Archive of Our Own

"You know, he just might have a point, Louis." Eleanor sipped from her iced coffee, making sure to turn the brand label outwards (can't have a beard with a little secret product promotion, right). A couple of paparazzi members snapped photos of her on the phone with her coffee and she could only imagine the headlines about her being apart from Louis and how the tabloids would spin her phone call as cheating, even though she was on the phone with Louis. At least they were all staying far away, trying to be discreet. She continued to act like she didn't notice them in order to force them to maintain their distance. If they knew she was aware of their presence, they might try to come up closer and overhear her phone call. "I mean, it's clear that he's not handling this whole beard thing very well and, to be quite honest, neither are you." Eleanor was stating a fact. So far, they'd done a moderate job of convincing some people that they were a couple, but the way that Louis and Harry looked at one another was so different, so unique, that there was absolutely no mistaking that feeling for platonic friendship.

"We can't, though, El," Louis said, rubbing his forehead nervously. Just talking about the subject of coming out made him so nervous. There were so many unknowns, so many variables. What would happen to their contracts with management? What would happen to their fan base? What would happen to the band dynamic? There was just way too many things that could go wrong, especially when what they had going on now was working so well. "I mean, hell, we're the most popular band in the world right now. How are we supposed to just go and throw that bit of information out there and expect everyone to accept that? It's so much more complicated than that 'Love Conquers All' attitude that everyone takes towards the subject." Louis sighed because he wish it were that simple.

"I'm just saying that when Harry says it hurts him, when he says it feels like you're ashamed, when he says it seems like you want the fame more -- all those things he could have a point about." Eleanor had always been point blank with Louis. At first, she had seen him merely as a job. Make someone so obviously not straight look a little more straight by strutting around on his arm for a while. It was a pretty easy gig. However, as she got to know the boys, especially the relationship between Louis and Harry, a.k.a. the reason why she was hired in the first place, she began to understand that maybe she didn't actually have a place in the big picture after all. "I would be blasted in the media as well if you two come out, Lou, but I'm still telling you that you should do it. It's not often that people get a chance to have that storybook love that you always hear about as a child, but the way he looks at you…" Eleanor shuddered at the idea -- it gave her whole body chills just to imagine a feeling that powerful.

"See, that just helps make my point, though!" Louis gripped his fringe, adjusting it much more vigorously than necessary. "If we do say something, everyone's going to attack you, too! I really don't want that happening. You're one of my best friends, El."

Eleanor had thought long and hard about what her future held if people had found out that she had been posing as Louis' girlfriend -- particularly the things that they would say about her. She could hear it in the back of her mind: "Tramp, Prostitute, Escort," she'd imagined them all, each of them nastier than the last. She also imagined having to keep watching Louis and Harry suffer at the hands of their management and continuing to be the tool by which they made them suffer and that was also not a life that she wanted to lead. It was a lose-lose situation, so she had justified her decision in her mind that something good must come out of it, even if it wasn't for herself. "I don't care, Lou. Everyone will say awful things about me either way, but it's all just talk. People will say awful things about you two, but again, it's all just talk. It's okay to want to make other people happy, but it doesn't always have to just be other people. I'm just saying that I think you should talk to him."

"Maybe you're right…" Louis adjusted his suit jacket and looked around to make sure that no one else could hear his conversation. The Brit Awards were bound to start any moment, but Eleanor was giving some pretty sound advice and usually when he listened to her advice, things tended to turn out really well. "Alright, alright. I'll try talking to him about it, again." He heard Eleanor squeal through the phone, obviously ecstatic that she had finally gotten through to him. "BUT, on the condition that I get to present my reasons for why it's a bad idea as well. I'm not just jumping into this head first and letting all the rest of the pieces fall however they want. I want to have at least a little control over the situation. Sound fair?"

Eleanor sighed audibly into the phone. "Of course, Lou. You always have to control the situation, whatever. I guess I got ahead of myself. I'm just imagining you guys making the announcement tonight would be too good." She giggled into the phone at the idea of them announcing their relationship in front of such a massive physical audience as well as at-home viewer base. "Oh well, guess it's just wishful thinking. Anyways, I gotta go, hun. The paps are closing in. I think they know that I know that they're there. Love you, Lou! Mwah!" With that, the line went dead quickly. Eleanor was beginning to pick up mischievous little habits from Louis like making her point and then cutting the line before he could argue back.

Louis sighed, but decided to follow through on his agreement with Eleanor. Harry did deserve an explanation, it was just the matter of making sure he listened to the explanation.

"Haz, can we talk for a minute?" Louis grabbed Harry by wrapping his arm around his shoulder and took him through a side door and out into a deserted alleyway on the side of the building. It was cold, so Louis quickly crossed his arms and huddled up near a wall to prevent the wind from making him freeze any more.

"What's up, Lou?" Harry looked annoyed. He had to be, since Taylor Swift was going to be performing that evening. It hadn't been too long ago that the two of them had been dating and the break-up, as with all of Swift's break-ups, ended up with a song being written about him which was part of the performance line up for the awards show tonight, so being tense was well within reason.

"I-i just…" Louis paused for a moment, having to rebuild the courage from his conversation with Eleanor to breach the topic of their relationship and it's privacy. "I want to talk about… us." Louis saw a look of panic develop on Harry's face rather quickly, so he quickly reassured him that it was nothing bad, putting him back at ease for a moment, before his tenseness kicked back in about the Swift performance. "I just want to tell you a few things about why I don't want to come out to the media yet and I want you to just listen and try to not fly off the handle and get mad at me and assume things and just… I don't know, you know what I mean right?" Harry nodded, but didn't answer. "Look, there's a lot at steak here, Haz. Not just our future, but Liam's future, Zayn's future, Niall's future, the band's future, Eleanor's future -- there's so much at risk. What we say could cause such a huge ripple effect that it could really mess up a bunch of people's lives and that's not right! We can't do that to so many people."

"So what, then?" Harry asked plainly, annoyed that this subject was coming up again with the same arguments about everyone getting hurt. "We're just supposed to sit and suffer and KNOW that we're suffering instead of letting everyone else know that we're happy when we don't even know if they'll suffer or not from it?" Harry shifted his body, becoming even more tense. He crossed his arms and furrowed his brow. The gaze he was giving Louis was the same frustrated gaze that he always gave when the subject came up.

"Harry, just think about it," Louis tried to reason with his boyfriend, just wanting so desperately for him to understand, "we really can't afford it, at least not right now! I mean, what would happen to the band? What would happen to our contract? There's no doubt that our sales would drop because whether you want to admit it or not, those homophobic people exist and even if they won't admit it out loud, they'll show it through they're actions and they'll stop supporting us, Harry. Then, some of them will start going against us. Who knows what happens after that?!" Louis was speaking softly, but with a lot of frustration in his voice. He was clearly bothered about everything just as much as Harry, but was trying to be more logical and level-headed about the whole thing.

"Yeah, well you've got it a lot easier than I do, Lou," Harry huffed angrily.

"How the fuck do I have it any easier than you?! We're in the exact same boat of hiding our relationship!"

"No, we're not. In my life, I want to share my happiness with all of the people who claim to love and support us. I want my boyfriend to stop worrying about the utilitarian good of the fucking music industry long enough to worry about the good of his fucking boyfriend. The same boyfriend who has been having to date different girls right and left and deal with all of their shit and have songs written about them and then performed IN FRONT OF THEM. LIVE." Harry's voice had gone from an aggressive whisper to a rather audible, angry tone. "Meanwhile, in what I so loving refer to as Lou Lou land, just down the road from La La Land, you're only having to date one girl who is only around when it's convenient for her to be around, who ends up becoming your best friend. You get to control when you reveal your love to everyone while your boyfriend just sits quietly waiting because he's trying his damnedest to make YOU happy! And why do you want to wait? Let's figure it out together, shall we. You care about what will happen to the band, otherwise known as your job, you care about what will happen to your bandmates, otherwise known as your friends and coworkers, and you care about what will happen to Eleanor, otherwise known as your good friend and BEARD, while your BOYFRIEND, the one who you supposedly claim to love and want to spend your life with sits here, suffers, and has nasty songs written him for being 'such a womanizer.' Fuck off, Louis." Harry was pissed. He turned away from Louis, his face hot with rage, but was grabbed by the smaller boy by the elbow.

"But why, Harry, just why does everyone else in the world have to know? Give me one good reason why everyone has to know?" Louis was on the verge of tears from the assault he'd just been dealt from his boyfriend. "You're putting my love in question, but I'm right here, I'm right fucking here. I am beside you every single time you sing on that stage and I am beside you in every single interview, and I will always be right here beside you. I. Am. Here." Louis let go of Harry's arm and grabbed onto him, locking him into a tight hug as a few tears began to flow onto Harry's coat. "Just because everyone else doesn't know about it does not make my feelings any less real, it does not make me ashamed of you, and it does not mean that I'm trying to look out for everyone except for you, because you're included in who I'm looking out for. In this life that we have now, we are able to be together, we are able to have fun together, we are able to be successful together. Everything we could possibly want out of life we get to have and together! Why the fuck is it so important to you to validate our relationship by shouting it from the rooftops into the cameras of every news channel on the fucking planet?"

"It's because I'm fucking tired, Lou." Harry wrapped his arms around the shorter boys shoulders, sighing. "I'm just so fucking tired. I have to spend every moment thinking about what I do, every moment wondering if I'm staring for too long, every moment wondering if I'm too close, and I'm tired of managing that. I'm so tired of having to manage just being me. I should be able to be myself and be happy without having to monitor myself. It's like living with your parents, Louis, you should fucking know how it feels. You have to worry about everything you do, because you're not allowed to live your life for you. You have to live your life for other people and it's all a big fucking lie." Harry was crying now, as well, his eyes becoming very puffy and red. Tears dripped down onto Louis' hair, which made the younger boy look up.

"We're in the entertainment industry, Haz," Louis said softly, wiping away the tears from his boyfriend's eyes, then running his fingers gently down his cheek. "Think about it. The only reason everyone loves us so much is because we're doing something everyone loves and behaving in a way everyone loves and because of that we're successful and that's something that just a few years ago, we couldn't have even ever dreamed about. Every single bit of our lives is public domain now. Hell, we can't even go buy bread at the market without someone taking a photo and plastering it all over the internet, so why can't we just keep being successful while also still having one things that's just ours?" Louis smiled at his boyfriend, placing his hand against the taller boy's chest. Harry's eyes always seemed to get a little greener after he just got done crying. Louis found it devilishly attractive. "If we came out, everyone would want to know details. About everything. We wouldn't be lying anymore, but then we'd also be one-hundred percent public property. People would want to know who is dominant, who is submissive, who asked who out first, when our first kiss was, when we knew we liked boys, if we only like boys -- the list goes on, Haz."

Harry pulled away from Louis and swore, "Fuck…" It was quiet, defeated. He knew that Louis was right. About everything. He wanted to just be able to fully be himself around everyone and wanted to quit lying, but then they wouldn't have "them" anymore.

"I'm sorry, Haz," Louis said, resting his forehead against Harry's shoulder, "I just want to keep it. All of it. Our first date, our first kiss, all of our romantic conversations. I don't want everyone else to have that, too. If they all have it, then it's not something that's just ours. We don't get to have special things between us anymore, because then the media will be following us even more closely than they were before. I still want to be able to have special moments with you without having to involve everyone else in the world. If we don't have special moments like that -- ones that belong to us and to no one else -- then all we'll be left with that is ours is sex." Louis wrapped his arms around the younger boy's waist and pulled him close, feeling his warmth in the icy wind.

"How much longer do I have to sit and suffer because you think you're right?" Harry's voice changed from its original defeat back to hostility. "You said yourself that our relationship isn't fake just because no one knows about it, so then how are our special moments any less special if everyone knows about them? Just because someone else knows doesn't make our first date less special, it doesn't make our first kiss any less special, and it sure as hell doesn't make our first time any less special." Harry turned around and gave Louis a stern look, demanding an answer. He had turned Louis' own argument back around on him, which caught Louis off guard.

"Hazza…" He paused, searching for the right words, just looking at Harry, his eyes pleading for him to understand where he was coming from. Surely, surely he could just understand if only he were told the right words!

"It's because I'm selfish," Louis finally said quietly, looking down at the ground. It was true. He was selfish and he wanted to keep those memories to himself. He didn't want to share them with the world and because that, Harry was suffering and was probably about to be heavily embarrassed by the performance that Taylor was going to be giving that night. Louis was trying really hard not to hurt anyone in the band or in his life, but with the public eye so tight on every single move they made, it was inevitable that Louis would hurt someone. "I guess it's true that it's easiest to hurt the ones we love most."

Harry sighed, seeing the pain in Louis' posture. He didn't want to lash out and fight with Louis, but he also had to make his point of how things were much easier on Louis since he was the one that was in control of the closet situation, but he knew it wasn't Louis' fault.

It was the fault of all of those who could not open their mind, even for a moment, to fathom the idea that someone else could be remotely different from them, but live a completely normal, functioning, healthy life. He was taking his anger with a heteronormative society and redirecting that anger towards Louis. When Louis said things like, "No, we can't come out yet," he sounded like society, though. That's what made Harry so angry. It was a constant reminder of the imperfect world that they lived in which insisted in its own idea of "the natural," which thereby put everything that didn't fit into that wholesome family portrait as "unnatural." For every waking, breathing moment, they had struggled with something that wasn't even an issue with which they should have to struggle. They spent days, weeks, months, pining over "the big reveal" of which gender to which they were ACTUALLY attracted.

"Lou…" Harry reached out, lifted the boy's chin, and delicately placed a kiss on the smooth lips of the man with whom he loved mind, body, and soul. "It's not you who hurt me, it's them. All of them. All of those people you were talking about. Strangers who don't like the idea of two guys or two girls getting along better with each other than with their opposites. I know you better than I know anyone. It's not you who's hurting me. It's people whose names I don't know, who I've never met before, and who I never will meet. I have absolutely no control in this situation and I don't have anyone to blame, so we live our lives this way to avoid hurting someone else's feelings who we don't know, won't know, and may never even pass on the street, much less meet."

"When you put it that way, it sounds really, really silly." Louis sighed, realizing that Harry had a point in this argument as well. This whole time he had been thinking about what would happen to them if people reacted, but never really stopped to question who it was that would be reacting. He didn't know. Just "them." "They" would react and "they" might hate them and "they" might end up causing problems for the couple. But "they" had no face, they had no gender, they had no name. They were everyone and they were no one.

"Come on, let's go inside, the awards are about to start. Plus, you look like you're about to freeze to death." Harry wrapped his arm around the smaller boys shoulder and led him back inside as the faint rumble of music indicated the beginning of the awards ceremony.

As they made their way back inside, Louis pulled out his phone and typed out a text to Eleanor, "Thanks for advice. He has a point, but it's still too soon. Sorry. xx"

The boys accepted their award with dignity and grace and as they were handed their award, Harry stepped forward, indicating he wanted to make a speech. Or so everyone thought. Once Harry wrapped his grin around the microphone, Louis could see the tremble in the younger boy's hand and the anxiety in his lover's eyes. He knew exactly what was about to happen and was frozen.

"I've been doing a lot of research, and I just have a couple of things I want to say quickly, if you're all willing to listen for just a moment."

A murmur swept across the audience and then a silence fell as the auditorium consented to the boy's request. Most of them just found that as an odd way to begin an acceptance speech.

Harry's bottom lip trembled and he exhaled sharply, which the microphone picked up on, sending a gusting sound through the auditorium. Louis was terrified, but could also see the terror in Harry's face, a fear that was so much worse than anything he'd witnessed before: the crippling fear of rejection in the form of being thought to be imperfect just for being. Louis stepped across from his bandmates and placed his hand on Harry's back. This gesture gave Harry the courage to collect his nerves and prepare himself for what was about to happen. Louis braced for impact.

"We live in a world where people are expected to act and behave in a certain way, especially when they're part of the entertainment industry. However, that's not what I want to talk about," Harry backpedaled, still trying to find the right footing for his announcement, "We have rules in our daily lives as well and we place these rules on ourselves, or rather, they have been placed on us by our ancestors and since they are all we have ever known, we accept them at face value, without picking apart what is fact and what is decision. We accept the decision of those before us as fact, forgetting about what was made as a decision. Examples can be seen throughout history with issues like sexism and racism. Some viewed women as inferior to men, so it became fact. Some viewed other races as inferior, so it became fact. Women took care of the house, the easier work. Africans became slaves in the early United States because they were viewed as "less than," as tools." Harry paused, at the moment to which he had been building in his speech. He'd regained his confidence and could still feel Louis' hand placed on his back. He straightened up his posture and spoke directly into the microphone, eyes straight ahead at the recording camera: "And homosexuals were viewed as unnatural, so it became fact. They cannot procreate by typical means, so it was decided that it was unnatural, so it became fact. However, we have continued to grow and improve as a whole on this planet. We have realized that women can do work, women can make decisions, women can be strong. We have realized that people are not less than one another just because of the color of their skin. Yet, we have not realized, yet, that people are not unnatural just because they are not interested in the same sexual practices as someone else."

Louis looked at the person he was standing next to and almost didn't recognize him. Harry was radiating this firm confidence that he had never seen before and he spoke with such a passion that rattled him to his very core. Every word resounded loudly through the auditorium to a silent, baffled audience. In that moment, Louis no longer felt shame and he no longer felt fear. He was truly living in the moment during that speech and felt a smoldering ember of passion beginning to well up in his heart.

"In this life, there are things that we do not understand. We don't understand things about space, we don't understand things like quantum physics, and we definitely don't understand sexuality, that's for damn sure, pardon my language. A lack of understanding is what fuels aversion to a different idea. What would happen if women gained power? What would happen if slavery were overturned? In a world filled with power struggles, where everyone desires to put themselves in a better place in the world, we conversely have to put others lower than ourselves. We strive to become better people to prove our parents, our teachers, our mentors proud, but whom are we bettering? We struggle to be better, but do not consider the cost of that betterment. I dream of a world in which people are equal. Some may consider that a radical statement, but at least on a social level, we have to consider each other as equals.

This world needs love, but it does not understand love. Love is one of the most irrational and abstract concepts that any one human being is going to face in their lives and anyone who has ever been in love can tell you that it can be the most magical thing in the world or it can be a thousand small hells repeated over and over again. However, love is equal. You can love an individual with all of your being and not be sexually attracted to them, you can be sexually attracted to someone and have not a shard of love for them in your body, but love is equal. Love must be equal -- and by equal, I mean apathetic. That sounds bad, like love does not care, but it's true. The emotion, the idea of love, has absolutely no discerning ability between whether it heals you or destroys you. Something that makes us do crazy things, something that we do not understand, and something that can make or break us has to be equal, especially since it is an abstract concept that we cannot fathom, but can feel and name.

If I were going to wrap all of this up in a nutshell, it would be this: I am Harry Styles and I am in love with another man."

There was an audible gasp and murmuring among the audience for a moment, but then everything fell to silence again as Harry cleared his throat, indicating that he planned on continuing his speech.

"We can no longer go through life accepting the notion that just because something exists that we do not understand that it must be beyond the realm of what is natural. There's a word for that and I looked it up, hold on." Harry fished in his coat pockets trying to find the note card that he wrote the word down on. He had written it down phonetically since it was a really hard to spell word and an even harder word to say. "Here it is: solipsism. What it means is…" Harry squinted trying to read his own hand writing. He'd written the note card rather quickly, so he was having trouble making out the characters. "It is a -- philosophical idea that only one's own mind is sure to exist." Harry nodded, sure he had gotten the words right. "Basically, what it means is that there is a large group of people that think what they know as fact is fact and that anything beyond that cannot be correct. It means that some people have trouble accepting that different things are right for different people.

We write books and television shows about people who try to understand that minds of serial killers and find ourselves completely entranced by these things, but some parents cannot even fathom the idea of trying to understand the minds of their gay son or their lesbian daughter. This is a world that I do not wish to live in, that I refuse to live in.

I have lived in the shadows of my own figure for so long, waiting for my true personality to show beyond the filter that I have been forced to put up in the past, but I will no longer do that. I have constantly lived in fear of what 'they' may think without even knowing who they are. I live my life in fear of an unknown entity thinking that I am not okay or that I'm somehow screwed up when I know for a solid fact that not only am I a good, caring human being, I am good at what I do, and most importantly, that I am good and loving who I love.

You can put this speech all over the internet, you can put this speech all over the television, you can put it all over the papers, but I will never change. I can't change. I shouldn't have to change. Some people may not view homosexuality as natural, but that does not give them any right to try to mash the idea out of existence and teach children and adults who are gay to live their lives in shame and live in the shadows of themselves, because that is what hell is: forcing someone to live one life, while inside of their head, an entire different reality exists.

If you've seen the show Once Upon A Time, it's the struggle of the Mad Hatter. A brief premise, characters from fairy tales and children stories are real and are sent to this world, our world, as part of a curse, but none of them can remember their true identities. However, the Mad Hatter can. The Mad Hatter can remember his identity and his daughter's identity who cannot remember her own. He, however, does not wish for his daughter to know the truth about the curse, because it is the greatest kind of hell. For each and every day, he must put on a face and pretend that he is someone who he is not.

The Mad Hatter's struggle comes from an existing duality: our world and the fairy tale world are two different realities. It's like being in and out of the closet. By choosing to be in the closet, people live in the shadows of themselves, but people who come out believe that they are bettering themselves, becoming whole as a person, when in actuality they are only continuing to reinforce the stereotype of the necessity of the concept of the closet. As long as there is a closet, as long as there are multiple realities, then people will never truly be equal.

Gay and lesbian individuals should not have to come out of the closet in order to be themselves; they should just be." With that closing remark, Harry set the microphone down and stumbled one step back, losing the rush of adrenaline he had gathered from the beginning of the speech.

Louis was in tears. Every moment of lying, every moment of pretending to be in a relationship with Eleanor had just been torn apart by this speech and he had never in his life felt more pride and joy in Harry Styles, the individual that he adored and loved with all of his heart. Tears flowed down his cheeks and he had to use all of his willpower to choke down a sob in the arena which had exploded in an endless stream of applause. He moved to Harry and grabbed him, looked him in the eyes, and said, "I love you." Then, he poured all of his emotions, all of his heart, and all of his soul into the most passionate kiss of which the world had live video footage. In that moment, every single ounce of shame or sorrow he had felt about his situation or about his feelings had washed away as the two connected, truly connected, surrounded by applause that sounded like the thousands of fireworks going off inside the hearts of the happiest couple on the face of this imperfectly perfect world.