He was really starting to hate trains.
At first, the rhythmic clatter of wheels against steel had seemed tolerable—annoying, yes, but something he could drown beneath the steady hum of his own thoughts. He'd even convinced himself, briefly, that the predictability of the sound had a sort of order to it, a pattern he could use to focus. But that illusion shattered the moment the child two seats behind him opened its lungs and decided that shrieking was the only form of communication worth employing.
It wasn't crying. That, he could have endured—crying was a natural thing, a sign of pain, hunger, or fear. A sound with cause, a problem with a solution. No, this was screaming—sharp, unrelenting, without rhythm or meaning. It was the kind of noise that ignored reason, that clawed into the base of the skull and burrowed. The kind of noise that existed only to be noise.
And Aelius, trapped in the narrow carriage with nowhere to retreat, felt his jaw tighten until the hinge ached.
He closed his eyes, forcing his breath even, but the sound still came, slicing through his thoughts like a serrated blade. A headache began its slow bloom behind his temples. He adjusted in his seat, resting an elbow on the windowsill, trying to look disinterested, calm—but inside, every fiber of his being wanted to snap.
His fingers flexed against his knee, nails pressing crescent marks into the fabric of his trousers.
It would be so easy.
Just a flicker of magic, a thread of his poison woven thinner than mist. Nothing lethal—he wasn't evil, not entirely—but enough to remind the little terror that shrieking in confined spaces had consequences. A rash, perhaps. Itchy, inflamed skin rising in red blotches across the arms and neck. Or boils, yes—fat, angry welts that would sting with every movement, every breath. Pain enough to silence him. Pain enough to give Aelius back his peace.
The image was almost pleasant. Almost cathartic.
He pictured the boy clawing at his own skin, confusion flashing into panic as his parents scrambled to understand what curse had descended on their darling. He pictured the silence that would follow, the train car finally still save for the clicking of wheels and the faint hiss of steam. He could recline, close his eyes, and sink back into thought unmolested.
Aelius exhaled through his nose, a low, controlled sound, and shifted again in his seat. His hand twitched, magic stirring at the edge of his fingertips like a snake coiling to strike—just one word, one push, and the problem would solve itself.
But he didn't move.
He wouldn't—not for this.
Not because he was merciful, but because it wasn't worth it. This wasn't the labyrinth, where a single irritation could spiral into danger. This wasn't survival. This was a train, crowded with civilians, each one ready to scream black the second something unnatural stirred. He already had enough eyes on him. He didn't need more suspicion, more whispers that the masked man in the cloak was a walking curse waiting to happen.
Still, the temptation lingered, sweet as poison on the tongue.
The child wailed again, louder this time, voice cracking, and Aelius's grip on the windowsill tightened until his knuckles went pale. His reflection in the glass stared back at him—mask dark, eyes faintly glowing, a figure every bit the villain people already suspected him to be. He could almost imagine leaning over the seat, one hand outstretched, and watching the air itself twist as his magic took hold.
But he stayed seated.
Instead, he muttered, just low enough for no one to hear, "If this is the price of travel, I may start walking everywhere."
The absurdity of it almost made him laugh. A S-class mage, killer of monsters, A wizard saint, brought low not by enemy or blade, but by a shrieking child and his own restraint. He leaned his head back against the seat with a soft thud, closing his eyes as though that might lessen the sound.
It didn't.
The screaming continued, the sound filling every inch of the carriage, reverberating in his skull like the tolling of a cracked bell. He counted the beats of the train wheels, matched his breathing to them, anything to anchor himself in something besides the urge to lash out. He thought of the wyvern. Of corruption. Of battles to come. Anything but the fact that the greatest test of his patience in weeks was sitting behind him, no taller than his knee, and armed only with a set of lungs.
"Boils," he muttered again, softer, almost wistful this time. "Would've been kinder than this."
After another few minutes of what could only be considered hell, Aelius's mind began to wander. The child's endless screaming gnawed at his patience, but rather than give in to the impulse clawing at the back of his mind to silence it, he let the sound drag him backward. Farther than he usually allowed himself to go. Before the labyrinth. Before Nehzhar. Before the blood and poison and masks.
Back to when he was considerably shorter.
Back to when he had still been just a boy in Fairy Tail.
The memory of those years was blurred at the edges, dulled by the things that came after, but they were still there if he forced himself to look. The guild had been louder then, or maybe he had simply been smaller, swallowed up by the chaos of it all. Every voice had towered over him. Every laugh, every brawl, every slammed mug of ale had felt like thunder.
He remembered sitting at the edge of the hall, chin barely resting above the table's rim, watching the others with that quiet stillness that had always set him apart. Natsu, charging headfirst into every scrap of trouble he could find, the building practically trembling under his recklessness. Gray, already stripping down without realizing it, barking challenges. Even Erza, though younger, already had that unyielding force to her, that presence that demanded attention.
And then there had been him.
Aelius—small, anxious, drowning in nerves. Every step he took felt like a trap. Every surface he brushed his fingers against, every glass he held too long, every flower he passed on the road to the guild—it was all a gamble. Would it crumble into dust? Would its roots twist and blacken, dripping venom until they writhed like serpents? Would something harmless suddenly become monstrous because of him?
He had lived in terror of himself.
The others had shouted, laughed, fought, and dreamed. He had sat in silence, palms pressed together so tightly that sometimes his nails cut his skin, just to stop his hands from wandering, just to keep his curse from finding. And when he couldn't hold it back—when a sprig of ivy withered at his passing, or a coin rusted in his palm—he had swallowed the fear and prayed no one saw.
It wasn't the kind of fear that faded with time. It nested in his ribs, it gnawed at his chest, and the louder the guild became around him, the smaller he felt—watching them all live so freely while he second-guessed every breath.
And yet, for all their… idiocy—because that's what it had been most days, loud, senseless, chaotic idiocy—it had been exactly those same fights, those same shouts and reckless dreams that had helped him gain some measure of control over himself. He had never admitted it to them, never voiced it aloud, but without their constant noise, without their endless interruptions, without the way they dragged him into the storm whether he wanted it or not, he might never have learned to keep the darkness at bay.
It wasn't the books Makarov had offered him, nor the solitary nights he spent staring at his hands until dawn, waiting for the shadows to creep out—it was them. It was Natsu shoving him into a sparring match he hadn't agreed to, forcing him to fight when all he wanted was to keep his distance. It was Gray, smirking as he challenged him, never giving him a moment to think, forcing his instincts to sharpen or else lose outright. It was Erza's lectures, her demand for discipline, for structure, for control—her sharp eyes that noticed when his magic slipped and her sharp voice that demanded he fix it.
And it was Mira, too, with her strange, aggressive patience. She had the uncanny ability to sit across from him in silence, doing nothing at all, and somehow her presence alone would keep his panic from festering. She hadn't been afraid of him, even when he had been afraid of himself. Maybe she should have been—but she hadn't.
He learned because of them. Not because he wanted to, not because he had some grand drive to master his curse, but because Fairy Tail didn't give him another option. Their world was too bright, too fast, too mercilessly alive for him to stay still. If he wanted to keep up, if he wanted to avoid being crushed by the tide of their chaos, he had to adapt.
And in time… he did.
Slowly and carefully, he learned how to touch without causing harm. How to grasp a flower by the stem without watching it curl into a husk in his hand. How to accept a tankard passed to him by Cana without leaving the rim corroded by his touch. He learned to shake someone's hand without fear that he would leave them marked with blisters, sores, or worse.
It hadn't been sudden. There had been failures. Countless ones. He still remembered the time he brushed past the guild's potted ivy by the door, and the leaves had blackened in seconds, shriveling into a tangled mass of rot. Natsu had laughed, Gray had frowned, Erza had scolded him—but none of them had looked at him like he was a monster. Not then. Not ever.
That had been the strange, infuriating thing about Fairy Tail. They never treated him like the curse he carried. They shouted at him, they teased him, they fought with him, but they didn't fear him. Even when he thought they should. Even when he wanted them to—because fear would have been easier than the stubborn acceptance they kept shoving in his face.
So he adapted. He learned. He became something more than the trembling boy afraid to breathe wrong.
Aelius leaned back in his train seat, eyes on the ceiling as the memories unspooled, raw and unwanted. For all their chaos, their idiocy, their reckless, maddening energy—Fairy Tail had given him control.
And that control was the only reason he was still alive.
And yet—perhaps in the greatest hypocrisy of all—he hated them for it.
For every step of progress they had dragged out of him, for every ounce of control he had clawed into his cursed veins because of their interference, he despised them. He hated them for forcing him to live when all he had wanted was for the labyrinth to finish what it started. He hated them for giving him enough strength to keep breathing, to keep surviving, when all he had asked of himself was to fall beneath the weight of that endless darkness.
If the labyrinth had been merciful, he would have died there. He would have been swallowed in its black halls, devoured by its hungering void, erased cleanly from the story. No legacy. No haunting memories. No weight of expectation dragging him back to a guild that shouted his name like it meant something. Death would have been simple. Final.
But no—he had lived. And worse, he had returned. Returned to Fairy Tail, where the walls were bright and warm, where voices called to him with infuriating familiarity, where he was reminded at every turn why he had once belonged. And that was the cruelty of it. To have to relearn. To remember.
He wished he hadn't survived José. He wished Phantom Lord had been the end of him, that his body had given out on that battlefield and left nothing behind but ashes. Because surviving meant remembering—meant being dragged back into that suffocating cycle of connection and obligation, of being someone's comrade, someone's responsibility, someone's friend.
They thought they had saved him. They thought giving him back his control, his foothold on life, was salvation. But all they had really done was curse him twice over. Once with the magic in his veins. Twice with the reminder that he was part of them, bound to them, tethered to Fairy Tail in ways he could never sever cleanly.
And he hated them for it.
Not with the sharp, clean hatred he bore for enemies. No, this was deeper. Muddier. A slow-burning resentment that settled in his marrow gnawed at him whenever he walked through those guild doors, whenever he caught the too-bright eyes of those who believed in him. They had forced him to stay alive, to adapt, to be something more than the broken boy he was. And for that, he loathed them in ways he couldn't even put words to.
Because all he wanted was the silence of the labyrinth. The finality he had been denied.
And every laugh, every cheer, every reminder of why he was once part of Fairy Tail was another blade twisted in his chest.
"Sulking and whining," Aelius muttered under his breath, the words slipping out more bitter than intended. His head tipped back against the seat, the mask hiding the faint curl of his lip, somewhere between a sneer and self-disgust. "Seems to be all I'm good for these days."
The thought sat heavy in his gut, unwelcome but unshakable. He wasn't blind to it—this cycle he trapped himself in. Brooding in basements, bleeding into cauldrons, gnawing on his own bitterness until it festered into something worse. He could dress it up however he wanted: training, preparation, strength. But when the mask was stripped away, when he caught himself talking to the ceiling as though his dead grandfather might answer—what was it if not sulking? What was it if not whining at a world that had already given him his lot?
He clenched his jaw and shifted his hand against the armrest, the cracked knuckles throbbing in dull reminder. The truth was simple, and he despised it for its simplicity. He could fight, he could kill, he could brew poisons that blackened the air itself, and yet here he was—complaining to empty rooms, snarling at memories, searching for answers in ghosts and half-remembered lessons.
Pathetic.
The word itched in his skull, loud even in the silence of his mind.
His eyes drifted toward the window, where the countryside streaked past, green and gold in the morning light. It was almost mocking in its serenity. Aelius let out a short, humorless laugh. "Nineteen years old, and I sound like some washed-up drunk crying over wasted youth."
He shook his head, tilting it against the cool glass. "Fairy Tail wouldn't see it. They never do. To them, I'm just—" he waved a hand faintly in the air, as though the gesture alone could dismiss the thought "—the kid who came back. The one who survived. The one who can be better, if he just tries harder." His voice dripped with derision, though quieter now, almost weary.
"But me? Sulking. Whining. That's the truth of it. That's what I'm really good at."
His reflection in the window stared back at him, distorted by the motion of the train, mask casting his face into something featureless, hollow. For a moment, he imagined it answering him, mocking him, whispering that it was right—that all his grand vows, all his chasing of strength, boiled down to the same endless spiral.
His fingers drummed faintly against the glass, slow, deliberate. "Then again," he muttered, almost to himself, "maybe sulking's all that's left when you're too weak to live and too stubborn to die."
Aelius took in a long, steady breath, trying to drag some semblance of clarity back into himself. The air felt stale, filled with the clatter of the train and the shrill of the child behind him, but he used it anyway—forcing his lungs to expand, forcing the weight in his chest to ease even if just by an inch. He wasn't proud of it, wasn't proud of this rut he'd been chewing into his own mind for months, but he was… tired. Perhaps more tired of himself than of Fairy Tail, and that was saying something.
The guild, at least, could be explained—loud, meddling, sentimental. Predictable. His own thoughts, though, those endless cycles of bitterness and loathing, they gnawed far worse. He'd gone through death, through the labyrinth, through things most of them couldn't even imagine, and yet here he sat, brought low not by some enemy or curse but by himself. By the inability to shut his own head up.
His hand flexed on the window frame, the ache in his broken fingers flaring, grounding. "I'll probably end up biting the bullet," he muttered, voice just loud enough for him alone to hear. "Fix this… side of me. One way or another."
Not loudly. Not openly. Certainly not in any way that gave Erza the satisfaction of being able to say I told you so.
The very thought made his lips twitch beneath the mask—something between a grimace and the ghost of a laugh. Ezra Scarlet, forever convinced that hammering her way into his life would force something to change. She saw everything in straight lines: problem, solution, done. If he gave her even the smallest opening, she'd leap in like a blade through armor, press until he admitted her rightness. And truthfully, her pestering didn't fix him. It didn't even come close.
But it did make him think.
And that was perhaps worse.
Because every time she forced him to face himself, every time she dragged the truth of what he was back to the surface, he was left questioning his choices. His path. The decisions that had carved him into what he was now.
He leaned his head against the cool glass again, eyes narrowing at the blurred landscape racing by. "Last thing I need is her being right," he whispered. "But… maybe I need her being wrong even less."
The thought lingered, unsettling, even as he tried to push it aside.