(NOT MINE) Poor Little Rich Boy (larry stylinson AU)

Chapter 2

Chapter Two:

Tipsy giggles trickled across the beach like the lazily moving ocean, the soft sounds carrying easily and echoing pleasantly down the pale golden sands. Louis' laughter could be obnoxiously loud and unpleasant, but he was in such a happy mood, especially with a good few mouthfuls of vodka sloshing around inside him, that the sounds of his amusement were gentle and almost pleasing to the ear. A chorus of other laughs - Stan's, Hannah's, Zayn's, Niall's - joined him, and all five of them sat on the beach and laughed, filled with the youthful idea that in that moment they were completely invincible.

The sun was setting so that the sky blazed a kind of orangey colour, and it cast a pale glow onto one side of Louis' face and sent shadows curling across the other side, giving him a slightly strange look. His fingers were curled around the neck of a half empty bottle, and a weird smile played on his lips as he stared down at the shapes he'd been tracing with one finger into the sand. A smiley face, a very lopsided dog, his own name...completely random pictures, and as he stared down at them with a dazed expression on his face, a passerby could have been forgiven for thinking that he was drugged up to the eyeballs.

Giggling breathlessly, Hannah flopped backwards onto the sand and splayed her arms and legs out wide, possibly pretending to be a starfish or something. Her blonde hair had worked itself loose of its messy knot, and cascaded freely around her face; her pristine white shorts and shirt were sandy and crumpled. She couldn't have cared less. Her blue eyes sparkled as she looked up at the burning orange sky, streaked as it was with clouds, and her small mouth had twitched into a dreamy smile.

"Well," she said cheerfully, "here we are." She'd drunk far more than Louis, but her voice was perfectly steady - Hannah was a very dignified drunk.

"And it's all thanks to Lou!" Niall reminded them, clumsily reaching out to thump Louis on the back, misjudging the distance and toppling over, ending up with a face full of sand while his hand grasped helplessly at thin air, reaching out for Lou. He ended up lying there for a while before pushing himself up and scrubbing some of the sand off his pink cheeks.

"Nah." Louis toyed with the bottle, tracing the rim with one finger, a smile still hovering at the corner of his lips.

"It was that girl on the stall. If she hadn't been so bloody persistent, I would never have picked up a ticket in the first place."

Stan raised his bottle, doing his best to hold it steady. His hand trembled a little bit, but they all pretended not to notice. "A toast," he cried, "to the annoying ginger!"

They all burst out laughing, and Louis reached out and gave him a playful shove even as Zayn started vigorously ruffling his tufty hair. Still, once they'd finished teasingly admonishing Stan for his clumsy choice of words, they all raised their respective bottles - even Hannah, although hers was almost completely empty.

"To the annoying ginger!" Stan announced, and then raised his bottle to his lips and knocked back at least half the liquid inside.

Louis rolled his eyes, then caught Zayn's eye and grinned at him. "The annoying ginger," they chorused, and emulated Stan, taking a generous gulp of their drinks.

Shaking her head fondly, Hannah tutted at them. "That's so rude," she scolded. Raising her own bottle to her lips and allowing it to clink against her teeth, she said "to charity raffles!" and downed the last dregs of her drink.

They all applauded, although no one was quite sure why. Perhaps because she had been the first to finish her bottle, and yet she was showing very few outwards signs of being more than ever so slightly tipsy.