Six degrees of separation-ENG

Six degrees of separation

Warning! Paragraphs written entirely in italics are flashbacks.
! This story deals with romantic and sexual relationships between men.
Trigger Warning: For featured themes - more or less graphic representations of injury, violence, depression, suicidal thoughts, more or less explicit/disturbing depiction of abuse and domestic/psychological/physical/sexual violence, bad coping mechanisms, mentions of various sexual and disturbing themes, self-destructive abuse of alcohol and/or substance - reading for children under 18 is not recommended.
Readers' discretion is advised.

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Prologue: Emptiness

You're going through six degrees of separation:
First, you think the worst is a broken heart
What's gonna kill you is the second part
And the third, is when your world splits down the middle
And fourth, you're gonna think that you fixed yourself
Fifth, you see them out with someone else
And the sixth, is when you admit that you may have fucked up a little
No, there's no starting over
Without finding closure
You'd take them back
No hesitation
That's when you know you've reached the sixth degree of separation
(The Script, Six degrees of separation)

It's not easy. It has never been between them, for the record, and it'll probably never be. But another thing that will never be easy for him is to let go of everything: the pain from the loss fogs his senses for a moment, leaving him speechless and frightened, with rather a huge weight to press on his heart. His eyes find a smile, a last image of beauty to take away with him, settling down in his heart and just staying there: it's a sweet, naïve smile, proper of those who still have no idea what life reserves for them. He can't find the words, the courage to give the coup de grace to that insane habit of theirs of wanting to love each other extremely, so he stays silent, limiting himself to fix his eyes on an unspecified point on the wall behind the boy standing before him with an intensity that makes it seem like he wants to pierce the wall with his look only. He feels a huge burden upon himself, some sort of responsibility that he's always tried to shake off his shoulders but has never managed to remove completely, only managing to postpone the inevitable, while invisible chains imprison his wrists making him feel like a lion in a cage, desperate, angry, crazy from pain. The crowd suddenly clears up, leaving just two people in the room and his body opposes what is going to happen, but the burden he feels is now more pressing, it crushes him, takes his breath away, overwhelming him.
His voice speaks alone, out of self-preservation, and then it's all over: the weight, his pain, his despair.
For a moment, he's really free. He savors that taste on his tongue, small excitement shocks run quickly under his skin, reminding him of what it means to be alive.
A moment before: everything.
A moment later, nothing.

There are many solitary nights, completely sleepless, now that he's alone. He knows that the only thing to do on occasions like these is trying not to think, not to fall into his own mind's trap: the secret is to get distracted. So Louis cooks, reads, watches movies, studies and, extrema ratio, ends up cleaning the kitchen, or the most complicated room to be washed up: he disassembles it piece to piece, degreasing and disinfecting up to the last corner at the bottom of the cabinets, ending up with his fingers burnt and his back crushed. It's not easy to erase Harry from his life, certainly not when they live in the same building and they still happen to meet by chance in the hall or the elevator. Seeing him again always has the same effect on Louis, just like the very first time they met: a warm and enveloping grip on his stomach, a tingling feeling of electricity under his skin, a thousand heartbeats per minute. He will never be able to shake off the emotion that that face, those eyes and that smile cause him, a total upheaval: Louis always thinks about Total Eclipse of the Heart by Bonnie Tyler, of the destructive, fully devouring love, toxic for those who live it depicted in its lyrics. Like Catherine and Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights, like Harry and he in real life.
And now Louis is thinking, his mind wanders free among those memories, waves of pain wash over the foreshore of his memory, spreading flocks of salt on his wounds still open. Some kind of hardly human-like screams come from downstairs, breaking the silence of the night abruptly, and Louis immediately kneels with an ear on the floor trying to better understand what the people downstairs are yelling to each other: it's not the first time it happens and probably won't be the last.
But today he fails at ignoring them, he simply cannot let it go and pretend that he doesn't care about those screams... because Harry lives in the apartment downstairs. And the voice that screams, interrupted only sporadically, is not his.