Monday's too early and Sunday's too late, and everything else in between is a little too presumptuous or unassuming, and Harry spends fifteen minutes circling the days on a calendar with thick red markers, scarlet ink bleeding into the white pages like poppy red lipstick.
In the end, he chooses a Wednesday.
--
Louis' fingers are ice cold on the back of Harry's neck, latching onto the collar and holding his hair back as Harry retches into the circular marble toilet bowl. His dinner floats against the water, a slump of fatfatfatfatfat and Harry sits back slowly, raising a hand and flushing it down, watching his sins disappear from sight.
Louis holds him, minutes after, when they're leaning against the canopy with whispers and quiet breaths, and his lips carve beautiful words onto Harry's cheek, pressing promises and prayers and warmth into the skin, sewn pale and tight over the bones. His heart is a dull thud against the space behind his ribs, a strumming beat that Louis matches with his fingertips resting on Harry's hipbones, drumming out a familiar rythmn, and Harry presses his face into the collar of Louis' sweater, smiling into the warmth and ignoring the ache inside his belly where there are dragons breathing fire into the walls of his stomach.
--
His breath is the glacier winds of winter, cold mist seeping into the pores of his skin and snaking like vines around his bones. The bed is too soft to lie awake in, and too hard to fall asleep on, even though his fatigue is dragging him down down down with invisible ropes that are as thick as a man's neck.
He's swallowed the pills, the ones that Dr Payne told him to take every night. Pretty pink to fog his thoughts and hatch spider eggs in his brain and letting them crawl through the spaces of his head; brilliant blue to dull the ache of hunger; and silver to spread like smoke down his throat, numbing and emptying him like a puppet with all the wrong strings cut loose, dangling on the edge of a cliff.
fat fat stupid worthless ugly fat stupid fat fat
He rolls over onto his back, staring up at the stars burning through the ceiling of his room. The sound of his own breath is so far away, ten hundred thousand miles from his thoughts, whispering under the sheets and leaving tell-tale creases behind. The room is cold, far colder than it should be, and the shivers wrack him inside out, filling his body with sawdust and throwing him like a ragdoll against the rocky sheets.
His hand rests on his leg, fingers curving over the icy skin and dipping down the space between his thighs, a chasm of air, space, weightlessness.
(Even his hands are cold, filled with frost that drips off his own touch, sinking into the skin like icicles and melting into a vicious poison that freezes his nerves and paralyzes his veins.)
fat stupid ugly fat worthless pig fat fat fat
The stars on the ceiling glitter like city lights,and each new breath is an Atlantic ocean tide washing over his blue lungs. As his eyelids gain the weight of the world, he watches the stars fill with blood the color of wine, crashing from the night sky and pouring into his open mouth, choking and suffocating him until he falls into a restless sleep.
--
Louis tells him to eat. Harry doesn't listen.
Louis launches off into another lecture on why eating normally is important, and adds in a few remarks about how skinny Harry's been getting, and Harry lets the words drift past him, circling the air in the room and fading before he has the energy to bother paying attention. He pretends to listen to Louis, wants to make him feel like a good person, and Louis talks and talks and talks and doesn't stop talking until Harry shuts him up with a kiss that fills the space between their starved lips.
He loves Louis, he doesn't see a need to complicate it any more than he has to.
Louis is a silhouette on the other side of the glass, and Harry is the circus freak trapped inside. Louis is beautiful and Harry is ugly, Louis is dangerous but he's so lovely, and Harry loves him, he loves loves loves him.
Harry thinks he should be careful, wary, but Louis has spellwork dancing on the edge of his fingertips, and when they touch Harry will drink in his breath, and see through his eyes and materialize from his thoughts.
Louis is his cigarette, his vodka, his deadliest drug, and Louis sprinkles life into Harry's puppet bones, waking his rusting limbs up, and he makes Harry a real boy, a real boy with a beating heart that taps out Louis' name in Morse code.
Harry likes it.
--
He's balanced on a tightrope between two parallel worlds, and he is light like air, starving, empty, strong. He is an acrobat, with gold and silver ribbons sewn around his skin, shimmering satin that flutters around his calves when he moves.
The world watches him, tip-toeing the fine rope gracefully like a dancer, a star, shining so bright that he blinds everyone. He feels beautiful, so so beautiful.
Somewhere off to the side, the whispers begin.
fat fat fat ugly stupid cow fat worthless pig fat
Harry shifts a little, tries to drown out the voices but they're inside his mind, it's hard to ignore them, and they creep around the stretched blank canvas of thoughts, curling their knife words into the soft pink brain, staining it all black.
fat stupid worthless unwanted fat pig cow whale fat
The ribbons are ripped from his skin, torn off by invisible ghost fingers to reveal the bleeding flesh underneath, rotting rotting rotting. The audience starts to murmur, what is wrong with him, he's so strange, and Harry can feel the crimson blood running down his legs, twining around his shins and burning like fire. His head is a spinning whirlwind, and his body isn't weightless anymore. He's flesh and bone and water and meat and fat, fat, fat.
fat ugly stupid fat fat worthless fat fat just die
The whispers grow into screams, a thousand voices saying the same thing over and over, embedding into the flesh, wiring under his skin, branding his face, arms, legs. There's rain in his eyes and can't think or move or breathe. The edges of his sight are blurred, unfocused like a malfunctioning camera, and he blinks once twice thrice but it only gets worse and he's leaning too much to the side and-
A scream tears off his lips, and turns his blood into ice, his limbs into stone, and suddenly he's falling off the tightrope, because one second he can feel the solidity of rope under his feet, and the next he's screaming, falling, crashing down a million miles as the world flashes sixty different colors a second, gravity dragging his paralyzed body downdowndown.
fat crazy worthless stupid fat ugly freak
He hits the jagged rocks at the bottom, and his body shatters into a million fragments of glittering golden stars, stained with crimson blood that tastes like dirty copper, splattering against the black walls as he wakes up screaming.
--
You're beautiful, Louis whispers one night, his fingers pressing over the inscription of scars on Harry's thigh.
--
Wednesday comes around far quicker than he expects, days running on the calendar one after the other until its that day, and Harry panics because he doesn't feel ready at all, he still has things to say to do to eat to speak and Louis-
He's sitting in the tub, warm water splashing against icy blue skin.
He starts slow. Deep breaths. Cold and shaking fingers slowly tightening around the blade. Left hand carefully stretching out to expose white skin, naked and glistening with wetness.
The blade goes in deep, and there's barely any pain, but then he's dragging it down, tearing up the skin tight over ivory bones. Blood gushes out, running into the warm water, swirling around and staining it red. The pain is crippling, hissing poison that seeps into his every nerve and blinds him.
He doesn't cry.
Deep breaths.
The life is bleeding out of his body, and slowly he reaches for his right arm. Dips the blade into the skin, ripping it up in a long chasm of blood down the middle. The pain is white-hot, bursting in flashing colors behind his eyes. He's shaking, he's a freak, he's a fat freak who wants to die, whodeserves to die.
He doesn't hear Louis pounding on the door, desperate screams torn off his lips.
He doesn't see Louis' face outside, ashen with tears, tightened in anger and frustration, in more pain that Harry is going through himself.
He's only aware of the pain, the beautiful pain that he hates and loves, and everything that is leaking out of his body, leaving behind an empty shell.
He closes his eyes. Any moment now. The breath is labored in his lungs, his body fighting to survive, but he's bleeding, still bleeding, always bleeding.
Louis screams again, rattles the doorknob, shakes the wood like there's an earthquake.
The suicide note with three words written neatly on it with a black pen has been placed beside the sink, three words meant only for Louis. Harry hopes it's enough. He hopes three words is all Louis will want of him, all he will need to remind him of Harry.
The emptiness is blackening his thoughts, charring his senses. Pain. Pain. Pain. It'll be over. He's not a puppet with broken limbs and neglected strings anymore, he's a real boy bleeding to death.
He smiles.
Outside Louis is still screaming, desperately kicking against the door and trying to bust it open. But this isn't a spy movie, and the door is hinged in unbreakable metal, and Louis is doing nothing but hurting himself.
Harry feels beautiful, and empty.
His sight flickers a few times like a lightbulb about to go out, a dying flame trying to chase away the last shadows. His final breath is easy, it's a release of everything, and when death arrives to pick his broken glass soul and suck it out of the lifeless body laying in the tub, Harry is ready.
He's beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, and that's his last thought before his mind goes black, and then it's all over.
--
Louis will wake up alone the next morning, just like he will wake up alone every other morning for the rest of his life.
--