tempered_rose: Quiet As Rain Not Yet Fallen
Author: ladytelemachus
Recipient: tempered_rose
Title: Quiet As Rain Not Yet Fallen
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~3300
Pairings/Character(s): Steven Gerrard/Michael Owen, Jamie Carragher
Warnings: some language
Summary: AU. Michael comes back to Anfield, and there are questions unanswered and unasked.
A/N: happy Christmas, love! Hope it's peaceful and snug. And hope this is angsty enough for your tastes :D Who doesn't like a bit of heartbreak for the festive season? Title and quote from this Brian Patten poem.
Beta'ed by: wonderful, wonderful dreamofthem
It's beginning to drizzle half-heartedly, seeping through his jacket. There's a wind picking up; the evening stealing in. He can't keep his mind off it - midnight. He adjusts his grip on his driver and squints down the green. There are black clouds gathering.
'Come on, lad,' Paul shouts from the cart. 'Bugger this for a game of soldiers, let's go have a pint.'
Stevie closes his eyes, feels his fingers cold and numbing round the handle. This shot. If he takes this shot, plays this hole, this round. One more and that'll be another wedge of time gone, another bit of midnight whittled away. The transfer window slamming shut, as though you could trap your fingers in it.
It's like this every year - since 2004, since he was on the brink, when it was his name being bandied about on blogs and gossip pages. Every year, twiddling his thumbs and worrying, feeling useless. Feeling like a kid on Christmas morning and sick, too, sick like the night before an exam or the dentist's waiting room.
He tried golf this year, dull, bracing. He thought the fresh air might clear his mind, might stop him thinking about ins and outs and stop him reliving every deadline, every window slammed shut that's left him - left the team - short and reeling and disappointed. Or the times they got their man, and hope swelled. It's not useful to think like that, either.
Golf doesn't work, then. He and Paul trudge back to the clubhouse, the rain driving now.
There's a telly in the bar, the SkySports ticker flashing red and blue, Barton, Berbatov, Dempsey, until the names of the clubs and the players and the stadiums and the reporters blur together.
Stevie monopolises the pool table, the collar of his shirt still rain-damp against his neck, loses himself in the angles and ricochets and the hollow thwock of the balls, the rattle of the pockets.
'Alright?' Paul says, perching his pint on the corner of the table.
'They'll chuck you out if they see you doing that,' Stevie says, nodding at the glass while he lines up his next shot. Tricky one; tight angle, risk of hitting the red.
'You playing against yourself?'
'Can't help it if none of these tossers can give me a game.'
'Looks like Charlie's Stoke-bound.'
Stevie straightens up. 'Yeah?'
'Four million, they're saying.'
'Bargain.'
'Yeah.'
'Come on, come and have a look. It's the usual shit. Raúl to Blackburn. That sort of thing.'
Stevie steals Paul's pint and takes a good gulp of it. The temptation to drink it out, sail through midnight on a crest of drunken oblivion, is almost overwhelming. 'Na, lad. Drives me mental, that stuff. Keeps me thinking about - gets a bit repetitive, you know.'
'Suit yourself,' Paul says, grabbing his pint back and leaning against the table as Stevie goes back to his shot, squinting along the felt. It works for a while, and he manages to ignore the chugging drone of the telly.
Paul switches on the radio, though, when they're driving home, into heavy rain, their golf bags rattling around in the boot. And that unravels all Stevie's good work, all Stevie's forgetting, because the presenter's rounding up the transfer news, and saying:
…moved from Anfield to the Bernabeu in 2004, returns to his boyhood club for an undisclosed fee, having been released by United earlier this month. Owen, who has been plagued by injury for several seasons, posted messages on his Twitter…
Paul fumbles for the radio and switches to Juice, but not quickly enough.
Not quickly enough. It's like a hole's been punched in Stevie's chest, cauterized immediately, but open still, the wind whistling through it. Through and through.
And of course, of course the radio's playing that song, the only one they've been playing all summer, somebody that I used to know, the syllables clipped and biting and xylophonic; it's not much of a coincidence, really - the law of averages - but it makes Stevie chuckle wryly into the battered windshield, because it's not as though he's got any words for this.
be careful what you wish for
Because everyone leaves him. Everyone leaves, leaves the birds rusting on their perches above the docks, and noone comes back. Except now, except for Michael - Mikey? Christ, he can't even remember what they used to call each other.
*
He's in early the next morning, unsure why. He slept badly, and he can feel it in his aching neck. As if he needs any more reminders that he's not as young as he used to be.
It's only been a week since Nuri turned up, wearing too many layers for August, nodding automatically with each introduction, trailing after Stevie, losing his way through the mazy corridors as soon as he'd found it.
Joe was the same, a month ago - not as fazed, but just as lost. He laughed at himself, laughed at Stevie's apologetic tour-guide act - this is the dressing room…where…you know…we get dressed - greeted the lads with slaps to the shoulder and jibes about last season. Joe stopped in the corridors, two or three times, to peer at photographs and huge murals - fossils of success, of glory, Rush and Dalglish. Hell, Gerrard. Istanbul. Five times.
Stevie didn't know what to say. Look what we used to be. Or look what we will be again. He doesn't know what he believes any more, or which is dearer to him now - the memory or the hope.
But Joe and Nuri were new; they still are, still stumbling over the names and still a little awkward in their kits. They don't bleed red, yet.
Stevie's outside the gaffer's office, scuffing his toes on the carpet.
a bit of warning would've been nice
He can't say that, though - he might have, with Rafa, Houllier - but he doesn't know Rodgers well enough yet. There's still a veneer of politeness, as though the boss doesn't want to step on Stevie's toes - there are only seven years between them, and that's odd sometimes, how Stevie feels so old, so ancient, and the gaffer seems so young, vibrant, at the beginning of something, instead of at the end.
Stevie knocks on the door and pokes his head round it without waiting for an answer.
'Alright, boss?' he says. 'Just thought I'd stick my head in.'
Rodgers is squinting at his computer screen, bleary eyed.
'I need some coffee, I tell you what,' he says, beckoning Stevie in. 'Yesterday took it out of me.'
'Yeah. Tends to do that.'
Rodgers looks at him sharply. 'Not a bad haul, all told eh? And you know Andy'll get his confidence back with the Hammers.'
'Just looking forward to getting started, boss.'
'That's the spirit. You heading to the dressing room? I think Mikey's gone straight there.' He chuckles lightly. 'Offered to show him the way, but he was all over it.'
'Course he was,' Stevie says. Of course he was.
He's halfway out of the door when Rodgers calls his name.
'It was…' the boss says. He pauses and runs a hand over his face. 'You know what it's like. Hectic. Last minute. Don't know who's coming or going. Just madness, you know.'
'Yeah, I know.'
'I'd've told you, Stevie. If I'd had a minute.'
Stevie shrugs. 'Doesn't matter. Not my decision, is it? It's just the fans he's going to need to win over. He's a Red now, right?'
Rodgers smiles thinly, because he knows about Liverpool by now, the heartbeat of it, the cult of it. And how Stevie is the high priest.
'Right. Thanks, lad.'
'Thank you, boss,' he says. 'Be good to play with him again.'
*
Michael's piling boots in his locker. It shouldn't be jarring, how different he looks, because they've seen each other since, in passing, through television screens, and Stevie's gotten used to him in different colours, over and over again, and watched his own body thicken and wrinkle and fold in on itself too.
So it shouldn't be a surprise - he saw Michael in the kit at Carra's testimonial just a couple of years ago, and could barely look at him. Like a Spot-The-Difference in a kid's colouring book: ring the changes, the stiff joints and the new sponsors and the new number and the old betrayal. The same and not the same.
He doesn't watch Michael long, because there's no point mourning that they've aged, and that their lives untangled themselves somewhere along the way and went ferreting off in different directions.
'Never thought I'd see you back here,' he says, and Michael spins round still clutching a pair of boots to his chest. 'Could have given me a bit of warning.'
Because if he can't say it to Michael, then to who? It's the only accusation he can afford (it's not you left, you left me, at least).
Michael laughs. It's nervous - because this move, this latest uprooting, this is the one that matters, this is the last one. The homecoming, the sunset.
'Sorry, lad. It was over and done before I knew what the hell was happening. Haven't got your number, anyhow.'
Stevie nods. 'Thought you might want a tour. They've put an extension in, all new tech stuff, performance analysis, that sort of thing.'
'Didn't have any of that fancy stuff in our day, did they?'
our day. As if that's closed off, history.
'Fuck me, the prodigal son!' Carra says, slip-sliding out of the showers with a towel round his waist. 'Took you long enough, lad.'
Michael grins, easier this time - Carra is the fiercest of them all, but he forgives. He's a Blue, somewhere in his marrow, somewhere ancient. He forgave Michael long ago, because he knows about allegiance and how its foundations are hollow and deceptive. And maybe, because he's not jealous - not now, not then.
'Thought I'd come and get a piece of the action. Top four this year, they reckon, with the gaffer.'
'Yeah, and the rest, you gloryhunter,' Carra says, winking. 'Should have done a Hargreaves, gone to City, if you wanted some of that. Give them a good run for it, though, bet on that.'
Stevie is still standing in the middle of the room, watching them. He hasn't even shaken Michael's hand yet. Is that appropriate? Welcome. Welcome back. Don't fuck it up this time. Don't leave. Don't leave me.
'Best get suited up, lads.' His voice is clipped and unnatural. 'Weights in ten minutes.' He turns on his heel and stalks away down the corridor, and his heart is hammering fast, frightening. His face feels hot.
The session blurs, and the coaches move them round the circuit quickly, and Michael's name is just one more shouted among the familiar roll-call, slotted in as smoothly as Nuri's and Joe's, but jagged and jarring all the same. To Stevie, at least. He wonders what it's like for the young lads, the ones who don't remember before.
*
Of course it sputters and falters, and pulling on the right shade of red doesn't erase the years of injury, doesn't wind anything back. Michael's still old - in different ways to Stevie: old from under-use, from the rootlessness, the restlessness, the cyclic grind of contracts and benches and physios here, there, there, further away.
Stevie's old from the despairing, disappointing monotony of it, the pressing, choking expectation, from carrying a city for a decade, burdened with shaky loyalty.
They're old, and the team is a motley crew of youth and age and home and abroad and tricksters and tanks and it's still not clicking, not in the right places, and not at the right times. Andy is scoring for West Ham, and the woodwork is still thwarting them, home and away.
Michael doesn't get on the pitch until October, even though he's been looming over it all since August, in the ways the commentators scoff and conjecture, the way the fans burned his shirts (old and new, before and after) outside the grounds. They're baying, howling as he adjusts his shorts before slapping Suso's hands, and Stevie is on the other side of the pitch, waiting for the throw in, and he feels a little stirring of sympathy, because they bayed like that, too, at the height of the Chelsea rumours, bayed for his blood. As though he hadn't bled enough.
Michael runs onto the pitch, and grinds out an unremarkable substitution, eleven minutes, plus extra time, a few neat square passes, a free kick or two won, drags his marker around well at the corner. Clean, competent, steady. Slower, though, of course. Less magical. They won't say it was a hero's homecoming, or a redemption, an atonement. Eleven minutes - plus extra time, time for Olsson to dispossess him tidily on the edge of the box and break - uneventful, against the Albion. They have to settle for quieter stories these days.
'Doesn't work like that, does it?' Michael says in the dressing room, afterwards, wiping his face with his shirt. 'All poetic and neat. Wasn't going to come on and score a hat-trick and have them all love me again, was I? Doesn't work like that.'
Stevie shrugs. 'Dunno, mate, Henry managed it for the Gunners.'
Michael laughs. 'Yeah, well. Doesn't work like that here. They're fickle, down South.'
It's just like Michael, to admire the fans for their hatred - he was always fair, logical like that, even when they were boys. It's as though he never forgave himself, either.
*
That's how it goes - Michael at the periphery, always, cup games and second half substitutions and odd starts against mediocre opposition, and he seems almost happy with it, penance, hard labour for having his head turned.
Stevie's joints are creaking. The manager's frown is deepening, and the table makes grim reading, and still, still they haven't talked, not properly. Not about who left, and who stayed, and why, and whether the medals and trophies and injuries and half-successes were worth it, for either of them, and what they are now, and what they will be, on the pitch and off.
It's Stevie who breaks first, because it's had years to fester, with him, and because he's still the captain, and he has base duties, settling the new guys, keeping up morale (keeping up appearances).
Michael accepts his dinner invitation with narrowed eyes, a little suspicious, and turns up with a bottle of wine and a wariness that Stevie knows it'll take years to erode.
The civility of it is stifling. They're adults now. Stevie had a food processor back then, too, because he was newly rich and mad with it, and he bought things for the sheer feeling of being sated. He actually uses it now, though, now that feeling's mellowed, soups and pastry and the salsa he's making right now, for the crisps he'll be serving up, in a china bowl only an adult would own.
It's stupid, distracting, the way everything - the food they're eating, the conversations they're having - is laden with the waste and silence of the inbetween years.
It's stupid, too, how it took this long for Stevie to realise this is a love story. A love story or a parable or a Just-So story, how the old man got his scars.
Stew and greens and expensive wine - serious food for serious talk, but the conversation is banal, painfully so. They talk about the team, about how good Raheem is going to be and about Pepe's new baby, and the mistakes Luis makes in English - in between the chinking of cutlery and the flurrying of napkins, polite and adult.
They don't talk about the past - their past - they talk about horse-breeding and the Olympics and eat the evening up with the sheer effort of ignoring what's changed, and what hasn't.
Michael's face looks less lined in candlelight; maybe that's true of Stevie's, too. It's getting harder to remember why they were friends, years ago. Stevie knows they were never truly friends - that it was more than that, if he's being honest with himself. And he's had time for that, for honesty. Love stories, incomplete.
He gathers the empty plates and takes them to the kitchen, and piles them in the sink, thinking about how this is a crossroads. They'll shake hands, and go on as team-mates, never quite living up to the old promise, until their joints give out or the lust for it goes, and they'll fade away on the bench, half-legendary.
Or they'll talk, talk and talk now, and do their damndest to recapture what they had before, whatever it was, whatever made them lethal on the pitch. It'll be blazing, and reborn, and worthy - but Stevie doesn't know how to begin.
His mouth is still gabbling, talking about the new food in the canteen, and about Lucas, how much they're missing him.
'Didn't drag me hear to bend my ear off about Lucas, though, did you?' Michael says, closer behind him than Stevie realised.
Michael's clever like that. Always has been, shrewd and thoughtful - he took a gamble once, gambled on Madrid, on the galacticos, and it never quite paid off, and he's been trying to claw back the debt ever since. Just one mistake, and years of wilderness to show for it.
Stevie puts the wineglasses on the sideboard. 'Na. Guess I didn't.'
'This about me leaving, then?' Michael's fingers are tracing the edge of the sideboard, Stevie can see them from the corner of his eye, careful, careful. 'Or about me coming back?'
Stevie shrugs. 'Dunno, mate. We never talked about it.'
we never talked.
They're silent, and Stevie was meant to be getting the pudding ready, a mockery of adulthood, but he's frozen. He can't stop thinking about his other self, his younger self, caught up in the riot of machismo and how the crowds were intoxicating, and he thought he'd never need anything but them, their love. How he pushed the way he felt for Michael away, and put the grief and the anger down to his betrayal, and not down to love.
Michael's hand is on his arm, and Stevie's kissing him then, pressed up against the sideboard, and after all the stifling silences and stilted conversations of the past few months, this. This: Michael's fingers in his hair and his knee between his thighs, a salvation for wasted time, and a glimpse of an apology. There's been dread clutching at Stevie's heart ever since he heard that snippet of a radio show, driving with Paul into the rain and into the night, and it eases a little, at long last. Or maybe the dread's been there for years, since he first met Michael, first thought fuck.
'Should've done this a long fucking time ago,' Michael says into the crook of his neck.
'Shouldn't have left, should you then?' Stevie says, half-joking. 'Then we might've.'
'Yeah, and maybe you'd've had your head turned by all those continentals Benitez brought over with him.' He runs his mouth along Stevie's jaw. 'Left me in the lurch.'
Stevie pushes him away a little, clasps his hands on each side of his face. A caress; a vice. 'I'm not the one who does the leaving.' He's not joking now.
'No,' Michael says. He's looking straight at Stevie - it feels like the first time in years he's met his eyes, without looking away, without the cloud of guilt. 'No, you're not.'
Easier now
to check longings and sentiment,
to pretend not to care overmuch,
you look out across the years, and you come to me
quiet as the last of our senses closing.
Recipient: tempered_rose
Title: Quiet As Rain Not Yet Fallen
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~3300
Pairings/Character(s): Steven Gerrard/Michael Owen, Jamie Carragher
Warnings: some language
Summary: AU. Michael comes back to Anfield, and there are questions unanswered and unasked.
A/N: happy Christmas, love! Hope it's peaceful and snug. And hope this is angsty enough for your tastes :D Who doesn't like a bit of heartbreak for the festive season? Title and quote from this Brian Patten poem.
Beta'ed by: wonderful, wonderful dreamofthem
It's beginning to drizzle half-heartedly, seeping through his jacket. There's a wind picking up; the evening stealing in. He can't keep his mind off it - midnight. He adjusts his grip on his driver and squints down the green. There are black clouds gathering.
'Come on, lad,' Paul shouts from the cart. 'Bugger this for a game of soldiers, let's go have a pint.'
Stevie closes his eyes, feels his fingers cold and numbing round the handle. This shot. If he takes this shot, plays this hole, this round. One more and that'll be another wedge of time gone, another bit of midnight whittled away. The transfer window slamming shut, as though you could trap your fingers in it.
It's like this every year - since 2004, since he was on the brink, when it was his name being bandied about on blogs and gossip pages. Every year, twiddling his thumbs and worrying, feeling useless. Feeling like a kid on Christmas morning and sick, too, sick like the night before an exam or the dentist's waiting room.
He tried golf this year, dull, bracing. He thought the fresh air might clear his mind, might stop him thinking about ins and outs and stop him reliving every deadline, every window slammed shut that's left him - left the team - short and reeling and disappointed. Or the times they got their man, and hope swelled. It's not useful to think like that, either.
Golf doesn't work, then. He and Paul trudge back to the clubhouse, the rain driving now.
There's a telly in the bar, the SkySports ticker flashing red and blue, Barton, Berbatov, Dempsey, until the names of the clubs and the players and the stadiums and the reporters blur together.
Stevie monopolises the pool table, the collar of his shirt still rain-damp against his neck, loses himself in the angles and ricochets and the hollow thwock of the balls, the rattle of the pockets.
'Alright?' Paul says, perching his pint on the corner of the table.
'They'll chuck you out if they see you doing that,' Stevie says, nodding at the glass while he lines up his next shot. Tricky one; tight angle, risk of hitting the red.
'You playing against yourself?'
'Can't help it if none of these tossers can give me a game.'
'Looks like Charlie's Stoke-bound.'
Stevie straightens up. 'Yeah?'
'Four million, they're saying.'
'Bargain.'
'Yeah.'
'Come on, come and have a look. It's the usual shit. Raúl to Blackburn. That sort of thing.'
Stevie steals Paul's pint and takes a good gulp of it. The temptation to drink it out, sail through midnight on a crest of drunken oblivion, is almost overwhelming. 'Na, lad. Drives me mental, that stuff. Keeps me thinking about - gets a bit repetitive, you know.'
'Suit yourself,' Paul says, grabbing his pint back and leaning against the table as Stevie goes back to his shot, squinting along the felt. It works for a while, and he manages to ignore the chugging drone of the telly.
Paul switches on the radio, though, when they're driving home, into heavy rain, their golf bags rattling around in the boot. And that unravels all Stevie's good work, all Stevie's forgetting, because the presenter's rounding up the transfer news, and saying:
…moved from Anfield to the Bernabeu in 2004, returns to his boyhood club for an undisclosed fee, having been released by United earlier this month. Owen, who has been plagued by injury for several seasons, posted messages on his Twitter…
Paul fumbles for the radio and switches to Juice, but not quickly enough.
Not quickly enough. It's like a hole's been punched in Stevie's chest, cauterized immediately, but open still, the wind whistling through it. Through and through.
And of course, of course the radio's playing that song, the only one they've been playing all summer, somebody that I used to know, the syllables clipped and biting and xylophonic; it's not much of a coincidence, really - the law of averages - but it makes Stevie chuckle wryly into the battered windshield, because it's not as though he's got any words for this.
be careful what you wish for
Because everyone leaves him. Everyone leaves, leaves the birds rusting on their perches above the docks, and noone comes back. Except now, except for Michael - Mikey? Christ, he can't even remember what they used to call each other.
*
He's in early the next morning, unsure why. He slept badly, and he can feel it in his aching neck. As if he needs any more reminders that he's not as young as he used to be.
It's only been a week since Nuri turned up, wearing too many layers for August, nodding automatically with each introduction, trailing after Stevie, losing his way through the mazy corridors as soon as he'd found it.
Joe was the same, a month ago - not as fazed, but just as lost. He laughed at himself, laughed at Stevie's apologetic tour-guide act - this is the dressing room…where…you know…we get dressed - greeted the lads with slaps to the shoulder and jibes about last season. Joe stopped in the corridors, two or three times, to peer at photographs and huge murals - fossils of success, of glory, Rush and Dalglish. Hell, Gerrard. Istanbul. Five times.
Stevie didn't know what to say. Look what we used to be. Or look what we will be again. He doesn't know what he believes any more, or which is dearer to him now - the memory or the hope.
But Joe and Nuri were new; they still are, still stumbling over the names and still a little awkward in their kits. They don't bleed red, yet.
Stevie's outside the gaffer's office, scuffing his toes on the carpet.
a bit of warning would've been nice
He can't say that, though - he might have, with Rafa, Houllier - but he doesn't know Rodgers well enough yet. There's still a veneer of politeness, as though the boss doesn't want to step on Stevie's toes - there are only seven years between them, and that's odd sometimes, how Stevie feels so old, so ancient, and the gaffer seems so young, vibrant, at the beginning of something, instead of at the end.
Stevie knocks on the door and pokes his head round it without waiting for an answer.
'Alright, boss?' he says. 'Just thought I'd stick my head in.'
Rodgers is squinting at his computer screen, bleary eyed.
'I need some coffee, I tell you what,' he says, beckoning Stevie in. 'Yesterday took it out of me.'
'Yeah. Tends to do that.'
Rodgers looks at him sharply. 'Not a bad haul, all told eh? And you know Andy'll get his confidence back with the Hammers.'
'Just looking forward to getting started, boss.'
'That's the spirit. You heading to the dressing room? I think Mikey's gone straight there.' He chuckles lightly. 'Offered to show him the way, but he was all over it.'
'Course he was,' Stevie says. Of course he was.
He's halfway out of the door when Rodgers calls his name.
'It was…' the boss says. He pauses and runs a hand over his face. 'You know what it's like. Hectic. Last minute. Don't know who's coming or going. Just madness, you know.'
'Yeah, I know.'
'I'd've told you, Stevie. If I'd had a minute.'
Stevie shrugs. 'Doesn't matter. Not my decision, is it? It's just the fans he's going to need to win over. He's a Red now, right?'
Rodgers smiles thinly, because he knows about Liverpool by now, the heartbeat of it, the cult of it. And how Stevie is the high priest.
'Right. Thanks, lad.'
'Thank you, boss,' he says. 'Be good to play with him again.'
*
Michael's piling boots in his locker. It shouldn't be jarring, how different he looks, because they've seen each other since, in passing, through television screens, and Stevie's gotten used to him in different colours, over and over again, and watched his own body thicken and wrinkle and fold in on itself too.
So it shouldn't be a surprise - he saw Michael in the kit at Carra's testimonial just a couple of years ago, and could barely look at him. Like a Spot-The-Difference in a kid's colouring book: ring the changes, the stiff joints and the new sponsors and the new number and the old betrayal. The same and not the same.
He doesn't watch Michael long, because there's no point mourning that they've aged, and that their lives untangled themselves somewhere along the way and went ferreting off in different directions.
'Never thought I'd see you back here,' he says, and Michael spins round still clutching a pair of boots to his chest. 'Could have given me a bit of warning.'
Because if he can't say it to Michael, then to who? It's the only accusation he can afford (it's not you left, you left me, at least).
Michael laughs. It's nervous - because this move, this latest uprooting, this is the one that matters, this is the last one. The homecoming, the sunset.
'Sorry, lad. It was over and done before I knew what the hell was happening. Haven't got your number, anyhow.'
Stevie nods. 'Thought you might want a tour. They've put an extension in, all new tech stuff, performance analysis, that sort of thing.'
'Didn't have any of that fancy stuff in our day, did they?'
our day. As if that's closed off, history.
'Fuck me, the prodigal son!' Carra says, slip-sliding out of the showers with a towel round his waist. 'Took you long enough, lad.'
Michael grins, easier this time - Carra is the fiercest of them all, but he forgives. He's a Blue, somewhere in his marrow, somewhere ancient. He forgave Michael long ago, because he knows about allegiance and how its foundations are hollow and deceptive. And maybe, because he's not jealous - not now, not then.
'Thought I'd come and get a piece of the action. Top four this year, they reckon, with the gaffer.'
'Yeah, and the rest, you gloryhunter,' Carra says, winking. 'Should have done a Hargreaves, gone to City, if you wanted some of that. Give them a good run for it, though, bet on that.'
Stevie is still standing in the middle of the room, watching them. He hasn't even shaken Michael's hand yet. Is that appropriate? Welcome. Welcome back. Don't fuck it up this time. Don't leave. Don't leave me.
'Best get suited up, lads.' His voice is clipped and unnatural. 'Weights in ten minutes.' He turns on his heel and stalks away down the corridor, and his heart is hammering fast, frightening. His face feels hot.
The session blurs, and the coaches move them round the circuit quickly, and Michael's name is just one more shouted among the familiar roll-call, slotted in as smoothly as Nuri's and Joe's, but jagged and jarring all the same. To Stevie, at least. He wonders what it's like for the young lads, the ones who don't remember before.
*
Of course it sputters and falters, and pulling on the right shade of red doesn't erase the years of injury, doesn't wind anything back. Michael's still old - in different ways to Stevie: old from under-use, from the rootlessness, the restlessness, the cyclic grind of contracts and benches and physios here, there, there, further away.
Stevie's old from the despairing, disappointing monotony of it, the pressing, choking expectation, from carrying a city for a decade, burdened with shaky loyalty.
They're old, and the team is a motley crew of youth and age and home and abroad and tricksters and tanks and it's still not clicking, not in the right places, and not at the right times. Andy is scoring for West Ham, and the woodwork is still thwarting them, home and away.
Michael doesn't get on the pitch until October, even though he's been looming over it all since August, in the ways the commentators scoff and conjecture, the way the fans burned his shirts (old and new, before and after) outside the grounds. They're baying, howling as he adjusts his shorts before slapping Suso's hands, and Stevie is on the other side of the pitch, waiting for the throw in, and he feels a little stirring of sympathy, because they bayed like that, too, at the height of the Chelsea rumours, bayed for his blood. As though he hadn't bled enough.
Michael runs onto the pitch, and grinds out an unremarkable substitution, eleven minutes, plus extra time, a few neat square passes, a free kick or two won, drags his marker around well at the corner. Clean, competent, steady. Slower, though, of course. Less magical. They won't say it was a hero's homecoming, or a redemption, an atonement. Eleven minutes - plus extra time, time for Olsson to dispossess him tidily on the edge of the box and break - uneventful, against the Albion. They have to settle for quieter stories these days.
'Doesn't work like that, does it?' Michael says in the dressing room, afterwards, wiping his face with his shirt. 'All poetic and neat. Wasn't going to come on and score a hat-trick and have them all love me again, was I? Doesn't work like that.'
Stevie shrugs. 'Dunno, mate, Henry managed it for the Gunners.'
Michael laughs. 'Yeah, well. Doesn't work like that here. They're fickle, down South.'
It's just like Michael, to admire the fans for their hatred - he was always fair, logical like that, even when they were boys. It's as though he never forgave himself, either.
*
That's how it goes - Michael at the periphery, always, cup games and second half substitutions and odd starts against mediocre opposition, and he seems almost happy with it, penance, hard labour for having his head turned.
Stevie's joints are creaking. The manager's frown is deepening, and the table makes grim reading, and still, still they haven't talked, not properly. Not about who left, and who stayed, and why, and whether the medals and trophies and injuries and half-successes were worth it, for either of them, and what they are now, and what they will be, on the pitch and off.
It's Stevie who breaks first, because it's had years to fester, with him, and because he's still the captain, and he has base duties, settling the new guys, keeping up morale (keeping up appearances).
Michael accepts his dinner invitation with narrowed eyes, a little suspicious, and turns up with a bottle of wine and a wariness that Stevie knows it'll take years to erode.
The civility of it is stifling. They're adults now. Stevie had a food processor back then, too, because he was newly rich and mad with it, and he bought things for the sheer feeling of being sated. He actually uses it now, though, now that feeling's mellowed, soups and pastry and the salsa he's making right now, for the crisps he'll be serving up, in a china bowl only an adult would own.
It's stupid, distracting, the way everything - the food they're eating, the conversations they're having - is laden with the waste and silence of the inbetween years.
It's stupid, too, how it took this long for Stevie to realise this is a love story. A love story or a parable or a Just-So story, how the old man got his scars.
Stew and greens and expensive wine - serious food for serious talk, but the conversation is banal, painfully so. They talk about the team, about how good Raheem is going to be and about Pepe's new baby, and the mistakes Luis makes in English - in between the chinking of cutlery and the flurrying of napkins, polite and adult.
They don't talk about the past - their past - they talk about horse-breeding and the Olympics and eat the evening up with the sheer effort of ignoring what's changed, and what hasn't.
Michael's face looks less lined in candlelight; maybe that's true of Stevie's, too. It's getting harder to remember why they were friends, years ago. Stevie knows they were never truly friends - that it was more than that, if he's being honest with himself. And he's had time for that, for honesty. Love stories, incomplete.
He gathers the empty plates and takes them to the kitchen, and piles them in the sink, thinking about how this is a crossroads. They'll shake hands, and go on as team-mates, never quite living up to the old promise, until their joints give out or the lust for it goes, and they'll fade away on the bench, half-legendary.
Or they'll talk, talk and talk now, and do their damndest to recapture what they had before, whatever it was, whatever made them lethal on the pitch. It'll be blazing, and reborn, and worthy - but Stevie doesn't know how to begin.
His mouth is still gabbling, talking about the new food in the canteen, and about Lucas, how much they're missing him.
'Didn't drag me hear to bend my ear off about Lucas, though, did you?' Michael says, closer behind him than Stevie realised.
Michael's clever like that. Always has been, shrewd and thoughtful - he took a gamble once, gambled on Madrid, on the galacticos, and it never quite paid off, and he's been trying to claw back the debt ever since. Just one mistake, and years of wilderness to show for it.
Stevie puts the wineglasses on the sideboard. 'Na. Guess I didn't.'
'This about me leaving, then?' Michael's fingers are tracing the edge of the sideboard, Stevie can see them from the corner of his eye, careful, careful. 'Or about me coming back?'
Stevie shrugs. 'Dunno, mate. We never talked about it.'
we never talked.
They're silent, and Stevie was meant to be getting the pudding ready, a mockery of adulthood, but he's frozen. He can't stop thinking about his other self, his younger self, caught up in the riot of machismo and how the crowds were intoxicating, and he thought he'd never need anything but them, their love. How he pushed the way he felt for Michael away, and put the grief and the anger down to his betrayal, and not down to love.
Michael's hand is on his arm, and Stevie's kissing him then, pressed up against the sideboard, and after all the stifling silences and stilted conversations of the past few months, this. This: Michael's fingers in his hair and his knee between his thighs, a salvation for wasted time, and a glimpse of an apology. There's been dread clutching at Stevie's heart ever since he heard that snippet of a radio show, driving with Paul into the rain and into the night, and it eases a little, at long last. Or maybe the dread's been there for years, since he first met Michael, first thought fuck.
'Should've done this a long fucking time ago,' Michael says into the crook of his neck.
'Shouldn't have left, should you then?' Stevie says, half-joking. 'Then we might've.'
'Yeah, and maybe you'd've had your head turned by all those continentals Benitez brought over with him.' He runs his mouth along Stevie's jaw. 'Left me in the lurch.'
Stevie pushes him away a little, clasps his hands on each side of his face. A caress; a vice. 'I'm not the one who does the leaving.' He's not joking now.
'No,' Michael says. He's looking straight at Stevie - it feels like the first time in years he's met his eyes, without looking away, without the cloud of guilt. 'No, you're not.'
Easier now
to check longings and sentiment,
to pretend not to care overmuch,
you look out across the years, and you come to me
quiet as the last of our senses closing.