these bountiful silences

xiii. afraid

WARNING: blood. there's a /lot/ of talk of blood in this.

"The entire world is falling in shambles at our feet."

xiii. afraid

Harry has been spending the past three days trying to find an excuse to walk into Liam and Louis' flat to no avail. The best excuse that he could come up with yet is that they're sometimes too loud doing.. things at night, but that wouldn't be a too grand way to insert himself into their lives more often. If anything, it would just make the tension between the three of them even more palpable. Luckily for him, Liam gives Harry the perfect excuse on day four of Operation Convert Louis to the Bright Side.

It starts with Liam practically bursting Harry's door open, wild eyed and sweating with his thought censors askew on his forehead.

"Harry," even the projection of his thoughts sound out of breath. "Can you? -I'm so sorry for this- But can you come to my flat, like, now?"

Harry detaches his hand from where he was rubbing at Dusty's hair and nods. Not minding to put on an actual shirt -as opposed to the one that he's currently wearing, which has a gaping hole on the ribs and the left armpit- before following Liam out of his own flat and into Louis and Liam's open door.

Harry scans the living room quickly, everything looks exactly the same as the past few times he's visited. Everything except for a currently bleeding Zayn Malik lying in the middle of the floor, appearing to be unconscious from the looks of how sated his face is, how he doesn't look like he's harboring a thousand secrets in the clench of his jaw like how Harry usually sees him do.

"I just-" Liam's voice resurfaces from where he was in a separate room, panicked and tetchy. "I just got scared. I've never seen this man before and-"

Harry glances up to see Liam holding up a steel-looking vase. With actual blood dripping from the dull edge of it. Worriedly, Harry rushes over to Zayn and moves his -terrifyingly limp- frame over to where he can see the back of his head, which is currently seeping out blood from a grotesque gash.

"We need help," Harry says aloud, so thankful that he hasn't used his words yet today.

Liam's perpetually furrowed brows sink even lower, "We don't have to do that."

Harry shoots a quick glare towards Liam, of course they need to get help. Zayn is bleeding from his head, and his usually warm skin color is slowly starting to fade. Harry actually almost has to bite back tears, he has grown quite fond of Zayn over the past months that they've been working together. He even gave Harry a small cake on his last day at the Clinic and they had a parting hug. He's always seen Zayn as this big, enigmatic, person who seemed so untouchable and full of spirit, and to have his hands covered with Zayn's own crimson blood while watching the life slowly fade out of him is something that Harry can feel embedding itself in his heart right under the category that's neatly labelled Things To Scar Me Forever right along with the guilt of injecting Gemma. He doesn't know whether to look away or to stare longer to try and decide how bad of a shape Zayn is really in. But Liam decides that for him by plopping down right beside Harry, still cradling the vase in his knobby hands that are caked with Zayn's blood.

"I came into the flat because i forgot my badge to get into work, and there was this bloke just sitting on my couch, messing around with injectors. He didn't notice me come in, so I dumped the flowers that Louis gave me the other day onto the floor and snuck up behind him and hit him in the head. I didn't expect him to bleed." Liam cradles his face in his hands and sighs. "I just. I saw his silencer, right? And I was scared, because Unconformists are bad, obviously, and they've been doing a lot of surprise attacks on innocent people. I thought that he was waiting for Louis and I to get home. That he was going to kill us. So I struck first, but we need to dispose of him before Louis comes home. I already cleaned up the flowers, but I need this.. thing out of here. Do you think you can hide him in your flat? You don't have to worry about any vitals-trackers sending assistance, we don't keep track of them."