Chapter Text
Day came.
Mavis woke to swathes of gray-blue, sliced apart by the dark branches above. The surroundings were duly dull in the cold light, as if the world had been distorted through a screen of smoke and water.
Dry grass crinkled beneath her hands as she stood. There was a tight gnaw in the pit of her stomach, a persistent reminder of hunger.
She had not needed to fight the urge to sustain herself once the first few weeks had passed. If she kept at it for long enough, maybe her body would waste itself away, eventually.
It was a thought too optimistic for the six months she had already lived, but it lingered.
She moved without aim or direction, guided by nothing but fear gnawing at her heels, warning her to stay away, away, far from anywhere they could find her.
It was callous to think that the deaths of strangers would hurt less. But it was also the truth.
She walked. One step after another as daylight toiled itself into nightfall.
The air was chilly. Her clothes were little more than rags hanging on her frame.
There was no dispelling the burn of eyes on her. It had been terrifying when she thought it was real, and worse when she realized it wasn’t.
Dead eyes. The hushed sound of birds falling, limp from their perches. The thump of a body hitting the ground. Men, women, children. Dead eyes, all of them, countless of them, watching in the distance.
She walked when she did not sleep. The ground turned from smooth earth to sharp rocks to hot stabbing knives.
Her feet were bleeding. They healed again.
She kept walking. She walked until she was too tired to stop walking, and then she walked some more.
Eventually, it dulled into to something insensate.
Dead woods turned to living ones and living ones to dead again. Her feet were bleeding. They healed again.
Night fell.
There was a wide ditch surrounded by a grove of trees. A lake might have slumbered here, once, before drying out. She turned away, but she did not feel like walking, anymore.
She saw a bower. She sat under it and tucked her limbs around herself.
She did not sleep.
Day came. She did not feel like walking.
Night fell.
Day came.
The hunger was gone.
Night fell.
She was still tired.
Day came.
Mavis woke up.
For a brief, liberating moment, she could not remember.
Where she was. What she was doing.
Who…
She wondered if this was yet another dream, creeping through fitful sleep.
This one was new.
Zeref was standing before her. He was dressed the exact same way he did the last time she saw him, with nary so much as a rip or a stain on the robe and toga he wore. It was a far cry from the pitiful state she was in.
“I’ve been looking for you, Mavis,” he said.
“Zeref…” Her voice was rusty from disuse.
When had she seen him last? A year, or perhaps more? She had only started counting the days after she stopped eating. It felt like decades.
“You look terrible,” he observed.
Mavis stared up at him. He was smiling, and his eyes were not dead, but they were not quite alive, either.
“I haven’t eaten anything for half a year…but I am still alive...” She rasped.
“Such is the curse of Ankhseram,” Zeref informed her bluntly. He was not smiling anymore, his expression set in one of rare intensity. “You cannot die even if you were beheaded.”
But Zeref had come to look for her. He had taught her most of the magic she knew. He was one of the most powerful mages in history.
He could do something about this. He could…
The plea dragged itself out of her, broken.
“I beg you…please…kill me…”
“I can’t,” he said. Regret flashed across his face, the first sign of emotion that broke through his calm demeanor.
Mavis sat there, numb and uncomprehending. For a moment, the words refused to sink in.
She watched as he went on to tell her of his own experience – as he tried to convince her that eventually, she would find a way to cope with this, just as he did, if only because they had no other choice.
But he could not even convince himself.
With its simple law of killing all that he held even the slightest care for, this curse had turned his own mind against him. She looked on, stunned into silence as he spoke of peace and destruction in the same breath, unable to remember any of it in his next.
He could no longer see the contradictions in his own thoughts. She could...
For now.
Zeref stopped smiling. His pressed his hand to his face, as if trying to shield himself.
“I want to see my brother again…
“I want to destroy him…
“No, please destroy me…”
There was no escape from the hell of one’s own thoughts.
She should be terrified. This…this was what she would become. She could not imagine living like this, for years, for centuries, as a shadow of the person she once was, helpless as the mind she so prized slowly tore itself apart.
He had seemed sad, the first time they met. She never knew just how.
Zeref knelt before her, hunched in on himself.
The world rejected them.
He was hurting…
But he was not alone.
It felt like such a natural thing to do, in that moment, that Mavis never once brought herself to question it in all the years which came after. Anyone with any degree of compassion would have done the same, had they been there – had they seen the depth of agony another soul could possibly be in.
She reached out.
“I will accept all of you!” She grasped his shoulders, hard, willing him to believe. “There must be a way of breaking this curse. So don’t give up…”
The pain in his expression turned into shock – disbelief – and finally, touched comprehension.
“Let’s find it…hand in hand,” Mavis said, smiling through her tears.
“Mavis…”
Zeref leaned into her, pressing his head into the crook of her neck. It was not a loving embrace, safe in the knowledge of its own security. This – it was loneliness, mad in desperation and bleak in the simplicity of it, down to every inch of contact.
He was…warm. She relaxed in the hold. The black silence veiling her mind lifted, for an instant, replaced by a sense of peace. It was a serene contentment, as if there was nowhere else in this world she would rather be; as if they were made to fit like this, despite how utterly broken they were.
“I have never been treated so kindly…” His voice shook. “By anyone…”
“Surely not,” she whispered, not wholly aware of what she was saying anymore, searching for the first words she could find to soothe. “You merely forgot…”
“And I have never loved anyone this much in my life...”
She was gaunt from malnourishment, her dress was filthy and tattered, and her hair was clotted in tangles from dirt and grime.
But he looked at her like she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in his life.
Her heart did not flutter from her nerves, the way it had in their last meeting. It merely paced, counting the seconds passing them by as they held on to each other.
His eyes were alight with hope, soft with gratitude, and more alive than she had ever seen.
She closed her eyes.
The kiss landed on her lips, gentle as snow falling.
A gust rustled through the clearing like a sharp exhale.
Mavis felt the instant every life was reaped from the place without seeing it.
The air blowing on her face was warm. Light phased through her eyelids.
Mavis tried to fling an arm over them. Her hand pricked with pins and needles, refusing to move.
It was not morning. The sky was burning, with a warm intensity that implied that this was the last of daylight, rather than the first of it.
She struggled to open her eyes. There was a fire beside her, burning away the damp chill of the evening.
“You’re awake.”
“…Zeref?”
Fully awake now, she scrambled up from the ground to take in the sight properly. Zeref sat a distance away from her, with the fire between them. His eyes were fixed unnervingly on her.
The fire seemed to have been started magically, with little smoke from the flames, but his face turned blurry and distorted through the heated air every now and then.
“...You’re real,” Mavis stuttered the first thing that came to her mind. Her mouth was dry, and a cloying thickness stuck to her throat. “Did I just…fall asleep?”
She shuffled towards him when he made no sign of approaching.
Zeref hesitated before replying.
“You were tired,” he said at last, looking away from her and into the fire. “You haven’t been sleeping much, have you?”
Mavis shook her head. She knelt beside him and reached a tentative hand towards his face. His skin was uncomfortably warm.
Or it could merely be that her hand was uncomfortably cold.
He did not flinch away. Gingerly, he placed his hand over hers, holding it against his face before she could drop it. His eyes slid closed, and he let out a stuttered breath.
“Is something wrong?” She asked. A sudden concern took her over.
Zeref shook his head, opening his eyes. There was a familiar blandness to his expression.
“I thought…” he muttered. His hand tightened against hers. “No, it’s fine. Nothing’s wrong, Mavis.”
He didn’t sound fine. Mavis stared at his face. The last thing she remembered was her promise. The ghost of the last kiss shared between them still lingered on her lips.
Her face heated from the memory. The sky was burning, still, and it might have happened as soon as minutes ago. She just could not shake off the feeling that she had missed something monumental in the time since, but for the life of her, she could not figure out what it was.
Zeref lowered her hand, shifting his eyes to focus on her again. “Have you thought of what we will do, now?”
Strange that he would ask her that, when he had been the one telling her of Alvarez. She saw it for what it was, now – a standing invitation.
“I’ll go to Alvarez with you,” Mavis said without hesitation. “We can figure out where to go from there.”
“…All right.” The agreement was not reluctant; merely hushed.
“Is it at war, now?” She asked, realizing as she did that she knew nothing of the continent, and no news of recent. The year had gone by without leaving a single mark on her, slow and fleeting in equal measures. This was what it felt like to be stranded by time.
Strategizing through a war could bring her curse under control again. Within her, something akin to hope keened at the very thought. Yet at the same time, she found herself rebuking the idea instantly. The sight of bodies strewn haphazard across the ground was too fresh on her mind. She did not know if she could ever find it in herself to take so many lives into her hands again.
In all honesty, she was not sure which answer she would have preferred.
“I have not returned there for some time,” Zeref said. “They have kept in contact with me. I have not responded, of recent…but they would not start a war without my presence.”
“You are certain?” She asked. It seemed illogical for him to hold such confidence, but he would know better.
He nodded. “Tomorrow,” he said. “We can leave tomorrow.”
Without warning, he closed his arms around her. Surprised, she returned it. There was nothing discomforting about the hold – quite the opposite – but the sense of foreboding from before spiked through her again.
“Zeref…” she tried. “What’s wrong?”
His hand tightened around the back of her head, for a moment, before it slackened.
“Don’t worry,” he said, smiling. “There’s nothing wrong, Mavis.”
His voice was even, but there was something hollow about the way his words were strung together.
“All right,” she conceded, knowing there was nothing more she would get out of him for now.
She could not help but think there was something hollow about his smile, too.