The first time they meet, they hate each other. Or, Harry hates Niall. The second time they meet, Niall doesn't remember Harry. He says he did. The third time they meet, they become friends. They're friends for a long time. And then they're not. And then they fall in love.

Or a When Harry Met Sally au

Harry's spent the majority of his life searching for his soul mate; the other half of his rose gold heart. When he's 19, he stops - stops hoping and wishing and searching – because maybe his mother is wrong. And then he meets a boy – bright blond hair, beautiful blue eyes, brilliant smile – and it feels like he's known this boy, this stranger, his whole life.

Niall falls in love five times before he finds the one, and Harry? Well he's been there all along.

Or the one where Harry and Niall are best friends who fall in love.

“I swore that I would never go back and I would never do this again, but this is my sixth consecutive year here.” Louis sighs wistfully into the receiver in a voice more sincere than Harry has heard from him yet. “Umpqua is a really great place, believe it or not. Great things can happen out here, Harry, just give it a chance. Don’t lock yourself away all summer.”

(Harry falls in love too easily, Niall’s perpetually sunburned, Louis isn’t a stickler for rules, and Liam makes sure they don’t die.)

The thing is, it’s entirely possible to want to lick every square inch of your best friend and touch his arse as much as you want to touch his face, to want to sleep beside him and wake up with him and make him laugh till he cries, and not want to have sex with him. Harry knows this intimately.

“Alive.” Niall says one night when they’re laying in bed and watching a bird documentary on TV.

Harry turns around in confusion to look at Niall, and raises an eyebrow at the now chuckling lad.

“You wrote down that fictional characters are people we want to be, but are too afraid to be or just aren’t.”

“Yeah.” Harry breathes out, wants to reach out and touch Niall’s face, which looks calm under the light of the TV, realizes he isn't even a tad bit mad of the fact that Niall was peering into Harry's book while he was writing in it, doesn't mind if he did it later on either.

“If I were to write a fictional character, I’d want them to feel alive.”