Keep the Car Running (Zarry AU)

Five Years Later

FIVE YEARS LATER

‘Don’t get mad, okay?’ Harry says, walking into the bedroom with his hands up. Zayn’s heart stops, of course, because even though he’s known Harry for five years, he still never knows what he’s about to do next. And while that’s what he loves most about him, his ability to constantly surprise him, to make his cheeks burn and his hands shake, it’s not always good for his heart.

‘What did you do?’ Zayn asks, holding his breath. His hands still, his shirt half buttoned as he waits for Harry to tell him. Then Talia totters in, and the edges of his heart soften like they always do when he sees her. Later, when she asks how she ended up in their untidy, slightly chaotic house full of books and stray animals, Zayn will tell her about that rainy night in January when the social worker turned up with this bundle and handed it to him, telling him the story of how she’d been left under a bench outside the Royal London hospital with a note that read, I love her so much, but it’s not enough in Urdu. Zayn still has the note. He almost had the words tattooed to across his chest – over his heart – but they’re too precious to be mixed in with his other tattoos. Skulls and snakes and red lips that he’d never regret, but were from a sillier time.

Besides, he doesn’t need to get it tattooed to him to remember that night. How he pulled back the blanket wrapped around her as though he was unpeeling an orange to find this little face, her right fist raised and her fingers uncurling when Zayn said, Hello as if she was saying hello back.

Two years later and he loves her even more somehow – somewhere inside him, in his bones, his marrow – as if each day it digs in a little deeper. He loves her in a different way than he loves Harry. Bright, beautiful, brilliant Harry who always makes him feel like he can’t catch his breath. Like he’s falling. He often thinks that falling in love with Harry wasn’t something that happened once, that night in the club, Harry sitting there like a gilded first edition in a basketful of paperbacks, but something that happened again and again. The first time he smiled. The first time he flew through his front door uninvited and showed himself to Zayn, like a red rag to a bull. The first time they kissed. The first time Zayn saw him cry. It’s something that keeps happening. That never ends. Just when he thinks that he loves Harry with every bit of him – with his heart and his hands and his fucking fingernails – Harry will do something to make him feel like he’s falling again.

But with Talia it’s the opposite. Zayn loves her in a way that is immovable, unshakeable. It’s a love that will never waver, that he will never doubt. There is nothing she can say or do that will ever not make him love her. The way his father loves him. So when she follows Harry into the bedroom, all big eyes and cola coloured curls, it’s all Zayn can do not to scoop her up and bite her cheek, but he feigns indignation.

When Zayn puts his hands on his hips with a sigh, Harry holds a finger up. ‘Wait!’ he says then nods at Talia who twirls. She looks so cute that Zayn has to fight a smile when he arches an eyebrow at him.

‘Is that the Vivienne Westwood dress we said we weren’t going to buy her because she’ll have grown out of it by the end of the evening?’

Alfie pads in then, tail wagging. ‘Don’t,’ Zayn tells him as he heads for the bed, but the dog ignores him, jumping up on it and promptly falling asleep.

Zayn throws his hands up. ‘Does anyone in this house listen to me?’

‘Don’t be mad. Look,’ Harry says, nodding at Talia who twirls again, fluffing up the layers of taffeta with her hands with a mischievous grin that’s not unlike her father’s.