Hide & Seek (Larry Stylinson AU)

"LOUIS!" I knew who it was. Daddy. He hammers his fist against my door like it's that whore he brings home every odd night. I get up off the worn-out mattress awarded to me from the attic by myself. In a hungover trance I approach the door and twist the handle to release the catch. The creaking of the rusted hinges is like nails on a chalkboard. "Fuck." I curse under my breath as the wave of nausea passes. "You gotta go to work so get the Hell up, Louis. You need to take Phoebe to school." Listening to my father's voice is like sticking my head in a tractor's weasing engine. "Yeah, I know. Go to work. I'll do it." I tell him. "Sure?" He ruffles my hair into order and it hurts my scalp. I shrug him off. "Yeah. Go." "Alright. Be good." My dad isn't all that bad, no one's saying he's worthy of the World's Best Daddy mug but he does what he has to and leaves. We prefer it that way. I turn back to my bed, wanting to crawl back from whence I hailed and hide under my covers. Phoebe will be downstairs waiting for me to walk her to school. Instead of a full-scale shower I change out my current clothing to put on jeans and a T-shirt with a brand I cannot identify in this haze. "Hanayen!" I call to the snoozing creature on my bed. "Hanayen, wake up! We have to take Phoebe to school today." The St. Bernard lifts his head off my pillow like it's a mission incapable of concluding even by Tom Cruise. He whines and I open the door again to welcome a wave of air free of the alcohol and crystal meth stench. "Let's go." I extend my hand towards the door urging my dog to move. He rises and jumps off my bed with the tremors of an elephant's footsteps, before he goes bounding off downstairs ahead of me. Phoebe is swinging her legs back and forth due to the gap between the ground and her feet. "Hey." She greets in that chirpy small girl voice that I'd otherwise find cute. "Shoosh. Don't yell!" I hiss and she puts her finger to her lips. As my apology I decide to make my baby sister laugh. I swipe her heart-shaped plastic shades from her head much to her discontent. I cover my eyes with them. They're a flashy pink in the form of a five-point star that's tinted black with stiff plastic. "Can you loan me these for the day?" I flash her a smile. "No! They're mine!" She tries to reach for them, but it's pointless. "I'll eat your veggies for a month, yeah?" "Fine." She relents. "Come on." I tug on her ponytail. "Let's get you to day-care." "I'm in the second grade, Louis!" She slips her small hand into mine as we step out the door with Hanayen closely behind. "I said that." Hanayen barks on my other side and it booms through my eardrums like arrows to my most fragile sensory organs. I send Phoebe on her way through the front doors of Dorsal Elementary School and continue down the street to the local radio station. My boss, Chris, will probably blow the tiled roof off the place when I show up after two days of being absent. I walk like a great gun down the middle of the street with Hanayen, no one's going to drive here anyway. Middleston is a small town that has no attractions, no place on any map and no way of letting anyone out there know we exist. We're too far away from anywhere to have anything good-quality and useful shipped in. There aren't runaways in this town, because there's nowhere to run to. "LOUIS!" Chris' barbaric American voice is louder than the speaker phone. Or is he on speaker phone? "You lazy bastard, get in here!" "Yes, boss." I mumble holding the door open for Hanayen to enter. "Louis, where the fuck were you this week?!" Chris materializes from the booth. "I didn't come for two days, Chris. Can you just-" I wave my hand about "-shut up. I have a headache." "You were getting drunk when you were supposed to be at work?" "No." I start stacking the covers and cases strewn across the sofa carefully on their designated shelves in their alphabetical order. Chris shakes his head. I think he's shaking his head. "You're fired." I drop the CD's in my hand. "What?" "You're my best worker, Louis, but that's limited to the one day you work out of the six that you're supposed to be here." "I'm also your only worker." I challenge. "It's a small town. I'll find someone else who will actually appreciate this job." "I do appreciate this job." "You don't." Now I'm certain he's shaking his big head. "Leave, Louis." My painful dilemma is lost for just a minute when I throw the many works of Shaggy and The Beatles at my ex-boss, before storming out. Hanayen is never late to pick up the situation and is right beside me when I step onto the cracked street. I sigh running my hand through my dry, weak hair. I have enough time to go back home and have a shower now that I'm unemployed. I'll have to bring out the hair dye for when Dad comes home and hears my news, adding another grey hair to his patch. I notice a group of ruffians, hanging out around the payphone. The lads always chose the least sensible place to cower about. I approach them with Hanayen now less than enthusiastic. I knew he hated these guys because they always tried to touch him with their grubby hands. "Hey, Louis!" Zayn grins and slings an arm around my shoulders. "We thought you were working today." "I got fired." I admit pushing Zayn off me. "Well done." Niall scorns and I glare at him. The blond asshole always belonged at the bottom of everything: the social ladder, the food chain, the river. "Well, we have a job today." Zayn rounds up our silent debottle. "Which loser gave you idiots a job?" I laugh. "Remember Alfred's pool?" Alfred's pool is the public pool, just customarily known as Alfred's because that was the first person to drown in those waters. "Yeah." "Niall?" Zayn jabs his chin out at Niall who pulls a can out of his backpack and tosses it at us. Zayn let's me catch it. "One last game." Spray paint. The can is from Milly's Hardware and is red spray paint. This isn't a big deal, we've done worse. "Okay, cool. When?" "Tonight. Tomorrow's the opening of the kiddy pool so we'll keep it PG thirteen." Niall raises his thumb and I ignore it. "Fine. Time?" "Meet us outside Alfred's right after you drop your sister off at home. Don't bring the mutt." Hanayen growled deep in his throat as if he knew he was a topic of disgruntled discussion. I nodded and walked off towards home. *** "What time will Daddy be home?" Phoebe asks as I put her to bed. "I don't know, Phoebe. Go to sleep." I sigh bending to kiss her forehead. She turns on her side and Hanayen has taken up residence at her feet, curled up to keep her warm in my absence. I realize I still have her glasses in my pocket. Fishing them out I leave them on her bedside table before switching off the lamp she made at school for an art project that had me cleaning up flour and water for three days. *** "Took you long enough." Niall once again uses his mouth to piss me and my ancestor's off. "Niall." Zayn cautions through his Tag Heuers and Niall steps back in surrender. "Let's go." We enter the public pool that now has a No Trespassers sign pinned to the admittance office window. We hoist ourselves over the rotating silver rods that would bring attention to our actions. "Louis, you're our second best artist so you start on that wall." Zayn says and I nod. I shake the can in my right hand before testing the quality of the spray on a spot of dry wall. It's fine. I stare at the can trying to read the label and find the hole again after it falls. "What exactly do I say?" I whisper to no one in particular. "How about.......you're under arrest?" A voice I do not recognize speaks to me. I rotate my flustered body to find Deputy Anderson staring amused at me, his handcuffs held out in one hand. I close my eyes in annoyance not bothering to look for the others. They took off long ago. I put my hands behind my back as per the routine and let the Kiss-Ass Deputy haul me to the Sheriff's office. One cannot smell the fear. I sit at a silver interrogation table, battered and run-down by circular engravings made with fingernail and key-chain alike. The product of multiple disdain suspects of petty crimes such as thievery and vandalism, being brought in to test the ideology of Honor Amongst Thieves. "Why the Hell can't you just be boring like the other smart kids in town?" Sheriff Jacobs enters the room smelling of stale bread and cigars. "I'm not smart." I pick at the handcuff. His jaded eyes narrow on my face and I ignore the scrutiny. "Here." He tosses a set of keys at me for me to unlock myself. It was the routine, unbalanced and fucking irritating but I have no complaints when it came to me. Sheriff Jacobs sighs, and sinks into the cheaply manufactured Proudly Middleston County chair. He covers his face with his chubby fingers, rubbing the tiredness out of his eyes. Sheriff Jacobs has had his fair share of time doing this job, but he hasn't seen the true intensity and harsh reality behind people's sinister endevours. Believe me, no amount of rubbing will clear that off anyone. "I've had it with you about fourteen incidents back, Louis." He leans back in the chair. "And?" I slide the Police equipment that once encased by wrists and disrupted my blood flow, to him. "You know that sending a person to prison in this county will cost us more money that the amount of good it will do." I shrug. That wasn't my problem. "What happened to your job?" "I got sacked." "Ah." He nods. "Why don't you work here?" I snort in justified humor. "Your mom was a great Sheriff, Louis. The best this town ever had." "It's your job to live up to that, not mine." "You don't want to risk giving your dad an added grief, your sister an added loss and your mother an added disappointment-" "Shut up!" I stand up sending the chair barreling towards the far wall. "Just shut the fuck up! You don't know my family and you don't know me!" "Louis, sit down-" "Why the fuck should I?! So you can throw more insults at me about not being good enough? You're not my father so you can be damn sure I don't give a flying fuck about what you have to say!" I pace to the other side of the room, far away from this blob of lard compiled of doughnuts and coffee. "I will cuff you again." I hold out my tattooed wrists. "Go ahead because that's all you can do to me." "I've had it up to here with your attitude, Louis!" Now the Sheriff rises to his feet, scraping the chair against the tiled floor less aggravatedly than I did. "I've just figured out your punishment." I roll my eyes. What now? "Since you were going to destroy someone's property, I'm giving you the opportunity to repent." He locks his cuffs away. "My wife is a real estate agent, the town's only real estate agent. She told me about a house far up North that needs to be sold but it needs a...........spring cleaning." I look at him only now feeling the twist in my stomach, the needles in my eyes from the harsh fluorescent light hanging above us. "It's up on Lost Lake. The house is still standing but you will paint it," He comes closer to me,"scrub it," He tucks his hands into his pockets,"and polish it until it's fit to be on the cover of Architectural Digest." I press my back against the cool wall in arrogance. "And if I say no?" He lifts and lowers his shoulders. "Our dear town will have the consequence of having wasted talent in town, by paying the fee to have to transported to Westville Prison." I hated showing even the slightest hint of fear, and so I do not. I think about the offer. Lost Lake is a rough three miles away from town, isolated and maybe that would do me some good. I'd take Hanayen with me and live there while I basically babysat a shack. "Fine." I roll my tongue. "Excellent. And no worries, you won't be alone up there." He returns to the table. "The kid whose family owned that pile of crap still lives there. Something tells me that this arrangement will do the both of you some good." "Jeez, Sherry. You're giving me an ancient house and a charity case? You better owe me when I get back." Sheriff Jacobs laughs. "You'll be back in two months, when every nook and cranny in that place is worthy of a family living in it. The kid ain't that bad, he's a loner. I don't see him around town very often." "Name?" "Um.......Harry. Yeah, Harry." He tips his cowboy hat. "You're free to go. I expect to see you here at ten tomorrow morning." I give him a weak and quite rude salute before we both leave in opposite directions.

Notes

For those of you who want a better format or spacing haha:

http://www.wattpad.com/story/15698008-hide-%26-seek-larry-stylinson-au

I have no idea what the issue is on here but it's probably my fault anyway.

- S xx