It Was Like A Little Light

By CrimsonStarbird

Five – An Unruly Power

"Well," said Zeref, at last. "It's easy to see what your problem is. Solving it, however, will be another matter entirely."

Gildarts wasn't a born storyteller, and his account of his life had been delivered entirely out of order, jumping between the events he considered important in accordance with the unpredictable wandering of his thoughts. The full narrative had required no small amount of piecing together on Zeref's part. The intense and tragic nature of many of his memories made the telling even harder; the boy had cried several times while recounting his story, and his companion had not offered a single word of comfort.

Indeed, Zeref seemed to care far more about the runes he was carving into his staff than anything the boy had to say. Yet for once, his silence had nothing to do with apathy. This entire affair was a few thousand miles outside his comfort zone, and in case that didn't make knowing what to say difficult enough, he was gripped by an anger that manifested as ever-deeper cuts and uncharacteristically rough rune work.

He knew, logically, that there was no point blaming the boy's parents. They had been scared. They hadn't known what to do about their son's power. They knew nothing of magic, and even if they'd lived in a city where mages and guilds were commonplace, the boy's condition had been unusual even before their actions had driven it out of control. From a purely technical standpoint, they had no way of knowing that the likely irreversible damage to their son's magic had been entirely their fault.

But the damage to his mental wellbeing and sense of self-worth was another matter entirely, and Zeref suspected that the only thing stopping him from leaving the island at once was the knowledge that not even he could kill someone who was already dead.

However, he allowed none of this to show in his manner or his expression. When he broke the silence to deliver his verdict at the end of the boy's speech, his voice was as calm as ever. That, he thought, was the closest to 'reassuring' that a man like him could get.

The boy left the edge of the sea and ran over to Zeref. He placed his soaked hands upon the other's knees, ignoring the annoyed look this earnt him, and begged, "Tell me what's wrong with me. Why do I break things?"

"Alright, alright." The technical side of the situation, Zeref could handle. That was more his area of expertise.

He patted the rock and the boy jumped up to sit by his side; two unlikely companions looking out to sea. Gildarts placed his hands in his own lap and tried not to fidget. His sand-coated feet didn't quite touch the ground.

Zeref asked, "You don't know much about magic, do you?"

"Only the stories Uncle Robin used to tell me. He said the city he moved to had a mage guild, though I never really got to visit him there…"

"So, before coming to this island, you hadn't met another mage?"

"No… there weren't any in my village."

"I'll start from the beginning, then," Zeref said. "Imagine a cup full to the brim with water. It's fine when left alone, but if you nudge it, it will spill." The boy gave a vigorous nod. "The cup is you, and the water is your magic. Usually, when a mage is just starting out, they don't have nearly enough water in the steady state to fill the cup. You, however, have far more of it than you should, so it's balanced in a highly unstable equilibrium until something happens to disturb it. Anger, loneliness, joy; any strong emotion could do it. It could be a physical disturbance – if you sense danger, or you get hurt, or you walk into something, for example. Or there might be no obvious trigger for it at all. Something as simple as a runaway train of thought could break so delicate a balance.

"What causes it doesn't matter. You can't control your power. You never learnt how. The only thing keeping it inside your body is surface tension, and it's just not enough. The slightest thing disturbs it, and then the water spills; your magic is set loose."

"So… it is a physical problem, then?" The boy's face was creased in concentration as he tried to keep up with the explanation. "Because I have too much magic?"

"No, it's still a psychological problem. You have an awful lot of magic in your body, but you also have a remarkable aptitude for holding it – just enough to contain all of it. If your equilibrium state involved slightly more magic, or you were slightly less capable of holding it, you'd have lived in constant pain and died from it years ago. But yours cancels out as perfectly as I've ever seen in a human being."

"I don't think it's very perfect," Gildarts said, in a quiet voice.

"From a purely theoretical point of view," the other amended, conceding that that hadn't been the most tactful thing to say. "Let me finish. In this analogy, learning control would be like… placing a lid onto the cup of water. For most mages, it's never an issue. There's such a large initial discrepancy between the amount of magic they have and the amount of magic they can hold that there's never a danger of it breaking loose on its own, like yours does. By the time their magic becomes that strong, if ever, they've already developed that control instinctively. Conversely, in the rare instance where one is born with too much magic, control does nothing, because even the sturdiest lid can't seal water inside a container that's physically too small to hold it. In that case, either the cup must be made bigger or the amount of water made smaller – both of which are theoretically possible with the right technology, but as far as I'm aware, no one has ever survived either."

"What about me, then?"

"Well, as I said, you can contain all your magic in your body, which is why you're not dying, but it's such a close-run thing that even the smallest incident can upset the balance. However, as I also said, that isn't what's causing your problem. If it were a purely physical issue like that, it would only produce small effects. You might occasionally emit sparks of pure energy, for example, or given the nature of your magic, you might put little cracks in the things you touch – but not enough to break something and certainly not enough to hurt another human being. And that's exactly what happened when your magic first started to appear, isn't it? Your physical situation explains your early childhood perfectly. What your physical situation doesn't explain is why your magic now explodes out of your body at every possible opportunity with enough force to level a building."

"So… why is that happening?"

Zeref looked him dead in the eye and said, simply: "Fear."

"What?"

"You're scared of your magic. This is the power that hurts people. This is the reason why you've never had any friends; why your father locked you in the basement and your mother hit you; why the other villagers shunned you and drove you out. This is what destroyed your house and killed your family, such as it was. This is the cause of all the bad things in your life – and you can't do a thing about it. You sense your power starting to break loose, and it terrifies you, because you know you're going to hurt more people. Everyone you love will die by your own hand and you'll be left all alone. You feel all that, and you are so, so scared."

He raised his hand and punctuated this last phrase with three sharp jabs to the boy's heart. Gildarts was shaking, but he could not back away; could not even blink. In those frightened yet comprehending eyes Zeref found a wordless confirmation of his hypothesis.

"Your magic isn't trying to hurt you," he continued. "It's trying to protect you; it just doesn't know how. Destruction is all it understands, so that's what it does. It senses your terror and tries to protect you from it in the only way it can: by destroying everything around you that could possibly pose a threat to you. You see this start to happen, and you become more afraid, which makes your power stronger, which scares you more, and it builds and builds until there's nothing left in your vicinity for it to destroy, or until you've used so much power that it's no longer capable of breaking free on its own. You're the reason why all this is happening."

"I'm…" Tears prickled in the corners of the boy's eyes, but he bit his lip and give his head a quick shake. "So, what can I do about it? Do I need to stop being… scared?"

The hesitant way in which the boy asked showed that even he could tell how unfeasible that sounded, yet that wasn't why the other shook his head. "That's not a good idea. There's nothing wrong with fear. Your problem is that you have a messed-up concept of it. You're not scared of me at all, though there are any number of reasons why you should be – not least because someone should have taught you not to talk to strangers. Conversely, you're terrified of yourself, and there's no reason for that at all."

"So… what should I do?"

Zeref shrugged. "How should I know?"

"…Eh?"

"I don't know how to solve your problems. Overcoming an irrational fear of yourself so deeply ingrained that it causes natural disasters? I wouldn't even know where to start. Psychiatrists go through years of training before anyone makes them do this sort of thing, you know."

"But… you said that you would help…"

"Well… I was sort of hoping Mavis would come up with some good ideas, but she's letting me down."

"Maybe she's not here," the boy suggested doubtfully.

"That would be infuriatingly unhelpful of her, so you're probably right."

He didn't say anything for a while, and Gildarts shuffled awkwardly. Fine white cracks started to creep from his palms into the rock they were sat on. They were slow at first, a curious exploration of their surroundings, but as soon as he noticed them, he remembered everything he had been told about his runaway magic, and he panicked. The boulder shattered at once. He fell with a yelp, landing flat on his back and throwing up a little cloud of sand.

Zeref caught himself easily and remained on his feet, looking down at the boy from above; a shadowy silhouette against the sun. Rather than snapping at him, however, he remarked, "You panicked, didn't you?" The boy nodded timidly. "Yes, I had a feeling that making you aware of the problem would only make it worse."

"So… I'm going to be stuck like this forever, then?"

That dark gaze left the boy's prone form and turned pensively out to sea. "I don't know how to fix your underlying problem, kid. That's not the sort of thing I'm good at, and even if it was, it's likely that the only person who'll be able to do anything about it is you. But… there might be things I can do to help. There are methods by which, if you can learn them, you might be able to restrain your power when it's trying to go out of control."

"Can you teach me?" Gildarts inquired, scrambling to his feet to clutch at this new glimmer of hope.

"I can try. I can't promise it'll work, though. I've seen plenty of young mages who have struggled to make their magic do what they want, but I've never encountered a case as extreme as yours before." He closed his eyes and thought for a minute, while the boy waited with unusual patience – which for him still meant bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet, but keeping his mouth shut while he did it. "Right. We'll try visualization first. It's not a method I've ever seen much merit in, but people have been using it to teach young children magic since the beginning of recorded time, so it might be worth a shot… Essentially, it involves the use of mental images rather than direct intent to control magic, which is supposedly more instinctive for children than grasping the entirely new sensation of the magic itself."

"What do I have to do?"

"When you feel your magic going out of control, you first need to stay calm – which I appreciate is a tricky thing in and of itself, but you'll need to concentrate on what to do rather than worrying about what's going on around you. Now, let's focus on your arm first."

He held his right arm out in front of him, and Gildarts copied him, as if to hail a passing motorboat.

"Now, the trick to control through visualization is to imagine some sort of barrier around your arm that your magic can't break through. What it looks like doesn't matter; you just have to picture something solid for your magic to hit and bounce off. If you do it right, you should find that your power, no matter what form it takes, is confined to the area within the imaginary barrier. Then, what you'd normally do is work on reducing the size of the barrier until it is at the level of your skin, at which point the magic would remain theoretically sealed within your body… by that point, though, you should be so used to the feeling of control that it will come automatically to you, without the need for visual tools. Can you do that?"

"I think so!" the boy chirped. "I just imagine something around my arm, right?"

"Right."

"Anything I want?"

"That's what I said."

"So, like… a big red balloon?"

"Sure."

"How about an igloo?"

"Whatever works for you, kid."

Gildarts screwed his eyes shut in concentration. "Okay, now what?"

"Now…" Zeref scanned the beach until his eyes fell upon a lump of seaweed-laced stone, which he hefted in one hand. Then, without warning, he pivoted on one foot and hurled the stone straight towards the boy.

The boy didn't notice the incoming missile, but his magic did. A grid of white lines sprung up around his arm and disintegrated the rock before it could hit him. He yelped at the unexpected surge of power, his eyes flying open, and then surprise became panic as the vicious cracks of his magic continued to streak out from his body, churning up the sand and forcing Zeref to take several hasty steps backwards before it could do the same to him.

At last it came to an end, and the boy was left shivering and gasping for breath. His first act was to glance around for his companion, and upon seeing that he had been out of the danger zone, he sighed in relief and offered him a sheepish smile. "Sorry. The igloo broke."

"So I gathered. Well, it's the sort of thing that takes practice. Let's try it again."

"Okay!" Enthusiasm only slightly diminished by his failure, the boy raised his arm again, adopting a comical fighting pose. "Maybe I'll imagine something bigger this time. How about an ice castle? It could have towers and battlements and everything! Though I'd have to put my arm through one of the windows, because it would have a drawbridge at the front!"

"I think you're somewhat missing the point of the exercise, kid…"

As Zeref suspected, the imaginary ice castle proved no better at restraining wild magic than the igloo. This attempt ended with the boy lying on the floor and spitting out sand, significantly more put out than before.

His next try also ended in failure, as did the next, and the next, until tears were blurring his vision and they had both lost track of how many times his magic had gone out of control. The more upset he became, the less control he had over his rampaging power. He had reached the point where Zeref no longer needed to trigger his magic to appear – his distress was doing that all by itself.

And yet he had made no progress. None at all. The feral magic that seared across the beach – and, as was increasingly the case as it strengthened with despair, tore through Zeref's body too – hadn't altered in the slightest. It had neither slowed nor softened, nor had it become any less improper to his magical senses.

There wasn't much point in continuing when the boy's mood was this low, Zeref knew that, but there was even less value in stopping when they had achieved absolutely nothing. Another surge of energy managed to cut raw lines across his palm before he could jerk his hand away, and the pain got the better of him. "You're not even trying any more!" he snapped.

The boy's eyes had already been swimming with tears, and at that they grew even more distraught. If not for the fact that his magic was now experiencing a few seconds of remission after every outburst, a result of the depletion of his internal power reserves, Zeref would have paid for that lapse in emotional calm with another intense burst of pain.

"I am trying! It's just… everything breaks! I know that I break everything, so… so everything I can imagine always breaks in my mind!"

Zeref grimaced. It was a genuine problem with any method that relied on imagination – a factor far more limited than was often assumed – but unless he could come up with a better idea, they'd have to stick with it. "There are things that your magic can't break, though, aren't there?"

"Like what?"

"Well… what about the sea? When you try to break that up, it just flows back together and pushes against you. A fluid barrier like that might work."

"It might, but… I don't think I could imagine it right."

"Hmm. You told me that the people who brought you to the island did so by creating a barrier that you couldn't destroy, right? You already know that can suppress your power, so if you focus on what that felt like…"

"I could try," the boy said dubiously. "It felt kind of funny, though. I don't really remember it."

"Give it a go."

"Okay…"

Approaching a task like this pessimistically was the one way to guarantee failure, and the boy's mood was already so low that Zeref was not the least bit surprised when the immediate eruption of energy was fiercer, wilder, and even more violent than before. Zeref snarled in sheer frustration.

Unfortunately, the boy heard. Heard – and understood it perfectly. He wasn't just failing to make progress; he was letting down the only person who believed in him. He was going to be abandoned again.

That thought snapped whatever last thread of calmness he had been clinging to. He let out a shriek of terror. His eyes flared open, pupils fully dilated; Zeref did not need to be a real therapist to recognize the signs of the boy descending into a full-blown panic attack. Power surged across the beach with the savagery of escaped lightning – and then Zeref wasn't thinking about the boy any more, because there was only one thing upon which the magic could take out its righteous rage, and that was him.

Magic fuelled by years of terror and self-loathing sought peace for its wielder by annihilating anything that could possibly further his grief. Despair called it forth and desperation released its restraints. It slashed as blades beneath his skin; drew razor wire through his veins; shattered his ribs in a single wave of force. He could feel his lungs filling with blood. He tried to breathe and couldn't; he tried to cry out and couldn't. There was nothing in the universe except pain and panic as his body screamed at him, you're dying, you're dying, you're dying-

I'm not, he told himself grimly.

But no matter how many times it happened, his body still had no means of processing lethal damage except with that one frightful certainty. It could not comprehend that drowned lungs were unharmed, or that torn flesh was whole, or that the blissful darkness was refusing to take him into its embrace. Without a source, the pain became confused; there because it felt it ought to be rather than because some wound had ordered it.

Dying – or, rather, not dying – never became any easier.

And as the agony of the door that was still closed to him faded, and the only terror remaining was that in the boy's frantic cries, something cleaved at last through the numbness of death: a bright and vital viciousness. To pay back the one who had hurt him a hundredfold. To cast off his empathy and all the pain that came with it, and let selfish desire guide his hand once again. To defy the world which had rejected him and punished him, and then thrust this frustrating child upon him and expected him to be kind.

How many times would he have to kill the boy to overcome the Tenrou Tree's protection? About as many times as the boy's power should have killed him today, he reckoned, and that thought induced a cold and hungry glee, for every fatal strike would soothe the raging pain within him a little more-

But he was better than that, wasn't he?

He tried to push that argument aside, but it was faster than his fury, leading to another thought and then another before he could catch and suppress it. The boy's mother had hit him because she hadn't understood what was happening, and yet he understood perfectly, and he knew it wasn't the boy's fault. She had feared the boy, and with good reason: it would only take one surge of power at the wrong time to end her life. He didn't even have that excuse. He was better than this.

The pain had all but vanished now. He could never remember quite what it felt like to die after the fact – he suspected it was necessary to preserve his sanity – and as his memory of that horrifying moment of being and not being all at once passed into the land of half-lost dreams, it took with it that urge to lash out. The reality of the world slowly returned to him; he was on his hands and knees upon the sand.

Through that exhaustion, he heard the boy's cry. "Are you okay? Please… please tell me you're okay…"

There was heartbreak in his voice, and, hearing it, Zeref could not even comprehend wanting to hurt him. He felt instead an equally irrational and far more dangerous urge to hold him close, and he was grateful that the lethargy saturating his limbs made such a preposterous action impossible. Emotions always ran fierce on the border of life and death.

"I'm okay," he said, appreciating too late that the raw red marks he could see crisscrossing his hands – and most likely the rest of his skin as well – would betray any attempt at stoicism.

"You're hurt, aren't you?" Gildarts exclaimed. "I am hurting you!"

"Of course you're hurting me," Zeref sighed. "Your power is trying to tear my body apart, and when it goes all-out like that, even I have no way of stopping it directly." The raw strength of the boy's magic was unbelievable. Maybe the constant cycle of suppression and explosion had raised it to this level, or maybe it was nothing more than a coincidence of birth, but Zeref could count on one hand the number of grown adults he knew with access to so much power. If he could learn to control it, he'd be a truly exceptional mage.

"I'm sorry," the boy blurted out. "I didn't know it hurt so much. You always said it didn't. I'm sorry… I wouldn't have stayed with you if I'd known…"

Pushing himself to his feet, Zeref rubbed at the marks on his arm and grimaced. "It's fine. It's not like it does any lasting damage to me. These marks will disappear in a minute."

"But…" sniffed the boy. "But even though you got hurt, I still couldn't do it…"

It had been a whole afternoon of struggle, pain, and not-quite-dying, and not even the most encouraging teacher could have found anything in it to call progress. The boy's control remained non-existent. His morale was lower than it had been when they started, and his magic had only grown more volatile, more aggressive, and more powerful as a result.

No progress.

Nothing.

Zeref sighed once again, and there was a softness to his voice that had not been present before. "Well, I did warn you that I didn't have much faith in a method like that. Let's call it a day. We'll go and find something to eat before it gets dark, okay?"

Wiping his eyes on his sleeve, leaving traces of mud on his cheek in the process, the boy nodded.

Yet Zeref hadn't taken more than a single step towards the forest when he felt a sharp tug pulling him back – the boy had grabbed the back of his robes. "What is it, kid?"

With his gaze fixed on Zeref's feet, the boy whispered, "Thank you for not getting mad at me."

"…Come on. It's a long way back to the camp."

As the other pulled away from him, Gildarts looked up, startled – and when he ran to catch up, there was a tremulous smile on his face.

Perhaps it was a sign of his gratitude, or perhaps it was a result of the exhaustion brought on by grappling with his unruly magic all afternoon, but Gildarts was surprisingly – thankfully – quiet for the rest of the evening. Twilight enveloped the island, and they were on their way back to their makeshift camp after eating when the boy caught sight of a pair of large crimson birds watching them from a nearby tree. He said nothing, but it was clear what was going through his mind from the way he clung to his companion's arm and was practically trying to bury his face into his side as they walked. He did not want to look at them. He did not want to relive the horror of what he'd done.

It made their journey through the forest more like an awkward three-legged race than a walk, but after what the boy had been through that day, Zeref let it slide. It would have been far more dangerous, however, to ignore the thin white cracks crawling into his body from where the boy clutched at him, and so rather than going straight to the camp, he led them on a slight detour.

The boy didn't notice that their destination had changed until they emerged from the thinning trees and out onto a meadow that led right to the edge of a cliff. At the sight, he froze at once. "This isn't our camp," he said suspiciously.

"We're taking the long way round."

This only made the boy dig his heels in deeper. "You're going to throw me in the sea again, aren't you?"

"Might be."

He glanced at the edge of the cliff and folded his arms defiantly. "I don't wanna go in the sea."

"I don't care what you want."

Unimpressed old eyes met indignant young ones, each daring the other to back down. The boy looked ready to sprint back to the safety of the trees at any moment. Rather than trying to order him, and risking turning this into an island-wide chase, Zeref just shrugged and changed approach with an adult's easy patience. "Suit yourself. Of course, there's no way I'm letting you inside my shiny new tent if there's any chance you're going to break it during the night."

"It's not your tent," Gildarts sulked. "It's mine."

"You can have it if you want, but since only I know how to activate it with magic, it won't do you much good, will it?"

"Well…"

"Not to mention, you're not sleeping anywhere near me if you're going to keep exploding all night. I've had quite enough of that this afternoon. So, if you'd rather spend the night out in the dark forest with all the monsters than in the safe warm tent with me, then by all means, don't go in the sea."

After processing his options for an agonizing minute, the boy pulled a face and shuffled towards the cliff. "Okay, fine, but don't push me." He glanced over the edge and swallowed audibly. There was another long pause. "It's quite a long way down, really, isn't it?"

"Sure, but it's not dangerous. Not to you. Your magic will deconstruct the water's surface – or any rocks down there – instantaneously, minimizing the falling damage. Not to mention how tough simply possessing such a ridiculous amount of magic power makes your tiny little body."

"Yeah, but… even if you're right-"

"I am right."

"-we're so high up…"

The silence was a good indication of how much the other cared.

Disheartened, the boy eyed the water below once more. The stars were out in all their glory, and their silvery light scattered from the ocean and cast ghostly waves upon the cliff, making it difficult to tell where the fall ended and the dreaming depths began. "You know," he ventured, "I think maybe I'll sleep-"

That was when Zeref lost patience and gave him a quick shove. The boy's sentence ended with a wordless wail, followed by a plop and a subsequent enormous burst of water.

Like the previous time, Zeref wandered down to the beach and waited for the explosions to die down. Unlike the previous time, however, the boy was left floating on his back, and he didn't appear to be moving. The rather resentful Black Mage had to wade out into the shallows to retrieve him. Any guilt he may have felt about deliberately putting the boy through another near-death experience was more than drowned out by the suffering he himself had undergone on the receiving end of the boy's magic.

Zeref wasn't overly pleased about having to carry the unconscious boy back to their campsite, but he did it nonetheless, and without cursing Mavis out loud either. Halfway through the journey, the boy woke up, shaking violently from the cold. As soon as they reached the campsite, Zeref made him change into dry clothes, but he was still shivering when they both crawled into the tent.

Their temporary home was easily big enough for the two of them, but it was little more than a grey-green shell inside – all the expense had gone on the protective spells woven into the canvas. With its lacrima broken, it would only hold its form while Zeref was sending it power from his own body, and it had been so long since he'd had to actively do anything with his magic that he wondered if he'd be able to keep it up while asleep… and no sooner had the thought occurred to him than ideas were starting to form in the back of his mind; springing like tiny green shoots from a wasteland which decades of enforced inactivity had failed to render barren.

Still, maybe he'd save the experimenting for when the boy was asleep. He sat next to the sealed tent flap with the wires wrapped around his hand, while the boy snuggled down and tried to make himself as warm as possible.

The silence that Zeref had been looking forward to all day lasted for about ten seconds before the boy piped up, "Is it just me, or did it get warmer in here?"

"There are spells on the tent which regulate its internal temperature. It's a simple matter for me to manipulate them to make it warmer."

"That is so cool."

Zeref blinked; he had been expecting gratitude, not awe. "It… really isn't."

An emphatic rustling came from the sleeping bag as the boy nodded fiercely. "It is! I was all cold before, and now I'm toasty. You can do amazing magic."

"Kid…" He shook his head in disbelief. "Firstly, the tent is the one doing the magic, not me. I'm just tweaking it a little. And it's not clever or difficult or rare – literally any mage who has bothered to pick up a book on the theory of environmental magic would be able to do this. And secondly… even if it was all of those things, this is about the most trivial piece of magic I have ever done in my life! I can't even comprehend being told it's amazing by a kid with a power for which most grown mages would give their right arm!"

"I'd happily swap with them," murmured the boy. "I'd much rather be able to make things warm than destroy them. That would have been so useful when I was in the basement. Or maybe, if I had that power, I'd never have had to go in the basement in the first place."

"…Kid, you have an incredible gift! I know it's causing you problems right now, but do you not have any idea what it means to possess magic as strong as yours? Or what you'll be able to do if you can learn to control it?"

"It means that I destroy everything. That I hurt the people who are kind to me and the animals who want to be my friends. I ruin all the things I touch and make life difficult for everyone around me. I wish I could just make it go away."

Zeref did not respond to that; the argument came to an end in sudden silence. For the boy, it did not feel like victory. He rolled over, uncomfortable, and found that his companion was staring at him so intently that he had to look down to check that there wasn't a hole being burnt through him.

"Oh," Zeref breathed. And then, again: "Oh."

"…What is it?"

"You've just given me an idea."

"Okay." But when the other didn't say anything else, he ventured, "Should… should I be worried?"

Zeref considered this for a moment. "Well, I'd be lying if I said my good ideas have never caused problems for those around me… so I suppose we'll have to see."

It wasn't quite the reassurance that the boy had been hoping for, and he burrowed back down inside his sleeping bag, hiding away from that piercing gaze. Zeref hardly noticed. He was feeling both very smug and very stupid – smug, because that was the answer he had been looking for all afternoon; stupid, because it should never have taken him so long to reach it. It really wasn't the sort of thing he was good at, but what excuse was that, when the answer was so damn obvious?

No wonder nothing he'd suggested had worked. He'd been going about it all wrong. He'd been so convinced that he couldn't help others – that he couldn't empathize enough with anyone else to do so – that he'd automatically tried to separate the technical issues of the boy's magic from the personal, psychological ones, but of course they were inextricably linked. One couldn't be fixed without the other. And he had a pretty good idea of how to go about addressing both at once.

As night fell, he played around with the tent's magic a little more, but he wasn't, this time, trying to improve their living conditions. This was the kind of complicated magic that the boy would never be able to appreciate, but which Zeref had always been exceptionally good at: building, creating, devising; finding the limits of magic and pushing them further than anyone before or since.

By the time the boy was sound asleep he had established a feedback loop within the tent's magical circuit. Once he'd filled it with energy, it would power the tent for several minutes without him needing to do it directly. That done, he crept out of the tent on hands and knees, pausing only to check that the boy had not awoken, and slipped out into the forest to begin preparations.

To hell with not getting involved.

It didn't matter if it was Acnologia, human mortality, or some kid's out-of-control magic. You didn't stick a puzzle in front of the great Black Mage and expect him not to have a bloody good go at solving it.

Mavis knew him far too well.