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Benitez comes on the Tuesday after what will come to be known as the transfer-which-will-not-be-named. Marcelo already knows what this means. He doesn’t want it.
He tries to push Rafa away, to tell him to take back that godforsaken piece of cloth. He is happy being third captain; he doesn’t want this. It hits him after the words escape his mouth that there is no captain, no vice captain. Only him.
“The fans, they want you,” Benitez says. “They picked you over Cristiano.”
He can’t say no. He can’t let them down anymore—they’ve had enough heartbreak after the season collapsed. They lost their captain, their savior, all the spirit that brought them la Decima. It’s all gone.
“I can’t let down the fans,” he says. Benitez looks pleased, blissfully unaware of the pain that weighs down his chest like a hundred stones.
When Rafa leaves, he goes into his room and cries. Iker’s number runs through his head and he isn’t brave enough to call it.
The next few nights are haunted with armbands and perfectly shaped C’s that feel more like a brand than an honor.
Iker’s commanding air is missing, and the next practices are empty and dull. Marcelo is not himself, and Benitez tries to talk to him, and he leaves before he can. Valdebebas feels more like a funeral home than a training ground.
For a week, Marcelo never smiles.
Time dulls all wounds, they say. By the second week he’s given responsibilities he’s not sure how to handle; Iker did it all before. Sergio did it—well, maybe time hadn’t dulled it quite enough.
He still cries at night. He should have seen it all coming, but he never thought it’d be him. He didn’t want the responsibility of being what Iker always was—and he never would be. He was a joker, a friend, but he was not Iker, and he was not Sergio, and he didn’t know how to lead the way they always did.
The team revolved around Iker Casillas and Sergio Ramos. Now it felt like the entire world was spinning off its axis and Rafa Benitez, in some strange decision, made Marcelo their new center of gravity.
He finally calls Iker, and he cries on the phone. Iker feels like a captain from far away, calming him the way he has for years and telling him what to do. He tells Marcelo to be himself, to lead the team, not to change, and never cave under the pressure. Marcelo whispers confirmations into the phone, but in reality he has no idea how he’s going to do it all.
When he gets off the phone, it hurts less, but he’s afraid.
“I am worried about you.”
Marcelo puts on a fake smile and cocks his head to the side, trying to pass as the innocent, fun-loving person he was before, and Benitez almost buys it.
“Why?”
“You aren’t in high spirits,” Benitez says, “is there something wrong?”
Marcelo’s smile doesn’t break, but he licks his lips and concentrates and tries not to meet Rafa’s eyes.
“I’m wondering if Cristiano would be the better captain,” he says, voice unnaturally cheery; the tone doesn’t match the words and Benitez looks shocked.
“Cristiano said you would make the better captain,” Benitez says, a look of confusion darting across his features, and Marcelo wants to punch Cristiano in the face.
He does, next practice session, remembering the times he couldn’t even get his water bottle open without Cristiano’s help, and accuses Cristiano of lying. They argue, and Marcelo leaves practice early.
That night, he calls Cristiano and they talk for hours until finally Cristiano comes over and lies next to him and they try to remember fondly the memories of their captains who left them the biggest shoes to fill.
They argue over the armband four more times before Cristiano can finally convince Marcelo to keep it.
“Swear you’ll be my vice captain,” he begs.
Cristiano smiles through eyes wet with tears, “for you, I will.”
“I never wanted this responsibility,” he tells Cristiano as they lay out in the grass, Marcelo’s eyes watching flickering stars. “I never thought they’d both leave.”
Cristiano is watching Marcelo; his gaze is curious, thoughtful, and sad. “Bad things happen to good people.”
Marcelo rolls over and looks at him with a strange, empty look. “Are we really good people? Am I a good person? I—” He seems to falter, sadness rushing back into his eyes, and he drops his gaze to the blades of grass by his arm.
“Marcelo,” Cristiano says, “why would you think that? You’re the captain of Real Madrid.”
Before he can stop himself, Marcelo is crying again. “I’m captain because two of my best friends left me for—for greener—pastures—“ He’s choking on his own words; they come out in rough, broken sobs.
Cristiano pulls himself upright, grabbing Marcelo by the shoulders and then touching each side of his face.
“I have faith in you,” he whispers. “You—you feel like you can never fill the holes they left, don’t you?”
Marcelo only nods, and Cristiano tries to smile a little, tears of his own joining Marcelo’s in the grass.
“We’re in this t-together,” he says uncertainly. “We—we can’t tell anyone that we were crying in the grass—we have to make them think we’re strong.”
The team is fragile enough as it is and neither of them wants to rattle it any more.
“We should make an oath, like children do,” Marcelo says. “Promise we’ll stick together.”
Cristiano holds out his pinky. “Like this?”
Marcelo wraps his pinky finger around Cristiano’s and they stay like that, fingers hooked, watching each other and trying to hold back any more tears. It’s only the call of an owl in the distant trees that pull them apart.
That night, they fall asleep side-by-side. The next morning, Marcelo wakes up to find Cristiano’s arm draped protectively over him, and he doesn’t try to move.
Benitez tells Marcelo he looks better lately, that something has changed. Cristiano sends him comforting smiles at training, and when they leave for the preseason tour they request to be roommates. Benitez is too worried about the health of the team to tell their captain ‘no’, so the request is granted without a question.
The first night, they sleep in separate beds.
Marcelo dreams that the captain’s armband opened up into a giant black hole that sucked him in and dropped him into a bottomless pit. Cristiano shakes him awake and makes a spot for him in his bed, and the nightmare doesn’t return.
The first time Marcelo dons the armband against Roma in Melbourne, he’s terrified. Cristiano squeezes his hand in the tunnel and he gives his first team pep talk.
His voice shakes the entire time, but he smiles, and he thinks he does okay. Cristiano’s eyes never leave him. He still feels like the weight of the world is on his shoulders, but the world doesn’t feel quite as heavy anymore.
They win 2-0 and the air feels like magic.
There might be no Iker, there might be no Sergio, but there is hope.
He and Cristiano skip the party and sit on the balcony of their hotel room and talk. Marcelo doesn’t like the way the chair feels so he makes a nest out of blankets and pillows and Cristiano eventually joins him on the floor.
“You know, they would probably make fun of us if they saw us like this,” Marcelo said. He thought of his teammates. He thought of how he’d done, the way his voice shook—it was still so intimidating. He shivered a little and Cristiano put an arm around him.
“You’re their captain,” is Cristiano’s simple response, and Marcelo nods. He is.
“I miss Iker,” Marcelo says. “I miss Sergio’s jokes—I miss my friends. It was—all the other players that left, it never really hurt like this.”
Cristiano sighs. “Sergio was one of my best friends,” he whispers. “I don’t know how I’ll go through this season without him. I needed him. He would cheer me up when I was sad—just like you.”
Marcelo frowns. “Me?”
Cristiano nods. “Yes, you,” he says. “You forget how funny you are. You keep the team happy. You and Sergio always did.”
Marcelo finds himself staring out at the stars again, wondering where they were—what they were doing, if they were thinking of Real Madrid.
“Marcelo, you’re crying,” Cristiano whispers.
So he was. He turns, buries his head in Cristiano’s chest, and sobs. Cristiano freezes for a moment before relaxing, pulling Marcelo into an embrace, running one hand through the younger man’s curls.
“We made a promise to stick together,” Cristiano says. “I won’t leave you.”
For what could have been minutes or hours, Marcelo cries. There’s a voice in his head telling him to stop being such a baby, but it feels better to get it all off his chest. Cristiano doesn’t seem to mind.
“Do you want to talk about it?” he says. “Why you feel so sad?”
Marcelo pulls away to rest his head on Cristiano’s arm, and he takes a shuddering breath.
“I—I don’t know how I’ll replace them, how I’ll be as good as they ever were,” he says. “I don’t have Iker’s sense of nurturing leadership or Sergio’s…Sergio. I’m not them. I just want to be good enough for the team, but I’m scared. I don’t want to let anyone down.”
“You’ll never let me down,” Cristiano says. “You’re one of the best people I know—that’s why you should be captain. I’m too selfish on the field to be a proper captain. Marcelo, you’re powerful. You can do whatever, wherever, and you’re good at it. You’re so…”
He trails off, not knowing exactly what to say, and Marcelo looks at him for a moment, nervous anticipation bubbling in his chest.
“What?”
“Perfect.”
Marcelo tries to argue with that, but Cristiano doesn’t respond. He’s shifted so he’s watching Marcelo now; his eyes are filled with something undecipherable.
“Cristiano?” he asks. “What?”
Cristiano cups Marcelo’s chin with his hand and hesitates a moment before bringing their faces closer together, stopping when their noses brush together.
Marcelo takes the rest of the initiative, pressing his lips tentatively against Cristiano’s, and suddenly, they’re kissing, and Marcelo’s heart pounds wildly in his chest.
Cristiano kisses him back, hesitantly and cautiously, and when he pulls away and their noses brush again Marcelo can feel his cheeks heating up.
“Oh,” Marcelo says dumbly, and Cristiano smiles before leaning forward and bringing their lips together once more.
“I can’t tell you how this season will go,” Marcelo tells the team, “because we have to earn it. If you have the motivation, you can win—that is a promise, because each and every one of us is talented enough to be on the best team in the world.”
Marcelo’s first loss as captain comes as 1-0 against Tottenham Hotspur, and Cristiano spends the whole night exchanging gentle, comforting kisses with him under the covers of their bed.
Marcelo doesn’t cry, though, and he feels like he’s improving.
He wonders how he’ll handle the regular season, and then he realizes it doesn’t matter. No matter what happens, he’ll do his best to keep everyone in high spirits. They’re a team. They stick together, no matter what.
They have a newfound sense of hope—a new idea that, perhaps, with each other and with the team they can go on even without Sergio Ramos and Iker Casillas.
They’ll move on and become stronger even as the media refers to them as the “Iker-less Real Madrid” and they’ll win trophies—if only through the determination in Marcelo’s heart to do so.
Real Madrid is wounded, but never broken.
Marcelo is scared, but fear is overcome.
No matter who comes and goes, no matter whose legacies are passed on and left behind, Real Madrid remain kings. It’s easy to forget when the times are hard that even kings fight difficult battles—and sometimes, they lose, but true kings stand up stronger. The goal is to win, and to win is the goal, and they will overcome whatever stands in their way to do it.
Marcelo understands it now, and as he lies with Cristiano under that blanket, he feels a little less inadequate. He still isn’t sure how to fill the gaps that Iker and Sergio left behind, but he won’t be doing it alone.
He’ll have Cristiano, and the rest of the team. He’ll have Benitez. The staff. He’ll lead them on to victory, and they’ll be a team.
Together, always.
That’s all that matters.