Winter [Harry Styles AU]

twenty one

winter // twenty one

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April showers bring May flowers and Lena hopes there's something fucking truth to that statement because April has only been showers so far. That's probably a simile or a metaphor for her tears or something, but Lena isn't an English Major for a reason.

That's what Harry deserves, Lena thinks. An English Major. Someone who can write sonnets about his green eyes and haiku's about his curls. Someone who can help him come up with new puns to tattoo on his body or something.

Lena's in the middle of creating a list of Possible Pun Tattoos for Harry that are all quite pathetic (funny bone? no harry is too clever for that...waist of time? rule of thumb? shoulder blade?) when her phone rings. It's probably fortunate considering her next list was going to be Reasons I Should Buy Harry Styles a Cat.

She plans on hanging up, expecting another call from Kate. Her thumb is already hovering over the end call button when she sees Beth's name on the caller ID. Lena almost drops her phone in her eagerness to answer, bringing it up to her ear so hard that she bangs herself in the cheek with the edge of the metal case.

"Hello?" Lena chokes out, rubbing at her already bruised face. "Beth?"

"Hello, is this my favorite nineteen year old inhabitant of London?"

Lena blinks. "Yes?"

"Nineteen, isn't it?" Beth continues. "I was going to call you yesterday but things were absolutely hectic with the airport and whatnot. Plus, you don't really get good service when you're fifty thousand feet in the air on a plane for nine hours."

Lena blinks again. "A plane?" she asks, voice a bit high.

There's a sound of muffled laughter on the line. "Kidding. I, unfortunately, am unable to drop everything to fly to London. Now get out of bed." It's so ridiculously motherly and familiar; Lena misses her with an ache for a moment. 

Lena pauses, curls a little bit further into her bed. "I'm not in bed," she says eventually.

"Brooding isn't helpful," Beth points out. "Sorry, I mean."

"You're not."

"I'm not," Beth agrees. "Are you out of bed yet?"

"No."

The thing is, she hadn't even told Beth told Beth that she and Harry sort of kind of broke up because she knew for a fact that Beth would call her immediately and make her do something insane. Like actually get out of bed or brush her hair or something. Insane things like that.

So the fact that Beth is now waiting on the phone patiently for Lena to speak means that Kate had called in reinforcements. 

Like, when American was basically getting destroyed by Britain in the revolution and they kept begging for France to help and then France finally got their asses over to help at the Battle of Saratoga. So Kate is America and Beth is France and fuck that's a really shitty metaphor and Harry deserves an English major.

"I hate Kate," Lena says, and then hates herself for rhyming, so she turns her head into her pillow and tries not to scream.

"You should get up."

"It's April. Classes are out in a month. I have no reason to get up. Or do anything, for that matter. I'm like Napoleon after Waterloo. Everything is over."

Beth sighs. "I know. Sometimes it feels like that."

"And then what?"

"Nobody knows," Beth says, and Lena just sort of falls miserably into her and wishes Beth were here to comfort her like she's done so many other times since Lena was eight years old. "But this bullshit of sitting around and wasting time is a stupid. You're not just going to have an epiphany."