One Adoption... Sorry, Direction (1D Fanfic)

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter 29

The days before the concert flew past with a lot of excitement, but nothing as noteworthy as the fraudulent media managers. The girls met the actual media managers, Christine Worth and Jake Rust, and the rest of the boys' team that included stage managers, directors, choreographers, musicians, lighting technicians, sound engineers, Simon Cowell, bodyguards and many others that they couldn't keep track of. They had selected their outfits for the concerts and agreed on the sequence of the show, especially parts that required their involvement. They hadn't slept well, partly caused by the excitement and partly by all the caffeine and lollies that everyone had had readily available, from as early as 6am to as late as midnight, which was the latest any of them were allowed out of bed. Alicia's impending punishment for thieving the shoes was postponed indefinitely, but other consequences had applied to the girls for behaviours such as swearing, pushing sisters down stairs and of course, getting in the way of a man carrying a very heavy ladder and giving Niall a heart attack. The eleven people living in the One Direction household spent the days between the concert venue, some office on a street somewhere, and the house. The day of the concert, one of the things on Natalie the Tour Manager's Catastrophe Major list happened.

Everyone slept in.

The fact that they slept in wasn't the issue; in fact, a few hits of the snooze button was accounted for in Natalie the Tour Manager's down-to-the-minute schedule of the day. The issue was how much they slept in by. When Natalie the Tour Manager had arranged 6:30 alarms, 7:00 morning routines and a 7:30 meeting, sleeping in two hours is a big deal. The reason was simple: in all of the scheduling, organisation and meticulous planning, nobody had thought to allocate someone to set the alarms. The boys (and their girls) had been informed that they would be waking up when their alarms went off and by that time there would be a schedule of the day in their house, and assumed that Natalie the Tour Manager had organised for alarms to be set – they wouldn't have put it past her to buy them new alarm clocks and hide them somewhere to force the sleeping people to wake up. Everyone else had been told that the boys (and their girls) would be ready for their meeting, and didn't care who, how or what was in place to make that happen. And Natalie the Tour Manager had completely overlooked that and forgotten to tell the boys (and their girls) to set their alarms, neglected to tell them the time and obviously not organised anything in case they didn't.

Oversleeping is easy – one of the easiest things to do, in fact. The only reason that they were only two hours behind is that Liam set an alarm for 8:00, figuring that he could have a longer shower if that was too early.

The night before, Harry's phone had died while he was selecting a picture for Instagram ("It has to look good in black and white, or be important enough to post in colour. That's my theme," he explained to Jas) and he hadn't realised that his charger wasn't plugged into an outlet when he put his phone on to charge and fell asleep.

Zayn, sick of the emails pouring in about the upcoming concert ("I can't turn notifications off because then I won't get the emails, and if someone important sends a text I need to make sure I get it," he explained to Jen), had decided to charge his phone outside his room so that he could get some sleep before the concert.

Niall, unable to sleep from nerves ("It only happens before massive things – first concerts and awards shows usually," he explained to Ali), had his phone charging in his bedroom, but fell asleep downstairs on the couch while watching Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.

Louis had straight up lost his phone somewhere in the house ("I just put it down and I have no idea where it is," he explained to Harry) and was relying on his friends to pass on messages from his family and work.

The girls, excited for the concert, had been texting each other until late at night ("We can't talk if we aren't in the same room, and if we were in the same room you would make us leave if we were talking," Ali explained to Liam) and got their phones taken from them by Liam, who charged them in the kitchen.