Work Text:
“Help!” Alex says dramatically with a loud groan as soon as the call connects.
“Are you alright?” Henry says, concern in his voice.
“I'm not, Hen. Nothing is alright. Everything is doomed. I hate this planet. I hate everything.”
“Are you planning on moving to Mars then?” Henry laughs. That asshole.
“Very funny,” Alex comments flatly.
“What happened?”
“I broke my fucking glasses.” Alex whimpers.
“Broke them, broke them?”
“Yes, Henry. They literally split in half.”
“How?” Henry asks incredulously.
“Oh, it's a funny story, actually.” Alex smiles despite his anger. “I put them on the bed and went to get some water —'cause that water reminder app you put on my phone won't fucking stop pinging me,”
“I'm glad,”
“Shut up,” Alex yells, “It's the reason I'm suffering right now, okay? I forgot that the glasses were on the bed and literally ran and threw myself on the mattress only to hear something crack very loudly and find that I fucking broke my glasses in fucking half.”
Henry –the damn asshole– laughs again. “You are right, it is quite funny.”
Alex whimpers again. “I have the worst fucking headache,” he says, a little more calmly this time, “And I have a very important chemistry test tomorrow that I can't even look at my notes to revise for. I'm fucking suffering here!”
“I know. You said that already.” He pauses for a second then asks, “Why don't you just send them to get fixed, it won't take twenty minutes,”
“I thought of that, but the only optician's around are closed now.” He sighs. “I have no idea what to do.”
“Do you want me to actually offer you solutions or did you just want to rant?” Henry asks softly.
“You have solutions?” Alex asks hopefully.
“Yeah, what kind of boyfriend do you think I am?”
“Then come over already.” Alex laughs and flops back on the bed but then he remembers something. “Wait, don't you have exams to revise for too?”
“My next exam is in three days, I thought you knew that.”
“Oh,” Alex definitely didn't know that, “Pfft, yeah, I know. Just wanted to make sure I wasn't keeping you from those A's.”
“You're not,” he says and Alex can hear the smile in his voice. “I will be there in ten.”
“I will be eagerly waiting for your return, my love,” Alex teases with a shit-eating grin that he knows Henry can't see but feels anyway.
“Such a sap,” Henry says and hangs up on him.
—
Henry does make it ten just like he said, standing there staring weirdly at Alex when he opens the door for him.
“You waiting for an invite or something?” Alex asks.
“Oh, Alex!” Henry finally says, “Almost couldn't recognize you without the glasses.”
Alex snorts and pulls him in by his shirt. “I hate you,”
“You love me.” Henry smiles and says as a matter-of-factly.
“I love you,” Alex says, then gets on his tiptoes to kiss him softly, smiling against his lips and reveling in the overwhelming joy that overcomes him. Kissing Henry would never not make him feel like his heart is soaring, he realizes.
“Henry, didn't know you were coming over.” Ellen's voice comes from behind them causing Alex to break the kiss and fall back, stumbling over his own feet.
“Mom, Jesus Christ!” Alex exclaims, touching a hand to his chest and taking a deep breath to calm his racing heart, before looking up and shooting her a glare. “He's helping me revise for my test tomorrow.”
“Okay. Just keep the door open,” she says and disappears into the house.
Alex looks up at Henry to see the tips of his ears an alarming shade of dark red and a deep blush high on his cheeks. He laughs and slides his hand in Henry's to pull him towards his room, “Come on sweetheart.” he laughs.
When they make it to his bedroom, Henry starts taking things out of his backpack and putting them neatly on the bed: a colorful deck of flashcards, two notebooks that are so clean and neat that they look almost unused, and a calculator.
“What's all this?” Alex asks, reaching for one of the notebooks and opening it, admiring Henry's neat cursive but barely making out anything of what's written.
“First off, when was the last time you ate?”
“Dinner, about an hour-and-a-half ago. Why?”
“Good,” Henry says, pulling out a small pill bottle from his bag. What else does he have in there? Alex wonders. “I got you painkillers,” He throws it in Alex's direction and Alex catches it before it hits him in the face. He takes out one pill and swallows it down with plenty of water, liking the way Henry is smiling at him.
“So, these are flashcards I used to make for fun. They really help with memorizing equations and formulas.” Henry starts explaining, pointing at the colorful cards. “And these are my notebooks from when I was your age, we could go over them.”
“You're only one year older than me,” Alex objects, throwing a pen at Henry who just… very swiftly catches. Jesus Christ.
“How do you want to start?” Henry asks as if Alex hasn't spoken.
They start with trying the flashcards, going over the materials quickly, and reviewing them together first before they separate, sitting away from each other on opposite sides of the bed, so Henry could quiz him.
Alex learns that each card color stands for something; yellow is for definitions, green is for equations, light blue is for chemical formulas, and it's all very neat and very organized and very Henry that it makes Alex giggle randomly while balancing an organic chemistry equation (which is totally not funny because he gets it wrong twice.)
He still aces almost all of the answers though, enjoying the way Henry would smile and praise him whenever he gets the answer correctly. He really never thought chemistry would be this fun.
“Do you want us to go over your notes?” Henry asks, leaning forward and pulling Alex's notebook from where it is on the bed towards him and opening it peacefully. Except that Alex suddenly remembers, Henry can not see his notes.
He bolts forward, immediately yanking the poor notebook out of Henry's hands like his parents never taught him any manners and hugging it to his chest protectively. Henry just looks back at him, his hands frozen in the air trying to process what just happened.
“What was that for?” he asks as Alex would ever tell him the real answer.
“Um, nothing,” he tries to lie and fails badly, “It's just... My handwriting is really bad, you won't be able to read it.”
“I'm very familiar with your handwriting, Alex. It wouldn't be a problem for me.”
“Yeah but, y'know. I wrote these notes super fast so it's worse than usual.” He aims for nonchalance but he feels like it's not really working. “We can go over your notes instead. They're always super neat and frustratingly clean. I don't even know how you do that.” He forces out a laugh.
Henry doesn't seem to be buying any of his lies or distractions. Well… shit. “Give me the notebook, Alex.” he says firmly.
“No,”
“What are you hiding?” Henry asks and Alex sees that little familiar smile on his face. Henry is taking this as a challenge and will not relent until he gets what he wants. Fuck.
“I'm not hiding anything,” Alex says, then very much hides the notebook behind his back, proving Henry right.
“Just hand it over!”
“I won't.” he very petulantly insists.
“Alex,” Henry warns.
“Henry.”
He reaches forward and tries to snatch it out of Alex's hands but Alex twists his body away from him. “Just show it to me, I won't laugh or judge or anything, I promise,” he says with fake pleading eyes that Alex would have believed except that he had fallen for them many times before and had learned his lesson. “Please?”
“It's embarrassing,” he pleads.
“Aha! So you are hiding something.” Henry says triumphantly.
Alex groans. “Ughh, please don't.”
“Just give it to me already.”
Alex clutches the notebook harder in his hand, holding onto it and not letting go. Which fails to secure the notebook when seconds later Henry jumps on him, pinning him to the bed and laughing while prying the notebook out of Alex's fingers.
He gives up and lets go of the notebook to Henry who finally lets go of him and sits down, opening the damn thing and flipping through the pages, searching for what Alex might be hiding.
And Alex just lies there next to him, wishing the bed –and the floor under it– would open up and swallow him, hearing as Henry realizes what Alex was hiding all this time, “Oh,” he very eloquently says.
“This. Is. Embarrassing.” Alex whines.
“This is bloody adorable,” Henry says with a smile in his voice.
Alex gets up and looks at the scribbles filling the page that Henry is tracing almost delicately with the tips of his fingers. Henry's name is written all over the page with small hearts and little badly doodled flowers next to a terrible attempt of Alex to sketch Henry's face at the bottom of the page.
Henry turns the page and giggles when he sees his name written in Alex's awful calligraphy skills and a horrible, terrible, no-good chemistry joke that in other circumstances Alex is sure Henry would have grimaced at hearing it.
But not now though, because right now Henry is making heart eyes at the pages in front of him like he's never seen his name in writing before. He's smiling widely and stupidly and Alex notes the way the tips of his ears are turning pink.
“So middle school-ish of you, love,” Henry says cheekily, closing the notebook and putting it away before lying down and scooting closer to him.
Alex groans. “Oh, shut up.” he spits out and plops back on the bed before a laugh bubbles out of him. “You were never supposed to see that.”
“I'm glad I got to, though.” Henry leans into his side, “It's just too goddamn adorable.”
Alex laughs again. “Well, I'm glad,” he says sarcastically.
“Why were you even thinking about me during chemistry?” Henry asks lying next to Alex close enough for him to put his head on his chest and cuddle him. So he does just that, relishing the feeling of the rise and fall of Henry's chest with every breath and the rhythm of his heartbeats. It feels so serene and so calming. It feels so right.
“Look, I love Miss Riley with all my heart, okay? But her classes are honestly always just so boring and I end up zoning out, I can't help it.”
“So you only think about me during chemistry classes?” His tone is cheeky and Alex can feel the soft vibrations of his voice.
“Well, during math too, 'cause you're the one who tutors me, and the image of your face trying to tell me kindly that I fucked up never leaves my mind. And during English, too, 'cause love poems would never not remind me of you. And also during physics, 'cause every time I just remember your face looking almost in pain during your study sessions with June and be like, “yeah, I see why Henry hates it so much.” And during—”
“Do you ever try to just… focus in your class?” He laughs.
“Oh, my attention spans could never.”
Henry chuckles and wraps his arms around Alex impossibly tighter and pulls him impossibly closer. Alex's previous nervousness and fear of tomorrow's test are almost forgotten now. His eyes are starting to feel heavy and he can feel himself dozing off, and it's weird because he never falls asleep this easily but with Henry holding him like that it's just inevitable.
“Are you still worried about the exam?” Henry asks softly.
“A little.” He sighs. “I'm worried that my broken glasses might affect how I do, like, what if I get a sudden headache or my eyes get dry that I can't see,”
“It's just about an hour,” Henry tries to reassure him, “And you have your painkillers and the eye drops. It's gonna be alright.”
“I hope,” he says and buries his face in Henry's neck. “Can you stay until I fall asleep?”
“Of course, love,” He plants a small kiss on his forehead. “Sweet dreams.”
Alex laughs, “Sweet dreams, baby.”
—
When Alex wakes up the next morning, groggily shutting off his annoying alarm, something catches his eyes on the nightstand.
A light purple sticky note stuck to his glasses –glasses?– with something written on them that Alex's sleep-filled eyes can't really make out. He recognizes that it's in Henry's handwriting anyway.
He sits up and gingerly holds his glasses between his fingers—they're somehow back in one piece again now. How did that happen?
He rubs his eyes and stares at the glasses, trying to figure it out, and when he does, something blooms in his chest, and a startled laugh bubbles out of him.
It's put together probably by super glue and covered with black masking tape so that it's barely even noticeable that they were broken at some point.
Henry has fixed his glasses for him.
God, this guy. He waited until Alex fell asleep and stayed just to fix them for him.
Alex can't fucking believe this—Henry stayed after Alex fell asleep just to fix his glasses for him so he'd be able to peacefully take his exam and was probably planning on doing that from before even coming over —since Alex doesn't have any super glue or black tape lying around. He brought these things with him from home.
He doesn't even know how to feel about this. All he knows is that he wants to see Henry right now and kiss him so fucking hard that he runs out of breath, or something might actually happen to him.
No one has ever taken care of him this way before.
He tries the glasses on and though they're a little crooked and feel a little weird on his face, he –at least– can see things clearly and take his exam. He remembers the note that he left on the nightstand and picks it up, smiling as he reads what Henry wrote for him.
I, too, write about you in my notes, by the way. Just not in my chemistry ones. There's a reason I'm my English teacher's favorite student after all.
Can't wait to see you again today.
Love, Henry.
He giggles to himself, daydreaming of this image— of Henry lost in thought in his class writing poetry about him. The thought makes him want to fucking burst with happiness. He never thought he'd get to love someone like that and for someone to love him back this much before.
He gets up and gets ready for school, humming a song that Nora sent him a while ago and has been stuck in his head ever since. He tries on his glasses again and giggles to himself before grabbing his bag and leaving.
He can't wait to see Henry again, too.