Work Text:
Jamie doesn’t really enjoy traveling to play a match. It makes him nervous. The bus is too big and the streets are too narrow. He always feels like it’s going to tip over or that they’ll end up crashing somewhere. He’s never liked being driven by anyone else, and he’d walk if he could help it. He’s been in the back of the car too many times with his fathers drunk swerving, clutching his seatbelt and trying to see any obstacles so he could brace for impact. It never happened, despite the laundry list of close calls, and he always felt lucky when he was able to climb out of the passenger side and rush inside to his moms house, but it made him nervous all the same.
At least if he’s driving himself he has complete control over the car. He can make sure everything is safe. He’d hated being in the car when his parents were fighting. His mother gripping the steering wheel with her knuckles completely white, and mascara running down her face as her husband shouted at her in the passenger seat, leaning across the console to point a fat finger in her face and put his bulging eyes and red cheeks so close she’d have to turn her face away from the road. Long seconds of driving blind and it put Jamie’s heart in his throat. Sometimes he didn’t know if she could see the traffic signs for crying so hard and the more he tried to tell them “Brake ahead!” Or “Construction!” Or “dog in the road!”, the more his father shouted down the car or reached back to grip Jamie’s face and turn it sharply away towards the side window.
His mom had rear ended an old woman once because of it. He was eleven. The elderly lady had laid on her horn, then gotten out of her car and screamed at them over it while his mother cried and apologized, her forehead bloody from when the solid impact made his father grab her hair to steady himself, so far into her space that It was the only purchase he could get without falling into the dashboard. And then he yelled at her, too.
Jamie hadn’t been able to force himself out of the car; frozen watching the line of blood oozing on his mothers forehead and the sharp lines of the car hood crumpled into origami in front of him. When he got home, his father shoved him bodily into his bedroom and warned him that he should have been watching the road, that it was his fault that he saw it and didn’t speak up. He could have killed his mother, behaving like that. Thanking back, she hadn’t even needed stitches, but it had seemed so major at the time.
The guilt and fear never left him. Now he constantly has to watch the road. He’d sit as close to the front as possible, and put His head phones in, though he didn’t play music through them. He just wanted to ward off conversation; couldn’t be distracted and get somebody he loved hurt again. He’d lean into the aisle to get a proper look out the windshield, and each time a car passed his stomach would knot until he knew it was well out of sight. It wasn’t so bad during the daylight, but at night it really freaked him out. What if the driver fell asleep? Nobody else ever stayed up or paid attention, so it was always all on Jamie. He couldn’t let himself sleep and be responsible for hurting his teammates if he abandon his post. His mom was lucky she only had a scratch, it could always be so much worse.
Keeley always thought it was a masculinity thing that he never let her drive them anywhere when they were together, and it wasn’t that he didn’t trust her, it’s just that if he was responsible for keeping her safe, he would always put in the best effort to do it. Parading a big ego helped keep difficult questions at bay, and he felt glad for it.
So here he is, sitting behind the gaffer and leaning his head round to view the road, only visible in the conical view of the headlights. He hates when it’s like this. It’s harder to brace for what could be coming if you can’t see it. Ted had pulled an eye mask down, and told Jamie to get some sleep, and he promised he would, but still didn’t move from his position.
Everyone else had given in to their exhaustion hours ago. The bus was silent outside of Jans snoring, and the faint buzz of Drake songs coming from Colin’s headphones, perpetually too loud. The quiet atmosphere unwinds the knot in his stomach a small amount; the loud conversation and laughter of the team sometimes feels too close to the shouting of his parents. Makes the whole thing feel claustrophobic.
He’s watching the curve of the dirt farm road too intently to notice that Dani has woken up until he is trudging up the aisle of the bus and sitting in the seat across from him, squinting through half-asleep eyes. Jamie can feel him staring despite not acknowledging it.
“You do not enjoy bus rides, Jamie Tartt.”
“Well spotted.” He mumbles, and tries to make it sound sarcastic, but his voice is tight and hard to manage, so it comes out strained. Dani doesn’t reply, and Jamie pulls his ear pods out, not bothering to continue the ruse. He offers, “Ain’t got anything playing.”
“I know that.” Dani says easily enough, like it’s so simple, and tells him lightly, “They are not plugged in.”
Jamie can feel his face burn in mortification. Fuck, had anyone else noticed, too, then? They’re gonna think he’s being a prick again, pretending to not hear them the whole ride. Dani doesn’t sound annoyed by him, but that’s not a good indication of how anyone else feels, because Dani is particularly unflappable and giving people the benefit of the doubt comes second nature to him, whereas Jamie thinks he’s always been the opposite. The pain or rejection can’t shock you of you expect it from everyone, he’d decided early on. Sometimes he wishes he hadn’t; that he could believe in people that way Ted or Dani did. They make it look so fucking easy.
Finally, though he knows Dani isn’t waiting for a response, “Just didn’t want to talk, really.”
He can’t turn to look at him and see his reaction to that; if he’s taken it offensively, but he hears Dani hum softly in consideration, and offer, “I don’t have to talk if you do not want.”
Jamie can’t read the inflection; if there’s any hidden emotion in it he should be picking up. So he tries to explain just in case, keeping His voice low like it might break his concentration, “It gets too much, sometimes. All the conversation. Too loud, like, and I can’t follow it.”
“That is how I felt, before.” Dani tells him, like he understands somehow, “It has always been loud in my family, and I thought I was used to it, but then I come here and I am alone, and I was learning English still. It felt like I dropped myself into a new kind of loud that I could not be a part of. It was as you say—too much—and I could not go home because I wanted to be here, too. It was difficult, to learn to be a part of the new loud; to find my space in it. And though I have learned, I do not always feel part of it, even still. It is not the same as home, and I sometimes wish the quiet would come easier.”
Jamie understands that, somehow. He likes the way Dani explains it to him, and does it without judgement, so he decided, without shifting his eyes, “Yeah, like, when I was at home I didn’t like how noisy it could get, just the three of us, and now I’m here it just feels so loud all the time—but, like, not in a bad way. It’s just a lot sometimes. Messes with me head summat. Can’t think clear like.”
Dani is silent in consideration, and Jamie thinks maybe he’s over shared, but then Dani’s knee edges into the aisle and comes to rest against his, just barely. Jamie is so surprised he looks briefly down at the place their kneecaps touch, but immediately moves his focus back to the road. Dani doesn’t move his leg. He just tells him softly, “My madre would touch my wrist when it was too loud at home. It was something to focus on. When I got here, I would put my hand on my wrist and imagine it was hers, so that I could breathe.”
So it was intentional. He gives Jamie’s knee a gentle jostle once he’s finished, and Jamie jostles back in assent. They sit like that for the rest of the drive, though it isn’t very long. He finds it is easier, somehow, to breathe through it. His brain isn’t as fired up and his stomach isn’t in knots, even though he still can’t get a full breath in until the bus is parked outside a hotel and the keys have left the ignition.
As he and Dani are the only players awake when they park, Coach Beard silently hands them the first room key, his eyes tired and mouth pulled into a frown. So, he and dani are bunking together for the night. He’s not sure why he feels so relieved by that. They have already situated in their room before the rest of the team have gotten their bags and been paired off.
Jamie is too wound up with residual anxiety to fall asleep immediately, but he lies flat on one of the twin beds and tries to settle his nerves into a comfortable enough buzz that he can start to drift off. His knee still feels warm from when Dani had touched it with his own, and he can’t refrain from bending his leg up and tracing his patella with his finger. Like he’s trying to find proof it happened. Dani is asleep on the bed across from him, and if Jamie is quiet he can hear the pull of Dani’s breath over the hum of the air conditioner. He’s dragged into sleep by the tide of his breathing.
He’s not as well rested as he’d like to be before the game the next day, but it’s not as bad as it could have been. Usually he barely gets an hour in after long drives like that—too on edge, brain spinning too loud in his ears. He thinks he’s moved past whatever he was dealing with last night, but then, before the game, Dani sits beside him on the bench and gently taps their knees together. He doesn’t say anything, but Jamie can finally look at him, and despite that Dani is paying complete attention to Coach and the play he’s drawing out, he’s got a small smile that Jamie knows is meant for him. It sinks all the way into the deepest part of himself.
They win the game by three goals. He’s in the clouds. Everything is golden hued and the excitement bubbles over the entire team. It makes for a rowdy bus ride home that he wishes he could fall into as naturally as everyone else. But he’s twisting himself into view of the windshield, and settling his nerves with a long pull of breath, only averting his gaze when Dani squeezes in front of him to take the vacant window seat directly next to him.
He’s worried Dani might try to get his attention and talk to him, pull him away from his focus, but Dani just lets his leg fall against Jamie’s, so that he can feel the burn of Dani’s thigh against his own. He can hear Dani turning pages idly, and at some point during the drive he’s begun to read aloud to Jamie in a hushed voice. It’s all in Spanish, so Jamie can’t make heads or tails of it, but he can center his mind on Dani’s voice—can follow it like the rise of smoke from a fire—instead of the unsteady cadence of conversation surrounding him.
Dani becomes his permanent seat partner, following that trip, and it’s nice that he never asks Jamie to explain, or tries to stop him when he locks his eyes towards the windshield. Jamie tells him anyways, a few weeks later, and Dani doesn’t speak, only listens and takes Jamie’s fidgety hands in His own, firm but soft. Kisses his knuckles and tells Jamie he understands; that the wounds of childhood can still be painful even after the blood has dried, and he knows that being able to watch the road is something that will soothe some of the residual pain of Jamie’s upbringing.
He still watches the road, after their conversation, but his anxiety has retreated incrementally. He feels safe with Dani, who assures him that the coaches would never let anything happen to the team, and that he would never let anything happen to Jamie. That he can put his childhood in a box to look at, when he’s ready to, and he doesn’t have to live in it anymore. It’s a choice that Jamie can make, if and when he wants to, and Jamie feels a fluttering warmth that Dani has put it there for him.
He makes an effort to relax about his constant watching of the street. He wants to get better about it, and opens up to the team in order to keep himself accountable. At the start, they take shifts watching the road, which Jamie hadn’t asked them to, but still feels a burning form of comfort that Sam had offered it up as an option to make Jamie feel safer: to let Jamie know that somebody is always watching the road. The team introduces him to road games, once, when his anxiety keeps shifting his attention back to the windscreen.
It catches him off guard, but soon they’re trying to complete the alphabet through signs and postage they pass, and Jamie doesn’t have to stop watching the road do do it—it would even ruin the objective of the game—but now he’s searching for something while he watches, and that’s better somehow. It’s funny, but now he finds himself looking forward to long bus rides, if just to hear Dani talk or to learn some new game to play with the team. And when the past creeps into the periphery of his senses, he can just sit in silence with it and watch the lines on the road blur with the speed of the drive, anchored by Dani’s knee pressed against his.