Chapter Text
The world has tilted off its axis many times in Pablo's life, both to shed light and to plunge him into darkness.
He is too young when he packs his entire life into a suitcase and is sent off to La Masia, barely a decade old, leaving his home behind. He is too young when he learns that being good is not always enough — that there will always be another boy waiting for his place, another trial, another coach with a different opinion. He is too young when the friends he keeps making start disappearing one by one, sent home to families who are proud of them but unable to understand why it wasn't enough.
And he is too young when he is called up to the first team.
FC Barcelona.
There are moments in a life that feel too large for the person living them. He remembers the shirt, the noise, the distant thought that his mother would probably cry when she saw him on the pitch. But he makes it, because Pablo has been proving people wrong his entire life.
One could argue he is too young, too, when he tears his ACL. But he supposes there is no age for that. There is no age at which your body is supposed to betray you, no appropriate time for the sound of something going wrong inside your knee, for the sudden absence of football, for the strange new vocabulary that becomes part of your everyday life — recovery, rehabilitation, load management, return to play.
The journalists are kinder with their words than he expects. They talk about unfortunate setbacks and difficult timelines, about the uncertainty of returning to the same level, about the physical and psychological demands of rehabilitation. They never quite say your career might be over. That would be irresponsible.
Pablo hears it anyway.
But this is okay, because Pablo has been proving people wrong his entire life, and he is two decades old now, and he has been playing football for longer than his memory can properly recall. He will fight the universe if he has to. He will play again. Mark his words.
The first time he runs properly after the injury, he cries — not during, but after, once he's back in the changing room with the door closed and nobody looking directly at him. He doesn't know exactly what the tears are for. Pain, maybe. Relief. Fear. Six months of wanting something can make the wanting feel bigger than the thing itself.
The run itself is only a few minutes.
It is nothing. It is everything.
His knee holds, and that is what matters. He goes home that evening and tells his mother that everything is going well, says it with the confidence of someone who has already decided the difficult part is over. The rest is just work, and Pablo knows how to work. He knows how to wake early, how to repeat an exercise until his muscles burn, how to do something badly a hundred times until one day he does it correctly without thinking. He has always been good at discipline. Even before the injury, food had quietly been part of that.
It hadn't started as anything dramatic. Professional football teaches you fast that your body isn't entirely your own — there are numbers attached to it, weight and muscle mass and body fat and hydration, recovery times and calorie needs and performance markers that someone else is always watching. He learned which foods left him feeling light before a session and which ones sat too heavy in his stomach when the ball started moving. He learned that some of his teammates could eat anything and still run for ninety minutes as if their bodies had been built specifically for the job, and that his didn't always work that way.
None of it bothered him enough to call it a problem. He was simply careful. Careful became disciplined. Disciplined became routine. And routine is hard to recognize as a problem when everyone around you is doing some version of it — when the whole building runs on the same quiet arithmetic of intake and output, and you've simply learned to do the math a little more attentively than most.
Then he got injured, and the rules changed overnight. He couldn't train the way he used to. He couldn't run. He couldn't burn what he used to burn. For the first few weeks nobody said anything about food — they didn't need to. Pablo understood on his own. If he wasn't training, he didn't need as much. It was simple. Mathematical. The less he did, the less he should eat.
So he became careful in a new way. He stopped taking the extra piece of bread at breakfast. He left a little more on the plate at the end of a meal. He said no to dessert more often than he used to, and told himself it wasn't a sacrifice, just sense. When the nutritionist adjusted his meal plan to match his reduced activity, he felt something that surprised him — not resentment, but relief. Here, finally, was a set of numbers he could hold onto and get right.
Because everything else about his body had stopped being his. His knee wasn't his. His career wasn't his. His days were measured by exercises someone else had chosen, appointments someone else had scheduled, scans someone else interpreted and then explained to him in a tone that assumed he wouldn't understand the images himself. But food — food he could decide. He could look at a plate and know, before anyone told him, whether it was too much or not enough. He could be right about something, on his own, without a doctor's sign-off. It became the one place his judgment still counted.
He didn't examine that too closely at the time. It felt like control. It felt like the opposite of what the injury had done to him. It didn't occur to him that a thing built to compensate for losing control over your body is still, in the end, about your body — that he had simply moved the fight to different ground.
By the time he was cleared to jog again, being careful with food had stopped feeling like something he did and started feeling like something he was. He didn't think about it as restriction. He thought about it as good habits, the kind that other people at the club also had, the kind coaches quietly approved of when they mentioned a player's discipline off the pitch. It was easy to mistake vigilance for virtue when the whole sport was built to reward it.
-
"You're going to eat that?"
Pablo looks up. Fermín is standing across the table, looking at his plate — eggs, toast, fruit. Nothing strange. Nothing wrong.
"I am eating it."
Fermín raises an eyebrow. "You've been staring at it for five minutes."
"I was thinking."
"About eggs?"
"Very complicated eggs."
Fermín laughs and reaches across the table to steal a piece of toast from someone else's plate before Pablo can answer properly. Pablo smiles and waits until his friend is distracted before taking another bite, unhurried, careful — he has learned not to rush. The food isn't going anywhere. Neither is he.
Except that today, unlike most of his rehabilitation, he has training. Proper training. Not rehab, not individual work, not twenty minutes on a treadmill with a physio watching the angle of his knee. Training, with the team. The thought puts something fluttering under his ribs that he doesn't have a better word for. He has imagined this moment so many times that the reality of it feels almost anticlimactic — there is no dramatic music, no announcement, no cinematic return, just a changing room full of noise, someone complaining about the playlist, a sock thrown at someone's head, boots hitting the floor. Normal. He wants normal more than almost anything he has wanted in his life.
He finishes the eggs. He leaves the toast. For a moment he considers taking it anyway, and then he doesn't. It's only toast. He'll eat later, when his body has actually earned it.
Training is harder than he expects — not impossibly hard, not enough to worry anyone, but hard in the specific, humbling way that reminds him six months is a long time to be away from his own legs. The first twenty minutes settle into something familiar; his body remembers the positioning, the passing, the sharp changes of direction before his brain has to ask it to. Then the intensity climbs, and his lungs start to burn, and his legs feel heavier than he remembers them being, and he hates it — hates the exact moment his body reminds him what six months costs. So he pushes harder, the way he always has, because pushing harder is the only response he actually trusts.
By the end he is drenched, bent over with his hands on his knees, dragging air in. Someone claps him on the back. "Welcome back." There it is — the thing he wanted, the thing he fought six months for. He is back. Properly, actually back. He should feel nothing but happiness, and mostly he does.
But when someone mentions lunch, his stomach drops, quick and strange, gone almost before he registers it. Then hunger rolls through him instead, sudden and sharp enough that it startles him. Not hungry. Starving. His body screaming for something in a voice he isn't used to hearing from it anymore. He straightens up and ignores it, the way he's gotten used to ignoring most things his body says lately, and follows the others toward the dining room.
The dining room is loud, the way it always is — someone arguing about the music, someone laughing too hard at nothing, plates and chairs scraping. Pablo sits down in front of a normal meal, a proper post-training plate, more food than he's been eating in months and exactly what his body needs today. He looks at it, and his stomach twists in a way that has nothing to do with hunger anymore.
Eat.
He picks up his fork. Across the table someone is already halfway through their plate without a second thought, the way people eat when food has never once been a decision. Pablo takes a bite, then another. He can do this. He isn't stupid. He ate breakfast. He ate yesterday. He's been eating all through his recovery. Every meal accounted for and approved. Everything is fine.
He takes another bite. Then, almost without deciding to, he starts counting. Not consciously at first — the bread, the sauce, the size of the portion, how much he's already eaten today against how much training he did, how much is left for later if he stops now. The numbers arrange themselves in his head the way they always do, quick and orderly, a language he doesn't remember learning but speaks fluently anyway. It has nothing to do with what his body actually did on the pitch twenty minutes ago. It has everything to do with the version of himself that existed for six months, the one who wasn't running anywhere, the one these numbers were built for and never updated since.
He sets the fork down. His stomach protests, quiet and easy to override. He takes a sip of water instead. Nobody notices. That's good — nobody needs to. He'll finish later. He always does, or tells himself he will, and the difference between those two things has gotten harder to feel from the inside.
Someone across the table asks how it feels to finally be back.
Pablo smiles. "Perfect."
The answer comes easily. It has to. Because Pablo has been proving people wrong his entire life, and he has finally made it back to the pitch that took six months from him. Everything else — the numbers, the hunger he keeps talking himself out of, the fork he keeps setting down — can wait.