Chapter Text
With all the grace of a derailing train, Louis Tomlinson burst through the back entrance of The Pembroke Theatre, his white dress shirt untucked and his black tie askew. “Sorry!” he all but shouted to no one in particular. “Had a flat!”
He pivoted just in time around one of his colleagues carrying a silver tray full of champagne flutes, nearly knocking his elbow into the mountain of carefully arranged shrimp appetisers in the process. He hurriedly fixed his tie, simultaneously trying to close the buttons of his black vest.
“You’re fine,” a bored voice said from the counter where even more trays of champagne flutes were lined up to be taken out. There, Louis found Niall Horan, his best friend since the moment they knocked foreheads together in their first year of elementary school. “The Dictator’s on the phone.”
“Thank fuck,” Louis said, skidding to a halt in front of Niall, nearly slipping on the recently mopped kitchen tile. “I swear I was on time, but I—”
“Had a flat tyre, yeah, who cares,” Niall said, grinning. “It’s only the sixth time in a row.”
“Oh, shut up,” Louis said, trying to check his reflection in the shiny silver countertop as he hurriedly tied a half apron around his waist. “How’s my hair?”
“Like you had a flat tyre on the way here and had to run the rest.”
“You’re useless. Actually useless.”
“Maybe, but at least I’m not late, am I?”
“Mr Tomlinson,” another voice suddenly said.
Louis froze, then abruptly turned around. Behind him, a severely apathetic Frances Inglethorp stood, arms crossed in front of his chest, a haughty eyebrow quirked up. He was Louis’s supervisor, and one hundred per cent, without a sliver of a doubt, Louis’s number one fan. He was also not-so-affectionately known as The Dictator amongst his employees.
“Late again, are we?” he said. “That’s the sixth time, is it?”
“Nah,” Louis said, trying for casual. “Just in the bathroom. Had to fix my tie.”
Frances sniffed, something he did when he disagreed but had no way to prove he was the one in the right. “Get on with it, Mr Tomlinson. Before the theatre decides never to hire us again.”
He turned without waiting for a response, and Louis let go of a breath when he’d left the kitchen again. Niall chuckled, clapping Louis on the shoulder. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were covered in slime, the way you always wriggle out of everything,” he said, to which Louis crinkled a nose.
“That’s the grossest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“Nah, I’ve done way worse than that.” Suddenly, he deposited a tray of champagne flutes in Louis’s hands. “Go on, then. Let’s actually work for our money.”
“Big smiles,” Louis said, putting on his most sarcastic one. “I’m betting on an hour, yeah?”
Niall snorted. “We’re not making it past a half,” he said, leaning I closer. “Dictator’s got a performance review coming up.”
“Ah, shit,” Louis said, sighing. “Can I change my bet?”
“Absolutely not,” Niall said with a massive grin. “I’m saving up for a new game.”
“Fuck’s sake.”
“Big smiles, Tommo. Let’s go make the rich folk happy.”
The kitchen doors swung shut behind them, and the world transformed.
The Pembroke Theatre’s backstage areas were a maze of concrete and exposed brick, but the transition into the front-of-house was like stepping into a gilded lung. The air itself changed—cool, faintly citrus-scented, and thick with the murmur of cultivated voices and the delicate clink of crystal. They emerged into the Grand Foyer, a cavernous space that always made Louis feel like a trespasser in a jewellery box. Even though he’d worked here plenty of times, he still wasn’t used to the decadence.
Everything was velvet, gilt, and marble. A colossal crystal chandelier, dripping with a thousand teardrop prisms, hung like a frozen firework from a ceiling painted with clouds and cherubs who looked, to Louis, smugly well-rested. The walls were lined with portraits of severe-looking men in wigs and women with necks so long they seemed engineered for pearl necklaces.
Tonight, the event was a black-tie fundraiser for the theatre's restoration fund, which, very simply, translated to rich people paying to feel richer. The crowd was a sea of uniform black and white, punctuated by flashes of jewel-toned silk and the glint of absurdly large watches. Louis navigated the perimeter of the crowd, his tray held aloft like a sacrificial offering. He caught fragments of conversation, each more alien than the last.
“...Darling, the acoustics in Gstaad are simply primitive…”
“...So I told him, if the yacht can’t fit a helipad, it’s essentially a canoe…”
As he moved, Louis’s eyes were drawn past the crowd, through the open doors to the auditorium itself. The sight never failed to pinch something in his chest. The plush red sweep of the seats, empty and waiting, the intricate gold leaf of the proscenium arch, glowing under the ghost light’s lonely vigil on the stage, it all created a temple. A world away from the cramped, steaming kitchen, a world away from his mother’s house. He felt a familiar, confusing tug—awe mixed with a sharp sense of not belonging.
With the practised eye of someone who had spent too much time serving one-percenters, Louis quickly caught sight of a group of middle-aged men in sharp suits, all with empty hands. He steered toward them, slipping into the near-invisible glide of a good server. As he proffered the tray, one of the men, his silver hair perfectly tousled, plucked a flute without breaking his sentence.
“...so of course, the value isn’t in the brick and mortar, it’s in the cultural capital. This place,” he said, gesturing with his champagne toward the ornate ceiling, “is a nonprofit in name only. We’re curating an experience, a legacy.”
Louis held the tray steady, part of the furniture as far as the crowd around was concerned. He caught Niall’s eye across the room. His friend gave a barely perceptible roll of his eyes. Louis fought the urge to snort. It was those interactions that made a night like this bearable.
If he was lucky, he’d finish his shift sometime around two a.m., which had all the clean-up and mandatory debrief included in the count. His mother would still be at the hospital by that point, so she’d be completely clueless about when he’d actually be done. He’d told her eleven, because she worried whenever he had to work past twelve, and he didn’t like worrying her. Sometimes, when he was absolutely sure she had no way to check, he’d lie to her about which time he was getting off, just to make her feel better.
As Louis made his way around the room, losing champagne flutes to snobs left and right, he eventually reached the quintessential group of any rich people gathering: the less rich but far worse-behaved offspring. It was always the exact same: a group somewhere usually up to fifteen people maximum, all between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight, completely off their face, white powder beneath their noses, and boisterously confident about topics they seemed to know nothing about. Louis had a theory on the age range: twenty-eight was when most people in that world got married, and once you were married, you were dignified and respected amongst the other adults, so you got to leave the kids’ table. Something like that, at least.
The cluster of them had colonised a plush velvet banquette near a statue of Euterpe, muse of music, whom they were thoroughly ignoring. They were a uniform of artfully distressed tuxedos on the boys and slinky, minimalist gowns on the girls that Louis knew cost more than his monthly rent. Their conversation was a spray of loud, confident declarations, designed to be overheard.
“...utterly derivative,” a young man with a perfectly sculpted five-o’clock shadow was saying, swirling his champagne, using the word of the hour. Niall and Louis also had a bet going on that. “I mean, if I see one more immersive dining experience that’s just eating in the dark while someone whispers Baudelaire at you, I’ll expire.”
“Ugh, literal poverty of imagination,” a girl with a sleek blonde bob agreed, not even trying to lower her voice. “Daddy funded one in Chelsea. The ‘actors’ kept forgetting their lines. It was like watching particularly underpaid zoo animals.”
Louis slowed his approach, the instinct to avoid this particular ecosystem warring with his duty to keep the tray moving. There was a reason he despised the offspring the most.
A boy in a velvet jacket, his arm slung over the banquette, eyed Louis’s approach. His gaze flickered from the tray to Louis’s face. He leaned into the girl next to him, a redhead in emerald green, and muttered something. Her lips twitched. She didn’t look at Louis, but her eyes tracked him as he stopped, holding the tray out in the silent offer.
Velvet Jacket took a glass. “Cheers, mate,” he said, the words devoid of any warmth, his accent a polished Mayfair drawl. It was a performance for his friends.
As Louis held steady, the redhead in green pretended to examine her nails. “God, Annabelle,” she said, her voice a stage whisper that carried. “I think my nail tech used the wrong base coat. It’s looking positively ‘servile’ under this light.”
A titter ran through the group. Annabelle, the blonde, snorted. “Darling, everything looks servile next to Sebastian’s new watch. What is it, a complication for telling the time in Monaco while your butler is in Gstaad?”
Sebastian, presumably Velvet Jacket, smirked. “It knows when the help is lingering.”
Louis felt a familiar heat creep up his neck. This was their speciality. Never a direct insult—that would be crude, or, gasp, common—but the sidelong glance, the giggle swallowed behind a manicured hand as he passed, the comment about the “catering uniforms” being “a bit council estate, no?” They were masters of the indirect sneer, using the staff as their private punchline, a way to bond over their shared superiority.
He moved away as soon as the last glass was taken, their laughter—light, breezy, and entirely at his expense—following him like a bad smell.
“Ran the gauntlet, did you?” Niall materialised at his elbow, his own tray significantly lighter. “The Velvet Mafia back there?”
“The very same,” Louis grumbled, swapping his empty tray for a fresh one of canapés from a passing colleague. “Next time I’m over there, I’m smashing my tray on the one with the whitest teeth.”
“You always say that,” Niall said. “Yet I’ve still got five hundred quid in my pocket, ready to be won.”
Two years ago, Louis had made the very same threat for the first time. Niall had said that if he’d go through with it, he’d give him five hundred pounds on the spot (money he didn’t have at the time, and most certainly did not have now). But, years later, the threat was yet to be fulfilled, and the money had yet to be won.
“One day I will,” Louis said. “Just need one more good reason.”
“We’ll see,” Niall said. “Any plans for after this?”
“Going home. You?”
“Heard Finn’s doing drinks at his. Might stop by. You up for it?”
Before Louis could respond, he felt a hand slap on his shoulder at the same time one clapped on Niall’s. He closed his eyes, knowing exactly who was behind him and Niall. “Gentlemen,” said The Dictator as he turned them around, “I see full trays in your hands, yet you’re standing still. Any reason why that is?”
“My sciatica’s acting up,” Niall said. Louis nearly laughed, quickly covering it with a cough.
“Yeah, I’m just checking up on him,” he said. “We’re very concerned.”
“Yes, very,” Niall said. “It’s a debilitating issue.”
Frances’s expression didn’t flicker. “How touching. Your medical leave is denied, Mr Horan. And Mr Tomlinson, your bedside manner is surplus to requirements.” He leaned in, his voice a low hiss meant only for them. “The young professionals cluster by the muse. They are the future donors, and they respond better to servers who are… contemporaneous. You, Tomlinson. Go. Keep the canapés flowing. And try to look less like you’ve swallowed a lemon. Big smiles, gentlemen.”
With a final pat that felt more like a shove, Frances melted back into the crowd, a shark in a starched shirt.
“Contemporaneous,” Niall mimicked under his breath. “He means we’re poor and young. Go on, then. Earn your five hundred.”
“Piss off,” Louis muttered, but he adjusted his grip on the tray and turned back toward the velvet banquette with the grim determination of a soldier heading into no-man’s land.
The group’s dynamic had shifted slightly. The blonde, Annabelle, was now delicately dabbing at her nose with a silk handkerchief she’d produced from a tiny beaded purse. Sebastian was holding forth on the “tragic commercialisation of the Edinburgh Fringe.”
It was then, as Louis braced himself for another round of indirect contempt, that his gaze snagged on a figure apart from the main huddle.
Leaning against the marble wall near a tall, leaded-glass window was a boy—a young man, really—who seemed carved from a different stone than his companions. One foot was propped against the wall, a crystal flute held loosely in his long fingers, the other hand buried in the pocket of trousers that fit him with a tailor’s obsession. He was tall, with a cascade of dark, tousled curls that defied the groomed looks around him, and he was staring out the window at the London night, his profile a study in elegant boredom. The soft light from the chandelier caught the line of his jaw, the curve of his lips, and the startling green of his eyes, which were fixed on some distant point beyond the glass.
Louis knew that face. He’d seen it in the society pages of newspapers left on the Tube, in the background of celebrity paparazzi shots, and at nearly every single gala Louis had ever worked at. Harry Styles. Desmond Styles’s son. The heir to a fortune so vast it was abstract. The ‘prodigal son’ who, according to gossip Niall picked up, had a reputation for being quiet, a bit dreamy, and utterly, infuriatingly disengaged from the circus of his own life. He was also, Louis had to admit with a surge of irritation that felt dangerously close to something else, outlandishly good-looking. It was unfair, really. The suit cost more than Louis’s bicycle ten times over, but it looked like it lived on him, all easy lines and unconscious grace.
Harry had never once noticed Louis. Why would he? To Harry Styles and his set, Louis was ambient noise, a moving part of the scenery—the boy with the tray, the help. He’d been serving at these functions for years, and Harry’s gaze had always slid over him like oil over water, seeing only the function, never the person.
Louis forced himself to look away, focusing on the tray. He offered it first to Annabelle, who plucked a blini with caviar without a word, her attention already back on Sebastian. He moved to the redhead, then to a guy with laugh lines that spoke of too much sun on too many ski slopes.
“Oi, Styles!” one of the other guys of the group shouted too closely to Louis’s ear. “We’ve got a hundred quid on one of these waiters calling us sir within the next twenty minutes, get it on this.”
Without removing his gaze from the window, Harry said, “That’s the most depressing bet I’ve heard all week, Leo. Do grow up.”
The guy, Leo, barked a laugh. “Spoilsport! It’s just a bit of fun.” His eyes, glazed and searching for entertainment, landed squarely on Louis. “You. What do you say? Call him ‘sir’ for twenty quid. Easy money.”
The entire group’s attention was now on Louis, a collective smirk forming at the game where Louis was the prop. The heat returned to his neck. Before he could formulate a retort that wouldn’t get him sacked, a low, clear voice cut through.
“Leave him alone, Leo.”
It was Harry again. He was still looking out the window.
“‘S’got no sense of humour, this one,” Leo said to the group, of which the members all laughed.
With them all distracted, Louis quickly slipped away again. He cast a glance over his shoulder toward Harry, but he still hadn’t removed his gaze from the windowpanes.
For the next few hours, Louis performed his duties with just enough effort to never catch any criticism from Frances, but not enough to accidentally work more than he was being paid, something he’d perfected over the years. He fetched, carried, and smiled his empty smile at the guests. As expected, he kept running into Harry. He saw the polite, distant nods he gave to older guests who approached him, the way he’d take a sip of champagne and then discreetly abandon the glass on a passing tray (Louis’s tray, once, but he didn’t seem to notice it was the person he’d defended against his friends).
That was usually how these nights went. More often than not, Louis kept eyeing Harry through the room, because everyone eyed Harry. Literally: the crowds parted for him like the Red Sea, yet seemed to simultaneously clog around him as soon as he stood still. Everyone wanted a piece of the twenty-two-year-old set to inherit an empire beyond financial comprehension, because one day, it could trickle over to them if they played their cards right. Louis just thought he was pretty. An arrogant prick, but a pretty one, and Louis had eyes.
By the time he stepped out into the alley behind the theatre, it was past two, and the theatre was long emptied of the fundraiser attendees. As Niall followed him out, he reached for his cigarettes and lighter, handing one to Niall without looking. They took a moment to allow the smoke to fill their lungs and magically get rid of the stress of the night.
“I really thought he’d explode tonight,” Niall said, leaning against the wall of the theatre, right beside the back entrance. “He had the look.”
“Mmm.” Louis watched the smoke from his mouth twirl into the sky. “Suspend the bet for next week, then?”
“Sure,” Niall said. “We’re at the… the fuckin’…”
“Golf club,” Louis said. “Some big tournament or summat.”
“Ah. Well posh, then.”
“Is it ever not?”
“We’ve done weddings that we’re alright.”
They finished their cigarettes. Louis took the lock off his bike, sighing at the flat tyre he’d forgotten about, and followed Niall out of the alley.
“Sure you’re not up for a pint?” he asked Louis. “Not too far of a walk.”
“Need to get home,” Louis said with an apologetic shrug. “Mum’ll blow her lid if I’m not there when she comes back.”
Sympathy filled Niall’s features. “She still working nights?”
“Not much choice, with her classes during the day,” Louis said.
“She getting close, finally?”
“Of sorts.”
“Well, better than nothing.”
“Yeah, I said the same thing.”
Niall held out his palm, to which Louis low-fived him, their fingers linking for a short second. “See you at the golf club, then,” he said, before giving Louis a two-fingered salute. “Sweet dreams, Tommo.”
They parted ways at the corner, Niall heading towards the distant glow of a pub sign, Louis turning towards the long walk home. The affluent streets around The Pembroke were still, the only sound the whisper of a street sweeper’s bristles and the distant hum of a luxury car.
He hadn’t gone three blocks when a roar of laughter shattered the quiet. Parked under a lamppost, its engine purring like a contented predator, was a sleek black car: a Range Rover so new it looked wet. The rear door was open, and spilling into it were the Offspring.
Sebastian was practically falling in, supported by Leo, who was shouting something incoherent. The redhead in green was trying to climb in with a precarious grace, her heels dangling from her fingers. Annabelle stood on the pavement, tossing her head back with a shriek of laughter at something. They were a blur of rumpled silk and undone bow ties, their earlier cruel precision melted into the messy, entitled chaos of the truly wealthy and truly drunk. The door thudded shut with a solid clunk. Then the car pulled away from the curb with a smooth surge of power, its tyres barely whispering against the asphalt as it sped off into the velvet night, towards another party, another mansion, another universe.
Louis shoved his free hand deep into his pocket and walked on.
The transition was always a lesson in geography and grace. He left the wide, clean pavements of theatreland and crossed into the hinterlands of Islington—not the leafy, multi-million-pound townhouses, but the part the estate agents called ‘vibrant’ and the residents knew as ‘holding on by your fingernails.’ The grand white stucco gave way to graffiti-tagged shutters and charity shops. The air grew thicker, carrying the tang of fried food from a late-night kebab shop and the damp smell of the Regent’s Canal as he crossed it.
His turnoff was a narrow street of tall, tired terraces that backed onto the railway lines. At the end stood the estate: several concrete blocks arranged around a patchy, fenced-in square of worn grass and a lonely climbing frame. The Andover Estate, or just ‘the blocks’ to everyone who lived there. His block was the one with the perpetually flickering light in the stairwell on the third floor.
The main door’s lock was broken, held shut with a bit of cleverly folded cardboard. He pushed inside. The stairwell was a brutalist symphony of echoing footsteps and the smell of damp concrete, disinfectant, and cigarette smoke. Graffiti layered the walls, a history of tags and declarations. He climbed to the fifth floor, the fatigue in his legs a familiar ache.
Their flat was at the end of a narrow, poorly lit corridor. The front door was painted a cheerful, peeling blue. The key stuck, then gave with a jiggle and a shove.
Inside, the world softened. It was small—a boxy living room with a galley kitchen off it, two bedrooms, and a bathroom—but it was fiercely loved. The walls were covered in bookshelves, sagging under the weight of his mum’s nursing textbooks and well-thumbed paperbacks. A second-hand sofa was buried under a bright Moroccan blanket. Every surface held evidence of a life being diligently built: his mum’s flashcards for exams, a pile of mending by the TV, and a photo wall of them at Southend Pier, with Louis in his primary school uniform, and his dad, now only a smiling ghost in a few faded pictures.
The quiet here was different from the theatre’s hollow grandeur. This was the quiet of two people trying very hard. The central heating clunked ominously. Through the thin window, he could see the lights of the city’s wealthier quarters glittering in the distance, the same stars looking down on a completely different London.
Louis dropped his keys into an old souvenir ashtray from Brighton. Shrugging off his stiff work shirt, he changed into a loose shirt and a hooded jumper. He headed into the kitchen, pausing by the refrigerator.
“Alright, Dad?” he said as he touched one of the pictures of his father, held up by a cheerful magnet that had been dropped one too many times, now reading ‘ondo’ instead of ‘London’, the bright red heart beneath it barely recognisable as such. Then he opened the refrigerator, grabbing the container of leftover curry his mother made earlier that evening. He warmed it in the microwave, mixed it around with his fork, and began to eat without waiting for it cool down.
He collapsed on the couch with a sigh, putting his aching feet up on the coffee table. Reaching for the remote, he switched on the telly, once modern but now well beyond its prime. The first channel that filled the screen was showing reruns of old EastEnders episodes. He couldn’t be bothered to change the channel again, and half-watched, half-dozed as he finished his curry. He’d go to bed soon, but not before leaving the small lamp on in the living room for his mum, so she didn’t have to come home in complete darkness.
He’d had worse days.