one direction: with the lights turned off
title: with the lights turned off
fandom: one direction
pairings: Louis/Harry, Louis/ofc, mentions of liam/danielle, louis/eleanor, harry/nick
rating/words: PG-13/~4,100
warnings: future!fic (so AU-ish, I guess?), infidelity, drug use
summary:And it’s one of those images he knows he’ll look back on later- Harry curled up and sad and beautiful in the backseat of his car.
a/n: Much, much love to marissa for the beta
The doctor prescribed sleep medication for his persistent insomnia, but he keeps them shoved in the back of the medicine cabinet, mostly full, save for maybe three or four. He kicked his pill habit years ago, but the addiction is still there, lurking just underneath the surface and even the knowledge of the orange plastic bottle in his home is enough to make his stomach twist. That was the first thing his mother did when his contract finally expired- got him into a rehab center under the guise of “exhaustion.”
He thinks that’s what started it, perhaps, the opening of this chasm between him and what he used to be. It was eight months of no outside contact, save the occasional visit from his mother and Lottie. Fizzy and Daisy were left at home, deemed too young to really understand. Coming home was a shock of cold water- eight months of news that he hadn’t been around to see, eight months of heartbreak and inside jokes and late night Skype calls that he had needed to ignore in order to get better. “It wasn’t the same without you.” Zayn tells him and Louis believes it, but what the others don’t get it that, to him, those eight months weren’t the same without them either. The four of them had grown into him like phantom limbs and to have them all amputated simultaneously, immediately- he remembers lying in the dark of his room, staring at the ceiling, tracing the outline of each of their faces behind his closed eyelids.
So when he comes back, it’s not the same, of course it’s not the same. He’s a man missing four limbs. People might not be able to see in on his body but they can see it in his eyes.
Xx
Despite everything, they all manage to stay in touch. Liam sends a group email every other month or so, asking for updates and other general information. He attaches photos of Danielle, of their kids, of his golf outings and happy family vacations and he’s able to express enough contentment in those pictures that it gives Louis a sense of second hand joy- warm and comforting in the center of his chest.
Zayn’s on wife number two, with a child and another on the way. He manages a studio now- doesn’t seem like he’s involved much in the actual creative processes but he’s cleaning up nicely from it. He’s still in the news occasionally- his rocky divorce with the first Mrs. Malik made headlines for about two hours before fading back into relative obscurity. Zayn probably handled the fame the worst out of all of them, bar Louis himself, and Louis wonders if Zayn also wakes in the morning damp with sweat, reeling from the nightmares.
Niall stays low-key, for the most part. He does football color commentary and still does the event circuit when he feels up to it. They covered things up so well- reporters hardly ask him about the band anymore. They mostly inquire about how the rest of them are doing, and if there’ll ever be a reunion tour and Niall smiles and laughs and shakes his head, says they keep in touch and that he misses them. He touches on the possibility of a reunion as little as possible, because all of their agents advise that they keep it open-ended, to keep hope alive. It’s laughable, really, the idea of them getting back together but none of them object to the advice and that probably says something about all of them as people, Louis muses.
And then there’s Harry. Harry, who Louis tries not to think about. Harry, who’s always in the news so Louis usually doesn’t have much of a choice.
His wife goes tense whenever he mentions going out with the boys, but they never talk about it and he supposes that’s for the better. What could he possibly say?
Xx
His wife, Shannon, is petite and brunette and when Zayn meets her for the first time, he makes a sly comment about how he always knew Louis would stick with his type. It hurts- of course it does, it’s meant to- but Louis chooses not the acknowledge it, blocking it out the way he blocks out almost everything that even hints at the remnants of his early twenties.
She’s a year younger than him, and spent her teenage years in a French boarding school, making her the first of his girlfriends untouched by the One Direction Mania. She comes from money, very old money, which helps dispel rumors of gold digging from the girls who still care. Shannon’s not on Twitter, not on Facebook, not on the media’s mind at all, really. Her first magazine cover is People, when the tabloid buys their wedding photos for a quarter of a million pounds and features them on the front. (And years later, Niall tells him about how he ran around like a chicken with its head cut off for four days, trying to keep Harry from seeing it. He found out, despite Niall’s best efforts, and went into the bathroom with a copy of the magazine and a coffee mug filled up with straight vodka and Niall found him on the bathroom floor two hours later, drunk and woozy and naked, the remnants of the magazine burnt to pieces and floating in the toilet bowl.)
Louis hoped, so naively, for the first few months that Shannon didn’t know who Harry was, that she had gone through life completely oblivious to One Direction until she was introduced to Louis. He was wrong, of course- she had grown up in France, not under a rock. The first time she ever really mentions Harry is poorly timed and even more poorly phrased. It’s a Friday and he’s restless and moody and unloading the dishwasher, desperate for something to do. She’s sitting at the kitchen table, thumbing through a tabloid, and she skims over some article (and to this day, he’s never thought to ask what it was) that makes her pause and cock her head and ask “Your friend, Harry- is he quite involved in the gay community? Since he came out?” and Louis responds by losing his grip on the bowl he’s putting on the shelf. It clatters to the countertop, smashing into eight or nine large chunks and Shannon jumps about half a foot in the air and skitters to go find the dustpan. She doesn’t bring up Harry Styles again for quite a while.
In fact, if he remembers correct, they don’t bring him up until four or five months after that, when he gets a call in the middle of the night and springs out of bed as soon as he hangs up, fumbling for his glasses and his car keys on the bed stand next to him. “I’ve got to pick up a friend.” He explained, yanking on a pair of sweatpants as he moved to the bedroom door.
“Who?” Shannon demanded, scrambling out of bed to follow him into the hallway. Elizabeth had been about a year old then and Shannon kept throwing nervous glances towards the nursery door.
“Harry.” He spit out and he could see the faint outline of her pretty face, her tiny frame clad in beautiful, lacy lingerie that stirred nothing in him and for a moment, he was absolutely despondent. And then he turned his back, taking the stairs two at a time because he couldn’t explain it to her right then, he didn’t have the strength. (And later, at a reasonable hour of the morning, she handed him the paper, the headline blaring “SINGER INCARCERATED IN PRIMROSE HILL DRUG BUST” and she asked “Is that was last night was about?” He snapped out a blunt “Yes.” and that’s the last truth he tells her for a long, long while.)
Fast forward six years and they really only see each other when they’re with the children and the only reason that they don’t fight is because they don’t talk and he catches himself spacing out as he’s shaving before work in the mornings, wondering what people would say if he left her. They haven’t had sex in months and he combs through her emails and her texts, praying for evidence of another man.
Xx
Harry opens the hotel door on the fourth knock. He’s shirtless, despite the air conditioner going on full blast. He steps aside, giving Louis enough space to slough off his jacket and his shoes and toss his overnight bag onto the armchair next to the desk. He’s been in variations of this room every other weekend for six years. Almost feels like home, if he squints hard enough.
They’ve done this too many times to count- the hotel and the four knocks and Harry, already waiting in the room, shirtless or naked and always halfway to his high by the time Louis shows up. Harry stopped using around him for a while, the first few times after Louis came out of rehab, which really was a grand gesture of love, in the scheme of things. Louis remembers the time he had gotten his own key card from the front desk and walked in on Harry snorting a line off of the television stand, the way his eyes looked, almost all pupil, with the thin line of green just barely rimming the edges, how he fumbled with the bag, almost spilling the fine white powder all of the floor and catching it at the last second on a stroke of luck.
“Lou, Louis, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I just-“ His words fell short, his mouth gaping open as he struggled the find the words to say with the high crystallizing like glass in the back of his mind.
“’s fine.” Louis had shrugged. He really didn’t mind. So long as it wasn’t pills, he didn’t care what Harry brought around him. In a way, he almost felt better having Harry do it here, in safety, at least. In safety with Louis. That way, Louis got a few hours of reprieve from the constant thoughts of Harry fucking Nick Grimshaw in the back of some noisy club. Nick or Alexa or some random who wouldn’t know how to do it right.
This time, Harry waits on the edge of the bed, holding onto his knees so tightly that he leaves nail marks. He’s already fidgety and hyped, chewing on his lip as he watches Louis undress. “Did you miss me?” he asks, scooting back on the comforter and lying down, shimmying out of his underwear. Louis laughs, the first real laugh he’s had in days, and climbs into the bed, hovering over Harry with a hand planted on either side of his head.
“I always miss you.” He mutters, letting himself collapse onto Harry gently, savoring the touch of skin on skin. He kisses Harry’s neck, carding a hand through his hair and Harry sighs, curling into it. His hands skitter over Louis’ back, tracing the muscles, the press of his shoulder blades, the two small dimples right above the curve of his arse.
“Even when we’re here?” Harry says and Louis knows that ‘here’ doesn’t necessarily mean the hotel room or even the same city. Here is just them, together, the way it was meant to be.
(And, oh, that thought hurts, right in the center of his guts.)
“Especially when we’re here.” Louis tells him and they kiss, long and open mouthed and Louis wants to cry, because it’s not like the world outside this room could ever give him something so beautiful. He hates himself for the way he fucked this love up.
Like past, like present and it’s been six years and you’d think he’d figure out a way to make things better.
Xx
He doesn’t know if the others know about him and Harry. They don’t talk about it, at any rate.
They ask him for updates, mostly, because when they all get together, it’s all small talk and reminiscing and crude jokes that make his eyes water from laughing so hard. Liam wants to know about Harry's drug habit, how that’s being taken care of, has Louis noticed any troubling signs, can Liam recommend a doctor or a therapist or something? Louis tries not to get into it because he knows he can’t lie to Liam, not about something like that. He gives vague, lame half-answers and Liam nods and furrows his brow and is just generally concerned, like he always is and Louis swears that there’s a special place in heaven for Liam, taking care of his wife and kids and four pseudo-brothers on the side.
“He just doesn’t talk to me about things, is all.” Liam says in hushed tones one night when they’re all out at a bar, Harry and Zayn having fled off somewhere to wreck havoc. “Not like he used to. I figure, if anything hadn’t changed, it’d be how he’s with you, yeah? I’d just figured you might know?”
Louis says nothing, just gives a non committal nod and takes another sip of his beer.
“Just worried about him.” Liam concludes softly, staring down into his seltzer water. “Things haven’t been the same. Not since, y’know, everything.” Louis senses the shift in the conversation, from trying to sort out Harry’s life to trying to sort out Louis’, and it’s not that he doesn’t appreciate it; it’s just that he doesn’t need it, really.
“He got over it.” Niall assures Liam. “We all did.” But judging from the look on Liam’s face, Louis isn’t so sure.
Xx
Louis barely recognizes her when he sees her in the shop- she’s just a slender flash of white on the late afternoon sunlight.
“Eleanor?” he calls and she turns, mouth slightly parted and god, yes, it’s her, in all her barely-there, wide-eyed glory.
“Louis!” she shouts and rushes to hug him, her shopping bags battering his face as they embrace. He’s too stunned to say much at first but she talks enough for the both of them, giggling nervously and smiling and “God, can’t believe it’s really you, it’s been so long!” She keeps repeating, over and over like a skipping CD.
He takes her for coffee, their favorite activity, and she rambles about her modeling career and her fiancé, intermittent with questions about him and the rest of the boys. It’s just strange, seeing her and remembering everything she represented in his life. She brings back memories of the engagement, the gossip magazine headlines, Harry bursting into tears in the middle of the night because the idea of it made him sick. So Louis had broken it off and El had understood (she always did, more than they gave her credit for.)
He wonders if she’s glad they never kept the ruse going all the way, if she misses the paycheck and (possibly) his company. He missed her; in the strange way you miss the winter when the summer’s too hot. She wasn’t that bad, he realized. They could’ve given him so much worse.
“So…how’s Harry?” she finally breaches, trying to play it off as nonchalant as she picks at her coffee cake. But let’s be honest, she was never a very good actress. “Do you two still-“ her huge doe eyes flicker up to meet Louis’. “Do you two still see a lot of each other?” He nods and she exhales, like she was holding her breath. “That’s so great!” she grins, white and blinding. “It always sort of sucked, y’know, that I couldn’t be better friends with him.”
Well, he hated you. Louis thinks, but manages to keep it inside. He thinks that if the circumstances had been different, Harry wouldn’t have minded Eleanor but things happened the way they did and he still says her name with a spit of disgust, even now. He used to make Louis list off all the things he didn’t like about her, over and over again, until Harry was satisfied that she was unsuitable and beneath Louis’ true affections.
“I’m not going to leave you for Eleanor. I promise, Haz.” He would mutter, nuzzling up to Harry in bed after a long day. Harry would huff and sigh and wax poetic and half sarcastic about his broken heart and Louis would laugh and cling to him and kiss it better. Harry couldn’t deal with El for the long term, though. Shannon’s the first he’s semi-approved of, approved in the sense that he doesn’t badger Louis about her and their sex life and what they did for their anniversary. Sometimes he asks if Louis thinks she might suspect anything and god, of course she does but she’s small and mousey and maybe Louis’ taking advantage of her but this is what he has to do to make things work.
“He’s doing alright for himself. Shannon and I try to have him around the house as much as possible.” El’s face falls and contorts.
“Shannon?” she asks and he could almost laugh at her expression.
“My wife.” He clarifies and for a moment, her mouth falls open but she rights herself immediately, fidgeting with the lid of her cup.
“Yes. Yes, of course. Your wife…” He can’t tell if it’s because of the broken engagement or Harry or both but she excuses herself moments later, saying she needs to get back to home to her boyfriend.
Xx
The rain comes down in sheets, drenching London without mercy. Louis leans forward in the driver’s seat, clutching the wheel with white knuckles. He was not a very good driver to begin with and the miserable weather just makes it worse, but it’s four in the morning and he’s not about to let Harry take the Tube in this sort of downpour. That means, however, having Harry lie down in the backseat so that any errant paparazzi won’t notice him. It’s a small chance, but it’s not something either of them is willing to risk.
“Would you ever do things differently?” Harry asks and Louis sighs, tapping his fingers against the steering wheel.
“Of course I would, Haz. You know I would.” They’ve had this conversation before and Louis still feels guilty enough about the whole thing without Harry bringing it up every few months. Harry usually isn’t one to pick at things like this, so Louis knows it must really bother him and Christ, he knows, he knows he fucked up but he’s trying as hard as he can to make things better.
“I’m not talking about you backing out.” Harry says. “I’m talking about after that. All of this. Me calling you the night after the bust and everything.” Louis is silent, using his concentration on the road to stall for time. “If you could do it all again, would you?” He sounds congested and heady, though Louis can’t tell if that’s from the lines he did back at the hotel or if he’s coming down with something. He thinks back to when they lived together, when they would nurse each other through bouts of strep and hay fever and allergies and it’s one of the only things about that time he still longs for.
He pulls up to Harry’s flat, throwing the car into park and undoing his seat belt so that he can turn and look at Harry, who looks about two sizes too big for the tiny backseat of Louis’ car. He’s got his knees bent up almost to his chest, the top of his head pressing against the door and god, sometimes Louis forgets how long Harry really is. The lamplight comes in through the back window, casting a pane of light onto Harry’s face, his eyes lighting up green and gold and Louis thinks for a moment, absently laying his teeth into the shoulder of the driver’s seat.
“No.” he says finally, shaking his head. “No. We could do it over a million times and I’d always do it the same.” Harry smiles sadly and reaches out his hand, his arm a pale line in the darkness of the car. Louis takes it, twining their fingers together and they stay there for a moment, Harry in the backseat, Louis in the front. Louis meant what he said, but there’s no point in dwelling on an answer like that. What’s done is done and he can’t change his bad decisions, just like Harry can’t change his and Shannon can’t change hers. He can attempt damage control, but he’s been doing that for so long- he wonders if he’ll ever get it right. He wonders if he’ll always have a few sins left unatoned for.
Harry hauls himself up so that they’re face to face and kisses him, pressing Louis’ hand over his heart. Louis can feel it beating wildly, half from the drugs, half from God only knows and he pressed into it with two fingers, feeling his own quicken in response. “Come inside.” Harry mumbles against his mouth and Louis kisses him harder. He knows he has to get home, but at the end of the day, Harry is Harry and he always comes first. And it’s one of those images he knows he’ll look back on later- Harry curled up and sad and beautiful in the backseat of his car.
Xx
“We’re taking him on holiday?” Shannon hisses, trying to keep her voice down so that Andrew and Elizabeth don’t hear.
“We’re not taking him with us. He’s going to meet us there.” Louis specifies. He’s so short with Shannon on days like this, when his skin crawls and his face burns and he just wants to go out to London and be alone, for God’s sake. “And he’ll only be there for the last few days.” Shannon rolls her eyes spectacularly and Louis fights the urge to snap at her.
“Mummy?” Elizabeth’s materialized at the doorway like a little ghost, her wild dark hair framing her thin face. “What’s wrong?”
Shannon forces a strained smile, crossing the room to pick their daughter up. “Nothing, love!” She smiles and tucks a piece of hair behind Elizabeth’s small ear and Louis softens. This is why he thought he could love Shannon, if only for a little while. “Uncle Harry’s coming on holiday with us! Isn’t that exciting?”
Elizabeth smiles, wide and toothy. She loves Harry and Harry adores her, though Shannon never lets them spend much time together. She cheers, pumping her fists in the air, imitating Louis when he watches football. Shannon looks to him and they smile, however tight, and he thinks for a moment that maybe he can be brave, maybe he can finally come clean, but then guilt hits him like a train, his face falling, his courage fading and he makes an excuse and ducks out of the room.
Xx
Harry and Louis lie awake in the dark, listening to the sounds of the waves through the open window. He forgot how tired Harry is when he isn’t high, going all limp and sleepy in Louis’ arms as soon as he gets comfortable. Louis concentrates on Harry’s breathing, on the clicking of the ceiling fan- anything to distract him from the sound of Shannon rustling as she turns in her sleep, just a room over. He wonders if Harry can hear her too. He buries his face in Harry’s neck, inhales the smell of clean soap and the hint of post-sex sweat. When Harry speaks, Louis can feel the vibrations of it in his chest, low and faint.
“Is this how we’re going to be?”
Louis sighs, watching the paddles of the ceiling fan turn in perfect rotation. Shannon moves again and it’s then that he realizes the walls must be paper thin. He wonders if she’s awake. He wonders if she heard them. Honestly, he wonders if she cares.“This is how we’ve got to be.”
Harry sighs, mussing his head against the pillow. He’s quiet, quiet like he has something to say, which is unusual- he hardly has things to say, just things to do. The last time he had gotten like this was the time he had told Louis that he’d check himself into rehab if Louis left Shannon. That stunk of false hope and idealism, but Louis clung to it anyway- said “okay” and didn’t let himself regret it. Harry bends down, pressing his face into Louis’s hair. “We could’ve been happy.” He whispers and they let it sink in. Louis pulls away, looks Harry in the face.
They both start laughing, gentle and lost and hopeless. Some things never change.
fandom: one direction
pairings: Louis/Harry, Louis/ofc, mentions of liam/danielle, louis/eleanor, harry/nick
rating/words: PG-13/~4,100
warnings: future!fic (so AU-ish, I guess?), infidelity, drug use
summary:And it’s one of those images he knows he’ll look back on later- Harry curled up and sad and beautiful in the backseat of his car.
a/n: Much, much love to marissa for the beta
The doctor prescribed sleep medication for his persistent insomnia, but he keeps them shoved in the back of the medicine cabinet, mostly full, save for maybe three or four. He kicked his pill habit years ago, but the addiction is still there, lurking just underneath the surface and even the knowledge of the orange plastic bottle in his home is enough to make his stomach twist. That was the first thing his mother did when his contract finally expired- got him into a rehab center under the guise of “exhaustion.”
He thinks that’s what started it, perhaps, the opening of this chasm between him and what he used to be. It was eight months of no outside contact, save the occasional visit from his mother and Lottie. Fizzy and Daisy were left at home, deemed too young to really understand. Coming home was a shock of cold water- eight months of news that he hadn’t been around to see, eight months of heartbreak and inside jokes and late night Skype calls that he had needed to ignore in order to get better. “It wasn’t the same without you.” Zayn tells him and Louis believes it, but what the others don’t get it that, to him, those eight months weren’t the same without them either. The four of them had grown into him like phantom limbs and to have them all amputated simultaneously, immediately- he remembers lying in the dark of his room, staring at the ceiling, tracing the outline of each of their faces behind his closed eyelids.
So when he comes back, it’s not the same, of course it’s not the same. He’s a man missing four limbs. People might not be able to see in on his body but they can see it in his eyes.
Xx
Despite everything, they all manage to stay in touch. Liam sends a group email every other month or so, asking for updates and other general information. He attaches photos of Danielle, of their kids, of his golf outings and happy family vacations and he’s able to express enough contentment in those pictures that it gives Louis a sense of second hand joy- warm and comforting in the center of his chest.
Zayn’s on wife number two, with a child and another on the way. He manages a studio now- doesn’t seem like he’s involved much in the actual creative processes but he’s cleaning up nicely from it. He’s still in the news occasionally- his rocky divorce with the first Mrs. Malik made headlines for about two hours before fading back into relative obscurity. Zayn probably handled the fame the worst out of all of them, bar Louis himself, and Louis wonders if Zayn also wakes in the morning damp with sweat, reeling from the nightmares.
Niall stays low-key, for the most part. He does football color commentary and still does the event circuit when he feels up to it. They covered things up so well- reporters hardly ask him about the band anymore. They mostly inquire about how the rest of them are doing, and if there’ll ever be a reunion tour and Niall smiles and laughs and shakes his head, says they keep in touch and that he misses them. He touches on the possibility of a reunion as little as possible, because all of their agents advise that they keep it open-ended, to keep hope alive. It’s laughable, really, the idea of them getting back together but none of them object to the advice and that probably says something about all of them as people, Louis muses.
And then there’s Harry. Harry, who Louis tries not to think about. Harry, who’s always in the news so Louis usually doesn’t have much of a choice.
His wife goes tense whenever he mentions going out with the boys, but they never talk about it and he supposes that’s for the better. What could he possibly say?
Xx
His wife, Shannon, is petite and brunette and when Zayn meets her for the first time, he makes a sly comment about how he always knew Louis would stick with his type. It hurts- of course it does, it’s meant to- but Louis chooses not the acknowledge it, blocking it out the way he blocks out almost everything that even hints at the remnants of his early twenties.
She’s a year younger than him, and spent her teenage years in a French boarding school, making her the first of his girlfriends untouched by the One Direction Mania. She comes from money, very old money, which helps dispel rumors of gold digging from the girls who still care. Shannon’s not on Twitter, not on Facebook, not on the media’s mind at all, really. Her first magazine cover is People, when the tabloid buys their wedding photos for a quarter of a million pounds and features them on the front. (And years later, Niall tells him about how he ran around like a chicken with its head cut off for four days, trying to keep Harry from seeing it. He found out, despite Niall’s best efforts, and went into the bathroom with a copy of the magazine and a coffee mug filled up with straight vodka and Niall found him on the bathroom floor two hours later, drunk and woozy and naked, the remnants of the magazine burnt to pieces and floating in the toilet bowl.)
Louis hoped, so naively, for the first few months that Shannon didn’t know who Harry was, that she had gone through life completely oblivious to One Direction until she was introduced to Louis. He was wrong, of course- she had grown up in France, not under a rock. The first time she ever really mentions Harry is poorly timed and even more poorly phrased. It’s a Friday and he’s restless and moody and unloading the dishwasher, desperate for something to do. She’s sitting at the kitchen table, thumbing through a tabloid, and she skims over some article (and to this day, he’s never thought to ask what it was) that makes her pause and cock her head and ask “Your friend, Harry- is he quite involved in the gay community? Since he came out?” and Louis responds by losing his grip on the bowl he’s putting on the shelf. It clatters to the countertop, smashing into eight or nine large chunks and Shannon jumps about half a foot in the air and skitters to go find the dustpan. She doesn’t bring up Harry Styles again for quite a while.
In fact, if he remembers correct, they don’t bring him up until four or five months after that, when he gets a call in the middle of the night and springs out of bed as soon as he hangs up, fumbling for his glasses and his car keys on the bed stand next to him. “I’ve got to pick up a friend.” He explained, yanking on a pair of sweatpants as he moved to the bedroom door.
“Who?” Shannon demanded, scrambling out of bed to follow him into the hallway. Elizabeth had been about a year old then and Shannon kept throwing nervous glances towards the nursery door.
“Harry.” He spit out and he could see the faint outline of her pretty face, her tiny frame clad in beautiful, lacy lingerie that stirred nothing in him and for a moment, he was absolutely despondent. And then he turned his back, taking the stairs two at a time because he couldn’t explain it to her right then, he didn’t have the strength. (And later, at a reasonable hour of the morning, she handed him the paper, the headline blaring “SINGER INCARCERATED IN PRIMROSE HILL DRUG BUST” and she asked “Is that was last night was about?” He snapped out a blunt “Yes.” and that’s the last truth he tells her for a long, long while.)
Fast forward six years and they really only see each other when they’re with the children and the only reason that they don’t fight is because they don’t talk and he catches himself spacing out as he’s shaving before work in the mornings, wondering what people would say if he left her. They haven’t had sex in months and he combs through her emails and her texts, praying for evidence of another man.
Xx
Harry opens the hotel door on the fourth knock. He’s shirtless, despite the air conditioner going on full blast. He steps aside, giving Louis enough space to slough off his jacket and his shoes and toss his overnight bag onto the armchair next to the desk. He’s been in variations of this room every other weekend for six years. Almost feels like home, if he squints hard enough.
They’ve done this too many times to count- the hotel and the four knocks and Harry, already waiting in the room, shirtless or naked and always halfway to his high by the time Louis shows up. Harry stopped using around him for a while, the first few times after Louis came out of rehab, which really was a grand gesture of love, in the scheme of things. Louis remembers the time he had gotten his own key card from the front desk and walked in on Harry snorting a line off of the television stand, the way his eyes looked, almost all pupil, with the thin line of green just barely rimming the edges, how he fumbled with the bag, almost spilling the fine white powder all of the floor and catching it at the last second on a stroke of luck.
“Lou, Louis, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I just-“ His words fell short, his mouth gaping open as he struggled the find the words to say with the high crystallizing like glass in the back of his mind.
“’s fine.” Louis had shrugged. He really didn’t mind. So long as it wasn’t pills, he didn’t care what Harry brought around him. In a way, he almost felt better having Harry do it here, in safety, at least. In safety with Louis. That way, Louis got a few hours of reprieve from the constant thoughts of Harry fucking Nick Grimshaw in the back of some noisy club. Nick or Alexa or some random who wouldn’t know how to do it right.
This time, Harry waits on the edge of the bed, holding onto his knees so tightly that he leaves nail marks. He’s already fidgety and hyped, chewing on his lip as he watches Louis undress. “Did you miss me?” he asks, scooting back on the comforter and lying down, shimmying out of his underwear. Louis laughs, the first real laugh he’s had in days, and climbs into the bed, hovering over Harry with a hand planted on either side of his head.
“I always miss you.” He mutters, letting himself collapse onto Harry gently, savoring the touch of skin on skin. He kisses Harry’s neck, carding a hand through his hair and Harry sighs, curling into it. His hands skitter over Louis’ back, tracing the muscles, the press of his shoulder blades, the two small dimples right above the curve of his arse.
“Even when we’re here?” Harry says and Louis knows that ‘here’ doesn’t necessarily mean the hotel room or even the same city. Here is just them, together, the way it was meant to be.
(And, oh, that thought hurts, right in the center of his guts.)
“Especially when we’re here.” Louis tells him and they kiss, long and open mouthed and Louis wants to cry, because it’s not like the world outside this room could ever give him something so beautiful. He hates himself for the way he fucked this love up.
Like past, like present and it’s been six years and you’d think he’d figure out a way to make things better.
Xx
He doesn’t know if the others know about him and Harry. They don’t talk about it, at any rate.
They ask him for updates, mostly, because when they all get together, it’s all small talk and reminiscing and crude jokes that make his eyes water from laughing so hard. Liam wants to know about Harry's drug habit, how that’s being taken care of, has Louis noticed any troubling signs, can Liam recommend a doctor or a therapist or something? Louis tries not to get into it because he knows he can’t lie to Liam, not about something like that. He gives vague, lame half-answers and Liam nods and furrows his brow and is just generally concerned, like he always is and Louis swears that there’s a special place in heaven for Liam, taking care of his wife and kids and four pseudo-brothers on the side.
“He just doesn’t talk to me about things, is all.” Liam says in hushed tones one night when they’re all out at a bar, Harry and Zayn having fled off somewhere to wreck havoc. “Not like he used to. I figure, if anything hadn’t changed, it’d be how he’s with you, yeah? I’d just figured you might know?”
Louis says nothing, just gives a non committal nod and takes another sip of his beer.
“Just worried about him.” Liam concludes softly, staring down into his seltzer water. “Things haven’t been the same. Not since, y’know, everything.” Louis senses the shift in the conversation, from trying to sort out Harry’s life to trying to sort out Louis’, and it’s not that he doesn’t appreciate it; it’s just that he doesn’t need it, really.
“He got over it.” Niall assures Liam. “We all did.” But judging from the look on Liam’s face, Louis isn’t so sure.
Xx
Louis barely recognizes her when he sees her in the shop- she’s just a slender flash of white on the late afternoon sunlight.
“Eleanor?” he calls and she turns, mouth slightly parted and god, yes, it’s her, in all her barely-there, wide-eyed glory.
“Louis!” she shouts and rushes to hug him, her shopping bags battering his face as they embrace. He’s too stunned to say much at first but she talks enough for the both of them, giggling nervously and smiling and “God, can’t believe it’s really you, it’s been so long!” She keeps repeating, over and over like a skipping CD.
He takes her for coffee, their favorite activity, and she rambles about her modeling career and her fiancé, intermittent with questions about him and the rest of the boys. It’s just strange, seeing her and remembering everything she represented in his life. She brings back memories of the engagement, the gossip magazine headlines, Harry bursting into tears in the middle of the night because the idea of it made him sick. So Louis had broken it off and El had understood (she always did, more than they gave her credit for.)
He wonders if she’s glad they never kept the ruse going all the way, if she misses the paycheck and (possibly) his company. He missed her; in the strange way you miss the winter when the summer’s too hot. She wasn’t that bad, he realized. They could’ve given him so much worse.
“So…how’s Harry?” she finally breaches, trying to play it off as nonchalant as she picks at her coffee cake. But let’s be honest, she was never a very good actress. “Do you two still-“ her huge doe eyes flicker up to meet Louis’. “Do you two still see a lot of each other?” He nods and she exhales, like she was holding her breath. “That’s so great!” she grins, white and blinding. “It always sort of sucked, y’know, that I couldn’t be better friends with him.”
Well, he hated you. Louis thinks, but manages to keep it inside. He thinks that if the circumstances had been different, Harry wouldn’t have minded Eleanor but things happened the way they did and he still says her name with a spit of disgust, even now. He used to make Louis list off all the things he didn’t like about her, over and over again, until Harry was satisfied that she was unsuitable and beneath Louis’ true affections.
“I’m not going to leave you for Eleanor. I promise, Haz.” He would mutter, nuzzling up to Harry in bed after a long day. Harry would huff and sigh and wax poetic and half sarcastic about his broken heart and Louis would laugh and cling to him and kiss it better. Harry couldn’t deal with El for the long term, though. Shannon’s the first he’s semi-approved of, approved in the sense that he doesn’t badger Louis about her and their sex life and what they did for their anniversary. Sometimes he asks if Louis thinks she might suspect anything and god, of course she does but she’s small and mousey and maybe Louis’ taking advantage of her but this is what he has to do to make things work.
“He’s doing alright for himself. Shannon and I try to have him around the house as much as possible.” El’s face falls and contorts.
“Shannon?” she asks and he could almost laugh at her expression.
“My wife.” He clarifies and for a moment, her mouth falls open but she rights herself immediately, fidgeting with the lid of her cup.
“Yes. Yes, of course. Your wife…” He can’t tell if it’s because of the broken engagement or Harry or both but she excuses herself moments later, saying she needs to get back to home to her boyfriend.
Xx
The rain comes down in sheets, drenching London without mercy. Louis leans forward in the driver’s seat, clutching the wheel with white knuckles. He was not a very good driver to begin with and the miserable weather just makes it worse, but it’s four in the morning and he’s not about to let Harry take the Tube in this sort of downpour. That means, however, having Harry lie down in the backseat so that any errant paparazzi won’t notice him. It’s a small chance, but it’s not something either of them is willing to risk.
“Would you ever do things differently?” Harry asks and Louis sighs, tapping his fingers against the steering wheel.
“Of course I would, Haz. You know I would.” They’ve had this conversation before and Louis still feels guilty enough about the whole thing without Harry bringing it up every few months. Harry usually isn’t one to pick at things like this, so Louis knows it must really bother him and Christ, he knows, he knows he fucked up but he’s trying as hard as he can to make things better.
“I’m not talking about you backing out.” Harry says. “I’m talking about after that. All of this. Me calling you the night after the bust and everything.” Louis is silent, using his concentration on the road to stall for time. “If you could do it all again, would you?” He sounds congested and heady, though Louis can’t tell if that’s from the lines he did back at the hotel or if he’s coming down with something. He thinks back to when they lived together, when they would nurse each other through bouts of strep and hay fever and allergies and it’s one of the only things about that time he still longs for.
He pulls up to Harry’s flat, throwing the car into park and undoing his seat belt so that he can turn and look at Harry, who looks about two sizes too big for the tiny backseat of Louis’ car. He’s got his knees bent up almost to his chest, the top of his head pressing against the door and god, sometimes Louis forgets how long Harry really is. The lamplight comes in through the back window, casting a pane of light onto Harry’s face, his eyes lighting up green and gold and Louis thinks for a moment, absently laying his teeth into the shoulder of the driver’s seat.
“No.” he says finally, shaking his head. “No. We could do it over a million times and I’d always do it the same.” Harry smiles sadly and reaches out his hand, his arm a pale line in the darkness of the car. Louis takes it, twining their fingers together and they stay there for a moment, Harry in the backseat, Louis in the front. Louis meant what he said, but there’s no point in dwelling on an answer like that. What’s done is done and he can’t change his bad decisions, just like Harry can’t change his and Shannon can’t change hers. He can attempt damage control, but he’s been doing that for so long- he wonders if he’ll ever get it right. He wonders if he’ll always have a few sins left unatoned for.
Harry hauls himself up so that they’re face to face and kisses him, pressing Louis’ hand over his heart. Louis can feel it beating wildly, half from the drugs, half from God only knows and he pressed into it with two fingers, feeling his own quicken in response. “Come inside.” Harry mumbles against his mouth and Louis kisses him harder. He knows he has to get home, but at the end of the day, Harry is Harry and he always comes first. And it’s one of those images he knows he’ll look back on later- Harry curled up and sad and beautiful in the backseat of his car.
Xx
“We’re taking him on holiday?” Shannon hisses, trying to keep her voice down so that Andrew and Elizabeth don’t hear.
“We’re not taking him with us. He’s going to meet us there.” Louis specifies. He’s so short with Shannon on days like this, when his skin crawls and his face burns and he just wants to go out to London and be alone, for God’s sake. “And he’ll only be there for the last few days.” Shannon rolls her eyes spectacularly and Louis fights the urge to snap at her.
“Mummy?” Elizabeth’s materialized at the doorway like a little ghost, her wild dark hair framing her thin face. “What’s wrong?”
Shannon forces a strained smile, crossing the room to pick their daughter up. “Nothing, love!” She smiles and tucks a piece of hair behind Elizabeth’s small ear and Louis softens. This is why he thought he could love Shannon, if only for a little while. “Uncle Harry’s coming on holiday with us! Isn’t that exciting?”
Elizabeth smiles, wide and toothy. She loves Harry and Harry adores her, though Shannon never lets them spend much time together. She cheers, pumping her fists in the air, imitating Louis when he watches football. Shannon looks to him and they smile, however tight, and he thinks for a moment that maybe he can be brave, maybe he can finally come clean, but then guilt hits him like a train, his face falling, his courage fading and he makes an excuse and ducks out of the room.
Xx
Harry and Louis lie awake in the dark, listening to the sounds of the waves through the open window. He forgot how tired Harry is when he isn’t high, going all limp and sleepy in Louis’ arms as soon as he gets comfortable. Louis concentrates on Harry’s breathing, on the clicking of the ceiling fan- anything to distract him from the sound of Shannon rustling as she turns in her sleep, just a room over. He wonders if Harry can hear her too. He buries his face in Harry’s neck, inhales the smell of clean soap and the hint of post-sex sweat. When Harry speaks, Louis can feel the vibrations of it in his chest, low and faint.
“Is this how we’re going to be?”
Louis sighs, watching the paddles of the ceiling fan turn in perfect rotation. Shannon moves again and it’s then that he realizes the walls must be paper thin. He wonders if she’s awake. He wonders if she heard them. Honestly, he wonders if she cares.“This is how we’ve got to be.”
Harry sighs, mussing his head against the pillow. He’s quiet, quiet like he has something to say, which is unusual- he hardly has things to say, just things to do. The last time he had gotten like this was the time he had told Louis that he’d check himself into rehab if Louis left Shannon. That stunk of false hope and idealism, but Louis clung to it anyway- said “okay” and didn’t let himself regret it. Harry bends down, pressing his face into Louis’s hair. “We could’ve been happy.” He whispers and they let it sink in. Louis pulls away, looks Harry in the face.
They both start laughing, gentle and lost and hopeless. Some things never change.