#dfmo

The Monday after you stopped talking to each other, you found out that you aced one of your midterms. It was one that Harry had helped you study for—he stayed up until four in the morning with you the night before you had to write it until you were absolutely positive that you were ready. He made cue cards with you and helped you rehearse them, and he even sat in your room and tried writing you a song about the anatomy of the human brain until one of your roommates came in and threatened to punch him in the throat if he didn’t quiet down. Even then he continued to sing the silly song that he’d written under his breath as you finished the cue cards, and afterwards he stayed up to test you on them. All you wanted to do that entire day was send him a simple text, telling him how well you’d done thanks to his help. But things had changed.

On Tuesday, you found out that the job that you had applied and were interviewed for weeks prior wasn’t going to be offering you the position. It was an interview for an internship at a radio station, something that you’d wanted to get into for the longest time, and you’d thought that this was your chance. Harry sat on your bed for almost half an hour as you decided what to wear to it, and he didn’t even complain once. And you had to admit, when you found out that you weren’t successful all you wanted was to curl into his bed and watch a movie with him and forget about it all.

You didn’t miss Harry, the guy that you kissed one drunken night after the bar. You missed your best friend.

But things weren’t that simple anymore.

Wednesday night, you decided to get an early sleep. You had a lot of things that you wanted to get done the next day, and you weren’t up for spending the night in your living room watching reruns America’s Next Top Model with your roommates and drinking wine until you were dangerously tipsy.

“Come on, (Y/N), it’s our tradition!” Krissa complained, leaning against the frame of the bathroom door as you brushed your hair.

“Kris, it’s only one night. You guys will be fine without me,” you sighed, running the brush through your locks as you looked at her in the mirror.

“But you’ve been sulking all weeeeeeek!”

“I am not sulking,” you grumbled, setting the hairbrush down on the counter as your brows furrowed. You knew that you were, and you knew that you hadn’t spent as much time around as you usually did, but you were stubborn and it was getting the best of you at the moment.

“You can’t be upset about Harry forever. Come on…just join us for like, one hour. One show, that’s not even an hour, that’s forty minutes. Maybe it’ll make you feel better! We ordered pizza, no pineapple this time,” she announced in a sing-sonny voice. You hated pineapple, and you were the only one who lived in your apartment that acknowledged the atrocity of it. Her confession made you smile, and you reluctantly gave in.

Twenty minutes later you were snuggled underneath a fuzzy white blanket, sipping on some wine and watching TV. Your roommates were all chattering happily about their favorites and who they thought would win the initial challenge of the episode, and you had to admit that you were enjoying yourself. You had even genuinely laughed a few times, and it had been a while since you could say that truthfully.

You were reaching for your third slice of pizza when there was a knock at the door.

“Got it,” Paige announced before hopping off of her spot on the ground in front of the couch. You hardly noticed that somebody had knocked, and you were still enthralled by the hairdo that was on the screen when you heard the commotion.

“No! No! Absolutely not, you need to leave, you need to take him away—”

“(Y/N)? Is—Is she home?”

Your heart stopped beating at the sound of Harry’s slurred speech at the door. You immediately felt your cheeks heat up with nerves and you clutched at your wine glass like it was your only protection, and even though you felt everyone’s eyes on you, you willed yourself to keep looking at the TV screen as you listened to what was happening.

“She doesn’t want to talk to you, Harry. You really hurt her feelings and she needs time, okay?”

“Let’s go, lad, I told ya you gotta give’er some time…” You heard Niall’s voice coming from the hallway.

“No, I need to…fuck, I’m beggin’ yeh, I need to talk to her, I need to make it all okay,” he protested, and you could tell simply by hearing him that he was on the verge of tears, drunk, and exhausted all at the same time.

“You can talk to her another day!” You heard Paige raise her voice slightly, and you could tell that she was beginning to lose her patience. She was a firecracker, and she was more protective of you than she let on.

“Harry, come on buddy, let’s go back upstairs.”

“Wait, wait, wait, waitaminute,” his words slurred, and you closed your eyes and leaned your forehead against the rim of your glass for a moment. Nobody was paying attention to the TV anymore, and you felt one of your roommates rub your back gently, trying to soothe you. “Can you jus’…can yeh please tell’er that I came, an’ that I miss her...”

At that point he began to sniffle, and you could tell that Niall was saying something to him quietly; though you could tell that he was trying to calm Harry down, you couldn’t make out the words that he was saying.

Fuck it.

“(Y/N), no!” Krissa protested as you began to push your blanket off of your frame and stand up off of the couch. “What are you doing?”

“I don’t know,” you answered gruffly, and you wrapped yourself around your blanket like a caterpillar in a caccoon before walking over to the front door. You could still hear Niall speaking lowly when you walked around the corner. Paige’s eyes widened when she saw you, and you could tell that she was about to protest as well.

“It’s okay,” you said softly, and as soon as you spoke Harry’s face snapped upwards from its position looking down at the ground. You couldn’t even look at him without your heart hurting; his eyes were puffy and glossed over from the alcohol, and his hair was an absolute mess. It looked like he hadn’t slept in days...hell, he looked worse than you did.

“Are you sure, (Y/N)? I can take’im home, you don’ hafta-”

“It’s fine, I promise,” you interrupted, and you gave Paige a look that let her know you would be taking over. She gave you a look of disapproval, but ultimately walked away and left the three of you alone.

“(Y/N)...” Harry spoke for the first time since you’d shown your face, and the way he said your name was as if he’d been drowning and had finally caught his breath after gasping for air for so long.

“Hi, Harry,” you said quietly. “I’ll call you if anything happens, Niall...thank you for not letting him get into trouble.”

“You let me know if ya need me,” he said hesitantly, giving Harry a once-over. “You behave, yeah?”

In any other scenario it would be a tad amusing to see Niall father Harry in the state that he was in, but there was nothing remotely funny about what was happening.

“Thanks, Niall,” Harry murmured drunkenly, his gaze never leaving your features the entire time. Niall gave you a small smile of encouragement before heading back down the hallway towards the elevator, and you turned around and began to walk to your room, knowing that Harry would follow.

You waited until he stepped into your bedroom to shut the door behind you, pointing at the bed.

“Sit,” You told him, not looking at his features or in his direction to see what his reaction was. You opened your closet and stood up on your toes to grab the spare comforter that you had for when he slept over in your room many times before, and you began to make up the couch that was on the opposite wall of my bed.

“You don’ have to do tha’,” he said quietly, as if he was a child being scolded. You exhaled a soft huff at this statement, spreading the blanket out across the couch before speaking.

“Well, seeing that you’ve taken it upon yourself to drunkenly harrass poor Niall and my roommates, I think I do,” You retorted. As soon as you did you felt guilty for being so mean; you knew that Harry would never harrass anybody, not even in a drunken state. He was probably more harmless while drunk than he was sober. The truth was, you weren’t angry with Harry in particular. Not anymore. You were angry with the entire situation that you two were put in, and you were angry with yourself for letting everything get to this point.

You were angry that you had let that night happen all those weeks ago.

“m’sorry,” he whispered sadly, and you froze in your place at the tortured sound of his voice. “Yeh can’t even look at me now, can yeh?”

You pursed your lips and sighed, slowly turning around to look at his features. He was looking down at the ground, his eyes still red and puffy and threatening to spill new tears that had formed in the past few moments, probably in response to your words. It made you feel like shit, even more than you already did.

“This isn’t fair, Harry,” you spoke in a softer tone, kneeling down in front of him. He lifted his eyes to meet yours, and you set a hand on his knee to steady yourself. “You can’t do this to me...you can’t show up drunk at my apartment trying to talk to me. I...I know you’re hurt, but so am I, and I’m keeping it together. I’m keeping it together, H, and you’re making that really hard for me to do right now...”

Harry looked at you for a long time. When you sunk your teeth into your lower lip as it threatened to quiver with sadness his brows knit together in thought, and you could tell that his eyes were beginning to droop.

“Okay,” he whispered. “m’sorry, (Y/N).”

“It’s okay,” you whispered raspily, standing up. “Now go to sleep.”

You waited for him to stand up and walk over to the couch. He slipped off his shoes, but other than that he slept fully clothed, his head facing the same way as yours was. You excused yourself to go brush your teeth in the bathroom, avoiding your roommates as you did so. You really didn’t want a lecture from them right now, not when you were still trying to decide what the right thing to do was.

When you returned to your bed you looked at Harry’s figure, and from what you could tell he was sound asleep. Regardless of the circumstances, it made you smile a little bit to see that he could still fall asleep practically on demand, and that it was something that at least hadn’t quite changed entirely. You shut off the bedroom lights and slipped into your own bed when you heard his voice again.

“(Y/N)?”

“Yeah?”

“If I’m hurt, an’ you’re hurt, why can’t we be together an’ both not be hurt anymo’?”

You shut your eyes and exhaled an inaudible sigh, almost taken aback by his words.

It was a simple question, and the answer was oh-so complex.

And you couldn’t tell if that was the way it had to be, or if it’s the way you made it out to be in your head.

Into the middle of the night you heard a gagging noise coming from the bathroom across the hall, and when you opened your eyes to see that Harry was gone, you knew that it was him.

You slipped out of bed hurriedly, as best you could while you were still drowsy from sleep, and you opened your bedroom door to the lights on in the hallway and the bathroom door open just a crack. And surely, when you opened the door to peer in, you saw your best friend kneeling on the ground in front of the toilet.

“Oh, Harry...” you sighed, immediately kneeling down beside him and running your hand up and down his back as soothingly as you could manage. He only replied with a groan before expelling more of the contents of his stomach into the toilet, followed by a small whimper. “How much did you have to drink?”

Harry could out-drink you any day, which meant that he had to have had a lot to get to this state.

“I dunno anymo’...” he admitted sheepishly, his lids drooping softly as he leaned down to rest his forehead against the rim of the toilet. You ran your fingers through his cropped locks of hair and brushed your fingertips against his scalp in an attempt to keep him calm, and once you were sure that he wasn’t going to throw up again soon you filled up a cup of water from the tap in the bathroom and handed it to him.

He sat back onto his bum and began drinking it slowly, his face a tad pale and his hands still shaky from all the energy that his body had used to rid himself of the excess alcohol contents in his system.

“Why’re yeh bein’ so nice to me?” He said drowsily, this time more because of the lack of rest than the drunkenness. You sat down beside him and looked at the tile underneath your feet, thinking for a long time.

“Because you’re not a bad guy, Harry,” you admitted, maybe more to yourself than to him. You had been so hurt that perhaps in the past few weeks you’d lost sight of that. “You’re actually a rather good one.”

He hummed contently with this answer, and he took another sip of his water before leaning his head against the wall and closing his eyes.

You spent a little longer guiding and encouraging him back to your bedroom, tucking him in when he settled in on the couch. Within seconds he was asleep again, and you went back to your place in your bed.

The next morning when your alarm went off for your 8:30 class, Harry slept right through it. You slipped out of bed and got yourself dressed and ready mostly in the bathroom so that he could rest soundly, and after leaving a glass of water on your bedside table for him and some aspirin, you were out of the apartment before he even noticed that you had left the room. He knew your class schedule better than you did, so you were certain that he would know where you had run off to so early.

Throughout class you couldn’t focus, though, because all you could think about was what had happened last night, and what had happened the entire last couple of weeks.

You didn’t regret standing up to him that night you argued, because you said a lot of things that you needed to say and that he needed to hear. He had done something that wasn’t right by you and he didn’t treat you the way that you deserved.

But maybe beyond that, you built him up to be more of a bad guy than he actually was, because YOU were afraid.

The two of you had opened Pandora’s box. You’d gone there, to that place that you thought you never would, and you couldn’t undo that. Everything had changed after that and absolutely spun out of control, and that was scary. Fuck, it was terrifying for you because you didn’t know how much Harry Edward Styles meant to you until he wasn’t in your life in the same capacity anymore.

And if that happened after just being friends, imagine what would happen if you two fell in love? What would it be like if something went wrong then?

Would you be able to handle that kind of pain?

After your class you decided to take a seat in the quad and read over the notes that you had for your next class. You hadn’t been paying attention much the week before, and you didn’t want to go into your biopsychology class without having any clue as to what you should know.

You were five pages in when you saw him.

He looked as if he’d showered no more than half an hour previous, and you could tell that he was in a much better state than last night. The minute he saw you across the quad his speed doubled, and he practically jogged over to where you were sitting.

“Harry, what are you doing here? You don’t have class today,” you questioned as soon as he was close enough, folding the corner of your textbook page over so that you could shut it and set it in your lap.

“I had to find you,” he explained, running his hands through his hair nervously as he rocked his weight from one foot to the other. “I know you have class, but this is important.”

“Harry...”

“Just listen, (Y/N)! Shut your mouth for two seconds an’ listen to me...please,” he added, his eyes pleading with you. You pursed your lips and nodded your head, your eyes wide a bit in response to how passionate he seemed about speaking to you in that moment.

He began to pace in front of you, his hands resting at the top of his head. He did this for a while, and you knew that he was gathering his thoughts, so you waited patiently for him to speak.

“I was fine,” he started, turning to look at me as his hands lowered to his sides. “I was fine before I kissed you. Before we spent that night together. I was fine, I was happy an’ I was so so so blissfully oblivious to how head over heels in flipping love I am with you.”

Your lips parted a tad in response to his statement. He said it so plainly, as if it was a fact as common as how the sun rises in the morning and sets at night, and it shook you to your very core.

“Tha’s right. I’m in love with you. God, I’m so in love with you that after we spent that night together I was fuckin’ terrified of doing somethin’ to fuck it up. Because I never last in relationships, because it’s never worked out with any other girl that I’ve been with an’ I’ve always just believed that it’s my fault, that there’s somethin’ wrong with me but you know what? That was never a problem because even if it didn’t work out with my girlfriends, at least I had you, (Y/N)! At least I had my best friend! Because with you, as long as I have you, everything else would be okay. The world could be collapsing and I would walk through the rubble for days on end if it meant I got to hold your hand at the finish.”

“Harry...”

“Shut up, I’m not done,” he scolded, setting his hands on his hips in frustration. “You are the most stubborn person I’ve met. Did you know that? Here I am, declarin’ my love for you, an’ you are so cutely neurotic that you can’t even just sit and listen to it.”

You couldn’t help but smile at that statement, but you kept quiet, showing him that you would listen starting then.

“I haven’t been able to get yeh out o’ my head for days,” he admitted quietly, squatting so he could kneel in front of you and put his hands on your thighs. “I can’t stop thinking about yeh...and I was afraid. You were right. I was scared of what could happen if this went wrong, but you were afraid too, (Y/N). Because I didn’t fight for yeh...and fuck, I should have, I know I should have, but you didn’t fight for me either.”

“But that’s okay,” he explained with a smile on his face, and I could tell that he was getting to the good part. “That’s okay, (Y/N), because we’re not perfect. Neither of us are...I know yeh too well to say that you’re a perfect human being, but I know that we are perfect for each other. Because we drive each other insane, because I know that no matter how much I piss you off, at the end of the day you’ll be there to take care of me when I’m on my knees puking my guts out in the toilet...”

You laughed at that, and you could feel the tears forming behind your eyes at the intensity of his words, and at the honesty of it all.

In the end, maybe that’s all you’d really wanted. For him to fight for you.

“We’re meant to be, (Y/N). And I know that fo’ sure. I don’t know if I believe in a God, or in religion, hell, I don’t even know if I believe that the Earth is round or that the Sun exists...but I’m damn sure of the fact that you an’ I were meant for each other. And I’d be a fuckin’ idiot if I let that go without going down swinging first.”

“Are you done?” You asked with a small smile.

“I...yeah. Yeah, I’m done,” he exhaled, eyes piercingly attached to yours as he waited for your response.

“You’re in love with me, eh?” You said almost cheekily, standing up off of where you were sitting so that you could stand in front of him properly.

“Yes,” he confirmed, his chest rising up and down with every breath that he took. This fingertips were shaking, which was something that only happened when he was nervous, and he looked like he was about to pass out.

You closed the distance between the two of you and your hands immediately found their place in his hair, fingertips winding around his soft locks playfully as your lips molded to his. He froze at first, as if surprised at your reaction, but within seconds his hands found their rightful place on your hips which he used to pull you closer, his arms slipping around your frame in a tight hug.

“Damn, I guess that means we’re stuck together,” you exhaled breathlessly after breaking away from his mouth, flashing him an elated grin. “Because I’m in love with you, too.”

He pulled you closer as he kissed you again, and again, right there in the middle of the quad where everyone could see.

But you didn’t mind. He took your breath away, and you could certainly get used to that.

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