and words are futile devices - harry/louis
i have none of the following things: self-respect, shame, or any sense of a timeline. 2600 words, lyrics from sufjan stevens, other help from greta. if you listen to futile devices on repeat you will either enjoy this more or hate me more.
it’s been a long, long time since i’ve memorized your face
They move in together. They all move in together, really, all five of them within feet of each other, both because it’s the easiest way to keep track of them all, and because they wouldn’t want to be much further apart anyway.
But they don’t all - well, it’s Louis that Harry sees sneaking up behind him in the bathroom mirror. Two hands snake around his waist and settle on his chest, and for a moment they just stay like that, Harry brushing his teeth in a hotel bathroom on what could be any morning on any single day.
“Hey,” he feels Louis say into the back of his neck.
“Morning,” Harry tries to say, but it comes out a mumble of foamy toothpaste. “Oops”
Louis just laughs, leaning his forehead against the collar of Harry’s undershirt so that he’s speaking mostly into the wrinkled cotton. “Er, right. Shut up. So I was thinking, maybe, I know we’re all getting flats or whatever, but I thought you and I could share”
He taps his fingers nervously, and Harry stills. They’ve talked about this before, curled up in a bunk at bootcamp, making big plans for all the lives they could live when “all this” was over. It feels far away, and he’d assumed Louis had forgotten, but -
“Just because it’s silly, you know, to each have our own place, when we’ve been getting along so well. It’s a bit of a waste.” He trails off. Harry leans down to spit, then shifts so he can catch Louis’s gaze in the mirror.
“Yeah, ‘course,” he nods, and Louis’s face breaks into a split-second smile before he looks down. Harry recognizes the gesture, waits expectantly for Louis to fix his hair, and it dawns on him that Louis didn’t know he’d say yes. He twists against the countertop until they’re facing each other, and reaches out to tug at the hem of the other boy’s shirt.
“It’d be a waste,” Harry repeats with mock gravity.
Louis looks down to where Harry’s fingers are twisted in his shirt and grins again.
“Yeah, okay,” he nods, mostly to himself, and spins back towards the hotel room.
“Don’t forget to tell Paul, yeah?” he shouts as he leaves, and Harry just shakes his head.
When he does get around to mentioning it, though, no one seems all that surprised.
---
and when you play guitar, i listen to the strings buzz
the metal vibrates underneath your fingers
They half-run half-stumble off stage, all breathless laughs and sweat-slick hair. Zayn is doing a victory sprint towards the dressing rooms to the sound of Niall mixing up the lyrics to stadium anthems - “Rock and Roll Part 2” becomes “We Will Rock You” becomes Liam laughing and chasing them both. Harry moves to follow them, but there’s a hand at his wrist, and Louis is flashing too-bright teeth and tugging him into a storage closet.
There’s not room for them to close the door with them both inside, but at least the sound of screaming fans is muffled enough that Harry can hear Louis cracking the bones in his fingers. It occurs to Harry that this should be weird, would be weird with anyone else, but he waits patiently, his hip jammed against a rack of something large and metal.
“We were alright tonight, Hazza,” Louis says, finally.
Harry nods. “We were great,” he agrees.
Louis exhales slowly. In the strip of light from the hall, Harry watches him relax, watches his neck loosen and fingers uncurl. One side of his mouth quirks up, just for a second, and Harry realizes that for all his talk, Louis isn’t quite sure whether he’s allowed to be proud.
I’m always proud of you, he wants to say. I’m so proud of you that I want to shout. I can’t not tell everyone.
They are close enough that their legs keep brushing together, that he can see the shadowy outline of his own face on Louis’s, and before he can stop himself, he leans in and presses their mouths together. Fuck, he thinks, but then Louis wraps a hand around his neck, tugging him closer, and his stubble moves against Harry’s chin, and it turns out don’t you want to becomes warm and solid and yes so much easier than he’d ever imagined.
---
it’s been four hours now since i’ve wandered through your place
There isn’t -
it’s not like anyone ever sits them down and decides what they can and cannot say, how they can or cannot touch. They know what kind of image they have to sell to make this work. So if Simon comes across them backstage, if he looks down at their interlocked fingers and frowns imperceptibly, well,
it’s the game, isn’t it?
And that’s what home is for. It’s for knocking shoulders while they make dinner (or rather, Harry makes dinner and lets Louis chop the vegetables. It’s just easier that way, and less dangerous, and if it means that he gets to lean over and guide Louis’s hand with his own, so be it), for not worrying about how much noise they make (and Louis, Harry learns, makes noise. He moans and swears and, if Harry drags at just the right pulse point on his neck, produces a gasp that can only be responded to with one of them being immediately pinned against the nearest relatively flat surface), for waking up in the same bed (early on, Louis announces that they’re going to fuck in every room of the apartment, but it turns out nowhere is quite as comfortable as Harry’s bed is. After three nights of pretending to accidentally fall asleep, Louis swaps out one of the pillows with his own, and that’s that).
When it becomes clear that their moments alone will be few and far between, they make do. Louis slides his fingers through Harry’s curls on the way into a signing or Harry rests his hand against Louis’s thigh on stage, just long enough that the warmth of his palm will linger.
On a Friday afternoon, they’re doing their sixth interview in a row, and they’ve run out of ways to make themselves laugh. Niall spends a solid minute describing the turbulence on their last flight just to pass the time, and Zayn smirks next to him, clearly proud.
The journalist (whether he even deserves the title is debatable, though, considering that he keeps calling Niall “Neil”) sighs loudly. “Harry,” he says, cutting Niall off. “You dated X Factor host Caroline Flack. Do you prefer older women, then?”
Harry looks over from where he’s slumped against Louis’s side. He’s pretty sure he can hear Liam groaning, and he knows Louis can feel the way his entire body tenses at the question because he’s been asked it so many fucking times, at least three times today, and it’s not even an interesting question so much as they’re all hoping his answer will fit on the cover of a magazine between the title and “Ten Quick and Dirty Tips to Please Your Man”.
Harry swallows, hard, and goes to give his canned answer when Louis swings a leg into his lap and says, “I think the real question is why do older women seem to prefer Harry when I’m clearly the charmer?”
Louis grins broadly and gives a thumbs up, reaching out until he brushes Harry’s cheek. When the journalist lets out a half-hearted laugh and turns to Liam, Louis leans in, hand cupped so that it looks like he’s whispering into Harry’s ear, and instead kisses the spot he’d brushed, gently. Harry makes a show of laughing and nodding, just in case, but he’s blushing, too, he can feel his face grow warm. Niall kicks at the couch from behind them, but Louis only leans back, leaving his legs draped across Harry’s knees.
Honestly, Harry is so fucking thankful for this band and the safe space they’ve created for Louis and him, not just in private - and he wonders, sometimes, when five boys piled onto a couch became his idea of “private”, when his inner circle got quite so large - but everywhere else too; that they’re all so loving and affectionate that he can curl a hand around Louis’s neck in return, thumb raised, and smile, and no one bats an eye.
They make do, is all.
Thing is, they never really find a way in this secret coded language of theirs to say the most important words, so they save them up instead - some things are better said into collarbones and under covers, meant for no one but each other.
---
and i would say i love you -
When they fight, it shakes mountains, shakes the foundation, shakes them both. They’re just so tired all of the time now that it gets hard, some days, for them not to turn that frustration inward. Harry will spill Chinese food on the couch, and Louis will snap at him, and suddenly they’ve shoved each other into a corner - it’s always a corner, too, out of sight of the prying eyes of
well, of no one, really, but habits are hard to break
- but saying it out loud is hard
---
Only once do they really fight with fists and knees and elbows. Louis comes home from a dinner with Eleanor with lipstick on his cheek, bright red like a warning sign. It’s not the lipstick that makes Harry’s stomach turn - (he’s grateful for Eleanor, for the role she’s playing in making the rest of this possible, and for the kindness she’s shown them both. And besides that, she’s insane at Draw Something. He thinks at another time they could have been friends) - it’s the knowledge that it means paparazzi, means photos of them hand-in-hand outside the restaurant, hips bumping together as they walk.
There’ll be photos in the papers tomorrow. The headline won’t read “bromance”.
Harry wants to be sick.
Instead, he laughs too cruelly when Louis tells him about the date, and Louis snarls something back, his wit turning vicious so easily, so quickly that Harry wonders whether that venom isn’t always lurking beneath the surface. This Louis with his eyes dark feels very far away. When Harry’s fist connects with his shoulder, it looks like he’s going to shake it off, but Louis grew up in defense mode, remember, grew up knowing how to connect an elbow to a chest, and then they are tearing at each other, the planes of their bodies knocking together hard.
It’s almost like sex in that they’re both trying to avoid leaving marks where anyone could see, and the thought makes Harry laugh right as Louis gets him in a headlock so that the sound that comes out is half-laugh, half-strangled shout. Louis drops him and backs up, slowly, until he hits the flat span of refrigerator. The screen in the metal door lights up and gives the welcome spiel they’ve been too lazy to bypass for months now.
“Thanks for purchasing a Samsung LCD Touchscreen-”
(They are two boys in a kitchen selected by a pop mogul, breathing raggedly and staring at each other because, despite their best attempts, there are rules about the ways in which they can touch)
“This is ridiculous,” Harry says, spins around, leaves.
so i won’t say it at all---
Liam is out with Danielle, but that’s probably best. Harry figures Niall is the most likely to skip the lecture, and he’s right. Niall greets him at the door with a beer and a hug, and Harry doesn’t think he’s ever seen anything more comforting. Mostly they drink, but Niall’s got a basketball hoop in his living room because of course he does, so they play HORSE for a while. It turns out Harry’s not any better when he’s drunk, because around round four he misses completely and sends a picture frame crashing to the ground.
“Fuck, Niall, I’m sorry,” he starts, but Niall just shrugs.
“Doesn’t matter, mate. There wasn’t a picture in it, anyway.”
“Seriously?”
“Nah,” Niall gestures to the wall. “The decorating was done when we got here, you know? And I guess I never got around to it."
He seems a little lost in his own space, like he’d have preferred something other than sleek leather furniture and white walls. Harry recognizes the look. When they’d first moved in, Louis had spent a lot of time wandering the hallways like he expected the place to shrink, the truth being that it was too big, both in size and importance, and too gorgeous, and neither of them really knew how not to feel like they didn’t deserve it yet. On the third day, they’d called Louis’s sisters to invite them out for a visit, tacked up a bunch of wrinkled movie posters, and gone to play football in the park.
“Who cares?” Niall says suddenly. “It doesn’t have to be a home, we’ve just gotta have somewhere to sleep, right?”
“ Right,” Harry nods, except -
except when the Tomlinson girls had finally arrived, they’d spilled into every room of the house, leaving suitcases on couches and making fun of Louis’s bedding and helping Harry with the cooking, and, well, home is exactly what it had felt like.
---
and when you bring the blankets, i cover up my face
When Harry slips in just after 2 am, there’s a flashing light coming from the living room.
“Lou?” he calls.
There’s no reply, but he didn’t expect there to be. He kicks off his shoes, cursing the cold marble floors, and trots down the hall to find entertainment news reporters muted on the television screen and Louis curled up on the couch, hands buried in the sleeves of his sweater and his mouth slightly open.
Asleep, he looks so much more defenseless than Harry had left him, so much younger, so much more familiar. Somewhere behind the alcohol, Harry knows they’ve got more security than the Musee d’Orsay, but he also knows, right now in this moment, eighteen and so young, that this desperate, clawing protectiveness is going to last for the rest of his life, and that he doesn’t mind.
He tugs off his jeans and crawls onto the couch, burying his face in the crook of the other boy’s neck. Louis stirs, reaching back to tug one of Harry’s arms around his chest, mutters “love you s’much”, and then it’s warm and it’s quiet. Then they’re just two boys on a couch in the early hours of the morning, limbs and layers of cotton tangled together, safe.
---
but you are the life i needed all along
In the same manner that no one tells them how they cannot touch, no one tells them how they have to talk about girls. Not in so many words, at least. Instead, a representative drops by their flat with a notepad, a list of their old relationships. She refuses their offer of something to drink. She uses words like “cougars” and “charmer” and “Natalie Portman. They nod, they smile, they agree whole-heartedly.
Then she’s gone before they can even offer to see her out, and they’re left staring at the empty couch.
“Hey,” Louis starts, and it could be anything - is this even worth it or do you want lunch or I think maybe I really do want to give it a shot with Natalie Portman after all. “Our next place should be near the water,” he says, and Harry lets out a shaky laugh.
“Yeah. A lake somewhere. Or the ocean.”
“With a field, lots of space for football with the boys?” and Louis drops a hand into Harry’s lap, lets their fingers intertwine automatically.
“Yeah,” Harry says. “Yeah, okay."
i do
love you