Swallow Me Whole

Louis feels lovely.

More than lovely, even. Spectacular. He can't remember why, though. He sticks his hands in his pockets and feels the little orange bottle with the white cap, the bottle that Zayn had gotten from one of his buddies and had given to Louis. Zayn's good at those kind of things.

Louis steps off of the curb. Or is it a cliff? He's falling down, down, down, and it's in slow motion, and he thinks, Maybe I can fly. He spreads out his arms and sure enough, he's floating. He once read a story about a boy like him who tried to fly, only his wings melted. Well, that'll show everybody. Louis stretches his arms out wider. He feels something melting, but instead of falling, he's going higher and higher.

He thinks back to what Zayn said when he'd given him the bottle a few hours ago. "Special occasions only. I mean it, Lou." He remembers nodding and saying yeah, okay, I know, and then taking about five of the pills as soon as he left.

Well, this certainly is a special occasion. Louis is flying. He might be the first human being to ever fly.

Suddenly, a faraway voice shouts, "Oi! Mate!" and Louis is plummeting to earth, landing on the ground with a crash so loud he imagines it shaking the entire street, maybe even the whole city.

The voice says, closer now that Louis is back, "Hey, mate, you alright? Shouldn't be lying in the street, you might get hit, innit."

Louis doesn't answer, and footsteps come closer until a boy with curly brown hair and hooded green eyes is staring down on him. "Hey," the boy says. "Can you hear me? You deaf?"

"I was flying, but I fell," Louis explains. "I might be dead. Careful."

The boy gives him a strange look, but then he looks closer. "Aw, shit. Aren't you that kid? The band member? Don't you have a show or something?"

Louis smiles up at him, and he imagines blood running from his teeth, dribbling down his chin and onto his chest. The blood is blue at first, but then it slowly melts into a crimson red. Louis holds up his hand and watches it drip down his fingers. "Careful," he says again. "The blood was blue at first, but now it's red. Can't imagine how."

"Niall! Hey, Ni, c'mere! We got a problem!" The boy calls.

Another person comes over and surveys the scene. Louis feels very much like a specimen at a museum. Perhaps this is his funeral. "Hey, isn't that - ?"

"Yeah," the first boy says. "It is."

"Have you got somewhere to be, mate?" the second boy asks.

Louis wants to scare them. He wants to dazzle them, to awe them, to shock them so they'll never be the same. Maybe his lungs have burst, maybe his ribs have broken in two, maybe his bones are jutting out of his skin. He feels the blood trickling everywhere. He is grisly. He likes it.

"My liver has just been taken out," he informs them.

"Oh, fucking hell," the first one says.

"Purgatory, maybe," Louis offers, because the sky is black but there's a few stars and then suddenly there's a lot of them. The blood is slicking his throat, and for the first time in a long time, Louis thinks it will be easy to sing, the blood acting like a lubricant, and he thinks he'll be able to force the words out no problem. "I will sing for you," he offers. "What should I sing?"

"What do we do?" the second one asks. "We can't just leave him here, man. He'll get hit by a car or stabbed or something. And I'm pretty sure he's on something."

"He's one of those teenybopper bubblegum boys. He gets followed everywhere by screaming teenage girls. This is probably how he normally is."

"Nah, man, he definitely took something. No one is this crazy."

"We've got a show in twenty minutes, Ni. What are we gonna do, take him with us?" There's silence, and Louis can see it in the air. It's a foamy gray, like static on the telly. He wants to touch it, but he doesn't want to get blood on the streets. Big mess to clean up, he decides. Lots of club soda, and he doesn't know if it's available right now.

"I'm mutilated," Louis tells them, somewhat impatiently. Don't they know what to do? If Louis saw someone on the streets, bloody and battered, their liver missing and their teeth and hands caked in blood, he certainly wouldn't stand around having a chat. But to each his own, he supposes. "My pancreas has burst, and my liver is gone. I want to scare you."

"You're scary, all right," the first one snaps. "Jesus, Niall, I don't want him to come with us."

"Haz, if we leave him here, he could get kidnapped."

"Isn't taking him with us technically kidnapping?"

"No, we're keeping him safe. We'll bring him with us, let him sleep off whatever he's taken, and then we'll ask if there's someone who can come get him."

It's then that Louis remembers Zayn and Liam and the fact that he's supposed to be somewhere. "I'm meant to be singing," he says, although he doesn't know if he can with ruptured lungs and a damaged esophagus and a missing liver. "What shall I sing?"

"Not anymore, mate," the second voice says, sounding cheerful. "Come on, Harry, grab his other side."

"Wait a minute," Louis says. "Don't let your hands slip on the blood."

"We won't," the second one promises.

"Have you at least got gloves?"

"Yes." Hearing that, Louis is satisfied for the time being. The last thing he wants is for these nice fellows to get their hands dirty. And then he's being hauled to his feet, and he wonders if he can fly again. He thinks maybe he needs a liftoff.

"Don't touch the bone fragments," he warns them. They carry him inside a dimly lit pub, and there's people, and he sees camera flashes. There's always camera flashes. Louis wonders if they can recognize him, if they can tell that it's his intestines on display and it's his blood dripping onto the floor. "I'm sorry for ruining your floor," he says to no one in particular. "Club soda should get it right out, if you've got any."

He's brought into a dimly lit room in the back and placed onto a couch. "I've got to go set up," the first one, the skeptical one, says. "Watch him, okay?"

"Yeah," the second one agrees. There's silence for a while, and then the guy kneels down next to Louis. "Hey, mate, you feeling any better?"

Louis studies him. He's got blond hair and blue eyes, and his face is nice and smooth. Louis sadly reflects on the times when his face was nice like that. Of course, now, it's no doubt all scarred and jagged. "What is your name?" he asks.

"Niall. And that was my mate Harry. He can be a little . . . well, you know." He shrugs. "You're Louis, right? Louis something?"

Louis wonders how he can still recognize him. "How do you know it's me? Have I stopped bleeding?" he asks.

Niall gives him a weird look before standing up and going over to the table. Louis watches as he takes a bag of white stuff out of his pocket and pours some onto the table. He cuts them into lines with some kind of credit card before leaning in.

"May I have some?" he asks politely. "I'll try not to bleed." He wonders how long it'll take for the blood to clot. Surely it would've stopped by now.

Niall looks at him and shrugs. "Sure thing, man."

Harry comes back a few minutes later, looking even more stressed than before. "Dude, did you know that Matt left?"

"What?"

"Nick and Matt got into some kind of row and Matt just bolted, man, I don't know how long he's gonna gone for, but now we've got no one on drums and we're on in ten minutes and shit, I've gotta pay the rent somehow."

"Drums?" Louis pipes up. "I can play the drums."

Harry just seems to notice he's in the room, and then he's striding over to him. They're standing extremely close together, and Louis wants to warn Harry not to get his nice jacket ruined. "You can?"

"Yes."

"Haven't, like . . . Niall, you were supposed to be sorting him out," Harry says, sighing.

"Zayn said special occasions only. I was flying. I am a special occasion," Louis says.

"Zayn! I know who that is, that's one of his bandmates. See? Sorted," Niall explains. "Come on, H, we need a drummer, and he just said he knows how to play. I'll teach him the songs, we'll be fine. Plus, I let him do a line, and he seems to be calming down."

Louis smiles as convincingly as he can, and Harry takes a step back. The blood and brain matter must've disgusted him, as well as the smell. He understands. "I understand," he says.

"Fine, fine," Harry says. "Whatever." He walks away. "We've got a famous pretty-boy in our band. Imagine that."

Niall sits with Louis and does his best to teach him the drum patterns. "We're an alternative band, so you mostly just need to bang and scream a lot."

"Scare them?" Louis is good at that.

"Yeah, exactly. Think you can do that?"

"I am the Champion of Fear," Louis decides as Harry comes back.

"We're on in five," Harry says. "Come on, popstar, let's get you changed." Louis nods. It would be wise to get him out of these bloody clothes; he doesn't want to make the audience puke. But then, Harry says, "Don't want to get you recognized." And a part of Louis remembers who he is, and then it makes him sicker.

"I don't want to be recognized," he tells Harry. "I'm not going to be Louis today."

And that's how he ends up in ripped black jeans and an old band t-shirt, his hair gelled back and tied with a bandana, sitting behind a drum set, facing a churning crowd in a dingy pub as Harry growls into the microphone, "I'm Harry Styles, and this is Niall Horan, Nick Grimshaw, and our very own Champion of Fear. We're Toxic Isolation."