Fairytale of Doom
By CrimsonStarbird
Chapter Thirty-Four – Obligatory Princess Kidnap (Reprise)
The dungeons.
The dungeons!
A shriek tore from Lucy's throat as she stomped back and forth across the freezing stone.
What was more clichéd than the grand finale of the princess's storyline being a royal ball? Only the princess being locked away until the arrival of her knight in shining armour!
It wasn't fair!
To make matters worse, the dungeons were so damn perfect. From the chains around her wrists to the grimy puddles that sploshed in protest beneath her feet, she truly had walked into the worst trope of all. It was a wonder the sturdy wooden door didn't ignite under the force of her glare.
"Are… you alright?"
From his place against the far wall, Zeref's eyes followed her progress warily, as though she were an unruly experimental spell that could explode at any moment.
Just what she needed: the guild's greatest enemy, bearing witness to her humiliation.
"Of course I'm not alright!" she fumed. "This is literally the worst thing that could have happened to me!"
A perplexed frown crossed his face, still looking at her like she was something other, something entirely alien to him. "I can think of quite a few things they could have done that would have been worse than mere imprisonment."
Lucy rounded on him at once. "Of course you can! Because you're not a cute female lead; you're a man! You've never had to contend with being someone else's prize! You've never had to accept that your main purpose is to motivate the hero, and power him up in desperation, and then be rescued to show his strength and his love! I bet you've never even been locked in a dungeon before!"
"I can't say that I have, no."
"Exactly! Because you're not a princess! You get to make your own fate!"
"I suspect the immortality and the death magic play a not-insignificant part in that too," he pointed out, but she wasn't listening.
"Do you know how many times this has happened to me?" she ranted. "Kidnapped twice by Phantom Lord; used as a hostage by Laxus; imprisoned in Edolas; locked up during the Grand Magic Games; very nearly tortured by Avatar; and I have no doubt that your own Dimaria would have joined the club if I hadn't been stolen away by this fairytale world instead! And that wasn't any better – I had barely a few hours of hard-fought freedom before I was kidnapped by a literal dragon and imprisoned in the highest room of the tallest tower! Because I'm a cute woman, and apparently that's all I'm good for!"
"Well, if you've been imprisoned so many times and lived to tell the tale, you must be an expert at breaking out," Zeref reasoned.
"Oh, you'd think!" she snapped. "But no! When does the kidnapped princess ever get any agency of her own?" She counted them off on her fingers. "I was rescued twice by Natsu during the Phantom Lord fiasco, technically Erza during Fantasia, Happy and Carla in Edolas – that was embarrassing – then Natsu again during the Games, Gray from Avatar, and I'm fairly sure Natsu would have thrown his hat into the ring a fourth time in the war even though my Prince Charming doesn't even like me in that way! And to top it all off, I get saved from the highest room of the tallest tower by freaking Mulan! It – isn't – fair!"
Her laugh became hysterical. "I went to your stupid ball!" she screamed up at the ceiling. "I put on a fancy dress and danced my way across the room and flirted with an unmarried member of the royal family! Isn't that enough for you?"
The universe gave no sign that it had heard.
Her shoulders shook to the sound of water dripping from the ceiling and echoing murkily in the gloom.
Zeref ventured, "Do you… want a hug?"
"Not from you!"
"Oh, thank goodness."
Lucy let out a startled bark of laughter and slumped back against the wall.
She shouldn't have stopped shouting. Now there was nothing to compete with the urge to cry.
"Do you want to talk about it?" Zeref inquired. "At a volume less likely to collapse the dungeons on top of us, that is."
"What, the evil emperor doubles as a therapist now?" she shot back rudely. "Why would you care how I'm feeling?"
"Because, when I agreed to go along with this rescue, it was very much a case of throwing my fate in with yours, and that's not looking like the best decision of my life right about now…"
Her snort came out suspiciously like a hiccup. "Yeah, don't stick with the most classic of all classic princesses unless you've got a knight in shining armour lined up to bail you out."
"That's not what I meant." He was watching her appraisingly from the far side of the dungeon, which suddenly didn't seem quite large enough. "My file on Lucy Heartfilia described her as intelligent, resourceful, and more likely than most in a notoriously chaotic guild to keep her head in a crisis. If I had to be kidnapped alongside someone from Fairy Tail, she sounded like one of the better choices. But the reality is… slightly more hysterical than I was led to believe."
Fortunately, Lucy had got stuck on the first sentence, and not paid much attention to the rest. "Wait, you have a file on me?"
"Of course. My empire has informants all across the globe. We have files on all our key enemies, including everyone in your guild."
"What else does your file say about me?"
Apparently deciding this was preferable to having her start screaming at the ceiling again, Zeref leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes. "Lucy Heartfilia. Descendent of my old friend Anna Heartfilia, and destined to open the Eclipse Gate, although Layla Heartfilia sacrificed herself to open it sooner, ending the duty of their bloodline before Lucy came into her power. Holder of ten gold keys and many silver keys, with whom she has bonds that far surpass her power level, granting her the ability to summon the Celestial Spirit King. Separating her from her keys is unlikely to make much difference given the affections of the Spirits towards her. Creative enough in battle to overturn a moderate power gradient, especially with Star Dress on her side. A great source of strength for Natsu and vice versa. Recommendations… her and Natsu to be separated at all costs, but with both believing the other is safe and well."
Lucy digested this for a moment. "Huh. Is that all it says?"
"There's evidence to back it up, but I assumed you wouldn't need that, given that it's your own life."
"Well, yeah, but… you didn't even mention my father. Or the fact that I ran away from an heiress's life to become a guild mage, or anything like that…"
Zeref's eyes opened again, regarding her with interest through the gloom. "Is that important? My forces are here to beat you in battle, not write your biography."
"That doesn't usually matter," she grimaced. "My upbringing somehow always seems to come up as important in our adventures…"
She sagged back against the wall. In truth, she'd probably said too much already to her guild's enemy, but in that case, did it really matter if she said more?
"I've tried so hard to get away from it all," she murmured. "I ran away from my father, who saw me as nothing but an asset to bear a rich man's sons in return for a lucrative supply contract. I left the world that rewarded such behaviour; the rules and the social norms that made a mockery of a young girl's dreams. I took nothing with me: not a penny of my father's money; not my friendships with the servants, who would be punished if my father had reason to suspect they knew where I was; not even my own last name, until it was brought to light by Phantom Lord's misdeeds. I fought so hard to become a formidable mage and be recognized as a valuable member of Team Natsu… but I'm not powerful like them. I always need saving. And between the climax of my story being a royal ball and needing to be rescued by a prince again, it seems like this world exists just to rub it in my face."
Zeref was silent for a long moment, and when he finally responded, it made her wish he'd stayed that way: "Back in that ballroom, you looked like you were having fun."
"I thought we had agreed to pretend that never happened!"
He shrugged, an indication that he would drop the subject if she wanted, but they'd both know her cowardice was the reason, and she couldn't stand for that.
"Well, I wasn't having fun," she huffed. "I hated every minute of it. No one likes stupid social dances with their stupid rules and the stupid idea that winning a rich spouse is the ultimate goal. People only do it because they've convinced themselves that they have to."
"Because they have to, you say?" he mused. "Do you know how I became the emperor of Alvarez?"
"I haven't the faintest idea," she said waspishly, partly grateful for the change of subject, and partly just irritated that she'd confessed all that to an enemy and he'd decided to make it about him. "I'm assuming it involved a lot of murders."
"It certainly could have done. It would have been easy, as an immortal, to seize the throne by force and rule with an iron fist. I didn't, though. I did it properly. I earnt that title. I gathered allies and outmanoeuvred political enemies; I learnt all the ancient social customs and turned them to my advantage. Any game that places such value on arbitrary rules no one will explain is ripe for manipulation. And yet every encounter on that battlefield was – is – different. One can play for centuries and still be tripped by new strategies, tested by audacious rebels, taken down a peg by the leaders of other countries. It is a challenge like no other; one where even I cannot be assured of victory. For an immortal death-mage who wins every battle by default… it keeps eternity interesting."
"Well, I'm so glad the future of my kingdom and the lives of my friends are such a source of entertainment for you," she lashed out.
"You're ignoring the point, Lucy," he observed, in a mild tone that hit home harder than her accusation had.
"I… I suppose I liked…"
In her mind's eye, she was once again sweeping across the ballroom, an unassuming servant-girl dispatching every opponent in her way until she had reached the throne. They underestimated her, those noble girls, with their lofty ideas of self-worth and low ambitions. And she had crushed them for it.
It never happened in her adventures with Fairy Tail. It never would, while she stayed with Team Natsu. Enemies calibrated for the likes of Natsu and Erza would never find her a threat; when she won, it was through chance and tenacity, never because she was simply better at the game than they were.
"I liked…"
Playing everyone in the ballroom with her performance. Doing it with a teammate – even if he could only temporarily be described as such – who got it; who complemented her own unusual skillset with sleek perfection. The two of them taking on an entire kingdom's worth of aristocrats, and winning.
She couldn't say it, though.
…
Why couldn't she say it? That, she thought, was the question Zeref was asking.
"I think," she tried, carefully, weighing every word for truth before letting it go, "that I shouldn't like it. I fought so hard to escape that world. Walking away from it was the best thing I ever did. So, doing it willingly… enjoying it… feels like betraying the person I've become. If I accept this stupid ball as the culmination of my character arc, it makes a mockery of everything I sacrificed to get to this point."
"Why?" he asked, patiently.
"Because it's weak! All the friends I look up to are fighting dragons and holding off armies singlehandedly, and I'm doing some pathetic dancing!"
"I fail to see how having a whole other set of skills can be anything but positive."
She scowled. "That's because you're not constantly fighting against the curse of being a cute female lead."
"No one else could have infiltrated the ball like you did. Reading between the lines of Lady Tremaine's gloating, it sounds like the other villains are guarding the castle from the outside, expecting a classic Fairy Tail strike-first-ask-questions-later assault – and you got right through those, all the way to me and the mirror. Anyone else in your guild would have been caught long before they managed that."
Lucy rattled her chains loudly. "Fat lot of good it did."
"Perhaps it did not achieve much in pursuit of your ultimate goal," he said, softly, "but it made a lot of difference to me."
Her heart jolted.
Their conversation had become so natural that she'd already forgotten how the villains had dragged him from the Beast's Castle like a broken doll. He had utterly lost: his coup undermined by Tremaine and her schemes; his image shattered by whatever had happened with the rose in the basement, which Cana had praised and Natsu had refused to talk about. Lucy had entered the ballroom to find the great Black Mage disconnected, defeated, still slumped on that throne only because high society was too polite to remove him openly.
He had been so very far from alive. Perhaps, before the night was up, he'd have drifted even further, beyond the point from which a newly non-immortal could return. The way he'd been when she met him, before he found out his enemies weren't abandoning him and the brother he'd given up on had refused to give up on him, she didn't think he'd have cared if he lived or died.
Now, she thought, he might.
And in this world, where there was no use worrying about a war that remained so very far away, it gladdened her.
She liked the way he was uncertain around her, well aware that his fate was in Fairy Tail's hands, and yet still not afraid to express himself, to discard polite conversation and cut straight to the things that mattered. It was exhilarating to watch him jump from deduction to deduction, dragging her along with him to confront parts of herself she'd been unconsciously shying away from. He got it, like no one else ever had.
He's trying to destroy your guild, she reminded herself, for the hundredth time.
But she was starting to understand, now, why Natsu hadn't let that thought stop him either.
It wasn't the first time she'd wished they and Zeref weren't enemies, but it was the first time that it wasn't out of fear of facing an immortal death-mage at the end of things.
"Well, maybe," she prevaricated. "I just wish I could have done it with some badass dragon-slaying, rather than a worthless princess skill like ballroom dancing, ruining every effort I make to try and change my image."
Zeref just shrugged again. His eyes glittered, but it wasn't at all malevolent; those little black gems were a hidden treasure of the darkness. "You saw me dance. Has it made me any less frightening, as your enemy?"
She snorted. "Of course not." Not unless there was some sort of rule that stopped his death magic from working within an hour of a waltz, or some such nonsense. The fact that he could play the games of high society and the fact that he could annihilate her friends with a flick of his fingers had nothing to do with each other.
"There you go, then," he concluded lazily, closing his eyes again. "I'll be adding what I observed to your file, but only because it's another battlefield on which I will need to watch out for you."
Before she could interrupt, he continued, "I think that in trying so hard to distance yourself from your past, you have given it too much power over you. You are trying to define yourself by its absence, but for as long as that forms part of your criteria for success, you won't ever be free from it. So, own it. You have skills that no one else in your guild ever will. You alone are able to convincingly play the part of a fairytale princess when you need to, all because you once lived that life, and survived it. Be proud of it."
"Yeah, well…"
Her protest floundered. Was he right? Could she see her ability to navigate high society as a secret skill in her arsenal, rather than a sign that she would never be a truly badass mage like Erza or Natsu?
Must I be one or the other? Zeref had asked her after their dance, and maybe it wasn't the inevitable worldview of a man possessed by the Curse of Contradiction, but the wisdom of someone who had lived long enough to see a different kind of truth in the world around them.
She knew he didn't do both at once, all the time; they'd caught him taking an extended vacation on Tenrou Island, after all. He walked into that imperial life and out of it again as he saw fit, so effectively that half the world knew him only as an elusive, sinister, genius of magic re-emerged from the shadow of history, and the other half as an emperor who ruled by the same temporal and archaic laws as any other.
And right now, she saw both and neither, a man who understood and even cared in a way that no one else ever had.
All her frustrations left her in a huff. "You know, Zeref, you're actually alright when you're not trying to destroy everything I hold dear."
"As we have established, it is in my best interests to keep you on side," he pointed out. "Besides, you don't seem to have been making much of an effort to hate me."
"No, well, I made a promise to Natsu," she grimaced. "I'll be sure to Lucy-kick the living daylights out of you once we're back home. For now, though… let's see what we can do about our current situation."
"Given our shared lack of magic and the fact that the only exit from this dungeon is securely locked, I expect there is very little we can do."
"That's where you're wrong. Zeref, help me take off my dress."
He choked. "I beg your pardon?"
"The problem with these magic-designed outfits," she continued, contorting her arm to try and reach up her spine, "is that they have no sense of practicality. I cannot, for the life of me, reach the zip… so give me a hand, would you?"
"Um. Why do you want to take your clothes off?"
"Because I'm a too-cute heroine; it's basically the rule," she grumbled. "Now, get over here, and help me take off this goddamn dress."
It took a lot longer than it should have done, largely because Zeref insisted on doing the whole thing with his eyes shut, the coward. Eventually, though, she managed to get the dress off her shoulders and her arms extracted. The excessively frilly, loose bodice now hung around her torso.
At last, the reason for the modifications they had made to Cinderella's classic dress became clear. Underneath her bra, secured to her stomach by cloth bandages that hugged her back in a makeshift corset, was an ancient book.
Now Zeref was staring, and it wasn't even at her breasts. "That's…"
"Yup," Lucy answered, picking at the end of one of the bandages. "I don't suppose, next time, you'd like to consider binding my best friend's life to something easier to conceal upon one's person? Like, a hairpin, maybe?"
He didn't seem to hear her. "Does Natsu know about this?"
"It was his idea," she shot back, annoyed that he thought she'd taken the Book of END into the heart of enemy territory without the permission of the one whose life depended on it. Finally, she managed to get the book loose, and stretched out her spine with a satisfying crack. "Good, I can breathe again."
Then she whipped around and held the book out to Zeref. "Natsu said you'd probably be able to use it to contact him in some way. Even if it's just the pain thing you did to him before. Can you?"
He made no move to take it. "I… but…"
"I told you – against all evidence, and all of his friends' advice, Natsu has decided to trust you. This is your chance to show him you are worthy of it."
"I… very well." Zeref still looked dazed as he took the book from her, although just as he had earlier, his gaze was already sharpening as he focussed on the task at hand. "Yes, I can do it without hurting him. It'll be harder to do in this world, though. The book has its own magic, but I'll need to activate it manually with runes. Did you bring a pen?"
"…Ah." They hadn't thought of that when they'd been planning. None of her friends had had the time to sit and study the book that held Natsu's very existence – and she honestly thought that none of them would have wanted to. It was a deeply uncomfortable object for all of them.
"No matter. I'll need something sharp."
"My shoes are made of glass," she volunteered.
He blinked. "Why?"
"It's a fairytale thing." She slipped off one of her glass slippers and whacked it against the wall, where it shattered in a satisfying defeat for impracticality. Picking carefully through the shards, she found what had once been the heel, splintered down to a fine point. "Will this do?"
He held out his hand, and she carefully placed the sharp glass into it. The care turned out not to be needed, however, as he unhesitatingly sliced it across his left palm.
Lucy winced. There were definitely places he could have cut that would have hurt a lot less. That was a man who was a little bit too used to a body that immediately healed all wounds it took. Still, he didn't make a sound as he dipped the shard in his own welling blood.
"Can you tell him we're in the dungeons, and that they need to go for Plan A?"
"Plan… A?" he checked.
"It's Fairy Tail," she sighed. "Of course 'charge in through the front door' was going to be Plan A. It was all Levy could do to convince them to give the ballroom route a go first."
"I'll see what I can do. It's not like sending him a letter, but with any luck, I will be able to convey the sense that something is wrong – which should be enough, if Natsu is waiting for a sign."
She watched in silence as he worked. Blood and glass hardly made for the most efficient writing implement, yet he moved with a grace that suggested it was far from the first time he had resorted to such measures. The ancient black runes on the page wriggled aside to make room for the new ones he was adding. Delicate crimson letters gleamed wetly up at her for a moment or two, before sinking into the paper and vanishing.
A shudder rippled through her. The thought that her unstoppable best friend could be so fundamentally affected by tiny lines on a page left her feeling so very uncomfortable.
"That's all it takes?" she murmured, as he inspected the page and then let the book fall shut.
"Yes, if you ignore the fact that this is the culmination of several decades' work," he grumbled. "Besides, it isn't as though the book is without any means of defending itself. If anyone other than me tried to write in it, it would probably kill them."
The words of her guild's enemy shouldn't have reassured her, but it still felt like a weight had been lifted from her shoulders. The book rested on his lap, one hand atop its cover protectively. After a moment, she decided to let him keep it, and focussed on getting her dress back on instead. Besides, Zeref could probably do with those bandages for his cut hand. She didn't want him helping her with the zip again with blood all over his fingers.
"What now?" he asked, with his uninjured hand still resting on his precious book.
Heaving a sigh, Lucy dropped down beside him. At least she could sit more comfortably now that she was no longer smuggling literature into the castle. "Now," she sighed, dramatically, "we kidnapped royalty await our Prince Charming."
A/N: A little bit of bonding time for our kidnapped princess and emperor. And oh, is that someone who doesn't just laugh at Lucy's rants, or says something sympathetic and moves quickly on, but actually listens to and challenges her viewpoint? I sense some character development on the horizon...
Happy New Year everyone! Thank you all so much for your support throughout 2023! ~CS
