Chapter Text
The day of Jasper’s second victory during the Tour is basically a blur. Right after crossing the finish line, he gets a lot of hugs from his teammates, a bunch of slaps on the back, and a couple of handshakes. Days are always long during this once-a-year event, but especially when you win and have to go through a thousand anti-doping protocols and have two give 5 interviews in what feels like 5 different languages, where once it’s done you’re not even sure if you’ve just answered in English, Belgian or French.
There’s a small celebration held when the team gets back to the hotel and Jasper is forced to hold a quick speech as well, something about team spirit and all that, always works like a charm. He has a few glasses of champagne before things are eventually called quits and people start wandering off to their separate rooms.
When he also finally gets back to his room he realizes that he had ridden the wave of victory for so long that he now was near his physical and mental limits and that any comment by Mathieu he’d simply ignore. Mathieu is nice enough as a roommate but at the end of the day, Jasper is done for. All that’s left is to put up the post about his victory that every PR person on his team and probably most of his followers are expecting.
“Name a better Friday feeling 🥇” He puts as a first line. He says it as a half-truth because there is just one better thing right now, sleep.
He had barely uploaded his post, already half glued to some shitty reel Tadej had sent him hours prior, when the man on the other side of the room speaks up, “So cocky, you know that?”
Sometimes Jasper wonders how Mathieu gets anything done in his day, he had seen him spend more time on his phone staring at some shitty meme or post than Jasper had anything else.
“You know I’m right,” The Belgian replies as he leaves the comforts of his bed for the final time.
“Jappe, you know I have way more wins than you, right?”
“Whatever helps you sleep at night,” Jasper states halfway through the doorframe to the bathroom. Mathieu also says something again, but the other man’s words get lost as the door falls shut behind him.
He brushes his teeth and tries to somewhat figure out what to do with the disaster that was his hair right now, he settles on doing nothing. He takes another moment to wonder how somebody like Tadej does these celebrations every second day before finally leaving the bathroom again.
“Your hair looks shitty,” he got greeted by the other again.
Jasper could only roll his eyes at that as he threw himself head-first back into his bed, his next words were half muffled by the pillows and blanket, “At least I didn’t have a buzzcut before.”
“What was that?”
“Nothing,” he retorted to as he lifted his head back up.
Covering himself with his blanket and relaxing into his pillow, he turns onto his side and opens up Instagram again to check how his post is doing. 15000 likes and a whole bunch of comments, both from people he had never met and some from current and former teammates.
There’s a notification that pops up at the top of his screen ‘@mathieuvanderpoel sent you a reel’. He ignores it for now, Mathieu can wait.
The comments underneath his posts are mixed but generally pretty positive, he had seen worse in his days. He quickly goes through some and starts liking them until he stumbles across one written in Portuguese, out of muscle memory he double taps before he double takes. ‘Vamos caralhooooooo’ the comment reads, ‘vamos’ is obvious, but he’s curious as to what the second part means so he quickly hits the translate button underneath.
“Let’s go fucking”
Jasper felt himself choke on his own spit for a second, not just because he hadn’t expected that, but also because the comment was written by none other than Ivo Oliveira and he couldn’t remember the last time they even talked.
Mathieu mumbled something on the other side of the room that he didn’t quite catch but for now, he had bigger problems, his face was burning up slightly and no matter how many times he reread the translation, the words simply wouldn’t change.
Jasper calmed himself down a bit, surely he was just a bit tipsy, a little exhausted, and when he’d wake up the next morning things would look totally different.
“I’m gonna sleep now so shut it,” he exclaimed to his roommate.
“Rude. But since when did you become so responsible?”
“Today.”
He turned off the lamp on his nightstand and rather sooner than later the other’s further snarky comments began fading into the background. He tried not to focus on a certain feeling that began creeping within with minimal success.
When he woke up the next morning he had a good feeling, as he went back on Instagram to check what’s new he had almost forgotten about a certain text until he saw the unopened text by Mathieu and it all came rushing back.
Revisiting the comment revealed three things. Firstly, the wording had stayed the same. Secondly, the weird feeling in his body returned and thirdly, not only was he surprisingly uncalm about the other’s suggestion, but he had also liked it in his naivety yesterday evening.
On that note, he tried to grasp the impact for the first time. What kind of suggestion was that? Was it even a suggestion? Just a throwaway line? Something totally different?