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writingsfromhome · 22 hours

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Echoes of the Night we Met

Request: Would you consider writing something based on one of these songs? „I’m not yours” Angus & Julia Stone or „The night we met” Lord Huron

A/N: I took Lord Huron’s song as a looooose inspo and just went with what came…hope it came out ok. Feel free to request any others :)

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Harry:

I've been searching for a trail to follow again.

I move my can from one hand to the other, the drink dangling from the bridge railing. Along the railing flakes of green paint give way to pockets of rust. I try not to read too much into that. Instead I focus on the soothing quality of the river below, always moving forward, always soldiering on.

YN liked coming here to think a lot when we were kids. That’s how I first noticed her, the girl with the curtain of hair hiding her face from passerbys. She’s look down into the river like it was whispering ancient words to her, mesmerized and connected. I wonder what she thought about all the time.

One day I asked. I remember the first night we met. It was just after 8, the sun was just about done setting. Summer was slipping away from us and we were both facing the start of a new school year.

“Hi,” I’d started off rough. She’d barely even glanced up. “Penny for your thoughts?”

That had gotten her attention. She had looked up through wisps of her hair and then turned to me fully. I didn’t know if she knew who I was. We’d grown up in the same neighbourhood all our lives but she didn’t go to the same public school I went to.

“A penny used to be worth a lot more,” she had said and I remember her brows raised slightly like she was surprised at what came out of her mouth.

“What?” I’d laughed, charmed by this awkward girl.

She shook her head, a shy smile brightening her face despite the oncoming dark. “A penny used to be like a lot more money so that phrase meant our thoughts were just as valuable. But now a penny barely means anything so…what does that say about thoughts in the 21st century.”

She was a nerd, and somehow the revelation of that made me like her even more.

“Can I summarize that answer in 140 characters? My thoughts are in tweets.” I tried to joke.

She snorted and covered her face. “That was kinda lame.”

“You laughed,” I had pointed out. “Plus you’re the one who just met me and delivered a lecture on-

“I get it,” she cut me off. “I was just caught off guard.”

“Do you usually deliver facts when you’re caught off guard?” I decided to join her, overlooking the water. Our elbows had stay a foot apart.

“Yes,” she said with humour.

“So if an intruder came into your house-“

“I would disarm them with a fact.”

It had take me a second to get the joke before I laughed. She had hid hers behind her hand.

“You have a nice smile,” I told her.

“Oh.” She had grow serious and avoided my gaze, staring out at the river.

“You can take the compliment.”

“I know,” she cleared her throat. “Thanks.”

“I’m Harry,” I finally introduced myself.

“I know.” She said again. “You volunteered at the community centre earlier this summer. The reading club?”

“Were you there?” I thought I would remember a face like hers.

“Not for that,” she had left it at that.

“What year are you in?” I had asked.

We began to talk and she began to relax. Slowly she faced me again, answered my questions and laughed at my jokes. I felt on top of the world. We barely register how dark it had gotten, the lights in the part casting us in shadows.

My breath catches in my throat as the memories wash over me as they usually did. It was torture, coming here to this bridge after a few weeks.

Y/N moved on. Moved out of this town and made a life out of travelling. I stayed and made a life here. On my bitterest nights I have to avoid thinking that I was left behind.

Not that it was her fault. We were both to blame how the relationship ended. But I didn’t understand why it still affected me this much a decade later.

I wish I had one night with her. Or go back to the night we met. If I could go back I’d tell myself what I should’ve done when I had her. And if that doesn’t work, then save myself the heartbreak and advise not to ride along.

Is it better to love and be left behind or never to have loved at all, the age old question circles my mind as it always did when I fell into this particular pit of despair.

10 fucking years. When was I going to get over her. I try to shut out the painful images that always came.

The softness of her, how loud her laugh could be despite her shy smile. The way she smelled when I nestled my face in the specific spot on her neck. Her eyes, the ones that I watched growing wearier throughout our relationship.

I replay our final moments together, the blow of every word that should’ve been left unsaid, the pain of tallying every unkept promise—the biggest being staying together, forever. Everything suffocates me.

I thought I could live a life without her but she lingered like a ghost with nowhere to pass over. Even if I managed to get over her, move on, she was like a thread that ran through me; a constant memory.

I’m snapped out of my thoughts as the bridge creaks with the weight of another person. I look up at the approaching figure and my chest squeezes tight at what I see. Who I see.

You:

The bridge stood as a silent witness to the passage of time, once gleaming in its steel it had been oxidized by rain and snow, worn down by wind and ice. Its timeworn pieces clang with every footstep that’s ever walked across, the secrets whispered by the rushing river below staying hidden from passerbys.

I listened to the secrets. As a teen this is where I came to get away from the small bungalow I lived in with my 3 siblings and parents. This is what kept me sane when times got tough at home, always leaning over the edge and letting the rushing of the river below whisper that things would get better.

It’s where I met Harry. Both of us naïve and 16. I wonder if he heard the same secrets I did.

For years, the bridge held our memories, preserving the echoes of a night long past. Just like this bridge we’d been worn down and away. Life circumstances, time, and heartbreak.

The air crackles as I step onto the surface of the bridge. He’s there, his perfect silhouette embodying the shadow of how I remembered us. How had so much time passed?

In the stillness of the night I walk towards him and hope I wasn’t making another mistake.

Harry:

Even in the dim light she was as beautiful as the first day I met her. Her hair was shorter, straightened and lighter than I remember.

“YN?” I had to be hallucinating.

“Harry, hey.” Her voice bristles slightly. That’s how I know she’s actually here, and not a part of my imagination.

“How…”

“My brother,” she goes to lean on the bridge rail but changes her mind last minute, wrapping her arm around her waist instead.

YN’s brother and I had become friends—which was weird since he was always YN’s younger brother. But he got a teaching job at the same school a few years back and he had remembered me. We got along well.

I had just left the pub with her brother. But what was she doing here? In town?

“You’re in town.” I state lamely.

“Yeah,” she turns away, out to the river. “Helping my parents with something.”

Her parents were selling their childhood home, I knew that from her brother. I wonder if she knows I know.

“It’s good to see you,” I say the obvious but truthful statement.

“Yeah,” she glances at me. “How are you?”

Now I look away, unsure how to answer. “Good. You?”

“Fine,” she says with a wry smile. We knew the other way lying.

“Really?”

“I’m here in this godforsaken town so yeah, great.”

It’s the first cut tonight; apparently being here was rock bottom for her.

“Still no room for second chances hey?”

She doesn’t respond but she stands taller. Annoyed—I could tell from her body language.

“Same old y/n,” I whisper under my breath. Fuck. I didn’t want to slip back into this version of me but I wasn’t expecting such a biting cold from this woman. I thought we could be pleasant before descending into old habits.

“Same old Harry.” She cocks a brow. “I shouldn’t have come here.”

“Y/N,” I sigh. I used to have all of her. I had to be better. “I’m sorry.”

Her mouth makes an ‘o’ and her eyes soften. She doesn’t say anything.

“I’m sorry,” I say again, hoping she somehow understands I meant it about more than just now. “I don’t understand why you’re here though. I was just thinking about…”

“I was in town. I was here earlier in the day actually. Hadn’t visited the bridge in a while, used to come here nearly every bloody day.”

“I know,” I chuckle. She was attached to it.

“My brother mentioned you when he got back from the pub. Said something about you being in your sad hour—you liked going to this park during it. He probably doesn’t know why but…”

“But then why come? Knowing I’m here?”

She shrugs, her hands coming up only to fall hard at her sides. “I don’t know Harry. I didn’t realize I’d come here to get the second-degree.”

“I was thinking about you.” I will her to look at me, it aches to look at her. She looks older in the same way I probably did to her. More mature. She looks beautiful. And so far away. “About us. I know it’s been a decade but some night I can’t get us out of my head. I did so many wrong things Y/N. I swear I’d do anything just to go back to the night we met. Before I had all of you.”

She sucks in a breath. Still doesn’t look at me.

I touch her elbow, plead inside my head for her to look my way.

“I needed you to be angry or apathetic. I thought I’d come here and see you never changed, and feel better about leaving us. Leaving this town.”

She finally looks at me, her eyes fill with tears and I feel myself crumble. I don’t know how I was going to wake up tomorrow morning after seeing her face like this. I couldn’t let her go. Somehow fate brought us back here.

You:

The night we first met, I had been stewing in anger staring at the rushing river and trying to stay out as late as possible. I didn’t want to go home. To my reality.

Dad had lost his job earlier this year and his new job paid less. They were pulling my brothers and I out of private school and into public. I had cried and begged—I had a year left couldn’t I just finish it off?

But they had been resolute. And I had been angry and heartbroken.

Until Harry had approached me. I knew him from seeing him around the neighbourhood. I was relieved when he said he didn’t notice me at the community centre where my brothers and I sometimes went for their free breakfasts. It had been a real struggle that year.

I had noticed him, he was really attractive and confident, but he’d also been really sweet with the people he was volunteering with. Especially the kids.

I guess he would be at my new school. Maybe I’d make a friend in him.

I hadn’t expected to fall for him after exchanging a few words. He hadn’t been weirded out by my awkward small talk or moody vibe. He had just talked to me, asked me questions about myself, and we’d laughed a lot. That’s what I remember.

But five years of friendship to lovers came to an explosive end. For ten years I ran away. Tonight I return to the night we met.

I wanted to stay on my high horse, absolutely sure that I made the right decision not forgiving him and moving away.

Now I don’t know anything.

Mom and dad were selling my childhood home, any ties I had to this place were unravelling, and now even the person I needed to stay the villain was apologizing.

“You travel a lot,” Harry touches my elbow lightly. I know he’s not ignoring what I said, just giving me a way to talk around it until I can talk through it. I forgot the little ways he could be kind. It tears a hole right through me.

“Yeah,” I had started working for a travel magazine a decade ago and then made it my own brand on social media. I got paid to travel which was a dream. And yet, it always carried an emptiness—like I was running away from a debt I never paid. “Do what you love right?”

“Yeah.” Harry had gone into teaching, he’d stayed in town, born and raised. It had surprised me finding out. “I can’t say I love teaching, but it gets me up in the morning.”

“I heard the kids adore you,” my brother had kept me updated on Harry when I asked. I think my brother loved him too—he definitely idolized him.

“Sometimes,” he smiles like he’s embarrassed but I know he’s not.

“It’s been ten years,” I whisper. Why was he still not over us? Why did it make me feel awful.

“I think I felt every year,” he says.

Me too.

“Wish I could rewind, go back to the night we met.” He says.

“So you could warn yourself?” I half tease.

“No. Y/n,” he rolls his eyes. “Just to remember what it felt like to-to…not have to worry about a million decisions, not have to worry about money and what’s for dinner and whether your car’s about to kick the bucket or whether you’ve got a serious vitamin c deficiency or it’s depression. Just…just to go back and remember what it felt like to…meet a cute girl in the park and wonder what she’s thinking about.”

“That cute girl was angry,” I remind him.

That had come out later, as we talked into the night. In the cloak of darkness when he’d expressed surprise that I was enrolling in his school and I had said some bitter response, he’s prodded in all the soft spots. Before I knew it I was crying in front of the very attractive guy. It was humiliating.

But he’d surprised me, with a gentle hand on my arm—a question that I’d responded with by tucking myself into his arms. It was weirdly not weird.

“I remember.”

“The girl’s still pretty angry,” I say quietly.

My mum and dad were selling the home. The place I thought I’d always get to call home no matter how many countries I went to and how many beds I slept in. I always thought the room down the hall would always be mine.

“Want to talk about it?” Harry asks.

“How?” I look at him. “How can you want to stand here and listen to me be angry? After everything.”

Harry sighs. It’s loaded. “Y/N I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. Ten bloody years have gone by, many relationships and so many fucking new memories and yet I’m still haunted by the ghost of you. And I push it away and pretend I’m okay. But I’m not.”

“We were both so angry at the end,” I ignore everything he just said to say something else. Or maybe to respond to him basically confessing that he missed me. I was scared.

“I tried to make you something you weren’t,” Harry admits and hearing him say it out loud even ten years later burns. Like the flaking paint on this forsaken bridge, I’m rusty on the inside.

“And I was angry at the world but I took it out on you.” I reply with the same vulnerability. He deserved it after I came here wearing body armour.

He moves an inch closer to me and my body feels like it leans in like an automatic response.

“Why did you run so far?” He asks, it’s barely a whisper.

I feel the tears threatening to pour out but I hold them back. “Why didn’t you come looking for me?”

“I was mad,” his hand reaches out but before it can brush mine it drops. My heart drops with it. “And then I thought we were better apart. But really I was just scared.”

“Scared?” I was too.

“I had all of you and then most of you, some of you and then none of you. I didn’t think it could go the other way.”

It couldn’t. I think about the ring in my pocket, the one I took off when I left my parents’ front door to walk here.

It was a 3 year relationship begging to take the first step. When the proposal came I had cried with tears of joy.

“I don’t think it can,” I say and I feel a tear slide down my cheek. I rub it away.

He nods in defeat. “I just wanted to talk to you. Say sorry and be sure there’s nothing to go back to.”

“The way I treated you I…I wish I did things differently Harry. And I’m sorry. But I think there’s too much between us to go back to.”

“Yeah well,” he scratches the back of his head. “At least I know now.”

I want to take his face in my hands and kiss him, feel his familiar hands work down my body and hold me close. I wanted all of him, or some of him. I couldn’t. I could only have none of him.

Harry:

It hurts, being rejected. But now I know.

“Thank you YN,” I say honestly.

“For what?” She brushes away another tear. I wish I could do that for her.

“Coming here tonight? Closure?”

“Thanks for showing me people change,” YN says after some silence, her voice breaks half-way and she turns away.

Something else I’d be haunted by.

“Y/N,” I tug her arm and she unspools in my arms. She fits exactly as I remember, a whirlwind of emotions threaten to overwhelm me as her scent fills my head. She felt like a dream, slipping away while I still held her.

Still, I hold on tight, desperate to replace every y/n-related ache with this feeling right here. But just like sand in my fingers, it’s impossible to cling onto.

Y/N pulls away slowly and I feel like the river’s gathered up a big enough tide to swallow me whole. I want her to stay, to give me another chance, to put aside our history and see who we were now.

But I stay silent, the words caught in my throat and held back; she’d just reject me again. As much as I needed to, we couldn’t go back.

“I think I should go,” she whispers. I should ask her to stay, to maybe get breakfast tomorrow, to see her one last time.

Instead I nod, I just fucking nod.

She turns and every step she takes there’s a part of me that leaves with her.

When I can no longer see her I turn back to the river and cry one of my own.

I wasn’t haunted by the ghost of her, but by the ghost of what could’ve been. The echoes of the night we met bounce off the walls of my head and I scream into the night. It feels good, but the shadow of us stays in the farthest corner of my heart.

“It’s no fair,” I whisper to the river.

The river streams on, a low shushing sound muffled by the night.

Maybe, I think, Y/N would visit here once more—maybe soon. Maybe she’d look down into the water like she always did and when she listened for the river’s secrets, maybe it would tell her mine.

“I still love her,” I confess to the river.

But the river only moves forward.

#harry styles fic #harry styles x reader #writingsfromhome #harry styles #harry styles fanfic #harry styles imagine #fic #harry styles angst #lyrics #lord huron #harry styles request #harry styles one shot #the night we met #not completely proofread

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