𝐅𝐄𝐑𝐀𝐋 𝐂𝐄𝐀𝐓𝐔𝐑𝐄, divinity is a wretched fate.
Dreary Forks is a cramped town beneath a near constant overcast sky, enshrouded in evergreen.
Like every small town, Forks is rife with gossip. Most children's grandparents grandparents had b...
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WHEN ZACHARY WAS FOURTEEN, he was admitted to a psychiatric care unit after suffering his first 'psychotic episode'. His fingertips had brushed the cool knuckles of his classmates in his eighth grade lunchtime period as he reached for the same bottle of water. Blinded by the horrors of the meek-faced girl's home life, Zachary had cried out in the center of the cafeteria and staggered away from the wide-eyed girl from his class.
As a little boy, and a pathetic excuse for a liar, Zachary confided in the School Nurse, then his parents once they'd been called, and the doctors when they'd driven him to the ER in case of a head injury. He was diagnosed with chronic schizophrenia once he suffered three more attacks in a forty-eight hour hold, and Zachary had been medicated from then until early seventeen. Zachary had been urged to medicate again after he'd met her.
It's this memory, of being far too trusting in those that are in charge of his care and treatment, that leads Zachary to lie. Maude narrows her thin, kohl lined eyes on him as Zachary stares at his tousling fingers in his bouncing lap, as if she hadn't believed him even if he'd became a significantly better liar since merging with an immortal family he might have called his own a handful of weeks before. It makes him uneasy, to find a competence in a silver tongue where he'd once prided himself on being so honorably honest.
Her bony fingertips drum against the clipboard against her crossed knee, and Maude clicks the top of her pen, releasing and tucking the inky nib. Maude's tongue drags along drawn lips, her gaze casting toward the ticking clock as she had barely forced a word from Zachary's sealed lips. He insisted that he hasn't had any more visions—no, episodes, that's how they word it—and that he does not feel much at all about the Cullen's sudden departure or the wellbeing of his bereaved cousin. Zachary refused to give much of anything away.
Mostly because if he does, Zachary is rather certain that the thoughts that are ricocheting around his skull are certainly enough to scribble his name onto the patient list in Forks hospital's psychiatric ward. Zachary offers a strained and awkward smile to his therapist, with the chirp of her timer signaling that time is up as Zachary clears his throat and gathers his nearby backpack. Stubborn as ever, refusing to simply accept the boy's stony silence, Maude rises with the inelegance of a mortal that Zachary finds he's grown less accustomed to.
"Same time, next week." Maude choruses as she does every appointment and Zachary nods tightly before he twists for a sharp exit. It's a short, handful of weeks after their abrupt departure, and Zachary is anything but numb. Waves of agony swell over his head, a harrowing loneliness wherein Zachary wishes he could find solace in the dead. The grief and excruciation that Rosalie Hale had battled away on his behalf roars behind Zachary's eyes with a clash of unforgiving swords as the war in his mind discontinues its short peace.
A toss of his backpack into the passenger seat and Zachary slumps into the interior with a toss of his head limply backward and he stares blankly through his windshield at the red brick building ahead. Zachary doesn't want to go home to the decomposing bones of what had once been his abode, rotting with his father, six feet under the Earth. His dark mind insists he couldn't visit Leah as her hatred for the Cullen's would only intensify and Zachary isn't ready to listen to her venom, her 'I-told-you-so's'.
