Ashworth Hospital is noted for its weekly test of the alarm system. They say it's tested regularly to ensure that it will be able to warn the surrounding areas of any escaped patients, but there have only ever been two cases of partially successful escapes, so Louis calls that bullshit. No, he's sure that they're sounding the piercingly loud thing at 9 am every Monday as some form of whacked out punishment designed to make him grind his teeth.
Not to mention that the bunk mattresses are more like blocks of granite, and by some stroke of extreme stupidity (or maybe it had been the fact that he hadn't known him at the time), he'd let Nick take the top bunk, and Nick never sleeps for more than 5 hours. He'll loudly write an entire novel maybe, or he'll lay on his back and talk at the ceiling until 4 am just for the sake of hearing his own voice, but he won't sleep until it's near dawn, and no one would ever be able to tell because he wakes up with enough energy to fuel a small plane while Louis feels tired and slow and stupid for being awake. Louis doesn't know how he does it and he would applaud Nick if he wasn't so annoyed by him.
It's just that, he's been at Ashworth since he was 19, and he's 21 now, so that's roughly two years. And there are 52 Mondays in one year, and 52 multiplied by 2 equals 104. Louis has lived through approximately 104 screeching sirens waking him up before noon. He's lucky he hasn't killed anyone yet.
And as far as he sees it, he shouldn't even be in this place at all. Sure, he'd killed his biological father when he was 16, but he'd had reasons. The man had completely walked out on Louis and his mother when Louis had been all of, what, 5? Louis had had every right to do what he did. And what really irritates him the most is that he'd gotten away with it for three years before anyone caught on. He's still not sure exactly how they caught on because he's positive he covered his tracks stupendously, but someone caught on and now here he is in this gloomy psychiatric hospital with an overly talkative roommate, a bed of slate, and some 200 other terminally insane men. Some of whom he'll catch whispering to walls or pissing on the linoleum of hallways. He doesn't belong with these savages, honestly.
Today's a holiday though, New Year's Eve, and the staff has decided to not sound the alarm in favour of giving the surrounding public a few more hours of sleep. Louis would revel in that fact, if he wasn't stuck living with -
"Rise and shine, Tomlinson, we have another day to face!"
And Louis swears if he had the right resources, he would either off himself or kill the chipper fucker.
But he simply breathes through his nose once, keeps his eyes closed, and says calmly, "What time is it, Nicholas?"
Louis can feel Nick's head right next to his, disgustingly close, so he's not surprised when the next answer sounds as if the older is literally inside his skull.
"I'm not entirely sure, but my internal clock says it's far too late for us to still be asleep. So let's up, it's almost New Year's!"
Louis sighs long and hard and opens his eyes, grabs the pillow from under his head, and swiftly hits Nick square in the face.
The older man splutters for about a half a second, leaning back from Louis' bunk (much to Louis' relief) and looking accusingly at the younger.
"I actually don't think that was necessary," he eventually manages.
Louis reluctantly sits up and runs his hands over his face before saying, "A lot of the things you do are highly unnecessary but I don't complain."
"You complain a lot, actually," Nick shoots back, and Louis fixes him with a glare.
"Has Paul even come around to unlock our doors yet?" he asks, already knowing Nick has been awake for a good few hours.
"He came around just before I woke you up, and I'm guessing everyone's in rec waiting on breakfast."
So, Louis figures, if he hurries, he might not get stuck with cold powdered eggs and burnt toast and that in itself lightens his spirits a little.
The rec room is Ashworth's poor idea of an activities room. There's a little tv sitting off in one corner that's outdated at least 30 years, because it's got foiled antennae and this popping, static-y image that sets Louis's nerves on edge. In another corner, there's a play area full of toys meant to keep the mentally complex patients occupied and happy. But mostly, the only thing the dolls and blocks are used for is assault on hands and fellow patients alike, and Louis very much likes to stay away from that corner because George had pelted him in the middle of the forehead with a Hot Wheels his first week there and he doesn't want to relive that incident.
Corner Number Three holds tables where various board games are played, like chess and checkers and Monopoly and Chutes and Ladders and anything else you can think of, really. Louis stays in this corner a lot, because it's quite entertaining to see middle aged men scream when they land on Park Place or full on tantrum when they're forced to go down a chute instead of up a ladder and Louis read once that psychopaths have sadistic pleasures and tendencies and he guesses he fits that profile pretty nicely.
So when Louis enters the room, he heads straight for Corner Three, and he sees Liam at one of the chess boards. He's sitting alone, and playing against himself, and his face is scruffy, like he hadn't bothered to try and shave and well.
Louis feels really bad for Liam. And it's rare that Louis ever feels bad about anything, let alone another person, but it's different with Liam. Louis had been at Ashworth for almost a year when Liam arrived, and normally he would've just filed him off as another nameless patient, except it hadn't worked that way.
Louis thinks maybe it had been something with his eyes, something in the honey brown that didn't look completely hopeless. Louis doesn't bother with completely hopeless. And even after he had tricked Paul into telling him Liam's backstory - of how the brown eyed boy had been in love and engaged until his fiancee had mysteriously died and he had lost it, shaving his head in a particularly nasty show of despair before abruptly retreating into himself - Louis still saw promise.
So he walks up to the younger boy's chess board and topples the white king to get his attention.
"Good morning, Louis," Liam replies, reaching over to set the king back upright and glancing up quickly at the smaller boy. He gives a minuscule turn up of the corners of his mouth, and most would've missed the tiny smile, but Louis catches it and beams, turns the opposite chair around so he can settle onto it backwards.
"Do you remember that bit in Harry Potter where they play chess and the pieces move by themselves and destroy each other when they conquer a space?" he asks, watching Liam move a black bishop diagonally so it can snag a white castle.
"I believe they call it wizard's chess," Liam answers without looking up, moving the castle to the table off to the side where the captured black and white pieces reside. Louis tilts his head to side as he counts up the pieces and yes, just as he suspected, the game is a draw.
"'Stimes like this I wish it was real, I think. I mean, it's the ideal game for the intellectual loner with way too much time on his hands, don't you think?"
Liam does look up then, reaches across the board to flick the white king at Louis's chest and Louis watches it thunk against his shirt and clatter back onto the metal table. He looks up at Liam, only slightly affronted, and sighs through his nose.
"What's your mood today?" Louis asks softly, slowly setting the king upright on the table and folding his hands behind it.
Liam sniffs once before he mutters, "Brown," and ah, Louis has approached this from the wrong angle. After about a month of trying to decode Liam and his mood swings, Louis had come up with the colour system. He had introduced it to the younger boy as "the mood ring without the ring".
Yellow is neutral, not happy but not particularly sad, and if today had been a yellow day, Louis's approach would have been a bit more acceptable. Liam is quiet and thoughtful and even a bit joke-y and laugh-y on those days and Louis thinks that maybe he's a bit more himself.
Blue is sad, and on blue days Liam doesn't leave his room unless Paul makes him. Louis doesn't like those days because the small glint in Liam's eyes completely snuffs out and he looks hollow and unwelcoming.
Red is angry, and angry days are the scariest for Louis because Liam is completely unrecognisable. In the way that yellow days are quiet, red days are loud, and volatile, and Liam will spend most all of them in solitary and some of them in the straightjacket, because the first red day they had left his hands free and he had scratched at his forearms until they bled.
And finally there's brown, which doesn't really have a particular emotion behind it. Brown days are a mixture of blue and red, never too much blue, never too much red, and brown days are the most frustrating for Louis because all of his advances at conversation and activity are snuffed out with hostility.
"Any reason?" Louis inquires, assuming Liam is done playing and reaching to the side to begin setting the pieces back to their respective squares.
"I just think it's quite shit that we're meant to celebrate another year of being here," Liam whispers, and he nods toward Corner Four, where the staff congregates and oversees the patient activity. The table that usually contains newspapers and coffee cups is now covered in...are those hats? And streamers? And decorative cups? Louis drops the pawn he was moving.
"They wouldn't," Louis says.
"They are," Liam replies.
Parties in mental hospitals never work out. There's screaming and hitting and destruction of property and this would be Louis's favourite form of entertainment if it weren't for the Opposite Game.
The Opposite Game is just as tediously trivial as it sounds. Each patient is given a hat with a certain theme attached to it, and they're meant to find the person with the hat that oppositely corresponds with theirs. And then they're supposed to talk with that person and get to know them and Paul told Louis once that it's supposed to be a team building excercise and well. How much team building do they really think can occur when said team includes a few hundred crazy men?
Louis despises Opposite Game because he despises these people, and he never gets paired with Liam and it's not that being in the company of new people makes him nervous, it's that he doesn't see the point of it. He knows all he needs to know about 98% of the people here and it's that they each suffer from varying degrees of insanity and he has nothing in common with them.
So the day drags on and Louis attempts to try and lift Liam's spirits while masking his own drowned enthusiasm for the task ahead, but to no avail. Liam stays brown until 6 o'clock rolls around and everyone is herded into the rec room and Louis can quite literally feel the cloud of doom looming over his head.
Paul is holding one of the double doors open and Louis taps Liam's elbow with two fingers to let him know he's leaving him but will only be a short while. Liam twists his mouth slightly to the right and continues into the room.
Paul is Louis's favourite hand because he's the easiest to get information out of. Sometimes, Louis considers them something close to friends.
"So do you have any idea why we're being subjected to this bullshit so soon after Christmas?" he says as he walks over, moving to stand next to the man and adjusting the beanie atop his head.
"Inside the rec room, Tomlinson," is all Paul says. He doesn't look over to him. He keeps his eyes fixed on the heads passing by him.
Louis isn't worried though.
"Do you really want to dance this dance again, Higgins?" he says tiredly, scrunching up his nose and shoving his hands into his hoodie pockets. "Because you've got two left feet and I always win."
Paul presses his lips together in a hard line and doesn't say anything else. Louis stares boredly at the side of his face and after a minute of no answer, he sighs loudly. The flow of patients is thinning and as much as Louis loves confusing things out of Paul and then leaving him flustered, he has to participate in this stupid game, and he at least wants to have a good choice in hat.
"Well then," he says, clapping the larger man on the shoulder. Paul has yet to look at him and Louis gives him mental kudos, because this is the most serious he's ever seen him. Louis has full faith he'll break that soon.
It's 6:25 and Louis wants to get back in bed because quite frankly, he'd rather be asleep than standing against a wall in a dog hat.
And the worst part is he hasn't even got an opposite, he's just there, and Paul's gotten a major stick up his arse and won't let Louis leave.
So he's pissed, to say the least.
He drinks the last of his punch and crushes the paper 2013 cup in his hand, dropping it to the floor and kicking it with his foot. He's scanning the room for Liam, but he can't seem to find him, and that makes him a little more than slightly uneasy because he hates people but he doesn't like being alone. He needs a familiar face to keep him level.
So he's fold his arms and shuffling his feet and he's about to throw the silly hat in the trash and lift up his hood when the double doors open and Paul shows two new people in.
And Louis's never seen them, so he guesses they're new arrivals, but new arrivals usually arrive in the morning, first thing, and Louis likes it that way because he thinks he makes his best decisions when he's half awake and what better way to decide whether or not you dislike someone than when you're disgruntled and hungry.
The boys are complete opposites, but Louis can tell that they're close in the way that they sort of...gravitate around each other. The smaller boy is pale and blond, with a set jaw and a smile in his eyes. His lips are moving, like he's whispering to himself, and the fingers of his left hand are tapping out a rhythm on his thigh.
But the second boy, he's really the one that catches Louis's attention. He's tall, taller than the blond boy and almost taller than Paul, and he's got broad shoulders that are sort of hunched in on himself. His hair is brown and curly, unruly on his head, and his lips are slightly parted while his fingers fidget with the stomach of his white t-shirt. And he keeps glancing down occasionally, flexing his fingers out and moving his lips, counting each one as if he's checking to see if they're still there, and Louis tilts his head to right and watches him. He watches as the three men walk past where he's standing, and he steps forward slowly so he can get a better look.
And normally, Louis wouldn't care about new arrivals. He never cares about new arrivals. Liam is his only exception.
But when the curly haired boy looks up and his green and glazed over eyes focus on Louis, he knows he has to get inside his head.