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When the wind of change blows, some people build walls, some build windmills.
Chinese proverb
Roy Kent’s bark is worse than his bite - in most cases. (A few foreheads might beg to disagree.) He finds it easier to growl his fellow tykes into a distance, starting with the little tykes at Sunderland who’d have made short work of him and Blankie if it hadn’t been for Roy lashing out in what was still a pretty high-pitched voice.
Fast-forward thirty years to 2020, and Roy directing his bike and “I’m gonna kill you” at Jamie Tartt after he went through more pratfalls than a fucking rodeo clown. It’s nothing, innit? Only him letting out a day's worth of stoked-up frustration - the match, the loss, Jan Maas’s smug Dutch and the smugger ring in Rebecca’s voice, imparting to Roy that he brought another loss on himself. So many losses gnawing at him, until he can feel the pang of them in the very breath taken out of his ribcage and doesn’t think, doesn’t pause, only reroutes his lungs to the next soothing growl.
I’m gonna kill you.
Jamie knows it’s nothing. Has been on the receiving end of Roy’s lungs, off and on, long enough that he can tell when Roy is mad for real and when Jamie is paying the toll for about everything in Roy’s current affairs. Even before Roy charged at him, they’d been horsing around on that empty square - Roy threatening to throw the cat’s-cradle of steel and wheels at Jamie’s head, Jamie’s Try and hit me guidance. Fuck, it’s not real, ’course it’s not, so why is Jamie backing away from him with one arm raised, why is he slipping, tilting, why is Roy, fuck -
- fisting the brake levers on instinct, flinging himself and the bike sideways, hard, so they won’t run over that sharp crack of Jamie’s wrist meeting with the Dutch pavement.
The crack is at once familiar and surreal. It’s nothing Roy hasn’t heard before in half a lifetime of playing hurt, and it’s Roy crawling over to where Jamie is struggling up, white-faced, his body fighting him to curl around his wrist. Fuck. Fuck fucking fuck goes Roy’s breath -
“Fuck,” Jamie says under his own. Then, with his head lowered - “Sorr-eh, Coach.”
Roy’s breath stops altogether.
“Didn’t mean to slip,” Jamie mutters on. “Made a right cock-up of it, me.”
Roy says nothing. Only stretches his own hand out, the two of them kneeling, shadowed by the night sky overhead. Oddly enough, it’s only them - the crash ignored, possibly unheard by the passers-by across the square, what with the loud flow of cars. His fingers brush Jamie’s hunched shoulder, even as Roy prepares his breath for the usual trite comfort. He’s hardly a novice in matters of falls; has witnessed fouls, tackles, sores and bruises of all stripes, and once scored a beauty against the Spurs with two ribs cracked. In the greater, harsher scheme of a footballer’s life, Jamie’s wrist barely qualifies.
Jamie’s wrist, which he last saw executing that lovely, lighthearted somersault.
“Oi,” Roy says, raucous from the onrush of guilt. “It’s okay, you’re okay, you’re gonna be okay. Eh?” He swallows around the guilt. “Let’s get you to the ER, that must be hurtin’ some. Here, get your feet under you” - their lesson inverted, Roy’s arm carefully guiding Jamie to verticality - “and I’ll flag us a car. Eh, lad?”
But Jamie is staring, disconsolately, at the capsized bike.
“It’s okay,” Roy repeats, his voice still parched. “I was shit at it, anyway.”
Jamie is shaking his head, but he lets Roy’s hand linger on, maneuver him to the street where there has to be a car Roy can stop and direct any-fucking-where they’ll fix Jamie and give Roy’s lungs a fucking break, and let Roy resume custody of his fucking hand - but not before.
Jamie still looks unconsolable in the car.
He looks forlorn in the ER hall, shuffling his feet about until Roy sits him on one of those impossibly stiff-backed plastic chairs and goes to grapple with insurance forms. He calls and texts Higgins, obviously lost to his one-night’s stand with the Red Light district; passes on reaching Beard; leaves messages to Ted, Rebecca and Isaac. By the time he makes it back to Jamie’s side, it’s been claimed by a nurse with painkillers and one of those minuscule paper cups Phoebe keeps begging Ruth to snag for her tea parties.
“... wanted to find a windmill,” Jamie is telling the nurse. “For Roy. That’s me old man, over here.”
The woman turns to beam at him with the awww face that God apparently designed as Roy Kent’s bespoke curse.
“Aren’t you lucky,” she says while Roy stares back, not parsing her tone. “Now let me check again with Dr. Mertens, and I’ll get back to you the moment she has an opening.”
She leaves, and Roy slips into his seat, the plastic mold quite malevolent to his spine. Jamie’s face is back to stricken - more than a footballer’s face has any call to be when it comes to arms vs. legs. But then Jamie glances down at his white sneakers (he really loves those - Roy suspects another gift from his mum) and whispers, “Guess you won't train me no more, then.”
Oh.
“You fucking wish,” Roy says, his whole arm reaching out for Jamie’s frame and - Roy realizes only now - Jamie’s sadness. Whatever dark spin Jamie’s mind is putting on his fall, including a visit from karma for busting Roy’s knee all those months ago, Roy will shoot it the hell down. “We have ten years of archive for you to browse if you are to learn from example. The fuck you’re playing truant, Tartt.”
“Oh,” says Jamie, a belated echo, and, just like that, his face sort of lights up with baffled joy, visible across the physical pain. Like the crack earlier, the joy is both eerie and familiar to Roy - calling up the memory of Keeley’s face under her own blond mane, when Roy first asked her out. She’d looked just like Jamie does. And Roy doesn’t know what to make of that, except that it’s weird. But okay-weird, because Roy’s had Keeley on his mind all day, right? Except for the time he spent running after Jamie. And learning from Jamie about Amsterdam. And then learning how to bike, and how deeply Jamie-in-pain can freak him out.
Still. It’s a parallel, is all - like and equal are two different things, like Madeleine l’Engle says.
“Yeah. Yeah, okay, Coach…”
And it’s a good thing these fucking chairs are so close, because when Jamie tries to shove his hand into the pocket of his track jacket, Roy is here to block his arm gently.
Is here to gather the sum of Jamie to him, like he did before - Jamie’s... Jamieness, his sunniness and resilience, somehow made over to Roy. And that should be a problem, right? Because Keeley was - is - sunny and resilient, and all her beauty ever did in the end was to leave Roy stranded, through no fault of hers; only his fucking mood, tripping him every time she carved another notch up the scale of fame.
As will Jamie (Roy will see to it that he does). But it’s another experience entirely, because running with or after Jamie never feels like Roy is falling back. Thing is, Roy has seen Jamie fall, too; has held Jamie, even with his knee bitched and busted, up against shame - the worst odds a man can face in Roy’s book. When they run, they run shoulder to shoulder. And when Roy feels exhausted, or mopey, or his grief threatens to catch up with him, Jamie is here to distract him with a hoog, or a Wikipedia tidbit. Or a bike.
Fuck. It’s only just dawning on Roy, how far and how easily he became Jamie’s debtor - only Jamie would never think of calling him that. To Jamie he is Coach. Somehow Roy feels that he could spend the next decade watching Jamie blaze his way through football history, and Jamie, today’s Jamie, would still turn to him as he does now, his head entrusted to the crook of Roy’s arm, and say with that newfound openness -
“The doctor will see you now, Mr Tartt. Your partner is welcome, unless he’d rather wait here.”
“I’m not his -”
“Sure,” Jamie says, undaunted as ever. The painkillers seem to have pepped him up, at least momentarily. “Wouldn’t go anywhere without me old man. Huh. This sort. Th’other is a bleedin’ pain in me arse.”
“I see.” The elderly nurse smiles fondly. “Well, let’s see what we can do for the non-bleeding pain.”
As it turns out, to Roy’s and Jamie’s common relief, what the latter suffered is a non-displaced fracture and not a scaphoid one, which Dr. Mertens explains in broken English would be a much tougher ordeal. Jamie’s fracture is the garden variety that will require plenty of icing and resting, but no surgery that she can see.
“Goody,” Jamie says while she immobilizes his wrist with professional expertise and a brace. “Couldn’t play with a fever that high, and I’d hate to let the team down, see.”
“That would be typhoid, Mr Tartt,” the doctor smiles. The Tartt Way is obviously on its way to charming the entire hospital, not that Roy can blame them.
Not, that is, until Dr. Martens turns her expertise on him and starts layering on advice with an intensity that would make Ted proud. Halfway into the next minute Roy discovers that not only is he to stay by Jamie (he intends to anyway), he is also to supervise his partner’s eating, sleeping and showering routine for the next three weeks.
He is opening his mouth to protest when Jamie turns to him with that vulnerable glow and his braced hand against his heart, and Roy finds himself melting.
“And here’s the prescription for painkillers,” Dr. Mertens says, adding, “the strong ones. He can have another in an hour or so, but that’s all for tonight. And strictly nothing else that Amsterdam can offer.”
Jamie’s eyes turn round at her tone. Then he looks at Roy, and his gaze turns thoughtful.
“Fuck no,” Roy says.
They’re back to where they were before, that bit of pavement facing the faux windmill thingie that Roy still thinks is atrocious and Jamie thinks will do the trick with a little help from painkillers (for him) and a space cake (for Roy).
Roy thinks this is the worst idea on a scale from starring in reality TV to I’m gonna kill you.
(Dumping Keeley Jones probably features on the scale, though Roy would be hard pressed to say where.)
“I’m supposed to take care of you! How can I do that and go fucking high on weed?”
“You don’t have to eat all of it,” Jamie says coaxingly. He had the taxi driver make a pit stop at Basjoe, a place known to him from his previous prick-induced-emergency-stop. Apparently Basjoe bakes the safest space cakes in Amsterdam, if such a thing exists. They’re called Rainbow Cakes and are, to the best of Roy’s estimation, gluey sponge biscuits dyed pink and yellow. Roy doubts Nigella would vouch for them.
“No.”
“Only a spoonful, then. For Grandad.”
“No.”
“For Amsterdam.”
“No.”
“For me?”
Roy opens his mouth, but that’s when he feels the soft burden of Jamie’s head on his shoulder - thank god for the bench they found, after he agreed not to return to the hotel if Jamie agreed not to spend the night on a street bollard.
“Just a teeny-tiny bit,” Jamie coaxes softly. “Just so you can see the real thing.”
Roy grunts, but Jamie is warm against his side, Roy's jacket draped over his shoulders, his weight abandoned to Roy’s two-armed embrace. He crumbles the atrocity between his fingers and brings a few yellow crumbs to his mouth. They can’t do much harm, he guesses, and they’ll make Jamie happy.
“Like it when you hoog me,” comes next, Jamie’s drugged bliss made palpable when he places his lips to the side of Roy’s neck for his next hummed words. “Wish you’d do it more. Like, often-more.”
And the crumbs must be doing some funny business on their own, because when Jamie lifts his head, and Roy bends his own to listen better, the air sensitive between their mouths, he can feel the touch of Jamie’s words before they find his ear.
“ ‘Cause it makes me glad,” Jamie says simply. “When I’m with you. Glad and… happy, and warm. And safe. Like now.”
His lips touch Roy’s, a brief, soft, humid affirmation that leaves Roy’s mouth thirsty on the inside.
He never knew until now that thirst could be a comfort.
“An' sleep-eh,” Jamie concludes happily, before he tucks his face back into Roy’s chest, his braced wrist safely laid across his and Roy’s knees, pressed together. He kisses Roy’s throat once more for good measure and closes his eyes.
Roy keeps his open, a sentinel to Jamie’s rest. When he looks up after a while the windmill is huge, a winged tower, strong and playful, grounded yet open to the unpredictable wind. Roy strokes his fingers across the tips of Jamie’s, peeping out of the brace, and down Jamie’s shock of hair, and listens to Jamie’s occasional Mancunian snore, and looks at the real thing.