Warnings: Rated M for violence, mental illness, substance abuse, suicidal things, language, sexual content and MENTION of under age sexual content.

Church of Beasts

Forever and ever
A night in search of a day

Everyone overreacted, in Zeref's opinion. Not about any one thing, but all things, always. Crying. Screaming. Peering into a dark-dark like their dark was the only dark.

Zeref met the absurd, the shock and the pain, with a stoicism that unsettled most everyone he'd ever known.

He could watch his father blow through his entire pay cheque in one sitting and listen to his mother scream about it and it didn't make him sad or helpless and small, it was like his chest was just one big sound chamber, it echoed and echoed and echoed, but it faded without ever leaving a mark.

He could watch Erik's dog get hit by a car and there was just an empty pit where he thought something should be.

He watched UP without getting wet-eyed when Natsu would bawl.

People called him strange and not because he swerved to crush a snake's head with his bike tire when he was six-years-old just to see what would happen, but because he did nothing afterwards, straight-faced. If he'd crowed excitedly, it would have been easier, because people understood better when the darkness was riddled with light.

In Grade Seven, his teacher, Mister Norman, had a massive coronary. He vomited up all of his butter chicken on his desk, slumped in it and died. Other children screamed, some cried, some even laughed because it was grade seven and they didn't know what else to do.

Zeref just sat in the chaos, feeling nothing except slightly nauseated by the smell.

"There's something wrong with him," his father had confided that evening. "He's not right."

"Because he didn't cry like the other kids?" his mother asked. "Because you know, everyone is different."

"Not different like he is. He needs help."

"He needs his family not to call him a freak."

"Maybe he should know," his father returned.

That turned into one of the biggest fights he could remember. Natsu's favourite plate was broken and he started to cry. Zeref took him up to his room and put noise-cancelling headphones on him while they played retro video games and he listened to the loud conversation below.

His mother put up a good fight but she lost in the end because that's what she always did.

Zeref saw a therapist the week following Mister Norman's death and learned words like dissociative, eremitic, and apathetic. Apathy was a sickness, he was told. And empathy was its cure.

But the truth was, it wasn't about light and dark. It was about grey. Endless seas of grey that stretched on and on. He trained like he'd train for an exam. I lost my Dad today, Zeref, and the correct answer was, I'm sorry to hear that, Doctor Raquel. And when people said happy stuff, too, like, Your cousin is pregnant, Zeref, he was supposed to say, Congratulations! Exclamation included. They gave him drugs. They did not make him enthusiastic, exuberant or earnest. Maybe if they had, his medicated brain would have liked them. But no, they took the dead inside and they smothered its rotting stench like Borax would. They made him fuzzy and tired and too drab.

So he filled the prescription and buried a pill in his mother's bird of paradise plant every morning. One day, it was going to die, and he'd have to explain why a bunch of yellow and blue pills were degrading in clumpy dirt and that would be tedious. Like acting okay, and alright would be. But he did not like those pills. And he did not like curious glances, taken-aback-stares when he looked on straight-faced when some tragedy would strike and people thought he should be upset but he wasn't.

So he learned to act.

And he learned to act well, imitating Natsu's injuries when he got them. Broken finger? Yeah. Mushed nose. Black eye. Cut calf. And then he imitated his response so he could get it just right. It worked so well, sometimes, even he believed it.

His phone kept autocorrecting to ducking. He'd never once meant ducking in his life. He erased the words and wrote them out again. He had an amazing capacity for patience. He'd been at it for five minutes, though, and had burned through the majority of his cigarette without smoking a bit of it. Eventually, his phone just rang, Ultear was less patient and was sick of Zeref's … popping up and disappearing.

"You could have just called."

"I'm not supposed to use my cellphone in the hospital."

"And you care so much about the rules."

Some, anyway.

She asked, "Was it the guy?" She'd put him on the trail of a mugger the night Natsu got jumped in the street, someone bragging that he'd stolen a kid's wallet and cell phone.

"No." Zeref examined the red cracks between his knuckles, the swollen bruises, the blues and the blacks. "The wallet belonged to some skinny kid. Have you heard anything else?"

"You know I haven't or I would have said something."

She wouldn't have kept it from him. He knew that. He just needed to hear it. "Keep looking."

"What are you going to do when you find them, Zeref?"

His shield cracked and the apathy he spent so long smoothing came roaring up to the surface and he could do nothing to tame it. "Kill them." He would. He would kill them all.

"You know you can't smoke in the hospital, right?"

Zeref hit the End button and put his phone back in his pocket. A girl was watching him. Her hair was so blonde it was white in its high ponytail, her eyes were rimmed with black liner and her scrubs were undone to her grey tank top. Her chest was covered in tattoos. Ugly creatures. Some of them had halos. Some were screaming in agony.

"Yeah."

She came further into the room and closed the door. She put her hip against a towel cart and smiled. "You're Natsu's brother, right?"

"How would you know that?"

"I was his nurse when he first came in. Angel." She put out her hand. Zeref stared at her chipped red nail polish. She took her hand away. "What are you guys doing back? He didn't get into another fight, did he?"

"He's getting his cast off."

She beamed. "So then why are you skulking in the supply closet?"

He liked the sharp curve of her lipsticked mouth. "I might ask you the same."

She sucked on her bottom lip, still smiling. "Can you keep a secret?"

He had them in spades. No one knew about the sickness in his head. No one knew about the gun under his bed. No one knew he thought of being dead. "It's one of the things I'm good at."

She came towards him. Zeref waited to see what she'd do. She smelled like lavender as she reached behind him and jiggled a panel loose on the wall. Behind it was a white paper bag. She opened it up. Pills. Lots and lots of pills in plastic bags.

"You're a bad nurse."

"Do you know anyone that's looking to buy?"

It felt like someone had grabbed his chest and torn a huge gap in it, and it was the echoing chamber once again. He did not like the pills the doctors prescribed, but he liked these. "Maybe a couple."

"I'm done work now," she said. "Your brother should be done soon, too."

Zeref took his keys from his pocket.