It should probably feel really cheesy for Louis to think that everything is different now that he and Harry are together, but that's really just the way that it is.
By the time the last sailor has staggered back aboard The Rogue the next day, everyone knows about Harry and the captain because that's just the way things work at sea. One of the few who'd lingered on the ship the night before had overheard noises from the captain's quarters, and he'd told people who'd told people who'd told even more people, and now Louis is being trailed down the hallway by a slightly stiff and blushing Harry and there isn't a mariner in sight not giving the pair a knowing look.
They don't tease as much as Louis expected, but then again, they know their captain. They know that a little ribbing here and there is all well and good, but continuing to pinch the bum of the man the captain's become quite fond of is a dangerous activity, unless you were specifically looking to take a swim out to sea.
It's not just the way the other sailors treat Harry that changes, either- it's like in an instant they've been given permission to be honest about the fact that they're drawn to one another like magnets and have no desire to resist. Harry still does his work in the kitchen, of course, but he spends his free time shadowing Louis now. As it turns out, he's phenomenal with sums, and Louis gladly hands over that portion of his job to the beaming lad.
"Your tutor must have loved you," Louis remarks as Harry neatly prints the figures he's adding up on spare parchment. "Look how tidy you are. No wonder it always adds up correctly."
"Maybe if you tried to be a little tidier you wouldn't have wound up with double as many sacks of flour as you needed last month," Harry teases.
"God, now you sound like my tutor. He absolutely hated trying to teach me anything, I was always too busy running around causing trouble to focus properly- what?"
Louis pulls up short at the surprised blink of Harry's eyes, but the younger boy just tilts his head curiously. "You had a tutor?"
The question makes Louis' hands still where he's folding up shirts haphazardly, fingers twitching in the rough cotton. "Oh. Yeah, for a while."
"Were you- I mean, I didn't think that many commoners could afford tutors," Harry says delicately. It isn't somewhere they've gone yet, to talk about Louis' past. All he knows is that Louis has a whole slew of younger sisters, and that only because Louis let it slip one night after a few mugs of ale before his face darkened and he decided it was time for bed.
Harry waits patiently to see if Louis will reply. Eventually he shrugs. "We had money."
"You did?"
"Mmm. Quite a bit of it, actually. I, um. I know I don't look it, but I actually came from good breeding." Louis abandons his task and sits on the edge of the bed, feet dangling boyishly and expression sheepish. "Could have courted you properly, had our lives turned out differently."
"Are you- is your family noble?" Harry asks in surprise, coming to sit next to Louis on the bed, cross-legged so he can face the mystery of a man before him. "I don't remember a holding with the name Tomlinson."
"No, it's Austin," Louis answers. "That was my father's name, my mother's first husband. He died when I was young and she married Tomlinson, and I took his name rather than Austin's. That's where the money is, though."
The name is familiar, a sizeable holding to the South that rarely appears in court but dutifully pays taxes to the crown. "I wasn't aware there was a son in the Austin family."
"Well no one quite wants to talk about their runaway miscreant son, do they?" Louis grins. "I was barely old enough to start being somebody in court when I left to go to sea. If you asked around, people might remember some oldest son, but generally I prefer people forget I existed."
