Burn to ash

Chapter 7

The alarm goes off early the next morning, and Louis groans as he turns off the shrill ringing on his phone. He rolls over and glances over at the screen, astonished for half a moment at just how many notifications he has.

It takes a second but then he remembers and he can't help but giggle a little helplessly.

That's right; he fucking came out last night. He'd come home right after the interview, before anyone had had a chance to react to their bombshells, and had gone almost straight to bed, knowing he'd be getting up early this morning.

All his texts are supportive . Most people he's close to already knew the important parts of the truth, so they're not surprised. He debates checking his twitter mentions, but chickens out. He'll have to deal with that fallout eventually, but he really isn't up to it this morning.

It's a testament to how free he suddenly feels that Louis finds himself singing in the shower for literally the first time in years. At first it's just nonsense, random scraps of melodies and lyrics.

Then somehow, he starts singing 'Best Song Ever' and suddenly he's belting out the chorus, shampoo bottle as a microphone, and it's maybe a little ridiculous, but Lou feels pretty good when he glances in the mirror and sees that he's actually smiling.

It's a good reminder that their songs used to make what felt like a whole generation of young girls smile, and Louis feels a bit more of that tension about the tour dissipate. It'll be okay, he tells himself as he gets dressed, it'll be just grand.

Because of the upcoming rehearsal schedule, Louis has scheduled today to drive down to Doncaster for a slew of meetings at Rovers headquarters. He doesn't know if he'll have time once rehearsals start and he definitely knows he won't after the tour begins. So it's a good time to deal with what he needs to and he also calls his mum and arranges to meet the family for dinner . It'll be a long day, but Louis finds that he's rather looking forward to it.

Then he glances out his front window and realizes that the army of paparazzi camping out in front of his house when Harry was discovered was absolutely minor before. The group has easily tripled and now there are actually reporters and video cameras out there. Louis doesn't know how to deal with this either, though he knows he'll have to eventually. He takes the back route and praises God he was smart enough to park a few blocks away from his house last night.

As he drives, he flicks on the radio, and groans out loud as he hears Nick Grimshaw's grating voice as he cackles with laughter at something.

He's never liked Nick. Nick was always really Harry's friend, and for awhile when things were bad, Lou liked to blame Nick for introducing Harry to the faster lifestyle that led to a lot of his drinking.

It's taken a few years but Louis knows now that none of it was Nick's fault. He didn't know Harry was an alcoholic, and when things went bad, he certainly wasn't the one encouraging Harry to drink. Mostly Louis ha s never liked Nick because he could be so open about who he was and flirt with Harry like it was the easiest, simplest thing in the world.

Louis doesn't actually think he's that jealous of a person, really--despite what everyone seems to think of him. Yeah, he likes what's his, likes making sure that what's his stays his, but the emotions that everyone seemed to believe were jealousy and possessiveness were actually more like envy. Everyone was able to be freer with Harry than he was, and to watch that, when he couldn't ever act the way he wanted, was sheer torture.

Despite this, Louis has never been Nick Grimshaw's greatest fan and he considers turning on some music on his phone. There's some fancy thing that connects it to the computer system in the car, and it's all really beyond Louis, but it's made listening to music while he drives a hell of a lot easier.