Keep the Car Running (Zarry AU)

Chapter 34

Harry doesn’t go straight to room 323 and wanders around for a while, walking up and down the long white corridors until he’s so tired that he has to fight the urge to fold to the floor and press his cheek to the bleach clean lino. Mercifully, he finds himself near the hospital canteen and buys a cup of tea that he stirs until it goes cold.

He can’t help but think of Ash then, of the hours he spent going back and forth between the ICU and the canteen, bringing Ash’s mother cups of tea and plastic packs of sandwiches as though it could make up for not noticing that her son was so miserable that he had to swallow a bottle of pills. It was when he was deliberating between a ham sandwich and an equally miserable looking cheese and pickle one that he saw Peter sitting at one of the tables. He’d never seen him outside of Clare College and the shock was the same as seeing any teacher somewhere unexpected. Peter must have seen him, too, because he stood up and there was something kind of flustered about it – kind of formal, like a scene from a Jane Austen novel – that made Harry’s heart skip in a way it never had before.

Harry had noticed him, of course, but not in the way he’d noticed Ash. Peter was a teacher and even though Harry called him by his first name and nodded if they passed one another in the courtyard, it was still with some restraint. Harry might smile, but never enough to pull at his cheeks and Peter might smile back, but it would never quite reach his eyes. But Harry had noticed him, noticed the sharp sweep of his jaw and the gold threads in his dark hair that always made him think of the edges of the elderly leather-bound books in the library. But then that was Peter, he wasn’t old – in his mid- thirties, Harry guessed – yet there was something kind of old-fashioned about him. He was the sort of man Graham Greene would have written about, the quintessential English teacher in his tweed jackets and glasses, but not, his hair only just the right side of tidy and his eyes bright with something Harry could never quite put his finger on. So when he stood up, Harry didn’t think, just walked over to him.

‘I had an altercation with a bread knife,’ Peter explained, holding up his bandaged hand. ‘There’s an hour wait at the pharmacy so I thought I’d get a cup of tea.’

Harry nodded, but when he looked at him, a jumper that was far too big hanging off him, the cuffs almost at his knuckles, he looked so young that Harry felt something in him begin to bow, his ribs suddenly straining like an overstuffed suitcase. So when Peter asked him if he was okay, it all spilled out of him, about Ash and the transplant and how fucked up it was that they were sitting there, waiting for someone to die. Peter reached for his hand and that’s how it started, in that hospital canteen, over a cold cup of tea. And that’s another thing Harry will never forgive himself for, not just for being able to love someone other than Ash, but for doing it so quickly. The guilt still scrapes at him. He can feel it rusting his insides, sometimes. Usually at night when he can’t sleep and he wants to reach for his Moleskine and write it all down but he’s terrified of what will come out.

This time Harry is on his own. He doesn’t have to be. He could call Zayn, make him sit there and watch as Harry stirs his tea as though it’s the only thing holding him together and if he stops, he’ll unravel. But he can’t because he can’t do this again. He can’t keep relying on people, hoping that they’ll fix him, because they never do.

They never do.