No Fear of Falling (Zarry AU)

Chapter 10

That was a year ago. They haven’t spoken since and the sad thing is, apart from their family, no one at school even noticed. They asked, of course, in the weeks after, when Harry sat with Melanie and her friends at lunch while Zayn lingered in the art room, painting between bites of whatever sandwich his mother was experimenting with that day. (Her favourite being cream cheese and strawberry jam, which she insists tastes like cheesecake, because who wouldn’t want a cheesecake flavoured sandwich, right?) But then they’re sixteen and no one really cares that he and Harry aren’t friends any more. They relish the drama of it, of trying to guess why, but it was nothing more than a distraction from a tedious Wednesday afternoon. In the end, they concluded that he and Harry fell out because they were both in love with Melanie and Zayn didn’t correct them because as hurt as he was, it would hurt Harry. Which was kind of pathetic given that Harry clearly couldn’t give half a shit about how Zayn felt.

Their parents tried, but after several awkward Sunday dinners, they gave up as well. And as Zayn watched Harry at school, mucking around with his new friends in their skinny jeans and plaid shirts while Zayn hung around with the kids in his art class, listening to the Beastie Boys and smoking too much weed, he wondered if their parents were right to. If all of this was somehow inevitable. That’s what Zayn says now, if anyone asks, he shrugs and says that these things happen, that they grew apart. And maybe they did, because that’s the metamorphosis of life. Friends come and go. People change. We aren’t kids forever. We all become butterflies one day. Some sooner than others.

It’s not that Zayn forgot, forgot about Harry’s dirty laugh and all those plans they made between kisses in the treehouse, it’s that he had to forget. He had to hide those memories in the shadows of his chest, behind his heart and in the spaces between his ribs because that Harry was gone. Now this Harry – the Harry who wears skinny jeans and plaid shirts – walks into parties with a huge smile and when he sees Zayn he frowns as if to say, This isn’t me, don’t tell anyone. What can Zayn do? Whatever’s happened, secrets are secrets and it doesn’t matter that Harry doesn’t look at him when they pass in the corridor at school any more, Zayn will never tell.

Is that growing up? Zayn thinks maybe it is. Or maybe it’s just admitting defeat because he looks at Harry sometimes and wonders if they ever had anything in common. ‘He’ll come back,’ his mother tells him whenever they hear Harry and his friends laughing over the garden fence. Zayn just smiles because he can’t help but wonder if they hadn’t been living next door to each other whether they would ever have been friends, as though they were some sort of accident. An imbalance the Universe corrected eventually.