Chapter Text
“Henry fucking Fox-Mount-who gives a fuck is an asshole,” Alex says, not for the first time, in greeting as he barged into Nora’s apartment.
“Bailing on his name halfway isn’t gonna distract me from how I know you know all twelve of his names,” Nora says, scrolling through train CSVs like a fucking storybook. It’s honestly spooky how good she is at whatever numbers shit she does.
“It’s seven, not twelve,” Alex mutters under his breath.
“I heard that! God, what was it? Just one group project like a week ago. You’re obsessed Alejandro.”
“I’m not obsessed!”
Nora is now on her back, head hanging upside down from the edge of the sofa and laptop held precariously in front of her face.
Alex vindictely wishes she’d drop the stupid laptop on her stupid face and tells her as much.
“And I wish you’d shut up about Henry for once, unless you’re giving me new physical descriptors applicable to him.”
“Fuck you, Nora,”
“Been there, done that.”
“Disgusting.”
“Amen brother.”
Alex is right though. Henry is an asshole. An asshole who has hated him from the very start without any reason.
And Alex is sure. The amount of times Alex has repeated what he first said to Henry in his head, picking it out for anything that might’ve come off as too strong, is truly staggering. He’s sure he’d said something super innocuous.
(He’d never admit it to anyone, but he remembers. He remembers he’d said ‘hi! I’m Alex, we’re paired for the law writing class’ project’. He also remembers the way Henry’s bright, blue, beautiful eyes stared a bit unseeingly at him then. The way they dropped to his outstretched hand just as Henry’s jaw dropped open a bit too. Alex could probably tell the exact way Henry’s soft blonde strands rested on top of one another.)
He’s sure that he’d put in the same extra effort he now puts in for his first interaction with anyone. The conscious effort to seem normal, casual, not too much. Ever since Alex learnt how to understand a language, and then two, he has been painfully aware of how he can be a ‘little much’ (or a lot much). Stubborn to a fault, Alex embraced this ‘quirk’ unashamedly, things were better, more under his control. But some days he just couldn’t get the cruel words, often of people whom he'd considered to be close, out of his head and wondered if his medication dose was really enough to make him palatable to others.
And Henry had made Alex wonder for so long, he’d spiralled a bit. It took Nora, June and his mom reassuring him to convert his self consciousness to something akin to hatred towards Henry.
So, Henry is an asshole and Alex would gladly never mention, or even think about him, if only he’d stop being so fucking omnipresent. It’s like a dam burst after meeting Henry and doing a project with him. Alex could not stop noticing Henry, and his stupid bright blue eyes, and stupid long legs, wherever he went.
Like today. Henry isn’t even here, but Alex can just tell that the library table in front of him is Henry’s. The fact that Alex recognises what the cover of a first edition Pride and Prejudice looks like has absolutely nothing to do with how many times Alex has stared at the way Henry’s strong forearms look crossed over it. Absolutely nothing, June probably has the same copy in her library. Yup, that’s definitely where he recognises it from.
The clean, grassy scent of just Henry and the ‘Henry’ scrawled across a slightly faded manuscript is a kind of a giveaway.
Alex picks up the manuscript, mostly just to have something to do with his hands.
Waterloo. He wonders if that should mean something to him.
It’s handwritten because of course it is, it’s Henry. Alex scoffs despite the weirdly calming effect Henry’s beautiful looping cursive has on him.
He starts to skim over the text, unbridled thoughts racing through his head.
Stupid Henry and his stupid manuscripts. Bet he writes odes about himself and how perfect he is and how everyone else are nothing but lowly peasa-
Abruptly, Alex forgets his train of thought. Now that he's subconsciously managed to read and understand a random line from the pages open in front of him, his brain is nothing but a stream of he loves, he loves, he loves m-
Nope. No. Willing himself to calm down and just breathe a bit Alex can see that 'he shines the brightest in a room but his warmth all shining on the ones he loves, so I couldn’t, in any universe, not be helplessly in love with him', is very likely not about Alex because how would Henry know that about Alex. Alex knows he's incredibly good at jumping to conclusions, so he tries to dismiss it.
As he reads on though, it's all too easy to pretend he's the one Henry writes about. Loved, apparently, irrevocably by all. By Henry. He's too busy with Henry's words to even consider why that seems to mean so much to him. He’s so busy that he doesn’t even notice Henry standing right in front of him until he hears a sharp breath.
Alex looks up and he can only hope he doesn’t look as shaken as he feels. Every attempt to school his expression and reign in his mind to the current situation fails because Henry is just looking at him. Gaping a little, Henry has got that same glazed, slightly awed look in his eyes. Alex has never felt so naked, like someone can see through him and unbidden he thinks, I might just let him.
He tries to force himself to say something, anything, preferably something about invading Henry’s privacy, why he’s here, a generic remark about the weather. Instead what he manages through his garbled thoughts is-
“This reminds me of me.”
Then, Henry drops his mug and in the split-second absence of his gaze, Alex is able to reel himself back to the present.
He immediately drops to the ground to pick up the shattered pieces. Feeling more confident in his ability to speak like a normal fucking person, using his brain to mouth filter, Alex looks up at Henry and opens his mouth to speak. He doesn’t get a chance to as Henry joins him on the floor with a muttered ‘Christ’, and starts talking.