Archive of Our Own

1. He’s seven the first time he sees it. Almost lovingly drawn in the place where all of his mum’s veins converge on her wrist, black on lilac, the small, half moon. She is tucking him into bed, and he is completely helpless against the overwhelming urge to reach out and touch. The skin feels normal, if a little warm, a little tingle of the forbidden or something shuddering down his spine.

“What is it?” He asks almost reverently, because he doesn’t understand. Can’t possibly grasp how bound he is to the whims of this mark. It’s just beautiful, for now, like a tattoo. He’s always wanted a tattoo.

Smiling sadly, his mum moves dark curls off of his forehead. Her lips brush against his skin when she whispers, “Nothing, love. Remind me tomorrow.”

He forgets, of course.

2. The next time, he’s fourteen, and he’s discovered that other, older kids are showing up to school with the marks. Some girls show theirs off: whispering in hushed voices about things that he could never make out, even if he tried, and blushing when they catch his wandering eyes. Other times, there are guys tugging up blue uniform sleeves to laugh at the delicate, curving swoop of one boy’s while admiring the strength inherent in one made of straight, dark lines.

It makes no sense to him that his wrist has remained wholly untouched.

The pressure now, half way through the year with kids that he’s spent every day with since primary school, has built up so high. He feels wrong, like an outsider or a fool or a defect. Why isn’t there a little black symbol on his wrist? Why isn’t he feeling the giddiness that other people are? What’s wrong with him? He’s always been a bit of a weeper, and on the Friday before winter break, he can do nothing but walk into the house and immediately put his head down on the kitchen table to hide his tears.

The kitchen is small, cozy, and smells of chocolate. He should have known that his mum couldn’t possibly be in any other room.

“Love,” she pets along the dewy, dusky place where his hair covers his neck, “Love, talk to me.”

He just can’t though. The only sounds coming from his mouth are these childish, weak mewling sounds, and he wants nothing more than to be held in his mum’s arms tightly, but he’s too old for that. Basically, everything is totally hopeless and he could possibly be an alien. Why else wouldn’t he get a mark? She sinks onto the floor beside his chair, a hand firm on his upper thigh.

“Alright then,” he can almost picture her gathering her soft hair up into a tie, “Want to hear a story?”

Why does she want to tell him a story? Doesn’t she recognize an existential crisis when she sees one? His eyes scrunched up in confusion, he nods, not even remembering that he must look a right mess until her fingers are sweeping along the bags under his eyes.

“When I was about eighteen,” she begins, “the government called me to a special building.”

He sniffles weakly.

“I sat down at a table,” she shakes her head, eyes squinted in remembrance, “and told them my name, my age, and where I was from.” His mum laughs self-consciously. Like everyone in their family, her blush turns the ridges of her cheekbones an inviting, girlish shade of red, “They handed me a notecard. Which, as you know, was probably where all of the problems began—”

“Mum, I—”

“The point, my love,” she whispers, “is that you’re too young yet. You’ll get called, when you’re eighteen, like I did. Like all of your peers will,” her fingers are soft against the side of his face, “And then, when you’re eighteen, you’ll go back to that same building, and they’ll give you a segno.”

He finally raises his eyes to her honest, honey brown ones. She is beautiful. With her dark hair and her pale skin and the fullness of her lips, he understands that he has her to thank for how he looks. But she also looks tired, exhausted, bone deep, and he’s never really taken the time to think about why before. The way she talks about the thing, the segno, he repeats in his head, is heavy. He feels some sort of awareness creeping into his own bones.

“Segno?” His voice comes out weak and trembling.

“Mmhm,” his mum bares her wrist up to him. “Mine probably won’t look like many others that you’ll see.” Her tiny moon has gone silver. “They change, according to how things work out and what you’re meant for, and I s’pose that your dad and I mucked everything up.”

He can’t stop from rubbing his thumb over the skin, feeling how cold it is, “It used to be black, maybe?”

Anne, looking tired, smiles, “Right you are, my lovely boy.”

“Why does dad…?” He can’t quite put what he wants to say into words. He’s always been so bad at articulating.

“Oh, love.” Rubbing a hand across her temple, she says evenly, “Whatever mark they put on your wrist will match only one other one. Whoever has the same one as you,” she delicately, longingly, traces her moon, “They’re your soul mate.”

He chokes on his own air. “My what?”

Anne’s hand, cool and soothing, cups his cheek. He has always been his mum’s boy, and he leans into the touch feeling out of sorts and scared. If he doesn’t have a mark, then he’s destined to be alone or some other horrible thing, and he can’t stomach that thought, he’s only fourteen, how does someone even begin to face the prospect of alone at this age?

“Don’t worry too much, Hazza,” her voice goes soft around the edges, “You’re young and you’re beautiful and someone is going to love you very, very much.”

But his heart still sinks.

He’s fourteen, and Gemma’s voice is trembling in the kitchen, raised and resolute. She’d stormed through the front door with tears on her cheeks, a rip in her blouse that hadn’t been there when she’d left. Harry is trying to watch TV, lying down on the couch, and pretending that he isn’t listening to every word his mum and Gemma are saying.

For the second time in five minutes, Gemma says, “I want it scarred over.”

Harry knows the exact tenor of his mum’s soothing voice. She’s probably got Gemma wrapped up in her arms, some tea brewing in a kettle. Sometimes, he feels guilty about how much they put her through.

Quieter than Gemma, his mum responds.

“No, no,” Gemma’s voice rises with each word, “I will not fucking go back to him. I will not—”

His mum again, gentle, “Love—”

“It’s my choice!” Gemma is obstinate: Harry can hear her putting her mug down on the table, the sound of her boots across the floor, “This is my bloody life. I don’t want to be with him, and I won’t. I understand that—”

“Please think of what you’re saying, my love, please—”

“I will never fucking love him.”

“I’m not asking you to but—”

Someone hits something, hard. The mugs rattle on the table. In the void of silence left over, Harry can hear the electricity of the TV crackling, the pitter patter of rain on the sidewalks, the uneven way Gemma’s breath is caught hitching in her throat. He pulls his blanket up to his chin to combat the shivery feeling in his stomach.

“I’m making an appointment to have it scarred over, whether you agree or not. I just—” her voice breaks, “I need your support, mum. Please.”

3. When his mum broke her bond, they had to move to a more modest home in an area further from the center of the city. It’s never troubled Harry: the hedges are clean and trimmed, the yards are big enough for sun bathing and swimming pools, and their home is perfect for him, Gems, and his mum. His memories of living in the apartment in the city are hazy at best because he’d been eight when his mum had broken her bond, and he’s watched enough of the news to know that he is fortunate in his place, fortunate in his ability to sleep soundly at night. A lot of times, broken bonds end way worse than this.

He is seventeen, bare boned with anxiety, when Louis Tomlinson’s family moves into the house next to theirs. The spring is just beginning to tip into summer, setting everything ablaze in oranges and reds every night, beautiful and burnt. Harry spends most days feeling like he’s coming out of his skin between school ending and waiting for the summons, after his birthday in February. One by one the kids in his grade are being called to government offices, being made to state their names, their ages, their hometowns, and getting notecards in return. Johnny and Ed and Jesy and Jake and Lou and Niall missing a day of school, returning close lipped and serious.

The day the Tomlinson’s move in is grey and soft, like a worn tee shirt. The heaviness of residual rain has worn off, leaving a cool breeze blustering down the streets, and Dusty is curled up in Harry’s lap while Harry gazes out an opened window at the woman and her five children next door. Absently stroking at Dusty’s fur, Harry watches as box after box is placed in the house by government movers, the red circle stamped on the inside of their wrists, the woman’s children flitting around the yard, into the garden, checking out the garage.

“What’re you doing?”

Gemma startles Harry enough that Dusty jumps off his lap, scrabbling back under the couch. Pouting out his lower lip, Harry turns back to the movers leaving, “Got a new neighbor, haven’t we?”

“I’ve obviously seen that with my own eyes. I meant the open mouthed staring out our window like a bloody—”

“Gemma! Be kind to your brother!”

Harry sticks his tongue out at Gemma’s retreating form just as Anne peeks into the front room from the kitchen. He’s always interested in what his mum thinks about things like this. She taught him, from a young age, that he didn’t have to agree with everything the new government had mandated. He had to follow the rules, but he was his own person, and things were bound to change back, once things settled down. His mum has never lost her ability to read people, despite how shuttered everyone’s lives have become.

“What d’you think, love?” Her fingers move gently through his knotted hair.

Harry shrugs. There aren’t rules, per se, about introducing yourself to your neighbors, but it’s not common. People keep to themselves in this new world, constantly wary, constantly detached, after everything that happened. Harry figures he won’t know anything about these new people until he (maybe) goes to school with them. Even then, if they don’t have classes together, the chances of talking are slim to none.

Harry will meet Louis after school, getting on the shuttle that will take them back to their part of town, later in the week. Louis is not quite used to the sleek, black seats and the seatbelts, stumbles a bit as he walks down the aisle of unfamiliar faces. It’s only the blue eyes, so reminiscent of the ocean, that cause Harry to move his backpack out of the seat next to him and make room for Louis.

Softly, Louis murmurs, “Thank you.”

Harry nods.

They spend the ride in silence, Louis carefully holding his arm so he doesn’t brush Harry. Harry tries, as inconspicuously as possible, to look at Louis: he seems so young, so fragile when he laces his fingers in his lap, thin lips pursed as he works at keeping his eyes straight ahead. There’s a ten emblazoned in gold across his jacket. Harry catalogues that bit of information. The bus buzzes with low chatter from kids who haven’t been sworn to secrecy about their jobs and their entire lives yet. Harry wonders why Louis acts like he’s already been put through academy, like he’s already an adult.

When they both move to get off on the same street, Louis looks back over his shoulder with furrowed eyebrows. He’s one of the most paranoid people Harry’s ever seen, like a skittish cat, clicking quickly down the street in his school dress shoes. Harry walks back as far as he can, in an effort to scare Louis less, counting the cracks in the sidewalk, eyes lowered.

“Are you following me?”

Harry nearly runs into Louis when he stumbles over a non-existent bump. Flushing, Harry shakes his head, “No. No. Never, I—”

Even younger and shorter than Harry, Louis manages to pin him with his sharp gaze, “I don’t have time for this.”

“I—We—” he feels useless, big clumsy hands gesturing ineffectually down the street, rows of repetitive houses, his flushed cheeks, “We’re neighbors?”

Louis’ eyebrow arches, “We are?”

Harry nods, “We live in number 14, and you’re—”

“Number 15, yeah.” Louis turns on his heel and begins walking away before Harry’s gathered his wits. He’s still standing in the middle of the street, like a dolt, when Louis turns around and asks, “Coming?”

“Uh—” Harry lopes up to Louis’ side, falling into step by him, “I’m Harry, by the—”

“Louis,” he flickers small fingers through the caramel fringe lying across his forehead, a bit anxious, a bit impatient, “If you didn’t already know that.”

The aborted, indignant sound Harry lets slip is embarrassing, “I’m not a—”

“I was just kidding,” Louis’ laugh is like quicksilver: light and soft, pretty as it echoes in the silence of their street, “Don’t hurt yourself.”

When Harry turns to look at him again, Louis is already gazing at the side of his face. Footsteps echoing dully off the concrete, they stare at each other: maybe measuring, maybe judging, maybe just looking. He’s beautiful, and Harry knew that, but he’s also ridiculous and light and paranoid and Harry wants to know about him. They come up on their homes faster than Harry would’ve liked.

“I’ll be seeing you, yeah?” Louis walks backwards to his door, small smile on his face.

Harry nods, grinning, “Yeah. See you around, Louis.”

As it turns out, they’re good at being friends. Louis is two years younger than him, witty and funny and cunning in ways that Harry has never had to be. Walking home everyday becomes a ritual and, often, right before curfew, one of them is jogging back across the lawn, barefoot. Despite all of the time they begin spending together, Louis is still very vague about what brought him and his family to the neighborhood. It’s a bit selfish, probably, how much Harry just wants to know. His mum tells him not to push, that Louis will tell him when he feels like it. Harry still spends days pouting about it to Gemma.

The only good part of worrying about Louis is that he stops worrying about his segno.

Around this time, Gemma introduces them to a girl with long, brown hair and big, brown eyes. Her smile is soft, shy, and she doesn’t make any noise when she walks around their house. When she shakes Harry’s hand, Harry gets caught staring at the clean, unmarred skin of her wrist, and Gemma gently tugs her out of the room while Anne settles into a chair across from him.

Eleanor, his mum says quietly, isn’t from here. She’s from the upper class living in the city, and her parents have requested that she remain without a segno. The way his mum’s words twist and frown around the words make Harry think there’s something big at stake, but he doesn’t know how to ask, doesn’t even know what he would ask, if he had the opportunity.

4. Louis turns sixteen on a day that dawns grey and slushy. Bloated, wet snowflakes fall from the sky, piling in the short fringe of the grass and on the ledge of Harry’s windowsill. The house is silent around him, and Harry allows himself a few more moments in the warm cocoon of his bed before he gets up for school. Everything is in shades of black and grey around him, gentle in the new morning as he slips out of bed and stumbles into his school uniform, fumbling fingers working to close up the clasps on his white shirt. It feels strange and empty, when the shuttle pulls up to his home later in the morning, and Louis isn’t sprinting out of his house with his rucksack haphazardly balanced over his shoulder, a sideways, tired smile for Harry.

Harry knows that Louis has to go get his check up. He knows. He still spends the day cuddled into Niall’s side at lunch, wondering how Louis is doing.

When Harry gets back home, he’s nearly knocked over by the wave of relief that crests in his chest when he sees Louis at the kitchen counter with Gemma. Hands fisted up in the ends of a maroon sweater, dark jeans just barely concealing the knobs of his delicate ankles, Louis looks pretty and tired, elbows on the counter as he tells Gemma in hushed whispers about his check up. Harry fights against every instinct in his body that wants to crowd Louis against the counter, that begs to kiss into the part of his mouth.

Instead, voice rough, Harry murmurs, “Happy birthday, Lou.”

Louis turns around, startled, before his mouth pulls up into a wide grin, “Hazza.”

They tumble together in a mess of knobby limbs and not-quite-sureness. Louis’ fingers clutch too tightly to his hips, then his shoulders, then his neck, breathing fast against Harry’s throat. As Harry drops his rucksack to bury his nose in Louis’ hair, he smells hospital and fear, the constant fear that everyone feels when they have to deal with the government and all of the half reports, shadowy corridors of an administration that came to power in the wake of immense horror. Louis shivers when Harry’s hands smooth down his spine.

“You’re alright?”

Louis nods against his shoulder, “’M okay. ‘M not going anywhere.”

There are no real stories of people disappearing. Only whispers, the silence of families who say that they have children “away on government business.” The graffiti that sometimes shows up on the streets, in the sky, the warnings. The persecution of those who were mentally ill before everything settled back into its own brand of normal. Harry didn’t really believe any of that until his mum showed him videos of a politician who had his tongue cut out for daring to speak out against the current administration. Harry holds Louis tighter when he thinks of the nearly silent way his mum had said, “It’s not safe to disagree anymore, love. Not publicly. Just keep your head down, and come home safe to me.”

“Promise?” Harry whispers.

Louis laughs, quiet and strained, “I couldn’t leave my mum like that.”

Eyebrows furrowing, Harry goes to ask Louis what he means just as Anne appears in the doorway from the basement, holding something between the careful cup of her palms. She’s smiling, somehow nostalgic and scared, as she walks towards them. Harry pulls back to look at her. Bouncing off of the beige walls and the shiny dark wood of their kitchen table, a faint light seeps from the spaces between her fingers. Louis’ face pulls into a puzzled frown, eyes squinted as he looks at Anne.

“Before all of this,” his mum whispers softly, “we would celebrate birthdays.”

Louis’ frown deepens. Harry just watches his mum: she softens under the weight of her memories from before, eyes lowering, hands cradling more gently, lips pulled into the smallest smile possible. Her entire posture seems to be directed to preserving whatever’s held in the careful clasp of her hands. Harry loves her so much he hurts. His mum is so kind and so lovely, and he’s not sure what he’s done to deserve the way she smiles at this boy that Harry has brought into their lives.

When his mum moves her hands to show a small, nearly circular thing with what appears to be frosting on top, a candle stuck in the middle, dribbling wax down the sides. Harry feels Louis’ fingers tighten on his hip.

“It’s a cupcake, love,” she searches Louis’ face for comprehension, “Sixteen is a big one, and I just,” Harry can read, in the jaunty shrug of her shoulders, how much this small slice of old means to her, “I wanted you to have that once. I know—”

Louis’ fingers tremble as he takes the small pastry from Anne, “Thank you.”

Harry watches the tiny flame atop the candle waver as Louis breathes near the orange glow, trying to get closer to see what’s going on. His blue eyes turn gold along the bottom, his tan skin going rosy as he whispers, “What do I do?”

Anne smiles, a hand on Louis’ wrist, “You make a wish and blow out the candle.”

Eyes closing, Harry’s hand still around his waist, Louis closes his eyes, purses his lips, and blows out the candle.

The next day, dull in the light filtering through the windows, Louis whispers, “They took my dad when he was forty.”

Harry feels like the white walls of Louis’ room are closing in on them, crushing like the edges of a black hole pulling tight. Despite how regulated his entire life has been, how careful and cautious, this is the closest Harry has ever come to real loss. He isn’t sure what to do. Is touching Louis a bad thing? Does he reach across the black sheets between them and settle a hand on the dip of Louis’ waist?

Tilting his head down into his pillow, Louis continues, “He got laid off his job at the government offices, and he didn’t have anything to do, so he’d just—drink. We’d wake up for school, and he’d be passed out in the chair, and my mum would just—She would just try to keep him from being called to his check ups.”

Harry is used to his own mum’s small rebellions: her cupcakes, her computer tucked away under a floorboard in her closet, her nail polish. Even as he tentatively settles a hand over Louis’ small wrist, he can’t imagine defying the government so openly. His thumb flickers back and forth over the knob of Louis’ wrist bone.

“She just wanted him to be able to stay with us, I think.”

“Lou,” Harry manages. It sounds silly and silvery, thin when it echoes back in the silence of the house.

“Not that I blame her,” Louis’ smile doesn’t reach his eyes, “’S hard enough to manage five kids and a full time job without a shitty husband.”

His hand is so much smaller than Harry’s, and when he twines their fingers; Harry feels the jolt all the way through his body, expanding electrically from their point of contact. Louis is still bleary from the nap they were taking; sleep softened edges and sharp canines digging into his bottom lip. In the close warmth of Louis’ bedroom, under the worn blankets on his bed, Harry imagines what it would be like to tilt Louis’ head to the side, to bite his lower lip. This is the first time, clear and real, that Harry wonders about what it would be like to have a segno that matches Louis’.

“’M sorry,” Harry tries after clearing his throat.

Louis shakes his head, “Nothing for you to be sorry about, Harry.”

“I wish— I want— It’s just. Like.” He’s young and selfish, doesn’t realize that what he wants is obsolete. Flushing with his own frustration at his inability to articulate his thoughts, Harry buries his reddening face into the pillow.

Louis’ fingers squeeze his.

“Me too,” Louis whispers, “I do too.”

5. January is brittle: everything so cold the tree branches look like the bones of an exposed skeleton, ice crackling off the roof in the middle of the night that startles him awake, the sun always too bright against the snow and the white sky.

Harry feels brittle too, sweating anxiously through his maroon sweater in the middle of a silent waiting room while he waits to know. He turns eighteen in two weeks. That thought has been acute and frustrating, taunting him when he tries to sleep, stressing him out when he’s meant to be doing other things. Sitting with his hands twisted tightly in his lap, Harry suddenly wishes he could rewind the years of his life before this, enjoy his life before this happens. A segno feels like too much.

A woman with close cropped blond hair steps into the room and says, “Harry Styles” in a high, clear voice.

Harry stumbles after her through hallways that all look the same: empty, clean, white walls, wooden floors, black blinds pulled low to block out the glare of the sun off of the snow. No one speaks, and it feels unnatural. Harry nearly falls over his own two feet when they round a corner to find a girl anxiously thumbing over an angry looking mark on her wrist, pale and exhausted and frustrated. It can’t possibly be like that for everyone, can it? His mum had made it sound like getting your segno was the beginning.

“In here.”

The room is small and white, just like the hallways. There’s a straight-backed chair in the center that Harry lowers himself into. A big, black machine hovers in his periphery, looming like a giant. In his anxiety, his hands smear sweat marks wherever he touches as the woman closes the door.

“Name, age, and where you’re from,” her fingers hover over the screen of whatever electronic apparatus she’s carrying in her arms.

Despite the sound of his own breathing echoing loudly within the room, Harry takes a moment to gaze at the woman staring impassively at him. She looks bored, exhausted, like she hasn’t slept very well. Awkwardly clearing his throat, Harry grits out, “Harry Styles, 17, middle class housing near Cheshire.”

A furrow appears between the woman’s eyebrows.

Startled, Harry begins to speak more frantically, “Before that, we lived in the city. My parents—”

“Enough,” she barely speaks above a whisper.

Settling herself behind the black machine beside the chair, she begins to type away. Her fingers click the keys rhythmically, the hum of machinery booting up the only other sound. Harry can’t believe this is it. His entire life has been building up to this point, and this woman, with her unreadable face and the furrow between her eyebrows, is going to put a mark on his wrist that will tie him to someone else for the rest of his life. Harry tries to breathe through the panic welling in his throat.

Cold fingers catch around his wrist and settle it beneath what looks like a stamping mechanism. There are rows upon rows of tiny needles, snapping down into place in the configuration of whatever shape Harry’s segno will take.

Harry feels faint.

“Wait—”

The pain is over before Harry has even had time to process it. Short, somehow both blunt and sharp, and then. Lifting his arm slowly, trying to see past the trembling of his own body and the blur of his tears, a small, curl of blackness against the lilac pathways of his veins. It’s simple, really, a tiny, lovely design: the crest of a wave.

“Take this.”

A notecard and a single name.

Harry can feel the insistent hysteria of a panic attack curling up in his throat. He grasps onto the handles of the chair as hard as he can: the wood biting into his hands hurts the tattoo, forces skin to stretch too tightly over the freshly branded area, his feet jostle anxiously, too small room, too many things happening—

Bold, black lettering staring up at him, final:

Louis Tomlinson

Age: 16

Home: Middleclass Housing near Cheshire

“Come with me.”

Brain stuck stuttering on the careful indents of Louis’ name on his sheet of paper, on the sheet of paper that tells him who his soulmate is, Harry rises jerkily to follow the woman. She marches, faster this time, down more long, monotonous hallways, Harry trailing behind her with his wide eyes fixed on the tiny wave that hooks him to Louis for the rest of his life. The floor is dark and muffles their footsteps, the click of her heels and the scuffling of Harry’s boots. This far back in the complex, there are no signs of life. Just the woman ahead of him marching like she’s got a map written on the backs of her eyelids.

“In here,” another dark door open to a room with more chairs, a bigger table.

Before the door closes, before Harry can sink gratefully into a chair, a clean-shaven man with dark hair strides briskly into the room. There’s a long moment where Harry just counts his heartbeats and feels the crinkled up paper in his palm. The man doesn’t even look at Harry as he takes a seat across the table from him. It’s baffling, all of this, the knowledge that Louis has been his the entire time, all of the moments he’s imagined being with Louis. It’s all—

“Sit, please.”

“’M sorry,” Harry mumbles as he drops ungracefully into the chair behind him.

This morning, when the dawn was still pink and purple, Harry’s mum had made him promise to be patient today. She’d stroked down his cheek while she told him not to speak out of turn, not to give them information unless they directly asked for it. Seated across from a man with his hands propped beneath his chin, his head tilted just to the side, Harry wants to ask when he can leave. How soon he can bury himself in his blankets and feel bad for himself. Underneath the table, sweaty palmed and anxious, his fingers tremble around the slip of paper with Louis’ name on it, his wrist echoing dully with the reminder of the tattoo.

“We’ve received video from your instructors,” the man begins in a slow voice, “that shows you performing.”

Harry flashes back to stolen seconds between classes, doing silly things to make Niall snort, the way his mum would grin during their choir concerts. It feels like he’s become a dartboard for decisions, for stress.

The man’s brown eyes narrow as he gazes evenly at Harry, “We’re prepared to offer you an opportunity to be an entertainer.”

Absurdly, Harry feels betrayed by the reddening flesh of his wrist. He should’ve gotten a second mark. There should’ve been a warm house somewhere for him and Louis, a job at a company that paid him enough for them to have children. Telling his this, while he’s still reeling over finding out about Louis, while he still feels so off kilter and strange, feels like a punch in the gut. Judging by the man’s slight smile, Harry must be fish mouthing, wide eyes and wider lips.

“You don’t have to decide now,” the man’s voice lowers into something soothing, “This is, of course, a huge decision. It will change your entire life, as I’m sure you know. There are consequences, and you’re young. You haven’t had a chance to experience your segno bond yet—”

“I know him,” Harry says before he can stop himself, “I’ve been friends with him for—”

“Your segno will change things.”

Feeling like his mind has been reduced to a sodden, confused mess, Harry murmurs, “How do I decide?” His fingers hover over the tattoo before they come down, touching at the angry, reddened, risen skin. “How do you know what’s the right answer?”

“I think you’ll find that there isn’t a right answer, per se,” the man smiles in a way that his dad used to, “but there will be an answer that feels right. You’ve, officially, got until the age of twenty-one to decide.”

Harry nods, his own curls bobbing in his periphery.

“No one will know, of course, that you’ve been handed this future career path. If you accept it, they will brand you for it, and you will move to the city,” fingertips glued to the table, the man moves his hand to the other side of his body, “Your segno will be obsolete. Entertainment is not a place for love. You will become a public figure, subjected to public speculation. Tying yourself to someone else is impossible in that scenario.”

Everything in Harry’s mind quiets.

“Your segno bond can choose to remain bonded to you, or they can choose to take another path, whether that be scarification or separation.”

“Do they get someone else? If they leave?” Harry’s voice is thin, wavers like the sunlight peeking under the blinds at the end of the room. Thinking about Louis with someone else makes his stomach feel bottomless.

“They will, officially, have the same status as those who separate from their bond mates. Their marks will silver, and they will be free to seek companionship elsewhere, if they wish.”

“What’s wrong?” Gemma’s got her hands on her hips, “Harry.”

Harry shakes his head. He stumbled back through the front door around midday. The sun was blazing across the rows of houses: similar yards, similar flowers, similar glint of snow in the distance. As soon as he’d seen the windows of Louis’ house, he’d been overwhelmed all over again and collapsed onto the couch. Gemma finds him there, fists curled into a blanket, face smeared into a pillow.

“Harry,” Gemma stomps her foot, “What the—I didn’t do this when I got my segno, did I?”

It’s unfair that he has to choose between something that he hadn’t even known he wanted, and someone who he’s been wanting, quietly, ever since he first met them.

Gemma shakes her head, “I swear, Harry. I’ve got to get to work, and mum wanted me to—”

“’S Louis.”

For a long moment, silence echoes between them. Gemma’s eyes widen as her lips press into a thin line so much like their mum that Harry aches for her warm arms.

Harry tries to shrug.

“Hazza.”

Before Gemma can say anything else, before he can stop himself, Harry is collapsing into tears.

6. “You don’t—You really think you should do this?”

Harry shrugs. He’s seen them a few times in history books, in tabloids. They’re beautiful, dark and artistic and personal, skin as canvas, just as permanent as a segno, a type of memory bonding. When the new government came into power, tattoos were made illegal for anyone outside of the entertainment industry. The warm, glowing person across the pillow from him is worth remembering, the haze of July sunshine sheening his skin. Harry still doesn’t know what he’s going to do, and that scares him more and more with each passing day. The words he has plans to ink across his inner elbows are a testament to this boy: this beautiful, honey skinned summer boy.

Louis’ fingers are gentle when they soothe down his arm, “I want you to be sure.”

It is different, like the man said it would be. Louis looks so soft in a sweater and black trackies, his fringe against his forehead, and Harry wants to be able to touch him. The urge to kiss across the concerned furrow of his eyebrows nearly forces Harry out of the bed.

“I am,” he whispers, eyes scanning Louis’ unsure expression, “I am sure.”

“How’re you gonna hide them?”

“My mum’s got cover-up, and Gemma said she’d teach me how to blend.”

“They’re okay with it?”

Despite the fact that he’s not meant to tell anyone, his mum and Gemma both know what happened. His mum could read it in his face that first night, that something horrible had gone wrong. She’d pried it out of him with the dull, tasteless tea they get in the middle class housing and a comforting hand rubbing circles in the center of his back. Harry had known that she’d explain to Gemma. They supported him in whatever he wanted to do.

Harry nodded, mussing his curls against the pillow, “’Course.”

Hesitant, sixteen years old with trembling fingers, Louis pushes a hand into his hair, “Then I’ll go with you.”

It’d all started with Niall’s friend, Jesy. She’s a tall, pretty girl with a spread of black flowers curling up over her ribs, and a bond mate who fucked her over before they’d even been together for a year. When Harry had asked her where she’d found someone to give her a tattoo, she’d been clear that he had to remain quiet and given him the phone number of a man named Zayn Malik. Harry’d made an appointment before he knew what he wanted, before he talked to his mum and Gemma, before he talked to Louis.

Sometimes, he feels so much all at once: the love he has for Louis, the frustration of wanting someone who doesn’t know you’re meant to be together yet, the longing for a music career, for the chance to live a life like that, the sadness of having to choose between two things he’s wanted so much. It feels like, if he doesn’t put it somewhere else, just get it out, he’s going to burst with it. A tattoo felt like a good compromise.

Zayn’s family lives near the back of the middle class housing in a big, crumbling white house. The girl who answers the door has huge, brown eyes that narrow in the golden light of early autumn before she calls for Zayn. Her eyes seem to apologize, even as she closes the door in their faces. Louis, at his side, shivers briefly before Harry soothes an unthinking hand to his hip, drawing him into his side. They wait at the door like that.

“What’s the name of the girl who referred you here?” The boy has a cigarette dangling from his lower lip as he shoulders out of the door and down the path.

Taken aback, Harry’s eyebrows furrow, “Jesy Nelson.”

The boy cups a careful hand around the burning ember of his cigarette after he lights it, taking a long drag before he appraises them, “Can I see your segno?”

It’s a pretty standard method of identification in their world, because no two are alike. Harry turns his wrist over to bear the tiny crest of a wave. At his side, Louis presses his face into Harry’s shoulder, and the boy’s, Zayn’s, eyes trace up his segno, up to his face, measure Louis’ presence beside him. Their eye contact feels revealing in a way that Harry usually doesn’t allow himself to be, for fear of being found out or turned in for being too weird.

Zayn exhales a wisp of grey smoke, shaking his head, “You know the risks?”

Harry nods. Louis makes a small noise.

They trail Zayn into a pleasantly full sitting room scattered with the remnants of a different time and religion before Zayn, running a hand through his messy black and blond fringe, brings them into a room with a big black leather table in the middle. Louis drops onto a stool before biting at his lip, taking off his jacket while he watches Harry.

It’s not scary: taking off his jacket and folding it, revealing the creamy inner creases of his elbow when Zayn asks for where he wants the design. The alcohol that Zayn swabs over his skin is cold, leaves behind a tingle in its wake, and Louis keeps leaning forward, pressing to Harry’s back, breathing shakily against Harry’s shoulder as he watches what Zayn is doing, all curiosity and fear. Harry turns his head, just once, to nose at Louis’ forehead.

When Zayn goes to get more ink, Louis’ fingers find his. Their eyes meet.

“’M scared, Haz,” Louis whispers.

The urge to cradle the hinge of Louis’ jaw in his hand is impossible to resist. Louis tilts into the touch, a hand coming up to cover Harry’s, small and insistent. He’s stunning in Harry’s like this: the flutter of his eyelashes, the part of his mouth, the tip of his nose and the pressure of his fingers. Thumb smoothing over the corner of Louis’ mouth, Harry murmurs, “Please don’t be. I want this. I—I really want this.”

“I know.”

Harry wonders whether Louis is thinking of his father, “Louis—”

“What if they take you away?”

Within the silence of Zayn’s house, the hum of the TV and voices far off, Harry coaxes Louis into him with the hand on his jaw. They press together gently, quietly, their lips barely touching as Harry murmurs, “I’m not going anywhere,” into Louis’ parted mouth. Louis’ fingers tighten in his hair, scratch against his scalp, his breathing hectic and loud in the room as Harry’s mind races with the pictures of Louis’ face, his closed eyes, the way his cheeks have reddened along the sharp cut of his cheekbones. It’s not a guarantee because their government doesn’t allow for that. The way that Louis eases into conversation with Zayn over the hum of the tattoo needle, stroking across the back of Harry’s hand, makes Harry think that Louis believes him, either way.

Between the pain of getting the tattoo and the electric buzz of Louis’ touch under his skin, Harry gets a bit lost in his head for a while. Things are quiet and warm and sharp, fuzzy. It’s easy to close his eyes and feel the competing sensations buzzing within him, building and cresting and breaking, like riding a wave of neon light. It’s when Louis is asking Zayn about his silvering mark that Harry suddenly perks up, eyes closed, body taut as he listens to Zayn’s sigh.

“I was…” a beat of silence, “M’boy was a musician, like. We were young, and he was scared shitless, and he just—” Zayn’s laugh is somehow angry, hard, “He just decided that that meant more to him than I did.”

The sharpness of the needle biting into his skin distracts him from Louis’ question.

“Sometimes, I do, yeah,” Zayn pauses to draw a cloth across his arm to soak up the extra ink, “’S all really regulated, because of what he’s expected to do, like, within the industry. I don’t—‘ve never really cared for the fakeness of it all, like. He loves it though, and that’s.”

Louis makes a high, sympathetic sound.

“That means more to me,” the buzzing of the needle covers up what Zayn is saying, and Harry focuses on the pain, forces it to the back of his mind, before he can zone back in to what Louis is saying.

“D’you ever—Like, d’you get lonely?”

Voice low, Zayn says, “There’s a club that we meet at, sometimes. He’s usually—Like, we’re not good at being together anymore, yeah? He gets angry and says stupid shit in interviews, and I just. Punish him, like. Punish him for leaving me.”

Louis’ fingers clench around his.

“We have, like. He lies, I think, sometimes,” a quiet laugh again, “Not that he means to, right? He’s not a bad person. He’s just. He’s trying to make an impossible situation better.”

“It’s not impossible—”

“Musicians never get to quit,” everything falls silent as Zayn pours cold water across the tattoo on Harry’s arm, “They never get to leave that atmosphere. They know too much or some capital bullshit.”

“’M so sorry,” Louis’ voice has turned cautious, careful, so much like Jay when she’s answering capital questions or when Anne calls home from work.

Zayn shrugs, maybe, before he says, “I can’t decide if ‘m thankful that he’s happy or if I just—miss him. Like. If ‘m just pissed as fuck that he let me go like that.”

Louis’ voice is small when he suggests, “Both?”

Harry opens his eyes when he feels plastic wrap being put over his arm. Zayn’s expression is nearly inscrutable, his eyes fixed on Harry’s face in a way that feels too sharp, too acute. It’s not until later, when Harry is walking home next to Louis, their fingers bumping together in a way that might be accidental, that he realizes: Zayn knows why he only has a segno. Zayn knows why he didn’t get a career mark.

While he’s lying there on the table, Zayn laughs, rueful and rough. “Yeah,” he nods, “Maybe both.”

Gemma moves into a home with Eleanor around this time. They aren’t allowed to be living together, officially. Eleanor is meant to be married off to whoever her parents choose, and Gemma has a scarred over segno. Harry can’t get past the way that Gemma keeps a hand on Eleanor’s waist all the time, can’t think of anything but the nearly silent way Eleanor giggles into Gemma’s mouth, the way they look wrapped around each other on the couch. He can’t understand why that’s wrong.

7. Clubs like these are, technically, not legal. It’s frowned upon for people without segnos to engage in romantic relationships with other people. Lives aren’t meant to start until someone has received their official mandates: the person they are bound to and the career they are meant to be shuffled into.

Harry’s mum talks about how things were before, sometimes. She says that things changed when people realized the government was taking advantage of them: rigging elections, using doublespeak, failing the country economically, stalling the creation of jobs, raising taxes for a military that wasn’t needed for wars that they had no business in, abandoning educational funding. It started small, she said. Then, it came to light that the government had had a hand in something Harry’s mum called, “9/11” like that had significance for Harry. Now, schools teach about The Rebellion as if it was glorious, as if these government crackdowns saved them all, instead of limited them, locked them into these planned lives, everything squared away from the moment someone is born so as to limit fear of the unknown.

Leaning back against the table they’ve got in the corner of the bar, watching Louis and Zayn grind under the flickering lights after knowing each other for a month, Harry wonders if Louis would’ve picked something different for himself. Zayn and Louis move so seamlessly, fluid and gentle, the sharp glint of Louis’ canine teeth the only visible thing as they grind in the mass of bodies. Zayn hasn’t approached him about his missing career path. He hasn’t kissed Louis again. The alcohol that Harry keeps in his hand isn’t helping the mass of thoughts twirling around in his head.

“Do you know the person dancing with Zayn?”

Harry jerks around. Half hidden in darkness, a hoodie pulled low over the fringe of his Mohawk, Liam Payne watches Louis and Zayn careen amidst the mass of bodies on the dance floor. They’re not kissing, not doing anything more intimate than what they normally do. Harry doesn’t know what to say: Liam Payne is a singer, arguably one of the most popular solo musicians today. The person standing behind Harry, clutching a pint, grimacing at Zayn and Louis, is obviously not here to show that off.

“Louis,” Harry feels like he’s doing something small, something merciful, when he continues, “He’s not—They’re friends.”

Neither of them says anything as the furrow between Liam’s eyes eases. Beneath the thumping of the bass, the pulsating of the lights, the warmth of all of the body heat, Harry can feel his own curiosity thrumming strongly. He wants to ask Liam about being a musician, about what it’s like. Mostly, watching the clutch of Louis’ hand on Zayn’s waist, Harry wants to know, as strongly as ever, if it’s worth it.

Harry is reaching for his pint glass when Liam looks up at him.

“You’re Harry,” he says, “You’re Harry.”

Instead of asking how Liam and Zayn maintain contact, Harry clears his throat awkwardly. He shrugs, “Yeah?”

“Zayn told me about you,” Liam says significantly.

This is the wrong place for this discussion. This is the last place that Harry should be talking to someone about his future, about Louis. Liam is a celebrity in their world of careful order and policing of every action. He’s got a string of arrows up his arm in black ink, script on the outside of his wrist and on the length of his wrist bone. Harry breathes out through his closed lips as he leans back against the table next to Liam.

“What did he say?” Harry tips his head to the side to gaze at Liam.

Liam watches the beer swill around in his glass, “He asked me if I got a career assignment. When I got my segno.”

“You didn’t.”

“No,” his brown eyes are usually wide, sparkling in the glow of stage lights. Here, they focus on Harry, pin him to his spot, “and neither did you.”

Zayn is laughing, head thrown back, hands around Louis’ neck, both of them lost in the dance floor.

“They offered me a career as a musician,” Harry clears his throat, “They—They offered me a job as a singer.”

“Feels fucking sick, right?” Liam’s grin is dopey and large.

For the first time since it happened, Harry feels like the weight constantly pressing on his chest has loosened. Being given permission to finally feel properly shocked and happy about what he’s been offered is incredible. No one else has been able to give him this. Not in the same open, no pressure, kind way that Liam has.

Harry can’t stop the smile he directs at his pint glass, “’S incredible. Overwhelming.”

Silence stretches between them. Harry can’t stop watching the way that Zayn rucks Louis’ shirt up, the sliver of skin revealed above Louis’ briefs. If Harry doesn’t choose to be with him… Will Zayn touch him the way Harry should be?

“Louis’ your bond.”

Harry sets his beer down. Rubbing his fingers up and down his bicep makes Liam look at him, long and concentrated.

“I don’t think,” Liam begins quietly, “that Zayn forgives me, really. Like. He probably thinks he does, but,” his careless shrug doesn’t fool Harry, “It’s not that easy, is it? I—I didn’t think—Things could be worse, yeah?”

Something curdles in Harry’s gut. The sweaty, silly boy grinning into Louis’ cheek is not happy. Liam should know that.

“How?” Harry asks without thinking.

“They could force me to get married to a woman. Zayn could’ve scarred over his segno.”

No one talks about what happens when a bond scars, when two people, officially, fall out of love with each other, when they have the operation to remove their segno. Liam says it flippantly, watching Zayn tickle his fingers up Louis’ ribs on the dance floor. The dark heat of Liam’s gaze and the white knuckled grip he has on his beer lead Harry to believe the casualness is an act.

“Zayn wouldn’t do that,” Harry’s only known him for a month.

Liam’s smile tilts dangerously into sadness when he looks back up, “When I told Zayn I was going to give being a musician a chance, he didn’t talk to me for a week,” fingers restless around the rim of his glass, Liam continues, “and the day before I was meant to leave for the capital, he showed up at my house with a tattoo gun.”

Harry’s mouth quirks into an unwilling smile, heart beating a thousand miles an hour as he tries to think about how Louis would handle it.

“I don’t really, um,” in the neon glow of the dance floor, Liam’s eyes are glossy. Harry feels like he’s seeing behind the veneer of being famous, “I don’t really deserve him, I don’t think. I would do anything—literally anything for him. A thousand times over.”

Those words, that emotion, are heavy between them as they both watch Louis and Zayn careen nearer the edge of the crowd.

“I’ve always loved him, and ‘m not sure he knows that.”

Harry nuzzles closer into the downy hair near Louis’ ear. Their arms are wrapped so tightly around each other that Harry can hardly breath, the edges of Louis’ shoulder blades digging into his palms. The ghostly white night light catches the angles of Louis’ cheekbones, the flare of the tip of his nose, the downy points of his eyelashes. He’s beautiful, and he’s Harry’s boy, and he’s warm and snuggling closer, the urgent press of his hands welcoming. Lips touching to the fragile, warm point of Louis’ temple, Harry tries not to think about how Liam and Zayn had looked, alternating between gentle kisses and yanking at each other like they were fighting. Thinking about his relationship with Louis becoming like that makes Harry physically ill. Zayn and Liam love on borrowed time. Harry will not borrow time to be good to Louis. Moments like this, the two of them wrapped up so close in the middle of Harry’s family’s living room, Harry wonders if Louis knows: if he can read it in Harry’s clutching fingers, the desperate pant to his breaths, the way his lips search for Louis’ mouth without even thinking about it.

In the haze of the moon, Louis’ mouth parts easily beneath Harry’s. Louis’ crooning out these small, wavering noises that dissolve into the space between their mouths. Harry tries to hold him close, by the hinges of his jaw, by the apples of his cheeks, fingers spidered out into points of white. They aren’t meant to be kissing like this; Louis’ not meant to weave his fingers through Harry’s hair and pet softly at his scalp. The pressure of their mouths eases, eventually, into the most careful brushing of lips.

Harry captures Louis’ lower lip between his teeth, biting down to leave some tangible mark, to make a tangible promise.

“That won’t happen to us,” Louis murmurs, “That could never be us.”

8. The summer before Louis turns seventeen is muggy with the promise of rain that never falls. Harry’s limbs stick to his bed, stick to the couch. Walking outside is like wading through the deep end of a lake, slow and careful. The sun is constant, beating down on everything, browning up the grass while the government announces new water rations on the heels of a month long drought. Harry tries to stay inside as much as possible, spending the days with Louis’ family, watching his siblings while their mums go to work on the city shuttle, disconcerted in the silence of his own home without Gemma there to pick on.

Louis’ skin turns permanently golden in the middle of July, just before the mid-summer announcements. They watch the new restrictions with mounting anxiety: Louis’ hand curls around his bicep, fingers splayed over the darkness of the words inked inside of his elbows. More often than not, Harry smudges cover-up over them. While the president talks about more stringent segno restrictions, the new forms of punishment, the forced removal of the segno-less to camps where they will work for the government, Louis strokes slowly over the slightly raised skin, his sisters around the TV with blank looks on their faces. Their mums will be on an official break right now, probably watching these announcements with the same horror. Without thinking, Harry smudges a kiss to Louis’ temple.

“We’ll be okay,” he whispers.

Wide, anxious blue eyes narrow at him.

It is under these new restrictions, the government promising more raids, more segno scarring for anyone who disobeys, that Harry finds his way back to Zayn’s tattoo table. Lavender bruises hollowed in the place under his eyes, lips chapped, hair messy about his face, Zayn presses fear into his left hipbone and love into his right. They stay silent under the humming of the tattoo gun. Harry’s body strains toward the pain, his hand empty without Louis’ in it. He’d lied this morning to get Louis to stay far away from here, from the illegality of this. Now, Zayn’s fingers soothing over the risen skin to get the excess ink, Harry wishes he were here.

Zayn is switching hips, looking up the line of Harry’s arms, when he says, “Does Louis know you’re here?”

Harry hesitates, breathing a yes when Zayn goes back to his hips with the tattoo gun.

The ceiling of the room is white, and Harry focuses on the blank space, hips twitching minutely under the scratching of the tattoo needle. If Louis were here, he would be able to distract himself with Louis’ small hands, the aquamarine pathways of his veins. Everything blurs into the buzz of the needle, the hot friction against his skin, the heady hum of arousal that is half the reason he is doing this again.

Zayn is finishing up, putting water on a paper towel, when the front door slams. Laughter rings from the front room: a chorus of female giggles and the warm smell of whatever spices Trisha is cooking with. Harry jolts when the cold, wet is swabbed across his skin.

“Does Louis know about your mandate?” Zayn carefully avoids his gaze, seemingly intent on the clean curls of script across his hips.

Harry shakes his head. He has to clear his throat, loud in the small, white room, before he can speak, “I don’t know how to tell him, really.”

Zayn’s laugh is rough edged, “Don’t do what Liam did to me. He won’t forgive you, Harry.”

Those words are heavy between them; settle sharply into the atmosphere of the room. Harry doesn’t ask what Liam did. There’s a part of him that doesn’t want to know, but there’s a bigger part that wonders if he did what Harry is doing now: took the coward’s way out, waited until he had no choice. Running a hand through his already mussed curls, Harry whispers, “How do you tell someone you love them but you might not get to be with them because the government is fucked?”

“You don’t,” when Zayn finally looks at him, his eyes are narrowed, hardened, “You tell him that you’ve got a decision to make. The government may be fucked, right, but they gave you the option. You get to choose.”

Harry sits up gingerly, wincing when the skin around his tattoos bunches. It feels like Zayn should be having this conversation with Liam, like they aren’t really talking about Louis at all.

“I don’t want to hurt him,” Harry stares at the knot of his fingers in his lap.

A warm hand settles onto Harry’s broad shoulder, a thumb working at the knob of his collarbone. Startled, Harry looks down at where Zayn is seated on his little leather stool, his boney shoulders pushing at the ratty nubs of his black sweater. He looks young and open, eyes full of a gravity that Harry can’t possibly understand when they finally make eye contact.

“You won’t,” Zayn’s voice trembles, “but you have to talk to him now.”

When they walk out into the living room together, Harry’s cheeks flushed from a quick cry, Zayn smiling lopsidedly at his sisters, Louis is seated in the middle of the floor with a bottle of blue nail polish in his hands, Safaa grinning down at him. Even as Zayn sinks beside him, Louis doesn’t look up from what he’s doing. He’s all focused concentration: even hands, the fringe of his soft hair falling into his eyes, his small smile when Zayn asks how the walk was. The two boys cuddle up together around Zayn’s sisters: Zayn’s head near Louis’ arm, his fingers splayed wide over Louis’ waist.

Harry sprawls across the floor near Safaa. Something small, needy, a part of himself that Harry would never admit to, wants desperately for Louis to look at him, to acknowledge that he’s got new tattoos, new marks for their story. Telling Louis to avoid this place was for his own protection. Watching Louis talk so easily to Zayn and Safaa makes the jealous part of his chest expand and threaten to choke him, even though he lied. Louis found him here. That should count for something.

Just as he’s getting ready to get up and walk out, Louis’ small fingers tug at the edge of his tee shirt.

Harry’s eyes find his.

“Let’s see ‘em,” a small, sharp toothed smile quirks Louis’ mouth.

Zayn’s fingers join Louis’. Under all of the attention, Harry’s heart feels like it slows to a more normal crawl, something heating his cheeks when Louis’ breath halts abruptly at the angry, risen red marks of the words across his hips.

Gruff, unsure of what Louis will allow him in this moment, Harry asks, “What d’you think?”

Louis shouldn’t touch them. There’s a danger of infection when the skin is still so raw. In the silence of the room, the feather light, wistful brushing of his fingers makes Harry arch faintly into the warmth. Everything is too much and not enough.

“They’re beautiful, Hazza,” Louis murmurs, not meeting his eyes, “They’re—I love them.”

9. “Why aren’t you home?” Harry’s throat feels like gravel. Ridiculously, so loud in his silent room, he tries to clear it, one time, two. When that fails, Harry swipes a hand through his riot of curls, mussed from where he slept on them. Liam invited him to a party last night at the club they’ve been frequenting together. It was a music industry party: no outsiders, no pictures, no segnos. Louis doesn’t know, “Lou—”

The light slanting in through his window tells him that it’s early enough for Jay to still be sleeping, especially after her late shift at the hospital last night. Louis is fidgeting endlessly with the ends of his black and white marbled sweater, dragging it this way and that across the fragile tips of his collarbones, fussing with the way it lays over his tummy. Harry opens his mouth to ask why he’s here, for a second time, when Louis shrugs.

“I missed you last night,” it’s quiet.

If Harry let it, he could pretend that Louis hadn’t spoken, that he wasn’t sitting up in bed with a pounding headache from finally getting to try weed and a fuzzy, disorienting sense of reality after a night spent in what could be his future. Two realities are colliding right in front of him: one, this sunshine, the bones of Louis’ ankles, the feathered fringe across his forehead, two, being a musician, lights and alcohol and answering to no one, the hollowness of Liam’s smile when he’s posing for official pap pictures.

When he opens his mouth to talk, nothing comes out. The comforter slips down his chest to pool around his hipbones.

“Lou—”

Louis’ shoulders jump in a shrug, “You don’t have to lie to me.”

“About what? Louis, what are you talking about?” Heart frantically skipping in his chest, Harry thinks back over the last year. He hasn’t told Louis about his mandate marking. It’s never come up, never even been explicitly discussed with his mum. Harry has been avoiding it with everything he’s worth. Balling a hand in the sheets, Harry whispers, “’m not—Lou, ‘m sorry I wasn’t here.”

“Did you miss me?”

“Of course I did,” Harry works hard to keep his voice even, “Louis—”

“’m seventeen today,” defiant, even with his glassy blue eyes, Louis looks up and meets his gaze head on. His lips are parted, just barely, his hands sliding down over the sides of his sweater to mess with his trackies.

Harry’s fingers curl tighter into the blanket to fight the urge to touch him.

“Did you remem—”

“’ve never forgotten your birthday,” it comes out angrier than Harry would’ve liked it to. He’s tired and scared, tremulous around Louis in a way that he’s never had to be. They should be having this conversation later, when neither of them is feeling so raw in the morning light. Harry’s not even wearing a shirt, “Never.”

Louis frowns at the ground.

“What’s this really about?” The part of him that hates confrontation shudders at the way Louis wraps his arms around his own torso, the way he leans back against Harry’s closed bedroom door, golden against the warm wood. The other part of him, the scared, cornered part, sits up straighter, runs a hand through his curls, “’m sorry that I wasn’t here, Lou, ‘m sorry, ‘m sorry, ‘m—”

Something whispered, something too soft for Harry to pick up.

“What?” He asks. Instinctively, to get closer to Louis, to hear what he has to say, Harry leans forward, feet over the edge of the bed, rumpled sheets over his lap.

Louis has never been hesitant around him. They talk it out, they hug it out, and it’s over. The person walking so gingerly across his bedroom with hands curled around his own torso, breathing shallowly, standing between Harry’s legs and still so slow to touch him, isn’t a person that Harry is familiar with. Just as careful as Louis is being with him, Harry cradles his slim hips, feeling the bones shift as Louis rests their foreheads together.

Breathing deeply, Louis whispers, “You should love me.”

Harry thumbs over his cheekbone, eyes closing, “I do. Y’know that.”

It’s not until Louis repeats it, the emphasis changed, that everything clicks into place. His voice cracking around the phrase, hands tightening in Harry’s hair, Louis murmurs, “You should love me.”

The memory of his last tattoo burns across the front of his mind: Zayn’s quiet questions, the sharp dullness of the tattoo needle, Louis sitting in the living room with Safaa, the way he wouldn’t quite look at Harry. He never had to tell Louis, because Louis has always known. Hands clenching around Louis’ hips, Harry closes his eyes, tries to quiet the roar of thoughts humming through his head.

“Louis,” underneath his sweater, Louis has goosebumps, “’m not—it was just a party, I’ve not—”

“Please love me,” he whispers, “Please don’t leave me.”

Harry’s heart gives a horrifying lurch when wetness begins to drip from under the black fan of Louis’ eyelashes and down the slopes of his cheeks. Desperation surges in Harry’s chest: how does he know what the right answer is? Will someone tell him? Thumbing across the ridges of Louis’ cheekbones, Harry breathes out jaggedly into the space between them. He has nothing to say, nothing to make the situation better.

Louis lets out a low whimper, says, “I’ll be so good for you.”

“I know you will,” something in Harry’s chest breaks.

They feel like two separate islands, two separate survivors clinging to a lifeboat that’s deflating. Harry wishes he could make promises. The morning feels fragile around them when Harry tips his mouth up to press to Louis’: they kiss slow and openmouthed, Louis’ breathing irregular when Harry maps a hand to the hot curve of his ribs. It’s easier to stay silent when Louis’ mouth is on his.

“I do love you,” Harry murmurs, “I love you, I do.” It’s the only thing he has to offer Louis, seventeen and terrified. He can remember the electricity of that age, the way he never stopped worrying about the person waiting for him on the other side. Imagining a future that is somehow unsure isn’t comforting for anyone. Least of all someone who is waiting for the answers to their entire life. Harry cradles the nape of Louis’ neck, touching at the tip of his chin with his thumb. “I do love you.”

10. Eleanor is reclined against Gemma’s chest, the TV murmuring softly in the background, when the sound of sirens splits the silence of the neighborhood. Quickly, Eleanor is standing up, her fingers leaving crescents of white on Gemma’s arm when they kiss, frantic, before Eleanor disappears down the hallway that leads to the bedrooms. Gemma’s eyes are too wide, watery and terrified, when they find Harry, who has frozen on the couch.

“El isn’t here,” Gemma’s voice is trembling.

Harry is twenty years old. He’s done countless inspections. His heart is still stumbling in his chest.

When he hasn’t answered for too long, Gemma grabs his upper arm too tightly, “Do you hear me?”

Jerky, Harry nods. They sink onto the couch, side by side, their hands clasped between their thighs. Harry wants to call their mum: she’s home alone, probably in the kitchen, her hands shaking while she sets the kettle to boil. Gemma keeps sighing out heavy breaths, her fingers knotting up in the ends of her silver hair. She’s all boney shoulders, the scarred over bump of her segno one of the only solid things beneath the drone of the siren.

They sit together on Gemma’s maroon couch, watching men with guns run by. Their uniforms have always been all black, sleek, special markings hidden down the wrists to denote rank. The soldiers file past houses as Gemma’s fingers begin to shake harder in his. When a pair of men crash through Gemma’s front door, Harry jolts, his eyes going wide.

Gemma doesn’t move: she bites down on her lower lip so hard ruby pools under her teeth, her fingernails cutting into Harry’s hand. The two men don’t speak. One of them comes over to the couch and points a gun at their heads. Harry feels emotionless at the same time that he feels too full, too overwhelmed, while he tries to figure out how Gemma must feel. Is this worth it? Is Eleanor worth all of this? What if he never sees Louis again? What is this is it? What if this man—

“Is Eleanor Calder here?”

Minutely, teeth clenched, Gemma shakes her head, “No.”

“She was last seen with you.”

Harry’s been on the receiving end of the look Gemma aims at the soldier too many times to count.

“Is she not allowed to have friends?”

The man’s fingers twitch against the safety, “I wouldn’t try her father’s patience, if I were you.”

A crash from somewhere near the back of the house has Gemma startling beside him. Childishly, Harry closes his eyes to stop himself from asking how much longer this is going to take, how much longer they’ll have to sit on the couch frozen with fear, a gun to their heads, his mum at their home a few streets away, probably shivering with her tea and hoping they’re okay. The sound of falling things continues, and the soldier keeps a careful catalogue of Gemma’s reactions from behind his inscrutable facial mask. The sound of a gun clattering to the ground has Harry whipping his head around.

Beside him, Gemma’s hand constricts around his.

“You sure she isn’t here?” The man repeats.

Gemma nods, once, concise. Her mouth doesn’t move.

Beneath the thudding of his heart, the sharp pricks of Gemma’s clenching fingers, the constant fear sizzling through him at having a gun pointed at his head, and his worry for his mum and Louis, he doesn’t realize when the siren stops. One second, his entire head is crowded with all of the fear he’s feeling and the siren’s monotonous, grating drone. The next, nothing. Only the echo of his breathing and the bile creeping up his throat. Gemma is nearly vibrating with her terror. Harry wills himself to focus on the pulses slowing in their wrists, the smooth scar of Gemma’s segno.

The man with the gun stands just as his partner comes down the hallway from the bedrooms. Curt, he shakes his head. With one last sweeping glance around the room, the two men take their leave, trailing dirt and the stench of fear. Harry tries to breath. This is it. This is the end. They’re not coming back for a little while, at the very least. Gemma’s forehead is imprinted with the neat circle of the mouth of the gun.

Amidst the retreat of soldiers, another set of footsteps pattering down the hall makes Harry shrink back into the couch. His heart is hammering too loudly again, a sudden zero to sixty, even as Gemma rises and collides with Eleanor in the center of their living room. They touch each other everywhere: Gemma’s hands sliding over the knobs of Eleanor’s collarbones where they reach out of her oatmeal sweater, following the concave curves of her ribs, nose pressing into her temple as Eleanor’s hands find Gemma’s neck.

They kiss slow, first, Gemma whispering, “I was so fucking scared,” too loudly.

Eleanor is crying beneath the blunt bangs fringed over her eyes, “Don’t be, don’t be, I’m right here.”

Harry can’t look away from the hands Gemma clenches up in Eleanor’s sweater, the white tips of their fingertips pressing to each other’s skin: does he kiss Louis like that? Does he look that deliriously pleased to have Louis close to him?

Gemma is kissing across Eleanor’s cheekbone when Harry hears, “I love you.”

It feels too intimate to keep watching them. They have always been this way, always so into each other that everyone else seemed nonexistent. Hands tangled up in the end of Gemma’s silvered hair, Eleanor whispers, “I love you too.”

Later, when they’ve turned on a lamp beside the couch and are nestled beneath a single, huge black blanket, their mum calls. Gemma is careful not to mention the gun that was pressed to her forehead and the shambles of her bedroom and office. Her voice is airy, gentle, coaxing when she explains that Harry is more than welcome to stay the night. “Come over for tea tomorrow, mum,” seals the deal. When mum asks about Eleanor, Gemma’s fingers slip under the blanket to pet at the boney jut of Eleanor’s hipbone.

Eleanor lifts a hand to the side of Gemma’s face while she’s talking, doing something that makes Gemma’s face sink into a grudging, fond grin. Harry had thought that Eleanor was segno-less for her father to marry off as he chose. Looking at her wrist against Gemma’s face, Harry can see a small, unevenly drawn heart. He’s seen it a million times: on Gemma’s notebooks, on the front of her diary.

Grinning, Gemma nuzzles a kiss to the heart she’s drawn on Eleanor’s wrist.

11. Twenty is quiet, for the most part. There are videos leaked of a politician who had his tongue cut out, holding up signs about how the government is fake, how the republic was founded on fear and silence. Harry’s mum watches the whole thing with a hand over her mouth, horrified.

Gemma and Eleanor get married as quietly and as legally as they can. Eleanor wears a black dress with long sleeves, barefoot and grinning as Gemma slides a delicate, golden bracelet over the jut of her wrist bone. Gemma has never been happier, her silver hair twisted up, her wrist holding the matching, silver bracelet. There are candles and a politician who is friends with their mum and recognizes how poorly the government has run the republic. If he is alarmed to see Eleanor getting married to a woman, he doesn’t show it. When the wedding ends, he kisses both Gemma and Eleanor on the cheek, wishes them the best marriage possible.

Louis is seventeen, almost eighteen, and lovely, filling out. His biceps are rounder, his hips softer and fuller. Harry spends entire nights dreaming about his thighs, the sensitive places behind his knees, the ridges of his hipbones, the spaces between his ribs. There are days when he spends the entire time in bed beside Louis, kissing his lips raw and rouging the skin around his neck red. The thought of becoming a musician becomes unbearable, in some moments, and all he can think about in others.

Harry gets more tattoos, mid summer, hot and humid, the sun beating down on the pavement, the grass crisp and brown. He fills out a huge, traditional ship on his bicep, spends the entire time laughing with Zayn and Louis, Louis’ hand in his. There are two swallows inked into the hollows of his throat. Louis kisses them before he leaves for the night, nuzzles against them when he collapses in Harry’s bed or vice versa.

There are a series of rebellions that begin in the lower class housing and flare up, like wildfire, into the middle class housing. No one talks about it in public or in a voice above a whisper, even within the confines of their own homes. It feels like they’re constantly waiting: his mum is always watching the news, even if it’s just on in the background, her hand pressed over the part of her lips, her eyes wide with concern, her hugs tighter when she does hug Harry, her calls to Gemma more frequent, her voice pitched more soothingly. Jay is over in the small hours of the morning, her hands around a steaming cup of tea while her and Anne talk about what they’re going to do. Harry pretends he doesn’t hear.

12. They have to take it in shifts. Trisha spends the nights when Jay is working, Louis sits through the afternoons and evenings with Harry, and Eleanor is there during the days, when Zayn isn’t awake. All of them walk around with bags under their eyes and constantly bitten down nails, a nervous twitch to all of their steps, guilty reverberations of it could have been me, it could have been me, again and again as they look at the thin, ashen boy on the table. It feels like they’re all running from an invisible threat.

The government came for Zayn on a Wednesday afternoon when he was walking home from school. When he wasn’t home an hour after he normally is, Trisha went out looking and found him nearly dead in an alley near their home, lashes scarred into his shoulders and too close to his segno, a wordless threat. It’d taken longer for her to the find the notch scarred into his other wrist, the wide black band of a first strike. Trisha can’t look at him without crying.

Jay is impassive and professional. She steals the pain meds and the bandages they need from her job. Other nurses, mothers and aunts and daughters, help her when they recognize the signs of government involvement. It is a series of smaller, smaller rebellions, within the fragile confines of their tenuous lives. They ask a god they don’t believe in for a stop to the inspections, for the time being, just until Zayn can move from the table.

When Harry gets home from school and goes to take his shift, Louis is curled up in a wooden chair near Zayn’s hand, their fingers touching in the silence of the kitchen. The Tomlinson’s home is quieter than it usually is with the girls at school, the commitment to inconspicuousness that they’ve all taken. In the fading light coming in through the windows, Louis’ paler and thinner than Harry has ever seen him, bruises under his eyes.

It feels like a crime to wake him up. Harry settles his backpack onto the floor, as quietly as possible, before kneeling beside Louis’ chair.

“Lou,” his hand pets over the ridge of Louis’ spine, counting the bumps in an effort to remind himself that Louis is okay and here and whole. Every day feels like waiting for someone else to disappear. When Louis only snuffles, leaning closer to Harry’s heat, Harry leans in, pressing a chaste kiss to the skin of his bicep, “Louis.”

Blue eyes, unfocused and half-mast, begin to get clearer as they take in Harry.

The urge to lean into the opening of his warm mouth is a fight for Harry. He debates it, debates how much Louis would let him get away with in this half awake place, “Go to your bed,” Harry whispers.

Louis shakes his head; mussing the soft fringe over his eyes, “Don’t wanna.”

“Louis,” Harry touches at the hazy, warm nape of his neck, “Please go get some sleep. I’ll be here when you wake up.”

Harry doesn’t realize at first, isn’t looking at Louis’ eyes. When he does finally make eye contact with Louis, his lower lip is trembling, his hands shivering as he reaches out for Harry, his entire body folding into Harry’s on the floor. They curl up together near the edge of the table, near the stillness of Zayn’s bruised form. Louis pushes his face into Harry’s shoulder to stifle the sounds of his crying, and Harry touches him like he can’t feel small worlds shaking apart under the careful stroking of his fingers. They don’t owe this government anything. Their fear should be enough.

Zayn doesn’t move on the table, just makes a small, snuffling noise that has Louis jerking up, his teary eyes watching the faint rise and fall of Zayn’s chest. It’s jarring to see anyone like this. Harry can’t imagine what Louis is going through. He’s worn thin with stress and terror and the constant threat of government interference in their day-to-day life. Harry didn’t think of it yesterday, but he’s probably scared of Harry’s tattoos too.

Being careful not to startle him, Harry sifts his fingers through the hair on the nape of Louis’ neck, “How’re you?”

Louis shivers, his mouth parting into a soft circle. His fingers are gentle against Harry’s chin as he draws their lips together. Harry sinks into the kiss, makes sure that things stay gentle, stay quiet, stay soft. There’s no reason to bruise each other. Other people will do that for them. Louis’ fingers tighten in his hair as he presses up into Harry’s body. Harry keeps a soothing hand along his spine, measuring the stuttering of his pulse.

When their mouths part, Louis leans their foreheads together, nudging Harry’s nose with his own when Harry stops petting at his spine. As soon as the touching has resumed, Louis whispers, “Liam called.”

Harry makes a small sound of acknowledgment.

“And I just—Like, what d’you say? What d’you—I can’t do anything.”

“No one is asking you to,” Harry coaxes Louis’ lips back against his for a moment, “No one is asking you to do anything but be here with him while he heals.”

Louis whimpers.

“If you don’t want to do that, then let me do it, Lou. Y’can go to school or—”

“You can’t miss school,” Louis’ voice is hard, “They won’t let you graduate. They’ll wonder why you aren’t there.”

“They don’t—”

“Shut up,” Louis whispers.

A week later, Zayn wakes up and asks for Liam before he asks for anything else. That night, Louis corners him in the upstairs hallway of the Tomlinson’s house before the girls are home. He’s magnetic, pulls Harry into the needy clutch of his fingers, kisses him like he wants to bruise the moment between them for as long as possible against the beige walls and the light wood. They careen into the door of Louis’ bedroom, and Louis arches up, his back pressing out into the wood as he mouths at the side of Harry’s neck.

It’s quiet: Harry’s hands slipping down the back of Louis’ loose trackies, the warm, welcoming clutch of his hole around Harry’s fingers, the way they come together against the wall, again and again, rutting, Louis’ fingers leaving crescents on his shoulders. Louis is seventeen, and Harry is freshly twenty, a bit of desperation coloring the way he grips Louis’ hips and thighs. They’re artless and young and new to it, new to moving their bodies together. Louis comes apart at the seams when Harry curves a hand too tightly around his arse cheek. There will be fingerprints that Harry will kiss later in the week.

The day Zayn wakes up and bursts into tears at the mark on his wrist, Harry waits for Zayn to fall asleep against Louis’ shoulder before they careen into the hallway, mouths together, hands frantic against each other’s bodies.

Louis sighs out when Harry pushes his against the wall with his pelvis, grinding long and low into the warmth between his bum cheeks. They’re both hard and full of adrenaline and young. Harry wants to be close to Louis, closer, thinks they both need the way his hand spreads wide over Louis’ side. Overwhelmed, scared, Harry buries his face into the juncture of Louis’ warm, fragrant neck over the side of his blue and white striped shirt.

Pushing his arse back, Louis whispers, “Touch me, Haz,” when he hasn’t moved for too long.

He starts small: drags his lips over the side of Louis’ neck, over the dusky place where the wispy ends of his hair rest. Louis makes a low, wounded sound, arching back, and Harry feels reverent when he sinks to his knees behind Louis’ bum, when he wraps his hands around the thickness of Louis’ thighs. They should talk about it. Harry should ask Louis if he’s okay. He’s laving at the dimples either side of Louis’ spine, pressing praise and kisses and love into the tense base of his spine until Louis is wiggling back onto Harry’s tongue, whining for more, instead of talking.

Louis’ hands winding into the curls on the top of his head, Harry pulls down Louis’ trackies enough to expose his bum and the heaviness of his balls. The entire house is silent when Harry breathes out unevenly over Louis’ skin. It feels like the days of tension, the days of fear, always lead them here: to half lit hallways, to trying to stay quiet incase Louis’ sisters get home, to making sure that Zayn is asleep before they undress each other like thieves, like arsonists caught in the act. Louis whines when Harry pulls his bum cheeks apart to get at the puckered pinkness of his hole. Harry always feels undeserving when he gets to see Louis like. No mark, no government mandate, none of that will ever make him worthier of Louis. Louis likes to start small, until he’s relaxed. Harry licks over him, there and there, before he presses his finger up to the warm skin behind Louis’ balls.

Finesse always goes out the window when Louis begins to respond like he’ll die if Harry stops. He’s all scrabbling hands; sweaty palms sliding down the wall, his breath so loud between them under the small licks of Harry’s tongue and his careful, persistent fingers. Louis tastes like musk and sleep and soap from the day spent at home, and Harry kisses his hole again and again, gives him fingers when he asks. Louis is pale pink and hairless here, pretty and soft, hangs his head in a way that makes his shoulder blades rise like mountains out of his back. The striped shirt he’s wearing bunches up in the place where his hips flare out. Harry loves that skin, rests a hand over his hip to help him move better into the pressure of Harry’s mouth and fingers.

When Harry finally stands up and lowers his own pants, pushing forward into the warm clench of Louis’ hole, they both whimper. Slow and steady, they rock back and forth against the wall. Louis’ cock is pink at the head, leaves behind precome on his tummy, his foreskin pulling back when he thrusts forward for friction. Harry aches for this boy. His lips move over Louis’ neck, his ear, his temple, their breaths mingling as they pant together. Their hands are tangled on the wall, bodies better at moving together, Louis’ hips malleable and soft as he rolls with Harry. Through the haze of it, through the pleasure of Louis so close and small and warm, Harry kisses his neck.

They stay so, so quiet, making love like they’re stealing it.

Louis’ mum taught him how to clean cuts when Zayn was asleep with the hospital’s stolen painkillers. Against the scarred, broken skin on Zayn’s back, Louis’ fingers trembled, his lips turned down as he swiped as lightly as possible with the alcohol cleaning cloth, then water. Jay was tired from her shift at the hospital: bags under her eyes, her scrubs smudged with darker spots that no one asks about. Still, she was patient with Louis’ tears and the frustration of his trembling jaw, the horrible sinking in his chest at hurting Zayn further.

Now, from behind the heavy kitchen door, Harry watches Louis clean Zayn’s back alone for the first time. His glasses are skewed over the tip of his nose, his cheeks sallow with fear, bruises under his eyes. He’s so, so careful with Zayn’s body: taps him lightly on whatever side he’s going to clean, strokes over the nape of Zayn’s neck to relax him when his whimpers are pitching too loudly in the early morning stillness. It’s a Saturday. Louis is going to help his mum get his siblings to his appointments, and Harry agreed to spend the day with Zayn so his mum could sleep.

Zayn whimpers again, louder, and Louis closes his eyes, hand clenched around the cloth.

Quietly, Louis whispers, “’m so sorry, Zee.”

There’s a moment where Louis is wiping at a cut along Zayn’s shoulder, and he’s not saying anything. Harry watches as Louis opens his mouth to apologize again, only to be cut off by Zayn’s: “There’s nothing to be sorry for.”

Louis hasn’t been dry eyed for a week. He’s weepy, even when Harry is kissing him on the couch, even when Harry is whispering sweet words to him, stroking the hair back from his forehead, fogging up his glasses to make him laugh.

Small hand scrubbing across the place under his eye, Louis says, “’m still—”

Zayn’s fingers twine with his over the angles of his collarbone. They’re beautiful and sad in the kitchen, Louis’ fingers dropping the wet cloth onto the table before he rounds it, to sink into the chair between Zayn’s legs. Harry wants to touch Louis, because that’s the only way they’ve been communicating recently, the only way Harry can tell him how he feels without having to say it and break a promise.

Louis leans into the soft pressure of Zayn’s hand on his cheek like he does when Harry is touching him, his shoulder blades popping under his striped shirt.

“If things were different,” Zayn murmurs, “I think I could’ve loved you.”

Harry can’t see his face, but he feels frozen in the doorway, horrified that Louis is going to want that. It makes sense. Zayn and Louis are so close, fell together like trees careening together in a wind storm. It’s not easy to have friendships under the threat of a murderous government, and Liam is so far sometimes, like a galaxy in another solar system.

Louis huffs a tired laugh, “We would’ve been partners in crime, like—”

“Constantly in trouble,” Zayn finishes with a toothy grin.

Wordlessly, Louis laces his fingers with Zayn’s, over his cheek.

“If things were different, yeah,” his voice fades into the morning sunlight.

13. Louis’ family’s home is raided on the day before his eighteenth birthday. The night is split by the sound of doors banging into walls, the bark of yells that has Harry jerking awake tangled in his own bed sheets. Beyond his windowpane, Louis’ home is lit up like a jack o’ lantern, windows like unseeing eyes, men in black suits with big guns prodding the family out onto the front yard. Harry doesn’t think. He’s tumbling out of bed, yanking roughly on his sweatpants, dashing down the stairs uncaring of his mum and Dusty sleeping.

Their front door is open, Anne in the front yard with her arms around Louis’ younger sisters, trying to herd them into the house for blankets and tea. The little girls squint up at Harry with wet, blue eyes, eyelashes feathered across their pale cheeks in the eerie stillness outside while the crashing in their house intensifies. A shattering sound startles Harry back into trying to find Louis. His mum doesn’t try to stop him as he slips past her and the girls, eyes roving restlessly over Louis’ family’s front yard. His heart keeps lurching in his chest, frightened and anxious, as he keeps not finding Louis. He won’t go into their yard, won’t put himself in the line of fire, won’t anger the government. A wave of fear for Gemma crests and breaks in his chest.

Jay is wiping furiously under her eyes as she clutches a blanket to her chest, Louis at her side with a coaxing hand on her waist as they back slowly away from their house. The raids are never systematic: they are meant to show the power of a government that has built itself entirely on fear and submission. There is no telling how long the soldiers will be there or how many things will be broken in their midst. Louis’ family will be under even more suspicion after his dad was taken away. The neighbors are probably all awake, lying in their beds and pretending that this isn’t happening.

Harry startles when he feels Anne’s hand on his shoulder, “Come in. He’s alright.”

Fingers pinching at his lower lip in the darkness of their entryway, Harry retreats into the shadowed living room to sit on the couch. Anne and the girls’ voices are a low hum in the kitchen. His mother is a social worker by mandate, her voice soothing and low as mugs settle against the table. Jay is trembling when Anne finally wraps her up in a hug, murmuring something that sounds like regret and apology, her hair knotted on her head, her eyes marred with dark bags, I knew it would happen, I knew falling into the anxious air in the room. The front door snicks shut with finality, the lock thrown before Louis comes into the greying light cast by the front window.

Louis has goosebumps across his exposed skin: his arms, his thighs, his feet. Harry’s arms feel, abruptly, with the force of a wrecking ball, empty without him in them. Their mums retreat to the kitchen together while Louis lingers near the edge of the couch, fidgeting with the bottom of his shirt.

“’m eighteen,” he murmurs, when Harry touches his wrist. The pulse humming under the press of Harry’s fingers speeds when the light shining through the window goes more orange, yellow and red, fire.

Hesitantly, not sure if it’s all right, Harry slides a hand around the hinge of Louis’ jaw.

“’m tired,” Louis whispers, eyes fluttering closed.

Harry is careful with the fragile boned, frightened boy in his arms. Louis doesn’t move further than a finger length away from Harry, feet tangling as they go up the stairs, arms around each other in the cold predawn. The murmured sounds of the girls in the kitchen follow them up and into the empty, sleep smelling cavern of Harry’s room, his white sheets rucked everywhere in his haste to get to Louis. He’s never wanted anyone to feel at home in his bed this badly.

Louis curls up in the warmth that Harry vacated, pillows behind his back and his legs, like a nest. Still, down below, his mum and sister and Louis’ family speak quietly. Louis’ skin soaks all of the light up in the room, glowing faintly from Harry’s sheets while he moves around to get comfortable, yanking the comforter up over his shoulders. Despite the frantic pulsing of his heart beat in his fingers, in his stomach, in the flush of his cheeks, Harry lies down as close to Louis as he dares.

Fingertips glancing down the fragile skin of Louis’ inner arm, the blankets shielding them from whatever other horrible things await in the world, Harry feels safer than he has in the past year. There’s a black tattoo on his arm, the only boy he’s ever loved in his bed, and the decision about whether or not he wants to be a singer feels frivolous. Tonight just made him want to be there for Louis, for all of it. He can’t just leave Louis to fend against their government.

“I’ve never been so scared,” Louis whispers without opening his eyes.

He’s softer here: the flutter of his eyelashes, the part of his lips, the cut of his cheekbones against the whiteness of Harry’s pillows. Harry wants this all the time, and that guts him. Mark or no mark on his wrist, he can’t imagine wanting anyone else this deep down.

Harry presses his palm to the arch of Louis’ lower back, “You don’t have to be anymore.”

Blue eyes half-mast, Louis slurs, fuzzy and sleepy, “’s a big promise.”

“It is,” his thumb moves in wide circles over the crest of Louis’ hipbone.

“Gonna keep it?”

Harry’s never told Louis, not explicitly, not about the segno or the mandate marking. They’ve always been the way they are now, from the second they met. There was never another way for them to interact with each other. Harry’s never cared for anyone the way he cares about Louis, and it’s not—It’s not a segno thing or a bond mate thing or anything else.

Fingers working over the splay of Louis’ lower back, Harry nods, “I will.”

Louis scoots over and presses their mouths together, once, twice, three times, sleep warm and pliant as Harry parts his lips. They kiss lazy and calm, like Harry doesn’t have a single year to decide whether or not he wants to be with Louis, like he has more time to prove to Louis that he can keep a promise that means the entire world to him.

They call Gemma that same night, his mum and him huddled around the telephone as they explain what’s happened. Gemma’s voice doesn’t break once when she tells them that she’s all right. She promises to visit as soon as possible, Eleanor passing along her love from the background.

14. Liam looks like he wants to drown in the center of the dance floor, under the glare of the club lights. He’s got his head tilted back, jaw clenched stubbornly even as a new girl sidles into the open basket of his hips. All of these segno-less people, hungry to feel, and Harry leans against the bar, thumbing against the tiny wave marring his pulse point. Boys and girls press against Harry’s side, and he reels back on instinct, skin prickling against the knowledge that none of these people are Louis.

The government instituted an earlier curfew at the beginning of the year due to a series of rebellions in the lower class sectors. Harry has an official state sanction to be out past dark to explore being a member of the elite. Louis, with his teaching mandate, does not. Somewhere, in the back of his buzzing, tipsy brain, Harry thinks about all of the small fights they’ve been having recently and feels guilty.

Thinking of Louis feels like having someone poke him repeatedly in the heart with a branding iron, and he came out tonight to stop seeing the sad tilt to Louis’ uncertain smiles and the fragile, shaking way Louis’ fingers look over his skin now. Under the frantic flashing of disco lights, Liam is dancing with a new person, slim hips and slimmer fingers around his wrist, his head turned away from her long hair, jaw clenched.

When his beer is finished, Harry settles the glass back on the bar. Surveying the room makes him dizzy and overwhelmed. His eyes hurt. Despite Liam’s repeated, careful explanations, he’s no better at telling celebrities from those who are segno-less or those who have had their segno scarred over. Everyone in this entire hot, cramped club makes something like sadness curl strongly in Harry’s gut, a near constant voice in his head counting down the days until he has to make an official decision.

One hundred and five seems too small, too insignificant within the framework of an entire life.

A girl stumbles into Harry’s side, giggling raucously as she stares him down.

“Excuse me,” she paws at his chest, “I’m so clumsy tonight. I’m so—”

The weight of missing Louis astonishingly heavy on his chest, Harry pushes off from the bar and walks out without looking back. The club is a sea of crushing bodies: pressure from all sides, the reek of sweat and loneliness, too hot and too close without someone to be close to. Thankfully, there’s a balcony along the back. Glass windows open onto the space, but it must be soundproofed because the sound dies down as soon as Harry gets over to the balcony and leans forward with his elbows on the ledge. Abruptly, he feels ridiculous. Liam is kind. Liam just wants him to make an informed decision. He should be able to do that without needing Louis.

Raking a hand back through his curls, Harry sighs and leans his forehead down onto the railing. The coldness seeps through his sheer black shirt and onto the skin of his forehead, blessed relief from his headache and a sort of cleansing for the cotton bunched between his ears.

“Alright?”

Harry doesn’t lift his head to look at Liam. The warmth radiating along Harry’s right side and the gruffness of Liam’s voice is answer enough. From where Harry is watching their feet, Liam’s fancy black boots shift, silver buckles catching the city lights before he settles with his elbow nudging into Harry’s arm. There are a million questions bubbling on the tip of his tongue, a billion things that Harry wants to know about this lifestyle before he makes a decision about it.

Lifting his head to look at Liam, Harry stays silent. The moon makes him look drawn and worn, sad in a way that feels permanent. Initially, part of Harry had come here to tell Liam about the crisscrossed series of x’s branded into Zayn’s back, the literal first strike marked on his wrist, the way he is smoking near constantly, his tattoo machines thrown into the river. Liam’s Zayn’s other half. He should know.

“Yeah,” Harry clears his throat, “Y’alright?”

Liam’s lips twist into a sardonic little half smile, “Love wondering what Zayn’s gonna see in the rags tomorrow, yeah,” tired, Liam lifts a heavy hand to the fuzz of his Mohawk, “Love knowing another reporter is going to call me a slag tomorrow or talk about how much ‘ve been partying lately or—”

“Lia—”

“’ve not seen Zayn in months,” Liam’s voice breaks.

Not wanting to make Liam uncomfortable, Harry stares straight ahead while Liam swipes angrily at his cheeks, flushed and glassy eyed. This doesn’t feel glamorous or fun. This feels like a spot below Harry’s ribs is being excavated to make room for the weight of Liam’s sadness, because one person shouldn’t have to deal with all of this on their own.

“He wants to see you,” Harry says quietly, “’s just hard now, y’know?” Everything is so calm, so collected, so careful, bits of a story: don’t mention Jay’s trembling fingers against Zayn’s scarred skin, the way Louis cried for days whenever he looked at him, the desperate, jagged way Harry and Louis would frantically touch each other in the empty hallways of the Tomlinson’s house while Zayn was asleep, “The government is coming down harder now after those rebellions. Zayn’s got his family to worry about.”

Liam’s fingers tighten around the railing. His shoulders are huddled up small under his red button up, and he looks so young beside Harry. The small boy who lived in middle class housing with his mum and dad and his sisters feels closer than it ever has. The wind whips past their spot, whisking Liam’s bandana out behind him. Neither of them grab for it when it blows away.

Abruptly, Liam says, “Ask me.”

Eyebrows furrowed, lower lip caught between his teeth, Harry looks at Liam.

Again, “Ask me,” Liam’s voice breaks, frustrated, too loud for this place, “Ask me if this is worth it.”

Harry feels frozen: scared for this shaking, sad boy and scared for himself, for the person who has a decision to make that could change everything, for Zayn and his scars, for Louis and his soft heart, for his mum and her cupcakes, for Gemma and her wife with no segno, for the soft, fond way that Gemma touches at her forehead, the way Eleanor’s brown eyes go crossed when Gemma kisses her from a close distance, scared for Jay and her daughters and their history of mental illness, scared for Louis’ missing father, scared for all of them.

Reaching out to lay a hand on Liam’s wrist, Harry says, “Liam—”

“It’s not,” Liam’s voice is fierce, “None of this fucking bullshit is worth it. Zayn is—” he shakes his head, eyes wet again, “I was so fucking stupid.”

It feels a bit like mercy when Harry says, “Zayn’s got a bandana tattoo now.”

Wide, brown eyes rise to his, “He does?”

Imagining the small, warm junction of Zayn’s arm, the intricacy of the black design he drew makes Harry smile faintly. He didn’t realize it then, when Zayn was still healing, watching the news channel obsessively, but he knows now. The last tattoo before he got rid of his machines permanently. The tenuousness of Liam and Zayn’s connection doesn’t matter.

“Black, on his elbow,” Harry cradles his own elbow over his sweater, “’s pretty.”

Liam collapses against the railing: his breath comes out in a huff, his shoulders falling together, his hands twisted up in the bottom of his shirt. Harry turns to him with his hands outstretched, only to see glittering tracks of wetness down his cheeks. He’s laughing and crying and tipsy and leaned over the side of a building.

Just as Harry goes to open his mouth, Liam says, “I can’t believe him,” and grins down at the small zap inked across his pulse point.

Even in the darkness of his bedroom, only the glow of the moon for light, Harry can see the measured rise and fall of Louis’ back in his sleep. More and more often, Harry has been finding him here as his mum presses him for information about a segno that he’s not prepared to talk about. Trying to be quiet, Harry slides his jeans off and puts them in his dirty laundry hamper, his sweater and sheer shirt coming off next. He smells of smoke and city smog and sweat. Raking a hand back through his curls, Harry crawls onto his bed, attempting not to jostle Louis.

Snuffling faintly against Harry’s pillow, blue eyes open, bleary with sleep. Louis’ small fingers flex against the bed, his warm toes connecting with Harry’s under the blankets. After spending tonight watching Liam break down, Harry can’t help the relieved love that bubbles up in him. He reaches across the couple of inches between them to touch Louis’ skin. They’re lying side by side, smiling faintly.

“Y’smell like smoke,” Louis’ voice is muzzy, “and sweat.”

Leaning in to drag his nose over the bare back of Louis’ neck, Harry murmurs, “Y’smell like sleep.”

Louis snorts, “We are in a bed, and it is, technically, bed time.”

“Yeah?” Harry can’t stop touching him: the flared base of his spine, the indents between his ribs, the warm hollow of his throat, the place right under his boxers, the heat of his forehead, “’m not tired.”

A hand twists into his curls, “We can’t all be destined for popstar-dom.”

Harry wants to kiss him but he settles for, “I missed you tonight.”

For a couple of moments, Louis just blinks at him: somehow sleepy and calculating, like he doesn’t know if Harry’s actually telling him the truth. Harry thinks about what Liam said, about how it’s not worth it, and wonders if he accidentally skipped this part or if he did it on purpose. The distrust that fosters, the constant calculating, the constant wondering. Maybe it’s too late or maybe Louis is tired of second guessing him. Whatever it is, his smile pulls up just the corners of his mouth.

“Missed you too, H.”

15. In the too bright light of morning seeping in under the bottom of his blinds, Harry’s mum is beautiful, sleep soft and fond, her hand cupped protectively around the flame of a candle in a cupcake. Louis, starry eyed and puzzled about what to do, thin lips pursed to blow out the flame, bursts behind Harry’s eyelids.

“Happy birthday to you,” she whispers, sinking onto the side of Harry’s bed, “Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday lovely Harry, happy birthday to you.”

Even under the white sheets, Harry can feel the tell tale flushing of his cheeks, the helpless smile that stretches across his face. His mum is watery eyed behind the glow of the candle flame, and Harry reaches out for the boney jut of her wrist without thinking. Her mark is silvering under his fingers, beautiful and sad and fading, a star burning out. The morning makes it all feel so tenuous. Flickering candle flame dancing inches from his face, he blows it out, humming a quiet yay when his mum sets it down on his bedside table in favor of putting her hand into his hair.

He leans into the warm tug of her fingers. Everything quiets out, his eyes drifting closed again. Harry feels, sometimes, like he’s spent the last three years worrying about what he was going to do, about making the right decision. It’s taken him a really long time and so many built galaxies to know that there isn’t a right decision.

His mum is humming something under her breath, “My beautiful boy.”

Harry smiles; content.

A few more minutes slip away as Harry sits under the pressure of his mum’s touch, the comfort of her presence and her mellowed Burberry in the junction of her wrist. She’s so strong, so accepting, so beautiful. Harry loves her more than he’s ever loved anyone.

When he opens his eyes, his mum is swiping a finger under her eyes to collect the moisture gathered there.

Harry’s voice is low and rough when he says, “’m gonna be okay, mum.”

She laughs wetly, “I know, love. I just—”

“I know,” Harry murmurs, “I know, ‘m sorry.”

She hates this, more than anyone else he knows. She hates the restrictions, the ways that Gemma suffers for the girl she loves and the boy who hurt her. She hates Louis’ fear for his sisters and mum and father and the bloodstains that won’t come out of Jay’s table from Zayn. She hates all of it.

“Love you so much, mum,” Harry can feel tears in the corners of his eyes.

His mum opens her mouth and then closes it, shaking her head.

It has never been an easy decision. Harry’s spun webs of possibilities, all of these different universes where different things happen, where his life looks nothing like the one he has, the one he wants. His mum has sat beside him and stroked across his cheekbone, making sure that he knows that she trusts him. Gemma hugged him so tightly the last time he saw her. They don’t understand that they’re not able to make the decision more or less hard. Harry doesn’t worry about disappointing people who will always love him.

Fiddling with a loose string on his black jacket, Harry thinks about all of the decisions he’s made up to this point. He trusts himself. Even with the tattoos on his arms, his refusal to let birthday celebrations go past without a celebration, his stubborn inability to visit his father in a suit, he’s done all right.

This time, when the woman with dark, curly hair knotted back in a ponytail calls his name, he stands up and doesn’t tremble at the future.

“Harry Styles?”

She gives him a tight smile before spinning on her heel and taking off down the beige carpeted hallway. They pass rows of matching, black doors, again and again. Harry is reminded of the younger version of himself: the small, shaking boy who was absolutely terrified at the possibility of being given an artist’s mandate. He’s moved so far past that, and he’s reminded of that when the woman opens a door for him, presenting the same room with the long, empty table and the shuttered windows, and Harry smiles at her before seating himself.

There’s no segno machine in here.

Harry is ruffling his curls, trying to make himself look more confident, maybe, when the door swings open to reveal the same man with soft eyes from the first time. He looks older, visible marks around his temples, a slight down turning of his lips that Harry might have been too terrified to notice last time.

When those familiar, brown eyes focus on Harry, he finds himself saying, “Hello,” before he’s been spoken to. Younger Harry would’ve keeled over. His mum would frown.

The man is looking down at the table, smiling faintly.

“Hello,” the man’s voice has worn slightly, like he’s had a long day, “Alright?”

People in the government don’t usually make small talk, and Harry welcomes it. Prolonging the moment he makes the biggest decision in his life for a bit longer is a small mercy that no one has given him until this man, “Yes, thanks.” Harry bites his lip against the urge to ask the man how he’s doing.

Laughing quietly, the man shakes his head, “You can ask.”

“Alright?”

“Yes,” a smile stretches the man’s lips, “Thank you for asking.”

The evening stretches between them as they sit across the table from each other. Harry’s heart is going so quickly in his chest, knocking against his ribcage with a force that renders him speechless. The man has folded his hands together on the table, silent and still as Harry flounders and second guesses himself and wonders what he can possibly do to make this okay. It’s everything he wants, and nothing he wants. It’s an eventuality that he has been planning for and actively avoiding, all at the same time. Years of school and long, hot summers, measuring the seasons against how golden Louis’ skin is.

The man’s eyes soften when he looks at Harry.

“You had a big decision to make.”

“I did,” Harry bites along his lower lip to distract from the buzzing of his own thoughts. His chest feels heavy when he breathes.

“And you’ve made a decision?”

The man’s hair is shot through with grey, like his mum’s. All at once, with the force of a tidal wave, Harry can feel nostalgia for childhood, for his bed, for Gemma, careening into his chest. It’s not an easy decision, trying to decide what is right for your life. You never know, and Harry kept waiting for a moment when the decision was easy, when it felt like a black and white response. There never was one.

Sitting here, chewing on his lower lip, sighing in order to get a deep breath, Harry nods.

“Which is?”

It hangs there in the air between them for a long time. Harry could change his mind, right now, and this man would be none the wiser.

“I want a life with the man I love. I don’t want to be a singer,” Harry whispers, voice tremulous, “I don’t want it.”

The old man’s face breaks in a soft grin.