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lewhis · 10 months ago

Text

Now I Realize

pairing: louis x reader (she/her)

rating: M

warnings: self-esteem issues

summary: An invitation to a party in LA forces you to revisit a chapter of your life that you thought you'd left behind. You struggle to reconcile who you used to be with who you have become - and are they truly separate entities?

A story of what it is to be young and in love, followed by what it is to be a little older, a little wiser, and still maybe, hypothetically, still a little in love.

***

I hadn’t thought about him in years.

Okay, that wasn’t true. Of course, I thought about him. He was a central fixture of my life for a long-ass time. Not thinking about him would be like not thinking about your stint in high school, or your first apartment, or your first job. I didn’t think about him all the time, but he was bound to come up every now and again, tied to the tail-end of some other memory to which he was inextricably linked. He popped up from time to time, but I wasn’t actively digging him up. Not anymore.

There was a time when I thought about him every day. That’s almost a post-breakup requirement, isn’t it? The pining. The moping. The late-night subtweeting, hoping against hope he might see me on his feed and think, “You know what? I’m a moron. And an asshole. I miss her.” It was all pretty pathetic. Exactly the sort of shit he would have teased me for, had we still been friends. But we weren’t friends. Not anymore. And there was no one around to witness my shame except for me.

But, as I said, that was years ago. I shed my tears, felt my feelings, drank a lot of wine, and I got the fuck over it.

Left to my own devices, I would have continued not thinking about him for many months more to come, until finally his prominence in my memories would fade completely into the background, and I’d be truly free to live my new, Louis-free life – a life which I had just begun to truly accept.

But that didn’t happen. Because Niall Horan is a fucking liar.

September, 2020.

I’d been living in my hometown again since the breakup. Got myself a, eh, decent one-bedroom apartment just outside the city and managed to drum up a more or less steady income doing special effects work for a few local film companies. (All the money that I didn’t spend on a nicer apartment went toward the monthly rental of my studio space.) Most recently, I’d been in talks with some folks putting together the pilot episode of a horror series. They were looking to pitch it to Netflix as soon as possible, and the producers assured me my monster makeup would be the ticket to winning them over.

I wouldn’t lie: the money wasn’t, like, a lot, or anything – certainly nowhere close to what I’d been pulling in my former life – but it was livable. I was making it work. And besides, I was never cut out for all the high-stakes glamour and fame, not even as a tangential player. I didn’t have to worry about behind-the-scenes staff photogs snapping my picture while I was trying to work, and I didn’t have to live with the knowledge that millions of seething, rabid, hormonal fans would later dissect every single frame for signs that I was infringing on their imagined territory. Yikes. My 550 square-foot sweatbox of a studio on the least-scary scary side of town was way better, by comparison.

The me who went to all those places and did all those things was an entirely separate person. Aside from a few reoccurring stress dreams and a modest nest egg in my savings account, I hadn’t come away from that time with anything tangible, anything lasting.

Well, unless you counted Niall.

We didn’t talk all the time. Not even every day, or every week. But I could count on Niall for a meme in my inbox now and again. I’d get a “whats the craic” and a sunglasses emoji at least once a month, and we’d chat for a little while if we had the time. We bantered, mostly. Kept it light – and we never talked about love-lives, as a rule.

I was elbows-deep (literally) in a ten-hour sculpting session for the pilot project when my phone rang. The only calls I ever got in the middle of the day were spam, so I was primed to hit decline out of habit alone, at least until I saw NIALLER splashed across the screen above a backstage selfie of us from Way-Back-When. He’d lost some stupid bet to Liam that night and, as punishment, had to go on stage with his hair (temporarily) dyed bright orange. It looked horrifying. After I’d finished the dye job for him, he said we should get a picture together, “seein’ as we’re both in the ginger club now.” (That, a reference to the fact that, although I frequently liked to change up my hair, I was a decided redhead for most of that tour.)

This – the call itself – was a total breach in protocol; Niall never called. Firstly, because he was always travelling and could never be assed to keep the time differences straight, and he never wanted to wake me up in the middle of the night if it wasn’t an emergency. Second, Niall was more of a FaceTime kind of guy, just in general. He (and others) had tried many times in the past to cajole me into switching to an iPhone, but I was a lifelong Android girlie; it just wasn’t happening. So, we defaulted to texting.

With both of these factors in mind – thinking this was either an emergency call or a butt-dial – I scrambled to wipe a palm full of clay slurry on the front of my overalls. I still wound up with a quarter-sized smear on my phone screen. Oh, well. Wouldn’t be the first time. Quickly, I jabbed at the screen a second time and switched it to speaker mode.

“Niall? Hey, can you hear me?”

“Y/N!” was his response, sung in vibrato. It certainly didn��t sound like he was having an emergency, nor did he sound surprised to be hearing my voice. So, probably not a butt-dial.

“Niall!” I said again. “Um. Just-- Hang on a second—” Holding my hands up like I was scrubbing in for surgery, I maneuvered my way around to a basket full of scrub cloths in the corner.

“Why d’you sound like you’re in a metal bucket?”

“Because I basically am!” I called from across the room. “Sorry, I’m in the studio. Gimme a second to wash up.” My phone was a good six feet away, on a table amidst various sculpting tools. In between that table and the clean-up area were four tables the size of barstools, placed around the room in such a way that a me-sized person could still manage to maneuver around and between them. On each stool were four sculpts at various stages of completion.

(Would it have made more sense to work on one sculpt at a time before beginning a second, a third, or a fourth? Maybe. But this was my process.)

Any response that Niall might have made was lost to the sound of running water gurgling out of the wash sink. The solidified clay coating all sides of my hands soon liquified under the spray and then went spiraling down the drain. I dried my hands on another rag and made my way back to my phone.

“Almost there,” I said, a little strained as I picked around the various delicate obstacles. “It’s a maze in here right now. I’m doing, like, four monster suits for this guy’s Netflix pilot. The script isn’t great, but these masks are gonna be—Shit.” My breath caught in my throat. There was a brief moment of panic when I thought I elbowed a Mothman sculpt in the face, but I’d only managed to catch the cement shoulder of the cast underneath.

Niall let out a laugh, which crackled through the speakers of my weathered phone. “You good?”

“Yeah.” My hands hovered around Mothman’s head, ready to catch him if he toppled over. “Yes? Yes. Okay, yeah! He’s good. I might have overestimated the size of my space when I took this job.” Finally, I made it to the desk with clean hands and no toppled monster heads. I seized my phone, switched off of speaker phone, and brought it to my ear.

“Hi,” I said resolutely, then laughed. “Sorry. You caught me on, like…” –I glanced at the clock— “Hour ten and a half of my workday. Woof. I might be a little delirious.”

Niall, in his jolly way, responded with another laugh. “You’re crazy, woman. Sounds like you’ve earned a break, then, yeah? Got a second to chat?”

Now that my momentum had been disrupted, I could feel how well and truly drained I was. My back ached from stooping over the sculpts. My head was fuzzy as if I’d just sat for the SAT, and there was an ominous tingling sensation in my right wrist that said I’d probably overdone it on all the fine detail work. I made a mental note to sleep with my wrist brace on that night.

“Yeah, I think I’m done for the day.” I pulled a folding chair out from under the desk and slumped into it. “What’s up? Is everything okay? I was surprised to see your call.”

“It’s all good,” he assured me. “Just didn’t feel like bangin’ out a text. You’ll be gettin’ an invite in the mail, anyway, but I wanted to invite ya personally.”

“An invite for what?”

“I’m havin’ a party!” I could hear his smile over the phone. “For my birthday. Also, just ‘cause parties are awesome. You in?”

I hated myself at that moment because my mind only went to one place. I knew instantly that Niall had heard my hesitation, and he knew the cause.

“Louis won’t be there.” He said it casually. Not a bribe or a placation, just a fact. “Talked to him already. He’s got something goin’ in San Diego that same night.”

“Oh, I see. So, I’m getting the invite because he won’t be there. Wow, Niall. I thought I got you in the divorce.”

“Sorry, love. Gotta split custody.” He cracked a laugh. “And don’t gimme none of that. You would’a gotten an invite no matter what. Just, now you’ve got no excuse not to come!”

He had me there. Niall might not seem it, but he was always an organized guy. Good at planning things. As of that phone call, I’d have over a month to get my shit together and carve out a few days to fly cross-country for his party. Even with the upcoming pilot project, I knew I’d be able to swing it.

“Alright, fine,” I said, putting on airs like he was really twisting my arm. In reality, I was smiling. “Where’s the party at?”

“My place in LA. Got a load of people comin’. There’s gonna be food, music, a ton of drinkin’, all that shite. And I’ve got extra rooms, so you can stay with me!”

I could already feel a bit of that old excitement coming back. The kind of giddiness that my old self used to feel when there was some big red-carpet event on the horizon. Not that a birthday party at Niall’s (albeit enormous) house was anything overly glamorous, but it was the closest I’d been to that world since I was unceremoniously booted out. It’d be fun, I thought, to dip my toes back in for a few days.

We talked for another thirty minutes. Niall asked for some pics of the sculpting I’d done today. He name-dropped a few other people on the guest list (none of The Lads, he told me [and it was always said that way, with the implied proper nouns – The Lads] would be able to make the party.) I asked if he’d been working on any new music lately, and if he’d ever fixed the warped neck of his favorite acoustic guitar. Then, we fell into the usual banter and jokes until, finally, it was time to hang up.

“I’m really glad you’re gonna be there, Y/N.” It was said so sincerely, and I felt my chest tighten with affection for my friend. Never once – not before, not then, nor any moment since – did I think that Niall harbored anything but completely platonic affection for me, and that was perfectly alright; it was a mutual feeling.

“Me too, Niall. I’ll talk to you soon, yeah?”

“Cheers.”

As I pulled the phone away from my ear to end the call, that picture of Niall with his stupid orange hair and me, with orange dye staining the very same hand that was raised in a peace sign, flashed up on the screen again. It stayed for a moment before defaulting to my home screen. Without questioning myself, I pulled up Niall’s contact info, then tapped his profile photo. It expanded to full size, even larger than it had been on the call screen.

It had been a long time since I actually looked at that picture. We were younger, then – God, how had I not realized at the time how young I was? – and it was obvious that we were tired. That show would’ve been during the middle of the tour, when most of the shows felt like fever dreams interspersed between long stints on the tour buses or – if we were lucky – crammed into airplane seats. We were stressed – me, because I had to get back to makeup if there was any hope of their opener being on time; Niall, because, well, duh, it was his show, and he was scheduled for a phone interview right before they went on. Despite all that – and maybe because we were so young and so full of an energy that I could no longer hope to fathom – despite all the stress and the shit, we had fun during those days.

Somewhere between that selfie and that present moment in my sweaty little studio, I’d gotten older. Old enough to have sympathy for that girl in the picture who thought that just because all her friends were pop stars and she was just the help, she mattered less, somehow.

And we were friends, back then. All of us. Me and Liam would bond over video games. Harry would let me raid his closet or style his hair and we’d talk for ages, without self-consciousness. Zayn and I liked to hide out on the bus or in someone’s hotel room, and we’d spend a few hours in almost total silence except for the few words it took to ask the other person to pass the drawing pencils, or to look over a sketch. I didn’t actually see a lot of Niall, back then. Not one-on-one. His girlfriend (now his ex; and in many ways, she was my ex, too) was never happy unless one or both of us gave her our complete, undivided attention. Niall and I didn’t truly start to bond until After (again, always a proper noun), because it was only After that we realized we could bond over a truly shared experience.

Only one person left off that mental rollcall (well, two, really.) I felt myself wanting to slam the gate shut, as I had so many times before. No more memory lane today! Road’s closed! Because again, I didn’t think about him anymore, remember? But I looked back down at that very young, very happy, very weary girl in the photo, and I realized that, for her sake, I shouldn’t try to block those memories out. Because she was me. I was her. Try as I might to draw a line between the two, there was no “this life” and “old life.” There was no pretending that those hard, scary times had never happened. And there was no point, either, in acting like those hard, scary times hadn’t come with more than their fair share of happy times, too.

And not just happy: the happiest.

Is that why I felt that rock in my gut every time I started to think about Way-Back-When? Was I afraid, somewhere deep down inside, even though I was a grown woman now, far removed from that very young, very scared girl that I’d been then – was I afraid that the happiest days of my life had already come and gone?

Yes, I was. I knew that I was. I could feel that fear settling into my toes and oozing up my spine.

Because no matter how many happy memories I had in my head, no matter how many days I spent feeling so grateful that I’d found people who knew me and loved me and wanted me to stick around—where was I now?

We were friends, back then. All of us. But we weren’t anymore.

⬇️ read the rest on ao3! ⬇️

#i was literally thisclose to deleting this thing and giving up but instead im doubling down #reblog to help a friend??#louis tomlinson #x reader #fanfic #fanfiction #one direction #where we are tour

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