Archive of Our Own

Like many things in his life, Harry doesn’t remember when he first saw the boy with the blue eyes, but he remembers the scene which he’d visited over and over in his dreams.  And he remembers seeing that scene well.

When the dreams start, he’s four.  His mum and his dad have had their first real fight, after which his mum had taken he and Gemma to her sister’s house.  The girls spent the nights in the guest room; he slept on the floor between his cousins beds.  Ben snored too much and Matt woke him up as he tossed and turned in his sleep.  The floor was hard, the thin blanket left his skin icy, and the unforgiving darkness led him to even darker dreams.

It lead him to a forest.

Delemare Forest, to be exact.  He’d been there many times with his family, happier times--when just he and his father went out for “boys days,” family picnics on the lake, and soft cuddles on softer blankets.

Those memories are gone now, lost to the darkness where the streams of daylight don’t quite reach.

He’s surrounded by trees, and darkness, and boys

They’re everywhere.  Some with rucksacks, some with dirty bikes, and many with nothing but the clothes on their back.

No one says anything, not to him, but he knows what they are... they’re runaways.

He sees the sun setting through the gaps in the trees, hears the day birds calling further in the distance, feels the sense of nothingness closing in on him.

So he takes his empty hand and swipes it through his hair once before stepping deeper into the forest.

Louis is seven years old when he first sees the boy with the curly hair.

His dad comes home late that night, wearing a strong scent much different than the cologne he had been wearing before he left.  Louis pauses the cassette, only frowning slightly as the stereo falls silent--the echo of C’est La Vie fading away just as his father’s footsteps sound in the hallway.  Louis smiles brightly at the sight of his father, eyebrows only crinkling slightly at the way the man is crumpled against the bedroom wall, somehow foreign with his new posture.

“You hear from your mum today?” the man calls, too loud for the room, but Louis doesn’t mind--he’s distracted by the sweet burning scent now filling the air.

“No,” he answers simply, but it smells like his mom is home.

Louis recognizes the odor.  It would linger in the living room after his mum and dad got to fighting, staining the couch cushions when his father returned home in the early mornings, stumbling through the door with just enough balance to fall over the back of the sofa.

“What’d I tell you about listening to those shit girl groups?”

The man is no longer slouching against the wall, but rather crouching toward him, foot only shaking slightly into a heavy step forward.

“Don’t think I didn’t hear you hurry up and turn it off.”

Louis has never seen him this mad, not this close.  From across the room, maybe, as he yelled senseless words toward his mum’s turned back--but never this near to him and never toward him.  He grips the sheet tightly in his fist, having seen enough through the cracks in the banister to know not to shrink away.

“You think I’m stupid?  Is that what this is?”

Louis shakes his head quickly, so quickly it hurts, but he’s sure that the pain is less than that which would follow should he sit there dumbly.  

“You’re right.  Cause I’m not.  And remember what I told you--what else I know?”

This time Louis isn’t sure whether to nod or shake his head, so the pain comes anyway with a tight fist closing around his upper arm.

“I told you if you keep acting like a god damn woman, you’ll turn out to be a worthless faggot.”

It’s hard for Louis to hear, with his heartbeat pounding in his ears and his pink blanket billowed around his head as he’s shoved into the mattress.

“And I’m not having one of those ruin the family reputation.”

He punctuates the impending threat, lifting the scrawny seven year old easily from atop the bed by the still-tightening grip on his arm.  Once the boy is tilted high enough that they’re seeing eye to reddened eye, he lets the boy fall from his sight, moving past to casually shove the stereo from it’s place on the wooden dresser.   Louis arm feels broken, he feels broken, but he knows better than to cry over the wound with his father still in the room.  Rather, he numbly watches at the Sony clatters with a ground-shaking force and a few sounds of snapped plastic.

“Call your mom tomorrow and find out when the fuck she’s coming home.”

The man walks past him without a second glance, fumbling twice for the doorknob before finally grasping it in his hand.

Louis eyes widen and water at the unexpected sight of an ice-blue glare offset by red rimmed eyes.

“On second thought, maybe we can do without the fucking woman in the house for a while.  One’s enough for now.”

The door slams shut just before Louis eyes follow suit.  He squeezes them tightly, and wishes hard.  His mum once read him a bedtime story when he was younger, one about a puppet and wishing upon the evening star and dreams coming true.  Louis isn’t sure how to tell the evening star from all the other stars in the night sky, he isn’t even sure if dreams really do come true because all he’s seen so far is nightmares.  But if a wish is all he has left, then he’s willing to risk it.

He whispers quietly, too low to be heard from his father’s room but just loud enough to carry through the cracked window for the evening star to hear.

“I wish to get away from here, and for my mum to come home, and for someone to rescue me.”

Louis isn’t sure how wishes or evening stars work, but he guesses that the more you wish, the more likely it is that a wish will come true.  He needs more than anything for a wish to come true.

“If you wish out loud, it doesn’t come true.”

He holds his breath, tightening his eyes one last time before throwing them open, finding a boy in the darkness, leaning against the window sill.

“You’ve been crying,” the boy whispers now, still nothing more than an outline against the shadowed corner of his room.

Louis shuffles, swiping at his eyes and clutching his aching arm to his side, toward the edge of the bed.

“Where’d you come from?” his voice wavers, and he’s slightly scared that his father will hear that he’s been taking his punishment like a girl too.

The boy doesn’t answer, but rather takes the question as sign of eased tension, stepping forward to stand at the foot of the bed, hand running absently along the soft pink blanket as he spoke.

“Why’ve you been crying?”  he looks up from the fabric for only a moment, seeming to sense Louis’ discomfort before turning his gaze away once more.  “You’re hurt?”

Louis says nothing but whimpers as he clutches his arm closer, gripping too tightly at the sore skin.

Looking up once more, he finds the boy looking at him with frown tugging at the corners of his lips and puckering between his brow.  It’s only then that Louis realizes that the boy has come into the light.

He’s not much to take in, to be honest, a scrawny frame hidden beneath a baggy pullover and fluffy, curly hair.  It seems soft, and Louis finds himself thinking that the boy, himself, is just soft.  Shining green eyes intercept his gaze, and Louis flinches for only a moment at the direct contact.  He thinks that green eyes are better than his father’s blue eyes any day--they’re warm and understanding, just as soft as the rest of the boy.

“What are you doing here?”

Louis thinks this could easily turn into nothing more than round after round of confused questioning, but he’s thankful when the boy before him breaks the pattern.

“You said you need saving.”  He smiles into the answer, as if it’s the most simple thing in the world.

Louis thinks it’s a little bit wonderful to have a real life superhero in his own room.

He looks up, as if the boy might say more, only to find his green eyes fixated on the busted stereo at the end to the right of his bed.  Louis’ face flushes a shade deeper than his arm as he sets it back in it’s place on the dresser, frowning at the cracked plastic of the cassette player.

“What do you need saving from?”

Louis bites his lip, grateful that the boy can’t see anything more than his back from this angle.  He’s never had as much trouble talking as he has this past month--he’s never had as much trouble, in general, as he has this past month.

The words don’t come to him, so he turns to face the boy instead, eyes simultaneous pleading for him to understand and to leave it be.  At the sound of shattering glass, his gaze is torn from the green comfort zone to the uncertainty of the white wooden door.

He doesn’t say anything more before the boy is patting the bedspread, and reaching to turn out the light.  Even on his tiptoes, he can’t quite reach the switch and Louis takes a small air of pride as he helps a superhero do such an easy task.

A moment later, they boy is once again cloaked into the darkness which has developed a quality of protection rather than confusion.

“If you lie down, I promise to keep watch until morning.”

Ordinarily Louis might protest, claiming to be a big boy who can take care of himself.  He sends anyone trying to underestimate his abilities on their way, because he is a big brother with two little sisters.  He knows how to behave like a grown up.

But he doesn’t feel like a grown up right now.

He feels small and broken and tired, eyes heavy with tears.  He feels like he could use a superhero right about now.

So rather than fighting for pride, Louis fights to stay awake long enough to pull back the sheets and fluff his pillows, one of which he throws down to the floor for the boy, alongside the pink blanket.  With a final, content sigh, he rolls over to his side, resting on his good arm with his back toward the door.

Just as the world around him grows black and fuzzy, Louis calls out into the darkness.

“Thank you.”

He takes the silence as a promise of the quiet night ahead.

Harry is seven when he first sees to the boy, really sees him.

He’s in London--he remembers what it looks like from his parent’s anniversary vacation two years ago--roaming the busy streets.

He sees people: girls weighed down with shopping bags running to catch up with their mothers; older kids swapping jokes and handshakes as they board the bus; men with business suits, briefcases and stern faces.  He sees many familiar blurs, then he sees the boy in the distance.

He’s sees this one boy, among the bustling city, sitting.  He’s sat at the bus stop bench, watching the buses loading and passing by without ever making a move to board them.  Another bus pulls to the curb, passengers leaving and boarding and cursing as they stub their toe on the bottom step, but the boy just stares ahead with his glassy eyes.

Harry doesn’t remember what he was supposed to be doing before he began watching the boy, maybe this was the only thing he was really supposed to do all along.  The only step he takes is one toward the bench.

More people pass--a teacher, a lawyer, another suited man.  The boy remains still and so does Harry, until he sees Gemma pass in front of him.

She’s alone, and as she glances over her shoulder Harry can see the tears streaming down her cheeks.  Her hair’s matted and her eyes are swollen, and for a moment Harry’s terrified by how much she looks like their mum.  He made Gemma promise that they’d never end up like their parents, but here she is.  Harry’s not sure if he wants to yell at her for leaving him, too, or hold her in his arms like he’d seen his Aunt Dee do for his mum.

In the end, he doesn’t have to decide.  He doesn’t get the chance.

He takes a few steps closer, to get a better view, and watches as the boy slides over to make room for Emma on the seat.  He sits up a bit straighter and pulls in his arm which had been lining the back of the bench.

“What’s bothering you, love?”

She sniffles, but says nothing.  Gemma’s never said anything.  She taught Harry how to be strong.

The boy doesn’t say anything more, at least nothing about what’s gotten her all worked up.  He seems to get it.

Harry slides closer, dodging a businesswoman and hiding behind a waste bin.

“You know, my mother always told me that crying this hard gives you wrinkles.”

Gemma sniffles and looks up at him for a moment, looking slightly put off by the mention of that.  Harry doesn’t exactly like the thought either.

“So,” they boy says, reaching a hand out tentatively to brush away a strand of hair which has begun to stick her her wet face, “she made me promise not to cry without a good reason.”

Harry watches him, how his flat eyes begin to sparkle a bit and how that, in turn, seems to comfort Gemma.

“Your face is too pretty to be carrying around wrinkles over something silly or temporary.  Just promise me that you won’t cry unless it’s something that means the world, something you won’t mind letting the world see that you fought and came out alive.”

Gemma’s breath seems to stutter for a moment, catching for a moment then coming out in heavy bursts.  Harry reaches out from behind the bin, fully intent on stealing his sister away from whoever this boy is... who does this boy even think he is, hurting Gemma like this?

But suddenly Gemma is sobbing, and he’s still, watching as she flies forward almost instinctively to bury her wet face and wrinkles in the boys shoulder.  Harry should feel scared for her, protective, but he doesn’t.  He simply watches the boy easily reach around her, one hand rubbing softly down her back as the other cards through her hair... Harry almost feels more relaxed himself.

The boy tilts his head now, and though Harry can’t see his mouth, he can hear the whispers.  Soft echoes of, “it’s going to be okay, love,” and “let it out,” followed by the softest promise, “just let it go and it can’t hurt you anymore.”

Harry watches, transfixed.  He’s never seen anyone with such a finesse for comforting.

His Aunt Dee would hold his mum for a while, but in the end would end up leaving her with a warm blanket and some chamomile.  His Dad would walk by his room at night, tired, and telling him to stop his crying and go to sleep.  Even the lady with the pad and paper hadn’t been much help--the one that his mum insisted that the whole family go see--she’d just asked Gemma and him some questions about their mum and dad, then handed them tissues as she watched them with that wrinkle between her penciled brows.

This, though... this was something new, something to get used to.  He’s sure that he’d give anything to have this for Gemma.

Gemma.

Gemma doesn’t even have this moment anymore.

She’s lifted her head from the boy’s shoulder and is watching him closely know, with her own wrinkle between her brows.

“Harry?”  she whispers breathily.

She raises herself from the bench, now, stepping closer toward the bin.  Harry closes his eyes and wills her away, back to the bench, back to the boy.  Don’t do this, Gem, please don’t--he’s better for you, so much better.

But she’s there, shoving his shoulder and whispering to him.

“Budge up,” she breathes, and Harry pretends that he can’t feel the breath on his face, pretends that she leaves and goes back to the boy that can make her feel better.

“Harry,” she tries again, pushing and speaking more urgently now, “Budge up.”

Harry peels his eyes open, hating himself for doing so, and lets them adjust to the darkness.  He’s only confused for a moment before he’s sliding over in his bed and holding up the covers.

“Gem?”  he whispers in his softest voice.

He doesn’t have to ask the question for Gemma to answer it, just like Gemma doesn’t have to say anything for him to know exactly what’s wrong.

“He tried to come home again tonight...”  she whispers, climbing in and rolling over to face him.  “I don’t think mum knows I did, but I heard it.  The answering machine’s pretty loud without any TVs on.  He was out--probably drunk, too, as he was shouting in the phone so loud...”  her voice dies out, but Harry knows from experience that her thoughts are screaming.

He reaches out a single hand to rub down her arm, her breath stops and so does Harry, casually pulling his arm back.

“I don’t want to hear it anymore.”

More than anything, Harry knows this.

“Come on, Gem.  Get to sleep.  It will be better in the morning...”  he whispers, fluffing his pillow and turning to lie on his back.

He does his best not to reach out when Gemma’s hand brushes against his own, not to scare her off.  If she doesn’t want to believe she’s weak, then Harry’s not going to hold her like she is.

“But what if it’s not, Harry?”  she asks.

It’s the question they’ve never been brave enough to ask their mother.

“Then it will be better in your dreams.”

By the time Louis is eight, he knows some things.  He knows that if his dad stays out later than ten, it’s safest if the chores are finished and the lights are out before he comes home.  He also knows his mother is never coming home, he stopped waiting for her to walk through the door a long time ago.  He knows that the boy will scramble in through his window every night, and that he will keep Louis safe until the morning.

It’s nice to have these definite things, Louis thinks.  When dinner tonight or safety tomorrow isn’t something to be counted on, it’s all the little routines that give life some familiarity.

He likes routines.

He wakes himself up at seven thirty, dresses himself in fifteen minutes and tiptoes downstairs with rucksack and toiletries in hand.  He puts toast in the toaster (because he doesn’t have to noisily rummage for a bowl for cereal or worry about slamming the refrigerator door) while he sneaks off to the downstairs bathroom to brush his hair.  At five past eight, he eats and drinks a glass of water from the faucet.  By eight twenty five, he’s washed the dishes, brushed his teeth, and is on the bus to school.

His nights are never a routine.

It’s gotten better, though, he thinks... or maybe he just hopes.  The boy he sits next to on the bus, the one who asked him what awesome stories he had behind his bruises that first week of primary school, he says it’s just Louis hoping that it’s getting better.  He says that his mum watches American talk shows in the evening, he says that when bad things happen to people they just think it’s getting better because they want it to.  Louis isn’t sure if the boy, Stan, makes him more mad because he is trying to teach Louis something like he’s a child, or because Stan has a mum to teach him these things.  In the end, Louis just tells him to shut up, because that’s what he learned from his dad.

“He’s not home yet?”

Louis looks up from the poster he’s working on for the science fair, stopping his drawing mid-lava to see a mop of earth-colored curls falling through the open window.  He’s getting here awfully late, Louis thinks, because the superman alarm clock in the corner reads 10:45.  (His father had gotten him his own alarm clock for his birthday, telling him that since he’s a big boy now, he doesn’t need his dad to get him ready in the mornings.  “See, Stan,” he’d bragged the first school day of the new year, “I told you things were getting better.”)

“No, I’ve been keeping quiet, but I haven’t heard the door.  I went downstairs for a drink of water about an hour ago and he still wasn’t home.”

Louis shrugs, and gets back to work, mentally deciding between orange or red lava.  He doesn’t matter having the house to himself--maybe if he does it well enough he can move out and get his own big house and he’ll take care of it so well that his mum and the girls will just have to move in with him.

“Out late tonight, isn’t he?”

“Yeah, but it’s not like he hasn’t been out this late before...” Louis mutters, trying out a combination of the two colors on a piece of scrap paper, “Last footie match he was out later than I could stay up.”

“But tonight’s a weeknight.”  The window’s letting in a draft, and it makes Louis shiver a bit--he has to remember to shut it before bed.  If his father knew he’d been letting this much warm air out, he’d nail Louis’ window shut and that would be the last he’d ever see of the boy with the curls.  “You need to be going to bed soon--you should have been to bed already, probably--and he has work tomorrow, doesn’t he?”

Louis doesn’t know anymore.  His father used to complain about a lot of things:  Louis and work and Louis’ mum and traffic and being out of pints.  Now Louis doesn’t spend enough time around him to know anything about his life outside of the house.

The mix of colors just looks messy, and lava should look more round than the choppy lines of the combined crayons.  He huffs out a breath and pitches the pair of them off the edge of the bed.

Louis can feel the boy watching over his shoulder, not even his warmth but just his presence.  It’s been happening quite a bit lately, but Louis doesn’t think much of it.  Instead, he sighs and points to the color swatches on the notebook paper.

“Orange or red?”

He shifts a bit on the mattress, under the pretense of allowing the boy a better view past his shoulder, but really to scoot a bit further from the boy.  Usually the boy will show up right before Louis goes to bed, having just a bit more time than needed to get to the bean bag across from the door.  It’s the closest he’s been to anybody in quite a while.

“Hmm...”  Louis watches as the boy’s brow creases a bit in thought. “Well, I think that the red would be great and violent, but the orange is more like fire, more believable.”

“So orange?” he asks, leaning down to pick up the crayons from the floor.

“Orange,” the boy repeats with a nod and the slightest grin on his lips.

Louis doesn’t think that he’s ever seen the boy smile before--there’s never been much room for smiles considering the reason that he was there.  Come to think of it, there’s a lot of blank spaces about the boy, things never brought about or thought of.  Like his name, or his family, or school.

“Have you ever been in a science fair?” Louis asks, pretending as if the question means nothing when it’s really the only thing that matters.  He thinks he remembers him mom doing that quite a bit.

“Nope,” the boy says, flopping onto his back so hard Louis thinks he feels the bed shake.

“Do you go to school then?” he tries again, glancing at the boy across his shoulder.

“Of course I do,” Louis can see the laugh in his face, dimples and all.  Dimples--that’s another recent development.  “What, just because I help you a bit at night that makes me a superhero or something?”

A bark of laughter fills the air and Louis loses interest in his poster for the evening.  The boy is sitting up again now, sitting across the bed from Louis.  He seems bigger now, because everything Louis can see is shining green eyes and wide smiles with gentle dimples that Louis just wants to stick his finger into.  Why hadn’t Louis seen any of this before?

“You do realize that if I was a superhero, there’s no way I’d be wearing this old thing.”  He pulls at his sweater with a brief look of disgust before his eyes are lighting up again, “I’d have a suit, an orange suit, with a long blue cape... It would look like the sky when I fly.”

It’s Louis’ turn to laugh now, as he falls forward to hide his laughter in the covers.

“Well, then I’d have a red suit, and an orange cape, so that it would look like fire when I fly.  People would see me and think I was a comet--then I would be all over every news station in the world, all anyone could ever talk about.  Everyone in the world would care about me then, because I’d be famous.”

He must find his own joke more funny than Harry does, because when he doubles over laughing, Harry just lets out a little giggle.  But it’s loud, Louis thinks, the sound of Harry’s laughter.  It’s the loudest thing he’s heard in such a long time--until the front door is thrown open with a slam.

That’s the loudest sound of the evening, and it successfully silences the room along with all his thoughts.  He scrambles about his bed, trying to be as quiet as he can as he tucks the poster away in the corner of the room with the box of crayons resting beside the alarm clock.  He motions for the boy to remain silent as he crosses the room to switch off the light.  If he can just make it back to--

“Don’t try to act like you’re sleeping now!”

Something hits the door as the footsteps enter the hallway, but Louis can tell it wasn’t a fist.  Tonight’s a night where he’s mad with his words rather than his fists.

“Yeah, don’t think I didn’t hear you!”

The voice isn’t close, but it hasn’t left the hall yet either.  Louis’ eyes immediately find the boy’s figure in the dark.  He’s sat straight up, alert, and it takes all of Louis’ mental strength to remain calm enough to motion for him to sit still.

His father had heard--what had his father heard?  Had he heard Harry?  Was he going to lock the windows and take Louis from his room?  Would Louis ever see the boy again?

“Go to bed!” he calls out, punctuating it with the slam of another door.

Louis can tell that will be all for the night, that he’ll fall into his own bed and be out like a light until the next afternoon. Maybe Louis should follow suit.

He sighs as he crawls into bed, not in defeat but rather like a lazy huff of air--he can relax now.  As he shoves himself under the covers, he sees the boy raise himself from the other side.  Louis can make out a pair of scrawny limbs moving through the moonlight toward the bean bag chair.  He does it so focused, so dutifully, not even bothering to grab for his usual throw blanket until Louis has launched it across the room toward his face.

“Thanks,” he hears the smile in the boy’s voice and took in the sight of him just once more before rolling over.  “Night, Louis.”

“Goodnight,” Louis whispers into the grey of his eyelids, only to have them fly open a moment later.  “Hey?”

“Yeah, Louis?”

“If you’re no superhero with some super secret identity, how come I don’t know your name?”

Louis lazily rolls over in bed, blinking into the darkness as he searches for that mop of curls and an answer.

“You never asked.”

The boy’s answer is simple, just like Louis’ finding many things about him to be.

“Can I ask now?” Louis pauses, but doesn’t really wait for an answer.  He’s too tired--he doesn’t have enough minutes left in the day.  “What is your name?”

“Harry,”  the word is short and soft across the air between them.

Louis can imagine it’s being carried on a draft, the wind through the window he still hasn’t shut--but he doesn’t care, not about drafts and not about windows.  It’s too late for that.  The only thing he has energy for now is sleep and--

“Harry,” he repeats, and maybe if he says it carefully enough he’ll still remember it in the morning.  “Good night, Harry.”

By the time Harry is eight, he sees the boy almost every night--always comforting one person or another... his mom, his sister, Widow Clarke next door, and the boy Jimmy from school who told the teacher on Mother’s Day that he doesn’t even have a mom or even a dad.

Harry’s not unused to soft blue eyes, and even gentler caresses.  He knows that funny accent like the back of his hand, and the back of the boy’s hand like his own reflection.  But it’s still new when he cries so hard before bed, that he’s still wrecked even in his dreams.

It’s no surprise, really, that he ends up outside the fitness center down the street, watching a group of young boys shoot the football across the grass just as fast as the tears stream down his face.  He swipes at them so that he can see the lads more clearly.

Harry’s been here many times before--he remembers all the days when his father would take him here to play with his friends and their boys.  He can almost feel his father gripping his shoulder and telling him not to cry, to be a man when the ball hit him a little too hard.  His father never liked to see Harry cry, but now he somehow can’t seem to stop.

He sniffles twice and looks up at the field, eager for a distraction, only to notice all of the boys already looking at him like they know... they know Harry has no right to cry.  He feels his cheeks flush a bit before he drops his eyes to the dirt.  He wants to get out of here--to run away to the woods or his bed or maybe even that little park that his mum used to take him to on the other side of town.  

He’s not used to people looking--he doesn’t like it.  He likes that only Gemma (and maybe his mom) has seen him cry throughout all of this.  He likes that at school when he sits on the edge of the playground, tracing patterns in the mulch, the other kids leave him be.  He likes that his new teacher doesn’t force him to talk to the other kids, or call his mum in for meetings.  He just likes to be alone.

But suddenly he’s not.

Harry looks up when he hears the soft sound of a throat clearing.  For a moment, he thinks it may be his mum or Gemma coming to take him home, but his breath catches at the sight of the boy standing no more than two meters away from him, blue eyes peeking out beneath his fringe.

“Hi,” the boy says softly, and that’s the only thing Harry can think about him--not that he’s nosy or a threat or undesirable... just that he’s soft.

“I’m fine, you know.”

He knows Louis’ purpose, has seen what it means when he’s around, and Harry’s not even close to being torn apart or in pieces like the others.  He’s a big boy.  He can take care of himself, without softness and blue eyes.

Harry tries his best to smile, though it feels mostly awkward and too tight around his nose.  He swipes the water under his own eyes for good measure.  And he is, mostly.  He is fine.

“I didn’t say anything was the matter,” the boy answers smoothly, flicking the edge of his fringe out of his eye.  “Actually, I was coming over here to see if you could help me.”

Now is Harry’s turn to answer, but he just doesn’t feel as if he can do it, not with the frog in his throat and the tickle in his nose and that smile--it’s all just so distracting.  The boy seems to realize as much.

“You see that boy over there?  The one with the awful push kick, and even worse Arsenal jersey?”  The boy pauses, but not nearly long enough for Harry to nod, let alone answer.  “Well, that’s Stan and he’s an awful footie player, as well as a cheat.”

Harry looks up at the field.  The boys aren’t looking at him anymore.  They’re not even watching Louis.  They’re so far back into their game that Harry almost wonders if they were ever really staring in the first place.

“So,” the boy reaches out and tugs on one of Harry’s curls to regain his attention, “What d’ya say, Curly?  Will you save me?”

Harry can’t imagine ever having to save him, that boy who comes around every time to help the people who need it the most, the real superhero.  He can’t imagine anyone saying no to a real superhero, either.  So, he nods.

“Well, I was thinking that maybe you could take me away from here...”  His voice is somehow softer, just as gentle as the tip of his shoe now traces patterns in the dirt, “There’s a park down the street, with a nice tire swing and a great field for tag, as you don’t strike me as a cheat...”

“Yeah,”  Harry blinks, not realizing he’s made a decision until he hears it falling from his mouth.  It frightens him, honestly.

Harry hasn’t been out to play in years.  The boys don’t tend to ask over the kid who sits in the corner of the playground sulking, and he honestly hasn’t been up to playing much, anyway.  It feels wrong, like he’s lying--like he even has a right to be happy.

“Yeah,”  his answer surprises him a bit less the second time--but if for no other reason justified, he repeats it just to see the smile spreading upward across the boy’s face, “I’d like to get away from here, too.”

His gaze flickers from the dirt to the boy.  The smile he finds there reminds him of the sun--something so vibrant that it’s frightening, and although he’s not sure why he looks away so quickly, something inside of him knows that continuing to look would be the stupid thing to do.  He loses himself in the dirt’s patterns again, instead, only returning to the world as the palm of a hand blocks his view.

“Shall we be leaving?” the questions, his smile genuine as if he’s completely unaware that Harry is nothing special--quite the opposite in fact.

Harry has his suspicions, of which he chooses to voice the least trivial.

“Why are you talking like that?”  Contrary to the warning of his burning gut, Harry watches the boy closely, “You sound like a grandparent?”

The look of pure horror that spreads across the boy’s tan face is special.  Not because it’s the first time today that Harry’s seen an expression other than a smile from the boy.  Not even because Harry’s not sure that he has seen anyone make such a weird face in his life.  That look is so special because for the first time in a long time, Harry’s laughing.  It’s not forced or sarcastic or confined to his face--it’s genuine, and Harry can feel it from the tops of his cheeks all the way down to beside the swirling feeling in his stomach.

He’s so shocked by it that he can’t seem to stop, not until the boy interrupts him.

“You’re really something when you smile.  I don’t think you do it enough.”

The boy has such a soft look in his eyes that Harry wishes nothing more than to have the laughter back.  At least that feeling covered up the churning feeling in his tummy.  Instead, he gulps and hopes that helps whatever’s going on down there.

“You never told me your name, Superman,” Harry can hear as he tries to stand up on his own, pretending to have forgotten the offered hand.

“Harry,” he manages to get out while fumbling for his balance.

The rejected hand comes to his rescue.

“Harry... Harold, then?”

“No,” he tries to casually shake free of the hand gripping his shoulder, not liking the way it upsets his belly even more, “Just Harry.”

He can’t pretend not to notice the look of hurt that begins to make its way across the boy’s face.

“And you are?”

He smiles his best in unspoken apology.

“Just Louis,” the boy answers with a forgiving tease.

“Just Louis, it would be my pleasure to run away with you.”   

When Louis is nine, he doesn’t want to be home anymore.  He gets off the bus, lets the driver watch him walk to his door, and he leaves out the back.

He swaps his school rucksack for the drawstring bag at the bottom of the hall closet, shutting the unlocked door behind himself.  

He always packs it in the morning, when his father is passed out on the couch or locked in his room.  He’ll take it into the kitchen alongside his lunch box, packing it with water and a sandwich before storing it back in the closet.

He thinks Harry does the same, because when he meets the boy on the other side of the gate, he’s already wearing his little, pink rucksack, ready for an adventure

He kicks a rock on the way up the hill, the one behind the fence that leads into the forest on the other side of the houses.  Actually, he kicks a lot of rocks... the ones that get in his way, anyway, just because he can.

His dad does the same things some nights, comes home and throws vases and plates, just because he can.  Louis’ not that stupid, though.

Well, he had been once, when he threw his notebook at the wall, the one in which he was supposed to write “a family portrait” for English class.  He threw it away as hard as he could, hoping to be able to chuck the assignment, the school, and the “family” clear out of his life.  He hoped to shatter the photos hidden beneath his bed, the concept of a happy house, the walls themselves.  All he ended up doing was attracting the attention of his father, when Harry wasn’t even there to save him.

His dad had taken to throwing fragile things around the house, Louis included.

Harry came early that night, but not early enough.  He came just in time to hush Louis’ sobs and promise him that things would get better sometime soon, to check that the house was empty and walk Louis down to lock the front door so that he could feel safety that Harry was promising him.

He kicks another rock, only to have a twig scratch the calf of his other leg.

He’s never been able to believe in the better future that Harry trusts.  He can only find that safety in running away, only breathe when he’s miles past the confines of those walls.

“Louis,” he hears somewhere to his right.

He doesn’t respond, and this time he kicks a stick, too.

“Louis, stop it... you’re going to hurt something.”

He looks up to see curly brown locks, and a pretty face drawn up into a wince.  Following the gaze, Louis finds the stick lying a few inches away from a small, brown snail.  Leave it to Harry to be the protector of nature.

“Okay, Mr. Lorax.  I promise not to take my anger out on nature.”  Louis swears, with a cross over his heart and one final kick in the opposite direction.

He steals a quick glance over his shoulder, only to catch sight of a green-eyed grimace.

“Now.” he assures, quickly, “That was the last time.  I promise not to now.”

“Come on, Lou.” the boy says softly, turning on the spot and heading further into the trees.

It’s unlike Harry to lead--usually he will just follow Louis around town and through the forest, wherever the need for escape takes him--that’s why he follows, why he knows this must be important.

He doesn’t ask questions, not important ones, anyway.  He never has to with Harry, so instead of asking where they’re going, he just looks up and wonders aloud what makes the sky blue.

“Maybe the sky is blue for you because your eyes are blue.  Maybe when I look up I see a sky as green as the grass.”

That’s enough to get Louis attention, as his gaze and his jaw both drop abruptly.  He’s thought it over for about three seconds before Harry is folding over himself in a fit of giggles.  Louis makes to swat at him, but he looks up to swipe at his eyes and dodges the blow just before it hits.

Instead, Louis draws his arm back and folds it across his chest with a pout as he walks past Harry on his way forward.  It’s not until sometime later, when the fit of laughter has finally faded out, that Harry speaks again.

“No, I think the sky’s blue because it’s the most beautiful color in the world.  If I had to pick which color to see everyday, anywhere on Earth, I think I’d choose blue, too.”

Louis steals a curious glance over his shoulder, only to find the boy staring directly at him rather than the sky.  With a jump, he turns back to face forward.

“Are we almost there?” he asks, instead, ignoring the way his faltering voice betrays his heartbeat.

“Yeah,” he giggles once more, “Just up here, Lou.”

He jogs to the front, once more, tripping over his pigeon toes with each step.  Louis thinks the girls at school would find him cute... all the more reason for him to be proud that Harry is only his.

It’s only when they round the corner that he realizes where Harry has taken him.

There is an old lake hidden just outside of town, the one the oldest houses were built on, the one that brought the neighborhood here.  People have forgotten it over the years, though, just like Louis and his friends and everyone except for this boy with the curly hair.

Louis looks over his shoulder to ask him, “why here?”  Harry, however, is lost to the world as he picks up one of the stones at his feet, skipping it across the surface of the waves until it lands somewhere in the distance with a dull, “plop” as it sinks below the surface.

“Your turn,” he offers with a small smile.

And in that moment, there are a million thoughts that Louis could easily get caught up in, but he’ll save those for later.  He will surely have plenty of time to think them over tonight when he’s trapped back inside his house, inside of himself.

The thought of returning, itself, is enough to have him picking a brown rock from the ground.  He squeezes a bit too tightly and the pointed end pokes into his palm, but the pain is still nothing compared to being trapped... trapped and beaten... like one of those birds Harry wants so desperately to save, locked inside of a cage with his wings clipped for good measure.

Suddenly, the rock is flying from his hand, violently cutting through the air before it disappears beneath the surface with a large splash.

He holds his breath and closes his eyes, ready to hear Harry go on about controlling his anger and how he has no right to these emotions with a better future ahead of him, but these sounds never meet his ears.  Rather, he can make out the faint skipping and “plop” of another stone.

“Your turn.”

He only steals one glance, to make sure that Harry’s serious, he’s really okay with this.

A minute later, he is hurling another rock toward the reflection of the sky in the waves.  He watches the ripples travel across the surface, distorting the image of the clouds, the sun, the entire world.

He doesn’t wait for Harry to take his turn again before he’s picking up another and tossing it into the depths.  He looks into the water and sees everything he wants to be rid of.

The family photos.  Plop.  The bruises.  Plop.  His father.  Plop.  The house.  Plop.  The house.  Plop.  The house.

And suddenly it’s not just the rocks falling from his hand, but the tears from his eyes and the curses from his mouth.

Then Harry’s there, with his arms around Louis, walls forming around him and cutting him off from the outside world.  Walls for Louis to run toward, rather than away from.

“It’s okay,” Louis can hear somewhere near his ear, somewhere around the soft brush of curls against his cheek, “It’s going to be okay, Louis, I promise.”  And he wants to believe that, he really does, but he just can’t.  Not when his mom promised to love him, and his father promised to treat him right to prove that he could be a loving father, a loving husband.  “I’ll protect you.”

Louis closes his eyes, and builds up the walls against his fears.  These walls of Harry, Harry, Harry.  And in that moment, when the anger calms and the thought clouds part, Louis thinks about the family portrait assignment used as a cannon against the bad walls and how Harry is the closest thing to “family” he’s ever had.

When Harry’s nine, things change.  His mother goes to work every day of the week, and is up early to make breakfast on weekends.  Gemma doesn’t sneak into his bed at night.  The teachers stop paying him special attention, no more heads to look his way when the kids start to get mean.

Things change, but Harry doesn’t.

He can’t.

He still gets sad.  He still has those nights when he wants to sleep, he just wants to sleep so badly, but his thoughts keep his mind racing and his conscience does the same with his heart.  He closes his eyes so tightly, imagining the blue that he might be able to find on the other side.

In the end, he keeps himself awake for days, until his finally reaches collapses under his exhaustion, allowing him to escape from one world into the next.

It’s not as if his problems don’t follow him there--the guilt is etched into every corner of his being--it’s just that they don’t seem to hurt as much when he’s surrounded by gentle brushes of skin and an even softer smile.

That’s how he finds himself, so often, wandering around his dreams, waiting for the boy with the blue eyes to show up and save him.

It’s just that Louis is that particular type of happiness that doesn’t mean moving on, or leaving it all behind.  Louis is that happiness that could find him at the end of the world and make it the best day of his life.  He has this thing about him where Harry can just trust him to listen to his whole life story, nodding at the right spots and carding his fingers through his curls, where he can express himself without all of the “it’s not your fault,”s and the “what’s passed is past,”s.  Louis doesn’t tell Harry to move on, or get him to fake happiness for a few minutes... he just listens and does the stupidest, most beautiful little things that make Harry smile for real and almost forget himself for a while.

Harry sighs, running his fingers through his fringe and looking around.  Usually he’s able to find Louis quickly... he’s always at the park, or down by the lake, Harry has even found him downtown at the pizza shop a few times.

He’s just leaving downtown, and Louis wasn’t there.  He wasn’t playing footie, or exploring the lake either.  Harry scuffs his shoes on the sidewalk and trips over his own two feet, and by the time he looks up he’s headed out of the city and into somewhere he knows far too well.

He thinks he should turn around, go back to the lake or just play footie on his own... anything would be better than this.

He wants to stop.  He wants to go back into town and get in trouble, or wake up to nothing but darkness.  He wants to stop, he wants to stop, he wants to stop!  But his feet keep moving forward.

He knows this place too well.  He knows that on Tuesday afternoons his father’s truck would be parked in that empty spot in front of the tree.  He knows that that window, the one with the lights of and the cobweb, that’s where his Daddy would go, in to talk with Ms. Roberts while he ushered Harry off to play on the playground.

The playground.  He looks it over, and sure enough it’s still there.  The school looks run down, abandoned, but the slide still stands tall with the metal of the fire pole and the monkey bars gleaming in the sunlight.  The mulch still looks new, the paint hasn’t yet been chipped, and there’s not a dent in the metal slide from when Harry got mad and threw the rock at it.

It’s still just as he left it, all those Tuesday nights.  With the exception of the boy moving back and forth slowly on the swingset.

He wants to say something, or at least thinks he should, but words refuse to form.  It’s just that he’s back here for the first time in so long.  And Louis’ here, too, as if he brought Harry here.  And if Harry had half a mind, he’d be pushing Louis off that swing set and into the dirt, throwing punches and dirt--or he’d see the appeal in it, anyway.

But he doesn’t.

He’s numb again, and he thinks that the darkness has finally found its way into his dreams.  This is it.  There’s nowhere left to run to.  This is where it starts to go downhill on all ends, sinking, sinking, and pulling Harry under as well.

“What’s wrong?”

The voice comes from somewhere behind him, along with the hand on his shoulder, which he’d shake off if he had half a mind.  He doesn’t.

“Hazza, talk to me.”

But he doesn’t, not normally anyway.  He’ll talk about everything from the sunset in the park to what a solar eclipse must look like from the surface of the moon, but he never speaks a word about anything that matters--and that’s why this has worked so far.  Because Louis never asks him to speak... until he does.

Normally, it wouldn’t even get this far--he’s learned enough over these past few years to know that the words “talk,” “look,” and “speak” can all be translated into one command: “run.”

But this isn’t normal--not the hand that has moved from his shoulder, tracing patterns of comfort from his collarbone to his elbow and back again; not the whispered words of comfort that actually sound sincere.  Louis isn’t normal.

“This is it, Lou,” he finds the words escaping with his breath before he even registers what he’s saying, “this is where it all happened.”

And the thing about Louis is he knows.  He just knows.  So he doesn’t make Harry say anything more, and he doesn’t crowd his space.  Instead, he lets go.

It takes two more breaths for Harry to work up the courage to open his eyes, not even knowing when he closed them.  When he does, he finds Louis, palms full of dirt of mulch.

He’s not even looking at Harry anymore, as if the act isn’t even for him, as he launches the handfuls toward the brick walls.  The boy’s breath breaks, along with a cobweb that had collected in the corner of the window.

Then there’s another handful exploding in the air, hitting the window, and sounding like tiny gunshots, coating the walls with dirt.  There’s another, and another.  And Louis’ arms are coated in soil, honestly doing more damage to himself than to the building, but he keeps grabbing one after another.

“Louis,”  he whispers, letting his own hand come to rest on the older boy’s shoulder.  “Lou... what are you doing?”

When he looks over his shoulder, it’s with dirt on his face and sweat on his brow, and  he’s out of breath when he whispers, “I’m making this place look just as ugly as it’s made people think you’ve become.”

Harry swears his heart swells so much, he swears it gets so heavy that it falls somewhere near his stomach.

He wants to tell Louis that it’s not the building, but the people in the building that did this.  He also wants to tell him that it was all Harry’s fault--that he’d cause this whole mess himself.  But he doesn’t want to break the moment, so he blinks and nods his head once.

“Because you’re beautiful, Harry,” Louis whispers, dropping the dirt in his fists to rub at the limp hand on his shoulder, “You never deserved any of this.”

And then the moments broken.  Louis breaks it on his own, bending forward to kick more dirt toward the dirty brick building.

“Don’t you ever want to do this, Harry?” he whispers, picking up yet another handful of dirt when the kicking doesn’t seem to work as well as he’d planned, “Don’t you ever want to go back and just wreck it all?”

And, yeah.  He does.  So he joins him, carefully scooping up a handful and aiming it for the brick.  Then another, toward the door.  Two more scoops of mulch for the crack in the window pane.  He wants it to shatter the window, to break the memories, the desk, the door on the other side.  One handful after another, just in case the first didn’t blow the walls down.

And when he wakes up to his hand fisted in his blankets, and the set of alarms blaring on his nightstand, he remembers that time doesn’t stop--the world turns away and leaves him somewhere in its wake.

But Louis sees him and gets him.

That’s something that will never change.

The first time Louis runs away is the summer after he turned ten.

Maybe it’s never meant to work out, and maybe he leaves knowing that he’ll be back home come tomorrow morning, but it’s exactly what he needs.

“You know what, Harry?”  Louis asks, stepping into the forest as the sun sets on the world behind him.

Harry hums in question, but Louis takes his time responding.  He’s too busy balancing as he makes his way down a fallen log, too busy to let thoughts of his father ruin the peaceful moment.

“I don’t need him,”  he whispers like it’s a secret, and maybe it is... maybe the world’s purposely been keeping this information from him all these years for fear of what he’d do with it, “I never needed him.”

He looks up from where his feet are carefully falling, one after the other, to sneak a peek at the green-eyed boy.  An objection is already forming on his lips.

“No, I’m not stupid,” Louis cuts him off before he even gets the chance to speak, slightly stung that Harry would even think that Louis was that naïve, “I know I need a roof and a bed.  I need the food and the bathwater.”

Louis rolls his eyes and looks away, hoping that Harry doesn’t try to make him out to be more trapped than he already is.

“I need the house,” Louis concedes, “But I never needed him.”

It makes sense now, saying it that way.  He’s been thinking about it a lot lately, but that’s the first time the words really came out in the right order.  It makes sense... to him, anyway.  Louis has that, at least, even if Harry reacts the same as the others, at least Louis believes in what he is saying.

But he waits for Harry to say something like the boy, Bobby, who Louis always plays footie with at recess--when Louis looked at the girls playing house and tutted that he would never trap himself with a family, Bobby looked him up and down as if he had grown a second head and told him, “You don’t just live by yourself.  When boys grow up, they either become husbands or Daddy, or both.  If you don’t, then you’ll never be a man... just a boy.”

Or Stan on the bus, who asked Louis what his family’s plans were for the winter holiday.  When Louis told him that he didn’t have a family, didn’t want one, he found himself on the receiving end of the most pitiful stare of his life.  Stan just looked him up and down sadly, as if Louis had just told him the class pet had died, and said, “You know, Mum said this would happen.  That I should treat you nice and be your friend, so that you don’t become a bitter old man before you even graduate to secondary school.  She told me that’s what happens to people whose mummies and daddies don’t treat them right... I think maybe I shouldn’t have waited so long.  I’m so sorry, Louis.”

So here it comes.  This is the part where Harry gives Louis an ugly look and tells him that he’s messed up, that someone should have fixed him somewhere along the way but never got around to it.  There’s nothing left to do but steel himself for the honesty and apologies, for the inevitable change.  Because Louis has changed, has grown so different from all the other little boys that he can’t even pretend to be one anymore and surely can’t blame everyone else for not seeing him as one.

He waits, but Harry doesn't say anything, doesn't do anything.  He doesn't begin a lecture on all the ways that Louis has gone wrong, doesn't take the lead and walk ahead of Louis like he's suddenly better than him, and when Louis turns around, Harry's still there, just looking at him--without any judgment in his eyes or disgust in his stance.

Louis opens his mouth to call out to him, to tell him to get on with whatever he’s got to say about all of that--because, frankly, normalcy is the only thing left that would catch Louis off guard.  Yet, as he struggles to regain his voice, he finds himself hearing Harry’s rather than his own.

“You’re right,” he calls, blinking slowly and nodding his head once.

Louis opens his mouth to respond, to defend himself, but finds his jaw going slack as the words sink in.

“You’re right,” Harry repeats, answering the unspoken question hanging midair.  “You don’t need him, not anymore.  He did his part, he helped make you who you are, in more ways than one.  He helped bring you into this world, and then he made you strong enough to face it.  You’re right.  You don’t need him anymore.”

That’s the moment when Louis breaks.

It’s not a crushing blow like the fists, or a slow burn like the brutal honesty, but more like he’s collapsing from the outside in.

He’s not sure where the emptiness comes from or what it means, but it’s everywhere.

“Come here,” he hears Harry call softly, softer than he’s ever spoken before.

One of his hands smooths out the strap of his ruck sack over his collarbone, while the other reaches out for Louis.

Louis looks at it for a moment, unable to move.  The last hand he held was his mothers, while he was crossing streets or running errands… he hasn’t seen her in over three years, now.

His eyes flicker to the soft expression on Harry’s pale face and, once again, to the outstretched hand.  

Louis takes a step toward him… he knows Harry will stay.

Harry’s slightly smaller hand wraps around his and tugs him forward, further into the trees and away from their houses.

He knows that in the morning he’ll need food and clean water, a roof to keep him safe from any storms that might blow their way.  In the morning, the anger will return, along with his father who will undoubtedly pin him to the wall if he knew that Louis had taken the good set of blankets from the hall closet along with his work cooler and some of the deli meats.

His father will return, but right now he’s got Harry.

The first time Harry doesn’t wake up is the summer after he turned ten.

The last thing he remembers is that his father will be coming over in the afternoon to take him and Gemma back to school shopping.  He rolls over once, hears Gemma moving about in her room and sees that the clock on his bedside table reads 9:36.

Fourteen minutes later, he is walking along a winding road, following Louis through dead grass and snapping twigs.   Cars pass every now and again--Harry hears their noise and feels the stir of the air as they drive by.  He wonders where they have to go on such a dull day... well, maybe he wonders aloud because he can almost make out Louis’ response from up ahead.

“--the religious types are probably off to church, Sunday morning mass and whatnot.  Families are probably headed out to brunch, making up for rushed mornings and cold breakfasts in advance.  My neighbor, Stan, is actually away at camp, so when he comes on the weekends his mum and dad spend Saturday inside--family time and all--and Sundays on the town.  So, could be that, too, I suppose...”

Harry likes it when Louis does this, just takes control of the conversation.  Sometimes he can even hold his own for a good five to ten minutes.  It gives Harry the chance to leave his body for a minute, to exist solely in the air between them.

When Harry looks back up, Louis is silent, turned around to watch him over his shoulder.  It’s a thin silence, unlike the suffocating ones that fill the air when his mum wakes him up at ten before she leaves for work (all while looking at him like she’s watching him drown).  It doesn’t feel like an exclamation point at the end of the conversation, or even a period, but rather an ellipse--like the words, themselves, are no longer as important as what surrounds them.

“What about you, Harry?” he says softly, the tone that he’s heard most lately, “What are you doing out on a Sunday morning?”

Harry’s lips move about silently and for a second he thinks he might respond, but they keep sliding, until his bottom lip is wedged between his teeth.  He can feel it turning red and swollen under four years of pressure.

Why is he out on a Sunday morning--doesn’t he have a family to go out to brunch with?  A home to spend the day in?

He releases his bottom lip when he begins to taste something metallic, opting for the top one, instead.

He hates himself for finding his way into this position in the first place, for letting Louis become comfortable with asking questions.  He hates Louis for overstepping the unspoken rules he’s drawn out so clearly.  Mostly, he hates his father, for being the one to screw it all up.

“Because I don’t have a family or a home,” he manages, letting his lip slip free and a gulping down the air he’s resurfaced for, “Because my dad had to go and screw everything up.  Because, somehow, my mum wasn’t enough for him--my family wasn’t enough for him!”

And he knows that this isn’t what Louis meant--he just wanted to know why Harry’s out, following him around town like a lost fog again.  Louis didn’t mean to ask about everything that has gone wrong in Harry’s life, all that he’s running away from on a Sunday morning.  He knows, but he’s drowning--and if he’s finally made it up for air, he’s going to get more than one breath out of it.

“And now I don’t have a home anymore.  Not really.  My home was warm--laughs and jokes and hugs and kisses, the bedtime stories dad would read to me and Gemma while mum tucked us in.  My home was full, and it sounded happy--now it’s got all of these empty spaces.  Like the second bedside table in mum’s room, the extra drawers in her dresser, the chair at the head of the table, and the recliner in the corner of the family room.  I’m not at my house or with my family because neither of those things exist anymore.”

And then he’s crying, like he hasn’t in months--hot, wet, tracks streaming down his face and searing the hate right back into his skin.  These are angry tears.  That has to could for something.  Louis is looking at him like it does.

The  expression he’s wearing isn’t like the one he sees on his mum’s face, when she opens his door to say goodnight and he’s already in and out of sleep.  Or the one on Gemma’s face, when he’s too tired to go downstairs and eat the first dinner she’s cooked on her own.  Or the look that flashes across his teacher’s faces when he comes to school late again.

No.  It’s something that mirrors  his own, or at least the rushing rhythm of his heart.  He swipes at his cheeks and eyes the older boy curiously.

“It’s okay,” Louis finally says, the expression on his face looking so grown up that Harry doesn’t dare not believe him, “I don’t either.”

Harry searches for words in the silence, but his mouth only finds new ways to twist over itself.  Instead, he reaches his hand out for Louis’, feeling an awful lot like he’s offering something yet still unsure about exactly what that thing is.

Louis accepts it regardless.

“It’s okay,” he repeats, taking Harry’s hand in his own, “We can be our own family instead.”

Harry’s lips pull into a new shape--up at the corners and lower toward the center.  It’s the closest thing to a smile he’s felt on his face in quite some time.

Louis accepts that, as well, returning it with the smallest smile.

Harry supposes the warmth that follows is something that families are supposed to feel when they’re near each other.

He trusts Louis when he tugs his hand forward, leading him further down the road.

It’s quiet again, but it’s still so much unlike the quiet at home.  It’s like the difference between being underwater and lying on the beach--so close, yet a world apart.  One sounding like panic and the other like promise.

The clock on his bedside table reads 7:05.  Next to it, he can see his door is cracked, as if someone had entered then left again.  If he tilts his head to the left the slightest bit, he can recognize his mum’s figure in Gemma’s doorway.

“...your little brother, Gemma!  I just asked for you to do one thing for me today, and that was waking him up before you left!  I didn’t say that you had to talk him into coming alone--I just wanted you to make sure he was up and eating something!”

Harry moans to himself as he rolls over.  Even as he folds the pillow around his ears, he can make out Gemma’s answering shouts.

He wants suffocating silence.  He wants to sleep.  Because he’s more tired than he’s ever been in his life.

Louis is eleven the first time he tells a lie, a real lie.

It all starts with this boy, Jimmy, at school.  He calls Louis a “faggot” when tries to join the footie game, saying that his dad told him never to play with those types of kids.

Louis bites his lip, to keep himself from crying or launching himself at the boy right then and there.  Instead he glares and kicks the ball as hard as he can toward the boy’s stomach.  He dodges it at the last possible second, turning back to talk with the other boys in his loudest possible whisper.

“You know, my dad says that’s why Mr. Tomlinson’s always walking around town drunk.  Said his wife left him--took all the good things from the house but let him keep their little problem.  Dad says that he doesn’t blame him, not really... he thinks it’s honorable that he kept Louis around all this time.  Dad would have killed the faggot rather than worry about the awful things he’s going to start doing when he’s older, things that might go on under the same roof where he eats and sleeps and makes his home.  He said it takes a lot to make him religious, but he prays every time he’s sees the man that he puts Louis out on the street where he belongs before he marks that place all over with filth and sin.”

The boy offers him one sidelong glance over his shoulder, a glint in his eyes and a smirk on his face.  He knows that Louis is listening.

Louis doesn’t bother with a ball this time.  He’s not going to take the risk of the blow not following through.  Instead, he charges forward, jumping on the Jimmy’s back and wrapping a leg around either side of his waist.  By the time their bodies hit the ground, Louis’ fist has already connected with his shoulder... then the back of his head... the side of his face... his nose... his nose... his nose...

“Louis Tomlinson!”

He can hear Ms. Davis wailing at him, the girls’ screaming in the distance, the boys’ slurred chanting... He can hear it, but he doesn’t let him escape the moment.

Fist after first he lays into this kid--for that first week without his mother when his father came home every day to throw him against the wall, complaining about how “of course the bitch left the faggot behind;”  for his tenth birthday when he was feeling particularly brave and told his father that he had just over five years until the “faggot” would be old enough to leave him just like his mom and the girls (the cake Louis had spent all day making slid from the table to the tile as Louis hit the tabletop with so much force that the wood broke);  for the night last week when he snuck back into the house just a bit past ten, his father brushing past him with his “going out” clothes promising that he’ll “be sure to change the lock next time... bloody faggot.”

The word echoes as he’s being ripped away from the boy, walked down to the headmaster's office, sat in a chair... as she discusses the fight, explains what that word means and why it’s wrong to use it... as she promises that she’ll be calling home and that tomorrow the boys, and their parents, will be discussing the impending punishment.

Getting home before his father is a blessing that Louis is never ungrateful for... except for tonight, that is.  Being the first one home means that he will not only be punished with punches and curses, but also by wondering just how many are coming and when.  

His gut tells him he should just pack his things and run as far as his legs take him--something that Harry echoes from where he’s sat at the corner of Louis’ bed, nervously playing with the laces of his shoes--but Louis knows better.  He’d rather just take whatever’s coming to him and get it over with--he just needs to make it out of this mess, and then he can focus on just getting by for a few more years until his sixteenth birthday.

“Why’d you do it, Lou?”  Harry suddenly asks, just above a whisper.

It’s the first time they’ve broken this shield of silence since Louis got home and explained the whole situation.  Since then, they’d just been sitting, and thinking, and listening for the sound of the lock turning.

“Harry, I...” Louis begins, fruitlessly searching for the right words, “I just... Look, I know I acted like him, but don’t you understand?  One of him is hard enough to deal with--I can’t have the kids at school doing the same things.  Then, where am I safe?  In the woods, with you?”

He almost feels bad as this look flashes across Harry’s face--a look that only four years of friendship can successfully peg as “I’m not enough?”

It disappears too quickly for him to mention.

“You know that’s not what I meant,” Harry mumbles, tone far too serious for his age--and yeah, Louis does but he doesn’t want to think about more ways that he went wrong right now.

Louis shifts around a bit in his spot, even more so when he feels Harry’s soft, green eyes lose interest in the shoelaces and begin to watch him instead.  The bed springs creak a bit under the strain of his growing weight, but the moment is too tense for him to worry himself with what sounds he should and shouldn’t be hearing.

“I’m supposed to protect you, Lou...” Harry whispers, like it’s a secret (and it has always been their secret), “I can’t really do my job if you’re just gonna go around, getting yourself into trouble.”

At that, Louis ducks his head even lower, until his chin his brushing against his collarbone.  He only looks up when a small, pale hand wraps itself around his ankle, brushing thoughtless patterns into his skin.  He wonders if Harry can hear the contented breath that escapes his lungs.

“You know I can’t fight him off for you--I would if I could, Lou, but I just can’t.”  

“I never expected you to,” Louis confesses, arching his ankle further into the cool touch.

It’s silent again, spare for the sound of heavy breathing and a particularly loud creak as the house settles.  The sound make Louis go wide eyed and desperate, searching for a calm, green gaze to hold onto.

“Louis,” Harry whispers, gripping his ankle particularly tighter now, “Come with me.  If you just come with me, I’ll be able to keep you safe... we can run away together, make our own place in the woods down by the lake.  I’ll never raise a hand to you, ever, and neither will anyone else.  I won’t let anyone close enough to.”

Louis struggles to keep up with how fast the boy is speaking, as if they’ve only got moments left to live.  And maybe he does, if his father has a legitimate reason to punish him this time--but it’s his problem, nothing that should be bothering Harry so much.

“Harry,” he breathes, the grip on his ankle softening in response, “I did this to myself.  There’s no reason for you to get yourself all worked up over this, when I brought this on myself this time...”

He watches the younger boy shift around on the bed a bit, finally drawing his hand away to wrap it around his bent knees instead.  

“But it’s my job to keep you safe,” he whispers into the caps of his knees. “If he really hurts you tonight, it will be all my fault for not taking you away, Lou.  You’re my best friend, and I--”

They both jump at the sound of a door swinging open somewhere downstairs.

Louis can feel Harry’s panicked eyes on him, and he’s sure that he’d be able to figure out exactly what the boy is thinking if he tries... but he doesn’t want to.  Louis’ mind is already flooded--with how Mrs. Parker had explained to them what the word “faggot” meant and why it shouldn’t be used, his father and all the times he’s called Louis a faggot, his raging temper, and the sweetest boy in the world sat at the foot of his bed.

“Harry,” he can hear his voice waver, the panic leaking into his words, but he hopes that the boy will ignore it all and do as he’s asked, “I need you to leave.  I promise you that I’m going to be okay, but I just really need you to leave right now.”

The door slams shut, just as heavy footsteps begin to make their way up the staircase.

Louis squeezes his eyes shut, trying his hardest to focus on what’s around him--simultaneously searching out Harry’s energy and willing him out of the room and down the tree by his window.

His eyes fly back open at the sound of door being swung back against the wall.  They find the half-open window, angry eyes, and, as a fist settles squarely into his gut, a familiar darkness.

The next morning, while their parents are discussing yesterday’s events, Louis and Jimmy find themselves in the clinic with the nurse surveying the previous day’s damage.  She strips them of their shirts and examines their arms and heads, surveying for damage.

When Louis drops his arms from around his abdomen, at her insistence, her mouth falls open ever so slightly at the sight before her.  Louis tries not to wince as she gently prods the ugly purple marks beneath and across his ribs.

“And how did you end up with these?” she asks, carefully.

Louis is especially aware of the boy off to his right, his father in the office, and the woman watching him suspiciously.

“Just can’t take a blow very well, I suppose,” he mutters, straining to string together some plausible excuse, “Jimmy’s not exactly a soft landing...”

She doesn’t too convinced, but leaves it at that, anyway.

It almost shocks Louis, how easy it is to lie even when you’re not exactly sure you want to.

Harry is eleven the first time he tells a lie, one that matters.

The first time it happens, he’s sitting downstairs while his mum gets ready for work, eating absentmindedly playing with Dusty as he eats a bowl of cereal.

He takes a sip of milk, then another spoonful, all while his hand is still wrestling Dusty into the seat of the bench.  She bats at his wrist and bites at his fingertips while his hand presses her against the cushion.

He hates waking up to go to school--always has.  It’s only made worse by the fact that twenty or so tardies caused the word “expulsion” to be tossed around a few times during the past year.  They held Harry back, instead.

He sighs and takes another bite of cereal, mentally trying to figure out the weeks left until winter holiday.  In his thought, the grip on Dusty loosens, allowing her to break free and roll over on top of her enemy.  The change in events regains Harry’s attention long enough for him to bop her head with his loose fingertips.

She doesn’t seem to appreciate that.  For a moment, her playful attitude disappears, her claws appearing in their place.  By the time his fingers have dropped back onto the cushion, she’s hitting him with a swipe of her claws across his wrist.

“Dusty!” he cries, letting his spoon fall into the bowl as he uses his free hand to push her off.

He doesn’t feel particularly bad when he shoves her against the back of the chair, especially not when she bites that hand in defense, as well.

He throws her a glare as he makes his way to the hall bathroom, to clean up the cut.  It’s nothing bad, really--only two small cuts.  There’s shallow one about three centimeters down his wrist, with a second one above it, just deep enough for Harry to really see where the skin’s split as he washes the bit of blood down the sink.

It stings, but it’s bittersweet.

He doesn’t talk to many people, but when he does it’s usually to the kids in the hoodies and dark colors.  He doesn’t like to explain why he just doesn’t show up at school some days, and they never ask questions.

Maybe they’re the reason why he keeps running it under the water even after the cut has been thoroughly cleaned.  Maybe he’s eaten lunch to the background noise of too many conversations about “focusing the pain” or “feeling alive.”  Maybe he should register this as something he doesn’t want, but he doesn’t.

By the time his mum’s ready to drive him to school, he’s cleaned his bowl and thrown on a hoodie.  As he makes steps over the doorframe, he pulls the sleeves down further so that they’re brushing the backs of his knuckles.

Other than that, the day’s no more eventful than any other.  As soon as they get back from picking Gemma up at swim practice, he’s got a few pieces of food in his hands and his right foot on the stairs up toward his room.  Ten minutes later, the food wrappers are piled on the side table, his trousers are strewn across the floor, and his wrist is tucked away beneath his pillow.

It’s the first time he’s had a nightmare in quite a while, the first time his dreams have taken him someplace worse than home.

They take him right back to the very thing he’s been running from--right back to that awful classroom.  Back to his father, ushering him off to the playground so that he and Ms. Roberts can talk about how to get him caught up to his classmates.

He doesn’t want to--he doesn’t want to be here at all, not when he knows what happens after.  He doesn’t want to walk out the door, down the hall, and into a house full of screamed words like “unfaithful” and “bastard” and “divorce.”  He wants to stay here, to force them apart, tell Mr. Roberts that his mum will be coming in from now on, instead.

But Harry’s not there--it’s just the ghost of him that skips so stupidly from the room and down the hall.

He fights to turn around--just turn around, please?  If only he can turn around, he can interrupt it, make it stop.  He can remind his dad of how much he loves his mum and his life--that he can stop this now and apologize, promise to fix whatever led him astray.  If he can just turn around.  Turn around.  Please, Harry, turn around.

But he can’t.  He’s simply propelled forward, step after mindless step, down the endless stretch of hallway.  He wants out.  He wants to stop the world and get off.  He just wants release from this nightmare..

At last, he’s tossed from one right into another.

Somewhere along the way, he has drifted from one horrible hall into the next.  He doesn’t want to look up, because he can tell where he is simply from the sounds and the tiles.  He knows that if he does, he’ll find those awful red lockers (that hurt your shoulder when you’re shoved into them) and those even worse lads from his English class (that talk about the “queer” kid as if he’s not even there).

“There goes that Styles kid, again,” someone sneers from up ahead.

It reminds Harry, yet again, that just because you choose not to look at something doesn’t mean it will stop existing.  He was so stupid to think that they’d just he could just ignore them out of his life.

He ducks his head lower, until his chin brushes against his chest, as another boy snorts in response.

“You know how Ms. Williams is always telling us to play nice with the kid?  How she says that ‘some of us social butterflies aren’t quite out of our cocoons just yet...’”

He pauses and Harry steals a glance upward because, no, he’d never heard that before. It was all a mistake, though, because now he can see the hate written all over their faces.  He’s seen too much to ignore.

“Well, this kid in P.E. class--he finally figured out why ‘social cocoon’ is so far behind.  Says he’s caught the faggot getting all pink-cheeked in the locker room.  Probably can’t even be around other guys without getting a little problem that needs a bit more attention than his social suicide.”

He bites his lip, to keep from doing anything he’ll regret.  Talking would only egg them on.  Denying would only make it sound like there’s something to hide.

Which there’s not, really.  No, he’s not attracted to girls, but he’s not attracted to guys either.  He doesn’t have the energy to waste on something he doesn’t deserve.  Sure, maybe he  knows a boy who can make him blush, but that doesn’t have anything to do with him liking every guy.  He doesn’t turn red in the locker room because attracted to anyone at all... it’s more that he’s nervous that they’ll call him out on being a puff and he won’t exactly know what to say to it, or if there’s any way he can deny it at all.

Like now.

He can usually run away from the thoughts--into a dream or a silence--but he can’t when it’s surrounding him.  The sneers and the laughter and the questions.

“Danny told me once that he remembers primary--back in Grade 2 they started to realize the kid was weird.  None of the boys ever wanted to play with him--probably cause even an idiot could see that he’s a puff--so he’d sit by himself during break time, in the corner with his lunch box or playing by himself outside.

The teacher even had to call his parents in to see if they could fix him... guess they never could.”

He sneaks another peek, and this time the boy’s looking dead at him, as if he’s saying all of this for Harry’s benefit.  

Harry takes a deep breath and bites at his lip--if he can feel enough pain then he won’t have to focus on this.  He can distract himself.  He can drown out the laughing and the sneers and the growing ache deep inside his--

“Oi!”

He can’t breathe.  He can’t breathe, he can’t move, he can’t look up because Louis’ not supposed to be here.  Louis’ not supposed to see him like the rest of them.  Harry’s supposed to be a kid, a normal kid who’s maybe a bit sad and probably doesn’t stay home as often as he should, but is still decent enough to be Louis’ friend.  He’s Louis’ friend... or close enough to it, at least--just close enough for it to hurt when he sees that Harry’s kind of tossed about at the bottom of the food chain.  Louis is too good, way too good to be true and too good to want to hang out with the socially cocooned little faggot being shoved into lockers and tripped in the lunchroom.

But Louis is still here, standing close enough for Harry to feel his warmth and hear the huff of his breath.

“Leave him alone.”

Harry has to look up just to be sure, to see those sparkling blue eyes and tan skin, because this isn’t a voice Harry’s ever heard.  With a single peep toward his left, he finds himself face to face with an entirely new person.  It’s Louis, of course, but no Louis that he’s ever seen.  This is Louis with fire in his eyes instead of ice, that burns so brightly it’s turning his golden face red.  His jaw is set and his hands are clenched into fits... then they’re not, they’re reaching out to pull Harry by the arm so that he’s standing behind Louis as the older boy continues to face forward, glaring down at the kids from Harry’s English class as if he’s daring them to say anything more.

Which they do, of course they do.  They always do.  That’s why Harry stopped bothering with to tell Ms. Williams.

“Oh, so I guess you’re a faggot, too, then?” the taller one begins to speak again... Harry thinks his name is Ryan but he can’t quite be sure--he’s usually too busy trying to find an escape route to try to make friends.  “Probably met in a bathroom somewhere, then.  Shared kisses in the janitor’s closet.  It’s kind of dirty in there, but we already know Harry’s a filthy kid.  You must be, too.”

At that Harry slides his arm through Louis’ grip--the fingers trailing further down his scrawny arm until they’re close enough for Harry to lace his own through them.  He tugs them twice, hoping Louis gets the message--come on, don’t take the risk... let’s get out of here before we get hurt.  Harry can tell he gets it, from the way the slightly larger hand tightens in his own, squeezing once and smoothing his thumb carefully down the back of Harry’s hand.

“I’d rather be a faggot than an arsehole!”

Ryan jumps at that, with a startled look on his face, but the kid begins to snicker... that’s never a good sign.  Harry tugs on his hand again, trying to will Louis away before things get worse--before he gets himself hurt over one of Harry’s problems.  The only part of Louis’ body that moves is his thumb, still stroking nonsense patterns into Harry’s skin.

“Course he’d rather be an arsehole... cock jocks love arseholes,” the other boys smirk at that, which only causes Louis’ grip to tighten, “Better watch out, Ryan.  If you really are an arsehole, the puff might be coming for you next!”

Harry can feel Louis tense up, even through the air between them.  His back straightens and curves ever so slightly as his breaths grow deeper.

Harry doesn’t want this--Louis fighting battles because of him, getting hurt because of him.  Harry’s already done enough for his mum and Gemma, splitting up their family with his little problem.  He’s not going to let his issues take the smile away from Louis’ face, as well.

He reaches forward, letting his free hand curl around the small of Louis’ waist to bring him back to the moment, to Harry.

“Lou,” he whispers, for only them to hear, “It’s not worth it.  None of it’s worth it.  If you really want to make me happy, then don’t drag yourself into my messes.”

Harry watches him closely, as glances over his shoulder and blinks once, blue eyes becoming lost behind closed lids.  He just wants Louis to look at him, really look at him and see the pitiful honesty his eyes.  He needs Louis to leave with him.

The moment his eyes reopen, he’s turning around on the spot, without as much as a glance over his shoulder.

He keeps his grip on Harry’s arm, steering him back up the endless hall.  He looks more tense than usual, but his face softens ever so slightly as he turns to catch Harry’s eye.

“You’re alright, Harry,” he promises, “I’m here, and I’ve got you and everything’s going to be--”

He blinks his eyes open, twice, at the feeling of a soft hand running down his arm.  It takes a moment for his eyes to adjust to the light enough for him to make out the figure.

“Mum?”

He sits up a bit, taking in the golden light streaming through the blinds.

She sighs, leaning back against the headboard and mirroring his gaze toward the new sun.

“You were shouting in your sleep again, love.”

He bites his lip, but doesn’t say anything.  He doesn’t ask her what all she’d heard, because he’s sure he can still hear it ringing in his ears, and he’d rather go a few more years or lifetimes without hearing that awful word actually spoken in his house...

“It’s just after seven.  Might as well get up for the day--I’ll make you a cuppa, alright?  And you can relax downstairs while I get ready.”

It’s Tuesday, a week later, when it happens.  Ryan kicks the marker just a little bit further into the aisle as Harry walks by.  Laugher is all he hears just before the crack of his cheekbone against the desk.

When they send him to the clinic, the nurse simply says there’s not much that she can do other than give Harry a Paracetemol and send him home early.  She hopes that he’ll use the extra time wisely, to try to plan a trip to see a doctor, because while it’s likely only to bruise the bone, you just can’t be too sure.  He grimaces, but accepts gratefully anyway.

It doesn’t take long after he gets home for Harry to realize that sleep isn’t coming as easily today, even if he’s too tired to make it up the stairs.  He rolls over on the couch, glaring at Dusty with envy.  She’s sleeping lazily at the foot of of the sofa, without a sharp pain in her head, a dull ache in her chest, or spat curses in her mind.  When Harry throws a pillow at her, without warning, it’s only a moment before she jumps up, hissing and brandishing her claws.

Minutes later, he’s got her pinned up against the seat of the sofa, wrestling her back and forth, irritating her just enough.  When she finally gains the upper hand, she swats at the hand that pinned her down, catching the open patch skin with one smooth swipe.  It’s not much--hardly enough to draw a few beads of blood to the surface--but enough for a slow burn to hold his focus, to drown out the rest.

He rolls over hours later, when the lock turns in the key.  Of course, his mum runs over immediately, fussing about the school saying that he’d taken a fall, but nothing about such a big bruise on her baby’s face.  He flinches as she draws her fingertip just along the circumference, pressing once just to see how badly it would hurt.  When he unclenches his jaw, she lets out the saddest sigh, letting her hands fall down to his shoulder, to trace the length of his arm.  She massages slowly, pressing her comfort into his skin--until he winces once again.

“Harry,” she breathes, tracing and pressing his wrist as well--running her fingertips across the two more obvious scratches, “what’s this?”

He hardly has the energy to pull his arms away, before he’s rolling over onto his side, burying his face in the cushions at the back of the couch.

“S’nothing.  Must’ve scratched it on the way down.”

She tuts and he thinks he might hear something about a doctor’s visit as she walks off toward the hallway.

He ignores the growing ache in his chest, the one that tells him he’s done the wrong thing, yet again.  It breaks beneath his skin, reminding him that if his mum or Gemma find out that he’s let them down once again, they won’t be so keen on helping him recover from his own mess the second time around.

He ignores it for the slow burn at the bottom of his arm.