One Direction Big Bang - Story 2 - unclean, rotten, endless Part II

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It seems like the practice room are only here to reveal half-hidden profiles and silhouettes and let stray notes float into the corridors. Harry cannot bear that he almost knows Liam Payne's face by heart, round jaw, ears invisible under the hair. (Harry doesn't like it - his profile is like butter and dough, and he prefers the sharp, scissors-cut angles of a face that lies).

Harry slips inside without warning. He wonders for a brief moment if he would slip into the emptiness so unthinkingly, a long, swift movement that would erase him completely, and he thinks, maybe.

"Hello," he says when he's inside. It's spring again. It seems to Harry that it was spring just yesterday, the raw-green buds, unopened, Zayn's face that he saw for the first time, sweet and sugary like chocolate (and new, too, new and exciting to him and Louis, fresh off the boat, skin still prickly with sand and salt and Greek sun).

But time has passed since. He sees it in Zayn and Louis's linked fingers, Niall's gaze that quietly drifts away from them, Liam that maybe grasped one or two notes that sounded like music at his last performance, but not enough. He'll never be enough, Harry thinks in a lightning flash of lucidity, and an acidic bile flows into his stomach, not really his (he can see it, though - Liam Payne trying and trying and never being a genius, being calm and composed and good and on the edge of the beautiful, but never quite so).

"What do you want?" Liam Payne asks, teeth first, biting his words cleanly separate.

It's as though he'd heard Harry's thoughts and was trying to protect himself (but he even does that wrong, protecting himself - it’s all words and no arms, pointy elbows and the back of his hands, surely they're big enough to break something). Harry thinks about a wounded deer, flank smeared with blood.

"Do you want to insult me, is that it?" he asks. His voice is loud - Harry watches his pupils dilate, their dull brown suddenly more interesting, tattered with golden sparks and stormy patches of heavy black. "Tell me that 'I don't know music'?"

He attempts to make fun of Harry's voice, but it comes out as a sort of strangled squeak. Harry doesn't say anything. He could, but he doesn't.

"Not really," he answers instead. His heartache is floating in his chest, stringless.

Liam seems to calm down. It doesn't take much, Harry thinks, but it's no wonder. "What do you want, then?"

What does he want? Isn't that a good question. He wishes he knew - Liam Payne probably knows what he wants, probably has a bullet-point list with items color-coded by importance and practicability. Does he want crazy things, too? Does he want to go the Niagara falls and open his arms to fly in the white, sizzling water?

"I don't know," Harry says. The truth feels sour in his mouth, like it's been kept in there too long without coming out.

Liam Payne has questions, but he doesn't ask them. They dissolve in the air and prickle their eyes like dust.

"Do you like music?" Harry asks, and curses language once more for being so wrong. Asking that feels like asking a question full of air when he meant it to be condensed, intense and golden. Does he like music - who doesn't?

"I do," Liam Payne answers. Hard as he tries, Harry can't blame him for his empty eyes.

"Who taught you?"

(It was Harry's mother who taught him. If she were still alive, people would probably think they were siblings, with their golden curls and green green eyes. She had a violin. It was her mother who had taught her. Anne repeated the words, "The violin is your lover." In his house, they taught everything by flesh.)

"I taught myself."

No wonder, Harry thinks, and then, there's a story here, but he doesn't ask and Liam Payne doesn't say.

"You know any Gould?"

"I don't like him," Liam Payne says. Harry wonders what he would've said to someone else. There is a truthfulness to Liam when they are together that bothers him. He wants him to stop, wants to say, tell me your lies. He imagines what Liam Payne would say. Those aren't lies, he would say. They're just another kind of truth.

But Harry doesn't believe that there are several kinds of truth.

"I know," he says. "Do you know any, though?"

"I do," Liam Payne answers. Even when he's angry, he can't help being the good boy that he is. A smile curls at the edge of Harry's mouth.

"Which one?"

"Toccata in E minor," he answers.

"It's a beautiful piece," Harry says, thinking, did you trample over this one too?

Liam Payne doesn't say anything. He probably doesn't like the piece. It probably bothers him that there's Gould singing in the background, off-key - that it isn't proper and clean like everything he likes.

"Play it for me," Harry asks. He doubts Liam Payne plays music for people; and even if he did, this piece wouldn't be the one. (What would it be? Maybe Vivaldi or Wagner, he thinks - something furious he can't play, that would convey all the rage and the confusion, but it's a blind guess. Maybe it's what he wants, and Liam would only play old-school Bach, with a dash of Fauré when he feels daring.)

"No," Liam Payne says.

Harry would insist, say, it's the anniversary of my mother's death in seven days and Liam Payne would play, but suddenly exhaustion washes over him, his knees buckle, and he flees.

*

They're all paired off in tentative tandems, Harry remarks idly one afternoon as they're sprawled on the grass in the back yard. Spring is lingering on; it seems to enjoy their company, for some reason, and it graces them with the sweet freshness of months that don't exist, slotted between March and April.

There's Louis and Zayn, because he can't not see them. Zayn's arms are curled around Louis's shoulders, holding him back; Louis's fingers circle Zayn's ankle. Harry wonders if they realize what they're doing, how they look. Their kisses must taste sour, he thinks, and it's really more of a certainty than anything else. There's Louis and Zayn, breaking each other in tiny increments, teeth and nails and the erosion of their skins.

There's Niall and his little freshman, Juliette, who's bright-eyed and funny, little fingers laced with Niall's; and then there's Matt and Aiden, and it's sort of ironic that they should be the only ones that fit, out of all of them, the scruffy thirty-years-old and the dark-eyed barely-adult, so unlike each other but so perfectly tuned, with their private smiles and quiet jabs, voice heavy with the tenderness they don't bother hiding.

There's Harry and Liam, too, maybe, looking at each other from opposite ends of their little group. But everything is wobbly and unsure - nothing will last. Harry watches with lazy eyes as Louis and Zayn whisper furiously to each other, on the verge of breaking. A jealous satisfaction settles low in his stomach. Louis stalks off with an angry shout that Harry doesn't try to decipher.

He thinks about his mother (he always thinks about her at this time of the year, maybe the only routine thing he does). He comes back to the dorm feeling a little nauseous, half from the heat that has simmered on his skin all afternoon and half from the memories, pale and sweet with an after-taste of regret, dull red.

He wakes up in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat. Thoughts are twirling in his head and he reaches before him with his hands to touch her and hold her but she isn't here, she isn't here and it kills him. He loves her so much that sometimes he thinks that he loves the ghost of her more than he loves himself, the soft arch of her eyebrows and her French name and her thin wrists and her perfume. He thinks about how life would've been if she were still here, but he can't find it in him and it makes him so mad.

"Come back," he moans.

His voice is broken - he takes his violin out of its case, walks to the the lake barefoot with gravel hurting his feet and he plays something aching and beautiful that cries come back, come back, come back. The surface of the lake stays the same, smooth and inexpressive, shining silver under the hard moonlight.

*

The truth is, Harry never really understood the notion of family. What is it, family? he would ask when he was a child, running around with wide green eyes and endless questions. What does it mean? And everyone would answer, but their answers were always different and not really precise, so Harry decided he would have to define it himself, since no one seemed to be able to.

One of them said, it's the ones you love. Harry nodded. He loved his toys and his friends and his parents and his grand-dad and grand-mum. Okay, then, he thought, and pasted the label 'family' on them. Then someone told him, it's your mum and your dad and your sister. And Harry wanted to say, is it? but it was during a wedding and everyone shushed him when he tried to ask. After the reception, when he asked again, someone else said to him, it's everyone you have blood in common with, darling - that means your mum and dad but also your uncles and aunts and your grandparents. Harry didn't get what blood had to with it, but he said thank you and he walked away.

He decided, i'll see when I get one, and then, it'll be beautiful. And he collected family like a treasure, people he put in the same drawer in his heart, tumbling when he walked, golden stones from a sun-kissed shore. Anne. Louis. Des. Robin. Gemma. Louis. The others, tentative, golden-brown dust. And he didn't think they were all equally important, or precious, or beautiful, but he felt they all deserved to be called family, whatever that meant. They were the ones he'd never leave, he thought at ten; the ones he shared blood with, at thirteen; the ones he'd miss if (when) he left, at seventeen.

"Gemma?" he asks.

They don't talk often. He should call her more, but it's the kind of thing he forgets. Sometimes he even forgets her birthday, but she knows it doesn't mean he doesn't love her, so she just smiles and asks that he come and have lunch with her on this tiny beach in Northumberland where they used to go on holiday, and he drives all the way there, once a year, if he can make it.

She laughs in his ear. She reminds him of Anne, but different, younger. Alive. "How are you, darling?" she asks.

"You sound happy," he says. He can hear noise behind her, but it's muffled, and he can't quite determine what it is.

"I am," she says.

It floors him and for a second he doesn't know what to say, what to do, just stands there frozen with the phone in his hand and thoughts running crazy in his head.

She laughs again. He wants to say, never stop, that's the stuff music is made of. He think about Lizst and Chopin, and the pieces they wrote for each other, and love, and Shakespeare.

"I'm glad," he says quietly. He doesn't know if he is, but he should be, and she deserves it. Gemma, beautiful Gemma. He wonders who made her so happy and he wants to thank them, a phantom ache in his arms, like a hug that's waiting to be wrapped around someone.

"I know," she answers.

Suddenly, as she says that, he realizes that he is, he really is. Happiness bubbles in his chest; it's not his, but it's good.

"Are you coming on Friday, then?" he asks. They've been doing this for nearly eight years now. She always brings the flowers because he forgets, pale yellow roses wrapped in crisp plastic.

There's a silence, and he knows what she's going to say before she says it, but he isn't mad at her.

"No," she finally says.

He hears, I've grown past this, and you haven't, but it's okay, but he always hears things that aren't there, so maybe this isn't there either and it's just the easy flowing joy that softens the pain.

They talk for a few more minutes; she doesn't ask him how he is again, and he doesn't push her to further the explanation of her happiness. When he hangs up, he feels drained of all his energy. He undresses and slips in the fresh sheets - as soon as he closes his eyes, he's asleep.

*

Harry likes Caroline. She's easy - she's not what he imagines when he thinks about dancing, because he's a boy who thinks about broken toes and the burning stretch in your muscles, and when she talks about it it's waves of sunshine rolling off your shoulders and energy sparkling in your fingers. It doesn't matter. Harry can deal with difference, unless it's Liam Payne and his stiff upper lip.

They don't really go out, when they're together. It would be weird, of course, her, thirty years old with high heels and a purse and a life in her lipstick, half-consumed, and him, fresh off the earth, all smooth creamy skin and hurt like foam on his lips, but most of all they don't belong together in the real world. Their union in the golden pallor of her bedroom, clean perfume sticking to the sheets, is merely an indulgence to their bodies. They're people who like feeling good, and they feel good with each other. They don't really search past that.

And there's no future between them, no moving in and no love, no love lost, but maybe that's what makes it so good, so wonderfully easy. Go figure.

Harry likes Caroline. He likes pressing her into the mattress and looking up at her when she's got her thighs squeezing his hips, and she likes him, the adolescent kisses and the tales and the youth that got away too fast. They don't ask questions. They don't judge. They're good together, good like rising bread and flushed skin and strangled moaning gasps in the soft dawn.

They eat together, sometimes. She lets him cook - he puts on her apron and she mocks him and she looks at him while he makes all these wonderful scents fill the kitchen she never uses, except when she has someone over and all-ready meals that she can pretend she cooked herself. Sometimes he takes her on the kitchen counter and sometimes they just eat; they tell crass jokes and drink more wine than they should, and then they smoke a joint together on the balcony with the traffic roaring like a sea somewhere remote in the horizon.

"It's like we're alone," he says, eyes glazed over, "but not really."

She laughs at him, a gaudy white laugh, brash with color, gums showing. She's had her poetic phase too.

"It's like we're the only ones in the world," he says, and her wishful thinking, love dies on the roof of her mouth when he leans over and kisses her throat, gently, lips barely brushing the skin.

It doesn't lead anywhere, but it doesn't need to - he tucks his head in her lap and she smokes a little more, thinking about sitting in this office in London signing away her marriage and teaching fifty kids about dancing, reading the hope naked on their little faces. She doesn't say, "I like you." He doesn't need her to.

It's ten when they wake up with cricks in their necks, the joint cold and smelly on the ground, shivering from the cold air. He curses that he's late for his classes, fuck, fuck, shit, kisses her quickly on the mouth and chuckles when she pulls away, saying that he should brush his teeth because he has morning breath and tastes like shit.

She's late for class too, but she doesn't move for a while, sitting cross-legged on her balcony with her bra strap low on her arm, breathing.

*

The teachers know by now that he's never there on the sixth of May. They don't say anything, but those who know shoot him sorry glances. He shrugs them off - their pity doesn't interest him. He's not that rebellious, fiercely defensive child anymore, but there are remnants of him in his body, his round cheeks, the soft flesh of his wrists.

He opens the door to Louis's room early in the morning only to be greeted by the painful sight of his and Zayn's tangled bodies, tan legs softened by the milky skin of Louis's calves. Harry wonders if they can breathe. Probably not.

"Louis," he says softly. He doesn't feel guilty - they should already be up anyway (but he heard the noises, the cries and moans and frantic whispers late into the night).

Louis doesn't stir, and Harry can't bring himself to disrupt their peace. He pads to the kitchen, his sock-clad feet sliding softly on the floor, and leaves a hastily scribbled note on the fridge. gone for the day. left waffles in the oven, jam is in the fridge and chocolate on the shelf. let zayn do everything. love x.

He doesn't add anything. They've been doing that for years, and each time Louis sends him twice more messages on this particular day, silly little things like gossip girl is actually quite good and did you ever notice mr gunther looks like a sloth when he closes his eyes with horrendous orthography and even more horrendous grammar. It's the way they work, and it's fine by Harry. He wouldn't trade it for the world.

He walks to the train station in the careful silence of the near-dawn, the pink sky stretched above him as he quietly hums a pop song. He likes the morning when it's like that, still, not fully awakened yet; when the dew is still fresh on the flowers and the sun rays timid in the sky. He knows the way this day goes by heart, and he savors this, because this is the best part. Music trickles in his ears.

He almost doesn't hear when someone shouts his name as the train station comes into view. When he turns around, the person, whoever it is, has probably been screaming for a while - their voice is hoarse.

"Liam Payne," he says. It sounds weird like that, the full name unleashed in the air, hanging there, a little random. "What are you doing here?"

Liam Payne shrugs. It could be anything, Harry thinks - he could have been already up and jogging or buying croissants or whatever it is Liam Payne does at six on a Tuesday morning, or he could have followed him here to find out something, whatever it is about him that puzzles Liam Payne so much.

"Where are you going?" Liam Payne asks. Harry keeps walking; he doesn't want to miss his train. Liam Payne falls into step with him.

"Holmes Chapel," Harry answers. Hiding it is no use, and he doesn't want to.

"What is there?" Liam Payne asks.

"My mother's grave."

"Oh," Liam Payne says, and he falls silent. Harry would smile; it's like him, to be shushed by something like that, forced back into his shell of politeness.

"Do you want me to leave?" he asks. He seems to have realized that he shouldn't be here, and they fall out of step, awkwardly.

Harry shrugs. He doesn't - not particularly. "Do what you want, I don't care."

They walk for another few minutes. The sun is starting to rise higher in the sky and the world seems to be waking up slowly, softly growing abuzz.

Liam Payne buys a ticket alongside Harry, and when Harry climbs into the train, he follows him, wordless.

*

Harry had forgotten about the flowers but Liam reminds him as they step out of the train, pressing a light hand to his shoulder. They aren't close, but their little group is, and unusually physical, so it isn't really surprising. A little weird, maybe, but on the good side of weird.

"Don't you have flowers?" he asks.

"Oh, right. We'll make a detour, then. There's a florist not far."

To his credit, Liam doesn't talk much. The whole train ride was spent reading for him (there is something amazing about the fact that he always carries a book everywhere, even if this time it didn't seem like something for class - Esmée, with love and squalor, a book of short stories by Salinger) and staring into space for Harry. He loves these landscapes, could name every mountain, every valley - he has learnt them one by one, something new for every train ride.

They fall silent again as they walk towards the shop, and Liam helps Harry choose the best-looking roses. They're lucky - it seems like a good season for roses, or so the florist tells them, but they really are beautiful, more so than usual. Liam heaves a sigh when they leave the shop, as though it was absolutely primordial that they have good flowers to do that and they have successfully completed their task. Harry hesitates between feeling softened and irritated.

The cemetery is a small thing, perfunctory, with white graves and less delicacies than usual. It always seemed fitting to Harry that she rest here, she who was beautiful without make-up and tender without pretend. His feet take the path of her grave out of habit. He notices it because Liam is here, making him more aware of everything, the wind in the bushes, the sand and gravel beneath his feet.

"It's here," he says when they reach her grave, and they stop.

"Do you want me to…," Liam Payne hesitates, "wait further, or something?"

It's been eight years, Harry thinks, ears and skull full of white noise, eight years or a little more or a little less, and yet. He sees the signs that her memory is fading, he sees it everyday, when he can't remember what color her jumper was that time she took him to the National Gallery, when entire weeks pass and he doesn't think of her once. It scares him more than anything. He doesn't want to lose her, and he doesn't want to keep her like that (he hears Gemma's voice in his head, she wouldn't want you to, either), but he doesn't know what the middle ground is, too afraid to tip over and fall.

He falls to his knees. He isn't weak. Liam Payne has shrunk into a corner and keeps his eyes downcast, a quiet, caring presence.

"I don't want to lose you," Harry says - whispers - murmurs.

I don't want you to lose me, says the silent grave.

He sobs - chokes on the tears he isn't used to shed. It's messy and it doesn't feel good, but it feels necessary, somehow.

I know you do, the grave answers. I miss you too.

His head is thrumming with unrelated memories, images and smells and the feeling of her pearls against his fingers, the ones she wore this night she and Robin went to a jazz club. He closes his eyes and thinks, it's okay, you're allowed because today is the day he's allowed to mourn, the day it's okay to cry and fall to his knees and rest his forehead against the cold marble of the grave, heaving a shaking sigh.

He thinks about the dreams she used to have, a boat in the Pacific ocean, the wind whipping the sails, salt on sunburnt skin. He wants to take the trip for her, in her memory, but he remembers Gemma and thinks, let it go and do what you want to do, but it's so hard to leave and not think that he's abandoning her, a grave that no one will visit once a year on the sixth of May, the anniversary of her death.

Time passes, maybe one hour and maybe five.

He clutches the bouquet against his chest because he doesn't know what else to do. He never understood why they should bring flowers, anyway - but she would have liked the color. Crazily, because Gemma isn't here to wrap her arms around him and whisper words of reassurance, he thinks he'll buy peach-colored roses next year. She'd have liked them too, and it would've gone well with her pearls. Besides, she always said change is good for you. What she said hasn't always proved to be true, but he has a feeling this will.

He can't really imagine changing, but he is, without realizing it. He looks at Liam Payne, eyes on his hands, where Gemma should've been, and that is change already, bringing along this oddity of a boy on a trip that shouldn't be anyone else's but his and Gemma's.

"It's okay," he calls out. "I'm finished."

He's not, though - he never will be, but it's close enough, and it's the only thing Liam Payne will understand, the neat closure of "I'm okay", not maybe.

It's all for the others, really - so that they can feel like they’re honoring her when they come here with a few flowers and a sorry word. But they don't get it. Grief - it's not that. It's not flowers and an hour out of your day. It's a life's work.

(But he won't pretend like he knows grief, because he doesn't - if he knew he would've learned to deal with it, but each year the pain soars and threatens to overwhelm him, waves rising high and acid in his stomach, waking up the tears.)

"Are you okay?" Liam Payne asks, useless as ever, trying to reassure himself.

Harry doesn't respond, and they walk side by side, away from the neatly aligned rows of graves, away from the flowers and the stench of death but not from death itself. Something flows into Harry's chest that feels strangely like peace. He breathes out a shaky sigh.

"Let's go," he says.

He doesn't look back. She isn't there.

*

"You hungry?"

He knows the town like the back of his hand, and it's always weird to come here on this particular day, because the town feels strange and alien, a dispassionate monster chewing with empty eyes, white belly rumbling with fire.

Liam Payne shrugs. Harry wonders if he gets urges, too, like the rest of them - if he ever rushed to a bathroom to vomit or exclaimed loudly when presented with chocolate-topped strawberries. Sometimes the idea that there could be people that don't, that don't crave and yearn and ache feels absurd to him. He wishes he were God so that he could feel like everyone, not trapped in the prison of his own body.

"I know a place," he says.

They won't go to his house. It feels strange to know that it's here, somewhere (but he knows the way, every shortcut and bump on the road), Robin living alone with the same swing, the same floorboards, the same everything except that she isn't here. They never go to his house when they come here to see her - each time he pretends that he discovers the city, and each time it gets a little truer. (Sometimes he gets afraid that he's forgetting her, but he can't help it.)

They walk to the bakery in silence. When they reach it, Harry instantly gets swarmed by old friends and regulars that recognize him. He lets himself be hugged from all sides, crushed in a sea of flesh - he feels good nested in this swarm of bodies, protected by the old ladies's bird noises in his neck, blocking the thoughts before they get to his brain. He doesn't feel guilty about leaving Liam Payne in the back, arms crossed, looking at him with indecipherable eyes. He rarely feels guilty for anything - it's no use, really.

When he's satisfied everyone's hunger for answers (howareyouwhatareyoudoingareyouokayareyouokaydoyouneedsomethingdoyouhaveagirlfriendaboyfriendthendearboydearboywemissedyou), responded to every last question, his stomach suffused with a warm happiness, he joins Liam who's snatched a table at the back.

"You're loved," Liam says without preamble, and Harry looks at him with blank eyes.

He remembers a necklace his mother gave him when he was a child, silver and simple with the letters of beloved tumbling and clinking against each other. He remembers - he laughed, and he said, "I'm not a girl!", a little embarrassed because he was already taunted at school for his too-red lips and girly curls and because motherly affection was the most embarrassing thing ever, anyway. But she pressed it into his hands, she kissed his forehead and she said, "Keep it."

He kept it. He still has it in a little jewelry box, and some days he wears it under his collar and touches it under the cloth with superstitious fingers.

You're loved. What does that even mean?

They eat in silence. The pastries are good, and sometimes they look at each other over the brim of their mugs, surprised for a second to find out that they want to lick the sugar off each other's lips. How strange, Harry thinks as he sees something stutter on Liam's face, how extraordinary…

He doesn't know what pulls him in, what makes him cross that final line and reach out to cup Liam Payne's jaw, kiss him square and sugary. Maybe it's the same thing that makes him sit for hours in front of a painting and break his violin, maybe not. Liam makes a surprised noise at the back of his throat but he doesn't pull away. They kiss during a few minutes, lazy and oblivious. It feels strangely good with the sun dripping on their shoulders, and beloved, beloved, beloved ringing in Harry's mind like a lullaby.

*

Liam Payne seems determined not to contradict Harry today. Harry doesn't know if he should be annoyed or thankful, so he settles for a bit of both, taking pleasure in making Liam do things he wouldn't normally do, but that he accepts without hesitation, his eyes quiet and grieving. Harry wants to do something that'll make him scream and startle and burn, but he settles for this.

They kiss without future, bodies neatly separated, fingers barely brushing. Harry isn't sure if they're kissing each other, but it doesn't really matter, not right now, not for him anyway. He relishes that Liam doesn't try to put boundaries (but he sees them anyway - in the I'm not thinking of you that's on the tip of his darting tongue). It's not about love, it really isn't, not love between them and not love for someone else, not this kind of love anyway.

It's about Anne, and Louis, and Zayn, and Niall and everyone else, and what if the way time stills and drags along languorously when they kiss feels like a clearing sky? Everything doesn't have to have a label. This never will. Liam Payne and Harry Styles - never united, but never truly apart (the truth is, Harry feels stupid saying 'never' and 'always' when his mother's ashes burn like embers under his feet, as young and foolish as he probably is).

And yes, for one day he can't quite bring himself to hate. He feels exhausted, tired to the bone with grief and unshed tears. He feels like his eyelashes are made of lead, pulling him down. He just wants to sleep. He just wants to sleep, and this is the next best thing, because sleep is nightmares or the shimmering ghost of a woman in a night gown, caressing him with gentle eyes.

Liam Payne kisses like Harry would've expected him to kiss. The last time was really too quick and drunken for any of them to remember anything, but nothing Harry deciphers now really surprises him. Harry's tongue is furious and forceful; Liam kisses like an autumn day, a lazy stroll kicking at stray gold-red leaves, precise, focused, unhurried.

It's okay.

It's okay. Harry isn't asking for anything more. He's happy with letting time flow, out of reach, let them live in the corner for a while, quiet and unscathed. He's not claiming he doesn't like the franticness (because it isn't true - why would he have chosen violin if it wasn't for the ecstasy of trying to rip the sky apart with a bow?), but today is a day for grief. Today he can let go of everything that isn't her, and if Liam Payne is there, well, he's there and that's all there is to it (he can't pretend he doesn't miss Gemma either; she always knows the words to reassure him).

Suddenly, he regrets not having brought his violin with him. He never did, but he was always with Gemma, and Harry can only be alone or with someone, never something in between (but the truth is, he can never be alone at all - it isn’t a curse or a blessing, it just is). Liam isn't really here. A question is burning the tip of his tongue, but he doesn't know what it is.

"When do you want to leave?" Liam Payne asks, and suddenly a wave of exhaustion crashes over Harry.

Never, he wants to say. I never want to leave. Coming back seems like such a hassle - coming back to seeing Louis and Zayn destroy each other without being able to stop, coming back to fighting with his violin, to watching Niall be happy… How much more simple would it be to stay here? Stop being doesn't really bother him, to be honest - he was never whole without her.

Why - why can't he stay here until he disassembles, until he falls apart and lets himself be scattered to the changing winds, as she was? Is she the only one who gets to rest in peace?

But Liam Payne wants real answers, answers like today or tomorrow or at three p.m. on platform 2, so Harry says, "I'll stay for the night."

It's the best he can do, really.

Liam Payne doesn't say if he'll stay too - they just keep walking in the streets of this town with its silence full of ghosts, sometimes stopping to kiss furtively, dry lips and tear-stained cheeks.

*

The truth is, it feels weird to see Liam without his piano. It's as if he were less of a Liam Payne and more of a Liam end of without his furrowed brows and giant hands on the keys, legs neatly tucked under the instrument's gigantic body. Harry loves pianos (he loves every instrument, really - together they're like some sort of boundless, dysfunctional family), but maybe they scare him a little, always right, incapable of being mean.

Liam Payne could almost pass as a regular young man right now, with his big hands tucked in his pockets and his shoes scrapping against the gravel. He follows Harry to the hotel, and Harry doesn't ask, but they book a room together anyway, two queens. Harry doesn’t particularly want to sleep in the same room as Liam Payne, but this screams for closeness. It just works out. Harry feels relieved.

It's only later, when he comes out of the shower, followed by billowing clouds of steam, clean of the stench of death, that something drops off of his shoulders, sliding on the length of his arms to form a translucent puddle on the floor, maybe his pain and maybe something else, darker, harder to understand and to name. He doesn't really feel better, but he feels - that's something already.

Liam Payne is propped against cushions on his bed, idly flipping the channels from a ball game to a cooking show to a singing competition sort of thing to a TV show that looks like Glee to the news to a silent jungle. It's a bit maddening, but Harry doesn't tell him to stop. He wonders if there's a heaven.

He doesn't know how much time it's been when Liam finally switches the TV off. The silence floods the room. Harry silently chokes on it for a second.

"The other day," Liam Payne starts. Harry watches him, his eyes suddenly very green.

The air is still in the room, waiting for them to continue.

"You asked me who taught me music, right?"

He looks right before him, right in the middle of the black TV. Harry wonders if the blackness could surge forward and eat them whole.

"When I was ten, I moved to Wolverhampton,” Liam says, precise and maybe a little fast. “There was this boy in our neighborhood, the house next to mine - it was Niall - and he played piano."

He could've guessed that this would be the way Liam Payne would tell his stories - no unnecessary words, fact without colors and without flesh.

"I took up piano too."

Harry reads everything behind these words - I liked him and I wanted him to like me and I was young and I was new. He tries to imagine little Liam sitting at a piano bigger than him with serious eyes and minuscule hands. Walking up to a bright sun-haired blue-eyed child and saying, "Hi. I'm Liam Payne."

"Did it work?"

Did he like you? Their conversations aren't really conversations - there's Liam Payne trying to say things as they are and Harry trying to read more into them, sometimes being right and sometimes not, asking questions out of the way, a foray into the unsaid. Seeing them like this, not looking at each other, one would probably think that they aren't even speaking to each other. Harry isn't sure if they are.

Liam Payne shrugs. "I guess."

A beat. Their silence too is music; it's the only music that fits them both, heavy drops of nothingness hitting their world of glass.

Liam Payne takes a breath. It seems shaky, but Liam Payne doesn't shake, and he doesn't triumph.

"He changed, though. Instruments, I mean. About two months after I'd moved there, he changed to trumpet."

Child Niall, laughing with an open throat, incapable to hold onto anything. Liam Payne in the background, intact knees, looking at a butterfly and seeing him. (Harry can't really believe that Liam Payne was ever a child, to be honest. He hasn’t thought about it, but if he had, he would have imagined him come out of the womb fully formed, his lips set in a straight line, with quiet, distant eyes.)

"He went through fourteen instruments before he chose the guitar," Liam Payne says. Something that looks oddly like a grin blooms on his face - at his own silliness or Niall's, who knows.

Harry laughs. "Come on, then," he says.

Liam Payne understands. He inhales. "Trumpet, then there was oboe, harmonica, drums, bongo," (at Harry's incredulous look, "I'm not kidding!"), "triangle, flute, cello, saxophone, ukelele, slide trombone, and then he took up the guitar," he counts on his hand, his grin getting bigger and bigger. Harry watches the transformation. The words form a pretty necklace of distant relatives brought together in a chaotic reunion.

"I stuck with piano," says Liam Payne.

It's not a surprise - nothing with Liam Payne ever is. Liam Payne isn't volatile. Maybe he fell in love with piano, maybe he didn't, but Harry feels a little reassured that it started because of something as silly and inconsequential as a childhood crush.

He makes a humming sound, maybe to say okay and maybe to say thank you. Liam Payne rubs his eyes, looking very tired all of a sudden, and for a second Harry get a glimpse of him as a child, trying to hold back tears. He blinks, and it's gone.

"I'm gonna take a shower, okay?" Liam Payne says with a smile.

He doesn't wait for an answer. Harry pretends to be asleep when he comes back, smelling of linen and soap. Liam doesn't ask. At two a.m., Harry is woken by his phone buzzing. The text reads, I need help, and Harry doesn't need to check the sender to know.

He turns his phone off and slips back into Morpheus's forgetful arms, his eyes red.

PART III