#arwa: we should write together!

[thunderoad]

3.3k of a time traveller au; 2017 harry wakes up in december 2012, and 2017 niall finds himself responsible for helping 2012 harry get home

Jeff slings his arm around Harry’s neck and pulls him in close, tucking him up under his chin. Harry tries not to smile but he’s just hammered enough to know he’s grinning like a Cheshire cat. He snakes his hand under Jeff’s blazer and curls his palm around Jeff’s hip. It makes Jeff huff - he must’ve touched a ticklish spot - and then laugh and shake his head.

“You did it, Hersh,” he says. Harry can’t crane his head up to look at Jeff’s face with his cheek pressed to his collarbone, so he regretfully pulls away to stand up on his own. Well, mostly on his own. He still needs Jeff’s arm around him to stay upright.

“It’s a great party, isn’t it?” Harry asks, raising his voice to be heard over the din. His assistant, Marilou, always does such a fabulous job with the lighting and with making sure that there’s lots of little trays circulating with lots of interesting things to eat; since they’re in Japan, the platters are stacked high with sushi, and Harry thinks she might have even called to hire street artists to demonstrate how to swallow a flaming sword. A troupe of buskers sing a mournful song in a language Harry doesn’t know, and a flash of annoyance shoots through him. He can’t tell if he’s annoyed with himself for not understanding or with them for playing such sad music, but he does his best to shrug it off.

Jeff squeezes Harry’s shoulder, his smile wide. “Not the party, man! I meant the tour!”

“The tour!” Harry shouts agreeably, and snags a sparkling pink drink off a tray passing by to raise his glass in a toast.

“First tour done!” Jeff goes on. Glenne squeezes between two vigorous dancers and takes Jeff’s hand. She puts her other hand on Harry’s shoulder and gives him a friendly squeeze. Harry’s careful not to slosh his drink all over her when he leans in for a proper hug.

Harry repeats, “First tour done!,” clinks his glass against Jeff’s, and knocks back the drink in one go.

“Many more to come,” Glenne adds. She takes the empty glass from Harry’s hand, sets it high on the heaping table near where they’re stood, and pulls them both into the throng of dancing bodies. Harry goes easily, feeling the bass thunder up from the quaking floor right into his very bones.

***

A beam of sunlight shoots through a chink in the blinds and lands squarely on Harry’s eye. He groans and rolls over, but rolling entails moving, and now his swimmy stomach feels like it’s trying to swim right up through his mouth. “No,” Harry whines weakly, and waits, and hopes, and the need to puke recedes minutely.

Complaining would feel good, Harry thinks (he feels like he’s dying and his bladder is about to burst and his mouth tastes like Jaeger), but the amount of effort required to form his thoughts into sentences puts him off it.

Room service. If he can find the phone, he can dial room service, and room service can bring him some paracetamol. But first he needs to get up and pee. Harry concentrates, but he can’t remember the floor plan of his hotel room, and he doesn’t fancy smashing his face into any walls, so he unwillingly cracks an eye open.

And it’s...not his hotel room, that’s for sure. Did he go home with someone last night? Maybe. (Probably.) But this doesn’t even look like someone’s room, really, unless that person has the personality of a member of the Queen’s Guard. The sheets and duvet are twisted up round Harry’s legs, but they’re mystifyingly white and tan. There’s a TV and a writing desk across the room on the opposite wall next to a lamp bolted to the floor.

Alright, Harry thinks, so definitely a hotel room. Whose hotel room? Are they still here? “Hello?” Harry tries. He twists his fingers in the sheets to ride out the wave of nausea like he’s back in Jamaica gripping water through his fingers to stay afloat. “Is - Is anybody there?”

No answer. Maybe he changed hotels last night? Normally, if fans figure out where he is or whatever, he just changes rooms.

The need to pee pushes all other considerations out of Harry’s head, and he slides his weight carefully onto his feet. He’s a little surprised his legs hold, and more than a little proud of himself. He hustles to the en suite bathroom and drops trou, surprised to find that he’s still wearing his pants.

Ordinarily he sleeps naked, and if he took someone home with him - but maybe he didn’t? Maybe they took the party on the road and Jeff checked him in here to sleep it off. Jeff. Harry’s phone. Yes, brill plan. As soon as Harry’s done emptying his bladder he’ll get right on it. And he might call room service, too.

Someone bangs on the door, making Harry jump so hard he nearly sprays the toilet lid like he hasn’t done since he was just an itty bitty lad. “We’re leaving for the airport in five, and if you’re not in the car we’re leaving without you!”

Bus? Harry’s on tour, yeah, but they mainly travel by plane; they hadn’t had the tour bus shipped all the way to Japan for a couple of dates. Had they?

“Sorry,” Harry clears his voice, “I think you’ve got the wrong room.”

“Ha ha,” someone says. They don’t really sound like they’re laughing. “Very funny. Not really, that was awful. See you downstairs!” The doorknob jiggles like someone’s trying to let themselves in, and Harry freezes with his pants gathered round his ankles and his hand still wrapped around his willy, defenseless. He holds his breath.

The door stays shut. “Five minutes!” The person repeats, and Harry lets out a breath. He tugs his pants up around his hips, washes his hands quickly in the sink - he’s not an animal, this might be a strange situation but he has standards, thank you very much - and hurries to find his clothes so he can get dressed and out of here before whoever thinks he’s coming with them finds out he’s very much not. He can call Jeff just as easily from the lobby, huddled behind a potted plant. He’s done it before.

His own clothes are nowhere to be found, but he discovers an open suitcase with a heap of jeans and ratty t-shirts inside, contemplates theft for a moment, realizes he has no other options, and quickly pulls it on. The clothes look familiar for some reason, like maybe he shops at the same store, but he doesn’t stop to think about it. He’s sliding his feet into a battered pair of trainers and pats his pocket for his phone before he realizes he never found it.

Harry freezes, torn between two equally awful possibilities. Look for his phone and wait to get caught, or leave it and be effectively alone in a city whose language he doesn’t speak?

Fuck.

Harry’s still frozen when he hears the distinct sound of a key card sliding into the lock. He closes his eyes again. The door swings open, and Harry braces for the worst.

“Harry?” says a familiar voice. “What are you doing stood there for? We’ve got to be in the car five minutes ago, or we might miss our flight! What have you done to your hair?”

Harry opens one eye, then the other. Liam fucking Payne is stood across from him with his arms folded across his chest like a disapproving father and his brow wrinkled like Harry’s nan’s. “If you’re hungover, that’s not our fault,” Liam says crisply. He steps sideways, shuts the door behind himself, and sets about tidying Harry’s room for him. He heaps the shirts and jeans and pants he finds lying around into the suitcase and sits on it to zip it closed.

“Liam?” Harry squeaks. He clears his throat. “What...are you...in Japan?”

Liam looks up at him. He’s buzzed his hair again, Harry thinks absently. His face is soft and round, though; Harry’s heart gives an unwilling surge of affection. “Japan? What are you on about? We’re not in Japan.”

“Not...in...” Harry blinks. What was Harry drinking last night? Maybe he wasn’t drinking, maybe he took something? What could he have taken that’d let him wake up in another country? “Where...are we?”

“New York,” Liam says briskly. He puts his hands on his hips. “Seriously, how much did you and Taylor have to drink last night?”

“Taylor?” Harry repeats.

Just then, a series of rapid knocks lands on the door.

“Don’t answer it!” Harry squawks.

Liam shoots him a bewildered look and ignores him entirely, the traitor. He pulls the door open quickly, and someone dutifully recites, “Paul says to come and make sure you didn’t get killed so he can kill you himself. What the fuck’s taking so long?”

“Harry’s on a bender,” Liam answers primly. Harry’s scowling before he can think twice.

The other person whistles lowly. “Is he really? What’re you having, then, Styles, did you save any for me?”

Irish lilt, skinny legs, pink cheeks. Harry knows this other person, too. “I think I need to sit down,” he says, and can’t think how to move, so he doesn’t. “What are you two doing here?”

There’s the fractured silence of two people sharing a meaningful look, followed by Niall’s thoughtful, “You reckon he hit his head?”

Harry stiffens in surprise. He does have a headache. Maybe this is all just some weird hallucination, and his subconscious is speaking to him through his old bandmates. He bends his head obligingly for Niall to check, only Niall clucks in disguise. “I’m going to need a feckin chair to stand on. When did you get so tall? And what happened to your hair?”

Even as he talks his hand finds its way carefully to Harry’s head. It comes as a shock when he combs his fingers gently through Harry’s fringe before setting about feeling for any lumps. Harry looks up at Niall through the screen of his hair while Niall investigates him for brain damage, and realization trickles in first slowly, then in a rush.

The tips of Niall’s blonde fringe poke out from under his gray beanie, and his face is entirely smooth, no stubble to be found. He doesn’t even really look like himself, he’s so young. Liam, with his buzzed head, too...and no tattoos on his bare arms.

“I’m having a panic attack,” Harry announces, and waits to faint, or something.

There follows a mystified silence, ended abruptly by someone throwing the door open with all the force of a wild karate kick. “What’s wrong with him?” another familiar voice asks.

He must be dying, Harry thinks. He must have a brain tumor or some other serious illness. Something must be very, very wrong.

“He says he’s having a panic attack,” Liam answers Louis quietly, like Harry’s a proper mental patient.

Niall offers, “That don’t look like no panic attack to me,” thoughtfully.

“He’s going to make us late to the airport, and if we’re late there, we’ll miss the Jingle Ball,” Louis says in his brisk important way. To the others, he says, “He and Taylor probably had a row.” Then, to Harry, “Get your things and let’s go. You can finish your meltdown on the plane over coffee and brekkie.”

It’s the promise of coffee and breakfast that, more than anything, convinces Harry to go along. It isn’t till they’re stood in the hallway waiting for Paul to come and collect them that Harry musters up the strength to ask, “Jingle Ball?”

“Yeah,” says Niall. He starts chewing on his thumb nail. “Back in London.”

Harry frowns. “You going to be alright on the plane for that long?”

“Are you?” Niall fires back.

Harry falls silent, chastened. To himself, he murmurs, “Jingle Ball, London...”

“December 8, 2012,” Niall nods along. “Now you’re getting it.”

&&&

Niall’s cycling through the apps on his phone backstage and considering whether to launch another Instagram livestream when Conor whomps him in the face with a pillow from the sofa. “What the hell?” Niall splutters.

Jake and Gerry both laugh. “We can hear you thinkin’,” calls John from his spot over by the huge gift basket they arrived to find set out for them with Guinness, peanuts, and candy in. “The boys and I agree: no more livestreams till you think of something to do during them.”

Niall splutters again, this time to keep from laughing. “I’ll have you know I’ve been doing absolutely nothing on streams since before there even were an Instagram,” which may not technically be true, but whatever.

“What was that?” Jake stage whispers to Conor, who grins. “A year ago?”

“Bet it was just as boring then,” Conor agrees.

“You’re all fired,” Niall says, going back to his phone. “I’ll go out there on me own and play the show acoustic. And no puppy, either,” he adds, though so soft probably only he can hear it. He’s just got the strangest email he’s ever had, and he’s had some whoppers. Niall reads it again, then once more just to make sure he’s really seeing what he thinks he’s seeing.

The boys go back to teasing him amongst themselves; Niall overhears Conor’s, “Check out the look on his face, bet that’s him watching the viewers drop ‘cos I’m not onscreen,” before both Jake and John punch him in the leg. Niall taps back a response, careful not to put too much thought into it:

Are you fucking w me? How do I know this is really you?

And sends it off. Niall still gets fanmail to this email address, and sometimes it’s mad entertaining, but this message looked different from the get-go. The subject line read: NIALL IT’S HARRY I NEED YOUR HELP, which was enough to raise several flags.

All the flags, really.

Niall hasn’t seen Harry since...which came first, was it his show or was it the one they were both on the bill for, the one Niall was surprise guest at? He’s done so many shows over the past year that he can’t quite keep them straight anymore, and the itch to start a new spreadsheet gets stronger.

It’s probably just someone fucking with him, he reasons. He gets enough nutters on all platforms to know better, really.

But who could resist a cry for help?

Niall pops his thumbnail into his mouth and starts absolutely wrecking his cuticles. He’s not sure which is more strange: Harry needing help, or Harry needing his help.

While Niall’s busy pondering that, Gerry drops down beside him. “Everything ok?” he checks, cuffing Niall on the back of the head in a friendly way.

“Just got the weirdest email of me life,” Niall admits, forcing his hand down to his lap. Gerry’s eyebrows go up, and Niall’s just wondering whether he ought to explain when Lucy, the showrunner for tonight’s Jingle Ball, knocks twice on the open dressing room door.

“Five minutes to stage, guys!”

The lads all jump up to get ready, equipping themselves with their instruments like a troupe of powerfully unintimidating warriors. Niall reaches for his guitar with no small amount of relief, happy to force everything out of his head except the next five songs. It’s his last live show like this for the next few months, and he’s been looking forward to it and dreading it in equal measure.

‘Course, his problems are still there when he gets offstage. He pauses in the cinderblock hallway backstage while the boys pile into the dressing room for snacks and bottles of water before going to catch the rest of the show or to share a few drinks with the mates they’ve made over the Jingle Ball tour. His email correspondent (allegedly Harry, but Niall’s not yet convinced) has sent back,

It’s me. Followed by, You’ve got a huge crush on Katy Perry, your favorite song is “Desperado,” you’re terrible at cuddling, and I need your help!! I’m really not fucking with you!!

The message is followed by an avalanche of distraught emojis. “Fuck,” Niall says to the empty hallway, just for the sake of hearing himself say it. Then he emails back his phone number. Not but five minutes later does his phone start ringing. Niall swipes to answer and damn near crushes his ear, he claps his phone to his ear so fast. “Hello?”

“Oh, thank God it’s you,” Harry sighs over the line. “I’ve had,” his voice wobbles, “the most awful day, the bath had three showerheads in and there was sushi everywhere -”

Niall very nearly slumps in relief. He’d know that posh drawl anywhere, and he doesn’t sound like he’s dying, so that’s Niall’s worst fears sorted out. He opens the first door he sees for a bit of privacy and finds a cramped utility closet he wouldn’t cram himself into if his life depended on it. He keeps looking, and asks Harry, “And that’s a bad thing?”

“Well, no,” Harry sighs, sounding put out. “It was top. But then I found my phone, and there were all these messages on it from people I didn’t know, and I started getting these angry phone calls from people asking why I’d missed these meetings, and I didn’t know what to say, and I didn’t know who to call, nobody’s number is in service, and...” he sniffs.

Quietly, Niall argues, “Your mum’s number hasn’t changed.”

“I couldn’t tell my mum this! She’d probably have a heart attack, Niall!”

Niall ducks into the loo, darts into a stall, and plops down on the closed toilet lid. He rubs his forehead with his fingertips, too tired and befuddled to know what to think. The faint, euphoric he called me, Niall quashes ruthlessly. “And what exactly is ‘this,’ then?”

“I’m a time-traveller,” Harry says, “obviously.”

***

Together, Niall and Harry arrange for Harry to fly out to LA, where he’ll take a car out to Niall’s place in Laurel Canyon. Meanwhile, Niall will leave from New York tomorrow morning, which puts them both in California with just a few hours’ difference.

“And then we’ll...” Niall draws up short. He’s back in his hotel room with his laptop open on the bed in front of him and his shirt unbuttoned over his chest. He hung up on Harry so he could say goodbye to all his Jingle Ball mates, and then he and the lads had to stop by a local bar for a few celebratory pints before splitting up for the holidays, and now they’re gearing up to do a proper night.

Harry’s silence on the other end is hardly vacant. “We’ll figure something out,” Harry says sleepily. “Hey, Niall?”

Niall gazes at his reflection in the mirror atop the bureau. He’s gone tense all over like he’s expecting a blow, and he has to remind himself that this Harry - if he really is telling the truth, somehow, if he’s not just away in the head - is from 2012, and as far as he knows, Niall’s just one of his good mates. Someone to call in a panic, someone to help him.

“Yeah, Haz.”

“You promise you won’t tell my mum or Robin?” Harry asks. His voice has gone treacle slow with drowsiness, and Niall pops his cuticle into his mouth. “I just don’t want them to worry, or tell me I can’t tour again. Not that she could stop me,” he tacks on, though he doesn’t sound convinced.

“I promise,” Niall says. “I don’t think anybody would believe me anyway.”

His phone buzzes with a message; it’s Tara, forever every evening’s organizer, letting Niall know everybody’s waiting for him in the lobby.

“I gotta go.”

“Okay,” Harry says, and from the sound of his voice Niall knows he’s worrying at his bottom lip. “See you soon.”

“Yeah,” Niall says. “Will do.”

[relationshipadviser-blog]

How irritating that smug couples have stumbled on the secret of a perfect relationship | Arwa Mahdawi

New Post has been published on https://relationshipqia.com/must-see/how-irritating-that-smug-couples-have-stumbled-on-the-secret-of-a-perfect-relationship-arwa-mahdawi/

How irritating that smug couples have stumbled on the secret of a perfect relationship | Arwa Mahdawi

We-talk constantly referring to yourself and your partner in the plural is annoying. But it is also a sign that your relationship is solid. What else has science got to teach us about staying together?

Its always we, we, we have you noticed? We all know people who seem to have lost the capacity to talk about themselves as autonomous individuals the moment they couple up. Were doing well, thanks; We love spaghetti; We are thinking about buying an emotional support squirrel.

Irritatingly, it turns out that these people are not just semantically smug theyre joyful. A study by researchers at the University of California, Riverside found that we-talk, as they term it, is associated with happier and healthier relationships. To quote the undecipherable academese seemingly beloved by social scientists trying to justify the fact they have spent months studying we-ing, they found meta-analytic evidence that we-talk predicts relationship and personal functioning in romantic couples. The study also found that hearing your partner use we frequently is more strongly linked to happiness than using we-talk yourself.

The long and short of all this meta-analysis is that if you want to make your significant other happy, you should increase your first-person-plural pronoun use. Grammar may not be the answer to all romantic woes, but it can work wonders if youre in a tense relationship: the researchers found we-talk is a good way to resolve conflicts. Which is common sense, really, because it spreads the blame. The poet William Carlos Williams would probably have had a much better romantic life, for example, if he had just said that we have eaten the plums that were in the icebox.

I am sure that, at this point, we are all thinking the same thing. Namely, how much other peer-reviewed relationship advice has been published in scholarly journals? Well, quite a lot as it happens. Lets romp through the highlights together, shall we?

Perhaps the most important modern love tip is to keep your relationship off social media. Evidence suggests constantly posting updates about how blissfully happy you and bae are is a sign your relationship is falling apart. A 2014 study found that when people felt more insecure about their partners feelings, they tended to make their relationships visible on Facebook. In an age of oversharing, #Couplegoals is keeping your private life private.

Another top social science tip is to observe the magic ratio and be five times nicer when you argue with your partner. A study from the 1970s found that the ratio between positive and negative interactions during a conflict is a reliable indicator of whether a relationship will last. Happy couples, researchers found, have five or more positive interactions for every one negative interaction. So, next time you get into a tiff with your other half, whip out a notebook and start a tally of your interactions. Did they go, Uh-huh, at regular intervals, to suggest they were listening? Thats a positive interaction! Write it down. Soon you will have enough data to provide a statistically sound prediction of whether you will acrimoniously divorce.

Finally, if you really want to fall in love with someone, or rekindle an existing relationship, science recommends you ask your romantic interest if they have a hunch about how they will die. Follow this up by asking about their relationship with their mother. I know that may sound like an unusual route to romance, but there is evidence to back it up. In 1997, a psychologist called Arthur Aron published a paper listing 36 questions that can make you fall in love with anyone, including the aforementioned. Two of the participants who took part in his experiment married each other. So there you go. If you want a happy love life, have a hunch about how you will die.

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us

[mysteriouslyzealouspandalov-blog]

How irritating that smug couples have stumbled on the secret of a perfect relationship | Arwa Mahdawi

New Post has been published on https://relationshipguideto.com/must-see/how-irritating-that-smug-couples-have-stumbled-on-the-secret-of-a-perfect-relationship-arwa-mahdawi/

How irritating that smug couples have stumbled on the secret of a perfect relationship | Arwa Mahdawi

We-talk constantly referring to yourself and your partner in the plural is annoying. But it is also a sign that your relationship is solid. What else has science got to teach us about staying together?

Its always we, we, we have you noticed? We all know people who seem to have lost the capacity to talk about themselves as autonomous individuals the moment they couple up. Were doing well, thanks; We love spaghetti; We are thinking about buying an emotional support squirrel.

Irritatingly, it turns out that these people are not just semantically smug theyre joyful. A study by researchers at the University of California, Riverside found that we-talk, as they term it, is associated with happier and healthier relationships. To quote the undecipherable academese seemingly beloved by social scientists trying to justify the fact they have spent months studying we-ing, they found meta-analytic evidence that we-talk predicts relationship and personal functioning in romantic couples. The study also found that hearing your partner use we frequently is more strongly linked to happiness than using we-talk yourself.

The long and short of all this meta-analysis is that if you want to make your significant other happy, you should increase your first-person-plural pronoun use. Grammar may not be the answer to all romantic woes, but it can work wonders if youre in a tense relationship: the researchers found we-talk is a good way to resolve conflicts. Which is common sense, really, because it spreads the blame. The poet William Carlos Williams would probably have had a much better romantic life, for example, if he had just said that we have eaten the plums that were in the icebox.

I am sure that, at this point, we are all thinking the same thing. Namely, how much other peer-reviewed relationship advice has been published in scholarly journals? Well, quite a lot as it happens. Lets romp through the highlights together, shall we?

Perhaps the most important modern love tip is to keep your relationship off social media. Evidence suggests constantly posting updates about how blissfully happy you and bae are is a sign your relationship is falling apart. A 2014 study found that when people felt more insecure about their partners feelings, they tended to make their relationships visible on Facebook. In an age of oversharing, #Couplegoals is keeping your private life private.

Another top social science tip is to observe the magic ratio and be five times nicer when you argue with your partner. A study from the 1970s found that the ratio between positive and negative interactions during a conflict is a reliable indicator of whether a relationship will last. Happy couples, researchers found, have five or more positive interactions for every one negative interaction. So, next time you get into a tiff with your other half, whip out a notebook and start a tally of your interactions. Did they go, Uh-huh, at regular intervals, to suggest they were listening? Thats a positive interaction! Write it down. Soon you will have enough data to provide a statistically sound prediction of whether you will acrimoniously divorce.

Finally, if you really want to fall in love with someone, or rekindle an existing relationship, science recommends you ask your romantic interest if they have a hunch about how they will die. Follow this up by asking about their relationship with their mother. I know that may sound like an unusual route to romance, but there is evidence to back it up. In 1997, a psychologist called Arthur Aron published a paper listing 36 questions that can make you fall in love with anyone, including the aforementioned. Two of the participants who took part in his experiment married each other. So there you go. If you want a happy love life, have a hunch about how you will die.

Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/us