Mutually Beneficial | H.S.

10

Y/N wouldn't say she had purposefully littered her personality around Harry's home, but when you spend more time somewhere than you do your own house, it tends to happen.

She buys some fridge magnets one day. A pack of letters—one of each in the alphabet—and the numbers zero to nine. Which, even as she is buying them she thinks, how ridiculous—that you can only spell words that don't require more than one of the same letter. And yet she pays for them anyway.

She thinks about what she'll spell out on her own fridge—but she's too impatient to ponder for longer than a couple of minutes, sure that they'll just be displayed in alphabetical order and reveal a true lack of imagination.

Somehow, they end up on Harry's fridge, and Y/N finds that she's much happier with that. Now she could leave him swear words and other insignificant things alike. Peas, Crow, Nip, Oink. Once she spelt out C-U-N-T but felt it too inappropriate for kitchen decor and quickly changed the C for a P.

Whatever word Y/N chooses to leave for the day has always been altered by the end of it; the silent game between Harry and her soon becoming a reason to peek at the fridge unnecessarily just to see if their letters have been rearranged. If he is up before Y/N, the morning light makes his head especially saccharine and the magnets are always spelling sweet names. Love, Pet, Angel, Darling. But by the evening, he's a little less soppy. Stinky, Mush, Gremlin, Bean.

Y/N once spelled out I Love You (using the zero as the second O) just to see what it would look like but felt like she was doing something naughty and quickly disorganised them in a far from natural manner.

Then Harry buys her some little strawberry magnets and places them on her fridge without telling her. When she sees them, it makes her heart skip a beat. Along with the dozens of clothes he continues to purchase for her, his wardrobe has been considerably disturbed and he figures he ought to leave his mark somewhere in her home too. If not her wardrobe then her fridge would do just fine. But there's really no competition, because if you were to take a peek inside of his dresser, Harry's clothes would be generously making room there too for Y/N's—something she always feels guilty about but Harry denies her any opportunity to move anything to her own home.

He wants to tell her to do the opposite. To take everything from her house and put it in his. But he doesn't. And he won't.

He'll just keep relishing over seeing her shoes by the front door, her shampoo in his shower, and her charger plugged in next to his bed.

The stomach has an interesting relationship with the brain. And the brain has an interesting relationship with the heart.

Because Y/N's heart tells her (and has been for longer than she wants to admit) that she's fallen in love with Harry... but her brain refuses to take love—as an option entirely—into consideration. And at the same time, on a particularly bleak weekday evening, her stomach says that it's threatening violence if she doesn't eat something and her brain translates that to a complete dismantlement of her capability.

It's funny (only in retrospect) that being hungry can result in such a drastic change in one's behaviour. That an empty tummy can make even the gentlest of souls behave erratically—so suddenly full of anger that even the smallest of things can make them explode.

Y/N has had a bad day... and... well... Every day is a bad day for Y/N. When you hate your job—hate working, even—every single day ends in dread for the next. And sometimes, every so often for Y/N, things start to build up. It's slow and steady, and can take weeks if not months to lead to a breakdown. But she does break down... and it happens far too often for the average person to deem healthy.