niall/barry misfits au - niall POV, part 1/3

[saysthemagpie]

I was thinking more about Niall’s character in the fic and where he comes from and what’s going on with him, and then meghan left this comment about a possible explanation for the guy following niall:

okay this is a rather dark option, but uh... perhaps niall did not have such a great home life and was targeted but an older man who seemed nice and handsome and bought niall nice things and treated him so kindly. and it was the best thing to happen to him! and he left his shitty family situation and was head over heels for this dude, but in reality the dude was an abuser grooming niall, and the second niall made noises about trying to reconcile things with his dad or whatever, dude turned violent.

and well that is RIGHT UP MY ALLEY in terms of dark fic backstories + niall suffering, and it also fits PERFECTLY with my idea for niall’s superpower. idk if anyone remembers the little empathy fic outline I did a while back for an angsty narry canon fic (https://saysthemagpie.tumblr.com/tagged/empathy-fic), but the basic premise of that fic was that niall has a condition that makes his feelings contagious, which means that if he’s feeling something very strongly anyone who’s physically close to him will ‘catch’ his mood. it’s not like he’s mind controlling them or anything, sometimes it’s very subtle, but niall’s learned to be very, very careful about controlling his emotions and not letting them seep out into the room, and he’s also become very watchful/observant/attuned to how other people feel, because he needs to know how they were feeling before or how they usually act so he can tell if his mood has been unconsciously influencing them in some way.

ANYWAY SO, as I said before, in Misfits people’s powers amplify some aspect of themselves, or are tied to a deep-rooted insecurity or past regret, so people’s powers are tied to their backstories and often tell you something about the person. and in this fic, the power niall gets is kind of a variation on that emotional contagion premise. when he gets struck by lightning, it’s like it reverses something inside of him, or recircuits something, and so now all of the feelings that he’s been internalizing and tamping down for his whole life are suddenly projected outwards into his environment, and other people feel what he feels, in ways that are often super amplified or unpredictable or out of control. (I was discussing this idea with Hannah last night and she said: “I just love the thought of two essential Irish personality traits being taken away from Niall, 1) not being a burden and 2) being emotionally controlled,” which, YES. YES EXACTLY!!!!!

I have APPROXIMATELY 10K MORE THOUGHTS about niall’s power and how it begins to manifest, and also about the slow dawning horror he experiences as he starts to realize that all of the things he’s kept private his entire life are being laid bare for everyone around him to know, and not just know but feel, in the most intensely visceral ways, but I will SAVE THEM FOR NOW, because they are IMPORTANT TO THE PLOT AND WILL BE REVEALED IN TIME. but for now how about we just spend some time unpacking niall’s backstory????

HERE IT IS, SOME SAD NIALL BACKSTORY.

Niall grows up way out in the suburbs somewhere. (His family’s just fictional btw, not Bobby and Maura.) They’re not especially well off, but they’re not struggling, either, and maybe he hasn’t always had new things but he’s never gone hungry or felt especially deprived, in a material sense at least. But his home life is still not good. His parents are together and shouldn’t be, though they’ll never, ever get divorced, not when it’s still a sin in the eyes of the church. They got married too young, before they really knew what the other was like, and they both feel trapped and blame the other. Over the years, what might’ve just been a slight mismatch of personalities has evolved into something horrible and bitter and mean. Things never really get physically violent, apart from a few shattered dishes, but Niall grows up listening to them fight through the thin walls of his bedroom. He huddles under the blankets with his head by his little radio, trying to play it just loud enough to drown them out, but not so loud that one of them hears it and comes in to shout at him, or worse, to somehow drag him into the fight.

They’re always doing that. Always dragging him into the middle of it, trying to pit him against each other, his mum telling him all the horrible things his da has supposedly done, his da complaining to him what a stupid nagging cow his mum is. Apart from that they don’t seem to notice him much. It’s better that way, Niall thinks. He’s learned to flatten himself out, to make himself small and quiet and unobtrusive, so that he doesn’t attract any attention. He doesn’t really make many friends at school—if they invite him over after school he’d feel guilty not asking them back, but he doesn’t want anyone to see what his parents are like. And anyway he’s so used to being small and drab at home that it’s easy to be small and drab at school, too. Nobody picks on him or anything; he doesn’t even stand out enough for the bullies to notice him. Sometimes it feels like people’s gazes just slide right over him. Like they don’t even register that he’s there at all. Sometimes he feels like he could just disappear and nobody would even notice: not his parents, not his teachers, not any of the kids at school.

(The one thing he loves, the one thing that he lets himself feel anything about, is music. He loses himself in it, listening to the wireless for hours, saving up all his pocket money to buy CDs and batteries for his CD player. Sometimes the music makes him feel things so intensely it scares him a little, all these feelings welling up inside him: grief and joy and anger, love and heartbreak. Sometimes when he’s letting himself dream he dreams about being on a big stage in front of a crowd, playing songs that he’s written, everyone singing the words right along with him. He knows it’s stupid, though. He can’t even play the guitar, and he doesn’t know the first thing about writing songs, and anyway, it’s not like anyone would be interested in the stuff that goes on inside his head. You’d have to be somebody special, to stand up in front of people and ask them to care about what you’re feeling.)

OK SORRY. NIALL IS VERY SAD AND LONELY. HE’S VERY VERY ALONE. TBC IN THE NEXT PART.