Work Text:
“Mr Crimm? You’re in the recovery room, your procedure was a success.”
The first thing Trent thinks is, am I dead?
The second thing he thinks is, what the fuck.
It takes every ounce of determination and strength he can muster to peel open an eye, promptly screws them shut when he’s met by a blinding light and a beep beep beep that starts out in a whisper and grows louder next to his head.
“How much do you remember?” a disembodied voice asks. A creature that’s fiddling with something behind him tugs on the leads suctioned to his chest and makes his skin feel like it’s being slowly ripped off his skeleton.
“Um,” He croaks out, coughs through a throat that feels like sawdust. “Not a lot. Sorry, am I dead?”
“Ah,” Someone appears next to him - a short, older woman with grey curls dressed in the familiar blue uniform with a weathered smile that aids in soothing some of the panic currently doing the tango with the haze clouding over his brain.
“No hun, you’re not dead, very much alive and with us on planet Earth. How are you feeling?”
A deep breath in on lungs that feel like they’re floating three feet above him, performs a quick, foggy body scan. Hair? Tickling his neck, thank God. Eyes? He could see the blue paper curtain shrouding him from the voices beyond, so he’s pretty sure at least one is in tact. Arms and hands and fingers? Resting at his side like he’s ready to be popped into a coffin and straight into the ground, fingernails imprinting jagged crescent moon divets into his thighs. The fact that he has even a shred of sensation hopefully means he isn’t dead just yet. Knees, feet, toes? They’re nice and toasty under the blanket, tucked up under his chin. There’s the hint of a blooming ache with ground zero at his lower abdomen, a twinge in his shoulder, the pull of something tight and sharp in his hand.
“Fine. Like I have no clue why the fuck I’m here.” He spits out. He doesn’t know where it comes from, anger turning on a knife edge. The lights are piercing and the pain is getting sharper and he tries to move his arm to tug at the damn blanket suffocating him but the movement sends shockwaves through his arm, and he’d like to leave.
“Good, you’re awake.” Says a man appearing from behind the blue curtain with the gusto of a magician at one of the crap shows they took Madeline to on their last family trip to Butlins.
“We spoke briefly before your procedure, Mr Crimm. My name’s Dr Alex Smith and I conducted your surgery along with my amazing team. The good news is that it was a success.”
“So people keep telling me, care to tell me what it was?” He drawls, like he’s returning a faulty item to an incompetent teenager at Argos and not speaking to the man who might have just saved his life, yet to be determined by Trent.
“You had a pretty bad case of appendicitis when you came in, you got here just in the nick of time. We could go ahead with the keyhole surgery we discussed and the procedure was a success, it won’t be causing you problems anymore. I’ll be back in a few hours when you’re settled to talk through your recovery, but I have full confidence that you’ll be out of here in no time.” He disappears in a flourish of blue, vanishing trick completed until the next show time.
He thinks so hard it nearly splits his head in two. There’s a few little vignettes of memory floating around that he can cling onto, make sense of what’s happening - a lingering stomach ache that he put down to some dodgy shrimp two days ago, vomiting in the toilets at work just before the team arrived, writing a grand total of 65 words in four hours, knocked sideways by the intensifying pain.
The nurse keeps talking, keeps prodding and poking and writing down things on a little clipboard, and Trent tries to perform the role of Functioning Adult to the best of his ability, perpetually a few seconds behind.
“Not long left until we can take you back up. Your partner’s waiting for you in your room, so you have something to look forward to.” The nurse - Cathy, he deciphers from the tag on her uniform through gritty eyes - smiles, feeling for his hand over the blankets and giving it a few pats before wandering off to attend to the beep again.
Trent can’t remember much, but he does know that Heather is in China on another business trip for the next 4 days, which is why Trent has Madeline on an off week. So, who the fuck is waiting in his room? His Dad is looking after Madeline today because of work, and she’s such a force of nature that Cathy would’ve led any conversation with a barrage of compliments about the light of his life. All of his friends are too busy in the City to care about sitting in some cramped little room waiting to see if he’s made it or not, and AFC Richmond… they wouldn’t be here, no two ways around that. And for the first time in years, all he wants the comfort of Heather right now - of her tangerine shampoo and her uncanny knack of knowing exactly what to say, the safety net of what they were before everything got blurred and messy.
Somewhere in the midst of his spiral, he’s wheeled through the winding corridors like the world’s worst Disney parade. He isn’t sure what’s worse - the moments where staff look down to him with tired, condescending concern and pity, or when he’s completely ignored in favour of the exchange of an in joke or a discussion about the newest episode of Big Brother with the porter pushing him around .
He’s cajoled into a lift, the porter pressing a few buttons and scanning an ID card to get the doors to slide shut. Trent’s faced with a distorted, scuffed floor length mirror in front of him, and can’t really do anything else other than stare right back. Quite honestly, he looks like shit. A blanket of sweat has engulfed his body, the hair that was voluminous and perfected in the staff toilets at 9:07am now slick to his forehead and hanging limp. He looks gaunt, cheekbones protruding and he knows at some point he must’ve been stripped of his very favourite outfit picked out to soften even the most stoic of football players, can see and feel the scratchy hospital gown poking out of the yellow blanket. All in all, he’s had better days, and he wishes he was back behind that drafty blue curtain, finds himself wanting another sweet dose of that anaesthetic to knock him out and wake up again in a few hours and then he might feel less like he’s on a carousel, head spinning and vision blurry.
He’s guided through a few more unfamiliar hallways - and rammed straight into a wall by accident, which makes Trent nearly swing for the guy - before the porter is knocking softly on a door proclaiming ‘241 - CRIMM, TRENT’.
The only explanation for what Trent Crimm sees as he enters the room is that anaesthesia has rare side effects he hasn’t been told about, including hallucination.
Because there’s no way that Ted Lasso, AFC Richmond manager, currently wide eyed and eclipsed by the big armchair in the corner of the room he’s sat in, is actually here.
The hallucination does a really convincing job of jumping to its feet, backpack sliding off its knees onto the floor. It’s rushing towards the end of the bed already in the room, helping the porter manoeuvre the operating bed around the tiny little room like a Tetris piece so Trent can do the most mortifying shuffle over from one to the other. The cushy duvet is pulled over him by the porter before he retreats, bed in tow.
“Boy, did you give us a scare.” Ghost-Ted says, settling back into the chair near his bed and placing a ghost-hand on his shoulder. It feels surprisingly real - the way the warmth seeps through the hospital gown and seeps into his skin, the touch reassuring.
Ted Lasso is real.
Ted Lasso is real, and right here, at his bedside. In hospital.
Trent does the only thing he can think of in that moment, and promptly passes out.
The first thing Trent Crimm hears when he wakes up is Ted Lasso’s voice.
He’s not entirely sure he believes Cathy when she said he was alive and well.
“There he is,” Ted beams, placing his phone face down next to Trent’s glasses on the night stand.
“Thought we’d lost you for a hot second before the nurse told me it was probably just the night night juice wearin’ off.” Ted grabs and deposits Trent’s glasses in his lap, then lifts the chair by the leather handles and scrapes the legs across the room to his bedside in a way that makes Trent’s teeth ache. He fusses with the chair to get it at the perfect angle, and Trent thinks he might get himself fired if he carries on scraping like nails on a chalkboard for much longer. He finally settles, and passes Trent’s glasses to his un-cannula’d hand. It takes far more effort than it should, but Trent slides them on his face, finally feeling a little more normal.
“Do you need anything? Are you in pain? Nurse said you might be now that sweet morphine is clearing out your system, I can grab you more ice or-“
“Why are you here?” Is the first thing Trent can think to croak out.
He means it literally. But he also means it as in:
Why are you in this hospital right now?
Why with me?
AFC Richmond have a football match today?
You’re their manager?
You’re important? To me?
I’ve been in this job for 3 weeks?
Can you accept my resignation this second and we can forget it ever happened?
“Why would I not be, Trent?” Ted shrugs, picking up a plastic jug of water and filling a cup to the brim before passing it off to Ted, who blinks, takes it wordlessly.
“But the match-“
“Got Beard and Roy to cover off the game today - before you start your hootin’ and hollerin’, it’s only a match against Leeds, we’ve beaten them tonnes before. They’re big boys, they can take the wheel for a bit.”
Trent remains frozen, cup halfway to his lips, staring at the man he gave up the only stable job he’s ever had for, who’s given him a second chance he doesn’t deserve, sat at his bedside like it means something. He sees the worry etch its way onto Ted’s face before he feels the change - wet, hot tears brimming in his eyes, spilling down and soaking into the duvet. He’d find it in himself to be embarrassed, but the moisture soothes his dry eyes, lets out the pent up energy that’s been building and compounding ever since he woke up in the recovery room.
“Ah c’mon TC,” Ted hurries and pulls six too many tissues out of a box behind him before flinging it off the table in haste, holding them out for Trent to take. He accepts them with a little nod.
“Sorry- Don’t even know why I’m crying-“
“While you were down in that old ER I had some time of my own to do a lil’ research. Now I think they probably put you on some pretty strong stuff to knock you out, according to your great NHS it can send you all kinds of ways - dizzy, nauseous, angry, weepy, all the worst of Snow White’s dwarves.” Trent laughs, winces at the stabbing pain he gets in return.
“Modern medicine is amazing aint it? Put one of their doohickeys through your shoulder here.” Ted raises a hand to gently tap just below Trent’s collarbone. It soothes the pain radiating from under his dressing, briefly considers if Ted has Jesus-like healing powers. “And fed it aaaaaaaaaall the way down to here,” Ted trails his index finger over his pec, his stomach, rests just by his hip bone. And surely he must be back in hallucination territory, butterflies battering his insides so hard that his stomach muscles ache. It does nothing to tame the raging crush that’s got just a little bit out of hand as of late. “Then they cut that sucker out, pulled it back up, job done.”
If football doesn’t work out for Ted, maybe he could give a career in medicine a go, Trent thinks.
“God, I still have no idea what happened.” Trent sighs, head spinning again.
“I can try fill in the blanks, let’s see. Well, you mentioned a stomach ache once or twice over the last few days, nurses office just told you to take some pain meds and it would go away - I’ve already booked a meeting with him once you’re better, he’s gonna get sent on every training course I can find. You strutted into work this morning looking sick as a dog let me tell you, of course Boss tried to turn your booty straight back round - of course you had none of it.” Yes, he remembers that conversation - Rebecca pulling her best quirked eyebrow, her most stern voice. Trent meekly insisting he was fine, squeezing his hand into a fist so hard behind his back to distract from the pain that he’s surprised he isn’t here with a broken finger too.
“I always suspected you had a lil’ drama in you from our previous encounters, Trent, but hoooooo it was BAFTA-worthy. We were in the locker room, there I was giving one of my pep talks, and bam - you hit the deck like a sack’a spuds. Perfect fall, how you managed to come out of that unscathed I don’t know, could teach our players a thing or two.”
“Then Roy called whatever dodgy number y’all have here, some kind folks strapped you up and bundled you in the back of the ambulance, blue lighted you here. I came here with you, been here ever since.” He finishes with a show of jazz hands, dropping to his knees when he clocks the colour draining from Trent’s face.
“God, I did all that in front of the team?” Trent’s tries to reach behind himself to grab one of the plush pillows to smother himself so he doesn’t have to endure this conversation any longer. Ted grabs his wrist before he can get too far, re-arranges the pillows and forces Trent to shimmy further down the bed to lay down.
“If your aim was to get them to stop being big ol’ meanies, it did the trick. I thought Isaac and Jan Maas were gonna carry you here themselves. All this,” Ted gestures around the room, “Got couriered here by the nation’s most trusted postal service, one Leslie Higgins.”
“This is from the team?” It’s the first time he’s had a chance to look around the room. Every surface possible, from the table in the corner to the top of the wardrobe, is covered in a level of gift baskets and balloons and flowers he’s only ever seen in cheesy straight to TV films. On the rolling table next to him, there’s an elaborate fruit basket, a little greyhound from their merchandise shop and a sky-high pile of cards. He’s pretty sure the top one is sealed with a kiss from Keeley.
“And the boss, Higgins, Roy, Beard, Keeley, even Dr Sharon. You’re part of the team now, team’s gotta look after their own.” Trent’s wheelhouse has always been words - it’s what he’s been good at his entire life, what he hides behind, crafts and curates to feel bolder. Ted Lasso consistently finds ways to steal them straight from his mouth, leave him breathless and gawping.
“All the joking aside though, TC. I-“ Ted clears his throat, shuffles closer in his seat until his knees are pressed against Trent’s thigh, rests his clasped hands on the bed next to Trent’s. “It takes a lot to get me shaking in my boots. Ive not felt scared like that in a long time. Seein’ you lying there, not knowing what was wrong, and I couldn’t do anything. I had to come, couldn’t bear the thought of you waking up alone.”
Trent lets his words wash over him, permeate through all the cracks and chips in his demeanour, soak into the parts of him that hold doubt in this new job being a good idea. There’s so much he wants to say to Ted, so many thank yous and things to ask and hidden gems yet to uncover about him. But another wave settles over him, one that makes him feel dizzy and sick and sleepy and if he’s learnt one thing from shitty medical dramas, it’s that he needs to rest. So he settles into the pillows made perfect by Ted, makes sure he holds Ted’s gaze.
“Thank you, Ted. You have no idea how much I appreciate it.” He’s rewarded with his favourite, cozy smile, and maybe nearly dying and losing any dignity he had around AFC Richmond was worth it to spend even a little uninterrupted time with him.
“Now I haven’t seen someone fight sleep this much since we let Henry stay up to see the ball drop on New Years Eve when he was four. Go ahead, get your rest sleeping beauty, I’ll be right here when you wake up.”
Call it the anaesthetic, maybe it’s the pain now creeping across his abdomen, perhaps it’s the sleep he finally succumbs to. But he feels like he’s seen Ted with brand new eyes - there’s a friendship, a dedication, a fondness he’s never had reflected back before. There’s a long road of recovery ahead, but with the promise of Ted Lasso in his corner, maybe he might come back better than ever.