Beyond The Gate
Chapter 10
To Carry Fate

Happy birthday to me~ I updated BTG~

I have written, and rewritten and reorganized and changed the song for, etc., etc., for this chapter so many times it's ridiculous. For the life of me, I just couldn't figure out how to say everything I wanted to. But here it is, at last. Chapter 10. I feel like this is a milestone for me.

Special thank you to sassyhazelowl for taking the time to look through it for weird patches.

Disclaimer: I do not own Fairy Tail or the song.

We Didn't Talk Much
And Still I Was Gone, Gone

-tyDi feat. Jennifer Rene "Carry You"

"Don't go after Rogue, Ultear."

The Time Mage gritted her teeth as she raced through the corridors of rubble that now made up the once flourishing city of Crocus. High above, the bloody moon cast its baleful eye over the world below – a disdainful god of destruction, come to watch the slaughter. And a slaughter it would become, thanks to the Shadow Dragon Slayer's future self.

"It's not like that!"

Of course it was! What else could it be?! There were dragons roaring all around; the world was bathed in the ruddy light of a tainted moon. Everywhere the little dragons screeched and people screamed. She desperately hoped that Meredy wasn't among them. They'd lost track of each other soon after the initial attack. Her daughter was out there somewhere; fighting for her life, and the future of humanity and Fiore itself.

"The future Rogue lost his way at some point."

This was a little more than losing your way! Ultear knew better than anyone what it meant to lose sight of the path and wander in the darkness. This landscape all around her was naught but death, with despair on the wind. Familiar and almost comforting, as if it were a caress from her long-gone mother. It called to a part of her soul that she thought she'd long since sealed away.

Yes, Ultear knew this place.

It was hell.

"He's not the same as the present Rogue."

Not yet he wasn't. He would be. That was how time worked, after all. A linear march, moving ever forward to a predictable rhythm and beat.

Though now that tune was muddled and broken. Mutable.

If she killed the present Rogue, it would all unravel. Time would settle back into its established pattern and calamity would be averted.

"This era's Rogue hasn't done anything wrong."

"He must be eliminated!" she hissed, her gut churning in anger and sorrow. "He can't be allowed to become what I did!" The world that she had once envisioned when she was at her darkest was not one that should ever become reality. Gray had shown her that.

Gray. Her little brother in all but name. Lyon. Jellal. Meredy.

Ultear wanted a world for them free of pain and suffering. Free from the corrupting influence of Zeref's black magic. A world without dragons and their would-be-king – the false Slayer, who had chosen to turn against his purpose and rule over dragons rather than slaughter them.

He had to die. Because there were people she wanted to live. It was that simple.

"The idea of killing him…"

Natsu's words were difficult to shake off, but Ultear was determined. She couldn't waver in her conviction. Not in the slightest, or she would falter and fall.

Instinct had her twist abruptly to one side, a blast of energy hurtling past her. Straight through where she would have been if she'd kept going on her intended path.

"Flash Forward!" she shouted, her lacrima streaking through the air. A barrage of hits landed against the creature that had dared to attack her. With a final shriek, it crumbled and the lacrima returned to Ultear.

Cautiously, Ultear stepped forward to inspect the remains of the thing. She prodded the rubble with her toe. No reaction. It was as if it had become just another part of the rubble around her. Were these things not actually organic in nature? Were they merely rock fueled by magic and infused with a purpose by their creator dragon?

Could her magic affect them directly?

Experimentally, she threaded the thing's time back together. At first, nothing happened. Then the pieces began to tremble and inched closer together. Ultear cut off the flow of her magic and the movement ceased. It seemed that she could influence these things with the Arc of Time after all.

But what could she possibly do alone, even with this ability?

"Are you trying to set us on the wrong path, too?"

All the pent-up hatred and self-loathing was rising to the surface of her soul. Natsu had been right, hadn't he? What was she trying to do? Killing Rogue… could she do to him what she had done to this abomination? Could she slay the Slayer, spill his blood across the flagstones and bathe her hands in his crimson lifeblood? Could she do it for Jellal to have a chance at his own redemption, even if it meant sacrificing her own? For Gray and Lyon's sakes? Or the world Ur loved?

For Meredy? Her beloved, beautiful daughter who deserved so much more than the life Ultear had forged in death and blood?

Now her own limbs trembled violently.

It wasn't a question if she wanted to or not, she told herself. She had to do it. Rogue had to die, so that her beloved people could live. So they could have shot at happiness.

Ultear could turn herself into a monster for them.

This wasn't selfishness. It was survival.

If there was one thing the Time Witch, the former leader of the Seven Kin of Purgatory, was skilled at, it was at being the one to survive. No matter what was thrown her way.

All that was left was to locate the Shadow Dragon Slayer's past, far weaker self. But how, exactly, was the crux of the matter. Methods of doing such were limited by the current terrain and incursions of monsters. Cursing under her breath, Ultear swiftly assessed her options. It wasn't as simple as finding him based on where the dragons were making a ruckus. There were seven of the beasts around after all, and Ultear couldn't afford to waste time and energy on sheer guesswork. Not to mention the likelihood that she ran the chance of encountering the same dragon more than once as she doubted their battles with the Dragon Slayers would remain confined to a single locale. A systematic grid search of the area was too time consuming as well, so it was quickly discarded. Nor was a random search a viable option.

There was no helping it then – Ultear would have to get above the action. This way, she would have the layout of the changed landscape. Get high enough and she might even be able to see all of the dragons at once. Then she need only observe which elemental magic was being used against which dragon. Yes, ascending above the general conflict would greatly narrow her hunt.

Ultear moved away from the corpse of the little dragon. With greater caution than before, she surveyed her immediate surroundings. She overlaid her mental map of the city before the dragon invasion with what she was currently seeing. 'Where were the tallest buildings before all this…'

In the distance, she spotted a single spire rising towards the sky, far above the tops of its surrounding architecture. The belfry! Of course; it was an ideal location. The bell itself could provide some sort of cover if the need arose. However… she would be effectively trapped up there as well.

It was a risk she would have to take.

A silvery snout poked around the corner of a building ahead of her. Cursing under her breath, Ultear decomposed the chain holding a large iron-wrought ornamental sign above the creature. The sign, free to succumb to gravity, plummeted towards the little dragon, impaling and pinning it to the ground. It let out a screech and ceased its movements.

Magic was not the only thing that could end them, then.

Good to know.

She took off down the path once more, searching for the path to the belfry. It continuously eluded her, as roves of the small dragons stalked the streets of Crocus – hunting anything that dared move. Flames from the dragons bathed the city. Even then, Crocus was not a city whose layout was familiar to Ultear, nor was it easy to intuit with its many winding streets and dead-end alleyways. The aerial viewpoint of the one map Ultear had seen was of little use to her now. That she had been able to find the palace and reach Natsu in time was more due to how large and obvious Mercurius was than by virtue of Ultear's memory. All of the rubble strewn about the city only made navigation that much more difficult, too.

A flash of blue and red caught her eye as she ran past what she thought might have once been a side street, but it was now fully open to the air with all the buildings lining it destroyed. Her feet slowed to a halt, and she turned back.

Sure enough, in the middle of the open space stood Jellal, and Erza.

And someone else. A woman with cat ears and a long tail.

"How could you ever defend a monster like him?!" the woman shouted, her voice strained. "You know what he did! He killed Simon, in cold blood! He hurt you!"

"I've forgiven him." Erza's level response seemed to infuriate the other woman even more. "And you should too, Millianna."

Ultear flinched at those words. Erza had no right to demand that of anyone. If there was one thing that she'd learned over the past seven years, it was that forgiveness was not something that could be demanded, nor should it be. All that would do is kick up the dust of enmity and bitterness. Forgiveness was something to be earned, after all. Forcing it only led to pain.

"Erza," Jellal said quietly, his shoulders slumped in resignation and his eyes downcast. "You don't have to defend my actions."

Guilt lanced through Ultear's heart. She'd spent so much time watching the man beat himself up over this very issue. Simon was Jellal's greatest and deepest regret, even over the suffering and torture he'd inflicted on Erza. It had left a scar in him that would never fully heal over. And at the end of the day… it was ultimately Ultear's fault that it had ever happened in the first place.

So she stepped out of the shadows, drawing the gathering's attention. "You're wrong about Jellal," Ultear stated. "He didn't kill Simon. Or at least… it wasn't entirely his fault."

Jellal's gaze turned hard, and he fixated it on Ultear. "Ultear," he warned, his voice low.

She ignored him, forging ahead with her confession. "I'm the one you should blame. I put a compulsion spell over Jellal years before and manipulated his every move. So really… I'm the one responsible for Simon's death. Me, and no one else."

Confusion stole over Millianna's face, the poor woman uncertain how to handle this new information. But after a moment, she furiously shook her head and glared Ultear down. "You're lying!" she snarled. "You're just trying to protect him, too! I won't fall for it!"

"Millianna…" Erza said softly. "She's…" Falling silent, Erza gazed on helplessly between the pair. Stuck in her unwillingness to foist all the blame onto Ultear and her instinctive protectiveness towards Jellal.

Jellal said nothing, unable to look any of the women in the eye.

He wasn't going to defend Ultear in return, that much was crystal clear to the Time Mage. It wasn't a surprise – in fact, she'd banked on it – but what was surprising was how deeply his silence cut her. But it was better this way, when all was said and done. This way, she could shoulder the blame that rightfully belonged to her, and resolve some of her sins while alleviating Jellal's.

Her will accomplished, Ultear spun on her heels to depart. Unable to look behind her to see their reactions, she strode away with determination. Vaguely, she heard Erza talking, but she closed her ears to whatever the Requip Mage had to say about her. She didn't need to hear it, didn't want to.

When she was out of earshot, she crumpled – collapsing onto the rubble, a puppet with her strings cut. Her chest was tight, and her heart was racing with her breath coming in short bursts. Sweat slid down her face and the world swam before her vision.

She had been going to kill Rogue.

The fact hit her harder than she thought possible, in the core of her being. It had taken her admission to her culpability in Simon's death to bring her to the realization that she had been about to take away the life of an innocent person. Again. Just like she had, time and time again throughout her life.

Redemption was nothing but a pipe dream for a monster like her. Here she was – poised to commit the same sins she'd been trying to repent for all this time. What kind of person was she, to justify it as if she were some sort of savior? A person without blood on their hands, forced into making a terrible decision?

What would Meredy think of her, now? With her hands soaking in blood once more? How could she face her daughter; the daughter whose parents she'd stolen?

Ultear would never be able to atone for anything. The truth of that seared away her willpower, her strength. She was just a monster, after all. Not worth saving, not capable of saving others. Only capable of killing.

The eerie, strained trills of the little dragons warbled in the air nearby.

Some instinct for self-preservation, buried deep inside of Ultear, took hold of her. She found herself standing up, and then stumbling forward towards a building that stood mostly intact. Entering, Ultear ran a hand along the railing of the staircase as she took the steps two at time.

Reaching the top of the stairs, she unbolted the trapdoor. With an upward shove, the hatch flew open. Her way now clear, Ultear hauled herself up and through the opening. On her hands and knees, she closed the trapdoor again behind her. Then she stood cautiously.

Horror coursed swift and icy through her veins as the world below came into view. Her gaze traveled far across the city, raking in the nightmare Crocus had become.

The situation was far worse than she'd thought previously. The initial rush to meet the dragons head on had split the once large gathering of mages into smaller, yet still sizeable factions. But then had come the ever increasing, oncoming waves of the little dragons, breaking them apart into much tinier groups and spreading them haphazardly across the city. With every new incursion dropped by Mother Glare soaring high in the bloodied, star-studded sky, the mages were further scattered. Harried and pressed, the humans were proving no contest as the little dragons surrounded them at their leisure.

It was a complete and utter rout.

Not even an hour had passed since the dragons were summoned through the gate!

Fires had also begun to spread rapidly in one district, ravaging everything that stood in their way and leaving only ashes and scorched stone in their wake. As if they had a mind of their own, they raced towards a group of mages fending off what could only be described as a horde of the little dragons. With bone chilling recognition, she spotted blue and red hair.

'No!' Ultear reached out her hand to the fleeing mages. Magic sang in her soul, replacing her fear as it pulsed under skin. She directed her gaze to the remains of a wall they would soon be past. Focusing on it, she tried to find the paths it had carved through time, searching for the frayed strings she could use to pull it together again. Finding them, Ultear grasped them with her magic.

She had once torn apart one of the greatest buildings on continent, the structure collapsing all about her as she laughed. Not a single bead of sweat had broken out upon her skin in performance of the heinous act.

But that had been seven years ago, and since that time, she'd become so much stronger.

"Rewind!" she shouted.

Light flashed, her magic stretching out before her. 'Please reach!' she pleaded with herself. 'Please be enough!'

It was.

The little dragons crashed into the wall, some breaking apart with the force of their charge while a couple of survivors stumbled away, dazed from the sudden impact.

Something sparked inside of Ultear, then. A feeling she had never felt before. It wasn't the power of magic singing throughout her veins – that was one she knew well. But this… this was something else entirely.

It was as if something inside of her had solidified, become concrete.

The certainty that she could make a difference. That she could save people after all.

She raised her hands, and at her command the city rose and fell, cutting off the little dragons, opening up escapes for the battling mages, and suffocating the fires wherever they tried to grab hold. Time unwound in Crocus, madly spinning out of control.

Ultear had never felt so alive as she did right then, so sure of herself and the path forming before her.

She would save them all, even if she used up every last drop of herself in the process.

We Sat In The Dark And Cold Place

-tyDi feat. Jennifer Rene "Carry You"

Ultear became aware of pain before anything else. Lancing through her skull, throbbing all over her body. A single inhale set her ribs to protesting the movement, and she coughed and choked, dust lining the back of her throat. Lying prone against something hard, she opened her eyes a fraction, only to find that one of the them wouldn't. Swiftly, she closed the other one again, the light filtering into it only increasing the intensity of her headache. Groaning, she tried to push herself into an upright position.

A scream ripped through her, agony flashing through her left arm like lightning. Her entire existence narrowed to the jagged edged pain coming from her arm, the totality of her being now focused solely to her left limb. All sense of time vanished, until the agony began to subside to a slightly less intense throbbing. Ultear forced her one cooperating eye to open. It took her several moments to recognize the thing lying at her side, twisted into too-many angles and encrusted with mortar dust, as her own flesh, and yet more to distinguish the thing protruding from the middle of it as bone.

Stomach churning madly, Ultear forced her gaze away. But the new view wasn't much better. All around her lay the rubble from the fallen tower from which she'd fought to save people. Shoulder-checked by one of the rampaging dragons, she now recalled. Her magic had been too spent to rescue herself from the ensuing fall. It must have knocked her unconscious.

Taking immense care to keep her arm immobilized, she pulled her legs to her to push herself to a standing position.

Or tried to. Her legs refused to move. Something ripped in her right leg, black spots from the resulting pain dancing around Ultear's vision. The sensation of something warm and wet sliding down the limb was vaguely registered. Careful not to move her broken arm, she peered down herself, and spotted the reason her legs had not responded to her earlier demand for movement.

A large chunk of concrete, rebar protruding from all angles, lay on top of her left leg. From her right protruded more rusty rebar, blood welling around the wound.

With horror, Ultear realized that she was completely trapped. So long as what pinned her legs remained, she was stuck in place – at the mercy of any still roaming monsters. Pain was something she'd long since grown used to; the experiments of her youth had seen to that. Now that the initial shock was over, Ultear fought her way through it. She ignored new twinges of distress from her midsection as she levered herself up as best as she could with her limited options.

Her hand grasped the rebar perforating her leg, searching for the current of her magic within her soul to break down the object from below its entry point to her flesh. She knew that if she completely disintegrated the thing while it still remain in her, there was a high chance of her bleeding out in minutes. For now the blood flow was mostly stemmed. Once she was freed from the ground, however, then she could do something about her other leg and seek out medical attention.

But her magic did not answer her call.

Again, she dredged her veins for it. Again, she found her magical container emptied. Drained completely from overuse, and any more ethernano she was absorbing being relegated to her body's recovery.

The burning sensation around her middle became too great, and she released the rebar, falling back into her previous position. She panted, but that only made it worse. Raising her hand, stained orange with rust, she drew back the tattered edges of her outfit, peeling it from her skin and smearing rust residue across it.

Dark purple bruising spread up her ribs.

Ultear closed her eyes and dropped her hand. A wave of dizziness accompanied cold certainty over her condition.

She wasn't going to survive this. It was a miracle she had thus far, though she hesitated to call her torture such.

Exhaustion consumed her as she lay there, unmoving with the summer sun beating down upon her. Not even the groaning of the concrete block on her leg shifting from gravity's influence stirred her to action.

So this was it, then. This was how her life was to end.

Somehow, it wasn't too bad of a way to go out. Ultear had saved so many lives over the course of the battle, or so she dearly hoped. She had no way of knowing how they had fared once she'd fallen. But surely some had survived, thanks to her actions. It was a small comfort, this small recompense to her great and many sins. Human lives could not be exchanged for one another, she knew. It was part of why redemption had always felt so far away from her grasp. Saving one could not return life to another. But it was something. It was something.

Ultear wasn't sure how long she lay there, in the ruins of Crocus. Her head was burning, and cold sweats shook her form. Shock, and possibly fever, she believed. It wouldn't be long, now.

A shadow fell over her closed eyes, chilling her further as warmth fled her body. Presuming it to be from a cloud, she paid it no mind. Then she heard footsteps, shuffling and clicking against the stone.

She opened her eyes, darkness clutching the edges of her vision and halos of haziness warping it further. In spite of this unreliableness, she turned her head to the side in search of the source of the sound.

Breath froze in her lungs, and her chest tightened at the sight that greeted her.

In the shadow of a wall that hadn't fully collapsed stood a figure. It resembled a human, but only in the most superficial of ways. There was something… other about it, an existential dread at its sheer wrongness rising in Ultear like the tide, unstoppable. Her instincts screamed at her, railing against its mere presence.

A grinning, fanged skull sat atop its shoulders, instead of a head. Two horns rose from it, twisting as they punctured the air. Its empty eye sockets were fixed in her direction, and Ultear knew with incomprehensible certainty that they were staring directly at her. Dark clothing covered its body, claws of white bone protruding where its feet should have been, and identical claws peeked from the sleeves of the loose clothes.

Whispers and legends and childhood tales swam through Ultear's mind, providing a name for the entity she was locking in a staring contest with.

Death.

Death had come for her.

Panic welled up in her, all her previous resolve fleeing in the face of Death himself. Her friends… her daughter… her amends… there was still so much she wanted to do, to see, people to meet. She had spent so much of her life either committing atrocities and consumed by the desire to right them that she had yet to actually live her life.

In that short moment between them, the numbness was chased away into the dark, and Ultear was left as she really was – a broken woman, battered and bruised beyond salvation, and overwhelmed with regret.

"I don't want to die!" Ultear found herself confessing in a violent expulsion of feeling. Tears welled in her eyes, and when they began to fall they left muddy tracks down her cheeks, carving through the grime coating them. "I-I h-h-haven't even beg-gun to make u-up f-for e-e-e-very-thing I've d-done. M-Meredy. M-my d-d-daughter. I c-can't leave her! I p-promis-s-sed I wou-wouldn't! I promised!" She gasped and choked for air, snot running from her nose to join her tears. "Jellal, t-too. He's… he's so h-hopeless. C-can't e-ven tell the girl…" Ultear swallowed thickly, and took a deep breath to help steady her voice. "Can't even t-tell her that he l-loves her. And Gray… and Lyon. They're… they're all… all I have left of my mother. P-please don't take me from them!" Despite the violent, screaming protests from her broken arm, and her bruised torso, she struggled to push herself a little higher. "And I'm scared!" she wailed. "I'm so scared! I didn't want it all to end this way! But I… I couldn't kill him! I couldn't bring myself to kill Rogue! I'm so sorry! I'm so sorry!"

But Death just stood there, implacable and devoid of expression.

Ultear slumped back against the rubble, her little remaining strength already spent. The only sound between them was Ultear's labored breathing, and restrained sobs. Everything hurt. Her chest. Her arm. She couldn't feel her crushed leg anymore. Somehow, the Time Mage didn't think that was a good thing.

Then Death moved, finally. He stepped towards her slowly, cautiously – as if she would (or even could) lash out at him. Coming to a stop beside her, he paused for a moment, and then knelt down in the rubble beside her. A bony hand, bleary and pale to Ultear's gaze, reached towards her. Death's clawed fingertips brushed Ultear's unbroken arm, cold as the grave to her feverish skin. She shivered and shuddered under the touch. Death's horned skull turned to the side, empty voids regarding her leg.

No, they were not quite vacant, Ultear groggily realized. There was a flicker of gold in their depths. Like the rising sun, liquid and bright. To her exhausted soul, that spark of colour was a balm, and her crying quieted.

His attention turned next to the ripped cloth barely covering her midsection. The deep, dark purple bruises were met with the same calm impassivity as the rest of the woman's injuries had been.

"I'm scared. I don't want to die," she whispered, knowing not where the words came from. Her world was starting to go completely fuzzy-dark at the edges. "Please stay." Ultear begged Death, her good hand weakly outstretched towards him. It hung there between them – stained brown with dried blood and rust and dirt.

She wasn't certain what she had expected to happen, in reaching out to Death. What was the point? But why shouldn't she, regardless? What did she have left to lose? He was there to escort her, wasn't he?

How kind of him.

Darkness pulled at her sight, and she let her hand fall.

A moment later, she felt the cool, smooth bones against her skin once more.

"No one," a dry, grating voice rumbled in her mind, "deserves to die alone, and in the dark. Rest, now."

A faint smile touched Ultear's lips, as her consciousness slid ever further into the slick darkness that crawled at her. Until finally, she couldn't hold onto herself any longer, and she knew no more.

Just One Single Moment Spent With You
I Lost My Space And Time

tyDi feat. Jennifer Rene - "Carry You"

And Death held her hand.

Never Had A Chance To Find The Way
But I'll Carry You With Me
Carry You With Me, Here Tonight

-tyDi feat. Jennifer Rene "Carry You"