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.

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

They’re about an hour into the drive home when something changes. Jamie straightens up. The water bottle that Roy had passed him, courtesy of Will — who apparently had access to some stash of water as well as towels — slips from his fingers, and rolls under the seat in front of them. What brought the thought to mind isn’t remotely clear to Roy, who hasn’t seen any new input that could’ve sparked it since they started driving, but Jamie has thought of something, and it’s freaking him out.

“Fucking cameras,” is the first thing Jamie actually says, looking directly at Roy when he says it. His eyes are wide, and his breathing is picking up by the moment. “The cameras, Roy, the journos with the cameras.” The hitch of his shoulders disrupts the towel he holds to his face, making it shake in a way that has to hurt as it jars the wounds underneath. “They’re gonna see. Everyone is gonna see, it’s gonna be all over the fucking news, fucking — SportsNet is gonna run photos of me — of me fuckin’ bleeding on the ground like some kind of — like some —”

“Jamie,” Roy tries, turning as fully to the side as he can in the cramped quarters. “You need to breathe, okay Jamie? Come on. Jamie, breathe.”

The repeated use of his name does nothing to get Jamie to calm down and stop before he hyperventilates or passes out. In fact, he just seems to get worse. He’s pressing the towel into his face pretty hard now, making Roy want to reach out and pull it away so that it won’t hurt him any worse, and the harsh sounds of his breathing get louder and louder.

“There’ll be vid—” Jamie cuts himself off with a sharp, ragged inhale, and shakes his head. His hand drops away from his face, pulling the towel with it. “Video. Fuckin’ video, of— of my dad— of him—” The splits in his lips are a bright collection of reds and purples, contrasting against the ashen shade that his skin has taken on. “There’s video, and everyone is gonna know.” He’s looking at Roy still, but it doesn’t seem like he’s actually seeing him. There’s a distant, almost vacant glaze to his eyes, and he’s shaking. “They’re all gonna know. Everyone— They’re all gonna know, that I— That he— That—”

The towel drops to the floor, slipping from his lax fingers. Jamie’s actually hyperventilating now, Roy just knows that he’s going to start bleeding again at any moment. Needing the extra space to… well, he doesn’t know what, but needing it for some reason, Roy stands from his seat. He stays facing the same way, looking at Jamie and trying to get his attention, but stands between the rows and tries to calm his own racing heart.

Jamie is fully, completely freaking out. It’s enough to make Roy also start to freak out, and so he does what he generally does when freaked out and unable to do a single goddamn thing to fix it, and turns to growl at the nearest person to fucking do something already.

“It's a panic attack,” Ted says. He’s made his way down the aisle and is now standing next to Roy, hanging onto the back of the seat in front of him for stability. Even though there’s a concerned frown on his face, Ted’s general attitude is much calmer than Roy would personally deem appropriate for the situation, but hey, what does he know? “Pretty sure he’s having a panic attack. You think I could…”

At the half-finished request, accompanied by a wave of Ted’s hand in the general direction of Jamie, Roy steps back a little bit. He moves out of the way just enough to allow Ted over, because he at least seems like he might know what to do about this, which is more than Roy can say for himself at present. He continues to watch over them, arms folded tightly over his chest and a hard frown on his face, not really willing to leave.

Something in Roy revolts sharply at the idea of getting too far away from Jamie right now, though he knows there's nothing that can possibly be a threat to him on this bus. Not with all of them around and no one else able to get in. They're on the M40 motorway, for fuck's sake. Still, he has better things to do than argue with his own instincts, so he allows himself to appease the snapping little monster of rage and protectiveness that snarls and paces around his ribcage.

Jamie's breathing is so fast and shallow that Roy is becoming increasingly worried that he might be about to pass out. The gauze taped over the side of his face where the cut goes through his eyebrow has a fresh bloom of blood at the centre of it. There's an anxious buzz up and down the bus as teammates pass along what's going on to those who don't have a view or aren't close enough to hear what's being said. Privacy's a thing of the past just at the moment, given the situation they've all just been direct witness to and the fact that they're trapped on a twelve-metre-long tin can, hurtling down the road together.

This is the version of these events that Jamie had picked, though. He'd decided that he'd rather live out the immediate aftermath of the attack on this bus in front of twenty-some people he knows rather than in hospital in front of two or three that he doesn't, and the judgement call had been, Roy must begrudgingly admit, his right to make.

Ted has started talking softly to Jamie, his voice a low rumble that sounds like it belongs to some kind of over-exaggerated character in a cowboy flick even more than usual. At the moment, though, it sounds soothing rather than comical or irritating, and Roy can feel his own heart — beating fast and hard with what he's fully willing at this point to call a great deal of worry — start to calm somewhat at the sound. With the limited space available to him, Ted has wedged himself around so that he’s got one knee on the ground in front of the seat that Roy vacated, putting himself just under Jamie’s hunched-over eye level.

Without any warning, Jamie's hand starts waving out — thankfully, not the one that he used to try and catch himself on the pavement. Ted puts together what he's looking for before Roy can do the math. Just as quickly, Ted grabs onto the searching, almost-flailing hand and holds it tightly in both of his. Jamie's fingers curl around the back of one of Ted's hands and clench hard, hard enough that Roy can see Ted's skin blanching under the pressure. There will probably be fingernail marks left behind when they disentangle, but to Ted's credit, if the grip hurts him at all, he doesn't betray it for a single moment. He just hangs onto Jamie's hand and keeps talking to him, a steady litany of nonsense, which is a skill of Ted's that Roy never thought he'd be so grateful for.

"You're alright, see, I'm not about to go nowhere, you and me and everyone else is gonna stay put exactly where we're at, and you're just gonna keep breathing, right? That's a good lad, see, you're doin' real well."

It's a strange turn of phrase to hear coming out of Ted's mouth, sounding a little awkward and out of place in his ridiculous American accent, but it seems to be doing the trick, and Roy can't find it in himself to make fun of the man for it, even internally. Jamie's staring at him like he's got the secret to stopping the end of the world hidden somewhere in his face, and it seems like he might be coming down somewhat from the fit — panic attack. It was a panic attack.

"You're doin' real well, Jamie,” Ted goes on, “that's it. Just keep breathing and looking right at me and I promise it'll stop soon. Cross my heart and all that. It's gonna pass, kid, you just gotta keep breathing and hangin' onto my hand there, cause I've gotcha, and it's gonna be okay. We're gonna figure this out, right? You and me and everybody else on this bus who's got your back just like I do."

You and me and everybody else on this bus who’s got your back just like I do. The words lodge in Roy’s chest and hurt there, deep and resonating like a cracked rib. He was supposed to have had Jamie’s back before now and he’d fucked that right up, which calls into question how wise it was for Ted to make that kind of promise. Seems like Jamie needs it, though, so Roy doesn’t call him on it. He bites his tongue and keeps quiet. This is not about him.

The ride proceeds with far less incident after that. Ted manages to get Jamie calmed down by continuing to talk in that same low, steady voice, even after it seems like the worst of it’s over. He gets up from where he’d been kneeling in the cramped space between rows and sits down beside Jamie instead, still keeping ahold of his hand. Everybody else gives the two of them space, letting Ted handle things on his own, which he seems to be doing competently enough. Everybody except for Roy, who just keeps standing there in the aisle. Standing guard, because it’s the only thing he can think to do.

At some point, Ted gets up and slips away to attend to something. Before he does more than stand, he looks a few rows down and gives a small nod and gesture to Dani, who wordlessly makes his way up and takes the now-vacant seat next to Jamie. He brings another towel with him, which is good — Jamie seems anxious about bleeding through the gauze and staining Sam’s shirt.

Roy is relieved that Ted summoned Dani over to take his place. Crowding Jamie is a bad idea, but Roy would bet anything that leaving him entirely alone is an even worse one, so it’s for the best that they keep someone with him. Selfishly, though, he’s glad that he wasn’t the one asked to do so. There’s just too much latent energy still buzzing around his body. He’s not sure he’d make a very good seat partner at the moment. Better that he’s allowed to help like this instead, to stand in the aisle and pace every now and then.

If pressed, Roy would have to admit that he has no basis on which to conclude that he’s actually helping anything at all. There’s still a ridiculous and nonsensical part of him that thinks that maybe Jamie feels it too — this ambient sense of anxiety, the dread that Roy can feel in the air. Maybe Jamie feels it too, and therefore maybe there’s some worth to be found in Roy being there when he glances over. At the very least, there’s someone standing there as a symbolic barrier, even though there’s nothing real left to be a barrier against, even if he had failed so spectacularly to actually protect Jamie when it mattered.

Standing his little self-imposed watch, Roy looks around the bus every so often, cataloguing those present. He does this partially to avoid just staring at Jamie the whole time, because that’s just going to get weird after a point, and partially to keep tabs on how everyone else is doing, because while Jamie is quite clearly the worst off by several leagues, nobody else could be said to be doing well.

Situated the closest to Roy are the other coaches. Ted and Beard speak in hushed tones while Nate sits and listens with a strange, grave look on his face and says nothing. Behind them, the collection of Richmond players filling the rest of the bus exhibit a variety of feelings in a variety of intensities, all of them universally bad.

Isaac looks like he’s feeling the same as Roy is, scanning the interior of the bus often with a deep frown worn into his brow, arms folded over his chest. Since taking over as captain, he does this a lot on the way home from bad matches —sits there and counts his teammates, catalogues what’s happening, who seems to be managing okay, who might need to be spoken to for one reason or another. It’s worse now.

Next to Isaac, in the window seat, is Colin. Colin is — in a word — twitchy. He looks more outright upset than Isaac does.He’s also looking around too, though with less purpose and more frenetic energy. In fact, when Colin’s chin jerks sharply towards the window, the movement hard enough to jar his upper body, his shoulders hiked to his ears, he manages to snag Isaac’s attention and holds it in place. Isaac reaches over and puts a hand on his arm. There’s no accompanying conversation, but it seems to help some, as far as Roy can tell.

Sam had kept a remarkably cool demeanour while getting things arranged with the bus and offering up the extra shirt. Now, though, now that nobody — well, aside from Roy and, occasionally, Isaac — is watching him, he seems profoundly bothered by what’s happened. His eyes are downcast and deeply pained, and he’s got his phone held up against his chest, the screen hidden. Every so often he pulls it away and squints at it, sometimes shifting to tap out a message. Whoever Sam is texting, it’s paradoxically both helping and making it worse. His expression will ease for a moment, and then twist back up again, more hurt than before.

Across the aisle from Sam, Moe is focused on something in his lap, like usual, but other than that this doesn’t seem like his usual post-match, wind-down knitting. He’s focusing with an angry intensity that Roy’s never seen, practically glaring down at what he’s working on. Every so often, he stops to yank at yarn that hasn’t done anything wrong with an uncharacteristically vicious impatience.

Sitting next to Moe, Thierry is looking over the seats up towards Roy and, subsequently, towards Dani and Jamie. He’s not remotely being subtle or trying to hide this, and he’s saying something to Moe that seems to coincide with some of the more emphatic pulls at the yarn. Behind them, Richard is on his phone with Jan leaning over his shoulder to see something on the screen, both of them riveted.

That, more than anything, is what makes the hair on the back of Roy’s neck stand on end. He doesn’t know what the two of them are looking at, and he has no reason to suspect that it might be related to what’s just happened, but he can’t help but recall the source of Jamie’s panic attack. Hell, the media’s place in all of this mess had nearly driven Roy into a panic attack of his own when he’d first remembered Keeley and decided that he needed to call her before she could see it on her own. It’s not out of the question that the footage, the images, might already be circulating social media.

Several of the others are on their phones as well, not just Richard and Jan. (And Sam, Roy supposes, though that is less troubling. He’s obviously texting, and Roy has a pretty good idea that it’s his parents, which is a thought that he doesn’t want to dwell on for too long.) This isn’t remotely out of the ordinary for the bus ride home from a match, but it feels different now. The only thing that stops Roy from pulling his own phone out and going on an extremely ill-advised trawl through Twitter himself is the knowledge that, once he sees it, there’s going to be few ways to hide his reaction from everyone around him, and Jamie needs him to keep his shit together.

Or maybe he doesn’t. Maybe Roy’s just telling himself that he’s important to this situation, to whatever remaining bits of stability Jamie has left. Maybe that whole thought process is a selfish flail for anything Roy can cling to that will give him a sense of purpose, a sense of being useful. Really, he’s engaging in quite the feat of making things very much about him when they are in no way actually related, and his only saving grace is that it’s happening inside the private confines of his own head. It helps to preserve whatever good opinion any of these people have of him. They don’t know what he’s thinking, and it allows him to continue clinging to the life raft that he’s built for himself. As long as no one refutes it, Roy’s going to believe he’s doing what needs to be done, and that’s just going to have to be that. He’s not psychic. What else is he supposed to do?

It’s late by the time the bus pulls into the lot at Nelson Road, and Roy feels like they’ve been driving for far longer than they actually have. The Coventry match that had left him feeling so elated and hopeful seems ages away now, faded into a distant memory that he can barely recall. Had it really just been a few hours ago that things had been so good, so bright and positive? The thought seems completely ludicrous now.

The bus parks in the slowest and most drawn-out way that a bus has probably ever been parked in the fucking history of bus parking, and Roy grinds the heels of his hands into his eyes to stop himself from snapping at the driver. It had been such a good day before it really, really wasn’t. He can’t figure out how it all managed to go that bad that quickly.

Because she is a light in a dark and terrible world and also probably because she was going mental at home by herself waiting around for them to get back after what she’d heard on the phone, Keeley is already there when they finally get off the bus. Roy doesn’t get to talk to her right away — he only glimpses her through a door, waiting at the end of a hall with her arms folded and a serious look on her face, but even seeing her is enough to bring him some small measure of relief. Ted circles everyone up in the locker room for a moment before letting anyone disperse — anyone except for Jamie that is, who he lets Beard shepherd away into the head coaches’ office, closing the door behind them.

“Now I know we’ve all had a real rough night just now,” Ted tells the room. His voice is pitched down from its usual tone and his hands are hidden away deep in the pockets of his khaki pants. Roy doesn’t know where the thought comes from, but he has the sudden and distinct impression that they’d probably be shaking if he could see them.

Nobody says a word. The room is quieter than quiet, not even broken by the rustling of match-day duffel bags being hauled around or shoulders jostling in wordless side conversations between distracted young men who aren’t entirely paying attention to their coach this late in the day. Everyone is riveted, Roy included. It feels like the whole of the building — like the whole of Richmond is holding their breath.

“I’m sure everyone has a lot of questions, lot of things going through your minds,” Ted continues. His face is turned down a little, eyes on the benches at the centre of the room, not looking at anyone. It’s weird, and it makes Roy’s stomach turn slightly.

Usually, when he’s making this kind of little speech, he looks around the room and makes eye contact with just about everyone there, one by one. Roy thought that it was hokey and fake at first, but came around to realize that it was a sincere demonstration of the way that Ted attempted to connect with every person he was speaking to when he had something important to say. The man conducts himself with deliberate, painstaking sincerity, and locker room speeches are no exception.

This time, though, Ted’s just staring at those benches, a little unfocused. It’s a lucky break that he can still manage to speak steadily, the sturdiness of his voice keeping up the solid, grounding presence that he always projects when things get rocky or uncertain.

“I know you have questions,” Ted repeats. “I do too. And that’s totally normal. Anybody would have questions after what we all just experienced. But we’ve just gotta focus on what’s most important right now, and that’s making sure that Jamie knows we’re here for him. We’re gonna need to give him some space, but that doesn’t mean – just disappear off the planet, right? We can let him know that we’re here for him if he needs us without making like those little seed pods in the field that get stuck to your pants and you’re picking them off for months after. Which, I see, is an analogy that I’ve lost a bunch of you on, so we’ll just circle back to the salient point, I think, which is that Jamie’s not okay right now, but we’re gonna take care of him, and he’s gonna be alright.”

Usually, after this kind of a talk, the talks after the days when it seems like nobody associated with Richmond will ever be able to catch a single break and bad luck will darken their collective doorsteps forever, everyone feels better. There’s a palpable release of tension in the air, a sense in the locker room that things are going to be okay, even if Ted has to personally rearrange pieces of the universe to make it so. This time, there’s no such feeling. None of the tension dissipates, none of the unease relaxes, none of the sense of impending doom eases up at all. It makes sense, really, since no matter what they’ve dealt with in the past, this is different. There’s getting relegated, and then… and then there’s this.

“That was scary,” Ted says eventually, noticing the lingering bad energy, the way that nobody seems like they want to be the one to break the stillness and leave first. “I know that was scary to see. Scared me too. But Jamie’s gonna be okay. We’ve got him, and he’s gonna be alright. And if any of you boys need to, you should set up an appointment with the good Doctor Sharon. I’m sure she’d be happy to talk to you about about what happened tonight. So am I, if you’re more comfortable talking to me for whatever reason.”

This seems to do it, at least to some extent. The searching eyes fixed on Ted, looking for him to give them some kind of an answer, a way out of this, crank their intensity back a few notches. Shoulders release and lower. There’s the scuffing sound of someone slinging a bag up and glancing it off the wall on the way. The moment is passing, and soon they’ll all be headed out to their night, to whatever it has in store for them after this, and Roy has a sudden thought.

“Oi,” he says loudly, snapping everyone’s attention to him before they have the chance to scatter completely. “None of you better talk to any media about this. I fucking mean it. Not one fucking word to one fucking reporter. Your motto is ‘no comment’ until we figure out how we’re going at this. Understand?”

A lot of staring, a few nods.

“I need to hear it, so I know you hear me. So I’ll ask again, do you understand?”

This time, a chorus of voices sweeps around the room: ‘yes,’ and ‘yeah,’ and ‘yes, Coach,’ which is still weird to hear addressed to him, but finally gets Roy’s hackles down.

“Alright,” he says, straightening the sides of his jacket for no reason other than the fact that he needs to do something with his hands. “Good. In that case, carry on.”

With that out of the way, the team disperses. As they filter out, Roy makes eye contact with Beard through the window, jerking his chin to indicate that they’re all set. Once almost everyone’s left, Beard shoos Jamie out of the office and into the locker room, waving his hands in front of him like it’s a normal day and Jamie has been harassing him at his desk, not like he’s been deliberately stowed away there so he didn’t have to endure a pep talk that was about him.

If there’s one thing that Beard can be counted on for, it’s making everything seem normal even when it very much isn’t. Of course, it also goes the other way, giving him the talent of making things seem incredibly weird even when they are in fact going just fine, but Roy is currently happy to make that trade-off.

Roy straightens up and holds out an arm, gesturing for Jamie to follow him when he leaves the coaching office.

“I’m taking him home,” he says to Ted when the man gives him a curious frown. When he subsequently receives a much sharper, partially-visible frown from Jamie, Roy pointedly adds, “I’m taking you home.” He’s braced for an argument — expecting one, even — but none comes.

Even as Roy’s tensed preparation relaxes, he chides himself. It was stupid to expect a negotiation, really, given the context. For a moment there, seeing Jamie come out of that office with Beard waving his fingers like he was dusting crumbs off a counter, Roy had forgotten that everything was upside down and inside out and it was absolutely ridiculous to be expecting an argument from Jamie about almost anything.

When Jamie is on edge or in trouble, he has two settings. On the one hand — and this is the only version of him Roy knew for a long time — he gets louder and more combative, fighting everything he sees as hard as he can. On the flipside, sometimes he goes in the other direction and shuts down, goes quiet and compliant. The more serious the trouble — as Roy has learned, as Roy continues to learn, though he really wishes this was the sort of thing he never had to know — the quieter Jamie gets. This, right here, tonight…. This is the quiet, subdued kind of trouble, and that’s without even factoring in the probable head injury, whether or not Jamie thinks he has one.

Regardless, while an argument had been expected, it’s good that one doesn’t come. The last thing that Roy needs is Jamie trying to fight him about whether or not he needs looking after right now, which he most certainly does. He’s already so far out of his depth that he feels insane for trying to manage this at all.

“Right. Anyway. Keep you updated, you do the same?”

The question is aimed at Roy, who turns to look at Ted. Ted’s not entirely with it, so to speak. Honestly, Roy’s been increasingly suspecting as much over the course of the evening. The fact that this seems to be the end of the conversation as far as Ted’s concerned, without any manner of long winded speech or rousing reassurance or inane anecdote about Kansas, only serves to reinforce that suspicion.

“Yeah, sure,” Roy agrees somewhat warily.

Ted gives him a slightly vacant smile, says, “Appreciate you, Roy,” then directs his attention to Jamie. Something in his face clears and solidifies, and Roy’s glad that he at least manages to get it together well enough for whatever’s about to happen. Jamie doesn’t need extra stress, even if it’s unlikely that he’s got his shit together to notice that anything short of Ted really going off the deep end is amiss.

“You doing alright there, kid?” Ted asks in this soft, quiet voice, obviously meant just for Jamie. He’s turned so that his shoulder angles like he’s physically directing the conversation now, shielding he and Jamie from the rest of the room. There isn’t even anyone aside from the three of them there anymore, but Ted still does what he can to create a removed little bubble where they can talk without the world getting in the way.

Roy doesn’t step aside to give them privacy, though. If they want that, they can either tell him outright or step out somewhere else. Until he’s directly told, he’s staying put, and that’s that. Neither Jamie nor Ted seem to be bothered by Roy’s presence, a fact for which Roy is silently grateful.

Jamie makes an indistinct sound and wobbles his head a little bit, then winces, because obviously that’s a stupid thing to do when sporting some serious head and facial injuries. With a wince of his own, Roy bites back whatever had been about to pop out of his mouth. Maybe he’d mock Jamie for that on a good day, but it feels like a bad idea at the moment.

“Yeah, that seems about fair,” Ted tells him. There’s a fondness in his eyes, his tone still in that gentle, warm register, and Jamie’s cheeks redden a little.

Well, cheek, singular. The one that Roy can see, anyway, given that the other is still obscured by the towel he holds up to it. That one is probably red in its own right, though not because of the way Ted is talking to and looking at Jamie. Roy would much rather think about the way he blushes under positive attention than the way his face is developing into some seriously spectacular bruising out of view.

“You just lay low tonight, Roy and Keeley’ll take care of you —” When Ted says that, Roy looks very studiously away at the first random locker he sets eyes on and not at either of them. “— and we’ll keep an eye on things on our end and make sure that we know what’s going on with the media when that starts happening. You just… Just best stay off Twitter and the like for now, you hear?”

“Right, sure,” Jamie mumbles, visible eye cast down at the floor. The fingers of the hand not holding the towel to his face fiddle at the bottom of his shirt — Sam’s shirt. He’s still wearing the borrowed one.

When Ted’s hand lands on his shoulder, Jamie doesn’t give the kind of violent jump Roy might’ve been expecting him to. He just glances at it and keeps his attention there for a long moment. It looks like Ted contemplates hugging him, but decides not to at the last moment. Instead, he grips Jamie’s shoulder a little harder, shaking him just the slightest bit. Jamie leans into the touch, his eye closing briefly, and Roy feels a lump in his throat, aching like he’s spontaneously developed a cold. Ted’s expression somehow goes even softer, his grip sliding up to squeeze the side of Jamie’s neck before letting him go.

“You boys look after each other,” Ted tells them, which Roy gives a roll of his eyes in response. Jamie smiles a little, though, the visible side of his mouth twitching just slightly, so Roy lets go of it at that. He’d let Ted say just about anything to him right now if it got Jamie to even contemplate smiling, it turns out, which is a realization that disgruntles him the tiniest bit. Not much. Just a bit.

When they reach Keeley in the hall, she’s unable to suppress a small gasp when she sets eyes on Jamie. Roy had been expecting that. He’d done his best to prepare her for what she’d see, to warn her before any of the images got out, but there was only so much he could do. If someone had tried to warn him before he’d seen it, even with how much Jamie’s been cleaned up by this point, with the worst of it all hidden behind towels, Roy knows that it wouldn’t have been enough. Nothing would ever have been enough.

“Jamie,” she says, shoving her phone into her pocket and walking up to them. Her voice is a little loud, a little high-pitched. “Oh, fuck, Jamie.” Keeley reaches for him and hesitates, her hands fluttering in the air over his injured arm, up towards his half-towel-covered head.

All Jamie does is hum in agreement, awkwardly shuffling his feet and hunching his shoulders. He’s avoiding eye contact with Keeley, who makes a sound in the back of her throat and steps a little closer.

“Am I gonna hurt you if I…” She trails off, her hands waving a bit in the general direction of his shoulders. Despite not finishing the sentence, it’s clear what Keeley is asking, and Jamie shakes his head, the towel moving awkwardly along with it. Everything about his posture is shying away from the attention, but he doesn’t back away or reject the offer.

“No, it’s… ’s fine,” he mutters, sounding somewhat embarrassed to be accepting.

Keeley stands on her toes and wraps Jamie in what — to Roy’s estimation — seems to be the most ginger, delicate hug that anyone has ever received in their life. She avoids the obvious sites of injury, but still remains careful and light no matter where she touches him. Not like Roy blames her for that — without having been there, it’s impossible to tell whether worse injuries are hiding under his clothing. Jamie doesn’t have much in the way of resources with which to reciprocate, and he seems anxious about getting blood on her, so he just bumps the side of his head into hers, an awkward move that resembles a cat. His free hand pats her back a few times, then settles there.

When she lets him go and steps away, the worry and sadness is still acute in Keeley’s face, but she seems, at the very least, to be less immediately shocked and panicked. She studies Jamie, her eyes raking him over from head to toe, and Roy is glad all over again that they’d spent the time they had on getting as much of the blood cleaned up as possible before they’d left Coventry.

“Fuck,” Keeley says for a second time, turning up nothing better to say after several long and empty moments.

“Right, we should get going,” Roy puts in, rescuing both of them from the interaction. Someone has to take control of cruise directing this evening, and it once again seems like it’s going to have to be him. “Jamie, you got your shit?”

“Oh.” The look in the eye that Roy can see is wide and owl-like. “Oh, I… I’ll be right back, hang on.” He turns around and starts back for the locker room, and Roy stomps back the immediate instinct to follow after him or call out and insist on going to get Jamie’s bag himself. It might come off as overbearing or whatever, and he needs this time to talk to Keeley. They need to speak before they head home, and it’ll be easier to do so without Jamie present.

“Roy,” Keeley says as soon as it’s just the two of them there. The word comes out intense, a lot of meaning packed down into three letters.

“I know,” Roy tells her, keeping his voice lowered so it doesn’t carry down the hall after Jamie. He gets it, he really does, can read everything she’d not been able to say in the plea of his own name and feels it reflected back in his own chest.

“Roy,” Keeley repeats, distressed. “Oh my god, he — Roy.” Her eyes are too bright and her expression is shocked, scrambling to figure out how to arrange itself into something reflecting how she feels about this.

“I know, but we don’t have a lot of time, and we’ve got to talk.” The redirect is abrupt and not particularly thoughtful, but at the moment, Roy can’t really spare the extra seconds that being thoughtful generally requires of him. He tries, most of the time, because that’s the decent thing to do, even though he doesn’t always get what the fuss is about. Right now, he doesn’t have the time or energy to spend on that part of communicating, so Keeley’s just going to have to roll with it.

Thankfully, just as she had on the phone, Keeley seems to pick up on the fact that there’s something important Roy is trying to get across, and so she folds her arms, tilts her chin up, and puts on what he mentally refers to as her ‘game face.’ It’s the way that she looks when she’s confronting a serious problem or troubleshooting some kind of complex scenario, and it’s exactly what Roy was hoping to see from her.

“We argued about it with him back at Coventry,” he says, trying to get this across as quickly and succinctly as possible, “but he’s not going to hospital. We tried, but he won’t do it. Said he couldn’t handle the attention, the cameras, just wanted to go home, and that he’s…” Roy hesitates, unsure how best to go on.

This is the part that Roy doesn’t want to tell her. He wants to shield her from as much of this as possible — all of it, in an ideal world — but he knows that he can’t. They’re in this thing together. Besides, no matter how weird it made him feel at first, no matter how thinking about it still occasionally irritates him, Keeley and Jamie had once been important to each other. Are still important to each other now, if he’s honest with himself about things. Keeley cares about Jamie a lot, and Roy knows that keeping parts of this from her is the last thing she wants.

“He said that he knows he’s not bad off enough to need to go because he’s had worse, and he knows what that would feel like. He said the damage looks worse than it is, and I don’t know about that, but I… I think I at least believe him about the first bit.” Roy swallows hard, tries not to feel everything he feels relaying this. He needs to keep his eyes forward and focused on the situation at hand. “I think, if it were bad enough for him to need to be taken to A&E, he’d have told us. So we agreed to not make him go.”

At first, Keeley is quiet. She’s staring off down the hall where they’d last been able to see Jamie, biting the inside of her cheek and frowning. “Fuck,” she says eventually, looking down. Keeley scrubs at her face with the heels of her hands, rubbing her eyes to dry them of the faint glittering wetness that’s starting to form there. It’s probably a good thing that she seems to have already taken off her makeup for the day — her mascara would’ve smeared something awful if she hadn’t. “Alright, then.” She sounds about as excited about the whole thing as Roy feels, which is ‘not even remotely.’

Jamie returns quickly, and Roy’s heart rate doesn’t totally settle until he’s squarely back in sight and the three of them are headed off towards the car park. Thankfully, it isn’t a long drive from Nelson Road back to Roy’s place, and the relief that he feels when he sets eyes on his own front door is enough to have him sagging in his seat, head thumping back against it. The street is dark and quiet, still except for their car pulling to a stop in his driveway.

Inside, several of the downstairs lights are on. Keeley has clearly come by while they were on the bus to make the place ready for… well, company feels like the wrong way to put it, but ready for more than just Roy coming home and crashing after a long day. Roy brings up the rear of their little group, watching Keeley drop her keys on the table and gesture Jamie towards the couch. Jamie’s shoulders are slumped and his head is bowed, one hand shoved in his jeans pocket while the other hangs awkwardly at his side, still holding the towel to his face.

Once Jamie is settled on the couch, all of the momentum that has kept Roy going so far comes to a sudden, grinding halt. All evening, ever since James showed up at the car park, he’s had something to do. First it had been to get to Jamie, then it had been to keep James from doing any more damage, then it had been to clean him up, get him on the bus, and keep him feeling as safe as possible on the bus while it ferried them all home. Back at Richmond, there had been other things to do — handle the team’s dispersal to their own lives, meet up with Keeley, get Jamie in the car and take him to the house.

Now, there’s just… There’s just Jamie, on the couch, staring off at nothing with bloody towels wrapped around his arm and pressed to his face; Keeley, several feet away and looking between Jamie and Roy with a faintly heartbroken expression; and Roy…

And Roy.

Roy, standing off to the side, out of place in his own living room, helpless to do anything to fix any of this and not even sure where to begin trying to help.

For a long time, Roy just keeps standing there. He stands there and watches Jamie while the minutes tick by in his silent house, wondering what to do. There ought to be something. Eventually, his attention is taken by movement to his right. It’s Keeley, approaching from behind the couch and indicating that they should step away, out of immediate hearing range. He doesn’t move until she reaches him, still caught up in an odd mix of listless indecision and sharp regret. Now that he’s home, alone with Jamie and Keeley and nobody who’d been there with them in the car park, Roy is feeling less and less comfortable with Jamie’s decision to not call an ambulance.

The sense that he’d made a huge mistake when he hadn’t insisted on taking Jamie straight to A&E on the spot only surges and gets much stronger when Keeley catches his arm and physically directs him a little ways away, pulling him to the side of the room. They stand huddled together at the wall like conspirators hatching some kind of sinister plot, both of them angled enough to see the subject of their consternation. As she watches Jamie, Keeley chews on the inside of her cheek, just standing there and looking at him until she huffs out a breath and turns to Roy.

“I don’t feel right about this. He doesn’t look well,” she says, keeping her voice low.

Honestly, even if she hadn’t, Roy doubts that Jamie would have heard them. He doesn’t seem like he’s tracking much right now. It’s hard to tell if this is better or worse than he’d been before, back on the bus and at the beginning walking into the house, when he’d twitched at the slightest sound, including ones that Roy couldn’t make out himself.

“I know,” Roy sighs, folding his arms over his chest and watching the back of Jamie’s head with a heavy frown that he can feel pulling at his forehead like the beginning of a headache. “I know.”

“He needs to go to hospital,” Keeley insists. “I know he told you he didn’t want to, but… Look at him, Roy. He needs a doctor, and neither of us are doctors. We can’t do this on our own. We’re out of our depth. He’s hurt.”

The helpless anger that has been bubbling up in Roy’s chest suddenly subsides, pulling back and away from the sudden strike of epiphany that her words have sparked. He snaps his fingers and digs his hand into his pocket, pulling out his phone.

“What, what is it?”

“We’re not doctors,” he says, and the appearance of her hand over his phone takes his attention off it and up to her face. Keeley is shaking her head slightly, expression confused. She clearly doesn’t know what he’s getting at, hasn't connected the immediate dots that he has. “But we know someone who is one.”

Keeley’s eyebrows shoot up and realization dawns. She nods slowly, mouth slightly open. “Oh, that’s brilliant. Yeah, call her. Or, wait, no. We talk to him first, then we call her.”

Right. Of course. Talk to Jamie first, rather than just spring something like this on him. As usual, Keeley knows what she’s doing and Roy is floundering in the dark, this close to making an enormous mess of an already-bad situation, had she not caught him in time. It makes him wonder what he thought he was doing by trying to help here all over again.

Shoving his phone back in his pocket for the moment, Roy crosses the room to where Jamie hasn’t moved at all. He keeps his distance, skirting around the edge of the carpet before coming into Jamie’s line of sight. His dull eyes seem to take a few moments to register Roy’s presence, going wide when they do. Jamie straightens up, still awkwardly reaching across his body to press the hand towel to his face. His other arm, the injured one, is still wrapped and taped up in a larger towel, looking almost cartoonishly bundled. There’s very little blood on the borrowed shirt that he’s wearing, and his swaddled arm is held far out enough that he’s clearly trying to keep it that way.

“Okay, here’s the deal,” Roy tells him.

Clearly unable to guess where this is going, Jamie eyes him warily. He looks like he’s trying to do long division in his head, frowning up at the man speaking to him. The uneven way that Roy has to look down and Jamie has to look up because he’s standing and Jamie’s sitting feels intolerably wrong all at once. Needing to do something to mitigate the situation, Roy walks around the coffee table and takes a seat on the couch. He still leaves some space between them, but they’re at each other’s eye level now, and that, at least, is better than before.

“Here’s the deal,” he repeats, doing his best to sound calm and sure of himself. “My sister, Sarah, she’s a doctor. She works in emergency, and she’s damn good. I know you don’t want to go to hospital, and I get that. It makes sense. But I’m also not about to let you keel over and die on my couch because you’re bleeding inside somewhere, or end up with a permanently fucked up wrist or whatever. So I’m gonna make you a deal.”

Jamie keeps quiet, still watching Roy, uncertainty clouding his eyes. He looks less dubious than before, less like a person trying to figure out if the ice he’s standing on is about to crack and drop him into fathomless, frigid water, but there’s still something anxious there.

“If you let Sarah come over and look you over,” Roy continues, deciding to keep going since Jamie at least looks like he isn’t going to get up and run away at the mere suggestion of the idea, “and she says it’s alright, then we’ll all just stay put and look after you here. If she says you need to go in, then you go in. Do we have a deal?”

There’s a long pause, during which Roy begins to worry that Jamie’s panic may have just been on a time-delay, but he eventually raises a wholly separate point.

“It’s the middle of the night,” Jamie says. While technically true, it’s completely irrelevant to the actual important topic at hand, and Roy is about to point this out when he goes on, asking, “She’d really do that? It’s — She’d come here, this late?”

What a ridiculous question. Roy almost doesn’t even want to answer it, on the principle of how completely moronic it is. He scoffs, glancing at Keeley for some ‘can you believe this shit’ backup, except that she’s got a thoughtful frown on now, like she thinks Jamie’s got a point in asking. Roy shakes his head in disbelief. Fucking only children, the both of them.

“She’s my sister,” he says. “Of course she will.”

Obviously, it isn’t always that simple. For them, though? It is that simple, and putting it like that is a better way to justify it rather than getting into the full backstory — exactly how and why Roy knows that Sarah would drop everything without hesitation if he asked her to, no matter what time of day or night it is. She’s done it before, and so has he. The idea of having to explain that is completely foreign.

At least Jamie seems too tired to push it farther, though he doesn’t really look like he understands the explanation he’s been given. Keeley at least has met Sarah. She’s seen them interact, she knows what they’re like, and she seems much more on board with the justification as presented.

“So,” Roy tries again, trying not to let impatience bleed out into his voice, “will you agree to that? To her coming over, and — and saying whether you need to be taken in or not?”

After a pause where it seems like he might be about to resist the proposed plan, Jamie nods. It jostles the towel, making both of them wince.

“Yeah,” he mumbles, the word exhausted and half-lost in the towel. “Fine. Whatever.”

‘Yeah, fine, whatever’ is probably about as good as it’s going to get, so Roy takes the win for what it is and stands to make the call. He leaves Keeley with Jamie in the living room, stepping out onto the back porch. It’s probably not necessary to go that far — everyone in there knows what this phone call is about — but Roy takes the space anyway. He doesn’t know how he’s going to put this to his sister, and it seems less impossible out here on his own.

“I need to ask you a favour,” Roy says as soon as the ringing stops. He doesn’t wait for a greeting or for Sarah to chastise him about the late hour. If he lets anything get in front of what he has to say, he might lose the nerve to try.

A long pause. Empty air stretches between his house and Sarah’s, and he can picture exactly the look on her face — eyes narrowed, lips pursed, calculating what’s most likely to be going on here.

“…well, ask it,” she says eventually.

At least she doesn’t sound like she’d just been asleep. Roy would’ve felt guilty if he’d woke her up. He still wouldn’t regret it, would still make the same choice again, but he’d feel guilty, and that would be one more thing this night just did not need.

“I need you to make a house call,” is the way that he settles on putting it. “I’ve got — Uh.” This part is harder. Roy doesn’t know how to explain why he needs a house call and who he needs it for. If he tried to tell Sarah the whole horrible story right now, he doesn’t know how long this conversation would go on. Quick and simple is what he needs, and nothing about this is either.

“Are you hurt?” Suddenly her voice is different. The apprehension and faint annoyance that had been there before are gone. “What happened? Are you okay?”

Sarah sounds like she had when she’d called him after he’d been injured in the relegation match. She hadn’t been able to watch it, had been on shift, but a coworker had told her what happened on the shift change. Evidently, the coworker hadn’t got many of the details across, so when Roy answered that call, he was greeted with near-panic.

“I’m fine,” Roy is quick to tell her, wincing. He probably ought to have led with that, but the thought that she would immediately assume something had happened to him hadn’t been the first thing on his mind. “It’s not for me. It’s for —” Jamie, Roy can’t say. Not if he wants this conversation to be as brief as he hopes it will be. “It’s for a mate. He’s at my house now. He was attacked, doesn’t want to go to A&E because he doesn’t want all the attention, can’t handle all that right now, but I don’t know how bad he is, and Keeley and I don’t feel right just hoping he doesn’t drop dead in the middle of the night. I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important, but — it’s bad. I just can’t tell how bad.”

“Oh, fuck,” is Sarah’s professional opinion.

“Yeah,” Roy agrees. Oh, fuck, indeed. “So, can you please-”

“Of course.” The response is immediate and without hesitation. “Of course, let me just get my bag together and get Phoebs in the car and I’ll be right there.”

Closing his eyes, Roy tips his head back and takes a deep breath. Fuck, does he love his sister right now. He loves her all the time, of course, but right now he feels his love for Sarah like a physical weight in his chest. “Thanks,” he says when he’s sure it’ll come out without breaking. She hums an affirmative response, likely already tallying up everything she has to get together to leave the house, and Roy hangs up without waiting for further input.

Before going back inside, Roy grants himself the luxury of taking an extra minute to stand out on his back porch and breathe. The night air is quiet and still around him, cool enough to make him wish that he had a slightly thicker jacket. In a moment, he’ll go back inside and inform Keeley and Jamie of the update, but for now he just stands there. Roy inhales clean air (well, as clean as air can get within the London metro area, anyways), holds it, then slowly lets it back out.

Sarah’s on her way. They’re home, and Sarah’s on her way, and everything feels so much more manageable now that she’s coming. One way or another, everything’s going to turn out okay.

“Sarah’s on her way,” he announces when he returns to the living room. “She doesn’t live very far, so she should be here soon.” Specifically to Jamie, Roy directs, “She’s good.” He said it before already, but he figures it’s the sort of thing that bears repeating, especially since he doesn’t think he’d count on Jamie to be retaining much of anything at the moment. “She’ll be able to see how you’re doing and she won’t go running her mouth to any reporters or posting anything online, that’s for certain.”

The news that there’s a doctor on the way and that they’ll soon be able to have things sorted goes over easy. At least, it does for long enough that Roy starts to believe that there isn’t going to be further issue for the duration of the empty fifteen, twenty-ish minutes between when he called and when Sarah will likely arrive. This belief barely has time to take root and start to solidify before Jamie suddenly sits straight up out of his defeated slump .

“Your sister,” Jamie says, looking right at Roy. It’s clear and direct, and his eyes are focused and present, which hasn’t been a consistent bet at all this evening, but he repeats, “Your sister Sarah is coming.”

“Yeah,” confirms Roy, and now he’s worried about the potential of a head injury all over again. They might be in more serious trouble than he’d expected if Jamie’s managed to forget that in such a short amount of time.

“Your sister Sarah, as in your niece Phoebe’s mum.”

“Yeah,” Roy says a second time, warily. The acute spike of concern over brain damage lessens significantly, but he still isn’t quite sure what’s going on.

Roy’s repeated agreement doesn’t seem to calm him. In fact, it does the opposite. Jamie’s posture has gone tight: tension wound up in his shoulders, down his back.

“She can’t see this,” he says sharply, shaking his head along with it, which makes Roy wince. It has to hurt. “You, uh, I know Phoebe’s dad ain’t around, and so Sarah’s got her on her own, and she’s on her way here, and — That kid can’t be here, she can’t see this. She’s a little kid.”

It’s the most animated Jamie has been since he freaked out on the bus, talking fast and urgent, visible eye wide as he looks from Roy to Keeley and back again. Roy finds he doesn’t quite know how that makes him feel. Of all the things that could have gotten Jamie worked up at this point, it’s this. It’s Roy’s niece, who’s going to be there soon along with his sister, and who Jamie is positively distraught at the idea of catching sight of his current state — the bruises, the blood.

Which, yeah, Roy doesn’t particularly want Phoebe anywhere near that sort of thing either, now that he’s thinking about it. But she’s his niece, and it’s his job to fret about her and protect her from things, not Jamie’s. Roy is surprised that he’s even thought of it in the middle of everything else.

“I’ll stay out front with her,” Keeley says, interrupting Jamie’s continuing build of anxiety before Roy can get his act together enough to scrape up a response. She’s calm and sure, coming over to sit on the table in front of Jamie, where Roy had been earlier. “It’s not too cold out, I’ll play with her on the lawn. We won’t go inside at all. Phoebe won’t even know you’re here.”

It’s a good idea. Roy probably should have thought of that, but as usual, Keeley is about ten steps ahead of him, immediately troubleshooting an issue that’s entirely blindsided him. After a little more spooked staring, his shoulders moving with breathing that’s just a bit too fast for Roy’s comfort, Jamie accepts the solution. He nods, then stops nodding, hissing a little and tipping his face farther into the towel held up to it.

When Sarah arrives with Phoebe, announcing herself via text, Roy and Keeley both go to meet them outside. On the way, something occurs to Roy, which is maybe what’s been making him feel like there’s been a thought just out of his reach the entire time. He stops Keeley as they reach the door, hand on her forearm, and asks if it might be better if he were the one who waited outside with Phoebe, and let Keeley stay inside with Jamie while Sarah saw to him.

“You know,” he says, keeping his voice low. “Because he’s… He feels safe with you.”

Keeley shrugs a little, still grasping the door handle, and matches her volume to his. “I thought about it, but I still think you should stay with him,” she says, and Roy frowns, ready to disagree until she goes on. “I know he feels safe with me, and that’s good, but I think with you, he’ll feel protected.”

This takes Roy so completely by surprise that he just lets her open the door and walk away without continuing the conversation. He’s floored by the idea — both by the concept that he’s someone who Jamie would feel protected by in a situation where he so badly needed to feel that way, and by the sure way Keeley said it. Even when he gets the ability to move back under his deliberate control, Roy can’t stop thinking it over.

With you he’ll feel protected. It turns over and over in his mind as he steps over the threshold and closes the door behind him, watching Sarah greet Keeley with a quick hug.

There really isn’t a need for them to both be out here now that they’ve put the matter of distracting Phoebe to rest. Roy supposes he could have waited inside with Jamie — probably should have, but he couldn’t bear it. He had to—

There’s a soft cry of delight, and Phoebe comes bounding out of the car, running straight to him. Roy steps down into the grass of the front lawn and sweeps her up in a hug.

“Hello, my love,” Roy says to the little girl, breathes it into her hair, above her ear. He cups her small head in one of his hands, the other braced under her to hold her up.

Next to her, his own hands always seem so frighteningly big. It’s the first thing Roy can remember thinking when Phoebe had been born. Sarah had handed her to him, the second person in the world to hold his niece, and he’d thought, When in the fuck did my hands get so big, holy shit? He wishes that he could say it was something more sentimental. That bullshit had come right after, but no. The first thought he’d had when he held that tiny baby girl was that his hands looked like fucking keeper’s gloves, she was so little.

Roy can feel his sister’s eyes on him even before he briefly glances over at her and sees her expression, shrewd and knowing. He doesn’t get affectionate like this unprompted, not in the way of soft pet names, at any rate. He’ll hug Phoebe, of course, hold her hand, braid her hair, cuddle her and kiss her goodnight, but the words stay the same as they always do. Fucking alright, just give me a minute, they actually teach you anything important in that school of yours today?

Hello, my love, though… Roy doesn’t really do that, talk like that, not without a reason. But all Roy can see when he blinks is Jamie, his face covered in blood, bruised at his father’s hands. He needs this.

“Alright, go on,” he says when he sets Phoebe down. She’d started to wiggle, something about a doll she had to show Keeley, and that shook him out of it. Watching her, Roy gives a fond shake of his head, smiling faintly. She’s got a coat on over her pyjamas, and it looks a bit ridiculous.

“Sorry for dragging her out here so late.” Roy doesn’t even look away from Phoebe but he hears the footsteps approach him, stopping at his side. “Feel bad, she should be in bed, but… It really is important, I promise.”

“Yeah, I know. You’d never have asked otherwise.” The easy dismissal is accompanied by a wave of Sarah’s hand in Roy’s peripheral vision. Tearing his eyes away from Phoebe, he looks at her instead. “You know kids, though, she was excited as anything when I told her to get her coat. Big adventure, going out in the middle of the night, especially here. Very fun.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet,” Roy says, unable to help a quiet snort of laughter.

That’s all the joy he’s got in him tonight, though. The smile quickly fades from his face, and the expression he can see on Sarah is the same one he feels mirrored on his own features.

“Are we going to go in and deal with your big emergency now, or what?” she asks, and Roy knew it was coming but cringes anyway.

Because they can’t. Not quite yet. Roy had another motivation to meet her out here rather than waiting inside. He needs a minute to speak to her before they enter the house. Among other things, he still needs to break the news of who, exactly, is waiting for them in there.

“Come with me,” he tells Sarah, and motions for her to follow him.

While Keeley takes Phoebe off to the side and sits down in the grass — and Roy takes a moment to be grateful for the fact that Keeley is the kind of incredible person who will sit on the ground and play with her boyfriend’s niece when she needs to be distracted and not bat an eye at it — they step off to the side, to the porch, and stand facing each other.

The light beside the door throws Sarah’s face into strange shapes. The curls that fall over her f orehead cast one of her eyes into deep shadow while the other is in sharp relief. It’s an odd effect, making her seem unlike herself.

Dr. Sarah Kent, it has often been said, bears a striking resemblance to her brother. Her eyes are darker, and her cheekbones higher, but they have the same thick eyebrows, the same nose. Their mouths make the same shape when wrinkled up with apprehensive suspicion. Her hair is longer than his, though not by very much. She’s worn it the same way since medical school, cropped short on the sides and back with a mess of curls that are the same shade as his atop her head, falling into her face. Roy’s hair curls up the same way if he ever lets it get long enough. A small silver necklace glitters as she shifts in place, a Star of David with her daughter’s birthday etched into it. Roy has one just like it, though he keeps his in a drawer upstairs.

“So, before we…” Roy trails off, then clears his throat and tries again. “Before we go in there, I need you not to react to this… dramatically.”

Sarah tips her head to the side and stares at him a little harder, her mouth pressing into a tighter line. Roy wonders if this is what his players feel like when he’s staring them down in training, trying to piece together what they’re likely to say before they actually admit it to him. It’s not a great feeling. It’s like being stuck under a microscope that’s frowning at you.

“Roy,” she says eventually. Nothing about her face or voice seems impressed with him. “I’m an emergency doctor. I don’t do dramatic reactions to medical situations, and I presume this is a medical situation, or you’d have called somebody else. Who the fuck is in that house?”

“Right,” he mutters. Straight to the point, then, which he really knew to expect from her by now. Roy squeezes his eyes shut for a count of three, then opens them again. “It’s Jamie Tartt.”

There’s a long beat of silence while Sarah stares at him openly. Behind her, Phoebe runs a short ways across the grass and Keeley grabs her about the waist, spinning her around. The little girl’s laugh is disturbingly out of place among the rest of the trappings of this strange and horrible evening. A street light nearby buzzes in a low, electronic hum.

“Jamie Tartt,” repeats Sarah eventually, seeming to have regained the ability to speak.

“Yes—”

“The muppet? Jamie Tartt, the muppet?”

That clip, the one of Roy on television — Jamie Tartt is a muppet and I hope he dies of the incurable condition of being a little bitch — had been, according to the woman herself, the highlight of Sarah’s year. She’d kept it in the video roll on her phone, and was apparently prone to pulling it out and showing coworkers whenever someone needed cheering up or she felt like having a laugh herself. Roy had gotten a call from her that night, and she’d barely been able to get coherent words out through breathless laughter. If he had to guess, Roy would say Sarah had quoted that clip every other time Jamie came up in conversation since.

Evidently, she’s not done now, either. “The one you’d ring me to bitch about, like, every other night, back when —”

“Yes, Sarah,” Roy finally interrupts when he can’t stand it any longer, “that one! Seriously, I need you to shut up and listen to me right now. Please.”

On any normal day, Roy would not have gotten away with telling his sister to ‘shut up.’ It’s the ‘please’ that’s done it, though, he knows. He and Sarah have never had much of a ‘please’ relationship, and now he’s said it twice in one night, both grave and sincere and without a hint of a whine or mocking tone to it. So instead of any of the usual ways she might have reacted to being told to shut up by her brother, Sarah sobers quickly instead, seriousness retaking her face, and says nothing further.

“He looks…” This is the second time that Roy has found himself in the position of needing to prepare someone for the shock of seeing Jamie, and he feels no better equipped to do it this time around than he had the first. Calling his sister over for a consult, so to speak, doesn’t really do justice to what she’s about to walk in on. “He looks bad.” It’s a ridiculously simplistic way to put it, but Roy genuinely can’t think of anything else.

Sarah’s expression grows more calculating. She narrows her eyes at him. “Okay,” she says, even and toneless. “How bad is ‘bad,’ exactly.”

“Bad is — well, the bleeding’s mostly stopped, but before it stopped there was a lot of it. I’m serious, he looked like he was in a fucking horror movie or a really graphic PSA against drink driving.” She nods, and Roy can almost see the little loading sign spin above her head as she digests this information. He’s not done though. “Also, when you go in there — Look, just don’t — Just. Be careful with him, alright?” It’s a pathetic end to a sentence that he started several times before he was able to eek out even that much of an ending.

“Careful?” Sarah repeats. One eyebrow has arched back up slightly. She’s not making fun of him this time, at least, thanks to the obvious seriousness of the situation, but she is trying to puzzle together exactly what’s going on here and is having trouble with some of the pieces.

“Yeah, like…” Once again, Roy is finding himself in the apparently endless situation of needing to articulate something that he has very little experience with and no words to describe. He’s scrambling through his mind for what he learned through trial and error over the last couple of hours, as well as what he’d picked up when he’d gone on that internet binge on websites about trauma after Wembley. “Don’t touch him without telling him, or move too quick, or yell at him, or whatever.”

And now Roy can really tell that ‘little sister Sarah’ is completely gone from this conversation, replaced by ‘Dr. Kent,’ because she would definitely be making fun of him for that one if she wasn’t. Warning her not to yell at Jamie is just absurd and Roy knows it, because there’s literally no reason why she would. It’s the kind of low hanging fruit that a sibling lives for, but Sarah’s not saying anything about the stupid caution, she’s just looking at him with a slight frown, all business.

“Attacked,” Sarah says, as calm and serious as anything. “That’s what you said on the phone, you had a mate who was attacked.” It’s clear that she’s figuring out things that Roy hasn’t told her, hasn’t decided whether he should yet, which is something he really should have seen coming. She’s a doctor, an emergency doctor. She knows what warnings like the one Roy has just given her mean. “Who was it? That hurt him, Roy, who was it?”

It’s not Roy’s story to tell. He knows it isn’t. Even so, he knows that it’s going to be everywhere in a matter of hours. It’ll be splashed across all corners of the internet by morning if it isn’t already, and at that point, nobody’s going to get a choice of who knows what and when. The entire world, whether they like it or not — whether Jamie likes it or not — is about to know exactly what happened to him and exactly who did it, and if he can better equip Sarah to handle this now, then, well.

“Piece of shit bastard who calls himself Jamie’s dad,” he says, and manages with a heroic effort to keep his voice low and even enough that it doesn’t attract Phoebe’s attention from where she’s still playing with Keeley across the lawn. “Showed up at Coventry after the match, in the car park, got in his face. Jamie tried to leave, and it got… it got bad.” Roy grits his teeth, forces himself to say this next bit without shouting, without losing his mind in one way or another. “Hit him a few times. Knocked him down, he hit his head on the curb. Hard. Says he’s not concussed, but… I don’t know. I’m not sure.”

It’s harder to say it in person than on the phone, but also easier to say to Sarah than it had been to Keeley. Terrible little equation, that one is, trying to figure out which of the times Roy has recounted the attack has been the objectively shittier one.

“And there were reporters there. With cameras.” Maybe he says it because he thinks that Sarah needs the full picture before they go inside. Maybe he says it because he still can’t process so many of the details, even though it’s been hours since they’d happened. “So many of ‘em, they blocked the way and kept me from being able to stop it, kept anyone from being able to — and taking pictures the whole time. Recording it, on video, which — what the fuck, who does that?”

The mask of Sarah’s professionalism cracks just a bit, allowing revulsion to show through. Roy finds that it validates his own distress. She shakes her head and looks out over the street, a lot of feelings passing through her face very quickly.

“Okay,” she says eventually, and Dr. Kent is back. “Alright, I think I have a decent idea of the situation. Let’s go in, don’t want to keep wasting time out here.” Then, without waiting for Roy to take the lead, Sarah picks her bag up from where she’d set it on the porch, turns to the house, and walks inside.

“We haven’t been formally introduced yet. I’m Dr. Sarah Kent,” she tells Jamie, dropping her bag by the couch and taking a seat on the coffee table, the same way as Roy had done not that long ago. “You can just call me Sarah, though. Don’t really feel very ‘Dr. Kent’ in my night clothes.”

The statement gets the faintest huff of air from Jamie, like the faded ghost of an almost-laugh. For the first time, Roy pays attention to what Sarah’s wearing. She’s got a jumper on, thanks to the weather, but sure enough her trousers aren’t jeans or slacks or anything of the sort, but rather a soft-looking flannel material in a garish blue and yellow.

“Jamie Tartt,” he tells her, holding out his right hand like this is normal, like it isn’t the middle of the night, like he isn’t bruised and cut and his other arm isn’t taped up in a bloody towel. Sarah doesn’t miss a beat, shaking the offered hand.

“Wish it were under better circumstances, but it’s nice to finally meet you,” she says with a small smile. “I’ve heard things.” When Jamie winces, she follows it up by clarifying, “From my daughter. You’ve made quite the impression, it seems.”

That puts Jamie at ease, and Roy sees a light flush creep up his cheek. She’s managing a breezy air, as if this were any other patient interaction she’d dealt with in her career, tempered by an edge of personal friendliness, like she’s being introduced to one of her brother’s friends under normal circumstances. Roy is baffled by how she manages to pull that off, and it makes him wonder if she might’ve been better suited to a career in acting than in medicine.

While she makes small talk about Phoebe, Sarah leans over and opens her bag, beginning to rummage around. She pulls a few things out and sets them on the table next to her. Most of it is completely unfamiliar to Roy, but he recognizes the box of gloves and the tablet that she retrieves last, balancing the device on her thighs and waking the screen to begin tapping a few things into it. When she’s got everything set up and seems to be ready to start her exam, she stops what she’s doing before actually reaching for Jamie at all. Instead, she turns to look at Roy, who’s standing to the side a bit, next to the arm of the couch.

“Time for you to go now, I think,” she says, and Roy is shaking his head before she’s even finished the sentence.

“Absolutely not,” he tells her, immediate and resolute. “I’m not going anywhere, don’t be daft. Time for me to go, what are you even saying? I’m staying right here.”

As stubborn as Roy can get, he sometimes forgets that they grew up in the same place, with the same tendencies. He and Sarah are more alike than they are different, though they’d both have been mightily offended by the suggestion when they were younger. That means that, when she looks back at him with her arms crossed in a mimic of his body language, she’s just as stubborn in return.

“I’m the doctor here,” Sarah says. “You asked me to make a house call, so I’m making a house call. I don’t care whose house it is. When I’m the doctor, I’m in charge. Now go. I’m seeing a patient, and he deserves privacy.”

Before Roy has the chance to decide whether to be offended by the order or capitulate and let her win this one because she might actually be right, Jamie interrupts. He speaks hesitantly but without pause, asking, “Could he — Would it be alright if he stayed, actually?” The shock that Roy feels must show on his face when Jamie glances back at him, because it’s followed quickly by a cringe and a rush to add, “I mean, you don’t have to, just—”

Roy snorts, not letting Jamie finish that train of thought. “I’m fucking staying.” He looks away from Jamie and back to Sarah, staring her down, daring her to fight him on it. Raising her hands, she lets the matter drop without bothering to push the subject, which makes Roy feel a little embarrassed. Obviously, she hadn’t been arguing with him because she’d wanted to argue with him or order him about. She is, as she’d said, the doctor here, and Dr. Kent doesn’t mess about when it comes to her job. It hadn’t been about him at all.

Without further ado, Sarah pulls on a pair of blue gloves from the box and starts at the top of some checklist that exists only inside her own head. As she goes through the motions, she tells Jamie what she’s going to do before she does it, describing her planned actions in language that’s easy for Roy’s layperson vocabulary to grasp without sounding like she’s talking to a toddler.

It’s an impressive balancing act between caution and a level of gingerness that would be insulting. Roy marvels at it until he remembers that, as an emergency doctor, this is probably something that Sarah has been trained to do. Working with, speaking to victims. The thought puts a sour taste in his mouth, and he shakes his head to clear it, instead just focusing on what’s happening.

She starts with Jamie’s arm, pulling it gently out and undoing the fabric Roy had wrapped around it on the bus. When Sarah cuts through the papery tape, it seems that the fibres of the towel have fused to the torn, wet skin of the wound in the hours since it was applied. The realization that he’d managed to inadvertently cause Jamie even more pain while trying, in his unskilled and under-resourced way, to help, strikes guilt that’s so strong it’s nauseating through Roy’s gut. He grits his teeth and looks studiously at what Sarah’s doing in order to avoid having to look at Jamie’s face. If he looked at Jamie’s face, saw the pain as it actually happened, he might try to apologize, and that likely wouldn’t go well for anyone. Roy’s always been awful at apologies.

“It’ll come loose easily enough,” Sarah says, leaning down to sort through her bag until she comes up with what she’s looking for. It’s some kind of bottle, topped by an odd, bent spout like one might find in a school chemistry lab. “Just gonna use some of this water to help it along, though this is probably going to hurt a bit. Sorry about that, but I’ll be fast and careful.”

As fast and careful as Sarah is, soaking bits of the towel and peeling it away with precise movements, it’s not enough. Jamie can’t help the small sounds that make it past his clenched jaw every time she disturbs a particularly well-embedded fibre of rough cloth. His arm twitches like he’s fighting the urge to yank it out of Sarah’s light grasp, like he wants to escape the pain but knows that he can’t. Listening to him makes Roy feel like he’s got raw nerves of his own, nerves that are jarred with every quiet whimper and stifled whine. By the time that the towel is all the way off, Roy’s blinking hard to clear his stinging eyes and stoking a solid little fire of loathing for himself. He should’ve seen this coming, should’ve known better than to tape a towel over an open wound. Stupid. It was just stupid.

There isn’t much to be done, it turns out, for his arm once Sarah gets a look at it. She circles Jamie’s wrist with gentle fingers and turns it this way and that, then announces that unfortunately, with this kind of injury, the best course of action is to prevent infection by covering it, and wait for it to heal on its own. Before they can do that, though, there’s the matter of cleaning the wounds.

Sarah talks the whole time she spends poking at the deep scrapes with tweezers, removing pieces of grit and unidentifiable debris from the dirty ground of the car park. She taps them off in a container that she’d sent Roy to get from the kitchen, her gloves quickly becoming damp and smudged with blood. It drips down onto the bath towel laid out for that precise purpose, staining it in little patches of red. Without context, Roy could almost believe he’d spilled red wine on it at some point. He grimaces and closes his eyes just to escape the sight of it for a few moments.

Closing his eyes does nothing to escape the sound. Though Sarah keeps talking, explaining why she’s got to clear away the gravel before they can get his arm wrapped up, it’s not loud enough to cover up the sounds that Jamie makes. They’re sharper than the noises he’d made when she was detaching the towel, little staccato cries muffled behind where he’s got his other wrist pressed to his mouth. It’s torturous to listen to, which is a thought that Roy resents himself even more for as soon as he has it. This is not about him. If it’s torturous to listen to, he can’t imagine how bad it must feel to actually be experiencing it.

With the wounds cleaned out and an antiseptic ointment applied to prevent them from getting infected, Sarah stops before applying the special kind of non-stick gauze that she’s got sitting out on the table next to her. She lets Jamie take his arm back, cradling it guardedly against his knees, and sets her own hands in her lap. There’s a slight frown on her face that Roy wouldn’t be able to read if it weren’t for the fact that he’s known her all his life. She’s got something to say, and she can’t figure out quite how to say it.

It’s a profoundly disturbing look to see on her, given she usually has no trouble at all with putting what she’s thinking into words and then saying them directly. It’s one of the bigger differences between them.

“Jamie,” Sarah eventually starts. Her voice is carefully light and neutral. “I’ve seen situations like yours before, a few times, and because of that experience, I think that it’s a good idea for me to take a few pictures of your injuries before we get them covered.”

Jamie freezes. Roy freezes. Every atom of the whole room freezes, except for Sarah, who just keeps going with her calm voice and cautious wording.

“It’s fairly likely, from what I’ve heard about what happened to you, that there will be a police inquiry,” she says. Roy has somehow not, until literally this very moment, considered the possibility. ”If there is, it would be best to start documenting things now, rather than wait until later.”

Now that he’s had a few seconds to process what she’s suggesting, Roy starts shaking his head. “Sarah,” he says, a warning in the tone. If this goes sideways — if the suggestion bothers Jamie the way it’s bothering him — Roy is going to step in and put a stop to it. Despite the interjection, she ignores him completely.

“I know there’s been enough going on for you with cameras and photographs today,” Sarah says. A muscle in Jamie’s jaw goes visibly more taut, his teeth gritted together so hard they might be at risk of cracking. It’s not a flinch, but it’s not quite not a flinch either. “I’ll understand if you don’t want to. But I really do think it would be easiest to do this now.”

Easiest for what? She doesn’t specify, and Roy doesn’t want to expend too much time or energy wondering. Jamie doesn’t ask. He swallows, eyes darting around the room, and then he nods. He’s obviously unhappy and uncomfortable with it, but he’s agreeing anyway.

“Are you sure you’re okay with this?” Roy can’t help asking. He shouldn’t be pushing, he knows he shouldn’t, but he truly can’t stop himself. If the thought of someone taking pictures of Jamie’s injuries is making Roy feel this unsettled, this nauseated, he can only imagine how Jamie himself feels.

“Roy,” Sarah says. Now it’s her turn to issue a warning in the form of her sibling’s name, which makes it Roy’s turn to ignore her.

A pause. “Yeah. I’m sure.” Despite the confirmation, Jamie’s voice doesn’t lend much confidence to his agreement.

So Sarah takes the photos, and it proves to be an excruciating process for all involved. Jamie is obviously not enjoying any part of it, which is a woeful understatement. This is one kind of scrutiny that they had been hoping to avoid by not going to a hospital in the first place — cameras. Pictures. There’s an odd emptiness to his face, like he’s somewhere else entirely when his eyes aren’t flickering around the room, looking from one thing to the next to avoid looking at either of the Kents.

Roy isn’t having a good time with it either. There’s an impatience itching in his skin. He feels like he should intervene, should be getting between Jamie and the camera, shielding him somehow, though he knows that if he can trust anyone in the world to not hurt Jamie, it’s the people in and outside this house. Still, Roy feels that same snarling animal he’d felt on the bus, the protectiveness caged in his chest. It’s pacing and snapping its teeth, and he can’t seem to muzzle it, no matter how many times he orders it to sit down and shut up.

The only person who seems to be having no issue with this is Sarah.

Or, that’s the way she’d seem if she were any other doctor, not Roy’s sister, and if Roy was any other person, and not her brother. But because it’s Sarah, he can see around the placid calm on her face, the professionalism she’s painted across her forehead and the emotionless, lax shape of her mouth. It’s in her eyes. Sarah’s eyes always gave her away, even as a kid.

Sarah doesn’t like this either, and somehow that comforts Roy. He feels bad about it, shouldn’t want her to be suffering in this, but it does, and there’s no way around it. The fact that Sarah would rather be doing just about anything else than sitting on his coffee table and taking pictures of Jamie’s beaten face, his fucked-up arm, a little ruler from her bag held up next to the wounds, is the only thing that calms the angry little animal inside Roy at all.

The verdict is both better than Roy had feared, and worse than he’d hoped.

Jamie’s going to need stitches in his forehead, down through his eyebrow, and in both his upper and lower lip. They’ll be able to get that taken care of tomorrow at the surgery where Sarah works. For now, the temporary solution to the problem is a row of little white strips that greatly resemble very small pieces of tape, which have been carefully laid across the deep cut in Jamie’s forehead, as well as the ones through his mouth. They look flimsy, but apparently they’ll hold up long enough to get the stitches put in tomorrow. He’s got a concussion, though a mild one, which Sarah had determined using some checklist of questions on her tablet, half of which Roy didn’t understand. She covers the horrible scrapes on Jamie’s arm with some kind of gel, then covers that with the non-stick gauze, and tapes the whole thing up to a far more professional effect than the towel swaddle from earlier.

The part that worries Roy the most is what Sarah says last. It’s about Jamie’s skull. Even just the words themselves, divorced from the sentences they live in, are enough to strike chills down Roy’s spine.

Skull. Possible fracture. X-ray scan.

Apparently, the extent of the bruising that’s beginning to blossom on Jamie’s face, how deep the laceration in his forehead is, and the fact that the damage was sustained in a collision with a concrete curb are all enough to make Sarah concerned that there might be a fracture somewhere in Jamie’s skull.

Jamie himself doesn’t seem particularly shocked by this. His expression is more tired than anything, a worn-out grimace and a thousand-yard-stare. Now, Roy, though — Roy feels like he might pass out.

Facial fracture. He might have a crack in the bones of his face. Jamie’s wretched excuse for a father may have broken his skull. No matter how many different ways he turns it around in his head, thinks it over and over in an attempt to assimilate the information, Roy can’t comprehend it. It just doesn’t feel like the sort of thing that should be possible, should really exist in the world.

Even so, there it is.

“We can get all of that taken care of tomorrow, though,” Sarah is saying when Roy tunes back into reality. “I’ll come in early before my shift, talk to a few of my colleagues, and we’ll get you taken care of. There’s a back way in, nobody will have to see you.”

“You really don’t… You don’t have to do all that,” Jamie says in a quiet mumble, looking down at his hands rather than at Sarah. It’s not like him — usually, the Jamie that Roy knows would be all over the idea of special treatment, of a surgery rearranging its morning to get him taken care of, coming in a special door so that he doesn’t have to use the same one as everyone else. He’d rather Jamie be smirking and preening about it.

“Maybe I don’t have to, but I’m gonna anyway,” is what Sarah comes back with. She doesn’t seem surprised or put off by his reaction. Probably because she doesn’t know him well enough to be, which is Roy’s problem, he supposes. “You should probably know better than to argue with a Kent when we get our minds set on something, yeah?”

The light jab at Roy does what it was probably supposed to do and eases some of the awkward tension in Jamie’s shoulders, in his whole body. In the whole room. He even smiles, just a little.

The last thing that Sarah does is compose a list of things to watch out for, things that mean they need to call an ambulance. If none of that comes up — and Roy seriously hopes it won’t, because one glance at the paper makes him feel a bit faint — she tells them that otherwise, they should be okay to wait until morning to get him seen to.

When it comes time for her to leave, Roy lets his sister get almost all the way out before he gives in and goes after her. He stops Sarah in the doorway of the house, and they stand there, huddled together.

For a long moment, Sarah just stands there and stares at Roy with her eyebrow raised in (what she would be horrified to hear) is a perfect imitation of their mother. The look is piercing, and it feels like being x-rayed, being seen through until everything inside him is presented on a neat little screen for inspection. He folds his arms tightly across his chest, feeling the tension of the deep frown that has knitted his forehead into increasingly more dramatic lines. His grandfather used to chide him that he was going to frown himself into a headache. That had always seemed ludicrous to Roy, but maybe the old man had been onto something. His head is definitely pounding now.

“This is a fucking mess,” is what he eventually comes up with when it becomes exceedingly clear that Sarah is not about to take pity on him and start this one herself.

All she gives him in reward for that herculean effort of conversational initiation is a slight nod. Her hair falls partially forward into her eyes, and she twitches it back with a small, absent-minded flick of her chin. It’s a habit that she’s had all her life, even when their mother used to tell her to just put her hair up already, or wear a headband. It’s got to be muscle memory now. For some reason, the sight of it makes Roy’s chest give a sharp throb.

“I just… I don’t know what to- how to… He’s just, and I-” Roy is failing at this spectacularly. He grits his teeth and shakes his head, then looks over at Jamie. Not much of him is visible, just a dip in the back of the sofa and a disheveled shock of brown hair.

Standing here, speaking in hushed tones while keeping half an eye on Jamie, it’s the same way Roy always remembers the grownups talking when they thought he and his sister were too little to understand big things — or scary things.

He remembers it from when his grandmother died. She got sick first, but no one told him and Sarah, just came in one day and said Bubbe Anna was gone. He knew, though. He’d always heard so much more than the adults ever thought he did, and that plays around in his mind now. Jamie’s not a child, obviously, and he and Sarah aren’t conspiring to keep things away from him, but there’s an element of secrecy and collusion to the way that he stands with her in the door, looking over every now and then to make sure Jamie hasn’t… Hasn’t what, he honestly doesn’t know. Bolted? Pitched over and died right there on Roy’s couch? Started to cry, too quiet to hear?

Still lost for words, Roy turns back to Sarah, who regards him with a shrewd look. He’s almost been reduced to actually directly asking her, begging her to tell him what his next steps are supposed to be. What to do about any of this. It’s a horrid violation of the natural laws of the universe for Roy to so thoroughly entertain the urge to ask his little sister to give him the answers. They share the load a lot more these days, it’s true, but there’s still a part of him that will always be Sarah’s big brother, always be convinced that it’s his job to help, his job to lead, his job to protect. But he’s lost now, and there’s not a person Roy knows who’s smarter than Sarah Kent.

“You want to fix it for him,” says the smartest person Roy knows, a moment before he was about to crack and beg her to just tell him what to do. “You’re a fixer, Roy, it’s what you do. It’s at the core of who you are.”

That… had not been what Roy was looking for. Not remotely. His head jerks back, as if to physically distance himself from the suggestion. “What? I am not.”

Sarah just rolls her eyes and folds her arms in a mirror image of him. “Fuck off. You are too,” she says, and he’s a just a little resentful of how she’s able to deliver such a primary-school-level response and still make it sound authoritative, which is maybe one of the things they teach you in doctor school. “I’ve known you my entire life, I know what you’re like. I’m the same way, remember? Or did you miss how I went and turned it into a career?”

Which, well, it’s not like Roy can really even deny that one, so he doesn’t try. He just stands there, frowns, and waits for whatever else is coming. There’s more. There’s always more.

“So, listen to me when I tell you, one fixer to another,” Sarah goes on, sure enough, “that some shit you cannot fix, and trying is only going to end up breaking it worse.”

Roy concludes, very suddenly and very decisively, that he does not like where this is going. He keeps quiet, and continues to wait, biting back the half-dozen responses that instantly spring to his tongue. None of them would help, and he’s in the dark here. He needs all the help he can get.

“You can’t fix this.” The verdict is delivered with a calm, blunt brutality. She doesn’t sugarcoat or soften it, which is just Sarah for you. Softening has never been her style, for better or worse. “You can’t make it so that he was never assaulted tonight, and you cannot go back in time and keep him from ever being abused in the first place.”

The language is so straightforward that it makes Roy flinch.

Assaulted. Abused.

They’re horrible words, sombre and frightening words that he wouldn’t want near anyone, can hardly process being in the same conversation as Jamie. Stupid, how he’d watched it happen right in front of him and can still be so affected by the words coming out of Sarah’s mouth.

“What you can do, though,” she says in the first pinprick of light that has shone through the depths of this very dark conversation, “is be there for him now. Take care of him now.”

“Take care of him?” Roy can’t help repeating, and Sarah rolls her eyes for the second time. Her face makes it clear that she thinks he’s being ridiculous, which is somewhat welcome, actually. When she does that, she looks more like his sister giving him a hard time than a doctor delivering grim news.

“Yes. Fucking take care of him, Roy, you’re damn good at it when you want to be and he needs that. He needs somebody to be there for him, and I know you. I know he wouldn’t be here in your house right now if you hadn’t already decided to be that person, whether you recognize that or not. You did the same thing with me when I needed you.”

“Okay, that’s different,” he can’t help saying, and Sarah shakes her head sharply before he’s finished talking. “You’re my—”

“Roy.”

Unable to look her in the face anymore, not with that hanging between them, Roy looks at the ground. He shuffles his feet a little, scuffing at the doorway carpet, and then glances over at Jamie again, still impulsively making sure that he can’t hear them from the couch. It’s a stupid thing to be worried about. Even if he could hear, it’s not like he’s in much condition to be taking in and processing a whole lot, much less mocking Roy about it later.

“It’s okay, you know.” Sarah’s voice has gone kinder now, more gentl. As close to soft as she really ever gets. It’s a voice that most people who know her now think she developed just for Phoebe, but Roy knows better. She’s always had that voice, kept it in her back pocket since she was a girl, put it on when someone needed her. Roy’s always wondered how she made it seem so easy. He’s always struggled to replicate it. “To want to be there for him. To care about him.”

When she says it, Roy’s face twists sharply, and he can feel a retort building up immediately. The words, that tone, they make something in his lungs knot up funny, and he clears his throat. Before he can get a word out, she cuts him off.

“Whatever you’re about to say to that, fucking don’t,” Sarah warns, gone suddenly sharp again. All trace of softness has vanished, wiped from both her voice and her face when he looks at her. “You’re not gonna do that. Not tonight.”

Roy is pinned under a hard and piercing look. There’s nowhere to hide from it. Sarah’s dark brown, nearly-black eyes are sharp, and they don’t miss a thing. They never have. Shark eyes, some nasty boy at school had once called them. Roy had gotten isolation for head-butting the kid, because he’d meant it in a mean way, but he’d been right.

“You can’t bullshit me,” she continues, “and trust me, if you try — if you lie about that and tell me you don’t care about him now, in the middle of all this? You are not going to feel good about yourself a second after you say it.”

Honestly, it’s… It’s a fair point. Sarah is right, and Roy knows she’s right as soon as he looks over at Jamie again. The sharp retort that he’d had, the bubbled up Care about him? Please, I don’t give a fuck about that brat turns to ash in his throat. He hadn’t even said it, and still the shame burns bright and hot. The only millimetres of relief he’s been granted have been because his sister identified the terrible instinct in him before he’d managed to say any of it out loud.

“It’s okay to care. That’s allowed.” And now the soft voice is back. Sarah sounds kind again, understanding, and Roy still can’t get a full breath in. “You’re not gonna lose your tough guy cred, or whatever. Life is weird and fucked up and complex, and sometimes shit happens, and I know you. I know how far you’d go for family. Better than anyone — I know that. So I am telling you right now, whether you can admit it to yourself or not, the muppet on your couch is your fucking family, and you had better grow up and get used to it.”

The pronouncement hangs in the air with a kind of inescapable finality that settles over Roy’s shoulders like a physical weight. He can’t argue with her. What surprises him a little is that he doesn’t want to.

For a while, she waits and watches him, and when he says nothing and continues to say nothing, Sarah nods, satisfied.

“Right. I’m not saying it won’t suck, but you’re gonna be okay. I really believe that. He will be too.” Without waiting for him to muster up any kind of answer, Sarah hooks an arm over Roy’s shoulder and tugs him into a quick, hard hug. “Love you, Roy-boy.”

“Yeah, whatever. Go home, go to bed,” Roy says gruffly, hugging her back, lifting her feet off the ground the slightest bit just to remind her that he’s still taller than her, then ducking his head to kiss her cheek. Sounding like an afterthought, though it very much isn’t, he adds, “Love you too.”

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

Standing in the doorway, Roy watches Sarah go. He watches his sister head down the walkway, watches Keeley say goodnight to Phoebe, then speak briefly with Sarah, and feels strange. It’s like, for the moment, Roy exists in a little outside bubble, separated from regular time and space, watching the rest of the world happen around him.

When Keeley gets back up to the porch, Roy hugs her for a long time, and she hugs him back just as tight. He’d needed it more than he realized, and that’s what bolsters him enough to be able to tell her what happened.

“Sarah says he’s good for the night, but he’ll need to go to the surgery she works at for stitches in the morning. And — and for a scan.”

Keeley frowns, but doesn’t ask. Roy tells her anyway, partially because he knows that she needs to know, and partially because he’s selfish and he wants someone else to help him carry it.

“She thinks there might be a fracture in his face somewhere. Not a bad one, but just maybe. Wants to get a scan just to be sure.” Roy rushes through it, every word bitter and difficult to shape in his mouth. “Took a bunch of pictures too, because she thinks there might be a police case about it, and they’re good for… for evidence, I think. Not sure.”

“Fuck,” is all Keeley says, just like she had when she’d first seen Jamie back at Nelson Road.

“Yeah,” Roy agrees with her, and then they both stand there for a moment, saying nothing at all. Keeley holds his hand tight when they both walk back inside.

When they get eyes on him, Jamie is still right where he’d been when Roy left to see Sarah out. He’s frowning down at his hands like there’s something on his mind, though Roy can’t possibly begin to guess what. Because his head is bowed, Roy can see that Sarah had missed a patch of blood in cleaning up his face with those damp, sterile wipes,. It’s small but not insignificant, on the left side of Jamie’s head, smeared into the hair right above his ear. The sight of it sends a prickle of agitated discomfort up Roy’s spine, and he makes the decision before he’s had time to really think it through, which is a habit that’s been landing him in trouble all of his life.

Dodging into the hall, Roy grabs a washcloth out of the linen closet and runs it under the kitchen sink, then heads to where Sarah had been sitting on the coffee table. The first time that he tries to reach out and handle the patch of blood, he gets his hand swatted away with an annoyed sound.

Roy figures that he earned that one. He should know better than to just start doing things. Family members, teachers, coaches — they’ve all chided him about it for as long as he can remember: The only person who knows what’s in your head is you, Roy, he can hear from a dozen imaginary voices.

“You’ve got… There’s blood on your head,” he explains. It’s what he should’ve done before trying anything at all, but there’s nothing he can do about that now.

The second time that Roy reaches out, Jamie smacks his hand away again, nearly knocking the washcloth out of it. Annoyance flares in Roy’s chest, and he pushes it down. It’s not Jamie’s fault that he’s on edge, he reminds himself. Anyone would be. He’s not trying to be difficult.

“Leave it,” Jamie mutters in a mutinous voice, which somewhat tries that conviction.

Annoyance again. “Well, you can’t just let it stay like that. Come on, keep still so I can deal with it.”

“Roy,” Keeley warns from the opposite end of the couch. Roy doesn’t listen to the caution. He just tries again.

This time, when he reaches for Jamie’s head, Jamie swerves sharply out of the way, dodging like a petulant child and then groaning, reaching up to cradle the side of his skull. The movement must have triggered a surge in the headache that goes with the concussion, and Roy feels just the tiniest bit vindicated.

“I fucking told you,” he says, irritation creeping into his voice and sharpening it at the edges. “Keep still so I can get this —”

“Just fucking leave it,” Jamie snaps, swatting at Roy’s hands for the third time.

“I can’t leave it, there’s blood in your —”

“It doesn’t matter, just —”

“Fucking of course it matters, there’s blood in your hair, now will you shut up and let me deal with it already?” The silence in the room makes Roy’s voice ring even louder by comparison. Keeley is staring at him with open astonishment that’s already turning into disapproval, but Roy can’t reel it back now. His patience had reached its sudden limit and he’d lost his temper — which he’s been working on, hand to god, but doesn’t always win the fight against.

At least it seems to have done the job this time. Jamie’s gone still, stopped pulling out of the way as Roy reaches for him, bowed his head and quieted. Roy can see the patch of blood clearly, and he twists the washcloth around his fingers, going to deal with it once and for all. It isn’t until the empty fingers of Roy’s left hand touch the uninjured side of Jamie’s face to steady his head that he swiftly and soundly realizes that something has gone very wrong.

Roy knows Jamie better than he’d ever have been likely to admit he did before now, but it’s true. He knows Jamie, knows how he reacts to things when he’s unhappy, when he’s uncomfortable. When he feels unsafe. It’s one of the few reasons Roy felt like he could do this at all, like he could help Jamie weather this without running from it — the fact that he knew what to watch out for. Roy knew, at the very least, that if Jamie got combative or started cussing him out or insulting him, then he’d know that he’d stepped over a line.

That’s what had happened at first, and maybe ignoring it was Roy’s first mistake. (Well. His first mistake in the last five minutes, anyway.) Jamie got combative and Roy pushed. Normally, if he were even more upset by that, Jamie would’ve just gotten louder, more explosive, and Roy definitely would’ve known to back down.

Except that he hadn’t. Instead, Jamie just went quiet and docile, head bowed and ready to comply. And then he’d flinched when Roy touched him. A muted, suffocated kind of flinch that Roy likely wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t been so close, hadn’t literally been touching Jamie at the time.

Which — Roy knows Jamie, knows his reactions, his bluster and agitation. He’s like one of those birds that puffs up all its feathers when it feels encroached upon. And he’s seen Jamie flinch, too, more times than he cares to count.

When he’s startled, Jamie lurches back like he’s trying to wholly displace himself in space and time to a place where nobody can reach him, where nobody can touch him. It’s a massive, blatant reaction, immediately obvious to anyone around him, and Roy had ignored it as hard as he could for longer than he’s proud to admit. If he’d thought about it for too long, he’d start wondering what it meant, and then he’d have had to stop wholeheartedly hating the two-dimensional cardboard cut out Prince of Pricks and start contending with Jamie-the-person.

It came dangerously close to that on the night of the curse fire, and then Jamie was shipped back off to Manchester, no longer in Roy’s face and locker room every day. Which was… Well, Roy told himself over and over again that he couldn’t be happier about that in the hopes that doing so might make it true.

And he’d flinched that day, too, hadn’t he? Nearly jumped back when Dani tried to high-five him. Funny to think about, compared to the way that he and Dani are attached at the hip most days now.

He’s such a contradiction in terms, Jamie. God forbid he ever do anything the easy way, right? Kid practically basked in the attention whenever someone so much as stood close enough to him for their shoulders to brush, and he all but glows when he’s hugged, like Superman recharging in the sun. But he also flinches harder than anyone Roy’s ever met, watches people’s hands like they’re always moments from striking.

All of this goes through Roy’s head in a split second, like time is compressed down so that minutes and hours all take place in this one pressurized moment. He’s made an enormous mistake, and now the world’s tipped sideways, and he doesn’t know what to do or how it all got so unbelievably fucked.

Roy has startled Jamie before. He knows that he has. He’s scared Jamie before, even, though he’s less thrilled about reflecting on that. This is not what that looked like. This is not how Jamie reacts with Roy.

This is how Jamie reacts with Ted. It’s how he reacts on the incredibly rare occasions that Ted’s actually been angry enough to snap at them, or at him in particular. This is how he reacts with his father, though Roy’s range of experience with that is limited to two appearances and maybe one or two phone calls that he’s partially witnessed. Jamie’s quiet. Still. His arms are folded and his hands are tucked against his sides, hidden where they can’t be seen trembling.

It reminds Roy of the way it had been at the beginning, just a bit, before things between them went so sour, the way they’ve started to become again. Roy’s got so much more sway over Jamie now, so much more power now that things are okay with them. He knows this, though he doesn’t really like to think about it. And now here Jamie is, concussed and bleeding, his face bruised six ways to Sunday, sitting in Roy’s living room, alone with just Roy and his ex-girlfriend who’s with Roy now and who he probably thinks would side with Roy no matter what.

(This is regardless of the fact that Roy is as sure as he’s ever been of anything in his life that if he hurt Jamie — not argued with him, not got in some teenaged insulting standoff, but hurt him, actually hurt him — Keeley would probably kill him for it without a thought, and she’d be fucking right to.)

That’s not the point, though. The point is that, right now, as far as Jamie is concerned, he’s completely at Roy’s mercy.

This thought finally makes Roy actually react, actually do something. He lets Jamie go like he’s been burned and lurches back, scooting farther away on the table until the backs of his calves hit the edge.

“Fuck,” he says, breathes. “Fuck. God, fuck.”

“No, I’m —” Jamie glances up and then looks back down even faster, angling his head farther to the side. “’S fine, just do it.” I’m cooperating, every inch of him is screaming. I’m doing what you want, see? I’m being good.

At a loss, feeling sick, Roy looks over at Keeley. She looks alarmed and maybe a little bit pissed, and she’s got a hand braced on the armrest like she’s about to push herself up to stand and intervene. God, does Roy want to let her. He wants to get the fuck out of here, honestly, wants to leave this room, maybe leave this house, and let her handle it. It would be easier, and probably a better idea too, but Roy just… can’t do it. Not when he feels like, if he doesn’t right this mistake himself, he’s going to fracture something between him and Jamie that can’t ever be fixed, and it will be entirely his fault.

“No, stop that,” Roy says, then cringes when he hears the sound of his own voice. He sounds abrupt, maybe even angry. It’s just his voice — he knows it’s just the way his voice sounds when he’s not careful about it, but this situation needs careful. He needs to be careful. So he grits his teeth, asks God (or his grandfather or Mrs. bloody Whatsit or anyone at all who might possibly listen to him) for the slightest touch of grace, and tries again. “It’s not your fault, Jamie. It’s mine. I yelled at you, and then I fucking grabbed you, and I didn’t listen, and that’s not okay. I shouldn’t have done it.”

Jamie doesn’t react. He just sits there, quiet and still except for the shivers that run through him every few moments. This isn’t a good sign, but it’s not a particularly bad one either, so Roy takes a chance and keeps going. He figures, at the very least, that Keeley hasn’t stepped in to either stop him or kick him out, and that must mean he’s not making a complete ass of himself and totally fucking up this whole thing.

“So I’m gonna sit here, right,” Roy continues, making sure to keep his voice quiet, as gentle as he can manage. He tries, if he’s honest, to aim for a Ted kind of voice, except without the radio host on a country music channel accent. “And I’m gonna give you this.” He holds out the washcloth and waits long, agonizing moments for Jamie to pull an arm away from his chest and reach out one faintly shaking hand to take it. “And I’m gonna let you take care of it yourself. If you want help, I’ll be here, and I’m good to wait as long as that takes, but don’t you dare tell me you’re ready until you actually are.”

The room is voiceless for a long time. During that stretch of silence, Roy forces his hands not to bunch up into agitated fists, and breathes deep and slow. Stupid, he berates himself. He had literally warned Sarah about this when she’d first arrived. Roy had told her not to yell at Jamie, though he should’ve known that she wouldn’t think to in the first place, and now he’s gone and done exactly that himself. Stupid, stupid. He knows better.

Sitting there on the couch, Jamie holds the wash cloth, doesn’t move, and breathes very deliberately, the way that Roy’s seen Ted do a few times. Then, eventually, he holds the cloth out. He’s not looking at Roy, is, in fact, staring low, at some indeterminate point on the wall past Roy’s side, but he doesn’t change his mind and yank the cloth back.

“Can’t see it, can I,” is what Jamie says, barely a mutter. “Be stupid, try’n get it myself.”

Reaching out slowly, Roy takes the washcloth. It feels like so much more than a washcloth, though it’s barely got any weight in his hand. He’s been given something just now, something he didn’t have the right to ask for and most certainly didn’t deserve. If he’s not careful, he’s going to blow it, and that’s the last thing he wants to do. When he looks over at Keeley, a quick dart of his eyes to the side, right as he’s leaning forward and getting ready to take care of the bloody patch, Roy isn’t sure what he expects to see. The warm approval in her eyes and relaxation in her shoulders surprises him a bit, but makes the tension in his own body ease.

There’s another flinch when Roy touches his face, but it’s a more normal one this time, a small jerk that passes quickly. Roy waits patiently for Jamie to settle and then cleans the blood from his head with short, gentle motions of the cloth. It doesn’t take long, and then it’s done. He gets up to toss the cloth in the sink, to get a moment to himself, a moment where he doesn’t have to school his face or worry about fucking up again.

While he’s in the other room, Roy hears Keeley start talking. He comes back and leans against the doorframe, watching the two people on the couch but keeping his distance for the moment.

“Is there anyone we need to call for you?” she asks Jamie in a soft, gentle voice that makes Roy feel immediately better just from the tone. “I mean, anyone who might see the news and get worried? Any family?”

The question is a little surprising to hear from her. Roy would’ve figured that she’d know about his family — whatever there was to it — but then again, he doesn’t actually know all that much about their relationship. They hadn’t been together for an extraordinarily long time, and he doesn’t know what sort of things they’d talked about with each other.

From where he hangs back, not quite ready to put himself back in the middle of this mess and risk fucking it up again, Roy sees Jamie shake his head.

“Nah,” Jamie says, and Roy’s stomach gives a weak lurch. “Mum’s dead. Don’t got any brothers or sisters. If my dad has any family, he pissed ‘em off long before I ended up his problem full time.” Another lurch. “There’s just…” Shaking his head again, Jamie winces. He looks down at his hands, picks at the edge of the bandage around his arm. When he speaks again, it’s very quiet. Almost too quiet to hear. “There’s just Richmond.”

A stab of guilt that Roy hadn’t been expecting shoots through his chest. It’s for a lot of things, probably, but mostly it’s for the way that he’d acted when he’d first taken the coaching job. The way that Jamie had tried and tried with him, and Roy had shut him out and knocked him down over and over again because of his own — in hindsight, petty — bullshit. There’s nothing that he can do about it now, though, and it’s not like Roy can claim he’d have made the decision any differently if he found himself back there again, knowing only what he’d known at the time.

There is time to do things differently now. That’s the thought that sends Roy away from the doorframe, fully walking into the room and sitting down on the couch this time, on Jamie’s other side.

“I’m surprised that your phone’s not blowing up from the lads,” he says. It’s the first time he’s thought of it, but he really is taken aback by the peace and quiet.

“Phone’s off,” Jamie tells him. “In my bag. I turn it off during matches. Didn’t have time to turn it back on after.”

Over in the corner, where it had been dumped when they first arrived, Jamie’s bag suddenly seems far more menacing. It now looms like a threat, like a bomb in an action movie that they’ve just realized has a ticker on the front, counting down the seconds. Jamie doesn’t make an immediate move to go and retrieve his mobile from inside, and Roy is glad. He realizes that he doesn’t want Jamie to turn his phone back on.

Evidently, he’s not the only one who feels that way.

“I think,” Keeley says, a reluctant hesitation in her voice, like she’s not quite sure she should be saying it, “that maybe you shouldn’t, just yet.” She pauses, and over Jamie’s slumped head, Roy can see that she’s watching closely to see how the suggestion will be received before pushing on any farther.

Rather than saying anything, Jamie just turns to look at her. Only able to see the back of his head, Roy doesn’t know what sort of expression he’s making, but whatever it is, it must not discourage her, because Keeley goes on.

“You don’t want to get inundated with all that right now,” she says, which is a good point. The notifications on his own silenced mobile make him dizzy whenever he glances at the screen. “You definitely don’t want to see what’s gonna end up happening on social media when this breaks, if it hasn’t already. Trust me, you’re better off just leaving it off for a while. Anyone who really needs to get ahold of you knows you’re here, right?”

The end of this question rises a little in volume. Keeley speaks louder and sits up higher to make more direct eye contact with Roy, who nods. Ted knows, and Ted’s sure to have told the other coaches, and probably also Rebecca. As far as Roy’s concerned, anyone else who might be wondering where Jamie is can go straight to hell.

“Okay, so then if anyone who might need to reach you knows you’re here and can call Roy or me, anyone who doesn’t know can wait, right?”

This time, the question is more clearly directed at Jamie. He looks away from Keeley and down at his hands again, which means that Roy can see his face. His expression is tense and unhappy, which makes Roy wonder if he might be about to put up some kind of argument about the phone thing. He doesn’t. Instead, Jamie just thinks on it for a moment, then his shoulders go lax and his head slumps even lower. He’s practically bent over double, which can’t be comfortable.

“Yeah, okay.” The agreement is a distant mumble, but it’s more than Roy might have predicted they’d get out of him.

The earlier thought of Ted brought another thing into Roy’s mind, and he fumbles for his own phone. It’s in his pocket, and he fishes it out, ignoring the plethora of unread message alerts that clutter the screen in favour of opening a group message thread. He’s halfway through writing the message when he notices that Keeley’s frowning at him out of the corner of his eye. Right. Other people here — people who can’t, as he’s been reminded over and over all his life, read your mind, Roy.

“I should probably let Ted know that Sarah’s cleared you for now. Coaches and Rebecca, should let all of them in on how things are going.” Keeley’s frown doesn’t let up, which briefly confuses Roy until it occurs to him that he probably should have asked a question rather than given a statement of intent. It probably would’ve been better to have asked permission before he goes texting people about Jamie’s medical status, but it’s out there now, and Jamie’s already nodding.

“Yeah, sure,” Jamie says, in the same tone he’d just used to answer Keeley. “Probably good.” The response doesn’t do much to clear up how he actually feels about the idea, but Roy doesn’t want to push it.

Excusing himself, he leaves the room to stand in the kitchen again. He probably could’ve stayed there to do it, but starting to write out the texts while sitting next to Jamie had already felt weird and bad. It was like having a conversation about somebody right in front of them, though he’s obviously far too checked out to be reading anything over Roy’s shoulder. It’s the principle of the thing, especially now that he’s drawn attention to what he’s doing.

First, Roy finishes the message he’d been writing to the coaching staff group chat, trying to be as succinct and professional as possible while relaying what they need to know. He tries not to scare them, but there’s no real way to avoid that. It’s all scary.

Nate’s response came later than the others. Roy had watched the indicator that he was typing appear a few times, only to disappear before he sent anything. In the end, all that comes across is those four words.

Next up, management.

Maybe introducing himself was a bit of an unnecessary move, but Roy doesn’t want to assume who Rebecca Welton does or doesn’t have programmed into her address book. To Higgins, he copies over pretty much the same message, albeit with a different salutation and gets a very similar response. That should be that, in terms of people who need to be updated, but Roy doesn’t quite turn around and head back yet. He hesitates, looking at his mobile, still open to his texts.

Remembering something he’d thought earlier, Roy considers his contacts list, chewing on the inside of his cheek and thinking hard. He doesn’t want to overstep, but… Making a snap decision, he scrolls down until he finds ‘Dani Rojas’ and texts him as well.

The exclamation points and the emoticon make him smile a bit, secure in having made the right decision in contacting Dani specifically.

It’s more of a personal and selfish point of reference, the strong recollection of being a captain and what that had felt like, that leads Roy to text Isaac too. Doing so takes care of the ambient worry Roy knows is going to be circulating amongst the rest of the Richmond players, and quiets the residual anxiety he feels as a former captain, imagining what it would be like to be Isaac and not know whether one of his boys was okay.

When he returns with everyone who needs to know having been informed, Roy notes that Jamie has at least partially returned to his normal level of awareness and cognition — not totally lost in a fugue of brain static, but not totally okay, either — and that he’s alone. Roy frowns, looking around for an indication of why that is, and Jamie must notice, because he answers the unasked question.

“Keeley went upstairs, said something about getting a guest room ready.”

It makes sense, and it’s a good sign that Jamie’s aware enough to know what Roy was looking for without him needing to say anything. Roy nods but keeps looking around, unsure of what he should do in the meantime. The TV screen is on, he notices. Maybe Keeley turned it on at some point, but there’s nothing pulled up. It’s just the revolving set of adverts that appear when you don’t choose something to watch on Netflix.

For lack of any better ideas coming to mind, Roy takes a seat at the far end of the couch, where Keeley had been, content to sit there in silence until she gets back, if that’s what’s going to happen. May as well, honestly. He’s too tired to think of something else.

That’s not what happens, though.

“I’ve lost my tolerance.”

It comes out of nowhere, a quiet, bitter mutter in a voice that Roy wasn’t expecting to hear again that night. Jamie had seemed like he was done talking, but apparently not, and when Roy turns to look at him, he looks about the same way his voice sounded. He’s got his forearms braced on his knees, picking at the edge of the bandage with his thumbnail again. When Roy stoops a little and peers at his face, he sees that Jamie’s eyebrows are tightly furrowed and his mouth is twisted in a sneer. A momentary impulse to warn him that he’s going to make his lip bleed again rises in Roy’s throat, and he swallows it down.

“How do you mean?” he asks, even though he’s pretty damn sure he doesn’t want to know. There’s a lot of that going around lately.

“All of this… shit,” Jamie says, his voice in an undertone steeped with loathing. His hand twitches up towards his face, indicating the damage, which makes Roy wince. “This is nothing. I used to be able to handle this on my own, but you’ve all gone and made me fucking soft, and I can’t just swallow it the way I used to. Can’t get over it. Shake it off. Been doing that since I was a kid, never had any fucking help, never needed it. And now I’m just…” He holds his hands out in front of himself, looks down at them. They’re shaking, and he tucks them back against his chest, arms folded. Every word comes out more vicious than the last. “’S fucking pathetic. Soft, just like he said.”

Roy is having trouble breathing. He doesn’t realize that he’s stopped entirely until his brain registers that it isn’t receiving the proper amount of oxygen and kicks his chest back into expanding the way it’s supposed to. The air feels thick and Roy focuses on drawing it in slowly, then releasing it even slower.

I’ve lost my tolerance, Jamie said. Like he went without drinking for a long time and then got absolutely smashed on a few swallows of that gross vanilla vodka shit he’s fond of. Roy doesn’t know how to process that, never mind anything that came after it, twisting the words over and over in his brain. I’ve lost my tolerance. I used to be able to handle this. You’ve all gone and made me fucking soft. Been doing that since I was a kid. Fucking pathetic. Soft.

“Good,” Roy finds himself saying, surprised by the word and even more surprised with the vehemence with which he says it. He practically spits the word, and Jamie looks up and over at him, surprised. The movement is sharp, and Roy feels a sting of regret until he manages to grasp that, thank God — thank whatever the hell — it hadn’t been a flinch.

Jamie frowns at him, and Roy hates the way that the strips over the cut in his eyebrow fold and wrinkle. If Jamie starts bleeding again at this point, it’s not going to be good for anyone. He opens his mouth like he’s going to say something, probably ‘what?’ but he doesn’t quite get that far. Instead, he just keeps sitting there on Roy’s couch, hunched over and looking up at Roy with that confused, wrong-footed expression.

“I don’t want you to have a — a tolerance for that shit,” Roy tells him, putting it as straightforwardly and solidly as he can. He doesn’t back down from the strange way it came out, standing by his guns and looking at Jamie dead-on. “Not the sort of thing you should have a fucking tolerance for, Jamie. You should’ve had help then, and it’s fucking awful that you didn’t, but you have it now. You don’t need to shake it off. Don’t need to get over it. You’ve got people here to take care of you now. Just — just let us. If that’s soft, then good. Be soft. That’s what you ought to be. That’s what we want you to be. That’s good.”

There’s an odd look on Jamie’s face, like he’s wondering if Roy might be fucking with him. Not only is Roy absolutely not fucking with him, the fact that Jamie thinks he might be is all sorts of screwing with his head. So he just sets his jaw, keeps looking at Jamie, and schools every feature into a hard mask of determination.

“Good,” Jamie echoes, breaking eye contact and looking down again. His face isn’t twisted this time, though. The self-loathing resentment has calmed, replaced by something different. Softer.

Feeling awkwardness build and build the longer he sits there, Roy resolves to go and do something else instead. Tea is never a bad idea in pretty much any given situation, so he heads back for the kitchen. On the way, he rolls his shoulders and feels his spine pop, a series of uncomfortable sounds that echo in a way that makes him wince.

A strange impulse leads him to stop behind the couch, leaning against the back. It creaks, and Jamie shifts. Roy reaches down and puts a hand on the back of Jamie’s neck, palm flat and warm against the stretch of skin between his hairline and the collar of his shirt. There’s a fleck of blood there, which makes Roy frown, but Jamie still doesn’t flinch, which makes the frown smooth out into something calmer. Fonder.

“We like you that way,” Roy says, a low reminder, then heads on into the kitchen.

That’s where Keeley finds him, not long after he’d gone in. She stops at the counter and looks at him with something warm and affectionate in her face, then tells him, “That was kind of you to say.”

Immediately, Roy’s face goes hot. “You heard that?” he asks, focusing very hard on his kettle in order to focus as little as possible on the audience he hadn’t known he’d had.

“I’ve got good hearing and sound carries in your house, I heard enough,” she says, leaning against the counter, just at the side of his vision.

Roy shrugs, uncomfortable. He doesn’t know what to say. Luckily, Keeley doesn’t expect him to, which he’s more grateful for than she’ll ever know.

“Make me a cuppa, yeah?” she asks, and he grunts an affirmative, and then he’s alone in the kitchen again.

When Roy brings the tea in, set out on a little tray he’s previously only had cause to use when Phoebe and Sarah have visited (he’s not exactly a regular host), they’re both on the couch. Keeley’s taken over the choice of what to put on, since nobody seems quite ready to go to bed just yet. It’s some kind of documentary Roy’s never seen before, about fish, or maybe ocean life as a whole, and he can’t fathom why she’s picked it, as he can’t remember her ever being much of a nature documentary person. Neither is he.

Maybe Jamie is, though, and it’s something that Keeley remembers from when they were together, which is a time that Roy generally prefers to not reflect on, but one that he finds himself bizarrely grateful for right now. At least it gives one of them some positive history from which to extrapolate Jamie’s needs. God knows Roy’s own history with him isn’t going to be helpful for that. Quite the opposite, in fact.

They watch the film for a while, the three of them in silence together on the couch . This is decidedly not a place that Roy thought he’d ever end up, but it doesn’t bother him at all to be there now. He sits on Jamie’s right, and Keeley’s on the other side, and Roy can’t fathom any of them being anywhere else.

Most of the movie goes over Roy’s head as an exhausted fog begins to shroud his mind. His phone goes off a few times, alerting him to a message he’s received from one person or another. He’d adjusted his settings earlier, after sending the requisite texts, telling his mobile to not let anyone contact him unless they were on a shortlist that exclusively consisted of Keeley, the Richmond coaching staff, Rebecca, Sarah, and Phoebe’s school. It’s the second-most secure lockdown his alerts can go in, falling narrowly below the setting where only Keeley, Sarah, and Phoebe’s school are able to get through.

If anyone else needs Roy, they’re shit out of luck. He answers a few texts in the coaching chat, taking longer than he reasonably should to tap out each word as stress and tiredness leech more and more of his concentration away by the moment. There are a few notifications on other apps, the alerts blocked by his settings but the little red number that shows how many he has glaring at him accusingly. He still hasn’t been able to bring himself to look at Twitter or any other social media platform, so he doesn’t know if the news about what happened is out. He’s not sure he wants to find out just yet.

When the documentary is most of the way over, Keeley gets up and tells the two of them that she’s headed to bed before she passes out. Roy mutters a distracted goodnight, and Jamie doesn’t say anything at all, which she doesn’t seem to take personally. She walks around the back of the couch, stopping to lean over it and kiss Roy’s cheek and run her fingernails through the back of Jamie’s hair, and then it’s just the two of them left.

Despite the fact that Jamie eyes him with a pointed look that says, what are you still doing here? Roy doesn’t go after her. Instead, he pins Jamie with a look right back, and says, answering the unasked question, “I’m good right where I am.”

Jamie shrugs with one shoulder and slumps even lower on the couch, shifting closer, a deliberately nonchalant look on his face, like he’s hoping very hard that Roy will either not notice or refrain from commenting. Graciously, Roy keeps his mouth shut. He stretches his arm out over the back of the couch after a while, though, resting a hand lightly on the back of Jamie’s far shoulder. It feels like a risk, like it might be a mistake, until Jamie heaves a quiet sigh and leans back against it, turning a little more towards Roy.

“If you’re tired, I know Keeley got the guest room set up,” Roy tells him, trying to keep his voice low in order to not disturb the still calm that’s settled over the room.

“Don’t think I can sleep yet,” Jamie says in response. It’s mostly a mumble, missing half the letters, but Roy’s learned to decipher a lot of different versions of Jamie-speak by this point. “Maybe can’t at all, tonight. Probably can’t.” A little shudder runs through him, one that Roy wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t been touching Jamie, hadn’t been able to feel it. “Usually can’t, after… Y’know. It don’t feel safe to.”

And that’s that. Roy’s staying put, and he’s staying put for as long as Jamie does. All night, if that’s what it comes down to. He couldn’t possibly bring himself to leave, not when he can finish that sentence even without Jamie’s help.

Usually can’t, after my dad beats me up. Because that’s the sort of thing Jamie has a usually about going to sleep after.

So stay there Roy does. And, eventually, against what seems to be all odds, Jamie starts to fall asleep. His chin dips, and his eyes go half-mast, snapping open every so often, breath quickening while he looks around and remembers where he is then slowing again. When he loses the battle with his own exhaustion, Jamie’s head hits Roy’s shoulder, and Roy feels a rush of relief. He’d been hoping that, if he just stayed there long enough, Jamie might get some fucking sleep.

Jamie’s not as heavy as Roy might’ve expected him to be, but he’s still a heavier weight than Roy’s used to contending with in this situation. This is maybe an odd thought to be stuck on, but, of the people Roy’s had sleep on him on this couch, the list is extremely short, and one of them is a primary schooler.

Keeley, Sarah, Phoebe. That’s the extent of everyone he’s sat with an arm around while they slept against his chest, and while Jamie’s obviously taller and broader than all three of them, he still seems smaller like this than he should be.

Originally, Jamie had been passed out properly on Roy’s shoulder like some kind of goofy schoolkid cliche, but he’s slipped down on the couch the longer he’s stayed asleep, his body releasing the rigid tension that has wired every inch of him since the car park. Now, when Roy glances down, the top of Jamie’s head has come to rest just under his collarbone, and at some point he’s apparently pulled his legs up onto the couch as well. He looks like he’s about a half-inch from falling onto the floor, to be honest, so Roy shifts as carefully and slowly as he can. Lifting his bad leg to prop it on the coffee table in front of them, he turns towards the back of the couch at a slight angle. This causes Jamie to slip a little, settling more solidly in the grasp of the arm Roy’s got around him, thankfully seeming less at imminent risk of falling.

From this angle, Roy can only see half of Jamie’s face, the other half hidden against his t-shirt, and the sight of the still-blooming bruising and raw cuts sets his teeth on edge. The wound closure strips that Sarah had meticulously laid over the split in Jamie’s left eyebrow sit in a clean, neat row. They remind Roy of a constellation, a little. One of the little bitty ones, off in the far corner of the sky, the ones that don’t seem like much of anything but have some horrible bloody story behind them when you look up the myth. The thought becomes heavier and heavier — far heavier and harder to hold than Jamie is himself — and Roy has to force it away, swallowing it down as he turns his attention back to the television.

The light of the TV flickers, the sound turned down so low that Roy can barely make out the words. He watches the documentary that came on after the previous one, though he has no idea what it’s about. Some kind of ancient civilization he can’t make heads or tails of. Despite not really knowing what’s going on, it’s a nice distraction for Roy to focus on while he at least pretends like he’s going to get up at some point, probably waking Jamie in the process, and go upstairs to bed.

A pained whine makes Roy’s heart skip a beat at the same time that he feels Jamie shift. He looks down and notes quickly, with some measure of relief, that Jamie’s still soundly asleep, and a new pressure settles against the far side of Roy’s ribs. Before, Jamie had both his arms tucked close to his own chest, but now he’s stretched one of them out. His hand has fallen across Roy’s torso, but it’s still balled up into a fist, like his subconscious brain is actively preventing him from clinging to the comfort and safety being offered to him, even in his sleep. Plausible deniability, or maybe fear of repercussions The thought makes Roy’s stomach twist and flip. He spreads his own fingers a little wider, covering as much of Jamie’s shoulder as he can, letting the rest of his arm press a little harder around Jamie’s back. I’m here, it says. I’m here, and that means you’re safe. You can let me do this, you contrary little bastard, it’s okay.

Sarah’s parting words echo in Roy’s mind, persistent and obnoxious in a way she’d be smug about if she knew it was happening. It’s okay to care, she’d said, fixing Roy with that piercing stare that proclaimed, ‘I know you better than anyone, don’t you dare try to lie to me on this.’

You’re not gonna lose your tough guy cred, or whatever. Life is weird and fucked up and complicated and sometimes shit happens, and I know you, and I know how far you’d go for family, and so I’m telling you right now whether you can admit it to yourself yet or not, the muppet on your couch is your fucking family, and you had better grow up and get used to it.

It doesn’t happen right away, but it happens. Roy doesn’t know where the relief that he feels comes from and why it’s so intense that it makes him dizzy, but it takes over like a head rush from standing up too quickly when he notices. Jamie’s hand, the one he’d reached out, with the little scrape on the side all that’s visible of the worse damage hidden under the bandages, is loose and uncurled. His fingers are relaxed, like the last of the fear, the hypervigilance, and pain — like all of it’s gone, at least for now. Like the quiet sound of the television and Roy holding him is enough to chase it all away and let him rest.

Yeah. Roy’s not going fucking anywhere. Which is why that’s exactly where Keeley finds him, a little over an hour later, according to his phone. She walks downstairs in her nightclothes, hair pulled back, rubbing sleep from her eyes and squinting.

“Everything okay?” Roy asks her, his voice barely a whisper as his face grows hot. He’s acutely aware of Jamie asleep against his chest, which prompts both his lowered tone and the flush in his cheeks.

“Fine,” Keeley tells him in the same tone. “Woke up, needed a glass of water. You just… planning to stay down here?”

“Mhm,” hums Roy, the sound a vibration in his throat. She crosses her arms and leans against the wall at the confirmation, eyes crinkling up with fondness and maybe the slightest hint of teasing. “Don’t look at me like that.”

“Your back is going to hate you in the morning.” Despite how quiet it is, Keeley’s voice is rich with love and amusement in equal measure.

“Yeah, but…” Roy barely catches himself in time to stop the shrug before it happens. His mouth twists instead, a strange expression that must be the facial version of a shrug, since his shoulders are otherwise occupied. “He’ll sleep, so.”

Roy had already gone through the mental calculus with himself before she came down here. He decided to stay put for a few reasons, and chiefly among them is the awareness that there would be no way to stay with Jamie and make sure that he sleeps if he gets up and moves to the guest room. Once, Roy might’ve been able to just throw caution to the wind and carry him, but those days are behind him now, and waking Jamie up to shepherd him upstairs will mean having to leave him. There’s just no way to offer to stay, no way for Roy to say that he’ll sleep there too, so that Jamie knows he’s got someone with him, so he can sleep knowing he’s safe and isn’t alone. So Roy stays put instead, plans to do so for as long as Jamie does.

“Alright,” Keeley whispers, then continues on into the kitchen for the water she’d originally come down for.

On her way back through, she gets the lights and stops behind the couch to kiss his cheek again, lingering for a moment with the side of her head pressed to his. The smell of her hair product and the lotion she uses on her face at night make the world briefly feel like a smaller, safer place. Roy cranes his neck carefully around to kiss her back, and murmurs, “Thanks.” He doesn’t specify for what — the lights, not making a big deal out of the ‘planning to sleep on the couch so that Jamie will get some damn rest’ thing, anything and everything in general — and she doesn’t ask him to. Keeley just hums a response, sighs, and then heads back upstairs.

It’s been a few minutes since Keeley left when Roy’s phone goes off again. It takes a bit of manoeuvring around to reach it where it’s fallen between him and the arm of the couch. When he finally gets it out without disturbing Jamie, Roy doesn’t bother checking the message he’s just got. Whatever it is, it can wait until morning.

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

When Roy wakes up the next morning, his back is as angry as Keeley warned him it would be, and Jamie is nowhere to be seen. He gets up and then levers himself down onto the floor with a stifled groan. May as well stay right here to go through the series of stretches that the physical therapist who rehabbed his knee told him to keep doing if he wanted to keep the greatest range of mobility possible. They’re a pain in the ass, but the alternative is losing even more function than he’s already lost, and also having a life-threateningly angry sister, so Roy keeps up with them religiously.

By the time he’s finished, Roy’s got a sore leg to go with his sore back, and he’s been stuck in his own head for long enough to get increasingly suspicious and worried about Jamie’s conspicuous absence. Using the couch as leverage to get to his feet, Roy starts wandering through rooms, cracking his back and grimacing as he goes. Jamie’s not in the kitchen, or out back on the deck, but a strange, silly instinct has Roy poke his head through a door under the stairs. He’s not remotely expecting it to be a productive check, because literally why would it be, except…

Jamie is in the laundry room, and the picture that he paints draws Roy up short. Maybe it’s his sleep-addled brain being stressed by leftover adrenaline from the night before, but he has trouble piecing together what it means. Jamie’s standing at the washing machine, folding things on top of it. He’s dressed in his own spare clothes that he must’ve retrieved from his duffel, Richmond jacket zipped up and hiding the bandages on his left arm. The borrowed shirt from Sam lays on the shiny white surface in front of him, along with his own clothing from the day before. Something seems wrong about all of it, and Roy can’t quite figure out what. He squints, frowning, until Jamie’s voice interrupts.

“Had to get the blood out of ‘em,” he says, the words a little thick and clumsy in places, likely from the swelling at the side of his mouth. “Not good to leave it too long, gets harder to clean.”

Going only by the tone of Jamie’s voice and the location they stand in, it’s a very mundane conversation. Laundry, stain removing, the kind of chores that make up every day adult life. Except the stains were bloodstains, and there’s no way Jamie should be that good at this. He shouldn’t be talking about how to get blood out of clothing with practised indifference, what makes it easier or harder.

Roy has no idea what he’s supposed to do about this. Maybe he ought to match Jamie’s energy, go along with the way he seems to be regarding this situation. Maybe he ought to counteract that energy, point out exactly how fucked up and wrong and not normal it is for Jamie to have such a blasé grasp of cleaning blood out of shirts.

“Right,” is all Roy winds up coming up with, stilted and awkward, which is neither of those options, and less helpful than both of them. Jamie picks the clothes up, tucks them under his right arm, and brushes past Roy out of the room before he can come up with anything else to say or do, which might be for the best, actually.

When they arrive at Sarah’s surgery, the place is as quiet as it ever gets. They manage to make it inside with little incident, going in through the back way she’d mentioned the night before. The staff is polite and friendly, and have obviously been warned about the situation, given that there is a minimum of staring. Of course, there still is staring, because they’re still Roy Kent, Keeley Jones, and Jamie Tartt with a busted face walking into a hospital rather early in the morning, and there’s no scenario in which that doesn’t attract some degree of attention. The fact that not a single photo is taken and nobody approaches them is something Roy chalks up to Sarah having put the fear of god into every person who works at this place.

“Morning, all! Keeley, Jamie, nice to see you. Roy-boy, you look like shit,” Sarah says brightly when she meets them. Roy greets her with a glare and a growl, which makes her snort. Keeley hugs her hello, and Jamie gives a wave and a half-hearted version of his usual megawatt ‘charming everyone he ever meets’ smile.

Leading them to an exam room, Sarah keeps up a steady stream of calm, meaningless chatter, which must be another skill they teach you in doctor school. It’s more effective than Roy would’ve expected it to be, not just on him but on Keeley and Jamie as well. By the time Sarah puts on a pair of pale blue gloves and gets out a suture kit, the uncomfortable tension has eased out of Jamie to such a degree that it’s a startling sight when he sees the needle and snaps back into a frozen statue of himself.

“I’ll numb the area before I get started,” Sarah says in the same conversational tone she’d been keeping up before.

“Right.” The answering word is faint and Jamie doesn’t look particularly reassured by the information. Roy doesn’t blame him. The suture needle is a nasty, curved little thing that glints threateningly in the bright exam room lights.

Before she gets started, Sarah asks Jamie if he wants the other two to leave. Much like the night before, he doesn’t, and Roy is grateful for it. He’d fuck off if he had to — besides the fact that this is very much Sarah’s territory and her word is king here, Jamie’s opinion about who’s around right now trumps even hers — but he’s glad that he doesn’t. Keeley seems to have the same reaction, grabbing his hand and squeezing it pretty hard as soon as neither Jamie nor Sarah is looking.

Taken all together, Sarah puts twenty-eight stitches into the injuries on Jamie’s face. There are fifteen in the cut through his eyebrow, and another thirteen between both his upper and lower lips. It seems like a lot of stitches to Roy. Way too many. In fact, when she tells him, he immediately blurts out ‘oh, fuck off,’ too shocked to say anything else — or to stop himself from saying that. Sarah sends him a withering look, Keeley whacks his arm with the back of her hand and hisses his name, and Jamie snorts a little.

“Facial injuries are tough,” Sarah tells him. “Gotta use thinner suture, more stitches per centimetre, and anything around the mouth is even more complicated. I trust you don’t want a whole medical school lecture about the intricacies of suturing, unless you’d like to audit all of my choices today, in which case I assume you must’ve gone and got an MD yourself when I wasn’t paying attention?”

“No, I don’t,” Roy says sourly, though he can’t begrudge her the teasing, not when it made Jamie laugh a little — just a light chuckle, but a real one.

Sarah laughs too, snickering at the expression on Roy’s face, Keeley elbows him gently in the ribs, and it feels like things are alright for just a little bit. It feels like they hadn’t just been talking about how many stitches his sister had just used to put Jamie’s face back together, though there they are right where Roy can see them. They stand out against his skin, dark blue and unnatural, but just for a moment, they fade into the background, and Roy feels lighter than he has since he first set foot in Coventry’s car park.

Then a nurse pokes her head in the door, tells Sarah that the techs are ready for Jamie’s scan, and it all comes back again.

Thankfully, the end result determines that there are no fractures in Jamie’s skull. Sarah sends them home with a sheet of instructions on how to handle the stitches and the scrapes on his arm, a signed consent form that says she’s allowed to send a report to and communicate with Richmond’s medical team, and with that, they’re released into the rest of their day. Keeley drives on the way home so that Roy can update the necessary people, given that Jamie’s still not turned his mobile back on. That’s when the subject first comes up.

Roy looks at the screen of his phone, frowning so hard at the conversation history that Jamie, sitting in the back seat and — Roy had thought — staring out the window, notices.

“What is it now?” he asks, sounding fed up with what seems like a never ending parade of bullshit that keeps turning up new and exciting ways for everything to get dramatically worse and more complicated. Roy can hardly blame him, given that he feels the same way, and he’s not even the subject of the parade.

Much as he would like to be able to tell Jamie that everything’s fine and he should mind his business, the guess had been right. The texts are, in fact, about him, which no one would receive any points or prizes for guessing with their current circumstances taken into account. The message Roy is staring at, trying to figure out how to respond to and unwelcomely aware that he can’t until he talks to Jamie and Keeley about it, is one from Ted, sent in a group chat composed of him, Roy, and Rebecca, that had never existed prior to this morning.

“Ted and Rebecca,” Roy grinds out, trying his best to sound neutral and wholeheartedly failing at it, “are asking when they and the rest of the coaches and people who are in charge of shit at Richmond can come over and have some kind of… briefing meeting.” Briefing meeting. Like they’re in a fucking James Bond film. “They want to talk about what’s gonna happen and how you want to handle things, Jamie. The media shit, and the football shit, and the… whatever else.”

Jamie makes an indistinct sound, and Roy refrains from glancing in the rearview mirror or over his shoulder. He’s not really sure he wants to see what’s happening on Jamie’s face, because he’s having a hard enough time wrapping his mind around the concept himself.

“I think it’s a good idea,” chimes in Keeley, because of course she does. “Get everybody on the same page, so we can be a united front.”

There’s a pause where both Roy and Keeley are very obviously leaving space for Jamie to give his own input, considering that this primarily concerns him. For a bit, it seems like he’s not going to respond at all, and Roy isn’t sure if he should take action or just leave him be, because either choice seems like it could backfire on them. Before he manages to reach a decision on that one, Jamie takes the choice out of his hands.

“Fine, whatever,” he says in a sullen little mumble, which, by Roy’s count, would be maybe the thousandth time Jamie has said something along the lines of that since yesterday. It seems to be on the shortlist of default responses that Jamie has programmed into his brain to handle this kind of thing.

Looking down at his mobile, Roy sees that Rebecca’s now proposed a time by which she believes she can have everyone mustered into a meeting at Roy’s house. It seems like an ambitious time, if you asked him. He certainly wouldn’t have been able to get that many people into what’s sure to be an incredibly grim meeting on that kind of notice, but that is, he supposes, why Rebecca is in charge and he just yells at the lads when their passing is shit.

Well, he figures, if she can make that happen, more power to her. At least it means that Roy doesn’t have to try to distil the results of the visit to Sarah’s office into a series of text messages that he’ll have to copy to like eight different people. Much more efficient this way.

Almost immediately when they get home, Keeley gets pulled into a phone call. This shouldn’t be as much of a surprise to Roy as it is. He’d read Ted’s text — the one he’d previously ignored — very early in the morning, when he’d woken and checked his mobile on instinct. Then he’d gone on Twitter, checked a few accounts, and promptly closed out Twitter again. When Keeley looks at the call, says, “I’m sorry, I’ve got to take this, and it might be a while. The PR office at Nelson’s been keeping an eye on the media situation,” it shouldn’t throw Roy for a loop. It does anyway, and he’s left watching her step out into the other room to answer, unable to come up with anything to say fast enough to matter.

With little to fall back on but instincts that Roy picked up without noticing from his grandmother at some point, he goes into the kitchen to make tea. Jamie follows, looking deep in thought a world away, and sits at the counter. They both operate on autopilot for a few minutes, largely ignoring each other. Keeley’s voice is audible somewhere else in the house, but not intelligible, which is probably for the best.

When Jamie starts to talk, there’s no warning. The question comes out of the clear blue sky, and it takes Roy several moments to process the sounds into words, and the words into meaning.

“Your parents. What’re they like?”

Though his first instinct, programmed from his exposure to Jamie thus far — the last couple of weeks notwithstanding — is to snap that it’s none of his business and he should fuck off, Roy doesn’t let the words get out of his mouth. He reigns them in and swallows them down, which is getting easier and easier with Jamie lately. The question is fair, Roy figures, though he hasn’t the faintest idea what could possibly have prompted it to come right now. It’s not like Jamie’s got a choice as to whether Roy or anyone knows his answer to that question at this point.

Fair or not, it’s kind of a difficult question to answer. Thinking it over, Roy stares down at his cup of tea. A golden-brown hue blooms from the paper bag containing some fancy mix of herbs and dried berries that Sarah brought with her when she came over for Passover last week. He watches the spiralling colour get stronger and eventually figures he’s delayed long enough, that he’s just got to pick something, and say it.

“They’re fine,” Roy says, and it tastes strange coming out of his mouth.

It had been hard enough to articulate that much, and he doesn’t really know why he goes on from there. Maybe it’s to get the weird almost-truth half-lie off his tongue, or because he figures Jamie deserves as much of the actual story as belongs to him to tell, but for whatever reason, he continues.

“They were… fine when we were kids. Weren’t very open, not a lot of talking about anyone’s feelings, or talking at all, and I didn’t see as much of them as some of the other kids did, but.” He shrugs. Picks up a spoon and pokes at the teabag. “It was fine. And they’re- —they’re fine now. They’re good, y’know, to me.”

The specificity of the clarification doesn’t escape Jamie, concussion or no, who asks, “To you?”

“They had a falling out with my sister, years back now.” Seven years, about. “We don’t talk much anymore.”

“You and your sister?” Jamie sounds confused, like he’s adding that up with the things he knows about Roy and the fact that they’d literally just been at Sarah’s surgery that morning and finding the equation doesn’t compute right. Probably because it doesn’t. “But she was just—”

“Me and my folks.” It comes out stronger than Roy meant it to, a little angry. This isn’t his favourite thing to talk about. Not that it’s been a regular topic of conversation with… well, pretty much anyone. He’s told Keeley, but not in much detail, even with her. “I picked her.”

Falling out was, really, a gentle way to put what had happened there. Roy can still remember the night he opened his front door and found his sister on his porch, the handle of a suitcase clutched in her determined fingers and a positive pregnancy test in her pocket. The little plus sign appeared on the tiny screen, Sarah had told him, stirring a cup of tea over and over and not drinking it, and she’d packed to leave the man that science was determined to call Phoebe’s ‘father’ before she could even process what was going on. Then, she’d called a cab and gone straight to her brother’s, and there she was.

Roy sat with her like she’d asked him to at their parents’ kitchen table, and he’d kept quiet like she’d asked him to as he listened to them lecture her about everything from her taste in men to the stupidity of choosing to be a single mother, as if they hadn’t just gotten done lambasting the would-be other parent.

Their parents had lectured Sarah until she cried and that was when Roy decided that he’d had enough. He stood up, announced they were quite finished, bundled his sister into the car, and left with her on the spot. Since that day, Roy has never apologized to them, because he doesn’t regret it and figures there’s no reason to. They’ve tried to fix things with him a few times, but they’ve never said they were sorry to her, and so he tolerates talking to them on the phone now and then, but that’s pretty much it.

It was just Roy and Sarah and their parents before, and then their family was effectively split down the middle, halved in a single night, and as far as Roy is concerned, if they’re upset about it, then that’s on them. They’re the ones who put him in a position where he needed to choose at all. Of course he picked Sarah. Fucking — somebody had to.

Looking down at the cup of tea that Roy pushed over to him, Jamie says nothing for a while. He looks lost in thought, and Roy leaves it be. He assumes that will be the end of the conversation, and he’s honestly a bit relieved that Jamie hasn’t chosen to respond to his highly pared-down version of what happened. There’s a reason that Roy generally prefers to not discuss it at all.

Jamie isn’t done, though. After an extended pause, during which he drops a few pieces of rock sugar into his tea and stirs it vigorously enough to make Roy wince, he announces with a degree of firm certainty in his voice, “Well, good, then.”

It’s a confusing response.

“Good?” Roy repeats back, standing very still and keeping his voice neutral.

Shrugging, Jamie stirs his tea again. A bit splashes over the edge of the cup. He’s not looking at Roy in a way that feels deliberate — even more so than his avoidance of eye contact usually does. It’s like he’s trying to memorize the layout of Roy’s house.

“Sarah seems great,” Jamie clarifies eventually when he seems to have sufficiently mined the details of Roy’s kitchen. “And I just mean, if she’s here, ’n’ they’re not, and it’s ‘cause you’ve picked her, must’ve been a pretty good reason.”

Roy is dumbstruck by the simplicity and the surety of it. He’d been pulling the teabag out of the cup, squeezing it out and setting it on the saucer, but he freezes halfway there, tea dripping onto the counter and his fingers growing damp. Though he’d spent so long thinking on it, Jamie had put it so succinctly. He’d said it like the only logical conclusion he could possibly come to was that, if Roy had sided with Sarah, hers must have been the right side of that conflict to pick. Roy is taken aback by how certainly Jamie seemed to believe that he must have made a good choice with good reasons, given how extremely little there was to go on in making that assessment.

The reason that Roy doesn’t usually talk about what happened between him and his parents — why he doesn’t see or speak to them aside from the very sporadic and extremely short phone call here and there — is twofold. Firstly, it isn’t really his story to tell, not most of it. It’s Sarah’s. That story belongs to her, and he’s always been uncomfortable handing parts of her life to other people. When he does speak of it, as he’s just done with Jamie, it’s in very loose, vague terms. Secondly, Roy always expects that, if he tried to explain, he’d only end up defending both Sarah and himself. People get weird about family, about what a person owes to their parents and what is or isn’t worth holding a grudge over. The fact that he isn’t even the party who was harmed doesn’t give Roy a lot of confidence that he’d manage to explain things without inciting heavy criticism and accusations of being a bad, ungrateful son.

On reflection, it makes sense that Jamie wouldn’t think like that, given his situation. But Roy had very specifically said that his parents were fine to him, and they’d had a fight with his sister when both he and Sarah were adults. It wasn’t as if they were… Well, they weren’t like James. So the immediate conclusion on Jamie’s part that, if Roy barely spoke to them anymore, he must have made the right call for the right reasons is still surprising.

There’s also a part of Roy that feels oddly proud that Jamie has that kind of faith in his moral compass. Immediately after he has the thought, Roy is annoyed by it. He frowns, and finally remembers to finish putting the teabag in the saucer, reaching over for a paper towel to mop up the small puddle he’d created on the counter. It’s not like Jamie’s approval of his choices is anything he particularly seeks. As a matter of fact, he would often have taken it as an indication that he’d probably gone wrong, but there’s still a little spark of feeling in Roy, like he must have done well if Jamie’s got that much unquestioned trust in his judgement.

After finishing up with her call, Keeley comes into the kitchen, and brings bad news with her. Of course, it’s not as if Roy anticipated that anything coming from the conversation she’d just been having would be good news, but hearing it out loud is different.

Whatever had started on Twitter the previous night, it’s a lot worse now that they’re several hours into the day and the world has woken up. The video and photos taken by the lowlifes in the car park have been shared and re-shared across multiple platforms.

“Some of the more reputable sources have taken the images down,” Keeley tells them, leaning against the counter island. She’s delivering the information as professionally as it seems she can muster, which means her that voice is mostly steady but her face occasionally flashes into anger or heartbreak.

“Doubt that fucking matters,” Jamie mutters darkly, and Keeley makes a face.

“Yeah, unfortunately, you’re right about that. The originals are still up in a couple of places, and enough people have copied and reposted what was taken down that it’s still circulating just as fast. It’s worst on Twitter, but we know it’s gaining traction on Reddit as well, and it’s starting to crop up on other social media sites. We’re monitoring the situation, and working on ways to mitigate things, which we’ll have a better idea of how to do after the meeting today.”

“Fucking meeting,” Jamie groans, leaning back on his stool and rolling his eyes to the ceiling. He reaches for his forehead and obviously doesn’t think it through, because he winces and yanks his hand away when his fingertips brush the edge of the freshly sutured cut. It looks somehow better and worse than it had last night. The lack of blood and the neat row of stitches helps, but the hours that have passed have brought the bruising out in all its glory. A good portion of Jamie’s face is stained with livid reds and purples now. “None of the other times the press went nuts about me ended up involving a meeting. Fuck’s sake.”

Keeley arches an eyebrow at him, and a faint smile twitches at her face. “That’s because the times you’ve been big in the press have generally been… let’s see, the usual transfer stuff, but also the reality show thing, the time we broke up, and the time you got really wasted and ended up passed out in that fountain. That sort of thing.”

That was before his days in Richmond, but Roy remembers hearing about it, and then rolling his eyes so hard he thought they might fall out of his head. He’d thought it was stupid then and he still thinks it’s stupid now, but Jamie’s grinning a little.

“Yeah, that was pretty great,” Jamie says, presumably about the drinking and the fountain, not the breakup or the transfers. “Don’t remember most of it, which usually means it completely ruled.”

“Well, remember it or not, it’s not exactly the sort of thing that requires a strategy meeting. This is different.”

“Yes, I fucking know it’s different!” In an instant, the smile is gone from Jamie’s face and his voice is a sharp snap.

Roy’s hackles go up and he about yells at the little shit for being so rude to Keeley, who’s only trying to help, only trying to explain something that Jamie had said he was confused about, but he doesn’t have the time. Jamie’s face falls before he can, his head dropping forward like a leaden weight and falling into his hands. If pressing on the stitched wounds hurts this time, he doesn’t show it.

“Sorry,” Jamie says, muffled by his hands. A shiver rolls through his shoulders and down his back. “Sorry, Keeley, I didn’t — Sorry.”

“It’s alright,” she says, and he shakes his head, face still hidden by his hands.

“It’s not.” He shakes his head again. Slowly, like he doesn’t want to do it, Jamie drags his chin up, hands dropping into his lap. “It’s not alright, I can’t be like that, I’m not —I won’t be — It’s not alright. I’m sorry.”

“Okay. It’s not alright, then, but I forgive you anyway.” Keeley’s voice is soft and calm, and when Roy looks at her, she doesn’t seem to have retained an ounce of hurt or offence as a result of being suddenly lashed out at. “You’re hurt, you’re scared, you didn’t mean it, and you apologized.”

If Jamie has any objection to being described that way, it doesn’t show in his face or his body language. Honestly, he might not be able to show it even if he did take issue with the characterization of himself as hurt and scared. There’s already so much tension winding him up in knots that Roy suspects any more might result in him breaking something.

The speed that everything has gone downhill has thrown Roy for a loop. One moment things were going… Not well, but at least alright, and Jamie was even smiling, amused by the memory of whatever uni boy nonsense he’d pulled to end up in a fountain. It changed so quickly that Roy’s head spins just thinking about it, and now they’re all gathered around the island counter, looking at each other or at the countertop, none of them seeming to know what to do next. The one thing Roy is glad for is that he hadn’t told Jamie off like he’d wanted to. Keeley handled it herself, far better than he would have, and he shudders to think what could’ve happened if she hadn’t been the first to react.

Ceramic clinks as Jamie picks up his spoon and starts stirring his tea again. With absolutely nothing more useful coming to mind, Roy picks up his own cup as well and takes a long sip. It’s much colder than he should’ve let it get before drinking it, but he’d rather drink cold tea than stand around here doing nothing for a moment longer. His coping skills for managing all of this have been unnervingly tea-centred so far, but Roy figures that he’s allowed that, given that he’s a Jewish Brit who doesn’t have any soup on hand, and soup and tea are pretty much the extent of his cultural training on handling other people’s feelings.

Time passes in a haze mostly occupied by Roy ignoring his phone, Keeley tapping at hers, and Jamie attempting some puzzles from a Sudoku book that Keeley found in her purse. Thanks to the ignoring his phone bit, Roy has to be elbowed by his girlfriend in order to realize that Ted’s texted to announce his arrival.

Roy develops the beginning of a very intense headache at the same time that Keeley shows him the message, which is something he’s going to chalk up to coincidence and refuse to examine any further.

“Ted’s here,” he tells Jamie, who looks up from the Sudoku puzzle with an expression like he’s experiencing the same headache Roy is. That’s probably the concussion, though. He hasn’t said much since snapping at Keeley, and has been scrawling little numbers in the puzzle book with an intensity that seems at odds with the way that Roy suspects his number-writing is being done mostly at random.

The headache-expression that Jamie wears only gets stronger when the doorbell rings. It’s clear that he very much doesn’t want to experience what’s about to happen. While Roy is without question on the same page with that one, there’s no avoiding it. This meeting has to happen, and hopefully afterwards they’ll all have some answers about what they’re supposed to do next.

—

After yelling at Keeley for absolutely no good reason and subsequently damn near dying of shame, Jamie resolves to talk as little as possible until it’s time for the world’s worst meeting. (Seriously. He’s thought it through, and concluded that this even beats out the meeting where his agent offloaded him and told him — several times in no uncertain terms — that no one wanted him. Before today, Jamie thought that would go down in his personal history as the worst meeting that he’d ever taken part in, with the runner-up being the incredibly brief and confusing conversation where he’d been told Richmond was sending him back to Manchester. This, though? This leaves them both in the dust.)

Thankfully, the book of number puzzles that Keeley had produced after he’d sat there for a while have proved to be plenty captivating, since his phone is still off and will be staying that way for the foreseeable future. Jamie has never played Sudoku before in his life, and he didn’t really know what it was until he cracked the book open. He’s still not sure that he’s been doing it right, but at least it’s something to focus his attention on. There’s something soothing about it — all those numbers and the neat little boxes in the neat little rows where they’re supposed to go, everything with its own right place and order.

He’d just been starting to feel normal again when Roy got his attention, and then everything tipped sideways all over again.

So it begins. The worst meeting of Jamie’s life.

Ted gets there first, followed by Rebecca and Higgins, and pretty soon there’s a small army of people assembled in Roy’s living room. Most of them are people Jamie knows, but some of them aren’t. Of course there are the coaching staff, Rebecca and Higgins, and Keeley, but along with them are a trio Jamie doesn’t know. There’s two women and a man, all three of them dressed in suits. It’s not like suits are unfamiliar attire for important leadership figures in a football club, but there’s something different about them. The cut is sharper, the fabric just that much nicer, but in an understated way. They make Jamie nervous. The people, not the suits — though the suits don’t help.

It becomes a full court press of strategic planning, each department present reviewing their portion of the situation they find themselves faced with and preparing each other — and Jamie, specifically — for what’s likely to come next. There are a number of angles they have to talk about, apparently, including Jamie’s participation in training and matches considering his injuries, the media problems, and — in a twist he somehow hadn’t seen coming despite it being obvious — the legal side of things.

The people Jamie doesn’t know, the scary ones in the intense suits, are lawyers, as it turns out. They’re lawyers from the team who came to the meeting at Rebecca’s request, there to give a realistic view of the likelihood that Jamie’s dad is going to end up with criminal charges over what happened at Coventry.

“Wait, though,” Roy almost immediately interrupts after the possibility is raised. He holds up a hand, and his thunderous expression eases very slightly when he turns from looking at the lawyers to looking at Jamie. “Do you want him charged?”

The question throws Jamie completely off balance. He sits there on the couch, struck dumb, for what feels like an excruciatingly long time, trying to figure out what to say. He doesn’t know what the answer is, he realizes after he’s thought about it for long enough that the tick of the clock on Roy’s wall has begun to grow loud.

Does he want his dad charged? The possibility of that happening has quite literally never crossed Jamie’s mind — at least, not in a very long time. Not as an adult.

It used to, when he was a kid. When Jamie saw the posters from the public service campaigns about domestic and family violence, the numbers for Childline printed across the bottom, he’d think about it. Even mentioned it once or twice, threatened to call someone in a naive attempt to protect himself in some of his more desperate moments. Not that he’d ever actually done it. Jamie doesn’t even think of it anymore, hasn’t thought of trying to report his father in any kind of official capacity in years.

The question turns out to not matter, though, because before he can gather his wits about him enough to come up with something resembling an answer — never mind deliver it out loud to other people — one of the lawyers makes a sharp, negative sound. Jamie looks at her, trying to remember her name from when Rebecca had briefly introduced the trio from legal. She’s a tall woman with intense brown eyes and little earrings made of red glass, standing between the other two. What the hell was her name?

What she’s saying barely registers at first. The words do, but their meaning is lost on Jamie. It’s basically all just sounds.

“Unfortunately, it doesn’t come down to that in a situation like this. What Jamie wants doesn’t ultimately hold much sway on whether or not the Crown will choose to press charges.”

Neera, that was it. Neera something.

“How can it not come down to that?” Roy asks, which relieves Jamie of the need to do so, at least. “He’s the-”

The victim echoes, even though he hadn’t said it. Jamie looks down at his hands.

“There’s a lot that goes into a decision like that, but the short version is that the Crown Prosecution Service considers a range of factors on charges in assault cases. They would consider the evidence available, which in this situation is… well, there’s quite a bit of documentation and a very high number of direct eyewitnesses. They would also look at things like the relationship between the victim and the accused, the likelihood of a repeated incident that could continue to put anyone in danger, the accused’s criminal record, and, ah…” She hesitates here, pausing and seeming to debate whether to continue before saying, in what is likely supposed to be a delicate tone, “And whether there is any prior history of violence in the relationship.”

All eyes in the room are suddenly looking either pointedly at Jamie or pointedly Not At Jamie.

“Yeah,” he forces out. Squeezing the words through gritted teeth makes his freshly-stitched mouth hurt. “There’s a… There’s history. You all fucking know there is.”

It’s probably not the nicest way he could’ve put it, but the other option was letting himself say the first thing that popped into his mind, which was the fuck are you asking me about a ‘prior history of violence’ for, there’s nobody on the fucking planet who hasn’t guessed by now that my dad has been beating the shit out of me since I were in primary school, and it’s fucking insulting to pretend otherwise. That didn’t seem like a great option, so Jamie went with his backup, which, it turns out, wasn’t exactly earth-shatteringly better.

“Right,” Probably-Neera says smoothly, moving on with the same kind of careful professionalism that Roy’s sister had shown this whole time they’d been in her office.

It’s quite impressive, if you ask Jamie, the way they’ve both been able to pretend like this whole thing is just a regular day rather than a horrible fucked-up humiliating nightmare. Maybe it is a regular day for them, though. Lawyers and doctors — they must deal with this sort of thing all the time. It’s both disorienting and helpful. Disorienting because everyone else is acting like it’s the end of the world somehow, and helpful because there’s usually at least someone around who Jamie can count on to keep things steady and moving forward.

“Given those things,” Probably-Neera goes on, “and your incredibly high-profile status as a public figure, it seems very likely to me that the Crown will choose to pursue charges.” She looks over to her colleagues, whose names Jamie would hazard a guess are Liz and… either Mark or Martin, and both of them nod their agreement with her assessment. “We’ll do our best to prepare you for what that will likely entail, though criminal law obviously isn’t our area of specialty.”

“Obviously,” Jamie repeats faintly. Honestly, he has no idea if that sort of thing is supposed to be obvious or not. He doesn’t spend a lot of time talking to or about lawyers and their jobs. Before this moment, he had just sort of assumed that they all did mostly the same thing, which was mainly what he’d seen on daytime telly when he was bored.

“I’ve got a question for you lot, actually.” As the lawyers have been talking, Keeley hasn’t said much. She does now, raising her hand a bit like she’s in a school classroom and continuing when she gets a nod from Liz. “I’ve been monitoring the social media stuff, and there are a lot of people saying there was an arrest the night it happened. Why are you talking about it now like we’re not sure if that’s gonna happen?”

“Right, that.” It’s Probably-Neera again, distaste colouring her expression. “I’m sure that would be confusing, yeah, and it could be a number of things. A lot of people, when they see police cars, automatically assume there’s been an arrest, so it’s entirely possible that those reports just aren’t accurate. Either that, or he could’ve been arrested but not charged and released shortly after. If he’d been charged, we’d know by now, so those options are safe to assume.”

Probably-Neera, Liz, and Mark/Martin continue talking for a while, and their words mostly go past Jamie like an insubstantial breeze. He processes some of them here and there, like spotting random bits of coherent text in a rapidly scrolling screen. Likely charges, one of them says, assault. Actual bodily harm and grievous bodily harm, which are apparently different things. Section something, then section something else, which makes Liz wince and Probably-Neera make an indistinct sound in her throat. Even the words Jamie does pick out are meaningless to him. He understands them on their own, but put together in this context, they’re completely incomprehensible.

Eventually, someone notices that Jamie isn’t exactly keeping up with the jargon that they’re throwing around, not in any real way. It’s starting to make his ears fill up with static that leaves him able to comprehend even less than before. A voice cuts into the three-strand braid of the lawyers taking turns with one another, so smooth that it seems nearly choreographed, stopping the flood.

It isn’t until Jamie looks up and looks around, confused, that he realizes it had been Coach Beard, of all people, who had cut into the intimidating rush of legal nonsense.

“He’s not getting any of this,” Beard says from where he’s standing off to the side, leaning against a wall with his arms folded. “Are you?”

He looks like he normally does, wearing the same hat as always, the same club-branded jacket as always, and his expression is the same one he has most of the time— impassively serious, deeply focused but not particularly inclined to betray how he’s feeling about what he’s hearing. At first, Jamie had been a bit scared of Beard. He’d seemed angry all the time. Then, after a while, it became clear that was just his face, and Jamie relaxed a little around him. Right now, he’s downright grateful for the man’s presence. It’s blessedly normal, an oasis of calm and steady same-ness in a rush of things that are different and frightening.

The question had been directed at Jamie, and it takes a few moments before he’s able to produce an answer. It feels like the muscles that move his mouth have forgotten how to function, like his throat’s stuffed with thick wads of cotton and he can hardly breathe past it, let alone speak.

“No,” he eventually manages, and heartily ignores the way he sounds rather weak and unsteady. “Not really.”

“Alright, that’s fine,” Ted puts in with an encouraging nod. Jamie has avoided looking at him for the most part, honestly — he hasn’t wanted to see the way Ted would look at him back. “That’s alright. We can go over this later, right?” A few nods from around the room, and nobody objects. “Good, good. Main point is, there’s probably gonna be some police stuff to deal with, but we’ve got these incredibly smart and well-educated folks from Rebecca’s legal team that’ll be able to walk you through that, Jamie. Nothing else is anything you need to worry about, at least not right now.”

It’s a relief to hear, and Jamie nods.

They move on from there to discuss the media strategy, which Jamie almost completely tunes out and doesn’t feel a speck of remorse or hesitation about. How the team is going to handle the press is very much not his problem, and he’s got enough of his own to deal with. He hardly wants to bother with borrowing more at this stage. Besides, Jamie’s a little afraid that, if he starts cramming more words into his head, other ones are going to start falling out, and those might be more important than understanding exactly how the team is going to manage press questions and social media.

The only part he really catches with the media discussion is a sentence that suddenly jerks him back into fully paying attention to what’s going on. Someone says his name, and then everyone is looking at him, and he looks back around at them, feeling very put on the spot and not sure what he’s meant to be answering.

“What?” Jamie asks, feeling rather dumb about it. Nobody snaps or rolls their eyes at him, which is a relief.

“It’s been suggested,” Keeley jumps in to explain, which he’s grateful for, though her voice is careful and somewhat odd, which isn’t, “that it might be a good idea for you to do some kind of an interview about what happened.”

Rather than try to do anything about what she’s just said, because… well, no thank you, Jamie instead surveys the room, hoping to get some idea of just what the hell is going on. Roy looks displeased, but that’s also just generally Roy’s default expression most days, so that’s not much of a help. Keeley looks concerned, which is also nonspecific, as she hasn’t looked much different since Jamie first saw her the day before, at Nelson Road.

Everyone else exists somewhere on a range from polite but somewhat-detached seriousness (the lawyers) to extreme discomfort, like they want to be literally anywhere else (Nate). Jamie can’t get an indication from anybody as to how he should be reacting, whose idea the interview had initially been, or what his options to respond are.

“It would be a way to get a version of the story that belonged to you out there,” Higgins puts in, seeming to sense that Jamie’s at a loss. It probably hadn’t been hard — he’s not doing much to hide it. “It would be a narrative that we — that you could control, rather than just whatever the internet feels like running wild about, which is what’s going on right now.”

Jamie has not been looking at whatever is going on online right now. He’s been very specifically warned against it, to the point that he doesn’t even have his phone on him at the moment. It’s still in his bag, turned off and dormant, out of sight but far from out of mind. Whenever Jamie’s attention strays to his bag — which is now stuck up on the second floor, in the spare room that he hadn’t slept in last night — his mobile looms like a threatening shadow, reminding him that he can hide from it as long as he wants, but it won’t ever go away. Sooner or later, he’ll have to face it and everything it holds.

Besides, he can likely imagine what’s happening. He knows what the media gets like, what social media gets like on the whole. It tends to latch onto whatever parts of a story seem most appealing to it by some criteria he couldn’t understand if he tried, and then tears it to shreds and put it back together like a bad collage. The thought of that being done with this story — with Jamie’s story — makes him shudder. Having a version of that story that’s his, though… He doesn’t know whether the idea bolsters or terrifies him.

When Jamie begins to seriously contemplate the question, to examine and poke at whether or not he should do an interview, how it would go, what he would say and what the consequences might be, he can’t get very far. It’s like there’s a wall of static in his mind that he runs into as soon as he starts trying to puzzle through the first bit. Even trying to picture sitting down with someone — and that’s another thing, isn’t it, who the hell would they even get to do this interview? — is a non-starter. It just fuzzes into nothing, and he feels hot and cold at the same time.

“Can I have some time to think about it,” is what Jamie eventually winds up managing to say. His voice is unsteady and faltering, and he’s embarrassed to hear it.

“Of course,” Rebecca tells him immediately. “You’ll take whatever time you need, and this club will be behind you one hundred percent, no matter what you choose. Whatever you need, Jamie, you let us know.” Her tone invites no disagreement, and there’s a finality in it as sure as the crack of a judge’s gavel.

There’s an understanding in Rebecca’s face when she looks at him, a recognition in her eyes that says she knows something of what he’s experiencing. A dozen clickbait headlines sprint through Jamie’s mind at once, all promising salacious details of the newest Rupert Mannion drama, the latest photos of whatever girl the former Richmond owner has been photographed with this time. The tabloids go after everyone here and Jamie knows it, but he also knows that Rebecca has caught a side of it that reaches a level beyond the usual run of the mill stuff.

It’s not the same — what he’s experiencing now and what she’s been through. He doesn’t know what it’s like to be in her shoes, and she doesn’t know the feeling of being in his, but there’s something they share now, he and Rebecca Welton. It’s terrible and hard to understand, harder still to explain if you haven’t been there, and Jamie finds that the only thing he feels when he takes in the way that she looks at him is relief. There’s someone here who knows and is going to have his back about this in a way that nobody else could if they didn’t intimately get it.

And, for the moment, that person has spared Jamie the need to decide whether or not he’s going to do an interview, tell the world what happened to him in his own words right away. He’s got time to think about it, at least.

With that settled, the discussion moves to the media team headed by Keeley and whatever strategy they’re working on to deal with what is, apparently, an ever-growing viral internet storm. Absolutely everything about it is going completely over Jamie’s head. He’s too overloaded with information to add more. The world is feeling increasingly blurry, and he’s losing what little ability he had to track the conversation before.

The only thing that manages to pull him back in for a moment is when the legal team chimes in again. Something that Mark/Martin says catches his attention enough to immediately snap him into the conversation.

“…matter of whether Mr. Tartt will attempt to pursue charges against you, Roy.”

“Hang on a moment,” Jamie says before anyone else has the chance to respond. “Against Roy? For what fucking reason could he — That’s bullshit!”

Liz shrugs and exchanges a look with Probably-Neera, and Mark/Martin clears his throat. “Well,” he says, “it’s visible in some of the video that Roy did push him quite hard. Into a car, I believe.”

“That’s bullshit.” Jamie truly can’t believe what he’s hearing. Not the push itself — that doesn’t even really surprise him, though he’d been unable to see it when it happened, on account of being face-down on the ground and bleeding at the time. There’s something about the thought of Roy pushing his father into a car that’s oddly nice to Jamie, something warm kindling to life in his chest, but he can ponder that later. Right now, there’s a lawyer talking total bullshit at him. “That’s not fucking assault.”

“Well —” starts Mark/Martin, tilting his head from side to side like weighing the assertion, before Probably-Neera interrupts him.

“We can get into that later, if it becomes relevant. The point is, it’s possible we might end up facing that sort of thing if it turns out that Mr. Tartt is inclined to retaliate.”

Even though James most definitely is inclined to retaliation to a greater degree than anyone else that Jamie has ever met, he’s shaking his head immediately. “He can’t do that. Roy didn’t do nothing wrong, he was just —” He was just trying to protect me, Jamie chokes on saying. He can’t finish it.

Which — Jamie shouldn’t even be the one arguing with Mark/Martin about this. Roy should be. He should be livid at the suggestion that he might get stuck with criminal charges because he’d been caught up in the middle of Jamie’s family mess.

He doesn’t look livid. He’s not looking at Mark/Martin or the other lawyers at all. He’s watching Jamie, apparently, with something rather soft and amused in his face, which makes even less sense than being told that Roy could get an assault charge, so Jamie looks back at the lawyers instead.

“It’s not likely.” It’s Liz this time, chiming in to offer her opinion. “It would be a difficult charge, I believe, but it’s something you ought to be aware of, even so.”

Somehow, there’s still more to say than that, because it goes on. Jamie zones out again. He’d already been beyond overwhelmed, even without the addition of ‘might’ve got Roy Kent in legal trouble’ to his plate. Ultimately, Keeley takes mercy on him and chases everyone else out, helped along by Beard, once he notices what she’s doing. The end of the meeting happens much more quickly than the beginning had, and soon it’s just the three of them again, together in Roy’s house, which feels much larger and quieter than it had before.

After everyone else is gone, Keeley explains that she’s working from home for the rest of the day and has quite a lot on her plate, so she’s taking her laptop upstairs to work in the study, and if either Jamie or Roy needs anything, they can text. Otherwise, she’ll be down in a bit so that they can all decide on what kind of takeaway to get for dinner.

Though she’d disappeared up the stairs some time ago, what she’s sure to be working on is looming in the back of Jamie’s mind. Keeley’s job is media — he has to wonder what sort of things the news sites have been starting to say as the more legitimate outlets pick up the story from the trash rags that started it all. Sky Sports, the BBC, the Independent — all of them will be talking about it sooner rather than later, and the comment sections don’t even bear thinking about.

Whatever they’re saying, whatever story is out there and however they’re talking about it, Keeley will be reading all of it. She and the people who work in her department need to stay aware of what the massive and ruthless machine of the twenty-four hour internet news cycle is saying in order to manage it for the club, and Jamie hates that on principle, but he hates it so much more because it’s her. He wishes it were someone else. She’s the best, Jamie knows she is, but she’s Keeley, and Jamie, on a purely selfish and emotional level, doesn’t want her to be the one reading what’s being said about him.

Regardless — and this is the strange part — at no point before she went upstairs did Keeley offer to take Jamie home, nor did she mention that he ought to call a ride service or anything of that sort. She’d just looked right at him when she said to text her if either of them needed anything, under the very clear assumption that Jamie was still going to be here for the foreseeable future.

And then there’s Roy. Roy, who is in the kitchen, making tea. Again.

Roy is apparently not going to work at all, though it’s unclear to Jamie whether that’s because he just doesn’t have to in the first place or because he’s decided to stay home. Whatever the reason is, he’s in the kitchen making unnecessary tea and, going by what Jamie can hear from the living room, meandering around while he does so.

Listening to him is making Jamie anxious, but it’s not like he can just go in there and tell Roy to knock it off. That would be another level of ridiculous entirely: Hey, can you please stop walking around in your own home, for no other reason than it’s making me — a person who doesn’t live here and shouldn’t still be here except that you obviously haven’t remembered that yet — twitchy? Hah, no. The day Jamie tries something like that on Roy will be the day he’ll have gone fully mental.

So instead Jamie just sits there on the couch and stares off into space, mind bouncing from one topic to the next, trying to find one that’s sufficiently distracting enough that he can stand to think about it for a little while and also has nothing to do with Roy, Keeley, Richmond, his dad, the media, or any of the other things putting him on edge. Nothing is forthcoming.

When Roy comes into the living room and hands Jamie a mug, he takes it, even though he doesn’t really want to. Being rude to the person whose house you’re essentially hiding in is not the road he wants to take today. Not after he’s already pushed his luck by snapping at Keeley earlier, causing all this embarrassing fuss — including a full-blown tactical meeting in this same living room — and generally being here in the first place.

Though he’s avoided thinking about it, Jamie knows he ought to go home. He’s received medical treatment, he’s basically fine now. At least, he’s not likely to keel over and experience some sort of major life-threatening medical emergency without any warning. There isn’t a purpose to being here anymore, wasting time while sitting around and doing nothing but getting in the way. No matter how many times he tells himself this, though — that he needs to grow up and get going, ride the rest of this out at his own place — Jamie just… doesn’t do it.

Instead, he stays put on the couch and lets time slip past him. And Keeley and Roy — respectively working upstairs and meandering about doing menial household tasks downstairs — let him.

Jamie can understand Keeley to an extent. She’s one of the nicest people this mostly-shitty world has ever managed to come up with, and some part of her clearly still cares about him despite everything that has passed between them. But Roy? Okay, Jamie realizes things are different between them now. They’re getting on these days, could probably even be called friends. That explains why Roy would be willing to jump in and do something immediately after Jamie’s father showed up and ruined things — first at Wembley, then at Coventry. It also explains why he might be reluctant to let Jamie go home alone fresh off a head injury and without a scan to evaluate the possibility of a fracture.

That was last night, though. Today is a whole different matter entirely, and still Roy just keeps fussing around with things that don’t seem to matter much in the moment, like he’s trying to keep Jamie within eyesight. He even stops by at one point with some over-the-counter pain medication, pressing the pills into Jamie’s hand without saying anything.

And for better or for worse, Jamie doesn’t push it. He decides to take what he can get for as long as he can, and doesn’t say anything about it at all. Until he doesn’t have a choice anymore, he just doesn’t want to have to handle this all on his own.

Dinner is… fine. It’s not the worst meal Jamie’s ever sat down to, but it’s far from the most easygoing experience he’s had eating with other people. They don’t eat in the dining room, which helps take the pressure off. Keeley clicked on the TV screen before anyone could make a move toward it when the takeaway arrived, which was a massive kindness. Sitting there on the couch with her, eating food straight out of the cartons that it came in and watching a cooking show — it feels almost normal.

This, more than anything, is what Jamie missed about their relationship. Not going out on the town, not the pictures of them together, not anything exciting or sexy — just hanging out. Normal stuff. Watching bad telly and eating takeaway and just being around someone he liked who liked him back. Sometimes, Jamie sees Keeley and Rebecca together and is so jealous it takes his breath away.

That was because, if Doctor Sharon’s theory was anything solid to go off of — and Jamie rather thinks she might be the smartest person on the planet, so he tends to take what she says as true — Keeley was his first real friend as an adult. Teammates and superficial connections to the lads he went to clubs with were fine, but that wasn’t real, sincere friendship. Jamie had been trying to explain his weird feelings about Keeley and everything that was wrapped up in the way he felt when he saw her with other people, and that’s what the conversation had come around to — that he missed her. Not as someone to date or to shag, but as his friend.

Jamie’s got other friends now. Real ones. People he’d known before but hadn’t appreciated the way he should’ve until he’d got himself run out of town, then crashed and burned and had to be taken back like the second-chance charity case he was. People like Dani, Sam, and Moe, and — hell, alright, Roy. Despite that, he still misses Keeley’s company fiercely. He’d been trying to come up with a way to tell her that without coming off really strangely, but then… Then other things got in the way, and figuring out how to have that conversation got shunted down his priorities list a bit.

Thinking of Doctor Sharon reminds Jamie of another thing she’d said in a different session, and the memory turns the mouthful of noodles that he’s just taken to ash. He chews and swallows reluctantly, then sticks his fork in his takeaway container and drops it onto the coffee table. The water in the glass next to it doesn’t do much to wash the taste away, and Jamie sits there, staring at the whole arrangement, resenting absolutely everything about his life in one go.

“Were fucking warned this’d happen,” he mutters. He goes to push his hands over his face, but stops when he remembers that his face is full of stitches. An additional pulse of resentment lurches around his chest for a while, and they drop into his lap.

When Jamie realizes that the sounds of dinner have stopped, reminding him that he’s not alone in this room, he silently curses and looks around. Keeley and Roy are both looking at him with expressions of mirrored shock and upset. Jamie wonders if he’s ever going to learn his lesson about keeping his thoughts in his head rather than letting them slip out of his mouth. So far, it doesn’t seem likely.

“What do you mean you were warned? Jamie, who warned you?” asks Keeley, who seems to have gathered her thoughts more quickly than Roy. The emphatic nod Roy gives is enough to conclude that he’s cosigning her response.

There’s not really a good way to get around this one. Of course, he could probably blow it off, bluster through some absolute bullshit and get them off his back, but Jamie has some doubts about how successful that tactic would be right now. Then, there’s the fact that even the thought of ignoring the question makes his gut twist with guilt. He’s in Roy’s house, making things awkward by hanging around Keeley and her new boyfriend. The least he can do is explain what had been, in all honesty, a fairly alarming statement.

“Doctor Sharon,” Jamie says in a reluctant mumble, looking down at his hands. If he’s going to say this, he can’t look at either of them while he does it. “I… I know what my dad was pissed about, when he showed up yesterday.”

There’s a low whistle — Roy — and the sound of someone’s hand smacking someone else’s t-shirt covered chest — Keeley, chastising Roy for interrupting, or not being serious enough, or… something.

“I told him we were done.” A second after he says it, Jamie cringes. It sounds like he’s describing some dramatic breakup, not cutting off his relationship with his father. There’s no good language for this sort of thing, no community shorthand for things that fracture and buckle within a family until someone has to break free of it or get buried underneath the collapse. Jamie supposes it’s the kind of thing that’s haunted him often lately — no language for the kind of connections he had, or wanted to have, or could no longer tolerate having. “We went back and forth a bit, on the phone, after — after Wembley.”

That, at least, is a helpful shorthand. They all understand exactly what he means, saving Jamie from having to go into the mess of what happened at the stadium all over again. It’s almost funny, though, the way he had thought that was the worst that the collision of his two worlds could get as recently as two weeks ago.

“Eventually,” he says, feeling childish and out of his depth, “I’d… I’d had enough. I told him I was done with his shit, and I told him never to contact me again. He didn’t listen, I blocked his number.” Jamie picks at his thumbnail. Cringes when he snags something that stings, picks at the edge of the bandaging around his left arm instead. Silence swells around him, though he’s not entirely sure why — shock, or some other sort of speechlessness maybe. “Talked to Doctor Sharon when I’d decided to, she helped me come up with what to say.”

“That was a good idea,” Keeley says. Her voice is encouraging enough, but he doesn’t want to look at her face. He’s not sure what he’s afraid he might find there, but it makes him anxious regardless. “I’m proud of you for doing that, I bet it was tough.”

That he can’t spend much time thinking about at all, so Jamie gives a one-shouldered shrug. “Anyway. She were the one who warned me, right. Said he might show up, might get… She said that people like him, they can get real pissed off when they feel like they’ve lost control of something that — something that belongs to them.”

He hadn’t really believed her. Not when his father barely cared enough to show up to a match when he was with City, not even when they’d played in the most famous stadium in the country. That had been one in a long list of Jamie’s mistakes, hadn’t it? He’d underestimated just how far anger could drive the man, which was a rookie move after knowing him for so many years.

“Fucking hell.” That muffled commentary came from Roy, and Jamie can’t really blame him. He’d had a reaction the first time she’d characterized it like that to him, too.

By now, though, he just shrugs again, that same shoulder rising and falling. “Yeah, well. Guess she was right, wasn’t she? Should’ve seen it coming.”

There’s a pair of negative sounds in response, though neither of them have much shape beyond near-involuntary reactions. The edge of the bandage splits a little under Jamie’s nails and he pulls his hand away from it, folding his arms and tucking both of his palms against his sides. With little left to distract him, Jamie finally looks up at the other two people in the room.

Roy opens and closes his mouth a few times, like he’s trying to say something and can’t, for the life of him, figure out how, which is something that Jamie empathizes with acutely. There’s been a lot of that going around over the last twenty-four-ish hours.

“Why didn’t you say anything to anyone?” Keeley asks.

Jamie would hate the look on Keeley’s face from almost anyone else. Her brows are drawn together, eyes wide, mouth in an unhappy slant. The expression is pained and sympathetic and sad. On her, he finds that he doesn’t really mind so much.

Regardless, the answer to her question isn’t one that Jamie wants to give. His shoulder again — a dismissive jerk.

I’m all you’ve got. We’re blood. I have to tolerate your miserable, pathetic shit. No one else does. Without me, you got nothing. You’ve always been too fucking weak and needy to make it alone.

“Didn’t want to make it a big deal,” he says, trying to make it sound like it isn’t and probably failing horribly. “Just blocked a phone number, weren’t gonna be a baby about it.”

Judging by the looks on both their faces now, this is not a framing Keeley and Roy appreciate. Whatever they’re about to tell him — and they’re both gearing up for it; Keeley’s face is twisting up like something’s building behind her features, trying to get out, and Roy’s chest is expanding with the deep breath of a man who has some things to say — he cuts it off at the pass by rushing the next bit, which means he doesn’t phrase it very carefully.

“Doctor Sharon warned me about that, too, I guess. Told me I should tell you.”

“Us?” asks Roy, eyebrows raised and whatever else he’d had to say disappearing in favour of the new question. “As in, Keeley and I?”

Yes, actually, Keeley and him, not that Jamie really wants to explain that one to Roy. He’d never live it down if he did.

“Told me I should tell someone,” Jamie grumbles, then can’t quite bring himself to leave it at that. “But… The two of you did come up, yeah.”

And now the absolute last thing Jamie wants to do is go on, so he straightens up, clears his throat, and points at them, first one then the other.

“Alright, enough of this, then. What I’d really like is to talk about literally anything else, do you think we can make that happen?” A hint of something desperate has slipped into Jamie’s voice, and there’s probably a bit of it in his eyes too, but he’ll allow it this time if it’ll help convince them to drop it. Is it manipulative? Probably. Does he really care, if it’ll get him out of continuing this conversation? Not even slightly.

Thankfully, by the grace of some kind of luck that has rarely smiled on Jamie in contexts unrelated to football, both Keeley and Roy let it go when he asks. He can see that neither of them like it, that both of them have questions they don’t want to let go unanswered, but they do. Jamie owes them for it. One more thing to add to the endless list.

The house is dark and quiet, the floors cold under Jamie’s feet. He’s glad that the boards don’t make much noise as he paces up and down the hall. The last thing he wants is to wake either Keeley or Roy up because he’s having a little walk at half midnight.

This is how it always fucking goes after his dad’s really laid into him. The day goes on like normal because it has to, because no matter how much Jamie hurts or wants to hide until it’s safe again, the world simply has no patience or grace for him. And then the night comes, everything slows to a stop around him, and Jamie’s left on his own with his body and all its pain and his mind with all its whirlwind of feeling and thought. He can never sleep, at least not for a couple of days. There’s too much happening inside him, too much restless, nervous energy trapped with nowhere to go.

Last night, Jamie slept. He slept on the couch — or, more accurately, he slept on Roy, which is something he both wants to jettison from his mind so he never has to think about it again and preserve forever so that he can always call it back up and remember how it felt to sleep — really sleep, knowing that he was safe, that he wasn’t alone. It had been enough of an unexpected, unprecedented mercy that he’d nearly cried with relief when he woke and remembered where he was. And then he’d nearly broken down from the shame of what it had taken to get him to actually rest. All day, when his thoughts returned back to last night, Jamie had hoped that the disruption to his usual post-violent-outburst routine would mean he wouldn’t have the same kind of trouble again tonight.

No such luck. So here he is, wandering around the second floor of Roy’s house with no goal in mind, just the faint off-chance that he might be able to tire himself sufficiently enough to at least get a few hours in. Jamie’s body feels heavy, and his head throbs in time with his pulse. He’s physically and emotionally exhausted, but he can’t bring himself to even lay down in the guest room that they so graciously lent to him. All he can do is pace.

The sound of a door opening down the hall, and then closing again catches Jamie’s attention. His head whips around to stare at it, his shoulders seizing up and his hands going into fists, readying himself for whatever’s coming. A moment later, he relaxes, embarrassed and guilty. It’s only Roy, standing there in his nightclothes, looking a mix of tired and confused.

For a few moments, they just stand there staring at each other from opposite ends of the hall, and then Roy starts to approach. The closer he gets, the more Jamie tenses up again. He doesn’t know what he’s expecting, but this interaction is not going to go well. By this point, Jamie may be reasonably sure that Roy won’t physically lash out at him, but it’s the middle of the night, he’s in a house that’s not his own, and he’s likely just woken its owner with his inability to just sit still and go the fuck to bed.

“Sorry,” he says when Roy gets close enough that they can speak in a hush, hopefully able to avoid disturbing Keeley. It’s an impulsive, instinct-driven move, and Jamie repeats it, just in case… Just in case. “Sorry.”

Roy frowns at him, which makes Jamie wince. Except, when he speaks, he doesn’t sound pissed off. Just baffled.

“The fuck for?” he asks, keeping his volume in the same lowered register.

“I woke you up,” Jamie explains. He’s not sure why Roy wants him to spell out what he’s done wrong himself, but if that’s what he’s gotta do, then he’ll do it. Instead of seeming satisfied, Roy just frowns harder. Anxiety prickles at the back of Jamie’s neck. “Didn’t I?” Maybe the problem is something else.

“Yeah, you did,” Roy says. It’s weird, though, because he doesn’t sound pissed. Barely even grouchy, which is his usual baseline. “I just don’t know why you’re—” There, Roy cuts himself off, shaking his head and not finishing the sentence. “Whatever. Came to see if you were okay.”

Now it’s Jamie’s turn to frown, thick with confusion. He can’t think of what he’s supposed to say, what Roy is expecting of him. Eventually, all he comes up with is, “Can’t sleep,” which he mumbles with a shrug of one shoulder. Breaking eye contact, Jamie looks at the bannister rather than at Roy. It seems like the safer choice.

After an extended pause of his own, Roy says, “Right, come on then.” He walks past Jamie into the guest room and doesn’t explain what he’s doing, leaving Jamie with no choice but to follow him.

Once inside, Jamie folds his arms, careful to keep the bandaged one on the outside, and watches Roy rummage around in a dresser off to the side of the room. Jamie hadn’t paid much attention to it earlier, just dropping his duffel in the corner and changing into the borrowed clothes that someone set out for him without inspecting the room’s contents beyond a cursory glance.

“Usually, Sarah’s the only one who uses this room,” Roy says, still looking through the drawer. “Sometimes Phoebe. Mostly set it up for them, don’t really get a lot of overnight visitors. Anyway, Sarah’s got trouble sleeping sometimes, says her mind’s all full of a thousand different things and she can’t turn it off, so — Aha!” Straightening up, he triumphantly brandishes something from the drawer. It looks like fabric, though Jamie can’t quite make out details. “Can I see your phone?”

Jamie thinks about it for a moment, completely unable to sort through what the fuck is going on, and then gives up. “Yeah, sure,” he mutters, walking over to his duffel and fishing his mobile out of it. “Still haven’t turned it on, so…”

Halfway to taking the offered device, Roy stills. His jaw works silently for a moment, then he gives a short nod. “I won’t read anything, and I’ll turn the alerts off. Okay?”

Belatedly realizing that it was a real question that Roy wanted a real answer to, Jamie shrugs. “Yeah. Okay.”

When the mobile turns on, Roy holds it out so that Jamie can unlock it with his thumbprint. The way he holds it covers the screen, leaving Jamie unable to see whatever’s on it that’s making it buzz over and over. It’s a nice touch, and Jamie’s grateful for it. He unlocks the phone, then goes to sit on the bed. Getting some distance from the ceaseless, agitated buzzing makes him feel a little bit better, though there’s no real point to it.

While Roy fucks around with the phone, Jamie looks down at his hands. He turns the left one over, studying the scrape on the side in the light of the lamp on the bedside table. There’s faint bruising near his wrist, creeping up his arm until it disappears under bandages. When the buzzing finally stops, silenced by whatever Roy is up to, some small bit of tension melts from Jamie’s shoulders. He hadn’t even realized how badly it was aggravating his already-frayed nerves until it stops.

“Alright, here,” Roy says after a few minutes, walking around to lean against the bedside table and offer Jamie’s mobile to him.

The screen is on, pulled up to an app interface that Jamie doesn’t recognize. There’s a big, clear play button in the middle of the screen, fast-forward and rewind buttons, and a scrolling title and credits at the top.

“Audiobook player,” Roy explains. “Logged you into my account, so keep your thoughts about my taste in books to yourself.” The fabric whatever-it-is that he’d pulled out of the drawer lands in Jamie’s lap. It looks like a headband, now that he can see it clearly, but it’s heavier, and there’s something in the folds. “Those are headphones, the kind you can sleep in. Bluetooth, so it hooks up to your phone without a cord, and the charge lasts for forever. Sarah has trouble sleeping, right, so I keep those here for her. She says it helps.”

Jamie sets his phone aside and feels the fabric of the headphones. It’s a soft, wide band and seems like it would be comfortable to sleep in. He pulls it over his head, but stops before adjusting it down to cover his ears. If he does so, the band will cover his eyes too, obstructing his vision as well as his hearing. The thought of laying down and trying to sleep while not being able to hear clearly makes him reluctant enough. Interfering with his eyes, too?

The audiobook sounds like a good idea. A voice talking to him will probably help. Not, though, if it means not being able to know what’s happening around him. If Jamie can’t hear and he can’t see, then he won’t know if something’s coming and he needs to protect himself. Even though he knows that threats don’t live in this house the way they’ve lived in his own home since he was a kid, he’s still reluctant to surrender to that possibility.

A short sigh gets his attention, and Jamie looks over at Roy. The instinct to apologize bubbles to the surface again, but Jamie chokes on the words before he can say them. Roy should’ve left by now anyway. There’s no reason for him to still be hanging around.

“Look,” Roy says, lowered voice stiff with awkwardness. “It’s the awareness thing, right? Can’t tell what’s going on, kind of freaking you out a little?”

Wordlessly, Jamie nods. He’s not sure how Roy managed to figure that out, but he’s glad, at least, that he doesn’t have to explain it himself.

“How about this, then,” Roy goes on. “You don’t have to, but if you think it could help — the headphones, I mean, if you think they could help, I’ll stick around and keep an eye out. So that, y’know…” He gestures around, a vague indication of the general room, the house laying beyond it. “It seemed like it helped last night. I mean, it seemed to me like it did. I’m just saying that, if it’ll help, then I can…” Grimacing, Roy shakes his head. “You know what I mean.”

Somehow, despite the clumsy delivery and the way Roy has always been something of a mystery to him, Jamie finds that he does.

“Yeah,” he says, in a rasping voice hardly above a whisper. His cheeks feel hot, and he doesn’t want to accept, doesn’t want Roy to know how pathetic he can be, but he’s afraid that if he doesn’t he’ll be a twitchy, restless mess all night. “Yeah, that’d be… thanks.” This whole mess is already nine kinds of insane. Why not add one more layer to it?

“Alright, then.” Roy sounds satisfied with the answer, which is a relief. At least he doesn’t sound like he wishes Jamie hadn’t accepted, as if it were some kind of test.

Shuffling around until he’s under the blankets, Jamie slowly, haltingly lays down. He rolls onto his side and bunches the pillow up under his head, trying to get comfortable. All that’s left is to close his eyes and go the fuck to sleep.

Today has been an awful day, and there’s no way of guessing what tomorrow is going to bring. Somehow, Jamie doubts that it’s going to be some kind of miracle where the world realizes that this whole thing has been a fucked-up mistake and nobody will talk about him anymore and he can just go back to playing football once the damn doctors clear him already. Hah, yeah. That’s just not going to happen. So Jamie needs to get as much rest as he possibly can, so that he’s at least not stumbling and flailing through whatever new nightmare is going to be thrown his way.

Still, Jamie’s reluctant to close his eyes and pull the headphones down into place. Static buzzes under his skin, and an unsettled restlessness begins to creep louder and louder again, making him want to get up and resume pacing.

A weight settles at the side of the mattress, disrupting the beginning of the spiral and catching Jamie’s attention. He looks down at Roy, who’s settled at the edge of the bed next to Jamie’s hip, poking at something on his own phone. For a while he continues doing that, then notices the attention on him, glancing up and meeting Jamie’s eyes.

“Oi,” he says, voice pitched down and gentled, “go the fuck to sleep, will you? You’re worse than Phoebe.”

Somehow, that quiets the unease enough that Jamie’s pulse slows, and the agitated static calms once more. Even though it works — he even snorts a quiet laugh at the comment about Phoebe, head falling back onto the pillow — Jamie still keeps looking at Roy for a moment longer. There’s something here, something about this situation that feels very familiar, though he can’t put his finger on it, which is unsettling. There’s no reason it should feel familiar. This is most certainly not a situation Jamie has ever been in before.

Except that Roy locks his phone screen and looks out into the hall, and then Jamie sees his profile in the dim light from the lamp. It’s set in a hard, grim expression — one that should scare Jamie senseless, given that it’s on an older, stronger man who’s between him and a door. This is different. This is the bulldog look again, and Roy’s sitting up next to Jamie like some kind of sentry, like he’s keeping watch, and in one twisting, lurching moment, it’s suddenly ten years ago.

Jamie blinks, and it isn’t Roy sitting there in sweats and a t-shirt, looking out into his own hallway with his mobile dormant in his hand. It’s Roy mid-run, determination creasing his face, bright blue Chelsea kit shining on glossy poster paper.

The memory superimposes itself so strongly over the present that Jamie’s breath hitches in a way he’s not prepared for. He squeezes his eyes tight shut and hopes Roy hasn’t noticed.

The headphones — headband — whatever shifts down far enough to cover his ears when he turns his head against the pillow. At some point, either he or Roy must have triggered the audiobook to start playing, because he tunes into a quiet voice in the middle of a sentence. A woman with a soft, smooth cadence is narrating, telling a story that Jamie barely pays any attention to. He doesn’t even know the title.

If Roy did notice the brief, strange moment when Jamie had tipped a decade into the past and then lurched back out again, he doesn’t say anything. There’s a shift in the mattress as he adjusts, but then he’s still, and the night settles around Jamie like the unfamiliar blanket he’s got pulled up over his shoulders.

Sleep had seemed so impossible earlier, when he’d been pacing a restless path up and down the hall. Jamie doesn’t even make it a full chapter into the audiobook before he’s out.

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

The police call in the morning.

The day starts in a slow, cautious crawl, and then Jamie’s mobile rings enough times to push through his do not disturb settings, and it’s the police, telling him they need him to come in for an interview to give evidence about the assault. That’s how they put it on the phone — give evidence about the assault. It makes Jamie’s stomach turn and he doesn’t want to go. The last thing he wants is to sit in some strange room with a person he doesn’t know and describe what happened all over again, especially when they could, apparently, just log onto Twitter if they really wanted to know what went down there.

Even so, he nods along, and then remembers the person he’s speaking to — who’d identified herself as DI Clarke, come down with her partner from West Midlands Police in Coventry — can’t see him, and starts agreeing to what she’s saying in the hope that it’ll make her stop saying it faster. By the time the call ends, Jamie’s been set up for an interview in a couple of hours. All he’s got with him to wear are the clothes he’d happened to have in his travel bag when they left for Coventry, and there’s a message from some organization that apparently does victim’s services or something like that.

The message from victim’s services, some caseworker named Beth-something, tells him a few things while he mostly zones out, but it ends by letting him know that he’ll be allowed to bring someone with him to his interview. He’s advised that he shouldn’t bring someone who was with him when ‘the incident’ took place.

The incident. Jamie honestly can’t decide if he prefers that phrasing over ‘the assault’ or not. At first, he dismisses the idea out of hand, and then it crawls back in, making him wonder if it might be a good idea to have someone with him after all.

Not being able to ask anyone who was there — the exact words had been strongly encourage you to choose someone who wasn’t present, but as far as Jamie is concerned, that sounds like not allowed to him —- severely limits his options. Most everyone he knows had been there, and certainly almost everyone he trusts.

“Hiya,” Keeley says, walking into the room.

Roy’s gone to work, but she’s stayed home again, making calls and using her laptop up in the office rather than going to Nelson Road. Jamie probably would’ve gotten pissier about that, insisted that he didn’t need babysitting and could manage on his own, if it weren’t for the fact that he very much does not want to be left alone right now at all. The fact that he’s not even in his own home, contemplating what he’s supposed to wear to a police interview because all he has is his travel match bag, contributes to the sense that the world is enormous and terrifying and he doesn’t want to be left to face it by himself.

Jamie’s been quiet for too long, looking at her too intently, and now Keeley knows something’s gone wrong.

“What is it?” she asks, immediately on alert, which he can’t really blame her for, given everything that’s happened so far.

“Will you come and talk to the police with me?” blurts out Jamie, before he can talk himself out of it.

For a moment, Keeley stares at him, uncomprehending. He grimaces, sorting through the words, trying to figure out how he might phrase this differently, what might have confused her.

“Police say I’ve gotta come in and talk to them,” he starts, the whole thing still feeling just as insane even as he’s trying to put it as simply as possible. “Got a call from someone with — with victim’s services or whatever.” Victim’s services — the words taste sour coming out of his mouth, and he sees a little twitch in her face when he says it. “They said I could bring someone with me, but it shouldn’t be someone who was there, and I thought you might come with me when I talk to them.”

The look on Keeley’s face softens, and in the space between finishing his explanation and her reply, Jamie starts to wholeheartedly regret having asked.

“Stupid question, sorry,” he says, interrupting whatever she’d been about to say before the first word could make it out. “Just forget about it, I’ll be fine, I don’t need someone to —”

“Of course I’ll go with you,” Keeley tells him, interrupting him right back. “Don’t be ridiculous, Jamie. Of course I’m going.”

Relief shocks through his body, zipping down his spine and tingling in his fingers like something just shy of nerve pain. Jamie nods, not quite trusting his voice right away. He waits a few moments, then nods again, and manages, “Thanks.”

Talking to the police, in short, fucking sucks. There’s a small swarm of media — journalists and photographers — outside of the station, and even with the team of security officers that clear a path and bring them in a side entrance, it’s a harrowing journey. Keeley snaps at someone about something to do with privacy and ‘doing your fucking job’, which elicits a stammered apology and something about a news leak, but Jamie’s heart is hammering too loudly inside his own ears to make out details.

Most of the actual interview goes by in a blur. DI Clarke and her partner, whose name Jamie doesn’t catch, ask him a lot of questions, but the specifics are lost to him. They download some things off his phone — messages from his father. There’s something about photographs, and then something about records from Sarah’s surgery, and then he has to tell them about the wembley thing and why James had been so pissed off at him in the first place, and somewhere around there is when Keeley interrupts and says, “We can come back another time but this needs to stop now,” and they let it end, stop the tape, and send them back out to the car with a security escort.

And then he’s home.

Jamie doesn’t remember the drive at all, but they must have got back without incident, because now he and Keeley are sitting in front of an episode of Sex and the City that he’s barely processing.

Honestly, he’s just glad for the background noise. They used to sit around and watch the show together, and the voices are soothing in their familiarity. Keeley doesn’t try to make him talk about what they’ve just done. She just sits on her side of the couch and watches the show, laughing when funny things happen, nudging Jamie at her favourite parts, and not asking questions.

For the most part, Jamie just sits there and drifts. The world feels fuzzy and distant, only solidifying and clearing when Keeley sends a light elbow into his side or when there’s a particularly loud moment on the show. It takes a few episodes for him to come back and stay back, and when he finally does, Keeley looks over at him and smiles. There’s something brittle in it, something wobbly, but it seems real, at least.

“Feeling any better?” she asks, and Jamie knows he’s back for good now, because he can hear the same shakiness from the smile in her voice.

“Yeah,” he says, trying to sound steady and reassuring. “Don’t… really know what that was, sorry. And thanks. For coming with, and for…” Jamie waves a hand, not quite sure how to finish that sentence without saying ‘thanks for sitting here with me while I lost track of time and maybe reality for a while.’

Keeley shakes her head. “It’s fine, really. You don’t have to be sorry. It’s been an intense day. Intense couple of days.”

That’s a rather succinct way to put it, and Jamie appreciates her grace. How she still has more of it to extend to him is beyond his understanding, but he appreciates it anyway.

When Roy gets back from work, Keeley goes to meet him at the door. Jamie stays put and focuses on his Sudoku puzzles, which Keeley told him he could keep, steadfastly ignoring whatever is up with the two of them as hard as possible.

“Alright Jamie,” Roy greets when he walks into the living room, and Jamie looks up from the puzzle book to return the acknowledgement. “Heard you had to talk to the police today.”

“Yeah. Fucking sucked.” It comes out sounding like a juvenile whine, but Jamie doesn’t really care. He figures he’s earned the right to a little juvenile whining. If having to sit in a police interview room and tell a stranger about the literal nightmare that’s taken over his life — as if she couldn’t just learn the exact same shit by logging onto Twitter for five minutes or turning on the nearest sports broadcasting channel doesn’t warrant a little whining — he really doesn’t know what would.

“I’ll bet,” Roy snorts, not calling Jamie on the tone. That, out of anything, indicates that it was a justified complaint. “Got notified that I’ve gotta go in to give evidence myself.”

Maybe it was building already and Jamie just hadn’t noticed it, maybe it’s a fun little part of his concussion coming and going, but it feels like he immediately develops a headache.

“What, you?”

“Yeah, since I was there and all.” The shrug and the way that he’s avoiding looking at either Jamie or Keeley say that Roy is highly uncomfortable with the whole concept. “They want Lasso, too. And Beard and Nate. Couple of other people who were there at Coventry. Sarah texted, said she got called in for an interview as well, which I assume means you told them she’s the one who saw to you.”

The headache gets stronger, and Jamie feels a little dizzy. “Yeah,” he says, and the word sounds distant to his own ears. “I did.”

“She’s given evidence on this sort of thing before,” Roy tells him as if that’s any kind of reassurance. “She knows what she’s doing.”

Jamie nods and tries to let it comfort him, even a little. It doesn’t, really. Not against the far more overwhelming thought of the interview he’d given today and the ones yet to come, where so many of the people central to his life will end up in that same little room, talking to DI Clarke or the partner she’d brought down with her from Coventry. Talking about Jamie. About his father. About what they’d seen.

Day turns to evening and night starts creeping in around the edges and still Jamie can’t shake it. They want to talk to Roy. Ted. The whole coaching staff. Other people too, and Jamie can’t help but wonder who that had meant. Had they contacted Dani? Sam? Isaac? Will, even? There had been so many people there.

Sometimes that thought lapses into the background against the fact that it feels like the whole world has seen the footage — the people who’d actually been there had actually seen it happen in front of them. It’s a fucking miracle that Roy can so much as look at him after seeing Jamie like that. That had been proof, hadn’t it? That Jamie was nothing, and he came from nothing, and that was all he was ever going to amount to in the end.

“Oi.”

Looking up, Jamie jolts out of his deepening spiral of awful, storming thoughts just in time for something to whack lightly into his chest, falling into his lap. He picks it up and studies it, squinting at the plastic-wrapped red and white sweet, and then looks over at Roy. Rather than ask the question, he just waves the mint in the air and makes a face.

“You were thinking so loud it was making my head hurt,” Roy dismisses, looking back down at the tablet where he is doing… something. “Couldn’t’ve been anything good going on in there.”

It’s an insult, except for the way that it isn’t, and Jamie can’t parse it for the life of him. He just sits there, mint in hand, looking at the sweet instead of at Roy. There’s got to be some kind of reason as to why his chest is suddenly tight and his breathing is coming shorter, faster. Some reason why he feels like he might cry when, right now more than any other moment in the last few days, he has no logical justification for it.

Instead of trying to figure out all of that, which seems an impossible task when sorting through his thoughts sometimes feels out of his reach on a good day, Jamie refocuses on the puzzle book. The numbers lay in their neat little rows, one after the other, empty boxes scattered between them where new ones need to go. He’s not sure he’s doing this right, but it’s something to do, and it’s been his saving grace so far, so he’s going to keep doing it. It’s more productive than whatever he’d been doing before Roy had thrown candy at him, at least.

The mint is just like every other mint Jamie’s eaten in his life, but the click of it against his teeth and the sharp, sweet taste is grounding. It keeps him in the room, focused on the puzzles, and out of wherever else he keeps wandering.

Eventually, Keeley seems to decide that enough is enough and approaches Jamie to announce that, “Right, I’m going to make a run over to your place, and I’m going to pick up some things for you. Can I have your keys?”

At first, he just stares at her, standing in front of him with her hand out, not entirely understanding what she’s talking about.

“You’re staying here, at least for a while. Right?” She directs this question at both Jamie and Roy, looking from one to the other. Roy nods without a moment’s hesitation, scoffing like he’s offended by the question.

Jamie takes longer to answer. He’s too busy trying to process the one that Roy gave. Eventually, he gives up on trying to form words at all and just hands over his house keys, laying them in her waiting palm.

“Alright, perfect,” she says, nodding and stuffing them in her jacket pocket. “Is everything where it was last — Wait, you don’t still live at the same place, do you?”

Doing his best to keep his expression as neutral as he can, Jamie nods and hopes nobody decides to call him on it. He’s told people that he just didn’t have time to move properly, didn’t get around to arranging for his house to go back on the rental market since it all happened so fast, and they’ve accepted that justification. Privately, though, Jamie isn’t sure that it’s necessarily the whole truth.

“Well, that makes things easier, then,” is all that Keeley ends up saying, and Roy doesn’t offer any commentary at all. He narrows his eyes, looking at Jamie with a furrowed brow, but he ultimately keeps quiet.

Then Keeley leaves, and Jamie is left alone with Roy. He’s wildly embarrassed by the whole thing, refusing to make eye contact with Roy once she’s gone. Instead, he sits there, stares at his hands and hates every single facet of his entire life. Jamie can feel his cheeks grow hot and his headache throbs harder, to the point that the stitched wounds in his face start to throb along with it.

“Hey.”

The gruff, quiet voice gets his attention, and Jamie’s eyes flick to the side. He can see Roy standing at the edge of his vision, but he doesn’t look up farther, returning his gaze to his own hands instead. His knuckles are reddened where he’s rubbing at them with his thumb, irritating the skin.

“Hey,” Roy says again, a little louder.

This time, Jamie risks looking up. There isn’t the sneer he’d been afraid of — no indication that Roy thinks less of him for not going home, for not even going to fetch his own things himself, for letting Keeley do it instead. Instead, Roy’s regarding him with an expression that is, if anything, understanding. It’s undercut a little by the raised eyebrow, but he doesn’t seem upset at all.

“Remember what I said, right?” Roy tells him. “We don’t want you to be able to handle this shit yourself. Just… keep that in mind.”

And that doesn’t fix things. It doesn’t shut down the part of Jamie’s mind that keeps generating a thousand different ways he should’ve done better, been stronger, but… it helps. It’s something.

It makes the time pass easier while they wait for Keeley to get back, at least. Jamie had been dreading having to spend even one more moment alone here with Roy, sitting in the man’s house after someone finally directly called attention to the fact that he hasn’t left except to go to Sarah’s surgery, but it isn’t so bad in the end. By the time Keeley returns, they’re both on the couch and Jamie’s looking over Roy’s shoulder at footage from training, throwing in his own commentary despite the irritated retorts he gets and generally having a shockingly decent time.

Keeley walks in the door without knocking, a duffel bag over one shoulder and Jamie’s keys jingling in her hand. She waves cheerfully when she sees them, and it’s not even much of a fight for Jamie to muster up a smile to give back to her.

When Keeley’s halfway through the room, her phone goes off in her pocket and she stops to fish it out. As soon as she sees the screen, her face changes. At first, it freezes, the easy, relaxed expression going stiff and fake and then disappearing entirely, disbelief taking over. The duffel over Keeley’s shoulder slips off and hits the floor when she lets go of it, holding onto her mobile with both hands.

“Oh, fuck.” The words slip out when she looks at the device’s screen for the first time, and then she stands there with it in her hand, bag forgotten on the ground. “My phone kept going off, but I thought it was still just… Oh, fucking fuck.”

That kind of sudden shift in attitude would be alarming at the best of times. This is — as has been made painfully obvious over and over again — far from the best of times, which means that it has surpassed alarming and is approaching the threshold of terrifying.

“What’s going on?” Roy asks. There’s nothing, for a beat. Silence. “Keeley?”

“Jamie,” she says in a low, slow voice, rather than answering Roy directly. It takes a long time for her to tear her eyes away from the screen, looking up at him with a muted, resigned kind of horror. “I’m really, really sorry about this.”

The phone laying on the table feels like it’s looking at Jamie. He eyes it warily. The thought that he doesn’t remember who had called who drifts through his mind, idle and inane — had they started it, or had someone on Nelson Road’s end? Jamie has no fucking idea, and it bothers him more than it should. The last few minutes are patchy, fuzzy bits of distant memory stitched around empty air.

The conversation happens around Jamie as he’s sitting at the table, wondering about this completely meaningless detail. Keeley sits across from him, hair loose from its elastic. She’s combing her fingers through it over and over, a nervous tic she’s had since he met her. Roy’s pacing around, seemingly unable to keep still. He’d been sitting at first, but it hadn’t lasted longer than it took for the ringing to stop and the line to open before he leapt up and started pacing back and forth again.

Honestly, Jamie would probably be doing the same thing if it weren’t for the fact that he’s pretty sure that, if he got up now, he’d just bolt the moment he did. He knows where every exit in this room is. (Jamie usually knows where the exits are. He’d been doing pretty good with not checking for them all the time since he’s been back in Richmond. Until Wembley, and then Coventry, and now he’s worse than ever.) So instead he just bounces his leg under the table, fast and erratic, unable to calm his nerves.

It’s like there’s static in Jamie’s head, like he’s put his ear up to a conch shell and that’s all that he can hear, muffling everything else around him except for the hammering of his own heart. He can’t concentrate, can’t think.

There hadn’t been time to think. There had just been the news and the posts on Keeley’s phone, and then it was all happening all over again and Jamie just can’t catch a fucking breath. He hadn’t had a moment to even try before Keeley jumped into action, already thinking about a plan of attack, and now they’re on the phone with who-knows-how-many people on the other end. The little device sits threateningly on the table, like it’s going to blow up and kill all of them any second now.

“Jamie?”

He stares at Keeley blankly, not sure why she’s said his name. Her worried expression grows even more worried, and then Jamie realizes that there’d been some sound from the phone, an indistinct buzz of speech that he hadn’t parsed out into words or even understood as a voice at all. A question. Someone on the Richmond end of the call has asked a question, and from the way Keeley said his name and her concerned frown, it was a question for him.

“Sorry,” Jamie says, because that seems like a good place to start. “What?”

“Do you need us to slow down?”

It’s such a brutally ironic question that Jamie almost has to laugh. He needs everything to slow down, he needs it to stop, just for a few fucking minutes so that he can get his feet back underneath him and start figuring out which fucking way is up, but that’s not going to happen. It can’t happen. None of this is ever going to stop.

“Don’t care,” he mutters in a way that might come out as sullen. He doesn’t really care about that, either.

The conversation moves on, though Keeley eyes Jamie like she’s thinking of throwing the brakes on the whole thing for a few moments. It doesn’t get much farther before there’s another question directed at Jamie, and he knows it’s about him this time, even though he still doesn’t catch any of it.

Not wanting to ask whoever it was to repeat it, Jamie just sits there, numb and jittery, and says, “I don’t know. I can’t, I don’t—”

Roy is the one who actually answers the question, cutting in and taking over when he realizes that Jamie just isn’t going to make it through a coherent sentence himself. Maybe if he were more collected, Jamie might bother to feel embarrassed or grateful for that, but he doesn’t feel much of anything at all. Nothing except for that static fuzz of anxiety and the overwhelming sense that everything around him is happening very fast and very far outside of his control. Things haze out for a moment as a few exchanges on the other end of the call escape Jamie’s notice. He only snaps back into the room when he hears Roy’s voice jump up higher, nearly yelling.

“Just — What I want to know is how the fuck did they find out?”

When Roy barks the question, Jamie flinches so hard that his hands seize into fists and his bouncing leg jerks to the side, smacking into his chair. His heart races, and he can physically feel it thudding in his throat.

“Fuck,” Roy hisses under his breath, then, slightly louder, “Sorry, sorry.” Returning to his regular speaking volume, he goes on, addressing the phone. “It was only us there. Nobody saw that happen but our team, our people, which means it was one of us that leaked this shit and that’s just — it’s fucking — No.” He can’t seem to come up with a better way to describe it, settling for an all-out rejection of the possibility.

The rushing, conch-shell sound in Jamie’s ears gets louder. He props his elbows on the table, dropping his face into his hands. It hurts when it jars the mess of stitches, but he doesn’t make a sound. He swallows hard. He isn’t thinking about it. Jamie is not fucking thinking about it.

“Maybe it wasn’t,” puts in Keeley. It’s not clear whether she’s trying to be a voice of reason or if she’s also distracting herself from something she doesn’t want to look in the face. “It could’ve been someone else, you don’t know that. Security guard at Wembley, or someone who overheard something, or one of his dad’s friends. There are a lot of options, not just somebody with Richmond.”

Somebody with Richmond. Jamie presses his hands harder against his face, gritting his teeth. Not thinking about it.

“The wording was very clear.” That voice is coming from the mobile on the table, distorted by the use of speakerphone. Its owner isn’t immediately discernible, and Jamie doesn’t bother trying to figure it out. It doesn’t really matter. “‘Source close to AFC Richmond’ and all that.”

Keeley scoffs a little, clearly unimpressed with that point. “It’s not like they never bend the truth or exaggerate. Close to AFC Richmond could mean basically anything.”

The debate of who could’ve leaked the Wembley incident continues on, but Jamie checks out of it entirely at that point. Honestly, he can’t bring himself to care. It’s not that he doesn’t care, not really, it’s that he can’t right now. He doesn’t have the energy to, not if he wants to be able to keep breathing and not completely lose his mind.

If there’s one thing to be said for the fact that he’s currently dead-centre in a major ongoing crisis for the team, it’s that there is, at least, quite the group of people attempting to manage that crisis. That means that Jamie himself doesn’t necessarily have to be on top of it all of the time. He can just stop listening.

Jamie’s face feels hot and his chest is tight. He digs his fingers into his hair, then rakes his hands back through it. Though he’s able to stifle a groan of exhaustion and annoyance with the whole horrible mess, he’s unable to quite stop the small sound of pain that escapes when the movement pulls worse at his stitches.

“Are you alright, Jamie?”

The question takes him by surprise, and he drags his chin up to look at Keeley. She’s still sitting across from him, though now she’s looking away from the mobile and directly at him. Behind her, Roy has stopped pacing and is watching him too, the strength of their combined attention pressing on Jamie’s shoulders, making him feel trapped.

A noise comes from the phone, but Keeley hushes it without even glancing down, saying, “Just a moment, please,” and then repeating her question. “Jamie, are you alright?”

It’s almost enough to make him laugh, that question is. Is he alright? A chuckle breaks through, rattling its way out of his dry throat. It hurts his mouth, and for some reason that just makes him laugh again — a strained, humourless sound that verges, just a bit, on being hysterical.

The concerned look on Keeley’s face deepens and starts to become alarmed. She doesn’t seem to know what to say, which is fair. It occurs to Jamie that he probably looks pretty fucking odd, sitting here laughing when she’s just asked him if he’s alright. When he so obviously isn’t.

Finally giving in to the urge that he’s been battling, Jamie gets up. The chair scrapes back across the floor with what seems like an unreasonably loud sound. Jamie’s phone is discarded over on the couch where he’d left it earlier, in danger of slipping down between the cushions. He ignores it, leaving it there. The notifications are still off, and it holds nothing good even if they weren’t.

The door that leads out into Roy’s back garden is the first thing Jamie sets his eyes on that gives him the opportunity he’s looking for — the chance to escape. He starts for it as soon as the thought occurs to him, only pausing when Keeley’s voice calls him back. She says his name again, sharp with concern, and Jamie stops, glancing back over his shoulder.

“Fine,” he says. Forces out, because he has to say something. “Going outside for a minute.” Then he continues on towards the door. There’s a sense building in Jamie’s chest that he has to get outside now or he’s going to… He doesn’t know, but something will happen, and it won’t be good, and it can’t happen in front of Keeley and Roy.

Behind him, there’s the sound of a chair scraping, and Keeley again: “Jamie,” she says, and he shakes his head, staring straight at the door handle.

It’s so close. He’s so close. If he just reaches out, he’ll be able to — “Please,” Jamie says. The metal of the handle is cold at his palm. It gives him something to focus on, one point to ground himself. To hold himself together for just a few more moments. Jamie stands there and breathes very deeply, hating the way it rattles on the way in and trembles on the way out. He’s sure they can hear it. They’re not that far away, and it sounds amplified, louder than it should be. “Please, don’t follow me.”

Jamie opens the door and steps outside, closing it behind him and nearly going straight to the ground the moment he does. He sags against the doorframe, breathing in ragged pants. It’s cold and dark out here on Roy’s back porch, the night quiet and still. While he waits for his legs to feel steady enough to carry him any farther, Jamie just stays there, leaning against the side of the house. Nobody follows him.

Once he’s confident he’s not going to collapse in a heap the moment he tries, Jamie pushes away from the wall and walks to where the wood panelling meets the grass. He ignores the short flight of steps to the left, stepping directly down to the grass and sitting on the edge of the porch.

From out here, there’s no way to hear the conversation continuing inside the house. Jamie doesn’t know if they’re telling Ted and whoever else might be there that he’s gone outside in a fit of dramatics, and it doesn’t matter. Whatever’s happening in there isn’t his problem, at least for now. It’s a relief, getting some distance from the endless crush of bad news on top of bad news. The thought that any of it could be escaped just by walking outside and sitting alone in the dark for a bit is patently ridiculous, but it’s not as if there’s anyone out there with Jamie to call him on it, is there?

A laugh pushes its way up through his lungs. It’s a horrible, brittle noise. It doesn’t sound like him at all, which, for whatever reason, just makes Jamie laugh harder.

What the fuck, he thinks, raising his shaking hands to either side of his bruised head. What the fuck is wrong with me? This whole situation is ridiculous. Jamie is sitting outside Roy Kent’s house, where he’s basically living at the moment, laughing, because he apparently can’t even manage to have appropriate emotional responses to this shit.

The next breath that Jamie takes in catches and rips, and then he isn’t laughing anymore, he’s crying. Jamie’s crying and he can’t stop. He tries to breathe deeply, tries to calm himself or get any part of this under control, and it doesn’t work. Pulling his hands away from his face, holding them out in front of himself, he can see them trembling.

“Fucking stop it,” Jamie orders himself in an angry hush, then chokes on a humiliated sob at how pathetic and wobbly his voice sounds. Stop it, he repeats, though he refuses to speak again. He reaches careful fingers up to pinch the bridge of his nose, squeezing his eyes tightly shut.

It doesn’t work. Hot tears still force their way through, streaking down his face and leaving damp spots on the fabric of his trousers. His lip stings when the salt makes contact, and Jamie whines, wordless and deep in his throat.

Somehow, this is what’s done it. This is where and when Jamie’s gone and lost it. Not bleeding on the bus on the way home from Coventry, not that first night when Sarah took those photos of his wounds, not at the police station. Now. On Roy’s porch, in the dark, while everyone else handles the newest nightmare.

What Jamie doesn’t get is why anyone even cares at all. Someone leaking this one shouldn’t have been news. Compared to what happened at Coventry, Wembley was hardly anything, was nothing at all. It felt like the end of the world at the time, but thinking back on it now, after everything else, Jamie just wants to laugh again.

Maybe he wouldn’t be in such a state now if he hadn’t taken that so hard, reacted so dramatically to it. Maybe if he’d been able to pull himself up and dust himself off like he always did. Then he would’ve been able to do that this time, too.

The thought reminds Jamie of what he’d said to Roy, late that first night. About tolerance and handling things. He’s starting to think that Wembley is what this all comes down to. If things hadn’t gone the way they did then, he might be okay now.

(Which is probably a stupid, deeply flawed thought process, but he’s the only one around to hear it, so he can get away with it, at least for now.)

What it comes down to is this: It’s like that night in the locker room has ruined him.

That night, that time that being prodded and taunted and shoved around at Wembley had gotten to be too much, and Jamie had punched his father, knowing that the consequences were coming his way. He’d known they were coming, only for the consequences to be intercepted before they could rain down on his head: his father was escorted out of the building and Roy goddamn Kent’s arms had locked him in against a strong chest and kept him there until he could breathe properly again. Jamie had known what was coming for him, known he could take it because he always did, always had to, and then it just… didn’t. Instead, someone had protected him. Someone else had held him. Let him cry about it, and he hadn’t even been hit that time.

It’s ruined him. They’ve ruined him.

Tolerance, right? It’s like Jamie was a hard drinker that went bone dry for a decade and lost any shred of tolerance he’d ever had. It’s pathetic, really. He’s known how to handle this sort of thing since he was small, hasn’t reacted like this in years. The closest he’s come is the first time he’d really been thrashed after leaving Richmond for that horrible stretch in Manchester, and even that hadn’t been like this. Yeah, Jamie had cried a bit after that, because he’d been hurt and half-convinced that the rest of his life was just going to be the days he got the shit kicked out of him and the days between those days, but he’d been alone when that happened, and it hadn’t stopped him from doing what needed to be done. He’d just waited for the bruises to fade and gone and signed up for Lust Conquers All. He hadn’t… collapsed. Not like he has this time, when he can’t seem to get back up and stay there for the life of him.

Jamie hadn’t collapsed and he sure as fuck hadn’t ended up camped out at someone else’s house, crying his fucking eyes out on their back porch. His head throbs, his face swollen and hot, and he rocks in place, just back and forth, once, twice. It doesn’t help. He can’t get it to stop, he just can’t make himself bloody stop. It feels like he sits there for ages, arms tucked close to his stomach, fucking crying because Richmond has fucking ruined him.

It’s a miracle that Jamie hears the backdoor when it opens. He cranes his neck to look over his shoulder, back towards the pool of warm light emanating from he house, and there he sees Roy. The man is standing silhouetted by the open door, stopped dead in place, face just lit up enough for Jamie to make out the look on his face. It’s shocked. Thrown off, like this is the last thing Roy expected to find out here.

Unable to stand it for another moment, Jamie turns back around. He scrubs at his cheeks with his sleeve, trying to avoid the healing bruises and scrapes, not quite managing it. Holding his breath doesn’t stop the hitching in his chest, the obvious way he breathes when he’s crying, and the effort only makes the next sob twist worse. Bigger, louder.

The door closes. Jamie hears it and hurts, deep and sharp, which is stupid. Ridiculous. He doesn’t want Roy to see him like this — doesn’t want anyone to see him like this, but at the same time, the only thing he can imagine that’s worse than Roy witnessing this is Roy seeing what’s going on, and turning around and leaving. It’s not like Jamie has the right to expect him to do anything different, but —

Footsteps cross the porch, hesitant and slow, approaching from the door. Jamie looks over again, leaving one hand over his mouth, the sleeve pulled down over it, like he could possibly hide anything about his state at this point. Roy cuts an awkward picture standing there, one hand jammed into his jacket pocket, the other holding something gingerly out in front of him. It shouldn’t be possible, the way he can walk into a locker room or onto a pitch and immediately command the attention and respect of everyone there, and then look like he wants to crawl out of his own skin or maybe die because he’s found Jamie crying in his own back garden.

“You, ah,” Roy says, too quiet for his normal voice and too loud for the quiet night. “You left your phone.” It sits there in his hand, innocuous and dark and horrible.

“Don’t want it,” Jamie tells him. “Don’t want to — I don’t need that, I don’t want to look at it.” He has just enough time to be proud of managing to get the response out in one piece when his lungs seize up all over again and he lets out a sorry, high-pitched whine. His shoulders crumple as easily as paper, like his whole body is trying to fold in on itself, and he screws his eyes shut. Bowing his head, Jamie covers as much of his face as he can with his hand.

The footsteps don’t start again. Roy doesn’t retreat back inside. He just stays there, standing a few feet away and then says, eventually, “Right. Want me to fuck off?”

Somehow, that actually, honestly makes Jamie laugh again. It’s a horribly wet, congested sound, but it cuts through the crying, and clears Jamie’s throat enough that he can answer, “Your fuckin’ house, ain’t it?”

Wood creaks as Roy sits down beside Jamie, close but not crowding him. He doesn’t say anything at first, just sits there, awkwardness radiating off him in waves. Maybe Roy doesn’t want to be here at all. Maybe he’s staying because he feels like he has to, for some reason. Very quickly, though, Jamie realizes that he doesn’t care. Whatever Roy’s reasons are, he isn’t alone, and he’ll take what he can get.

There’s the muffled bang of someone’s car door closing down the street, followed by a beep as the vehicle is locked. A breeze sweeps through the row of back gardens, and the wind chime on Roy’s next-door neighbour’s porch peals out a short song. The sounds of the night wearing on around them and the presence of another person beside him are something to focus on. Jamie clings to them, and slowly the crying eases, until all that’s left is a periodic catch in his breath and single tears that occasionally slip in hot tracks down his cheeks. He catches them with his sleeve, grimacing.

“Finished talking to Ted and everyone,” Roy says eventually. “Went okay. Still don’t got any idea who leaked the Wembley thing, but we’re working on it. Keeley’s drafting some official release, I guess, for the team’s media shit. She’ll probably want to show you before it goes up tomorrow, but you don’t gotta worry about that yet.”

When he finishes with the update, Roy falls quiet again. He doesn’t ask for Jamie’s input on any of what he’s just said, content to let it sink in instead. The information filters its way through Jamie’s mind in slow, dazed trickles, making him shiver. He doesn’t know how to feel about any of it. A little soul-searching doesn’t turn up anything worthwhile, and he wonders if he might have strained his ability to feel anything so much over the last few days that there’s just… nothing left.

Honestly, Jamie would be lying if he said the idea didn’t appeal to him. He’s felt entirely too much at this point, and to have that stop would be a mercy.

Roy takes a sudden, purposeful breath like he’s about to say something several times, only to stop before making a single sound. What he settles on, about the fourth time he does this, is, “It would probably be really stupid of me to ask if you’re okay.”

Jamie lets out a short, harsh exhale. It’s almost a laugh. Almost. “Yeah. Would be.”

Another long stretch of empty space with stop-start breaths, and then Roy says, “Was it — I mean, did something we…”

“No,” Jamie says, putting him out of his blatant misery. “Just… Needed everything to slow down. It all just keeps — it keeps happening, it never stops, so I just. Needed it to stop.”

“Right. Yeah, I get that.” He sounds a little relieved.

They lapse into quiet after that. Jamie’s shoulders hunch upwards, his body shrinking in on itself against both the cold and the strange, fragile feeling that has overtaken him. It’s like his skin is thin as tissue paper and his insides have been replaced with candy floss. He’s pretty sure that a strong breeze could collapse him, could snap him clean in half. It’s an exposed-nerve kind of feeling. No matter how long he sits there, breathing as deep and steady as he can, Jamie just can’t seem to shore himself up. He tries for long enough that it’s impressive that Roy hasn’t gotten tired of waiting for him to get his act together and gone back inside already.

When Roy shifts and leans back, Jamie catches the movement in his peripheral vision. He can see enough that it doesn’t take him by surprise when Roy sets a hand on his back. It’s a slow, telegraphed move. Deliberate.

It takes all of Jamie’s strength not to collapse sideways at the contact. Warmth seeps through his shirt from the wide, heavy press of Roy’s hand, and he shivers reflexively. Jamie’s breath hitches, like a leftover sob has caught back up with him, even though he thought he was done with the crying. Roy must be able to feel it, because his hand goes tense and starts to pull away, which is when Jamie does the only thing more embarrassing than what he’s already done. He makes a panicked, whining sound in his throat, unable to stop it from escaping in time. It’s a wordless plea, but the meaning is evidently clear.

Roy stops moving. His hand presses back down again, tentative at first and then settling more firmly, rubbing back and forth in one quick sweep before settling back where it originally had been. Jamie buries his face in his elbow, exhaling a rattling breath into his sleeve, and wonders if it’s obvious how grateful he is — both that Roy had stopped pulling away and that he hadn’t actually had to ask for that out loud.

The night has grown colder the longer he’s sat there, temperature brought down by the increasingly late hour and the slow ebb of the fever-like flush brought on by his breakdown. The steady weight of the hand between Jamie’s shoulderblades does a lot to chase away the chill.

Eventually, Jamie drags his head out of its exhausted slump and props his chin on his forearm, laid across his knees. “Sorry,” he says. He’s not really sure what, specifically, he’s apologizing for. Just that it feels like he ought to be saying sorry for something. Maybe everything.

Roy just snorts. Out of the corner of his eye, Jamie sees him shake his head.

“Don’t be an idiot.” Somehow that manages to come out fondly, which is just another part of the seemingly-endless Roy Kent puzzle.

After sitting together in silence for a while longer, the hand on Jamie’s back slides up to briefly grip the nape of his neck, then lets him go. There’s a hesitant pause, like Roy’s waiting to see what his reaction will be. When nothing happens — Jamie solid enough now to handle losing the contact without feeling suddenly bereft — Roy starts shifting like he’s going to get up. It seems to be a more involved process than it should, and noting this makes something click in Jamie’s mind. He quickly rises to his own feet, holding out a hand and plastering his best ‘I swear to god, mate, I’m not fucking with you’ expression across his face.

Roy eyes the offered hand with guarded suspicion, then shakes his head just a little. He accepts, clapping his palm into Jamie’s and letting Jamie help him to his feet. A cracking sound makes them both wince, and Roy takes a cautious step, testing his bad leg. He falters almost immediately, grimaces, and adjusts his weight to rest mostly on the good one. Jamie, suddenly concerned, holds out an arm, but Roy waves him off.

“I get around alright,” he says. Hesitates. “Thanks, though.”

The second part comes out in a stiff, begrudging tone, like Roy doesn’t want to be saying it. Somehow, though, Jamie thinks he knows it’s not actual resentment. He shrugs, choosing not to pursue the issue. He knows a thing or two about wanting to preserve whatever sort of pride you had left to be saved, and besides. There’s still a part of Jamie that feels a little twist of guilt when he notices Roy’s having a particularly difficult day with his knee. Needling him about it seems like it ought to be off-limits, at least most of the time.

“You coming in?” Roy asks, and Jamie shakes his head.

“Nah. ‘M gonna…” He looks around, wondering how to justify wanting to stay outside for a while without it being alarming. “Just gonna stay out here for a bit.”

Though it looks like he won’t, Roy ultimately decides to let it go. “Alright. Come inside before too long though, yeah? You’ve gotta sleep sometime. Fucking brain’s not done developing until you’re twenty-five, got to get your eight hours in or it won’t turn out right, and you need all the help you can get with that one.”

Jamie squints at him, then makes a face. “You just made that up.”

“I did not,” Roy retorts, raising an eyebrow and folding his arms. “Do you want me to get Sarah on the phone? She’ll tell you I’m right, and she’s a doctor. She knows that shit.”

That, Jamie can’t help but laugh at. It’s faint and a little weak, but it’s a laugh, and he says, “No, don’t bother her. Just go to bed or whatever. You need your rest, old man.”

“Oi, watch who you’re calling old. This is my house, remember?”

It’s the kind of retort that sounds familiar, almost like things are normal again. There’s a flicker across Roy’s face, like he might regret saying it, might want to take it back, but Jamie just laughs again. He doesn’t even bother trying to look offended, not wanting Roy to think that he actually is. This is the kind of normal interaction he wouldn’t have held out hope they’d be able to have again, not after… all of that. Like hell does his father get to take that too.

Even after Roy limps back into the house and Jamie is left alone again, the crushing cascade of emotion that overwhelmed him before doesn’t return. He sits back down on the steps, looking out into the darkened garden, and feels somewhat close to peace. Jamie’s breath hitches, just a few times, but he manages not to cry again, which feels like a win.

–

Wanting to achieve something even vaguely approaching normalcy, Jamie doesn’t let himself pace that night. Even aside from that, he just feels too damn tired. His head throbs with a worse headache than ever, probably thanks to the fucking crying, and every limb is leaden and clumsy. So Jamie goes to bed straight away, trying not to pay much mind to how relieved he is to be walking into someone else’s guest room rather than his own bedroom at home.

The headphones/headband/whatever it was called that Roy found for him the night before are where he’d left them that morning, plugged into their charging cable, and Jamie disconnects it and slips them over his head. He doesn’t remember the name of the book Roy downloaded — some middle-grade thing about dragons, maybe — but the narrator has a nice voice and he wants to get out of his own head. It had worked once, and he figures it might work again.

Except that, also like last night, Jamie lays down, pulls the comforter up over his shoulders, and finds he can’t quite bring himself to close his eyes. Whenever he tires, they fly open again after a few moments, his pulse picking up and his lungs struggling like they’re not getting enough air. He tries, and he’s able to keep them shut longer each time, but it’s not easy, and he’s frustrated with himself.

It’s not like anything is going to happen. Even so, the idea of losing two senses at once — sight and hearing — is just too much for his overtaxed mind, stuck as it is in the panicky, impossible-to-settle track Doctor Sharon called fight or flight.

Jamie eventually gives up, sitting up and grinding the heel of one hand into the eye without a bunch of bruising and stitches around it. He’s so fucking tired but he just can’t go to sleep, which is the sort of problem most people grow out of when they’re toddlers. Every breath feels heavy and thick when he pulls it in, and then rushes out again, leaving him feeling hollow in its wake.

The fact that the sleep headphones have slipped down around his neck means that, when Roy shows up in the doorway, Jamie hears him coming. That’s a relief, given that if he’d been surprised in this state, he might have reacted in some heinously embarrassing way — as if he had any dignity left to protect at this point. Still, it’s the principle of the thing.

At first, Roy just stands there, and Jamie’s too damn tired to try and figure out what he wants on his own, so he just allows it to happen, and they exist in heavy, awkward silence. Then, Roy looks up at the ceiling and sighs like he doesn’t want to be here, except that he isn’t leaving either. When he finally gets to the point, he does so with all the finesse of a sledgehammer.

“Do you want me to stay tonight?” Roy asks.

“Maybe —” Jamie hesitates, then shakes his head. Whatever. Fucking may as well, at this point. It worked last night and the night before, and he needs to grow up and knock it off, except they keep telling him he doesn’t, right? We don’t want you to be able to handle this shit yourself, and all that. “Maybe just for a bit, yeah?”

Roy nods and comes inside, seeming as relieved as Jamie is that they’ve navigated that with a minimum of difficulty. Maybe that’s because they talked as little as possible in the process — they’ve never been very good at that. Neither of them are what could be described as verbally gifted when it comes to expressing themselves on their own, and when they get put together, it’s often a recipe for disaster.

Even since working their shit out, there have still been several times where there’s nearly been a dust-up because one of them said something, fucked it up, and the other took it the way it sounded rather than the way it was meant. They’ve gotten better at stopping and stepping back, clarifying rather than jumping immediately into anger, but it hasn’t been the world’s smoothest adjustment. Jamie still feels like they’ve just enacted a minor miracle every time they walk away from any remotely high-stakes interaction without anyone feeling like they were insulted at some point in the process.

Jamie pulls the band down over his head, the heavy fabric shrouding his eyes, and presses the side of his face into the pillow. He feels the mattress dip where Roy sits down, and prickles of relief cascade from his neck down his arms. It makes him feel shaky, like the tension letting up has left him unsteady and fragile.

Crying always does that to him, honestly. It’s one of the reasons he hates doing it. It’s exhausting, and the harder he’s cried, the more he feels like he’s made of tissue paper or candyfloss afterwards — like something that’s easily shredded, would blow away in a light breeze. The crying itself is bad enough, such an embarrassing, violent process, and then there’s everything that comes after — the headache, the tiredness, the way it always shows so clearly on his face and in his hands. No matter what, Jamie’s hands always seem to give him away. Once they start, he can never quite get them to stop trembling. If Roy notices any of this, he says nothing about it, which Jamie is quietly grateful for.

Eventually, listening to the narration on its low volume and feeling his body grow heavier and heavier, Jamie knows the worst has passed. He doesn’t feel like he’s about to shake right to pieces anymore. He feels warm and safe there, and fairly certain he’s going to stay that way.

“Roy,” he mumbles, barely audible to his own ears past the audiobook. His mouth is slow and clumsy with encroaching sleep. If he were more awake, he’d probably care about the way he surely sounds like a half-dozing child. As it stands, he barely gives it notice. “Y’can go now. ‘M okay.”

There’s no answer for long enough that Jamie starts to wake a little more, brain working a bit harder as it tries to sort out whether he’d actually spoken at all or just imagined that he had.

“Alright,” is the response that finally filters through the fabric around his head, which answers that question.

Still, despite the acknowledgement, the weight at the edge of the mattress doesn’t move. Roy stays where he is, though Jamie doesn’t know for how long — he’s drifting in and out of sleep, existing in a half-conscious state that lays over him like a heavy blanket. Finally, after he’s done waiting for… whatever he’d been waiting for, there’s a shift in the bed, and Roy gets up. He doesn’t leave immediately then, either.

There’s a brief touch to the side of Jamie’s head first, just a moment or two. He doesn’t know what it’s for — that brush of fingertips against his temple, right over the stitches, light enough that it doesn’t hurt at all. Roy’s impossible to understand most of the time, though, and right now Jamie is too asleep to care.

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

The fact that other people have been rearranging their lives to avoid leaving Jamie alone is unspoken. It becomes obvious in a way that Jamie wishes it hadn’t when Keeley announces to him that both she and Roy have to go in today, and what does he want to do? The question leaves him staring at her, owl-eyed and clutching the smoothie he’d just been drinking. A bead of condensation trickles over his fingers and he grimaces, shifting the glass from one hand to the other and flicking them dry.

“What do I want to do?” he repeats when she continues looking at him like she expects an answer.

Keeley nods, and then elaborates. “I just mean, you know, one of us has been staying with you so you’d have someone here, and since we’re both gonna be gone, you’ve gotta decide if you want to stay here or come in with us.”

Jamie just keeps looking at her. The explanation hasn’t been as helpful as they’d both obviously hoped it would be — it’s like the inside of his skull’s been hollowed out, and there’s nothing left there except for the sensation of the cold glass against his palm and a very faint throbbing in his scraped-up arm.

“You could come in with us,” Keeley says, clearly having decided that, for some reason, he’s literally not understanding what she’s trying to get him to answer, “you know, so you wouldn’t have to stay on your own, or if you didn’t want to leave or worry about dealing with anyone else, you could stay here and that would be fine too — Right, babe?”

This last bit is clearly directed at Roy, who looks up from his phone across the kitchen with an expression that makes it extremely clear he hasn’t been paying attention to the conversation at all. He grunts a non-specific affirmative, and Keeley rolls her eyes with a small, affectionate smile on her face, which is an interaction that makes Jamie feel the most like an out-of-place third wheel that he’s felt the whole time.

“Anyway.” Returning to her point, Keeley shrugs. “Whatever you want to do, whatever you’d be most comfortable with, we’ll make it happen. So, do you want to stay here, or do you want to come with? I’d give you more time to think about it, but we really do have to be going or we’re gonna be late.”

This time, Roy chimes in without prodding or looking up from his phone, saying in a derisive sort of gruff mutter, “We can be late. They can deal with it if we’re late, he can think about it.”

Keeley rolls her eyes again and makes a face at Jamie. He doesn’t really know what to do with that, so he just makes a face back and hopes it was the situationally appropriate thing to do. As for the decision itself, he thinks about it for a few seconds, which he experiences less as actual pros and cons and more as the mental equivalent of a prolonged dial tone, and then blurts out the first thing that pops into his head, which is, “Sure, yeah, I’ll come with.”

Why not, really?

As Keeley and Roy go about finishing up their morning routines and getting their shit together for work, Jamie grows more and more sure that deciding to go with them was the right call. As strange and useless as he feels, idly watching from the table while they shoulder bags and ask each other truncated questions that the other knows the answer to before it’s even finished, Jamie doesn’t want to be left in this house alone. It isn’t until he’s in the car and they’re on the way that he starts to come close to regretting it, just a little bit.

Something about staying at Roy’s for the last couple of days has felt like being able to exist outside of all of this, like it was some kind of separate place, an insulated bubble away from the outside world and everything happening there. Jamie has only left briefly, first for Sarah’s surgery and then for his police interview, and he doesn’t much fancy leaving now.

Still, he doesn’t want to be alone either, especially given the fresh wave of bullshit that arrived the night before. According to Keeley, who’d reluctantly answered when he’d asked, everything online had kicked into a higher gear with the leak about Wembley. If he had to sit there alone with that all day, knowing what’s happening out there, by himself in Roy’s house, he might start climbing the walls. Really it’s a horrible decision between two pathetic options — either he’s too scared to leave the house or he’s too scared to be alone, and he’s going to hate himself either way.

Keeley’s idea, proposed on the drive over, is to stash him in Rebecca’s office. Apparently she has a bunch of meetings today and is going to be out for the most part, leaving her office empty. He’ll be able to watch training if he wants to without being directly in the middle of all the chaos, and it will be a nice change of pace from floating around Roy’s house or doing deeply unpleasant and logistically necessary things relating to his injured state and how he got that way. Plus, there’s something kind of exciting about spending the day there — like spending the day in the Batcave or in a wizard’s office, or something.

Roy walks on one side and Keeley walks on the other when they enter the building, which makes Jamie feel very strange and a little bit like he’s either been arrested or is at the risk of someone taking out a hit on him. The benefit becomes clear when someone spots them and looks like they’re about to come over and say something, only to baulk and turn directly back around when Roy sends them a rather intense glare. Keeley just keeps talking about something completely unimportant and in no way related to any of their current major problems, which is nice. She keeps it up, and Roy does too, scaring off anyone who seems like they might even try to approach. It’s an efficient system, and it gets them all the way to the stairs that lead to Rebecca’s office without incident.

“Right,” Roy says when it comes time for him to split off from them — though, as he’s thinking about it, it occurs to Jamie that he actually should’ve done so several turns before this. “I’m gonna tell the lads that if they see you, they should be fucking normal about it. If anyone doesn’t, tell me and I’ll yell at them or something.” Without waiting for any kind of response, Roy reaches up and tweaks his headband, causing it and some of Jamie’s hair to fall into his face, then turns and leaves.

Pulling the headband off and shaking the hair out of his eyes, which he’s pleased to note doesn’t ignite a fresh ache in his healing head, Jamie watches him go, mystified. He’d hoped that, once they’d worked through the bulk of their issues with each other, Roy might start making some kind of sense. Apparently, that had been pure wishful thinking, and instead of being easier to understand, Roy is now just incomprehensible in new and different ways.

Keeley shakes her head, chuckles a little, and says, “Bit bad at being nice sometimes, isn’t he?” then gestures to the stairs. “Rebecca’s in her office but she won’t be there long, she’s got a meeting in a few. She knows you’re coming, but do you want me to go with you? I’ll have to head right out, but—”

“No,” Jamie interrupts as soon as he processes the question. “Just the one set of stairs, can’t very well get lost, can I?” Besides, it’s Rebecca. Jamie knows Rebecca, he doesn’t need a chaperone to talk to her. He already can’t bear to be left home alone, nor can he so much as go to bed without someone watching over him like he’s fucking six years old and scared of monsters in his closet. It’s high time he proved to himself and to everyone else that he’s capable of doing literally anything on his own.

“Alright, well.” It almost seems like Keeley wants to say something else, but she doesn’t. She just smiles at him and reaches up to squeeze his arm, brushing her hand down it as she lets go. “Have a good day then. I’ll bring lunch up later from the cafe down the street a bit, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Jamie says, a beat later than seems wholly normal, like he’s a computer with a glitchy lag, and then she’s gone and it’s just him and the stairs and Rebecca’s office at the top of the stairs. Looking up, he starts to think that maybe he’s made a rather stupid call on this one, that he should have just stayed back at Roy’s house after all. Stupid call or not, though, he’s made his choice and now he has to live with it. With that debatably motivating conclusion in mind, Jamie starts up the steps.

Rebecca’s office is not somewhere that Jamie has spent an awful lot of time. People pop up to see her now and again for one reason or another, but he’s never particularly prone to doing so. It’s something that seems to have become more common after his unceremonious return to Manchester, and he’s never quite been able to figure out whether the new… not open, but not quite locked-and-barricaded door policy applied to him or not. Since he’s been allowed to come back, Jamie has tried to avoid pushing his luck. While there are things that were obvious needs improvement points, he sometimes finds it a little hard to tell which parts of him people find difficult to deal with and which parts they like.

With a person whose opinion of him is as high-stakes as the owner of the club, Jamie has adopted a policy of pretty much mostly avoiding her whenever possible. Easier to not make a bad impression when he’s just staying out of someone’s way.

Eventually, after walking in the semi-open door and looking around for significantly longer than is probably polite, Jamie realizes that Rebecca has seen him there and is waiting for an acknowledgement. She’s sitting behind her desk, computer closed and bag set next to it like she’s taking care of a few things before getting ready to leave, looking at him with the expectant expression of someone whose office has just been entered by a person who hasn’t so much as looked at them yet. Dragging his expression into what he hopes is a polite smile and ignoring the twinge as it pulls at the stitches in his mouth, Jamie nods at her.

“Uh, good morning, Miss Welton,” he says. The whole thing rather makes him feel like he’s standing in front of the head teacher’s desk, waiting to find out whether he’s in trouble or not. “Thanks for letting me hang around here today.”

The ‘waiting for input’ look on Rebecca’s face changes, returning a polite smile of her own. “Yes, well,” she says, waving a hand. “It’s not as if I can make any use of it when I’m not here, can I? There’s water in the fridge in the corner, electric kettle on the tea tray over there, help yourself. Nobody should bother you here.”

Once having satisfied what she apparently viewed as her obligations in this interaction, Rebecca turns her attention back to getting ready to leave for her meeting. After a few moments of just standing around, unsure what he’s supposed to do, Jamie walks over to the couch. He sets the small backpack he’d borrowed from Roy down on a cushion, then hesitates. When Rebecca doesn’t seem to notice, let alone yell at him, he risks sitting down. Nothing happens.

It’s probably a stupid thing to have been so worried about, Jamie realizes after he’s been there for about a minute, but he doesn’t know the protocol here. He’s been trying to do good since they let him back. Be pleasant, be cooperative, be a team player. Be good. The protocol for ‘camping out in the club owner’s office while she’s away because you’re all stitched up and concussed and too much of a baby to be left home alone’ is… unclear, though, and Jamie’s not sure what he’s supposed to do, if there are things he’s not supposed to do, any of it.

As far as Jamie can tell, trying not to stare too blatantly from where he’s sat gingerly on the couch, Rebecca doesn’t seem to care what he’s up to. Honestly, she doesn’t seem to be aware of it. It’s a little reassuring, really, to finally not be watched — out of spectacle (the media), out of duty (Sarah Kent, DI Clarke, the lawyers at the strategy meeting), out of worry (Keeley, Roy, Ted, everyone on the bus). For one reason or another, necessary or not, people have been watching Jamie non-stop since everything started at Coventry.

Does he understand why they need to? Yeah. Some of them, anyway. Does it make him feel something soft and warm in his chest when he looks up and notices the eyes on him? Sure. Maybe. When it’s some of them, sometimes. Is he nevertheless glad to be out from under the microscope? Absolutely.

Rebecca keeps herself busy with whatever she’s still rummaging around for, and then checks her watch and grabs a blazer off the back of her chair. She starts for the door, giving Jamie a tight smile and a nod. He nods back, not able to muster a smile fast enough as she walks past.

Something sticks in Jamie’s mind, and he knows he shouldn’t, but right as she’s almost at the door, the word pops out of his mouth without entirely waiting for his brain’s permission. “Sorry.” She stops in her tracks, bag over her shoulder and mobile in her hand, and looks at him. Jamie cringes. His mouth feels dry. “Sorry, for, ah—”

Sorry for camping out in your office like some kind of weirdo. Sorry you’re probably heading to a meeting about me and how I got my ass kicked in front of a bunch of cameras. Sorry my family bullshit’s landed on your front door and now it’s your problem.

“Sorry,” he finishes, vaguely. Inadequately.

Regarding him silently, Rebecca purses her lips. Her hand, which was reaching for the door, lowers back to her side, smoothing at a non-existent crease in her skirt. Though she seems to be on her way to something important — which, when isn’t she? — Rebecca doesn’t turn and leave after Jamie delivers his sad little nonsense apology. Instead, she walks over to the couch and sits down on the other branch of it, folding her hands in her lap.

The way Rebecca is looking at him is difficult to understand. She smooths her skirt again — again for no reason, Jamie swears she must have the most detail-oriented dry cleaner in the country — and then refolds her hands, fingers threaded together in a neat clasp.

“There are a lot of people who ought to be very sorry for their role in all this, I believe,” she says eventually. Jamie eyes the clock on the wall. If she’s worried about being late to wherever she’s headed, Rebecca doesn’t betray it on her face. “You aren’t one of them.”

Jamie’s mouth is dry, his throat tight. He doesn’t know what to say, but he has to say something. It’s Rebecca. He can’t just sit here, stupid and silent in her office, while she makes herself late waiting for him to get his shit together. “Oh,” is all he manages, raspy and insufficient. Then, at least, an afterthought — “Thanks.”

“Yes, well,” Rebecca says, then pauses. Her silence is stiff and uncomfortable, and she looks out of place. It’s strange — Jamie didn’t know she could look like that. It’s about the same way he feels. “No need.” She sits there for a moment longer, then stands, brushing at her skirt. There still aren’t any wrinkles in it. Maybe it’s a habit thing or something, like the way that Keeley tightens her hair when it’s up in an elastic, or Jamie pulls at his sleeves when he’s anxious.

Rebecca flashes him a little smile, one that seems awkward and unlike the ones Jamie’s seen on her before, which makes him think it’s probably real. She adjusts her bag up over her shoulder and starts towards the door. When she’s halfway there, Jamie finds his voice again.

“Thanks anyway,” he says. His fingers twist in his lap, and when he feels a hangnail, he scratches at it. Rebecca stops and looks over her shoulder at him, surprised and confused. “I mean, just…” Jamie’s face feels hot. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, he’s always been shit at this. “Even if there isn’t a need. Thanks anyway. For, you know, letting me use the office, and… And for saying that. Thanks.”

“Oh,” it’s her turn to say, and that little awkward smile is back. “Well. You’re very welcome, Jamie.” And then she’s gone, and the door is closed behind her, and Jamie’s left alone.

For a while, Jamie sits on the couch — which is more comfortable than most beds he’s slept in, which means he really needs to ask where she got it from — and works on his puzzle book. Then he gets bored and starts listening to some really long podcast that Keeley recommended a while ago, because he knows she likes it when people actually watch or listen to the shit she recommends and then talk to her about it. If he didn’t know it would make her happy, he probably wouldn’t bother, which is an instinct that is proved correct when the host has enough of a monotone that Jamie falls asleep partway through and doesn’t wake up until the next episode starts and the theme music startles him awake.

The sleeping thing shouldn’t be a surprise, really. Jamie hasn’t been sleeping well the last few days, though he should be grateful that he’s sleeping at all, given the circumstances. By all accounts, he should be an insomniac zombie by now. It’s a miracle that he isn’t.

When Keeley brings up lunch, she asks Jamie if he’s thought any more about the interview they’d suggested at that first meeting. He shrugs and admits, truthfully, that he really hasn’t. After it was initially brought up, there’d been so much going on that it slipped to the back of Jamie’s mind, for the most part, and he hasn’t been attached to keeping it in focus. Really, he’d rather not, if he can avoid it. She drops it pretty quickly, obviously sticking to Rebecca’s verdict that he can take as much time to think about it as he needs, and launches into something else instead.

Keeley tells Jamie about some minor and low-stakes personal drama happening at the cafe where she’d picked up their sandwiches, complete with imitation voices and dramatic hand gestures. She’s apparently been there enough times that she’s gotten to know the employees, and is starting to catch on to the dynamics at play behind the counter. It’s nice to listen to, even for how completely pointless and inconsequential it is. The chance to think about someone else’s nonsense for once is refreshing.

After Keeley leaves, Jamie gathers up every ounce of nerve he has and picks up his mobile. He turns the notifications back on and winces, bracing himself. Whatever has happened, it’s time he grew up and faced it — it’s just messages, just people online, which is far from even approaching the scariest thing he’s dealt with.

The first thing that arrives is a barrage of notifications —literally dozens of texts, a handful of missed calls, a few voicemails. Jamie ignores them all in favour of scrolling for a specific widget on the screen. Most of the time, he is a sporadic Twitter user at best. Now, it’s the first place he goes, opening the little-used app and finding the search bar, then typing his own name into it. It’s not the first time he’s done such a thing, which is something that another person might be embarrassed about but just seems like the normal thing to do for him. It is, however, the first time that the search has been accompanied by the sense of mounting apprehension that crawls up Jamie’s throat now.

The results populate the screen, and his eyes flick over the Tweets, his name highlighted when it appears. Not that he’d been expecting it to be, but the news isn’t good.

The sound that Jamie’s mobile makes when it lands on the couch cushion is not remotely as satisfying as it would have been if it had landed on the floor or the table, or if it had hit the wall. That’s probably a good thing, anyway. They’re a pain in the ass to replace. He might care about that later. At the moment, Jamie just stands there in the middle of the room, shoulders heaving with harsh breaths, glaring at the phone like it has somehow personally done him wrong, rather than just providing the means for him to directly wade into something he was told over and over not to look at.

It wasn’t like he could just hide forever. Jamie needed to face the music at some point, to buck up and deal with whatever’s out there. Not knowing what was being said about him seemed like an even worse idea than looking at it did.

Now that he’s actually done it, Jamie’s not so sure. He’s still having a bit of trouble breathing, not really feeling like the air’s getting all the way where it’s supposed to go. It’s like his lungs won’t expand as far as they ought to, and his body is protesting not getting the oxygen it should. It’s like he’d felt on the bus, when he’d completely freaked out upon first remembering the cameras at all, and he doesn’t want to go through that again.

For lack of anything else to do, any other way to stave off the impending doom that is wringing his lungs like dish rags and making his skin feel prickly and too tight, Jamie starts walking. He ignores the phone laying innocently at an odd angle on the edge of a couch cushion, heading straight past it without a second look. If he’s reasonable about it, Jamie knows he should take it with him, that it’s stupid to leave it behind, but he doesn’t feel like being reasonable, and he doesn’t want the thing anywhere in his sight.

Jamie leaves the bag too, the puzzle book. He leaves all of it, walking out of Rebecca’s office empty-handed, without a destination in mind except for somewhere other than here. The energy needs to go somewhere or it’s going to build into some kind of episode, and that’s the last thing he needs to deal with. So he just… goes. He heads down the stairs, picks a direction, and walks.

Down the halls and across the building, Jamie runs into the first teammate he’s seen since the way in, where they’d encountered a few but not spoken to any because they’d clearly been rightfully too afraid of Roy’s death-glare to risk it. The teammate he’s confronted with now is Jan Maas, which feels like bad news as soon as Jamie sets eyes on him.

It’s not that Jamie doesn’t like Jan. He likes Jan just fine — he likes all the lads just fine, really, there isn’t anyone here who he takes active issue with anymore. Jan is, despite what it may seem at times, a nice enough guy. He doesn’t go out of his way to be a dick, though sometimes that happens anyway, more often than it does with most people. Jamie, out of anyone, can understand and empathize with what that’s like, but it doesn’t mean he’s particularly thrilled at the prospect of dealing with it right now.

Of anyone on the team, Jan is the most likely to draw attention to something that Jamie desperately wants him to not notice — his fucked-up face, the way he’s skulking around the building like a grounded teenager who’s snuck out of the house, the three-ring-circus that’s happening on social media. All of this leads Jamie to stop dead when he comes face to face with Jan in the hall, dressed in street clothes, looking like he’s late either arriving to or departing from training. Gritting his teeth, Jamie braces himself for whatever insensitive observation is about to be lobbed his way and waits.

It doesn’t happen.

Jan regards him with his usual placid, impossible-to-read expression, though there’s something soft about his eyes. Instead of you look like shit or the internet’s talking about you or that’s a lot of stitches in your face, he asks, “How are you holding up?”

It’s a harder question to answer than it should be.

Fine sits in Jamie’s mouth and refuses to leave, weighing heavy behind his teeth until he swallows it down and decides to borrow a page out of Jan’s book and tell the truth.

“Not doing too well, ‘f I’m honest,” he says. Though he tries to keep it upbeat, give it a dismissive or ironic tone of voice, it doesn’t land that way. It comes out halfhearted and weak instead, unsteady in a way that leaves doubt as to whether he’d be able to finish the short sentence at all.

“I cannot imagine anyone would be doing well in your situation, given what you’ve had to deal with over the last few days,” Jan tells him, and Jamie shrugs, looking down.

He’s still looking down when a pair of trainers come into view. Someone is now very close in front of him, and then Jan’s arms are around him before he can quite process what’s happening. For a long moment, Jamie stands there, stock-still and unable to react. Maybe because of the way he’s already so completely strung out on anxiety and stress, maybe because the interaction has already been going so much better than he thought it would, maybe because of some other reason he can’t come up with, Jamie knows he hasn’t flinched.

Seemingly not at all bothered by the way Jamie still hasn’t moved, hasn’t said a word or reciprocated or stepped away or anything, Jan keeps standing there and hugging him. The embrace is strong, without hesitation or the faintest hint of self-consciousness, and Jan is just unreasonably tall, which has the effect of making Jamie feel like he’s been entirely wrapped up, in someone else’s too-large jacket or a heavy blanket.

The touch burns, though not really in a bad way — it burns the way it always does when he’s having a difficult time and one of these people reaches out to him. Jamie isn’t used to being touched. He’s barely learned to let himself reach for them — to drape himself over one of Sam’s shoulders or tentatively move closer and closer to Dani during an away match movie night until their sides are pressed together. Understanding it, responding to it when they reach back (Sam’s fingers absently coming up to squeeze his wrist in greeting when Jamie uses him as an armrest, Dani shifting to wrap an arm around him and pull him closer) is so much harder.

Before, in the beginning in Richmond and when he’d been with City, Jamie had been at a distance from the people around him. He’d never reached out to anyone else, even people like Isaac and Colin, who he’d theoretically been friends with, except in the kind of elbow-jabbing camaraderie that was always just a bit too brisk and rough to be honest affection. This was the same sort of thing he got in return, and that was when he didn’t keep enough space around himself to prevent it.

Jamie could tell himself that it wasn’t really his fault — that he’d just spent too long anticipating that touch would bring blood and bruises along with it, that physical affection was a dim and distant daydream against the grim reality of violence, and that explained everything. That would be too convenient an excuse, though, and Jamie can’t blame all of his problems solely on his father, as tempting as it can be sometimes. James was definitely responsible for quite a bit of it, but part of Jamie’s loneliness was his own fault too. It turns out that holding yourself above everyone around you is a good way to ensure that you end up on your own.

“I’m sorry this is happening to you,” Jan says, and it rumbles in his chest. “I am sorry you were hurt, and for everything after. It’s terrible, and you don’t deserve it.”

Slowly, barely able to get his body under control enough to move at all, Jamie raises his arms and twists his fingers into the back of Jan’s shirt. It’s light at first, barely catching fabric, and then he’s clinging hard, his temple pressed into Jan’s chest hard enough that Jamie thinks he can feel the man’s heartbeat against his forehead. Something batters the inside of his ribcage, like there’s a wild bird in there trying to force its way out. Jamie’s eyes sting, and his stitches throb, and he thinks he might be shaking.

The hugs on the pitch — when they win matches, when Jamie or someone else scores — are intoxicating. They make him feel lighter than air, an incredulous kind of happy that he can’t help but push himself closer to, further into, until it envelops him completely. Off the pitch? Off the pitch, their hugs, their arms around his shoulders or his waist, hands on his neck or back, the occasional scrape of fingers through his hair — it undoes him. Jamie is taken to pieces by their touch. It flays him, it hurts, and he feels like he’ll never get enough of it.

Jamie wonders how many times it’s going to take before being hugged off the pitch, when he hadn’t earned it, will stop making him want to cry. This whole mess, though, has definitely set him back a bit on that front, given how hard he’s fighting to keep his composure now. His breathing is a choppy mess, his chest faintly hitch-jerking in a way he’s sure Jan can feel. One of the hands on his back slips up to squeeze the nape of Jamie’s neck, which definitely doesn’t help the not-crying thing, but he still manages to keep ahold of himself.

They’ve been standing there like that for too long, probably, but like most things deemed polite or fitting for a public place, Jan doesn’t seem to have noticed, and if he has, he doesn’t give a shit. Unable to force his hands to release their grip and let go just yet, his body mutinous at the idea of stepping back, Jamie just hangs onto Jan very hard and continues trying to make his breathing sound normal. Jan makes absolutely no comment about it, which is good. If he had, Jamie may have died directly of shame right that moment, which is an outcome he’d like to avoid.

Eventually, after long enough that it seems like improbable luck that no one else has come upon and turned down this hall, Jamie clears his throat and lets go. His knuckles ache and he grimaces, looking down at them as he steps back. Jan lets him go, but that’s not the end of it.

Big, rough hands catch and hold the sides of Jamie’s face. Jan studies him like he’s looking for something, scanning the bruising and the stitches, the partially-healed scrapes, not settling on any of it. Jamie can’t meet his eyes, unable to tolerate that kind of intense eye contact this close and looking more in the vicinity of his shirt collar, but Jan doesn’t seem to mind at all. He just considers something, then says, “You will tell us if you need us, yes?”

It’s said as a question, but it really doesn’t feel like one. It feels, like a lot of the things Jan says, like he’s stating some kind of universal truth, like it’s an inarguable, basic fact that he’s only been selected to convey as a conduit. Jamie almost nods, then remembers the hands still on his face, and keeps still instead.

“Yeah,” he mutters after fighting with his dry throat for long enough it was starting to grow obvious he was having trouble answering.

“Good,” Jan pronounces, satisfied. He gives Jamie’s cheek — the right one, the one that isn’t a child’s fingerpainting of different colours — a brief, affectionate stroke with his thumb, and then he lets go and steps back. Jamie feels a little funny, off-balance and almost like he’s about to laugh. “That’s what you should do. That’s what we all want you to do. I hope you know that.”

“Thought you didn’t like me.” It’s a joke — or it’s trying to be, anyway. The teasing comment comes out half-hearted and a little weak in a way that makes Jamie cringe.

Tilting his head to the side a bit, regarding Jamie with a look in his icy, blue-grey eyes that are as unyielding as ever, Jan says simply, “I didn’t.” He’s smiling a little, which is good, because otherwise Jamie may have had to attempt wringing something approximating ‘offence’ out of the exhausted remnant of his brain. “I thought you were sort of totally horrible and probably were not telling the truth about wanting to do better. I was wrong. You were, and you did. So I revised my opinion. I like you now.”

The way he says it so easily strikes Jamie speechless, and he’s a little reflexively embarrassed. Jan has that effect on him sometimes. His blunt presentation can range from annoying to rude to funny, depending on the context, but sometimes it’s other things, too. Sometimes it takes Jamie’s breath away when Jan says things like that. Things like, I was wrong. Things like, I revised my opinion. I like you now.

As unbothered as ever by his own candour and the way people react to it, Jan just smiles again and rocks back on his heels. He sticks his hands into his hoodie pocket and says, “I should get going. If you need anything, I will be a phone call or a text message away.” Jan starts down the hall, and claps Jamie’s shoulder on the way past. “Take it easy, Jamie.”

Then he’s gone, and Jamie is left alone in the hallway. He still feels strange, but not as bad as he’d felt earlier. He’s warmer now. It’s odd — he hadn’t noticed that he’d been cold before.

Continuing to wander, Jamie spots a door hanging half open, leading into an equipment room. There are a bunch of footballs in wire bins, plastic orange cones stacked in the corner, a fat cake of the thick white cord that they use to fix the netting of the goals when it frays. Seeing it gives Jamie an idea, and he ducks inside to grab a football before turning around and heading outside to the training pitch.

When he first exits the building, a light breeze blowing cool air over his face, Jamie knows he’s made the right decision. For some time, there’s been a faint smell bothering him, the scent of the brand of cheap, hoppy beer that his father’s always been fond of. He smells that beer a lot, even when he knows there’s none around, usually when he’s been reminded of something that sends him back to his father’s house, which reeked of the stuff. Now, recently-cut grass overpowers it, though, strong and familiar in another way entirely.

Now that he’s out there, Jamie can feel the restless agitation prickling in his legs. He stretches a bit as he starts out onto the field, the blunt, cropped blades of grass prickly under his shoes. They aren’t really the right shoes for this — they’re trainers, not boots, and he’s in tracksuit trousers and a t-shirt rather than any kind of athletic gear, but he’s messed about on a pitch dressed in worse. Eyeing the first goal he sees, Jamie makes his way over to it, football tucked under one arm. When he gets close enough, he drops it and aims a kick with the inside of his right foot. The ball sails cleanly into the net and falls to the ground.

Hands jammed into his pockets, Jamie stands there and looks at it, satisfied and relieved that he’s still at least somewhat the person he remembers being before Coventry. It’s only been a few days, but it feels like so much longer, and Jamie feels very far from the person he’d been right after that match ended. Looking in the mirror at Roy’s and being greeted with stitches and scabbed-over scrapes, bruises deep enough that he can see why Sarah had been worried about the bone underneath, Jamie can barely recognize himself right now. The injuries themselves aren’t so much the issue — his father’s temper has left him bruised and bloodied more times than he can count — but something about this time has still left him feeling unnatural and strange in his own body.

That kick — putting the ball into the net and having it go exactly where he needed it to — lifts some of that strangeness and makes the air feel easier to breathe than it has in days. It wasn’t a difficult kick. Honestly, Roy’s niece could’ve made that goal blindfolded. Even so, it's like some kind of proof that Jamie hasn’t gone completely to pieces, that he still knows who and what he is, at least out here.

Training is over and has been for a while now, which means that the pitch is completely empty and all of Jamie’s teammates are gone, but he settles in to chase the football around for a while anyway. He fetches it out of the goal and jogs back a little farther, sending it in and retrieving it again. Now that he’s started, Jamie has to get some of the energy he can feel thrumming through his body out somewhere. It would be more fun if there was someone with him, and it feels odd to be alone on the grass, but he’ll take what he can get.

With the intermittent breeze ruffling his hair and only the sound of his own footsteps and breathing for company, Jamie can feel the emptiness of the pitch gnawing at him. He doesn’t want to be alone. Something in him aches after spending most of the day by himself in Rebecca’s office, but Jamie sternly reminds himself that he’s an adult. There’s no reason to be lonely. He was talking to Jan just a few minutes earlier, and Keeley had been in for lunch not long before that. He’s fine on his own, he doesn’t need anyone to babysit.

Besides, it’s probably for the best that there isn’t anyone else here to observe Jamie kicking and chasing the ball around for no reason. If he were honest about it, Jamie knows he really ought not to be doing this, and as if to remind him, his head throbs a little when he pushes too hard while running the ball down. Still, there are no coaches or anyone with medical credentials present to yell at him about concussion protocols or clearance or whatever.

Jamie sees Dani approaching across the training pitch before he gets there. He stops where he stands, ready to bounce the ball off the left post, and watches for a while. The moment that Dani notices Jamie’s attention on him is clear — his face breaks into a wide grin and his hand rises with a cheerful wave. Unable to help a smile of his own forming, Jamie waves back.

“Are you going to kick the ball, or do you plan to just stand there?” Dani calls over when he’s close enough to do so without outright yelling.

Not about to back down from the challenge, Jamie turns back to face the goal. His kick sends the ball sailing into the left post, just as he’d meant it to, bouncing off with a satisfying hollow sound. There’s a whoop and the sound of clapping from off to the side, and then he sees Dani darting forward to fish it back out. He jogs up to Jamie, tossing and catching the ball as he does. When he reaches the same point that Jamie had kicked from, Dani sets it down and eyes it with a readied stance, then bounces it off the same place.

“Your turn,” he says, infectious smile still lighting up his sunny face.

“Alright, you’re on,” Jamie answers, then heads in to get the ball and set up for his next shot.

Just like the day they’d first met, the two of them settle into a pattern without discussing it first, trickshot after trickshot, matching each other at each one. Jamie starts out a little worried, first that Dani’s going to bring up the state of his face and left arm or point out that he shouldn’t be here, and then that he’s going to go easy and let Jamie win without making him fight for it first, either out of pity or a misguided attempt to be nice.

Dani does no such thing. In fact, Dani thoroughly kicks his ass in the first round they play, and then Jamie demands that they go best two out of three. By the time they’re midway through the second, Jamie’s gotten out of his own head enough to actually relax and have a good time, enjoying the friendly competition. Before, he’d been so keyed up and stressed that focus was hard, and he was missing more shots than he was making. Now, his body feels loose and at peace, like he’s where he’s supposed to be and nothing matters but the pitch, the ball, and the goal.

It happens thanks to Dani. He grins and gives his all to the competition, even though he has to have already participated in training earlier, even though Jamie’s not in good enough condition to be much actual threat. It’s normal and casual and fun, and not once does Dani say a word about the way Jamie’s face is still a mess, or how he’s definitely not supposed to be out here doing this. The only indication that anything is out of the ordinary at all is the way that Dani is more affectionate than he usually is — which is saying something for him — while, at the same time, being gentler about it.

When they finish with the competition, which Dani wins in the third round by a single kick that thuds neatly off the centre of the crossbar while Jamie’s skids too low down into the net, neither of them turn to head back inside. They drop to sit on the ground, both of them breathing hard by that point, having been chasing down the single ball that Jamie brought out with him between shots rather than just standing in one place and kicking. They sit shoulder to shoulder, legs splayed out haphazardly in front of them, the toe of Dani’s boot knocking into Jamie’s as his foot sways from side to side with errant energy he somehow still possesses.

For a long time, it’s just the two of them together, listening to the light wind and watching the dull grey clouds scudding across the sky. They look like they’re threatening rain, but not imminently enough to persuade Jamie to get up. Not when Dani’s close enough that he can feel the warmth of his shoulder and hear the way that his breathing slows and evens out the longer they sit there.

“That weren’t the kind of thing they taught you to do on the teams I was on when I was a kid.” Jamie doesn’t know why he says it, doesn’t even know that he’s going to say it until the words are already coming out. He doesn’t look at Dani, just keeps his gaze cast out over the grass of the training fields. Blades of grass twitch and flutter, making the whole expanse of the fields look like they’re dancing. “Got my start at this little park near the shitty little flat I moved to with — After mum died.”

It’s not something he talks about and it feels strange to say out loud, even though it’s been years since it happened. There’s a part of Jamie that wonders if it maybe still hurts to mention her because he’s discussed her death so rarely, and another part of him still that selfishly wants to keep it that way. As long as it hurts like that to speak about her, it reminds Jamie that she’d been real. That, once upon a time, someone had loved him enough for it to hurt like that to remember.

“Lot of other kids there usually, right — neighbourhood in Manchester, how could there not be? But I was there late, y’know, later than anyone else usually stuck around, and sometimes showed up earlier too, so I spent a lot of time there on my own.” Jamie doesn’t bother saying why he’d been there so often and at such odd hours, what he’d been avoiding when he’d stayed out long past sundown at that sketchy little park, kicking a football at the net over and over. Dani seems to know even without the explanation, at least going by the way that he shifts even closer still until their arms brush. If Jamie were to lean to the side, he could put his whole weight against Dani and be held up that way. It feels good to know, to be aware of the strength that Dani seems to be ready to offer, should Jamie’s own fail him. “Weren’t a whole lot you could do on your own, so I made it a little game, see how many times I could hit the crossbar, or a certain spot on the post. Got really good at it. Always had real good aim, ‘course, but that made me even better.”

If Dani wonders why he’s saying this as much as Jamie does himself, he gives no indication. He just hums quietly in the back of his throat, swaying and jostling Jamie’s shoulder with his own.

“My mother taught me,” is what Dani eventually says, taking his turn breaking the comfortably tired silence that’s fallen between them. “I had so much energy when I was a boy, used to drive her mad. So she set up this… board, behind our house, and painted circles on it in all different colours. She took me out there one day and showed it to me and then showed me how, if I kicked the football just right, it would hit one of the circles. I thought it was the most amazing thing. I didn’t know you could do that with a football.”

“Your mum play?” Jamie looks at Dani, curiosity enough to override the way that asking the question makes his throat ache. Talking to other people about their families has only ever been marginally easier than talking about his own, painful in a different way, but he wants to know. And besides, Jamie’s been trying to figure out how to be a better friend. Isn’t that what friends are supposed to do? Be interested in your life and ask questions?

A wide, proud grin breaks across Dani’s face, crinkling his shining eyes. “Si, she did,” he says, and it radiates from his whole being, that loving pride. “She was very good when she was young. Played for our national team. She started teaching me as soon as I could walk.”

Jamie’s throat hurts worse now and he can’t force an answer out around it, so he nods instead. As perceptive with the feelings of others as he is expressive of his own, Dani’s smile dims somewhat as he looks over and studies Jamie’s face. Guilt flashes in his warm brown eyes and his brow furrows as he cringes, saying, “I apologize, it is insensitive of me to tell you stories like that after what you said, what’s happened this week. These things are obviously very different.”

Now there’s sufficient motivation for Jamie to force himself to speak, pain or no, so he clears his throat and says, voice steady and confident, “Nah, Dani, no. Don’t say sorry for that.” He refuses to let Dani apologize for telling a story about his mum, even if Jamie’s is gone and the way he’d learned trickshots was about as different as possible. Not when he’s so glad for it, so glad to know how loved Dani is and had been as a boy. He deserved that. It hurts to hear about, but Jamie’s still glad to hear it, and he won’t let Dani be sorry for having and sharing a happy memory. “She sounds fucking cool.”

The grin is back now, Dani’s face tipping to the dull sky like he could light it up all on his own just by talking about his family, that’s how happy they made him feel. “She is. The coolest.”

The two of them go quiet again, watching the darkening cloud cover getting heavier by the moment. Dani’s shoulder jostles Jamie’s again after a while, and he says, “I think she would like you.”

A laugh barks out of Jamie’s chest, hard enough to make the cut in his lower lip throb. “Ah, no, I don’t think so mate. I’m not — Mums don’t really like me, historically speaking.”

“Maybe not before,” Dani says, still with a smile in his voice. “But I didn’t know you then. I know you now. Things are different now, and this man? This is someone my mother would like.”

Jamie can’t answer that one. His face feels hot and the stitches in his mouth still ache. He pokes at the edge of one with his tongue, then winces when it stings. The distraction isn’t worth the pain, and so Jamie is forced to hold what Dani said with nothing to take his mind off it.

Together, he and Dani sit on the grass while Jamie tries to breathe around the lump that’s grown heavy and painful in his throat, watching the gathering clouds and wondering how he ended up here. Dani doesn’t push or ask why he’s gone so quiet, nor does he get up to leave Jamie on his own. He just stays put, seemingly content to be there as long as he needs to be.

Eventually, Jamie risks leaning a little farther to the side. He hates himself for it a little bit, but he’s grown colder as the minutes pass, and the conversation about childhoods and mothers — the pronunciation that he’s someone who Dani’s mum would like — has left him feeling shaky. Jamie’s head comes to rest on Dani’s shoulder, hesitant but willing to take the risk. Even if he hates himself for it, it’s unlikely that Dani will, and Dani’s opinion of him weighs far more heavily than his own does.

Though he must feel it, Dani doesn’t react much. All he does is adjust after a moment so that they’re both at a more comfortable angle, and then settle again. They stay there like that on the grass together for a long time. It’s the calmest and most okay Jamie has felt in a while, at least since before Coventry.

When it finally starts to actually rain, they’re forced to climb up off the grass and seek shelter. They go up into the stands, far up enough that they’re covered by the overhanging partial roof, and pick out seats there, looking out over the pitch. Jamie leads the way, and he doesn’t give himself time to question his own decision. He just goes, pivoting at the last moment towards the rows of seats rather than the door back to the locker room.

The sound of footsteps behind him, indicating that Dani has decided to follow without making a fuss, are a relief so strong and sudden that it makes Jamie feel lightheaded. He hadn’t really wanted to be alone just yet, hadn’t wanted to retreat back to Rebecca’s office and wait there for Keeley and Roy to be done with their days so they could take him back home. The phone he left up there hovers in his mind like a movie monster that lurks in the shadows at the edge of the frame, always threatening danger even when the audience isn’t really paying attention to it.

No, Jamie would rather be out here for a little while longer, even as the day continues to cool and the grass is spattered with more and more rain by the moment. As long as Dani’s here, it’s better than just about anywhere else.

They sit side by side in quiet for a while. Dani looks around the rainy pitch with a muted awe in his face, like it’s the first time he’s ever seen it, which is the same way he always looks at it. At first, Jamie had thought that expression was fake as hell. It wasn’t.

Eventually, Jamie sighs, shoulders moving up and down, looks out to the far fence by the car parks, and says, “They want me to do an interview.”

“An interview?”

“Yeah. About Coventry.” He pauses, chewing on the words. “About my dad.”

The silence from Dani somehow has a surprised edge. Jamie’s face prickles, and he wonders if he’s being looked at. There’d been a shift in his peripheral vision, but he refuses to turn to check.

“They think it might help with the media stuff, or whatever.”

“Are you going to do it?”

“I don’t know.” Jamie gives a half-shrug. He starts to worry his cheek with his teeth, but stops when it pulls at the stitches in his lower lip. “I haven’t decided yet.”

“Do you want to?”

That’s the more complicated question. “Don’t know,” he mutters. “Can think of a lot of reasons to do it, lot of reasons I shouldn’t. Keeley thinks it’s a good idea, so do the other media people. Don’t think Roy thinks it’s a very good idea, not sure about Rebecca neither. It’s kind of hard, because I can’t really tell. They’re not saying anything direct, just kind of making faces and keeping shit to themselves, which I hate.”

An elbow taps Jamie’s arm, and now he does look over. Dani pins him with a sharp, shrewd look. Sometimes, people make the mistake of thinking Dani’s dumb or naive because of his attitude, his general demeanour and the way he approaches life. That assumption couldn’t be further from the truth. One of the first things Jamie learned as they began to get closer was that Dani is a person with a precise sense of lie detection and a keen eye for when someone is being evasive or insincere.

“That isn’t what I asked,” he says. “I asked if you wanted to do it.”

Speechless and uncertain, Jamie doesn’t answer. He looks away again, down at his hands. The bandage on his arm got a little damp when the rain started to fall, which means he’ll have to change it when he gets back to Roy’s house. More accurately, he’ll have to ask for help changing it when he gets back. He’s tried doing it by himself, but it’s awkward and messy to attempt to bandage his own forearm. Neither Keeley or Roy seems to mind, as far as he can tell, but Jamie still hates asking. He always has to bite down the urge to say something snappy or mean when they’re done.

“I don’t know,” Jamie says eventually. If it were someone else, he may not have answered at all. But because it’s Dani, and because he knows Dani wouldn’t push him any harder if he decided not to, he does answer. “I’m not really sure.”

Somehow, despite saying the only true thing he can say, it doesn’t really feel like he’s told the truth. It feels like a lie, though it would be impossible to say why that is. It’s a bizarre feeling to have, and he doesn’t know what to make of it. How could he be lying when he’s just answering a question about his own feelings the only way he knows how?

Dani’s hand, warm and gentle, closes on Jamie’s wrist, stopping its movement. Jamie hadn’t even noticed that he’s been fiddling with the edge of the bandage more roughly than he usually did, and it’s starting to come loose. With a light tug, Dani pulls his left arm over his own lap and adjusts the wrapping, realigning the end and tucking it down so that it’s smooth again. His touch is careful, all his attention focused on what he’s doing. Jamie just sits very still and lets him do it, barely breathing.

When it’s finished, Dani holds onto his arm for a little longer. It’s a grip that could be broken with the slightest pull, but Jamie doesn’t bother. He keeps still until Dani lets him go on his own. It’s colder outside than it has been all day, but he feels it less than ever.

“You will figure it out,” Dani says, easy and sure.

The rain grows harder, a particularly strong gust of wind sending a hail of droplets onto the seats and the lone pair high up in the stands. Despite the dropping temperature and the fact that Jamie has nothing more to say, no reason to offer for staying where they are, Dani doesn’t leave. He doesn’t move until Jamie does, and until that happens, they both stay put, sitting in the calm quiet and watching the rain.

Chapter Text

Sometimes, when bad news comes, it is in such ordinary and unremarkable form that it’s impossible to understand at first.

Since turning his notifications back on the day before in Rebecca’s office, Jamie has left them activated. It’s been less of a disaster than he’d been afraid it would be. Most of the messages have been from his teammates, and most of those have been very deliberately avoiding anything potentially upsetting in their content. It’s a little amusing, honestly, how completely unsubtle they’ve been. It’s sweet, and Jamie appreciates their somewhat clumsy attempts at kindness and sensitivity. The texts make him smile when he gets them — reading them and seeing the worry and fussing that seeps out between the questions about recommending a tattoo artist (Jamie sends Thierry his artist’s Insta, but when he asks what the keeper’s thinking of getting, the answer is a bunch of nonsense without any specifics) or asking if the hat in this picture is his, maybe, they found it in the laundry bin at the locker room (it is, and he confirms as much, but it’s been there since, like, a week before Coventry, and there’s no reason for Moe to be texting him about it now).

This message isn’t one of those. It’s from Beth, Jamie’s assigned case manager from Victims’ Services or whatever it’s officially called. Back when she first contacted him, he’d told her that he preferred to communicate by text, which he’d meant, but being able to look at the words for as long as he wants rather than hearing them once doesn’t help him this time. He stares at it for a while, trying to make any of it make sense, but it may as well be gibberish for all he can put together what it means.

Jamie stares at the message for so long that it disappears, the screen of his mobile timing out and going dark. He doesn’t open it again, just keeps looking at its blank black window, which does him as much good as reading and rereading and rereading the words had.

Grievous bodily harm, he thinks.

It seems an overly-dramatic, extreme description. Jamie sets his phone aside and reaches up to his forehead, feeling along the edge of the wound there. It’s tender, a quiet pulse of pain radiating away from where he prods at his eyebrow. The stitches are supposed to come out in a couple of days, as well as the ones from his mouth. When he looked in the mirror that morning, Jamie had been greeted with a kaleidoscope of evolving colours splotched down the left side of his face. Fresh bandages are crisply wrapped around his arm — Keeley had helped him replace them when they got home the night before, the old ones dampened by the rain out on the practice pitch. Roy had done them up for him this morning after Jamie showered and came downstairs for breakfast. Sarah told them to at least keep it covered until he came in to get the stitches out, but it’s not like the damage hidden underneath the non-stick gauze padding and the wrap over the top is enormously severe. He’s only doing what the doctor told him to do.

Grievous bodily harm? This isn’t even close to the worst Jamie’s had.

And Section 18 — why did she even mention that? It’s not like Jamie has any idea what any of the law shit means. He dimly recalls the lawyers from the meeting with Ted and everyone saying something about sections, naming a few different ones, and maybe 18 had been one of them, but he has no idea what’s behind them.

On the couch cushion next to him, Jamie’s mobile goes off. It cuts through the thick haze surrounding him, and he flinches, startled. It’s not even a message from anyone this time, just an alert that it’s started to rain from his weather app. The most recent software update had made that start, which Jamie thinks is dumb as all hell. It’s England. It’s always raining, or starting to rain, or about to rain in the next hour. Hardly worth writing home about.

Since his phone’s in his hand anyway, Jamie opens his messages back up and stares at the little paragraph from Beth again. It doesn’t make any more sense this time around, no matter how hard he wracks his brain to see if anything from that meeting with those lawyers will fall out. Trying does give him an idea, though, and Jamie opens up a different message thread.

The second bit is an afterthought, and Jamie’s embarrassed that he almost forgot to say it. Three dots appear in the corner almost immediately, indicating that Ted is writing a response, but they disappear before anything comes through. It’s another several minutes before his mobile buzzes with the answer.

The speed with which Ted has apparently arranged a meeting with the lawyers and those in charge of Richmond is a little unnerving. It doesn’t seem like a group of people who should be able to be corralled together on that kind of notice, especially on a match day. The Greyhounds are set to play West Bromwich Albion FC at home this afternoon, so it’s not as if they’re all sitting around without anything to do.

When he tells Roy and Keeley, they react with the same sort of urgency that Ted had. Well — First, Roy gives him a hard look and announces, “Good,” with a grim satisfaction in his voice, and then Keeley snaps his name and there’s a brief exchange of bickering between them that Jamie catches almost absolutely none of. Then they jump into action, just as Ted did. The three of them take off for Nelson Road together, and Jamie spends the entire trip zoning in and out while Roy and Keeley take on the responsibility for what actually needs to be done. He’d probably feel worse about making them deal with it if he had the room in his head for that, but he doesn’t, so all he feels is a dull static.

This meeting takes place in Rebecca’s office, which is good because there’s enough room for everyone and it’s relatively out of the way. Even the buzz of match day activity doesn’t usually touch Rebecca’s office in more than a ripple.

Most of the group from the initial strategy meeting has accumulated there, and front and centre are the trio from legal — Jamie makes a point of wrangling the strained threads of his focus together to remember their names this time. Neera, Liz, and Mark do their best to explain the situation, based on the text that Beth from Victims’ Services sent him. Their three dark-haired heads bow over his mobile together for a minute or two in a quiet circle of conspiracy, clearly gleaning something from the words that Jamie had not been able to get. Then, they look up and start talking.

Most of it is what it sounded like —-Jamie’s dad is being charged, and it’s serious. There are a lot of things that make the situation worse, and not many (if any at all) that make it better — which, yeah. Jamie could’ve told them that part. He’s well aware that shit is fucked, to put it straightforwardly — which is something he’s increasingly coming to wonder if all lawyers are universally allergic to doing, or if it’s just these three.

The parts they get to next are where Jamie is wholly out of his depth. Grievous bodily harm, it is explained, doesn’t really mean what it sounds like. The short version, Liz says, noticing the varying levels of apprehension at the idea of sitting through the full explanation, is that Jamie’s injuries qualify.

“Twenty-eight stitches, a concussion, and the need for a scan to rule out skull fracture,” Liz says, in a tone that implies this should settle the conversation. “Plus, some degree of… definitely lasting and maybe permanent scarring. That, suffice it to say, satisfies the standard.”

Yeah, Jamie has been avoiding thinking about that part. His stomach flips uneasily, and he strongly resists the urge to touch his face. He stares determinedly just at the lawyers, not really wanting to know how many of the people in the room are looking at the damage for themselves.

“Right,” he mutters. “Sure.”

“The bit in there about Section 18 is probably the most important bit, if I had to pick,” Neera says, shifting in place as she takes over, and her colleagues nod their agreement. “It’s a significantly more serious thing to be accused of. Basically, the difference between a Section 18 charge and a Section 20 charge, which was the other possibility we were likely looking at, is about intent.”

That last sentence is composed primarily of words that Jamie has never heard, except for the ones he’s come across on overly dramatic crime drama programmes. He would never have guessed that anyone in the real world actually talks like this, but Neera says it so normally that it has to be ordinary for her.

“We spent some time looking into these things and consulting with a few friends from school who went into criminal work,” Mark puts in, taking over from Neera. She lets him, indicating her permission with a dip of her chin when he looks to her for confirmation. If Jamie had to guess, he’d say Neera is probably the highest ranking of the three of them — if the legal department has a ranking system, which he’s not sure it does. “By giving him a Section 18 charge and alleging intent, the Crown is saying that Mr. Tartt meant to do the damage that he did, and he meant it to be as severe as it was, if not more so.”

There’s a ripple of movement around the room as several people turn to look at Jamie, probably meaning to evaluate how he’s faring with that information. Jamie doesn’t know what’s showing on his face, but he isn’t surprised to hear it. He knows full well his dad meant to hurt him exactly as bad as he did, and definitely meant to go farther if he hadn’t been stopped before he could.

“Right,” says Mark after a long and awkward pause. “At any rate. That’s what they’re going to have to prove to make the charge stick, and they think they have enough evidence to win a trial or get him to take a plea agreement. Liz?”

“The main sticking point, in terms of the consequences of this decision, is the sentencing, if the case results in a conviction,” Liz says, smoothly assuming her part of the conversation. It still makes Jamie’s head spin a little, the way these three seem like they’ve almost rehearsed the way they pass the explanation back and forth. “The maximum sentence carried by a Section 20 charge is much lighter than a Section 18. I mean much lighter.” She hesitates, like she’s reluctant to say the next bit. The air is tense and thick, and the clock on the wall is abnormally loud.

Jamie moves a hand to encourage her to get on with it. Whatever it is, he just wants to know, so that they can all move on to the part where they figure out what they need to do about it. Sitting around wondering isn’t helping at all.

“The maximum for a Section 20 GBH assault,” she says, the acronym rolling smoothly off her tongue like it’s normal, like everyone communicates this way and would know exactly what that meant, “is five years. The maximum under Section 18, however, is life.”

Uniform shock sweeps through the room.

“Life,” Jamie repeats, croaks out in a voice barely above a whisper.

Liz nods. “Yes,” she says, and the professional simplicity cracks a little bit, something softened and maybe even a little upset flickering across her face in the moment before it’s all shored up again. “Life. It seems extremely unlikely to be the result, here, but if the case goes to trial and your father is convicted, then it’s probable that the sentence will be substantial. I could go into why, but I doubt that would be particularly helpful at the moment.”

Something about the way she says it — ‘your father’ — hits Jamie hard enough to make him flinch. Liz and the other lawyers have largely avoided calling James that — he’s always Mr. Tartt to them, when they mention him directly at all. Jamie rather thinks he prefers the distance of the usual version. He’s not really sure why, but it makes him feel exposed and vulnerable to hear it the other way — your father.

The lawyers say a little bit more about next steps, which Jamie knows he should be paying attention to but definitely isn’t. His skin feels too tight and his throat hurts, and something else has snagged his focus.

Keeley’s phone is on Rebecca's coffee table. It’s face-down, and she’s silenced even the vibrating buzz of her alerts, but he can tell when it lights up because of the way the glass surface reflects light. She’s gotten a few messages through the course of the meeting, and she gets a few more right at the end of it, one after the other in quick succession. Jamie wonders, seeing the reflection of the light for the fourth time, if something else has hit the internet or the news, something that’s going to further upend his life. At this rate, he would be the farthest thing from surprised.

When he sees Keeley’s phone go off the next time, Jamie can’t stand it anymore. He jumps up off the couch, startling Mark into trailing off mid-sentence. Everyone is staring at him. He feels like he might explode, or collapse, or start screaming if he doesn’t get out of here right now.

“I need a minute,” Jamie forces out. He stuffs his hands in his pockets and fixes his eyes on Rebecca’s desk rather than look at anyone else. “I’m taking a walk, I’ll take my phone but — I need a fucking minute. Please.”

When he finishes, tacking the please on as an afterthought that he hopes will be persuasive enough to get them to listen, Jamie takes off towards the door. He walks straight for it, absolutely unable to turn around and look behind him once he’s started. Someone tries to follow him, probably more than one person judging by the footsteps he hears, but they’re stopped. Roy and Keeley chime in at once, overlapping each other as they caution whoever it was to leave him be, let him take a minute if he needs one. Jamie is grateful for their intervention, but he doesn’t take the time to express it, instead yanking the door open and going down the stairs as quickly as possible. He just needs to get away for a bit.

‘Away’ ends up taking Jamie down a hall, nearly to the locker room. He only stops when he realizes that every farther step he takes in this particular direction greatly increases the chances that he’s going to encounter someone he’s not prepared to deal with at the moment. Looking around, Jamie spots a bench at the side of the hall and sinks down onto it. His whole body feels heavy and bruised, and his breathing seems too loud. Head tipped back against the wall, hands deep in his pockets, Jamie stares at the paint on the wall opposite and wonders what the fuck his life is about to turn into next.

The reality of it is inescapable — as soon as this hits the news, it’s going to be insane. Everything that’s happened so far has been devoured with a ravenous fervour that scares him, and this is going to be no different.

Literally the moment the internet finds out that Jamie’s dad has been arrested, and that the charge is that serious, serious enough to possibly result in a life sentence, no matter how unlikely it is… It doesn’t bear thinking about, at the same time that it’s all Jamie can think about. It has already been bad enough with the pictures and the videos of what happened in the Coventry car park, and then the Wembley leak. James’s arrest is going to set off a brand new firestorm. And — advance notice from Victims’ Services or not — the news will break.

The world is going to find out, and it’s going to be out of control before ‘control’ was ever on the table as an option for him. This is his story, but not once has he been able to exercise any amount of control over it — people will say whatever they want, believe whatever they want and say it to anyone they want on whatever platform, and none of those voices will be his. Jamie is a trainwreck on display, and everywhere he looks there are onlookers gathering around to take pictures and post their opinions on who’s to blame.

Jamie’s hands shake. He clasps them between his knees and listens to the sound of his loud, swift heartbeat, his laboured breathing.

When Jamie makes the decision, it happens all at once. In an instant, he goes from feeling like he’s surrounded by a thick and icy fog that prevents him from moving and freezes him to the core to having a single purpose, a focal point that has sliced through everything else like the thousand-watt beacon of a lighthouse. The debate that’s been waging inside him has faded to the background, shoved there along with everything else in Jamie’s life when he got the news about the charges and the impending arrest.

As soon as the thought occurs to him, the choice snapping into focus in one sharp moment, Jamie realizes something else. He hasn’t been hesitating to answer the question from the strategy meeting at Roy’s house because he isn’t sure what he’s going to do. He’s been hesitating because, he suspects with a deep conviction that he’s rarely felt, he’s known what to do all along, and has just been afraid of what the consequences will be when he does it. As soon as Jamie acknowledges it — as soon as he gives it life and tells anyone about it, it will become real, and so will everything that’s going to follow, every domino it will set falling.

Dani is the first person he tells.

They run into each other by accident. Or maybe Jamie has been looking for him and just hasn’t realized it, knowing he’s just made a choice and needing to run it by someone he trusts to tell him if he’s making an enormous mistake. He’s gotten up off the bench and started off down the hall in the direction of absolutely nowhere, away from the locker room, and literally nearly runs into Dani, who’s rather quickly coming from the opposite direction.

“I’m doing the interview,” Jamie blurts out as soon as he recognizes who he’s just nearly collided with. Dani’s already dressed for the match, and he might’ve been on the way to do something important related to it, but he stops immediately, eyebrows shooting up. Before he can say anything, Jamie rushes on. “Lady from Victims’ Services or whatever called me. Police are arresting him, maybe already did. Crown’s gonna charge him, and I’m doing the interview.”

It’s a lot of information packed into not a lot of space, and none of it is worded carefully. Jamie had to get it out while he had the chance, though, both while he has Dani here with him and it’s just the two of them, and while he’s got the nerve to say it at all.

They stare at each other for a long moment, and then Dani’s arms are around Jamie’s waist, hugging him so tightly he lifts a little off the ground. “I think that’s a very brave decision,” Dani says, right beside his ear. Jamie’s hands come up and grip at the back of his shirt, feeling the slick decals of his number wrinkle under his fingers. “You’re going to do great. I’m proud of you.”

“Thanks,” mutters Jamie thickly. He impulsively holds on just a little bit harder, tucking his face into the side of Dani’s neck, and feels Dani immediately match his strength.

Dani has to go pretty quickly, needing to get wherever he’d been headed when they ran into each other, but the moment serves its purpose. Jamie told him, and in doing so reinforced for himself that the decision is made and he’s going to do it. He wanders for a while again, realizes after a bit that he should probably get back to the others, then starts making his way towards Rebecca’s office once again.

On the way, Jamie checks his phone and winces when he sees that he’s ignored a few messages. People have definitely started to worry — he’s been gone longer than his little walk was supposed to take. He speeds up his steps, and when he’s a couple of turns from the staircase up to Rebecca’s office, he runs into Keeley.

Just as he’d done when he saw Dani, Jamie tells Keeley what he’s decided as soon as he sets eyes on her, then asks her if she would please tell the others so that he doesn’t have to. She agrees with a wavering smile and glittering eyes.

“I’ll deal with telling whoever needs to be told,” Keeley says. She reaches up and squeezes his shoulder, her hand staying to rub his upper arm as she asks, “You’re sure about this, though? Like, really sure?”

Jamie nods. “Yeah. Really sure.” He means it, and he’s pleased that it comes out sounding that way.

“Alright.” Determination creeps into Keeley’s expression, hardening her smile into one that promises that, if Jamie’s sure this is what he wants to do, she’ll do whatever she needs in order for it to happen. She pats his shoulder, then lets him go and pulls out her mobile, already making plans. “Sit tight for a minute down here, then, and I’ll be back in a minute to take you home before the match day insanity really gets going. Meeting’s over anyway, and I can fill you in, yeah?”

“Thanks.”

Then she’s gone again, and Jamie is once more left alone in a deserted hall. Richmond feels startlingly big and empty at the moment. Normally, right before a match starts, the place feels like a beehive of activity. Jamie supposes that might be due to the fact that normally he’s got to be preparing for the match along with everyone else and not merely haunting the halls until Keeley can spirit him away before the chaos really kicks into gear.

The feeling is odd and unsettling enough that, despite having been told to ‘sit tight,’ Jamie starts walking again. The stillness and the strange way he can barely recognize such a familiar place sets him off moving, needing to do something with the strange, latent energy. Unfortunately, the feeling doesn’t pass. It just gets stronger when Jamie turns around a corner that leads him to the doors into the locker room, which is completely devoid of people and noise.

Everyone is probably out doing warmups or something, but knowing that doesn’t make looking around on a match day and not seeing a single other soul there any less disturbing. Signs of life are everywhere, though it’s empty.

Items are strewn around like they usually are at a time like this: a few duffels half-zipped on the floor, a discarded jacket on the end of a bench. There’s a whiteboard off to the side, strategy diagrams scrawled across it in weak blue ink. The marker needs to be replaced, Jamie thinks idly, wandering across the room. They should probably have someone get on that.

Having been operating on autopilot, Jamie comes to a stop in front of his own stall in the locker room without realizing that’s where he’d been headed. He looks dully up at the large, crisply painted number 9 over his cubby, his last name neatly lettered just above it. He looks at the locker without really thinking much about what he’s seeing. It’s like the information is reaching his eyes and stopping there, brain empty of any actual coherent thoughts on what he’s looking at.

Jamie wonders if he should be feeling sad or frustrated at not being able to play tonight. Maybe jealous of his teammates who can, ashamed that his absence leaves such a gaping hole in the roster that it would be impossible not to notice — which isn’t bragging or whatever if it’s true.

There’s none of that, though, just a sort of empty static as he stares at his locker and looks around the room, then back to his locker again. Everything is right where it should be, right where it always is.

Everything except Jamie himself, that is. Well — and something else.

The door to the square cubby above Jamie’s locker is off, just a little. It’s not even fully ajar, just pulled away the smallest bit from where it’s usually flush against the housing when closed. Frowning, Jamie pulls it open the rest of the way, then reaches in and removes an item that stands out as something he most definitely did not remember being there the last time he’d opened it.

The thing, whatever it is, is made of fabric, and he unfurls it carefully, squinting at the shape it takes. It’s a hat. Someone’s put a hat in his locker.

It’s a beautifully knitted hat made of thick, soft wool, dyed a vibrant Richmond blue with a band of crimson red around the edge. There’s a note tucked inside in handwriting that Jamie recognizes. There’s no way it could be anyone else’s — Moe’s always had such nice handwriting. Sometimes they gave him grief for it — Jamie definitely used to give him grief for it — but it really is lovely, neat and sweeping in cursive arcs. It’s not a card, just a piece of notebook paper torn off of a larger sheet, which makes Moe’s perfect script seem even stranger by such inelegant comparison. The message on it is simple, not even signed.

chin up mate xx, it says.

Looking down at the message, Jamie turns and sits down without taking his eyes off it. He reads it maybe a dozen times over, then stares at it for a long time after that. He isn’t even reading anymore, just looking at the shape of the letters until they no longer look like letters, just loops and curls of ink on that torn bit of paper. Eventually, Jamie folds it up and puts it safely in his pocket. He clears his throat, swiping his hand across his eyes, and then tugs the hat over his head.

It’s a perfect fit, and it makes Jamie’s pulse calm out of what he hadn’t even realized was an erratic race that’s been picking up since he got that text from Beth Fletcher. It hurts a little, right at first, to pull it down over part of the cut in his forehead, right down to his brows, but it stops quickly. He feels at the edge, straightening one bit that got folded over a little strange, and smiles faintly.

That’s how Keeley finds him when she pokes her head in, sitting on the bench in front of his stall, wearing the hat and staring off into space.

“I’ve gotta say,” she says as she walks in, “this is not really what I’d meant by ‘sit tight.’” There’s enough of a teasing tone in her voice and a complete absence of actual frustration in her face that it’s obvious she’s just making fun, not actually annoyed by the extra work to track him down. It’s a little bit of a relief, honestly — makes Jamie feel a bit normal.

“That’s new,” Keeley comments on the walk out to her car, reaching up and gently poking the red band at the side of Jamie’s head. “Looks nice.”

“Found it in my locker. Bumbercatch made it,” he tells her, and she makes an impressed sound, obviously knowing the significance of that. Getting pieces of Moe Bumbercatch knitting is a highly-coveted event amongst those familiar with his work, and it’s always a big deal when someone is gifted something new. There’s even a betting pool going on who it’ll be next.

Jamie smiles a little, lifting a hand and touching the hat as well, brushing his fingertips across the soft surface. It’s a nice pattern to touch, interestingly textured, and he pulls it off and holds it in his lap on the drive home, running his fingers across the fabric. It’s definitely a better distraction than what he’d probably have ended up thinking about otherwise.

As she drives, Keeley talks about a pair of fingerless gloves that Moe made her, though Jamie doesn’t really track most of it particularly closely. She seems to have seized onto the opportunity to think about something else just as gratefully as Jamie has, and he lets the sound of her voice wash over him, soothing away his nerves.

When they get back, Keeley orders takeaway from a restaurant they both love but that Roy apparently hates — “He tries to be nice about it, but it’s just sad watching him try and pick through to find something he can eat, so I figured we’d take the opportunity to enjoy ourselves without him, and feel good about our superior taste.” — and asks if he wants to watch the match.

“You don’t like watching football,” Jamie says, surprised, and Keeley shrugs.

“Honestly don’t know how much narrative media I have it in me to track tonight, but I want some noise, you know? Besides, I figured you might enjoy watching it, if it wouldn’t be too weird to watch without being able to play.”

They end up putting the match on and Keeley mostly works on something on her laptop at the table while Jamie lays down on the couch, eyes closed, listening to the match more than watching it. Technically, when Sarah came over to check him out that first night, she had told him that he probably shouldn’t be watching screens, what with the concussion and all, but that’s been guidance he’s mostly disregarded. He can only keep his eyes on the TV for so long before his skull starts to throb like it’s being pressurized, but it’s been a helpful distraction just to be able to listen to it, which is a trade-off he’s willing to make.

This time, Jamie’s head already hurts, and Keeley’s not too interested, so they keep the volume low. Jamie drifts in and out of a doze, listening to the voices of the commentators and the overlay of Keeley’s laptop keyboard clicking at what he finds to be an insane pace. For the moment, at least, everything is okay.

It’s been a rather insane week in the world of Richmond sports journalism. Trent has had some busy news weeks over the course of his career, but there hasn’t really been anything quite like this before. Not in the sense of both the constant volume of reports, and talking, and circling back around to the same thing, and the gravity of that thing.

Shocking blockbuster trades, sure. Massive upsets when the least likely possible team went all the way to the top, absolutely. Controversies about match fixing, officiating scandals, changes to the rules that no one can seem to agree on the legitimacy of — there’s been all of that. Sudden diagnosis of serious illnesses, even. Personal tragedies. This is… different, and it’s been hard to find even footing

Trent has kept his coverage of what happened at Coventry on the twenty-fifth of April succinct and to the point, to what extent he can. He hasn’t written on it much, just the occasional update that satisfies the need to keep up with what’s happening in the news cycle without egregiously participating in the feeding frenzy around him. His superiors aren’t very pleased about it, but what he’s done has received enough engagement and brought in enough ad revenue to keep them off his back. It’s a distasteful, vulgar way to think about journalism on the whole, Trent thinks, but especially when the subject matter is this serious. Even so, it’s kept the wolves at bay, so he’ll take what he can get.

Tonight is different. Everyone in the press room is talking after the match, which isn’t all that strange, but the volume level is above its usual collegial hum, sitting at a dull roar. Trent does his best to stay out of it, looking down his nose at his notepad in his lap, jotting nonsense about the match and trying to look as unapproachable as possible. It’s a laughably futile exercise — nobody is going to be talking about the match tonight. All discussion of Richmond this evening is going to be about one thing, and it has nothing to do with football.

Coach Beard walks in first and calls the room to order. If it hadn’t already been abundantly clear, that on its own would have been enough to indicate something extremely strange is afoot tonight. Beard never starts the post-match questioning period, at least not on his own. This time, he walks in on his own, then stands in front of the desk, arms folded over his chest, his face a mask of inscrutable hardness. He’s an intimidating man, and Trent knows more than one of his colleagues are afraid of him to some degree. While he doesn’t quite share those feelings, he maintains a healthy distance for the most part, giving Beard what seems to be much-desired space.

“Listen up,” Beard says, voice hard and sharp enough to cut glass. Oh, there was a reason they’d picked him to get started tonight, and Trent appreciates it immediately. If there’s one person able to harness their general presence, crank it to twelve, and successfully stare down a room full of journalists into cooperation, it’s this one. “The team will be releasing a statement in the morning about the new development that was announced during the match. Prior to that, we will not be speaking on or answering any questions about the arrest of James Tartt Sr. Anyone who decides to push on this policy will have their media credentials suspended. No strikes. First offence, you’re out. Do I make myself clear?” His eyes are piercing and his posture hasn’t moved an inch, stood to his full height, every line of his body tense.

The pressers since Jamie Tartt was attacked have been strange, strained affairs. Those affiliated with the club engaged in a delicate dance around answering the questions posed to them while maintaining Jamie’s privacy and discouraging speculation to whatever degree possible. This is a deviation from that strategy, veering hard into a complete shutdown. The choice to have Beard deliver this message only emphasizes the new and rigidly locked down approach.

Silence resounds. A few nods. The room is full of suspended, anxious hesitation.

“Do I,” he says, voice inching higher and shoulders squaring, “make myself clear, folks?”

This time he gets a response, a scattered wave of agreement going around the room, which Trent gives his voice to with a quiet, “Yes, you do,” that gets lost among the sea of similar mutterings.

Satisfied with this, Beard gives a short, curt nod. He looks around the room one more time, then turns and leaves without another word. Ted passes him at the doorway, pausing to touch his shoulder and say something that Trent can neither hear nor lipread clearly.

Ted assumes his place at the podium and starts the presser, and it’s odd from the moment it begins. Trent has been working with this man for long enough now that he’s gotten to know Ted Lasso, to some extent. They’re almost friends, which is a strange position to find himself in with the manager of the team he covers. At any rate, strange position or not, it puts Trent in a vantage point from which to be able to immediately tell that something is off tonight. It’s honestly an obvious fact, really — Ted hasn’t made a single media appearance since the twenty-fifth that hasn’t been off in one way or another, which he can hardly be blamed for — but there’s something strange about tonight, even aside from that.

For one thing, he keeps looking at Trent. Not in the way he usually does, scanning the crowd and meeting the eyes of various journalists, giving the effect of making a personal connection with each one of them. No, Ted keeps looking at Trent like he doesn’t want to be doing it but can’t help himself, like his eyes are drawn back time and again no matter whether he wants them to. And it’s specifically Trent he’s looking at, not the first journalist he sets eyes on at random.

About the third time they make direct eye contact, Trent realizes he’s being singled out. Foreboding creeps up his spine, and he does his best to ignore it and move on, focus on his job. Whatever’s going on, at least it won’t be immediate. There’s a press conference to get through first.

It’s a quick round of questions tonight. Nobody can think about much except the news that’s just come out, and there’s nothing particularly journalistically compelling about a 1-1 draw against West Bromwich, especially with something more important and shocking hanging over their heads like a cartoon anvil. At least it can be said for the Richmond press room that nobody breaks the rule that Beard had so clearly laid out right at the beginning — nobody brings up Jamie Tartt, Coventry, or the arrest. A few times, it’s clear that someone is getting close to asking something they shouldn’t, but an elbow from a colleague or an uncharacteristically hard look from Ted is enough to rein them in.

When the question period ends and Ted makes a swift retreat from the room, Trent slings his bag over his shoulder and gets ready to file out with the rest of his colleagues. As he lingers behind the bottleneck of reporters at the door, content to wait it out rather than attempt to jostle along with them, someone taps his elbow.

Turning to the side, Trent sees a dark haired, round-faced boy standing there, wearing a determined expression while simultaneously seeming so anxious he might pass out. It takes Trent a moment to place who he is, and when he does put it together, it doesn’t clear up anything about what’s going on.

“Ah,” Will, the kit man who replaced Nate Shelley after his promotion, says, wringing the fingers of his left hand one by one and rocking on his heels, “Mr. Crimm, sir, Coach Lasso would like a word if you could stick around for a bit.”

Just out of pure scientific curiosity as to whether he can actually provoke the kid to pass out on the spot, Trent is tempted for a moment to say no. But Will seems like a good lad, all things considered, and it would be a shame to give him unnecessary grief. Besides, if Ted is asking to speak to him right now, it’s got to be serious. So rather than mess with Will, Trent just nods and steps a bit farther back from the last few people trickling out of the room. They wait for a bit, probably for the halls to clear, and then Will leads him out and away from the press room, back farther into Nelson Road.

About ten or so minutes later, Trent and Will walk into AFC Richmond’s head coaching office. It would have been significantly faster than that, but they’d been stopped no less than three times along the way by various members of the team, all of whom seemed to have some sort of bone to pick with Trent specifically.

“Why,” he asks Ted as soon as Will disappears out of the office door and closes it behind him, “did I just — I think — get threatened by several of your players?”

Ted’s eyebrows raise, and the look on his face is closer to a smile than Trent would have predicted would appear on him tonight. “You think you got threatened?”

“I just got told I better know what I’m doing, and that I shouldn’t ‘be an idiot.’ It was a little hard to tell.” Trent makes a face. “Actually, it wasn’t at all hard to tell with one of them. He just told me straight out, ‘if you fuck this up, we’ll fuck you up,’ which, while I’m not at all sure what it meant, was definitely a threat.”

Then there was Isaac McAdoo, who’d just stopped Trent with a flat palm, square in the middle of his chest, right before he’d walked into the locker room to get to Ted’s office. Isaac hadn’t said anything at all. He’d just death glared for about fifteen full seconds and then walked away, which Trent frankly found more intimidating than the rest of them put together.

Ted winces, though there’s a fond shine in his eyes. “If you let me know which one of my boys said that part, I’ll go on and have a word with him. We try to discourage threatening reporters around here.” There’s a moment where it seems like he’s about to say something else, possibly something like ‘well, usually, anyway,’ judging by the sour twist of his mouth, but he bites it back instead and says nothing.

“Sorry, Ted, a journalist never reveals his sources,” Trent says. It had been the little one that knits — Moe Bumbercatch — that had said it, but he doesn’t plan to breathe a word.

“Right.” On a normal night, that probably would have made Ted laugh. Not tonight. Ted leans back in his chair behind his desk and looks past Trent’s arm, out the window into the locker room. His face is distant and unhappy, which, given the circumstances, is fair. After a few moments of thick silence, he shakes himself a little, sits up straighter, and motions at the chair opposite the desk from him. “Why don’t you go ahead and have a seat there, Trent, there’s something I’d like to talk to you about.”

Trent sits down and says nothing. He just waits for Ted to keep going, which he does after another long pause.

“Jamie wants to do an interview.”

Though he probably should have been able to guess where this was going, Trent very much hadn’t. The announcement takes him so thoroughly by surprise that he can’t respond at all, left sitting there and staring in open shock at the man across the table.

“Well, I guess maybe ‘wants to’ is a bit of a stretch, it wasn’t his idea, but we talked it over and think it’s a good one, and he’s decided he’s gonna do it,” Ted goes on, heedless of Trent’s stupefaction. “And — which is the important part as far as you’re concerned — we decided we think you’re the right interviewer for the job.”

“Wow,” is what Trent finally manages to get out through his suddenly dry throat. “I don’t know what to say.” Sometimes, the truth is simply the easiest road to go down.

“I mean, we’d appreciate it if you said ‘yes.’”

“Oh, of course I’ll do it,” Trent is quick to say. “Obviously, yes. I’m just not sure what… Yes. If Jamie’s decided that he’s ready to talk, I’d be honoured to be the one to listen and do my best by what he says.”

A faint, slow smile pulls at Ted’s face, shifting it somewhat out of the deep, sad tiredness that had plagued it since Trent saw him at the press conference. “Kinda figured you’d say something like that,” he says, sounding relieved and satisfied with himself. “’S why we thought you’d be the man for the job. You know what sort of media firestorm we’ve been caught in the middle of, I’m sure.”

Trent gives a curt nod and refrains from providing any personal commentary on the state of the articles and social media posts being produced by those determined to count themselves amongst his colleagues. “Yes, I’m aware.”

“We talked to Keeley — Keeley Jones, you know her, crazy smart gal who runs our PR stuff for us.”

“Indeed.” Trent very much is familiar with Keeley, and has worked in coordination with her a number of times since she took over the media and marketing department at Richmond. He thinks highly of her, and is impressed by the work she’s done in her tenure.

“Well, we talked to her and the folks in her department, and ran it up the flagpole with legal too, just to be sure we weren’t breaking any laws or nothing, what with the arrest and all, and Jamie’s decided he’s gonna do it. We think it’d be best if he were able to get his story out there his way, y’know? In his words, rather than all chopped up and guessed at, reproduced in little pieces by other people who don’t know what they’re talkin’ about.”

It’s not a bad idea. It’s quite a good idea, in fact. Trent knows very well how powerful the articles that get written from that sort of interview can be. He has a folder on the desktop of his office computer where he saves the pieces he’s encountered over the years that really struck him as the best of the best, the kind of articles that made him want to be a writer in the first place. They’re on all manners of topics and by a wide range of journalists, but one of the things many of them have in common is that they are written from very personal stories — individuals relaying events in their lives from their own perspectives and in their own words.

The thing that throws Trent for a loop is not that the idea had occurred to them or that they’d thought it was a good one, but that Jamie had decided he wanted to do it. Interviews like that, when they’re about traumatic events, can be incredibly difficult to get through, for both parties, though it’s obviously a heavier burden for the subject. Trent has a hard time imagining Jamie Tartt, who he’s only spoken to briefly so far, being particularly enthusiastic to gut himself for the world to see.

Then again, Trent supposes, that ship has sailed. Jamie has already been gutted, and the world has certainly already seen the carnage.

“I can be ready to meet with him as soon as the day after tomorrow, on the first.” It’s a quick turnaround with very little notice, but Trent doesn’t have anything more important in his schedule that can’t be reshuffled. How could he? This is the biggest news story in football right now. “Please let Jamie know that I can meet him here or at his home, or we can conduct the interview at my office, whichever would make him most comfortable.”

There’s naked relief on Ted’s face as he nods and jots something down on a small notepad he sticks in his pocket. It makes Trent somewhat uncomfortable. He hasn’t done anything worth being that relieved over. All he’s done is agree to write an article about something that’s taken his professional world by storm and will make his superiors absolutely ecstatically happy with him.

“That sounds good,” Ted says. His voice is a little unsteady — barely, faintly, just enough that Trent notices. “I appreciate your willingness to get that together so fast, Trent, I think it’s for the best for everyone if we get it done with as soon as possible. You know, before this whole mess can spiral any farther out of control.”

Trent hums a wordless agreement. For just a moment, it seems like this is the end of the conversation, but that moment passes quickly. A stiff quiet hangs between them, like it’s waiting for something else to come and take its place.

This isn’t over yet.

The chair that Trent sits in faces towards Ted’s desk, away from the windows that look into the locker room. He hears, but doesn’t see, someone walk into the room, pause, then walk back out again. Ted looks out through the window, maybe watching the doors even after Trent hears them close, a strange look on his face. He doesn’t bid Trent goodnight, offer to walk him out, or do anything that would normally indicate that they’re done talking and will be in touch about the interview later. Trent, whose patience is a skill he has cultivated and honed deliberately, waits in silence for him to figure out what he’s going to do. Whether things are going to end here or not.

Eventually, Ted looks at Trent, making direct eye contact and saying, with a faint shadow of his usual enthusiasm, “Tell you what, Trent Crimm from the Independent, there’s a nice place around the corner from here that I’ve been just dying to try out. What do you say we take a walk down there, and we can chat about a few things over a late dinner. Sound good?”

Trent agrees to the proposed plan and then waits by the door, watching with casual fascination as Ted gathers his things. The man does three different sweeps of the office before he seems to finally conclude that he hasn’t, in fact, left anything crucial behind. Sometimes, Trent muses, following Ted out of the building and watching him greet every person they pass by name (albeit with a fraction of his typical gregariousness) he thinks he could make an entire career just out of studying this one person. There’s enough going on there, with the way Ted sees and interacts with the world, that it could fuel a writer indefinitely.

It’s a short walk to the place Ted had been speaking of — a little Thai spot that just opened within the last couple of months — and they’re quickly taken to a table near the back of the room. The night is rather quiet, the dining room maybe half full, and a low chatter bubbling from the other tables provides a background white noise without making it difficult to hear one another. It’s the perfect spot to have a serious, private conversation. They take seats across from one another, Ted’s back to one of the blue-and-green papered walls that form the corner.

“We gotta set some ground rules,” is the first real thing Ted says that’s just to Trent, not related to placing an order or responding to a question from the waitress. “I know this isn’t the sort of thing people like me usually get to say to people like you, but we’ve gotta establish some expectations about how things are gonna go.”

He’s right. It’s not usually the sort of thing that people in Ted’s position say to people in Trent’s, at least not remotely successfully. Sports reporters don’t generally let team managers set the rules for how interviews or journalistic endeavours are going to go, and it would be wildly unethical and biased to allow them to. They aren’t adversaries — that’s a reductive and needlessly aggressive way to look at it, in Trent’s opinion — but they’re not exactly allies either. It’s more of a truce than anything, a symbiotic relationship where each needs the other and yet neither can truly afford to offer their trust or complete guileless cooperation.

This time, though, Trent feels he can make an exception. This is not the ordinary fare of sports reporters, and though he’s already received several different versions of the ‘don’t fuck this up’ warning before he’d even known what it was really for, Trent doesn’t begrudge Ted another one.

“I respect you, Trent,” Ted starts, and it’s obvious that he means it.

It means a lot to hear, too. Ted’s respect is worth quite a premium, as far as Trent is concerned. Especially when it’s his opening salvo in what’s sure to be one hell of a conversation, the subject matter of which is magnitudes more consequential than most anything they’ve ever discussed before.

“I respect what you do, and how you do it,” the man goes on. “I know you’re a damn good journalist, and I’ve never had a problem with anything you’ve written about me or about our team. Even when it hasn’t exactly been flattering, it’s always been true and it’s never been cruel. I don’t hold any grudges about that day we first spent some quality time together, either. You did your job. Not your fault you were basically supposed to write a hit piece on me, and you were awful kind with what you did write in the end.”

What Trent wouldn’t give, honestly, to one day have a serious conversation with Ted about that. The way he references the article Trent wrote about him way back in the early days, when he’d thought Ted was a lot of American hot air and nonsense swagger with nothing behind it, takes Trent back. He’d thought Ted was there to play games with the team Richmond loved so much — the team that Trent himself had more love for than he’d ever expected to when he’d started this job. It had seemed like Ted was going to make an awful mess of things and then swan his way back to the States as soon as it got a little tough.

That hadn’t been the case, obviously. Trent had learnt that before leaving Ted’s friend Ollie’s restaurant that night.

“I appreciate that,” Trent says, because it’s true. He does appreciate it — he’s encountered some players, some managers particularly, who took every word that wasn’t a hundred percent fawning as a direct and personal attack.

An almost-startled imitation of a smile takes up residence on Ted’s face, his eyes a little too wide, lips pursed a little too hard. It’s like he’d forgotten that Trent was actually here with him, that there’s another person at this table who’s capable of responding and contributing to the conversation. It takes him a moment to shake the disorientation off and keep going, and Trent gives him the time. He figures they’re all a little off-kilter these last few days.

“Anyways,” Ted resumes eventually, with a big breath like he’s just surfaced from underwater, “I meant all that. But I gotta level with you, Trent, this interview with Jamie? This one cannot go the way that one did. You can’t do with him what you did with me, you can’t push, and dig, and you’re not gonna pressure him into anything. He wants to stop, you stop, I don’t care how ticked-off your bosses will be or how much you still have left to ask him.”

It’s a fair line to draw in the sand, Trent supposes. He nods. “I’m fine with that. I certainly won’t be trying to push him — I don’t plan to approach this interview like an interrogation, if that’s what you’re concerned about.”

“That’s good,” Ted says. “That’s good. I’d hoped so. Figured so, obviously, you being the upstanding, honourable sort of guy you’ve shown yourself to be, in my estimation, but you never can be too careful. The wildest stuff can come at’cha from the least likely of places, sometimes. I ever tell you about this once? When I was talking to these folks from the school paper — the school paper! — and all of a sudden this girl — I swear, she’s like, nineteen years old if she’s a day, right — this girl is grilling me about—”

The story goes from there, launching into a winding anecdote about being interviewed for the university paper by some particularly dogged student reporters. He hasn’t, in fact, told Trent about this before. It’s a nothing story, really. There’s so little point to it that by the time it comes to a close, it melts right into Ted’s next story without hardly any indication that a new one’s started at all. He goes on like that, winding his way around a half dozen different tales of interviews, reporters, articles, apparently anything that comes to mind.

Earlier on, before he’d spent any time speaking with and watching Ted, both as a coach and as a person, Trent may have grown quite impatient at this point. They’ve gotten through the necessary warnings, the expectations of how the interview with Jamie is going to go, and now they’re just winding around in circles. It honestly should have been an incredibly simple conversation that ended very quickly. It’s one they could have had in Ted’s office, honestly, and they could both have been on their way home by now if that had been the case. Earlier, Trent may have interrupted, may have politely but firmly excused himself and gone home.

But now, though… By now Trent has spent enough time around Ted to get to know him, and he knows what it looks like when there’s something that Ted needs to get to that he’s just not ready to say yet, for one reason or another. The man had absolutely driven the press room mental the night he’d informed them that Roy Kent had sustained a serious injury, and they weren’t sure what the outlook was for his career. He’d talked aimlessly around about absolutely nothing remotely relevant to anything that anyone cared about or needed to know for what felt like ages before he’d finally said what he’d actually come to say.

If all Ted had to say was, essentially, ‘be nice to Jamie when you talk to him,’ then they never would have ended up here in the first place. If it were only ground rules about the interview, then they never would have left Ted’s office. He would have said what he needed to say there, and that would have been that. No need to drag them both out here, to waste time sitting down to talk somewhere else and ordering dinner, no matter how good the online reviews for this place have been.

But still, here they are, sitting across from each other at this table, and Ted isn’t rambling just because he seems to like doing that — which, to be fair, sometimes he does. This is rambling that’s avoiding something, and Trent is going to sit here and wait until he gets there.

“I try and be a good father, you know?” Ted says, a sudden, sharp turn away from what he’d been saying before.

Ah, Trent thinks. There it is.

“My son’s a good kid.” When Ted talks about his child, which he does whenever the boy pops into his mind (which seems to be often), his face lights up. His eyes shine and his voice takes on a tone that’s so openly loving it’s hard not to smile when he uses it. Tonight, the effect is dimmed. The love is there — the pride, the shine — but it’s hampered by something else. Something heavy. “He’s the best kid, and, you know, a person’s father, they… a person’s father has an impact on them, kind of thing that lasts a long, long while. A person’s father stands in the background of their whole life, I think. Sometimes it’s a good background, like a support, big beam that holds the tent up, and sometimes… Sometimes it’s a shadow.”

Trent is suddenly very aware of his own breathing, of the pulse thudding quietly at his throat. Ted is looking past his shoulder, eyes a little unfocused, maybe not entirely here, and Trent would bet quite a bit of money that he knows why.

When Ted had first been hired to coach at Richmond, Trent had started doing research right away. It was his job, after all, to know who the new manager of the club he covers was. Some sports reporters would have stopped at looking at Ted’s record — noting how much he won or lost, how long he spent at wherever he’d coached, what his players had to say about him if they’d been interviewed. That was what was relevant, after all, and Trent couldn’t wholly fault them for that. It’s the job.

But he’d dug deeper. Trent hadn’t just wanted to know who Coach Lasso was, he’d wanted to know who Theodore Lasso was. That desire to understand, to get at the man himself and understand just who was guiding the ship that seemed so perilously at risk of running aground, had only grown when Trent had been sent out to spend the day with him.

It wasn’t that hard to find in the end, honestly. Ted’s hometown was right there on his publicly available profile, just like all of the players. A search of the town paper turned up articles about the tragedy that had struck a local family. Trent had read just enough to know what it was, to realize what had happened when Ted was sixteen, and then he’d closed out of the archival search, feeling a bit sick to his stomach.

Though he’d been researching Ted on purpose, wanting to understand where he came from and what sort of perspective he was bringing along as a head coach, that had felt like something Trent was never meant to see. He felt like he’d spied on the man somehow, despite the fact that it was a public record that was relatively easy to attain.

“Anyways,” Ted says suddenly, like he’s shaken himself free of something. Maybe of a memory. “I try… I just try not to be a shadow, y’know?”

And Trent nods, because, in a way, he does know. About fathers. About shadows.

“I understand that,” Trent says, and Ted nods.

“Yeah, yeah. It’s tough. It can be tough.” The distant look comes back to Ted’s eyes for a moment, and then clears up again, much more quickly this time, and now he’s looking right at Trent, launching into, “And some of the kids I’ve coached, my god, you’d not believe the kinds of things I’ve had get said in front of me, happen in front of me.”

Maybe he wouldn’t have before. After this week, though, Trent would honestly believe just about anything. That video broke his disbelief over what people will do to their children in the presence of others.

“What happened with Jamie, with his dad, that was…” Ted can’t finish the sentence, trailing off with a slow drift of his chin, side to side, back and forth. It’s not the sort of sentence that needs finishing, anyway. They’ve all seen it. “It took everyone by surprise, me included, but it’s not like things have never gotten dicey before, right? I mean, I coached college. Some of those folks took that stuff real serious. And my kid, Henry, he’s in Little League—” The faraway look is back now, and the proud-father shine makes for a strange, melancholy combination. “And man, I gotta tell you, it is rough not being able to be there for that. All those games that I miss, I sit up nights sometimes counting them. His mom sends me videos, and sometimes some of the other parents if they’re taking some, but it’s not the same, y’know? You’re a dad, you get that.”

Trent wordlessly nods. His daughter is too small still to play organized sports, but that’s rather moot. He gets the point, at any rate.

“Right, you get it. Anyways, there are a lot of great things about being a coach, lot of really great things, but there are some things that aren’t so great. Sometimes that’s the parents.” When he picks up his water glass to take a deep drink, Ted’s hand is shaking. Just a little bit, but it’s enough for Trent to notice. “We had them at Hengry’s games too, right, and boy does that just get my hackles up to see that. I never understood that shit, how they could get so mad at their kids, young kids, over a game. Not even a game that meant anything, neither. Just Little League. They don’t even keep score in Little League.”

Now that he thinks of it, Trent doesn’t actually know what Little League is, but the context clues are enough for him to put together the basic idea. Certainly nothing worth doing anything like what has put that look on Ted’s face. Not that an adult professional league is worth that, either.

Echoing Trent’s thoughts, Ted says, “Not that it’s any better when it’s their grown kids — or mostly grown, really, I still can’t look at those college boys I coached and see anything but kids. Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, they’re all so damn young. Anyways, it wasn’t any better when it was them either, still made me just as sad and mad at the same time to see some pissed off parent yellin’ at their kid when they were eye to eye as it does when they’re yay-high.”

Ted illustrates his point by waving his hand in the air at about waist height on a grown adult. His hand is still trembling, just a bit, and Trent wonders if he knows it’s happening. It makes a wavering path through the air, but Ted doesn’t look at it at all.

“Figured out how to handle it after a while. Wasn’t all the time, obviously, don’t get me wrong — lot of players I coached had great parents, some of ‘em still send me Christmas cards and whatnot, but there were enough that I learned how to handle it, when to get between one’a my kids and their dad, or their mom sometimes.”

At some point in the past, Trent would have found that hard to imagine. He would have tried to picture Ted intervening in a confrontation, deliberately involving himself in a conflict with some angry parent, and not been able to. Of course, it made sense that the man would want to do such a thing — he’s nothing if not devoted to his players, and that has been clear from the very beginning — but the actual image would have come up blank.

Not any more. Now, Trent finds it all too disturbingly easy to conjure in his mind’s eye — he’s seen the expression Ted would have worn a dozen times over the last week, both in photographs and in person, in the press room earlier. It’s a look that says I don’t want to be here, but you leave me no choice, and I ain’t moving an inch. Try me.

“There was this one time in Kansas, this boy and his dad — I had to physically put the kid behind me, stood there between them while one of our physical therapists called campus security. Coach Beard was about ready to jump in too when they finally got there. I’ll never forget that man’s voice, or the things he was hollerin’.” The tone that Ted tells the story in is serious but matter-of-fact. His index finger taps the surface of the table repetitively, a tiny metronome. “Until now, that’s the worst it ever got. Things devolved, got bad real fast, and I had to give a statement to the police later, but I still…” His voice fades away into silence and he looks down, expression drawn and distant. The tapping finger goes still, pressing flat down to the tablecloth. “I still, until last week, never had one’a my players get hit in front of me.”

“I never would’ve considered that would be a part of coaching,” Trent says. He mostly says it because he feels like he needs to say something, keep Ted connected to the present somehow and pull some of the weight of carrying the whole conversation off his shoulders. Even so, it’s true. Maybe it’s because his career as a sports reporter has focused on adult professional leagues, where it’s far less likely there will be the sort of parental interference that leads to that sort of thing, but until now, he really hasn’t thought about what it would be like to be a coach of a player with an emotionally or physically dangerous parent.

Ted sighs. “I didn’t either, at first. Figured out how to gauge a situation eventually, though. When I could talk ‘em down, when I just had to step in or have Beard show someone the door. Feel like it’s on me to keep that kind of thing from happening, at least when I’m right there to stop it.”

It’s a painful phrasing, given what’s just happened — on me to keep that kind of thing from happening. Right there to stop it.

Once again like he’s reading Trent’s mind, Ted switches abruptly from talking about his former players and his life in America to talking about more recent events. It’s clear from the shift in his voice and his face, even before he specifically names either event that’s made its way into the media.

“I wish I’d stepped in,” Ted says. It’s a grief-laden confession. “I should have. Both of those times, I should have done something, done way more than I did, and I can’t even really say why I didn’t. I mean, I tried at Coventry, but…”

“Hey,” interrupts Trent, not quite willing to sit there and listen to a degree of condemnation Ted doesn’t deserve and hasn’t earned, even from himself. “I know what they’re saying online, but anyone who’s paid real attention, we all know you did your best. You don’t need to defend that to me. I know you did the best you could do for him.”

“Except that I didn’t, though, is the thing.” Now he sounds sharp, an uncharacteristic snap that’s downright shocking to hear from this genial, polite man. “I didn’t do the best I could. I could have done one helluva lot more to protect that kid, but I didn’t. At Wembley, hell, I just stood there, and if Coach Beard hadn’t jumped in when he did, I don’t know what would’a happened.” Ted snorts and shakes his head, and his expression is darker than Trent’s ever seen on him. “I mean, I guess I do know now. Guess now we all know. At least at Coventry I didn’t just stand there. I tried. We all did, every one of us tried to get to him, but…” Pursing his lips, Ted shakes his head again. He’s been doing that a lot. His eyes are distant and sad and Trent knows suddenly that he’s replaying it — that he’s been replaying it, over and over in his head since it happened. “It just wasn’t enough.”

It’s such a simple phrase with so much packed into it. How many tragedies, how many horrible and haunting things could be summed up that way: It just wasn’t enough.

“I’m sorry,” Trent says. It’s woefully inadequate. Still, he has to say something at the same time that he’s helpless to say anything else. “I can’t possibly imagine how difficult it’s been to watch all of this happen to him — not just…” The attack, the assault, the abuse. There’s too many ways to put it and all of them feel impossible to say, like Trent will be enacting further violence upon violence just by saying it. “Not just Coventry, but everything that’s followed.”

The way Ted looks at him, the faint and strained smile that pulls at his features without fully taking shape, is impossibly sad.

“Yeah,” he agrees. “It’s been—” When Ted stops, it’s abrupt, almost involuntary. His throat convulses, he takes a drink of water, and then he starts again, fractionally steadier. “It’s been real hard.”

Though it must be completely cold by now, Ted focuses on his food for a bit after that, and Trent follows suit. He suspects there’s a reason behind this choice other than hunger, something else motivating the sudden shift in concentration away from words and towards dinner. Neither of them have eaten much, and they’re not likely to — that’s not the point of why they’re here, restaurant or no. When Ted sighs and sets his fork back down on the table, they’re both breathing easier.

“Anyway, I just… I try to be a good father, is all.”

Trent likes Ted. He really does. He finds the man to be sometimes shockingly funny and, most of the time, incredibly sincere to a degree that is occasionally painful to spectate. And, it turns out, as he’s shown since he arrived, he’s a damn good coach as well. There is, however, a version of Ted that Trent doesn’t like, and he knows that version is about to show up at this table.

In just a moment, Ted is going to plaster on a wide, fake smile, turn his voice up a notch brighter, and say something along the lines of, Well, that was a great conversation, really feel like we understand each other, thanks Trent, hope you enjoyed your food, this is a great little place, gotta get going!, and then he’ll be gone. Trent does not want to see that happen. He didn’t come here to talk to a plastic action figure or a cardboard cut-out, he came here to speak to Ted, and he won’t have that imposter show up and take over.

So, Trent does something that surprises even himself, and says, “You know, my father wasn’t exactly the nicest man.”

Ted stills from where he’d been about to stand up, the counterfeit smile fading immediately and replaced by a genuine expression of earnest interest, tinged with concern. “Yeah?”

Trent is not a man who makes a habit of discussing himself or his personal life with subjects. The idea generally makes him feel uncomfortable at best. However, this isn’t exactly an interview, and Ted isn’t exactly an ordinary subject. So, here he goes.

Figuring out what to say next is a little more complicated. ‘Wasn’t exactly the nicest man’ encompasses a lot of things that make quite the broad scatterplot when arranged next to one another.

It’s not as if Trent has to keep going, of course. He knows that if he left it at that, Ted would let him, and it would end there. That knowledge is perhaps why he doesn’t stop, doesn’t leave it at that. There’s something to be said for the way that the option to not continue makes it feel that much less intimidating to do so anyway, and besides. Trent has a point to make here.

“What you said about fathers, about supports and shadows… mine is a shadow. I’ve always been rather acutely aware that I am not the son he asked for, and I have not become what he wanted of me.” It’s more honest, more direct than Trent usually gets when he talks about this, as little as he ever does. Most of the time, it feels like an unbecoming thing to ruminate on, like talking about the weight he carries with him everywhere he goes will make a self-centred spectacle out of something that no one needs to fuss over. This feels… different. Somehow, he doubts that Ted feels that way about hearing it. “Rather hard to shake that sort of thing off, no matter how old you get.”

“Yeah,” Ted says, his voice warm and quiet. His eyes are soft and crinkled at the corners. “Yeah, I’ll bet that it is.”

Trent purses his lips in a faint imitation of a smile and nods. He doesn’t have to continue. He knows that, but something keeps him talking regardless, opening his mouth once more to keep going about fathers and expectations, about the weight of knowing you have failed to live up to yours. It’s more general, for the most part — he doesn’t get into many specifics after that first bit — but he’d imagine it’s obvious from what he says and how he says it that he’s drawing from direct experiences. And it isn’t just because Trent’s decided he feels like talking. There’s a purpose to this, a reason for what he’s saying.

After what has happened this week, Trent can only guess at how enormously frightening it would be for these people, for Ted to allow this interview to happen. To trust someone with Jamie like that — to trust a journalist? A sports reporter, after what they’ve done to him? Maybe, Trent hopes, by talking about this, by unearthing some of his own history, he might be able to put Ted’s mind at ease, to reassure him and anyone else who may have concerns of Trent’s intentions.

Maybe it will help them see, to put it simply, that Trent is not here to hurt Jamie. He understands the instinct and where it comes from, and he respects it immensely, but he isn’t someone they need to protect Jamie from, and it will be far less difficult for everyone if they understand that before the interview takes place.

From the way Ted looks at him, the understanding and the compassion in his face, the edge of what might be deemed relief, Trent would guess it’s having something of its intended effect.

“I think I know why you’re telling me this,” Ted says, with a slightly arched eyebrow.

Okay. Maybe too much of its intended effect. Trent busies himself fussing with his napkin, folding it and straightening the edges along the crease in the starched fabric.

“You didn’t have to do that, Trent. Not that I would ever pass up the chance to get to know more about you, especially since most of our sit-downs end up with a lot of me talking and you listening, but I know you didn’t just say that because you felt like gettin’ some things off your chest, am I right?”

Sighing, Trent shakes his head. “I only mean to convey that, while I completely see why you would be somewhat reluctant to trust anyone, particularly within my profession, with Jamie and his story, I fully intend to approach this matter sensitively. And I am… not without some understanding of the way that families can be difficult. Particularly fathers.”

The longer Ted goes without saying anything, just sitting there and regarding Trent with a look he can’t quite place, the more Trent starts to think he’s gone and made a fool of himself. He opens up the napkin again, then refolds it, then takes off his glasses to clean the lenses, for lack of anything else to do with his hands. This is why he doesn’t do this sort of thing — he didn’t get into journalism because he was particularly at ease talking about himself. But then Ted knocks his knuckles on the table — just an absent, offhanded fidget of a gesture, not purposefully meant to get Trent’s attention, but doing so anyway.

“I knew you were the right man for the job,” Ted says, nodding. He looks satisfied, like he’s been proven correct about something. A bit prematurely, perhaps. The article hasn’t been written yet. “Thank you. That was more than you needed to do, but it means a lot that you did.”

Trent shrugs, uncomfortable. “Yes, well.” He doesn’t have anything to go after that, and they lapse into a double-edged silence. It lingers for a long time.

“While we’re saying things, you know, just really laying it all out there,” Ted starts, voice a little strange, “there’s something else I’d like to say, I think. Just between you and me. I don’t want Jamie to know.” As he says it, Ted is looking down, at the water glass by his plate. He taps the edge of it with one knuckle, disrupting a bead of condensation running down the side. With a grimace, he wipes the water off on his napkin. “I don’t really… This is off the record, you hear, I mean off the record. I don’t want this getting to anyone else.”

Trent nods. “You have my god’s honest word, this is off the record.” Honestly, he’s mostly just relieved to not be talking about himself anymore.

“Right.” Ted doesn’t seem as reassured by that as Trent might have hoped he’d be, just flashes a ghost of a smile - a haunted, somewhat vacant expression. That’s probably fair. There’s nothing about this that’s really reassuring. “I…” He trails off, taps his fingertips on the tabletop. Shakes his head, looks out over the restaurant, looks back at the folds of the cloth napkin piled beside his half-empty plate. “Man.” Ted looks away from the napkin and up at the ceiling. His eyes are bright. A little too bright. “I should’a stepped in.”

Frowning, Trent says, “You already said that.” If Ted is forgetting which parts of this conversation they’ve already had, he might be even worse off than he seems, psychologically speaking.

Except that Ted shakes his head, working his jaw, and corrects, “No. Not Coventry, not Wembley. Not this year. It was after the relegation match last season, you remember the one. It was then. At Nelson.”

Now Trent’s head is spinning. He’s having trouble piecing together what he’s being told — or, rather, what he isn’t. He can see what Ted is saying perfectly, but he just can’t seem to understand it, can’t seem to process it being true.

“There was an —” Trent stops, cutting himself off. He swallows hard, needing this to come out steadily, no matter what he’s hearing. “There was an incident of abuse involving Jamie and his father at Nelson, after the relegation match last year?”

Though Trent hoped against hope that he wouldn’t, Ted nods, silently confirming the question.

“Oh. God.” He shouldn’t have said it, but Trent can’t really help himself. Thankfully, Ted doesn’t seem too bothered by it — just nods again, smaller.

“Yeah. It was… I’ll never get it out of my head. Any of it. And I should’ve stepped in, I should’ve done something, but I couldn’t.” Ted’s expression suddenly goes dark and he shakes his head sharply, back and forth just the once. “No, actually, that’s wrong. I didn’t. I could have, but I didn’t, because I didn’t think it was any of my business. Jamie wasn’t even my player at the time, and I know that if I’d have tried to do anything, or talk to him about it, he’d have told me where I could shove my concern so loud it would’a broke windows, especially considering…”

“Considering?” Trent takes the trailing end of the sentence as his cue to prod Ted forward, encourage him to keep going. He doesn’t particularly want to hear the rest, but this is his job in the world. There is violence and pain, suffering and enormous guilt, and he is a journalist. It is his job to bear witness to it, to shoulder what he can as an observer. Trent might be a sports writer, but he sees that as his duty all the same.

“Considering the kid thinks I asked for him to be sent back to City.”

Once again, Trent can’t help it. “You didn’t?” That had been quite a stir for a while, people debating what had happened, what the last straw had been for this man and his seemingly endless patience. It was plainly obvious to anyone who listened to a word he said that Jamie himself thought Ted had been behind the termination of his loan, and much of the conversation around his departure had assumed the same.

“Let’s just say the decision was out of my hands and leave it at that,” Ted says, which isn’t an explanation but is clearly the closest he’s going to get to one. “The point is that, no matter all of that, no matter what I thought or what I — I should have done something. I should have done more. I just thought, private moment, Jamie’d be pissed, and so all I did was write him a note and give him that little toy and I washed my hands of it. Just like that. Thought to myself, well, you did what you could, Lasso, and tried not to dwell on it.”

“Toy?” There’s so much in this anecdote, this confession that Trent doesn’t understand. It would be impossible to tease out every separate piece, so he clings to the smaller bits when he comes upon them, asks for clarification on the parts that are probably the least consequential, overall.

Ted nods. A wry, regretful smile pulls at the side of his mouth and he sticks a hand in his jacket pocket. When he pulls it back out again, he sets something on the table. It’s a small child’s toy made of green plastic. A soldier, a rifle propped against its tiny plastic shoulder.

“My son sent me a bunch of those in a care package, early on. Said they were to keep me safe,” he explains. His eyes are distant, looking at the soldier at the same time that they’re far, far away. “In that game, the way Jamie played… It was beautiful. He was incredible. And that pass, man, that pass was everything we’d needed from him. It was everything I’d asked him to do. And then after I saw him getting just — getting screamed at by that sorry sonuvabitch, pushed around, shit thrown at him, just because—” Ted breaks off. He’s breathing heavily, faster than before, and he pauses for a long time.

Trent lets him. Doesn’t push, doesn’t ask any questions, just sits back and lets the silence stretch out between them. Honestly, he feels a little sick. What he’s been told swirls around in his brain, and he tries not to picture it, but he can’t quite stop it. Not when he already has the photos and the video from Twitter, all on immediate call-up in his mind.

“I needed him to know,” Ted says eventually, after several cycles through very deliberate, very deep breaths. He picks the toy soldier up off the table and studies it in his palm, then closes his fingers over it. Even after it’s out of sight, Ted keeps looking at his closed fist. “I wrote a note and put it and one of these in an envelope and made sure it got to him, because I needed him to know how proud I was of him for how he played, for that pass. Even though he cost us big time in that game. He needed to know I was so damn proud of him I could hardly stand it — he deserved to know that, because I know what it’s like to—”

Breaking off, Ted shakes his head. The hand with the soldier in it has gone tighter, and Trent imagines it might hurt - those little hard edges of plastic digging into his palm, the insides of his fingers.

It’s one hell of a story. Trent leans back in his chair, looking at the ceiling and turning it over and over in his mind. It’s almost enough to make him wish he hadn’t agreed so soundly to confidentiality, to keeping this off the record. That’s the sort of story Trent got into this business to write — the small stories that tell the much larger ones, pinpoint moments of individuals making the only choices they can live with, out of necessity, out of faith, out of pain. Out of love.

Obviously, Trent isn’t going to do that. He told Ted this was off the record, and Trent is a man of his word. Besides, that sort of story is the sort that can only be told with the permission and cooperation of the people involved. It isn’t the sort of thing one can take, not without warping it in the process.

Which brings Trent’s mind back to the story he is here to tell, the one that prompted this dinner and this aching, meandering conversation in the first place. He looks away from the ceiling and back to Ted, takes a deep breath, and says, “I don’t know how this interview is going to go. I can’t say exactly what will end up coming from it. There’s a lot that I don’t know, just yet, won’t know until I get the chance to talk to Jamie. But I can tell you one thing that I know for certain.”

The look on Ted’s face makes Trent uncomfortable. It’s vulnerable and just a little desperate, like he’s hoping that whatever is about to come next will shine a clear light through a deep and confusing fog.

“You,” Trent tells him, “are a wonderful father.”

A sharp inhale, and Ted’s mouth twitches into a strange, wobbly little smile. He puts the toy soldier back in his jacket pocket. “I…” Another inhale. Deeper, more controlled. “I appreciate that, Trent. Very much.”

“I meant it.” And he did. It wasn’t an empty platitude, Trent meant what he’d said. He’d thought of recorded Little League games, and the way he’s seen Ted talk to children before: like they’re important, like their thoughts and opinions matter. And it wasn’t just about Henry, either. It was the way Ted talked about every player he’d ever coached. It was the way Ted talked about Jamie, the enormity of the guilt he felt over not protecting him. I needed him to know how proud I was.

Yes, Trent very much believes that has the evidence to conclude that this man is a good father.

“Yeah, well…” The odd, unsteady smile wavers like it’s about to turn into something else, then solidifies. “Thank you.”

Trent just nods, and is thankfully rescued by the waitress bringing the cheque before he has to come up with anything else. Still, there’s something dogging his mind, something he can’t shake no matter how much he tells himself it isn’t any of his concern.

As they exit the building, stepping out of the warm dining room and into the cool night air on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant, Trent hesitates. Something tugs at the edge of his mind, something that he doesn’t really want to say, because it isn’t the sort of thing he says, but feels like he should. He thinks about it, debates with himself for the split second he has left to waste, then calls, “Ted?”

Ted turns around, stopping under a streetlight with his hands in his pockets, looking very human and very tired. It’s hard to remember him like this when he’s at the side of the pitch or rattling off some answer that’s twice as poetic as it has a right to be and more sincere than most managers in this sport ever even get close to. But Ted’s just a person like the rest of them, and it’s never been more clear than it is right now.

Maybe that’s why Trent does it, puts aside his distaste for meddling in personal affairs, and takes a few steps closer, just enough that he won’t have to shout to be heard clearly.

“Listen,” he says, “this is not my place or my business, but can I offer you a bit of advice?” Ted doesn’t do anything to interrupt or deter him, so Trent goes on, putting the calmest tone in his voice that he can manage and suggests, “You should go and see Jamie.”

Though he doesn’t say anything, the street light is just enough to make out Ted’s expression, and it’s equal measure curious and surprised.

“If he’s not already staying with you,” Trent goes on, because the thought that he can’t imagine these people have left that young man out there to deal with this all on his own has occurred to him a few times, “go and see him. You’ll feel better if you do. I think you both will.”

“Thanks, Trent,” Ted says, with half a smile. “I appreciate it, and I think you’re probably right about that. I will.”

Then he turns and walks away, and Trent is alone on the street, thinking about fathers and legacies, the beginning of a story already taking shape in his mind.

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

Ted doesn’t really know what he’s doing here.

Or, well, no. He knows exactly what he’s doing here in a literal, practical sense. Ted is standing on the sidewalk with his hands in his pockets, lingering outside of Roy’s house because he’s here to see Jamie, following Trent’s very wise advice.

From the moment Trent said it, Ted hasn’t been able to get it out of his mind. It’s like the thought has a stranglehold on him now: his palms tingling just a little, his breath shorter than it should be, like his body physically knows he needs to see Jamie right now or something terrible is going to happen. Foreboding has loomed over Ted often in the last couple of weeks, especially since Coventry, but it’s surged since his conversation with Trent. It’s the sort of thing that would be very difficult to describe to someone who wasn’t in his head with him, the way he knows so surely and acutely that something awful is about to happen at the same time that he has absolutely no idea what it is.

It isn’t the first time this has happened to Ted, either — this terrible, knowing certainty of impending cataclysm. Sometimes there are specifics, but a lot of the time, when it takes him over, he doesn’t have a clear grasp of what terrible thing is coming, just that it’s on its way and he’s powerless to stop it.

That’s what he’s facing this time. He doesn’t know what he’s so worried about, just that it’s there and it might end the world — or at least his world — when it arrives. The indistinct, ever-growing sense of doom is pressing down on Ted’s shoulders like it plans to do its level best to flatten him into the ground, and he needs to see Jamie, get eyes on Jamie and make sure he’s alright, or something awful’s going to happen.

Usually, there isn’t a condition clause attached to it, so that’s new. Usually it’s all just a whole lot of I see a bad moon rising with not a lot of I need to do this or else stuck in front of it, so that’ll be something interesting to bring up to the esteemed Doctor Sharon at some point when Ted has ten minutes between crises to both breathe and make an appointment. (So far, no dice on that front. The hits just keep coming and they don’t even have the decency to space themselves out when they do.)

For the moment, though, there is an or else around, and the object of Ted’s urgency is almost definitely in the house in front of him, and he’s got to do something about it ASAP. Even though the bee hive in his chest has slowed its roll down out of DEFCON 1 since arriving at the curb and getting out, setting eyes on the front door, DEFCON 2 is still not his preferred place to be.

So, yes, in the plainest and most literal sense, Ted is here to see Jamie.

More abstractly, though, Ted does not know what he’s doing here. As in, Roy’s gonna open his front door and see Ted there and ask what are you doing here, and he’s not just gonna mean what are you doing here when he does. He’s gonna mean do you know what time it is and did you lose your phone at some point in the last couple of hours and probably a handful of other perfectly reasonable questions that Ted won’t have good answers for. And yet here he is anyway, and the cab’s long since driven off by now, and at some point Roy or one of his neighbours or somebody is gonna notice that Ted’s been standing out here and staring at the house for long enough that he looks like he’s casing the joint, and so he’s gotta move it or lose it.

The door doesn’t open right away after Ted knocks, which makes him wince. It really is late — dinner had gone on for a while, and then he’d wasted more time than he’d thought he had after he and Trent went their separate ways, wandering back to his apartment — flat, whatever — and then wandering a bit more outside of it just for good measure. Time has a way of slipping away from Ted sometimes, and maybe that’s something he oughta work on, but what it all boils down to at the moment is that it’s later than is really polite or excusable to show up unannounced at someone else’s front door.

After long enough that he starts to wonder if everyone in the house might be — justifiably — asleep already and thus unable to hear him, the door does indeed swing open. Roy is standing there on the threshold, wearing a very dark grey hoodie over a black shirt and a deeply confused and somewhat suspicious expression, which lightens a bit when he sees who has come calling.

A bit.

“I know it’s late,” Ted says immediately. He tries to sound polite and apologetic, the way his mama raised him to talk when he goes calling on someone else’s home unannounced, but it doesn’t really work. He just sounds anxious, even to himself. “Sorry, I know I should’ve called first, but I just… I don’t actually know why I didn’t.” Really, truly he doesn’t know. At some point while he’d been sitting in the cab on the way over, Ted had realized he hadn’t called, and his phone was still in his pocket, and he just… still didn’t take it out and make the dang call. “Anyway, I hope I didn’t wake you up, sorry if I did.”

“You didn’t.” It’s a stiff, stony reply that doesn’t reassure Ted at all, but Roy doesn’t really seem angry, either. At least, no more than he usually does at a baseline.

They both stand there for a moment, looking at each other across the threshold of the doorway, and then Roy shakes himself and steps back, waving Ted inside. Even when the door’s closed again, they stay there in the hall at first. The entryway light isn’t on, which throws the place into shadow, but the whole house isn’t dark. Ted had seen the light from the outside, and now he can tell that it’s coming from the living room.

“So, I’ll cut right to it then, huh,” Ted says, keeping his voice low. It seems like the only polite approach, at this hour. “I’d like to talk to Jamie for a minute. If he’s still up, anyway, don’t bother waking him if he’s — y’know, if he —”

“He’s in there,” Roy interrupts at the same volume. He jerks his chin towards the living room, the place the light is coming from. “We’re all still up. He hasn’t been sleeping too good.” Something about the way he says it has the distinct air of an understatement, and Ted’s heart gives a sudden, hard squeeze.

“That must be tough,” he says, when he’s got enough air to say anything.

Roy makes a sound in the back of his throat, shrugging one shoulder. He’s got his arms folded tightly across his chest, every inch of his body language radiating tense discomfort. “We’ve been handling it.”

He hadn’t meant it as a rebuke. Roy didn’t say it as some kind of backhanded and where were you, when this was happening, when we were ‘handling it,’ because you weren’t here, but the guilt seeps in anyway. Ted has felt that guilt on and off, in ebbing and flowing degrees of intensity. He regrets not stepping up and taking Jamie home right at the start himself, and it’s hard to hear about how difficult things have been for him and not take it as a condemnation of that failure, even if Roy hadn’t meant for there to be one.

Even so, whenever Ted thinks on it rationally, he has to admit that he knows that Roy and Keeley had been the better choice, for Jamie’s sake. Their schedules are just — put plainly — more flexible than Ted’s, more able to be shifted and moved around, and besides, there’s two of them. And then there’s the fact that Ted’s had, by his estimation, four panic attacks since Coventry — or maybe six, depending on how precisely ‘panic attack’ is being defined here.

It’s a bit of a rock and a hard place, that one. Ted’s been warring with himself over it ever since he went home alone on the twenty-fifth and wondered if he’d made a mistake, if Jamie was okay, how Roy and Keeley were managing with him. Yeah. It’s been tough.

Speaking of tough.

“How’re you holding up with all this?” Ted asks, because he knows he hasn’t been having a particularly easy time this week, and he hasn’t been right in the middle of the fallout with Jamie every minute. He knows Roy. He knows that Roy can take things real hard sometimes, can internalize with the best of them and make everything his own fault. It’s the reason, Ted suspects, that he’d been so checked out of the captaincy, back at the start. Responsibility can’t crush you if you refuse to truly take it on.

The snort that Roy lets out in response to the question is still quiet but thick with scorn. “How am I holding up? Who gives a shit?”

“I do, that’s why I asked.” Ted doesn’t give him an inch. It’s clear that Roy wasn’t expecting the question, but Ted wants an answer regardless. He might not be on top of his game right now, but that doesn’t mean he’s lost sight of the people around him, and this is affecting more than just Jamie. He can spare an extra minute or two to get a real response.

It seems like he might not get one at first. Roy regards him with a suspicious, reluctant expression, jaw tensed and brow furrowed. He says nothing. From their proximity in the hall, standing close so as to keep their conversation as quiet as possible, Ted can see his shoulders rising and falling with somewhat laboured breaths.

Eventually, Roy looks away and shrugs. “It’s… been tough,” he says, pitched even lower than before. His voice is barely more than a featureless rumble. “We... Keeley’s having a hard time with it. You know, with the footage that’s out there and all the shit she’s seen online. Hard to get that out of your head. She… She cares about him a lot, it’s hard for her to see him like this.” The words are stiff and forced, and Roy won’t look at Ted the entire time he speaks.

While there’s no doubt in Ted’s mind that all of what he said very much does apply to Keeley, he also knows that hadn’t really been the whole point. It’s as close as Roy is going to come to confessing the truth himself, and they both know it for what it is, so Ted just nods.

“I’m sure, yeah,” he says. “Been real difficult for everyone. Hard to see that happen, even harder when it’s someone you—” Ted knows suddenly that if he keeps going, he’s going to choke on his own fear and grief, and so he stops. Looks down, shakes his head a little. “Anyways. I’d just like to see him, tell him about what Trent and I sorted out for the interview, if he’s still up.”

After a beat, Roy asks Ted a question and he hums an affirmative without bothering to sort through exactly what he’s just been asked. This instinct of automatic agreement backfires when he looks up and finds Roy staring at him like he’s grown another head. Oops. Right. Forgot what country he was in for a moment, there.

“Oh, you just asked me if I wanted tea, didn’t you?”

“Force of habit, yeah,” Roy says with a raised eyebrow.

Ted shakes his head. “No, thanks. Sorry, I didn’t really…” I completely wasn’t listening to a single word you said, my bad. “No, thanks.”

They set off away from the door, pausing when they reach the stairs to the upper floor of the house. The living room sits off to their left, but Ted doesn’t turn that way just yet.

“Roy,” Ted says suddenly, not even knowing he’s about to do so until it comes out. He keeps his voice down, even lower than they’d been speaking before, so that nobody but the two of them will hear him. “You’re doing good. With him. You two have done real good, and I’m sure it’s helping a lot. Means a lot. It’s meant a lot to me to know he’s safe, that you’re takin’ good care of him. So thank you for that.”

The look on Roy’s face is familiar. Ted’s seen it quite a few times, especially since they’ve started coaching together. There’s a deep crease in his forehead, his mouth twisted sharply and his jaw flexing as he gives a short shake of his head. It’s Roy’s I’m picking my battles, but it was a very close fight to not pick this one face. He stands there for a while, staring at Ted with his warring over whether to pick this battle face, and then doesn’t say anything more, just turns and starts to head up the stairs without so much as a goodnight. Ted doesn’t let it bother him — they’ve all got a lot going on right now, so polite is probably too high an expectation. And besides, he’s got other priorities to focus on.

Taking a moment to draw in a deep breath, doing his best to steady his nerves, Ted walks the short distance across the hall to the living room doorway. Keeley, sitting in an armchair directly opposite the threshold, looks up at his approach and smiles at him. It’s a tight, strained thing, but he appreciates it anyway, and flashes one back at her.

Jamie is sitting sideways on the couch, leaning against the arm with his legs drawn up towards his chest and a book of some kind open propped on his knee. That confuses Ted until Jamie uses a pencil to start scratching something onto the open page, and he realizes that it’s some kind of puzzle book, which makes a lot more sense. Human beings contain multitudes and all that, but Ted would be incredibly surprised if this were the moment that Jamie developed a keen interest in literature.

Either not having noticed the knock and the door opening and closing, or having noticed but decided to return to the task at hand rather than give his attention to finding out who has arrived, Jamie still hasn’t looked up and seen Ted. He’s focused down at the puzzle book, face creased in a concentrated frown that Ted would ordinarily find kind of adorable, though he’d have kept that observation to himself. This time, the effect is pretty well ruined by the healing damage, the stitches in Jamie’s furrowed brow and pursed lips.

“Hey,” Ted says quietly, after waiting for long enough that he’s pretty sure he’ll be able to talk and have it come out steady. He keeps his voice in a soft undertone out of respect for the late hour and because he doesn’t want this interaction to start off with a startle.

Frown turning confused, Jamie looks up. When he sees who’s standing there looking back at him, he sets the puzzle book off to the side. Now that it’s on the coffee table, Ted can make out the closed cover. Sudoku, apparently.

Keeley gets up, then. She says goodnight to Jamie and to Ted on her way past, leaving the two of them alone in the room. Ted appreciates it, though it seems to put Jamie more on edge. He watches Ted approach with a wary look that ramps up with every step. Trying his best not to let it get to him, to keep his own face calm and reassuring, Ted sits on the empty side of the couch.

“Coach? Did something happen?” Jamie asks. Something else, he means. Something new. On top of everything that’s already happened.

Which is, of course, the assumption that he would make. How could he not, after the last couple of days? It’s felt to Ted like they get pitched some horrible new curveball every couple of hours, and he isn’t even the one at the heart of the whole mess, not even the one it’s all directly happening to. He can only imagine what it feels like to Jamie.

“No, no,” Ted is quick to reassure him. “Nothing new, anyway. I was just speaking to Trent Crimm about this interview we’re gonna get set up, wanted to come let you know how all that was coming together. And, I…” I needed to see you, see for myself that you were okay or — well, I don’t know ‘or’ what, but something bad. “I wanted to come by and check in on you, too. See how you were holding up, since I haven’t exactly been around too much these last few days. Which I’m sorry for, by the way. Feels like I ought to have been.”

Jamie looks a little bowled over, which is fair. Ted winces. That was kind of a lot. He really does need to get better at reigning himself in, not just saying anything and everything that comes to mind. Even so, saying it didn’t feel like enough, didn’t feel like it even approached all the things Ted has to say to Jamie, all the things that Jamie needed and deserved to hear.

“Oh,” Jamie manages, after a long pause. “Oh, yeah, it’s… it’s fine. Don’t worry about it.” He’s got his hands tucked into his sleeves. It reminds Ted of the day they met in the bar, when Jamie first asked to come back to Richmond. He’s started watching Jamie’s hands sometimes, ever since then. Even when he won’t talk, won’t say if something’s up with him, it tends to show up in his hands.

“I do, though.” When he sees the confused look that causes, Ted clarifies, “Worry about it. Not just ‘cause of all this, either. I worry about you all the time.”

Jamie breaks eye contact immediately, looking down and pulling his knees more tightly towards his chest. The tops of his ears are red, and what Ted can see of his face is flushed too.

It’s a familiar sort of reaction. He tends to go shy whenever he’s told anything just a little too sincerely without being given the opportunity to deflect. Seeing it makes Ted’s chest ache, like he can’t quite get a full breath in. He pushes that aside as much as he can, keeping his expression in a gentle smile. I know this is hard for you, he thinks, but I’m not taking it back.

Ted doesn’t like to sit in silence, has never been very comfortable with it, but he does anyway. He wants to give that space to settle, to sink in, like rain when the ground is dry and hardened, packed down after a drought.

“Talk with Trent about the interview went well,” Ted says after he feels like he’s left it for long enough. “He was real agreeable. Said that he’d do the interview, the article about it, and he went along with all the terms I set out.” He waits for Jamie’s head to lift, looking somewhere over Ted’s shoulder if not at his face, and then goes on. The last thing he wants to do is unleash a barrage of details that are just going to overwhelm Jamie and shut him down again. “Day after tomorrow, on the first, sound okay to you? Unless that’s too soon. We can wait, if you want.”

“Nah,” Jamie replies immediately. He’s fiddling with one of his sleeves, worrying it between the fingers of his opposite hand. There’s a fraying thread at the seam, which is odd. It looks like a fairly new shirt. “Better just get it over with, right? It’s not like it’s gonna get any easier.”

That’s a fair point, Ted has to admit. “Okay, alright, as long as you’re sure.” It’s honestly good to get a read on Jamie’s level of willingness to do this interview at all. Keeley told them he was on board, that he wanted to do it, but it’s hard to evaluate that sort of thing from a second-hand message. “I do want to make sure that you know you can back out any time if you decide you can’t do it. Any time, I mean it, I don’t care if you’re right in the middle of the thing. And if there’s anything you don’t want to talk about, you just say the word and he stops, you say the word and everything stops, okay? Trent’s agreed to that, and I trust his word.”

Jamie nods. He’s still pulling at the thread on his sleeve. It’s the same sleeve that’s bunched up a little where it’s covering the bandaging around his arm. The effect is strange and bulky, like he’s wearing two long-sleeved shirts, one on top of the other. Maybe it’s uncomfortable, or the wounds underneath hurt still. He can’t seem to stop messing with it.

“That sound okay to you?” Ted asks.

“Yeah, sure.” Despite what he says, Jamie doesn’t sound very sure. Any enthusiasm he’d had at first, solemn or no, is gone.

It’s giving Ted a bad feeling, honestly. If there’s a question about whether Jamie actually wants to go through with this, he doesn’t want to let it rest until he has an answer.

“I mean it, it’s okay if you don’t want to do the interview,” Ted tells him. “I will call Trent first thing in the morning and tell him that it’s off, if that’s what you want. Nobody’s gonna make you do anything you don’t want to, nobody’s gonna ask you to. Really, it’s okay.”

With a faint, humourless smile, and a huff of air that doesn’t even approach being an actual laugh, Jamie says, “No, I want to.”

Still, it feels wrong. Something about it feels wrong. Jamie’s still pulling at the thread, pulling until it snaps and he’s left with the little end piece and a split in his shirt sleeve that hadn’t been there before. Ted has the distinct sense that there’s something he isn’t saying, but he’s not sure. He doesn’t really know how much he can trust his internal barometer right now, to be honest. There’s still a bit of that sense of impending doom hanging over him that might be contributing to this. If there’s even a chance, though…

“Can I…” Jamie trails off. He wets his lips and looks out across the room. He smiles a kind of smile that belongs on someone else’s face. Belongs on no one’s face, ideally. It’s a small and vicious, ironic sort of smile. “Can I tell you something that’s — that’s just fucking pathetic, Ted?”

One would be forgiven for thinking that, by this point in his life — by this point in this apparently-cursed month — Ted’s heart has already been shattered as much as it’s possible for a person’s heart to shatter. He’d thought so too, himself. Until now, because when Jamie says that, he feels it break just a little worse in his chest. He thinks that, if this were one of the cartoons he used to get up early to watch on Sunday mornings, it would’ve sounded like a real nice wine glass, the kind that bursts into a million tiny pieces and looks like snow on kitchen tile.

“You can tell me anything,” Ted says. His mouth feels like sandpaper, and he sounds like it, too. “I hope you know that by now. And I promise, whatever it is, I won’t… You can tell me.”

Jamie’s eyes stay across the room, focused on the wall above the television. That awful little smile fades a bit, then comes back. He starts to say something, then stops, the sound catching in his throat. Humiliation burns bright on his cheeks, twin spots of red that Ted wants to put his hands over just so he can stop looking at them. It’s horrible, seeing Jamie look like this.

“I’m fucking scared,” is what Jamie eventually says. The confession is barely audible, and he shrinks in on himself when he says it. His shoulders hunch and his chin dips like he hates himself for allowing the words out.

Probably because he does.

“That’s alright,” Ted forces out, despite the way it feels like he’ll never be able to breathe again, never mind speak.

“Nah, I mean —” Stopping suddenly, Jamie swallows convulsively, snorts, and starts again. He wraps his arms around his shins and circles his own wrist in his thumb and forefinger, chafing it like an anxious compulsion — a step up from picking at the thread. “I mean, the press and the fucking internet and whatever, but — I’m fucking scared to do the interview because — because of my dad. He’s gonna be… He’ll be so fucking mad.”

Ted has to say something. He needs to say something, because he can’t live with the idea of sitting here and listening to Jamie admit that he’s afraid to do the interview because of his father, characterizing that as pathetic with that bitter look on his face, and not saying anything about it. But he can’t. For whatever reason, Ted’s voice has up and quit on him, and he can’t get it back in time to say anything at all before Jamie heaves in a deep, tremulous breath and keeps going.

“He’s gonna be fucking pissed and I know I — I’m so fucking scared of him.” The word ‘scared’ cracks into two syllables where there should only have been one. Jamie’s chafing his wrist harder, twisting his grip around it even faster. “I never — I didn’t ever tell anyone. About — About what he — Not anyone. Knew I weren’t supposed to. And I know everyone knows, but still, I’ve never said it, never told and that’s different. So I just. I know he’ll be so fucking angry, and I’m just. Scared. I can’t help it. I — It’s embarrassing and stupid and I know I shouldn’t be, should just grow up and get over myself, but — I just—”

“No.” Finally. There’s Ted’s voice, a day late and a dollar short. “Jamie, no, that’s not — No. Of course you are. That’s alright, just — Hey now, come here.” He moves farther down the couch, closer to Jamie, and holds his arms out. The swiftness and ease with which Jamie lets go of his wrist and falls into the waiting embrace tells Ted that he’s done exactly the right thing. For once.

As soon as he’s in Ted’s arms, Jamie presses as close as he can, his fingers digging into Ted’s back and his face tucked into the side of Ted’s neck. He’s muttering still, a muffled, almost gasped little ‘I’m scared, ‘m fuckin’ scared,’ and there it goes again. That wine glass sound, almost musical, as Ted’s heart is crushed further to pieces with each word.

“It’s alright that you’re scared,” Ted says. He adjusts the arm he has wrapped around Jamie so that he’s covered as much of Jamie’s back as possible, shielded as much of him as possible. His other hand holds the back of Jamie’s neck, covering the vulnerable expanse of skin between the collar of his shirt and the line of his hair. “It’s totally normal to be scared.”

Hell, Ted is scared, too. He’s afraid he’s been handling this all wrong, that he’s been staying too distant, that if he hadn’t, he’d have clung too close. He’s afraid of what’s still to come, what else is yet to be done to Jamie that he won’t be able to stop. Everywhere he’s looked over the last several days, Ted has felt that fear and seen it reflected back at him in the faces of those around him. It’s in his players and his fellow coaches, just as sure as it saturates his own brain. There’s not a one of them that isn’t feeling deeply shaken at best.

“It’s okay to be scared, ain’t nobody gonna judge you for that. Certainly not me. Nobody else, neither. It’s a scary, horrible thing that’s happened to you, that’s been happening to you.”

Jamie’s crying. If it hadn’t been for how close he is, Ted isn’t sure he’d have noticed at all. He’s quiet, terribly quiet, and he’s breathing in hitches that make his ribcage jerk in restrained, violent little spasms. Ted can feel it against his chest and under his palm. There are shivers coursing through Jamie’s body, like he’s straining himself with the effort of keeping nearly silent despite the tears seeping into Ted’s jacket collar.

How long’d it take you to learn that? How old were you? Ted wonders. He rubs Jamie’s back, a slow sweep up and down that he hopes will offer some kind of grounding input, something for him to focus on. Bet your old man was a real ‘if you don’t stop crying I’ll give you something to cry about’ type, huh. Jamie shudders, and Ted holds him tighter. Well, not here. You cry all you want here.

“I can’t just tell you not to be scared,” Ted says after a while. He’s determined to give Jamie as much time as he needs, but keeping quiet’s never been his strong suit. As he speaks, he’s careful to keep his grip just as strong. The last thing he wants is for Jamie to think Ted’s trying to push him away now that he’s talking again. “But I can tell you that your father’s in custody, and as long as that’s the case, he can’t get to you. You’re usually the one that bails him out when he’s been arrested, yeah?”

Ted doesn’t really know that for sure. He’s guessing, both that Jamie’s dad has a history of arrests and that the logistical and financial responsibility has fallen to Jamie, but he figures it’s a pretty good guess. It’s confirmed when he feels the nod.

“Right.” Even though he’d guessed, Ted still feels a little flare of anger at the unfairness of it when he knows for certain. “I don’t know how much of this you remember, but those nice folks with the legal team were saying he’s probably not gonna get bail anyway, since this is all real serious, and if he does, it’ll be high. He’s not getting out, and even if he did, we’re all here for you. Everyone that loves you is here, and we’re gonna make sure nothing more happens to you, best as we possibly can.”

Loves you. Jamie flinches when he hears the word, jolting the same way he’d done when James slapped him. Feeling that makes Ted’s own eyes sting hotly, his throat growing tight. Even so, he forces himself to keep talking through it.

“We love you,” he says. The insistence is met with a shudder and a wordless, profoundly bereaved sound. The tear that breaks through and races down Ted’s cheek itches, but he does nothing to wipe it away. He doesn’t move an inch. “I know, but we do. We love you, and we’re here. So it’s okay to be scared, you are… more than allowed to be scared, but you’re not handling it on your own anymore. Not your dad, not the interview, not any of it. You’re not dealing with any of this alone, I promise.”

There is always a point — and this is something that Ted has struggled with for most of his life — where it comes time to stop talking. There’s a point where words aren’t going to do it anymore, where everything that can be said has been said and it’s time to let it rest. It’s hard for him to do that, to stop talking, leave what he’s said to hang in silence and sink in, either to help or not. This is one of those times, though, so Ted makes himself do it. He makes himself stop the flood of words. A continuing stream of redundant, useless reassurances aren’t going to help anything, and would probably just come out sounding hollow if he let them keep going. Instead, Ted just keeps holding Jamie, settling in for the long haul.

If shutting up and keeping quiet is hard, this is the part that’s easy. Sitting there and letting Jamie cry, feeling his breathing slowly start to calm even as the crying gets a little louder, is the easiest thing in the world. Honestly, the fact that he can actually hear Jamie’s quiet sobbing now, like even the smallest bit of the oppressive shame and need to hide has been lifted, makes Ted prouder than he can say. He moves his hand from Jamie’s neck up to cup the back of his head, twisting just a bit until he can press his lips to the dark hair brushing his jaw, then settling his cheek against the same place.

Without the catch in Jamie’s next inhale, the faint whine that follows it, Ted wouldn’t have been sure if he’d felt it at all. The reaction makes him sad. It reminds him that this is probably a new and unfamiliar experience for Jamie. Even when he was much younger, even if things had at any point been better than they are now, Ted can’t imagine James Sr. had ever been the kind of father who’d held his son while he cried, let alone kissed him. It’s incomprehensible to Ted, thinking about that.

Henry Lasso is the axis on which Ted’s world spins. The thought of seeing him in pain, seeing him crying, and doing nothing to comfort him… He just can’t fathom it. And at this point, he can no more imagine turning away from Jamie than he can Henry.

Some time later, at least several minutes, Ted notices that Jamie’s grown very still. His breathing is deep and steady, the sobs having slowed and eased until they’ve finally stopped entirely. Peering around the room, Ted spots what he’d been hoping to find, then leans back and starts to carefully shift Jamie down to lay on the couch.

Hazy eyes blink up at Ted, confused and starting to become a little anxious. He can feel the tension in the body he still holds, returning bit by bit. Jamie’s awake, though not all of the way — he’s in that unclear, twilight place where nothing feels quite real and seems like he’s struggling to make his way out of it and into full consciousness.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Ted says, keeping his voice barely above a whisper. He can’t help but remember what Roy said, back in the front entry — he hasn’t been sleeping well. “It’s alright, I’m staying. I’m just gonna grab something real quick. I’ll be right back.”

Jamie relaxes enough that Ted can bear to pull away and stand up. He watches Jamie for a moment longer, sees him shut his eyes again and his face into the couch cushion, then risks the few steps to the armchair Keeley had been in earlier. There’s a dark green blanket thrown over the back — the objective of moving in the first place. He grabs it and brings it back, pleased to note that Jamie doesn’t seem to have gotten worse again in his absence. It was only a few moments, but sometimes that’s enough.

Shaking the blanket out, Ted lays it over Jamie carefully, making sure that he’s covered and that he’ll be warm enough. He tucks the edges in and smoothes out the folds with practiced, familiar ease. Maybe it’s the way he’d just been thinking about his son, but Ted is suddenly struck breathless by the powerful sense memory of tucking Henry into bed, back home. Jamie’s different — he’s much bigger, obviously, but he also lacks Henry’s boneless, pliant sprawl. His eyes are mostly closed, still obviously being pulled at by sleep, but he’s not all the way there. He’s awake enough to watch what Ted’s doing, to shudder a little every so often. It seems like an involuntary reflex, like shivering when you get too cold, and it makes Ted’s chest ache.

Once the blanket is all situated, Ted honours his promise and doesn’t leave. He sits on the edge of the coffee table and sets a hand on Jamie’s head. It makes Jamie startle a little at first — just a slight jerk that calms immediately when Ted murmurs, “Just me, son. Just me.”

(He’s relieved when the word doesn’t seem to catch Jamie in a bad place. Ted hadn’t thought about it before he’d let it slip out, and he knew it was a risk the split second he said it. Thankfully, there’s no ill effect he can see.)

The room is quiet then, dark except for the standing lamp in the corner. Ted sits on the table and strokes Jamie’s hair long after his eyes have fully closed and it’s clear he’s asleep. He knows he could leave now, but he doesn’t want to. Not yet. This is the calmest Ted has felt since they won the Coventry game, sitting there and brushing back the longer hair at the top of Jamie’s head.

Ted stays there for a long time, right until he can feel himself starting to get so tired his body’s starting to fall asleep without his brain’s permission. He texts Roy that he’s leaving, then uses the cab company’s app to request a ride back to his own place.

Getting up and walking away is a tall order. Ted is reluctant to leave Jamie, though he knows he needs to get something approaching a good night’s sleep himself if he doesn’t want to be a complete trainwreck tomorrow. He runs his fingers through Jamie’s hair one final time, brushing his thumb over Jamie’s temple, then forces himself to rise and walk into the hall.

To Ted’s surprise, Roy is halfway down the stairs when he steps out of the living room. He’d thought the man was probably asleep and had planned to see if he could lock the door from the inside before closing it behind himself. Stopping and waiting for him, Ted raises his eyebrows when they’re both standing on even footing.

Roy doesn’t answer the silent question at all, just takes a step past Ted and peers into the living room. “He out?” he asks in an undertone, not bothering to specify who ‘he’ is.

“Yeah, yeah,” Ted says, matching his volume. “He’s… He’s havin’ a tough time, but we talked a bit and he’s asleep now, yeah.”

Roy’s expression is heavy with acute relief when he withdraws from the living room doorway and looks back at Ted. There are faint circles under his eyes, deep lines in his forehead that he’s hardly seen without these days. This is wearing hard on him, Ted can tell. It’s wearing hard on all of them.

“Thanks,” Roy mutters. “Need a ride home?”

“Nah, that’s alright. Requested a cab, should be here in a couple minutes and in the meantime I’m gonna get some night air, I think. See if that’ll wake me up a little, don’t wanna be noddin’ off in some nice cabbie’s backseat.”

They walk to the door together. Ted’s just stepped out onto the porch when a light thump catches his attention, and he looks over his shoulder. Roy’s standing there, fist braced against the doorframe he’s just knocked against. He’s got an expression like he’s just taken a bite of a lemon, but there’s something in his furrowed brow that’s determined, too.

“What you said earlier,” he says. Roy’s growl of a voice is low, even for him, and stiff with awkwardness. “The… thing about me, about doing well with him. You are too, you know.”

Ted’s smile freezes on his face. He doesn’t really know what to say to that. It’s so blatantly just… “I don’t know about that, Roy, but I appreciate you saying it.”

“I do know, though,” Roy insists, the loudest he’s been all night. Apparently, his aversion to talking about feelings — his own or anyone else’s — is surpassed by his determination to say whatever he’s decided to say at the last moment before Ted is fully gone from his house. “You’re holding shit together at Richmond, with the lads — I know a couple of them have been to talk to you, and I know from the ones who’ve come to me that those aren’t easy conversations. And tonight, I don’t know what you did or talked about, but I can bet it was fucking hard. So just… Look, Lasso, go easy on yourself, yeah?”

A little speechless, all Ted can do is nod. A few seconds later, he manages, “Yeah. Yeah, I’ll try. Thank you.”

His work here apparently done, Roy thumps the doorway with his knuckles again, then turns around and heads back inside. Ted goes in the opposite direction, down towards the street to wait for his cab. He looks up at the cloudy night sky, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly. Nice night, all things considered. It’s cold, but not intolerably so, and Ted feels lighter than he has in some time.

It’s the thirtieth of April, and Jamie has been spending most of his day trying very hard not to think about what he’s going to do tomorrow, which means of course that he’s done a lot of thinking about what he’s going to do tomorrow, mixed with some sporadic watching of reality television. He can’t really go anywhere, which is what he’d really like to do. It would be nice to get out of the house and do something else, except that he knows that the moment he so much as goes with Keeley to the shops he’s going to get mobbed, so that’s right out.

The whole thing has left Jamie a bit stir-crazy, to be honest. It’s enough to send him out into the back garden to kick a football around for a while, just to burn off some of the energy that’s built up under his skin. There’s not much about it that’s particularly exciting, but at least it beats sitting around doing nothing, and he can get his heart rate up a bit.

After a while, Roy pops his head out the back door and calls over, “Dani wants to know if he can come round in a bit to see you.”

Jamie stares at him like he’s gone mad, because it rather seems as if he has. “This is… your house. Why are you asking me?”

At first, it looks like Roy is going to try and answer that, but he ends up dismissing it with a shake of his head. He ignores Jamie’s question, and instead asks, “Do you want him over here or not?”

And of course he does, because literally who wouldn’t want Dani around in any situation? It’s probably impossible for him to make things worse. Jamie would bet money on it.

Once he’s got his answer, Roy nods and the door closes, and then all Jamie’s energy is gone in one fell swoop. The lack of stamina is as frustrating as it is worrying, especially since he’s got no idea what the reason is. Maybe something about the concussion, maybe all of the anxiety that’s built up over tomorrow, maybe something else entirely. Regardless, Jamie doesn’t think he could keep running anymore to save his own life. He leaves the football by the steps up to the deck and goes inside.

When the knock sounds at the front door, Jamie is the only one nearby. Roy is upstairs and Keeley is out, so after pausing to see if the actual homeowner plans to come and deal with it, he gets up to answer.

Jamie opens the door warily, though he can’t quite articulate why. All he can say in defence of his own suddenly climbing stress levels is that he doesn’t know who’s there, and that it could mean any number of things, none of which seem like they’d be any good. Surprises generally aren’t good, in Jamie’s experience. They certainly haven’t been good for this last week in particular. But when Jamie opens the door, shoulders tense and jaw set, the person standing there isn’t bad news. The person standing there is, in fact, just about the best news it could’ve been.

Dani smiles as soon as he comes into view, though it’s a more anxious, subdued version of his usual solar flare of a grin. As soon as Jamie sets eyes on him, he feels ridiculous. Obviously it’s Dani. Roy had said earlier that he was coming over, who the hell else could it have been? His nerves are just shot, that’s what it is.

“Can I come in? I would have texted you instead of Roy, but I didn’t know if your phone was on after yesterday.” There it is again in his voice, the same thread of anxiety his expression holds, so out of step with the way Dani usually is that it immediately makes Jamie worried.

It feels beyond strange to be doing this in someone else’s house, but Jamie just steps back and waves him inside, saying, “Yeah, yeah, sure.”

As they go inside, Dani looks around, taking in their surroundings. It’s not his first time in Roy’s house, but he’s surveying the walls and furniture like it is anyway, the same way Jamie does when he needs a focus to steady his nerves.

They wind up in the kitchen, Jamie filling and turning on the electric kettle on the counter and getting mugs out of the cupboard to make tea. He’s not really sure why he does it — once again, this is not his house, and he’s not exactly the biggest fan of tea, not to mention that he has no idea whether Dani likes it or not, but he’s starting to see why Roy can’t seem to stop making it this week. There’s something incredibly appealing about the idea of having something to do with his hands.

While the kettle starts to heat up, Dani leans against the breakfast bar and says, “I know your interview is going to be tomorrow. Coaches told us about the plan yesterday, after they told us your father had been arrested.” Jamie tries not to twitch when he says that, and thinks he mostly manages it. “I wanted to come and see you before then, to wish you luck, and because I have something for you.”

That’s unexpected.

Dani reaches into the pocket of the colourful wool jumper he’s wearing and pulls something out of it, though Jamie can’t tell what it is. He beckons with his closed fist and Jamie frowns but holds out his own hand anyway, over the top of the counter between them.

The item that Dani reaches out and lays in Jamie’s open palm is small, though heavy for its size. It’s made of metal, a hammered silver circle on a necklace chain. The circle is engraved with an image of a man holding a staff and a round object that Jamie doesn’t recognize in the middle, with five short words curving around the flattened border.

St. Jude Pray For Us, it reads.

“It was my mother’s idea,” Dani says, sticking his now-empty hand back in his jumper pocket and rocking on his heels. “She’s been following the news of what’s been happening here. To you. I was on the phone with her a few days ago, and she said I should get you this. That you seemed like you could use someone looking out for you.”

Some of Jamie’s complete incomprehension must be showing on his face, because Dani elaborates.

“It’s a Saint’s medal. Here, see?” He hooks his thumb under a chain around his neck that Jamie’s noticed him wearing a few times, pulling a similar pendant from underneath his shirt.

It’s a little hard to read, until Jamie squints and leans closer. There’s another little portrait in the same style, though this time the man depicted in it is carrying a child. The text is in Spanish: San Cristóbal Ruega Por Nosotros. Jamie doesn’t know what it means in English, but he can guess it’s probably something similar to what the one he’s now holding reads.

“San Cristóbal, Christopher, he looks after travellers. My mother gave this to me when I left Guadalajara; she said she needed to know someone was watching over me when she could not. That one,” he says, dropping his own necklace and pointing to the one Jamie holds, “is Saint Jude. He looks after people who are going through a difficult time. And also lost causes, but don’t worry, I didn’t mean that one.”

People going through a difficult time. Lost causes. Jamie has to snort a little at that, twisting the chain through his fingers.

“Anyway,” Dani says, a little louder. There’s something strange and shadowed in his eyes, and Jamie hates it. Dani’s not supposed to look like that. Dani’s never supposed to look like that. “I do not know what you believe or practice, and I don’t mean to overstep, and you don’t have to keep it, but I have wanted to do… something for you. Not being able to do anything at Coventry, and then with all of the rest…” He shakes his head and takes a short, harsh breath in and out. “I couldn’t do anything to protect you, and when there is nothing we can do, this is what the people in my family do. So when she said that, I… You do not have to keep it, but I wanted to give it to you.” When he finishes with his explanation, Dani shrugs, rocking on his heels again.

“Oh,” Jamie says, looking down at the medal. It glints faintly in the light. “I don’t — I mean, I don’t really practice anything, but. Thanks. I… Thanks.” He doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t know how to begin to express what he feels, looking at the little necklace and trying to process everything Dani said about it. What he’s been given along with the simple circle of engraved metal.

It’s not Jamie’s style — not remotely fashionable at all by anyone’s standards. It’s just a weird metal portrait of a funny little man with some words around it, and Jamie’s always been more of a rings guy than a necklace guy when it comes to jewellery. Still, he loves it immediately and fiercely. Not for what it looks like, but for what it means. For the fact that Dani gave it to him, for the thought of Dani’s mum on another continent, worrying about Jamie enough that she told her son he ought to ask one of their Saints to look after him, even though he weren’t even a Catholic.

“That’s nice of her,” Jamie says faintly. His voice sounds a little thick, and he hopes it’s not too obvious. “Of your mum, I mean. ’S a nice idea.”

Dani’s laughter catches his attention, pulling it up away from the medal.

“This is nothing,” he says, bright and amused. He’s got the same expression as he had when they’d sat together on the training pitch, talking about how Dani’s mother had once played for the Mexican national team. His eyes crinkle deeply with his shining smile. “If we were in my city, she would have made me bring over bags of food, so you didn’t have to worry about cooking anything. It’s what she has always done when one of her friends has been going through something hard, or one of mine. There would be nowhere to put it all. At least enough for a week.”

Lost for words, Jamie closes his hand around the medal. It’s warmed by his palm now, but just as heavy as it had been when Dani first handed it to him. He finds he rather likes the weight of it, how solid it is. These days, he often finds himself feeling like he might be about to lose his grip on the world and float away. The idea of an anchor sounds nice.

Unable to put any of his feelings into words, at least not any that will make sense, Jamie reaches out instead. He waves his empty left hand at Dani, arm aching when the movement pulls at partially-healed wounds that are neatly taped over with gauze. “Just — Can you—” he starts, and that’s all that makes it out before he starts to choke on his own voice.

Jamie’s eyes feel hot, a pressure building in his head, and he honestly feels more exasperated than anything when he recognizes the feeling. He’s got to stop crying. First the other night on the porch with Roy, and then last night he’d let Ted fucking hold him while he cried. This is getting ridiculous, he needs to stop doing this, and he presses the side of his other hand to his eyes — the one with the medal in it. He can feel the edge of the necklace chain brush his cheek. No tears come, but Jamie isn’t sure if it’s because they’re not going to or because they just haven’t started yet.

A moment later, he feels a warm hand on the back of his neck, tugging him over until he hits Dani’s chest. It’s a brief hug, over quickly when Jamie pulls away and stands straight, taking a deep, bracing breath and clearing his throat, but it serves the purpose he’d needed. It said what Jamie himself couldn’t.

The kettle makes a beeping sound and the light in the base goes from white to blue, indicating the water’s ready. Grateful for something to do, Jamie tucks the medal into his pocket and opens the drawer he’s seen Roy get his tea from, rummaging around in it.

“How does, ah —” Jamie squints at the box he’s pulled out, reading, “Lemon Zest Mint sound?”

“I have never had that type of tea before, but I would be happy to try it!” responds Dani cheerfully. “I am always happy to try new things.”

Which, well. Of course he is. Jamie pulls the dish of rock sugar over too, slides a mug across to Dani, and sits across from him at the breakfast bar. While waiting for the tea to steep, Jamie pulls the necklace out of his pocket again, laying it flat in his palm and studying it. Dani starts up a steady stream of chatter about something thankfully unrelated to absolutely anything the news would find interesting, not seeming to care that he’s not getting much in the way of a response. It’s while he’s sitting there, listening to that bright, familiar voice and looking at the St. Jude medal in his hand, that Jamie has a sudden, personal epiphany.

Dani Rojas is his best mate.

That isn’t the sort of thing that should probably rattle Jamie, but here he is. Dani is his best mate. He hasn’t had one of those in a really long time — not since he was a kid — and after a while, he’d kind of figured that was the sort of thing you just didn’t have anymore once you grew up. Except apparently not, because that’s what Dani is to him. Once he’s had the thought, Jamie can’t do anything with it but sit there and hold it, like he holds the necklace.

It’s a frightening thing to realize, which seems like the wrong reaction, but he’s rattled. A little bit scared, because Jamie doesn’t know if he knows how to do that sort of thing now that he’s an adult. Have a best mate — be someone’s best mate. He’s going to have to try, though, because it’s Dani, and Dani is fucking wonderful, so he deserves that. Honestly, whatever the best Jamie can do is, however hard he can try, Dani deserves about a million times better, but this is what he’s got to offer. And, by some incomprehensible miracle, Dani’s decided he’s worth the risk. Jamie has a medal to a Saint he’s never heard of in his hand, and a smiling man across the counter from him — now providing a thorough review of Lemon Zest Mint Tea — to prove it.

“Jamie?”

The review cuts off, and Jamie realizes he’s been staring at Dani without responding for quite some time, at least long enough to provoke the concerned look now being levelled at him. It’s not a particularly strong look, which is nice. Just a shade past the usual level of ‘Jamie spaced out mid-interaction’ worry.

“Are you alright?” Dani asks, and Jamie smiles at him.

“Yeah,” he says. “I’m okay.” And it feels really, really fucking good to not be lying.

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

The tension levels that had almost dissipated over the course of Dani’s visit don’t stay low for long. The more Jamie thinks about what he has to do tomorrow, the more on-edge he feels. Keeley reminding him about a dozen times that he doesn’t have to go, that he can cancel at any point and no one will have a problem with it, isn’t remotely helping. Jamie has decided that he wants to do this interview, and he’s resolute in that decision. The choice to go to that office and tell Trent Crimm about what happened to him is one he isn’t wavering on, far from it. Something else looms over that, though, a massive uncertainty that’s making it hard to think of anything else.

Jamie doesn’t know how much he should say. He doesn’t know how much he can say. The scope of the interview is a mystery — he doesn’t know if Trent plans to stick to the events at Coventry or if he’s going to dig into other things, too. The rest of everything that came before it, all of the other Coventrys that nobody had been around to see. And if Trent does ask, what then? What should Jamie say if that happens? Should he keep everything that he still can to himself, or should he take the chance and finally let it all spill out? There’s something appealing about the idea, if he’s honest.

Half of the instinct to bare absolutely everything that Trent asks him — and maybe some stuff he doesn’t, just for good measure — is vindictiveness. The world wants to stop and stare, gawk at and gossip about Jamie’s baggage? His — his trauma, or whatever? Fine. Let them, then. Let them see all of it and understand the full breadth of what they’re looking at.

The other half is a little harder for Jamie to acknowledge, but it’s there all the same. It’s the part of him that has been desperately searching for an excuse for years, grasping at straws to find an opportunity to finally tell someone, anyone absolutely everything, no matter how afraid he is. It’s the kid who had sat wordless through dinners with his mum, barely touching his food and silently begging her to ask why he didn’t want to see his dad this weekend. It’s the boy who had stared at his teachers and willed them to please notice that something was desperately, malignantly wrong in his life.

It’s the same part of Jamie that had once sat in a pub with Ted and then leaned against the doorframe of Higgins’s office, both times dancing around what he wanted to say. He can be a bit… he’d told Ted, then made a face rather than finishing, and he’d said, He’s just a dick, not much you can do with that to Higgins, when what he’d meant to say was, See, the thing is, my dad hurts me, and I don’t think he’s supposed to do that. Right? Please tell me it’s wrong of him to do that. You’re a good man. You’re a dad. Please tell me you’d never do to your son what my dad’s done to me, and that he shouldn’t have done it neither.

Except he hadn’t said any of that, had he? Neither Ted nor Higgins understood what Jamie was trying to tell them, which was only his own fault in the end. Even when he’s tried to talk, Jamie’s just fucked it up, and he doesn’t know how to make sure it doesn’t happen again this time. Figuring that out is only made about a hundred times harder by the fact that they’ve been going over the logistics for longer than he feels like should be possible for such a relatively straightforward event.

Every word Roy and Keeley say about the stupid fucking interview with Trent fucking Crimm makes Jamie feel like someone’s electrocuting him, just the smallest bit — tiny shocks that make him go just a little more rigid each time. Even so, it has to be done. They need to make sure everyone is on the same page about what’s happening and when, if this thing is going to happen at all.

The interview is going to happen at three in the afternoon. Along with the proposed time, Roy informs them that Trent has agreed to do the interview anywhere Jamie wants — there at Roy’s house, in a conference room at Nelson, wherever. Jamie opts for Trent’s office. It’s a good idea, he figures, to have some kind of a neutral ground for this sort of thing. Somewhere private but not… personal.

“Alright,” Roy says, nodding. “So, three o’clock tomorrow, at Crimm’s office. I’ll get the address from Ted. I’m sure he’ll offer to drive you over as soon as I talk to him, too, so that takes care of that.”

“Hang on, no.” As soon as Roy mentions Ted driving him to the interview, Jamie’s shaking his head. “Ted can’t take me. That’s not happening. Don’t need fucking anyone to drive me. No.”

There is absolutely no way on this green earth Jamie is going to let Ted drive him to that stupid fucking interview. The last time Ted saw him, he’d been held while he cried all over the man, and he absolutely cannot be seen like that twice in three days. If Ted drives him to Trent’s office, Jamie knows with an absolute, horrible certainty that this is exactly how he’s going to end up. A crying wreck. There’s no way he’ll be able to avoid it, because Ted will do what he always does, be kind and gentle in the way he always does — the way that Jamie has absolutely no defence for. If Jamie has to deal with that on the way to that interview, on the way out of the frying pan and into the fire — which is what this is, even if he chose to make the jump — he will not be able to handle it at all.

“I don’t need to be driven,” Jamie repeats, stubborn and insistent.

Equally as set in his stance, Roy shoots back, “You fucking do, actually, don’t be an idiot.”

Jamie’s temper flares, sudden and harsh. “Oh come off it, where do you get off calling me an idiot. I know how to drive a fucking car.”

“I wouldn’t be calling you an idiot if you weren’t acting like an—”

“Roy!”

At Keeley’s sharp rebuke of his name, Roy has the decency to look regretful. “Okay, I didn’t mean—”

“You did, though!” Jamie snaps, interrupting him. “You obviously think I’m a fucking idiot because you apparently think I forgot how to drive and need to be taken to Crimm’s office like a fucking kid getting dropped off at primary school. Think Ted ought to pack me a lunch, too? Tie my shoes, maybe?”

Which, okay. Jamie shouldn’t have said that. Not because he regrets sniping at Roy, because Roy fucking had it coming on this one, but because it’s backfired on him spectacularly. Dropping someone off at primary school, packing their lunch, tying their shoes… All things that fathers, dads did for their kids. It had been a jab aimed for Roy, meant to mock Roy, but all that the implied comparison in Jamie’s tirade has done is hurt himself instead.

“You know that’s not why I think you need someone to drive you,” Roy says. “If you don’t want it to be Ted for whatever reason, sure, fucking whatever, I’m sure Keeley would take you. Right?”

Keeley nods, saying, “Of course I would! You know I would, right?” and Roy gestures at her.

“See? But you can’t go alone.”

The ultimatum provides a welcome distraction from the other things bubbling up in Jamie’s head. Anger is easier to fall back on than any other feeling, and he sneers, pacing around to the other side of the couch. The furniture puts a barrier between them, and for some reason that makes him feel just a little less like he might be about to explode. Not that it stops him from continuing, full-on yelling back at Roy this time.

“Since when do you get to decide what I can and can’t do?”

“It’s not me, it’s basic fucking common sense. For fuck’s sake.” The fact that Roy doesn’t yell back is actually worse than if he had. Instead, he just speaks with an eye-rolling kind of moderate annoyance, like this argument is trying his patience at best. If Roy had at least yelled at him, it would mean he was being taken seriously.

Jamie isn’t able to say why that’s the last straw. Even so, it is, and he laughs. It’s a harsh, loud sound that makes both of them draw back a step. The sight gives him a thrill of sick satisfaction, followed immediately by a twisting lurch in his gut that he hates.

“Cut the bullshit. Cut the pity. Both of you cut it out with the fucking pity.” He spits the word, his heartbeat thundering in his ears. Roy and Keeley are staring at him openly, and a headache throbs at Jamie’s temple, pulsing stronger as he feels the fight building in his chest kick even harder to life. He feels cornered, and he knows what happens to people who are cornered when they’re weak. “I know that’s what this is, ain’t it? You fucking pity me, you feel bad ‘cause you saw my dad beat me up and now I’ve got a fuck-load of stitches in my face, and everyone’s all talking about me, but I’m fine and you can fucking stop. I’ve been dealing with this shit myself for years, I don’t need to be coddled or minded, and you might feel like you’re doing your good deed for the year by taking pity on me and letting me stick around here, but that doesn’t mean I’m actually completely fucking helpless.”

“Jamie,” Roy tries. He sounds like he might be getting a little pissed now, and Keeley’s staring with a slightly open mouth, like she can’t believe what she’s hearing, never mind come up with a response to it.

“Or, hey, maybe not,” Jamie continues, blowing right past both reactions. “Maybe you just think this is funny, or maybe Lasso guilted you into taking me on because someone’s gotta deal with my shit, right?”

It’s a mean thing to say. Jamie knows it’s a mean thing to say even as he says it, and he knows he should stop. He doesn’t. He’s already talking again, loud and upset, hands bunched into fists and tucked against his sides, his arms folded tight. The left one hurts — he’s pressing against the sensitive tissue of his healing wounds. His eyebrow throbs, and so does his mouth. The stitches mostly just itch by this point, but right now they hurt.

“Maybe you’re just stacking it all up and having a little laugh together about how much I owe you now — because I know I do. Must be a long fucking list that I don’t need to add any more to by letting someone take me to this stupid interview, which I am more than capable of doing on my own.”

“Oi.” Keeley’s interruption cuts through anything Jamie could’ve thought to say next, leaving him silent and voiceless and shaking from head to toe. She sounds mad. “That’s enough, alright? Now come here and sit with me for a minute, because I need you to listen to something.”

Walking to the couch, Keeley sits down first, then gestures to the empty side. She’s left plenty of space, but Jamie’s still reluctant. He hesitates, face still feeling hot, the firecracker that’s gone off inside him still smouldering. Now that he’s been stopped, that something has interrupted his outburst long enough for Jamie to start to realize what he’s just said and who he’s just said it to, the guilt starts to creep in at the edges. Not all the way, but enough that he doesn’t want to look at either of them.

“Jamie, please,” Keeley says. It’s more firm than pleading, but it’s still enough to start moving Jamie’s stiff legs, edging around the couch to ease down as far away from her as he can get without sitting up on the arm itself.

Taking a deep breath, Jamie gets ready to say something, even though he doesn’t know what it’s going to be, but she doesn’t let him get that far.

“No, just — You’ve done enough talking for the moment, I think. Just listen. I need to say this, and I need you to hear me. We are not fucking with you, and the thing is that hearing you make accusations like that about us really fucking hurts.”

Whatever Jamie could’ve been expecting, that didn’t really make the list. His mouth goes dry and the angry, defensive heaving of his shoulders stutters. The defensive fury he’d lashed out with is hard to hold onto once he’s no longer leaning straight into it as hard as he can.

Slowly, Keeley moves from her corner of the couch closer to the one he’s pressed himself back into, and when she’s close enough, she reaches out to him. Jamie watches her hands get closer and closer and manages not to jerk out of the way before she can touch him. Instead, he allows her to gently pull his arms away from his torso, prying them of their tense cross over his chest with a light grip.

Once she’s dislodged his arms, tugged them out to sit over his lap instead, Keeley doesn’t let go. She just sits there and slips her hands down his wrists to hold them. Jamie looks down at them with a distant kind of unsteady fascination. He watches Keeley’s thumb stroke the side of his hand, brushing the bone of his wrist. The combination of the soft touch and the hard edge in her voice when she speaks is disorienting, and he’s not really sure what to make of it all.

“I know this is hard for you. When people say kind things, or try to help you when you’re already feeling trapped and hurt,” Keeley says, and echoes of Ted from last night ring in the words. It raises a lump in Jamie’s throat, and he coughs lightly against it. “I know you think the world is out to get you, and that the only person you’ll ever be able to count on is you, and I know you have good reasons for believing that.”

Keeley’s thumb strokes Jamie’s wrist again, and it’s the only thing that keeps him from getting up and bolting. She’s not being harsh in the way she says it, the way she lays bare all those things they’ve talked about glancingly before but never quite dug into, but she’s not hugely cautious with it either. Her voice is unyielding, refusing to back down.

“I knew that you did before, and I know even better now. But it’s still not fair to Roy and me to say that sort of thing to us — and it’s not fair to you either, to go that far trying to push us away. It’s cruel. And I know you’re not a cruel person. You can be inconsiderate sometimes, but you aren’t cruel.”

It would be easier to take if she was cruel. If she’d yell at him, or tell him to get the fuck out, or fucking hit him or something. But she wouldn’t. Keeley’d never do any of that, and she’s the first person Jamie really got close enough to as an adult to be able to trust that without question. Knowing that, remembering that, makes everything that’s happened in the last few spiralling minutes feel so much worse.

“We are not,” Keeley says, squeezing Jamie’s hands for emphasis, “keeping count of — of what you owe us for anything we’ve done. Fuck, Jamie, you don’t owe us anything. Maybe that’s hard for you to believe or understand, but I’m telling you the truth, and I know you can’t look me in the eyes and call me a liar.” She pauses and ducks her head a bit to make sure he’s looking right at her. “Can you?”

And, no. He can’t. Fucking of course he can’t. He could never do that, not to her. Ashamed and exhausted, Jamie shakes his head. A shiver courses through his body, and still Keeley doesn’t let go of his hands.

“Okay. Then hear me. No one is pitying you. We are having compassion for you, and we hurt for you because that’s what happens when someone you love gets hurt. It hurts you, too. So the things we’re doing, right? Me and Roy and Ted and everyone else? When we offer to help you? That’s real. All of it. The help, the support, the kindness. The love. It’s all real.”

Listening to Keeley say that to him that feels like every wound Jamie got at Coventry has been reopened again and someone’s poured alcohol straight over them. It burns, hot and bright, and he grits his teeth and breathes through it. He breathes through it until the burning fades and all that’s left behind is warmth, settling into his chest and easing his tight lungs.

“Right, Roy?” Keeley tacks the question on the end of her little speech like an afterthought, raising her voice a bit and looking over her shoulder at the man in question. He’s still back where he’d been before, keeping his distance.

Roy’s arms are folded, and he’s got a look on his face that’s only marginally not a glare, but he just nods. “She’s fucking right,” he says, and he doesn’t even really sound pissed off, just kind of strangely intense. “Should listen to her.”

Tight-chested and unable to do anything but blink in slow disbelief, Jamie says nothing. One could easily characterize what’s just happened there as Roy Kent agreeing — directly and without a fight — that he loved Jamie, which… Jamie is just going to have to take that and put it way down in a little box in his mind somewhere until he can take it out and process it sometime later, because that is not happening right now. The only thing he knows now is that these people need to stop fucking telling him that they love him. At this rate, Jamie’s afraid he might not be able to take it if they decided to stop. If they take it back.

Ted, and now Keeley, and Roy by association. Jamie just doesn’t know what to do with it.

“Right, see?” Keeley squeezes his hands for a second time, shaking them a bit. “So just — if you can’t do it for you yet, that’s alright, but if you can’t do it for you, then please try and stop shooting down everything we try to do for you for our sake, yeah? Because it hurts. You can’t keep doing that.”

“Yeah,” Jamie mutters. His eyes sting, but he’s somehow managed to not cry at all during this whole mess of an interaction, and he feels calmer than he has since they started talking about the interview. “Alright.” Taking a deep breath, Jamie lets it out slowly, then adds, “Sorry. Shouldn’t’ve said all that. I’ll — I’ll try not to do it again.”

“Thank you,” Keeley says, and it might have felt like a condescending response to his agreement, except for the intense and genuine gratitude plain in her voice. She lets go of his hands, reaching up to give his cheek a gentle pat, then withdrawing back to her side of the couch. “Now, we still have to sort out how you’re getting to the interview. Roy, do you want to try saying why you think someone ought to take him, so that we can understand where we’re all coming from?”

Something claustrophobic rears and kicks inside Jamie’s ribcage and he wants to bolt straight out the front door at the idea of that conversation beginning again. He doesn’t. It’s real, he repeats to himself, instead. It’s real. Keeley said it’s real. Roy agreed. It’s real.

“I think you need someone to drive you,” Roy says in a slightly strained, slow-paced voice that Jamie recognizes. It’s the voice Roy uses when something’s started to go wrong with them, when they’ve started getting worked up with each other and he’s trying very hard to be patient and clear and pull it all back from the edge of the cliff. “I think it’s necessary, because even if you are able to get to the interview alright, I seriously doubt that you will be in any condition to get yourself back home safely afterwards, and nobody wants you getting in a wreck.”

Jamie wants to hate it. He wants to claw and spit and curse and reject the whole thing wholesale. Except that… Except that, honestly, Roy has a point, and it’s a fair one. Thinking back to when he went to give evidence to DI Clarke at the police station, Jamie doesn’t know that he’d have been able to drive home from that. He doesn’t even remember the drive back, honestly. And however hard that interview had been, it’s sure to pale in comparison to how hard this one is going to be. Roy’s right. He probably won’t physically be able to get back in one piece.

“Okay,” he forces out after a while. Conceding the point feels bad — there’s a voice in the back of his head reminding him of how stupid it is to admit to weakness like that, and it still feels just incorrect to step back and let Roy win an argument —- but there’s no way around it. “Okay, but it can’t be Ted.” Jamie can see as soon as he says it that Keeley’s about to say something, and before she can he rushes to say, “Can’t be you either, Keeley. You two would just… You’d be too — too nice to me.”

Keeley frowns, looking suddenly incredibly concerned, shoulders rising as she takes a deep breath, and Jamie holds up a hand to stall her.

“No, just — Listen. It’s not about—” He sighs harshly, pulling the ends of his sleeves down over his hands again to give himself something to do besides think about what he’s saying and what it means. “It’s just that if it’s one of you, you’ll be too fucking nice to me, right, all — all gentle and shit, and if I’m gonna keep my shit together, I need that to not happen. I won’t be able to handle it, is what I’m saying, so it can’t be Ted, and it can’t be you.”

Jamie’s cheeks are flaming, but there’s nothing judgmental in either Keeley or Roy’s expressions. Roy nods once, then shrugs.

“That’s easy, then.”

Both Jamie and Keeley turn to him with identical looks of confusion, and Roy returns a look of his own that says very clearly that they’re both obtuse.

“Oh, come on,” he says after pausing for long enough that he seems to realize that neither of them are about to catch onto what he means without him saying it outright. “Obviously I’m gonna do it. Nobody in the history of the world would ever accuse me of being too fucking nice to you, would they?”

There’s a very quiet choking sound, and Keeley puts a hand over her mouth. She looks like she’s trying pretty hard not to laugh, which prompts Roy to glare at her.

Maybe she has a point. Maybe that would have been true before and things are different now, but for the sake of needing some kind of halfway decent option, Jamie needs to believe it’s true. So he tells himself that, yeah, that’s right, Roy is never nice to anyone, ever, and certainly not to him, and he agrees to the plan.

Somehow, settling that doesn’t really make anything feel much more settled. It doesn’t help that there’s still one more thing they need to sort out about how tomorrow is going to go, and it’s something Jamie hadn’t even considered until Roy brings it up.

It comes up about an hour after the moderate dust-up over whether or not Jamie needs to be driven to the interview. Things have somewhat settled into a slightly fragile, exhausted calm by that point, which only emphasizes how reluctant Roy seems to disrupt it. He clearly doesn’t want to risk stirring the pot again, but it’s a necessary point.

“Sarah got back to me and said she can come over tomorrow evening and take out your stitches, if that’s alright,” he says, and Jamie immediately feels another wave of exhaustion wash over him. “I can tell her a different time if you don’t want to deal with anything else after the interview, but her schedule’s a bit crazy this week. Surgery’s short staffed or something, I guess. We can probably have one of the team doctors do it or something, I’m sure—”

“No,” Jamie’s quick to interrupt as soon as the possibility of someone else removing the stitches is raised. He’s not totally certain why, but he doesn’t want to have to deal with any other doctors if he can help it. The medical staff at Richmond are nice — they’re good at their jobs and Jamie doesn’t have a problem with them, but the idea of someone else poking at these particular injuries is just… He would really, really rather have Sarah Kent do it, if that’s at all an option. He finds her demeanour easy to be around. It’s comforting and somewhat oddly familiar, though he’d not known her before all this.

“Alright, if you’re sure.” Roy doesn’t sound like he wholly thinks it’s a good idea, and that raises Jamie’s hackles.

“Yes I’m sure. I can make my own choices, I’m not some incompetent fucking kid, it’ll be fine.”

“Hey, Jamie.” The interjection comes from Keeley, looking up from where she’s working on her computer at the table. “Cool it. We’re trying to help, remember?”

It’s a gentle reminder, but Jamie’s cheeks burn anyway. “Sorry, Roy,” he mutters. He goes to scrub his hands over his face, only to stop when he remembers the stitches.

That’s one thing he’s certain about: it is going to be really fucking good to have those out, at least. Jamie’s sick to death of them by now, and he’s thrilled at the thought of that part being over with.

After tomorrow, honestly, a lot of things are going to be over. The stitches will come out, and one way or another he’ll make it through that interview. Maybe then some of this will… Well, it won’t be like it’s all over, there will still be a million different things to handle, and that’s without even considering the arrest and what’s going to happen if his father’s case goes to trial. Still, to Jamie, it feels like after tomorrow, things will be at least a little closer to getting back to something resembling ‘normal.’

Agreeing to three o’clock for the interview starts to feel like a mistake not long after Jamie gets up on the morning of May first. Primarily, this is because Jamie is left to float through the whole day before the appointed hour, anticipating what’s coming. It lights up static under his skin, buzzing in his hands and prickling at the back of his neck.

Even going out to the back garden to kick a football around like the day before isn’t a good option. It’s fucking raining — has been since Jamie woke up, drizzling on and off all morning. The rain stops by the time noon rolls around, the sky lightening as the clouds slowly make way for the midday sun to start shining through, but at that point, the idea just isn’t appealing anymore.

Jamie changes his shirt three times in the span of about fifteen minutes, putting one on and staring at it before grimacing and taking it off again. Between changes, he can see the faint imprint of finger-shaped bruises on his upper arm. It’s the least of all the damage done, and it’s easy to forget it’s there when Jamie isn’t looking at it, but it makes him feel off and queasy to see now.

It’s so faded that anyone who didn’t know it was there wouldn’t be able to make it out, but Jamie can see it clear as day. That’s enough.

Finally, when he’s cycled through the same three shirts more times than is necessarily rational, Jamie turns to the duffel Keeley packed for him and studies it hard. He’s not sure what he’s looking for. It’s not as if the thing’s going to magically spawn more clothes just because he’s looking at it again. It’s just that none of his — admittedly limited — options feel right.

Something catches Jamie’s eye and he hesitates, then reaches for it. The soft, light blue t-shirt tucked at the back of the bag is simple and neat. Hefting it in his hands, he can see Sam in his mind’s eye, holding it out to him in the Coventry car park. A lot of that evening is a blur, but not that part. He remembers Sam talking directly to him and not to either of the people who’d helped him off the ground, Sam offering him the shirt so he didn’t have to ride home in his own torn, blood-soaked one.

The item sits innocuously in his hands as he stares at it, biting the inside of his cheek and thinking hard. In the end, Jamie justifies it by telling himself that nothing else he has with him is both clean and suitable for the tone of the interview he’s about to give, and he pulls the borrowed shirt over his head. It feels better than anything else, so he gives himself a nod in the mirror and firmly resolves not to think anything more of it.

A faint knock sounds on the door of the guest room, and Jamie startles. His heart rate spikes, and he takes a moment to grit his teeth and breathe deeply before calling out, “Come in,” just so that his voice stays steady when he does.

The door opens and it’s Roy, standing there with a determined look on his face and something in his hands. He pauses there, hovering at the threshold, and Jamie is just too tired to bother trying to figure out what he wants, so he just waits.

“Here, take this,” is what Roy finally says, walking into the room and holding out the thing in his hands: a jacket. Roy’s jacket to be specific. It’s some black leather thing that Jamie’s seen him wearing about a million times.

Jamie frowns at it, then at Roy, and doesn’t take it. Instead, he asks, “The hell is that for?”

“Raining earlier, wasn’t it?” Roy asks back with a slight irritated edge to his voice. “Might start again, and the only jacket you brought wouldn’t do shit against anything worse than a light breeze.”

For a long moment Jamie squints at him, trying to figure out if he’s being had on, but Roy seems completely serious. Eventually, he shrugs one shoulder and reaches out, taking the jacket.

“You’re fucking weird,” he informs Roy, just for good measure.

Roy scoffs at him. “You’re weird,” he shoots back. “I’m thinking ahead. Don’t want you fucking with the heat settings in my car ‘cause you prefer stylish nonsense over jackets with an actual point.”

Jamie makes a face at him, and Roy pulls one back. There’s something pointed in the look. See? It seems to convey. Not being nice to you. Then he’s gone, and Jamie’s alone in the room again, a bundle of well-made, expensive leather in his hands and something confused and soft thudding in his chest.

The jacket is nice — warm and heavy across Jamie’s shoulders. It’s too big for him, really, but not so much so that it’ll be blatantly obvious to anyone who looks at him. After he puts it on, Jamie sits down on the bed and goes through a few of the grounding exercises Doctor Sharon had reminded him of in her email, hands worrying at the cuffs.

Three o’clock creeps closer and closer, the minutes seeming to pass more and more slowly the closer they get to the interview. Jamie can feel his anxiety levels rising the closer it gets, and he can feel it making him an increasingly worse version of himself as it does. It’s like his edges have all gone sharp and jagged, the vicious impulse to snap at anyone who speaks to him surging.

Wrestling it far enough down that he doesn’t let it out of his mouth is tough, but he wrestles with it even so — the idea of being the kind of person who doesn’t is far worse than the effort it takes. He’s been that person before, and he doesn’t want to be again. Mostly, he just stays put, alone in the guest room away from Roy and Keeley, and they let him have whatever space he needs. He’s grateful to them for that. That and everything else.

All attempts to find distraction fail — even the Sudoku puzzle book isn’t serving its purpose in giving him something else to focus on — and all that’s left to think about is what’s to come. There’s still a decision hanging over him, the same one that’s been haunting him since yesterday.

Looking over at the mirror, Jamie studies the person he sees looking back at him. He tries to put himself into Trent Crimm’s shoes and imagine what he’s going to see when Jamie walks into that office. The bruises and scrapes look better now than they had earlier, but they’re still impossible to miss, as are the dark blue stitches. He’s been avoiding looking at them too much until now, thinking that they looked rather pathetic. Now, Jamie’s not quite sure that’s the right word.

Leather jacket, stitched-up face, the grim determination in the set of his jaw… The overall effect makes him look a bit tough, honestly. It makes him look like someone who might be able to walk into whatever this is going to be and then walk back out of the other side having survived it. The Jamie in that mirror isn’t a kid anymore. He isn’t a kid and he isn’t on his own, and that… Well.

When it settles into clarity, Jamie feels a heavy calm descend on his shoulders, and he knows what he’s going to do.

Jamie is going to tell Trent everything.

Finally, it’s almost time to get in the car and go. Despite the fact that the rain is still holding off and the clouds are even clearing up as the day has worn on, it’s gotten colder. Jamie can feel it even inside the house, and it gets worse when he opens a window in the guest room and experimentally sticks a hand out. He’s definitely grateful for the jacket, but it somehow doesn’t feel like enough.

There’s a bin piled with cold weather gear by the door downstairs. It’s probably a symptom of Keeley’s presence here, given that she’s had the same sort of thing tucked near the door at her place for as long as Jamie’s known her. He wanders over on impulse and grabs a scarf, throwing it around his neck and feeling something prickly and anxious inside himself lower its hackles at the layer of fabric shielding his neck. It’s a soft thing, dark grey-blue and run through with some kind of glittering silver thread that shines when it catches the light. Definitely Keeley’s, and the thumbs-up she flashes when she sees him seems to indicate she doesn’t mind.

That same impulse sends Jamie back upstairs, grabbing the knitted hat that Moe left in his locker off the bedside table. May began with a cold rain that has turned into a stiff wind, and even with the clouds clearing up by now, it’s left a worse chill than before. Maybe that’s a kindness that Jamie hadn’t recognized until now: an excuse to wrap himself up in as much makeshift armour as he can.

As soon as he characterizes it that way, even inside his own head, Jamie feels so annoyed and repulsed with himself that he pulls a deep grimace. Calling this assortment of other people’s things — Roy’s jacket, Sam’s shirt, Keeley’s scarf, the hat Moe made — armour of any kind is just… Please. Jamie cannot get away with thinking shit like that. That’s the sort of thing that only people like Ted and Sam can get away with, people who are so bright and good that it just shines out of them. That’s who can express bloody Hallmark card shit without rightfully dying of embarrassment on the spot.

As long as no one else knows, though… Maybe that’s alright, then.

As he sits in Roy’s car on the way to the interview, Jamie can’t stop his leg from bouncing. He feels like he might jitter right out of his body, and a few times he entertains the daydream of opening the door of the moving vehicle and rolling out like in a James Bond film.

The only saving grace is that Roy is playing songs on the radio, some station Jamie is pretty sure he picked just because it has a bunch of old shit that no one listens to anymore, which drives him a little nuts and also gives him a lot of opportunities to make fun of Roy for all the ancient songs that he apparently knows every word to. He mouths along with the radio when he knows them, like he can’t help doing it — like it’s a compulsion or something.

Roy lets him get a little bitchier about it than he’d usually tolerate, jabbing back when he starts to get too sharp, just enough to remind him to rein it in. It’s a familiar, easy kind of routine to settle into, and it mostly manages to keep Jamie from wanting to claw his own skin off out of sheer nerves.

The bickering helps. So do a few other things.

There’s an unfamiliar weight at Jamie’s chest. The St. Jude medal is right against his skin, where he’s tucked it under his borrowed shirt. It had been cold when he’d first put it on, but it’s warmed up now, and Jamie’s glad to find it’s just heavy enough that he can still feel it, reminded of its presence when it lifts and falls as he breathes.

In his pocket, right there where he can reach it if he slips his hand in, is a small, green plastic soldier. Jamie’s got the shape of it memorized, knows that his thumb fits right against the thing’s tiny plastic chest, under its binoculars. The toy, like the medal, is out of sight, but right where he can feel it. Right where it can remind him of things. Things like We love you. Like a kiss, pressed to the crown of Jamie’s head.

Soon enough — sooner than Jamie would’ve liked — they’re on a quiet road lined with two and three-storey buildings, shops on the street level and rental offices situated above. A little park sits surrounded by three rows of commercial properties in a rounded triangle, with a fountain at its centre and a few benches and rose bushes that make it a nice splash of colour in the middle of all the glass and cement and brick.

Roy pulls the car to a park along one of the narrow side-streets across from the address of Trent Crimm’s office. They can see the store it sits above from here — when Jamie’d looked it up last night, he’d learned that the journalist worked over the top of an artisanal soap shop, whatever the hell that means. The sign is legible even from this far: Uncommon Scents, it says in bright, curling script.

“Ready?” Roy asks him, and Jamie snorts.

“That’s a stupid fucking question.”

All he gets in response is a raised eyebrow, and he shakes his head and looks away. He sets a hand on the car door handle and hesitates, not wanting to get out. As soon as he gets out, walks over there and goes up to that office, it’s all going to turn out to be real. It’s a stupid, childish thing to think. This whole thing is entirely too real, whether Jamie gets out of this car or not. Still, he can’t help thinking it.

“Want me to come up there with you?”

Fuck you. It sits in Jamie’s mouth like a fistful of heavy, jagged gravel. He manages not to let it out, but it’s a near thing. Instead, after a few moments of forcing the venomous response back down his throat, he says, “No.”

There’s a heavy pause where he can feel Roy not asking are you sure so loudly that it would honestly have been less obvious if he’d just asked. Jamie grits his teeth and breathes in short, deliberate huffs. Just as he’s about to have to come up with something to say, he hears Roy shift in the driver’s seat.

“Right,” Roy says, a little louder than before. “Not being nice to you. Got it. Fuck on off out of here then, you’re gonna be late.”

The words are fairly abrasive, but the tone they’re delivered in is as warm as it is gruff. It reminds Jamie of the way he’s heard Roy talk to Phoebe sometimes, and as much as he hates it on principle, he’s desperately grateful for it at the same time.

Everything else aside, it gives him the push he needs to finally step out onto the street. A gust of wind barrels down the pavement, and Jamie shivers a little despite the way he’s dressed. As he closes the door to the car, he catches a glimpse of himself in the reflection in the window and frowns. He hopes the patchwork of other people’s things is at least somewhat subtle, so that it’s not enormously clear that he’s got borrowed and gifted clothing wrapped around himself like it’ll protect him from anything.

Roy’s jacket is hard to pick out of a lineup if you didn’t already know it’s his. Keeley’s scarf is one she only got recently, and it’s not totally out of step with something Jamie would buy himself. Sam’s shirt is just a shirt, could be anyone’s. The stitches aren’t as obvious as they’d been in the first couple of days after Sarah put them in. With the hat that Moe made him pulled low, you can barely see the healing cut in his forehead, though there’s really nothing to be done about his mouth.

Jamie pulls a face at himself, grimacing at the corresponding change in his reflection, and straightens up. Across the little park, Trent Crimm waits for him in an office he’s never been to. If he doesn’t go now, he might never get the courage to at all.

—

Trent’s been sitting at his desk accomplishing approximately nothing for the last half an hour — and that’s being generous to himself — when he gets the message that Jamie’s arrived. He gets up from his chair and straightens his jacket, then stands there aimlessly in the middle of his floor, waiting for something to happen. Almost as soon as he stands, Trent realizes that it’s an absolutely ridiculous thing to be doing right now, and he sits back down. Might as well wait at his desk. Thankfully, he doesn’t have to wait too long. The stairs in this building have always worked just as well as any security system.

When he walks into the room, Jamie Tartt looks nothing like Trent has ever seen him before. For one, he’s not dressed like himself. Trent wouldn’t claim to be some kind of expert in fashion, and certainly doesn’t make a habit of tracking the style preferences of the players he reports on, but with someone like Jamie it’s hard to miss. The way he dresses is… well, it isn’t subtle. Except that today, it rather is.

Moving past that, there’s also the fact that Jamie’s so visibly anxious. His shoulders are up by his ears and his posture is defensive, though not overpoweringly so. He's stiff, and he keeps taking an odd little jittering moment to shake himself out just a bit in a way that Trent wouldn't have noticed if he hadn't been paying such close attention. The conclusion that Trent comes to is that Jamie is stressed and probably afraid and he’s trying to hide it. He stands quickly, coming over but keeping his distance at first. When they come within arm's reach of each other, he holds out a hand, letting Jamie be the one to actually make contact by accepting it.

"I'm honoured that I'm the one you chose to trust with this,” Trent says, keeping his voice conversational but serious. He doesn't want to put too much pressure on the conversation, but he also wants to be sure that Jamie understands the gravity of what they're doing here today. It doesn't escape him — what it must have cost Jamie to not only make the call in the first place, but also to follow up on it, to make it all the way here, walk up to the office, and come in the door, knowing what would be waiting for him on the other side the whole time.

"Yeah, well," Jamie says, his voice stiff and uncomfortable, "you were the only one I wasn't totally sure would muck it all up completely, right. Weren't like I had much choice. You saw the kind I had to pick from, when that —” he waves up at his face — "ended up on the news in the first place."

At the mention of the disastrous night that precipitated this meeting, Trent can feel his face twist into a distasteful frown. He studies Jamie, takes in the damage left behind from the injuries he'd sustained in that parking lot, which, the reports indicated, had been just barely this side of serious enough to necessitate a trip to hospital.

Some of the bruising has faded, but not all of it. The contusions had been deep enough that some smudges are still left behind, looking like a clumsy-handed child had swiped fingers through their mother's makeup and then pressed them to Jamie's cheek. The cut through his eyebrow, partially visible under the edge of his hat, is more healed than the one in his lip, though 'healed' would be the wrong word to describe either of them, in complete honesty. When he speaks, the line that bisects his lower lip and juts into the upper moves with his mouth, standing out and immediately drawing attention from the rest of his face.

"You're staring, mate."

The statement is blunt but not quite accusatory, which is more than Trent would have expected. He'd expected to be snapped at, at the very least — maybe yelled at, depending on how bad a mood Jamie was in already when he arrived. Instead it's just an observation, if one made in an incredibly direct fashion, accompanied by a raise of an eyebrow — the same one Trent had just, indeed, been staring at, which he nonverbally admits to with a raise of his hands.

"You're right," he agrees, turning and walking back towards his desk. "I was."

"Bit hard to miss, all this is," Jamie mutters behind him, footsteps indicating Trent is being followed.

There's nothing more said until they're both seated, Jamie looking uncharacteristically nervous and Trent feeling much the same.

"Why don't we get down to brass tacks then."

"Don't know what tacks've got to do with it, but yeah, let's," Jamie says, avoiding eye contact and staring out the window. Trent had picked this office specifically because of it. It's got a nice view of the tiny park across the street, barely big enough to be called one, housing not much more than a grass strip and a few benches where the lawyers and accountants of the surrounding white-collar business neighbourhood take their lunches when it's not actively pouring.

"I've got a photographer waiting downstairs, is it alright if I call her up? It'd be good to get a few good shots in. This piece is probably going to be fairly widely circulated, there's no point in pretending otherwise, and having a decent photo to attach — one of you as a person, not you as a footballer — is going to be beneficial."

Jamie looks sceptical, and Trent can't exactly say he blames the kid, because he's sure that all of this sounds like another language. He doesn't usually try to talk shop with the subjects of his articles, but this is about as extenuating as circumstances get. Usually doesn't really apply here. Not today. Explaining to Jamie exactly what they're doing and why — the moving parts and turning gears behind the face of the finished product — seems like as good a tactic as any to get his trust and put him at ease. If there's one thing Trent wants above anything else right now, it's for Jamie to feel in control. He's the one calling the shots here today, and nothing is going to happen before he understands it or without his say-so.

Instead of repeating the question, Trent lets Jamie sit with the explanation while he mulls it over. Impatience is not a character flaw you can get away with for long when conducting interviews, particularly on topics like the one that’s facing them today. Trent can remember one of his professors in journalism school talking about it, lecturing the class on the importance of giving a subject space. She'd been an oral historian, taking accounts from people who'd been alive during World War II as part of her doctoral thesis, and Trent had hung onto her every word. He can still hear her voice now, telling him that when you rush a subject, you take away a piece of their ability to tell their own story their own way, in their own words. He figures that her advice applies to a question about a photographer as much as anything else, so patience it is.

Eventually, the patience pays off, and Jamie nods.

"Sure, whatever," he says in a deliberately nonchalant mumble. "Not like I'm not used to havin' my picture taken, right?"

Nodding, Trent picks up his phone and sends a quick text to the woman waiting down the hall. As they wait for her to arrive, he tells Jamie a little bit about her, explaining that her name is Aoife Dunne, and that, "I've been working with her for years. She's as professional as they come, and we'll get a good result. She knows what she's doing."

Jamie doesn't say anything in response, just looks out the window, back at the tiny park across the way. It looks like he's worrying the inside of his cheek between his teeth, the movement distorting his face a little, pulling at his split lip in a way that can't be comfortable. Tension radiates from every inch of him, and Trent can feel it in his own body, like sympathy pains. The years he’s spent doing this job, moving around a field with others who do this kind of work, are the only thing keeping him from being openly flabbergasted by this version of Jamie Tartt.

A journalist — a good journalist, he should specify, a journalist worth their salt, a journalist who is about as different from those carrion birds in the parking lot, who saw a young man being violently assaulted by his father and did nothing but document the attack as thoroughly as possible, all so they could plaster it across the internet at the first opportunity — knows that a person is rarely who they seem to be on television. It is easier to lose sight of this with some people than it is with others, and Jamie is definitely one of the ones with whom it is easy to assume that what you see is what you get. It feels strange to have the incontrovertible proof — in his office, right now — that Jamie is a lot more than he'd appeared.

Aoife enters the room after a polite, quiet knock, and gets about her business quickly and efficiently. She doesn't bother to stage a lot of lighting, settling for working with what's already available in Trent's high-ceilinged, large-windowed office. They don't really want these shots to look overly professional, anyway. That's not what they're going for with this piece. They're not presenting the world with — as he's heard it put time and time again — Jamie Fucking Tartt. They're introducing the world to Jamie. Ring lights and perfect angles aren't going to help them do that. The afternoon sun filtering through a mercifully cloudless sky, on the other hand, just might.

Trent can tell that Aoife does her best to make the process as painless for Jamie as possible. She takes maybe a dozen or so different shots, having him stand or sit closer to the light or farther away, and then she excuses herself and it’s just the two of them left.

It’s time to get the interview started now. Jamie has settled uncomfortably into the chair that Trent directed him towards, his posture awkward and strange. He looks like he’s resisting the urge to get up and run out of the room with every fibre of his body, and there’s an almost-glare on his face, but he stays put. If it weren’t for the fact that he knows it would send Jamie bolting out, Trent might commend him for the effort.

Instead, they just sit together in the thick, horribly quiet atmosphere. The longer the silence lasts, the more Trent begins to wish that he had some kind of white noise machine to play. That could at least take the edge off the oppressive, lingering void of sound. His old therapist’s office had one. It was loud enough to dull the heavy edge of quiet and preserve privacy between offices, but not loud enough to be distracting.

Eventually, Trent figures he’s just got to get going. Waiting for Jamie to feel comfortable enough to start this off would mean that this interview will never get to happen. Jamie is not comfortable here — in this room or in this conversation.

Of course he isn’t.

“So, Jamie,” he says, figuring there’s no better place to start than with the present moment. “This is an interview that you requested, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, I guess.” Jamie shrugs. The fabric of the scarf around his neck shifts with the movement, its glittering strands catching and reflecting the light. It’s an odd item of clothing, but Jamie’s never been one to shy from bold fashion choices before. “I mean, the team helped me set it up, so it’s not like I just went and gave you a ring myself, but yeah. Someone at Richmond had the idea, and I thought it was a good one. I wanted to do it.”

“Can you tell me why that is?” Ted gave some indication of what was going on when they spoke, but Trent wants to hear it from Jamie himself. The decision to come here and give this interview is big, and it’s going to be a core part of the article.

Jamie gives him a look, one that implies Trent might be stupid. “Well it’s not like anybody in the fucking country doesn’t know what happened. Not like I can keep it quiet, can I?” His shoulders are up by his ears, and he looks like he wants to climb out of his own skin.

If he pushes now, things are going to go downhill before the interview’s even practically started, so Trent nods and drops the matter. He gets the feeling that there’s far more to it than Jamie had said, but if he wants to dodge the question, that’s fine. They can come back to it — or not. Whatever Jamie’s comfortable with.

“Alright,” Trent says easily. “I’m glad you’re here, whatever the reason. It’s good to be talking with you, though I regret the circumstances we find ourselves in. I know you’re currently not participating in training with the club. Do you have any idea what the timeline on your return is?” That’s a nice, softball question that doesn’t get too much into the more emotionally fraught territory in front of them. Should be a safe place to get going.

Jamie cringes, which provides an answer even before he speaks. “I’m not allowed back until the doctors clear me, which isn’t going to be for at least a week after… after all that happened.” He avoids referring to it directly, skating around the words and using vague terminology instead. “Concussion protocol or something. It’s stupid.”

It’s incredibly important to protecting the long-term health of athletes’ brains, actually, and not at all stupid, but Trent keeps that to himself as well. That’s another necessary skill that a journalist has to develop when working directly with subjects — knowing when to speak your mind and when your input will cause more harm than benefit. Having all the information in the world doesn’t do any good if you don’t know when to keep it to yourself. Some of his colleagues have never quite managed to grasp that particular nuance, Trent thinks. Valuing the ability to be the smartest person in the room above and beyond any other characteristics of human compassion is a distasteful quality that he’d first noticed in his classmates and then continued to see around him as he began to work after earning his degree.

“It’s clear you’re eager to get back out there on the pitch,” Trent says. Eager might be an understatement, not quite able to fully encompass Jamie’s attitude towards coming off of concussion protocol and being allowed to participation. He’s eager, yes, but there’s frustration there too. Something agitated.

“Yeah,” Jamie agrees. He shifts, adjusting his position in the chair, and looks down at his hands. The ring on his index finger glints as he twists it around and around. There’s a long pause before he continues, and when he does, his voice is strange and quiet. “Like Richmond a lot. Got a lot of good teammates here. Good coaches. Good people, they’re just… They’re good people, ‘m glad they took me back.”

They’re circling things still, Trent can tell. There’s something in that answer other than what Jamie actually said, buried under and behind it, something that Trent can see just beneath the surface. It’s like those videos of boats on the sea, when the camera pans back and there’s that great big shape beneath it, the whale just out of sight. That’s fine. They can circle around the edge of things. Trent is patient.

“Took you back?” he repeats.

If Trent is honest, he suspects he already knows the answer to that question. It’ll be an emotional response, but the kind of emotion that Jamie is more comfortable expressing than the other sort that’s bound to come up today. Like the rest of the world, Trent has heard the comments that Jamie has made about being sent back to Manchester City — the half-dozen-odd times he’s mentioned, in various contexts, that Ted got rid of him — or sent him off, or dumped him. Thanks to his conversation with Ted, he knows things were more complicated than that. The transfer, though it had been initiated by Richmond, had been out of Ted’s hands, and it seems like there’s a lot more to the story than the public — and, it would appear, Jamie — had been initially led to believe. However, Trent doesn’t get the feeling that Jamie knows this at all. It’s a concerning impression, but it’s not really Trent’s place to get involved in sorting out that particular mess.

Regardless of what he knows and when he knew it, it’s clear that the circumstances of Jamie’s departure from Richmond have left a deep impression on him, and he hasn’t been shy about voicing how he feels about it. Trent is expecting more of the same now, which is why it seems like a good place to start getting into some of Jamie’s emotional state — as much as he’s willing to share.

That’s not what Trent gets. Instead of an emotional outburst, a sneered or snapped comment about being thrown away, Jamie answers with straightforward, soberly candid clarity.

“I wasn’t a team player,” he says. “Didn’t care about nobody but myself. I played for me, not for Richmond. That ain’t how football’s supposed to be, y’know?” Jamie’s head dips a little farther, chin almost touching his chest. He twists the ring again. “Anyway. I fucked it in Richmond, that first time. Was the best individual player, mind, but I weren’t anything else. I was a shitty teammate, and honestly I was just — I was a dick. No other way around it. I mean, you know what I was like, you wrote about it when I came back.”

The reminder of that article, a major focal piece that Trent did on Jamie when Richmond first announced he would be brought back, comes as a surprise. Whether or not someone’s read a piece that Trent has written about them is almost always a perpetually unanswered question, and he’d wholly assumed that Jamie had certainly not read that one. If it did come up, he’d have figured that it would’ve been in a way that involved a lot less calm and a lot more swearing.

“What was that thing you called me? The—”

“The prodigal son, yes,” Trent finishes with a mild grimace. The title is immediately available in his mind, jumping out with frighteningly quick recall. Questions Loom Over the Return of AFC Richmond’s Prodigal Son, he’d christened it.

There had been quite the stir when Jamie had come back. It been widely regarded as a statistical no-brainer — they really weren’t the same club without him, even with the undeniable talent of Sam Obisanya and Dani Rojas and the addition of Roy Kent to the coaching staff — but it had been, from every other angle possible, a bit perplexing. Trent hadn’t been above voicing his questions about why they’d opted to bring Jamie back in, given Ted’s dedication to a healthy, cohesive locker room, and he had been far from the only person asking.

Eyeing Jamie and trying to get a read on his emotional state, Trent finds himself not really sure how this interaction is going to go from here. It hadn’t exactly been an article that painted a flattering picture.

All Jamie does is shrug. “Everything in it was true. I was pissed when I first read it, but you were right. And you said a bunch of nice shit later anyways, so don’t worry about it.” At the expression on Trent’s face, Jamie gives a very light laugh, more a harsh huff of an exhale than anything else. “Could tell you were thinking about it. You looked like you had a migraine.”

“Well I’m glad you saw the follow-up I wrote, at least.” And he is. The concerns he’d raised in the Prodigal Son article had turned out to be for nought, and Trent had readily owned up to that in a second assessment titled Bright Future for Jamie Tartt’s Second Chance With AFC Richmond. “I stand by what I said, given the information available to me at the time, but I stand by what I said in both pieces.”

If he’d been surprised by what Jamie said when his return was first broached, Trent is even more surprised by what comes next.

“I just…” Jamie says, after thinking hard for a while, staring out the window. “I really weren’t used to that, right? The team-first thing. ‘Cause all my life before Richmond — when I was a kid, back in City — if I’d played like that, like Coach Lasso wanted me to, like I should’ve, remembered I was just one of eleven and all, then—” He breaks off with a snort. “The whole time, I just had my old man breathing down my neck about every little thing, didn’t I? Weren’t a whole lot of room left to think about the other ten.”

When Jamie falls quiet, Trent doesn’t push him. He looks at his notepad and jots a few things down, scrawling a handful of abbreviated sentences in the shorthand that he’s spent years developing. Honestly, they could stop here entirely and there could still be a good story to be written from what they’ve discussed, even without another word said, without talking about Coventry at all — Coventry or Jamie’s father or the stitches in Jamie’s face and whatever came before them. If this is where it’s going to end, that’s fine with Trent.

Ted’s warning to go easy on Jamie — to be kind to him and not to push or dig — has been on the edge of Trent’s awareness this whole day, but even without it, he would’ve let it stop here. If Jamie wants to spend their time together vaguely chatting around about things being better in Richmond than they’d been in Manchester, about concussion protocols and eagerness to return to full participation, and how he hadn’t even really grasped what full participation was supposed to mean before the Greyhounds, then sure. Okay, that’s understandable.

There’s still a good story there. Trent could write a good article out of that. He could tell a story about a young man who got out from under his father’s thumb — out from under his fists, implied — went somewhere else, and bloomed there once he’d decided to give it his best self, and he could do that without Jamie needing to give anything else up.

Trent is still thinking about this, still turning the shape of the story around in his mind, when Jamie starts speaking again. The pen slips to a stop against the paper and Trent looks up, giving his full attention. Jamie seems to have settled into the conversation, judging by the way he looks, the way he sounds. He’s opening up a little, compared to the tight-wound, tight-lipped tension he’d had about him when the interview began.

“I think… I think that I’d been just starting to get it, you know?” Jamie’s voice is earnest. Almost shy. “When I got sent away. Starting to get that it weren’t just me, that my performance, my successes weren’t the only thing that mattered. Cause, like, in Richmond, there wasn’t someone going to come at me after every match to go over every bloody thing I did, and how I should’ve done better, should’ve got the ball myself, should’ve had a goal instead of an assist, should’ve gotten more than one goal if I’d had one, should’ve been better, stronger, tougher…” The whole list comes out with the rehearsed practice of someone who’s heard the words that he’s repeating over and over again so many times that he knows them by heart.

“So your father gave you a hard time often, then?” Trent asks softly. It’s a light push, just to see if Jamie wants to go any farther down this road. “About matches.”

Jamie nods. His fingers twist together and he nods his head in slow, absent-minded bobbles. Then he cringes, the expression twisting the stitched split in his lower lip in a way that must hurt.

“Sorry, I should probably — answer out loud or something, I don’t know how you —”

“Nodding is fine,” Trent interrupts gently. “You don’t need to verbally respond. We’re not recording, it’s just me taking notes. You respond however you’re comfortable with responding, and that will be perfectly sufficient.”

“Oh, okay.” Jamie smiles a little, a faint, wry look. “Never done one of these before. Not one that — not one that mattered like this anyway.” He looks down at his hands, folded in his lap, and twists his fingers for a moment, then pulls them apart. They shake a little, and he balls them into fists, sticking them in his jacket pockets. When he does, he makes a face for some reason, and pulls them back out again.

There’s something in one of Jamie’s hands, though Trent can’t see what it is from here. It’s small, and Jamie looks at it for a long time. Then he folds his other hand on top of the one with the object in it, and looks up at Trent, who waits for his attention to return before responding.

“It’s perfectly alright, I understand,” Trent tells him, and he means it. He knows Jamie has done interviews before — hell, Trent himself has conducted a couple of them. They have certainly never done anything like this. It’s not Trent’s first more serious, personal piece on a player, but it’s his first with Jamie, and it’s definitely Jamie’s first overall. They’re both in uncharted territory together.

Looking at him a little longer, like he’s trying to solve a puzzle in Trent’s words that hadn’t ever been there, Jamie eventually sighs and elaborates, “I mean, when I was with City, yeah. He’d turn up at my place after a match, usually at least a little buzzed, yelling on about how I’d done like some kind of backseat coach. You know. Typical football dad type of shit.”

That last comment, with its wry tone and faint smirk, is clearly an attempt to laugh it off, make a joke out of it all, but Trent can’t quite let it go. Not with the strange, distant look haunting Jamie’s eyes, and the things the world’s learnt this week about the way James Tartt Sr. treats his son.

“Was it though?” Trent asks. “Typical football dad type of shit?” He echoes the word choice directly and deliberately.

Something flickers across Jamie’s face, and any hint of a smile he’d managed to conjure disappears in an instant. “No,” he says. It’s a fuzzy-edged mumble. “I mean. Not really.”

Ah, well. At least he knows that. It’s something, at least, that Jamie knows that, though he doesn’t sound as certain as Trent might have hoped.

“Not like I thought everyone’s dad were like mine or anything,” Jamie continues. The pause is shorter this time than it was before, but heavier. He’s scraping his thumb against the cuticle of the opposite hand’s index finger. It’s an absentminded motion, like he’s not totally aware he’s doing it. “Had some teammates who had parents that… just seemed to like ‘em. No matter what they did, their mums, their dads were just. Around. Involved, all supportive and shit. So I don’t think it has to be a sport parent thing — or, it shouldn’t be, at least. Started to understand that, after a while.”

No. That shouldn’t be a sport parent thing, in Trent’s incredibly strong opinion. Shouldn’t be an any kind of parent thing. It’s good to know Jamie seems to have realized that, at least to some extent.

“Did get some parents yelling from the sides though,” Jamie adds. He picks at his cuticle a little too hard and hisses, balling his hands into fists and tucking them up inside the sleeves of the leather jacket he wears. It’s just long enough to be able to do so, seeming just a bit big for him. “In the lower levels, right? When that was more of a thing people did. Could do. Hard to tell sometimes if it were supposed to be good or bad. Used to throw me off a bit whenever that happened. Made it hard to concentrate when I could hear it but didn’t know what was going on or if someone was mad, or if they were mad at me, so… Was real glad when I didn’t have to deal with that anymore.”

“And your father.” When he brings up the man directly for the second time, Trent watches the micro-expressions that twitch across Jamie’s face, looking for an indication that this is about to go sideways. Ultimately, Jamie looks uncomfortable, but not like he wants to get up and run. So far, so good. “He was one of those parents yelling from the sides?”

“Oh, no.” It’s an unexpected response. The way Jamie says it almost comes out as a laugh. “I mean, sometimes, sure, but mostly no. He never had nothing good to yell, and as for bad… Well, mostly he’d just wait ’til we got back home and fucking beat me up if he didn’t like how I did.”

The pen makes a faint scratching sound when it slips sideways. Trent knows he’s openly staring. He knew what they came here to talk about, of course, but even so, hearing it that directly is shocking, especially given how they’ve been meandering around the topic until now.

Jamie notices the staring, and he winces. “Sorry,” he says, sounding astoundingly awkward and uncertain. “Sorry, am I not allowed to say ‘fuck’ in here — I mean, swear? Am I allowed to swear?”

Unbelievable. This kid is fucking unbelievable.

“No, it wasn’t — it wasn’t the language, it was the…” How to put this. “The other part of your answer that I found shocking.”

“Oh, well.” Jamie seems like he’s not really sure what he’s supposed to say to that, peering at Trent with an odd, unsettled expression. “Sorry?”

It comes out like a question, and Trent shakes his head. Honestly, he feels a little revulsed by the apology. He doesn’t want to be apologized to for that, not by Jamie. Trent doesn’t want Jamie to apologize to him for anything to do with any of this.

“No, you’ve no reason to be sorry,” he says. “There will never be a question I ask that you have to answer — if you don’t want to tell me anything, you can say so, or you can just not answer, and we’ll move right along. I won’t press you on it. But when you do want to answer, that’s what you ought to do, however you wish to do so. You answered my question truthfully, and that’s why you’re here. To tell your story. However much of it and in however much detail you’re comfortable with.”

There’s an odd, tight almost-smile on Jamie’s face now, and Trent gets the feeling that ‘comfortable’ might have been the wrong word. Even so.

Taking a deep breath, Trent decides to risk a more direct question, since they’ve gotten into it now. “It’s clear, from what you’ve just said, and from what we’ve learned this week, that what happened at Coventry wasn’t a one-off kind of incident.” Jamie nods. Trent hadn’t needed the confirmation, but it’s good to see that he’s taken Trent’s assurance about non-verbal answers to heart. “When did the abuse start?” he asks, keeping his voice even and polite, warm but without personal feeling. “How old were you?”

Shrugging one shoulder and looking down, Jamie starts fiddling with his ring again, twisting it around and around. “Don’t know exactly when. Probably depends on what you mean. My dad and my mum broke up ‘fore I was six months old. He weren’t around for a while, but I guess they still had the same friends, ‘cause he heard from some’a them who’d heard from my mum that I’d started to play. Heard I was real good. Started turning up at matches, and then started wanting time with me. Honestly, still not really sure how all that happened. Nobody really explained much to me. Just started being him taking me home from matches, then keeping me for weekends. Anyway, as for the, ah — as for the abuse…”

Everything before it came out in a bit of a rush, sentences crowding in against each other, but Trent doesn’t miss the way Jamie stumbles over the word. Naming things for what they are is difficult, no matter how many other people have already been saying it around and about you.

“He was always…” Jamie’s head tilts to the side and his mouth twists, like he’s having trouble articulating what his father was. “He was always tough. Only time he ever seemed like he liked me at all was when I’d done good at football, and that never lasted. Be proud for, like, a night, and then the yelling’d start up again, calling me all sorts of — And I could never figure out what I’d done to — Yeah. Never lasted.”

Glancing out the window, Jamie reaches up and pulls the hat off his head. It’s a knitted object made in Richmond colours that Trent suspects might be handmade, given he’s never seen the design on any fan or player before. He crumples it in his hands, abandoning fiddling with his ring to run a thumb over its edge. It’s difficult body language to watch — it’s fear. Pain.

“The — the physical stuff started kind of small, I think anyway. All that stuff from before my mum died, that’s hard to remember, exactly. My memory’s not so great, ’s like it all gets fuzzy when I try to think about when I was a kid too much. But I know by the time she died, it had gotten bad. He was, uh, beating me by then. I guess. Had been for a while. Not like, all the time or nothing, but — Enough.”

“How old were you when she died?”

“Eleven. He got full custody after that.” Trent’s expression must seem surprised, because Jamie gives a light scoff and shrugs. It’s a tight, restrained movement. “Weren’t like there was anyone else around looking to volunteer to take me on, was there? Got lucky, I guess.”

“Lucky?” Trent asks. He normally schools his face well when in this sort of role, but his eyebrows shoot up anyway when he hears the word come out of Jamie’s mouth, referring to his abusive father gaining full custody of him as an eleven-year-old child. There is not a single part of that situation that Trent would characterize as ‘lucky.’

“I mean, if he hadn’t shown back up before then, don’t know what would’ve happened to me, do I?”

It’s a fair enough point. Even so, Trent still cannot imagine calling that luck.

“Got pretty bad after that. Stayed pretty bad.”

“Did you ever tell anyone? A teacher, a coach?”

“No. Never did. I think there were people who had some idea what was going on. I know he weren’t always too careful about who saw, and he didn’t care how he talked to me in front of his mates or anything — they definitely saw him smack me about at least a few times. They knew, I’m sure of it. Didn’t much care, though. Knew it weren’t gonna do any good to tell anyone, especially not once he…” With a deep heave in and out, Jamie shifts uncomfortably. His eyes dart from the window to the hat in his hands, then to the wall behind Trent’s shoulder. “I told him, once, threatened him that I’d call the police if he didn’t stop. He’d gone after me pretty good, and I didn’t — I told him I’d tell if he ever touched me again.”

“What happened then?”

“He laughed at me,” Jamie says in a dead, detached tone. He’s still looking at the wall. “Told me to go ahead and try it, that he’d dial the number for me himself if I wanted, but it wouldn’t do me no good. Said they’d just laugh, on account of they had real problems to worry about, that there were kids out there really getting hurt and they didn’t have time to waste on weak little bitch baby Jamie, whinging on about shit that weren’t nothing. He only did what he had every right to as my father, and it weren’t his fault I was too soft to take it like a man.”

The fact that he remembers the insults after all these years doesn’t surprise Trent. He’d imagine Jamie probably heard those words time and time again, until they’d been burnt into his brain. Hear something horrible about yourself enough times from someone with the kind of sway over your world that a father has, and you’ll never forget it for the rest of your life.

“That was…” Jamie trails off, eyes abnormally bright and lips trembling slightly as he purses them, waiting to find the words. “Think that was probably when I started thinking I, uh. That I might not live long enough to make it out. Not in— in a specific way, not like I thought he’d— But that it could happen. Maybe would. Sometimes p— ah, sometimes probably would.”

Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck.

For the first time in this whole awful, ugly conversation that’s been so saturated in grief and pain that Trent can practically taste it in the air, a tear breaks free and races down Jamie’s cheek. It’s accompanied by a cough, like Jamie’s trying to clear his throat, and Trent suddenly looks away.

“Here,” he says, getting up and walking to the small refrigerator tucked into the corner of his office. The top shelf is entirely filled with water bottles, and Trent takes far longer than he needs to select two of them. When he walks back to his chair, he offers one to Jamie, who takes it and cracks the top immediately.

Despite not really being thirsty, Trent opens his own as well and takes a long drink from it. Jamie’s face is dry again, no trace remaining that it ever hadn’t been, but Trent wants to give him a minute regardless. Honestly, he needs a minute himself, after that.

When he resumes and he’s fairly certain that Jamie’s said all he needs to on the matter of his childhood, Trent switches gears somewhat, moving them forward.

“And it continued when you were an adult?”

A wordless, tight-lipped nod. Jamie thinks on it for a bit. Trent can see from the way his chest moves that he’s breathing slowly and shallowly, interrupted every so often with a sudden jerk, signalling a harsher inhale. Eventually, he says, “Not as often. Didn’t live with him no more, he just didn’t have that kind of… opportunity, I guess. Just weren’t around when he was worked up or pissed off or off his head or whatever. Kind of got worse when it did happen, though, so.” He tilts his head from side to side, as if conveying a sense of there were pros and cons.

“Was there ever a point at which it stopped?” That question might be a stupid one, given they’re sitting where they are now, but Trent feels it would be an oversight to leave it out. Besides, he’s wondered about —

“I mean… When I went on loan to Richmond.”

About that, precisely. Ted only mentioned seeing Jamie abused at Nelson Road the once, after the relegation match, and Jamie had already been sent back to Manchester by then. Trent knows that it’s not that simple. This went unnoticed by countless teachers and coaches and athletic trainers over the years, and he does not expect that George Cartrick had been all that attentive a manager. Even so, he gets the feeling that, if Jamie’s father had been beating him even sporadically while he played under Ted, the man would’ve picked up on something, that he’d at least have mentioned the possibility to Trent that night at dinner.

Jamie elaborates, saying, “It’s far enough away that he couldn’t just turn up where I lived whenever he felt like it, and he wouldn’t put the effort in to come down and visit me here. Not until I was back with City, anyway. No reason for him to bother when I wasn’t. He still called or texted whenever he wanted to blow off steam, or caught part of a match on telly, or whatever other reason he had, but he never… I didn’t get hit that whole time. And I could get away with ignoring my phone, at least for a while.”

There’s something sobering about that answer that Trent finds difficult to absorb. It’s not the worst thing he’s been told this afternoon — far from it, in fact — but it sticks in his throat anyway, making his chest feel tight, like he can’t quite get a full breath in. ‘I didn’t get hit that whole time’ Jamie said, like even that was more than he’d ever thought to hope for. Like that was better than he’d ever thought it could get: the cessation of the physical violence and the ability to put the verbal and emotional abuse on a temporary delay.

“And that was a strange experience?” Trent already knows the answer to his question from the look on Jamie’s face. Sometimes those are questions you still have to ask, though. To verify, or to hear it in a person’s own words.

“Yeah, but I don’t think I realized it was at the time.” Jamie’s eyes drift up to the ceiling, and he flattens a hand out over the hat in his lap. He presses his palm to it and strokes the fabric like he’s pressing out wrinkles. “Like — it didn’t occur to me until I got back to Manchester and he was right in front of me, and he grabbed the collar of my shirt, and I realized I didn’t even know what I’d just lost until it was gone. It’s so stupid to think now, but I didn’t even know I’d been safe until I weren’t anymore.”

How redundant, Trent muses somewhat distantly, to be thinking god, that’s fucking heartbreaking at this point. And yet he thinks it anyway, jotting down enough notes to remember what Jamie said, how he said it.

“How did it feel, realizing that?” he asks. Trent has been able to hear his own voice going softer and quiet as the interview progresses, and he can’t help it. Refuses to feel bad for it, either. There’s no flaw in gentleness, no matter how reluctant some people may be to acknowledge that fact.

“Really fucking bad,” Jamie says. Despite the words, he’s not snapping at Trent. He doesn’t sound like he thinks Trent’s been colossally stupid for asking, or like it was a pointless question. It’s a flat, almost sad tone, and the corner of his mouth twitches into a faint, humourless smile. “It felt really fuckin’ bad, especially since I knew it was basically entirely my fault, cause I’m the one fucked it all up in Richmond in the first place. And I didn’t even realize what I’d cost myself until I looked back and thought about where I’d been, compared to where I’d gone back to, and it just…”

Shaking his head, Jamie sighs.

“Eventually, I couldn’t take it anymore. After I went back, I mean. Something about being away made it so much harder to deal with when I was back there again, and he was on me about everything, even when we won. Everything I did, just — and when he were drunk, or just — just fucking angry…” He trails off, grimacing. His eyes are jittering, jumping from place to place, none of them anywhere near Trent’s. “Then one night he went real far, and after he left I thought he might’ve broke my — broke my wrist or a couple of my ribs or something, and I just…” He stops abruptly, breathing hard, and there’s a look on his face that’s distant and strange.

Trent feels a creeping concern rise in his mind that Jamie might be having or about to have some kind of flashback, and he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do if that is indeed the case. Should he call Ted? Triple-nine? Something? Somehow, this wasn’t what he’d planned for, and he feels very foolish for it now. Given the subject matter of their conversation, it was shortsighted of him to not foresee that there might be some kind of issue like this. But he hadn’t, and now here he is, not sure what he’s going to do if Jamie Tartt has a flashback in his office.

Thankfully, Jamie gets it under control quickly. Either way, the matter is out of Trent’s hands when Jamie shakes himself a little and clears his throat, sitting up straighter.

“That’s when I signed up for the reality show. Got me away from him again, for a while at least, which was the idea. I mean, did it to piss him off, too, cause I guess I sort of realized that nothing I ever did was going to be enough for him, and so why bother trying, right? Everything I did, he’d just get mad anyway, so why not do it on purpose. But mostly it was to… Yeah. I had to get away.”

“That’s completely understandable.” It is, really. Trent has had that epiphany before: nothing will ever be good enough, and it’s time to stop. He quietly smothers that line of thought. This is not about him. “And then, when that was through, you ended up back at Richmond again.”

Once again, Trent is thrown for a loop by the way just the mention of Richmond is enough to change Jamie’s face, melting away some of the stress and softening the tense lines around his eyes and mouth.

“Yeah,” he says, and his voice is quiet in a different way. A fond kind of quiet. “They let me back. Gave me another chance.” Jamie’s words take on an anxious edge, and he folds his hands on top of the hat in his lap, running his thumbnail over the ring he’s been twisting on and off but not fiddling with it again. “One I’m trying real hard not to fuck up, because I get it this time. I know what I’ve got, and I know how important it is. So I’ve been working hard to make things right and not… be who I was, last time.”

“And now that you’re back here, back in Richmond, you’re safe again.” It’s a logical, reasonable thing to say, connecting back to what Jamie had said earlier about not even realizing he’d been safe until he wasn’t anymore. Even so, the moment he says it, Trent knows he’s misspoken. Because Jamie hasn’t been safe here, now that he’s back, has he? That’s the whole point of why they’re here.

“Until the last couple weeks, anyways, yeah.”

It’s difficult for Trent to refrain from doing the math, counting up the time between when Ted informed the media that they were bringing Jamie back and when the match against Manchester City at Wembley had taken place. How long did Jamie have before the rug was pulled out from under him again? A handful of months? How much of that time had been spent trying to reintegrate into the team, stumbling through what must have been a stretch of rocky ground before reaching equilibrium again? How much actual peace and stability had Jamie actually had?

That isn’t the point, though. Not today. It has, however, reminded him of the point.

“So,” Trent says. It takes some effort, but he remains polite and professional even as he pivots into different but still truly awful territory. “We have all, by now, seen the footage from the unfortunate run-in you had with your father, the night of the twenty-fifth of April in the car park at Coventry City FC’s pitch. Do you want to speak about that?”

Jamie gives him a a look, one that implies Trent might be stupid. “Well it’s not like anybody in the fucking country doesn’t know what happened. Like you said, everybody’s seen it online. Not like I can keep it quiet, can I?”

“That doesn’t mean you have to speak about it yourself,” he points out. “I’m certainly not going to ask you to describe that day if you don’t wish to, and you’re right. Everyone knows what happened, that much is true. But it also means that you don’t have to tell anyone anything yourself. They already know. ”

“Well yeah, but — Actually, no. No, they don’t, is the thing,” Jamie says, his voice surging in strength. He sounds engaged now, too, in a way he hasn’t been since the start. Invested. Like he actually does want to be here. Needs to be here. “They don’t know anything 'cept what they saw, and what they saw is not the story. They didn’t even really see what happened, not all of it. Not what it meant.”

Once he starts, Trent lets him keep going for as long as he’ll go for, giving Jamie space at the end to keep talking if he decides to, if there’s more there for him to say. When it becomes clear that Jamie has come to the end of the road, at least for what he’s saying right now, Trent takes it as his cue to pick up the direction of the conversation again.

“Alright, then, so tell me the real story,” he says. “Tell me about the twenty-fifth. Tell me what it meant.”

The fire in Jamie goes out in an instant, and he seems to deflate. He looks smaller than he had before, shoulders gone back up and the cuff of his too-big jacket pulled down far over his knuckles. Trent is ready for him to stop before he even starts, to pull back, pull away, and say no. Which is his right. He’s already given enough, given so much more than anyone had the right to expect him to, for reasons that Trent still doesn’t fully understand. If Jamie wants to stop flaying his wounds — both old and new — open for the world to see, that’s his right.

“Okay,” Jamie mutters. He breathes sharply in and out, then nods. “Okay, sure. Should I start with…”

When Trent realizes he’s not going to finish that sentence, he gestures vaguely with the pen, and says, “Wherever it feels right to you to start. You’ve got possession of the ball here, so to speak.”

The sideways attempt at a light joke lands better than Trent really had the right to expect, and the corner of Jamie’s mouth twitches into an anxious, strained shadow of a smile.

“Okay,” he says, then repeats a couple of more times. “Okay, okay. Okay, so we’d won the match, right? Two-nil, with those goals from Sam and Dani, and we had reporters tailing us back to the bus. News was all still talking about the semifinal match against City, so I guess that was probably why.” Mentioning the Wembley match makes Jamie’s voice speed up and get unsteady and bunched together again, like it had when he’d been talking about his childhood. “Everything seemed like it was fine, until it wasn’t. Felt like he came out of… Out of fucking nowhere.”

That’s how it felt to the rest of the world too, though Trent doesn’t point that out. He figures it probably wouldn’t be a useful thing to mention. Seeing a text from a friend from the press room and opening Twitter, only to be immediately confronted with an auto-playing video of Jamie being shaken and slapped by an angry older man with greying hair, had been a shock that felt like getting punched in the face. Which, Trent assumes, was nothing next to actually having been punched in the face.

“Do you need me to —” Jamie’s breathing faster again, leg bouncing so rapidly it reminds Trent of the sewing machine he used to watch his aunt make quilts with when he was younger. “The part where he, y’know — Do you need me to say what happened there, or —”

Oh. “No,” Trent says quickly. “No, we have a very clear understanding of what happened next, after he got ahold of you. We’re aware of… We have the details on the physical violence. You don’t need to recount that part.”

“Right.” Another breath in, and out. Fast, sharp. Then again, slower and more deliberate. “So, he started, you know —” Jamie balls up a tight fist and raises it off his lap, making a very small swing through the air that causes Trent’s pulse to jolt just a little. “And then I was — I was down, and he was going to— Roy stopped him before he could do any worse, though.”

That’s new. Not that Roy intervened to prevent the assault from worsening — they all knew that part. Trent has seen it over and over again: the part of the video where Roy Kent crashed out of the crowd and grabbed Jamie’s father right as the man seemed to be pulling back to start kicking him. Things surely would have escalated even farther had he not, that much was eminently clear. What hadn’t been at all clear was that Jamie even knew that had happened.

“So you saw what happened after you were knocked down?”

“I mean, no. Not really. Like, I, I was kind of… I was on the ground, right, couldn’t see anything, couldn’t track much, but I— one minute I knew he was coming at me, next I heard Roy. Didn’t know what he was saying, it was all kind of a blur, but I heard his voice, and I knew—” He cuts off abruptly, his cheeks rapidly reddening.

For a moment, Trent is massively convinced that Jamie isn’t going to continue, isn’t going to finish the sentence, and they’re just going to move on. He’s wrong. It takes a pause, Jamie seeming to war with himself before he mutters the rest of the thought quickly, eyes fixed on the far wall.

“Heard him, and knew everything was gonna be okay.”

That’s not what Trent would have expected at all. Given their history, having Jamie directly admit that hearing Roy’s voice had been enough for him to know that his father’s assault was over and wouldn’t start again is shocking. Trent makes sure to get the right wording on it, jotting it down in a more complete sentence than he would usually employ to record a quote.

“Ask me something else already, will you?” The demand is irritated and almost a snap, like this, out of everything he’s said so far, is the part that Jamie can’t help but want to get away from as fast as possible.

Very well, Trent can oblige him.

“Alright, to address another matter related to Coventry specifically, and a question that’s been at the top of everyone’s minds this week — how are you feeling? Your injuries, I believe it was reported by the team, weren’t incredibly severe, which I was glad to hear.”

Saying that the inquiry about Jamie’s wellbeing was the first thing on everyone’s minds was probably overly generous to the general public, at least if what he’s seen online is any indication. No matter. Trent will get to that later.

Jamie’s face twists in an uncomfortable expression that seems like it’s trying to be some kind of smile but isn’t quite managing it. “Yeah, I mean, I’m feeling alright, I guess,” he says. He sounds awkward and uncertain, and Trent quietly pushes down another wave of disbelief at the version of this person here in front of him. “Head kinda hurts still, but it’s not too bad. I’ll be getting my stitches out later today, so that’s good. They’re really starting to itch. Most of it’s just bruises and scrapes, couple of stitches. Mild concussion. I got lucky, really.”

There’s that word again. Lucky, used in yet another place where Trent would never have placed it, but he keeps that input to himself. It probably wouldn’t help. Instead, he just jots a few things down. They’d said on social media and in the press room that he wasn’t severely injured, but the details themselves had been light. This is the first time Trent has heard an accurate catalogue of the extent of the physical damage suffered in the attack.

“And you were seen in hospital?” he asks.

“Not right away. I got seen at home by… by a friend, who’s a doctor.” Something must show on Trent’s face in response to that, because Jamie’s eyes widen and he quickly adds, “A good one. I didn’t just see some back alley hack, she’s good. Real good.”

Trent nods, writing a few things down again. He doesn’t pursue the unknown in that equation, but he does have to admit, in his own mind, that he’s deeply curious about the identity of this friend. There’s some suspicion in the back of his mind, remembering having reported on Roy’s career-ending injury and seeing significant involvement from a sister who worked as a doctor. That’s not the subject of this interview, though, and the human interest piece on the evolving nature of what had once been an incredibly contentious relationship between Jamie and Roy would have to wait.

“But yeah,” Jamie goes on, giving Trent another thing to focus on instead, “went to her surgery next day. Got all these stitches — twenty-eight of ‘em, if you can believe it. And I got a scan. I guess she — the doctor, I mean — she was worried I might’ve had a fracture in some bone in my face or head or whatever.”

The information is delivered in such a casual, dismissive tone that Jamie clearly doesn’t see anything particularly notable or dramatic in that sentence. Trent just nods and adjusts his grip on the pen. Matching the subject’s energy is, for the most part, the best way to approach this kind of thing, much as Trent may have all kinds of opinions about how casually one ought to discuss the potential for broken bones in one’s head, or the frankly insane-sounding number of stitches in one’s face. He jots down the number 28 and is proud of the way the curves of the 8 don’t jitter.

“Scan was clear though, so. No cracks in my skull or anything, which is good.”

“Yes, that is good to hear,” Trent says, with a mild smile. Dear God, he thinks. Cracked skull. They were worried about a cracked skull. The words stare up at him from his legal pad: Cracked skull, next to a small x.

Now that they’ve covered the actual events of the night and the injuries he’d sustained during them, there’s something else Trent wants to get some clarity on. It’s a difficult subject to broach, though, and he considers it carefully before he speaks, looking at his notes as he mulls it over.

“I want to make something clear before I ask this next question, and that is that I am in no way meaning to imply that anything that happened was your fault at all.” There’s been enough of that going around from various sources on the internet, and Trent wants absolutely no part in stoking that fire. Some of the things he’s seen being said have been positively abhorrent — both behind anonymous masks and from bare-faced public figures on sports commentating panels. “That being said, I want to ask — was there something in particular that he was angry about, this time? You’ve been in the public eye for some time now, and from what you’ve said, the abuse has been ongoing for most of that.”

A wordless nod.

“Right. And yet this is the first time the public has witnessed your father’s violence like this. Did something specific happen that set him off?”

Another nod. “Yeah. The, uh — You remember the other thing that came out in the press recently, the Wembley thing?”

Now it’s Trent’s turn to nod. “Though I’m not really sure how much of what I’ve heard to believe. We didn’t get a particularly coherent version of what happened there, just a somewhat vague account that was fairly light on detail from an unnamed source who was reportedly close to the team.”

Jamie’s jaw flexes. His shoulders shift as he adjusts in his seat. “No fucking idea who that was. Don’t know who’d have done that to me, why anyone would…” He stops, breathing hard. “That part’s almost worse than everyone knowing, I think. That it were one of us that — and I won’t ever know why.”

That hadn’t really been where Trent was going with this one. He hadn’t meant to get into the practicalities of the leak — the who and the why, the complicated little mess Trent himself had stumbled into in the most glancing, inadvertent way possible. Pressing his lips together and thinking hard, Trent concludes after a very quick but very fierce debate with himself that the conversation he’d partially overheard at the Crown and Anchor was best not raised just now.

Seeing how deeply the Wembley leak has impacted Jamie is enough to give him pause. Trent hadn’t known how large a factor it was in the ongoing crisis, and it’s impossible to deny its significance now that he’s seeing the consequences with his own eyes. Even so, this is not the time, and he is not the person to bring this up with Jamie. So, rather than broaching what, to Trent, seems to have been a careless mistake with far-reaching and largely unintended consequences, he chooses to move them along instead.

“All the report that we heard said was that you’d had another violent altercation with your father in the presence of the team before, after the semi-final loss to Manchester City.”

Thankfully, Jamie doesn’t seem to notice the subject change, or if he does, he doesn’t care.

“Yeah, well. He showed up after the match, was a bit shitfaced. Talked his way into the locker room. Started in on me right there in front of everyone. I tried to — to have boundaries.” Jamie pronounces the word carefully, like he’s very rarely — if at all — said it before, and he isn’t quite sure he’s using it correctly. “I tried to use the stuff Doctor Sharon taught me to just — calm shit down, I did, but he wouldn’t let me go. I tried to leave, and he grabbed me, and I knew what was coming, so I punched him.”

That certainly does clear up a few things Trent had been unclear on regarding what happened at Wembley. The leak hadn’t included many details, and he hadn’t known which were accurate. Apparently not done, Jamie takes a sharp, bracing breath and keeps going. He talks faster and quieter than he had before, looking down at his hands.

“He got back up. Came at me. So mad he was laughing, which is — That’s when you can tell he’s really angry. Scared the fuck out of me, since I was little.”

They’re shaking, just a little, balled up around the hat and whatever he’d taken out of his pocket early on. The sight of Jamie’s hands trembling that way reminds Trent of Ted, sitting across from him in the restaurant the other night.

With that thought comes another, and Trent suddenly has the distinct feeling he knows what Jamie’s holding, hidden from sight behind his tightly closed fingers. He doesn’t really know what to do with that realization. Trent wonders if Ted knows that Jamie had kept the little toy soldier since the end of the previous season, if he’s right about what it is.

“He was gonna teach me a lesson for that one,” Jamie says. His shoulders jerk with another sharp, sudden inhale. “Knew he was. Bad. But Coach Beard got there first and threw him out, so he didn’t get to me that time.”

That time.

“Anyways, day after that, he started texting me about… He started texting me all this shit, and it just wouldn’t let up. I tried a bit, but trying to get it to stop just made it worse, always fucking makes it worse, so I went to talk to Doctor Sharon because I just… I wanted it to stop, and she said if I wanted him to leave me alone for good, I had the right to tell him to fuck off.”

The way that Jamie says the last part, I had the right to, is a little harsher than the rest of the words around it, and his chin juts up, just a bit. It’s like he’s already braced for a fight about it, defending that right even before it’s been questioned. Like Jamie himself has been questioning it enough that no one else has to prompt him to automatically launch into a justification.

“So, you’d decided to cut off contact with him?” Trent can’t say of course you had the right to do that, you always did, and it’s an enormous step that you should be proud of yourself for taking, because that’s just not what his role here is, but he puts as much casual, easy non judgement in his voice as he can fit. Hopefully, that gets something of the message across.

“Yeah,” Jamie says, the word whooshing out in a sigh. “Couple of days before Coventry, I finally got up enough nerve. Had to have Doctor Sharon help me write the message, and then I sent it, and blocked his number before he could call and start screaming at me about it. Not hard to figure out that’s why he tracked me down. Few days after I stopped answering messages but before I told him to leave me alone, he said if I didn’t stop ignoring him, he’d make me regret it, so… Probably should’ve known something was coming.”

The idea that there had been threats issued at some point, in what Trent would judge to be a pretty clear and direct manner, clears up some of the questions surrounding the charges, at least. Trent isn’t a lawyer, but he’s sure that if James had been threatening Jamie prior to the attack, that went directly towards supporting premeditation.

Something else about what Jamie said sticks out, a name that Trent’s heard a few times now but can’t quite place.

“I have a redirect, if we could go back a moment.” When Jamie nods, Trent looks at the name he’d noted down, and asks, “That’s the third time you’ve mentioned a Doctor Sharon. Can you tell me who that is?”

“Oh, right. Doctor Sharon Fieldstone. She’s a sports psych, I guess. Team hired her on this year.”

Now Trent remembers. He hadn’t been able to piece it together without the surname attached, but he knows of the woman in question. It made a bit of a splash in the media when the news got out that Richmond hired a psychologist for the duration of the season. Personally, Trent thinks it’s a rather good idea. He’s spent years seeing a therapist on and off himself, and Dr. Fieldstone’s reputation precedes her.

“She’s fucking brilliant,” Jamie continues, unknowingly echoing Trent’s thoughts. There’s honest admiration in his tone. “She knows all this stuff about brains and the way people think and why all your thoughts and feelings and shit get all mixed up sometimes. Helps me figure out how to sort through it. Doctor Sharon says she reckons I could use talking to somebody who mostly handles cases like mine, though, on account of it’s not her specialty and she’s just on contract through the season.”

The idea of Jamie willingly pursuing therapy, even going past what came with Dr. Fieldstone’s presence with the club, is something that Trent probably ought to find surprising. However, with all of the other things he and the rest of the world have learned about Jamie recently, he just finds it a relief. To say that he could probably benefit from some professional help is a woeful understatement.

“She gave me a referral to some other shrink she knows, a trauma specialist, for a — a full PTSD evaluation. Or, no, she called it something else, said what I got’s probably- ah— Some shit with another letter in front of the— C-PTSD. That was it. There was a C on the front, ‘cause what I got’s the ‘complex’ kind, I guess.”

Trent’s pen hovers over the page. “I don’t have to write any of that down, if you’d prefer to keep that kind of detail about your mental health private.”

“Don’t care,” Jamie says after only the slightest pause, shrugging one shoulder. “Not like the whole world don’t already know I’m fucked up in the head now. Who gives a shit if they know what kind of fucked up. And maybe it’ll… I dunno, maybe it’ll mean something to somebody, I guess, if maybe they got the same thing. That’s something that matters, right? Hearing someone else say they deal with the same bullshit you do, and it’s not the end of the world or whatever.”

It’s a distinctly Jamie way to have put that, but he’s got a point. “Yes,” Trent agrees. “Often, yes, it does.”

“Right. Then go ahead and print it. I’ve got fuckin’ complicated post-traumatic stress and the club psych is gonna send me to some specialist she knows so I can get it sorted a bit, hopefully not muck up the rest of my life. Never thought I’d be the therapy type but I don’t know if I’d have ever told him to leave me alone if it hadn’t been for her help. She says there’s a lot of stuff about the way things are for me that are — that are a lot harder than they’re supposed to be. That it might take some work, but it don’t have to be like that.”

Not for the first time over the course of this interview, Jamie has just delivered a conclusion representing a rather profound shift in perspective in the same fashion in which one might deliver an opinion about what to have for dinner. It causes Trent’s pen to hover over his paper for a beat before he starts writing things down.

There are a lot of things that Trent wants to note as faithfully as he can to the way that Jamie said them. He usually tries to avoid writing too much at once when he’s interviewing. To the subject, it can come across like they aren’t being listened to, and Trent prefers not to risk that. However, this time, the words themselves are too important.

Once he’s finished with that, the reminder of how inescapably public all of this has been for Jamie brings Trent to another point he needs to raise.

“The media response,” he says, unable to help the distaste that seeps into his voice. “It’s been rather… intense, particularly given the presence of the reporters at Coventry who filmed what happened there. How much of that have you seen, and how has it been to handle that aspect?”

“I’ve seen enough, and it fucking sucks.” The verdict is short, sharp, and entirely warranted. It could’ve been left at that and summed the whole mess up successfully, but Jamie goes on. “Didn’t really look at first, everybody kept telling me not to, but I did eventually, and it… There’s all these people calling it drama, or saying anyone’d do the same if they had the chance, and that sucks, and then there’s — there’s people making memes about it. I literally saw a clip on Twitter of my dad punching me in the face that someone set to that song Despacito.”

Trent just has absolutely no idea what to begin to say about that, so he says nothing, staring at Jamie with his mouth slightly open. That is, apparently, response enough.

“Yeah,” Jamie scoffs. “Exactly. That’s not even a current meme, that was over like — like a couple of years ago, nobody even thinks that shit’s funny anymore.”

That part is not really what Trent had been shocked by there, again, but he doesn’t push it. If Jamie wants to focus on the fact that it was an outdated meme, and not how viscerally horrifying it must have been to see video of one’s own abuse set to a pop song for the sake of a joke, then he’s allowed to do that.

“And it’s not even just the — the people making memes about it, right, the people making jokes or saying it were my fault or I must’ve had it coming, it’s the other shit too, right? People trying to — to figure out what all this means, how my fucking — daddy issues,” he spits the words like they repulse him, “show up in my life, how they should’ve guessed. I mean, fuck’s sake, it’s not like — listen.” Jamie’s on a roll now, his voice picked up a few degrees of volume, his face twisted in an irritated frown.

The hat in his hands is completely crumpled up now, wrinkled over on itself. He doesn’t pull on any of the edges, though, like he’s being mindful not to fray it. His eyes snap up in a sudden change, meeting Trent’s in an unusual move both for this meeting and for Jamie’s demeanour overall. There’s a kind of fire in them, a bright flash of anger, commingled with pain.

“You’ve seen the shit people are saying about me, yeah? The things they’re trying to — to write off as being because of this or whatever?” Just like that, his eyes are gone again, skating off to the side and looking at something out Trent’s window. The way Jamie dances around the subject, not saying it out loud or naming the abuse when he can avoid it, doesn’t surprise Trent. Some things are hard to look at directly, and he doesn’t blame Jamie for wanting to come at this one sideways.

Trent nods. “I’ve seen quite a lot of it, yes.”

“That this is why I, like — About my dating history, and how I haven’t really seen anyone long-term other than Keeley, which is ridiculous, because dating’s just fucking weird, so that doesn’t mean shit, or that — that I’m some kind of liability, which is just fucking stupid, because it’s not like this has ever been an issue before when I was actually living in Manchester still and he could just show up and thrash me whenever he felt like it, which he fucking did. Nobody had a problem then — one night he put me through the fucking coffee table and I scored the next day and nobody even noticed.”

Trent’s pen stops dead on the pad, a sharp little line jutting off the word he’d been writing. He looks up from the paper and stares at Jamie, trying valiantly to wring words out of the shocked sponge of his brain.

“Jamie,” he says, and the young man looks at him, seeming a little surprised. Maybe he’d forgotten this was an interview, which was precisely why Trent wanted to stop him while he could. This is not a normal sports interview, and while ordinarily he’d be happy to let a subject just keep talking, this is not the sort of thing he wants to publish without explicit permission. Not at that level of detail, and not when he isn’t sure that Jamie fully remembers what they’re doing here. “I don’t need to write that down, if you don’t want me to.”

“Write what… oh,” Jamie says. He frowns, his hands ceasing the movement where they’d still been fiddling with the hat. For a moment it seems like he’s considering something and then the troubled, pensive expression clears into one of defiance. “I don’t give a shit,” he announces. His jaw has a stubborn set to it, and Trent can see his hands, the hat balled up between them, shaking in his lap.

It’s not like the way Jamie had said Trent could record and quote what he’d said about his C-PTSD diagnosis and the treatment he was receiving. That had been dismissive and almost casual. This time, the permission comes with a distinct air of a challenge — like if the world wanted to point and stare, they were damn well going to know what they were pointing and staring at.

“Put it in there, word for fucking word if you want. ‘S all out there anyway. What does it matter?” Jamie’s voice is loud, teetering between bold and upset. “My dear old dad was pissed one night, and so he came round where I lived, and when he got done shoving me into walls and screaming in my face, he threw me down hard enough that it broke my fucking coffee table. Cracked the thing clear in half. Scored the next day, and then I had to make sure I didn’t let anyone see me without a shirt on for more than a week.”

Trent hesitates, but when the resolve doesn’t fade from Jamie’s face, even though he still visibly trembles every few moments, he starts writing things down, taking a few notes. His handwriting is a little wobbly, recording the details of the horrifying story he’s just been told, knowing there are a hundred more just like it that he hasn’t heard.

“When was this?” he asks, voice soft.

“About two months before I first got sent on loan to Richmond. Match was against Brighton,” Jamie tells him without taking a second to think about it. He clearly remembers the event in detail, and Trent can see why. Something like that would leave an impression. “That sort of shit happened all the fucking time, and nobody’s ever asked if I were fucking mentally fit to play then, so it’s stupid that they think it’ll make a difference now, just ‘cause he stopped caring if he went for my face hard enough to leave marks that’d last.”

“And you kept the resulting injuries hidden from your teammates? That must have been difficult.” It’s the closest Trent can get to saying what he wants to say, which is, ‘dear god, I’m so sorry that happened to you.’ Something tells him, though, that if they’re to get through the rest of this interview, that is the exact sort of thing he can’t say to Jamie yet.

Jamie nods. He opens his mouth and then closes it again, swallowing hard and nodding again before he speaks. “Yeah, it was.” It’s a poorly articulated mumble, tired and half-formed.

Though Trent wants to tell him they’re done, that he’s asked all he has to ask and Jamie can go, as long as he’s still up for more, they aren’t quite finished yet. There’s still a little more they have to discuss. There’s another question in particular that Trent has to ask now, as much as he doesn’t really want to. He feels exhausted himself, and if it’s taken this much out of him to hear all of this, to process what he’s being told secondhand, he can only imagine what it’s taken from Jamie to recount things he’d actually experienced. This question, though… this is an important one.

“Did you ever consider reporting the abuse?” he asks, light and without inflection one way or another. “Telling anyone?”

“I mean, I told you earlier…” Jamie says stiffly, obviously not wanting to get back into that.

Which — he had told Trent earlier, the last time he’d been asked this. What he’d said then jumps unbidden back into Trent’s mind — the description of the time Jamie had threatened to call the police on James and been laughed at for his trouble, the subsequent conclusion that his father might kill him. Pushing that memory — and the nausea that comes with it — away, Trent refocuses instead on the present moment, and on clarifying what, he realizes, had been a poorly-worded inquiry.

“No, as an adult, I mean,” he says. “Did you ever speak to any of your coaches about this? Any teammates? Anyone?”

The look on Jamie’s face goes from tired to uncomfortable. Maybe a little scared. He seems like he’s going to start talking a few times, only to think better of it and stop before anything comes out. Trent sits back and lets him have as much time as he needs. Though he thinks he knows the answer already, it’s a more complicated question than just ‘yes, I told,’ or ‘no, I didn’t,’ — and that’s if Jamie is going to be able to articulate it for someone else in the first place.

“It’s not just…” Jamie starts eventually. He speaks slowly and stiffly, twisting his ring again and not able to even come close to looking Trent in the face. “It got to be different, after a while. It’s being — being scared, but it’s not just that, you know? It’s not just — just knowing I’d pay for it if I ever said a word to anyone.”

When he admits to being afraid — of James, the clear implication reads — Jamie stumbles over the words a bit, which makes Trent’s gut twist. It seems like such an obvious given — that Jamie would be afraid of a man like that after all of the suffering that he caused — and still, it was a hard confession for him to make.

“It’s other stuff too, right?” Jamie goes on. He’s not picking up speed or confidence at all as he continues, but he’s not stopping either. This is hard for him to articulate, hard for him to say, but he seems determined to finish out the answer anyway. “There’s just… Some things you just don’t know how to talk about. Some shit you don’t got words for. Because there’s words, right, big words. Heavy words, and maybe you don’t know if what’s happening counts. And maybe it’s your fault. Maybe you deserved it. Kind of figured I did, for a while. Little less, lately, but sometimes, I still — I think I’d listened to him for so long that his voice got louder in my head than mine was, and I didn’t have no one else to listen to.”

Though Trent finds himself immediately compelled to push back, to ask how Jamie could ever possibly still think that any of this had been — or still was — his own fault, he also knows it’s a stupid question, and he doesn’t ask it. That’s not the sort of thing that operates on logic, and even with an adult’s ability to reason, sometimes a child’s heart is able to overrule everything else. Especially when that heart had been taught to believe what it believed by someone like a parent — someone who is the centre of your world for so long, who practically writes the rules of your reality. And then when the rest of the world chimed in the way it has the last week on social media… It’s not hard at all to see how Jamie might still believe the abuse was his own fault, under the weight of all of that.

“And there’s just… Shame.” It’s a little hard to hear Jamie at this point — he’s speaking so quietly and so softly. “Fucking — so much shame you feel like you might fucking choke to death on it whenever you think about saying anything. ‘Cause maybe you could be excused when you were younger, ‘cause you were so little, and there weren’t nothing you could’a done, but…” He stops, takes a deep, sharp breath.

The way Jamie speaks in second person, displacing the story off of himself and onto someone else, doesn’t escape Trent’s notice. That’s what a person has to do, sometimes, in order to be able to tell that kind of a horrible, suffocating story. It has to happen to someone else, because if it happened to you, then you might not be able to bear telling anyone about it.

“But then you grow up, and you’re not so little anymore. And you didn’t do anything to make it stop or get away when you were sixteen, or when you were eighteen, and then you’re all the way grown, and faster than him, and a Premier League footballer, and at that point isn’t it all on you? I could just… I could hear the questions.” Jamie’s hands go still, gripping the hat, whatever’s still tucked in his palm out of sight, so hard his knuckles are pale. His jaw flexes as he swallows, and Trent wonders if he’s started to develop some kind of tension headache. If he hasn’t, he probably will soon. “Why didn’t I just leave, why didn’t I fight back? Why’d I just… let him keep smacking me around? Fucking pathetic. Could hear the laughing, too.”

And there has been laughing, is the really terrible part. Trent’s seen it, online, on a few of the panels. Jamie obviously has too, going by what he’d said earlier. Memes making fun of what’s happened to him, honestly. The things some people are alright with making jokes about will never cease to astonish Trent.

“How has it been, then? For the people around you to know?” Because that’s the part Trent hopes will be able to take them somewhere better. Not the laughter from the general public, the gawking and the ways in which all of Jamie’s fears about speaking out have been realized, but to the people who actually know Jamie. Trent doesn’t know most of them particularly well himself, but if he had to guess, he’d stake his entire career and pretty much anything else on the assumption that those people, at least, would not have laughed, blamed, or shamed Jamie over what they’ve seen and found out about.

It’s a long time before Jamie answers. The silence stretches on for long enough in fact that Trent starts to worry that he may have been off somehow in his assessment of Richmond’s culture, that maybe someone had reacted poorly and caused even more hurt to pile on top of what existed there already.

“They’ve been… They’ve been incredible, actually,” is what Jamie finally says, and Trent relaxes a little. Though he’s barely audible, Jamie’s voice no longer sounds like he’s trying to avoid disturbing an exposed nerve ending. There’s warmth in it now, and his hands have eased out of their death-grip. He’s looking at the little object he’s been holding throughout the interview.

“So you’ve had help?” Trent pushes just a little farther. “There’s been a support system around you as you’ve been dealing with all of this?”

“Yeah,” Jamie says, back in a mumble again. He looks at his hands, twists the hat around some more. “Yeah, I have. Team’s been great, they’ve been — they’ve been the best. All of them have, the lads, Coach Lasso —”

Once. Only once during this entire long and difficult conversation has Jamie cried. Upon saying Ted’s name, he chokes up so suddenly and strongly that he can’t keep speaking at all. Jamie’s chest jerks with a series of quick little breaths and he tips to the side, snagging the bottle of water off the ground again and taking a long drink of it. When he replaces the cap and sets it back down beside the leg of his chair, he’s able to keep going, though he still sounds a bit unsteady.

“Don’t even think I can figure out how to really explain how Ted’s been with all this. What he’s done for me since he first got here, before he knew any of this,” he says, more down to his own hands than to Trent. “And after. He’s just — He’s been —” Jamie stops again. He pulls his hands apart, folding one arm across his body and tucking the fist with the small object in it against his side. “He’s Ted,” Jamie finishes simply.

Just two words. Two words coming out a little too damp, his eyes shining a little too bright, like that explains everything. And, honestly? It kind of does.

“But yeah,” Jamie says, a little louder. Stronger, like he’s shaking himself free of whatever had welled up inside him when he’d tried to talk in any detail about Ted. “Team’s amazing. Ms. Welton’s got these lawyers making sure I know what’s going on with the court stuff. And Roy ’n’ Keeley have been… They’ve been lookin’ after me, I guess.”

If Trent could reach inside his brain and find the switch that would turn off his ability to feel surprised, he would. At this point, it’s just ridiculous to continue to be taken aback by the things that Jamie says in this interview. And yet —

“That’s Keeley Jones? Your ex-girlfriend?”

“Yeah. But she’s more my friend than my ex, you know?”

Really, no, Trent doesn’t. The distinction seems odd to him, but it seems to mean something important to Jamie, so he nods regardless.

“She’s the best,” Jamie muses, expression going fond and warm. It’s like talking about her makes his entire presence lighten. “She’s a really great friend, ‘m fucking lucky to have her. So, no, don’t really think of her as my ex at this point. Just feels kind of… rude. Cause it makes it sound like we don’t speak no more, or like I feel badly about her, which we do, and I don’t.”

It makes a little more sense with an explanation attached, though it’s still a bit confusing. Then again, Jamie’s a bit of a confusing person in general, and this is far from the first time that he’s given an explanation that hasn’t particularly cleared things up.

“Okay. So, Keeley’s been looking after you, because she’s a friend. That makes sense. And Roy Kent, as well. Suffice it to say your relationship with him seems to have improved.” Trent puts it as a mild observation, not even framed as a question, in case Jamie doesn’t want to get into any of that right now, but he’d be lying if he said he weren’t incredibly curious.

“Hah, yeah, I guess. He’s…” Jamie trails off and looks over out the window. He seems like he’s thinking rather hard. When he starts again, it’s a bit of a non-sequitur. “Used to watch him play any chance I could. Whenever there was a match on. Didn’t care who he played for, just that he was there. Thought a lot of him, when I was a kid. Then I didn’t so much for a while, when I got to Richmond, and we didn’t… get on.” He’s clearly aware of the understatement.

“And now?” Trent asks lightly. He can’t help it. He wants the end of this particular tangent badly; it’s not the point of why they’re here, obviously, but it’s a compelling layer. The rivalry between Jamie and Roy has been one for the record books from the very start of Jamie’s time in Richmond. It’s been fascinating to watch the way it’s changed since Jamie came back from Manchester, and this new information about just how far back their complicated history goes for Jamie… One day, luck willing, Trent is going to write that story.

“Now…” Jamie’s mouth twists like he’s chewing on the rest of his answer, unsure if he’s actually going to say it or if he’s going to let it melt away to nothing. His expression is different than the one he’d worn when talking about Keeley, but it’s not in a wholly separate category either. “Figure I had it right the first time, yeah?” He hesitates again, pausing and shrugging one shoulder. The words are slow to come out, and there’s a slight blush reddening his cheeks. “He’s a good coach. Good man. Been right there the whole time, this week, making sure I know he’s there. Didn’t even need to ask him, he just — He’s been… been real good to me, since everything’s been happening with my dad. Probably better than I deserve.”

Trent’s lips purse tightly, but he doesn’t say anything. Not your place, he reminds himself. Not your place.

There’s something else there that sticks out to Trent, just as strongly as the almost offhanded, self-directed condemnation. Jamie had to drag himself through saying all of that, making his way through talking about Roy like it took an immense effort to get through the words out. Compared to everything else they’ve discussed today, only the way he’d sounded talking about Ted seems to compare. It makes a stark contrast against the way he’d talked about how bad things had gotten in Manchester. Trent doesn’t know what to do with that.

Jamie has had a harder time trying to explain what Ted Lasso means to him, admitting to the way he’d looked up to Roy Kent as a child and found himself relying on the man now, than he did describing the time his father put him through a coffee table. For some reason, this is the part that Jamie is more reticent about saying.

Speaking of things Jamie is reticent about saying… There’s something Trent wants to circle back to, now that they’ve gone over just about everything else he’d wanted to bring up or ask about. They’ve talked about this already, but Jamie’s answer had been a non-answer. Over the course of the interview, he’s opened up significantly, grown comfortable enough with Trent to tell him all manner of horrifying, heart wrenching, and deeply personal things. Maybe now Trent might get a different sort of response.

“You said earlier, when I asked why you’d decided to do this, that it was impossible to keep what’s happened to you quiet after Coventry. But what you told me today goes far beyond the events of the twenty-fifth, including why you’ve never told anyone before this. You don’t have to answer, but I’d like to ask again. Why sit down with me today? What motivated your decision to go public with this?”

Jamie’s bouncing leg stills. He looks out the window for a while. “It’s because…” Trailing off, he shakes his head.

The hand tucked against Jamie’s side gives such a sudden, fierce twitch it seems almost like an involuntary muscle spasm, and he pulls it away, finally stowing the object he’s been clutching for so much of the interview back in his pocket. He puts the hat back on with the same brisk movements, like it’s an afterthought. Like he’d just noticed that he wasn’t wearing it anymore. Jamie tucks one of his now-empty hands into the other and lets them rest. He looks equal measure anxious and determined.

“I decided to talk now because there are kids in this country, in countries all over, who are going through the same shit I did,” Jamie says. There’s a faint tremble in his voice and he’s speaking just a shade too loudly, but he doesn’t stop. “There are kids watching Richmond games, watching me play, who don’t think they’ve got a chance of growing up to be anything, maybe don’t think they got a chance of growing up at all, and they need to hear it. They need to know that it’s possible to grow up and be okay, because right now it feels like it won’t ever be. Because they’re getting their— their fucking skulls scanned for fractures, and they’re getting beat when they go home and didn’t do well enough at a match. So they need to know that it’s possible to live. And to be okay. And…”

Looking back down at his hands, Jamie opens them slightly. He moves his thumb over the object in his palm. The room is quiet and still. Trent wants to tell him that it’s alright, he can take his time, but he keeps his mouth shut. He gets the feeling that if he tried to reassure Jamie right now, it will likely backfire on them both. It’s a delicate-feeling moment, and Jamie needs this. He needs to do this one himself. Jamie is quiet for a while, and then he looks back up at Trent.

“And because I’m tired of working so fucking hard to hide it,” he says. “I’m tired of feeling like I’ve got to— to keep this huge, stupid, shameful secret. Especially because— because it isn’t my shame. Weren’t ever my shame. It’s his.”

It’s the kind of revelation that’s years, decades in the making. The kind that some don’t ever reach in their lifetime. Trent doesn’t say it — it’s not his place, he isn’t a therapist or a friend, he’s a journalist here to help Jamie tell his story, but he writes those words down, careful to get them right. He takes perhaps more time than he needs, making sure he’s got the phrasing, writing every word out in full rather than in shorthand. The pause gives Jamie time to gather himself again. The hard, harsh sounds of his breathing are audible to Trent, until they finally start to ease and slow again.

And just like that, they’re done. The interview is finished. It’s like the whole opera has built to this, and once the final crescendo lives out its last notes, the curtain goes down and everyone begins to shuffle back to the rest of their lives.

There are a few more moments of awkward shop talk — about the article, about how Trent will make sure there’s a copy sent to Keeley for final approval before it’s printed. That’s not ordinarily something he would ever do. Advance copies aren’t unusual, but any kind of oversight or authority to pull bits out very much is. There’s nothing about this that isn’t strange and out of step, though, so Trent doesn’t hesitate in making the offer, just in case the gravity of all he’s said hits Jamie later on and he’d rather not have some of the more acute details printed.

Trent has already set his pen down, shuffling through his notes as Jamie heads for the door, ready to get to work as soon as possible. This is going to be an article written on a very swift turnaround, if he wants to give them time to review and approve the contents. Their direct business being done, he doesn’t expect there to be any more coming from Jamie except the sound of footsteps down the stairs.

But then, that’s the point, isn’t it? Jamie’s never been prone to doing what’s been expected.

“There’s another reason, too,” Jamie says, voice cutting through the strange and stilted quiet that always falls around Trent once an interview has concluded. He’s halfway out of the office when he says it, stopping in the doorway and turning around. “Another reason I decided to come here, to do the interview. Tell the story.”

Leaning back in his chair, Trent finds his pen again, holds it loosely. He arranges his face and body language to indicate that he’s paying attention, and waits for Jamie to go on.

“It’s because…” The hand Jamie has braced on the doorframe folds up into a fist. He scrapes his knuckles absentmindedly over the surface, looking at his hand rather than at Trent. “It’s because I’ve had help. A lot of help, after Coventry. From the sort of people I never believed really existed — and if they did, then they definitely wouldn’t ever give a shit about me. But they do, and — you know. They do. So I wanted those kids like me, grown-ups too, to know that. I wanted them to know that if someone tries to help you, it’s okay to let them. It’s okay to ask for help. I wish I had a long time ago. And it’s… I want them to know it’s real. The…”

Jamie stops abruptly. He swallows hard, knocks his knuckles against the wall again. His teeth grind, the muscle on the side of his jaw working visibly as he does. Rocking back and forth on his heels for a moment, Jamie taps the wall again, then says it all in a rush, quick enough that the words nearly trip over one another coming out.

“The love. The love, that they’ll get from those people. It’s real.” With a sudden, sharp inhale, Jamie glances back at Trent. His eyes are bright and the look on his face is something relieved. “Thanks, Trent. Good, ah. Good interviewing, or — Well, thanks.” He knocks the doorframe one more time, then leaves so fast Trent doesn’t have the opportunity to respond.

On an impulse, Trent texts Aoife as Jamie is walking down the stairs of the office building, making a final request, then stowing his phone on his desk and leaning back, staring out the window that had attracted Jamie's attention so many times that day. There's a lot for him to think about, information and impressions turning over each other in his head, unable to settle. He’s feeling more than he’d expected to feel, though that was perhaps an oversight on his part. Going in, it was obvious that this wasn’t just going to be any old interview, that Trent was going to have a lot to sift through afterwards. Somehow, he still hadn’t expected it to be this much.

Leaning back in his desk chair, Trent pulls the glasses from his face and folds the stems over one by one. The muted tick of plastic on plastic sounds extraordinarily loud in the overwhelmingly quiet room. His notepad sits on the desk next to him, notes scribbled up and down the yellow ruled page. Crossing his arms over his chest, Trent takes a deep breath in and lets it out slowly. Normally, he’d have started writing already, scribbling down ideas on another legal pad. Just thoughts to start out, particular phrases or sentences that seemingly came to mind out of thin air. Then he’d go through an outline, sketching through the concept for the structure of the article, forming the best way to convey the information in a way that both did the subject justice and told a good story for the reader. This time, though, it’s taking longer than usual. The thoughts are slow and muddled, clouded with thoughts of Trent’s own childhood, his feelings about the father that still dogs his own steps. He may not have stories of being thrown through coffee tables or scars on his face, but he’s spent a lot of years doing a lot of personal work on sorting through what he did carry.

Trent had promised himself he wouldn’t do this. He’d sworn inside his own mind that he could stay objective and do this without his own baggage, his own feelings getting in the way. It would ordinarily have been a ridiculously naive self-promise for a journalist to make. Objectivity is a harder battle to fight than most fresh young sprouts beginning their first years of journalism school think it is. Trent knows better, now, but it isn’t usually a problem in sports reporting. There aren’t usually these kind of stakes on the table in sports reporting. Trent had known that this one was different — that this interview, this article was different — but he’d thought he had enough distance. He’d done the therapy, put years between himself and where he came from. It never goes away, but most days it sits quietly, now. All except that one phrase that recurs to him periodically: Are you a man or are you a mouse?

That’s what’s taking so long now. Trent is having trouble picking through his own thoughts and feelings, things that were brought up much more strongly than he’d ever have expected. Something about Jamie sitting there, the tremor that came and went in his voice, the way he twisted his hands in his lap, had called it all up. The weight of Jamie’s story sits on Trent’s shoulders, heavy and precious and frightening. His story deserves a voice. His pain deserves a voice. Trent agreed to give it to him.

Are you a man or are you a mouse?

The question meanders through Trent’s thoughts. The cold, disdainful voice he remembers hearing it in so many times is loud and clear, even though he hasn’t heard it aloud in years. He hears it and he sees Jamie’s odd, anxious posture, and then there they are: The words, the thoughts he needs to get down before he starts to lose them. His fingers twitch towards his pen and he straightens up in his chair, picking it up and grabbing a second legal pad from the drawer in his desk. When he starts writing, Trent tries not to overthink it too much.

Maybe that was the problem. Maybe he was thinking about it too hard, and disentangling his own thoughts and feelings from those Jamie had expressed was the wrong way to approach this. There might be some merit, as reticent as Trent might instinctively feel about the idea, in doing the opposite.