#sytycyd lourry

[ferryboatpeak]

lol i can’t tell if this is a request or an exclamation about what a terrible idea this file name is, but here you go all the same.

the backstory: as someone who enjoys ethically sourced lourry (and uh also the occasion larry blood diamond), i was going to see if i could write a responsible lourry fic. the answer, it turned out, was that i could not. or at least i could not write this particular lourry fic without getting into some larry tropes that are profoundly distasteful to me.

i want the record to show that if this was 2012, this could have been a great fic. i really liked the way everybody slotted into the sytycd universe, and it had a very solid plot, and i wanted the image of louis tomlinson dribbling a soccer ball down the middle of a vegas hotel ballroom floor filled with dancers stretching out. oh well. below is the first bit, which is mostly unrequited zarry. don’t blink or you’ll miss the haylor. i have restrained myself from editing anything, even to fill in gaps or fix things that are now very embarrassing.

Zayn manages to snooze his alarm three times before Harry takes charge.

“Zayn?” The knocking starts out gently, just the back of Harry’s knuckles against the cheap hollow bedroom door. Zayn tucks his knees up and nuzzles the side of his face more decisively into his pillow. “Zayn, I can tell your light’s not on, you’re not even up.”

The knocking intensifies. “Zayn, I’m coming in.”

Zayn rolls onto his stomach and wraps his arms around his pillow as the door creaks open. Harry shakes him by his bare shoulder. “C’mon, get up.”

Zayn makes a pitiful noise intended to emphasize how dark it is outside. He knows he’s going to get up, they’ve worked too hard for him not to, but he’d still like to be convinced. Especially because being convinced means Harry wrapping his arms around him and trying to pull him out of bed.

Zayn puts up token resistance and Harry deposits him on the floor. “I know you’re gonna spend forty-five minutes on your hair before we can leave, so get after it.”

The floor is cold, and Harry’s not wrong about Zayn’s priorities. Zayn casually flips him off and slouches into the bathroom.

Not quite 45 minutes later, Zayn descends the stairs through the dark common room toward the light coming from the kitchen. Harry hands him a piece of peanut butter toast and a paper towel. “C’mon, let’s go.”

“No smoothies today?” Harry’s generous with his morning smoothie ritual, whenever anyone else in the house is awake and in the kitchen for it, which is mostly never. Zayn thought today might be his day. If any day warrants a smoothie, this is it.

“Not gonna run the blender at this hour,” Harry says, and it feels right even though the blender never wakes anybody up anymore. The house is quiet in a whole different way this morning. Three o’clock’s different when you wake up to it than when you fall asleep to it. Even the chirp of the locks on Harry’s battered Honda seems unusually loud on their silent street.

They’re on the freeway in record time, barely a red light in their way. Zayn considers going back to sleep, but looks over at Harry instead.

It ought to feel strange, doing this with Harry instead of anyone else in the crew. Zayn’s been dancing with everyone else for far longer, a couple of them ever since they were kids taking their first hip-hop lessons together. Others are dancers they met through the competition circuit as teenagers, or in college, or when someone’s LA orbit touched their own long enough to synch up.

Not Harry. A year and a half ago, Harry had been nothing but a new roommate. Their rundown house doesn’t have any advantages besides its large, high-ceilinged common room, but for the crew, that’s everything. For four years, Zayn’s led the constant hustle to make rent, cramming seven rent-paying bodies into five bedrooms. The crew’s big enough that there always seems to be someone ready and waiting to move in whenever a spot opens up. But Jaden moved out to live with his girlfriend right when everybody else in the crew happened to be settled elsewhere. So they’d posted on craigslist and hoped for the best.

When Harry came to check out the room, he’d tripped on the stair with the loose piece of carpet. Zayn caught him by the arm and hauled him upstairs, where Harry blinked slowly at the small dim available bedroom. In the kitchen, Harry stood with one hand on his elbow and the other on his chin, inspecting the scuffed countertops and beat-up electric range.

Zayn, meanwhile, inspected Harry, and decided he’d quite like to have Harry’s broad shoulders and cryptic tattoos and messy curls in the bedroom down the hall.

Zayn warned him that the house was a gathering place as much as a residence, that it would feel like more than six roommates most of the time, that he’d have to put up with late-night practices and arguing about choreography and the same song playing over and over so that the crew could perfect a routine.

Harry’d just smiled slow and easy and said, “Sounds like fun.” He’d moved in the next day.

Turned out it wasn’t strange at all to have a roommate who wasn’t part of the crew. Somehow, Harry made himself fit. After a few days of walking through their practices on his way to his room, Harry’d sat down on the stairs and draped his orangutan arms over the railing while he watched them. The next day he asked about a trick, and somebody taught him a move or two. A month later he tagged along for a Saturday of busking and appointed himself the hype man. Somewhere along the way he picked up enough choreography to weave himself into the fabric of the crew.

His integration was helped along by his status as good luck charm. Since he’s been around, the crew gets more money in the hat, more prominent gigs, more hits on their YouTube channel. Harry was the one a producer approached after they performed at a festival last summer, slipping him a business card and giving him an LA smile under blunt blonde bangs and cat eyes. Harry’d assumed she was flirting when she told him about So You Think You Can Dance, but when he emailed the address on the card, she ignored his suggestion about getting a drink and sent back a PDF of audition information. Told him to share it with the rest of the crew.

Harry had texted him. do u know so you thnk you can dance?

yeah so? Zayn had watched the show for years, partly for choreography ideas and partly just because.

what is it

dance show. ?

Harry didn’t answer, but Zayn came home from work that evening to find him curled up on the couch with his laptop, bony feet tucked underneath him. “Heyyyy,” Harry smiled at him, tugging his headphones down. “So I’m watching some So You Think You Can Dance stuff.”

“Yeah? Like what?” Zayn dumped his bag in the corner and slid in next to Harry, pressing into Harry’s shoulder to see what was on the screen. It was a YouTube video of Twitch and Alex Wong. Zayn stayed pressed up next to Harry while the red line along the bottom of the screen ran out the last 30 seconds of the routine, the music echoing faintly from the headphones resting around Harry’s neck. “That one’s a classic. Have you watched Twitch and Cyrus yet?”

Zayn took over the laptop then, and only after a few more greatest hits did he remember to ask about Harry’s sudden interest in the show.

“I think we should try out.” Which was a ridiculous thing to hear from someone who’d been dancing for all of a year, and watching the show for all of twenty minutes. But Harry goes for what he wants, up-front and unashamed about it. Zayn prefers to approach things from the side, like prey, expecting them to run away if they notice he’s interested.

“We who?” Zayn had thought about auditioning over the years, but never cared enough to follow through. It never felt like such a longshot was a good enough reason to get out of bed that early.

“You and me.” Then Harry explained about the email from the producer. “So do you want to?”

Zayn demanded to see the email, and Harry pulled it up on his phone. It was short, professional, and came from a fox.com email address. Everything about it, including the signature block, looked legitimate. Zayn felt a flutter of possibility. It was the closest anyone in the crew had ever come to somethinng official, something big. Figures that it’d come to Harry.

Then he scrolled down to Harry’s come-on, and laughed. “You hit on her, and she asked you to audition?”

Harry shoved him. “Well, I didn’t know! Why would she come up to me for that? Everyone else was right there.”

“Harry, that means you should try out.” Zayn shoved him back. “We were all there, and she chose you. You have to be the one to do it.”

Harry’d set his jaw stubbornly. “I’m not doing it alone.”

“Jesy, then. You already partner her. We could come up with a routine for you.”

“No.” Harry shook his head, and then leaned toward Zayn, eyes locking on his with purpose, with intensity. “I want to do it with you.”

And that was it, that was all Harry had to say. They did a shot of vodka and filled out the audition paperwork, and the next day Zayn was on the phone to his old studio, bartering for a couple of sessions to fine-tune their choreography and clean up some of Harry’s worst amateur habits.

Paul had laughed dubiously when Zayn explained, but after he saw Harry dance, Zayn could tell he got it. Whatever magic Harry has, the thing about him that grabs an audience and won’t let go, Paul saw it too. “You guys might just do this,” he told them after a couple of hours, and Zayn let himself start believing it too.

With Harry around, it seems like anything’s possible. As they slide into an easy parking space on the empty pre-dawn streets, Zayn can’t imagine being here with anybody else.

The queue is already starting to form, but they’re close to the front, behind a clutch of blonde teenage contemporary dancers who look like they’ve been mass-produced by a single Utah studio. They’re all in some variation of rolled sweatpants and shearling-lined boots. In less than fifteen minutes, Harry charms his way into a share of the plaid blanket that three of them have draped over their laps.

Zayn stays standing for a bit, watching as dancers filter toward the theater and join the queue. As the line increases, so does the nervous energy, and so does the number of black-clad producers. They patrol the line, squawking radios clipped to their waists and cameras trailing in their wake. Zayn feels inspected.

When the sun’s up and the line stretches to the end of the block, a producer approaches the front of the line. As she gets closer, Zayn recognizes her as the one who approached Harry at the festival last summer.

Harry pushes his hood back and smiles beatifically up at her, or maybe at the camera by her side. “Taylor! Hello!”

“Harry, glad you made it.” She extends her hand, and Harry clambers awkwardly to his feet to shake it, plaid blanket falling forgotten behind him.

Harry beckons Zayn closer. “This is Zayn, from the crew.”

Taylor gives him a mildly interested smile. “Are you and Harry auditioning together?”

Before he can answer, the Utah blondes are on their feet, edging their sharp elbows into the conversation. Harry introduces them all. Zayn marvels that he can even tell them apart, let alone that he’s learned all their names.

“You all up for dancing a little?” Taylor asks, and the blondes are expanding into a loose circle before she’s even finished her sentence, urging the next few layers of the line forward to join them.

It’s Zayn that Harry drags into the center of the circle with him, though, grinning at him bright as the sun and starting a clownish combination of moves that’s more of an inside joke than a proper routine. Zayn falls into step easily -- it’s always so easy to fall in step with Harry, easy as obeying gravity -- and it’s easy to smile right back at him too. He’s really here, he’s really doing this, and he’s doing it with Harry. Harry drapes an arm over him as they fade back into the circle, ceding the center to a blonde who kicks

The circle breaks up when the cameras swing away, following Taylor toward a dancer in a red tracksuit with an Adidas bag slung over his shoulder. He’s weapon-pretty, compact and dangerous, cheekbones and jawline like a set of throwing knives.

Zayn prefers beauty that’s approachable, arms to wrap around you and hair you can get tangled up in.

“Who’s that?” Harry asks, and Zayn’s heart sinks a little at the note of interest in his voice. Harry likes challenges, things that give up their secrets in response to his patient attention: complicated recipes, Scrabble tiles, breaking down a new piece of choreography. And when the whole world falls in love with you, nothing’s a bigger challenge than a rare person who seems like he won’t.