Modest Oblivion - Book 6 (Larry Stylinson AU)

Chapter 30 - To break with tradition

‘Every breath you take’ - Denmark and Winter

Love Don't Live Here - Bastille ft. Rory Andrew, Jonas Jalhay and F.Stokes

To break with tradition  

Louis looked at Zayn, he lingered between having a thousand things to do and wanting to simply haul Zayn straight off the rooftop and away from Saskia. He squinted beyond the fairy lights and hardly recognised the girl with bubblegum pink hair and a look of abhorrence on her face. Her eyes were wide, she stared straight at Zayn and briefly glanced to Louis with mirrored disgust. Her nose was wrinkled up in a scowl and she gripped the microphone with a twisting force, her anger clearly directed at Zayn. Saskia wasn’t the girl they once knew, she was thinner and paler as if she had wasted away since their last encounter. 

That night, he swallowed hard as he tried to silence his thoughts, you were cowards. Louis shook his head, you ran away, he squeezed his eyes closed but he had learnt long ago that turning a blind eye didn’t change the past.

Saskia’s gaze was so heated, so intense that Louis physically turned away with a loud huff and put a hand on Zayn’s tense shoulder. “You okay,” he muttered under his breath as waiters and florists madly blew past them. It was a stupid question, Zayn was clearly anything but okay. 

Zayn stared at the skyline, his eyes blank and jaw clenched. “I’m fine.”

“Those fateful words,” Louis scoffed. I’ve said them many times before.

Zayn blinked as he returned from his thoughts, cast a look at Louis and finally said; “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” Louis stepped closer and took a cigarette from Zayn’s breast pocket. “No sooner we say those words, no sooner a breakdown is in sight.”

Zayn didn’t move, the music from the band grew louder and he stepped further from the stage as if the sound itself were physically pushing him. He chuckled, “sometimes I think if I say, ‘I’m fine’ enough times–” he inhaled the thick smoke from the lit cigarette between his lips. “–that it will eventually come true,” the words mixed with smoke that rolled from his mouth.

Louis nodded, and folded his arms as he let the thought think in. Zayn was right, they were all guilty of trying to convince themselves they were okay. He glanced at Zayn, then looked beyond Zayn to Harry at the bar. 

Harry worked to take the attention off Zayn who swayed on his feet and looked off colour, Harry was also avoiding Louis after his confession about his time in rehabilitation. It was one of Harry’s talents, avoidance. Louis knew it well, Harry buried himself in work, music, anything to avoid facing whatever it was that appeared too hard to handle. 

Louis sighed and watched Harry, he brushed his hair from his eyes as he talked in detail to a small blonde girl with clipboard in hand and bluetooth piece in her ear. Louis smiled, a dazed kind of smile that turned to a frown as he let Zayn’s words settle in. ‘I think if I say I’m fine enough times, it will eventually come true.’

With Zayn lost in his own thoughts Louis was greeted with a silent wave of awareness. Through the haze of sex, the veil of lust that overtook him when he was with Harry lay an uneasy truth. Harry was a killer.

The words alone left bile in his throat, Louis stiffened as he recalled the vacant expression on Harry’s face as he confessed his mistakes. Am I really fine with what Harry told me? He swallowed, his body rigid. He wasn’t sure he really was ‘fine,’ have we changed too much? Can I love who he’s become? The thought was obscene, of course he could love Harry. The fact he couldn’t immediately answer with, ‘I love Harry no matter what,’ had Louis taken aback.