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When Louis was 6 years old, Lottie was born.
He doesn’t remember much about it; just his mum got a bit bigger throughout the year, and then one day he was playing outside and then picked up and whisked away to the hospital across down.
Lottie (well, technically it was Charlotte but Louis much preferred her nickname) was a pretty baby. She was tiny as well, and Louis distinctly remembers holding her for the first time in his arms, his legs dangling off the bed as Johannah stroked his hair, watching him carefully.
“What do you think?” she had murmured quietly, and Louis looked up at her.
“Think of what?” he asked a bit blankly, and his mother nodded her head towards Lottie.
“What do you think of her?” she clarified, and Louis tilted his head to the side, looking down at her briefly.
“I think I very much like babies.”
Two years after that, Fizzy was born. Louis was 8.
He remembers her arrival more, obviously; Lottie was only 2 and didn’t understand what was happening, and Louis tried very patiently to explain it to her.
“There’s another baby, Lottie. A tiny one, and she’s your sister,” he had told her, but Lottie was merely more interested in her toys than her mum down the hallway.
Johannah asked Louis the same question that night, while Felicite was squirming in his arms.
“What do you think of her?”
Louis smiled a bit, looking up at his mum.
“I think she’s beautiful because she looks like you.”
Phoebe and Daisy didn’t come for another 4 years; granted, Louis was a bit surprised to say the least when his mum informed him one day that there were going to be two babies instead of one.
“Twins?” Louis was 12 now, and had already taken on the role of being the man of the house. He didn’t mind at all; taking care of his sisters and mum had never seemed like a chore to him, and he wasn’t sure why his mum looked a bit sorry at him from time to time, as if she felt guilty about it.
Johannah had nodded, sitting down next to Louis on his bed after Lottie and Fizzy had been put down for naps.
“Yeah, twins Lou…” Louis had blinked at her for a moment, confused as to why she looked a bit nervous.
“Are you scared, mum?” he piped up, but he already knew the answer. It flashed across her eyes for a brief instant, a betrayal to what she was actually feeling beneath the usually hard exterior.
“A bit, Louis,” she breathed out slowly, and Louis didn’t understand why.
He huffed a bit, crossing his arms and giving his mother a slightly cross look.
“You don’t need to be scared, mum,” he retorted, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. Johannah raised an eyebrow at him, tilting her head to the side.
“And why not?” she mused, and Louis rolled his eyes at her.
“Because you’ve got me to help you, silly!”
When the twins came, Louis remembered struggling to balance the weight of two babies on his arms while leaning against one of the pillows in his mum’s bed, his mouth twisted in concentration before he finally got comfortable. Two little girls.
Johannah asked the same question; Louis merely told her that two babies was better than one.
In the years that followed, Louis never once questioned his role as father figure in his house. It was just second nature to him; get his sisters up for school, make sure they had breakfast, help them on the bus and help his mum with the babies before he left. The older he got, the easier it became, but Louis had never viewed it as a burden anyway.
When he got the role as Danny in Grease, his mum had cried like a child and Louis was rather embarrassed, wondering why he’d even told her in the first place.
“Aw come on, Mum! It’s just a play!” he pleaded, holding her hands as she cried happy tears onto his shirt. She had lifted her head up, glancing at him through watery eyes, grinning from ear to ear.
“You’re so talented, Louis. Don’t you ever forget that, alright?” Louis had blinked at her, confused as to where she was going with this as she wiped her nose with the back of her sleeve.
“Yeah, I won’t…” he mused, watching her carefully as she kept smiling at him.
“You can do whatever you want to do with your life, Louis. Anything.” Louis had stared at her for a few moments after that, and it was a sort of silent exchange between a mother and her son, speaking with their eyes.
‘It’s okay for you to leave when you must, Louis.’
‘I know it is, Mum.’
When Louis was 18, his life was indeed changed forever.
He remembers bits and pieces of audition day, but mostly the morning of. His mum had packed him a lunch, and made sure he ate his entire breakfast and drank glass after glass of water so he wouldn’t feel faint or dehydrated.
“Now remember love, there’s going to be loads of people there. It’s not the end of the world if you don’t make it,” she had reminded him before he left, and Louis knew that but he still felt nauseous at the thought of letting down his mother. This was something he needed to do not only for himself...but for her as well.
The day is a bit of a blur. He sang in front of the judges, and Simon seemed to stare directly into his soul. He remembers wondering if he was going to throw up before walking in, and nearly throwing up after he walked out.
But obviously, the most important thing to happen was yet to come.
If he thinks about it now, it still feels like a dream. He remembered his stomach sinking somewhere to the bottom of his feet when his name wasn’t called, and exchanging a look with a curly haired boy across the room that read; I’ve failed, I really have.
He was dreading calling his mother then; ten minutes later, he was practically screaming at her over the phone.
“I made it, mum! I’ve been put in a group, in a band!”
Louis will never regret the years he put into One Direction. How could he? They made him who he is today, put him on this huge pedestal and rewarded him with all of this success and fame and money. It’d be stupid to sit there and say, wow I really despised that band, because he truly didn’t.
Even now, when he knows that all the time he spent away from home while touring could’ve been spent with his mum before she died.
When Louis was 22, Doris and Ernest were born.
His mum had called him absolutely ecstatic when she found out she was pregnant; he believes he might’ve been in America at the time, so the phone call woke him up quite early.
“Can you believe it, Louis?! Another baby!” And Louis had merely smiled and nodded, though he knew he couldn’t see her.
“I’m so happy for you, Mum.” And he was. Dan was the man she’d been waiting for for so long. Louis hadn’t ever paid much attention to the men and came through and out of his house when he was younger, because they never stayed. They never took over his job at home. No one ever could, until Dan came along.
Louis remembered taking many pictures the day of the wedding, and in one particular one that’s hanging on the fridge at home, Johannah is whispering into his son’s ear.
“What do you think of him, Louis?” she had asked, and Louis nearly laughed at her.
“Bit late for that, isn’t i?” he teased, and Johannah had rolled her eyes playfully at him.
“But really...do you like him?” Louis had turned and pressed a kiss to her cheek gently before responding.
“I love him.”
Louis managed to fly home to meet the twins for the first time only a few hours after they were born, tiny little things wrapped in blankets. His heart had swelled a bit at the sight of the blue bundle beside the pink one; it had only taken 22 years for him to get a brother.
He had a strange sense of deja vu as he sat down on the edge of his mother’s bed, holding the two babies in his arms and thinking back to a literal decade ago, when he had been 12 and a bit scared he was going to drop them.
“What do you think of them, Louis?” she murmured, and Louis had grinned, looking up and meeting her eyes.
“I think that I’ve never been so happy for you in my entire life.”
The room had smelled like flowers and a tiny bit of disinfectant, and Louis can still feel the way his mother’s hand gently stroked his hair as they laid there together in silence, watching the twins sleep soundly.
But now, there were no babies in his arms.
There wasn’t silence; his ears were filled with annoying beeps and the whirring of machines.
This was it.
This was what he’d been preparing for, for months now, and yet it had arrived disguised as just another normal day.
As cliche as it sounds...it was just like a movie.
If Louis thinks about it, all he can picture are snippets;
his mother’s hand gripping his own,
the sound of a machine beginning to go haywire at his side,
his heart beating so quickly and loudly that he feared he might throw up.
Her eyes were closed, yet Louis imagined that if they’d been open they’d be full of tears.
“What do you think, Louis?” Her voice sounded different; it seemed to have already gone up to heaven.
Louis matched his mother’s firm grip with one hand, the other going up to her head to gently stroke her hair.
“I think it’s time to let go.”
And she did.