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He remembered what it was like—before.
Lionel Messi was, of course, at the center of everything when you were a football player. He was the idol, the master and the god of the game.
He himself had never been too big a fan, not following him too closely—he’d never liked Barcelona, and since he played in the Prem and wasn’t a starter for England either, they didn’t meet on the pitch too often—but of course that didn’t mean he could deny how incredible he was. Anyone who knew about football, nevermind played it professionally, would be a fool not to understand why some people were mildly convinced that he was some sort of god.
The few times he’d seen him from afar, at award ceremonies or on the pitch, he’d seen things, sometimes, glimpses—noises and sights that his brain wasn’t really built to understand, that his senses weren’t capable of quite perceiving for more than a split second. The shadows would grow long and the stadium lights intense, implacable, headache inducing. The roar of the crowd would turn murderous, screaming for blood like the audience of a gladiator fight and it would sound for a second like it came from him and not all around. There’d be an eyed shadow surrounding him for a second, a trick of the light.
But he knew everyone saw these things. He knew they all brushed it off as exhaustion and something weird with the lights and the intensity of the moment getting to their head. He knew they all had a distant awareness that this was all a lie, of course, and that there was indeed something there, warping reality right next to them; but like animal instinct, like it was programmed to do so, their mind would brush it all off, knowing it was better not to think about it too much, not to speak of it, pretend it wasn’t there. Like a collective, instinctual agreement; knowing if they thought too much about something even their senses and brain warned them they couldn’t process, something bad would happen.
Then something happened in him, and this agreement broke. From one day to the other, it was like he snapped out of a dream—England played a friendly against Argentina and suddenly he could see it. Or, rather; he couldn’t not see it, anymore. He couldn’t help it, though he tried.
Messi had taken a second longer to shake his hand than he had the others, looking at him with a slightly more focused look, and he’d actually felt kind of flattered at that, wondering if he knew who he was—maybe Emiliano, their keeper at Villa, who also played for Argentina, had mentioned him when talking about his club. He was starting today instead of sticking to the bench as one of the midfielders had felt a slight pain yesterday, and he walked on the field with a step that was slightly more confident than usual.
Thinking back on it, he was pretty sure that it had happened at the exact moment when the referee blew the whistle, because suddenly something was different. When he looked up, he saw it, and almost screamed.
He saw whatever was wearing Lionel Messi’s skin, under the disguise; saw the cacophony of eyes and wings and roars bubble up and tear at the seams of the human appearance, huge and twisting, the thin needles of golden light trying to prickle through the skin and feathers. He saw the wings fluttering at its feet, the thousand eyes blinking open on its body, its immense, shifting shadow behind it—felt the stadium change and shift and groan like a living, animal thing awakening, the lights sharpen and the sounds of the crowd change, the sky grow further and further away above him as the stadium grew larger, taller, until he could barely see the stars above him, like he was trapped on the bottom of a well—then he couldn’t tell the stars apart from the lights of the stadium at all.
Everybody kept playing as if nothing had happened. For a moment all he felt was horrified, baffled confusion, his mind trying to process what he was seeing, feeling, and failing entirely—he felt like he was lacking a sense that would allow him to grasp what was in front of him, like his own five weren’t enough, and knew they weren’t, desperately trying nonetheless and falling short.
Then a defender ran in front of the thing, but it didn’t stop. It kept running, ball at its feet like an extension of its shifting form, and ran through the defender’s body.
He screamed as he saw his teammate’s torn apart form collapse unto the grass with a splatter of dark blood, bones bared to the far away, invisible skies, ribcage ripped open and guts spilling onto the wet grass.
His horrified confusion from earlier abruptly vanished and was replaced by an overwhelming, visceral sense of fear . Like a cornered prey, he felt so overwhelmed with it that he almost ran away, away, as far away from that thing as he could.
Fortunately he was frozen still, and his scream was drowned out by the roar of the crowd as the thing scored, because he blinked and suddenly his teammate was standing there again, whole, seemingly intact, frustrated at having been nutmegged. There was still blood in the grass.
For a second, he thought he’d dreamed it, but then it happened again, and again, until the pitch was littered with bodies. He did his best not to scream the next few times. The thing’s eyes were legion and looked everywhere, all focused on different parts of the stadium, dark and wide and shifting, distinctly unhuman despite the fact that they looked exactly like the two ones the human body wore.
He tried to play normally, well aware that there were dozens of eyes on him at all times watching his every move, and asked to be taken out as soon as he recovered enough sense to. As he walked off, he felt the things’ eyes on him—the thousand ones fluttering above him, casted into wings and metal groaning rings, but also the two ones on its human-looking form. It looked intrigued.
He said he needed to go to the bathroom and threw up between heaving gasps as soon as he was out of sight.
The defenders came back, but they came back—not quite the same. Not quite as human. Every time they looked a little less like themselves, like puppets, replicas of their former selves that based themselves on the latest copy and so, progressively, lost details of the originals along the way, a little more every time. For some it was just small, almost unnoticeable—but for those that it had brought back many times over the years, it became impossible to ignore.
He desperately tried to go back to the way things were, back when his mind let him or even forced him to ignore the thing, back when he could just pretend it wasn’t there and go on about his day.
But he couldn’t stop seeing it. He tried to stay away from any mentions of it, but being a footballer and avoiding Lionel Messi was simply impossible. He tried locking himself in his house and not talking to anyone for a couple of days, but even then, it was all he could think about, his mind putting all its energy into desperately trying to understand what he’d seen, driving him insane with it—he tried overworking himself, keeping his mind off it, but nothing worked. Finally he had to sit down and contemplate, wonder why he could suddenly see this thing when nobody else could. Why he’d awoken, after having walked asleep and happy his whole life.
He didn’t think he was anything special. He certainly didn’t think it was something he’d done—he was quiet and average, didn’t go looking for trouble, did his job and went home and ate and slept like everyone else. He didn’t have any particular amounts of imagination or curiosity either. He was average in every way, except for the fact that whatever veil covered everyone else’s eyes to stop them from seeing what their brain couldn’t comprehend had been ripped from his own.
Why, was the question.
He watched defender after defender torn apart, under everyone’s eyes, unnoticed as they were quietly replaced by something else.
He watched a Clásico and saw Ramos torn to shreds at least five times in ninety minutes, five different corpses of his all ripped in different ways and littering the grass of the Barnabeu. The next time they saw each other he was almost nauseous just by looking at him, at the walking husk of what he’d once been, a manic but cold, unhuman glint in his eyes. He laid awake that night, horrified at the mere thought of what, exactly, was being brought back, what these beings that played and lived by their side were, these not quite right imitations of humans.
He saw everyone turn a blind eye, stutter and get that far away look in their eyes when he tried to get the truth through to them, still working unknowingly into the immense machine built to entertain the thing, a million cogs working to keep it amused, the most famous and successful of them all yet ultimately unseen for what it really was.
So maybe, he concluded, maybe he was supposed to help them. Maybe he was allowed to see so that he could warn those who couldn’t, so they could do something, stop whatever that thing was, end the carnage.
He decided to start with his club teammates. Dibu, especially, deserved to know. He cohabited with that thing on the daily every international break; the mere thought of it made him want to throw up again, he was having a tough enough time in a whole different country, only seeing him occasionally and mostly from afar. He couldn’t imagine living in the same training grounds, sharing a locker room with it, even.
So, the next time his path met the thing wearing Lionel Messi’s body, the next time Barcelona played against Aston Villa, he gathered his teammates in the locker room, right before the game, his speech ready, his mind made up.
“It’s about Messi,” he said.
The coach shot him a puzzled look. He’d already given them a speech about how good Messi was minutes before, they’d seen at length how they’d try and stop him; and he’d been sitting at the back thinking that all that planning would be useless if they all ended up ripped to shreds under the unforgiving stadium lights anyway.
He looked around the room, trying to convey how important this was, how attentive they had to be. He looked at Emiliano’s tall frame, at the coach, then the others, one by one, and readied himself to speak the truth, to force them to listen if he had to, to snap them out of their daze, to wake them up.
He looked back at them one by one, taking a deep breath. The coach. And then his eyes fell on Dibu again.
Dibu blinked and suddenly, an eye ripped itself open on the keeper’s forehead.
He froze, eyes widening, doing everything in his power not to scream. He couldn’t help a terrified step back, his whole body alert and covered in goosebumps. The eye, on Dibu’s forehead, blinked lazily, but it was set on him, dark and focused.
It was familiar, of course. He’d seen the same eye before, two on the thing’s human mask, a thousand in a hive around it.
Shaking uncontrollably, he tried to calm himself down, aware of the whole team’s focus on him, but most importantly of the third eye Dibu didn’t seem to notice at all, still looking at him expectantly, as if confused about why, exactly, he’d stopped talking. “G-good luck,” he stammered out, feeling bile in his throat, threatening to fill his mouth. “We—we’ll be fine.” He took a step back, tried to hide into the crowd that was still a bit confused at his mumbled out, short speech, doing his best to escape the eye’s focus. He tried moving behind Dibu. The eye blinked and disappeared from the keeper’s forehead, then reappeared on the back of Dibu’s neck, following him. He tried not to react, but he turned white as a sheet, pale and shaky.
He asked to be removed from the bench and said he was sick so he could avoid coming to training for the next few days. He couldn’t stand to even look at Emiliano.
It happened a couple more times after that. An eye stared at him from the palm of Lisandro Martinez’s hand in a game against United. Cristian Romero, after exchanging his shirt, walked past him and that same eye blinked at him from between his naked shoulderblades. Argentinians, every time, he noticed. He saw it on Dibu a couple more times too, and that one worried him more, because he knew him, and shared a locker room with him.
What had that thing done to Emiliano exactly? He felt both terrified and angry on behalf of the man who’d always been, albeit a little off-putting, nothing but kind to him since he’d arrived in Birmingham. Whatever this thing was, it had done something to the keeper, and he was determined not to let it go unnoticed.
But he had eyes everywhere. This could mean anyone else might’ve been taken—who did he have to worry about? Any Argentinian, any of its former teammates in general? Did he have to start keeping track of who came from Barça, who came from La Liga, even? Did he have to worry about them all? Was Dibu really himself, or had he been replaced, like all the dead-eyed, mechanical puppets he’d seen the thing bring back after having had its fun with them and leaving them a bloody splatter on the grass? Dibu looked human enough. His hands were warm, still. But that eye—even when it wasn’t there, he could feel a certain faint presence surrounding Emiliano that was alarmingly similar to the one around the thing.
He asked Buend í a about Messi; the winger went on and on about how he was planning on playing for Spain, and how one talk with Messi had easily swayed him into playing for Argentina, instead. He said it like it was the most natural thing in the world—like changing your career and your life at one man’s orders or even mere suggestion, after having just met him, made perfect sense. He talked to Lenglet next, a loan from Barça. The man had a dopey grin on his face immediately when Messi was brought up and started ranting on and on about his football abilities, his gentleness and leadership, how good and kind a man he was—he’d spent several years playing by his side before Barça started loaning him off, and once the topic was brought up he didn’t seem capable of shutting up about it. To anyone else it might’ve just seemed like admiration with some hero worship mixed in, but he was starting to hear some words that returned a little too often, and an eagerness in his voice that sounded almost like fanaticism.
When he alluded to something strange, trying to sneak in some words about eyes and wings and golden lights, about the roar of a crowd and the spark of a thunderstorm, Lenglet’s eyes grew distant and his smile fell a bit. “That’s Leo,” he said a little dismissively, as if to let him know the conversation was over.
He went to the bathroom and washed his face after that talk, growing increasingly frustrated, feeling powerless; he was pretty sure whatever that thing was, it wasn’t a thing you could kill, but the only other alternative that occurred to him—exposing it—was seeming more and more impossible. Plus, there was a new, nagging worry at the back of his mind. He’d first been worried about Dibu, about the defenders, about Buend í a and Lenglet, but it was starting to dawn on him that he ought to think about himself too.
Clearly, the many defenders it had left splattered across the pitch didn’t remember it, weren’t aware that they were something different and that their eyes lost their shine a little more every time they faced him—Emiliano and the others with the dark eye ripped open on their skin didn’t flinch at it, maybe they weren’t aware it was there, either—so, if it happened to him—would he have any way of knowing? What if the thing had ran through him dozens of times and rebuilt him at will, what if to others he also looked dead and cold like a puppet? What if it had used his body like it did theirs, what if it had done it dozens of time and he couldn’t remember, what if it had opened an eye on his body before, what if there was an eye open on his forehead right now —
He looked at himself in the mirror, terrified, and felt only mild relief when what looked back at him seemed human and warm and only two eyes stared back at him—because ultimately, he couldn’t know if he’d be able to see it if it was there.
After seeing that terrifying eye one too many times, he decided he had to do something. He waited for it to be gone, for Dibu to go back to a somewhat normal state, and followed him into the locker room after training, waiting until it was just the two of them to walk up to him. Dibu startled a bit, looking down at him with a slight frown, surprised at the urgency in his voice.
“Did he do something to you?” he asked him, voice low and rushed, grasping at Dibu’s sleeve. “Do you need help?”
Instead of any of the reactions he’d expected—fear, confusion, a cry for help—something like understanding came over Dibu’s face, as his lips stretched into a slight grin.
His hand came up to cradle his face, long, enormous fingers wrapping around his skull and holding him just tight enough that he let out a tiny pained squeal, surprised. Dibu’s head tilted to the side, an almost condescending smile baring his teeth at him like a wild animal.
There was a shift in the air—the taste of ozone and clean feathers, cut grass and metallic blood was heavy on his tongue. The crack of thunder like a whip, the fluttering of powerful wings and the roar of a crowd filled his ears for a second, deafening, then got muffled and distant, background noise. His skin prickled with goosebumps so suddenly it was almost painful, and he felt the strong urge to fall to his knees.
He almost screamed when he looked at Dibu again and realized it wasn’t him staring back. He didn’t know how he knew, but he did. He looked like himself, it was his face, his body, but something in his eyes, his expression, the suffocating pressure in the air—he gasped, a quiet, pained rasp.
“He’s okay,” the thing promised using Dibu’s mouth, voice different from the keeper’s, tone calming but sounding distorted and off, as he stared at him with wide dark eyes that were almost kind. “He doesn’t want help.” Does he need help, had been his question, and he wanted to point it out but he felt like if he spoke he’d start crying, break into uncontrollable sobs right there and then. Already his knees were so weak that only Dibu’s hand on his face really held him up, because the grip was so firm that he felt like if he let himself fall to his knees, his head would get ripped clean off his shoulders. It was nonsensical a thought, but he could hardly think straight right now, his whole body having a visceral reaction to the thing wearing Dibu’s skin in front of him, desperately trying to make sense of it, making him shake and hurt with a deep feeling of wrongness.
Something shifted again, less stark a contrast but still noticeable. Dibu’s eyes still weren’t his, but his smile was, as it widened into a psychopathic grin, showing off all his teeth like a shark, and his voice was the louder, giddy one he was used to hearing from the goalie. “Can I kill him?” he asked, frantic and excited. He tried not to yelp at that. Dibu’s smile fell to meet his eyes’ expression better, and his head lolled to the other side in a disarticulated, unhuman manner, like a puppet’s when its strings slipped off the puppeteer’s hand for a second. When he spoke, his voice was low and soft again, a gentle yet commanding mumble, accent rosarino instead of marplatense once more. “ No , cariño, we talked about this.” His mouth fell into a disappointed pout, distinctly Dibu’s this time, then the face shifted again, eyes still focused on him.
He let out a quiet squeak under those burning eyes, the first sound that he’d managed to produce since the shift had happened.
The thing’s lips curled slightly at that, and it kept looking at him with calm, amused attention, a detached kind of curiosity that made him feel like some vaguely odd animal, there to entertain until he lost the benefit of novelty.
“Please,” he breathed, eyes huge like a cornered prey, finally managing to muster up the strength to speak. He could feel the shadows of the room curling around him like thorny hands. He was covered in cold sweat, shaking uncontrollably, unable to look away from what was standing in front of him.
The thing hummed quietly in acknowledgement, and in a heartbeat the pressure of the room changed again, emptying of something huge and invisible like the air had been abruptly sucked out of the room. He felt something like feathers against the skin of his back for a second, despite the fact that he was still wearing his jersey, which made him jump again.
Dibu let go of him and he stumbled, falling against the wall and only managing to stay up by leaning his weight on it. Dibu tapped his cheek with a grin. “Good talk,” he said, and walked off, a bounce to his step.
It took him a long time to finally compose himself enough to stand on his feet and walk again. There was a painful ringing in his ears and a thick and metallic taste of cold blood on his tongue; he went to the bathroom half-expecting to have bitten his tongue and find his lips red, but there was nothing. It took days until he could taste anything else.
He laid in his bed and replayed the conversation over and over, the shift in the air. He tried to understand Emiliano’s role in all this, why he seemingly accepted the hold the thing had over him, wondering whether his mind was still his at all.
He wondered what the thing was, too. His mind didn’t like those thoughts at all. It went back to them over and over, obsessively, then when it actually tried to get answers it hissed and recoiled like it had been burned, leaving him incapable of stopping his thoughts from wandering there, with a terrible, headsplitting headache that no painkillers could soften.
He had come to think of it as the thing because although he knew it wasn’t human, of course, he couldn’t quite grasp what it was; not in exact words, because he was certain whatever it was didn’t have a name, but in a more general sense. Was it a creature, some sort of beast, or an intelligence, like a computer program, was it something religious, something mythical, something animal, was it an idea, was it a place? Amidst his painful questions, one thing felt unshakeable and certain, though. He’d heard all the talk of Leo Messi being an alien, from another planet—but he knew, somehow, that wasn’t the case. The thing was from here. It’d been shaped and grown from something earthly but distinctly not human.
It felt like the terrifying feeling you’d get when you were six in your room and became convinced there was something in the dark with you, too scared to scream out for your parents, silent and shaky in your bed. It felt like the awe that came with seeing wild animals, massive creatures like blue whales that felt like they shouldn’t exist, unfathomably big landscapes, the baffled sensation that you couldn’t grasp all there was, there. It felt like the terrifying destruction of a forest fire or the crack of lightning inside a stormy cloud. The rivulets of electricity streaking the sky, the heaviness in the air before the hurricane; the manmade myths of creatures not quite human walking among them and wearing their skin, of gods living atop mountains, of forests and cities and darkness being alive. It felt like the invisible thing cats hiss and stare at in the corner of the room that make you wonder what they can see that you can’t.
It was almost more terrifying, knowing the Earth could grow something like this.
The talk with Dibu hadn’t worked out at all, and all his effort to shake some sense into his teammates had only gotten him weirded out looks and dismissive answers. A certain sense of urgency, or bafflement, too, like they were asking don’t you know we can’t talk about that? He was growing desperate, and the only thing he hadn’t tried yet were the defenders the thing brought back after ripping them apart; and if he was going to speak with one of them, he knew where to start.
The next time they played against Madrid, he rushed over to the Spaniards as soon as the game was over.
“I need to talk to you,” he said, voice rushed and quiet. Ramos squinted at him, looking a little confused like he wasn’t sure what, exactly, he was looking at.
“I’m kinda in a rush—”
“It’s about him ,” he said, insistent, putting as much fear and emphasis on that word as possible.
“Who?” Ramos asked, eyes suddenly sharper, and he knew immediately that the defender knew exactly what he was talking about.
He felt an odd sense of victory, a thrill—there was no defense mechanism rising automatically in Ramos’ mind, making his face go vacant and his words evasive. He knew what he meant, despite his pretend dismissiveness.
“He’s doing something to you,” he said and Ramos scoffed and started walking towards the locker room.
“Either you start making sense, or—”
“You look different. Your eyes—your skin—he’s—listen,” he insisted, growing more and more desperate, he was running out of options, out of people to talk to—“listen, he’s, he’s not—he’s not human, he’s not—”
“Stop talking. You don’t understand,” Ramos said, and his eyes opened wide when he heard the man’s hushering tone—this was the closest he’d come to Ramos—or anyone really, except Dibu of course—actually admitting he knew what he was talking about.
“What don’t I understand? Listen to me, I’ve seen it, he toys with you, tears you apart for fun,” he insisted, grabbing his arm and throwing caution out of the window, trying to make Ramos see by all means necessary, even if it shocked him, or made him seem insane.
“You don’t understand,” he said again. “He—” Ramos stopped right in front of the locker room door, turning back to him with a manic glint in his eye that kind of scared him. “He doesn’t have to bring me back,” Ramos breathed.
He startled. Clearly he’d underestimated how much Ramos knew. But also, there was a glint in his eyes that looked—odd, awed and earnest at the thought of the very thing that had been tearing him apart, almost grateful. The feeling he’d been having that Ramos’ eyes looked less and less human sharpened, suddenly, became impossible to avoid.
The arm under his hands was all at once unbearably cold, the skin feeling wrong, like if he pressed it would not bleed but shatter. He slowly ripped his hands off him, fingers letting go of his arm with growing dread, backing away carefully as nausea took over him again, wondering what he’d just talked to, what he’d just touched, exactly. Ramos snapped out of his daze a bit when he took the step back, and he glanced at him almost pityingly.
“I hope he fixes you,” he said, then opened the door of the locker room and walked in.
He was left there standing, goosebumps covering his skin, wondering what he’d meant by that.
They announced a friendly between England and Argentina, three months away.
If the idea of playing against the thing itself hadn’t been horrifying enough, playing against its whole team, with their puppet bodies and their many eyes, was unbearable. Fortunately, of course, he wasn’t a starter, and he certainly wouldn’t be against Argentina of all teams, the coach wouldn’t risk it. He was sure he’d still feel unsteady even from the bench, but at least he wouldn’t have to step a foot on the pitch.
Two days before the game, a midfielder got sick. A bad cold.
He was first in line to replace him and he knew it; so as soon as he heard about the player’s state and realized what it meant, he grabbed a hammer and hit his foot hard enough to have it go red and painful and hot, swelling nastily. He was fairly certain nothing was broken, but the pain was excruciating, and if his body hadn’t felt so numb and far away lately he’d have screamed himself hoarse all night. Instead he went to sleep, planning on letting it grow ugly and red and showing it to the coach tomorrow. In the morning the swelling was completely gone and his leg looked good as new, healthy and whole. Not only did he not feel any pain but he felt full of energy, almost artificially so.
He thought of a million other things he could try—from taking something that wouldn't let him pass doping control to breaking his leg—but if this hadn’t worked, there was no reason that anything else would. He forcefully convinced himself it wouldn’t be so bad: he’d faced the thing on the pitch before, and as horrifying as it had been he’d lived through it. It was a waking nightmare he’d have to face—he just had to try and act normal for a couple hours.
He was fidgety, jumpy and quiet before the game, but so were his teammates, although for them it was simply the stress of facing off against such a good team, even in a friendly—and of course the eternal excitement of getting to play against Messi.
He looked around the stadium for their rivals with huge and hunted eyes. He finally saw them in the tunnel right before the start, joking and teasing each other, ruffling each other’s hair, speaking loud and laughing like a group of children, playfully kicking and kissing each other on the head. Before the game they looked like kids having immense fun being around each other, but they walked on the pitch like an army, led by the thing and marching as soldiers would, with their usual determination and the intensity that they carried into any stadium, no matter the country or the crowd, whether for a friendly or a cup final.
He kept his head down as he shook their hand, refusing to look any of them in the eyes. Even if he hadn’t felt reality warp and the intent gaze on him, he’d have known which one was the thing’s hand because it burnt painfully against his palm, and when he checked it afterwards as he walked over to his spot on the pitch he was convinced it would be charred or at least covered in sores, but it looked fine. His legs were shaking already. This would be worse than he’d thought. He tried not to look up but now that he was a bit further, he couldn’t help but sneak a glance at the Argentine side of the pitch just as the whistle was about to blow, and there they were, all standing straight and linked by an almost invisible thread of gold to the thing, who stood there with its chin high and its shoulders light, relaxed.
They all had more eyes than they ought to have covering their bodies, and when the whistle blew every single one of them, simultaneously, blinked at once and seemed to sharpen like activated machines.
The whistle set it all in motion—not just the game. He tried to keep an eye on all of them at first, while also trying his best to play as well as possible. They moved in tandem, just slightly too attuned to each other for it to be normal. It was subtle enough that he understood how it could be ignored, but with his eyes sharp and clear and awake, he could see the way they sometimes blinked all at once, the way several of them sometimes moved exactly at the same time, the way they seemed to speak and communicate without needing words and often without even having to look at each other.
The game became a trap and the stadium a mouth, and he felt like his feet were unsteady under him; the feeling of the grass under his soles was always familiar, but today it felt wrong. He thought he could feel it lift up and down, slowly, under his feet, as if the pitch was breathing, like they were playing on the body of some massive, sleeping creature; he thought he could see the crowd in the stands pulse like a heartbeat and the stadium lights grow brighter, nonsensically feeling that they were going to leave his skin painfully sunburnt; he felt irrationally that the ground might rip open like some gigantic dark mouth and swallow him; he felt like if he dug his heels a little too firmly into the grass it might bleed; he thought he could see the grass ripple like waves in the ocean or shudders on the human body, like hairs on an arm standing straight when one gets goosebumps.
The grass rippled like waves and rose slightly in some places as if some enormous seasnake was swimming just under the surface, and he could all too easily imagine it swallowing him whole. Already he felt like he’d been eaten by something massive and alive, like he was inside a ribcage that could easily digest him or make itself smaller and smaller and crush him against metal bone, and if it did nobody around would notice, the very memory of him would be crushed just as easily and none of his teammates would even remember having known him, they’d all just keep playing like nothing had happened at all.
The ground’s breathing and shifting was horrifying, but he couldn’t look away from it—he didn’t dare look up above any of the players' knees anymore. He knew what he’d find if he dared to by now. The sky would be far away and the stands endless; but most importantly the pitch would be haunted by the constellation of blinking eyes and stain glass shards sharp and hungry like a thousand teeth, a painful kaleidoscope: and there would be nobody on the pitch human and awake like him.
He kept his eyes on the ball, made a run with it and suddenly felt someone tackle him and send him flying into the grass to take it back. Before he had time to scramble to his feet, the man walked up to him and reached a hand towards him. He grasped it but still refused to look up. “Come on,” said the voice—Otamendi, he recognized—“you’re no fun.” He felt the hand, instead of helping him up, squeeze his own impossibly tighter, feeling like it would crush his bones like chalk if he didn’t do as requested, and so he hesitantly looked up at Otamendi, who grinned in approval and pulled him up at last. He followed the others’ lead when they started playing again, and now that he was looking at their faces it was like he couldn’t look away, morbidly fascinated, horrified.
It was as if all his teammates had been replaced by blurry versions of themselves, far away, like he was seeing them through water or through some faulty grainy old screen. As for the Argentinians, even now he could barely look at them without his eyes burning.
Their skin shifted and rippled like melted gold and there was light in their veins and skulls as well as blood, and even without speaking to them they were such beings of worship and devotion that he felt they had no mind of their own. Their heads were so full with golden light it spilled over and shone around their heads like a halo in a church’s stained glass, some of it crystalizing into long needles of gold and piercing skull and scalp to form a sunray-like crown, and it might’ve been pretty if it didn’t burn his eyes and if he didn’t see the liquid gold dripping from their eyes, their noses, their ears and their mouths, from their hair where the crowns pierced their way out of their head, down their chins from their lips, staining their jerseys, sometimes sweating through their skin; and he felt sick just looking at them because none of them were real people, he was alone, he was alone .
When he turned away from one of them, it was like it reset; when he looked back the tears tracks were gone and the golden tears started dripping anew, going from clean and almost human to more and more monstrous and foreign the longer he stared at them. He’d never seen this before, despite having seen plenty of these players on the pitch; it was like it was the thing’s proximity, and the fact that they were all together, that was causing this somehow.
Their eyes would grow distant and glassy at times, and then the next minute they were as sharp as broken glass. They played as they moved, ruthlessly, almost violently, and in perfect harmony with each other, closing around the opponent—closing around him —like a rope around a neck.
It was like being stuck inside a thunderstorm, a hurricane, a tornado, a clicking and whirring perfect machine that kept on working towards its purpose, uncaring of what might get caught and crushed between its cogs and wheels in the process. Something you couldn’t shake or change because it was as uncaring of human feelings as any natural catastrophe would be. He felt fear on this pitch, real and visceral, knowing himself to be a mere prey surrounded by a pack of predators on their very own territory, all led and orchestrated by the thing at the center of it all like they were simply its limbs, an extension of it, or like they were all part of a web and he was the ticking mechanic spider at the center of it all, able to simply pull on the web as it pleased and move them closer or further away at will, puppeteering them so expertly it looked natural.
The game was now a hunt, and he could tell he was a fly caught in the web, in the metallic golden net he was growing more and more entangled in the more he battled against it and he couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t breathe.
He stopped and leaned forward to rest his hands on his thighs, trying to take deep breaths instead of little wheezing pants. He had to get up, keep playing, if he stayed down the thing might shatter him to pieces and then what would it bring back in his stead, what if he came back like Ramos, what if— no! the idea was nauseating and he couldn’t breathe .
He fell to his knees; grasped a handful of grass; it didn’t bleed but he’d swear he felt it rise and breathe under his palms, steady and slow; he closed his eyes and the grass suddenly felt like feathers in his shaky hands.
“Hey!” said a voice, friendly and concerned; he looked up and saw one of the Argentinians’ youngest, Julián he thought his name was, eyes big and filled with worry. Nonsensically he thought that maybe this one wasn’t the thing’s, because he looked sweet, and human. He reached for him and let him help him up, stumbling against the boy. “Please get me out of here,” he heaved, “Please get me away from—” he realized his mistake when as he stared at him gold started steadily leaking out of the boy’s mouth, nose, eyes, ears, when a crown of gold and light started growing like mold from his mindless head.
Instead of calling for help, Julián just looked up across the pitch at the thing, knowing instinctively where he was, eyes suddenly sharp and alert, and his heart sank when he saw that. He knew very well that if the thing decided he was to stay on the pitch and keep playing, Julián wouldn’t even spare him another pitying look, just let go of him and go back to his position, and nobody else would do anything, would even notice his distress. He closed his eyes and prayed, quietly. He opened his eyes when Julián moved a bit, and thought he caught a glimpse of eyes on his neck, disappearing under the albiceleste jersey, observing his reaction, but they closed fast enough that he wasn’t sure. The thing must’ve given its approval though because Julián called for the referee and he was escorted off the pitch; he managed to tell the coach, between heaving breaths, that he must’ve caught the cold too, or something like it, because he felt close to passing out.
They lost the game, of course, and the coach was furious. The midfielder that got sick was perfectly healthy and ready for training the next morning despite having been bed-ridden only hours before, and the doctors called the suddenness of his recovery miraculous .
He didn’t know who to talk to anymore. He’d tried everything, and been only ignored, dismissed and threatened.
His mind couldn’t think of anything else, and he couldn’t talk to anyone about it, and so he grew so isolated he barely spoke to anyone at all, sitting dizzy and nauseous for hours, unable to think of anything else, his brain eating itself in a fruitless effort to try and understand what was happening to it and why, why, why.
Eventually, he ran out of options. It became too much.
He couldn’t think of anything else, he couldn’t breathe without feeling overwhelmed with fear, he’d forgotten what having a clear mind felt like, and it became unbearable.
He laid in his bathtub and put an end to the chase, escaping by closing his eyes as the water became pink then red around him.
He awoke slowly, confused. There was something soft under his body, starkly different from the way the bottom of the bathtub had felt against his back. Once he was present enough to feel that he was in a bed, and seemingly alive, he assumed he must’ve been in a hospital, somewhere—but he didn’t understand how he’d gotten here. He let out a long sigh and reached down with one hand, distantly surprised to not feel any pain from the movement, and carefully touched the scars on his wrists. Or at least he touched the perfect, soft skin where scars should have been.
His eyes snapped open. Above him was a familiar ceiling.
He’d died, he knew suddenly, the knowledge filling him suddenly and painfully like a gust of poisoned air swallowed eagerly after ages of not being able to breathe. And this was no hospital room; that was the ceiling of his room, back home. He was in his bed, unharmed, whole.
The slow trickle of dread, like cold water down his spine, inside his spine, replacing his bone marrow, settled in slowly as the horror creeped into him. He’d died.
He’d been brought back.
Slowly, shaking, he sat up on his bed. He looked down at his arms, intact. The memory of players broken then brought back different, not really themselves, was so sharp in his head it felt like it was tearing all reason to shreds, replacing it with a desperate, gasping fear.
Terrified of what he’d see, shaking uncontrollably, he looked up.
He stared at his reflection in the mirror that faced the bed, across the room. His eyes looked dead, his skin was cold and pale like chalk, he looked both familiar and foreign, both himself yet not at all.
The reflection smiled at him, huge and full of teeth. He knew with absolute certitude that he wasn’t smiling back.
Then a dark brown eye blinked itself open on his forehead, ripping at the skin, and looked back at him in the mirror.
He woke up screaming, hands coming up to scratch and tear at his forehead desperately, clawing at the skin and trying to bat off the feeling of wings gently brushing against his shoulders, and only started calming down when the feeling of hot blood trickling down into his eyes forced him to wipe it off with his bedsheets. Once he could see again, he looked up at the mirror across the room—it wasn’t there. There wasn’t a mirror in his room, he remembered with a start. There hadn’t been one since he was fifteen living at his parents’ old house.
He clumsily stumbled to his feet, getting tangled up in his blood-stained sheets, and managed to get himself inside the bathroom. He looked—normal, like himself—terrified, shaking, the skin of his forehead clawed open into wide bloody scratches—but like himself, no dead eyes or freezing skin. No open eye between the rivulets of crimson. The bathtub was empty, white and clean.
He washed the blood off his face and went back to his room, stumbling into the bed and laying on the red-stained sheets. “I won’t,” he whispered to the dark, empty room. “I won’t,” he said again, more desperate, “I won’t,” he said to his discarded jersey on the chair, “I won’t,” he said do the football on the floor and the trophies on his shelf, “I won’t ,” he promised, swore, prayed, vowed, because this was a warning, he knew—don’t take its toy away from it, it would just bring him back, so it could keep playing.
He kept whispering it, low— I won’t, I won’t, I won’t —between exhausted sobs until finally he felt a presence, when he was too tired to even startle as he felt it surround him. It wasn’t quite reassuring, always a dangerous edge to it that didn’t let it feel like something well-intentioned—but it was soothing still, taking mercy on him, surrounding him and dragging him down into a dreamless sleep, as if to say, “I believe you”.
The scratch marks were gone from his forehead in the morning, although the sheets were still stained in blood. A part of him thought maybe it was the thing’s idea of a kindness; healing him but still leaving him proof of what had happened, so he could know that that part, at least, had been real.
The dreams didn’t stop there. Although that one had been a warning, the others were seemingly simple nightmares—but the doubt persisted; maybe they’d been infused into his mind by something else than just his fears—he had no way of knowing. He’d see himself controlled, helpless and terrified, or the remains of a ripped apart body on the pitch, and wake up screaming, heaving and grabbing at his sheets so desperately that he ripped a few. He was already paranoid and fidgety before, so now with his restless nights wearing on him he became a constant bundle of nerves, eyebags heavy under his eyes and hands shaky as if he was stuck in a constant state of insomnia or withdrawal.
He couldn’t trust anyone, in his club, in the others, in his own house, his friends—he didn’t know where the thing’s hold ended. He was constantly checking his reflection and his body for eyes, feathers, scales, anything, and digging his nails into his scalp just in case something was hidden there, too, ripping at his head as if to get to his skull and dig the thing out of it once and for all.
He reached his limit again. Knowing he couldn’t end his life, but not knowing what else to do, he made a decision.
He once again walked up to Dibu, who was alone near the locker taking off his gloves, and who looked up at him as he approached despite the fact that he’d been perfectly quiet. Legs shaky, silent, he walked up to the keeper under his watchful eyes, wide and wild as usual. He raised his hands as if to grab his shoulders, then realized him touching what belonged to the thing might displease it and instead just joined his hands in front of him as if to pray. “Call him,” he panted, “please.”
Dibu raised an eyebrow and a slow, slow smile stretched his mouth into something full of teeth and threats. “Oh?” he just said.
He let out a quiet sob, understanding what he wanted from him, too desperate to even think about not complying. “Please, please, I need to talk to him, please I can’t—I can’t keep—I’m sorry I said you might need help. You don’t, you don’t, you’re lucky to have him, I understand now, I—please call him, I’ll—I’ll do anything you want.” He lied, and knew Dibu might’ve known he was lying, but he remembered Ramos’ grateful and manic behavior, he knew what pleased the thing’s puppets now.
Dibu looked at him for a beat longer, then nodded. Instead of the thing taking over his body like last time, though, he just walked off, patting his shoulder as he walked, but he knew from that nod he’d get what he wanted.
When he came home that night, the thing was sitting on the edge of his bed, the body small and quiet but the shadows, eyes and wings filling up the whole room, and he almost sobbed in both horror and relief when he saw it. His mind didn’t even wonder how it had gotten in—immediately, it went right back to pleading.
“Help me,” he pleaded. “Please, I need you.” He knew he didn’t have to explain what he meant, somehow he knew it would know—and it did.
The thing hummed quietly and reached out for him. He walked towards it, desperate enough to put aside his instincts and his body screaming at him to run the other way, recoiling in horror and fear at the mere thought of approaching it yet forcing himself forward. He got close enough to it that it could gently touch his cheek with the back of its fingers. It burnt like an iron right out of the fire, like sizzling acid, soft and tender like gentle feathers against his skin.
“Beg.”
He fell to his knees and immediately felt his head start buzzing with a horrified moment of clarity as he realized what he was doing, what he was kneeling in front of, and thought vaguely of what his self of only a few months ago would’ve thought of him; yet at the same time he also felt an absolute, deep sense of rightness; that this was where he belonged, where he had to be; that him fighting against it in any way until now had been not only futile but also foolish, stupid.
“Please, make it all go away. However you want, do whatever you want, please—I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t understand, I understand now, I’m sorry—please, please, please, I can’t— please .” He started sobbing between pleas, tired eyes wide and gaze blurry.
The thing gently reached forward, cradled his face, fingers digging into the sides of it just a little too hard, and looked down at him with its eyes soft, pitying. “Alright. I’ll fix you,” it promised and in response he tried not to let out a loud, relieved whine, and failed. “May I?”
He nodded, not really knowing what he was even agreeing to, barely really caring now, and was certain the thing’s slight smile came with a distant purr, low and satisfied, sounding like the roll of thunder.
It leaned forward and kissed him, still holding his face in place. He didn’t fight against it, closing his eyes—a kiss seals the deal, his mind offered a little hysterically.
The tongue licking into his mouth at the same time as golden threads dug and buried into his brain like roots growing unto the earth felt both wrong and invasive yet also like an immense relief. They dug in, prodding and searching for something, until finally they went in deep enough that they reached a specific part of his mind and latched onto it with a satisfied hum.
His eyes snapped open, but they couldn’t see, glassy and huge, staring at nothing. His body went slack, his mouth dropped open, making it easier for the thing to lick into it almost hungrily; slowly, as the golden tendrils dug in and did something to that place inside his mind, his eyelids dropped and his eyes fell closed again, his body growing heavy, leaning forward and almost falling into Leo’s arms. The world quieted down. His fears felt distant and foreign, like those you’d remember from a nightmares of many nights ago; his mind was peaceful and slow, comfortably sleepy after the unbearable, constant restlessness of the past few months; after so long of being shaky and on edge, he now felt like he could just close his eyes and fall into the deepest, most peaceful of sleeps.
Leo leaned back with a quiet hum, licking his lips, and pet his hair back a bit while he just sat there, dazed and heavy. “Well?” he prompted. “What do you say?”
He opened his mouth, swallowed, tried again. “Thank you,” he finally breathed, eyes huge and awed. Leo smiled, stroked his hair again.
“You’re welcome, pet. Go to sleep now—you need rest.”
He remembered everything—what he’d seen, the creature, the eyes, the dreams. He remembered it all perfectly. He just couldn’t remember what he’d been so worried for. The thought of Leo taking over him now was almost pleasant, the thought of him using him made him feel oddly warm. He remembered it used to scare him, horrify him. He couldn’t fathom why.
He still noticed the details, probably more so than most; he still saw the eyes opening on Argentinian players’ arms, backs, faces, but he just looked back quietly at the familiar sight, the eye winking at him when it noticed him. He still saw the walking hurricane on the pitch when he watched Leo play, still noticed the cold dead eyes of the ones he tore apart, and their shattered bodies littering the pitch. But he couldn’t grasp why he’d once cared.
He met Ramos on the pitch again not so long after; his cold eyes shone almost amusedly when they met his, saw the stark contrast with the jittery, fearful man he’d met months ago, the weight off his shoulders now.
“All fixed?” he asked as he shook his hand.
He nodded, and Ramos grinned. “Isn’t he kind,” he said and squeezed his hand before moving on.
His hand felt warm against his again, he noticed distantly, but he was already shaking the next person’s, and the conversation slipped his mind immediately. He didn’t wonder if it had gotten warmer or if his own was just colder now. He just hummed a tune under his breath, walking unto the pitch, feeling light.
“Did you have fun?” Kun asked, amusement thick in his voice. “Was it what you wanted?”
It was the international break, only days later, and Kun was enjoying having Leo in his arms again immensely, firm and warm and as familiar as his own body—Leo was always with him, of course, in the back of his mind, but it wasn’t the same—he always missed being able to touch, to kiss, to bite and feel.
When Leo had mentioned that he was bored, and was asking himself questions about the human mind, Kun had been a little excited; he’d thought maybe it meant Leo would spend some more time inside his head, experiment a bit, take control for longer, maybe.
Then he’d showed Kun what he’d done. The way he’d picked a player at random, someone he barely knew, and erased, voluntarily, all the barriers that generally stood in the way of anyone seeing him as he was, scratched off the thin layer of golden polish that didn’t allow the human brain to even attempt to comprehend what Leo was, for their own protection. He’d planted the seed of curiosity and fear inside his mind, the urge to try and warn others, and let it grow, take root into his brain and slowly overtake it until it was all that was left—instead of shaping his mind by hand, purposefully and step by step like he’d been doing for years now with that other feral pet of his, he’d just planted the seed and observed, fascinated and amused, what it did to a man, what he became when that instinctual layer of self defense was stripped off.
Kun hadn’t really known Leo could do that, although he wasn’t particularly surprised—intrigued, mostly, to see where this went. A little jealous maybe, that Leo was playing with some random player and not him, giving so much of his time and attention away to something that wasn’t Kun.
Leo kissed the top of Kun’s hair with a happy little hum, nuzzling into his thick hair, as if he’d heard the thought and wanted to reassure him a bit, and Kun let out a laugh that sounded embarrassingly like a giggle.
“I did have fun!” Leo answered him cheerfully. “I think the boys did too. Dibu especially.”
“Are you gonna do it again?”
Leo hummed, thoughtful. “I don’t think so, at least not for now. It’ll get boring, don’t you think?”
“Yes,” Kun said immediately, digging his fingers into the flesh of the back of Leo’s thighs to pull him closer, and Leo laughed at the wave of quiet possessiveness that passed through him.
“Oh, stop. I just wanted to experiment a bit. It’s not like you, you know that.”
“You could’ve experimented on me,” Kun mumbled. Leo shook his head immediately, this time a bit firmer, burying his nose in his hair and slightly digging his nails into Kun’s scalp.
“Kun, no. Stop. We’ve talked about this,” Leo mumbled quietly. It wouldn’t have worked anyway, they both knew—Kun was part of Leo; while what he wanted was someone who perceived him the same as everyone else. Still, he didn’t like even the idea of hurting Kun like that, and immediately Kun could feel his distress at the idea, and hugged him tighter.
“Sorry, sorry. I was kidding, Leo, sorry.” He kissed his neck, trying to send soothing waves of reassurance into his mind, soft and regular like little kitten licks—while Leo himself had an unshakeable mental bond and connexion with all of la Scaloneta, Kun was the only one who, to some extent, could reach back, try to slip into Leo’s mind and offer up something in return—because Leo let him, of course.
Leo kissed the top of his head, tugged at his hair a bit to lead his head up. “Stop being jealous, come on.”
Kun grinned, kissed up his neck and cheek, dropping a gentle one on his lips, then pressing closer and licking eagerly into his mouth when Leo parted his lips, inviting him in. Leo squeezed his hips, tugged him closer, ground a bit against his body, clearly wanting him to go a bit further now that he was done pouting, but Kun was too enthralled with kissing him, wet and hungry, tasting every inch of his mouth. Leo was growing impatient though. He sent a quiet, warm wave of want into Kun’s body. Kun flushed a little from it and grinned. “Bossy,” he mumbled against his lips, stalling him a bit, maybe to try and keep up the jealous act for a bit more if he could get away with it, and kept kissing him.
Leo let out a quiet, displeased groan and seeped want into his mind again, stronger this time; he didn’t quite take over his body, just planted the thought in Kun’s head that Kun wanted, and so Kun wanted—suddenly achingly hard in his pants, a wave of hot, burning need passing through him made him gasp and moan, forcing him to stop kissing Leo. Now that he wasn’t busy licking into his mouth, instead panting with his forehead pressed against his, Leo nudged in the idea of Kun’s lips around his cock, expertly wrapped his every thought in the feeling of if, the memory of what he tasted like, made him hungry for it. It was gentle, not fully taking root, something he could ignore if he wanted to, more of a suggestion than anything—but Kun was more than happy to follow such a suggestion, his mouth watering already just at the image Leo had conjured up for him. Breathless and shaking with need, he grinned against Leo’s lips, pressed a kiss into them one last time, then started kissing down his chest.