It Was Like A Little Light

By CrimsonStarbird

Three – An Unusual Therapist

The following morning, history's dreaded Black Mage was very rudely awoken by someone shaking his shoulders. Zeref kept his eyes closed for as long as he could, hoping that the other person would vanish along with the rest of his retreating dreams, but this was a particularly stubborn nightmare. Even worse, a high-pitched voice, apparently better suited for wailing than talking, insisted, "Wake up! Wake up!"

Even half-asleep, Zeref knew that there wasn't any danger. Any approaching threat would have woken him long ago. But this nightmare in human form – Gildarts, he remembered the boy calling himself, and so much for not getting attached – wasn't to know that, and something clearly had him on edge.

So he opened his eyes and fixed the boy with the most baleful look he could manage this early in the morning. "What?"

Gildarts's face was so uncomfortably close to his that he couldn't fail to notice the relief that sparkled like dewdrops in the boy's eyes. "You're alive!"

"Being alive happens to be one of the things I'm good at," he grunted, brushing the boy's hands away from his shoulders before the white cracks that had appeared there could turn their attention from exploration to conquest.

The boy fell back a couple of paces, but his intensity did not lessen. "Everything's dead! The trees, the flowers – they're all dead!"

Zeref did not bother looking around the clearing to confirm this. He knew what he would find; he had seen it ten thousand times on ten thousand separate mornings. "And yet you're not," he remarked, peering at the boy instead. If he focussed, he could still sense it – that otherworldly shimmer dancing upon his skin, fainter than before but unmistakeably there; unmistakeably familiar.

The Tenrou Tree's magic was immense, and not fully comprehensible even to the great Black Mage, but his mere presence weakened it daily, just as its power calmed and tempered his. He had not thought it – had not thought her – still capable of this. The island protected those with the guild mark from death, but even focussed down into a personal shield, he doubted it would hold up for long against the power of contradiction…

Still, Zeref reflected, the precise nature of the magic surrounding the boy wasn't the point. A note stapled to his forehead saying Zeref, I want you to help him would have been more subtle.

It was to this that his scowl was directed. "You can't protect him forever, Mavis. The curse will win in the end. It always does."

Unsurprisingly, Gildarts didn't look at all reassured by his incomprehensible remarks. "Did I cause this? When I was asleep?"

"If you'd done it, don't you think everything would look a little more… destroyed?"

"…Oh. I guess you're right." The boy glanced around again, shuddered, and fixed his attention back upon his companion. "But then… what happened?"

"Who knows?" Zeref deflected. "But it isn't dangerous to you… I don't think. Not at the moment."

"But the forest's hurt… isn't there anything we can do about it?"

"No. It's just the way things are."

"But…" The boy gave a vehement shake of his head. "There must be something that's doing this to the forest. Maybe, if we could find that thing, and destroy it…"

"That would be nice, wouldn't it?" Zeref agreed wistfully. And then his eyes suddenly narrowed and he growled, "Oh, don't give me that look."

"What?" the boy blinked.

"I wasn't talking to you."

"Then… who were you talking to?" he queried, glancing over his shoulder and still finding nothing alive in sight.

"None of your business." Zeref got to his feet and stretched, taking in the position of the early morning sun and the clear sky's promise of another beautiful day – as if this island ever offered any other kind of day. "Come on, let's go somewhere else."

Gildarts fell into step beside him without complaint. Away from the circle of newly dead trees, the forest was as lively as ever: great red birds trilled at each other from the branches above them; small mammals scurried to get out of their path; inquisitive eyes watched them from the undergrowth.

Zeref paid them no heed, as both he and they had long ago learnt was best, but the same could not be said for the boy. Everything here was new to him, and exciting; he spent far more time watching the wildlife than paying attention to where he was going. It might have been endearing, if not for the fact that his magic had returned to full vitality overnight, and it was saving him from tripping over by destroying everything he blundered into – whether that was a rock, a tree root, or an increasingly irate Black Mage.

It was on the third round of this that Zeref snapped, "Kid, if you can't keep your magic under control, then at least stop walking into me, or I really will abandon you."

"…Okay. I'm sorry. I'll try."

And he really did try to concentrate on where he was going – for all of about a minute, before a group of monkeys caught his attention, and he ploughed straight through a several-hundred-year-old fir tree while watching them swing through the mismatched canopy. As blocks of wood rained down around them, his companion gave yet another sigh. "Uncontrollable destructive magic and absentmindedness? I cannot think of a worse combination."

The boy hadn't been this bad yesterday, he was sure of it. Since Gildarts had come to realize that his companion wasn't going to abandon him without warning, it seemed that he had started to relax in his presence. That was not a good sign. While there was a part of him that was glad the boy wasn't flinching away from him again, or letting the fear of abandonment bring tears to his eyes every time his magic appeared, the last thing he wanted was for the boy to become used to being around him. That would cause nothing but trouble.

As if to prove this point, Gildarts suddenly spun round to confront him, placing his hands on his hips and declaring, "I'm hungry."

"…Ah."

"Do you have any food?" the boy pressed.

"Do I look like I'm carrying food around with me?"

The boy did a full lap around him to check that he wasn't hiding any picnic hampers before saying, "Guess not. What do you eat, then?"

"Well… as I said, this is a good island. Most of the fruit here is safe to eat." Or so he suspected. His knowledge of obscure magical plants was excellent; his knowledge of edible ones, not so much. It had been a long time since he'd had to concern himself with such matters.

Equally, he doubted plants lethal to humans would be able to grow within an environment saturated by boundless protective magic, so it was with passible confidence that he indicated a cluster of short trees. The island's unnatural climate didn't care much for the constraints of the seasons, and many of the plants here blossomed irregularly and unnaturally often. Half of the trees he pointed out were stubbornly bare, while the remainder bore green melon-like fruits which bent the boughs almost comically. "Those ones aren't poisonous, for a start."

"Okay!" chirruped the boy, and that was as far as his buoyant mood would go that morning.

The first fruit he touched exploded in a burst of white light. He froze, his outstretched hand shaking, mirroring the tremors which had picked up with his anxiety and circled as storm-stirred waves through his unstable magical presence. "I'm- I'm sorry-" he breathed.

There was more than enough volatile energy lurking about the boy to dissuade Zeref from getting any closer – not, of course, that he had been considering doing so. But even if he had been the kind of person inclined towards comforting others, he remembered how the boy had recoiled from his one-off attempt to do just that the previous night; how he expected savage – even physical – reprimands every time his magic went out of control.

Perhaps a reprimand wasn't unwarranted, especially given the trouble the boy's power had already caused him that morning, but Zeref knew better than anyone that control was an ability rather than a choice – and one never spontaneously gained upon being made to feel resented. If anything, it would only increase the likelihood of that wild magic causing him harm.

Instead, he gestured at the ground and said, "The birds seem pretty happy about it, don't you think?"

Gildarts blinked and looked down. The scattered cubes of fruit had drawn a crowd of fearless tiny birds down from the trees, and they hopped and fluttered around the boy's feet, pecking at the fruit and tweeting merrily. Astonished, Gildarts gaped at them as if he'd never seen a bird before, and by the time his companion called out to him to hurry up, his moment of despair had vanished, along with his rogue magic. It still took several attempts for him to grab one of the fruits without it breaking, but perseverance won out, and he darted back with two of them in his arms, one of which he offered up to his companion with a beaming smile.

Zeref stared at it for a long moment before accepting it, and in the end, he set it aside without eating it. The boy didn't notice. He was too busy squinting at his own, as if trying to work out what on earth he was supposed to do with it. Zeref cracked open the tough outer shell for him, as any attempt the boy made himself would have resulted in the disintegration of the entire fruit, and then he settled down to eat.

After watching his blissful and rather messy contentedness for a moment, Zeref asked, "Did they really just abandon you on this island with nothing? It seems very out of character for Mavis's guild."

"Well… I suppose they did leave me with some stuff. Quite a lot of stuff, actually. But…"

"You destroyed it?"

The boy gave him a sheepish, syrup-splattered grin.

"I suppose it might be worth going back to the cove and seeing if any of it is salvageable."

A shrug. "If you say so. I don't know the way back, though."

"I do. But I swear, if you wander off again, I won't come after you."

Jumping to his feet, the boy promised him, "I won't! I'll pay attention!"

For some reason, it wasn't at all reassuring, but Zeref supposed it would have to do.

In the end, they made it safely to the cove. Gildarts only wandered off twice, and both times it was in pursuit of the island's great red birds, which he seemed rather taken with. If the bird species had an official name then Zeref did not know what it was, but they looked like large peacocks, bedecked in fiery crimson and orange, with great sweeping tail-feathers as long as their body again. At full height, their heads did not rise much higher than his waist, but that put them almost as tall as the boy – and with a glorious wingspan of several metres, the first one they saw had bowled away a child already in awe of the littlest birds on the island.

It was upon their second encounter with one of these great birds that the boy proudly announced his intention to catch it and ride it up to the top of the Tenrou Tree, and he had dashed off in hot pursuit before a frustrated Zeref could catch hold of him.

After a long deliberation with himself, during which several curse words and Mavis's name had come up repeatedly, Zeref had gone after the boy and found him sat cross-legged at the foot of the tree the bird had fled up, waiting patiently for it to come down. As usual, the bird took one look at the approaching Black Mage and vanished in a flurry of feathers, and thus he had been able to convince the disappointed boy to abandon his post and carry on.

Once they reached the cove, though, the boy cheered up again with the start of a new game: treasure hunting. Even being told in no uncertain terms that he wasn't allowed to touch anything didn't seem to dampen his enthusiasm. He was probably given that instruction a lot. He hovered a few paces away as his companion inspected the crates left on beach.

There were two of them, the unexciting yet reliable kind used for transporting cargo during long sea voyages. There had once been three, but the third and all its contents had been reduced to dust. Fortunately, with that one as a distraction for the boy's power, the other two had escaped unscathed.

Or so it seemed, but as Zeref prised the lid off the first one, he was greeted by a rather unpleasant sight. It had once contained food, probably enough to last a single human for days on a generous diet, but now it looked as though the entire contents of the crate had been put through a blender in an attempt to create an everything-flavoured smoothie.

"I think we might leave that one for the wildlife," he decided, while the boy shuffled his feet guiltily.

Thankfully, the final crate didn't contain anything edible. Being tougher than food, its contents had also fared slightly better; most of the tools he pulled out were damaged but usable. Amongst the most useful were a couple of blankets, a penknife, a rucksack, a towel, and four bottles of water, which all went onto the 'keep' pile. There was even a sleeping bag, which sported a large rip down one side but was a lot better than nothing – and as far as Zeref was concerned, anything that might encourage the boy to stop trying to use him as a pillow was worth taking.

It was when they reached the bottom of the crate that the boy's excitability reached its peak, and his determination not to touch anything didn't have a hope of keeping up. He darted around the cove like a hungry seagull, except his target wasn't the seafood buffet inside each rockpool, but the miscellaneous items of clothing stuffed into the box – and all the agility in the world wouldn't have helped Zeref protect them.

"Are these really all for me?" Gildarts marvelled, diving under the other's arm and retreating with his prize, a rolled-up white t-shirt. He held it up to the sky, even more in awe of a common item of clothing than he had been of the island's wonders.

Zeref let him go. Best to give that one up as lost and use the distraction to scoop the rest of the clothes safely onto the keep pile. "Well, they're hardly big enough for me."

"Look! This one's got a lion on it!"

"Wonderful."

"I'm gonna put it on!"

"Can't you wait until- no, clearly you can't."

Careless impropriety aside, it probably wasn't a bad idea. The boy's magic didn't damage his clothes for the same reason that it didn't damage his skin; he, and thus his power, subconsciously saw whatever he was wearing as a part of himself, and left it untouched. Yet it seemed that life, in this case, hadn't needed the assistance. He had been wearing little more than black rags when he had arrived, and being dragged bodily through a rockfall and then thrown into the sea hadn't helped their structural integrity.

Getting rid of his old clothes thus should have been a good thing, but as the boy chucked his tattered t-shirt enthusiastically up into the air, it revealed, just for a moment, pale skin marred repeatedly with ugly blue and violet. Many of the marks were new, and had most likely come from the long and terrible chain of events which had resulted in a child being dumped on an uninhabited island, but many more were old, and none were placed where they would easily be seen.

Zeref closed his eyes for a long moment, and only when a voice exclaimed, "Ta-dah!" did he open them again. The boy was proudly puffing his chest out, showing off the glittering red lion upon his t-shirt as if nothing had changed. And it hadn't, Zeref supposed; all it had done was confirm what some part of him had already known.

The boy was waiting for a response, so he said, "Very nice," and received a broad smile in return.

"So, is there anything else in the treasure chest?"

"Hmm? Oh, uh…" Returning his attention to the matter at hand, he threw out a pair of shoes, one of which had an abnormally square hole in the bottom – ignoring the boy's protest that the other shoe was still perfectly usable – and he felt a shiver of magic brush along his senses.

"Oh, now, you're interesting," he remarked, lifting up a furry coat (which had clearly been packed by someone who had never been to Tenrou Island) and untangling a strange device from within. It looked like a traditional wizard's staff: an orb of glassy crystal sat atop a sturdy wooden cane, whose length was carved with runes. Granted, the staff was barely a foot long because the boy's rampaging power had snapped it in two, but it was quite clearly a magical artefact, and there was still energy bound inside it.

"What is it? What is it?" the boy called out. He dashed over, remembered that he wasn't allowed to touch it in the nick of time, skidded to a halt, and bounced up and down on the balls of his feet as a substitute for handling it himself.

"It looks like a magical tool designed to repel monsters."

"Whoa." The boy's eyes grew comically wide. "How does it work?"

"If you stick the end of the staff into the ground, it will generate a small cylindrical barrier centred upon itself. It isn't strong magic and it certainly won't hold up against a sustained assault, but it should prevent wild animals from getting too close while you're asleep."

"Like this?" the boy asked, and rather than waiting for an answer, he snatched the device out of the other's hands and thrust the end into a crack in the rocky shelf.

There was a flash of light and he was thrown backwards, landing on his bottom with a startled yelp. He gazed up at the staff, which stood there innocuously, before turning to his companion in wonder. "I think it thought I was a monster!"

It was surprisingly difficult for Zeref to suppress his smile. "No, it's just broken." Picking up the device, he held it out to the boy, indicating the carved letters. "See these runes? They stabilize the magic in the lacrima and guide it into the form of the barrier. They fix its radius, height, and strength, and they also contain all the technical details of how to convert the energy into a stable form – the instructions for the magic, if you like. But because you broke it, the instructions are incomplete. Rather than deploying the barrier, it just emitted raw energy until it triggered the safety cut-off and reverted to its dormant state."

"…Oh." Gildarts looked blankly from his companion to the broken staff and then back again. "You're actually quite smart, aren't you?"

"You don't have to sound so surprised."

"Huh." The boy peered at the device while the other held it carefully just out of his reach. "Can you really read the writing on that?"

"Sort of."

"Sort of? How can you sort of read something?"

"Well… if you'd asked me a while back, the answer would have been yes, but I'm a little out of practice. Still, it would be a shame to waste such an expensive magical tool. I might be able to fix it. I'll keep hold of it; see what I can do." He tossed it over his shoulder and it clattered to the ground beside the 'keep' pile. "And, finally…"

His attention turned to the last item the cove had to offer them. This one sat apart from the crates: a small mound of grey-green canvas that might have been a tent, except that there were no poles or supports in sight. "You're magical too, aren't you?" he asked of it, kneeling down in order to examine it properly.

"That one's broken as well," the boy informed him sadly.

"It doesn't look broken to me." Zeref ran his hands over the surface of the material as he spoke. Where another man might have checked for tears in the canvas, however, he was probing the defensive magic woven into it for any signs of damage. The patterns of its enchantments revealed themselves to his mind, and a quick scan through them turned up no obvious anomalies.

Gildarts insisted, "No, it is. I broke the crystal thing by accident so it won't work any more."

"Ah, the lacrima? That's not a problem. It was only acting as a power source here anyway. If I can find…"

His words tailed off as he buried his head beneath a fold of smooth material. The boy watched in bemusement as he rummaged around and eventually re-emerged holding a thick cable. It was about an inch in diameter, a steel rope made of many intertwining threads, and its end was frayed where the lacrima had been torn away. He rested the frayed end on his palm, curled his fingers around it, and pushed his own magic into the wire.

At this, the tent began to assemble itself. It unfolded and took on a standard dome shape, stretched to its fullest extent, with a rigidity that the lack of tent poles couldn't explain. He regarded it critically, assessing its magic through the link he had formed with it. "A shield to deflect rain and wind… oh, and to protect against temperature extremes. This could be useful. It's a shame it will only hold its form while someone is supplying it with magic now, but all in all, this looks like a high-quality piece of gear. Whoever dropped you on this island spared no expense-"

"Whoooaaa."

Startled by that drawn-out exclamation, he glanced up to find the boy gaping at him. Gildarts pointed from him to the tent and then back to him with the same level of awe he had granted the divine firmament. "That is so cool."

Zeref blinked at him. "Kid, your magic can destroy literally anything you touch, and you think that this is cool?"

He nodded earnestly. "I wish I could do something like that."

Letting go of the cable, Zeref allowed the tent to collapse back down to its portable form. "There's no reason why you wouldn't be able to learn. You'd find it simple enough, if your magic wasn't destroying everything you touched."

"Do you think I'll ever be able to stop destroying things?"

There was a pause. "Who can say?" Zeref deflected. His eyes suddenly darkened, and he reiterated, "I'm not doing it, Mavis. I'm in too deep as it is." As the boy blinked at him in bewilderment, he added, "This is different!" Then: "It just is!"

"Umm…" Cautiously, the boy tugged at his arm to attract his attention. "Are you alright…?"

"Yes, everything's fine," he snapped, and when the boy flinched, he bit back his anger with the self-discipline of practice. "Let's get this usable equipment away from the shore before the tide comes in."

"…Okay." The boy still sounded nervous, but he shuffled obediently over to the 'keep' pile. "Shouldn't the tide already have come in, though?"

"You'd think that, but, as with most things on this island, the tide tends to come in when it wants to come in, rather than when the moon tells it to. It'll be better if we can find a spot far inland to use as our base of operations." He handed one of the bottles of water to the boy. "Here, you carry-"

But the moment he grabbed it, the bottle burst apart, drenching them both with water. Rainbow droplets rained down through the silence.

Slowly, Zeref reached up and brushed his sodden fringe out of his eyes. "Well, I should have seen that coming…"

"I'm sorry!" the boy burst out. "I'm really sorry, I didn't mean to… I…" It was impossible to tell whether those were water droplets or tears sparkling in his eyes, as he waited, terrified, for something bad to happen.

Zeref remarked, "You get shouted at a lot at home, don't you, kid?"

The boy gave a timid nod. "All the time. But it's my fault… because I'm always breaking things… because I ruin everything…"

Your parents did more than just shout at you, didn't they? Zeref thought grimly. I can't do anything about this, Mavis.

In the crashing of the waves and the murmuring of the breeze an answer came to him, and he didn't like it. He shook his head slowly, as if weighed down by all the years he had lived. A shadow flitted across his face, but when he turned to the boy once again, all trace of it had gone.

"Don't worry about it," he said. "I'll carry everything; we'll make a few trips. Come along. We've got a lot of walking ahead of us."

Late afternoon found the Black Mage sat in a clearing deep within the forest, whittling. Granted, it was rare for him not to be found sitting in a clearing these days, but it was unusual for him to have a task to occupy his waking hours, and that only went double when it was something creative. This may well have been his first ever attempt at whittling, but then again, the last twenty-four hours had been full of new things. Besides, what he lacked in experience he more than made up for with patience and a steady hand.

He had cut a branch from the Tenrou Tree – by far the most magic-receptive wood on the island – and stripped it of leaves and twigs, then carefully sliced away the aged outer bark. The penknife he had picked up from the cove was hardly the best tool for accomplishing this, but it was the only one he had, so he made do. Once that was done, he was left holding a long, thin cane, which was to form the basis of the new staff he was carving to replace the one Gildarts had broken.

That was the easy bit. The difficulty lay in getting the runes upon it exactly right. He started from the top, where he still had the broken one to use as a reference, and slowly worked his way down. For the most part, he merely copied the runes across, amending them only when he came up with a more efficient way of wording an instruction or closing a loophole. What he would do when his reference material ran out – well, that would be a true test of what he could remember, but even as he worked away at the early stages, he was already analysing potential approaches in the back of his mind.

And that was a problem.

The thing was, he really wasn't supposed to be doing this.

No books, no artefacts, no weapons. No magic, unless it was necessary, for the most harmless temptations were always the most dangerous, and one thing would lead to another until that single snowflake triggered the most brutal avalanche. No involvement with the fate of mankind; no meddling in that little empire growing ever stronger across the sea. No one's ally, and no one's enemy. Nothing to suggest that he was any less dead and buried than the legends asserted. Those were the conditions of his self-imposed exile.

He was to wait, and nothing more. That was what he had decided. That was the only way he had been able to retain some measure of calm in the years after she had died; that was the only reason why the world still trundled obliviously on its way, safe from the scourging black devastation that he knew it deserved, but that she would not have wanted for it. Apathy was a virtue, when the only other choice was hate.

It wasn't as though he had never broken those rules. His was a voluntary imprisonment; the barriers around the island, which, to one without the guild mark, ought not to allow passage out any more than in, could not hold him if he truly set his mind to leaving. There was a little voice somewhere deep inside and that alone was capable of enforcing the conditions of his exile – but it was often quiet enough to ignore, and on bad days, he could not hear it at all. He left, and he interfered, and he created; projects which might one day turn out to have terrible consequences for the world… but he had never not returned to the island. Not yet.

Several years had passed since his last relapse. Quite how many he did not know, but it was enough for him to have become so immersed in the solitude and disinterestedness and stoic waiting that he could not even contemplate taking action again. At least, not until he glanced at the half-carved staff and realized that he was at that very moment breaking one of his own fundamental rules.

He wasn't supposed to create. Yes, the rule had been conceived with monstrous demons and world-changing weapons and terrible new magics in mind, but there was a reason why he hadn't restricted the ban to those things. Nothing was as dangerous as that slippery slope – today he was simply fixing a survival tool, and tomorrow he'd be improving it, and then the day after that he'd be adding offensive powers as well as defensive ones just to see if he could still do it and the next thing he'd know, he'd be holding a terrifying new weapon he could mass produce for his army-

Did he not trust himself to stop? He thought that it wasn't as straightforward as that. Certainly, it was awareness of his own unpredictability, of the vast and alarming contrast between his good days and his bad days, that necessitated exile in the first place. On the other hand, the voice of his conscience, which had been so very vocal over the past twenty-four hours, had failed to bring this transgression to his attention – and even now that he had consciously realized what he was doing, it was the continuing lack of objections, rather than their presence, that gave him pause. If that wasn't trust, he didn't know what was.

Still, whether right or wrong, he wasn't about to stop now. He had already written enough for the magic to begin to take shape. Despite the staff not being connected to a power source, the island (and he himself) emitted enough ambient magic to make every rune he carved shimmer violet and fade slowly, and he hadn't realized how much he had missed the feel of it. He had told the boy that he would fix the artefact, and even though he been too distracted to understand what that entailed when he had said it, it would be useful if he could get it working – and besides, he enjoyed testing his knowledge. That never changed, no matter how much time passed.

Most importantly, he enjoyed the peace and quiet. Apparently, watching a novice whittler strip bark from a branch wasn't the kind of gripping entertainment the boy had been hoping for, and he had wandered off in search of something more fun to do. Zeref had made no attempt to stop him. In fact, he was just glad to be alone again. After informing the boy in no uncertain terms that he wasn't going to come and find him if he got lost, he had settled down to his work in peace.

And he almost managed to forget about the boy.

Almost.

But as much as he would have liked to, he could hardly forget about the single most unexpected thing that had happened to him in years, and – as dangerous as it was to admit it – he was a little worried about what the boy might get up to while left to his own devices. When the sound of the third consecutive explosion reached his ears, he lowered his knife and gazed out into the thickening trees, as if he could somehow see all the way to wherever the boy was.

"I take it that's the bird-chasing ending in tragedy," he remarked, before turning his attention back to his carving project with a shrug. "Of course I'm not going after him. I made that quite clear."

So he stayed where he was and ignored the uncomfortable prickling concern, as he had learnt to do over the years, and nothing in the clearing died.

True to his word, however, the boy had not forgotten the route back to the clearing they had designated as their base, and a few minutes later he shuffled into view. If not for the distinctive firecracker-sparking of his magical presence, he could easily have been mistaken for a troll. There were twigs and leaves sticking out of his shaggy ginger hair at every angle; the new t-shirt he had been so proud of had acquired enough stains to conceal its sparkling lion; but above everything else, his eyes were red from crying so many tears that they had washed the mud from his cheeks. He stepped into the clearing and paused.

Zeref, who was in the middle of carving a particularly complex rune it had taken ages to coax out of his deep memory, spared the boy little more than a glance as he entered. From the corner of his eye, he caught the oddly longing look thrown in his direction and sighed inwardly. He hadn't had nearly enough time alone to mentally prepare him for a clingy, upset child invading his personal space.

Yet seconds passed and nothing happened. The anticipated distraction failed to materialize. He carved another rune, but this one failed to glow; his mind was elsewhere. Frowning, he looked up from his work to find that the boy was sat at the foot of a tree over the other side of the clearing, staring at the ground with his knees drawn up to his chest.

It seemed that the boy did know how to respect his personal space, after all. That was good.

Or was it?

Yes, he told himself, trying to put the boy out of his mind and concentrate on his work, but it was difficult now that his peace and quiet had dissolved into a constant background of sniffing, shivering and hiccoughing. The boy clearly wanted comforting. He wouldn't have come here otherwise. But when Zeref had not been friendly – had not acknowledged him – had not wanted him to approach – well, then the boy had kept his distance, like a civilized human being.

Which was exactly what he'd hoped for, but…

If the boy was keeping a respectable distance not because he thought it was the right thing to do, but because he was afraid of the repercussions of getting closer…

Zeref thought about the timidity and the bruises, and the carefree cheerfulness that emerged only in tandem with the boy's belief that he would not be abandoned. He thought too about the warning he had given – I can't do anything about this – and the answer that had come back to him on the wind. And he remembered, as if all the years since had folded into a single day, waking up surrounded by corpses and not knowing why- not having anyone to turn to-

He'd dealt with it alone because he'd had no choice, but if there'd been someone from the start who understood… how different might things have turned out?

Before he knew it, he had thrown the staff he was carving over to the other side of the clearing, out of range of the coming storm, and called, "Alright, alright, you can come over here!"

If the boy noticed the snarl in his voice then he gave no sign of it, immediately jumping to his feet, sprinting over, and throwing himself bodily at the other. He curled up against him and sobbed into his chest, and the Black Mage held him like he had not held another human being in so many years, and let him cry. The boy's rampant magic ripped through him, so he closed his eyes and pretended it didn't hurt and just kept holding him close.

And for the boy's part, he didn't notice that the trees his power was shattering were already dead, or that the uncontrolled emotions radiating out from the two of them were levelling the surrounding forest with cold efficiency. He did not see the hateful black death swirling around him, nor the brave golden light that, for the time being, was sufficient to push it back. No- he felt only the warmth of that embrace, and the kindness of the hand that gently stroked his hair, and in that moment, when he was in more danger than ever before, he had never felt so safe.

Eventually, the boy's enormous sobs ceased. The magic surging around them settled into an uneasy equilibrium, leaving them sat at the centre of a new patch of wasteland. Zeref eyed the devastation with distaste. There was a sore ache in his muscles, an after-effect of repelling so much of the boy's violent magic from his body. He wanted to get up and stretch to ease the tension, but the boy had only just calmed down, and he didn't want to disturb him again. He settled for growling his annoyance as words: "I hope you're happy, Mavis."

The sound of his voice caused Gildarts to stir. He mumbled something that was difficult to make out, but which was almost certainly him asking if Zeref was unhurt, unaware that the only one who had come close to dying throughout that encounter was he himself.

"I'm fine," he sighed. When the boy didn't look convinced, he gruffly changed the subject. "I'm not happy about the mud you've managed to get all over my clothes, though. You've got a whole new wardrobe you can change into, but none of the clothes we salvaged are going to fit me."

"No… The sleeping bag might be big enough for you, though."

"And, what, I could crawl around like a caterpillar in it?"

The boy tried to giggle but it came out as more of a choking cough. "That would be quite funny."

"For you, maybe." Zeref shifted position on the ground, uncomfortable now that the tree he had been resting against had been turned to dust. "What happened, kid?" When no response was forthcoming, he pressed, "If you didn't want to talk about it, you should have gone somewhere to be on your own, not come looking for me."

The boy's arms tightened around him, as if trying to work out whether being alone would really be worse than recounting his experience. "I… I found a big group of birds," he sniffed, having concluded that it was. "I was chasing them and they kept pecking me and flying off, but they never went very far. We were only playing. And then… I finally caught one. They have such big wings, you know? Even bigger than their tails. And it was going to take me to the top of the huge tree, but I- but I-"

"You killed it."

"I didn't mean to," he said, a haunted whisper. "It was going to help me, and then... then it died, because of me. Just like mummy and daddy… everyone around me dies. I can't do this any more. I don't want to hurt anyone else. I want to die."

"No, you don't."

The sudden, even response took the boy by surprise. "Yes, I do," he objected, more out of defensiveness than any real conviction.

"No. You're far too young to be able to make a decision like that."

Perplexed by his certainty, the boy floundered. "But… I…"

"If you died, you'd never be able to see the stars again, or learn to operate magical tools, or reach the top of the Tenrou Tree."

"Well… I do want to do all those things, but…"

"You know, the top of the Tenrou Tree is the best place to watch the stars from. It's the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, especially as the sun goes down."

The sorrow thickening around the boy's heart was no match for his childish awe. "You've been up there?"

"I told you, I've been everywhere on this island."

"I want to see it! Can you take me there?"

"Maybe," he said, and he gently ruffled the boy's hair. "But do you see what I mean? You're too young. There is still too much wonder in you for you to possibly want to die. It isn't something you should say lightly, especially not to me." There was a hundred years in that sigh, and he let his hand fall back to the ground. "If you still want to die in ten years' time, come and see me again. In the meantime, find a way to do those things you want to do, and don't let anyone stop you. You want to explore this entire world and see everything that it has to offer, don't you?"

"I… Maybe I could live somewhere far away from other people and go exploring on my own. That way I wouldn't hurt anyone… oh, but there would still be all the animals and the trees and… I don't want to live in a way that's going to hurt anything." Gildarts released his death-grip on his companion and sat down right next to him, staring numbly at his hands. "I hate it. I'm trying so hard to stop it, and I just… can't. I cause problems for everyone. That's why I was abandoned here. And now I'm only causing problems for you too."

"You can say that again." Zeref turned his gaze skyward. "I can't help him, Mavis. You know what will happen if I try – you know it better than anyone."

The boy prodded his arm. "Who's Mavis?"

Zeref stared at him for a long moment. "A friend of mine."

"I don't see her," said the boy doubtfully, glancing around the clearing.

"That's because she's invisible."

"I don't hear her either."

"She doesn't say much."

Gildarts frowned at him. "But if you can't see her or hear her, how do you know she's there?"

"I don't."

"Are you going to stop talking to her, then?"

"You ask a lot of questions, kid."

"Well, I've never really had anyone to talk to before. None of the other boys in the village would let me play with them. Then grandma and grandpa stopped visiting, and Uncle Robin, and… and I had to stay in the basement a lot… and now mummy and daddy are gone and Uncle Robin is in hospital and I'm stuck here, but I don't feel lonely any more, because you're here too and you talk to me and you're maybe the first friend I've ever really had." Here he paused in his convoluted explanation to give his companion a beaming smile. "And Mavis can be my second friend. Even if I can't really talk to her."

For a long time, Zeref said nothing at all. He ran a hand through his hair – the exasperated gestures were getting worse – and heaved a sigh. "Alright. Fine. I'll try to help him. But whatever happens will be on your hands, Mavis. Remember that."

With that, he got to his feet and glared down at the boy. "Get up. We're going for a walk."

"We do a lot of walking," the boy pointed out.

"Yes, and now we're going to do some more." As an afterthought, he picked up his carving project from the far side of the clearing – where it, along with their tent and supplies, had narrowly escaped the destruction – and began walking off. He did not look to see if the boy was following him, and more than a small part of him hoped that he was not, but the now-familiar sound of wild magic shattering tree roots told him that he was only a few feet behind.

As he walked, he spoke. He wasn't talking to the boy, who wouldn't understand; he was speaking out loud only to get his thoughts in order. It might be best if he treated the boy's situation like a purely academic test of his knowledge. That was surely better than treating it as an attempt to help someone, because the last time he had done that… well, it didn't bear thinking about. He did think about it – four decades on and there were still days when he could think of little else – but he needed a clear head right now, and the emotions tied to those memories would only get in the way.

So he said, "There are two reasons why your magic could be going out of control. The first is that there might be something physically wrong with it – it could have developed incorrectly, though I've never heard of that happening before, or it could have been intentionally broken by an external force."

"What sort of thing could break magic?" the boy inquired.

"Oh, I don't know; some spiteful god's curse, maybe? But you'd better pray that that isn't the case, because if you're like me then there really is no hope for you."

"…Oh. What's the other reason?"

"Trauma. Psychological problems, usually but not always stemming from a particularly distressing event in the past, can make it difficult or even impossible to use magic properly. In other words, I'm almost certain that the problem isn't with your magic, but with you."

"And… can that be fixed, then?"

"Probably, by a professional therapist. But by me? I'm not entirely sure what Mavis is thinking." He shook his head despairingly. "But if I don't try, she'll just keep nagging me about it, so… Ah, here we are."

"What's here?" Gildarts inquired. Before them lay a little beach: several metres of golden sand and gentle waves. It was pretty, but by Tenrou Island's standards, it was remarkably mundane.

"Nothing's here. Absolutely nothing. No plant or animal life, and the sand's so small already that your magic won't be able to touch it. I'm going to sit on that rock over there, and you're going to tell me about your family and your village and how you ended up on this island."

The boy, who had already started skipping happily across the sand, stopped in his tracks. "But I don't… really want to talk about that…"

"Yes, and I don't really want to hear about it either, but if you don't tell me, we won't be able to get anywhere." Sitting down upon the rock he had indicated, Zeref flicked open the knife and began adding more runes to the staff. "Go on. Talk."

"Well… are you even listening?"

"Mavis is listening."

The boy gave him a suspicious look. "How do you know she's listening?"

"Well, she'd better be, because I'm sure as hell not going to know how to help you," he scowled. "Now, are you going to talk about your problems or what?"

"…Can I go in the sea?"

"…Yes, you can go in the sea."

The boy took off his shoes and rolled his trousers up, then ran forwards just in time for a wave to break over his feet. He walked around in circles in the shallow water, looking for shells and strands of seaweed that drifted beneath the foam. The small white cracks that parted the water's surface ever so briefly made no difference to the steady splashing of the waves. In between the bright sun and the cool water and the vast glittering ocean spread out before him, and the knowledge that he was not alone, he found some measure of peace, and it was easier for him to talk.

And all the while the Black Mage sat and carved runes from memory into a makeshift staff, listening patiently and reflecting upon the fact that adding 'therapist' to his long list of titles was not even the most bizarre thing that had happened to him that day.