🍉🥝✨ Breathe me in, breathe me out. Welcome to my little fruity corner of tumblr. 🥝 Writing hs fics and over-analyzing them.🍕 Pizza is my love language. ✨ Kindly sharing my stories with you. Asks: OPEN! 🍉MASTERLIST🥝
Welcome to my library! Here is where I keep all my Harry Styles stories, organized by genre and vibe. Grab a slice of it, get cozy, and enjoy the read.
🥝 One-Shots & Short Stories:
The Frisbee Fiasco {Fluff /Meet-Cute} (Harry Styles x Reader)
The Green Thumb in 4B {Domestic Fluff / Neighbors AU / Rom-Com} (Harry Styles x Reader)
Half Baked Flour Power {Rom-Com / Workplace Fluff / Meet-Cute} (Harry Styles x Reader)
Faceplant {Hurt/Comfort, Soft Harry, Idiots in Love} (Harry Styles x Reader)
The Pineapple Paradox {Enemies-to-Lovers (in 10 minutes) / Playful Banter / Cozy Romance} (Harry Styles x Reader)
The 11 PM Collison Of Comfort Food {Meet-Cute / Soft Realism / Healing Fluff} (Harry Styles x Reader)
The Center Of The Universe (And Her Name Is Blair) {Papa!Harry/ Domestic Fluff/ Parental Fluff} (Dad!Harry x Reader)
2AM Raid {Domestic Fluff/ Rom-Com} (Harry Styles x Reader)
I Just Noticed.... {Angst / Family Angst / Hurt Comfort} (Harry Styles x Reader)
The Other Bedroom {Angst / Family Angst / Domestic Angst} (Harry Styles x Reader)
He's My Dad {Fluff / Coming-Of-Age / Slight Angst} (Dad!Harry Styles x Reader)
Paparazzi Panic {Angst / Coming-Of-Age / Family Angst} (Dad!Harry Styles x Son!Reader)
Underfed {Angst / Coming-Of-Age / Family Angst} (Dad!Harry Styles x Daughter!Reader) + Drafts {Angst / Coming-Of-Age / Family Angst} (Dad!Harry Styles x Daughter!Reader) <It was a part 2>
Hello! I absolutely adore your stories so much! I was wondering if you could do another Doctor AU but make it Trauma Surgeon? Reader and Harry have been together for over 5 years and are newly engaged. Reader gets into a major car accident coming home from work (she swerved to avoid an animal but ends up crashing into a tree near their house going 70 mph) but due to the adrenaline rushing, she walks home, very disoriented. Harry happens to be home, making dinner. When she walks in the door, she practically collapses from all the stumbling she’s doing. Harry notices her condition and internally freaks out but physically goes into trauma surgeon mode. He’s calling her all these pet names trying to keep her conscious as he assesses her. She’s now in a tremendous amount of pain that the slightest touch is agony but Harry has to check her out and he lets her know how sorry he is as he feels around. After he does his initial assessment, he either takes her to the hospital himself or calls an ambulance. He’s very protective and assertive especially when she insists that she just needs rest and painkillers at home. After Harry essentially forces her to the hospital—saying it’s non-negotiable, she is treated. She has broken ribs which causes a pneumothorax (so they must put in a chest tube, harry holds her hand and whispers sweet nothings in her ear), concussion & skull fracture, internal bleeding (resulting in an emergency laparotomy), lacerations from the glass, and an overall soreness in her body. I was also wanting to see how post op goes. I’d imagine Harry to be super overprotective, always watching her like a hawk. Not letting her do anything herself, checking her vitals and incision site 24/7 (even when she’s sleeping), caring for her as a fiancée but also trauma surgeon. Maybe she tries to do something eventually herself because she’s so bored of lying in bed 24/7 but she ends up making it worse (possibly pulling a stitch and exacerbating her injuries when trying to make a sandwich or something) and Harry freaks out. Like he’s downright angry but it’s all out of love because he was and is so scared having this happen to the love of his life. He sternly puts her in her place because he has no patience for that behavior. Just very domesticated and concerned Harry. It can be as long as you feel it needs to be, I will read the longest story you’ve ever written. I hope you find the inspiration cause I think you’d really kill at this type of story. Thank you in advance if you choose to write this story x
Hold On (Don't You Dare Let Go)
Pairings: Trauma surgeon!harry styles x reader
Genre: Hurt/comfort, medical drama, emotional angst, fluff (the soft kind after the storm), Angst, Domestic Angst
Word Count: ~6k words
Warnings: major car accident, detailed medical assessment and procedures (chest tube, laparotomy), broken ribs, pneumothorax, skull fracture, concussion, internal bleeding, lacerations, blood, mentions of surgery, post-operative pain, protective/possessive behavior, one instance of raised voice (out of fear), emotional distress, near-death situation. reader is injured but survives. this is angst with a very fluffy, soft ending.
Prompt: You and Harry are newly engaged after six years of dating and as a trauma surgeon, Harry has seen it all... he just never expected you to be the one he has to save.
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The house smells like garlic and rosemary when the front door opens.
Harry doesn't look up from the stove. He's been simmering the sauce for the last two hours, stirring it slow and patient the way Yn likes it, the way his Nonna taught him when he was twelve years old. Their engagement photos are sitting on the counter—a stack of Polaroids they took last weekend in the park, her laughing at something stupid he said, her ring catching the golden hour light.
She should have been home forty-five minutes ago.
He's not worried. He's never worried. Yn is a careful driver, and her commute is only twenty minutes, and sometimes she stops at the grocery store or gets caught on a call with her sister. He's not worried.
He checks his phone anyway.
No texts.
He's about to call her when he hears it—the creak of the front door, the shuffle of footsteps, the soft, wet sound of something hitting the hardwood floor.
"Yn, I know you're home. Dinner's almost—"
He turns.
And the world stops.
Yn is standing in the doorway of the kitchen, one hand braced against the wall, the other pressed to her side. Her work clothes are torn. Her blouse is ripped at the shoulder, dark with something that isn't water. Her face is pale—too pale, the kind of pale that makes his stomach drop—and there's a cut above her eyebrow, blood dripping down her cheek in a slow, lazy line.
She's not wearing shoes.
"Harry," she says, and her voice is wrong. Slurred. Too quiet. "I think I—I think something happened."
She takes one step forward. Two.
And then her knees buckle.
Harry moves before he thinks.
He crosses the kitchen in three strides, catching her under the arms before she hits the ground, lowering her carefully onto the tile. His hands are already running over her—a reflex, years of training, a lifetime of muscle memory—and his brain is screaming at him in a language he knows too well.
"Yn. Look at me." He cups her face, tilts her chin up, checks her pupils. Her left pupil is sluggish. Slower than the right. His heart seizes. "Baby, I need you to stay awake. Can you do that for me?"
"'M awake," she mumbles. Her eyes are glassy. She blinks too slowly. "Just tired. 'M so tired, Harry."
"I know. I know you are." He runs his hands down her neck, her collarbones, checking for deformity, for step-offs. "Did you drive? Were you in the car?"
"Tree." Her brow furrows, like she's trying to remember. "There was a—a dog. Or something. In the road. I swerved."
"Where's the car?"
"Don't... don't remember. Close. I walked."
She walked. Jesus Christ. She walked home after crashing at seventy miles per hour. The adrenaline must have been astronomical—and now it's wearing off, and her body is starting to realize what happened, and Harry is kneeling on his kitchen floor with his fiancée bleeding in his arms and he doesn't know how bad it is yet.
But he's about to find out.
"Yn, I need to check you over. It's going to hurt." He presses his palm to her cheek, and she leans into it, her eyes fluttering. "I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry, baby. But I need you to stay still and stay awake. Can you do that?"
"Don't wanna go to the hospital," she whispers.
"We'll talk about that later. Right now, I need you to breathe for me. Deep as you can."
He unbuttons her blouse with shaking hands—steady, Styles, you've done this a thousand times—and pushes the fabric aside. His breath catches.
Her left side is already bruising. A deep, angry purple spreading from her ribs down to her hip. He presses gently along the curve of her ribs, and she screams.
Not a gasp. Not a whimper. A full, throat-tearing scream that makes him want to throw up.
"I know," he says, and his voice cracks. "I know, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, sweetheart. I have to check."
Her ribs are unstable. Floating. He can feel the crepitus under his fingers—the horrible grinding of bone against bone—and he knows what that means. Broken ribs. Multiple. Probably flail segment, which means—
"Take another breath for me, Yn. As deep as you can."
She tries. He watches her chest rise, and on the left side, it doesn't move right. It caves in. Paradoxical movement. Flail chest.
And her breathing is fast. Too fast. Shallow.
Tension pneumothorax. The thought hits him like a freight train. Air leaking from her lung into her chest cavity, pushing her trachea, collapsing everything. If he doesn't decompress it, she'll—
No. He's not going there.
"Harry." Her voice is small. Scared. "Hurts to breathe."
"I know. I know it does, angel." He presses two fingers to her neck, counting her pulse. Tachycardic. Thready. She's losing blood somewhere. "I need to call an ambulance."
"No."
"Yn—"
"No hospital." She grabs his wrist, and her grip is weaker than it should be. "Just—just give me something. Painkillers. I'll rest. I'll be fine."
"You have broken ribs, Yn. You might have a collapsed lung. You might be bleeding internally." He keeps his voice level, even, the way he does with scared families in the trauma bay. But this is different. This is her. "You are not fine. And you are not staying here."
"Harry, please—"
"No." His voice sharpens. "This is non-negotiable. You are going to the hospital, even if I have to carry you there myself."
He's already pulling out his phone, dialing 911, giving their address in a voice that doesn't sound like his own. The operator asks questions—is she conscious, is she breathing, is there severe bleeding—and he answers on autopilot while his other hand holds hers, his thumb tracing circles on her knuckles.
"Harry," she whispers again, and there are tears in her eyes now. "I'm scared."
He hangs up. Drops the phone. Leans down so his forehead touches hers.
"I know you are. But I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere." He kisses her temple, gentle, avoiding the cut. "The ambulance is five minutes out. You're going to stay awake for me until they get here, and then you're going to let them take care of you, and I'm going to be with you the whole time. Okay?"
"'Kay."
"Say it back."
"I'll stay awake."
"Good girl."
The ambulance ride is a blur of sirens and fluorescent lights and hands that aren't Harry's. He rides in the back with her, holding her hand, telling her names of stars and the capital of every country he can think of just to keep her talking.
"Tell me about the wedding," he says, when her eyes start to droop. "You picked out flowers last week. What color?"
"White," she murmurs. "And... and eucalyptus."
"What kind of white? There's a million kinds of white. You told me that. You were very passionate about it."
A ghost of a smile. "Peony. Garden rose. Something called... 'Quicksand.'"
"Quicksand? That's a flower?"
"It's a... it's a rose. It's blush. But mostly white." Her grip on his hand tightens. "Harry, it hurts."
"I know, sweetheart. I know." He looks at the paramedic, who's already hanging a bag of fluids. "Can you give her something for the pain?"
"Already on board," the paramedic says. "Morphine, four milligrams. Should be kicking in soon."
Harry watches her face. Watches the way her brow slowly unclenches, the way her breathing stays too fast but her eyes get a little softer.
"There you go," he murmurs. "That's better, isn't it?"
"Mmm." She blinks up at him. "You're pretty."
He laughs, and it comes out wet. "You're on drugs."
"Still true."
The ambulance hits a pothole, and she gasps, and he stops laughing.
The trauma bay is chaos.
Harry steps back when they wheel her in—he has to, he's not on shift, he's not a doctor here, he's just a man in jeans and a sweater with his fiancée's blood on his hands—but he doesn't leave. He stands in the corner, arms crossed, watching as the team swarms around her.
"Female, thirty-two, high-speed MVC, walked home post-accident, found down by fiancé," the paramedic rattles off. "GCS 14, unequal pupils, obvious chest wall trauma with respiratory distress, suspected tension pneumothorax, multiple lacerations, hypotensive in the field—"
Harry tunes out the rest. He's watching her face. She's looking for him in the crowd of scrubs and stethoscopes, and when she finds him, her eyes fill with tears.
"Harry," she says, and her voice breaks.
He moves.
He doesn't think about protocols or visitor policies or the fact that he's technically not supposed to be in the trauma bay. He walks to her side, takes her hand, and presses a kiss to her knuckles.
"I'm here. I'm right here."
"Don't leave."
"Never."
The trauma surgeon—a woman with kind eyes and steady hands—introduces herself as Dr. Chen. She looks at Harry, recognizes him from a conference last year, and doesn't tell him to leave. She just nods once and gets to work.
"Let's get a chest X-ray," she says. "And page surgery. I want a FAST scan and a head CT."
Harry watches them cut off her clothes. Watches them expose the bruising on her ribs, the swelling on her abdomen, the laceration on her scalp that's still oozing blood. He watches Dr. Chen listen to her lungs, her expression going tight.
"Diminished breath sounds on the left," Dr. Chen says. "Harry, you're a trauma surgeon. You want to do the honors or should I?"
He's not supposed to. He's not on her case. But Harry looks at YN—at the way she's gripping his hand like he's the only thing keeping her tethered to the earth—and he makes a decision.
"I'll do it."
He scrubs his hands in the sink, puts on gloves, and picks up the scalpel. The room goes quiet. Dr. Chen holds the ultrasound probe over YN's chest, confirming what he already knows—a massive pneumothorax, lung completely collapsed, everything shifting to the right.
"Yn, I need to put a tube in your chest," he says, keeping his voice soft. "It's going to hurt, but it's going to help you breathe. Do you understand?"
"Will you hold my hand?"
"I'll hold your hand with one hand and put the tube in with the other. I'm very talented."
She laughs weakly, and it hurts her, but she doesn't let go of him.
He positions himself at her side. Dr. Chen hands him the scalpel. And Harry—Harry who has done this procedure hundreds of times on strangers, on people whose names he never learns, on bodies that feel nothing—makes a small incision between her ribs and feels his own heart crack.
"Deep breath for me, sweetheart."
She breathes. He pushes the tube through the chest wall, into the pleural space, and there it is—the rush of air, the hiss of the lung re-expanding, the beautiful sound of her chest rising and falling the way it's supposed to.
"Good," he breathes. "That's so good, baby. You did so good."
The chest tube is secured. The drainage system bubbles quietly. And Yn is still looking at him, still holding his hand, still alive.
Dr. Chen orders a head CT and a pan-scan. Harry follows the gurney to radiology, still holding her hand, still whispering.
"You're doing so well. I'm so proud of you. Just a few more minutes, and then we'll get you fixed up, and you can rest."
"M'not doing anything," she slurs. "You're doing everything."
"That's my job."
"Your job is... saving people."
"Today, my job is saving you."
The CT results come back forty-five minutes later.
Harry is in the waiting room—they made him leave for the actual scan, something about radiation exposure, and he spent twenty-three minutes pacing a hole in the linoleum floor—when Dr. Chen finds him.
"We have a skull fracture," she says, holding the films up to the light. "Linear, non-depressed, temporal region. No active bleed, but she has a moderate concussion. We'll monitor her neuro status overnight."
Harry nods. He was expecting that. "What else?"
"Abdomen. She has free fluid in her peritoneal cavity. We're calling it a positive FAST—she's bleeding internally, and she needs a laparotomy. We're taking her to the OR in ten minutes."
Harry closes his eyes. A laparotomy means opening her abdomen, finding the bleed, stopping it. It means hours under anesthesia, hours of him waiting in a plastic chair with bad coffee and worse thoughts.
"Who's operating?" he asks.
"Chang. He's good. You know him."
Harry does know him. Michael Chang is one of the best trauma surgeons in the state. He's also a friend. And right now, Harry needs to trust him.
"Can I see her before they take her up?"
Dr. Chen hesitates. Then she nods. "Five minutes. She's in bay three."
Yn is awake when he gets there. Barely. Her eyes are half-closed, and there's an oxygen mask over her face, and someone has put a cervical collar around her neck even though her spine is fine. She looks small. She looks breakable. She looks like the person he's supposed to spend the rest of his life with, and she almost died tonight.
"Hey," he says, sitting on the edge of her bed. "They're going to take you to the OR in a few minutes. You have some bleeding in your belly, and they need to fix it."
Her eyes widen. "Surgery?"
"Just one surgery. A small one. And then you'll be done, I promise." He brushes her hair back from her forehead, careful of the laceration. "Dr. Chang is going to take care of you. He's very good. He once took out a gallstone the size of a golf ball."
"That's... gross."
"It was impressive." He presses his lips to her forehead. "I'm going to be right here when you wake up. I'm not leaving the hospital. Do you hear me?"
"'M scared."
"I know." He pulls back so she can see his face. "But I'm not scared. Because I know you're going to be fine. You're too stubborn to die on an operating table."
"Harry."
"I'm serious. You once argued with me for forty-five minutes about whether a hot dog is a sandwich. You're not going anywhere."
She laughs, and it hurts her, and he hates himself a little for making her laugh. But she's smiling. She's still smiling.
"I love you," she whispers.
"I love you too." He kisses her forehead again, her nose, the corner of her mouth. "Now go be the most dramatic patient Michael's ever had. I'll see you on the other side."
They wheel her away. Harry watches until the doors close. Then he puts his head in his hands and doesn't move for a very long time.
The surgery takes three hours.
Harry spends them in the waiting room, alternating between pacing, staring at his phone, and drinking vending machine coffee that tastes like burnt regret. He texts her mom—she's in surgery, she's going to be fine, I'll call you when she's out—and then turns his phone off because he can't handle any more questions.
He thinks about the last thing they argued about. It was stupid—something about where to hang a picture in the hallway, her wanting it higher, him wanting it lower. He thinks about how he'd let her hang every picture in the house at whatever height she wanted if it meant she'd come out of this okay.
He thinks about the ring on her finger. The one he spent six months saving for, the one he hid in his sock drawer, the one he put on her hand last month in their living room while she was crying happy tears and saying "yes, yes, yes" over and over again.
He thinks about a world where she doesn't come out of this, and he has to stop thinking about it because he can't breathe.
At 11:47 PM, Dr. Chang comes out.
Harry is on his feet before the door finishes swinging.
"She's stable," Michael says, pulling off his scrub cap. "Lacerated spleen. We were able to repair it without removing it. She lost about a liter and a half of blood, but we transfused two units, and her vitals are solid. Chest tube is in place, lung is fully expanded. Skull fracture is non-operative—we'll just watch it."
Harry sags against the wall. "Thank you. Michael, thank you."
"She's a fighter." Michael claps him on the shoulder. "She's in the SICU. You can see her in about twenty minutes, once we get her settled."
Harry nods. He waits eighteen minutes—because he's never been good at waiting—and then he's walking into the SICU, past the beeping monitors and the hushed voices, to the bed in the corner.
Yn is asleep.
She looks pale against the white sheets. There's a tube coming out of her chest, connected to a bubbling drainage system. There's an IV in each arm, a pulse ox on her finger, leads on her chest. Her abdomen is bandaged from sternum to pelvis, the dressing clean and white. There's a small gauze pad taped above her eyebrow where they stitched the laceration.
Harry pulls up a chair. He sits. He takes her hand—the one without the IV—and holds it between both of his.
"Hi," he whispers. "I'm here."
She doesn't respond. She's sedated, intubated, her chest rising and falling with the rhythm of the ventilator. But her hand is warm. Her fingers curl around his, just a little, like even unconscious she knows he's there.
Harry lowers his head to the edge of the bed. And for the first time since he saw her standing in the doorway, he cries.
She wakes up twenty-six hours later.
The first thing she sees is Harry. He's in the chair next to her bed, head tipped back, mouth slightly open. He hasn't shaved in two days. There are dark circles under his eyes. His sweater is the same one he was wearing when she walked in the door—except now it has blood on it. Her blood.
She tries to say his name, but her throat is dry, and there's a tube in her mouth, and she can't—
"Easy, easy." Harry is awake instantly, leaning over her, his hand on her forehead. "You're intubated. Don't try to talk. Just squeeze my hand if you can hear me."
She squeezes.
"Good girl." His eyes are wet. "You're in the SICU. You had surgery on your spleen last night. Your lung collapsed, but we put a tube in, and it's healing. You have a concussion and a small fracture in your skull, but your brain is fine. You're going to be fine."
She squeezes his hand again. Harder.
"I know. I know you have questions. But you need to rest right now, okay? They're going to take the tube out in a few hours, and then you can talk my ear off as much as you want."
She doesn't want to talk. She wants to sleep. But she also wants to look at him—at his stupid beautiful face, at the worry etched into every line of it—and she wants to tell him she's sorry for scaring him, for swerving, for walking home instead of calling an ambulance, for all of it.
Instead, she just holds his hand and closes her eyes.
When she opens them again, the sun is up, and the tube is gone, and Harry is still there.
The next week is a blur of pain and sleep and Harry.
He doesn't leave. She's not sure if he's officially on leave or if he just stopped showing up to work, but every time she opens her eyes, he's there. Reading in the chair. Sleeping in the chair. Eating bad hospital food out of plastic containers. Holding her hand.
"You need to go home," she says, on day three. Her voice is still raspy from the tube, and her ribs ache every time she breathes, and she's so tired she can barely keep her eyes open. "You need a shower. And real food."
"I showered in the on-call room."
"That doesn't count."
"I used soap."
"Harry."
"Yn." He raises an eyebrow. "I'm not leaving. Stop asking."
She wants to argue, but she's too tired. So she just watches him rearrange her pillows for the fifth time, tucking the blanket around her legs, checking the chest tube drainage like he can't help himself.
"You're hovering," she says.
"I'm monitoring."
"You're hovering."
He sits on the edge of her bed, careful to avoid the tubes and wires, and cups her face in his hands. "I almost lost you. I'm allowed to hover."
"I'm fine."
"You're not fine. You have a chest tube and a skull fracture and an incision that goes from here to here." He traces a line down her abdomen, light as a feather. "But you will be fine. Because I'm going to make sure of it."
She leans into his touch. "I love you."
"I love you too." He kisses her forehead. "Now go back to sleep. The nurses get grumpy when you're awake during shift change."
"How do you know that?"
"I've been here longer than they have."
Day five, she gets discharged.
Harry handles everything—the paperwork, the prescriptions, the follow-up appointments, the careful instructions about showering and lifting and driving. He carries her bag. He helps her into the car. He drives five miles under the speed limit the whole way home, and she doesn't tease him about it because she's pretty sure he'll cry if she does.
Home is strange.
It smells like garlic and rosemary, still, faintly—the sauce he was making when she walked in the door. She looks at the kitchen floor and sees the spot where she collapsed, scrubbed clean but somehow still there in her memory.
"Don't," Harry says softly, coming up behind her. "Don't think about it."
"How do you know what I'm thinking?"
"Because I'm thinking the same thing." He wraps an arm around her waist—carefully, so carefully—and guides her toward the stairs. "Bed. Now. You've been upright for twenty minutes, that's your limit."
"I'm not an infant."
"You're a trauma patient. Same thing."
He helps her up the stairs one step at a time, his hand on her back, his body blocking her from falling if her knees give out. She hates needing help. She hates the way her body feels foreign and fragile, held together with stitches and staples and prayers.
But she loves the way he holds her. The way he treats her like something precious.
He gets her settled in bed—their bed, the one with the soft sheets and the pillows she stole from his side—and then he disappears into the bathroom. She hears water running, cabinet doors opening, the sound of him organizing things on the counter.
When he comes back, he's carrying a blood pressure cuff, a pulse oximeter, and a small notebook.
"Harry."
"What?"
"Why do you have a notebook?"
"To track your vitals." He sits on the edge of the bed and reaches for her wrist. "I'm going to check you every four hours. BP, HR, O2 sat, temperature, and I'm going to look at your incisions."
"You're not a nurse."
"I'm a trauma surgeon. I'm overqualified to be a nurse."
"You're obsessed."
"I'm thorough." He wraps the cuff around her arm and starts pumping. "There's a difference."
She lets him do it. Lets him record the numbers in his little notebook, lets him lift her shirt to check the dressing on her abdomen, lets him listen to her chest with a stethoscope he apparently brought home from the hospital.
"Your lung sounds good," he murmurs, pressing the cold metal to her back. "No diminished breath sounds. Chest tube site looks clean."
"You're ridiculous."
"You're alive." He puts the stethoscope down and kisses her forehead. "I'm going to be ridiculous for as long as it takes."
The first three days at home are... intense.
Harry wakes her up every four hours, even at 2 AM, to check her vitals and give her pain medication. He hovers in the doorway when she uses the bathroom. He won't let her walk down the stairs by herself. He won't let her shower without him sitting on the toilet lid, reading aloud from a book to keep her company, ready to catch her if she slips.
"Harry, I can wash my own hair."
"You can't lift your arms above your shoulders. You have a skull fracture."
"It's a hairline fracture."
"It's still a fracture." He squeezes shampoo into his palm and starts working it through her hair, gentle, methodical. "Stop arguing and let me take care of you."
She closes her eyes. His fingers feel good—scratching her scalp, working out the tangles, massaging the tension from her neck. She leans back against the shower wall and lets him do it.
"You're good at this," she mumbles.
"I've had practice."
"On who?"
"On you. You're always getting into trouble." He rinses her hair, cupping his hand over her forehead to keep the water out of her eyes. "Remember when you fell off that ladder trying to change a lightbulb?"
"I was fine."
"You had a sprained wrist for three weeks."
"Fine."
He laughs, and the sound echoes off the tile, and she thinks maybe being taken care of isn't so bad.
Day four is when she almost ruins everything.
Harry is in the shower—his first real shower in days, because he's been too busy monitoring her to take care of himself. She can hear the water running, hear him humming something soft and low, and she looks at the clock and thinks: I have fifteen minutes.
She's hungry.
Not snack-hungry. Starving. The kind of hungry that comes from eating hospital food for a week and then sleeping through three meals because the pain meds knock her out. She wants a sandwich. A real sandwich. With bread and cheese and maybe that pesto from the fridge.
She shouldn't get up. She knows she shouldn't get up. Harry's rules are very clear: Do not get up without me. Do not walk down the stairs. Do not lift anything heavier than a book. Do not be a hero.
But she's so tired of being helpless.
So she swings her legs over the side of the bed. Stands up slowly, holding onto the nightstand. Waits for the dizziness to pass. Takes a step. Then another.
The stairs are harder.
She goes one step at a time, holding the railing with both hands, her abdomen screaming with every movement. The incision pulls. The chest tube site—still healing, still tender—throbs in protest. But she makes it. She makes it to the bottom of the stairs, makes it to the kitchen, makes it to the counter.
The bread is in the cabinet above the microwave.
She has to reach for it.
She stretches her arm up—too high, too fast—and feels something pull in her abdomen. A sharp, tearing pain that makes her gasp, makes her drop the bread, makes her double over with her hand pressed to her side.
"No no no no no," she whispers, looking down.
There's blood on her shirt. Just a little. Just a spot. But it's spreading.
"Yn?"
Harry's voice from the top of the stairs. She doesn't answer. She can't. She's too busy trying not to panic.
And then he's there.
He takes the stairs two at a time, still dripping wet, a towel around his waist, his hair soaking wet. He takes one look at her—bent over, hand pressed to her abdomen, blood on her shirt—and his face goes white.
"What did you do?"
"I just wanted a sandwich," she whispers.
He doesn't say anything. He picks her up—not carefully this time, not gentle, just picks her up and carries her to the couch, laying her down like she's made of glass. He pulls up her shirt, and she sees his expression shift from panic to anger to something worse: fear.
"You pulled a stitch."
"I'm sorry."
"You pulled a stitch, Yn. You could have torn the whole repair open. You could be bleeding internally again. You could—" He stops. Presses his palm to his forehead. Takes a breath. "What were you thinking?"
"I was hungry."
"You were hungry?" His voice rises, and she flinches. He sees her flinch, and something in his face cracks. "You almost died. You had a hole in your lung. Your spleen was in pieces, Yn. I watched them put you back together. I held your hand while they cut into your chest. And you—" He looks away, jaw tight. "You couldn't wait fifteen minutes for me to get out of the shower?"
"I didn't want to bother you."
"Bother me?" He laughs, and it's not a happy sound. "You are the love of my life. You are my fiancée. You are the person I have chosen to spend every single day of the rest of my life with. And you think asking me to make you a sandwich is bothering me?"
She doesn't know what to say. The blood on her shirt is still wet. Her abdomen is throbbing. And Harry is looking at her like his heart is breaking.
"I was so scared," he says, quieter now. "When you walked through that door, bleeding, not knowing where you were—I have never been that scared in my entire life. And I have seen people die on my table. I have told families that their loved ones didn't make it. And none of that—none of it—was as hard as seeing you fall in my kitchen."
"Harry—"
"No. Let me finish." He kneels in front of the couch, his hands on her knees, his eyes bright with unshed tears. "I need you to understand that you cannot do things like this. You cannot push yourself. You cannot be brave or stubborn or proud. Because if something happens to you—if you tear something open and I can't fix it in time—I will not survive it. Do you understand me?"
She nods. Her throat is too tight to speak.
"I need words, Yn."
"I understand."
"You can't do that again."
"I won't."
"You have to let me take care of you. Even when it's annoying. Even when you're bored. Even when you just want a stupid sandwich." He presses his forehead to her knee. "Please. I'm begging you."
She reaches down and touches his hair. It's still wet from the shower, curling against her fingers. "I'm sorry."
"I know." He looks up at her. "I'm sorry I yelled."
"You were scared."
"Terrified." He takes her hand and presses it to his chest, over his heart. It's pounding. "I love you so much. You can't do that to me again."
"I won't."
"Promise me."
"I promise."
He closes his eyes. Takes a breath. Opens them again, and he's still scared, but he's also Harry—her Harry, the one who catches her when she falls, the one who puts sun cream on her shoulders in Italy, the one who held her hand while they put a tube in her lung.
"Now," he says, standing up. "Let me look at that stitch."
He rechecks the incision. The bleeding is minor—one small torn suture, nothing deeper. He cleans it, tapes it closed, and puts a fresh dressing over it. Then he goes upstairs, puts on clothes, and comes back down to make her a sandwich.
She watches him from the couch, wrapped in a blanket, feeling stupid and loved in equal measure.
He brings her the sandwich on a plate, cut into triangles, with a pickle on the side and a glass of water with ice.
"You're not allowed to eat it in bed," he says. "But you're allowed to eat it on the couch. Baby steps."
"Thank you."
He sits next to her, close enough that their thighs touch, and watches her take the first bite.
"Good?" he asks.
"Good," she says.
He nods. Leans over and kisses her temple. Stays there for a long moment, his lips pressed to her skin, his hand finding hers under the blanket.
"I love you," he murmurs against her hair. "Even when you're an idiot."
"Especially when I'm an idiot."
"Especially then."
Six weeks later, she's cleared for normal activity.
Harry still checks her vitals every morning. Still hovers when she walks down the stairs. Still sleeps with his hand on her stomach, over the scar, like he's making sure it's still there.
She doesn't mind anymore.
She lets him take care of her. Lets him be overprotective. Lets him check her incisions and track her blood pressure and wake her up at 2 AM just to make sure she's breathing.
Because she knows, now, what it cost him. She knows what it means to be loved by someone who almost lost you.
And when he puts a ring on her finger for the second time—not an engagement ring this time, but a wedding band, simple and gold, on a beach in Maine with just their families and the sound of the waves—she looks at him and thinks:
I would survive it all again, just to end up here.
But she doesn't say that. She just kisses him, soft and slow, and lets him hold her like she's something precious.
can you pretty pls do a oneshot where yn and harry are in italy and harry tells yn again and again to put sun cream on and she waves him off every time saying that she’ll do it in a minute and by the time they head out she forgets. she burns badly and she’s trying to act like it’s not painful so he doesn’t say i told you so and so he doesn’t worry about her. he takes care of her and it’s all fluffy <333
Warnings: sunburn, mild pain, fluff, harry being a nurturing boyfriend
Prompt: You and Harry are enjoying a nice vacay in Italy and you decide sunscreen isn't on the list-- Harry begs to differ, but.... you learn the hard way regardless.
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The Italian sun doesn’t mess around.
That’s the first thought Yn has when she steps out of the villa’s sliding glass doors, barefoot on the warm terracotta tiles, a cup of espresso in one hand and her sunglasses perched on top of her head. The sky is that specific shade of endless, aggressive blue that only exists in the Mediterranean—no clouds, no mercy, just golden light spilling over everything like honey.
It’s their third day in Positano. The third day of lemon trees, cobblestone streets, and Harry waking her up at an ungodly hour just to watch the sunrise from their balcony.
“Y’ready?”
His voice drifts from inside, low and still scratchy with sleep, even though they’ve been up for an hour. Yn turns, leaning against the doorframe, and watches him rummage through their shared suitcase. He’s already shirtless—because of course he is—wearing only a pair of loose linen shorts that sit low on his hips. His curls are a disaster, sticking up in seventeen different directions, and there’s a faint crease on his cheek from the pillow.
She’s so ridiculously in love with him it makes her chest ache.
“Almost,” she says, even though she’s fully dressed in a tiny white crochet cover-up over her bikini. “Just finishing my coffee.”
Harry looks up, squinting against the sunlight pouring in behind her. “Did you put on sun cream?”
Yn takes a slow, deliberate sip of her espresso. Doesn’t answer.
“Yn.”
“Harry.”
“Don’t ‘Harry’ me.” He abandons the suitcase and walks over, barefoot like her, and she has to tilt her chin up to keep looking at him because he’s close now. Close enough that she can smell his deodorant—something clean and warm, like sandalwood. “I’m serious. The sun here is different. It’s not like London.”
“I know what the sun is,” she says, amused. “I’ve been outside before.”
“Have you, though?” He raises an eyebrow, and his hand comes up to push a strand of hair off her forehead. The gesture is soft, automatic. “Because last time we were in Greece, you turned the color of a tomato and then cried when I tried to put aloe on you.”
“I didn’t cry.”
“You wept, love. Full tears. Said I was being too rough.”
“Because you were being too rough.”
Harry laughs—that warm, crinkly-eyed laugh that makes her stomach flip even after three years together—and presses a kiss to her temple. “Just put it on, yeah? I’ll wait.”
“In a minute,” she says, waving a hand. “Let me finish my coffee first.”
He gives her a look. The look. The one that says I know you, and I know you’re going to forget, and I’m going to end up being right, and you’re going to hate that.
“Yn.”
“In a minute, Harry.”
He sighs, but there’s no real frustration in it. Just resignation. He’s learned, over the years, that Yn is the kind of person who has to learn things the hard way. You can tell her the stove is hot a hundred times, but she’s still going to touch it. Not out of defiance—just out of a very specific kind of absent-minded stubbornness that she calls trusting the process and he calls driving me insane.
“Fine,” he says, stepping back. “But when you’re crispy and miserable later, don’t look at me.”
“I won’t.”
“You will. You always do. You get that little pout and you look at me like a sad kitten.”
“I do not pout.”
“You’re pouting right now.”
She is. She stops immediately.
Harry grins, kisses the tip of her nose, and disappears back inside to find his own sun cream. Yn finishes her espresso, licks the bitter foam off her lip, and thinks: I should probably put some on.
And then the moment passes.
Because the boat rental is at eleven, and they have to walk down to the marina, and Harry is already yelling something about forgetting the bag with the towels, and Yn gets distracted by the way the light hits the bougainvillea climbing up the villa’s walls, and then they’re locking the door behind them and the sun cream is still on the bathroom counter, untouched.
The boat is small and white, with blue cushions and a little canopy that Harry promised would provide “plenty of shade.” Yn stands at the bow as they putter out of the marina, the wind whipping her hair into a tangled mess, the salt spray catching on her skin. Behind her, Harry is steering with one hand, sunglasses on, looking disgustingly handsome.
“You’re staring,” he shouts over the engine.
“You’re pretty,” she shouts back.
He ducks his head, grinning, and she sees the tips of his ears go pink. Three years, and she can still make him blush. She considers that her greatest achievement.
They anchor in a small cove about twenty minutes later—turquoise water, cliffs covered in pine trees, not another boat in sight. It feels like something out of a movie. Like they’re the only two people in the world.
Harry cuts the engine, drops the anchor, and immediately starts setting up. He lays out towels on the bow, inflates a floating mat, arranges the cooler with sparkling water and peaches and prosciutto-wrapped melon. Yn watches him from where she’s perched on the edge of the boat, feet dangling in the water, and thinks, not for the first time, that she’s never met anyone who takes care of people the way he does. It’s in the small things. The way he remembers she hates cilantro. The way he always gives her the bigger half of the cookie. The way he’s currently holding up a bottle of SPF 50 and looking at her expectantly.
“Yn.”
“Harry.”
“Did you put any on before we left?”
She looks down at her shoulders. They’re already faintly pink. Just a little. Barely.
“...Yes?”
“You’re lying.”
“I’m not lying, I’m misremembering.”
Harry pinches the bridge of his nose. It’s such an exasperated gesture—so dad—that she has to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing. “Get over here.”
“I’m fine.”
“Yn. Now.”
She sighs dramatically, but she pushes herself up and pads over to where he’s standing on the towel. The deck is warm under her feet. Harry doesn’t wait for her to sit—he just squirts a generous amount of cream into his palm, rubs his hands together, and starts with her shoulders.
His hands are big and warm, and the sun cream is cool, and the combination makes her shiver. He works it into her skin slowly, methodically, like he’s painting a canvas. Across her shoulders, down her arms, over her collarbones.
“You’re supposed to do this before you start burning,” he murmurs, his thumbs pressing gently into the muscle where her neck meets her shoulder.
“I wasn’t burning.”
“You’re pink, sweetheart.”
“I’m rosy.”
He laughs under his breath. “Rosy. Right.” He taps her hip. “Turn around.”
She turns, and now she’s facing him, and his eyes drop to her chest—not in a weird way, just in a you missed a spot way. He squirts more cream into his palm and reaches for her sternum, and she watches his face as he does it. The concentration. The softness. He’s not trying to be sexy. He’s just taking care of her. That’s the thing about Harry. He could be doing anything—folding laundry, making tea, applying sun cream on a boat in Italy—and he’d do it like it mattered.
“There,” he says, finally, wiping his hands on his shorts. “You’re coated. You look like a glazed donut.”
“Romantic.”
“You know what I mean.” He cups her face, thumbs brushing her cheekbones. “Just reapply every hour, yeah? Especially after you swim.”
“Yes, Dad.”
He narrows his eyes, but he’s smiling. “I’m gonna remember this when you’re whining later.”
“I won’t whine.”
“You will.”
“I won’t.”
She does.
Of course she does.
It starts innocently enough. They swim, they float, they eat cold peaches and drink sparkling water straight from the bottle. Harry puts on a playlist—something soft and acoustic, all Fleet Foxes and Joni Mitchell—and Yn lies on her stomach on the floating mat, letting the water lap at her fingers. It’s perfect. The kind of perfect that feels dangerous, because you know it can’t last.
Around two o’clock, the sun is directly overhead, and Harry looks over at her from where he’s sprawled on the bow. His chest is tan already—he’s one of those annoyingly lucky people who just gets golden instead of burnt—but his eyes are fixed on her back.
“Yn.”
“Hmm?”
“You’re getting red.”
She twists to look over her shoulder, but she can’t really see. “I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine. Come here. Let me put more on you.”
“In a minute,” she says, turning back to face the sun. It feels so good. Warm and heavy, like a blanket. She closes her eyes.
“Yn.”
“Harry. I’ll do it in a minute. I’m relaxing.”
A pause. She can feel him looking at her. Then: “You said that two hours ago.”
“And I’ll say it again in two more hours. I’m a woman of consistency.”
He doesn’t laugh. Which means he’s actually annoyed. But he doesn’t push it—because that’s not who he is. He’s not the kind of person who forces. He suggests, he reminds, he nudges. But at the end of the day, he lets her make her own choices, even when those choices are monumentally stupid.
So he lies back down, and she lies on the mat, and the sun beats down on both of them, and Yn thinks: I’ll put some on when we get back to shore.
They don’t get back to shore until five.
The ride back is slower. The wind has died down, and the sun is lower but somehow more intense, bouncing off the water and hitting her from every angle. Yn sits in the back this time, facing away from Harry, and she notices that her shoulders feel... tight. Like someone is pulling the skin too thin.
She doesn’t say anything.
By the time they dock, her arms are stinging. Just a little. Just a warning. She keeps her cover-up on, even though it’s hot, and she doesn’t meet Harry’s eyes when he reaches for her hand to help her off the boat.
“You okay?” he asks.
“Perfect,” she says, and she smiles, and she hopes it looks real.
The walk back up to the villa is a special kind of hell.
Positano is built on a cliff, which means every street is a staircase. And every step sends a fresh wave of heat radiating off her skin. Her shoulders are throbbing. The backs of her legs—the parts she didn’t even think to put cream on—feel like they’re on fire. Her nose is so tight it hurts to scrunch it.
She keeps pace with Harry, though. Doesn’t limp. Doesn’t complain. Doesn’t even wince when he brushes his hand against her lower back.
“Dinner at that place with the lemon pasta?” he asks, scrolling through his phone. “The one we walked past yesterday?”
“Sure,” she says, and her voice comes out normal. She’s proud of herself.
“You want to shower first?”
“You go ahead.”
He looks at her. Just for a second. Just long enough for her to smile wider.
“Okay,” he says slowly. “I’ll be quick.”
He jogs up the stairs ahead of her, and the moment his back is turned, Yn lets her face crumple. Just for a second. Just long enough to mouth ow ow ow to herself.
She’s fine. She’s fine.
The villa has a massive bathtub and a rainfall shower and a bidet that neither of them knows how to use, but right now, YN would trade all of it for a bag of frozen peas. She closes the bathroom door behind her—locks it, even though Harry never walks in without knocking—and peels off her cover-up.
And then she looks in the mirror.
Oh no.
Oh no.
She’s not pink. She’s not even red. She’s the color of a fire engine. The color of a Ferrari. The color of that one lobster she saw at the aquarium when she was seven. Her shoulders are two perfect circles of violent crimson, and her chest is blotchy, and her nose looks like Rudolf got into a fight with a blowtorch.
There’s a distinct line where her bikini top was. The rest of her is... angry.
She touches her shoulder gently. Just with one finger.
She actually yelps.
“Yn?” Harry’s voice through the door. “You alright?”
“Fine!” she calls back, too fast. “Just—dropped something. Dropped the—soap. Dropped the soap. All good.”
A pause. “You don’t use bar soap.”
“...The body wash, then. Dropped the body wash. Very slippery. Anyway.”
She turns the shower on as cold as it will go and steps under the spray, and the second the water hits her skin, she lets out a sound that is absolutely not a sob. It’s a shudder. A controlled exhale. She is a grown woman, and she is in Italy with her gorgeous boyfriend, and she is not going to let a little sunburn ruin anything.
The cold water helps. A little. Long enough for her to wash her hair (painful, her arms don’t want to lift) and shave her legs (more painful, bending over compresses her chest) and convince herself that she’s being dramatic.
She towels off carefully—so carefully—and puts on the loosest, softest thing she owns: an oversized linen shirt that Harry bought her in Florence last year. It buttons up the front, which is good, because lifting her arms over her head is officially not an option.
When she comes out, Harry is sitting on the edge of the bed, scrolling through his phone. He looks up.
And he stops.
His eyes move from her face to her shoulders to her chest to the way she’s holding her arms slightly away from her body, like a T-Rex.
“Yn.”
“Don’t.”
“What happened to ‘I’ll put it on in a minute’?”
“Don’t say it.”
“You’re burned.”
“Don’t say I told you so.”
He stands up. He crosses the room. He stops in front of her, close enough that she can see the sunburn on her own face reflected in his eyes. His expression isn’t smug. It isn’t triumphant. It’s worried.
“How bad is it?” he asks softly.
“It’s fine.”
“Yn.”
“It’s fine, Harry. I’m fine. It’s just a little pink.”
He reaches out, very slowly, and touches the inside of her wrist. The one place that isn’t burned. His thumb presses gently against her pulse point, and she knows he can feel how fast her heart is beating. Because it hurts. It hurts so much, and she’s trying so hard to pretend it doesn’t, and the effort of pretending is almost worse than the pain.
“You don’t have to be brave,” he says. “Not with me.”
And that—that’s what breaks her.
Her chin wobbles. Just once. Just enough for him to see.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I should have listened. You told me like a million times.”
“I know.”
“And I was so annoying about it. I kept saying ‘in a minute’ like I was being cute, and I wasn’t being cute, I was being an idiot.”
“You were being a bit of an idiot, yeah.”
She laughs wetly. “Don’t agree with me. You’re supposed to say ‘no, you weren’t.’”
“You want me to lie?”
“Yes.”
He smiles—that soft, lopsided smile that she fell in love with—and pulls her into a hug so gentle it almost doesn’t count as a hug. His arms go around her loosely, carefully, not touching her shoulders at all. He rests his chin on top of her head.
“I’m not going to say I told you so,” he murmurs into her hair. “Because you already know. And because you’re in pain, and I don’t want to make it worse.”
“You’re too nice to me.”
“Someone has to be.”
The rest of the evening is a blur of cool compresses and aloe vera.
Harry takes over completely. He makes her sit on the couch with a glass of ice water while he goes through the villa’s cabinets, looking for anything that might help. He finds a half-empty bottle of aloe gel in the bathroom, a box of ibuprofen in a drawer, and a bag of frozen peas in the freezer.
“These are for emergencies,” he says, holding up the peas.
“This is an emergency.”
“It really is.”
He sits behind her on the couch, her back to his chest, and he starts with her shoulders. The aloe is cold—shockingly cold—and she hisses when it first touches her skin.
“I know,” he says softly. “I know. Just breathe.”
He works in small circles, patient and slow, avoiding the worst spots and coming back to them later. His hands are so gentle. He treats her like she’s made of glass, like she might shatter if he presses too hard, and the truth is—she might. Not because of the sunburn. Because of him. Because of the way he’s taking care of her without a single I told you so, without a single ounce of smugness, just quiet focus and the occasional kiss pressed to the back of her head.
“You don’t have to do this,” she says, after a while. “You could be getting ready for dinner.”
“We’re not going to dinner.”
“What? Harry—”
“You’re not putting on a bra with that burn.” His voice is final. “And you’re not sitting in a restaurant for two hours while your shoulders rub against the back of a chair. We’ll order in.”
“But the lemon pasta—”
“Will still be there tomorrow.” He kisses her hair again. “You’re more important than pasta.”
She wants to argue. She wants to say don’t change your plans for me, I’m fine, really, but the truth is, the thought of putting on actual clothes makes her want to cry. So she leans back against his chest—slowly, carefully—and lets him wrap his arms around her middle.
“I’m sorry,” she says again.
“Stop apologizing.”
“I’m not good at being taken care of.”
“I know.” He presses his lips to her temple. “But you’re going to have to get good at it, because I’m not going anywhere.”
He orders pizza from the place down the street. Not because it’s the best in Italy—it’s not, it’s fine, the crust is a little thick—but because they deliver, and Harry doesn’t want to leave her alone.
They eat on the couch, cross-legged, the pizza box balanced on the coffee table between them. YN is wearing the linen shirt unbuttoned (because buttons pressing against her chest hurt) and nothing else (because elastic waistbands are the devil’s invention). Harry keeps looking at her and smiling, and she keeps asking “what?” and he keeps saying “nothing,” and it’s not nothing, but she doesn’t push.
After dinner, he makes her take more ibuprofen. He fills a water bottle and puts it on the nightstand. He finds the softest sheets in the closet—an old set of cotton that feels like butter—and changes the bed while she watches from the doorway, leaning against the frame.
“You’re doing too much,” she says.
“I’m not doing enough.” He pulls the duvet back, fluffs the pillows, and turns to her with his hands on his hips. “Okay. You’re going to sleep on your stomach.”
“I’m a side sleeper.”
“Not tonight you’re not.”
She wants to argue, but he’s right. The thought of lying on her side, her shoulders pressing into the mattress, makes her wince just thinking about it. So she shuffles to the bed and lowers herself onto her stomach with all the grace of a beached whale.
Harry gets in next to her, on his side, facing her. He props his head on his hand and just... looks at her. Traces a finger down her spine, light as a feather, careful to stay on the parts that aren't burned.
“You’re staring again,” she mumbles into the pillow.
“You’re pretty.”
“I look like a tomato.”
“A pretty tomato.” He leans over and kisses the back of her neck, right where her hairline meets her skin. The only part of her shoulders that isn’t red. “The prettiest tomato in all of Italy.”
She laughs, and it hurts a little—her chest moves, and the skin pulls—but it’s worth it. “I love you.”
“I love you too.” He settles in beside her, his hand finding hers under the pillow. “Even when you’re stubborn.”
“Especially when I’m stubborn.”
“Especially then.”
She wakes up in the middle of the night.
It’s the heat. Her skin is radiating warmth like a radiator, and the sheets feel too hot, and her shoulders are throbbing in a way that ibuprofen can’t quite touch. She tries to roll over—forgets, for just a second, that she’s not supposed to—and the friction makes her gasp.
Harry stirs beside her.
“Yn?”
“Go back to sleep.”
“Are you hurting?”
“No.”
“You’re lying.”
He’s already sitting up, blinking in the dark, reaching for the lamp on the nightstand. The light clicks on, soft and yellow, and he looks at her. Really looks. She must look as bad as she feels, because his face does something complicated—concern and tenderness and a little bit of I told you so that he’s too polite to say out loud.
“Stay there,” he says.
He gets up. He disappears into the bathroom. She hears water running, the cabinet opening and closing, and then he’s back with a cold, damp towel and the aloe vera.
“This is gonna be cold,” he warns.
“I know.”
He lays the towel across her shoulders first—just lays it there, doesn’t rub—and the relief is so immediate, so profound, that she actually moans. A real, honest-to-god moan. Harry laughs quietly.
“Better?”
“Don’t ever stop.”
He doesn’t. He sits on the edge of the bed and lets the towel sit for a few minutes, then replaces it with another cold one. He dabs aloe on the worst spots—the backs of her arms, the tops of her thighs, the angry red stripe across her chest where her cover-up gaped open. He works in silence, and she watches him through half-closed eyes, and she thinks: I don’t deserve him.
But also: He chose me. He keeps choosing me.
“Thank you,” she whispers, when he’s done.
“Don’t thank me.” He sets the aloe aside and lies back down, this time on his stomach too, so they’re face to face on their pillows. “Just... next time I tell you to put on sun cream, maybe don’t wave me off?”
“I won’t.”
“You said that last time.”
“I mean it this time.”
He looks at her for a long moment. Then he reaches across the small space between them and tucks a piece of hair behind her ear. “You’re impossible.”
“You like it.”
“I love it,” he corrects. “But I also love you not being in pain. So. Compromise?”
“Compromise,” she agrees. “I’ll let you put the sun cream on me. Every time. You can even do the commentary.”
“What commentary?”
“You know. ‘You’re missing a spot, love. Turn around, sweetheart. You look like a glazed donut.’”
He grins. “That’s not commentary, that’s affection.”
“It’s both.”
“It’s both,” he admits.
She closes her eyes. The cold towel has faded to lukewarm, but the aloe is doing its work, and the ibuprofen has finally kicked in, and Harry’s hand is on her wrist again, thumb brushing her pulse point.
“Harry?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m glad you’re here.”
He doesn’t say anything for a moment. When she opens her eyes, he’s looking at her like she hung the moon.
“I’m glad you’re here too,” he says. “Even when you’re burned. Especially then. You get very honest when you’re burned.”
“I do not.”
“You told me I was ‘aggressively handsome’ earlier.”
“...You are.”
He laughs, soft and low, and leans over to kiss her forehead. “Go to sleep, tomato.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Sleep well, my little Italian produce.”
“Harry.”
He turns off the light, and in the dark, she feels him shift closer. Not touching—he’s careful not to touch—but close. Close enough that she can feel his breath on her cheek. Close enough that when she falls asleep, she’s not alone.
The sun will rise over Positano tomorrow, golden and relentless, and YN will still be red. She’ll peel in about four days, and Harry will help her with the pieces that are hard to reach, and he won’t say I told you so even once.
Because he doesn’t need to.
She already knows.
And more importantly—she already knows she’s loved.
end notes: soft boyfriend harry owns my entire heart. please reapply your suncreen. x
Prompt: Harry finds a girl and makes her his "cure" for his own pain; he soon realizes he must step away to truly find himself again.
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(Stream of Consciousness from Harry's POV. Inspired by The Cure, by Olivia Rodrigo)
The screen is too bright.
It’s always too bright now. Three in the morning and the blue light is a knife behind my eyes, but I can’t look away. I’ve been here for an hour. Maybe two. My thumb scrolls. Scrolls. Scrolls.
“Adam’s such a lad. Upgraded in every way.”
“Harry’s too soft anyway. She wanted a real man.”
“Imagine getting your girl stolen by your own mate. Embarrassing.”
I close my eyes. But the words are burned into the backs of my lids. Red and angry. I don’t even know why I look. It’s a form of self-harm, this. The digital equivalent of pressing a bruise. No—worse. Pressing a wound that won’t clot.
She left three months ago. Or rather, she unlatched herself from my side with the slow, deliberate cruelty of someone who had already found the next warm body to cling to. I just didn’t know it yet. I was too busy loving her. Too busy giving her the keys to every locked room in my chest. I told her about the nights I couldn’t breathe. About the voice in my head that says you’re not enough, you’ll never be enough. She held my face in her hands and said, “I’ve got you.”
She didn’t have me. She had my platform. My proximity to things that glittered. And when she’d milked it dry, when the tabloids had their fill of Harry Styles’ mystery muse, she traded me in for Adam. My friend. My mate.
The word makes me sick now. Friend. What a joke.
I scroll again. A new comment. “She was never that into him. You could tell. He was just a stepping stone.”
Something cracks behind my ribs. Not metaphorically. It feels physical. Like a piece of cartilage giving way. I throw my phone across the room. It hits the armchair and thuds to the carpet, mercifully silent.
The hotel room is too big. Too quiet. I’m on tour, technically. But we had to cancel tonight’s show. “Vocal rest,” the statement said. A lie. The truth is I couldn’t get out of bed until four p.m. Jeff found me curled around a pillow that still smelled like her shampoo—no, wait. That’s a lie I tell myself. It doesn’t smell like her. I changed the sheets weeks ago. It just smells like my own stale sweat and loneliness.
I roll onto my back. The ceiling is a white void. My chest is doing that thing again—the tight thing. The thing where I forget how normal people breathe. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Simple. Primal. And yet my body has decided to unlearn it.
I think about Adam. About the photo they posted last week. Her tucked under his arm, smiling that same smile she used to give me. The caption: “Home.”
Home. I gave her a fucking home. I gave her weekends in the countryside and my mother’s Sunday roasts and the password to my phone. I gave her the softest parts of me—the parts I don’t even let my therapist see. And she took them. Wrapped them around her finger. And then she handed them to him.
What did he do? Laugh? High-five her? Did they toast to my humiliation over expensive wine?
Stop. Stop it, Harry. You’re spiraling.
But that’s the thing about spiraling. It’s not something you choose. It’s something that chooses you. A current that pulls you under, and the harder you kick, the deeper you sink.
I don’t sleep that night. Or the next. Or the next.
The shows become a blur of sweat and autopilot. I sing the words, but they don’t mean anything. The crowd screams, and I smile, and it’s a puppet’s smile. Pull the string. Teeth appear. The fans hold up signs—I love you Harry, you saved my life—and I feel like a fraud. How can I save anyone when I can’t even save myself?
Some nights, I hear the whispers backstage. Not from my crew. They’re loyal. They’re family. But from the hangers-on. The plus-ones. The people who float through the green room with their phones out, recording everything.
“Did you see the breakup post? Brutal.”
“She’s with Adam now? He’s fit, though. Good for her.”
“Harry looks rough. Like really rough. Someone get that boy a sandwich.”
I laugh at that one. A sandwich. If only it were that simple.
I start canceling things. Interviews. Meet-and-greets. I tell Jeff I’m tired. He knows I’m lying. He knows it’s deeper than tired. But he’s a good man, and he doesn’t push. He just squeezes my shoulder and says, “We’ll get you help, yeah? When you’re ready.”
I’m not ready. I’m not anything.
Then I meet Yn.
It’s stupid, really. The way it happens. A coffee shop in a city I’ve already forgotten the name of. Somewhere in Europe. Amsterdam? Copenhagen? No—Munich. Yes. Munich. Rainy Tuesday. I’m wearing a hoodie pulled low, sunglasses even though the sky is the color of dishwater. I just want an Americano. I just want to exist without being perceived for five minutes.
She’s behind the counter.
Not working there—just standing there, waiting for her own order. She’s reading a book. An actual paperback, spine cracked, pages yellowed. She’s so engrossed that she doesn’t notice when I bump into her. My fault. I wasn’t looking where I was going. I was looking at the floor, which is where I keep my eyes now. Safer that way.
“Oh—sorry,” I mumble.
She looks up. And her eyes—God, her eyes. They’re the color of something warm. Tea. Honey. Something that doesn’t belong in this gray city.
She blinks. “You’re fine.”
That’s all. Just you’re fine. She doesn’t do a double take. Doesn’t whisper to her friend. Doesn’t pull out her phone. She just smiles—small, genuine, unimpressed—and goes back to her book.
I stand there like an idiot.
The barista calls her name. “Yn?”
She takes her drink, nods at me again, and walks out into the rain. No umbrella. Just her coffee and her book and her brown boots splashing through puddles.
I watch her go. And for the first time in months, I feel something other than the hollow.
It’s not love. It’s not even attraction, exactly. It’s curiosity. A flicker. A tiny flame in a room that’s been dark for so long I’d forgotten what light looked like.
I go back the next day. And the next.
I tell myself it’s for the coffee. But on the third day, she’s there again. Same time. Same book. She’s further along now. I notice because I’ve been thinking about her. About what happens on page 237.
“You’re almost done,” I say.
She looks up. Recognizes me this time. Her eyebrows lift. “You’re observant.”
“I’m a lot of things.”
She laughs. It’s not a polite laugh. It’s a real one. A little crooked. A little surprised, like she didn’t expect to make it.
“What’s your name?” she asks.
I hesitate. Always the hesitation. Because Harry comes with baggage. Harry comes with headlines and ex-girlfriends and memes about my broken heart. But she’s looking at me like she genuinely doesn’t know. Like I’m just a guy in a hoodie who likes Americanos.
“Harry,” I say.
She nods. “I’m Yn.”
“I know. I heard the barista.”
“Right. Creepy.”
“I prefer attentive.”
She smiles again. And that’s it. That’s the moment I fall.
Not slowly. Not reasonably. I fall like a piano pushed out a window. Fast, loud, and with absolutely no way to stop it.
We start meeting at the coffee shop every day. Then for walks. Then for dinner. She doesn’t ask about my job. Doesn’t Google me—or if she does, she never mentions it. She treats me like I’m normal. Like I’m just a person. And God, I’ve missed that. I’ve missed it so much I could cry.
She talks about her life. She’s a textile designer. She travels for work, which is why she keeps appearing in different cities. We keep crossing paths. I start rearranging my tour schedule to align with hers. Jeff raises an eyebrow but says nothing. He’s just glad I’m smiling again.
And I am smiling. Real ones. The kind that reach my eyes.
But here’s the thing I don’t tell anyone. Not even Jeff. Not even my therapist, who I’ve started ghosting.
Yn is not a person to me.
She’s a solution.
I don’t realize it at first. It feels like falling in love. The racing heart. The obsessive thinking. The way I check my phone every thirty seconds to see if she’s texted. The way I rearrange my entire day around a thirty-minute window when I know she’ll be free.
This is what love feels like, I tell myself. This is what I’ve been missing.
But it’s not love. It’s desperation.
She’s a wound dressing. A splint on a broken leg that needs surgery. She’s the warm blanket I throw over a radiator that’s leaking carbon monoxide. I’m not healing—I’m distracting. And she’s too kind, too gentle, too fucking gracious to notice.
Or maybe she notices. Maybe she’s just too polite to say anything.
One night, we’re in my hotel room. She’s curled up on the couch, sketching something in a notebook. I’m watching her. I do that a lot now. Watch her. Analyze her. Catalog every micro-expression, every shift in her breathing, because I’m terrified she’s going to leave. That she’s going to wake up one morning and realize I’m not worth the trouble.
“You’re staring,” she says without looking up.
“You’re beautiful.”
She smiles, but it’s tight. “You say that a lot.”
“Because it’s true.”
She puts her pencil down. Looks at me. Really looks. “Harry. Can I ask you something?”
My stomach drops. This is the moment. This is where she says I think we should slow down or I need some space or I’ve met someone else.
“Anything,” I say. My voice is steady. My hands are not.
“When’s the last time you were alone? Like, truly alone. Not working. Not with me. Just you.”
The question hits me like a door slamming shut.
I try to think. Before her, I was alone all the time. Alone in hotel rooms. Alone in my head. But I hated it. I hated the silence because the silence had teeth. It would whisper all the things I was trying not to hear. She left you. They’re laughing at you. You’re not enough. You’ll never be enough.
“I don’t know,” I admit.
Yn tilts her head. “That’s not healthy, Haz.”
Haz. She calls me Haz. It makes my chest ache.
“I like being with you,” I say. Too fast. Too fervent. “You make everything better. The noise in my head—it goes quiet when you’re around. You’re like… you’re like a cure.”
She flinches.
It’s small. Almost imperceptible. But I see it. And something cold slithers down my spine.
“I’m not a cure, Harry,” she says softly. “I’m a person.”
“I know that.”
“Do you?”
The room goes very still. The rain against the window sounds like applause. Or gunfire. I can’t tell anymore.
I want to say yes. I want to say of course I know you’re a person, I love you, I love everything about you, the way you laugh, the way you bite your lip when you’re concentrating, the way you always leave the last sip of coffee in the cup because you say it’s ‘too sad’ to finish.
But the words won’t come. Because some part of me—the honest part, the one I’ve been smothering for months—knows she’s right.
I don’t see her. I see a function.
I see someone who can hold my hand during panic attacks. Someone who can make me feel wanted when the rest of the world has made me feel like a joke. Someone who can fill the hole that Eleanor left.
But that’s the problem, isn’t it? Holes don’t get filled. They get lived with. And I haven’t learned how to live with mine. I’ve just been trying to bury it under the weight of someone else’s presence.
Things get worse before they get better.
I start needing her more. Not wanting—needing. I call her at 2 a.m. when the thoughts get loud. I show up at her Airbnb unannounced. I get short when she mentions other plans, other people. I don’t shout. I’m not cruel. But I go quiet. And my quiet is louder than any scream.
“I’m going to dinner with a friend tomorrow,” she says one afternoon.
“Which friend?”
“Lena. From university.”
“Male or female?”
She pauses. “Female. Not that it matters.”
“It doesn’t,” I say. But my jaw is tight. My hands are fists in my pockets.
She sees it. She always sees it.
“Harry.” Her voice is careful. Like she’s talking to a spooked horse. “You’re doing it again.”
“Doing what?”
“Clinging.”
The word lands like a slap. Clinging. That’s what she called it. Not loving. Not caring. Clinging.
I want to be angry. I want to tell her she’s wrong. That I’m just passionate. That I’ve never felt this way about anyone, and it’s terrifying, and that’s why I act the way I do.
But I hear Eleanor’s voice in my head. “You’re too much, Harry. You love too hard. It’s suffocating.”
She said that to me. Three weeks before she left. And I laughed it off. I said, “There’s no such thing as loving too hard.”
But there is. There absolutely is. Because love isn’t supposed to feel like drowning. Love isn’t supposed to make the other person responsible for your existence.
I’ve been doing to Yn what Eleanor did to me. Not the same way—I’m not using her for fame or status. But I’m using her. Using her presence to medicate a pain she didn’t cause. Using her patience as a substitute for my own healing.
I’m not loving her.
I’m consuming her.
That night, I don’t sleep. I lie in bed and stare at the ceiling and think about all the ways I’ve gotten this wrong.
She’s not my cure. She was never supposed to be my cure. And by treating her like one, I’m putting her in a cage. The same cage I was in with Eleanor. The cage where one person’s entire emotional stability depends on the other.
If I stay—if I keep holding on this tight—I will break her. Not intentionally. But I will. Because no one can be someone else’s reason for living. That’s not love. That’s a hostage situation.
I meet her at the park the next day. I chose the park because it’s public. Neutral. And because I know myself. If we’re in a hotel room, if we’re alone, I’ll cave. I’ll hold her and tell her I’m sorry and promise to change, and then nothing will change, because change isn’t something you promise. It’s something you do.
She’s sitting on a bench, feeding crumbs to a pigeon. She looks up when I approach, and her face does that thing—the soft thing, the open thing—that makes me want to forget everything I came here to say.
But I don’t. For once, I don’t.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hey.”
I sit down next to her. Not too close. I leave a foot of space. It’s the first time I’ve sat this far from her since we met, and it feels like miles.
“You look serious,” she says. “Should I be worried?”
“No.” Pause. “Yes. I don’t know.”
She waits. She’s good at waiting. I’m not.
I take a breath. The kind my therapist taught me. In through the nose, out through the mouth. It still doesn’t work. But I try anyway.
“Yn, I need to tell you something. And it’s going to hurt. And I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Her smile falters. “Okay.”
“I’m not well.”
The words come out raw. Unvarnished. I don’t dress them up with charm or deflection. I just say them.
“I know,” she says quietly.
“No, I don’t think you do. Or maybe you do, and you’ve just been too nice to say anything. But I’m not well. I haven’t been well since Eleanor left. Probably before that, if I’m honest. And when I met you, I thought—I told myself—that you were the answer. That you were what I’d been looking for. The missing piece.”
Her eyes are wet now. But she doesn’t interrupt.
“But you’re not a piece, Yn. You’re a whole person. And I’ve been treating you like a bandage. Like a pill I can take to make the bad feelings go away. And that’s not fair. That’s not love. That’s just me being too scared to sit with my own shit.”
I’m crying now. I didn’t notice when it started. The tears are hot on my face, and my nose is running, and I probably look like a disaster. But I don’t care. For the first time in months, I don’t care about looking like anything.
“I’ve been clinging to you,” I continue. “And clinging isn’t loving. Clinging is surviving. And you deserve better than to be someone’s life raft. You deserve someone who’s whole. Or at least someone who’s trying to be whole on their own, not through you.”
She’s crying too now. Silent tears tracking down her cheeks. She doesn’t wipe them away.
“What are you saying?” she whispers.
My heart splinters. I can feel it breaking in real time. Not like Eleanor—that was a slow rot. This is a clean snap. A bone breaking so it can heal straight.
“I’m saying I need to step back.”
She inhales sharply. “Step back how?”
“I don’t know. I don’t have a plan. I just know that I can’t keep using you as my cure. Because one day you’ll get tired of being used. And you’ll leave. And I’ll be right back where I started, except this time I’ll have hurt you too. And I can’t—I can’t do that. I can’t be the person who hurts you.”
The pigeon scuttles away, startled by the weight of everything unsaid.
Yn looks down at her hands. They’re trembling. I want to hold them. I want to pull her close and tell her I take it all back. That I didn’t mean it. That we can pretend I never said any of it.
But that’s the clinging talking. The part of me that would rather be unwell with her than well alone.
“How long?” she asks.
“I don’t know.”
“A week? A month? A year?”
“I don’t know,” I repeat. And the not-knowing is the worst part. Because I can’t promise her a timeline. I can’t promise her anything except that I’ll try. And “trying” is such a small word for such a monumental thing.
She stands up. Brushes the crumbs off her jeans. And for one horrible second, I think she’s going to walk away. That I’ve ruined it. That I’ve pushed her too far.
But she doesn’t walk away. She turns to face me. And her face is sad—so sad—but it’s not angry. It’s not bitter. It’s the face of someone who understands something I’m only beginning to.
“Harry,” she says. “I want you to know something.”
“Okay.”
“I wasn’t trying to fix you. I never was. I just liked you. The real you. The one who quotes bad poetry and makes up songs about the barista’s mustache and cries at dog commercials. That’s who I fell for. Not a project. Not a broken thing to mend.”
My throat closes up.
“But,” she continues, and her voice wobbles, “you’re right. You can’t love me the way I deserve right now. And I can’t love you the way you deserve if I’m just… filling a hole. That’s not partnership. That’s codependency.”
She’s read about this. I can tell. Or maybe she’s just smarter than me. More honest.
“So I’ll go,” she says. “Not because I want to. But because you asked me to. And because I think—I hope—that one day, you’ll be ready. And maybe I’ll still be around. Or maybe I won’t. But either way, you’ll be okay. You have to believe that.”
She leans down and kisses my forehead. Just a brush of her lips against my skin. It’s the gentlest thing anyone has ever done to me.
And then she walks away.
I watch her go. Her brown boots. Her leather satchel. The way she tucks her hair behind her ear even though it’s not windy.
I don’t call after her. I don’t run.
I sit on the bench. And I let myself feel it. The hollow. The ache. The screaming loneliness that I’ve been trying to drown with her presence.
It’s unbearable. For the first ten minutes, I think I might actually die. My chest is a vice. My hands are shaking. Every instinct is telling me to run after her, to apologize, to beg her to come back.
But I don’t.
Because this—this unbearable, horrible, gut-wrenching aloneness—is the thing I’ve been running from. And if I don’t learn to sit with it now, I’ll never learn. I’ll just keep bouncing from person to person, using them up, burning through their kindness until there’s nothing left but ash.
I close my eyes. The rain starts again. Soft at first, then harder.
I let it soak me.
Three months later, I’m in a different city. A different hotel room. But this time, the curtains are open. The sun is coming in.
I’ve been seeing a therapist. Regularly. Not canceling. Not lying. I’ve been doing the work—the ugly, boring, relentless work of untangling my worth from other people’s opinions. From Eleanor’s betrayal. From the comments that still pop up on my phone (though I’ve gotten better at not looking).
I still have bad days. Days when the hollow feels ocean-deep. Days when I want to call Yn. I still have her number saved. Yn — honey eyes. I scroll past it sometimes. Let my thumb hover over the call button.
But I don’t press it. Not yet.
Because I made a promise. Not to her—to myself. That I wouldn’t reach out until I could do it without needing her to save me. That I wouldn’t love someone else until I’d learned to love the parts of myself that I’d been trying to bury.
It’s slow. God, it’s so slow. Some days I feel like I’m making no progress at all. But other days—like today—I wake up and the first thought isn’t I’m not enough. It’s just Good morning.
And that’s something.
I pick up my phone. Not to call her. Just to write something down. A lyric. A fragment.
“I was looking for a cure in the shape of you. / But the only way out of the dark is through.”
It’s not good. Not yet. But it’s honest. And honesty is the thing I’m learning to value most.
I set the phone down. I get out of bed. I make coffee. I open the curtains wider.
The world is still there. Waiting.
And somewhere out there, so is she. Maybe. I don’t know. I can’t control that part. All I can control is the work. The sitting. The breathing.
Warnings: None ;) Just God forbid a guy makes a podcast!!!
Prompt: Harry decides the world needs to hear his opinions-- he begins a podcast giving HIS advice to people's problems and what HE thinks they should do.
◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊
It started, as most of Harry’s questionable ideas did, with a cup of tea and a thought he refused to let go of.
“I think,” Harry said, very seriously, from across the kitchen island, “the world needs more guidance.”
You didn’t even look up from your phone. “Mm.”
“Proper guidance,” he continued, pacing now. “Gentle, thoughtful, honest advice. People are overwhelmed. They don’t know what to do.”
“Mhm.”
“And I,” he said, placing a hand dramatically over his chest, “have opinions.”
That made you look up.
“…Oh no.”
Harry frowned slightly. “What do you mean, ‘oh no’?”
You set your phone down slowly. “Every time you start a sentence like that, something unhinged follows.”
“It’s not unhinged,” he said, mildly offended. “It’s helpful.”
You stared at him.
He stared back.
“…What are you about to do?” you asked.
Harry’s lips twitched.
And that’s when you knew.
“Oh my God,” you whispered. “You’re about to do something.”
“I’m starting a podcast.”
Silence.
Just… complete silence.
You blinked once. Twice.
“…A podcast.”
“Yes.”
“Harry.”
“Yes, love?”
“You don’t even like answering your emails.”
“That’s different.”
“How?”
“Emails are… structured,” he said vaguely. “This would be conversational.”
You let out a slow breath. “What kind of podcast?”
Harry lit up.
“Advice.”
You leaned back in your chair. “Advice.”
“Yes! People write in, tell me their problems, and I tell them what I think they should do.”
You stared at him like he’d just announced he was opening a medical practice.
“…You’re not qualified for that.”
“I’m alive,” he said. “That counts.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“I’ve experienced things,” he insisted.
“Harry, everyone has experienced things.”
“Exactly! And now I can share my experiences.”
You pressed your fingers to your temples. “This is a terrible idea.”
“It’s a brilliant idea,” he corrected.
“No, it’s not.”
“Yes, it is.”
“No—”
“God forbid a guy can’t make a podcast,” he muttered under his breath.
You froze.
“…Did you just—”
“I’m just saying,” he continued, louder now, “if a woman can journal her feelings, why can’t a man speak his truth into a microphone?”
You stared at him, then burst out laughing.
“Oh my God. You’re serious.”
“Very.”
“You’re going to sit there and give people life advice.”
“Yes.”
“Publicly.”
“Yes.”
“On the internet.”
“Yes.”
“…I can’t wait to watch this crash and burn.”
Harry grinned. “You say that now.”
—
Three days later, your living room looked like a low-budget recording studio.
There was a microphone. A stand. Headphones. A notebook filled with what Harry claimed were “structured thoughts” but were mostly doodles and phrases like “be kind but firm???” and “maybe tea analogy here”.
And Harry—sitting cross-legged on the couch, adjusting the mic like he’d been doing this his whole life.
You stood in the doorway, coffee in hand, taking it all in.
“This is really happening,” you said.
“Mm,” he hummed, focused. “Do I look professional?”
“You look like you’re about to start a YouTube apology video.”
He gasped. “That’s offensive.”
“It’s accurate.”
He ignored you, slipping the headphones on. “Alright. Quiet on set.”
“This is our living room.”
“Quiet on set,” he repeated.
You smirked but stayed quiet, leaning against the wall as he hit record.
There was a beat.
Then—
“Hello,” Harry said, voice suddenly softer, smoother, radio-ready. “Welcome to Harry’s Slice of Life.”
You had to physically bite your lip to keep from laughing.
“I’m Harry,” he continued, “and today… we’re going to talk about your problems.”
You snorted.
He shot you a look but kept going.
“Now, I’m not a professional,” he said, “but I do have thoughts. And sometimes… that’s enough.”
You shook your head, smiling despite yourself.
“Let’s begin.”
He picked up a piece of paper.
“Our first message,” he read, “is from—anonymous. ‘Hi Harry, I’ve been seeing someone for a few months, and they’re lovely, but I don’t feel a spark. Should I keep trying or end it?’”
He leaned back slightly, thoughtful.
“Alright,” he said. “Here’s the thing.”
You crossed your arms, curious now despite your skepticism.
“You can’t force a spark,” Harry said gently. “You can nurture it, sure. Give it space, give it time—but if it’s not there at all…” He shook his head. “You deserve to feel something. And they deserve someone who feels it too.”
…Okay.
You blinked.
That was… actually decent.
“But,” he added, pointing at the mic like the listener could see him, “don’t rush it either. Sit with it. Ask yourself if it’s nerves, or if it’s truly nothing. Be honest. Not brutal—just honest.”
You shifted slightly.
“…Huh.”
He glanced at you, catching your expression, and smirked.
“Surprised?” he mouthed.
You rolled your eyes.
He looked back at the mic.
“And if you do end it,” he continued, “be kind. There’s no need to make someone feel small just because your feelings aren’t big.”
Your chest softened a little.
He moved on to the next one.
“This one says, ‘My best friend is dating someone I don’t trust. Do I say something or stay out of it?’”
He sighed quietly.
“That’s a tricky one,” he admitted. “Because you care, and you want to protect them. But you also have to respect that it’s their life.”
You watched him now, really watched him.
The way he leaned in slightly. The way his voice softened when things got serious. The way he chose his words carefully, like he genuinely didn’t want to hurt anyone—even hypothetical strangers.
“If you say something,” he went on, “say it once. Gently. From a place of love, not judgment. And then… you let them decide. You stay. You support. You don’t abandon them just because they didn’t listen.”
You swallowed.
Okay.
That was… good.
Annoyingly good.
He finished the episode about twenty minutes later, ending with:
“Take care of yourselves. And each other. And maybe drink some water. Goodbye.”
He hit stop, pulling the headphones off with a satisfied sigh.
“Well?” he asked.
You took a slow sip of your coffee.
“…I hate that I didn’t hate it.”
His grin was immediate. “You liked it.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You implied it.”
“I said I didn’t hate it.”
“That’s basically love.”
You rolled your eyes. “Don’t push it.”
He stood, stretching. “It’s going to do well, you know.”
You laughed. “Alright, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
“People need me.”
“People do not need you.”
“They absolutely do.”
“Harry.”
“Yn.”
You shook your head, smiling despite yourself. “You’re unbelievable.”
—
Two weeks later, it had… traction.
Actual traction.
Messages were coming in—a lot of messages.
Your email was flooded. His DMs were worse. People were sending voice notes, paragraphs, entire life stories.
And Harry?
He was thriving.
“I’ve got a really good one for today,” he said, pacing again, phone in hand. “Listen to this—‘Hi Harry, I keep going back to someone who isn’t good for me. How do I stop?’”
You leaned against the couch, watching him. “Let me guess. You’re going to tell them to ‘choose themselves.’”
He paused.
“…Well, now I can’t say it.”
You smirked. “Predictable.”
“It’s not predictable, it’s true.”
“It’s cliché.”
“It’s a cliché because it’s correct,” he shot back.
You laughed. “Fair.”
He ran a hand through his hair, already slipping into that thoughtful headspace. “But I’ll say it better.”
“Oh, I’m sure you will.”
—
Recording days became a thing.
You’d sit nearby, pretending not to listen—but always listening.
And Harry… Harry had this way of speaking that pulled people in.
Softly pushy. Gentle but firm.
“You know what you should do,” he’d say sometimes. “You’re just afraid to do it.”
Or—
“Staying somewhere that hurts you isn’t loyalty. It’s self-neglect.”
Or—
“You don’t have to be perfect to be worthy. You just have to be honest.”
And every time, you’d feel it a little.
That quiet oh settling in your chest.
One night, after he finished recording, you found yourself sitting beside him on the couch.
He glanced at you. “What?”
You hesitated.
Then—
“…Can I ask you something?”
He softened instantly. “Always.”
You picked at the sleeve of your sweater. “Hypothetically.”
He smiled slightly. “Of course.”
“What if,” you said slowly, “someone feels like they’re… not doing enough? Like they’re always behind, or failing, even when they’re trying?”
Harry didn’t answer right away.
He just looked at you.
Really looked at you.
Then he set his phone down.
“Come here,” he said quietly.
You frowned. “Harry—”
“Come here.”
You sighed but shifted closer.
He reached for your hand, thumb brushing over your knuckles.
“You’re not behind,” he said gently.
You huffed. “You don’t even know the full—”
“I don’t need to,” he said. “I know you.”
Your throat tightened.
“You care,” he continued. “You try. You show up. That’s not failing.”
You looked down.
“It just doesn’t feel like enough sometimes,” you admitted.
He tilted his head slightly. “Enough for who?”
You didn’t answer.
He squeezed your hand.
“You don’t have to earn your worth,” he said softly. “You already have it.”
Your eyes stung a little.
“…Do you say that to everyone on your podcast?” you asked, trying to lighten it.
He smiled. “Only the important ones.”
You rolled your eyes, but you leaned into him anyway, resting your head on his shoulder.
“Don’t let this go to your head,” you muttered.
“Too late,” he said.
You smiled.
Because of course it was.
Because of course he’d start a podcast.
Because of course he’d turn it into something unexpectedly… meaningful.
And because of course—
He’d somehow make you feel a little more okay, just by talking.
Genre: Angst, Coming-Of-Age, Domestic Angst, Family Angst, Teenage Angst, Tension, Slow-Burn Angst, Family Tension
Word Count: ~5k words
Warnings: Mentions of emotional neglect, numbness, depression, mental exhaustion, isolation and feeling unseen
Prompt: Renee-- now settled into New York life, believes she's moving on with her life away from her father Harry-- until he comes back and decides to reconnect with his estranged daughter, neither one realizing how numb Renee truly is to his advances now.
◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊
(You guys wanted me to make a part 2 to this and so using this song that I also loved, here is Renee Styles once again, just in a different shade ;))
Entry One: September 12th. 11:23 PM. My dorm room, Lower Manhattan.
Dear Diary,
I've been in New York for twenty-seven days, and I've discovered something strange: you can be surrounded by eight million people and still feel like you're floating in a soundproof glass box.
My roommate, Jess, is from Portland. She has purple hair and a nose ring and she plays the ukulele badly at 2 AM and apologizes for it at 3 AM. She's the kind of person who leaves Post-it notes on the fridge that say "You're worthy of love!!!" with three exclamation marks and a poorly drawn heart. She's exhausting and wonderful and I think I might love her.
But I haven't told her about Harry.
Not really. She knows my dad is "someone in music"—that's the phrase I use, the one that sounds casual and doesn't invite follow-up questions. She's guessed, I think. She Googled me once when I was in the shower (I saw the search history; she's not subtle). But she hasn't said anything. She just leaves me extra Post-it notes now, the ones that say "I see you" instead of the generic ones.
I don't know why I'm writing this tonight. It's 11:23 PM. I have a creative writing workshop at 9 AM, and I haven't finished the reading. I should be annotating a Joan Didion essay about self-respect. Instead, I'm sitting on my twin XL bed, wearing Jess's oversized hoodie that smells like lavender laundry detergent, staring at my phone.
Harry texted.
Three times, actually. He's been texting more lately. It started a week ago—a photo of a sunset from his hotel room in Tokyo. Then a voice note that I haven't listened to all the way through because his voice sounds the same as it always does: warm and distracted and slightly apologetic. Then tonight: "Thinking of you, bug. How's New York treating my favorite girl?"
My favorite girl.
That phrase used to make my heart flutter. Now it just makes me feel tired.
I haven't responded to any of them. Not because I'm angry—not in the hot, sharp way I used to be. I'm just... numb. Like someone turned down the volume on all my feelings about him, and now they're playing somewhere in the distance, muffled and indistinct.
Is that what healing feels like? Or is that what giving up feels like?
I can't tell the difference anymore.
Jess just knocked on my door frame. She asked if I wanted to go get dollar slices. I said no. She asked if I was okay. I said yes. She didn't believe me—I could see it in her face—but she didn't push. She just said, "Your light is on if you need it," and walked away.
I don't deserve her.
I don't deserve a lot of things.
But I'm too tired to figure out what I deserve tonight. I'm just going to write. Because that's what I do. That's what I've always done. I turn my feelings into words and my words into emails I'll never send, and somewhere in that process, I convince myself I've done something.
Tomorrow I'll respond to his texts. Or I won't. I'll figure it out.
Tonight, I'm going to write him something I'll probably delete in the morning.
Old habits, Diary.
--------
Unsent Email #5
To: Harry
Subject: Twenty-seven days
Hi.
I haven't written to you in almost a month. Not because I stopped thinking about you—I don't think I know how to do that—but because something shifted when I got on that plane. Like the girl who wrote those four emails was someone I used to know. A younger sister. A ghost.
New York is loud. It smells like garbage and pretzels and possibility. I walk down streets where no one knows my name, and I feel, for the first time, like I'm not performing. Like I'm just Renee. Not your daughter. Not the girl with the famous dad who's never around. Just a girl with a secondhand winter coat and a backpack full of library books and a very confusing relationship with her own heart.
I should respond to your texts. I know that. You're trying. I can see you trying. The sunset photo, the voice note, the "thinking of you"—those are things a dad does. Things you do when you remember that I exist and feel guilty about it.
But here's the truth, Dad: I don't know how to talk to you anymore.
Not because I hate you. I don't. I wish I did. Hatred would be easier. Hatred has edges. Hatred knows what it wants.
I'm just... tired. So tired. The kind of tired that sleep doesn't fix. The kind of tired that lives in your bones and makes everything feel heavy.
I started writing a poem in my workshop about a girl who waits by a window. My professor said it was "evocative but emotionally withholding." She said, "What is she waiting for?" She said, "Why won't you tell us?"
I didn't know how to answer. Because the girl is me. And what she's waiting for—what I've been waiting for—is something I'm not sure exists anymore.
I think I'm starting to accept that you're never going to be the dad I needed. Not because you're bad. Not because you don't love me. But because you can't. The machine is too big. The fans need you. The music needs you. The world needs you. And I'm just one person, standing in the wings, holding a guitar pick from three years ago.
I don't want to wait by the window anymore.
I don't know what that means for us. I don't know if it means I stop answering your texts, or if I answer them with short, polite responses that don't require anything of me. I don't know if it means I stop loving you—I don't think I can stop loving you—or if it just means I stop expecting.
Maybe that's it.
Maybe I'm not giving up on you.
Maybe I'm just giving up on the version of you I invented.
I'll text you tomorrow. Something short. Something easy. I'll tell you New York is fine. I'll tell you I'm fine.
Because that's what we do, isn't it? We tell each other we're fine, and we believe it because the alternative is too big to carry.
I'm not fine.
But I'm also not not fine.
I'm just here.
And I guess that has to be enough for now.
Renee
---------
Entry Two: September 28th. 8:14 PM. Washington Square Park, on a bench that's sticky with something I'm trying not to identify.
Dear Diary,
I responded to his texts.
Short. Easy. "New York is good. Classes are good. I'm good."
He sent back a string of emojis—the heart hands, the smiling sun, the guitar. It felt like being hugged by a bot.
I didn't cry. That's the strange part. A month ago, I would have cried. I would have stared at those emojis and felt the weight of everything he wasn't saying. But tonight, I just looked at them, shrugged, and put my phone in my pocket.
Jess says I'm dissociating. She learned the word in her psychology class and now uses it like a scalpel, cutting through my bullshit with surgical precision. "You're not fine, Renee. You're just not here."
She's not wrong.
I've been going through the motions. Class. Homework. Late-night ramen with people whose names I'm still learning. I laugh at the right times. I nod when I'm supposed to nod. I'm doing all the things a functional person does.
But I feel like I'm watching myself from across the room. Like I'm a character in a movie, and I've forgotten my lines, so I'm just smiling and hoping no one notices.
Maya called me last night. She asked if I've talked to Harry. I said no. She asked if I was going to. I said probably not. She got quiet—the kind of quiet that means she's choosing her words carefully—and then she said, "Ren, you know you're allowed to be angry, right? Like, actually angry. You don't have to protect him."
And I wanted to be angry. I tried. I sat on my bed and thought about all the missed birthdays, the empty chairs, the videos instead of hugs. I thought about the guitar pick and the star box and all those unsent emails.
But the anger wouldn't come.
It's like I've been holding a match for so long that it burned down to my fingers, and now I can't feel anything anymore.
Maya started crying. She cried. For me. Because I couldn't.
I told her I was fine. She didn't believe me either.
I don't know why I'm telling you this, Diary. Maybe because you're the only one who's been here the whole time. The only witness to all the versions of me I've tried to outgrow.
I'm going to the park. It's cold, and my coat is too thin, and there's a guy playing guitar near the fountain. He's not famous. No one's filming him. He's just... playing. For no one. For himself.
I'm going to sit here and listen.
And maybe, for a few minutes, I'll feel something again.
------
Entry Three: October 12th. 1:47 AM. My bed. Can't sleep. Everything is loud in my head.
Dear Diary,
I went to a Harry Styles concert tonight.
I know. I know how that sounds. I know what you're thinking: Renee, why would you do that to yourself?
I don't have a good answer. Jess found out about him—really found out—when a girl in our building recognized my last name on the mailroom directory. She knocked on our door at 10 PM with a vinyl sleeve and a Sharpie and asked if I could "maybe get this signed sometime." Jess watched the whole thing, her mouth hanging open, and after the girl left, she said, "Renee. What the actual fuck. Your dad is Harry Styles?"
I told her it wasn't a big deal. She said, "You literally never mention him." I said, "There's nothing to mention." She said, "That's the weirdest thing you've ever said."
So I told her. Not everything. Not the star box or the unsent emails or the way I count his hugs in seconds. But enough. Enough that she hugged me for a really long time and didn't say "I'm sorry" because she's smart enough to know that's not what I needed.
She asked if I wanted to go to his show at Madison Square Garden. He's playing three nights. She found tickets on a resale site—nosebleeds, expensive, ridiculous. "Maybe it'll help," she said. "Maybe you need to see him the way everyone else sees him. From a distance. Where he's not your dad. He's just... a guy on a stage."
I said no. Then I said yes. Then I said no again. Then I bought the tickets at 3 AM when my brain wasn't working.
We went tonight.
And Diary... I don't know how to describe it.
The stadium was full. Eighteen thousand people, maybe more. All of them screaming. All of them holding signs. All of them wearing feather boas and rainbow glitter and the kind of hope that looks like desperation if you squint.
And then he came out.
He was so small. From the nosebleeds, he was this tiny figure in a sequined jumpsuit, moving across the stage like a firefly. And the sound—the sound was enormous. The bass vibrated in my ribs. The crowd sang every word. I've never heard anything like it.
I watched him perform "Sign of the Times." I watched him kneel at the edge of the stage and hold a fan's sign that said "You saved me." I watched him cry during "Fine Line"—the beautiful cry, the controlled cry, the one I've seen a hundred times on YouTube.
And for the first time, I didn't feel angry.
I didn't feel sad.
I felt... nothing. And that nothing felt strangely like peace.
Because I realized something, Diary. Sitting there in the nosebleeds, watching eighteen thousand people love a man who can't love them back the way they want—I realized that I'm not special. I'm not the exception. I'm just one of thousands of people who want something from Harry Styles that he can't give.
The difference is, I'm supposed to be his daughter.
But tonight, I stopped being his daughter. I became a fan. Just for a few hours. Just long enough to understand.
He's not trying to hurt anyone. He's not even trying to be distant. He's just... him. And "him" is a person who belongs to the stage. Who belongs to the crowd. Who belongs to the music in a way he's never been able to belong to me.
Jess held my hand during the encore. She didn't say anything. She just squeezed my fingers and let me stare at the tiny figure on the stage, singing his heart out, giving everything he had to strangers who paid hundreds of dollars to feel seen.
I wanted to be angry. I wanted to cry.
But I just sat there. Quiet. Still.
And when the lights came up, I turned to Jess and said, "I'm hungry."
She laughed. She said, "That's the most human thing you've said all week."
We got dollar slices at 11 PM. We sat on the curb and ate pizza and watched the crowd spill out of the Garden, still singing, still glowing. And I thought about all those people going home to their normal lives, carrying a piece of Harry Styles with them like a souvenir.
I've been carrying him my whole life.
Maybe it's time to put him down.
--------
Unsent Email #6
To: Harry
Subject: I saw you tonight
Dad.
I was in the nosebleeds. You couldn't see me. No one could see me. I was just a face in a crowd of eighteen thousand, and for three hours, I let myself forget that you're my father.
You were beautiful. You always are. You danced and you laughed and you told everyone they were enough. You held up a pride flag. You dedicated a song to someone's dead grandmother. You did all the things Harry Styles is supposed to do, and you did them perfectly, and the crowd loved you for it.
I loved you for it too. For a minute. From a distance.
But here's the thing I can't stop thinking about: when you knelt at the edge of the stage and held that girl's sign—the one that said "You saved me"—I saw her face. She was crying. Real crying. The kind with snot and shaking shoulders and no audience. And you looked at her like she was the only person in the world.
I've never seen you look at me like that.
Not once.
And I don't think I ever will.
I'm not writing this to make you feel bad. I'm writing this because I need to say it out loud: I'm done waiting.
I'm done waiting for you to see me the way you see your fans. I'm done waiting for you to be present. I'm done waiting for the phone call that doesn't end with you checking your email. I'm done waiting for a hug that lasts longer than seven seconds.
I'm not angry anymore. I'm just... done.
I don't know what that means for us. Maybe we'll still talk. Maybe we won't. Maybe you'll keep sending sunset photos and I'll keep responding with one-word answers. Maybe we'll both pretend that everything is fine, because pretending is easier than admitting that we don't know how to be father and daughter.
I saw you tonight. Really saw you. And I realized that the man on that stage—the one who gives everything to strangers—is not the man I need. He's not my dad. He's not even close.
My dad would have been at my choir showcase.
My dad would have picked up the bunny.
I'm tired of grieving someone who's still alive.
I'm tired of loving you and hating you and wishing you were different.
I'm just tired.
So I'm going to stop writing these emails. I'm going to stop counting your hugs. I'm going to put the guitar pick in the star box and close the lid and maybe—maybe—I'm going to stop waiting by the window.
You're not coming.
And I think I finally believe that.
Renee
--------
Entry Four: November 5th. 9:14 AM. The dining hall. Coffee that tastes like regret.
Dear Diary,
I didn't send that email.
I saved it in the Drafts folder with the others, and I closed my laptop, and I went to class, and I pretended the last three months hadn't happened.
That's what I do now. I pretend.
Harry has been calling more. Actual phone calls, not just texts. I've let three of them go to voicemail. The fourth one, I answered.
He asked how I was. I said fine. He asked if I was eating. I said yes. He asked if I was happy. I said... I said, "I'm working on it."
There was a pause. A long one. I could hear him breathing on the other end, and I could hear the background noise—someone talking, a door closing, the hum of a city I couldn't identify. He was somewhere. He was always somewhere.
"I miss you," he said.
I didn't know what to say. Because I miss him too. Or I miss the idea of him. Or I miss a version of my life where I believed he could change.
"I miss you too," I said. Because it was true, and because I didn't know what else to say.
We talked for eleven minutes. He asked about my classes. I told him about my creative writing workshop. He said, "That's amazing, bug. You're going to be a writer. I've always known it."
And I wanted to say, You've never read anything I've written. But I didn't. I just said thank you.
He said he might come to New York in December. He has a show in Philadelphia, and he could "swing by" after. He said, "We could have dinner. Like real dinner. Just us."
I said, "That would be nice." And I meant it. And I didn't mean it. Both things were true.
After we hung up, I sat on my bed and stared at the wall for a very long time.
Jess came in and asked if I was okay. I said yes. She said, "You're lying." I said, "I know."
She sat next to me. She didn't say anything else. She just sat there, and after a while, she put her hand on my knee, and I put my hand on top of hers, and we sat like that until the sun went down.
I don't know what I'm doing, Diary.
I don't know if I'm healing or hiding or both.
But I know I'm tired of pretending I don't care.
I care. That's the problem. I care so much that it's hollowed me out, and now there's nothing left but this numb, buzzing emptiness where my feelings used to be.
Harry wants to have dinner. He wants to be my dad. He wants to try.
And I want to let him.
But I also want to protect myself. Because I've done this before. I've believed him before. And every time, I end up back in this same place—waiting by the window, holding a guitar pick, writing emails I'll never send.
I don't know how to do this anymore.
I don't know how to love him without losing myself.
-------
Entry Five: December 10th. 11:03 PM. My dorm room. The day before winter break.
Dear Diary,
He came.
Harry showed up at my dorm at 7 PM. No security. No assistant. Just him, in a baseball cap and a hoodie, looking smaller than he does on stage. He had a bag of takeout from some fancy Italian place, and he said, "I didn't know what you liked, so I got everything."
Jess let him in. She was very cool about it—played it off like meeting a global superstar was a totally normal Tuesday—but I saw her hands shaking when she handed him a water bottle.
We sat on my bed. We ate pasta out of cardboard containers. We talked about nothing: the weather, his tour, my finals, the strange man who lives on our floor and owns fourteen lizards.
And for an hour, it was almost normal.
Almost.
But I kept noticing things. The way his phone buzzed every few minutes. The way he glanced at it, just for a second, before looking back at me. The way he asked questions but didn't quite wait for the answers. The way he was present but also not present, like there was a glass wall between us that neither of us knew how to break.
At one point, he reached out and touched my hand. He said, "I'm really proud of you, Renee."
And I felt... nothing.
Not the warm rush I used to feel. Not the desperate hope. Not even the anger. Just nothing. A flat, empty plain where my feelings used to live.
I said thank you. I smiled. I pulled my hand away to reach for my water.
He noticed. I could see it in his eyes—a flicker of something. Confusion? Hurt? I don't know. I don't care. That's the scary part. I don't think I care anymore.
He left at 9 PM. He hugged me goodbye—eight seconds, I counted without meaning to—and said, "I'll come back. I promise."
I said, "Okay."
We both knew what that meant.
After he left, Jess came into my room. She didn't say anything. She just looked at me, and I looked at her, and she said, "You're going home tomorrow?"
I said yes.
She said, "Are you going to be okay?"
I said, "I don't know."
She hugged me. Her arms were warm. She smelled like lavender. And for a minute, I let myself cry. Not because of Harry. Not because of the dinner or the hugs or the promises. But because I was tired. So, so tired. And I didn't know how to stop being tired.
I'm going home tomorrow. Back to the house with the empty kitchen table and the star box under the bed. Back to the room where I wrote four unsent emails to a man who can't be my dad the way I need him to be.
I don't know what I'm going to do when I get there.
But I know I can't keep going like this.
Something has to change.
------
Entry Six: December 12th. 9:47 PM. My childhood bedroom. The star box is still here.
Dear Diary,
I'm home.
The house feels smaller than I remember. Quieter. There's a layer of dust on the piano, and the fridge is almost empty, and the only evidence that anyone lives here is the stack of mail on the counter—mostly bills, mostly addressed to a person who's rarely here to open them.
Harry isn't here. He's in London for some recording thing. He left a note on the kitchen counter: "Make yourself at home, bug. I'll be back in a few days. Love you. —H"
Make yourself at home.
In my own home.
I laughed when I read it. Not because it was funny. Because it was so perfectly him. He doesn't even know how to be a dad in a note. He signs it like an autograph. The same H. The same flourish.
I went upstairs. I walked past my bedroom—past the seventeen cardboard boxes that are still here, still unpacked, still waiting—and I went to the room I used to write in. The one with the window that faces the street, where I used to sit and watch for headlights that never came.
Everything is the same.
The same wallpaper. The same creaky floorboard. The same emptiness.
I don't know why I expected anything different.
I sat on my bed. I looked at the space under it. And I reached down and pulled out the star box.
It's heavier than I remember. Or maybe I'm just weaker. I don't know.
I opened the lid.
The photo was still there—me on his shoulders, tugging his ear, both of us laughing. The ticket stub. The birthday card signed "Harry" like an autograph. The guitar pick.
And underneath everything, a piece of paper I don't remember putting there.
It's a receipt. From a guitar store in London. Dated three years ago. The same week he left the pick on the kitchen counter.
I stared at it for a long time.
And then, Diary, I did something I've never done before.
I opened my laptop.
I opened the Drafts folder.
And I read through all six unsent emails. Every word. Every confession. Every time I told him the truth when I couldn't say it to his face.
I don't know what came over me. Maybe it was the empty house. Maybe it was the star box. Maybe it was the exhaustion—the bone-deep, soul-deep exhaustion of carrying this weight for so long.
Maybe I'm just tired of being numb.
Maybe I'm tired of protecting him.
Maybe I'm tired of protecting myself.
I scrolled to the last email. The one I wrote after the concert. The one where I said I was done.
And I hovered my finger over the mouse.
I thought about all the years I've spent waiting. All the birthdays. All the empty chairs. All the times I smiled when I wanted to scream. All the times I said "it's okay" when it wasn't. All the times I made myself small so I wouldn't add to his stress.
I thought about the girl in the nosebleeds, watching her father perform for strangers, feeling nothing.
I thought about the star box and the guitar pick and the photo of a man who used to carry me on his shoulders.
And I thought about what Maya said: You're allowed to be angry.
What Jess said: You're not fine. You're just not here.
What I said, in email after email, year after year: I'm tired.
I'm not tired of loving him.
I'm tired of loving him in silence.
I'm tired of writing things I'll never send.
So I'm going to send this one.
Not because I think it will change anything. Not because I think he'll finally see me. Not because I expect an apology or a hug or a phone call that lasts longer than eleven minutes.
I'm sending it because I need to send it.
I need to stop hiding.
I need to stop protecting him from my own truth.
I need to be messy and loud and unfinished, even if it means he reads these words and feels terrible and tries to fix it and fails, because that's not the point anymore.
The point is me.
The point is that I've spent seventeen years waiting for my father to see me, and I'm done waiting.
The point is that I see myself now.
And that has to be enough.
------
Unsent Email #7 (The One I'm Actually Sending)
To: Harry
Subject: The star box
Dad.
I'm in my bedroom. The star box is open on the floor. There's a guitar pick in my hand, and I'm looking at a photo of us from a festival in London, and I'm trying to figure out how to say what I've been trying to say my whole life.
I'm not going to be eloquent. I'm not going to be poetic. I'm just going to be honest.
I love you. I've always loved you. And I've spent my entire life trying to earn your attention, your presence, your seeing me. I've smiled when I wanted to cry. I've said "it's okay" when it wasn't. I've made myself small so I wouldn't add to your stress. I've counted your hugs in seconds. I've saved a guitar pick from three years ago because I couldn't bear to throw away the last physical proof that you were here.
And I'm tired, Dad.
I'm so tired.
I'm not writing this to hurt you. I'm writing this because I can't keep carrying it anymore. I can't keep writing emails I'll never send and putting them in a folder called "Drafts" like that counts as courage. I can't keep waiting for you to be the dad I needed when I was six, or ten, or fifteen, or seventeen.
I don't know if you can be that dad. Maybe you can. Maybe you can't. Maybe the machine is too big and the fans need you too much and the music won't let you go. I don't know. I've stopped trying to figure it out.
What I know is this: I'm done waiting.
I'm done waiting for you to see me the way you see your fans. I'm done waiting for you to be present. I'm done waiting for the phone call that doesn't end with you checking your email. I'm done waiting for a hug that lasts longer than seven seconds.
I'm not angry. I'm not even sad. I'm just... done.
I'm going back to New York in a few weeks. I'm going to keep writing. I'm going to keep trying to become the kind of person who doesn't measure love by how many seconds a hug lasts. I'm going to keep failing and trying again, because that's what people do.
And I'm going to keep loving you. I don't know how to stop. But I'm going to love you differently. From a distance. Without expectations. Without the desperate, aching hope that you'll finally show up.
I'm letting go of the version of you I invented.
I'm keeping the real you—flawed and distant and trying, maybe, in your own way.
But I'm not waiting anymore.
I'm putting the guitar pick back in the star box. I'm closing the lid. I'm going to sleep in my childhood bedroom one last time, and tomorrow, I'm going to get on a plane and go back to my life.
The life I'm building for myself.
Without waiting.
I love you, Dad.
But I love myself more.
Renee
-----
Entry Seven: December 13th. 7:23 AM. The same bedroom. The same box. The same girl—but different.
Dear Diary,
I pressed send.
I sat on my bedroom floor at 2 AM, surrounded by cardboard boxes and silver Sharpie stars, and I pressed send on an email I've been writing my whole life.
I don't know if he'll read it. I don't know if he'll respond. I don't know if anything will change.
But here's what I do know: I changed.
Last night, after I pressed send, I sat with the star box open in front of me. I took out the photo—me on his shoulders, tugging his ear, both of us laughing. I looked at it for a long time. And then I put it back.
Not because I'm done with it. But because I don't need it anymore.
Not the way I used to.
I closed the lid. I pushed the box back under the bed. And I lay down on the same mattress where I've cried a thousand tears over a man who couldn't stay.
For the first time in years, I didn't cry.
I just breathed.
And in the morning, when the sun came up, I got out of bed and packed my suitcase. I left the star box where it was—a time capsule of all the things I never said, and the one thing I finally did.
I'm going back to New York today.
Back to my dorm room and my purple-haired roommate and my creative writing workshop. Back to dollar slices and late-night ramen and the slow, messy work of becoming myself.
I don't know if Harry will respond to my email. I don't know if he'll show up at my dorm with another bag of takeout and another promise he can't keep.
I don't know anything, Diary.
But for the first time, that feels okay.
Because I'm not waiting anymore.
I'm just living.
And maybe—just maybe—that's enough.
— Renee
P.S. The guitar pick is still in the box. I couldn't bring myself to take it out. But I also couldn't bring myself to hold onto it anymore. So I left it there, with the ticket stub and the birthday card and the photo of a man who used to carry me on his shoulders.
He's not coming to pick it up.
And I'm not waiting for him to.
P.P.S. My phone just buzzed. It's probably Jess, asking what time my flight lands. Or Maya, checking in. Or Harry.
I'm not going to check.
Not yet.
Not because I don't care.
But because I need to prove to myself that I can wait.
Warnings: Mentions of emotional neglect, sadness, depression, loneliness, heartache and deep inner angst
Prompt: 17-year-old Renee Styles is about to deploy out to New York for college, but still carries unaddressed wounds from Harry's own neglect from having millions of fans who seem to love him more than Renee feels from him.
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(Had a sad-girl song night last night and when I heard the song Begged.... oh my gosh did it get me in my feelings!!! Enjoy this bitter angsty blurb based from it ;))
Title: The Distance Between a Standing Ovation and a Living Room
By: Renee Styles
Entry One: August 14th. 11:43 PM. My bedroom floor, surrounded by things I should be packing.
Dear Diary,
There are seventeen cardboard boxes in my room right now, and I am sitting in the exact center of them, cross-legged, like a very confused spider who forgot how to build a web. In less than forty-eight hours, I get on a plane to New York. New York. As in, the city where people go to become something other than what they were. I keep saying the words out loud when no one is listening. College. New York. You, Renee. You are leaving.
It feels like a magic trick I’m about to perform on myself.
But I can’t pack the last box. It’s the one under my bed, the one I decorated with silver Sharpie stars when I was twelve and still believed that if I wished hard enough at 11:11, my dad would show up to my orchestra concert. The box is full of things I don’t know what to do with: a ticket stub from a show he missed, a birthday card signed with only his first name (Harry—as if he was signing an autograph for a stranger), and a guitar pick he left on the kitchen counter three years ago. I’ve been carrying it around like a rosary.
The thing about Harry Styles is that everyone thinks they know him. Millions of people. They scream his name like it’s a prayer, like he personally reached into their chests and made their hearts beat for the first time. And I get it. I really do. He’s kind on stage. He kneels down to hold signs that say “You Saved My Life.” He wears feather boas and cries during “Fine Line” and tells strangers they are enough.
But here’s the secret that sits like a stone in my throat: He has never once looked at me like I was enough.
Not because he’s mean. That’s the part that makes it impossible to hate him cleanly. He’s not cruel. He doesn’t yell. He doesn’t slam doors. He just… isn’t there. Or when he is there, he’s only half there. His phone buzzes. His manager emails. His fans need him. There’s always a flight to catch, a soundcheck to run, a meet-and-greet where he has to be on. And when he comes home—those rare, glittering weekends—he’s still performing. He asks how school is, but his eyes drift to the window like he’s already composing a melody about leaving.
I learned a long time ago not to show him my sadness. Because when I was fourteen, I tried. I told him, very quietly, that I felt like I was competing with a stadium. He laughed—not meanly, just tiredly—and said, “Ren, you’re my daughter. That’s not a competition.” Then he hugged me for exactly four seconds and went to take a call with his producer.
Four seconds.
I counted.
I still count.
So now I write things instead. Emails I will never send. Letters that live in a folder called “Drafts” on my laptop, which is password-protected because I’m not stupid enough to let anyone see how much I actually love someone who barely notices I’m in the room.
Tomorrow I’ll pack the star box. Or I won’t. Maybe I’ll leave it under the bed like a time capsule of all the things I never got to say.
But tonight, Diary, I’m going to write to him. Just one. Just to see how it feels to say what I mean without the fear of his gentle, distracted eyes sliding off my face.
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Unsent Email #1
To: Harry
Subject: The last time you forgot my birthday
Hi Dad.
I’m not going to send this. I want you to know that first. This is for me. This is the equivalent of screaming into a pillow that smells like someone else’s cologne. But I need you to know—even if you never read it—that I remember everything.
Do you remember my fifteenth birthday? Probably not. You were on tour. You sent a video of yourself singing “Happy Birthday” to my phone at 2 AM, and your eyes were glassy from the stage lights and probably a drink, and you looked so beautiful and so far away that I actually cried into my pillow afterward. Not because I was sad. Because I was angry at myself for being sad when millions of people would kill for a video like that.
I showed it to my best friend, Maya. She said, “That’s so cool, Renee. Your dad is literally Harry Styles.” And I smiled and said, “Yeah. It’s cool.”
But here’s the thing I didn’t say: I don’t want a video. I want you to be at the kitchen table on a Tuesday. I want you to see me fail a math test and not tell me it’s okay because “failure is just part of the creative process.” I want you to ask me a question and actually wait for the answer without checking your phone.
I want you to look at me and not see a responsibility. I want you to see me.
I know you love me. I’m not stupid. You pay for my school. You text me emojis sometimes. You bought me that vintage record player I wanted for Christmas, and you wrote a note that said, “For my favorite girl.” But the note was in your handwriting—the same handwriting you use for autographs. The same loop in the “y.” The same flourish.
Am I an autograph, Dad?
I leave for New York in two days. I’m terrified. And I realized something tonight: I’m not scared of failing. I’m scared that I’ll succeed, and you’ll send a video, and I’ll still feel this way. Like a fan in the front row who never gets picked for a sign.
Anyway. I love you. That’s the stupid part. I love you so much it makes me want to break things.
Renee
P.S. I’m not going to send this.
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Entry Two: August 15th. 6:17 AM. Can’t sleep. Watched the sun rise like it owed me an apology.
Dear Diary,
I didn’t pack the star box. I opened it instead. At 4 AM, because that’s when my brain decides to unpack every emotional suitcase I’ve ever closed.
Inside, underneath the ticket stub and the guitar pick, I found a photo I don’t remember taking. I must have been six or seven. I’m sitting on Harry’s shoulders at some festival in London. His hair is shorter, curlier. He’s laughing at something off-camera, and I’m tugging his ear. We look like a normal father and daughter. Like the kind of people who eat breakfast together on weekends and argue about what to watch on TV.
I stared at that photo for so long that my eyes started to burn.
I think that’s the worst part of having a famous parent. You have all this proof that they can be present. The paparazzi caught him holding my hand when I was four. There’s a video somewhere of him carrying me through an airport, me asleep on his shoulder, him whispering something to my mom that made her laugh. But those moments feel like they happened to someone else. A parallel-universe Renee who didn’t grow up watching her dad wave at strangers who loved him more consistently than he loved her.
I’m not saying the fans don’t deserve his attention. They do. I’ve seen the signs. “Harry, you saved me from my eating disorder.” “Harry, your music helped me come out.” “Harry, I was going to kill myself, and then I heard ‘Sign of the Times.’” That’s real. That matters. And I’m genuinely glad he’s that for people. I really am.
But who is he for me?
I don’t need him to save my life. I just need him to notice that I’m living it.
Maya says I should just tell him. “Renee, he’s not a mind reader. You have to use your words.” And she’s right. She’s always right. But here’s the thing about using your words with someone who has millions of people screaming for his attention every single day: you start to feel like one more voice in a crowd. Like if you ask for something—time, presence, a real conversation—you’re just another demand on an already exhausted man.
And I’ve seen him exhausted. I’ve seen him after shows, backstage, sitting in a corner with his head in his hands, and I’ve wanted to go to him. But there’s always a handler, a publicist, a bandmate, a fan with a VIP pass. And I learned to just… wait. To stand in the wings of my own life, holding my own hand, waiting for my dad to remember that I exist.
The worst part? He always does remember. Eventually. He sends flowers. He calls at 11 PM on a Wednesday and says, “I’m so sorry, bug, it’s been crazy.” He tells me he loves me. He means it. I know he means it.
But meaning it and being there are two different things, Diary.
And I’m tired of knowing the difference.
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Unsent Email #2
To: Harry
Subject: The time you almost saw me cry
Hi.
It’s me again. Still not sending this.
Do you remember the night of my junior year choir showcase? The one where I sang “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac, and I wore that green dress you bought me from that boutique in Italy? You promised you’d come. You said, “I moved my whole schedule, Ren. I’ll be there. Front row. I’ll embarrass you.”
I believed you. That was my mistake.
You didn’t come, obviously. Your flight got delayed. Or your label needed you. Or some other very reasonable, very legitimate thing happened that was not your fault. You sent your assistant, a very nice woman named Priya who clapped politely and took a video on her phone. She gave me a hug afterward and said, “He’s so proud of you.”
I smiled. I said thank you. I went to the bathroom after everyone left and sat on the floor of a stall for twenty minutes, because if I had come out any sooner, I would have started screaming.
Here’s what I wanted to say to you that night: I don’t want your assistant’s hug. I don’t want a video. I want your arms. I want your actual, physical, messy, human presence. I want you to hear me sing a song about change and loss and growing up, and I want you to see me, not as your daughter-the-project, but as a person who is scared and hopeful and trying so hard to be okay even when she’s not.
I sang that song to you, Dad. Every word was for you. “I’ve been afraid of changing.” That was me. That was us.
But you weren’t there.
And the worst part is that I can’t even be properly angry, because you texted me at 1 AM: “I’m so sorry, bug. I hate this. I hate missing things. I love you more than anything.”
And I texted back: “It’s okay. I know you love me.”
But it’s not okay.
I lied.
I’m sorry I lied.
But I’m even more sorry that you believed me.
Renee
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Entry Three: August 15th. 2:14 PM. The kitchen. He’s here. He’s leaving again.
Dear Diary,
He showed up today. Harry. My dad. He flew in this morning—unannounced, because of course he did—to “help me pack” and “have some quality time before I go.” He’s currently on the couch, scrolling through his phone, wearing a cardigan that probably costs more than my first semester’s textbooks.
He brought pastries. He hugged me for seven seconds this time (I counted; old habits). He asked about my dorm. He asked if I’m nervous. He said, “New York is going to love you, Ren.”
And I almost said it. I almost said, But will you?
I didn’t. Because he looks tired. There are circles under his eyes that makeup can’t cover. He’s got that slightly hollow look he gets at the end of a long stretch of touring, where his smile still works but his eyes are somewhere else. Probably writing a song. Probably thinking about a deadline. Probably mentally packing for his next flight.
So I just nodded. I said, “Yeah. I hope so.” And I ate a croissant and pretended that my heart wasn’t doing that thing where it feels like it’s shrinking.
Here’s what I’ve noticed about being around Harry: he’s really good at being present in a room without actually being present. Like, he’ll look at you, and his eyes are warm, and he’ll say the right words, but there’s always a layer of glass between him and the world. I think he learned it from the fame. You have to protect yourself when millions of people want a piece of you. You build a wall.
I just didn’t realize that I’d end up on the other side of the wall with everyone else.
He asked me if I’m excited. I said yes. And I am. God, Diary, I really am. I’m going to study creative writing. I’m going to live in a city where no one knows my last name is Styles unless I tell them. I’m going to be Renee. Just Renee. Not “Harry Styles’s daughter.” Not the girl with the famous dad who’s never around.
Just me.
But there’s this small, horrible part of me that’s scared: what if I get to New York, and I’m still the girl waiting for her dad to notice her? What if you can’t outrun that feeling? What if you just pack it in a box with silver Sharpie stars and carry it with you forever?
He’s leaving in an hour. He has a studio session in L.A. He promised he’d “face-time every week.” He promised he’d “come for parents’ weekend.” He promised.
I want to believe him.
I want to believe him so badly that it hurts.
But I also want to protect myself. So I’m going to smile. I’m going to hug him goodbye. I’m going to say “I love you” and mean it, because I do. And then I’m going to come upstairs and write another unsent email, because that’s the only place I know how to tell the truth.
--------
Unsent Email #3
To: Harry
Subject: You’re sitting in the other room right now
Dad.
You’re literally in my living room. You’re drinking tea. You’re humming something I don’t recognize—probably a new song. And I’m in my bedroom, typing this, because I don’t know how to say any of it to your actual face.
I don’t know why it’s so hard. You’re not scary. You’ve never yelled at me. You’ve never made me feel small on purpose. If anything, you’re too nice. You’re so nice that it’s impossible to fight with you. Because the second I’d bring up something that hurt me, you’d look at me with those big, earnest eyes and say, “I’m so sorry, Renee. I never meant to hurt you.” And then what? What do I do with that? Apologies don’t fill up empty chairs at dinner. Apologies don’t teach you how to ask me about my day without checking Instagram.
I’m not trying to be cruel. I’m trying to be honest.
Do you know that I’ve never once seen you cry? Not really. Not the way normal people cry, with snot and ugly faces and no audience. You cry on stage sometimes, but it’s a beautiful cry. A controlled cry. A cry that makes people feel things. But I’ve never seen you cry because you missed me. I’ve never seen you cry because you realized you forgot my piano recital. I’ve never seen you cry because you’re sorry—really, truly, bone-deep sorry.
Maybe you do cry. Maybe you cry on planes, in the dark, when no one can see. Maybe you have your own star box full of things you never said to your own father. I don’t know. Because you don’t tell me things. You ask about me, but you never share yourself. And I’ve realized that’s part of the distance. You’re not just absent physically. You’re absent emotionally. You give me the polished version of you—the one that signs autographs and poses for photos—but you never give me the messy, tired, scared version.
I want the messy version.
I want the dad who burns dinner and complains about traffic and falls asleep on the couch with his mouth open. I want the dad who doesn’t have a publicist. I want the dad who forgets to be charming.
But maybe that dad doesn’t exist anymore. Maybe the fame ate him. Maybe I’m grieving someone who was always going to leave.
I leave tomorrow. For real. And I’m terrified that I’m going to get on that plane and you’re going to wave goodbye from the driveway, and then you’re going to go back inside and answer emails, and I’m going to spend the next four years of my life trying to become someone you’ll finally see.
What if I become someone great, and you still don’t see me?
What then?
I have to go. You’ll be knocking on my door in a minute to say goodbye. I’ll put my phone away. I’ll smile. I’ll let you hug me. And I’ll pretend that my chest doesn’t feel like it’s caving in.
I love you. I hate that I love you. I love you anyway.
Renee
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Entry Four: August 16th. 6:00 AM. Airport Starbucks. He left already.
Dear Diary,
He didn’t stay the night. Of course he didn’t. He had a 2 AM flight to L.A. He hugged me in the driveway at 11 PM, said, “I’m so proud of you, bug,” and got into a black car that swallowed him whole. I stood there in my pajamas, holding the front door open, watching the taillights disappear, and I felt something crack open in my chest.
Not a dramatic crack. Not a sob. Just a small, quiet fracture. The kind you don’t notice until you try to breathe and it hurts.
I didn’t sleep. I finished packing the star box. I put the photo of us at the festival on top, right where I can see it when I open the lid. I don’t know why. Maybe because that version of Harry—the one laughing, the one carrying his daughter through a crowd—feels like a ghost. And I want to remember that he existed. That it wasn’t all in my head.
Maya picked me up at 4 AM. She drove me to the airport in her mom’s minivan, and we listened to Lizzo and screamed the lyrics, and for twenty minutes, I forgot that my chest hurt. That’s what Maya does. She’s like human ibuprofen.
But now I’m sitting in the terminal, Diary. My flight boards in an hour. And I’m looking at my phone, at the text Harry sent at 1:47 AM: “Can’t wait to see what you become, Ren. The world is yours. Love you forever.”
And I want to scream.
Because I don’t want him to wait to see what I become. I want him to love what I am. Right now. Messy and scared and unfinished and still carrying a guitar pick from three years ago.
I’m going to write him one more unsent email. The last one. And then I’m going to turn off my phone, get on that plane, and try to become someone who doesn’t need her father’s approval to feel whole.
But I don’t know if that person exists yet.
I guess I’m going to New York to find out.
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Unsent Email #4 (The Last One)
To: Harry
Subject: Boarding in 45 minutes
Dad.
I’m at the airport. Gate B17. There’s a family next to me—a mom, a dad, and a little girl who keeps dropping her stuffed bunny. The dad picks it up every single time. He doesn’t look annoyed. He just smiles and hands it back. He’s not famous. No one knows his name. But that little girl will grow up knowing that when she dropped something, her dad was there to pick it up.
I’m not writing this to make you feel guilty. I’m writing this because I need to say it out loud (well, type it out loud) before I leave.
I’m angry at you. I’m so angry. But I also love you so much that I’ve spent years protecting you from my own anger. I’ve smiled when I wanted to cry. I’ve said “it’s okay” when it wasn’t. I’ve made myself small so I wouldn’t add to your stress. And I’m tired, Dad. I’m really tired.
I’m not asking you to quit music. I’m not asking you to stop being Harry Styles. I’m asking you to be my dad. Even if it’s just for five minutes a week. Even if it’s just a phone call where you don’t check your email. Even if it’s just you, sitting in silence with me, not performing, not charming, not being on.
I’m scared to go to New York. I’m scared I’ll fail. I’m scared I’ll succeed and still feel empty. I’m scared that I’ll spend my whole life waiting for you to look at me the way you look at your fans—like I matter, like I saved you, like I’m enough.
You don’t have to save me, Dad. You just have to see me.
I’m not going to send this. I’m never going to send any of these. Because I know you. You’d read it, and you’d feel terrible, and you’d try to fix it, and you’d be present for a week—maybe two—and then the tour would start, or the album would need mixing, or someone would need you more than I do. And I can’t handle that cycle anymore. The hope and the disappointment. The almost.
So I’m going to keep these emails in a folder called “Drafts.” And maybe one day, when I’m older, I’ll have the courage to send them. Or maybe I’ll delete them and finally let go.
But right now, I’m going to turn off my phone. I’m going to get on a plane. And I’m going to try to become the kind of person who doesn’t measure love by how many seconds a hug lasts.
I love you. I always will. That’s the tragedy of it.
Your daughter (not your fan),
Renee
P.S. I kept the guitar pick. I’m not sure why. Maybe because letting go of it would feel like admitting you’re never going to stay.
P.P.S. Please don’t ever find this folder. But if you do: Hi. I’m sorry. I’m also not sorry. I’m just Renee. That’s all I’ve ever wanted you to see.
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Final Entry: August 16th. 10:17 PM. Somewhere over Ohio. (The plane has Wi-Fi, which feels like a cruel joke.)
Dear Diary,
I’m on the plane. It’s dark outside. The woman next to me is asleep, her head tilted against the window, snoring softly. I have my headphones in, but I’m not listening to music. I’m just… sitting here. Watching the little map on the screen show me how far I’ve come.
I wrote four unsent emails today. Four. That’s 2,847 words of things I’ll probably never say to my father’s face. And I thought I’d feel lighter. I thought catharsis was supposed to feel like setting down a heavy bag.
But I don’t feel lighter. I feel… hollow. Like I’ve been carrying this weight for so long that I forgot what my shoulders felt like without it.
But I also feel something else. Something small and stubborn and quiet.
Hope.
Not the kind of hope that says, He’ll change, he’ll come around, he’ll finally see me. That hope died somewhere between my fifteenth birthday video and the empty chair at my choir showcase. This is a different kind of hope. This is the hope that I can change. That I can learn to be enough for myself. That maybe—just maybe—I can go to New York and fall in love with my own life, even if he’s only watching from a distance, clapping from the wings.
I’m still angry. I’m still sad. I still want to shake him and scream, Look at me! I’m right here!
But I’m also 17 years old. I have silver Sharpie stars on a cardboard box. I have a guitar pick in my pocket. I have a folder full of unsent emails that might become a book someday, or might just become a very expensive therapy bill.
And I have New York.
New York, where no one knows my last name. New York, where I can be messy and loud and unfinished. New York, where I can finally figure out who Renee Styles is when she’s not waiting for her father to come home.
I don’t know if I’ll ever send those emails.
But I know I’m going to keep writing. To him. To myself. To the girl I was at six, sitting on his shoulders, laughing at something off-camera.
She deserved better.
And so do I.
The plane is starting to descend. The pilot just said we’ll be landing in forty minutes. Forty minutes until a new version of my life begins.
I’m terrified.
I’m hopeful.
I’m still Renee.
And for the first time in a long time, that feels like enough.
Goodnight, Diary. Goodnight, Dad—wherever you are.
I hope you’re proud of me.
But more than that, I hope one day I’m proud of myself.
Let’s find out.
— Renee
P.S. (The one I’ll never say out loud): I left the star box under my bed. Not because I’m done with it. But because I want to come back to it someday and see how far I’ve come. Or maybe I just want to know there’s a home to return to. Even if he’s not there. Even if he’s never really been there. The box is. The stars are. And somewhere, underneath all the disappointment, I am too.
Warnings: Softness overload, excessive kissing/cuddling, overprotective "Papa Bear" behavior, a microscopic sniffle, Harry being absolutely "gone" for his daughter, tooth-rotting sweetness.
Prompt: In which Harry is completely and utterly wrapped around his three-month-old daughter’s finger. Between debating her future career (and vetoing everything for being "too dangerous") and treating a single sniffle like a national emergency, Harry proves that his heart no longer belongs to him—it belongs to Blair.
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The sunlight in the London townhouse always seemed to pool in the nursery first, as if the day itself was eager to check on her.
Harry was already there. He was always there. He had become a permanent fixture of the rocking chair, his long limbs draped over the velvet upholstery, looking like a discarded couture suit that had been lovingly tossed aside. In his arms, wrapped in a lavender swaddle that seemed to be her favorite colour, was Blair.
She was three months old, a tiny, gurgling miracle with Harry’s exact dimples and a temperament that suggested she already knew she owned the place.
"You’re doing it again," you whispered, leaning against the doorframe with two steaming mugs of tea.
Harry didn’t even look up. He was busy staring at Blair’s hand—specifically, the way her tiny, bird-like fingers were curled around his thumb. "Doing what, love?"
"Worshipping her," you teased, walking over to press a kiss to his temple before handing him his mug. "You’ve been staring at her for twenty minutes. I’ve been timing you."
"Can you blame me, YN?" Harry’s voice was like honey left in the sun—thick, warm, and sweet. He brought Blair’s hand to his lips, kissing each knuckle with a reverence usually reserved for holy relics. "Look at her. She’s... she’s the whole point. I don't remember what I did with my time before she was here. Was I just walking around? Aimlessly? It seems impossible."
You sat on the floor at his feet, resting your head against his knee. "We used to go to dinner, Harry. We went on tours. You wrote albums."
"Frivolous," he murmured, his eyes crinkling as Blair let out a soft, sleepy huff. "Meaningless. This? This is the work. She’s the sun, isn't she? We’re just planets caught in her little orbit."
As Blair began to wake up properly, stretching her legs out like a little starfish, Harry hoisted her up so she was resting against his chest. He looked down at her with a look of such utter, soppy adoration that it made your chest ache.
"What are you going to be, little bee?" he cooed, his nose brushing against her button one. "A world-shaper? A heart-breaker?"
"I think she’s got the hands of an artist," you said, reaching up to tickle her feet. "Maybe she’ll be a painter. We’ll get her a studio in the attic with big skylights, and she can cover everything in charcoal and oil paint."
Harry’s face immediately fell into a pout. "An artist? No, no. Too much brooding. Too many late nights in cold lofts wondering if the world understands your soul. It’s too lonely, YN. I want her to have friends. Happy friends. No starving artists."
You laughed, shaking your head. "Okay, fine. What about a secret agent? She’s already very good at disappearing into the blankets. She could be the next 007."
Harry gasped, pulling Blair closer as if an assassin were already in the room. "Absolutely not. Are you mad? The peril! The high-speed chases! People shooting at my little lady? No. She’s far too precious for espionage. Besides, the suits are too itchy."
"A pop star then?" you suggested, tilting your head. "She’s certainly got the lungs for it. And she’d have the best mentor in the business."
You expected him to beam at this, but instead, Harry looked deeply concerned. He tucked a loose curl behind Blair’s ear, his expression turning protective. "The industry? With these sharks? YN, I love the music, but I don't want her dealing with the schedules. The travel. She’d be exhausted. And the fans... they’d want a piece of her. I’m not sharing her. She’s ours."
"An actress?"
"Too much rejection," he countered instantly. "I won't have anyone telling my daughter she isn't 'right' for a part. She’s the lead in every room she walks into."
"Harry," you giggled, reaching up to stroke his jaw. "You’re finding something wrong with everything. She has to do something."
"She can stay right here," he decided, nodding firmly as Blair grabbed a handful of his cashmere sweater and shoved it toward her mouth. "She can be a Professional Daughter. A Full-Time Doter of Her Parents. I’ll pay her in strawberries and cuddles. It’s a growth industry."
Later that afternoon, the house was quiet. You were tidying up the living room when you heard the low, melodic hum of Harry’s voice coming from the kitchen.
You paused, peeking around the corner. Harry was slow-dancing. There was no music playing, just the rhythm of his own heartbeat. He had Blair tucked under his chin, his large hand supporting her head with such gentleness it looked like he was holding a soap bubble.
He was whispering to her, unaware that you were watching.
"You’ve ruined me, you know," he murmured into her soft hair. "I used to think I knew what love was. I thought it was big and loud and sang from the rooftops. But it’s just you. It’s just your tiny socks and the way you smell like milk and lavender."
Blair made a small, happy sound, and Harry’s entire posture melted. He looked like he might actually cry from the sheer weight of his own affection.
"I’ve spent my life looking for the 'one,' Blair," he whispered. "And your mum, she’s my queen, she’s my soul... but you? You’re the love of my life. You’re the final piece. I’m just a man who belongs to you now. Entirely. Utterly. You’ve got me wrapped around your little finger, and I never want to be let go."
You stepped into the room then, unable to stay away a second longer. Harry looked up, and instead of being embarrassed by his vulnerability, he just smiled—that wide, dimpled, beautiful smile that always made you feel safe.
"She fell asleep," he whispered, though he made no move to put her down.
"You should put her in the crib, Harry. Your back is going to hurt."
"I’m fine," he insisted, swaying gently. "I think... I think I’ll just hold her for a bit longer. Maybe forever. Is forever okay with you?"
"Forever sounds perfect," you replied, wrapping your arms around his waist from behind, pressing your face into his back.
In that sun-drenched kitchen, with the man you loved holding the life you’d created together, the world felt small, quiet, and absolutely complete. For Harry, the stadiums and the lights were a lifetime ago. The only audience that mattered now was fast asleep against his chest, dreaming of the father who would quite literally move the moon if she asked him to.
The grand piano in the living room was usually where Harry went to find his "flow," but lately, it had been repurposed as a staging ground for various plush bunnies and silk baby blankets.
Harry sat on the bench, Blair propped up in a portable bouncer right beside him so he could maintain eye contact with her at all times. He had his notebook out, a pen tucked behind his ear, and his fingers dancing lightly over the ivory keys.
"Okay, listen to this bit, Bee," he whispered, his voice dropping into that low, gravelly register he only used when it was just the three of you.
He played a soft, melodic sequence—something ethereal and sweet. “Golden hair and eyes so bright, keeping watch through the deepest night...”
He stopped, chewing on the end of his pen, his eyes darting to Blair. She let out a tiny, soft hiccup.
Harry froze. His hands hovered over the keys like he was defusing a bomb. "Did you hear that?"
You were curled up on the sofa with your laptop, trying to get some writing done yourself. "The hiccup, Harry? Yes, it was adorable."
"It sounded... wet," he said, his brow furrowing in instant, high-alert concern. He abandoned the piano immediately, sliding off the bench to kneel on the floor in front of her bouncer. "Was it a hiccup or a pre-cough? YN, I think she’s coming down with something. Did we leave a window open? Was the draft too much?"
"Harry, she’s fine," you said gently, leaning over the back of the couch to watch him. "She just ate ten minutes ago."
But Papa Bear had already been activated. He was currently pressing the back of his hand to her forehead, then her cheeks, then her tiny neck, his expression as serious as if he were performing surgery.
"She feels a bit warm. Or maybe cold? She’s clammy. Is she clammy?" Before you could answer, Blair let out a tiny, microscopic sniffle.
Harry’s eyes widened. "BOOM. Sniffle. I knew it."
In a blur of tattoos and cashmere, he had her out of the bouncer and tucked against his chest. He began pacing the room, his hand cradling the back of her head with a possessive grip. "Don't worry, my angel, Papa’s got you. No germs allowed. I’ll fight the germs. I’ll banish them from the house."
"Harry, you're hovering," you giggled, walking over to join them.
"I'm not hovering, I'm monitoring," he corrected, though he was currently kissing the top of Blair's head every three seconds. Kiss. Sway. Kiss. Sway. "Look at her nose. Is it pinker than usual? I’m calling the doctor. No, I’m calling a specialist. The best pediatric lung specialist in the UK."
"It's a sniffle, my love," you said, reaching out to stroke Blair's cheek. "She probably just had a bit of dust in her nose."
Harry pulled her slightly away from your reach—not out of unkindness, but out of a pure, instinctive need to be her primary source of comfort. He was obsessed. He was far past the point of "doting"; he was hers, body and soul.
"I'm going to take her to the steam in the bathroom," he decided, his jaw set in that stubborn, protective line. "And then we’re doing skin-to-skin for the rest of the day. For her immune system. It's science, YN."
An hour later, the "emergency" had passed (mostly because Blair had giggled at Harry when he tried to check her throat with a flashlight). Now, they were back at the piano.
Harry was supposed to be finishing the lyrics, but he was too busy being distracted by her existence. Every time Blair made a sound, he had to stop and shower her with affection.
"You're a thief," he murmured, tickling her tummy until she let out a breathless little shriek of joy. "A little bandit. You stole my heart and you haven't given it back. You aren't even using it! You just keep it in your diaper bag."
He turned back to the piano, trying to focus. “And when the world is loud and gray, I’ll kiss the shadows all away...”
He stopped again, turning to her with an intense look of adoration. "Do you like that? Is it too cliché? You deserve better than clichés. You deserve a new language created just for you."
He leaned in, blowing raspberries on her neck until she was squirming and laughing, her tiny hands grabbing at his rings. Harry’s face was a picture of pure, unadulterated worship. He didn't care about the album. He didn't care about the charts.
"You know," Harry said, looking over at you as you watched them from the doorway, "I don't think I can finish the song."
"Why not? It sounded beautiful."
"Because there aren't enough notes," he said quite seriously, kissing Blair’s palm. "There aren't enough chords in the world to describe how much I love this girl. It’s actually quite annoying. I’m Harry Styles, I’m supposed to be good with words, and she’s reduced me to ‘goo-goo-ga-ga’ and constant heart palpitations."
He pulled Blair up, tucking her under his chin and closing his eyes, breathing her in like she was the very air he required to survive.
"She's mine," he whispered, more to himself than anyone else. "My little Blair. My whole heart."
You walked over and wrapped your arms around both of them, feeling the warmth of your little family. Harry leaned his head against yours, his grip on Blair tightening just a fraction—the ultimate protector, the ultimate "Papa Bear," and the most soppy, in-love father you had ever seen.
Harry was just a puddle of love for his little girl, and.... your family together.
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I just had to add this one in because it's soooo timely and lovey to this blurb!!!!! Also my first dadrry story and I LOVE daddy Harry!!!
Genre: Angst, Coming-Of-Age, Domestic Angst, Family Angst, Hurt Comfort, Teen Angst
Word Count: ~3k words
Warnings: Harry's overprotectiveness, but understandable worry
Prompt: Wayne, Harry's 16-year-old son wants to go with his friends in public, Harry's fears of the paparazzi cause tensions.
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Harry Styles, at forty-two, looked nothing like the boy who’d once torn through stadiums in feather boas and sequined jumpsuits. His hair, now shorter and dusted with grey at the temples, was tied back as he chopped vegetables with the methodical precision of a man who’d traded screaming fans for the quiet hum of a sourdough starter. He wore a simple cream sweater, the sleeves pushed up to his elbows, revealing the faded outlines of tattoos—cherries, a mermaid, a cross—that were now more memory than declaration.
Across the island, his sixteen-year-old son, Wayne, was the human embodiment of restless energy. He had Harry’s sharp cheekbones but his mother’s darker, unruly curls and a jaw that was still figuring out its adult shape. He was scrolling through his phone, his leg bouncing under the marble counter with a frantic, silent rhythm.
“Dad,” Wayne said, not looking up. “We’re going. The crew.”
Harry didn’t stop chopping. “The crew?”
“Yeah. Jamal, Chloe, Ravi, and me. We’re gonna hit that new arcade bar on Shaftesbury. The one that’s all retro. They let under-eighteens in before eight.” He finally looked up, his eyes a plea painted in teenage nonchalance. “It’s Ravi’s birthday thing.”
Harry’s knife paused mid-chop. A tiny piece of red pepper clung to the blade. “The one in Soho?”
“It’s not in Soho. It’s Soho-adjacent. Dad, come on.”
That was the trigger phrase. Dad, come on. Harry had heard it in a thousand different tones over sixteen years—whiny, defiant, sarcastic, hopeful. But today, it landed differently. It landed like a stone in the still water of his carefully constructed peace.
Harry placed the knife down. He didn’t look at Wayne. Instead, he stared at the neat, color-coded rows of vegetables—orange peppers, yellow squash, purple onion—as if they contained the secrets to the universe. “It’s Saturday. It’ll be packed. Foot traffic is a nightmare.”
“Yeah, that’s the point. It’s fun.”
“Wayne.” Harry’s voice had a new quality to it. A tightening. “You know how I feel about the West End on weekends. Too many tourists. Too many cameras.”
Wayne groaned, letting his head fall back. The sound was theatrical, but the frustration beneath it was bone-deep. “Oh my God. The cameras. Dad, I am sixteen. No one cares about the son of a guy who released his last album before I lost my baby teeth. You’re a legacy act, not Harry-freaking-Styles in 2023.”
Harry flinched. He tried to hide it, turning to wash his hands at the sink, but Wayne saw it. They always saw it.
“That’s not the point,” Harry said quietly.
“Then what is the point?” Wayne slid off the stool, his Converse squeaking on the tile floor. He was almost as tall as Harry now, all limbs and unchecked emotion. “The point is I’ve never been to a birthday thing with my actual friends without a blacked-out SUV idling around the corner. Without you texting me every twenty minutes. Without some bloke in an earpiece pretending to be ‘just grabbing a coffee’ but really watching me try a claw machine.”
Harry turned, drying his hands on a tea towel embroidered with a lemon. “That bloke saved you from a man hiding in the school bushes with a telephoto lens when you were eight.”
“I know! I know that! You tell me that every time.” Wayne’s voice cracked, not just in pitch but in spirit. “But I’m not eight anymore. I’m not a cute little accessory. I’m just a tall, awkward kid who wants to play air hockey with his mates without feeling like a prisoner on day release.”
The word prisoner hung in the air. Harry felt it lodge behind his sternum. He looked at his son—really looked at him. The faded band tee (The Strokes, a band Harry had introduced him to). The ripped jeans. The small beaded bracelet on his wrist that Chloe had made him. He looked so normal. So painfully, beautifully normal. And that was exactly the problem.
“It’s not about you being an accessory,” Harry said, his voice softer now. “It’s about what happens when someone recognizes you as my son. They don’t see a kid. They see a headline. ‘Harry’s Boy, All Grown Up.’ ‘Wayne Styles Lets Loose.’ They’ll take your photo while you’re laughing, crop it to make you look drunk. They’ll follow you to the loo, Wayne.”
“Then let them!” Wayne threw his hands up. “Let them take a picture. Who cares? It’s 2026. Paparazzi are dinosaurs. The only people who buy those photos are sad old ladies in Cheshire who still miss One Direction.”
Harry’s jaw tightened. He walked to the French doors that led to the small, walled garden—a sanctuary he’d paid a landscape architect a fortune to make completely invisible from above. He could feel the old panic, the one that lived in his marrow, starting to thrum. It wasn’t about fame anymore. It hadn’t been for years. It was about control. About the illusion of safety. About the nights he’d spent in his twenties, waking up to flashes of light outside his hotel window, feeling less like a pop star and more like a hunted animal.
“You don’t understand what it was like,” Harry said, his back to his son.
“Then help me understand!” Wayne’s voice was raw now, stripped of its teenage irony. “Don’t just protect me from it. Explain it. Because right now, all I see is you being scared of nothing. And all I feel is… trapped.”
Harry spun around. The movement was sudden, violent in its quietness. “Trapped?” he repeated, his voice low and dangerous. “You feel trapped? Do you know what trapped feels like, Wayne? Try being nineteen years old, trying to buy a pint of milk, and having thirty men with cameras shove you against a wall until you drop the bottle and it shatters, and they keep clicking because they want the shot of you looking scared. Try having a woman hide in the boot of your car. Try having your address sold to a fan site for fifty thousand pounds. Try feeling like every pair of eyes on the street is a potential threat. Try having a son and realizing that you’ve passed that curse on to him.”
By the end, Harry was no longer talking to Wayne. He was talking to the ghost of himself at twenty-three, holding a newborn, reading a security report about a kidnapping threat from a deranged fan. His hands were shaking. He hadn’t even noticed he’d crossed the room.
Wayne stood frozen, his back against the refrigerator. His face was pale, the earlier bravado completely gone. He looked small again, despite his height. For a long moment, the only sound was the hum of the fridge and the distant shriek of a gull.
Then Harry saw himself reflected in his son’s eyes. And he didn’t like what he saw. He saw his own father—not the man who’d left, but the man who’d stayed. The man who’d yelled first and thought later. The man he’d sworn never to become.
Harry blinked. The rage drained out of him as fast as it had come, leaving behind a cold, aching shame.
“Wayne,” he whispered. His voice broke on the name.
Wayne didn’t move. His arms were crossed tight over his chest, a shield against the outburst.
Harry took a single step forward, then stopped. He raised his hands, palms out, as if approaching a spooked horse. “I’m sorry. I am so, so sorry. I didn’t mean to—I shouldn’t have yelled. That was not okay.”
Wayne swallowed. His eyes were glassy, but he was fighting it. He’d learned to fight tears early. “You called me cursed.”
“No.” Harry shook his head vehemently. “No, God, no. I said I passed the curse on. That’s my guilt, Wayne. That’s my fear. It has nothing to do with you. You are not a curse. You are the best thing that has ever happened to me. You are the reason I stopped touring. You are the reason I get up in the morning.”
“Then why do you treat me like a glass ornament?” Wayne’s voice was thick. “Why can’t I just live?”
Harry closed his eyes. When he opened them, they were wet. He reached out and gently took his son’s hands, uncrossing his arms. He held them loosely, feeling the knobbiness of knuckles that were still growing.
“Because I’m a coward,” Harry said simply. “When it comes to you, I am a complete and total coward. I spent ten years being brave for millions of people. I sang about being fearless. I wore dresses and didn’t care what anyone thought. But then I had you, and suddenly, the whole world felt like a threat. Every shadow, every stranger, every click of a camera—it’s not my safety I worry about anymore. It’s yours. And I’ve let that fear make me cruel. I’ve let it make me small. And I’ve let it make you feel small, and that is unforgivable.”
Wayne tried to pull his hands away, but Harry held on, softer this time.
“Let me finish,” Harry said. “You want to go to a stupid arcade bar with your stupid friends on a stupid Saturday night because you are sixteen years old and that is exactly what you should be doing. And I am standing here, a forty-two-year-old man, having a panic attack about a hypothetical photographer who might squint in your general direction. Do you see how absurd that is?”
A tiny, reluctant smile tugged at the corner of Wayne’s mouth. “A little bit, yeah.”
Harry laughed—a wet, shaky thing. “A lot bit.” He let go of Wayne’s hands and ran his own over his face. “Here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to go. You’re going to take the tube, not the car.”
Wayne’s eyes widened. “Wait, really?”
“Yes. Take the tube. Be normal. Be a teenager.” Harry pointed a finger at him, his expression turning serious. “But. You keep your phone on. You do not put it on silent. You check it every thirty minutes. Not for me—for yourself. So you know that you’re okay. And if anything feels weird—anything at all—you call me. Not a text. A call. I don’t care if it’s 7 p.m. or 2 a.m. You hear me?”
Wayne nodded, a slow grin spreading across his face. It was the kind of grin that reminded Harry of looking in the mirror twenty-five years ago, right before he stepped onto the X Factor stage. Pure, unguarded hope.
“And Wayne?” Harry added, his voice dropping.
“Yeah?”
“I want you to have fun. I mean it. Don’t think about me. Don’t worry about the what-ifs. Be with your friends. Lose at air hockey. Eat terrible pizza. Be sixteen.”
Wayne hesitated. Then he stepped forward and hugged his father. It was a brief, hard hug—the kind teenage boys give when they still want the comfort but are terrified of seeming to need it. Harry wrapped his arms around him and held on for a second longer than Wayne tried to pull away.
“I love you, Dad,” Wayne mumbled into Harry’s shoulder.
“I love you too, kid. More than you will ever understand. Now go. Before I change my mind.”
Wayne pulled back, grabbed his worn canvas jacket from the hook by the back door, and paused at the threshold. He looked back at Harry, still standing in the middle of the kitchen, looking every one of his forty-two years.
“Hey, Dad?” Wayne said.
“Yeah?”
“You were never a coward. You just cared too much.”
And then he was gone. The back door clicked shut. A moment later, Harry heard the faint sound of the garden gate, then the distant rumble of the Northern line train vibrating through the floorboards.
Harry stood alone in the quiet kitchen. He looked at the half-chopped vegetables. He looked at the tea towel with the lemon. He walked to the window and watched the empty garden, the leaves of the silver birch tree shivering in the breeze.
He pulled out his phone. He didn’t text Wayne—he’d promised not to hover. Instead, he opened the photo album labeled “Wayne” and scrolled to the first picture. A newborn, red-faced and furious, tiny fists clenched, lying on Harry’s bare chest. Harry was crying in the photo. He remembered that moment with perfect, painful clarity. The terror had been enormous. But so had the love. It had swallowed him whole. It had never let go.
That was the thing about fear, Harry thought as he put the phone down and picked up the knife again. Real fear—the kind that came from loving someone more than your own life—it didn’t make you brave. It made you terrified. It made you want to lock the doors and board the windows and never let the world touch them. But that wasn’t love. That was a cage.
And cages, even gilded ones, were still cages.
He resumed chopping pepper. Orange, this time. The knife fell in steady, rhythmic thuds. He would make a stir-fry. He would leave a plate in the oven for Wayne, who would come home smelling of cheap cologne and arcade carpet and teenage sweat. He would ask how it went. He would listen. He would not flinch if Wayne said a stranger had looked at him funny.
At eight-thirty, his phone buzzed. A single text from Wayne: *air hockey champion. also jamal threw up in a bin. 10/10 birthday. call u in a bit.*
Harry smiled. A real smile, the kind that reached his eyes. He typed back: Proud of you. Keep phone on. Love you.
Then he put the phone face-up on the counter, just in case, and turned the stove on.
Outside, the London sky faded from amber to violet. Somewhere in Soho, Wayne was laughing with his friends, the sound swallowed by neon lights and the thrum of a city that didn’t care whose son he was. And for the first time in a long time, Harry Styles let himself believe that maybe—just maybe—that was exactly how it should be.
Prompt: Gracie is a teen who is perpetually embarrassed by her father, Harry's 'fashionable' quirks-- until someone decides to insult him at school. Then she's mad that someone else has the audacity.
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Gracie Styles had perfected the Art of the Eye Roll by the age of fourteen. By sixteen, it had become a martial art—precise, devastating, and deployed with surgical timing. Her primary target, unfortunately, was the man who had given her life, a roof over her head, and an unshakable tendency to wear sequined blazers to parent-teacher conferences.
Harry Styles was forty-two years old and looked every bit the former pop star who had refused to grow up. His hair was still long enough to tuck behind his ears, streaked with silver that he refused to dye. His wardrobe was a chaotic museum of velvet, florals, and the occasional feather boa, which he maintained was "ironic" but wore with such unironic joy that Gracie wanted to disappear into the floor.
The embarrassment had started early. When Gracie was seven, Harry had shown up to her school's "Career Day" dressed as a human disco ball—literally. He'd borrowed a costume from a West End prop shop, complete with mirror tiles that threw fractured light across the entire assembly hall. The other children had been delighted. Gracie had hidden under a chair.
When she was eleven, he'd picked her up from a birthday party wearing a bright yellow suit and a wide-brimmed hat that made him look like a psychedelic garden gnome. Her friends had taken photos. Those photos had ended up on a group chat. Gracie had changed schools the following year, though she'd denied it had anything to do with the hat.
By the time she hit fifteen, she'd learned to manage the situation through strategic distance. She met Harry two blocks away from school. She refused to let him walk her to the door. She begged him—actually got down on her knees and begged—not to wear the patchwork cardigan with the elbow patches shaped like strawberries to the spring musical. He'd worn it anyway, because he was Harry Styles, and Harry Styles did not take fashion advice from fifteen-year-olds, even the ones he'd helped create.
"He's not embarrassing," Gracie would tell her friends, her voice tight with false confidence. "He's just... eccentric. There's a difference."
Her friends, who had seen Harry do the floss dance at a school bake sale while wearing platform boots, were not convinced.
The truth was more complicated than Gracie wanted to admit. Beneath the sequins and the feathers and the inexplicable collection of embroidered vests, Harry was a good father. He showed up. He listened. He made her laugh when she was sad and held her when she cried and never once complained about the three-hour round trip to her fencing tournaments. He just did it all while dressed like a magician who had lost a bet.
But at sixteen, nuance was a luxury Gracie couldn't afford. All she could see was the gap between her life and everyone else's. Her friends' fathers wore sensible polo shirts and drove sensible cars and did not, under any circumstances, release a surprise acoustic album recorded entirely in a bathroom because the "reverb was better." Harry had done that last year. The bathroom album had gone platinum. Gracie had wanted to die.
So she had developed a system. She controlled the variables. She managed the exposure. She kept Harry contained to specific, low-risk environments—home, the cars, the occasional dinner at a restaurant with booths tall enough to hide in. School was off-limits. School was hers.
Which was why, on a gray Tuesday morning in October, Gracie's carefully constructed world came crashing down.
It started in the cafeteria.
Gracie was sitting with her usual group—Maya, Chloe, and a new kid named Sam who was quiet and kind and had a habit of doodling dragons on his math homework. They were picking at the school's version of lasagna, which was mostly cheese and regret, when a voice cut through the noise.
"Is that really your dad?"
The speaker was Leo Hargrove, a junior with the kind of confidence that came from having rich parents and the kind of cruelty that came from never being told no. He was standing at the end of the table, phone in hand, a smirk spreading across his face like oil on water.
Gracie looked up. Her stomach dropped. "What?"
Leo turned his phone around. On the screen was a photo—Harry, leaving a coffee shop that morning, wearing a floor-length leopard-print coat, purple velvet trousers, and what appeared to be a single sequined glove. His hair was windswept. He was laughing at something. He looked, for all the world, like a man who had never experienced shame.
"That's your dad," Leo said. It wasn't a question. "The guy in the cat coat."
Gracie's cheeks flushed hot. "It's leopard. And yes. So what?"
"So nothing." Leo's smirk widened. "Just... wow. I thought my dad was embarrassing with his sandals-and-socks situation. But at least he doesn't look like he escaped from a drag queen's lost luggage."
Maya reached over and squeezed Gracie's hand under the table. Chloe shot Leo a death glare. Sam stopped doodling and looked up, his expression unreadable.
Gracie forced herself to laugh. It was a hollow sound, brittle as old bone. "Yeah, well. He's a former pop star. They're all like that."
"A former pop star who dresses like a parrot exploded on him," Leo said. A few people nearby laughed. Leo's friends—a pack of boys in expensive sneakers—snickered on cue. "Seriously, Styles. Does he own a mirror? Or does he just spin around and wear whatever the sequins land on?"
Gracie's smile froze on her face. The laughter in the cafeteria seemed to swell, filling her ears with static. She could feel everyone looking at her—waiting to see how she'd react, whether she'd cry or snap or just melt into the floor.
Instead, something strange happened. Something she hadn't expected.
She got angry.
Not at Harry. Not at the leopard coat or the velvet trousers or the single sequined glove. At Leo. At his smug, pretty face and his pack of hyena friends and the casual cruelty of making someone else's parent a punchline.
"Shut up," Gracie said.
The word came out low and steady, cutting through the noise like a blade. The laughter died. Leo raised an eyebrow.
"Excuse me?"
"I said shut up." Gracie stood up. She was not tall—she'd gotten her mother's compact frame—but something in her posture made Leo take a half-step back. "You don't get to talk about my dad. You don't know him. You don't know anything about him."
Leo held up his hands in mock surrender. "Whoa. Touchy. I was just making an observation. The guy dresses like a toddler who got into a craft drawer. It's not an insult—it's just a fact."
"It is an insult," Gracie said, her voice rising. "And you don't get to do it. I do. I've earned the right to be embarrassed by my dad. I've spent sixteen years being embarrassed by my dad. I've been humiliated by his fashion choices at school events, family gatherings, and one time at a funeral—don't ask—and I have the scars to prove it. But you?" She pointed a finger at Leo, her hand shaking. "You don't get to waltz in here with your basic khakis and your basic haircut and your basic sense of humor and make fun of him. That's my job. And you're not good enough at it."
The cafeteria was silent now. Even the lunch ladies had stopped scooping.
Leo's face flickered—surprise, then annoyance, then something that might have been respect. "Whatever, Styles. I was just saying—"
"You were just being a jerk," Maya cut in, standing up beside Gracie. "Like always."
"Go away, Leo," Chloe added, also standing. Sam didn't say anything. He just stood up too, his quiet presence an unexpected wall of solidarity.
Leo looked at the four of them—Gracie flushed and furious, Maya with her arms crossed, Chloe glaring, Sam steady as stone—and made a calculation. Whatever he saw made him shrug, shove his phone in his pocket, and walk away. His friends followed, their laughter now uncertain, deflated.
The cafeteria slowly returned to its normal hum. People went back to their lasagna. The moment passed.
Gracie sat down. Her hands were still shaking. Her heart was hammering so hard she could feel it in her throat.
"Gracie," Maya said softly. "That was amazing."
"That was terrifying," Gracie corrected. "I think I blacked out."
"You told off Leo Hargrove in front of the entire junior class," Chloe said, grinning. "You're a legend."
Gracie looked down at her hands. They were still trembling. The adrenaline was fading, leaving behind a strange, hollow feeling—like she'd just run a race she hadn't trained for.
She thought about Harry. About the leopard coat. About the way he'd laughed outside the coffee shop, not caring who saw him, not caring about the phones or the whispers or the inevitable social media posts. He'd been happy. Genuinely, unselfconsciously happy.
And Leo had tried to take that from him. From her. From both of them.
"That's my dad," Gracie said quietly, mostly to herself. "He's ridiculous. He's embarrassing. He wore a feather boa to my violin recital and photo-bombed the group picture. He once gave a speech at a school assembly about the importance of 'authentic self-expression' while wearing a shirt that said 'Juicy' in rhinestones. He's a human disaster in a sequined jacket."
She paused. Her voice dropped.
"But he's my human disaster. And no one else gets to laugh at him."
The walk home that afternoon felt longer than usual.
Gracie had texted Harry: Coming home. Don't pick me up. I need to walk.
His response had been immediate: Everything okay, love?
She'd stared at the three dots for a long time before typing: Yeah. Just thinking.
Okay. I'll have tea ready. Earl Grey for you, yeah?
Yeah.
She pocketed her phone and walked. The autumn leaves crunched under her feet. The sky was the color of old pewter. She turned over the events of the day in her head, examining them from every angle, trying to understand the intensity of her reaction.
She'd spent years distancing herself from Harry. From his fame, his fashion, his refusal to be normal. She'd built an entire identity around being the daughter who rolled her eyes and sighed deeply and muttered oh my God, Dad under her breath. It was a performance, sure—partly for her friends, partly for herself—but it had felt real. She had genuinely been embarrassed. Genuinely wished, sometimes, that he would just wear jeans and a t-shirt like every other father she knew.
But Leo's words had cut something loose in her. Something she hadn't known was there.
Because the truth—the truth she'd been hiding from—was that she loved the leopard coat. She loved the way Harry's eyes lit up when he found a ridiculous new jacket at a vintage shop. She loved that he didn't care what people thought, that he'd spent forty-two years on earth and still hadn't learned to shrink himself to make others comfortable.
She loved that he was her dad.
And the thought of someone else—someone cruel, someone who didn't know him—using that love as a weapon made her want to scream.
The flat smelled like bergamot and something baking when Gracie walked through the door. Harry was in the kitchen, wearing an apron over a pink crushed-velvet shirt and a pair of high-waisted trousers that would have looked absurd on anyone else. On him, they looked like a choice. A deliberate, joyful, slightly unhinged choice.
"There you are," he said, looking up from the kettle. His face was open, curious, but she could see the worry behind his eyes. "You okay? You sounded... different. In the texts."
Gracie dropped her bag by the door. She walked to the kitchen table and sat down, letting the familiar creak of the chair ground her.
"Someone made fun of you today," she said.
Harry's expression didn't change. He poured the hot water into two mugs, the steam curling up around his face. "That happens sometimes. Comes with the territory."
"At school. In the cafeteria. A kid named Leo." Gracie's voice was flat, but her hands were gripping the edge of the table. "He had a picture of you from this morning. The leopard coat. He said you looked like you escaped from a drag queen's lost luggage."
Harry handed her a mug of Earl Grey. He sat down across from her, his own mug—chamomile, always chamomile after 4 p.m.—cradled in his hands. "That's actually pretty funny," he said. "Drag queens have excellent luggage."
"Dad."
"I'm serious. That's a good line. I might use it."
Gracie stared at him. "You're not embarrassed?"
Harry considered the question. He took a sip of his tea, his eyes fixed on some middle distance. "I was embarrassed once," he said finally. "A long time ago. I was on a tour bus, and someone had leaked a photo of me wearing something—I don't even remember what—and the comments were brutal. 'He looks like a clown.' 'Someone take his stylist away.' 'He's trying too hard.' I cried in the bathroom for an hour."
Gracie's mouth fell open. She had never—not once—imagined her father crying over anything.
"But then," Harry continued, "I thought about who I was trying to impress. And I realized I wasn't trying to impress them. I was trying to impress myself. The seventeen-year-old kid from Holmes Chapel who was told he wasn't pretty enough, wasn't cool enough, wasn't anything enough. That kid—he would have loved the leopard coat. He would have worn it to the grocery store just because he could. So now I wear it for him." He shrugged. "And if people laugh? Good. Laughter's better than silence."
Gracie felt something crack open in her chest. "I've been so mean to you," she said. "About the clothes. About everything. I've been embarrassed for years, and I never—I never thought about why you wore them. I just thought you were being difficult."
Harry reached across the table and took her hand. His fingers were warm, calloused from years of guitar. "You weren't mean. You were sixteen. Sixteen is hard. You're supposed to be embarrassed by your parents. It's a rite of passage."
"But I defended you," Gracie said, her voice wobbling. "Today. When Leo made that joke, I got so mad. I told him he wasn't allowed to make fun of you because that was my job. And then I realized—I don't want to make fun of you either. I don't want to be embarrassed. I want to be proud. But I don't know how to switch it off. The embarrassment. It's like a reflex."
Harry smiled—that same smile she'd rolled her eyes at a thousand times, but now she saw it differently. Saw the kindness in it, the patience, the bottomless well of love that had never once wavered, even when his daughter had begged him to wait around the corner so her friends wouldn't see.
"It's not a switch," he said. "It's a muscle. You have to exercise it. Every time you choose pride over embarrassment, it gets a little stronger. And eventually—not today, maybe not this year—it becomes automatic. You stop flinching. You start smiling. And you realize that the leopard coat isn't a liability. It's a gift."
"A gift?"
"A gift to anyone who needs permission to be themselves." Harry squeezed her hand. "When I walk down the street in something ridiculous, I'm not doing it for me. Not entirely. I'm doing it for the kid who's scared to wear the bright shoes. The teenager who's hiding their favorite shirt in the back of the closet. The parent who's afraid to be silly in front of their children. I'm saying, 'Look. I'm still here. I'm still happy. And you can be too.'"
Gracie's eyes filled with tears. She blinked them back furiously. "That's... that's really cheesy, Dad."
"I know." Harry grinned. "But it's also true."
She laughed—a wet, surprised sound. "I told Leo off. I stood up in the middle of the cafeteria and yelled at him. Maya said I was a legend."
Harry's grin softened into something tender. "You are a legend. You always have been." He stood up and walked around the table, pulling her into a hug. She resisted for a moment—old habits—and then she gave in, pressing her face into his shoulder. The crushed velvet was soft against her cheek. It smelled like him. Tea and cedar and something vaguely floral.
"I'm sorry," she mumbled into his shirt.
"What for?"
"For all the eye rolls. For making you wait around the corner. For pretending I didn't know you when you showed up to school events."
Harry kissed the top of her head. "I never took it personally. I was a teenager once. I know how it works."
"But I was wrong." She pulled back and looked at him—really looked at him. The silver in his hair. The lines around his eyes. The ridiculous pink shirt and the impractical trousers and the apron that said "Kiss the Cook" in gold letters. "You're not embarrassing. You're brave. There's a difference."
Harry's eyes glistened. "That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me."
"Don't get used to it," Gracie said, but she was smiling. A real smile, not the tight, embarrassed one she'd perfected over the years. "I still have standards."
"Of course you do." Harry released her and went back to his mug. "Now. Tell me about the rest of your day. Did anything else happen? Did you learn anything in chemistry? Is Maya still mad at Chloe about the thing with the thing?"
Gracie settled back into her chair. The tea was warm in her hands. The flat was quiet, save for the hum of the refrigerator and the distant sound of traffic. For the first time in a long time, she didn't feel the urge to check her phone, to see if anyone was posting about her father, to brace herself for the next wave of embarrassment.
She just sat with her dad, in his ridiculous pink shirt, and let herself be proud.
Later that week, Leo Hargrove found a small package in his locker. Inside was a leopard-print face mask, a handwritten note that said "For next time you want to borrow my dad's style—he's flattered, by the way," and a single sequined glove.
The note was signed Gracie Styles, Professional Embarrassed Daughter.
Leo never mentioned the leopard coat again.
And Gracie, walking to school the next morning, didn't ask Harry to wait around the corner. She didn't ask him to drop her off two blocks away. She just walked beside him, in full view of everyone, while he wore the patchwork cardigan with the strawberry elbow patches and a pair of velvet slippers that definitely weren't meant for the street.
A few people stared. A few people whispered. Gracie kept her chin up and her eyes forward.
It wasn't easy. The embarrassment muscle was still weak, still prone to cramping. But she was exercising it. One step at a time. One ridiculous outfit at a time.
And somewhere behind her, Harry smiled—a quiet, private smile—and reached for her hand.
Genre: Extreme Angst, Domestic Angst, Family Angst, Hurt Comfort, Sadness
Word Count: ~3k words
Warnings: Mentions of miscarriage, depression, loss of child.
Prompt: Yn and Harry lose their second child. Their son, Floyd is confused why the other bedroom is empty.
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The silence in the house was a living thing. It had teeth.
Yn Styles felt it every time she walked past the closed door at the end of the hallway—the room that was supposed to be the nursery. Seven weeks ago, it had been a cheerful explosion of pastel yellows and hand-painted clouds. A mobile of felted planets spun lazily above an empty crib. Tiny sleepsuits, folded with military precision, sat in neat stacks on a changing table that had never been used. The name on the wall, hand-lettered by Harry in gold acrylic—Florence—caught the afternoon light like a cruel joke.
Now the door stayed shut. Yn had tried to go in once, three days after they came home from the hospital with empty arms and a folded piece of paper listing the hospital’s bereavement counseling hours. She’d made it as far as the threshold. The smell—baby powder, clean laundry, and underneath it, a faint, sweet scent that was probably just her imagination—had hit her like a physical blow. She’d turned around, walked back to the bedroom she shared with Harry, and lain down in the dark. She hadn't opened that door since.
Harry dealt with it differently. He dealt with it by not dealing with it at all. He woke up at 5:30 every morning, before the sun had even thought about rising, and went to the home gym he’d built in the converted garage. He lifted weights until his arms trembled.
He ran on the treadmill until his lungs burned. He cooked elaborate meals that no one ate. He cleaned surfaces that were already spotless. He did everything except sit still. Because sitting still meant thinking. And thinking meant remembering the ultrasound at twenty weeks, the little heartbeat that had been so strong, so fierce. And remembering that heartbeat led to the thirty-week appointment, the silence where the doppler should have found a galloping horse, the terrible, apologetic face of the doctor who’d said the words no fetal heartbeat with the same gentle tone you might use to tell someone their house had burned down.
They hadn't told Floyd yet. Not really. Floyd was four years old—a boy with Harry’s green eyes and Yn’s stubborn chin, a mop of caramel curls that stuck up in the back no matter how much you brushed them. He knew that Mummy had been very sad for a while, and that Daddy had been going to the garage a lot. He knew that the door at the end of the hall was closed, and that when he’d asked about it last week, Mummy had made a strange sound—half cough, half sob—and Daddy had scooped him up and taken him to the park to see the ducks.
But children, even very young ones, are not stupid. They feel the shape of a family's grief the way a seismograph feels an earthquake. They may not have words for the fault line, but they know the ground has shifted.
It was a Tuesday when Floyd finally asked the question they'd been dreading.
Yn was sitting at the kitchen table, staring at a cup of tea that had gone cold two hours ago. She was wearing one of Harry's old cardigans, the cream-colored one with the patch on the elbow. It swallowed her. She'd lost weight—eight pounds in seven weeks, not that she was counting. Eating felt like a betrayal. How could she put food in her mouth when her daughter would never taste anything? How could she sip tea when Florence would never know the warmth of a bottle?
Harry was at the sink, scrubbing a pan that had been clean forty-five minutes ago. His back was to the room. He hadn't shaved in days, and the stubble on his jaw made him look older than his forty-one years. He'd canceled everything—the podcast appearances, the charity gala, the quiet studio sessions he’d been looking forward to. His manager had been kind about it, the way people are kind when they don't know what else to be. Take all the time you need. As if time were a thing you could take. As if time weren't the very thing that was killing them, one slow hour at a time.
Floyd came padding into the kitchen in his dinosaur pajamas, even though it was four in the afternoon. He'd been watching Bluey in the living room, but the tablet had run out of battery, and his imaginary game of saving the world from broccoli monsters had grown lonely. He stopped in the doorway, his small face scrunched in that particular way children have when they are working up to something.
"Mummy?" he said.
Yn turned. The movement was slow, as if she were moving through water. "Yes, my love?"
Floyd walked to the table and rested his chin on the edge, his eyes level with her cold teacup. "Why is the baby's door still closed?"
The air in the room changed. Yn felt it first—a sudden pressure in her chest, like a hand wrapping around her lungs. She opened her mouth, but no sound came out. She looked at Harry. He had stopped scrubbing. The pan was still in his hands, but he wasn't moving. His shoulders were rigid under his grey henley.
"The door," Floyd repeated, more insistent now. He pointed down the hallway with a sticky finger. "The one with the stars. It's always closed. I want to see the baby."
Harry put the pan down. It clattered against the stainless steel sink, too loud in the quiet kitchen. He turned, and for a moment, his face was a battlefield—grief, rage, exhaustion, and underneath it all, a bottomless, aching love for the small boy who had no idea what he was asking.
"Floyd," Harry said. His voice was rough, unused. He cleared his throat. "Buddy, come here."
Floyd didn't move. He was four, but he was perceptive. He could sense that something was wrong, the way dogs sense a storm before the first raindrop falls. "Is the baby sleeping? Jamal from school says his baby sister sleeps all the time and they have to be quiet."
Yn stood up. Her legs were unsteady. She walked to Floyd and knelt down so she was at his eye level. She took his small hands in hers. His skin was warm and slightly sticky from the fruit snack he'd had an hour ago. So alive. So impossibly, heartbreakingly alive.
"No, sweetheart," she said. The words felt like shards of glass in her throat. "The baby isn't sleeping."
Floyd tilted his head, confused. "Then why can't we go in? Did she do something wrong? Is she in time-out?"
Harry made a sound behind them—a sharp exhale, almost a groan. Yn heard him pull out a chair and sit down heavily. She didn't turn around. She kept her eyes on Floyd, on his sweet, open face that held no understanding of death, no framework for the concept of gone forever.
"Floyd," she said carefully. "Do you remember how we told you that Mummy had a baby in her tummy? And that you were going to be a big brother?"
Floyd nodded enthusiastically. "Yeah! I was gonna teach her how to do the poop-scoop dance." He demonstrated a small wiggly maneuver, his hips swiveling with unself-conscious joy.
Yn's heart cracked a little more. "Well, sweet pea... the baby got sick. Very, very sick. Before she was born. And the doctors tried to help her, but... she was too sick. And so she couldn't stay. She had to go away."
Floyd's brow furrowed. "Go away where?"
"To... to a place where she isn't sick anymore." Yn's voice wavered. She could feel the tears coming, hot and insistent, but she forced them back. Not yet. She needed to get through this. For Floyd. For Harry. For the daughter who would never hear any of this.
"Is it like when Grandma's dog went to the farm?" Floyd asked.
Harry spoke from the table. His voice was raw, barely above a whisper. "Yeah, buddy. Something like that."
"But when is she coming back?" Floyd was getting frustrated now, the way children do when adults speak in riddles. "I drew her a picture. It's a rainbow and a cat. Cats are my favorite so I thought she might like it too."
Yn closed her eyes. The tears escaped anyway, sliding silently down her cheeks. She felt Harry's hand on her shoulder—warm, solid, the first time he'd touched her in days that wasn't a perfunctory brush in the hallway.
"She's not coming back, Floyd," Harry said. He'd moved to kneel beside Yn, his shoulder pressed against hers. "I'm so sorry, buddy. She's not coming back. We're not going to have a baby in this house. Not right now. Maybe... maybe someday. But not right now. And that's why the door is closed. Because it makes Mummy and Daddy very sad to look at that room right now."
Floyd stared at them both. His lower lip trembled. He didn't cry—Floyd had never been a crier, not like other kids—but something in his face shifted. A piece of his childhood innocence folded in on itself, making room for a new, uncomfortable understanding. The world, he was learning, was not safe. Things could go away and never come back.
"But I wanted to be a big brother," he said quietly.
Yn broke. She pulled Floyd into her arms and held him so tight that he made a small squeaking noise. She buried her face in his curls—they smelled like shampoo and playground and little boy—and she sobbed. Great, heaving sobs that came from somewhere deep, somewhere primal, somewhere that had been locked away for seven weeks.
Harry wrapped his arms around both of them. He didn't cry. He hadn't cried since the hospital, when they'd let him hold Florence's small, still body, wrapped in a white blanket, her features perfect and peaceful as if she were sleeping. He'd cried then. He'd sobbed so hard a nurse had brought him water and a glass of something stronger that he hadn't touched. But since they'd come home, the tears wouldn't come. Just this endless, dry ache. Like being thirsty in a desert made of memory.
They stayed like that for a long time—a tangle of grief and love and confusion on the kitchen floor. Floyd eventually wiggled free, his four-year-old attention span reaching its limit. "Can I go play with my dinosaurs now?" he asked.
"Of course, baby," Yn said, wiping her face with the sleeve of Harry's cardigan. "Go play."
Floyd ran off, his footsteps fading down the hallway toward the toy room. But he paused at the corner. He looked back at his parents, still kneeling on the floor, still holding each other. "Daddy?" he called.
Harry looked up. "Yeah, buddy?"
"I still want to give her the picture. Can we put it by the door? So she knows we didn't forget?"
Harry's composure cracked. A single tear—the first in weeks—slid down his cheek and disappeared into his stubble. "Yeah, Floyd. Yeah, we can do that. That's a really good idea."
Floyd nodded, satisfied, and disappeared around the corner.
Yn leaned into Harry's chest. He kissed the top of her head, his lips lingering in her hair. They stayed there, not speaking, as the afternoon light faded and the kitchen grew dim. The clock on the wall ticked. The refrigerator hummed. Somewhere in the distance, a siren wailed and faded.
"I can't do this," Yn whispered eventually.
Harry tightened his arms around her. "We don't have a choice."
"I know." She pulled back and looked at him. His eyes were red-rimmed, hollow. He looked like a man who had been shipwrecked and was still waiting for rescue. "But I can't do it alone."
"You're not alone." He cupped her face in his hands. His palms were rough from the weightlifting, the obsessive cleaning. "I'm here. I've been here. I just... I didn't know how to reach you. I didn't know how to reach anyone."
Yn covered his hands with hers. "I didn't know how to be reached."
"I'm sorry," Harry said. "I'm sorry for leaving you alone in this. For going to the gym at 5 a.m. and cooking food you didn't want to eat. I thought if I kept moving, I wouldn't have to feel it. But I feel it anyway. I feel it all the time. I wake up in the middle of the night and I reach for her—for Florence—and she's not there. And I remember she's never going to be there. And I want to scream."
"Then scream," Yn said. "Scream with me. We can't keep pretending she didn't exist. We can't keep that door closed forever. She was here. She was real. She had your nose and my stubbornness and she kicked me so hard at 2 a.m. that I thought she was trying to escape."
Harry let out a sound—half laugh, half sob. "She kicked you in the ribs constantly. You were so annoyed."
"I loved it." Yn's voice broke. "I loved every single second of it. And now it's just... gone. And I don't know how to be a person anymore."
Harry pulled her back into his arms. They rocked slightly, a gentle sway, like a slow dance at the end of a night you don't want to end. "We figure it out," he said. "We figure it out together. We let Floyd leave pictures by the door. We cry when we need to cry. We yell when we need to yell. And eventually—not today, not tomorrow, but eventually—we open that door. We pack up the room. We donate the sleepsuits. We keep one thing—maybe the mobile, maybe a tiny pair of socks—and we put it in a box. And we let ourselves miss her without it destroying us."
"You've thought about this," Yn said.
"I've had a lot of time in the garage," Harry admitted. "Lifting weights, staring at the wall. At first I was just trying to outrun it. But eventually... eventually I just sat there. And I let myself think. And I realized that the only way through it is through it. There's no shortcut. There's no detour. We just have to walk through the fire and hope we come out the other side."
Yn pulled back and looked at him. The man she'd married nearly fifteen years ago. The boyish pop star who'd become a steady, loving husband. The father who'd wept with joy when Floyd was placed in his arms. The father who'd wept with despair when Florence was taken away. He was still here. Battered and bruised and broken, but still here.
"I'm scared," she said.
"Me too," he said. "But we've been scared before. We had a baby when the whole world was watching. We raised a kid in the eye of a storm. We've survived things that should have torn us apart. This is just... the next thing."
"It's not 'just' anything, Harry. It's our daughter."
"I know." His voice was soft, infinite. "I know what she was. I know what she could have been. I know I'll spend the rest of my life wondering what her laugh would have sounded like. What her favorite song would have been. Whether she would have had my love of bad puns or your ability to burn toast under a broiler."
Yn laughed despite herself. "I don't burn toast."
"You burned toast last week. You were crying and you forgot you put it in."
"I was distracted."
"You were grieving. We're both grieving. It's okay to burn toast when you're grieving. It's okay to leave doors closed. It's okay to not be okay."
They heard Floyd's footsteps again. He came running back into the kitchen, a crumpled piece of construction paper in his hand. The drawing—a rainbow with lopsided arches, a cat that looked more like a potato with ears, and a sun wearing sunglasses—was creased and smudged.
"I made it better," he announced. "I added a heart. See?" He pointed to a wobbly red shape in the corner.
Yn took the drawing. Her hands trembled. "It's beautiful, Floyd. She would have loved it."
"Can we put it by the door now?" Floyd asked.
Harry stood up, then helped Yn to her feet. He took Floyd's hand. "We'll all go," he said. "Together."
They walked down the hallway as a family—Harry on one side, Yn on the other, Floyd in the middle. They stopped in front of the closed door. The gold letters—Florence—caught the light from the window at the end of the hall.
Yn's breath hitched. Harry squeezed her hand.
Floyd, with the unceremonious practicality of a four-year-old, let go of his parents' hands, walked up to the door, and knelt down. He pressed the drawing against the wood, smoothing out the wrinkles with his small palm. "There," he said. "Now she knows we didn't forget."
He stood up, dusted off his dinosaur pajamas, and looked at his parents. "Can we have pizza for dinner? Pepperoni?"
Harry looked at Yn. Yn looked at Harry. They were both crying now, silent tears streaming down faces that had forgotten how to smile.
"Yeah, buddy," Harry said, his voice thick. "We can have pizza."
Floyd cheered and ran back toward the kitchen, already shouting about toppings and whether they could have breadsticks.
Yn leaned against Harry. The door was still closed. Florence's room was still untouched. The grief was still a living thing with teeth.
But for the first time in seven weeks, the silence in the house felt a little less heavy. And the door—the closed, golden-lettered door at the end of the hall—seemed a little less like a tomb and a little more like a shrine. A place where love had been. A place where love still was.
Harry kissed Yn's temple. "We're going to be okay," he whispered.
Yn didn't answer. She just held on tighter. And together, still holding each other, they walked back toward the sound of their son's voice, toward the kitchen, toward the pizza, toward the next small, impossible step of a life that refused to stop, even when everything inside them had stopped with Florence.
Behind them, the drawing of a rainbow, a cat, and a heart fluttered slightly in the draft from the window. And if you listened very closely—if you believed in such things—you might imagine you heard a tiny, impossible laugh, echoing from somewhere far away, somewhere safe, somewhere without sickness or sorrow.
But that, perhaps, is just what grieving people tell themselves to make the silence bearable.
Genre: Angst, Family Drama, Hurt Comfort, Domestic Angst, Drama
Word Count: ~3k words
Warnings: Mentions of toxic family and abusive situations with them.
Prompt: You invite Harry over to meet your estranged family for the first time. He doesn't like them for reasons you soon discover.
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The air in the car is thick with a nervous energy that has nothing to do with the humming engine of Harry’s Range Rover. You’ve been staring out the window for the last ten minutes, watching the familiar suburban streets of your childhood blur into a green and grey smear. Beside you, Harry’s hand rests on your thigh, his thumb tracing soothing, mindless circles against your jeans.
He’s dressed in a soft, cream-colored knit sweater and dark trousers—the perfect "meet the parents" attire—and he looks every bit the charming, effortless man the world knows him to be.
But you know the tension in his jaw. You know he’s picking up on the way your breathing has become shallow the closer you get to the driveway.
"You’re doing that thing again, love," he says softly, his voice a low, melodic rumble that usually grounds you instantly.
"What thing?" you ask, finally turning to look at him.
"Holding your breath. Like you’re preparing for a collision." He squeezes your leg, his emerald eyes flicking toward you with a mixture of concern and unwavering support. "We don't have to do this. We can turn around right now, find a greasy diner, and spend the afternoon arguing over which Fleetwood Mac album is truly the best. I’m quite partial to Tusk today."
You offer him a small, fragile smile, reaching over to lace your fingers through his. "No. I want you to meet them. Or... I feel like I have to let you meet them. It’s been a year, Harry. If I keep hiding you, they’ll just use it as more ammunition."
Harry’s expression shifts—a brief, sharp flicker of something protective—but he nods. "Alright. But I’m right here. I’m not leaving your side for a second."
The house is exactly as you remembered: pristine, cold, and smelling faintly of expensive floor wax and citrus. Your mother opens the door before you can even ring the bell, her eyes immediately scanning you from head to toe before landing on the man standing behind you.
"Well," she says, her voice high and brittle. "Look who finally decided the family was worth a Saturday afternoon. Come in, come in. Don't let the heat out."
She doesn't hug you. She barely looks at you as she ushers you both into the sitting room, where your father is already seated, a glass of scotch in one hand and a newspaper in the other. He doesn't stand up, but he does offer a stiff nod to Harry.
"So, you’re the singer," your father says, his tone hovering somewhere between boredom and disdain.
"I am," Harry replies, his voice incredibly polite, though you can feel the physical effort it takes for him to maintain that easy smile. He extends a hand. "It’s a pleasure to meet you both. Thank you for having us."
The afternoon begins as a masterclass in 'polite' cruelty. It starts small—the kind of passive-aggressive jabs that only someone who grew up in this house would truly recognize.
"Oh, you’re still wearing your hair like that?" your mother asks as she pours tea. "It’s very... brave. I suppose when you’re dating someone so famous, you feel you don't have to try as hard."
Harry’s hand, which had been resting on the back of your chair, stiffens. You feel the heat rise in your cheeks, but you just give a small, airy laugh. "I like it this way, Mom. It’s easy."
"Clearly," she murmurs, handing a cup to Harry.
Dinner is worse. The dining room feels like an interrogation chamber under the glow of the chandelier. Your father spends the first twenty minutes talking over you, directing every question toward Harry’s career, his finances, and his "intentions," while treating you like a piece of furniture that happened to bring a celebrity into the room.
"It’s a shame," your father says, cutting into his steak with clinical precision. "We always hoped she’d find someone in the medical field. Stability, you know? But I suppose she was never one for long-term planning."
"I think she’s doing brilliantly," Harry says, his voice quiet but firm. He hasn't touched his food. He’s spent the entire meal watching them, his eyes dark and observant. "Her work is incredible. She has a perspective that—"
"Oh, please," your mother interrupts with a sharp, tinkling laugh that sets your teeth on edge. "She’s a dreamer. Always has been. I suppose that’s what happens when you’re a surprise. You never quite find where you fit, do you, dear?"
The table goes silent. It’s the sore spot. The family joke that isn't a joke. The constant reminder that your existence was an inconvenience, a mistake that derailed their "perfect" life.
"Mom, stop," you say, your voice trembling just a fraction. You try to play it off, forcing a laugh that sounds hollow even to your own ears. "You make it sound like I crashed the party. It was twenty-something years ago, I think we can move on."
"We moved on the moment we decided to keep you," your father adds, not even looking up from his plate. "But facts are facts. You were a shock to the system we weren't ready for. Some things you just never quite get over."
You feel the familiar, cold weight in your chest—the one that tells you that you are a burden, that you are unloved, that you are only here by the grace of their obligation. You look down at your lap, blinking back the stinging heat in your eyes, and let out another small, pathetic chuckle.
"Yeah," you whisper. "Total shock."
Under the table, Harry’s hand finds yours. He doesn't just hold it; he grips it so tightly it almost hurts, his knuckles white. You look over at him, and for the first time in your life, you see Harry truly, deeply angry. He isn't smiling. He isn't being the charming guest. He is staring at your parents with a look of such profound coldness that even your mother falters, her hand hovering over her wine glass.
Harry doesn't say anything. Not yet. He promised to stay quiet, and he honors that for the next agonizing hour of dessert and forced small talk. But the air around him is practically vibrating with unspoken fury.
The moment the front door clicks shut behind you, the silence of the night air feels like a physical relief. You walk quickly to the car, your head down, your arms wrapped around yourself as if you’re trying to keep your soul from leaking out.
Harry unlocks the car in silence. He waits for you to get in, closes your door with a gentle click, and then walks around to the driver's side. He doesn't start the engine immediately. He just sits there, his hands gripping the steering wheel at ten and two, his chest rising and falling in heavy, jagged breaths.
"Are you okay?" you ask softly, trying to reach out to him. "I'm sorry they were... like that. I told you it wouldn't be fun."
Harry says nothing. He pulls out of the driveway, his movements stiff and controlled. He’s coy for the first few miles, answering in one-word grunts when you try to make light of your mother’s comments about your hair or your career.
"It wasn't that bad, really," you lie, your voice cracking. "I'm used to the 'unplanned' jokes. It’s just their way of—"
Harry laughs — a single, disbelieving exhale. "Don’t do that."
"Do what?"
"Lie to me."
You blink. "I'm not—"
"You are."
He pulls the car over onto the shoulder of a dark, empty road and kills the lights. The only illumination comes from the dashboard, casting long, dramatic shadows across his face. He turns in his seat, and when he speaks, the floodgates finally burst.
"Do not sit there and tell me that was 'not that bad,'" he says, his voice trembling with a raw, visceral anger you’ve never seen. "Those people... those monsters... they spent three hours systematically trying to tear you apart. And you laughed. You laughed while they told you that you were a mistake!"
"Harry, it’s just how they are—"
"I don't care how they are!" he roars, his hand hitting the center console. "They are supposed to be the people who love you most in this world, and they treat you like a debt they’re still paying off. I have never seen anything so cruel in my entire life. The way they looked at you... the way they talked about you like you weren't even in the room..."
His eyes are wet now, shimmering with a mix of tears and pure, unadulterated rage on your behalf. "They were horrible to you."
You open your mouth, but he cuts you off. "No. Listen to me."
You do.
"You are not a mistake," he says, leaning in closer, his voice dropping to a fierce, desperate whisper. "You are the best thing that has ever happened to me. You are brilliant, and you are kind, and you are so full of light that it physically hurts me to see them try to dim it. You deserve a world that celebrates the very day you were born, not a couple of bitter people who use your birth as a weapon against you."
You try to speak, but the sob you’ve been holding back since dinner finally breaks through. You bury your face in your hands, and Harry is there instantly, unbuckling his seatbelt to pull you across the console and into his lap. He holds you like you’re made of glass, his face buried in your neck.
"I mean it," he mumbles against your skin, his voice thick. "I never want to go back there. I never want them to touch you with those words again. You have me now. You have a family that actually wants you. You are so loved, do you hear me? You are so, so loved."
And there, in the quiet dark of the car, with the man who truly sees you holding you tight, the weight of being unplanned finally starts to lift.
Because for the first time, you realize that while you might not have been planned for them, you were exactly what Harry had been waiting for.
You inhale shakily. "I didn't want you to see that part of my life."
hello! I was wondering if you can write a funny dad! harry x teen!daughter reader one shot were he and his daughter are on a cute daddy-daughter date at a cafe and their waiter is a teenage boy and the reader has a crush on him and Harry notices. As soon as he leaves, Harry asks her teasingly “Do you think he’s cute?” and the reader goes “Yeah, kind of.” and then Harry all of a sudden gets up from his chair and signals the waiter to come here and she says “NO DAD STOP STOP” as tries to hide herself. As soon as he comes over to their table, Harry tells the him “My daughter here is thinks you’re cute.” 😭
Warnings: None ;) Just Harry being an embarrassment to his daughter's existence.
Prompt: Lauren and Harry are on a daddy-daughter date and when she sees a cute boy who is their waiter, Harry of course takes advantage... until the boy notices how pretty Lauren is.
◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊◊
The café smelled like cinnamon and espresso and something sweet that clung to the air like a memory you didn’t want to leave.
Lauren wasn’t even hungry.
Not really.
She sat across from her dad, chin resting in her palm, lazily stirring her drink while the late afternoon sunlight spilled through the windows and painted everything gold.
This was their thing.
Daddy-daughter dates.
They’d been doing them since she was little—back when she needed help cutting pancakes and would proudly announce to every waiter, “That’s my dad.”
Now she was seventeen.
Now she pretended she didn’t care as much.
Now she definitely didn’t point him out to strangers.
Harry, however, had not changed.
At all.
“So,” he said, leaning back in his chair, sunglasses pushed up into his curls, watching her with that knowing little smirk, “you’ve been suspiciously quiet.”
Lauren rolled her eyes. “I’m literally sitting here.”
“Mhm. Quietly.”
“I talk all the time.”
“You do,” he agreed. “Just not right now. Which means—something’s happening.”
“Nothing’s happening.”
“Something’s happening,” he repeated, pointing at her with his fork. “I know your tells.”
“You don’t have—”
Her words cut off.
Because the waiter walked past.
And Lauren—
Well.
Lauren forgot how to exist for approximately three seconds.
He was around her age. Maybe a little older. Dark hair, soft smile, that slightly awkward confidence that made him seem… real.
Not polished. Not intimidating.
Just… cute.
And he smiled at another table as he passed, dimples appearing like a betrayal.
Lauren’s brain short-circuited.
“Right,” Harry said slowly.
Oh no.
No, no, no—
She immediately looked down at her drink. “Don’t.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were about to.”
“I wasn’t.”
“You were thinking something.”
“I’m always thinking something.”
“Dad.”
He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table, eyes sparkling now.
“I see him,” he said.
Lauren groaned, dragging her hands over her face. “Please act normal.”
“I am acting normal.”
“You are absolutely not.”
He glanced over his shoulder casually—too casually—then back at her.
“Is that him?” he asked, voice dropping like they were discussing state secrets.
“I hate you.”
“Is that him?” he repeated, quieter this time.
“…Yes,” she muttered.
Harry sat back, satisfied.
“Alright,” he said, nodding once like he’d just gathered critical information.
Lauren narrowed her eyes. “Don’t do anything.”
“I’m not going to do anything.”
“You always say that and then you do something.”
“I’m just observing,” he said innocently.
“That’s worse.”
The waiter approached their table a few minutes later, notepad in hand, smile soft and easy.
“Hey, how are you guys doing?”
Lauren forgot her own name.
“Good,” Harry answered smoothly, because of course he did. “How are you?”
“I’m good,” the boy said, glancing between them. “Can I get you anything else?”
Lauren stared at the table like it held the secrets of the universe.
Harry noticed everything.
The way her shoulders tensed.
The way she tucked her hair behind her ear.
The way she didn’t look up.
Oh, this was too good.
“No, I think we’re alright,” Harry said, then added, “What’s your name, mate?”
Lauren’s head snapped up.
“Dad—”
The boy smiled. “Ethan.”
“Ethan,” Harry repeated, nodding approvingly. “Nice name.”
“Thanks,” Ethan said, a little confused now.
Lauren wanted to disappear.
“I’m Lauren,” she blurted suddenly, immediately regretting it.
Ethan’s smile softened. “Nice to meet you, Lauren.”
“Oh my God,” she whispered, sinking back into her seat.
Harry bit the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing.
“Well, Ethan,” he said, “we’ll let you get back to it.”
“Yeah, of course,” Ethan nodded. “Let me know if you need anything.”
And then he walked away.
There was a pause.
A heavy, dangerous pause.
Lauren slowly lifted her eyes.
Harry was already looking at her.
Smiling.
No.
“No,” she said immediately.
“What?”
“Don’t.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You’re about to.”
“I’m not.”
“You’re doing the face.”
“What face?”
“The face.”
He leaned forward slightly, lowering his voice like this was a private confession.
“…Do you think he’s cute?”
Lauren froze.
There it was.
The question.
The worst question.
She stared at him, debating her options.
Lie?
Deflect?
Fake a sudden illness and leave?
“…Yeah,” she admitted finally, quiet. “Kind of.”
Harry’s eyebrows shot up.
“Kind of?” he echoed, like that answer was deeply unsatisfying.
“Dad.”
“Just ‘kind of’?”
“Yes!”
“I mean, he seems more than ‘kind of,’ if I’m being honest—”
“DAD.”
He grinned.
And then—
Before she could process what was happening—
He stood up.
Lauren’s brain lagged behind reality.
“Wait,” she said.
Harry turned, scanning the room.
“Oh no,” she whispered.
“Just a second—”
“NO.”
He spotted Ethan near the counter.
Raised his hand.
Waved him over.
“DAD, STOP, STOP—”
Lauren ducked down in her seat, hands flying to her face as if that might somehow erase her existence.
“Come here a sec!” Harry called casually.
Ethan looked over.
Pointed at himself.
Harry nodded.
Lauren considered simply evaporating.
Ethan walked over, polite but clearly confused.
“Yeah?” he asked.
Harry gestured to the chair. “Got a second?”
Lauren made a sound that was somewhere between a groan and a dying gasp.
“Dad, I swear—”
“This’ll take two seconds,” Harry promised.
It would not.
Ethan glanced at Lauren, who was now actively trying to sink into the floor.
“Uh… sure?”
Harry turned to him, completely calm.
“My daughter here,” he began.
Lauren slapped her hands over her face.
“—thinks you’re cute.”
Silence.
Actual, physical silence.
Lauren stopped breathing.
Ethan blinked.
Once.
Twice.
“Oh my God,” Lauren whispered into her palms. “I’m going to pass away.”
Harry sat there like he’d just made a perfectly reasonable statement.
Ethan’s cheeks turned pink.
He looked at Lauren.
Lauren refused to exist.
“I—uh—” he started, clearly flustered now. “I mean—thank you?”
Harry nodded, satisfied. “Thought you should know.”
“Dad,” Lauren groaned, dragging her hands down her face. “Why would you say that?”
He shrugged. “Honesty’s important.”
“It was not necessary!”
Ethan laughed softly, rubbing the back of his neck.
“I, um…” He glanced at Lauren again. “I think you’re really pretty, too.”
Lauren short-circuited.
Fully.
Completely.
System error.
“What,” she said faintly.
Harry lit up like a Christmas tree.
“Oh, there we go!” he clapped once. “See? That wasn’t so hard.”
“Dad, stop encouraging this,” she hissed.
“I’m not encouraging anything, I’m facilitating communication.”
“That’s worse!”
Ethan was smiling now, a little shy but clearly amused.
“Well,” he said, “I should probably get back to work before I get fired.”
“Probably wise,” Harry agreed.
“But—” Ethan hesitated, then looked at Lauren again. “It was really nice meeting you.”
Lauren nodded like a malfunctioning robot. “You too.”
He smiled one more time.
Then walked away.
The second he was out of earshot—
“WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?!” Lauren whisper-shouted.
Harry burst out laughing.
“I’m helping!”
“You are not helping!”
“You were just going to sit there and stare at your drink forever!”
“That was the plan!”
“Terrible plan.”
She dropped her head onto the table. “I can’t believe you.”
“You’re welcome,” he said cheerfully.
“I didn’t say thank you!”
“You’re thinking it.”
“I am not thinking it.”
He leaned back, completely unbothered. “He said you were pretty.”
She groaned louder.
“That does not make this okay.”
“It kind of does.”
“It absolutely does not.”
Harry studied her for a second, then softened—just a little.
“You liked him,” he said, quieter now.
Lauren peeked up at him.
“…Yeah.”
“So I helped.”
“You publicly humiliated me.”
“I gave you a story.”
“I don’t want a story, I want to survive high school!”
He laughed again.
“Fair.”
When Ethan came back later with the check, things were… different.
Still awkward.
Still charged.
But lighter.
Lauren actually looked at him this time.
Smiled.
“Hey,” he said, setting the bill down.
“Hey,” she replied.
Harry watched the entire exchange like it was his favorite movie.
“…Ignore him,” Lauren added, nodding toward her dad.
“I can’t,” Ethan said with a grin. “He’s kind of hard to ignore.”
“Tell me about it.”
Harry placed a hand over his heart. “I’m right here.”
“I know,” she said. “That’s the problem.”
Ethan laughed.
And just before he left again, he slid a small receipt toward Lauren.
There was something written on it.
Her eyes widened.
Harry saw.
Of course he saw.
“Ohhh,” he leaned over, trying to peek. “What’s that?”
“Nothing,” she said quickly, grabbing it.
“Looks like something.”
“It’s not.”
“Is it his number?”
“DAD.”
Ethan was already walking away, definitely smiling.
Harry sat back, grinning like he’d just orchestrated a masterpiece.
“Well,” he said. “Successful outing.”
Lauren stared at the receipt in her hand.
Then at him.
Then back at the receipt.
“…You’re insane.”
“Bit,” he agreed.
She shook her head, but there was a smile tugging at her lips now.
Small.
Reluctant.
Real.
“…Thanks,” she muttered.
He tilted his head. “What was that?”
“I said nothing.”
“Mhm.”
But he heard it.
He always did.
And as they stood to leave, Harry slung an arm around her shoulders, pulling her into his side.
“Next time,” he said casually, “we’ll aim for less public humiliation.”
“There is no next time.”
“Course there is.”
“Absolutely not.”
“We’ll go somewhere with better lighting.”
“DAD.”
He laughed, pressing a quick kiss to the top of her head.
And Lauren—
Still embarrassed.
Still flustered.
Still very much seventeen— Couldn’t help but laugh too.
Because somehow…
Even when he made her want to disappear— He also made everything feel a little easier.
Ik you guys want a dad!harry one shot and I will TOTALLY make one! I've just been sooooo busy these past few weeks and I'm still kinda busy, which is why if my posts have waned down a bit, that's why. But I do have a dad!harry one shot in mind and I can't wait to unveil it!!!
