Chapter Text
On the first day of freshman year at uni, Niall nearly gets hit by a bus.
It’s pretty typical, really. He tends to start things out at shittily as possible and then get better from there. His mum says it’s the key to his optimism—he always starts at the very bottom so that he knows he’s on his way up.
He gets to his first class on time, a dull class on the history of photography that he hopes beyond hope will get better as they actually, y’know, get to the part where they use anything close to a modern camera. But by the time it’s over he’s starving, and he talks Josh into getting food with him even though he doesn’t really have the time before he has to get to his actual photography class.
The good thing about going away to uni with your best mate is that he knows what sandwich to order you at a sandwich shop on the first day of class, even if it’s not exactly the sandwich you would get at home because they don’t have pickles and the cheese isn’t sharp enough.
The bad thing about going away to uni with your best mate is that he’s no better judge of how to get to the photo building with time to spare before class than you are. Probably worse. Josh is a worse judge of most things.
It’s dumb, but he’s not used to being in the city yet, and back home if he darted out into traffic he’d get cursed at but everyone would be used to dogs and cats and sheep and kids all doing the same thing, so they would be watching, and they’d slow down and no one would get hurt.
The bus doesn’t slow down. Not in time, anyway. He hears the screech of brakes in his ear and he has just enough time to turn to see it bearing down on him, and then the air gets knocked out of him by something solid and warm and there’s a bar of pressure at the back of his knees and he’s being lifted, and this isn’t at all how he imagined being hit by a bus would feel. Not that he’s often imagined being hit by a bus, but he expected it to hurt. He feels his camera strap snap, there’s a confusing crash of glass and metal, and then he’s up and over the curb and onto the sidewalk and nothing hurts and the bar under his legs isn’t a bar at all but an arm, and there’s another around his back, crushing him in tight. He’s got his face pressed into someone’s chest; he can feel a heart hammering against his nose where it’s squashed flat against what feels like a t-shirt.
There’s a moment where neither he nor the person holding him moves, and then he tries to lift his head and the arm around his back loosens immediately. “Sorry,” says a light tenor that he feels against his cheek more than hears, and then he pulls back far enough to see his rescuer.
Perhaps it’s the shock, but he can’t do much more than stare, taking in the boy who’s saved him. The boy’s staring back, looking as terrified and confused as Niall feels, his dark eyes huge and wide above cheekbones that could cut glass. He looks like someone Josh’s little sister would hang posters of on her bedroom wall, a model or a rock star or something, and Niall feels hysterical laughter bubbling up in his chest. Hey Mum he imagines saying to his mother when he calls her tonight, Today I was saved from being hit by a bus by a famous rock star.
He slumps forward, boneless with relief, and laughs into the stranger’s neck.
The stranger, to his credit, just holds him, probably thinking he’s saved some sort of lunatic and it’s better to let him laugh himself out. When Niall’s giggles subside he wipes his eyes. “Sorry,” he says, pulling back again.
The stranger shakes his head. “It’s okay,” he says, his voice soft. It’s a nice voice, the kind of voice Niall might expect from someone with a penchant for saving people from buses. “Um. You’re okay?”
Niall nods and tries to put his feet down so this boy isn’t, like, carrying him bridal style through the streets. He slides down the stranger’s side but his feet don’t hit the pavement, and when he looks down his eyes go wide. Neither himself or the stranger are touching the ground. They’re hovering, in fact, about three inches above the smashed remains of Niall’s camera.
“My camera,” he says numbly, and then, “oh my god you’re flying.”
“Shit,” says the boy, the concern in his face turning to panic, and then he does something with the hand that’s not still slung around Niall’s shoulders, and the two of them drift sideways and drop and Niall’s feet hit the ground, the shock of it twinging his knees.
“Oh my god,” says Niall again. “You’re a superhero.”
The boy shrugs fluidly, dropping his arm off Niall’s shoulder. He runs a hand through his hair, which is teased upwards in a way that makes him look ethereal and impossible, which, like, he is pretty fucking impossible because he can fly. “Sorry about your camera, mate,” he says, a little bit awkwardly.
“It’s, uh, it’s okay?” says Niall, because there are definitely more important concerns. There’s a crowd gathering around them now, chattering and shouting and amazed. None of them seem to have noticed the whole superhero thing and Niall’s trying very hard to figure out how to ask about it without giving anything away because if superheroes are real then the rules about superheroes are real and the cardinal rule of superheroes is that you don’t give away their identity.
“Um,” he says, but the stranger’s already moving past him, squeezing his shoulder as he goes.
“Glad you’re okay,” he says shortly, voice thick with something Niall doesn’t understand even a little bit, and then he’s shouldering his way through the crowds and away.
“Hey—“ Niall calls, because he hasn’t even fucking thanked him and he’s a superhero and you can’t just, like, meet a superhero and then move on to go to photo class and forget about it, but then Josh is there and he’s gathering Niall up in his arms and he babbling holy shit holy shit I thought you were going to die and Niall hugs him back because maybe you can forget long enough to reassure your best mate that you’ve gone away to uni with that you’re alright.
He goes to class camera-less and in shock. Thankfully it’s the first meeting so they really only hand out the syllabus and talk about what kinds of things they’re interested in doing in terms of photography—Niall hasn’t really thought about it enough, or at all, and his mind is caught in that impossible moment of weightlessness, the feeling that his feet should be on the ground but weren’t. It was like something was pushing up under him that he could both feel and not feel, and it makes him itch and sweat to think about. “I want to, like, capture the moments that no one thinks about,” he says when it comes time for him to talk. “Like, smiles and stuff that you do without thinking.” The clasp of a hand on a shoulder, the nervous slide of fingers through hair. “Just. People being happy.”
The professor just nods and moves on to the next girl, who talks about maybe wanting to do wedding photography, and Niall feels pretentious and weird and kind of unreal, like he’s squashed into a box that until yesterday he thought was the whole world.
He keeps looking at everyone around him out of the corners of his eyes, wondering. They just look like uni kids, but now that he knows there’s a boy, somewhere in the city, who can really, actually fly…
It makes sense, on a weird kind of level. He’s not religious and if someone had asked him if he believed in magic he would’ve laugh at them, but he’s always kind of known, or hoped, or believed in—something, a kind of energy to people, a presence that’s more than physical. It’s hard to live in small-town Ireland without halfway believing in ghosts, and he supposes the jump from ghosts to superheroes isn’t such an impossible one.
It is one that’s going to take some getting used to, though, and by the end of class he’s kind of convinced himself it didn’t happen, that he’d had some kind of mental break in response to the trauma of nearly dying. It doesn’t actually make sense because he can still feel the weirdness of it, and his camera is definitely smashed to bits, and he didn’t save himself from a bus, but. This way he can, like, think about anything that isn’t the feeling of flying or mysterious strangers.
He calls his mum after class, walking slowly, and stands and waits at a crosswalk. “Hey, honey,” she says, and he feels wrapped in the normalcy of it like a blanket. He’s suddenly and hideously homesick and overwhelmed and he bites at the inside of his cheek.
“I broke my camera, mum,” he says, and it’s really not the most important part but it’s hard to put the most important part into words.
“What?” she asks. “How? What?”
“Well,” he says, “I, uh. Nearly got hit by a bus.”
“Niall,” she wails, “baby, I knew the city was too dangerous—“
“Mum, calm down,” he says, laughing. “I’m okay, I’m okay.”
“You’re a stupid boy and you should know better and I love you so much,” she babbles. “I told Josh to take care of you, and you have to take care of him, you’re in this together, hear me—“
“Yes mum,” Niall says, “I know, Josh was there, he made sure I was alright, it’s okay.” Disasters always seem like so much less of a big deal once one’s mum starts making them into one. “I promise I’m fine, but. My camera.”
“Fuck your camera,” says his mum vehemently.
Niall squints at his feet, concentrates on the solidness of the sidewalk below him. “I’ll get a job,” he says. “To save up money for another.”
He hears her sigh. “You’re a good boy. My best boy.”
“Yes, mum,” he says, embarrassed.
“How are your classes going?” she asks. “Have you made any friends?”
“It’s the first day,” he protests. “Classes are fine, probably good, I can’t really tell, yet? And.” He stares across the street, watches everyone pass him by, not ready quite yet, to move. “There’s one boy, maybe? He um. Helped me, with the bus thing.”
“Makes him worth your friendship in my book,” his mum says. “What’s he like?”
Niall furrows his brow, thinking about what he could possibly say. Well, he can fly, is right out, so he goes with, “He looks a bit like a rock star, he’s got, like, that mysterious thing going on?” which is true in absolute spades. “Dunno if I should pursue that friendship, though, no girl’d look at me twice next to him.”
“Speaking of girls,” says his mum, and he laughs, feeling tension that he hadn’t even noticed ease away. It’s like he’s passed some kind of test.
“First day, mum,” he reminds her, and crosses the street.
He ends up borrowing a camera from the photo department, which is kind of awful, because he can only check it out between 8 AM and 8 PM and he has to sign it in and out each time, but at least he can take pictures. He mostly ends up taking pictures of Josh, who always laughs and scrunches up his face. “We’re in a new city, mate,” he says. “Don’t you want to take pictures of new things?”
“Why would I? Brought my favorite subject with me,” Niall replies easily, because Josh is full of the exact kind of joy he meant in that first photo class—something careless and a little bit stupid that Niall feels like he used to be able to tap into much more easily, before.
Before the city and before the bus and before superheroes being real.
He does try to find a job. He applies at the uni library, although he’s pretty sure he would hate working inside and alone all the time, and he applies at the book store and to work at the front desk at the gym and offers his services as a dog walker and pretty much anything he can think of.
Josh and him spend a lot of time in the music rooms after school, just fucking around, Josh on drums and himself on guitar, and there’s a girl called Jade in his photo history class who smiles at him when she sees him and he notices her sheet music and invites her to hang sometime and she seems like she actually might, so. Life goes on, and, as always, goes up, but somehow it doesn’t feel like he’s snapped into it at all, like it’s sort of happening around him without his intervention.
He’s in the coffee shop just off campus, filling out a job application to work there, when the superhero rockstar walks by the window, hand in hand with a pretty pink-haired girl. He’s laughing down at her, dark eyes scrunched up with amusement, and she’s got a nose ring and a really lovely smile, and Niall feels a little bit like all the air’s been sucked out of the world.
He’s on his feet before he really thinks about it, the bell at the door of the coffee shop jingling behind him as he pushes his way outside. “Hey—“ he calls, but they don’t hear him, so he darts forward and grabs at the boy’s free hand.
He spins, surprise stealing the laughter from his face. Niall has a flash of guilt at that, but it’s replaced with an expression he has no idea what to do with, a mixture of joy and terror and worry and weird fondness, and for a minute he thinks the boy must be looking at someone else, but then he goes, “Oh. Hi,” and he’s definitely talking to Niall.
“Hi,” says Niall. “Um. Hi.”
The boy doesn’t say anything else, just looks at him dark-eyed and curious and complicated, which is kind of fair, considering that Niall didn’t, like, ask him anything, but just running up to someone and going what are you why are you how did you become what you are is rude and also, he doesn’t know if the boy’s girlfriend even knows—knows anything.
She, for her part, bursts out laughing and sticks out a hand. “Hello,” she says. “This is Zayn. I’m Perrie. And I’m thinking you guys should talk somewhere a little more private.” She winks at Niall, and he blinks back. That answers that, then.
Zayn swallows, casting Perrie a glance, and Niall realizes he’s still kind of holding onto his hand and drops it, embarrassed. “That, I’d like that?” he hazards, because there’s a lot going on that he really doesn’t understand.
Perrie cocks her head at Zayn. “Well?” she prompts.
Zayn drops her hand, running his hand over his face. “Um,” he says, “What, um, what dorm do you live in?”
“Heshels,” says Niall dumbly, because what the hell does that have to do with anything—
“You can get to the roof of that, right?” Zayn says seriously. “Meet me up there in fifteen?”
Niall thinks about how long it’ll take him to get back to his dorm. “Um, twenty?”
Zayn smiles at him, a warmth in it that Niall feels somehow he hasn’t deserved. “Twenty,” he says.
Niall nods, and turns to jog back to his dorm. He tries desperately to think of things he can ask—how did you get your powers, what else can you do, are you an alien or magic or was there an accident or—but literally all of them are feel so incredibly invasive, like, what right does he have to ask? What right does he have to do anything but be grateful?
But he itches with it, with the need to know something, anything, about this world he’s stumbled on. He needs to know about it more than anything he’s ever needed in his life.
Zayn’s waiting for him when he gets to the roof. Niall falters to a stop just beyond the threshold, and just stares, really taking in, for the first time, the first superhero he’s ever seen. He’s a dark, soulful boy in a leather jacket and a white tee shirt and black jeans, but it’s like someone has taken all the possibilities for a boy of that description and layered them over one another, a thousand-exposure photograph, all the best features of each picked out until they become something that transcends the originals. He’s hovering about four feet above the surface of the roof, hands spread to either side of him like he’s a gymnast on invisible parallel bars. Silhouetted against the late afternoon sun, he’s the most purely beautiful person that Niall’s ever seen.
It’s a thought that kind of surprises him, but it’s a small surprise in a sea of world-shaking ones.
Zayn twitches his long fingers, and slowly descends to the roof, touching down like a dancer. There’s no way anyone should be that light-footed in combat boots. Niall’s mouth is dry.
Zayn’s smiling at him again. “So there’s that,” he says, and chuckles, like he’s sharing a joke with Niall, and maybe he kind of is.
Niall swallows hard. “Christ,” he says, “I’d sort of convinced myself I’d made you up.”
Zayn stares at him, his mouth half-open, and Niall feels like he’s been shown into the lobby of a theatre, like he finally knows the names on the marquee, but the doors are still locked and everyone inside is laughing. He shifts awkwardly from foot to foot, and then Zayn seems to shake himself out of whatever thought he’d been stuck on and says, “Yeah, um, that’s kind of why I showed you? So you’d know you’re not, like, crazy or whatever.”
“Thanks,” says Niall. “I needed that.”
Zayn takes a step towards him and then seems to think better of it. “You’re alright, yeah? You weren’t hurt.”
Niall shakes his head. “I just—you were kind of a revelation, you know, and I didn’t want to just. Let you walk by. I’m sorry, that’s weird, I’m treating you like you’re some sign or something and you’re probably—“ he almost says just a guy but it’s so, so clear that Zayn’s not, and anyway he has no idea if—“Are you—you’re human?”
Zayn’s eyes warm, though, not offended at all. “I’m human,” he says. “Perrie too.”
“Is she your girlfriend?” Niall asks, because it feels like the least invasive question he can access at the moment.
Zayn tilts his head to one side. “Partner, in. What we do.”
“You’re a superhero team?” Niall asks, incredulous.
Zayn wrinkles his nose. “More a duo than a team,” he says. “I, um. There used to be more of us.”
“What happened?” Niall asks, and as soon as he’s said it he knows it was the wrong thing to say.
He always hears people talk about walls going up behind eyes and he’s always kind of thought it was bullshit—there are things you can always tell in expressions, in his freshman-photo-student opinion. But it’s like flicking a switch. Zayn goes from at ease and comfortable and open to something much more jittery and nervous. He even rounds his shoulders like he’s trying to hide in himself. He clears his throat and slides a pack of cigarettes out of his jacket pocket. “They left,” he says shortly.
“Oh,” says Niall. “I’m sorry.”
Zayn slips a cigarette out of the pack and puts it to his lips. For a crazy second Niall thinks he’s just going to snap his fingers or something it’ll light, like he’s stored up the light of the sun within himself and he can summon it at will—but his hand’s in his pocket again and comes out with an ordinary lighter, and Niall feels like an idiot.
He scuffs a toe against the ground. “You saved my life, man,” he says.
Zayn shrugs, smiling sideways at him, but it’s a little hollow. “Comes with the job,” he says, not harsh, just humble.
Niall nods to himself. “Cool,” he says. “How did you—I mean—“ He’s not sure what he’s even asking, why he’s still here. Zayn’s showed him what he’s going to show him and he feels suddenly like an intruder, like he’s butting in on this hero and his sky.
Zayn takes a drag on his cigarette. “It’s, um, kind of a long story,” he says, and that could be an answer to anything, really. It’s the most earnest, politest brush-off Niall’s ever gotten, but it’s a brush-off nonetheless, and, like, of course it is. He’s probably coming down from saving the world or some shit, and he doesn’t want to be spending all his downtime chatting with a star-struck frosh.
“Yeah,” he says, “Alright. Well.” He shoves a hand into his hair. Thank you has never felt so inadequate in his life, but he says it anyway. “Really, mate, thanks. I mean. Obviously.”
Zayn just watches him, smoke curling around his face, and Niall itches to take his picture. His fingers twitch at his sides. “I, um, I’ll see you around then,” he says.
Zayn nods, still watching him, and Niall slips back through the access door and down the stairs.
He’s not really sure what to do with himself. He feels…he feels like he’s felt since Zayn rescued him, and it’s just taken this long to put a name to it: he feels useless. Not just because he doesn’t have his camera but on some deeper, like, existential level. Maybe it’s the city. Maybe it comes with a near-death experience, the aftermath, the feeling that if he’s here he should be doing something good with his life, something worthwhile.
Maybe it’s the quiet boy on the roof behind him, who’s so used to doing real good he dismisses saving a life as an everyday occurrence.
He goes back to his room and sits on his bed. He picks up his guitar but doesn’t play it, sliding his fingers over the strings, feeling them sing with tension.
Josh comes in about half an hour later, his backpack slung over his shoulder, all cheerful energy. “Hey, mate,” he says, and drops his bag on his bed. He stills when Niall doesn’t say anything. “You okay?”
Niall nods, smiling at him reassuringly. “Yeah, fine, grand.” He fiddles with the tuning pegs. “Hey, uh, you know when I nearly got hit by that bus?”
Josh’s eyebrows shoot up and he sits on his bed opposite Niall. “I can’t exactly forget it,” he says. “Thought you were dead, mate.”
“Yeah,” says Niall. “Me too. Did you see what happened?”
Josh shook his head. “Not really. That guy must’ve pushed you out of the way, because when the bus moved on he was helping you up, yeah?”
“Yeah,” says Niall. “I dunno, it.” He wants to say he wasn’t helping me up, he was setting me down. He wants to say, I met a real superhero today and I don’t know anything more than I did before but I feel like I shouldn’t, really. He wants to say, have you ever met anyone that’s made you feel huge and tiny at the same time? But Josh hadn’t seen, and it didn’t feel right just blabbing it outright, even to his best mate. He might not be able to do much, but at least he can keep a secret. “It was weird, is all.”
“I’d think you’d be happier about it,” Josh says, quirking his eyebrows at Niall. “Considering you’re not dead.”
“I am happy about it,” Niall says, laughing a little. “Obviously I’m happy to be alive.”
Josh looks at him a moment longer. “Y’wanna smoke?” he asks. “You look like you need to chill.”
Niall shakes his head, because the last thing he wants to do is go back to the careless repetition of his life, to getting high and playing music and going to class. He doesn’t want to bury this feeling until he figures it out. “No, I, um.” He puts his guitar back in its case. “I’m gonna go for a run, or something?”
Josh gapes at him. “A run. You. Running.”
Niall shrugs. “I dunno, man, I have all this energy.” He stands up. “Maybe I’ll get some food.”
“Maybe you should get laid,” Josh calls after him, and Niall chuckles at him.
He doesn’t end up running but he does end up walking, farther from campus than he’s ventured before. It’s late afternoon, the sun slanting between the buildings, and part of him wants to board a bus and just go home and part of him knows that whatever this is would be worse there, it’d be a literal step backwards in this process he didn’t even realize he’d started on until an hour ago.
He tries to focus on the newness of the city, the sheer number of opportunities and possibilities it contains, tries to think about all the things he could do that could be important, but it just ends up feeling overwhelming. He doesn’t know how to do anything. He knows how to play guitar. He knows how to take photographs that some people like. He knows how to make his friends laugh. He has no idea how to save the world.
He follows the streets that look the most open, wanting to see the sky, and ends up down by the river. The sun is starting to set, and he buys himself a hotdog from a street cart and hops up on the railing of a bridge to watch it go down. It’s a moment he wants to photograph but couldn’t even with a camera: it’s the stillness he wants to capture, the slow slide of the sun behind the clouds, the dogs barking in the distance. The feeling of a city winding down.
“I know what you’re thinking,” says a soft voice from his side, and he yelps and nearly falls into the river. A small, strong hand steadies him, and he looks over to see the Zayn’s pink-haired partner, Perrie, leaning on the rail beside him.
“Hi,” he says.
She smiles at him. “Hi.”
“If you know what I’m thinking I wish you’d tell me,” Niall says, playing it off for laughs, but she’s a superhero, maybe she means she can read his mind. He wants to laugh at the thought, but it might actually be true.
She laughs, which freaks him out even further, until she shakes her head and says, “I can’t read your mind.”
He narrows his eyes at her. “Then how did you know that I was thinking maybe you could?”
She cocks her head. “You have a very expressive face,” she says, and then, slower, “and I’ve been where you are now.” She turns to look at the river. “It’s weird, right? It’s like you forget how to have fun.”
Niall thinks about how he hadn’t even considered getting high, how things like football and video games and even music seem like weird distractions from what really matters, whatever that is, and nods.
“It’s like…” She gestures, taking in the bridge they’re sitting on, the city around them, the sun and sky. “All this is funneled into you all at once, everything is right there and you have to do something with it, you have to make it better because what the hell else are you for, right?”
“Yeah,” says Niall, “yeah, exactly.”
She nods. “I know.” She pulls her hair over her shoulder, and Niall sees the metal glint of piercings at her ears and the nape of her neck. “When I was eight,” she says, “I fell off an overpass into traffic.”
“Oh my god,” says Niall, his eyes going huge. “What?”
She smiles sideways at him, just a quick flash and then gone. “I was fine,” she says. “Not a scratch on me. The driver swerved to avoid me and crashed into the sidewall. I was hit by falling glass,” she continues, her eyes on the water below them, “and when the car caught fire my clothes burned right off me, but I was fine.”
Niall swallows, turning on the railing to stare at her.
“The driver lost both of his legs,” she says softly. “His wife, in the passenger seat, died.” She shakes her head. “I was too young to understand any of it, you know? I didn’t even understand what had happened to me, not even touching on what happened to them, but. As I grew up it, like, filtered in, and I’ve been living with that feeling my whole life.”
“How do you deal with it?” Niall asks, quietly. “God, I can’t even imagine.”
Perrie turns to face him, the light catching her pink hair. She looks ethereal and beautiful and very, very alien, a piece of the sunset made human, and paradoxically it grounds Niall, somehow, anchors him to the strangeness. She and Zayn are of a piece, somehow, sun and sunset. “Two things,” she says. “First, you just do what you can. I can give you the number for a soup kitchen I used to work at, to start with, and you work your way up from there.”
“Up to what, though?” Niall asks. “I’m just, like, a person, I’m not indestructible and I can’t fly and I can’t.” He stares at his feet. “I can’t save the world, and that’s the problem.”
Perrie snorts, and he looks up at her, surprised. She raises her eyebrows. “I can’t save the world, either. You think Zayn and I fight off aliens and giant crocodiles all the time? Cosmic threats?”
“Well,” says Niall, and feels his cheeks heat. “Yes?”
She smirks at him. “Adorable,” she says, “but no. The biggest thing we do is stop normal people from doing things they regret. Hurting other people, hurting themselves.” She gives him a significant look, and he realizes why she’s here, why she’s telling him all of this, realizes his precarious position on the bridge’s railing.
“I, I wasn’t—I wouldn’t have jumped,“ he stammers. “I’m just here to think.”
“Good,” she says. “That’s the second thing I was going to say. Remember that you’re part of the world, yeah?”
Niall blinks at her. “What?”
She grins at him. “You want to make the world better, yeah? So make you better. Make you happy.”
Niall grins back at her, slow. “Yeah,” he says, “Okay.” He gnaws at his lip. “Um, does Zayn—“ he stumbles to a stop, not sure why he asking, or even what he’s asking, really.
Perrie raises an eyebrow at him, but waits.
“Does he feel it, too?” he asks, finally finding words that are at least nearby to what he wants to say. “The purposelessness?”
Perrie bites her lip and regards him for a long moment, and then finally shakes her head. “Zayn’s known his purpose for a long, long time.”
“Lucky,” says Niall, wrinkling his nose.
“Sometimes I think so,” Perrie agrees, the sometimes I don’t hanging between them for long enough that it makes Niall itch to ask why, and then she says, “Anyway, I should go. Aliens to fight and all.”
“Yeah,” says Niall, and hops down from the railing. He smiles at Perrie and starts back towards campus, but something makes him stop. He turns, and calls after her, only a little hesitant. “Um,” he says, “Can I see you again?”
She stops and turns back to look at him, looking small and frail and everything he knows she isn’t in the gathering dark. “Is that a ‘will I ever see you again’,” she asks slowly, “or a ‘can I see you again’?”
“Either,” says Niall easily, because he really doesn’t care. She’s pretty and she’s kind and she’s his link to a world he’d never even imagined. For fuck’s sake, she’s a superhero. “Whichever you wanna answer.”
She pushes her hand into her hair like she’s thinking. “This is not the last time you’ll see me,” she says, and then smiles. He smiles back, not as disappointed as he thought he might be, just glad she didn’t vanish like, like Batman. Not that she’s much like Batman at all. Zayn would probably be Batman, brooding on roofs.
Not that he knows enough about Zayn to know that. Not that he knows anything at all about Zayn, except that he’s humble and he can fly and he has purpose.
“I’m glad,” he says, “Bye, Perrie.”
“Bye, Niall,” she says, and it’s not until he’s back at the dorm that he realizes he never told her or even Zayn his name.
“Maybe she can read minds,” he says aloud.
Josh pulls off his headphones. “What, mate?”
**
Perrie pushes the access door open, sighing when she sees Zayn still perched at the edge of the roof. He’s crouching, now, like a stupid coiffed gargoyle, cigarette butts scattered around his feet.
“Litterer,” Perrie says fondly, and Zayn turns enough that he can see her out of the corner of his eye.
“I’ll clean them up before I go,” he says absently, and stands, his gaze still on the street below.
She joins him on the edge. “He’s fine,” she says. “He was just thinking.”
He nods and looks at her at last. He looks terrible, gaunt and worried-eyed and just tired, and Perrie cups his cheek, smoothing her thumb over the bag under his eye. “God, Zayn,” she says. “When was the last time you slept?”
He shrugs one shoulder, the corner of his mouth turning up. “Last Thursday?” he asks, and she scowls fiercely at him and slaps his cheek gently, once. He takes her hand, slipping their fingers together, staring down at their hands.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I know I need to sleep, but it’s so.” He shakes his head. “It’s so lonely, Per. It’s the loneliest I’ve ever been, worse than when Lou left.”
She sighs, sliding into his side and putting her head on his shoulder.
“You should’ve gone to talk to him,” she says after a long moment, both of them staring out at the darkening sky.
“No,” he says firmly, “I shouldn’t have.”
She lets her eyes slip closed. “You shouldn’t have,” she admits. “But you should soon.”
She can feel him shake his head, but she’s too tired to fight him on it and keeps her eyes closed as he lifts them both into the sky.