The first time they meet, it is sunrise, and Harry is naked.
It's not immediately apparent what he's looking at, at first, when Louis approaches at a relaxed pace on his bicycle. He thinks, peering at the pinkish lump in the distance off to the side of the road, that it's just a large piece of rubbish, because the countryside is littered with it these days, the jetsam of an unruly nation who've no consideration for nature anymore, what is this country coming to, and god, he could not sound more like his nan right now.
And then he thinks maybe he needs a new prescription on his contact lenses because the lump looks suspiciously like a prone human body lying in the grass, and then Jesus Christ it's an actual human body, and Louis swerves his bike so hard he nearly ends up adding himself to the body count.
Extracting himself from spinning wheels and the clatter of protesting chains, Louis gingerly brushes gravel out of a long scrape on the side of his left hand. He walks on unsteady feet towards the body while shrill questions whirr through his head to the backbeat of a jackrabbit pulse. He's not sure what the protocol is to check if a person is dead. What if he's treading all over a crime scene right now and destroying evidence that will let a murderer go free? Maybe he should find a long stick to poke it with? Or, like, should he just sort of prod the body with his foot? But he really likes these Vans and if they touch a dead person he'll have to burn them, and shit, what kind of a horrible person is he to be thinking of his shoes when someone has just died?
"Hello," Louis calls out in a wobbly voice.
The corpse stirs.
Not a corpse! Relief smashes him in the chest at the same time that his startle reflex sparks on. The combination twists his body into some kind of advanced yoga pose nobody has even invented yet, and Louis chokes out a weak, "Gah."
Not-a-Corpse clambers with slow limbs onto his feet and blinks sleepy owl eyes at him. "Hello," he says, his voice scratching out lower frequencies than Louis expects.
And it's not like Louis knows anything about him to make any kind of call about what he should sound like or whatever, but, look, he has these tattoos and markings all over his body that belong to a child. Like, a girl child. There is an enormous butterfly emblazoned across his torso, and plump, twin swallows just beneath his collarbone,so forgive Louis if he thinks this guy should sound like a peppy sidekick from a Disney cartoon. On acid, maybe.
"You okay, mate?" Louis says. He takes a cautious shuffle backwards, because hey, the guy is skinny and has a thing for butterflies, but he also is bigger than Louis. Granted, the chances of him pulling a weapon are slim. He's starkers, after all. Unless he keeps a switchblade somewhere really painful.
It's now that Louis notices a ring of small, wilted flowers nestled in his head of dark curls, and Louis would wager his left foot that Not-a-Corpse is friendly with more than a few recreational drugs.
"I'm all right," Not-a-Corpse says, and gives Louis a honey-slow smile that Louis should probably find offensive.
So, okay, he's cute, what with the dimples and freakishly green eyes and all, but he's also probably high as balls and he's naked in a field, so he's probably not exactly meet-the-parents material. Louis' pretty much done with those types; there are pieces of his heart he can't find still.
"Right, okay. D'you want me to call somebody for you? Or, like, the police? You're obviously missing... a lot of stuff. Like," Louis says, with vague gestures to a general area and trying not to look too closely, "pants?"
The way Not-a-Corpse blinks at him it's like they're not even speaking the same language.
Louis tries again. "Did you hit your head or something?" he asks.
