#joel is some kinda sports major maybe? and niko studies literature as his major

[theflyingfeeling]

Crying over 42 promt 😂 how about Niko/Joel for it?

Excellent 😌

...I made it a College AU, just because! Hope you don't mind <3

42. You get attacked by a goose and I’m the one to help patch you up (3404 words)

~

Joel tied the laces of his right foot sneaker and evaluated the quality of his work. Dissatisfied, he untied and tied them again, and repeated the same exact action for the left one, gritting his teeth as he did. 

“Oh my god, Joel, you can just tell me if you want me to come with you.”

Joel glared at his roommate who was spread on his bed, eyes on the phone he was holding above his face.

“No, thanks. I’m a big boy.”

“Sure you are, but those geese are pretty big too,” Joonas said. “And you almost pooped your pants when we walked past them yesterday.”

“I did not.”

“So you held my hand just because you like me so much? Awwww, babe– ow!”

The textbook Joel had thrown at Joonas may have shut him up momentarily, but the snickering smile on his face returned as soon as the book was off his face.

“They’re just stupid, brainless birds,” Joel muttered as he zipped up his Adidas track jacket.

“Stupid, brainless birds with razor blades for teeth.”

Joel tightened his high ponytail. He grabbed his phone from his bedside table and slid it in the pocket of his shorts.

“And have you noticed they have teeth on their tongue as well?”

“Shut the fuck up, Porko!” Joel snapped and rushed out of the door before his roommate could mess with his head some more. 

Because yes, the aggressive geese that had taken over the campus park had given him a proper scare the day before when he and Joonas had walked back to the dorm and one of them had started following Joel right behind his heels. But no, he wasn’t going to let some vicious, bloodthirsty, feathered animals keep him from going on about his morning jog through the campus.

Or that’s what he had thought, right until he arrived at the park and saw the whole gaggle of geese that seemed to stop and stare at Joel in the middle of their usual geese business, and not because they thought he was a sight for sore eyes.

No; they were out for his blood. 

Joel clenched his hands into fists and took a deep breath. 

Stupid, brainless birds, he started chanting to himself in his head. I am an apex predator, and they are just stupid, brainless, useless birds that have no control over my life. 

He kept his eyes fixed on the lecture building on the other side of the park as he started jogging, perhaps a little faster than he normally would for his morning exercise. The black, lifeless eyes of the geese followed him closely, or so it felt like to Joel at least.

When a few of the geese flapped their wings as Joel passed them, he sped up his steps and tried to keep his breathing under control. He was only about a hundred metres away from the edge of the green area, a hundred more steps away from safety, but the faster he ran, the farther away the campus gates seemed to be.

A couple of the geese were now clearly running after him, and if the thumping of his heart wasn’t the only sound roaring in his ears, he would have heard them quacking loudly at him.

His final mistake was when he glanced behind him and saw a glimpse of the beasts and their disturbingly sharp-looking rows of teeth and yes, even the spiky tongue, but then the chase came to an abrupt end when he collided with something. 

“Hey, woah, watch where you’re going!” a familiar voice spoke to him. 

When he looked ahead again, he saw the guy who always sat next to him in his compulsory English class, glaring at him with his green eyes. His long brown hair framed his permanently annoyed expression, but his exceptional beauty still made Joel catch his breath, like it did every time he stepped in the classroom and found the man’s eyes already staring at him, like he had been waiting to see Joel, even if they never really talked. 

The thought of finally saying something to the man was the last one Joel had before he felt a sharp pain in his ankle. He looked down and saw one of the geese poking his feet with its killer choppers. 

Then everything went black.

 ~

Later that day, when Niko recollected the whole incident to his roommate, he realised he had heard Joel before he had seen the man, his heavy, panicky breathing approaching Niko gradually as he had walked on the gravel, lost in his thoughts. However, it wasn’t until Joel had already bumped into him that he realised who it was that had been running for his life in such a perplexed state.

Their eyes met only for a few seconds, the weird sadness Niko usually saw in Joel’s eyes having given room to terror and helplessness, and then Joel was suddenly collapsing against him, right there in the middle of a path in the campus yard at eight in the morning on a Monday. 

Niko shooed the over-enthusiastic geese away and dragged Joel to a nearby bench. He noticed some of the passers-by had stopped to gawk at the scene, but none of them offered any help in moving the long-limbed blond to a more comfortable position. 

“Joel! Can you hear me?” Niko tried snapping his fingers at Joel’s face, but there was no reaction from the other man. Just when Niko was about to dial the emergency number, Joel’s eyelids began to flutter and a silent sigh left his mouth.

“Ahhhhh, the fuck?” he groaned, and Niko was ready to kiss the guy from pure relief. 

“Are you alright, Joel?” 

A realisation of some sort seemed to hit him, judging by the way his eyes widened and the colour left his face.

“Wh-where is it?”

‘It’, supposedly, meant the large bird that had been after him when he had run into Niko. 

“It’s gone, you don’t have to worry about it anymore.” Niko placed a calming hand on Joel’s shoulder when he tried getting up from the bench. 

“But… what happened?”

“Well, I can only tell what happened after you crashed into me: you passed out.”

“Oh– OH! Oh, oh my god!” Joel moaned and looked like he was about to faint again. 

“Hey! Hey hey hey, are you good?”

“It bit me!”

“What?”

“That son of a bitch! It bit me!” Joel grabbed the back rest of the bench to try and pull himself up as he reached his other hand towards his ankle.

“Fuck, really?” Niko moved his gaze from Joel’s pained eyes to his feet.

“Ahh, it hurts like hell! Ah shit, I can’t even look! Can you tell me, is it bad?”

Niko took a closer look at Joel’s ankle and saw a few, tiny droplets of blood.

“Well–”

“Oh, fucking hell! Do geese have rabies?

“I don’t thi–”

“Ahh, fuck, this is it, isn’t it? This is how I’m gonna go? I’m gonna fucking DIE, right?”

“You’re not–”

“Tell Porko to keep his filthy fingers off my vinyl collection, I’m taking that shit with me when I go!”

From the way Joel always sat so quietly in the back row of the English classroom, sulking and rarely talking to anyone (except for that one time he had noticed Niko’s wrinkly band shirt and started bombarding him with questions, asking if he listened to this and this band, until the teacher had to shush him silent), Niko would never had guessed the man could be so theatrical.

“Okay, listen to me, you drama queen: it’s only a scratch, I’m pretty sure birds don’t transmit rabies, you’re not gonna die, and I have no idea who the hell Porko is, so will you just calm the fuck down?”

Joel looked at him, breathing heavily and his eyes frightened. Niko used his thumb to rub the side of Joel’s bare ankle just above the bruise left by the goose, hoping it might help the man to cool off. 

“If I were you, I’d be more worried about how you blacked out like that. Has it happened before?”

He saw Joel swallow before answering. 

“No. At least not like this.”

“Do you want me to take you to the emergency room? Or to the campus nurse?”

Joel’s eyes enlarged and he shook his head. Niko noticed him becoming restless again, so he slowed down the movements of his thumb to make him relax.

“Okay, I won’t,” Niko said as calmly and softly as he could. “But can I at least help you back to the dorm and clean the wound and stop the bleeding?”

“There’s blood?!” Joel bolted up, his face as pale as if he had just been given the death sentence.

“Just a tiny scrape, alright? It is bleeding a little, yes, but you will live, jeez.” Niko added the last part under his breath. “It should be disinfected though, so let’s get you back to the dorm now, yeah? Which one is yours?”

“No, no no no no, I am not going near those demons again!”

Under his palm, Niko could feel Joel tremble.

“Fine, no more park for today. Let’s just go round the park, hm? I live in that dorm over there,” Niko pointed his finger at the dormitory building in the farthest right hand corner of the campus square, “so we can just walk past the park and no geese will bother us. How does that sound? Do you think you can do that?”

He heard Joel take a few unsteady breaths in, which made Niko want to clasp the man’s hand instead of his wounded ankle and tell him he was safe, as far as Niko was concerned.

“Okay,” Joel said and nodded, probably more to himself than to answer Niko's question. “Okay,” he repeated and let Niko help him up. 

“Do you need a drink?”

“Most definitely,” Joel mumbled with such solemnity that it was hard for Niko to hold back his laughter.

“I meant, like, water or something. ‘Cause you were kinda going through it just now.”

“Let’s just go get the bandaid, alright?” Joel replied quietly, eyes on the ground as they began walking. If he had been fearing for his life just a moment ago, now he looked like he was wishing for the earth to swallow him whole. 

Niko knew that feeling all too well, so he didn’t bother Joel with meaningless small talk as they strolled around the campus area. And anyway, he was far too busy trying to make sense of what had just happened and how, instead of attending his morning lecture like he was supposed to, he was now tending to the guy from his English class, whose grumpy appearance at the door of the classroom was always the highlight of Niko’s week, despite the fact he was yet to actually start a conversation with him outside the structured class discussion activities. Every time Niko had psyched himself up to finally at least say hi to Joel, the guy had either ran out of the classroom hardly a second after the teacher had dismissed the class or, in some cases, not shown up at all. Niko hated those days, because usually it meant he wouldn’t see Joel during the lunch break that followed either, and left him fretful and melancholic for the rest of the day which, of course, never went unnoticed by Aleksi who would then try all his tricks to make Niko spill the tea about what had brought him so down.

But how was Niko supposed to explain he was merely lovesick for a man he had barely even talked to? Niko wasn’t even sure if Joel knew his name.

“I’m Niko, by the way,” he said when they were halfway to the dorms. “We go to the same English class, remember?”

“Yeah,” Joel acknowledged. Then he fell silent for at least twenty more steps until he cleared his throat. “I’m… Joel.”

Niko swallowed the “I know”, regarding it creepy as fuck, as well as the awfully formal “Nice to meet you”, and settled for awkward “Cool” instead (which wasn’t any better, he realised the second he had uttered it).

After what seemed like forever, walking in the uncomfortable silence, they were at the dorm and Niko led Joel up to his room, hoping Aleksi had already left for his classes. Indeed, Niko sighed of relief when he saw his roommate’s unmade bed empty and his white sneakers gone, and ordered Joel to sit on the only chair in the room.

 The bridge of Joel’s nose wrinkled when Niko tapped on his wound with a cotton pad soaked in way too much disinfectant, which had been totally unintentional from Niko’s part, although he had to admit he would gladly take care of Joel’s injuries another time if it meant he’d see Joel scrunch up his face into the most adorable expressions he had seen from the man so far. 

“There, all patched up now,” Niko concluded when he smoothened the bandaid on Joel’s bony ankle. 

He was expecting Joel to be back on his feet and out the door by then, but instead Joel stayed put on the squeaky chair next to Niko’s bed. He was scratching on something on his nail but said nothing, safe for a small, barely audible “thanks”.

“No problem,” Niko nodded, and still Joel did not move an inch. “So, umm…afraid of birds, huh?”

“Kinda,” Joel replied, with a voice even quieter than earlier. The sight of him was so heartbreaking, like a child whose lollipop had just been snatched right out of his hand, that Niko found it almost impossible to not take the man to sit on his lap, despite being noticeably smaller in size than Joel, and rock him back and forth until he’d forget all about the geese and other horrors of the world.

“Yeah, well, one almost snatched my hat the other day, so…” Niko trailed off and then bit his lip; this was the opposite of what he wanted to talk about, so he took a deep breath and started again.

“You know, I’ve… noticed you in class.”

Fuck’s sake, Niko, that’s the best you can do?

“I mean, obviously I have, we sit next to each other almost every lecture…”

Just shut your dumb mouth already.

“And… like…” he tried, but the words he wanted to say  just didn’t come to him, so he scratched the back of his head in frustration. 

“Yeah, I’ve… noticed you too.”

Niko’s heart almost jumped to his throat.

“And to be honest, this is not how I imagined our first actual conversation to go down.”

“Our first conversation? Have you forgotten about that time you talked my ears off about Nine Inch Nails?”

Niko’s quick wits had been so eager to make the remark that it took him another few seconds to realise Joel had just confessed he had imagined talking with Niko before.

The thought made Niko bite his lip to hide his dopey grin.

“A real conversation, not me blabbering about my hyperfixations after having downed five RedBulls.” Joel’s voice was but a low grumble again, but the rosy shade of red on his cheeks looked insanely attractive on him, Niko thought. 

It also made Niko just bold enough to add another twist to their current exchange of words.

“Well, what would you have said, then, if you’d get your own way?”

Joel’s eyes visibly brightened when he glanced at Niko.

“For starters, I would have told you those checkered Vans look dumb as fuck.”

“Excuse me? They’re retro!” Niko exclaimed, finally letting his lips break into a smile.

“I’m sorry to break it to you but not a single piece of clothing from the early 00s is retro, it’s cringe.”

“At least I own more than two shirts…”

“And you wish they were as cool as my Venom ones!”

“I don’t need to wish, I know they are.”

“Ha! So you admit they’re cool!”

Joel’s triumphant face had erased the last traces of his frown, and his smile was so blinding that Niko completely forgot to watch his own mouth.

“I do like the sleeveless one at least.”

Only Joel’s surprised silence made Niko realise what he had blurted out. 

“You know, ‘cause… like… your tattoos are pretty sweet.”

“Oh,” Joel brushed his upper arm where his labyrinth tattoo was hidden under the sleeve of his track jacket. “Thanks.”

“I wanted to tell you when I first saw it but, umm… didn’t want to bother you, I guess.”

Niko’s eyes wandered around the room until they found Joel’s again. The curve of Joel’s eyebrows had softened and his lips were slightly parted, and Niko tried not to think about how soft they looked.

“I…,” Joel began, “I wish you had, though. Bothered me, I mean. Because… after that one time I was so embarrassed to talk to you again–”

“No reason to feel like that,” Niko told him, fighting the urge to put a reassuring hand on the long, skinny leg that was still stretched out on Niko’s bed after the medical operation.

“You probably thought I was a freak.”

“No, actually I thought you were… kinda cute.”

When Joel chuckled, Niko felt his heart starting to beat again.

“Well… despite the hideous shoes and the baggy pants–”

“At least I’m comfortable!”

“–I think you’re sorta cute too.”

Joel blinked his blue eyes softly, and even in his right mind Niko could not have looked elsewhere. 

What a blessing it was, to be alive on a spring morning and sit with a guy you thought was cute and who thought you were cute too.

Niko wanted to linger in that moment and that feeling forever, staring into the bluest eyes he had ever seen, wondering what kind of secrets and unsaid confessions were behind them, and whether he was worthy of learning about any of them.

He had every intention to find out.

“I should… go,” Joel said eventually, although the look in his eyes communicated a completely different message.

“Yeah, I’m… late for my lecture, too,” Niko said, and both men stood up. Niko waited for Joel to say something more, but when he didn’t, Niko swallowed his disappointment and fixed his hair. 

“I’ll see you in English class, I guess. And hey,” he added when Joel was already on his way to the door, “if those geese ever attack you again, you know where to find me.”

Niko had to consciously command his knees to stay strong when Joel flashed him another bright smile. 

“Yeah,” he chuckled. “Okay, well, see ya.”

“Bye,” Niko forced himself to say, and when Joel closed the door after him, he threw himself on his bed and muffled his frustrated groan on his pillow. 

He had been  so close to confessing how sad he became every time Joel didn’t attend their weekly mutual lecture, and that it had been him who had taken Joel’s sunglasses to the lost-and-found when he had forgotten them in the classroom (he had been too much of a coward to give them to the man himself), or at least tell Joel he’d like to spend some more time together, outside the artificial context of English classes. 

Now, the most Niko expected was them to go back to the awkwardness of sitting side by side in class without saying a word to each other, which, after the latest incident, felt almost worse than one of them moving overseas and never seeing each other again.

Already halfway down to his pit of misery and self-pity, Niko was startled when there was a knock on his door. 

Thinking it was Aleksi who had forgotten his key again, Niko didn’t hurry on his way to the door, and almost gasped out loud when he saw Joel standing at the door frame instead.

Wordlessly they just stared at each other for seconds that lasted a small eternity, but then Joel opened his mouth.

“I was just wondering if… if you’d like to… hang out, maybe? Later?”

As if bitten by a savage poultry again, Joel was visibly shivering. It might have been just the chilly hallway, but when Niko reached his hand to brush Joel’s finger with his own, he saw the man’s shoulders relax and his jaw unclench.

“I’m free tonight.”