𝕋𝕦𝕣𝕟 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕋𝕚𝕕𝕖||𝕃.𝕊

EPILOGUE

2015: Maritime Museum, London, England

Louis walked around the museum looking at it in awe. He had finally found free time to visit the museum and something was drawing him to it.

Each time he passed it, he would stop and stare but something was always keeping him away and it had gotten unbearable so here he is, wandering the great rooms that hold stories for people to know and stories no one will ever hear.

There were journals that belonged to great sailors and artifacts retrieved from wrecks. Boastful and expensive things scattered the glass casings but he didn't feel sated. He's missing something.

He looked around. The museum was silent and only a few people lingered around. Children held their mothers' hands as they looked around bemused at the sites before them.

Swords and cutlasses hung as a reminder that pirates still venture the great seas but he knows no one compares to the stories of the great Captain Harry Styles. The stories of him and his lover are still talked about with great awe.

He had always felt connected to the story as his mother told him every night as a young one. Each time a different tale and each time he couldn't help but feel how familiar it was.

The great Captain and his lover took ill spontaneously and they both died in each other's embrace peacefully. Their children preceeded them and led the growing fleet of ships. Leo and Luna Styles. People say that the ghosts of the great Captain and his lover, once a British Prince wronged by family, still linger drifting through worlds together but Louis thinks differently.

While others always feared the tales, he loved them. It felt so familiar and he had even corrected his mother once on a detail and she looked at him in shock as no one knew of that detail. He believes that the Captain and the Prince loved deeply and that love ran so deep that even beings in other realms watched in awe.

He almost missed an entire room on his hunt to ease his restless mind. The door was newly polished which meant the exhibit was new. He stepped inside the brightly lit room with no one inside  and all of a sudden, the thirst inside his system that had been nagging at him as he walked through the museum had quenched itself. He felt content. The kind you feel after a long day when you finally retire to the comfort of your bed to rest your aching muscles.

He looked around at daggers and artifacts that were all too familiar to him. He has seen these before. He feels like he has used these before. The polished white of the pistols and the rusting barrel which spoke to its genuineness beckoned him closer.

He pushes his feathery fringe away from his blue eyes and observes the paintings hung in the room. Not many were present but they look well preserved.

One of them, the one of Captain Harry Styles feels like his own work. It looks like his work. The long chocolate curls messily falling around the sharp features of his godlike beautiful face as he looked on with fond eyes at whoever the painter might have been. His tricorn was cluttered with feathers only in the most elegant way. A silver rose ring that was not among the retrieved jewellery in the glass casings in the room, painted with great detail and the indicolite ring boasting it's presence on the captain's hand. His crimson waistcoat wrapped around his broad figure and Louis smiled. It was all too familiar.

He could feel the salty wind on his face and the ebbing of the great vessel as it moved against the waves.

Louis is an artist. A famous artist. A famous gay artist. His art was always closely related to the aquatic scene of the world. Not just the beauty of the sunset against the never ending sea but also the beauty of jaggered rocks and shipwrecks. The beauty of the fishermen hard at work and when he travelled, islands that spoke to him. He never painted unless the scene spoke to him and so his work was on high demand. They sat in the homes of the most elite people and they were fawned on like unmatched treasures. He inspects the work and the signature that is so familiar as it sticks out at the bottom. A few cursive loops signing the name L. William.

He feels a presence beside him. A reassuring one but he does not turn to look at the person. He can smell the tobacco vanille perfume and the presence is so familiar and he feels drawn to the man he had not even seen the face of.

The next painting makes him gasp slightly. It looks an awful lot like him. The features are his. The blue eyes and the sharp cheekbones. Two children, a girl held by the great pirate captain and the other, a little boy in the arms of the captain's lover. That's him but that would be absurd. He was not in existence then. It cannot be him.

"That's Prince Louis William. He was Captain Styles's lover." The man beside him speaks in a familiar deep drawl. Fondness seeped through the man's every pore as he uttered the Prince's name, his own name.

"Really?" He asks pretending to not know. "Who's work is that?" He pointed to the single painting of the captain.

"That would be the Prince's work. Did you know that he stood on a stage on which was originally meant to be the site of the Captain's execution and exposed his father and brother before killing them?" The man asks.

Louis nods because he has heard the tales. He looked to the second painting. The two children are so familiar as is the Prince and the captain.

He looks at the glass encasing the weaponry closer. He looks at the white pistol. "Mine." He says softly. The daggers and the cutlasses. "Mine."

The rings. The malachite ring. "Mine." He said.

He finally turns to look at the man that was beside him. "My name is Harry Styles." The man gives a knowing smile and held his big silver rose ring clad hand out.

His curly hair and his features. Familiar. His. He knows this man. It's the captain. It's his Harry.

"Louis Tomlinson." Louis says. The next words were more possessive but this man was way too familiar. One more glance at the man and the memories from another lifetime flooded his brain. He knows why everything was so familiar. It was his life. The captain was his lover. A man who had promised to find him in his next life. A man who promised to love him in lifetimes to come.

"Mine." He says as he crashes against the man. He holds Harry tightly as he relaxes against his body.

Harry instantly hugs back because as soon as he saw Louis in the museum the memories came crashing down on him. Memories from another lifetime. Memories of promises, memories of fights, memories of pain and memories of desire and wholehearted love.

"Yours." Harry sighs.

"I've waited so long Haz. You found me. You found me." He repeats in a whisper. He hugged his lover. His lover who he knew intimately and deeply from another lifetime but this man was still his. His to love. His to rediscover but through it all, He belonged to Louis and Louis belonged to him.

"It's nice to see you again mi cielo." Harry said as he hugged Louis tightly and breathed out a sigh of relief as the emptiness in his heart slowly dissipated and love and warmth replaced itself as it would in every lifetime that followed.

-Fin-