Chapter Text
It’s like getting struck by a bolt of lightning, seeing Niall for the first time.
Maybe it’s because Harry’s been cooped up in his apartment for almost two full days with little to no human contact, that the mere sight of any sentient being, Niall or otherwise, would have hit him so hard. A slap on the back of the head to remind him, no, you’re not the only person in the world, you narcissist.
But he doubts it. Harry thinks it’s because Niall is a bolt of lightning.
The building is quiet. As it should be, at half past eleven in the evening. It’s a quiet building to begin with, almost every apartment occupied by graduate students, like himself, who spend the majority of their time burrowed deep in their studies, occasionally making appearances as they travel to and from classes at the university just down the road.
After two semesters, Harry is sharply tuned in to the rhythm of his neighbors’ comings and goings, his ears anticipating the sounds of creaking floorboards and shuffling footsteps, closing doors and brief greetings and goodbyes just seconds before they occur. It’s the musician in him. Twenty-five years young, and he feels like he can tap his foot to the rhythm of the world, conduct the orchestra of his everyday life with his eyes closed and one hand tied behind his back. Because nothing is new anymore. Not even his music. Especially not his music.
Harry’s hunched over the 88-weighted-key Yamaha in his sitting room, sheet music in front of him sporting more eraser smudges than actual notes, his fingers begging for the four-hour torture to cease. That torture, specifically, being jazz. He doesn’t even like jazz. But it’s fulfilling a requirement this semester, and the professor is warm enough, if a little over-excitable in her love of what Harry considers the most self-indulgent genre in all of music.
He can feel the onset of a headache, so he adjusts his headphones to free up his right ear. More of a placebo than an actual fix. He chews at his bottom lip in concentration, and moves lanky, calloused fingers from a D minor nine to a G thirteen as his foot keeps time with the keyboard’s built-in metronome. The little ditty he’s composing will be pleasant enough for his professor, sure, but he’s fantasizing about how satisfying it would be to slam his head off this keyboard in four-four timing rather than pluck out a bland, boring, elevator melody that is taking him far longer to finish than it should.
It’s just the piano part he needs to write for this assignment. No woodwinds, no brass. And definitely no requirements to work with his arch nemesis percussion, so he is startled out of his bones when he hears what sounds like the quick rat-tat-tat of a snare immediately followed by the boisterous boom of bass drum from outside his apartment door. Neither he nor his assignment nor the familiar, endless drumming rhythm of Harry’s Perfectly Predictable Life had called for this, and he’s frozen on the bench for a moment, head snapped sideways toward the door, until he hears what sounds like the strangled groan of… some living thing.
He checks his watch. It’s almost midnight. There’s never noise this late. Something’s wrong.
Breaking for the door, the headphones that he forgot to remove yank him backward and he yelps in shock when he stumbles into the bench and stubs his toe bad, doing a kind of pirouette to get untangled from the cord before tossing the headphones aside, gathering his remaining dignity and muttering in embarrassment to no one but himself, “Every goddamn time…”
By the time he reaches the door he’s an absolute mess but he can’t care for long because, peering across the hall and down the stairs, someone he presumes to be a fellow tenant is being crushed into the corner of the landing by what looks like some kind of giant black cylinder, vertically mounted on metal legs, the entire apparatus nearly as tall his he is, at least a foot in diameter and clearly really goddamn heavy.
Harry’s bolting down without hesitation, panting, “Jesus, are you alright?!” as he lifts the thing which weighs a ton off of the young man who’d been attempting to carry it up the stairs, all by himself.
“Yeah! Yeah… m’alright!” Harry hears from behind the bulky black obelisk. “Hold on, I think we can lean it against the wall,” the voice pants, sounding dangerously out of breath, but Harry heeds his instruction nonetheless. “Just move with me… this way…”
Harry sees two pale hands curve around the cylinder from the other side, and he follows suit as it is guided to a spot on the landing, leveraged by a protrusion of old fashioned chair rail. “And… there."
Harry just about catches his breath, only to have it knocked right out of him when the source of all the commotion finally peeks out from behind his gigantic piece of luggage.
He’s young, with eyes that smile despite being glossy with exhaustion behind thick glasses, with messy, sweat-spiked hair of an outrageous platinum blonde smothering the dark roots of what Harry assumes is his respectable, natural color. He’s still panting, fanning his plain navy t-shirt between pinched fingers to cool himself down, and he’s looking at Harry as if they’ve been best friends for years.
It’s a look so shockingly jovial for a stranger to share, a look that doesn’t belong here on this landing, Harry thinks, where nameless faces pass each other daily with minimal acknowledgement and that’s just the way things are. It’s the kind of circumstantial anomaly that happens in dreams, its strangeness only noticeable a millisecond before you wake up.
But this is real, and Harry is suddenly drowning in that reality when the boy extends a hand, grabbing Harry’s and shaking vigorously.
“Cheers, thanks mate,” he heaves, dropping Harry’s hand as quickly as he grabbed it and clapping Harry on the arm with a sweaty palm, “Don’t think I would’ve made it on me own… she’s a beauty though, isn’t she?”
He’s patting the giant cylinder fondly now, but Harry is cut off again before he can ask what the hell this thing even is.
“Hell, sorry,” he’s scrunching up his face in a self-berating way that, for some reason, gets Harry laughing softly. “I didn’t even introduce… Hi. I’m Niall.”
Harry does a poor job of hiding his amused chuckles, but the boy doesn’t seem to mind. Just flushes a bit deeper and grins as Harry responds, “Harry,” and extends a hand, only to realize, you already shook hands with him, idiot. Niall clearly notices this too, but he just clasps Harry’s hand once again, even more enthusiastically than the last time, with a touch like static electricity.
“Good to meet you. Harry.”
He repeats the name pointedly. Commits it to memory. He seems to be committing Harry’s eyes to memory too — he’s barely broken contact at all.
“I hope I didn’t wake you. Really sorry if I did. Was supposed to get here hours ago, but… flight got delayed. Horrendous weather coming out of Ireland. Great way to start the next three years of my life. Truly fantastic . Least the sky’s clear and weather’s lovely out this way. It was a welcome sight to land to, believe you me.”
He’s a rambler, Harry notes. A rambler with a musical Irish lilt that Harry thinks he could listen to for hours. Good combination.
“But this is the last of it, I promise,” he reassures, and Harry is puzzled for a moment, then it dawns on him. The last of his luggage. He’s just moved in. And Harry’s feeling massively guilty, all of a sudden, cursing the headphones that kept him locked up in the miserable world of jazz when he could have been doing something useful with his life…
“Jesus I’m sorry, I wish I’d heard… I was busy practicing and I didn’t hear— I mean…”
It’s the blonde boy’s turn to laugh now, shamelessly as Harry stammers, cheeks heating up.
“It’s fine,” he reassures, dismissing the notion with an affectionate humor that Harry suddenly knows, though he hasn’t known him more than a few minutes, is one of his defining traits.
“Really, I needed the exercise. And I’m not done yet, anyway, so if you want help me haul her into the flat,” he gestures toward the monstrous thing propped against the wall, “I might be able to find it in my heart to forgive ye, neighbor.”
“Yeah, of course!” Harry knows he sounds too eager. But it’s an honest eager. He doesn’t know why, but it is. His new neighbor is grinning, then bending down to lift the thing when Harry stops him to ask, “What exactly is… she?”
Bright blue eyes go wide, and stare at him, incredulous.
“Shit, mate, can’t tell me you’ve never seen a Newtonian before?”
“Uh… a… Newtoni… what ?” Harry wonders vaguely if he looks as stupid as he sounds right now. But with this man, Harry’s learning, self-consciousness never seems to last long.
“You’re telling me,” he says, hands out in front of him to punctuate every syllable, “that you’ve never looked at the night sky through the likes of her?”
Harry looks the thing up and down, sighing with an intrigued little smirk. Telescope, he thinks, seeing now that the metal legs are extendable, and the scope itself tilts on a hinge, where he assumes you can prop it diagonally, angle it toward the stars. “No, I guess… I guess I can’t say that I have.”
His words are met with an offended scoff. “Well, I’ve got news for you, bud — if you haven’t seen the night sky through a Newtonian… then you haven’t seen the night sky.”
Harry’s holding his hands up in surrender but he’s quickly getting orders barked at him, which he’s happy to follow. “Grab her from the top there, will ye? Help me take her up. I’m in 3C. We’re gonna get her out to the balcony, and then, we are gonna change that.”
“Oh we are, are we?”
“Hell yeah, we are,” he huffs as they hoist the thing off the ground. “I may not have a sofa or a table or any real food to speak of, but I’ve got two good patio chairs, a bag of ice, half a bottle of Jameson, and a twelve-inch Newtonian reflector, which means there is literally no better time to look at the stars.”
“Oh is that what that means?” Harry grunts loud as he nearly topples backward over the top step, getting a grip on himself in the nick of time.
Infectious laughter fills the hall. “Yeah, that’s what that means.”
Harry shrugs as much as he can with the weight of the scope dragging his muscles toward the ground, and kicks open the door to 3C which, much to his satisfaction, is the flat directly on his neighboring side. He hadn’t even known the apartment was empty, if he’s being honest. Just thought he had a quiet church mouse of a neighbor. Laughter bubbles up inside him as he looks down the length of the telescope at the platinum mop straining to support the weight. Yeah, he thinks, he definitely won’t be making that mistake again.
They stumble into the apartment, which is dimly lit by a single desk lamp sat atop one of about a hundred cardboard boxes in the living room. The trek through the cardboard labyrinth to the sliding glass door leading out to the balcony is a long and bumbling one, but a few stubbed toes later they’re setting the telescope down on the concrete patio, Harry’s eyes watering with joy as his muscles finally relax, and his new neighbor collapsing dramatically into one of the two aforementioned patio chairs.
Harry pops the foot-wide lens cover off the eye of the telescope and begins using it to fan himself. It’s not hot out, but it’s not quite cool enough to bring him down from his unexpected workout.
“What was that you said before about Jameson?” he snickers, the idea of a whiskey on the rocks suddenly sounding like the best idea ever.
He gets a soft chuckle in response, through labored breathing. “Gimme a minute, and I’ll grab it.” Then, with warm, palpable gratitude, “And thanks for the extra hands, Harry.”
“No problem…”
Harry slows down his fanning, and he’s usually not terrible with names, but he finds himself retracing their conversation in his mind to remember.
“I… sorry,” he says, and the boy looks Harry’s way, blue eyes practically illuminating the entire patio, gaze like a moonbeam shining directly upon him. “Did you say your name was… Nile? Like… like the river?”
Eyes close, and shoulders shake with a fond kind of laughter before they open again and he responds, “Yeah. Sort of. Spelled different.” He drags a finger lazily through the air, “N-I-A-L-L. But, yeah. The same.”
“Different,” Harry comments, not meaning for it to sound so much like a contradiction. “I like it,” he adds.
Niall’s suddenly hoisting himself up from the patio chair and retreating into the apartment, but not before he snatches the lens cap out of Harry’s hand with a joking, “Gimme that. This is fragile equipment, this is.”
Harry snorts, and Niall’s holding the cap in his hand and waving it right before Harry’s nose to reinforce his point, but then he’s shrugging, and begins using it to fan himself just the same as he disappears inside.
Harry doesn’t believe in love at first sight. He never has. And he’s promised himself he never will. He has too many friends who claim to have experienced it, only for those relationships to crumble six months, a year, two years down the line, buttoned up with an “I never really loved them anyway” from the same boy who cried “love at first sight” at the start. Love at first sight is a fantasy, he tells himself. A juvenile, impossible fantasy that he most certainly has never, and will never, experience.
It’s too bad Harry doesn’t believe. If he did, it would be a lot easier to for him to rationalize the way his heart sank into his belly when, just a moment ago, he spotted the shining silver band gracing the ring finger on Niall’s left hand.