Butterflies & Hurricanes || l.s

Chapter 1

A sneer crosses his face instead as Harry looks properly beaten down and weak. "Don't you come at me with that 'you shouldn't smoke' shit," Louis plucks a cigarette out of the pack in spite, throwing it at Harry, who flinches away as it makes contact with his face. "Any last words?" He offers the opportunity for the younger boy to speak one last time, to which Harry accepts and opens his mouth.

But he should've known better, really (after all these years? How slow is this boy?) because Louis crouches down and violently shoves Harry off the side of the cliff with his bloody hands, the rocks at the edge crumbling and falling under his weight before disappearing from sight.

Harry's last words end up forming a continuous scream of Louis' name, his voice getting smaller and smaller as he continues to shout, falling endlessly. "Louis! Louis! LOUIS!"

"LOUIS! Get up, you oaf, it's time for school!" Louis' younger sister Lottie prods at his side, trying to rip the blankets from his firm grip. "I don't know what you're grinning about, but you better wake up or I'm going to come back and shove ice down your shirt until you do."

Good morning to you too, Lottie.

Louis groans, using all of his strength to keep the sheets over his head, shielding himself from the morning sunlight and sparing Lottie from seeing his unkempt bedhead. "Gimme five minutes, Lots."

"Nope. It's the first day of school and it's about time that you get up and out of bed. Mum made pancakes." Louis doesn't move. "They're chocolate chip. She's got breakfast sausage too," Lottie adds with another tug to the blankets.

A little bit of sunshine trickles through the holes of Louis' sufficiently worn blanket. (He can't seem to find any replicas of his fuzzy Marvel blanket to replace his beloved childhood one, so holes it is.)

This gets him out of bed quickly, but not without a few more groans of 'it's so fucking early, Lots' and 'if they're blueberries and not chocolate chips, I'll murder you'. With a final wave of his hand, he ushers Lottie out of his room so he can get dressed in private.

First time in about three months that he's wearing his shitty school uniform, and he scowls down at the plain, navy-colored outfit before he yanks the notably crinkled collared shirt over his head. If the school wants it dry-cleaned, they can pay for it themselves. A bit of wrinkles never hurt anyone.

In Louis' always correct opinion, there's no personality to the uniform with the exception of the mandatory pocket square (Louis finds this rule absolutely ridiculous, but at least he gets to choose the color or print of it). So, in his own passive form of resistance, Louis takes the liberty of untucking his shirt and undoing his maroon tie, which looks and feels considerably more like him. His scuffed, years-old dress shoes will help with this, along with the bright Spider-man socks he slips on under his trousers.

He grins at his reflection in the large mirror on his closet door as he picks up a tube of gel and squirts a bit into his hair. The comb on his nightstand still has old, dried clumps of gel in it from months past, and Louis just adds to the mess he claims he'll clean one day by running it through his rather gel-sticky hair.

He uses his fingers to pull a bit of hair out of his combed back mess and swooshes it across his forehead for a bit of motion. His dean will hate it, which means it's perfect.

After, he takes a minute to admire the stubble that'd sprouted over the summer, running his fingers over it gingerly. It's not the weird, 9th-year-pre-pubescent kind, but a proper one that he knows for a fact Harry doesn't have. It makes him grin; even having the tiniest thing like this up on Harry is a win in his book.

One last glance in the mirror, and his entire appearance screams effortlessly chaotic with a healthy dose of sex appeal. Very handsome, very rugged, very fuckable.