Zarry One Shots by dattumblrgal

(Maybe) Unrequited Love AU - Oblivious Best Friends

love is always tricky. it never works out the way you want it to. even when it's good, even when it's near damn perfect, love does whatever it wants. you don't choose the people you fall in love with. they don't choose whether they fall in love with you too or not.

your heart breaks with love but it also heals with it. love can be a salve that mends together all your shattered pieces back together. other times, love just keeps you happy and warm.

that's how harry feels around zayn - warm, happy, content. it's just right, like coming home after getting out of a storm in fall and wrapping yourself in a cozy blanket with a cup of your favourite tea. loving someone like that makes everything brighter. being together is suddenly a piece of summer sunshine in the middle of december. you never want to leave that place, you just want to keep basking in its glow.

harry's known zayn for years and years. they got matched up as roommates in uni in their first year. what seemed like a disaster at the first sight, an introvert and extrovert who both don't fit the stereotypes of their alignments, turned out to be a friendship for a lifetime. they were inseparable, wreaking mild havoc all around campus, being the life of the party together, having illicit threesomes that to this day make harry blush sometimes. behind closed doors when it was just the two of them, a wave of calmness washed over them and they studied together, binged tv shows and movies, talked many nights away without realizing. it was a match made in heaven.

the love didn't come until their uni days were long gone. maybe it had, only harry was oblivious and never noticed it. maybe the minutes he spent staring at zayn's face in the solitude of their room meant nothing. maybe the kisses that the girls asked for meant something. maybe harry wanted it to be just the two of them all along.

harry loved zayn. plain and simple. he loved the way he talked, with his accent and hand gestures that always distracted harry with the daydreams of zayn's long fingers taking him apart. he loved zayn's eyes, how they were always honest and the colour of them that harry has never seen anywhere else in the whole world. he loved everything about zayn, from the little details like that way he wrapped his arm around harry when they were watching movies to the big and important things, like how zayn's actually helping save the fucked up world by being a fearless badass in court and trying to get human rights to be as equal as they claim to be.

harry loves him with his whole heart and probably has ever since he made zayn laugh for the first time when they were still teenagers.

the thing is, zayn doesn't know. and that's where harry fucks up.

he should've kept his mouth shut. why whine about something you know for a fact isn't going to change? yet harry does exactly that.

harry was three glasses of wine in when he decided to call gemma and complain about his miserable case of unrequited love. he should've been inside, enjoying the birthday party of an amazing friend of his but there he was, sitting outside on a patio chair in october because he was a loser. as it's usual for london, it was starting to drizzle so harry thought his little meltdown was safe and sound, hidden from strange ears, especially zayn's ears since he was inside the house too.

"gem, you need to stop telling me to do something when you know i can't do that," harry huffs after a few minutes of conversation. it's always the same when he talks about it. "you need to tell him." "i can't." "why?" "because i love him and i can't hurt him.". the script to this charade barely ever changes.

"no, you listen to me," harry says. "i'm in love with him. i love zayn with my whole fucking heart so i can't do something like this to him. i'd rather have him love me as a friend than hate me. i can't lose him. it'd break me."

the silence that falls upon the conversation is dreadfully interrupted by harry's name being said. honestly, harry's never hated his name until that very moment.