boys don't cry. [h.s]

epilogue

August 2015.

Harry thought he saw Adam.

It was just the back of this guy's head, dusty brown hair sticking up and broad shoulders, but Harry's breath caught in his throat and he stared for longer than he should have. Then the guy turned and he didn't look like Adam at all – his nose was too upturned, his eyes were blue, his cheekbones weren't sharp enough – and Harry looked away.

Harry paid for the ice creams, holding all three in one hand as he turned back to get one last glimpse of this warped version of his brother, but he was gone. And Harry walked back towards the edge of the water, wondering whether he should feel something about this encounter, but he didn't at all.

Isabel was sat on a bench with baby Lucas on her lap, smiling at him as he played with her sunglasses. Ruby was beside them, her little legs not even reaching off the edge of the bench, and she stabbed furiously at the screen of Harry's phone with her chubby fingers, cackling every time one of the Angry Birds skimmed a block.

"One for you," Harry announced with a smile, leaning over Isabel and passing Ruby an ice cream. She beamed up at him, her dark tufty hair falling into her eyes.

"Fanks Harry!"

"No problem, love," he grinned back. He handed another ice cream to Isabel's nephew and glanced at Isabel. It would be all over his clothes in about thirty seconds, but she shrugged and smiled, and so Harry did too. He leaned back on the bench, taking a lick of his and Isabel's shared ice cream before passing it to her, his gaze being momentarily caught by the strands of her hair that glistened in the light, that had turned maize and white from the sun. He remembered then that the first time he'd smelled his shampoo in her hair his heart had nearly stopped, and he smiled slightly when he thought about how it was becoming normal to him now, how something that had made him lose it months ago was now just the way things were.

Isabel shifted Lucas in her lap, extracting her sunglasses from him before they got sticky and sliding them into her hair, pushing it back from her face. She bit the flake of the ice cream and smiled at Harry as she handed it back to him. They'd only had enough money to buy three ice creams between the four of them, but it didn't matter.

Harry took it and looked away from her, looking out over the surface of the river contentedly, and all of a sudden he felt so perfectly calm that he could have fallen asleep right there, with the sun glistening off the water and the heat washing over him like a blanket. Isabel was right when she'd told him about Norrköping – they'd been out here last night and the water really was like a black mirror, so dark and shiny that Harry had just stared at it for so long, trying to imprint it into his memory forever.

He'd been like that everywhere they'd been so far on their trip, though: wide eyed and quietly fascinated, letting Isabel lead him around everywhere while he took pictures of everything, devouring guidebooks, insisting they visit the same place multiple times so he could burn the image of it into his brain. When they were in Barcelona, they'd visited the cathedral three times because Harry wanted to remember perfectly the curve of the cloisters, the patterns in the windows, the fact there was geese in the garden. Isabel just watched him mostly, holding his hand and smiling every time they left somewhere and he turned back, giving it one last look as though he didn't have his whole life to come again.

They'd started there, in Barcelona, for three days before going to Milan, Zurich, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin. Harry had got so used to living out of one rucksack between the pair of them, sleeping on trains and in shabby hostels with clean sheets but peeling walls, broken sinks and cracked mirrors and tiny beds that meant they had to sleep on top of each other until he forgot which limbs were hers and which belonged to him, that he felt like he could do it forever.

They were stopping over in Sweden for a while because Isabel's family were here for the summer before starting again, across Eastern Europe and finally finishing in Rome. And although Harry had loved everywhere, he thought maybe Sweden was his favourite so far because even though there were huge mosquitoes that had made it their mission to eat Harry alive, and even though Isabel's pregnant sister-in-law had insisted Isabel's granny's house became a strictly alcohol-free zone, and even though Harry and Isabel had to have sex so quietly, laughing with their hands over each other's mouths because Alex and Savannah's room was right on the other side of the very thin wall, it felt like it belonged to her, and he couldn't have loved it more.

"You okay?" Isabel asked him, running her thumb along the raised scar on his palm. He blinked down at her, at the curve of her upper lip and the freckles on her nose and and her irises that were almost yellow in the Swedish summer light and the little wrinkles under her eyes from smiling, and he wondered for the thousandth time how it was possible to ever feel this much all at once.

Harry would never not miss Adam, but that was okay. And he'd never not lose his breath for a minute when he saw something that reminded him of Adam, but that was okay too. There were thousands of double negatives about what Harry's life would be like now, without Adam, but Harry was okay with them all.

Sometimes it wasn't easy. Sometimes he wanted to stay in bed all day, and sometimes he couldn't speak really, just wanted to be in his head and on his own for a while, and sometimes he'd just start crying. It wasn't often - it had only happened a handful of times since Christmas - but sometimes he just thought about something a bit too much and cried. He always felt better after, and if she was there, Isabel would come and sit in his lap and put her head on his shoulder, letting him wrap his arms around her tight. She never tried to stop him crying, just let him cry until he stopped. And he always stopped, whether she was there or not, and each time he cried, he cried a little bit less.

They were almost unrecognisable, sitting there in Norrkoping by the water with the surface sparkling and ice cream dripping through Harry's fingers and Isabel's citrus hair catching in the breeze, to how they'd been in January a year and a half ago. Least of all, Harry's 'I Can't Change' had turned into an anchor.

He leaned forward and pressed his lips to hers. Her mouth tasted like ice cream and he squeezed her hand when he kissed her, not caring that people might be watching his tongue slip into her mouth, or that his other hand was wet from melted ice cream, or that Ruby was shrieking and bashing him on the side of the face.

He pulled away, grinning sheepishly at Ruby and licking the ice cream off his fingers.

"I'm fine," Harry answered, passing Isabel back the ice cream and watching her with a smile.

And for the first time in his life, with the sound of children around them shrieking and laughing and a tram rattling along the tracks, with the sun beating down hard on his back and his blood racing hard through his veins, with his gaze steady on hers and their fingers locked, with the detail of her, of them, stamped into his mind forever, clearer than anything else, and with his heart belonging to her, beating for her with the promise that he was alive, alive, alive, Harry Styles meant it when he said he was fine.