary delights (with their bare hands, he was mildly horrified to note), Roger turned to stare at him with curiously dull red eyes.

"You don't like us, do you?" The question was blunt and to the point. Silence fell over the group as he considered his options.

If I say yes then they'll start bitching. Bitching kids in public is a nuisance. They're also less likely to co-operate later on. If I say no then they'll get attached and think I like them. I want them gone as soon as possible.

He settled for a short, "You weren't part of my plans."

A woman passing by raised an eyebrow at the gaggle of children. "Nobody expects quintuplets, hon. Your poor wife…"

Acnologia had never craved death as much as he did in that very moment.

"What's a quintuplet?"

He stared at the river longingly. It wasn't nearly deep enough to fling himself into for results.

It was true what they said about shitty days being like exponential functions: just when you think you've hit an all time low, it gets lower.

"If it isn't the black dragon of chaos himself," Ivan Dreyar purred. "Out for the first time in decades."

"Yeah," Acnologia said. "I can tell it's been a while; your hair is starting to go white."

Ivan bristled slightly and the immortal smirked lightly in response. He had never liked the third master's son. To say Ivan was odd was putting it lightly. Every time Acnologia so much as entered the same room as him, the hairs on the back of his neck would rise along with the urge to rip him in half. Perhaps it had to do with two severely alpha-male personalities being in the same room, but he had never had the same problem with Gildartz, so he assumed it was long buried survival instincts telling him to wipe out a threat before it caused any actual trouble.

It wasn't as if his hatred was completely unwarranted, either. Ivan had tried his best growing up to cause as much harm to him as possible. Acnologia could account for at least three scars on his person that hailed from Ivan's magic (some hellish paper-thing, if he was correct). Acnologia wasn't quite sure why Ivan held an animosity towards him, but he grasped at any excuse to justify his homicidal thoughts towards the man.

"I didn't know the Council sanctioned an adoption for you, Acnologia," Ivan said. "I didn't know you were interested in parenting either."

"Well, if the Council still has you listed as a father, I'm sure it can justify me as a temporary guardian," he sneered lightly. His electric blue eyes fell to the youngest Dreyar, who flinched back under his scrutinizing glare.

At the tender age of twelve, Laxus Dreyar was probably the weakest mage Fairy Tail had ever produced. He had always been a sickly child, prone to lung infections and the like, and, as a result, was scrawny and tired easily. He had a weak affinity for lightning magic (something he remembered Yuriy, Laxus's great-grandfather, was a master at), but even creating small sparks drained his virtually non-existent magical container. He was shy, but polite and always smiling. Ivan detested him, Makarov adored him, and Acnologia almost pitied him.

Almost.

"I've done a fine job considering what I have to work with," Ivan spat. Laxus continued to stare fixedly at the ground. Natsu frowned and walked over, extending his half-eaten Jell-O container. "Want?"

"Not allowed."

"Why?"

"Unhealthy."

"Oh. That means it's bad an' stuff, yeah?"

"Yes."

"Oh."

"And who might you be?" Ivan asked, leaning down to Natsu's level. The boy held out a sticky hand. "Natsu. You got a big nose. 'S'at mean you lie lots?"

"No," Ivan said. Acnologia was pleased to note that he looked almost affronted at the question. Perhaps Igneel 2.0 wasn't as much of a waste as he thought he was. Anyone who managed to insult Ivan was half-decent in his books.

"Where are you from?" Ivan asked again. Acnologia had a brief moment of panic before Rudy said, "Bosco. I am Rogue."

Rogue shot Acnologia an oddly meaningful look for a five-year-old. He knew he was lying about his land of origin - the continent hadn't even been divided into formal countries four-hundred years ago, so the only time he could have heard Bosco was at the store. Rogue was intuitive, he decided, and that would get him far in life.

This one he could grow to trust.

"Ry-" Sting opened his mouth, only to be purse his lips a second later.

Ryos. Rogue's real name was Ryos.

Why did he lie about his name?

"Bosco is a long way to come from. Why would the Council ship you all off here to be looked after by Acnologia?" The man in question curled his lip back in disgust. Ivan was well aware that children were poor liars and that the best way to get genuine answers was to interrogate them. Laxus's blue eyes darkened with sympathy - Acnologia could only imagine the kind of hellish questioning he had been through in his youth.

"'Cause we're dragon slayers and he's s'pposed ta look after us 'cause he's also a slayer," Gajeel answered bluntly.

Ivan's face lit up at the tidbit, just as Acnologia stiffened.

He could smell something close to glee radiating off him. Ivan knew full well that Acnologia was a slayer, but he had never reacted like this when he learned of the fact all those years ago.

Something was wrong.

"Slayer children? How fascinating! All five of you?" Only Wendy seemed to shrink back under his beady eyes. She could probably smell the unnatural joy, while the others' undeveloped senses only seemed to trigger a slight sense of discomfort in them without knowing why. Sting nodded happily. "Yup!"

"Does the name Bijale-"

"We're going," Acnologia interrupted him. "Ry-Rogue. You lead."

Ryos nodded and tugged at Sting's hand to get them moving down the path. Natsu turned back to wave at Laxus, who lifted his hand shyly in response.

While the children were distracted, the chaos slayer pinned Ivan with cold, unforgiving eyes.

"I don't particularly give a fuck as to what you do on a day-to-day basis, but these gremlins are under my watch for now, so let's make one thing clear: I may hate them, but I'm always looking for an excuse to rid the planet of your existence, so if you so much as look at them, that's all the justification I need to kill you."

Ivan's previously cheery face melted into disdain. "Awfully sweet of you to care. You're getting soft."

"And you're growing senile in your old age if you think that."

"I would be careful if I were you, Acnologia," Ivan called as the immortal began to walk away. "You never know when a more powerful slayer will rise to take over your position."

"Those brats can only dream to surpass me," he said simply. Ivan smiled thinly. "I wasn't talking about them. Come, Laxus."

Acnologia frowned as he caught up to the slayers, who had stopped to stare at a group of teens skipping rocks in the canal. There were only seven dragon slayers in Fiore, and five of them were barely old enough to count. The only other possibility was Serena. While the hybrid did have the magical variance he lacked, Serena was short the centuries of experience Acnologia had, and everyone knew it. Even Ivan.

Unless…

The hybrid theory was a project that only twelve people in the entire world knew about - the Wizard Saints, who had come up with it, the king, who had approved it, Acnologia, who had been brought on the committee to provide feedback, and the selected hybrid himself.

God Serena.

Currently host to five different kinds of draconic lacrima, God Serena was one of the first people to have survived the procedure in recorded history, and it was for that reason that the Wizard Saints had decided to turn him into Fiore's most valuable asset. To call him a weapon was too much, in the king's eyes. To call him an asset was to be too gentle, in Acnologia's. Either way, with enough training and lacrima, Serena would soon be strong enough to give even him a run for his money. But Serena would never try to pick a fight with him. Not a fight to the death, anyway.

There was no way that Ivan knew that Serena hosted more than one lacrima, so what had he meant?

His eyes fell to the group of slayers trailing after him like little ducks. They all had the potential to become powerful in their own right, but which one of them would surpass him?

A small part of him wondered what he could do to stop it from ever happening.

"You lied about your name."

"You lied about where we came from," Ryos said in return. "I am from Geneva. Not Bosco."

"Do you think that people would understand the circumstances of your arrival?" he challenged. "Bosco is the closest to Geneva's traditions that I can use to pass you off as foreigners. Do you want to see your parents hurt in their quest to kill Zeref? If people know where you're from, it will happen."

Ryos flinched. He had hit a sore spot. Acnologia idly wondered what would happen if they knew their parents were already long dead.

"I lied because Skiadrum once told me that to give a stranger your true name is to give them power over you. Names can be used in the darkest of magicks against you," Ryos said. "For that reason, I do not wish to use my real name outside. Rogue is one Skiadrum and I selected together."

"So you wish to be legally known as Rogue?" Acnologia asked. He was mildly impressed, not only because Ryos was able to remember that ancient warning (it was why nobody knew his real name), but because of his eloquence. Skiadrum had gone through great pains to educate the boy.

"Yes."

Acnologia pressed a thumb to Ryos's forehead and dragged it up well past his hairline, stopping just short of the very center of his skull. "Hereinafter, you are Rogue Cheney. Ryos is no more."

"Yes." Rogue bowed his head respectfully.

Wendy may have had the potential to become a formidable opponent, but Rogue would certainly become the most adept leader.

A/N: literally the only thing I had planned for this chapter was inserting as much mall-craziness as I could, but then I was like 'I could also just introduce a mini-story arc and save said craziness for the first time the kids go to the Guild' and that's what happened. So enjoy plot. If any of you can guess what Ivan was trying to say before Acno cut him off, you are a winner. All of you are winners, but the one who guesses correctly is a double winner.

Acno is actually a horrible parent and person, but what can you expect? The guy is a loner and asshole. He'll learn. Hopefully. That last part with Rogue actually wasn't planned at all. I just needed to find a way to get him to go from Ryos to Rogue, so why not use it as an excuse to build Rogue-Acno fam by having them bond over traditions and old magic? (Funny story, that whole names have power thing is the reason I never give my real name out online. I don't believe in magic and all that shit, but my mom did tell me that people can cast negativity on you if they know your name, so I mean...it stuck!)

Also, this is unedited because it's 4 AM, so I'll probably fix spelling and grammar errors in the morning. I just wanted to publish this. Enjoy!

-Touko