fic: if you build yourself a myth (1/3)
if you build yourself a myth
nc-17, 13,000 words
louis/harry, liam/zayn
magical realism AU
found yourself in a new direction
eons far from the sun
can you come when they come to reach you
let you know you’re not the only one
can’t keep hanging on
to all that’s dead and gone
if you build yourself a myth
know just what to give
Harry is six the first time he makes something change. He’s drawing at his little table in the playroom, page after page of planets and trees and stick people with too many legs. He’s got a lion drawn on the paper in front of him, and he’s showing it to his mum, telling her about the lion -- “See, his friends are all lost in the jungle and he has to go find them to save them, cos no one else knows where they went, but he does,” -- when he decides that actually, this lion should be blue. He’s already drawn it in yellow and brown, but it really ought to be blue, so he thinks for a minute, frowning a little, and then presses his fingertips against the paper and thinks, blue.
The lion turns blue. The grass the lion’s standing on turns blue. The trees and the sky and the sun and the clouds turn blue.
“Oh, Harry,” his mum says, and she sounds breathless. He looks up at her, and she’s got tears in her eyes, and Harry thinks maybe he’s done something bad, that he’s going to be punished and sent to his bedroom. Sometimes he does bad things without knowing it, and he doesn’t really mean to, his mum says he just doesn’t always think.
But she’s smiling, now, and she pulls Harry in close to her chest, hugging him and smushing her face into his curls so hard he flails, trying to get away from her grip. “Stop it, mum, come on,” he protests.
“It’s very beautiful,” she says before she lets him squirm out of her grasp. “My favorite drawing you’ve done yet.”
“Can I go outside?” he asks, and he’s out the door with one arm shoved in his jumper before she can answer.
-
He changes more things after that. He makes his milk turn chocolate one day and his mum scolds him, tells him he’s not allowed, but even then she smiles a little like he’s done something very clever.
He decides to make his hair red one day, just to see what it would be like, and his mum laughs herself silly until he puts it back, feeling slightly put out.
His mum puts up a poster of a tiger in his room, right next to his bed. The tiger is hiding in the jungle and you can just see his eyes, the start of his face, his mouth. Harry touches it at night and turns it into a pig, and a cow, and then a lion, which is how he leaves it, even though he read in a book that lions don’t actually live in the jungle. Later on, he puts in more lions, lots more until the whole poster is lions, little ones and big ones and ones with great huge manes and baby ones. His mum laughs, and says he should leave some empty space for the lions to run around, that it must get too crowded with so many of them, but Harry refuses, and leaves it like that -- all lions.
-
When Harry is ten, he comes home from school and there are strangers in his sitting room with his mum, two grown ups and a boy about his age, maybe a little older, having tea.
“Harry,” his mum says, standing up to hug him, “come say hello. These are some friends of mine, they’re just in town for today and they’ve stopped by for tea.”
“H’lo,” Harry says, kicking at the carpet with his trainers. “Mum, can I go outside?” He holds his hand in his pocket and absently changes the piece of candy that he has in it, makes it go all melted before bringing it back.
His mum exchanges looks with the tall woman sitting next to her. “Maybe you could take my son along?” the woman asks, nodding towards the boy seated across from them. He’s dressed up smart, pressed shirt and a nice jumper with no holes in it like Harry’s has, but his collar is pulled off to the side, and he’s frowning and leaning into himself like he’s trying to hide behind his tangled hair.
“Alright,” he agrees cautiously, sensing that it wasn’t really a question. “You can come, I suppose,” he says to the boy. In his pocket, Harry makes the candy go all pointy and brittle.
“Don’t be too long,” his mother calls after them as the door swings shut, but Harry is already headed across the road to the open meadow, the boy following a few paces behind him.
-
“Can you change things too?” Harry asks the other boy. They’re seated in the tall grass of the meadow, hidden from the road and the house and everything besides the stalks of grass dancing in the wind. Harry puts his hand out, grabs a handful and turns the blades rainbow colored before yanking them out of the ground and tossing them so they float on the breeze.
“No,” the other boy says, and Harry feels sad all of a sudden. He’s always wondered if maybe there’s someone else like him, someone else who can change the words around in their comic books and make flowers bloom faster than they should and who wouldn’t look at him like he was a bit strange when he did it. He’d thought that maybe there was something about this other boy that was a little like him.
“I can... I can do something else, though,” the other boy says, a little quiet like it could be a secret. “Do you want to see?”
Harry nods furiously, his hair flopping into his eyes at the motion.
The other boy takes a breath in and then he holds his hand out in front of himself. He opens it, shows Harry that it’s empty, and then clenches it into a fist, facing down. Something feels staticky and electric around Harry, like when he scuffs his socks on the carpet, and then the boy exhales, turns his fist up and opens it.
There’s a brand new pound coin, sitting face up in the center of his palm.
Harry doesn’t say anything for a minute, not sure what he saw but he knows that it’s big, it’s important, it’s someone else who’s more like him than not.
"It’s stupid, I know,” the other boy says, looking down at the ground. “My mum says--”
“It’s brilliant,” Harry finally says, smiling so big his cheeks hurt.
“D’you really think?” the other boy asks.
“What’s your name?” Harry asks instead of answering.
“Louis.”
“Can I--” Harry points at the coin, and doesn’t wait for Louis to respond before he reaches forward, touches the coin with the tip of his finger. Something goes all twisty, and then the coin isn’t a brand new pound, it’s a pence, smaller and dented up and dingy.
“Wow,” says Louis, and they sit there like that, Harry’s finger touching the coin still sitting in Louis’ palm.
-
“Mum says there are other people like us,” says Louis. “It’s not so bad, she told me that there’s actually loads of us, so it’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“Who’s ashamed?” Harry asks. He knows that most people think it’s weird when he makes things change, but it doesn’t stop him, and it never occurred to him that he should feel bad about it.
Louis just blushes a little, and doesn’t answer.
“Anyway, my mate Niall reckons it means we’re wizards, or something,” Harry continues. “He likes it when I change stuff. He says it’s sick. He’s always making me change his grades before his mum sees them. I don’t mind, though.” And he doesn’t. Harry likes to change things, especially for appreciative audiences.
“I don’t like to tell people I can make stuff,” Louis confesses. “I had one mate, I told him, but he said it wasn’t possible, even though I showed him--” He cuts himself off. “Anyway. He got mad about it. I guess he didn’t like it.”
“That’s stupid,” Harry protests vehemently. “He sounds stupid. It’s sick that we can do this, Niall says so. It means we’re special, yeah?”
“Guess so,” says Louis, and he might not be all the way convinced, but he’s smiling now, and he takes his hands out from his pockets where he’s kept them jammed for most of the day, except for when he made the coin. Harry thinks it’s a good thing.
They spend the rest of the day making things, and then changing them. Louis makes a toy truck, and Harry changes it into a dinosaur. Louis makes a rock and Harry changes it into something shiny and faceted, like something from his mum’s jewelry. Louis makes a piece of paper and Harry changes it into confetti shaped like snowflakes and stars, and they float across the park on the wind.
-
Harry doesn’t see Louis after that. He asks his mum about him sometimes, asks when Louis can come back, asks if they can go see Louis, but she always says that Louis’ too busy, or that it’s not a good time, but maybe soon. Eventually Harry stops asking.
He carries on changing things, changes the colors of his trainers when he’s thirteen and doesn’t have the coolest ones at school, tries to change water into beer with mixed results when he and Niall are fifteen and bored, changes the ceiling of his bedroom so that it’s full of twinkling stars in constellations that dance across it while he sleeps.
He doesn’t meet anyone else like him, and sometimes he wonders what happened to Louis.
-
When they’re eighteen, Niall finds them the flat in London, which surprises Harry as much as anyone. Niall is good for bringing food around, and knowing football schedules by heart, and having a laugh, but long range planning is not one of his strong suits, so when he texts Harry and says he’s found them the perfect place near Camden (well, kind of near, Niall amends later), Harry almost drops his phone.
“There’s a boy called Zayn who lives there already,” Niall explains around a mouthful of something when Harry rings him to get the story. “My brother’s mate went to uni with his sister, or something like that. Needs some flatmates, I guess. Rent’s cheap, don’t think it’s too fancy or anything, but we’ll make do, yeah?”
“Shit, yeah, of course,” Harry agrees.
They’d been talking about moving to London, practically constantly since they were kids it feels like. But that was always just as an idea, something in the future, and now it’s happening. Harry’s full of nervous energy all of a sudden. He’s pacing around his room, smiling and absent-mindedly changing the titles of the spines of his books.
“Haven’t even told you the best part,” Niall adds, dropping his voice a little. “Zayn’s like you. Like, he doesn’t change stuff, but he’s got -- I dunno, something. Greg didn’t really know, but apparently he’s got, like. A power, or something. So’s his sister.”
Harry doesn’t know what to say to that, so he doesn’t say anything, just grins madly into the phone. He hasn’t met anyone else like him since Louis, years and years ago. He’s asked his mum occasionally, looked it up on the internet and what have you. There are enough of them that it’s not completely unheard of to be able to do things that you shouldn’t actually be able to, but it’s still rare. Once he’d asked his mum if she could do anything, and she’d seemed to have gone a little sad, and said “No,” sounding like she regretted it, so he hadn’t pushed it.
“Is that... alright?” Niall asks hesitantly. Niall’s so used to Harry changing things that he doesn’t usually remember it’s unusual, but this is new, this is the first time they’ve talked about it in terms of other people, of more of them, of powers and all that. Like it’s something unusual.
“‘Course it is,” Harry reassures him, feeling light around the chest. It’ll be perfect, he thinks. He’ll live in London and they’ll get up to all sorts of mischief and this Zayn lad will be their best mate, and Harry won’t feel like he’s the only one all the time, and Zayn will introduce them to all sorts of people and maybe even knows more that are like them, and -- Harry’s head starts to spin. “When can we be there?”
-
The flat isn’t fancy, Niall had been right, but Harry loves it the second he walks in. The ceilings are high and open, and the windows go all the way up, and inside there’s a bedroom that’s all his own and a toilet and a kettle, so he figures he’ll do just fine.
Zayn lets them in, gives them keys and all that, before disappearing, mumbling something about work and someone called Liam.
His mum only cries once, when she hugs him before leaving to catch her train back home.
“Be careful,” she tells him. “Do good.”
She’s been telling him that for years, ever since he changed something for the first time. Be careful, do good. Except Harry thinks that now, for the first time, he gets what she means.
-
Zayn appears in the kitchen the next morning while Harry’s putting the kettle on and makes a vague noise of greeting.
“Morning,” Harry says.
Zayn just nods and sets about making toast before asking, “Settled alright, then?” Harry thinks that Zayn might not be very talkative. He’ll have to work on that.
“Brilliant, yeah,” he says, smiling and trying to look charming and non-threatening, which isn’t a particularly hard task for him. Dangerous has never really been his area. “So, like. Did you have roommates before, or?”
“Yeah, two blokes called Matt and Aiden. Fucked off for some job of Matt’s, moved up north.” Zayn shrugs. “They were good sorts.”
Harry nods. “You work? Go to school?”
Zayn reaches for the kettle that Harry’s got heating, pouring out two mugs of tea for both of them. “Dropped out of uni for a bit, but might go back. My, er -- um, Liam, he’s got me this job right now helping out at an arts centre. Mostly answering phones, you know, but sometimes I get to help out the instructors.”
“You’re an artist, then?”
“Something like,” Zayn says, with a half smile on his lips. “What about you and Niall?”
“Nah, no school. Neither of us are much for further education, I don’t think. I worked in a cafe doing baking back home, was thinking I could find something like that here. Dunno ‘bout Nialler. Reckon he’ll fall into something, he always does.”
Harry pauses. He knows what he wants to ask, but he’s not sure if it’s allowed, if Zayn wants to talk about it or if he should just stick to pleasantries until he knows him a bit better, but on the other hand -- he can’t not ask.
“Niall said... Niall told me you can, you know. Do something. Like, a power, or something,” he says slowly, feeling like he’s trying not to spook a kitten.
“Er. I guess,” Zayn says back just as cautiously. “It’s--”
“--No, yeah, if you don’t want to talk about it,” Harry says at the same time, blushing a little. “It’s just...” He stops for a moment, and then reaches over to take the cup of tea out of Zayn’s hands. He wraps his own hands around it, concentrating, and the mug changes from a chipped white to a bright jade green. The tea turns to coffee, and the steam curling off of it starts to sparkle and pop in the air like fireworks. He leaves it like that and pushes it towards Zayn, who peers into it curiously.
“That’s brilliant,” Zayn says quietly. “So you, like--”
“I can change stuff, yeah,” Harry admits, and for the first time he feels a little bashful about what he can do. He reaches over to tap the mug, and it goes back to normal. “Just, like, stuff that’s already there, I can like, change it... physically, I guess. That’s all.”
Zayn considers this. “Mine’s about feelings,” he says after a moment. “I can, like. I can tell how people feel, or make them feel how I do. Stuff like that. Not all the time, I mean. I try... I try not to, unless the other person’s alright with it, just cos it can get a bit weird, you know?”
“Would you show me?” Harry asks. He’s still feeling like they’re in slightly uncertain territory, gets the impression Zayn feels a bit awkward talking about this, but mostly he just feels excited. Zayn hadn’t recoiled when Harry changed the tea, and he’s talking about feeling other people’s emotions like it’s not totally insane, and the relief of it makes Harry’s chest loosen, makes him feel like he could float right up to the ceiling.
Zayn nods and reaches over and wraps his thumb and forefinger loosely around Harry’s wrist. Harry breathes in, not sure what he should be feeling, and on the exhale, he realizes: he feels something else pressing in on him from the outside, a sense of cautious optimism, like he’s not quite sure of something yet but he thinks it’ll end up good. He feels happily nervous about something that’s happening later tonight, although he can’t pinpoint what. He worries that he might be late for work today, which doesn’t make sense, obviously, because he hasn’t got a job yet.
Then it shifts, and he feels panicked, like the walls are crushing in on him, like he needs to get out now, needs to run. Then he’s exhausted, so tired he could sleep for days, and then he’s peaceful and calm, and everything is alright.
Zayn takes his hand off Harry’s wrist, and it all drops away.
“Wow,” Harry says, breathing heavily. “Wow. That was--”
“Me, at first,” says Zayn. “Like, how I’m feeling now. The rest of it was just random stuff. You notice it more when it’s extreme like that.”
Zayn hesitates, and Harry doesn’t need his hand on his wrist to know that he’s a bit anxious to see how Harry reacts.
“It’s brilliant,” Harry says honestly. “Really, Zayn, this is, like. It’s perfect.”
“Really?” Zayn asks, sounding a bit shy. “I dunno many other people who are like, you know. Like us. My sister’s the same as me, and there was another girl at school with us who could make things float, but.”
“D’you know anyone else here?” Harry asks, feeling hopeful, but Zayn shakes his head.
“Just you, now. Why, d’you? Niall?”
“Nah, Niall’s useless. I met one other person when I was young, but. Y’know. It was just in passing.” Harry shrugs. “That’s enough, though, innit? Just you and me.”
“Yeah, alright,” Zayn says, smiling wider, and even though they’re not touching Harry is sure he feels a sense of relief coming off of Zayn so thick he thinks he could touch it. It makes him feel like he’s home.
-
Harry finds a job at bakery down the street after he begs a trial shift from the owner and impresses her by turning a whole sheet of white cake multicolored and peach flavored. It’s a risk, he knows, it always is when he shows off like that, but what’s the point of all this if he can’t use it? And people need multicolored peach cake on demand, he reasons.
Niall finds a gig bartending at a pub nearby, and he sneaks Harry free drinks when he stops by after his shifts. The job ends up paying Niall an inordinate amount of money that Harry figures is directly related to his easy smile and Irish charm, even though the bastard hasn’t been back to Ireland since he was eight, and that was just for a visit.
Between the two of them it almost always covers their share of the rent, and if sometimes Harry has to change a pound note into a tenner, well. No one needs to know about it.
As long as he doesn’t get greedy, is what he tells himself, and he doesn’t. He’s got Niall and Zayn and a flat and a job. He’s happy enough just like this.
-
“Zayn, mate, let’s go out,” he whines. It’s September and he’s off work and even though it’s getting a bit chilly, the sun is shining for once, and he needs to get out of the flat immediately. He’s already driving Zayn mad making the floors turn technicolor and rubbery and threatening to see if he can change the walls enough to make his own bedroom the biggest of the three.
“Bugger off, I’ve got plans,” Zayn says, shoving Harry’s arms from around his neck where he’s draped. Harry feels a twinge of fond annoyance that he knows isn’t his, and he reaches up to ruffle Zayn’s quiff before dodging away from his flailing arms.
“Plans with who? Plans with Liam?” Harry asks, and Zayn’s cheeks go pink.
“No, not Liam, if you must know,” Zayn says, trying vainly to fix his hair. “Just a bloke I know.”
“Honestly, Zayn, sneaking around on your boyfriend?” Harry teases. “Our gentle Liam’ll be devastated.”
“He’s not my boyfriend, you twat,” Zayn protests. A little too heartily, in Harry’s opinion, which means he’s lying, which Harry knows anyway. He doesn’t need help from anyone’s magic power to deduce that Zayn’s been mad about Liam for ages. The first time he’d brought Liam around to meet Harry and Niall, Harry had felt such secondhand nervousness that he’d had to excuse himself from the room, because everything he said had felt so awkward and wrong-footed. Also because he had kind of desperately wanted to kiss this bloke he’d just met, which wasn’t necessarily unusual, but he was still pretty sure that was just Zayn projecting. Liam’s quite nice, but he’s not Harry’s type.
“Then who’s this mystery man?” Harry persists, folding into the couch gracelessly and bouncing one leg furiously. He really, really needed to get out of the flat. Even if Zayn won’t come to the pub, he reckons he can beg enough pints off Niall before the dinner rush on his own to distract himself a bit.
“Met him a while ago,” Zayn shrugs. “He was in a class with me at uni.”
“Well bring him along then,” Harry whines, and he’s knows it’s not dignified, but can’t help himself. “Come on, Zayn, I’m bored, and if you and this mate of yours don’t distract me I’ll redecorate the whole flat in shades of pink and turn all our furniture into oversized poufs. And I know how you feel about that sofa, Zayn, you’re well attached.”
“Christ, fine,” Zayn relents. “I’ll bring him round to the pub in an hour or so, then, if you want to meet us there.”
“Cheers,” Harry says, beaming a smile and bouncing to his feet before he presses a sloppy kiss into Zayn’s cheek.
“Get off, you tosser, or I’ll change my mind,” Zayn says, but Harry grabs his jacket and heads out the front door before any of the threats that follow can land on him.
It’s a truly gorgeous day, he thinks to himself as he walks the long way to the pub. He misses Holmes Chapel once in a while, and his mum a bit more often, but London really is massive and spectacular, especially in the sun. He whistles while he walks and pulls the cuffs of his jacket down over his hands, which feel full of possibility.
-
Harry’s had two pints and something pink with an elaborate frilly garnish on it (“an experiment,” Niall had called it) by the time Zayn and his mate are due to show up. He’s been misshaping all the glasses he empties, turning the first glass short and squat, the second impossibly thin and tall, and the third into an obscene shape that Niall smashes in a very dubious accident before anyone can get a good look at it. Niall keeps threatening to chuck him out if he doesn’t stop ruining all the glassware in the building, but he also keeps throwing his head back with laughter, so Harry’s not too fussed.
“Zayn’ll be around soon,” he says as soon as Niall comes back from filling him another glass. This time it’s water, he notes disappointedly. “Said he’s bringing a mate of his from Uni.” Harry drums his fingers on the bar happily. Niall starts to tell him a story from his last shift, and Harry’s half listening, half thinking about how lovely the sun has been, hoping it doesn’t piss down rain again tomorrow. Harry wonders, sometimes, if there’s someone out there who can change the weather, make it sunny when they’re happy and rainy when they’re feeling tired or cozy or hungover.
He’d tried, once, thought that maybe since the weather was already there, he’d be allowed to change it, but nothing happened except he’d given himself a headache trying.
He’s thinking about that, and how if there is someone in charge of the weather they must be a bleak sort given how often it’s rained lately, save for today, when the door to the pub opens, and Zayn enters, with another boy trailing behind him, and --
-- and Harry drops the straw he’d been fiddling with, because it’s Louis. He hasn’t seen Louis in eight years and even then it had just been an afternoon, and yet he’s absolutely certain this is the same boy who made a coin appear in his hand that day in the meadow. He’s thought about him enough since then, wondered where he’d gotten to, and now there he was, right there, in a preposterous striped shirt and pastel trousers.
He’s well fit, Harry thinks unbidden as the two of them cross over to where he’s sitting, and before he can start to imagine how Louis got here of all places, he lets himself look, just for a second, at Louis hair, which is still mussed and pushed up at all angles, and his arms, which seem very strong from where Harry’s seated. He’s just got to Louis’ jawline when they’re there, standing next to him.
“Lads,” Zayn says, nodding, “this is my mate from school --”
“Louis,” Harry finishes for him, and he hadn’t realized he’d stood up, but he has, and has apparently also stepped nearer to them, because he and Louis are quite close now.
“Sorry?” Louis asks, frowning a little in confusion.
“D’you two know each other?” Zayn asks warily.
Harry starts to say “Yes, from ages ago,” at the same time that Louis says “No, sorry, I don’t think so,” and he clamps his sentence off. Maybe Louis forgot about him, he thinks, and for some reason the thought makes him bite down on his lip unhappily. It’d make sense if he had, it had been years ago, but still. Harry didn’t think he’d ever be able to forget Louis if he’d tried. He’d been -- well, nevermind.
“I think we met a while ago,” he says, this time more carefully. “Like, our parents knew each other, I think? You’re Louis, yeah?”
“Yeah, no, that’s me,” Louis agrees. “I’m sorry, though, if that happened...” He gestures apologetically.
Harry notices, though, that he looks nervous for some reason.
“You came to visit me and my mum in Holmes Chapel once.” He thinks maybe he should drop the topic, but he can’t. He needs Louis to remember.
“Think you must be thinking of someone else, mate,” Louis says apologetically. “Never been anywhere called Holmes Chapel.”
Harry frowns. Maybe he’s wrong? Maybe this is just a boy who looks a lot like someone he met once a long time ago. But, then, that doesn’t explain how Harry had known his name the first moment he’d seen him. Harry knows, deep down and with certainty, that this is his Louis.
“Sorry,” he says, taking a step back. “Just, you look a lot like someone I used to know.” The lie feels wrong in his mouth.
“No worries,” Louis says, smiling, friendly enough, and they stand there for a moment quietly while Zayn peers back and forth between them.
Niall, with unusually good timing, plunks down three pints on the bar next to them, and it’s enough to break the awkward silence.
part 2
nc-17, 13,000 words
louis/harry, liam/zayn
magical realism AU
found yourself in a new direction
eons far from the sun
can you come when they come to reach you
let you know you’re not the only one
can’t keep hanging on
to all that’s dead and gone
if you build yourself a myth
know just what to give
Harry is six the first time he makes something change. He’s drawing at his little table in the playroom, page after page of planets and trees and stick people with too many legs. He’s got a lion drawn on the paper in front of him, and he’s showing it to his mum, telling her about the lion -- “See, his friends are all lost in the jungle and he has to go find them to save them, cos no one else knows where they went, but he does,” -- when he decides that actually, this lion should be blue. He’s already drawn it in yellow and brown, but it really ought to be blue, so he thinks for a minute, frowning a little, and then presses his fingertips against the paper and thinks, blue.
The lion turns blue. The grass the lion’s standing on turns blue. The trees and the sky and the sun and the clouds turn blue.
“Oh, Harry,” his mum says, and she sounds breathless. He looks up at her, and she’s got tears in her eyes, and Harry thinks maybe he’s done something bad, that he’s going to be punished and sent to his bedroom. Sometimes he does bad things without knowing it, and he doesn’t really mean to, his mum says he just doesn’t always think.
But she’s smiling, now, and she pulls Harry in close to her chest, hugging him and smushing her face into his curls so hard he flails, trying to get away from her grip. “Stop it, mum, come on,” he protests.
“It’s very beautiful,” she says before she lets him squirm out of her grasp. “My favorite drawing you’ve done yet.”
“Can I go outside?” he asks, and he’s out the door with one arm shoved in his jumper before she can answer.
-
He changes more things after that. He makes his milk turn chocolate one day and his mum scolds him, tells him he’s not allowed, but even then she smiles a little like he’s done something very clever.
He decides to make his hair red one day, just to see what it would be like, and his mum laughs herself silly until he puts it back, feeling slightly put out.
His mum puts up a poster of a tiger in his room, right next to his bed. The tiger is hiding in the jungle and you can just see his eyes, the start of his face, his mouth. Harry touches it at night and turns it into a pig, and a cow, and then a lion, which is how he leaves it, even though he read in a book that lions don’t actually live in the jungle. Later on, he puts in more lions, lots more until the whole poster is lions, little ones and big ones and ones with great huge manes and baby ones. His mum laughs, and says he should leave some empty space for the lions to run around, that it must get too crowded with so many of them, but Harry refuses, and leaves it like that -- all lions.
-
When Harry is ten, he comes home from school and there are strangers in his sitting room with his mum, two grown ups and a boy about his age, maybe a little older, having tea.
“Harry,” his mum says, standing up to hug him, “come say hello. These are some friends of mine, they’re just in town for today and they’ve stopped by for tea.”
“H’lo,” Harry says, kicking at the carpet with his trainers. “Mum, can I go outside?” He holds his hand in his pocket and absently changes the piece of candy that he has in it, makes it go all melted before bringing it back.
His mum exchanges looks with the tall woman sitting next to her. “Maybe you could take my son along?” the woman asks, nodding towards the boy seated across from them. He’s dressed up smart, pressed shirt and a nice jumper with no holes in it like Harry’s has, but his collar is pulled off to the side, and he’s frowning and leaning into himself like he’s trying to hide behind his tangled hair.
“Alright,” he agrees cautiously, sensing that it wasn’t really a question. “You can come, I suppose,” he says to the boy. In his pocket, Harry makes the candy go all pointy and brittle.
“Don’t be too long,” his mother calls after them as the door swings shut, but Harry is already headed across the road to the open meadow, the boy following a few paces behind him.
-
“Can you change things too?” Harry asks the other boy. They’re seated in the tall grass of the meadow, hidden from the road and the house and everything besides the stalks of grass dancing in the wind. Harry puts his hand out, grabs a handful and turns the blades rainbow colored before yanking them out of the ground and tossing them so they float on the breeze.
“No,” the other boy says, and Harry feels sad all of a sudden. He’s always wondered if maybe there’s someone else like him, someone else who can change the words around in their comic books and make flowers bloom faster than they should and who wouldn’t look at him like he was a bit strange when he did it. He’d thought that maybe there was something about this other boy that was a little like him.
“I can... I can do something else, though,” the other boy says, a little quiet like it could be a secret. “Do you want to see?”
Harry nods furiously, his hair flopping into his eyes at the motion.
The other boy takes a breath in and then he holds his hand out in front of himself. He opens it, shows Harry that it’s empty, and then clenches it into a fist, facing down. Something feels staticky and electric around Harry, like when he scuffs his socks on the carpet, and then the boy exhales, turns his fist up and opens it.
There’s a brand new pound coin, sitting face up in the center of his palm.
Harry doesn’t say anything for a minute, not sure what he saw but he knows that it’s big, it’s important, it’s someone else who’s more like him than not.
"It’s stupid, I know,” the other boy says, looking down at the ground. “My mum says--”
“It’s brilliant,” Harry finally says, smiling so big his cheeks hurt.
“D’you really think?” the other boy asks.
“What’s your name?” Harry asks instead of answering.
“Louis.”
“Can I--” Harry points at the coin, and doesn’t wait for Louis to respond before he reaches forward, touches the coin with the tip of his finger. Something goes all twisty, and then the coin isn’t a brand new pound, it’s a pence, smaller and dented up and dingy.
“Wow,” says Louis, and they sit there like that, Harry’s finger touching the coin still sitting in Louis’ palm.
-
“Mum says there are other people like us,” says Louis. “It’s not so bad, she told me that there’s actually loads of us, so it’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“Who’s ashamed?” Harry asks. He knows that most people think it’s weird when he makes things change, but it doesn’t stop him, and it never occurred to him that he should feel bad about it.
Louis just blushes a little, and doesn’t answer.
“Anyway, my mate Niall reckons it means we’re wizards, or something,” Harry continues. “He likes it when I change stuff. He says it’s sick. He’s always making me change his grades before his mum sees them. I don’t mind, though.” And he doesn’t. Harry likes to change things, especially for appreciative audiences.
“I don’t like to tell people I can make stuff,” Louis confesses. “I had one mate, I told him, but he said it wasn’t possible, even though I showed him--” He cuts himself off. “Anyway. He got mad about it. I guess he didn’t like it.”
“That’s stupid,” Harry protests vehemently. “He sounds stupid. It’s sick that we can do this, Niall says so. It means we’re special, yeah?”
“Guess so,” says Louis, and he might not be all the way convinced, but he’s smiling now, and he takes his hands out from his pockets where he’s kept them jammed for most of the day, except for when he made the coin. Harry thinks it’s a good thing.
They spend the rest of the day making things, and then changing them. Louis makes a toy truck, and Harry changes it into a dinosaur. Louis makes a rock and Harry changes it into something shiny and faceted, like something from his mum’s jewelry. Louis makes a piece of paper and Harry changes it into confetti shaped like snowflakes and stars, and they float across the park on the wind.
-
Harry doesn’t see Louis after that. He asks his mum about him sometimes, asks when Louis can come back, asks if they can go see Louis, but she always says that Louis’ too busy, or that it’s not a good time, but maybe soon. Eventually Harry stops asking.
He carries on changing things, changes the colors of his trainers when he’s thirteen and doesn’t have the coolest ones at school, tries to change water into beer with mixed results when he and Niall are fifteen and bored, changes the ceiling of his bedroom so that it’s full of twinkling stars in constellations that dance across it while he sleeps.
He doesn’t meet anyone else like him, and sometimes he wonders what happened to Louis.
-
When they’re eighteen, Niall finds them the flat in London, which surprises Harry as much as anyone. Niall is good for bringing food around, and knowing football schedules by heart, and having a laugh, but long range planning is not one of his strong suits, so when he texts Harry and says he’s found them the perfect place near Camden (well, kind of near, Niall amends later), Harry almost drops his phone.
“There’s a boy called Zayn who lives there already,” Niall explains around a mouthful of something when Harry rings him to get the story. “My brother’s mate went to uni with his sister, or something like that. Needs some flatmates, I guess. Rent’s cheap, don’t think it’s too fancy or anything, but we’ll make do, yeah?”
“Shit, yeah, of course,” Harry agrees.
They’d been talking about moving to London, practically constantly since they were kids it feels like. But that was always just as an idea, something in the future, and now it’s happening. Harry’s full of nervous energy all of a sudden. He’s pacing around his room, smiling and absent-mindedly changing the titles of the spines of his books.
“Haven’t even told you the best part,” Niall adds, dropping his voice a little. “Zayn’s like you. Like, he doesn’t change stuff, but he’s got -- I dunno, something. Greg didn’t really know, but apparently he’s got, like. A power, or something. So’s his sister.”
Harry doesn’t know what to say to that, so he doesn’t say anything, just grins madly into the phone. He hasn’t met anyone else like him since Louis, years and years ago. He’s asked his mum occasionally, looked it up on the internet and what have you. There are enough of them that it’s not completely unheard of to be able to do things that you shouldn’t actually be able to, but it’s still rare. Once he’d asked his mum if she could do anything, and she’d seemed to have gone a little sad, and said “No,” sounding like she regretted it, so he hadn’t pushed it.
“Is that... alright?” Niall asks hesitantly. Niall’s so used to Harry changing things that he doesn’t usually remember it’s unusual, but this is new, this is the first time they’ve talked about it in terms of other people, of more of them, of powers and all that. Like it’s something unusual.
“‘Course it is,” Harry reassures him, feeling light around the chest. It’ll be perfect, he thinks. He’ll live in London and they’ll get up to all sorts of mischief and this Zayn lad will be their best mate, and Harry won’t feel like he’s the only one all the time, and Zayn will introduce them to all sorts of people and maybe even knows more that are like them, and -- Harry’s head starts to spin. “When can we be there?”
-
The flat isn’t fancy, Niall had been right, but Harry loves it the second he walks in. The ceilings are high and open, and the windows go all the way up, and inside there’s a bedroom that’s all his own and a toilet and a kettle, so he figures he’ll do just fine.
Zayn lets them in, gives them keys and all that, before disappearing, mumbling something about work and someone called Liam.
His mum only cries once, when she hugs him before leaving to catch her train back home.
“Be careful,” she tells him. “Do good.”
She’s been telling him that for years, ever since he changed something for the first time. Be careful, do good. Except Harry thinks that now, for the first time, he gets what she means.
-
Zayn appears in the kitchen the next morning while Harry’s putting the kettle on and makes a vague noise of greeting.
“Morning,” Harry says.
Zayn just nods and sets about making toast before asking, “Settled alright, then?” Harry thinks that Zayn might not be very talkative. He’ll have to work on that.
“Brilliant, yeah,” he says, smiling and trying to look charming and non-threatening, which isn’t a particularly hard task for him. Dangerous has never really been his area. “So, like. Did you have roommates before, or?”
“Yeah, two blokes called Matt and Aiden. Fucked off for some job of Matt’s, moved up north.” Zayn shrugs. “They were good sorts.”
Harry nods. “You work? Go to school?”
Zayn reaches for the kettle that Harry’s got heating, pouring out two mugs of tea for both of them. “Dropped out of uni for a bit, but might go back. My, er -- um, Liam, he’s got me this job right now helping out at an arts centre. Mostly answering phones, you know, but sometimes I get to help out the instructors.”
“You’re an artist, then?”
“Something like,” Zayn says, with a half smile on his lips. “What about you and Niall?”
“Nah, no school. Neither of us are much for further education, I don’t think. I worked in a cafe doing baking back home, was thinking I could find something like that here. Dunno ‘bout Nialler. Reckon he’ll fall into something, he always does.”
Harry pauses. He knows what he wants to ask, but he’s not sure if it’s allowed, if Zayn wants to talk about it or if he should just stick to pleasantries until he knows him a bit better, but on the other hand -- he can’t not ask.
“Niall said... Niall told me you can, you know. Do something. Like, a power, or something,” he says slowly, feeling like he’s trying not to spook a kitten.
“Er. I guess,” Zayn says back just as cautiously. “It’s--”
“--No, yeah, if you don’t want to talk about it,” Harry says at the same time, blushing a little. “It’s just...” He stops for a moment, and then reaches over to take the cup of tea out of Zayn’s hands. He wraps his own hands around it, concentrating, and the mug changes from a chipped white to a bright jade green. The tea turns to coffee, and the steam curling off of it starts to sparkle and pop in the air like fireworks. He leaves it like that and pushes it towards Zayn, who peers into it curiously.
“That’s brilliant,” Zayn says quietly. “So you, like--”
“I can change stuff, yeah,” Harry admits, and for the first time he feels a little bashful about what he can do. He reaches over to tap the mug, and it goes back to normal. “Just, like, stuff that’s already there, I can like, change it... physically, I guess. That’s all.”
Zayn considers this. “Mine’s about feelings,” he says after a moment. “I can, like. I can tell how people feel, or make them feel how I do. Stuff like that. Not all the time, I mean. I try... I try not to, unless the other person’s alright with it, just cos it can get a bit weird, you know?”
“Would you show me?” Harry asks. He’s still feeling like they’re in slightly uncertain territory, gets the impression Zayn feels a bit awkward talking about this, but mostly he just feels excited. Zayn hadn’t recoiled when Harry changed the tea, and he’s talking about feeling other people’s emotions like it’s not totally insane, and the relief of it makes Harry’s chest loosen, makes him feel like he could float right up to the ceiling.
Zayn nods and reaches over and wraps his thumb and forefinger loosely around Harry’s wrist. Harry breathes in, not sure what he should be feeling, and on the exhale, he realizes: he feels something else pressing in on him from the outside, a sense of cautious optimism, like he’s not quite sure of something yet but he thinks it’ll end up good. He feels happily nervous about something that’s happening later tonight, although he can’t pinpoint what. He worries that he might be late for work today, which doesn’t make sense, obviously, because he hasn’t got a job yet.
Then it shifts, and he feels panicked, like the walls are crushing in on him, like he needs to get out now, needs to run. Then he’s exhausted, so tired he could sleep for days, and then he’s peaceful and calm, and everything is alright.
Zayn takes his hand off Harry’s wrist, and it all drops away.
“Wow,” Harry says, breathing heavily. “Wow. That was--”
“Me, at first,” says Zayn. “Like, how I’m feeling now. The rest of it was just random stuff. You notice it more when it’s extreme like that.”
Zayn hesitates, and Harry doesn’t need his hand on his wrist to know that he’s a bit anxious to see how Harry reacts.
“It’s brilliant,” Harry says honestly. “Really, Zayn, this is, like. It’s perfect.”
“Really?” Zayn asks, sounding a bit shy. “I dunno many other people who are like, you know. Like us. My sister’s the same as me, and there was another girl at school with us who could make things float, but.”
“D’you know anyone else here?” Harry asks, feeling hopeful, but Zayn shakes his head.
“Just you, now. Why, d’you? Niall?”
“Nah, Niall’s useless. I met one other person when I was young, but. Y’know. It was just in passing.” Harry shrugs. “That’s enough, though, innit? Just you and me.”
“Yeah, alright,” Zayn says, smiling wider, and even though they’re not touching Harry is sure he feels a sense of relief coming off of Zayn so thick he thinks he could touch it. It makes him feel like he’s home.
-
Harry finds a job at bakery down the street after he begs a trial shift from the owner and impresses her by turning a whole sheet of white cake multicolored and peach flavored. It’s a risk, he knows, it always is when he shows off like that, but what’s the point of all this if he can’t use it? And people need multicolored peach cake on demand, he reasons.
Niall finds a gig bartending at a pub nearby, and he sneaks Harry free drinks when he stops by after his shifts. The job ends up paying Niall an inordinate amount of money that Harry figures is directly related to his easy smile and Irish charm, even though the bastard hasn’t been back to Ireland since he was eight, and that was just for a visit.
Between the two of them it almost always covers their share of the rent, and if sometimes Harry has to change a pound note into a tenner, well. No one needs to know about it.
As long as he doesn’t get greedy, is what he tells himself, and he doesn’t. He’s got Niall and Zayn and a flat and a job. He’s happy enough just like this.
-
“Zayn, mate, let’s go out,” he whines. It’s September and he’s off work and even though it’s getting a bit chilly, the sun is shining for once, and he needs to get out of the flat immediately. He’s already driving Zayn mad making the floors turn technicolor and rubbery and threatening to see if he can change the walls enough to make his own bedroom the biggest of the three.
“Bugger off, I’ve got plans,” Zayn says, shoving Harry’s arms from around his neck where he’s draped. Harry feels a twinge of fond annoyance that he knows isn’t his, and he reaches up to ruffle Zayn’s quiff before dodging away from his flailing arms.
“Plans with who? Plans with Liam?” Harry asks, and Zayn’s cheeks go pink.
“No, not Liam, if you must know,” Zayn says, trying vainly to fix his hair. “Just a bloke I know.”
“Honestly, Zayn, sneaking around on your boyfriend?” Harry teases. “Our gentle Liam’ll be devastated.”
“He’s not my boyfriend, you twat,” Zayn protests. A little too heartily, in Harry’s opinion, which means he’s lying, which Harry knows anyway. He doesn’t need help from anyone’s magic power to deduce that Zayn’s been mad about Liam for ages. The first time he’d brought Liam around to meet Harry and Niall, Harry had felt such secondhand nervousness that he’d had to excuse himself from the room, because everything he said had felt so awkward and wrong-footed. Also because he had kind of desperately wanted to kiss this bloke he’d just met, which wasn’t necessarily unusual, but he was still pretty sure that was just Zayn projecting. Liam’s quite nice, but he’s not Harry’s type.
“Then who’s this mystery man?” Harry persists, folding into the couch gracelessly and bouncing one leg furiously. He really, really needed to get out of the flat. Even if Zayn won’t come to the pub, he reckons he can beg enough pints off Niall before the dinner rush on his own to distract himself a bit.
“Met him a while ago,” Zayn shrugs. “He was in a class with me at uni.”
“Well bring him along then,” Harry whines, and he’s knows it’s not dignified, but can’t help himself. “Come on, Zayn, I’m bored, and if you and this mate of yours don’t distract me I’ll redecorate the whole flat in shades of pink and turn all our furniture into oversized poufs. And I know how you feel about that sofa, Zayn, you’re well attached.”
“Christ, fine,” Zayn relents. “I’ll bring him round to the pub in an hour or so, then, if you want to meet us there.”
“Cheers,” Harry says, beaming a smile and bouncing to his feet before he presses a sloppy kiss into Zayn’s cheek.
“Get off, you tosser, or I’ll change my mind,” Zayn says, but Harry grabs his jacket and heads out the front door before any of the threats that follow can land on him.
It’s a truly gorgeous day, he thinks to himself as he walks the long way to the pub. He misses Holmes Chapel once in a while, and his mum a bit more often, but London really is massive and spectacular, especially in the sun. He whistles while he walks and pulls the cuffs of his jacket down over his hands, which feel full of possibility.
-
Harry’s had two pints and something pink with an elaborate frilly garnish on it (“an experiment,” Niall had called it) by the time Zayn and his mate are due to show up. He’s been misshaping all the glasses he empties, turning the first glass short and squat, the second impossibly thin and tall, and the third into an obscene shape that Niall smashes in a very dubious accident before anyone can get a good look at it. Niall keeps threatening to chuck him out if he doesn’t stop ruining all the glassware in the building, but he also keeps throwing his head back with laughter, so Harry’s not too fussed.
“Zayn’ll be around soon,” he says as soon as Niall comes back from filling him another glass. This time it’s water, he notes disappointedly. “Said he’s bringing a mate of his from Uni.” Harry drums his fingers on the bar happily. Niall starts to tell him a story from his last shift, and Harry’s half listening, half thinking about how lovely the sun has been, hoping it doesn’t piss down rain again tomorrow. Harry wonders, sometimes, if there’s someone out there who can change the weather, make it sunny when they’re happy and rainy when they’re feeling tired or cozy or hungover.
He’d tried, once, thought that maybe since the weather was already there, he’d be allowed to change it, but nothing happened except he’d given himself a headache trying.
He’s thinking about that, and how if there is someone in charge of the weather they must be a bleak sort given how often it’s rained lately, save for today, when the door to the pub opens, and Zayn enters, with another boy trailing behind him, and --
-- and Harry drops the straw he’d been fiddling with, because it’s Louis. He hasn’t seen Louis in eight years and even then it had just been an afternoon, and yet he’s absolutely certain this is the same boy who made a coin appear in his hand that day in the meadow. He’s thought about him enough since then, wondered where he’d gotten to, and now there he was, right there, in a preposterous striped shirt and pastel trousers.
He’s well fit, Harry thinks unbidden as the two of them cross over to where he’s sitting, and before he can start to imagine how Louis got here of all places, he lets himself look, just for a second, at Louis hair, which is still mussed and pushed up at all angles, and his arms, which seem very strong from where Harry’s seated. He’s just got to Louis’ jawline when they’re there, standing next to him.
“Lads,” Zayn says, nodding, “this is my mate from school --”
“Louis,” Harry finishes for him, and he hadn’t realized he’d stood up, but he has, and has apparently also stepped nearer to them, because he and Louis are quite close now.
“Sorry?” Louis asks, frowning a little in confusion.
“D’you two know each other?” Zayn asks warily.
Harry starts to say “Yes, from ages ago,” at the same time that Louis says “No, sorry, I don’t think so,” and he clamps his sentence off. Maybe Louis forgot about him, he thinks, and for some reason the thought makes him bite down on his lip unhappily. It’d make sense if he had, it had been years ago, but still. Harry didn’t think he’d ever be able to forget Louis if he’d tried. He’d been -- well, nevermind.
“I think we met a while ago,” he says, this time more carefully. “Like, our parents knew each other, I think? You’re Louis, yeah?”
“Yeah, no, that’s me,” Louis agrees. “I’m sorry, though, if that happened...” He gestures apologetically.
Harry notices, though, that he looks nervous for some reason.
“You came to visit me and my mum in Holmes Chapel once.” He thinks maybe he should drop the topic, but he can’t. He needs Louis to remember.
“Think you must be thinking of someone else, mate,” Louis says apologetically. “Never been anywhere called Holmes Chapel.”
Harry frowns. Maybe he’s wrong? Maybe this is just a boy who looks a lot like someone he met once a long time ago. But, then, that doesn’t explain how Harry had known his name the first moment he’d seen him. Harry knows, deep down and with certainty, that this is his Louis.
“Sorry,” he says, taking a step back. “Just, you look a lot like someone I used to know.” The lie feels wrong in his mouth.
“No worries,” Louis says, smiling, friendly enough, and they stand there for a moment quietly while Zayn peers back and forth between them.
Niall, with unusually good timing, plunks down three pints on the bar next to them, and it’s enough to break the awkward silence.
part 2