Oh no, now I want the inverse. Jamie Bell Niall finds Stuart Campbell Ruben while cruising one night and/or Ruben pays him to be his alibi to get out of jail or something? And Ruben just imprints on him. Niall keeps shooing him away but Ruben just wants to be a good guard dog and if you would be ever so kind as to let me sleep on the foot of your bed please and Niall is like am I the only adult in this kids life?? Am I responsible for this now??
your mind is a beautiful, beautiful place. yes to ALL of this.
the concept of a version of niall who—without ruben—had nobody. whose bullying persisted. who had a real rough go of it all the way through school—feeling painfully lonely and other—and still somehow got into oxford as this enormous fuck you to everyone who ever treated him like shit. this niall completes his degree. but his first book still flops.
for as long as he can remember, there’s been this ache inside himself he's never been able to fully articulate. as a child he’d try to explain it to his mom and she’d brush him off—tell him it’s a stomach ache from eating too much, or too little, or the wrong thing. and he’d say, no, it’s not my tummy it’s inside of me, my everything feels wrong and off and not right—and go through all these various explanations but she wouldn’t answer. of course she wouldn’t, because she’d be off in her own world—or worse, she’d have her disappointed i-can’t-with-you-face—so he learned very quickly to stop trying. started believing instead that it was proof of there being something fundamentally wrong with him—something rotten enough for the boys at school to sense.
his whole life is defined by constant reaching: for people, for acclaim, for meaning, for something, anything, that might finally fill whatever hollow thing lives within him. but nothing ever does. everything is always at a remove. like there's a pane of glass between him and everyone else, everyone moving forward while he stays suspended, untouched by his own life. a series of almosts and what-ifs that keep him up at night.
then there's ruben, who like niall, had no one. without having someone so implicitly his—he's more jaded, more scarred, more vulnerable underneath it all, which just serves to make him more angry and armored. canon ruben is a bomb, but this ruben is a sore, pulsing wound that has been left to fester. his best form of defense has always been attack, but without niall, there was never anyone to be soft for, not even in secret. so he never learned he could be, or felt safe enough to find out. maybe in this universe when he gets out of the young offenders institution—no lori&maura, no shared house, no strange little imitation of family waiting for him—he ends up back at his dad's. which is its own kind of institution; its own kind of ruin.
so one night he's just. walking. not really paying attention to where he's going and he wanders into a dogging spot—sees two men fucking in the back of a car—and he's so caught off guard that he doesn't notice he’s been spotted, that the attention has shifted. because there’s something about this boy, undeniably young and beautiful, all restless energy and sharp edges, so palpably—sparklingly—alive that the men who’ve seen him find themselves more arrested by him than the sex unfolding in front of them. maybe one of them starts toward him—
but niall is already moving before he consciously decides to. steps in front of ruben, steers him away—no place for a lad come on, son—and ruben is so caught off guard by this stranger’s hands on him, by what he’s just seen, that he lets it happen for a moment before he jerks himself free and spits something vicious. niall throws his hands up instinctively, all right, all right—and then they get their first proper look at each other. and God. something ignites between them, wordless and immediate, because of course it does. it’s them.
or maybe it all starts in a different setting… maybe ruben’s been assigned community service hours and ends up doing them at the library where, you guessed it, niall is writing his book—and also, as it happens, cruising. ruben’s the boy at desk who, for reasons he can't explain even to himself, always lets niall print for free.
it’s an easy choice. this man with his lilting voice and big, bottomless eyes, whose face is made impossibly kinder by his smile lines. who makes a point of asking ruben about how he’s doing each time he sees him. who always wants to know about his schooling. who even helped him prep for his placement exam after ruben mentioned it completely offhand—who sat with him and said i remember how shit school was. i'm proud of you for sticking with it anyway. you work hard, don't you? you're a hardworking lad. i can tell.
and ruben—who has never once in his life been spoken to like that, believed in like that, treated gently like that—finds he can’t stop thinking about him. cannot make sense of any of it. all he knows is that whatever voracious, restless hunger lives inside him eases around niall. that the constant static underneath his skin goes strangely silent whenever this man looks at him. like something in him, some lonely and aching thing he’d never known how to name, has finally been recognized. can’t shake the feeling that it must be mutual—this odd sense of rightness between them, of something slotting into place. like they’ve stumbled into something inevitable.
he’s not naïve to what niall is doing in the bathroom. finds himself standing guard outside the door whenever niall disappears in there with someone, absolutely fucking fuming with jealousy, but god forbid anyone except him—and the lucky bastard inside with niall—hears the noises he makes, figures out what he’s doing. is completely unable to stop himself from listening and keeping watch and being good…
until one day niall finally goes in alone and ruben, completely overcome, swiftly follows and bolts the door shut. niall jumps before he realizes who it is, then relaxes immediately. you scared me rube, he laughs softly. all right? and ruben draws himself up to his full height, mouth pulled tight as he says something nasty and pointed about knowing exactly what niall gets up to in here.
niall has spent his library time very well indeed, but never so well that he hasn’t noticed this furious, swaggering, firecracker boy with his constant scowl and watchful eyes. his attempts at convincing himself this was fatherly almost worked; that he simply saw something of his own lonely childhood in ruben, that he only wanted to give him the support he had once so desperately craved. he truly, honestly, almost believed it. but it got harder and harder to ignore the way he moaned louder knowing ruben was outside the door listening in, protecting him, giving and giving and giving….
and now ruben is standing in front of him, jaw clenched hard enough to crack a tooth, trying so desperately to play-act being a man while every inch of him betrays exactly how undone he is.
niall feels something rising up within him, dark and electric, that will not be reasoned with. he’s never felt so real, so powerful, so lit up from within than in this bathroom, with ruben so close he can hear the stutter in his breathing. a smile forms on his face before he can stop it. niall tilts his head, taking him in slowly, all that fury and no release... so clearly begging for it… and says, very quietly: if there’s something you want, lad, you’ve got to prove you’re grown enough to ask for it.
ruben, who is irate and more turned on than he’s ever been in his life, without any finesse at all, grabs niall by his lapels and shoves him up against the wall and—
