It's just a spark but it's enough || ENG version

Chapter Three

Harry thought it would take him just a few minutes, at most a couple of hours, to forget about Louis's crisis, to move on, to start thinking about anything else.

Yet, three weeks had passed and he couldn't stop ruminating, remembering, reliving the scene of his friend in his arms, utterly spent as he tried to resume the simplest, most mundane act of all: breathing.

As a result, he found himself spending sleepless nights, questioning that absurd day which began with a fight and ended with Louis crumbling like the bricks of a decaying wall that everyone seemed to have thrown into the background, perhaps at the behest of the oldest, or maybe out of a sad routine.

But Harry hadn't been accustomed to this before, and he certainly wasn't now, even though it felt like he had known Louis and the others for a lifetime by that point. He truly couldn't comprehend how no one seemed to care about his friend and colleague's evidently fragile mental health, especially when his crises were as debilitating as the one he had experienced days earlier.

He felt more useless than ever, powerless in the face of his overwhelming desire to learn more, to understand that mysterious side of Louis, which, he had to admit, he still found appealing despite everything.

But the worst part of feeling something for such an unpredictable person was primarily this: the fear of being rejected at any moment.

Because Louis had repeatedly given him the chance to get closer, to embrace him a bit longer than two simple friends would, to stroke his hair while watching a film on Harry's sofa, but...

But he was afraid. Afraid of being cut off at the first misstep, afraid of reliving that moment when all his certainties about Louis's perpetual smile had crashed down on him like a roof during a hurricane, afraid of no longer being seen as an escape, but instead becoming something Louis would want to run away from.

"Hazza, are you there? This is the third time we've asked what you'll do over the holidays," Louis asked in the dim light of the pub where they were spending that early April evening, and it felt as though he had plummeted back to solid ground after falling from the floating island of his tangled thoughts.

The air was cool, but in just a month, the temperatures had risen quite a bit, and now he could finally see the muscular arms of the blue-eyed boy wrapped in lovely shirt sleeves, rather than in tattered pyjamas or bulky monochrome jumpers.

He was beautiful.

"Oh." he found himself saying, running his free hand through the slightly shortened curls that fell just above his shoulders; with the other hand, he brought his dark beer to his lips, took a sip, and replied, "My parents want me to go and see them." He shrugged, his gaze dropping down again to the dark, stained wood of the high table where they were seated.

"You don't seem very enthusiastic, mate," Niall commented, chuckling and tapping a finger on the neck of his beer bottle, but only Zayn imitated him; Harry and Louis remained silent.

"My brothers and their families will be back in town too and..." he paused, feeling a knot form in his stomach at the mere thought of having to answer the usual inappropriate questions. "And my parents keep asking me when I'm going to find a husband and have kids," he admitted, rubbing his tired face in an attempt to focus on the evening with friends and not on Louis's gaze, which had shifted from being solely on him to suddenly landing on his hands, adorned with rings on every finger except his left ring finger.

It wasn't a surprise to him that Harry wasn't tied down in any way, but still.

"Brothers are an unimaginable pain in the ass. I have two younger ones and they never leave me alone when I go home," Zayn shared, bringing his lips to the straws of his mojito as he awaited a retort from one of the friends.