And They Knocked On The Closet Door

6. Holding Onto Heartache

The next night at Bluebird was awfully calm (at first) and Harry truly believed it would remain so. She had had a busy morning: speaking with the lawyer, calling her mom, going through possible contract clauses... Mike wouldn't sugarcoat anything, and it was horrible! Fake girlfriends? But Harry did not want to have fake girlfriends! She wanted real girlfriends, and boyfriends, and everything in between...!

According to Mike, they were called pr relationships and were extremely common in the industry.

"Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait...!" Harry had stuttered. "Is Louis' girlfriend fake?" In her head, she couldn't help but reproduce the conversation she'd had with Louis after her first gig at Bluebird, how he'd said everything was fake.

"You'll have to ask Louis." The man had answered, and Harry had mentally face-palmed herself and blushed profoundly. Of course her mind would instantly go there! And what did the man expect her to do? Call Louis and go: "So anyway, are you and Eleanor dating for real? Just out of curiosity, you know... I'm a knowledge-hunger soul!"

Regardless of whether or not Louis' relationship was real, Harry did not stand a chance so she'd do better to focus on their music and let her little crush go away. And hours came and went away, and Harry tried to focus on that night's performance, but there was so much going on...! Louis was M.I.A, the lawyer kept pushing and coming up with new clauses they could put her through and ways to prevent them, and her fears were growing more and more: not only for her, for her fate, for the attainable dream quickly becoming a goal; but also for the One Direction boys... Could they possibly be going through all of that? Surely not!

But then again, they were being punished at the moment just for going out for the day, as if they were toddlers who could not manage themselves!

As she entered the stage, she realized it was dead, completely dead. It did not matter, she felt good: tonight, in her white loose dress and her flowery headdress; she felt like a superstar. It was a shame, though, that the boys were not there, as they had a concert that same evening.

Something happened when she was two songs in, something changed. She saw the manager plead with a large crowd outside, and people started coming in one by one. Were they queuing? Were they queuing for her?! For Harry?!

She stopped, resolved to wait for them, and once they completed capacity, she got up and presented herself again.

"Hi, my name is Harry, I'm going by she/her tonight and yeah... Thank you for coming, I hope we spend a nice time together."

The public cheered. She felt it, she felt it in her bones: it was going to be a wonderful night. And as she danced and sang in all her marvelous beauty, unaware she was being watched, One Direction performed one more night in New York. This was not, however, a night like any others: Directioners, who were scarcely perspective in every single universe the band was a thing in, were quick to notice their favorite artists were not in a good mood; not at all. For starters, Louis looked annoyed, which really didn't go well with the teary eyes he had come out with; Liam and Zayn would spend most of the time between songs and fan-chatter whispering to each other and then randomly but totally coordinately ambushing Louis; and Niall... Oh well, he would not stop throwing defensive glances at their managers and following, then again, the eldest of the four, who at some point bursted in anger and whispered loudly to the open microphone: "Stop hovering over me, Horan! I know how to take care of myself and how to take care of you three !"

What the conversation was about, Directioners couldn't tell, but they were worried, and the news rapidly spread through Twitter. Louis had a right to be annoyed, he had managed alright for a year, so why did they feel the need to treat him like something they were set to protect? Louis was not weaker or more dependent of external help for what was happening to him, quite the opposite actually, since his mistakes, the treatment he'd been receiving since signing the damn NDA, had prevented him from overlooking some of the casual comments his bandmates made about their private conversations with Simon himself from time to time. No, Louis' trauma did not make him useless, and he'd already been looking out for them for a whole year, preventing them from being tricked in a situation remotely similar to his...! So they'd do better to stay out of it, out of everything, and relay on Louis.