Chapter Text
By now, the focus of the rehab efforts had begun to shift away from the original goal of getting a basic level of day-to-day function. Now the recovery outlook was clearer, the priority was on increased physical endurance, and getting Zeref back to a state where he would be fit to travel.
Even disregarding a very personal desire to go to Fiore, needing to travel would be inevitable eventually. As other nations began to warm up to the idea of having dealings with the empire, there was sure to come a point when someone requested a state visit, or just added ‘Emperor Spriggan’ to the list of invitees for an in-person diplomacy meeting. Having a tangible end goal helped significantly with Zeref’s motivation, as he could at least feel like the frequent aches which resulted from it all were for something worthwhile.
Theoretically, anyway. Stumbling around slowly with an orthosis and a crutch often didn’t feel very ‘worthwhile’ when he could get from A to B significantly faster, and with less discomfort, in his wheelchair. ‘It will improve’ people kept telling him, but if so it certainly wasn’t happening very quickly.
After a couple of weeks practise, Zeref’s original hopes of being able to swap the wheelchair for the orthosis in a fast-paced life-or-death attack type of scenario were looking… unlikely. At least in the near future.
He had quickly solved the problem of it taking too long to put on, as if entire armour sets could be requipped onto one’s person… why should the same not be true of disability aids? Requipping was easy, and had the added bonus of saving him from the mortification of being forced to wear the stupid shorts unless actively using the orthosis.
Walking, on the other hand, could not be called ‘easy’. It was slow, and often clumsy - with uneven ground proving even more of a hazard than in his wheelchair. The mechanical support from the orthosis helped with his movement, but it was also quite literally the only thing holding him upright. Zeref had very little voluntary control of the muscles in his left leg, so if his foot caught on a rock or in a dip it was far harder to rely on reflexes to catch himself. That’s why he was also encumbered with a crutch, to act as a sort of pseudo third limb he could ‘press down through’ to keep balance.
He was not very happy about all this, as the ‘solution’ wasn’t even a solution and he was – essentially – back in square one. Vulnerable, and ever-reliant on a wheelchair which was too easy for opponents to obstruct mid-battle. He had not even been allowed to give up on the orthosis! Whenever he complained about it, someone would immediately comment that it was ‘good to have options’ and extol its ‘usefulness’ until Zeref ultimately gave in and begrudgingly continued.
Deep down, he could sort of recognise that having even limited walking ability would be useful at some point. But nonetheless it was incredibly annoying that the device would not fix the problem he’d so desperately wanted it to.
Accepting that there would be things he couldn’t do – at least not in the way or with the efficiency he wanted to - as a result of the injury was something Zeref had thought he’d made peace with months ago. Although he had, at the time, Zeref found himself having to more consciously accept it now.
It had been far easier to make peace with it when he’d believed the impact on his life would be inconsequential. Indeed there had in that sense been almost nothing to ‘make peace’ with. Accepting the raw, hard, reality that ‘some ability to walk’ would not mean ‘walk efficiently like before’ was… challenging. It also failed to provide the ‘quick fix’, that he’d been so desperately seeking, for the fearful feelings of vulnerability which Noriko’s attack had unleashed.
But… not all of that was really the fault of his injury. Yes, being injured and less capable in defending himself had highlighted the problem… but being vulnerable to attack was also a natural side-effect of being mortal again. Whether walking or otherwise, he couldn’t ever truly guarantee his safety. Being mortal meant he could die, ultimately, when old age finally caught up to his body …or sooner if something went wrong. That was just… reality, albeit one he’d scarcely had to consider in centuries.
The more he thought about it, it posed the question of what was he trying to achieve by attempting to force through any protective solutions possible? Someone could have tripped him up whilst walking, and that could have been just as dangerous to a now-mortal wizard as getting his chair stuck! Being freed from the curse – with all the many positives that had brought – also meant potential danger was a part of Zeref’s life for the first time in centuries. So, somehow, he had to work out how to live with that reality.
It wasn’t going to be easy to do, but Zeref was fairly sure that doing so would make other things easier. If he could stop trying to pin everything on being able to walk more ‘properly’, then the orthosis not achieving that wouldn’t be such a massive issue anymore. Life was busy, even if half of that was thanks to all the trouble the MNMC had been causing, and thinking himself into frustration over this only served to drain him emotionally and waste time probably better used for other purposes.
That in mind, as he took an uncomfortable step forwards, Zeref considered that perhaps… it was unnecessary to force through another few minutes of practise that day. Tomorrow, or even the day after, would be soon enough. Settling back into the wheelchair was far more comfortable, and without the constant mental drain of focusing on keeping upright it was much easier to think about other things he needed to do. Like putting away the pile of books currently filling the coffee table, ultimately cooking some food… and completing the absolutely riveting box of paperwork Invel left for him earlier.
With all the extra work created by the MNMC’s meddling, he frequently felt like all he did these days was eat, sleep, fill in paperwork, and get sent to somewhere for a rehab session. His evenings were sometimes free for a few precious hours of magic study, but then Rahkeid had determinedly organised a ‘family evening’ and proceeded to make it a weekly – or twice weekly if given half a chance – occurrence.
Brandish also returned from her extended period doing in-person diplomacy in Fiore recently… and as if conspiring with the former to take up as many evenings as possible, she had immediately set about creating a ‘palace social’.
Unfortunately, the last people to hear this particular plan were the very two who would have quickly shot it down – namely, Invel and Zeref. Invel had grumbled about this significantly, and told Brandish off for ‘not informing His Majesty first’ whilst Zeref was left with a feeling that their lack of being told was deliberate… and precisely because they’d have put a stop to it.
Brandish had then unhelpfully ‘reassured’ him it would be ‘sort of like a Spriggan Twelve meeting, but more casual’. However that was true only in the sense that they used the same room. There was no agenda, people’s favourite topics were now the weather or food – neither of which Zeref found remotely interesting – and the second occurrence of this disaster had somehow ended with Ajeel challenging Jacob to a poetry contest. In Zeref’s opinion they both lost, as neither could write decent poetry in the first place, but if you asked anyone else – except Invel - Jacob had apparently narrowly won.
Eventually, Zeref put his foot down – so to speak – and declared that he was taking an evening off and would not be available for work or socialising until the following day.
Ah, the blissful near-silence of being shut in his own rooms when they were devoid of all other humans! At last he could relax, and rest, without being expected to deal with ‘poetry contests’ and absurd questions about his tastes (or supposed lack of taste) in food… among other such topics.
He suspected that the increasing amount to which other people filled his schedule was deliberate. To stop him having too much time to ‘be sad’, and to ensure there was almost always someone around to sound an alarm in the event of another attack. However with Noriko publicly declared to be on trial in a few days for attempted murder… Zeref thought that was probably unlikely. Certainly the MNMC would have had to lose all sense of ‘how the political game is played’ to try such a thing.
For now, though, Zeref attempted to put all of that out of his mind and instead focus on the productive task he intended to accomplish with his increasingly rare time alone.
Namely, putting some structure onto the vague idea of ‘attaching defensive enchantments to the wheelchair’ that he and August had been bouncing back and forth for several days. It had been August’s idea originally, and Zeref could only agree that it was about as perfect a ‘mitigation’ - for any battle he had to fight in the wheelchair - as was possible to achieve.
With use of the orthosis in battle out of the question for now, but the need for self-defence vital nonetheless… switching perspectives to work out how to defend rather than how to fight back was a brilliant solution. It wouldn’t be foolproof, nothing was, and if Zeref’s opponent worked out how to dispel the protective runes then he’d be left vulnerable once more. However, by choosing an obscure ancient script as the language for the enchantment, Zeref could certainly make it significantly challenging to achieve that.
Having talked the idea over across several days, August had ultimately given him a draft version of the spell one afternoon. The timing was either coincidentally brilliant, or a case of August having exceptional foresight. After a failed practise session where Zeref had tried – and often failed – to intercept various harmless spells as they travelled towards him, the intrigue of the draft spell had boosted his otherwise unhappy mood. With a day or so of distance since then, Zeref could admit that the practise hadn’t been a total failure. He’d managed to evade or intercept around half of them, but in a real battle the ‘attacks’ would not merely summon a silly glittery cloud.
He’d first brought up the suggestion that some practise would be necessary at one of their ‘damage control’ emergency meetings in the days after Noriko’s attack. It had been unanimously agreed that he ought to get back into practising combat-related spells with another mage, but Zeref’s potential candidates for help had quickly counted themselves out one by one.
Ajeel had rightly suggested that sand was not good for wheelchairs, Jacob declined on similar reasons of incompatibility, Rahkeid made a variety of incomprehensible excuses then quickly slunk away, and although Invel would have helped he was up to his ears in other matters. Zeref had then considered asking Irene, who had been unable to attend the meeting as interrogating the MNMC soldiers took priority. At least, until he concluded she might well find reason to get ‘creative’ with ideas like… subjecting him to a barrage of plant pots! …and thus the idea of asking her had been rapidly shelved!
That left August, and having helped train many empire mages over the years, he was admittedly in the perfect position to notice and consider Zeref’s new strengths and weaknesses in a battle situation.
Zeref hadn’t wanted to force the duty onto his shoulders though, which had been a large part of his decision to raise the suggestion more publicly. August hadn’t seemed to mind becoming the only remaining candidate, and quickly suggested the ‘glittery cloud plan’ as a way to prevent any injuries but still have a way to measure success.
August had always been an exceptional mage, with magic power of a level far exceeding normality even as a small child, but August’s skill extended far beyond merely having an abnormally large ‘magic container’. He understood magic exceptionally well too, even if various people had dubbed the copy magic he gravitated to using as ‘cheating’ and wrongly saw it as meaning he ‘lacked the skill’ to ‘focus in on one branch’. None of August’s exceptional magic-related skills were quite as surprising these days as Zeref had once found them. Magic was, in part, genetic and it was certainly true that parents’ with a high aptitude for magic were more likely to have children who exhibited similar traits. Considering the significant individual skill levels of himself and Mavis, it was hardly surprising that their son had been born with such an aptitude for it.
Having collected a relevant book from across the room, Zeref unsteadily sat down on the now-reinstated chair behind the desk in his study. He accidentally let go of the crutch as he did so, and Zeref grumbled unhappily as it quickly fell to the floor beside the chair. He had no need of it immediately, but it would be annoying as and when he did want to get up again so he awkwardly bent to pick it up and stow it in his requip space so it couldn’t fall again.
Reinstating the desk chair had been one of the few conveniences brought about by the orthosis. His wheelchair never had been quite the right height for the desk, so it was nice to be able to sit at a more comfortable level now. By reinstating a heavy-ish chair in such a frequently used location also, by extension, forced him into regularly practising the motions of standing up and sitting down again.
As he at last got to settle at his desk and focus on the magical conundrum before him, Zeref finally felt some of the stress of it all begin to dissipate. People had long thought him strange for it, but studying magic was – to him – an energising experience rather than a tiring one.
He could come to this ‘work’ tired and drained, work on it for an hour or so, and leave feeling strangely rejuvenated. Which was nice, even if it had also been known to result in him staying up until the early hours entirely unaware of how late it had got.
After a couple of hours work, which ended at an entirely reasonable 9:40pm, Zeref had a completed revision of the initial plan for the chair enchantment. It looked about right, but he intended to pass it by August before implementing it. Firstly because it was his son’s idea and he genuinely wanted to see what August thought of the revised version but, also if there were any mistakes, or anything which could be improved, it was more likely to get picked up by a second pair of eyes.
