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A blinding flash, a metallic thud and a whir. Zayn drops the book of matches onto the table in surprise, hunches his shoulders reflexively and glances up, pulling the cigarette out of his mouth.
“Jesus, Ni.”
“SMILE!”
“You’ve already taken the picture, babe, I didn’t have a chance.”
“Well smile anyway. You’re lovely when you smile.” He tugs the print out of the camera and shakes it, then lets it fall to the table on top of the weekly folded there.
“Just lemme light this.”
“Alright.” Niall watches patiently as Zayn strikes a match and holds it to the end of the cigarette. He breathes in and the paper crackles and glows in the dark of the pub. As he waits, Niall leans his chin on one hand and taps at the polaroid on the table.
“Gonna be a good one.”
Zayn takes the cigarette from his mouth and breathes out, smoke curling up and over their heads. He looks at Niall and curls his mouth deliberately. Niall shakes his head.
“No. Bigger. Wider, please. A proper one. Shall I tell you a joke? Two vampires walk into a pub—”
Zayn lifts his hands in protest.
“No jokes! Spare me.”
Niall gasps and sits up, slamming his palm down on the table. “You love my jokes! I can’t even believe what I’m hearing right now. I’m wounded!”
He falls silent as Zayn reaches over, his face a mask of mock concern. He pats at Niall’s chest, his hair, his face. Niall waves him away, protesting.
“Get off, you’re a cruel person.”
“Aw, babe.” Zayn laughs and tugs at the collar of his jacket, pulling him close. “I was kidding. I love your stupid jokes. They’re my favorite.”
Niall sighs and leans into him, pressing his head into Zayn’s chest. His voice is muffled when he speaks. “I know you’re telling the truth because I feel you laughing.” He’s quiet for a moment, unmoving, and Zayn wonders if this is how they’ll be sat for the rest of evening.
“We don’t have to go…we can stay if you want to stay. And I won’t go without you…”
Niall’s voice is quiet. Zayn takes his sunglasses off and drops them on the table, then pushes Niall upright, holding him at arms length. He grins, and it starts out deliberate and jokey, but then he’s really looking at Niall, the way his hair’s gone sort of lopsided and how serious he looks and he can’t help smiling for real. He feels his eyes going all squinty the way they do and Niall smiles back happily.
“There! I did it. Nice.”
Zayn reaches over and straightens Niall’s hair, smoothing the mess down. Niall picks the polaroid off the table and inspects it.
“A good one. Told ya. You look all striking and mysterious and shit. Like a spy.”
“Yeah right. I’d make a rubbish spy.”
“You’d make a great one! You’ve got the whole,” Niall waves his hand around his head vaguely, “thing thing. Anyway where was I?”
He drops the photo and pulls the weekly toward him, opening it.
“Two hundred reasons to stay in Dublin. We’ll skip that one then. Sore subject…ummmm…Oh!”
“What?” Zayn leans over to see.
“Lookit.” Niall turns the paper toward Zayn. There’s an article about Billy Idol. A fluff piece about his meteoric rise as a solo artist. Zayn shrugs.
“Eh.”
“I know, what a git, yeah? But what do you think of the hair? Do you think I could pull off blonde?”
He lifts the paper and holds it next to his face, affecting a Billy Idol-like sneer. Zayn laughs.
“You could pull off anything, babe. Sure. Yeah.”
Niall drops the paper back onto the table and chews at his thumb, thoughtful.
“I don’t know if it’ll even keep. Never tried it.” He reaches over and ruffles Zayn’s quiff. “We could give you a bride of Frankenstein kind of streak in the front. Very edgy.”
Zayn shrugs.
“I’m game. Fuck it.”
“Fuck it! It’s the 80’s!” Niall stands up suddenly. “Alright. I should get us some pints so we don’t look like freeloaders. Don’t go anywhere.”
Zayn doesn’t move. He sits, toying with the camera and watching the crowd. It’s nearly closing time and people are milling around, clutching cold pints and lit cigarettes. The air is charged. He can feel a hundred minds buzzing. People vibrating with indecision. Stay here or take a chance somewhere else before the lock-in? Curiosity coming off the people who’ve come out just for the show, intending to stick it out through the headliner. Nervous energy, the false invincibility of youth and something more. The frenetic hum and spark of the addicted brain.
That’s more common these days, that hunger and anxiety and desperation. Sweat on a brow. Needles discarded in dark alleys. It feels familiar to him, because he knows what it is to be that hungry, and it feels dangerous because just like he does, and just like Niall does, it kills sometimes too. It taints the blood with something new and corrosive and wrong and they’ve not figured out how to know so they’ve been heating everything they get and they’ve not been drinking fresh at all. Zayn would honestly be happy with bank blood and boiling kettles for the rest of time, but to be forced into it by fear…it’s…not ideal.
He thinks Niall might be cracking up a little. It’s something he craves, that direct connection. The contact and the opening up and the laying bare that comes with hunting, with keeping a source close and building that unique sort of intimacy. He wants to possess people. To consume them in every way. To map their bodies and their minds and keep them with him. And then inside him…because he never forgets. He remembers every word and touch and gesture.
Zayn exists in this world, with these people, and he lets their thoughts move through him and away. He’s left with a feeling, a sense of them, an impression that fades and becomes part of a greater tapestry. Niall holds a map of every thread in his memory. Keeps each one close. Zayn is a radio, catching fleeting frequencies and losing them again. Niall is a tape recorder. He’s a camera. His mind is an archive. And encyclopedia. Or a haunted house maybe. He’s full of ghosts.
He’s coming back from the bar now, holding a pint in each hand, and he’s being shadowed by a boy, who’s talking at the side of his face. Of course he is. Niall is a magnet. He draws people to him. Wherever he is there’s music and there’s laughter and it’s loud and that’s what Zayn loves about him, isn’t it? Niall hasn’t drawn a proper breath in hundreds of years but wherever he goes, everything is so alive.
Zayn can hear the boy talking now, and his voice is slow and deep which comes as a bit of a surprise. He’s tall, but he’s got the face of a baby or one of those little cherubs all over the chapels back in Italy. His mind is going at a mile a minute, a mess of enthusiasm tempered by anxiety, but he’s picking his words carefully, deliberately, which is intriguing. Nothing about his slow drawl and easy smile would betray the truth. He’s high strung. Eager to please. Desperate to do right. And that’s cool. That’s fine. Zayn appreciates a person who presents as open and receptive but keeps himself to himself. Who filters. Who cultivates a presence. He loves Niall, doesn’t he?
“And it’s like wham! You know? Like this wall of sound. Or like a tidal wave or something. Need bloody earplugs, right?”
Niall sets a pint down in front of Zayn, smiling.
“I found you an Englishman!”
The boy raises his hand, the one that’s not holding a pint. He’s wearing a sheepskin coat, the shearling poking out at the collar and arms, which is comical, considering how warm it is in the bar. His hair is shaggy and curly and dark brown and swept back off his face in an effortlessly arranged sort of way.
“Hiiii! Harry.” He holds out his hand and Zayn takes it, shaking it firmly. He can feel the boy’s pulse. The warmth moving through his veins. It’s enticing and distracting and wonderful and terrible all at once. He keeps his face benign. Friendly.
“Zayn.”
“Cripes, mate! Your hands are freezing!” Harry pulls his hand back and crosses his arms, shivering demonstratively and spilling a little beer on his coat. “Sorry, I just can’t get warm out here. It’s fucking arctic.” He sets his beer down and takes a seat.
“Been a crazy cold spell this week.” Niall edges around Harry and takes a seat. “Honestly it’s usually quite balmy.”
“Shit luck for me, then. I’m like lizard or a frog or something. Cold blooded. I need sun, you know? Have you ever been to LA?”
Niall shakes his head. “Nah…never that far West. We’re not uh…” He glances over at Zayn and smiles. “We’re not big flyers.”
“Well, I’ve not been either, but I hear about it, you know, from music people? They’ve got year-round sun. They go to the beach on Christmas. Proper mental stuff.”
He takes a sip of his beer. Niall turns to Zayn.
“Harry is music people, Zayn. He’s visiting from Manchester.”
Zayn raises his eyebrows and holds his pint to his lips for a moment.
“What brings you to Dublin then? The ambiance? The tourism? Maybe the abandoned buildings?”
Harry laughs. “Yeah. It’s uh…I like it. It’s like…a city in transition. Manchester’s the same, you know? You can feel stuff brewing over there. Feel like you’re standing on the ground floor of something.”
Zayn shrugs, skeptical.
“Might be a while for Dublin, honestly.”
Niall nudges Zayn with one elbow and scoffs.
“Like you’re sad about it.” He screws his face up at Harry. “Zayn loves things that are falling apart. He loves decay and chaos and morbidity.”
“Oh” Harry smiles. “How gothic of you! You’re here for the show, then?”
Zayn tips his glass in a guilty as charged sort of way.
“Me too. I mean. I’m sure you guessed. We’ve been hearing like…buzz about Dublin. Like some stuff that’s coming up. New shit, you know?”
Niall nods.
“New shit. Yeah, Zayn’s neck deep in it. It’s mental though, like you said. All the distortion and stuff. I dunno. It’s like…suffocating.”
The crowd is getting bigger, people pressed against one another in the aisles. There’s a whistle and the sound of clapping and then it’s lock-in and the bartender is yelling at people to get in or get out.
“Fuckin packed in here, innit?” Niall’s voice is a little high. A little nervous, and Zayn tugs at his sleeve, pulling him close.
“You’re good, babe.”
Niall straightens up, shrugging it off.
“Have you seen them though? It’s hilarious, mate. Like there’s so much going on, with the pedals and stuff, they just like…stand there and space out. Like it’s not even a performance. I told Zayn he should call it shoegazin’ because that’s all any of ‘em ever do. They just stand there and sway back and forth a little and step on pedals and stare at their feet.”
Harry laughs.
“Sounds electrifying. Shoegaze…” He tests the word out, drawing out the O.
Zayn shakes his head.
“Don’t need all that other stuff though, do you? The jumpin around and messin about. It’s about the music, right?”
“Yeah. I dunno. I guess it sounds like a performance in itself. The standing.”
“True, Harold.” Niall is grinning, thoroughly amused. “Can I call you Harold? It suits you.”
Harry laughs and tips his glass.
“True, Harold. Anyway, I’m just talkin a load of shite. I like it just fine. You can’t dance to it, but it’s lovely, you know?”
He reaches over then, under the table, and puts a hand on Zayn’s knee. Squeezes gently.
They talk while they wait for the show to start. Harry tells them about the radio station in Manchester where he’s been taken on as an intern (mostly through nepotism. He’s good mates with one of the nighttime DJs). Harry didn’t know bugger-all about audio tech when he started, but he’s getting acclimated slowly. What he lacks in technical know-how he tries to make up for in enthusiasm. He’s on a break from school (he’s studying some weird combination of law, sociology and business) and has been tasked with a kind of scouting mission.
“Nick was like hearing all this buzz about the Dublin scene from some friends and I was like ‘fuck it, I’ll go’. He called me mental but I love a road trip, you know? And I like new stuff. So why not?”
“You drove all that way alone?”
“Yeah! It’s not so bad, right? There’s a ferry. I made like a million mix tapes. And when I’m driving alone I can sing along as loud as I want without getting shushed.”
He launches into a story then, something about a road trip he took out of Holmes Chapel with his mother and sister when he was 12. It’s a long, meandering tale and at first Zayn’s paying close attention, following the twists and turns, waiting for the point. There’s something about sheep. Something about a train. A few minutes in, Zayn realizes that maybe there is no point, but he’s not particularly bothered. Harry’s got a soothing voice, slow and deep like molasses dripping off of a spoon. Niall cuts in occasionally, trying to make sense of the narrative—“Wait why were the sheep there? But you didn’t get in til 3 right?”—and Zayn wants to laugh every time because he knows that Niall is retaining all of it. That he’s filing this totally useless never-ending anecdote away in the archives. He can’t help it. It’s who he is.
Harry excuses himself when they start to hear sharp bursts of guitar, someone speaking into a mic and requesting more bass in the monitor. He digs an unwieldly-looking tape recorder out of his bag.
“Duty calls, then. Can’t go home empty handed. I’ll see you lads after?”
They tip their glasses and nod and smile and then he’s gone, absorbed by the crowd.
They sit quietly for a moment, then Niall pulls a warm flask out of his pocket and hands it to Zayn. They take a sip each and the music opens up. It’s as loud and encompassing and transcendent as promised. Zayn can hear bits and pieces of himself in it. The stuff they’d been messing around with together. He’d spotted Kevin across the room at the beginning of the night, caught his eye. Kevin had given him a small wave and a smile, then turned back to his conversation. He gets it. That’s what Zayn likes about him.
Or almost gets it. He’s gone somewhere new with their work. Reshaped it. Made it something else. Something more. Zayn’s not surprised. He couldn’t be. It’s not the first time.
Niall leans close and speaks softly into Zayn’s ear. His lips are warm from the blood.
“It’s lovely. It’s decaying, you know? Just the way you wrote it, but now it’s like…blooming.”
He’s right. He’s exactly right.
They slip out before the last song, ducking through the door and out onto the pavement, where the dull drone and thud of the music meets the sound of the night. Animals rooting through trash cans and the buzz of the street lamps and someone singing quietly, drunkenly, a block or two away. Niall loops his arm through Zayn’s and propels him forward, humming the tune of the last song. A tune Zayn’s been teasing out since last November.
“It’s a good one,” he says, and he nods like it’s decided and Zayn thinks it is. It’s decided. It’s a good one.
They’d moved across the city on foot tonight, but now there’s no real time to walk back and anyway Niall likes the bus at this time of night. Likes the people he sees there. They play a game sometimes, the two of them--Niall watching someone a few seats over and whispering a story to Zayn. Speculating on what brought them to this place and this time and this bus on this night in this city in this life. He’ll try his best or try his worst, depending on his mood--or on Zayn’s mood maybe--and Zayn will shut his eyes and listen. He’ll tell Niall if he’s hot or cold. If he’s right or wrong. Sometimes he lies, depending on his mood. Or Niall’s mood maybe. Sometimes he has trouble telling those two things apart. Mostly he tells the truth.
They get to the bus stop and Niall parks himself next to the signpost in the glow of a streetlight. Zayn moves into the shadow of the building and leans against the wall.
They stay that way for a time. Alone together. Niall humming to himself and letting his mind wander. He’s remembering something from a long time ago. Something about the smell of wet peat and his hands on stone and the taste of blood. Zayn tries not to pry when Niall’s like this. Tries to rein the sense in, but there are always glimpses. Little bits he’ll always pick up on, like a broken radio scanning through stations. The key is to not let himself latch on to any one thing. To let the thoughts move past him like a rolling stream. It’s a thing Zayn learned a long time ago, a long way away from here. Something Niall tried to help him with--telling stories in his head. Throwing thoughts at Zayn like crumpled up bits of paper that Zayn would have to dodge. He was rubbish at it at first. It took time. But time is the one thing they’ve always had.
“Should’ve come by now.”
Zayn looks up at Niall, who’s peering at the schedule tacked to the signpost.
“Is it late?” He pushes off the wall and moves forward, then stops. There’s a tickle in the back of his mind. A hint of activity. It’s familiar. Then footsteps. Zayn looks down the street and sees Harry, who’s seen Niall, illuminated by the glow of the street lamp. He’s smiling crookedly and slouching a little, his bag slung over his shoulder and his hands shoved in his pockets. Zayn can smell the salt on his skin and the smoke from the club and a hint of shampoo. Harry’s breath moves in little white puffs when he talks.
“Hey there.”
Zayn moves into the light and touches Niall’s elbow lightly. Niall looks up from the schedule and smiles. Zayn feels a push. A glimmer. Something working in Niall’s mind.
“We meet again.”
“Do you live here?” Harry is smiling in an unreadable way, but Zayn feels the joke of it. He’s taking the piss. Niall laughs.
“At the bus stop? No. We do not live at the bus stop. Just waiting on a late run is all.”
Harry hitches his bag up on his shoulder and pulls a set of keys out of his pocket.
“Gonna be waiting a while, lads. Last bus was an hour ago.”
Niall shakes his head.
“No, it says just there--” Zayn hears the truth of it in Harry’s thoughts and laughs, cutting Niall off.
“Daylight savings, babe.”
Harry points at Zayn with his keys.
“We have a winner.”
Zayn looks over at Niall and nudges him with one shoulder.
“You didn’t have that filed away somewhere in the archives?”
Niall looks thwarted. A little annoyed.
“I do now, don’t I?”
Harry tilts his head at them.
“You lads stranded, then? I’ve got a car down the way. I could give you a lift.”
Zayn starts to shake his head no. No, they can make their own way. No just leave us alone, no, then Niall hits him with a thought so hard it feels like his own, loud and present and front and center. Yes.
“Yeah, mate. That would be ace.”