I love you to the Circinus Constellation and Back

Chapter sixteen

Harry didn't remember the next twenty-four hours. Actually, he remembered some bits and pieces of it, but not every minute.

Harry remembered trying to not jump off the cliff after he was already in midair and scraping his palm against the sharp rock. Then he remembered the searing pain in his head and his spine as he hit the water. But it was much too hard to be the water. Harry then remembered hearing a few hellish screams before blacking out.

It felt like only a few seconds, but it must've been longer because the sun had gone down by then. He could see blurry images of people bustling around him. He felt himself being raised up from the ground and into cupped hands. He thought he could make out Niall and Liam but he wasn't really sure.

"W – where am ..." Harry trailed off his question as black filled his vision once again.

Harry woke up screaming two hours later. He shot up in the nurses' bed he was laying in and screamed like he'd just watched his parents die. The pain in his head and back were so overwhelming Harry could barely breathe. Tears streaked his face from the pain.

He felt a pair of large hands push him back down onto the bed. Harry squirmed around, crying out for help, not knowing who was holding him down or what was wrong with him. He screamed and cried for another full minute before running out of breath and blacking out a third time.

The fourth time Harry woke up, it was morning, and he had a large bandage wrapped around his left palm and all the way down to his elbow. Gauze was sticking out between his fingers, dotted with blood stains and –

BLOOD STAINS!

Harry shot up in his bed, immediately regretting the act. His head felt like a boulder and spiked pain through his neck and eyes.

"Hey! Whoa! Whoa! Don't get up!" The nurse screamed at him, pushing him back on to the bed.

"W – What happened!? Why am I bleeding? Why does my head hurt? What's going on? Where's –"

"Sh!" The nurse ordered. "I'll explain it all to you, but you can't move, okay? You suffered a severe beating. So please, stay still, alright?"

Harry wouldn't have moved if he could with the searing pain in his head, but he tried to seem like he was better than he was, so he protested slightly before giving in and lying on the bed. The nurse gave him a cup of water for him to drink. Harry chugged it all in one breath, feeling slightly better.

"Alright, kiddo." The nurse smiled, sitting down at a chair next to Harry's bed. "I'm gonna tell you what happened, but you need to stay quiet the whole time alright?"

Harry agreed and looked at the nice nurse. She took a deep breath.

"So last night, you were jumping with your friends, right? Well I guess you fell wrong or something and smack into a sand dune. I guess you tried to grip the cliff as you fell and scraped up your hand pretty badly," She pointed to Harry's wrapped arm, "Your friend, Zach –"

"Zayn," Harry interrupted.

"Zayn, sorry. He came sprinting up here, crying and telling me what happened. He told me you were unresponsive and that Liam and Niall had dragged you from the water but you weren't breathing."

Harry's eyes widened. Had ... had he almost died?

"We got to you and recovered your pulse, and brought you up here on a gurney. We put you on plenty of pain killers and stitched up your hand."

STITCHES!!

"We ran some test in the back office and concluded that you had major trauma to your skull. We know it is a concussion, but lucky for you, it's not that serious, thanks to the cushion of the sand you fell into. The major problem we found was in your eyes. They don't seem to focus right. Do you feel any pain now?" The nurse asked.