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The keys jangle harshly as Roy throws them onto the table by his front door, and the sound makes him wince.
It’s late— must be going on two in the morning, now— and Roy’s last beer was over an hour ago. He’s always been a bit too good at holding his drink, and the delightful blur of the night has faded already into a faint buzz, leaving a pounding headache behind in the wake of its chaos.
“Christ,” he mutters. “I’m gonna have a killer hangover tomorrow, you know. Remind me to never go out with you again.”
Jamie, swinging the door shut behind them, just giggles. “Aw, c’mon, lad. You had fun.”
He did, but he doesn’t want to give Jamie the satisfaction of hearing that, so he just rolls his eyes. “I’m getting too old for this crap.” He sits down hard on the couch, stretching out his bad knee and wincing again. “Fuck. My head and my knee both are gonna fucking kill me.”
“Headache?” Jamie stops now from his slow lap around Roy’s living room, where he was busying himself studying the artifacts on Roy’s shelves— photos and childhood trophies, misshapen lumps of clay made in Phoebe’s art class, various other personal ephemera indicating the life Roy prefers to keep entirely separate from his life in football.
Jamie’s been over to Roy’s house before, but only a few times. This truce, this… you might even call it a friendship… is still new to both of them. Roy of a year ago would still be ready to smother this kid in his sleep.
“Just from the drink,” Roy says. “Probably dehydrated.” He starts to stand, bracing his arms on the couch to lift his weight onto his poor sorry legs, but Jamie rushes over before he can get very far.
“Oh, I can get it!” And damn his young springy body, the way he bounds across the room, the way the alcohol has done nothing to him but leave his face rosy and flushed, no hint of migraine or hangover in sight. It makes Roy’s head pound a little harder just looking at him.
Roy waves him toward the kitchen, and Jamie’s kicking off again. The little prick has the nerve to start happily humming to himself, a lip-curling sub of salt into Roy’s misery.
He pulls his bad leg up to rest on the coffee table as Jamie fucks off to the kitchen, hoping the elevation will soothe some of the pounding fucking flames of inflammation in his knee, and then lets his head dip back to the couch cushion. Closing his eyes, he tries to take solace in the quiet, cool house— no pounding club beats, no pulse-quickening press of bodies in a crowd, no familiar touch of clammy skin against skin as Roy fought, earlier tonight, to keep Jamie— Jamie, who can definitely not hold his drink, Roy has learned— upright. But he can’t really appreciate the peace and quiet, can he, not when Jamie is making such a fucking ruckus in the kitchen. Drawers slide open, cabinets snap shut, silverware clinks together.
“The fuck are you doing in there?” Roy groans out. “How hard is it to get me a fucking glass of water?”
“Have you got any nutella?”
Roy sighs.
“Never mind, found it!”
He lets his head fall back against the couch. Fuck it. Jamie can do whatever he wants. Roy will clean up the carnage in the morning.
He doesn’t open his eyes again until he hears the sound of Jamie setting something down on the coffee table. The glass of water is there as requested, but Jamie’s got something else in his hand— wrapped in a kitchen towel. He hands it to Roy without a glance, as if it’s an afterthought, and then goes searching for… something.
Roy takes the package from Jamie and is surprised when it’s ice cold. He peeks inside the towel to find a ziploc bag with ice cubes inside— a homemade makeshift ice pack. He’s just managing to get the thing settled on his knee when Jamie comes back with a throw pillow, stolen from the loveseat on the other side of the room, and lifts Roy’s foot on the coffee table to slip the pillow underneath.
Roy narrows his eyes. “You’re being suspiciously nice.”
A mock offended hand flies to Jamie’s chest. “Excuse you, Kent, I am an extremely nice person, and always have been so every single second since you first met me.”
Roy snorts. It makes Jamie smile— and not even just a quirk of his lips, either, an all out thousand-watt grin that makes something weird squirm around in Roy’s chest. Jamie does this sometimes, starts beaming whenever Roy laughs at one of his jokes. Phoebe does it too. He once gave a half-second laugh at one of her antics, and hours later, it was the first thing she told her Mum when Sarah got home from work that day. “Mummy! I made Uncle Roy laugh today!”
Adorable little fucks. They just want his approval, don’t they?
Roy leans back against the couch cushions. “Did you break something in my kitchen or something? Are you bargaining for your life?”
Jamie, still smiling, shakes his head, turning away. “I didn’t do nothing, I swear!” He’s headed back toward the kitchen now. “I’m in a good mood right now anyway. Happy to play nurse to our poor old grandad.” He pauses in the kitchen doorway. “Besides, you’re letting me sleep over, so the least I can do is return the favor!”
Roy nods for half a second, but then his words sink in. He frowns. “Hey— when did I say I’m letting you sleep over?”
But Jamie is already gone.
“Fucking— whatever,” he mutters.
(He doesn’t mind, not really. He might huff and puff about it, but he does actually appreciate the company. Not that he’d ever say that out loud.)
“Alright, headache time,” Jamie calls from the kitchen. “I’ve got just the thing.” And something in that sounds slightly mischievous— Roy thinks maybe he should be worried— but he’s too damn tired to care right now, so he just closes his eyes, signing his kitchen over to whatever terrible idea Jamie’s got planned.
A minute later, Jamie is reappearing, a somewhat alarmingly large bowl balanced in each hand. He hands one of them to Roy.
“Headache cure,” he says, his face gravely serious, as if he is imparting the medicinal wisdom of the ancients onto Roy. “Swear down.”
Roy sighs and takes the bowl, pulls at the spoon on the side, before he catches a glimpse of the actual contents of the dish. And freezes.
Jamie eases himself into the loveseat with a sigh, wriggling slightly with excitement at digging into his… dinner.
Meanwhile, Roy stares at him in horror.
“Jamie. What. The fuck. Have you just given me?”
The… concoction in the bowl is made up of a few different things. At first it looks deceptively like a bowl of cereal, milk along the edge of the bowl with Frosties floating in it, but then that white lump in the middle most definitely does not belong. It’s a scoop of vanilla ice cream, chocolate syrup drizzle on the top and everything. And then there’s the fact that on the side of the bowl is a piece of… toast? Toast with nutella on it? What the fuck is Roy meant to do with that?
Jamie answers his silent question by plucking up his own toast, ripping off a piece and dipping it through the ice cream/milk/cereal combination, scooping everything together into one big bite. He raises his eyebrows at Roy as he chews. “Mm? ‘S it alright?”
Roy’s mouth honest to god hangs open in shock. “What the fuck is this?”
“Headache cure,” Jamie repeats, as if this is a perfectly rational dish to eat and not the result of a fucking madman with the palate of a two year old. “Promise.”
Roy tries to take a bite and chokes on the overwhelming scent of sugar that emanates from the bowl. “I cannot eat this.”
“Pooh. I ate it all the time when I was younger.” Jamie’s shoveling the dish into his mouth in a truly horrifying manner.
“All the time ?” Jamie must be fucking with him. It’s the only rational answer Roy can come up with— there are hidden cameras tucked away somewhere in his living room, and Jamie is about to burst out laughing, ready to share the video of Roy’s shocked face to the team group chat. “How did your physios not fucking murder you?”
Jamie laughs, but doesn’t really answer. “Come on, Roy-boy. You’ll feel better if you eat it. Promise.”
Roy’s past experience with combining intense amounts of alcohol and sugar would suggest otherwise. But his head is pounding, and Jamie is looking at him expectantly, so he takes a few bites. It’s… sugar. Pure sugar. But that’s not so bad— at least, for the first bite. By the fourth, he cannot imagine forcing more sugar down his throat, and he hesitates.
Jamie’s expectant gaze stays solid for another few moments, and Roy’s heart sinks with dread as he concludes that Jamie is going to make him eat this whole bowl.
At the last second, just before Roy is about to make himself tough it out and bring a fifth spoonful of the toddler’s nirvana to his mouth, Jamie’s face breaks, and he grins. “Alright, alright.” He snickers, but no hidden cameras are revealed. “You don’t have to eat the whole thing.” He stands. “I’ll fetch you a paracetamol.”
“Oh, thank god.” Roy quickly puts the bowl back on the coffee table. “Seriously, Tartt, how the fuck did your physios not kill you?”
Jamie rolls his eyes. “I ain’t been eating it much lately . Mostly when I was small— before football got serious, y’know.”
Of course. Roy shakes his head. The dubious concoction clearly has nothing at all to do with painkilling abilities, and its origins most likely come from the “distract the baby with sugar” philosophy of injury care.
“Painkillers are in the bathroom cabinet upstairs,” Roy calls out as Jamie wanders off. He readjusts the ice pack on his knee.
And then, quietly.
“Thank you.”