After the End: Book 4

3. Proving Right or Wrong

Harry's POV

I got drunk in the early hours of Tuesday morning. I made it through the vomiting up applesauce and countless episodes of the Kardashians, but I couldn't get through the sleeping part. They had to know I was going to fuck that up.

I found myself to be pretty fickle when it came to deciding how I was going to play this. I was there because at some point I'd asked for help. I understood that as a fact, and my brain had fixated on it quite a bit since I'd woken up and learned about it. If I knew that to be true, it seemed pretty self defeating to fight against it now that I was already in captivity. I was a miserable addict. I owed it to myself to try, right?

Except for I was miserable all the time, and sitting in silence next to Phoebe on the sofa while the Kardashian family argued wasn't exempt. After throwing up apple sauce, I kind of lost my drive to go pub crawling, so I'd ended up back on the sofa. My skin was crawling and I felt like an elephant was sitting on my chest. Physically, I felt like shit. Mentally, I was drowning. Sitting in my dead mums house was burning down all the carefully constructed walls I'd put up in my head over the past year. I couldn't handle what was breaking out of them.

Sometime after dark, Phoebe got up from the sofa, told me not to move, and then came back with another glass of water and a piece of toast. I rolled my eyes and accepted both. I didn't throw up that time. Phoebe congratulated me.

Sometime around midnight, she told me to go to bed and I laughed a dry empty laugh.

"Didn't Louis tell you, love? I'm not likely to sleep for days."

She hadn't believed me. She didn't understand the power of quitting cold turkey when your drugs of choice were in rapid fluctuation. My body had no idea what it wanted. Alcohol? Coke? Adderall? Ativan? Those were my most recent options. And my mind wanted a host of things; Ambien definitely and opiates too. I bet I had liked that morphine. Truthfully, my inconsistencies protected me from some parts of physical dependence. I wasn't likely to have seizures anyways, but that didn't mean the withdrawal wouldn't hurt anyways.

I was anticipating insomnia, because I always had that. Body pain, throbbing head aches, nausea, delusions, episodic depression, panic attacks, nightmares if we got past the insomnia, anger, irritability, disorientation, heart palpitations, delusions.... The list went on, and the more I thought about it, the more angry I got at Louis for putting his sister in the middle of it.

Eventually, I got tired of Phoebe staring at me so I closed my eyes to avoid looking at it. She seemed to get quieter and more content. The feeling of tension lessened. The idea that I was attempting to rest, even if it was just on the sofa, seemed to please her. Truthfully, it lessened the throbbing in my head some to close my eyes and sit in the dark. The Kardashians provided okay background noise. I tried to disassociate away from myself a little bit from that position.

It didn't work. The cravings came in full force and my body felt heavy and energized at the same time. My entire existence was discomfort.

When I opened my eyes again, more than an hour had passed and Phoebe had fallen asleep at my feet on the opposite end of the sofa. I got up and started pacing again. My muscles felt sluggish and strained, but I just couldn't stay still. I felt like my bones were trying to crawl their way out of my flesh, and I was moving to prove I wasn't dying by moving.

I need help.

I couldn't freak out and bail. I needed to at least try. I had to give it at least a day... except I couldn't.

The clock on the wall told me it was past midnight. Assuming the morphine dose had been around then, I was coming up on a full 24 hours and that was arguably easier than the rest. I'd slept through most of it anyways. The next day would be worse. The feelings would get much worse before they got better, and that didn't even account for how my mind was already exploding on its own, even if the drugs weren't a factor. I couldn't cope with all of this.