#yeah I was fed up with the rigidness of my job and so jealous of the flexibility of my boyfriend's job

[linguenuvolose]

I applied for a new job today 😩

[nightingiall]

where the skies are blue // a niall horan au (coming soon)

Sonia has known Niall for what feels like their whole lives. He is her best friend, her anchor, and occasionally, a pain in her ass. They are polar opposites. This is a fundamental fact they have always known. She likes making lists and checking them twice while he thrives on spontaneity. He is destined to fly away to unknown places while she is doing just fine on the ground. 

So, it is not surprising that when they are forced to reckon with the fact that their corporate job makes them both miserable, Niall's first instinct is to uproot and leave. What does amaze Sonia, however, is that he wants to take her along for the ride. 

A roadtrip AU about stepping out of comfort zones, discovering what it means to be alive, and untangling a years' long web of really complicated feelings all on a journey that changes everything.

C O M I N G     S O O N

Start date and update schedule TBA.

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“Sunny.” 

Niall is currently lying face down on her couch, worn out from the day’s work and the fact that Sonia made sure he was fed, showered, and in comfortable clothes. He is watching her with a frown. 

“Yeah?”

She doesn’t realize it then but this is a moment she will think about a lot. The two of them, there in her tiny apartment, Niall giving her this somber look and Sonia feeling tired and helpless. She doesn’t realize it then, but this is a turning point. 

Niall’s fingers are twirling around a loose thread on the pillow, eyes glazed over in thought. “Why exactly does your boyfriend hate me?” 

Sunny sighs. Her laptop is a blurry light in front of her. Dev. She can’t lie, she has thought extensively of this very thing herself. Mulled it over on sleepless nights. Watched every single one of Niall and Dev’s interactions like a hawk, storing them to memory to analyze later. She’s really not sure why her best friend and her boyfriend can’t seem to get along. Perhaps, she’s considered, that it’s mostly to do with the fact that they are both, coincidentally, attractive men. 

Otherwise, what else could it be? When they’re not around Niall, Dev is an absolute sweetheart. She loves him to death, really. Something strange happens when the two of them are in the same room together, though. Dev becomes reserved and curt. He’ll always stay close to Sonia, always will find a way to have contact with her. A kiss on the cheek. An arm around her shoulder. 

Just twenty minutes ago he stopped by to drop off a dress of hers that she’d left over at his. It was meant to be a quick thing; she needed the dress for an event tomorrow and he’d deliver it to her, along with a lingering kiss, and be on his way. When he learned that Niall was over, though, something shifted in him. His beautiful smile became stiff, his tall and lanky spine tense. He’d invited himself inside and stayed until he was called into work, but not before subtly interrogating Niall and adapting that weird sarcastic persona that only Niall could elicit from him. 

Sonia didn’t like it. One, because everyone always seemed to be so happy around Niall. And two, because she wanted her boyfriend and her best friend, two people she loved to the ends of the earth, to get along. 

But she can’t tell Niall all of this. So she simply shrugs and attempts to get back to typing up a memo for tomorrow. “He doesn’t hate you.” 

She doesn’t have to look at Niall to know that he’s giving her a look. “I’m pretty sure he does. Just now when you went to the kitchen he told me that he doesn’t understand why you and I are even friends when we’re so different.” 

Now she looks up at him, shocked by this statement. “He said that?” 

“Yeah, he did.” Niall is slightly upright now, resting on his forearms so he can send her the full force of his wry look. Be honest with me, is what it says, and now Sonia is sighing. 

“Okay, fine.” She saves the document she’s working on, just in case this is a long conversation. “I don’t know why he doesn’t like you.” Even as the words leave her mouth she knows that’s a lie. Dev is jealous of Niall, this much Sonia is aware of. Why that is the case is beyond her. Sure, she and Niall have been friends since they could toddle, but that was no reason to dislike a person. Truthfully, this is one thing that’s always bothered her about Dev. Niall is important to her; why couldn’t her boyfriend see that? 

“You’re doing that thing with your nose,” is what Niall says to this. For his part, he doesn’t look all that upset anymore. 

Inadvertently, she scrunches up her nose. “What thing?”

He is visibly repressing a smile now. “You do this thing when you’re holding something back. It, like, wiggles.” He attempts to demonstrate but it only makes her laugh and she throws a pillow at him. “Hey!” Niall throws it right back at her, but he’s laughing too. “Since you’re being mean I guess I should tell you that holding something back was just a euphemism for lying.” 

Sonia gasps, feigning offense. “I’m not lying! It’s not like he’s told me why he doesn't like you. Every time I try to ask he changes the subject.” This, in her defense, is true. She learned early on that Dev hates talking about anything having to do with Niall. Which, now that she thinks about it, leaves not much else to talk about. After all, most of her life is connected to something about Niall. Considering they’ve been best friends for over two decades and they work together, this is natural.

Niall just looks at her for a while, his smile fading. Sonia feels a sort of heaviness settle over them at the absence of that ever-present grin of his. This is important, she realizes now. She cares deeply about this blue-eyed boy. This is a fact of her life that she could never ignore. It follows her everywhere, the shadow of him. She doesn’t know how to breathe without him, so how could she just allow a significant other to walk all over him for seemingly no reason?

“I’m sorry if Dev has upset you,” is what she says next, voice quiet, the only sound in the room now that the playlist Niall had put on earlier has faded out. She didn’t notice how silent the apartment had gotten. As always, she’d been too distracted by Niall’s laugh. “I don’t like that you two don’t get along. I promise I’ll talk to him about it the next time I see him.” 

Niall smiles again but it doesn’t meet his eyes. “It’s okay. I’m not upset.” That’s a lie. She knows it from the rigid angle of his spine as he settles down on the pillow again. Guilt pools in her belly. “You’re happy with him. That’s all that matters.” 

This moment. You’re happy with him. These words will play on repeat in her head for the rest of the night. Is she really? She loves Dev, this she knows. They’ve been together for nearly a year. He listens to her, respects her, makes time for her. But the truth is, lately, she’s okay with being away from him. He’ll go away to assist on a surgery at some out-of-state hospital or she’ll be away on a business trip or they could spend weeks apart, and she won’t miss him. Not in that aching, longing sort of way. 

Yes, she’s happy with Dev. But she’ll also be okay if he wasn’t in her life at all. 

That, she knows, is not the kind of love that keeps a relationship standing.

Silence settles over them then. Niall doesn’t prod the subject and Sonia doesn’t offer any more information. Her laptop screen, true to her prediction, has dimmed out, so she enters in her password again and gets back to work. She somehow falls right into it, her workflow, moreso because it’s a distraction from her current predicament. Dev and Niall. Dev or Niall. She never thought she’d have to choose between them. While no one is making her select one out of the two of them, she gets the feeling that it may be something she will have to do soon. 

She nearly thinks Niall has fallen asleep when he speaks again. 

“I’m so tired,” he’s mumbling into the pillow. She glances up at him, softening when she finds that he looks about two minutes away from passing out right there. “So tired.”

She sighs, adjusting her glasses on the top of her nose as she tries to finish up her work for today. There’s only one more item on her to-do list and she intends to complete it before hauling herself to bed. If she doesn’t, she won’t sleep. “You don’t say,” she deadpans, but mentally adds something to her list: get Niall his favorite sheet so he can go to sleep. 

When the quiet stretches on between them again, Sonia can’t say she’s glad for it because, suddenly, she can’t focus. There’s something heavy in the quiet between them, and she doesn’t understand why until she sees Niall shift his head to look at her, the shadows under his eyes more prominent than ever. She doesn’t realize she’s staring until he blinks.

“What are we doing with ourselves?” It sounds like a nonsense question at first, but the way Niall’s voice shrinks to match his feelings exposes his vulnerability. Their vulnerability.

“What?” She tries to brush him off, make it seem like she has no idea what he’s going on about, but her voice gives her away—breathy and uncertain. They’re definitely not talking about Dev anymore. She doesn’t want to have this conversation. Not now. Probably not ever, really. Even though they’ve been skirting around the topic for months.

Niall sits up slowly, and Sonia realizes that she’s never seen him look so defeated. It makes her feel defeated too. “This.” He gestures around them, her scarcely decorated apartment, the piles of files and paperwork currently burying her coffee table. “What are we doing? Why is it so hard to get out of bed in the morning? Why do I hate my job?”

I just want to be happy. His voice is suddenly as clear as day in her head, and something else comes back to her in that moment. She remembers what she said to him afterwards: “Yeah. Me too.” She remembers actually believing it, even up until she was standing in front of her parents’ smiling faces, their cameras held up as she posed with her degree on graduation day; she just wanted to be happy. 

“Niall,” she sighs, and the words suddenly escape her. She doesn’t know what to say to him, how to make any of this better. All she knows is that she feels the exact same way.

Neither of them say anything after that, but the look in Niall’s eyes tells her that it won’t be long until they won’t be able to escape the remainder of this conversation. She never pictured Niall with a desk job, and she knows why when she looks at him now. This bright, free-spirited boy was always meant to fly, as high and as far away as it took to reach those dreams of his that seemed to stretch miles and miles. But Sonia’s not sure she’s meant to fly with him. And maybe she’s selfish, but she doesn’t want to let him go before she can figure it all out. 

He’s done it once before, and she’d let him with promises of flying out to visit each other at their respective college campuses, despite there being hundreds of miles in between, and she doesn’t think she can do it again. At least not right now, not when she realizes how incomplete she’d been when the hundreds of miles between them had them losing touch.

It’s nearly midnight when she finishes her work, and when she looks over at the couch, Niall is already sleeping. As she drapes the sheet over him, she wonders how long she has until he decides to fly away again.