plaid shirt days & nights (when you made me your own) // niall horan au

this battle of fools (part ii niall pov drabble)

Niall thinks it's crazy how they've gotten here.

Zoe's arms are wrapped tightly around his shoulders, and she's drunkenly mumbling something into the crook of his neck that he's not quite listening to. She's a heavy weight on his back, weighing him down as he carefully walks to Miss America, but he still feels like this is a dream, like he's almost floating up in the clouds despite the fact that Zoe's weighing him down to earth.

It's almost like this whole thing isn't real.

His throat still feels a little closed up from their moment in the car, and now, as Zoe's saying his name to get his attention, he's distantly remembering something like this happening before. He remembers it in waves, like it just happened yesterday as opposed to years ago, remembers Zoe's lips pressing up against the pulse point on his neck like she's doing now, her breath reeking of cheap vodka and her skin warm as she wrapped her limbs all around him, remembers her telling him she loved him like she meant it. Or at least he thought she meant it. It's hard to believe the things she did then were genuine when he thinks of them in hindsight. If she really loved him, then she wouldn't have left.

"Are you flirting with me?" he remembers asking at the time, remembers feeling like he could float up into the clouds he was so happy, remembers feeling like nothing in the universe could take that feeling away from him, like nothing could take Zoe away from him. Needless to say, he was wrong. Zoe had giggled and held onto him tighter at the time, her soft lips attached to his neck trailing up to close around his earlobe and nipping until he was laughing along with her.

He finds himself humming in response to her now, trying to suppress the shiver that's threatening to run down his spine at the press of her cold nose against his heated neck. "I love you," she's saying, the same way she said it all those years ago when they were in this exact situation. Niall feels his heart stop, feels like he needs to shrug her off his back so he can press his hands to his knees and catch his breath and not have to look at her as he does it.

He pulls it together, though, and the words rush out of him without his brain processing it. "Yeah, yeah. I love you too." He has to regulate his breathing to keep from choking out the last few syllables, because saying it out loud after all these years hurts. Being here with Zoe and having her smile against his neck hurts. Trying to hold it all together when he really wants to scream and throw things and cry hurts.

Everything just hurts.

It doesn't help that she's looking at him like he put all the stars in the sky when he sets her down in a booth in Miss America or that she jokes around with him like shit didn't hit the fan between them. It doesn't fucking help that her eyes still sparkle with mischief or that her smile can still make his heart stop or that he can't stop staring at her lips.

Niall is surprised at their whole reunion because he still thinks that her laugh can move mountains and that her hand still fits perfectly in his and that maybe, maybe, if he just leans forward to brush his lips against hers that the past five years will somehow be reversed and he'll have his Zoe all to himself again.

But Niall knows better. He's not eighteen and naïve anymore, not caught up with a teenage romance and whatever his heart has to say anymore. He's twenty three and wiser, and if he could go back in time, he'd tell eighteen-year-old Niall to either stop Zoe from leaving without telling anyone or break up with her so she'd be the one with the broken heart and not him.

And it's not fair, it's not fair. He loved her so much, still loves her, like a crazy person, loves her so much that he can feel something in his chest aching with it, feels his skin tightening around his frame with it. It doesn't help that Zoe's laughing and cracking jokes and lightheartedly throwing fries at him from across the table, doesn't help that she still looks exactly the same and that she told him that she loved him and that's why she left. Niall doesn't even know what that means. He's not sure he wants to find out either.