The Stylinson Scrapbook

Glass Boxes

Story

•••••

Tour moves agonizingly slow, but maybe that's just what comes along with feeling broken.

Aching, bleeding, and bruising.

Well...in actuality, it's not tour that gets to either of them.

Harry lives for the high, for the attention and for the jokes he likes to believe he pulls off onstage. Performing really is his favorite part of the job, loves interacting with fans, singing his entire heart out onstage, and relishes in acting like the complete goofball he is. He's developed an understanding as to why he was so enamored with the whole idea back ages ago when his eyes skimmed the stage of The Script concert, because the feeling is truly like no other.

Louis always finds himself caught up in equal parts shock and wonder. Every country, every city, every face in the crowd, every song they perform, Louis feels like there's something new and unique and special about every one of them. The grandness of everything, every part of hard work that goes into it all never fails to make him stop to catch his breath. And he always does enjoy a bout of good fun onstage, too.

Truthfully? Being apart from each other. Dancing around awkward glares and confrontations, and not even speaking what's more than necessary (which can't ever be more than at least ten words)...that's truly what shakes the both of them, in their souls and hearts and what they sometimes believe to be the entire fiber of their own beings.

They're both alive without each other, but are they living?

They harness the energy and the liveliness of performing as a cover up, to display that they're doing fine, that everything is fine and that neither of them feel like their worlds are being tipped upside their axises.

Louis is better at it than Harry, using his sassy attitude and handfuls of jokingly snarky comments to help him feel normal, to trick others into believing there's nothing different about him. In reality, there's so much that's different, and he wants to break down, wants to scream at the world and scream at management's faces for how cruel they're being.

The Thing seems to simultaneously help and hurt Harry all at once. He constantly has it in his hands, by his side, always protecting it from the eyes of others (only one set of eyes, not including Harry's own, would have permission to look through the pages). The other boys notice Harry's secrecy (as it is, they just know him too well), but don't ever pry into whatever it is because it seems to be so personal to him. The joy Harry gets from reliving past memories on pages invigorates him, makes him excited and giddy, but then it's all gone quicker than it came. Gone, because outside of cream colored pages and nostalgic pictures and smears of pen ink, he doesn't have what always made him excited, made him giddy, made him fond and crazy and silly and in love.

He doesn't have him, because he's avoiding Harry, and Harry's avoiding him because every time Harry sees those hardset blue eyes soften at the sight of his own, maybe saying I'm sorry or telling him It's over or something Harry cannot for the life of him decipher, he thinks a little piece of his heart chips away.

So Harry becomes brash. Throws away a lot of his childhood innocence for a cover, one to protect his own heart. A lot of people see through it.

Harry also takes to writing songs, (ones separate from One Direction's songs) because his emotions are trapped in the bars of a bird cage. Can't be let free, can't be relieved, so he puts a bandaid over them as words flow from his brain onto sheets of paper.

And they do have actual, raw fun on tour, when performing and of course when spending their time laughing and talking being plainly idiotic with the other boys. Though, at the end of the day, someone between the two of them always ends up with a swarming mind, a damp pillowcase, puffy eyes, or a restless night.

Because, as it seems, they're both stuck in separate glass boxes, close to each other but extremely far away all at once, and neither of them can figure out how to break the glass.