Heartstopper oneshots/ requests

Nick angst/ OCD

Hi everyone, I'm not sure what this is but I know Lemonsunshine01 requested more Nick angst and alice74fhvh asked for another OCD oneshot so I've sort of mashed it together... lemme know what you think!

Disclaimer: I've totally made Jake up for this loool

Also, this stupid book is number two in the Alice Oseman tag and we're well over 75k reads... whattt?! Thank you <3

Nick had just finished tidying his room, well, a more accurate way of putting it would be that he just finished rearranging it for the second time that week.

It was Saturday morning and he knew that his rearranging was because he was nervous for today. Which he couldn't help but feel stupid about. All he was doing was rugby practice, the same as he did every Saturday afternoon. Yet this time it felt different and as the week had gone on, he found himself falling into 'his old routine' as his mum says.

Which involved having the shower set at the exact same temperature every morning. If he didn't, he had convinced himself that something awful would happen to his mum that day. He also double, triple, quadruple checked that he had turned the bathroom light off when he was done in the bathroom.

Then he put on his uniform in the exact same way, one tiny difference in the way it was put on meant he had to take everything off and start again. There were other things, but it'll take all day to say them all. What it did mean is that by the time Nick actually left for school, he was mentally drained.

Something that didn't help him cope in the busy and chaotic environment that was school. At one point, he had convinced his mum to home school him because facing it every day was just too much. But to get home schooled they had to go through all sorts of tests and somewhere along the line, a Doctor diagnosed him. OCD.

Three letters that defined why Nick was like he was. Why, as a child, he would get so wound up about even the smallest of things like not going up the stairs the right way. So much so that he would cry about not being able to go up the stairs at all because 'he was doing it wrong'.

Why he would pick up on the smallest of things like objects on surfaces not 'being as they should be'.

Why he would always wash his hands at least twice to make sure they were 'definitely clean'.

And now, it explained why he had rearranged everything in his room twice this week. Which he was now pacing around because everything still didn't look 'quite right'.

"Nick, lunch is ready" His mum called from downstairs. Somehow, an hour had passed since he rearranged his room which meant it was 12:30 which meant he hadn't had time to wash his hands before getting called down to lunch which meant practice was going to go bad.

Sarah, Nick's mum, had got laying the table for lunch down to a fine art. Making sure it was 'just so' for his son to be able to even sit at it.

"Were you rearranging your room again?" Sarah asks once Nick appears in the kitchen doorway
"Yes and I still don't like it" Nick says, sitting down at the table. Pulling the chair close to the table twice. Making the table the perfect distance away.
Sarah sighs, "You need to go back to the Doctors, see if they can put you on those pills"
"Mum, it's really not that bad"
"You look so tired, Nick. The pills would help"
"What, are they sleeping pills?" Nick shoots back, irritated that they were having this conversation again.

"They would stop your mind doing over time so you could sleep better" Sarah replies, seemingly unbothered by Nick's mood.

Nick doesn't say anything else and just eats his food instead. It's not really sleep that's the problem and most of the time he has everything under control. Just sometimes he slips up, but he always recovers. Sometimes within a day, sometimes in a few weeks. But he always recovers. Always.