It Was Like A Little Light

By CrimsonStarbird

Six – An Unassuming Saviour

This was the second morning in a row upon which Zeref had been rudely awoken by another person. The first time, Gildarts had been worried; the second, he seemed more impatient than anything else, repeatedly jabbing his shoulder and insisting, "Wake up, wake up, wake up!"

Grunting something unintelligible, Zeref glared at the boy through half-shut eyes until the jabbing ceased. "What is it?" he sighed. Even the infamous Black Mage found it difficult to come across as fearsome when he was still mostly asleep.

The boy stepped back and put his hands on his hips. "You sleep too much."

"Not my fault," Zeref grunted. "My body's stuck at a difficult age. It doesn't handle mornings very well."

"…You're weird." The boy disappeared through the tent flap and was back before the burst of sunlight had faded from Zeref's vision, depositing an armful of lumpy objects into the unfortunate Black Mage's lap. "I went and found some stuff for breakfast. You gotta tell me which ones are safe to eat."

"…Alright, alright." Zeref stared at the bizarre assortment of fruits in his lap, trying to recall just where in his vast and sophisticated mindscape he had filed his godforsaken agricultural knowledge. "These are fine," he began, picking out two of the green melon-like fruits that had been yesterday's breakfast. "These purple ones are edible if you peel the skin. They're citrus fruits – you know, like oranges. The red berries… not sure. I'd need to see the bush you got them from. Don't eat them until I've tried them. The black ones are fine, though. And these… are they sweet potatoes? I didn't know they grew on the island."

"I was chasing a giant mole when it disappeared into a hole," he declared proudly. "I fell down after it, and I saw the potatoes sticking out of the ceiling. I thought I should bring them back to the surface rather than follow the mole and get lost."

"Very sensible of you. I don't think we'd want to eat these raw for breakfast, but still, I'm surprised you knew what they were."

"They're my favourites! When I used to go shopping with mummy, she'd let me pick something that the village farmers grew, and then… then she'd cook it for me…"

Zeref groaned inwardly as the boy's mood took a nosedive. As much as he disliked inane cheeriness first thing in the morning, he enjoyed despair-fuelled surges of violent magic even less. How was he supposed to keep track of everything that might trigger distressing memories? And how on earth was he supposed to know what to do about it? People were frustrating at the best of times. For children, that only went double.

"Right," he tried. "If you like them, I'll hold onto them and try to come up with a way of cooking them for tonight, okay?"

That seemed to do the trick. The boy's eyes returned at once to their prior luminosity. "Really?"

"Sure. I'll work something out."

"Awesome!"

Setting the sweet potatoes aside, he pushed the edible pile towards the boy. "Knock yourself out. Though, if you're going to eat, do it outside." This warning came with a pointed glance towards the floor, where white cracks were beginning to spread from the boy's feet into the canvas. Gildarts grabbed the food and hurried out into the open before any harm could come to the tent.

As blessed silence returned, Zeref felt a strong urge to curl up and go back to sleep, but unaccompanied boy added to unexplored island was a recipe for disaster. After a couple of resentful minutes, he did his best to flatten down his hair and make himself look presentable before heading out of the tent, allowing it collapse back down to its compact state behind him.

Once the boy had eaten, they wandered down to the beach again so that he could practise trying to control his magic. After yesterday's disastrous session, the boy was a little nervous about starting over, but he hadn't complained – partly because he was even more nervous about the mysterious new idea his companion had come up with the night before. But Zeref didn't mention his idea again. He simply found another rock to sit on and resumed work on his carving project while Gildarts began another bout of mental wrestling with his magic.

Sure enough, it only took a few failures for the boy's mood to die completely. Every uncontrolled burst of power added to his growing sense of failure and worthlessness – for he was letting down the only person in the world who still believed in him. Even worse than the fear that his magic might never be fixed was the worry that his companion would lose patience with him, and then he'd be all alone.

If he had been paying attention to anything other than the rampaging power and his own despair, he might have noticed that Zeref didn't care about the lack of progress. In fact, Zeref had started the day's session even more nervous than the boy; he simply hid it beneath centuries of calm control. When the overwhelmed boy burst into tears, and Zeref announced that they were going to take a break and go looking for shells in the rockpools instead, he told himself that he was pandering to the child's anxiousness rather than procrastinating what he knew he needed to do.

But the boy cheered up quickly, as always, and Zeref was out of excuses. When had he started doubting himself so much? It wasn't like him at all. He suspected that he had started to care too much about the outcome – that he was gambling too much on an idea that was seeming more and more ridiculous with every passing minute. It wasn't that he had grown attached to the boy, or so he told himself, but that it was hard to affect disinterestedness in the result of the boy's struggle when it was quite literally the only thing in his life right now.

With an effort, he pushed all such doubts aside. The boy's magic was emotional, not logical. This would work.

By now, the rocky shelf had gained several new holes just waiting to be turned into rockpools when the tide came in, courtesy of Gildarts's magic. The boy still looked dubious about resuming his struggle, so it was unsurprising that he voiced no complaints when Zeref suggested they go for a walk along the shoreline instead.

There wasn't much beach at this side of the island. Away from the rocks and the sand that had become their improvised training ground, cliffs on either side rose sharply out of the sea. They took a winding trail that led to the top of one of these – though Zeref kept them away from the edge, for there was always the possibility that the power leaking out of the boy's feet would destroy any overhangs and send them plummeting into the water below.

The path continued to rise, until the boy could have sworn that they were higher than any point on the island he had seen from the boat. They moved away from the shore and turned inland, and the environment through which they walked became craggy and bare, devoid of the plant life so abundant everywhere else on Tenrou Island.

"This place is kind of cool," Gildarts remarked, examining their unusual surroundings with interest. The rock formations were a dry, earthy orange. Lone stalagmites rose out of the ground; stacks of boulders formed lop-sided towers. To Zeref, they looked as though a giant had carved himself some chess pieces and scattered them in a fit upon losing his first and only game. To the boy, they looked like dragons' teeth – but not in the way that sent one fleeing from whatever had knocked the teeth out of such a beast. Instead, he craned his neck to look at every single thing they passed, in the hope of finding an entire skull. "I've never seen anything like this before. I didn't know there were places like this on the island… or anywhere, in fact."

"Welcome to the world outside the basement," Zeref responded, somewhat dryly.

"Whoa. I bet there are all sorts of cool things hidden here!"

"If I recall correctly, there's an abandoned mine somewhere…"

"Can we-?"

Zeref jumped in with a flat denial. "No. You're not going underground. You'll bury yourself alive, or worse, cause an earthquake that will bring down this entire crag and ruin my island."

"…Oh."

As disappointed as he sounded, the lack of further protests confirmed that the boy had bought his logic. Exploring above ground was enough to satisfy his curiosity for the time being, and he peered into every crack they found in the sun-bleached rock, hoping to find a secret entrance to this mysterious mine. He didn't find one, but he did find something – something with a great scaly tail coiled up like ruby rope, which slithered into the shadows before he could get a good look at it.

He pressed himself closer to his companion, and asked, as casually as he could, "Do monsters live up here?"

"Hmm. Some of the lizards here can grow rather large. They don't eat people, though. Neither do the coyote, usually, although they can be quite bold in a pack."

"Coyote?" the boy echoed, simultaneously clinging to his companion's leg in fear and looking around for a glimpse of one. "I've never seen a coyote before."

"I don't think they still exist on the mainland. But even when they did, they weren't as big as the ones here. They'd easily be big enough for you to ride."

"Whoa. Do you think we could catch one? Are they scary? Do they bite?"

Zeref opened his mouth to explain that he hadn't meant he should ride a coyote when a harrowing screech emerged from the rocks. Echoes resounded back and forth between the crags, and each bounce seemed to bring the rocky walls in closer; a warning that the open plateau was behind them now and there was no such freedom in this ravine.

Both of them stopped in their tracks – the boy because he was struck by sudden fear, and Zeref because the boy was holding onto him so tightly that he had no choice. Normally, Zeref would have tolerated this behaviour, but the white cracks spreading from the boy's fingers had redoubled their efforts to prise his body apart with the onset of fear, so he dislodged him with an effort. Another cry reached their ears: a shrill plea, followed by its ghost, reliving its fleeting life over and over again.

"What was that?" squeaked the boy. "A ghoul?"

"Sounds like one of those birds you like."

The boy's eyes widened. Far from being relieved that it wasn't an undead monster, he gazed up at his companion in sorrow and guilt. Memories of the bird he had caught and accidentally killed flashed through his mind. Quietly, he tried, "I think… I think we should go back to the beach now."

"It sounds like it's in trouble."

"But… I don't…"

Come on, kid, I know you're better than this, Zeref thought. But there was no point to any of this if he had to force him, so he just gave a shrug. "Well, it's your call. If you want to go back, we'll go back."

The boy stared at him for a long moment, and then took a deep, shuddering breath. There was nothing brave about his trembling words, but he said them anyway: "We'll go and look for it. But, I don't know where…"

Zeref paid this trailing doubt no heed. Now that he had agreement, he led the way deeper into the ravine, which twisted along the path of an extinct river until it came to a sharp end. The twin walls of red-orange rock widened briefly and then converged to a single point directly ahead of them. At the foot of this steep cliff lay a scattering of scree and mismatched boulders, remnants of whichever dynamic event had crashed the earthen walls together, and it was amidst this wreckage that the great crimson-feathered bird waited. It saw them at the same time they saw it, but while they stopped walking at the sight, the bird only fluttered its wings more frantically, raising dry dust into a blood-red shroud.

The boy darted swiftly behind his companion. "Do you think it knows what I did to its friend?" he spoke; a dreadful whisper.

"I think it's probably more worried about itself right now."

No matter how strong the bird's wings, they could not carry it to safety. The fire-like streaks that made up its tail were trapped beneath a boulder as large as the bird itself. It strained with all its might but it could not pull itself free.

As soon as he saw it, the boy's fear vanished at once. "We've gotta help, we've gotta help, we've gotta help!" he yelled, dashing to the end of the ravine. The bird struggled more fiercely at the sight of someone approaching, all flaring wings and clashing beak and claws thundering upon the ground. "It's okay," he tried to tell it. "We're not enemies. We're going to help you."

Perhaps it didn't understand him, or perhaps it didn't believe him, but his attempt to calm the bird backfired; it twisted and would have bitten him if he hadn't jumped back just in time. Gildarts stared at it in consternation, and then he swallowed and sprinted round behind the bird.

He placed both hands against the boulder and pushed with all his might. It didn't move. Turning around, he put his back to it and tried pushing that way, but it didn't make the boulder any lighter. He fell back with despair in his eyes.

That was when he realized he had been left to fight this battle alone. Zeref was still at the bend in the ravine, watching as intensely as usual but not offering any assistance. As Gildarts returned to pushing the boulder with no more success than before, he shouted across, "Help, please help!"

"I can't. This is as close as I can get."

Ignoring those words as thoughtlessly as the bird had ignored his, the boy ran over, grabbed his hand, and tried to pull him through the ravine. When the Black Mage didn't want to go somewhere, however, he was a lot more difficult to move than a mere rock.

The boy seemed to realize this, and tried pleading with him again. "I think we'll be able to move the rock together! Come on, you've got to help!"

"I can't," Zeref reiterated gravely. Three days ago, he would have sworn that once he had made up his mind over something so trivial, nothing in the world could make him change it. Now, he looked at the boy's desperate, pleading expression and thought it was probably for the best that he could not free the bird without coming close enough to steal its life. "I cannot approach that poor creature with the intention of helping it. Mavis is already protecting you; she can't protect the bird as well. Kid, you have to do this on your own."

"But…" The boy could not understand what would drive someone to refuse to help an innocent creature, yet he gleaned some of its paradoxical inevitability from the other's solemnity. "But I can't move the rock on my own…"

"Wouldn't it be easier if you destroyed the rock rather than trying to move it?"

"I…" All the fear and vulnerability that dominated during his lowest moments burst through the surface at once. "I can't! If I break the rock, I'll break the bird too! I won't be able to stop it… I don't know how to control it…"

"I've told you how to control it. You simply have to do it."

"But I can't!" he wailed. "Every time I try, I make things worse! I'll kill it, like I killed the other bird, or like…" Unable to finish the sentence, he looked to his companion for sympathy, and found none. None visible to him, at least. "Maybe… maybe a big animal will come along and help it."

"I think it's far more likely that a pack of hungry coyote will find it first."

The boy threw a wild glance back along the ravine, as if he expected to see the predators advancing upon them already. "But… but I don't want to kill anything else…"

"Then don't kill it. Control your power before you can."

"I can't! You know I can't!"

"Then the bird is going to die, isn't it?"

They looked at each other in silence. With leaden steps, the boy began to walk towards the trapped bird. Its great head was bowed towards its fate; it no longer had the energy to struggle. He was trying not to meet its gaze. Tears were already forming in the corners of his eyes.

He reached out to touch the boulder but drew his hand back at the last moment. "I can't," he whispered. His distress took form as destruction; he scrambled backwards as a crack opened in the ground at his feet. His heartbeat was thundering around the ravine as loudly as the creature's cries for help. "I can't control it. I can't…"

He looked at his hand, and to the helpless bird, and then over his shoulder, but he could not hold that intense black stare for more than half a second. He had never before known his companion to be so unapproachable.

What he could not see was that beneath his aloof exterior, Zeref had his fingers crossed behind his back. You can do it, kid, he thought. You're brave and you're gentle, and you mustn't let doubt control you any more.

"What if I'm fast?" the boy muttered to himself, and Zeref's heart leapt to hear it. He wouldn't be strategizing if he had given up hope. "What if I just touch the rock quickly and run away before it can reach the bird? Yeah, maybe I'll try that…"

His trembling fingers brushed the sun-baked rock. Instantly, his power drove through it like spears through a straw dummy. Cracks shot across solid stone, sending small puffs of dust into the air. He shrieked out loud. For a moment, he felt the silky smoothness of feathers beneath his palm, as though he were stroking the bird, and he knew instinctively that his magic was tracing fatal lines of light across the creature's back. He tried to wrench back that alien feeling, but he might as well have been trying to grab sunlight.

The boulder shattered. Thousands of perfectly cubic fragments shot within millimetres of his head, but he didn't notice. He saw only the white lines breaking up that stunning fiery plumage. There was nothing to stop them from ripping the helpless animal apart.

It was happening again. It would never stop happening. He would kill it, just the same as he'd killed the last bird he befriended, or he'd brought down the ceiling of the spare room in Uncle Robin's house-

Except it wasn't the same.

Back then, he had thought his magic unstoppable. It raged and crushed and killed independently of his control and his wishes, and although none of those things would have happened if not for him, there was a small part of him which clung to innocence, because there was no way he could have prevented them.

That was no longer the case. He knew a way to stop his magic; his companion had explained it to him. Yes, he had never been able to manage it, but that wasn't the fault of his magic – it was his fault. If the bird died here, it wouldn't be because his magic had gone out of control. It would be because he had failed to stop it when it did. There was no ignorance to hide behind; no inevitability to alleviate his guilt. The bird's death would be entirely his fault.

Some tiny yet fundamental part of him had believed that his condition would never change no matter how hard he tried, and now, as he held that beautiful little life in his palms, it was that part of him which shattered.

He screamed, and the light reacted. The white grid seemed to lift away from the bird's back, as if it were a net of woven threads rather than an ethereal figment of magic made manifest. It unfolded and collapsed back onto the boy's outstretched arm, where it pulsed upon his skin once, twice, and then faded completely.

The boy stared at his arm in shock. He was shaking. He was crying too, somehow with even less restraint than usual. A red streak flashed across his blurred vision. The thought of wiping his eyes didn't occur to him, and he struggled to make out what was going on as the freed bird spread its wings and swept once around his head. A wingtip tickled the back of his neck, a soft breeze curled around his shoulders, and then the bird shot up into the sky and was gone.

He fell to his knees, clutching his arm to his chest and weeping freely. He was far too preoccupied to see Zeref let out the breath he had been holding for long enough to suffocate a normal man, or to notice that the first few steps he took towards the boy were weak with the release of his own tension. In fact, the boy only recalled the existence of his companion at all when Zeref rested a hand upon his shoulder, a gentle and comforting presence. "Good job, kid."

This only made the boy break into yet another flood of tears. He clutched at the other's robes, using them to dry his eyes – which Zeref tolerated, but only barely, for the sake of helping him calm down.

"I did it," sniffed the boy.

"Yes," came the soft response. "You did."

"I did something useful. I broke the rock and freed the bird." The wonder in his voice was heart-breaking. "I didn't hurt the bird; I saved it."

"You did well. No one else could have done that. It was because of you and your magic."

"I did something good," he said again, as if he still couldn't believe it. He gave a broad, beaming smile and tightened his grip around the other's leg in a manner that was probably meant to convey affection but only succeeded in cutting off his circulation. "Thank you."

"Why are you thanking me? I didn't do anything."

The boy shook his head. "You're the one who showed me a way of controlling it. If you hadn't done that, I…"

"You finally got a visualization method to work for you, then?"

"Yeah. I don't know why I didn't think of it before. All I had to do was imagine you, since you're the only thing my magic doesn't break."

"Me?"

"Yeah. In between me and the bird. Well, hugging the bird, really. It was quite sweet. You should do it in real life." At the sight of Zeref's expression, his smugness quickly faded. "…What?"

"I honestly don't know whether to laugh or cry."

"I've never seen you do either of those things," the boy pointed out unhelpfully.

"Look…" He ran a hand through his hair in exasperation. "Don't imagine me. It's creepy." And then he added, with a frustrated sigh, "Oh, don't you start."

"I didn't- oh! That was to Mavis, right?"

Zeref met the boy's gaze for a moment and then glanced away again. "She seems to think it's funny."

"If you can't see her or hear her, then how do you know what she's thinking?"

"It's never too difficult to guess what's going through that girl's mind."

The boy mulled this over. "In that case, does telling her to be quiet actually achieve anything?"

"No," Zeref scowled. "But it makes me feel better."

"You're really weird."

"I don't want to hear that from you, thank you very much. Imagining me, of all things…"

The boy just shrugged. "Can we go back to the beach? I want to practise."

"Alright."

They hadn't taken more than a few steps back through the ravine when a sudden thought occurred to the boy, and he stopped in his tracks. "How did the bird get its tail stuck under the rock, do you think?" he wondered aloud.

"It was at the foot of a cliff, wasn't it? I imagine there was a rockslide, and one of the dislodged boulders happened to pin its tail."

"Well, yeah, but… Why didn't it just fly away when it heard the rockslide? It could clearly fly just fine, and those birds are really fast and strong."

"Beats me," Zeref said, walking on.

Gildarts gave him a deeply suspicious look. He had, after all, picked the crags of all places to explore that day, and he had seemed to know exactly where to find the trapped bird… but they'd also been together all morning, and he couldn't have sneaked out during the night because the tent would have collapsed without him. Besides, he seemed far too kind to be the sort of person who went around deliberately harming the wildlife for no reason. So the boy shrugged, put the matter out of his mind, and ran to catch up.

But there had been a reason for it, and as the boy popped up brighter and livelier than ever before at his side, Zeref thought it a good one.

Magic coupled to emotion, and nowhere more so than in a child, who had not yet developed the requisite mental discipline for controlling either. Gildarts's fear of himself, which had commanded his magic for so long, ran deep in him, but there was something that ran deeper still. Zeref did not have a name to put to it – it had simply been too long – though he suspected Mavis might have done.

There was despair in the boy, but not yet enough to have fully quenched his optimism. Each sunrise woke him with new hope, and he had not given up on befriending the animals – or the people – he encountered despite all his setbacks. He had never stopped trying to explore; to make friends; to learn and grow in this world; and to help others, rather than burden them, and thus exist with them as their equal. Deep inside, he had never stopped trying to live. And if that desire was strong enough to survive what the world had thrown at him, it must also be strong enough to override terror's control of his magic.

Just as there had been a part of the boy that had accepted his situation would never change, there had been a part of him fighting it with everything it had, and when they had been forced to face each other, that was the part that had proven stronger.

And, because magic flowed with emotion and responded to desire, from one single encounter the balance of the boy's power had already started to change.

One little magical feedback loop to let him slip away from the boy unnoticed. A simple stasis shield to protect the bird until morning, for no living creature would approach anything bathed in the magic of the one who for so long had brought with him nothing but death. And as for the bird's speed… well, that would do no good against one with an intimate knowledge of time magic. He had gambled with the boy's future, and perhaps he ought not to have done, but nothing less would have opened the way, and only one who knew all too well the consequences of failing could have had the conviction to take that risk.

He wasn't supposed to be using magic, he knew that, but he saw the boy's smile and he knew with equal certainty that no one in the world was going to hold it against him just this once.

And once was quite enough.

Never had he felt so helpless. Never had he cared so much about the outcome of a situation he had so little control over. Never had he risked so much upon the resolve of another human being, let alone one so fragile and unpredictable.

He was never, ever going through that again.

He really wasn't cut out for this whole mentoring thing.

"Kid, would you please pay attention?"

Gildarts looked up sharply, saw the white lines casually attempting to rip his companion's body apart, and gasped. "Ah, sorry!" He closed his eyes and focussed, and the sense of uncontrolled magic receded, leaving behind a stinging pain which loitered below the surface of Zeref's skin. He glared at the boy, who gave him a sheepish smile in return.

In the few hours since he had rescued the bird, he had already become much better at controlling his power. At first, he had been able to force it back every other time it appeared, but that had crept up to three-quarters with practice, and he was becoming still more competent. He had the feel of it now, and the sense and shape of that control came to him more readily every time.

There was, however, a flipside to the rapidity with which the boy was picking up control. He could force his power safely back into his body – but he seemed completely incapable of stopping it from breaking out in the first place. He could suppress it only when he turned his full focus towards doing so. The moment his attention was caught by something else, his control would slip away unnoticed, and something around him – usually the tree or bush he had just blundered into, but sometimes his irritated companion – paid the price.

If he concentrated on where he was going and what he was doing, he could keep hold of his magic fairly well, and nothing was destroyed. Unfortunately, it just so happened that the boy was absentmindedness incarnate.

Zeref had lost count of the number of times the boy had become distracted by some prowling animal or rainbow plant and walked into him, casually sending enough power through his body to kill a normal man. He was doing his best not to get angry about it. The boy's magic was still incredibly sensitive to his emotions; the more upset he was, the more volatile it became, increasing the chance of it breaking out and making it more difficult for the boy to bring it under control.

It was becoming harder and harder to curb his annoyance, though. How was it even possible for a child to be so absentminded? Maybe, if he could find the source, he'd be able to do something about it… but he discarded that idea almost immediately. He wasn't a therapist. He had only been able to make progress with the boy's wild power because he understood magic, and he knew what was likely to make it act in certain ways. Human beings were another matter entirely. He'd never understood them. This would not be a problem so easily fixed.

"I'm sorry," the boy was saying, shuffling his feet guiltily. "I was distracted thinking about the birds."

Either he misinterpreted Zeref's resentful silence as curiosity, or he was so interested in the subject that he wanted to talk about it anyway, but he added, "Where do you think they live? Because the trees in the forest are big, but the birds are really big. A nest big enough for two birds and all their chicks should be really easy to spot, but I haven't seen a single one, and I've been looking out for ages."

Heaving a sigh, Zeref pointed skywards. "They roost in the Tenrou Tree, like most of the birds on the island."

"Really? Cool!"

"And now you know that, do you think you could maybe concentrate a little more on where we're going?"

Apparently not. "I wanna see them! Can we go up to the top of the tree and find them?"

"And how, exactly, are you planning on getting all the way up there?"

"Umm…" The boy glanced around for a huge ladder, and, upon finding none, he gave his companion an accusing look. "I don't know, but you said you'd been up there, so there must be a way. I've just gotta find it."

"Good luck with that."

"Or, you could take me there," he added hopefully.

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because if you got distracted and destroyed the branches we were standing on, we'd both fall to our deaths. Well, technically neither of us would die, I suppose, but I won't put myself willingly through that kind of pain. There's no way I'm taking you up there while you can't control your magic properly."

"Then, does that mean you'll take me if I can control it properly?"

"…Maybe."

"That's a promise!" the boy crowed.

Zeref blinked. "What part of maybe constitutes a promise?" he objected, but the boy wasn't listening, skipping off into the forest and promptly shredding a giant conifer. Zeref raised his eyes towards the heavens. "What am I doing, Mavis?" he moaned, setting off after the boy once again.

They arrived back at their camp. It was getting late, and the boy wasn't shy about demanding food when he needed it, so Zeref had called an end to the day's training (or, as the boy seemed to be treating it, the day's exploring). He sent Gildarts off to gather firewood – a task that now had become possible, thanks to his ability to control his power when he was concentrating, but one at which he remained extremely inefficient, thanks to his infuriating tendency to wander off after random animals and get lost.

In the meantime, Zeref hadn't forgotten his promise to try and cook the sweet potatoes. He hadn't bothered with anything like this in a great many years of exile – why would he, when it didn't make a difference whether he ate or not? – but if the boy could make an effort, so could he. He found some sticks of his own and took his penknife to them, stripping them down to sharp points before soaking them in water. He had also done a little foraging, turning up some mushrooms that he was fairly sure weren't poisonous, and something that he might have called an oversized courgette if he had found it on a farm on the mainland – or if it hadn't been bright pink. Still, it seemed edible. Knowing the boy, its weird colour would only make him more eager to try it.

The boy returned with a passable amount of firewood. Zeref built a small fire and lit it with a flame flicked from his fingertips – trivial bits of magic didn't count – then went back to sharpening his sticks.

"What're you doing?" the boy asked.

"Cooking."

"Cooking? You said we couldn't, since we didn't have any pans."

"I'm thinking outside the box. It won't be much, because I haven't done this for a while, but it will make a change. Here, hold this," he added, handing the boy one of the sweet potatoes before he could refuse.

"Okay. But what are you- ah!" This came out as a startled shout, because the moment the boy had taken his attention off the potato in his hands, it had broken into little orange chunks. Despair clouded his gaze at once. "I'm sorry… I broke it…"

"Perfect, thank you."

Zeref picked the potato cubes out of the boy's hands and began threading them onto his makeshift skewer. As the boy blinked in astonishment, he pushed the next potato into his hands. "Do this one too." The boy just kept staring at him, and moments later, that potato was neatly cubed as well. "See, we've discovered two uses for your power today: saving trapped birds and instantaneously dicing vegetables. That's much cooler than a magical tent, isn't it?"

"…Huh."

There was a faint smile upon Zeref's face as he held the vegetable skewers above the small fire to cook. The boy shuffled a little closer to him – possibly in search of warmth from the fire, possibly out of an interest in the food, but most likely because it didn't occur to him that other people might not want him invading their personal space. They sat there for a while, watching the vegetables slowly shrivel in the heat, and then, out of nowhere, the boy said, "You seem happy today."

"Do I?"

"Yeah. Happier than before. You're trying new things; fun things. When I first met you, you were kind of distant, but now you seem more cheerful… like you're more alive."

"Really? Well, I'd best put a stop to that, then," Zeref grumbled.

"No, don't. I like you best when you're happy."

"I don't care what you like."

Gildarts lay down on his front, resting his chin on his hands and gazing into the fire. "People aren't normally happy around me. I used to watch the other boys playing in the park, and they were always laughing and smiling and having fun, but whenever I tried to join in, they… they weren't happy any more. When I'm around, people are always angry or scared. But you're not. You never yell at me, even when I break things or hurt you. You're not frightened of me. And when you can be happy even though I'm around… it makes me feel like it's okay that I'm here."

Only silence followed this conclusion, but the boy didn't seem to mind. He was happy to talk to the fire. "I'm sure there was a time when my parents were happy that I was around, but… I don't really remember. Sometimes, when I'm just waking up…" His brow furrowed comically as he tried to think. "You know, until I met you, I had forgotten how warm people were."

"Warm…?" Zeref murmured, and he said nothing else. If only it were so easy to stop himself from thinking.

The boy had spent all of his short life being feared and despised through no fault of his own. The speed with which he would apologize for things; the worry dawning in his eyes whenever he realized he'd caused trouble; the readiness with which he would spring to tears; the need to cling physically to the one human being he could safely touch – they were far more telling signs of the boy's mental state than the words he consciously chose. Even the boy's tendency to get distracted by the smallest things was likely a mechanism his subconscious mind had developed to protect him from the world, because for most of his life, he had only been able to be truly happy when his mind was far away.

Looking in as an outsider, with nothing to lose, nothing to fear, and all the experience that the boy's family and friends did not have, it was easy for Zeref to see where things had gone wrong. Pushing the boy away, and driving him to feel as though he was good for nothing but bringing harm onto others, had been as much a cause of the problem as a response to it. The whole situation could have been avoided if the boy's parents had sought the help of a mage guild when his power had first surfaced – that there were still villages in this day and age which viewed magic with superstitious distrust astounded him – but failing that, if they could only have brought themselves to continue loving him despite it, the boy's quirk would never have developed into a catastrophic problem.

Not being involved, not getting attached – both of those goals had gone out of the window the moment the two of them had met, though it had taken Zeref this long to admit it. He wanted to help the boy because he was the only one who could. It wasn't just that he could solve the puzzle behind the boy's wild magic, because plenty of mages could have done that. It was because he alone had no need to fear the boy. What did he care about the boy's tendency to break things, when he did not carry with him a single item of material value? Why would he worry about being hit by deadly magic when he could not die? He was the only person in the whole world who could treat the boy like a normal human being.

And he understood perfectly what the boy was going through. No – it was more than that, wasn't it? He had found a boy who hated his own existence, but who had not yet learnt to hate the world, and he knew that it was not too late for him to be saved.

Saving people wasn't what Zeref did. Even if it might have been, a very long time ago, any remnant of that which had survived the centuries of rejection had died with-

"It's on fire!" the boy shouted, jumping to his feet.

Cursing his own inattentiveness – the realization that he had been paying less attention than Mister Absentmindedness himself was not a pleasant one – he jerked the makeshift skewers back from over the fire and saw, to his dismay, that one was now sporting its own little crown of flames. The boy was dashing back and forth in search of the bottles of water, but Zeref ignored him, wrapping his free hand around the burning wood to instantly douse the flames.

The boy skidded to a halt, staring at him with horrified eyes. "Did you just-?"

"Don't ever do that, by the way," his companion told him, somewhat unnecessarily.

"But didn't you burn your hand?"

"No." He held up his hand to show the boy his unmarked skin. "Kid, you do realize that every time your magic goes out of control, it's putting enough power through me to kill a fully-grown wyvern, right? If that can't leave a mark on this body, what on earth makes you think an ordinary flame will be able to hurt me?"

"…Oh." Gildarts sat back down again. "You're actually quite cool, aren't you?"

"Again with the surprise," Zeref grumbled. "Here, you can have the unburnt one. Careful, though – it'll be hot."

The boy took it gratefully and began tearing the vegetables off with his teeth. It was the closest thing they were going to get to a proper meal on the island, and though it might not have been much, in a strange way, it was important to them both.

The fire died out; its smouldering embers found their celestial twin in the fading twilight above. The boy got to his feet, yawned, and announced that he was going to get the tent so that they could go to bed.

He hadn't taken more than one step before a hand closed around the back of his collar. "Not so fast, kid. You haven't been for your evening bath yet."

"…By 'evening bath', do you mean 'being thrown in the sea'?"

"I can't get anything past you, can I, kid?" Zeref asked dryly.

"I don't wanna go in the sea again!"

"I don't care."

"But I don't need to!" the boy protested. "I can control it now!"

"Wrong. You can control it for as long as you're concentrating on it. That's about five minutes maximum when you're awake; when you're asleep, there won't be anything holding it back at all."

"…Oh. Does that mean I'll always destroy things when I'm asleep, then? Since I won't be able to focus?"

"Not necessarily. Once control becomes more natural to you, it should hold when you're asleep as well. You don't stop breathing when you're asleep, do you?"

"I guess not…"

"At the rate you're progressing, give it another day or two and you'll be fine. Right now, though, you need to go in the sea."

"I still don't want to. It's cold and wet and it's really tiring and I keep thinking I'm going to drown."

Zeref felt a twinge of guilt, but he pushed it away at once. That was one battlefield upon which he had to hold firm against his compassion. It was only because the boy believed he was in mortal danger that this method for draining his power worked in the first place. His magic reacted to his fear that death was imminent, and appeared in the most powerful form it could take in its attempt to destroy a threat that could not be destroyed, quickly driving itself to exhaustion. If he were merely swimming in the sea for fun, it would provoke no more of a response from his power than his ordinary lapses in control.

There was no danger – the blessing of the Tenrou Tree protected him from death by drowning, and besides, Zeref would intervene long before it reached that point – but if the boy understood that, it would cease to provoke the necessary survival response from his magic. If there was a less unpleasant way of draining the boy's power that didn't also damage the island (or Zeref himself), he'd be doing that, but letting the ocean absorb it was the best he had.

So he shrugged, and said, "It's better than you waking me up every five minutes in the middle of the night because your power has gone out of control again, don't you think?"

The boy mumbled something unintelligible. Then he sat bolt upright as an idea occurred to him – a motion which only induced a sense of trepidation in his companion. Craftily, he said, "Mavis says she doesn't want you to throw me in the sea."

"No, she doesn't," Zeref retorted, unimpressed. "Don't make things up."

"But how do you know she's not saying that?" the boy persisted.

"Because she knows I know what I'm doing. Her leaving you in my care involved a tacit agreement that I could deal with you in whichever way I saw fit. And right now, that involves dropping you in the ocean."

"Aww…"

"And don't be disrespectful to Mavis. She's the only reason why you're still alive."

The boy shuffled his feet. "I don't see how anyone could support the idea of you throwing me in the sea, though."

"Kid, anyone who has spent more than five minutes in your company would support me unreservedly. Now, come along, or I might just leave you alone in the dark."

A/N: So... hi all. I haven't been writing my usual notes at the end of chapters this time because I knew most of them would just end up being me complaining about all the problems I had writing this fic. (This week's problem: I now know why no one writes training sequences from the point of view of the 'wise mentor' rather than the 'young protagonist'. I tried shifting to Gildarts's PoV but it didn't work at all - the tension was even less believable, not least because it was obvious that Zeref had set everything up - so at least (mostly) staying with Zeref makes it consistent with the rest of the story. And of course, Zeref has it backwards - it's precisely because he was so stressed during that scene that proves he's a good mentor. Heh.)

Anyway, I only really came here to say thank you to everyone who has followed or reviewed this story so far - it really means a lot to me! As always, thank you for reading! ~CS