He shouldn't wear this mask each day, shouldn't sneak in candy bars and packets of m&ms to Angelina Sucre, the girl usually called simply 'Sugar.'
It was a fitting name, with her pale hair like icing and her insatiable sweet tooth. And for whatever reason, sugar seemed to make her more lucid, less likely to ramble about nonsense, less likely to take his hands and twirl around in unidentifiable patterns to music only she could hear. Give her enough candy and she was almost sane. Almost.
Benjamin Mortis, the man known as the Batter for god knows what reason, shouldn't have been hired. Shouldn't be allowed near the patients, shouldn't be able to hit them across the face when they unknowingly broke the rules he so rigidly kept. The man had anger issues that bubbled deeply underneath his careful, measured calm, splashing up to combine the two in a bizarre, emotionless violence.
He would report him. He should report him. But he was breaking so many rules himself by being close with Sugar, by wearing his white frog mask to work each day. Pablo, the head nurse, turned a blind eye to both men's rule breakage. And so Zacharie did as well.
He shouldn't have. But there was so much that shouldn't go on here.
Elura Vader, the oldest patient there, was the only one that was never touched by Mortis. Most days she just sat by herself, staring out the window and murmuring to 'Hugo,' the son that had died and broke her heart and her head.
Zacharie wondered if the Batter had once lost a child as well. If maybe that was why he looked at Elura with so much sorrow, so much as offs with his usually carefully indifferent expression and violent actions. If maybe that was why he never hit her.
Sugar and the other patients-they were collectively called the Elsens, after the name of the hospital-were not so lucky.
So often Sugar would cling to Zacharie with tears and a red mark across her face, whispering about angry duckies and scary things. He'd hug her and comfort her and slip her a chocolate bar, while staring at the Batter from behind the black eyes of his mask. He was weak, not brave enough to do more, and he hated it.
There was so much that shouldn't go on here.
But it did.