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Drew wakes up with the distinct feeling that something is slightly wrong.
He reaches out for Harrison, and has to open his eyes, confused.
“That’s my leg,” Harrison tells him. He’s sat up against the headboard, tapping his thumbs together.
“Why is your leg here.” Drew asks, not nearly awake enough to grasp what’s going on.
“I couldn’t sleep,” Harrison admits.
Drew wakes up a bit more.
“You and Hal have to stop watching horror movies.”
Harrison doesn’t reply, and that’s how Drew knows it’s bad.
“Hey,” he whispers, “come ‘ere”. Harrison’s eyes scan the room again.
“Harrison, hey, it’s okay. I’ve got you.” Harrison slides down the bed, allowing Drew to pull him into his arms, though he still doesn’t turn.
“I’ll protect you, Harrison, I swear,” Drew tells him, and Harrison turns suddenly to face him, burying a whimper into his chest.
“I’ve got you,” he repeats. “I’ve got you.” He strokes Harrison’s back, and keeps his eyes open until he’s sure Harrison is asleep.
***
“I can’t do this.” Harrison says. Deadlines are fast approaching, and they’ve been studying together all morning. “I can’t. This is not something I have the capability of doing. I can’t write this essay-“
“Harrison.” Drew says, quiet but firm.
“I can’t write this essay and I’m gonna fail the module and then I’ll fail the course and if I resit I’ll fail that and then they’ll kick me out and then-
“Harrison.” Drew interrupts, crossing the room to pull him up from his desk and into his arms.
“Hey, hey. It’s okay, you’re not going to fail.”
“But I can’t —“ he starts, before collapsing into Drew, tears beginning to fall. Drew keeps one hand on his back, sweeping up and down, and the other rests in his hair, stroking through it gently.
He lets Harrison cry himself out, and he can’t say he’s really surprised that this is happening. Harrison has been stressing for weeks, and though he’s done his best to help, Drew has deadlines too.
“I’m sorry,” Harrison chokes out from between sobs, but Drew just shushes him, and continues to hold him close. It takes a while for his sobs to die down, but eventually he quiets, though he’s still shaking in Drew’s arms. Drew shepherds him over to the bed, grabbing some tissues for him to blow his nose. He sits them down, keeping Harrison in the circle of his arms all the way.
“Talk to me about it,” He says simply, and slowly, shudderingly, Harrison does, letting Drew cup his cheek and wipe the tears away as they come.
***
Harrison has burnt the toast. It’s been a very long week, and he’s burnt the toast.
He knows, objectively, that it’s very easy to fix. But his objectivity is chased away by the furiousness in his head. He’s so fucking useless.
And because he’s useless and there’s no point him trying, he doesn’t bother fixing it - just sits on the counter and lets himself wallow.
That’s where Drew finds him, not all that much later, when he comes to investigate the burning smell.
“Hey,” He says, cautious. Harrison sighs, and that’s all Drew needs to understand. He steps into his personal space, and Harrison wraps his legs around him immediately, just as Drew wraps his arms around him.
After a minute or two of just breathing, Drew breaks the silence.
“What do you need?”
Harrison thinks on it for a while, fighting through his annoyance at himself to work out what will actually help.
“I need you to distract me.” He says eventually, and he has a pretty good idea how that distraction is going to go.
Drew moves a hand to cup his cheek. “You’re sure?” Harrison nods, pressing a kiss to Drew’s palm.
“Very sure,” he replies, pulling him even closer.
He’s not expecting Drew to pick him up. But he does, and a thrill goes through Harrison that knocks all thoughts of his terrible week away. Instead, there’s only Drew’s arms, strong and gorgeous, and Drew himself, who’s kissing up his neck.
He carries him out of the kitchen, stopping in the corridor to push Harrison back against the wall, finally moving his mouth from his neck to kiss him hard. Harrison returns it, already breathless, already growing hard against Drew’s stomach.
Drews grip tightens again, and he carries Harrison to their bedroom, and doesn’t give Harrison chance to think about the toast - or any of his terrible week - for the rest of the night.
***
They’re at a party, and look - Drew loves Harrison. He loves his friends. He’d even go so far as saying he loves parties with his friends (now that he has them, now that he knows they’re his friends).
Parties like this, though, parties where the bass keeps time with his heartbeat, where he can’t listen to any one conversation without losing the thread because there’s another? Not so much.
But he loves Harrison. And he loves his friends. So he’s here, and it’s not great , but it’s okay. And Harrison is loving it, so really, it’s worth it.
There are a lot of reasons Hal and Drew get on so well, and one is that they share this, this discomfort. They’d bonded over it, even, in Drew’s first year. So naturally, by now, they have a system to get through it. Drew thinks he’s done pretty well tonight, all things considered. He’d held out for a while before raising and eyebrow at Hal and slipping away. He wanders outside, and she joins him not long after, leaning on the wall beside him. For a while, they're quiet, the comfort of each other’s companionship enough.
“I can get Harrison, if you don’t want to go back in,” Hal offers, eventually.
Drew thinks on it, and there’s no rush between the two of them. Eventually, he shakes his head.
“No, I’m good. I just needed a break. You?”
It’s her turn to think on it, but after a moment she agrees.
“Let’s stick to the edges, though,” she suggests, and Drew knows her well enough to see that it’s more of a plea than a casual suggestion.
So they do, wandering only back in enough that Drew can see Harrison - or at least glimpses of him, caught as he is in the throngs of friends surrounding him. He catches Drew’s eye, just for a second, and Drew sends a smile his way. Harrison responds with a wink, and Drew turns back to Hal with a laugh. It’s not difficult for them to get caught up in some conversation, a bubble of peace in the chaos around them.
Some time later, the chaos comes back to them, formed exactly in the shape of Harrison. Drew lifts his arm, just in time for him to slam into his side.
“Oof,” Drew says, an amused admonishment, his arm wrapping around Harrison’s shoulders anyway.
“Hi.” Harrison says, beaming up at him.
“Alright?” Drew asks, helpless to do anything but smile back.
“I think,” Harrison stage-whispers, conspiratorial, “I might have drunk a lot of alcohol,”
“No kidding,” Hal says.
“Oh!” Harrison remembers, and Drew winces at the volume. “You two have to carry on talking! You looked happy!”
“We... are,” Drew ventures.
Harrison’s face goes suddenly serious. “Good. Carry on. I just wanted to cuddle you.”
“Blush,” Hal calls, and through some magic of her own making, a shot appears in her hand. Drew glares as she knocks it back, but Harrison taps his chest.
“Go back to talking,” he instructs, his drunken eloquence blurring the line between conviction and bossiness, and Hal and Drew do their best around their giggles.
Harrison goes back to smiling as they get back into their conversation. He’s not paying attention, perfectly happy where he is. Except - well. He could be touching Drew more. He wriggles, and Drew lets him press close, shifting slightly to carry on talking over his head.
And that’s perfect, it’s great, but, well, Drew has another arm. He has two arms. One of them is around Harrison, as well it should be. The other is at his side, and that’s just a tragedy.
Harrison is known for his excellent schemes, and this, he thinks, is one of his best. He reaches out for Drew’s arm, and pulls it up and around him. He has to twist his own arm weirdly to manage it, but manage he does, and he lets out a hmmph of triumph when he’s safely enclosed in Drew’s arms.
Hal had been mid-sentence, but now she’s openly laughing. He can feel Drew shaking as he tries to hold his own giggles in.
“Happy?” Drew asks him, and Harrison gives him another brilliant smile, reaching up on his tiptoes to place a sloppy kiss on Drew’s cheek.
“Home?” Drew asks, and Harrison agrees, so long as Drew doesn’t let him out of reach all the way back.
***
Before he’d joined their radio show, Harrison had been... between friendship groups. It wasn’t that he didn’t have friends — but they were just classmates, really, and there was no one he wanted to spend time with outside of assignments. In his first year at Sidlesmith, he’d thought he’d gotten at least one of the tropes he’d been so badly hoping for: his found family trope. It had turned out that he’d been very, very wrong about that.
Even though this new found family of his, now, is so much better, he still feels sad about those first friends sometimes. They’d all been in the same dorm, and it was that freshers rush to make friends, to stop the loneliness before it really dawned on anyone that they’d left everything they knew behind in their home town. They’d bonded together out of desperation and determination, and it had worked, for a time. It had been good, really.
And then it had started falling apart, and it hadn’t stopped falling apart until there was nothing left. Harrison had tried, he really had. It hadn’t worked. He talks to two of them still, occasionally, and he knows there are little bubbles left over.
They’d lived right on the opposite side of campus, and most of them had stayed there. When he’s feeling generous, Harrison likes to count that as one of the reasons they never see each other any more.
And given all of that together, Harrison doesn’t really expect to see all of them as he’s walking over to the Communications building one evening before his and Drew’s show. He curses the fact their show is in the evening, that he can’t just blend into the crowds of students who are always clustering here in the daytime. It’s a wide open space, and there’s really nowhere to hide.
One of his old friends spots him, and now it’s really too late to get out of whatever this clusterfuck turns out to be.
“Harry!” She says, coming up to him, smiling as if she’s unaware of their history, even as he grates at the nickname; smiling as if they’re still friends and not people who were once so close and are now irrevocably separated.
“Hi,” He says, as if there aren’t a bundle of ugly emotions trying to make themselves apparent in his voice.
She goes for it, he’ll give her that. She starts down the small-talk route, as if it isn’t clear that he’s been the only one not invited. He doesn’t look, but he can feel the shifty glances going round the others, can feel the slight tension as the rest of them acknowledge how awkward this is.
And then—
“Harrison!”
He’s never been so happy to hear Wendy’s voice in his life. He doesn’t care how audible his sigh of relief is. He turns, and his smile gets even wider when he realises she isn’t alone. She and Hal move like they’re flanking him, and then Drew is there too, wrapping an arm around him.
“Hey, you,” He says, looking only at Harrison, and leans down to kiss him.
“Drew!” One of Harrison’s old friends interrupts, in that starry-eyed way people get around Drew. Harrison had forgotten they were even there.
“Do I know you?” Drew asks, not bothering to inject even a sliver of warmth into his voice.
“Um. No.” She says, sheepish. He raises an eyebrow, unimpressed, and turns back to face Harrison.
“Shall we?” He asks, and they walk away. It occurs to Harrison to look back, and he thinks about it, for a moment. But then Wendy links her arm through his on the side not occupied by Drew.
“Are you okay?” Hal whispers, as soon as they’re out of earshot. Harrison presses in closer to Drew, intertwining their fingers.
“I am now.” He says, and he doesn’t look back.