this is how it’s going to go
Title: This Is How It's Going To Go
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Diego Forlán / Luis Suarez, if you squint.
Word Count: 5,651
Summary: “Try not to punch anyone,” Diego says, and Luis just rolls his eyes, because he has the reputation of being the hotheaded one on the squad, even though Victorino is the one who’ll throw punches if someone touches his alfajores. “Playing man down is still hard, even when we’re only missing you.”
A/N: Written for distira's prompt over at touchline . D- Sorry this took forever and a day to write, and please excuse my lack of porn!! And even though you asked for this approx. 6 years ago, just remember that my love for you is eternal!!
Diego talks to him in the tunnel, their faces close.
“Look for Edi to your left, okay?” he says. “He’ll be with you on most of the fast breaks.”
“Okay,” Luis says. It’s nothing he doesn’t already know, and all Diego’s doing is making him nervous. Luis wants to tell him to shut the hell up because he’s got it, but he doesn’t because this is Diego and the fact that he’s even talking in the tunnel is enough to tell Luis that he’s nervous, too.
“And their keeper,” Diego continues. “He tends to favor the left side of the goal, even on penalties: low and left.”
“Alright,” Luis says. “I know. El Mister said-“
“And the ref,” Diego cuts him off. “I re-watched his other matches and he-”
“Fuck,” Luis interrupts, “I know.”
Diego stills at that and has this look on his face like he didn’t even realize what he was doing, how he was making Luis anxious when football is the last thing in the world that Luis should worry about.
“You’re right,” Diego finally says, and he smiles a little, knocks the back of his hand against the back of Luis’s. “You’re right.”
“Yeah, I’m right,” Luis says. It’s such a stupid thing to say-so stupid-and he wishes he could take it back, only Diego doesn’t even seem to find anything unusual about it, doesn’t react any differently that he normally does to the things Luis says.
“Alright,” Diego says, and Luis can see his chest rise and fall as he takes a deep breath. “Yeah, we’ve got this.”
They stop talking and Luis jumps up and down for a minute, in part to keep warmed up and in part because keeping moving takes his mind off things, and Diego goes back to facing the front of the tunnel. Luis watches as he fixes his hair, readjusts his headband, and he wants to tell Diego to just cut it, that it’s easier when it’s short, but he doesn’t. The ref comes by, checks their kits and makes sure that they don’t have anything illegal hidden in their shorts or the spikes of their boots.
The line moves forward-the line, Luis thinks; he means his team, means Uruguay-and it’s just before they step out onto the pitch that Diego turns back around to face Luis. He smiles.
“Try not to punch anyone,” he says, and Luis just rolls his eyes, because he has the reputation of being the hotheaded one on the squad, even though Victorino is the one who’ll throw punches if someone touches his alfajores. “Playing man down is still hard, even when we’re only missing you.”
Luis lets out a loud bark of surprised laughter and calls Diego a motherfucker, but Diego’s walked out onto the pitch already and doesn’t hear him.
Luis doesn’t bother to call him it again.
When it happens-when Luis is on the goal line, with everyone and no one right there with him, when he throws his hands up to block Adiyiah’s shot and to keep Uruguay alive-Luis isn’t thinking about what it could mean, for him or for the squad. There’s no time for him to think about that stuff, and all that matters is that they’ll get to keep playing, keep fighting, and keep winning for Uruguay, and so he does it, blocks the shot because no one else is there to do it for him.
It’s a bigger deal than Luis could have ever imagined. Everyone goes crazy, shouting and pointing, and the ref goes into his pocket, pulls out a red, and Luis holds his hands up like he can’t believe it, even though he can, because how else was this supposed to end? How else?
And so Luis walks off the pitch and sees the ball hit the crossbar and sees everyone celebrating, and he’s celebrating too, by himself in the tunnel, and as he’s ushered off the pitch, and as they put the match on a tv for him in the locker room, Luis has to fight the urge to laugh because Diego and everyone else have to go on without him.
At least, he thinks, he didn’t punch anyone.
And at least, he thinks, they win.
The celebration is crazy. Not the one on the pitch, because Luis isn’t there for that, but afterwards, on the bus and at the hotel, everyone cheering and singing, “Uruguay! Uruguay!” with their arms slung around each other’s shoulders and drinks in their hands.
“Luis!” El Loco yells. He’s got a smile stretching across his face and Luis knows-knows-that he does, too. “The Golden Glove! You’ll win for sure!”
“Yeah, yeah,” Luis says, but he’s laughing; he’s so happy. “Don’t be jealous ‘cause you’re getting jack shit!”
“Hey! I’ll be getting a fucking gold medal!” El Loco yells back, and Luis thinks, Okay, because they’re going to win it all, they have to.
He doesn’t think much about anything else except for celebrating until he feels a cool hand slide around the back of his neck and Diego’s there, smiling wider than Luis has ever seen, and he says, “Luisito,” that’s it, just Luis’s name, and Luis smiles back so wide, he feels like his face is splitting in half.
If Luis is going to be honest, it doesn’t hit him until he’s lying in bed, Maxi snoring across the room. And it’s only then that he realizes that, yeah, Uruguay won, but he’s out, done, not playing the next match, and he almost doesn’t know what to think; he’s missed matches before, but he’s never missed a World Cup semi-final before. And suddenly it’s like his legs don’t want to rest, and he feels like he’s got adrenaline pumping through his veins, and he thinks, We wouldn’t have made it to the semis without me, and I don’t even get to fucking play.
He feels a little bad, afterwards, for thinking that, but not too bad, because it’s true.
They go to see lion cubs a few days later. It’s okay, Luis thinks; he’s not all that big on wild animals that aren’t actually in the wild, where they’re supposed to be, but Egidio is excited enough for the both of them and Diego says, “Come on, when are you going to get to do this again?” and so Luis goes.
The lions are cute, he guesses. Everyone takes photos with them, even El Mister, and they all hold the cubs and pet the cubs and take even more photos of the cubs, and if he’s going to be honest, he gets bored about fifteen minutes in and spends the rest of the time carving his name into the wood of the observation deck with a pen. His skin itches, like some physical reaction to the fact that he’s not practicing football when he knows he should be. Only-only, maybe he shouldn’t be; maybe it doesn’t matter because he can’t play in the semi-final, anyways.
But no, that’s not quite right. It matters, Luis knows; he’ll be playing in the final, and that’s what matters. He needs to be ready for that.
He watches as Diego asks for a football and then plays a bit of one-on-one with the cub. Luis likes that, how football is such a big part of Diego that he’s thinking about it even when he’s on a nature reserve in South Africa; it’s a big part of Luis, too, so big that sometimes Luis thinks that maybe it’s the only part that matters.
“What is he doing?” El Mister asks when he sees it, how Diego tries to swat the ball out from between the lion’s paws. “Is he putting his-Diego, watch it!”
“Yeah,” Maxi jokes. “Can’t be a footballer if you lose your hand.”
“No,” El Loco yells, “that’s Luis!” The guys laugh, and Luis does, too.
Afterwards-after Diego plays and loses to the lion cub, and after El Loco films the whole thing from two different angles to put up on YouTube and Diego’s twitter-Diego climbs up onto the observation deck with Luis and says, “Luis Suarez was here, July 2010?” He points to Luis’s graffiti.
“Yeah,” Luis says. He doesn’t really know what Diego means by it; he’s just reading what Luis wrote.
“Very original; I like it,” Diego says, and he smiles a little, like he knows something that Luis doesn’t.
“Hey, fuck you,” Luis says. “You can’t beat a classic.”
“I guess,” Diego says. He keeps looking at Luis after he says that, even though Luis doesn’t say anything, and it kind of puts him on edge. He wishes he knew what Diego was thinking. He wants to ask, What are you looking at? or, How could you lose to a lion cub, I mean, really? Or, if he is serious, he wants to say, How am I supposed to sit out of a match like this? I don’t know how to do that; I don’t know how to be a part of the team when I’m apart from the team. But Luis doesn’t say any of that. Instead, he bites at the skin around his thumbnail.
Diego looks back at the rest of the guys, out where El Ruso is taking pictures of a cub ripping the football apart, and Luis notices as he shifts his weight from his heels to the balls of his feet.
“Rusito!” Diego calls out. “Rusito, take a picture!”
“I took like eighty already,” El Ruso yells back, his eyes never leaving the screen of his camera, which never leaves the lion cub. “I’m taking video now.”
“No,” Diego calls back. “I meant of us.” He waves a finger back and forth between himself and Luis.
El Ruso pauses at that, looks at the two of them and jokes, “Why would I want one of you two?”
Diego just laughs with him, but Luis says, “Hey, come on,” even though he doesn’t know why Diego wants the picture. He supposes that it doesn’t really matter.
“Alright, fine,” El Ruso says, and he says it like they’re asking a lot of him, even though they’re not.
Luis leans forward and rests his arms on the wooden railing in front of them; Diego does the same, and Luis almost thinks he can feel the heat from Diego’s arm through their sweatshirts, even though, realistically, he knows he can’t.
“Make sure you look tough,” Diego says. “We have to compensate for the fact that we’re with lion cubs.”
“What?” Luis asks, and he laughs.
“Alright,” Diego says, and he shrugs. He’s smiling too. “Maybe not.”
“On three,” El Ruso calls out, and then all in one breath, he counts, “Onetwothree,” and snaps the photo.
“Hope you didn’t blink,” Diego says, and then jerks his head towards El Ruso, who’s already walking away.
“I didn’t,” Luis says. “I looked wonderful. Of course.”
“Of course,” Diego says, and it’s the weirdest thing, but Luis almost wishes Diego wasn’t just joking around with him when he says that.
Later, when Luis is in his room and has nothing to do, he thinks about how he’ll be glad to be back home, once all of this is over; he loves the football, loves playing and practicing, but the in-between times he could do without. Of all the things that shock Luis about the World Cup, nothing catches him as off-guard as the boredom. He’s travelled before, knows about the lulls between matches, but for some reason, he always expected the World Cup to be different, and how could it not be? So many footballers who all know each other from their clubs, all in one place and with tons of down-time. It never really occurred to him that everyone would most likely just stick with their own national team, for the most part. Luis thinks that’s crazy; he wants to text Maarten to see if he wants to hang out, or maybe watch some tv with Gregory, just for something new, something to do, but as it turns out, that’s just not done, especially not this late in the game. He doesn’t get it.
Instead, to pass the time, Luis does stupid shit-he steals bread from the kitchens, knocks on Martin’s door and then runs away, sees how long he can keep his feet in the cold pool water out back-sometimes by himself, but sometimes with some of the guys, and it does its job, gets him from day to day without dying of boredom.
He hangs in his room for a while, but eventually, Luis just needs to get out of his room. He heads out the door and peeks around the corner of the hotel hallway; it’s quiet out, and most people are in their rooms or hanging out downstairs, but it never hurts to be careful, especially when doing something against the rules. He steals down to the kitchens and when he gets there, he says hello to the chef on duty-a man named Abrahem, who has two daughters and a son on the way-and then asks him what he’s got. Abrahem is all right with Luis.
“I have some biltong,” Abrahem says.
“I don’t even know what that is,” Luis tells him, and he hops up to sit on the counter; his feet swing because they don’t touch the ground.
“It’s, uh.” Abrahem uses meaningless hand gestures as he struggles through the minimal amount of Spanish and English that they both know. “Like… dry meat?” Luis assumes that he must pull a face or something, because then Abrahem throws his head back and laughs.
“What?” Luis asks, and then he starts laughing, too. “What?”
“I have cookies,” Abrahem says, and then he holds up one finger, walks towards the back of the kitchen, leaving Luis where he is, his feet swaying back and forth.
When Abrahem gets back, he gives Luis a couple of oatmeal raisin cookies wrapped up in a napkin. They’re not chocolate chip, but Luis can’t complain; he just thanks Abrahem and heads back out of the kitchen.
He runs into Victorino on his way out, and Victorino just looks at him and the napkin bundle in his hand and smiles.
“Late night snack, Luis?” he asks. “You little rebel.” Luis scowls and shoves the cookies into the front pocket of his hoodie.
“Yeah, yeah,” Luis says, and Victorino laughs.
“If you see Forlán, tell him I’m looking for him, and I won’t rat you out to El Mister,” he says.
Luis shakes his head, but he still says, “Alright, fine.” It’s really not a big deal, looking for Diego, and El Mister will flay him alive if he finds out he was sneaking junk food at night, but still-- Victorino's got some nerve, Luis thinks.
He runs into Fuci and Edi when he’s crossing through the hotel restaurant, a couple of glasses of water out in front of them and a deck of cards spread across the table, and he figures that while they probably won’t know where Diego is-Lugano’s the only one who ever really has tabs on Diego, maybe because he’s the captain, but maybe just because they’re good friends, Luis doesn’t know-it’s worth asking anyways.
“Hey,” Luis says as he walks up to the guys. The restaurant is mostly empty and he grabs a chair from the next table, straddles it backwards as he watches Edi deal.
“Hey,” Edi says back. “Want me to deal you in?”
“Nah,” Luis says. He appreciates the offer and he probably would have said yes if he hadn’t been looking all over the place for Diego. “Who’s winning?”
“He is,” Fuci says, and he rolls his eyes from behind his plastic, thick-rimmed glasses. Luis thinks they make him look like an idiot, but Fuci is adamant that they’re cool in the United States, and so that it’s only a matter of time before they’re cool everywhere else, too, and he’s going to be recognized as being ahead of the curve. Luis isn’t really too sure about that, but he goes along with it.
“When you’re good, you’re good,” Edi says, and he smiles. “I’ve cleaned him out of a hundred fifty euro so far.”
“It’s insane,” Fuci says. “I’m normally really good, too.” Luis laughs, which causes Fuci to sputter and say, “Fuck you, you know I am!”
“I know, I know,” Luis says, and he holds his hands up in a sign of peace, partly because Luis does know, and partly because he feels bad that Fuci’s out of the next match, too. “But hey-I was just wondering if you guys have seen Diego around here somewhere.”
“Who, Godín?” Edi asks. “He’s right over there.” He points a finger over Fuci’s shoulder, and both Luis and Fuci turn to look. Godín’s not there, and Luis turns back in time to see Edi nonchalantly swapping a card from his hand with one from the deck. Edi knows he’s caught, but he just smiles a little and doesn’t say anything; Luis doesn’t either. It’ll be entertaining to watch Fuci squirm before they finally tell him that Edi didn’t win fair and square, after all.
“Where?” Fuci asks. “I missed him.”
“Really? He was just-”
“Doesn’t matter,” Luis cuts him off. “I meant Forlán.”
Fuci nods his head and says, “He was with Walter last I saw him, heading up to our floor.” He looks at Luis as he talks, and Edi uses the time to lazily look though the top few cards in the deck. “You might want to check there.”
“Alright, awesome,” Luis says, and he drums his fingers on the back of his chair before getting up. “Thanks.”
He gets up and heads towards the elevators, but just before he’s out of earshot, he hears Fuci say, “Again? Oh my God, you’re on a roll.”
Luis barely holds back a laugh.
Luis figures that he can stop the search, that Victorino’s not really going to rat him out, but he’s bored and so he keeps looking. He finds Diego upstairs in the room that he shares with Lugano; their door is ajar, but there are no sounds coming from inside, and so Luis wonders if anyone’s actually there.
“Can I come in?” he asks, but he doesn’t wait for an answer, just nudges the door open and heads inside.
The room is a lot neater than the one he was assigned to with Maxi, to be honest; there’s no clothing thrown about, no muddy sneakers kicked off just inside or anything like that. For a second, Luis thinks about what it would be like to share a room with Diego instead, but then he shakes the thought out of his head because it’s pointless.
He finds Diego lying on his bed. He’s on his back, one arm behind his head, and Luis would have thought he was napping except for how his eyes are open.
“Hey,” Luis says, and he says it quietly, although he doesn’t know why. “Victorino’s looking for you.”
“Alright,” Diego says back, but he doesn’t look at Luis, just keeps staring at the ceiling.
Luis doesn’t know what to do with that, because yeah, Diego’s quiet most of the time, but he’s never like this, not around Luis. So a part of Luis wants to just leave, wants to say, Just delivering the message, and walk back out the door, but he can’t because he knows he shouldn’t.
Instead, he throws himself down into the chair next to Diego’s bed and says, “So.”
“So,” Diego says back, and he turns his head to look at Luis. Luis just kicks his feet up onto the bed, even though he knows it drives Diego crazy.
He waits for a while, figures that Diego will tell him what’s wrong eventually, but Diego never does and the silence starts to drive Luis crazy. He feels like he should fill it with jokes, or maybe by telling Diego how Juan is thinking about shaving his head, but he doesn’t and he doesn’t know why.
Instead, he says, “So-so I can’t play in the semi.”
Diego looks at him, says, “I know.”
And Luis doesn’t know what else he was expecting, but something about it-about Diego, about the hotel room, about South Africa, all of it-has words coming out of his mouth before he even realizes it.
“I kind of resent everyone else because they can, though,” he says. “It shouldn’t have come down to me.” And it’s so true-so dark and ugly and true-that he can’t believe he’s even saying it.
“Sometimes I-” Diego says, and then he seems to rethink what he was going to say, like maybe he thinks Luis is looking for comfort and not just saying these things because he thinks it’ll make Diego feel easier talking to him. “You have every right. But there’s no point; it won’t change anything.”
“I know,” Luis snaps, because Diego does that sometimes, talks to Luis like he’s a child, and Luis doesn’t want that, doesn’t need that, not from anybody and definitely not from Diego. But then, realizing that Diego doesn’t really mean anything by it, he goes into his hoodie pocket, pulls out the cookies and offers some to Diego. Diego takes two.
“Thanks,” Diego says.
“Don’t worry about it,” Luis says back.
They eat the cookies in silence, and when they’re done, Luis wipes his hands on his pants and stands up to leave. He waves goodbye, says, “I should go. I told Maxi that I’d…” and then he trails off there, because he didn’t tell Maxi he’d do anything.
“Alright,” Diego says, and even though Luis knows he shouldn’t, he leaves because the silence is too much and the only thing he ever knows how to say is the wrong thing.
The hotel has something that they call a game room, but that is really just a room with one small tv and a beat-up pool table. Luis is terrible at pool, can’t play worth shit, but the felt is bumpy and torn in places, and the entire table sits at a tilt, and so talent means less and less. He and Juan play almost every night; Juan is really good, to the point that he can beat almost everyone, but with the hotel table, Luis wins at least one every four. It keeps things exciting, gives them something to do, and it’s nice getting to know him outside of practice, too; Juan’s been receiving call-ups since 2007, same as Luis, but Luis still hardly knows him.
“Alright, I’ll break?” Luis asks once the table is all set up, and Juan laughs.
“No,” he says, as if Luis had said something completely outrageous. He waves the plastic triangle in the air. “I just racked!”
“Fine, fine,” Luis says, and then he waves a hand as if to say, Well then get on with it.
Juan breaks and the balls scatter every which way, most of them settling on the left side of the table because of the tilt.
“Your go,” Juan says.
Luis grabs his pool cue and bends at the hip, lines up his shot. It’s all bullshit, anyways, because the cue ball hits a tear in the table felt and skips, changes direction and knocks the nine ball into the right center pocket. And then he knocks in another one, and another one, and another, and Juan is just staring at him like he cannot believe what he’s seeing.
“You’re cheating,” he says.
“No, I’m not,” Luis says. “The table just wants me to win!”
“Sure,” Juan says, and he pulls a face. Neither of them has knocked in that many balls in a row, not on this piece of shit table. Luis lines up to take the next shot, and as he does, Juan hits him in the back of the legs with his own pool cue, hard enough that it hurts, although not hard enough to do any damage. Luis jumps and yelps.
“Motherfucker!” Luis says, and he points his pool cue at Juan threateningly. Juan just laughs and holds his hands up in a sign of surrender.
They play a few more games and have a pool cue sword fight before Walter pops his head in and reminds them that curfew is in a few minutes. Juan puts everything back and calls Luis lazy when he doesn’t offer to help, and then they head towards the elevators.
In his room, Luis strips off his shirt and toes his shoes off at the door before heading to the bathroom to brush his teeth. Maxi talks to him through the door about the weather and his family and how El Ruso is taking up African drumming. Luis laughs and accidentally spits toothpaste all over the mirror.
On his way to his bed, he trips over his own feet and only just manages to catch himself before his face hits the ground. Maxi laughs and says, “Be careful; don’t want to ruin the money maker.” Luis just pulls his face and flicks him off as he climbs between the sheets.
Luis wakes up in the middle of the night, and at first he doesn’t know why. He looks over at Maxi, but Maxi’s still sleeping, one arm thrown over the edge of his bed and his sheets kicked off almost to the floor. Luis is about to roll over and go back to sleep, but then he hears it again, the steady thump of someone kicking around a football outside, and Luis is suddenly very awake.
He climbs out of bed and heads to the window, but he can’t see anyone. Still, the noise is there and Luis knows he’s not going to fall back to sleep anytime soon, and so he throws on some sneakers and a hoodie and closes the door behind him as quietly as he can.
He’s not at all surprised when he sees that it’s Diego who’s outside, kicking a football around: if anyone puts in extra time, it’s Diego, and Luis knows that. And while a part of him wants to call out to Diego, to say hey, an even larger part wants to just watch him play football, and so Luis doesn’t do anything for a while, just stands there. Diego bounces the ball off of his knees and the top of his foot, keeping it off the ground, doing tricks.
“Hey,” Luis says finally, grabbing his attention. “You know it’s like two in the morning, right?”
Diego looks up, startled, and drops the football. It bounces off the asphalt and then rolls a few feet away, following the curve of the pavement.
“Yeah,” Diego says, and he looks embarrassed, a little, the way he scratches the back of his head. “I couldn’t sleep.”
“Neither could I,” Luis says, and he shoves his hand deep in the pocket of his hoodie. “Some asshole was outside my window playing football.”
Diego laughs, probably because he didn’t expect Luis to say that and not because it was particularly funny, and he says, “Sorry, sorry.”
“S’okay,” Luis says.
They both stand there for a minute after that, neither of them really saying anything, just enjoying the silence. It’s not awkward, not at all, and Luis looks at Diego, who’s staring off into space. Luis kind of wants to ask him if he wants to play some one-on-one, maybe first to ten or something like that, but then Diego looks up and looks at him. For a second, neither of them moves, and then suddenly they’re both sprinting for the football. Diego gets to it first-in Luis’s defense, he was closer to begin with-but it gets tackled away and Luis takes off with it, down the center of the parking lot and towards the row of low bushes lining the curb.
He picks a spot arbitrarily, calls it the goal and shoots, and Diego’s a second too late.
“One-nil, Forlán. Is that all you’ve got?” Luis holds his arms out wide.
Diego shakes his head, says, “Please. I was going easy,” and then they kick off from center, start playing again.
First to ten goes by fast, probably because it’s fun and stress free and because there’s nothing else to worry about except for the moment, except for beating Diego. And he does, he gets to ten first, but he knows it could have just as easily gone the other way; that nine times out of ten, Diego would have won. And so when Diego asks for a rematch, Luis shakes his head and jerks a thumb back to the hotel and says, “El Mister will kill us if he finds us out here,” but he’s smiling wide and he knows that Diego understands. “I guess I’ll just have to go out on top, as reigning champion of the one-on-one.”
“Low,” Diego says, “but ultimately expected.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” Luis laughs.
“Nothing,” Diego says. He’s not laughing, but he’s smiling like he wants to be.
“Sure, sure.”
A beat passes and Luis is about to turn and head inside when Diego says, “I’ve thought about it, you know? What you said.”
“What did I say?” Luis asks; he doesn’t know, but all of a sudden, everything feels so much more serious, and it almost makes him a little uncomfortable. He’s not good at this, at serious talks; he’s good at football and at loving his club and at loving his country, and that’s it.
“How you were mad that no one did their job, and so you had to get that red just to keep us in,” Diego says, and it sounds so much worse, when he says it.
“I didn’t mean it like-”
“Yeah, you did,” Diego says. “And it’s okay, because I’d be mad, too. But I thought about it, and the thing is-” he cuts himself off.
Luis doesn’t do anything to fill the silence at first because he doesn’t know what to say, anyways. Instead, he just shifts his weight from foot to foot and tries to wait it out, until he becomes too impatient and decides that he needs to say something.
“Come on,” Luis says. “Just tell me already.”
“I worry we can’t do it without you.”
And it’s all written there, right on his face, and Luis can see it so clearly, can see how Diego is struggling with the pressure of an entire nation on his shoulders, and the talk of the Golden Ball and everything. Luis thinks that Diego shouldn’t ever look like that, like he’s unsure of himself and the football he plays.
“Shut up,” Luis says. “You’ll be fine; trust me.”
Diego doesn’t say anything for a minute, just stares at the ground as he rolls the football back and forth with the tip of his shoe, and then he says, “It makes me so mad because we were so good.”
“We still are,” Luis says, and he really believes it, but Diego shakes his head.
“I know, but…” he says. His eyebrows are furrowed and Luis thinks that it should feel weird, having Diego talk to him like this, only it isn’t. Not many people get to see Diego so open, he knows. “But it’s different now; you’re out, and Fuci’s out, and Nicolas played through a broken foot, and Lugano hurt his knee, and Godín’s thigh still isn’t-“
“Hey,” Luis interrupts. He knocks the football out from underneath Diego’s foot and juggles it between his two own. “They don’t get van der Wiel or de Jong next match, so at least that evens things a bit.”
“Yeah,” Diego says, and Luis could leave it at that, but he shouldn’t, and he doesn’t really want to, either, only he doesn’t know what to say. But he thinks about how hard they worked for this and how badly they all want it, and yeah, the Dutch want it too, but Uruguay wants it more, and Luis is sure of this because he can’t imagine anyone wanting to win more than he does, more than his team does; it’s not possible.
“We’ll win because we have to,” Luis says. “Because no one expected us to even make it past the group stage. And we can, you know. You know that; you don’t need me telling you that.”
“And if we don’t?”
“And if we don’t, then fuck them.”
“That’s it?” Diego laughs.
“Yeah,” Luis says, and he shrugs. “That’s all I’ve got.”
Diego laughs a little more under his breath and then says, “Alright then. Okay.” He nods to himself for a minute and then continues, “Okay, this is how it’s going to go.” He darts forward to steal the ball from between Luis’s feet and takes off, running down the makeshift pitch, guiding the ball around cars and potholes. Luis stands there, just stands there, because this is how it’s going to go: Diego will play and Luis will watch.
When Diego gets to the edge of the parking lot, he kicks the ball a little bit further until it hits the curb and then takes off running back towards Luis, smiling wide with his arms spread and his shirt catching on the air behind him. Luis claps and yells, “Forlán scores and the crowd goes insane!” And then Diego’s right there, right beside him and still running fast, but before he passes by, he loops one arm around Luis’s shoulders and drags him with. Luis doesn’t fight it, just turns and runs with Diego down the edge of the parking lot, one arm outstretched and the other around Diego’s shoulders, his fingers tight in Diego’s shirt, celebrating just like they will be in the final, when Luis can play again.
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Diego Forlán / Luis Suarez, if you squint.
Word Count: 5,651
Summary: “Try not to punch anyone,” Diego says, and Luis just rolls his eyes, because he has the reputation of being the hotheaded one on the squad, even though Victorino is the one who’ll throw punches if someone touches his alfajores. “Playing man down is still hard, even when we’re only missing you.”
A/N: Written for distira's prompt over at touchline . D- Sorry this took forever and a day to write, and please excuse my lack of porn!! And even though you asked for this approx. 6 years ago, just remember that my love for you is eternal!!
Diego talks to him in the tunnel, their faces close.
“Look for Edi to your left, okay?” he says. “He’ll be with you on most of the fast breaks.”
“Okay,” Luis says. It’s nothing he doesn’t already know, and all Diego’s doing is making him nervous. Luis wants to tell him to shut the hell up because he’s got it, but he doesn’t because this is Diego and the fact that he’s even talking in the tunnel is enough to tell Luis that he’s nervous, too.
“And their keeper,” Diego continues. “He tends to favor the left side of the goal, even on penalties: low and left.”
“Alright,” Luis says. “I know. El Mister said-“
“And the ref,” Diego cuts him off. “I re-watched his other matches and he-”
“Fuck,” Luis interrupts, “I know.”
Diego stills at that and has this look on his face like he didn’t even realize what he was doing, how he was making Luis anxious when football is the last thing in the world that Luis should worry about.
“You’re right,” Diego finally says, and he smiles a little, knocks the back of his hand against the back of Luis’s. “You’re right.”
“Yeah, I’m right,” Luis says. It’s such a stupid thing to say-so stupid-and he wishes he could take it back, only Diego doesn’t even seem to find anything unusual about it, doesn’t react any differently that he normally does to the things Luis says.
“Alright,” Diego says, and Luis can see his chest rise and fall as he takes a deep breath. “Yeah, we’ve got this.”
They stop talking and Luis jumps up and down for a minute, in part to keep warmed up and in part because keeping moving takes his mind off things, and Diego goes back to facing the front of the tunnel. Luis watches as he fixes his hair, readjusts his headband, and he wants to tell Diego to just cut it, that it’s easier when it’s short, but he doesn’t. The ref comes by, checks their kits and makes sure that they don’t have anything illegal hidden in their shorts or the spikes of their boots.
The line moves forward-the line, Luis thinks; he means his team, means Uruguay-and it’s just before they step out onto the pitch that Diego turns back around to face Luis. He smiles.
“Try not to punch anyone,” he says, and Luis just rolls his eyes, because he has the reputation of being the hotheaded one on the squad, even though Victorino is the one who’ll throw punches if someone touches his alfajores. “Playing man down is still hard, even when we’re only missing you.”
Luis lets out a loud bark of surprised laughter and calls Diego a motherfucker, but Diego’s walked out onto the pitch already and doesn’t hear him.
Luis doesn’t bother to call him it again.
When it happens-when Luis is on the goal line, with everyone and no one right there with him, when he throws his hands up to block Adiyiah’s shot and to keep Uruguay alive-Luis isn’t thinking about what it could mean, for him or for the squad. There’s no time for him to think about that stuff, and all that matters is that they’ll get to keep playing, keep fighting, and keep winning for Uruguay, and so he does it, blocks the shot because no one else is there to do it for him.
It’s a bigger deal than Luis could have ever imagined. Everyone goes crazy, shouting and pointing, and the ref goes into his pocket, pulls out a red, and Luis holds his hands up like he can’t believe it, even though he can, because how else was this supposed to end? How else?
And so Luis walks off the pitch and sees the ball hit the crossbar and sees everyone celebrating, and he’s celebrating too, by himself in the tunnel, and as he’s ushered off the pitch, and as they put the match on a tv for him in the locker room, Luis has to fight the urge to laugh because Diego and everyone else have to go on without him.
At least, he thinks, he didn’t punch anyone.
And at least, he thinks, they win.
The celebration is crazy. Not the one on the pitch, because Luis isn’t there for that, but afterwards, on the bus and at the hotel, everyone cheering and singing, “Uruguay! Uruguay!” with their arms slung around each other’s shoulders and drinks in their hands.
“Luis!” El Loco yells. He’s got a smile stretching across his face and Luis knows-knows-that he does, too. “The Golden Glove! You’ll win for sure!”
“Yeah, yeah,” Luis says, but he’s laughing; he’s so happy. “Don’t be jealous ‘cause you’re getting jack shit!”
“Hey! I’ll be getting a fucking gold medal!” El Loco yells back, and Luis thinks, Okay, because they’re going to win it all, they have to.
He doesn’t think much about anything else except for celebrating until he feels a cool hand slide around the back of his neck and Diego’s there, smiling wider than Luis has ever seen, and he says, “Luisito,” that’s it, just Luis’s name, and Luis smiles back so wide, he feels like his face is splitting in half.
If Luis is going to be honest, it doesn’t hit him until he’s lying in bed, Maxi snoring across the room. And it’s only then that he realizes that, yeah, Uruguay won, but he’s out, done, not playing the next match, and he almost doesn’t know what to think; he’s missed matches before, but he’s never missed a World Cup semi-final before. And suddenly it’s like his legs don’t want to rest, and he feels like he’s got adrenaline pumping through his veins, and he thinks, We wouldn’t have made it to the semis without me, and I don’t even get to fucking play.
He feels a little bad, afterwards, for thinking that, but not too bad, because it’s true.
They go to see lion cubs a few days later. It’s okay, Luis thinks; he’s not all that big on wild animals that aren’t actually in the wild, where they’re supposed to be, but Egidio is excited enough for the both of them and Diego says, “Come on, when are you going to get to do this again?” and so Luis goes.
The lions are cute, he guesses. Everyone takes photos with them, even El Mister, and they all hold the cubs and pet the cubs and take even more photos of the cubs, and if he’s going to be honest, he gets bored about fifteen minutes in and spends the rest of the time carving his name into the wood of the observation deck with a pen. His skin itches, like some physical reaction to the fact that he’s not practicing football when he knows he should be. Only-only, maybe he shouldn’t be; maybe it doesn’t matter because he can’t play in the semi-final, anyways.
But no, that’s not quite right. It matters, Luis knows; he’ll be playing in the final, and that’s what matters. He needs to be ready for that.
He watches as Diego asks for a football and then plays a bit of one-on-one with the cub. Luis likes that, how football is such a big part of Diego that he’s thinking about it even when he’s on a nature reserve in South Africa; it’s a big part of Luis, too, so big that sometimes Luis thinks that maybe it’s the only part that matters.
“What is he doing?” El Mister asks when he sees it, how Diego tries to swat the ball out from between the lion’s paws. “Is he putting his-Diego, watch it!”
“Yeah,” Maxi jokes. “Can’t be a footballer if you lose your hand.”
“No,” El Loco yells, “that’s Luis!” The guys laugh, and Luis does, too.
Afterwards-after Diego plays and loses to the lion cub, and after El Loco films the whole thing from two different angles to put up on YouTube and Diego’s twitter-Diego climbs up onto the observation deck with Luis and says, “Luis Suarez was here, July 2010?” He points to Luis’s graffiti.
“Yeah,” Luis says. He doesn’t really know what Diego means by it; he’s just reading what Luis wrote.
“Very original; I like it,” Diego says, and he smiles a little, like he knows something that Luis doesn’t.
“Hey, fuck you,” Luis says. “You can’t beat a classic.”
“I guess,” Diego says. He keeps looking at Luis after he says that, even though Luis doesn’t say anything, and it kind of puts him on edge. He wishes he knew what Diego was thinking. He wants to ask, What are you looking at? or, How could you lose to a lion cub, I mean, really? Or, if he is serious, he wants to say, How am I supposed to sit out of a match like this? I don’t know how to do that; I don’t know how to be a part of the team when I’m apart from the team. But Luis doesn’t say any of that. Instead, he bites at the skin around his thumbnail.
Diego looks back at the rest of the guys, out where El Ruso is taking pictures of a cub ripping the football apart, and Luis notices as he shifts his weight from his heels to the balls of his feet.
“Rusito!” Diego calls out. “Rusito, take a picture!”
“I took like eighty already,” El Ruso yells back, his eyes never leaving the screen of his camera, which never leaves the lion cub. “I’m taking video now.”
“No,” Diego calls back. “I meant of us.” He waves a finger back and forth between himself and Luis.
El Ruso pauses at that, looks at the two of them and jokes, “Why would I want one of you two?”
Diego just laughs with him, but Luis says, “Hey, come on,” even though he doesn’t know why Diego wants the picture. He supposes that it doesn’t really matter.
“Alright, fine,” El Ruso says, and he says it like they’re asking a lot of him, even though they’re not.
Luis leans forward and rests his arms on the wooden railing in front of them; Diego does the same, and Luis almost thinks he can feel the heat from Diego’s arm through their sweatshirts, even though, realistically, he knows he can’t.
“Make sure you look tough,” Diego says. “We have to compensate for the fact that we’re with lion cubs.”
“What?” Luis asks, and he laughs.
“Alright,” Diego says, and he shrugs. He’s smiling too. “Maybe not.”
“On three,” El Ruso calls out, and then all in one breath, he counts, “Onetwothree,” and snaps the photo.
“Hope you didn’t blink,” Diego says, and then jerks his head towards El Ruso, who’s already walking away.
“I didn’t,” Luis says. “I looked wonderful. Of course.”
“Of course,” Diego says, and it’s the weirdest thing, but Luis almost wishes Diego wasn’t just joking around with him when he says that.
Later, when Luis is in his room and has nothing to do, he thinks about how he’ll be glad to be back home, once all of this is over; he loves the football, loves playing and practicing, but the in-between times he could do without. Of all the things that shock Luis about the World Cup, nothing catches him as off-guard as the boredom. He’s travelled before, knows about the lulls between matches, but for some reason, he always expected the World Cup to be different, and how could it not be? So many footballers who all know each other from their clubs, all in one place and with tons of down-time. It never really occurred to him that everyone would most likely just stick with their own national team, for the most part. Luis thinks that’s crazy; he wants to text Maarten to see if he wants to hang out, or maybe watch some tv with Gregory, just for something new, something to do, but as it turns out, that’s just not done, especially not this late in the game. He doesn’t get it.
Instead, to pass the time, Luis does stupid shit-he steals bread from the kitchens, knocks on Martin’s door and then runs away, sees how long he can keep his feet in the cold pool water out back-sometimes by himself, but sometimes with some of the guys, and it does its job, gets him from day to day without dying of boredom.
He hangs in his room for a while, but eventually, Luis just needs to get out of his room. He heads out the door and peeks around the corner of the hotel hallway; it’s quiet out, and most people are in their rooms or hanging out downstairs, but it never hurts to be careful, especially when doing something against the rules. He steals down to the kitchens and when he gets there, he says hello to the chef on duty-a man named Abrahem, who has two daughters and a son on the way-and then asks him what he’s got. Abrahem is all right with Luis.
“I have some biltong,” Abrahem says.
“I don’t even know what that is,” Luis tells him, and he hops up to sit on the counter; his feet swing because they don’t touch the ground.
“It’s, uh.” Abrahem uses meaningless hand gestures as he struggles through the minimal amount of Spanish and English that they both know. “Like… dry meat?” Luis assumes that he must pull a face or something, because then Abrahem throws his head back and laughs.
“What?” Luis asks, and then he starts laughing, too. “What?”
“I have cookies,” Abrahem says, and then he holds up one finger, walks towards the back of the kitchen, leaving Luis where he is, his feet swaying back and forth.
When Abrahem gets back, he gives Luis a couple of oatmeal raisin cookies wrapped up in a napkin. They’re not chocolate chip, but Luis can’t complain; he just thanks Abrahem and heads back out of the kitchen.
He runs into Victorino on his way out, and Victorino just looks at him and the napkin bundle in his hand and smiles.
“Late night snack, Luis?” he asks. “You little rebel.” Luis scowls and shoves the cookies into the front pocket of his hoodie.
“Yeah, yeah,” Luis says, and Victorino laughs.
“If you see Forlán, tell him I’m looking for him, and I won’t rat you out to El Mister,” he says.
Luis shakes his head, but he still says, “Alright, fine.” It’s really not a big deal, looking for Diego, and El Mister will flay him alive if he finds out he was sneaking junk food at night, but still-- Victorino's got some nerve, Luis thinks.
He runs into Fuci and Edi when he’s crossing through the hotel restaurant, a couple of glasses of water out in front of them and a deck of cards spread across the table, and he figures that while they probably won’t know where Diego is-Lugano’s the only one who ever really has tabs on Diego, maybe because he’s the captain, but maybe just because they’re good friends, Luis doesn’t know-it’s worth asking anyways.
“Hey,” Luis says as he walks up to the guys. The restaurant is mostly empty and he grabs a chair from the next table, straddles it backwards as he watches Edi deal.
“Hey,” Edi says back. “Want me to deal you in?”
“Nah,” Luis says. He appreciates the offer and he probably would have said yes if he hadn’t been looking all over the place for Diego. “Who’s winning?”
“He is,” Fuci says, and he rolls his eyes from behind his plastic, thick-rimmed glasses. Luis thinks they make him look like an idiot, but Fuci is adamant that they’re cool in the United States, and so that it’s only a matter of time before they’re cool everywhere else, too, and he’s going to be recognized as being ahead of the curve. Luis isn’t really too sure about that, but he goes along with it.
“When you’re good, you’re good,” Edi says, and he smiles. “I’ve cleaned him out of a hundred fifty euro so far.”
“It’s insane,” Fuci says. “I’m normally really good, too.” Luis laughs, which causes Fuci to sputter and say, “Fuck you, you know I am!”
“I know, I know,” Luis says, and he holds his hands up in a sign of peace, partly because Luis does know, and partly because he feels bad that Fuci’s out of the next match, too. “But hey-I was just wondering if you guys have seen Diego around here somewhere.”
“Who, Godín?” Edi asks. “He’s right over there.” He points a finger over Fuci’s shoulder, and both Luis and Fuci turn to look. Godín’s not there, and Luis turns back in time to see Edi nonchalantly swapping a card from his hand with one from the deck. Edi knows he’s caught, but he just smiles a little and doesn’t say anything; Luis doesn’t either. It’ll be entertaining to watch Fuci squirm before they finally tell him that Edi didn’t win fair and square, after all.
“Where?” Fuci asks. “I missed him.”
“Really? He was just-”
“Doesn’t matter,” Luis cuts him off. “I meant Forlán.”
Fuci nods his head and says, “He was with Walter last I saw him, heading up to our floor.” He looks at Luis as he talks, and Edi uses the time to lazily look though the top few cards in the deck. “You might want to check there.”
“Alright, awesome,” Luis says, and he drums his fingers on the back of his chair before getting up. “Thanks.”
He gets up and heads towards the elevators, but just before he’s out of earshot, he hears Fuci say, “Again? Oh my God, you’re on a roll.”
Luis barely holds back a laugh.
Luis figures that he can stop the search, that Victorino’s not really going to rat him out, but he’s bored and so he keeps looking. He finds Diego upstairs in the room that he shares with Lugano; their door is ajar, but there are no sounds coming from inside, and so Luis wonders if anyone’s actually there.
“Can I come in?” he asks, but he doesn’t wait for an answer, just nudges the door open and heads inside.
The room is a lot neater than the one he was assigned to with Maxi, to be honest; there’s no clothing thrown about, no muddy sneakers kicked off just inside or anything like that. For a second, Luis thinks about what it would be like to share a room with Diego instead, but then he shakes the thought out of his head because it’s pointless.
He finds Diego lying on his bed. He’s on his back, one arm behind his head, and Luis would have thought he was napping except for how his eyes are open.
“Hey,” Luis says, and he says it quietly, although he doesn’t know why. “Victorino’s looking for you.”
“Alright,” Diego says back, but he doesn’t look at Luis, just keeps staring at the ceiling.
Luis doesn’t know what to do with that, because yeah, Diego’s quiet most of the time, but he’s never like this, not around Luis. So a part of Luis wants to just leave, wants to say, Just delivering the message, and walk back out the door, but he can’t because he knows he shouldn’t.
Instead, he throws himself down into the chair next to Diego’s bed and says, “So.”
“So,” Diego says back, and he turns his head to look at Luis. Luis just kicks his feet up onto the bed, even though he knows it drives Diego crazy.
He waits for a while, figures that Diego will tell him what’s wrong eventually, but Diego never does and the silence starts to drive Luis crazy. He feels like he should fill it with jokes, or maybe by telling Diego how Juan is thinking about shaving his head, but he doesn’t and he doesn’t know why.
Instead, he says, “So-so I can’t play in the semi.”
Diego looks at him, says, “I know.”
And Luis doesn’t know what else he was expecting, but something about it-about Diego, about the hotel room, about South Africa, all of it-has words coming out of his mouth before he even realizes it.
“I kind of resent everyone else because they can, though,” he says. “It shouldn’t have come down to me.” And it’s so true-so dark and ugly and true-that he can’t believe he’s even saying it.
“Sometimes I-” Diego says, and then he seems to rethink what he was going to say, like maybe he thinks Luis is looking for comfort and not just saying these things because he thinks it’ll make Diego feel easier talking to him. “You have every right. But there’s no point; it won’t change anything.”
“I know,” Luis snaps, because Diego does that sometimes, talks to Luis like he’s a child, and Luis doesn’t want that, doesn’t need that, not from anybody and definitely not from Diego. But then, realizing that Diego doesn’t really mean anything by it, he goes into his hoodie pocket, pulls out the cookies and offers some to Diego. Diego takes two.
“Thanks,” Diego says.
“Don’t worry about it,” Luis says back.
They eat the cookies in silence, and when they’re done, Luis wipes his hands on his pants and stands up to leave. He waves goodbye, says, “I should go. I told Maxi that I’d…” and then he trails off there, because he didn’t tell Maxi he’d do anything.
“Alright,” Diego says, and even though Luis knows he shouldn’t, he leaves because the silence is too much and the only thing he ever knows how to say is the wrong thing.
The hotel has something that they call a game room, but that is really just a room with one small tv and a beat-up pool table. Luis is terrible at pool, can’t play worth shit, but the felt is bumpy and torn in places, and the entire table sits at a tilt, and so talent means less and less. He and Juan play almost every night; Juan is really good, to the point that he can beat almost everyone, but with the hotel table, Luis wins at least one every four. It keeps things exciting, gives them something to do, and it’s nice getting to know him outside of practice, too; Juan’s been receiving call-ups since 2007, same as Luis, but Luis still hardly knows him.
“Alright, I’ll break?” Luis asks once the table is all set up, and Juan laughs.
“No,” he says, as if Luis had said something completely outrageous. He waves the plastic triangle in the air. “I just racked!”
“Fine, fine,” Luis says, and then he waves a hand as if to say, Well then get on with it.
Juan breaks and the balls scatter every which way, most of them settling on the left side of the table because of the tilt.
“Your go,” Juan says.
Luis grabs his pool cue and bends at the hip, lines up his shot. It’s all bullshit, anyways, because the cue ball hits a tear in the table felt and skips, changes direction and knocks the nine ball into the right center pocket. And then he knocks in another one, and another one, and another, and Juan is just staring at him like he cannot believe what he’s seeing.
“You’re cheating,” he says.
“No, I’m not,” Luis says. “The table just wants me to win!”
“Sure,” Juan says, and he pulls a face. Neither of them has knocked in that many balls in a row, not on this piece of shit table. Luis lines up to take the next shot, and as he does, Juan hits him in the back of the legs with his own pool cue, hard enough that it hurts, although not hard enough to do any damage. Luis jumps and yelps.
“Motherfucker!” Luis says, and he points his pool cue at Juan threateningly. Juan just laughs and holds his hands up in a sign of surrender.
They play a few more games and have a pool cue sword fight before Walter pops his head in and reminds them that curfew is in a few minutes. Juan puts everything back and calls Luis lazy when he doesn’t offer to help, and then they head towards the elevators.
In his room, Luis strips off his shirt and toes his shoes off at the door before heading to the bathroom to brush his teeth. Maxi talks to him through the door about the weather and his family and how El Ruso is taking up African drumming. Luis laughs and accidentally spits toothpaste all over the mirror.
On his way to his bed, he trips over his own feet and only just manages to catch himself before his face hits the ground. Maxi laughs and says, “Be careful; don’t want to ruin the money maker.” Luis just pulls his face and flicks him off as he climbs between the sheets.
Luis wakes up in the middle of the night, and at first he doesn’t know why. He looks over at Maxi, but Maxi’s still sleeping, one arm thrown over the edge of his bed and his sheets kicked off almost to the floor. Luis is about to roll over and go back to sleep, but then he hears it again, the steady thump of someone kicking around a football outside, and Luis is suddenly very awake.
He climbs out of bed and heads to the window, but he can’t see anyone. Still, the noise is there and Luis knows he’s not going to fall back to sleep anytime soon, and so he throws on some sneakers and a hoodie and closes the door behind him as quietly as he can.
He’s not at all surprised when he sees that it’s Diego who’s outside, kicking a football around: if anyone puts in extra time, it’s Diego, and Luis knows that. And while a part of him wants to call out to Diego, to say hey, an even larger part wants to just watch him play football, and so Luis doesn’t do anything for a while, just stands there. Diego bounces the ball off of his knees and the top of his foot, keeping it off the ground, doing tricks.
“Hey,” Luis says finally, grabbing his attention. “You know it’s like two in the morning, right?”
Diego looks up, startled, and drops the football. It bounces off the asphalt and then rolls a few feet away, following the curve of the pavement.
“Yeah,” Diego says, and he looks embarrassed, a little, the way he scratches the back of his head. “I couldn’t sleep.”
“Neither could I,” Luis says, and he shoves his hand deep in the pocket of his hoodie. “Some asshole was outside my window playing football.”
Diego laughs, probably because he didn’t expect Luis to say that and not because it was particularly funny, and he says, “Sorry, sorry.”
“S’okay,” Luis says.
They both stand there for a minute after that, neither of them really saying anything, just enjoying the silence. It’s not awkward, not at all, and Luis looks at Diego, who’s staring off into space. Luis kind of wants to ask him if he wants to play some one-on-one, maybe first to ten or something like that, but then Diego looks up and looks at him. For a second, neither of them moves, and then suddenly they’re both sprinting for the football. Diego gets to it first-in Luis’s defense, he was closer to begin with-but it gets tackled away and Luis takes off with it, down the center of the parking lot and towards the row of low bushes lining the curb.
He picks a spot arbitrarily, calls it the goal and shoots, and Diego’s a second too late.
“One-nil, Forlán. Is that all you’ve got?” Luis holds his arms out wide.
Diego shakes his head, says, “Please. I was going easy,” and then they kick off from center, start playing again.
First to ten goes by fast, probably because it’s fun and stress free and because there’s nothing else to worry about except for the moment, except for beating Diego. And he does, he gets to ten first, but he knows it could have just as easily gone the other way; that nine times out of ten, Diego would have won. And so when Diego asks for a rematch, Luis shakes his head and jerks a thumb back to the hotel and says, “El Mister will kill us if he finds us out here,” but he’s smiling wide and he knows that Diego understands. “I guess I’ll just have to go out on top, as reigning champion of the one-on-one.”
“Low,” Diego says, “but ultimately expected.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” Luis laughs.
“Nothing,” Diego says. He’s not laughing, but he’s smiling like he wants to be.
“Sure, sure.”
A beat passes and Luis is about to turn and head inside when Diego says, “I’ve thought about it, you know? What you said.”
“What did I say?” Luis asks; he doesn’t know, but all of a sudden, everything feels so much more serious, and it almost makes him a little uncomfortable. He’s not good at this, at serious talks; he’s good at football and at loving his club and at loving his country, and that’s it.
“How you were mad that no one did their job, and so you had to get that red just to keep us in,” Diego says, and it sounds so much worse, when he says it.
“I didn’t mean it like-”
“Yeah, you did,” Diego says. “And it’s okay, because I’d be mad, too. But I thought about it, and the thing is-” he cuts himself off.
Luis doesn’t do anything to fill the silence at first because he doesn’t know what to say, anyways. Instead, he just shifts his weight from foot to foot and tries to wait it out, until he becomes too impatient and decides that he needs to say something.
“Come on,” Luis says. “Just tell me already.”
“I worry we can’t do it without you.”
And it’s all written there, right on his face, and Luis can see it so clearly, can see how Diego is struggling with the pressure of an entire nation on his shoulders, and the talk of the Golden Ball and everything. Luis thinks that Diego shouldn’t ever look like that, like he’s unsure of himself and the football he plays.
“Shut up,” Luis says. “You’ll be fine; trust me.”
Diego doesn’t say anything for a minute, just stares at the ground as he rolls the football back and forth with the tip of his shoe, and then he says, “It makes me so mad because we were so good.”
“We still are,” Luis says, and he really believes it, but Diego shakes his head.
“I know, but…” he says. His eyebrows are furrowed and Luis thinks that it should feel weird, having Diego talk to him like this, only it isn’t. Not many people get to see Diego so open, he knows. “But it’s different now; you’re out, and Fuci’s out, and Nicolas played through a broken foot, and Lugano hurt his knee, and Godín’s thigh still isn’t-“
“Hey,” Luis interrupts. He knocks the football out from underneath Diego’s foot and juggles it between his two own. “They don’t get van der Wiel or de Jong next match, so at least that evens things a bit.”
“Yeah,” Diego says, and Luis could leave it at that, but he shouldn’t, and he doesn’t really want to, either, only he doesn’t know what to say. But he thinks about how hard they worked for this and how badly they all want it, and yeah, the Dutch want it too, but Uruguay wants it more, and Luis is sure of this because he can’t imagine anyone wanting to win more than he does, more than his team does; it’s not possible.
“We’ll win because we have to,” Luis says. “Because no one expected us to even make it past the group stage. And we can, you know. You know that; you don’t need me telling you that.”
“And if we don’t?”
“And if we don’t, then fuck them.”
“That’s it?” Diego laughs.
“Yeah,” Luis says, and he shrugs. “That’s all I’ve got.”
Diego laughs a little more under his breath and then says, “Alright then. Okay.” He nods to himself for a minute and then continues, “Okay, this is how it’s going to go.” He darts forward to steal the ball from between Luis’s feet and takes off, running down the makeshift pitch, guiding the ball around cars and potholes. Luis stands there, just stands there, because this is how it’s going to go: Diego will play and Luis will watch.
When Diego gets to the edge of the parking lot, he kicks the ball a little bit further until it hits the curb and then takes off running back towards Luis, smiling wide with his arms spread and his shirt catching on the air behind him. Luis claps and yells, “Forlán scores and the crowd goes insane!” And then Diego’s right there, right beside him and still running fast, but before he passes by, he loops one arm around Luis’s shoulders and drags him with. Luis doesn’t fight it, just turns and runs with Diego down the edge of the parking lot, one arm outstretched and the other around Diego’s shoulders, his fingers tight in Diego’s shirt, celebrating just like they will be in the final, when Luis can play again.