7up || larry stylinson au ||

Part IV: The Later Years

And loving you
was a pattern of self-discovery
because someway, somehow,
I always ends up
learning something new
and something real about myself.

So thanks baby,
thank you for fucking
hurting
and the beating
and the tragic love story
and the way you handled it,
and the way you let go.

It helped me learn one thing.

How some people really do need
other people.
How they need someone to tear them apart,
until there is nothing
let to hold.

And I am holding on to whatever it is
that I have left.

-- RM Drake

September
Age 42

"Christ has it already been 7 years again? I've been fighting and dealing with this for 7 years?" This is how Harry begins his interview, skipping over his introduction entirely. He tries to ignore the way the crew is giving him a variety of faces, looks that say Harry, what are you doing , and Oh no, not this again , and Fuck .

He rubs his eyes and sighs. "I'm Harry Styles. I'm 42 years old. My kids are 13 and nine. I've been married for 14 years." He cracks his knuckles. "Feels like a lot longer."

Eloise and Augustus are still present, and when Harry looks at them, he wonders if he looks as old as they do. They're in their 70's, so probably not quite, but with the amount of stress he's been under in the past 20 months or so, he can imagine he doesn't look too great, either.

Eloise tilts her head to the side, something his mum always does when she's trying to get him to listen. "Harry, do you want to give us a quick recap before we begin? It can be off the record."

He shakes his head. "Might as well do it all on camera, yeah?" He waves his hand about. "Let's just get it over with."

Augustus turns the overhead lights on so they shine brighter. "Okay, Styles, let's do this."

"Marriage is hard," he starts, "and all the shit that comes along with it is even harder. I don't think we were adequately warned. I just assumed we'd always be fine because he was the love of my life. But it's fucking hard and now, in this moment in time, I'm not so sure what he is to me. Definitely not the love of my life. Barely even a friend.

"Almost two years ago, Louis' mum, Jay, got really sick. It was a total shock. No one in his family has ever had cancer, so when she was diagnosed, we were all in denial. And her prognosis wasn't good. Doctors gave her nine months, tops.

"It all just happened so quickly. Nine months would have been a dream . We got four. And Louis... He just absolutely fell apart. You don't know heartache until you watch your spouse lose a parent. I can imagine the only thing worse would be if you were the one actually losing the parent."

Harry pauses to wipe his eyes. He never really had time to mourn the loss of his mother-in-law because he was too busy mourning the loss of his husband. Whenever he thinks about Jay, he feels short of breath. He misses her so much .

"I just feel like we're in this perpetual cycle of shit . I have to keep reminding myself that it isn't his fault, really. I don't know what it feels like to lose a parent, and I hope to God I won't know what that feels like for a really long time, so it's hard for me to understand. But fuck . We'd completely gotten over that rough patch that we went through a few years ago and this set us back so far that I don't know if we'll ever be able to recover. It was better for so long, but now every minute of every day is a struggle. He just completely lost himself when his mum died, understandably so, but he isn't trying to get his life back. It's like he died, too.