Title: A Few Days in the Life of Zacharias Smith
Challenge: The Emotion Challenge given out by Deadly Poppy. The next chapters will be centred around the following emotions: Anger, Lust, Shyness, Crabbiness, Fear, Happiness, Conceit, Betrayal, Love.
Characters: Zacharias-centred, though it does have other Hufflepuffs featured throughout the fic. :) Will end up having a pairing.
Authors Note: These are a bunch of unrelated drabbley-type things. Enjoy! :)
He just doesn't do sad.
It's just like how Justin doesn't do mean, or how Ernie doesn't do stupid, and that's why the three of them work so well together as 'friends'. One day though, Justin does do mean and he finds out that Ernie can be stupid, so Zacharias decides that that gives him the right to do sad whenever he wants to - like a free pass card or something.
Zacharias doesn't use said free pass card until the beginning of sixth year when the letter arrives to tell him about how the Death Eaters got to his little sister the night before, and then the sadness comes easier than he expects it to. It comes as easily as a crack in a porcelain vase. It washes over and over him in an endless tide, and it keeps on drowning him as he reads in such a simple emotion.
The letter falls from his hands and flutters to the ground where Ernie picks it up. Ernie looks at him with a pathetic look of sympathy and Zacharias is suddenly finding it harder to breath with a lump forming in his throat. He gives a broken sob and is soon tasting the tears which were threatening to fall from his eyes.
As Zacharias jerks away from Ernie's caring touch, he finds himself looking at the blurred image of the letter Ernie had just placed on the desk, and Zacharias is wondering how something as light as parchment can deliver the news of something so dark and earth-shattering to him as this.
It appears that Zacharias does do sad after all, and he doesn't like it one bit.