Bad Habits
We all have bad habits. Biting our nails, lighting up a cigarette at every given chance, walking on our toes...small things that usually have little to no effect, when looked at as small things. Harmless, really. Isn't that always the case? Even smoking is harmless in the short-term scheme of things. But Zexion's bad habit was much worse than all that.
Zexion lied. Zexion lied as if his life depended on it. To hear a truth from him was to be afforded a rare glimpse at the real Zexion, the Zexion below the stoic, apathetic facade. But he lied so often, had gotten so good at it, that it was near impossible to tell the difference between his lies and the truth. He had no trouble at all keeping up with all the lies he told, never tripped himself up over them as some compulsive liars tended to; he almost seemed to have a mental filing cabinet filled to the brim with all his petty little lies, and another filing cabinet entirely for the serious ones, the ones that could result in the injury, or even death, of either himself or another person. These were much more common than they should have been, but that was just the way with Zexion. The unusual was made usual, and the usual was completely unheard of.
Zexion didn't always want to lie when he did. Sometimes, he would try to tell the truth, just let it all out, but the truth would sieze up in his throat, choking him, and a smooth, easy lie would slip through his defenses and slide off his tongue instead. And by that time he would have precious little choice but to continue with his unintentional lie, making it very intentional, and just as airtight as every other lie he ever told.
The truth of it was--the true truth, that is, not the truth that was a lie so cleverly disguised that even the best and brightest considered it to be truth--Zexion was scared of the truth. The truth, reality itself, was unwavering and concrete. His lies were like dough, to be remolded at his will as soon as he didn't like how things were going. Reality was too much for him. His own truths were much preferable in the end. No good could come from reality. It was too harsh, too unbearable, too impossible to deal with. He hated the world, and all its inhabitants. People were disgusting, hypocritical pieces of garbage who didn't give a damn about any other person. Zexion was no better, and he didn't pretend to be; he knew he was just as hypocritical, just as uncaring, as the rest of them. In fact, in most cases he was worse than everyone else. He didn't just not care about what happened to people he didn't know, he wished ill on them. He found himself hoping a natural disaster--or unnatural, that would work equally well, really--would simply wipe out the population of some major country. Would the world be a better place? Perhaps, if it was the right country. But that wasn't why he privately wished for such things to happen. He just wanted reality to be so cruel to everyone else that they would have no choice but to see that he was right to try to escape. To escape to his lies, his dreams, his books, all his different realities created in his own mind...
Those different realities were his paradise, his true escape. The lies were to deal with the truth of reality, the books were to stay absorbed in something while he was forced to be in that 'true' reality, and his dreams were never worth it anyways, too horrific to be considered anything but pure nightmare. The realities in his mind were the only true escape he had. And he cherished them. But he kept them as carefully-hidden as his own thoughts, because they were one and the same, and if they were known to the rest of the 'real' world...he would be put away in an asylum for the rest of his life, which would most likely be fairly long considering he was still in his teenage years. They could never know what he saw, heard, felt while he was in his own worlds--'they' meant anyone, everyone other than himself--'they' would never understand why his overly-analytical mind worked in such a way, nor why he needed such escapes as the ones he created, nor why he wasn't all that odd after all...They would believe him to be insane.
And so, Zexion lied as if truth was a foreign concept. It didn't seem like such a bad habit, after all.