Chapter Text
Louis
“You know, this wouldn’t‘ve happened if you had just agreed to live with us, mate.”
Louis sighs, exhaling a long breath of smoke through his lips as he lazily rolls his head to look over at Liam. The “good boy” of their friend group barely contains his shudder as the smokey air wafts in his direction. How Liam’s still so sensitive to it after months of dating Zayn is beyond Louis’ comprehension.
“You know I couldn’t swing it. And there was no way I’d share a room with Niall again,” Louis replies easily, eyes skirting over to where the blonde is currently taking a too big bite of a burger.
Niall chews with an incredulous look on his face, as if to say, what the fuck, mate?
“We could hear your violent masturbation through the fucking walls when we went on holiday last year,” Louis explains, a smirk on his lips when Niall flips him off, the Irishman’s ears tinting red. They both know that he’s not actually embarrassed. And the whole crew has teased him plenty about his little solo escapade.
“Hey! It was a long, lonely week. And you fuckers were busy being all loved up!” Niall defends, arms up in surrender.
Louis rolls his eyes fondly, shifting his attention back to Liam who is watching Zayn get more drinks from the bar with the most golden-retriever-like expression possible on a human man. Six months of this and you’d think Louis was used to it already, but he still finds the couple absolutely nauseating. “Anyways, Payno, I’m sure it’ll be fine. He’s just a first year student, not a bloody child. How bad could it be?”
“Uh… It could be terrible,” Zayn answers, slipping into his seat at the picnic table beside his boyfriend. His arm winds easily around Liam’s waist. Louis holds himself back from rolling his eyes. He’s happy for his best friends, really, but the PDA the two insist on shoving down everyone’s throats is sickening. Louis pointedly ignores the fact that he never used to even notice how touchy the two were when he had an arm around his own waist.
“I’m sure it will be fine,” Niall says breezily. “Louis will show the guy around. Plus, maybe he’ll be fun!” He pauses, taking a long sip of his fresh, cold beer. “Hey! Maybe he’ll even play footie! We need another member for the team.”
Louis gives him a small, tight-lipped smile. “Sure, we’ll see tomorrow, I guess. We move in at 10.”
“Do you need help moving your shit?”
“Nah, I’ll be fine,” Louis replies. His jaw clenches as he thinks about moving into his dorm last year. More specifically, who helped him move in last year. “I don’t have a lot of stuff. It’s all in the back of my car right now.”
Zayn nods his head, clocking the shift in Louis’ body language. “Lou, you know you can talk about it, right? It’s only been a few weeks...”
“No,” Louis says quickly, pressing his cigarette to his lips. He lets the nicotine wash over him, eyes focusing intently on the way the leaves flutter in the breeze on one of the trees nearby. “I’m fine, Zayn.”
Zayn sighs, and Louis knows he’s giving Liam a knowing look. He knows that Niall is rolling his eyes dramatically at him as well, all three keyed into the fact that he’s lying through his teeth. But he doesn’t care. He is fine. Mostly. Maybe. Some days. Whatever.
Regardless, he has no desire to discuss it now, the day before their third and final year at uni is set to start, when they have a pitcher of beer collecting condensation at their table outside of their favorite pub. He’s not about to be the buzz kill; that’s just not who he is. He’s Louis “the Tommo” Tomlinson, life of the party, after all.
“How ‘bout a round of shots, lads?”
~~~
In hindsight, three rounds of shots after a few pitchers of beer was perhaps not Louis’ best idea.
At least the old saying “beer before liquor, never been sicker” is a lie.
Still, he wakes up with a splitting headache, the late summer Manchester sun beaming through the windows of his friends’ new flat and hitting him right on the face. He can tell it’s early, way too early to be awake, by the fact that the sun isn’t even halfway into the sky yet. Why didn’t they think to close the blinds last night?
He groans, his eyes squeezing shut as he blindly tries to feel on the coffee table for water and ibuprofen. It’s in vain, of course it is, because all four of them had been far too plastered to remember to set out anything to help ease their transition back into functional human beings the next morning. He never had to remember setting out the tablets the night before, it was always—
Louis sighs, turning over to ignore where he knows those thoughts are going. He buries his head deeper into his pillow, turning to face the back of the couch, and tries to fall back asleep.
~~~
Waking up a few hours later is, unfortunately, not much better.
He’s ripped out of his dreamless sleep as soon as he hears a bedroom door squeak open on old hinges. Louis listens to socked feet pad into the bathroom, hears someone piss and flush the toilet, the water running as they wash their hands. He desperately wishes he were a heavier sleeper, that he could fall back asleep and ignore reality for a few more hours at least.
Louis keeps still as he notices the footsteps come closer, the person walking into the living room where he’s curled up on the couch. He evens out his breathing, not quite ready to face the day yet, but he can’t help but let the corners of his mouth lift up just slightly when he hears someone set what sounds suspiciously like a glass of water and bottle of medication down on the table behind him.
“I saw that,” Zayn whispers fondly. He gently drags his fingers through Louis’ fringe, leaning against the armrest of the couch. “Morning, Lou.”
Louis blinks his eyes open, the right side of his lips still quirked up as he looks at his friend. “Morning, mate.”
Zayn reaches out for the glass and two tablets as he waits for Louis to sit up. When he finally does, not without some dramatic groans, he takes the medication with a grateful smile, washing it down with water. He chugs the rest of the glass before setting his head against the back of the couch.
“What time s’it?”
“Half ten,” Zayn replies, patting his shoulder before he moves to the kitchen. The flat is nothing flashy – they’re all uni students, after all – but it’s nice enough considering. The open floor plan grants Louis access to see his friend grab two boxes of cereal from the cupboard – Coco Pops and Cheerios.
Louis groans again, raking a hand through his messy fringe. “I’m already late.”
“You are.” Zayn says it simply. Zayn’s always been more attuned to Louis’ schedule than Louis was himself, ever since they were kids. “Have some breakfast, then you can head over. If you try to move in on an empty stomach, you’ll probably scare your poor first-year roommate when you throw up before even saying a proper hello.”
He has a point, Louis figures, accepting the bowl of Coco Pops from his comfortable spot on the couch. “Thanks, love.”
Zayn gives him a wink then sits down on the very old leather couch beside him, kicking his feet up onto the dilapidated coffee table in front of them. “You nervous?”
“For what?”
“To meet the kid. What if he’s… weird? Or homophobic? What if he hates tea?”
Louis rolls his eyes. “Z, he’s not going to hate tea .”
“What if he takes his tea with three sugars?”
Louis shudders at the thought, but continues anyway. “I’m not nervous. I’m sure he’ll be fine. Besides, it’s only one year. Then we’ll have graduated, I’ll have a job doing… something… and you’ll be a professional tattoo artist ready to ink me for free.”
“Ha, you wish.” Zayn gently knocks their shoulders together. “You say that like you don’t already owe me like forty quid. And as if I haven’t been feeding your arse for years.”
“Yeah, whatever, love. You just wish you could have my arse.”
Zayn smiles at him fondly and rolls his eyes. “Liam’s arse is perfectly fine.”
“My arse is what?” Liam mumbles, stumbling in from his shared room with Zayn off to the left of the flat. His hair is haphazardly sticking up in every direction around his head, his sweatpants a bit tight and Louis guesses that they probably belong to Zayn.
“Just saying I love your arse, babe,” Zayn explains. Louis makes a gagging noise. “Oh piss off, Lou. Just because you’re sad doesn’t mean we can’t be happy.”
“You two are gross,” Louis replies simply, standing up from the couch. Liam falls into the spot he previously occupied, immediately curling around his boyfriend. Somehow he gets even more puppy-like when hungover and sleepy. Zayn feeds him a spoonful of cereal and Louis makes another gagging sound before turning to set his own empty bowl in the sink. When he turns back around to face the living room, the two lovebirds are snogging on the couch, Liam’s hand snaking its way under Zayn’s shirt already. Gross .
“Well, I’m going to head out,” Louis says pointedly. He’s ignored by his friends, though that is not much of a surprise. He’s used to them being preoccupied with each other.
He picks his hoodie up off the floor, pulling it on and leaving it unzipped. He glances down at his clothes now, sighing inwardly. He’s still dressed in the same clothes he wore last night – a comfortable pair of black skinny jeans, an old black Black Sabbath tee he found in a charity shop a few years ago. It’s his usual clothes, but somehow they feel wrong for moving in, for making a first impression. It’s not even necessarily the outfit that’s the problem, more just the fact that they’re a bit rumpled, probably smell, and have clearly been worn before. He could borrow clothes from Zayn or Liam, he figures, but shrugs the thought away. Who cares what he looks like? It’s the first day. And his new roommate will have to get used to seeing him hungover anyways.
“Call us later and tell us about the first-year!”
Louis looks back as he shoves his feet into his Vans, smiling at Liam. “Yeah, alright, mate. I will.”
The smile doesn’t leave his lips after he shuts the door behind him. Liam was his roommate last year. He and Zayn got together after a few months of thinking that they were fucking each other in secret but in reality being incredibly obvious about it. Louis also found Zayn’s clothes around their dorm on more than one occasion, further giving them away. Luckily, Liam fit into their crew seamlessly, acting somehow as both the mother of the group, and complementing Zayn in ways Louis never knew possible. Louis loves them both, even if they’re utterly disgusting most of the time.
Getting into his car is easy enough, but he groans as he starts it, his stomach twisting as the car rattles to life. As much as he loves Zayn, Coco Pops are not proper hangover food. So, he pulls into the nearest McDonald’s drive through, ordering himself a sausage egg McMuffin, a large Sprite, and three orders of hash browns. He figures that if he’s going to be this late, he might as well come with food.
He eats as he drives the few miles to campus, sighing to himself when he notices the parking lot in front of his building is nearly full. He luckily snags one of the last spots, parking his beat-up silver 2001 Ford Focus right at the end of the lot. It’ll be a long walk to schlep all of his shit inside, but that’s what he gets for arriving over an hour late.
Louis tosses the empty wrappers of his breakfast into the passenger seat then gets out of the car. He takes a second to stretch, his back cracking after spending the night on his friends’ shitty sofa. Then, he walks around to the trunk, popping it, and slinging a backpack over his shoulders. He grabs two boxes in his hands, clutching his new roommate’s hash browns in his fist before heading towards the looming building in front of him.
It’s loud as soon as he steps inside, catching the lift with a few other students and a couple of their parents. He smiles to himself, noticing the nervous first years, the bored second years. The building is one of the nicer ones on campus, a mix of students from all years residing there. Most older students opted to live off campus, as Liam, Zayn, and Niall, but some – like Louis – still stayed in a dorm, whether for financial reasons or otherwise.
Louis steps out on the second floor, walking down to the end of the hall where he finds the door with an eight. The door’s unlocked, so he takes a deep breath before pushing it open with his hip.
What he sees when he sets his boxes down is a shock, to say the least.
The room is furnished as expected, two twin beds, two desks, two dressers all in the same boring color of wood. The walls are painted a basic off-white colour, large windows overlooking the grassy square behind the building. To the left is a closed door leading to the bathroom, which he knows will be just as standard as everything else about the room.
That’s not what surprises him.
What surprises him is that half of the room looks like one of his younger sisters may have decorated it.
The bed to the left is dressed in a white duvet with a black floral pattern, light pink sheets peeking out from beneath it, complemented by darker pink decorative throw pillows. There are a few stuffed animals sitting against them – a unicorn pillow pet, a big squishy blue fish looking thing, and what looks like a rainbow Build a Bear? The bed has plenty of blankets on the end of it as well, two pink ones, a purple one, and a white one, all fluffy and soft looking. On the desk at the foot of the bed is a flamingo lamp with a pink shade, what looks like a little bag of nail polish off to one side, a few pastel coloured notebooks, and a cup holder of colorful pens.
Louis blinks, stunned into shock as the door to the en suite opens.
“Oh, hey! You must be Louis!”
The boy looks young, with a clear baby face though Louis knows he had to be at least eighteen. He has wild chocolate brown curls, pulled away from his face with a patterned scarf, and his large green eyes have a hint of nervousness in them. He shuffles a bit under Louis’ gaze, playing with the hem of the oversized lilac sweater he was wearing, bringing Louis’ attention to his hands. His nails were painted. A subtle metallic colour, but still noticeable.
“Hey,” Louis says cautiously, stiff. He’s never met anyone like him before. “Yeah, I’m Louis. You must be-“
“Harry!” The boy supplies a shy smile on his pink pouty lips. They’re shiny, almost as if he had put on a bit of lip gloss. Louis tries not to stare.
Instead, Louis nods, trying his best to give the boy - Harry - a comforting smile. “Nice to meet you, love. Welcome to the University of Manchester.” Harry relaxes slightly, his shoulders less tense, but he doesn’t move from his place in the doorway of their bathroom. “I uh, I brought breakfast. If you’re hungry.” He holds up the bag. “Sorry I’m late.”
Harry glances to the bag Louis holds up, the grease evident and staining the paper, and his nose scrunches up in the most endearing way possible. “Uh, no thanks.”
Louis frowns. “You don’t like Mackies?”
“Uh, not really,” Harry replies. “Sorry. Good hangover food though, I guess.”
Louis nods, wondering if his hangover is really that obvious. He should have splashed his face with water before he left the boys’ flat. “Yeah,” he mumbles. “I’m going to go get the rest of my stuff.”
He slips out the door before Harry can reply, taking a deep breath. Harry is in no way what he was expecting.
Louis pulls out his mobile to phone the other boys; they’ll never guess the kind of guy his first year turned out to be.