Gravity Always Wins (Zouis Fan Fiction)

Chapter 1

Zayn thinks about it too much sometimes – why me? He lies awake some nights, playing with the pendants on his necklace like he’s counting tasbih as he asks himself what would have happened if he’d gone to that first X Factor audition. Talent’s talent, his mother says, but he’s not so sure he believes that, not deep down. Not when he passes a busker in the street who’s so good it makes him stop mid-sentence or when the end of X Factor neared and all the people he was sure would win were no longer in the room.

First it was Gamu. They were on their way to audition at Simon’s house when they heard. They were all a bit giddy and slightly hysterical at being in Marbella, their faces pressed against the windows of the minibus when they left the airport, watching the palm trees flick past and the glimpse of blue between each one, then Harry got the text and it was so quiet that Zayn could hear the sea rushing at the rocks. ‘But she’s such a good singer,’ he said, almost to himself, hands shaking like they had an hour before when the plane cut through the clouds like a teaspoon through the head of a cappuccino to dip towards the sea. ‘But Katie will make better telly,’ Louis said, turning his face away and Zayn still isn’t sure which Louis scares him more, the fierce, funny Louis who could probably stop a horse mid-gallop with a look or that Louis, the Louis who hasn’t grown up yet but already knows too much. That day he scared them all and they sat a little straighter as it dawned on them that it didn’t matter what they sang – or how they sang it – because in the end it came down to whatever that unknowable, uncontrollable thing Simon was looking for and there was absolutely nothing they could do about it.

But then Zayn’s never had any control over any of this. From the moment his mother first heard him singing in the shower and he walked out of the bathroom to find her waiting for him, tears in her eyes, singing ceased to be this quiet, secret thing. He tried to keep it that way, tried to shrug her off and tell her not to be so melodramatic as he retreated to his bedroom. But a few minutes later, when he was looking for a clean school shirt to wear, he realised that he was singing again and he hadn’t even noticed.

That’s when he realised that he couldn’t help it. Singing was this thing he did without trying, like breathing. He only stopped when he caught himself doing it, or if someone told him that he had a nice voice, then he got flustered and his voice would falter as though he’d been called upon to answer a question in class. He never understood it, though, not really, not until he met Charmaine Campbell a few months later. She lived two streets away from him and had hair the colour of Lyle’s black treacle and as soon as he made the comparison – something he’d never felt the need to do before then – he knew. He didn’t know what exactly, he just knew that the mere mention of her name was enough to make his fourteen-year old heart throw itself against his ribs. Then the time came, weeks later, when they were at her fifteenth birthday party, the two of them sitting on the wall outside her house, his jacket hanging on her shoulders because she was cold, and he leaned in to kiss her, but she turned her cheek away and the shock of it almost made him jump off the wall and run all the way home.

They never spoke again but that thing – whatever you want to call it, love maybe, if you can call it love when it isn’t reciprocated – the thing that kept him up at night thinking about the soft sweep of her mouth or made him sit next to a girl on the bus because she had hair the colour of Lyle’s black treacle, didn’t go away. It should have – he wanted it to – but it didn’t and that terrified him, that there were parts of him, parts he was attached to, that he needed to survive, that he had no control over. Charmaine Campbell was gone but some part of him still remembered her and it was the same with singing. He couldn’t stop that, either, and it’d break his heart as well because, as his grandmother told him once, you should never fall in love with something you can lose.

But what about the things you love that you don’t have? Zayn was close – he was there, on the X Factor, singing like his life literally depended on it – but he didn’t have it. He was closer than most, though, because after Gamu there was Nicolò then John then Treyc and every week the sweet relief of hearing Dermot say One Direction was dampened when he had to say goodbye to someone who had a better voice than him. Yvie told him off when he said that in rehearsals. She’d find him in whatever corner of the studio he was hiding in (usually the broom cupboard on the first floor, surrounded by damp mops and bottles of bleach because he could practice his part and no one could hear), and tell him that he had the best voice she’d heard in years. But then he was sure she’d said the same to Nicolò and John and Treyc so it didn’t make him feel any better.