Lifeline (Harry Styles Fan Fiction)

Chapter 43

{Chapter 43}

When Harry was 7 years old, his grandmother passed away.

He could remember hearing his mother crying softly in her bedroom across the hallway. He could remember the smell of the hospital and the way the nurses gave him a pitiful smile, as though he didn’t already know something was terribly wrong.

“Do you want to go say goodbye to Grandma, Harry?” His mother leaned down to whisper into his ear. 

At the time, he didn’t really knew what it meant. Goodbye? Well what was goodbye? Where was she going, why was she leaving?

So he nodded and being the curious, headstrong 7 year old he was he walked into the hospital room to find his grandmother laying in the bed with her eyes closed.

There was a strange machine hooked up to her and tubes that ran through her nose, around her chest and hooked into these machines that mad strange noises he didn’t like.

He remembered how desperately he begged her to open her eyes, because how could he say goodbye if she wasn’t looking at him?

“Say goodbye, Harry. It’s time to go.” His mother cried softly as her 7 year old son walked to her mother’s bedside. The only thing that was keeping her alive was the machines that allowed her to keep breathing.

The 7 year old boy with big bright green eyes didn’t understand what life support was, he didn’t understand the concept of ‘pulling the plug.’

Harry could remember pressing his plush lips against his grandmother’s cheek one last time and mumbling a ‘Bye, Grandma.’

As he grew older, he wished he hadn’t gone into the room that day to say goodbye. Was it fair that his last memory of his grandmother was her all tied up and lifeless in a hospital bed?

He’d prefer to remember her as the lady whose eyes crinkled at the sides as she smiled at him and gave him the bowl of cake mix to lick afterwards. She was the lady who’d sneak him money as he grew older and told him not to tell his mother, with a wink.

Perhaps that was the reason he held so desperately to the image of the smiling, skinny girl with bright brown eyes and shiny hair who stood in her jeans shorts and worn down Toms. That same girl who smiled at him from across the living room of the beach house, when they had first met.

He clung to that image of her, like a lifejacket in the middle of a hurricane. 

Harry’s breathing grew shallow as the red and blue lights blinded him.

He couldn’t see straight, he couldn’t think properly. It was almost as though his own body was shutting down on him.

As he stepped out of the ambulance, the moments began passing in blurs he couldn’t completely understand.

He heard shouting, lots of shouting.

“Get her into the ER.” The men in white jackets screamed as they looked at the broken girl in the gurney. The only thing Harry was sure of in that moment, was the feeling of that girl’s cold hand in his.

In the rush of the moment, Harry was pushed aside by a man with a blue mask over his nose and mouth.

“Sir, please.” The man spoke frantically as he pushed the gurney. “We need you in the waiting room. We will take care of her.”

The man’s words helped Harry find some sense of the moment as he was pulled from his daze.

As the doctors began pushing the gurney away from the ambulance, that’s when Harrys hand was ripped from Katies.