When mum wakes up, she finds him sitting on the sofa in complete silence, staring into the wall. He's cleaned up the mouse, mostly because he almost slipped on it when he went to get a glass of water, but he's been in the same spot since then, hoping for some kind of breakthrough.
The empty frame above the fireplace seems to be making a point today.
"Morning, darling," she says, stepping into the room gingerly and looking around like she expects Louis to be nearby. "Are you by yourself?"
Harry blinks to shake himself out of the statuesque state he's been in. "Yeah," he says, and turns to look at her. He tries his best to smile. "Louis left a while ago."
In truth, he has no idea how long it's been. The mornings start to look the same after a certain time - he easily could've been here for hours and not realised.
She comes over and sits next to him, pressing a kiss to his cheek. There's a worried wrinkle between her eyebrows.
"Everything okay?" she asks, and pushes some of his hair off his forehead, touches the skin there like he's eight again and she's checking for a fever. "Are you feleing all right?"
He wraps his fingers around her wrist, feeling very small, and like he wants to hold her hand more than anything. "I don't have a fever, Mum," he says, tried to make it into a joke, but it just kind of limply slips out of his mouth and falls onto the coffee table.
She frowns now, and fusses some more. Harry finally stops her when he tries to fix his collar, and intertwines their fingers. He feels so childish, but so safe.
"Harry," mum says, quiet, insistent. "What happened?"
Harry squints into the sun outside and contemplates telling her. What happened is that he's been selfish again. What happened is that he's realised he never, never fell out of love; that he's been walking around for the past five years trying to fill an empty space he didn't realise was there.
What happened is that he's eighteen again, and completely, utterly, arse over teakettle in love with Louis Tomlinson.
"It's nothing," he says, scrambling for an excuse. She wouldn't understand, he tells himself, because he's been so casually cruel, has made his stance clear over and over. "I, um," he looks at the papers spread all over the coffee table, at his laptop which is still open, but asleep, "just struggling with picking out some songs."
"Darling," mum says. She doesn't believe him. "Is it-did Marcus-"
Harry shakes his head hastily. "No," he says, and remembers that most normal people would probably still be mourning their lost relationship - the most recent one, that is. "No, of course not."
She nods, and pats the back of his hand. "That's good to hear. You've been looking so much happier these past couple of weeks."
"Have I?"
"Yes," she smiles, tilts her head. Cups his cheek, and runs a thumb under his eye, until Harry has to double-check that he's not crying. "It's been really lovely to see you acting the way you used to, you know, not popstar Harry, but the one who fell into Mrs Johnston's sewage and then ran across the entire village with no clothes on."
Harry laughs, unexpected but so very welcome. "Louis threw a two-pound coin in it and dared me to fish it out," he says. Because that memory, like every memory, is infused with Louis's infectious laugh, with his blinding-bright smile while he watches Harry do his every bidding.
"I know," mum grins. "Then Jay and I forbade you from seeing each other for two weeks, and you climbed out of your window in the middle of the night and left a note that said you were running away from home because you couldn't live in a dictatorship."
Harry puts his head in his hands and hiccups with laughter. He met up with Louis that night, in the forest just outside of town, and they spent hours huddling against a tree trunk in the damp grass. That was the night Louis told him that he was gay, and he's found out because he kissed some boy in his grade, and Harry, in his ripe thirteen years of age, felt real jealousy for the first time.
"I'm sorry," he says, even though he's sure he's apologised a thousand times. "I-I don't know what I'd been thinking."
Mum laughs a little. "That's okay, love. It kind of was our bad for assuming you two could stay away from each other for more than twelve hours."
She's right, so very right. Louis used to be Harry's entire life - every minute, every moment of it, up until the night Harry packed up and left - and it never felt anything but right.
From the moment Harry came into the world, and Louis toddled in on his mum's heels to say hi, they were meant to be, destined to be, each other's beginning and end.
"Mum," he says, and his throat is hopelessly dry. "Mum. I love him."
Mum frowns. "I know," she says, and she sounds puzzled.
"No, I mean," Harry says, "I'm in love with him. With Louis."
"Darling, I know," she says again, gentler, and pets his hair again. "Didn't you?"
Harry bites his lip, and shakes his head.
"Oh. Oh, Harry."
"I don't know what to do," he says, looking down at his knees, leaning into her concerned touch. "I can't-I know I can't ever have this again, but-"
"Why not?" she asks, as if it's that simple. Why not.
The amount of reasons he's got on the tip of his tongue is so enormous it won't leave his mouth. Their past, his guilt, the way Louis looked at him like he's seen a ghost after they kissed for the first time in five years, but what it boils down to is-
"He doesn't love me anymore," he says, whispers really, but it's so heavy, so absolute, that it plunges the room into a terrifying silence. "Obviously."
"Are you sure?" mum asks. When Harry looks at her, she seems tentative, timid in a way she never is, with her small shoulders hunched in on themselves. "I mean-God knows you've spoken to him more than I have, but-"
"I'm sure, mum," Harry replies, takes her hand again, squeezes it. Thinks about Louis signing the divorce papers with a flourish, about his peaceful face when he lay down in the grass after, and immediately feels guiltier because they're not even- "I'm sure. He's told me enough times."
Mum blinks at that, and her eyes seem a little too shiny for the shadowy corner of the room they're sitting in.
"Okay," she says, and gives him a watery smile. "Then-then I suppose you've got to find a way to move on. Throw yourself back into your music, maybe."
She looks at the papers curiously, reaching forward to lift up the corner of one and read what's underneath.
She's right, and Harry knows that. He can't stay here and dawdle forever, can't hover in this in-between, can't hold on to Louis in the vain hope that something is going to happen. He's got to get back into the studio, back to LA, to doing his job and moving on with these pieces of a life. He'll figure out how to put them back together, eventually.
"I've already picked one of these," he tells mum, looking at the sheet he's set apart from the others on the far corner of the coffee table. Just Hold On. It makes him smile a little, the promise it holds, the idea of working on music again when he's been so preoccupied these past few months. "I'll probably go away for a bit to work on it."
"Good," she says, and stands up. Brushes off her pyjamas like they've been sitting on the ground. "Oh, I almost forgot - I actually came to tell you that I just got off the phone with the reno company."
Harry perks up. "And?"
When she smiles this time, it's bright and unreserved, full of that spark that's undeniably mum. "The house is ready."
*
Harry packs up his things the same day and moves back into his room.
He tells himself he'll go over around ten to say goodbye and thank you to Louis, stands by the window in the darkness and imagines he can see the light in the kitchen coming on somewhere in the distance, through the trees - but he ends up nervously pacing behind the door, reaching for the handle and then changing his mind.
He doesn't know what Louis is thinking, what he's feeling. Maybe it's better if they talk about it in daylight, when neither of them are tired and prone to saying things they might regret.
The house feels painfully empty without anyone else there. Harry's room has been repainted the exact same colour, and most of the furniture survived the water, but it still feels alien - that's no longer the wall that he and Louis leaned against when they first talked about moving in together, where Louis kissed him and told him that he'll follow him to the ends of the world. It doesn't feel like the same bed, even though it is, doesn't feel like it's got anything left that made the room Harry's.
And it's so dreadfully, dreadfully quiet, so dark and dull without a fire in the fireplace, without Louis sitting in the kitchen until the wee hours scribbling away like he does, without-Louis. That's what Harry misses most, here in his self-imposed exile - the knowledge that Louis is always close by, that the essence of him has soaked into every wall and floorboard in the house even if he's not physically there, that at any given time, his laughter could drift up the stairs and curl around Harry's ears like it's at home there. He already misses the evenings they would spend on the sofa, together, laughing about inane things. Warm, and comfortable, and at home. Here, with these clinically new walls and stiff new carpeting, Harry might as well be lying in a hospital bed.
At midnight, as Harry contemplates going for a walk to help him sleep, Mark texts him back about the demo.
Good 2 go, the text says. Meet in Ldn tmrw at 1, will text address writers name is Will T lol.
Will T sounds like a Black Eyed Peas reject. Harry becomes a little more wary, then, but it's not quite enough to quell his excitement about getting to work on new music with this person, whoever they might be.
He pulls up the demo on his phone again, and listens to the gorgeous piano while he goes online and Googles his potential writing partner.
Google comes up with a Wikipedia page, and a very extensive list of writing credits, but no personal information. No full name, no date of birth, no photo. It is a man, though - and he's written with two dozen artists Harry knows, with Ryan Tedder, on at least five songs that Harry recognises from the radio in just the last few months.
He scrolls through his other search results, but nothing real comes up. Will T doesn't have a single social media account, doesn't talk to the press, and wherever he's mentioned in an interview it's in very generic terms. He's an enigma, and Harry cannot wait to meet him.
He goes to bed with the ballad still ringing in his ears, already thinking of tweaks, of lyric changes he might suggest. He stubbornly thinks about music and music only as he stares into the dark, and ignores every thought of bell-bright laughter, of blue eyes.