"Stay," Harry whispers desperately, pressing his lips to Louis' temple like he can somehow ease the pain that's blooming there, but he can't make the pain stop and no matter how hard he tries he can't make Louis stay.
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{not my story}
COMPLETED
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A seizure, the doctors tell him. Bad, but common with glioblastoma patients. Harry wants to be sick again.
When Louis wakes up, he is screaming in pain, clutching at his head with shaking fingers and grabbing the nurse's hand and begging, "Please make it stop, please make it stop, just make it stop."
So they cut into his scalp, taking Louis' desperate cries as permission. They're able to remove some of the tumor, but not enough. Not nearly enough. It's bad, they say, shaking their heads and gazing sadly at Harry when he breaks down in the waiting room, head in his hands. Really fucking bad.
He only cries harder when he gets to see Louis, looking so small and tired in his hospital bed, patch of hair missing and angry stitches where they sliced into his head, poked around in his brain. He has to be escorted out until he can compose himself. When he finally does, Louis won't talk, but Harry doesn't need him to. He just sits in the chair by his bed, matching his fingers into the shapes of Louis' tattoos.
Jay and the whole crew are there by the next morning, crowding around Louis and his sisters are crying, crying, crying and when the twins crawl onto the bed next to them Louis just quietly strokes their hair, murmuring, "It's okay. I'm okay. Don't worry about me. I'm okay." Jay has to leave the room and Harry follows her, enveloping her in a tight hug because he gets it.
"I know," he whispers, Jay's face pressed into his shoulder, staining his coat with mascara tears, "I'm scared, too."
The boys come visit, too, piling into a couple of chairs near Louis' bed and talking to him excitedly, quickly, and it breaks Harry's heart when Louis merely looks up at them, blinking and lost and so, so confused. Harry tries to repeat what the doctors told him to them, that they need to slow it down, that Louis' brain isn't working at fully capacity right now and it's going to start taking him a little while to understand people so they need to just slow it down so as to not overwhelm him.
They nod grimly, and the way they talk to him after that is so heartbreakingly gentle that Harry has to leave the room.
Louis gets to come home five days later. A few pictures of him leaving the hospital, Harry's beanie on his head covering the worst of his scars, make it into the tabloids, but it's passed off as a minor incident, a stomach bug. It's clear from the glazed look in Louis' eyes and his hollowed cheeks that this isn't the case, but most people don't question it. An influx of Get well soon! :) tweets are posted, all tagging @Louis_Tomlinson, and it makes Harry's skin crawl.
Somehow, when Louis walks through the door, guided by Harry's warm hand on the small of his back, and whimpers Just wanna go back to bed, Haz, Harry knows things will never be quite the same again.
The clock ticks on the wall. He shivers.
Harry spends a lot of time doing research, and each search turns up more horrors about Louis' worsening condition - more seizures, sleeping 18 hours a day, hallucinating, unable to eat or drink or even swallow, forgetting things that happened just hours ago. He can't believe this is happening, and it's happening to Louis, of all people - the sun of his existence, light of his life, the love of his life, his favorite boy in the world.
When one night Louis can't stop throwing up and he's shaking so bad Harry worries he's going to have another seizure, Louis buries his tear-stained face in Harry's chest and cries, "Just want it to stop, just want it to be over now."
"I know, boo, I know you do, I'm sorry," Harry babbles, hands stroking Louis' hair as he mentally prepares for the next vomiting episode.
It only occurs to Harry later, after he's cleaned and sanitized the entire bathroom, when they're curled up in bed as the sun begins to rise, turning the whole world purple, that maybe Louis' just want it to be over now means something different than what he'd originally interpreted it as, and he clutches the smaller boy closer.
