Liam has liked boys before. There was a period of time, short and intense, when his best friend now, Louis, was his lover. They’d met at football practice, Lou in little joggers that made his arse look fantastic when it jiggled while he ran, his boyish smirk, his too bright blue eyes. Liam remembers fucking him in so many places he lost count, and he remembers the happy thrill down his spine when Louis’d smiled at him. Needless to say, they hadn’t quite worked as anything more than friends. Louis was ready to come out and, at that point, he met Harry. Liam couldn’t match up to Harry, never could. They’d broken up, remained good friends, and that was it.
But Zayn doesn’t feel quite like that. It isn’t a thrill when he smiles so much as a secret that Liam needs to know. Across the cafeteria, when he catches the fluttering of the darker boy’s eyelashes, he wants to press a kiss to his temple, let him know how beautiful he is. When Zayn’d been stretching, he had seen dark ink against his skin. Liam wants to know what the tattoos are.
He doesn’t ask any of these things. In the few, precious moments, he manages to snag with Zayn, they wedge themselves into corners and make themselves invisible, and he gets it. They are so, so different. Zayn has a reputation to maintain, and Liam is not anything like that. Liam is supposed to be just like all of the other boys, and Zayn is this outsider, this other, that no one is quite sure of. He grows to love the small smiles that tilt Zayn’s lips, even when they’re not close, and he puzzles out all of Zayn’s expressions: from his scowl when someone has called him something horrible, to the sleepy yawn that parts his lips when Liam walks in from missions when Zayn is on night watch.
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The next time they really talk, Zayn is preparing to go into the city with the men who turned him in to the sergeant. His back is ramrod straight, shoulders tense under his uniform, and Liam doesn’t know what he’s doing.
He forces himself through the rush of soldiers clotting the cafeteria during lunch time and out into the desert. The day has just begun to cool, the sun painting everything lavender and magenta, and he can just barely see the darkened fringe of Zayn’s hair over his face. Feet pounding against the ground as nonchalantly as he can manage, Liam follows the darker haired boy as he goes into his barracks.
The wooden door is scarred between his fingers.
“You’re kinda terrible at being quiet, yeah?” Zayn is the picture of ease, reclined against the bars of his bunk.
Liam manages a lopsided smile as his cheeks color. He looks, examines, memorizes, the grain of the wood. What was he thinking? He wasn’t, obviously, and he needs to go now. He needs to go back to the cafeteria and eat whatever gross, undercooked meal is be—
“Do you normally follow people? Or is this a new thing?” he is trying to keep his voice light, but Liam can hear the curiosity. “Because I’ve never been stalked before, and it’s quite flattering and all, but—”
“Is it safe for you to go out on patrol with those guys?” Liam wonders when the floor will finally grant him his wish and open to swallow him whole. “They don’t care about you.”
Zayn’s dark eyes, even though Liam can’t see them, move over his face, “It’s not really my decision to make.”
It’s true, it’s so true, and Liam knows that it’s true, but his heart is still in his throat. He wants to tell Zayn that he can refuse. That he doesn’t need to go anywhere with people who would gladly drag him into a dusty alley off of the main street and put a bullet between his umber eyes.
“Don’t spend your night off worrying, yeah?” Zayn’s voice is light, and Liam’s eyes still don’t move from the floor, “I’ll be—”
“Zayn, they’d shoot you!”
“Mate, half of the guys here would shoot me. Not just the bloody Americans.”
Liam’s eyes snap to Zayn’s. “That’s horrible.”
“You’re not living in reality,” is what the darker skinned boy whispers. His steps are carefully measured, softened by the loud thudding of Liam’s heart in his ears, as he moves across the floor. He smells like the cafeteria, like stale bread and rotten fruit, but Liam can make out the stronger notes of some cologne, and he wants to know if Zayn dabs it in the hollows of his collarbone or along the pulse in his neck. “People are horrible, yeah? And you can’t do anything about it. You’ve gotta keep yourself safe for the people you left back home, and I’ll keep myself safe. Stop worrying.” Zayn murmurs, “It reminds me of my mum.”
“Don’t go.” Liam says weakly, but he knows that Zayn will go. There is a reason that he joined the army, a good reason, and that is the same thing that keeps him leaving the safety of their camp and marching into foreign cities for little girls. “You don’t have to go.”
Zayn’s laugh is exasperated. It tugs up the corners of his lips into a begrudging grin as he, in a deliberately friendly way, pats Liam’s shoulder.
Liam wants so much more than a pat on the shoulder.
“Get some sleep, mate. I’ll be back before you wake up for tea.”
Zayn walks back over to his bed. His fingers tremble, almost not noticeably, around his gun as he slings it across his chest. It is what they all have to do: inhabit a different brain space to snap on the unfailing bravery and exhaustive hatred embodied within a soldier. On Zayn, the scowl just turns his plump lips down into a tiny frown, and there is a crease between his eyebrows that Liam imagines smoothing with his thumb. As he passes Liam on his way out the door, the other boy doesn’t think, he just grabs at the hand wrapped around the doorjamb.
Their hands fit together is the first thing that Liam notices. Zayn’s hand is soft and warm and dewy from sweat or maybe fear and that doesn’t matter, because this is right. His brown eyes flicker down to see how their skins look together, and it’s like someone took caramel and milk and dumped them into a glass together or maybe something else that Liam just doesn’t have the brain capacity to think of, in this moment.
His thumb whispers over the contours of Zayn’s knuckles. The scar on the inside of his thumb. “You don’t have to go.”
Zayn’s hand covers up the entire left side of his face, warm and secure. It is an intimate gesture that sets Liam’s blood to sparking in his veins, his heart to hammering wildly. He has had girlfriends do this to him, thumb along his lower, and he knows that it ends in a kiss, in a promise.
But Zayn, who stubbornly insists on being different, merely murmurs, “I’ll be seeing you.”
