The White Toymaker

One Direction//Larry Stylinson Fanfic ~ Misfits

Chapter One. 

Based around the show Misfits, and for those who are not familiar with it, there will be superpowers involved. :)

—

“Are you sure you still want to perform? You should know, the reports say that weather’s only going to get worse out there. It could get pretty nasty. I’ll understand perfectly if you don’t want to go on.”

Liam couldn’t help but smile at the man’s earnest tone, and at how truly concerned he looked on their behalf. It was his charity that would benefit from their participation in the concert, and it had been his hard work that had brought them back home and into the arena to try and raise money for a children’s cancer ward, yet he was the one giving them the opportunity to step down if they didn’t want to brave the rough weather.

Liam glanced over to meet his fellow band members’ gazes, and saw the same determination that he felt echoed in all of their features as they silently agreed to continue performing.

With a smile for the man whose name they had never been informed of, he turned back and said, “No, it’ll be absolutely fine. We’d still love to perform.”

The relieved, grateful look the bloomed on his face was more of a thank you than any of those that stuttered from the man’s lips as he hurried off to alert the stage managers and the security that they would be on in five minutes. The boys had already been prepared backstage, fitted with their ear-buds and readied with sound checks, and so the only thing left was to slam themselves into a quick staggering hug, whispering their good lucks into familiar ears, before they moved to the positions behind the stage, waiting at the foot of the narrow staircases that would lead them up top. The sound of the crowd was enormous as it vibrated through the flat surface of the platform to reach their ears.

Liam turned and smiled widely at Niall, who was standing beside him, and the blonde boy grinned back. Shaking the nervous energy out of his fingers before he clamped them tightly around the microphone in his hands, Liam took a quiet breath and quickly jogged up the steps on cue. Their introduction was called over the speakers, and then, with a speed that never failed to stun him every time they performed, they were suddenly rushing out as one group to greet their audience.

“Good evening, Manchester!”

Thunder boomed overhead as Harry spoke, yet the deep, rolling noise only seemed to add the crowd’s excitement as the five young men stepped up to the edge of the stage, arms held wide as they greeted the open festival arena. The sight that greeted them was still astounding to see, no matter how many times they laid eyes on it. Hundreds of people stretched out in a wide arc before the stage, bodies writhing and swaying in place as their voices came together in a seamless stream of deafening white noise to herald the band’s arrival.

To the sidelines, their security guards cast wary glances toward the dark purple sky that loomed above them, but they were the only ones. The rest of the gazes were turned in one direction only.

“How are you all doing?” Harry continued into the microphone, flicking the cord out of the way as he stepped forward. His grin was so bright that it could be seen from the very back of the crowd. “It’s so lovely to be back home, performing for all you guys!” The roar of the crowd surged again at his word, becoming almost a sentient being as it reverberated through the rafters above their heads and pounded against their ears. They were part of a long line of performers that had come throughout the course of this concert, and their agreement had been purely for the charity’s sake, yet it didn’t lessen the elation that rose in their chests at being in front of so, so many people doing what they loved most.

Another wave of thunder rumbled in the sky.

“We’re just gonna play a little song, if that’s alright with all of you,” Harry called, and he was answered with yet another billowing swell of noise. Beaming at his fellow band-mates, the curly-haired boy stepped back again so he could fall in line with the lads at his side, just in time for the music to start up behind them.

The crowd’s enthusiasm soared as the One Direction boys launched into song, and they chanted the words along with each chorus that came around, arms held aloft and throats cracking with the effort of their singing. Smiles were plastered on every face, though, and those grins did not slip; even when the angry storm began to crack and boil above their heads.

The thunder became a deep bass line beneath the melody, booming out an emphasis for each burst of the chorus and each high note, and it only drove the audience’s fervour to new heights as purple streaks of lightning began to flash far in the distance.

The boys continued to sing as the raging storm descended around them, but Liam cast a concerned glance back at the officials standing behind the curtains as the weather continued to worsen by the second. He had agreed with their decision back inside, thinking that the money they could raise was too big of a deal to cancel the concert over some rain. But now, watching the dark clouds roll in, Liam wasn’t entirely sure that had been a good idea; not only for themselves, as he could stand the rain a bit of thunder, but for all of the electrical equipment that was stacked up behind them. It had been pushed far back under cover and draped with dark plastic, but the increasingly heavy rain that had begun to float through the air was certainly not falling straight down as might have been convenient for them. Instead, it was sheeting sideways to saturate their faces with a layer of water and plaster their hair to their heads.

Still, he continued to sing.

Niall and Louis were the only ones that truly revelled in the change of the weather, and they embraced the oncoming storm with an eagerness that the pair often seemed to share on stage. When it became soaked with water, Niall peeled off the outer layer of his outfit and flung it out into the crowd, earning himself an approving glance from the older lad beside him, and then held his arms wide by his sides to invite the rain that seemed to aim directly for them. For his part, it took quite a long time for Louis to realise that, even as he shook his hair out wildly and tipped his face upward into the freezing onslaught, his tight, white shirt had long since been soaked into transparency against his flesh, driving new screams of frustration from the girls in the front row.

Harry’s hair soon become sopping wet, too - ruining any control that the make-up artists may have given him over it before he came out - and he was quickly forced to begin shoving the wet curls out of his eyes every other second. There was thinly suppressed laughter in his voice as he sung his solos from beneath the mop of curly hair that was hanging in his face, and the bemused look that he sent Louis beside him was half-concealed by the strands that masked his features.

Zayn was perhaps the only one who didn’t find the rain quite as amusing as the others; especially as his far more complicated hair-style began to suffer for it. He smoothed it back as best as he could as they were gradually drenched, yet even though the corners of his lips briefly turned down in annoyance, he was still grinning resignedly by the time that his gaze flicked up to meet Liam’s. He simply shrugged as he brought the microphone back up in place, tilting his head slightly as he sang so his mouth wouldn’t fill up with rainwater.

Despite his own misgivings, Liam was surprised to find that he was actually starting to enjoy the wet weather, too. He was freezing cold and his fingers were having trouble gripping the microphone as they slowly turned numb, but there was something incredibly exhilarating about performing in the rain. All of their performances had been inside before, and so he had never experienced what it felt like to have the cold water trickling down his back as they moved around the stage, or how amazing their songs sounded with the noise of the rainfall sloshing on in the background. He was even beginning to think that this might have been one of his favourite performances so far, and he smiled as he watched Louis skip over to where Harry was standing, shaking his hair out into the other boy’s face while they both had a momentary break during Zayn’s solo. Harry jerked back in surprise, but then he quickly seized Lou around the waist and pressed their dripping wet bodies together. They only just managed to remember where they were when the chorus came around and they joined the harmonies once more.

Zayn was grinning wildly as he sang, trying and failing to rid himself of the sopping jacket that had moulded itself to his arms as a very wet second skin. Niall was kicking water out in great waves toward the audience, splashing happily in the puddles that had collected on the stage and laughing as the fans all squealed in delight.

Then, the ice began to fall.

The first hailstone was no more than the size of a grain of sand, and it instantly melted on the skin of the woman upon which it landed. The next was hardly any larger than the first, and it lingered in the world for only a few seconds before it became a part of the sleet running down her arm. For several long minutes, very few people even took notice of the tiny, icy beads that clattered against their skin and collected at their feet. However, as the hail began to pick up in speed and intensity and more and more heads began to tip back to squint into the black clouds that were hurtling the ice toward them, it soon became much clearer that the storm was rapidly turning violent around them, until finally –

The edge of the stage exploded.

With an ear-splitting crash and a showering of frozen shards, a boulder of ice plummeted from the sky and buried itself in the wood of the platform beneath them, completely obliterating the space where Louis had been standing only moments ago. The boom it made upon impact was even louder than the thunder that accompanied it, and the boys’ voices died instantly with a sudden spike of electric feedback from their mikes. Large wooden splinters flung up around the point of impact, shooting out in all directions as strips of the foundations were torn to pieces, and within the space of one stuttering heartbeat, the wild, excited cheering of the crowd had turned to panicked screams. 

Louis instantly staggered back as the floor gave way beside him, heart thumping wildly with terror, and he used his hold on Harry’s shoulders to jerk him out of the way; pulling his friend to safety when the curly-haired lad seemed unlikely to do it himself. The eldest band member’s alarmed profanity echoed throughout hundreds of eardrums before he threw the microphone away from him, flinging it far enough that he would not trip on the cord as he quickly backed away. The device fizzed and died with a quiet burst of yellow sparks as it was quickly drowned in the water pooling beneath them.

Out in the arena, more shrieks picked up as another massive chunk of ice fell only moments later, landing with a thunderous crash far back in the audience. The people split around it, dispersing instantly from where it had touched down and causing a sudden mad, chaotic scramble within the crowd. 

Louis’ hands were shaking and adrenaline rushed through his veins, yet all of those reactions were drowned out by the deafening storm that had suddenly burst into glorious life above the stadium. The music had long since come to a stop, and he could hear the muffled sound of the speaker system calling for an evacuation of the arena as the announcer struggled to compete with the howling winds. His hands tightened around the body next to his own; Harry clutched him back, and together they stared in horror at the incredible size of the icicle that had literally blown a hole through the platform. He could feel Harry’s cold lips against his ringing ear as the other boy shouted “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Louis yelled back, shaken. He lifted his trembling hands to see that they were awash with a strange, thin liquid, and it took him several moments to realise that the pale pink colour had been brought on by his blood mixing with the rain that soaked him to the bone. He had a deep cut on the side of his hand, most likely from one of the wooden fragments that blew up beside him, but he decided it wasn’t overly serious. Then, his heart leapt sickeningly in his chest, and he immediately looked over to Harry’s body, his gaze intently searching for any signs of injury.

On the other side of the stage, the other three lads were pulling far back undercover. The moment the massive chunk had hit the stage; Liam seized a handful of both Niall’s sleeve and his skin, jerking him backward nearly throwing him off his feet with the force of the pull, and then reached for Zayn on his other side less than a second later. His eyes immediately flicked over to find Louis and Harry, but they were on the other side of the damage and he could not reach them in time to do anything to pull them away. His heart contracted painfully with fear, but then he saw that Louis had a hand at the back of Harry’s dripping neck, holding the younger boy close to his side, and that they were stumbling away, unharmed. There was a rare intensity to the eldest boy’s eyes as he stared at the frozen boulder in front of him - the one that could have easily claimed his life if he had not conveniently stepped aside a minute earlier - yet his expression was strangely still and blank.

Harry alone had kept a hold of his microphone rather than dropping it in shock, and Liam watched as Louis did a double take in his friend’s direction before yanking it out of his hands and tossing it aside. Though Liam could not hear what was said between them, Lou reached up to take Harry’s hands in his own, turning them over several times before he put his mouth to the younger boy’s ear. Harry shook his soaked, curly head twice, and then Louis proceeded to drag the stunned boy under his arm as he walked around the damage to join their side. Once they were within earshot, he instantly demanded, “Is everyone alright?”

Hastily and with wide eyes, they all nodded their assent, but then each one of the boys’ gazes slowly shifted to stare out at the audience. The arena was still echoing with the sounds of panic; the panicked shouts and radioed calls for an evacuation were broken only by the intermittent booming noises of thunder cracking and the smaller, nearer crashes that announced that yet more colossal hailstones had begun to fall.

“What the fuck is that?” Niall yelled shakily, as he watched the devastation unfolding before their eyes. The combined noise of the screams and the wind had combined, so that while the others could read the question in the movement of his wet lips and in the fearful cast to his eyes, they could not hear any of the actual words that were spoken.

“I don’t know!” Liam shouted back, and pulled the Irish boy closer. His eyes desperately scoured around the sidelines of the stage, but the official security that had been standing there throughout every performance had already left; though whether it was to deal with the panicked masses trying to flee to the nearest cover or to find safety themselves, he did not know. They were the only ones left standing on the stage and by the look of it, there would soon be no one else left in the entire stadium, either.

“God, look at that,” Zayn mouthed inaudibly, and they did.

As they watched, people were fleeing through any exit that they could, arms held over their head in a vain attempt to protect themselves from the icy stones that had yet to cease their terrifying descent. The massive crowd had parted in the middle, giving way to a floor that was turned white with the widespread, frozen slush that had gathered there. Though most of crowd had managed to disperse, they could still a few tiny black shadows against the frosted ground as the remaining attendees tried to run for cover.

They were so distracted by those few stragglers, so intent on watching their retreat from the storm, that each one of the lads cried out in shock as a sudden bolt of lightning struck home in the centre of the arena, carving straight through the open top of the stadium in a swift, jagged crack of light that burned itself into the insides of their eyelids as they lurched back in shock.

Niall swore again, true fear bleeding into his voice; Zayn’s face steeled into a hard mask to hide whatever emotion lurked beneath the surface of his expression; Harry’s hand dropped to grip Louis’ wrist, making the older boy glance up to his face - but only Liam’s eyes fell from the violent skies to the water pooling beneath their feet. He shifted a few times, watching the liquid slosh around beneath his saturated shoes, and then his wide, horrified gaze suddenly flew up to where the lightning had just struck.

“Guys, we have to-–”

Liam was cut off by a loud ‘Fuck!’ and a hard, violent shove to his chest. Pain blossomed in his sternum, and before he could try to find purchase on the impossibly slippery floor beneath him, his feet had slid out. The ground instantly slammed into his back, knocking the air from his lungs in one awful gust. Something sharp jabbed into his side as he fell, his elbow exploded with pain as it hit something hard and unyielding on the way down, and the weight of his landing sent a small wave of water splashing into his mouth from the puddles on the floor, making him choke and gag, but none of that mattered as he heard another bang; far louder and much, much closer than the first. He felt a fresh wave of water slosh over his legs and felt a whistling gust of air fly past before there was an absolutely deafening crunching sound, followed by a piercing screech of grinding metal that made his hands fly up of their own volition to cover his ears. Curling inward, he heard electricity crackle and hiss in the air for several agonizing seconds; then it passed, and the only sounds left were those of the rain pummelling the icy ground.

Spitting out a mouthful of dusty rain and wheezing, Liam had to first roll onto his side to ease the suffocating pinch in his ribs before he could move any further. More water coursed down his face as he lay there, dripping from his sopping wet hair, and he blinked furiously before the scene in front of him finally came into focus.

The massive speakers that had blared behind them throughout every performance had caved in around the frozen block of ice that was now buried deep inside the wreckage. The large hailstone had shattered on impact, splitting apart into hundreds of tiny, razor-sharp shards of ice that lay scattered at the base of the broken sound equipment. The destruction was astounding, given that the size of the lump of ice was far less than that of the one still thawing its way through the front of the stage; the plastic and metal of the equipment had actually been warped by the strength of the blow, bending it into a useless, gnarled twist of matter around the heart of the damage.

As his eyes moved back across the stage, Liam saw for the first time the melting chunks that littered the rest of the stage; in a trail leading to the boulder’s final destination, slivers of ice were slowly floating along the puddles that the rain had left, bobbing along the surface like miniature icebergs. The deep marks carved into the wood beneath them clearly showed how the boulder had skidded along the floor before it had crashed headlong into the sound system, and Liam didn’t even want to think of what would have happened if they had still been standing there when it hit.

The speakers were still sparking feebly though, sitting dangerously close to the roiling water - which was still rising steadily as the rain continued to spray sideways onto the stage. Again, Liam instinctively searched for some sort of dry spot as fear of electrocution once again thrust itself to the forefront of his spinning mind.

“Is everyone okay?” Zayn’s croaky voice came from somewhere to Liam’s right. “Can anyone hear me?”

Niall’s voice followed immediately after. “I’m okay.”

“Me, too,” Liam called dizzily, feeling his impossibly dry, scratchy throat protest against the shout. Then, he remembered Louis shoving him out of the way, recalled exactly where they had been standing when the ice hurtled toward them, and instantly he was forcing his frozen, unfeeling fingers to the ground through the pool of water so that he could push himself back onto his ungainly feet. “Lou? Harry? Are you guys hurt?” Water poured off of his body as he stood, splashing noisily around his ankles. His feet were completely submerged, now; the water level had risen to gently lap against the tops of his shoes.

Lightning speared through the sky again, briefly casting a blinding flash of light over the rain-soaked destruction that lay at their feet, and in the sudden illumination, Liam caught a glimpse of the other two band mates hunkered down on the other side of the damage, half-concealed behind an errant speaker box.

At Liam’s panicked shout, Louis’ arm waved high in the air, throwing more water over them both as liquid poured out of his torn sleeve.

“Stay where you are!” Liam bellowed through cupped hands, casting a wary glance toward the dim opening of the stage, which now looked to him like the gaping maw of the furious storm that lay beyond. “Take the exit on that side, and we’ll meet you round back! Don’t cross over here again! And try and keep out of the water as much as you can!”

Louis’ reply was instantaneous and very, very irritated. “Try and keep out of the water?” he barked back. “Try and keep out of the water?! We’re completely soaked, Liam! There is rain everywhere in case you hadn’t noticed, so why don’t you try and stay out of the fucking water and we’ll just see how you manage it!” A moment later, both he and Harry drew themselves up. Louis was also unsteady on his feet, pressing the palm of his hand to the side of his skull. His other was clamped tightly around Harry’s waist, and the younger boy’s fingers appeared to be digging painfully hard into Louis’ shoulder as he shivered uncontrollably. Even with the distance between them, Liam could see that Harry’s lips were beginning to turn blue with the cold and, despite the frustration in Louis’ tone and the grimace on his face; the older boy still began chafing his hand along Harry’s arm in an effort to warm him up.

“Can we please just get out of here now?!” Zayn demanded loudly and suddenly, jerking a trembling thumb toward the water-logged stairway before he stuffed his hands into his armpits to keep them warm.

Liam was more than happy to agree with that suggestion, but he waited until he saw Louis turning Harry toward their side-exit, as well. For the first time, he noticed that Harry was limping slightly as he leant into Louis’ embrace. Then, Liam turned and placed a hand on both Niall and Zayn’s shoulders, and together they moved toward the exit.

He didn’t see the bolt of lightning the last time, the one time he needed to; he only heard the sizzle of it behind his ears and felt his hair stand on end before his body seized up, his muscles spasming uncontrollably as painful jolts ran up and down his spine. His vision flashed a bright, blinding white, and then abruptly sputtered to black as the swirling water rose up to drown him.