Disclaimer: Everything belongs to their respectful owners.
A/N: Based on the prompts:-
'Walked into the wrong classroom and didn't realise until halfway through AU.'
and also
'My favourite college experience is when i had a 7am class and the kid next to me literally poured a monster energy drink into his coffee and "I'm going to die" and drank the whole thing.'
So, I haven't been writing for this fandom for quite a while, and this particular pairing in fact. After founding out that a relative of mine started reading this series, she told me about the heartbreaking scenes (coughGUNTOTHEHEADcough) and I started writing. Actually this was in my laptop for a long time and I managed to finish this only today. Enjoy!
It was ridiculous.
Everything about this class was just wrong.
It wasn't a bad kind of wrong, more like weird-wrong, like something was misplaced but Thomas couldn't identify what it was and where it went, like a terrible itch that he couldn't reach and it was driving him absolutely crazy.
He tried to search for anything past his hazy mind, anything at all. But he gave up when the blooming headache was starting to pound on his temples, causing him to groan slightly as he rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hands, with the sound of the professor's voice talking from up front. The professor's voice wasn't even clear to him, it was as if she was talking through a large fish tank full of water.
The hangover this morning didn't fully go away even after he drank half thermos of luke-warm coffee he managed to grab from the cafeteria, it was as if the black coffee didn't take affect at all. The thermos sat in front on him on the table, with a can of monster drink beside it as plan B if the coffee didn't manage to snap him awake from his zombie state.
Sure, maybe he should have gone easy on the drinks last night, but what's a party without losing your senses to the world right?
Minho's parties had always been something he looked forward to, a real slacker he could be as booze quickly took his mind off a lot of things, all those shit that was making him stressed. He remembered until the point they started shoving glasses upon glasses filled with alcohol under his nose, anything later than that was a blur of laughing, loud obnoxious music, and grinding between all those bodies.
The next thing he knew, he woke up with a sharp pain on his arm from where Minho had chucked a bottle of shampoo with.
"Wake up, you shank!" His friend shouted from their dorm toilet, the sound of tap running could be heard. The Asian boy poked his head out, a toothbrush jammed in his mouth as he put on some gel on his hair. "We have class in ten minutes and you still look like crap," He tried talking past the obstacle, toothpaste threatening to drip from the corner of his lips. "Do you want to get your ass kicked?"
He had grunted before siting up from his bed, his bones heavy and achy. The blankets were disarrayed as his face felt as if someone poured some glue on his eyelids. "Cool it, I'm up."
And so came the routine of going to class after washing his face, brushing his teeth, and only changing his drink spilled shirt that also suspiciously smelled like perfume that wasn't his because he never wore any (so fucking expensive) -he didn't know if it was women or men's perfume, for all he knew it had both- before he sprinted to grab his so called breakfast before bursting into class five minutes late, ignoring the stares before taking a seat.
Half an hour of class had past, and he finally noticed the weird sensation.
Sighing, he tried to focus on what the professor was explaining, but the words on the whiteboard didn't make sense to him as he blinked a few times to try sharpening his eyesight.
Since when does calculus had anything to do with Literature?
His clogged mind found it incredulous that the sentence was even formed and he shook his head slightly, before making a grab for the thermos, only to stop when his eye caught the sight of the monster drink. A thought managed to caught his interest, and he bit his bottom lip as he lingered on it. He shook his head again, muttering a "Fuck it." under his breath before popping open the can and dunk its contents into the thermos, finishing it off entirely.
Thomas closed the thermos, shaking it so that they mixed together. He was about to take a drink when he hesitated.
"I'm going to die." He mumbled, staring at the sloshing drink before he chugged it half.
What a way to be alive in Hell.
It took a moment before the headache had eased down, and when he could read what the professor had written clearly, he realised why there was Literature on it.
He was in the wrong class all along.
"You've got to be kidding me," He whispered frustratingly, tugging his hair as he buried his fingers in it, elbows resting on the table as he stared helplessly at the professor. "You have got to be kidding me," He hung his head as his hands were the only support his head had from it to fall on the table. "I can't believe this. What. The. Actual. Motherhubba-"
"Trouble?"
His head snapped up after he was cut off, where he met blue eyes of a blond dude sitting beside him from the left, the blond's eyebrow raised warily.
Thomas stared at him, trying to remember why those blue eyes of his looked familiar. He shook it off, there were a lot of blue-eyed people he met. "Just realised I'm in the wrong class," He said in a low voice, sighing as he eased back in his seat while running his fingers through his disarrayed hair again.
The blond chuckled. "How?"
Thomas snorted. "Hangover."
He winced in pity. "Yeah, I know that feeling," He searched his face for a while. "Thomas yeah?"
The boy in saying looked surprised. "How did you know my name?"
He shrugged. "I was at Minho's party last night, and I remembered him introducing you to the lot of us at the pub," When Thomas frowned, he gave a quirk of a smile. "You don't remember don't you?"
"No," Thomas replied. "I guess I was already too wasted to remember."
The other guy nodded in agreement. "Yeah, you did look a little tipsy at that time," He thrust out a hand. "Newt by the way."
Thomas clasped his hand and shook it. "Nice to meet you again."
Newt smirked. "Nice t'meet you too, Tommy."
After they withdrew their hands, Newt let his eyes focused on the board, tapping his pen on the table lightly as he continued to speak. "Are you goin' to stay here and let this boring class get at you or make your way out and let the people here know you just made a shank of yourself?"
Thomas scoffed as he continued suit. "It's a lose-lose situation, isn't it? Nah, might as well bore myself to death than lose my already bruised dignity," He gave a quirk of a smile when Newt snickered, and then looked around suspiciously before he addressed the other guy in a whisper. "They didn't seem to notice me here though."
"A few did," Newt replied back in the same tone. "Took me a while, but I recognised you, looking more like you've been run over by a bloody truck than having a party last night."
"Like you're any better." He shot back.
Newt waved his hand dismissively. "Touchè."
Which was true. The guy got bags under his eyes, his hair looked as if he just got out of bed -that made the both of them then-, but at least his clothes didn't look as wrinkled as Thomas' did.
Once class were done, Thomas was about to leave when Newt's words stopped him.
"You really don't remember what happened last night, do you?"
There was a way Newt looked at him. The blond's posture was with ease, patiently waiting for his answer, and yet at the same time his eyes were searching his face silently-and to be honest, Thomas felt like he was being judged, but he could be wrong- as if Thomas was hiding some truth he didn't want to reveal.
Or he forgotten.
He met Newt's stare levelly. "No, I don't."
Newt broke into a grin. "You should, I remembered most of it and I could say it was one of the best nights I ever had. Tell Minho I said thanks, yeah?" He walked past him, lightly brushing their shoulders as he tossed the last few words behind his back. "Also, you might want to tell him he just upchucked his dinner at the backseat of his car."
Thomas had to stand there for a while, surprised at the change of conversation, before making his way out, all the time thinking how Newt's faded cologne had the same smell as the shirt he had thrown on the floor earlier.
"And just where have you been?"
Thomas didn't look up from his work of picking up dirty laundry. "Did I miss anything?" He asked instead, lastly plucking the blue shirt he wore last night.
Glancing up, he saw Minho tossing his back pack at the foot of his bed before slumping on it face down, a groan rumbled from his throat. "What do you think?" Came the muffled reply. He probably decided he looked ridiculous talking with his ass in the air and so flopped onto his back, draping an arm over his eyes. "My head's gonna shucking fall off my neck, I could just feel it," He peeked from under his arm to shoot Thomas a glare. "And where've you been?"
Thomas slung the shirt on his shoulder, and the smell of liquor was making his nose twitch a bit. "I might have accidently went to a different class."
Minho let out a bark of laughter. "The hangover was that bad huh? Could say the same thing for myself when I went inside the storage room," He groaned again, covering his eyes again. "Man, I can't even look at you from this angle without feeling the need to puke. How many did I take? 20? 30?"
Thomas snorted, discreetly playing with the shirt so that he could find the smell of the cologne. "How the heck am I supposed to know, even I don't remember how we got back here without crashing to our deaths," He paused. "Wait, what happened to your car?"
"Someone helped us out," The Asian boy answered back dismissively. "He managed not to steal it when I take a look at it, the guy was probably not drunk at that time," He huffed out a breath. "Forgot who he was, got blond hair though, it could either be Ben or Newt, or some nice sober kid who took pity on us pathetic losers."
Thomas felt some sort of feeling spread in his chest when Newt's name was mentioned. "Must be Newt."
"Is it? Well, thank Lord for a friend like him." There was a pause. "Wait, how did ya know?"
"He said something about you barfing at the back seat of your own car."
"What?" Minho sat abruptly on his bed, before letting out a pained moan as he hung his head, hands on his head. "Shouldn't have done that," He muttered, closing his eyes. He reached out to the bottle of quarter filled water from the side of his bed and finished it off, collapsing on the bed again with the empty bottle in his hand. "For fuck's sake."
"Also, he said thanks for the party," Thomas let out an internal cheer when his nose caught the spicy tang of the cologne, and his assumptions were confirmed when it did, in fact, smelled like Newt.
"Wonderful," Minho mumbled. "Now I gotta bring it to the car wash before it'll stink like hell."
"Look at it this way," Thomas said lightly, plucking the towel that was hung on the back of his desk chair and swung it on his other shoulder, tossing the shirt towards the mountain of clothes at the corner of the room where the laundry basket once was. "No one would even try stealing it after you did your territorial mark on it."
"Shut up," Minho snapped as he threw the plastic water bottle at his roommate's way, to which said person avoided with a laugh as he made his way to the toilet to take a shower. "Or I'll leak something of yours all over this damn place."
"So mature," Thomas sang as he was about to close the door but then stopped himself, because what the fuck this is Minho talking here, and though some people wouldn't do those type of things and he would have just brushed it away, this is goddamn sass king Minho. Especially when it included something, no doubt, utterly embarrassing that he would never live down. Poking his head out, his eyes narrowed when he saw the obvious mischievous grin stretched on his roommate's face. "What kind of thing are we talking about here?"
At the bed, Minho crossed his legs like a little kid that was about to tell a story. Apparently, the headache just now miraculously vanished at once. "So, I was scrolling through my phone at class when I saw something interesting of you that I'm gonna share to the others later."
Opening the door wider, Thomas leaned on the door frame in hopes to look intimidating as he stared down at the other person in the room, but no such luck as said person merely raised an eyebrow in defiance. "On a scale from one to ten of 'Thomas being Minho's amusement of boredom', what would you give?"
Minho snorted. "Amusement of boredom? Really? And a scale?" He then gave a toothy grin. "Eleven."
"Embarrassment?"
"Eh, over the roof."
Thomas stared at him, his lips pursed. "What did I do?"
"On a scale of 'Thomas being a horny asshat', I'll give more because man, were you onto it last night," Minho tossed his phone towards him, and Thomas caught the black iPhone effortlessly. "Scroll."
There was a sort of danger he felt as he stared warily at the other guy, before dragging his eyes to the screen. His eyebrows shot up when he saw the picture.
It wasn't exactly clear, taken when hands were shaking from the excessive amount of alcohol. But he could still distinguish it, and the flash of the phone help lighten the semi-dark club. He was sitting on a chair, a girl sat on his lap as they kissed so aggressively -he wouldn't be surprised if there had been any tongue- her hands latching onto his shoulders with her wavy red hair was tied into a lose bun, where strands of hair framed her face. He had one hand on her small part of her back, while the other was on her exposed thigh, where her black cocktail dress was hiked up a little.
He scrolled, the next few ones were the same, exception a couple of those where she was tugging on his lower lip. He showed that obscene picture to Minho. "Who's she?"
Minho shrugged. "Dunno, but that's not it," He jerked his head towards the phone. "Scroll more."
Warily, he swiped his thumb on the screen once, and almost dropped the phone the next second.
"Holy shit," He breathed out as he caught the phone with his arm, his eyes widen when he he looked at it again. "Holy shit."
"Bingo."
This time, it wasn't him and the girl.
But rather, him and Newt.
They were apparently in the middle of the dance floor, and no flashes were used when the picture was taken because neon lights were bright enough he could make out his own features. He could feel the heat spreading from his cheeks all the way down to his neck as he stared at it, swearing to himself to maybe be careful in the future.
It was obvious the two were oblivious to the surroundings around them, too immersed into each other that it looked like nothing could separate them at the moment. Thomas had his hand tangled in Newt's hair, while the other was resting on his cheek. Newt's arms were snaked around his hips, almost clutching as his hands meet at Thomas's back. But they didn't kiss, despite their sensual position. Their noses were pressed gently against one another, their eyes closed as Newt had his head slightly tilted to the side so that his head was at the right angle, allowing Thomas to see the line of his jaw.
Their lips were barely touching.
Just barely.
And to be honest, it felt a bit of a pity.
"You seriously don't remember any of that?"
Thomas almost dropped the phone again when Minho called from where he was taking off his shoes, tossing them beside the bed. He glanced up as he started taking off his socks. "Well, obviously not since I've never seen you this shocked since Gally started genuinely apologizing to you after he hit you. Must be good then," He toss the pair to the pile of clothes. "Also, you didn't tell me you were gay."
"I'm not gay." That was the first thing that burst out from his mouth, and he was responded with a snort. "I'm just a little," He hesitated, knowing he'd sound pathetic but said it anyway. "Confused."
"Sure you are," Minho replied with a roll of his eyes. He stood up, and went ahead inside the toilet as he grabbed the towel that hung on the bed post on the way. "Just don't wreck your head too much." He then slammed the door closed, the sound of the shower came next.
Thomas was left with the phone, still staring at it blankly.
Well, damn.
It was very obvious Newt knew, even hinted it a few times, but since of course, Thomas was in a state where he was more concerned on staying awake than remembering what he did last night.
So, how's he going to face him after this?
Thomas told Newt about it.
Well, technically, he was still actually trying to find ways to mention it as he fidgeted in the library, the books and unfinished equations lay the table as he tapped his pen lightly on the surface of one of the books. His eyes kept trailing to the blond haired once in a while, who was minding his own business as he busied himself with his work.
Thomas didn't know whether or not Newt knew he was there, or he was just ignoring him. But he'd like to take that opportunity to think of better words to say instead of blabbing out stuff that would make him want to sink into the ground later.
So, Newt, I just found about yesterday...
No.
When I said I didn't remember what happened yesterday, well, I do now and-
No.
Minho showed me a picture of us cuddling in a club so I was wondering on the fact that whether or not we kissed because what the fuck were we doing clutching onto together like the world was going to end?
Absolutely not.
Thomas sighed and ruffled his hair a bit in frustration.
What was he going to do?
"A lot on your mind?"
Thomas almost had a heart attack as he cursed under his breath, raising his head and saw no other than Newt standing at the opposite side of the table with his hand in his pocket jeans, while his books was held by his other hand. He smiled in amusement when Thomas heaved out a breath to calm himself down, leaning against the table.
Thomas shook his head. "No, just thinking I guess. " Lame.
He saw the way Newt's eyes flitted towards his books. "Having a hard time solving this?"
"Nah, I'm fine," He met his eyes, and tried to put more emphasis on his next sentence without actually telling him. "I know actually."
Something shifted in Newt's eyes, like he caught on what Thomas was trying to hint but was unsure about it, and so he played along by giving him a crooked smile. "You know? Well then, guess I'm not needed," He straightened himself up to leave. "I'll see you around, Tommy."
"Wait," Thomas called out a bit too loudly that Newt froze when he took a couple of steps away, and Thomas ignored how a couple of students were staring at them curiously. "Even though I know this particular question, but there's a few others that I don't know."
Newt stared at him, and Thomas could see he was controlling himself from showing any emotions of interest as he raised an eyebrow. "What few others?"
Thomas exhaled softly, lowering down his voice so that only both of them could hear. "Like did we really kissed?"
Now, queue the sinking-into-the-ground operation.
Newt looked surprised when his mouth opened slightly, words unable to form when he struggled to talk. But then he let out a soft chuckle, shaking his head in disbelief. "So, you found out."
Thomas pursed his lips, shrugging awkwardly. "Yeah," He paused. "Were you sober?"
"Nope, but I was better than you and Minho, both of you were dead to the world," Newt replied with a laugh, and Thomas found he liked that. But then Newt's face changed, he dropped his cheery look and change it with a look of seriousness, not intimidating, but serious all the same. "I understand if you're disgusted or revolted that happened, we could just pretend it didn't, live our lives as it is."
He didn't know, on one hand he was absolutely confused that he actually kissed a guy, and it didn't seem to be disgusting as Newt would have claimed, especially if Newt was the subject of him showing his affections to. On the other hand, well, he didn't per say mind of it happening.
Anyway, he had resolved to himself long ago he was bisexual, so what the fuck, he could give it -he didn't even know what it was- a try if Newt was okay.
Thomas shrugged. "I'm not mad if that's what you're thinking."
Newt raised an eyebrow. "No?"
Thomas gave a small laugh. "No. Maybe a little shocked sure, but other than that, I'm fine."
There was a pregnant pause. "Well," Newt snorted. "That worked out better than I expected."
Thomas scoffed. "You're telling me, " He pursed his lips. "So, we're cool?"
Newt snickered. "We're cool, Tommy. Just out of curiosity though, are you...? "
Thomas wanted to laugh loudly, but only settled for chuckling. "I prefer both sides of the door open."
Both eyebrows shot up. "Interesting."
"Yeah," He pursed his lips again. "I'm sorry this turned out to be awkward, you want coffee after this? So that we could, you know, get to know each other better, since we've never had the chance at Minho's party. My treat."
It was Newt's turn to chuckle. "Clichéd, but I'll take it," He then proceeded to sit on the chair, setting his books on the table.
Thomas was smiling the whole time. Hey, so maybe the hangover wasn't that bad, could have been worse.
But it was nice.
Very nice, he thought when Newt flashed him another smile.
He'll get used to this.