Chapter Text
Leo did not see the exact second Neymar’s body gave out.
That would bother him later, more than it probably should have. He would watch the replay once, then again, then a third time despite knowing there was nothing useful to be found in it, only the same cruel sequence of movements unfolding with mechanical certainty: Neymar receiving the ball near the left side, one defender too close, another already shifting across to cover the space he liked to attack; Neymar dragging the ball beneath his foot with that familiar looseness that always made defenders hesitate; Neymar cutting inside, quick enough that the first defender’s weight went the wrong way; Neymar planting his right foot to change direction again, only for it to catch in the grass, his knee turning inward with a wrongness so sudden and unnatural, and then the rest of him collapsing as if the thread holding him upright had been cut.
But Leo did not see it then.
In the moment, he saw only the aftermath.
The ball had rolled loose by the time he looked over, spinning harmlessly away from the place where Neymar had gone down. The match continued for a heartbeat because matches always did; bodies kept moving, boots kept chasing, the crowd kept roaring above them with the delayed confusion of thousands of people who had not yet understood that something had happened. Then the whistle came, sharp enough to slice through everything, and players began slowing one by one. Someone threw an arm up toward the bench. Someone else shouted for the physios. Leo turned fully then, irritation already beginning to form because Neymar was fouled constantly and half the time the referee needed written permission from God himself to notice it.
Then he saw Neymar.
And the irritation vanished so completely that for one suspended second Leo felt nothing at all.
Neymar was lying on his side near the edge of the box, one hand pressed flat into the grass, the other curled close to his chest as if he had not decided where to put it. He was not rolling. He was not swearing. He was not looking toward the referee with that familiar expression of theatrical outrage Leo had already learned meant he was hurt but not badly enough to stop performing. He was still. Completely, horribly still. His head was bowed slightly, forehead nearly touching the grass, and even from several meters away Leo could see the careful way he was breathing, each inhale measured and shallow.
Leo was moving before he understood why.
There were physios for this. There were protocols. There were captains and referees and teammates closer to Neymar than he was. Leo knew all of that in the abstract, but his body did not seem interested in abstractions. He crossed the pitch with a strange, focused urgency, not quite running and not quite walking, his eyes fixed on Neymar’s face because the rest of him was too frightening to look at directly. Dani reached him first and dropped to a crouch, one hand hovering uselessly over Neymar’s shoulder, his mouth moving too quickly for Leo to catch the words. Neymar did not answer him. Or maybe he did and Leo simply could not hear it over the sound of the stadium finally beginning to understand.
By the time Leo sank down beside him, the world had narrowed to the patch of torn grass beneath Neymar’s fingers and the strained line of his mouth.
“Ney,” Leo said.
Neymar’s eyes opened.
For a second, he looked confused. Not dazed exactly, not unaware, but startled by the fact of being where he was, as though he had expected to still be upright and running and had woken inside a body that refused to obey him. His gaze moved from Dani to Leo, and something in his expression shifted when he recognized him. Relief, maybe. Embarrassment. Pain.
Dani made a small, furious sound beside them. “Don’t move.”
“I’m not moving,” Neymar said, and there was something almost like humor in it, except his breath caught on the last word and broke the sentence in half.
Leo watched the pain arrive properly.
It changed Neymar’s face all at once. His eyes squeezed shut, his jaw tightening so hard a muscle jumped near his cheek, and his hand dug into the grass until dirt gathered beneath his nails. He did not scream. Somehow that frightened Leo more. Neymar made noise when he was hurt. He complained. He cursed. He filled pain with words because Neymar filled everything with words.
The physios reached them then, voices low and urgent, and Leo moved back only because someone touched his shoulder and told him to give them space. He stood, but he did not leave. He found himself a few steps away with Dani beside him, both of them staring down as the medical staff began asking Neymar questions. Where did it hurt? Could he move his foot? Did he hear a pop? Did he feel the knee shift? Neymar answered in pieces, sometimes with words, sometimes with a shake of his head, sometimes not at all. Once, when one of the physios tried to straighten his leg even slightly, Neymar inhaled so sharply that Leo’s own chest tightened in response.
He should have looked away.
He did not.
The match had stopped completely now. Players from both teams stood scattered around the pitch with the uncomfortable stillness of men who had been reminded, abruptly and without warning, that the bodies they used for a living could betray them in an instant. The crowd noise had lowered into a restless murmur. Cameras hovered at the edge of the moment. Leo noticed all of it and none of it.
When they brought the stretcher on, Neymar finally opened his eyes fully.
The look that crossed his face then was worse than the pain.
Fear, Leo thought, and then immediately wished he had not named it.
Neymar saw the stretcher and understood exactly what everyone else had been trying not to say. He swallowed once, hard, his throat moving. Dani leaned in close, talking to him in Portuguese now, too fast and too quiet for Leo to follow, but the tone was unmistakable. Stay with me. Don’t think ahead. Look at me. Neymar tried to answer. His mouth moved, but the first attempt failed. When the words came, they were barely audible.
“I’m sorry.”
Dani went still.
The physio shook his head immediately. “No. No, don’t apologize.”
But Neymar was looking past him toward the bench, toward the players, toward the match that had been stopped around him, and Leo understood with a sudden, unpleasant clarity that Neymar was apologizing for interrupting the game. For being carried. For needing. For the possibility of becoming, for however long, a problem other people had to solve.
Something hot and protective moved through Leo so quickly it unsettled him.
He had no right to it.
That was the first thought that made any sense. He had no right to the sharpness in his chest, no right to feel almost angry on Neymar’s behalf, no right to want to push every camera away and tell the entire stadium to stop looking. Neymar was his teammate. His friend, maybe, though even that word felt too small and too large at the same time. They joked sometimes in training. They understood each other on the pitch in a way Leo valued more than he had expected to so quickly. Neymar brought noise into places Leo had not realized were quiet until he arrived. But they were not—whatever this feeling implied. Leo did not know Neymar well enough to feel as if something had opened beneath his own feet when Neymar went down.
And yet.
When the stretcher lifted, Leo stepped closer without meaning to.
Neymar’s face turned toward him.
It happened for barely a second. There were physios around him, Dani walking beside the stretcher, the referee waiting with the impatience of a match that had to continue whether anyone wanted it to or not. Still, Neymar found him. His eyes were too bright, his face too pale, and the attempt at a smile he gave Leo was so clearly meant to reassure him that Leo felt something inside him fold.
Leo did not know what to say.
So he only nodded once.
A small, useless promise.
Neymar disappeared into the tunnel.
The match resumed.
That seemed impossible, but it did. Football always resumed. There was a substitution, a restart, the ball moving again as if the pitch had not just swallowed something important and left the rest of them standing around the hole. Leo played because there was nothing else to do. His feet made decisions his mind barely followed. He completed passes. Drifted between lines. Took a shot that went wide and registered the disappointment only because the crowd reacted. People would tell him later that he had finished the match quietly but well. Leo would not remember enough to agree or disagree.
What he remembered was Neymar’s water bottle still sitting by the bench when they returned to the dressing room.
It was ridiculous, the way his eyes found it immediately. A half-empty bottle, the plastic slightly dented near the middle where Neymar must have squeezed it earlier, the cap missing and lying somewhere beneath the bench. Someone would throw it away. Someone would pack Neymar’s things. Someone would call the hospital. There were people whose job it was to handle every practical consequence of what had happened. Leo knew that. Still, the sight of the bottle bothered him. It made Neymar’s absence physical. A space where his noise should have been.
The dressing room was quieter than usual.
Not silent. Footballers rarely knew how to be silent in groups. There were showers running, lockers opening and shutting, low conversations happening in corners, but the noise had changed. It kept lowering whenever someone mentioned Neymar. Dani had gone with him, or tried to, or argued until someone let him ride along to the hospital; Leo was not entirely sure. He only knew Dani’s locker stood open and empty, a towel thrown carelessly over the bench, his usual flood of words gone with him. Without Neymar and Dani, the room felt wrong in a way Leo could not explain without making himself sound foolish.
He sat in front of his locker and untied one boot.
Then stopped.
The laces hung loose between his fingers.
He was still thinking about Neymar apologizing.
Not the injury itself, though that returned too in flashes: the unnatural stillness, the sharp inhale, the stretcher. But mostly the apology. The way Neymar had said it as if pain were an inconvenience he had caused. As if being hurt required manners. As if he had already begun worrying about what his absence would cost everyone else before anyone had even told him what was wrong.
Leo pulled off his boot.
Set it aside.
Started on the other.
He had seen teammates injured before. Serious injuries. Bad ones. He had visited hospitals, sent messages, asked after recoveries, stood beside players who cried from frustration weeks after the initial pain had passed. He was not careless. He was not cold. He cared about the people around him, even if he did not always know how to show it in ways other people recognized. But this felt different, and the difference irritated him because he could not name it.
Maybe it was because Neymar was new.
Maybe because he was young.
Maybe because he had looked frightened and tried to smile anyway.
Maybe because Leo had been starting, without quite noticing, to expect him everywhere: in training, laughing too loudly with Dani; on the pitch, making runs that seemed reckless until they worked; in the dressing room, talking with his hands when his Spanish failed him; in the space near Leo’s own locker, bright and restless and impossible to ignore. Neymar had arrived in Barcelona like weather, changing the air around him, and Leo had apparently grown used to it faster than he realized.
That explanation was sensible enough.
It did not make him feel better.
By the time he showered and changed, no one had real news. Bad sprain, someone said. Knee ligaments, someone else murmured. Hospital scans. Maybe surgery, maybe not. Nobody wanted to say anything definite because definite things were harder to undo. Leo listened to all of it with his bag over one shoulder, expression calm because his face often did calm things without asking him first.
Inside, something would not settle.
On the drive home, he missed his turn.
He realized only when the road no longer looked right, when the familiar streets had shifted into something less familiar and the GPS remained silent because he had not bothered turning it on. He slowed at the next light, hands resting on the steering wheel, and stared through the windshield at nothing in particular.
This was stupid.
People got injured. It was horrible, but it happened. Neymar was at the hospital. Dani was probably there. The doctors would know more soon. Leo going home and sitting uselessly in his apartment would not change anything. Worrying would not change anything. Replaying the moment would not change anything.
He turned the car around.
At home, the apartment was too quiet.
Usually, Leo liked quiet. He liked returning to a place where no one needed him to be anything other than himself. The training ground was noise and movement and responsibility, cameras and staff and teammates and questions. Home was where sound softened. Where he could put his keys down, take off his shoes, drink water from the refrigerator, and let the day loosen its grip one small thing at a time.
That night, quiet felt less like rest and more like absence.
He set his keys on the counter. Took out his phone. Put it down. Opened the refrigerator. Closed it again without taking anything. Walked to the living room and turned on the television, then muted it almost immediately because the images moved too brightly, too meaninglessly. For several minutes he stood in the middle of the room with no clear memory of why he had come there.
His phone buzzed.
He reached for it too quickly.
It was a message from Dani.
No diagnosis yet. Bad. He’s scared but pretending not to be. I’ll tell you when we know.
Leo read it once. Then again.
For a long time he did not answer. He could not think of anything useful to say. Asking Dani to keep him updated felt obvious. Asking whether Neymar was okay felt insulting. Saying poor Ney felt too small. Saying anything else felt like opening a door he did not understand yet.
Finally, he typed:
Tell him I’m thinking of him.
He stared at the sentence.
Deleted it.
Too formal.
He typed:
Tell him I’ll come tomorrow if he wants.
Deleted that too.
If he wants. As though Neymar, lying in a hospital with his knee swollen and his season suddenly uncertain, should be responsible for deciding whether Leo cared enough to visit.
Leo rubbed a hand over his face.
Then he typed again.
I’m coming tomorrow.
He looked at it for a long moment. It sounded too certain. Too much like a decision made before he had been invited. But perhaps that was what unsettled him most: it was a decision. Not an obligation. Not team duty. Not politeness. He wanted to go. The wanting sat in him plainly now, undeniable in the quiet apartment.
He sent it before he could change his mind.
Dani replied almost immediately.
Good.
That was all.
Leo set the phone down beside him and leaned forward, elbows on his knees, staring at the dark television screen where his own reflection looked back at him. He had seen teammates injured before. He had cared before. He had worried before. None of that explained why his chest still felt tight, why Neymar’s apology kept repeating in his mind, why the sight of his pale face on the stretcher had followed Leo all the way home and into a room where it did not belong.
Maybe there was nothing to explain yet.
Maybe caring did not always announce itself honestly at first. Maybe sometimes it arrived disguised as concern, as responsibility, as the simple inability to leave someone alone with fear when you had seen it in their face.
Leo did not know.
He only knew that tomorrow, he was going to the hospital.
And for reasons he was not ready to examine, tomorrow felt very far away.