Under Coloured Trees || Larry Stylinson

17

... How many people do you think live in your world? You say four billion people live in your world? Are you standing way down there in the ground and telling me that four billion people do not live in four billion separate worlds, are you going to put that across on me?

This book is starting to get on Louis' nerves. Because each fucking time he opens it he finds something that is worth paying attention to and he has to sit there reading the same line over and over again until after a while it starts to lose its meaning. Except it never truly does so Louis can stay there for hours on end. And this one in particular...

This one in particular means something more important to Louis. Especially right now. Especially because of what Harry wrote on the margins.

'I wish you invited me to see your world someday. I'd invite you to see mine'

And Louis finds himself thinking that, yes, he'd like to see that world. Louis never thought that Harry was bad or evil or something like that. But that anger that he has about himself, he reflected it on Harry because it was more comfortable that way. And he can tell Harry is also angry. There are things in Harry's personal story, in his world, that make that rage accumulate inside of him just like Louis' does. Everyone has those things. It's just sometimes the demons are bigger and uglier than others. 

He occasionally thinks about that debate Hobbes and Rousseau had going on. The first one said man is originally bad, that morals ideas were not known to him in his natural state. The second one said, "man is, by nature, good". And Louis is conflicted. Because who does he agree with?

He doesn't believe Harry is furious because he was born furious. Louis himself wasn't either. It's one's particular world that makes them who they are. But if he decides to pick that theory to live by, then what does that say about Stan, for example? What does it say about most people Louis has dealt with?

Then again, it's us people who beat up the rabid dog until it bites and gives us the opportunity to call it evil.

But Harry helped Lottie. He helped Louis' sister and he didn't ask for anything in return. And to Louis, his sisters are the most important thing. They are everything. They come first. And Harry put Lottie first that day. He did what Louis would have done, maybe something even better. And Louis cannot just ignore that. It's the little things that matter. It's those little things and the tiniest acts of kindness people selflessly do sometimes in their daily life that keep evil in line.

And just like that, he decides he wants to know Harry's world.

***

Louis wakes up the next day due to the blinding sun rays that come in through the window because he forgot to close the drapes last night when he went to bed.

"Mmmphhh..." he hears Liam stir in his bed, moving to put the pillow over his head. "Turn off the sun..."

Louis scoffs and shakes his head while he gets up to make the room dark again and grant Liam a few more minutes of sleep. But as he gets closer to the window, he also gets closer to his desk. And he sees the drawing pad Harry left open on top of it when he and Lottie left last night after many desperate and failed attempts of deciding a plot for their little film. 

He left it open in one of Louis' favourite drawings. One of the few ones he's kind of proud of. It's nothing difficult or original or excessively complex. It's not even completely Louis'. But he did it for someone he cared about and that's enough.

It's one of the illustrations from 'The Little Prince'. The one at the beginning in which the prince takes advantage of the migration of a flock of wild birds to escape. Except it was not an exact copy. It was made in Louis' own way. The original was simple, it was like a sketch. Louis put more effort. The birds were much more detailed. They weren't all the same colour. One was orange, one was green, another one was purple. The stars and planets around the prince and his birds were drawn more realistically. They were actual balls of yellow fire and Louis had used watercolours to actually paint the background a dark blue. It was properly outer space. And the prince... Well, the prince was not a prince. The prince was just a boy. Which, in a way, he actually was in the story, but Louis would never call the boy in his painting a prince. Because he was closer to being Louis himself than a member of royalty. He had kept the green scarf and the hairstyle and the posture, yeah. But it was all much more real. The result ended up not being as close to the original as Louis had initially imagined because he kind of let the artsy part of himself flow. One wouldn't actually recognize it as a version of The Little Prince unless they had read it quite a few times. Like Louis had.