Football AU: Now That I Am in Madrid and Can Think 17/22
Now That I Am in Madrid and Can Think 17/22
Rating: R (grownup stuff, swearing etc.)
Summary: Xabi was always the least fun one in the Alder Hey pictures. The rest is so not true.
May 2018
“Get off of me, you bellend!”
Stevie can barely find the energy to shake Jake off his back after screaming himself hoarse for a hundred and twenty plus minutes, after wearing a groove into the dugout and digging purple crescents into his palms for the duration of his first European semifinal on the sidelines of Anfield. He observes the seemingly neverending scrape with a strange feeling of disembodiment, as if his legs were involved in every crunching tackle and his skin could feel every blade of grass. The only time he’s ever felt like this before, like he was watching his soul running frantically outside of his body, was watching his girls chase each other around his legs. Except tonight there were eleven versions of him out on the pitch and, shouting and flailing aside, there was nothing he could do but hope and ball his fists tighter.
Jake finally slides off of Stevie when they complete their return to the dressing room. His bones don't even register the effort of carrying his euphoric striker like a baby koala after he’d latched onto Stevie’s back with all four toned, brown limbs and led forty-four thousand souls into at least a dozen renditions of the Gerrard song.
“Boss, you’re what us New Yorkers call one hardass motherfucker!”
He’s never seen Jake like this (well, at least not when sober) the feline swagger and fuck you, watch what I can do attitude replaced by the boundless and slightly misguided energy of a puppy you’re trying to keep from licking your face.
“A’right, a’right,” Stevie laughs, voice crackling with the same sheer fucking elation he sees on everyone’s faces. “All I did was play you at left back for half an hour when we were deep in shite and hope for the best. Whatever, it worked, but Christ you nearly gave me a heart attack one too many times, you bastards!”
After the jumping around amid assorted piles of trash scattered on the concrete floor and the badly synched chants of “Finalists of the lesser of the European Cups, we know what we are!” die down a bit, Jake just stands there for a few moments, his back straight like a rod, the rush of adrenaline slowly retreating under the surface.
“I, uh… There’s something I wanna tell you guys…”
“Fuck me, you is gone back to United in this summer, right?”
Jake is taken aback for a second, his Scouse wit detector not quite fully functional yet, but once the laughter dies down, he sounds as calm and collected as one of his killer lobs over some of the league’s best goal keepers.
“Barcelona or bust, Joao, how many times do I have to tell you? Nah, I just… If we had any other job, if we were accountants or garbage collectors this would be none of your business, but… football hasn’t reached the level of public sanitation services yet so… This could affect the team…” Jake pauses for just long enough to look at Stevie across the room and the warmth in his eyes is like an anchor. “I don’t give a shit who you’re sleeping with and hopefully the same is true for you, but… I’m gay.”
There’s a soft current of air being whooshed out of several sets of tired lungs but not much else for a while, not until Adam’s eyebrows come down from the ceiling.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, Morgan, I’m pretty sure.”
“Well, is just… you dress like a chav!”
“So do you,” Jake points out.
“Exactly!”
“And yet I’ve always been into dudes. Sorry, this is fucked up… it’s not like you guys have to walk around explaining to anyone who you sleep with, but there’s people out there who’ve been trying to use who I sleep with against Liverpool and I didn’t want it to blow up in your faces.”
Unsurprisingly, Lucas is the first one to put an arm and his Captain’s armband around his neck.
“I don’t know how things worked at United, but around here nobody messes with one of ours. A’right?”
“OK. I just… This doesn’t have to change anything between us. I mean… You got nothing to worry about, I showered next to you guys for months without getting a boner, I think I can handle it from now on too.”
“Oy, so we’re not sexy enough for you now?”
“I’m not into football players,” Jake shrugs, the corners of his mouth going up with the predictability of Adam’s disappointment. “What can I say, Morgan, gross, ingrown footballer toe nails don’t drive me wild. If you saw your chavettes naked in the shower every single day, you’d probably be bored of finding the same thing at home after a while too.”
“I always thought I had a sexy bum though. Are you sure…? Never?”
“Nope. Sorry, Jordi. ”
“So… what is your type?” Joao asks as conspicuously as humanly possible.
“I… met someone. We’ve been going out for a while. Well, not out-out. But that would be nice. Normal. He’s been out his whole life, his family’s always been supportive of him. It’s been weird to force him into hiding because of a stupid job.”
“Your family’s supportive of you too,” Stevie says and Jake realizes he’s suddenly got a knot in his throat when he sees the feeling reflected on everyone’s still slightly dazed faces.
“If it does go beyond this room at some point in the future, they’ll call all of you names too, not just me. At pretty much every stadium we’ll play at…”
“Fuck them. Let the whole world see them for the twats they are,” says their thickest, Most Likely to Have Grown Up at Stoke Academy defender. Jake is weirded out more by the fact that this is the first full sentence with a predicate he’s heard from him in five months rather than by his cool, reassuring shrug of indifference.
“You have our blessing, Guinto,” Lucas says. “But on one condition… Does he support Everton?”
“Believe it or not, he’s from Liverpool and doesn’t give a shit about football. His Mom asked for the boss’ autograph though. Not sure about his Dad… We’ve only known each other for three months, haven’t gotten that personal yet.”
Business as usual resumes pretty soon since there are elaborate plans to be made for the drinking binge to follow, even though the gratification has to be delayed until after their last push for the coveted and now painfully possible top four spot. Fuck up Chelsea first, drown in vodka later is the universally agreed upon battle tactic.
Stevie pats the back of Jake's head before he watches him getting ready to leave, surrounded by a larger than usual cohort.
“Is he cute?”
“In a nerdy way… He’s a biochemistry student.”
“So you pay for everything then.”
“Yeah, Joao, my life is a footballing cliché…”
“How the hell did you manage to pull a brainy guy like that?”
“No idea, mate.”
“Does he at least know the offside rule?”
“Does he count as a WAG?”
“Who’s usually on top?” … …. … “WHA’?!? You’ve all been thinking it!”
“He’s got a few single friends, Morgan; we can hook you up if you want to explore your curiosity.”
Stevie listens to the echo of their voices slowly fading down the halls of Anfield with a strange feeling of having forgotten something that’s right on the tip of his tongue.
Xabi doesn’t pick up the phone and the seventeenth rrrrring finally does Stevie’s head in.
“Where the fuck are you?”
December 2008
“I’m at Mikel’s.”
“Bolton Mikel?”
“Everton Mikel,” Xabi clarifies, knowing all too well that his brother is filed under the Good Mikel label in Stevie’s mental index while Arteta is Blueshite Mikel. “Jon has a cold, I am hiding from the germs while Everton plays out of town.”
This is a terrible idea and Xabi knows it, just like he knows he has no intention of ever stopping the words that come out of his mouth next.
“You want to have a beer or something?”
Stevie is at Blueshite Mikel’s door in eighteen minutes flat and for a while they pretend that this could work. That it’s normal, that they’re two mates chilling on someone else’s couch with a beer and the obligatory festive season football blathering on TV serving as the perfect placeholder for a conversation that consists almost entirely of grunts and half-mumbled bitching about United. It’s… nice.
Then Xabi says:
“I can’t get the kids at the hospital out of my mind.”
Stevie watches him picking at the corner of the label on his Carlsberg and keeps quiet because he doesn’t have to ask what’s changed after so many years of visiting sick children around Christmas. One of the many benefits of the squad’s yearly Santa trips to Alder Hey is to remind everyone just how blessed they are, how lucky they are to be alive, how lucky they are to have healthy sons and daughters.
“I know people ask you to go see their dying child so they can meet their hero before… I am maybe a horrible person, but I am glad not to be you in those moments.”
“You go all stiff and serious around healthy kids, nevermind sick ones,” Stevie smiles at him, oddly relieved to hear that someone other than himself does not want to be him. “They’ve got sharp senses them, can smell fear a mile away.”
Xabi’s knee nudges Stevie’s, slowly and like it’s the most natural thing in the world. He places the half-empty beer bottle on top of a French magazine Mikel keeps around for some reason and looks at Stevie for what feels and actually is the first time in many moons.
“I missed you,” he says quietly, feeling the fault in the careful veneer of his self-control audibly crack wider.
Not many people would be able to tell because not many people know Xabi at all, but deep down he’s always craved the rush of a free fall. The taller the walls of self-reliance and wisdom beyond his years he builds around himself, the taller the springboard he can use. Some people see through it right away and those are the people he should steer well clear of, but…
“I didn’t mean it like that…”
“Bullshit.”
His hands are in Stevie’s hair so fast he doesn’t even remember how they got there and by the time he’s biting on Stevie’s lower lip and drowning in the sounds coming from the back of his throat, he could care less.
Xabi wakes up a few hours later to the sound of an atrocious version of Against All Odds coming from Mikel’s shower. He buries his head in the pillow wishing he could stop feeling like the most selfish creature to have crawled on the Earth.
May 2018
What the fuck are yeh, some schoolgirl waiting for a phone call?
Stevie gets a bit concerned when he realizes his inner monologue voice is beginning to sound a lot like Carra lives inside his head. He distracts himself from that pants-shittingly terrifying prospect with possible explanations for Xabi’s nonreaction to Liverpool’s biggest night in five years. Too busy scheming some backroom deals and planning an upcoming onslaught on the transfer market is a far more reassuring scenario than passed out drunk in some ditch. Steven chides himself for that thought.
Fuck it.
His persistence is rewarded with a drowsy Hola that doesn’t exactly bide well for his mental scenarios.
“Hola yourself, sleeping beauty. We had a meeting ‘bout half an hour ago.”
“Err… what?”
“Don’t worry, everyone was still too buzzed about last night to worry about doing their jobs today, you didn’t miss much.”
“Um… What day is it?”
Xabi sounds like he’s down in some stalagmite-covered cavern and Stevie’s beginning to lose it just a bit, but manages to keep a relatively even keel kind of tone nonetheless.
“The day after we qualified for a European final for the first time this decade, you divvy! Please tell me you at least watched it?!?”
Now that he thinks of it, Stevie doesn’t remember seeing Xabi anywhere around Anfield last night.
“Of course I watched it, don’t be daft, it was fantastic! I … stayed up too late.”
“You all right?”
“Fine… I’m fine. Sorry about the meeting,” he adds with a genuine note of regret.
“’S all right,” Stevie says, trying to get used to the very idea of Xabi oversleeping instead of undersleeping for once.
“I’ll be there in an hour.”
Xabi looks down at where he’s laying on the sofa, wearing his rumpled trench coat but an otherwise undisturbed gray suit, complete with LFC insignia and a Liverpool scarf hanging half around his neck and half on the floor. It’s at least beginning to make sense for him.
Rating: R (grownup stuff, swearing etc.)
Summary: Xabi was always the least fun one in the Alder Hey pictures. The rest is so not true.
May 2018
“Get off of me, you bellend!”
Stevie can barely find the energy to shake Jake off his back after screaming himself hoarse for a hundred and twenty plus minutes, after wearing a groove into the dugout and digging purple crescents into his palms for the duration of his first European semifinal on the sidelines of Anfield. He observes the seemingly neverending scrape with a strange feeling of disembodiment, as if his legs were involved in every crunching tackle and his skin could feel every blade of grass. The only time he’s ever felt like this before, like he was watching his soul running frantically outside of his body, was watching his girls chase each other around his legs. Except tonight there were eleven versions of him out on the pitch and, shouting and flailing aside, there was nothing he could do but hope and ball his fists tighter.
Jake finally slides off of Stevie when they complete their return to the dressing room. His bones don't even register the effort of carrying his euphoric striker like a baby koala after he’d latched onto Stevie’s back with all four toned, brown limbs and led forty-four thousand souls into at least a dozen renditions of the Gerrard song.
“Boss, you’re what us New Yorkers call one hardass motherfucker!”
He’s never seen Jake like this (well, at least not when sober) the feline swagger and fuck you, watch what I can do attitude replaced by the boundless and slightly misguided energy of a puppy you’re trying to keep from licking your face.
“A’right, a’right,” Stevie laughs, voice crackling with the same sheer fucking elation he sees on everyone’s faces. “All I did was play you at left back for half an hour when we were deep in shite and hope for the best. Whatever, it worked, but Christ you nearly gave me a heart attack one too many times, you bastards!”
After the jumping around amid assorted piles of trash scattered on the concrete floor and the badly synched chants of “Finalists of the lesser of the European Cups, we know what we are!” die down a bit, Jake just stands there for a few moments, his back straight like a rod, the rush of adrenaline slowly retreating under the surface.
“I, uh… There’s something I wanna tell you guys…”
“Fuck me, you is gone back to United in this summer, right?”
Jake is taken aback for a second, his Scouse wit detector not quite fully functional yet, but once the laughter dies down, he sounds as calm and collected as one of his killer lobs over some of the league’s best goal keepers.
“Barcelona or bust, Joao, how many times do I have to tell you? Nah, I just… If we had any other job, if we were accountants or garbage collectors this would be none of your business, but… football hasn’t reached the level of public sanitation services yet so… This could affect the team…” Jake pauses for just long enough to look at Stevie across the room and the warmth in his eyes is like an anchor. “I don’t give a shit who you’re sleeping with and hopefully the same is true for you, but… I’m gay.”
There’s a soft current of air being whooshed out of several sets of tired lungs but not much else for a while, not until Adam’s eyebrows come down from the ceiling.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, Morgan, I’m pretty sure.”
“Well, is just… you dress like a chav!”
“So do you,” Jake points out.
“Exactly!”
“And yet I’ve always been into dudes. Sorry, this is fucked up… it’s not like you guys have to walk around explaining to anyone who you sleep with, but there’s people out there who’ve been trying to use who I sleep with against Liverpool and I didn’t want it to blow up in your faces.”
Unsurprisingly, Lucas is the first one to put an arm and his Captain’s armband around his neck.
“I don’t know how things worked at United, but around here nobody messes with one of ours. A’right?”
“OK. I just… This doesn’t have to change anything between us. I mean… You got nothing to worry about, I showered next to you guys for months without getting a boner, I think I can handle it from now on too.”
“Oy, so we’re not sexy enough for you now?”
“I’m not into football players,” Jake shrugs, the corners of his mouth going up with the predictability of Adam’s disappointment. “What can I say, Morgan, gross, ingrown footballer toe nails don’t drive me wild. If you saw your chavettes naked in the shower every single day, you’d probably be bored of finding the same thing at home after a while too.”
“I always thought I had a sexy bum though. Are you sure…? Never?”
“Nope. Sorry, Jordi. ”
“So… what is your type?” Joao asks as conspicuously as humanly possible.
“I… met someone. We’ve been going out for a while. Well, not out-out. But that would be nice. Normal. He’s been out his whole life, his family’s always been supportive of him. It’s been weird to force him into hiding because of a stupid job.”
“Your family’s supportive of you too,” Stevie says and Jake realizes he’s suddenly got a knot in his throat when he sees the feeling reflected on everyone’s still slightly dazed faces.
“If it does go beyond this room at some point in the future, they’ll call all of you names too, not just me. At pretty much every stadium we’ll play at…”
“Fuck them. Let the whole world see them for the twats they are,” says their thickest, Most Likely to Have Grown Up at Stoke Academy defender. Jake is weirded out more by the fact that this is the first full sentence with a predicate he’s heard from him in five months rather than by his cool, reassuring shrug of indifference.
“You have our blessing, Guinto,” Lucas says. “But on one condition… Does he support Everton?”
“Believe it or not, he’s from Liverpool and doesn’t give a shit about football. His Mom asked for the boss’ autograph though. Not sure about his Dad… We’ve only known each other for three months, haven’t gotten that personal yet.”
Business as usual resumes pretty soon since there are elaborate plans to be made for the drinking binge to follow, even though the gratification has to be delayed until after their last push for the coveted and now painfully possible top four spot. Fuck up Chelsea first, drown in vodka later is the universally agreed upon battle tactic.
Stevie pats the back of Jake's head before he watches him getting ready to leave, surrounded by a larger than usual cohort.
“Is he cute?”
“In a nerdy way… He’s a biochemistry student.”
“So you pay for everything then.”
“Yeah, Joao, my life is a footballing cliché…”
“How the hell did you manage to pull a brainy guy like that?”
“No idea, mate.”
“Does he at least know the offside rule?”
“Does he count as a WAG?”
“Who’s usually on top?” … …. … “WHA’?!? You’ve all been thinking it!”
“He’s got a few single friends, Morgan; we can hook you up if you want to explore your curiosity.”
Stevie listens to the echo of their voices slowly fading down the halls of Anfield with a strange feeling of having forgotten something that’s right on the tip of his tongue.
Xabi doesn’t pick up the phone and the seventeenth rrrrring finally does Stevie’s head in.
“Where the fuck are you?”
December 2008
“I’m at Mikel’s.”
“Bolton Mikel?”
“Everton Mikel,” Xabi clarifies, knowing all too well that his brother is filed under the Good Mikel label in Stevie’s mental index while Arteta is Blueshite Mikel. “Jon has a cold, I am hiding from the germs while Everton plays out of town.”
This is a terrible idea and Xabi knows it, just like he knows he has no intention of ever stopping the words that come out of his mouth next.
“You want to have a beer or something?”
Stevie is at Blueshite Mikel’s door in eighteen minutes flat and for a while they pretend that this could work. That it’s normal, that they’re two mates chilling on someone else’s couch with a beer and the obligatory festive season football blathering on TV serving as the perfect placeholder for a conversation that consists almost entirely of grunts and half-mumbled bitching about United. It’s… nice.
Then Xabi says:
“I can’t get the kids at the hospital out of my mind.”
Stevie watches him picking at the corner of the label on his Carlsberg and keeps quiet because he doesn’t have to ask what’s changed after so many years of visiting sick children around Christmas. One of the many benefits of the squad’s yearly Santa trips to Alder Hey is to remind everyone just how blessed they are, how lucky they are to be alive, how lucky they are to have healthy sons and daughters.
“I know people ask you to go see their dying child so they can meet their hero before… I am maybe a horrible person, but I am glad not to be you in those moments.”
“You go all stiff and serious around healthy kids, nevermind sick ones,” Stevie smiles at him, oddly relieved to hear that someone other than himself does not want to be him. “They’ve got sharp senses them, can smell fear a mile away.”
Xabi’s knee nudges Stevie’s, slowly and like it’s the most natural thing in the world. He places the half-empty beer bottle on top of a French magazine Mikel keeps around for some reason and looks at Stevie for what feels and actually is the first time in many moons.
“I missed you,” he says quietly, feeling the fault in the careful veneer of his self-control audibly crack wider.
Not many people would be able to tell because not many people know Xabi at all, but deep down he’s always craved the rush of a free fall. The taller the walls of self-reliance and wisdom beyond his years he builds around himself, the taller the springboard he can use. Some people see through it right away and those are the people he should steer well clear of, but…
“I didn’t mean it like that…”
“Bullshit.”
His hands are in Stevie’s hair so fast he doesn’t even remember how they got there and by the time he’s biting on Stevie’s lower lip and drowning in the sounds coming from the back of his throat, he could care less.
Xabi wakes up a few hours later to the sound of an atrocious version of Against All Odds coming from Mikel’s shower. He buries his head in the pillow wishing he could stop feeling like the most selfish creature to have crawled on the Earth.
May 2018
What the fuck are yeh, some schoolgirl waiting for a phone call?
Stevie gets a bit concerned when he realizes his inner monologue voice is beginning to sound a lot like Carra lives inside his head. He distracts himself from that pants-shittingly terrifying prospect with possible explanations for Xabi’s nonreaction to Liverpool’s biggest night in five years. Too busy scheming some backroom deals and planning an upcoming onslaught on the transfer market is a far more reassuring scenario than passed out drunk in some ditch. Steven chides himself for that thought.
Fuck it.
His persistence is rewarded with a drowsy Hola that doesn’t exactly bide well for his mental scenarios.
“Hola yourself, sleeping beauty. We had a meeting ‘bout half an hour ago.”
“Err… what?”
“Don’t worry, everyone was still too buzzed about last night to worry about doing their jobs today, you didn’t miss much.”
“Um… What day is it?”
Xabi sounds like he’s down in some stalagmite-covered cavern and Stevie’s beginning to lose it just a bit, but manages to keep a relatively even keel kind of tone nonetheless.
“The day after we qualified for a European final for the first time this decade, you divvy! Please tell me you at least watched it?!?”
Now that he thinks of it, Stevie doesn’t remember seeing Xabi anywhere around Anfield last night.
“Of course I watched it, don’t be daft, it was fantastic! I … stayed up too late.”
“You all right?”
“Fine… I’m fine. Sorry about the meeting,” he adds with a genuine note of regret.
“’S all right,” Stevie says, trying to get used to the very idea of Xabi oversleeping instead of undersleeping for once.
“I’ll be there in an hour.”
Xabi looks down at where he’s laying on the sofa, wearing his rumpled trench coat but an otherwise undisturbed gray suit, complete with LFC insignia and a Liverpool scarf hanging half around his neck and half on the floor. It’s at least beginning to make sense for him.