Nocturne in Silver and Blue

Chapter 2- Feelings

"O how he loves you, darling boy. O how, like always, he invents the monsters underneath the bed to get you to sleep next to him, chest to chest or chest to back, the covers drawn around you in an act of faith against the night."

– Richard Siken, from You Are Jeff

*

It takes a while to learn to live with it.
Sometimes Harry's with Louis and he'll be Louis, nothing more, just the boy he's known for ages now, his best friend in all the world. But then he'll find himself paying attention to Louis's glow and he'll suddenly remember everything. A star. It's hard to get his head around it sometimes. Stars have always looked so tiny to him, so far away – something that he knows is there but sounds vaguely made-up, something that could be imaginary and it'd have the same effect on his life anyway. It's hard to think of the teensy glittering lights up there in the way he's told at school: giant fiery balls of heat like the Sun, bigger than the Earth many times over.

But where being with Louis sometimes is so normal, other times Harry looks at him and just knows. Louis is made of light. There's no other way it could be.

Which is confusing, even if the knowledge fits so well. How can that be? Louis has a boy shape. He's not a giant ball of fire. It makes everything Harry though he knew about stars become strange and abstract. But there's no one he can ask about it; he's old enough to know that no one will believe him when he tells them what Louis is. (He suspects that he's the only one who can see Louis glow, for whatever reason, so he won't even be able to use that as proof.)

So Louis is a star. Okay. He gets used to the idea eventually, like he'd get used to a new haircut or the change in number from one year to the next. It's strange, it should be impossible, but it makes sense. The more time that passes, the more familiar the idea sounds, and the less it suddenly shocks him when he's with Louis and he thinks about it.

The guilt is different.

Harry tries to learn to live with it, but it's so much harder. It's not something the just has to get used to – it's something he can never escape, no matter how hard he tries. It sits heavy in his gut, and he can never ignore it for long. He forgets it's there sometimes when he's having an especially good time, when he's with Louis and he's laughing so hard he can't breathe – but then Louis will make an offhand comment about where he came from, or Harry will have to go home and he'll remember Louis has nowhere to go home to and it's suddenly back again, stronger than ever. He gets better at shoving it away and pretending it isn't there, but he can never fully escape it.

He can never tell Louis. That's the one thing he knows. He can never tell Louis that Harry was the one who brought him here, because Harry's certain it'll make Louis hate him and he can deal with the guilt but he doesn't think he could deal with that.

*

In Harry's head, summer is when he gets to be with Louis properly.

He doesn't know when he started thinking of it like that. He doesn't really care to remember, either – that's just the way things are. He sees Louis during the school year because he always sees Louis, but there's so much other stuff in the way: school itself and homework and things he does after school and seeing all his other friends and having to go visit relatives on the weekend when he's supposed to have the whole day to do as he likes. Summer's different. Summer means travelling every so often, yes, but it also means weeks and weeks ahead of him where he has absolutely nothing to do. And "absolutely nothing" always has something to do with Louis.

Summer means the park and playing there like when they were little. (Because playing is a little-kid thing, yes, but Harry has so much fun he can't bring himself to care.) Summer means Harry having the time to teach Louis football and Louis promptly becoming much, much better at it than him; summer means Harry having to go up to the ice cream cart and ordering two cones by himself because Louis stubbornly refuses to order his own; summer means Louis staying over and talking in whispers way past midnight and clear blue skies and sunlight in the day and no clouds to block out the stars at night. Summers are for them. Harry never wants them to end.