Handpicked Fanfics (Reclist)

Keep the Car Running (Zarry)

Keep the Car Running by writeivywrite

Posted on AO3 (I also found it on Wattpad recently)

Pairing: Zarry

Rating: Explicit

Chapters: 10

Word Count: 73,724

Summary: AU where Harry's a male escort and Zayn's a professional footballer written for the prompt 'anything involving switching'

~~~

This fic is one of those that I would honestly describe as beautiful, there is really no other word for it.

Going into this I was extremely nervous, because the tags were very intimidating, they do include suicide and one literally says "the end will make you want to yell at me" but without spoiling it, I'll just say that what I thought would happen did not and the suicide bit played a much smaller role in the story than I previously assumed it would.

As the summary says Harry is an escort and he tells himself he's just doing it until he gets enough money to go to Paris and write a book, but he's sort of stuck. Then he meets Zayn and god - I love their relationship with each other like it's a bit toxic but only because Harry is stubborn and Zayn is in the closet so it's very angry and tense but there are real feelings underneath all of that.

I adored how this was written as well. There were a lot of flashbacks which were woven into the story wonderfully and you slowly got to see more of Harry's character as you went along. At first you didn't really understand some of his reactions and why he was so angry but then it all tied together and it was so well done in my opinion.

And I'm not really sure how to explain this correctly but this was one of those books where I didn't think of Harry and Zayn as themselves. The names gave me a reference to how they looked, but their personalities were so unique to me that I didn't see them as real life Harry and Zayn, which usually I'm not super fond of, but it worked spectacularly here if that makes sense and let me get into the story more than if they had written Harry and Zayn more true to themselves.

My only complaint is that it was two chapters too long. They should have stopped at chapter eight, because that ending was so perfect and I really didn't need anything else, but they dragged it out a bit longer which I thought was unnecessary and sort of took away from the story a bit. It wasn't awful or anything it just changed the tone for me at least and left me with a different feeling than before.

Honestly though this was an amazing read. It made me tear up quite a few times and the author has a wonderful writing style so I give this a 9/10.

Link: http://archiveofourown.org/works/902215/chapters/1744566