Fragility

I'd like it if you stay

For Louis, Harry has always been this odd bit of poetry. A word that changes the entire perspective that is built till that point.

For him, Harry was something he classified as dangerous. He could charm everyone and hide behind it, keep his personality open and friendly, embellished with ruddy cheeks and soft dimples.

Sometimes his thoughts are fire, they burn through his scalp and burn his brain, sear strips of fat and flesh. Harry would only laugh in return, hollow and echoing, press his wet lips to the mouth of a bottle and swallow again, urging on the fire.

Louis knows it the best, what Harry really is—they are each other's in every wicked way.

Even though he is the odd bit of poetry that sticks out, he still sticks out, demanding attention to himself, preening under the glazed glances and wanting whispers that surround him with blush pink invitation.

He soaks in the attention he gets from girls and boys alike, he lets them live in the illusion that he is theirs, he makes believe that they are the only one he'll ever want.

Only to slip away between the gaps of their fingers just like desert sand slipping away, warmth only staying for so long.

He comes back to Louis with slick lips and a hunger that only ends with stickiness and bright red all over their bodies. They become canvases splashed with reds, violets are pinks.

They live together, cigarette smoke and scent of freshly baked bread mixing, tobacco and vanilla with hints of rose seeps into their walls. Their bodies reek of chlorine during summers and of firewood in winters.

More often than not, they ride the bus together, sit beside each other while Harry charms the passengers, leaning forward to bare his scorched knees from itchy carpets and slippery silk sheets.

He wears his wrecked parts with joy.

And while he shows off to the world, radiating the desire to be debauched just as worse, over and over until he cannot remember how it feels to not be ruined everywhere, Louis observes.

Harry's words and people's reactions are like a song. Macabre lyrics with upbeat melodies and harmonies, a twang of dark melancholy fitting itself betwixt curves of their cursive.

Not always he has the world on his fingertips, sometimes he is scorned and screamed at by men who don't know how to give and women who've never had been given.

They consider his pleasure as sins, tell him that the fire that burns inside him is a piece of hell he's carrying around, reminding him of all the dirty sins he commits in the name of love and want.

On days like that he dims the lights, sits with his feet swinging in the pool, moonlight reflecting on his body, flashes of silver and quicksilver covering him, coy and swift. He becomes blue.

Louis sits with him until Harry's lips are glossed and dark as the fire in him, roaring with rage and passion.

He had once burnt his tongue trying to get a taste of fire. He fears the flames more than death.

But with Louis, he craves to lick the flames, feel his skin and muscle turn into ash and sit heavy and grim on his tongue, stick to the roof of his mouth, stain his teeth with grey. Tarnished silver like.

He knows Harry more than he lets on, more than the boy himself, knows how to mould him into something unnoticeable.

Whenever someone brings up Louis, Harry stiffens, becomes the one piece of jigsaw that is too big to fit in unless turned a certain way, that odd bone that never recovered after an injury, a scar that has a history he'd rather not recall.