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The sun comes up behind the clouds and shoots through the spot where the blade on the window shade is cracked from when Louis got frustrated a couple of months ago, illuminating a part of the room a little bit.
It was enough to wake Harry up. It always was.
But Louis doesn't move. He never does.
Harry never expects him to, anyway.
So, Harry gets up. Swinging his feet to the side of the bed and setting his sock-clad feet on the cold morning floor, the bed shakes and creaks as he pushed himself up, he cringes at the noise, glancing at the unconscious boy still wrapped up in the thick duvet, but Louis doesn't move.
He never does, Harry doesn’t expect him to.
Still, Harry tiptoes quietly as he can, extra careful not to wake Louis up. But Louis won't, Harry knows that.
Louis got home at who knows what time last night from the bar, screaming and yelling about things that didn't even make sense. He smelled of whiskey and cigarettes, the signature scent of a night out with Zayn.
He broke a few things in his way as he stumbled through the foyer, ranting about nothing. Harry cleans up the purple vase that had been sitting on the shelf by the coat closet, and the beer from the bottle Louis threw at the fridge when Harry asked him to put it in the trash.
And that's what Harry does. Harry cleans up after Louis' messes.
Cleans up after everyone's messes.
And maybe Louis had come home like that almost every day for two weeks, too drunk to function, too drunk to think. But wasn't that the point? To get out of your head for a while? Nothing hurts when the burn of alcohol is sitting in your stomach and racing through your head.
Because Louis was shoved into something he didn't know was coming. (They all were, weren't they?)
All he wanted was to make people happy, to sing on a stage with people screaming for him. And he'd done it.
He got what he wanted. (they all did. didn't they?)
That's what Harry told himself.
It's always what he told himself while he bandaged the small cuts on his hands from picking up the shards of glass.
It's what he told himself while he watched Louis walk down the street hand in hand with her.
When he stood in Times Square wrapped around her.
Most of the time, while Harry has to watch Louis drown himself in liquor, or lie awake while he sleeps with too much vodka on his breath, he just thinks.
Mostly he thinks about all those times someone tried to explain that little black and white circle to him, the one swirled down the middle, with the inverted coloured dot on each side.
He never exactly understood what it truly meant and why it was so important, until now.
Because everything good around him was eventually swallowed by something evil.
Maybe he and Louis were the same way, two sides of something that didn’t make sense on its own.
Louis yearned to forget, and Harry remembered everything.
Louis broke things; Harry put them back together.
Louis came home, and Harry waited.
Waited for him to come home, to come back. Back to Harry, back to himself.
He never does, Harry doesn’t expect him to.
He was living his dream with four people who loved him more than they loved themselves, singing to thousands of people a night while they sang back to them, and he made millions of people happy.
But she, with her polished smile and love songs that everyone believed, stood there like a mirror of everything he could never have honestly. Not in front of them.
They told him he wasn't enough, that he was so many things he wasn't, and that the way he was born wasn't normal, or natural, and it had to be kept hidden.
But bright blue eyes stood in the white dot at the end of the dark tunnel, and at the end of the night, he still came home.
So, if Harry's being honest, he'd rather not think, and most of the time. Everything moved too fast for him to think anyway.
He wanted to slow everything down at first, catch his breath, and enjoy what was happening around him because there was so much he couldn’t appreciate.
But slowing down didn't mean just smelling the metaphorical flowers; it meant seeing the cracks in the carefully concocted narrative they wrote.
Mostly, he saw how unfair things were, and how there was a lot of evil and a little bit of good in his own "yin-yang";
He saw the exhaustion and fear in his eyes. He saw the powdered white dollar bills in Zayn's hotel rooms. He saw the concerning amount of food left on Niall's plate. The dialed calls at 3 in the morning on Liam's phone. He saw just why Louis drank.
So, when the boy stirred in bed well into the day, too weak to even yell for the younger and complain, Harry was already there with water and pain reliever, and no questions asked.
Louis wouldn't tell anyway; he never did.
And deep in his heart, he knew, this was the one mess he was desperate to clean up, but the one he couldn't.
It just was. It would always be.