Deep (Zarry AU)

Imagines

Zayn had his cheek resting on his hand as he played with a silver napkin ring. His eyes looked almost black, staring into the distance. He put the napkin ring down and raised his thumb to his mouth, chewing on his nail, hiding a smile.

"I was just a bit drunk one night and... ah don't know why I started looking at it. Some joker sent me the link I think...." He studied his thumbnail, then picked up the napkin ring again. "It was a story.... of.... I don't know. It was just. Really well written. Not like some of them I've seen. And I... I wanted... I wanted it to end, you know. I wanted to get to the end. So that I could read about us...umm..." He smiled, lowered his eyelids.

"There were all these pictures... clips.... of you just lookin at me. Like, I hadn't even realised you looked at me like that. Or how we smile around each other all the time. Well. Maybe I had realised that." He smiled down at the table and for a moment Harry thought he looked like a little boy. Harry's heart softened.

"You know the people that write those things are seriously weird, don't you?"

Zayn laughed. "Yeah." He pinched his bottom lip, then traced his finger back and forth along it. Harry stared. He started to forget what Zayn had been saying.

"Maybe not so weird," Zayn said. "Well, not that particular... website. Tag. Whatever. Anyway. They've got a lot to answer for!"

Yeah, Harry thought. A lot to answer for.

2015:

I didn't know what to do with it. My blog. Long since discontinued; the gifs from years ago still spinning when you accessed it. Like signals from a far-off galaxy. And then the signals had grown fainter and fainter and one day just kind of stopped.

And I was looking at it now purely out of nostalgia; indulging my melancholy; clicking back through the pages 'til I saw that gif: the two of them, sat on a couch, Harry nuzzling into his neck: the first gif that had got me; the first one that had made shooting stars curve out from my heart and land on every rib; the first time I knew that it wasn't just all about Harry and Louis.

That gif had a lot to answer for.