Chapter Text
This time, Ruben doesn’t answer Niall when he asks why Ruben is taking off his shirt and wrapping his hands.
“You know,” Ruben tells him when he’s done.
“Know what?” Niall’s gaze shifts over him, refusing to linger. He’s looking beyond him. It pisses Ruben off.
“You know what!” Ruben growls, taking a step closer. He jabs a finger into Niall’s collarbone. “This is all your fucking fault!”
Niall shies back, a flash of panic in his eyes. Ruben isn’t about to concede anything to him right now—but if he was so inclined, he supposes he would have to admit that perhaps the panic isn’t unwarranted. Niall’s died thirteen times in this barn already.
Ruben steps across the final gap between them, shoves his chest right up to Niall’s until he can feel the anxious thump of his heart against his own.
Niall swallows hard, his throat bobbing.
“I’m not speaking about this,” he says. His voice trembles more than it did the first thirteen times he said it. It’s like he’s trying to convince himself that the train is still on the rails, even while the carriage they’re stuck in dangles over a ravine.
“Don’t give me that shit again,” says Ruben. He grabs Niall by the shoulders and gets a first-hand insight into the way Niall’s entire body locks up in fright. It gives him a familiar rush of power. He still has the upper hand, when it comes down to it. He’s still the one in control. He could skip this conversation altogether, if he wanted, wrestle them both to the ground, end it all with Niall’s body slack and dead, Ruben exhausted and bleeding out at his side. He could make them do that all over again, and again, and again. But if he’s honest, he’s getting sick of it. And now it turns out that he could have put an end to it sooner, because Niall knew. Niall knew, and he didn’t tell Ruben.
Story of their fucking life.
“You let me kill you twelve times,” he says, leaning down so his nose almost brushes Niall’s. When he lifts the back of his hand to scrub at his itching eyes, his palm scrapes Niall’s temple and his knuckles come away wet. “You fucking let me—”
Niall laughs as Ruben breaks off. It’s a hollow, crackling sound dredged deep from his lungs. “I didn’t have much of a choice, Ruben.”
“You knew,” says Ruben. “Every single fucking time after the first, you knew what was about to happen, and you said nothing! Why would you say nothing?”
“Would it have changed anything?” Niall’s eyes sharpen as he takes a step back and finally looks at Ruben head-on. “It’s nothing more than I deserve for what I did to you, right?”
“Once, yeah! Twice, maybe. Three times, okay, at a push. But twelve fucking times, Niall?” Ruben can barely bring himself to believe Niall just lay there and took it from him over and over, each time worse than the last, and never said a word. “You’re fucked in the head, Bambi.”
They stare at each other for a long, silent stretch. Niall gnaws at his lip, one hand protectively cupped over the spot on his stomach where the doctors had to remove all those chewed pen lids, or whatever the fuck they did to stop his stomach rotting from the plastic. Ruben glances down at himself and sees the dirt and grit smeared over Baird’s name on his chest.
They’re both so fucking stupid.
Ruben isn’t sure who breaks first, but the mood flips like a light switch and suddenly they’re both howling with laughter. A brief flicker of a memory comes back to him: of that last prison visit before it all went to shit. That shimmering moment of hope that had both of them hysterical and on-edge, a precarious synergy crackling between them in a taut, thin line, threatening at any moment to snap and flare into violence. But this time, there are no more secrets bubbling beneath the surface to boil over and scald them when they least expect it. The worst is already over. How could they fuck it up any more than this?
“Why?” Ruben says, through tears of laughter. “Why’d you do it?”
Niall shrugs. “Wanted you to see how it felt.”
“The fuck you mean?” says Ruben, sobering a little. “Know how what feels?”
Niall keeps smiling at him. There’s something hard to read in his eyes. Sadness? Fondness? Mockery?
“How it feels to have it all taken out of your hands,” he says.
Ruben grunts. It takes him a while to consider Niall’s words. He could snap back, say he already knows how that feels. What are a couple of decades in prison and a paedo dad for, if not taking decisions out of your hands? But he’s man enough to admit that he has murdered Niall a dozen times in this barn, so maybe he should just let him have that one.
“Okay,” Ruben says, in the end. “So, now we’re even, right?”
“To make it even, I’d have to kill you for the next twelve goes,” Niall points out. He doesn’t point out the other things he could do, if he really wanted to even the score. Ruben waits, but Niall just skates over it without a hint that he even remembers. The unspoken weight lies on both of their shoulders, but Niall doesn’t seem to recognise its heft.
“Hm,” Ruben says, to fill the sudden emptiness he feels open up in the space between them. He’s not about to let Niall smother him to death even once, but Niall doesn’t necessarily need to know that right now. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” says Niall. “But doing that sounds fucking pointless, so. Let’s not.”
Ruben doesn’t breathe a sigh of relief, because he wasn’t going to let Niall do it anyway.
“I killed myself straight after, every single fucking time,” Ruben tells him. “If it’s any consolation.”
Niall’s smile doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “Not really, no.”
Ruben doesn’t really know what to say to that. But since it's not in his nature to be quiet, he says something anyway.
“What happens, then, d’you reckon?” he asks, trying to sound casual about it. “If neither of us dies, I mean.”
Niall pauses, biting his lip. “I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe we should find out.”