Work Text:
“Liam,” Harry frowns where he sits cross-legged on the floor of their flat, “did you know we have a copy of Walk Hard ?”
“Huh?”
Harry holds the DVD out to his flatmate, who bends down to narrow his eyes at its cover.
“The Dewey Cox Story… ” Liam reads aloud. “Nope, never seen it.” He hands Harry a cold beer and then plops down on the couch, sinking deeper into the cushions than he would have four years ago, when they first moved in. It's a couch that has seen some shit. “Could be Niall’s.”
“We should have him bring over his own box. Half of the stuff in this flat is probably his.”
Liam hums in agreement before taking a sip of his own beer.
“I have a working theory, and it’s that he uses ours as a receptacle because he’s too fucking lazy to take a bag over to the charity shop.”
“The long con." Liam gestures at the movie. "What’s it about anyway?”
“Think Walk the Line meets Step Brothers,” Harry says, gently flinging the plastic case into a small floor pile sitting between two cardboard boxes.
“Definitely Niall’s,” Liam decides.
Harry leans forward, pulling a small stack of DVDs off of their now half-full shelving unit and starts to examine them.
“You didn’t find my Game of Thrones Season 1 anywhere, did you?”
“Ah, we were so hopeful back then,” Harry says, faux-wistfully. “I think you should leave that one to history, mate. You’re never gonna be able to watch it again without remembering how completely they fucked everything up.”
“But Khaleesi and her dragon babies...”
“Are on YouTube,” Harry interjects. “ Game of Thrones was a thing we all did, and yeah, sometimes it was fun, but for the vast majority of the time, it was shit. And I don’t care that we’re not going to be living together anymore, there’s no way I’m letting you do that to yourself again. I mean, Bran gets the throne? How stupid did they think we are?”
Liam considers Harry’s rant for a moment.
Harry secretly loves it when he does that. It’s one of the best things about being friends with Liam and particularly about being his flatmate. He always listens to Harry – really listens – even when it’s two in the morning and Harry’s just solved world hunger after smoking a bowl. Deep in the most inner, not-high part of him, Harry knows he’s talking utter shit, but Liam’s zeroed in like he’s planning on taking it to the UN. Surely he’s also aware that Harry is communicating exclusively out of his ass; he’s just too nice to say.
“Alright, point taken. The ending didn’t make any sense.”
“Thank you.” Harry drops two more DVDs into his own box, satisfied with having made his argument, then moves onto the next row. “Why do we own one random season of Midsomer Murders ?”
“Someone left it outside for free,” Liam shrugs.
He was always bringing home junk he found on the street. It’s how they’d ended up with a waffle maker that wouldn’t heat up and a cabinet full of mismatched pint glasses. At one point, Harry’d had to put a moratorium on found glassware; Liam responded by coming home the next day with just the frame of a papasan chair. He was like a crow or something.
“That’ll be yours then,” Harry says, placing the sun-faded case in Liam’s box.
Leaving his beer on the coffee table, Liam moves to the floor and scoots over to Harry’s work area. The flat’s less of a disaster than it should be, but they’ve only just started packing. Dividing up their books and DVDs seemed to be a good way to ease into the process.
Liam scans the shelves as Harry shifts to make room for him. “I can’t remember if some of these are yours or mine…” he trails off. “Nope, wait. This one’s easy. Be honest – how many times have you had to replace it?”
Harry looks up to find a smirking Liam holding his precious copy of Love Actually between two fingers.
“I’ll have you know that’s the original.”
“Would’ve thought that one would be scratched to oblivion now with all the use it gets.”
“I take care of my things,” Harry says indignantly, taking the DVD from Liam as delicately as a bomb tech. “And don’t act like you don’t like it too. You say you don’t want to watch, but then there you are, hovering in the kitchen like Angel Mr. Bean.”
“Some of it’s alright. I like the Billy Mack bits. The rest is too soppy.”
“And yet you always manage to leave the room right before Emma Thompson opens up her Joni Mitchell CD,” Harry remarks. “Don’t think I don’t know why.”
“She’s a national treasure,” Liam sniffs.
“Yet, you thought you’d spend your hard-earned money on this.” Harry brandishes a Blu-ray of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom , an objectively terrible piece of cinema.
“It wasn’t that bad.”
“Human clones, Li. Bryce Dallas Howard fighting for dinosaur rights .”
Liam runs his fingers through the soft swoop of his hair and turns his eyes to the floor. It’s been months since he’s had it cut and Harry’s found himself quietly dreading the day he finally decides to go to his barber.
“I know, I just...I saw it on sale one day and I remembered the day we went to see it. Louis had just gotten that promotion, and Zayn knew the manager at that restaurant, so they kept refilling our drinks for free. We had the whole theater to ourselves because the movie had already been out for a few weeks. You were particularly pissed and kept booing every time Chris Pratt was onscreen.”
“Don’t remind me,” Harry groans, stomach weak at the memory of the next day. “You lot should have just put me in a car.”
“No,” Liam says sincerely, laying a hand on his arm. “It was funny. You were funny.” He breaks the contact to pick up his beer, and Harry takes advantage of the opportunity to take a long pull of his own. “It’s just a nice memory, I guess.”
Harry hands Liam the case so he can add it to the box he’ll take when they part ways next week. “Well, if I ever feel the urge to watch Jeff Goldblum debase himself sober, I know who to ask.”
They fall into silence for a few minutes, reading covers and passing DVDs back and forth.
“It’s gonna be weird,” Liam eventually says – not to Harry, but to the copy of Gladiator he has in his lap. “I know we’ll hang out, but I’m pretty used to seeing you every day.” He looks up, shooting Harry a small smile.
“Yeah.” Harry’s chest feels tight all of a sudden. “We were pretty good at the flatmate thing, huh?”
“Good? We’re legends, mate,” Liam breaks into that grin wide that turns his eyes into happy slits and holds his beer aloft for Harry to clink his against. “Practically invented it.”
“I never told you, but I was dead scared at the beginning. Friends decide to get a place together and then end up not speaking...happens all the time. I didn’t want us to be like that.”
“Us?” Liam says reassuringly. “Never.”
He already sounds too far away. Harry hates it.
“Oh.” Liam’s voice goes oddly flat, and when he sees what he has in his hand, Harry realizes why. “Is this yours?” he blurts out. “I’m pretty sure it’s yours.”
Harry accepts the Special Edition of Once from him, wishing again that he’d just tossed it out at some point over the last six months and pretended it had gone mysteriously missing. As it was, it had been glaring accusatorily at him whenever he spent any significant amount of time in their living room.
“Thanks,” he murmurs, feeling Liam’s eyes on him.
It had been a strange night to begin with. Harry met up with David, completely unaware that his boyfriend of three-quarters of a year was about to break up with him. He arrived, shellshocked, back at the flat an hour after he’d left, and Liam instantly sprang into action, ordering pizza, cobbling together some extra-strength cocktails from what they had on their bar, and offering to watch whichever depressing movie Harry wanted to. Harry decided on Once , reasoning that the double gut-punch of Guy and Girl having to go their separate ways and the movie’s stars falling in love on set only to fall out of it later might be cathartic enough to jumpstart the process of getting over his now ex.
From the way Liam’s acting now, Harry knows he remembers it just as well as he does. As Guy and Girl began clicking as songwriters, Harry cuddled closer into his flatmate. Nothing unusual – they’re both tactile, and he’d used Liam’s toned chest as a pillow on many previous occasions. That evening felt different though, and not just because Harry had been blindsided by David’s words. With Liam’s arm wrapped around his shoulders, Harry thought about all the other times his friend had dropped everything to be there for him, how generous he was with himself, and little he asked for in return. Before Girl realizes that Guy has bought her a piano as a parting token of his love, Harry was sniffling quietly. He felt Liam kiss him on the top of his head, he turned into him, and–
“I’m sorry,” Liam’s saying, here and now. “You were sad, and I shouldn’t have–” He huffs, frustrated with himself. “I feel like I took advantage.”
“Liam. Liam, hey.” Harry takes a hold of his shoulders, encouraging Liam to meet his gaze. “It wasn’t your fault, okay? It was all me. You were being so great, and I felt really close to you...If anyone took advantage, it was me.”
Liam shakes his head. “No.”
“Okay,” Harry tries, smiling softly at Liam. “How about neither of us did, then?”
Liam gets up from the floor, and Harry lets him, watching him pace around the moving ephemera littering the space. “I know I should have cleared the air, but you were in your room when I woke up on the couch, so I figured you just wanted to leave it. And that’s okay, you were going through something.” He pauses, and then, sounding like he’s trying to convince himself of something: “Anyway, it was just a kiss.”
Harry doesn’t realize what he’s about to say until it’s out of his mouth.
“Was it?”
Liam’s neck snaps toward him, and the air in the flat crackles.
“What?”
“I don’t know...I didn’t bring it up because I didn’t know what to say. My head was a mess just then, and it was really bloody confusing. And then you mentioned that you were making enough money to get your own place at the end of our lease, and I thought…”
“Thought what?”
“I thought that might be why. I’d made things so awkward that you didn’t want to be here anymore.”
Liam scrubs a hand over his face. “Fucking hell, Harry! Are you saying what I think you’re saying? I thought I was going crazy having these feelings for you, and you’ve probably felt the same way the whole time?”
Harry makes his way to his feet, ignoring the pins and needles he feels from being in one position for too long.
“Are we...idiots?”
Liam’s shoulders start to shake, and in another second, he’s laughing as hard as Harry’s ever seen him. He wipes tears from the corner of his eyes as his laughter peters out, and Harry wonders when, exactly, his life started revolving around Liam’s smile.
“We are most definitely idiots,” Liam says, stepping into Harry’s space, his voice low.
Their lips meet, and nothing else gets packed that night.