It's You [H.S.]

8.2 | Only you

22nd March 2017

Upon landing back home in London from Capodichino airport in Naples, Harry turns on his phone to see a text from Liam with an adorable photo, proudly introducing Bear.

He's thrilled for him, and after sniggering about it for only a couple of minutes or so to Eloise - who all the while just suppresses her own laughter at his antics, and focuses on her phone, ordering flowers and browsing for a gift - he pulls himself together and messages him back.  And without any mention of the elephant in the room; it's a cute name for a baby boy, but surely they must realise it will soon enough be more fitting to some kind of WWF wrestler or second-rate superhero type? Bear Payne... Oh, Liam!

God, as if  Liam's a dad too now?

Harry adores kids, and babies especially, but he can't help but note there was definitely no room for a car seat in that Ferrari...

They're still so young. In many ways, they'd all had to mature quickly - moving away from home so early, travelling the world, navigating the industry, managing investments and the media alike. But in other ways, Liam and Louis are two of the very most immature people he has ever known.

He's pretty sure they always will be, and he loves them for it. Certainly never seen them leave a water bottle unscathed in each other's presence.

Having experienced him as 'Daddy Direction' for so long, Harry can't wait to see Liam in actual dad mode. He just hopes they're ready for visitors before he gets swept up with promo.

His wandering thoughts snap back into focus as they're set upon by paps when they exit Heathrow Terminal 5 arrivals. Fucking hell.

It's a stark reminder that their blissful Italian bubble has well and truly popped.

It was light, joyous and beautiful, but couldn't last forever.

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22nd March - 3rd April 2017

They're straight back at it, both juggling heavy schedules.

Eloise is dashing between meetings with the production company, Netflix and the BBC, kicking off pre-production for Killing Eve.

She's trying to join as many of the upfront discussions in person as possible, before she becomes a remote presence for a month or so, when she'll be travelling with Harry for much of his single and album promotion.

Around meetings, she's also juggling gruelling sessions with a personal trainer, getting intensive tuition for the fight choreography, and also general conditioning and cardio to get her strength and endurance back again.

And between those sessions, tired and aching, she's also working intensively with a renowned dialogue coach on both foreign languages and accented English.

She's never one to shy away from a challenge, but boy is she starting to regret being quite so ambitious with Villanelle... Russian, French, Italian, German, even Dutch. She's kicking herself for not cutting herself some slack and swapping in some Swedish.

Harry's used to her playfully breaking into silly accents at random to make him laugh. But between dialect lessons, she practises so much, he's never sure quite which accent to expect from her; the only guarantee is that it won't be her own.

It appears that she can switch effortlessly; but he sees first hand just how much honing and practise it really takes. It's fascinating.

Her talent and focus overwhelm him a little bit, truth be told.

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Between all his band rehearsals, and endless scheduling updates, Harry popped over to New York for a couple of days with Jeffrey, Molly and Tom, to run through the final promo, launch and tour plans with the team at Columbia.