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Not to be dramatic, but Jamie usually leaves Manchester City in tears.
Two years ago, he spent an hour in the locker room afterwards, feeling the bruise swelling from where the shoe hit him, his shoulders still locked up, always mid-flinch, always ready should his father return and catch him off-guard again. By the time he managed to limp off the bench—Roy Kent knew how to tackle people—he then sat in his car, had a good cry, and drove back to his temporary flat.
One year ago, his dad came to the locker room. How he managed to finagle a way down there, Jamie will never know, Jamie will never try to guess. He gave his dad tickets, but he didn’t give him direct access to him. Yet, there he was. Pushing him, yelling at him, saying all those nasty words that would haunt him at night, but in front of his team. And Roy pulled him into a hug, and he cried.
This year, Jamie leaves Manchester City on crutches with a big pink fluffy coat on.
“You look lovely in it,” Keeley tells him, messing with his hair.
And Jamie knows he might be a little—read: a lot— high from the painkillers and the adrenaline and finally fucking beating Man City, but he preens like one of those birds with all the feathers. “Thanks, Keeley. It’s very pink.”
“Thank you,” she says.
Roy looks between them. “That wasn’t a compliment.”
“No, it was,” Jamie and Keeley say at the same time. Then, they high-five. Because that’s fucking legendary, talking at the same time like twins or something.
Before Roy can say something, Jamie feels someone half-jump on his back before panicking and retreating. He turns around in time to see Colin, rubbing at the back of his neck and pretending to look anywhere else.
“Oi, bruv, I told you not to jump him,” Isaac says.
Colin shrugs. “I don’t think I did. Did I, boyo?”
Jamie knows he’s supposed to lie right now. Colin does a little wink and everything. But when he opens his mouth, he says, “but you just did.”
Colin winces.
Isaac laughs. “They got you on the good shit, don’t you?”
“Jamie has always had the subtlety of a bag of shit,” Roy says.
“Oi,” Jamie says.
But the moment has passed because Roy is practically shoving him towards the bus, and Jamie has to hop some of the way there before Keeley ducks under his arm. The medics offered him crutches at Man City, but look. Ted has taught him the velocity of forgiveness and all that, but he thinks Man City might be out to get him, and he’ll take his Richmond metal before Man City metal any day.
“I’m doing this on me own,” Jamie tells Keeley.
“Sure you are, love,” Keeley says because Keeley is a perfect being and has never said the wrong thing, ever.
Except maybe earlier today… yesterday? She fucked him up, got him all up in his feelings. Feelings are bad, generally.
Then, an inner voice that sounds suspiciously like Ted says, “now, hey there, Jamie. Feelings are not bad; feelings are just feelings, and we have to choose what we do with them. Do we drizzle them with barbecue sauce and gobble them up? Or do we let them sit in the hot sun until they have all sorts of infections in them and choose to eat them anyway?”
Actually, that inner voice has to be Ted, because Jamie has never had barbecue sauce in his life. He’s only ever had BBQ sauce.
“Wait,” Jamie says after a moment. He had too much fun putting his hands on the seats on either side of him and vaulting himself forward to keep any weight off his ankle, which is right fucked up, “I missed me seat. Lemme go back.”
“No sirree, Billy Murray,” Ted calls from the front of the bus. “We’re letting you have the premium seats back there!”
“You’ve earned it,” Sam says, and Jamie isn’t not convinced Sam materialized out of the void. Sam smiles, like Jamie said that out loud, and he pats his heart. “Thanks. It means a lot you think I can teleport places. I think that would be the best superpower.”
“It would make you a better player,” Jan Maas says. “You wouldn’t have let the ball get stolen if you could teleport.”
“Hey now,” Bumbercatch says. “Just because you can teleport doesn’t mean you can make the ball teleport with you.”
“If you can’t make the ball teleport with you, then you wouldn’t get your kit to teleport with you,” Colin argues immediately.
Richard makes a strange purring noise.
Jamie likes to think he purposely blacked out the next few moments of that conversation because suddenly, he’s being set on one side of the bench, and Keeley is taking his injured ankle and setting it on her dainty lap, and Roy somehow is between them on the bench, texting someone furiously.
“You don’t have to do that,” Jamie says softly. “I know me feet smell like poopy.”
“You reek,” Roy says without looking up.
“Jamie,” Keeley says, somehow even softer than him. “I am pampering you, got it? This is me pampering you. Besides, have I ever told you how Shandy put a lamb in my office the day after she got fired? Now, that smelled like poopy.”
“It was poopy,” Jamie says, and he’s a strong man secure in his masculinity, so he’ll admit it. He giggles.
Keeley giggles too. “It was literal poopy.”
“You two,” Roy says, “are ruining that word.”
“What word? Poopy? Has it ever not been ruined?”
“Yeah, Roy, I would love to hear about a time you said poopy in a positive way. Was it the time you shit your pants on the bus?”
“I remember that!”
“I hate both of you. By the way, your mum says hi,” Roy says with no real heat in his voice. That, or Jamie is getting dangerously close to falling asleep despite the rumble of the road and the team still debating whether teleportation could only belong to a nudist colony and wow, looks like Coach Beard has experience with a nudist colony and—
And Jamie blinks, and he thinks twenty minutes have passed because somehow, Roy has scooted close enough Jamie’s head is on his shoulder, and Keeley is still cradling both his feet in her lap like they’re something precious.
Jamie makes a face when he reaches up to his, admittedly, numb bottom lip. Painkillers, man. “Ew, gross, was I droolin’?”
“Yes,” Roy says.
“I’m sorry. That’s disgustang.” He starts to move away, trying to wipe the drool off Roy’s shoulder.
Roy catches his hand. “Don’t be such a muppet. You don’t have to apologize.”
“What? But it’s gross.”
Keeley is watching them like they’re animals at the zoo.
“I’m sorry,” Jamie repeats, a little thickly. “I’m gross right now. To both of you. I can just—”
“No!” Keeley cries out at the same time Roy says, pained, “I like your drool.”
Jamie blinks.
He looks at Roy first. “You like my drool?”
Roy, who has never backed down from something in his life, gives a stiff nod. “Yes. I was okay with you drooling on my favorite leather jacket—”
“Do you have multiple?”
“—and potentially ruining it,” Roy finishes, ignoring Jamie’s very valid question. Roy looks over at Keeley, who gives him an encouraging nod. “It’s… fine.”
“And your feet smell like ass,” Keeley says, “but everyone on this bus smells like ass, so I think it’s alright.”
“If we were in Richmond, I could’ve used my body spray,” Jamie says mournfully. Then, he gives himself a proper shake and looks at the rest of the bus. The team is still celebrating, exchanging beers and doing dares and cracking jokes, but all of them are doing it quietly. “Huh.”
“They’re letting you rest,” Keeley explains.
At that exact moment, Van Damme looks back and swipes a hand through the air. His voice is suddenly the loudest thing on the bus. “Guys! Jamie’s awake again!”
The whole team cheers.
“We don’t have to be quiet anymore!”
“Yes!”
“Go to hell, silence!”
Immediately, Colin starts up the chant. If there is one thing to know about a drunk Colin, it would be that he will start up any chant he can. “Jamie Tartt, doo-doo, doo-doo, doo-doo! Jamie Tartt—”
Jamie hobbles to his feet, ignoring both Roy and Keeley’s protests, and takes a bow, which sets off another wave of cheers. The whole time, he can feel Roy’s fist clenched tight around the back of his shirt, keeping him from falling over. Which, rude. Jamie is a football player; he’s never lost his balance in his life.
The bus hangs a right, and he immediately topples into Richard’s lap.
Richard wiggles his eyebrows suggestively.
Jamie giggles and steals his beer instead, raising it up. The rest of the team follows suit.
Isaac is the one who starts stomping the floor. “Speech, speech, speech, speech!”
“Now, listen, you wankers,” Jamie starts, and he waits for the noise to die down as he starts his speech. As he stands back up, moving off Richard’s lap, he tries his best to give off the same energy Rebecca gives when she goes to the press. She’s always, like, so boss-like and like that one Taylor Swift song. The one where she serves cunt and wears a blazer. “We all played good today.”
“Yes, we did!” Dani confirms.
“Colin got a header, and, like, we should be scared. He’s, like, one concussion short of having no brain cells,” Jamie continues.
“That’s rich coming from you!”
“No, that’s hypocritical. Rebecca is rich.”
The collective oh s prove Jamie’s point, and he gives Colin a smug look. Despite Colin choosing to live in a glass house—a literal glass house; look, Jamie doesn’t know a lot of idioms, but he’s pretty sure there’s one about smashing glass houses, so watch the fuck out, Colin, that’s all he has to say on the matter—Rebecca is easily the richest on the team. Jamie hasn’t bought a club.
Yet.
Jamie thinks he would buy a club just to let old geezers like Roy play—
“Oi! Tartt!”
Right. He’s making a speech.
“And I fucked up me ankle, but that’s okay because that’s why you have two.”
“I’m not sure—” Higgins starts.
But Jamie keeps going. Since when has he ever stopped to listen to what Higgins has to say anyway? “And then, I got us a goal!”
The team cheers.
“I mean, really, we all got us a goal. The real goals are the friends we made along the way, and—”
“I’m benching you,” Roy says, suddenly, appearing behind him like Batman.
As he drags Jamie to his seat, Jamie grins. “Right! Roberts finally got to play! Congrats, man! You fucking smashed it!”
Then, when Roy gets him to sit down, Jamie slumps into the shockingly plush seats and grins dopily at Keeley, who immediately goes back to elevating his shitty ankle.
He wonders if that makes Jamie and Roy a matching set. Both of them have bad joints now. Roy’s is his knee. Jamie’s is his ankle. He wonders if that means destiny is going to come down hard on Keeley’s wrists or some shit one of these days. Oh, God, he hopes destiny doesn’t go after Keeley’s boobs; those are her best joints.
“Thank you, Jamie,” Keeley says, “but boobs aren’t joints.”
“What are they then?”
“Just big bags of fat, really,” Keeley says. She reaches over, adjusting her pink jacket on him.
“Then, why are they sexy?”
“I don’t know. You’d have to ask them.”
“Okay,” Jamie says, and he leans in to Keeley’s breasts. “Why are you sexy?”
Keeley laughs and pushes his head back to his seat, and Jamie grins at her.
Right as Jamie starts to fall asleep, he hears Roy go fuck. Usually, that’s pretty par for course, but Jamie manages to struggle back to consciousness long enough to hear the next few seconds. He knows an empathic, character-development fuck from Roy when he hears one.
“What?” Keeley asks because Keeley has also memorized the language of Roy’s fucks.
“I need to Google polyamory.”
Keeley squeals.
Jamie thinks he falls asleep, even though he really thinks he should have stayed awake to see where that led.
But, suddenly, Keeley is shaking his shoulder and telling him they’ve arrived at Richmond, and any of the painkillers’ effects have worn the fuck off because his entire ankle is throbbing, and he thinks he might pass out.
The next thirty minutes go as a blur. At some point, Keeley takes back her fluffy coat, and Jamie knows he’ll be making an investment in the future. The rest of the team says goodbye to him—and he gets to say some personal goodbyes to Dani and Colin and Isaac—as they head out for what might be the most boring night out on the town yet. Ted puts him in his rolling desk chair, and Coach Beard puts Higgins in his, and they race down the hallway to see who can get to the medic first. And if Jamie wasn’t crying from the pain, he thinks he would’ve enjoyed that a lot more.
“Hey, we can do a rematch,” Ted says. “You don’t have to cry, Stephen Fry.”
“It seems fucking unfair.” Jamie sniffles. “Higgins isn’t dead weight like I am.”
“You were not dead weight,” Ted says, and Jamie thinks he might hallucinate this next part, but he could’ve sworn Ted gave him one of those paternal kisses on the forehead. “That was all me, baby. I could’ve ran down that hallway faster. Next time.”
“Next time, I’ll push.”
“There we go! That’ll get her done!”
Then, the coaches and the staff disappear, and the medics are checking him out and saying a lot of big words like ‘your ankle is dislocated’ and ‘you’ll need to be benched, but you can play in the West Ham game,’ and honestly, Jamie can’t understand them when they use all those doctor words.
They leave him in the medics’ room alone, his ankle submerged in its little ice bath. Jamie debates trying to dig out his phone but right now, with the way the room is bobbing and weaving around him, he thinks he’s content. One of his favorite things to do after getting high with some of the boys is to lie beneath a ceiling fan and just watch the blades go around and around and around—
Like a motherfuckin’ windmill!
Wow.
Jamie will need to tell Roy that one.
Then, because Jamie might have superpowers—but not teleportation—Roy and Keeley both appear.
“Hi,” Keeley says.
Jamie blinks, and he grins. “Hey. What are you doing here?”
“We thought we’d come and keep you company—”
“And fucking celebrate.”
“Yeah!”
Jamie laughs as Roy plops the champagne—which Jamie is not entirely sure he can drink, but right now, with the high from the painkillers still fresh in his body and the exhaustion from the match, he thinks he can live with—in the ice bucket. Keeley and Roy both take seats near him.
“‘Cause that was fuckin’ amazing,” Keeley says.
He leans against her. “I was fuckin’ amazing. You’re right.”
He looks over at Roy, grinning, because look. He can be the biggest prick that has ever pricked, just like Roy asked him to be. Roy only rolls his eyes before popping the champagne he just put on the ice.
But something in Jamie settles down, being with the two of them.
Yeah, he thinks. This is fuckin’ amazing.