Crush [H.S]

4. Show Me

In my mind, where all possibilities were ruthless and everything was just a wallow trench of benevolence over the weak minded and rash, I couldn't find it in me to walk away. The wall was frail, trembling, beating like a heart, and there you were, on one side, on my side, holding me close because I couldn't refrain. The need to save her was strong, overpowering and gnawing until there was nothing left of me. I thrashed against you, I tried to fend you off although I wanted nothing more than to just lay there long enough to make this a figment of my imagination.

"I need to save her. I need to save her." Robotic, monotonous; not an urge, but a fucking need so strong I couldn't breathe. I remembered the hand slashing across my face vividly, remembered the sound of my mother's voice as she sent me away and continued to pry your arms from around me. "Let go of me, Harry!"

On cue, a shrill cry sounded from the other side of that thin, frail wall, covered in blue floral wallpaper, decorated in pictures of then and before. You tightened your hold around my waist and cried along to the sound of my father beating my mother. I heard the first pleads for mercy and deflated against your hold, wrenching my fingers along the material of your shirt. And we weeped, and weeped, and weeped, pressed against that damned wall, sinking, falling, losing hope for what used to be.

You were the one to cover my ears after I'd became so transfixed with the sound of my mother's cries, until hearing them hadn't piqued adrenaline rushes of anger or fury for finding help, but wonder. Because I wondered what it'd feel like to be strong enough to fight you off of me, and I wondered what it'd feel like picking my crippled mother off the floor, and I wondered what it'd feel like to have my own father's blood on my hands because bastards like him deserved a life in hell.

An hour passed, then two, three, then silence. I grasped your hand and curled into your side, and you picked me up and held me a little longer before slipping me away from my broken home. Defying a love as real as mine for you was harder than leaving my mother behind for the night. She was battered, bruised heavily around the socket of her eye, bleeding from a cut in her lip and both of her nostrils. I reached for her hand, and sadly retracted it as she roared: "Don't touch me! Leave me the fuck alone! Get out of my house, get out!"

I stayed away from home for a while and only came back after realizing Harry couldn't hide me away in his basement forever. My own mother had only stared at me with flames for eyes, and let me transpire to my bedroom, where I stared at that wall for days, and let a blade graze my skin.

Watching you flip through the photos of Zayn and Venus from across the courtyard, I shunned away the pins and needles derived by guilt. I knew I should've been there for you the way you were there for me so many times before, but when I saw Venus I saw a barricade. She was in the way of meeting you again. And I knew she'd betrayed you, cheated on you, used you for things you wouldn't refuse, but that somehow all settled harder on my shoulders than it settled on yours.