we'll live to tell the tale (l.s.)

only god knows

tw// mentioned self harm , eating disorder , trauma 

hi all, hope you enjoy this chapter. i enjoyed writing it. things are going okay with me, the doctors want me to go to some behavioral health crisis place and i honestly rather die so i told them hell fucking no. i got 2 hrs of sleep last night, went to school, went to an appointment, now i have 3.5 hrs of orchestra. very tired. not a big deal. but whatever, you know. it'll be fine. i'm just beyond irritated. also the white men in my life <<<<<

thanks for all the support. comments mean a lot to me. i've been receiving some dms on twitter regarding this fic, and they honestly make my day. it might not seem like it because i suck at texting and conversating in general, but i really do. so thank you guys sm.

twitter: @louflymehome

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for louis, he thought a lot about how he was living proof of not only how tainted someone can be, but also of what parmenides, during his time, believed. what is, is, and what is not, is not. in other words, he thought, what he was trying to say was that things are constant—how something is made stays as how it is made. louis, for one, has been, and will always be, the same scared little boy shoved in the closet. no matter how much time passed (another construct parmenides refused to blindly believe in), he was who he was predisposed to be, as much as he hated it. parmenides was the first of all presocratic philosophers who had even thought to question the existence of change. past the atomists, the pythagoreans. his ideas didn't make any sense to anyone back then, and they still didn't now.

many of these ideas were so indescribably outside of what everyone else believed, such as that the world around us is nothing more than an illusion—after all, if the universe once did not exist, then there was no way to prove that it existed now.

obviously, louis didn't believe all this. one would be crazy to. and it's not that he liked to study philosophy or even particularly understood it. this concept had just stuck out to him, one that he'd read somewhere in a book or article, and it'd taken him by the shoulders and throttled him. this is who you are, it told him, no matter how far you run from doncaster, from your illness, from new york, you will never escape from who you really are.

stagnancy is terrifying—that's an undeniable fact. but the thought of change, of the idea that he could have become a much better person than he'd actually turned out to be, was much more nauseating.

he limited the amount of times he'd allow himself to wake harry after a nightmare to just twice a week. even that, he thought, would be too much to ask of the younger boy. it'd get old, somehow, eventually, and harry would leave him if it happened too often. he felt this reality seep into his bones every time he caught harry glance at him with this worried puppy dog expression when the younger boy thought he wasn't looking. luckily enough for him, he'd learned over the years how to anticipate others' emotions and read them like words on a page. to steel himself for sex, for being hit, for being scolded. perhaps that was the reason he liked to lose himself in books so much, he'd realized later on in his life.

harry had finally released his first single out to the public, and producers were already eager to eat him up. labels, record deals, contracts. harry himself hadn't anticipated this sort of success, but louis had—after all, what was there to not like? he was talented, hardworking, beautiful, kind. it'd been clear to him from the beginning that harry was a miracle. that he'd grow to become someone whose talent would be recognized by the world.

when he first listened to the song, he cried. he was one of the first to realize harry's talent, the silky timbre of his voice. but when he heard the words to the song, ones that he knew were directed toward him, it was like discovering harry all over again. it felt too good to be true, that someone like harry had loved someone like him so much that he'd even write a song dedicated to him.