violins and cigarettes (larry stylinson a.u.)

Four

((Hey I'm really sorry for taking so long to write this I'm going to do my best to be more prompt with writing lmao))

Louis tells himself to breathe when he first opens his eyes every morning. Out loud, firm, sometimes without any sort of tone or meaning behind the repetitive order-- yet he does it. Frankly, he feels that he needs to. It's necessary, he's thought to himself before when questioning the importance of such a practice. How else am I going to remember?

"Breathe."

He wouldn't describe himself as hollow. He wouldn't even say that he defines as unhappy. Just interrupted. Off-balance, like the planets and starts that make up his life are no longer perfectly aligned; like the force of gravity he receives is less that what everyone else does. Oh, he's still on the ground-- he's still pushing through, that's for damn sure. Sometimes, however, his toes graze off the edge of the earth and he floats.

Sometimes he's not as steady as he'd like to be.

Louis compares this time of his life to a distant childhood memory. One night, his mother had asked his sisters to prepare supper, for she was too weary to do it herself. As the helpful brother he was, Louis'd suggested to assist them, but they readily declined the offer. Young girls, they were, the kind of young that made them anxious to do everything on their own. Louis allowed it.

He regretted such leeway that night, though, and he was sure his mother had, too. The meal wasn't horrid: spaghetti noodles with a red meat sauce, dinner rolls and a salad. Louis thought that the rolls were a bit chewy and the sauce was somewhat tangy, but it was overall an edible dinner.

That is, until the youngest of his sisters, who had been sitting through the meal with a sick look on her face, blurted out that the meat in the sauce wasn't beef. No, they'd discovered far too late that there wasn't any thawed meat to put in the sauce, so they had to settle on an alternative.

"Some of the canned cat food," she'd murmured, and God, Louis became sick right then and there, all over the dinner table. He couldn't hold it in; found the idea downright repulsive, imagining how foul the food had smelled when it'd been his turn to refill the cat's bowl.

Later, when he was getting into his pyjamas, tummy still somewhat unsettled, he'd said to his sisters, "It would have been better if you hadn't told us."

The memory makes Louis smile, but the logic behind the idea wipes said expression away. Louis wants a love like what he'd felt when hands had been roaming at his pectorals, while lips kissed at his own; he wants those hands, those lips, that man. And he knows that his life would be better if he hadn't run into him that night, if he'd never locked gazes with such evergreen eyes. He wouldn't be longing for those touches-- you can't long for what you don't know exists. Just like how you can't get sick from what you don't know is in your food, provided that that something is harmless.

He won't let himself forget, either, so he's stuck in a world in which he is hopelessly denied and infatuated with the one thing that is ruining his existence. Is it possible to let one night, one human, break all the resolve you've built up for yourself in the years prior? Months ago, Louis wouldn't say so. But now?

Of fucking course.

"That's the ugliest piece of shit I've ever had the displeasure to look at," Stella says instantly when Louis meets her at her flat one Wednesday afternoon. She's referring, Louis assumes, to the red bandanna that is tied in his hair (the same red bandanna that he now refuses to leave the house without; the same red bandanna that he wraps around his wrist when he's practicing either the violin or the piano), but he supposes that she could very well be talking about his presence in entirety. Hell, she seems to really hate him more often than not. Louis wonders
why she sticks around.