Work Text:
"It's alright," Danny had said, when Zayn sat up in bed staring at the figure in his open window. "It's alright, it's me, Zayn, it's me."
"Danny?" Zayn had said, clutching his blankets. "I can't see your eyes."
"It's alright," Danny had said, sweetly, and he sounded the same, curling around Zayn in his twin sized bed and kissing his forehead with warm lips. "See? I'm right here."
;
Zayn was fifteen when his best friend of two years climbed in his bedroom window with black eyes. Danny wouldn’t tell him what happened, and Zayn was glad at the time; the radios were always talking about unrest, and his dad’s friends had too many stories to tell about little brown boys getting beaten up on the way home from school. He didn’t want to hear any more bad news. He didn’t want to believe his best friend had been just another kid in a hoodie caught down the wrong alley.
Danny was gone in the morning, and Zayn only briefly wondered how he’d climbed up the two story brick wall outside his window.
;
Danny isn’t at school the next day. When Zayn asks Ant, he shrugs. “Got the flu or summat,” he supposes. “Didn’t get out of bed, Mum took his temperature and said he weren’t even faking.” Zayn doesn’t think Danny would fake; Danny is the one who’s always telling Zayn and Ant off for forgetting their homework or getting detention for stupid shit, he’s been talking about uni and becoming a teacher himself one day. School’s important to Danny, and Zayn hasn’t seen him miss a day since last semester when he had to stay home with Aaliyah after his mum got called into work. The Riachs can’t afford daycare, which is why Michelle works nights, when Danny and Ant are at home to take care of their baby sister. Thinking of it makes Zayn’s stomach go squirmy inside. Danny doesn’t usually leave just Ant at home to take care of Aali. Zayn’ll have to ask him what’s going on.
Danny is out sick for a week.
;
When he comes back to school, Danny looks like he hasn’t slept since Zayn last saw him. He’s got dark circles like bruises, and his skin still seems a bit clammy when Zayn pats him on the shoulder, rubs at his neck like they do. “Are you feeling alright?” he asks, and Danny nods. “Yeah, mate, fine.” He smiles, and it’s all wrong, and Zayn takes his hand away like he’s been burnt.
;
“Are the Riachs doing alright?” Zayn asks his mum. He’s helping her clean up the kitchen after dinner, while the girls watch tv and Yaser has a beer on the back steps, phoning his dad. Work hasn’t been going well for Zayn’s dad. Zayn would usually be worried, but he’s more upset about Danny at the moment. There was something about his eyes, that day at school.
Tricia looks at him, her arms in suds up to her elbows, the sleeve of her blouse wet where it’s fallen down. Zayn puts down the platter he’s dried and rolls it up for her, anxiously. “What do you mean, love?” she asks.
“They’re not, like.” Zayn bites his lip. “Has Mrs. R lost her job again?”
Tricia looks surprised. “No, love. She was telling me last week they actually gave her a bit of a raise- why? What’s going on?”
Zayn should feel relieved, but his stomach is unsettled.
;
Zayn texts Danny, going to mosque this week, r u?
Zayn doesn’t usually go to Friday prayer, maybe once a month now, to make his dad happy, but this week has been long and strange, and he’d tried praying on his own but it hadn’t felt right. Danny goes a lot more regularly, and maybe if they go together, wash their feet and kneel and listen to those soothing words wash over them, Zayn will feel better.
Zayn’s phone buzzes just before he’s about to leave the house with his abba. cant make it.
The prayers don’t help.
;
In class the next week, Danny and Zayn pair up to do mirror exercises in theatre. Usually they make it fun; silly gestures and creepy faces for the other to imitate while they try to keep from laughing so loud their teacher makes them trade partners. For some reason it seems more solemn. The shadows under Danny’s eyes are fading, but Zayn still wants to reach out and touch them- he makes the motion before he remembers it’s an exercise. His thumb traces the bruised darkness beneath Danny’s eyesocket and he nearly starts at the touch of Danny’s thumb under his own eye. It feels like they’re both looking for something.
They win the exercise; “Most coordinated,” their teacher announces, beaming, and each get a fun size Twix. Danny wrinkles his nose, and gives his to Zayn. Zayn eats it and doesn’t mention that Twix are Danny’s favorite.
;
“Has Danny been acting weird lately?” he asks Ant, as they piss in between periods. Ant shakes his dick and tucks himself back into his pants and trousers, makes a face at Zayn. “Weird like how?” he asks, washing his hands and glancing at Zayn in the mirror.
Zayn zips his own fly and shakes his head. “I dunno.”
;
That afternoon, Zayn goes round to the Riachs. He doesn’t ask Danny if he can come, doesn’t tell Ant he’s stopping by. He takes the street behind their house and comes up at their back garden gate.
Danny is standing in their little yard, by the garden plot they’d dug up for his mum earlier that spring. She wants them to plant tomatoes in it later, when its a bit less rainy and likely to wash away. Danny’s standing there in the mud in bare feet, like he simply forgot his shoes on the way out the back door.
Danny’s standing there staring at his hands, and Zayn’s heart stops beating, because as weird and as wrong as the past two weeks have felt, as much as he’d worried and wondered the worst, he never realized that the worst was this. Danny standing in his back garden with blood on his hands.
He looks up at Zayn, recognition dawning across his face, and Zayn flinches. He should go, probably. He should run, back down the alley and not come back, never face this monster that’s in his best friend’s body again. Tell his abba, and let adults worry about what happens when evil takes a human host.
“Zayn?” Danny asks, so softly and sweetly.
Zayn opens the back garden gate.
;
“I swear, it’s not- I’m so sorry,” Danny says, strangled and stuttering like he can hardly breathe. His chest is heaving to back that up, but Zayn doesn’t believe him any more. His best friend is a liar, and he’s a liar whose hands are red, red, red, dripping into the mud. But he’s Zayn’s best friend, all the same.
“I had to,” Danny says, “I had to, I couldn’t- I wouldn’t hurt anybody, but I had to- to do something, I needed the blood, and I didn’t wanna hurt anybody, please, Zayn, please, I promise, I didn’t hurt anybody-”
Zayn is crying, probably, his cheeks feel hot and wet; but maybe that’s just the rain, beginning as if it never ended, a typical Bradford spring day gone grey around them. “Who did you hurt?” he asks Danny, “who did you hurt, Danny?”
“Nobody,” Danny says, “Nobody, I promise.” His hands are shaking, and Zayn stares at him, incredulously.
“Who did you hurt?” he says, louder, and Danny is the one who flinches this time.
“Nobody,” he says, like a swear, and glances over his shoulder, like an admission.
Zayn follows his gaze, to the open hutch door beside their kitchen window. He helped Danny build that hutch last summer, when Danny had called him on their mums’ phones and said he’d got a rabbit for his birthday. The hutch door is open. There’s blood on Danny’s hands.
But he hasn’t hurt anybody.
Just the fucking rabbit.
;
“It’s okay,” Zayn says. “It’s okay. You didn’t hurt anybody.” He almost can’t believe it, but it’s true, and whatever monster lives inside of Danny, Danny is stronger. He didn’t hurt anybody.
He could have. When they went inside, after Zayn helped him bury the rabbit in the rain, after Zayn washed off Danny’s hands with the nozzle and hose outside the back door, after Zayn helped him strip his soaking wet, muddy clothes off on the kitchen tile, as they tiptoed to the stairway wrapped in towels Michelle had drying on the line strung up in the kitchen- Ant was on the sofa, watching cartoons with Aaliyah. He waved his hand at Zayn absently. Zayn saw the look in Danny’s eyes. He hadn’t hurt anybody, Zayn repeated, that time to himself. He knew what they were both thinking, though. Yet.