ocean sequence: running on my mind boy, forrest gump (2/3)
harry styles is all devilish curls and cherry red mouth and green. no boy has ever looked less like liam.
and what it was is magnetism: longing for the half of themselves they have lost.
so zayn buys harry a drink and harry shares his hydrocodone (orange straitjackets) and they tumble into the same bed at the end of the night riding out a rush on each other’s hips. it was strange for zayn - feeling his way around somebody’s body.
harry is too pretty of a creature that’s wiry in form and moves slinky. his skin is pale like moonlight, his hands rove like asteroids, and he has a whole galaxy in his starry eyes. harry’s strong, not in muscle or weight, but by the sheer massiveness of his diamond skeleton.
but harry’s gravity doesn’t intimidate zayn. it’s neither a burden nor a pressure. harry has the strange ability of being able to fold himself around zayn, joints and tissues interlocking protectively into a cage of cosmic bones.
it’s heavy compassion. not even one’s own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.
harry loves zayn for it, the mutual agony, and he keeps zayn in his big hollow ribcage like a new heart.
“where’re you from?” the cream sheets are pooled around harry’s lavender hips, his face is pink and his nose white. stunning.
he blows out a puff of smoke with his quiet response, “bradford.”
“why’d you leave?” harry inquires with a subtle knowing tilt of his head, irises sparkling comets.
“problems with a bloke.” he tries for nonchalant despite all the cartilages in his hands twitching in protest.
harry quirks an elegant brow and swipes his floppy fringe off to the side. harry’s got a beautiful young face, fresh raspberry mouth, but harry’s perhaps the wisest of them all (wiser than niall). harry has been bent and broken, and zayn thinks, into better shape.
“boyfriend?”
zayn thinks bronze muscles twisted like syntax in a poem and how maybe he even loved him before he saw him and every atom he’s composed of is held together by liam’s sunlight.
zayn malik believes in soulmates.
“something like that.” zayn says because that’s easier than explaining everything liam encompasses (liam is flesh of his flesh; bone of his bone) and harry nods in accession because that’s easier than prying the delicate flower roots out from his sternum so zayn leans over and kisses him gratefully. their wet mouths slide over each other and zayn tastes vodka, money, and an overwhelming amount of grief off harry’s soft tongue.
(or maybe that’s just the ecstasy).
he murmurs gently against harry’s temple, hand on harry’s cock, “you love someone, don’t you?”
“yes.”
“how do you leave someone you love?” zayn questions because harry is lovely and should not be so lonely, eyes lidded as harry presses him to the mattress.
harry’s husky voice is stern, “ ‘i don’t love you anymore. goodbye.’ it’s the only way to leave.”
zayn thinks that doesn’t sound quite right but his head is starting to grow fuzzy and harry’s skin feels gorgeous against his, “supposing you do still love them?”
“you don’t leave.”
“you’ve never left someone you still love?”
this then is harry’s story. people’s paid harry for it. it has bits of marrow sticking to it, and blood, and beautiful green flies. harry’s ribcage echoes ibiza and at the pull of the oceanic tide, zayn feels his slippery mind eluding from himself, gliding into deeper and darker waters than he’d care to probe.
“nope.”
it is in this moment - the haze of bright stars behind their eyelids, the tingle, the flame, the honeydew, the ache that still remain with him - in this mimosa grove, that darling harry styles with his seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted zayn ever since.
--
what does space smell like?
it’s strange to think that the near-vacuum of space could have a smell and it’s even strange that humans - atmospheric creatures - can actually experience it.
nonetheless, research has discovered that astronauts have consistently reported the same ubiquitous odor after length space walks, bringing it back with them on their suits, helmets, gloves and tools. since then, chemists have been attempting to reproduce the scent during acclimatization training.
it’s a bitter, smoky, metallic smell - like seared flesh, hot metal, and arc welding smoke all meld into one. it is believed that the smell is caused by high-energy vibrations in particles that mix with the air and oxygen when contained to earth’s stratosphere.
(harry styles is now).
given the right chemical information, it’s possible to recreate the smell of saturn, jupiter, the sun or any place in the universe. even the fragrance of the heart of the galaxy - astronomers are searching for amino acids in sagittarius b2, a vast dust cloud in the middle of the milky way, and have come upon ethyl formate, which smells and tastes sweet and soft; raspberries and rum.
(liam payne comes later).
--
and this is why zayn loves harry:
once zayn woke up from a deep morphine sleep with his lashes tangled and he’d fluttered them wetly to try to loosen them like wings. he dreamt that he was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes of a butterfly, and flew freely without care about humanity, conscious only of his happiness as a butterfly.
but then he woke and he was invariably zayn, solid and trapped and sad, and zayn did not know was he before a man who dreamt about being a butterfly or is he now a butterfly who dreams about being a man?
between him and the butterfly, here must be a difference; an instance of transformation.
he tells harry as much and harry just kisses him silent with his soft mouth and electric tongue and he forgets all about it once the amphetamines hit his bloodstream.
the night before zayn’s 18th birthday, harry brings him to his present on the balcony of his flat. they sit on the floor, legs poking out through the gap of the railings, light cigarettes, then harry moves the underbrush of a patch of sunflowers and zayn stuns at the sight of the chrysalis anchored at the stalk of the plant.
“ - is that…” zayn gapes.
harry’s smile is laced with affection, “it is.”
he shakes his head in disbelief, “h-how…how did you - i - when?”
“anytime now.” answers harry confidently.
so they sit quietly for the next hour - zayn’s skin feels heavy like he might be molting as well - until the chrysalis starts to break and he gasps the first moment he saw the delicate pupal wings that had gone through rapid mitosis slice through the paper cocoon. the body stretches and the feelers extend, the scales on the wings gleaming, dusted with shimmery powder.
a sweet little lavender butterfly (gossamer-winged lycaenidae).
it’s vulnerable and just emerged. it needs to spend time waiting for its pastel paint to dry, fanning them in slow new motions, filling the veins in the wings before it could fly.
“it’s a palos verdes.” harry says, owl green eyes never leaving zayn. his big pretty face curious and fond and desirous, a supernova compressed into diamond clavicles and opalescent hands.
“why?” the gossamer creature is bleeding excess dye; wet indigo acrylic slick on his fingertips when he reaches out tentatively to feel the fragile slender wings. harry reaches to expertly pluck the butterfly into a nearby jar, getting smears of blue on the glass.
“because i have a tender spot in my heart for cheaters and bastards and broken things.”
he repeats his question, because that’s not the truth, “why?”
he blinks and when harry blinks back, all his electrons are charged, his mouth cherry-sweet with popsicle dimples, “so you can have your instance of transformation.”
the two sweetest pleasures zayn has known to man is drugs and butterflies. and harry styles gave him both.
--
(in the beginning, god created the heavens and the earth).
okay so it’s 5am.
zayn asks himself: do you know where you are?
the club is either antik or j’adore. all might come clear if he could just slip into the bathroom and do a little more bolivian marching powder. then again, it might not. a firm marigold voice (irish lilted) inside him insists that this blatant lack of clarity is a result of too much of that already.
“zayn.” so maybe zayn doesn’t know the exact location but he’s in a nightclub talking to harry styles. and harry is staring at him with quite fond, big andromeda green eyes, “zayn, do you know where you are?”
the night has already turned on that imperceptible pivot where 2am changes to 5am and zayn can’t figure out where the hell the time has all gone.
“where am i?”
harry flips his bangs, laughs once, then goes back to his fruity drink, “lizard lounge.”
“oh.” somewhere back around maybe an hour ago, he knew he should’ve cut his losses, but he rode past that moment on a new comet trail of white powder and now he is trying to hang on to the rush.
“and you know who else is here?”
his brain at the moment is composed of tiny bolivian soldiers. they’re muddy and tired from their long march through the night. there are holes in their boots and they are hungry. they need more white powder, but zayn is not yet willing to concede that he has crossed the line beyond gratuitous damage and into unraveled nerve-ending addiction.
“who, har-reh?” his tongue doesn’t work right and his pitch is high.
harry smirks, bemused, “you know who.”
(and god said, ‘let there be light,’ and there was light).
he peers up through his lashes and indeed in his golden glory is the elegant column spire of antelope legs and sculpted shoulders and curvy spine. the lithe coil of liam payne in a bronze twist not ten feet from him.
this kicks the bolivian soldiers up to their feet and for a second, zayn thinks he might vomit a flutter of brush-footed skippers. and it’s like pressing fast forward on a remote because the frames skip and when he hits ‘play’ again he’s holding liam’s adonis jaw in clammy palms and liam’s so worn and molten and so boy.
(liam is flesh of his flesh; bone of his bone).
he clings to liam like a rope to the stars, “oh god. oh god. what did you do? what did you do?”
liam stares back at zayn, blinking peach doe-eyes and pouting with his plum mouth but zayn thinks he’s looking but not recognizing, grasping hard at the cosmic space that zayn has dissolved into, and it’s then that an elastic synapse snaps somewhere in his hypothalamus, between lilac dendrites and inky myelin sheaths: they are not liamandzayn anymore.
(liam is called ‘liam’, for he is taken out of ‘zayn’).
somewhere along the way of ivory poison, forgotten dates, and too much silence, their portmanteau has deteriorated and frayed into:
liam.
zayn.
he can hardly imagine it; he didn’t dare.
(and the lord god commanded, ‘you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will surely die’).
“relax, darling.” harry’s svelte figure materializes by his side, perpetually fluid and crystalline. zayn’s spine is stiff, his neck is burning from harry’s icy green fire and harry smirks because he knows. “looks like he’s just having a bit of fun.”
“shut. up.” zayn snaps. he imagines this must be what guilt tastes like; like moonshine or comet dust caught in his bronchioles. and harry smolders quietly because he knows.
“let’s get you some air, yeah lee?” zayn takes liam - softly and with a certain velvet reverence - by the arm and closes his palm around the worn familiarity of liam’s bronze skin. liam is always sweltering; burning hot like the surface of the sun.
zayn relishes it. he hopes liam leaves a mark.
(now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the lord god had made).
harry styles and his liquid bones, eyes thinned and lashes fanned tantalizingly, is smiling with his crimson mouth, his pink tongue. long, moon fingers curling like a crescent, pressing down on zayn like gravity. his voice is candy-apple sweet, “don’t take too long. i’ve got shots lined up.”
(‘you will certainly not die’, said the serpent, ‘for god knows that when you eat from the garden your eyes will be opened, and you will be like god, knowing good and evil’).
harry styles wears temptation well, as he was born to do, obscene and glittering. and zayn can’t bear to look at him as he exits the lizard’s eden with a white-nosed liam and the weight of sin that sits too heavy on his chest.
“why did you come?”
“why else but for you?”
outside, the wind is cold and liam is heavy (as expected, filled with so much heat and tragic goodness). the pulse of liam’s wrists is strong and zayn breathes because for god’s sake and his lungs open and there’s the sharp twinge of pain in his side where zayn imagines his missing rib is because -
liam.
zayn.
so he says, quiet and aching, quietly aching, blues and violets in a voice like a bruise, “you shouldn’t have.” for liam is too lovely to know sadness or secret or sin and everything up until this point they had been writing it off as speculation and a shadow of the ventricular (an arrhythmia) but now that they’ve bitten the apple of knowledge and discovered light and evil.
the heart is corroding.
they’ve played god with their fates and now they can no longer live forever.
“i was - ” liam’s melted gaze is searching, amber and simmer. he worries his lip and his canary voice is delicate, “i am…trying to understand.”
zayn wonders if it’s really possible to tell someone else what one feels. he thinks of harry and their magnetic compassion.
“you won’t.” he swallows a sob, “you can’t. how could you possibly - ” liam couldn’t understand what it’s like to stand on the sidelines or what it’s like to be the one people look at and think what a shame but at least he’s pretty or what it’s like to have to compete for someone’s attention against the rest of the world.
liam couldn’t understand waiting; he’s too busy running.
while zayn - well, zayn has been waiting for liam, on liam, all his life.
“it’s my burden.” this then, is the chain zayn has forged, link-by-link with every red-hot doubt and striking insecurity and iron guilt. his voice is frayed, unraveled at the seams, “s’not yours to bear.”
liam’s chain is not made of the same material (it’s jagged glory and blistering duty and cold ignorance). he could not wear it for zayn, however much he tries, “but i am bearing it, aren’t i? i just don’t know what it is.”
“i know it hurts.” the way it hurts to spend a tenth-year anniversary alone. or the way it hurts to smile at admirers when his date is a no-show at his exhibition at the tate. the way it hurts to have a bouquet of lavender by his hospital bed instead of his fucking boyfriend on a track-meet weekend - the doctors took out his appendix but zayn had felt empty all over. “but that’s just the way love is.”
and here’s what they’ve been waiting for, the repeated image of lovers destroyed:
“go home.” he prays, murmuring grace into aurous skin, “please, liam.”
“come with me.” okay so it’s 6 am and zayn asks himself: do you know what you want?
(liam’s gentle nature, crafted build, fiery loyalty, quiet intelligence, soft smiles, calloused palms, intricate tendons, strong heartbeat)?
no, he doesn’t want comfort - maybe that’s the bolivian soldiers speaking or maybe it’s the butterflies. and truth is he would like his money’s worth: a voice fine and gravelly like comet rocks. devil curls and daring hands and diamond bones.
zayn wants god. he wants poetry, he wants danger, he wants freedom, he wants anger, he wants sin.
it’s liam that’s chosen knowledge, liam that’s carved from zayn’s rib. zayn supposes this is why he’s always known liam was meant for him and that there’s a part of him in liam he’ll never get back and why he’s always felt breathless with and without liam. liam looks very sad, but not sad enough, and zayn is out of body parts to give.
this is where the evening splits in half, love or not.
zayn steps away, trying not to look long at liam, as if he were the sun, yet he saw liam, like the sun, even without looking.
(and the lord god commanded, ‘for dust you are and to dust you will return’).
zayn malik believes in genesis.
--
“you said you’ve never left someone you still love. why?” zayn asks the moment he’s back in the lizard lounge and finds harry’s feline silhouette slouched in a booth among sniffling strangers.
harry flutters his lush moonlit eyes, like a spiral galaxy turning, and puts down his mobile. he responds slowly with a curious tilt of his head, “because we’ve both sacrificed something unspeakable for each other.”
and zayn knows the story, the whispered rumor of louis tomlinson’s creation of the universe, but he needs to hear about harry’s loss from harry himself, “which is?”
harry’s gaze is searching, roaming over zayn’s quivering arms and desperate brows. zayn thinks he sees concern in harry’s pretty starry face when he stands, unfolding his reedy limbs and pushing aside his floppy fringe, “we should go.”
“yeah.”
harry moves much like how he speaks, languid but with purpose, a slow fluid figure of creamy skin and gorgeous mouth, his planetary hand steady on the orbit of zayn’s back. when they get out onto the curb, harry is searching again, the muted understanding bright in his nebulous irises, saturated in wet luminous green. and when harry drapes his coat over zayn’s delicate shoulders, zayn knows he’s saying: i’m sorry about the ache in your bones. i wish it were mine.
the valet pulls up a sleek racecar with doors that slide up like zayn’s precious lavender palos verdes and harry claims the keys. they step in, harry blasts the heat and they split a little yellow tablet, “where to, darling?”
this isn’t their car.
zayn rests his forehead against the tinted glass of the window, watching two tanned, golden forms climb into an orange volks. the sky’s velveteen which means the sun’s going to rise soon and zayn doesn’t want the night to end because the morning means reality so he tells harry, “chase after the stars.”
and this isn’t their car.
wanted, wanted: harry styles. hair: brown. lips: scarlet. age: six thousand five hundred days. profession: none, or ‘starlet’.
they go ninety give-or-take down the a41, the scenery a mossy blur and the concrete rolling beneath their feet. zayn watches the rain run on the windshield, starting a little when he feels a cool palm press against the back of his hand over the console. harry’s closes his ruined knuckles around zayn’s and zayn can feel his fortune lines - heroic love and tragic fate and broken life.
harry just keeps his hand there, neither lacing their fingers nor counting zayn’s bones; a reassuring weight on zayn’s too-flighty being. zayn looks to him and harry blinks back, constellation eyes endless and wild like the road in front of them.
“where to, darling?” harry repeats as a fork in the road comes up, his husky drawl soft but verdant. if they take the m62, zayn could be back in bradford and the sidelines in three hours. if they stay on the a41, they will loop back to london, city and glass and paradise.
in - one, two - out - one, two -
zayn’s not a runner but maybe he should try it, “not too far.”
“what’s too far?”
“where you are.” he murmurs, fond. the shades of harry’s movements when the wind washes the morning’s rays from his seaside arms to his big pale face are feathery shadows against the sharp mishaps of his skin. his andromeda body like a painted hymn of oiled blush and acrylic greens.
in that drunken place, he would like to hand his heart to harry and say: touch it - but then give it back.
“pull over.” he says as they’re routed onto a long stretch of pasture road. harry obliges, shutting off the lights, the only resonating sound the high from the ecstasy rushing in their ears. during three hundred heartbeats, zayn pushes down the window for the taste of the rain on his skin, harry lights a cigarette, and they sit together in nuclear silence.
another hundred heartbeats go by.
“i have his money and he has my soul.” harry murmurs into the unfinished arc of sunrise. zayn shifts dazedly in response as he waits for harry to continue. harry has a whimsical, wandering way of speaking, a tendency of starting sentences that end up nowhere. “you asked why i never left…why i can’t…we didn’t make this deal with caroline. i sold my soul to louis and he traded his money for me. yes, there was deception and there was betrayal but in the end, this was me and louis’s deal; we did this to each other, then to make ourselves feel better, we say it was for each other. i never left louis, the greedy bastard, because - well, where would i go?”
harry smiles in the sunlight but resembles the moon. he leaves the same impression of something gorgeous, yet annihilating.
zayn feels harry’s loss like the space between breaths. so he reaches over to grab harry’s pretty steel jaw (because harry is forged with titanium) with his rain-slicked hands (and zayn’s mother always said he was sculpted from water) and he catches harry’s berry mouth with his, “would you please please please please please please please stop talking?”
he presses harry’s tall, slender figure into the leather and holds onto harry’s hips with skeleton-key fingers and whispers with a voice like ink from memory, “personne ne m’aime et j’ai les mains froides.”
nobody loves me and my hands are cold.
zayn’s not a runner but he tries it for a night and he thinks maybe something is only yours when you can do as you please with it.
--
Z.
my mother once told me that everyone has their own star. i’ve always believed her because i think you must’ve been born in the heart of my star, in a brilliant white furnace that burned and trembled and dazzled the darkness.
every atom in your body was cooked in a stellar crucible as dense as fifty nialls crammed inside a thimble, and then, as its world raged and shook, my star tore open it’s own heart for you, exploding suicidal atoms far across the oceans of the universe - atoms that came to reside in you.
what’s left of me - a vast cloud of stellar gas and dust - formed the sun and the planets swirling around it over billions of years, radiating and watching over the rocky world you reside in, where you are encased in the blue skin of its atmosphere.
and you’re moving faster than you could’ve ever imagined.
the earth beneath your feet is spinning at 1,600 km/h, the planet is hurtling towards the sun at 107,500 km/h, the sun is moving towards vega at 70,000 km/h, the orion arm of our spiral galaxy is rotating at 900,000 km/h, and the milky way is heading for the andromeda galaxy at 3,600,000 km/h.
but still here you are - a lovely collection of atoms, a perfect composition of organic molecules, a child of the stars themselves.
you are my universe. every stardust of you. and in a hundred billion galaxies, there is not another like you.
L.
slipped under the maliks’ door the day before liam leaves for the olympic opening ceremony. the envelope reads: l to z (the 10th year).
--
it’s 2pm on a thursday: zayn’s not out of bed, he hasn’t been going to school, and he still can’t see a future worth living without liam in it.
he can hear someone picking their way through the mess of glass bottles, clothes, empty cigarette packs. whenever they would pause, zayn assumes they’ve found a bump of coke he forgot to lick off or a capsule of prescription pill or a stray syringe - he hopes it’s little blue sleeping aids, he could do without the visions for a night.
his eyelids burn with the clementine glory of the afternoon. he’s careful to keep them shut this time, his sheets that still smell of grass and woodsy cologne pulled up his chest. from beside him, his sweet mariposa is resting in its jar, staring sadly down at him.
the bed dips and zayn senses from the proximity that it’s not niall. niall is loud, brash, and always sits too close. a hand cards into his hair, touch gentle, hesitant even. zayn turns onto his side and blinks open his eyes, “baba.”
zayn takes after his father in general appearance, the same poignant nose, high-set cheeks, and russet complexion but on a more significant level, he has tricia’s coy eyes, flowery lashes, and fine, fine bones. for this reason, zayn thinks, yaser malik has never allowed himself to get too close. zayn thinks he reminds his baba too much of her and what she had left behind.
“your sisters are worried. waliyha says you haven’t eaten in three days.”
zayn curls into himself, “m’fine.”
when his baba speaks again, his gaze is fixated on zayn’s pretty butterfly, “this could be good for you...liam - ” the blindsided hit that strikes zayn’s chest is actually astounding. he cringes but his baba carries on, “you were too dependent on him. what was his was yours - his dreams, his aspirations, his ambitions but what was yours was still yours - your pain, your loneliness, your grief. you never shared everything with liam, you were always afraid he wouldn’t…couldn’t…love everything. you held onto those parts of yourself and they’re monsters. they’re suppressed with affection and attention; they grow when they’re starved.”
“baba, please…” zayn pleads, his insides feeling like they’re folding, but his father looks determined in a way zayn has never seen before.
“liam was good for you. but he’s not the only good thing about you, zayn.” there’s something wistful in his baba’s eyes and his voice softens, “love, for you, is larger than the usual romantic love. it’s like a religion.”
and it’s a bad religion.
his voice catches, swallowed by shallow heaves and ripping sobs, “i just - don’t know…how i could be - without him.” he shakes his head, wraps his arms tight around his middle like he might come apart.
“you’re very young, my son.” and suddenly his father looks ancient, his sad smile deepening the wrinkles around his mouth. “here is the world. wonderful and terrible things will happen. don’t be afraid. experience solitude. find tranquility, my son; the way i’ve never been able to.”
this then is baba’s story. with a wife he loved too much that had felt too trapped and when she left he helped her pack her bags. he could not ask for her to stay when he knew she was unhappy and as she departed, she took all of him with her.
he kisses zayn’s hair, stands and walks with weighted tiredness. it’s time that his father retreats back into his study; zayn’s eyes still haunt him after all these years. he pauses by the dresser to place a letter atop, “the prophet muhammad said: when a thing disturbs the peace of your heart, give it up.”
--
timeline: sunday at noon.
zayn is sitting on a park bench in primrose hill overlooking into the streets. he’s stopped painting as of late and have taken up sketching in its stead.
buildings. he has been sketching buildings. and primrose hill is good for variety. it’s far out that there are still old artforms but close enough that it overlooks into downtown.
zayn finds that beauty in the european sense has a premeditated quality to it; with an aesthetic intention and a long-range plan. long, lean lines and tall, golden structures like a victorian cathedral or renaissance piazza.
(liam payne comes later).
meanwhile, the beauty of skyscrapers - a foreign invention - rests on a completely different base. it arose independent of human design, like a steely cavern. it’s jagged edges and sleek surfaces, quite ugly in design, but in the right setting they sparkle with a sudden wondrous poetry.
zayn was very much attracted by the alien quality of skyscrapers. he found it intriguing but frightening; it made him feel homesick for europe.
(harry styles is now).
a slinky, feline shadow looms over his sketchpad and zayn peeks up through his lashes to the twinkling green eyes of a bemused harry styles. he puts down his pencil, greets quietly, “hello, harry.”
“it’s sunday.” returns harry simply. he’s dressed in a mute gray jumper and sweet popsicle dimples. he’s carrying a small bakery bag of croissants and he’s sober and wow so this is what harry looks like properly in the sunlight. sure there subtle lavender bruises pressed under his eyes and his cheeks are drawn in by his big jaw but he looks…worn…as opposed to ruined. his skin’s creamy without the heavy contrast of darkness, not porcelain.
harry looks young, and by god, is he a stunning creature.
“it is.” zayn confirms.
harry grins cattishly, taking a seat next to zayn, picking up the butterfly jar he’s brought with him and holding it in his giant galactic hand. he asks over zayn’s shoulder, “what’re you drawing?”
shear walls in straight vertical planes, steel corners, strussed brace. he answers, “you.”
harry nods, leaning back to drape his arm across the back of the bench. the wind plays with his sleepy curls. he tilts his head back, turning his moon-and-stars face towards the sky. he announces with eyes closed, filling his lungs deeply, “i’m waiting for you.”
“to do what?”
“leave me.”
zayn pauses midstroke then after a minute closes his sketchpad. harry’s clever and zayn can tell he’s already got his armor on. he tells him, “i’m leaving you.”
“where are you going?”
“ibiza.” zayn answers and harry tenses so quickly, he sparks. harry knows what ibiza means, he knows better than anyone; it’s solitude and it’s the place where sin is shed. he could not go there, it’s the forbidden place.
harry chuckles to himself, “what a shame we all became such broken things.”
“liam broke my heart but you broke my life.”
“good. we’re stronger in the places that we’ve been broken.” harry nods, his raspy drawl steady and firm. his brows are relaxed, “who are you waiting for in ibiza?”
zayn shakes his head and his lungs bloom at the sound of the truth, “nobody. i’m not waiting for anybody.”
harry’s lips quirk. with that, he slowly unscrews the top of the mason jar and for a moment the gossamer purple butterfly just suspends there but then with a dust of lilac powder and violet wings, it’s filled its wings with lavender ink and flown out of it’s cage. it does not hesitant or linger.
harry asks then, “do you think…in another world or another life…we could’ve gone on together? do you think in that world, we would’ve been happy?”
zayn believes in other lives, in reincarnations, in other worlds, and he thinks he would’ve loved harry in all of them. but the thing is, zayn can’t imagine any world or life without liam and zayn thinks in any world or life, that’s what happiness would mean to him so he smiles very softly at harry and says, “there is another world, harry, but it’s inside this one. we are fated, i think - but never destined.”
there is a fixed natural order to the universe. what is fated, is to be unavoidable and inevitable. what is destined is with regards to the finality of events, a sense of ‘destination’.
such is the way of the cosmos.
“star-crossed.” harry murmurs with fond reverence.
zayn shrugs, “something like that.”
harry stands, straightens his constellation wide shoulders, shifting back into elusive, silken, lunar. he smirks at zayn, curved and sharp like a crescent. his voice is careless and strong, “go on then. and don’t look back, for when you do, i will have already forgotten about you.”
i don’t love you anymore. goodbye.
part three