corporate affairs [Niall Horan AU]

T W E N T Y T W O

T W E N T Y T W O

- N i a l l -

It hadn't been real.

In London and Paris, she had been a hazy memory he would sometimes clarify between the shifting hours of dusk and dawn, with the help of his trusty friend Smirnoff. In Europe her face and her presence was muffled. Sometimes he would catch her face on magazines, but then the more angular face of Gillian would shift into his peripheral vision, and his attention would be forced to focus away. The streets he walked were cold and bare-they held no memory of the girl with life in her every fiber. And London was cold and wet. Much colder than New York City had ever been. Paris was too busy and tainted.

He spent a lot of extra time in London. Two weeks longer than he was supposed to have spent. The city-in its harsh cold bluntness and its ever rainy disposition-was perfect for him. There were plenty of other bleary eyed chaps having a pint in the murky corners of underground pubs-Niall was nobody special.

He felt like he was living his life on mute. People were making noise and talking to him all the time, but he heard none of it, hell-he didn't see most of it. There was one face and one voice that stood out in the crowd, but she wasn't real. Just a vision of somebody he used to lo-know. Gillian and the other business partners trashed their way through London-but he stayed behind. He would wave them on, complaining about important work to be done, and then he would walk.

Up and down and zigzag he would weave through London. He was searching for something. He could catch glimpses of it in coffeehouses early in the morning, when they would play Ella Fitzgerald over the sunrise and talk in earnest voices; in small shops with odd-ended knickknacks that meant no sense; in bookshops with used books whose spines were cracked and pages frayed; on the Thames late at night, when the lights of tall buildings glittered against the river. He could find pieces of it fragmented across the city, but he could never catch the whole thing. So he kept walking. And eventually, on one rainy evening, he stepped into a brewery/bookshop that sold odd-ended bits-like Polaroid cameras, knobby keychains, broken record players-that sort of stuff. He bought a coffee, a polaroid camera, extra film, and a notebook. He borrowed a pen from the barista and stepped back into the drizzle in it, snapping a picture of the coffeeshop and jotting down its address.

And that night, with every place that had a piece of whatever he was looking for, he took a picture of it and wrote its address. He never stayed long, never touched anything, just looked. Sometimes it hurt to look. It cut his heart sometimes and twisted his gut and he didn't understand why looking at a sunrise could bring him to his knees. He would return to his hotel room at dawn, falling into bed alone. He'd started locking Gillian out of his room, there wasn't anything exciting about her presence now, and she'd started shagging Mr. Jones (who has a wife) anyways.

It hadn't been real.

In London it was intangible. It was chasing him, or rather he was chasing it-but it wasn't so overwhelming as this is.

It hadn't been real.

Not in the car, not in the drive back to his apartment he'd been away from for so long. But the elevators had opened to dead silence and the smell of overly clean, stale air. The penthouse was dead empty, not a living soul in the huge expanse.

That made it a little bit realer.

He has one of the doormen put his bags away, and he heads to the kitchen, sock-clad and feeling like a stranger in his own home. The muteness from London is suddenly un-muted, and there is a hallow ringing sound in his ears from the emptiness of space that should be occupied with laughter and voices and happiness. For the modern day king with millions of admirers the silence in his home is deafening.