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seanchaidh7 · 8 days

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i dont know when ill get around to writing the larger fic this is part of but you know brain worms have this

Nicky offers to pick him up at the airport like it’s nothing, like it hasn’t been almost ten years since they saw each other, because he knows Joe hates planes and won’t want to try and navigate the two trains and two buses it’ll take to actually reach their hometown after the flight. And Joe doesn’t even try to protest, just texts him Thank you before he gets on the plane and then tries not to think about it for the entire flight. He fails.

When he arrives he’s exhausted, because it never really gets easier no matter how many times he does it. Moves through the airport like a zombie, operating mostly on muscle memory. He hasn’t been here in a long time. Still knows it well enough to navigate without really thinking about it.

His suitcase is one of the last to come through on the carousel, but it does come through, and then he’s walking to arrivals with his heart in his throat.

Nicky’s hanging back from the crowd, hands in his pockets. His hair is a little longer now, and at some point in the last decade he’s gotten his ears pierced, which Joe didn’t know. He’s wearing a dark green sweater and blue jeans. When he catches sight of Joe he smiles, small and restrained, straightens slightly.

“Hey,” he says as Joe gets closer, voice soft.

Joe has to swallow. “Hey,” he says hoarsely.

And he doesn’t even need to say anything else, because Nicky pulls him into a hug before Joe even has to ask, and Joe buries his face in Nicky’s neck and tries to breathe around the sob catching in his throat. One of Nicky’s hands comes up to cup the back of Joe’s neck, his thumb moving back and forth gently, and Joe is fragile enough that that gesture alone almost undoes him.

Nicky pulls back first. Smiles at Joe. “You look good,” he says.

Joe has to swallow before he trusts himself to speak. “You too.”

They linger just a moment longer, Nicky’s hand still on the back of Joe’s neck. Ten years ago, Joe would’ve kissed him; now there’s a gap neither of them quite know how to fill.

Finally, Nicky steps back fully, and Joe feels the loss of contact sharply. “We should go,” Nicky says. Joe nods, and follows him out of the terminal.

The car Nicky heads for is the same battered old thing he’s been driving since he got his licence. Joe wonders to himself how the car is even still going, and the look Nicky gives him tells him he knows exactly what Joe’s thinking.

It does something funny to Joe’s heart. He looks away, and gets in the car.

“I brought you something to eat,” Nicky says before he starts the car, reaching for the bag by Joe’s feet.

“You didn’t have to–” Joe begins, but Nicky cuts him off with a knowing almost-smile.

“You hate plane food,” Nicky says, “and it’s almost two, and the other option would be whatever we can find on the way. I thought you might prefer this to service station food.”

It makes Joe want to cry a little. “Nicky,” he says, and can’t manage anything else.

Nicky seems to understand. He pulls out what he had been looking for - a silver thermos, and a fork - and hands it to Joe. The contents are still warm when Joe opens it: pasta, warm and comforting.

“Good?” Nicky asks, watching him.

Joe nods. “Good.”

“Okay.” Nicky looks at him for a beat longer, then turns away and starts the car.

There’s a moment of delay before the CD player starts up, but when it does, Joe knows it from the opening note: he bought Nicky this CD from a thrift store the summer before he left for university, when they’d taken off for two weeks, just them and the car and the road. And there’s no chance that Nicky’s kept it in his car for ten years, but as they leave the airport and turn onto the motorway it makes it feel like they’ve done this a thousand times before, even though Nicky never picked him up from the airport when he came home, only met him at the station once or twice.

Joe finishes the pasta and tucks the thermos back in the bag. “Thank you,” he says, and it comes out a lot quieter than he means it to.

Nicky glances at him. “We’re still a few hours away, if you want to try and sleep. I will wake you when we’re almost there.”

Joe might protest under other circumstances, but the flight was long, and he doesn’t sleep well on planes anyway. So he takes off his scarf and folds it into a makeshift pillow before leaning back and closing his eyes. Nicky drums his fingers on the steering wheel in time with the beat, hums along with the tune, and Joe lets the sound of his voice and the tapping of the rain on the window wrap around him like a blanket, carrying him off to sleep.

----------

Joe wakes to Nicky shaking his shoulder gently. “We’ll be there soon,” he’s saying. The rain has stopped; the radio is on, now, chattering in the way in the background. They’ve left the motorway behind for a much narrower road. Joe has to blink a few times before he catches sight of a sign and realises what Nicky means.

He sits up. The position he’d been sleeping in hadn’t been great for his back or his neck, and he’ll probably regret it soon, but he’d slept a lot better than he might’ve expected.

Being back always makes the rest of his life feel like a dream, like he’d never left at all. When the sign for their town passes Joe sits up, panic coiling in his stomach. He’s had days to prepare himself and still isn’t ready.

“Wait,” he says when they turn a corner two streets away from Joe’s parents’ house, “Nicky. Wait.”

“What?” Nicky asks. He doesn’t stop, but he does slow down.

“I can’t– I can’t do this.”

Now Nicky does stop, pulling into a lay-by. “What is it?”

“I don’t know, I just. Not yet. I need time.”

Nicky looks at him for a long moment. “When are they expecting you?”

“I didn’t give an exact time. Just sometime this afternoon.” He’d told his sister Nicky was coming to get him over the phone; she hadn’t said anything, but the silence had been enough.

Nicky doesn’t say anything, but he’s got the look on his face that means he’s thinking.

“I’ll be okay by myself,” Joe says then. “If you need to work.”

Nicky shakes his head. “I have today off.” And then, before Joe can really think about that, he turns the car around and heads back the way they came. This time, he recognises the path Nicky’s taking almost immediately, turning away from the area Joe’s parents live in and towards the outskirts of town, where it starts to become mostly farmland.

“I can park the car by my uncle’s house,” Nicky says, glancing at Joe. “Then we can go from there.”

Joe doesn’t need to ask where; they’ve walked the same route so many times he could probably do it in his sleep.

The sheep are out in the fields by Nicky’s uncle’s house, but he doesn’t see any of the lambs yet, though they must be coming soon. Nicky’s uncle let Joe try and help with lambing once, up until the point where Joe saw what exactly that entailed, and immediately lost his nerve. But he’d still let him help Nicky feed them every year.

There’s a little paved yard outside the farmhouse, where Nicky parks the car before grabbing the bag that had been by Joe’s feet. “I’m going to drop these off,” Nicky says. “You can come in, if you want?”

Nicky’s aunt and uncle have always been kind to Joe, but they will inevitably ask about his father, and Joe cannot quite bring himself to talk about that, not yet.

“I’ll wait,” Joe says.

It’s a few minutes before Nicky reappears, this time without the bag, but carrying a different thermos. He smiles apologetically as he jogs over. “I didn’t mean to make you wait long,” Nicky says. “But you know how they are.”

All Joe can do is nod. Nicky sets off down the path towards the woods that border the farm and Joe falls into step beside him. They don’t talk much on the way there, but they don’t need to: the silence is comfortable enough.

It’ll be spring soon. It’s cold but not cold enough to be uncomfortable, and the snowdrops are in full bloom, bright shards of white in the grass. The rain has stopped, but the smell of it still hangs in the air. They must’ve spent hours walking this path, enough that Joe doesn’t really need to look to know exactly where Nicky’s going.

This part of the river is just secluded enough that he can’t hear cars passing by anymore. The bench by the path is still there, though at some point they’ve built a shelter over it, which probably leaks but has kept it dry even after the rain. Nicky makes for it immediately.

If he looked at the back of the third slat from the left he’d find their names carved into the wood, side by side. Joe very deliberately doesn’t look.

Nicky sits down. Nods to the space beside him. When Joe joins him, he holds out the thermos.

“Tea,” Nicky says. “If you want.”

How many times have they done exactly this, over the years? In summer, they’d wade into the river; in winter, Joe always wanted to try skating on it, but the ice was never quite thick enough. Every time Nicky got into a fight with his father, every time Joe couldn’t bear to be in the house one second longer, they’d come here.

Joe gives into memory and rests his head on Nicky’s shoulder. Nicky brings one arm up to hold him close, hand on Joe’s upper arm.

Joe closes his eyes, listens to the birds, listens to Nicky’s breathing.

Nicky says, “When is the funeral?”

“Thursday,” Joe says. He doesn’t want to think about this, doesn’t want to think about the last conversation he had with his father, doesn’t want to imagine walking into his parents’ house and finding him gone. Of all people, Nicky will understand. It’s what brought them together when they were younger: being the only two students in their class who spoke English as a second language, and difficult fathers.

Silence falls between them, and Nicky doesn’t let him go, and Joe’s missed him, more than he really knew. He’d tried to stay in touch, and they had, for the most part, but it’s not the same as having Nicky beside him again.

Joe doesn’t think there’s anyone in this world who knows him the way Nicky does.

He doesn’t know why he says it, but they haven’t talked about it, and it feels like something they should, if only so Joe can lay this all to rest.

Joe opens his eyes. “You, uh. You seeing anyone?”

Nicky doesn’t pull away, but Joe feels the way he goes still, tense. Slowly, softly, he says, “I don’t think this is the right time, Joe.”

“Is there ever a right time?” Joe asks, half-joking.

Nicky doesn’t laugh.

Joe clears his throat. “I’m not. So.”

Nicky exhales slowly, like he’s steadying himself. His thumb moves back and forth, back and forth where it’s resting on Joe’s arm, catching on the fabric of his coat. “Me neither.”

Joe’s not sure if that’s better or worse than if Nicky had said he’d found someone. If he had, perhaps Joe could put to rest the little part of him that will always be in love with Nicky. Not get rid of it entirely, but fold it away in a little corner of his heart and leave it there. This, though – this is possibility he doesn’t know what to do with.

“How long are you here?” Nicky asks quietly, moving his hand up to run his fingers through Joe’s hair, like he used to whenever Joe needed something to keep him grounded.

“I got two weeks off work,” Joe says. “After that I don’t know.”

Two weeks feels monumentally long and yet vanishingly short at the same time. And after?

They don’t talk about much after that. Small talk, more than anything else: Nicky’s still living in the same apartment, still working the same job, but Joe knows he loves it from the tone of his voice when he talks about the shelves he built for his most recent client, how he’s starting to make more of his own stuff, how his boss has been talking about retiring and leaving the whole business to Nicky. Joe could listen to him talk about it for hours. Maybe he does.

It settles the frantic thing that had woken in his chest when they crossed the town line, and eventually, Joe says, “I think I’m ready.”

Nicky turns his head inwards and kisses the top of Joe’s head. Lingers there for a moment. It isn’t anything; it doesn’t have to be anything.

“Okay,” Nicky says. “Okay.”

The walk back to the farm is largely silent, just as the walk there had been, passing the thermos of tea back and forth between them. They get back in the car, and Nicky drives them back to Joe’s parents’ house.

Nicky pulls up on the curb outside the house. “Call me, if you need anything. Or just– call me.”

“I will,” Joe promises. He has two weeks; he’s not going to waste them. They haven’t been in the same timezone in a long, long time.

Nicky smiles, small and hopeful, and there’s nothing really to say, after that.

Joe gets out of the car, and prepares to face his family.

#i loved this #damn #the old guard #kaysanova

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