Work Text:
Liam shrank back from the door like it had just burned him.
It hadn’t. What had burned him though, severely and unforgettably stood on the other side of it head down and looking sullen.
His immediate response when he’d looked through the peephole and seen that familiar figure was to run back to his room and close the door. He could pretend he wasn’t there and no one would be any wiser to his cowardice.
He was just turning around to do just that when the knock came again, louder and more persistent.
“Li? Please. I know you’re in there. I saw your car outside.”
He sounded sad, broken even, a little like Liam had been feeling for the last few months. Huh.
“Leeyum, I just – can you open the door?”
Liam shook his head even as he turned back and walked towards the door, hesitantly gripping the knob. It was less of a choice and more of a longing.
It was the familiar way he said his name and how he had missed it something terrible that had him twisting the handle and pulling it open.
“Hi,” he said. His eyes were wide, innocent like a child’s as they met Liam’s.
Liam didn’t move or speak. He just stood there, stuck.
“I um…can I come in?” Zayn asked.
Liam wanted to say that it wasn’t a good idea, that Zayn should just leave but he was losing all sense of coherent thought. The only thing he was aware of was that old, tentatively stitched up wound being torn open again one agonising rip at a time.
“Please,” was the whispered plea and like times of old, Liam could never deny him anything, especially when his golden honey eyes burned through him, imploring.
He stepped aside, making room for him to walk in.
“Why are you here?” he asked, his tone straddling the line between harsh and hurt.
“I just wanted to see you,” Zayn said turning around to face Liam who clung to the now closed door. “I’m in a bad place Li and I needed to tell someone. I needed to tell you…I always tell you.”
“Not anymore Zayn, you made it clear we were nothing to each other. Remember? Or did it mean so little to you that you couldn’t be bothered remembering how you tore me apart?”
The words were bitter, intended to hurt, to maim the way he had been left feeling.
“Of course I remember,” the reply was barely a whisper pushed out on a quivering breath. He was looking down now, shrinking with every second that ticked by.
Everything in Liam felt like it was conflagrant, going up in a blaze of anger suddenly.
“So what? You’re just here to twist the knife in? To make sure that I remember too?”
“Liam I’m sorry.”
His voice was small and raw with emotion.
Sorry. In that moment Liam couldn’t figure out what the word meant, what those five letters were supposed to do. Were they supposed to make Liam forget how he’d been left on the floor outside Zayn’s apartment gasping for air when his organs had felt like they were packing it in? Was the word supposed to erase how he still couldn’t sleep in his bed because the essence of his room and his bed was Zayn. Was he just supposed to accept the word and offer himself up to Zayn just because he needed him now? What about when he needed him? What about when he was begging him to not break his heart?
“I’ve just been struggling with something an-”
“And what? You think I can help you? There’s nothing for you here!” he almost shouted, the hurt taking over him. “I have nothing for you here anymore,” Liam said jabbing at his own chest for emphasis.
He wasn’t even lying. There really was nothing in his chest. He was sure his heart had been dead for the past several months. All that was left was an empty cavity, hollow and aching.
His heart had long since decayed in the debris of being dumped by the man he had thought he would spend the rest of his life with.
“Li,” he was pleading again, a pain more desperate emanating his words.
“I think you should leave.”
Liam could feel himself breaking apart. He could feel another attack coming and he didn’t want him there to see him lose what little pieces he had left.
He steeled himself and stood aside to let Zayn walk by towards the door.
He was leaving Liam, again.
Briefly Liam wondered what about him had not been enough for Zayn. Which parts of the whole heart he had handed the raven-haired man had been so repulsive that they’d made him so easy to walk away from, to just give up on.
If he really was 'too good' why had he been left alone, falling apart.
For the second time.
Zayn was already out the door, when he said the words that made the earth beneath Liam’s feet begin to cave.
“I lied, you know. I do love you.”
The confession was so quiet that Liam was unsure if he’d actually heard it or imagined it.
The door clicked closed with a finality that made Liam shiver as he sank to the floor to wait out his panic attack.
Zayn had been mixing paint for over an hour and he just couldn’t get it right. He couldn’t find the right shade of red to finish off his painting. He’d mixed about ten shades and none them looked right. None of them conveyed the message like he needed it to be conveyed.
He chucked the palette at the wall, frustrated. It wasn’t unusual for him to fall into wild rage over something seemingly small lately. He seemed to vacillate between anger and despair, his only two moods when he wasn’t feeling numb.
When the action did little to ease his furore, he turned his anger to the bottles of paint that sat beside him on his dining room table. With one enraged swipe of his arm he sent the glass bottles sliding off the edge of the table and on to the floor with a deafening shatter.
Zayn stood there heaving. The anger seeming to have burnt itself out leaving in its wake a pang in his chest. He sank to the floor, trying desperately to keep the violent tremors that usually followed at bay.
He was bringing his hands up from where he’d lowered himself to the ground, to wipe away the tears when he saw it.
It was perfect.
It was just the tone he’d been looking for. Dark and tortured just like he needed it to be. Just like he felt. He’d found it, the missing element to his painting. It had been there all along, in him.
He squeezed the cuts on his hand trying to get more blood to trickle out of them. But they were only light cuts from the fractured shards that lay scattered all over the floor.
He needed more.
He wasn’t really thinking of the implications when he lifted one of the larger shards in his hand and put it to his wrist dragging it down in a long line.
The blood gushed from the laceration, dripping onto the floor. He quickly grabbed a clean palette that lay nearby and let the blood drip onto that.
He felt around on the paint stained floor for a brush, barely feeling the pieces of glass cutting into his hands as he did.
Palette and brush in hand he stood and began painting.
Fiery red flames burned around a black-shadow figure that seemed to be clawing at its face while it screamed in agony. Tormented. There were other smaller figures, bony and black and they seemed to be pulling at the main figure from all different directions. They clung to his legs, his arms and his clothes tearing him apart, seeming to drag him down.
Zayn continued to paint in the blood-red flames, filling in what little white was left on the canvas that was covered in blacks and smoky greys.
His cut was drying up and so was his blood-paint. He needed just a little more. A little more to complete the blazing flames.
He grabbed the shard again, this time cutting down his other arm. He let it bleed onto his palette and when he had enough he started to paint again.
He felt the twinge of the wounds with every flick of the paint brush but barely paid it any mind as he focused solely on finishing his painting.
He was starting to feel woozy. The painting was blurring in front him as he tried to finish it. He only had a little bit left to go. Only a few more strokes and he’d be done. He only had to hang on for a couple more strokes and then he could rest.
Just one more stroke and he could be done with the painting, with the torture, with the pain.
Finally.
Without further fight, Zayn gave in as his body crumpled to the floor, limp and cold.
So, so cold.
He could think of only one thing as he lay there, his breaths laboured and his heartbeat faint: a warm, dark brown hue framed by crinkled corners – soft and beautiful.
So beautiful.
He was tired now. So tired…He just needed a little nap. Just to close his eyes for a little bit.
So he did, his last vision those warm, brown eyes. His only peace in this raging turmoil lulling him to oblivion, whispering with his last breaths:
So, so beautiful.
There was a knock on the door.
Liam didn’t want to open it. He didn’t want to move from his bed.
A crippling grief had set over him after he’d woken from a bad dream in the early hours of the morning. He couldn’t remember what the dream was but he could remember how it felt vividly.
He shivered, pulling his duvet tighter around himself.
He’d forced himself to go back to his room and back to his bed last night after Zayn had left, thinking that it was what he needed to do to get closure, to force himself to move past the emptiness he had been clinging to for too long. He couldn’t let the memory of Zayn continue to exile him to the couch.
But it had been a war in all senses of the word as Liam had found himself battling memories of tracing over a blocky black heart with his fingers as he listened to Zayn go on about this book he’d been reading about a man who had lived in house full of ghosts that would come out and torment him every night until one night he’d set the whole place on fire, with himself inside.
'He knew that they’d never leave him alone, no matter where he went. He knew the only way to be free of them was to kill them. But they were a part of him, lived in him. To kill them he had kill himself,' Zayn had explained. 'Can you imagine that Li? Can you imagine feeling so trapped by your own mind that it seems like the only option is to die?'
After that night things between them had begun to change. Zayn drew into himself and Liam found it increasingly harder to get to him, to pull him out of his head. He’d spend days locked up in his apartment, barely eating or sleeping. He’d just lay there staring into his darkened room.
Liam had tried his best not to worry, to give him space to work through whatever seemed to be going on but after almost a week of not hearing from his boyfriend he’d gone over there, panicked and found Zayn frantically throwing paint at a canvas on his easel.
He’d tried to talk him down, tried to get him to open up but everything he said seemed to anger him more. That was when he’d done it. That was when he’d said the words that had sent Liam’s world crashing to the ground.
I don’t love you Liam! How can I love you when I don’t know how to love? All I do is hurt and destroy. I don’t want to do that to you. We’re over. You’re too good for me.
Liam had tried to argue against that reasoning but to no avail. Zayn had shut off, his eyes were empty and cold as he pushed Liam out the door telling him to ‘Go! Run and never look back.’
For some reason that memory wouldn’t leave him alone that night.
‘Up in flames he went and no one ever knew that he’d set himself alight to set himself free.’
Generally fires didn’t scare Liam. He put them out for a living. But that story, that image of this unknown man burning to death, thinking he had no choice, no hope, it chilled Liam to his bones.
That thought alone had kept him from drifting back to a fitful sleep.
Somewhere in the ridiculous hours his heart had begun to choke, suddenly. It had felt like it was coming apart, bits being torn from him one anguished mite at a time until he was weeping into the pillow that lay on what had been Zayn’s side of the bed.
That was the war that left him paralyzed in his bed, barely able to move as the knocking continued, loud, desperate and persistent.
When it was clear that the person wouldn’t go away, Liam dragged his brittle bones to the door and opened it.
Behind it stood a red-nosed, puffy-eyed Harry. He looked devastated. The expression was odd on the man who was usually of a happy disposition as though sunshine ran through his veins.
Liam immediately knew something was wrong because that feeling was back. That aching pain that made him want to cry out was beating at the walls of his heart, threatening to break through.
The slow thundering in his heart started picking up with every sniffle from Harry.
“What’s the matter Haz?” he managed to ask through the sudden panic.
“Uh, can I come in?” the younger man asked. Liam merely stood back as Harry walked in and headed straight for his living room.
Left with no choice, Liam shut the door and followed him.
“You should sit,” Harry said when he entered the room. Liam didn’t argue, just did what he was told.
“It’s about Zayn. I uh found this next to uh…” but he didn’t finish the sentence as his voice seemed to break. He instead just handed Liam a folded piece of paper, hand shaking.
Liam took it from him, against the reluctant thudding of his heart’s advice and unfolded it.
Dear Liam,
It’s so dark in my head I can barely find the words to write to you.
I’ve been trying to fix it Liam, trying to get better but I just don’t know how. That’s why I came to you, because when I’m with you I feel less hopeless and alone. But I messed that up, didn’t I? I lied about not loving you and now you hate me.
I can’t live with that.
I can live with a lot of things. I can live with the darkness and the hopelessness and I can live with my family abandoning me. I can live with the self-hatred and the constant sadness and aching.
But I can’t live with that.
I can’t live in a world where you don’t love me. Not when you were all that I was hanging onto.
I hope you can forgive me one day for lying to you, because I do love you and will for all eternity.
All of my heart and all of my love
Z
“Where is he?” Liam asked voice trembling. Harry looked down at his hands where he was fiddling with a ring, constantly twisting it round and round.
That was the ring Zayn had found at a grungy hipster store on one of their walks one day. He’d told Liam that the blue-green gems reminded him of Harry’s eyes and that his best mate would love it. So he’d bought it for him. Harry had worn it everyday since.
“Harry?” Liam prompted when he still refused to answer his question and meet his eyes.
“He’s gone,” Harry finally said. Tears started to fall from his darkened eyes.
“Gone where? “ Liam asked flatly, not following very well.
“He’s dead Li.”
There was pulsing in Liam’s ears that made it almost impossible for him to hear.
“LIAR!” he screamed. “Zayn’s not - he can’t be – NO! You’re lying!”
This was some twisted joke. It had to be because Zayn was there, in his apartment almost at that exact time the previous day, very much alive.
Liam wasn’t naïve. He knew that a lot could change in 24 hours but surely not this. Surely there had to be more to it. Surely something more had to happen when someone died taking your heart with them.
The sun sure as hell shouldn’t have been shining. There should have been clouds and torrential rain. A hurricane of some sort or maybe thunder to signify the destruction of all he had known.
“I found him in his apartment this morning Li. He’d bled out,” Harry said through tears.
“NO! No, no, no, no, no!” Liam shouted out, a body-shaking sob breaking through him like waves hitting a boat on rough seas.
He vaguely heard the word suicide leave Harry’s mouth but that was impossible. Zayn would never.
No. He was there, standing in Liam’s entryway, trying to talk to him. Trying to ask for help and Liam had shouted unforgivable things and sent him away. He’d pushed him away and now he was gone.
For good.
If he’d just listened. If he’d just focused more on the dark bags under his eyes and the sallow cheeks. If he’d let himself feel his pain instead of trying to cover his own with stupid anger he might still be here. He might still be alive.
“Oh God! What have I done? What have I done Harry. I did this! I made him do this!” he sputtered out.
'Can you imagine feeling so trapped by your own mind that it seems like the only option is to die?'
The words resounded in his head, jabbing and stabbing until he could barely breathe anymore.
He pictured a man, haunted by feelings of abandonment, unworthiness, self-loathing, misery and rejection. He pictured him reaching out, house ablaze, trying to leave but being pulled back by the ghosts.
Zayn’s fire had been his depression. He’d lived with it so long, unnoticed and untreated. It had engulfed him until he couldn’t find a way out and so he’d done what he thought was the only thing to do.
He’d bled it out of himself. He’d freed himself the only way he’d known how.
Liam stood there, staring at the painting.
How had he missed it? How had he completely missed the great struggle the man he loved was going through?
He should have seen it.
His therapist and his friends had tried to tell him that it wasn’t his fault. But it was. Zayn told him in the letter Harry had found not far from his lifeless form.
'I can’t live in a world where you don’t love me.'
He’d let him die believing he was unloved when Liam’s whole existence was sustained by him.
“An interesting piece, isn’t it?” the curator said, coming up to him.
“Tragic story. Did you know that the artist died shortly after completing this? It’s believed that the flames,” she said tracing their outline in the air, “were actually painted with his own blood.”
She spoke as though this was a tale; something to regale potential buyers with to increase the allure. To sell the painting. To make money.
That’s all it meant to her. A fat cheque to cash.
She didn’t know that depicted in there, was Liam’s greatest shame and pain. She didn’t know that those flames of blood she spoke of were the last bits of life for his Zayn. That he’d painted them with his very last breaths before succumbing to the shadows that had followed him for most of his life.
That painting represented what was left of Liam’s life and he wasn’t going to let some stranger with deeper pockets than his take that from him.
“I want to buy it,” he said without preamble.
“It’s worth over two hundred and fifty thousand pounds,” she said, eyeing him sceptically.
Liam pulled the crumpled check from his overalls and handed it to her.
He’d pooled his savings, sold his flat and car to get the money.
“I’ll have someone wrap it up for you.”
**
Not even ten minutes later Liam walked out of the gallery in his fireman’s overalls with nothing but a painting to his name.
But that was all he needed.
The last bits of Zayn were all he needed because nothing else had filled the painful void. Not the alcohol, nor the therapy.
Nothing.
Maybe what was left of Zayn would. Maybe looking at this painting would quiet his own inner screams.
Or maybe not.
It was ironic how Liam saved lives for a living but he’d chosen not to save the one that mattered most to him.
He’d never forget that.
He’d live with it forever and this painting, under his arm would always be there, a bloody reminder of how he’d failed Zayn.