It's Getting Cold These Days [Larry Stylinson AU]

Eighteen

"Liam and I met right after I'd come here, a few years back. At first I thought he would offer me his couch, that I might..." Harry rolled his eyes and tapped his fingers to the plastic cup the good nurse had given him. Tepid water sloshed inside. "He didn't. Let me stay, I mean. Which was fine—I was just being naïve. He introduced me to his friends and they were like my safety net for the first years, before we started 'dating'." He made quotation marks with his healthy hand and grimaced. "I hung out less and less with them and Liam would stay over at my place and I at his, most nights."

It glimmered of unanswered inquiries in Louis' eyes but he stayed silent.

Harry decided to take a break.

The temperatures had risen all over the country. Outside the hospital window, water escaped from their assigned runnels and created a veil before the glass, blurring the world. Chunks of ice would break at the root and skid along the downspouts. Sometimes a chunk would block the path and flood the system. Harry had been watching them for a while.

Maybe for the first time, he wondered if the crash had been intentional. Undoubtedly he believed that it was an accident—Liam would have made him know if it wasn't—but a small part of him considered the possibility that Liam had seen him wandering from alleys to the middle of the street and, perhaps without realising it, short circuited. That his reflexed had been dulled and his feet leapt from gas to brake when it was certain they would collide.

He couldn't share these thoughts.

He looked at Louis, at how equally bruised they were now, and pursed his lips. It might as well have been Liam here by his side, couldn't it?

He shook his head, blaming the gash in his skull for drawing parallels. Despite Louis' non-verbal protests, Harry lifted his hand to Louis' mouth. It skipped over swollen clots and fissures carved by the cold, almost as harsh as they ones in Harry's face. He touched Louis' chin and forced himself to remember how he had thought of Liam when they kissed.

Louis hummed softly in his throat and his sore lips parted, just far enough for his breaths to ruffle the frayed bandages. Harry withdrew but kept his eyes downcast.

He continued: "This one time you asked me if I'd been on any dates. I've been out to fairs, to restaurants, homebound ones. I would've brought him home to meet my folks but, you know. I need you to understand that I don't talk about Liam. There's a reason I haven't mentioned him."

"Were you in love?

Countless nights spent on Harry's tiny couch flooded his mind, where Liam would act blanket so Harry wouldn't have to keep his feet out in the cold. Even during summers it would get chilly inside. Harry would drown in the cologne and Liam's breaths in his neck.

He said, "Doesn't matter now, does it? He's gonna be a dad, yeah?"

Louis nodded.

"We broke it off a month ago."

Louis took Harry's free hand and brought it to his nose, nudged over his knuckles.

"He told me he was married."

Harry laughed. "Fuck if I know. He was engaged last time I met him. His girl invited me to the wedding. She had this... I know people say you're supposed to glow when you're pregnant, but I..."

He shook his head, unwilling to delve into the subject. It still haunted him at night, when he was down to his final cigarette and the tar filtered through his brain. He wasn't willing to heal just yet.

Louis stilled the trembles running through his hand, but Harry didn't want to lie down. He needed to breathe.

"It was, like, the day before I saw you for the first time. We were supposed to go out—Well, Liam was supposed to come over. He'd been busy fucking someone else so we hadn't seen each other in a while. So I get to the flat, get dressed and see the note—his note. He says it'd been brewing and that I should have anticipated it and he says that he's bought cigarettes. I'd bought some wine he probably wouldn't have liked, so I smoke and I drink and I have a stroke. Of course, he still stands as my emergency contact, so when I wake up he's there by my bed. He was kinder then."