Work Text:
For a long time, Keeley was ashamed of the lines. She didn’t like that they told the world a story on her behalf—the story of someone who trusted so deeply and loved so hard that she wore the evidence on nearly every part of her body. The marks were sharp and fine, as if drawn with the most delicate yet indelible nib. Bright blue, same as everyone’s—a color enchanted to show up boldly against all skintones. Unique patterns that curled around her limbs and torso; hers were all vines, some leafy, but mostly stalk.
(In a horror movie, vines like hers would have wrapped around her more and more tightly, constricting her organs until she lost the ability to breathe.)
It was a mercy, the way everyone’s lines stopped at the neck. Keeley appreciated that her face was her own to paint or leave bare. But from the neck down, she had a very fraught relationship with the relentless vines that started to form when she was only sixteen and in love for the very first time. Most people developed their first trust lines around that age, and you could get them for all sorts of reasons—close friendships, love interests, passion projects, anything you found on your own, separate from the people who raised you. Someone you believed in and who changed you enough to etch into your skin. She wasn’t special, but at the time she’d been deeply paranoid that everyone could tell that her first lines, which twisted around her calves (and on a day she’d worn a short skirt to school!), had formed because she’d fallen for her best friend.
Keeley tried not to be suspicious about the origins of other people’s lines. It was hypocritical, when she longed for people to notice anything about her other than the exceptional amount of tattoos on her skin. But sometimes she’d pass someone in the street wearing jeans and a turtleneck, too-long sleeves bunched around their hands, denim hems stuck into sturdy boots, and wonder if they were covering up extensive trust lines or a lack thereof. Either extreme could be dangerous. Plenty of people assumed a heavily-lined individual was especially gullible, an easy mark. How else could they have ended up with so much blue on their skin? But a lack of blue suggested you were closed-off and cold.
Over the years Keeley tried several of the many line reducers on the market. There were creams advertised to promise substantial fade in 5-7 days. Serums invented by quacks who claimed they could target “regret lines only,” which was especially tempting for someone whose jealous partner only wanted to see the specific lines they’d inspired on their lover’s skin. She got recognized at a drugstore on a day a brand rep for a gel cure happened to be on site offering free samples; they wanted to talk about a potential social media campaign, co-hosted on her socials and theirs, maybe a longer-term partnership. She was forever glad she said no: the gel cure worked about as well as any of the other products did, which was to say not at all, and the older she got the sadder she found it that there was a billion-dollar industry devoted to obscuring something natural, something that could and did happen to anyone at all.
(She still wasn’t entirely resistant to the pressure, of course. If a modeling contract was contingent on heavy body makeup or post-shoot color corrections to dial back the lines into something more tasteful and subdued, she never had a problem signing. She secretly liked that she had access to some images of herself looking like that—like the person she’d be if she were less excessive, less desperate to connect and believe and commit. But when Boots launched their Trust Yourself ™ campaign, which coincided with the decision to remove all line reducers from their shelves, she started to wonder if things really were starting to change.)
Until Ted Lasso showed up in Richmond, she’d never met another person with as many lines as her. Ted’s trust lines were like cross-hatching, finely etched squares in little patches all over. They added texture, as if he was a comic book character and it was someone’s specific job to go in with a pen and add some depth.
Most people who inspired an outsized amount of trust—a great deal of lines—had only an average amount of lines themselves. They coasted on the cult of their own personality, the phrases they’d learned got results, the confidence in their own system. Not Ted. He was covered with the love he’d experienced, new patches of it showing up near-daily.
It thrilled Keeley, who was no stranger to the AFC Richmond locker room, to watch the Greyhounds turn blue in the weeks and months following Ted’s arrival. Even Jamie wasn’t immune; he had substantially more blue on him at only a couple of months in.
Keeley wondered sometimes, as the months of the Lasso Era collected into years, just how many of her own new-growth vines could be traced back to Ted’s influence.
Roy inspired some, and she certainly wouldn’t have ended up with him without Ted’s presence in their lives—Roy, who’d been nearly devoid of blue when she met him but whose rapidly multiplying lines were intricate spirals, each one frantically seeking the center, each one gorgeous on his skin. Roy loved all of Keeley’s vines, but she could tell he was particularly enraptured by the ones generated by her love for him, a twist of stalks that crept up her ribcage towards her heart.
The vines at her shoulders filled in when Rebecca became someone she trusted. Rebecca herself had had almost no trust lines when they first started spending time together. She’d cried about it to Keeley, champagne drunk in a hotel room in Liverpool on her and her ex-husband’s anniversary, overcome by the contrast writ plain on their skin. She confessed that part of her felt lucky that she hadn’t trusted her husband enough for her love for him (horrible, immense) to show up in blue, but she’d endured years of embarrassment all the same. She’d lied to him, claiming the roses scattered up her spine were for him when in actuality they’d been there since she was a teenager thanks to her closest childhood friend. Then that very friend showed up at the hotel, and the whole weekend was a brilliant whirl, and by the time their plane landed back in London, new flowers—daisies, daffodils, lilacs—had started to bloom across Rebecca’s flesh.
Keeley figured it would have to settle down eventually, but nearly every time she hung out with Ted she was left with increasingly intricate growth—her ankles, mostly, and a few tendrils that crept higher up her legs and twisted around the very first lines, the ones she’d grown at sixteen. It was the same for Ted; she was able to watch a section of lines develop on his forearm in real time on a night they met up for a few drinks not long after Roy broke up with her. She supposed it made sense that the patterns were seemingly infinite—everything was changing for her because she wasn’t sure where she was supposed to be, and maybe it was the same for him too, a strong feeling deepening, shifting, sometimes wonderful but often confusing, no choice but to keep trusting things would work out as they were meant to. They didn’t talk about it, as if they each sensed the other could use a break from feeling so goddamn blue all the time.
When Ted went back to America, he left them ink-stained and open.
Keeley wasn’t angry about it. Just sad. She went over to Rebecca’s to see how she was holding up and Rebecca cried hard, like Keeley had witnessed only a few times since the weekend they first trusted each other. Harder, even, because this Rebecca had so many good things to weep over. She warned Keeley that she was going to take off her shirt so she could see for herself (and Keeley tried not to gasp too delightedly, because while she’d literally prayed for something like this to happen, this was a tragic moment in Rebecca’s life).
Nothing could have prepared her for the garden that had overtaken Rebecca’s entire torso.
“I don’t know what to do,” Rebecca sobbed. Her best friend, her love. As they held each other, the vines on Keeley’s shoulders shifted to make room for a deepening of the roots.
Life went on. Without Ted physically present to be the most blue person she knew other than herself, Keeley realized she was less alone in her explosion of lines than she’d assumed herself to be. Of course she knew about the flowers all over Rebecca, and she dreamed at night of being able to trace the spirals on Roy’s skin again, but there was also Beard, coated in a whole storm of raindrops. Nate, arms encircled with precise parallels like the staves on a sheet of music. Will was very young, and prone to dressing in full tracksuits no matter the weather, but Keeley occasionally got a glimpse of a mesmerizing pattern akin to fingerprints, or the grain of wood.
Keeley hoped every community felt like hers did, like there’d never been a group of people so blue with needing each other, so audaciously covered in trust. The night she got back together with Roy, he glowed with it, and she understood that while they would make plenty of new mistakes in the years ahead, neither feared they’d repeat the old ones. They made room for Rebecca and something within Keeley calmed, an inner peace settling a question that had fluttered inside her for a very long time.
When Rebecca left to go find Ted again, she returned a week later with peonies unfurling on the backs of her hands. Even Keeley didn’t have any lines that extended past her wrists. “I don’t mind,” Rebecca told her. “I love him.”
They all loved him. It was all blue anyway, a tangle of it, no hope of picking it apart strand by strand.
When Ted moved back to England, he brought his son with him this time, and Keeley remembered that while trust in a parent could never result in a tattooed child, some parents grew lines that reflected their love for their children. She didn’t see how it could be possible, since every trust line burned as boldly as another, but Ted’s lines seemed much brighter than they’d been before.
She made a joke about the vines on her skin in bed with him once, disparaging herself but only gently, in that silly offhand way people find to make light of the most important things. “I kinda wish my lines weren’t actual vines choking me,” she said, giving voice to a very old complaint. She regretted it immediately, although part of her was relieved to finally be able to talk about it.
Ted bent to kiss her shoulder, his tongue just barely pressed against one of the Rebecca-vines he often favored, before lifting his head again. They looked at each other. The lamplight was just enough to illuminate the years of trust engraved on their bodies.
“Or they’re holding you up,” he said, and that was how she thought of them from that moment on.