narry curse fic
Feb. 9th, 2018 06:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
saysthemagpiehi ok i can't remember if i've fic outlined this before on tumblr or just described it to hannah but: I read this harry/draco fic years and years ago where harry (potter) is under a spell called the Cassandra Curse that causes everyone around him to believe that everything he says is a lie. and if i recall correctly it's like, as the curse intensifies people's negative reactions to him get more intense too, like they think he's not just lying but lying maliciously. ANYWAY i was thinking about that fic recently and thinking about a one direction fic kinda loosely inspired by that concept. except that in this fic harry (styles) is under a curse that is poisoning everyone in his life against him. it would come on very gradually -- like he would start to notice at first that people were just a little bit less patient with him, a little more irritable or quick to snap at him, a little less willing to immediately forgive him for anything and everything. but things would get slowly but steadily worse. the tide of public opinion starts to turn against him in ways that feel at first like the fickleness of the internet, which he's used to and pretty good at ignoring, but then in ways that kinda feel more serious or more confusing. his close friends start to get more and more impatient with him, and every time he tries to apologize or fix things he somehow manages to put his foot in his mouth or make the situation worse.
and the worst part is that like, it's not just people being mean to him for no reason, a lot of it is people confirming things that he was always secretly afraid they thought of him and just weren't saying. like there's enough truth mixed in that he feels like they might be right. idk i'm trying to think of all the hurtful-but-with-a-grain-of-truth things that people might say to him, like nick getting exasperated with him for thinking he can drop off the face of the earth for months and then waltz back into his flat for dinner like they can just pick their friendship up where they left off, or jeff or mitch or somebody saying something that implies that harry bought his career, or ben asking if he realizes that he's not actually part of their family, gemma saying something that makes him realize how much his fame has negatively affected her life, or whatever. like none of it is outright MEAN mean, it's all more implied or suggested, or like, people will say something very pointed in a moment of anger and then sort of back off but also... not totally apologize or take it back. and so it takes harry a long time to sort of think that maybe something is going on? it does occur to him in the early stages that it's weird that people are so... suddenly not charmed by him, but he spends a lot of time talking himself out of it, or like, trying to figure out if it's something he's doing, or maybe just sort of putting the bad feelings.. somewhere else.. and drifting off rather than talking it out or investigating further. like maybe after he's tried to fix things with nick and nick just gets more annoyed harry just decides to sort of... drift off to LA... stop calling nick... whatever. idk classic harry styles avoidance maneuvers! the important thing is that like he experiences a lot of doubt and confusion about what's happening and is slow to put the pieces together and also people are kind of RIGHT but it's just.. they also keep kinda getting meaner and more pointed about it, and while he could handle one or two people in his life being irritated with him it's just like... everyone in his life is irritated with him, as well as millions of strangers on the internet, and none of the people he would normally talk to (including his therapist!) seem to have the time or patience to listen as he tries to muddle through what's happening.
OKAY i just spent all this time describing this concept as harry would experience it but i'm not even sure it would be from harry's POV! my original idea was that the fic would be either narry or lourry (it works better as lourry I think because of their complicated history but I prefer writing niall... idk!!) and that it would be mostly narrated from the other person's perspective. I was thinking that maybe it's future canon fic and it would start about six months or so into the curse, when niall runs into harry at some thing in LA. or rather doesn't run into him, because niall knows harry's going to be there and his general policy is to arrange his life in ways so that he is always just missing harry and never overlaps. niall has been out of the spotlight for the past couple months working on his second album, possibly having a jamaica idyll of his own, so he hasn't really been checking social media or interacting with industry people or mutual friends in LA or anything. also he has become very, very good at just sort of.. deliberately filtering out anything to do with harry and Not Thinking About It. idk what their history is like in this fic, like if they were together and harry broke niall's heart or if it was a 'we didn't talk about it and then we drifted and you never called and i wish you had just dumped me because this slow drifting and radio silence has made it impossible for me to fully move on' kinda thing. except i'm thinking there's also an edge of real hurt there, like, it didn't have to be inevitable and it's probably like 80% harry's fault that it played out the way it did. also possibly harry broke up the band in the most painful way possible. who can say. their history is a fraught one!!
anyway niall comes back and he's at some party or leaving some event or something and happens to sort of just barely overlap with harry, like he sees harry walking through the paps to get through to his car. and even just in that brief moment it's like... something is just off. like paps are always nasty and always trying to get a reaction, and fans can be.. intense... especially if they're stalkers and you don't stop, but it's just like... what little he sees of harry's interactions with the crowd is just very very weird. and i think he catches a glimpse of harry's face (harry doesn't see him) and that confuses him even more because he's never seen harry look like that before, at least not in public. he knows harry's bland smiling media face and that isn't it. harry looks terrified, flinching away when people try to grab him and sort of stumbling towards the car, and maybe there's some sort of altercation, like someone spits in his face or something, and his security guy pushes them away but also kinda shoulderchecks harry into the side of the car. like it all happens super fast, harry's through the crowd and in the car driving off in seconds, but it's an intense moment, and niall's accidentally witnessed the whole thing.
jesus, niall says, turning to whoever he's with. and whoever he's with snorts and is like, i know, right? he's such a fucking twat. and niall's like .....wait. what?
but then they're inside the party/event and niall sort of forgets about it for a while because he's seeing all these people he hasn't seen in months etc etc. except that it keeps sort of happening. maybe it's like an industry event or party or something so there's like, a veneer of politeness or professionalism or whatever, but niall starts piecing together that like... people are really, really, really not feeling harry styles, and it's not clear what's happened or why it's changed. maybe he ducks out for some fresh air at some point and googles harry's name just out of curiosity, to see if he's somehow missed some huge scandal or something. the first result is like, tmz tweeting out a fan video of the altercation niall just witnessed. niall doesn't watch the video again but he just... cannot make sense of the headline, which seems to imply that the whole incident was soehow and then all of the retweets and replies are people just tearing into harry (which is nothing new bc twitter is a cesspool and he tries to never look at it if he can help it) but it IS weird that there's like.. no stans jumping in to defend harry, nobody tweeting death threats at tmz for hurting their fave, nobody even being like LARRY IS REAL. (the larries haven't vanished in this verse, they've all just turned against harry.)
anyway idk what happens in the story!! at first i was thinking that niall was somehow immune to the curse, but i actually think that it would be more interesting if he was NOT immune but had instead sort of accidentally inoculated himself against it? like not really, it still affects him, but he's spend so many years learning to sort of.. detach himself from his feelings about harry, if that makes sense, at first because it was too painful in the early years for him to be pining the way he was over harry when harry mooning over louis but also having a lot of sex with a lot of intimidatingly hot people, and then in the later years because it was too painful to have harry finally but know that he was never going to get to keep him. idk i need to think about it but i feel like it's just, he knows harry, and he knows how to separate what he feels about harry from what harry's doing or what harry needs from him or whatever. and after harry broke his heart he got even better at it, because it's not harry's fault exactly, it's niall's fault for knowing it was going to happen and still still hoping it could be different, that harry would want it badly enough to fight for it. anyway he's good at separating things out in his mind and compartmentalizing his feelings etc etc where harry's concerned. and it turns out that weirdly, he can do the same with the curse? like he can't totally ignore its effects but he can kinda separate out those feelings. or he's good at separating out these versions of harry, like he's spent all these years in the band separating out the version of harry he loves from the version that everyone else sees, and so he sort of instinctively is able to parse his anger from those underlying feelings about harry or something. i also had this thought that maybe niall has bad anxiety in this verse and part of the way he's learned to cope with it is by detaching from his feelings a little and neutrally observing how he's feeling, like not assuming that whatever visceral reaction he's having to a situation is always the correct one or the way he wants to respond, and then that coping mechanism helps him sort of manage the curse's effects without realizing he's doing it? idk!!
what happens???? what is the plot??? i have no idea! but there's definitely a scene where niall and harry encounter each other face to face for the first time in a long, long time, and niall feels this surge of anger towards him. and harry must see the anger in niall's face because his own face just sort of shutters. maybe in that first instant he had felt just the tiniest flicker of hope that it would be different with niall. but it wasn't, it isn't, and he knows how this is going to go.
IDK THIS ISN'T EVEN A FIC REALLY I JUST WANT SOME XTREME HARRY SUFFERING!!!! I want him feeling totally alone and scared and unsure of whether he's done something to deserve this. I want him moving past the kind of good, useful self-examination that maybe he needs to do in this fic (bc he IS kind of a flake, he HAS hurt people, he isn't perfect) into this small scared hurt place where he can't see a way out and he doesn't know if it's ever going to change or how long he can keep going like this alone. I want the curse to just compound all of harry's fears and anxieties around communication because everything he says makes things so, so much worse. I want him to try to deal with it by just making himself smaller and smaller, trying to need less, to want less, to ask for less, so he won't drive away the people he loves. and I want Niall to have to push through all of these layers and layers of anger and bitterness to figure out how he really feels about harry and to try to look at him, clear-sighted, through the curse and through all this complicated history they have together. and also just like!! you know!! the usual intense angst around harry not knowing who he is when he's not Harry Styles(TM), or when being harry styles isn't a desirable thing or a thing he can hide in to avoid being a real person. THERE COULD BE A LOT GOING ON HERE EMOTIONALLY IDK. JUST SOME THOUGHTS.
and the worst part is that like, it's not just people being mean to him for no reason, a lot of it is people confirming things that he was always secretly afraid they thought of him and just weren't saying. like there's enough truth mixed in that he feels like they might be right. idk i'm trying to think of all the hurtful-but-with-a-grain-of-truth things that people might say to him, like nick getting exasperated with him for thinking he can drop off the face of the earth for months and then waltz back into his flat for dinner like they can just pick their friendship up where they left off, or jeff or mitch or somebody saying something that implies that harry bought his career, or ben asking if he realizes that he's not actually part of their family, gemma saying something that makes him realize how much his fame has negatively affected her life, or whatever. like none of it is outright MEAN mean, it's all more implied or suggested, or like, people will say something very pointed in a moment of anger and then sort of back off but also... not totally apologize or take it back. and so it takes harry a long time to sort of think that maybe something is going on? it does occur to him in the early stages that it's weird that people are so... suddenly not charmed by him, but he spends a lot of time talking himself out of it, or like, trying to figure out if it's something he's doing, or maybe just sort of putting the bad feelings.. somewhere else.. and drifting off rather than talking it out or investigating further. like maybe after he's tried to fix things with nick and nick just gets more annoyed harry just decides to sort of... drift off to LA... stop calling nick... whatever. idk classic harry styles avoidance maneuvers! the important thing is that like he experiences a lot of doubt and confusion about what's happening and is slow to put the pieces together and also people are kind of RIGHT but it's just.. they also keep kinda getting meaner and more pointed about it, and while he could handle one or two people in his life being irritated with him it's just like... everyone in his life is irritated with him, as well as millions of strangers on the internet, and none of the people he would normally talk to (including his therapist!) seem to have the time or patience to listen as he tries to muddle through what's happening.
OKAY i just spent all this time describing this concept as harry would experience it but i'm not even sure it would be from harry's POV! my original idea was that the fic would be either narry or lourry (it works better as lourry I think because of their complicated history but I prefer writing niall... idk!!) and that it would be mostly narrated from the other person's perspective. I was thinking that maybe it's future canon fic and it would start about six months or so into the curse, when niall runs into harry at some thing in LA. or rather doesn't run into him, because niall knows harry's going to be there and his general policy is to arrange his life in ways so that he is always just missing harry and never overlaps. niall has been out of the spotlight for the past couple months working on his second album, possibly having a jamaica idyll of his own, so he hasn't really been checking social media or interacting with industry people or mutual friends in LA or anything. also he has become very, very good at just sort of.. deliberately filtering out anything to do with harry and Not Thinking About It. idk what their history is like in this fic, like if they were together and harry broke niall's heart or if it was a 'we didn't talk about it and then we drifted and you never called and i wish you had just dumped me because this slow drifting and radio silence has made it impossible for me to fully move on' kinda thing. except i'm thinking there's also an edge of real hurt there, like, it didn't have to be inevitable and it's probably like 80% harry's fault that it played out the way it did. also possibly harry broke up the band in the most painful way possible. who can say. their history is a fraught one!!
anyway niall comes back and he's at some party or leaving some event or something and happens to sort of just barely overlap with harry, like he sees harry walking through the paps to get through to his car. and even just in that brief moment it's like... something is just off. like paps are always nasty and always trying to get a reaction, and fans can be.. intense... especially if they're stalkers and you don't stop, but it's just like... what little he sees of harry's interactions with the crowd is just very very weird. and i think he catches a glimpse of harry's face (harry doesn't see him) and that confuses him even more because he's never seen harry look like that before, at least not in public. he knows harry's bland smiling media face and that isn't it. harry looks terrified, flinching away when people try to grab him and sort of stumbling towards the car, and maybe there's some sort of altercation, like someone spits in his face or something, and his security guy pushes them away but also kinda shoulderchecks harry into the side of the car. like it all happens super fast, harry's through the crowd and in the car driving off in seconds, but it's an intense moment, and niall's accidentally witnessed the whole thing.
jesus, niall says, turning to whoever he's with. and whoever he's with snorts and is like, i know, right? he's such a fucking twat. and niall's like .....wait. what?
but then they're inside the party/event and niall sort of forgets about it for a while because he's seeing all these people he hasn't seen in months etc etc. except that it keeps sort of happening. maybe it's like an industry event or party or something so there's like, a veneer of politeness or professionalism or whatever, but niall starts piecing together that like... people are really, really, really not feeling harry styles, and it's not clear what's happened or why it's changed. maybe he ducks out for some fresh air at some point and googles harry's name just out of curiosity, to see if he's somehow missed some huge scandal or something. the first result is like, tmz tweeting out a fan video of the altercation niall just witnessed. niall doesn't watch the video again but he just... cannot make sense of the headline, which seems to imply that the whole incident was soehow and then all of the retweets and replies are people just tearing into harry (which is nothing new bc twitter is a cesspool and he tries to never look at it if he can help it) but it IS weird that there's like.. no stans jumping in to defend harry, nobody tweeting death threats at tmz for hurting their fave, nobody even being like LARRY IS REAL. (the larries haven't vanished in this verse, they've all just turned against harry.)
anyway idk what happens in the story!! at first i was thinking that niall was somehow immune to the curse, but i actually think that it would be more interesting if he was NOT immune but had instead sort of accidentally inoculated himself against it? like not really, it still affects him, but he's spend so many years learning to sort of.. detach himself from his feelings about harry, if that makes sense, at first because it was too painful in the early years for him to be pining the way he was over harry when harry mooning over louis but also having a lot of sex with a lot of intimidatingly hot people, and then in the later years because it was too painful to have harry finally but know that he was never going to get to keep him. idk i need to think about it but i feel like it's just, he knows harry, and he knows how to separate what he feels about harry from what harry's doing or what harry needs from him or whatever. and after harry broke his heart he got even better at it, because it's not harry's fault exactly, it's niall's fault for knowing it was going to happen and still still hoping it could be different, that harry would want it badly enough to fight for it. anyway he's good at separating things out in his mind and compartmentalizing his feelings etc etc where harry's concerned. and it turns out that weirdly, he can do the same with the curse? like he can't totally ignore its effects but he can kinda separate out those feelings. or he's good at separating out these versions of harry, like he's spent all these years in the band separating out the version of harry he loves from the version that everyone else sees, and so he sort of instinctively is able to parse his anger from those underlying feelings about harry or something. i also had this thought that maybe niall has bad anxiety in this verse and part of the way he's learned to cope with it is by detaching from his feelings a little and neutrally observing how he's feeling, like not assuming that whatever visceral reaction he's having to a situation is always the correct one or the way he wants to respond, and then that coping mechanism helps him sort of manage the curse's effects without realizing he's doing it? idk!!
what happens???? what is the plot??? i have no idea! but there's definitely a scene where niall and harry encounter each other face to face for the first time in a long, long time, and niall feels this surge of anger towards him. and harry must see the anger in niall's face because his own face just sort of shutters. maybe in that first instant he had felt just the tiniest flicker of hope that it would be different with niall. but it wasn't, it isn't, and he knows how this is going to go.
IDK THIS ISN'T EVEN A FIC REALLY I JUST WANT SOME XTREME HARRY SUFFERING!!!! I want him feeling totally alone and scared and unsure of whether he's done something to deserve this. I want him moving past the kind of good, useful self-examination that maybe he needs to do in this fic (bc he IS kind of a flake, he HAS hurt people, he isn't perfect) into this small scared hurt place where he can't see a way out and he doesn't know if it's ever going to change or how long he can keep going like this alone. I want the curse to just compound all of harry's fears and anxieties around communication because everything he says makes things so, so much worse. I want him to try to deal with it by just making himself smaller and smaller, trying to need less, to want less, to ask for less, so he won't drive away the people he loves. and I want Niall to have to push through all of these layers and layers of anger and bitterness to figure out how he really feels about harry and to try to look at him, clear-sighted, through the curse and through all this complicated history they have together. and also just like!! you know!! the usual intense angst around harry not knowing who he is when he's not Harry Styles(TM), or when being harry styles isn't a desirable thing or a thing he can hide in to avoid being a real person. THERE COULD BE A LOT GOING ON HERE EMOTIONALLY IDK. JUST SOME THOUGHTS.
