Chapter Text
Foxburgh, England: November 5th, 1975.
WOMAN SURVIVES BRUTAL CROWBAR ATTACK, PERPETRATOR ON THE LOOSE
On Sunday night, shockwaves surged throughout town as Susanna Wilson, an employee at a local fashion store, Marley’s, miraculously survived a gruesome attack involving several deadly beatings with a crowbar. The woman was abused until she obeyed the perpetrator’s demands by handing over cash from the register. The assailant, a masked man in his early twenties, is currently being sought by the police.
Detective Inspector John Shepherd, leading the investigation, spoke at a press conference and appealed for witnesses to come forward with any information that could help identify the assailant. Earlier today, at the conference, Shepherd announced: “My team and I are treating this incident as a serious case of robbery and assault. Our priority is to bring the perpetrator to justice and ensure the safety of our community.”
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PART ONE
“There are poisons that blind you, and poisons that open your eyes.”
August Strindberg
· ✼ ·
EIGHT YEARS LATER
May 19th, 1983
Louis yanks open the mahogany door, a brass shop bell chiming overhead, and strides in haste into the most reposeful shop in all of Foxburgh, ninety-five kilometres south of Manchester, England.
The Plot Knot, a local two-storey bookstore, is not a place he ever visits with the intention of buying books.
Samuel Maguire, one of his housemates, just happens to be the shopkeepers’ most well-read employee. It sometimes even seems that Sam, the bookworm, spends more time among these bookshelves and bluestockings than he does at home, in their shared cottage.
The air is dense with the smell of dust, darkwood, and parchment. Louis struts over the well-trodden floor and up to the cashier’s desk with a gait of utmost confidence. He’s here to deliver the news—the most excellent news.
Louis, brimming with impatience, rings the service bell twice. By the time Sam does approach through the door of the breakroom, Louis has already whacked the bell seven or eight times, nearly having knocked it off the desk.
Sam, the overachiever, steps forward carrying an impressively tall pile of books on the verge of tipping over. And, indeed, that is precisely what the pile does. Behind the desk, there’s a string of cluttered thuds and, afterwards, an injured, animalistic groan.
Ava, the third housemate, erupts from the same doorframe. Almost in tandem, the two of them plummet and combine their efforts to regather the fallen books on the floor.
A jumble of murmurs is heard from behind the hardwood; observing them on the sly, from Louis’ bystander viewpoint, is like watching a riveting theatre drama.
These two darlings have a shared tendency to shelter their feelings (and specifically those directed towards one another). They are in love with each other, and Louis is sure about it. The simple fact that they share a two-person bedroom while Louis sleeps alone in the loft should be enough of a pointer.
Finally, in the half-light, Sam stands upright with averted eyes.
“Found everything you wished for this evening?” As they gain eye contact, Sam’s feigned decorum shifts into a fatigued laugh. “Fuck’s sake, Louis. I heard the bell the first time. What’s the bloody rush?”
“I got the job.”
Louis received the news just before stopping by the bookstore: he is about to become an everyday caretaker for the Styles family. The client has TON—traumatic optic neuropathy—and has, on top of that, wedged himself into an abyss of depression. But a Styles kid is not just the average bloke. He’s none other than the son of Foxburgh’s only celebrity.
Roger Styles’ wife, Jody, was easy to impress. A week prior, during the interview, the posh lady laughed at nearly everything Louis said, whether it was humorous or not.
Despite his lack of academic abilities in this field—or in any field altogether—she considered him an optimal applicant, apparently. He has no idea what convinced her—charisma or avid compliance, perhaps—but it doesn’t fucking matter; what matters is, he got the job.
“Louis, that’s fantastic!” Ava, the female asset of their trio, exclaims. “When d’you start?”
Having heard the news, Louis’ friends are, in the way mannequins are, completely solidified.
Disregarding their likeness in terms of stance, the two of them are profoundly different in appearance. Samuel is, though Louis hates admitting it, the tallest of the three. Even when dressed in working overalls, he—owing to his doll-like features—looks as handsome as one can get. The bloke is freckled, slim-hipped, golden-haired, and as pale as crème anglaise.
Ava Adams, who is only a tad shorter than Sam Maguire, is buoyant and dark-skinned with a huge lion’s mane of black, voluminous hair that is currently secured into a frizzy but tamed ponytail. This former theatre fanatic is athletic, able-bodied and, for that reason, in possession of a physique that Louis can only ever envy.
The Plot Knot isn’t Ava’s workplace, though it might be assumed given how often she fiddles around in the breakroom on the sly; a med student like her does indeed require a place to study, even if said place—the breakroom—isn’t single-handedly used for, ahem, studies. (Louis pretends he hasn’t figured this out, of course).
“I start Monday. At the fucking Styles’ villa. Can you believe it?”
Louis doesn’t stay at The Plot Knot for long after delivering the news.
He pedals unswervingly down the cleared pavement of Penrose Street, the rubber wheels of his bike clicking rapidly at a steadfast rhythm.
By reason of his excitement, he casts aside the off-putting memory that comes to him when he glides past the local pharmacy at the end of Mill Road. The reminder sparks off by a brief whiff of common lilacs, the fragrance reminding him of the shrubs in front of the house he was brought up in. But on his scurrying bike, a memory that could’ve shattered his temperament on a regular day now passes like an aspen leaf, abducted by the wind.
Mill Road tapers off towards a knolled footpath. The thoroughfare, then surrounded by acres of ploughland, is no longer smooth nor soundless, but rough and noisy from the crunching of gravel. Further down, roots, dead twigs and pine cones are littered across it, the route veering off into the forest.
This spot, by a wide margin, is Louis’ lotusland, his Shangri-La. The place where he is most comfortable.
It’s the west wing of the forest, where the tree growth is the thickest—a place off the beaten path. It pacifies him: the birdsong, the hefty scent of pines, and the incredible solitude.
Two fractions in particular are his favourites: a flower-studded meadow among the trees and, on the forest edge, a deserted two-storey haybarn.
The barn is where he stays the most. But, as much as he fancies wallowing on its slanted roof, an undertone of frightfulness always returns to him each time he scrambles up top through the skylight.
(Said skylight is really just a jagged hole that looks like it’s been formed after somebody crashed through and thus broke the ceiling.)
The mere gesture of climbing up those rungs on that specific ladder reminds him of running away as a youngster.
That stepladder is there only because Louis, in his teens, brought it there and threaded it through the wormhole. In his younger years, he always tugged it up after himself, retracting it, to ensure his own safety up on the roof.
He always knew he was safe up there to begin with—since no one knew about this hideout, not even his mates—but revoking the ladder rendered him unseen and unreachable. These days, however, he leaves it down.
In itself, the view from the roof of the barn is a grand panorama of the entirety of Foxburgh.
To the left, there’s the urban section where, amongst many stumpier buildings, an ivy-mantled church tower takes off towards the sky. This quarter of Foxburgh is locally spoken of as South Fox. Some villagers—the wealthier bunch, quite frankly—reside there (the Styles family, for instance) while others, of lower living standards, dwell on the opposite side of town, beyond the local stream, Sanguine River. A bulk of pine trees and conifers grow in between said inner-city and the half-decent thatched-roof cottages among which Louis lives and has always lived, albeit on various streets within the same vicinity. This neighbourhood, in contrast, is locally known as North Fox.
Apart from the woodlands and old-fashioned architecture, Louis’ hometown is made up of crops, knolls, and fenced-in pastures. The lowing of cows and bleating of sheep are therefore part of the everyday Foxburgh soundtrack.
Even from a young age, Louis often settles on this roof when he journals. He’d started journaling at the tender age of thirteen, at which point privacy proved to become an essential asset in his life.
Jotting down what was pent up inside his overwrought, preadolescent body, only for himself to reread and reconsider, became a coping strategy; once his thoughts were written down, they were easier to deal with and understand.
In the grand scheme of things, this habit has taught him to be optimistic.
When he was younger, he used to think he was prone to discomfort and misfortune. He used to think he wasn’t meant to have a better life than the one he was given at birth. He used to think—and thought for a long time—that he was being punished for not conforming to the rules assigned to his gender.
He thought he was supposed to like it when, in year eight, Lily Sanchez traced her fingers up his thigh under the desk during geography class—not freeze and feel his stomach turn inside out. At least that’s what he gathered based on how Ralph and Braeden, two boys in the same year, had reacted when Louis had told them about it in hopes of finding comfort.
Ralph had called Louis a casanova—an alias that stuck with him for as long as their friendship lasted. It wasn’t funny, but they laughed about it and brotherly patted his back in triumph whenever the subject was brought up.
Lily was a whore after that. Not by definition, but because the boys decided so. Louis never criticised her for what she did, nor did he ever call her a whore for it. He mostly criticised himself for what seemed like an unnatural chemical reaction.
Meeting Sam Maguire erased in him this internalised self-hatred. For the first time in his life, he met somebody who wasn’t heterosexual and wasn’t ashamed of it.
Though he fancied both girls and boys, Sam was more like Louis than anyone he’d ever met before. He needed to admire someone like Sam—someone who was like him in the carnal sense—in order to understand that someone else could admire him in return, despite his abnormalities.
This made him understand that rejecting the norm wasn’t inherently negative, but deliberately dangerous. It was required to keep it a secret, even if Ava and Sam were accepting.
A robin chirrups from somewhere aloft.
With a blue ballpoint pen, Louis scribbles down everything that comes to mind: a clutter of thrilled what-ifs, a chunk of sentences about his self-doubt and, towards the end of the page, a list of dos and don’ts for his and Harry’s first encounter this following Monday. By the end of it, his hand is cramping and smudged with navy-blue ink.
Louis takes a long, shuddering breath. He thinks of Roger Styles, founder of The Beacon, the most widely consumed newspaper in the entirety of the UK. That’s a big title.
To this day, Louis remembers skimming through one of his features in the local newspaper, Foxburgh Daily, at the age of eleven or so; the article included a step-by-step description of his plan for knocking together the most grandiose house on the poshest of streets in town: Elm Avenue.
The headline quickly circulated and became a hot topic amongst all residents. On several occasions, while it was still in mid-construction, Louis came by on his kick-bike to watch the house get built.
He was gobsmacked. A royal fucking palace in a semi-impoverished town in the English countryside? Must be a mistake!
Except it wasn’t. Because Roger Styles’ villa still stands, equally as handsome in ‘83 as it’d been in ‘69.
The local flower shop, Green Fingers, Louis’ current workplace, is not even comparable to working full-time for the wealthiest family in town.
The job assignments are still somewhat undefined—he has essentially only been told to make Harry’s life less miserable—but given Louis’ shortage of money and the Styles’ apparent affluence, anything that family has to offer is a challenge worth accepting.
Louis takes another breath after feeling himself go fluttery with apprehension.
He lies down and, even though the roofing isn’t moss-topped enough to make it cushioned, ease (and a hefty measure of nostalgia) flows through his bones. He is pleased; to be euphoric would be naïve.
The robin twitters blithely again.
Everything’s gonna be alright.
This time, unlike so many other times, it genuinely feels like it will.