Viva La Vida

Part 25

Liam knows that Zayn does not ask for much, which is why he drops everything and runs when he gets a text that says I need you. There's no details, no context, and no assumption that Liam will neglect his duties for Zayn, but Liam knows that if it wasn't serious—if Zayn had any other choice than asking someone for their help—he wouldn't have gotten the text at all.

So he tells one of the secretaries to take care of his schedule for the rest of the day on his way out, and runs. Runs in the only direction he knows how: towards Zayn.

When he bursts through the doors of Zayn's chambers, unannounced and flanked by a flustered guard whom he immediately orders out of the room, Zayn avoids his half-raised arms—the invitation of an embrace that Zayn so rarely turns down—and points mutely to a torn-open envelope lying on the table. Liam crosses the room in three quick strides and rips the letter inside out.

It's an official court summons. Zayn is going to have to testify at the Circle trial.

Liam does his best to muffle his sound of outrage.

"They want me—I can't do that, I can't get up in front of everyone and talk about that—Liam—they want me to get on a witness stand and tell everyone what they did to me, I can't—I can't do that, I can't do that, I can't do that—" Zayn's moving around almost frantically, his eyes never on one thing for too long. He stays on the other side of the room from Liam like he's trying to stay out of arm's length, and he keeps touching his wrists like he's checking for the presence of a pulse or the absence of chains. There's that hunted, hollow look in his eyes that he'd had when he'd first been returned to them. Liam's chest hurts.

"Zayn, you don't have to. We'll get Ned to write them a note saying that you can't for mental health reasons—"

But Zayn is well beyond the point of reason. "They're going to show the footage in the trial, they say they need to ask me about it—they—I—" His fists clench and unclench desperately. Liam doesn't need him to vocalize what he's feeling when it's so obvious, when Liam has seen what's caused it. The fear, the shame, the horror is almost palpable in the room. The idea of having people—a whole throne room of people—see what Zayn has suffered is abhorrent. It's worse than being stripped bare in front of a crowd of strangers; it shows the darkest, most humiliating and painful things in Zayn's life. And there's no doubt that seeing the footage himself in court—let alone being cross-examined about it—would rip away what fragile mental stability Zayn has and send him into a downwards spiral of flashbacks and panic attacks that would make this crisis look like a case of test anxiety. "I can't—I'm gonna—if they show that—if I see that it'll be like living it all over again, I won't let them do that to me, I won't—"

"Take a deep breath," Liam says, remembering how quickly and expertly Zayn had talked him down from his panic attack before Simon's trial and trying to emulate his strategies. "Zayn, look at me."

Zayn's chest is rising and falling far too rapidly for him to be taking any sort of deep breath, but he does glance at Liam for a fraction of a second before his eyes continue darting around the room. It takes Liam a moment before he realizes what the other man is looking for—he's cataloguing all the possible escape routes again and again. Whether it's something from Zayn's rebel days, when he'd always needed a quick way out from a dangerous mission, or some sort of habit he's picked up to cope with the claustrophobic memory of his windowless cell, it breaks Liam's heart.

"Zayn," he says as gently as possible. "Zayn, babe, is it okay if I touch you?"

Zayn shakes his head jerkily, hands flying back to his wrists.