“Did you not research the place before you picked us for your…” Louis hesitates, words like holiday on the tip of his tongue. It’s what Harry used earlier, but it didn’t seem quite right. “Your… retreat?” he finally settles for. The way Harry’s body stiffens slightly confirms it.
He shrugs, looking down.“Not really,” he admits. “Just googled ‘most remote place in the UK’ to be honest. And this was the result.”
Louis smiles, a little sadly, at the sight of this tall man and the shadow clearly hanging over his head. “Yeah,” he agrees, voice more raspy than usual. He clears his throat. “That’s us.”
Harry smiles, polite as he fiddles with his room key.
“You really wanted to be far away, uh,” Louis comments gently.
Harry stops moving, stops playing with the keys, and he looks back up, straight into Louis’ eyes. “Is that what you wanted?” he asks and on someone else’s lips, it would sound accusatory. Louis has many distant relatives who have thought similarly and have told him off for it, so he’s intimately familiar with the way his self-imposed exile can be perceived. “Is that why you left England and moved here? Because you wanted to be far away?”
It almost sounds like he’s asking permission to feel this way, like he needs someone to understand and relate, like he’s the loneliest person in the world who came to the loneliest place in the world to fix it. It’s almost enough to make Louis lie, to make him agree with Harry just to make him feel better.
“No,” he says softly. “I wasn’t running away from home. I was running towards it.”
Harry’s eyelids flutter as he looks back down for a second. “I understand.” He turns slightly to face his bedroom door, pushing the key into the lock and turning it. Once the door is open, he reaches down to grab his bag, putting one strap over his shoulder and giving Louis a side glance. “I didn’t want to be really far away,” he admits softly, “I needed it.”
Then, he vanishes into his room.
As a B&B owner on the most remote of all the British Isles, Louis Tomlinson is used to spending the coldest half of the year in complete isolation, with his dog and the sea as sole companions. Until, one day, a mysterious stranger on a quest to rebuild himself rents a room for the winter.
part of the @onedirectionbigbang // pairing: harry/louis // wordcount: 113k // rating: M // read on AO3 // art by @harrehleh // Spotify playlist
janainaart
stormborns
yousharknotpass
turnnoffyourmind
jbbartram-illu
