Fifteen Minutes (Zarry AU)

Chapter 5

Harry doesn’t know why he went to the bar, not until he hears his phone ringing in his pocket and ignores it because he doesn’t want to interrupt Zayn’s story about the guy he had to draw for a life drawing class last week who got a boner.

‘Aren’t you going to answer that?’ he asks without looking up. He’s muddling mint in a glass, making the air between them smell sharp and sweet, like it’s just rained.

He doesn’t know how Zayn hears his phone in the growing din of the bar. It’s been getting gradually darker, the music louder, as the seats around them fill up. Harry’s been making himself useful, lighting the candles on each table and cutting limes in exchange for a series of drinks that are getting him steadily drunker. The DJ’s just arrived so, as people crowd around him, trying to get Zayn’s attention, Harry knows that he won’t be able to keep his stool much longer, but he just wants to hear one more story.

‘It’s not important,’ he tells Zayn with a small shrug when his phone stops ringing. But it is. Harry’s missing a gig. Not a big one, but then none of them are, they’re always in a shithole of a pub that Blur played once, back in 1989, so Harry and the band should be grateful that they’re not being paid because this could be the gig.

It never is and Harry needs a night off. It’s not unreasonable, but given that he hasn’t actually told the band, just fucked off while they were bickering in the kitchen over the last can of baked beans, it’s a assholey thing to do. But then, Harry is an asshole now. This is what he does. He lets people down and only thinks about himself. That’s what his mother says when he doesn’t call for two weeks, what Chloe tells him the morning after he shags someone else. And he’s not denying it – he can’t, can he? – he just wishes that making himself happy wasn’t always at the expense of someone else.

He can hear his phone ringing again and he knows it’s Tom. He’s probably having an embolism and he can’t blame him – Harry’s the singer, they can hardly go on without him – but for once, he’s not thinking about himself, he’s thinking about Zayn.

Harry doesn’t much believe in fate any more. He used to. For a while he believed in stuff like that, stuff like fate and destiny and love at first sight. He really believed that he was special, that he would make it if he just sang a little louder than everyone else, tried a little harder. But that’s bollocks, he knows now. If he makes it, it’ll be coincidence or dumb luck. It doesn’t matter how long he agonises over a lyric or perfects a chord, one night, Steve Lamacq will just happen to be in the pub he’s singing in and that’ll be it.

He used to think that he could make those things happen, that if he sung in enough shitty pubs, he’d eventually sing in the one Steve Lamacq was in, but look at Daniel Delgado. As if opening for him wasn’t a new low, Harry heard this morning that he’s going on tour with Bon Iver. Daniel Delgado. Daniel Delgado who has three fucking songs and can’t even say Bon Iver properly. If that’s fate, then fuck fate.

So maybe that’s why he went to Zayn’s bar, because for months it’s felt like he isn’t moving, like nothing’s changing. He’s singing the same songs in the same bars and shagging anyone who shows him a passing interest because he needs to feel something. He needs a distraction from the question that’s been playing on a loop since he walked out of that X Factor audition.

Is this it?

But somewhere along the way, somewhere between his mother stroking his hair and telling him that he can do anything – be anything – and opening for Daniel Delgado, it stopped being a question. Is this it? has become This is it and that’s what will break him, not that he didn’t try hard enough or sing loud enough, it’s that he isn’t enough.