Hysterical
A Beautiful Creatures Fanfiction
"Macon!" Lena burst in breathlessly, the front doors flying open without her touching them. Her black curls whipped around her shoulders as if she were standing in the middle of a windstorm (likely one of her own making, however unintentional). "Uncle Macon, help!"
Macon had settled back on the piano bench, though he wasn't playing. Slowly, he turned to look at her with a withering expression. "What were you doing outside anyway? I thought you were upstairs in your bedroom." Sulking about that boy, no doubt. Lila's boy... "What did you do, Lena, climb out the window? Mercy's sake, you know there's no call for that." It was just such a mortal teenage reaction to a fight with a legal guardian. He couldn't help finding it distasteful. "We have a perfectly good staircase."
Tears streamed down Lena's face in long messy, oily tracks. She was hiccuping and shaking so hard, Macon had to rise from the bench and come closer to even hear what she was trying to say.
"Ethan came back," she choked out. "I climbed out the window and met him at Greenbrier. We were just talking and–" Her sobs made her temporarily inaudible, but Macon caught the rest – the gist of it, anyway – in the remains of her raspy whisper.
Apparently, the boy wanted to give her some piece of jewellery as an early birthday present, and the moment their clasped hands held the bauble between them, he'd passed out cold.
Macon got the impression his niece was keeping something from him, that she'd seen something before the boy slipped into unconsciousness, like a vision, but she wouldn't – or couldn't – say.
"This is precisely what I warned you about when I said no friendships!" he snapped, the long silken tails of his coat swishing past her as she fell, hard, to her knees on the floor. "Whatever's happening, you know you can't control it. Keeping you apart protects the mortals as much as it does you. Remember that next time." He added in a mutter, "Assuming there is one."
Lena wanted to bellow that Macon didn't care about mortals – he'd never had a friend even in their world – but she couldn't; she could only thrust her face into her hands and scream a muffled scream of hysterical agony.
It was too much.
First the broken window, now the only person ever to be nice to her, not only here in Gatlin but anywhere she'd ever gone to school in all her travels, was sprawled out on the grass at Greenbrier, unmoving.
Maybe even dead.
By the time Macon returned, Ethan's limp body draped over one of her uncle's deceptively slender shoulders, Lena had stopped crying. She was sitting on the couch, staring into the enormous log fire burning in their massive fireplace. Her red-rimmed green eyes darted away from the fire, locking questioningly on Ethan's prone form.
"The Wate boy is just fine, Lena." Her uncle cleared his throat. "That is to say, he will be. I'm going to call someone for him."
"Who?" she croaked, wiping her nose on the back of her sweater sleeve.
"Amma Treadeau."
Lena craned her neck and frowned, uncertain. "You mean the seer?"
"Yes, that's correct, she is a seer – among other things – but she's also been with this boy since before he could eat solid food, so I imagine she'll know better than us how to look after him."