Louis asks for very few things in life, and they are: to solve cases, to keep bad people from doing their bad things, to get good coffee, to go home to a spacious apartment with nobody else in it, and to manage his stupid telempathy powers with minimal interference. And now he’s stuck in a tiny cabin in a snowstorm in the middle of god-awful-nowhere with Harry Styles. Because of course he is.
“I think I have an idea,” Louis said. Slowly, and reluctantly, but with a growing sense of the inevitable. “God damnit, I think I have a really good idea.”
“Oh christ, that’s the problem-solving face,” Babs said. “Last time we saw that face, he sold a company.”
“Wait, what?” Zayn asked.
“Right place, right time,” Louis said. “Also, fuck my life,”
“What?” Zayn repeated. Niall patted his hand.
“I usually just roll with whatever Louis is about to do,” he said. “It’s better for us all.”
“That’s the attitude,” said Louis, “I’ll tell you tomorrow. Tonight, I need to do some research. Zayn, give me your number. I’m gonna save our symphony.”
There’s no single path forward from the connection, no truth other than the truth that the person whose words you carry is out there, an undefined something that you’re going to have to deal with.
In whatever way you can possibly deal with meeting the stranger who’s always been there, and always been missing.
OR: Louis is a music critic, Harry is a rockstar, soulmates are destiny but no one ever said destiny was easy, music is everything.
“Shut up,” Louis says, an involuntary grin tugging at his mouth. It’s not every boy who will stand in the middle of a cold barn in a suit and play musician trivia. “I’m Louis.”
//lambing season brings sleep deprivation, noisy alarms, cold barns, demanding animals, and warm strangers.
Every single magnet unstuck itself from the fridge and fell to the floor in a clattering cascade.
“I’m only a little afraid of ghosts,” Louis said
OR: Louis is a plucky Gothic Heroine, Harry is a Mournful Spirit, and Big Country Houses are full of mystery and suspense, as Big Country Houses ever are!
Maybe in another universe he isn’t different. Maybe he hadn’t been given an impossible choice. Maybe he wouldn’t have lost everything and broken everything and then fallen impossibly, irrevocably in love with the first next thing that was kind. Maybe in that universe he doesn’t feel like he’s never breathing, always pretending, teaching the kids even though they all have to learn alone, trying hard not to read the headlines, and so afraid, every day, that he won’t be a good enough teammate to the superhero he can’t live without. He knows that love isn’t supposed to feel this way, slid secret under your skin like a surgical razor, an invisible war held close over the tender vein that keeps you alive. On the other hand, Louis wonders, had he ever known how to do it any other way?
Maybe there’s a universe where he doesn’t have to keep all his secrets on the inside.
