northern downpour sends its love
Title: click your heels
Pairing: Zayn/Liam
Rating: pg
Summary: Zayn is sleepless in Singapore. Liam is messing with ecosystems. The distance, you'll notice, has considerably decreased.
If there was a knock at the door, he didn’t hear it. Dawn has happened, he is surprised to see, it slipped by. When did it get the chance, he has been vigilant, guarding the night, wearing his insomnia between his eyebrows like a crown. It’s been torture, weeks and weeks, but there is something about being sleepless in Singapore. There’s a certain poetry to it.
His apartment walls are painted eggshell white, but dawn in Singapore is orange and sweet, and the good thing, he’s found out, about white walls, is that they suck up dawn like sponges, reflecting it back to him, offering it up as a reward for waking up. The light will get duller and colorless as the day grows, but for now it’s dreamy, it’s all candyfloss and birthday candles and the shadow of a boy who can’t be there, painted tall and absurd on the opposite wall.
Zayn stays still for some moments, looks and blinks and thinks, wake yourself up.
His washing is all folded and piled neatly on the sofa, his socks paired and lined up on the coffee table, and the mugs and cups and spoons from weeks ago are nowhere to be found. That, and the faint scent of fresh coffee wafting around and making his tongue itch are defying logic, fleshing out the vision of the boy who can’t be here, making him real, giving him edges and curves and hunched shoulders, those eyes and that mouth that Zayn remembers and a pair of shoes he does not recognize.
There’s a leather jacket draped over one of the chairs, a small suitcase by the door. Zayn takes it all in, counts to ten then takes a deep breath and straightens up. His legs have fallen asleep. His spine is protesting. It's the first time in weeks he's slept for more than a couple hours.
“You’ve been messing with my ecosystem,” he says in the end, when he decides it's time to speak, rubbing circles into his own calves with his thumbs. As far as greetings go, it’s a fairly shit one, but it gains points for originality. Zayn doubts he’s ever used the word ecosystem in a sentence before.
“I have,” Liam nods, and his voice hasn’t changed one bit. Why would it, though, it’s only been five months, and they’re well past puberty. Little to no chance for a betrayal like the one of summer ’09, when half your friends sounded like their older brothers on the phone, and you were never sure whose name to use.
“How did you even get in?” Zayn asks, head full of cotton, mouth dry, still trying to work around the reality of this boy in his living room and the complicated function of his own limbs.
Liam shrugs, one shouldered. “Your doorman recognized me. I lied to him about stuff.”
“Hah,” Zayn sighs, pushing clumsy fingers through his hair, forcing it up, up, off his forehead. The day just started, he thinks, and it’s already impossible. “So much for the airtight security I was promised.”
Liam lifts his head. His hair is longer now. It falls in tufts over his forehead, frames his bones perfectly. He really has, such lovely bones. In his face, especially, the rest of them are just. Alright.
“I can go, Zayn,” he says, sounding earnest and serious and hurt, all at the same time. It’s impressive, that he can do so much with just four words.
“I shouldn’t have barged in here. It was.”
In the early morning, his eyes are two black beads catching the glint of the sun, the opposite of lightbulbs, Zayn thinks, but not quite. Black holes, but not quite. Just Liam’s eyes, really, a pair of dark eyes. It’s just that they haven’t been around enough lately for Zayn to get over the part where he’s not a poet, fighting to sum them up in metaphors and lyrics from the eighties. Black velvet, if you please, comes to him now, this is a new one, and it’s pretty good, too.
He has to shake his head, get back on track, go where?
“Go where? You just got here, and you’ve already done the laundry.”
Liam laughs, dropping his chin to his chest. “I was jet-lagged, and you were sleeping, and the laundry was all done, I just folded everything so I didn’t have to go crazy looking at it.”
Zayn pulls himself up and off the armchair, unfolds to his full height, which is not much, not after the mountain Harry grew up to be. Liam doesn’t move from the table, perched on top of it with his arms spread on either side of him, brand new shoes dangling over the floor, only barely short of touching down. There’s slight mud on the soles, not much. Liam is Liam, he wiped his feet before coming in.
“It was raining yesterday.” Zayn throws it out there, uselessly. Can’t tell why. He pulls his eyes from Liam’s feet to his face.
“I know,” Liam says. “I caught the last of it.”
And then, “you couldn’t sleep, you said. In the postcard.”
Zayn nods. “Wasn’t lying, either, if that’s what you’re thinking.” He doesn’t snap at Liam, but sure, he could have been gentler.
Liam’s smile is soft and Zayn reads in it something like come on, now. Would I really.
“It’s not what I was thinking.”
“That why you’re here?”
Liam gives him the shrug again, a noncommittal thing that Zayn doesn’t associate with him. It’s not on the list of Liam Things, like holding his breath in tunnels and folding one leg under himself when he's sitting and stealing people’s slippers in the winter.
“That’s what you wrote,” Liam says and sure, Zayn knows what he wrote.
“I wrote a lot of things.”
Liam’s looking at him and Zayn won’t look away. He’s doing the math in his head: it’s been a week since he sent that postcard, it’s a twelve-hour flight to Singapore and long-distance flights rank at least on seventh place in Liam’s chart of Things I Hate (No, Really, I Hate Them). He figures he’s allowed a morsel of wishful thinking. He can give himself that much.
Liam wipes a hand over his mouth, like they do in the movies before delivering bad news, your pet squirrel passed away last night, Alma, and Zayn panics, does a full 180 and tells his own calculations to go fuck themselves, of course he got it all wrong. Apparently people do take last minute breaks to Singapore for recreation. It’s a thing that’s done.
“Wish you were here is such a cliché,” Liam is saying then, and it calls Zayn back, back into the eggshell room, the orange morning. “You fucking sap.”
“Is it.” Zayn asks, dry-mouthed, scratching at his stomach under the flannel, taking a half step forwards. “Cliché.”
“Yep.”
Zayn opens his mouth, about to protest that corniness was the whole point of the postcard, it was a pug waving from the Great Wall for fuck’s sake, now what about the note, what about what I wrote to you, Liam, but instead he lets out a deep breath like a car exhaust, an exaggerated phewwww that makes Liam hiccup a laugh and his eyes go crinkly and happy and small.
“And I love you?” Zayn asks. His voice could be small and shivery, but it's not, because he's not ashamed, three words on a postcard and the bravest thing he's ever done.
Liam loses the smile and purses his lips. “I love you,” he says, “on a postcard, after you’ve packed your bags and moved half a world away.” He pauses, rubbing his hands on his knees. For effect, for the drumroll. “Is a dick move.”
Zayn is shocked into laughter. So, Liam swears now. Why not. He’s a man in possession of a pair of brand new shoes and a leather jacket, who got on a plane to Singapore to fold Zayn’s shirts and make coffee. He can say “dick” without choking.
“Bloody effective, though,” Zayn grins. The sun is too hot on his shoulders, all of a sudden, too hot on his face and down to his toes and in his belly, and it might not be the sun, it’s not that kind of heat, it might be a sudden fever or a heart attack, do you feel warm all over when your heart’s about to call it quits?
He’s grinning so wide, it’s hurting him. His face was not made to split like this. “I notice,” he says, schooling his face into what he hopes is a less manic expression, taking another step towards Liam, warm feet sticking to the cold tile, “that the distance has considerably decreased.”
“Hm,” Liam hums, shrugging again. Zayn finds that he doesn’t mind it that much after all. It’s just one more thing about Liam he can catalogue and keep close, like his emails, the back of his neck, the messy hair and the leather jacket and the new and exciting jumping on planes on a whim.
“I suppose it has.”
Liam arches his eyebrows, waving a hand towards Zayn’s entire person, his entire filthy, rumpled, insomniac person, self-exiled and punch-drunk on love and booze and crazy hopes and thoughts about space and black matter. Half a world and now half a living room, just four steps, and then Liam huffs, waving him over, “come on, you’re still all the way over there, Zayn, come on.”