Imprisoned In My Heart: A Larry Stylinson Fanfic

1.

 “You’re new to this, right?” Liam asked as they headed down the corridor. He continued without waiting for a confirmation, “the trick is to never look shocked by anything. Otherwise they’ll walk all over you. Act tall, stand your ground, don’t blink too much. It’s like facing up to a wild animal; don’t act like you’re afraid.”

Louis was a psychologist – and a pretty good one, if his exam results were anything to go by – so he was pretty sure he already had a fairly good idea of how to deal with this kind of thing. Still, he didn’t comment and left Liam to cheerfully make suggestions and point things out to him here and there. The directions, at least, Louis was grateful for; psychologist or not, he didn’t fancy getting lost in this place. He did watch TV, police dramas included, and he had no intention of getting jumped by prisoners who expected anyone with a doctorate or any sort of medical qualification to be hiding drugs in their briefcase. Whether or not that kind of thing happened was debatable, but he wasn’t taking any chances.

“So you’re what, early twenties?” enquired Liam.

When had they moved from advice to small-talk? “Yeah,” Louis confirmed dazedly.

 “Early to graduate, weren’t you?”

“I was on an advanced course. I was, uh, kind of running rings around the rest of my psychology class,” Louis admitted with an embarrassed smile. “They moved me up a year. Or two.”

 “Mmmm hmm.” Liam nodded. “I get it. You think you can handle this lot?”

“Hopefully. I mean, training and putting everything into practice are, you know…they’re two completely different things. But I think I’ll be okay.”

“That’s the spirit!” Liam patted him on the back. “Here’s some advice, though – lose the briefcase.”

Louis blinked. “Oh God, will they attack me and strip-search me for drugs?”

A huge grin filled Liam’s face and he laughed. “No – it just makes you look a bit pretentious.”

With that, he gestured towards a nearby door, gave Louis an encouraging smile and then walked off, whistling.

“Um…thanks,” Louis muttered. He wasn’t entirely sure whether or not he meant it. Probably not. After all, how was he supposed to dispose of his briefcase in a place like this? Did it have a staff room? Or lockers? Or…something? He couldn’t see a friendly receptionist to leave his belongings with.

 Of course not. That would be silly – this was a prison. Why was he expecting it to be like school?

 In the end, he decided to stuff the offending article underneath a nearby chair and then go for a little wander. He didn’t have to see any of the prisoners for another half hour yet – might as well have a look around and see what he was getting into.

 He worked out pretty quickly that all of his stereotypes were wrong, because there were very few skinheads and most of the people wandering around wearing bland prison uniforms looked pretty much harmless. There wasn’t so much as a hint of a gang tattoo or the suggestion of a revolution. In fact, quite a few people smiled at him as he walked along – one young blond boy with amazingly blue eyes even waved at him as he went past, and Louis hoped that he would be meeting the lad again in one of his therapy sessions. He could do with a couple of friendly faces around, even if they did belong to lawbreakers. Several of the prison guards nodded at him and a couple smiled, and he hoped that Liam had been putting in a good word for him. Just like in high school, there were separate groups of people: the quiet ones who looked studious and scared of everyone, the sporty looking ones, the ones with the giant beards and loud laughs, the good-looking ones, the loud ones that seemed like the most likely to make trouble. Louis memorized faces that he expected would be trickier to deal with and took a mental note of those he expected would get along well with him. Every so often he had a quick word with a passer by – and occasionally people would stop staring curiously at him for long enough to ask him who he was and what he was doing there. The news that he was a psychologist wasn’t taken too well, but after assuring them that he’d left his strait-jackets at home and they had no legal obligation to say anything, people seemed to take to him. Things were going remarkably well. 

It was getting close to time for his first session when he first spotted the boy with the curly hair.

 The boy looked like he belonged in a young offenders’ institute, not a prison for fully grown men. He had a very young-looking face, soft, loose brown curls that fell neatly across his forehead, dimples and amazing playful green eyes that seemed to notice everything in just one cursory glance. As Louis watched, the boy stretched out across a chair, lounging against the fabric, and he yawned, rumpling his hair with one hand. Louis couldn’t help admiring the boy’s long body and the way he seemed so at ease with himself, sprawling across the upholstery like he owned the place. Still, perhaps he wasn’t as relaxed as he appeared; a trained psychologist, Louis knew the signs. The boy was a professional at playing it cool; he had even taken in Louis for a second. But when he took a closer look, Louis could see tension rippling through every breath the lad took, and his pretty eyes were tight and anxious. For some reason, despite his apparent ease and carefully unruffled expression, the boy looked…worried. That made Louis uneasy for reasons he wasn’t entirely sure of.

 He reached out and caught the arm of a passing guard, who, by some sheer stroke of luck, turned out to be Liam.

“Hiya! How’re you settling in?” Liam asked warmly.

“Great, thanks. Listen, who’s that boy over there, the one with the curly hair?”

Liam didn’t even glance over as he said instantly “That’s Harry Styles.”

Clearly Harry Styles was already well-known, although whether that was good news or not was hard to say. Louis carried on hurriedly, “Are you sure he ought to be here? He looks awfully young.”

“He just arrived a few days back. It was his eighteenth last week; he’s just old enough. He doesn’t belong in a young offender’s institute any more. He’s a man.”

“Can they not make an exception? Look at him. He looks so…” Louis waved a hand, lost for words.

“Innocent?” Liam snorted. “That’s what he’d like us all to believe. Trust me, that lad belongs in here more than anybody else. Exceptions have been made for him already – he ought to be in a far higher security place than this. The kid may look harmless, but he’s ten times more dangerous than any of the others. His age has already been taken into consideration; he’s got off very lightly.”

Troubled, Louis asked, “What did he do?”

Liam threw him a pitying look. “You really are new, aren’t you? I wouldn’t have thought it took a genius to figure out that we’re not allowed to say. Confidentiality, and all that. If you want your curiosity satisfied on that one, you’ll have to ask him yourself. But I’ll tell you this much – it was bad.”

Louis felt agitated and confused. Surely plain curiosity couldn’t have inspired this kind of feeling in him – it was almost desperation, this burning need to understand the mystery. “How bad?” he pressed.

Glancing worriedly around to make sure no one was listening, Liam leaned in a little closer and whispered “Bad enough for a life sentence.” Then, he stepped smartly back, checked behind him, then turned around and quickly walked off in the same direction he had come from, determined to avoid any more of Louis’ questions.

 Louis nibbled a bit of loose skin on his thumb worriedly, and he looked quickly upwards, trying to spot the boy. That was when he discovered that he was not the only one staring; curly hair falling across one eye, Harry Styles was watching him with a small smile on his young, attractive face. Louis blinked at him in shock as their eyes locked and he was frozen in place by a look that could have melted a heart of stone, the kind of look a puppy might give you before you kicked it. The expression looked odd next to the amused twitch of the boy’s lips.

 Then Harry Styles, the boy with the life sentence, the youngest and most dangerous prisoner in the complex, the boy who had only escaped a high-security prison through youth, grinned straight at Louis and winked.