13th: Loneliness

Summary: To be abandoned by your parents was one thing. Being lonely for as long as you could remember was an entirely different thing – and they knew this feeling just too well.

Bixslow hadn't always been Bixslow. In the first years of his life, he had been Eugene. Eugene had been loved by his parents until the fateful day on which his eyes started to do strange things – things that scared his parents and thus, they put them into an orphanage and he never saw them again.

Even in the orphanage, he was the outcast. He was forced to cover his eyes – always and under every circumstance – and he hadn't a single friend. To him, it seemed like he had just found his personal hell. His hell consisted of loneliness and the knowledge that he would never have a single friend because no one would look past his terrifying eyes.

He hated his life because no one understood that he didn't mean for those things to happen and that he hadn't any influence on this.

When he was ten, he left the orphanage to search for a guild where he wouldn't be avoided because of his eyes. He was sick of being lonely. He wanted to be acknowledged and he wanted to be seen as someone special and not as the freak show. He was a young child and being treated like trash hurt him deeply even though he wouldn't admit it later on. His childhood was a dark and lonely one. And so it wasn't surprising for anyone who had noticed him back then that he had joined Fairy Tail out of all guilds. But it was fitting, in a way. Fairy Tail had more members with sad pasts than all the other guilds combined – and they accepted even those who had been former enemies.

When Evergreen had been born, her parents had been happy and they had loved her. They had been proud of their daughter and they already planned out her amazing future. Her parents were rich people and so they imagined how their beautiful daughter would marry either an equally if not richer man or maybe even a prince. The young Evergreen was dressed into the most comfortable and beautiful clothes and everyone in the mansion were she grew up adored her.

That was until that day when she was six years old and got mad at one of the children who were supposed to be her friends. Before she knew what she was doing, it had happened: she had petrified the boy who had tugged on her long braids – and she couldn't undo it because at such a young age, magic often worked outside the regular ways.

Her parents and everyone else had to realise that Evergreen was a mage – even though there was no other mage in her family – and from one to another, her whole life changed. She was forced to wear glasses to prevent that she petrified someone again but this was the only thing her parents did to make her life easier.

She had to realise everything on her own while her parents started to ignore her. She realised that her parents didn't approve of mages, calling them criminals and worthless. Sometimes, she had to control herself not to unleash her stone gaze at them. She wasn't put into an orphanage but she knew that her parents didn't love her anymore because she was different and her parents didn't like people who were different. The constant silence around her annoyed her and the books she was studying magic in didn't help her that much either … but she read of guilds … and after her parents had all but abandoned her, she desired to be acknowledged for her unique abilities – and if a guild was the only place where this was possible, well, she would leave.

And she did leave. She sneaked out of the mansion and once she had brought enough distance between her and her parents, she cut off her long braids and enjoyed the feeling of complete and perfect freedom.

For Ultear Milkovich, the abandonment was painful because the experiments the scientists made with her were agonising and to hear that her mother had abandoned her was painful. Her past was a lie and her future didn't exist and she just wanted to go home to her mother and have a bright future with the powerful ice mage. But her fate wasn't to be with her mother as she learned soon. And so hope died right after it had been found and left her with an empty and hollow world.

She had believed. She had believed that her mother would come and take her home … that her mother would protect her from all those evil people but Ur didn't come and soon, the young Ultear found herself on the path to becoming a dark mage.

This was a way she didn't mean to walk at first but after a few words of Master Hades, she truly believed that if she would go into the Great World of Magic, she would be able to complete the Arc of Time and she would see her mother again.

She searched for answers in herself but she found nothing because none of her answers was sufficient in her eyes. And so she lost herself more and more in her loneliness and her hate towards her mother who had left her alone with those creepy guys who had hurt her so much. She passed nameless graves, graves she had helped to fill with her anger with her desperate wish to complete the Arc of Time one day.

Sometimes when she was sitting in Grimoire Hearts airship and watched Meredy sleep, she wondered if the pink-haired girl might be the only kind of light she still saw because no matter what she said or how she acted, she did care for the girl she had adopted and she had sworn that she wouldn't abandon her like her mother had abandoned her.

But all in all, there was nothing but emptiness in her and she wanted to do something useful. Capturing Zeref wouldn't be enough to go into the Great World of Magic, she knew that, but it would be a start and for the first time, the years she wasted with toying around with Jellal Fernandes and the council wouldn't be in vain anymore.

But then again, she wondered why the emptiness inside of her didn't fade away.