Harry + Felicity backdated pre bonfire Who: Harry and Felicity When: Pre-bonfire What: Sib-types hang with donuts Warnings: Disgustingly sweet + creative swearing
It was so very Harry to decide that now he was in town? He was needed to fight her battles for her, instead of the new ones he dragged her into. Felicity didn’t mind a spat about boys, but only if the boy was worth it and the girl was competition. Harry wasn’t someone to get tied up in knots about but that? Hadn’t stopped a single girl from winding up that way. And she liked her life so far in this tiny little town that meant nothing to her apart from her mother’s name in a family Bible somewhere. She liked it enough not to screw it up for herself and she’d managed, hadn’t she?
Gwen was the last person who had been in the tiny apartment except herself, and it smelled now like rose soap and Chanel No. 5 and like hot air and steam. There was tea, cooling to temperate on the counter and Felicity wore a soft, fuzzy long sweater over pj pants and a tank and the A/C turned the tiny apartment arctic-cold, her wet hair coiling in copper rivelets down her back. She had found the apartment, made it hers, all by herself and it was a world away from the tiny little place that had smelled of death and pee that had been hers so very temporarily in the city.
The city felt like forever and she was adamant it was going to remain in its box. So that meant going back further, and oh, Felicity didn’t want to pry up those particular boards and look what was underneath them. Harry was sweet and he was fickle, but he wouldn’t try very hard, and she had every belief they’d wind up talking about the music and the latest girl he’d fallen in love with and not one bit about how exactly, she’d gotten to Repose. Which suited Felicity perfectly. He was the only person she’d taken with her from the city to Repose -- well, if you made allowances for not being able to resist prying as to why the boy who’d been a hero or been trying so hard to be, had been able to give it all up to stay home with family. It was admirable, but Felicity had never been particularly good at doing what was right, and still less if it left her feeling like she was in a box without air. The costume and the Capital had been a reminder she could breathe, but if Harry was going to take all the oxygen out of town, she wanted to know.
She was knees to chest on the tiny couch, her tea balanced on her knees, and she waited, thinking of night air.
Contrary to popular belief, Harry understood boundaries. He knew about drawing lines in the sand, and about all of the heartbroken, hasty escape routes that involved a bus ticket and a bottle. He understood carefully-placed walls because he had his own, so he'd never been the kind of guy to go digging for skeletons in the closets of his friends. It was a perfectly Harryesque approach to every relationship he'd ever had, romantic or not: Pasts can stay buried, let's just have fun instead. So he hadn't poked Felicity over the reasons behind her abrupt relocation to Nowheres-ville, Harry was just glad that it gave him a reason to get away from the city too, because that scene was getting especially tired with ex-fling overpopulation. Although, really, Repose was kind of turning out just the same.
He was trying not to feel hot under the collar or coffin-claustrophobic. The only real solution he'd found was staying half-aware whenever possible. This usually involved a toxic combination of 'wake and bake' and the kind of day drinking that might have crowned him as king of fraternities everywhere, but he was relatively sober on this day. Relatively as he was still a little drunk from the night before, but he'd only just rolled out of bed.
When he walked through her front door, aware that she knew he'd be coming by, and it would therefore be unlocked, Harry was mussed. It was a familiar Harry look from some handful of years ago when he'd roll out of bed and sleepwalk to class. His hair, dark and half-tamed under a Mets cap. The rest of him was cotton: black sweatpants, noose knotted around the sharpened bones of his hips, and a t-shirt depicting the monochromatic likeness of a heyday Madonna. There was a box of donuts, perilously balanced in his hands, as he wedged his body into the doorway while cautiously kicking off his shoes, which were often caked in all kinds of questionable grime. Grime, that Harry knew from too many instances in the past, Felicity would not appreciate being dragged across her floor or furniture. Their friendship had thus far stood the test of a whole lot, but Harry wasn't sure that diesel stains on new carpet wouldn't be just big enough do what no other drama had managed.
So he was cautious with the shoes, but his walk from the door to her sofa was still marked with a fallout trail of rainbow sprinkles as he shoved the final bite of a pink-glazed donut past his teeth. The rest of the box was closed and balanced one the spread of one hand's fingers. He extended it toward her like a maitre d presenting the finest confections in town. "Eclair?"
Symbiosis. She remembered the term from bio, brief paper-cuts of memory from between the grim, gross foster-home and sessions in the back of whatever car had been parked, looked expensive and the guy driving? Was willing to help her out with forgetfulness. Symbiosis, a mutual and cooperative relationship. Harry was her last chain-link with before, even if he dragged dirt in on his shoes and dropped failed relationships in his wake. He hadn’t asked why Repose, and Felicity was pretty sure he never would. It was the end of a bus-route, he’d found himself a map and a ticket to where she was, and eventually, Harry would leave. He wouldn’t stay, because their friendship was rooted in late night gin and emergency dial to rescue each other from the morning after with last night’s conquest and she? Wasn’t upholding her end of the bargain.
He looked like he hadn’t slept, or maybe he was just still asleep, walking. Harry reminded Felicity of the little boys she’d had sleep-overs with when she was small enough to still be somebody’s precious: mussed hair, sticky cheeks and hands that clutched tight and trusting. Of course, he looked like fashion had given him a cursory once over and relegated him to the depths of eighties-revival hell, but that hadn’t stopped Harry getting girls before.
She unfurled, the petal of arm on knee and tea-mug transferred to table, “Shoes,” she ordered, pointing in the direction of the strip of cherry-colored rug by the door, but he brought sugar as if candyfloss-sweet insubstantiality could form a new building block to base a friendship on. She reached with a swipe of her thumb for a trail of chocolate icing smeared on the side of the box, and licked it from her fingernail.
“You,” she said with clear satisfaction, “Are one day going to wake up middle-aged and fat.”
Freshly devested of grimey shoes, and smelling better than his weathered clothes or slowly detoxing blood supply should have allowed for, Harry got cozy on the couch beside her, pushing the offering of donuts into whatever direction, toward whatever surface she found acceptable. He tried for the floor first, but deeply suspected that she'd settle for nothing less than an end table. He'd even begrudgingly walk them into the kitchen, if she'd only ask.
But it was her words that flayed Harry's ruddy, sprinkle-dotted mouth into an expression of the Insulted. "I will never be middle-aged, you witch. Take it back." He was less concerned about the prospect of becoming fat. His metabolism coasted dramatics highs due to way, way, way too much partying. There was no way it was slowing down for a couple of tall boys or fried pastries.
In contrast to his bubbling costume production of clothes collected from floorboards or the backs of chairs, Felicity looked together. She always did, even in pajama pants. There was something delicate to her presentation, and it reminded Harry of the brighter side of the city where they'd come from. Manhattan was his kind of stomping ground, way more than Repose could ever be, but it was true that he hadn't hesitated to dig up his roots and bounce after Felicity's rustic relocation. No questions asked as to why in fuck's name why here. It felt like an adventure. And besides, his father seemed to find the idea keen enough to foot all of our boy king's bills.
The second the donuts almost hit the carpet she’d sweated like high summer in a subway station over dragging back from the Capital (it was cheap, because there was a tiny flaw but it looked practically perfect and that was all that mattered) Felicity swiped the box out of Harry’s hands, and nested them onto the coffee table. Harry trailed stickiness and dirt the way he left broken guitar strings and hearts behind him, but that didn’t mean she had to feel generous about accommodating it.
“You’ll be middle-aged, and you’ll be telling people in elevators you were in a band. You’ll be a salesperson, maybe used cars.” Felicity’s delighted laughter rang out against pale-pink walls and she took a donut from the box and scraped a tiny bit of icing with her little fingernail. And of course he looked disgustingly cool, when the shirt was probably filthy, and the shoes were gross and the boy himself was probably high.
She drew her feet up against the couch cushions to make more room for him, and tucked bare toes under the flat of his thigh once he’d settled. She didn’t know why Harry wanted to look like no one gave a shit about him, when she knew daddy paid his Amex bill, but maybe it incentivized the girls in the bars. The little-boy-lost look was lost on Felicity, she reached over with a wrinkle of forehead, and picked off a sprinkle from his shoulder.
“You’re completely disgusting.” Which was practically ‘I missed you, you idiot’, but in a language of margaritas at three am and dirty little secrets buried under floorboards.
"Cross my heart, if I'm anything by 40, and it isn't famous? Let me be burnt out and dead." And he was serious, there was a grotesque turn of his tone like ew extended to people who lived past 27 with nothing to show for it. "Devote my body to science," he begged with dramatics and twisted just so when she pushed the cold bareness of her toes beneath his leg. He wound himself up against the couch, crossed his legs with hers in some friendship bracelet of indian style, and he looked at her.
He was peaceful, really. Just her and him and the donuts, and it’s not like he had anything else to do on this day, nowhere else to go. "Are you ever going to tell me why this was the place to move to?" Harry dipped his head back and accessed. Her ceiling was nice, but, "This ain't fucking Boca."
Forty wasn’t old. Oh it was older but Felicity thought forty sounded like the kind of age you had your shit collectively together. Twenty? Felt like trying running to stay still, but Harry didn’t know that. But she wondered if Harry actually cared if he stuck around on the planet. He was out of his skull frequently enough that it was debatable, and as he tangled up with her on her own couch, parked like he owned the place (of course he had, Harry had the enviable gift of looking comfortable no matter where he landed. It had taken her the years in the foster-home to learn how to look that disaffected. Felicity liked comfort) she put heel to his calf and pushed. Alive and stupid and probably high, but he brought donuts and he wasn’t demanding.
“Like you care. You’d follow me to Bora-Bora.” Tease and she didn’t believe it. The tie was tenuous, and eventually? Harry would find someone he loved enough to make it snap. If he did. But that took losing the lost-boy act and Harry was her anchor, not that she would ever tell him. She studied him, under the auspices of examining her hair for split-ends, and judged the balance of truth and lie and came down on sweet-spun-sugar lie for seconds before the truth.
“My mother was from here.” Truth hung in the air like Chanel and she kicked his thigh. “This place is dead, but you’re still on something.”
He mocked injury after she kicked his leg. Wincing puppy expression had him pulling slightly away, but not so much that he would have had to get off the couch. "Bora Bora," he repeated experimentally… but no. It sounded too remote, too many tropical drinks and not enough hard drugs. Did they even have a skate park? Probably not. Even so, the unspoken realization on his part was that Harry probably would follow her even there, but she hadn't subjected him to that kind of tropical paradise torture, not yet. Whatever Felicity was running away from, and Harry wasn't as fucking dumb as he was comfortable playing out to be. He might not have been as science or logic savvy as Perry of Gwen, but he'd still aced all of his classes without even a flex of effort. Those teachers, and his father, they always told him, 'If you'd only apply yourself…'
But 'applying oneself' had no place in punk gutter culture. It was a whole lot of the opposite, really.
Felicity said that her mother was from this small town, and Harry didn't push for anything beyond that. He stretched out on the couch while his stomach grumbled in need of another donut, or just actual sustenance. He knew that her mother's old stomping grounds wasn't the whole truth of it, nobody came to the wasteland for nostalgia from the family tree… did they?
Whatever, he wouldn't push, except the toe of his foot, stinky black sock insulting the line of her leg. "I'm clean as Clorox, fire crotch. What about you? Overdosing on some OCD medication?" Because her place was clean. Although in contrast to Harry's place, most nuclear waste sites could be considered clean.
Messy, that sprawl over sugarplum clean couch and Felicity dug her toes into his calf with feigned irritation for casual comfort in an environment that had taken days to construct, ruby-red varnish glinting under the overhead. Maybe it was why Harry never settled, because no matter where he was, he seemed home. Felicity? Felicity liked to know exactly what was where wherever it was because she hated surprises.
Harry was the kind of smart that dredged itself up from the hard drugs and punk music to stay afloat. If she had been Harry-kind of smart, then maybe the mob and the art-theft wouldn’t have tanked college, but it had and Felicity ignored the twist of envy that stabbed always-and-forever lower down. That was in the past, and Harry was unchanged as ever and it didn’t matter what her reasons were for coming here, he had still followed.
She didn’t have customary red lip to curl it, but she glared all the same. “Just because I don’t let cockroaches hang out in my space. You know, those pests that have been your roommates since the maid service stopped?” And she ran fingers through damp hair intent on curling, “I’ll believe you’re clean when you wake up before the afternoon and you don’t smell like you’ve bathed in a bar.” Because no matter how much she despised the blown-wide pupils and the dizzy way Harry swam through girls and life like he only had to do the breaststroke instead of live, secretly? She was terrified one day Daddy’s Amex was going to purchase something too pure to swim through.
“So who in town haven’t you slept with yet? I’m discounting the boys, unless you’ve got something you need to tell me.” Eyebrow.
'Messy' could have been the tagline of Harry's biography, or just the name of his fashion line. He wasn't messy like unshowered or stale sex, he wasn't caked dirt or mildew on poorly dried clothes. No, Harry was messy like lipstick traces on the hollow dips of his hipbones, three-days old and that waterproof Maybelline barely wanted to scrub off. Harry was messy like sharpie phone numbers on the insides of his forearms or palms, the names smeared or just forgotten and he wasn't going to call anyway. Harry was messy like a bad decision, a weekend of bad decisions. The kind that made for the best time of your life, but was just supposed to be a weekend, and not much more. All the drugs, and the girls, and hell maybe the boys too(maybe Felicity was onto something there). He'd have denied it if he remembered enough to deny. Besides, somebody famous once said that it was best to never apologize, never explain anything. Maybe it was Kate Moss.
Harry croaked wounded laughter at her question. "I haven't slept with anybody in this town since I got here." Since being the keyword for certain high school buddies reemerged. "The Capital is a different story… don't hate me because I'm beautiful.." Teasing lack of sincerity had Harry landing the back of his head against her couch headrest. He was all dark curls, wind-whipped.
"What about you? Any beau on the radar?"
She hadn’t studied the insides of his wrists or the length of his rib-cage for the remnants of phone numbers and broken hearts. Felicity didn’t need to, she knew they would be there just the way she knew Harry wasn’t going to dial a single one of them a second time, and the way she knew they wouldn’t want him like this. Harry wasn’t a second-time-around kind of boy, but that was okay, because none of the girls (boys?) he spent all those firsts with really wanted him to be more. He was someone’s fucked-up fantasy, and fantasies didn’t have staying power. She ran fingers through the tangle of his curls, the wrinkle of nose at encountering sticky-something that remained nameless.
“Since you got here,” she repeated, knowingly as she wiped her hand off carefully on a pale-pink tissue from the console table. “How many of the little gang have you gone through? MJ, I know. She had her claws out from the second you showed.” She didn’t doubt he’d laid waste through the Capital, a morass of panties and lost first names. Harry did best when he first arrived someplace. It was remembering how to stick around he was bad at.
She rolled in on her side towards him, the spread of damp-copper over the back of the couch smelled like vanilla, and she had the fuzzy sleeve of her pale pink sweater pulled over her knuckles as she bunched her hand beneath her head.
“Me? I’ve been good as gold.”
"MJ is such old news." Harry wrapped part of his body around her. She smelled clean and wet and girl, and inevitably Harry pulled away because… you know, self-preservation. He huffed a powdered sugar donut exhale and kind of wished for hard liquor of something even harder than liquor so that he didn't have to say the words he was about to say. But it was day time, and even Harry still had his limits. "I loved her, but I don't love her." Not anymore, come on. Sixteen year old hormones and sneaking through windows? How long was something like that supposed to last?
As far as Harry understood, she had a new boyfriend now anyway, but that was totally beside the point of him being hung up on anyone whatsoever.
He reached out to pull at a wet string of her red hair, and he liked knowing that she was good here, settled. "I brought the donuts out of love, but I should go crash soon. I've got a gig tonight with the boys. Still love ya, yeah?" Because he was getting up from the couch and making his way to the door with a very Harry wink.