Capable

🅒🅗🅐🅟🅣🅔🅡 16

LOUIS

"You sure you're up to this, lad?" Zayn asked, putting a hand on my shoulder that I didn't know I needed until it was there.

We'd just left the hospital where Harry was staying, he hadn't woken yet and they had a few more procedures to do, yet, so we'd dropped his stuff and left. I wanted to be there for Niall and Liam, but I wasn't sure if I could be in a hospital for a long time without breaking down, to be honest.

Besides, Liam said that the doctor had said the diagnosis wasn't for certain, yet, so there was nothing anyone could do until a few more tests were run.

When we'd gotten back in the car, Zayn had asked what I'd like to do. If I'm being totally truthful, what I wanted to do and what I felt like I really needed to, were two very different things. So, I'd taken a deep breath, turned to him and answered, in a voice squeakier than I'd care to admit,"Go see Fizzy."

That's where we were now, at the gates to the cemetery where they'd buried both my mum and my sister.

I nodded, biting my lip and staying quiet, not wanting to appear like a baby, but not trusting myself to speak while feeling so vulnerable.

We tramped through the grass, mostly dead from the autumn chill, and I couldn't help but feel like the sky was dimmed out of respect, or something. If the sun would have been shining, I think I would have been very offended.

I made it to the side of the graveyard where I knew my mum was and, Lottie had told me, Fizzy was buried beside her.

I saw the tombstone before I even reached it and felt my stomach clench, I'd not been back here for nigh on two years now.

My eyes burned and clamped down on my lower lip, stopping in my tracks and staring bleakly at basically nothing.

Suddenly, everything felt grey and I felt nauseated. I was about a half a mile away from the grave and, yet, it felt too close to me, still.

Just as I felt like I was going to be sick, Zayn's arm was around my shoulders.

I looked up to see him smiling softly at me, for once, not minding that I was only five foot six because, somehow, smaller felt safer, just then.

I leaned into his side and sighed, staring straight ahead and trembling a bit from the cold and grief. His beard tickled my forehead as he wrapped me on a hug that I wanted to pull away from at the same time I didn't.

Instead, I leaned in close and buried my cheek in his leather jacket, breathing his familiarity in and feeling a bit more grounded.

Ever since I'd moved in with him, I'd found the smell of cigarette smoke so comforting.

Probably because, after those first few nightmares in his flat when I'd first moved in, I'd always gone back to sleep to the scent wafting around me as he'd sit beside my bed and rub my back till I was out again. A right baby I'd been when I first moved in, but i sort of felt like I did, then, now.

I felt that sort of loneliness that I have to believe everybody who loses a family member feels. Even if you know they didn't have a choice, you always feel like they did it on purpose.

That's how I felt now, except for I knew that Fizzy DID have a choice and I felt cruel and selfish about it, but she'd left me. We were all we had left of our family in the whole world, and she left me.

I know that's not how I ought to have felt about things, but it was. In thinking of her leaving, I felt that wound that had barely scabbed over in my heart for my mum leaving, be ripped wide open.