niall has a tormented past, and so being with harry isn't the easiest.
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Breathe.
He needed to remember to breathe, because when he had episodes like this, it was never easy. Staring at himself, he attempted to make sense of what was happening. Emotions were whirring, and his body felt too heavy to hold up. Niall was never proficient in cases like these, not after everything that'd happened. If that made him weak, well then Niall was too damaged to care.
Closing his eyes he could only see his biggest fears. The man he had tried to forget for so long. Being with Harry had helped him with that, there was never a day where the Irish boy looked back at the ashes he emerged from. But, forgetting and healing were two different things, weren't they?
Harry was everything; no matter how much Niall had tried to prevent it from happening. Harry had been his everything since the very first day he'd met him. He didn't want to paint the curly haired man in the same light as him, but his conscious wouldn't listen. There were a lot of things Niall wasn't good at, but it seemed his lack of emotional control was the worst of them.
Why did Harry throw that punch? Why?
Trying to blink fast enough to wear away the tears, Niall tore his eyes from the bathroom mirror and simply glanced at his hands shakily grasping the porcelain. It was the familiarity of the situation that was driving him downward.
That, and the fact that he could never truly move on. With pain comes trauma, and nothing he did could change that. And so with every blink, he could feel the ghost of his past striking at him.
He knew what it felt like to be on the other side of that punch.
To see Harry so violent, the punch thrown with practice and precision, well it made him wonder if there was something he was missing.
"Niall!" Louis walked in with a slight screech as he swung the door with full force. "Niall, are you okay?" Quick in the way he wiped his tears, he gave his older friend a nod of reassurance as they made eye contact through the mirror. Louis' eyes were frenzied with worry, his hair slightly tousled, pulled by the tattooed hands. Suit wrinkled and all, Niall was left wondering how a charity function turned into a boxing match.
"Babes," his accent was thick, and everything he said was disoriented. Was that blood on his knuckles? "What did we do wrong?"
No one really knew how things went down in his last relationship, and now wasn't the time to tell them. "Nothing, Lou. Just an anxiety attack." he mumbled out quietly, readjusting his own jacket as he prepared himself to leave.
With a quirk of his eyebrow, Louis questioned. "You've been in countless fights. Anxiety over what?"
"Where's Harry?" What would be the point of saying anything now, things had passed hadn't they?
"Outside with a cigarette."
Nodding, he made a feeble attempt to walk past his friend, to which the other grabbed his arm gently. "You're building walls, Horan. In a relationship you need boundaries; I would open up to Harry before.."
"Is he thinking of leaving?" Small, weak in the way it left his pale pink lips. He'd have to deal with his baggage alone no matter what, but to not have Harry at all? A part of him wanted to laugh, all he'd been since his past was damaged goods. No part of him blamed Styles at all.
He was Harry Styles, intimidating in the way he stood yet gentle in the way he spoke. Always from the heart, never anything less. Harry Styles may not have been a morally strict man, but he did everything with passion; and it's why he runs the city the way he does. The curly haired man, bright as a star, would forever be too good.
