Chapter Text
Chapter One
Time came in only through the gap in the curtains.
The trapezoid of light it laid across the floor lengthened, shortened, disappeared. That was a day. Messi had long since stopped counting which day it was, since counting changed nothing.
There were three glasses on the nightstand. One drained, one half-drunk, one he had no memory of filling. Beside them, the pills. The man who had found him this flat had brought them himself - nothing from the team doctor could be taken now. Swallowed, they let him sleep. Asleep, time went by. There was nothing he wanted except for time to go by, so as medicine it was enough.
His phone was in the drawer, switched off.
From the last day he had turned it on, things were still printed on the inside of his eyelids.
-did he really not know -I've yet to hear a reason we should believe "I didn't know" -a man who dopes wouldn't fix a match?
He hadn't known. He truly hadn't. He thought he had said it a hundred times, and from the hundred and first the sound coming out of his own mouth had begun to sound like an excuse to him too. Once it starts sounding like an excuse, it is over. After that it ran to the same place whether he spoke or not.
When he shifted, something under his ribs pulled, heavy. Looking down, he could see the bruise. What had been dark red was going yellow now, from the edges in. He watched that instead of a calendar. The rate at which the colour changed was the only time moving in this room.
The first thing they took hold of was his shoulder. Not even hard. The way you'd say sit down a second.
"All you have to do is stay quiet."
He had looked at the face saying it. Last year that same face had gone around the room showing photographs like wedding invitations, asking everyone to come to his boy's first birthday. Now it was a face Messi had never seen before. Not angry. Not sorry. A face that had finished its arithmetic.
Being hit came as sound first. Flesh meeting flesh was duller than he had expected, and shorter. The pain arrived slightly late. His back struck the lockers and the metal rang and the ringing went into his spine. Someone bent his arm up behind him, and the tape wound around that wrist came into view. Messi had bought it. Ordered it by the case at the start of the season and put a roll in every locker.
When his cheek came down on the floor tile, the first thing he thought was that they'd cleaned in here not long ago.
Another familiar face was standing at the door. He didn't hit anyone. He never once put a hand on him only stood at the door, looking out.
There were eight of them. He hadn't counted, and he knew.
Messi shut his eyes. The drug came up from behind his knees.
He felt someone in the room a long time later. Or perhaps not long; he had no way of telling. When he opened his eyes the light was different from before, and there was a man standing beside the bed.
He should have startled. Only a handful of people at the club knew this address, and he had heard nothing not the keypad at the door, not a footstep in the hall. If it were a stranger he ought to have shouted, or reached for something. His body did none of it. Being startled took energy too. That was one of the things Messi was learning lately.
His focus came slowly. The outline of the man was familiar. Wide across the shoulders, standing with his weight low.
"...Rodri."
"Yeah." De Paul answered as though nothing about this were unusual. "I'm here."
How did you get here was the thing to ask. How he had found the place, how he had got through the door. The questions scattered before they could form a queue. Wondering took energy as well. However he had found it, the result was the same: he had been seen in a state Messi had wanted no one to see.
"...Go home."
His voice came out cracked, not quite his. It was the first he had used it in days.
De Paul didn't go home. He looked around the room instead. The curtains, the glasses on the nightstand, the bread going hard on the counter untouched. Messi didn't watch to see where that gaze stopped or for how long. He didn't need to watch to know.
"It's warm in here," De Paul said. "Let's get some air."
The curtain shifted a little and the window opened the width of two fingers. Outside came in with it. Traffic. A dog barking somewhere. The sound of a world carrying on as usual was strange to him.
"Sit up a minute. You'll wreck your back lying flat like that."
And, saying it, De Paul reached out to take him under the shoulder and bring him upright, the way they had held each other after goals, a movement passed between them several hundred times.
The moment the hand touched his shoulder, his body moved first.
A flinch. Backwards.
The feel of that day sent him half a span back before he had any say in it.
And that was as far as it went. He didn't strike the hand away. He didn't push it off. The body that had retreated simply went slack, and stopped there, in a shoulder too rigid to be refusal and too rigid to be consent.
The room went quiet.
De Paul's hand had stopped in the air. Messi dropped his eyes to the blanket so as not to look at it, which meant he did not see what crossed De Paul's face. He could guess what was on it. That was why he couldn't look.
The stopped hand withdrew, slowly.
"...Right, well. You stand up too fast, you get dizzy." De Paul's voice was untroubled. It was the kind of untroubled where the effort is audible all the way through. "I'll get you fresh water. These have all gone warm."
He carried the three glasses out and came back with one full one and set it on the nightstand. Then he stood a pace from the bed and said a few things that weren't about anything. That the roads had been slow. That the weather had turned. Not one word about the team. Messi didn't answer, and De Paul didn't appear to be waiting for one.
Some length of time passed. There was the sound of him getting to his feet.
"I'm off. Drink the water."
The front door closed, far away. This time he heard it. That he had missed the sound coming in and caught it going out seemed strange to him.
The room settled back to its old density. Through the window, open the width of two fingers, the outside was still coming in.
Messi looked at the ceiling.
It was not as though he didn't know how De Paul had always looked at him.
When the broadcast cut to De Paul on the bench, nine times in ten that gaze was following one man on the pitch, and once a season some commentator would make a joke of it. When a match ended, whatever the score, De Paul was the first one running over to hoist him up onto his shoulder if they'd won, to get an arm around his shoulder if they hadn't. Asked in interviews which player he admired, he was old enough to know how gauche it is to name a teammate, and he named the same one every time. Bodyguard had started as a nickname the squad used to take the piss out of him. He was the one who liked it best.
That was what the boy had seen today. In a room with the curtains drawn, next to bread going hard, a man who backs away from a hand on his shoulder. The distance between the shoulder he used to lift and the shoulder that pulled away De Paul had taken it all in at a glance.
He won't come again.
Strangely, the thought didn't hurt. Hurting took energy as well. Messi drank half the fresh glass, took his pill, and closed his eyes.
The trapezoid of light climbed the wall and went out.
Chapter Two
The prediction that De Paul wouldn't come again lasted two days.
When Messi opened his eyes, De Paul was sitting in a chair he had dragged in from somewhere. Hoodie. He registered that Messi was awake, said "you're up," and began a story nobody had asked for about stopping at the shop on the way, and the man ahead of him in the queue buying three whole watermelons. What was supposed to be remarkable about this was never established. Messi didn't answer, and De Paul wasn't waiting for one.
The next time he opened his eyes it was training kit. His hair was still damp. It meant he had showered after session and come straight over.
The time after that, the away accreditation was still hanging round his neck. He thought he'd heard a case being stood up in the hall. It meant he had come here from the airport instead of to the training ground.
At some point Messi began keeping the days by that. Hoodie, training kit, accreditation. In a room with the curtains shut, there was now something besides the colour of a bruise to tell him time was passing. A different set of clothes meant a different day, and it also meant that on a different day, he still came.
Messi didn't ask why. If he asked, De Paul would answer, and he hadn't the strength to hear the answer.
"There's something you need to know."
The day his agent produced that sentence. On the phone held out to him, his own name and the word positive sat on the same line. The team doctor had prescribed it. He photographed the prescription and sent it, and it made no difference. The explanation that he had taken exactly what he was given never made it past the second paragraph in any article. A different sentence took the last line of all of them instead. With a doping controversy now added, the allegations of match-fixing carry increasing weight.
And so Messi became a player who had doped, and a player who dopes would have fixed matches too. Two things he had not done had become each other's evidence.
"Staying quiet is what's best for you."
His manager's face when he said it came back as well. A face he had looked at for ten years. It took one sentence to turn it into a stranger's. That all of them had known. That they had known and had been moving accordingly. That the only one who hadn't known was him.
And then the locker room. "I'm asking you nicely."
When it got that far, Messi opened his eyes. Ceiling. Light in the gap of the curtains. The glass on the nightstand. He touched each thing his eyes could hold, and waited for his breath to come back to where it belonged. Sound came back after that. Traffic outside, the air in the room, and over it-
"-so then he puts a fourth one in the trolley, I swear to God."
De Paul's voice. Watermelons, and a new laundrette, and other sentences carrying no weight at all. Only once his focus had settled onto that voice did the rest of his body finish returning to the present.
That day De Paul was in training kit, and his face was serious from the moment he came in.
"Leo. There's something you have to know."
Messi's stomach closed.
He knew the shape of that sentence. There's something you need to know. Behind a sentence of that shape there was always a phone, and behind the phone a headline with his name set into it. His body turned half a span towards the wall before he could stop it.
"...I don't want to hear it."
"You have to hear this one." De Paul didn't back off. "It's important."
There was the movement of a phone being held out. When Messi looked down, De Paul was holding it by the top corner with two fingers. The whole lower half of it was empty, so that as the phone changed hands, nothing of theirs touched anywhere.
It took him a moment to understand that this was not an accident.
Messi looked at the screen.
Ducklings.
Six little scraps of down, crossing the grass in a line, waddling. The last one kept drifting out of the line and hurrying back into it. The video ended around ten seconds and started again from the beginning.
Messi looked at the screen. Then he looked at De Paul - properly, at his face, for the first time in days.
"...This is the thing I have to know?"
"Yes." De Paul was in deadly earnest. "That away trip, two seasons ago. The park across from the ground with the lake in it. Remember? There was a white bird. I said swan, you said goose. We bet a drink on it and then never looked it up."
He remembered. The evening before a match, the lake on the walking route. One white bird on the water. Look at the neck, it's a swan. Look at the orange bill, it's a goose. The kind of argument that weighs nothing, on a day with the kit off.
"She's had chicks. Somebody in the supporters' club lives out that way and posted it."
Messi looked at the screen again. The video restarted for the third time. Six scraps of down crossed the grass again. The last one drifted out again and hurried back. He watched it a fourth time, a fifth, and then something came out of his mouth on its own.
"...They're ducks, though."
"What?"
"Look at the chicks. They're ducks." Messi tilted the screen a little towards him. "We were both wrong."
De Paul leaned in to look. He tried to hold down the corner of his mouth once, and failed.
"You're right. Both wrong." Then his face turned to the business of adjudication. "Hang on. Does that void the bet, or do we both lose?"
"The problem is that you still remember the bet."
"Next time we're out that way I'll find out exactly where they are and tell you. You'll want to see them grown."
Messi set the phone down on the blanket. The same way, so that nothing touched.
"...I'm not going to be going out that way."
It wasn't an answer arrived at by calculating a future. It was the answer of a man with no future to calculate. The pitch, the team bus, the walk the evening before a match - all of them words belonging to a season already gone. There was the movement of De Paul starting to say something and letting it go.
"...We'll decide that when we get there." What he settled on was that. "Anyway, they need names first. Six of them, so back four and a double pivot."
"Don't set up a formation for ducks."
De Paul went, and the room settled back to its old density.
Messi looked at the ceiling for a while and then shut his eyes. What came up on the inside of his eyelids was not a headline. It was six scraps of down crossing the grass in a line, and the last one, drifting out.
It was the first time in weeks.
Chapter Three
The curtains stood open a hand's width now.
Messi had opened them. One day after De Paul had gone, the fact that the trapezoid of light didn't reach the bed had become suddenly unbearable. With a hand's width open the air in the room was a little different, and since it was different he started drinking water when he was supposed to. They were changes too small to call recovery. Still, on the days De Paul came he had taken to sitting up against the headboard. Being met lying down and being met sitting up turned out to be more different than he'd expected.
That day De Paul was in a hoodie, and he came through the door already aggrieved.
"Leo. I have been wronged"
"What now."
"Okay, so. I'm underwater on Tesla, right? I go in at the open to bring my average down. It's sitting at 202. So I figure, fine, I'll take it at 200, and I put the order in. And this little prick slaps my hand away and you know what he says to me? He goes, are you kidding? You think I'm a two-hundred-dollar stock? I don't sell a single share to a guy who doesn't know what I'm worth. And shoots straight up to 210."
"The stock talks."
"Let me finish. So now I'm pissed. Fine, I think. Let's see who breaks first. It goes to 215. And it's laughing at me the whole way up you're never seeing this price again. So I go, all right, I'm sorry, I was wrong about you, and I scramble in at 215 and barely get filled. And that's when the little bastard turns around and says, idiot, I'm actually a 190 stock, and drops like a rock. Broke piece of-"
Messi had been listening without a word. Listening, his shoulders went once. He tried to hold it, and they went a second time, and what came out of him in the end was the sound of air escaping. A laugh, of a kind.
"Who is," Messi managed. "Who's the broke one. The one who lost a staring contest with a stock is you."
"No, listen, there's a signal. There's definitely a signal. It waits till I've bought and then it goes he has purchased and drags the whole thing down like clockwork."
"...A signal." Messi turned the word over once. "And out of eight billion people, why is it only you who picks it up?"
"I'm serious. Leo, you gotta see this." De Paul woke the tablet and pulled up a chart. "Look at it. Say I cut my losses right here. Immediately it goes he has sold - beep, beep, beep the word's out."
Messi reached for the tablet. To see the screen better; no thought behind it. The hand passing it over and the hand reaching for it met halfway, and their fingers crossed.
Contact.
Nothing happened.
The tablet went from one hand to the other like any other object.
It took him two or three seconds after taking it to register that nothing had happened. When he looked up, something was moving fast across De Paul's face. De Paul folded it away in a hurry and pointed at the chart.
"-so, anyway, it was doing this the whole time before I bought."
Messi looked down at the tablet. He came off the chart and into the account. Under Tesla the positions ran down the page, and they ran red. The further he scrolled, the redder it got. Messi looked at the screen, then at De Paul, then at the screen, and let out a breath.
"Rodri. Why do you do this."
"Retirement."
"It's not just Tesla, is it. Other people invest to prepare for retirement. You're going to have to play a few more years than everybody else because of this. What are you, on staff at the Fed? Running yourself into the ground so you can personally keep failing companies off the delisting notice?"
"...Is it that bad?"
"It's that bad. This isn't investing, it's charity. Charity. No with charity the other side at least knows your name-"
"You have zero intention of making me feel better about this."
"Were you here to be made to feel better?"
"Obviously. I told you when I walked in I'd had a rough day. I said listen to me." De Paul took the tablet back and held it against his chest.
"I did listen. Listening is what made it worse."
"You could still be a little supportive about it."
The muscles of his face had gone slack from disuse, and the corner of his mouth went up before he knew it had.
While two people's worth of talking went back and forth in the room, the light coming through the hand's width of curtain had reached the foot of the bed.
There was nothing particular about that day.
De Paul was in training kit, and he talked about things he'd seen at the store, and Messi gave him a hard time twice. Somewhere in the middle of it - De Paul was on the subject of the candy racks by the register - something came out of Messi's mouth that meant nothing at all.
"...I could go for an alfajor."
"Hm?"
"The ones coated in chocolate. I used to have them all the time." Having said it, he let it go himself. "Anyway. Keep going. The store."
De Paul kept going about the store, and when the time came he got up like always, and left with the usual instruction to drink his water. Messi let the rest of the evening go by like always too.
It was nearly night when the sound came from the front door.
It opened, and De Paul was standing there. Still in what he'd left in, a paper bag in one hand, a little out of breath.
"...You didn't go back?"
"I went back and came out again." He held the bag out the same way he handed over the phone, gripping only the top corner. It seemed to have become a habit. "Three places. Two of them didn't have any. It's the ones with the chocolate on the outside, right?"
There were six alfajores in the bag. Something had pressed on them in the warmth on the way over, and the chocolate had bloomed pale in patches. They were not in the condition they'd been in on the shelf.
Messi stood holding the bag and couldn't say anything for a moment. It was a thing said in passing in the afternoon, a thing he himself had forgotten. That sentence had traveled several hours, been through three stores, and come back to stand at his door at this hour.
"...You came back out for this?"
De Paul's face suggested he couldn't see what there was in that. Then he checked his phone and winced. "Okay, if I'm not back now I'm actually dead. I'm going."
He was through the doorway when he turned around.
"Eat all of them. Don't leave any. All six."
The door shut.
Messi carried the bag back to the bed and opened it. He took out one of the bloomed alfajores and bit into it. It was thickly, heavily sweet.
For weeks, eating had been a procedure for passing time. He had not once eaten because he was hungry, or tasted anything while he did it.
On the second one his throat closed. There is no reason for something sweet to catch in a throat, and it caught. He drank some water and finished it. The third. The fourth.
And here he was now, eating a cookie with the chocolate gone pale on it, and not leaving any.
When the sixth was gone, there was nothing in the bottom of the bag but chocolate crumbs.