Hungry for Release

Part 11

"The wheels on the bus go round and round. Round and round. Round and fucking round," Niall sang tonelessly, drumming his hands on the table."Arghhh, are we nearly there yet? I'm so bored it's unreal."

"Cheer up leprechaun. Only nine hours to go," Zayn replied, pinging his friend on the forehead as it slumped forward in despair. Liam, who was seated beside him, gave a low moan, and slammed his head into his hands.

"Why? Why did there have to be a hurricane the day we had to take a flight?" he groaned. "As though we weren't sleep deprived enough. Now we're stuck on this deathride instead. Bloody fantastic." Nobody said anything. The only sound was rain hammering against the windows, driven by screaming winds.

Privately, Zayn had wondered if it was even safe to be on the road, but not wanting to add to the prickly atmosphere, had kept his thoughts to himself. They had to be at that stadium tomorrow evening, and nothing would stand in the tour manager's way.

Opposite him, Louis sat morosely shuffling playing cards. As he had every night for the past few weeks, Harry had taken himself off to his bunk alone, apparently preferring to Skype for hours on end than socialise with the others.

Zayn shifted against the pleather couch, trying to get comfy, and turned back to his book.

"How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart, you begin to understand, there is no going back? There are some things that time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep...that have taken hold."

He felt his eyes well up. He'd been re-reading the full Lord of the Rings these past few weeks, and that scene cut a little too close to the bone. Furtively he rubbed his eyes, quickly glancing around the bus to make sure nobody had noticed

Something had taken hold of them all recently. Or maybe it was the distance that had helped put things into perspective. The boys just seemed...broken. There was no other way to put it.

You wouldn't know it from watching them perform. As ever, they were a well oiled machine, serving up loud, crazy gigs night after night, as close and in sync as any brothers.

His feet (well, crutches) had barely touched the ground before he was back rehearsing for the next round of concerts. It was their biggest to date, which meant even more pressure, longer hours of practice, and endless PR activities to sell all the tickets that fed the machine.

But the cracks behind the bubblegum pop facade were starting to ripple through, like the fissures in an ice block before it falls apart.

Nobody had blamed Zayn for what happened. If anything, they all joked that they'd been glad of the rest. But there was no denying though that Modest had locked its attentions down on them - to the benefit of no-one.

Three months ago, he'd been given the nod to start working out properly again. At Liam's suggestion, he'd started having daily training sessions with his bandmate, focusing on boxing and weights.

Of course, he'd never be comfortable doing what Liam did, downing all those disgusting protein shakes and actively pumping himself up - it was hard enough just to take in the minimum amount of calories every day. But...and maybe he was projecting...sometimes, Zayn thought Liam's attitude to exercise wasn't exactly healthy either.

He'd noticed how Liam got like a caged animal before a workout - and even when he'd had that bad cold last week, he'd powered on through, even tacking an extra twenty minutes to compensate for not being able to work as hard as usual. By the end of the workout, he'd been actually shivering, his eyes red, and his entire body dripping in cold sweat.

But he was probably just jealous, he thought. When he met fans, he couldn't help but fixate on the super skinny ones. The ones that seemed just a touch too brittle, their eyes just a little too large for their faces. They all made him feel disgustingly fat, and so undisciplined and lazy.