And What If I Were You

Prologue

Tuesday, June 15, 2021

Douglas Eversham Eye Hospital

Manchester, England

3.15pm. Room 102...

A hospital is no place to spend an anniversary.

Louis' head is pounding, like his brain is suddenly too big for his skull and it's trying to push his eyeballs out of their sockets. He fleetingly thinks he wouldn't be opposed to that eventuality right now, if only to ease the searing pain that has been a relentless presence for the last twelve or so hours since the onset of this migraine.

Fucking migraines; the bane of Louis' existence since he was a teenager. The untold days he's lost holed up in darkened rooms as he's waited for them to pass; incapacitated and weighed down with wave upon wave of nausea, blurred vision and prismed auras, sleep just out of reach even as he grappled with sheer exhaustion.

He shifts his feet, rubbing them together out of habit more than anything else, the thin hospital sheets rustling against the plastic cover that protects the mattress.

Harry is a passing black shadow against the backdrop of blurry white light that streams through the window of the private room they've been put in, away from prying eyes, away from the bustle outside the door. He's pacing, talking on his phone with Josh, one of the producers of his latest movie. Harry's whispered voice is angry, frustrated, and while Louis can't hear the words, the tone is clear enough to convey his level of annoyance.

Louis can relate. Josh is a fucking weasel and a source of irritation at the best of times, and these are far from the best of times.

Harry was supposed to be on set today doing studio reshoots on the third instalment of the Heaven's Gate action movie franchise, Heaven's Gate: Redemption, that's over budget and out of time. After a series of less than enthusiastic test screenings the studio had demanded significant changes which will likely take the next six months or more to complete. But instead of being there doing his job, Harry is stuck here, with Louis, and Josh is pissed.

It's understandable, but there's not like they can do anything about it. This is the last fucking place Louis wants to be and he'd very much like Harry to just take him home so he can curl up in their bed until it's over. Except they can't, because this migraine has hit him harder than any that have come before, and they're not going anywhere until the doctor's give him the all-clear.

He'd been asleep when it had started in the early hours of the morning, which is always the worst way for it to happen because he's already well and truly in the middle of it before he can do anything about it. This one was no different to his regular migraines, at first; a niggling pressure behind his eyes that he couldn't shake, blurred vision, dizziness, and that spacey feeling where his limbs seem to move through the air like they're underwater, fighting against the pressure.

Just like always, Harry had brought him his medication, cranked up the air conditioning, and laid cold compresses dotted with lavender oil at the back of Louis' neck and under his arms. There was something different about this migraine though, and none of the usual remedies had helped. By mid-morning, Louis was throwing up nothing but bile into the toilet, Harry stroking his back and trying to soothe him, and his eyesight had gone from blurred with some rainbow auras, to something far more distressing.

His field of vision had become significantly reduced, contained to a squashed oval shape in the middle that resembled an overexposed picture, almost like a white-out, with a fuzzy blackness surrounding it. It's been like that for hours now, and while it's not getting worse, it's also not getting any better.