put your lips close to mine | n.s

a moment after

a moment after drunk niall slips up. just for a second.
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He's not sure what he's expecting. Doesn't know what he can probably get from Harry now. An accusation, maybe. God knows, one wouldn't be undeserved at this point. Cajoling or flirting, or simple anger. He wouldn't be surprised to hear Harry being kind, but he'd take anger and hurt just as readily. He'd just said one thing, one thing, but he doesn't know if Harry understood what he meant. Maybe.

What he gets is, "A little while back we went to this place. A ryokan." Because of course, this is Harry after all. "One of the light techs, his parents own it. It's a fairly big deal, I think, very old and respectable. They're pretty famous for their cooking, actually; I was thinking of taking you there—" He makes an impatient noise. "Right, not the point now. The thing is, the place was really something, genuinely beautiful in this totally Japanese way. Not showy or anything, but—restrained. His mom does this stuff with flowers, it's called ikebana, right, and his great-grandfather was a potter. They still have some of his pieces around the place on rotation."

"Harry," Niall starts.

"No, just—just let me finish, okay? They gave me this bowl to look over, to touch and everything. They're surprisingly hands-on here, by the way. It was absolutely gorgeous, this deep, blackish green. I've never seen anything like it. It even felt good to hold, you know? You could sense how much love went into making it. But there was a crack in it. I thought it was deliberate at first but Hoshi, that's the tech, said no, his great-granddad and one of his apprentices got into a fight one day and the bowl got smashed into pieces. And see, the old man could've made another one, he was good enough to make a perfect copy, but instead he took those pieces and glued everything back together. There were cracks in it, though. But you know what he did? He filled them with gold."

And Niall knows that Harry is saying something completely different, but he can't help put let the words water the little stem of hope that stating to crawl up his heart. But then, he sees the pretty people again and it hurts because Harry is here, he's so nice, he's....he's Harry and Niall is so in love.