head over heels

4. irresistibly beautiful

{maybe it's irresistibly beautiful, maybe it's beautifully irresistible}

(dunno what came over me here on generally while writing this emotional chapter lmao it was 2 am. posting this in the honors of harry releasing his first single for harry's house)

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Louis can't sleep.

It's a thing that happens often, that he can't sleep.

That he rolls around on his mattress, turns his pillow around to have the cold side of it under his face, stares at the spot on the floor that is illuminated by the moonlight shining through the curtain. That he listens closely to the sound of his roommates snoring, wondering why he can't be in an as peaceful position as them. He tries every sleeping position ever invented, counts fucking sheep - but nothing ever works.

When he was younger, when it started, these sleepless, reckless nights, he used to worry a lot. Used to think about many various things. To be mad at himself, even. He asked himself what the fuck was wrong with him, if it was ever going to go away.

Of course, back then and now, he always knew what was wrong with him, he also knew that it was not his fault. But he still felt so fucking pathetic back in the house he grew up in, crying and screaming into his pillow until he couldn't take it anymore and threw away his blanket, got out of bed and tapped up to the attic barefoot, then further up through a small window onto the roof of his childhood house.

Nobody knew that he stole the key that locks and in his case unlocks the little window above a few chests with old dresses of his sisters inside.

Neither did anybody know that he climbed up these chests and out of the window, nearly every night for a few years. The window that was his entry to freedom his whole childhood.

He knew that he could talk to his dad. He could talk to his sisters. But he never did. Nine year old Louis would rather sit on the roof of his home, stare at the sky and try to find funny names of the constellations in his head than talk to anyone about his problems, because he didn't want to bother them. 

It would surprise everyone, but Louis was a quiet child.

Until he was seven years old, he spent his free time reading and cowering in corners when he was forced to go to birthday parties of his classmates of elementary school.
He hated spotlight and social environment because it was so loud.

Then his life changed the matter of weeks and they moved away, moved to Doncaster and he met Zayn. Quickly realising his life needed the most drastic change possible now, Louis became a new person.

Because memories are difficult. They hurt. A thing about grief is that it takes and swallows your entire life and all those important moments and experiences that made you who you are. And it makes it so painful to look back at them because suddenly they're not experiences anymore, they're reminders.  And you have to invent an entirely new system to escape the feeling of losing all control over it because something terrible just took your memories and you couldn't do anything, the absence of them is inevitable and you can't possibly get them back.

So Louis started to be loud and moving and maybe a bit annoying, but that is who is he is now and no one but his sisters and his dad know that he hasn't always been this way. He told Zayn, but Zayn hadn't been there when it happened. He knows about the past, but personally he only knows the new Louis.

With all the change in his life, there is only one thing that stayed the same. His problems with sleeping. By now, Louis is used to it and doesn't worry about it anymore, he knows what he needs to do in order to catch some peaceful moments in the wonderland of dreams. He needs fresh air and some time alone. In moments like these, the old version of Louis comes back to him briefly and he just needs some silence and the night sky.