The Moment I Knew (Larry Stylinson)

Chapter 22

A/N
I'm back from camp guys! So hopefully these chapters will be better written and longer.

Love you!!

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Harry's POV

I loved Felix to death, but sometimes, I really hated some things about him.
Mainly that he knew me entirely too well.
I had been dancing around him, avoiding the conversation that I knew that we had to have eventually. I knew that he could feel how tense I went every time he so much as walked next to me.
I didn't know how to treat him. I didn't know if he wanted me to keep cuddling with him and kissing his cheeks or if he wanted me to back off.
"Harry Styles, put that fucking book down right now and talk to me," he ordered, storming into our room.
I set the book that I had been reading down and hesitantly looked over to him.
"About what?" I asked, attempting to feign innocence.
He scowled at me.
"You know exactly what I'm talking about. I'm done with you're bullshit act of forgetting that anything ever happened. You're a shit actor Harry, I know that you have no idea how to act," he snapped, "So just fucking talk to me, okay? You went from my best friend to my best friend that I know feels incredibly awkward around me and it's driving me crazy."
"It's fine, Felix. We're fine," I mumbled, but I had given up trying to mask the unease in both my voice and posture.
"Like I said, Harry, you're a shit actor," he snorted, "We are not fine and you know it."
Felix looked more upset than angry. I hated it.
I looked down, around the room, at the door- anywhere but Felix's burning eyes.
"Jesus fucking Christ, Harry. Listen. Yes, I've got feelings for you, pretty fucking strong feelings. But I don't just love you in a romantic sense, okay? I love you because you're my best friend and I'm not letting what happened with you and Louis happen to us, got it?"
I cringed and I kept looking at my feet.
He made me feel like I had been so weak for not trying to be friends with Louis. There Felix was, shoving his feelings aside so that I could be happy.
I suddenly hated him, my chest burning with the dark, ugly emotion.
Who was he to be so fucking noble or whatever he was doing? Who was he to be so condescending? Who the fuck was he to make me feel even weaker than I already knew that I was?
Then, as I looked up, outraged and furious, my hatred melted away just as quickly as it had come.
Suddenly, he wasn't condescending. He wasn't noble.
Felix's eyes were brimming with tears and he looked so desperate and afraid.
He looked like he was the weak one.
"Harry, I can't lose you like that, okay? And fuck, I don't know if I'm being selfish or not. Part of me wants to be close to you still because I want to feel like I could have a chance with you eventually. But the rational part of me knows that I don't stand a chance at all and that maybe I'm stupid for doing this. But I can't hurt you like I know you've hurt Louis. I can't hurt you like that again, because I know hurting him hurts you. I can't look you in the eyes and see everything that I threw away because I fell for you. I'm not you, Harry. I'm not strong enough to hurt somebody I love to protect myself," he whispered helplessly.
I stared at him, my mouth opening slightly.
"Am I really that much of a horrible person to you?" I sniffed, and a wave of tears and hurt crashed down on me.
I tried to dash for the bathroom, but Felix caught my wrist and pulled me back.
"Fuck, Harry, no! You've got it so wrong! What I'm trying to say is that maybe you had the right idea, pushing Louis away. Maybe you got hurt a little less. And I know that you still hurt, but maybe you chose the better route. I don't care, though. I want to be your best friend because I want everything you can give me. Fuck, love, please don't cry," he begged, wiping away the tears that streaked down my cheeks with his thumbs.
"What did I do to deserve you?" I croaked, "And why can't I repay you for everything you've done for me by loving you? Fuck, why can't I do that?"
Felix sighed softly, his green eyes clouding with something I couldn't read.
"Because, even if you're the one for me, I'm not the one for you," he murmured.
I couldn't control the sobs that shook my body. I wasn't even sure why exactly I was crying.
Because my best friend was in love with me and I couldn't return the feelings? Because he was such a fucking amazing person? Because I was such a fucking terrible person?
I wasn't sure.
He let me crowd into his space, fisting my hands in his shirt, pushing my face into his neck, inhaling the warm, comforting smell that was Felix.
"Christ, I love you so much," I mumbled, "I do."
"There are so many kinds of love, though," he added, "Our loves mean different things."
"You know that I wish that they didn't. Felix, maybe...fuck, maybe we should try, shouldn't we? I want to try and you want it too, I know you do," I said, my eyes shining with a newfound hope.
He smiled sadly and even that looked incredibly forced and pained.
"Harry, you know that's a bad idea. You can't look me in the eyes and say that if we did try and Louis suddenly realized maybe he does have feelings for you, you can't say that you wouldn't immediately throw me away for him. And I know it's a slim chance of that happening, but even if it doesn't, I can't compete in something I know that I'll lose. Plus, love, you're so fragile right now. We didn't even fight and you had an anxiety attack. I can't risk your health for something I want, no matter how bad I, or both of us, want it. Look. When you go home and after you adjust to the real world and you and Louis sit down and have a nice, long talk, and after you heal more and you still want to try, we will, okay?" he murmured, tangling his fingers with mine and kissing my knuckles gently.
I stared at him.
"Felix, um. Do you think I could maybe be alone for a bit?" I asked, my voice coming out strangled.
He squeezed my hands before letting go and kissing me on the forehead.
"Just don't do anything to hurt yourself, okay, love?" he said softly.
I watched him pull his shoes on and leave through blurry eyes.
I made my way across the room to sit on his bed cross-legged. My eyes were full of burning tears that wouldn't fall. I wanted to cry, I wanted to scream and claw at my wrists, I wanted to break something.
But I couldn't. I didn't know why, but I couldn't.
The intense, dark anger returned and boiled inside of my chest. I couldn't even get release by crying anymore and it was so, so infuriating.
I stared at my scarred wrists, imaging the how perfectly straight and even new cuts would be. They would be orderly- the only organized thing in my life.
I was hit by an overwhelming urge to simply destroy my body. I didn't care with what. I wanted to claw at my skin with my nails, or take something heavy and hit myself until I bruised. I wanted to feel pain, any pain other than the one in my heart.
I wanted to cut my veins open and watch my own blood spill out until my mind went black and I had nothing left to bleed.
I stood up to ransack the room and find anything that could be used to even scratch myself with.
"Just don't do anything to hurt yourself, okay, love?" Felix had said, his voice part worried and part guarded so that I couldn't hear any other emotions.
I collapsed back onto the bed and wrapped myself in his covers, tempted to scream his name until he came to get me.
I couldn't cut or kill myself or anything that I wanted to do. Felix did so much for me; he sacrificed his own emotions for me. I couldn't let him down over something so trivial.
But it wasn't really trivial, not to me. It was a constant, insistent ache that my body was desperate to release.
As I slowly calmed down, the swirling anger faded and it was replaced by painfully intense guilt.
What had I done to deserve Felix? He was such a perfect guy. He was willing to shove away the fact that he had bloody fallen in love with me just so that I could be happy. He was willing to wait forever if he had to, and he accepted the fact that he would probably always have to wait.
Felix always knew what to say or what to do, when to be funny or to be serious, when enough was enough or when I could eat a little bit more. He knew me so well that it was a bit weird, but I knew that he was just extremely perceptive.
I touched my mouth, remembering how it felt to kiss him.
I remembered the way he had absolutely glowed afterwards until he came to the decision that we couldn't be together.
I wondered if Felix had a breaking point. He took so much pressure off of my shoulders and it had to be a heavy weight. Felix was extraordinarily strong, but I was scared of what would happen if the weight ever became too much.
Would he yell? Would he cry? Would he turn to drugs? Would he slip into the headspace that I sometimes did when I was too depressed to even move?
I couldn't picture Felix doing any of that, and that was what really scared me.
I had to have fallen asleep because I woke up to Felix crawling into his bed and tucking himself around me. The room was dark and I realized that I must have slept for a while. It had been daylight when I had fallen asleep.
"I love you, you know. I don't deserve you," I whispered.
His fingers combed through my hair and I pressed closer to him, soaking in his warmth.
"You deserve so much more than me, love," he sighed, "You shouldn't have to deal with unrequited love so often."
"Nice vocabulary," I yawned, nuzzling into his neck and wrapping my arm around his waist.
I felt him shiver and my heart sank. The room was warm and I knew that he hadn't shivered from the cold.
"But really, though. You deserve so much more than you think, Harry. Fuck, you don't deserve to be jerked around like a fucking ragdoll by Louis. I could make you so much happier, you know," Felix whispered, his voice rushed and urgent.
I wanted to kiss him. I was so close to it, too. I could smell the faint scent of cherry on his breath from the cough drops he had been eating as he recovered from a nasty cold.
His breath was gentle and steady.
"I want to kiss you," I said softly, reaching up to tug lightly on his hair.
Felix leaned forward a minuscule amount, his mouth barely brushing mine before he laid back.
"No, Harry," he said quietly, "You don't want to kiss me. You just want to kiss Louis."


Liam's POV

After a long night full of tears and threats of suicide, Louis finally cried himself to sleep.
I carried him to Harry's bed and gently deposited him, tucking the sheets around him. He felt a fraction lighter than I remembered.
I headed back to where Niall and Zayn were sitting, close and tense on the sofa.
I sighed as I sat down beside them.
"I can't watch him be like this anymore," Zayn said, almost angrily, "He's going straight down the same path Harry did. Who knows if we'll stop by one day and find him swinging from some goddamned rope?"
Niall gave a horrified squeak and I stared at Zayn, appalled.
"I think he'd probably drink himself to death, actually. He's not brave enough to hang himself," Zayn said bitterly.
"Jesus, Zayn, shut the fuck up, would you?" I snapped, "We don't need to hear that kind of shit. Louis is not going to kill himself because we won't let him."
"You said that same thing about Harry and look where it got us!" Zayn yelled, jumping to his feet, "Don't say something that you can't carry out, Liam."
I winced.
"Calm down, Zayn," Niall said quietly, looking up at Zayn like a puppy that had been kicked, "We learned from our mistakes and we are going to correct them. We're not going to just sit back and watch like we did for Harry. You've got to have better expectations of us than that."
Zayn blinked at him, his chest rising and falling as he breathed slowly, calming himself.
"What should we do?" he finally asked, sitting down again.
"I want to take him back to Doncaster. We can't always watch him and I think it'll be good for him to go home for a bit. Maybe his mum'll be able to turn him around. She is his mum after all," I explained.
They nodded their approval.
"I want to ask her to find him a psychiatrist or therapist or whatever he needs too. He isn't getting better keeping to himself," I added.
"Is there a difference between a psychiatrist and a therapist?" Niall asked.
I shrugged.
"Regardless, he needs to open up to somebody. He won't talk to us because we're too closely related to his problems in his mind. i dunno. It's a theory. Staying silent is eating at him and I don't want to witness him break down again like he just did," I said.
We all shuddered.
They'd probably broken several laws when they had come speeding back from visiting Harry.
They had rushed in right as Louis was screaming how badly he wanted to die especially loudly.
I had bruises forming around my body from when he had used me as a punching bag. I tentatively pressed a spot on my chest and flinched.
"I just can't stop thinking...you know, how Louis used to be the life of our group. He was always the one to cheer us up or raise our spirits when we felt down. And now, he's just...he's not Louis any more. A few months ago, if we told him he would be like this, he would have laughed his head off," Niall said sadly.
"Harry used to be happy too, you know. He used to know how to smile," Zayn said.
"Do you remember when us three were convinced that they were together behind our backs?" I asked, smiling slightly at the irony of it.
"I think even their own mums were convinced that they were in a relationship," Niall snorted.
"Wouldn't that have been nice? We could have avoided all of this," Zayn grumbled.
I ended up calling Jay a short while later and explaining what had happened. She didn't seem entirely surprised.
"I've hardly talked to him lately. I can understand how the poor girl felt. And he slept with- tried to sleep with a guy?" she asked, sounding bemused.
"Yeah. I don't really understand what goes through his mind anymore. Knowing the way he's been acting, it made perfect sense to him," I sighed.
Jay sounded so upset. I had no idea just how little she knew about what her son had been dealing with.
She knew about the excessive drinking and the lack of communication, but that was about the extent of her knowledge.
"So, I'll bring him to you whenever he wakes up tomorrow and we can go from there. Just make sure that the girls know to be careful around him. He can be pretty unpredictable and I don't want him to accidentally hurt their feelings," I warned.
"I'll talk to them. I think that only the littler girls need to know not to bother their big brother. The older ones will probably already know," Jay said.
I agreed and we exchanged a few more words before hanging up.
I went to Harry's room to check on Louis and make sure that he essentially was still alive.
He was fast asleep. He looked peaceful- an emotion that he simply didn't know anymore.
As I studied him, I realized how small he was. He was the oldest of us and probably the leader of the group when it came down to it. But as I looked at him, he looked so small and vulnerable. There were lines on his face that hadn't been there just a few months prior. Even as he slept, there were dark bruises under his eyes that hinted at exhaustion.
I knew that he felt scared and alone. He had been thrown head-first into a huge mess without any warning or any information.
I didn't know how I could be there for him. He refused company and getting him to talk was useless. The only thing I could do was hand him off to his mum and hope for the best.
I pulled a blanket up over him from where he must have kicked it to the bottom of the bed. I wondered if he had had a nightmare and woke up scared and alone and without protection as he had wrestled the blanket off of him in a fit of terror.
"Lou," I said softly, helplessly.
I made my way out of the room, closing the door quietly. I found Zayn asleep with his head on Niall's lap.
Niall looked up and shrugged.
"Zayn does know that there's an extra room, right?" I asked.
"Yeah. He said that you could have it," Niall said.
"I think I'll stay here with you guys. Being alone doesn't sound appealing," I explained, wrinkling my nose.
Niall nodded in agreement.
He hesitated for a moment before asking, "Liam? Will you be completely honest with me for a moment?"
"Yeah, of course, Ni," I said, "I always am."
He sighed.
"What do you think will happen when Harry comes back? Do you think he and Louis'll ever be friends again?" he asked.
He seemed scared of my answer and I had to admit that I was afraid as well. I didn't want to venture so far into the unknown.
"Christ, I don't have a clue. Lou's going to try to make Harry tell him everything, but I guess the question is what Harry'll do. He's a bit unpredictable when it comes to Louis. One second he'll refuse to hear his name and the next he'll be begging to know how Lou's doing. But I don't know about the friends thing. Definitely nowhere near as close as they used to be. They're both just too damaged from each other. They'll have to put up with each other, but I have no idea how friendly they'll be," I said slowly.
"I'm just scared, I guess. What if they can't stand to be around each other?" Niall asked.
"Then we lock them in a room together until they can. I'm being serious, Niall," I said as he snorted.
"Alright, Li. Goodnight," he yawned.
I smiled as his eyes flickered closed. I got up and got a few spare blankets and pillows and laid them around for whenever he and Zayn woke up cold or uncomfortable.
In the morning, I found Louis making tea. He didn't turn when I entered the kitchen.
"Lou?" I asked quietly.
He spared me a quick glance before turning back to his drink.
"How're you feeling?" I asked.
He shrugged.
"We're taking you to your mum's. Don't even fight me about it. You can't be by yourself any more and being in this place isn't doing you any good. You just need to get away," I said, "So go pack your stuff and we'll leave when you're ready."
Niall and Zayn had already left for their respective homes, wishing me luck with Louis.
Louis shrugged again and shuffled out of the kitchen. I heard the door to Harry's room shut a few moments later.
His eyes had been so emotionless. They weren't even blue; they had been a dull, defeated grey.
I was scared.
I knew that he had truly given up.
He slept, or at least pretended to sleep, for the entire drive to Doncaster. He listened to music to avoid having to listen to me.
He slowly slid out of the car when we pulled up to his house. His lips didn't even twitch while I remembered how he had always grinned madly when he had come home before.
I remembered when he had goofily danced with Harry while improved an incredibly random song about home.
Harry had laughed and laughed, looking at Louis like he was his entire world.
And that had been before he had fallen in love.
I wondered if Louis remembered it. I wondered if he thought about it too as we hauled his suitcases up to the door.
He didn't say a word and no emotion so much as flickered in his eyes.
Jay pulled us inside and greeted us both with tight, long hugs. Louis let himself be all but suffocated but he didn't hug her back. I saw the brief flash of hurt and worry when she pulled away.
Lottie came forward and tried to hug him as well, but he pushed her away. It was a bit rough and she stumbled back, her expression incredulous.
"Leave me alone. I want to be alone," he growled.
He stormed up the stairs and a door slammed a moment later.
"Don't take it personally, girls," I sighed, "He's just not doing well."
"Girls, go do something while I talk to Liam. You can visit with him later," Jay said, shooing them away.
She led me into the kitchen and I accepted the offer of tea.
"So how is he? Not well from what I saw in the five seconds before he went to his room," she sighed.
"Yeah. He hasn't said a word to me the entire day. He's just so...empty looking. And it scares me because I can remember several days when Harry looked identical to that," I said.
Jay nodded sadly.
"I feel horrible about everything that's happened. Harry's like a son to me, you all are," she said, "And Anne calls me all the time, too upset to hardly speak. She's just having trouble with realizing everything that happened. I'm having trouble dealing with how my son has ruined himself and he's only a fraction as worse as Harry."
"Sometimes I wake up and wonder if this whole thing hasn't been a dream and Harry and Louis are going to come running in, still knowing how to smile and laugh," I sighed, rubbing my hands over my face, "They're my best friends, your sons. It's killing me how helpless I feel."
Phoebe came running in.
"Mum! Louis shouted at me! And he swore!" she cried indignantly.
"I told you not to pester him, remember? He probably will shout at you for seemingly no reason, okay? You just have to leave him be. What did he say?" Jay asked.
Phoebe bit her lip, apparently wondering if she had to censor whatever he had said.
"Well, he told me to bugger off and to um...leave him...um, the fuck alone," she squeaked.
I raised my eyebrows. Louis loved his sisters a lot and he was always careful not to swear around them.
"Okay. I'll talk to him about it. Now go and don't go to him unless he asks you to," Jay said sternly.
Phoebe nodded and pranced off.
"I don't think that he's ever sworn around them before. He hardly even cares about anything anymore, not even the girls," Jay said, her voice thick.
"His mind is all over the place. He can't sort out his thoughts that tell him not to swear in front of them. Speaking of thoughts, do you know any therapists or like psychiatrists?" I asked, "Louis definitely needs to go to one."
"I can look around. I agree with that though. If Liam Payne can't get my son to open up, he needs professional help," Jay joked.
"I said to Niall and Zayn that I think Louis doesn't want to talk to us because we're so closely related to what he doesn't want to talk about," I explained.
Jay nodded.
I stayed until dinner, talking to her and filling her in on things she didn't know about what had been going on with Louis.
He refused to come down to eat, so she took some up to him. She came back with less than half of it eaten and a sad expression on her face.