ok my sister sent me this photo with the text “this photo is giving me very specific vibes,” to which i said “70s SoCal rock vibes?” and she said “yes also something about the hand is giving me kinda skeezy daddy niall vibes??” and then proceeded to ignore all of my texts demanding MORE HEADCANONS AND A FULL FIC OUTLINE. but SURELY WE CAN DO THIS OURSELVES. help me friends!!

here are my initial thoughts.

as you probably know, i LOVE trashbag!1d in fic. i had never considered a trashbag!niall before, probably because my two favorite fics in this genre, do you wanna and proper groupie, do not even include niall (or barely include him). SO MY EYES HAD NOT EVEN BEEN OPEN TO THE POSSIBILITY and that feels like a crying shame!!!! i am imagining like, some kinda fic that is not exactly celeb/groupie fic but has celeb/groupie or famous/nonfamous vibes + vague sugar baby vibes. it feels narry to me although i am open to other ships. and it definitely features niall as a kinda older (late 30s maybe?) guitarist in an Eagles-type band and harry as a youngish (19-22 maybe?) kid who moved from some small town to LA a few months back and thinks he's adapted to city life but is 100% still a total innocent. (you'll have to pretend like niall doesn't look totally baby-faced in that picture and imagine him as having a sort of rugged older Californian vibe.) i know nothing about the 1970s but it's the '70s and niall's got a house in laurel canyon and everybody knows his name. I have NO idea what would happen in the plot but harry's a little breathless and wide-eyed and niall's a little weathered, a little jaded, a little distant.

OK you can stop reading there and just speculate in the comments about niall's past if you want!! or you can read this possible outline for the first chapter IDK. im interested in both general speculation about a sugar baby!harry/older famous niall and specific speculation about this version of the plot!!

possibly harry meets niall at some party he's charmed his way into attending? i am kinda thinking that he's hanging out with these LA girls he's met who think he's adorable and let him hang around them, and then louis (who is also older and maybe in niall's band) is out at a club or a restaurant or something and the girls are flirting with him and he invites them to a party at his later. and one of the girls is like "can our friend come?" re: harry and louis looks at harry, kinda sizing him up, and then maybe says something under his breath to whoever he's with, they both laugh, and louis's like "yeah bring him too, got somebody who might like to meet him," kinda smirking as he says it. anyway maybe louis even sends a car for them or something, and when they get to the party the girls head off and harry's left alone at this party where he doesn't know anyone, in this huuuuuuge obscenely gorgeous california mansion, and he keeps seeing famous people and he's just sooo wide-eyed, keeps bumping into people and furniture because he's so busy staring around the room trying to take it all in. he doesn't know anybody but he can tell that a lot of the people there are famous -- some of them he recognizes but a lot of them just have that kinda aura about them, like everybody's intentionally not gaping at them but the intense casualness with which they're not being watched is basically like everyone staring at them... anyway he's just wandering around, hardly able to believe he's there, trying to commit every single detail to memory so he can tell his roommates about it later (zayn? liam? dunkirk boys?).

anyway the whole evening kinda goes by like this, with harry sort of drifting from room to room, drifting around the edges of people's conversations and being sort of coolly acknowledged but not addressed, which is fine by him!! he's totally overwhelmed and just trying to play it cool!!! i think at one point maybe louis is sort of holding court somewhere and spots him drifting past and is like c'mere, and harry goes over to him, and louis makes him sit down next to him and introduces him to like, the fifteen people who are sort of lounging around him, most of them with kinda improbable names or nicknames that harry's never gonna remember, and harry's just kinda dazed and nodding. probably he smokes a little himself when someone passes him a joint even though pot always makes him a little vague and hazy round the edges and horny. louis then seems to forget that he's there, and harry just sort of sits in a daze watching everyone talk, watching louis talk, and maybe louis's got a girl half draped over him and he's got a hand on her thigh but he's got his leg pressed up against harry's just sitting there all hazy and not really following the conversation anymore, just watching louis talk, feeling the warmth of his thigh against harry's. and he's kinda working himself up to developing a crush on louis, watching louis talk, thinking about louis's thighs, thinking about louis's dick, thinking about sliding to his knees and getting his mouth on him later. maybe fantasizing about doing it now, even, with all these people around watching, louis's hand in his hair, pulling a little.

ANYWAY harry definitely starts getting an inopportune boner and is like umm.... i gotta... be right back, and louis, who's got this lazy smug grin on his face again like he can tell exactly what harry's been thinking about, makes some joke and everyone laughs. maybe he's also like, don't leave yet, kid, i want you to meet someone, and harry, who's blushing now, is like ok!! and flees the room.

somehow he runs into niall who’s somewhere else in the house on his own? maybe harry wanders into one of the unused bedrooms looking for a bathroom and then after he sees that the balcony door is open and he steps out to look at the view and niall’s sitting out there in the dark drinking and watching the waves break on the shore. when Niall sees Harry in the dark he gives a little jerk of surprise, like something's startled him badly, and almost knocks over whatever he's drinking. Harry recognizes him, goes all wide eyed and confused and clumsy again, and is like sorry! sorry!!!!! and then niall looks at him again and seems to really see him this time. he seems to sot of shake out of something and is gruffly like, it's fine, sorry, thought you were someone else.

harry offers to go, but niall's like no it's ok, stay if you like. and it feels awkward to leave so harry sits down near him and they watch the ocean together for a while. harry's kinda watching Niall out of the corner of his eye, because he's not a fan fan but he knows exactly who niall is and he's trying to be casual and cool about it like the people at the party but is failing miserably. except he notices that niall keeps stealing looks at him too, almost like he can't help it, and harry's internally like "hmmm. HMM!!! very interesting!!!!" and takes it as a cue to start flirting a little, because he probably is not going to get to suck louis off tonight but maybe he can still hook up with a famous person before he has to go back to his real life, which is much less exciting.

idk maybe they start talking. niall's quiet and doesn't contribute much to the conversation but he's a good listener, and every time harry stops talking he asks some question that sends harry off again, and harry winds up telling him all about his hometown and moving to LA and the dishwashing job he's doing until he can make it big in acting or something (he has no idea what he wants to do, he just has vague romantic notions about LA and being in a profession where his job is to be adored). and he just sort of talks and talks, with a bit of bravado mixed in because he wants niall to think he's worldly and sophisticated and unfazed like everyone else at the party. but he's got this earnestness and he even makes niall laugh a couple times. but then at one point he realizes he's been talking for a long time and niall's probably just being polite, and he gets a little self-conscious and is like 'sorry' and niall's like 'for what?' and harry doesn't know how to say 'for boring you, probably' so he just sort of awkwardly ignores it, and then casts around for something to say instead and settles on asking niall who he was expecting. niall's like 'what do you mean?' and harry's like 'when i came out here you thought i was someone else, who were you expecti

except that somehow it's the Wrong Thing to say. immediately niall goes all reserved and distant again, and harry hadn't realized how much niall had relaxed in the space of their conversation until suddenly his walls go up again. harry's confused and tries to muddle through an apology, but niall just sort of brushes it off and is like 'you're probably missing the party' in a way that's clearly like, you should go now. but harry doesn't want to go!!!!! anyway i think maybe he sort of panics and decides to just GO FOR IT, i don't think he would actually kiss niall but maybe he puts his hand on niall's thigh, pretty high up, and then Looks at him. and niall kinda freezes, and there's this half second where harry's afraid he got that wrong too and he doesn't know if niall's going to be angry or have a gay panic moment and his mind's kinda spinning off thinking about what might happen, and then niall kinda surges forward and puts a hand on the back of harry's head and kisses him, not gently, and things get very heated very fast. it's very intense, and there's this weird undertone to it -- it's not at all violent or dub con-y, but it's rougher and more impersonal than harry was expecting, and niall's just a bit like.. idk. like on the balcony when they'd been talking harry had had this feeling sometimes that he'd taken niall by surprise -- he'd made him laugh when he wasn't expecting to, or said something that niall hadn't expected to hear, and it had made niall sort of focus on him and look at him like he was really seeing harry, and was surprised by what he saw. and it had sort of thrilled harry, this feeling of being sort of the focus of niall's attention like that. but now that they're hooking up it's sort of like niall's not focused on him anymore? (i can't decide if niall is thinking about the person harry reminds him of and responding to his feelings about that person in this scene, or if he's just had a lot of sex with people who want to sleep with him because he's famous and he's just kinda falling into the role he usually plays in these casual, kinda ultimately meaningless sexual encounters. possibly some combination of both!! im still getting a feel for his character.)

anyway it's hot but also it's all happening very fast, and probably harry goes down on niall on the balcony and that's excellent and he feels very accomplished and worldly bc look at him, blowing a celeb at his very first real famous LA party!! but then niall's like 'can I fuck you, i want to fuck you,' and harry is like yes, 100%, immediately, but once they get inside he starts getting a little nervous because actually he has not done this part before!! but possibly he has sliiiiightly misled niall on that front, aka sort of exaggerated / embellished his sexual history in the attempt to impress niall. and he is definitely game to have sex but also is nervous and hiding it, possibly by being even more like 'i know EXACTLY what i'm doing, obviously, ahaha! very good at sex, that's me! experienced lover harry styles!' and he sort of rushes through the prep and then when they actually start having sex it hurts a lot more than he expected and he can't relax but he doesn't want to stop because he doesn't want to mess up!! except then he winds up getting overwhelmed and sort of freaking out a little, bc Feelings!!! and niall's like 'whoa what ok let's just - let's stop' and harry's like 'NO KEEP GOING' bc he's just being stupid obviously and he doesn't want to fail at losing his gay virginity to a famous rockstar who's probably slept with so many people!!! but it's not ok and now he's gotten himself all worked up and niall's like 'ok actually let's just.. take a break yeah' and goes to get him a glass of water.

when harry's calmed down a bit he's soooo embarrassed and gets tearful again over it. at this point niall is still concerned, but also pretty convinced that harry's got a few screws loose and probably it would be best to just disentangle himself from this situation before things get any weirder. except that idk they have some kind of moment and harry just ditches the worldly act altogether, confesses that he has no idea what he's doing, and also winds up having a lot of Feelings, and it's so earnest and just.. obviously genuine that niall once again seems to be kinda taken by surprise? and once again it's like he's still kind of reserved/not exactly warm or forthcoming, but harry's willingness to be very unselfconscious and unguarded in front of him sort of makes him respond in kind, to an extent. and they get to have a do-over, which I will not describe here bc i actually wrote this part of the sex scene, except to say that it is totally different from what came before and it surprises them both and is weirdly intimate in that narry bizarro soul connection kinda way. 

AND THEN, OF COURSE, HARRY WAKES UP IN THE MORNING AND NIALL IS GONE, and has left him all alone in a strange house, and when harry stumbles out of the bedroom and wanders the house looking for a telephone or the way out he accidentally wanders into the kitchen, where famous rockstar louis tomlinson is sitting in his pants eating breakfast with a girl harry's never seen before, and it is very clear that 1) neither of them knew anyone was still in the house, 2) louis doesn't remember who harry is or much about the previous evening, and 3) niall must've cleared out first thing and definitely did not mention to louis that he'd left harry sleeping in one of the spare bedrooms.

[INSERT REST OF FIC HERE]

hi 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.

every single goddamn song on gavin james's album Bitter Pill is about narry, and also the more i listen to it the more i hear little echoes of it in Flicker, like it's obviously 1000% the album that niall listened to in 2016 to get through the breakup (or the not-breakup, since they weren't a Thing, they were just... a thing, a forever and ever soulmates thing, a best friends in love thing).

IM JUST GONNA DO THIS IN MULTIPLE PARTS SO THAT YOU CAN FULLY ABSORB THE PAIN OF EACH SONG
Read more... )
hi i promise i did some actual writing today but also i spent an hour texting hannah a long description of an XTREME SLOW BURN narry fic where narry are teen dads together but there is lots of PINING and it takes them YEARS to actually get together!!! OK FIRST HAVE SOME TEEN DAD NARRY VISUALS.
Read more... )
SURPRISE SURPRISE, I'm still thinking about [personal profile] coldbam 's narry farm au, which i just sent to hannah/harrybasquiat because i knew she would love it with her whole heart (she did). and then i was saying to her that the best, loveliest, happiest narry dynamic is one where they're both patient, hardworking people doing their best in whatever little spheres they occupy, except harry just happens to be a weirdo with weird niche interests while niall's more of a normal-seeming everyday sort of person.

but ALSO, and this is CRUCIAL, they both don't quite fit into the worlds they inhabit in some way. it's just that niall's not-fitting is a sort of quiet 'well, i can make do' sort of not-fitting, where he's conscious that he doesn't quite slot into whatever social mold he's supposed to fit into but he's amenable, he adjusts, he assumes that the world is probably right and anyway it's not the world's business to make him feel fulfilled or content in his skin. whereas harry's brand of not-fitting is much more visible but is also much more unconscious. he's just a harmless eccentric who goes about his life without seeming to even register the fact that he's completely unlike from everyone else around him. he's just living his life, pursuing his bizarro interests, interacting with people in his gentle weirdo fashion. lemme see if i can find like six more ways to say this lol. it's like niall doesn't exactly fit 'normal' but he passes for normal, and his default response to everything is just to be reasonable, to adjust or lower his expectations accordingly, so that he can establish a sort of equilibrium for himself even if sometimes he has this feeling that he's not, like, the happiest he could be? and then he meets harry, who is 100% the oddest, most out-there person niall's ever seen and yet doesn't even seem to notice. except that OF COURSE, internally, harry is a little lonely in his weirdo way!! he doesn't ever really conceive of it as loneliness, because i headcanon harry as having only a confused sense of his own inner terrain -- he feels things deeply but he never really understands what is Going On inside himself because putting things into words is not his strong suit.

but when narry find each other their ways of not fitting align in the most wonderful ways!!! they just Get Each Other on some intuitive level and they bring out these aspects of each other that the other needs. like niall helps harry live in the world, he translates confusing things other people do into things harry can understand and he also helps harry translate his own feelings, or not translate exactly but just figure out how to express. and he just makes things easier for harry, like helping him reset his password eight times by clicking the link!!! and harry's in awe!!!! and he makes harry not lonely anymore, because niall always makes harry feel heard.

and harry does the same for niall, but in different ways!!!! in his gentle weird way he makes this little space where niall can explore the not-fitting instead of always just being amenable to things and adjusting how he feels to align with other people's expectations for him. harry just naturally, intuitively responds to the secret quiet weirdness in niall, and he never acts like it's weird or even that it's secret, he just responds to niall as he is and doesn't register that other people might judge niall for those things. and niall watches harry just living his life so contentedly, acting like it's perfectly ok to feel however you feel and live in the world however you want, and it makes him feel ok with himself. ANYWAY OK NARRY ARE SOULMATES AND IT'S SO IMPORTANT TO ME!!!!!!!!

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