Run Like the Devil • L.S. • Larry Supernatural AU

timestamp: in the dark and out of harm ch. 2

FEBRUARY, 2018

Therapy, Louis thought, was supposed to make you feel better. And he would admit that, in ways, it did. He had vocabulary to talk about a lot of the things that happened in his head— flashback, dissociation, panic attack, trigger— and instructions for how to bring himself back to earth when he experienced them. He was finally talking about some of the things that had haunted him, silently, for years.

But the more he went, the more he remembered, and the more he remembered, the more he drank, and the more he drank, the more worried Harry got, and the more worried Harry was, the more guilty Louis would feel, and the more guilty he felt, the more he drank. It was a vicious something , more a knot than a circle, and Louis had no idea how to begin unraveling it.

Well, that was a lie. He knew: there was one answer. Stop drinking. But that was an impossible answer, and so he ignored it. He was a functioning alcoholic, goddammit. The people around him (who loved him, which was still overwhelming when he thought about it) knew this about him, and accepted it for the most part. He had always been this way, as long as Niall or Liam or Harry had known him. He wasn't an angry or violent or unreasonable drunk, alcohol helped him, kept everything fuzzy enough that he could focus, blotted out the memories that snapped at his heels and threatened to drag him down, let him sleep his few precious hours without nightmares.

It didn't make sense. Talking about it was supposed to make it better. Frankie said he was making good progress. She was teaching him breathing exercises and ways to ground himself in the present and how to talk about things-- well, that was a work in progress, because when she had asked Louis to state, "My father abused me," Louis was able to do it, at some length, but immediately after felt himself shuttering, battening the hatches and retreating and setting his jaw and drifting away and Frankie said that was about all the time they had and Louis didn't remember the drive home, which should've worried him but didn't, really, if there was one thing he trusted about himself it was his ability to drive whatever his condition. Not drunk--he had a rule, and a breathalyzer in the car for that reason, and it was one of the things that helped him keep the drinking under control, in years past, when he had to stay sober for long periods of time driving and driving and driving through the endless nothingness of West Texas or the twisting and turning precarious mountain passes in Montana, to the next job, because there was the next job and the next lead on the demon and nothing else.

But he was driving so much less, now. That left more opportunity for drinking.

He parked in the driveway and opened the door and then noticed how weak all his limbs felt, making him fall to his knees on the gravel, and he stayed there for a while, slumped against the door of the Subaru and wishing badly for the Camaro, who was not far away, out back with Niall's other cars, but which he really never drove anymore because it was falling apart and it was damned expensive to keep fixing it and he was also able to recognize that it wasn't super healthy to be hanging on to his dad's car, okay, and Frankie would say it was triggering, and Louis was supposed to avoid triggering himself when it could be avoided. Whatever that meant. Louis felt more like there were landmines buried everywhere, and he was doing his best to find a safe path but every step could blow him off his feet and he couldn't see the mines and he wasn't safe wasn't ever safe not even after putting Caroline down not when his dad was long gone but—

"Lou? Honey, hey, can you take my hand? Let's get you off the ground, huh?"

Harry's ringed and tattooed hand appeared in front of Louis, and he grasped it, felt himself gently pulled to his feet and against Harry's body, and he froze for a minute before going limp, trusting that Harry would hold him up, and he did. Louis stuck his face into the side of Harry's neck and breathed in, for a fleeting moment missing being able to bury his nose into Harry's long soft hair, but it didn't matter, and god, he just loved him.