Swimming Through Sick Lullabies - Larry Stylinson

Chapter 10

“Lou, baby. Are you up.” The gentle voice and fingers, treading through his hair, brought him out of his sleep. He fluttered his eyes, before trying to rub the fuzzy warm feeling of sleep out of them. He felt amazingly rested.

“I’m up,” he mumbled, snuggling deeper into the bread chest he’d used as a cushion.

“Did you have a good nap?”

“Yeah, I did,” Louis yawned, as he made efforts to sit up. And he actually had. It felt like the first time in weeks he’d got a good sleep without nightmares or minor cases of sleepwalking. The sting of pain in Louis’ bum he felt every time he moved, reminded him of what he and Harry had been doing before he’d fallen asleep. It brought a smile to his face. What a great time to be alive.

“You must’ve been very tired. You just fell asleep before I even had the time to clean you off.” Harry asked in concern, moving to gather their clothes. He threw Louis his trousers and jumpers as well as a clean pair of boxers. And just like that, Louis was reminded again of his situation. Goodbye, sweet bless of ignorance.

“Yeah, I was actually. I didn’t sleep well last night,” Louis straightened his back, hearing his joints pop. It was true, he’d had a bad night of sleep last night, but that was more the rule than the exception these days.

“You seem to do that quite a lot lately,” Harry inquired, shooting looks filled with concern at his boyfriend.

“I guess,” Louis answered, pulling his shirt over his head at the same time.

“I hope it’s not because of the increase of attacks lately. I don’t want you to worry of those. I’m not trying to say that we’ve got everything under control, because as much as it pains me to say it, we haven’t, but I certainly won’t give it the chance to come close enough to you.”

“I know that Harry. The thought of it getting its hands on you is what worries me the most. And school too, I guess I need to stop stressing about the amount of homework and just get down to it, instead of procrastinating it.” He shrugged. It wasn’t like Louis lied to Harry. He did worry of the curly haired lad. Louis worried of what he might do to Harry during one of his black-outs. Not to mention the fact that Harry’s face always seemed to pop up in his odd dreams. So, he wasn’t per se lying, just not telling the complete truth. Hanging out with werewolves had learnt him some sneaky ways to lie without his heartbeat giving him away.

“You don’t have to worry of us either, Louis. We’re not humans, we have natural weapons.” Harry let his claws out for a while, eyes turning from green to gold and back to green again as he finally withdrew his claws. He possessed the perfect control of his wolf, of which Niall and Liam could only dream of, that came with being a born werewolf.

“Don’t act like humans are weak, pathetic creatures. We can fight too.” Louis rolled his eyes, refusing to be seen as a damsel in distress just because of his nature.

“I know that. But in a way you are weaker, physically that is. You don’t have a proper healing. You can’t even take pain away from each other. Your hearing, strength, speed and stealth or mediocre. You’re not weak per se, just a tad vulnerable than us.”

“That’s not entirely true, we just fight different than your kind. We use our brains to create technology. We invent our weapons,” Louis smiled as he pulled a pocket knife out of the pocket of his trousers.

“What’s that?” Harry asked dumbfounded, instantly smelling wolfsbane as Louis opened the knife.

“A pocket knife laced with wolfsbane to defend myself against supernatural creatures.”

“Where did you get that?” Harry took the knife out of his hand, careful not to touch the very poisonous blade and took his time to inspect it.

“Laced it myself after I got initiated in the supernatural world. The wolfsbane was a bitch to get, but I did feel a lot safer having it. I stopped taking it with me, after I decided to trust werewolves for not shifting and attacking me. With the attacks lately…” He shrugged.

“Smart,” Harry told him, after handing him the knife to put it back.

“Thanks, Curly,” Louis smiled, before giving him a kiss on the lips, tugging at his shirt to pull him closer.

“I really have to go now,” Harry sighed, “Nick said pack-meeting at half five and it’s already five fifteen.”

“You better go then,” Louis amended, “Wouldn’t want to madden grumpy Nick even more, huh.”

“You could come along, you know. The pack adores you.” Harry brought his puppy eyes out.

“Don’t think Grimshaw would agree to that actually. And besides, I already promised Zayn we’d hang out tonight.”

“Oh, well. Okay then. Say hi from me.” Harry spoke up as they were outside.

“I will. You too then, ‘kay?”

They kiss for a last time before breaking apart.

Louis figured he’d walk to the nearest bus stop and take a bus to Zayn’s house. It wasn’t that far from Harry’s, but still too far for walking. He hadn’t have a black out that day, nor the day before and it made him restless, thinking it could happen any moment.

The blackouts had kept coming the last few weeks and would struck randomly, sometimes only lasting for minutes, sometimes lasting for hours. Once Louis had gone to bed, not even knowing what had happened during the day since he'd woken up. Fortunately he hadn’t experienced anything like the time he’d waken up in the forest and no one noticed them. Well, no one had mentioned anything to him.

He'd come to two options. One, his memory just cut random bits out, but he still experienced them before getting wiped out. Two, his body just went on auto-pilot during the black outs. Louis didn't know why they happened, but he surely knew that he wanted to get rid of them as soon as possible.

He was also not entirely sure if they had anything to do with the attacks. According to Harry random people got paralysed by the creature. At first they thought those people were dead, but doctors soon found out they were still breathing, they just couldn’t move. After a bit more than a day, the victims would regain control of their limbs again. Unfortunately, none of them could remember what happened.

The police thought there was a new, very dangerous drug causing these symptoms. They couldn’t smell the scent of the creature on the victims of course, neither could they see the small healed scars at the back of their necks. The pack could.

But of course, that was the only thing the pack could do at the moment. Their lack of progress brought the whole pack on edge. Nick even more than others, apparently. One more reason of why Louis didn’t often go to pack meetings anymore. Normal Nick was already bad enough.

Louis was grateful for having a friend like Zayn, who didn’t even know that werewolves existed. He enjoyed the time they spend together and couldn’t think of how much more stressful his life would’ve been if he hadn’t get to meet this boy at the beginning of the year. Harry did a great job of using sex to keep them both sane and relaxed, but sometimes he just needed a friend. A friend whose biggest problem was that “Liam probably didn’t like like him.”

So that was why the sight of Zayn’s front door brought an instant smile to Louis’ face.

A.N.: I'm back! I'm officially off hiatus :). I had a weird kind of writer's block with this chapter but yeah, here it was. Tell me your thoughts!  (it makes me write faster, ;) )