InsaneJournal

FAMILY:

Mother: Jennifer Smith (Deceased).

Father: Albert Smith.

Siblings None.

SEXUALITY: Straight.
SIGNIFICANT OTHER: Single.

LOYALTY/ALLIANCE: None really except for his friends.
ROLE IN THE WAR: Coward. When things started to go down, Zach is ashamed to say that he abandoned a lot of his friends and escaped to Hogsmeade (see History for more detail).
POLITICAL VIEWS: Doesn’t really trust anyone.

HEIGHT: 5ft 10.
BUILD: Muscular.
EYES: Blue.
HAIR: Blond, typically dishevelled.
MANNER OF DRESS: Due to his job Zach prefers more practical easy to wash clothing like Cargo Trousers, T-shirt’s and hoodies. That’s not to say that he cannot clean up well when he needs to though, it’s just there isn’t much need to with his job.
OTHER: A long scar across his chest where he was caught off guard by a spooked Hippogriff. He also has a number of light scars on his arms from various animal bites or scratches over the years.
PB: Bradley James.

POSITIVE

CARING: If there was one word to sum Zach up, it would be Caring. Whether it is with animals or people, he hates to see anyone in pain and will go to great lengths to ensure it doesn’t last long, often at his own expense. It is part of what makes him so good at his job, as he’s willing to regularly go the extra length to look after loved ones and animals in his care. In the past this has included things like working 16+ hour days, waking up every few hours to feed an orphaned baby demiguise or putting himself in danger to save animals with poachers. With his friends though he is pretty much the same, willing to go to lengths to make sure his friends and family are happy and safe.

HARDWORKING: While Zach might have been born into a wealthy family, he was always made to work hard, maybe too hard at times by his father. His parents were afraid that if Zach had every luxury in life then maybe he would not appreciate the value of things. So, as soon as he was old enough he was expected to work menial jobs through the summer and any other school holidays. The only exception to this was the year that his mother was ill. Rather than taking a job as he normally would, he instead helped nurse her during her final days, both day and night.

PROTECTIVE: Having witnessed his mother and father not always having the healthiest relationship growing up, Zach has always been very protective of those who he cares about. This in the past has taken the form of things like standing up for people who he watches being bullied, or physically putting himself between a poacher and a nest of baby demiguises. While he has faltered somewhat in this a little in the past when his cowardice has gotten in the way, he still tries his best. Generally if you have won his close friendship, you have won someone who will look after you physically or mentally, through thick and thin.

ADVENTUROUS: Zach isn’t sure whether it was his adventurous spirit that made him take off travelling, or the travelling that gave him an adventurous spirit. Regardless of which way round it came, it is something that has now intrinsically become part of him. For the first time in his life away from his father, Zach found a new purpose and began to understand the man he wanted to be. With each new place explored, he discovered new things about himself and the world around him, things that helped him see the world in a new year. Whereas once he would be hesitant to try new foods or hobbies, now Zach happily throws himself out of his comfort zone whenever he can.

NEGATIVE

REMORSEFUL: Having not been one of the nicest people in the world, Zach experienced an awakening of sorts as he was travelling around Asia and Australia. Having realised he hadn’t always been the nicest of people and had an extraordinary talent for rubbing people up the wrong way, Zach tries his best to make up for previous wrongs. Not only has this meant that he tends to live a lot in the past and is often very hard on himself. He can often push himself to hard in the pursuit of trying to make up for a perceived wrong in his past.

QUESTIONING: Of all of his negative traits, this is historically one of his very worst ones. While in some people being inquisitive isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it is Zach’s method of delivery that gets him in trouble. He has a terrible habit of questioning things, in a less then diplomatic manner, until he is satisfied he has all the facts or understands the situation fully. In the past his lack of tact with questioning has seen friends falling out with him and being on the other end of a hex.

PRIVATE: This is a trait that he has unfortunately inherited from his father, an equally private man. That’s not to say he won’t share details of his day with you, or anything else like his father. He instead tends to keep his feelings to himself when it comes to personal matters. For example, even his Mother passed away while he was at school he didn’t tell anyone. Instead he chose to grieve in private and then go back to maintaining an outwardly normal appearance. This unfortunately meant he could act out, but as people didn’t realise why they just thought he had a bad attitude.

EASILY FRUSTRATED: Having being put under enormous amounts of pressure by his father growing up, Zach holds himself to very high standards. As a result of this, he tends to get very frustrated if he is slow to grasp something, or if it takes too longer for something to happen. Rather than focusing on how far he has come with something, he instead sees he’s failed at something and loses his temper. As a result, he does not tend to get on well when he is put into formal learning environments or has to deal with anything too bureaucratic.

LIKES: Animals, coffee, cold pint of beer, curry, crap telly (especially reality shows), documentaries, being outside, vegetarian food, self help books.
DISLIKES: Being stuck inside for long periods of time, formal clothing, being told he’s stupid, thinking of the past to much, seeing anyone or anything hurt, his father

HOGWARTS: As much as his parents both sold to him what a magical place Hogwarts was to him, their stories did not do justice. There really was an indescribable magic to the place, right from getting onto the train for the first time, to crossing the lake on the boats, right up to the Great Hall.

Standing in the line waiting to be sorted, he still remembered how painfully nervous he was, how much he just wanted somewhere to fit in. So when he was sorted into Hufflepuff and met some new friends by the name of Justin, Ernie, Susan and Hannah, he could not have been more happy. Rather than judging him like some of the kids at his Primary school had for being a slightly uptight posh boy, they took him as he was and offered nothing but friendship.

HIS MOTHERS DEATH: One of Zach’s hardest years to date, must be the year that he lost his mother in the summer of 4th and 5th year. While Jennifer had always been a little sickly while he was growing up, he knew that there as something seriously wrong when he returned home for the summer to find his mother collapsed in the kitchen. After forcing her to go to the hospital and get checked out, it was discovered that she had a terminal brain tumour and was unlikely to live much longer.

Opting to bring her home to pass away, rather than her passing in hospice of some description, with the help of Ministry Healers and Carer’s who would pop in throughout the day, Zach became his mother’s carer. To his friends, that year was the summer that Zach pretty much disappeared without a trace, however he found it hard to communicate with his friends with so much going on at home. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust them enough to tell them, more that by telling him was having to admit the reality of the situation he was in.

It was only 2 weeks shy of the summer holidays ending, that Jennifer passed away in her sleep surrounded by her close family. While she had a large circle of friends, Zach’s father, an extremely private man took the decision to keep the funeral extremely small, preferring to grieve in private. While Zach can understand why he did what he did, he still to this day does not agree with how his father shut so many people out of their last opportunity to say goodbye to his mother.

Returning to school only a week after the Funeral, Zach refused to speak much at all about the summer to people. It was only around 6 weeks into the term when he broke down crying from stress after misplacing something that he finally admitted to one or two of his close friends what had happened. After the admission, Zach locked his feelings tightly back inside and tried his best to keep moving forward in the way that his father had instructed him too.

THE FINAL BATTLE: In Zach’s life so far there have been a lot of moments where he has not been proud of his actions, none more so then on the night of the final battle. While his friends and House mates were preparing themselves for the battle of their life, Zach found himself a small alcove and had a panic attack. Not the normal variety either, the type where he couldn’t breath and his hands were trembling so bad that he could not stand up, let alone hold a wand. So, while his friends charged to the front, to defend their freedom, Zach instead picked up a few equally scared first years and fled to Hogsmeade.

Unable to bare facing his friends after such an act of cowardice, just a few days after the final battle, Zach packed up some of his belongings into a bag and took off.

A CHANCE ENCOUNTER: Having left so quickly, without a plan and without much money to his name, Zach drifted from place to place for a few months. Fast forward 6 Months after the battle, Zach found himself in a bar in rural Thailand when he got talking an older man by the name of Ephraim Larkin.

Ephraim was a travelling Magizoologist, conducting a tour of Asia in search of new animals and interesting animals to potentially bring back to the Zoo in England. Sensing that Zach was more than a little lost, and being in need of an assistant himself, he invited Zach to join him on his travels.

Rediscovering a deep passion for animals along the way, a few months later Zach official because Ephraim’s Apprentice, following him wherever he went.

FIRST LOVE: It was somewhere in the back and beyond of Australia that Zach first met Elisa. He had been working at a sanctuary for trafficked and poached animals for some time when a Hippogriff was brought in. Being indigenous to Europe, the animal posed a large challenge for the sanctuary as none of the current employees had ever seen one, let alone worked with one before. Despite only meeting one a handful of times during a Care of Magical Creature’s lesson at school, Zach was deemed to be the most qualified of them all. Spending weeks earning the animals trust, all it took was on misstep one fateful day for him to be attacked.

Sustaining a severe, deep strike across the chest, Zach was extremely lucky to have not died after the amount of blood he lost. Spending the next few weeks in hospital, it was when he was in hospital that he met a beautiful Spanish Healer by the name of Elisa. Elisa was a woman so like many of his friends back home yet was so wonderfully captivating at the same time. In a very short period Zach found himself smitten with her, unable to go more than a day at a time without seeing her. So after spending weeks getting up the courage to ask her, he eventually asked her out the day of his release to which she accepted.

A matter of months after first meeting Elisa, Zach knew (or at least thought) that she was the one. Buying a ring, he was all set to propose to her until one fateful night. Arriving at her apartment slightly earlier then arranged, he watched as she bid farewell to another man in a dressing gown with a kiss. Confronting her immediately, the reality of the situation left Zach a broken man. Far from her having another man, Zach was the other man as the man. The man he had watched leaving the apartment was her fiancé of 3 years.

It was then, that for the first time in a number of years that Zach felt any sort of homesickness. Whether it was the heartbreak that caused it, or just it was overdue he was unsure, regardless he knew it was time to finally go home. Packing up his bags, and putting in his notice, he began the long journey to return home to England and the life he left behind.

NAME: Tori.
AGE: 29.
TIMEZONE: GMT.
OTHER CONTACTS: Tori#3639.