ZIAM ONE-SHOTS (BOTTOM LIAM)

Tragedy: You'll Remember Me When I'm Gone 3

Chapter 3: I Heard You Singing

Zayn starts disappearing on weekends. Liam doesn't worry – he's learned now not to worry about Zayn, not to count on any form of consistency or reliability. He's learned, and he's worked his own life into a carefully scheduled mess around the whirlwind that is Zayn's ever-changing plans.

But then Zayn comes back one day, a bruise on his cheek and a manic grin on his face, and Liam knows better than to ask – knows that he won't like the answer, but he reaches out – he strokes his finger along that bruise, and sucks in an anxious breath.

"Where have you been?" He asks.

The answer isn't as bad as he was anticipating, actually.

Zayn takes him out the next weekend. They wait until the sun goes down, sipping bears on the narrow deck, dangling their legs over the road and counting cars. "You'll like it," Zayn breaks the silence. Liam doesn't know what it is and he already wants to like it too.

"If you do, I will," Liam says. He knows that isn't true, even as the words leave his lips, but Zayn smiles anyway, one of those crooked half-smiles that he reserves for Liam alone, and Liam ducks his head bashfully, almost embarrassed. But not quite.

The sun goes down, and leaves their apartment in the shadow of a flickering streetlamp. Zayn leads Liam down winding roads to a tube station he's never been to, which takes them to the other side of town. They walk in the dark, in a well practiced side-by-side march, until they reach the bar.

The bar, it's darker than the street, marked by a nondescript, unlit sign. The tables are pushed to the wall, and Zayn, he leads Liam through the throngs. He says, "Art isn't just visual." Liam knows this – he's seen Zayn dance, he's seen Zayn sculpt, he's seen Zayn laugh – that in itself is an art, he knows.

Nothing he's ever seen Zayn do even comes close to seeing him sing.

He lights up a room like a firework – there's no stage, just a tangle of wires on the ground, two guitarists that look like they know what they're doing, and a drummer that doesn't if his bloodshot eyes and the scent of weed clinging to his shirt says anything at all.

There are kids, well, not really kids because they're in a bar, but there are kids. And Liam, he watches them surge forward, tangled together like one pulsing mass of bodies, getting up in Zayn's face like they, not he, own the stage.

And Zayn lets them – he pushes the microphone into the faces that stagger close enough, lets the kids stand on his toes, and he smiles.

He smiles more than Liam's seen him smile in years.

Liam slips out. He turns off his phone.

He walks across London, walks home, stopping at the park to watch the sunrise on the brisk winter morning.

He walks, until his fingers go numb, and he feels like he can never feel the heat of the sun again.