Bromance One-Shots [Closed]

30. Ziall: Fly A Little Faster

Prompt: Sometimes Zayn goes out of his way to bump into Niall.

I wrote this with a friend, the lovely and beautiful Annie (@larryporn) She is a bit of a dickhead though because I wrote “As Bright As The Stars” with her too, and she is a spectacular writer but she wont publish her stories onto Wattpad :(

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Niall is sure that the world is a complicated collection of colours and shapes. He sees blue and yellow and round and square and a million different points that join segments together; like the stars build the constellations in the sky. Water is blue and vibrant and vast and, although it doesn’t have a particular shape on its own, he’s sure that if you stared at the ocean from a seat on the moon it would appear as something arbitrary and beautiful and terrifying.

So Niall studies geometry and art and astronomy because he wants to understand everything that he sees. He doesn’t want to simply see the world around him; he wants to feel it and know what shapes exist in the night sky, because his sight is his favourite sense, and he wants it to make up for the one he’s lost.

See, the thing about losing the ability to hear is that he didn’t simply lose the sounds of street cars and music, he lost the sound of his brother laughing and the voice of the joke that caused the laughter in the first place. It’s an invisible wall that separates Niall from his family; Niall from his friends; Niall from the world. So, if he’s not able to experience the world in its entire imperfect glory, he’d like to learn a little more about it. Because the blue of the sky and the green of the grass and the faulty shape of the ocean are all he has here in England.

Perhaps there are shapes and colours he’s still unfamiliar with. He hopes so, and sees the first glimpse of a crooked angle at university.

The boy is tall and dark and muted cuss words thrown around pink lips when Niall bumps into him in the hall. The blonde’s stack of textbooks tumbles to the ground in a miniature avalanche, hitting the linoleum surface with what he imagines to be a painful thud. And of course his cheeks tinge pink because he’s sure he’s just humiliated himself in front of a student at least a year older than him, and pink lips continue to swear from what Niall can read.

So he crouches down to gather his belongings, keeping his eyes trained on the books and away from tan skin and pink lips. He tries to ignore the feeling in his gut that he’s being rude because, surly, the guy is still talking to him...and he’s not making an effort to acknowledge the silent sentences. A few seconds or perhaps hours pass and the raven haired boy is crouched down as well, gathering scattered papers and stacking them in a neat pile. When he hands them over with soft, tan fingertips, Niall takes them gratefully and finally makes eye contact in his apologetic way.

Brown eyes are wide and hosting magnificent specks of gold, like stars dancing across the surface of the water. They’re beautiful and foreign and a million different shades of the rainbow and shapes in the sky. The boy’s eyes are extraordinary, and Niall is sure that he’ll never properly learn the geometry or art or astronomy of them in any of the textbooks he’s holding in his hand.

The raven-haired boy is talking and Niall isn’t hearing and he’s too lost in his own head to even try reading lips so he just stands there, staring. And the guy is pissed off again, because Niall just keeps ignoring him without a decent explanation and all he can do is mutter ‘sorry’ and hope that it’s loud enough. He motions awkwardly to his ears and tries and tries to express that it isn’t his intention to be rude...if he could listen, he would.