Stand By Me

Chapter Four

Niall's step-father doesn't care about the presentation at school, doesn't even know about it, let alone ask about it when he walks through the door that evening. Instead, Paul is angry about something that Niall isn't even aware of, and so first comes the yelling, then the hitting.

He leaves after, storms out of the house and slams the door behind him so that the sound ends with a breathtaking bang and then there is only deafening silence. Niall can hear the shuddering of a car engine igniting, listens to him drive away. There isn't any relief.

He isn't sure what he feels as he lies there in the middle of the living room floor, rolling into his side and curling in on himself, wincing at the sharp pain in his left side that every inhale entails. He squeezes his eyes shut, tears falling at the action, running across his nose and dripping off onto the stained carpet beneath him.

"Come on," a soft voice says from overhead, and he wants to block it out.

He wants to ignore it and curl further in on himself until he ceases to exist because he isn't sure how much more he can take of this until he breaks; shatters into a thousand irreparable pieces like that bottle that Paul had thrown at the wall just behind his head when he'd first stepped foot into the house.

But the voice doesn't give in so easily, and then hands are thrown into the mix as well, hands that Niall finds himself involuntarily flinching away from until he opens his eyes and sees his mother kneeling beside him, her cardigan pulled tightly around her frame, hair greasy and tucked behind her ears, eyes scanning over him as she coaxes him into sitting.

Her hands run down his arms over the material of the school blazer that he's yet to change out of. He winces when her fingers brush over the top of his left arm where one of the blows had landed, an area where there will no doubt be a mottled bruise come the following day, one to match those that are already blossoming over his ribs. He's just relieved that none of the punches had caught his face this time, because he's running out of excuses to give the small number of people that have questioned him recently.

He sniffles when his mother hooks her hands over his elbows and guides him up on unsteady feet to sit on the couch instead, letting him go and sitting back a little after she's apparently decided that he's uninjured enough for her to not be worried about it.

She shakes her head at him, blue eyes tired yet stern. "I wish you wouldn't provoke him," she says quietly.

Niall isn't sure where the anger comes from, but one moment it's absent and the next it's there, at the forefront of his being, and he doesn't bother holding it back.

He's had enough of this — of Paul beating on him whenever he feels like it, of his mother never defending him, of all of it. Of the lies to people who care about him and the makeup covered bruises every time he has to go to school.

"Provoke him?" He repeats, voice cracking painfully in the middle as tears of anger and underlying hurt prick at his eyes again. He stands from the couch, body aching and ribs burning, glaring down at the woman sitting in front of him, the woman who's supposed to take care of him. "Provoke him? Mum, I didn't do anything! I never do anything and he just — he just hurts me anyway and you let him! You always let him!"

Mum looks almost offended at the words before she frowns back, standing opposite him with her arms wrapped tightly around herself. "I don't let him! What am I supposed to do, Niall? He lays into you for a reason —"

"What reason!?" Niall shouts, his voice hoarse from the pain and the tears that are trying to fall. He blinks rapidly but a few slip free nonetheless.

She sighs, rubbing her hands down her face. "I don't know, Niall, but he isn't going to start like that for nothing. There's — there's nothing I can do to stop it, you know that —"