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He’s walking down the stairs and then his mug is shattered on the floor and there’s tea sogging up his pants and his head is crooked in a weird angle, and he knows all of this because he’s looking at it. He’s laying on the floor soaking in warm Earl Grey like an old rag, but he is also on his feet, staring down at his own body, his own face.
He thinks, weirdly unfazed, that his hair looks great today.
His mum calls and leaves a message on the answering machine when, for some reason, he can’t pick up the phone but his fingers keep slipping through it. She says she’ll be a little late for dinner but she’s bringing over some pizza so he’d better be hungry when she shows up.
He tries to do the dishes and he tries to shake his floor-laying self awake and he tries to turn on the TV but he can’t touch anything. He decides he’s dreaming, then, even though he can’t remember going to sleep, but that’s sort of how dreaming works, isn’t it? Besides, it’s the only logical explanation he can come up with, so he sits on the couch and stares at the wall waiting for the alarm clock.
Of all the billions of things I could be dreaming of, this is the worst, he thinks over and over again, a little angry at himself but mostly bored.
His mum comes home with pizza which she drops the moment she walks through the door, and then she drops down too, melting on her knees like she’s a puppet and someone cut her strings.
Niall watches her cry over his dead body, warm with tea, and his hair is fantastic.
“I think maybe we should throw a party,” Louis says, kicking the door open with his toe. Behind him, Zayn is carrying a huge box of books, so all he manages is a strained grunt. “I’m just saying. We don’t know anybody around here.”
Zayn drops his box right by the door and sighs. “So you want to invite a bunch of strangers into our home. Seems nice.”
“Don’t be an oaf,” Louis tells him, rolling his eyes as he walks into the kitchen. He puts down his own box gently, and then he rips it open and starts fishing out all sorts of kitchenware that his mother got him for the new apartment and that neither of them is ever going to use, not properly anyway. “We’ll get to know them first, our neighbours for example, and then we’ll throw the party.”
“Ugh,” Zayn says from the living room. “That sounds like an awful lot of work.”
“Or we can keep up the hermits lifestyle, because that’s healthy,” Louis shrugs. “Whatever you want.”
Zayn walks into the kitchen and leans against the doorframe, crossing his arms, and then he looks up at Louis fussing around the cabinets with big forked things and spatulae and his breath catches in his throat.
There’s a boy, sitting on the counter by the sink; his hair is a tousled, washed out blond stain and his eyes are bright and blue and Zayn knows him because the landlord showed them a picture of him. Poor boy, he’d say, and he’d shake his head like people always do when they think of sad things, as if sad things were fleas and shaking your head would make them drop out of your hair. Poor boy, he’d say, so happy and kind and shake shake shake, poor boy, his mother was so heartbroken, shake shake shake, poor boy.
Poor boy who broke his neck falling off the stairs one afternoon, and after that tenants never stayed for longer than three weeks; poor boy who’s looking at Louis curiously, following his every move, swining his legs in the air. Poor boy whom Zayn can see, and Zayn shakes his head and blinks as fast as he can because all the bugs in the world would be better, way, way better than this.
Poor boy whom Zayn sees and can’t stop seeing.
“Louis,” he says, his voice cracking at the hems. Louis turns around, his eyes shifting past poor boy like he’s not there, and Zayn breathes out. “Okay. Let’s have the party. Let’s meet the neighbours.”
Louis beams. Poor boy stares at Zayn, and when Zayn looks back at him, not through him, not right next to his shoulder, but at him, his face goes white and he yelps, loud and scared and he says, “You can see me?!”
Louis drops a pot, and Zayn nearly jumps out of his skin.
“Sorry!” Louis says, frowning. “Sorry, gee, why are you so twitchy?”
“I — uh, no, it’s nothing,” Zayn says, rubbing a hand through his hair. “I’ll just go see if I can find my cigarettes.”
He hopes poor boy will follow him upstairs, but he also hopes poor boy won’t.
“I can’t leave the house,” poor boy says. He also says his name is Niall and he’s stuck looking like he’s seventeen, but he’s actually twenty-three, thank you very much. “I never meant to scare all the other people who came here, but, you know. They got scared anyways.”
Zayn is chain-smoking. He’s chain-smoking and he knows that he shouldn’t and he also knows he doesn’t give a fuck; there’s a ghost in his house, sitting on his bed, talking about tea and how he’s read all the books in the house twenty times over and how he can’t wait to go through the ones Zayn and Louis brought and how happy he is that they’re here, because he’s seen all the boxes they labeled as books and DVDs and Zayn’s idiot bullshit which he totally hopes means it’s comicbooks and videogames; and he can tell they have good taste, he can tell by just looking at them, Zayn’s shirt is super cool, by the way.
Zayn is chain-smoking and he’s almost burnt through half a packet and Niall tells him, “You should slow down, these things are going to kill you.”
And Zayn just loses it at that; he ducks his head and laughs, maniacal and exhausted and vaguely scared. He ruffles his hair with one hand and he’s still so elated and desperate when he looks up and across the room, at Niall who just looks puzzled, and so very young, and dead, poor boy.
“No, they won’t,” Zayn says, throwing the cigarette’s butt out of the window and lighting up another one. “They won’t kill me, same as you.”
Niall frowns. “That’s because I’m dead. Dead people don’t get lung cancer.”
“My point exactly,” Zayn says, with a tight-lipped smile.
Louis is good at a lot of things, but most of all, he’s very good at things that involve people; he’s great at throwing parties, and Zayn comes back from his shift at the hospital to a home filled with guests and brightly colored plastic cups of cheap alcohol, and he smiles a little to himself.
“Hey, stud,” Perrie says, walking up to him and offering a cup, which he takes with a grateful smile.
“Hello to you, too,” he says, and he’d meant to drink only a tiny little sip, but then he sees Niall walking around the crowded living room with a smile, and he ends up draining the cup because what the fuck, he can’t be sober for this.
Perrie laughs, her eyes bright and happy as she says, “Easy, Malik, you just got here,” and she must be drunk, because she’s leaning into Zayn already.
“Sorry, love, I need to, uh, go get changed. I stink like the hospital,” he says, his tongue tied and his heart breaking a little when he has to push her away. Perrie smirks up at him.
“I’m happy to help.”
Zayn forces a laugh and starts walking away. “Later, maybe.”
“Fine, whatever!” Perrie calls back after him, but Zayn has caught Niall’s eyes from across the room, and soon enough they’re locked in his mercifully empty room, and he’s ready to throw an hysterical fit.
“What if someone saw you?” he hisses. Niall is sitting on the edge of his bed like he aways is, and it’s way too fucking familiar already, no matter how hard Zayn tries not to grow fond of him.
“Nobody did, I checked, I was careful,” Niall says, his voice thin but firm. He looks up at Zayn. “I’ve been fine for years before you moved in, okay? You don’t have to worry.”
Zayn is still tugging at his own hair, but he stops and forces himself to take a breath, deep and steady, just pretend everything’s fine. Niall looks so deceptively young and tiny and dead that it’s hard to remember that he’s actually neither one of those; except dead. He is dead, but then again he is not, and Zayn drops onto the bed, sitting right next to him.
“This is so fucked up,” he says, pushing the heels of his hands into his eyes. Niall chuckles weakly, bumps his knee against Zayn’s and then he breathes in very sharply. Zayn looks over and it takes him a moment to realize, Niall has never even so much as brushed past him.
“Niall—”
“I’m sorry, I—”
“No, no, hey, it’s okay,” Zayn says, before Niall can pull any of the weird things he does sometimes, like dropping down through the floor or going really invisible. “It’s okay. You can — can you do it again? It’s fine, I promise.”
Niall stares at him for the longest time, his eyes terrified and frozen, the music from downstairs beating through the paper-thin walls; he reaches out, slow and hesitant, his fingers shaking a little, but he stops his hand mid-air. He reaches out and stops again and again and again, without getting any closer to Zayn, but the fifth time, he shuts his eyes closed and shoves his hand against Zayn’s face, his cheek, without giving himself any chance to have second thoughts about it again.
Zayn laughs softly, and puts his own hand on the back of Niall’s, keeping it there.
“It’s fine,” he says again, leaning forward a bit. Niall slowly opens his eyes, ducking his head to look up at him from under his lashes.
“Actually, it’s not,” he whispers. “Zayn, you’re cold as fuck.”
There’s a boy in the kitchen, digging through the pots in the cupboards, and Zayn smirks as he fishes a beer, a decent one, out of the fridge.
“Louis will never forgive you if you mess up his pots,” he says. The boy throws him a toothy, pretty grin from over his shoulder.
“It’s fine, I have his permission,” he says; Zayn chuckles and walks to the table, popping the beer open against its edge. The boy follows his movement, his smile going a little softer, then he goes back to the cupboard, then he looks back again and he stands up so abruptly he bangs his head against the cupboard’s flap.
“You okay?” Zayn asks, half a laughter still playing on his lips until he realizes the boy is looking straight past his shoulder.
“Niall?” the boys says, his eyes huge with surprise and maybe a touch of fear; Zayn turns around and of course Niall is standing right there, frozen in place.
“Shit,” Zayn mutters, and without thinking, he grabs Niall by the wrist and drags him in, kicking the kitchen’s door closed behind his back — Perrie was walking there but she stops and blinks and then turns around and swears to herself she’s never going to talk to Zayn ever again, except she’s drunk and she won’t remember any of that in the morning.
“Niall,” the boy says again, and then, “What the fuck? I thought—”
“Yes,” Niall says, because he doesn’t like it when other people say that, Zayn has learned. “Yes, I am dead. How can you see me?”
“I don’t — wait, so you are, like, a—”
“I’m Zayn,” Zayn chimes in, throwing out his hand and almost knocking his forgotten beer off the table. “Zayn Malik, nice to meet you. I live here now.”
The boy looks startled, but he shakes Zayn’s hand and nods. “Liam Payne. I live next door, Louis invited me.” He sighs. “Cool party.”
“Thanks,” Zayn says, smiling brightly even though he had pretty much no business in putting together this thing, but there’s no need for Liam Payne to know that.
“I’m a ghost,” Niall says, in one breath and barely audible. “I’m a ghost and Zayn can see me because he’s—”
The door swings open and a headful of curls pokes in, “Liam, how long’s it gonna take it to find a bloody mug? Did you end up in Narnia or something?”
Zayn’s first instinct is to get the fuck out of there as fast as he can, but the door is the only exit and all he can do is take a step back, putting some more distance between himself and the intruder. Clearly a dick move, anyway, because it catches the boy’s attention and now he’s staring right at Zayn and obviously, he knows; just look at how his eyes widen and his grip on the door handle clenches.
“Yeah, sorry, Harry, I was just, uhm,” Liam stammers, and when he drops a sideways glance to Zayn, probably looking for help, he realizes how fucking terrified he is by this Harry guy. “Uhm, Zayn, are you — are you all right?”
“Liam, we’re leaving,” Harry says, still not taking his eyes off Zayn. “We’re leaving right now.”
“What? What’s going on?”
Niall snaps his fingers, suddenly enlightened. “They’re, like, sworn enemies,” he says. Liam just looks more confused.
“What? Who’s whose sworn enemy? Why would anyone have a sworn enemy?” he asks, just as Harry says, “Niall?”
Niall waves, “Hey, Harry.”
“Okay,” Liam says, breathing hard to keep himself from freaking out, which is currently Zayn’s favourite activity ever. “Is anyone going to be so kind as to explain what’s going on?”
“He’s a bloody werewolf,” Zayn rasps, taking another step back and plastering himself against the sink.
“You’re a vampire,” Niall says, almost apologetically. Liam does a double-take.
“A vampire? Seriously?”
Zayn can’t fucking believe his ears. “What, werewolves don’t shock you but a vampire does?”
“Harry’s my roommate,” Liam says, shrugging a little. “I’ve known about his, uh, furry problem for ages.”
Zayn laughs, sharp and bitter. “Furry problem, he says! Mate, a kitten who pisses everywhere is a furry problem, not a bloody bloodthirsty beast running through my neighbourhood every full moon—”
“Yeah, ’cause I’m the only bloodthirsty beast in the room,” Harry spits back, his hands on his hips.
“I’ve never hurt anyone, Fido,” Zayn says through gritted teeth.
All of a sudden Harry’s up in his personal space, breathing down his neck and staring him down, growling, “If I had a penny for every time I’ve heard that sentence and the bastard who said it wasn’t lying —”
“You’d have a penny!” Zayn yells, shoving him away; Harry stumbles back, knocks over a chair, and the noise is enough to attract some curious glances from the guests. After a moment, Louis is elbowing his way into the kitchen.
“Zayn, what the fuck,” he says, slightly flustered; he looks over the three of them like a scorned mother, which is a look he wears wonderfully, and then his eyes lock on Niall. “And who the hell are you?”
Zayn offers Harry a cold beer — a good one — before sitting down next to him on the kerb.
They smoke and drink into the night for a while, peacefully silent, and it almost feels like they’re friends, so Zayn says, his voice coarse from all the cigarettes and the non-speaking, “You wouldn’t.”
Harry looks at him, his eyes warm under heavy lids, his lips curled tight around the cigarette’s filter. Zayn swallows hard and he feels like he won’t ever sleep again, so he says, “You wouldn’t have a penny.”
“I know,” Harry says, quiet and kind and warm.
He’s so warm that Zayn feels even colder.
There’s a full moon three days after that, and Zayn wakes up to the scent of pancakes. In the kitchen downstairs, Harry is sitting at the table looking like he just crawled his way out of Hell, and Louis looks up from the stoves to give Zayn a long, meaningful stare of doom.
Zayn coughs to make his presence known, even though Harry probably heard him fumble out of bed half an hour ago, and administers a friendly, magnanimous pat on his back.
“’morning, lad. How d’you feel?” he asks, kicking out a chair from under the table and dropping onto it like a dead weight. Harry shrugs, his eyes wandering to Louis’ back, the pile of pancakes he’s making.
“I’ve had worse nights, to tell you the truth,” he says. “Definitely had worse mornings.”
Zayn laughs and pours himself a much useless glass of orange juice, faking a toast with Harry’s own. “Amen to that,” he says, and Harry lets a tiny smirk slip from his guard. “Where’s Niall?”
“He went out,” Louis announces proudly. Zayn blinks.
“Come again?”
“Niall went out,” Louis repeats, with a big grin. “He’s at Liam and Harry’s, with Liam, to grab some milk.”
“That’s impressive,” Zayn says, because he doesn’t know what else to say. Louis looks like he could walk three feet from the ground, anyway, so Zayn’s happy too.
“Can I ask you a question?” Liam says one day; he’s down at the hospital for his weekly night of voluntary work, and Zayn might have dropped by a little earlier than he should have, just to spend two hours folding towels with him.
“You just did,” Zayn says, with a smirk. “But go ahead, ask away.”
Liam bites his lips and blushes, uncharacteristically hesitant. Zayn might even get worried.
“Do you, uhm, do you have to feed?” Liam asks. “From humans, I mean. Do you do that?”
Zayn chews on the toothpick he keeps in his mouth when he’s not working but still in a place where he can’t smoke; he wraps his tongue around it and shifts it from one corner of his lips to the other, and he can tell Liam is staring, but that question is still hanging there in the air between them and Zayn can’t walk around it.
Fuck, he could barely breathe if he still needed to.
He could lie. He wants to lie, he’s done that before. It’s easy as fuck, throwing on a fake smile and pretending you are whatever you want to be — an astronaut, a world-class chess player, the bastard son of John Lennon, not a killing machine with a sweet tooth for the velvety dark red of hot human blood spilling and pouring out of a pulsing wound. It’s easy and satisfying, the more they drink it in the better you feel about yourself, your mask, the thing you made up and stuck to your forehead to hide the huge black hole of a failure you are; it’s easy and satisfying and the only other thing that Zayn knows that’s just as easy and as satisfying as that is giving in to the bloodlust.
“I do,” he says, in the end. “I tried not to, for a while. I got grumpy, horrible personality, not even Louis could stand it, so I had to start feeding again.”
Liam flips a towel and whispers, without looking at him, “Not to mention the fact that you would have died.”
Zayn wants to say, But Liam, I am already dead. He wants to say, There’s no point to this, all of this, except the fact that I’m so selfish I can’t even let go of myself. He wants to say, Don’t do that to me, don’t talk like that and act like that and don’t sit here with me for hours; Louis is enough. Niall is enough. He wants to say, I am broken enough, Liam, I am dead enough, two thousand times over, I don’t need you too.
He wants to say, Please don’t go anywhere.
“Yeah,” he says, instead. “That, too.”
“I never knew you were like that,” Niall says, barely audible, but it’s okay because he’s pressed close to Harry’s side, talking into the soft cotton of his hoodie, and Harry could hear a leaking faucet from four blocks over anyway.
“I know.”
“Even when I wasn’t, you know, alive anymore,” Niall sighs. Harry keeps brushing his hair with his fingers, gentle and numbing, better than any lullaby he’s ever heard. “I never knew. I’m sorry. I wish I knew.”
“It’s okay,” Harry says, and Niall believes him. “I’m okay, you know? I’m great right now, in fact, because I have a new friend and I have you again, but I was okay before, too.”
Niall smiles and doesn’t say anything for a while; then he lifts his head and looks at Harry with a very, very serious face.
“And Zayn,” he says. “You also have Zayn. He’s your friend, too.”
Harry rolls his eyes, but Niall pinches his cheeks and pulls until they’re both laughing and Harry agrees that okay, fine, yes, he has Zayn, Zayn is his fanged leech of a friend, too.
Zayn feeds from bloodbags and sometimes he goes out in the woods to hunt smaller, clueless animals, but he doesn’t do that much anymore because he’s afraid Harry might smell him — which is admittedly insane, Harry must have murdered some billions of rabbits in his monthly escapades. Still, Zayn’s wary around him, because everyone else, Louis and Niall and obviously Liam, seem to like Harry so much, and everything he says or does or cooks — burns, mostly — and isn’t his clumsiness so, so adorable?
It isn’t, in fact; it’s insane, it’s annoying and it also doesn’t make any sense, because he’s a werewolf, top of the food chain, his senses are the sharpest they could possibly be so how can he miss so many bumps in the sidewalk and forget about all the steps in the world?
Zayn is slowly going crazy, that’s what it is.
One day he finally snaps, and when Louis finds him sitting on the floor, rubbing sandpaper to the corners of every single piece of furniture in the house, he doesn’t say a word. He just sits right next to Zayn and starts smoothing out the other side of the coffee table.
“We need to get those things for the sockets,” Zayn says, his eyes trained to the wood. “Child-proof covers, or whatever they’re called.”
Louis nods, very seriously. “They could use them in their apartment, too.”
“We’ll think about that when we’re done here.”
Sometimes, Niall thinks it’d be so much easier if they all just moved in together. Then he hears Liam and Harry next door bickering about hot water and bathroom turns, and he remembers that, right, the living are weird and complicated and, most importantly, they need a lot of space. He doesn’t, which is why he’s still around, fitted in the tiny cracks of his friends’ homes and lives.
Sometimes he forgets this was once his home, too.
It gets harder and harder to remember that once, he was alive too. That once, he took up a lot of space, too.
Zayn gets sick from a batch of bad blood. Niall can touch things without effort now, so he takes care of him when Louis is at work, and sometimes even Harry drops by, he brings a couple of rabbits one morning and Louis will be scarred for life, but fuck the gods Zayn had no idea how much he needed that warm, sticky mouthful.
When he’s almost back on his feet, Liam shows up with a six pack and a tiny smile that’s half apologetical and half self-deprecating.
“Wipe that thing off your face, Payne,” Zayn says, throwing his legs off the side of the bed to make some space for him and groping at the nightstand for his cigarettes. “I told Louis not to let you in, if you came knocking.”
“But I didn’t,” Liam says, under his breath; Niall was sitting on the windowframe and then he’s just not there anymore. Zayn thanks him in his mind and then he almost pats the mattress by his side; he catches himself, afraid that it might come off as pushy. He’s scared at shit at the thought of scaring Liam.
Liam, however, does it all on his own, crossing the tiny room in two quick strides and dropping down next to Zayn.
Zayn breathes out in relief, because he’s been so weak for so long it almost feels like he’s human again. He lights up two cigarettes, offers one to Liam, who takes it between his thumb and middle finger and then breathes in a deep drag.
Zayn smirks.
“Like a true soldier,” he says. Liam looks down at his feet, which he crossed at the ankles the moment he sat down.
“I’m truly sorry, Zayn,” he says, quiet but clearly. “I should’ve come and see you, and I wanted to, but — I don’t know. I’m a coward, I guess.”
“Shut up,” Zayn tells him fondly. “You’re not a coward. You’re human, and I’m a vampire, and as much as I like to pretend it’s all for shit and giggles, that means I’m a predator, and you’re my prey. You were smart.”
Liam’s laughter is brittle and rough. “Smart, and a shitty friend.”
Zayn gives him a smirk and a sideways glance, puffing out a round cloud of smoke. “There’s no hope for humanity then, if not even Mr. Liam Payne is actually perfect.”
“Shut up,” Liam mumbles, blushing. He bumps his knee against Zayn’s and rips two beer out of the pack he brought, but he hesitates before handing Zayn his own. “Can you drink? I mean, is it okay if you drink?”
“I can’t think of anything else I’d rather do,” Zayn says, and that’s the first time he’s ever lied to Liam.
“How do I do it?” Zayn asks. They’re out in the cold and Liam, four steps ahead of him, jumps, startled, then turns around and there’s a faltering smile on his face.
“Shit, Zayn, you scared me,” he says. “I didn’t even hear you get out of your house.”
“I know,” Zayn says with half a grin. “Sorry.”
Liam shakes his head, tugs at his sleeves. “No, it’s fine.”
A light goes on on the second floor of the next building; it’s Harry’s room, and Zayn bites his lips, trying to fight the beer running through his veins and making his head feel light and empty and useless.
“You said that human is not something you just are, it’s in the things that you do,” he says, and he doesn’t dare stepping any closer to Liam. “So, how do I do it? How does — how does Harry do it?”
Liam looks up at the shining window too, but only for a moment.
“You have to find that thing that makes you feel human,” he says.
Zayn thinks of the rush of life that killing always gives him; he thinks of how grateful and warm he feels at funerals; he thinks of the sunny smile of the poor boy with the broken neck still filling a house with laughter.
He shakes his head, and when it doesn’t get those thoughts out of his mind, he shakes it harder.
“Can’t do that,” he whispers.
Liam frowns, and he’s not really a coward, not as much as he thinks; he walks up until he’s close enough that the tiny cloud of his breath, visible like smoke in the cold dead of the night, sometimes brushes the tip of Zayn’s nose.
“Yes, you can,” he says. “Something that makes you feel fragile and wrong and sick, but also hopeful and like, like you’re really here, you’re really you. It has to be selfish, Zayn. It’s about you.”
Zayn laughs softly. “You never do stuff like that. You’re never selfish.”
“Yes,” Liam says, with a small smile. “And that’s my selfish thing.”
Zayn stares, and he wants to say that it doesn’t make sense, how does selflessness turn selfish? Liam spends his Friday nights changing old people’s diapers at the hospital, if that makes him an egotistical bastard then what about all those who don’t do that, what are they, monsters even more horrible than Zayn?
But then it just sorts of clicks in place; maybe it’s the smug edge of Liam’s smirk, maybe it’s the way his eyes are sharp and smart, maybe it’s just that Zayn has lived long enough to be smarter than what he gives himself credit for. Liam’s thing is that he’s so great he makes everyone else feel terrible about themselves by comparison.
Zayn grins and says, “You’re one sneaky bastard, you are.”
He has half a laughter trapped inside his chest, and he lets it all out when Liam smiles back, all faux modesty and soft eyes.
They stand there for a while, and there’s a gap every time Liam breathes in, and Zayn fills that, breathing out, and he doesn’t even realize it.