fic: with all the madness in my soul (1/4)
with all the madness in my soul
nc-17, 30,000 words
natural born killers AU
harry/nick, brief harry/louis/nick
also on ao3
a/n: written for the reel_1d challenge for the prompt based on the movie natural born killers, so please be aware of the warnings for graphic violence, minor character death, murder, implied abuse / non-con... and i guess spoilers for a movie that's 19 years old?
as always thank you so much to my princess lane for reading this over and encouraging me and basically being the best person in the whole world. also i'm on tumblr if you care to contact me there.
london
Nick is not drunk. He’s not even close. He’s got an itch beneath his fingernails, something familiar that keeps coming back like a dog no matter how often he tries to kick it, and he knows that whatever it is, getting pissed isn’t going to help. He’s tried, and it only makes the feeling multiply. Like spores, like insects. Alcohol doesn’t help, and drugs or boys or both only rarely -- whatever it is, it sticks around. It makes his hands restless, and he fiddles with his pint, picking at the chip in the dirty glass idly with the side of his thumb.
He’s used to restlessness.
The bar is almost entirely empty, and Nick only notices the boy sat at the opposite end of the bar once the bloke walks in, the door slamming behind him as he lopes over to the opposite end of the bar and looms over him. The man is tall and a bit rat-faced, menacing in a completely generic way. Nick’s seen a thousand variations on this type, and they’re always so predictable, hot tempered with no intelligence to back it up, patched-together rage that amounts to absolutely nothing. It bores Nick to tears.
The boy he’s looming over, though -- he’s unusual. He’s new. The bar itself is foul, a dark cave of low ceilings and an uneven concrete floor, usually vacant save for a handful of unsavory types, the sort that all start to look the same after a while. This boy, though, he’s something else entirely -- long limbs and sharp angles, but something soft to him as well. He can’t be older than eighteen, nineteen, and his curls tumble messily around his face as he stares down at the bar, avoiding the other man’s eyes. His shirt is ratty and torn a bit around the neck, but he’s still bright and sharp, conspicuously incongruous in the foul room.
Nick puts down his pint and lets himself look, at the boy and the man both. Mostly the boy, if he’s being honest -- something he tries to be, at least with himself.
They’re arguing about something, but it’s low and far away enough that Nick can’t hear what. Actually, it’s the man arguing, still looming and scowling, obviously trying to throw his height around like it ought to be intimidating, and to Nick it just seems desperate and a bit sad. The boy is ignoring him steadfastly, staring down at his hands -- big and wide, with long fingers that taper off almost elegantly, again out of place -- where they’re wrapped around his drink. The man says something sharply, and when it fails to get the boys attention, jerks him rather violently by the shoulder he’s got hunched up near his chin. Unexpectedly, the boy smiles, still looking down. It’s so quick that Nick thinks he’s imagined it for a moment, a sharp flash of something secret, something quiet and just this side of unpredictable and almost violent, that Nick can’t look away -- if he does it again, Nick wants to see.
Distantly, he knows that staring so blatantly is a quick way to make trouble for himself, especially somewhere like this bar, but he can’t find it in himself to stop.
A moment later, the bloke is shouting something foul in the boy’s face -- which remains placid the whole time, neutral in a way that Nick finds vaguely impressive -- and then grabs at him, pulling him up and out of his chair.
The boy glances back to the rest of the room as the other bloke manhandles him, yanking him indelicately by the upper arm towards the back exit. His long legs trail awkwardly behind him as they go, getting caught up on the legs of chairs and nearly knocking one over in his wake.
As they reach the door, the boy turns back and makes eye contact with Nick, the first time he’s done so -- Nick hadn’t been sure the boy had even realized anyone else was in the pub with him. Nick raises his glass a few inches and nods, and the boy just shrugs and smiles again, this time caught somewhere between wry and apologetic, before he’s pulled through the exit sharply, the door shutting solidly behind him as he goes.
-
The boy’s back several nights later. Nick tells himself not to feel a jolt of pleasure when he turns up and sees the boy sitting in that same spot at the end of the bar, but he does anyway.
He’s alone, no sign of the bloke from before, and the bartender keeps disappearing round back for long stretches of time, so it’s just the two of them. Nick resolves to talk to the boy sooner rather than -- he’s not keen on sitting around silently again, staring at strange boys like a lech. He’d much rather do something about it. He’s never been any good at inactivity.
He waits, though, sipping his drink, and before the right moment presents itself, the bloke shows up again. He doesn’t say anything, just leans on the bar next to the boy, mostly blocking Nick’s line of sight, which probably isn’t a bad thing if he doesn’t want to get his teeth knocked out for staring. He doesn’t, incidentally, but he’s still fascinated by this boy despite himself, so he carries on peering at him as best he can.
The boy turns his face up expectantly at the man, waiting for something that Nick can’t figure out what it might be, but the man just whispers a few sharp sentences at the boy -- Nick only catches “any idea what time” and “ought to have” -- before the man scoffs and turns on his heels, out the back door in a few long strides without a backwards glance.
Once he’s sure the bloke’s not coming back, Nick sets his pint down noisily. When the boy doesn’t look up at him, he clears his throat. It takes two more tries before the boy notices him, or at least for him to react, but when he does, he lifts his eyes and stares so directly that it takes Nick a moment to gather himself and sort out what he wants to say.
“S’your boyfriend?” Nick asks eventually, nodding his head towards the door the man left through.
The boy shrugs. “Not, um. Sort of, but. ‘S’not really like that.” His voice is low, deeper than Nick would’ve guessed, and slow. It’s a rather nice voice. It goes well with his face.
“Yeah?” Nick asks, but the boy doesn’t elaborate, just blushes a bit, then smiles and looks down at his hands.
“D’you want another drink?” Nick offers. The bartender’s still off somewhere, but Nick’s got no qualms about going around and getting himself a drink if he needs to, and doubly so if it’s for this too pretty boy, who’s still managing to look so out of place and not all at once.
The boy just shakes his head slowly, and carries on looking down at his folded hands and his nearly empty pint. Nick shrugs. “Suit yourself. The offer stands, though.”
“Thanks,” he says to the flat surface of the bartop, still smiling in an unknowable way.
-
The boy leaves eventually, and Nick hangs about for a bit before slinking out back after his second pint, still sober. The back alley is full of broken pallets and rubbish bins that are knocked over, and he steps around broken glass and scraps of food as he picks through the maze of twisting corridors and alleys towards his flat. It’s easier if he goes round on the main road, more straightforward and less labyrinthine, but this way’s quicker, so he figures it’s a trade-off.
Several doors down from the bar he hears a sound coming from one of the dark corners that branches off between two run-down blocks of flats, and he slows down enough to glance down the alley casually as he passes.
About halfway down the bloke from the bar has the boy shoved up against the brick wall, one hand fisted in his curly hair, the other shoved down the front of his trousers. The boy’s hips are pressing forward, meeting the blokes hand as it jerks erratically, but he’s staring off over the bloke’s shoulder, his eyes locked onto something Nick can’t see from this angle, not without stopping at least.
Nick lets out a small hmm, and although he thinks the boy shouldn’t have been able to hear him across the distance, he still glances over in the next moment. Nick freezes, waits for the boy to shout something at him, telling him to piss off or something, but he doesn’t. He just smiles enigmatically at Nick, the whites of his eyes shining, and then after a moment looks away again, fixing his eyes on the spot just past the bloke’s shoulder.
Nick hesitates for a moment to see if the boy will look back, but when he doesn’t, he forces himself to shake his head, and walk back to his flat, carefully avoiding looking down any more alleys as he goes.
-
Both of them, the boy and his bloke, are back at the pub the next time Nick stops in. Only this time, they’re arguing loudly, or at least the bloke is, shouting all sorts of things at the boy as Nick sits down at the bar. His voice is thin and reedy, filling up the otherwise empty room. The boy, for his part, is again steadfastly ignoring him, which only seems to infuriate the bloke more.
As Nick sits down at the opposite end of the bar, he thinks maybe the bloke will stop now that there’s an audience -- they’d been the only two there until Nick had come in, no sign of even the bartender. But the bloke carries on, working himself up into enough of a rage that his rat-like face starts to go red.
Nick tries to ignore it, assuming he’ll eventually tire himself out, but after several minutes with the bloke showing no sign of stopping, he thinks he might not have a choice but to involve himself. The thought doesn’t necessarily upset him.
“Look at me when I’m talking,” the bloke says, and when the boy doesn’t, the bloke grabs him hard, one hand fisting the collar of the boy’s shirt and the other yanking his chin so hard that his neck jerks. Nick winces and looks away.
“Alright,” he says firmly. He stares at himself in the cracked mirror that hangs behind the bar instead. His hair’s starting to go flat, and his fingers are white where he’s flexing them. “That’s enough.”
His voice startles the bloke, apparently, and he turns away from the boy slowly to glare at Nick.
“Don’t reckon this concerns you, mate,” the bloke says.
“Actually,” Nick says steadily, swiveling to meet his gaze, “I reckon it does.”
The bloke lets go of the boy where he’s got him by the collar and turns to Nick, taking a few steps closer.
“Fuck off,” he says, flexing his hands and puffing out his thin chest in a way that’s obviously meant to be intimidating.
Nick stands up to his full height, and he hopes this areshole tries to hit him, God, he does, because it’ll be the absolute most satisfying thing in the world to watch him try it, expect Nick to fold in like crumpled paper, and then go from smug to surprised in an instant when Nick decks him, leveling him on the dirty concrete floor. Nick can see it playing out behind his eyes like a film, and he has to keep himself from laughing in anticipation.
“See, that’s actually what I was going to say. Seems like you’re bothering him, and you’re definitely bothering me, so why don’t you fuck off and leave us to our drinks?” He ignores the fact that he hasn’t actually got a drink yet, choosing to consider it artistic license.
The man glares some more, widening his stance and obviously not intending to go that easily. “What’d you say to me?”
“D’you have a problem with your hearing as well as your manners?” Nick asks. He can feel his pulse narrowing, speeding up, and the fingers in his right hand tense into a fist as the man walks a few steps deliberately closer. “You must, I think.”
The bloke jumps at that, knocking over a stool as he makes for Nick, and Nick closes his eyes for just an instant, savoring the moment before it happens. The bloke swings wildly at him and misses by a mile, too far away still, but before he can get close enough to Nick to make contact, the bartender appears, getting between the two of them in a flash. He gets a hand on the bloke’s collar, yanking him hard away from Nick and saying something firmly to him, but Nick can’t hear it, his ears swimming slightly. Nick hadn’t expected that -- he’d fully expected to break the bloke’s nose against the surface of the bar at the very least, and the change in the script throws him. By the time he reorients himself, the bloke’s slamming out the front door, still angry, but he doesn’t look back as he goes.
“Don’t pull that shit in here, yeah?” the bartender’s saying to him, already back behind the bar and pulling a cigarette out of his pack to tuck behind his ear. He shoves up his sleeves, showing off dark swirls of tattoos on his forearms. “I know he started it, but I don’t give a fuck, I’ll toss you both out next time.”
Nick nods easily enough, folding himself back down into his seat.
“And you...” he says to the boy, his voice going from rough to something like sad so quickly that Nick frowns, confused. The boy just opens his eyes wide, looking innocent, and the bartender sighs, like there’s a conversation going on silently between the two of them, an old one that by this point doesn’t need to be said out loud.
“I know,” the boy says. “Sorry, Zayn.”
The bartender just sighs again, pours the two of them drinks without being prompted, and heads for the back again, lighting his cigarette before he’s even halfway to the door.
Nick hadn’t known the bartender’s name is Zayn, even though he’s here most of the nights Nick is. Nick hadn’t realized the boy had known, either. The two of them sit in silence for a while, still at opposite ends of the bar. Nick wonders what else he doesn’t realize.
“Your boyfriend’s charming,” he finally says. The boy snorts out a laugh.
“‘S’not my boyfriend, I told you.”
“Well, whatever he is. Right twat.” Nick still feels a bit cheated that he hadn’t got to deck him.
“Trust me,” the boy says after a moment, “I know.” He takes another sip of his pint, audible in the otherwise silent room.
“Okay,” Nick says, gesturing for the boy to come sit near him. “C’mon and tell me about it, then.”
The boy peers at him curiously, but after a moment he stands up, carrying his drink with him, and lowers himself into the seat next to Nick.
“Mostly he can’t stand me,” he says once he’s sat down, laughing mostly humorlessly.
“How d’you know that?” Nick asks.
The boy squints at him, like the answer is obvious. “Well, he tells me enough, t’start with.” He pauses to take a sip from his pint, the long column of his pale throat working delicately as he swallows. “I know how it looks, but, like. He’s got more money than you’d think.” He shrugs, like what can you do about it. “Takes care of me, so...” he trails off. “I, like. Owe him.”
“Nah,” Nick says, quieter than he means to be as he shakes his head. “It doesn’t work like that.”
The boy turns fully to look at him at that, drawing in his eyebrows curiously as a smile quirks on his lips. “What doesn’t?”
“Anything,” Nick says vaguely. “What’s your name?” He’s got more to say, but first, he thinks, he wants to know that much at least. The boy makes him want to keep talking, makes Nick want to find little bits of himself to give him, and he wants to at least know his name before he’s too far into something he can’t stop.
“Harry,” the boy says, still staring at Nick intensely. Nick holds his gaze, looks back just as steadily, because a long time ago he taught himself to never be the one to blink first. Most people look away within seconds. Harry doesn’t, though.
“What I mean, Harry,” he says, twisting his pint around in a slow circle, “is that it doesn’t work like that -- owing someone, or whatever -- because we’re all on our own, yeah? Every last one of us sad masses trudging along.” He walks his fingertips along the sticky bar as if to illustrate his point, pausing for a moment; he half expects Harry to look away, but he just carries on peering at him curiously, like he’s interested in hearing what Nick’s got to say. “‘S’just you you’ve got. No one else.”
“That’s a bit depressing, isn’t it?” Harry asks.
“No,” Nick says, shaking his head. “Not at all. Because if it’s just you, yeah, no one can ever own that. The things you do, the things you’ve got, they’re all yours. That’s brilliant, innit? Freeing, and all that.” Nick thinks so, at least, and unexpectedly finds himself hoping rather a lot that Harry understands his meaning -- he sort of desperately wants Harry to understand.
Harry smiles and draws his eyebrows together at the same time, giving him a look of agreeable curiosity. Nick thinks he’ll take that. “‘S’not what he says,” Harry says.
“He’s wrong, then. You can’t owe anyone anything unless you want to.” He takes a drink, trying to sort out what he means in words. “‘S’like. He gives you food and money, I suppose, yeah? A place to stay?”
Harry nods.
“And you give him... things in return, right?”
Harry nods again, exactly the same way, easy and open and honest.
“But, like. See, he does it because he wants something, yeah? Not out of the goodness of his heart, or anything.” He feels the restlessness creeping up again, making his fingers twitch, and he tries to quiet it, flex his fingers enough to exorcise the need to move, because he wants Harry to hear this, he needs Harry to know. “Greed doesn’t deserve anything in return,” he says slowly. “The more he thinks he deserves you, the less he does.”
Harry’s still peering at him, wide eyes soft and open, an almost rapt expression on his face.
Nick feels almost frantic, like he’s reaching the apex of a roller coaster and is about to plunge off the other side into something free-floating and unmoored. He’s got the sense that Harry’s almost there with him, and he wants to grab him, pull him over the edge. “There’s just you, and the things you do, and if you do get tied up with someone else -- it’s not from greed, or obligation, none of that shit matters. It’s ‘cos of the complete opposite of all that.” He lets his hands fall down at his sides.
“Okay,” Harry says slowly, like he’s working that over. “So what’s the opposite of all that, then?”
Nick shrugs, and smiles, feeling something around them click quietly into place. “Love, obviously.”
-
Nick doesn’t mean to come back. Or at least, he doesn’t mean to come back to look for Harry specifically, now that he’s said his bit, because that should be all -- he can go back to ignoring him, sit alone and have a drink in peace. And if not, there are plenty of other filthy pubs in dodgy areas he can get a drink at, plenty where he can go and sit alone, or possibly find someone stupid and pissed enough to either fuck or goad into trying to start a fight with him, whichever is easiest. Nick’s found that it’s actually quite easy to manipulate drunk people who fancy themselves tough into antagonizing him. Possibly there’s something about his face that just calls for roughing up, or at least an attempt at it.
But he goes back to the bar anyway, looking for Harry before he can help it, and then goes back again. Harry’s not there the first two nights, and Nick sits quietly and drinks alone and goes home without incident, the itch in his fingers staying gone just long enough for him to do so.
One the third night, Harry’s there when Nick shows up, alone, with a dark split healing in the corner of his lower lip. It curls up in a grin when he sees Nick anyway, unflinching, and he comes over to sit next to Nick immediately.
“You didn’t tell me your name,” Harry says, the edge of his hand resting just beside Nick’s, nearly brushing. Nick knows it’s deliberate, but it makes his stomach twist sweetly anyway.
-
“You don’t owe him,” Nick reminds him when he sees him the next week. It’s almost a habit now, Harry shows up every few nights, sitting next to Nick and having a pint. The bloke hasn’t showed up again yet, but Nick reckons he must still be around -- tonight there’s a new mark on Harry’s cheekbone, scraped raw with an undercurrent of a sickly yellow bruise blooming beneath it. “D’you not believe what I told you?”
Harry laughs once, loud and startling and breathtaking. “I do,” he says, voice low and gravelly. Nick wants to grab the sound of it out of the air and hold it in his palm. “He’s not as easy to convince, though. ‘S’got some pretty firm ideas.”
“You don’t love him, though,” Nick says, feeling obvious and frustrated. Harry understands, Nick knows he does, but he’s not doing anything with that, and it makes Nick feel restless all over again.
“‘Course not,” Harry says easily.
“You don’t want to stay with him?”
“No,” Harry agrees again.
“You could get rid of him then.”
“He finds me,” Harry explains.
“Get rid of him better,” Nick says firmly. It’s so simple, he thinks. If only Harry would understand how simple it is. “Get rid of him so he can’t find you.”
Harry considers him, takes even longer than usual to answer. When he does his voice is the same, pitched low, deliberate and deep. “I couldn’t, I don’t think,” he finally says. “It’d have to be someone else.”
The moment that stretches between them at that, delicate and crystalline but becoming thicker and more solid as it goes on, makes Nick’s chest swell, his heart beat with excitement. Harry understands.
“Someone else,” Nick repeats. “You’ve got anyone in mind?”
Harry shrugs. “A friend, I suppose.”
“Mm,” Nick says. “What about your funny sense of debt, though? If your friend helped you out and got rid of him? Wouldn’t you just owe this friend and be right back where you started?”
Harry smiles widely at that, like he’s been expecting Nick to say it. “Not if it was, y’know. Like you said, not if it was the opposite. Not if it was love.” He says the word slowly and carefully, turning it over in his mouth as if he likes the way it feels. “D’you know what I mean?”
Nick smiles back, and gestures for the bartender to bring them each another pint. “I think I do,” he says, and he does, he does, he does.
-
When he leaves the bar that night, out the front exit this time instead of through the back alleys, Harry follows him silently, trailing a few paces behind him easily like it’s a long-standing arrangement. Nick pauses once they set off down the deserted street to see if Harry will catch up to walk beside him, but he doesn’t, stays just behind Nick, following his lead.
“‘S’not far,” Nick tells him, nodding in the general direction of his flat. Harry just nods in agreement, like he’s walked this path a dozen times before, and smiles as he curls into his worn jacket, drawing his shoulders up around his ears. There’s a chill in the air, something damp and creeping that Nick likes -- it makes him feel alert, and a bit dangerous. Harry’s skin glows pale in the flickering light of the street lamps, and he looks perfectly at ease.
“Isn’t it a bit risky, trusting strange blokes like me?” Nick asks as they walk.
Harry just laughs at him. “What would you know about it?” he asks. “Aren’t I the expert in trusting blokes I oughtn’t, anyway?” He looks entirely unfazed, like it hasn’t even occurred to him that Nick’s question probably could be heard a bit threateningly, even though Nick knows he has no intentions to hurt Harry at all. Exactly the opposite, actually -- the only one he’s any worry to is this bloke of Harry’s, or anyone else who might hurt him, because Nick knows, had known immediately that Harry is his to protect, his alone, debtless and permanent. Like fate.
Harry might not know that, though, not yet at least. Nick can’t see how he would. But Harry still follows him anyway, sure and trusting like he’s seen the future written down and knows that it’s alright for him to keep walking off into the darkness.
Nick thinks Harry might be even more fascinating than he’d originally thought.
When they reach Nick’s building, he leads them up the foul stairs to his floor, unlocking his flat and gesturing Harry inside. It’s clean and mostly bare, and dark, but Harry reaches for the switch instinctively like he’s done it a hundred times before.
-
Harry doesn’t go back to the bar. Instead he stays in Nick’s flat while Nick goes round once or twice, but after that even Nick stays away. Harry’s bloke has apparently been looking for him, leveling threats at anyone he thinks might know where Harry’s gone. The bartender -- Zayn, Nick remembers -- had told him, and looked at Nick just slightly too suspiciously.
“Wherever Harry’s gone,” he’d said to Nick, “I hope he’s got someone better than that twat looking after him.”
Nick had wanted to tell him yes, he did, he does, but it’s still his secret, for now, something he’s holding softly in his chest, keeping it all to himself, Harry wrapped up in a quilt in his flat, happy and shirtless and humming along to the record player. So instead he smiles, and nods at Zayn, and when he pays for his tab, he thinks it’s time, and knows that afterward, neither of them will be able to come back.
-
It’s quick, in the end. It’s easy -- almost too much so. Nick makes some phone calls before, gets an old mate to call in a favor on his behalf so that everything can be arranged, afterward. Harry hasn’t got any identification so they pay for all new ones, a passport and a driver’s license. Harry writes down HARRY STYLES in neat capital letters on a slip of paper for Nick, and Nick is sure that’s not his actual surname, but -- but the day he gets his new passport, it is. He’s Harry Styles now.
Nick shoves an old candle he finds in a kitchen drawer into a piece of angel cake that night. “Happy birthday, Harry Styles,” he says, and even though it’s not February 1st, the day listed on all of Harry’s new papers, Nick thinks this is more Harry’s birthday than anything else.
-
He’s not sure if Harry will come with, when it happens, until he’s leaving, and Harry’s pulling on his worn out trainers and jacket and following Nick out of the flat.
“He’s still looking for me, I’ve heard,” he says as they walk through the foggy streets.
“Who’ve you heard it from?” Nick asks, but Harry just shrugs enigmatically.
“You don’t have to come along, y’know,” he says after a while, but Harry just grins, his teeth glinting white in the light from the streetlamps.
“I know,” he says, smiling sweet and wicked. “I want to.”
-
“Surprise,” Harry whispers to the bloke, once they’re inside his flat. Harry’s looming over where the bloke’s sleeping -- they’d let themselves in with Harry’s key, it’d all been so absurdly easy -- and once he gets his eyes open, realizes what’s going on, he moves to sit up angrily, but before he can, Harry dodges out of the way, and Nick presses the man flat on his back again, pinning him down easily, hand shoved over the man’s face, blocking off his mouth. He thrashes around, so Nick pulls his fist back and smashes it into his face, thrilling at the sick crunch of his nose collapsing, the warm trickle of blood that comes out of it. The man goes woozy after a few blows, stops fighting Nick, and that’s when Nick fits his hands around the man’s neck, letting his long fingers splay elegantly over the bloke’s windpipe as he starts to press in, unrelenting.
“You found me,” Harry singsongs from behind Nick as the bloke tries to struggle. “Isn’t that what you wanted? For me to come back?” he asks, and then he laughs, moving in closer to run his own hands over Nick’s where they’re crushing the bloke’s windpipe. He’s still laughing as the bloke falls still, his eyes shutting.
-
“You know we’ve got to go away now,” Nick says to Harry when they’re back at his flat, wrapped up on Nick’s bed with the duvet pulled snugly over their heads like a clean white cave. “For real. Somewhere far off enough that by the time they sort this out, we’ll be untouchable.”
He’s not stupid. He knows they’ll likely sort it out eventually, the police, Scotland Yard, whoever it’ll be -- that part doesn’t bother him. He’d just rather that once they do, he and Harry be as far away as possible.
“I know,” Harry says easily, agreeably.
“Where shall we go?” Nick asks. “Where would you like me to take you?”
Harry considers it. “Mm. America, I think.”
“America’s rather big, yeah? Anywhere in particular?” Nick finds that he’s quite prepared to agree to whatever Harry suggests.
Harry just yawns, though, eyes drifting closed lazily like a kitten. “Surprise me,” he murmurs contentedly, nuzzling sleepily further into the covers of Nick’s bed.
-
It’s still dark the next morning when they arrive at the airport, their hastily packed bags slung over their shoulders. Harry’s got a beanie jammed over his curls, and he looks utterly at peace, even in the eerie glow of the terminal at four in the morning.
Nick buys them tickets on the next flight to the states, not even bothering to make note of where it will take them.
“He deserved to die,” Harry says quietly as they wait to board. He sounds sure of it, and soft, no hint of remorse in his voice -- more than anything he just sounds happy, and he leans in closer to Nick to grin at him.
Nick smiles back, reaching an arm around his shoulder and pulling him in closer. He doesn’t need to be convinced.
-
When they’re above the clouds, Harry turns to Nick with a curious look in his eye. “Why d’you think we found each other?” he asks, curling into Nick’s arm happily.
Nick considers it. He looks at Harry, and then past him, out the window and down where London is receding beneath them, blanketed by a layer of gray. He can’t see it, can’t see the city or any of the things still left in it, the broken bits and layers of grime and their fingerprints everywhere. It’s all so small beneath them, turning into nothing at all.
“I suppose it was probably fate,” Nick finally says.
“Fate,” Harry repeats. He’s quiet for a bit, like he’s thinking it over, but then he says it again, “fate,” and this time he’s agreeing.
--------------------
missouri
oklahoma
kansas, colorado, new mexico
“Nobody knows it was us,” Harry pouts. His bare feet are propped up on the dashboard of the car -- of their car. Nick loves their car. It’s stolen, so they’ll have to abandon it eventually, and the thought makes him inordinately sad. But there’s no public transit in the middle of the Great Plains, obviously, just miles and miles of open freeway and country roads and so much open sky, so as soon as they’d arrived, Harry’d picked out a car -- this car, their car now. It’s vintage, cherry red under a layer of dust kicked up by the road and the wind, low and wide with a crank-down top, and even though it feels like everything inside of it is flipped, on the wrong side, Nick’s willing to overlook that bit, because it’s theirs. He doesn’t know the first thing about cars, but he knows he likes this one, feels like it’s been theirs all along, just waiting for them to nick it out of a nearly-empty car park in front of a run-down supermarket outside of St. Louis where it’d been left idling. He wonders if it’s normal to form an emotional attachment to that sort of thing.
“Generally that’s a good thing, Haz, when you’ve murdered someone.” Nick doesn’t think that ought to need saying, but Harry clearly has his own set of rules for everything.
It’d been in the news, although just in a passing mention, two lines stuck in one of the local papers back home. Apparently junkies without family get murdered enough in London that it’s hardly news when it happens. They’d never have seen it if Harry hadn’t been checking for it since they landed, refreshing an assortment of news sites on his mobile over and over, frowning in something like disappointment. Two days ago he’d finally spotted a write-up on it while Nick had been pulling them up to a fast food restaurant’s window, and whooped so loud Nick had almost dropped their milkshakes.
He’s less excited now, though, chewing his lip in a pathetic way.
“I want them to know,” Harry says with a pout.
“Who?” Nick asks.
“Everyone,” Harry breathes out dreamily.
“Tell them, then,” Nick says with a shrug, shifting gears and pushing his sunglasses up where they’ve started to slip down his nose. “Call up the Sun and tell ‘em you want to sell your story. ‘I Was A Teenage Murderer’ or summat, they’ll eat it up.” Nick isn’t worried about being caught. If anything, he’s worried about getting bored. It’s been a week now since they’ve landed in the states, and besides pinch the car that first day, all they’ve done is drive and drive. They stayed three nights in St. Louis after they’d arrived, took the car, and they’ve been driving since then, picking idly west towards nothing at all in particular. Harry’d sent them veering north at first, and then they’d dipped south again, and by the time they’d gotten to Oklahoma, Nick had given up on the map entirely, instead only turning when it struck one of them.
“Maybe I will,” Harry muses, gazing out over the fields that are rolling by, bronze and gold in the sun that’s starting to cut horizontally through the sky. He crosses and recrosses his feet. “Are we stopping soon?” he asks Nick.
“If you like, love,” Nick tells him. There’d been a sign a few miles back, a turn off with a motel and a diner, and sure enough after a few minutes Nick spots it, a bright neon arrow pointing at small oasis of lights and sounds in the middle of the vast fields.
-
Harry does tell them. He doesn’t mention it to Nick before he does, but two days later he hears Harry on his mobile, talking to someone around a grin that stretches his whole mouth to the very edges. Nick’s on the patio off their motel room, a concrete slab with four deep cracks running through it just outside of the sliding glass door. It looks out over a gas station and a restaurant, and beyond that, the wide, vast space of dirt and grass and further off, rolling hills, the inorganic straight cut of the highway the only interruption. Harry’s voice inside is a low, happy murmur, and Nick squints out over the expanse in front of him, runs his bare feet over the crack in the concrete, before tugging the door open.
“He deserved it, that’s why,” Harry’s saying when Nick steps back into the room. He pauses and waits, and Nick hasn’t any idea who he’s got on the other end of the phone line, but he imagines that whoever it is must be at least sort of convinced that Harry’s not lying, since they haven’t hung up yet. Nick wonders if Harry’s recited some of the details of what they’d done to the bloke back in London to convince whoever it is he’s talking to. The thought of it sends a thrill through Nick, and he creeps up behind Harry quietly, resting his chin on the bare curve of his shoulder.
“Anyone else?” Harry repeats, and pauses, twisting his neck to peer at Nick, his eyes brilliant and wild. He smiles and leans down to lick a stripe across Nick’s chin, biting down just slightly at his jaw when he’s finished, and then turns his attention back to the phone. “No,” he says to the person on the other end. “Not yet, anyway.”
-
More papers in London pick up the story, run the headline of the murderous duo who left the country only to call home to confess their crimes. They find out their names and run pictures of them -- a terrible old shot of Nick that he can’t imagine how they’ve found, and one of Harry at the seaside on holiday from years before. It must be old, because his arms are bare in it, and he hasn’t got any of his tattoos.
It thrills Nick, and he can tell it thrills Harry as well. He keeps track of it all, showing Nick any bits of press he finds about them, smiling giddily as he does. It’s amazing, Nick thinks, all those people knowing what he’d done to that bloke who’d deserved it. He runs through the details of it at night before he falls asleep, remembering the way the man had jerked and then fallen still, the way Harry had laughed, the peaceful, uninterrupted night’s sleep he’d gotten afterward. He thinks the memory is the most beautiful one he’s got, and holds it in close.
-
The first gun Harry finds in the trunk of the stolen red convertible, just a few days after they pick it up in St. Louis. “Oh, wicked,” he’d whispered as he loaded their bags into the car as they’d been leaving a motel. He’d leaned down and straightened up a moment later, holding an old revolver, wrapped up carefully in a dirty handkerchief.
“D’you have any idea how to use that?” Nick had asked him.
Harry had grinned, and it’d been more dangerous and more gorgeous than the actual gun he’d been holding.
“I’ll figure it out,” he’d said, pointing it across the car park carefully, closing one eye as he did. It hadn’t been aimed at anything, just the emptiness at the end of the concrete. “You and me, we’ll learn.”
-
The day after they leave the motel in Oklahoma where Harry’d called in his confession -- the thought of which makes Nick want to laugh into the empty air all around them, an empty two-lane highway with only fence posts and distant hills to hear him, to listen to the absurd idea that he’s killed someone, and told about it afterward, and they’re still alone and wild and free, god, it makes him want to laugh -- Harry tells him to keep driving into the night, far later than they usually would’ve stopped for the night.
“Pull off here,” he says eventually, leaning over the space between them so he can whisper it in Nick’s ear. His seat belt is stretched taut across his chest, pulling the neck of his shirt down, and the way he looks in the moonlight makes Nick want to bite his collarbones until he cries out.
They wind up on top of a bluff, the flat hollow of a valley spreading out beneath them, the sound of crickets drifting up and surrounding them like a cloud.
“What’re we doing here?” Nick asks as he shuts off the car, the headlights flickering out so that the only light is the moon, full and bright above them.
Harry just smiles at him, teeth bright in the moonlight. “Practicing.”
“Practicing what?” Nick asks, but Harry doesn’t answer, just tumbles graceless out of the car and lopes around back to open the trunk. When he slams it shut again, he’s got two guns out, a handgun and a pistol, one in each hand.
“Practicing these,” he says softly. “I want --” He pauses and cocks a hip against the car, trying to sort out of the right words. “I want to be ready,” he finally settles on. Nick doesn’t ask what he wants to be ready for -- anything, probably.
So instead he follows Harry up to the top of the hill, kicking at clods of dirt as he goes. Harry folds his legs up and sits, and sets to loading the guns.
“D’you know what you’re doing?” Nick asks.
Harry waves his hand dismissively. “Looked it up,” he says, which is distinctly not an answer.
He must, though, because he moves through it confidently, his long fingers unusually graceful as they open the chambers and load in the rounds, long and sleek over the steel, shutting them both with a click.
“You go first,” he says to Nick when he’s finished, holding the pistol out to him handle first.
Nick stares at it, considering, before finally taking it. It feels odd, somehow strange and familiar all at once, like someone he’d used to know but whose name he’s forgotten.
“You can’t laugh if I’m rubbish,” he warns Harry, standing up. His hand doesn’t shake as he aims across the field at a low copse of shrubs. He’s squeezing the trigger before he even realizes it’s happening.
He tries not to make a sound but lets out a small little gasp anyway, the vibrations of the shot ringing in his ear and traveling up his arm. He shoots three more times, each hitting more or less the same spot on the shrubs, and the feeling just gets stronger, louder.
“You now,” he finally tells Harry. But he’s already got the second gun out, pointed at the same spot Nick had aimed for. His hips are cocked and his tongue pokes through his teeth as he squints, concentrating, before he shoots. It goes slightly wide, sending up a plume of dust when it hits the ground, but he tries again, each time a bit closer.
By the time Harry’s halfway through his ammunition, Nick is spectacularly hard. His own gun is still held loosely in his hand, hanging beside his leg, and he suddenly needs to put his hands on Harry, needs to do it as soon as humanly possibly. The long line of him, his loose shirt and tight trousers lit up by the thin blue moonlight, brow furrowed in concentration as he takes aim across a vast empty meadow, is too much for Nick.
He tries to make himself focus, raises his own gun back up to squeeze off the rest of his shots, aiming for the same spot with moderate success, but then both of them are out of bullets, and the lack of sound rings loudly in the air. Nick tosses his own gun to the dirt and strides over to Harry in two long steps. His own gun clatters down as well, and in an instant Nick has Harry’s trousers open, wrapping his long fingers around his cock, just as hard as Nick’s.
“Jesus, Nick,” Harry gasps, wrapping his arms around Nick’s neck and hanging limply as Nick wanks him off in short, sharp jerks.
“You’re good,” Nick says, “you’re so good,” and he’s not even sure what he means but he wants Harry to hear, wants him to know it while he pants and falls apart under his hand, coming hot between them with a groan and a whine.
“We’ll have to practice more, obviously,” Harry gasps into his neck once he’s collected himself.
Nick nods, but he doesn’t respond, too distracted by the pluck of Harry’s long fingers undoing the buttons on his jeans, the dark smell of smoke and gunpowder wrapping around them both like a blanket.
( part two)
nc-17, 30,000 words
natural born killers AU
harry/nick, brief harry/louis/nick
also on ao3
a/n: written for the reel_1d challenge for the prompt based on the movie natural born killers, so please be aware of the warnings for graphic violence, minor character death, murder, implied abuse / non-con... and i guess spoilers for a movie that's 19 years old?
as always thank you so much to my princess lane for reading this over and encouraging me and basically being the best person in the whole world. also i'm on tumblr if you care to contact me there.
london
Nick is not drunk. He’s not even close. He’s got an itch beneath his fingernails, something familiar that keeps coming back like a dog no matter how often he tries to kick it, and he knows that whatever it is, getting pissed isn’t going to help. He’s tried, and it only makes the feeling multiply. Like spores, like insects. Alcohol doesn’t help, and drugs or boys or both only rarely -- whatever it is, it sticks around. It makes his hands restless, and he fiddles with his pint, picking at the chip in the dirty glass idly with the side of his thumb.
He’s used to restlessness.
The bar is almost entirely empty, and Nick only notices the boy sat at the opposite end of the bar once the bloke walks in, the door slamming behind him as he lopes over to the opposite end of the bar and looms over him. The man is tall and a bit rat-faced, menacing in a completely generic way. Nick’s seen a thousand variations on this type, and they’re always so predictable, hot tempered with no intelligence to back it up, patched-together rage that amounts to absolutely nothing. It bores Nick to tears.
The boy he’s looming over, though -- he’s unusual. He’s new. The bar itself is foul, a dark cave of low ceilings and an uneven concrete floor, usually vacant save for a handful of unsavory types, the sort that all start to look the same after a while. This boy, though, he’s something else entirely -- long limbs and sharp angles, but something soft to him as well. He can’t be older than eighteen, nineteen, and his curls tumble messily around his face as he stares down at the bar, avoiding the other man’s eyes. His shirt is ratty and torn a bit around the neck, but he’s still bright and sharp, conspicuously incongruous in the foul room.
Nick puts down his pint and lets himself look, at the boy and the man both. Mostly the boy, if he’s being honest -- something he tries to be, at least with himself.
They’re arguing about something, but it’s low and far away enough that Nick can’t hear what. Actually, it’s the man arguing, still looming and scowling, obviously trying to throw his height around like it ought to be intimidating, and to Nick it just seems desperate and a bit sad. The boy is ignoring him steadfastly, staring down at his hands -- big and wide, with long fingers that taper off almost elegantly, again out of place -- where they’re wrapped around his drink. The man says something sharply, and when it fails to get the boys attention, jerks him rather violently by the shoulder he’s got hunched up near his chin. Unexpectedly, the boy smiles, still looking down. It’s so quick that Nick thinks he’s imagined it for a moment, a sharp flash of something secret, something quiet and just this side of unpredictable and almost violent, that Nick can’t look away -- if he does it again, Nick wants to see.
Distantly, he knows that staring so blatantly is a quick way to make trouble for himself, especially somewhere like this bar, but he can’t find it in himself to stop.
A moment later, the bloke is shouting something foul in the boy’s face -- which remains placid the whole time, neutral in a way that Nick finds vaguely impressive -- and then grabs at him, pulling him up and out of his chair.
The boy glances back to the rest of the room as the other bloke manhandles him, yanking him indelicately by the upper arm towards the back exit. His long legs trail awkwardly behind him as they go, getting caught up on the legs of chairs and nearly knocking one over in his wake.
As they reach the door, the boy turns back and makes eye contact with Nick, the first time he’s done so -- Nick hadn’t been sure the boy had even realized anyone else was in the pub with him. Nick raises his glass a few inches and nods, and the boy just shrugs and smiles again, this time caught somewhere between wry and apologetic, before he’s pulled through the exit sharply, the door shutting solidly behind him as he goes.
-
The boy’s back several nights later. Nick tells himself not to feel a jolt of pleasure when he turns up and sees the boy sitting in that same spot at the end of the bar, but he does anyway.
He’s alone, no sign of the bloke from before, and the bartender keeps disappearing round back for long stretches of time, so it’s just the two of them. Nick resolves to talk to the boy sooner rather than -- he’s not keen on sitting around silently again, staring at strange boys like a lech. He’d much rather do something about it. He’s never been any good at inactivity.
He waits, though, sipping his drink, and before the right moment presents itself, the bloke shows up again. He doesn’t say anything, just leans on the bar next to the boy, mostly blocking Nick’s line of sight, which probably isn’t a bad thing if he doesn’t want to get his teeth knocked out for staring. He doesn’t, incidentally, but he’s still fascinated by this boy despite himself, so he carries on peering at him as best he can.
The boy turns his face up expectantly at the man, waiting for something that Nick can’t figure out what it might be, but the man just whispers a few sharp sentences at the boy -- Nick only catches “any idea what time” and “ought to have” -- before the man scoffs and turns on his heels, out the back door in a few long strides without a backwards glance.
Once he’s sure the bloke’s not coming back, Nick sets his pint down noisily. When the boy doesn’t look up at him, he clears his throat. It takes two more tries before the boy notices him, or at least for him to react, but when he does, he lifts his eyes and stares so directly that it takes Nick a moment to gather himself and sort out what he wants to say.
“S’your boyfriend?” Nick asks eventually, nodding his head towards the door the man left through.
The boy shrugs. “Not, um. Sort of, but. ‘S’not really like that.” His voice is low, deeper than Nick would’ve guessed, and slow. It’s a rather nice voice. It goes well with his face.
“Yeah?” Nick asks, but the boy doesn’t elaborate, just blushes a bit, then smiles and looks down at his hands.
“D’you want another drink?” Nick offers. The bartender’s still off somewhere, but Nick’s got no qualms about going around and getting himself a drink if he needs to, and doubly so if it’s for this too pretty boy, who’s still managing to look so out of place and not all at once.
The boy just shakes his head slowly, and carries on looking down at his folded hands and his nearly empty pint. Nick shrugs. “Suit yourself. The offer stands, though.”
“Thanks,” he says to the flat surface of the bartop, still smiling in an unknowable way.
-
The boy leaves eventually, and Nick hangs about for a bit before slinking out back after his second pint, still sober. The back alley is full of broken pallets and rubbish bins that are knocked over, and he steps around broken glass and scraps of food as he picks through the maze of twisting corridors and alleys towards his flat. It’s easier if he goes round on the main road, more straightforward and less labyrinthine, but this way’s quicker, so he figures it’s a trade-off.
Several doors down from the bar he hears a sound coming from one of the dark corners that branches off between two run-down blocks of flats, and he slows down enough to glance down the alley casually as he passes.
About halfway down the bloke from the bar has the boy shoved up against the brick wall, one hand fisted in his curly hair, the other shoved down the front of his trousers. The boy’s hips are pressing forward, meeting the blokes hand as it jerks erratically, but he’s staring off over the bloke’s shoulder, his eyes locked onto something Nick can’t see from this angle, not without stopping at least.
Nick lets out a small hmm, and although he thinks the boy shouldn’t have been able to hear him across the distance, he still glances over in the next moment. Nick freezes, waits for the boy to shout something at him, telling him to piss off or something, but he doesn’t. He just smiles enigmatically at Nick, the whites of his eyes shining, and then after a moment looks away again, fixing his eyes on the spot just past the bloke’s shoulder.
Nick hesitates for a moment to see if the boy will look back, but when he doesn’t, he forces himself to shake his head, and walk back to his flat, carefully avoiding looking down any more alleys as he goes.
-
Both of them, the boy and his bloke, are back at the pub the next time Nick stops in. Only this time, they’re arguing loudly, or at least the bloke is, shouting all sorts of things at the boy as Nick sits down at the bar. His voice is thin and reedy, filling up the otherwise empty room. The boy, for his part, is again steadfastly ignoring him, which only seems to infuriate the bloke more.
As Nick sits down at the opposite end of the bar, he thinks maybe the bloke will stop now that there’s an audience -- they’d been the only two there until Nick had come in, no sign of even the bartender. But the bloke carries on, working himself up into enough of a rage that his rat-like face starts to go red.
Nick tries to ignore it, assuming he’ll eventually tire himself out, but after several minutes with the bloke showing no sign of stopping, he thinks he might not have a choice but to involve himself. The thought doesn’t necessarily upset him.
“Look at me when I’m talking,” the bloke says, and when the boy doesn’t, the bloke grabs him hard, one hand fisting the collar of the boy’s shirt and the other yanking his chin so hard that his neck jerks. Nick winces and looks away.
“Alright,” he says firmly. He stares at himself in the cracked mirror that hangs behind the bar instead. His hair’s starting to go flat, and his fingers are white where he’s flexing them. “That’s enough.”
His voice startles the bloke, apparently, and he turns away from the boy slowly to glare at Nick.
“Don’t reckon this concerns you, mate,” the bloke says.
“Actually,” Nick says steadily, swiveling to meet his gaze, “I reckon it does.”
The bloke lets go of the boy where he’s got him by the collar and turns to Nick, taking a few steps closer.
“Fuck off,” he says, flexing his hands and puffing out his thin chest in a way that’s obviously meant to be intimidating.
Nick stands up to his full height, and he hopes this areshole tries to hit him, God, he does, because it’ll be the absolute most satisfying thing in the world to watch him try it, expect Nick to fold in like crumpled paper, and then go from smug to surprised in an instant when Nick decks him, leveling him on the dirty concrete floor. Nick can see it playing out behind his eyes like a film, and he has to keep himself from laughing in anticipation.
“See, that’s actually what I was going to say. Seems like you’re bothering him, and you’re definitely bothering me, so why don’t you fuck off and leave us to our drinks?” He ignores the fact that he hasn’t actually got a drink yet, choosing to consider it artistic license.
The man glares some more, widening his stance and obviously not intending to go that easily. “What’d you say to me?”
“D’you have a problem with your hearing as well as your manners?” Nick asks. He can feel his pulse narrowing, speeding up, and the fingers in his right hand tense into a fist as the man walks a few steps deliberately closer. “You must, I think.”
The bloke jumps at that, knocking over a stool as he makes for Nick, and Nick closes his eyes for just an instant, savoring the moment before it happens. The bloke swings wildly at him and misses by a mile, too far away still, but before he can get close enough to Nick to make contact, the bartender appears, getting between the two of them in a flash. He gets a hand on the bloke’s collar, yanking him hard away from Nick and saying something firmly to him, but Nick can’t hear it, his ears swimming slightly. Nick hadn’t expected that -- he’d fully expected to break the bloke’s nose against the surface of the bar at the very least, and the change in the script throws him. By the time he reorients himself, the bloke’s slamming out the front door, still angry, but he doesn’t look back as he goes.
“Don’t pull that shit in here, yeah?” the bartender’s saying to him, already back behind the bar and pulling a cigarette out of his pack to tuck behind his ear. He shoves up his sleeves, showing off dark swirls of tattoos on his forearms. “I know he started it, but I don’t give a fuck, I’ll toss you both out next time.”
Nick nods easily enough, folding himself back down into his seat.
“And you...” he says to the boy, his voice going from rough to something like sad so quickly that Nick frowns, confused. The boy just opens his eyes wide, looking innocent, and the bartender sighs, like there’s a conversation going on silently between the two of them, an old one that by this point doesn’t need to be said out loud.
“I know,” the boy says. “Sorry, Zayn.”
The bartender just sighs again, pours the two of them drinks without being prompted, and heads for the back again, lighting his cigarette before he’s even halfway to the door.
Nick hadn’t known the bartender’s name is Zayn, even though he’s here most of the nights Nick is. Nick hadn’t realized the boy had known, either. The two of them sit in silence for a while, still at opposite ends of the bar. Nick wonders what else he doesn’t realize.
“Your boyfriend’s charming,” he finally says. The boy snorts out a laugh.
“‘S’not my boyfriend, I told you.”
“Well, whatever he is. Right twat.” Nick still feels a bit cheated that he hadn’t got to deck him.
“Trust me,” the boy says after a moment, “I know.” He takes another sip of his pint, audible in the otherwise silent room.
“Okay,” Nick says, gesturing for the boy to come sit near him. “C’mon and tell me about it, then.”
The boy peers at him curiously, but after a moment he stands up, carrying his drink with him, and lowers himself into the seat next to Nick.
“Mostly he can’t stand me,” he says once he’s sat down, laughing mostly humorlessly.
“How d’you know that?” Nick asks.
The boy squints at him, like the answer is obvious. “Well, he tells me enough, t’start with.” He pauses to take a sip from his pint, the long column of his pale throat working delicately as he swallows. “I know how it looks, but, like. He’s got more money than you’d think.” He shrugs, like what can you do about it. “Takes care of me, so...” he trails off. “I, like. Owe him.”
“Nah,” Nick says, quieter than he means to be as he shakes his head. “It doesn’t work like that.”
The boy turns fully to look at him at that, drawing in his eyebrows curiously as a smile quirks on his lips. “What doesn’t?”
“Anything,” Nick says vaguely. “What’s your name?” He’s got more to say, but first, he thinks, he wants to know that much at least. The boy makes him want to keep talking, makes Nick want to find little bits of himself to give him, and he wants to at least know his name before he’s too far into something he can’t stop.
“Harry,” the boy says, still staring at Nick intensely. Nick holds his gaze, looks back just as steadily, because a long time ago he taught himself to never be the one to blink first. Most people look away within seconds. Harry doesn’t, though.
“What I mean, Harry,” he says, twisting his pint around in a slow circle, “is that it doesn’t work like that -- owing someone, or whatever -- because we’re all on our own, yeah? Every last one of us sad masses trudging along.” He walks his fingertips along the sticky bar as if to illustrate his point, pausing for a moment; he half expects Harry to look away, but he just carries on peering at him curiously, like he’s interested in hearing what Nick’s got to say. “‘S’just you you’ve got. No one else.”
“That’s a bit depressing, isn’t it?” Harry asks.
“No,” Nick says, shaking his head. “Not at all. Because if it’s just you, yeah, no one can ever own that. The things you do, the things you’ve got, they’re all yours. That’s brilliant, innit? Freeing, and all that.” Nick thinks so, at least, and unexpectedly finds himself hoping rather a lot that Harry understands his meaning -- he sort of desperately wants Harry to understand.
Harry smiles and draws his eyebrows together at the same time, giving him a look of agreeable curiosity. Nick thinks he’ll take that. “‘S’not what he says,” Harry says.
“He’s wrong, then. You can’t owe anyone anything unless you want to.” He takes a drink, trying to sort out what he means in words. “‘S’like. He gives you food and money, I suppose, yeah? A place to stay?”
Harry nods.
“And you give him... things in return, right?”
Harry nods again, exactly the same way, easy and open and honest.
“But, like. See, he does it because he wants something, yeah? Not out of the goodness of his heart, or anything.” He feels the restlessness creeping up again, making his fingers twitch, and he tries to quiet it, flex his fingers enough to exorcise the need to move, because he wants Harry to hear this, he needs Harry to know. “Greed doesn’t deserve anything in return,” he says slowly. “The more he thinks he deserves you, the less he does.”
Harry’s still peering at him, wide eyes soft and open, an almost rapt expression on his face.
Nick feels almost frantic, like he’s reaching the apex of a roller coaster and is about to plunge off the other side into something free-floating and unmoored. He’s got the sense that Harry’s almost there with him, and he wants to grab him, pull him over the edge. “There’s just you, and the things you do, and if you do get tied up with someone else -- it’s not from greed, or obligation, none of that shit matters. It’s ‘cos of the complete opposite of all that.” He lets his hands fall down at his sides.
“Okay,” Harry says slowly, like he’s working that over. “So what’s the opposite of all that, then?”
Nick shrugs, and smiles, feeling something around them click quietly into place. “Love, obviously.”
-
Nick doesn’t mean to come back. Or at least, he doesn’t mean to come back to look for Harry specifically, now that he’s said his bit, because that should be all -- he can go back to ignoring him, sit alone and have a drink in peace. And if not, there are plenty of other filthy pubs in dodgy areas he can get a drink at, plenty where he can go and sit alone, or possibly find someone stupid and pissed enough to either fuck or goad into trying to start a fight with him, whichever is easiest. Nick’s found that it’s actually quite easy to manipulate drunk people who fancy themselves tough into antagonizing him. Possibly there’s something about his face that just calls for roughing up, or at least an attempt at it.
But he goes back to the bar anyway, looking for Harry before he can help it, and then goes back again. Harry’s not there the first two nights, and Nick sits quietly and drinks alone and goes home without incident, the itch in his fingers staying gone just long enough for him to do so.
One the third night, Harry’s there when Nick shows up, alone, with a dark split healing in the corner of his lower lip. It curls up in a grin when he sees Nick anyway, unflinching, and he comes over to sit next to Nick immediately.
“You didn’t tell me your name,” Harry says, the edge of his hand resting just beside Nick’s, nearly brushing. Nick knows it’s deliberate, but it makes his stomach twist sweetly anyway.
-
“You don’t owe him,” Nick reminds him when he sees him the next week. It’s almost a habit now, Harry shows up every few nights, sitting next to Nick and having a pint. The bloke hasn’t showed up again yet, but Nick reckons he must still be around -- tonight there’s a new mark on Harry’s cheekbone, scraped raw with an undercurrent of a sickly yellow bruise blooming beneath it. “D’you not believe what I told you?”
Harry laughs once, loud and startling and breathtaking. “I do,” he says, voice low and gravelly. Nick wants to grab the sound of it out of the air and hold it in his palm. “He’s not as easy to convince, though. ‘S’got some pretty firm ideas.”
“You don’t love him, though,” Nick says, feeling obvious and frustrated. Harry understands, Nick knows he does, but he’s not doing anything with that, and it makes Nick feel restless all over again.
“‘Course not,” Harry says easily.
“You don’t want to stay with him?”
“No,” Harry agrees again.
“You could get rid of him then.”
“He finds me,” Harry explains.
“Get rid of him better,” Nick says firmly. It’s so simple, he thinks. If only Harry would understand how simple it is. “Get rid of him so he can’t find you.”
Harry considers him, takes even longer than usual to answer. When he does his voice is the same, pitched low, deliberate and deep. “I couldn’t, I don’t think,” he finally says. “It’d have to be someone else.”
The moment that stretches between them at that, delicate and crystalline but becoming thicker and more solid as it goes on, makes Nick’s chest swell, his heart beat with excitement. Harry understands.
“Someone else,” Nick repeats. “You’ve got anyone in mind?”
Harry shrugs. “A friend, I suppose.”
“Mm,” Nick says. “What about your funny sense of debt, though? If your friend helped you out and got rid of him? Wouldn’t you just owe this friend and be right back where you started?”
Harry smiles widely at that, like he’s been expecting Nick to say it. “Not if it was, y’know. Like you said, not if it was the opposite. Not if it was love.” He says the word slowly and carefully, turning it over in his mouth as if he likes the way it feels. “D’you know what I mean?”
Nick smiles back, and gestures for the bartender to bring them each another pint. “I think I do,” he says, and he does, he does, he does.
-
When he leaves the bar that night, out the front exit this time instead of through the back alleys, Harry follows him silently, trailing a few paces behind him easily like it’s a long-standing arrangement. Nick pauses once they set off down the deserted street to see if Harry will catch up to walk beside him, but he doesn’t, stays just behind Nick, following his lead.
“‘S’not far,” Nick tells him, nodding in the general direction of his flat. Harry just nods in agreement, like he’s walked this path a dozen times before, and smiles as he curls into his worn jacket, drawing his shoulders up around his ears. There’s a chill in the air, something damp and creeping that Nick likes -- it makes him feel alert, and a bit dangerous. Harry’s skin glows pale in the flickering light of the street lamps, and he looks perfectly at ease.
“Isn’t it a bit risky, trusting strange blokes like me?” Nick asks as they walk.
Harry just laughs at him. “What would you know about it?” he asks. “Aren’t I the expert in trusting blokes I oughtn’t, anyway?” He looks entirely unfazed, like it hasn’t even occurred to him that Nick’s question probably could be heard a bit threateningly, even though Nick knows he has no intentions to hurt Harry at all. Exactly the opposite, actually -- the only one he’s any worry to is this bloke of Harry’s, or anyone else who might hurt him, because Nick knows, had known immediately that Harry is his to protect, his alone, debtless and permanent. Like fate.
Harry might not know that, though, not yet at least. Nick can’t see how he would. But Harry still follows him anyway, sure and trusting like he’s seen the future written down and knows that it’s alright for him to keep walking off into the darkness.
Nick thinks Harry might be even more fascinating than he’d originally thought.
When they reach Nick’s building, he leads them up the foul stairs to his floor, unlocking his flat and gesturing Harry inside. It’s clean and mostly bare, and dark, but Harry reaches for the switch instinctively like he’s done it a hundred times before.
-
Harry doesn’t go back to the bar. Instead he stays in Nick’s flat while Nick goes round once or twice, but after that even Nick stays away. Harry’s bloke has apparently been looking for him, leveling threats at anyone he thinks might know where Harry’s gone. The bartender -- Zayn, Nick remembers -- had told him, and looked at Nick just slightly too suspiciously.
“Wherever Harry’s gone,” he’d said to Nick, “I hope he’s got someone better than that twat looking after him.”
Nick had wanted to tell him yes, he did, he does, but it’s still his secret, for now, something he’s holding softly in his chest, keeping it all to himself, Harry wrapped up in a quilt in his flat, happy and shirtless and humming along to the record player. So instead he smiles, and nods at Zayn, and when he pays for his tab, he thinks it’s time, and knows that afterward, neither of them will be able to come back.
-
It’s quick, in the end. It’s easy -- almost too much so. Nick makes some phone calls before, gets an old mate to call in a favor on his behalf so that everything can be arranged, afterward. Harry hasn’t got any identification so they pay for all new ones, a passport and a driver’s license. Harry writes down HARRY STYLES in neat capital letters on a slip of paper for Nick, and Nick is sure that’s not his actual surname, but -- but the day he gets his new passport, it is. He’s Harry Styles now.
Nick shoves an old candle he finds in a kitchen drawer into a piece of angel cake that night. “Happy birthday, Harry Styles,” he says, and even though it’s not February 1st, the day listed on all of Harry’s new papers, Nick thinks this is more Harry’s birthday than anything else.
-
He’s not sure if Harry will come with, when it happens, until he’s leaving, and Harry’s pulling on his worn out trainers and jacket and following Nick out of the flat.
“He’s still looking for me, I’ve heard,” he says as they walk through the foggy streets.
“Who’ve you heard it from?” Nick asks, but Harry just shrugs enigmatically.
“You don’t have to come along, y’know,” he says after a while, but Harry just grins, his teeth glinting white in the light from the streetlamps.
“I know,” he says, smiling sweet and wicked. “I want to.”
-
“Surprise,” Harry whispers to the bloke, once they’re inside his flat. Harry’s looming over where the bloke’s sleeping -- they’d let themselves in with Harry’s key, it’d all been so absurdly easy -- and once he gets his eyes open, realizes what’s going on, he moves to sit up angrily, but before he can, Harry dodges out of the way, and Nick presses the man flat on his back again, pinning him down easily, hand shoved over the man’s face, blocking off his mouth. He thrashes around, so Nick pulls his fist back and smashes it into his face, thrilling at the sick crunch of his nose collapsing, the warm trickle of blood that comes out of it. The man goes woozy after a few blows, stops fighting Nick, and that’s when Nick fits his hands around the man’s neck, letting his long fingers splay elegantly over the bloke’s windpipe as he starts to press in, unrelenting.
“You found me,” Harry singsongs from behind Nick as the bloke tries to struggle. “Isn’t that what you wanted? For me to come back?” he asks, and then he laughs, moving in closer to run his own hands over Nick’s where they’re crushing the bloke’s windpipe. He’s still laughing as the bloke falls still, his eyes shutting.
-
“You know we’ve got to go away now,” Nick says to Harry when they’re back at his flat, wrapped up on Nick’s bed with the duvet pulled snugly over their heads like a clean white cave. “For real. Somewhere far off enough that by the time they sort this out, we’ll be untouchable.”
He’s not stupid. He knows they’ll likely sort it out eventually, the police, Scotland Yard, whoever it’ll be -- that part doesn’t bother him. He’d just rather that once they do, he and Harry be as far away as possible.
“I know,” Harry says easily, agreeably.
“Where shall we go?” Nick asks. “Where would you like me to take you?”
Harry considers it. “Mm. America, I think.”
“America’s rather big, yeah? Anywhere in particular?” Nick finds that he’s quite prepared to agree to whatever Harry suggests.
Harry just yawns, though, eyes drifting closed lazily like a kitten. “Surprise me,” he murmurs contentedly, nuzzling sleepily further into the covers of Nick’s bed.
-
It’s still dark the next morning when they arrive at the airport, their hastily packed bags slung over their shoulders. Harry’s got a beanie jammed over his curls, and he looks utterly at peace, even in the eerie glow of the terminal at four in the morning.
Nick buys them tickets on the next flight to the states, not even bothering to make note of where it will take them.
“He deserved to die,” Harry says quietly as they wait to board. He sounds sure of it, and soft, no hint of remorse in his voice -- more than anything he just sounds happy, and he leans in closer to Nick to grin at him.
Nick smiles back, reaching an arm around his shoulder and pulling him in closer. He doesn’t need to be convinced.
-
When they’re above the clouds, Harry turns to Nick with a curious look in his eye. “Why d’you think we found each other?” he asks, curling into Nick’s arm happily.
Nick considers it. He looks at Harry, and then past him, out the window and down where London is receding beneath them, blanketed by a layer of gray. He can’t see it, can’t see the city or any of the things still left in it, the broken bits and layers of grime and their fingerprints everywhere. It’s all so small beneath them, turning into nothing at all.
“I suppose it was probably fate,” Nick finally says.
“Fate,” Harry repeats. He’s quiet for a bit, like he’s thinking it over, but then he says it again, “fate,” and this time he’s agreeing.
--------------------
missouri
oklahoma
kansas, colorado, new mexico
“Nobody knows it was us,” Harry pouts. His bare feet are propped up on the dashboard of the car -- of their car. Nick loves their car. It’s stolen, so they’ll have to abandon it eventually, and the thought makes him inordinately sad. But there’s no public transit in the middle of the Great Plains, obviously, just miles and miles of open freeway and country roads and so much open sky, so as soon as they’d arrived, Harry’d picked out a car -- this car, their car now. It’s vintage, cherry red under a layer of dust kicked up by the road and the wind, low and wide with a crank-down top, and even though it feels like everything inside of it is flipped, on the wrong side, Nick’s willing to overlook that bit, because it’s theirs. He doesn’t know the first thing about cars, but he knows he likes this one, feels like it’s been theirs all along, just waiting for them to nick it out of a nearly-empty car park in front of a run-down supermarket outside of St. Louis where it’d been left idling. He wonders if it’s normal to form an emotional attachment to that sort of thing.
“Generally that’s a good thing, Haz, when you’ve murdered someone.” Nick doesn’t think that ought to need saying, but Harry clearly has his own set of rules for everything.
It’d been in the news, although just in a passing mention, two lines stuck in one of the local papers back home. Apparently junkies without family get murdered enough in London that it’s hardly news when it happens. They’d never have seen it if Harry hadn’t been checking for it since they landed, refreshing an assortment of news sites on his mobile over and over, frowning in something like disappointment. Two days ago he’d finally spotted a write-up on it while Nick had been pulling them up to a fast food restaurant’s window, and whooped so loud Nick had almost dropped their milkshakes.
He’s less excited now, though, chewing his lip in a pathetic way.
“I want them to know,” Harry says with a pout.
“Who?” Nick asks.
“Everyone,” Harry breathes out dreamily.
“Tell them, then,” Nick says with a shrug, shifting gears and pushing his sunglasses up where they’ve started to slip down his nose. “Call up the Sun and tell ‘em you want to sell your story. ‘I Was A Teenage Murderer’ or summat, they’ll eat it up.” Nick isn’t worried about being caught. If anything, he’s worried about getting bored. It’s been a week now since they’ve landed in the states, and besides pinch the car that first day, all they’ve done is drive and drive. They stayed three nights in St. Louis after they’d arrived, took the car, and they’ve been driving since then, picking idly west towards nothing at all in particular. Harry’d sent them veering north at first, and then they’d dipped south again, and by the time they’d gotten to Oklahoma, Nick had given up on the map entirely, instead only turning when it struck one of them.
“Maybe I will,” Harry muses, gazing out over the fields that are rolling by, bronze and gold in the sun that’s starting to cut horizontally through the sky. He crosses and recrosses his feet. “Are we stopping soon?” he asks Nick.
“If you like, love,” Nick tells him. There’d been a sign a few miles back, a turn off with a motel and a diner, and sure enough after a few minutes Nick spots it, a bright neon arrow pointing at small oasis of lights and sounds in the middle of the vast fields.
-
Harry does tell them. He doesn’t mention it to Nick before he does, but two days later he hears Harry on his mobile, talking to someone around a grin that stretches his whole mouth to the very edges. Nick’s on the patio off their motel room, a concrete slab with four deep cracks running through it just outside of the sliding glass door. It looks out over a gas station and a restaurant, and beyond that, the wide, vast space of dirt and grass and further off, rolling hills, the inorganic straight cut of the highway the only interruption. Harry’s voice inside is a low, happy murmur, and Nick squints out over the expanse in front of him, runs his bare feet over the crack in the concrete, before tugging the door open.
“He deserved it, that’s why,” Harry’s saying when Nick steps back into the room. He pauses and waits, and Nick hasn’t any idea who he’s got on the other end of the phone line, but he imagines that whoever it is must be at least sort of convinced that Harry’s not lying, since they haven’t hung up yet. Nick wonders if Harry’s recited some of the details of what they’d done to the bloke back in London to convince whoever it is he’s talking to. The thought of it sends a thrill through Nick, and he creeps up behind Harry quietly, resting his chin on the bare curve of his shoulder.
“Anyone else?” Harry repeats, and pauses, twisting his neck to peer at Nick, his eyes brilliant and wild. He smiles and leans down to lick a stripe across Nick’s chin, biting down just slightly at his jaw when he’s finished, and then turns his attention back to the phone. “No,” he says to the person on the other end. “Not yet, anyway.”
-
More papers in London pick up the story, run the headline of the murderous duo who left the country only to call home to confess their crimes. They find out their names and run pictures of them -- a terrible old shot of Nick that he can’t imagine how they’ve found, and one of Harry at the seaside on holiday from years before. It must be old, because his arms are bare in it, and he hasn’t got any of his tattoos.
It thrills Nick, and he can tell it thrills Harry as well. He keeps track of it all, showing Nick any bits of press he finds about them, smiling giddily as he does. It’s amazing, Nick thinks, all those people knowing what he’d done to that bloke who’d deserved it. He runs through the details of it at night before he falls asleep, remembering the way the man had jerked and then fallen still, the way Harry had laughed, the peaceful, uninterrupted night’s sleep he’d gotten afterward. He thinks the memory is the most beautiful one he’s got, and holds it in close.
-
The first gun Harry finds in the trunk of the stolen red convertible, just a few days after they pick it up in St. Louis. “Oh, wicked,” he’d whispered as he loaded their bags into the car as they’d been leaving a motel. He’d leaned down and straightened up a moment later, holding an old revolver, wrapped up carefully in a dirty handkerchief.
“D’you have any idea how to use that?” Nick had asked him.
Harry had grinned, and it’d been more dangerous and more gorgeous than the actual gun he’d been holding.
“I’ll figure it out,” he’d said, pointing it across the car park carefully, closing one eye as he did. It hadn’t been aimed at anything, just the emptiness at the end of the concrete. “You and me, we’ll learn.”
-
The day after they leave the motel in Oklahoma where Harry’d called in his confession -- the thought of which makes Nick want to laugh into the empty air all around them, an empty two-lane highway with only fence posts and distant hills to hear him, to listen to the absurd idea that he’s killed someone, and told about it afterward, and they’re still alone and wild and free, god, it makes him want to laugh -- Harry tells him to keep driving into the night, far later than they usually would’ve stopped for the night.
“Pull off here,” he says eventually, leaning over the space between them so he can whisper it in Nick’s ear. His seat belt is stretched taut across his chest, pulling the neck of his shirt down, and the way he looks in the moonlight makes Nick want to bite his collarbones until he cries out.
They wind up on top of a bluff, the flat hollow of a valley spreading out beneath them, the sound of crickets drifting up and surrounding them like a cloud.
“What’re we doing here?” Nick asks as he shuts off the car, the headlights flickering out so that the only light is the moon, full and bright above them.
Harry just smiles at him, teeth bright in the moonlight. “Practicing.”
“Practicing what?” Nick asks, but Harry doesn’t answer, just tumbles graceless out of the car and lopes around back to open the trunk. When he slams it shut again, he’s got two guns out, a handgun and a pistol, one in each hand.
“Practicing these,” he says softly. “I want --” He pauses and cocks a hip against the car, trying to sort out of the right words. “I want to be ready,” he finally settles on. Nick doesn’t ask what he wants to be ready for -- anything, probably.
So instead he follows Harry up to the top of the hill, kicking at clods of dirt as he goes. Harry folds his legs up and sits, and sets to loading the guns.
“D’you know what you’re doing?” Nick asks.
Harry waves his hand dismissively. “Looked it up,” he says, which is distinctly not an answer.
He must, though, because he moves through it confidently, his long fingers unusually graceful as they open the chambers and load in the rounds, long and sleek over the steel, shutting them both with a click.
“You go first,” he says to Nick when he’s finished, holding the pistol out to him handle first.
Nick stares at it, considering, before finally taking it. It feels odd, somehow strange and familiar all at once, like someone he’d used to know but whose name he’s forgotten.
“You can’t laugh if I’m rubbish,” he warns Harry, standing up. His hand doesn’t shake as he aims across the field at a low copse of shrubs. He’s squeezing the trigger before he even realizes it’s happening.
He tries not to make a sound but lets out a small little gasp anyway, the vibrations of the shot ringing in his ear and traveling up his arm. He shoots three more times, each hitting more or less the same spot on the shrubs, and the feeling just gets stronger, louder.
“You now,” he finally tells Harry. But he’s already got the second gun out, pointed at the same spot Nick had aimed for. His hips are cocked and his tongue pokes through his teeth as he squints, concentrating, before he shoots. It goes slightly wide, sending up a plume of dust when it hits the ground, but he tries again, each time a bit closer.
By the time Harry’s halfway through his ammunition, Nick is spectacularly hard. His own gun is still held loosely in his hand, hanging beside his leg, and he suddenly needs to put his hands on Harry, needs to do it as soon as humanly possibly. The long line of him, his loose shirt and tight trousers lit up by the thin blue moonlight, brow furrowed in concentration as he takes aim across a vast empty meadow, is too much for Nick.
He tries to make himself focus, raises his own gun back up to squeeze off the rest of his shots, aiming for the same spot with moderate success, but then both of them are out of bullets, and the lack of sound rings loudly in the air. Nick tosses his own gun to the dirt and strides over to Harry in two long steps. His own gun clatters down as well, and in an instant Nick has Harry’s trousers open, wrapping his long fingers around his cock, just as hard as Nick’s.
“Jesus, Nick,” Harry gasps, wrapping his arms around Nick’s neck and hanging limply as Nick wanks him off in short, sharp jerks.
“You’re good,” Nick says, “you’re so good,” and he’s not even sure what he means but he wants Harry to hear, wants him to know it while he pants and falls apart under his hand, coming hot between them with a groan and a whine.
“We’ll have to practice more, obviously,” Harry gasps into his neck once he’s collected himself.
Nick nods, but he doesn’t respond, too distracted by the pluck of Harry’s long fingers undoing the buttons on his jeans, the dark smell of smoke and gunpowder wrapping around them both like a blanket.
( part two)