Skin And Bones; Harry Styles

Sew My Eyelids Shut (And Pray I Don't Wake Up)

Monday's too early and Sunday's too late, and everything else in between is a little too presumptuous or unassuming, and Harry spends fifteen minutes circling the days on a calendar with thick red markers, scarlet ink bleeding into the white pages like poppy red lipstick.

In the end, he chooses a Wednesday.

--

Louis' fingers are ice cold on the back of Harry's neck, latching onto the collar and holding his hair back as Harry retches into the circular marble toilet bowl. His dinner floats against the water, a slump of fatfatfatfatfat and Harry sits back slowly, raising a hand and flushing it down, watching his sins disappear from sight.

Louis holds him, minutes after, when they're leaning against the canopy with whispers and quiet breaths, and his lips carve beautiful words onto Harry's cheek, pressing promises and prayers and warmth into the skin, sewn pale and tight over the bones. His heart is a dull thud against the space behind his ribs, a strumming beat that Louis matches with his fingertips resting on Harry's hipbones, drumming out a familiar rythmn, and Harry presses his face into the collar of Louis' sweater, smiling into the warmth and ignoring the ache inside his belly where there are dragons breathing fire into the walls of his stomach.

--

His breath is the glacier winds of winter, cold mist seeping into the pores of his skin and snaking like vines around his bones. The bed is too soft to lie awake in, and too hard to fall asleep on, even though his fatigue is dragging him down down down with invisible ropes that are as thick as a man's neck.

He's swallowed the pills, the ones that Dr Payne told him to take every night. Pretty pink to fog his thoughts and hatch spider eggs in his brain and letting them crawl through the spaces of his head; brilliant blue to dull the ache of hunger; and silver to spread like smoke down his throat, numbing and emptying him like a puppet with all the wrong strings cut loose, dangling on the edge of a cliff.

fat fat stupid worthless ugly fat stupid fat fat

He rolls over onto his back, staring up at the stars burning through the ceiling of his room. The sound of his own breath is so far away, ten hundred thousand miles from his thoughts, whispering under the sheets and leaving tell-tale creases behind. The room is cold, far colder than it should be, and the shivers wrack him inside out, filling his body with sawdust and throwing him like a ragdoll against the rocky sheets.

His hand rests on his leg, fingers curving over the icy skin and dipping down the space between his thighs, a chasm of air, space, weightlessness.

(Even his hands are cold, filled with frost that drips off his own touch, sinking into the skin like icicles and melting into a vicious poison that freezes his nerves and paralyzes his veins.)

fat stupid ugly fat worthless pig fat fat fat

The stars on the ceiling glitter like city lights,and each new breath is an Atlantic ocean tide washing over his blue lungs. As his eyelids gain the weight of the world, he watches the stars fill with blood the color of wine, crashing from the night sky and pouring into his open mouth, choking and suffocating him until he falls into a restless sleep.

--

Louis tells him to eat. Harry doesn't listen.

Louis launches off into another lecture on why eating normally is important, and adds in a few remarks about how skinny Harry's been getting, and Harry lets the words drift past him, circling the air in the room and fading before he has the energy to bother paying attention. He pretends to listen to Louis, wants to make him feel like a good person, and Louis talks and talks and talks and doesn't stop talking until Harry shuts him up with a kiss that fills the space between their starved lips.