A Piece of His Heart / larry uni AU

chapter ten

"Would you—no. Go left, Lou, left."

"I am. This is left, right?"

"No, go left. Not my left, your left."

"My left?"

"Right."

"Right?"

"No, left. But left is right, not right."

Louis drops the entire bed.

Harry's laughter beats him to it, whatever it is—blubbering, shrieking, wallowing in despair, etcetera—and, "Oh my god, Lou," Harry doubles over and kicks the brass forlornly, "This was not supposed to be this hard."

In light of their inevitable demise, Louis didn't think it would be either. Don't get him wrong—Louis was never top-class in geometry. Not even close. He was more of a daydreamer than a bookworm, but if he remembers anything at all, it was that bigger rectangles do not fit in smaller rectangles.

He knew it last night. He knew it this morning. He knew it when Harry volunteered himself and Louis to singlehandedly lug Harry's bed down and out of East—in short, there was absolutely, one hundred present, a fraction of Louis' mind that sensed a potential impasse.

But he'd been lost in Harry's dimples again.

Silly. Fool. Idiot.

A silly, foolish idiot who smiled when Luciana asked if they were sure, who smiled again when she shot them a concerned glance, who laughed in the cramped lift on the way down to the foyer, and who is now completely blocking the entrance to an entire dormitory.

Anyway, Spooning Fundraiser Mission 1: Get Beds Onto Grass has failed.

"What now, Captain?" Louis asks, after having taken a seat on the bed, because if they're going to be an inconvenience to a hundredth of the university's population, might as well do it comfortably.

Harry seems to like this idea. He takes a seat beside Louis without much thought at all, his breaths sharp and quick. They both stare out the opened front door and over the plains of frosty campus grass, the plains of freedom.

Their ankles knock together. Harry sighs. "Wanna call for help? We've got Niall, Cass, Liam, and Luci upstairs. Amy and Jack must be out on the lawn by now..."

Louis shakes his head. "No, no." He's sure that Amy and Jack have their hands full already—successfully doing everything Harry and Louis should be doing right now—and honestly, Louis doesn't want to bother the others with it. He's sure that Luci has recruited them by now anyway, sorting out the rest of the available bed frames. And Zayn, well, he isn't very partial to fundraisers.

I'd sooner die, he'd said over a bowl of cereal that morning, I'd prefer actually death, Louis.

They both take a breath. 

"It'll fit if we turn it to your left," Harry says eventually, "I repeat, your left—a.k.a. that way, towards the sofas, the poorly decorated Christmas tree, and all the staring students," he ducks into Louis' collar sheepishly, yanking on Louis' pointer finger and pointing it across the room, "That way, okay? This is sad."

Louis laughs a little too fondly. He nods thoughtfully, and presses a kiss to the back of Harry's hand. "Ten-four, Captain."

And then, "Fucking poofs."

Even through the thin doorway of crisp, December wind, Louis can hear the remark as it sails across the lawn and over to where he and Harry are sitting. It's choppy and quick and frankly unexpected as it slaps him across the face, but Louis would be mad not to recognize the blatant ignorance.