nicky hemmick is a mess and doesn't even really have boundaries of his own. at all. especially where his family is involved.
a big theme in his character is the conflict between himself and his family, specifically whether he can keep his family while being his true self. he wants to be himself, but he cares about his family more than anything else, and those things come into conflict time and time again.
this is most apparent in his relationship with his parents, obviously. he came out to them despite knowing they were religious nutjobs who wouldn't accept him. his dad sent him to conversion therapy for a year and when he came home he was too ashamed to admit that it hadn't worked so he pretended to be straight, which was so miserable he thought about killing himself and probably would have if a teacher didn't notice and stage an intervention. going to germany and meeting erik saved his life. he was finally okay there, and he is so genuinely happy whenever he talks about erik. but he still came back to take care of his cousins, and he still tried to make things right with his parents. what they did to him, a year of conversion therapy and all that entails, wasn't enough for him to want to cut ties for good, it was what they did to andrew that finally did that.
he has started to come to terms with his sexuality and is unwilling to be anything other than unapologetically gay, but he's still not exactly in a healthy place with that, and that self-acceptance doesn't really extend to anything else about him. because he's still pretending to be someone he isn't.
nicky is implied to be faking aspects of his personality for the entire series and, predictably, it's making him fucking miserable.
he is, at the very least, pretending to be unbothered and happy. he's genuinely outgoing and friendly, he desperately wants friends and is extremely, extremely lonely, but the twins don't want to get close to anyone and he goes along with that. (he also craves attention and affection, which isn't good for him respecting other people's boundaries and makes his relationship with andrew worse.)
the twins treat him like shit. it probably used to be a lot worse, but aaron is still openly embarrassed of him, frequently insults him, and often just outright ignores him (a lot of people do this to him, actually); andrew is violent towards him, which seems to be a frequent occurrence, and when neil tells him it's not okay, he brushes it off, makes excuses for it, and says he deserved it.
until neil showed up, those were pretty much the only two people he regularly talked to for at least a year.
he tells neil that andrew doesn't understand boundaries and is incapable of doing so or understanding why it's wrong, which is interesting because andrew definitely understands boundaries. boundaries are extremely important to andrew, actually. so why does nicky say this?
because he doesn't understand boundaries. he doesn't know how to establish boundaries, much less enforce them. he lets his cousins do whatever they want and he goes along with it without really understanding that he could have any influence on this dynamic. i talked earlier about him being ridiculously ride-or-die for them, but that isn't necessarily a good thing for him; as that post mentions, he doesn't have a deal with andrew, but things might be significantly better for him if he did.
nicky is an adult. he's twenty-four years old, he has a life in germany where he's actually happy, but he chooses to stay here and let himself be isolated and pushed around by his cousins when he is getting literally nothing out of this arrangement. if he had any self-respect at all, he'd leave and never interact with anyone in his family again for a long time.
but that's the thing. he doesn't have self-respect. that's his problem.
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