small town divorce fic

[saysthemagpie]

Louis turns the shower on full blast above him. Niall curses, struggling to escape, but Louis just shoves him back in, his face dark with rage.

“What the fuck were you doing,” Louis snarls. “Who let you get behind the wheel like this?”

The water’s freezing. It doesn’t sober Niall up so much as wake him up, make him painfully, agonizingly alert.

He doesn’t want to be alert. He doesn’t want to even think, because his head aches fiercely already, and because when he starts thinking it starts hurting, all of it, in ways he hadn’t even known it was possible for a person to hurt.

“Jesus, Niall,” Louis’s saying now. “You should be dead in a ditch somewhere.”

Niall slumps against the side of the tub, his cheek pressed to the cool tile. He closes his eyes, defeated. “Yeah,” he says, the words coming out thick and slurred. “Reckon I should be.”

He doesn’t mean it exactly. He doesn’t want to die, and in the morning he knows he’ll be horrified by what he’s done, what he could’ve done. He’s no different than Greg, when it comes down to it. But right now he’s drowning in self pity, and a grief he’s buried so deep down inside himself he can’t even think about it, can’t even look at it straight on, without it threatening to crack him wide open.

There’s a long silence.

He wonders if Louis will leave now too. If he’ll look at Niall like this, a shivering, pathetic wreck, and see the same thing Harry had so obviously seen. That Niall’s no good, a risk not worth the investment. That everything he touches, everything he tries to love, withers away in the end, and it’s his doing, his fault.

Louis should leave. He should get out while he can, and leave Niall to piece back together some fragments of a life he’s shattered, a life that nobody ever believed he should have in the first place.

His breath catches on a sob. He presses his fist to his mouth, trying to muffle the sound.

“Niall,” Louis says. “Niall, look at me.”

Niall shakes his head, squeezing his eyes shut even tighter. “No,” he chokes out. “Just go. I’ll be - I’m all right.”

Louis doesn’t go. He gets down on his knees beside the tub instead, and takes Niall’s hand, his cold, clammy hand.

“Can’t do that,” he says. “See, I need you, Niall. I’m the one who needs you. Can’t live in this godforsaken shithole of a town without you, to be honest. I need you, and the girls need you, and my mom needs you too. So you’re going to have to get your shit together, Niall. Because I’m not letting you drink yourself into an early grave just because Harry Styles couldn’t keep his dick in his pants.”

“He’s your friend,” Niall says, because he hasn’t forgotten. Louis might be here now, but he was Harry’s first, and it’s not fair of Niall, wanting to keep him, hoping against hope that he’ll be allowed.

“Yeah,” Louis says. “He is, though I’m pretty pissed off with him at the moment. But you - Niall, you’re my friend too. You have to know that by now, don’t you? And right now I reckon the two of us need each other a hell of a lot more than Harry does.”