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

if i cleaned everything

tw// mentions of weight , eating disorder , mentions of self harm , suicidal thoughts

hi i can feel myself slipping but idc. hope everyone is well, hope this chapter is adequate. recently i've been growing less and less satisfied with my writing and i'm trying to do something about it (i've been studying a lot! grammar, syntax, diction, etc. i have a lot of writing textbooks from when my father was first studying to become a professor and learn english simultaneously), and i hope this fic shows growth. 

i don't know what i want to do with my life, i've always wanted to pursue oboe but now that dream seems so much more faraway. i'm exploring other options at the moment and i am unsure (and i never thought i'd make it this far to the point where i would have to start thinking about the future). hope that clears things up. 

twitter: @louflymehome

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harry knew not to let slip his happiness after he caught a glimpse at the ocean boy's face at the news of his weight.

louis was no longer underweight, now tiptoeing on the border between underweight and normal—a result of several months of treatment and what seemed like endless amounts of blood and tears and sticky strings of saliva dripping into an unyielding toilet bowl. he found louis in that position far more times than he'd like to admit, always proceeded by broken sobs through thin wooden doors and poorly-covered retching. that was the sole detriment of their new place, they both came to realize; how thin the walls were. they learned this after the first or second night, able to hear their neighbor's cat mewling to no end, so much and so clearly that they had thought it was stuck inside the wall rather than on the other side of it.

personally, harry had been over the moon with excitement, learning that his boyfriend's heart was now functioning without the risk of shutting down, his bones without the risk of shattering at the lightest touch, his lungs expanding without the risk of collapsing if strained just past the threshold of normal.

but louis hadn't been. it was when they were sitting in the suffocating office, harry realized that the boy sitting beside him was not sitting beside him at all, rather floating about in a different dimension too far and too abstract for someone like himself to fathom. for anyone, really. anyone that was not louis william tomlinson. seeing his vacant eyes made harry's smile roll smoothly off his face like a coin, reminding him that this was not so much a step forward, but an opportunity for a step forward. whether the ocean boy decides on taking that step or not, he knew, was completely out of his control. and being reminded of that was demoralizing to say the least—knowing that, to louis, physical health meant naught.

it was not that harry hadn't tried to make things better, or to comfort louis, but he didn't know how. everything seemed to backfire so quickly in his mind that ideas were immediately scrapped and never heard of again. all they could do was sit in silence and bask in the dusty sunlight that beat down on them. it was getting hotter and seasons were passing like fleeting thoughts, so quickly, it was incomprehensible.

things were picking up for him, as well. school and work were becoming more and more impossible as his music career began gaining traction. so much so, that he was really forced to begin to at least consider whether continuing school and part-time work was really worth it or not. he hadn't expected to blow up so quickly and so widely, being well-known in london would have been more than he could have asked for. but there were people who listened to him across the country now, and the thought alone made him dizzy.

of course, school wasn't something he would ever drop so carelessly. even if, realistically, it wouldn't change much about his career, having the privilege of learning about the nooks and crannies of something he loved while also being held accountable was something far too valuable for him to simply discard. the only classes that would be of use to him if he continued on his current path were composition, and to an extent, theory. but it was the most seemingly irrelevant classes that he held the closest to his heart, like conducting, or music history, or intro to music education.