Viva La Vida

Part 16

The doctor eventually comes in and yells at them for being near Zayn; apparently, the doctors don't know what the injuries have done to Zayn's immune system, but on the off chance that it's been weakened, they're not supposed to be in his room without being sanitized. None of them are very good at following the rules, but they all do have a vested interest in keeping Zayn alive, and none of them want to be responsible for giving him the common cold and accidentally killing him, so they allow themselves to be hastily ushered out without much complaint.

So now all four of them are standing outside the door of the palace's hospital wing in silence, wiping their tears and feeling Zayn's absence in their midst more acutely than ever. Now that he's not within their sight, it's hard to believe that they'd had him in their collective arms only moments ago.

"He looks terrible," Louis says flatly after a moment. He's the only one who hadn't gotten the chance to see Zayn before he collapsed and was carted away to the hospital, so the shock seeing him just now must have been beyond words. Liam can remember the swell of horror and indignation that had risen up in his throat after seeing him the first time.

"Well, no wonder," Niall says. "Man was locked in an underground cell for a year and a half, and it's not like they were treating him with their finest hospitality."

"I know." Lous scuffs the toe of his shoe into the tiled floor. "It shouldn't have been a year and a half. We should have found him sooner. Why didn't we find him sooner?"

Niall shrugs. "Pure bad luck. No one thought he was alive, so no one was looking for him specifically, and so he just happened to be in one of the last bases we raided."

"Good thing you asked for that extra money for the last few raids," Liam says fervently. "Otherwise who knows what would have happened. We might have ended up killing him if we'd done a shoot-out." Harry and Niall exchange a quick look, and something clicks in Liam's brain. "Wait—"

"I received info from one of my sources about three weeks ago that there was a prisoner undergoing high-level interrogation in one of the last thirteen bases," Niall says swiftly before Liam can work himself up to anger over not being told about their apparent rescue plan. "I wasn't sure who it was, because no one who's high enough to get that treatment has been captured lately. So I was running through a list of people who were influential in the revolution who maybe got taken when I remembered that—well, that we never found his body. Zayn's, I mean. So I started looking into it, and realized we'd need more funding if we wanted to get anyone out alive, and—yeah. We managed to pull him out."

"And you didn't tell any of us that you thought Zayn might be alive? For three whole weeks?" Louis looks like he's somewhere in between ripping Niall's head off and bursting into tears; it's an interesting expression on him. "We thought he was dead, Niall. It was fucking killing us all, and you didn't think to tell us that he might be alive?"

"He told me," Harry says quietly.

Louis rounds on him with a look of betrayed fury. "And you didn't tell me either?"

"No, we didn't," Harry says with the sort of calm reason that won him his title as one of England's best and brightest new diplomats. "We didn't tell either of you, because you're right—it was killing you, and it still would have killed you if you thought he was still alive somewhere. Neither of you would be able to focus on anything else; you would have been eaten up with guilt, and gotten distracted from everything else trying to get him, and you would have gotten in the way of the mission. And if the prisoner wasn't actually him, or if he died before we could get to him, or if he got killed during the raid, you would have lost him all over again, and it would have broken you both into a million pieces. We didn't tell you because we love you both enough to want to spare you more pain, and we love Zayn enough to want to get him out as quickly and efficiently as possible. So don't be angry, yeah? We did what we thought was right, and it all worked out."