Underwater. ||h.s.||

prologue.

"—I'm sorry. I-I just need to sort out some things within myself, but I don't want to bring you down with me."

He looked down at our locked hands, probably wondering how a girl like me could second-guess herself in just a matter of seconds. "...Where's all this coming from?"

I shrugged my shoulders and smiled softly so that he knew I meant well.
"I don't know. Sometimes I just feel like I don't belong here, Harry. I don't fit and I don't mean in just Baltimore."

"Erin, people like us don't fit. We don't fit because we're above being normal or...or having a place in this world. For us, it's better to be outside of the box rather than in."

Upon heeding his wise words, I let my hands reach the back of his neck, ultimately pulling him closer to me.
While relishing into each other, our bodies molded into the comfort of my duvet as we continued forgetting about the world.

I kept running away, and only two men kept putting roadblocks up to stop me.
All along my trek of finding myself, I was losing myself...and I was losing them. I hid in a corner, a dimming corner that I hoped no one would find me in. In that corner, there was no light. There was only me and my way to cope.

As these thoughts ran through my head, Harry reached down and pressed a warm kiss to my cheek. Reveling in a man that could take away the darkness, I found that I wasn't really alone in my fight. And that I wasn't the only one in the light.

But I was selfish, wasn't I?
I was selfish because Harry wasn't the only man that helped me out of the dark.

What about Calum?
______________________

Some time earlier.

When you're born, there's this nurse that comes in; more like a hype nurse that smiles at your parents and says, "It's a girl!" or "A boy!"
And it's really quite comical, because you're naked, and if your parents can't tell already, it's a problem. The one thing that I would do differently in this situation is, instead of calling out the gender, how about calling in the name?
If you say, "Here's Jared!" or even, "Here's Laura," the parents would be even more excited because you're really there as what they planned you to be.

With me, neither of those things happened.
I had a rare condition where my legs were attached to each other, ultimately blocking the one place that could decipher if I was a boy or a girl.
I was like a mermaid without scales and everytime I tell this story, it sounds more appealing than the last.
As the story was told to me, my mother wailed my name (she had an instinct that I was a girl) before passing out at the sight of me. My father wept pitifully as he held me in his arms, staring at his baby girl as though she was completely dimorphic.
I wasn't a mermaid, nor will I ever be, but my condition made it so.
The doctors thought that I would never be able to walk and it'd be quite ironic if I said that "I stand before you today" to say that I can walk.

A clear incision was made where skin met skin and where a bone fraction met my knee.
You can imagine what the doctors thought of that.

At the age of three, I wobbled like Bambi.
We all know the Disney character.
I had a cane attached to my arm to support the left side of my body that couldn't support itself. Without the bone that they'd taken when I was a newborn, yeah, it was a bit hard to walk.
Surgery after surgery improved my stability, and my parents seemed...okay about everything.

Okay. All right. Fine.

All three phrases being the default usages for showing no emotion.
The reality is that growing up with that cane did not settle with my parents. They said they were fine, but were they really?
Medicines to keep the tender flesh from growing back together, calcium pills to keep my bones from giving out; all of this seemed like the symptoms of cancer without it actually killing me.

By the time I was sixteen, I could walk without the cane.
I was a normal girl, I guess you could say. I went to school, I took showers by myself, and I enjoyed tater tots.
The only thing different was that I walked with a limp. I didn't mind it, but occasionally, people would stop me during passing period just to ask what happened. I liked the idea of story-telling, especially the mermaid part.