Larry Stylinson - Turning From Praise (AU)

2.

Mentally filing away the fact that Fizzy had been asking a lot of questions about Harry as well, Louis focused on not giving anything away; he didn’t like to lie, which meant that he had mastered the art of not giving the whole truth away when he spoke.

“I need to catch up on all the gossip. You know I don’t like to be out of the loop.” One hundred per cent true. To distract her, he quickly leaned forwards and poked her in the face with his ice cream, leaving an enormous vanilla blob on the end of her nose.

Lottie shrieked in outrage, batting him away, and then with a laugh she leapt off the wall and started backing away, wiping her sticky nose with the back of her hand and pulling a disgusted face. “Oh, you’re so going to pay for that.”

“You wanna bet?” Louis tossed his ice cream into the nearest bin and held his arms out challengingly. “Bring it, squirt. I could take ten of you and not even break a sweat.”

“Yeah? Let’s hear you say that again after I kick you in the balls!” Giggling, Lottie lunged at him, and he quickly leapt out of the way. As with most siblings, they had quarrelled almost daily since birth, meaning that they were experienced in play-fighting with each other. Louis was seventeen now, and Lottie in her teens, but that didn’t mean they were going to stop messing around.

Setting off at a sprint to avoid her, Louis shook away all of his troubling thoughts that were demanding to know why he was so fascinated with Harry, and burst out laughing, enjoying the advantage that his longer legs gave him. He’d satisfied his curiosity – for now.

                                                   ~*~

It had been far too long since he’d been shopping, so he made a well-needed trip to the shopping centre to buy the necessities for when school (well, college – gulp!) started again in September; some new school shoes, a new bag, all the standard stuff. It was completely by accident that he ended up in HMV, perusing the indie section of the store and checking the CDs for bands that his parents didn’t disapprove of. They had very specific orders about what music they allowed him to listen to, and he didn’t really mind; he wasn’t into the heavier kind of stuff anyway. He preferred quieter songs with an actual meaning behind them rather than shrieking guitar riffs.

While he was examining the cover-art of a compilation CD of one of his favourite bands, wondering whether he could afford it, he heard an extremely loud laugh behind him. Completely by instinct, he turned towards the source of the noise, and found himself face to face with a blond boy wearing a leather jacket with so many enormous spikes on it that he was in serious danger of poking someone’s eye out, looking kind of like a black and silver porcupine.

He almost jumped out of his skin, yelping in shock and staggering several feet backwards. Before he could fall flat on his back into a stack of CDs, the boy reached out and snagged him by the sleeve, stopping him from falling, and Louis saw that he was wearing a ring shaped like a snarling lion, and had black nail varnish. Nervously, he licked his lips, nodded in thanks and quickly disentangled himself from the boy’s strangely helpful hands.

“Sorry,” the boy said sheepishly, the corner of his mouth quirking upwards into an apologetic smile. “Didn’t see you there.” He had a strong Irish lilt to his voice that was obvious even from those two short sentences.

“No problem,” Louis replied faintly, struggling to cope with the fact that by some coincidence, he’d come face to face with Harry Styles’ best friend, that Lottie was completely right; he wore eyeliner too, and the edge of a tattoo was poking out just above the collar of his jacket, decorating one of his defined collarbones. It looked suspiciously like a pentagram, one of the symbols Louis had always been taught was a sign of evil, and he swallowed very hard.