Chapter Text
“Louis, are you coming? We’re gonna be late!”
Running a hand through his already overly mussed-up hair, Louis Tomlinson tries to keep his tone civil as he screams back “I’m coming, just another minute!” Leave it to Liam, Mr. Slick-And-Smooth, to be the one freaking out about this whole party thing. Normally Liam keeps Louis from getting too agitated, too panicked about what he’s going to wear, if the caterers got there on time, and if that stupid Mrs. Sajak will spend another hour on one of her pointless speeches.
Taking a deep breath, he readjusts his tie and emerges from the bathroom. His apartment is like a war zone; everything is covered with various items of clothing that Liam rejected over the course of the evening’s preparations, and his dog, Snickerdoodle, clearly had her way with a lot of them, as a good number of Louis’ suit jackets are clustered together in a sort of doggie nest. As if his life couldn’t get any more glamorous.
“Seriously, we’re going to be late,” Liam says, peeking out from behind the closet door. Louis can’t help but admire the great amount of effort he put into making Liam look as good as he does tonight, because for whatever reason straight guys seem to have absolutely no sense as to what to wear and try to match patterns with plaids and blacks with navy blues and it’s just one big fat mess, but Liam actually looks really put together. Instead of the sweatpants and Ramones t-shirt he entered in, he’s dressed in one of Louis’ nicer Alexander McQueen suits with a snappy tie and some hipster glasses that are really just those cheap 3D ones that you get at the movies that Louis punched the lenses out of.
Louis still rolls his eyes, because Liam is still being a pain in the arse, and grabs Snickerdoodle’s leash off of the counter, hooking her collar on so he can take her out for a quick bathroom break before they leave. Ignoring Liam’s shouts of protests, Louis quickly walks to the front gardens and lets Snickerdoodle sniff around and do her business.
Looking up at his second-story window, Louis can’t help but admire how much of a drastic improvement this apartment is from his last one. Before, back when he lived further south, he basically lived in a cube with what now seems like hardly enough room to breathe. Now he’s got space, a beautiful view of the city, and some quite posh neighbors.
Of course, he’s older now too, so he realizes that what he thought was cool and artsy two years ago just seems stupid. For example, having a dog in a total of two hundred square feet was stupid. Really stupid. Especially when that dog is a puppy who likes to gnaw on all of the wooden furniture in said two hundred square foot apartment and has nowhere to go.
Snickerdoodle sniffs lazily up at the stars, and Louis lets her, staring over her to see the skyline of London across the Thames. Even though Marylebone isn’t exactly right in the heart of London, it’s close enough that he feels like a part of the energy the city has to offer. The blinking lights of the Tower Bridge and the gentle spinning of the London Eye are like therapy to him, and on nights when he can’t sleep he’ll sit out on his balcony and see if he can pick out any of the buildings.
Hearing some hollering indoors from Liam, Louis decides it’s time to take Snickerdoodle inside and finally get on the road. Even though they’re still fifteen minutes ahead of schedule. Whatever.
Getting back inside his apartment, he finds Liam flopped down on the California king bed, lazily flipping through the channels. “Where’s Eastenders? I wanna know what happens with Linda and Shirley,” he asks, his voice muffled by the lapels of his suit jacket.
Louis takes the remote and turns the TV off. “Li, it’s Wednesday, it’s not on. Plus the Omnibus isn’t on for a few anyway, so you’re not missing anything.”
Liam groans and flips onto his stomach. “Who the bloody hell has parties on a Wednesday night? Like don’t these people have anything to do?” Louis sighs and grabs his Burberry coat off the chair where he laid it out earlier.
“No, that’s the issue,” he says. “Plus, most of them are so rich that they don’t even need to work tomorrow. Unlike me.”
Liam grunts antipathetically. “You and me both,” he mutters as he pets Snickerdoodle on the head and follows Louis out the door.
* * * * *
Louis can’t help but think that the string quartet is a tad pretentious for this party. To be fair, he thinks this while he sips a glass of champagne and dutifully tunes out a multi-million dollar donor, but all the same. The string quartet is a bit much.
Not taking his eyes off of the snobby woman in front of him, Louis tries to covertly peek behind her and look for Zayn and Niall, who still have yet to arrive. It’s only eleven, and the party is just heating up, as fancy women float across the marble floors of the art museum in floor-length gowns and opera gloves.
He can’t honestly understand how in the world he ever got this job, working as a museum curator in one of the most exclusive museums in the world, let alone London. For some reason, the National Gallery, the bloody National Gallery, the museum with Titians and Seurats and Van Eyck, Raphael, Ucello, and Michelangelo, Boticelli and freaking Leonardo da Vinci, not to mention one of the largest Egyptian collections in the world save for the Louvre and the Cairo museum, wanted him, Louis Tomlinson, to head up the care and maintenance of its beloved pieces. So every day, Louis comes to work with the Conservation Department, then breaks for lunch and takes over teaching a few classes and giving bi-weekly public lectures, soliciting pieces from galleries across the world, and maybe once or twice giving private tours to the Prime Minister’s kids.
It seems like just yesterday that he was sitting in that stupid classroom teaching a bunch of bored, whiny, arseholes about the majesty of Renaissance culture, and now, finally, he had a group of people who could actually appreciate what he was talking about and discuss it and take a degree of interest in it. Which was a drastic improvement from before.
He does miss it sometimes, though. Even though he hated a lot of it, parts of that job were still fun. The times he would sneak out of work early, helping Liam acquire Disney posters in different languages, lunch with Zayn and Liam and Niall and—
“Mr. Tomlinson?” the lady asks, clearly annoyed that her question which Louis totally did not hear has gone unanswered. With great tact and suavity Louis manages to get her to repeat the question, citing the string quartet as too loud, which the snobby lady actually agrees with, and then he’s showing her some of the pieces and explaining their subtleties to her. So, he still does teach, but to people who are actually smart. And care about art. Again, a drastic improvement.
Behind him, he hears a bit of a clamor and some cursing, and guesses that Niall and Zayn must have arrived. True to his prediction, he and snobby lady turn around to see Niall in a wrinkled suit trying to exchange chest bumps with a mortified Liam, who is trying to explain to one of the MP’s in attendance that he does not, in fact, participate in that aspect of culture, while Zayn, in a tan suit that would look hideous on anyone else but somehow looks gorgeous on him with his unshaven face and gelled hair, looks like he’d rather be getting a root canal.
Zayn and Niall have been together this whole time, two years, since Louis left his old teaching job. They met when Zayn made Niall spill coffee down the front of his shirt, and, Zayn later admitted to a horrified Louis, gave Niall a blowjob in the bathroom when they were trying to clean up his shirt. They’d been inseparable ever since, and had even been talking about marriage.
Louis had been noticing married people and things a lot more lately. Glancing down at his conversational partner’s wrinkled and veiny hands, he sees a beautiful diamond ring accompanied by a faded gold wedding band on fingers curled elegantly around a glass of pinot noir. He can see her, married to some snobby man named Alfred with two snobby dogs named Augustus and Napoleon and it may or may not slightly depress him that these snobby people are off living an imaginary snobby life and he spends every night alone in his massive bed and eats way too many boxes of cookies from Harrod’s while watching old episodes of “Keeping Up Appearances”.
Zayn finally manages to rip Niall off of Liam, and Louis excuses himself to go say hello. Niall is in the middle of a protest to his boyfriend when he notices Louis approaching, and breaks into a grin.
“’Ey, mate! What’s the ish?” Niall nearly shouts, pulling Louis into a ridiculously tight and majorly uncomfortable that makes Louis nearly choke on the champagne taste in his mouth. When Niall finally lets him go, Zayn looks at him flatly.
“Where can I get one of those?” he asks, hailing a waiter walking around with glasses on a tray. He downs the entire glass in one go, and puts it down on another passing server. “I’m gonna need like six of these.”
Louis laughs, because he knows that even though Zayn pretends to be perturbed he is secretly loving every stupid thing his boyfriend is doing right now. That’s just Zayn’s style, this flat affectation that masks a softie underneath.
“Guess what, Lou?” Niall asks triumphantly. At this point, Louis has given up trying to guess what new and overly ridiculous thing Niall has managed to come up with, so he just shrugs and says “What?” like he always does.
Before Louis can even hear what new oddity Niall is about to announce, or what this means for him, society, and possibly the future of the universe, he is yanked to the side by Liam’s strong grasp and pulled away from the party into a side gallery.
“Ow!” Louis whispers after he’s released him. “What the hell was that for?”
Liam’s face is lit with panic. “Harry’s here.”
Immediately everything in Louis’ world drains to a complete standstill. No no no. Not now, not here. This cannot be happening, not in this universe or in this life or in any other. Harry Styles could not possibly have shown up to this party on this night. Not after two years, two years of nothing but unanswered text messages and drunken phone calls and a dog. No way, this cannot be happening, it is not happening.
“What?” is all Louis can choke out, but it somehow manages to communicate to Liam everything he needs to know about the sheer amount of panic this instills in him. “How?” he tries next, and Liam just shakes his head frantically.
“Mate, I have no bloody clue. I was just talking to one of the security guards about something and then the door opens and Harry bloody fucking Styles walks in the door and just smiles at me and says hi!”
Louis is shell-shocked. “That’s it?” Liam nods frantically, at a loss for words. Trying to get his feet back under him, Louis starts asking the important questions. “What was he wearing?”
Liam rolls his eyes and whisper-shouts impatiently “I don’t know! I wasn’t exactly concerned about what the bloke was wearing because, oh, I don’t know, he was actually in the freaking museum!” Louis groans in frustration, and runs a hand through his hair, remembering too late that he had just gotten it perfectly gelled down.
“Okay, well, was he alone?” he asks. Liam nods a few times and starts pacing the floor in front of him with great intensity. “Yes, he was alone. He came in by himself, nobody by his side, there was no interference—”
“I get it, Li, he was alone,” Louis interrupts. “Well…” He’s at a loss for words at this point. Finally he settles for an exasperated “What is he doing here?”
Liam shrugs, looking like he’s trying incredibly hard not cry. “I don’t know! Maybe somebody invited him? Does he come here or donate a lot of money or something? What is he even doing?”
Louis tries desperately to flip through the mental file cabinet he had labeled “DO NOT OPEN EVER BECAUSE YOU WILL DIE AND COMBUST AND IT WILL TERRIBLE DON’T DO IT” to try to remember what Harry Styles had been up to. All he knew was that he drove him back home from London and they worked together civilly to the end of the year, and then Louis had started applying for other jobs, and then he got the job, and Harry hadn’t come to his going-away party, and he’d texted him a few times with much delayed responses, and so things had kind of gotten awkward and eventually he’d just given up trying and sealed that chapter of his life away with the intention of forgetting it forever and chalking it up to yet another time that Louis Tomlinson got swept off of his feet and dumped onto his ass.
Yes, it was largely his fault that he’d been an asshole and run away four times, and yes he’d kind of majorly freaked out and gone off the radar, but Harry did leave him with a dog. So that kind of made them even, right?
“What are you going to do?” Liam hisses, to which Louis looks at him with murderous intensity.
“What am I going to do?” he repeats with agitation. “What the actual fuck kind of a question is that?” Liam stands in front of him, running his hands up and down his pants like they’ve got the blood of somebody on them or something. Louis bats his hand away with a “Don’t get my pants all sweaty, you wanker.”
Liam looks around helplessly for a few moments, and then looks Louis dead in the eye. “You have to say something to him.” Louis looks like he is ready to murder Liam, resurrect him, and then murder him again.
“What the flying fuck am I supposed to say to him?” he hisses, putting his hands on his hips like he does whenever he gets super stressed out.
“I don’t know!” Liam says. “But you have to say something. I mean, you lived with the guy, it was your first real relationship since Stan. That’s saying something, that’s not exactly something you can ignore. So what, you brush him off? Then what? I mean, he’s going to know you’re here. Your name is on the flipping invitation, I mean, Jesus.”
Louis sighs in aggravation, mostly because he knows that Liam is one hundred percent correct in his evaluation of the situation. Liam takes him by the shoulders and looks him dead in the eye.
“Look, I know this sucks, Louis, and I know how hard you’ve worked to bury all of that in the past. But you can’t keep running from Harry. I mean, you tried that, and looked how well it worked out.” Seeing he’s already losing Louis’ attention, he refocuses his chin. “Lou, you have to do this. Just to at least put this behind you once and for all.”
Before Louis can protest or submit or possibly start crying into his chest, Liam’s phone starts ringing, and he sheepishly takes it out of his breast pocket.
“Who is it this time?” Louis asks flatly. Liam checks the Caller ID, and then brings it up to his ear, signifying that he’s going to take the call and strand Louis to confront Harry all by himself. Which is perfect. Except not. At all.
“Danielle,” he says, and Louis rolls his eyes. For the past year, Liam’s been seeing not one, but two girls on the side, because of course it’s feasible for Liam to dote on two girls at the same time and have neither one know that he’s carrying on any sort of a scheme like this. When it’s not Danielle it’s Jade, and when it’s not Jade it’s Danielle, and Louis absolutely refuses to abet his friend in this matter, not counting those several times he pretended that Danielle was his third cousin twice removed on his mum’s side.
So while Liam goes off to placate one of his women, Louis stomps off to go have a lovely little chat with Harry. This party has clearly been a rousing success.
Re-entering the main party area, Louis surveys the room, trying to spot any sign of Harry’s ridiculous hair or some sort of patchwork peasant rice farmer suit. Within a matter of seconds, he spots a cluster of patches spread over a tall, lanky frame chatting up some of his colleagues in the corner and Louis makes a beeline for him. Time to get this over with.
Louis approaches the group standing around talking, and a few of his colleagues move aside with a gentle smile to give him entrance into the conversation. If this were a movie, Harry would look up and into Louis’ eyes, his smile freezing on his face as the two of them get lost in each other’s faces and there’d be sweeping orchestral music and possibly a song and dance routine, but because this is not a movie, all that Louis gets is a quick glance and a “Hey, Lou” and for some reason that makes Louis more lovesick than any movie scene could ever do.
He spends a few minutes lingering on the outside of a conversation centering around the fine arts of pre-packaged dinners and proper microwaving procedures before the crowd gradually disperses and Louis is left alone with Harry.
Louis can’t feel his heart beating, pulse racing, or everything he’s tried so desperately to hide in the past few years boiling back up to the surface. Nope. None of that at all.
* * * *
The conversation is awkward, sometimes jolting, like Louis was when he first learned to drive stick, a bunch of halting forward movements, but eventually they get the hang of it and fall back into a pattern.
Louis finds out that Harry moved from his old job at the high school teaching European History and now has Louis’ old job, teaching art history. Apparently he loves it, and is really quite good at it. He’s still bartending, but like he was when Louis first met him, and he still has a penchant for getting drunk in front of the telly and shouting at the X-Factor contestants. So it’s Louis who’s changed so much. Harry’s just stayed the same, or maybe even gotten happier.
It’s a nice conversation, and they do a lot of catching up. Harry asks a lot about Snickerdoodle, and Louis shows him some pictures on his phone, and they laugh about how big she’s gotten and how lanky she is compared to when they first got her, and reminisce about times she used to pee all over everything in their house because that was what puppies did.
But eventually, the conversation runs dry, grows stagnant. Eventually Louis just ends up staring at his shoes and Harry swirls his champagne with great effort and intent, watching as the bubbles go around and around inside the glass, creating waves with new heights and trying to keep it inside the tall glass. Louis can’t help but wonder why he fell for Harry, and why he’s still so helplessly in love with him, after all this time.
Just as Louis is about to say goodnight to Harry and dart off in an attempt to find Liam and hide with him in one of the side galleries and discuss how awkward it is that Louis had to see Harry again and ha-ha isn’t that funny that he showed up and then they would go their separate ways and just forget about everything, Harry says “Yeah, I’ve actually got a job here now,” and Louis chokes on his champagne and Harry has to thump him on the back while he hacks away until he finally calms down enough to let Harry continue.
“I mean, I’m still doing the whole teaching thing, y’know, but there’s a part time position here after school on the weekdays and the full day on Saturday taking special courses on the art and everything, plus work behind the scenes with the curators. Continuing education and all that.”
The only word that keeps going through Louis’ mind at this point is “fuck”, so that his thoughts about how he in fact is the one teaching these classes and supervising all of this work in the conservatory offices and teaching the group about proper technique and style and all of that just kind of becomes a string in his mind, like fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck.
“That’s awesome,” Louis chokes out, realizing that Harry likely got the invitation to this party because he sent them out to the sponsors of these various pupils with his name across the top and some person, likely that stupid snobby woman with her snobby dogs, sent the invitation to Harry and invited him to sip champagne and rub shoulders with all of these people and wear these hideous patchwork suits to said parties because such is the life of a Harry Styles.
Essentially, Louis wants to scream, laugh, and cry. All at the same time. This is what Harry does to him.
* * * * *
When he finally gets home, Louis finds the door to his flat unlocked.
Immediately suspicious, Louis retreats to his car and grabs the can of mace he has hidden in the glove compartment were he to be pulled over and hijacked by an angry person on the motorway, because this is likely, of course, and also takes a towel from the backseat that Snickerdoodle likes to pull at so that he can maybe throw it onto the intruder and Snickerdoodle will yank at him and frighten him away.
That sounded way more logical inside his head.
He sneaks up to the door and pushes it open, avoiding the third step on his way up because it squeaks, and finally makes it to the entrance way. Kicking off his shoes, he braces himself and with a shout of aggressiveness, kicks open the door and falls onto his face because he hit it the wrong way and stubbed his toe on the doorknob and is now lying in agony with a can of mace and a towel spread over his suit that Snickerdoodle immediately jumps on and starts pulling.
Louis manages to get the blanket off of himself and stand up, looking around warily with the can of mace in his hand. He doesn’t see anybody in the living room, and the telly is off, so he warily proceeds forward, grabbing a butter knife covered in yogurt from the sink. Snickerdoodle sits on the kitchen floor licking her flank lazily. Some guard dog she is.
Creeping forward ever so carefully, Louis sees a shaft of light coming from underneath his bedroom door and the faint sound of the telly. As he tries to will himself forward to confront the intruder, he can’t help but picture the scene that awaits him. A gang of robbers with a bag full of all of his money. Those new Italian golf shoes he got the other week because they were on sale. Of course, robbers don’t know things are on sale, but still. They’ll seem expensive and likely worth stealing.
He tries desperately to steel his pounding heartbeat, inching closer and closer to the bedroom door. Finally, he stands in front of it. Summoning all of his courage, he winds up and kicks the door open, better this time, only half stubbing his pinky toe on the recoil, and looks up to see Stan Lucas sitting on his bed eating ice cream out of the carton and looking at him casually.
“Oh, hey, Lou,” he says, taking another spoonful of the strawberry. “Long time no see. Oh, and how about Zayn and Niall having that baby mama? Pretty sweet, eh?”
Things are definitely not a drastic improvement from two years ago. At all.