Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Now, there is the story that must be told, and the story that can’t be told, and sometimes they are the same story.

- Richard Siken, Spork Press Editor's Notes

“So here we are, end of an unusually gorgeous day in late April, match day, and you’ve just won against Coventry City FC. How are you feeling right now?”

All things considered, Jamie Tartt would have to say he’s having a very good day, thank you very much.

“I think we’re all feeling pretty good, yeah,” he tells the reporter walking alongside him, flashing a grin at the camera over her shoulder. Not even the impending two-hour bus ride home from Coventry to Richmond could take away how good he feels about the team’s performance, his own in particular. “Nice to see myself on the score sheet, and that pass I sent to Dani for his goal near the end, the fake-out conversion? That’s highlight reel shit, that was.”

The description of the pass that netted Jamie one of his two assists gets a chuckle out of the reporter, which makes him, in turn, smile wider. There’s the click of a camera, and a ping of satisfaction comes along with it. That photo’s going to turn out well, and he can see it under the recap blog headlines now: AFC Richmond 2 - Coventry City FC 0.

Usually, most of the match day photography takes place inside the facilities themselves, but it’s not exactly a hard rule. Occasionally, they’ll get tailed all the way to the bus for a few more pictures and some walk-and-talk interviews. Sometimes, if someone says something particularly interesting or asks a good question, they’ll get a sound bite out of it, and good press is worth its weight in gold.

Tonight, though, Jamie thinks he’s got something of an idea as to why they’re being followed through the car park. It’s part of the reason why he’s walking a little ahead of the others, why the majority of the attention is on him even though he hadn’t scored. He knows it, and they know it, and he can’t help poking at it. There’s something satisfying in being able to remind them all of why they care so much this time.

“And I’ve gotta say,” Jamie adds, looking away from the reporters to the expanse of the car park stretching out in front of their group, “it always feels better to win the ones no one thinks you’ve got a shot at. After the disaster at Wembley, it’s nice to be the good kind of spectacle for once.”

The rattle of laughter that bounces among the reporters is less sincere this time, and Jamie knows he’s caught them out on it. It’s not as if it had been hard to guess why they were so interested in Richmond tonight. The match that they’ve just won was the first away match they’ve played since their nightmare of a loss against Manchester City, the one it felt like the whole world had watched and cringed at. More than one thinkpiece asking if Richmond was officially in a death-spiral had been written after it.

Even among himself and his teammates, that feeling had been hard to shake. That match— and what had happened after — had loomed over the past two weeks like some kind of ghost. To Jamie, winning against Coventry feels like it’s done some small amount to revive them, and he hopes that the press is going to feel the same. There had been a sense among the team that winning that first away match after losing to City would be a big step, and basking in the satisfied glow of having done it only reinforces that conclusion.

Of course, it hasn’t just been the loss of the match at Wembley that has lingered, making the days that followed feel strange and unsettled. Thankfully, the humiliating and very public scene his father made in the locker room doesn’t seem to have damaged anyone’s opinion of Jamie — a result he had not been counting on. Things were awkward and a bit stiff for the first few days, but that died down quickly. By now, it’s been long enough that his father is no longer at the forefront of everyone’s mind. At the very least, Jamie can’t see it in their eyes every time they look at him.

“It was easy to see that Coach Roy Kent was pleased with your performance, too,” the reporter interviewing him says, seeming to have remembered what she was planning to ask before he brought up the elephant in the car park. “How has it been, adjusting to having him behind the bench?”

Jamie thinks about it for a moment. Roy, particularly, seems to have finally eased up. He’s stopped looking around with a face like guarded thunder, as if he thinks the world is out to get Jamie and he’s the only person standing between it and him. Jamie has to admit that there were things about that look that weren’t necessarily so bad, though. In the days following the incident, he had, more often than not, felt that the world might, in fact, actually be out to get him. Having Roy stand there, looking like a bulldog who was ready to rip someone’s throat out if he had to, wasn’t the worst thing possible.

But things have calmed down now, so that’s not so much of an issue.

Honestly, things with Roy have just been… good in general, which is weird. Good weird, but weird. Jamie had assumed that the hug and the way that Roy brought him home after the match was going to be a one-off, some bizarre, latent protective instinct that kicked into gear when Roy saw him get yelled at and shoved around by his old man. Which — okay, at the time, Jamie had just decided to take what he could get. And then — Well, then the bulldog look had kept up, and even once it faded, things seemed to have shifted between them. After the second goal of the night, a beautifully aimed outside shot by Dani off of Jamie’s aforementioned highlight reel pass, he had even looked over at their coaches and been able to lipread the words Roy was joyfully calling out:

Nicely done, Dani! Attaboy, Jamie!

Rolling his shoulders and shaking his head a little, Jamie snorts in disbelief at the memory. Attaboy indeed. His face twitches in a smile that he can’t suppress for long, though he doesn’t try very hard. A flash goes off somewhere to the left and in front of where he’s walking.

“It’s good,” he says. It’s a shitty, two-word answer, completely unable to encapsulate everything that comes to mind, but they don’t really need to know about the rest of it. Nobody needs to know the rest of it — it’s bad, embarrassing enough Jamie does. “Little bit weird, but good. He’s a good coach.”

There’s another camera flash, which makes sense because that’s the sort of thing press eats up. Jamie lets his smile widen in response. He tips his chin up, pulling in a long, deep breath of the almost-evening air.

They got him giving a cheeky nudge to his club’s current reputation for being an internationally-televised disaster, bolstering his pride in Richmond while he was at it, and publicly saying nice things about Roy Kent. That should be enough for whatever fluff pieces get written when there’s not real football news to write about, and they’ll come off very well this time. The reporter moves on to Dani next, which is only sure to result in even more quotable, feel-good material.

This has been a very good day indeed, shaping up to be a very good night. They won the match. Jamie played well. There’s going to be great photos and sound bites for the Twitter accounts and day-after recaps. He feels practically giddy thinking about it. Everything that they touched — that he touched — has turned to gold today. Jamie’s done his job, done every part of it expertly. The match, the press. Passing on Sam and Dani’s goals, complimenting his teammates in the interview - Jamie has been such a team player today he could teach a fucking seminar on it and hell, he’s proud of that too.

At this point, he usually tucks in his earbuds and listens to music for the rest of the walk down Coventry’s genuinely excessive car park. Not tonight, though. Tonight, Jamie lets the sounds of a few follow-along interviews being conducted behind him, the snapping of camera shutters, and his teammates’ bubble of overlapping voices wash over him. It’s a nice sound. He’s so caught up in it that, earbuds or not, he almost doesn’t hear the voice call out to him.

“Jamie!”

With a stuttering step, he turns to look out into the concrete and metal landscape of the car park, and almost trips. An engine rumbles, and someone pulls away through the vehicles to his right. That’s not the problem, though. The problem is that someone is approaching from in front of him on his other side, moving faster than a regular walking pace, and Jamie recognizes that voice as it shouts his name a second time.

In an instant, the elation, the pride, the happiness — it’s all gone at once, and Jamie is left stopped dead in his tracks. His blood turns to ice, and his pulse skyrockets. The tips of his fingers prickle. Behind him, he can hear the reporter who had just been speaking to him peter off to an awkward, confused pause halfway through asking Dani a question. Jamie can barely breathe.

It’s been long enough now, since the scene in the locker room at Wembley, since the steps Jamie started taking under Doctor Sharon’s advice, long enough without disaster or massive disruption that it’s been almost possible for him to start to believe that James won’t be an issue again. That maybe he’ll take the L and finally decide that enough is enough, that he’s going to leave his son alone.

Which, really. Labouring under that ridiculous belief was a delusion. He’s known his father for far too long. He’d have to be incredibly stupid to think he could get away with believing that. Jamie should’ve known better than to think that at all, even for a moment.

The calculations start automatically running in his mind. James is probably drunk. He’s usually drunk. And he’s angry, because of course he’s angry. He’s made his way through the cars and out into the empty space with the big white ‘drive this way’ arrows painted on it, now coming towards the group of players and reporters from the side, headed straight for Jamie — in full view of everyone. Now that Jamie’s paying attention, another detail pops out: The path James is making is too direct, too intent. Not weaving, not pitching side to side.

Sober. He’s stone cold sober. Which means this probably just went from ‘really bad news’ to ‘an actual fucking emergency.’

Glancing over his shoulder, Jamie registers that heads are turning more and more by the moment, his teammates’ attention aggregating on the approaching figure. They’re getting closer too, closing the gap that he’d created by walking out in front of them. Claustrophobic panic lurches up Jamie’s throat.

“Jamie!” The name rings out for a third time, and that’s already twice too many.

Someone’s fingertips skim the back of Jamie’s shirt like they’re trying to stop him from leaving, trying to pull him back, but he steps out of their reach. Even as he does it, he can’t justify the decision to step towards James instead. Not logically, at least. Instinct tells him to obey, and it’s trained in him too deep to dig out, backed up by some stupid little ages-old reflex that says he has to handle this himself. Keep it in the family. Make sure it doesn’t reach anyone else.

Stepping even farther from the group, Jamie quickens his pace into a near-jog. He lifts a hand, ready to set a palm on his father’s chest and urge him away, back into the rows of cars, behind the bus, anywhere but out here in the open. This is a scene that he’s seen play out a few hundred times, and he’s ten, fourteen, seventeen years old at the same time that he’s twenty-four, getting ready to say hey, you’re drunk, we can’t do this here, you’ll get us thrown out. Jamie is well-practiced at intercepting this before it can get any worse in public, placating James until they can at least get somewhere away from other people. It’s never seemed more vital than it does right now.

It’s not that Jamie necessarily thinks his dad is a danger. (A danger to anyone aside from Jamie, maybe, some snide little voice in the back of his head contributes.) It’s more that he’s embarrassed. He’s so embarrassed that he could die right here in this car park at the thought of anyone seeing this — the thought of Richmond, of his teammates seeing this. Jamie wants to keep the rotten core of his family as something private and unseen, tucked away where only he has to know how ugly it really is. The last thing he wants is for anyone here to see how it has stained him.

Which, really, is a stupid priority to have, given that they’ve already seen it. Everyone who is here with him right now was there in the locker room at Wembley. They all know what Jamie is, that he comes from trash and is the kind of person who gets pushed around and laughed at, called names by some tottering old drunk. Still, that feels different than what’s about to happen here.

That had been a humiliating display, but what would have come after if Coach Beard hadn’t seen James swiftly out the door would have been so much more awful. Jamie knew the look in his eyes as he’d gotten to his feet and promised hell to pay, had seen it time and again before the real violence started. His team, his coaches, Sam and Dani and Ted and Roy, were all going to see him get beat by his dad, probably pretty fucking badly, and it was the stuff of Jamie’s absolute worst nightmares. It hadn’t happened then, thanks to Beard’s timely intervention, but Jamie knows exactly what would have happened if he hadn’t stepped in. The look in those cold blue eyes had sworn it.

“Alright,” Jamie says, “let’s just go over here, yeah?” It doesn’t work, doesn’t even get an acknowledgement. He may as well not have spoken at all.

That same look from the locker room, from so many places before it, is in front of him now, and Jamie can’t seem to get James to move, take this out of the public eye. Of course he can’t. Because the man isn’t drunk, and this isn’t like all the times they’ve done this song and dance before. This is so much more specific, and it promises to be so much worse.

The hand comes up towards his face and Jamie can’t control the flinch, no matter how hard he tries. He knows what comes next, what’s about to happen, except that it doesn’t. A palm settles at the side of his head, holding his cheek in a facsimile of gentleness.

“That’s fucking right,” James says, smug contempt oozing from his voice. “You come when I call you.”

Something about the possessive certainty of it, triumphing over him like they’d been in some kind of battle that James has already won, snaps Jamie out of his directionless stupor. Or, at least, it does so enough for you’re not wanted here, get the fuck away from me to pop into his head. He opens his mouth to say it, to muster any of it out into the world, and nothing happens. There’s just a soundless whistle of air.

“You come when I call you,” James repeats, emphasizing when, his eyes flashing. Renewed, cold fear fizzes down Jamie’s spine. His father’s lip curls, and he speaks loudly, far too loudly for how close he is now. Everyone behind them has to be able to hear this clearly, word for word. “Not when you fucking feel like it, not when you’re done posing for pictures, messing about and wasting my time.”

If Jamie had been thinking right before this, he would’ve already done what he really wanted to do right from that first moment after he stepped away from them: He should’ve gone back. That expression on Roy’s face from the last few weeks, the bulldog one, the one that said ‘fucking try it, anyone, I goddamn dare you’ flashes through Jamie’s mind as he stands there numbly. He should’ve gone back.

But it’s already too late.

Anything he could’ve said, should’ve said, wants to say — telling James to get out of here, that he’s not supposed to be anywhere near the team, calling for security — it all sticks in his throat. Jamie has just enough time to think well, I’ve made a massive fucking mistake, before there’s a hand grasping the front of his shirt, twisting in and shaking him a little. The one holding his face taps his cheek in a firm, condescending little pat that doesn’t even hurt, and Jamie loses the ability to reason whatsoever.

The transition between being a human person with higher thinking capabilities and being a frightened, hunted animal is disorienting. Thought flees, followed by sense. All that’s left is fear. It isn’t even coherent fear, not the awareness of what’s about to happen, how A follows B and turns into C, swing, impact, pain. It’s just a plain, unadorned blitz of terror.

“Came all this way to see you,” the brash, grating voice tells him, still too loud, too close. Other people are yelling somewhere behind them. There’s a car, the sound of scuffling. None of it matters. None of it except for James, who sounds crystal clear, because he isn’t even drunk. “Mate lined up a lead on a job up here, didn’t he, and looks who came to town the next night. Needed a word with you, with my son, since he can’t be arsed to answer my messages anymore, can he? Stuck around for you.”

As he keeps going, pronounces my son like he’s furious with the very concept, James gets closer. His grip in Jamie’s shirt twists, pulling at him, and Jamie takes a step back. It’s barely a stumble, more to keep his balance than anything, but it’s received like a grievous slight.

“Do not fucking walk away from me,” James outright yells this time, and if there’s any way the crowd of onlookers weren’t all listening before, they certainly are now.

Jamie looks over his shoulder at his team just as a camera bulb flashes, blinding him for a moment. He blinks to clear his eyes, frantically searching for anyone he knows, and sees his teammates there, just out of reach. There are reporters between him and them, cameras and recording equipment that Jamie doesn’t pay a moment’s attention to because he can’t afford to spare any. All that he has is focused on picking out the faces behind them, the people effectively blocked by a media barricade.

Isaac is the first one he really sees with any clarity. Isaac, trying to shoulder past them, unable to leverage around an inopportunely parked car, hand stretched out like he’d reach through and pluck Jamie away if he could. Like, even though it’s impossible, he’s trying to anyway.

Something inside Jamie snaps when he sees that. Adrenaline takes out his hearing and replaces it with white noise, but he doesn’t care what’s being yelled at him anymore. None of the kaleidoscope of chaos and sound around him matters, nothing at all matters except for getting away.

Because Jamie’s not ten years old, he’s not fourteen or seventeen, he’s not a cornered animal, and he can walk away. There’s somewhere for him to go back to, people waiting for him, trying to get to him, and if he can just reach them, it will all be okay. If he can just get to Isaac, it will all stop. He’ll be safe.

Another step away, this one bigger. Deliberate.

What happens afterwards takes place in a fast, disjointed set of moments. His father never did take it kindly when Jamie turned away from him.

James grabs him by the collar of his shirt, yanking Jamie back, then letting it go and seizing hold of his arm instead, gripping it so tightly that it’s bound to leave bruises. Jamie lets out an undignified little yelp when it sets him off balance. It’s hard to tell if it’s the sound that does it or if it was already inevitable, but either way, his father’s calloused hand catches him across the face in a hard slap, lighting his cheek on fire.

“You look at me when I talk to you,” James is yelling, and Jamie doesn’t care. It doesn’t matter, it’s not important. He wrenches his arm free and starts back towards Isaac for real.

There’s a reporter in the way, stepping to the side at the exact wrong moment, and Jamie stumbles. That pause is all it takes for James to get ahold of him again, spinning him around and grabbing onto his collar this time. The second slap cuts through a dull roar of sound, deafening in Jamie’s ears against the backdrop of voices. It hurts. He can’t breathe.

All he can make out of what James is shouting is, “—walk away from me!” and then everything pitches sideways. The punch cracks into his jaw, sending a starburst of hot pain through his face and a bloom of blood across his teeth. The force of the blow and the sudden release of James’s grip on his shirt throw Jamie off balance, without any hope of recovery. He falls, tripping against the curb at the end of a parking space, and then there’s the ground, rushing up to meet him.

There’s the ground, and there’s Jamie’s hand slamming into the rough pavement and shooting out from under him, and there’s Jamie’s face, and, well. That’s that, isn’t it?

The Coventry match is the sort of match you dream about as a coach. Now, Roy hasn’t exactly been coaching for long, at least not at a professional level, but he’s had the dreams - the ones where you watch your players execute everything they need to exactly how they need to and take the team to victory without your interference at all.

It was far from a perfect game. They’d gone into halftime nil-nil, but Isaac had rallied the lads with a speech that made the hair on the back of Roy’s neck stand on end, and they got it together. They course-corrected every mistake they made. They had each others’ backs, covered each others’ weak spots, and did every damn thing that Roy wanted to yell from the sidelines without him having to yell anything at all. It wasn’t a perfect game, except for all of the ways that it was.

The high of the experience — watching every moment of how they got to that win — has Roy walking on air all the way out of the building, across the car park towards the bus. He’s talking to Ted, not really paying attention to what he’s saying, just letting out the first things that pop into his mind, in an uncharacteristically chatty mood. Ted seems to be enjoying the change, but not even his jabs at Roy’s sudden affinity for meaningless small talk can bring him down off this one. Not after the disaster at Wembley, how the last few matches at home had felt like they were treading water trying to keep things steady.

Roy doesn’t see it coming. He doesn’t get a strange feeling that something is off, doesn’t sense that things are about to turn. It just suddenly happens, and there’s no time at all to prepare.

A new voice, loud and discordant, has joined the low bubble of sound in the car park. It’s towards the front of the group, beyond where Roy can see. He and Ted exchange a glance, both of their happy expressions freezing in place and then melting away, piece by piece, until they reflect troubled anxiety back at one another. Roy looks away quickly, then starts to speed up. Something in his reflexes, in his instincts, has pinpointed the newcomer’s identity even before his conscious mind does. His heart rate starts picking up and his hands go into angry fists as he shoulders forward, past his players and towards the front of the gaggle of media members. He can hear someone talking- shouting somewhere ahead of him.

That voice, the new one that interrupted their joy and satisfaction, is unfamiliar in the sense that it hadn’t been there a moment ago and definitely has no business being here now, but Roy knows exactly who it is. When he has the realization, it first comes as a string of furious curse words, enough to make a sailor blush or whatever the figure of speech is, and then he thinks James goddamn motherfucking son of a bitch Tartt.

When the name dawns on him, Roy picks up speed automatically, even though his bad knee protests a bit and he knows he’s probably going to end up paying for it later. It has not been a great day, knee-wise, and he shouldn’t really be rushing anywhere, but that doesn’t matter. Shouldn’t isn’t remotely an option right now, not when Roy has spent the past two weeks having on-and-off fantasies about pulverizing this man.

By now, Roy has likely pictured the way it would feel to break James Tartt Sr.’s nose - or his jaw, or any other bone in his cowardly, pathetic, abusive body - a couple hundred times. It buzzed in his knuckles at night when he couldn’t sleep, pulsed at his temples like a headache when he looked at Jamie in the days after and saw how twitchy and fucking ashamed he seemed. Roy had just started to feel like he and Jamie were figuring out how to be around each other, and then there was this. Now, Roy daydreamed about how it would feel to break whichever bone in his abuser’s body was most convenient and that… maybe it shouldn’t have, but it felt like it changed things somewhat.

And maybe now, Roy’s going to actually get the chance to find out how that would feel. For a moment, it occurs to him that, if he actually does kick this man’s ass right here and now, it’s going to be airing on television for longer than he wants to think about, and will probably feature on the front page of every news outlet that remotely knows what football is, and maybe a few of the ones that don’t. Just as quickly, Roy realizes that, frankly, he doesn’t give much of a shit. He doesn’t care about the reporters, doesn’t care about the cameras he can hear going off with their loud, cartoonish clicks. Not even a little bit.

As Roy reaches the front of the pack and rushes forwards, everything goes into slow motion. He moves as fast as he can, reaching back into the place he used to go to when he ran up and down the pitch, and he still doesn’t get there in time. Isaac tries to pull Jamie back before an altercation can start, but Jamie isn’t letting that happen, steps away instead. (What is he doing, the little prick? What the hell is he doing, moving away from them and towards the man that left him sobbing in Roy’s arms not too long ago? Where is his sense of self preservation? Although — Well, that would do it, he doesn’t have any. Not a single shred, and yes, they will be discussing that as soon as this evening’s nightmare has run its course.)

As Roy helplessly watches, Jamie leaves the relative safety of their group. Roy wants to grab him by the collar and yank him back, the way you’d pull someone out of harm’s way a second before they walked into traffic. It feels like watching Jamie walk into traffic, or through the line of fire, or off the edge of a plank over a dark, seething ocean.

Jamie is in danger, and there’s nothing Roy can do to protect him. There are too many people in the way, too many obstacles that keep him from where he’s needed most, leaving him watching uselessly.

James’s loud, rough voice gets even louder, saying something about how he’d come all this way, stayed in town just to see his son. Jamie, bless him, thank god, doesn’t seem to want to listen. He does the smart thing, the thing Roy wishes to almighty fuck he’d have done the second James got within a hundred feet of him, and turns around and tries to leave. Tries to get back to where he’s safe, to the people around Roy who are starting to react, to try and get to Jamie and intervene.

Two weeks ago, that night at Wembley, they had all been frozen. They’d been frozen and unsure what the hell — if anything — they could or should do when that fucker had blustered his way into the locker room and started raising trouble, started pushing Jamie around and saying those vile things to him. Now, it seems like none of them want to be caught in the same situation again, Roy included. They all want to be fast enough to stop Jamie from being hurt this time.

Nobody is fast enough.

When James notices that Jamie’s trying to leave, he isn’t having it. He yanks his son back by the shirt, hauls him around and slaps him across the face, once, twice. The sound of it makes Roy’s heart jolt into his throat and all the air leave his lungs. When Jamie steps back and pulls, like he’s trying to get away, to run — everything abruptly gets so much worse. This time, James punches him, and Jamie’s head snaps to the side. James’s hold on his arm releases at the same time, and the momentum finishes the job.

Jamie goes down, and he goes down hard. He tries to catch himself, but he can’t. His outstretched hand lands at an awkward angle and skids out from under him, dragging his forearm across the curb, and he slams into the pavement face-first, hard enough that Roy swears that he can hear the sick smack of Jamie’s skull bouncing off the ground.

And then Roy sees red.

He surges, the pain in his knee completely pushed into the background by the rush of adrenaline that he can taste in the back of his throat, metallic and sharp. One way or another, he is going to get his hands on James Tartt tonight.

Which is precisely what he does. Roy rounds the last person in front of him, some rail-thin man about his age with hungry eyes, and is already reaching, grabbing two fistfuls of James’s shirt and shoving him as hard as he can when he comes within range. The only thing he cares about is getting that man as far away as possible from Jamie, who lies motionless on the ground.

That’s actually not true. There’s one thing he cares about just a little bit more, which is Jamie himself. But there’s nothing that he can do for Jamie until he’s sure that this man can’t haul him up just to sock him again, or — god forbid — rear back and kick his ribs in like Roy is suddenly very afraid that he’s gearing up to do. So, first thing’s first.

“You fucking think about trying to touch him again and you will fucking regret it, I fucking promise,” Roy says. It’s not quite a shout, but his voice resounds, even in his own ears. He punctuates the words with another push, planting one hand in the middle of James’s chest in a flat-palmed shove.

It doesn’t knock James to the ground, but only because a car gets in the way. He bounces off the side of the silver sedan, and Roy catches him by the front of the shirt again. It’s half to make sure he stays in place, half to make sure that Roy’s message is good and received. Sometimes people like this don’t back down, even when it’s in their own best interest.

Before the situation can further devolve, a distinctly accented voice cuts through the background noise.

“Roy!” Ted calls over. He sounds stiff and terse, maybe even angry. Roy’s never heard him talk like that before. He’d be more annoyed at someone trying to rein him in if it didn’t strike him as likely more for Jamie’s sake then anything else. “Roy! Leave it and get over here, come on now.”

It’s easier to follow that order than Roy would have expected. The situation is fairly well-controlled now. There are a dozen angry footballers standing in a semicircle around James. There’s another priority that needs Roy’s attention more. He peels his fingers away one by one, prying them out of his grip on James’s shirt like his hand itself is reluctant to let go.

“Someone fucking call security on that waste of air,” Roy can’t help but throw as a final parting message, just to be sure. He glances back at James, who’s still leaning against the car, breathing heavily, mouth opening and closing like he’s trying to come up with some kind of response. Roy sneers at him, contempt twisting his features as he takes in the red-faced fury, the camera flashes glinting off wide eyes.

Then, he rounds on the gaggle of journalists gawking with their cameras out. Brilliant lights strobe faster as they take more photos, picture after picture immortalizing this moment: Roy, fist clenched so hard that his knuckles hurt, chest heaving with rage of his own. The crowd of Richmond players talking back and forth in a rapid, confused buzz. Jamie on the ground.

“And you,” Roy starts, “you — you fucking vultures, put your goddamn cameras away before I start smashing them! The fuck is wrong with you? This is disgusting!” He doesn’t just yell, he bellows it, expelling as much force and energy as he can muster. The words come out at such a volume that he’s surprised his voice doesn’t crack.

Roy doesn’t just shout the way he does because he’s blindingly, incandescently angry. It's also because he knows that he needs to get it out now, needs to exorcize as much of the fury and disgust that he can feel like molten metal in his bloodstream before he turns around. By the time he walks back to where Jamie is still on the ground, curled up on his side, Roy has already thrown the anger somewhere else — at least, enough of it that, when he kneels down, it's not on his face anymore, and will take some time to build up again.

At first glance, Jamie looks bad. He’s curled up on his side at the rise of the curb, one of his arms stuck under him, the other up over his head. It’s a small comfort that he’s visibly breathing, his ribcage rising and falling in short, stuttering little pants. Isaac and Dani are crouching next to him, looking thunderous and terrified, respectively. When he called Roy over, Ted had been standing, apparently justifiably concerned that his assistant coach would get arrested if he gave Tartt Sr. the thorough ass-kicking he deserved. Now, as Roy crosses the remaining distance in a jog, he’s kneeling on the ground with the others.

A quick glance around tells Roy that the rest of the team has circled up around them now. He can’t see the reporters any more, nor can he see James. Roy’s players — Jamie’s teammates — are standing shoulder-to-shoulder in a solid wall of Richmond red and blue, blocking the media’s line of sight. Their faces are turned out towards the rest of the world as they shield those inside the bubble from it, but Roy can imagine their expressions, and it gives him a little rush of proud satisfaction. He can hear Beard’s voice somewhere on the outside of the circle, and Nate’s along with it.

All of that stops mattering as soon as the quiet sound reaches Roy’s ears. It’s somewhere between a groan and a whimper, nearly muffled out of audible range, and he whips back around to stare at Jamie’s prone figure. Some kind of a decision must have passed between Ted and Isaac while Roy was distracted getting a read on the general situation, because manager and captain move nearly simultaneously.

“Easy there, Jamie,” Ted says, voice shot through with an undercurrent of frail fissures. He sounds rattled, which is an observation that Roy kicks himself for a second after he makes it. Fucking — of course he’s rattled. They’re all rattled. “I’m just gonna put my hand on your shoulder, here, alright, and Isaac’s gonna be on your other side, and we’re gonna help you get turned over so we can get a look at how you’re doin’. We just want to make sure you’re okay, that’s all.”

The instinctive snap that he’s not okay — how the fuck could he be okay, out of all of the stupidest, most pointless things a person could say why would he pick that one? — gets almost all the way out of Roy’s throat before he bites down on the words and swallows them back. It won’t help anyone — certainly not Jamie — to let his temper loose on Ted. At least Ted is doing something. That’s more than Roy can say for himself, kneeling there on the ground, at a loss for what he’s supposed to say, what he’s supposed to do.

Ted’s hand, as promised, lands on Jamie’s right shoulder, the one that isn’t trapped between his body and the pavement. Even though the touch is gentle — painstakingly so — Jamie jolts with a heavy, uncontrolled flinch. Ted leaves his hand where it is, murmuring, it’s alright, just me, it’s alright. He waits for a few moments, displaying what Roy deems to be an impressive amount of patience and restraint, then begins pulling lightly. Aided by Isaac’s steady grip and Jamie’s own cooperation, Ted slowly gets him rolled onto his back. Roy can’t do anything but watch. Hovering behind Isaac, Dani seems to be in the same predicament, his bright face warped in worried heartbreak.

When Jamie’s face comes into view, even though it’s somewhat shadowed by the protective barrier circled around them and blocking most of the direct light, Roy has to bite back a string of colourful curses at the sight. There’s blood streaming down the side of his face. A lot of blood. He has to remind himself firmly, several times over, that head wounds always bleed like that. Roy should remember well enough, given the time that he took a cleat to the head a few years back. Head wounds always bleed, and it probably just looks a lot worse than it is.

The blood seems to be primarily coming from a cut high on Jamie’s face, a nasty laceration that splits his left eyebrow. It looks like he’s been gone at with a cheese grater. Little bits of gravel are ground into the scrapes that stretch from the side of his forehead, down his cheek, past his eye, all the way near to his jawline. His mouth is split pretty badly as well. Not his lip, Roy notes quickly with a nauseated little twist in his gut, his mouth, both sides marred by uneven wounds. The bottom got it worse, probably bad enough to need stitches.

Given the state of his face, Roy nearly misses the damage to Jamie’s arm entirely. He only notices when Jamie brings it up in a slow, wobbly arc, just barely stopped from poking at the wound in his lower lip by Isaac carefully catching him around the wrist. When he fell, he’d tried to break the landing by sticking out his left arm. It hadn’t worked, clearly. Probably something to do with the angle of the curb at the exact place where he’d fallen. Whatever the reason, the sleeve of Jamie’s long t-shirt has been snagged and torn, and what Roy can see through the tattered edges of fabric isn’t pretty. Mostly, it’s just more blood, dark and thick, dripping from where Isaac holds his wrist to the front of his shirt.

Jamie’s hazy eyes squint up at his own arm, seeming surprised by what he sees there. His mouth opens a little, like he’s going to say something, but no sound comes out. All that happens is that his face contorts in pain, eyes scrunching tightly shut once more, bloodied teeth gritted hard.

“Jamie.” It’s Ted again, broken free from the stunned silence that they’d all fallen into when the extent of the damage came into view. He speaks slightly louder than his usual conversational volume, but in a gentled, soothing tone. “Jamie, buddy, are you with us?”

The only response that gets is a further exaggeration of the grimace on Jamie’s face. His head rolls to the side, only to jolt back when the injured side of his face starts to brush the ground. Jamie makes a sound at the back of his throat, hurt and confused. His eyes are confused and unfocused, and foreboding starts to creep up Roy’s spine.

“Head injury protocol,” he says, looking away from Jamie and catching Ted’s attention. “We need to go through the—”

“Right, right.” Ted nods, glancing up at the sky and pausing for a moment before turning his focus fully to Jamie again. He shifts on the ground, farther into Jamie’s line of vision. “Jamie, I need to ask you a couple questions, okay? I need to know you can hear me, and you understand what I’m saying.”

Another indistinct sound. Then, Jamie clears his throat and says, “Yeah.”

It’s more of a croak than anything, hoarse and quiet. Roy barely refrains from recoiling. He’s never heard Jamie sound like that, not even when Wembley happened — small and scared. Trembling. Hurt.

“Okay,” Ted mutters under his breath. “Okay.” It seems almost like he’s buying time, trying to figure out what to say next. That doesn’t really make sense to Roy — they’ve both been there a dozen times while the medical staff ran concussion protocol. Roy thinks he could probably rattle most of it off without having to think very hard, and he’d have assumed Ted could too. “Uh, President. Jamie, can you tell me who the President is?”

Roy’s attention leaves Jamie again. He doesn’t really want to look away, but he doesn’t have a choice when Ted says that. “Ted,” he starts, about to ask the man what the hell is wrong with him, but he doesn’t get very far before Ted shakes his head and lets out a short, nervous chuckle.

“Wait, no, scratch that. Can’t ask that here, can I? That’s not, ah— So, who’s the— Who’s your— Ah, shoot. What’s the Queen’s name — does that work? Do y’all use that as a concussion assessment question here?”

This isn’t helping. Roy takes a moment to stifle his annoyance, then reaches out to tap Ted on the back, indicating that he plans to take over now. “Jamie,” he says, voice raised hopefully enough to get his attention but not loud enough to frighten him. He tries to be gentle, kind in the way he speaks, but he’s not sure how well he manages it. Roy is shit at this sort of thing. “Jamie, it’s Roy, can you look at me?”

Brown eyes dart around a few different places before meeting Roy’s, and he nods encouragingly.

“There we are, that’s it. Do you remember what happened?”

Jamie’s head moves a little like he’s trying to nod, but he gives up quickly, making an affirmative hum instead.

“Alright, good. That’s good. Can you tell me what happened to you?”

As soon as Roy asks the question, Jamie breaks eye contact. “Got hit.”

It’s an obstinate, blunt little mumble, but it’s technically an accurate summary of events, so Roy accepts it. “We just finished a match, can you tell me where we played today?”

Jamie doesn’t answer. His focus drifts towards Ted, frowning when he sees the manager hovering over him. Ted doesn’t volunteer anything helpful, still tongue-tied.

“Hey, Jamie,” Roy says, as loud as he dares. “Jamie, look at me.” A flicker of eye contact, just a moment. Jamie’s attention lands somewhere at Roy’s chest, which is good enough. “What city are we in?”

“I— We’re, ah. M-Manchester.” Jamie stumbles over the word, starting to breathe faster. Blood stains his teeth. He raises his hand again, reaching for his face, and again Isaac stops him, restraining his wrist with very little effort. His eyes jump from person to person, then out towards the sky before he squeezes them tight shut.

Roy doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t know what to do. Manchester, Jamie said, which is a two hour drive from Coventry on a good day. While Jamie’s general demeanour raised red flags — the disorientation, the repeated loss of focus, how long he’d laid there without moving — he’d at least answered the questions correctly. Until now. That answer, though? That answer provoked serious concern about whether Jamie was aware what year it is, never mind what city they’re in, and that’s what starts to scare Roy.

If Jamie’s got a head injury — a serious one, a brain injury — then things have just gone from very bad to absolutely catastrophic. Can a person even get a brain injury from being punched? How hard do you have to fall and hit the ground to be hurt that severely?

“We need to call a hospital. An ambulance.” However scared Roy suddenly feels, Dani sounds several magnitudes more petrified. Before anyone can respond to him, though, Jamie’s eyes fly open and he starts to sit up.

Quickly determining that keeping him on the ground is probably going to do more harm than good, Ted and Isaac guide Jamie upright, supporting him on either side until he can sit up on his own. He sways a little, and although he doesn’t look like he’s going to fall backwards the second they move away, Ted leaves one hand on Jamie’s back anyways. He stays perched on the curb, sitting beside and a little above Jamie, watching him closely.

“No hospital.” It’s the first thing that Jamie has said without being prompted with a question, and it’s hard to tell if the slight slur in his words is due to his split lips or because he’s bleeding in his brain.

The possibility of the second option is what does it for Roy, speechlessness broken by the sudden arrival — into his head and straight out his mouth — of, “You have got to be fucking joking me.”

The slight jerk that goes through Jamie makes Roy regret having said it more than the reproving look from Ted, though not by much. It had to be said, because the idea was patently ridiculous. Jamie is bleeding all over the place because he just got punched hard enough to knock him to the ground, where his head cracked incredibly loudly into concrete. He needs to go to hospital right now — no detours, no arguments.

Except, of course, even Jamie-with-a-head-injury appears to still fundamentally be Jamie, because he absolutely does start to argue.

“Don’t want to go,” he says in a strained mumble. Any other day, Roy might be tempted to deem the insistence petulant. Today, though, right now, the thought of describing him that way seems revolting. “’S not that bad.”

“Not that bad?” Roy repeats, incredulous. “How can you possibly be saying that right now?”

“Because I’ve had a lot worse!” The response is louder than Jamie seems capable of, harsh and annoyed. His shoulders heave from the effort, and he leans heavily against Ted, who supports his weight easily.

One of Ted’s hands rubs across Jamie’s shoulders, and it makes Jamie shiver. It seems to be some kind of instinct, because the look on Ted’s face is alarmingly vacant. He doesn’t say anything, looking somewhere off to Roy’s left with an off expression and skin paled beyond its usual shade. Something, —maybe a part of him that picks up on things that his conscious mind doesn’t, maybe all the ambient anxiety from the entire terrible situation — makes him scrutinize Ted a little more closely than he ordinarily would. The man seems to be breathing steadily, at least, which is something, but it’s almost too steady. Every inhale is exactly the same, every exhale measured against the last.

If something is up with Ted, though, it’s going to have to wait. Because it seems like whatever it is, he’s at least got a handle on it, but Jamie is bleeding all over the place while insisting he doesn’t need medical attention, which is definitely a ‘right now, immediately,’ problem.

“Jamie, you hit your head,” Roy tells him. It is becoming clear that he’s going to be in charge of taking point on this particular issue. “You could have a concussion. A — a whatever they call it when there’s bleeding in your brain. You need, like — You need scans, and medications or something, you definitely need a doctor. This is not the time to be a tough guy. You’ve got nothing to prove here.”

The expression on Jamie’s face isn’t reassuring. It cycles through a couple of things too fast for Roy to catch any of them, but all of it makes him nervous.

“Not about…” Jamie shakes his head. Or starts to, anyway. He only gets as far as one ‘shake’ before he wobbles enough that Ted gets a tighter grip on him and both Isaac and Dani make like they’re ready to catch him if he collapses in a heap. “’S not about tough. I just — I’m not bleeding in my head.”

“Jamie…” When Roy starts, he doesn’t get very far before he’s interrupted by the subject of his cautionary, warning tone.

“I’ve had ‘em before. Concussions. Know what they feel like. I’m fine, ‘m just…” Jamie winces, reaching up to swipe at his face and ignoring the way that Dani hisses his name and the way Isaac moves like he’s going to try and grab his wrist again, only to abort that plan halfway through. The sleeve of Jamie’s shirt, the side not ripped from the fall, isn’t made from an absorbent material. It just smudges the red around, drawing sideways swipes through the trails. “Not that bad off, just looks bad because of, y’know.” He twitches his fingers upwards, indicating the mess. “All the blood.”

Amazingly, that really doesn’t make Roy feel better about things.

“It looks worse than it is,” Jamie insists. “I know what worse would feel like.”

There’s a grotesquely perfect timing in the way that the explanation —the almost exasperated argument that this is far from the first time that Jamie has been in the position of assessing how badly his father has hurt him — is followed almost immediately by a sudden rise from a voice from outside their little bubble. Roy doesn’t need to be able to place the voice himself to know who’s yelling indistinctly, followed by overlapping voices growing sharper and louder in response. It’s made perfectly clear by the way Jamie flinches again, and fuck does Roy ever hate seeing that more and more each time.

The urge to get up — turn around and go back there, make his way through the cluster of people that separate them now and give in to the desire that he has thus far suppressed and just fucking kill James — is overwhelming. Roy would do it happily, with his bare hands if necessary. But he shoves it down and locks it away, because Jamie needs Roy here, with him, and not over there, committing homicide. So instead he reaches out and takes ahold of Jamie’s knee, tightening his grip in a way he hopes conveys a message of we’re over here, and he’s over there, and he can’t touch you as long as I’m between you and him.

“So I’m saying no ambulance, no hospital,” Jamie says eventually. He does nothing to dislodge Roy’s hand, which says a lot about his current state, but his voice is clear enough. He’s twitchy and strange, but he doesn’t seem ‘bleeding behind a cracked skull’ strange, at least. Probably. “I just…” As he talks, his voice goes quieter. Jamie lifts his uninjured hand towards his face again but stops before it touches anything. He sounds like he’s making some kind of horrible confession. “It’d be a big deal. Don’t want the attention. The cameras. Can’t… Can’t handle the cameras. I just… want to go back to Richmond. Please.”

After he says it, Jamie’s chin dips down towards his chest. For long, empty moments, he sits there and just breathes, deep inhales of air turning ragged when they whoosh back out of his lungs. Ted is the one who eventually voices agreement, giving in to Jamie’s pleas for an ambulance not to be called. Roy wants to argue but he can’t, not when presented with all of that. As long as it doesn’t seem like he’s actively bleeding to death or about to have a stroke or a seizure or something, Jamie ought to be able to make his own decisions about what happens to him right now. If he gets any worse, Roy will call triple-nine himself, but for now, it gets to be Jamie’s choice.

Besides, something in what he said is gnawing at Roy now. It churns in his mind, throwing up the persistent feeling that there’s something he should be remembering, something important about what’s going on. And then all at once, there it is.

Cameras. The fucking cameras.

Roy's mind races through all the possible ways that this shit could get out and where it could go, the news outlets, social media, fucking Twitter, and then the second part of it hits him — Keeley. Oh, fucking hell, Keeley. As soon as this hits the internet she's going to know about it, and that cannot be how she finds out. She needs to be warned first. Roy needs to catch her and warn her before she can log onto her Twitter feed and see a photo of Jamie's busted-up face or a video clip of the moment that he'd been tossed to the ground like some kind of fucking ragdoll his father was finished playing with.

Seeing that is going to hurt her badly enough already, and given her job, she’s going to have to see it one way or another. If Keeley sees what’s happened to Jamie online before she’s warned about it by someone she knows… That just can’t happen. Roy can’t allow that to happen.

Now that the debate about calling an ambulance is done, Jamie seems to have deflated. Ted makes sure that he’s alright to stay upright and then gets up to speak to Beard about something. Roy shifts to take his place when he stands, sitting on the curb next to Jamie, who’s drawn both his knees up to his chest and is resting his arms on them. His back moves slowly under Roy’s hand, moved there from his knee to replace Ted’s, and Roy can feel him shaking, just a little bit, every so often. His bloodied face is out of view, which doesn’t make this any easier.

Conflict tears at Roy. He wants to stay with Jamie, wants to stick right by him, keep a hand on him and make sure that he knows Roy is there. That Roy’s going to protect him, that he’s safe. But he also knows he needs to call Keeley, and he needs to do that right now. Every second he wastes is another second that those journalists — if they could even be called that — could be working on some kind of post that’s sure to go viral the second that it hits the internet. Indecision is not a feeling that Roy is familiar or comfortable with. He hates it, as it turns out, churning in and ripping at his gut. It’s a physical feeling in his hands, even, like he’s being tugged in different directions.

Dani is talking to Jamie now, and Jamie’s responding in quiet little hums that Roy can feel under his palm. This is enough of a distraction that when Roy notices out of the corner of his eye that Ted has returned from speaking to Beard, he blurts it out immediately.

“I’ve got to call Keeley,” he says, keeping his voice low and looking right at Ted. He doesn’t direct it at all to Jamie, and is kind of glad that Jamie doesn’t seem to be able to process much outside of whatever Dani’s saying. He doesn’t need to be worrying about this, and trying to explain to him exactly why it’s so urgent for Roy to get ahold of Keeley right now, now, now, is liable to do nothing but freak him out even worse.

Ted kneels back down next to him and considers Roy for a moment, then nods, his face going somehow even more drawn and serious than it already had been. It’s an odd, wrong look on him, and Roy hates seeing it. He hates the deadly serious look on Ted’s face, he hates Jamie shaking and bleeding next to him and not saying a word, he hates the entire profession of journalism and whoever the fuck it is who invented the goddamn internet. Roy hates the absolute guts out of every single stupid little fraction of this whole horrible nightmare.

“I’ve got him,” Ted tells Roy, nodding again. He seems to know why Roy’s telling him this, even without an explanation, and for once the uncanny ability that man has to read people’s minds every so often isn’t creepy or absolutely infuriating. It’s the best thing that’s happened to Roy all evening. “I’ve got him, go call her.”

With Jamie left safely in Ted's hands, Roy gets up and walks swiftly a few paces away. He can't go any farther, can't bring himself to leave the still-solid human wall where he can keep eyes on Jamie, but gets at least far enough that, should he come out of the fog he’s drifted into, Jamie won't be able to hear what he's saying.

In a stroke of meagre luck, Keeley answers quickly, beginning a cheerful greeting that Roy cuts off before it can barely make it out of her mouth.

"I'm sorry, I really need you to listen to me for a second. I don't have long and I have to go but there's something you need to hear from me right now before you see it online," he rushes out. The information needs to get out as quickly as possible and Roy has no time to figure out how to be gentle about this, but he’s sure he's doing himself and Keeley absolutely no favours with the way he's wording things.

He can imagine her so clearly he may as well be right there with her: Keeley’s answered from the car, from the sound of the audio, the call connecting through the Bluetooth link and interrupting her ‘running errands’ playlist. She’ll have still been bopping her head a bit to the song, some part of her brain still playing it though the speakers no longer do. And when Roy said what he said, the calm ease will have stopped. In his mind's eye, the smile disappears off her face, her eyes narrow, and she glances quickly at the screen before focusing back on the road. He’s scaring the shit out of her.

"Roy, you're scaring the shit out of me," she says, her bright voice gone dim and flat.

“I know, and I’m sorry, but first off, he's okay. That's the important part. Jamie's okay."

There’s a very brief, very tense pause, and Roy can hear how frightened she is in it, the same way that he can hear it in her voice. “Jamie? What — Roy, what's this about Jamie —"

"Keeley, please." He doesn't yell, but the words come out in a snap that has her immediately falling quiet. Roy winces but doesn’t apologize. He doesn’t have the time to, and he knows she’ll forgive him for it as soon as she understands. "I really have to go, but he's fine. Well, no, he's not fine, but he's not badly injured, and the pictures are going to look a lot worse than it is. Okay? Jamie's going to be alright."

"Okay." It's a single-word response, clipped and nervous.

"Jamie's dad showed up tonight after the game," Roy explains. He wants to get through this as quickly and directly as he can so he can get to the part where he can tell Keeley everything is as okay as it possibly can be, thereby reassuring whatever much-worse fear he's surely about to strike in her, and then get back to the more pressing issue of his immediate surroundings.

"He got aggressive, attacked Jamie. Grabbed him and smacked him, once or twice I think, and uh — punched him, knocked him down. Jamie hit his head on the ground, ended up bleeding pretty good, but — But," he has to repeat when he hears a horrified, high-pitched sound start from the other end of the line, surely some kind of question or exclamation that he doesn't have time for, "it's just a split lip and a little cut on his forehead, some bruising, and he scraped his arm. He's gonna be okay, we’re not even forcing him to go to hospital, so you know that he's gonna be alright. We wouldn't be bringing him straight home if it were worse than that. You know we wouldn't."

‘A split lip and a little cut on his forehead, some bruising, and he scraped his arm’ is a woeful understatement, and Roy is going to deserve however pissed she might be at him for downplaying it, but she doesn’t need any more reasons to panic. Not when they’re still all the way up here in Coventry, and she’s down there in London, and there’s nothing she can do to help.

"Pictures," is what Keeley eventually says, her voice sounding leagues more composed than Roy figured he had the right to expect at the moment, and he's both grateful to and proud of her. "You said something about pictures, why are there pictures?"

"Reporters." Roy spits the word like it's poison in his mouth, and it tastes just as acid. "Fucking bastards had fucking cameras out and started taking photos as soon as things went bad. Pretty sure somebody probably got video too, that’s why I had to get ahold of you before I got on the bus. I didn't want you to see it before I told you what happened. I gotta get back now though, I've gotta..."

"Right, yeah," Keeley says in a rush, "you go do what you have to. Look after him, yeah?"

"Yeah," Roy agrees. Some of the tension in him, the jittering nerves of keyed up adrenaline, has eased. Not much, just a fraction, but enough to matter. "We will."

"And — Roy?" She catches him just as he's about to hang up, and he pauses, waiting for her to continue. "You're bringing him home when you get back."

"Yeah, I am," he says, confirming without a moment's thought. It's a decision that he'd already made without realizing, a background conclusion that he'd come to without his brain's conscious permission. Now that he's acknowledged it, though, it seems obvious. There's no other way forward that makes sense.

"And we're gonna take care of him."

"Yeah, we are," Roy confirms again, another small bit of the mess roiling in his gut calming.

"Good. Good, alright. Okay. See you soon."

"See you soon." Hanging up the phone, Roy is already walking back to the others by the time he's stowed it away in his jacket pocket. He reaches where Ted and Isaac are sitting with Jamie and crouches back down in front of them, giving a quick look around to gauge how the situation has changed.

Jamie still looks about the same, no better but at least not any worse than he'd been when Roy walked the short distance away. They’ve moved him a few feet, and he’s now sitting against a pillar that had once been painted bright yellow but since grown dingy and faded, the way paint tends to get in a car park. One of his arms, the one that he'd used to try and break his fall, is laid out over his knee, hanging in front of him in the air. A trail of blood has collected from the deep scrapes that run up his forearm, drops hanging from the end of his little finger and then falling to spatter the pavement. It makes a bolt of nausea strike through Roy's gut.

"Hey," he greets, voice muffled by the sleeve of his other arm, into which he's pressed his face. The shirt he's wearing is going to be absolutely ruined, the Richmond blue fabric now thoroughly stained with blood from his messed-up face, the sleeve of his scraped arm ripped and torn along the lines of the wounds.

It’s too much blood. Even though Roy knows head wounds bleed like this — that it’s just shocking because blood is supposed to shock you when you see it — it still seems like far, far too much.

His attention is drawn by someone clearing his throat and in an instant Roy is on his feet, ignoring his screaming knee in favour of turning to confront the intruder, his fist clenched at his side and ready to swing for any reason necessary. It doesn't prove necessary, because the person standing there, having cleared his throat, and now looking whiter than a sheet of copy-paper and just as flimsy, is only Will. The kit man stands there holding out a plain white towel with a blue border, an earnest expression on his nervous face.

"It's clean," Will says, gesturing a little with the towel. "For the, uh, for..."

Suddenly understanding, Roy's eyebrows raise and he takes the towel, nodding at the kid. "Right," he says, too occupied with a half-dozen other things to bother feeling too bad for nearly swinging on Will. Without paying another moment's attention to anything else, Roy kneels back down in front of Jamie.

"Oi, give me your face," he says, voice deliberately lowered and softened. Contrary to what some people might think, Roy does actually know that he sounds like someone who might be hired to play a frightening giant in one of those kids movies he's seen with Phoebe, and at the moment, he would really like to avoid giving Jamie another reason to flinch away from him. Every time it happens, it feels like someone's reached into Roy's chest and yanked on something that he didn't know was there, and it hurts more than should be possible.

In response to the quiet request, Jamie makes a confused sound in his throat and lifts away from his arm just enough to frown out at Roy. He's still bleeding, another fresh pulse of blood surging from the cut through his eyebrow as Roy watches. It's saturated his sleeve and dripped onto the ground by his shoes, and holy hell is Roy glad that he called Keeley to warn her. Jamie's face looks like a fucking crime scene.

(Jamie's face is a fucking crime scene.)

Swallowing back that thought, Roy waves the towel a little, careful not to breach Jamie's space with it just yet. "Gotta get some of that off of you before we load onto the bus, yeah?"

The way that Jamie frowns at the towel like he's not entirely sure what it is and what's going on, expression hazy and strange, makes Roy momentarily significantly more worried. Maybe things are far worse than he’s allowed Jamie to convince him they are. A moment later, though, something else comes to mind.

After the incident in the locker room, there had been a lot of reasons as to why leaving Jamie alone was a bad idea, so Roy had brought him back to his own place. Atfirst, he’d parked himself on the edge of the mattress and sat with Jamie until he managed to fall asleep. They hadn't talked about it, they'd just done it, navigating the negotiation of this sentry watch through a series of expressions and little shrugs. Talking would have been risky — they were never good with saying the right thing to each other.

Then, later, with Jamie passed out in the other room, the adrenaline of the evening leaving him exhausted, Roy had ended up pulling out his phone and doing a few Google searches. He hadn't been able to shake the thought of how Jamie had stood there in front of the bench and stared out at nothing, seemingly not registering anything that was happening around him and then flinching so hard when Roy had approached him that his entire body seized up under Roy's touch. Needing to do something to calm the helpless anger still tingling in his hands at his own inability to get his shit together and step in sooner, Roy had done the only thing he could think of: he’d researched a little. He'd read a few pages about abuse and trauma, and a few of the words that he'd learned from them come to mind now. Triggers and dissociation seem particularly likely, given the circumstances.

"Right," Jamie mumbles, lifting his head fully and reaching up to wipe at the side of his face with his uninjured arm. The sleeve is already so soaked through with blood that it does nothing but smear it around on his cheek, causing him to wince when he presses on what will surely develop into a patch of spectacularly nasty bruising over the next couple of hours. He reaches out then, with the hand he'd used to break the fall, the one that also has blood on it, but Roy doesn't give him the towel.

"Probably easier for me to just... ‘Cause you can't see it, and all. If that's alright." It feels weird to be acting so cautiously with Jamie — someone whose relationship with Roy has always been characterized by the two of them grating against each other like jagged sheets of torn metal that wouldn't fit right — but that's just how it has to be right now. Roy gets the feeling that maybe nobody's been careful with Jamie in a long, long time, maybe not ever, and fuck if he's going to touch the kid now without his consent. The last thing that's going to help this situation is for Roy, who'd once memorably yelled at Jamie that he was going to kill him, to just start grabbing at his face without warning or permission.

"Oh, right," Jamie says, still in that strange, off little mumble. He swallows hard, Adam's apple bobbing visibly in his throat, and then tilts his head up. His focus skitters off to the side, face turned towards Roy but eyes refusing to look directly at him. "Do what you've gotta do then, I don't give a shit."

It's not exactly a response that puts Roy at ease, but they've gotta get through this quickly, so he'll take it.

Something enters his peripheral vision and Roy glances to the side to see a bottle of water — sealed and brand-new, thus uncontaminated by germs from the outside world — being held out to him. Will is offering it again, the boy's young face twisted still in an anxious frown. Roy nods his thanks and accepts the bottle, steeling his nerves for the strange job that he’s about to take on. This wasn’t in the duties described to him when he was hired on to coach at Richmond, that’s for sure.

There’s a small crowd around them at this point, one that Roy mostly ignores. If they know what’s good for them, they’ll stay out of his way. He cracks the lid of the bottle and gives Jamie what he hopes is a reassuring look. Jamie doesn’t take much notice, eyes directed at the ground somewhere next to Roy’s knee.

Jamie flinches at the first contact between the corner of the towel wetted from the water bottle and his skin. It’s not a surprise — Roy would’ve actually been surprised if he hadn’t flinched — but it still hurts to see. Gritting his own teeth, Roy swallows, ignores the startle, and keeps going. He drags the fabric over Jamie’s jaw, the water-soaked towel leaving behind a pinkish, lightened streak in its wake. The second pass pulls a little at Jamie’s lower lip, the one with the more severe split in it, and a quiet sound of pain makes Roy wince.

“Sorry,” he mutters, “sorry.” If there were anything more helpful to be said here, Roy would say it. At this point he would be tempted to say the first thing that comes to mind whether it was particularly helpful or not, but there’s nothing forthcoming to say. It’s like the interior of Roy’s head has been emptied and replaced with the static of a radio station that’s gone out of range.

Jamie doesn’t respond to the apology. He doesn’t seem to be too tuned into what’s going on, though he does as he’s directed promptly and cooperatively whenever Roy prompts him to move his face with a faint nudge. Swallowing down the immediate urge to reject Jamie’s obedience, Roy instead repays it by proceeding as quickly and carefully as he can with the cleanup. He avoids the injuries themselves as much as possible, cataloguing them as he does.

The cut in Jamie’s forehead is nasty, and Roy’s face twists into a deep frown as he wipes away the blood around it. It starts about halfway to his temple and rips through his eyebrow, and seems to be the source of most of the bleeding. Thankfully, it’s not bleeding quite so actively by now, but every so often, Roy has to catch a new drop rolling past Jamie’s eye and onto skin that he’s already cleaned.

Roy’s good knee grinds into the ground, the rough surface painful even though the fabric of his trousers. His bad knee aches, though it doesn’t support the majority of his weight. He doesn’t care, shoving his own discomfort aside and focusing on keeping his hands steady. Jamie’s heart is racing, which Roy knows because he can feel it in the pulse hammering away where he’s got a palm braced to hold Jamie still. There’s a tremor, too, one that he can feel shiver periodically under his hand.

With a deliberately slow breath that comes out like a sigh, Roy pulls his hands away from Jamie and looks down at the towel. He’s almost out of water. The bottle sitting on the ground is maybe a quarter full, looking more like carelessly discarded garbage than a tool of medical care. The towel is soaked, streaked red and pink. Roy grimaces as he wrings it out and pours the remaining water onto it. He shakes out the saturated fabric, ridding it of the excess liquid, then turns back to Jamie.

“Alright,” Roy says, mildly and distantly proud that his voice sounds as calm and casual as he’s managed to keep it, “about finished here. Looking a lot less like an extra from a ‘90s slasher movie, so that’s an improvement.”

The joke was a risk, but it pays off when Jamie gives a very quiet, very small, but nevertheless audible huff of a laugh. The relief that Roy feels is dizzying.

“Just got this eye here left, if you can close it for just a moment,” he goes on, trying to use the same tone that he used to make a joke about movies. Casual. Keep it casual. “Quite a lot of blood here, and it’d probably be good if your eye didn’t get glued open or something. Can’t be comfortable.”

For a moment, it seems like Jamie’s going to draw the line there, and Roy can’t honestly say he wouldn’t be a tiny bit glad if he did. Kneeling here in Coventry City’s car park — washing blood off Jamie Tartt’s face with a towel and a water bottle while trying to avoid the more fucked-up parts — is weird enough for both of them. Making him close his eyes so Roy can finish the job in the most delicate way possible seems like it’s only going to make a weird situation weirder.

But Jamie eventually nods and slowly, hesitantly closes his eyes, and Roy’s not about to make him sit on a two hour bus ride home with an eye stuck half-open or worse with congealing blood because he’s a little out of his depth. Swallowing past the lump in his throat, Roy twists the towel until he holds only a corner of it, then reaches out again.

“Here we go,” he mutters, hoping but failing to avoid the flinch that comes when he touches Jamie’s jaw. Roy purses his lips and uses the cloth to carefully wipe at the delicate skin of Jamie’s eyelid. It’s frustratingly slow, but he doesn’t want to risk pressing any harder. The tremors he’d felt earlier are even worse now, consistent trembling that doesn’t stop.

When it’s finished, Roy sits back on his heels and studies his handiwork. It’s not perfect or completely clean — a fresh bead of blood is already making its slow trail along the edge of Jamie’s eyebrow — and it’s done absolutely nothing to address the wounds themselves, of course, but it looks far better than it had when he’d first rolled over. The crime scene of Jamie’s face, made even more ghoulish by the harsh lighting of the lamps in the car park snapping on one by one as the sun sinks lower, looks somewhat less horribly violent. It’s an improvement, and Roy says, “There we go. Well done.”

Jamie hadn’t actually done anything, but that seems rather beside the point. ‘Well done,’ came out of Roy’s mouth anyway, just like it did whenever Phoebe sat still and put on a brave face long enough for him to apply peroxide and a plaster to a scraped knee.

Nothing about this is the same as a scraped knee. Roy knows that. But it’s easier to think of Phoebe falling off her bike and shrieking for her uncle with her knee clutched to her chest and a twisted look of little-kid dismay on her face. Roy would rather think about that than the sick crack that James Sr.’s fist had made when he split his son’s mouth or the gut-lurching smack of Jamie’s head hitting the concrete corner of the curb, busting open his eyebrow. At least a fall off a bike is something he can fix with a plaster and a bowl of ice cream. A fall off a bike doesn’t make him feel homicidal.

By the time he's done, Will is waiting with another clean towel and a plastic bag in which to dump the used, bloody towel. Turning back to Jamie, Roy presses the new towel carefully over the cuts, which will hopefully prevent too much more blood from getting everywhere between here and the bus. Once they're settled on board and heading back home, they can get his face taken care of for real, but for now, this is going to have to do.

Jamie takes over holding the fabric up to the wounds and lets Roy and Isaac pull him to his feet. Everyone else — who Roy isn't the least bit embarrassed to say he hasn't paid a moment's attention to while he's been absorbed with far more important tasks — seems to have dispersed, headed in various directions to load the bus and get ready to take off. As Roy watches with his arm wrapped around Jamie's waist and Isaac keeping a strong hold on his opposite shoulder, Sam exits the bus and jogs his way over to them.

"We've got a place set up for you," Sam says, very clearly addressing Jamie directly rather than the men on either side supporting him. The way Sam ignores him makes Roy feel a flicker of pride in his chest. "The first-aid kit is set out and everything, and we've kept a couple of rows clear, to give you some space." He hesitates a little before he says the next bit, but says it anyway. “Also, I grabbed this for you. There’s — there’s blood, all over your shirt, and it seems incredibly uncomfortable.”

In Sam’s outstretched fist there’s a wad of fabric, light blue material that —despite the way it’s bunched up — Roy can immediately identify. It’s a spare short-sleeved t-shirt. Nothing fancy or even team-branded, but there is something notable about it: it doesn’t belong to Jamie. Sam is holding out one of his own shirts, the one he keeps tucked in his bag, just in case. Roy chooses not to point this out, and if anyone else notices, they follow suit.

Jamie himself accepts the shirt and then is immediately forced to also accept help swapping it for the torn, blood-soaked one he wears. Roy peels the ruined item over the back of his head, stretching its neck so that it won’t drag across his injuries, and Jamie just complies, bending when he needs to, his eyes downcast, refusing to meet anyone else’s. He seems bothered by the fact that he needs the help, but acutely aware that he can’t afford not to take it. It’s a precarious position to be in, and Jamie seems to have opted to handle it by being as silent and cooperative as possible.

There are many times over the course of the last year in which Roy has fervently wished for a Jamie who was silent or cooperative, and would have only imagined he might be able to get both at the same time in his wildest dreams. Oddly enough, now that he has it, he hates it, and wishes with even more strength that Jamie were running his mouth or swatting at Roy’s hands or making an obnoxious nuisance of himself in any way. It barely feels like Jamie at all. Roy never could’ve guessed how much that would bother him.

It’s a little tricky to manoeuvre the new shirt over his head around the towels being used to staunch the bleeding, and Jamie cringes when the collar brushes his bloody temple, but he seems relieved when the whole process is over. This is enough for Roy to judge the change worth the time and relative difficulty of the task. Anything that’s going to make Jamie feel at all better is something Roy is happy to contribute as much of his own effort to as is necessary.

They finally get Jamie up and onto the bus after that, but not before one last final debate about whether it was really a good idea to not take him to hospital after all. Jamie doesn’t budge on the topic a bit, and so onto the bus it is. As Sam promised, the first few rows have been kept clear, with everyone else crowding in closer quarters than normal in order to leave space. Jamie ducks into the second row back, collapsing into the window seat and not speaking a word to anyone except Sam, who gets a, “Thanks, mate,” as he passes.

Once everyone is inside and seated, the doors close and the bus begins to move. The beginning of the ride home is, all things considered, uneventful. Across the aisle from where Jamie’s ended up, Roy sits and studies him. He’s obviously in pain, but not so much that Roy can give in to the urge to demand that the bus turn around and take them to the nearest hospital in good conscience. Jamie’s posture is crumpled and uncomfortable, but he’s still conscious and he’s not acting strange. Roy will take what he can get.

Somehow, Roy has found himself in the position of being elected, without his knowledge or permission, to the position of ‘wielder of the first aid kit.’ He’s got it cracked open and splayed out over his lap at the moment, studying it with a critical eye. While the thing is pretty big and fairly well stocked, it is still ultimately a red plastic box with some over-the-counter supplies stuffed inside, and he’s dubiously uncertain that it’s going to do much good. Looking up, Roy casts his eyes around for anyone who looks like they might be inclined to help or provide some sort of guidance.

No dice. Everyone else on the bus, from the coaching staff down to Will, is keeping their respectful distance of the space left to Roy and Jamie, just as Sam had promised. This is something that Roy would probably appreciate more if it weren’t for the fact that he’s apparently responsible for operation ‘patch up Jamie’s busted face on a moving vehicle while Jamie languishes in some kind of trauma-and/or-concussion-induced-haze.’ He’s not remotely qualified for this, which is a conclusion that he’d immediately reached upon realizing that he’d been the one left to handle the situation, and one that he continues to make repeatedly at each step of the process.

This is not Roy’s first encounter with a first aid kit, though before now it’s been entirely related to Phoebe and his stint coaching the girls’ team. As it turns out, he’s a pretty quick draw with a plaster and an ice pack, which makes him a favourite among the parents when he’s able to handle minor scuffs at training or matches without things dissolving into hysterics, but this is far over his head. Roy can handle little kids with bruised elbows or skinned knees. He’s old hat with bloody noses or little scrapes on tiny chins. This is not in the same stratosphere, and he’s not qualified for this. Still, no one else is about to step up, and Jamie has already let Roy manhandle him a bit today, so maybe it’s for the best to not push it by asking him to accept more sets of hands poking at his injuries.

Thankfully, the bleeding has mostly slowed by this point, so when Roy relocates to the seat beside Jamie’s and eases the towel away from his head, there isn’t an immediate mess. Not that Roy would’ve minded that much, but it would have just added to the to-do list, and he can’t imagine that Jamie would have been particularly nonchalant about getting blood everywhere at this stage.

There’s very little to be done here on the bus, especially since it’s moving and the elbow room available leaves something to be desired. Roy covers the wounds on his face with gauze, taping a large white square over the affected part of Jamie’s eyebrow and forehead. It’s a little big for the job, and partially overlaps his eye in a way that has to be interfering with his vision, but Jamie offers no complaint.

The cuts to his mouth are harder to deal with. Roy ultimately concludes that plasters are not going to do it and just gives Jamie another clean hand towel from the pile that Will has spirited out of nowhere, telling him to hold it to his face until they get home and can do a more thorough job. Similarly, he applies a towel to his arm, wrapped around the deep, messy scrapes and taped in place with the same papery roll of white medical tape that he’d used to secure the gauze to Jamie’s forehead. The end result is a rather hastily put together effort that looks more like a child’s attempt at creating some kind of mummy costume than actual medical attention, but their resources are limited, and they are — to reiterate once again — on a moving bus, so it’s the best that it’s going to get at least for a while.

Once his injuries are seen to to the best degree possible, Jamie slumps to the side and curls up against the window of the bus. He looks worn and exhausted, bent over on himself to the effect of seeming smaller than he is, maybe achieving that effect deliberately. It makes Roy feel strange to see him like that. He wants to get up and move away, sit somewhere else or find something to do that can take his mind off of Jamie and his father and the horrible, incomprehensible violence that they all bore witness to, but he can’t. There would be no way to do that without abandoning Jamie in the process, or at least feeling like that’s what he was doing, and Roy has failed enough times to do what he should when it came to the kid’s dad showing up and ruining everything he could possibly ruin.

Back in the locker room at Wembley, Roy hadn’t stepped in, hadn’t been able to move or breathe or think until it was too late. Just tonight in the Coventry City car park, he was too far away to do anything and was separated from Jamie by those godforsaken pissant reporters until after it was already done. Sure, he had pulled the man away before he’d been able to make it any worse, but the initial attack still happened, and Roy can’t help but feel responsible for it.

So, no. He doesn’t get to turn away from this. It’s the least he can fucking do at this point to stay.