A/N - I finally got it out! The first chapter of my rewrite that is going to be massive in the making. After discussing how Fairy Tail could have been, the urge to try my hand at retelling the story finally won out and I joined the bandwagon.

Unfortunately, Bora decided to go ham and make the first episode longer than I had originally planned. But, to be honest, I truly love what I did with this, and I am excited to see how this all goes!

RE:Script

Episode One: Hargeon

By Genavere

Prelude

Fires smoldered throughout the ruins of the once tranquil harbor town. Smoke clogged the air and the lungs of survivors and family members looking for a speck of hope. They wandered the scorched wasteland coughing and with eyes full of tears from the sting and loss.

Shadows from giant beasts soaring far above plunged the hazed sun into darkness with their wings spread wide. No one on the ground reacted to them, even when some swooped down low. Each pass they made to protect those below a stark contrast to what must have felt like the end of the world hours prior.

The young teen thought it amusing. Dragons protecting fragile humans after it had been their own kind that caused the destruction. The massacre.

Next to him stood Igneel, King of the Fire Dragons. Staunch protector of the lesser races and of those dragons seeking to cohabitate with them. It had been on the power of his wings that he had arrived home sooner than normal transport would have allowed. A trip home he to the school where he resided would take nearly a week to complete, one way.

"Do you wish for me to search with you?" Igneel asked gently—as gently as a great beast like him could. The great king had dignity and sympathy, but knew not to step on another's pride. Already he grew to like the salamander for that reason. "I could help find their scent."

It would be faster, the teen admitted, but he knew he would not stand for it. What if his brother were alive and came face to face with another dragon? How terrified his fearless brother would be after such an attack; it would only be normal.

"Thank you, Igneel." He bowed his head graciously, "but this is a task I must endure myself."

The dragon nodded and settled back on his haunches. "I will wait here for your return, then."

A deep, shaky breath of the acrid air filled his lungs and brought forward an unpleasant itch. His heart pounded in his ears like drums beating in the distance to ward off rogue dragons and beasts. Through the smoke, ruins, and ash, the answer to his family's fate would be found. Nothing would be the same—nothing had been the same since the attack. A burning sensation filled the back of his throat. "The reality of yesterday is today's fairy tale," his mother's voice whispered in his ear.

With each step through the melted stones that had been buildings and paved streets, he peered through the smoke to try to catch his bearings. The drive to know the answer of what became of his family pushed him forward. That would be the best place to start. To find a hint of proof they had survived the attack.

He had been granted a miracle in the form of the dragon left waiting for him—he would not allow himself to waste it.

Igneel had been the one to report the attack to the school. Not a villager or messenger bird. He requested aid for those who might still be alive and sought for any students who hailed from the region. While supplies were brought out, the other dragons under him carried them off to help those in need faster. Igneel stayed, waiting for confirmation that there were no students from the area.

When the teen had walked out and stared up at the grand beast, they both acknowledged the other with mutual respect. And from there, the reality he had once cherished had become a fairy tale.

Through Igneel's network, word had spread that a group of dragons had entered their domain and had begun to attack. Several towns and villages had been wiped out within a short period of time. Erigeron, the quaint harbor town he had grown up in, had been the last place the invading dragons had set themselves upon before being attacked by Igneel and those who followed him.

Something strange on the ground squished beneath his boot and made him pause mid-step. Lifting his foot slowly, he stared down at the remains of a disembodied hand lying there on the ground. Most of the skin had melted off, revealing bone that still glimmered with blood.

A small part of him relished that the limb had likely belonged to an adult due to the size. Male, judging by the charred fingers. While the chance remained that it could have been his father's, he chose to ignore the idea and step over the limb. Someone else would take care of it. He needed to find his home.

Across debris, fires, bodies, and areas crushed or melted into one, he searched for some semblance of where he had grown up. Sometimes the old pathway he used to run down with his brother would snake unhindered through the hellscape. Other times it would be an old landmark that miraculously survived the onslaught.

One building that escaped the destruction, surprisingly, had been the bakery. Parts of it had crumbled and the door had been flung off the hinges, but inside, he could see the fresh bread that had been made that morning. The pastries that he had once shared with his brother.

As a treat, their parents would give them a few gems to split between the two and they would rush off to the bakery. If they managed to get there early enough in the morning, everything would still be warm, flaky, and melt in their mouths.

The old bread would be given for free, and they would take it to the river to feed the ducks and fish there. Fed animals meant the fishermen and hunters could bring home an easier catch. Unfortunately, when he found the river where they had gone swimming on hot summer days, all that remained of it was a dried bed.

There had been no doubt the reason for the lack of water. It lay there before him as a testament of the attack.

With its throat torn out, the corpse of a dragon blocked the river upstream and poured murky purple blood into the bed. Sharp, splintered wood dug into the beast and the mud and was all that remained of the dock he had helped his father build the same summer his brother had been born.

A fleeting thought of his environmentalist professor came to mind. The hazards of the acid seeping into the ground would be seen for generations to come, the toad would explain. It annoyed him, that scientific portion of his mind. His home had been destroyed. Anger should be brewing in his veins. Revenge consuming him!

All he felt was nothing more than a sense of numbness.

Turning around, he stared up the hill and spotted the remains of a home hidden in what had been an alcove of trees. The memory of the place—the sun streaming through the leaves, his mother walking with a basket of clothes—hid the damages.

The once tranquil home where he had been born—surrounded by family and neighbors. The same home where his brother had come into the world, belting out his displeasures with a pair of lungs that told the whole village of his coming.

The sunrays shifted to whiffs of smoke. Trees smoldered and disintegrated to ash. And the building shifted back from the past, revealing its damage.

Half of the walls still remained standing, but the roof was gone. From behind what still stood, white smoke sizzled and curled upward like snakes moving through the air. From the scent and color, it spoke of something worse than fire. The remains of the poison dragon flickered forward in his mind.

A strange emotion welled up inside his chest and gripped his esophagus. Everything tilted. The ground threatened to meet him. Stumbling forward, he gasped, and a name tore through the grip painfully. "Ig-Igneel!"

Dashing up the hill, he tripped and fell. A sticky substance stained his once immaculate clothes, but it neither burned nor hurt, so he ignored it. A ringing formed in his ears, enhanced by his heart beating like a rhythmic drum. His lungs burned. Lips gasped like a beached fish, and he fell to his knees by the melted stones that had once been his home.

"Zeref!" Igneel's voice caught him before his hands could grasp the debris to move it and a thick tail pushed him back. "Don't touch anything or the acid will eat away at your flesh!"

"B-but my parents!" He fought the urge to dig into the debris to find any hint they were alive. "My brother!"

"I will move them," the king answered gruffly. "My talons can withstand this acid, while your flesh cannot."

And true to the dragon's word, each stone, whole or melted, was carefully lifted and tossed to the side. To make things easier, the last walls standing had been pushed outward and crumbled. From what used to be the ceiling, wood beams lay in melted chunks. A back of a chair leaned on some stones—half of it gone and still sizzling.

Each stone moved felt like an hour of talons carefully picking them up and then chucking them in some random direction. From under a larger slab, a table he vividly remembered appeared.

Hope glistened in the heat of all the uncomfortable emotions swirling inside his chest and the air around them. Flimsy and far-reaching, he prayed to whoever would listen to him that his family still lived. That he would not be alone in a world that seemed to crave violence and chaos. He'd be willing to do anything to save them.

Anything?

He sucked in a breath.

The elation he had felt disappeared and darkness engulfed him. Any light from the fires, the smoke covered sun above, or from the glints of flames that tickled out of Igneel's nostrils as he carefully dug had been snuffed out. Nothing surrounded him, nothing encroached upon him, but a presence of immense power crushed down on his very soul.

"Who's there!?"

I need your word. The voice echoed around him, everywhere—above and below, different pitches from murmurs to shouting. It was disorienting. And though it looked as if he stood on solid ground, when he stumbled back against the onslaught, he neither felt the ground nor did he feel as if he would fall.

It felt like an endless void. Would he continue to float there with nothing around? An echo repeated from below. Nothing should be echoing from below. It was an impossibility that his scientific mind could not comprehend.

In this space, all your human senses betray you.

"Where is this space, then?" He pulled in a slow, steady breath, though something in the back of his mind said the gesture was senseless. Not doing so would have brought a deeper sense of panic.

In that moment, he needed his focus and attention on the void and voice around him. All of it could be his imagination, a figment to help him not go into shock and a catatonic state. But he knew that could not be the case in this situation.

It was strange, the gloom around him, but it felt familiar.

You are in the great between. The voice rumbled pleasantly. It seemed pleased by the curiosity of its guest. All souls who leave the realm of the living pass through here to the golden fields, and those who are reborn pass through here to enter a new life.

Life. Death. Golden fields. Reborn. His eyes widened.

"You are the God of Life and Death, Ankhseram, are you not?" In all his studies at the academy, only one God had the power over such things. His powers could render any that offended him cursed or sent from the world without a hint of care.

Perceptive of you.

"And you are able to save my family?"

Life is not so fickle to allow that.

"Then why have you brought me here, if you are not seeking to answer my plea?" An emotion roared up inside of him. One he had felt once before when an older boy in the town had hit his brother. As he did then, he balled in his fists. "I only seek to save my family!?"

Do you wish to save one of them?

His lips sealed and his brows furrowed. "What do you mean?"

Only one can be saved.

"Only one?"

Indeed, only one. The choice will be yours, but you will have to be able to bring their body back before I will return their soul.

Only one…His father, mother, and brother appeared before him.

How could he only choose one of them?

Growing up, it had been his father who had taught him everything he knew of working with his hands to build the structures needed to survive. Nets and poles for fishing, all the furniture they used in their home, the tools to cultivate the land for food. Through him, he learned that utilizing the talents of the mind can provide the greatest efforts to minimize the work of the body and urged him to question everything.

On cold nights when he lay sick in bed with fever, his mother would stay up with him and place cool towels on his forehead, give medicine she crafted from herbs and roots, and care for him until he recovered. At night, she would curl up with all of them on the couch and tell stories she had heard from local travelers. Her soothing voice carried them away on adventures with dragons and close friends.

But, if he were truthful, his baby brother would be the person he truly treasured. He still remembered the day when all he could hear were the cries of a bundle of blankets that held such a small creature. His mother had smiled and let him hold him.

"This is your baby brother, Natsu," she told him gently, showing him how to hold the bundle. "I'll need your help to keep him safe and teach him how to be a good person who values those he loves."

In that moment, he had felt an instant need to protect and help him navigate the world. Show him all the wonders that could be had. From the highest mountain range, to the valleys that scaled below sea level. He would see his brother's eyes fill with wonder and a bright smile take over his chubby cheeks.

If he had to choose between the strength of his father, the soft love of his mother, and the future of his brother…

He could only choose one.

"Zeref!" A gruff voice pulled him out of the darkness and he startled at the large beast before him.

"Igneel?" His brows furrowed and even against the heat of the fires around them, a soft breeze against the sweat on his skin chilled him. "What happened?"

Even with scales and a face unlike those of a human, he could see the concern the dragon had for him. The pinched muscles of his lips, the flare of his nostrils. They had only known each other for a short period of time, yet he felt he had known the salamander for eons considering the hell they witnessed together.

"I fear it might be shock, young human." He motioned to the debris with his large snout and the reason behind his words became evident.

The table had been cleared completely of melted stone and wood, but the middle of the sturdy surface had also dissolved away from the acid that poured through the roof of their home. Below, two figures embraced there in perfect view. The back of his father, who had used his size to protect his family, had melted away completely. Organs, muscle, bones, and flesh pooled together in his chest cavity. Blood drained to the floor and turned ash to mud.

Even with his father's attempts to keep his beloved wife safe, the acid that had eaten through him had dripped down to her. The only saving grace he felt looking at his mother's beautiful, yet blood-stained face was the obvious blow she had received to the head. His father's hand still threaded through her locks to keep her pulled against his cheek and pieces of her skull together. She had likely never felt a thing after that blow, unlike his father.

Under both of them, a small hand laid limp in a pool of blood.

With Igneel's help lifting his parents, he pulled the small body of his brother out and huddled on the ground with him in his lap. One half of his face dripped with the blood he had been lying in, and the other a grey tinged that marked death. With the weight of everything on top of him, even with their parents trying to protect the small boy, he had probably suffocated to death. His small body unable to move or take in a breath to fill his coated lungs.

He ran a hand through the dirty cherry-blossom locks his brother shared with their father. A sign of their heritage from the valley before the dragons had come and now laid to ruin. Everything was gone and destroyed.

Their village

Their people.

Their home.

His family.

A sob broke the silence and startled him. Had that come from him? The answer lingered on the outskirts of his consciousness he refused to acknowledge.

Another dark feeling settled heavily in his chest. Uncomfortable. Painful. It hurt to breathe. His heart pounded against the ribs surrounding it. There were people all around, but he felt so alone, clutching the pathetic body of the small, limp child.

He had promised to protect him. To keep him safe. No harm had meant to come to this child once full of energy and life. The still chubby cheeks of a toddler held no smile. Stood motionless and devoid of life. Not even in sleep had he been so still.

Have you decided?

Ankhseram's voice entered his mind again and sent a chill down his spine. That had been real? Blinking, he looked around, but the world stayed the same. No inky scrawl of nothingness covered the wasteland of corpses, ruins, and smoke. The large dragon still sat next to him; his great head bowed in mourning of a family he had never known. At the loss of such a young child.

A pang ran through his chest at the thought of this massive dragon, who had helped him in so many ways in barely a day's time, who would never know his brother. Would never see his excitement of seeing a live dragon or laugh at Natsu's childish antics.

No.

He would not allow it. There had been a path offered to him to fix this.

Clenching his brother closer, he nodded and stood firm.

He had decided.

A/N - Hungry for another chapter? Don't worry! This story will be updated bi-weekly on Fridays!

See you all on September 22!