Football AU: Now That I Am in Madrid and Can Think 13/22
Now That I Am in Madrid and Can Think 13/22
Rating: R (swearing, grownup stuff etc.)
Summary: Xabi really did call him Steve in The Mirror (July 2005). The rest is pretty much crack.
March 2018
“How bad?”
Jake ignores Xabi’s chat with the doctor like they’re two uncles having one of those right-over-your-head, dead serious grownup conversations about his future. He has a nagging feeling he’s about to be sent to a boarding school conveniently located in the most remote part of the Swiss Alps.
“It’s just a knock…” he mumbles. The synthetic material of the infirmary bed clings to Jake’s sweaty, aching limbs.
“Thank you for your professional opinion, Doctor Guinto. If you don’t mind, you could maybe wait with the self-diagnosis after we get your ankle scanned,” Doc Iqbal suggests calmly.
Xabi pats the Doc on the back and they chat for another couple of minutes as Xabi walks him out. As much as Jake would like to be left alone right now and for the remainder of their short stay in Switzerland, he knows that’s just not how things work around this part of Merseyside.
“Don’t ever do that again,” Xabi says, a blade of steel running through his voice.
“Never score a hattrick in Europe? I can do that…”
The chair Xabi pulls to sit across from Jake’s bed scrapes with metallic unpleasantness.
“You and I both know you’re not a stupid player so don’t play stupid with me. You scored that last goal on a swollen ankle and that’s a risk you should never take. When you’re out there on the field, that’s not your ankle, that’s Liverpool’s ankle and you have no right to risk our next games to get your numbers on the board.”
Jake chews the inside of his cheek, swallowing words that he knows are unwise because he really isn’t a stupid son of a bitch, no matter how much he wishes that weren’t the case some days.
“Somebody had to score. We were out of Europe at 2-2…”
“Lussey managed just fine from the midfield after you hobbled off the pitch. Now we have to figure out whom to play up front against West Ham in three days if your scan doesn’t come out clean…”
Xabi wets his lips, looks away from the ugly truth of the predicament the club is in and for which this kid is not responsible in the least. He’s got a message to deliver though, fairness be damned.
“They love Lussey,” Jake lifts his eyes, ignoring the throbbing in his ankle. “Like they loved you. So don’t tell me how hard I have to work to get them to sing about me… You had your own freaking Beatles song as soon as you were off the plane!”
“That I did…” Xabi’s face softens.
“And you still ditched them.”
Well, fuck. Two can play this game.
“There were two things I came to say to you before you go back to the hotel,” Xabi reaches inside his duffel coat and Jake takes the phone he produces from his pocket.
“Tomorrow’s front page of The Liverpool Echo,” Xabi clarifies, just in case Jake’s inclined to think that the picture of himself scoring off his wrong foot from an impossible angle and the bold, red caption above it are the work of bloggers with too much Photoshop time on their hands.
“I didn’t think Scousers read books,” Jake says, trying in vain to rein his voice in and not give away the dryness of his throat.
“Get to bed as soon you get back to the hotel, Your Highness,” Xabi smiles as he retrieves his phone. “The Half Blood Prince… Has a nice ring to it, no?”
~
Stevie’s surprised at the absence of the dreaded hospital smell when he steps inside the semi-darkness of Xabi’s private room at the clinic. It smells artificially nice instead, of bland purified air. He can see well enough though that something else is missing from the picture.
“Where’s your hospital gown, mate?”
Xabi looks down at his sweats paired up with the latest Liverpool away kit shirt (the red would have clashed with the pants) and folds his laptop onto the nightstand.
“If you wanted to get a glimpse of my ass you should have come half an hour ago when they did the spinal puncture.”
“Missed it for the press conference, sorry. Did it hurt?” Stevie plops himself down in an armchair by the bed, his misgivings about the whole situation loosened yet further by how comfortable the seat turns out to be. He has to admit that the whole clinic seems like top class and the kind of place where it’s obvious the Swiss don’t fuck around, the lack of flimsy, open-at-the-back gown notwithstanding.
“No, but they have the good kind of drugs. After they reheated my blood and pumped it back in, everything feels… sort of nice and numb,” Xabi gesticulates vaguely. “How are the lads?”
“Buzzed and hopefully in bed by now. Jordi’s the most excited about going to Liege next, local derby for him.”
“Stevie… it’s almost 1am,” Xabi says.
“Yeah…”
“You don’t have to stay here. I mean… I’m glad you came, but… Even if anything went wrong at some point, they wouldn’t know it for a few days, maybe weeks.”
“Already told everyone I’m taking the later plane back. And I brought you something,” Stevie says, switching gears fast enough to ignore the part about things going wrong.
Fuck that part.
“Bedtime stories?” Xabi notices at last that he’s holding a small paperback.
“Since you wouldn’t let me read your… symbolic crime novel, I thought I’d go with the next best thing.”
Stevie makes a show of opening up The Big Sleep and leafing through the preface, conversationally remarking on how Chandler was kind of a weirdo who had a bit of a problem with the ladies and Xabi can’t stop grinning because he knows there is no way Stevie’s picked the book by himself. He can vividly picture Stevie drinking in every word of a bookstore attendant with a ring in her nose and a clear opinion on what constitutes good crime fiction.
“Or at least according to Lilly-Ella,” Stevie finishes with a little shrug. He stretches his legs and digs into the first chapter, his forehead creasing at every piece of Americana or any word that’s been out of the vernacular since before the Blitz.
Xabi watches through half-lided eyes as Stevie’s facial expressions morph with every turn of the story, seemingly lost in noir era Los Angeles. He slides under the covers gradually…
…it’s summer. The air smells of grass.
“Steve?.. You called me Steve in The Mirror?”
“What is wrong with Steve? I like it, sounds more… grownup,” Xabi’s teeth raking down his earlobe are quite a distraction from the newspaper Stevie’s struggling to read over both their heads.
Steve is everything… Stevie tries to imagine Xabi actually uttering those words out loud… Gerrard is wanted by all… In the year I have been at Liverpool I have come to understand what is expected. It makes the air in his lungs hotter.
Xabi’s body is pressed so close against his that he can feel the knot in Stevie’s stomach tighten.
“You shouldn’t have to even have to answer these questions, I’m…”
“Stop saying you’re sorry,” Xabi hums against Stevie’s lips. He snatches the newspaper from Stevie’s hand and throws it unceremoniously under the bed. “You’re here now, aren’t you? You’re staying.”
Stevie’s eyes are as vulnerable as he’s ever seen them.
“Yes,” he whispers.
Nothing Xabi says to him would make Stevie feel any less miserable. Some of the things Xabi does to him achieve the effect instantly though…
..at some point Xabi opens his eyes and realizes he’d dozed off to the sound of Philip Marlowe’s oddly fitting new Scouse accent.
It was a hard bare masculine bedroom with a polished wood floor, a couple of small throw rugs in an Indian design, two straight chairs, a bureau in dark grained wood with a man's toilet set and two black candles in foot-high brass candlesticks…
Xabi closes his eyes, pulls the covers tighter around his body.
The room felt cold. I locked it up again, wiped the knob off with my handkerchief, and went back to the totem pole. I knelt down and squinted along the nap of the rug to the front door. I thought I could see two parallel grooves pointing that way, as though heels had dragged. Whoever had done it had meant business.
Dead men are heavier than broken hearts…
Rating: R (swearing, grownup stuff etc.)
Summary: Xabi really did call him Steve in The Mirror (July 2005). The rest is pretty much crack.
March 2018
“How bad?”
Jake ignores Xabi’s chat with the doctor like they’re two uncles having one of those right-over-your-head, dead serious grownup conversations about his future. He has a nagging feeling he’s about to be sent to a boarding school conveniently located in the most remote part of the Swiss Alps.
“It’s just a knock…” he mumbles. The synthetic material of the infirmary bed clings to Jake’s sweaty, aching limbs.
“Thank you for your professional opinion, Doctor Guinto. If you don’t mind, you could maybe wait with the self-diagnosis after we get your ankle scanned,” Doc Iqbal suggests calmly.
Xabi pats the Doc on the back and they chat for another couple of minutes as Xabi walks him out. As much as Jake would like to be left alone right now and for the remainder of their short stay in Switzerland, he knows that’s just not how things work around this part of Merseyside.
“Don’t ever do that again,” Xabi says, a blade of steel running through his voice.
“Never score a hattrick in Europe? I can do that…”
The chair Xabi pulls to sit across from Jake’s bed scrapes with metallic unpleasantness.
“You and I both know you’re not a stupid player so don’t play stupid with me. You scored that last goal on a swollen ankle and that’s a risk you should never take. When you’re out there on the field, that’s not your ankle, that’s Liverpool’s ankle and you have no right to risk our next games to get your numbers on the board.”
Jake chews the inside of his cheek, swallowing words that he knows are unwise because he really isn’t a stupid son of a bitch, no matter how much he wishes that weren’t the case some days.
“Somebody had to score. We were out of Europe at 2-2…”
“Lussey managed just fine from the midfield after you hobbled off the pitch. Now we have to figure out whom to play up front against West Ham in three days if your scan doesn’t come out clean…”
Xabi wets his lips, looks away from the ugly truth of the predicament the club is in and for which this kid is not responsible in the least. He’s got a message to deliver though, fairness be damned.
“They love Lussey,” Jake lifts his eyes, ignoring the throbbing in his ankle. “Like they loved you. So don’t tell me how hard I have to work to get them to sing about me… You had your own freaking Beatles song as soon as you were off the plane!”
“That I did…” Xabi’s face softens.
“And you still ditched them.”
Well, fuck. Two can play this game.
“There were two things I came to say to you before you go back to the hotel,” Xabi reaches inside his duffel coat and Jake takes the phone he produces from his pocket.
“Tomorrow’s front page of The Liverpool Echo,” Xabi clarifies, just in case Jake’s inclined to think that the picture of himself scoring off his wrong foot from an impossible angle and the bold, red caption above it are the work of bloggers with too much Photoshop time on their hands.
“I didn’t think Scousers read books,” Jake says, trying in vain to rein his voice in and not give away the dryness of his throat.
“Get to bed as soon you get back to the hotel, Your Highness,” Xabi smiles as he retrieves his phone. “The Half Blood Prince… Has a nice ring to it, no?”
~
Stevie’s surprised at the absence of the dreaded hospital smell when he steps inside the semi-darkness of Xabi’s private room at the clinic. It smells artificially nice instead, of bland purified air. He can see well enough though that something else is missing from the picture.
“Where’s your hospital gown, mate?”
Xabi looks down at his sweats paired up with the latest Liverpool away kit shirt (the red would have clashed with the pants) and folds his laptop onto the nightstand.
“If you wanted to get a glimpse of my ass you should have come half an hour ago when they did the spinal puncture.”
“Missed it for the press conference, sorry. Did it hurt?” Stevie plops himself down in an armchair by the bed, his misgivings about the whole situation loosened yet further by how comfortable the seat turns out to be. He has to admit that the whole clinic seems like top class and the kind of place where it’s obvious the Swiss don’t fuck around, the lack of flimsy, open-at-the-back gown notwithstanding.
“No, but they have the good kind of drugs. After they reheated my blood and pumped it back in, everything feels… sort of nice and numb,” Xabi gesticulates vaguely. “How are the lads?”
“Buzzed and hopefully in bed by now. Jordi’s the most excited about going to Liege next, local derby for him.”
“Stevie… it’s almost 1am,” Xabi says.
“Yeah…”
“You don’t have to stay here. I mean… I’m glad you came, but… Even if anything went wrong at some point, they wouldn’t know it for a few days, maybe weeks.”
“Already told everyone I’m taking the later plane back. And I brought you something,” Stevie says, switching gears fast enough to ignore the part about things going wrong.
Fuck that part.
“Bedtime stories?” Xabi notices at last that he’s holding a small paperback.
“Since you wouldn’t let me read your… symbolic crime novel, I thought I’d go with the next best thing.”
Stevie makes a show of opening up The Big Sleep and leafing through the preface, conversationally remarking on how Chandler was kind of a weirdo who had a bit of a problem with the ladies and Xabi can’t stop grinning because he knows there is no way Stevie’s picked the book by himself. He can vividly picture Stevie drinking in every word of a bookstore attendant with a ring in her nose and a clear opinion on what constitutes good crime fiction.
“Or at least according to Lilly-Ella,” Stevie finishes with a little shrug. He stretches his legs and digs into the first chapter, his forehead creasing at every piece of Americana or any word that’s been out of the vernacular since before the Blitz.
Xabi watches through half-lided eyes as Stevie’s facial expressions morph with every turn of the story, seemingly lost in noir era Los Angeles. He slides under the covers gradually…
…it’s summer. The air smells of grass.
“Steve?.. You called me Steve in The Mirror?”
“What is wrong with Steve? I like it, sounds more… grownup,” Xabi’s teeth raking down his earlobe are quite a distraction from the newspaper Stevie’s struggling to read over both their heads.
Steve is everything… Stevie tries to imagine Xabi actually uttering those words out loud… Gerrard is wanted by all… In the year I have been at Liverpool I have come to understand what is expected. It makes the air in his lungs hotter.
Xabi’s body is pressed so close against his that he can feel the knot in Stevie’s stomach tighten.
“You shouldn’t have to even have to answer these questions, I’m…”
“Stop saying you’re sorry,” Xabi hums against Stevie’s lips. He snatches the newspaper from Stevie’s hand and throws it unceremoniously under the bed. “You’re here now, aren’t you? You’re staying.”
Stevie’s eyes are as vulnerable as he’s ever seen them.
“Yes,” he whispers.
Nothing Xabi says to him would make Stevie feel any less miserable. Some of the things Xabi does to him achieve the effect instantly though…
..at some point Xabi opens his eyes and realizes he’d dozed off to the sound of Philip Marlowe’s oddly fitting new Scouse accent.
It was a hard bare masculine bedroom with a polished wood floor, a couple of small throw rugs in an Indian design, two straight chairs, a bureau in dark grained wood with a man's toilet set and two black candles in foot-high brass candlesticks…
Xabi closes his eyes, pulls the covers tighter around his body.
The room felt cold. I locked it up again, wiped the knob off with my handkerchief, and went back to the totem pole. I knelt down and squinted along the nap of the rug to the front door. I thought I could see two parallel grooves pointing that way, as though heels had dragged. Whoever had done it had meant business.
Dead men are heavier than broken hearts…