One Direction Bromance One Shots

It's Clever To Count Everything Because Everything Counts - Zouis

                Zayn counts everything he comes across and he doesn’t really know why.

                Maybe he was the born wrong way or maybe his brain snapped in half at some point in his life that he can’t recall. Either way, he has been counting everything for as long as he can remember. The number of cigarettes he smokes a day, how many hours he works at his demanding job as an attorney, lines on the road, light posts, trees, sentences, words, blinks. The numbers are constantly in his mind like a song stuck on replay, and he can’t get rid of them. He isn’t really sure if he wants to. His counting, it’s exactly that; his. It is his and it always has been, always will be. It’s something that isn’t necessarily wrong, but not completely right, and the solidity of its existence is comforting in a way.

                Sometimes Zayn comes across a case that makes him want to scream and vomit and hide away in his bedroom for the rest of his lonely days. After prosecuting case after case of child abuse and rape and domestic violence his hair is starting to turn gray and his body thin. He finds himself having to adjust the number of cigarettes he smokes a day and the number of hours he works a day. They both grow so fast he becomes winded, and he has to adjust the number of hours he sleeps, too.

There is one case, there is one case that drives nails into Zayn’s chest and whispers haunting tunes of songs he’d rather forget into his brain at night. He has so many questions; why? Who? How? When? Where? So many, many questions swim around in his brain, and he neatly archives them into files in the back of his mind.

                He counts the number of nightmares the case gives him and decides that there are too many.

~~~~~

                Everyone thinks that Louis is dead. But he’s not.

                He is somewhere in the middle of nowhere, left abandoned by his sister years ago because his sister could already tell that Louis was going to be a problem. Louis was going to get all of the attention; Louis was going to be the good kid. So she threw Louis away in the middle of the night long, long ago, and Louis figured things out on his own. He got a job, got an apartment (not a very nice one, but it fulfills its purpose), and he enrolled in night school. He’s getting things done. He doesn’t really hold it against her anymore.

 But there are still rumors, lies that Louis was kidnapped and tortured and held as a slave and beaten and whipped and murdered. Louis doesn’t care much for them. He walks around like any other normal person and people just ignore him. He guesses he got lucky and happened to move to a city where no one has heard a thing about him. Pure luck, that’s all it is.

                Louis has his routine; get up, go to work, go to school, have some Yorkshire tea, go to bed, repeat. He doesn’t like things that don’t follow his routine. Attorney Zayn Jawaad Malik is definitely not part of his routine.

                The attorney drops by one day while Louis is hunched over his stove, watching over his Yorkshire tea. His eyes are red and his black hair has gray streaks running through it, but his face is young. Louis wonders what happened, what broke him down. Maybe it was everything, or maybe it was the overwhelming nothingness that seems to erode people down into shells of their former selves. Louis can’t really tell.

                He invites Zayn in because the poor lad is shivering and his teeth are chattering so hard Louis’ afraid they might just fall out. He doesn’t ask anything, just makes Zayn a cup of tea and sits across from him on the other reclining chair that rests in his living room. He vaguely thinks about getting the spring that digs into his backside fixed, because it’s really getting to be a problem.