Cross-legged on the ground, Harry craned his head back to study the concrete ceiling. The whole room was sparse, bleak light trickling in through small windows. A tired fan was whirring in one corner, barely enough to stir the sluggish summer air, air conditioning losing to the combined body heat of so, so many contestants scattered around the space. Distantly, a little distorted, Harry caught snatches of someone's audition filtering through.
Somehow, he had always imagined the backstage area of a popular TV show to look a tad more... glamorous. Even if it was for the pre-recorded segment.
He glanced over when someone dropped to the ground next to him—Niall, expression disgruntled. That implied his food quest had been inconclusive.
"Fucking
…show more content…
It was dirty, but he'd seen worse. If he wanted to be lying down, a little dirt wasn't going to stop him, now was it? He'd spent a night on the floor of a Colombian train station; this was sterile in comparison.
Niall wasn't finished. "And why's everyone so fucking uptight? Could barely string two words together, most people I talked to."
"I think it's just nerves," Harry told him comfortably.
"It's just some show. Not, like, an audience with the Queen."
"Some people weren't signed up as a joke," Harry
…show more content…
I could still get a good one in." Harry shifted to pillow his head on Niall's thigh. Honestly, for all that he'd been a mix of incredulous and amused at Niall's out-of-the-blue announcement that they were going to audition for The X Factor, he didn't quite get the big deal. Sure, it was a laugh, but it didn't seem like a hardship to show up some place with Niall and Niall's guitar to sing a few tunes, not when busking had got them through the European and American sections of their world trip. They’d performed together so many times in so many places that the mass auditions had been a piece of cake. This, now—going up in front of the judges and a studio audience—might be a little more pressure than they’d faced so far but... Well. It was still just music, was it? Harry and Niall and Niall's guitar. It was fun, and a few faces more didn’t make much of a difference. The potential of millions of viewers at home was both abstract and wouldn’t matter unless they were to get much, much further in the competition, so Harry could easily block it