Things Have Gotten Closer To The Sun -starseas on ao3

Eleven

Harry dreams of a car moving fast.

It's like he's outside of himself, watching as he drives down a dark road at full speed, dangerous and electric, always moving and moving and moving. He can't stop because the sun is behind him. Even though it's night time, the sun is behind him, and even though he can't see it, he knows it's there. Does that make sense?
His car is red, and memories float out of the blackness like smoke.

They're just fleeting, really, small disturbances in the air, but in the dream they wash over his windshield and then they're all he can see and hear and think. Everything becomes white noise.

In the mist of it, there's his face looking back at him, changing so fast it's like pictures being layered. It's like still images of himself that stretch out through his life and then past it-grainy footage of him as a little boy, green eyes bigger than the moon as his mum kissed him and told him that he was made of sunlight. Him at twelve years old, sitting at school beneath the big oak tree during lunch break and crying his eyes out after being picked last in gym. That day, he thought his life had ended. There's him at sixteen, too, starry-eyed and falling in love for the very first time, the feeling coming so fast and so sudden that he felt dizzy with it.

In the dream, Louis' name sits on his tongue, and Harry keeps driving.

The memories keep coming, flooding in and getting lost in the dark. He dreams of the car crash, of metal screeching against pavement; he dreams of the love that him and Louis shared and he remembers the way that he destroyed it, harsh words spilling out of his mouth before he could stop them, leaving bruises on the milk of Louis' skin.

But past that, past that-Harry dreams of light.

Not like sunlight, harsh and burning, but light itself-just the idea of it, the simple meaning of it. He dreams of himself as an old man, living in a cottage tucked deep in the English countryside, a place surrounded in flowers even though it's the middle of winter. This is what his death would look like. If it hadn't been chosen by the sun, this is what his death would look like. In his dreams, Louis is there, and he's still the most beautiful thing in the world, his face wrinkled with the years gone by. Moonlight washes in and makes him look blue, naked and blue, makes him look silver as he sleeps.

The images move like static and then all of his memories are floating back into the dark again, then it's just him and his red car and a black road that stretches on forever, the stark whiteness of his headlights washing over the pine trees, bringing out the green in them.

Harry dreams of a car slowing down.

Louis' name sits on the tip of his tongue and Harry stops driving.