Timeless - A Larry Stylinson FanFiction

Chapter 5

“She’s just about your age too, and quite the floorflusher,” Thea said with her familiar lighthearted chuckle. Her and Harry were standing in a cleared out corner, cold glasses of sparkling water held protectively in even colder hands. Harry gave Thea a slightly distracted nod, standing on his toes to look for his lanky older sister. “She’s really quite something, maybe a bit of a flour lover, but a lovely girl at that.” Thea spoke with slight strain in her voice, maybe a bit of pleading for Harry to go mingle with this niece of hers. Letting the last remains of tasteless carbonation pass his lips, he looked up from the steady, two-minute gaze off into the nothingness risen above the small town square.

“Alright,” He piped up, voice giving a mid-puberty squeak as he came in from his daze. “What’s her name? I’ll ask her to dance... I suppose,”

“Oh, how wonderful, thank you Harry,” Thea smiled as she instantly shuffled Harry through the crowd of people, dancing, laughing, drinking. He shoved his hands in his pockets, soon enough face-to-face with a girl his age. She had a short, dirty-blonde bob, looking a bit frazzled and limp from the night of such energy, and dark brown eyes similar to Thea’s. The girl had a nose like Thea’s too, small and symmetrical, pointed up just so at the end. With a slight shove from Thea, Harry was hardly toe-to-toe with this girl.

“Harry, this is Florence, my niece. Florence this is Warren’s cousin Harry,” Thea spoke with great excitement in her voice, feeling a spark of success in her heart. Harry’s dad was always ruffling his feathers about how he should be keeping his eye out for a keen little lady to call his own. Brushing off the remarks, Harry tended to skip the weekly trips to the soda shoppe after class, never quite in the right mind to search out a nice girl whose books he could carry home. Not because he was lazy, no, he’d carry books if he was interested, he just was never keen on swooning a girl like that. It was nothing that bothered him too much, his mum always told him he’d know it when he found the right girl.

Harry and Florence stood together for a brief moment of stillness, though the cold air was hustling and bustling around them, before Harry got the guts to ask her for a dance, which she happily obliged. Before they knew it, the young pair was out in the cleared patch of lit cobblestone, swinging their hips to the seemingly never-ending tune. The air swirled in ways Harry had never realized, eyes lighting up as Florence ever so gracefully took his hand, showing the clumsy lad the steps.

“You’d really think a guy like you would know the steps, too bad you’re such a corn-shredder,” Florence chuckled, taking a breath as the young, weary pair stepped off the proclaimed dancefloor. Harry gave a timid smile, giving a shake of his shoulders, for he couldn’t quite find any other words to say. Hands in his pockets protecting him from the cold, his nearly numb fingertips brushed over the pin, now practically frozen to the inside of his jacket. With a lighthearted flicker of confidence, Harry took a breath.

“Can I walk you home?” The question surprised himself more than the breathless little thing pouring herself a final glass of water, adding just a drop of hooch for good measure. Glancing up, her eyes had a look of somewhat exhausted adrenaline. Taking a sip and pulling a slight face of distaste, she nodded, limp curls almost plastered to her round cheeks.

“I would like that,” Florence said with a lipstick-smudged smile. Harry gave her a single nod. He immediately thought back to his mum’s words. In the pitch black of early December, Harry walked a girl home. For the first time. She politely mentioned each street name with a drowsiness settled into her voice, and they eventually arrived at Florence’s home, expensive-looking and settled back into a protective coat of frost-dusted pine trees. He thanked her for the dance, as a proper gentleman should, and in return gained a thankful peck on the cheek. Her lips were chapped and coating in diminishing red lipstick, but it still caused a slight dance in Harry’s heart. He thanked her yet again, stumbling upon his words before taking off running down her dirt and stone driveway.

Arriving back at the celebration with a choking sort of pain in his chest, taking large swallows of the frigid air as he ran back, being plucked from the crowd by Gemma, who peppered him with nearly a million questions about the girl she had spotted him dancing with.

Harry gave only bashful answers, though he felt a swell of pride and excitement in his heart for the first time really. Alright, maybe the second, the first being just earlier that day. Nonetheless, he was on an exuberant high fueled by dancing, hormones, and carbonated water, only to be brought down later on after being dragged home from the festivities and forced to settle down, crawling into bed with cheeks as red as roses and full lips to match.

He laid in bed, eyes wide and nearly bloodshot, with a sort of ache in the backs of them, silently telling him he needed to get some shut eye. Harry’s bony fingers made his way to his jacket pocket, for he had collapsed in bed with all of his dressing clothes, removing the still-freezing metal pin. How could he become so attached to such a silly little pin he’d found in the dirt? What Harry didn’t know yet was that it wasn’t the pin that he was so attached to, it was the stranger who had relinquished such a thing to him that his mind, like the candle on his windowsill, kept flickering to. If only the thoughts of this stranger were just as easy to blow out.