Chapter Text
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Iris Black Laurence!!!!!! The suspense is killing me I know it’s three hours but I can hardly take the wait |
now |
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Iris Black Laurence is chemistry lab going well? |
now |
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Iris Black Laurenceeeeeeeeeeeeee |
now |
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Iris Black I HOPE CHEMISTRY IS GOING WELL FOR YOU TOO!! Any cute people?😉since apparently week two is the week of love. For some people |
5m ago |
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Iris Black Let* OMGOSH |
6m ago |
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Iris Black Sorry I am typing so slowly I need to keep up with writing the examples on the board but it’s pretty easy. It's only week two and a lot of this is review from home but I’m so excited I’m gonna talk to him after class I’ll yet you know how it goes!!! |
6m ago |
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Iris Black I’ve decided. I’m going to sit next to him next time and get his name then (and maybe his number hehe). Wish me luck😁!!!!!! |
7m ago |
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Iris Black But holy crap I am 100% gonna try to get his name |
9m ago |
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Iris Black A pic not apocalypse LOL autocorrect |
9m ago |
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Iris Black I don’t think I can get. Apocalypse without him noticing or like looking weird bc he’s Sitting behind me but oh my gosh trust me please Laurence |
9m ago |
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Iris Black Okay he wasn’t really doing anything but taking notes but then HE HAD A SOUTHERN ACCENT WHEN HE ASKED A QUESTION!!! I DIDNT think that’d be my thing but somehow that just makes it better? You have to trust me. You must!!! |
10m ago |
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Iris Black There’s this guy I. My calc 3 class oh my gosh. So glad I switched from the 8:00 to the 9:00 lecture because WOWWWW this guy looks GOOD. I’ll keep you updated |
20m ago |
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Iris Black LAURENCE OH MY GOSH!!!!!!! |
20m ago |
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Iris Black LAURENCE |
20m ago |
‧₊˚ ⚘ ‧₊˚.
“Dude, not to be nosy or anything, but you might wanna check your phone,” Lou comments, spinning a metal spatula between her purple gloved fingers as she stares down at their crucible, flames from the Bunsen burner currently licking its underside. “The screen won’t stop lighting up, and I think all the messages are from the same person… If that means anything to you?”
Laurence looks up from his lab notebook and to the end of the bench, where his phone screen is indeed lit up with multiple messages. “Oh, uh, it’s fine, don’t worry. I’ll reply to them after I get these calculations done. I’m pretty sure it’s just my friend, anyway.”
“Must be nice to have classes where you can sit and spam your friend instead of fighting for your life to understand what the hell your prof is going on about, huh?” Lou removes the lid of the crucible with forceps and jabs her spatula inside, doing her best to break up all the clumps that have formed over the past five minutes.
Well, five-ish minutes. Laurence isn’t sure that either of them have been following the procedure all that closely, considering they were supposed to have their calculations completed before even coming to lab and have them checked over before starting anything. Hell, they probably shouldn’t even be allowed to be doing this right now, but their teaching assistant is as laid-back as it gets; she’d just told Laurence to show her the math once he got it done—which, okay, he should hurry up and do it.
“Your friend is a D1 yapper,” Lou snarks, shooting Laurence a look with her good eye. Her scarred-over eye, on full display behind her goggles with all her bushy ginger hair scraped back into a ponytail, remains closed. “Do they talk that much in person, too?”
“I mean, yeah, but I don’t mind it,” Laurence shrugs. “We go way back. I’m used to it.”
Way back feels like an understatement, somehow. Way back brushes over the fact that Laurence and Iris have hardly been perceived as anything but a pair by nearly everybody they grew up with. Way back doesn’t encapsulate the way Laurence can hardly dig up any of his memories without realizing they are, in one way or another, also Iris’s.
“Hm. Suit yourself. And finish the damn calculations so you can show the TA.”
Laurence ducks his head to hide his grimace. “Ugh—yeah, okay. Give me a minute.”
He’s an urban planning major, not a math major. Which, okay, Iris would find Laurence struggling with basic arithmetic pretty funny considering he himself tested out of so much math that he got put in multivariate calculus as a freshman, but that’s… not the point.
Laurence sighs and punches the proper numbers into his calculator. And then starts over with another, louder sigh when he accidentally pushes the 8 instead of the 5 and gets some weird (and definitely wrong) answer. He finishes right as the timer on his phone goes off, leaving Lou to turn off the Bunsen burner while he brings his calculations up to the teaching assistant, who’s currently messing with a scale that broke at the start of the lab.
“Can you check these?” he asks, averting his eyes as the woman looks up.
She leans across the bench, lab coat unbuttoned, long brown hair loose, and goggles dangling from her neck as she skims Laurence’s work. Laurence prays to God that he’s right, more for his lab partner’s sake than his own. Lou makes Laurence’s dislike of the lab look like true love; the first thing she told Laurence when they paired up was that her goal was to get out as fast as fucking possible every single time.
“You’re good,” she says after a beat. “Just make it neater in the lab report so you don’t lose points for illegible work.”
Illegible? Really? “Okay, thank you.”
Laurence returns to the bench, meeting Lou’s questioning stare with a thumbs-up.
“Thank fuck,” Lou mutters. “I’m gonna start on the lab report while we wait for our stuff to cool. Do you just wanna do everything with and after the calculations while I do everything before them?”
“Fine by me,” Laurence agrees, grabbing his phone and finally looking at his slew of notifications—and, as predicted, they’re from Iris.
The whole Iris-proudly-announcing-his-interest-in-some-random-guy-in-his-math-lecture part wasn’t what Laurence was expecting to see from him on this fine Tuesday morning, but it’s not really… surprising?
Laurence draws some random squiggles next to his stoichiometric conversions as he mulls over Iris’s messages, not quite ready to open his phone and have everything get marked down as read. Because then Iris would start spamming that he knows Laurence is there and that he wants his opinion STAT, and Laurence isn’t sure he has anything more than a firm “idk yet dude” in store at the moment.
Iris has had crushes before—Laurence has had a front-row seat to every single one, being Iris’s closest (and often only) friend for their entire childhood. This level of decisiveness is nothing new. Iris has always been the sort of person to decide off-the-bat that he likes someone and stick with his decision like glue until something rips him away from it—usually his mother, once or twice Laurence. With his mother, it was because her precious little son shouldn’t be liking other boys. Fuck growing up in a conservative small town. Laurence at least had good reasons, like Iris picking terrible men to crush on. Fuck going to a small conservative high school.
For the sake of everybody involved, Laurence hopes Iris honed in on a guy who isn’t some kind of -phobic or -ist, because Iris deserves for something good to happen to him for once. God knows he’s done enough good for other people, especially Laurence.
Sitting with Laurence during their Sunday school lessons because Laurence had lice last week and everyone decided he was gross and they didn’t want to sit with him because of it, even though his mother had long since rid both her child and her entire house of every last nit and egg.
Crouching on Laurence’s bedroom floor with his tablet on incognito mode, looking between a Reddit thread on DIY binding and Laurence’s measly assortment of camisoles and sports bras piled onto the floor, Laurence balancing Iris’s sewing kit in his lap just in case they decide they need to use it.
Holding Laurence’s hand in the hospital waiting room and letting him squeeze as hard as he needs as he works up the nerves to go behind the heavy wooden doors and into the ward where his grandfather is motionless in bed, breathing weakly through a ventilator.
Posing in front of Laurence’s mirror in a glittering yellow prom dress, tugging at the too-loose shoulder straps and spinning like an idiot, trying his absolute hardest to make Laurence feel even a little bit better about having to put the damn thing on himself in a couple of hours.
Laurence knows he hasn’t done nearly as much in turn, but he hopes that stashing Iris’s danmei novels beneath his own mattress and away from Iris’s mother and keeping Iris from asking out a monster of a musical lead in junior year mean at least something.
“Hey. Lock in,” Lou snaps her fingers in front of Laurence’s eyes, yanking him back to reality.
“Shit—sorry.”
“I got the final weight. Wash the glassware while I wipe everything else down.” Lou’s already got her backpack zipped up and balanced on her stool.
Laurence scrambles to stuff his belongings back into his bag and washes the glassware so fast he almost drops it. Once he’s done, he and Lou slip out of the lab together, the second pair of students to leave. Laurence has his doubts over whether they actually did everything correctly, but Lou’s a sophomore with friends who took the class last year and, according to them, the lab report grading depends mostly on the teaching assistant—and theirs doesn’t seem like the type to dish out anything below a ninety, so they have nothing to worry about as long as they try.
Correction: “try.”
“Thank fuck that’s over,” Lou says sagely the second they step foot outside, September heat immediately melting away any residual chill from the chemistry building. Laurence shifts his backpack from both shoulders to just one, but he knows there’s no real escape from a disgustingly sweaty back in this weather. “I hate this lab, but it’s literally the only one that works with my schedule.”
Laurence raises his brows. “It’s week two, man. We haven’t even done anything worth actually hating, and you’re literally good at chemistry. Seriously, how can it be that bad?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Lou’s expression hardens, but smooths back out a moment later. “Just text me if you have questions on what to write for the report, okay? I’ll see you later.”
“Yeah, okay.” It’s almost insane how pissy Lou is in the lab compared to how normal she is outside of it.
Laurence is about to turn and leave when Lou speaks again. “Hey, wait a sec. That actually reminds me. When we talked about music last week during those dumbass lab partner icebreakers—we want to see you on the guitar. Are you down?”
Really?! “Wait, is that tonight?”
Laurence knows his lab partner is in a band—no way he’s going to just forget something that cool—but he wasn’t really expecting anything to come of him offering to play guitar when Lou grumbled about their last guitarist quitting. Especially when, at the time, Lou was in her lab-induced bad mood and sounded like she wanted to simply stay pissed forever instead of look for a solution.
“Yup. Hammer out that lab report and pull up around… seven, maybe? I’ll text you the location when Azzy finally tells us what room she booked. If you’re not picky, Azzy’s bringing pizza.”
Right now, Laurence is more than happy to be wrong.
“Yeah, okay, I’ll do that. Thanks!”
Lou nods, smiling for the first time since Laurence greeted her at the lab bench at 8:58 A.M. “Awesome. I’ll see you later.”
She turns on her heel and starts down the sidewalk, leaving Laurence to fish his phone from his pocket with the intention of opening up Google Maps, but a wall of notifications makes him pause.
First things first. Before any lab reports or band practices, Laurence needs to figure out what the hell is going on with Iris and whether this newfound crush is a recipe for disaster or not.
…After he gets into a building with some fucking air conditioning.