live through this and you won't look back (1/2)
Pairing: Liam Payne / Zayn Malik
Rating: NC-17
Word count: 19 142
Summary: "I ruined our date," he says, and Liam's first thought is no and his second is where would you live if you had the whole world and his third is next to you
.
On their very first flight together after the competition, Liam doesn’t hear a word of the safety protocol because Zayn’s hand, still a little unfamiliar and definitely already perfect, just like the rest of him, is clutching his beneath the armrest.
+
It’s the middle of February and it feels like there is nowhere in the world colder than Des Moines, Iowa. Shallow exhales are visible against the starry night’s sky and the winter wind bites at the spaces between their sleeves and leather gloves and Liam can’t look away from the pink flush staining Zayn’s cheeks.
Zayn catches him watching. The corner of his chapped, bitten raw lips quirks up, the breeze blows his fringe into his eyes, and the high beams cast eyelash shadows onto the soft skin of his cheekbones, and Liam’s never seen someone so incidentally beautiful. Zayn cocks his head like let’s get out of here and forget the world and Liam wants to tug him behind the bus, shove him up against the wheel and-
(not yet)
“I hate you,” Louis says, prodding him in the shoulder until Liam looks away. “I have never hated anyone this much before in my entire life, and I’ve met the Wanted.”
Harry snorts with that hideous beanie he bought last summer tugged all the way down to the tip of his nose. “Overreaction, Lou,” he says, tilting his head all the way back until they can see his wide green eyes in the darkness. “It’s just an hour flight.”
“An hour flight without Liam,” he scowls, and Louis has always been a bit adamant with the dramatics. “Think of all the pre-show rituals-”
“We don’t have those,” Niall interrupts.
“- the view of the American countryside-”
A bark of laughter is muffled into Harry’s scarf. “That we’ve seen a thousand times.”
Louis rolls his eyes and stomps all the way to the wheel-up staircase. “Scratch that, I hate absolutely all of you. Enjoy peak hour traffic and petrol breaks.”
And Liam knows that it sounds ridiculous, choosing an eight-wheeler with too-small beds and bad water pressure over the promise of leg room and Zayn on the jet, but he just wants silence and a pillow for four hours.
He doesn’t say that, though, slings an arm around Harry’s shoulders instead and says, “Love you, Tomlinson.”
Harry whispers we love you too into the shell of his ear (and that’s always been his little quirk, like he can’t help but echo it, even when it’s from a stranger, even when they’re at an awards show, even when they’re watched by the whole world) while Niall kisses his other cheek. Zayn hasn’t stopped grinning and Liam still wants to lick it off.
They wander on board huddled together for warmth until it’s just him and Zayn and the space between them, and it’s so, so easy to step a little closer, fist his hand softly in the collar of Zayn’s jacket and press their foreheads together.
“Remember to close the blinds,” Zayn whispers, with the wind and engines roaring around him, “you know how the streetlights make you dizzy.”
Liam grins and he wants to press forward, kiss him, wrap them up in a cocoon of blankets for the next three days. “Remember to move the armrest so you don’t get restless.”
The driver is knocking impatiently on the window and he needed to leave twenty minutes ago to get to the venue on time, but there’s nothing quite as important as adding, “Are we still on for tonight?”
Zayn nods until their noses brush together. “Can’t wait,” he says, and reaches up to thumb at the woven bracelet on Liam’s wrist they bought together in Japan and then he’s boarding, black jeans and leather jacket and dark eyes such a contrast against the remnants of snow all around. He turns to wink over his shoulder and Liam really doesn’t want to wait.
He stays until he can see them settled into the cabin before climbing onto the bus. The bed by the window is cold, but it’s Zayn’s favourite and if he sits up straight, he can see the plane and Louis waving from the door.
There’s a tiny space where the window’s propped open and he wedges it further apart, just in time to hear Louis yell, “I hope your bus freezes up!”
He laughs and watches as Harry scolds them from the cabin. “Yeah?” he says, and he’s never felt so alive. “Well, I hope your damned plane crashes.”
+
(He and Zayn have been an almost for a year too long when they’re locked in a penthouse together.
“We are sick to death of the unresolved sexual tension,” Harry says sternly - as sternly as Harry Styles can manage - from the other side of a mahogany door while Niall and Louis snicker into the peephole.
“Besides,” Louis says, and Liam hates the smugness in his voice, “things are all heading in-”
Liam groans. “Don’t-”
“It was a good weekend,” Zayn says patiently, like he has a dozen times before, while Louis hammers out a rhythm on the door, “but we promised no more-”
“- One Direction,” Louis finishes, so damn gleeful, “so consider this an expressway.”
Zayn’s a body too close -that’s always the way it is, isn’t it, a hand on the small of his back, lips catching dry on his neck when they’re on stage, waking up tangled together in a bed plenty big - and a laugh brushes over Liam’s bare neck. He flushes but the tattooed arm pressed against the door has goosebumps, so he doesn’t feel too embarrassed. “Are you installing an external deadlock?”
Liam makes a helpless noise at the beat of words against his pulse and, through the door, Niall laughs a ‘pathetic, the lot of you’ with absolutely no malice. They could fight back or just sleep off the post-show adrenaline, but there isn’t enough gravitational pull in the universe to drag him away from this.
The suite is too big and too empty and still feels so, so theirs. He twists on Zayn’s axis to grin into his neck and follows him through the room, kicking off their shoes and sweaters without stepping back from each other.
They end up in the bathroom, inexplicably, with the waterfall showerhead and porcelain sink and-
“Oh,” Zayn says, and Liam doesn’t realise how close he is until he looks up and can count those damn eyelashes. The only light in the bathroom is a blue flame fireplace and he doesn’t even pretend to hide the way his heart races like mad at the look in Zayn’s eyes. “You’re so - the tub is - incredible, hey?”
Liam grins at all the insinuations between the words and stares (even though it hurts, sometimes, never quite enough to force him to turn away) at the embarrassed smile on pretty pink lips.
The bath is spectacular, when he twists to stop from kissing Zayn all over in the middle of a dark bathroom in a city they won’t remember. It’s pressed against the wall overlooking the city and has high glass walls and curved ends and the sight of it settles this marrow-deep sense of exhaustion in his bones.
He catches the longing in Zayn’s expression and hip-checks him closer. “You could take one,” he offers, as casually as he can at the thought of Zayn and tattoos and glass tub. “We can hook up your iPod and it’ll be like you’re back home.”
There are two dozen unlit candles scattered across the marble floor and a bottle of lube by the sink and three arrows drawn onto the mirror in the red lipstick from Halloween last year, but he bypasses those in favour of the rose oil and bubble bath mix. He shoves them at Zayn and cheats his reflexes, sneaking a hand into Zayn’s front pocket to steal his phone.
Fiddling with the dock is difficult - two thirds because of his racing heart and half because of the mirror and wholly because of Zayn - but Daft Punk comes on shuffle and he exaggerates the hitch of his hips until he hears that relaxed laugh from behind him.
He turns around and Zayn’s just frozen, shirt bundled around his forearms and jeans low on his hips, and Liam forces himself to look up, shoves him teasingly towards the half-full tub at the amused smirk he sees last. It’s not harsh or rough by any means but Zayn follows his momentum and slips backwards into the bath, half-dressed and dishevelled with dark circles around his eyes and the biggest grin on his face.
Through the water, Zayn’s legs spread, and it’s not for hours yet that Liam will realise it’s a distraction tactic for when Zayn fists a hand in the front of his jeans and tugs him in. He emerges spluttering out laughter and settles his back against Zayn’s chest and they trade lyrics and lace their fingers together until they’re ready to talk.
Liam leans back and Zayn’s stubble grazes against his cheek and he never wants to move. “I think you’re the best person on this whole damn planet,” he admits, and the city lights shine just for them.
Arms curl around his torso and he feels the hitch in Zayn’s breath before he hears it. “I never love the world as much as when I’m with you,” he says, and softer - braver - he adds, “Next weekend in Chicago, there’s a midnight screening of the new Thor film after our show so maybe-”
Liam nods before Zayn’s happy, embarrassed laugh can ruin the sentence and they stay in the bath until the water runs cold, listing off Stan Lee’s appearances as their lips brush against free skin.)
+
The bus is a little colder without four over-affectionate bodies pressed close on a thin mattress but he tries to compensate, curls up under Zayn’s blanket with his face buried in his pillow, wearing Harry’s sweater and drinking coffee from Louis’ cup and rewatching Mad Men on Niall’s laptop, and it almost feels like home.
(almost.)
It’s pitch black as the edges of Chicago blur past his window. He doesn’t pick up his phone, not even when Louis calls a half dozen times-
(“I hate talking on the phone,” he said, that very first time he’d cornered Liam just off stage as he punched in his number and in three hours, Liam will hate himself for not answering the second, fifth, eighth time it rang)
- and people always talk about this sense of premonition but it’s not until he looks up as they pull into the stadium that he knows something’s wrong.
Their new security guard, an eighteen year old from Germany who’s built like a brick with a voice like an angel and a vernacular like a soldier, is standing by the door. He doesn’t move when Liam grins goofily at him upside down and it’s only then he thinks-
oh.
“What?” Liam asks, and he hates how scared he sounds, hates the way his heart throbs, hates the way he looks over his shoulder and fists a hand in the sheets like the ache in his chest can materialise into the four of them. “Did they hide in the airport again because Harry loves the baggage carousel and we sat on one for an hour when we were in Berlin last summer, so security should really check-”
Elliot - who tells them a different name every week because it makes Louis cackle and, god, Louis - holds out an iPad and Liam can’t look, flickers his gaze between the windows and Niall’s laptop and where his phone is, under last night’s clothes and this morning’s sweatpants. “Liam,” he says patiently, carefully blank, and no-
“Or has Zayn lost his voice,” he says, and there’s something thick and scary building just under his tongue, “he always forgets to warm up before a show and I bet he’s gargling herbal tea backstage, even though he hates the way it tastes-”
He looks at the screen with this newfound tremor chasing his blood, until it’s not just his fingers shaking, but his legs, his stomach, his lungs. Niall’s always been an enthusiast for the instantaneous - cannot stand the anticipation, pulls off bandaids and tears open the award nominations for the Brits without a second thought, but Liam hadn’t taken a leap of faith until that day in Wellington when he saw Zayn waiting at the bottom.
His first thought is that looks a lot like and his second is-
He doesn’t have a second thought.
+
A lie, really, because it’s more accurate to say he doesn’t stop thinking, because the caption says none found and the plane is torn in half like in Lost and he hates that connection because the five of them watched all six seasons last year and he doesn’t want to taint that memory of sharing a hotel bed, fighting for pillow space, Zayn, not if-
It would be easier if it was his family, he thinks, and hates himself for even suggesting that but it’s almost the truth; his parents didn’t drag him around the world and abandon him in Chicago at nineteen with a grainy surveillance photo of half a plane and dirty dishes under the sink
And there’s only a one in ninety million chance of dying in a plane crash but they’ve beaten the odds before, and he’s a conflicting litany of maybe and never and can’t and won’t and he never understood ‘falling apart’ until he realised that maybe no one would be around to fix him, and there’s just no oxygen left in a world where they’re-
+
I hope your damned plane crashes.
+
“Pull over,” he says, and he hasn’t sounded quite so young or quite so old since I cried a river over you.
Elliot looks like he’s trying to force out pity. Liam doesn’t deserve it. “There are people around,” he says, but Liam’s halfway down the too-steep stairs in bare feet and clutching the bands around his wrist - from the Leeds they went to together, the Radio City Music Hall tour with Harry last Christmas, the beaded bracelets they’d made each other at Zayn’s cousins’ birthday - and he can’t hear a fucking thing over the roar of traffic.
The icy wind bites at his cheeks and he used to find solace, outside, in that first breath of fresh air after a show, but not now. Now all he can look at is the crowd, silent, for once in their fucking life, and he hates the way some of them are crying, as if they know more about each of them than a two word label brainstormed in a glass office, like they’re the ones who might-
have
- lost something.
He’s hunched over and gasping for air when a hand fists in his collar. “You’re okay,” she says, and when he looks up it’s the sound engineer with red hair and a soft spot for Niall and steely eyes to anchor him. “You’re okay and they’re okay and I will take you wherever you need to go.”
+
Her name’s Blair and she turns off the radio when the Beach Boys play before he can even ask. She drives faster than the speed limit and throws his phone into the back seat when strangers won’t stop ringing and drops his wrist with a hard pinch to the underside when they pull up to the scene, and he can’t think of anyone who’d handle him better.
(wrong, because he would kill for four boys teasing him for overreacting and wrestling him into his seatbelt)
It’s Louis he finds, cross-strapped to the stretcher with one of his feet boxed up and a wild look in his eyes. His eyelashes flutter in that way that distracts from the tear streaks below when he sees Liam and he says ‘hey, I think you’re psychic’ before Liam can even think an apology.
“They pulled Harry and Zayn out a half-hour ago,” he says, and he looks so exhausted, sweat pooling in the hollow of his throat and hair shoved messily off his forehead and the grimace of his lips etched bone-deep. Liam can’t look away from his taped up foot, the shards of bone protruding through the skin, the wires threaded into his forearm. “They can’t get Niall-”
And he stumbles, then, but Louis grips his arm to keep him up, even when the jolt of pain makes them both flinch. “He wouldn’t let me help,” he says, and then, a little more urgently, “he’s locked in the pit with the pilot and Liam you need to get him out, I need to yell at him and the last thing I said was-”
Louis’ chest is heaving with these shallow breaths which make Liam dizzy and he has a dozen things he wants to say over and over, until they thicken the air like the smoke from the wreck.
The paramedics are making all these soothing sounds and it’s only when Louis pulls his hand away bloody that Liam realises his own forearm’s bleeding, ugly shallow scratches all over his tattoos.
He manages a smile and finds the words, just for Louis. “We’ll be there, Lou.”
Whatever is coiled tight around Louis’ spine relaxes, just a little, like it did the first time Liam hugged him back.
“We’re going to be alright,” Louis says, almost a promise, like ‘eleven months isn’t that long’ and ‘we’re going to make it’ and ‘he’s going to be infatuated with you too’ and Liam believes him, because he always has, and Louis hasn’t let him down yet.
+
It’s an hour and a half later and Liam doesn’t realise he’s walking forward until he’s thigh deep in ice-cold water that stains his jeans dark, and he’s never really understood staring at a trainwreck until he realises he can’t look away.
Niall’s limp in the space blanket wrapped around his shoulders but his eyes fly open as he’s carried past and when the paramedics strap him to the stretcher in the ambulance, he squeezes the very tips of Liam’s fingers like a hello.
+
One of the doctors - Dr. Howard, a pretty blonde he’d accidentally called nurse on the way in and had received a lecture on Merit Ptah and Title IX and South London Hospital for Women and Children before he could apologise - sits on the window ledge beside him and wraps a cotton bandage around his forearm.
“Sorry,” he says, while she fixes the edges, “I’m just - I really wasn’t thinking.”
Something in her expression softens and she adjusts the taping until the ache under his skin disappears. “Has a doctor talked to you about them yet?”
She shows him x-rays and explains all the monitors and starts talking in this foreign language about infection rates and intravenous fluids and post-sedation disorientation and Harry’s four fractured ribs and the three bones in Louis’ foot and Niall’s hypothermia until it blurs, and all he hears afterwards is post traumatic stress disorder.
He blinks hard at the window to Louis’ room and turns to look at her. “So do I - stay? What do I do to fix them when-”
He cuts himself off at the look in her eyes, just in time to hear her say, “I meant you, Mr. Payne.”
+
He doesn’t sleep - doesn’t think he’ll sleep ever again - but he dreams. It’s nothing identifiable and it’s blurred over with something cancerous (clouds, Zayn will tell him, months from now when they talk about it, pressed close under the blankets, I see them too) and when he opens his eyes, all he can remember is who would die first in the hunger games do you ever want to murder each other who-would-you-leave-to-drown?
When he lurches out of the hard chair he stole from the waiting room, gasping and maybe crying a little bit, Zayn’s watching from across the dark room. His skin is a ghostly shade of pale and his right shoulder and forearm is covered in bandages, but when his spare hand tugs off the oxygen mask to smile at Liam, he’s never looked so beautiful.
“I ruined our date,” he says, and Liam’s first thought is no and his second is where would you live if you had the whole world to choose from and his third is next to you.
He makes a helpless sort of noise he hopes means shut it and he wants to kiss him. He wants to crawl onto the good side of the bed and hinge Zayn’s strong jaw open and kiss him until those bitten-raw lips push thoughts about drowning in bathtubs and falling out of the clouds from his head.
But he doesn’t.
Can’t.
Instead, he wriggles a hand between the cold metal bars of the bed and wraps his fingers around Zayn’s bare ankle, kicked out from under the coarse hospital blanket, like he does every time he falls asleep. The bolt tattoo by the heel has faded - just like Liam’s - but when he traces it with his thumb, he can still feel the five sharp edges Louis had etched into Zayn’s skin with a manic grin at each of them, to the tune of that one Beatles’ song he can’t remember, in that one hotel in a city they’ve barely seen.
“I’m really glad you’re okay,” he says, an understatement in comparison to the half dozen things he really should tell Zayn and can’t, because the words get caught on something monstrous under his tongue every time he tries. And when Zayn makes a noise that sounds like a laugh but definitely doesn’t feel like one, he repeats it.
“Liam,” he says, breathless, now, and Liam wants to find the oxygen line and press it back to his lips or he might just kiss him instead, and that’s not how he wants to remember it, doesn’t want their beginning to be with dry lips and tears in his eyes and Harry unconscious a few steps away.
(or with this ache behind his teeth and in his chest and buzzing under his skin, something that tastes like guilt and bites like madness and feels like shattered glass)
And he thinks Zayn knows but can’t be sure, because every time Liam looks up he stares at the bandaged arm, instead.
Zayn wriggles his free fingers under the blankets like a come close and a hello and a please all at once. “Liam,” he repeats, and he sounds nervous and uncertain and then it’s the biggest non-decision Liam’s made since so will the band stay together? as he climbs over the rail, curls around the curve of Zayn’s ribs. The blankets are thick between Zayn’s skin and Liam’s mouth but that doesn’t quite stop him from pressing his I’m sorry to Zayn’s waist.
They don’t talk and Zayn’s drowsy and weightless from the PCA and when he lurches, blood staining his bandages before Liam can stop it.
“Niall,” Zayn urges, eyes flickering from the door to Liam and back again with this combination of pain and chaos under his skin, “did you-”
He presses Zayn back onto the bed as gently as he can with a strong hand on his chest and a softer one on his bad arm until it comes away red. “They’re fine,” he says and he doesn’t say the ways they’re not, the ways he’s not. “Everyone’s sleeping. You, on the other hand, just tore your stitches.”
“How do you even know that?” he asks, almost a laugh, and later Zayn will bury his face in Liam’s neck and bite onto his collarbone to stop from watching as the cuts are sewn together.
+
Sometime after sunrise, with the sky a heavy blue and the whole world waking up around them, Harry blinks hard a half-dozen times and then over-dilated green eyes are watching Liam owlishly across the room.
They sweet-talk Dr. Howard until she lets out a sigh and calls in nurses to push their beds close so Liam can sit on both mattresses and feed them ice chips while Harry and Zayn call their parents.
Harry’s still drowsy and gasping for air when his mum hangs up, even as he grins lazily at the two of them. “So,” he says, and Liam automatically glances at the monitors, “you two snogged yet?”
And Zayn freezes but it’s not the way Elliot was still when he told him about the plane, or the still Niall was when he came in, and Liam can handle Zayn not wanting to kiss him if he’s still so alive under his fingers.
“What?” he says, instead of not yet, instead of not here or not now, and Zayn relaxes against his side.
Harry frowns and opens his cracked lips to add something, but one of the interns tuts from the hallway. “Oxygen, Mr. Styles,” he scolds, and Zayn sniggers until he adds, “you too, Mr. Malik.”
Zayn buries his cheek in the crook of Liam’s neck and mumbles out something about a favour while Harry’s fussed over by a nurse. Liam says anything because Zayn could ask for privacy or a hug or those cupcakes from Sweden or the whole world and the answer would always be yes
yes
yes.
Zayn breathes slow against his collarbone and fumbles for the discarded mask. “Just don’t check your voicemail for a few days.”
+
Louis and Niall wake up and it takes four doctors and an orthopaedic surgeon and a lung specialist but they’re all allowed into the same room the next afternoon. They fiddle with the television in the corner until they find North by Northwest and Liam turns away, watches the four of them, instead.
+
The world stops, for a while, just for them, but then there’s a press release and a dozen different meetings with specialists and lawyers, because that’s something they need to consider, now, and a hotel room Liam’s barely in and five phones to answer to and there’s just no time to sleep and too much time to sit in rooms crowded with machines instead of his boys and it feels like before, like he needs to force what comes naturally to the others and he can’t take the way Niall reaches for him or the way the Blair starts watching him eat or the way his mum asks if he’s seeing anyone for the insomnia, liam, it classifies as insomnia-
+
He and Louis are four floors up in radiology for another x-ray of his foot and that grimace Liam will never, ever, ever forget is slowly grinding into something bearable. He’s still on more morphine than the other three of them combined but he laughs more than Harry, talks more than Niall, moves more than Zayn and smiles a hell of a whole lot more than Liam.
They’re in the hallway outside one of the rooms and he’s helping Louis into the bulky lead blanket with a radiologist watching from the doorway when a hand sneaks out from underneath and wraps around his wrist.
“Hey,” Louis says, and he scrapes a nail over only time will tell until Liam looks up. “Are you alright?”
He makes a face and Louis’ fingers slip into his, pinch the spaces between. “That’s the dumbest thing you’ve ever said,” he says, “and you called a boat a water car before.”
“Oh, shut it,” he laughs, and then, with this urgency Liam doesn’t hear often- “It was eight minutes from turbulence to freefall. And you really need to know that you were the first person I called. You were the first person all of us called.”
Liam smiles at that but only because it’s what Louis is waiting for, and it doesn’t work at all because the look he gets in return is so, so different to the one he’s seen before (backstage, across the table at the Brits, from the other side of a crowd), and he just aches for something familiar, something he doesn’t need to swallow down.
+
The world is still turning, turning, turning three days later, and it doesn’t stop until Zayn’s hand (the free one) wraps around his wrist.
“Li,” he says, and there’s no oxygen mask and most of the tubes are out and he’s so, so, alive, with pink cheeks and wide eyes. And Liam - he can barely take it. “Please don’t-”
Liam stops the careful infinities he’s been tracing into the veins of his forearm, but Zayn makes this half-desperate noise and presses into the touch.
“Don’t leave,” he finishes, “you’re always leaving and I know what you’re thinking and I also know you’re wrong. I want you here and we want you here and I never really understood the whole just Liam and Louis and Harry and Niall thing until I realised that I need you, and I just need you to stay, can you please stay with me-”
It’s not what he wanted - the back row of a busy theatre after the end scene and before the coda, ten minutes of tongue and teeth and Zayn, is what he imagined- yet he can’t help it as he leans over the rails, presses his thumb in the hollow under Zayn’s chin and his lips to the very corner of a word.
Zayn makes a helpless sort of noise and kisses back, slips his tongue into Liam’s mouth like he’s something skittish or maybe just something to be protected, and his fingers scratch up his arm until he’s clutching Liam’s shirt, instead. The television is crackling with white noise but all he can hear is the hitch in Zayn’s breath when teeth graze his lip, the laugh when he finds the sensitive skin under Liam’s jaw.
+
(Harry can’t yelp with his ribs but he pulls a face when he walks in on them, like he hasn’t spent the past week whispering quotes from When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle whenever they’re in the same room)
+
Their new assistant - Grey, with a buzzcut and affinity for pressed suits even when Liam’s barely left the hospital for the past fortnight - forwards him their schedule and walks in with a coffee at three in the morning, which is the first sign that the day’s going to be awful.
Zayn stirs when he reaches for the coffee and they haven’t kissed since that afternoon but his lips are still swollen, fingers caught in Liam’s shirt.
“Go back to sleep,” he whispers, which is the absolute worst decision he’s made because then both Harry and Zayn are blinking awake and scowling ‘you go to sleep’ like they’ve rehearsed it, which they probably have.
Grey steals the chair in the corner and unbuttons his blazer as he sits down, and Liam lazily watches the movement, thinks of Zayn teaching him how to do it three years ago. “It’s a triple shot because you’re about to hate me,” he says, all in one breath, “you’re doing a solo with a breakfast show from New York.”
Zayn pinches his sternum through the cotton and Liam’s not quite sure why that slows his heart. “I could come with you.”
“You’re seeing that one doctor at eight,” Liam corrects, even when he wants to say yes, please, don’t let me go through this alone.
Zayn just grins at him. “The one with the eyebrows?”
“Cheekbones.”
Both Harry and Grey are watching them with this certain fascination and Liam barely notices, too caught up in the clarity of Zayn’s fingertips on his stomach.
“The press is getting restless,” Grey explains and looking away is the hardest thing Liam’s done in fourteen days, six hours. “Reporters snuck in last night through the morgue and hid out in the stairwell for thirteen hours eavesdropping. If you give them twenty minutes willingly-”
It’s silent, for a moment, when Grey cuts himself off and then Harry’s wheezing as he props himself against the pillows. “We could all go,” he breathes, all raspy, and Liam thinks everyone is so, so wrong about this boy with perpetual bed hair and owlish eyes and a big smile. “The cast was put on Louis’ foot last night and Niall’s bragging about his stamina again. We’re ready.”
Except they’re not. He knows it in the curve of Niall’s spine and the hitch in Zayn’s breath, the bottle of pills Louis keeps close and the platitude of pillows on Harry’s bed. So he takes a sip of the scalding coffee and practises his responses with Zayn scratching out an SOS on his palm.
+
(His suitcase is three blocks away and everything Grey brought over belongs to someone else so he ends up wearing Louis’ bleached white henley with the sleeves rolled up, Harry’s skin tight jeans and Niall’s snapback and Zayn’s boots and it’s not the same as shouting along to Madonna in the car, but it’s close enough)
+
The sky is that hazy place between black and blue when they sneak out through the fire exit, with the neon lights reflected on the icy dark road. There are a few girls tentatively watching from across the street and he feels bare, when they say his name but not Harry’s, sweet and soft and cautious. They’ve been so absent for two weeks so he goes over with something like a grin and says ‘thank you they’re getting better we’re so sorry’ until Grey tugs him into the taxi.
They’re thirty seconds from live when Grey grabs his collar and tugs him out of range of the camera. “You’re going to be brilliant,” he says, and Liam wonders if there’s been a PSA on how to react around him after he dry heaved by a park bench a fortnight ago.
He pinches at the fingers tangled in his shirt. “Go find me a chocolate scone,” he teases, instead of a thank-you, and Grey smirks like he gets it as Liam walks on stage.
The interview is live and she lets him keep his phone on the coffee table as long as he reads out every third text from the boys, things like fix your sleeves asshole and tell them about Nurse Andrews and the jelly cups that make the crowd laugh instead of watching him like he’s an exhibit from a different era.
(others - messages like wow you look like circa eighties Springsteen and you’d look better with that dumb shirt off - are kept to himself)
Fifteen minutes pass too quick and there are just a few audience questions between him and the taxi ride home. A girl in a live while we’re young shirt is first, and she offers this sympathetic smile he can’t look at before asking, “how would you describe the other boys?”
He bites his lip and considers it, for a moment, and from the corner of his eye he sees Louis text him ????? and Zayn’s it’ll bruise if you keep that up. “They’re the best people I know,” he says, even if it’s inadequate. “The bravest, and definitely the strongest. I wouldn’t be here - definitely not in Chicago, but probably not the person I am - without them.”
The audience coos and he flushes this hideous pink, but the four x’s he receives within a minute trick a grin out of him the whole drive back to the hospital.
+
Zayn’s bandage is off when he gets to the room. The scar curls from the crook of his neck and branches off as roots, over the corner of his chest, down the inside of his arm to stop abruptly at his wrist, and angry pink lines cut his tattoos in half, disfiguring the clean borders of the bandana, mic thinner by an inch, the black and yellow comic tribute now a zp, and all Liam can think of is Zayn’s first name with his last.
“Damage to your right arm was quite extensive,” the doctor says, and Liam has his fingers tangled in the hair at the nape of Zayn’s neck as Harry, Niall and Louis hold his hand, ankle, wrist. He looks encouraging as he touches the scar, though, and Zayn presses back into them. “Debris caused pretty extensive cuts and there were concerns about the brachial plexus-”
(their grip tightens, just minutely, and Liam thinks I will remember this feeling for the rest of my life)
Liam zones out when he says no nerve damage is evident and starts watching Zayn for those little microexpressions that give him away.
+
“Hey,” Liam whispers. It’s midnight and Zayn should be asleep but he just smiles at him, a little sad, when Liam sees the phone light shining on his scar. He swallows down something awful. “Want to come with me for a bit?”
They sneak through the hallway and into the empty study room by the stairwell and Liam knows how it looks, with a mattress covered in blankets and a half dozen lit candles and a stupidly expensive projector and Thor: The Dark World frozen against the white wall. Liam lets the blush burn his cheeks and refuses to look away.
“How do you have the movie?” Zayn asks and if he’d been anyone else in the entire world he would sound awed or reverent but this - this slight amusement and resigned kind of curiosity, like he sounds when he says of course you could do it, you’re Liam goddamn Payne - is so, so much better.
There are two popcorn boxes from the cinema on the corner and Liam pulls out a handful and Zayn eats from his greasy fingers. “Just called in a favour,” he says, because I called around and insinuated I was friends with Tom Hiddleston and agreed to name drop their theatre sounds a little too desperate.
Zayn looks at him like he can see his bones. “Extraordinary,” he says, and Liam doesn’t ask if he means him or the movie.
They settle onto the two mattresses wedged together and Liam’s half in the gap between with Zayn lying on his chest so he can mouth at his hairline between scenes to stop from mauling him, instead.
+
Liam can’t get on the plane.
They’ve been at the hospital for a week too long and Louis has that look in his eyes he gets when he misses home and the thought of boarding a plane makes Liam sick, sick to his bones, but he can cope with an hour or seven of that ache under his skin for them.
Except he can’t, even with Louis in front and Niall behind and Zayn and Harry bracketing him like he’s something to be protected. His heart is burning a hole right through his chest and the 787 is huge but the moment he steps on board, the world shrinks to-
I hope your damned plane crashes
He takes a step back, right into Niall and right off the plane. “Go ahead,” he says and it’s like they knew this was going to happen, the way they turn to him expectantly. “I’ve just- I’ll meet you there, yeah?”
Louis (fuck, wide eyes, soft voice, bloody hands, bloody hands) reaches out and Liam jolts backwards. “On the plane, or back home?”
“Just go,” he repeats, staring resolutely at the wings of the plane, if just to confirm they’re stable, and he knows he’s crying and nudging Harry’s bad side but he just needs them gone, “You need to get home and I’ll-”
“What?” Niall says, and his lips look blue in the sterile light and Liam can’t look at him. “You’ll drive to Alaska and take a boat to Russia and spend three weeks on the Trans-Siberian? Liam-”
“I’ll figure something out with Grey - fucking stop looking at me like that-”
Because he doesn’t deserve sympathy or pity or anything except for a get the fuck over yourself, and the boarding tunnel is made of glass so he can see the clear sky, Harry’s hideous orange suitcase on a luggage carrier, planes landing, and he can’t watch but he can’t look at the four of them, either-
“Okay,” Zayn says, and Liam wishes he could say that his scars looks ugly but in reality it just draws attention to his broad shoulders, delicate wrists, and Liam feels like a monster for thinking so.
His breath hitches. “You’ll leave?”
Harry slings an arm around his shoulders. “We’ll all stay.”
+
Space, he thinks, just a few inches on either side or a whole body width in front and maybe an entire city between their hands, would be enough to calm him down, but they won’t give him that. Instead they wedge together in the back seat of a car (Louis over his thighs, Niall and Harry holding hands at the nape of his neck, Zayn half in his lap) and take turns calling the estate agents from a list Grey already has on him.
It’s dusk by the time they pull out the front of The House North of Chicago, capitalised by Harry a half hour ago as he doodled little hearts around ‘four bedrooms and ‘bathroom fireplace’ and ‘high ceilings’. Only him and Niall are awake (alive, alive, alive) enough for the showing so the others sit in the car, make cooing noises over the French rosewood deck on the phone.
The agent walks backwards through the empty rooms and says all the bullshit Liam heard the last time he bought a loft. Grainy phone quality distorts Zayn’s voice but Liam could recognise the smile behind ‘it has a porch, Li’ if he was a whole world away.
They’re in the kitchen with its marble countertops and post-industrialist splashback when Harry steals the other phone from the backseat. “Liam,” he says, in that lower register he seems to think is a whisper, “this place has a vertical garden and a maple tree. It’s like autumn and spring at the same time.”
Liam looks out the nearest window and sees the neighbour’s fence and he can’t remember the last time he had a neighbour or a fence or even a hiding place for a spare key and-
“I think we’ve seen enough,” he says, and it’s theirs before the pizza arrives.
+
The study is the only room in the house with spare wood, so they light a fire and eat on the cold floor while Harry looks around the room like he’s falling in love. They’ve ordered four pizzas but only finish three (which they always do, always the same four, as well, as if there’s a general consensus of international pizzerias to always serve margarita, pepperoni, vegetarian and Hawaiian for the sake of homesick boybands).
(none of them actually like pineapple on pizza but it’s always the one they crave hungover, and they’ll pick out the chunks in hotel rooms at five a.m in yesterday’s clothes as they pass around Gatorade flavours)
They talk about fuck all over a six-pack of beer that Liam can’t quite swallow and they’re in the middle of a conversation about Pixar they’ve had a thousand times over-
(“Up was revolutionary,” Louis says, with a passion he usually reserves for his ear piece and shoe collection. “The aspect of maturity in the opening sequence is unparalleled-”
Zayn scoffs and presses the sole of his foot to the inside of Liam’s thigh. “The exploration of abandonment and nostalgia in Toy Story is the foundation of every animated film in the past decade,” he counters, and Liam will never be able to consider the role of an antagonist as a hero without flushing at the memory of the look in his eyes)
- when Grey pulls him away to show him the mattresses they ordered.
It’s pitch black and wintry outside and Grey’s looking at him like he’s about to fall apart.
A cardboard cup is shoved into his hand and Grey looks vindictive as he scowls at the Starbucks logo. “Not coffee,” he says, when Liam takes a sip and wrinkles his nose at the taste. And then, while he’s swallowing and helpless, he adds, “when was the last time you slept for more than an hour?”
He scowls and shoves at the memory foam just to see it rebound. “Recently,” he mumbles, a little defensive, when really it was a week ago with Zayn’s head in his lap after the interview. “I’m handling it.”
One of the moving trucks drives past in time for him to see the roll of Grey’s eyes as he smoothes out Liam’s collar. “There are only four mattresses.”
(maybe it’s wishful thinking but when he thinks of sleeping, he thinks of crisp, creased sheets and a quilt that smells like home and Zayn, right there next to him)
“Li,” Zayn says from the doorway, with his hip propped against the frame and a hand in his hair, and Liam thinks he’s smiling but the light casts all kinds of shadows over his features, the shadows cast by his eyelashes, the natural curl of his lips, the worst of the scarring. “We’re picking rooms, are you-?”
He nods and stumbles up the lawn, maybe a little too enthusiastically, and Grey cuts off a laugh before Liam can whack him. “Have fun with your mattress,” he yells, and Liam spins around to flick him two fingers at the way he cackles.
Zayn’s thumb catches in his belt loop on the way past. “Hey,” he says, blushing, and when he presses his cheek into Liam’s shoulder, Liam nudges back. “Are you - is there something for me to be worried about?”
He freezes and Zayn’s staring at the birthmark on his neck when he says, “No - never-”
In the light, Zayn’s eyes flicker to his lips and turning away from an almost is the easiest thing Liam’s done in weeks.
+
Zayn chooses the bedroom which will come alive with the morning sun, the one with a stripped bare feature wall and a big, empty bookcase and it’s so, so Zayn that it makes Liam ache with solidarity for the world around them, at how they will never quite break down these walls to get to him.
He turns to leave but Zayn twines their fingers together with his injured hand and tugs him backwards. “Can you stay?” he asks, and Liam would give anything to remove the doubt from his voice.
Helpless, he thinks, helpless and nowhere close to being able to deny him. Liam keeps his eyes on him as they tug off their jeans, stretching out on the bed until Zayn curls under his arm.
His hand drifts all the way down Zayn’s back and he doesn’t like the feeling of cotton under his fingers, especially when he could be touching the knobs of his spine instead. “Hey,” he says, grasping the button-up under the covers. “Isn’t this my shirt from the last tour?”
Zayn bites at his collarbone. “Shut it,” he scowls, even as he cuddles closer so Liam can tuck the blankets around his shoulders. And then, quieter, into the hollow of his throat, “I’m really glad you’re here.”
+
(he’s awake until dawn but, eventually, he falls asleep to the euphony of Zayn’s exhales against the shell of his ear)
+
There’s a jeep in the driveway and a pile of McMuffins in the kitchen and Niall propped up against the counter when he wanders into the kitchen after watching Zayn read The Outsiders out the corner of his eye for the better half of the day.
“Morning,” he says, stealing one, and it’s still hot even though 10:30 was hours ago because no one’s ever been exceptionally good at refusing Niall. He props himself up beside him and tears off the parts of the bun covered in melted cheese and passes it over.
Niall grins and throws over a key for the car. “Mate,” he groans with a mouthful of food, because in the beginning it was thank you and then it was cheers mate and sometime between moving into the same complex and finishing the first album it halved in syllables. “The car was here in the morning. Harry looks shifty whenever I ask about it and keeps telling us to go buy furniture.”
He wrinkles his nose at salty bacon. “Like that night in Japan when he drank too much happoshu?”
“Serious though,” he says, even though he’s laughing, and passes over a shopping list, “he wants a dining room table for his roast tonight.”
There was a month or so last year when Harry would start every question with an if you were in an alternate universe and the hints of them already staining the room (an upside down snapback used for their keys, cardboard slushie cups reused for orange juice, the scuff on the floorboards from either Harry’s boots or Louis’ crutches) kind of feel like that. “Wait, what?” he hisses, but Niall’s already grabbing his phone from beside the sink and slipping out the front door.
+
“Did we pick out a lounge feature yet?” Liam asks absently, with the list wrecked in his fist, and they’re on the fourth floor of a glass building with one of those wedding-register scanners that Niall’s taken to shooting lasers with at the ceiling.
Niall’s crumpled up on the box trolley they’d stolen from the check-out with a film camera delivered by the PR team. He keeps tipping it upside down to film Liam’s reaction to his jokes and they’re failing at keeping composure in the silent store. “Didn’t we decide on the Adrian collection?” he actually roars, more to the camera than to him, and Liam thwacks him over the head with the catalogue. “Which swore to, quote, ‘satisfy our needs’?”
He scowls at the back of Niall’s head and twists over to muss up his hair. “Stop being a twat,” he says, and shoves the trolley hard up the aisle when Niall bellows with laughter.
+
There are five embroidered aprons hanging from shiny gold hooks in the kitchen and a raw chicken by the sink and fresh pumpkin on the counter and Harry in the middle of it, with six open cookbooks on the breakfast table and a streak of batter across his cheek even though there’s nothing in the oven.
When Liam enters the room, Harry looks up with bright eyes and floppy curls and a furious you on his lips.
“Me?” he repeats, staring at the sous-chef Liam apron with frilly yellow edging. “I didn’t magically learn the fine art of stitching in twelve hours.”
Harry finishes dragging his wooden spoon over the oven time and flicks up to point it at him. “I was bonding with our new neighbours and buying wine glasses and fine china while you failed to find us a fridge. It’s like you want tonight’s dinner to be a failure.”
He thinks about rebutting but Harry’s standing the tallest he has in a fortnight, a month, a year, like all the stress and distress has leaked out of his vertebrae. Instead, he grabs the camera from where it’s recording on the table, scoops his keys back out of the snapback (and there’s a shallow jar beside it, now, the kind of pointless shit Louis would choose in favour of practicality) and drags his feet childishly up the hallway.
Zayn’s watching him from the top of the staircase with this amused look on his face and Liam hasn’t seen him in five hours. It says something about their band dynamic that he’s missed him to death and is thinking in terms of Romeo and Juliet and baby just say yes at the sight of him over the balcony.
“How was your book?” he says awkwardly, like he does every time Zayn reads a novel with poetic words and striking imagery, because he never understands the literary jargon that follows but he will always, always, always love the way Zayn sounds while he explains it.
He reacts so beautifully, with a soft smile and fingers tugging his sleeves down to his knuckles as he talks about the role of literature in the proletariat and the symbolism of switchblades until Liam can’t even think of leaving-
“How much do you know about refrigerators?”
+
The manager rolls her eyes when she sees them (and maybe it has something to do with the display of photo frames that Niall crashed into right before they left) and Zayn steals his hand and doesn’t let go as they walk through the room displays.
Zayn props the camera inside one of the open freezers and spreads his free hand flat against the closest fridge. “What about this one?”
Liam laughs at the description summary and leans close to bury it into the nape of Zayn’s neck and thinks he could stay like this forever. “When will we ever need a wifi circuit through our ice tray?”
“Instagram?” he suggests, tongue darting out to lick his lips until Liam stares. “And speaking of alternate forms of communication which are most definitely not necessary for functioning in the twenty-first century, have you checked your voicemail yet?”
The tattooed feather is just as fascinating as it was from the other side of the parlour chair as he watched a stranger knit it together and Liam wants to trace it with his tongue. “From forever ago?” he asks. Zayn freezes and Liam watches something tight coil around his spine. “Didn’t you tell me not to?”
Apparently satisfied, Zayn drags his fingers to the next model and doesn’t move away. “This one?” he repeats, instead of answering, and Liam’s so dizzy on him that he doesn’t notice the assistant until she’s hovering by their shoulders.
(they won’t be able to look at the fridge for weeks yet without grinning)
+
They’re wrangled into aprons the moment they cross the kitchen archway and shoved towards the sink to peel potatoes in a space too small between the bread dough and gravy sauce. It takes an hour to prep and three to cook and it’s the dumb kind of fun Liam associates with roadtrips and snow fights.
Harry shoves them out of the kitchen to go change into nice clothes, you bastards, you are not eating my roast in a onesie and when Liam walks back into the dining room after spending ten minutes pretending not to see Zayn watching him dress (and pretending not to watch Zayn), there’s a neat line of roast dinner down the centre of the table that makes him instantly nostalgic for home.
“Perfect, sweetheart,” Louis says, even though it’s not because they burnt the chicken skin and undercooked the pumpkin, because he has never been anything except avidly indulgent of Harry Styles.
Zayn nudges his foot under the table and Liam nudges back and thinks, I will keep that a secret for years.
+
Louis makes them chocolate sundaes for dessert and they sit three-two on the stairs and talk about all the dumb things they said years ago and terrorise the moving crew around them.
(“I think it would look better under the mirror,” Zayn says, with his legs stretched out in front of him and head on Liam’s shoulders and fingers wriggling a hole into his sweatshirt. “It looks out of place by the stairwell.”
“We talked about this,” Niall repeats, because somewhere they found the time to talk about every furniture decision without Liam’s notice, “the symmetry of the archways produces the kind of breath that the traditional Chinese could only dream of. Fung shui, Zayn.”
Liam presses a grin into the banister. “Qi, Zayn.”
“Wind-water, Zayn,” Harry echoes, and Louis smacks an obnoxious kiss to his forehead for the proud look on his face.
“To the left!” Zayn yells anyway, flashing them a grin, just for the way Niall mumbles everything you own in a box to the left like it’s an automatic response, and the moving crew would probably hate them if Louis hadn’t made extras.)
And it feels - normal, almost, so normal that he has to blink hard at the cast on Louis’ foot or the unsteady line of Zayn’s shoulders, and he’s not going to let it ruin this, he’s not, so he slips out and into an empty room and leans against the locked door until his breathing slows.
“Li?” Zayn whispers, from the other side of the wall, and Liam remembers a hotel in a city he can’t remember and a glass bath and opens the door.
“’M fine,” he says, and he loves the absence of pity in Zayn’s eyes but hates the certain hint of understanding. “Really, Zayn, I’m-”
“Oh fuck off,” Zayn scolds, and sits down against the door and holds his hand until they’re talking about the newest Superman movie, instead.
+
part two here
Rating: NC-17
Word count: 19 142
Summary: "I ruined our date," he says, and Liam's first thought is no and his second is where would you live if you had the whole world and his third is next to you
.
On their very first flight together after the competition, Liam doesn’t hear a word of the safety protocol because Zayn’s hand, still a little unfamiliar and definitely already perfect, just like the rest of him, is clutching his beneath the armrest.
+
It’s the middle of February and it feels like there is nowhere in the world colder than Des Moines, Iowa. Shallow exhales are visible against the starry night’s sky and the winter wind bites at the spaces between their sleeves and leather gloves and Liam can’t look away from the pink flush staining Zayn’s cheeks.
Zayn catches him watching. The corner of his chapped, bitten raw lips quirks up, the breeze blows his fringe into his eyes, and the high beams cast eyelash shadows onto the soft skin of his cheekbones, and Liam’s never seen someone so incidentally beautiful. Zayn cocks his head like let’s get out of here and forget the world and Liam wants to tug him behind the bus, shove him up against the wheel and-
(not yet)
“I hate you,” Louis says, prodding him in the shoulder until Liam looks away. “I have never hated anyone this much before in my entire life, and I’ve met the Wanted.”
Harry snorts with that hideous beanie he bought last summer tugged all the way down to the tip of his nose. “Overreaction, Lou,” he says, tilting his head all the way back until they can see his wide green eyes in the darkness. “It’s just an hour flight.”
“An hour flight without Liam,” he scowls, and Louis has always been a bit adamant with the dramatics. “Think of all the pre-show rituals-”
“We don’t have those,” Niall interrupts.
“- the view of the American countryside-”
A bark of laughter is muffled into Harry’s scarf. “That we’ve seen a thousand times.”
Louis rolls his eyes and stomps all the way to the wheel-up staircase. “Scratch that, I hate absolutely all of you. Enjoy peak hour traffic and petrol breaks.”
And Liam knows that it sounds ridiculous, choosing an eight-wheeler with too-small beds and bad water pressure over the promise of leg room and Zayn on the jet, but he just wants silence and a pillow for four hours.
He doesn’t say that, though, slings an arm around Harry’s shoulders instead and says, “Love you, Tomlinson.”
Harry whispers we love you too into the shell of his ear (and that’s always been his little quirk, like he can’t help but echo it, even when it’s from a stranger, even when they’re at an awards show, even when they’re watched by the whole world) while Niall kisses his other cheek. Zayn hasn’t stopped grinning and Liam still wants to lick it off.
They wander on board huddled together for warmth until it’s just him and Zayn and the space between them, and it’s so, so easy to step a little closer, fist his hand softly in the collar of Zayn’s jacket and press their foreheads together.
“Remember to close the blinds,” Zayn whispers, with the wind and engines roaring around him, “you know how the streetlights make you dizzy.”
Liam grins and he wants to press forward, kiss him, wrap them up in a cocoon of blankets for the next three days. “Remember to move the armrest so you don’t get restless.”
The driver is knocking impatiently on the window and he needed to leave twenty minutes ago to get to the venue on time, but there’s nothing quite as important as adding, “Are we still on for tonight?”
Zayn nods until their noses brush together. “Can’t wait,” he says, and reaches up to thumb at the woven bracelet on Liam’s wrist they bought together in Japan and then he’s boarding, black jeans and leather jacket and dark eyes such a contrast against the remnants of snow all around. He turns to wink over his shoulder and Liam really doesn’t want to wait.
He stays until he can see them settled into the cabin before climbing onto the bus. The bed by the window is cold, but it’s Zayn’s favourite and if he sits up straight, he can see the plane and Louis waving from the door.
There’s a tiny space where the window’s propped open and he wedges it further apart, just in time to hear Louis yell, “I hope your bus freezes up!”
He laughs and watches as Harry scolds them from the cabin. “Yeah?” he says, and he’s never felt so alive. “Well, I hope your damned plane crashes.”
+
(He and Zayn have been an almost for a year too long when they’re locked in a penthouse together.
“We are sick to death of the unresolved sexual tension,” Harry says sternly - as sternly as Harry Styles can manage - from the other side of a mahogany door while Niall and Louis snicker into the peephole.
“Besides,” Louis says, and Liam hates the smugness in his voice, “things are all heading in-”
Liam groans. “Don’t-”
“It was a good weekend,” Zayn says patiently, like he has a dozen times before, while Louis hammers out a rhythm on the door, “but we promised no more-”
“- One Direction,” Louis finishes, so damn gleeful, “so consider this an expressway.”
Zayn’s a body too close -that’s always the way it is, isn’t it, a hand on the small of his back, lips catching dry on his neck when they’re on stage, waking up tangled together in a bed plenty big - and a laugh brushes over Liam’s bare neck. He flushes but the tattooed arm pressed against the door has goosebumps, so he doesn’t feel too embarrassed. “Are you installing an external deadlock?”
Liam makes a helpless noise at the beat of words against his pulse and, through the door, Niall laughs a ‘pathetic, the lot of you’ with absolutely no malice. They could fight back or just sleep off the post-show adrenaline, but there isn’t enough gravitational pull in the universe to drag him away from this.
The suite is too big and too empty and still feels so, so theirs. He twists on Zayn’s axis to grin into his neck and follows him through the room, kicking off their shoes and sweaters without stepping back from each other.
They end up in the bathroom, inexplicably, with the waterfall showerhead and porcelain sink and-
“Oh,” Zayn says, and Liam doesn’t realise how close he is until he looks up and can count those damn eyelashes. The only light in the bathroom is a blue flame fireplace and he doesn’t even pretend to hide the way his heart races like mad at the look in Zayn’s eyes. “You’re so - the tub is - incredible, hey?”
Liam grins at all the insinuations between the words and stares (even though it hurts, sometimes, never quite enough to force him to turn away) at the embarrassed smile on pretty pink lips.
The bath is spectacular, when he twists to stop from kissing Zayn all over in the middle of a dark bathroom in a city they won’t remember. It’s pressed against the wall overlooking the city and has high glass walls and curved ends and the sight of it settles this marrow-deep sense of exhaustion in his bones.
He catches the longing in Zayn’s expression and hip-checks him closer. “You could take one,” he offers, as casually as he can at the thought of Zayn and tattoos and glass tub. “We can hook up your iPod and it’ll be like you’re back home.”
There are two dozen unlit candles scattered across the marble floor and a bottle of lube by the sink and three arrows drawn onto the mirror in the red lipstick from Halloween last year, but he bypasses those in favour of the rose oil and bubble bath mix. He shoves them at Zayn and cheats his reflexes, sneaking a hand into Zayn’s front pocket to steal his phone.
Fiddling with the dock is difficult - two thirds because of his racing heart and half because of the mirror and wholly because of Zayn - but Daft Punk comes on shuffle and he exaggerates the hitch of his hips until he hears that relaxed laugh from behind him.
He turns around and Zayn’s just frozen, shirt bundled around his forearms and jeans low on his hips, and Liam forces himself to look up, shoves him teasingly towards the half-full tub at the amused smirk he sees last. It’s not harsh or rough by any means but Zayn follows his momentum and slips backwards into the bath, half-dressed and dishevelled with dark circles around his eyes and the biggest grin on his face.
Through the water, Zayn’s legs spread, and it’s not for hours yet that Liam will realise it’s a distraction tactic for when Zayn fists a hand in the front of his jeans and tugs him in. He emerges spluttering out laughter and settles his back against Zayn’s chest and they trade lyrics and lace their fingers together until they’re ready to talk.
Liam leans back and Zayn’s stubble grazes against his cheek and he never wants to move. “I think you’re the best person on this whole damn planet,” he admits, and the city lights shine just for them.
Arms curl around his torso and he feels the hitch in Zayn’s breath before he hears it. “I never love the world as much as when I’m with you,” he says, and softer - braver - he adds, “Next weekend in Chicago, there’s a midnight screening of the new Thor film after our show so maybe-”
Liam nods before Zayn’s happy, embarrassed laugh can ruin the sentence and they stay in the bath until the water runs cold, listing off Stan Lee’s appearances as their lips brush against free skin.)
+
The bus is a little colder without four over-affectionate bodies pressed close on a thin mattress but he tries to compensate, curls up under Zayn’s blanket with his face buried in his pillow, wearing Harry’s sweater and drinking coffee from Louis’ cup and rewatching Mad Men on Niall’s laptop, and it almost feels like home.
(almost.)
It’s pitch black as the edges of Chicago blur past his window. He doesn’t pick up his phone, not even when Louis calls a half dozen times-
(“I hate talking on the phone,” he said, that very first time he’d cornered Liam just off stage as he punched in his number and in three hours, Liam will hate himself for not answering the second, fifth, eighth time it rang)
- and people always talk about this sense of premonition but it’s not until he looks up as they pull into the stadium that he knows something’s wrong.
Their new security guard, an eighteen year old from Germany who’s built like a brick with a voice like an angel and a vernacular like a soldier, is standing by the door. He doesn’t move when Liam grins goofily at him upside down and it’s only then he thinks-
oh.
“What?” Liam asks, and he hates how scared he sounds, hates the way his heart throbs, hates the way he looks over his shoulder and fists a hand in the sheets like the ache in his chest can materialise into the four of them. “Did they hide in the airport again because Harry loves the baggage carousel and we sat on one for an hour when we were in Berlin last summer, so security should really check-”
Elliot - who tells them a different name every week because it makes Louis cackle and, god, Louis - holds out an iPad and Liam can’t look, flickers his gaze between the windows and Niall’s laptop and where his phone is, under last night’s clothes and this morning’s sweatpants. “Liam,” he says patiently, carefully blank, and no-
“Or has Zayn lost his voice,” he says, and there’s something thick and scary building just under his tongue, “he always forgets to warm up before a show and I bet he’s gargling herbal tea backstage, even though he hates the way it tastes-”
He looks at the screen with this newfound tremor chasing his blood, until it’s not just his fingers shaking, but his legs, his stomach, his lungs. Niall’s always been an enthusiast for the instantaneous - cannot stand the anticipation, pulls off bandaids and tears open the award nominations for the Brits without a second thought, but Liam hadn’t taken a leap of faith until that day in Wellington when he saw Zayn waiting at the bottom.
His first thought is that looks a lot like and his second is-
He doesn’t have a second thought.
+
A lie, really, because it’s more accurate to say he doesn’t stop thinking, because the caption says none found and the plane is torn in half like in Lost and he hates that connection because the five of them watched all six seasons last year and he doesn’t want to taint that memory of sharing a hotel bed, fighting for pillow space, Zayn, not if-
It would be easier if it was his family, he thinks, and hates himself for even suggesting that but it’s almost the truth; his parents didn’t drag him around the world and abandon him in Chicago at nineteen with a grainy surveillance photo of half a plane and dirty dishes under the sink
And there’s only a one in ninety million chance of dying in a plane crash but they’ve beaten the odds before, and he’s a conflicting litany of maybe and never and can’t and won’t and he never understood ‘falling apart’ until he realised that maybe no one would be around to fix him, and there’s just no oxygen left in a world where they’re-
+
I hope your damned plane crashes.
+
“Pull over,” he says, and he hasn’t sounded quite so young or quite so old since I cried a river over you.
Elliot looks like he’s trying to force out pity. Liam doesn’t deserve it. “There are people around,” he says, but Liam’s halfway down the too-steep stairs in bare feet and clutching the bands around his wrist - from the Leeds they went to together, the Radio City Music Hall tour with Harry last Christmas, the beaded bracelets they’d made each other at Zayn’s cousins’ birthday - and he can’t hear a fucking thing over the roar of traffic.
The icy wind bites at his cheeks and he used to find solace, outside, in that first breath of fresh air after a show, but not now. Now all he can look at is the crowd, silent, for once in their fucking life, and he hates the way some of them are crying, as if they know more about each of them than a two word label brainstormed in a glass office, like they’re the ones who might-
have
- lost something.
He’s hunched over and gasping for air when a hand fists in his collar. “You’re okay,” she says, and when he looks up it’s the sound engineer with red hair and a soft spot for Niall and steely eyes to anchor him. “You’re okay and they’re okay and I will take you wherever you need to go.”
+
Her name’s Blair and she turns off the radio when the Beach Boys play before he can even ask. She drives faster than the speed limit and throws his phone into the back seat when strangers won’t stop ringing and drops his wrist with a hard pinch to the underside when they pull up to the scene, and he can’t think of anyone who’d handle him better.
(wrong, because he would kill for four boys teasing him for overreacting and wrestling him into his seatbelt)
It’s Louis he finds, cross-strapped to the stretcher with one of his feet boxed up and a wild look in his eyes. His eyelashes flutter in that way that distracts from the tear streaks below when he sees Liam and he says ‘hey, I think you’re psychic’ before Liam can even think an apology.
“They pulled Harry and Zayn out a half-hour ago,” he says, and he looks so exhausted, sweat pooling in the hollow of his throat and hair shoved messily off his forehead and the grimace of his lips etched bone-deep. Liam can’t look away from his taped up foot, the shards of bone protruding through the skin, the wires threaded into his forearm. “They can’t get Niall-”
And he stumbles, then, but Louis grips his arm to keep him up, even when the jolt of pain makes them both flinch. “He wouldn’t let me help,” he says, and then, a little more urgently, “he’s locked in the pit with the pilot and Liam you need to get him out, I need to yell at him and the last thing I said was-”
Louis’ chest is heaving with these shallow breaths which make Liam dizzy and he has a dozen things he wants to say over and over, until they thicken the air like the smoke from the wreck.
The paramedics are making all these soothing sounds and it’s only when Louis pulls his hand away bloody that Liam realises his own forearm’s bleeding, ugly shallow scratches all over his tattoos.
He manages a smile and finds the words, just for Louis. “We’ll be there, Lou.”
Whatever is coiled tight around Louis’ spine relaxes, just a little, like it did the first time Liam hugged him back.
“We’re going to be alright,” Louis says, almost a promise, like ‘eleven months isn’t that long’ and ‘we’re going to make it’ and ‘he’s going to be infatuated with you too’ and Liam believes him, because he always has, and Louis hasn’t let him down yet.
+
It’s an hour and a half later and Liam doesn’t realise he’s walking forward until he’s thigh deep in ice-cold water that stains his jeans dark, and he’s never really understood staring at a trainwreck until he realises he can’t look away.
Niall’s limp in the space blanket wrapped around his shoulders but his eyes fly open as he’s carried past and when the paramedics strap him to the stretcher in the ambulance, he squeezes the very tips of Liam’s fingers like a hello.
+
One of the doctors - Dr. Howard, a pretty blonde he’d accidentally called nurse on the way in and had received a lecture on Merit Ptah and Title IX and South London Hospital for Women and Children before he could apologise - sits on the window ledge beside him and wraps a cotton bandage around his forearm.
“Sorry,” he says, while she fixes the edges, “I’m just - I really wasn’t thinking.”
Something in her expression softens and she adjusts the taping until the ache under his skin disappears. “Has a doctor talked to you about them yet?”
She shows him x-rays and explains all the monitors and starts talking in this foreign language about infection rates and intravenous fluids and post-sedation disorientation and Harry’s four fractured ribs and the three bones in Louis’ foot and Niall’s hypothermia until it blurs, and all he hears afterwards is post traumatic stress disorder.
He blinks hard at the window to Louis’ room and turns to look at her. “So do I - stay? What do I do to fix them when-”
He cuts himself off at the look in her eyes, just in time to hear her say, “I meant you, Mr. Payne.”
+
He doesn’t sleep - doesn’t think he’ll sleep ever again - but he dreams. It’s nothing identifiable and it’s blurred over with something cancerous (clouds, Zayn will tell him, months from now when they talk about it, pressed close under the blankets, I see them too) and when he opens his eyes, all he can remember is who would die first in the hunger games do you ever want to murder each other who-would-you-leave-to-drown?
When he lurches out of the hard chair he stole from the waiting room, gasping and maybe crying a little bit, Zayn’s watching from across the dark room. His skin is a ghostly shade of pale and his right shoulder and forearm is covered in bandages, but when his spare hand tugs off the oxygen mask to smile at Liam, he’s never looked so beautiful.
“I ruined our date,” he says, and Liam’s first thought is no and his second is where would you live if you had the whole world to choose from and his third is next to you.
He makes a helpless sort of noise he hopes means shut it and he wants to kiss him. He wants to crawl onto the good side of the bed and hinge Zayn’s strong jaw open and kiss him until those bitten-raw lips push thoughts about drowning in bathtubs and falling out of the clouds from his head.
But he doesn’t.
Can’t.
Instead, he wriggles a hand between the cold metal bars of the bed and wraps his fingers around Zayn’s bare ankle, kicked out from under the coarse hospital blanket, like he does every time he falls asleep. The bolt tattoo by the heel has faded - just like Liam’s - but when he traces it with his thumb, he can still feel the five sharp edges Louis had etched into Zayn’s skin with a manic grin at each of them, to the tune of that one Beatles’ song he can’t remember, in that one hotel in a city they’ve barely seen.
“I’m really glad you’re okay,” he says, an understatement in comparison to the half dozen things he really should tell Zayn and can’t, because the words get caught on something monstrous under his tongue every time he tries. And when Zayn makes a noise that sounds like a laugh but definitely doesn’t feel like one, he repeats it.
“Liam,” he says, breathless, now, and Liam wants to find the oxygen line and press it back to his lips or he might just kiss him instead, and that’s not how he wants to remember it, doesn’t want their beginning to be with dry lips and tears in his eyes and Harry unconscious a few steps away.
(or with this ache behind his teeth and in his chest and buzzing under his skin, something that tastes like guilt and bites like madness and feels like shattered glass)
And he thinks Zayn knows but can’t be sure, because every time Liam looks up he stares at the bandaged arm, instead.
Zayn wriggles his free fingers under the blankets like a come close and a hello and a please all at once. “Liam,” he repeats, and he sounds nervous and uncertain and then it’s the biggest non-decision Liam’s made since so will the band stay together? as he climbs over the rail, curls around the curve of Zayn’s ribs. The blankets are thick between Zayn’s skin and Liam’s mouth but that doesn’t quite stop him from pressing his I’m sorry to Zayn’s waist.
They don’t talk and Zayn’s drowsy and weightless from the PCA and when he lurches, blood staining his bandages before Liam can stop it.
“Niall,” Zayn urges, eyes flickering from the door to Liam and back again with this combination of pain and chaos under his skin, “did you-”
He presses Zayn back onto the bed as gently as he can with a strong hand on his chest and a softer one on his bad arm until it comes away red. “They’re fine,” he says and he doesn’t say the ways they’re not, the ways he’s not. “Everyone’s sleeping. You, on the other hand, just tore your stitches.”
“How do you even know that?” he asks, almost a laugh, and later Zayn will bury his face in Liam’s neck and bite onto his collarbone to stop from watching as the cuts are sewn together.
+
Sometime after sunrise, with the sky a heavy blue and the whole world waking up around them, Harry blinks hard a half-dozen times and then over-dilated green eyes are watching Liam owlishly across the room.
They sweet-talk Dr. Howard until she lets out a sigh and calls in nurses to push their beds close so Liam can sit on both mattresses and feed them ice chips while Harry and Zayn call their parents.
Harry’s still drowsy and gasping for air when his mum hangs up, even as he grins lazily at the two of them. “So,” he says, and Liam automatically glances at the monitors, “you two snogged yet?”
And Zayn freezes but it’s not the way Elliot was still when he told him about the plane, or the still Niall was when he came in, and Liam can handle Zayn not wanting to kiss him if he’s still so alive under his fingers.
“What?” he says, instead of not yet, instead of not here or not now, and Zayn relaxes against his side.
Harry frowns and opens his cracked lips to add something, but one of the interns tuts from the hallway. “Oxygen, Mr. Styles,” he scolds, and Zayn sniggers until he adds, “you too, Mr. Malik.”
Zayn buries his cheek in the crook of Liam’s neck and mumbles out something about a favour while Harry’s fussed over by a nurse. Liam says anything because Zayn could ask for privacy or a hug or those cupcakes from Sweden or the whole world and the answer would always be yes
yes
yes.
Zayn breathes slow against his collarbone and fumbles for the discarded mask. “Just don’t check your voicemail for a few days.”
+
Louis and Niall wake up and it takes four doctors and an orthopaedic surgeon and a lung specialist but they’re all allowed into the same room the next afternoon. They fiddle with the television in the corner until they find North by Northwest and Liam turns away, watches the four of them, instead.
+
The world stops, for a while, just for them, but then there’s a press release and a dozen different meetings with specialists and lawyers, because that’s something they need to consider, now, and a hotel room Liam’s barely in and five phones to answer to and there’s just no time to sleep and too much time to sit in rooms crowded with machines instead of his boys and it feels like before, like he needs to force what comes naturally to the others and he can’t take the way Niall reaches for him or the way the Blair starts watching him eat or the way his mum asks if he’s seeing anyone for the insomnia, liam, it classifies as insomnia-
+
He and Louis are four floors up in radiology for another x-ray of his foot and that grimace Liam will never, ever, ever forget is slowly grinding into something bearable. He’s still on more morphine than the other three of them combined but he laughs more than Harry, talks more than Niall, moves more than Zayn and smiles a hell of a whole lot more than Liam.
They’re in the hallway outside one of the rooms and he’s helping Louis into the bulky lead blanket with a radiologist watching from the doorway when a hand sneaks out from underneath and wraps around his wrist.
“Hey,” Louis says, and he scrapes a nail over only time will tell until Liam looks up. “Are you alright?”
He makes a face and Louis’ fingers slip into his, pinch the spaces between. “That’s the dumbest thing you’ve ever said,” he says, “and you called a boat a water car before.”
“Oh, shut it,” he laughs, and then, with this urgency Liam doesn’t hear often- “It was eight minutes from turbulence to freefall. And you really need to know that you were the first person I called. You were the first person all of us called.”
Liam smiles at that but only because it’s what Louis is waiting for, and it doesn’t work at all because the look he gets in return is so, so different to the one he’s seen before (backstage, across the table at the Brits, from the other side of a crowd), and he just aches for something familiar, something he doesn’t need to swallow down.
+
The world is still turning, turning, turning three days later, and it doesn’t stop until Zayn’s hand (the free one) wraps around his wrist.
“Li,” he says, and there’s no oxygen mask and most of the tubes are out and he’s so, so, alive, with pink cheeks and wide eyes. And Liam - he can barely take it. “Please don’t-”
Liam stops the careful infinities he’s been tracing into the veins of his forearm, but Zayn makes this half-desperate noise and presses into the touch.
“Don’t leave,” he finishes, “you’re always leaving and I know what you’re thinking and I also know you’re wrong. I want you here and we want you here and I never really understood the whole just Liam and Louis and Harry and Niall thing until I realised that I need you, and I just need you to stay, can you please stay with me-”
It’s not what he wanted - the back row of a busy theatre after the end scene and before the coda, ten minutes of tongue and teeth and Zayn, is what he imagined- yet he can’t help it as he leans over the rails, presses his thumb in the hollow under Zayn’s chin and his lips to the very corner of a word.
Zayn makes a helpless sort of noise and kisses back, slips his tongue into Liam’s mouth like he’s something skittish or maybe just something to be protected, and his fingers scratch up his arm until he’s clutching Liam’s shirt, instead. The television is crackling with white noise but all he can hear is the hitch in Zayn’s breath when teeth graze his lip, the laugh when he finds the sensitive skin under Liam’s jaw.
+
(Harry can’t yelp with his ribs but he pulls a face when he walks in on them, like he hasn’t spent the past week whispering quotes from When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle whenever they’re in the same room)
+
Their new assistant - Grey, with a buzzcut and affinity for pressed suits even when Liam’s barely left the hospital for the past fortnight - forwards him their schedule and walks in with a coffee at three in the morning, which is the first sign that the day’s going to be awful.
Zayn stirs when he reaches for the coffee and they haven’t kissed since that afternoon but his lips are still swollen, fingers caught in Liam’s shirt.
“Go back to sleep,” he whispers, which is the absolute worst decision he’s made because then both Harry and Zayn are blinking awake and scowling ‘you go to sleep’ like they’ve rehearsed it, which they probably have.
Grey steals the chair in the corner and unbuttons his blazer as he sits down, and Liam lazily watches the movement, thinks of Zayn teaching him how to do it three years ago. “It’s a triple shot because you’re about to hate me,” he says, all in one breath, “you’re doing a solo with a breakfast show from New York.”
Zayn pinches his sternum through the cotton and Liam’s not quite sure why that slows his heart. “I could come with you.”
“You’re seeing that one doctor at eight,” Liam corrects, even when he wants to say yes, please, don’t let me go through this alone.
Zayn just grins at him. “The one with the eyebrows?”
“Cheekbones.”
Both Harry and Grey are watching them with this certain fascination and Liam barely notices, too caught up in the clarity of Zayn’s fingertips on his stomach.
“The press is getting restless,” Grey explains and looking away is the hardest thing Liam’s done in fourteen days, six hours. “Reporters snuck in last night through the morgue and hid out in the stairwell for thirteen hours eavesdropping. If you give them twenty minutes willingly-”
It’s silent, for a moment, when Grey cuts himself off and then Harry’s wheezing as he props himself against the pillows. “We could all go,” he breathes, all raspy, and Liam thinks everyone is so, so wrong about this boy with perpetual bed hair and owlish eyes and a big smile. “The cast was put on Louis’ foot last night and Niall’s bragging about his stamina again. We’re ready.”
Except they’re not. He knows it in the curve of Niall’s spine and the hitch in Zayn’s breath, the bottle of pills Louis keeps close and the platitude of pillows on Harry’s bed. So he takes a sip of the scalding coffee and practises his responses with Zayn scratching out an SOS on his palm.
+
(His suitcase is three blocks away and everything Grey brought over belongs to someone else so he ends up wearing Louis’ bleached white henley with the sleeves rolled up, Harry’s skin tight jeans and Niall’s snapback and Zayn’s boots and it’s not the same as shouting along to Madonna in the car, but it’s close enough)
+
The sky is that hazy place between black and blue when they sneak out through the fire exit, with the neon lights reflected on the icy dark road. There are a few girls tentatively watching from across the street and he feels bare, when they say his name but not Harry’s, sweet and soft and cautious. They’ve been so absent for two weeks so he goes over with something like a grin and says ‘thank you they’re getting better we’re so sorry’ until Grey tugs him into the taxi.
They’re thirty seconds from live when Grey grabs his collar and tugs him out of range of the camera. “You’re going to be brilliant,” he says, and Liam wonders if there’s been a PSA on how to react around him after he dry heaved by a park bench a fortnight ago.
He pinches at the fingers tangled in his shirt. “Go find me a chocolate scone,” he teases, instead of a thank-you, and Grey smirks like he gets it as Liam walks on stage.
The interview is live and she lets him keep his phone on the coffee table as long as he reads out every third text from the boys, things like fix your sleeves asshole and tell them about Nurse Andrews and the jelly cups that make the crowd laugh instead of watching him like he’s an exhibit from a different era.
(others - messages like wow you look like circa eighties Springsteen and you’d look better with that dumb shirt off - are kept to himself)
Fifteen minutes pass too quick and there are just a few audience questions between him and the taxi ride home. A girl in a live while we’re young shirt is first, and she offers this sympathetic smile he can’t look at before asking, “how would you describe the other boys?”
He bites his lip and considers it, for a moment, and from the corner of his eye he sees Louis text him ????? and Zayn’s it’ll bruise if you keep that up. “They’re the best people I know,” he says, even if it’s inadequate. “The bravest, and definitely the strongest. I wouldn’t be here - definitely not in Chicago, but probably not the person I am - without them.”
The audience coos and he flushes this hideous pink, but the four x’s he receives within a minute trick a grin out of him the whole drive back to the hospital.
+
Zayn’s bandage is off when he gets to the room. The scar curls from the crook of his neck and branches off as roots, over the corner of his chest, down the inside of his arm to stop abruptly at his wrist, and angry pink lines cut his tattoos in half, disfiguring the clean borders of the bandana, mic thinner by an inch, the black and yellow comic tribute now a zp, and all Liam can think of is Zayn’s first name with his last.
“Damage to your right arm was quite extensive,” the doctor says, and Liam has his fingers tangled in the hair at the nape of Zayn’s neck as Harry, Niall and Louis hold his hand, ankle, wrist. He looks encouraging as he touches the scar, though, and Zayn presses back into them. “Debris caused pretty extensive cuts and there were concerns about the brachial plexus-”
(their grip tightens, just minutely, and Liam thinks I will remember this feeling for the rest of my life)
Liam zones out when he says no nerve damage is evident and starts watching Zayn for those little microexpressions that give him away.
+
“Hey,” Liam whispers. It’s midnight and Zayn should be asleep but he just smiles at him, a little sad, when Liam sees the phone light shining on his scar. He swallows down something awful. “Want to come with me for a bit?”
They sneak through the hallway and into the empty study room by the stairwell and Liam knows how it looks, with a mattress covered in blankets and a half dozen lit candles and a stupidly expensive projector and Thor: The Dark World frozen against the white wall. Liam lets the blush burn his cheeks and refuses to look away.
“How do you have the movie?” Zayn asks and if he’d been anyone else in the entire world he would sound awed or reverent but this - this slight amusement and resigned kind of curiosity, like he sounds when he says of course you could do it, you’re Liam goddamn Payne - is so, so much better.
There are two popcorn boxes from the cinema on the corner and Liam pulls out a handful and Zayn eats from his greasy fingers. “Just called in a favour,” he says, because I called around and insinuated I was friends with Tom Hiddleston and agreed to name drop their theatre sounds a little too desperate.
Zayn looks at him like he can see his bones. “Extraordinary,” he says, and Liam doesn’t ask if he means him or the movie.
They settle onto the two mattresses wedged together and Liam’s half in the gap between with Zayn lying on his chest so he can mouth at his hairline between scenes to stop from mauling him, instead.
+
Liam can’t get on the plane.
They’ve been at the hospital for a week too long and Louis has that look in his eyes he gets when he misses home and the thought of boarding a plane makes Liam sick, sick to his bones, but he can cope with an hour or seven of that ache under his skin for them.
Except he can’t, even with Louis in front and Niall behind and Zayn and Harry bracketing him like he’s something to be protected. His heart is burning a hole right through his chest and the 787 is huge but the moment he steps on board, the world shrinks to-
I hope your damned plane crashes
He takes a step back, right into Niall and right off the plane. “Go ahead,” he says and it’s like they knew this was going to happen, the way they turn to him expectantly. “I’ve just- I’ll meet you there, yeah?”
Louis (fuck, wide eyes, soft voice, bloody hands, bloody hands) reaches out and Liam jolts backwards. “On the plane, or back home?”
“Just go,” he repeats, staring resolutely at the wings of the plane, if just to confirm they’re stable, and he knows he’s crying and nudging Harry’s bad side but he just needs them gone, “You need to get home and I’ll-”
“What?” Niall says, and his lips look blue in the sterile light and Liam can’t look at him. “You’ll drive to Alaska and take a boat to Russia and spend three weeks on the Trans-Siberian? Liam-”
“I’ll figure something out with Grey - fucking stop looking at me like that-”
Because he doesn’t deserve sympathy or pity or anything except for a get the fuck over yourself, and the boarding tunnel is made of glass so he can see the clear sky, Harry’s hideous orange suitcase on a luggage carrier, planes landing, and he can’t watch but he can’t look at the four of them, either-
“Okay,” Zayn says, and Liam wishes he could say that his scars looks ugly but in reality it just draws attention to his broad shoulders, delicate wrists, and Liam feels like a monster for thinking so.
His breath hitches. “You’ll leave?”
Harry slings an arm around his shoulders. “We’ll all stay.”
+
Space, he thinks, just a few inches on either side or a whole body width in front and maybe an entire city between their hands, would be enough to calm him down, but they won’t give him that. Instead they wedge together in the back seat of a car (Louis over his thighs, Niall and Harry holding hands at the nape of his neck, Zayn half in his lap) and take turns calling the estate agents from a list Grey already has on him.
It’s dusk by the time they pull out the front of The House North of Chicago, capitalised by Harry a half hour ago as he doodled little hearts around ‘four bedrooms and ‘bathroom fireplace’ and ‘high ceilings’. Only him and Niall are awake (alive, alive, alive) enough for the showing so the others sit in the car, make cooing noises over the French rosewood deck on the phone.
The agent walks backwards through the empty rooms and says all the bullshit Liam heard the last time he bought a loft. Grainy phone quality distorts Zayn’s voice but Liam could recognise the smile behind ‘it has a porch, Li’ if he was a whole world away.
They’re in the kitchen with its marble countertops and post-industrialist splashback when Harry steals the other phone from the backseat. “Liam,” he says, in that lower register he seems to think is a whisper, “this place has a vertical garden and a maple tree. It’s like autumn and spring at the same time.”
Liam looks out the nearest window and sees the neighbour’s fence and he can’t remember the last time he had a neighbour or a fence or even a hiding place for a spare key and-
“I think we’ve seen enough,” he says, and it’s theirs before the pizza arrives.
+
The study is the only room in the house with spare wood, so they light a fire and eat on the cold floor while Harry looks around the room like he’s falling in love. They’ve ordered four pizzas but only finish three (which they always do, always the same four, as well, as if there’s a general consensus of international pizzerias to always serve margarita, pepperoni, vegetarian and Hawaiian for the sake of homesick boybands).
(none of them actually like pineapple on pizza but it’s always the one they crave hungover, and they’ll pick out the chunks in hotel rooms at five a.m in yesterday’s clothes as they pass around Gatorade flavours)
They talk about fuck all over a six-pack of beer that Liam can’t quite swallow and they’re in the middle of a conversation about Pixar they’ve had a thousand times over-
(“Up was revolutionary,” Louis says, with a passion he usually reserves for his ear piece and shoe collection. “The aspect of maturity in the opening sequence is unparalleled-”
Zayn scoffs and presses the sole of his foot to the inside of Liam’s thigh. “The exploration of abandonment and nostalgia in Toy Story is the foundation of every animated film in the past decade,” he counters, and Liam will never be able to consider the role of an antagonist as a hero without flushing at the memory of the look in his eyes)
- when Grey pulls him away to show him the mattresses they ordered.
It’s pitch black and wintry outside and Grey’s looking at him like he’s about to fall apart.
A cardboard cup is shoved into his hand and Grey looks vindictive as he scowls at the Starbucks logo. “Not coffee,” he says, when Liam takes a sip and wrinkles his nose at the taste. And then, while he’s swallowing and helpless, he adds, “when was the last time you slept for more than an hour?”
He scowls and shoves at the memory foam just to see it rebound. “Recently,” he mumbles, a little defensive, when really it was a week ago with Zayn’s head in his lap after the interview. “I’m handling it.”
One of the moving trucks drives past in time for him to see the roll of Grey’s eyes as he smoothes out Liam’s collar. “There are only four mattresses.”
(maybe it’s wishful thinking but when he thinks of sleeping, he thinks of crisp, creased sheets and a quilt that smells like home and Zayn, right there next to him)
“Li,” Zayn says from the doorway, with his hip propped against the frame and a hand in his hair, and Liam thinks he’s smiling but the light casts all kinds of shadows over his features, the shadows cast by his eyelashes, the natural curl of his lips, the worst of the scarring. “We’re picking rooms, are you-?”
He nods and stumbles up the lawn, maybe a little too enthusiastically, and Grey cuts off a laugh before Liam can whack him. “Have fun with your mattress,” he yells, and Liam spins around to flick him two fingers at the way he cackles.
Zayn’s thumb catches in his belt loop on the way past. “Hey,” he says, blushing, and when he presses his cheek into Liam’s shoulder, Liam nudges back. “Are you - is there something for me to be worried about?”
He freezes and Zayn’s staring at the birthmark on his neck when he says, “No - never-”
In the light, Zayn’s eyes flicker to his lips and turning away from an almost is the easiest thing Liam’s done in weeks.
+
Zayn chooses the bedroom which will come alive with the morning sun, the one with a stripped bare feature wall and a big, empty bookcase and it’s so, so Zayn that it makes Liam ache with solidarity for the world around them, at how they will never quite break down these walls to get to him.
He turns to leave but Zayn twines their fingers together with his injured hand and tugs him backwards. “Can you stay?” he asks, and Liam would give anything to remove the doubt from his voice.
Helpless, he thinks, helpless and nowhere close to being able to deny him. Liam keeps his eyes on him as they tug off their jeans, stretching out on the bed until Zayn curls under his arm.
His hand drifts all the way down Zayn’s back and he doesn’t like the feeling of cotton under his fingers, especially when he could be touching the knobs of his spine instead. “Hey,” he says, grasping the button-up under the covers. “Isn’t this my shirt from the last tour?”
Zayn bites at his collarbone. “Shut it,” he scowls, even as he cuddles closer so Liam can tuck the blankets around his shoulders. And then, quieter, into the hollow of his throat, “I’m really glad you’re here.”
+
(he’s awake until dawn but, eventually, he falls asleep to the euphony of Zayn’s exhales against the shell of his ear)
+
There’s a jeep in the driveway and a pile of McMuffins in the kitchen and Niall propped up against the counter when he wanders into the kitchen after watching Zayn read The Outsiders out the corner of his eye for the better half of the day.
“Morning,” he says, stealing one, and it’s still hot even though 10:30 was hours ago because no one’s ever been exceptionally good at refusing Niall. He props himself up beside him and tears off the parts of the bun covered in melted cheese and passes it over.
Niall grins and throws over a key for the car. “Mate,” he groans with a mouthful of food, because in the beginning it was thank you and then it was cheers mate and sometime between moving into the same complex and finishing the first album it halved in syllables. “The car was here in the morning. Harry looks shifty whenever I ask about it and keeps telling us to go buy furniture.”
He wrinkles his nose at salty bacon. “Like that night in Japan when he drank too much happoshu?”
“Serious though,” he says, even though he’s laughing, and passes over a shopping list, “he wants a dining room table for his roast tonight.”
There was a month or so last year when Harry would start every question with an if you were in an alternate universe and the hints of them already staining the room (an upside down snapback used for their keys, cardboard slushie cups reused for orange juice, the scuff on the floorboards from either Harry’s boots or Louis’ crutches) kind of feel like that. “Wait, what?” he hisses, but Niall’s already grabbing his phone from beside the sink and slipping out the front door.
+
“Did we pick out a lounge feature yet?” Liam asks absently, with the list wrecked in his fist, and they’re on the fourth floor of a glass building with one of those wedding-register scanners that Niall’s taken to shooting lasers with at the ceiling.
Niall’s crumpled up on the box trolley they’d stolen from the check-out with a film camera delivered by the PR team. He keeps tipping it upside down to film Liam’s reaction to his jokes and they’re failing at keeping composure in the silent store. “Didn’t we decide on the Adrian collection?” he actually roars, more to the camera than to him, and Liam thwacks him over the head with the catalogue. “Which swore to, quote, ‘satisfy our needs’?”
He scowls at the back of Niall’s head and twists over to muss up his hair. “Stop being a twat,” he says, and shoves the trolley hard up the aisle when Niall bellows with laughter.
+
There are five embroidered aprons hanging from shiny gold hooks in the kitchen and a raw chicken by the sink and fresh pumpkin on the counter and Harry in the middle of it, with six open cookbooks on the breakfast table and a streak of batter across his cheek even though there’s nothing in the oven.
When Liam enters the room, Harry looks up with bright eyes and floppy curls and a furious you on his lips.
“Me?” he repeats, staring at the sous-chef Liam apron with frilly yellow edging. “I didn’t magically learn the fine art of stitching in twelve hours.”
Harry finishes dragging his wooden spoon over the oven time and flicks up to point it at him. “I was bonding with our new neighbours and buying wine glasses and fine china while you failed to find us a fridge. It’s like you want tonight’s dinner to be a failure.”
He thinks about rebutting but Harry’s standing the tallest he has in a fortnight, a month, a year, like all the stress and distress has leaked out of his vertebrae. Instead, he grabs the camera from where it’s recording on the table, scoops his keys back out of the snapback (and there’s a shallow jar beside it, now, the kind of pointless shit Louis would choose in favour of practicality) and drags his feet childishly up the hallway.
Zayn’s watching him from the top of the staircase with this amused look on his face and Liam hasn’t seen him in five hours. It says something about their band dynamic that he’s missed him to death and is thinking in terms of Romeo and Juliet and baby just say yes at the sight of him over the balcony.
“How was your book?” he says awkwardly, like he does every time Zayn reads a novel with poetic words and striking imagery, because he never understands the literary jargon that follows but he will always, always, always love the way Zayn sounds while he explains it.
He reacts so beautifully, with a soft smile and fingers tugging his sleeves down to his knuckles as he talks about the role of literature in the proletariat and the symbolism of switchblades until Liam can’t even think of leaving-
“How much do you know about refrigerators?”
+
The manager rolls her eyes when she sees them (and maybe it has something to do with the display of photo frames that Niall crashed into right before they left) and Zayn steals his hand and doesn’t let go as they walk through the room displays.
Zayn props the camera inside one of the open freezers and spreads his free hand flat against the closest fridge. “What about this one?”
Liam laughs at the description summary and leans close to bury it into the nape of Zayn’s neck and thinks he could stay like this forever. “When will we ever need a wifi circuit through our ice tray?”
“Instagram?” he suggests, tongue darting out to lick his lips until Liam stares. “And speaking of alternate forms of communication which are most definitely not necessary for functioning in the twenty-first century, have you checked your voicemail yet?”
The tattooed feather is just as fascinating as it was from the other side of the parlour chair as he watched a stranger knit it together and Liam wants to trace it with his tongue. “From forever ago?” he asks. Zayn freezes and Liam watches something tight coil around his spine. “Didn’t you tell me not to?”
Apparently satisfied, Zayn drags his fingers to the next model and doesn’t move away. “This one?” he repeats, instead of answering, and Liam’s so dizzy on him that he doesn’t notice the assistant until she’s hovering by their shoulders.
(they won’t be able to look at the fridge for weeks yet without grinning)
+
They’re wrangled into aprons the moment they cross the kitchen archway and shoved towards the sink to peel potatoes in a space too small between the bread dough and gravy sauce. It takes an hour to prep and three to cook and it’s the dumb kind of fun Liam associates with roadtrips and snow fights.
Harry shoves them out of the kitchen to go change into nice clothes, you bastards, you are not eating my roast in a onesie and when Liam walks back into the dining room after spending ten minutes pretending not to see Zayn watching him dress (and pretending not to watch Zayn), there’s a neat line of roast dinner down the centre of the table that makes him instantly nostalgic for home.
“Perfect, sweetheart,” Louis says, even though it’s not because they burnt the chicken skin and undercooked the pumpkin, because he has never been anything except avidly indulgent of Harry Styles.
Zayn nudges his foot under the table and Liam nudges back and thinks, I will keep that a secret for years.
+
Louis makes them chocolate sundaes for dessert and they sit three-two on the stairs and talk about all the dumb things they said years ago and terrorise the moving crew around them.
(“I think it would look better under the mirror,” Zayn says, with his legs stretched out in front of him and head on Liam’s shoulders and fingers wriggling a hole into his sweatshirt. “It looks out of place by the stairwell.”
“We talked about this,” Niall repeats, because somewhere they found the time to talk about every furniture decision without Liam’s notice, “the symmetry of the archways produces the kind of breath that the traditional Chinese could only dream of. Fung shui, Zayn.”
Liam presses a grin into the banister. “Qi, Zayn.”
“Wind-water, Zayn,” Harry echoes, and Louis smacks an obnoxious kiss to his forehead for the proud look on his face.
“To the left!” Zayn yells anyway, flashing them a grin, just for the way Niall mumbles everything you own in a box to the left like it’s an automatic response, and the moving crew would probably hate them if Louis hadn’t made extras.)
And it feels - normal, almost, so normal that he has to blink hard at the cast on Louis’ foot or the unsteady line of Zayn’s shoulders, and he’s not going to let it ruin this, he’s not, so he slips out and into an empty room and leans against the locked door until his breathing slows.
“Li?” Zayn whispers, from the other side of the wall, and Liam remembers a hotel in a city he can’t remember and a glass bath and opens the door.
“’M fine,” he says, and he loves the absence of pity in Zayn’s eyes but hates the certain hint of understanding. “Really, Zayn, I’m-”
“Oh fuck off,” Zayn scolds, and sits down against the door and holds his hand until they’re talking about the newest Superman movie, instead.
+
part two here