It’s early morning, and Louis is standing under the hot blast of water, eyes pinched shut with his face in the spray, when a cold blast of damp air wraps around him as the shower door is opened. He doesn’t turn to look, just smiles as he feels long arms wrap around him as the door clicks shut and the heat swallows them both now. His lips stretch up even more when he feels his boy’s mouth trailing along his shoulders from behind.
Louis leans back into his warmth, his body that engulfs him like a blanket as his large hands kneed into his body.
He loves him, he really does.
He feels those lips trace up his neck and behind his ear, whispering something he can’t quite understand— it’s drowned out by the blast of water.
He turns to press a kiss to his boy’s mouth, but as he opens his eyes, he’s greeted with a black tile wall with long streaks of condensation along it. His body shudders coldly as the jets of water become unbearably hot, beginning to sear at his skin as he lets out terrified screams of horror, ringing out into emptiness as steam begins to engulf him.
Louis jerks awake, sweating so profusely he finds he’s drenched the shirt he’d slept in. His heart is jumping in his throat, and he wants nothing more than to feel his boy wrapped around him again. So he buries his face into the pillow opposite and let’s out a wretched scream until it feels his soul has crawled out through his mouth.
-
Louis has become the epitome of nothing. He finds himself holed up in Zayn’s guest room for most hours of the day, staring out the window overlooking a river.
He thinks of how it would feel to throw himself into it’s depths, to never emerge again.
He even ponders on an hour to do so, but when he hears Zayn calling for him down the hall, he decides that it wouldn’t be the right way.
It is three days after his boy was lost, that Louis finds himself hunched over the kitchen table, tentatively sipping at tea with Zayn staring at him with a solemn expression across from him.
Louis looks up at him with heavy eyes as his friend strikes a match and lights a cigarette. And if Louis weren’t so deep into this hole, he would’ve chastised him for smoking inside.
Zayn is expectant, but not in the impatient way— he’s one of the few people who can sit for as long as you make him without pestering you about when he can stand.
So Louis revels in this silence among he and another, stares into the pit of his mug, at the dark liquid within.
"What happened, Louis…" he says quietly, not in the form of a question, more of a suggestion. He knows better than to push on a gaping wound.
The man glances up again from his mug, drumming his fingers on the rim of it before letting out a ragged sigh, not able to muster down the ever-present ache in his throat and the way his bottom lip quivers. He shakes his head and diverts his eyes quickly, “Oh..—”
He tells Zayn how Miranda and Harry’s father had done in slow, trembling words that threaten to spill out from his mouth in a slur of sobs. He composes himself long enough to finish with hearing the gun shot before he’s crippled by heart-wrenching sobs that emanate deep within him.
Zayn ashes his cigarette before rounding the table and wrapping the man in his arms and lifting him with surprising ease. Louis’ entirety was dwindling day by day, pounds being shed like water.
He carries him to the couch where he holds him for well over an hour as he sobs incoherent words into his chest, cringing and yelling. When his cries suddenly stutter out to empty heaves for breath, before quietly settling down to just the pain of tears in his throat, he glances up at Zayn.
