Chapter Text
Once-upon-a-fucking-time, Roy Kent was everywhere.
Not just on the pitch—although, critically, he was, hence the nauseatingly repetitive cheer—but everywhere else, all the meat and bones of him stretched thin across the whole of England, between Sunderland and London, between his sport and his home. Oftentimes they could be the same thing, family and football, but just as often they stole from each other like thieves, greedy and aching, and left Roy's palms empty.
Case in point, he was tripping over other snot-nosed nine-year-olds when his Grandfather’s blood clot marched pretty up his veins and lodged itself into his fucking lungs. When Chelsea won the FC Cup in ‘12, he heard their cheers from the corner telly in his sister’s hospital room, waiting for Phoebe—who after all of that, decided to be born the next fucking day.
The point was, that as often as he was here, and there, and everywhere, he found himself nowhere; and almost never in the place he was probably fucking supposed to be.
The point was, that when Jamie Tartt started downfield towards West Ham’s goal, knowing damn well that their goalkeeper, Nolan, was one fucking game away from a lifetime ban, Roy Kent was not there.
Roy fucking Kent, formerly everywhere, currently thirty some odd yards to the left, was standing uselessly, letting his ears be assaulted by the sound of Tartt’s fucking kid-song chant. The one that Phoebe had the nerve to love, the one that lit the field up with toneless baby talk, with sharp edges and bated breaths, the one that got everyone onto their feet, whether or not they were sober enough to stand on them.
The one that drowned out the memory of Lasso’s last speech, the extra huddle just to reinforce what he’d already told them. The extra warning, one last time, minutes before they got on the pitch. Don’t risk anything, he’d said, not even for an easy goal.
Just like I like my wings, guys. Let’s keep our bones in.
If the sound was fucking with his memory of it, making his heart race and his mind cloud with the saltwater, acid mix of fear and hope and anxiety, he knew what it was doing to Tartt. And he knew that he was too fucking far off the field to stop it.
Ted yelled for caution. Beard waved his hands in a wide, frenzied motion. Sam ran from left field, Dani following from behind. Nolan ran faster, and Roy shut his eyes and kept his knuckles pressed into his thighs before they found homes in the Richmond FC plastered walls beside them. The crowd continued to chant, Colin passed the ball and Jamie found it, pushed forwards towards the goal until Nolan challenged Jamie, ran up to him with the front half of him nearly bent, as if propelled by a force outside of himself, leapt into the air and—
Roy shut his eyes.
When he opened them, the chant had cut itself off into shouting, screaming, and Jamie was flat on the ground as Nolan was hauling himself up. Between the shouting, the announcers wedged their voices in the stadium air. A challenge turned to a gruesome tackle from Nolan on Tartt—he’s been knocked down. Beard had both of his hands covering his face, and Ted stood, eyes wide, breath held tight in his throat so that Roy could almost see the eerie stillness, the aching muscles of his chest. Beard didn’t uncover his eyes. Ted did not breathe.
And Jamie did not get up.
“Fuck!”
Roy wasn’t sure if he’d even said it. The word was as natural to him as breathing, and so it rose from his chest like a scream, like an exhalation. He’d run towards the field before he’d gotten to see if anyone else reacted to it, if it’d reached anyone’s ears through the deafening cries of the crowd.
By the time Roy had reached him, his fucking knee had helpfully knocked itself out of its fucking joint—later, he’ll tell everyone that’s why he landed on it, hands hanging towards Jamie’s face, Jamie's hair brushing against the back of his palm.
“Coach,” said one of them. Colin, maybe. Sam, probably. “I’m so sorry, coach, I—”
“Jesus, fuck, get him up before—” the words caught in Roy’s throat. The nearer he was to Jamie the more he realized that he was still, that his face was pale, his arms thrown out beside him, that he was not getting up, no matter how much Colin-Sam-Someone apologized above them.
“He’s not alright,” said Sam, because now it was definitely Sam, kneeling down next to Roy. His voice carried through the crowd, sharper than the dull roar in its worry, and deeper than the high-pitched wailing in its faith. “We need to give the medics room.”
In the distance, a small team of capable-looking medics in black strode up to them. One lifted Jamie’s arm up into his own, and carefully laid her fingers against his wrist. Jamie didn’t move. She nodded, said something to the other, and before Roy could even figure what was happening, before he’d even tried to get himself up, they’d set an oxygen mask over Jamie’s face and were nodding at Roy, telling him to move.
“I can’t—” he started. His knee, he tried to say, but it was just as much of an excuse as it was before. He shook his hand. “Give me a fucking second. Is he breathing?”
The medic looked at him carefully for a moment and nodded her head.
“It’s shallow,” she said. “And his pulse is weak.”
She sounded partially unworried, most of it blown out through stress, but Roy knew from his sister that that meant fuck-all; she could reattatch a limb by its tendons and barely even blink.
The medic nodded her head towards him as the rest of the crew headed towards them, a large black stretcher pulled out between them like a sheet. The look of it made Roy feel nauseous.
“We need room to help him, coach.”
Jamie didn’t get up. Roy didn’t get up.
“They’re going to help him,” said Sam, extending a hand toward Roy. Roy considered not taking it—moving himself backwards only just enough for them to have room, staying right here, where he maybe he was supposed to be—fuck, if he hadn’t fucked up his knee, if he’d been on the field, he’d have tackled Tartt himself for being so stupid—
But if it was back then, before he’d fucked his knee, would he have even cared if Tartt was on the ground? He’d hated him then. He hated himself now, hated how there was nothing he could have done from thirty yards away.
“Roy,” said Sam. He grabbed his hand without asking, pulling it towards his chest so that Roy had to either let him hold his fucking hand like an infant or actually get up off of the ground. Despite the obvious choice, Roy found himself stalling. “You have to get up. We have another problem.”
“What other fucking problem—”
“Actually, there’s two,” said Sam. He nodded his head towards the right, where Ted was standing, barely outside of the box, face slack and eyes wide. His hands were shoved into the pockets of his coat and he was staring, lips half formed around a sentence. “Coach Lasso, and the referee.”
Now that Roy was standing, and his direct helpfulness had been spent, Sam’s voice seemed less sturdy, more young and uncertain. The medics had lifted Jamie onto the stretcher before Roy had even finished righting himself, barely feeling the shock of pain that his knee usually sent up his spine in greeting.
“What the fuck did the fucking referee do.”
God, they were all fucking children. Roy wanted to fucking break something.
“Coach Beard is talking to him now, but—” Sam shakes his head, shrugging his shoulders hopelessly, lips parted. “Coach, he didn’t call a penalty.”
Now he knew what the fuck it was he wanted to break.
He growled and turned on his heel, ready to find the referee, to find Nolan, to find the version of Jamie Tartt that was still standing and deciding to ignore Lasso’s advice and attempt a goal from that close to the net, to find anyone he could bury his fucking knuckles in, to bash his own forehead into the nearest hard surface, but instead found Ted again, still standing, hands still shoved in to his pockets, and lips still half-forming something unspoken.
“Lasso!”
Thirty yards away--Ted must've run back to the box after he'd seen Jamie on the ground--and Roy could feel each one of them shake in his leg, jolt pain up the side of it. He gritted his teeth together.
“He’s breathing,” he said, out of breath from the run and the pain, as soon as he thought Ted was in earshot. Even then, it barely seemed to register in his face—fuck. “Fuck, are you breathing?”
As if he’d been waiting for the fucking instruction, Ted sucked in a rush of air that sounded almost painful. He took a trembling hand and wiped the back of it on his forehead and nodded.
“He’s okay?” he asked.
Roy pressed the heels of his feet into the ground and wished that it would steady him.
“He’s breathing, Ted,” he said. “He’s got a pulse.”
“That’s bare minimum,” said Ted. He did something that almost sounded like a laugh, but like it’d died on the way out. “If I said—if I said, hey, is your car running, and you said—look, Ted, it’s got wheels, do you think—”
Roy put his hand on Ted’s shoulder and was unsurprised to find it shaking. He bent his head to try and look Ted in the eyes, and when he did they were still wide, blown out with fear. He pressed his fingers into Ted’s shoulder blades and willed himself to believe his next words.
“You don’t have to worry about Jamie,” he said.
Now, Ted really did laugh.
“How many people have believed that?”
Roy pressed his lips together. Fuck. But Ted was right—how long had people believed that about him, and how many times had they been wrong before? Even after they’d become friends, Roy didn’t worry about Jamie. Not until the Man City game, but Jamie had had the same father his whole life. Roy’s worry, or the lack of it, made up only a small portion of the cosmic debt that weighed itself over Jamie’s head. He opened his mouth to say something—although the only things that were coming to mind were fuck and shit and idiot, sometimes aimed at himelf and sometimes at Tartt, but Ted beat him to it.
He shook his head and looked at Roy, in that disarming, distinctly fucking American way, the kind of manifest-destiny boldness that allowed him to stare straight in to your fucking pupils without blinking. He nodded his head out towards the field.
“Can I ask you something? And I’m going to need you to do two things, if that’s alright with you.”
Roy kept his hand on Ted’s shoulder and nodded.
“Alright,” said Ted. He sat down, blowing long, even breaths out of his mouth. Roy stood still, feet still dug into the turf. It had always been a centering presence, the crisp green feeling of it, the study ground beneath him. He counted on it to be that again. “One—believe me when I say that when we’re done talking, I’m going to be alright.”
Roy opened his mouth and then shut it again.
“Okay,” he said.
“Two, answer me honestly.”
“Jesus, spit it out. You’re fucking scaring me.”
Ted nodded. He looked like he was scaring himself.
“Jamie,” he said. Roy wanted to tear out his own fucking hair if it meant it would drag the question out of him any faster. But Ted only swallowed, breathing harsh and nervous. “Jamie, he—there wasn’t much blood, was there?”
Roy blinked. Unwillingly, he put himself thirty yards out, a few minutes back. His mind’s eye traveled over Jamie’s face, slack and puffed with oncoming bruises, eyes hooded and neck askew. It had been unnatural, horrifying, to see the normally fucking Pixar-animated creature that was Jamie Tartt lying still and unmoving, but there hadn’t been blood.
“There was no blood,” he said.
Ted nodded. He looked like he was in the middle of a migraine, the kind that he used to get, primarily brought on by concussions or Tartt himself. His fingers pressed hard into the lines of his forehead.
“Alright,” he said. “So I imagined that.”
Something sloshed its way unpleasantly through Roy’s stomach—suddenly he felt like he didn’t know anything that was going on. The turf under his feet no longer grounded him, just swallowed him in the upset, carried him in the cries of the crowd around them and in Ted’s terse, shaking breaths, and somewhere, Jamie’s faint ones.
“Fuck,” he said, trying to put the pieces together. He nodded once towards Lasso, brows furrowed in concern. “Panic attack?”
Ted nodded grimly, and for a second, Roy thought that was all he was going to say.
“Yeah, and—” he sort of got lost for a moment, lips barely moving, as if looking for the correct word, and then cringed, like the word he found was unpleasant. “...flashback, I guess. Twofur. Great deal.”
Roy shook his head, at a loss for words. He looked at Ted, and for a second saw someone entirely new. Not just the dopey, midwestern idiot he’d first seen, or the caring, competent coach he’d grown to know. A person who was as young as him, as young as Jamie, as young as Jamie had looked in the Man City lockers, wearing his socks and his grief heavy on his body. It was a miserable feeling, to suddenly understand that someone had been alive longer than you’d known them, that they had suffered longer than you’d cared. It was a feeling Roy was getting really fucking used to, even though it still made him want to fucking punch something.
He cleared his throat.
“Always did love a BOGO,” he said, although his voice was flat. It felt like ground sand coming from this throat. “Ted—”
But whatever he was going to say was interrupted by Isaac, running in with a grim look on his face, and Beard, walking with his head down and fists clenched and directly past the both of them.
“No penalty,” he said. “We keep playing.”
Roy grit his teeth together and growled. Fucking referee. Fucking Nolan. Fucking fucked knee that kept him off the field, fucking Jamie, his preschool idiocy, his lack of self-preservation, his dense fucking skull that no warnings ever seemed to be able to permeate through.
“Fine then,” he said, after a beat. “Let’s fuck them up.”
And fuck them up they fucking did—ended the game in the lead with last-second score by Rojas, whose innate positivity had faltered the entire game, and blocked every goal with vicious, vengeful feet.
There was no celebration, though, when it was over. Normally Dani was the first to smile, to celebrate, but now he did it only in response: only after he had looked at the rest of the team, with their eyes low and mouth set, did he turn on his smile and turn to the crowd. Where the rest of their anger and weakness sat too heavy to do much more than raise their fists, he somehow found it in himself to grin until the moment the shadows of the tunnel crossed over his face, and it dropped in the same motion that his arm reached around Colin’s shoulders.
“I will call my family,” he said, softly. “It’s Sunday. They will light a candle.”
Roy watched this exchange from the corner of his eye and knew, as a coach, that he ought to thank Dani for his sentiment, but unfortunately the image of Dani and Colin were growing smaller and smaller as Roy walked, neatly and ferociously, into the treatment room.
All the anger that had been pressing into the back of his skull during the game came out through the door as it swung harshly on its hinges, crashing into the wall and echoing, painfully loud, in a completely bare treatment room. Bare of medics, bare of Jamie, bare of anything fucking helpful at all. Jamie had not been in the locker room when he’d left the rest of the team there to shrug off their kit and worry, and he was not here, in the club, which meant that the injury had been severe enough that—
Fuck.
Fists clenched, he kicked the bottom of the door, hard enough that it bounced back and slammed on his toes. Before he could let out the instinctive expletive, though, someone’s hand pressed itself into his shoulder.
Soft, gently pressed in between his bones. The smell of coconut lotion and hairspray, and the hand followed almost instantaneously by the gentle press of her forehead into his back. Keeley.
“Ted’s at the hospital with Jamie,” she said. “He’s bad off, but they say he’ll be okay. They said he lost a tooth.”
Roy looked down at the ground to his still mud-covered boots. It should have been a relief, hearing that he would be okay, but Roy had never much been a future-thinker. He was a man of the present, always immediately there, shouting and growling, righting things as they came; he was a man of action, of throwing punches or wrapping himself around people, of getting hurt first. But he hadn’t been. The best he could do was win at a stupid game and hope that somewhere, Nolan wasn’t thinking to himself that it had been worth it.
“I want to fucking punch his fucking face in.”
Roy felt Keeley laugh against him.
“Jamie or Nolan?”
“Both,” he said, quickly, which felt true but also didn’t. He wanted to punch Jamie last year, two years ago, five or ten—whenever it was he’d decided that winning a fucking game was more important than his own safety—but he wasn’t about to march in to hospital and add another blank spot into Jamie’s smile. “Mostly Nolan.”
Keeley was quiet for a moment, pressing gently into his shoulders with her fingers and resting her chin there, looking ahead. Then, she sighed and shook her head against him.
“No, you don’t,” said Keeley. “You’re not vengeful like that.”
He could feel his breath rattle in his chest.
“I want it to have been punched,” he said, throwing out a palm in frustration. “I want him to have been off the field before—”
“You wanted to have been there,” said Keeley.
“I wanted—”
“You wanted to have been able to keep him safe,” said Keeley. She pressed a kiss into the top of his shoulder. “That’s what you do. You keep people safe.”
Roy closed his eyes and felt his head drop—there was no need to say the rest of it, the way he heard Keeley sigh and bury herself into his back. No need to point out that he’d failed at that, at what he had now decided to be the main purpose of his life, just as there was no need for her to try and convince him that he hadn’t. She just wrapped her arms round his chest and pulled him close, holding him together and in place.