lars and the new girl 𖦹 ⋆ﾟ꒰♡꒱༘ | new neighbour! [long hcs]
lars lindstrom x neighbour!fem!reader — no warnings.
—strangers to something more than friends
❅ lars felt like a victorian man seeing an ankle for the first time. he stood by his window, watching you move into the house across the street. he’s so hyper aware of your existence already, he knew this was going to be disastrous.
❅ on your way to bring in another box from your car, you spot him and his poor attempt at hiding. you wave at him with a small smile and he immediately moves away from the window. he wanted to disappear right this second. oh. oh, no. you were pretty. this can not be good for him.
❅ lars sat very still, quietly listening to you moving boxes in your house for about forty minutes instead of offering help like a normal person. he’s was mentally grappling with the fact that he was going to start seeing a new face—a very pretty one—around town often. yet another pair of eyes were going to be on him.
❅ he avoids you like the likes of plague for the first two weeks. from home to work, work to home, and church every week. he didn’t want you to pop up out of nowhere and watch him embarrass himself.
❅ he was still watching you though, not spying! just.. observing. he had memorised your schedule, 8 am your bedroom lights come on, 8:45 you leave for work and you’re back sometime before 4:37. good, now he knew when to avoid you, now he just had to figure out where to avoid you.
❅ the first time you see him fully, you’re both outside on a saturday. he was getting some mail, and as he’s rummaging through the mail box, he hears a cheerful “good morning!” he looks back for one second, and it’s you. and you watch the poor man quickly waddle back into his house, while a couple of letters fall out of the box with a small “oh…? uhm, okay…”
❅ after that, you notice him everywhere. a tall figure behind frost covered windows, his curtains slightly shuffling when your cars pulls out of your driveway. catching him through your window once, but he moves to quick you thought you genuinely imagined him.
❅ the second time you see him, it’s at a record store that recently opened. he was so excited to go buy some new albums after gus introduced him to a band that made ambient jazz, but when he walked in, his heart might as well have fell out his ass. there you were, the pretty girl next door, placing down vinyls and cds on the display shelves. he wanted to run away again, but he genuinely froze.
“hi! are you looking for a new album to buy?”
“…yeah… a… jazz band…”
❅ he stood there, internally panicking as you told him about what albums you had. he was sweating, even though it was freezing cold outside. you pick up the album he was looking for, but he couldn’t bring himself to say that it’s what he wants, instead blurting out a quick “i left my keys at home, sorry.”
❅ he locked himself inside his house for the rest of the day, but when he was about to leave for work the next morning, that same album was waiting outside his door with a small note on it. sorry about your keys! enjoy -y/n
❅ now he had a name to the face, and later that day, he told gus and karin about the gifted record, and karin tried to get him to talk to you. “i’ll bake you some cookies, why don’t you bring them to her?” but lars didn’t know the difference between seeing you again and being held at gun point. he insisted on the fact that you probably wanted privacy.
❅ on your way out to work the next day, your driveway was shovelled and freshly salted. and when you looked across the street, he was standing by the his window, yet again. but this time, when you waved at him and smiled, he nodded and stood there for one second, before quickly walking away.
❅ something in him relaxed just a little bit when he realised that you didn’t find him to be a complete freak weirdo. you kept waving at him every time you saw him, you would flash him that gorgeous smile, even left a couple more records from the band just because you wanted to. well, now he obviously had to pay you back, right?
❅ your rubbish bin would be dragged back up your driveway after collection day, your porch light would mysteriously be fixed after flickering for a whole week. you had no proof, but you knew it was him.
❅ he became obsessed with the sounds of your routine. the sound of music through your open window when he’s chopping wood in the evening. the sound of you struggling to open your car frozen car door in the morning.
❅ there’s this one horrible moment where you knock on his door (knowing damn well that boy is not opening up) unexpectedly to introduce yourself after months of silently watching each other from a distance. lars completely panics and freezes, he can see you through the window and he stupidly decides to pretend that he’s not home, despite the fact that you can literally see him standing there.
❅ but afterwards, he felt so guilty, he literally couldn’t sleep. but you had walked away quietly giggling because this man looked absolutely petrified of you.
❅ your first actual conversation lasts less than a minute. it happens when you catch him outside while he’s shovelling snow, thanking him for clearing your driveway. he muttered “it was in the way,” despite the fact that it objectively was not. that’s when you finally get his name.
❅ you start lingering outside longer after that. taking your time to open your front door, watering plants that the freezing weather had killed weeks ago, anything to see him appear near by again.
❅ and he somehow always does.
❅ there was an odd chemistry between you at this stage, and it’s unbearable because it’s built on restraint. longing looks through windows, tiny acts of care neither of you acknowledged. you feel his eyes on you before you you see him, and he spends everyday convincing himself that he needs to stay away while unconsciously orbiting you like a planet.
❅ lars grew very obsessed with this chemistry because it was only interesting thing going on for him. between small talks in the morning, you would mention minor inconveniences because seeing him so focused to get something done just because you mentioned it in passing was kind hot. it was clear that he was a very attentive man.
❅ a loose cabinet hinge? he’s on it. snow shovelled before dawn. your heater is making a weird noise? he’s outside your house before he’s even fully put on his gloves.
❅ it was ridiculous because after a while, it was you watching him from afar. maybe you had a massive little crush on your shy neighbour. watching him chop wood and shovel snow just because seeing him breathing hard would get to you a little. you would ask him to pick up a heavy box just to hear him groan or whimper a bit.
❅ you quickly figure out that he likes routine, so you’d appear in predictable ways to see him relax, maybe even give you that adorable awkward smile of his. same time everyday at the mailbox, same overly sweet wave through the window.
❅ you couldn’t tell if it was the proximity, or the fact that he always seemed to be there when you had an issue with your house (no matter how small it was), but you had your eyes on him now.
❅ you’d lean against the doorframe, gently teasing him while he’s red-faced, gripping a mug of tea so tightly it might break, looking like he’s seconds away from going into cardiac arrest.
❅ lars hadn’t even realised that you’ve been flirting with him until karin pointed it out. because “what do you mean she asked you to change her bedroom lightbulb three times this week?”
❅ oh? is this what intentional flirting was like? when you’d call his hair perfect, while brushing snowflakes off of his sweater even though touching him felt like it needed medical approval? looking at him with that hypnotic gaze while he accidentally rambled about carpentry? oh.
❅ this poor baby would go back to hiding for days in his house, but he’d always have his eyes on you. he didn’t want to be outside unless he looked perfect, he’d put on his best sweater just to look good for you. combing his hair in different sides to hear you say which side you liked better, showing up to the record store just to say hi and buy nothing.
❅ one night the power goes out after a particularly violent snowstorm, and you show up at his door, wrapped in a blanket asking if you can stay with him because your house kept making scary creaky noises. you sit together in candle light, drinking terrible hot cocoa. one point you fall asleep next to him with your thighs touching, and he terrified of moving because he doesn’t want to wake you up.
❅ lars tells gus and karin, and they’re immediately invested. thank goodness, it’s a human girl this time! gus trying not to laugh every time lars “just happens to be” outside your front door again, and karin watching you to talk to lars even though he’s one touch away from falling to his knees.
❅ he’s hyper focused on everything you say. when you mentioned that you had a favourite candy that you used to eat as a child, he’s suddenly giving them to you with a quiet “i saw these in the store and they reminded me of you…”, even though he ordered them from a different city. you genuinely had to look away because it had affected you so badly.
❅ and the tension gets so unbearable because you want to touch him so bad, but you feel like you need government clearance for that. and it was almost a year to the day you moved in when you finally caught him looking at you with that soft, helpless expression he didn’t even realise he was making. just pure affection, like he couldn’t believe you were living next to him. and that was the exact moment he realised, you both are definitely having the same thoughts about each other.
{inspired by @larsandthewritergirl , @prudejudee , @astrophxge}
