Chapter Text
When international pop sensation Harry Styles was fifteen years old, he fell in love. Of course, this was long before he topped the charts across the globe, before the millions of Instagram followers and the magazine covers and the awards, before he had the ability to make tens of thousands of fans scream until their voices gave out just by waving a hand. Back then, his face wasn’t plastered across bedroom walls and billboards. A world-famous actress had yet to call him «sex on a stick» during a televised awards ceremony, causing a minor scandal.
No, all of that was still years and years away. He wasn’t considered astonishingly handsome and he didn’t make anyone faint when he took off his top — at fifteen, he had an unruly mop of curly hair and still struggled to walk without tripping over his own legs, which had seemingly grown six inches over the summer. He’d only kissed two girls and gotten his hands down the pants of one of them, and he wasn’t quite sure what to make of the experience. At fifteen, he wasn’t Harry Styles, pop star extraordinaire. He was just Harry, he’d recently moved to Doncaster with his mum and his stepdad, and he was trying to fit in at his new school. And then he fell head over heels in love.
When Harry Styles, currently the world’s number one best-selling-artist-slash-heartthrob, at 29 years and four months of age, turns on the TV in the lounge room of his sprawling North London home one evening in June, for a second he’s fifteen again. He’s fifteen and clumsy and stupidly in love with a boy, and that boy has just turned up on Harry’s 85-inch television screen. He’s 29 and he’s fifteen all at once and he hasn’t seen him in ten years, but he would recognise him anywhere. There, on his TV, is Louis. Pop star Harry Styles yelps and spills red wine all over his embarrassingly expensive new sofa.
Louis was the first to ever call him pop star. Back then, it was meant first teasingly, then affectionately, but neither of them ever thought it would be used the way is it these days, in the headlines of every media publication in the English-speaking world, whenever Harry so much as breathes. «Up-and-coming pop star Harry Styles of X-Factor fame lands record deal with Sony» was the very first one. He remembers Louis’s wide-eyed look of awe as he read it out loud to Harry in bed, watched him zoom in and zoom in on the words on his laptop until they became pixellated and unintelligible, his entire face scrunched up with happiness as he pressed a kiss to Harry’s cheek, mumbling «I’m so proud of you.» They were so stupidly young then, him seventeen and Louis nineteen, and they really and truly believed that they had the entire world at their fingertips. Well, as it turned out, only one of them did.