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Harry

When Harry wakes up in the morning, sunlight streaming through the blinds and patterning him in stripes, he can’t remember where he is.

“Bloody hell,” he mumbles, rolling over and slamming the off-button on his alarm with his palm before it has a chance to ring. 8:30 a.m. Perfect.

Groggily, he sits up straight, the blanket covering his body falling down and revealing his bare chest and the waistband of his sweats.

As the haze of lost dreams lifts from his brain, he remembers.

Mission.

Drug bust.

With Sophia.

The sudden turbulence of emotions circling inside of him causes a cautious hand to rise to the space above his heart.

Until the notion that he’s pledging to her crosses Harry’s mind, that is.

Harry’s emerald eyes glide over to the door of his adjoining room with her and he has the fight the smirk that settles on his face.

Contrary to popular belief, Harry didn’t want to be here just as much as Sophia didn’t. He didn’t do little field missions like this, he was an interrogator who went into deep cover to get the information he needed.

Like when he found Sophia.

Harry Styles is not meant for drug busts in Florida high schools.

Lithely, he jumps up from the bed and crosses over to the door. He curls his hand around the handle, applying slight pressure to see if she left it unlocked. She didn’t.

Harry doesn’t know what he expected, honestly.

With a quick swipe of a card and a couple of encouraging nudges from a flat-head screwdriver (someone should really do something about that, it’s a shame), the door swings open to absolute darkness.

Occasionally, Harry wondered if Sophia was part vampire.

He raps four times on the door before flicking on the lights, blinking a couple times to settle his vision.

Harry forces himself to ignore the slight stutter in his heart beats when he realizes for a brief, terrifying moment that she’s lying facedown on the floor, a duvet tucked around her legs.

Then her back moves fractionally, the slight movement that comes with breathing, and relief floods so violently through him he takes a step backward, pulling a hand through his hair and muffling his sigh with the back of the other.

Walking over to her, Harry nudges a calf with his foot. Sophia barely budges, a curtain of brown hair tinted red in the bright light covering her face.

“Holly.”

She groans and flips over, draping an arm across her face to shield her eyes. Her voice, soft and light and yet dark and troubled, mumbles a phrase that sounds suspiciously like “Fuck you.”

“Lovely way to greet the person who is writing your post-injury evaluation, isn’t it?” Harry says, strolling around her as if he had all the time in the world. “We’ve got to go register for classes. Get our timetables, and all that. You wouldn’t want to miss that, right Holly?”

“No, what I wouldn’t miss is you actually being here.” Sophia pushes herself up from the floor

Harry raises an eyebrow. “Is your pleasantness inherited or genetic?”

“Put a shirt on, Styles,” she says lightly, her voice heavy with sarcasm.

As Sophia brushes past him, Harry can’t help but notice the paleness of her skin and the clammy look to her palms. She’s hiding something, and it’s destroying her from the inside out.

The bathroom door slams shut behind her and Harry hears the faucet start running, and the faint buzz of an electric toothbrush.

As he leaves the room, he shuts the door and wonders what, exactly, he’s gotten himself into.

High school.

***

“Does it feel strange?” Sophia asks after a bout of silence in the car.

“Does what feel strange?” Harry asks curiously, glancing over at her from the driver’s seat. Her eyes are dulled and exhaustion is evident on her face.

“Driving on this side of the road.”

“I know how to drive here, Holly,” Harry says, his automatic defense to her is always to respond with something sharp. He’s not really one hundred percent on why, but nothing with Sophia really is sure. “But yeah. It’s kind of weird. I’ve never given it much thought, really.”

Another wave of silence washes over them, tense and strange and unfamiliar. Harry can feel his muscles contracting, his fists clenching the steering wheel. The emotions he’s feeling now; nervousness, anxiety, insecurity, all have never been this intense on such a basic mission before.

As if sensing him, Sophia slips a pair of Ray-Bans from the top of her head until they slide comfortably on her nose. “Any suggested course of action?”

To turn the car around and leave, he wants to say, but instead he shrugs. “According to the file, our targets are somewhat high on the food chain. All-American perfect children. Perfect grades, starting spot on sports teams, the whole bloody lot of it.”

Sophia chuckles, but it sounds hollow and empty. “Classic sob story. The ‘where did it all go wrong?’ and their faces when we get them, oh God I’m tearing up just thinking about it. It’s gonna be the whole fucking shebang.”

“Holly, just one thing.” Harry runs another hand through his curls; he’s done it so many times it looks as if he styled it in a quiff. “No drugs.”

Harry realizes that the exact wrong thing to say when she sits up so rigidly and immediately the top of her head nearly grazes the roof of the car.

I’m in the shit.

Her voice is sharper than ice splinters being wedged under his fingernails, and it spurs a sudden burst of anger in his veins, consuming him. “Are you implying something, Harry?” The air in the car seems to Harry like it’s ready to be ignited at any second, one of them holding the match to light the fuse. “Because I know you aren’t telling me not to do drugs on a mission. Frankly, that’d be really fucking idiotic of you, wouldn’t it? Who the hell would be stupid enough to do that? Do you think that little of me to even entertain the idea that I would jeopardize a mission like that? Who the hell do you think you are?”

The anger boiling up inside Harry is reaching new levels, spreading through him like a disease, a sickness rivaling death. “Oh, I’m sorry, is this Holly I’m talking to not the same fucking Holly that asked me to put a gun to her head and pull the trigger? Is this not the Holly that tried to kill herself in the hospital? Is this not the same goddamn Holly that has to sneak pain killers because even her doctor thinks she’s going to fucking overdose?.” The steering wheel feels like it’s going to break beneath his grip, the muscles in his jaw working and his heart beating in double time. “If there’s some new Holly that no one’s told me about, I’d really like to fucking meet her.”

Harry refuses to look over at her and see the rage painted on her face because it’ll match his own. He refuses to look at anything but the concrete flying beneath them as his foot presses heavier and heavier on the gas. He has to make a conscious effort to remember that a speeding ticket will do him no good and lighten up a bit.

It’s silent for a long time, enough time for anger penetrating as deep as Harry’s bones to dissipate fractionally.

When she speaks again, her voice is dead and flat, the same emotionless tone she used on him back in her prison.

It feels almost like it was years ago.

“I hate you.”

Harry can’t help it. He smirks, and in an infuriatingly cocky tone, responds. “The sentiment is returned, Holly.”

***

Harry doesn’t even have the car in park before Sophia forces open the door and slams it shut, adjusting her backpack filled with blank notebooks on her shoulders. He grabs his own bag and locks the car, walking with her to the main office of their new school. They arrived to school late on purpose, just after first period had started to avoid any unnecessary interaction.

They’re playing transfer students from across the country, southern California. The state of sun-kissed skin and celebrity sightings and whatever else a person could do in California.

Frankly, Harry was pretty much over this mission and it hadn’t even started yet.

Harry silently thanks God that they’d already come up with a fake story to spout out to any curious students or teachers before they ceased all communication.

The air outside is muggy and thick, sticking to his skin like a second layer. The wall of cool air they encounter as they enter the building is a welcome relief.

“Are you the new transfer students?” A happy and helpful lady behind a desk greets them with a bright smile that looks actually genuine; Harry notes that it doesn’t have the forced quality of someone who had to practice it in the mirror.

“Yep,” Sophia says first, surprising him. She sounds happy and normal, like a perfectly well adjusted teenager. Grudgingly, he decides to take her lead. “Fresh out of California.”

“Sorry we’re late, Miss,” Harry adds, slipping effortlessly into an American accent and sugar coating his voice. “The school was a little bit hard to find.”

Harry can see it in her eyes when she locks on him, and he ignores the sudden roil of disgust in him by smiling. “Oh, don’t you worry too much about it, dear. The first day is tough on everyone. Now, just give me your names and I’ll print out your schedules for you.”

“Sophia Caulwell.”

“Harry Styles.” Harry averts his eyes when the older woman blushes before shuffling over the back room, the whirring of a printer drifting through the doors.

“Well,” Sophia mutters. “You’ve certainly got that on lock.” The derision in her voice could have cut anyone else in half.

Harry refuses to answer her, instead tapping his fingers restlessly on the laminated wooden desk.

The woman returns with two sheets of paper still warm from printing. She desperately offers them maps of the building (which they don’t need because they’ve already memorized the plans) and they part as quickly as possible. First period ends in fifteen minutes; this is when they make their entrance. It can either go horribly right or horribly wrong.

Of the nine classes on the list, Harry has five of them with Sophia, including lunch. The school isn’t large, clocking in at just over a hundred students per grade. The building itself is only seven or eight years old. The metal of the lockers still shines in the right light.

The two of them stop just in front of the door.

“We don’t jeopardize anything,” Sophia says, an unspoken truce between them. Her fingers fumble with the hem of her tank top before coming to a rest beside the fabric of her shorts. Harry nods in agreement.

“That’s a promise, Holly.”

Gently, he reaches over and twists the door knob, pushing open the door and letting her walk in first. The class is World History and the teacher in the middle of a lecture pauses completely, giving them his undivided attention.

The eyes in the room seem almost disembodied as they swivel over to focus on them. In a matter of seconds Harry pinpoints the targets, and judging by Sophia’s shift in posture, she has too.

“Ah! I almost forgot! Class, we have two new transfer students today, all the way in from California!”

Way to put us on the fucking hot spot.

“Your names are…?” The teacher, a man in his mid-forties desperately trying to hide his balding scalp, trails off at the end of his sentence.

“Sophia,” she says, giving the kind of smile that makes a person want to know everything about her, and a wave.

“I’m Harry.” Harry gives the room filled with eyes the same grin he gave to the receptionist.

As the teacher fusses about them and points them to open seats, Harry prepares himself for a very, very long year.