Chapter Text
I
A few late alerts ping around the hushed eerie still of the Dog Track. He’s aware of the shift in atmosphere the same way he’s aware of the stormclouds collecting overhead and what they might mean for the last half-hour of the match. The same way he’s aware of the chip on the visiting number 17’s shoulder after Richmond’s wet-behind-the-ears new striker nutmegged him in the first five minutes.
Potential issue noted and filed away for later. No sense worrying over it now. Some other fucks fucking scored, or won, or were murdered so badly in a match they should go ahead and voluntarily relegate themselves now, mid-season, to spare themselves the embarrassment, he can’t do anything about it besides get his lads through their own ninety minutes.
He does. They win 3-2, they win more often than not these days, win enough to hover near the bottom of the top ten, jockeying for seventh, eighth, ninth place every week with Leeds, Brentford, fucking Sunderland. Won’t be clawing their way back to the Champions this year, but – maybe next. The new striker isn’t quite foot-kissed-by-God good, but he is… very good. Lad they brought in last season for midfield has turned out to be a fucking beast in defense.
They win 3-2 and trudge off the pitch, elated and miserable all at once, shivering in the cold November rain that’s been coming down at a steady clip since the seventy-seven minute mark. Normally, Roy would turn his phone back on after the final whistle; today, he’s left it safe and dry in his jacket pocket. Today, he’s watching the opponent number 17 approach Richmond’s young striker, a decade his junior and half his fucking bulk, slap him good-naturedly on the back and strike up a conversation with their rain-matted hair and mud-stained shoes.
So he doesn’t turn on his phone and doesn’t think to ask before dripping his way to the press room, not his circus, not his monkeys. Higgins, to his credit, does try and warn him off, but he doesn’t tackle the stairs quite as recklessly as he used to after a stern warning from the lovely and intimidating in equal measure Julie, and Roy’s already got the door open to a deafening raucous of shouted questions and blinding series of camera bulbs flashing, before Higgins comes hurtling around the corner to catch him.
“Roy! Before you -!” he does try, but eventually the sound of a dozen voices resolves into a semi-coherent common question:
“Coach Kent, any comment on what happened in the match with Jamie?”
It’s a stupid fucking question, and the press has known for years now that’s the surest fire way to get a real answer out of him, however biting. So he turns heel, steps and snaps into the room, “Janway didn’t play today, the fuck kind of question is that?”
The quick one-two sequence of the press collectively shutting up and Higgins gagging at his back clue Roy in to the fact that he’s fucking missed something.
“Roy,” a new voice turns him right back around.
Keeley’s too busy anymore to make it to all the matches. She didn’t come to this one, he knows for a fucking fact.
He swallows, grunts a terse acknowledgement.
They’re not talking about his benched centre-back who strained his groin last week in training.
“Jesus Christ.”
There are bad tackles and there are dirty tackles. Difference between a yellow and a red. Not always easy to tell which is which, if the little prick in question can really sell it.
This one’s just bad. Misjudged. Intrinsic risk of going at a player who can pivot in the blink of an eye, who’s made a whole glorious career out fancy footwork fakeouts, of knowing exactly where he’s going and how he’s going to get there and leaving everyone else fumbling and guessing and playing constant catchup.
The tackle’s bad and he goes down, but it’s not the fucking fall that concusses you, it’s the goddamn landing.
The tackle’s bad, but it wasn’t intentional, no one could play at the Leipzig player’s panic when he picks himself up and realizes Jamie isn’t following. Of course, from his angle, he couldn’t see the way Jamie’s head fucking bounced on the ground. Roy wouldn’t be surprised if he could fucking hear it though, fucking hell.
The broadcast lasts long enough to catch Jamie pushing against the hands, teammates and opponents alike, trying to keep him still, sluggish and dazed, shoving up on one elbow and promptly vomiting on the little prick who brought him down, which is some instant fucking karma Roy would enjoy if he weren’t digging his fingernails into his palms hard enough to bleed.
Later that night, he’ll find a video on socials of the ambulance carrying Jamie out of the Allianz Arena.
Four months on, he’ll uncover it and watch it again and again when the news breaks that Jamie’s requested to be released from his contract with Bayern Munich and the awful realization settles in his gut that the ambulance ride was the last time Jamie fucking Tartt would leave a football pitch.
Roy had walked off the pitch at Stamford Bridge after the Arsenal slaughter like he was slogging through molasses. And that was just for sensing the end was on the horizon. He’d still clawed four more seasons out of his scattered focus and failing joints. The retroactive concession of defeat, the acknowledgment that Jamie’s star had reached its zenith and come crashing ignominiously back to Earth four fucking months ago with the crack of his head on the cold, hard ground at Allianz, well –
That shit’s like fucking… breathing through soup, he’s sucking in breaths like he’s clawing every molecule of oxygen out of the viscous air suddenly pressing in around him, weighing him down, pinning him in his chair while the sounds of the slowly filling dressing room echo vaguely in the background of his awareness.
He snaps out of it when Coach Rizzo crashes into his seat across the room. Gets a strange look for the strangled hiccup of a breath that escapes him when his lungs snap back into proper working order, but this history’s all fucking academic to Rizzo, to everyone left in Roy’s day-to-day orbit, with his last holdout from the old days finally retired end of last season.
The buzz of his phone isn’t surprising, it’ll be Phoebe or Keeley or Ted nudging him about the news and his fucking feelings. His fingers itch to grab it, but they’ve been itching for four months and it’s only getting worse and worse the longer he doesn’t call or text or send a fucking carrier pigeon, for fuck’s sake. Letting fucking… thirdhand well-wishes passed from Keeley to Georgie to Germany suffice like the coward he is who knows he fucked it well and good one last time, despite Sharon’s best efforts, because pushing Jamie out the door was always going to be easier than biting his tongue to stop himself from begging Jamie not to leave.
Roy’s mantle at home consists of approximately a million framed photos of Phoebe doing everything and nothing, from the first dazed discontent on her little squished, pink newborn face to the award she won for a science project last year to her dozing on the sofa with Dauphine curled up on her chest.
Tucked in amongst the lot is exactly one shit photo of him and Jamie at Heathrow arrivals, snapped on a passerby’s cell phone the day Jamie came home after the ‘22 World Cup. While Jamie was collecting his bag and hamming it up good-naturedly for the cluster of fans and friends he’d made on the flight and any others dragged along in the wake of his spectacle upon arrival, the young lady who’d taken the photo sidled up awkwardly to Roy, phone in hand.
“No,” he grunted.
She went bright red and stammered, “Sorry, I just…” as she turned her screen around so he could see. “I didn’t mean to – my fiancé’s a big fan,” she nodded towards Jamie, “I were just trying to get a quick pic to rub in his face, like.” And okay, she endeared herself pretty fucking fast to Roy with that one. “Didn’t realize he were meeting his… that he was meeting someone,” she pivoted, and Roy didn’t really understand what word she’d decided against saying aloud, but he did understand that she didn’t recognize him at all. “D’you want it?”
Roy blinked at the picture, and back at her, and back at the picture, and didn’t know what to say. It was just a fucking picture caught mid-greeting, Roy’s hands on Jamie’s shoulders and Jamie’s curling into the fabric of Roy’s coat. And yeah, Jamie was grinning all… eyes fucking shining, he could’ve been bounding to the dugout after the final whistle if it weren’t for the luggage claim signage over their heads and no sign of Richmond kit anywhere.
And yeah, Roy was fucking… beaming at him so hard his eyes were crinkled all but shut, and fucking hell, been getting papped since he was seven-fucking-teen and no one’d ever caught him looking more than vaguely content in public.
“…Yeah, okay,” he heard himself rumble over the hubbub all around them, and a quick airdrop had it flashing on his phone while she deleted her own copy right then and there for good measure. “Uh – thanks.”
Five years later, he’s got the photo tucked on his mantle in between Phoebe making a face at her first bite of ice cream and Phoebe bent over her desk with charcoal in hand and her tongue poking between her teeth, mid-drawing of what’s either shaping up to be a still life or more tits, Roy can’t fucking remember which.
He never told Jamie about the woman who took it.
He never showed Jamie the picture.
Five months later, Jamie won his last match, and the League, for Richmond. He turned at the final whistle, caught Roy’s eyes in an instant and held them longer than he ought have been able through the rising pandemonium.
Roy thought for a long time – wanted to think more like – that Jamie danced his way through that marvelous match motivated first and foremost by spite.
The more time that passes, the more Roy contents himself with the things he has and the things he’s never been able to find, or hold on to, or convince himself he fucking deserves or is capable of keeping so why fucking bother, the more he knows at his fucking core Jamie was just looking one last time for a sign Roy couldn’t give.
Three summers after parting ways with Richmond’s talisman, their rising star, their central cog, Roy watched England go down to Argentina in the final minutes of the Cup semi-final in fucking America. Watched Jamie trudge exhaustedly off the pitch, offering obligatory congratulatory handshakes to the opposing team and consolation backslaps to his fellow Lions along the way.
He idly wondered if Jamie would fly home to Munich or home to Manchester, flexed his hand against the sudden itch in his fingertips, and turned his attention back to his summer scouting reports.
Three months after the news dropped that Jamie was parting ways with Bayern Munich, retirement in all but official announcement, Roy finally yields, succumbs to the itch in his twitching fingertips, and scrolls deep in his message history to find a long-dormant thread. He braces himself and scrolls up, doesn’t make it all that far in the end, death by a thousand fucking cuts. The last one is a drowning gasp of their dying friendship, a desperate fucking olive branch Roy was too much of a self-pitying pathetic prick to take.
Jamie: friendly @ Chelsea next month. Catch up while I’m in town?
Roy never answered. Munich wiped the fucking floor at Stamford Bridge.
Before that is a three-text exchange from a few months earlier, final week of the season, that goes like this:
Jamie: congrats on the upset :) top ten!
Roy: did Arsenal manage to conjure enough money to bribe you away from City another season?
Jamie: whatever.
The next day, Jamie finally answered the hottest question in the Prem, what with his two-year contract with Arsenal ending, and announced that he wasn’t just getting the fuck out of London, he was fleeing the whole damn country. It’s not lost on Roy, looking back, that getting the fuck away from him was likely not nothing, when it came time to weigh the merits of his myriad offers.
He steels himself and scrolls further back through a litany of needling and critiques, the fuck was that match? after an embarrassing loss to Fulham, as if Richmond had any room to talk that season; the fuck are you doing? after a few tabloid spreads dropped within a couple month span, clubs and women, too much booze and rumors of worse; you’re better than this you little prick after he was papped cozied up in a booth in a nominally private restaurant with a teammate’s wife.
The fuckface photographers mostly left him alone after Jamie was spotted on holiday in Mallorca that summer with said wife and said teammate, because as it turns out, there are some answers the press don’t really want to uncover.
It’s not lost on Roy, looking back, that Jamie’s career was really just defined by periods of evolving greatness competing with his eventual need to put distance between himself and the latest arsehole full of unsolicited opinions.
He stops torturing himself and scrolls back to the bottom of the thread, Jamie’s last effort to salvage something functional out of the ashes of potential for something greater, just in time to see three bubbles pop up at the bottom of the screen, disappear, and pop up once more. He drops his phone like it burned him; it clatters loud on his kitchen counter.
No message ever comes through.
The thing about Roy’s life, settled into its new shape around managing a Premier League team and all the inherent busy schedules and stresses therein, is that it’s a far better life than he ever fathomed having once he’d worn his body down beyond the limits of playing. He’s no Ted, but he can find the wins even in a losing match, a lackluster season, he appreciates the players’ growth for its own sake, on and off the pitch.
His life is more personally fulfilling than he ever imagined it could be once his granddad died. Phoebe’s past the age of needing minding while her mum works, but they never go more than a week without grabbing dinner, she texts him every day, she is kind and witty and smart and stands up to bullies and referees as determinedly as she’s ever done.
He has friendships that fucking… mean something, Keeley and Trent, Rebecca and Ted, aren’t just superficial teammate bonds built around who frequents the same clubs after wins and who can keep up after losses.
He has more than he could have ever hoped, as if he’d ever really even hoped to make it here, well into his mid-fucking-forties with the first gleaming strands of silver in his beard, but he’s never had an honest answer to the incredulous question Beard threw at him when he realized Roy had no intention of joining the conversation about Jamie’s expiring contract. That Roy had already reconciled himself to letting him go.
“What the hell are you afraid of, man?”
That Jamie would limit himself out of a sense of obligation to the club, considering the lifeline Ted almost didn’t throw him. That Jamie’s peak years were already at hand, a late-bloomer by typical standards, his early years with City spent buckling under the weight of his fuckface father’s oppression. That every season he spent in Richmond, a neighborhood club really even still compared to the likes of City, Chelsea, Arsenal, represented dwindling opportunities for better contracts, higher pay, the sort of global star power that would earn him a starting position in Madrid or the like.
Better to nudge him along while his prospects would never be better than risk any sense of an imbalanced ledger keeping him stifled until he was suffocating in resentment.
If therapy were being graded, Roy’s marks wouldn’t be any better than any other fucking thing he ever did at school, but he’s mature enough now, fuck you very much, to acknowledge it was all bullshit all along. He slides the photo off his mantle, awkward angle and shit lighting and dodgy focus and all, and knows damn well the path he flinched away from.
Knows Jamie would have stayed with him forever. Stayed at Richmond as long as Rebecca would have them, let their partnership define a new era, turned Richmond into the sort of international club that would only drag more greatness into its orbit.
But he panicked. First year as manager and he was terrified of fucking it, all of it, and he was terrified of fucking a career destined to be as glorious as Jamie’s.
Or maybe he was just terrified that he was reading it all wrong.
He stares at the photo in his hand and thinks - can’t get hurt if you don’t try.
The photo moves to Roy’s office when he comes back from a couple weeks’ summer holiday, and the third day it’s up, pinned amongst the collage of Phoebe’s motivational cards, Coach Rizzo stops and squints at it and asks, “Who’s that?”
Roy can’t help but bristle, despite the dodgy focus and whatnot, but he thinks he keeps the indignation out of his voice when he grumbles, “Jamie Tartt.”
“I know it’s Jamie Tartt,” Rizzo glances around at him like he’s lost his mind, “Who’s he with?”
Jesus fucking Christ, Roy really needs to smile more. He scowls and growls, “Fucking no one,” and steers his assistant coach away from the board with the sheer power of his glare.
Despite his frustration behind closed doors, to Roy’s knowledge Beard never tried to sway Jamie to stay. To Roy’s knowledge, Beard never stopped making Jamie a little nervous just by merit of his watchful, still silence, and to Roy’s knowledge, once Jamie left Richmond for Arsenal, that was the end of their association.
The day Jamie bounced his head off the grass at Allianz, Ted and Beard were on a bus west with the Lady Greyhounds; Roy was still overthinking and second-guessing what message to pass to Keeley to pass to Georgie to pass to Germany, and by the time he’d sorted it out, Beard was already on a flight out of Bristol.
The next day, he sent Ted and Rebecca a picture taken with Georgie, flanking a rather put-out Jamie in a hospital bed, the two of them smiling and offering thumbs-ups to counter Jamie’s scowling flipping off the camera. The day after that, once Ted and the Lady Greyhounds were back from their match, they had a quick call, Rebecca and Higgins, Ted and Keeley all clustered around the phone on Rebecca’s desk while Roy sat on the sofa and glowered harder at the floor with each passing minute, with each tired word from Jamie’s mouth.
“Don’t remember the tackle,” he confessed and
“Don’t remember the ambulance,” he realized and
“Don’t remember how to flirt with the nurses, me German’s gone to shit,” to which Vincent fucking Kompany replied
“What you don’t remember is that your German’s always been shit, Jamie,” and everybody chuckled, Jamie included, while it just bounced around Roy’s head over and over:
Don’t remember, don’t remember, don’t remember
Must’ve been traumatizing.
A week before their first pre-season friendlies, Roy walks in his office and jumps, “Jesus fucking Christ,” to find Beard standing there, head tipped consideringly as he stares at the latest addition to the board.
The thing about Beard is that Roy never would have dreamed he’d stick with him once Ted found his way back, but he has always suspected he made it all too easy on him after that first year he was manager, that year they won it all, that year they fell a goal short of making it to the Champions semi-final.
What he’s never quite grasped, until Beard turns around with an incongruously softened expression on his usually unreadable face, is just how hard his eyes have been all this long time since. The unsettling suspicion squirms through him that Beard’s finally answered that question he’d asked, all on his own.
Whatever it is putting that fucking look in his eyes, Beard declines to comment, thank fuck. Instead, he pulls out his mobile and waggles it pointedly at Roy and tells him, “Press release dropped half an hour ago. Wanted to make sure you saw it, since they do like to ask.”
“Press release,” Roy echoes, brows furrowing. “Whose press release? Our press release?”
Beard shakes his head, which makes sense since he’d have heard it from Keeley first in that case. He hands over his phone without an answer, without a word of any sort.
And Roy finds himself staring at an image of a beaming Jamie Tartt bedecked back in City sky blue.