Stay Green || [h.s.]

Chapter Two

Hello hello, friends! We're starting to get into it...

As always, let me know your thoughts <3

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Harry Styles

The smoke burned as it crawled its way up my throat. My insides feeling battered and raw from the incessant chain-smoking that has defined the past 24 hours.

I am on edge, my skin feels too tight for my body, my fingers ache when still for too long. So, I need the cigarettes. If not to keep my hands occupied, but to provide some sort of relief from the pressure in my chest.

It has always been there. The innate heaviness. 

Even as a child it lingered in the wings of my mind, waiting to swoop in and crush whatever I had managed to cobble together in my life. It was never much, but it always felt as though any semblance of happiness or just general good was constantly under threat of slipping through my fingers and falling victim to the crushing heaviness.

It made me an irritatingly jumpy child. Plagued by insomnia and doom spirals, I never knew stillness. My father would demand I simply tough it out, just stop thinking about it. As if it were that easy. Ignore the shadowy figures that haunted my bedroom at night or the constant voice in the back of my head convincing me everything was going to fall apart. He'd demand I just stay fucking still for once.

And I tried, I really fucking tried. But I didn't have the tools, the vices back then.

My father took matters into his own hands. It started as endless denigration, reminding me how weak and pathetic I am. What can't I just fucking pull it together like the other kids? And when that didn't work, the end of his lit cigarette pressed into my skin would pull me out of my obsessive thoughts.

And by the time I turned ten, my arms were decorated with circular scars, but I had learned that pain quiets the voices. For even just a moment, it eases the heaviness.

So, while my father's methods weren't perhaps going to win him parent of the fucking year, he was the only one to teach me how to obtain even just a little god damn relief. 

Pain became my deliverance until I discovered a chemical solution. I learned quickly that the marks I began to acquire on my skin drew the wrong sort of attention. And when I discovered alcohol, pills and powders, I found a way to cut off feeling all together.

A blissful nothing. So, I tattooed my arms to cover the scars and added my dealer to speed dial.  

Musicians and drugs. They go hand in hand. No one ever asks questions. Or at least they never used to. Until I had allegedly "gone off the deep end."

Little did they know, I have been furiously paddling above water in the shallow end. Because what hides in the deep might truly drag me under for good.

Pressing the back of my head against the cool marble of the bathroom floor I had found myself sprawled out on, I squeeze my eyes shut. Tendrils of smoke flow from my nostrils as I grind my teeth together.

I hate fucking thinking like this. I don't think like this anymore. It's fucking pathetic.

But still, it feels as if the heaviness is about to cave my chest inwards and pummel me through the floor. My lungs rattle in desperation as I gasp for oxygen.

Nicotine isn't going to cut it. I need some blow, a handful of benzos. Fucking anything to numb the feeling.

But after my agreement to fall in line and be a good little puppet for Malbon, both Grant and Niall are currently sat in the living room of my hotel suite.