Coming Home- A Ziam Fanfic

Coming Home

"Did they send you in here to talk to me?" he asked, his voice frigid. He'd barely given a glance in my direction and suddenly determined that I was the enemy. Was I his enemy? Was that what he saw me as now? Four years of endless travelling and all I could be was his enemy. He didn't have to do much packing. Just fill his small black carry-on. We each were allowed two bags per hotel. He took the same ones each time. A dark polyester sack and an average backpack with Deadpool's logo drawn all over it. When he swung it over his shoulder, he almost looked normal. Like he was off to university. He shoved his box full of bathroom supplies into the black carry-on and looked up at me. "If you're supposed to be talking me out of it then you're doing a piss-poor job."

I opened my mouth, hoping a response would just form with the intention to create one. But however ready I was to talk him out of it, I couldn't bring myself to make good sense. The longer I stood there, a realization formed in my mind: I couldn't blame him for leaving.

The moment Niall ran into mine and Harry's hotel room, it was agreed upon that I would be the one to go talk to him.

"He listens to you." Harry insisted, pushing me towards the door. Niall's eyes were red and puffy and Harry seemed right on the edge of being the same way. Louis had locked himself in the bathroom when he got the news. Wouldn't come out. Harry opened the door and practically threw me out into the hallway.

"But what am I supposed to say?" I asked. Harry shrugged.

"I don't know just talk him out of it! It's not too late." he said. Then suddenly the door was shut and I was left alone to confront my best friend.

He looked at me now, his warm brown eyes unable to fully turn cold on me. They had a desperate edge to them. A god-dammit-why-do-things-have-to-be-this-way edge. I'd seen it before. Our first world tour in our hotel in Japan. All the floors were made of thick glass, showing off an aquarium always beneath our feet. He'd spent a lot of the day chasing golden carp around our temporary home. His eyes catlike in his pursuit. But then -our last day in Japan- I found him sitting on the floor, a golden catfish twisting and twirling beneath his black keds.

"Are you alright there?" I asked. The only response was a twitch of his thin shoulders. First tour. We'd already done a handful of concerts. Spent hundreds of hours in a recording studio. But that erratic twitch was something I'd never seen before. Something so out of character, the meaning barely processed.

"I-" his voice was a vase, thrown on the floor and shattering into pieces. "I want to go home." he whimpered. He turned, his eyes the same as they were now. But then they were full of tears. Now, tears were only vague traces. A natural distortion between how he saw the world and how I did.

"What about the fans?" I asked. It was the only argument that always seemed to strike his heartstrings. He took the question with no facial response.

"The fans will understand. This isn't about them." he said. I meant to ask him what it was about, but my voice had no strength. He caught the movement of my lips and answered anyways. His response was a sigh. He ran his fingers over his brow, then lightly rubbed it temple. A crease formed between his dark eyebrows. He looked back at his packed bags. "This is about a lot of things, Liam." He looked back up at me. "I'm sure you know what they are."

A list was forming in my head. At the top was that moment in Japan. The world had lost its shine after having been around it a few times; he wanted his home. But which one of us didn't?

This thought took me back to our tour for Midnight Memories. By then, we'd all gotten used to the homesickness. The exhausting tours and screaming fans. One night in Stockholm, he looked out at the crowd, then back at me. He seemed agitated. Agitated in the way that only someone who knew him inside and out could recognize. He gave me a weird little smile, but something sagged in it.

"They think they know us." he said, having to practically shout over the sound of our fans.

They think they know us. No matter how long ago that was, it never quite escaped my memory. It seemed to play in the beginning notes of each song, echo in the inflection of the raging fangirls screaming about how much they loved me. They think they know us.

Did that phrase taunt him as it taunted me?

"Zayn." I said. He gave me his full attention, maybe just a little bit of compassion in his eyes. "You aren't leaving the fans. You're leaving us."

"He's leaving us." Niall said as he rushed into the room. Harry was biting his nails, I was on Snapchat. He looked around the room and seemed to wonder why we didn't know what he meant. Harry asked him what he was talking about. Niall- who looked like he'd been crying- burst back into tears. Harry held him around the shoulders as he spilled the details, each word covered in stages of grief. We listened, then Harry looked back at me. His mouth hung open an inch or so, his eyes wide and his eyebrows high. He collected himself and shook his head.

"He can't do this."

"You can't do this." I said. He ran a hand through his dark hair, a fold in his shirt exposing the lipstick tattoo that rested between the two arches of his collarbone. He pursed his lips and for a moment I could feel exactly the way he was feeling. Like no one was going to support him. Like the world was coming to an end. Like he was abandoning everything comfortable for everything unknown. But at the same time, the unknown was comforting in its own way. There were vague things in the unknown. Concepts we'd given up in our pursuit of the undying fame we were promised. Individuality. Respect. Dignity. Things we'd sacrificed for the past four years, but what had they gotten us? He looked up, his cold determined demeanor shedding away to something honest and maybe a bit regretful.

"I have to." His statement, brief and poignant was quickly followed by justification. "I need to figure out who I am, and tell the world. I need to....I need to be something more than what I am now. People....the fans...they think they know me and they don't. And people tell me that they might not like the real me. But..." he looked over at me. "Doesn't getting to know someone, even with the bad stuff, doesn't it mean more if they know the complete you and still choose to be accepting? Like..." his voice trailed off and a somewhat prepared speech became focused on me. "Like you and me."

It didn't take a scientist to figure out why we became friends. Two people forced to occupy the same space for such a long amount of time would only lead to a mutual assimilation into each other's lives. He knew this. I knew this.

"Do you think, if all this hadn't happened, we'd still be friends? If say I met you on the street. And we hung out once. Would we still...?"

"No." I said. It was the obvious, if somewhat painful answer. He gestured in my direction.

"Exactly. I've-we've just been forced into things that would never happen naturally. I want to know if I could still do all this while still being myself."

"But you act like that's a bad thing!" I stepped towards him, throwing a pointed finger towards the door. "Our life outside that door is something that people only dream of. We've had the opportunity to meet all these people, make all this money, freakin'...live the dream! And you act like you don't even want it!" I realized I was practically shouting and I lowered my voice a bit. "As for us, we can't go back and time and make everything normal between us. This isn't a 'natural' friendship but come on... at least we have it."

Zayn stared at me, a thin line of tears at the cliffs of his eyes.

"Liam." he said, his voice slow. "I don't want to do this. I need to do this."

Talk him out of it. Harry had said. He listens to you. And something in that was the truth. Give it enough time and energy, and he'd probably stay. We'd do another four albums and then retire. We'd do a throwback concert every year or so and live comfortably the rest of our lives on the money we made in our prime. But he wasn't looking for money. What he wanted was never part of the deal.

I threw my arms around him and pulled him as close as I could, burying my head in his shoulder. The same way he did that night in Japan. His hands landed somewhere on my shoulder blades and somehow whatever politics and complexities prevented us from acting the way we felt were gone completely. The moment my arms fell around him, we were both in tears. He had to go. And I didn't want to stop him.