Things Have Gotten Closer To The Sun -starseas on ao3

One

So, this is what it's like to be the last man on earth.

Harry huffs out a dry laugh at the thought as he follows the bend in the road, gravel snapping like fire beneath the worn out tires of his car.

The midnight sky is the colour of the deep sea, but it doesn't feel calming at all. The feeling is all cold-sweat and a heavy panic, like everything's closing in around him. Inching closer and closer and closer, suffocating.

But it's not, it's not that. It can't be that, because nothing's closing in. Nothing at all.

It's just him. Him and the long stretch of road ahead, the road and the streetlights that cast pale shadows across his windshield, pale shadows that brighten his shaking hands on the steering wheel and the stark emptiness of the backseat.

He may have had something to drink. He can't remember.

He can't even remember what he was doing this morning, to be honest. Can't remember if he went out and pretended to socialize or if he just sat in the darkness of his flat as usual, thinking, drowning himself in his useless bloody nostalgia. He doesn't even know where the hell he's driving to, he's just hoping that he ends up somewhere.

It's a been a hard day to feel real.

Everything looks the way it does in dreams, clear but a bit blurry, like it could change into something else at any second. The car radio is on low volume, voices filling up the space like static or soft rain, and Harry catches fragments of the conversation as he drives.

He's not really paying attention until, all of a sudden, he is.

"Well. I suppose that's all, folks. It's December fourth, two thousand and eighteen, and we've got about twelve days left until the end of the world."

Frowning, he fiddles with the buttons until the voices grow louder.

"What in the bloody hell are you saying, Nick? Are you high?" A woman laughs over the speakers, her voice warm and hazy like the setting sun.

Harry stops at a red light.

He sits at the lonely intersection and he listens. The world seems to be asleep at this hour. No other car is in sight and suddenly, Harry's starting to remember. With the end of the world sitting less than two weeks away, he remembers a pair of blue eyes.

Deep ocean eyes that grew shallow.

Loving blue eyes that grew cold, that grew tired.

The man on the radio laughs. "Oh, screw off, I'm serious! Apparently the world is going to end in, like, twelve days or something. Solar flare, they're saying."

"Who's saying?"

"I don't know-the scientists? The perverted little shits who research the end of the world for a living?"

The woman laughs. "Are you being for real right now or are you just screwing around? Be serious."

"I'm being for real! It was on the news earlier and everything. I think they were trying to keep quiet about it before, didn't want us breaking into shops and starting riots or what not."

There's a pause in the conversation and Harry doesn't drive even when the lights switch from red to green, from stop to go. He just listens, he just turns off the engine and listens, because the world is ending in twelve days. In less than two weeks, the planet is going to be eaten up by the heat of the sun. The earth will fold in on itself and disappear, a bright speck of nothing against the dark sky of space, and it doesn't matter that he was in a band once. He's going to be dead.

Boom, boom, bang.

Zayn, Liam, and Niall-they're all going to be dead.

Jesus, it's been almost a year since Harry has seen any of them, and almost five years since he's seen them all at once.

He scrubs a hand down his face, inhaling sharply.

When he starts listening again, the woman is asking him: "Any regrets? Anything you would've done differently?"

Suddenly, the words seem distorted and far away, like the letters are out of balance, colliding with each other on their way out of the speakers.

Harry turns off the radio and sinks back into his seat, sinks back into the silence of his car. His breathing is heavy and he can't slow it down. Outside, the road is still empty, and so he presses his face against the cold glass of the frosted window and breathes in, trying to calm himself down. But the question is still there.

What does he regret? What would he have done differently?

He doesn't even see the other car coming.

It just comes, and then the world is exploding in a rush of warm light, like lightning cracking across the night sky, white against black, white and black, the white and black overtone of his memories, the images blurring with the red of the warm light, the red of the blood. His blood. The sharp copper sits in his mouth as he shouts and his vision shifts and blurs and in the brightness, he sees those blue eyes again, he sees the ocean, he hears a voice telling him not to come back and he hears himself saying, fuck you, I don't give a shit. I don't care anymore. Fuck you. I won't want to come back. He hears a door slamming, the same echo that ends up in every nightmare.

Metal against pavement. Flesh against bone. Lie after lie after lie.

Any regrets? Anything you would've done differently?

In the space between the light and the dark, Harry thinks he finds his answer.