Chapter Text
Higgins ignores the emails at first. There’s been so much paperwork to get through with the relegation and new player contracts and appeals to sponsors, and he gets a scam call purporting to be from HMRC threatening deportation at least once a week; it’s not like the Visas and Immigration department would email about something urgent.
Only, as it turns out, they would, and they don’t actually like it when their emails about something urgent are ignored, and near the end of the season things escalate to an official letter with some frankly uncalled-for language.
Higgins reads through it once, twice, certain he’s got to be misinterpreting the legal jargon and the mess of dates, underlined and bolded. A third time, just to be sure. Then he picks up the phone.
“Rebecca? We’ve got a bigger-than-medium-sized problem.”
.
The drunkest Rebecca has ever been in her life was Flo’s hen’s night.
Not the wedding itself, because as maid of honour she’d been too busy wrangling drunk uncles and trying to keep Flo’s thirteen-year-old niece away from the open bar. Not her own wedding, either, that wouldn’t have been proper, and she'd been far too nervous to do much more than sip at her slowly warming champagne (an '88 Krug, and Rupert had berated her for wasting it). No, until Flo’s hen’s night, Rebecca had always suspected that the cinematic plot device of being drunk enough to just entirely forget parts of the night before was a myth. Then she'd woken up in Margate, in a different dress than the one she'd put on, with a ticket to Dreamland tucked into her bra and a £235 taxi fare on her credit card.
Sitting in her office, with a two-thirds-empty bottle of navy strength gin at her elbow and the letter from the Home Office playing the role of makeshift dartboard, Rebecca is quickly beginning to suspect that she's going to knock Margate clean out of first place.
The problem is simple. Coaching a Premier League team was prestigious. It was elite. It allowed the club to ship in a coach from anywhere in the world, no questions asked. Coaching a Championship team, though? There were more than enough homegrown candidates to choose from for that. That afternoon, after he'd shown her the letter, Higgins had also helpfully provided her with a list of other visa options. It was marked with careful annotations explaining why none of them were viable.
Rebecca takes another swig of gin, and her next dart pierces the Home Office emblem with a dull thunk. Barbecue sauce, she thinks to herself.
There's one entry on the list that doesn't have a fat red line through it. One single entry bears a wobbly question mark instead, as though Higgins had hesitated while writing it. Ted's not an investor, or an entrepreneur, or a Service Provider from Switzerland (and why did the fucking Swiss get their own special category? As if they weren't superior enough already), or any of the other things that would qualify him to stay. Option six is the only choice left.
It's a fucking ludicrous one.
She should call Keeley. She should absolutely call Keeley and let her friend's inevitable litany of reasons that this plan is a Giant Fucking Disaster, capitals necessary, bring her back to her senses. She should. Because in that litany, which she can already anticipate ordered both alphabetically and by degree of unavoidable implosion, the absolute fucking top one is that Ted would never ask Option Six of her, if their situations were reversed. Rebecca knows this. Ted would never even float the notion of putting her in such an insane predicament, even if it would be the thing to save his position at the club and everything he's worked for. He would walk barefoot back to Kansas first.
In the end, that’s why she does it.
The next morning, she strides into Ted's office before she lets herself acknowledge exactly how ill-conceived this entire plan, born from half a litre of gin and the overwhelming terror of being left to win the whole fucking thing alone, truly is.
“Ted."
“Hey, boss!”
“We’re getting married.”