Chapter Text
The world didn’t tilt on its axis when Niall lied under oath. There was no sudden crack of thunder over Edinburgh, no shift in the heavy, low-hanging gray sky to mark the moment he traded a piece of his soul for Ruben’s freedom. When he walked out of the police station, the damp air still smelled of coal smoke and wet tarmac, and the double-decker buses still rattled down the street exactly as they had that morning.
That was the most jarring part of the whole thing: the total lack of external evidence.
Inside his chest, a massive, catastrophic shift had occurred—a quiet cave-in that left him feeling hollowed out, as if his internal organs had been replaced by cold ash. Yet, on the outside, life insisted on being agonizingly ordinary. He packed his bags, caught the train to the university, and moved into a drab, damp-smelling flat with peeling wallpaper and a single gas heater that clattered like a bucket of bolts.
University was supposed to be a fresh start, but it was just a grey continuum of nothing. The lectures were a blur of voices he couldn't quite hook his mind into. The other students laughed too loudly in the corridors, obsessed with things that felt utterly trivial to Niall—their flats, their records, who was sleeping with whom. Niall moved through them like a ghost, going to class, coming back to his room, and waiting for a punishment that never seemed to arrive from the outside world.
He never called Ruben. Not once. To pick up the heavy plastic receiver of the payphone at the end of the hall and dial Ruben’s number felt like pulling a trigger. If he didn't call, maybe he could pretend that summer had never happened.
But Ruben called him.
Ruben’s voice down the line was always loud, grounded, and entirely unaffected by the gravity of what they shared. He’d ask about the weather in Edinburgh, about the classes, about the flat. Niall would lean against the cold wall of the hallway, twisting the coiled black cord around his fingers, giving short, clipped answers. He was careful never to ask too much, never to invite Ruben into his head. But he never hung up, either. He just stood there, absorbing the sound of the man he had damned himself to save.
It all broke on a Tuesday night in late November.
Outside, a miserable Scottish drizzle was hammering against the small window of his room. Niall was hunched over his desk, a single desk lamp casting a harsh yellow circle over his open textbooks. He was trying to study for his upcoming terminal exams, but the words on the page refused to form sentences. Every time he tried to focus on the text, the white space between the lines began to blur, and Alby’s face would crowd into his mind.
Not the version of Alby he’d known, but Alby in the alleyway. Bleeding. Broken.
And then the lie would echo in Niall's ears, loud as a gunshot. He came up on Ruben. Ruben was just defending himself.
Niall closed his eyes, his breath hitching. The sheer weight of the guilt was physical; it felt like a lead weights pressed against his chest, making it impossible to take a deep breath, let alone retain information about economic theory. He had ruined Alby’s life—turned a victim into a predator in the eyes of the law—just so Ruben didn’t have to go to prison. And now, Ruben was out there living his life, while Alby was broken, and Niall was drowning in a room that smelled of damp wool.
When the telephone at the end of the hall started ringing, Niall knew it was him. It was always him at this hour.
He dragged himself out of his chair, his limbs heavy and numb, and picked up the receiver.
"Niall," Ruben said, his voice instantly cutting through the static of the long-distance line. "You working?"
"Trying to," Niall muttered, leaning his forehead against the cold plaster wall.
"You sound like shit. They working you ragged up there?"
Niall swallowed hard. The silence stretched between them, heavy and suffocating. Usually, he’d lie. He’d say he was just tired, that everything was fine. But tonight, the walls felt too close, the room too cold, and the ghost of Alby too loud.
"I'm not fit for this," Niall whispered, his voice cracking. He hadn't meant to say it, but once the dam broke, he couldn't stop it. "I’m sitting here, and I’m looking at the books, and I can't... I can't read them. I don't know. I have nothing. I’m just sitting in the dark."
On the other end of the line, the casual, easy-going tone vanished from Ruben's voice. There was a pause, the faint crackle of a cigarette being lit, and then Ruben spoke, his voice lower now, more deliberate. "It's just the stress. You're overthinking."
"I'm not overthinking," Niall said, a desperate, sharp edge creeping into his tone. "I can't focus. Every time I try, I just... I think about what we said. What I said. I can't get it out of my head."
Ruben didn't mention Alby's name. They never mentioned his name. "Go to sleep, Niall," Ruben said harshly "Just get some rest tonight. Let it go for a bit."
Niall didn't sleep. He lay motionless on his narrow mattress, staring fixedly at the window frame where the paint was flaking off in dry, brittle curls. He had thrown his heavy wool overcoat over the thin blankets for extra warmth, but the weight of it didn't comfort him; it just felt like another thing pressing him down into the springs, pinning him to the bed.
He watched the sky turn from a pitch black to a pale, sickly gray, the color of dirty dishwater. Morning had arrived, but it brought no relief, only the dread of another day he had to pretend to exist in.
When the alarm on his small bedside clock finally buzzed, Niall didn't move a muscle to turn it off. He just let the harsh, mechanical drone fill the room until it ran its course and clicked shut. He had no desire to stand up. The prospect of putting his feet on the cold linoleum floor felt like an impossible, monumental task. Why bother? To sit among normal people.
He stared at his open textbooks on the desk. They looked like ancient artifacts, written in a language he no longer spoke. He felt entirely paralyzed by a heavy, suffocating depression that made his limbs feel like poured concrete. He just wanted to lie here, under the weight of his coat, and let the dampness of the room slowly consume him until there was nothing left. He didn't want to eat, he didn't want to think, he didn't want to breathe.
He closed his eyes again, praying for a dreamless sleep that wouldn't come, wishing he could just slip between the floorboards and disappear.
Then, breaking the oppressive silence of the flat, came a heavy, rhythmic knock at his bedroom door.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
It wasn't the timid tap of one of his flatmates asking to borrow milk. It was loud, demanding, and entirely authoritative. The sudden noise jolted through Niall’s chest like an electric shock, his heart instantly hammering against his ribs as the ghost of his guilt whispered that the police had finally come to take him away.
Niall frowned, pulling his cardigan tight around himself as he swung his legs out of bed. He unlocked the door and pulled it open, his mind completely blank.
Ruben was standing in the dim hallway.
He looked entirely out of place in the dreary, academic boarding house—wearing his heavy leather jacket, his dark hair damp from the fog, smelling of cigarettes and the cold outside air. In his hand, he was holding a grease-stained brown paper bag from a local bakery, the scent of hot rolls and square sausage cutting through the musty smell of the flat.
"You look pathetic," Ruben said, but his eyes were sharp, scanning Niall's pale face, the dark circles under his eyes, and the slight tremor in his hands. He pushed past Niall into the small room without waiting for an invitation, setting the bag of food down right on top of Niall's open, useless textbooks.
"What are you doing here?" Niall asked, his voice barely a whisper as he clicked the door shut behind them. "Ruben, it's a three-hour drive from home. You have work."
"I called in," Ruben said easily, unzipping his jacket but leaving it on. He sat down on the edge of Niall's unmade bed, looking around the cramped, depressing room before his eyes settled back on Niall. "You said you were feeling shit, you look like it too. I figure a bloke can't study on an empty stomach."
He reached into the bag and pulled out a warm roll, breaking it in half and offering it to Niall. "Sit down. Eat. Then we're going to figure out how to get your head straight."
Niall looked at the food, then at Ruben, who looked so solid, so real, and so entirely unbothered by the wreckage they had left behind. The guilt inside Niall coiled tighter, a sickening knot of gratitude and absolute revulsion.
He sat down and started to eat. He did what Ruben told him to do as always.
He sat down on the squeaking wooden desk chair, his knees trembling slightly under his trousers, and took the half of the roll Ruben held out to him. It was warm against his frozen fingers, the grease seeping through the cheap white tissue paper, but it felt entirely foreign in his hand. He didn't want it. The smell of the fried square sausage, usually a comfort, made his stomach turn a violent, sick wheel.
Yet, he bit into it anyway. He chewed, swallowed the heavy dough down his dry throat, and did exactly what Ruben told him to do.
He always did. That was the terrifying, pathetic truth of it. When Ruben spoke with that absolute, unshakeable certainty, Niall’s own agency simply dissolved. It was the same terrifying magnetism that had pulled Niall onto the witness stand, the same force that made him nod and lie and ruin Alby’s life without a second thought. Standing next to Ruben was like standing near a cliff edge—you knew it was dangerous, you knew the drop would kill you, but the gravity of it was impossible to fight.
Ruben watched him eat, leaning back against the mattress with his hands tucked into the pockets of his leather jacket. He looked incredibly large in the cramped university room, taking up all the air, bringing the raw, unapologetic energy of their hometown right into Niall’s fragile new sanctuary.
"Good lad," Ruben murmured, his voice softening just a fraction as he watched Niall swallow the first few bites. "You’ve gone skinny up here, Niall. Look like a stiff breeze could knock you over."
Niall kept his eyes glued to the greasy paper bag on the desk. He couldn't look at Ruben's face. If he looked at Ruben, he would see the mouth that had ordered the lie, the hands that had broken Alby, and the eyes that slept perfectly fine at night.
"I've just been busy," Niall lied, his voice thin and hollowed out. "The course is... it's a lot of reading."
"Right. The reading." Ruben leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, invading Niall’s space. The scent of stale rolling tobacco and cold rain rolled off him. "But that’s not really what’s keeping you up, is it? You told me on the phone. You’re still stuck on it."
Niall froze, the bread turning to ash in his mouth. He slowly lowered his hand, his heart beginning to hammer against his ribs again. “I was tired.."
"You're cracking up," Ruben said, his tone dropping into that firm, older-brother cadence he used when he was taking control of a situation. "I didn't stay out of a prison cell just to watch you waste away in a damp room because you can't control your own mind."
The sheer arrogance of it hit Niall like a physical blow. I didn't stay out of a prison cell. Ruben spoke about it like it was a stroke of luck, an inconvenience he had successfully bypassed, rather than a monstrous miscarriage of justice built on Niall's ruined conscience.
"I can't just turn it off," Niall whispered, a sudden, desperate heat rising under his skin despite the chill of the room. He finally looked up, his eyes wide and glossy with unshed tears. "Every time I open a book, I see him, Ruben. I see what the street did to him. I hear the things people said about him after the trial. And it's because of me. I said it."
"You said it for me," Ruben snapped softly, his eyes darkening as he grabbed Niall’s wrist. His grip wasn't painful, but it was absolute. Steel wrapped in leather. "Look at me, Niall. You did it for me. It’s done. The police closed the book. He's alive, he's at home, and he'll get over it. But you’re going to ruin your whole life over a bit of bad conscience if you don't pull yourself together."
Niall stared at the dark leather of Ruben's sleeve. He felt a sickening surge of that internal conflict—he hated Ruben for what he had done, hated him for forcing this burden onto him, but as Ruben’s fingers tightened around his wrist, a dark, shameful part of him felt a profound sense of relief. Ruben was taking the weight again. Ruben was telling him what was real and what wasn't.
"I don't know how to do this," Niall choked out, a single tear spilling over his eyelashes and tracking down his pale cheek. "I have an exam on Friday. If I fail it, I lose my grant. I can't focus for five minutes."
Ruben studied him for a long, quiet moment. His gaze drifted from Niall’s trembling mouth down to his throat, then back up to those dark, exhausted circles under his eyes. A strange, calculating shift passed over Ruben’s features—something dark and entirely heavy with intent.
"You need an incentive," Ruben said quietly, his thumb tracking a slow, deliberate circle against the pulse point on Niall's wrist. "You're a good lad, Niall. You need a release. A proper reward to look forward to when you finish a chapter."
Niall frowned, the shift in Ruben's tone making the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. "What do you mean?"
Ruben didn't answer with words. Instead, he reached out with his free hand, his rough, cold fingers gently catching Niall’s chin. He tilted Niall’s face up, forcing him to look directly into his eyes. There was no warmth there—only a fierce, desperate sort of possessiveness disguised as charity.
"Get your books out," Ruben commanded softly, his voice dropping an octave, thick with a sudden, tense gravity. "You read the first three chapters. You take your notes. And when you're done... I’ll give you something to take your mind off Alby completely."
The silence that settled over the room was thick, almost suffocating, broken only by the frantic scratching of Niall’s fountain pen against the rough paper of his notepad.
Ruben didn't leave. He didn't pace, and he didn't pick up a magazine. He just sat back against the headboard of Niall’s narrow bed, his long legs stretched out across the unmade blankets, his heavy boots dangling off the edge. He lit another cigarette, the small flare of his petrol lighter soundless, and then he just watched.
Niall sat stiffly in the wooden desk chair, his spine rigid, his shoulders hunched as if trying to shield his body from the sheer weight of Ruben’s gaze. He could feel Ruben’s eyes on him—a physical, burning pressure right between his shoulder blades. It felt exactly like the suffocating tension in the alleyway just before the first punch was thrown.
A cold, familiar dread coiled tightly in Niall’s stomach. A dark, intrusive thought took hold of his mind, whispering that Ruben hadn't come here out of kindness. Ruben had come to manage a liability. And if Niall failed—if he couldn't pull his head straight, if he lost his grant and had to come back home to their small town, broken and talking too much—what would Ruben do to him? Ruben had broken Alby’s ribs without blinking. He had looked Alby in the eyes and ruined him.
Niall’s breath hitched.
Driven by a sudden, frantic spike of pure fear, Niall buried his face in the textbook. His eyes flew across the dense, academic text on mid-century trade tariffs, his mind scrambling to absorb the words, not out of any desire to learn, but as a desperate survival tactic. His fingers shook so violently he could barely hold the pen, but he forced himself to write.
He didn't dare stop. He didn't dare look up. Every time he heard the mattress creak behind him, or the rustle of Ruben shifting his weight, Niall’s heart leaped into his throat, his hand moving faster, writing blind notes just to look occupied, just to prove he was being good.
He filled page after page, his wrist aching, his eyes burning from the harsh glare of the desk lamp. He forced himself through the first chapter. Then the second. By the time he reached the end of the third, his shirt was damp with cold sweat under his cardigan.
He couldn't keep his back turned any longer. The tension had stretched to a breaking point, and he needed to know what Ruben was doing. He needed to see the threat.
Gripping the edges of the wooden seat, Niall slowly spun the chair around to look at Ruben.
"I'm done," Niall said.
The words came out small, flat, and entirely drained of life, sounding horribly like a young child calling out to their mother from the bathroom to come wipe their arse.
He leaned forward, sliding off the high mattress until his heavy boots hit the linoleum floor with a dull, heavy thud. He walked over to the desk, his massive frame blotting out the pale morning light from the window. Niall didn't move. He couldn't.
Ruben flipped through the pages, his rough thumb trailing over the frantic, messy blue ink. He couldn't understand a word of it, but he could see the volume of it. He could see how hard Niall had worked to please him.
"Look at that.” Ruben murmured, setting the pad back down with a low chuckle that held no real warmth.
Ruben sank down onto his haunches right in front of the chair, forcing himself into Niall’s immediate space. He reached up, his rough fingers wrapping around the waistband of Niall’s trousers, his gray eyes locking onto Niall’s pale, terrified face.
"Now," Ruben whispered, his thumb hooking into the fabric. "Let's get you sorted out so you can sleep."
Niall didn't nod. He couldn't. His neck felt as rigid and cold as a stone monument. He just sat there, frozen, staring down at the dark, thick crown of Ruben’s hair as Ruben leaned in closer, his heavy shoulders blocking out the rest of the dreary room.
"I'm doing this for you. To clear that static out of your brain. You hear me?" Ruben whispered sharply.
The sound of his own belt buckling—the sharp, metallic click-clack of the brass prong slipping from the leather—sounded like a gunshot in the tiny space.
When Ruben’s mouth finally touched him, Niall’s whole body flinched, a violent, involuntary shudder traveling up his spine. He gripped the rough, splintering edges of the wooden desk chair so hard his fingernails dug into the grain. He kept his eyes wide open, staring blindly at the water stains on the ceiling plaster, tracking a jagged brown line that looked like a crack in the world.
He didn't feel pleasure. He forced himself not to feel it. To feel good from this would mean he was entirely corrupt, that he was enjoying the wages of his own perjury. Instead, he treated his own body like a piece of wood, completely detaching his mind from his skin. He let himself float up to the ceiling, looking down at the pathetic boy in the cardigan and the big man in the leather jacket kneeling on the dirty linoleum.
It was over quickly.
Ruben’s mouth was impossibly warm against the damp chill of the room, a stark, shocking contrast to the freezing air Niall had been breathing for weeks. As Niall’s thighs began to shake with a violent, uncontrollable tremor, Ruben reached up with one large, heavy hand and cupped Niall’s knee. His rough thumb moved in steady, deliberate circles against the bone, a grounding, surprisingly gentle rhythm meant to soothe the panic out of him.
But the tenderness only made the shame sharper. Ruben took him entirely, swallowing him whole with a dark, heavy intensity that didn't leave room for Niall to breathe, pulling the climax out of him before Niall could even find his footing. It was a brutal efficiency, a total collapse of Niall’s defenses that left him undone in a matter of minutes.
When Ruben stood up, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand in a single, careless motion, the spell broke. The room rushed back in—the smell of the square sausage, the gray light.
Ruben looked down at him, entirely unbothered, his leather jacket creaking as he stretched his arms.
"You're going to pass that exam on Friday," Ruben said, it wasn't a question; it was an order. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a crumpled fiver, and tossed it onto the desk next to the messy econ notes. "Get yourself a proper dinner tonight.”
Niall looked at the blue banknote lying on the desk like a blood-money payment. "I don't want your money."
"Take it," Ruben said, his tone hardening just enough to make Niall flinch. He walked over to the door, unlocking it with a loud click. He paused, looking back over his shoulder at Niall, who was still huddled in the chair, looking small and wrecked. "I'll call you Sunday night. You better have good news about that mark."