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This should be a beautiful scene.
Niall's friends and family laughing and dancing and drinking to the local band Alby had hired across a lawn of lush grass dotted with bright flowers and lights, celebrating late into the night before he and Alby would drive off to the little bed and breakfast Alby's parents had reserved for them as a wedding gift.
It's a crowd full of love for the two of them - Niall and Alby.
None of it should be giving Niall indigestion.
He sneaks an antacid with his champagne he’s kept in his sporran along with a few loose ibuprofens and his mobile’s he’s had off since late last night.
He should be feeling relief. The hard part is over. He’s married. It's done.
He chews the antacid quick and gulps the drink down in one shot and nearly chokes on it when Ruben appears like an other worldly shadow before him, his large hand held out.
Expectations stretch out between them. By the steadiness of Ruben’s hand and the adrenaline spiking in Niall - Niall’s meant to crumble.
Niall stares at it instead.
His dry callouses.
Crooked knuckles belonging to a boxer that have been broken and popped more than any one man's should be able.
The sturdiness of that hand he's had ruffling his hair and shoving him into walls and onto floors and grabbing at his clothes to reel him in for wrestling turned embraces that’d try his bones, palm pressed flat to glaze-hardened glass.
It’s safer to look at it than who it belongs to.
A dribble of drink escapes the corner of his mouth.
"You can't be serious." Niall croaks out.
He clears his throat with a harsh cough. He wipes his lips and his chin off on his sleeve.
Under the bleary sunlight warring with the icy blue stare from Ruben, Niall’s sweating through his blazer. On the back’s of his knees. His tie has become such a hostile presence he'd like to try and rip it in two. He’s fucking drenched in the type of sweat that belongs solely in muggy summertimes.
Small blessings for the near-cool breeze under his kilt keeping him from heatstroke.
Though, truly, he'd prefer any almighty force listening to focus on something a bit more prescient.
Ruben wiggles his fingers with the slightest twitch.
Niall’s teeth clack together.
"It's my brother's wedding and I'd like to dance with my brother." Ruben says. As simple as it needs to be.
Outside in a field surrounded by every soul Niall knows, it feels like he’s been cornered. An immovable wall of guests around him. An unstoppable Ruben in front of him.
Niall dares, shaking in his newly bought oxford shoes and over-heated behind his ears, to follow the roughened road up Ruben's tendon-flared wrist. Up his black leather sleeve. Up his thicker forearm. Up to where the leather stretches, goes taut around his considerable bicep.
Niall's breath is struck out of him, considering it.
He fumbles with his empty champagne flute, almost dropping it on the ground when Ruben dives in and catches it by the stem just as its sheer rim grazes the grass, forcing himself into Niall's eye line.
There are his blue eyes.
There is his crooked grin that means apocalyptic trouble to be stirred.
Here is the more familiar face than his own twisting Niall's chest into an impossible to untie knot made of rope too heavy for Niall to lift himself.
He thinks he says something.
He can feel his lips move.
Whatever words his mouth says, Niall's no idea. But in his tensed muscles strapped to his trembling bones is Ruben’s hook.
When Ruben rights himself, he’s standing closer to Niall than he had a moment ago.
Taller. Broader. Towering in every way.
Niall can't stop looking at him. Comparing the Ruben in his memories to the black-clad colossal man in front of him dressed just like he’d walked off the cover of Niall’s The Rising Sun.
Hooked and caught.
With a nod and a casual kind of quick grunt, Ruben hands the glass off to Niall's passing agent, Butch, who mouths Niall a silent pleading apology before running off and away, disappearing in the blurred crowd of bright colors of swishing clothing and tinkling laughter lining the music.
The party is still going somehow. There are people two steps away from him and Ruben. There must be eyes on Niall. Ears listening to what they’ll say to each other. He feels the attention on the back of his head. Waiting for something to happen. After Ruben's speech - why wouldn't they have their ear glued to the metaphorical estranged brother door?
His hands twitch useless by his sides. His left hand weighs heavy.
A distant pang of worry appears as a tickle in the back of his throat.
He can’t have Alby know he and Ruben are talking.
It's too much that Ruben’s here and looking down at Niall. Waiting. Watching. Expecting. Knowing damn well every little thing there is to know about him.
“Always did take a long time to make up your mind.” Ruben says, idly, thumbs hooked into his pockets.
“Have you lost it?” Niall says. Trying his damnedest. “I’m not going to dance with you.”
"This all for show, then?" Ruben nods to the crowd around them.
It takes a moment for Niall to force himself past his incredulity and shock, to think about what Ruben is implying.
Men with men. Women with women. A mix of all types Alby's picked up and calls, My community, that Niall's just barely managed to ingratiate himself to by the nubs of his bitten-dull fingers.
It prickles. Just that quick glance away from Niall. A line of sweat drips down the left side of his head and curves around his jaw.
Ruben’s in two thick jackets. Dry. Pale as he’d been as a wild child, ruddy in the face running around in the fog causing disasters and leaping over consequences, only checking over his shoulder to make sure Niall was following.
Niall shakes his head, trying to get rid of that young Ruben biting at his bottom lip in a slanted, joy-ridden grin. He doesn't want him in his head when he's standing right there.
"It's different. You know that." Niall says, scrounging for the words and hobbling what he can together.
"Do I know?" Ruben asks, sounding genuine, frowning like he might even be asking the question.
Ruben steps closer. Niall stiffens. Tension rams through every muscle of him to hold himself still.
In the short space between them, Ruben prowls. His head crooked on his neck. His shoulders loose and ready. That slight swagger to his hips. It tightens Niall’s chest.
Ruben stops when the tips of their shoes tap together. Niall's dwarfed by the size of Ruben's black biker boots.
Niall keeps his breath tucked in his chest. He stares at a spot on Ruben's massive shoulder and unfocuses his eyes so that when he smells Ruben’s heady cologne of gasoline and cigarette smoke, when he feels the tickling hint of Ruben's beard and mustache brushing his cheek, his lips hovering over his ear, he manages to keep himself to himself.
"Or maybe," Ruben rumbles, voice dropping depths to rattle inside Niall and knock on each of his ribs, "You'd prefer peeking through a door instead?"
Niall inhales through his nose quickly. His hands curl tightly into fists, his new ring pinching in the joint, his knuckles popping out in stark white as his face warms.
Yards away, he hears muffled music and chattering, glasses being clinked together - a lovely day dancing on without him.
Ruben leans back, pride at a strike landing written clear between his dimples and in the cut of his teeth biting into his bottom lip. He holds out his hand again.
Niall’s mother had told him he made his own problems. He’d inherited his father’s misery. Her tendencies to stub her toes on every chair she walks by.
No greater pain to Niall Kennedy than himself.
He grabs at Ruben blindly. Slaps their hands together in a tight grasp that rings in his ear. Ruben's rough and warm while Niall’s is tacky with anxious sweat.
Niall walks the two of them to the center of the storm where Niall and Alby had danced hardly an hour before.
Alby had whispered, Ready? and Niall hadn’t the courage to tell him, No.
Not with Ruben watching.
Trudging through the field with Ruben in hand, Niall feels people looking now, bumping into Butch who scuttles away again, crossing his mother with her cane tucked under her arm and he can only bear to see a passing glimpse of her glasses glinting on her nose. More friends. More of Alby's family. His community filling in the gaps where Niall had kept to himself for so long.
"Damnit, Ruben." Niall hisses to himself, unable to quite look over his own shoulder and see what expression may be crossing on Ruben’s cut-sharp features if he heard him.
He stops when his heart starts to pound painfully in his temple.
He can’t catch his breath.
His attention bounces from the faces of Alby’s friends. His sister and her son. To Joanna and her date. Their heels and loafers in the grass. His mother is glaring at his back, surely. Maura, wherever she’d gone, must be having a time of it watching him pant.
Ruben pulls at him.
Reels Niall back and up. Moves him easily with the air of someone not trying hard at all. Winds the both of them together until Niall's been spun around on his heels and catches himself on Ruben’s chest. His sporran pressed to Ruben's crotch. If Niall wanted to look Ruben in the eye, he’d get a crick in his neck.
It's their brief years of shared boyhood all over again - Niall being shoved and yanked and placed exactly where Ruben wants him. His hand on his broad shoulder. His other hand clasped tight in Ruben's larger one, his wedding band hidden under his thick fingers.
And Ruben's hand on his waist. Heavy and steadying. Settled just under Niall’s blazer. On his hip. Thumb pressing hard on his sensitive spot just under his bone that he can feel somehow behind his ear, every one of his fingers with their worn-tough callouses heating him through the thick wool of his vest.
It makes him dizzy.
Ruben's foot knocks into his.
“Look at me.” Ruben squeezes Niall’s hand. “Come on now, Niall. Catch your breath. Steady. Steady.” He hears Ruben’s slow inhale and tries to match it. But what air there is in the scant hairline space between them comes in shaky and refuses to stay for long.
His neck fucking hurts.
There are those blue eyes.
"Ready?" Ruben says rubbing a small circle into that tender spot.
He's rushed headlong into things without a thought for so long because thinking tends to lead to romanticizing walking in front of a bus.
“Why - ,” Niall scrapes his nails on Ruben’s shoulder, the leather is soft, “Why are you dressed like the cover of my book?”
Ruben’s face cracks into a bright grin, blinding laughter pours out of him in a manic burst that catches the both of them off guard and shoves Niall in front of that bus.
Ruben starts moving, pulling Niall along with him.
They sway offbeat from the music, but Niall can hardly hear it anyways. Ruben keeps him tucked in close. Niall steps on his toes more than once and earns himself a slight upward twitch of a smile under his mustache and beard that collects in the corners of his all-watching blue eyes.
“Fuckin’ stiff.” Ruben says with that same tilt to his voice he’d use to complain when Niall couldn’t throw a jab right. “Think you’d be loosened up on your second go-around.”
Niall frowns. He can't see past Ruben’s shoulders.
“I don’t dance.”
“You did all those plays.”
“There wasn’t - “ Niall flushes and scowls up at Ruben, tension bleeding from him and replaced with old indignation. “I didn’t dance, Ruben. It was Hamlet and King Lear and - and fucking Antigone.”
“To thine own self be true.” Ruben quotes.
Niall trips on one of their feet, his hand sliding down Ruben’s shoulder to clutch at his bicep.
“You - you remember?”
“Aye. Had a bit of time to read.” Ruben pauses. They sway. Lulling Niall into something close to calmness by the easy motion. Ruben takes Niall in a larger circle, leading him around his guests that he can’t see anymore, can’t hear, either.
Ruben moves his hand from Niall’s hip, sliding up Niall’s side to rest at his ribs, holding him there like he owns the spot.
It’s getting harder to match Ruben’s steps.
Ruben continues on quietly, “And it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.”
“Oh.” Niall says, breathless. “That’s - that was lovely, Ruben.”
Ruben shrugs off the compliment. Ignoring it entirely.
“Think I get what you saw in the old fuck. Bunch of cock, but, still.”
“Shakespeare isn’t cock.”
“And you are the expert, turns out.” He lifts an eyebrow and there are so many shades to the ice in his eyes Niall feels that old and familial pang of shame swim to the surface to swirl hotly in his gut.
Ruben goes on, his finger touches Niall’s ring in their handhold with an electric bolt.
He says, “Fit bloke. Where’d you find him - your book, Niall.”
He’d been sent dozens of model choices and had been determined to pick the one that looked the least like Ruben. But then he’d flipped to the next photograph in the stack and found David and his cold blue eyes and an edge to the set of his jaw that made Niall’s insides squirm like he'd been fifteen and in awe of his brother.
He’d been invited to the photoshoot and declined. Had stared at the proofs for hours after days of avoiding opening the email.
Overheated, Niall chips the story to the barest essentials, “The publisher sorts it out.”
“Good.” Ruben nods. He hums. Deep and lilting against the band's music. His hand holding Niall's flexes slightly. He rotates Niall’s ring with a prod from his finger. He hasn’t once let his attention waver from Niall. He ducks his head. He tugs Niall forward to press against him wholly.
He leans in.
His breath is on Niall’s face.
His mustache tickles when he whispers into Niall's ear, "What would he do if I put my hand around your neck? Right now?"
The knot inside of Niall is yanked taut.
Niall digs his nails into Ruben's shoulder, nearly tearing through his leather jacket and hoodie by how violent the shudder wracks through his entire body. His knees run from him. His lungs flatten. His head knocks forward to press into Ruben's broad chest. Heat stirs in his cock and the horror of it only worsens it.
A thought in his head appears for a moment. He could push Ruben away. End this. He’s married. It’s done. There’s no need for anymore of this. There should only be relief and love and -
But Ruben's hold on him is the only thing keeping him standing. Buckling knees on shaking legs. He could sink into the grass and down into the earth right now by the steady thump of Ruben's heartbeat beating against his temple.
He wonders where his mother is. Where Alby is. What it would feel like for Ruben to do it. Choke him. Have everyone see it happen. How it makes the front of Niall's kilt lift.
Falling apart in front of everyone and god at the hands of Ruben.
Ruben's nose nudges at his hairline. He inhales hard with a groan that has no place for a wedding or a married man.
He says, “Would he stop me?”
Niall shakes his head, nose nudging along Ruben’s pectoral through his hoodie. He’s no idea.
Probably.
Alby’s a good, decent man while Niall’s - he can only see himself as what he is, a nightmare.
“Would you stop me, Bambi?”
Niall's mouth falls open, his lips graze along soft fibers in a daze. His hand's slick in Ruben’s and he digs his fingers into Ruben’s jacket, clutching at it.
He's been dunked into a bath warm sunlight.
He feels drunk. That glass of champagne has done him in.
“No.” He admits into Ruben’s chest.
Ruben says, "I'm spinnin' ya now."
"What?” Niall says groggily from his stupor and then more sharply as Ruben wrenches himself from Niall, "What? Ruben - “
Niall's arm is pulled up and Ruben spins him, turns him around on his unsteady heel, his kilt flairs around him, a rush of cool air between his legs, and reels him back in, Niall thumping unsteady against Ruben's chest with both his hands.
His head wobbles. His eyes take a moment to steady. He struggles to find his footing right away, gripping at the front of Ruben's jackets. Running his hands up to grasp breathlessly at his firm shoulders. There's laughter. Clapping.
He doesn't notice where Ruben's hand is heading until it's in front of his face, two thick fingers skating across his forehead, brushing back a knocked-loose lock of his fringe and tucking it away, his hand coming to rest on Niall's meteoric pulse thumping in the side of his neck.
"Why are you doing this?” Niall’s voice breaks. His bottom lip quivers. “Quoting fucking Hamlet at me - dancing with me, Ruben? What is this?”
Ruben spreads his hand and presses his thumb just under Niall's Adam's apple, the pressure feeling so great for such a small touch from him.
Ruben surely feels it when Niall swallows thickly around the rush of spit in his mouth.
Ruben tilts his head and says back, "Why did you invite me?"
"I didn’t think - “ He hadn’t thought. He’d just panicked and did what he’s always done when he’s been left alone with what’s in his head and is standing in front of him now.
It’s hard to find the shape of the truth. Unearth it from decades of burying it with his own hands. The gentle sway of Ruben and him together must have knocked something loose inside of his chest.
Ruben’s fingers close around his neck
Niall steps on his boot and leaves it there, putting his weight on him. His hands shake where they clutch at Ruben leather jacket. He wants to rip it off of him. He needs to feel what Ruben's hiding under all this.
That impossible knot begins to unravel itself, coming undone.
He confesses in the quiet space between them, in the storm dancing around them, “I didn’t think you'd really come.”
“Oh, Bambi.” Ruben drawls, his fingers twitch, squeezing at his neck. He says Niall’s name like it’s his real one. Full of good memories alongside all the ones that have gone rotten.
Ruben lets go of Niall’s neck with a last squeeze and slides his big hand up to cup Niall’s jaw, cradling Niall with the sort of care that makes Niall want to bolt.
They’ve stopped dancing. Niall’s foot is still on Ruben’s. This is different. He hadn't been wrong about that.
Niall crumbles.
He pushes himself forward into Ruben’s hold, chasing after the sharp pinch of his skin, the dig of Ruben’s nail near his ear.
“Looking at another man like that. On your wedding day, too.” Ruben shakes his head. Grin spreading in delight across his face as he bites his bottom lip with sharp teeth. “I think your husband might just beat the piss out of the lucky bastard.”
Ruben grips Niall firmly, steers Niall's head to turn and look to his left. A terrible, embarrassing, awful whine escapes his lips at being made to look away - and there across the field is Alby and Niall's mother. She's holding his arm. Saying something to him.
Ruben presses his lips to the sweat beading at Niall's hairline.
"Shall we go somewhere more private to talk?"