Madness ➮ Harry Styles AU

C8

Christopher

Something was wrong.

And I wanted to scream and cry and punch the walls in front of me just for the sake that I didn't know what it was. It was like that smell of bitter almonds that you couldn't quite place.

I didn't know who Louis was, just as evidently as I didn't know who the hell Liam or Niall were. I didn't know anything about them or if they even existed, but I knew one thing: that they were written upon her wall, with the very same paint that my own name had been etched in.

And here I was, almost exactly where I had started.

In an empty white room.

I had done it. There was smears of white and tear stains painted all over me, like I was her next wretched art piece. But I had finished painting her room. I had begun to erase her, to shade over everything that resembled of us.

But I didn't feel any less troubled than I had before. In fact, something inside me said I had just tangled myself deeper into something I could never quite understand. Liberation wasn't as simple as I thought. Because now, I was suffocating on the ash of all those bridges I'd burned.

Something was wrong, and I was determined to find out what that was.

I loved her and will continue to love her more than anything. But that's never enough. Fear is stronger than adoration. Even when we were together, I knew something was wrong, but I was never scared enough to find out what it was.

So I cleaned the room, picking up tarps and paint buckets and trashing them, washing paint rollers, and thinking about things that really had nothing to do with paint at all.

But strangely enough, when I left, I didn't lock the door. The names I had learned in there stuck, Ashley wasn't stupid, she wouldn't paint them for no reason.

She was trying to tell me something.

And it took me three damned years to realize that.

Once again, I was back in the room with a handful of black acrylic paint bottles and a new and refined set of intentions.

All these thoughts were eating though me, consuming every bit of everything I ever was. There was some kind of new-found curiousity—a justified paranoia, rather—that I just couldn't shake.

" NIALL "

I wrote across the middle of the first wall, in large and skinny letters of my own print.

" LIAM "

It was there, painted atop of her mural and mine to conceal it.

" LOUIS "

Just as prominent as the others. Just as dark, and just as large and narrow.

And lastly,

" ASHLEY "

Written on the wall adjacent from the door and next to every other name I didn't know.

Four names, excluding my own.

I didn't need mine anyways. I knew more about me than anyone I had ever come to know, which, granted, was still not very much at all.

I figured that every thought, every feeling of mine was aimless, scattered like a firework of broken glass.

There wasn't a word or phrase or anything, really, to describe how I felt. It was like all the letters and words and sentences in the world couldn't quite figure it out either.