Pretty n' Pastel [l.s.]

❁ fifteen ❁

"Have you seen anymore bruises lately?" Niall asks.

Harry, who's sitting across from Niall at the library, nods with a sad look in his eye. "Yeah, a few. All in places that someone could've grabbed him. A lot of the time they're on his arms."

Niall shakes his head. "I don't know how you're supposed to know for sure."

Harry shrugs. "Me either. Even if I did, what would I do about it? What could I do about it?"

"I don't know, man. I don't know how you'd be able to get him away from someone who's so controlling," Niall says, ignoring his textbook just as Harry's doing.

"That's the problem, Louis might not know or like acknowledge his situation so I can't just be like, 'hey you wanna run away from your douche bag boyfriend with me?'"

"Yeah, I wish there was something I could do. I know I'm not his friend or anything but like, I still want to get him out of this."

"You're doing everything you can. Just listening and helping me."

"Yeah I guess," Niall says with a sigh, genuinely starting to get attached to the situation.

"I'm just worried that if I do say something, Louis will get mad and like kick me out of his life."

"And then he'd be stuck with Eliot."

"Right."

And really, right now that is Harry's biggest fear. He cares so much about Louis, he's not sure why his feelings were so strong right off the bat, but they were and literally since he saw him, Harry's had a place for Louis in his heart. If something happened, and Louis got mad and started ignoring Harry and not letting him in his life, Harry would never forgive himself for not helping Louis, even if it wasn't his fault.

Harry still hasn't figured out a plan but he's realized that it's not really possible to do that anyway. This isn't a step by step thing. This is a complicated relationship. Harry doesn't know the full story, he doesn't know who's all involved or if Louis' family knows. He doesn't know what Louis would do if he brought it up, he doesn't know anything.

This is life and it tends to throw curveballs at people pretty often. Anything could happen and there's so many different things that could be going on. That's why Harry's decided he's not going to come up with a plan. He's going to deal with it as he goes. Trust his intuition on things and pray that he makes the right choices.

He did some research on abusive and toxic relationships and the advice he saw a lot was to raise the person who's in trouble's self esteem. This toxicity is all they've know or at least it's been so ingrained into their head that they start to normalize it. They ignore what obviously isn't okay, because they're scared of what being without their painter will be like.

Showing what a good relationship looks like, will help Louis start to realize that he's worth more than what Eliot's given him. That was Harry's idea from the beginning, to treat Louis well.

He also read that he shouldn't criticize Louis. He needs to accept that Louis has the right to make his own mistakes and that this is his life and he can choose to be with Eliot if he wants to. If Harry comes off as judgmental, Louis' just going to get defensive.

He also saw that telling Louis that he understands his position is important too. The only problem is, he's never been in a situation like this. However, his mom and Kendall both have. Kendall's was more verbal and manipulative, but his Mom's was physically.

He's talked to his mom about it before and she doesn't really have any problem opening up about it so he's going to talk to her too and see if she has any advice.