It Was Like A Little Light

By CrimsonStarbird

Two – An Accidental Empathy

What Tenrou Island lacked in size it more than made up for with disorder.

Its very existence defied logic. Not only did it have its own climate, but that climate was not even consistent across the entire island. It contained multiple ecosystems and environments that had perhaps once been distinct, but had since blurred together into some incomprehensible cacophony of life which refused classification. The forest which covered most of the island's surface was interspersed with golden meadows and patches of deep jungle; its coastline was a disjointed chain of beautiful sandy beaches, sheer cliffs, and even a saltmarsh or two – as if the small island had been assembled out of the fragments left over from the divine creation of the continents. Above it all rose the great Tenrou Tree, uniting the chaos beneath its golden-green canopy.

The correct answer to "what could possibly live in such a mishmash of habitats?" was "anything and everything". The fauna and flora obeyed the same rules as the environment – that was to say, no rules at all. Here, tropical birds lived side by side with seagulls, eagles and pigeons. Enormous reptilian creatures, closer to dinosaurs than modern lizards, competed with prowling wolves and ferocious big cats for their prey. Beneath the earth, something gigantic had carved out a whole world of tunnels for itself, where an entirely separate food chain existed amongst the creatures who would live and die without ever seeing sunlight. There were great beasts unheard of in the natural histories expounded upon the continent. There were monsters which did not seem to belong to a species at all, but were unique lifeforms, altered beyond recognition by the magic permeating the island.

There had even been humans here, once: an entirely self-sufficient village, complete with its own mage guild. It had not been the bizarre environment that had driven them from this place in the end, but other humans – as ever it was. Now, the black-haired young man who walked unerringly across the chaotic landscape was the only one left.

Ostensibly, the island belonged to the mage guild Fairy Tail. Two magical barriers made it so – one which hid the island from those who did not already know where to find it, and a second, far less subtle, which acted as a force field preventing anyone without the Fairy Tail mark from setting foot upon its shores. But that guild's mages visited only rarely, and it was a mark of the brevity of their visits that not once during the countless years this man had made their island his home had anyone noticed his presence there. He may have been a guest upon the island, granted permission to stay by the one who watched over it, but there was no one alive who knew it like he did. To all extents and purposes, Tenrou Island was his own private haven.

And that was how he liked it. No – that was how he needed it. The arrival of strangers onto the island that was his sanctuary was therefore one of the few things that could stir him into action, so that he could ascertain their purpose from afar and ensure that they departed none the wiser to the Black Mage Zeref's presence there.

With that in mind, he was presently making his way towards the clifftop that would give him the best view of the eastern ocean. He moved slowly not because he was lost. To explorers and Fairy Tail mages alike, the terrain may have been impenetrable, but this was his home and he knew each and every one of its quirks. No, he chose each step with care so that he might avoid crushing beneath his feet any of the myriad of beetles with whom he shared the land. The death he left behind him here was never intentional.

At the top of the cliff, he stood with his bare toes curled around the edge of the precipice, breathing deeply of the salty air that seemed unable to penetrate the forest where he spent most of his time.

"The barrier is up again," he noted out loud, of the shimmering dome that enclosed the island. He could not see it with his eyes, but he could sense its presence, just as the warmth upon his back confirmed the existence of the sun in the sky behind him. "Was I mistaken?"

The presence of odd objects in the cove below suggested otherwise. Two crates, and an unidentifiable blurred heap, sat upon the rockpool-covered plateau – manmade objects which had not been there yesterday. Still, he could not see any motion within the cove, let alone any living human beings. Perhaps they had dropped off the cargo and left straight away.

The world was rarely that kind to him, though, so he picked out the trail that led down to the cove and went to investigate for himself.

He had barely taken three paces when the sound of an explosion stopped him in his tracks. A flock of long-tailed crimson birds, startled into the sky by the disturbance, screeched their alarm for all the world to hear. His eyes narrowed slightly. It wouldn't be the first time that the guild had come here for some form of training exercise – he supposed he would do the same, if given access to a sanctuary which bestowed such powerful blessings upon its sons and daughters – but…

"Invaders?" he asked of the trees around him. "Would you have me defend your island, then, Mavis? Fight for the sake of keeping this a peaceful place?"

Another explosion provided the only answer. This time it was close enough that he first detected it not with his eyes or ears, but with the senses that had assured him of the absence and then presence of the invisible barrier; it flashed across his body as a pulse of roiling, frothy magic that seemed somehow… off. As he watched the accompanying burst of earth and leaves rise into the air, falter, and rain back down again, a frown creased his youthful face. "Then again, I don't sense hostile intent."

It was perhaps an odd thing to hear from a man who was presently watching a forty-foot fir tree break into tiny cubes of green and brown, but he was never wrong about these things. Pausing, he weighed up the potential intrigue of investigating the destruction of the local flora against his desire not to get involved in anything concerning other human beings.

Common sense won out. He turned on his heel and headed back towards his grove of solitude.

Before he had taken more than a step, however, another explosion thundered through the air. This one was accompanied by an earthquake that shook the entire island. Magic so devastating, wrought without a trace of malice? That was odd. Very odd. It had been so long since anything interesting had happened to him that the temptation to investigate was scarily strong.

Curious despite himself, he paused, and that was his mistake.

One hesitant moment was all it took for something black and orange to shoot out of the undergrowth and affix itself to his leg.

Utterly bemused, he gazed down at the thing clinging to him as if he couldn't quite comprehend its existence. The thing in question was a child – a boy, probably, though he couldn't see much of him beyond the mop of dirty ginger hair and the black rags covering his body. The boy clutched at him, wailing his heart out.

Zeref blinked at him. "You're not what I was expecting to see."

The boy kept crying into his robes. His grip did not loosen. It wasn't the normal reaction people had upon meeting the infamous Black Mage, that was for sure.

Hopefully, Zeref ventured, "Maybe you could let go of me now."

The boy gave no sign that he had heard.

"Uh… there, there," he tried, clumsily patting the boy's head.

That seemed to get a response. Slowly, the strange boy's shaking eased; his wailing petered out into the occasional sniff. He looked up at the man he was clinging to with enormous, round, watery eyes.

"What are you doing here, kid?" Zeref asked. "Are you on your own? Are there any adults with you?"

The boy shook his head as his comically wide eyes began to fill with tears once again. "They left me here!" he wailed. "They threw me off the boat and sailed away! I don't wanna be on my own!"

With a sigh, Zeref rested his hand atop that stark mop of hair once again. If there weren't any adults around who would know him for who he was, he had no need to worry. His mistake in allowing himself to be seen would have no serious consequences. He could return to his life of isolation. "You'll be alright here. This is a good island. It will look after you."

Unfortunately, his attempt to sidle away was foiled by the boy's grip of iron. "Don't go! Don't leave me on my own! Please!"

"It's far better for you to be on your own than to be with me, kid."

"But why?"

"Because it would only end badly. I can promise you that."

The boy gazed up at him with imploring eyes, and it was suddenly and incomprehensibly difficult to feel anything other than guilt. He saw the tremulous set of the boy's mouth, the desperation in his grip, and the fear in his shaking shoulders. And he noticed what few others in the world would have done: a golden aura, the kind which could not be seen with the eye alone, was wrapped around the boy's vulnerable form. His attention was drawn towards the upper left of the boy's chest, where the magic swirled most strongly. He had no doubt that if he looked beneath that ragged t-shirt, he would find a Fairy Tail mark in that exact spot.

His eyes narrowed imperceptibly, and he said, "You know full well that I don't help people, Mavis."

Not even innocent little children who had been left all alone on an unfamiliar island.

Rather, as the two strangers looked at each other, it was not compassion but anger that twisted the Black Mage's expression. Deadly red light sparked within the jet-black orbs of his eyes. "Shut up," he snarled.

The boy flinched back from him, stammering, "I didn't- I didn't say anything…"

"I wasn't talking to you."

"But… There isn't anyone else here…"

"Look, kid," Zeref snapped, and he was rewarded with the sight of the child cowering away from him. Reason might not have been able to break the boy's tenacious grip, but it seemed fear could, and that was a weapon he knew how to use. If it would stop him from having to interact with any other human beings – something that never ended well – he was more than happy to employ it, even against a child. "You cannot stay with me. I can't make you leave the island when we're both stuck here with no boats, but this place is plenty big enough for both of us to live separately. Don't come looking for me. I don't want to hurt you, but I also don't want anything to do with you. Is that understood?"

"But…"

Ignoring the weak protest, he turned on his heel and made to stride off into the forest. He barely managed two paces before the child shook himself free of fear's paralysis, bounded forwards, seized his wrist with both hands, and dug his heels into the ground. "Please don't go!"

Zeref's eyes narrowed, and there were any number of less gentle methods he might have employed to force the boy away from him, but he never got the chance. Magic streaked again across his senses; wild, jagged, painful, like the sting of chemical fumes in his eyes and throat. A grid of white lines was spreading up his bare arm. He jerked his hand out of the boy's grip with a hiss, rubbing at the lines of magic with the heel of his other hand until they faded from his skin.

"That's not a good way of trying to get someone to do what you want, kid," he warned him.

For the first time, though, the boy's attention was not upon him. He was staggering backwards across the dry earth, staring at his hands in horror. "It's happening again," he breathed. "No, no, no, please don't, please-!"

"Kid…?"

His voice rose to a dreadful crescendo. "Stop it! I don't wanna kill anyone else!"

He was not looking at Zeref as he spoke. He was not, in fact, speaking to the man he'd met at all.

None of that changed the fact that Zeref went as still as if those words had stopped time: breath locked half-formed within frozen lungs; his eyes even wider than the boy's he had found so amusing. Somewhere out there the world had flipped on its axis, and at the centre of it all was this boy who had appeared from nowhere – this boy he wanted nothing to do with, yet who had screamed the same words carved by trial and tragedy into the Black Mage's own heart-

Everything around them shattered. White light burst from the boy's body, ripping up the trees, the undergrowth, and even the ground beneath their feet. It tried to tear apart Zeref too, and when it could not, it hurt all the more for failing: immense forces slashed through him from the inside out; pressure unable to cut itself free from a body which would not break. The raging power made short work of the dense soil until it reached the roof of the tunnel below, and then they were both falling, surrounded by perfect cubes of earth.

Zeref hit the ground and lay there on his back in the darkness, breathing heavily. Several metres above him, the uneven sky-blue circle through which they had fallen allowed a beam of sunlight into the oversized warren. All around him, the rubble was settling into a stable position. The bitter sting of improperly formed magic vanished from his senses as suddenly as it had appeared.

"I'd forgotten how much that hurts," he grimaced, pushing himself into a sitting position. Ghostly waves of pain swirled around him in confused eddies as his body struggled to process the fact that it was still in perfect working order.

Sharp eyes picked out the boy's shadowy form, battered and bruised from the fall but somehow still staggering across the rubble, frantically swinging his head left and right. "Hey… are you still there?" he called, and his voice trembled, as if it were a question he did not fully dare to ask. "Please… please don't be dead…"

"Over here, kid."

He spoke on impulse, without conscious intent, and the boy froze at once. Tears of relief welled up in those impossibly wide eyes. The boy opened his mouth but there were no words to sum up how he felt in that moment, so instead he just dashed over and grabbed hold of his arm once more. "I'm so glad you're alive," he said, honestly, earnestly; as if he didn't know how not to be those things. "I thought… I thought… I might have… you too…"

He was shaking now. "I don't ever want to hurt anyone, it just… I can't make it stop. Everyone around me gets hurt and it's all my fault. That's why they abandoned me here, because I… because I just bring pain to everyone. Uncle Robin is in hospital because of me. And daddy… and mummy… it's my fault that they… that they…"

It was at that moment that Zeref drew him close and held him tightly. And the boy was crying his eyes out once again, and all the while the Black Mage held him protectively, kindly; an accidental empathy upon that lost and lonely island.

"I'm still not going to help him, Mavis," Zeref whispered, but it was really just a gesture by this point, because it looked for all the world like he was never ever going to let that boy go.

There was no way of knowing how long they remained in the collapsed tunnel. The boy's crying had slowly ceased, and his ragged breathing grew calmer, and he felt enough at ease to rest his forehead upon this stranger's shoulder. "Maybe you're right," he murmured. "Maybe I should stay on my own. You're a nice person and I don't want to hurt you."

Zeref gave a sigh. "Look at me, kid." As the boy raised his tear-stained face, he asked, "Do I look hurt to you?"

An amusing expression of puzzlement lit up the boy's red-tinted eyes as he noticed perhaps for the first time that the other wasn't merely alive – he was completely unharmed. Like the poor trees in the forest, or the very earth itself, his body should have been torn apart by that rampaging power, but there was not a single mark upon him to suggest that anything out of the ordinary had happened. If any damage had been done, it had been undone just as quickly, and pain always passed when there was no physical justification for its stay.

"No…" said the boy, curiously.

"You're not going to hurt me." A small smile touched Zeref's lips, and he added, "Rather, it is the height of arrogance to think that you could ever harm me with such crude, unformed magic."

"But…" The boy floundered in his anxiousness. "But if you did die, because of me, then… then I… I don't think I'd…"

"I won't die on you, kid. That is very much the one thing that I am not going to do. If you want to worry about someone's safety, worry about your own. Mavis can't protect you forever."

"I… don't really understand…"

"Let's hope things can stay that way."

"So…" They looked at each other, the solemn mage with his unblinking jet-black gaze, and the boy who was still a little afraid of him, but would not let go of him for anything. "Does that mean… that I can stay with you?"

"No. It's no better an idea now than it was ten minutes ago. But…" Zeref sighed again. He felt as though he hadn't stopped doing that since the boy had crossed his path. "I suppose you can come with me until we're out of the tunnels. You'll never find your way back to the surface on your own."

"I can come with you? You really mean that?"

"Yes."

"You promise you won't leave me?"

"I just said I wouldn't, didn't I?" Nudging the boy away from him, he climbed to his feet, stretched, and glanced wistfully up at the hole through which they had entered the enormous warren. "Come on. If you get lost down here-"

He was stopped in his tracks as the boy barrelled into him again, apparently having decided to express his gratitude by grappling him happily. It was as if that single promise had flipped some switch from utterly heartbroken to completely cheerful – an instantaneous reaction that surely only children could survive. Zeref caught himself wondering just how many times this boy had been left alone by those who had pledged otherwise, and wrested his train of thought away from such perilous tracks with an effort.

"Fine, but you've got to stop touching me, kid."

The boy looked at him, noticed that he was not joking, and let go with a very serious nod. Still, he remained a little too close for comfort as they began walking through the tunnels. After years of having every creature on the island smart enough to listen to its instincts treat the ten-foot radius around him as if it were a minefield – and not without good cause – the boy trundling along at his side was a jarring anomaly, far too close and far too energetic. The nearby motion caught his attention again the moment he was able to shake it free. It was only with great effort of will that Zeref prevented himself from pushing the boy back to a respectable distance, and he added personal space to the sizeable list of reasons why this partnership was a very bad idea, and would absolutely not be enduring beyond the tunnel's exit.

Away from the hole their fall had made in the ceiling, their eyes began to adjust properly to the darkness, and they made their way using the dim light shed by the occasional glowing protrusion of crystal. Even the boy had noticed the expertise with which his companion navigated the maze, asking of him, "Everything looks the same down here. How come you know where you're going?"

"Because I have a lot of free time and nothing to do with it. Exploring the island was the first thing I did."

"Exploring sounds fun," remarked the boy wistfully. "I don't get to explore much, because I'm not really allowed to leave the house. Sometimes I'm not even allowed to leave the basement. I did explore the whole basement, but there were only empty boxes and spiders down there. There weren't even any monsters. Did you find monsters? Are there monsters living in the tunnels?"

At this thought, the boy seemed to press himself a little closer to his guide, peering excitedly around his legs and missing the annoyed look this garnered.

"I suppose you could call them that."

"Do they eat people?"

"No."

"Are you sure?"

"I'm sure. There aren't any people on the island for them to eat. They don't have a taste for human flesh."

"So… you're the only person here?"

"That's right."

The boy grabbed his wrist and looked up at him with wide eyes. "But what if the reason why there aren't any other people is because the monsters ate them all?"

"That's… that's really not the case," Zeref sighed. "Look, don't worry about the creatures on the island. They won't come anywhere near while I'm around."

"Okay," he shrugged, cheerful again. "I'll just stay with you, then."

The Black Mage blinked, and then raised his exasperated gaze towards the ceiling. "I walked into that one, didn't I?"

The boy paid his rambling no heed. He just kept trotting along at his new friend's side, as if he hadn't a care in the world. "I'm Gildarts, by the way."

"I don't care. I'm not getting attached."

"Okay." Gildarts shrugged at this too. "Well, you can call me whatever you want. I don't really mind if you keep calling me 'kid'. Uncle Robin does that sometimes. He does actually have kids, though. You don't look that old."

"You'd be surprised."

"Really?" The boy gave him a curious look; he stared evenly back. "How old are you, then?"

"Guess."

"Okay! Are you, uh… sixteen?"

"Not even close."

"Aww," Gildarts groaned, pulling a face. "Then are you older, or younger?"

"Hmm. Difficult question. Older, I suppose, though you may have to be a little more precise about how you're defining age."

Unconvinced, the boy frowned at him. "It's not that difficult. How about you tell me how old you are, and I'll tell you if you're definitely older or younger than sixteen?"

"Can't."

"Why not?"

"Because I have no idea how old I am."

Never mind his apparent immunity to the boy's lethal magic; never mind the fact that he was living in secret on a supposedly abandoned island – it was this revelation, rather than anything else, which provoked an expression of abject horror from the child. "How can you not know how old you are?"

"I haven't been counting. I know when I was born, though, so if you tell me what year it is, I'll work it out."

The boy's jaw almost hit the floor. "How can you not even know what year it is?"

"Does it look like I have a calendar here? Besides, after a while, all the years start to blur together."

"My grandpa used to say that all the time."

"Getting warmer."

"You're really weird," the boy informed him. And then he clapped his hands together and stared at his companion with dawning realization. "Oh, I know! Are you from the future?"

"No, I'm not from the future. Good guess, though."

"Then, are you from the past?"

"Aren't we all from the past?"

The boy actually stopped in his tracks to mull this over. Then, as if in slow motion, his eyes widened and he gasped, "Whoa. I never realized that before. That is so cool! We're all time travellers!"

"Kid, if you don't keep up, I'm leaving you behind."

The sound of footsteps picked up again, and the black and orange sprite duly reappeared at his side… for all of about five seconds, before he veered away again, pouncing upon some new treasure with the hunting cry, "What's that?"

"What did I just say?" Zeref snapped, glaring at the cavern wall, where the boy was peering inquisitively at a spearhead of protruding crystal – the first of their natural torches that was low enough for him to reach. Apparently he had no setting between 'absolutely terrified' and 'fearlessly curious'.

"Oh, please don't touch that," Zeref sighed. "I'd really like to get out of here before-"

"Before what?" asked the boy brightly, touching the crystal. Which promptly shattered. Followed by the wall it had been attached to. Cracks spread across the ceiling, as it debated whether or not to join in the fun.

"Before your magic brings this entire place down on us."

"…Oops."

The fearsome Black Mage of legend had his head in his hands. "I can't believe I am doing this," he growled, adding another few feet of watertight logic to the Tenrou-Tree-high stack of evidence suggesting that staying with the boy was a bad idea. It was going to take one hell of a counterargument to change his mind this time.

And as the ceiling decided that it did want to drop on them after all, he seized the boy by the scruff of his neck and sprinted down the tunnel.

He couldn't remember the last time he had run away from something, let alone while dragging along a helpless child. This really was turning into a day of new experiences. Yet run he did, carrying the boy to safety and cursing Mavis under his breath the entire time, as a thunderous crash filled his ears and the world was collapsing around him and a searing pain ripped along the arm holding the boy-

They reached the cave exit he had been looking for and burst out into the open. The instant they were clear of the rockfall, he hurled his passenger to the ground and took several paces back, until the boy's rampaging magic lost interest in him and decided to carve the mossy earth into cubes instead. Panting, he leaned up against a tree, focussing his willpower to force the remnants of that wildfire magic out of his body. The white lines crisscrossing his arm faded once again, leaving not a single visible wound, but even he hadn't escaped entirely unscathed from prolonged contact with the boy's power, and echoes of that ripping agony reverberated over and over beneath the skin of his arm.

Hissing at the pain of it, and furious, he rounded on the boy – only to stop in his tracks. Gildarts was curled up in a ball on the broken ground, slowly rocking back and forth in time to the tears spilling from unfocussed eyes. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry-!" he murmured, over and over and over. "Please don't leave me… I didn't mean to… I'm sorry…"

And it didn't matter that the power Zeref saw flooding out of the boy was bright white, because in his mind's eye it was black – the same midnight-black which trailed its fingers across skeletal trees and bore the graveyard's shroud. That too had raged heedless to desire and unmoved by prayer. In that moment, the pain in his arm was nothing compared to the pain in his heart.

The sharp reprimand died on the tip of his tongue. Instead, he waited in silence for the uncontrolled magic to die away, and then he walked over to the boy and reached out to help him up. The boy flinched away from his hand. Zeref noticed this, and his mouth tightened, but he let his hand fall back to his side without comment.

"I'm not going anywhere," he said, instead. "So stop crying, alright?"

The boy gazed up at him tearfully. "But I hurt you again, didn't I?"

"No, you didn't." It was an impulsive lie, and even as he said it, he had a feeling he would come to regret it. Of course the boy's magic was hurting him, and it had been countless years since he had felt physical pain like it. What it couldn't do was inflict permanent damage to him. As always, any harm done reversed itself in seconds. Yet he still experienced receiving those wounds, and he should have been angry about it, but a very long time ago he had opened his eyes to find everyone in the academy dead, and if there was anything – anything – that could have lessened that horror…

"Come on," he told the boy, and he hadn't known before that moment that his own voice could sound so kind. As he spoke, he could hear the fatal cracks spreading through his mountain of evidence, destroyed by the boy's magic just as effortlessly as the tunnel had been, if for entirely different reasons. "We've still got a long way to go, and I'm not carrying you any further."

This time, when he offered out his hand, as steadily and carefully as he might have approached a skittish puppy, he was able to pull the boy to his feet atop the earth his magic had churned up. The boy asked, "Where… where are we going?"

"Somewhere away from that tunnel," Zeref answered, already striding away.

"Why?"

"Because there are a lot of monsters living in there who aren't going to be happy that you just collapsed their house."

"…Oh." And it seemed that the boy picked up the pace at that realization, jogging by his companion's side and throwing the occasional nervous glance over his shoulder.

Night was falling. The sky was free of clouds, and a beautiful twilight painted across the tops of the trees, as if they had been dipped in liquid gold. It wasn't getting cold – it very rarely did on this island – but in a place without any human settlements, once the fiery glory of the sunset faded into the evening's gloom, the night was truly dark.

Zeref was used to nightfall on Tenrou Island; he had been here long enough. Besides, one did not get a nickname like Black Mage by being afraid of the dark – or, in fact, by being afraid of anything – and, as he had already promised, all the dangerous beasts on the island knew better than to come near him. But the boy at his side saw hostility in the lengthening shadows, if the way he shuffled closer and closer with every step was any indication.

It wouldn't be right to get rid of the boy now. Besides, judging by his tenacity, short of knocking him out and running for it he couldn't think of any means by which he'd be able to make a convincing getaway – and that made leaving feel less like common sense and more like outright betrayal. He might as well wait until the boy fell asleep. One evening surely couldn't make things worse.

So as they walked, he kept an eye out for a suitable location, and as soon as he found one, he called a halt to their travels. "Here will do."

"What's here?" inquired the boy, looking round the perfectly ordinary forest clearing with interest.

"A good place to spend the night."

"We're going to sleep in the forest?"

"Yes. It doesn't get cold here, and it hardly ever rains."

"Oh. I kinda figured you'd have a house, or something."

"If I had a house, do you really think I'd let you anywhere near it?"

"…Oh." This sounded even more downcast the second time round. "Guess not. I'd probably destroy it."

"There's no probably about it," Zeref confirmed, settling himself down with his back to a sturdy tree.

"Okay." Placing his hands on his hips, the boy surveyed the little clearing, as if looking for a good spot of his own. "Well, this might be fun too. It's like camping. Only without a tent. Or a campfire. Or… anything at all…"

His voice tailed off. His surveying of his surroundings became a little less regal and a little more anxious. He turned a full circle on the spot, and then another. Finally, with his gaze fixed firmly on the ground, he shambled over and sat down right next to Zeref.

Zeref stared at him. The boy stared back.

Zeref shuffled a couple of feet to the right. The boy shuffled with him.

Zeref glared at him. The boy gave him a sheepish smile and then rested his head upon his companion's shoulder, as if that settled the matter.

It didn't.

"What are you doing?" Zeref snapped.

"…You looked more comfortable than the ground."

"I can assure you, I am not."

That was far, far too close, and not even the boy could fail to notice the icy undertone behind those words. He changed tack. "But it's dark, and I'm scared…"

"What is there to be afraid of?"

"Monsters!" he insisted, with eyes as wide as saucers.

"I told you, they won't come close if I'm here. And even if they did, your magic would turn them into little monster cubes before they could eat you."

This didn't seem to reassure him. "What if there are ghosts, though? Or demons? Or ghouls? Or something really scary that only comes out of the shadows at night?"

"Kid, the scariest thing on this island is me, and you don't seem to have a problem clinging to me."

"You're not scary. You're…" Here, the boy paused to poke his arm several times, as if abstract adjectives had failed him and he was genuinely considering resorting to tactile ones. "You're actually kind of nice."

"…You spent that long thinking about it, and that's the best you could come up with?" Zeref grumbled, sighing for the umpteenth time that afternoon. "If it's the dark that's bothering you, will you let go of me if we light a fire?"

"I… I guess…"

"Then go and gather some firewood."

The boy considered this, came to the conclusion that a short trip into the twilight forest on his own was a lot better than the alternative, and scurried away.

When he had disappeared from sight, Zeref drew his knees up to his chest and rested his chin on them, gazing pensively out through the trees. "What am I doing, Mavis?" he murmured. "You know I can't help him. You know what will happen if I try."

The shadows murmured something back, and he said, softly, "I can't deal with children. They're just too difficult to hate. The longer I stay with him, the worse it's going to get. He'll be fine here on his own-"

His head snapped up as the boy re-entered the clearing. "Did you get the firewood?" he demanded, a little harsher than he had intended for being startled, and he saw the boy shiver.

"Well…" As the boy shuffled forwards, it became clear that, rather than holding several broken branches, he was cradling a pile of wood to his chest. It might once have consisted of suitably flammable branches, but now that his magic had shredded them down to as small as they could go, even calling them twigs would have been generous. A stream of stubby little splinters spilled like sand grains from his clumsy grip; a trail of woodchips marked his route out of the forest.

"Yeah, there's not much I can do with that."

The remainder of the wood fell from the boy's grip as tears sprung once again from the endless wells of his eyes. "I'm sorry," he sniffed. "I tried, I really did, but I can't make it stop… Everything breaks when I touch it… I'm sorry…"

His plea rose to a scream as white light burst out from his body, trying to do to the entire clearing what it had already done to the sticks he had gathered. Zeref closed his eyes and gritted his teeth as the wild energy had another go at tearing him to pieces. Eventually it was forced to concede defeat, and the light faded, leaving them both half-blind in the dusk. The boy was on his knees, gasping for breath and crying freely and waiting for the repercussions.

Oh, Zeref was certainly angry enough for there to be some – he would be until the pain faded completely from his body – but he buried that anger deep, sealed in the same lightless crevice in which he had concealed compassion and affection during the darkest of the years that had earned him his reputation. Instead of snapping at the boy, he simply observed, "This is going to keep happening all night, isn't it? Neither of us is going to get any sleep."

The boy drew himself more tightly into a ball, trembling. "It doesn't stop… I can only sleep when they put something in my arm…"

"Some kind of sedative?" Zeref shook his head in disgust; drugging the boy while his magic was going out of control would only make the problem ten times worse when he woke up. "Your magic wouldn't have reacted well to that."

"I didn't like it," the boy sniffed, hunching over further, as if he could make himself so small that he would vanish into nothing. "I kept having horrible dreams that I couldn't wake up from, and even when I did, my head hurt so much… but it was the only way to make it stop for a bit, so I didn't mind as long as it made things better for mummy and daddy and everyone else, but… I don't even have that any more, so I'm only going to keep making things difficult for you. I'll go… I'll go and find somewhere else to sleep tonight…"

Zeref looked up at the weeping boy, and it was then that an idea occurred to him.

"Oh, no, come on," he growled, out loud. "I just told you I have to leave him on his own. I can't help him; you know that!"

He wasn't going to get involved, and if he had to get involved then he certainly wasn't going to get attached. He knew better than that.

But despite his common sense, he was inexplicably on his feet, beckoning to the boy. "Come with me. I want to show you something."

"Show- show me what?"

Instead of answering, he simply turned on his heel and strode away. After a moment spent weighing up his resolve to leave and not cause trouble against his fear of being left alone in the dark forest, the boy hurried after him.

Still annoyed with himself for giving in, Zeref did not speak during the entire journey – not to answer the boy's questions, which quickly lapsed into a worried silence, nor to reassure him. He made his way with impeccable precision through the ever-darkening night. The murky gloom wrapped around the tree roots, and would have caused the boy to trip several times were it not for the fact that all obstacles broke into pieces the moment they came into contact with him. By the time they emerged from a suspiciously jungle-like copse of trees and out into the open, night had well and truly fallen upon Tenrou Island.

They were standing atop a cliff on the northernmost side of the island. This close to the edge, the foliage had succumbed to the ocean winds, and the exposed slate-grey rock formed a natural road leading to a sheer drop and the sea below. Of far more interest than the scenery, however, was the sky.

Out of the jungle; out, even, from beneath the reach of the Tenrou Tree, the heavens were visible in all their majesty: thousands upon thousands of little lights crowded every inch of black space, twinkling warm yellow and brilliant white and bright-burning blue. The sea's calm surface gleamed like a perfect mirror, an ocean of stars above and below, holding them and all the world within its celestial embrace. The full splendour of the Milky Way shone down upon them, an arc of dust and shadow entwined with the most glorious sidereal light. The night that painted the sky and shimmered upon the sea was not dark at all.

Struck dumb by the wonder of it, the boy could do nothing but gape at the scene before him.

Zeref watched him for a moment before giving his head a quick shake. He wasn't here for stargazing; he had seen the stars a hundred thousand times. Of far more concern to him than the unchanging heavens were the tiny lines of light that were stealthily spreading out from the boy's feet and into the cliff face. He strode to the very edge of the cliff and peered over, looking for sharp rocks below and finding none.

"It's so pretty!"

That sudden exclamation dragged his attention back to the boy, who was gesturing frantically between his companion and the sky as if he could not comprehend choosing to look at anything else. "It's…" Words failed him, and he decided to compensate for his limited vocabulary by adding a whole new dimension of joy to his voice. "It's so pretty!"

"Isn't it just?" Zeref agreed, and pushed him off the cliff.

It was so unexpected that it didn't even occur to the boy to scream. The best he managed was a sort of startled yelp; it came out more confused than terrified and was closely followed by an equally unremarkable splash.

The anticlimactic nature of the fall, however, was more than made up for by the subsequent explosion. An enormous sheet of water filled Zeref's vision, and he shielded his eyes with his arm as the spray whipped around him, a silvery dance beneath the firmament's light. The droplets had not yet settled when a second burst of water was flung up in front of him, almost as large as the first. It was as if he had thrown the boy into a regularly erupting geyser rather than the sea.

Aware of the cliff's unhappy rumbling beneath his feet, and not too keen on the idea of falling into the ocean himself, Zeref glanced over the edge with caution. The boy appeared to be hanging in mid-air – only, in this case, 'mid-air' was several feet below the normal water level. The ocean's surface curved around him, so that he was momentarily suspended in an abnormal dip in the sea.

As he watched from above, the water succumbed to gravity's pull and flooded back into the gap around the boy, briefly submersing him completely – and an instant later there was a flash of white light and another almighty explosion, and all the water within a few-metre radius of his body was hurled up and away from him. Ghostly gridlines traced through those liquid sheets, separating them into perfect cubes for an instant before they sloshed back together and flowed towards him, forcing the whole process to start again.

This strange cycle continued for several minutes, though the explosions grew weaker every time, and soon the plumes of water were no longer visible from the top of the cliff. By the time Zeref had taken a far safer (and far drier) route down to the strip of pebbled beach, the white lines radiating out from the boy's body had faded almost to the point of invisibility, no longer capable of parting the sea. Thrashing his arms, the boy managed to haul himself up onto the beach, and there he remained: face-down upon the pebbles, soaked to the skin, and shaking from the exertion of not drowning. The waves lapped reproachfully around his ankles.

With a great effort, he raised his head to fix the man he had thought was his friend with an imploring look. "Why…?"

He couldn't manage more than that one desperate word, but the question hung loud in every gasped breath; in every rolling tear: I said I would leave you alone, so why did you try to kill me?

Zeref heard those unspoken words and had to fight not to roll his eyes. "Kid, if I wanted you dead, you would be dead." He gave a sigh. "Touch the pebbles you're lying on. Pick them up. Throw them."

The boy glanced down at the pebbles beneath him, not understanding. He clutched at them with his hands, and when nothing seemed to happen, he gazed blankly back at the other. "I don't…"

"They're not breaking, are they?"

"They're not…?" He blinked at the stones he was holding. "They're not breaking! I'm holding things and they're not breaking!" He let go of the rocks and then picked them up again, clapping them together repeatedly, and they still refused to break. "It's stopped! Why has it stopped?"

"Because you used up all your magic power trying to destroy the sea," came the cool response. "It's only a temporary solution, but at least this way you'll be able to sleep normally tonight, without constantly hurting me."

"Then… I won't have to be on my own tonight!" The boy's eyes shone with gratitude, mirroring the stars above and below, as if he had already forgotten how close he had come to drowning. He looked as though he wanted nothing more than to run over and hug the other, stopped only by the exhaustion preventing him from getting to his feet – something for which Zeref was profoundly grateful.

"I'm… I'm kinda tired though," the boy added, finally noticing this himself. "Maybe I'll just sleep here tonight."

And then he was out like a light, sprawled across the pebbles.

"Figured that would happen," Zeref observed, somewhat ruefully. Shrugging, he turned to leave, but paused after taking only one step. He knew he couldn't leave the boy there. Magical exhaustion was dangerous enough without factoring in the vengefulness of an extraordinarily violent and unpredictable power, and the island might not get cold at night, but the boy's clothes were soaked…

Heaving a sigh – something he felt he had done more in this one day than in the entire rest of his existence put together – he picked up the sodden boy, slung him over his shoulder, and set off back into the forest.