He’s seventeen.
‘No,’ Zayn says when Harry tells him.
‘No what?’
Just no, Zayn thinks as he walks into the living room to find Harry’s mate (he still doesn’t know his name) passed out on the sofa. He’s about to laugh when he sees that someone has drawn a dick on his cheek, but when Harry laughs first, he hears himself muttering under his breath like a grumpy old man. ‘I suppose he’s staying, too.’
Zayn rolls his eyes then rolls them again when he sees that Jas has abandoned his post behind the decks in favour of a girl with white blonde hair and a tattoo of bee on her right shoulder. They’re the only ones in there, everyone else gone, Zayn realises as he heads back into the hall, apart from a few stragglers who’ve been collared by Doniya to assist with the cleaning up. As soon as she sees him, she takes the chips and pita out of his hand and nods at the living room door. ‘Put something decent on.’
He puts on Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the sound of his voice immediately making the muscles in Zayn’s shoulders soften. Harry tries to sing along as he walks around the flat, picking up empty cans and bottles and chucking them in the bin bag Doniya’s given him, which is much more endearing than it should be. She’s gone to bed, Zayn realises when he goes to his room to get Harry a blanket, smiling at the thought of Ant returning from his cousin’s wedding tomorrow to find his pillow bruised with her eyeliner.
‘The fuck are you doing?’ he asks when Harry follows him in.
‘Going to bed,’ he says as if it’s obvious, kicking off his Converse.
‘What?’
‘I’m knackered.’
If Zayn had thought about it – and he did, of course he did – he stopped himself when Harry yawned, big and loud like a toddler in church, because he’d never felt so old.
‘We have two sofas,’ he reminds him, slinging a pillow at him.
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All the Leaves are Brown (Zarry AU)
FanfictionIt's the summer before Zayn's final year at uni and he's got it all sussed. Or so he thinks until he meets 17-year old Harry and realises that he doesn't know a thing.
