Chapter Text
A 13-year-old Zayn struggles to keep up with his two best friends (it would be three, but one of them is currently unavailable), jogging slowly as his necklace keeps hitting against his diaphragm.
“Hurry up, ya cunt!” one of his friends, Niall, shouts as he tackles Harry to the ground and laughs when Harry glares at him.
“I told you no cursing!” Harry flips them over so that he’s on top and proceeds to bite Niall’s thumb when Niall tries to slap Harry. Niall yelps in pain.
Zayn glares down at the annoying piece of jewelry everyone is given when they’re born. It’s weird, once you think about it. How one is mysteriously conjured up once the mother names the child. He grabs the heart piece and looks on the back of it. It has his full name engraved in it. Each one is jagged in a way that only your soulmate can make their other half fit them together (Zayn and Niall seriously tried to put their necklaces together; it wouldn’t work).
His is currently black, Niall’s is black as well, and Harry’s the only one of the three to have one that’s a deep red. His mother used to tell him that when he found his soulmate, the piece would illuminate a bit, like a mini-flashlight, and intertwine with his soulmate’s to make a whole heart, and the two pieces would turn red.
He saw the whole thing happen when Louis met Harry. Harry was new to his neighborhood, and they became fast friends when Zayn saw him reading a comic book (he wasn’t actually reading it, Zayn finds out, he was just using it to block the sun out of his eyes). But when he introduced him to his two other friends, they were surprised to see Louis and Harry’s necklaces shine and come together.
They’re avoiding each other now; neither of them have experience with this sort of thing, so they decided to ignore the problem at hand and never see each other again.
He takes off the annoying necklace and places it on a nearby picnic table. The thing had always been too big on him; he never grew into it like the rest of the kids in his grade had over the summer. Every time he’d reach over the dinner table to grab a napkin, the necklace never failed to sink into his food.
Once it’s off he smiles to himself before running off to join his friends, shouting a ‘dogpile’ and jumping on top of the both of them.
It isn’t until the next morning when he’s reaching for a napkin, and an object doesn’t dip into his cereal, that he realizes he forgot his necklace. He searches his chest and his neck all around for it – as if it were going to magically appear – before he panics.
“Mum?” Zayn mumbles as he watches his mother walk over with a plate of pancakes for her herself.
“Yes, dear?” she responds, smiling sweetly at her son.
“I think— I lost my necklace. I left it at the park.” He’s frowning now and bowing his head in shame.
Trisha merely kneels down to his level and gives him a hug. “It’s okay, honey, we’ll just go to the park after school. M’sure it’s still there.”
Zayn smiles at his mother’s reassurance and nods his head, heading to school with his worry forgotten.
Well, forgotten until he goes back to the park and searches endlessly for it and realizes it’s gone, for good.