✘ ● ✘●
ZELDA'S best friend tells her that she needs to take a break from reading futures.
He does more than tells her, practically begs it of her. His reasoning lies within the fact that it has been fourteen days since Watkins Xavier stalked out of her tent with fuming rage, and it's been thirteen days since she's tried to forget about it. Still, every other customer she's had since is forced to bear through her pendulum of mood swings from her frustration with the voices that keep scolding her. They all say mockingly, What, are you gonna let another dead man walk? She has even accidentally hexed one or two unfortunate souls. It's another reason added to her never-ending list of why she hates Watkins Xavier: not only has he intruded into her mind without her permission, but he's also interfered with her life's work. He's made it to where she almost can't function properly, and he didn't even have to touch her.
"I'm just saying," the young man says as his eyes rest on Zelda while she drives down the road, "that you know, that it might be the best thing for you right now if you took a break. It'll get you relaxed, and I'm sure your mère would understand you have a lot going on."
She rolls her eyes. "I don't have a lot going on, Mathis. I've just ..." She punctuates the end of her sentence with a sigh. "I've just been preoccupied, but I'm fine."
"You "accidentally" hexed a guy yesterday."
"Excuse me, how do you know it was an accident? He got The Devil as his journey card; there's no doubt he's been doing shitty things."
Mathis gives her a look. Zelda shuts up.
He continues, "Z, you've been fixated on Watkins' reading for the past two weeks, and it's getting to where it's excruciating watching you try to read your cards. You need to help him out, or just drop it and, ya know, live your life or something."
Raising a neat eyebrow and turning her head to the side, she spares him an amused look as they pull into the driveway. "And what exactly do you know about living, Mathis?"
Mathis Jon Martin Corentine has been dead for over seventy years. Even after the curse was placed on the Dubois family and were exiled from their community, he did not fray and depart from the girl. Instead, they grew even closer. The family moved away from France to avoid persecution, and she could never allow herself to clean her hands of him — that was part of the problem. Because as his body began to betray him and decay from old age, she held his soul between her fingertips and refused to let go. Zelda feels as if their time together consisted of three blinks.
She blinks once and they are best friends. She blinks twice and never sees him again. She blinks three times and finds herself attending his funeral in 1989. His body may have died, but he never left. His soul appears to her often throughout the day, more than a dream but less of a man. Mathis adorns the same outfit she last saw him in: a crisp white button-down halfway undone to reveal a sliver of milk chocolate skin and a brown vest. He's absolutely timeless.
Mathis has always been the type of boy that was too easy to fall in love with, and that's why she can't let him leave. If she were to lose Mathis, she would lose a part of her.
The apparition gives an unimpressed look at her joke before rolling his eyes, scoffing. "I know a lot more about it than you do, that's for sure."
