niall/barry misfits au - barry POV, part 2

[saysthemagpie]

HOOOOO BOY well i wrote 5k more of the niall/barry misfits au today, i don't know what's happening or why but i'm not fighting it. here is 3.5k of it for you!! i decided not to split it up because this scene would be a standalone chapter, i think.

i'm finally gonna advance the plot, lol, and things are about to get weird!!! tiny bit of body horror/supernatural elements ahead, just heads up! and i'm back to barry's pov (thanks to meghan for some excellent questions re: the dynamic and some details about stuff barry notices about niall, this is basically all in response to your comment). also it’s hard writing irish people so just, yknow, I’ll get it irish-picked eventually, but bear with the weird mashup of probably misused irish/british slang all filtered through a v american syntax, lol.

i don't know how to number these sections so they make sense, so on the off chance that anyone has just wandered onto this page and is craving niche angst, i'll just.. include a quick overview here of the sections in the order in which they should be read.
1. barry POV section/general premise stuff is here
2. niall POV sections and backstory (part 1, part 2, part 3)
3. barry POV (the section/chapter under the readmore cut below)

When Barry gets to the alleyway, he doesn’t round the corner right away, just hangs back by the boarded-up off-license listening. It’s obvious the kid—Niall—had recognized whoever was in the car, and that he hadn’t wanted anything to do with them. Maybe the guy’s just a persistent asshole, a john who won’t take a hint, or maybe he’s proper dangerous. No sense jumping in without some sense of the trouble this kid’s in.  

No sense jumping in at all, you idiot, says a little voice in his head, sounding rather like his gran. Barry ignores it—he’s always been good at ignoring his common sense—and sidles closer to the entrance of the alleyway, pressing himself against the wall.

The car engine idles for a moment longer, then goes quiet. There’s the sound of a car door opening, and then—there. A man’s voice, low and steely.

He’s speaking too quietly for Barry to make out what he’s saying. But his pulse still spikes, heart suddenly beating faster in his chest. A sick wave of something washes over him: adrenaline, but shot through with something queasier, darker. Something foreign but—familiar, too, something he’s felt before.

Down the alleyway Niall says something, his voice so soft it’s barely audible. The man responds.

There’s no point. There’s no—Barry’s limbs feel leaden, too heavy to lift. He wants to sit down on the pavement and curl in on himself, hugging his knees to his chest, putting his head down till it all blows over. Till everything stops.

He’s seven years old, huddled in the dark with his arms round his little brother’s shivering shoulders. There’s noise outside—glass breaking, a woman yelling her head off—and over it one of the neighbors shouting from the hallway, her voice raised over the din. Sirens scream in the distance, drawing closer.

Barry’s eyes fly open. “Jesus,” he breathes, blinking hard till the world settles around him. Slowly the darkness composes itself into something more familiar: a long stretch of empty street, shops with their boarded-up windows, streetlamps flickering overhead.

A scream shatters the stillness. Then, abruptly, it stops, the sound cut cleanly off.

Barry’s moving before he has time to think, scrambling towards the alleyway. He rounds the corner and stops dead, staring.

The kid’s at the back of the alley, just as he’d expected. But he isn’t cowering in the corner or backed up against a wall. He’s suspended in the air, his limbs and midsection almost fully cocooned in what looks like a thick, silvery web, gleaming in the darkness. That must’ve been what stopped him screaming, too—the whole lower half of his head is wrapped in the same gleaming stuff, his wide, terrified eyes are the only visible part of his face.

“Ah, Jesus,” Barry mutters, because if there’s one thing worse than a john who won’t take no for an answer, it’s a john who brings his own bloody bondage equipment. He slides his little switchblade into his palm, flicking it open. He doesn’t expect to have to use it—most of these blokes are cowards, deep down—but he’ll wave it around a bit if he has to, play the armed tough.

The kid sees him first. His eyes go impossibly wider, and then he’s struggling against his bonds, making muffled sounds through whatever he’s been gagged with. And that’s when things get—well, not weird, Barry reckons that ship’s sailed—but weirder.

First, he gets scared.

It comes on so sudden it feels like somebody’s snuck up behind him and emptied a bucket of icewater over his head. One second he’s fine, not looking forward to the next bit, but all right, and the next second he’s so fecking terrified he thinks he might shit his pants. He almost drops his knife, fingers gone nerveless.

Lucky he doesn’t, though. Because that’s when the man turns around.

“What the fuck,” Barry says, and then it’s on him, moving lightning-fast as it tackles him to the ground—not a man but a man-shaped thing, with a face that’s so horribly wrong his brain can’t make sense of what it’s seeing. It’s got too many eyes, all of them huge and black, and great bloody fangs, and it must be him who’s screaming bloody murder because there’s absolutely nothing human about the sounds coming out of that thing’s mouth. It’s hissing, clacking, as it bears down on him, fangs gleaming in the light, and Barry screams again and stabs out blindly with his switchblade, hacking at whatever bits of it he can reach, hacking and hacking till the thing convulses above him, shudders, and stills.

*

WELL SORRY FOR THAT BIT OF BODY HORROR. TURNS OUT NIALL’S PREDATORY EX ALSO GOT HIT BY LIGHTNING, AND IN A HORRIBLE TWIST BECOMES A HUMAN-SPIDER HYBRID WHO TRAPS HELPLESS THINGS IN ITS WEB, SLOWLY DRAINS THE LIFEFORCE FROM THEM, AND THEN KILLS THEM. YIKES!!!!!!

ok so: I’m too lazy to keep writing writing, but here is some more detailed plot outline. barry’s reaction to this whole horrifying experience is obviously ‘what the FUCK!!!!!!!’ he shoves the corpse of the thing off him and realizes it’s a fucking SPIDER, a man with a spider’s head, but he does NOT investigate too closely because NO FUCKING THANK YOU. it takes him a second to remember that oh yeah, there’s a kid trapped—IN A FUCKING SPIDER’S WEB, JESUS CHRIST—and so he goes and cuts Niall free. he demands to know what that thing was, and then immediately is like, “you know what, no. on second thought, fuck that. I do not want to know.”

niall’s not really in an state to answer him anyway, as he’s basically catatonic with shock. he barely even moves as barry hacks away at the web, and when barry helps him to his feet he just sort of goes with it dazedly. barry's got his wits about him now though, as whatever weird surge of terror he’d felt earlier has apparently passed, and he’s a little shaky but with it enough to be like, “ok…. we should get out of here now,” because the police don’t come by this area often but he sure as hell does not want to get caught with the corpse of whatever the fuck that was explaining what had happened. he hustles niall out of there, gets him a few blocks away from the scene, and then is like “ok well…see you never,” because he’s about to go back to his flat, take the longest shower of his life, and then drink enough whiskey that he wakes up tomorrow morning with no memory of what happened.

niall doesn’t even say anything. he just sort of blinks around him. barry’s like “ok, here’s the bus stop, you can get pretty much anywhere from here.” still nothing. not my problem, barry thinks. really really not my problem. he’s done his good deed for the day. actually killing that spider thing should probably count as all of his good deeds done for a lifetime, really, and maybe even cancel out some of the things he did in his wayward youth. so he leaves niall at the bus stop and walks down the street, turns the corner, and slows down.

because obviously he can’t just leave the kid there, even though literally every instinct he has is telling him to do just that. the kid’s traumatized, and up close it’d been pretty obvious from the state of his clothes and his general hygiene that he’s homeless. so he jogs back around the corner and of course niall’s standing right where he’d left him, rooted to the spot, looking completely lost and overwhelmed.

“listen,” barry says. “you can come round to my gaff and clean yourself up, I’ve got a sofa you can kip on, but it’s one night, that’s it, and I don’t want to know anything about you or where you’ve come from or why you’ve got evil spidermen attacking you. understood?” niall just keeps blinking at him, dazed, till barry sighs and is like, come on, let's go, and steers him in the direction of his flat.

barry’s flat is on the seventh story of a building, the lift hasn’t worked for years, and the stairwell always stinks of piss. the tenants are a somewhat odd demographic mix. there’s families and elderly people who’ve been living in the same rent-controlled units for decades, and it used to be that people like him lived in the other units, but there’s been a wave of students from the local uni moving in lately and that means he probably won’t be able to afford to live there much longer.

his place used to be a studio, but then some former tenant who’d watched too much House Hunters (or whatever the UK version of HGTV is) had built a wall smack in the middle of the living room. so now it’s a tiny cramped bedroom just big enough for a bed and dresser, and then a tiny cramped living room just big enough for a sofa and television. the kitchen’s a sink, a hot plate, a microwave, a kettle, and a fridge.

it’s not much, but it’s better than squatting in an old building that had been closed for health code violations, which is what he’d done the first three months after he’d run away from his last foster home to the city, and it’s better than a mattress on the floor in a flat he shared with four other people, which is what he’d done for eight months after that, until he’d scraped together enough for a deposit on this place. he's been here for years now, and he’ll be sorry to leave it.

he lets niall have the first shower, and he makes them both pot noodles and tea. He leaves out fresh clothes for niall, and takes niall’s hoodie into the kitchen to try and scrub off the sticky residue of the spiderweb.

niall takes ages in the shower, and then when he turns the water off he takes ages more, and then finally, just as barry’s starting to get a little worried, niall calls through the door that he needs his hoodie (pullover? idk what you call them), please.

I left you some clothes, barry calls back.

silence. then niall says, no, I need it.

well, it’s sopping wet and on the radiator, barry says. so you’ll have to make do.

anyway niall finally comes out. his pale skin’s flushed pink from the heat of the shower, and the old shirt barry’d given him is way too big on him, the collar stretched out around the neck. so it doesn’t do anything to conceal the ugly bruising around his throat, what’s obviously the result of somebody trying to choke the life out of him.

niall swallows hard, not looking at him. his shoulders are set, defensive, and he’s practically telegraphing his discomfort and shame.

barry remembers that feeling. it’s been years since anybody used him as a punching bag—kids at school, mostly, though his ma had a boyfriend who got mean when he drank—but it's not the kind of thing you forget.

too good for my old things, are ya? he says, his voice light. whaddya expect, dior?

niall looks at him, quick, then away, his cheeks flushing as pink as the rest of him. but he relaxes a fraction, some of the tension easing from his shoulders.

s'fine, he mutters. thanks.

barry has a quick shower too, and then they eat the pot noodles in silence on the sofa. niall’s obviously trying to be polite, not to bolt it down, but it’s clear he’s starving. barry doesn’t comment, but when they finish he makes a big production about still being hungry, says he thinks he’ll run down to the kebab place on the corner.

i'm okay, niall says when he asks him if he wants anything, as if his stomach hasn’t been growling audibly for the past ten minutes.

suit yourself, barry says, then goes down to the shop and comes back up twenty minutes later with more greasy food than he could possibly eat in a week. when he comes back upstairs he passes one of the aforementioned new student tenants [HARRY STYLES] in the hall, engaged in a hushed but clearly heated argument with someone barry doesn’t recognize [FIONN WHITEHEAD].

he awkwardly sidesteps whatever’s going on there and comes back into his flat, only now realizing that he probably shouldn’t have left a complete stranger in his flat (although if niall's willing to cart his ancient television down seven flights of stairs, barry reckons he can have it).

anyway niall hasn’t stolen the tv, obviously. he’s just sat there staring off into the distance, and he startles when barry comes in, badly enough that it spooks barry a little, too.

just me, he says, and sits down on the sofa, keeping distance between them, since niall seems to feel better when barry’s a little ways away from him and where he can see him.

barry can’t blame the kid. if he’d been choked out and then later chased into an alleyway by a weird human-spider hybrid all in the same week he’d probably feel the same. so he eats his food, and then after he gets a few bites in he makes another big production of being full (‘my gran always used to say my eyes were bigger than my stomach’) and pushes the greasy bag over to niall. niall keeps up the façade of not being hungry for about a minute, then finally caves and wolfs down the rest of the food.

barry meant what he said about not wanting to know anything about niall. so he doesn’t ask, and niall doesn’t offer anything, and after a while it gets awkward sitting there in silence, so barry turns on the tv and they watch something mindless for a while. but finally barry has to ask.

are there more of them? he says. more like that thing, I mean.

I only saw him, niall says, then shudders all over, like he can’t help it. but he – he wasn’t always like that.

okay, barry says, and he’s honestly not sure if the answer makes him feel relieved or more apprehensive.

he clears away the takeaway bags and then makes up the couch for niall with clean linens and a pillow from his bed. then he says awkwardly, well – anything else, then?

niall's gone all weird and tense again. barry stands there and waits. he figures the kid’ll spit it out eventually if he’s just patient.

I can’t pay you back, niall blurts out. I don’t – I haven’t got any money. for the food, or letting me stay here. but I can – if you wanted something else.

he doesn’t meet barry’s eyes when he says it, fiddling with the fraying edge of the blanket barry’s given him. he looks exhausted, wrung-out, like he’s barely holding himself together. barry wonders what kind of person he’d have to be, to take this kid up on what he’s so reluctantly offering.

what, like a wank? he says, raising his eyebrows. no offense, mate, but you look knackered. reckon you’d pass out on me halfway through.

I wouldn’t, niall says, going red. I – I could –

he's so flustered that barry feels guilty for teasing.

only joking, he says.

and then he adds something like ‘cheers mate, but you’re not really my type’ or something, because barry’s a bit awkward about feelings and kind of uses humor to put other people at ease, and he doesn’t want niall to feel uncomfortable or like he owes him anything.

[EXCEPT AS YOU MIGHT’VE GUESSED, all of barry’s carefully casual ‘nah you’re not my type’ maneuvers (which aren’t definitively true, they’re meant to put niall at ease) will lay the groundwork for NIALL/BARRY angst later, when niall starts to realize that he has feelings for barry but tries to repress them because he knows barry’s not attracted to him like that, and when barry starts to realize that he has feelings for niall but tries to repress them because he doesn’t want niall to think he was just grooming him for eventual seduction like niall’s horrible now-dead abusive ex!!!!!]

anyway ok then barry goes into his room and niall settles down on the couch. barry isn’t sure if he should close the door or not—he can’t decide if it’d make niall feel more nervous or more at ease—so he sort of leaves it half cracked, and figures that the floorboards are noisy enough that if niall comes in to murder him in his bed or something he’ll probably wake up.

he’s exhausted, but it takes him a long time to fall asleep, and from the way the sofa springs keep creaking as niall shifts, restless, it seems like the same’s true for niall. it’s not just what’s happened—he keeps thinking, not just about the man with the spider’s head, but about that moment before he’d burst into the alleyway, when he’d felt for a moment like he was somewhere else. someone else, almost—the kid he’d been back then feels so distant from him now he’d almost forgotten what it felt like. feeling that helpless, that powerless. he hasn’t thought about that room or that night in a long, long time, and now it’s like someone’s poked a stick into the muddy recesses of his memory and stirred things around, brought all kinds of long-buried muck to the surface.

maybe that’s why, when he finally drifts off, he dreams of his mother. one of her good days—it must be, because they're out in phoenix park, sitting on a blanket on the grass. spread out around them is the wreckage of a picnic: the crusts of store-bought sandwiches, crushed juice cartons, the sticky wrappers of ice cream bars.

it’s just the two of them, and it’s high summer, one of those rare Dublin days where the sun shows its full face, burning off the grey, the whole world made green and new. he’s stretched out on his back with his head in her lap, his eyes shut, and she’s stroking his hair. he feels lazy and warm, content.

it won’t last, she says.

I know, ma, he says, eyes still closed. s’nice though, isn’t it?

her hand stills in his hair.

it won’t last, she repeats. it won’t last, and this time he opens his eyes to look up at her. her face is tired, the worry lines round her eyes carved deep, but she’s so young, even so. he forgets sometimes, how young she was.

he finds her hand, winding his fingers through hers.

feel the sun, ma, he urges her.

but as soon as the words are out of his mouth, he notices the sky’s beginning to darken above them, the clouds rolling in: grey at first, then darker, more brooding, threatening rain.

you should’ve looked after him, she says, ugly twist to her mouth. she wrenches her hand free of his grasp. I told you to look after him. and what did you do?

ma, he says, stung. he sits up, reaching for her. lightning fractures the sky, thunder rolling in the distance.

it won’t last, she says, shaking her head, rocking. it won’t last. what did you do?

I tried, he says. ma, I swear—I’m sorry, ma, I tried.

he wakes up disoriented, blinking in the darkness. his face is wet, the pillow damp beneath his head. in the other room he can hear niall crying—choked, muffled sobs, like he’s pressed his face into his own pillow to keep the sound from carrying. barry lies awake in the darkness listening to him. his own breathing’s still ragged at the edges, his mind a careful blank.

after a while, he fumbles with the clock radio on the nightstand. he doesn’t know why, but he’s got this feeling it might help to listen to something—something quiet, soothing, something that’ll take him out of his head.

he turns the radio on, low, fiddling with the dial till he settles on some after-hours station. the music sounds old, the kind of thing his grandmother might’ve listened to as a girl. it's a woman singing, her voice low and rich, and as he listens the tightness in his chest begins slowly to loosen.

niall's gone quiet. embarrassed, maybe, to be heard crying.

it sends a pang through him.

“all right?” he says, keeping his voice soft. just loud enough to carry.

silence. he thinks, for a moment, that niall won’t answer. then he hears the springs creak again, the sofa shifting, and niall says, very quietly, “all right."