Stars Leave Black Holes Behind [HS]

1

Valerie could not sleep. She lay on her back looking up at the ceiling through the darkness, watching and waiting for something, for anything to happen. Cool, December air floated in from the open window but she couldn't feel it. Valerie could not feel much anymore.

A quiet snore jarred through the air, making her jump and after a moment she sighed. Zayn.

Zayn.

They were friends. Good friends. Bonded over their mutual hatred for people and an ugly, crippling sadness neither of them had learnt to let go of. It was that utterly soul-consuming shit that seemed to last forever. The lonley, brittle feeling that had lodged its way into the dips and creases and pores of her skin, had intertwined around the strands of her very existence and had melted into her bones like lava. Hot and suffocating and really fucking painful.

Except Valerie couldn't feel the pain anymore.

Zayn could, but he liked to smother it in frivilous addictions that were breath by breath and inch by inch stopping his heart.

She shuffled, kicked Zayn's leg accidentally, shuffled again. She couldn't get comfortable. Her pillow felt like a smooth slab of concrete and the mattress like those jagged rocks by the beach she used to go to every Saturday with her father.

It was like this every night, now. No sleep and the ceiling above her bed and the feeling of being stranded on an island even though Zayn was lying there alive beside her. It was lonliness and rocks that cut her and things that she'd lost lifetimes ago.

"Val?" Zayn's voice was raspy from sleep. "Val, are you awake?"

She didn't answer. He sighed, touched her hand, let it go.

"Go to sleep."

His voice wasn't comforting, wasn't pretty and smooth, wasn't tender. It was friendly, though. Calm. Not the voice of a lover, but at least one of a friend.

She nodded but he couldn't see it, and she didn't care if he did. Val waited until the same soft snores were creeping out of his mouth before getting up out of her bed. Their bed. And she padded to the kitchen, opened the window onto the fire escape, sat and looked down.

After a moment, Valerie began to feel herself shivering - not because she was cold, despite the ice she could feel running up and down her arms - but because it was like she could feel a ghost beside her.

The ghost of them, what they were, what she wished they could still be.

Val and Harry had often sat there, watching the world go by. She would be curled into his side, her head in the point where his neck met his shoulder, with her legs folded up inside his lap. His arm would be around her back, stroking her skin, holding her gently together. They would be drinking black coffee, too. Always. Sipping in turn, with their secret kisses tasting bitter and sweet and soft and warm and home.

Home.

If she closed her eyes hard enough it was like she could still feel his arms on her, his phantom hands holding her own as they kissed underneath the sky; and looking up at it now, with the light and the dark and the stars and the big full moon; Valerie could feel her heartbeat suddenly stumble. Stutter. Stop. Altogether. Just stop.

Because looking at those stars a million miles away, was like looking at him. Like looking at Harry.

Because he was made of stars too.

Every atom of his fucking being had been melded with something so exquisite, so delicately divine, that he shone. His skin and his eyes and his smile. Everything about him just fucking shone.

And she remembered when she used to just sit and watch him. Sometimes it was all she could do: just relax in the brilliance that seeped from him into the atmosphere, making everything around him radiant, everything around him glowing with his light. Because stars do that. They glow and they burn and they radiate, create a special halo around themselves- their own little pool of yellow electric light, and they're the centre of it. They're the catalyst.

All, of course, until they go out and all they leave in their wake is a black, soul-sucking mass of nothingness.

If Harry was a star, Valerie was the black hole.

Yes. That summed it up about right.

Valerie closed her eyes to the sky, the back of her eyelids still humming. She could still taste black coffee in her mouth.

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Song: I Go To Sleep by Sia

"When I look up from my pillow, I dream you are there with me. Though you are far away, I know you'll always be near me."