a/n- new story! bc vampire!louis!!! so yay. updates will be sporadic so. and i'm not promising a happy story. definitely not a love story. (this is not a love story; it's a story about u̶n̶r̶e̶q̶u̶i̶t̶e̶d̶ love. and apparently me quoting 500dos. huh.) here ya go.
oh and external link on the side is the link to this on ao3. i also have another one-shot posted on ao3 which wasn't uploaded here so. you know what to do.
(ty to cstyles101 for the cover. you should req her to make you some; honestly she's bril)
1.
The night is cold and eerie, and Harry Styles feels strangely isolated.
Which is the most bizarre revelation when he is sat on a high stool in front of a bar, the nightclub almost shaking from the loud music (the playing track could be Usher’s, Avicii’s or A$AP Rocky’s for all Harry could care), and there are hot bodies all around him. So rather, it is stuffy, loud and boisterous, and overcrowded.
And Harry has a strange emotion expanding in his chest with every inhale. It’s like, the void claustrophobia, or something. (Oxymoron in its best – and complex – form, ladies and gents.)
He feels tenfold older than his age as he fingers the rim of his glass, filled with enough concoction of vodka and tonic to mark it half-empty. He himself is filled with the concoction of worry and a hunch of something bad is going to happen, leaving the rest of him more than half-empty.
To be honest, everything is half-empty, give or take.
The inflated packet of chips he bought earlier that days was more than half-empty, the sponge cake he’d baked – made to rise with baking soda – was less than half-empty, the hourglass sitting beside his bed would be half-empty, and his life was (less than) half-empty.
Sometimes Harry wishes he could see everything as half-full, but that would mean giving hope to himself, making himself believe there was a way to give more and more until verve flowed over the brim of the glass, and really, it was better to convince himself that half-empty is what every situation was and the glass could easily be drained bare and left nugatory.
Which, his thoughts are positively pessimistic and his drink is completely empty. (More oxymora; boy he is on a roll—and manifestly not in a stable state of mind.)
“Harry,” he hears Liam say, and pivots his head to spot his ex-flat-mate, who, as it turns out, is standing behind him. His cheeks are flushed, forehead sweaty, and his teeth shine just like his whole form with the grin he’s flashing at Harry.
It’s regular coitus that’s done this to him, it has. Harry remembers the reclusive and studious boy he’d met in the kitchen of their three-persons shared flat on his first day of university, having to stay on campus like all the first years had to.
Now, a year later, Harry has his own solitary flat a few blocks away from the academe, and yet he still hangs out with the people he used to share a flat with (Zayn and Liam), and Liam has definitely turned into an exuberant party-animal ever since he met his girlfriend, Danielle, who’s on a scholarship for the university’s dance programme.
“Yeah?”
“Why are you sitting all alone, mate? Half the blokes in here can’t take their eyes off you.”
“Yeah, no,” Harry agrees, already been bought a few drinks in the past two hours. He’s refused them all, though; he’s had an experience with spiked drinks before—nasty, those drinks were. “I just don’t feel like dancing or hooking up tonight.”
Liam’s brows furrow. “You alright mate?”
Of course he’s not. His sister called him today.
He hadn’t been feeling up to going out tonight then, but his friends were persistent and he thought a bit of drinking would be his saving grace from all the stress lurking beside his head and waiting for the moment to impose down onto him like a dark, heavy cloud.
“Yeah, I’m good,” Harry lies, before his shaking his head. “Uh, actually, I’m feeling a bit feverish, so I’m just gonna head back to my flat.”
Turning to the bartender, he fishes a fiver out of his wallet for his most recent pint and thumps it down on the polished mahogany counter with an air of finality.
He slides off his stool (not waiting for his change), turns away from the bar, and would’ve landed facedown into someone’s feet if it wasn’t for Liam steadying him by grabbing his shoulders.
“You shouldn’t walk when you’re drunk, Stumbling Styles,” Liam chuckles, and Harry shoves him away. At least he thinks he does. He can still feel hands on his acromions.
God, his head is spinning.
“I think I should walk with you,” the older boy says at the sight of Harry’s hooded eyes, but Harry shakes his head, feels himself getting giddier with the movement, but stands firm on his notion of walking home alone. (It’s the only thing he’s standing firm on, to be honest. The ground beneath his feet his waving like a sea.)
“No, go dance with Dani. An’ tell Zayn to pick me up fo’ lessons tomorrow. My class is at ten. Or one… Um, just tell him it’s my psychology lecture. Um, yeah. Bye, Li.”
And then he walks away, slinking through the crowd as he feels Liam’s eyes on his back. He doesn’t pay it much attention.
**
As soon as cold air stings against Harry’s bare face, neck and hands, the twenty-one-year-old feels himself sobering up. Moderately. At least he can walk straight, because well, he has made half the journey to his flat without falling over once, and it’s a clear feat in Harry’s case.
He’s walking with his hands cocooned in the warmth of his coat’s pockets, mist condensing in front of his mouth as he exhales softly, the pavement cold, wet and hard under his boots.
The street is vacant, but there are cars parked along the footpath, and the road is illuminated by moonlight, streetlights and the bustling Ethiopian restaurant located to Harry’s right on the other side of the road.
It’s amicable, with the muffled live music and mewls of a cat in some trashcan he can hear, and the smell of chili and meat entering his nostrils is almost (more) inebriating.
Harry is singing under his breath, making up a song about being drunk and loving cats, hell to the world, when he catches movement in his peripheral vision.
He pauses, a bemused frown on his face as he turns his head left, and all he can see is a mailbox in front of the house it belongs to, standing proud in abandon, but he can swear he just saw a body standing there.
However, there’s nothing present beside the mailbox. Harry blinks sluggishly.
“You’re drunk,” he censures his head with a roll of his eyeballs, proceeding to take a step forward, and then falls over in astonishment when a reply is whispered right into his pinna, brushing against his skin.
“Not even close.”
There’s a gust wind which blows right through Harry, ruffling through his clothes and hair tenaciously and chilling him to his bones, and when the boy whips his head back, he finds an empty street gaping back him.
“What the hell,” he breathes out, down on his fours with his heart accelerating in apprehension as his wide green eyes rake over the path he had just strolled down on, but not perceiving any other living form, let alone a human, other than himself. “What the hell.”
“Ahem,” the same foreign voice comes from his right, barely a foot apart, and when Harry rushes to twist his head forth and beside to glower at the culprit, he spots nothing. Nothing. Just the wind blowing momentarily.
From across the road, a giggle sounds from a couple as they step out of the restaurant, the sudden increase in the volume of the culturally thematic music lasting a mere few seconds before the door of the diner swings shut behind the pair and obscures the melody again. They don’t pay Harry mind, who is on his hands and knees on the pavement, starting towards the direction Harry had come from while chatting flirtatiously.
Their voices fade eventually, and the hoot of an owl makes Harry look away from the retreating twosome incredulously, wondering just what an owl was doing right in the middle of the city. He locates the bird sitting atop the mailbox he had been previously staring at, and the tilt of the creature’s head seems ominous.
The feeling Harry had felt back at the club spikes up again. Something bad is going to happen.
And it does, when Harry feels something against the inside of his elbow, and nothing but shrieks down at the—kitten?
His shrill scream dies down in his throat like a deoxygenated flame, and he chortles at himself. He is so bloody drunk.
“You scared me, kitty,” Harry tells the brown-furred cat (the one he is sure he heard mewling before), and it hesitantly reaches its tiny paw out from behind Harry’s wrist, where it had cowered at Harry’s deafening reactions. The mammal licks its nose in response, and Harry suddenly finds it so endearing.
“You’re so cute, oh God. We should make a music video.”
Harry advances to pet the kitten’s head, but the moment he stirs his hand from where it’s digging into the gelid concrete below, he hisses at the sting that the movement impulses.
Of course his muscles had been locked in place with intense pressure on the limbs for a long time, but the ache in his wrists is different from the sting at his palms. He draws his torso backwards so he’s up in a firm kneel, and when he finally is able to lift his hands up for inspection, he groans at the sight of the angry-red and scraped skin.
Broken legs and swollen cheeks are fine, but tiny lesions and grazes are what Harry loathes. Those fuckers look harmless and then shoot pain into your nerves when you least expect it.
With a sigh, he boy mounts onto his feet and is staring jadedly at his hands when he feels the icy wind again, but this time instead of wafting through Harry, it stops right in front of him, and he feels the air hitting his face softly, sending an instinctive shiver down his spine.
Perplexed, since everything, even the wind is acting weird this night, Harry looks up, and instantly staggers back in surprise when he finds a man standing right in front of him.
Fingers curl around his wrists steadfastly to help Harry retain his balance instantly, the hands cold against his pulsating skin, and Harry gasps at the transparent intimacy between him and the stranger, seeing how the toes of their respective shoes are touching.
Harry’s hot breath concentrates into vapour around the older-seeming man’s face, but he doesn’t appear unnerved, staring down at Harry’s upturned palms in stupor.
He’s beautiful, the former concludes immediately, taking in the lustrous hair, sharp bones, long lashes, pasty pallor and dark stubble in bafflement before clearing his throat.
“I’m fine, mate. Th—thanks,” he says, and when the chap doesn’t look up, he clips on, “It’s just a scuff.”
The man releases one of his wrists, bringing his own right hand over the scratched skin on Harry’s suspended hand before pressing it down on the torn epidermis.
Harry winces at the pain, watching questioningly the man overturns his own hand to display the fresh red spot on his fingertip, and Harry is so confused. A bit dizzy too.
“’s just a bit—” he starts, but cuts short when the deathly pale bloke raises his finger to his nose and inhales deeply, his eyelids drooping.
“…blood,” Harry finishes belatedly with a gulp.
The man’s eyes snap up to meet his for the first time, and Harry gasps again. His irises, they’re—red. Shit. How didn’t he notice that before?
Maintaining his frightening yet captivating hold on Harry’s gaze, the man lowers his finger to his lips, slips it into his mouth and sucks on it, a pleased hum resonating in his throat as he sucks on—Harry’s blood.
Intoxicated or not, Harry can recognize danger, and this ordeal screams nothing but peril and ludicrosity, so he takes a step back to flee, but the clutch on his still-captured wrist tightens. In a split-second, the man moves closer and has his cold hands cladding the younger boy’s head, his freezing palms pressing into Harry’s ears as he jostles his skull to the side to bare his neckline.
A startled yelp escapes Harry’s mouth, and that’s all that does leave his mouth as he feels forbidding lips lugging on his throat before parting profusely, and the imminent cry because of the twinge is trapped in his throat as he feels something sharp pierce into his skin, teeth sinking into his jugular vein.
Horrifying pain comes as he feels the mouth sucking against his neck—
And subsequently it… stops.
Harry then feels himself sinking into the abyss of the impeccable and naked feeling of euphoria.
**
There are shrieks. And the sound of fingernails being scraped against chalkboards. And bangs of gunshots. Harry’s eardrums are going to explode.
He moans into his—pillow? Is that a pillow his face is smushed into? It smells vaguely akin to his aftershave.
Prying his eyes open with a dubiously incredible amount of effort, Harry spots his phone vibrating and shifting minimally with every tremble on the bed beside him after the four unbearable seconds of letting his eyes adjust to the dazzling light in his room.
He realizes the crass cacophony blaring into his ear and travelling right up to his head to congregate the throbbing already there is being produced from his phone, and—right, that’s his ringtone.
What in the hell made him choose such an insufferable song as his ringtone?
‘It feels like we only go backwards, baby,’ the voice in the song trills, and fucking fuck fuck, fuck this blatant noise.
“Oh my God,” Harry breathes out as he feels like he is going to vomit. Only, his stomach feels so empty, everything feels empty, and his head hurts. He moves his right hand towards the affronting mobile phone, and his limb feels heavy in contrast, his muscles feel weak and it hurts to move his hand, making it seem like his skin is pasted onto his flesh stiffly, and there is no lubricating blood between his tissues and bones so that they grate against each other painfully.
Yet, as he already is feeling the inexplicable ache in every part of his body, he endures a bit more to drag his fingers to the ringing iPhone, pinching the edge of the sleek black device between his thumb and middle finger to lift it off the bedspread just enough to get a glimpse of the lit-up screen. It takes a moment to decipher its content until the jumbled symbols clarify into letters and read ‘Zayn’.
'Every part of me says go ahead,' the song continues.
Harry lets his grasp loosen until the phone lies flat against the surface of the bed after the short drop and then slides his finger and taps on the parts of the touchscreen that he knows would accept the call and put it on loudspeaker.
'I got my hopes up again, oh no--'
The sudden end of the song and the vibrating beside his head is blissful.
Harry sighs into his pillow.
“Haz?” his friend’s voice fills the room, emitting from the phone, and Harry grunts in response. Fuck you for calling me, he thinks inwardly, not in the mood – or state – to speak out loud.
“Alright then. I’m guessing you just woke up. Your class is in twenty minutes, Harry. Get up right now; it’s cold in my car.”
Class? What class? Harry doesn’t need a class, especially the one researching the strategies in personality psychology. We don’t need no education, he quotes to himself. He would’ve said it to Zayn too, because the bloke appreciates good music, but no, head hurts and existing sucks.
“Ummpf.”
“Are you hungover? How much did you drink last night?” Zayn inquires, and without even waiting for an answer or giving Harry the time to ponder over it, he sighs and says, “I’m coming up.”
The call drops with a beep, and Harry exhales into the silence.
He closes his eyes for a second, just a second, and the next moment Zayn barges into his room. Harry didn’t hear him open the flat-door with his key, but, whatever.
“You are aware that your door was unlocked, ye—what the hell happened to you?”
“Hmm?” Harry lifts his head in bewilderment and pivots it, staring at a blank wall a few feet away from him before Zayn moves around the bed and stands between Harry and the wall.
“Are you okay, H?”
Harry blinks at the older boy before shaking his head and dropping it down so that his ear is deafened by the pillow, already exhausted.
Zayn shuffles closer to the bed and kneels down at the edge, his cold hand resting on Harry’s forehead after wiping sweat and his curly hair off it.
“You look pale like death, Haz,” he frowns at the boy. “Did you throw up?” he enquires, and the tilt to his lips deepens when Harry shakes his head once with a lot of strain. “Are you feeling feverish?”
Harry mumbles something without moving his lips, and repeats himself hoarsely when Zayn asks him to. “’unno.”
“You don’t know?”
“Uhm.”
“Do feel alright?”
Harry’s brows furrow, and the pain in his head intensifies as Zayn smoothes the crease out with his thumb. “Jus’ feel like dyin’. Bo’y ache.”
“Maybe we should get you to a hospital. Was your drink spiked?”
“No. I bough’ ‘em meself.”
“Well… Did you die and resurrect?”
“Shu’up an’ ge’ me a pai’killa.”
Zayn smiles, amused. “Are you sure you’re speaking English mate? I mean, you’re the one studying literature and I’m the one whose mother tongue is not English but—”
“Fuck off.”
“Now that sounds about right, yeah?” the Anglo-Pakistani boy laughs, his accent thick, and Harry contemplates punching him, but in the end fatigue and pain domineer and he a huffs out a ‘please,’ while wondering why he did feel so fragile and shitty when he didn’t even drink a lot of alcohol. He remembers walking home without much trouble, even.
“That’s all you had to say.”
Zayn leaves after shoving two paracetamol pills and a gallon (approximately) of water down Harry’s throat, preparing scrambled eggs and a cup of coffee (“because I’m the best friend you’ll ever have”), placing them down on Harry’s bedside table for whenever he feels hungry (Harry doubts he ever will) and making him promise to call the former if he feels the need to see a professional.
So Harry goes back to sleep (pleased that Zayn didn’t force him out of bed and that he has a bed he can sleep on) after the boy’s departure.
He wishes he didn’t.
**
It’s cold, and dark, and Harry’s heart is racing.
He is standing on the path which leads towards the older part of the lone cemetery in Holmes Chapel, recognizing his surroundings as he had been to the cemetery liberally as a child, visiting his grandmother’s grave with a peach rose – always a peach rose, since they had been her favourite kind when she was amongst the living – but it had been months since his last stopover at the graveyard, and Harry—he doesn’t remember how he got here.
The previous time he had been here, the whole of his family had accompanied him – in living or dead form – and since then he had vowed to not step back into the place for the sake of his own sanity. He had this part buried deep within him, and he couldn’t fathom just why he—
Harry whips around as a strong rustling of leaves sounds behind him, and he spots a tree swaying on its ground a few feet away, literally shaking by a force which couldn’t have been that of petty wind.
Gulping in fear, Harry starts speed-walking backwards onto the grass and off the graveled trail, his eyes focused on the large elm tree whose oscillations are receding, and he doesn’t notice his steps are leading him towards a gravestone until he trips over it, dropping down on the dew-wet meadow with a yowl for his back colliding with the earth painfully.
Fuck. Shit, shit, shit, why is he so clumsy in the worst situations?
He isn’t even sure what he’d been running from, but when a body suddenly presents itself in front of him, Harry knows.
The face—the face is vaguely familiar and Harry is assuming he saw it in some fashion magazine until the man steps forward and his eyes appear to be red. And red eyes, yes he’s seen them before somewhere personally, maybe walking down a street, but why would someone have red eyes?
The man is keeps gliding forward, his figure of an average height but with an impressive built, and he walks like his feet are flying on the grass, the epitome of elegance. His face is highly chiseled and somewhat unrealistic.
And then—one moment Harry is admiring his face, and the next he is wriggling backwards in alarm at the man’s terrorizing expression, reminding himself that this bloke is possibly the one who almost unhinged a tree, and nothing is really making sense as the older-looking guy drops to his knees in front of him and then crawls over his legs and torso, his movements almost ethereal and lethal.
Harry doesn’t even know when he stopped inching away, but he feels the man’s weight against himself and with his heart racing faster than it ever has, Harry just doesn’t know.
He is scared, but isn’t sure what of. He turns his face away in anticipation, but the muscles of his body tighten with dread, and he doesn’t understand why his body is in control and knows how to react while his brain is preoccupied with white panic.
The individual on top of Harry grins, his teeth so sharp that it feels like you could cut yourself by just staring, and he crows, “I’ll take care of you, Harry.”
Harry wants to ask him what he means by “take care,” and how he knows his name, and when did Harry himself get to this place, and why is this all frightening, and why the man’s voice sounds like it wasn’t even heard (since now, not even a second later, Harry cannot remember his tone or accent), but his tongue is suddenly acting like an involuntary muscle and Harry can only watch in horror as the man leans down, his eyelashes striking as annihilating under the moonbeams, and touches his lips to the side of Harry’s neck.
“This is going to hurt,” he declares in a voice which is lost to Harry’s ears as soon as heard, and Harry feels the man’s lips separating against his thyroid cartilage before a tongue runs over his throat, and Harry should feel disgusted, scandalized or even aroused, but instead, all he feels is the sting of teeth penetrating his skin.
He wakes up screaming.