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“You really hated me in the beginning, didn’t you? Back then. Early days.”
Gary smiles slightly, amused, but doesn’t look away from the soundly sleeping baby.
“Yea, you could say that.”
It’s the stuff of nightmares, the entire thing.
Not that he never considered this could happen - he had several bad dreams in which his brain mulled over the concept. In them, he usually ended up playing in some relegation fodder like Ipswich or Norwich, loving the game but hating the badge, and suffering in second division. In a couple, he became a goalkeeper. Could you imagine? Jamie bloody Carragher, a goalkeeper!
From those, he usually woke up sweaty and annoyed, still feeling the ball colliding with his face at full speed. More than once, Jamie had to go to the loo and check in the mirror if he still had all of his teeth in the places they were supposed to be in, his hands feeling the ghostly touch of goalkeeper’s gloves for at least a few more minutes.
So when Liverpool gently lets him down about his chances for a senior contract, Jamie takes it the same way he does every upset - goes to the pitch, runs until he can’t breathe, then runs some more. Then, he boxes.
Once he sweats all of the anger out, he goes home and has a long, good talk with his parents. He’s not going to play for Everton, that’s for sure, and you won’t catch him dead in Manchester City kit, oh no, he’d rather not play football ever again. London would be an option but he doesn’t fancy being this far south at barely eighteen.
So when Liverpool lets him go, Jamie swallows his pride and tests out for United. Two weeks later, he has a two year contract in his pocket and wears the wrong shade of red.
Funny, how things happen sometimes.
So Jamie packs and promises his mother to visit often, and not go down the bad Mancunian ways. He gets a flat that isn’t exactly a shoebox but it’s nothing fancy, still, more than enough for a football-crazed young lad who mostly needs a space to keep his clothes and books, nothing else.
At the club, it’s not even close to smooth sailing, of course, but he knew that’s how it was always going to go even as he put pen to paper and signed his name on the dotted line.
“They will give you a hard time,” Sir Alex says after they shake hands and Carra’s photo is taken with his new jersey, Carragher 23. “You’ve got to be tough, lad.”
Jamie smiles at that, swallowing the nerves and squaring his shoulders. Oh, he’s ready for a fight. That was a part of the deal here in Manchester, after all.
“I’m from Bootle,” he says with a shrug, as if that explains it all, after all the streets of Bootle were tougher than a dressing room filled with men who can be mean but can’t really throw a punch. “If they think they can take me…”
Sir Alex laughs.
And indeed it’s far from smooth sailing. The hours are long, and the training is hard - but Jamie is the guy who stays on the pitch and keeps going even after everyone else leaves. Sometimes Solskjær joins him but keeps to himself on the other side of the pitch. Still, they’re friendly - Jamie usually sticks to the company of a gaggle of foreigners, especially the little Nordic group. He can barely understand them, and he’s pretty sure they can’t understand a word he says either. Still, they’re a friendly enough bunch and he enjoys the camaraderie well enough.
“They’ll warm up to ye, the local lads.” Keane pats his back after Jamie makes his debut for the first team in a thrilling win at home against Leeds. Sure, the applause from the stands of Old Trafford has been sparse but Jamie’s happy about the clean sheet and a few tackles he managed to get away with. He only shrugs, and for some reason it has Keane laughing again.
As far as the local lads in the dressing room go… Well, Jamie’s not all that sure he really wants to make friends.
“On your left, Bootle!” shouts one of the Nevilles as he pushes past him - Gary, of course, always too loud and too annoying and always out to get a jab in. Phil follows him with that odd sort of an apologetic expression he usually wears whenever his brother acts like the little shit that he is. Which means Jamie rarely sees him without that grimace on his face.
“If it bothers you that Gaz keeps calling you that, I can get him to stop,” Becks offers some three years into Jamie’s United career, a fresh new contract and all. Carra laughs it off.
“Nah, it keeps me honest, you know? Reminds me where I came from. Let him have his fun.”
David doesn’t look like he understands but nods and never picks it up again. Jamie prefers it that way.
So Gary Neville is an arsehole, and Phil Neville is a long suffering saint. Becks is the friendliest of the bunch but of course he is, he’s a Londoner after all. Butt largely ignores Jamie, hell, later he even claims he didn’t know Carra’s name for the first two seasons. Scholes would make a decent friend, Jamie decides at one point, but they never really click.
He thinks to himself that in the long run, it doesn’t really matter all that much.
“Why did you even come here?” Gary Neville asks him when they’re changing after a long training, his beady eyes shining with something nasty. Nearby, Phil shifts, nervous. It’s the first winter Jamie is spending in Manchester but he already knows what this look means - that Gary has some sort of an unpleasant pun or comment, probably related to Jamie being cut from Liverpool’s academy.
There are two ways this could go: first is an exchange of barbs, followed by something of a brawl because Jamie is a pretty physical guy like all good defenders are, and ending in Sir Alex’s office.
He’s not a fan of the idea of landing himself in some schoolboy trouble. He’s also tired after a long week, and aware that the older players are listening, perhaps looking for some easy entertainment.
So he goes with the second option.
“To win,” he says simply, and takes pleasure in the sight of Gary opening his mouth and then shutting it again, not being able to find an appropriate response. Someone - he thinks it’s Jordi Cruyff - lets out an amused “ha!” while some of the others huff. Long-suffering Phil leans towards his brother to whisper something furiously into his ear.
As Jamie leaves the dressing room, Gary’s face is almost as red as Manchester’s kit.
Except - he wasn’t wrong, winning is what United is all about. Perhaps it doesn’t have the same kind of soul Liverpool does but it is a club of hard work, and so many trophies. If you told Jamie he’d ever be a part of a treble-winning team, he’d call you a dreamer - but yet, there he was.
And sure, sometimes Jamie had to lie to his parents about “going out with the lads” even if he was spending an evening alone in his new house, curled over a book in his favourite comfortable armchair that cost more he’d like to admit. His parents worried a bit. It was only natural.
Friends came and went, and Jamie was a good guy to talk to if he wanted to be one. But that’s the nature of football, not many things remain constant and some will leave whether you like it or not. He didn’t like it. Well, there was one constant and it was that Gary Neville for some reason held a specially spectacular grudge against Liverpool, or at least so it seemed, because he just never warmed up. Jamie ignored him.
Until, that is, the Chelsea game.
“I have a bad feeling, ragazzi ,” Tibi mutters before they come out onto the Stamford Bridge pitch. “A real bad feeling.”
Roy shushes him but Jamie privately agrees, there was just something in the air that made him feel somehow unsettled, and uncomfortable in his own skin. He taps the noses of his cleats for good luck, and prays it’d be enough to push away the bad.
It isn’t. Twenty three minutes into the game - and isn’t that just fucking ironic - Denis Wise clatters into him and Jamie’s world goes dark.
When he comes to he’s lying on his side in the damp grass, confused, face hurting like he had hit the wall and taste of blood in his mouth. Someone is kneeling over him, no, several people are standing around him, and most of them are yelling. There’s a lot of noise that makes Jamie shut his eyes in pain, but there’s also someone’s hand very gently rubbing the back of his neck, its owner kneeling next to Jamie’s head. It gets even more confusing when he realises who that person is as Gary Neville keeps talking to him, a non-stop stream of words.
“Fucking hell, Carra, come on. Don’t do that to us, okay? Come on.”
“I’m fine,” he tries to say, and decides to open his eyes again, immediately seeing panic in Neville’s eyes. Having the other man’s voice to focus on helps a little though. The medics are already there, and they get Gary to back off. Before he disappears in the crowd around the referee - something about Butt kicking Wise, and a red card? Jamie’s not sure, everything is so loud - Jamie manages to show him thumbs up.
They clear him of a spine injury and help him off the pitch, substitution already happening as he tries to make it to the bench. Someone presses a cold compress into his hand.
“Hold it against your face, your nose is still bleeding.”
He does and it hurts - broken nose, he’s pretty sure. Jamie’s still a bit confused as to what happened, and the lights are too bright so he’s also suspecting a trip to the hospital to get a concussion diagnosis on top of setting his nose will be required.
Gary gets taken off at the beginning of second half and trots over to sit next to Jamie, and maybe it’s the confusion talking but he’s not all that surprised. It’s all fun and games until you see your teammate prone on the pitch after a bad collision with someone’s foot.
“How are you feeling?” Gaz asks, a bit hesitatingly, like he’s uncertain of the reception he’s going to get. Lucky for him Carra isn’t a man who holds a grudge if it doesn’t involve his family.
“Shit,” he says. That’s the moment Chelsea choose to score again. “Somehow even shittier now.”
“Yeah.”
“Oi, Neville? Thanks.”
“What for?” Gary frowns, genuinely confused.
“That, on the pitch. It helped that someone wasn’t yelling in my ear.”
“Oh.”
They sit through the rest of the massacre in silence that isn’t even awkward anymore, hell, Jamie would call it somehow companionable if they weren’t watching their team get ripped apart again and again.
It doesn’t make them friends.
They don’t start going out to clubs or for a pint in the local pub, and they don’t chat in the dressing room about some gossip. But sometimes they exchange comments about other games in the Prem, or about a particularly interesting transfer happening somewhere.
“Oh thank fuck,” Phil sighs with relief when it becomes clear the hostilities have stopped permanently. “I was ready to lock you in here for a night and then collect whoever’s still alive in the morning.”
“Sir Alex wouldn’t like that.”
“Bold of you to assume it wasn’t sir Alex’s suggestion, oh brother mine.”
Jamie strangely enjoys this new dynamic, especially when it evolves from occasional conversations over one thing or the other, to full blown discussions that have them stay back in the dressing room after training, oblivious to the fact their teammates have already gone home.
When the staff, fed up with them spending hours on discussing - or rather arguing about things - starts to kick them out of the building, they move those conversations to Jamie’s house because it’s closer to the grounds than Gary’s, until they become a bi-weekly fixture.
“Would the two of you just shag already?” Giggs rolls his eyes at them, and throws a pair of rolled socks in the general direction of the two currently bickering about Arsenal’s second choice of goalkeepers.
Well. It’s not like Jamie wouldn’t go there. Gary is not objectively handsome, nowhere near the good looks of Becks, but there’s something special about him. Jamie notices it whenever Gary gets excited about some noteworthy play, or an interesting transfer happening. So honestly, he would be interested - and he thinks Gary would be too, judging from the way he sometimes looks at Jamie over the rim of his glass, or how he touches Jamie’s knee to get his attention and his fingers stay there for a few beats too long to be accidental.
But they’re footballers and Manchester United footballers at that, which means always being in the public eye. Jamie does what he needs to protect himself - sleeps with some girl picked up at a club from time to time, always gets teased about it in the dressing room, and it keeps the paparazzi at bay. He’s not exactly enjoying using these women, or the act itself, but that’s the reality they live in. For the same need of protecting himself, he resigns himself to long years with just his hand and, occasionally, one discreet friend from Liverpool days who had the same secret.
Jamie wishes it wasn’t so.
“Becks is going to leave,” Gary says, seemingly out of nowhere, during one of their shared evenings over some strictly forbidden but so delicious curry and a Sunderland game on the telly. Jamie stops chewing and only blinks for a moment, processing the news.
“Fuck.”
“He told me yesterday. It’s not going to be official for a few more weeks though, keep your big mouth shut, yeah?”
“Yeah. Bloody hell, did he tell you where?”
“Spain.” Gary’s mouth is tight, and Jamie can see he’s clearly upset about this. He swallows the urge to put his food down and comfort him. “Madrid.”
“Spain’s a good place to be, I’m sure he’s going to do great,” he says carefully. “It’s a really damn shame for us though.”
“I hate it.” Gary sounds like a petulant child, Jamie notes with a hint of amusement, but doesn’t say a word about it because if it was his best friend moving to another club, let alone another country, he would be pretty damn upset as well. “I never thought about moving to another club, you know? There were some offers but United is it for me, I don’t wanna go someplace else. You?”
Jamie thinks about lying and saying that no, he’s also a United man through and through - but it would be a complete lie. Out of respect for whatever bond they’ve started to build over the last seasons, and the man he grew to genuinely like, he decides to go with the truth.
“Once or twice,” he admits with a shrug, and puts his empty plate on the low coffee table. Sunderland is in some real trouble, he notes absent-mindedly, but that’s not really news this season. “More often in the beginning, when I felt like the odd Scouser out. But winning so much helped, and, uh, I enjoy the dressing room now.”
“So if an offer came…” There’s something intense in Gary’s voice, and the way his eyes are drilling into Jamie. “If an offer came from Spain or Italy or whatever, would you go?”
It doesn’t feel like a transfer question, no, it feels more profound. Jamie allows himself to smile slightly.
“Nah. You know me, I’d hate the weather there.”
He’s fairly sure he’s not imagining something similar to a sigh of relief that escapes Gary.
So they win the league, throw Becks a going away party that is just stuff for the ages and ends with at least one week’s worth of a hangover - and then everything changes. It feels like they’re not the golden boys anymore, like the victories that used to come so easy now refuse to cooperate. They’re still a good team, at times even a great team, but it simply isn’t enough.
Players come and go - Roy leaves, and it makes them feel orphaned in a way. Jamie’s the one to put the captain’s armband on Gary’s arm because by that time Phil has gone too.
“You’re gonna do fine,” he tells him quietly, and off they go again.
A few seasons later, he blames that fucking armband for the temporary moment of insanity that possessed him to call Gary, out of sheer desperation, almost in the middle of the bloody night. Because when you’re in trouble, who do you call if not your damn skipper? Especially if that damn skipper is well known for watching some Brazilian or Argentinian league in the middle of the night, or reading some ridiculous book about real estate instead of sleeping?
So he calls, and sure enough Gary picks up after the third ring.
“Carra? Do you know what time it is?”
“As if you’d be asleep at one in the morning.”
“That’s not the poi...wait. Why do I hear a baby crying?”
Jamie sighs. There is indeed a wailing child in his arms, and he has no idea what to do.
“I need your help.”
“ James. How the fuck did you acquire a child? Whose child is this? Do their parents know you have it?”
“Gary, for the love of God, I have no idea why I’ve called. I’m the parent. It’s really fucking complicated. I don’t know what I’m doing and my parents are on some fucking cruise around Caribbean, and…”
“Jamie.”
“What?!”
The child cries even louder.
“Breathe. I’m gonna be there in twenty, okay? It’s going to be alright, we’ll figure it out, yeah? Keep breathing, I’ll see you in a few.”
When Gary walks into Jamie’s house - and it’s quite telling what their relationship is like these days that he has his own keys, and Jamie has a set to Gary’s home - it’s to the scenes of a nightmare. Carra’s walking around his living room with a baby crying so loud Gary has heard it from the outside. The wailing toddler is red in the face, and Jamie… Well. Jamie looks like he’s one step from being in tears, too.
“Hand over the child, Carragher,” Gary demands and a moment later has his arms full of a kid, swaddled in pink. A girl, then. She stops crying, apparently confused by the sudden change of the person holding her, and reaches to Gary’s chin with one hand. “Oh, you have your daddy’s jaw, you poor little girl, haven’t you? Yeah, you have. And his eyes, but the rest seems to be your mum, eh? So maybe you’ll do alright.”
Jamie just stares at him, dumbfounded and grateful and just too overwhelmed to even be properly relieved that the hellish wailing has stopped. He sits, or more falls onto the sofa, and runs his fingers through his already messy hair.
Gary, with the little girl currently amusing herself by playing with the zipper of his hoodie and trying to put it in her mouth, perches on an armchair. It’s sinfully comfortable, he notes somewhat absent-mindedly.
“Okay, Carra. Spill.”
“I got a phone call from me agent earlier. Social services say a woman gave her up, claimed I’m the dad.” Jamie huffs, shaking his head. “And yeah, I slept with her, she claimed she was on the pill… Stupid, just stupid. There’s going to be a test, of course.”
Gary hums, taking the zipper out of the kid’s mouth and resists the urge to call Carra an irresponsible idiot just for good measure but seems like there’s no need to beat him up about it even more. So instead he looks down at the kid. Yeah, he can see the resemblance to Carragher, no need for a test.
“So what, they just gave her to you, no questions asked?”
“Oh, questions were asked but Mary, the mother, she put my name down in the little one’s birth certificate, had it registered and all.” Jamie points to what looks like a baby seat, a bag with diapers and accessories, another with baby clothes, and some soft plush toys. “My agent got this stuff, formula and bottles in the kitchen, and there’s a crib in my room. I wasn’t gonna leave her for child services, was I?”
“Oh, Jamie,” Gary sighs, and shifts the baby in his arms so that she’s more in a lying position, head and butt supported, enjoying being rocked lightly. He can already see her eyelids growing heavier by the second. “You fed her? Changed her?”
“Yea, of course.”
“Well then. This little lady is going to fall asleep faster than Sunderland gets relegated again, I figure. Oh, yeah, there we go. Take me to the crib, Carragher.”
He almost says “to bed”, he catches himself just in time. Bloody Freudian mistakes.
Jamie leads him upstairs and soon enough Gary’s carefully putting the sleeping baby in a crib, hoping she doesn’t wake up. Thankfully, she seems to be as exhausted by all the crying as Jamie looks.
“What’s her name?” he asks quietly. Jamie looks at him confused for a second, then smiles fondly.
“Elizabeth. Lizzie, I think.”
“Lizzie. Yeah, I can see that. Well, sleep well, sweet Lizzie,” Gary whispers, putting his hand on the child’s belly, for a moment stunned by how tiny she seems. He switches on the baby monitor, and pulls on Jamie’s sleeve. “Come on, we’ve got to talk.”
Except they don’t talk because Jamie looks like he’s ready to fall over so once they’re back in the living room, Gary forces him to sit down, makes him a sandwich, and then almost has to shove it down Jamie’s throat after ten minutes of watching him pick at it.
“You’re ridiculous,” he informs Carra in his best skipper voice. He sometimes manages to sound it close to how Roy sounded, and he’s quite happy with himself for that. “If you can’t take care of yourself, you can’t take care of your kid. Eat the fucking sandwich, James, and let me think. This is going to require some planning.”
Over the next months Jamie discovers a previously unknown side of Gary’s character - the compulsive planner. He has extensive research, and notes, and printouts, and even a spreadsheet or two. They talk about baby food, potty training, and best nurseries in Manchester, and how soon is too soon to teach Lizzie how to kick a ball.
Both of their mothers consider it quite adorable, and the fact that these two women got on like a house on fire scares the hell out of Jamie - he’s also a tad confused as to when did Gary’s mum become an honorary grandmother to his kid but he’s not going to complain. There’s so much co-parenting going on already that there might just as well be some serious co-grandparenting, he figures.
Managing the media isn’t particularly easy because it’s a juicy story but fortunately Jamie gets the club’s full support in protecting his privacy. His lawyer earns a fortune on terrorizing the press into submission because apparently Jamie’s single parenthood is worthy of a headline. Jamie himself thinks there are more important things in the world that could use some press attention, like global warming or unsustainable trade practices. But what does he know?
He does know that Gary jumps into co-parenting Lizzie because Jamie started wondering aloud if perhaps he should retire early and take up punditry, allowing him to spend more time with her.
“Don’t be stupid,” Gary almost snarls when presented with the idea. The look in his eyes makes Carra think back to the conversation they’ve had years ago, around when Becks decided to leave. “You’re not doing this alone, are you?”
Indeed and a bit to his confusion, he is not.
Lizzie changes things for both of them, Jamie can’t deny it. It doesn’t take long for Gary to pretty much move in, or at least it feels like because whenever he’s doing the washing, Jamie finds clothes belonging to them both, and it’s pretty impossible to tell which black sock belongs to whom.
At least their United shirts are quite easy to distinguish.
But something changes between just the two of them, like those charged silences that didn’t use to be there before and that make Carra think of a striker before he takes a penalty. Or the lingering touches, completely innocent and yet make his nerves sing.
“I wish you waited until Gary retired with that domesticity,” Phil comments calmly at one occasion when it’s just him and Carra and Lizzie in her stroller. “I’ve had good money on the two of you getting together once one of you isn’t playing.”
Jamie doesn’t even know what to say in response to that, but it makes him think. He takes his time with this because somehow Gary became a precious presence in his life, and he doesn’t want to risk losing being able to see him play in the garden with Lizzie, or sorting socks, or cooking Carra chicken soup because he caught some nasty cold. He thinks about how quick he was to trust Gary with his child, and to do it in a way that is complete and unquestionable. He thinks of the consequences of this getting out, of lives this could ruin. And of lives this could change.
So he thinks, and he comes to a decision.
“You really hated me in the beginning, didn’t you? Back then. Early days.”
Gary smiles slightly, amused, but doesn’t look away from the soundly sleeping baby. It’s something they do from time to time, after a particularly bad game or an injury, or just a day that tries to kill one’s spirit. There’s something impossibly soothing in the way a sleeping child looks, the calm and the promise of tomorrow.
Jamie walks over to him and stands right next to him, shoulder bumping his.
“Yea, you could say that,” Gary responds, not losing the smile but now he looks at Jamie, who nods.
“It seems to me like we’ve skipped a step, you know. The two of us.”
“A step? What are you going on about, Carra?”
Jamie looks at him and it’s suddenly very serious, and he shifts on his feet like he always does when he’s nervous. Gary still finds it incredible that he knows these little details about him. That he’s allowed to know them.
“We went from me wanting to punch your face in, to teammates, to friends, and then skipped a step and landed straight in the family business, you see. All diapers, no romance.”
And there it is. The deep exhale before a pen. A stadium waiting on the edge of their seats.
“I had no idea you needed to be romanced, James.” Gary’s smile widens before he moves to frame Jamie’s face with his hands, and gently pulls until the other man gets on with the program.
The kiss is almost careful but not hesitant, and oh so tender that it makes Jamie’s heart hurt with how full it feels. It’s perfect even if a little ungraceful, and a couple of years too late. Or perhaps just in time?
Lizzie sleeps peacefully, unaware that something in the world just changed for the better.