Chapter Text
It creeps up on him, as most things do.
Until a few months ago he was just being himself, and he had four wonderful lads to keep him together. It was okay that they thought he was an idiot sometimes, because Louis dug at him for laughing and laughed along anyway, and when he talked about food Zayn mumbled the fondest objections, and Harry’s hugs welcomed him without words. They were always there for his panic attacks, too, even when he was red in the face and teary-eyed with embarrassment. Early on it was easier than any friendship he had ever known—so easy, in fact, that when Liam finally gained enough confidence to yell him awake in the morning with promises of pancakes, that was all Niall needed to know he would be okay.
It’s not so simple anymore. He knows, of course, that the lads wouldn’t judge him for anything. It’s not about their friendship, not really.
No, it’s about publicity, the stupid fame. It started to catch up to him around the start of their second tour, and without even being aware of it he was trying a little harder each day to measure up to his shadow, to be the best version of himself.
In a way, nothing’s really different. He still eats everything and laughs too much and moans about missing home and pints of Guinness; he still breaks awkward silences and jumps too high on stage and raises a hand high in the air when overeager female interviewers ask who’s gonna take me home?
And he isn’t lying, not exactly. He would never lie to the lads, not on purpose, or at least he’d like to think so. But it’s starting to feel like an act. Trying to be his “best” self was good for him at first, but at this point it’s become a kind of denial, a locking out of all negative thoughts. Whenever he starts to freak out nowadays he finds he’s a little meaner to himself in his head, shoving it all down with more and more disgust. He’s got no right to panic, does he, to feel self-conscious or claustrophobic or afraid, because the others have been dealing with the fame for just as long and they’re perfectly fine! They’re great, is what they are, joking around on the buses and coming to life every night, distracting each other (distracting him) so they won’t chain-smoke into oblivion or post inappropriate shit on Twitter when the hate hits too close to home.
Okay, so they aren’t always okay, but he’s different. He’s just…he’s Niall. He has to be okay for everyone else. At some point it became the norm. Each of the other lads comes to him sometimes when they’re overwhelmed, just like he used to go to them, and he sees in their eyes that he’s an anchor. He’s safe for them, unchangeable. So he pushes down the fear and gets really good at little white lies, even as he finds himself losing sleep and digging his nails deep and deeper into sweaty palms when the world is too much for him and he can’t quite calm his thudding heart.
The first time, it’s July in Toronto, and they’re halfway through the North American bit of Take Me Home. Niall tells himself it’s an accident, and it really is.
He’s lying awake again at half four in the morning, alone in a hotel room and furious at himself. All the others are most definitely fast asleep in the bus like good lads, knocked out after a long show and a good two hours of drinking and talking nonsense on the bus couch, but Niall had to fucking distance himself again, and so instead of familiar snoring all he hears is the annoying buzz of the air conditioner and a distant echo of Louis’ unanswered question: Where y’off to, Nialler?
He needs to be up in less than three hours for an early photoshoot, and he’s running on two hours of sleep as it is, but he’s trembling with a sick combination of exhaustion and adrenaline that he can’t shake. He’s already tried wanking (no libido to speak of) and music (two playlists have failed), so as a last resort he’s been watching the ceiling, hoping his mind will shut down.
After a few more aggravating minutes, he gets up in a huff for his fourth cup of water. It’s not much, but Niall has never been patient, and it’ll take him away from the endless temptation that is his phone. There’s no reason not to.
It’s a nice hotel, though—he doesn’t remember the last time it wasn’t—so the bathroom cup is actually a glass. And his hands haven’t gotten any steadier as the night has gone on, so he was bound to drop it at some point.
“Bloody fucking shit.”
The shattering glass makes him flinch and step back, heart pounding in his ears. He drops to his knees in a scramble to clean away the mess, and his hands are so unsteady that he almost drops the base of the glass and a handful of pieces before they even reach the trash bin. It’s like the broken shards are proof that there’s something wrong with him; he may be alone in a hotel bathroom in Canada, but the whole world could be watching with how fast he picks them up.
When it happens, the first thing he notices is there’s blood on the floor, even though he’s still holding the shard that he has inadvertently pressed into his right palm.
The second thing he notices is the pain, and then he isn’t noticing anything at all. It clears his head and pays his dues, and maybe he chases after it, gripping the shard tighter for a second and feeling out the burn, but the indiscretion hardly lasts a second before survival instincts kick in.
Niall wraps a towel around his hand and carefully clears away the glass, willing himself to forget about the bloody gap in his skin. When he gets back into bed, he finds the tension is gone; he’s sleeping like the dead within minutes.
That’s how it starts.
He gets babied the whole next morning. The lads and the crew subtly and not-so-subtly check his injury every five bleeding seconds, making wanking jokes because, as Liam says, “at least it’s not your left hand, mate,” and it’s nice. It is. But the truth still burns in his gut, even as he valiantly tries to convince himself that the whole thing was a sleep-deprived dream.
He gets good and drunk after the show in Minneapolis, and in the morning Louis and Zayn watch in silence as he pours himself a bowl of cereal, looking at his sunglasses and each other like they don’t know if it’s appropriate to crack jokes. The strange tension in the bus combined with his pounding headache makes it all too clear to him that he can’t rely on booze all the time in good conscience—and he needs something to rely on. He still hardly sleeps, and the panic keeps sneaking up on him in crowds and elevators, even during a couple signings, and he loves his life but not every goddamn second of it, and he can’t forget how broken glass took that suffocation away in a heartbeat.
They’re in the bus leaving Kansas City on the 19th when Niall finally loses his resolve. He watches fondly as Harry nods off on him during Pitch Perfect, head buried in a pillow that he’d thrown over Niall’s lap. Niall wishes he could join him—he should, since it’s past three in the morning—but a familiar bristling under his skin is making him restless. Only when Haz starts obnoxiously snoring does he take his chance.
Telling himself it’s just because of the snoring, he slides out from under Harry and his pillow and steps over to Zayn’s bunk. He’s been turning this over and over in his head for days, thinking about wheres and hows and whens, but in the moment his mind is strangely clear. He’s hardly even breathing, afraid that any sudden movement will change his mind.
He still fumbles a little, of course, as he searches through Zayn’s toiletries for a disposable razor. Despite everything, he can’t help but worry that someone will stir, that Zayn will notice the razor missing even if he never uses his disposables. But when he finally has it on hand, its blades glinting at him in the dark, the worry is replaced by conviction. He slips into the tiny bathroom, flips on the light, and turns away from his pale, scared reflection.
The walls close in on him a little as he struggles to pry out a blade, and it’s tiny and so so sharp when he finally gets it, and his left hip stings like hell when he manages more than a scratch, but the relief is overwhelming, like he’s finally grounded in something he can control, in penance for all of his worries and fears.
He presses three more cuts into his hip, mesmerized by the way his skin parts for the blade. It’s addicting, more than he was expecting—more than a lot of things, really—and fuck, this can’t be happening.
It was one thing when it was broken glass and he could tell himself it was an accident. But there’s no way around this one; he’s been lying to his four best mates, and he just fucking cut himself, and this doesn’t make sense at all, doesn’t line up with the image of Niall Horan he has perfected in his head.
Where y’off to, Nialler?
The strangest part is he’s felt great for most of this tour, laughing and dancing and loving with his whole being as always, tackling his boys and mumbling nonsense in their ears and watching them grow up a little as they all work on the new album in hotel rooms. There’s no one thing that’s wrong, and yet somehow everything is still too much, from video games to red carpets. He feels like an unfettered hot air balloon sometimes, slipping, slowly, with every performance and every we push, higher up and away, but he might be imagining it and he’s afraid of putting it into words, even to the four people who feel most like home. He’s so afraid, apparently, that laughter and alcohol—and now, he hates to think, razor blades—are the only tools he allows himself to tame the beast in his head.
After a long moment of indecision, of wanting to try it again, Niall pockets the stolen blade and steps out of the bathroom. He immediately feels like an intruder on the bus; Harry is snoring on the couch with his mouth open, there’s a hand and a foot sticking through the curtains of Louis’ bunk, Zayn’s hair is messier than he’d ever allow while awake, and Liam’s brow is furrowed like he’s having a nightmare or a confusing wet dream. It’s clearly a shared space, a trusting space, and that rules him out. He’s not sharing anything with them, not right now. Hell, he fell asleep with his sunglasses on after he got drunk in Minneapolis just because his eyes were red and he didn’t want anyone to think he’d been crying.
The worst part is that he knows they wouldn’t have judged him if he was. (Okay, so maybe he was.) He knows that they care, that they would help, that it would stay between them. It’s not about trust.
It’s just that he’s gotten so used to being treated like he’s invincible.