Count On Me | Niam

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Liam

He was having a weird morning.

Not necessarily a bad morning, just a weird one.

Waking up to an empty bed had sucked, granted. Both Saturday and Sunday he'd woken up next to Niall, and he hadn't been able to help but smile as Niall grumbled, hiding his face in Liam's chest, pulling the blankets further up over them until he'd woken up enough to be able to give Liam a smile, that lovely, still sleepy smile Liam hadn't seen before but would do anything to see again.

But this morning, his bed had been empty.

Niall had taken Chloe home on Sunday, after a morning of badly burned, burnt-ish, and then actually edible pancakes and films, leaving Liam alone again with Loki, stuck in his apartment with nothing to do and no chance of escaping into the city lest he be seen and photographed. Or in case he ended up following Niall and Chloe back to their flat and gatecrashing their evening of laundry, dinner and generally getting ready for the week. Which he would happily have done had he not been sent another mountain of emails to sort through, all regarding tour schedules, how the end of his engagement to Sophia would go down, and how they would like for him to go in for a 'chat' at some point.

His Sunday evening had been work filled, spent thinning out his inbox until he could take it no more and went to the gym, working off some of his pent up...frustration, if you could call it that, before he collapsed into his bed, trying not to think about how empty it was without Niall there.

It had only taken Niall one, maybe two days to make Liam's usual routine seem dull. Dull, and cold. And lonely.

Though, truth be told, his life had pretty much turned around since he'd run into Niall, and it seemed like this was really just an extension of that.

Oh, and he'd managed to find Niall's t-shirt. His actual t-shirt, the one they couldn't find on Saturday morning. It had ended up underneath Liam's bed, retrieved at some point around three am on Monday morning when Liam was unable to sleep. He'd been surprised to see which t-shirt it was, as he could've sworn that Niall was wearing the exact same t-shirt in one of the few pictures Liam still had from years ago, a t-shirt that had been Liam's originally.

He was probably mistaken, t-shirts didn't last that long, not seven years, surely not, and whilst it had been big on Niall back then, there was no way it would have fitted the taller, broad shouldered Niall Liam had fallen asleep with one arm thrown around. No way. Though...it could have. Maybe.

One search back through box of memories he'd last looked through nearly three months ago told him that maybe a t-shirt could survive that long. Possibly.

That, though, wasn't even the weird part.

The weird part came later, when he braved his inbox once more, and he found an email from Myspace, alerting him to a message from one of his Myspace friends. It took Liam a moment to remember he even had a fucking Myspace page, let alone that he still had any friends who would use it. He almost put the message down to an odd prank by Louis until he saw who'd sent it. He did remember messaging certain people, asking them if they still knew of a way to contact Niall, one person in particular: Niall's brother.

Apparently, three-ish months later, Greg had finally messaged him back.

Sort of.

Months after he'd originally sent him a message, an odd, rambling message that now seemed borderline weird, he'd gotten a message back, saying something along the lines of Greg being 'happy for his little brother' but warning Liam that 'if he fucked up something horrible could happen'. Liam remembered Greg not really being okay with Liam, even back when they were kids, but still. Then again...violent threats aside, he supposed it could be worse. Greg had said he was happy for them. Even if it was later punctuated with 'sort of'.