Dad always says that doing anything, even the most difficult things, only takes five seconds of courage. Taine clings to this as he follows Ben out of the store after a gruelling Saturday morning shift. Nothing went wrong, per se, but the fact that it’s before sunrise on a Saturday is insult enough.
He takes a deep breath, counts down from five, then announces (slightly too loudly), “I’m coming with you today.” It takes everything not to cringe at himself, but he squares his shoulders and tries to pretend this is normal.
It’s not.
In the two months since Ben made the connection between Taine Wallace, his teenage coworker at Morrisons, and Nik Wallace, his brand-new flatmate, Taine hasn’t brought it up. Ever. Ben, being Ben, must have picked up on at least some of the odd tension, because he almost immediately followed suit and effortlessly avoids the topic too. But avoiding it out loud doesn’t mean Taine doesn’t think about it, or the way he yelled at Nik after it came out, or the way even Dad seemed not to understand his anger.
It’s a bit childish, he realises that, but that doesn’t stop the resentment from bubbling up inside him every time he thinks of Nik just… being friends with Ben. Effortlessly, because of fucking course. Everything comes easy to Nik. Ben was Taine’s first, part of Taine’s little separate life in Morrisons that he tries so desperately to keep his brothers out of. Not Nik’s. Even after two months of wrestling with himself and his stupid feelings, Taine can’t quite shake that premise and the resentment that comes with it.
But he’s not a child and this entire mess is stupid and childish and that’s why he’s here now, two months later, telling Ben he’s coming like it’s a normal thing to do.
Ben slows his stride a bit and quirks an eyebrow at Taine. “I’d be flattered, but I have a sneaking suspicion I’m not the main reason you’re joining me.”
Fuck that. If Ben’s going to play sage advisor and start lecturing on how idiotic Taine’s being, he can go by himself for the rest of eternity and then some.
“You just want the croissants, don’t you,” Ben continues and raises the paper bag in his right hand.
Oh.
He forgot about those. The bakery staff all but forced them onto Ben after he came an hour earlier to take a look at their faulty oven. Either way, a very convenient excuse. “It’s not like you could eat twelve croissants,” he says. “I’m doing you a favour.”
They reach the staff exit and Ben yanks at the steel door with a shake of his head. A gust of icy wind blows his scarf right up into his face even as he gestures for Taine to go first. “I’d certainly be glad for your help, I can’t deny that,” he says drily from underneath the scarf. “Please, after you.”
Taine brushes past him with a snicker. It's his own fault for not tucking it in.
A seagull cries somewhere overhead, a sure sign of the approaching dawn even when the streetlamps are still on and the sky beyond them still an inky black. Beyond the inherent indignity of being awake at seven on a Saturday, Taine hates that it’s still dark, these days.
“Do you have a way to get back?” Ben asks as he leads them over to his bicycle. He stows the paper bag safely in the rusty, crooked basket, but doesn’t swing himself onto the seat (with all the poise of a fucking ballerina) as usual. The bike makes a horrible groaning noise, but rolls into motion as Ben pushes it along next to him.
The question has to be some kind of joke. Ben and Nik may live way out, past Seton, but there’s a bus line near their house that goes straight to city centre. Getting home by himself wouldn’t even take forty minutes.
“Nik can just drive me,” he says and hopes it’s true, setting his eyes firmly on the crosswalk they’ve stopped at. Whatever Ben’s face is doing now, at the first mention of Nik in two full months, Taine doesn’t want to see it. “It’s no big deal.”
The light turns green and they hurry across, Ben pushing his squeaking bike along like an afterthought. “If you’re sure. I wouldn’t want you to pay fares just to help me out with my croissants.”
Ben’s always worrying about money. Well, not worrying, per se, but he’s always aware of it in a way that reminds Taine of a kid hoarding allowance. When he first started working, back in summer, back when his eyes were even sadder and his elbows even pointer under the patches, he’d cheerfully answered Taine’s less-than-cheerful question of what the fuck he was doing here with, “I’m saving up for a bicycle.”
And sure enough, a few weeks later, he’d rolled up on this sad excuse for a functioning vehicle instead of hurrying over from the bus stop. “What are you saving up for now?” Taine had asked, still grumpy but a shade more comfortable, “or are you leaving?”
“A printer,” Ben had said. And so it went on, to course books and a new lamp and on to whatever his current goal is.
“Hey,” Taine asks, because they’ve been plodding along silently in the dark for far too long. “What are you saving up for right now?”
Ben hums. “A mattress topper.” He turns to Taine, and in the orange glow of a frankly pathetically dim streetlamp, this time the raised eyebrow is unmistakeable.
Taine shoves him a little. “I told you, you need to save up for a phone next. It’s ridiculous that you don’t have one.” He’s not entirely sure what a mattress topper is. It doesn’t even sound that expensive.
Ben laughs and sways back into step like the shove didn’t even phase him (it probably didn’t). “I have a landline.”
Taine rolls his eyes. “That’s the saddest thing I ever heard.”
The bike gives an unholy screech as Ben adjusts his hands on the handlebars. “Youth these days. No respect for your elders.”
“Even my dad has a phone,” Taine retorts, “and he’s like, way older than you.”
He hadn’t thought so, at first, until one of his coworkers from HR gossiped about Ben in the breakroom. Ben looks a lot older than he is, with grey streaked through auburn hair and small wrinkles carved into weathered skin. It’s probably the recent heart attack. Or, at least, the hypothetical recent heart attack that Barbara swears on her life was noted in his file. But Barbara is kind of a bitch, so Taine’s still a bit sceptical of the whole thing.
“Is he?” Ben asks and whips out his arm before Taine can cross the street. “The light’s still red.”
Taine rolls his eyes again and pointedly turns his head to the right, to the left, to the right again. “Road’s empty.”
“That’s not the point.”
Taine shoves at the arm in front of him and steps off the curb. “The point is that I’m fucking hungry, so we need to go, and the road’s empty.”
After a few steps, he turns around and waits for Ben to join him in the middle of the road with a shake of his head. “You’re such a wet blanket,” he says. “I bet you were that kid who told everyone else not to chew gum in class or something.”
Ben chuckles and leads them down the pavement, turns to the left with another abominable shriek of his bike, and then up into a small alleyway between two buildings. “Here’s a shortcut.”
He doesn’t answer the implicit question. He never does.
By the time they make it back to Ben’s flat, the clouds have a light pink lining, and they’re engaged in a surprisingly intense conversation about Death Note. Apparently, Ben got curious when Taine mentioned it a few weeks earlier, and actually hunted it down and watched nearly forty episodes. The idea warms Taine’s heart a lot more than he lets on. He can't remember the last time someone watched something just because he recommended it.
“Misa’s like, the shittiest character in the entire show,” he insists as Ben locks the bicycle in place in a little rack behind the garden wall.
“She is easily manipulated,” Ben says. “But perhaps that is what makes her character interesting.” He turns back to grab the bag of croissants from the basket. They nearly had to fight a particularly nasty specimen of seagull for it earlier, until Ben pulled whatever weird animal whispering powers he has and got it to calm down and fly away. Fucking weirdo. It’s entirely ridiculous that Taine’s friends with him.
“What’s interesting about it?” Taine bounces on his feet as Ben unlocks the front door and tries to tell himself it’s impatience, not nerves. “It’s stupid. She’s shallow and obnoxious.”
The door swings open and Ben gestures for Taine to walk in first. Fuck. He can do this. It’s just Nik. He’s just being the bigger person by reaching out first.
Nik’s arrogant. He orders everyone around and thinks he can tell Taine what to do just because he’s oldest. His grades are an unattainable bar Taine’s teachers and coaches want to measure him by, and no matter where Taine turns, Nik was there first and Nik probably did it better.
But for all of Nik’s infuriating perfection, he’s a fucking wreck when it comes to reconciling with people. At least, he and Dad still don’t really get on, for all that Dad tries. So in this case, being the first to say something means that for the first time in what feels like… well, ever, Taine can win.
So he takes the step, over the threshold, and onto the stairs to their flat.
“If she were truly shallow, she wouldn’t be involved in a grand international murder trip,” Ben says from somewhere behind him as he gently pulls the door shut. Right. Death Note. “I think the interest lies in the tragedy. She has so much passion and potential, and she directs it at someone who only wants to use and manipulate her.”
Taine pauses halfway up the stairs to turn and shoot Ben a fully unimpressed look (and to shove his fist into his coat pocket to hide the trembling). “Only you could watch that show and like Misa of all people. She’s also a murderer, you know.”
Ben raises his hands. “I’m not condoning her actions. I simply find her circumstances tragic.”
Taine shrugs and takes the last few steps two at a time. “I think you found that seagull’s circumstances tragic. You and your bleeding heart.”
Ben comes up to stand beside him on the top step, once again fumbling for the key. This close, Taine can see the painful twist to his smile and instantly feels like an ass, though he doesn’t quite know why. “I have been accused of that before,” Ben says softly and pushes the door open. “Me and my bleeding heart, indeed.”
Before Taine can even begin to ask what the hell, Nik calls out, “That you, Ben?” and something in his chest leaps up and lodges itself in the back of his throat. His eyes ache and those aren’t tears building up, they’re not, he’s not going to cry on hearing his brother’s voice for the first time in months because that’s fucking stupid.
“It is,” Ben calls back. He’s already stepped into the hallway and shimmied out of his worn trainers, which he stows neatly under the heater. Fucking idiot apparently doesn’t even wear boots in winter. Does he want to freeze all his toes off?
That thought somehow forces Taine’s mind back online. He shakes the numbness out of his head and begins to peel his own shoes and coat off.
“I brought breakfast and a friend,” Ben offers and lightly rests a hand on Taine’s shoulder. The joyful shock of hearing Ben casually call him a ‘friend’ distracts him from shrugging the hand off, and if he happens to like the support it offers, well, then that's no one’s business but his own. “Though I’m afraid the presence of the second is rather contingent on the presence of the first.”
That seems to have been enough mystery for Nik, because a very familiar head of curly black hair pokes out from the curtain at the end of the corridor. “Who’s the—oh.”
And now Taine is very glad for the hand on his shoulder, because it means he can straighten them and meet his brother’s eyes without flinching.
“Taine,” Nik finally says. “Hello.”
“Hey,” he retorts, and it’s too loud, much too loud, slightly shaky, why did he have to open his stupid mouth— “Ben can’t finish twelve croissants.”
Nik blinks, opens the curtain wider. “You’re probably right.”
“That’s why I’m here,” Taine clarifies, “to help with the croissants.” Because even though he’s being the bigger person, Nik doesn’t need to know that’s what he’s setting out to do. It can just, come up naturally, like he didn’t even have to put effort in. Later. He doesn’t want to apologise right this instant. Not in front of Ben.
Behind him, Ben chuckles and squeezes his shoulder a bit before he lets go. “I appreciate your sacrifice,” he says and Taine tries not to look too smug at the obvious fondness in his voice. “Would you care to join us, Nik?”
Nik stares at the two of them, face illegible, and for a second Taine wonders if he’s still angry. If he’ll yell at Taine to get out, to leave him alone, just like Taine did to him two months ago. “Of course,” he finally says, steps back and holds the curtain open. Taine trots over and tries not to show his relief.
“Coffee?” Nik asks as he sweeps his books and shit off the table and sets the stack on the floor beside the sofa. Taine made fun of him and Jon, back in the day, for putting a sofa in the kitchen. But now as he clambers on and relaxes into the plush upholstery that smells a bit like spice and a bit like coffee and a bit like Ben, he decides that it’s rather a clever piece of interior design. Not everyone gets to be this comfortable for breakfast. And it’s not their fault they don’t have a sitting room.
“Yeah,” he answers, happily. Dad doesn’t often let him have coffee. Some bullshit about developing minds and caffeine. Standing over by the counter, Ben wrinkles his nose and shakes his head.
“Fucking tea addict.”
“Language,” Nik and Ben say automatically, then glance at each other and grin. And part of Taine still wants to scowl at their easy rapport, the part that looks at Ben and chants mine mine mine I saw him first and hates Nik for intruding on every single fucking thing Taine’s ever tried to do. But he’s here, and Nik’s pouring him a mug of coffee even though he knows Dad doesn’t like it, and Ben is eyeing the microwave very distrustfully as if he expects it and the plate of croissants he’s holding to explode. And everything is warm and the coffee smells good and if he’s truly, truly honest with himself, then both of them are some of his favourite people in the entire world.
It’s hard to still be angry in the face of all that.