Young & Beautiful

Louis to wonder if he should question further, when Harry suddenly continues. “I was about six
or seven. She despised me. She found me annoying. Everybody loved me, you see. Everybody.
Our entire staff, our entire family. Friends. My father, if he was able to. But she hated me.
“Sometimes I wonder if she was jealous. Because she loved attention—she was a nasty peacock
—and I usually had more than her. Because I was the youngest and Gemma coddled me.” Harry
shrugs. “I don’t know. But it all got a bit worse after she came.
“Father was fairly clean when they first got married. I was the ring bearer.” Louis smiles at the
thought. “But she was big on coke—and a lot of it—so it wasn’t long before he was using again.
And that just made everything…worse. They’d party all night, both of them, come back at all
hours of the night and just fuck in the kitchen or the living room or…” Harry winces. “I was too
young for that, you know? Like, I didn’t… They shouldn’t have done that, but I think she did it
on purpose. I remember once being very young and going to the bathroom in the middle of the
night and they were in there. It was so fucking disturbing, that. And she saw me. She saw me
walk in, wearing fucking Spiderman pajamas, and she laughed.”
A small fire ignites within Louis. This is... Well. It's difficult to hear. It's difficult to imagine Harry
as a sweet youth. A tiny china doll face on a tiny porcelain boy, wrapped up in warm Spiderman
pajamas, eyes wide and scared and wet with tears....
It's difficult.
“She’d tell me not to talk, just about every day," Harry continues, voice husky with too much
weight. "She would never address me personally. She’d always tell my au pair—my mum,
coincidentally—to tell me whatever it was that she had to say. I just didn’t exist to her. And she
talked about me to my father. She made shit up, she lied to him. And he believed her because he’s
always been so paranoid. Because he couldn’t help but forget who I was in the first place. I’ve
never really been sure about how much he remembers of me or how well he knows me. Not
really.
“But eventually I got used to it. And I got attention at school, so it wasn’t like I was totally ignored
or anything. I got awards and endless praise and the teachers adored me, were proper parental to
me, and I had tons of friends and no enemies and… It was nice at school. At school I had a name,
at home I didn’t. And it wasn’t so bad; not really.”
Louis’ heart hurts.
“However. Things got more complicated when I was nine.”
Nine.
The age Zayn and Niall had said Harry’s mum died.
“Barbara died that year,” Harry says, voice distant. And, ah, there it is.
“An overdose?” Louis blurts, caught within the story, heart caught within a blender.
A stunned silence fills the room as Harry turns to face Louis, shock written clear across his face in
the shadow.
“An overdose?” he repeats, stunned. “No. She killed herself.”
Louis’ stomach drops.
Oh.