these bountiful silences

xiv. blameless

"While falling apart at your feet, I realized that you would always be stronger than I."

xiv. blameless

"You're really clueless about everything, aren't you?"

Harry isn't sure what he's expecting, precisely, perhaps a detailed description of What Louis Finds Wrong In This World, but he surely wasn't expecting for Louis, with his matted hair and burning eyes, to shoulder past him without another word, leaving Harry without explanation.

For a brief moment Harry feels disoriented, like one of those prehistoric floating things that Gemma told him about once, drifting aimlessly in a rocky sea with no sense of direction, just being and not doing. It's terrifying, in every way possible.

He's dragged out of his downward spiral by an extremely loud sound of distress coming from no other place than the living room. He takes a stagnant breath and shoves his hair off his forehead. Focus, right. Don't let Louis kill Liam, don't let Zayn die. Alright. It's an easy task. (It's not. This entire day is bloody mental, he wants to delve under his starched blankets and huddle over Dusty and forget all of this ever happened. Or maybe he could go slip into his issued Superior kit, work himself into the facade of someone who knows what to do and is always a step ahead of the rest of society.)

"What do you mean that he's a friend of your's?" Liam's censors all but screeches as soon as Harry walks himself back into the living room. "How could you possibly be acquainted with one of them?"

"I meant what I said." Louis visibly flounders for a moment before taking a piece of gauze and gently pressing it to Zayn's blood-addled temple. "I mean.. I met him before he had that," Louis tacks on hurriedly, gesturing empathically at Zayn's stark, white silencer. "But I still consider him my friend."

"Those people aren't friends, Lou. They're animals. Look what they've done to the world that The Movement has created. They find any and every excuse to try and ruin it, but they can't because they're idiots with no sense of morals."

Louis shifts uncomfortably at that, and Harry almost feels pity for him. It must hurt, for the person that he's supposed to love endlessly and be loved back by to openly disregard something that Louis' obviously very much a part of. But Louis chose to be this way, and what Liam said is true.

"He's still human, yeah? At the end of it all we're all the same. No matter what our beliefs are." Louis squares his shoulders and looks up at Liam. "Now check his pulse, please. And Harry? Leave."

Harry shakes his head, he's not leaving. Not with Zayn still lying on the floor like that and both Louis and Liam looking very much like one step away from a mental break down.

"Yes, you are. This is my flat, I'm kicking you out. Leave."

Harry tries to return the steadfast glare that Louis aims at him, but his resolve weakens at how disheveled and in pain Louis looks in the stale, sinking sunlight of the flat. So, he leaves behind a shaken Louis, a slowly bleeding Zayn, and a frantic Liam in exchange for his own flat.

Dusty mewls and paws at his leg as soon as he crosses his own threshold, and he can almost force himself to forget everything that he just saw.

He picks her up at and stares into her glassy eyes, forcing himself back into the mind frame of eighteen year old Harry, the one who was so ecstatic to have a companion in his life when he first got Dusty. The one who thought that all of the Bad Things in this world were astronomically far away. Younger Harry didn't know what it actual blood looked like, and Younger Harry would've taken pity on Louis or Zayn, would've offered to help them and maybe even would've tried to see if they could help him find Gemma.