oh damn y'all, it's football fic!
jinxedraven requested Tedy Bruschi/Junior Seau First date. This is probably not what she was thinking when she said 'first date', but this is how I decided it had to go down. ;)
Junior Seau/Tedy Bruschi
rated PG-13
6,392 words
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. It is in no way a reflection on the actual life, behavior, or character of any of the people featured, and there are no connections or affiliations between this fictional story and the people or organizations it mentions. It was not written with any intent to slander or defame any of the people featured. No profit has been or ever will be made as a result of this story: it is solely for entertainment. And again, it is entirely fictional, i.e. not true.
classic cars on modern roads
There's this thing football players have, the ones who've been around for long enough. Sixth sense or whatever, autonomic and automatic. Quarterbacks get so they can tell where the borders of the pocket are without checking; runningbacks get so they knew where a hole's gonna open up a moment before it actually does. Safeties get so they can predict which direction a ball carrier's gonna deke; receivers get so they always know where the sideline is and how to keep both feet in-bounds without so much as glancing down.
Junior's a linebacker-- a defensive jack of all trades, if you will-- and he's been in the League for fifteen-going-on-sixteen years, which is basically forever in football terms. He has, over the course of his career, gotten pretty good at this instinctive stuff. He's got an uncanny sense of what it takes to scare the crap out of an opposing quarterback. He can sense impending open air just like the runningbacks, although he comes at it from the opposite side, hustling to close the space instead of trying to dart through it.
He can always, always, always tell when someone's looking at him, even if he doesn't see them staring. That moment when a quarterback's pupils snap onto his TV numbers, right before they blow wide in fear-- he feels it, like a little hook right in the top notch of his spine, even if he's tracking the ball and not the guy's face. A resentful offensive lineman giving him a classic stinkeye from halfway down the line he feels like a heated tingling on the back of his neck.
When he rolls into camp come July (the twenty-third instead of the twenty-first, 'cause he ain't no goddamn rookie), he has that little nape-of-the-neck bristle all the time. Figures he should have expected it. He would have, if he'd bothered to stop and think about it, because he's a defensive guy who's been out of football for a while and he's playing for a coach who is defensively-minded himself. And everyone knows that Coach Belichick hates unknown quantities. Stood to reason he'd be watched.
The first full week is one long drawn-out twitch. Every time he turns around, seems like, he sees Belichick standing there in his ratty oversize gray sweatshirt, arms folded, cut-off sleeves fraying mothily at his elbows. Belichick has a way of staring that's half-assessing, half-insolent, and if he wasn't the head coach Junior isn't at all sure that he'd be able to keep from trying to pop him one. It's one thing if you're a high school kid, a college kid, whatever, but you just don't look at a man like that. You don't look at someone who has fifteen years of hard-earned respect under his belt like that.
But it's fine. He can deal. He'd known what he was buying into, signing with the Pats. It wasn't ever gonna be much like playing in Miami.
After that first week, though, Belichick moves over to glare stonily at the offense during practices, and the tingling doesn't go away. Junior's in shape, he's learning the playbook a lot faster than most of the new kids, he isn't getting into extra curricular fights or causing any trouble. It isn't even like he's the only inside linebacker in camp, everything riding on his performance. He's not a wholly unknown quantity; god knows the Pats had enough tape on him even before he signed.
It gets so that it's kinda distracting, making him whip his head around in the middle of drills, that damn tingle crawling along his skin. It doesn't screw his timing up so bad the coaches would notice-- he is, after all, a pro-- but it's bad enough to make some of the other guys think the mosquitos have a crush on him or something, cracking jokes at his expense, hey Seau, you must have some strong-ass perfume on there! They nudge him, pretend-friendly, but he'll be fucked if he's gonna laugh along. He doesn't need to take any shit from some dumb bunch of punks who were squelching around in dirty diapers when he was shouldering 300 pound men into the turf.
Near the end of practice, that day, and he's overheating even in minimal pads. Hell, most of them have more uniform off than on, going for whatever combination of shorts and t-shirts they can get away with (the quarterbacks shirtless except for their red no-tackle shells, the special teams guys in almost full gear; not at all fair, but you can't fight the coaches on it). It is still too hot for football and way too fucking hot for Junior to deal with these cleat-munchers giggling at him.
"Say-oooowww," Mike Vrabel crows, sidling up after he's finished running his drills. Junior ignores him, but Rosevelt Colvin and Larry Izzo wander over in Vrabel's wake and snicker in unison like some kind of defensive backup band. "Say-ow, Say-ow, what is with that hair, man? Can I get me some'a that Time Machine Hair Gel, man?"
Junior doesn't even dignify that with a response. The high-top cut was good enough for Miami, and it was good enough for San Diego; if these kids want to make fun of it now, well, no skin off his own damn nose.
The sense that someone, somewhere nearby, is watching him with scout-hawk intensity prickles across his scalp again. It sure as fuck isn't Vrabel or Colvin or Izzo, who are busy high-fiving each other over their own hilarity. Junior scowls at them, keeping his neck steady, then whips his entire upper body around, twisting from the waist to avoid warning whoever's rubbernecking at him.
Tedy Bruschi has his arms folded in front of his chest like a better-built parody of his coach, not even trying to hide the direction of his gaze, eyes narrowed at Junior, his entire posture just radiating pissy disapproval.
"What?" Junior snaps. He doesn't owe Bruschi even that much in the way of acknowledgment, but the guy is a team captain, a defensive leader, and the Patriots take that shit seriously.
"I'd like a word," Bruschi says. Junior raises a hand, hey, whatever, go ahead and talk, but Bruschi just shifts his feet a little farther apart and raises his chin a notch. "After practice. We'll talk over dinner." He manages to make it sound like a Dear John Meeting-- when the coach calls you in at the end of camp to tell you you haven't made the final cuts.
Vrabel waggles both his hands and made oooooooing noises. Junior shoots him a look of pure scorn. This joker went to a fucking Big Ten school; where he gets off acting better than anyone, Junior will never understand.
Bruschi just smiles at Vrabel, though, half tolerant and half indulgent, a real these-are-my-people kind of grin. Ridiculous. Junior can't do much more than shake his head in revulsion and say yeah, yeah, whatever, OK, yeah to the dinner plans Bruschi unloads at him.
----
The restaurant is one of those expensive joints fancy enough to have tables set off from the main room by screens, with a separate waitstaff just for that section. Bruschi walks right in and gets them one with minimal fuss, big celeb style. Junior would have been impressed, maybe, if it wasn't a Tuesday night in bumfuck central Massachusetts, but it is a Tuesday night in bumfuck central Massachusetts. This kind of shit hasn't impressed him since his rookie year anyhow.
They make it through bread and salad without getting into anything too contentious. Bruschi instead asks innocuous questions about how Junior is settling into his new apartment, if anything is confusing him about the trickier formations in the playbook. Junior doesn’t have complicated answers to any of this, so he uses the time to chew his food real well and to eyeball Bruschi.
Bruschi is one of those guys it's near-impossible to imagine as anything other than a football player. He just looks the part way too much, with his broad jaw, thick neck, the flattened bridge of his nose. Even when he's wearing a t-shirt he looks like he's wearing pads underneath it. He isn't, of course-- you'd hafta have some kind of NFL post traumatic stress disorder to wear your impact gear out to dinner-- but his chest and shoulders are built to look padded even when they aren't. At a delicate, fancily-set dinner table like this one, he's huge and hulking, looking like he takes up more than his side of the table, like he's about to encroach on other tables in the area. His forearms are too big to comfortably rest on the tablecloth and his hand dwarfs the wineglass.
Junior leans back to take a sip from his own glass and listens to his chair squeak deep in its screws. The world wasn't designed for linebackers.
The main course arrives: perfectly good steak tarted up with shavings of unidentifiable vegetation and those inane drizzles of sauce that always serve only to annoy Junior. Sure, they look good, but what's the point of a sauce if you don't have enough of it to cover your damn meat? These fucking restaurants.
"I think we should talk about your attitude towards the team," Bruschi says, fork halfway to his mouth, all nonchalant, like this isn't the horribly pathetic cliche it actually is.
"My... 'scuse me? My what?"
Bruschi puts his fork back down. "Your attitude." When Junior just goggles at him some more, he sighs. "Not that I have a problem with your football attitude. You're doing fine between the lines. It's more your..." He taps his steak absentmindedly with the edge of his knife. "Your interpersonal relations."
Junior stares at him. He cannot believe he is actually hearing this shit from another player. Interpersonal relations, that's something the coaches lay on you when they're trying to politic their way out of a clusterfuck and don't want to say something plain and sane where the media can hear.
"I understand that you're a veteran player," Bruschi says, "but out here, you don't make a big deal outta that. That's not our game. This is... we've had success as an outfit that's more concerned with the team than with the players, and that's not gonna change. No exceptions. And if you're gonna play here, if you want to win here, with us, you have to play the game our way. Not just between the lines," he says, pointing his fork over the table to forestall Junior's indignant response. "Maybe in San Diego it was good enough to run the plays, but in New England it's not. You have to buy into the team philosophy, and you have to mean it."
"Team philosophy?"
Bruschi frowns at him. "Don't act like you don't know what I mean. I know you do. And yes, the team philosophy. From the ground on up in this organization, you're no more important than anyone else. And we're all in this together."
"Are you fuckin' serious?" A waiter looks over at them nervously. Junior lowers his voice to a hiss. "Are you seriously saying you think Tom Brady ain't no more important than, than... the punter?" He doesn't even know the punter's name, for fuck's sake. "Are you seriously saying that if the punter got hurt and hadda be replaced, it'd have the same effect on the team as Brady goin' down?"
Bruschi makes a dismissive gesture with his hand, almost taking out a wineglass. "You're talking about on the field. Strict gameplay. What I'm talking about is the New England Patriots, the team, as a whole unit."
"You're out of your goddamned mind." Junior has been at this long enough; he knows damn well that you win football games by playing hard every second that clock is ticking, by making every last step from endzone to endzone count. You win games with good quarterbacks, and big offensive linemen, and sure-handed receivers, and agile runningbacks, and fast cornerbacks, and multi-Pro-Bowl tough-as-nails veteran defensive linebackers. You don't win football games by learning the punter's name.
"Three championships in recent years say otherwise." Bruschi sops up some of that lame sauce trail with a bit of steak, chews it thoughtfully. "You can't argue with our results, so why argue with our methods?"
"Interpersonal relations, what, I should be nicer to the backups? That ain't how football works--"
"You ever held one?" Bruschi asks, cutting Junior off.
Junior squints at him suspiciously, but Bruschi just looks back with blandly expectant innocence, so he's forced to ask. "One what?"
"Super Bowl trophy. Doesn't feel like anything else in the world." Bruschi gets a faraway look in his eyes. "I've held the Stanley Cup, I've held the World Series trophy, the NBA Championship trophy, and none of 'em feel anything like the Lombardi trophy. You kiss that silver ball," he says, very serious, "and you don't ever forget it."
"Fuck you," Junior mutters. "You know I ain't won it all yet."
Bruschi pushes his plate, with its cargo load of steak remnants, to the side of the table. He leans across, schooling his features into an expression that he probably thinks exudes real earnestness and the utmost in reasonability. "So you want to. Look, I know you don't like the phrase or what the fuck ever, but why not buy into the team philosophy here? We win with this. You know that, you agreed to sign here for a reason, right? To win. Why go to all that trouble of, of retiring--" Bruschi's nose wrinkles up like he's smelling something nasty; no secret how he feels about that particular tactic-- "and coming back and everything just to get balky at the basic shit once you get in?"
"I want to win. Fuck, who doesn't?" Duh, Junior does not add. "But I ain't been in this League 'long as I have just to get all hugs-and-kisses with a bunch of third stringers."
"I'm not asking you to tie their shoes for them. I ain't even asking you to go out clubbing with them after hours. I'm asking you to be civil and treat them like teammates, not like dog shit you just found on the bottom of your shoe."
Junior pushes his own plate off to the side. "You know who I am. You know what I done. I don't gotta deal with bullshit from guys who're maybe one step above the clubbies that wash my jocks."
"You're not that special," Bruschi says. "You wanna play on this team? You wanna be on my defense? Get the fuck over yourself."
While Junior is gaping at him, just totally blindsided, Bruschi catches the eye of the nearest waiter and signals for the check.
----
"What the fuck does that even mean?" Some part of Junior hates this, reduced to trotting across the restaurant parking lot after Bruschi, plaintively demanding explanations. Some part of him also recognizes that he has been brilliantly set up, wrong-footed so skillfully that Bruschi's got him reeling and defensive and exactly where he wants him. At this point, though, there's nothing he can do but play out the script.
Bruschi strides all the way out to his truck without turning around. He beeps the alarm off with his fob, which is almost entirely invisible under the thick column of his thumb, before he deigns to lean back against the driver's side door, fold his arms, and glare at Junior. It's all a little too orchestrated and slick, perfectly timed and tailored like he's been watching Junior ever since he got to camp, figuring out exactly what makes him tick and how to play on that. Junior glares back.
"Get in," Bruschi says, jerking his head at the truck.
"I ain't goin' nowhere with--"
"I'm not doing this in a parking lot."
"We're doin' something?" Junior mutters, but mostly to himself, and he's already circling the truck to get to the passenger's side.
----
Bruschi winds his way up 95, hooking into route 128 with a carelessness that makes Junior grit his teeth. People drive like shit in Miami, but this is a whole new level of aggressive; the closer you get to Boston, the more these freaks seem to treat the road like a football field, oncoming traffic like opposing players to be intimidated and tackled.
They flash past places with funky, quaint names like Walpole and Dedham and Needham, the evidence of civilization getting progressively denser and thicker along the sides of the highway as they go. Once Bruschi exits, the buildings get much more suburban-looking, the trees less highway-wild and more sidewalk-tame. Junior doesn't know the area-- or any area in Massachusetts, really, not yet-- but the sign right before they turned off said BROOKLINE/BOSTON, and he's pretty sure this ain't Boston.
The house that Bruschi slows down in front of doesn't look particularly remarkable. It's got a big yard, same as all its neighbors, and the house itself is surprisingly small, much smaller than Junior would have expected to see for a guy with a wife and kids and an NFL salary. The car that he pulls up behind in the driveway, though, has boxy, angular lines and a round-cornered rectangle of mesh grill that Junior, and indeed any pro baller with eyes in his head, would recognize anywhere.
"Is that a Bentley?" He hops out of the truck and beelines to the side of the car, circling around to get a look at it head-on. It's black, with subtle undertones of gold playing up in the streetlights. It doesn't scream filthy stinkin' rich the same way a bright, sporty little convertible does, or the way a huge tricked-out Escalade does. This car's got class. It says money the same way a three-thousand-dollar bespoke suit does: subtle and understated at a quick glance, but the closer you look, the more quality you see.
"Yeah, it's a Bentley," Bruschi says, somewhat unnecessarily now that Junior can obviously see the winged B on the hood. There's amusement in his voice, but Junior does not care. He doesn't even care why they came out here at the moment; seeing this thing is reason enough. He circles the car again, hovering his palm over the paintjob without actually touching it.
"I take it you don't have one," Bruschi adds.
Junior shrugs, dragging his eyes just a little unwillingly up from the car and back to Bruschi. "I got a few Mercedes. It's the kinda thing where I got one, and it seemed like a good idea to keep gettin' 'em. You know. Go for a set." Bruschi nods. Junior sighs and looks back down into the gleaming ridged hood in front of him, studies the way the faint reflection of his face warps across it. "There's something about a Bentley, though. It's like it's outside of time or some shit. Even if it ain't a Rolls."
"Yeah. Which this isn't, actually," Bruschi says. "It's an Arnage. The new one, the oh-six model."
"Yeah? I wouldn't've guessed. Looks real classic." Of course now that he knows what to look for, Junior can see the differences; subtle around the body, most obvious at the front of the car, with the separate double headlights instead of the original combined doubles, and the second layer of grillwork lurking under the front bumper like a smile.
"They keep the design pretty consistent. No point in getting a Bentley that doesn't look like a Bentley." Bruschi edges up to Junior's side, hesitates, then lays his hand gently on the door handle. "You, uh, wanna take 'er out for a spin?"
It is one of the most tempting offers Junior has ever gotten, up to and including most of his professional contracts. But backing the Bentley out of the driveway would involve moving the truck first, pulling the Bentley out into the road, waiting for Bruschi to pull the truck back into the vacated top spot in the driveway (this not being the sort of neighborhood where you leave a pumped-up truck with oversize wheels just chilling in front of your property value snapshot). Besides, there's no way he would be able to get the car up to anything like its full speed in this neighborhood, and he very much doubts that Bruschi is suggesting he do anything more than a slow lap around the block. It's better to look at the car and imagine how it handles than to get behind the wheel, feel its potential thrumming under the gas pedal, and not be able to do anything about it.
"Nah," Junior says. "I'm cool. You wanted to talk or somethin', right?"
Bruschi squeezes a hand around the car door handle briefly (Junior almost drools openly) before releasing it. "I... yeah." He narrows his eyes. "Wait, suddenly we're cool to talk about this? Just because I have a nice car?"
Junior smiles, letting his lips stretch out and up nice and slow. "When you got a car like this, it ain't ever really about the car, is it?" He starts towards the front door, forcing Bruschi to follow. Bruschi darts a series of quick looks in his direction, obviously trying to work out exactly what Junior means by that. Junior just keeps on smiling. If he's managed to turn the tables a little bit, get Bruschi that little bit off-balance, so much the better.
----
Bruschi drives this big, macho, blue-collar-on-steroids truck. It's his everyday wheels. It's what he uses to get to and from the stadium; it's what he uses to get around on nights out with the guys and it's what he drives up to the door at charity events. It's the kind of truck that says I make a shit ton of money playing a sport that encourages me to ram other men with my head. It's the kind of truck that says I may be able to buy your house eight times over, but I'm just like you, really. It's the kind of truck that says I'm the team-voted captain of a hard-nosed NFL defense.
But at home he's got this beautiful piece of vehicular engineering, this little slice of expensive automotive history sitting buffed and waxed in his driveway. So he's got his utilitarian, bruiser, principled leader image down pat, sure, but he still appreciates the classics. The proven models. Maybe a little bit of the finer things in life.
That's really all Junior needed to know.
----
Inside the house seems even smaller, and there's a kind of dinginess to the carpet, a certain ingrained griminess to the walls that gives Junior the sense of an absolute absence of anything female. There are some framed pictures and newspaper clippings on the walls, all football-related. No photos of grandparents or kids, and no shoes by the front door that belong to anyone but a football-big adult man.
"Your wife doesn't live here?"
"Ah. My, uh, the main house is down in North Attleboro. Closer to the stadium. This is just something I keep around for hanging out with the guys." Bruschi shrugs a little uncomfortably. "Heidi doesn't really like having the guys around the house." This is an explanation that might seem odd but, to Junior, actually isn't; a lot of pros have multiple houses or apartments, especially the ones who have been in the League long enough to afford it easily. He nods, OK, sure, whatever, and Bruschi looks relieved. Junior smiles a bit to himself when Bruschi turns around; it's almost cute that he cares what Junior thinks about this.
Bruschi toes off his shoes and Junior, after a moment's hesitation, follows suit. It's probably so Bruschi doesn't have to vacuum the carpet as often, since his wife isn't gonna come out here and do it for him. He follows Bruschi into the kitchen, looking around, not bothering to be subtle about it. The newspaper clippings are framed but not laminated; some of the older ones are already yellowing. The kitchen table is plain wood, no tablecloth, with little dark rings on its surface, places where someone put down a sweating glass without a coaster or napkin. The fridge, when Bruschi opens it to take out a couple bottles of beer, makes a sticky sucking noise, like something spilled on the rubber stripping and never got fully cleaned up.
They sit down at the table and stare at each other over the necks of the beer bottles for a minute. Bruschi is the one who has a problem, so Junior waits him out, perfecting his thousand-mile stoic stare until Bruschi huffs out a breath, cuts his eyes down, and says his bit.
"OK, look," he says. "Look, we gotta clear this up. 'Cause I'm serious, if you want to play on this team... if you want to play for Coach Belichick and you want to be a part of my defense, you can't... you can't keep acting like you've been." Junior shifts in his seat, because, really, acting like you've been?, but Bruschi talks a little faster. "Why don't you just let me lay it out best I can, OK, and then you can say whatever you think you gotta say? Let me just lay this out there without you interrupting."
Junior frowns across the table-- he's not some green kid Bruschi can intimidate-- but twitches his fingers out in a fan to indicate his (temporary, conditional) agreement.
Bruschi sighs, rests both elbows on the table and runs both of his hands back through the thick black scrub of his hair. "OK. You've been doing fine with the playbook and you've been doing OK with the coaches. Tom says you've been great with him. You haven't even given me any shit on the field. But you're not... the rest of the guys on the defense are getting some really shitty vibes off of you, and a few of them expressed their concern to me." He narrows his eyes at the incredulous, disdainful expression that is almost surely at the moment camped out on Junior's face. "I'm the defensive captain, OK, that's what they do, if they have a concern, they bring it to me."
He frowns thoughtfully for a moment, then rapidly changes directions. "You're not the first vet we've picked up, y'know, not by a long shot. It's not like the entire team is full of kids straight outta college. We've got a lot of guys who've been around the block a few times, with us or with other teams. We've got a lot of guys who have a lot of playoff experience. Championship game experience. You can't say that for every vet." He looks rather pointedly at Junior, who stares right back without saying a goddamn word.
"So. This, this attitude you have, where you act like you're better than everyone else on the defense-- and don't try to say you don't, because I'm not just going on, whatever, complaints lodged, I'm talking about shit I've seen myself. You treat some of the guys like they ain't out of high school. And that's... OK, maybe that kinda shit flew just fine in San Diego or Miami, but you're on the Patriots now. That's not how the Patriots operate. And it's not, it's not, like, something that automatically comes with being a vet-- we have vets who don't act like that. You think you're hot shit. Like you're the hottest shit, so you can act like this or however you want, but that ain't how it works, and you ain't such hot shit."
Junior waits a decent amount of time, pulling at his beer and watching Bruschi chew on his lower lip, shooting little glances over at Junior to see what effect this speech has had on him. "You done?" he asks, just to make sure, and also to be kind of an asshole. Bruschi's mouth thins as he nods.
"I didn't get to where I am by bein' too damn pig-headed to learn new schemes." He pauses there, letting Bruschi enjoy a momentary belief that Junior's just going to roll right over for him. "But I also didn't get to where I am by lettin' people talk shit about me, and I didn't get to where I am by lettin' people disrespect me."
"I promise, Junior, I'm not trying to be disrespectful at all--"
"I know that," Junior interrupts. Man, he can't stand to hear Bruschi speaking in excuses. "I don't mean... I ain't had any problems with you." Mostly. But he's doing the whole reasonable thing right now. "Some of the other guys. They try and act like they're on a level with me. Like they earned the right to mess with me. And they ain't done that."
Bruschi is shaking his head, his lips compressed again. "You're still doing it. Like you think you're above, better than these guys, and you're not. You're a Patriot same as the rest of us, or you aren't no Patriot at all. Seriously. You're a good player and we want you on the team. I want you on my defense. But you ain't the fuckin' Queen of England. You don't have anything I haven't seen before."
Junior frowns slightly at this, oh really? Bruschi leans across the table towards him, an echo of earlier, over dinner. "I mean it. You think I'm some kinda rookie? I've played with the best of the best out here. I've done the whole fucking Pro Bowl gig. You're good. You're great, man, but you're not so unbelievable that you're breaking out stuff I've never seen before."
"You got no fuckin' idea," Junior says. If this was Vrabel... if this was Vrabel here, saying these things, now would be the natural time for Junior to lunge across the table and plant his knuckles squarely across the bridge of Vrabel's nose. But he believes Bruschi when he says that he is honestly not trying to be disrespectful. Bruschi can say whatever shit he wants, he has a real appreciation for someone who's stuck around the League as long as Junior has, who's played at as high a level as Junior has for such a sustained period of time. He's talking shit, but he's talking shit out of a place of, essentially, respect, and, to Junior, that makes all the difference.
Which is why, when Bruschi rolls his eyes a little and says, "Oh, please. Tell me one thing you've got that I wouldn't have seen before," instead of punching him in the face, Junior leans across the table, gets a fistful of Bruschi's shirt so he can tug him forward to close the rest of the distance between them, and kisses him hard.
----
This wasn't exactly premeditated, so Junior didn't have time to work up any particular expectations of how Bruschi would react-- but if he had, he wouldn't have expected the intense abandon with which Bruschi assaults him. The guy has a wife, after all-- a young, attractive wife-- and he's got a couple of young kids, so he's obviously getting action at least some of the time.
But he pounces on Junior like he hasn't been laid in months, practically dragging him across the table, hands all over him and tongue jammed halfway to his tonsils. Kinda unexpected.
Then again, Junior's the one who made the first move, and Bruschi can't have been expecting that, because it was a whim, a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing, with both their tensions running high and hot and... well, he didn't really think about it. It seemed like the thing to do, autonomic and automatic. He's used to reacting like that. If he wasn't, he'd be one shitty linebacker.
Bruschi's table makes a woody grinding noise in its joints, legs threatening to bow. Junior can't blame it; he's resting almost his full weight on it, because he's still got a hand tensed in the front of Bruschi's shirt and Bruschi has Junior by the hair at the top of his head in one hand, the collar of his shirt in the other.
"Maybe we should take this--" Junior starts, then stops. Putting voice to it means he has to pause long enough to separate his mouth from Bruschi's, to stop and actually think about this, about what this actually is.
Bruschi freezes up solid when he hears Junior talking, like all of a sudden he realizes he has to think about what the hell he's doing too. He jerks his fingers open, releasing his hold on Junior, and tries to back away. Junior follows him, though, sliding off the table and back onto his feet without losing the grip he has on Bruschi's shirt, because... well, what the hell-- instinct, right?
Bruschi dips his chin to look at the fabric of his shirt knotted under Junior's fingers, then tilts his chin up to look Junior full in the face. Junior has to give him credit for that, 'cause he's giving every indication of being strung out so tight he's close to snapping, and he can still make eye contact.
"So. You're. You're, what... gay?"
Junior shakes his head, one sharp negating jerk. "Uh uh, no way, I ain't gay. But I... you know. I grew up in California, man. I went to USC. I sure as shit ain't straight." Which sounds kind of awful, when he says it plain like that, but he doesn't exactly have a pretty way of putting it written up special for this kind of situation.
Bruschi is eyeing him, a measuring kind of look, like he's trying to decide if he should go with it or if he should try to see if he can break Junior's face with his bare hands; maybe even like he's thinking about putting on his Team Captain helmet again and playing this all off with a stern leaderly laugh.
"Look, we got shit to work out," Junior says. "I've seen worse ways to work shit out than this. I mean, I've been around, man. I've seen it done this way. It does the job." This is not necessarily the truest thing Junior has said tonight, but the last thing he wants is for Bruschi to get all Team Captain on him again.
There's a long moment where Bruschi continues to just look up at him and Junior stands there holding onto his shirt, feeling progressively more ridiculous as the seconds tick past. When Bruschi stands up, it's so sudden and without warning that Junior is surprised into letting go. His hand hovers awkwardly in front of Bruschi's chest while Bruschi hikes up a single eyebrow. He doesn't back off, though, so after another moment, with the level of awkwardness in Bruschi's kitchen rising all the while, Junior flattens his palm up against Bruschi's chest. He does it real slow and deliberate, giving Bruschi every out in the world, but Bruschi doesn't take a single step away.
The awkwardness slowly drains out of the air, but it's getting more and more charged with a different kind of intensity. This is OK, though: it's a kind of intensity that Junior is much more adept at handling.
"OK," Bruschi says. Junior can feel his chest rising and falling as he says the word.
"OK?"
"You've worked stuff out like this before?"
Junior huffs, like, what, you could ever doubt me? "You know how long I've been in the League? If there's something that's been done, I've done it."
Bruschi leans into Junior's hand a little-- solid, real solid, and warm-- before finally taking a step back, turning and heading for the kitchen doorway. "C'mon," he says. "You're right. We should take this somewhere else."
Well, all right, then. Junior follows behind him as Bruschi walks down the narrow hall, only a little bit disappointed. He didn't really expect Bruschi to buy that line. But Bruschi's blue-jean-clad ass, now that he's allowing himself to check it out, is one hell of a tempting sight, so, no, he's not complaining.
Bruschi pauses at the door to what is, presumably, his bedroom. He half turns his head to glance back at Junior over his shoulder.
"Seau?"
"Yeah?" Junior asks, trying to act like he hasn't just been blatantly checking Bruschi out.
"You're so fulla shit."
Junior grins. It's a big, bright grin, in no way narrow or mean or sarcastic; maybe the first honest-to-god real smile he's felt the need to break out since he signed here. He takes that extra step forward so he can wrap his arms around Bruschi from behind, something that he can now admit he's been kinda wanting to do. He nuzzles up to Bruschi's ear, all kinds of gratified by the way Bruschi stiffens under his hands, then slowly relaxes back into him.
"Better hope I'm not," he murmurs, dropping a hand and skimming his fingers under the edge of Bruschi's shirt hem.
Bruschi makes a slightly shocked-sounding choking noise, and Junior laughs out loud, right in his ear. He can't help it. Looks like he'll be able to take Bruschi for a novel kind of ride, show Mr. Big Jaded Veteran something new after all.
Junior Seau/Tedy Bruschi
rated PG-13
6,392 words
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. It is in no way a reflection on the actual life, behavior, or character of any of the people featured, and there are no connections or affiliations between this fictional story and the people or organizations it mentions. It was not written with any intent to slander or defame any of the people featured. No profit has been or ever will be made as a result of this story: it is solely for entertainment. And again, it is entirely fictional, i.e. not true.
classic cars on modern roads
There's this thing football players have, the ones who've been around for long enough. Sixth sense or whatever, autonomic and automatic. Quarterbacks get so they can tell where the borders of the pocket are without checking; runningbacks get so they knew where a hole's gonna open up a moment before it actually does. Safeties get so they can predict which direction a ball carrier's gonna deke; receivers get so they always know where the sideline is and how to keep both feet in-bounds without so much as glancing down.
Junior's a linebacker-- a defensive jack of all trades, if you will-- and he's been in the League for fifteen-going-on-sixteen years, which is basically forever in football terms. He has, over the course of his career, gotten pretty good at this instinctive stuff. He's got an uncanny sense of what it takes to scare the crap out of an opposing quarterback. He can sense impending open air just like the runningbacks, although he comes at it from the opposite side, hustling to close the space instead of trying to dart through it.
He can always, always, always tell when someone's looking at him, even if he doesn't see them staring. That moment when a quarterback's pupils snap onto his TV numbers, right before they blow wide in fear-- he feels it, like a little hook right in the top notch of his spine, even if he's tracking the ball and not the guy's face. A resentful offensive lineman giving him a classic stinkeye from halfway down the line he feels like a heated tingling on the back of his neck.
When he rolls into camp come July (the twenty-third instead of the twenty-first, 'cause he ain't no goddamn rookie), he has that little nape-of-the-neck bristle all the time. Figures he should have expected it. He would have, if he'd bothered to stop and think about it, because he's a defensive guy who's been out of football for a while and he's playing for a coach who is defensively-minded himself. And everyone knows that Coach Belichick hates unknown quantities. Stood to reason he'd be watched.
The first full week is one long drawn-out twitch. Every time he turns around, seems like, he sees Belichick standing there in his ratty oversize gray sweatshirt, arms folded, cut-off sleeves fraying mothily at his elbows. Belichick has a way of staring that's half-assessing, half-insolent, and if he wasn't the head coach Junior isn't at all sure that he'd be able to keep from trying to pop him one. It's one thing if you're a high school kid, a college kid, whatever, but you just don't look at a man like that. You don't look at someone who has fifteen years of hard-earned respect under his belt like that.
But it's fine. He can deal. He'd known what he was buying into, signing with the Pats. It wasn't ever gonna be much like playing in Miami.
After that first week, though, Belichick moves over to glare stonily at the offense during practices, and the tingling doesn't go away. Junior's in shape, he's learning the playbook a lot faster than most of the new kids, he isn't getting into extra curricular fights or causing any trouble. It isn't even like he's the only inside linebacker in camp, everything riding on his performance. He's not a wholly unknown quantity; god knows the Pats had enough tape on him even before he signed.
It gets so that it's kinda distracting, making him whip his head around in the middle of drills, that damn tingle crawling along his skin. It doesn't screw his timing up so bad the coaches would notice-- he is, after all, a pro-- but it's bad enough to make some of the other guys think the mosquitos have a crush on him or something, cracking jokes at his expense, hey Seau, you must have some strong-ass perfume on there! They nudge him, pretend-friendly, but he'll be fucked if he's gonna laugh along. He doesn't need to take any shit from some dumb bunch of punks who were squelching around in dirty diapers when he was shouldering 300 pound men into the turf.
Near the end of practice, that day, and he's overheating even in minimal pads. Hell, most of them have more uniform off than on, going for whatever combination of shorts and t-shirts they can get away with (the quarterbacks shirtless except for their red no-tackle shells, the special teams guys in almost full gear; not at all fair, but you can't fight the coaches on it). It is still too hot for football and way too fucking hot for Junior to deal with these cleat-munchers giggling at him.
"Say-oooowww," Mike Vrabel crows, sidling up after he's finished running his drills. Junior ignores him, but Rosevelt Colvin and Larry Izzo wander over in Vrabel's wake and snicker in unison like some kind of defensive backup band. "Say-ow, Say-ow, what is with that hair, man? Can I get me some'a that Time Machine Hair Gel, man?"
Junior doesn't even dignify that with a response. The high-top cut was good enough for Miami, and it was good enough for San Diego; if these kids want to make fun of it now, well, no skin off his own damn nose.
The sense that someone, somewhere nearby, is watching him with scout-hawk intensity prickles across his scalp again. It sure as fuck isn't Vrabel or Colvin or Izzo, who are busy high-fiving each other over their own hilarity. Junior scowls at them, keeping his neck steady, then whips his entire upper body around, twisting from the waist to avoid warning whoever's rubbernecking at him.
Tedy Bruschi has his arms folded in front of his chest like a better-built parody of his coach, not even trying to hide the direction of his gaze, eyes narrowed at Junior, his entire posture just radiating pissy disapproval.
"What?" Junior snaps. He doesn't owe Bruschi even that much in the way of acknowledgment, but the guy is a team captain, a defensive leader, and the Patriots take that shit seriously.
"I'd like a word," Bruschi says. Junior raises a hand, hey, whatever, go ahead and talk, but Bruschi just shifts his feet a little farther apart and raises his chin a notch. "After practice. We'll talk over dinner." He manages to make it sound like a Dear John Meeting-- when the coach calls you in at the end of camp to tell you you haven't made the final cuts.
Vrabel waggles both his hands and made oooooooing noises. Junior shoots him a look of pure scorn. This joker went to a fucking Big Ten school; where he gets off acting better than anyone, Junior will never understand.
Bruschi just smiles at Vrabel, though, half tolerant and half indulgent, a real these-are-my-people kind of grin. Ridiculous. Junior can't do much more than shake his head in revulsion and say yeah, yeah, whatever, OK, yeah to the dinner plans Bruschi unloads at him.
----
The restaurant is one of those expensive joints fancy enough to have tables set off from the main room by screens, with a separate waitstaff just for that section. Bruschi walks right in and gets them one with minimal fuss, big celeb style. Junior would have been impressed, maybe, if it wasn't a Tuesday night in bumfuck central Massachusetts, but it is a Tuesday night in bumfuck central Massachusetts. This kind of shit hasn't impressed him since his rookie year anyhow.
They make it through bread and salad without getting into anything too contentious. Bruschi instead asks innocuous questions about how Junior is settling into his new apartment, if anything is confusing him about the trickier formations in the playbook. Junior doesn’t have complicated answers to any of this, so he uses the time to chew his food real well and to eyeball Bruschi.
Bruschi is one of those guys it's near-impossible to imagine as anything other than a football player. He just looks the part way too much, with his broad jaw, thick neck, the flattened bridge of his nose. Even when he's wearing a t-shirt he looks like he's wearing pads underneath it. He isn't, of course-- you'd hafta have some kind of NFL post traumatic stress disorder to wear your impact gear out to dinner-- but his chest and shoulders are built to look padded even when they aren't. At a delicate, fancily-set dinner table like this one, he's huge and hulking, looking like he takes up more than his side of the table, like he's about to encroach on other tables in the area. His forearms are too big to comfortably rest on the tablecloth and his hand dwarfs the wineglass.
Junior leans back to take a sip from his own glass and listens to his chair squeak deep in its screws. The world wasn't designed for linebackers.
The main course arrives: perfectly good steak tarted up with shavings of unidentifiable vegetation and those inane drizzles of sauce that always serve only to annoy Junior. Sure, they look good, but what's the point of a sauce if you don't have enough of it to cover your damn meat? These fucking restaurants.
"I think we should talk about your attitude towards the team," Bruschi says, fork halfway to his mouth, all nonchalant, like this isn't the horribly pathetic cliche it actually is.
"My... 'scuse me? My what?"
Bruschi puts his fork back down. "Your attitude." When Junior just goggles at him some more, he sighs. "Not that I have a problem with your football attitude. You're doing fine between the lines. It's more your..." He taps his steak absentmindedly with the edge of his knife. "Your interpersonal relations."
Junior stares at him. He cannot believe he is actually hearing this shit from another player. Interpersonal relations, that's something the coaches lay on you when they're trying to politic their way out of a clusterfuck and don't want to say something plain and sane where the media can hear.
"I understand that you're a veteran player," Bruschi says, "but out here, you don't make a big deal outta that. That's not our game. This is... we've had success as an outfit that's more concerned with the team than with the players, and that's not gonna change. No exceptions. And if you're gonna play here, if you want to win here, with us, you have to play the game our way. Not just between the lines," he says, pointing his fork over the table to forestall Junior's indignant response. "Maybe in San Diego it was good enough to run the plays, but in New England it's not. You have to buy into the team philosophy, and you have to mean it."
"Team philosophy?"
Bruschi frowns at him. "Don't act like you don't know what I mean. I know you do. And yes, the team philosophy. From the ground on up in this organization, you're no more important than anyone else. And we're all in this together."
"Are you fuckin' serious?" A waiter looks over at them nervously. Junior lowers his voice to a hiss. "Are you seriously saying you think Tom Brady ain't no more important than, than... the punter?" He doesn't even know the punter's name, for fuck's sake. "Are you seriously saying that if the punter got hurt and hadda be replaced, it'd have the same effect on the team as Brady goin' down?"
Bruschi makes a dismissive gesture with his hand, almost taking out a wineglass. "You're talking about on the field. Strict gameplay. What I'm talking about is the New England Patriots, the team, as a whole unit."
"You're out of your goddamned mind." Junior has been at this long enough; he knows damn well that you win football games by playing hard every second that clock is ticking, by making every last step from endzone to endzone count. You win games with good quarterbacks, and big offensive linemen, and sure-handed receivers, and agile runningbacks, and fast cornerbacks, and multi-Pro-Bowl tough-as-nails veteran defensive linebackers. You don't win football games by learning the punter's name.
"Three championships in recent years say otherwise." Bruschi sops up some of that lame sauce trail with a bit of steak, chews it thoughtfully. "You can't argue with our results, so why argue with our methods?"
"Interpersonal relations, what, I should be nicer to the backups? That ain't how football works--"
"You ever held one?" Bruschi asks, cutting Junior off.
Junior squints at him suspiciously, but Bruschi just looks back with blandly expectant innocence, so he's forced to ask. "One what?"
"Super Bowl trophy. Doesn't feel like anything else in the world." Bruschi gets a faraway look in his eyes. "I've held the Stanley Cup, I've held the World Series trophy, the NBA Championship trophy, and none of 'em feel anything like the Lombardi trophy. You kiss that silver ball," he says, very serious, "and you don't ever forget it."
"Fuck you," Junior mutters. "You know I ain't won it all yet."
Bruschi pushes his plate, with its cargo load of steak remnants, to the side of the table. He leans across, schooling his features into an expression that he probably thinks exudes real earnestness and the utmost in reasonability. "So you want to. Look, I know you don't like the phrase or what the fuck ever, but why not buy into the team philosophy here? We win with this. You know that, you agreed to sign here for a reason, right? To win. Why go to all that trouble of, of retiring--" Bruschi's nose wrinkles up like he's smelling something nasty; no secret how he feels about that particular tactic-- "and coming back and everything just to get balky at the basic shit once you get in?"
"I want to win. Fuck, who doesn't?" Duh, Junior does not add. "But I ain't been in this League 'long as I have just to get all hugs-and-kisses with a bunch of third stringers."
"I'm not asking you to tie their shoes for them. I ain't even asking you to go out clubbing with them after hours. I'm asking you to be civil and treat them like teammates, not like dog shit you just found on the bottom of your shoe."
Junior pushes his own plate off to the side. "You know who I am. You know what I done. I don't gotta deal with bullshit from guys who're maybe one step above the clubbies that wash my jocks."
"You're not that special," Bruschi says. "You wanna play on this team? You wanna be on my defense? Get the fuck over yourself."
While Junior is gaping at him, just totally blindsided, Bruschi catches the eye of the nearest waiter and signals for the check.
----
"What the fuck does that even mean?" Some part of Junior hates this, reduced to trotting across the restaurant parking lot after Bruschi, plaintively demanding explanations. Some part of him also recognizes that he has been brilliantly set up, wrong-footed so skillfully that Bruschi's got him reeling and defensive and exactly where he wants him. At this point, though, there's nothing he can do but play out the script.
Bruschi strides all the way out to his truck without turning around. He beeps the alarm off with his fob, which is almost entirely invisible under the thick column of his thumb, before he deigns to lean back against the driver's side door, fold his arms, and glare at Junior. It's all a little too orchestrated and slick, perfectly timed and tailored like he's been watching Junior ever since he got to camp, figuring out exactly what makes him tick and how to play on that. Junior glares back.
"Get in," Bruschi says, jerking his head at the truck.
"I ain't goin' nowhere with--"
"I'm not doing this in a parking lot."
"We're doin' something?" Junior mutters, but mostly to himself, and he's already circling the truck to get to the passenger's side.
----
Bruschi winds his way up 95, hooking into route 128 with a carelessness that makes Junior grit his teeth. People drive like shit in Miami, but this is a whole new level of aggressive; the closer you get to Boston, the more these freaks seem to treat the road like a football field, oncoming traffic like opposing players to be intimidated and tackled.
They flash past places with funky, quaint names like Walpole and Dedham and Needham, the evidence of civilization getting progressively denser and thicker along the sides of the highway as they go. Once Bruschi exits, the buildings get much more suburban-looking, the trees less highway-wild and more sidewalk-tame. Junior doesn't know the area-- or any area in Massachusetts, really, not yet-- but the sign right before they turned off said BROOKLINE/BOSTON, and he's pretty sure this ain't Boston.
The house that Bruschi slows down in front of doesn't look particularly remarkable. It's got a big yard, same as all its neighbors, and the house itself is surprisingly small, much smaller than Junior would have expected to see for a guy with a wife and kids and an NFL salary. The car that he pulls up behind in the driveway, though, has boxy, angular lines and a round-cornered rectangle of mesh grill that Junior, and indeed any pro baller with eyes in his head, would recognize anywhere.
"Is that a Bentley?" He hops out of the truck and beelines to the side of the car, circling around to get a look at it head-on. It's black, with subtle undertones of gold playing up in the streetlights. It doesn't scream filthy stinkin' rich the same way a bright, sporty little convertible does, or the way a huge tricked-out Escalade does. This car's got class. It says money the same way a three-thousand-dollar bespoke suit does: subtle and understated at a quick glance, but the closer you look, the more quality you see.
"Yeah, it's a Bentley," Bruschi says, somewhat unnecessarily now that Junior can obviously see the winged B on the hood. There's amusement in his voice, but Junior does not care. He doesn't even care why they came out here at the moment; seeing this thing is reason enough. He circles the car again, hovering his palm over the paintjob without actually touching it.
"I take it you don't have one," Bruschi adds.
Junior shrugs, dragging his eyes just a little unwillingly up from the car and back to Bruschi. "I got a few Mercedes. It's the kinda thing where I got one, and it seemed like a good idea to keep gettin' 'em. You know. Go for a set." Bruschi nods. Junior sighs and looks back down into the gleaming ridged hood in front of him, studies the way the faint reflection of his face warps across it. "There's something about a Bentley, though. It's like it's outside of time or some shit. Even if it ain't a Rolls."
"Yeah. Which this isn't, actually," Bruschi says. "It's an Arnage. The new one, the oh-six model."
"Yeah? I wouldn't've guessed. Looks real classic." Of course now that he knows what to look for, Junior can see the differences; subtle around the body, most obvious at the front of the car, with the separate double headlights instead of the original combined doubles, and the second layer of grillwork lurking under the front bumper like a smile.
"They keep the design pretty consistent. No point in getting a Bentley that doesn't look like a Bentley." Bruschi edges up to Junior's side, hesitates, then lays his hand gently on the door handle. "You, uh, wanna take 'er out for a spin?"
It is one of the most tempting offers Junior has ever gotten, up to and including most of his professional contracts. But backing the Bentley out of the driveway would involve moving the truck first, pulling the Bentley out into the road, waiting for Bruschi to pull the truck back into the vacated top spot in the driveway (this not being the sort of neighborhood where you leave a pumped-up truck with oversize wheels just chilling in front of your property value snapshot). Besides, there's no way he would be able to get the car up to anything like its full speed in this neighborhood, and he very much doubts that Bruschi is suggesting he do anything more than a slow lap around the block. It's better to look at the car and imagine how it handles than to get behind the wheel, feel its potential thrumming under the gas pedal, and not be able to do anything about it.
"Nah," Junior says. "I'm cool. You wanted to talk or somethin', right?"
Bruschi squeezes a hand around the car door handle briefly (Junior almost drools openly) before releasing it. "I... yeah." He narrows his eyes. "Wait, suddenly we're cool to talk about this? Just because I have a nice car?"
Junior smiles, letting his lips stretch out and up nice and slow. "When you got a car like this, it ain't ever really about the car, is it?" He starts towards the front door, forcing Bruschi to follow. Bruschi darts a series of quick looks in his direction, obviously trying to work out exactly what Junior means by that. Junior just keeps on smiling. If he's managed to turn the tables a little bit, get Bruschi that little bit off-balance, so much the better.
----
Bruschi drives this big, macho, blue-collar-on-steroids truck. It's his everyday wheels. It's what he uses to get to and from the stadium; it's what he uses to get around on nights out with the guys and it's what he drives up to the door at charity events. It's the kind of truck that says I make a shit ton of money playing a sport that encourages me to ram other men with my head. It's the kind of truck that says I may be able to buy your house eight times over, but I'm just like you, really. It's the kind of truck that says I'm the team-voted captain of a hard-nosed NFL defense.
But at home he's got this beautiful piece of vehicular engineering, this little slice of expensive automotive history sitting buffed and waxed in his driveway. So he's got his utilitarian, bruiser, principled leader image down pat, sure, but he still appreciates the classics. The proven models. Maybe a little bit of the finer things in life.
That's really all Junior needed to know.
----
Inside the house seems even smaller, and there's a kind of dinginess to the carpet, a certain ingrained griminess to the walls that gives Junior the sense of an absolute absence of anything female. There are some framed pictures and newspaper clippings on the walls, all football-related. No photos of grandparents or kids, and no shoes by the front door that belong to anyone but a football-big adult man.
"Your wife doesn't live here?"
"Ah. My, uh, the main house is down in North Attleboro. Closer to the stadium. This is just something I keep around for hanging out with the guys." Bruschi shrugs a little uncomfortably. "Heidi doesn't really like having the guys around the house." This is an explanation that might seem odd but, to Junior, actually isn't; a lot of pros have multiple houses or apartments, especially the ones who have been in the League long enough to afford it easily. He nods, OK, sure, whatever, and Bruschi looks relieved. Junior smiles a bit to himself when Bruschi turns around; it's almost cute that he cares what Junior thinks about this.
Bruschi toes off his shoes and Junior, after a moment's hesitation, follows suit. It's probably so Bruschi doesn't have to vacuum the carpet as often, since his wife isn't gonna come out here and do it for him. He follows Bruschi into the kitchen, looking around, not bothering to be subtle about it. The newspaper clippings are framed but not laminated; some of the older ones are already yellowing. The kitchen table is plain wood, no tablecloth, with little dark rings on its surface, places where someone put down a sweating glass without a coaster or napkin. The fridge, when Bruschi opens it to take out a couple bottles of beer, makes a sticky sucking noise, like something spilled on the rubber stripping and never got fully cleaned up.
They sit down at the table and stare at each other over the necks of the beer bottles for a minute. Bruschi is the one who has a problem, so Junior waits him out, perfecting his thousand-mile stoic stare until Bruschi huffs out a breath, cuts his eyes down, and says his bit.
"OK, look," he says. "Look, we gotta clear this up. 'Cause I'm serious, if you want to play on this team... if you want to play for Coach Belichick and you want to be a part of my defense, you can't... you can't keep acting like you've been." Junior shifts in his seat, because, really, acting like you've been?, but Bruschi talks a little faster. "Why don't you just let me lay it out best I can, OK, and then you can say whatever you think you gotta say? Let me just lay this out there without you interrupting."
Junior frowns across the table-- he's not some green kid Bruschi can intimidate-- but twitches his fingers out in a fan to indicate his (temporary, conditional) agreement.
Bruschi sighs, rests both elbows on the table and runs both of his hands back through the thick black scrub of his hair. "OK. You've been doing fine with the playbook and you've been doing OK with the coaches. Tom says you've been great with him. You haven't even given me any shit on the field. But you're not... the rest of the guys on the defense are getting some really shitty vibes off of you, and a few of them expressed their concern to me." He narrows his eyes at the incredulous, disdainful expression that is almost surely at the moment camped out on Junior's face. "I'm the defensive captain, OK, that's what they do, if they have a concern, they bring it to me."
He frowns thoughtfully for a moment, then rapidly changes directions. "You're not the first vet we've picked up, y'know, not by a long shot. It's not like the entire team is full of kids straight outta college. We've got a lot of guys who've been around the block a few times, with us or with other teams. We've got a lot of guys who have a lot of playoff experience. Championship game experience. You can't say that for every vet." He looks rather pointedly at Junior, who stares right back without saying a goddamn word.
"So. This, this attitude you have, where you act like you're better than everyone else on the defense-- and don't try to say you don't, because I'm not just going on, whatever, complaints lodged, I'm talking about shit I've seen myself. You treat some of the guys like they ain't out of high school. And that's... OK, maybe that kinda shit flew just fine in San Diego or Miami, but you're on the Patriots now. That's not how the Patriots operate. And it's not, it's not, like, something that automatically comes with being a vet-- we have vets who don't act like that. You think you're hot shit. Like you're the hottest shit, so you can act like this or however you want, but that ain't how it works, and you ain't such hot shit."
Junior waits a decent amount of time, pulling at his beer and watching Bruschi chew on his lower lip, shooting little glances over at Junior to see what effect this speech has had on him. "You done?" he asks, just to make sure, and also to be kind of an asshole. Bruschi's mouth thins as he nods.
"I didn't get to where I am by bein' too damn pig-headed to learn new schemes." He pauses there, letting Bruschi enjoy a momentary belief that Junior's just going to roll right over for him. "But I also didn't get to where I am by lettin' people talk shit about me, and I didn't get to where I am by lettin' people disrespect me."
"I promise, Junior, I'm not trying to be disrespectful at all--"
"I know that," Junior interrupts. Man, he can't stand to hear Bruschi speaking in excuses. "I don't mean... I ain't had any problems with you." Mostly. But he's doing the whole reasonable thing right now. "Some of the other guys. They try and act like they're on a level with me. Like they earned the right to mess with me. And they ain't done that."
Bruschi is shaking his head, his lips compressed again. "You're still doing it. Like you think you're above, better than these guys, and you're not. You're a Patriot same as the rest of us, or you aren't no Patriot at all. Seriously. You're a good player and we want you on the team. I want you on my defense. But you ain't the fuckin' Queen of England. You don't have anything I haven't seen before."
Junior frowns slightly at this, oh really? Bruschi leans across the table towards him, an echo of earlier, over dinner. "I mean it. You think I'm some kinda rookie? I've played with the best of the best out here. I've done the whole fucking Pro Bowl gig. You're good. You're great, man, but you're not so unbelievable that you're breaking out stuff I've never seen before."
"You got no fuckin' idea," Junior says. If this was Vrabel... if this was Vrabel here, saying these things, now would be the natural time for Junior to lunge across the table and plant his knuckles squarely across the bridge of Vrabel's nose. But he believes Bruschi when he says that he is honestly not trying to be disrespectful. Bruschi can say whatever shit he wants, he has a real appreciation for someone who's stuck around the League as long as Junior has, who's played at as high a level as Junior has for such a sustained period of time. He's talking shit, but he's talking shit out of a place of, essentially, respect, and, to Junior, that makes all the difference.
Which is why, when Bruschi rolls his eyes a little and says, "Oh, please. Tell me one thing you've got that I wouldn't have seen before," instead of punching him in the face, Junior leans across the table, gets a fistful of Bruschi's shirt so he can tug him forward to close the rest of the distance between them, and kisses him hard.
----
This wasn't exactly premeditated, so Junior didn't have time to work up any particular expectations of how Bruschi would react-- but if he had, he wouldn't have expected the intense abandon with which Bruschi assaults him. The guy has a wife, after all-- a young, attractive wife-- and he's got a couple of young kids, so he's obviously getting action at least some of the time.
But he pounces on Junior like he hasn't been laid in months, practically dragging him across the table, hands all over him and tongue jammed halfway to his tonsils. Kinda unexpected.
Then again, Junior's the one who made the first move, and Bruschi can't have been expecting that, because it was a whim, a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing, with both their tensions running high and hot and... well, he didn't really think about it. It seemed like the thing to do, autonomic and automatic. He's used to reacting like that. If he wasn't, he'd be one shitty linebacker.
Bruschi's table makes a woody grinding noise in its joints, legs threatening to bow. Junior can't blame it; he's resting almost his full weight on it, because he's still got a hand tensed in the front of Bruschi's shirt and Bruschi has Junior by the hair at the top of his head in one hand, the collar of his shirt in the other.
"Maybe we should take this--" Junior starts, then stops. Putting voice to it means he has to pause long enough to separate his mouth from Bruschi's, to stop and actually think about this, about what this actually is.
Bruschi freezes up solid when he hears Junior talking, like all of a sudden he realizes he has to think about what the hell he's doing too. He jerks his fingers open, releasing his hold on Junior, and tries to back away. Junior follows him, though, sliding off the table and back onto his feet without losing the grip he has on Bruschi's shirt, because... well, what the hell-- instinct, right?
Bruschi dips his chin to look at the fabric of his shirt knotted under Junior's fingers, then tilts his chin up to look Junior full in the face. Junior has to give him credit for that, 'cause he's giving every indication of being strung out so tight he's close to snapping, and he can still make eye contact.
"So. You're. You're, what... gay?"
Junior shakes his head, one sharp negating jerk. "Uh uh, no way, I ain't gay. But I... you know. I grew up in California, man. I went to USC. I sure as shit ain't straight." Which sounds kind of awful, when he says it plain like that, but he doesn't exactly have a pretty way of putting it written up special for this kind of situation.
Bruschi is eyeing him, a measuring kind of look, like he's trying to decide if he should go with it or if he should try to see if he can break Junior's face with his bare hands; maybe even like he's thinking about putting on his Team Captain helmet again and playing this all off with a stern leaderly laugh.
"Look, we got shit to work out," Junior says. "I've seen worse ways to work shit out than this. I mean, I've been around, man. I've seen it done this way. It does the job." This is not necessarily the truest thing Junior has said tonight, but the last thing he wants is for Bruschi to get all Team Captain on him again.
There's a long moment where Bruschi continues to just look up at him and Junior stands there holding onto his shirt, feeling progressively more ridiculous as the seconds tick past. When Bruschi stands up, it's so sudden and without warning that Junior is surprised into letting go. His hand hovers awkwardly in front of Bruschi's chest while Bruschi hikes up a single eyebrow. He doesn't back off, though, so after another moment, with the level of awkwardness in Bruschi's kitchen rising all the while, Junior flattens his palm up against Bruschi's chest. He does it real slow and deliberate, giving Bruschi every out in the world, but Bruschi doesn't take a single step away.
The awkwardness slowly drains out of the air, but it's getting more and more charged with a different kind of intensity. This is OK, though: it's a kind of intensity that Junior is much more adept at handling.
"OK," Bruschi says. Junior can feel his chest rising and falling as he says the word.
"OK?"
"You've worked stuff out like this before?"
Junior huffs, like, what, you could ever doubt me? "You know how long I've been in the League? If there's something that's been done, I've done it."
Bruschi leans into Junior's hand a little-- solid, real solid, and warm-- before finally taking a step back, turning and heading for the kitchen doorway. "C'mon," he says. "You're right. We should take this somewhere else."
Well, all right, then. Junior follows behind him as Bruschi walks down the narrow hall, only a little bit disappointed. He didn't really expect Bruschi to buy that line. But Bruschi's blue-jean-clad ass, now that he's allowing himself to check it out, is one hell of a tempting sight, so, no, he's not complaining.
Bruschi pauses at the door to what is, presumably, his bedroom. He half turns his head to glance back at Junior over his shoulder.
"Seau?"
"Yeah?" Junior asks, trying to act like he hasn't just been blatantly checking Bruschi out.
"You're so fulla shit."
Junior grins. It's a big, bright grin, in no way narrow or mean or sarcastic; maybe the first honest-to-god real smile he's felt the need to break out since he signed here. He takes that extra step forward so he can wrap his arms around Bruschi from behind, something that he can now admit he's been kinda wanting to do. He nuzzles up to Bruschi's ear, all kinds of gratified by the way Bruschi stiffens under his hands, then slowly relaxes back into him.
"Better hope I'm not," he murmurs, dropping a hand and skimming his fingers under the edge of Bruschi's shirt hem.
Bruschi makes a slightly shocked-sounding choking noise, and Junior laughs out loud, right in his ear. He can't help it. Looks like he'll be able to take Bruschi for a novel kind of ride, show Mr. Big Jaded Veteran something new after all.