Say Something

Chapter Thirty-three ~ Little things

I woke up early the morning after I proposed to Caitlin and decided to go downstairs to the memory room before Caitlin woke up. I looked over at her to make sure she was still asleep, and she was. I got out of bed and quickly threw on a random pair of jeans and a t shirt before getting the key from the kitchen and heading to the basement.

"Hi, Liam." I said when I opened the door to see him standing there.

"Good morning, Nialler." he said with a smile. "I heard you're getting married."

"Yeah, I am. Finally did something about that ring I bought in 2011 and popped the question." I laughed.

"About time, 17 years ago you bought that ring. I remember being there with you when you bought it, you didn't know how much money to spend and you didn't even have anyone there to propose to."

"17 years? God, it really has been a long time."

I picked up my guitar and began strumming a rhythm that I had always loved playing. It was a song that our good friend Ed Sheeran had given to us and was on our second album as a band, and it was called Little Things. Ed was still going strong in the music industry, still writing beautiful love songs, still had messy ginger hair and that birthmark by his eye that made him look as if he'd been in a fight. He was still the same Ed as the day we first met.

After a while of me strumming the same old rhythm, Liam began to sing.

"Your hand fits in mine like it's made just for me, but bare this in mind it was meant to be. And I'm joining up the dots with the freckles on your cheeks, and it all makes sense to me."

Those few lines were the ones that Zayn used to sing, so naturally Liam choked up a bit at them seeing as Zayn had only recently been murdered.

"Remember the way Zayn used to sing those lines, Niall? Remember how amazing that voice of his was? I kind of miss it, don't you?"

The only thing I could do was nod. I missed Zayn, I missed him an awful lot. He was our best mate...

"I met up with Zayn not long after he died. He's not quite a ghost like me, but more of an angel. I told me to tell you that he's sorry, sorry that he got caught in the trap of that horrible man and he killed him. Sorry that you had to be the first one to find out that he was dead."

"I miss him, Liam. I miss him like I missed you right after you died. Do you think I'll ever be able to see him like I do with you? I'd like to tell him that he never needs to be sorry for anything. "

Liam and I sat and talked for quite a while, as I continued to strum old, well-known rhythms on my guitar. We talked about lots of things, about the career that we shared for those five years, about the serial killer, about the people who we knew that had been caught up in the whole serial killer thing, and most of all we talked about Caitlin, Tommo, and the twins.

After a while, I thought I could hear somebody tiptoeing down the stairs, but I didn't pay any attention to it because I was sure that I had shut the door to the stairs. I softly played the rhythm to a song that had never been ours, a song called Give Me Love, by a man who had given us a few songs to be on our albums: Ed Sheeran. I had always really liked the song, with its beautiful guitar rhythm and its beautiful lyrics, but I could never quite nail the thing Ed did with all the different notes and his loop pedal. Even with the rest of the boys, we could never sing that part as good as Ed could.

When I finally stopped playing my guitar, I could hear this soft sobbing coming from behind me. I turned to see Caitlin standing there, staring around at the posters that covered the walls, the many cutouts all lined up in a row, the many, many awards, every single bit of One Direction music ever to exist. She was in tears, her face and t-shirt sopping wet from them. I put my guitar down and walked over to hug her. She threw her arms around me and sobbed even harder, holding me as close to her as her baby bump would allow her to, her head buried in my chest, her tears soaking my own shirt.

She cried and cried and cried, and eventually I found myself crying with her. Once she finally managed to pull all the words going through her mind together, she choked out the words:

"Niall James Horan, I can't believe you kept all this stuff. All these memories, right here in your secret basement. Hidden away from the world. Why? "

"I kept all this stuff because I want to never forget One Direction, ever. Because those were the best years of my life, with Liam, Louis, Harry and Zayn, with my brothers. Because I miss the good times the five of us shared. The theatres, the arenas, the stadiums. I miss every single word to every single song we ever sang, and I remember every single one of those words. That moment when Liam here collapsed on stage, that was the moment that I knew was the end. I knew that our band wouldn't be able to carry on without the smiling lad with the big heart and the eyes like melted chocolate. But I wanted us to continue, I wanted us to keep going strong without him. No matter how hard we tried to keep keeping on, we couldn't do it. So I kept this little shrine to our career down here, hidden. Every single thing ever that was ever related to One Direction."

Caitlin continued sobbing into me for what seemed like a lifetime, and when she finally managed to stop and catch her breath, she told me that she too missed the One Direction days. That she missed being a teenage girl with a love for that one big boyband that so many adored. That she could never have dreamed of a life without the five boys who came together with a shared dream all those years ago. And that she couldn't believe that she was right here, in the arms of the man that she fell so deeply in love with during that time.