Walls || Larry Stylinson WWI AU

Chapter Three : Persephone's Tears

On stepping into the tent, Louis shuffled through his belongings and found the letter to hand it over to the Alpha.

Harry looked up at the Omega after reading and his eyes suddenly lost its sparkle, Harry's shoulders relaxed but it was a sign of exhaustion more than relief. A flurry of disappointment began circling him.

"They're sending us to Somme," Harry told him, his eyes growing weary, "I leave tomorrow with Liam and the others."

"Oh." Louis let out, feeling upset with how much disappointment was carried out in that one response.

"Niall had sent a letter to us informing that he and the other comrades had been shifted to Somme for tunnelling as well," Harry gave away.

Louis felt a small margin of brief rage at the circumstances they were in, the situations given to them and the hurt his heart bore because of the twists fate was giving him in every interval. Louis was born for disappointments, he faced them in every facet of life but the one moment he harboured a thought of expectation, fate triumphed once again. He despised her and her threads and her ways with a fury which laid only in the depths of hell.

"Will you walk with me?" Harry asked him, allowing a fleeting sense of deja vu to rush past the Omega.

"If you wish for it."

"I do wish," Harry returned.

And they walked. They trudged around the camp lighting one another's cigarettes, as they gazed into one another's eyes in the silence of the moon and her brethren. Soft smiles and quiet glances in the middle of their sparring, that's all there was. Conversation flowed liked wine from the Gods, they would jump from the topic of politics to horses to the course of their education and philosophy.

When his rage discoursed, he had no idea. Louis was a natural and love

"Isn't your sister in Verdun as well?" Harry probed in between.

"She was," Louis nodded, "the day you received your letters, a letter came for me. I was called to Verdun because of her ill health. She passed after I met her."

Harry remained quiet, his senses quickly running through his situations one after the other, connecting the dots which he did not know existed.

"I am very sorry," Harry offered. "Was she the only blood relative alive?"

"I have an aunt in Paris but that's about it."

"Your parents?"

"My mother died out of pneumonia when I was ten and my father shortly followed because of grief."

"My condolences," Harry put forth, he wished to hold Louis' hand or to comfort him in an embrace but he very well knew that was beyond his reach of propriety. "You can talk to me, you are aware of it, aren't you?"

Louis smiled and turned his gaze away, "I thought I'd cry, it didn't happen."

"Louis, anybody's ability to cry or lack of it doesn't define anything," Harry advised, his fingers very slowly caressing Louis' back.

"I wish there were more people who thought that way," he mumbled, nonchalantly and quickly averted the topic which Harry quietly complied with.