Chapter Text
Ruben Pallister visits his mother every Thursday afternoon. He sits with her, he feeds her, he takes her for walks in the garden, he tells her about his work and his life and never expects an answer beyond the rare groan or sigh that escapes from the right corner of her mouth as she slouches in her wheelchair or lies in bed, looking at him with glazed eyes. He does everything a dutiful son might do in his position.
What he does not do, what he leaves to the staff of Greenock Care Home, is anything related to “intimate” care—helping her use the toilet, bathe, change clothes. It’s not that it scares him, it’s just that he thinks she deserves to keep a bit of her own dignity. The staff know and respect this.
Which is why it was such an outrage today when he and his wife—after knocking on the door and receiving what sounded like a “come in” from the other side—walked in on his mother, half-undressed with two aides at her side, struggling to put a bra on her. He saw her sagging breasts for half a second before the female aide, startled, moved in front of his mother to block his view, and he quickly shut the door. He and Mona stood by the door silently, avoiding each other’s gaze for another minute before the aide opened the door and whispered apologetically that his mother was ready to see him now. She and the other aide, a male, scurried out of the room.
The rest of the visit proceeded normally. On his way out, he locked eyes with the male aide he’d seen in his mother’s room—a Michael, according to his name tag—and shot him with a menacing glare. He’d prefer to have shoved him up against a wall, at the very least, but it was the best he could do for the moment. He couldn’t very well get himself kicked off the visitors’ list. He's gotten into enough trouble lately.
Only now, on the drive back home, can he give full expression to his feelings (well—not quite full expression). Mona nods along and assents to all his castigations of Greenock Care Home and their incompetent staff until he suggests moving her to a new home.
“I—I just don’t think that’s really necessary,” she ventures.
He looks over at her incredulously. “But you just agreed to everything I said.”
Mona sighs and says nothing.
“Well?” he asks.
“I just don’t think—I don’t know if it’s a very… big… deal,” she says, reluctantly. “I think it was just a mistake.”
“Oh, you think it’s a mistake, do you, that they’re parading my mother around, naked, in full view of everyone?”
Mona doesn’t contest this version of events. She tries to change the subject. Ruben isn’t having it, and forces her back to the subject at hand.
“Where else are you going to put her?” she finally retorts, exasperated. “What other decent place is there within 25 miles of here? We’re not going to put her up in our home.”
He doesn’t respond.
Mona stares at him in disbelief. “You want us to raise a child and take care of your mother, all under one roof, at the same time?”
He says nothing. They’re approaching the house now. He pulls into the driveway.
Mona steps out of the car, but turns and leans in, looking at him with trepidation. “Ruben—”
“I’m going for a drive,” he says simply, and leans over, pulling the door shut as Mona startles backward, narrowly avoiding getting her fingers smashed. He pulls out of the driveway, leaving her staring in bewilderment as he pulls away.
He’s not going to try and move his mother. Mona’s right, actually—every other home in the area is a dump. And there’s no way they could take care of her at home.
It’s just that seeing his mother in that position makes him feel a certain way. Maybe it’s repulsion at seeing her nakedness, maybe it’s knowing he can’t do anything to fix her situation. Maybe it’s—
Niall’s fault.
He had no particular destination in mind when he pulled out of his driveway, but now he finds himself driving towards Niall’s place, the house he just moved into with his girlfriend. Niall told Ruben that he didn’t need him to pay for his bedsit anymore just a couple of months ago. Now, Niall’s debts have stalled out at £30,000. Ava pays for everything now, she owns the house—he thinks he doesn’t need Ruben anymore. He thinks that after taking 14 years of Ruben’s life, his mother, and £30,000 from him, he can just walk away and find someone else to leech off of.
All these thoughts and more swirl around in Ruben’s head on the drive to Niall’s house. He’s only been there a couple of times, but he knows the route. He recognizes the house among its near-identical neighbors as he approaches it, and he sees that only Niall’s car is sitting out in front. Ava must be out tonight. Good.
Ruben parks in front and bounds up the steps to the front door, ringing the doorbell and knocking insistently. No one answers, but he can see the light on up the stairs inside. The door’s locked. Ruben looks through and underneath the many potted plants along the steps before he finds the spare key. He unlocks the front door and steps into the foyer.
“Bambi?” he calls into the seemingly empty house. He hears a faint clamor from upstairs, a sort of ceramic clanging sound, followed by retching noises and then a flush. The toilet.
Ruben walks up the stairs, locates the door behind which these noises emanate, and knocks gently, pushing the door open.
He’s not sure what, exactly, he came here planning to do to Niall, but the desire for some form of revenge dissipates and is replaced by—interest? Amusement? Schadenfreude? A strange sense of endearment?—at the sight of Niall Kennedy, pallid and sweaty and looking even smaller than usual, hunched over the toilet bowl.
Niall looks up warily, wearily, and almost guiltily at Ruben looming in the doorway. “What are you here for, Ruben?”
Ruben ignores his question and walks over to the sink, leaning back against it and folding his arms as he looks down at Niall. “You’re sick.”
Niall looks from Ruben to the toilet bowl and back to Ruben again. “Well… yes.”
“Why?”
It’s Niall’s turn to ignore the question as he gags, lurches forward a little, and hangs suspended over the toilet bowl for several seconds before another convulsion brings up bile and half-digested food. He spits twice into the bowl, flushes, and leans back against the wall, breathing heavily through his nose.
Ruben is reminded of when they were teenagers, and he brought Niall with him to a party thrown by one of Mona’s friends—Niall had spent the whole night in a corner of the garden, barely speaking to anybody and quickly, nervously downing a succession of beers. Poor thing couldn’t pace himself. Ruben found him later that night puking into a potted plant. Ruben, drunk and excited himself, couldn’t help laughing at him as he rubbed soothing circles on his back. “Awwww, Bambi,” he cooed, half-mockingly, “Clare’s going to be pissed when she sees what you’ve done to her plants.”
Maybe it’s the memory of this and similar incidents from their adolescence that cause Ruben to step forward and press the back of his hand to Niall’s forehead. Slightly warm, but not truly feverish. Niall flinches a little and swats his hand away. Ruben steps back to the sink.
“So, you drinking alone or something?” he asks.
“No, no, I—it must be something I ate,” Niall says. Ruben can believe it. It never took that much to get Niall to spew.
“No girlfriend around to play nurse tonight?”
“She has a work thing.”
“You been at this for a while?”
“Maybe an hour. It should be over soon.”
“Oh, so food poisoning follows a timetable with you?” Ruben asks.
Niall responds by puking again.
Ruben takes advantage of the pause in banter to peruse Niall and Ava’s medicine cabinet.
“Don’t look through my stuff.” Niall’s voice starts out on a sharp, panicked note, then softens as he regains self-control. A bit squirrelly.
Well, with that kind of response, how can Ruben resist? “Relax, I’m just looking for Pepto-Bismol,” he says, while picking up and reading pill bottles one by one. Old antibiotics. Acetaminophen. Antidepressants (one of the few things in there that seem to belong to Niall). No sign of birth control. Floss.
“I don’t need anything,” he hears Niall say behind him, exasperated.
Ruben moves on to the cabinet underneath the sink. Cleaning supplies, rat poison, a hairdryer, and several unopened boxes of toothpaste. He closes the door and looks back at Niall, who’s just leaning his head against his folded arms on the rim of the toilet bowl now, saying nothing. Vomit from the last time he puked is still sitting in there, unflushed. Ruben gets the sudden urge to dunk Niall’s head in it. It passes. He flushes the toilet instead, and Niall startles backward in disgust when a little speck of vomit hits him on the forehead. He wipes it off.
“You want a glass of water?” Ruben asks, ignoring his previous statement.
“I just want you to leave,” Niall pleads miserably.
There is something about Niall’s manner when he’s sick that Ruben finds appealing. For the last several months he’s presented himself to Ruben as clean, self-controlled, and respectable. It’s like he’s wearing a mask. Now he looks grimy and pathetic in his sweat-soaked white T-shirt and grey joggers. Ruben remembers the night they reconnected at the hospital, how puny, vulnerable, and beat-up Niall looked in his gown, how his voice cracked as he laid out his laundry list of grievances and woes. He’s not so wordy tonight, but seeing his need and his naked resentment of Ruben again, combined with his complete inability to do anything to stop him from being there, does… something to Ruben.
“I would, but I can’t. You could never take care of yourself, could you, Bambi?”
Niall sighs. After a long pause, he says, “Glasses are in the upper cabinet next to the sink. Tap water is fine.”
As if Ruben was otherwise going to fetch him an Evian or a sparkling San Pellegrino. Niall thinks too highly of himself.
Ruben’s standing in Niall’s spacious kitchen, having just filled a glass of water and thinking to himself, Sick people like soup, right? Should I microwave something? when he suddenly comes back to his senses. He came here to slap Niall around a little—or something like that—and now he’s thinking of making him soup? No. That’s a bridge too far. He roots through the cupboards and grabs cream crackers instead.
Back in the toilet, he hands the water and the crackers to Niall, who nods in gratitude without meeting his eyes. Ruben leans back against the sink and concentrates on Niall’s face as he rinses out his mouth, spits into the toilet bowl, then swallows a tentative sip of water and a dainty bite of cracker. When he doesn’t puke, he continues to take sips and bites, and for about ten minutes the silence in the room is only interrupted by the sounds of Niall meekly eating crackers. Ruben watches the sweat dry on his face.
Eventually Niall stands up shakily, and Ruben moves to his side to support him.
“Don’t want to brush your teeth? Take a piss? Shower?”
“No,” Niall replies simply.
They move down the hallway towards the bedroom, Ruben’s hand resting lightly on Niall’s lower back. Niall seems tense and uneasy with his touch, but he doesn't resist. A puzzled look passes over his face.
“How’d you get in here?”
“Your front door was unlocked,” Ruben says. For convenience’s sake, he’d rather Niall and Ava not try to hide the spare key somewhere new if he needs to come back some other time.
“Ah.” Niall nods.
When they arrive in front of the bedroom door, Niall turns to face him, as if he were expecting him to leave now.
Ruben stands his ground. “What—you don’t want to be tucked in?” he teases. “Don’t want me to see your porn strewn all about the place? Yours and Ava’s sex toys lying out in the open?”
Niall rolls his eyes and pushes the door open.
They step in. Ruben flicks on the light switch, and Niall flops onto his back on the bed. He drapes an arm over his eyes. Ruben pulls the wastebasket towards the bed.
Niall peeks out from under his arm at Ruben. “Thanks. You can go now.”
Ruben makes no move to leave. He looks around the room, taking in the red-painted walls, the luxurious grey bedsheets, the TV mounted on the wall across from the bed and the books on the mantelpiece. There's a photograph of Niall and Ava taken at some garden that sits on the nearest nightstand. He gazes down at Niall and takes in his pallor, the hair plastered to his forehead, his sweated-through clothes. His stale, sickly odor.
He wordlessly leans over and starts to pull down Niall’s joggers.
Niall immediately starts to flail. “Ruben— Ruben— RUBEN!” he pants with increasing urgency as he tries to pull his joggers up and scramble away from Ruben towards the headboard. He kicks out, striking him in the chest.
It’s not a particularly strong kick, but pain and anger combine in Ruben’s chest and he pictures himself pouncing onto the bed, pinning Niall down by his (no doubt, already sore) throat… instead he lets go of his legs and straightens up. What the fuck did Niall think he was trying to do? Niall has raised himself onto his elbows, with his knees bent in a somewhat defensive posture, huffing and glaring at Ruben. He feels put out, but holds his hands up, as if in surrender. “As you said—you can take care of yourself from here on out.” He turns and kicks the wastebasket away from the bed on his way out. The fuck does he care if Niall soils his girlfriend's bedsheets?
He hears Niall call out his name again, but ignores it. He storms out the door and into the cool night air.