larry- one shots

blend into my favourite colour

"He's glaring at me again," Louis whines, biting down viciously on the straw of his iced tea. Eleanor glances up at their barista, who is indeed staring at their table from the shadows behind the coffee bar. He has a polka-dotted scarf in his curls and murder in his eyes. He looks like a demonic Muppet Baby. Louis has never in his life seen such a ridiculous person.

"Don't be stupid, I'm sure he's not-- oh." Eleanor cuts herself off, and then snickers until Louis kicks at her ankle under the table. Normally, Louis finds studying with Eleanor to be loads of fun. They've been friends since their first year at Uni, when Eleanor designed costumes for the show Louis was performing in. It had felt like a stroke of divine luck when their Lighting Design professor had partnered them together in lab this term, and an even bigger stroke of luck for Louis' procrastination habits when Eleanor had taken one scornful look at their dusty, crowded lab space and dragged Louis into a nearby coffee shop instead. It hadn't taken much wheedling on Eleanor's part to convince Louis to finish the rest of their term's assignments in coffee-scented comfort.

But Eleanor also has a sneaky habit of knowing too much. Like the fact that the indomitable Louis Tomlinson could be so easily unsettled by a demon-barista with unnecessarily tight jeans and ostentatious tattoos.

"Harry Styles is such a twat," Louis sighs, and relieves some of his feelings by pulling rude faces at Harry from behind his iced tea. "Like, this is a shitty student café with bad lighting and worse muffins. What's he even trying to prove?"

Eleanor rolls her eyes with the world-weary patience of someone who has heard this all before.

"Can we skip the bit where you complain about the pattern on his jumper, and his sad hipster playlists, and I'll just nod along while you obsess over his 'pretentious' biceps? Some of us have real work to do."

"Shut up," Louis says, but without any heat behind it. "They are pretentious. Think how much effort they must take. Bet he watches Mad Men and thinks that makes him an arbiter of culture." Louis rolls the last phrase off his tongue with a sort of relish.

"Christ, here we go," Eleanor mumbles, desperately jabbing at her phone's Facebook app.

The truth is, Louis could have forgiven Harry many things -- biceps included -- but the first time they'd met, he had managed to insult the one thing that Louis held sacred. It only added insult to injury that Louis'd been aggressively flirting with him at the time.

When Lottie had browbeaten Louis into watching a weird sci-fi show called Werewolf High in the name of "sibling bonding," she'd endured three solid episodes of Louis' complaints. But then Hank had been introduced as the pack's new Alpha in Episode 4, and. Well.

It's not just that Hank is stupidly attractive (he is), or that he has spectacular chemistry with his sarcastic co-star, Logan (he does), but he's also the character around whom the rest of the ensemble turns. With just a few sarcastic eyebrow furrows and meaningful pauses, Hank could convey frustration at his pack of melodramatic teenage werewolves, but also a sense of careful responsibility for them. Louis is convinced that without Hank's quiet but hilarious performances, the whole show would be ruined.

And at the time, Louis had thought: I want to do that.

He'd even said as much, in the midst of a shouting match with Lottie that had mostly devolved into gesturing wildly at a paused screen and insisting "Why can't you see how much narrative work his clenched hand is doing!?"

And she had bellowed back "If you know so bloody much, maybe you should act in something yourself instead of talking shit about Rob's emotional range!" (Rob was Lottie's favorite character. He had spectacular abs, and Lottie was very invested).