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The click of the bedroom door closing is near silent but it wakes Ruben up anyway.
He squints against the sunlight seeping through the curtains before stretching, limbs pleasantly heavy the way they only get after a great night’s sleep. His bed feels different, looser somehow with the blankets strewn about. When he lazily flexes his fingers, there’s a warmth to the sheets. His pillow smells weird, but it's not a bad-weird, exactly. Familiar yet new, the distant way it does after he’s had a late night tumble with a bird, like the light, sweet-soft scent of another body’s sleep.
With the next inhale, his dick makes itself known—hard, with it being morning and his bed smelling good and all—and he slides his hand down his bare stomach to cup himself through his boxers before slipping under the waistband.
He twists a bit, half on his front so he can tilt his hips against his own hand and press his cheek down to inhale against his pillow. It takes another few seconds for his brain to catch up and it hits him—oh. They’ve only shared this tiny room for a few days but yeah, he already recognizes that scent, and last night floods back to him.
Wrestling Niall down, rocking against him until Ruben’s hands stopped shaking—shaking because Ruben’s father had been outside, yelling in that horribly familiar drunken slur—
Ruben’s cock wilts at the memory. He locks the thought down in its tracks but the moment is gone, so he pulls his hand free and rolls onto his back to glare at the ceiling. The shower cutting on in the bathroom across the hall catches his attention. That’ll be Niall getting ready for school, normal as anything, probably. Little fuck, Ruben thinks halfheartedly.
Something slimy settles in his chest so suddenly that he feels like throwing a punch. No way their mums didn’t hear the hollering outside at all hours.
Breakfast isn’t gonna be fun.
+
Ruben and Niall leave the house in silence and pass the first few minutes of the walk to school that way. It doesn’t last, of course, because Niall’s got something new to be twitchy about and it’s pissing Ruben off more than usual. He thinks about telling him to fuck off before Niall’s even looked at him because he knows it’s coming, whatever it is Niall’s working himself up to say, but Ruben’s been lost in his own thoughts since breakfast.
Niall listened to him. Last night, when Ruben told him to keep his mouth shut, Niall listened. Not only did he not say a word about what happened when his mum nosed around, but he covered for it. Ruben doesn’t know what to make of it, only that it feels like something ugly and wounded in his chest is lifting its head in interest.
It’s a new thing, someone looking out for him like that, so when some little poof interrupts their walk with a mocking “Oi, soft cock,” Ruben thinks it's only fair that he takes care of it. Last night sent him off-kilter so setting himself to rights like this’ll be a bonus anyway.
Niall listens to him again, when Ruben tells him to leave. Ruben thumbs his blade to check its sharpness as he watches Niall honest-to-fuck actually run away. Ruben glances down at his hand, sucks a tiny line of blood from his finger, and turns back the way they came.
+
School is just as fuck-off boring as he’d expected. He doesn’t care that everyone stares at him—except for the few fit birds that bat their lashes when he passes them in the hallways between classes. There’s some potential here, he reckons, by the time he drops down next to Niall in their second shared class of the morning. He skips out over lunch after that, having had enough of school for the day.
The house is quiet when he slams the front door behind himself and kicks his shoes off in the doorway. He wastes the afternoon filling his and Niall’s room with the scent of weed and flipping idly through skin mags that don’t do anything for him, cotton-headed as he is now. Time passes quickly like that, and his high has mostly worn off by the time late afternoon light fills the room. He’s been hearing the sounds of Niall and their mums getting home, so he gets up and flips the radio on, cranking the volume in case anyone gets the bright idea to come try and talk to him.
A glance around the room has him thinking he needs to tell Maura to do the laundry. There’s shit everywhere, so he kicks a dirty shirt up from the floor and catches it one-handed, launching it across the room straight into the near-full laundry basket. Five points for finesse, he thinks, and does the same to a rogue sock at the foot of Niall’s bed. He figures ten points for that one, considering the sock’s small size compared to the shirt and all, and he’s toeing up another sock when a song he doesn’t hate comes on over the radio.
It’s a good one, really, with a relaxed beat that gets his hips moving. It’s easy to get lost in it with the dregs of his high softening his movements—until he spins and there’s Niall, eyes wide and a slight smile on his face while he fuckin’ laughs at Ruben from across the room. Ruben gets him up against the wall in a second and finds that he likes Niall’s face better like this instead, collapsed into fear as it is.
I thought it was great, Niall says. Right to his face, even, and it sends a warning bell shooting through Ruben like ice. He shoves away, needing to put distance between himself and Niall’s panicked eyes and stupid words.
Ruben rips open the discarded skin mag again but doesn’t see it, ignoring Niall so hard he can’t focus on anything else. He almost thinks it might scare Niall off of whatever he clearly wants to say, if the unsubtle glances he sends Ruben are anything to go by. No luck, but Niall scurries off easily enough when Ruben snaps at him.
Fuckin’ exam. No chance.
Ruben’s shoulders drop the second the door closes behind Niall. He glares over at the door before dropping the magazine to the floor between his bed and the wall, then rolls up and onto his feet to kick at it. His foot finds a pile of clothes in the corner next, and he punts a pair of his sweatpants toward the laundry basket hard enough to fling them over the other side of Niall’s bed.
The rest of the pile follows with a particularly hard kick that still doesn’t feel fully satisfying. He follows the clothes and bends to swipe them off the floor one by one, slamming everything into the basket with increasingly sharp throws. He’s just reaching for his sweats next to Niall’s bed when his eye catches on a wadded bit of fabric shoved behind the front leg of Niall’s bed frame.
He tugs it free and uncrumples it to find Niall’s boxers from last night—not that Ruben was looking or anything. It’s just something you notice when you share a room with someone, what they wear to bed, isn’t it.
Weird for Niall to shove them behind the bed like that, but Ruben doesn’t think much of it until he turns to toss them into the basket and his fingers skim over a hardness on the fabric. He turns it over in his hands and understanding makes a grin cross his face.
Kid creamed his boxers. Been there, Ruben thinks, and big deal? Niall could’ve just thrown them into the laundry basket himself, but he didn’t. Huh.
Ruben pauses to study the boxers. No, Niall hid them, and the only reason to do that is if he wanted to hide them from Ruben. Because he specifically didn’t want Ruben to know, because he—Ruben’s brain trips over it.
Because he slept in Ruben’s bed last night. In Ruben’s arms. And he went and jizzed himself over it.
Ruben’s grin falls as the idea kicks something awake in his chest, that same curious something from this morning now rising up to growl. His cock twitches in interest at the same time something slippery and black like motor oil bubbles up in his gut, coating his insides with familiar unease that straddles the line between hatred and arousal.
His skin crawls with it, the more he thinks about it. It’s like. Violating, or some shit, maybe. He doesn’t know.
Niall fucking came when Ruben wrestled him down. He came in his boxers like some fucking kid while Ruben’s father screamed for him from the street, while Ruben panicked and trembled like he was nothing more than a dumb kid, himself. Fury rises up, so hot it blinds him. He runs his thumb across the crusted stain on Niall’s boxers again and can’t think about anything but the fact that Niall came in his arms last night.
He thinks about how his dad’s drunken voice had sounded, familiar enough to make Ruben freeze in the middle of his and Niall’s room, right up until Niall had made to leave and Ruben’s brain kicked in like a firecracker as Niall’s words registered—and why the fuck would he go and tell their mums about this anyway? Ruben had no choice but to get an arm around him and bring him down.
He thinks about the rest of it, his mind carefully carving out his father’s belligerent screams as it catalogs every memory now: his muscles tensing as he’d dragged Niall down onto the bed and pulled him in tight. His nose buried in Niall’s hair (yeah, there’s the smell on his pillow again) like he could’ve burrowed in closer. He thinks about Niall thrashing against him as Ruben had cut off his air and his gasps when Ruben let up on the chokehold. Niall’s hips knocking against his own, and the way Niall had finally settled against him so Ruben could dig his face into the back of Niall’s neck and breathe him in until Ruben stopped shaking—and then Ruben thinks about how somewhere in all that, Niall came in his boxers. Hands free and all.
So yeah, okay, maybe it makes sense. Ruben’s dick seems to think so anyway, the way it’s thickening in his sweatpants.
It doesn’t matter, Ruben knows. Bodies react—he knows that too. And besides, Ruben didn’t even feel it when Niall came, so it doesn’t count, does it. Even so, it’s just Niall anyway. They’re practically brothers by now, so it's okay. No big deal.
Only he can’t make himself drop the boxers into the basket yet.
Ruben flops down onto his bed, thinking about how easy it had been to whip Niall’s skinny arse down with him. No upper body strength on him, no muscle, just a meek little body pressed tight against Ruben’s like he could’ve gotten away if he’d struggled hard enough, but Ruben knows the truth. He’d had Niall well and truly held down.
Lucky for him that Ruben had taken care of that fuckface yelling insults on the walk to school this morning, because if he hadn’t, Niall wouldn’t stand a chance if it came down to a fight. Ruben will have to teach him some self defense, clearly. He’ll need it someday, knowing him.
The boxing gloves stashed in his bag come to mind as he leans back against his pillows, shifting his hips a few times to get comfortable. He switches Niall’s dirty boxers to his left hand and slides his right past the waistband of his sweatpants to get a hand around himself, sighing through a few lazy strokes and refusing to let his mind wander beyond the boxers in one hand and his cock in the other. He absentmindedly swirls his thumb around the head at the same time he circles a fingertip across the stiff patch on the front of the fabric.
Niall’s scent lingers faintly on his pillow, Ruben realizes when his head lolls to the side. He inhales against it, remembering the smell of Niall’s hair combined with the near-safe feeling of a smaller body pressed to his front, and then he’s pulling his hand from his sweats so he can shove them down his thighs instead. He spreads out a little—knees open and feet hanging off the small bed—and doesn’t bother to stifle a satisfied groan when he gets his hand around his newly freed cock again.
It’s good like this, his palm dry so it tugs the sensitive skin just a little as he thrusts against his own fist. He squeezes the boxers in his other hand, feeling the cum stain crunch between his fingers, and wonders distantly what it would’ve felt like when it was still wet. Slippery. Gooey almost, the way spunk is. Warm too, he reckons, because the boxers would’ve been warm already with Niall’s body heat—with their shared heat, Ruben thinks, tightening his fist around the head of his cock with a bitten off gasp.
He’s not gonna last long and he has no interest in drawing this out anyway. The scent surrounding him is vaguely masculine only in that it is boy-like, soft somehow, and Ruben wants to dig his face into the back of Niall’s neck again like taking a hit off some new drug he doesn’t know is dangerous yet.
With nothing in his head except for the way Niall smells, he can’t help but wonder how else Niall might smell—he stops that thought in its tracks but can’t stop himself from dropping the boxers over his face anyway, and the scent that surrounds him rips a groan from low in his chest. The fabric is absolutely rank in all the ways that matter and Ruben sucks in a deep breath to feel it soak into his sinuses.
His mouth drops open, his tongue at his bottom teeth, the wet heat of his breath turning the scent almost liquid like it could spill over his tongue. He swallows hard and drops his now free hand to roll his balls in his palm while his other hand speeds up, and he can’t help but plant his feet, hips jerking up desperately to fuck his own fist.
His breaths are coming faster, oxygen replaced by NiallNiallNiall under the stifling fabric until it’s hard to breathe, but nothing could make him stop right now except maybe Niall walking through the door—and jesus fuck, the thought makes something horrible and broken rage through his pleasure-stupid mind, makes his cock pulse, makes him flit his tongue out to touch the crusted spot on the front of the boxers, fuck—and then his eyes roll back and he’s coming so hard it forces a weak moan from his throat, his hips stuttering as cum stripes across his stomach all the way up to his chest.
He holds his cock protectively as he comes down from it. He heaves breaths into the boxers, dazed, and thinks, okay, yeah, he gets it. Fuck, he hasn’t come that hard in a long time, and—he freezes.
Just like that, his brain catches up and he rips the boxers off his face like they’re on fire. His chest is suddenly so tight he can hardly breathe. He swallows, ignoring the barely-there flavor of salt and musk on his tongue as he stares up at the water stains on the ceiling, refusing to let himself think about what he just did.
It overtook him, is all. He couldn’t help it. It was just his body reacting the way any man’s would. It's not like it’s gay shit or whatever, and he’d kill anyone who’d think so because they’d obviously be too stupid to live anyway. It’d be doing them a favor, really.
And anyway, it’s only Niall, so it doesn’t mean anything. He’s familiar. Familial. It’s that thought that finally makes his chest loosen.
It’s only Niall.
He shakes the sludgy feeling off with a cough, then uses the filthy boxers to clean the cum dripping down the side of his stomach and chest. After wiping his hand clean too, he tosses the boxers back to the other side of Niall’s bed.
It’s close enough to where he found them. Fuck if he cares if Niall knows that Ruben found him out. It’s the kind of thing only Niall could worry about—Ruben knows better.
Let him feel caught, Ruben thinks, laughing to himself, then rolls over to doze for the next few hours before dinner.
+
He asks Niall about his father that night, in the quiet darkness where it’s safe to talk about things like fathers.
Niall asks him about Gus in a pathetic voice and Ruben thinks about eyes wide in terror, cheeks shiny with tears and blood, lips trembling after Ruben threatened to cut out his tongue if he didn’t stop begging.
He tells Niall what he needs to know about what happened to Gus.
When he looks across the small space separating their beds, Niall’s eyes are wide in undeniable fear, too. Ruben smiles a bit and commits that expression to memory as he bids those Bambi eyes goodnight, then rolls over, showing Niall his bare back.
He relaxes down into his bed and counts minutes until the palpable tension from the other side of the room eases.
He’s still thinking about Niall’s eyes, huge and bright even through the darkness—huge and bright when Ruben pressed him up against a wall this morning and again this afternoon, too—and yeah, he’s always known Niall’s scared of him to some degree. The only difference now is that Ruben knows that it gets him off.
He grins at the wall and thinks, fuck it, he could go again.
He doesn’t bother to be quiet as he shifts to get his hand in his boxers and tugs himself from soft to rock hard in record time. Something about that fear in Niall’s eyes feels good, feels powerful. He’s bigger than Niall, tough and manly the way Niall never could be. They both know it, and Ruben takes comfort in the fact that he’s not the only one that really fuckin’ likes it.
He pulls his hand out of his boxers to spit into his palm, then grunts at the slick slide of his fist around his cock. He keeps his noises low—doesn’t want their mums to hear, wants to keep this just for Niall. Give him something to aspire to, maybe.
There’s no sound from the other side of the room and Ruben wonders if maybe Niall fell asleep. He ignores the flicker of confusing disappointment in his gut, but a wank is a wank so it’s not like he’s gonna stop.
He thinks about the day. Niall’s confident “We were asleep, both of us,” over breakfast, and Gus’s wet eyes. The skin mag he’d flipped through this afternoon. One of the pretty little lasses in the school hallway this morning.
Gorgeous, she was. Long dark curls, great tits. He’ll have to find her and get her name tomorrow. He wonders what his pillows might smell like after a tumble with her, what Niall might think of her—and then Niall is all he can think about again as he rubs his forefinger into the sensitive spot under his cockhead with a sharp gasp.
He wonders if Niall’s a virgin, and his next moan comes out like a soft laugh, loud still in the quiet room, because of course Niall is. He’s just a kid, isn’t he, just a boy. Girls only want to fuck men.
Ruben’ll have to do something about that. Can’t go around having some virgin non-man for a brother.
The thought has him twisting his wrist on the next upstroke. He leans further onto his side so he can fuck down into his own hand, and lets out a groan into his pillow, his breath picking up, heart starting to pound in his ears. A sharp inhale drags the last lingering bits of Niall’s scent through his lungs and his hips jerk involuntarily.
He thinks about Niall’s hands scrabbling uselessly at his forearm last night, his fingers wrapping around Ruben’s wrist as he tried to pull Ruben off. Niall’s got long fingers; they’d wrapped all the way around Ruben’s wrist, probably. Ruben pictures them and squeezes his cockhead and thumbs into his slit and is instantly, furiously embarrassed by the high little whine it pulls from him.
He wonders again if maybe Niall’s listening, what Niall would say about a noise like that. Ruben would fit his hand over Niall’s mouth to shut him up forever before he could even try to say anything.
What comes to mind next are the noises Niall might make. High and needy, probably, like a girl. Ruben’s hand speeds up and he lets his next deep, low groan carry so Niall can hear what a real man sounds like—and then he finally hears a barely-there hitch of breath from the other side of the room.
Ruben’s already so close that just the sound of it, the confirmation that Niall’s listening, probably fucking touching himself, the little fucking perv—it sends Ruben right over the edge and he comes hard, moaning with it. His eyes roll back for a second before he forces them open again, looking down so he can watch the wet spot form across the front of his boxers.
The silence in the wake of his orgasm rings in his ears and before he’s even come fully down from it, he’s chuckling to himself. Of course Niall was listening the whole time. Nasty little freak. Ruben wants to drag him down onto the bed again, feeling fond somehow.
He pulls his hand free and wipes it clean across his hip before shimmying out of his boxers and twisting to throw them onto the floor between their beds. The fabric lands with a soft noise, but the room is so quiet they both hear it. He glances over at Niall’s bed and sees a pile of blankets pulled up so high that Ruben can only see the top of Niall’s head where he’s turned away.
“Since we’re not bothering to put ruined boxers in the laundry basket,” Ruben says, quiet but clear, cutting through the dark like a knife.
He rolls over again with a grin, enjoying the deadly silence from the other side of the room.
+
Niall is gone when Ruben wakes up the next morning, so Ruben spreads out on his back, naked, yawning loudly as he folds his arms behind his head. He’s in no rush to fully wake up, feeling lazy and sated after another great night’s sleep, but he finally gets up to go for a piss after a bit of a lounge. When he pads back into the room to crawl back into bed, he glances down at the laundry basket and freezes.
His boxers from last night are sitting right at the top of the pile, right next to Niall’s dirty ones from the prior night. Ruben bets the cum stains are touching, even. That new, addictive something in his chest swells, baring its teeth in a grin.
Ruben pulls on yesterday’s sweatpants and a clean shirt, and heads downstairs.
He’s got an exam to get to.