Before The End (One Direction)

13. Clean

I feel like this song does a good job of really communicating Harry's messed up thinking in this chapter. The song is migraine by 21 pilots.

Louis POV~

Harry stayed in bed late the following morning. When he finally did get up, the rest of us had already eaten and gotten dressed. It was our last day in Africa. All we were doing today was stopping in the town for a bit of filming and then getting on the plane to go home.

When I asked Harry how he was, all he told me was "Don't worry, I shouldn't start tweaking until later." That didn't reassure me for obvious reasons. I made sure to hide his drugs deep in my bag before we headed out. Disposing of them was going to be my first priority as soon as I got home.

Harry was irritable all day but he made an obvious effort to be friendly and charismatic to everyone we interacted with. Whenever he snapped at us, he'd apologize as fast as he could get the words out of his mouth. He was really trying. I almost thought that maybe Harry getting clean was going to be easier than we thought.

It started to get bad about an hour into our flight, when Harry complained that he had a headache. At first it was just a headache, but an hour later he also stated that his shoulders were sore from carrying kids around on them. Less than twenty minutes later he said that his stomach along with everything else was killing him and that he was going to take a nap. The look on his face wasn't a good one. He looked miserable. I silently thanked the universe for making him give up his knife along with all of our other potentially dangerous items at the gate. All those things were in cargo out of his reach.

"He looks terrible," Niall said as soon as Harry closed the door to the bunks.

"I know," I nodded. "He's trying to keep it together for us, I can tell."

"What was he complaining about?" Zayn asked quietly glancing at the door he'd disappeared through. We all spoke in hushed voices to keep Harry's prying ears away.

"He says everything hurts," I answered shrugging. "I hope he knows that this is only the start."

"I think he's painfully aware of that," Liam said sounding resigned. "Do you still have the drugs?"

I nodded. "We shouldn't of made him quit cold turkey. We should have weaned him."

Zayn shook his head. "He wouldn't have stopped. He'd just keep weaning forever."

I shrugged. I just wanted to find a way to make all of this easier for him. The more I thought, the more hopeless it felt. I hated having to sit back and watch him suffer. Yesterday had been the first breakthrough with him and none of us knew how to go about this.

We sat without speaking for a few long moments before I decided to go back and check on Harry.

I found him curled up on the floor next to the bunks with a pillow beneath his head. He was pale and sweating buckets. His sweatshirt had been removed to reveal the multiple deep slices acrossed his wrists. There were deeper than I'd ever seen him cut before and they terrified me, but I wasn't surprised. I'd assumed thats what he was trying to communicate to me when me and Liam had held him back by his arms the previous day and I'd seen blood on the sheets and his hands. His eyes were closed, but the uneven pace of his breathing and the restless twitching told me he was awake.

"Harry?"

He jerked violently sitting upright with terror in his eyes. I'd clearly startled him. He scanned the room before settling his eyes on me and relaxing immediately. "How bout not sneaking up on me yeah?" He suggested laying back down. His forehead was creased with anxiety as he attempted to settle in again.