It’s time to fight the boss and if I don’t tell you now, I might not live to tell you
“I,” Harry says, wetting his lips. In front of him, the huge alien creature roars, stomping on roads and making buildings crumble. “I have to go.”
Beside him, Louis stills. “What? Where?” He asks, turning to Harry. His eyes are wide and suddenly so focused on Harry, that he doesn’t notice the alien creature creeping up on him.
Harry does, however. “Duck,” he tells Louis, and when Louis moves, he hurls his shield at it, slicing its head clean off his body.
“Harry,” Louis says, when there are no more aliens in the near vicinity. His voice is level, almost devoid of emotion. “Where do you have to go?”
Harry takes a deep breath, meets Louis’ eye. “There,” he says, pointing at the weird wormhole in the sky, where the aliens are coming from. “I have to go–I have to cut it off at the source.”
It’s still a bit strange, when he thinks about it–back when he grew up, outer space travel was still an idea that was light years away. Heck, aliens were something fictional, made by someone in order to entertain a country at war. It makes Harry’s head spin that now, almost eight decades later, they’re descending from the sky, trying to destroy their planet.
Who would’ve thought.
Harry spots Louis’ dissent, because of course he does–he’s known Louis since they were both in diapers, chasing each other around half naked and digging up worms in the park. He sees it in the minuscule furrow of his eyebrow, in the sudden anger that flares up in his blue eyes.
“No,” Louis says, his tone without room for argument. “No, you won’t.”
And Harry wants to back down–wants to defer to Louis’ judgment, wants to stay here in the ground fighting aliens side by side with Louis, but the thing is. The thing is, buildings are collapsing, people are dying, and what use is being a super soldier if he can’t protect the people around him?
“I have to, Lou,” he says. “It’s the only way.”
“No, it’s not,” Louis replies. “Niall can handle it.”
Just as he says that, Niall flies up into the sky, with what looks like a hundred aliens trailing after him. Harry watches him for a few moments, distracted, before turning back to Louis.
“Niall could die,” he says.
“So could you,” Louis snaps back. “You’re a super soldier, but you’re not immortal.”
Harry shakes his head. “You don’t understand,” he says as gently as he can. “If Niall goes and he dies, it’d be a waste of a perfectly good life.” He pins Louis with a look. “It’s not the same with me, because, well, I should already be dead.”
It’s something that neither of them have talked about, but Harry knows it’s the truth–he should’ve died decades ago, when he crashed that plane into the ice. Or he should’ve died years before that, when they injected him with an experimental super soldier serum that had a twenty percent chance of taking. Hell, he should’ve died when they were teenagers, when he’d gotten a really bad bout of pneumonia that one winter, which left his lips almost blue and his breath rattling. Louis had stayed by his side the whole time, trying to warm him up, and pressing his forehead to Harry’s, whispering please don’t leave me over and over again.
He should’ve died all those times. And yet miraculously, he didn’t.
“I have to, Louis,” he says.
“No,” Louis snarls, his blue eyes flashing. Harry catches the way his hands tremble minutely on his assault rifle, the way he grips down hard to make them stop. “No, you don’t get to do this to me. I made a promise to keep you alive and I fucking will.”
“Louis–”
“Please,” Louis says, and this time his voice is raw, almost pained. “Please don’t leave me.”
Harry’s heart skips a beat, then his entire chest cavity clenches. “Lou,” he says. He reaches out, places a hand on the back of Louis’ neck, pulls him closer. Louis goes willingly, but his shoulders are a tense line.
“Hey,” Harry says quietly. He waits until Louis’ eyes meet his, before pressing their foreheads together. “You trust me, right?”
Louis lets out a breath. It might actually be a laugh. “Fuck you.”
“If I don’t make it out alive,” Harry starts, resolutely ignoring the way Louis pinches his side, “I just wanted to say–”
He doesn’t get to finish, because Louis is rising on to his toes, and suddenly they’re kissing, lips pressed together, and it’s dry and it’s desperate and it’s emotional and it’s everythingHarry has ever wanted in the last eighty years.
“If you don’t make it alive,” Louis says, when they pull apart a few moments later. “I’ll bring you back from the dead and kill you myself.”
Harry feels the corners of his lips curl up. “I believe you,” he says, and then he lets his hand fall, takes a step back. He holds Louis’ gaze for a few moments more, before turning and running towards the worm hole.
There’s a crackle in Harry’s ear. “Well, that was a touching moment,” Niall says, through the comm lines. “Need a lift up?”
Harry laughs. “Fuck you,” he says. “And yes, please.”