Labels || H.S. [#Wattys2020]

THIRTY-ONE

Surprisingly, Lydia did not bring up the articles that had been released about Harry and Reagan that morning. Instead, she was attempting to do some work on the boys' image after new had broken the Zayn did indeed plan to go solo. It wasn't the fact that he decided to go solo that was the problem necessarily, it was the way he went about it. Although all of the boys knew that at one point Zayn would be launching his solo career, they just didn't think it would be so soon. Needless to say, the one who was taking it the hardest was Louis.

Louis had already gone on four smoke breaks by the time lunch had rolled around, his hands nervously tapping on any surface he found when he actually was in the studio. Nobody could blame him though, each and every one of them had tried to understand, they really did. From the time Zayn began acting more and more distanced to now, they wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, but Louis just couldn't. All he could remember was that phone call from Zayn telling them he wasn't coming back. There was nothing between that time that told them that he was leaving, they didn't think he was suffering to that point. All they thought was that he was having a rougher time than them. That he missed his family and his fiance, and that maybe he just needed some time at home to fix it. That he would come back and things would be okay. But they weren't, and Zayn left. So what hurt Louis the most was that they had spent so much time together, had grown so close, and Zayn still didn't feel that he could tell Louis what was going on. So of course Louis took it the hardest, of course he had a right to be mad. But that didn't make him feel better, not by a long shot.

"Normal twenty-two year old, right. Okay." Louis mumbled under his breath.

The rest of the boys didn't answer, knowing better than to encourage his slew of insults against their ex-band mate. Of course they were a tad irked by what Zayn had done, but they knew that sometimes you just don't feel like you have a choice. They felt betrayed, but at the same time they were proud of Zayn for saying enough and breaking away from the thing that was killing him slowly. But Louis just didn't understand how Zayn could walk away from the boys he called his brothers, from the life he worked so hard for.

"He had his reasons." Liam said, looking up from his notepad.

"Yeah, he fucked up royally and had to go home to the missus and explain it." Louis said as he clicked his tongue, referring to the tipping point in the boys' relationship. It wasn't too long ago that they were in Bangkok on tour on one of their unusual night off. Per usual Liam, Niall, and Harry were at the hotel up to their own devices, and Zayn and Louis decided to go clubbing. Louis had broken up with Eleanor already by this point, he was drunkenly hitting on one girl or another, while Zayn was getting too close for comfort with a blonde they had met earlier that night. Zayn swore nothing had happened, but Louis was far too wasted to remember anything from that night. The only remnants were pictures of Louis walking into a club with a group of girls, and Zayn holding the blonde's hand among other not so great looking pictures implicating him. Of course those pictures made their rounds on the internet and had eventually made their way to England to Zayn's fiance Perrie. So what happened? Zayn had enough. He didn't want to lose Perrie because of some pictures, because of his lack of privacy. Even though the boys knew that he would never cheat on Perrie, the pictures didn't look to great and the stories behind them were published far too fast for Lydia to do anything about them. So he left, he left and he never came back.

"You know he missed his family." Liam replied, going back to his writing, already knowing where this conversation was going to go and not wanting to be any part of it.

"I'm not saying he didn't. But we both know that he shouldn't have been in Bangkok that night with that girl. Maybe nothing happened, but he knew how the paps were. He knew he would get photographed."