the edge of everything: part 1
Title: The Edge Of Everyhing
Rating: R
Pairing: Lionel Messi / David Villa
Word Count: 10,665
Summary: Football was there at the beginning and football will be there at the end, and football will be there at every step between those two points, and Leo knows that. Wants that. Needs that.
Leo’s laying on one of the artificial grass pitches at Ciutat Esportiva Joan Gamper and the sun overhead is warm and bright and making him tired. He shuts his eyes and when he does, someone walks over; Leo can tell that it’s Pep by the way his heels drag in the grass. He crouches down by Leo’s head, tugs on a strand of Leo’s hair.
“We’ve been good,” Pep says. “Our team. Last year was good.”
“Yeah,” Leo says, because they have. The Sextuple; it doesn’t get better than that.
“We’ll be good this year, too,” Pep tells him. “You’ll see.”
Leo knows. He can feel it in his bones and in the earth underneath him.
First, there was football.
Leo doesn’t know what came second or fifth or fiftieth, but he knows enough. He know that first there was football and that was all that mattered until his growth hormone deficiency was diagnosed, and then it was like football mattered even more. The treatments are expensive, the doctors said, and then Barcelona told him, Don’t worry, just play, and he did. And a million other things happened along the way, although Leo can’t really remember anything besides the feel of grass under his boots and sweat on his skin, the sound of his heart pounding and a football hitting the net. Football is all he knows, all he wants to know, all he loves and wants and needs. People say, You’ve missed out on your childhood, but what’s the other option? To miss out on this? No, Leo thinks. He didn’t miss out on anything; he gained everything.
Football was there at the beginning and football will be there at the end, and football will be there at every step between those two points, and Leo knows that. Wants that. Needs that.
This year will be good. It has to be; Pep said it would. They have new signings, new signings who know what they’re doing just as well as Leo does. Mascherano-Leo knows him, is confident in everything he can do and everything he can bring to Barcelona. He’s already a part of Leo’s family, and his move only serves to solidify that. Adriano-Leo watches him use both feet like they were one in the same. And then there’s David Villa-he had a tremendous World Cup, of course he did, and that has Leo feeling jealous and nervous and ashamed.
When David finally comes to his first practice at Ciutat Esportiva, everyone goes crazy and Leo just watches for a while before he says anything. It’s different for him than it is for the rest of the guys; he doesn’t already know David because he’s not La Furia Roja and David’s only just barely a culé. He’s seen David on the pitch, though, seen enough of him to know that he’s good and that he is football and football is him, in the same way that Leo is football and football is Leo, all of him, the only thing he has to offer.
“Don’t be shy,” Bojan says, and he hits his shoulder against Leo’s. He’s hanging back too, pulling away because although he knows David, they’re nowhere near friends. Leo notices this, understands for the most part.
“I’m not,” he says. “I don’t know him.”
Once the excitement of having David at practice dies down, though, David walks up to him and sticks out his hand.
“David,” he says. Leo knows that, knows who David is as a footballer and as a rival. This isn’t the first time they’ve spoken, isn’t the first time they’ve shared a pitch, but it is the first time they’ve spoken this way, like teammates, and it’s the first time they’ve shared this pitch, a training pitch.
“Leo,” he says back, and he takes David’s hand.
Gerard juggles a football with his feet and Leo watches.
“Watch this,” he says, and Leo doesn’t bother to tell him that he already is. “Actually, count how many times I do it, yeah?” He kicks the ball lightly into the air and circles his foot all the way around it, back to the start, where catches it between his shin and the top of his foot. Leo stops counting at seven; Gerard’s foot hits the ball in time with Leo’s beating heart and it distracts him.
“How many was that?” Gerard asks when he finally drops it. “At least twenty-six.”
“At least one less than I can do,” Leo jokes, and Gerard kicks the football at him.
It’s just practice, but Leo runs like it’s not. The grass under his feet pushes him along, the wind in his ears whispers, faster, faster, and he runs. His shirt sticks to his skin and it’s not the stripes but it’s still got the crest, the one that weighs him down and picks him up and makes him push harder.
Pass from David, ball finds net. He looks at David, David who’s standing still and looking surprised, and Leo says, “It’s that easy,” and he smiles wide.
“Every time,” David says, and he smiles like he knows how they’ll destroy entire defenses together, how they’ll take other teams apart and refuse to put them back together. Maybe does know; Leo already knows.
“You watch him just as much as I do. What do you think?”
“I don’t know,” Leo tells Pep. He’s in Pep’s office, sitting on Pep’s couch while Pep makes some tea in a hot pot. It was weird at first, for Leo, to look at Pep as a friend. He is Leo’s coach and he is Leo’s mentor, but a friend? Leo doesn’t know if that’s possible, doesn’t know if that’s even what they are or not, but he doesn’t know what else to call it.
“And what does that mean?” Pep asks.
“It means-he’s good,” Leo says. They’re talking about David. “He fits.”
“Yeah, I thought so, too,” Pep says, and Leo wonders how many other players Pep talks to like this. He thinks he’s the only one, but he can’t be sure.
“Yeah.”
“Hey, are you okay?” Pep asks. He looks over at Leo and he’s still so young, Leo thinks, still so young and yet he’s taught Leo so much about football. Leo doesn’t know what he’d do if Pep left, because Leo is Barcelona and Pep is Barcelona and blaugrana runs through their veins, spreads to the tips of their fingers and toes with every heartbeat, and Leo knows that for sure.
“No,” Leo says, because he figures it’s best to be honest. “I’m tired.”
“The season starts soon,” Pep says. “Just few weeks.”
Leo likes that Pep knows what he means, that he’s tired from not playing. He’s exhausted.
For all the watching Leo does, David watches back, just as intense. Leo can feel his eyes on him wherever he goes, every time he has the ball and every time he doesn’t. He’s quiet but not stupid, and so he knows what David’s thinking. It’s what they all think, everyone who meets him, everyone who wants to know about how the glory of a Ballon d’Or feels or about how much Pro Evo he plays and what it was like to live with a growth hormone deficiency. Leo won’t ever be used to it, knowing that’s all that people think about when they see him, but he’s come to expect it.
“Just say it,” he finally says as they set up to scrimmage. David doesn’t even look surprised that Leo calls him out on it.
“The awards,” David says. “The records and the trophies and everything. Doesn’t make it any easier, does it?”
“No,” he says. “It makes everything harder.”
David shakes his head, more to himself than to anything Leo had said, and jogs to midfield. Leo takes it to mean that they’ve come to some sort of understanding, although he’s not quite sure what that is.
The night before the season opener, Leo invites Bojan over and they play Pro Evo and fight over who plays as Barcelona. In the end, they take turns, and when Bojan plays as Barça, Leo plays as Racing Santander and wins soundly.
“Beating your own team like that,” Bojan mutters. “Disgusting.”
When Leo plays as Barça, Bojan picks Real Madrid.
“At least this way when I lose, I’ll be happy about it,” Bojan tries to justify his choice, but Leo just shakes his head.
“Playing for Real Madrid when you’ve already been a culé? Are you pulling a Ronaldo on me?” he jokes.
Bojan says, “No, I’m not in underwear ads, yet. They just won’t have me.” And Leo wants to say, I didn’t mean Cristiano, and, It was one year, but you wear the stripes and you should know.
Instead, he rolls his eyes and says, “I’m sure they’ll be banging on your door any day now.”
The match goes more or less how Leo expects it to. He scores, Andrés scores, David scores. It’s how it should be, only it should be more. Leo doesn’t just want to win; he wants to devastate.
In the locker room, he congratulates David again on his goal.
“Thanks,” David says, stripping off his sweaty shirt. “You too.”
“Thanks,” Leo says, and he heads a few spots over to his locker. He doesn’t say anything, the team yelling and celebrating all around him as takes off his shirt, his shorts, his boots. He slides on his sandals and heads to the showers and then-
“I should have done better,” David says. “More.”
“Me too,” Leo says. He should have.
“It’s okay,” Pep says when Leo tells him. “It’s better than okay. You played well.”
“I know it’s okay,” he says.
“You don’t though, do you?” Pep asks. “Three points are three points; it doesn’t matter how you get them, only that you do.”
“I’ll get them,” Leo says. “We’ll get them for you.”
Pep smiles at that, looks at Leo in a way that makes him think of his dad.
Sometimes Leo wonders how much of him is luck. All of him? None of him? He works hard; he works harder than anyone he knows. So maybe it’s not all luck, but some of it is. A lot of it is. Leo knows.
Andrés has always been serious, him and Xavi always mind-melding about the midfield, but when David comes, all of that changes. Leo notices. Everyone changes, shifts slightly around David, but especially Andrés.
At first, it started small. David’s stretching and Andrés kicks a ball at him from half a pitch away. “Hey, asshole!” David yells when he loses his balance. Andrés laughs and it’s real loud, loud enough for Leo to hear from the opposite sideline, and that’s new.
And later, when they’re scrimmaging and David’s sitting out, he stalks up and down the sidelines to cheer Andrés on. “Show them that the shortest stands the tallest,” he yells. And when Andrés misses a tackle, David shouts, “That’s exactly it, Andrés! Show them what not to do!”
And after Andrés scores, when David cheers, “One-Sixteen! The Spanish Machine! Come home with me and I’ll make you-” Andrés runs and jumps on his back and David fights him the entire way.
“One-Sixteen?” Leo asks Pedro.
“World Cup Final,” Pedro says. “That’s when he scored.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah,” Pedro says, and he laughs as Victor throws himself on Andrés’s back and all three of them topple over.
It’s nice to see Andrés like that.
“I hope you’re not going to hate me when they give me the Alfredo Di Stéfano Trophy,” David says as they jog around the pitch, and it catches Leo so off guard that he almost loses his balance as he laughs.
“If Marca thinks you’re player of the year, by all means, it’s yours,” Leo says.
“As long as we keep it from Cristiano, right?”
“As long as we keep it from Los Merengues,” Leo corrects, and David laughs.
“Well, since you’re so kind, I’ll let you be Pichichi,” he says.
“Thanks,” Leo deadpans.
“Next year.”
Leo laughs.
Nobody says anything after they lose to Hercules. What can they say? Nothing that matters, nothing that will change the scoreboard. Leo can already see it, the headlines. David Conquers Goliath. Barcelona Humbled. Mighty Barça Shocked.
Has the Barcelona Puzzle Been Solved?
His team is mad around him, mad and loud, but Leo rages silently. They should have done better; he should have done better. They are Barça and Barça is better than that, deserves better than that, what they gave out there on the pitch.
He doesn’t talk to anyone on his way out.
At home, Leo thinks it all over. He thinks over every missed shot, every crossbar, and every time the ball touched his foot and then left his foot. What went wrong? Nothing went wrong. Everything went wrong. They just didn’t win. They lost. Barcelona lost. Leo lost.
The doorbell ringing comes as a surprise, makes Leo jump, and he almost ignores it except for how it rings again and again. It’s David, and Leo doesn’t know how he knows that but he does, because David’s the only person Leo knows who might right a doorbell like that, incessantly, purposefully. When he opens the door, David pushes his way inside and Leo can tell that he’s still mad, too.
“How did we lose to fucking Hercules?” he asks. “I came to Barça to win.”
And that makes Leo mad, because he wanted to win, too; because the rest of the team wanted to win, too. David’s not the only one, and yet he’s blaming everyone else.
“Hey,” he snaps, and that’s very unlike him. “You had every opportunity.”
“So did you,” David reminds him.
“You think I don’t know that?” Leo asks.
“I don’t know, do you?” David asks back.
“Of course I do.” And he does, but this isn’t a conversation that he wanted to have ever, let alone in his foyer. He already knows.
“I know it, too,” David says, and then, “Fuck! I need be better.”
“Then be better,” Leo says, because need to, want to, have to-none of it matters; all that matters is that he is or he isn’t. Leo knows he needs to be better, too. Of course he knows.
And then-and then David’s pushing him up against the door, hip to hip, so close, saying, “Fuck you,” and “Fucking Hercules,” and “We lost.” His fingers are tight around Leo’s arm, pressing him firmly into the door.
David kisses him before Leo even realizes what kind of game David’s playing at, and he understands that that fact alone means he’s already lost. David doesn’t stop kissing him, pinning him back, and Leo’s not entirely sure he would ask David to if he could.
David pulls away and stares at Leo for a minute and Leo stares back because he is Lionel Messi, he is the best player in the world, and they’re off the pitch right now, but it’s still the same principles and Leo should know how to play when he’s down, only in this case, he doesn’t. David pushes his body even tighter against him, kissing him hard and squeezing his fingertips into Leo’s skin. It hurts, but Leo doesn’t say anything. Maybe that tells David everything he needs to know.
Leo stands there and he wants to fight back but he just can’t, and David keeps kissing him, biting at his lips until they’re raw. David reaches down, palms Leo through his shorts, and Leo’s embarrassed because he’s already hard and they haven’t even done anything. He hadn’t even realized he was attracted to David, not like this.
Leo turns his head to the side, humiliated, as David laughs. He’s the one here, kissing Leo, so why is Leo the one ashamed to be hard? It doesn’t make sense but that’s the way it is, and Leo bites his lip, angry at football and himself and everything.
“Come on,” David goads as he reaches his hand inside the waistband of Leo’s shorts. He wraps his fingers around Leo’s cock and Leo’s hips stutter without his permission. “Look at me.”
Leo doesn’t and David squeezes his fingers tighter, starts to jack Leo off as he smiles because he’s got Leo out of his element. The hand around Leo’s bicep moves to his neck and David’s thumb presses down on Leo’s pulse point. Leo knows his heart is going crazy, and he’s mad at himself that now David knows it, too.
“Look at me,” David says again, rougher this time, his hand moving faster and making Leo’s head spin. Leo thinks it’s good that he can’t move, that David’s pressed so tight against him, because he doesn’t know what he’d do if he could. “You just lost to Hercules,” he says. “Look at me.”
“No,” Leo says, and David doesn’t like that. He moves his fingers from Leo’s neck to cup his jaw and force his face forward. When Leo’s finally looking at David, he can’t help but notice that David’s eyes are dark and his eyebrows are knotted together. But then he smiles, one that mocks Leo, and Leo comes with a shout.
When David takes his hand out of Leo’s pants, Leo can see his own come on David’s palm, between David’s fingers.
“Fuck,” David says, and he wipes his hand on Leo’s shirt. “Fucking Hercules.”
He shoves Leo aside, away from the door, and heads outside and down Leo’s front steps. He doesn’t look back and Leo’s left there, fuming and embarrassed and ashamed.
He lost.
“Talked to Cesc the other day,” Gerard says as they stretch, and Leo laughs. He’s stretching his quads, holding onto Gerard for balance and avoiding David.
“You manage to convince him to come back yet?” he asks and he pulls the stretch deeper.
“No,” Gerard says. “He’s still spreading our Barcelona tiki taka to the British. Charity or something, I can’t figure out why else he’d do it.”
“Fuck you,” Victor butts in. “You spread our tiki taka to the Brits, you traitor.”
“I was young!” Gerard says, and they all laugh.
“And what’s Cesc?” Victor asks.
“An idiot,” Gerard says, and then Xavi shouts from across the group, “We already know you are; we wanted to know about Cesc.”
Gerard throws a water bottle at him and hits Puyi instead. He throws up his hands and points to Leo, saying, “It was him!”
“Yeah,” Leo deadpans. “Because that’s something I would do.” Gerard looks at him like, Et tu, Leo? and Leo just rolls his eyes.
They spend the rest of the day on sprints and drills, and in the last forty minutes they scrimmage. He and David are on separate sides and that’s easy. Leo doesn’t even notice he’s there.
He goes home that night, though, and jerks off in the shower to thoughts of David on the pitch with sweaty skin. David smiles because he’s just scored and his eyes are light, not anything like they were the night before, and Leo thinks about hugging him, his fingers on the back of David’s neck. He comes embarrassingly fast.
They don’t talk until two days later, the night before they’re set to play Panathinaikos in the Champions League. David comes over again, unannounced again, this time wearing a sweatshirt with the hood pulled up and carrying a dvd.
“Hi,” Leo says at the door.
“Can I-can I come in?” David asks, and Leo figures that’s as much an apology as he’s going to get.
“Sure,” he says, and steps aside. “What’s up?”
“I brought the Hercules game,” David says, and waves the box. “I figured we could watch it, figure out where we went wrong.”
“We’ve watched it in practice,” Leo reminds him.
“I know.”
“I’ve watched it twice on my own already, too,” he says.
“So have I,” David tells him, and Leo nods okay.
“Alright,” he says. “Okay.”
They sit on the couch for the next while, David slumped in the corner as far away from Leo as possible, and they critique each other. Should’ve passed there, and, Open goal if you waited just a second, and, What was that even supposed to be?
It’s nice, though. Makes Leo feel like he’s working towards something.
It works.
Leo scores and then David scores-
(Leo’s right there, right next to him when he does, and David turns to him and their arms are outstretched, and David hugs him as they race down the pitch, one arm flung over Leo’s shoulders as he says, “Hercules was a speed bump,” and “Look at us.” Leo tells him, “No one else stands a chance,” and David laughs and Leo laughs, and they’re winning and it feels good again.)
-and then Leo scores again, and they’re on top of the world and Panathinaikos doesn’t know what to do, can’t do anything because Barcelona is strong, Barcelona is tiki taka, Barcelona is him and David and Pedro destroying their defense and it is Puyi and Gerard and Dani destroying their offense and by half-time, they are up 3-1.
They score more-of course they do, they are Barcelona-but even a 5-1 victory is ruined when Leo misses a penalty kick in the fifty-third.
“Hey,” Pep says to him as they walk off the pitch, “it doesn’t matter. Put it out of your mind. You know how to take a penalty.”
“Hey,” David says to him in the locker room, “if you want to go to practice early tomorrow, we can work on penalties. I’m a shitty keeper, but…”
Leo says, “Yeah, okay,” to both.
When he gets home, he throws on a load of laundry and cleans the kitchen while Gol Televisión plays in the background. The announcers talk about how Real Madrid is playing Ajax tomorrow, and Leo’s pulling hard for Ajax. He knows it won’t happen, especially not with Suarez sitting it out, but stranger things have happened. Hercules beat Barcelona. Goes to show.
He’s throwing his clothes in the dryer when David calls.
“Come over and celebrate with me,” he says, and it’s not a question.
“Okay.”
David’s nicer this time, softer. He runs his mouth over Leo’s body, just lips and tongue, no teeth, and he lets Leo touch him back.
Leo loves the dips of muscle that he traces on David’s stomach, his collar bones and the curve of his spine. He loves the way David sounds when something feels good and the way he still can’t give up control, not to anyone, not even to Leo. He loves the look on David’s face when he comes.
Leo leaves shortly afterwards, but it’s not awkward. David walks him to the door.
Nothing changes between them and nothing should. David is still David Villa, headstrong, and Leo is still Leo Messi, determined. Their partnership on the pitch stays as strong as ever and their friendship off it remains just that.
The weeks go by and Barcelona wins more and more and draws only once. It feels good, feels really good. Leo feels good.
But sometimes, although Leo would never admit it, he walks into the locker room and gets all the way to number nineteen before he remembers. Maxwell, the jersey tells him, and Leo thinks, Messi, I am Messi. And the entire walk back from nineteen to ten, Leo tells himself, You are ten and ten is you. You are Messi. You are Barcelona. You are football.
He stops there and feels vaguely disappointed that that’s it, that’s all he is.
David gets thrown out against Bilbao for a fight. Leo doesn’t see it but he hears about it as David’s walking off the pitch, and he thinks it’s ridiculous. No one seems to know why it happened, only that it did, but Leo doesn’t care; they’re down to ten men. He has to keep reminding himself that David isn’t there every time he gets the ball.
In the locker room, everyone leaves David alone but Leo.
“So is this something you’re planning on making a habit of?” he asks. “Because you might want to tell Pep.”
“Could you,” David says, and his hands are clenching the bench he’s sitting on hard enough to turn his knuckles white, “just for one second, not be such a dick? I said I was sorry.”
“No, you didn’t,” Leo points out. And maybe he did, but he didn’t say it to Leo.
“Would it matter if I did?”
“No,” Leo says. “I was there for my team.”
“Fuck you,” David says. “It’s our team.”
“Is it? I couldn’t tell,” Leo says, and walks away to shower. It’s a stupid fight, Leo knows that, and he gets over it after about two minutes in the shower. As a peace offering, when he gets back and David’s putting on his clothes, Leo says, “How does Llorente even fit into those shirts?”
David laughs, one of those laughs where he bends his knees and leans backwards, and says, “I don’t know. The whole time during World Cup Silva and I tried to figure it out, but fuck if I know.”
They lapse into a comfortable silence, getting dressed and packing their boots away. Leo’s hair is wet and it’s not as long as it was before, but it still sticks to his forehead and drips water down his neck.
“Meet you out at the bus?” he asks when he’s dressed. “I’ll grab us a seat towards the back.”
“Alright,” David says. He’s gelling his hair. “I call aisle!”
“I know,” Leo says, and he hefts his bag over his shoulder, heads out the door.
Leo guzzles some water as he talks to Bojan.
“It’s just so frustrating,” Bojan says. “Striker Syndrome. Just kill me if it goes on much longer. Just put me out of my misery.”
“Hey, it’ll get better,” Leo says. “It happens to everyone.”
“I know,” Bojan says, but he doesn’t sound too convinced.
“Look at Cristiano-he had terrible start to the season,” Leo points out.
Bojan rolls his eyes, says, “Yeah, but now he’s scoring eight goals a match.”
“Well then we’ll working on getting you to average nine,” Leo jokes and reaches out for Bojan’s water bottle. “Gimme that.”
At practice, Leo works on penalties again. He hits most of them-top right, bottom left, dead center-and Victor cusses up a storm at how few he blocks.
That night, David comes over and pins his arms down as he fucks him.
“You looked so hot at practice,” he says. “Fuck-I couldn’t look away. You were just so-best player I’ve ever seen-fuck.”
He licks a stripe along Leo’s jaw and bites down on Leo’s earlobe. Leo comes first.
They’re playing some team-any team, doesn’t matter because they are Barcelona and they’re playing and it’s a 5-0 shut-out.
Dani to Pedro, goal.
Xavi to Pedro to Leo, goal.
Andrés to Xavi to Andrés to David, goal.
Xavi to David to Leo to David to Leo, goal.
Sergio to Leo, goal for the hat-trick and it’s beautiful.
They head back to the locker rooms and Pep tells them that they played like champions; he doesn’t discuss any sloppy work because there’s always time for that at practice. Puyi stands on a bench, yells, “Força Barça!” and they all chant and cheer, and right before they make their way to the showers, right before things calm down and silence sets in, right before, David slings an arm around Leo’s shoulders and says, “Pretty fucking perfect.” Leo’s not quite sure what David’s referring to, but he agrees anyways.
Leo smiles a lot. Always on the outside, sometimes on the inside, but either way, Leo smiles. There are a lot of things in life that make him happy, that make him laugh-how Gerard makes fun of Puyi’s hair, how Bojan looks in a turtleneck, and how Pep sometimes makes a gesture like he’s going to tug on his own hair and then looks startled when he remembers he doesn’t have any.
Nothing makes Leo happy like football, though. There is not a single feeling in the world comparable to scoring a perfect goal or to lifting a cup. Leo wants this forever-practices and matches and physios and travelling-all of it, forever.
So when he feels his body protest a bit in practice, when he feels the slow pressure of a headache build up behind his eyes, or when his muscles cramp sooner than they should, Leo thinks, No.
No, but he can feel his body getting tired already and that can’t happen, it can’t, because the season’s not over yet and Leo’s still so young.
Football’s not everything, his parents had said before moving to Spain. And maybe they’re right, maybe it’s not. But even if football’s not everything, it’s most things, and Leo knows that, likes it that way.
Gerard invites him out for dinner and Leo goes even though he knows that Gerard is going to trick him into picking up the tab.
“What if I scored more goals than you this season?” Gerard asks after they order. “I should have ordered a bottle of wine.”
“I’m good with just water,” Leo says.
“Your loss,” Gerard says. “But come on, what if?”
“You’re not going to score more goals than I am.”
“That’s why it’s a hypothetical,” Gerard says, and he reaches out for some bread from the basket in front of them.
“Hypothetically, you’re not going to score more goals than me,” Leo says, and Gerard laughs.
“Ooo-kay,” he says, dragging out the syllables. “Someone’s been hanging with Villa too much.”
Gerard moves on, talks about his girlfriend and Cesc and the Primera División table, but all Leo thinks about is what Gerard said about David.
Leo’s sitting on his couch, feet propped up on the coffee table as Argentina struggles in Pro Evo 2010. It’s a little late, later than Leo’s usually up, but he can’t sleep because there’s a spasm in one of his leg muscles that keeps him from relaxing.
David calls, almost like he knows, almost like he and Leo share a hive mind, and says, “I can’t sleep either. Come over.”
“I never said I couldn’t sleep,” Leo says, because he didn’t. David didn’t even give him time to say hello.
“You answered your phone, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, but I can’t,” Leo says, and in his head, Gerard says to him, Ooo-kay. “I’ve got a load of laundry on.”
“Oh,” David says. “Alright.”
They both know he’s lying. It’s twelve thirty at night.
He wakes up one morning and it’s like his body doesn’t want to listen to him. His eyes hurt, his joints hurt, his bones hurt, and it takes him longer than usual to get ready for practice.
Leo doesn’t know what to do so he doesn’t do anything; tries to hide it. No one mentions his hunched shoulders or the way he drags his feet or how he’s tired all the time all of a sudden. That’s good, though, because Leo needs football. He can’t have them taking it away.
Leo goes out of his way to stretch with Pedro at practice, or to not pick up his phone every time David calls. He doesn’t have a problem with David-not at all, he’s not avoiding him or anything-but he thinks that maybe Gerard was right, that maybe he was spending too much time with him.
“You’re not getting weird on me, are you?” David asks him as they do stability ball exercises. Leo wants to tell him that they’ll talk about it later, but no one else on the squad is even paying attention to them.
“No,” Leo says. “I’ve just been busy. I have things to do outside football, you know.”
“Fuck you,” David says. “You are getting weird.” And then he turns to the rest of the group and says loudly, “Can you fucking believe it? Messi’s so chicken-shit he won’t even play me in Pro Evo.”
Bojan shouts back, “No, he’s good. He’ll kick your ass and have you thanking him for it.”
The guys all rib Bojan for that, especially Gerard who says, “Speaking from experience, eh, Bojan?”
Bojan says, “Hijo de-” and then Gerard’s tackling him to the ground.
“That was pretty dirty,” Leo says once everyone’s focused on the wrestling.
“Say you’ll come over,” David says.
“Okay. I’ll come over.”
Leo leaves the bed to fill up his glass of water for the third time and David comments on it.
“You look straight out of Invsion of the Body Snatchers or some shit,” he says. “What is with all the water?”
“Nothing,” Leo says. “I’m just thirsty.”
“You’re not going to compare me to a glass of water in a desert, are you?” David asks.
“No.”
“Okay,” David says, and then he blows Leo, holds Leo’s hips down with his hands although he doesn’t really need to; Leo’s not moving too much, just barely weaving his fingers through David’s hair. When he comes, it’s with a strangled moan, quiet and breathy and unusual for him.
“Hey,” David says, and he knocks a fist lightly against Leo’s knee. “You with me, asshole?”
“Yeah,” Leo says, and he gets up and stumbles to the bathroom. He throws up in the toilet and rests his forehead against the cool tile wall.
David comes in sometime after him, still completely naked, and Leo absently thinks that he’s beautiful.
“Thanks,” David laughs, and Leo realizes he said that out loud. “You know, if my blowjobs disgust you so much, I don’t have to give you them.”
“No,” Leo says. “No-I-Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” David says, and he pushes Leo’s hair away from his eyes. It’s far too intimate a gesture. “You should have told me you were sick.”
“I didn’t know I was.”
“Maybe you should see the doctor,” David says, and maybe Leo should. His head is killing him.
“Hyponatremia,” the doctor tells him. “You have extremely low blood sodium. I’m surprised you went this long without noticing it-headaches, muscle spasms, excessive thirst-but you said you didn’t have any of the symptoms. If we just give you some more electrolytes, you should be good to go, but that could take a week or two before you’re back on top. At least.”
Leo goes crazy. On the first day, he cleans his entire house and watches all of the Terminator films. On the second, he goes grocery shopping and visits the kids at La Masia, just for something to do. On the third, all the papers are saying he brought this upon himself so he could have a break, that he doesn’t have the drive to win anymore. Leo just smiles, says it’s not true when anyone asks.
“You’re so fucking nice to them,” David says. “I don’t get it. You let them love you when you’re doing well and you let them walk all over you when you’re not.”
“You have to be nice to the press,” Leo says. “It doesn’t really bother me what they say.”
“You could be like Ibrahimović,” David tells him. “They eat that shit up.”
“I guess,” Leo says. “But that’s not me, that’s not what I’m really like.”
“I know. I’m just messing with you.”
“Okay,” Leo says. “Why are you so nice to them, then?”
“You have to be nice to the press,” David says, and he’s got this grin that says that he knows he’s being an asshole. Leo doesn’t call him on it.
Leo’s in a bookstore, just something that he ducked into on a whim, and he’s looking at a book about La Roja, thinking about getting it. In an interview, Llorente and Andrés are asked who the best player of all time is. Llorente says Leo; Andrés says Laudrup. Leo thinks that he could probably rib Andrés about that for a while, I would have said you, Andrés, and that’s what hurts the most.
“That book’s shit, don’t waste your money,” some boy says, interrupting Leo’s thoughts. He’s wearing a name tag; it says Javier.
“Isn’t it your job to try to get me to buy stuff?” Leo asks.
“I guess,” Javier shrugs. “What does it matter? You already know you’re gonna buy that one.”
“Maybe I won’t,” Leo says. “What’s wrong with it? You don’t like La Roja?”
“I fucking love La Roja,” he says, and it comes out sounding a lot like, Fuck you. “But all they want to talk about is how great Messi is. Fuck that shit. Must be hard for you; you look just like him.”
Leo thinks that this is not where he wanted the conversation to go, so he heads to the front to pay. Javier follows him.
“I mean, shit,” Javier says, counting the money Leo hands him. “Thirty-three million euro a year and he doesn’t even do anything interesting with it.”
“Maybe he’s just a boring guy,” Leo shrugs, and he takes his change and heads to the door.
“Hey, Leo!” Javier calls out, and the second Leo turns around he realizes the kid was just messing with him the entire time. “I’d like you a lot more if you played for Espanyol.”
Leo laughs and offers him tickets to Camp Nou if he ever feels like raising his standards a bit.
“Do you ever think about quitting?” Leo asks.
“What? Football?” David asks. Leo called him; they’re on the phone.
“Yes.”
“No,” David says. “I think if I quit I’d-I don’t fucking know. I’d never quit. Why? Do you?”
“No,” Leo says, and he means it. Of course he means it. He is football and football is him and it would be stupid to get rid of the one thing you’re good at, the one thing you love. He’s just going crazy, not doing anything.
Leo’s bored and so he cleans one of his spare rooms and unearths an old foosball table. He vaguely remembers buying it with Kun what seems like years ago at an old flea market, back when they could still go to those. The player figurines are all chipped, the paint on them worn down to nothing.
Leo goes out to the store and buys some acrylics, paints blaugrana on one team, albiceleste on the other. He doesn’t care that it’s impractical; it’s his table and he can do what he wants. For a second he thinks of making them all number ten as a joke, but in the end he doesn’t. Every team needs a Xavi, a Mascherano; every team needs a Heinze and a Zanetti.
When he’s done, Leo sits back on his heels and looks at it. It looks pretty terrible, the paintjob sloppy, but Leo thinks it’s beautiful all the same. The paint needs to dry before he can put it back together, and Leo’s bored again.
He paces, plays video games, naps.
Leo laces up his boots. He loves that sound, the sound of laces on leather. He puts on his shirt and he’s loves that, too, the feel of it on his skin. He steps out onto one of the training pitches-artificial turf, and he hates that-and he’s missed it.
They all kind of tip-toe around him at first but then Pep yells at them and that changes. And then he’s back and it’s like the past two weeks didn’t even happen because he was gone but there was still a Leo-shaped hole where he used to be and he fills it again now that he’s back.
Leo’s got this smile, the next game, when he steps onto the pitch and Camp Nou comes alive around him. He thinks his smile might break his face. They sing El Cant del Barça and it echoes in Leo’s bones. He is home again, and the whistle blows and he is off, racing down the pitch with a ball at his feet and he is alive, blaugrana in his veins.
Rumors are thrown around about David leaving at the end of the season, of Manchester United and AC Milan fighting over him, of him wanting to play for Manchester City and return to his on-field partnership with David Silva.
Leo doesn’t bring it up for a long time, but he does start leaving hickeys on David’s chest that have the boys catcalling at David in the showers.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Okay.”
Practice goes well. It goes better than well, Leo and David and Pedro working on drills and formations and crazy plays that they probably won’t ever get to pull off in a real match. They look good, though; strong. And for a second, for the tiniest of seconds, Leo hates David for thinking about leaving so much that he stumbles, doesn’t get his pass off.
“I’m okay,” he laughs when he gets up, but he’s not okay, of course he’s not, and Pep can see that.
“What’s with you and David?” he asks later, and of course he knows; if it shows itself on the pitch, even for a millisecond, Pep sees it. “Are you two fighting?”
“No,” Leo says. It’s true.
“Okay,” Pep says. “Today at practice, I just thought-are you feeling okay? You’ve been drinking your Lucozade, following what the doctors said?”
“Yes,” Leo says. “Yes. Don’t bench me this next game, Pep, I’m fine. It was just an off day.”
“It wasn’t an off day,” Pep says, and Leo sighs with relief. “And I won’t. I wouldn’t if you told me you didn’t need it.”
“I don’t,” Leo says. “That’s exactly what I don’t need.”
“Okay. Okay.”
David hisses out a breath and Leo says, “You like that.”
“Shut the fuck up,” David says, and he rubs his right nipple, slick with Leo’s spit, and the teeth marks around it. Leo smiles because he knows he’s right, and bites his way down David’s chest. David leans into it.
Leo tells himself that if David leaves, Barcelona will be down an important player and Leo will have to learn how to read someone else’s mind on the pitch. He tells himself that David leaving is something the club will feel the impact of and so it’s better if he just stays.
“Fuck,” David says, and he sounds only a heartbeat away from the edge of everything. Leo knows because that's how he feels.
“I don’t want you to be a Ronaldo,” Leo says. It’s a few days later and they’re sitting alone on a bench in the locker room, shoulder to shoulder, all suited up, and no one else is there. Leo’s voice echoes off the tiles and Leo thinks if he moves his feet, moves his boots at all, the clack of the spikes on the floor will be loud and jarring.
He tries not to expect anything, to not predict what David will say or do when he hears that, but he does, he can’t help it. He expects David to say, I’m not Brazilian, and, Thirty-four goals in thirty-seven games? I’ll score thirty-five, and he expects David to say, Next World Cup and I’ll knock him off the top spot.
David says, “I won’t be.”
Leo says, “Good.”
Part 2
Rating: R
Pairing: Lionel Messi / David Villa
Word Count: 10,665
Summary: Football was there at the beginning and football will be there at the end, and football will be there at every step between those two points, and Leo knows that. Wants that. Needs that.
Leo’s laying on one of the artificial grass pitches at Ciutat Esportiva Joan Gamper and the sun overhead is warm and bright and making him tired. He shuts his eyes and when he does, someone walks over; Leo can tell that it’s Pep by the way his heels drag in the grass. He crouches down by Leo’s head, tugs on a strand of Leo’s hair.
“We’ve been good,” Pep says. “Our team. Last year was good.”
“Yeah,” Leo says, because they have. The Sextuple; it doesn’t get better than that.
“We’ll be good this year, too,” Pep tells him. “You’ll see.”
Leo knows. He can feel it in his bones and in the earth underneath him.
First, there was football.
Leo doesn’t know what came second or fifth or fiftieth, but he knows enough. He know that first there was football and that was all that mattered until his growth hormone deficiency was diagnosed, and then it was like football mattered even more. The treatments are expensive, the doctors said, and then Barcelona told him, Don’t worry, just play, and he did. And a million other things happened along the way, although Leo can’t really remember anything besides the feel of grass under his boots and sweat on his skin, the sound of his heart pounding and a football hitting the net. Football is all he knows, all he wants to know, all he loves and wants and needs. People say, You’ve missed out on your childhood, but what’s the other option? To miss out on this? No, Leo thinks. He didn’t miss out on anything; he gained everything.
Football was there at the beginning and football will be there at the end, and football will be there at every step between those two points, and Leo knows that. Wants that. Needs that.
This year will be good. It has to be; Pep said it would. They have new signings, new signings who know what they’re doing just as well as Leo does. Mascherano-Leo knows him, is confident in everything he can do and everything he can bring to Barcelona. He’s already a part of Leo’s family, and his move only serves to solidify that. Adriano-Leo watches him use both feet like they were one in the same. And then there’s David Villa-he had a tremendous World Cup, of course he did, and that has Leo feeling jealous and nervous and ashamed.
When David finally comes to his first practice at Ciutat Esportiva, everyone goes crazy and Leo just watches for a while before he says anything. It’s different for him than it is for the rest of the guys; he doesn’t already know David because he’s not La Furia Roja and David’s only just barely a culé. He’s seen David on the pitch, though, seen enough of him to know that he’s good and that he is football and football is him, in the same way that Leo is football and football is Leo, all of him, the only thing he has to offer.
“Don’t be shy,” Bojan says, and he hits his shoulder against Leo’s. He’s hanging back too, pulling away because although he knows David, they’re nowhere near friends. Leo notices this, understands for the most part.
“I’m not,” he says. “I don’t know him.”
Once the excitement of having David at practice dies down, though, David walks up to him and sticks out his hand.
“David,” he says. Leo knows that, knows who David is as a footballer and as a rival. This isn’t the first time they’ve spoken, isn’t the first time they’ve shared a pitch, but it is the first time they’ve spoken this way, like teammates, and it’s the first time they’ve shared this pitch, a training pitch.
“Leo,” he says back, and he takes David’s hand.
Gerard juggles a football with his feet and Leo watches.
“Watch this,” he says, and Leo doesn’t bother to tell him that he already is. “Actually, count how many times I do it, yeah?” He kicks the ball lightly into the air and circles his foot all the way around it, back to the start, where catches it between his shin and the top of his foot. Leo stops counting at seven; Gerard’s foot hits the ball in time with Leo’s beating heart and it distracts him.
“How many was that?” Gerard asks when he finally drops it. “At least twenty-six.”
“At least one less than I can do,” Leo jokes, and Gerard kicks the football at him.
It’s just practice, but Leo runs like it’s not. The grass under his feet pushes him along, the wind in his ears whispers, faster, faster, and he runs. His shirt sticks to his skin and it’s not the stripes but it’s still got the crest, the one that weighs him down and picks him up and makes him push harder.
Pass from David, ball finds net. He looks at David, David who’s standing still and looking surprised, and Leo says, “It’s that easy,” and he smiles wide.
“Every time,” David says, and he smiles like he knows how they’ll destroy entire defenses together, how they’ll take other teams apart and refuse to put them back together. Maybe does know; Leo already knows.
“You watch him just as much as I do. What do you think?”
“I don’t know,” Leo tells Pep. He’s in Pep’s office, sitting on Pep’s couch while Pep makes some tea in a hot pot. It was weird at first, for Leo, to look at Pep as a friend. He is Leo’s coach and he is Leo’s mentor, but a friend? Leo doesn’t know if that’s possible, doesn’t know if that’s even what they are or not, but he doesn’t know what else to call it.
“And what does that mean?” Pep asks.
“It means-he’s good,” Leo says. They’re talking about David. “He fits.”
“Yeah, I thought so, too,” Pep says, and Leo wonders how many other players Pep talks to like this. He thinks he’s the only one, but he can’t be sure.
“Yeah.”
“Hey, are you okay?” Pep asks. He looks over at Leo and he’s still so young, Leo thinks, still so young and yet he’s taught Leo so much about football. Leo doesn’t know what he’d do if Pep left, because Leo is Barcelona and Pep is Barcelona and blaugrana runs through their veins, spreads to the tips of their fingers and toes with every heartbeat, and Leo knows that for sure.
“No,” Leo says, because he figures it’s best to be honest. “I’m tired.”
“The season starts soon,” Pep says. “Just few weeks.”
Leo likes that Pep knows what he means, that he’s tired from not playing. He’s exhausted.
For all the watching Leo does, David watches back, just as intense. Leo can feel his eyes on him wherever he goes, every time he has the ball and every time he doesn’t. He’s quiet but not stupid, and so he knows what David’s thinking. It’s what they all think, everyone who meets him, everyone who wants to know about how the glory of a Ballon d’Or feels or about how much Pro Evo he plays and what it was like to live with a growth hormone deficiency. Leo won’t ever be used to it, knowing that’s all that people think about when they see him, but he’s come to expect it.
“Just say it,” he finally says as they set up to scrimmage. David doesn’t even look surprised that Leo calls him out on it.
“The awards,” David says. “The records and the trophies and everything. Doesn’t make it any easier, does it?”
“No,” he says. “It makes everything harder.”
David shakes his head, more to himself than to anything Leo had said, and jogs to midfield. Leo takes it to mean that they’ve come to some sort of understanding, although he’s not quite sure what that is.
The night before the season opener, Leo invites Bojan over and they play Pro Evo and fight over who plays as Barcelona. In the end, they take turns, and when Bojan plays as Barça, Leo plays as Racing Santander and wins soundly.
“Beating your own team like that,” Bojan mutters. “Disgusting.”
When Leo plays as Barça, Bojan picks Real Madrid.
“At least this way when I lose, I’ll be happy about it,” Bojan tries to justify his choice, but Leo just shakes his head.
“Playing for Real Madrid when you’ve already been a culé? Are you pulling a Ronaldo on me?” he jokes.
Bojan says, “No, I’m not in underwear ads, yet. They just won’t have me.” And Leo wants to say, I didn’t mean Cristiano, and, It was one year, but you wear the stripes and you should know.
Instead, he rolls his eyes and says, “I’m sure they’ll be banging on your door any day now.”
The match goes more or less how Leo expects it to. He scores, Andrés scores, David scores. It’s how it should be, only it should be more. Leo doesn’t just want to win; he wants to devastate.
In the locker room, he congratulates David again on his goal.
“Thanks,” David says, stripping off his sweaty shirt. “You too.”
“Thanks,” Leo says, and he heads a few spots over to his locker. He doesn’t say anything, the team yelling and celebrating all around him as takes off his shirt, his shorts, his boots. He slides on his sandals and heads to the showers and then-
“I should have done better,” David says. “More.”
“Me too,” Leo says. He should have.
“It’s okay,” Pep says when Leo tells him. “It’s better than okay. You played well.”
“I know it’s okay,” he says.
“You don’t though, do you?” Pep asks. “Three points are three points; it doesn’t matter how you get them, only that you do.”
“I’ll get them,” Leo says. “We’ll get them for you.”
Pep smiles at that, looks at Leo in a way that makes him think of his dad.
Sometimes Leo wonders how much of him is luck. All of him? None of him? He works hard; he works harder than anyone he knows. So maybe it’s not all luck, but some of it is. A lot of it is. Leo knows.
Andrés has always been serious, him and Xavi always mind-melding about the midfield, but when David comes, all of that changes. Leo notices. Everyone changes, shifts slightly around David, but especially Andrés.
At first, it started small. David’s stretching and Andrés kicks a ball at him from half a pitch away. “Hey, asshole!” David yells when he loses his balance. Andrés laughs and it’s real loud, loud enough for Leo to hear from the opposite sideline, and that’s new.
And later, when they’re scrimmaging and David’s sitting out, he stalks up and down the sidelines to cheer Andrés on. “Show them that the shortest stands the tallest,” he yells. And when Andrés misses a tackle, David shouts, “That’s exactly it, Andrés! Show them what not to do!”
And after Andrés scores, when David cheers, “One-Sixteen! The Spanish Machine! Come home with me and I’ll make you-” Andrés runs and jumps on his back and David fights him the entire way.
“One-Sixteen?” Leo asks Pedro.
“World Cup Final,” Pedro says. “That’s when he scored.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah,” Pedro says, and he laughs as Victor throws himself on Andrés’s back and all three of them topple over.
It’s nice to see Andrés like that.
“I hope you’re not going to hate me when they give me the Alfredo Di Stéfano Trophy,” David says as they jog around the pitch, and it catches Leo so off guard that he almost loses his balance as he laughs.
“If Marca thinks you’re player of the year, by all means, it’s yours,” Leo says.
“As long as we keep it from Cristiano, right?”
“As long as we keep it from Los Merengues,” Leo corrects, and David laughs.
“Well, since you’re so kind, I’ll let you be Pichichi,” he says.
“Thanks,” Leo deadpans.
“Next year.”
Leo laughs.
Nobody says anything after they lose to Hercules. What can they say? Nothing that matters, nothing that will change the scoreboard. Leo can already see it, the headlines. David Conquers Goliath. Barcelona Humbled. Mighty Barça Shocked.
Has the Barcelona Puzzle Been Solved?
His team is mad around him, mad and loud, but Leo rages silently. They should have done better; he should have done better. They are Barça and Barça is better than that, deserves better than that, what they gave out there on the pitch.
He doesn’t talk to anyone on his way out.
At home, Leo thinks it all over. He thinks over every missed shot, every crossbar, and every time the ball touched his foot and then left his foot. What went wrong? Nothing went wrong. Everything went wrong. They just didn’t win. They lost. Barcelona lost. Leo lost.
The doorbell ringing comes as a surprise, makes Leo jump, and he almost ignores it except for how it rings again and again. It’s David, and Leo doesn’t know how he knows that but he does, because David’s the only person Leo knows who might right a doorbell like that, incessantly, purposefully. When he opens the door, David pushes his way inside and Leo can tell that he’s still mad, too.
“How did we lose to fucking Hercules?” he asks. “I came to Barça to win.”
And that makes Leo mad, because he wanted to win, too; because the rest of the team wanted to win, too. David’s not the only one, and yet he’s blaming everyone else.
“Hey,” he snaps, and that’s very unlike him. “You had every opportunity.”
“So did you,” David reminds him.
“You think I don’t know that?” Leo asks.
“I don’t know, do you?” David asks back.
“Of course I do.” And he does, but this isn’t a conversation that he wanted to have ever, let alone in his foyer. He already knows.
“I know it, too,” David says, and then, “Fuck! I need be better.”
“Then be better,” Leo says, because need to, want to, have to-none of it matters; all that matters is that he is or he isn’t. Leo knows he needs to be better, too. Of course he knows.
And then-and then David’s pushing him up against the door, hip to hip, so close, saying, “Fuck you,” and “Fucking Hercules,” and “We lost.” His fingers are tight around Leo’s arm, pressing him firmly into the door.
David kisses him before Leo even realizes what kind of game David’s playing at, and he understands that that fact alone means he’s already lost. David doesn’t stop kissing him, pinning him back, and Leo’s not entirely sure he would ask David to if he could.
David pulls away and stares at Leo for a minute and Leo stares back because he is Lionel Messi, he is the best player in the world, and they’re off the pitch right now, but it’s still the same principles and Leo should know how to play when he’s down, only in this case, he doesn’t. David pushes his body even tighter against him, kissing him hard and squeezing his fingertips into Leo’s skin. It hurts, but Leo doesn’t say anything. Maybe that tells David everything he needs to know.
Leo stands there and he wants to fight back but he just can’t, and David keeps kissing him, biting at his lips until they’re raw. David reaches down, palms Leo through his shorts, and Leo’s embarrassed because he’s already hard and they haven’t even done anything. He hadn’t even realized he was attracted to David, not like this.
Leo turns his head to the side, humiliated, as David laughs. He’s the one here, kissing Leo, so why is Leo the one ashamed to be hard? It doesn’t make sense but that’s the way it is, and Leo bites his lip, angry at football and himself and everything.
“Come on,” David goads as he reaches his hand inside the waistband of Leo’s shorts. He wraps his fingers around Leo’s cock and Leo’s hips stutter without his permission. “Look at me.”
Leo doesn’t and David squeezes his fingers tighter, starts to jack Leo off as he smiles because he’s got Leo out of his element. The hand around Leo’s bicep moves to his neck and David’s thumb presses down on Leo’s pulse point. Leo knows his heart is going crazy, and he’s mad at himself that now David knows it, too.
“Look at me,” David says again, rougher this time, his hand moving faster and making Leo’s head spin. Leo thinks it’s good that he can’t move, that David’s pressed so tight against him, because he doesn’t know what he’d do if he could. “You just lost to Hercules,” he says. “Look at me.”
“No,” Leo says, and David doesn’t like that. He moves his fingers from Leo’s neck to cup his jaw and force his face forward. When Leo’s finally looking at David, he can’t help but notice that David’s eyes are dark and his eyebrows are knotted together. But then he smiles, one that mocks Leo, and Leo comes with a shout.
When David takes his hand out of Leo’s pants, Leo can see his own come on David’s palm, between David’s fingers.
“Fuck,” David says, and he wipes his hand on Leo’s shirt. “Fucking Hercules.”
He shoves Leo aside, away from the door, and heads outside and down Leo’s front steps. He doesn’t look back and Leo’s left there, fuming and embarrassed and ashamed.
He lost.
“Talked to Cesc the other day,” Gerard says as they stretch, and Leo laughs. He’s stretching his quads, holding onto Gerard for balance and avoiding David.
“You manage to convince him to come back yet?” he asks and he pulls the stretch deeper.
“No,” Gerard says. “He’s still spreading our Barcelona tiki taka to the British. Charity or something, I can’t figure out why else he’d do it.”
“Fuck you,” Victor butts in. “You spread our tiki taka to the Brits, you traitor.”
“I was young!” Gerard says, and they all laugh.
“And what’s Cesc?” Victor asks.
“An idiot,” Gerard says, and then Xavi shouts from across the group, “We already know you are; we wanted to know about Cesc.”
Gerard throws a water bottle at him and hits Puyi instead. He throws up his hands and points to Leo, saying, “It was him!”
“Yeah,” Leo deadpans. “Because that’s something I would do.” Gerard looks at him like, Et tu, Leo? and Leo just rolls his eyes.
They spend the rest of the day on sprints and drills, and in the last forty minutes they scrimmage. He and David are on separate sides and that’s easy. Leo doesn’t even notice he’s there.
He goes home that night, though, and jerks off in the shower to thoughts of David on the pitch with sweaty skin. David smiles because he’s just scored and his eyes are light, not anything like they were the night before, and Leo thinks about hugging him, his fingers on the back of David’s neck. He comes embarrassingly fast.
They don’t talk until two days later, the night before they’re set to play Panathinaikos in the Champions League. David comes over again, unannounced again, this time wearing a sweatshirt with the hood pulled up and carrying a dvd.
“Hi,” Leo says at the door.
“Can I-can I come in?” David asks, and Leo figures that’s as much an apology as he’s going to get.
“Sure,” he says, and steps aside. “What’s up?”
“I brought the Hercules game,” David says, and waves the box. “I figured we could watch it, figure out where we went wrong.”
“We’ve watched it in practice,” Leo reminds him.
“I know.”
“I’ve watched it twice on my own already, too,” he says.
“So have I,” David tells him, and Leo nods okay.
“Alright,” he says. “Okay.”
They sit on the couch for the next while, David slumped in the corner as far away from Leo as possible, and they critique each other. Should’ve passed there, and, Open goal if you waited just a second, and, What was that even supposed to be?
It’s nice, though. Makes Leo feel like he’s working towards something.
It works.
Leo scores and then David scores-
(Leo’s right there, right next to him when he does, and David turns to him and their arms are outstretched, and David hugs him as they race down the pitch, one arm flung over Leo’s shoulders as he says, “Hercules was a speed bump,” and “Look at us.” Leo tells him, “No one else stands a chance,” and David laughs and Leo laughs, and they’re winning and it feels good again.)
-and then Leo scores again, and they’re on top of the world and Panathinaikos doesn’t know what to do, can’t do anything because Barcelona is strong, Barcelona is tiki taka, Barcelona is him and David and Pedro destroying their defense and it is Puyi and Gerard and Dani destroying their offense and by half-time, they are up 3-1.
They score more-of course they do, they are Barcelona-but even a 5-1 victory is ruined when Leo misses a penalty kick in the fifty-third.
“Hey,” Pep says to him as they walk off the pitch, “it doesn’t matter. Put it out of your mind. You know how to take a penalty.”
“Hey,” David says to him in the locker room, “if you want to go to practice early tomorrow, we can work on penalties. I’m a shitty keeper, but…”
Leo says, “Yeah, okay,” to both.
When he gets home, he throws on a load of laundry and cleans the kitchen while Gol Televisión plays in the background. The announcers talk about how Real Madrid is playing Ajax tomorrow, and Leo’s pulling hard for Ajax. He knows it won’t happen, especially not with Suarez sitting it out, but stranger things have happened. Hercules beat Barcelona. Goes to show.
He’s throwing his clothes in the dryer when David calls.
“Come over and celebrate with me,” he says, and it’s not a question.
“Okay.”
David’s nicer this time, softer. He runs his mouth over Leo’s body, just lips and tongue, no teeth, and he lets Leo touch him back.
Leo loves the dips of muscle that he traces on David’s stomach, his collar bones and the curve of his spine. He loves the way David sounds when something feels good and the way he still can’t give up control, not to anyone, not even to Leo. He loves the look on David’s face when he comes.
Leo leaves shortly afterwards, but it’s not awkward. David walks him to the door.
Nothing changes between them and nothing should. David is still David Villa, headstrong, and Leo is still Leo Messi, determined. Their partnership on the pitch stays as strong as ever and their friendship off it remains just that.
The weeks go by and Barcelona wins more and more and draws only once. It feels good, feels really good. Leo feels good.
But sometimes, although Leo would never admit it, he walks into the locker room and gets all the way to number nineteen before he remembers. Maxwell, the jersey tells him, and Leo thinks, Messi, I am Messi. And the entire walk back from nineteen to ten, Leo tells himself, You are ten and ten is you. You are Messi. You are Barcelona. You are football.
He stops there and feels vaguely disappointed that that’s it, that’s all he is.
David gets thrown out against Bilbao for a fight. Leo doesn’t see it but he hears about it as David’s walking off the pitch, and he thinks it’s ridiculous. No one seems to know why it happened, only that it did, but Leo doesn’t care; they’re down to ten men. He has to keep reminding himself that David isn’t there every time he gets the ball.
In the locker room, everyone leaves David alone but Leo.
“So is this something you’re planning on making a habit of?” he asks. “Because you might want to tell Pep.”
“Could you,” David says, and his hands are clenching the bench he’s sitting on hard enough to turn his knuckles white, “just for one second, not be such a dick? I said I was sorry.”
“No, you didn’t,” Leo points out. And maybe he did, but he didn’t say it to Leo.
“Would it matter if I did?”
“No,” Leo says. “I was there for my team.”
“Fuck you,” David says. “It’s our team.”
“Is it? I couldn’t tell,” Leo says, and walks away to shower. It’s a stupid fight, Leo knows that, and he gets over it after about two minutes in the shower. As a peace offering, when he gets back and David’s putting on his clothes, Leo says, “How does Llorente even fit into those shirts?”
David laughs, one of those laughs where he bends his knees and leans backwards, and says, “I don’t know. The whole time during World Cup Silva and I tried to figure it out, but fuck if I know.”
They lapse into a comfortable silence, getting dressed and packing their boots away. Leo’s hair is wet and it’s not as long as it was before, but it still sticks to his forehead and drips water down his neck.
“Meet you out at the bus?” he asks when he’s dressed. “I’ll grab us a seat towards the back.”
“Alright,” David says. He’s gelling his hair. “I call aisle!”
“I know,” Leo says, and he hefts his bag over his shoulder, heads out the door.
Leo guzzles some water as he talks to Bojan.
“It’s just so frustrating,” Bojan says. “Striker Syndrome. Just kill me if it goes on much longer. Just put me out of my misery.”
“Hey, it’ll get better,” Leo says. “It happens to everyone.”
“I know,” Bojan says, but he doesn’t sound too convinced.
“Look at Cristiano-he had terrible start to the season,” Leo points out.
Bojan rolls his eyes, says, “Yeah, but now he’s scoring eight goals a match.”
“Well then we’ll working on getting you to average nine,” Leo jokes and reaches out for Bojan’s water bottle. “Gimme that.”
At practice, Leo works on penalties again. He hits most of them-top right, bottom left, dead center-and Victor cusses up a storm at how few he blocks.
That night, David comes over and pins his arms down as he fucks him.
“You looked so hot at practice,” he says. “Fuck-I couldn’t look away. You were just so-best player I’ve ever seen-fuck.”
He licks a stripe along Leo’s jaw and bites down on Leo’s earlobe. Leo comes first.
They’re playing some team-any team, doesn’t matter because they are Barcelona and they’re playing and it’s a 5-0 shut-out.
Dani to Pedro, goal.
Xavi to Pedro to Leo, goal.
Andrés to Xavi to Andrés to David, goal.
Xavi to David to Leo to David to Leo, goal.
Sergio to Leo, goal for the hat-trick and it’s beautiful.
They head back to the locker rooms and Pep tells them that they played like champions; he doesn’t discuss any sloppy work because there’s always time for that at practice. Puyi stands on a bench, yells, “Força Barça!” and they all chant and cheer, and right before they make their way to the showers, right before things calm down and silence sets in, right before, David slings an arm around Leo’s shoulders and says, “Pretty fucking perfect.” Leo’s not quite sure what David’s referring to, but he agrees anyways.
Leo smiles a lot. Always on the outside, sometimes on the inside, but either way, Leo smiles. There are a lot of things in life that make him happy, that make him laugh-how Gerard makes fun of Puyi’s hair, how Bojan looks in a turtleneck, and how Pep sometimes makes a gesture like he’s going to tug on his own hair and then looks startled when he remembers he doesn’t have any.
Nothing makes Leo happy like football, though. There is not a single feeling in the world comparable to scoring a perfect goal or to lifting a cup. Leo wants this forever-practices and matches and physios and travelling-all of it, forever.
So when he feels his body protest a bit in practice, when he feels the slow pressure of a headache build up behind his eyes, or when his muscles cramp sooner than they should, Leo thinks, No.
No, but he can feel his body getting tired already and that can’t happen, it can’t, because the season’s not over yet and Leo’s still so young.
Football’s not everything, his parents had said before moving to Spain. And maybe they’re right, maybe it’s not. But even if football’s not everything, it’s most things, and Leo knows that, likes it that way.
Gerard invites him out for dinner and Leo goes even though he knows that Gerard is going to trick him into picking up the tab.
“What if I scored more goals than you this season?” Gerard asks after they order. “I should have ordered a bottle of wine.”
“I’m good with just water,” Leo says.
“Your loss,” Gerard says. “But come on, what if?”
“You’re not going to score more goals than I am.”
“That’s why it’s a hypothetical,” Gerard says, and he reaches out for some bread from the basket in front of them.
“Hypothetically, you’re not going to score more goals than me,” Leo says, and Gerard laughs.
“Ooo-kay,” he says, dragging out the syllables. “Someone’s been hanging with Villa too much.”
Gerard moves on, talks about his girlfriend and Cesc and the Primera División table, but all Leo thinks about is what Gerard said about David.
Leo’s sitting on his couch, feet propped up on the coffee table as Argentina struggles in Pro Evo 2010. It’s a little late, later than Leo’s usually up, but he can’t sleep because there’s a spasm in one of his leg muscles that keeps him from relaxing.
David calls, almost like he knows, almost like he and Leo share a hive mind, and says, “I can’t sleep either. Come over.”
“I never said I couldn’t sleep,” Leo says, because he didn’t. David didn’t even give him time to say hello.
“You answered your phone, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, but I can’t,” Leo says, and in his head, Gerard says to him, Ooo-kay. “I’ve got a load of laundry on.”
“Oh,” David says. “Alright.”
They both know he’s lying. It’s twelve thirty at night.
He wakes up one morning and it’s like his body doesn’t want to listen to him. His eyes hurt, his joints hurt, his bones hurt, and it takes him longer than usual to get ready for practice.
Leo doesn’t know what to do so he doesn’t do anything; tries to hide it. No one mentions his hunched shoulders or the way he drags his feet or how he’s tired all the time all of a sudden. That’s good, though, because Leo needs football. He can’t have them taking it away.
Leo goes out of his way to stretch with Pedro at practice, or to not pick up his phone every time David calls. He doesn’t have a problem with David-not at all, he’s not avoiding him or anything-but he thinks that maybe Gerard was right, that maybe he was spending too much time with him.
“You’re not getting weird on me, are you?” David asks him as they do stability ball exercises. Leo wants to tell him that they’ll talk about it later, but no one else on the squad is even paying attention to them.
“No,” Leo says. “I’ve just been busy. I have things to do outside football, you know.”
“Fuck you,” David says. “You are getting weird.” And then he turns to the rest of the group and says loudly, “Can you fucking believe it? Messi’s so chicken-shit he won’t even play me in Pro Evo.”
Bojan shouts back, “No, he’s good. He’ll kick your ass and have you thanking him for it.”
The guys all rib Bojan for that, especially Gerard who says, “Speaking from experience, eh, Bojan?”
Bojan says, “Hijo de-” and then Gerard’s tackling him to the ground.
“That was pretty dirty,” Leo says once everyone’s focused on the wrestling.
“Say you’ll come over,” David says.
“Okay. I’ll come over.”
Leo leaves the bed to fill up his glass of water for the third time and David comments on it.
“You look straight out of Invsion of the Body Snatchers or some shit,” he says. “What is with all the water?”
“Nothing,” Leo says. “I’m just thirsty.”
“You’re not going to compare me to a glass of water in a desert, are you?” David asks.
“No.”
“Okay,” David says, and then he blows Leo, holds Leo’s hips down with his hands although he doesn’t really need to; Leo’s not moving too much, just barely weaving his fingers through David’s hair. When he comes, it’s with a strangled moan, quiet and breathy and unusual for him.
“Hey,” David says, and he knocks a fist lightly against Leo’s knee. “You with me, asshole?”
“Yeah,” Leo says, and he gets up and stumbles to the bathroom. He throws up in the toilet and rests his forehead against the cool tile wall.
David comes in sometime after him, still completely naked, and Leo absently thinks that he’s beautiful.
“Thanks,” David laughs, and Leo realizes he said that out loud. “You know, if my blowjobs disgust you so much, I don’t have to give you them.”
“No,” Leo says. “No-I-Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” David says, and he pushes Leo’s hair away from his eyes. It’s far too intimate a gesture. “You should have told me you were sick.”
“I didn’t know I was.”
“Maybe you should see the doctor,” David says, and maybe Leo should. His head is killing him.
“Hyponatremia,” the doctor tells him. “You have extremely low blood sodium. I’m surprised you went this long without noticing it-headaches, muscle spasms, excessive thirst-but you said you didn’t have any of the symptoms. If we just give you some more electrolytes, you should be good to go, but that could take a week or two before you’re back on top. At least.”
Leo goes crazy. On the first day, he cleans his entire house and watches all of the Terminator films. On the second, he goes grocery shopping and visits the kids at La Masia, just for something to do. On the third, all the papers are saying he brought this upon himself so he could have a break, that he doesn’t have the drive to win anymore. Leo just smiles, says it’s not true when anyone asks.
“You’re so fucking nice to them,” David says. “I don’t get it. You let them love you when you’re doing well and you let them walk all over you when you’re not.”
“You have to be nice to the press,” Leo says. “It doesn’t really bother me what they say.”
“You could be like Ibrahimović,” David tells him. “They eat that shit up.”
“I guess,” Leo says. “But that’s not me, that’s not what I’m really like.”
“I know. I’m just messing with you.”
“Okay,” Leo says. “Why are you so nice to them, then?”
“You have to be nice to the press,” David says, and he’s got this grin that says that he knows he’s being an asshole. Leo doesn’t call him on it.
Leo’s in a bookstore, just something that he ducked into on a whim, and he’s looking at a book about La Roja, thinking about getting it. In an interview, Llorente and Andrés are asked who the best player of all time is. Llorente says Leo; Andrés says Laudrup. Leo thinks that he could probably rib Andrés about that for a while, I would have said you, Andrés, and that’s what hurts the most.
“That book’s shit, don’t waste your money,” some boy says, interrupting Leo’s thoughts. He’s wearing a name tag; it says Javier.
“Isn’t it your job to try to get me to buy stuff?” Leo asks.
“I guess,” Javier shrugs. “What does it matter? You already know you’re gonna buy that one.”
“Maybe I won’t,” Leo says. “What’s wrong with it? You don’t like La Roja?”
“I fucking love La Roja,” he says, and it comes out sounding a lot like, Fuck you. “But all they want to talk about is how great Messi is. Fuck that shit. Must be hard for you; you look just like him.”
Leo thinks that this is not where he wanted the conversation to go, so he heads to the front to pay. Javier follows him.
“I mean, shit,” Javier says, counting the money Leo hands him. “Thirty-three million euro a year and he doesn’t even do anything interesting with it.”
“Maybe he’s just a boring guy,” Leo shrugs, and he takes his change and heads to the door.
“Hey, Leo!” Javier calls out, and the second Leo turns around he realizes the kid was just messing with him the entire time. “I’d like you a lot more if you played for Espanyol.”
Leo laughs and offers him tickets to Camp Nou if he ever feels like raising his standards a bit.
“Do you ever think about quitting?” Leo asks.
“What? Football?” David asks. Leo called him; they’re on the phone.
“Yes.”
“No,” David says. “I think if I quit I’d-I don’t fucking know. I’d never quit. Why? Do you?”
“No,” Leo says, and he means it. Of course he means it. He is football and football is him and it would be stupid to get rid of the one thing you’re good at, the one thing you love. He’s just going crazy, not doing anything.
Leo’s bored and so he cleans one of his spare rooms and unearths an old foosball table. He vaguely remembers buying it with Kun what seems like years ago at an old flea market, back when they could still go to those. The player figurines are all chipped, the paint on them worn down to nothing.
Leo goes out to the store and buys some acrylics, paints blaugrana on one team, albiceleste on the other. He doesn’t care that it’s impractical; it’s his table and he can do what he wants. For a second he thinks of making them all number ten as a joke, but in the end he doesn’t. Every team needs a Xavi, a Mascherano; every team needs a Heinze and a Zanetti.
When he’s done, Leo sits back on his heels and looks at it. It looks pretty terrible, the paintjob sloppy, but Leo thinks it’s beautiful all the same. The paint needs to dry before he can put it back together, and Leo’s bored again.
He paces, plays video games, naps.
Leo laces up his boots. He loves that sound, the sound of laces on leather. He puts on his shirt and he’s loves that, too, the feel of it on his skin. He steps out onto one of the training pitches-artificial turf, and he hates that-and he’s missed it.
They all kind of tip-toe around him at first but then Pep yells at them and that changes. And then he’s back and it’s like the past two weeks didn’t even happen because he was gone but there was still a Leo-shaped hole where he used to be and he fills it again now that he’s back.
Leo’s got this smile, the next game, when he steps onto the pitch and Camp Nou comes alive around him. He thinks his smile might break his face. They sing El Cant del Barça and it echoes in Leo’s bones. He is home again, and the whistle blows and he is off, racing down the pitch with a ball at his feet and he is alive, blaugrana in his veins.
Rumors are thrown around about David leaving at the end of the season, of Manchester United and AC Milan fighting over him, of him wanting to play for Manchester City and return to his on-field partnership with David Silva.
Leo doesn’t bring it up for a long time, but he does start leaving hickeys on David’s chest that have the boys catcalling at David in the showers.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Okay.”
Practice goes well. It goes better than well, Leo and David and Pedro working on drills and formations and crazy plays that they probably won’t ever get to pull off in a real match. They look good, though; strong. And for a second, for the tiniest of seconds, Leo hates David for thinking about leaving so much that he stumbles, doesn’t get his pass off.
“I’m okay,” he laughs when he gets up, but he’s not okay, of course he’s not, and Pep can see that.
“What’s with you and David?” he asks later, and of course he knows; if it shows itself on the pitch, even for a millisecond, Pep sees it. “Are you two fighting?”
“No,” Leo says. It’s true.
“Okay,” Pep says. “Today at practice, I just thought-are you feeling okay? You’ve been drinking your Lucozade, following what the doctors said?”
“Yes,” Leo says. “Yes. Don’t bench me this next game, Pep, I’m fine. It was just an off day.”
“It wasn’t an off day,” Pep says, and Leo sighs with relief. “And I won’t. I wouldn’t if you told me you didn’t need it.”
“I don’t,” Leo says. “That’s exactly what I don’t need.”
“Okay. Okay.”
David hisses out a breath and Leo says, “You like that.”
“Shut the fuck up,” David says, and he rubs his right nipple, slick with Leo’s spit, and the teeth marks around it. Leo smiles because he knows he’s right, and bites his way down David’s chest. David leans into it.
Leo tells himself that if David leaves, Barcelona will be down an important player and Leo will have to learn how to read someone else’s mind on the pitch. He tells himself that David leaving is something the club will feel the impact of and so it’s better if he just stays.
“Fuck,” David says, and he sounds only a heartbeat away from the edge of everything. Leo knows because that's how he feels.
“I don’t want you to be a Ronaldo,” Leo says. It’s a few days later and they’re sitting alone on a bench in the locker room, shoulder to shoulder, all suited up, and no one else is there. Leo’s voice echoes off the tiles and Leo thinks if he moves his feet, moves his boots at all, the clack of the spikes on the floor will be loud and jarring.
He tries not to expect anything, to not predict what David will say or do when he hears that, but he does, he can’t help it. He expects David to say, I’m not Brazilian, and, Thirty-four goals in thirty-seven games? I’ll score thirty-five, and he expects David to say, Next World Cup and I’ll knock him off the top spot.
David says, “I won’t be.”
Leo says, “Good.”
Part 2