Chapter Text
Half past eleven in the morning, Ruben drops into the chair besides Niall.
Grey joggers and an oversized henley handed down from Niall’s closet under an open red anorak.
Not his uniform.
It’s a Tuesday.
“There’s my favorite cunt.” Ruben says, loudly, for the second floor of any library.
He earns equally incredulous and irritated glares from the three other patrons sitting at the spread out research tables and the one librarian re-shelving a cart of books.
Nigel. An asshole that blew Niall and has been giving Niall the cold shoulder ever since.
Unbothered, Ruben turns his grin to Niall, his hand on his shoulder moves up to swipe at Niall’s fringe, brushing back his hair from his face before throwing his heavy arm over Niall’s thin shoulders, shoving himself into Niall’s space, jostling him in his seat and keeping Niall from sinking into it like he would very much like to.
Niall is the one who feels the haughty glances while they bounce off of Ruben.
Ten years ago Niall had been that freshly turned seventeen year old and he’d done nothing except care too much about what everyone thought of him.
He likes to think he’s gotten better.
By the heat in his cheeks and the sweat collecting on his lower back, he’s not sure he’s grown as much as he’d like.
“Volume.” He says.
“Pardon me, mammy.”
“Ruben.”
Niall sets his chewed-flat biro down on his notebook that’s filled with looping blue-inked scribbles and not a coherent sentence to be found.
“Fuck me for being happy to see you or nothing. Warm reception and fuck all.” Ruben catches the eye of the poor soul who’s been neck deep in Voltaire and Alexander Pope since Niall shambled his way inside fifteen minutes past opening. Ruben leans his elbow on the table to say, “Problem, darling? Wanna go for a dance? Sorry, I don’t date fuck ugly cows.”
Niall laughs.
It jumps out of his chest. Inappropriate. Full-bodied. A spark of joy sent from somewhere up high to bite at his ass. Lingers in the air as it often does when Ruben decides to make the world his own personal problem to solve with Niall as his one-man audience.
He tamps it down with a hurried bite to his cheek then puts a hand on Ruben’s sharp elbow and squeezes at him - for some sense, to calm him down, just to grab at his red anorak and feel it crinkle under his hand, distract himself from the familiar weight of Ruben’s arm on him and the heat of the boy pressed to his side.
He’d missed him.
Niall forces himself to focus on the stink of weed. A glance to the side finds red flooding Ruben’s sclerae, the vein on his temple pulsing thick to join his cut-crooked grin, a new tattoo on the side of his neck that hadn’t been there a month ago.
Niall traces the big nose of Kilroy with his eyes and thinks how unfair it is that Ruben’s gone and changed without him sometime between after his birthday and Niall had thought it’d be best to drop off the planet for a while.
Niall wrings the crinkly fabric of Ruben’s anorak between his forefinger and thumb.
“I don’t want to be kicked out.” Niall whispers.
“I’m here.” Falling back into his chair, Ruben whispers, “No one’s giving you the boot.”
“That’s not how that works.”
“Details, Niall.”
“Library policy, Ruben.” It’s not that Niall is whining, but he can hear the tone his own voice is taking and see the glittery shine Ruben’s icy eyes pick up - and it’s trouble. No writing. Getting banned by Nigel. Forced to find a library farther from home with a toilet big enough for two men to be friendly.
Ruben starts with, “Bastard was gantin for it, Niall - ”
“ - Why aren’t you in school?” Niall cuts in, obliged for the moment to be the adult between them when he can’t win an argument.
No sense in losing. Just cross the road to the next issue until Ruben’s bored and gives in just so you’ll shut your mouth for five minutes, Bambi. Mary didn’t talk to God this much.
With little space between his own face and Ruben’s sunny disposition setting new records for Scotland, Niall shifts his focus on his many notebooks strewn across the table sitting untouched and unwritten-in today and sees from his periphery Ruben’s lips start to pinch.
It shouldn’t make him happy. There’s a lot about Ruben that shouldn’t make Niall want to light his short fuse and bask in the blow-up.
Niall shifts in his seat. Feels Ruben’s arm flex on the back of his neck.
Three days ago had been the first sunny day in months and then the cold had swept back in. The library’s heating had little on the nook under Ruben’s arm.
Seventeen and a radiator.
Niall picks up his pen and bites at the end of it. Chews on the plastic that’s had his teeth marks bitten into it a week ago. Nineteen days ago, really.
Ruben’s watching him. A rushed glance shows Niall his slanted grin’s morphed and puckered into something closer to a pout.
Ruben’s dense arm around his shoulders flexes and unwinds from Niall, his jacket brushing against the back of Niall’s neck followed by the warm pass of his hand.
Ruben tugs on his short hair. A quick pinch Niall feels in his gut, between his legs. He crosses his arms. He leans the chair back on its hind legs.
Niall hadn’t wanted that.
He frowns. Forces himself to stop biting the biro and slips it into the coil binding of his nearest notebook.
This is the problem with trying to write outside of the house. It’s the problem with trying to write at home, too.
It’s the problem. All of this.
Ruben kicks up a foot onto the ledge of the table with a sullen thud that shakes mud off the rubber sole of his sneaker and across Niall’s notebooks.
“Went by Lori’s place and you weren’t there.”
“It’s my place.” Niall corrects him.
“Went by that bent pub you like - weren’t there, either.”
“It’s not - it’s not a - a - “ Hot in the face, Niall quiets his already hushed whispering to say, “ - It’s eleven in the morning, Ruben.”
“Then I figured you were here having yourself a massive wank over Jane Austen for the last three weeks because why else would you be ignoring me?”
It’s too close to the truth for Niall to do anything other than snap his mouth closed and try hard not to blink too much or look at Ruben past the collar of his jacket, but Ruben catches on quick. Always has. He’s got Niall’s number and he’s the only one who’s managed it.
Ruben dips his head and finds Niall and seizes him.
“So yeah.” Ruben says with his eyebrows raised high, forehead crinkling, fuse lit, “Fucked off from school because you’re here and I was over there and none of that sits right with me.”
He looks so much older. Weeks without him and Niall squirms under his glare. Eleven in the morning and he should be in at any pub.
It’s too early to be pinned like this.
Niall shoves his fist against Ruben’s sneaker and Ruben’s foot drops with a such a raucous thunk followed by his chair hitting the floor so hard it shakes the shelves and knocks over the stack of Voltaire at the table next to theirs.
A ringing string of bright-sparkled laughter erupts from Ruben that bellows down to the main entrance and out to the parking lot and along the streets through Glasgow and through Niall to the meat of him, bringing with it a few more intense glares that’ll likely turn into comments soon.
Ruben shakes with snickers and Niall joins him, knocking their shoulders together. An apology of sorts.
“Of course I’m happy to see you, Ruben.” He admits, quietly when he can catch his breath.
“I’d kick your ass if you weren’t.” Ruben says, beaming back at him.
“I’d give you a fight.”
“Damn right, son.”
Ruben chuckles. He picks up the notebook closest to Niall and flips through it. His knuckles are red and freshly scabbed over with dark bruises yellowed at the edges. He holds up the notebook and shows Niall all of his scribbles and all of his blank pages he hasn't written a damn thing in.
Like he needs the reminder.
"I'm having writer's block." Niall says, grabbing the notebook back and stacking it with the rest of them only to shove and hide them away into his bag, refusing to acknowledge the heat blooming in his cheeks.
A slanted smile spreads across Ruben's lips and creates cutting dimples in his cheeks and Niall refuses to acknowledge either of those, too.
"So, you're doing shit right now?" He says.
"I'm writing."
"But you're not."
"I'm trying to write. It's a process."
"This is perfect, though. We’ve both got the whole day to fuck around in.” Ruben places his hand on the back of Niall’s neck.
He's seventeen and muscular with hands bigger than Niall’s and Niall feels part of himself melting and another part of himself nailing the windows shut.
There are other people watching, ears glued to them no matter how quiet they are, the library is quieter. Swallowing up sound and echoing it by the shelf.
But it feels good to lean into Ruben’s hold.
“Don't you want to graduate?" Niall attempts at responsibility and family obligations and finds the both of them as boring as what he'd failed at writing when Ruben pinches his ear. A sharp little pain spreads warmly through him.
Niall’s eyes flutter and he hates himself for that, too.
"I want to go do something worthwhile with my brother."
His nail digs into the shell of Niall’s ear and it takes everything for Niall to stay still.
Brother. The word lodges in his chest. Wonderful and damning.
Niall clears his throat and croaks out what's meant to be chastising and only sounds like complete knees to the ground surrender, "Ruben."
Ruben lightly slaps at Niall’s cheek twice.
“Buy me some chips, Bambers.” He says, bright as the day isn’t. “I’m starving.”