wake the morning light - iker/david
wake
the morning light
Iker Muniain/David De Gea
~2380
G
Loosely based off this prompt at we_are_cities
The first time the two share a room is September 2012. They have been playing together on a national team in various guises for almost three years, but the first time they room together is that September, and David gets the irony.
Iker is as messy as he ever was. His bed is unmade, though they have only just arrived, and his bag has spilled across it. Iker is in the bathroom and the noise from the fan is annoying. David squashes his shoulder up against his ear for no real reason, and then puts it down again.
Iker’s singing under his breath in the bathroom. If David looks over he can see a glimpse of Iker washing, leaning into the mirror in inspection.
He settles further back into the pillows and re-adjusts his book against his folded legs.
Iker comes out, but leaves the fan and the light on. David glances over but he doesn’t say anything. Iker’s rooting through the detritus on the bed, still singing. David doesn’t recognise the tune but it reminds him of a different song and that gets stuck in his head instead.
He turns a page, and tries to focus.
Iker’s by David’s bed, looking down at him. “Hey,” he says. He leans slightly to the right, so that his body is nudging David’s legs where they are folded up, feet planted flat against the covers.
“Hey,” he says again, drawing the word out this time and leaning further in, balancing himself against the edge of the bed. He’s not wearing a shirt, and he’s brown from a long summer.
David feels like it was too long. He didn’t know where he wanted to be. He spent his first week back in Spain feeling weird and misplaced, and his second week wishing he didn’t have to go back. Then they were in Asia, and everything was strange, and when he finally got back to Manchester he crawled into his bed and dreamt of sunshine and heat and bright blue ocean and familiar voices. But he found solace on the pitch and before he knew it he was home again, falling into the English patterns of speech, making fun of Phil with Tom and Danny and laughing at the boss.
Now they’re in Georgia and Iker is all sunshine and heat but he’s a whole different kind of familiarity and David is confused.
Iker steps up and over David and throws himself down on the other half of the bed. Their arms are touching and Iker pulls up more pillows to cushion his head.
“What are you reading?”
It’s an innocuous question, but it throws David, because all of a sudden he doesn’t know how to answer. He has two languages. The book is in English, but Iker asked him in Spanish.
“Siempre el mismo día,” he says in the end, and stumbles over it because what his mouth is saying is not what his eyes are reading.
“Is it good?” Iker asks. His knee knocks against David’s leg, accidentally.
“Wait,” Iker says, without waiting for an answer. “You’re reading it in English?”
He reaches out and pushes the book open, to see for himself, then he makes an impressed-sounding noise. They sit there together for half a minute, Iker just staring at the pages.
“Can I have my book back,” David says, and Iker drops his hand and shrugs. The pages all shuffle and David loses his place.
Iker wriggles until he can pull his phone out of his pocket, and David goes back to his book.
---
David reads a whole chapter and it only takes him half an hour. He folds down a corner and closes it, turning to Iker. Iker’s been quiet for a while; David had half noticed that outside the focus of the book.
Now he sees that Iker is asleep, his head lolling to one side and his mouth open. His phone has slipped out of his hand and lies, blinking red, on the sheets.
He won’t wake Iker up; he goes to the bathroom instead, where the light is still on and the fan is still going. He switches the light off and pulls the string hanging from the shaving light instead. It’s too bright on his face as he brushes his teeth and stares at his own reflection.
Iker’s still asleep when he comes out. He takes off his clothes, puts on different boxers, and goes back to the bed. Iker wakes up when David shakes his shoulder. He blinks slowly at David, scrunching up his face and then burying it into the pillows, and David feels a rush of relief that Iker hasn’t changed, that he still hates waking up and that he still whines with his eyes closed.
Iker pushes his face so far into the pillows that his whole body turns over.
David waits. If he waits - in the end, Iker grumbles, drills his head into the pillow and pulls up his body while he does it, scrambling onto his knees and eventually sitting up. He goes back on his heels and looks at David. David smiles.
“I hate waking up,” Iker says, and David says, “I know.”
Iker stands up then, walks across the bed and puts his hands on David’s shoulders, using them to jump down. He crowds into David, into David’s hand where it steadies his arm, into David’s knees where they stumble together.
Iker closes his eyes for a moment and David looks down at his quiet, sleep-flushed face.
Then Iker looks up at him, looking cross and tired again, and he moves around David to fall down onto his own bed. He’s asleep in minutes. David turns the lights off.
---
David wakes up in the middle of the night, overheated. He switches a cool pillow under his cheek and slips back into his dream. He’s dreaming in Spanish.
---
The morning is hurried, passes by in moments, David sleeps through his phone, ringing under his pillow, and Iker refuses to get up until David is running out the door, shoes in his hands, calling behind him. He stands in the open doorway, his right hand on the handle, his left hand pulling a shoe onto his right foot.
“Iker,” he says. “We’re fifteen minutes late.”
He puts the other shoe on and Iker crawls out of bed in a seething fury that the night should be over.
He shuts himself in the bathroom and David dithers, half in, half out. He should go, he thinks. He should get breakfast.
“Iker,” he says, to the closed door. “Iker-”
“I’m coming,” Iker snaps, and David leaves.
“I’ll meet you down there.”
---
He doesn’t know why they’re rooming together, except that they’re the newest to the squad. David shouldn’t even be there, only Pepe is sick with the flu back in Liverpool and so David gets bumped up the rankings. It feels strange and he keeps thinking they’ve forgotten people, looking round for his under twenty one teammates.
He sits at a table with Javi and Fernando, Thiago and Sergio. Iker joins them, ten minutes later, looking grumpy with a crease across his cheek. Half the table smiles at him, ridiculously fond, and Iker glares at them all. He inhales his food though, and by the time they’re at the bus he has perked up. He has his phone out and he’s talking non-stop gibberish to Javi, who just looks amused and lets him talk.
David sits on his own, halfway down the bus, and Iker swings into the seat across from him, next to Thiago. He spends half the journey half on top of Thiago and the other half leaning over the back of the seat, talking to Javi. Occasionally he leans across to David and says something, moving too quickly to catch the answer.
Juan is in front of David. He leans around the side of the seat and says to David, “Tell me if he’s annoying you.”
Iker’s head whips around and he gives them both a long look. David replies, in English because Juan started it and because David can. “Don’t worry,” he says. “I can look after myself.”
It’s a phrase that was useful, early on, back when Rooney taught it to him. “He can look after himself,” he had said to Phil, “Can’t you, David?”
Iker turns away, and David pulls out his phone and texts Javier. How’s it going mate, he taps out, and the English comes easy.
---
They get in after training, exhausted, and some of the players go to lie down. David doesn’t want to, he sits instead on a bench in a courtyard and he calls home. His mother picks up and answers in English and David gets confused again. He doesn’t know why. He says “Hello, mamá,” and she slips into Spanish and he does too.
At home, he doesn’t have a problem. In the dressing room, it’s English. On the pitch, it’s English. To the boss, it’s English. Then he goes home, or he goes to lunch with Antonio and Javier and they speak Spanish in the midst of Manchester.
Now he doesn’t know what to speak. He writes in English, dreams in Spanish, and when he’s out on the pitch he shouts in any language that comes to him.
---
It’s late, and David is reading again, and Iker is messing with his phone, his ipod, his laptop.
David gets changed first, brushes his teeth and wanders back and forth between the bathroom and his case. He has no focus and forgets everything he goes to do.
Iker looks up at him and says, “You got bigger.”
David stops, in the doorway, with the light on and the fan going. He looks down at Iker, sprawled on the bed.
“Yeah,” he says, after a moment. “They wanted me to - you know. Said I was too skinny.”
“I liked you skinny,” Iker says, and David smiles sort of.
“Well,” he says. “I guess they didn’t.”
There’s a pause, and David’s going to go -
“Like Oriol,” Iker says. “He bulked up too.”
David does smile then, looking down at the door frame where he’s holding it absent-mindedly. He thinks of telling Iker that he’ll be next, but these days the talk is about Madrid, not Chelsea nor City. Not England.
“I’m sorry if I’ve been a dick,” Iker says.
That takes a moment to register.
David looks up just to check that Iker is being serious.
“Oh,” he says, and looks back down again. “What?”
“You know,” Iker says. “I don’t know. I feel like I’ve maybe been a dick.”
David doesn’t know what to say, so he just stands there.
“Like, you went to England, and then I got called up, and I thought I’d see you but I didn’t. And -”
Iker trails off, and David fights a nervous smile.
“Well anyway,” Iker says, a little defiantly. David looks at him.
“It’s okay,” he says. “It happens.”
Iker’s looking down.
“I just have to -” David says, and he goes into the bathroom.
When he comes out again, Iker’s lying there still but he has his phone out. David’s had time to figure out what to say.
“You are kind of a dick sometimes,” he says, and Iker looks up, surprised. “But, we still all like you for some reason.”
David turns off the bathroom light and shuts the door behind him.
“But thanks,” he says.
Iker shrugs, kind of heavy, says, “Yeah okay.” And that’s that.
David climbs into bed and gets under the sheets, he turns on the light that hangs over his bed and picks up his book again. After a while, Iker looks over. “Can you actually read that?” he says.
“What do you think I’m doing?”
Iker sits up. “No but like, I didn’t realise your English was that good.”
“I still have to use a dictionary.”
“But you can read it.”
“Well - yeah.”
Iker shuffles across his bed till he’s sitting on the edge of it. “Read me some,” he says. “I want to see if I understand.”
David does. Iker screws up his face and laughs a little. “I was never paying attention anyway,” he says, and he’s lighter now. David grins at him.
“Can I -” Iker starts, and then he steps up and over David again, only almost tripping over David’s knees where they rise up under the sheets. He drops down next to David and their arms are touching again and Iker reaches out to the book again but this time when his knee knocks against David’s it isn’t accidental and he leaves it there.
“I know that,” Iker says, and points at a line.
David smiles. “Wow,” he says. “Congratulations.”
Iker nudges him, hard.
“I meant,” Iker says, after a long pause, “You know, sorry for -
“- I wasn’t just messing around,” he says. “I mean I was, but not like that.”
David thinks about that, and he knows, but it’s still - it still means something to hear it. He’s quieter when he replies. “Yeah,” he says. “Okay.”
“I know,” he says.
---
Two days later he’s back in England. It feels good to be home, to be back in the place he feels like he owns a little. Not just on the pitch, but the city too. He steps out of the house and squares his shoulders a little, says goodbye to his Dad in Spanish and it’s okay.
He gets an email from Iker, which is unusual in itself.
It says, I just meant to say, it could have been different. And it wasn’t, and that’s fine, but it could have been. I just wanted you to know that I know that. I’m not a complete dick, even if you and Javi and whoever don’t care if I am.
And it makes David feel okay, because although it gets him down if he thinks about it too hard, it is okay.
He sits there at his laptop in his room and the sky is grey outside, and cold, and he thinks through feeling disappointed and then bad and then okay again, and then he replies.
Hermano, he starts, and the rest comes easy.
the morning light
Iker Muniain/David De Gea
~2380
G
Loosely based off this prompt at we_are_cities
The first time the two share a room is September 2012. They have been playing together on a national team in various guises for almost three years, but the first time they room together is that September, and David gets the irony.
Iker is as messy as he ever was. His bed is unmade, though they have only just arrived, and his bag has spilled across it. Iker is in the bathroom and the noise from the fan is annoying. David squashes his shoulder up against his ear for no real reason, and then puts it down again.
Iker’s singing under his breath in the bathroom. If David looks over he can see a glimpse of Iker washing, leaning into the mirror in inspection.
He settles further back into the pillows and re-adjusts his book against his folded legs.
Iker comes out, but leaves the fan and the light on. David glances over but he doesn’t say anything. Iker’s rooting through the detritus on the bed, still singing. David doesn’t recognise the tune but it reminds him of a different song and that gets stuck in his head instead.
He turns a page, and tries to focus.
Iker’s by David’s bed, looking down at him. “Hey,” he says. He leans slightly to the right, so that his body is nudging David’s legs where they are folded up, feet planted flat against the covers.
“Hey,” he says again, drawing the word out this time and leaning further in, balancing himself against the edge of the bed. He’s not wearing a shirt, and he’s brown from a long summer.
David feels like it was too long. He didn’t know where he wanted to be. He spent his first week back in Spain feeling weird and misplaced, and his second week wishing he didn’t have to go back. Then they were in Asia, and everything was strange, and when he finally got back to Manchester he crawled into his bed and dreamt of sunshine and heat and bright blue ocean and familiar voices. But he found solace on the pitch and before he knew it he was home again, falling into the English patterns of speech, making fun of Phil with Tom and Danny and laughing at the boss.
Now they’re in Georgia and Iker is all sunshine and heat but he’s a whole different kind of familiarity and David is confused.
Iker steps up and over David and throws himself down on the other half of the bed. Their arms are touching and Iker pulls up more pillows to cushion his head.
“What are you reading?”
It’s an innocuous question, but it throws David, because all of a sudden he doesn’t know how to answer. He has two languages. The book is in English, but Iker asked him in Spanish.
“Siempre el mismo día,” he says in the end, and stumbles over it because what his mouth is saying is not what his eyes are reading.
“Is it good?” Iker asks. His knee knocks against David’s leg, accidentally.
“Wait,” Iker says, without waiting for an answer. “You’re reading it in English?”
He reaches out and pushes the book open, to see for himself, then he makes an impressed-sounding noise. They sit there together for half a minute, Iker just staring at the pages.
“Can I have my book back,” David says, and Iker drops his hand and shrugs. The pages all shuffle and David loses his place.
Iker wriggles until he can pull his phone out of his pocket, and David goes back to his book.
---
David reads a whole chapter and it only takes him half an hour. He folds down a corner and closes it, turning to Iker. Iker’s been quiet for a while; David had half noticed that outside the focus of the book.
Now he sees that Iker is asleep, his head lolling to one side and his mouth open. His phone has slipped out of his hand and lies, blinking red, on the sheets.
He won’t wake Iker up; he goes to the bathroom instead, where the light is still on and the fan is still going. He switches the light off and pulls the string hanging from the shaving light instead. It’s too bright on his face as he brushes his teeth and stares at his own reflection.
Iker’s still asleep when he comes out. He takes off his clothes, puts on different boxers, and goes back to the bed. Iker wakes up when David shakes his shoulder. He blinks slowly at David, scrunching up his face and then burying it into the pillows, and David feels a rush of relief that Iker hasn’t changed, that he still hates waking up and that he still whines with his eyes closed.
Iker pushes his face so far into the pillows that his whole body turns over.
David waits. If he waits - in the end, Iker grumbles, drills his head into the pillow and pulls up his body while he does it, scrambling onto his knees and eventually sitting up. He goes back on his heels and looks at David. David smiles.
“I hate waking up,” Iker says, and David says, “I know.”
Iker stands up then, walks across the bed and puts his hands on David’s shoulders, using them to jump down. He crowds into David, into David’s hand where it steadies his arm, into David’s knees where they stumble together.
Iker closes his eyes for a moment and David looks down at his quiet, sleep-flushed face.
Then Iker looks up at him, looking cross and tired again, and he moves around David to fall down onto his own bed. He’s asleep in minutes. David turns the lights off.
---
David wakes up in the middle of the night, overheated. He switches a cool pillow under his cheek and slips back into his dream. He’s dreaming in Spanish.
---
The morning is hurried, passes by in moments, David sleeps through his phone, ringing under his pillow, and Iker refuses to get up until David is running out the door, shoes in his hands, calling behind him. He stands in the open doorway, his right hand on the handle, his left hand pulling a shoe onto his right foot.
“Iker,” he says. “We’re fifteen minutes late.”
He puts the other shoe on and Iker crawls out of bed in a seething fury that the night should be over.
He shuts himself in the bathroom and David dithers, half in, half out. He should go, he thinks. He should get breakfast.
“Iker,” he says, to the closed door. “Iker-”
“I’m coming,” Iker snaps, and David leaves.
“I’ll meet you down there.”
---
He doesn’t know why they’re rooming together, except that they’re the newest to the squad. David shouldn’t even be there, only Pepe is sick with the flu back in Liverpool and so David gets bumped up the rankings. It feels strange and he keeps thinking they’ve forgotten people, looking round for his under twenty one teammates.
He sits at a table with Javi and Fernando, Thiago and Sergio. Iker joins them, ten minutes later, looking grumpy with a crease across his cheek. Half the table smiles at him, ridiculously fond, and Iker glares at them all. He inhales his food though, and by the time they’re at the bus he has perked up. He has his phone out and he’s talking non-stop gibberish to Javi, who just looks amused and lets him talk.
David sits on his own, halfway down the bus, and Iker swings into the seat across from him, next to Thiago. He spends half the journey half on top of Thiago and the other half leaning over the back of the seat, talking to Javi. Occasionally he leans across to David and says something, moving too quickly to catch the answer.
Juan is in front of David. He leans around the side of the seat and says to David, “Tell me if he’s annoying you.”
Iker’s head whips around and he gives them both a long look. David replies, in English because Juan started it and because David can. “Don’t worry,” he says. “I can look after myself.”
It’s a phrase that was useful, early on, back when Rooney taught it to him. “He can look after himself,” he had said to Phil, “Can’t you, David?”
Iker turns away, and David pulls out his phone and texts Javier. How’s it going mate, he taps out, and the English comes easy.
---
They get in after training, exhausted, and some of the players go to lie down. David doesn’t want to, he sits instead on a bench in a courtyard and he calls home. His mother picks up and answers in English and David gets confused again. He doesn’t know why. He says “Hello, mamá,” and she slips into Spanish and he does too.
At home, he doesn’t have a problem. In the dressing room, it’s English. On the pitch, it’s English. To the boss, it’s English. Then he goes home, or he goes to lunch with Antonio and Javier and they speak Spanish in the midst of Manchester.
Now he doesn’t know what to speak. He writes in English, dreams in Spanish, and when he’s out on the pitch he shouts in any language that comes to him.
---
It’s late, and David is reading again, and Iker is messing with his phone, his ipod, his laptop.
David gets changed first, brushes his teeth and wanders back and forth between the bathroom and his case. He has no focus and forgets everything he goes to do.
Iker looks up at him and says, “You got bigger.”
David stops, in the doorway, with the light on and the fan going. He looks down at Iker, sprawled on the bed.
“Yeah,” he says, after a moment. “They wanted me to - you know. Said I was too skinny.”
“I liked you skinny,” Iker says, and David smiles sort of.
“Well,” he says. “I guess they didn’t.”
There’s a pause, and David’s going to go -
“Like Oriol,” Iker says. “He bulked up too.”
David does smile then, looking down at the door frame where he’s holding it absent-mindedly. He thinks of telling Iker that he’ll be next, but these days the talk is about Madrid, not Chelsea nor City. Not England.
“I’m sorry if I’ve been a dick,” Iker says.
That takes a moment to register.
David looks up just to check that Iker is being serious.
“Oh,” he says, and looks back down again. “What?”
“You know,” Iker says. “I don’t know. I feel like I’ve maybe been a dick.”
David doesn’t know what to say, so he just stands there.
“Like, you went to England, and then I got called up, and I thought I’d see you but I didn’t. And -”
Iker trails off, and David fights a nervous smile.
“Well anyway,” Iker says, a little defiantly. David looks at him.
“It’s okay,” he says. “It happens.”
Iker’s looking down.
“I just have to -” David says, and he goes into the bathroom.
When he comes out again, Iker’s lying there still but he has his phone out. David’s had time to figure out what to say.
“You are kind of a dick sometimes,” he says, and Iker looks up, surprised. “But, we still all like you for some reason.”
David turns off the bathroom light and shuts the door behind him.
“But thanks,” he says.
Iker shrugs, kind of heavy, says, “Yeah okay.” And that’s that.
David climbs into bed and gets under the sheets, he turns on the light that hangs over his bed and picks up his book again. After a while, Iker looks over. “Can you actually read that?” he says.
“What do you think I’m doing?”
Iker sits up. “No but like, I didn’t realise your English was that good.”
“I still have to use a dictionary.”
“But you can read it.”
“Well - yeah.”
Iker shuffles across his bed till he’s sitting on the edge of it. “Read me some,” he says. “I want to see if I understand.”
David does. Iker screws up his face and laughs a little. “I was never paying attention anyway,” he says, and he’s lighter now. David grins at him.
“Can I -” Iker starts, and then he steps up and over David again, only almost tripping over David’s knees where they rise up under the sheets. He drops down next to David and their arms are touching again and Iker reaches out to the book again but this time when his knee knocks against David’s it isn’t accidental and he leaves it there.
“I know that,” Iker says, and points at a line.
David smiles. “Wow,” he says. “Congratulations.”
Iker nudges him, hard.
“I meant,” Iker says, after a long pause, “You know, sorry for -
“- I wasn’t just messing around,” he says. “I mean I was, but not like that.”
David thinks about that, and he knows, but it’s still - it still means something to hear it. He’s quieter when he replies. “Yeah,” he says. “Okay.”
“I know,” he says.
---
Two days later he’s back in England. It feels good to be home, to be back in the place he feels like he owns a little. Not just on the pitch, but the city too. He steps out of the house and squares his shoulders a little, says goodbye to his Dad in Spanish and it’s okay.
He gets an email from Iker, which is unusual in itself.
It says, I just meant to say, it could have been different. And it wasn’t, and that’s fine, but it could have been. I just wanted you to know that I know that. I’m not a complete dick, even if you and Javi and whoever don’t care if I am.
And it makes David feel okay, because although it gets him down if he thinks about it too hard, it is okay.
He sits there at his laptop in his room and the sky is grey outside, and cold, and he thinks through feeling disappointed and then bad and then okay again, and then he replies.
Hermano, he starts, and the rest comes easy.