Archive of Our Own

"When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him. In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer."

 

April, 2010 (2 weeks into the new season, almost 18 weeks after the World Cup Draw)

Coming into a bar called 'Buffalo Wild Wings' is not Mark Zuckerberg's idea of a good end to an evening, and he really does not fucking care how much money they've been raising for charity that night.

Mostly because it's LA Galaxy who are helping raise it — 'Have your photo taken with a member of the team!' — who according to his boss are PAR's nemesis

(whether the Galaxy have noticed this is really up for debate, but there's some arguments Mark's kind of run out of patience for having with PAR's head coach, and this is seriously one of them)

— and yet seem to have attracted all the Redwoods players right into their little wannabe Galacticos party.

(and yes, Mark might have all Real Madrid's statistics immediately to hand at the front of his mind on any given day, but that's beside the point, and anyway, the Galacticos of Madrid don't even exist any more, no matter what the new players like to call themselves, so his comparison-making brain can shut up any time now)

Mark would really love to think that the PAR's players didn't show up there, invite or no invite, just because half the paparazzi in California are hanging around there.

After most of a season spent trying to get it into their empty little skulls that no-one even knows what they look like, so it's pointless getting snapped anyway, he's given up thinking the best of any of them.

He also thinks this is not his fucking job, but that's sort of beside the point, because when Thiel says something's his job?

Yeah. It is. Woe is him. How is this his life. Etc.

This is what I get, he thinks grimly, maneuvering his way through several surprisingly large and very drunk people who have managed to get not only an autograph from a still leg-propped, plaster-cast David Beckham, but spoken to him — and seriously, is the man the Doctor when he's off the pitch? Because nothing else explains how he manages to create extra space and time to keep so many people happy and not thinking he's an asshole like every other player of the MLS manages even on their best days — this is what I get for thinking oh, yeah, I'll be fine, I don't have to have any actual pitch skills, I don't have to be a player-manager, I don't have to work my way up from the sticks in Europe, I can just go work for an owner-manager, that'll be awesome, that'll work, yeah, I'll do that.

No, sorry, not an owner-manager, an owner-coach, fuck all the rules of soccer-as-she-is-known anywhere else, Thiel's known as a goddamn coach, despite the fact that no he really isn't, and actually, he employs people to do that part. What he is is a manager, and Mark does most of that for him, even on Thiel's best and most involved days, and yeah. It's kind of intrinsically annoying.

See, here's the thing. Mark's good at his job.

He knows it. Everyone else knows it.

But here's the other thing, which is that just like everyone else on Thiel's staff, he's way too fucking young to make it count on his own. There's no way anyone's going to give him a team.

There's no way anyone's going to let him try and even watch over a game by himself, not even nominally, not even if Thiel's in the fucking hospital with double pneumonia

(which hasn't happened yet, but Mark lives in hope, because man, their chances of doing better than a scraped one-goal win or a desultory no-one-cares-draw or just losing will go up amazingly if that ever becomes the case).

The cameras need to see Thiel on the sidelines, the cable companies

(and fuck Sky Sports and their analysis of the MLS as 'pub football' anyway, they don't know shit)

need to be able to remind anyone watching at least six times a game that Thiel owns the club and is never going to be replaced as the Redwoods' manager ever in the history of ever; they all need to be able to visibly and audibly compare him to every other seemingly dull-as-fuck manager who walks the earth and somehow has genius behind their grayish-bland faces, and seriously, why do commentators even exist?

So instead, as far as Mark's concerned, on the one hand it's working for

(and rarely, on a really good day, with)

Thiel, and it's this stupid new created-from-nothing team; and it's Sean's ideas of publicity, which he's pretty sure are the main reasons behind most of the damn team's being here tonight; and it's Erica's obsession with making sure no-one breaks their toe, which Mark can sort of see the point behind, because damn does it ever sound stupid when players are missing games because they have a broken toe; and on the good side, it's Dustin actually getting to be on the medical staff, which he couldn't have been if Mark hadn't pushed like mad for someone he could actually work with to be around; and it's Chris and his enthusiastic ideas for a youth team rather than just a ridiculously young substitute squad, and his insistence on employing specialist coaches for goalkeeping and defense and set pieces, and his mysterious ability to soothe down all the players Mark's managed to annoy during the course of half a training session. It all evens out.

Sort of. In the kind of 'someone's got to score to win this game' way.

In the stating the obvious and sounding like a lunatic sort of way.

But hey, that's football, or rather soccer,

(yeah, and Mark's an assistant coach, of course he is, right, yeah, he's not managing a thing and he's sure as hell not wrangling cats and herding snakes, and oh, how's that iced water doing, fresh out of the inferno?)

for you.

Besides, he's got just one target here tonight, and if Mark has to drag him out by the scruff of the neck

(forget all the muscle and height his target's got on him)

he will.

He didn't go through all that agony over a year ago, convincing Thiel to pay out almost as much as he'd set aside from his season's budget for a whole fucking team, just to have all his planning sabotaged.

He didn't spend days and days and days finding every recording he could of Eduardo Saverin playing and mocking them up on the computer with comparisons to actual acknowledged world-class defenders, and then explaining the similarities in microscopic detail while Thiel looked skeptical, just to have it all trashed by one unwise night out.

He didn't go through all that to get one defender out of Palmeiras

(which at least some people have heard of, even if it is in Brazil)

and into the MLS and the Redwoods

(which most people with any sense don't want to admit they've heard of)

just to launch the stupid guy straight into a paparazzi heaven-on-earth, courtesy of LA Galaxy and their happy little raise-money-for-charity plans.

Seriously. Seriously. This is not what he's supposed to be doing. This is not what he signed up for. And fuck Sean Parker and his bright publicity ideas anyway, because if there's one thing Mark's learned over the last year, in training and out, off-season and end-of-season and even a year ago, hell, make that more than a year ago, make it something Mark realized even during the transfer reveal?

Eduardo and paparazzi are a marriage made in absolute hell.

And Mark's really not in the mood for dealing with the fallout tonight.

When he eventually finds Eduardo, he is

(as per usual)

in the inevitable hotseat for any potential trouble — in this case draped all over an intensely-talking Galaxy player with sleepy blue eyes that look like he went a bit heavy on the eyeliner before he came out, and being observed by an amused David Beckham, who doesn't seem entirely certain whether he wants to use his good leg to kick them both a long way away from him, or just laugh his English head off at the idiot pair.

When he gets close enough, Mark realizes that's because the subject of their intent discussion is, in fact, Beckham himself. Complete with pointing and arm gestures, and oh, God help him, because there's no way deity or mortal is going to help the duo enthusiastically posturing in front of the bar, ridiculously wavering attempts at re-enacting the famous stance before an equally famous Beckham free-kick.

I'll be lucky if all Beckham does is kick them, he thinks with morbid amusement. He's not entirely sure if he cares whether that happens or not, but assumes it would be bad publicity, and also would probably earn him a too-long Sean-style explanation (and possibly a Dustin-style briefing on UNNECESSARY INJURIES WHYYYYYY via text) if it does happen, so decides to err on the side of caution and interrupt.

Or rather, he's going to interrupt, when Eduardo catches sight of him, and, abandoning his partner in idiocy

(who promptly loses his balance and topples into a barstool — Beckham doesn't even move to block his fall, which says quite a lot about what the poor man's feelings are in re: the impromptu replays of his own Greatest Hits, and Mark spares a moment to be relieved that at least Eduardo was almost definitely being sincere about his admiration, even if the other guy is laughing way too hard for it to have been meant as a compliment)

decides that Mark is the latest Best Thing to have happened to him that evening.

"You came!" he slurs happily, managing to somehow actually pour what feel like a mutant octopus amount of limbs around and onto and over Mark, and then, gleefully, to his sleepy-eyed and now rather ruffled-looking New Best Friend Ever, because that's what you get for laughing like a hyena and falling into a stool, and Mark's not at all vindictively happy about this, "see, I told you!"

"Ow," says the NBFE, trying to rub between his shoulder-blades, where the stool apparently hit him on his way down, and obviously not caring what Eduardo has or hasn't been telling him, "mmrrr. Mfffarr. Can' reach. Ow."

"He did," Beckham agrees, scratching his nose, which may well be a multi-millionaire Englishman's signal to his pet assassins to please kill all of them, now, thank you so much, something Mark would kind of like to avoid if possible, "er, a bit of a lot, yeah?"

"Fuck," Mark says coherently, distracted from any attempts at eloquent apologies by having to wrangle Eduardo and his extra and very drunken limbs. "I mean. Yeah, he does that, okay. He's — sort of drunk? You probably —" Eduardo chooses that moment to get less octopus-ish and more boneless-cat-like, and it's not doing much for Mark's coherency, never mind his wild stabs at what most people find to be effortless apologizing, and oh fuck, he sounds like he's drunk, and he is an assistant manager, not a star-struck fan, what even is he trying to say here, because he is totally not going to be reduced to babbling just because it happens to be David Beckham he's apologizing to, he's not going to allow that to happen, "— and yeah, you probably noticed that, what with the, er, the flailing, and the — Wardo stop that — um, yeah, licking thing — what are you — fuck, look, I don't have any salt, or lemon, or whatever you're — yeah, and definitely not on my neck — I am totally going to kill whichever one of you let him out-drink you in tequila shots," which he can really, really smell, this close up, not that it's unpleasant, it's just — strong, and Eduardo's trying to start some kind of staring contest with him at the same time as licking him, which means he can see every. Single. One. Of those ridiculous eyelashes; and seriously, the universe and alcohol and soccer all have it in for Mark tonight, fucking hell, "and yeah, Mr. You Can't Make Your Ass Meet The Stool So Stop Trying, I am definitely talking to you — Wardo, will you give it up? — right, great, awesome, thanks," he says in relief as Eduardo at least decides on just the too-many-limbs thing, which is awkward but less hypnotizing and/or damp, "Yeah. Sorry?"

"That's—all right?" Beckham says, sounding bewildered, and looking, for some reason, as though he feels a bit overwhelmed, which is weird, because Mark knows years spent in the Premiership and La Liga must have immunized him to weird teammate behavior, and probably random public licking, too. Even in the dim lighting, though, Mark can see his pupils are dilated, which probably means he's still on the good drugs, which, hell yeah, of course he is, the man just had his Achilles tendon sewn back in, he'll be on the good drugs for a while — "He's actually, um, he, yeah, he's rather sweet. Well. When he's not having drinking games with Landon—" the sleepy-eyed man waves, and oh, fucking fucking hell, that's Landon Donovan, Eduardo's been trying to out-drink, no, not trying, he has apparently just successfully out-drunk Landon Donovan, and what the hell, aren't he and Beckham supposed to be not-talking to each other, or something, even though they're on the same team? Something like that, but it looks as though they aren't doing the whatever-it-is, or not this evening, anyway, "—he's very. He seems. Nice?"

"Yeah," Mark says, feeling weirdly depressed, for some reason. "Yeah. He kind of is. And now I have to get him out of here without him being nice to all the paps outside. Yay me?"

Beckham grins, all Brit-crooked front teeth, the new shiny not-Brit whitening distracting attention from their wonky line-up, and this time he really does gesture to some unobtrusive people, who aren't wearing suits and don't have guns, and don't look even vaguely stereotypical, but could still almost definitely take Mark out with one finger on their bad hand, whichever one that happens to be.

"There's a way around that," he says.

Mark, who is still managing — literally and physically — the drunk cat-octopus hybrid that is apparently Eduardo on god knows how much tequila, can only hope he looks suitably grateful.

Beckham, stuck with his leg propped up and trying to wrangle the equally out of it Donovan, is in no position to acknowledge him or his gratitude. He doesn't even lift a hand in a goodbye.

Probably, Mark thinks, stumbling out of a back entrance into what smells like a year's worth of old garbage bags, with what feels like a ton of soccer player going to sleep on him, that's for the best.

After all, he might have to work with the guy someday, if anyone ever acknowledges his genius at its true worth.

**

February, 2009 (one month before the start of the MLS season)

"Look," Thiel says, "I went along with your idea, I watched everything you put in front of me —" no you didn't, you kept spacing out and just let your eyes surf over all my hard work, Mark thinks, but is wise enough not to say out loud — "and I bought him on your say-so. Just because I own him doesn't mean I have to go meet him, okay."

Well. Technically, that's true. Thiel doesn't have to do anything he doesn't want to, up to and including interact with any of the players until they're actually on the training pitch, but that, Mark thinks, is not the fucking point, and also, does Thiel have any idea how disturbing he sounds, throwing around words like 'bought' and 'own' with such a casual lack of import?

Obviously not, is the answer, because this is the man who thinks sending Mark to make a good impression on their incredibly expensive transfer is a good idea, so clearly he rarely uses his brain for anything but number-crunching at all.

"Okay," Mark says. "I'll meet him, I'll take him to the medical, but you're the owner of this damn club, so you'd better be standing there when we unveil the shirt. Smiling."

"Of course," Thiel says, not even vaguely offended at Mark's brusque instructions. "That's my job."

Great, Mark thinks, I keep forgetting your job is to do just the fun bits, and land me with the rest.

The rest, which includes actually communicating with the players, and which he's really, thoroughly, godawful at, because he's good at theory and strategies, not actually communicating them in person. Still. There'll be Dustin and Erica to do the back-up medical before the reveal, and Chris there afterward to help with fitting in to the training schedule, and oh.

Well, fuck.

Before that, of course, their prize new defender has to get briefed by Sean, which is irritating even when you know him and are prepared to be told the same thing six times in nine different ways of phrasing stuff.

And Mark gets to handle all of this. For a player who's probably really fucking confused as to why some new team no-one's even heard of

(because it didn't even exist officially until about five months ago, and sometimes the fact that the MLS really doesn't work like any other league in the world is something Mark could kiss its metaphorical feet for)

wanted him so desperately.

A player who's got no idea that Mark found every single instance of his pitch appearances, right back to all the youth clubs who let him play once and then transferred him on at the speed of light; who has no clue that it's not that money's no object for Thiel and the Redwoods

(which is technically true, but thanks to Thiel's over-cautious approach to initial outlay, is also really not true at the same time)

but that Mark's got an attitude to soccer which comes from watching way too many Premiership and La Liga and Bundesliga games, and mainly consists of knowing that it doesn't fucking matter how awesome your strikers are, if the other team's defense are just as good, so you better be prepared to lay out some serious money on getting your own defense up to standard, as well.

Thiel, he thinks a bit grimly, sometimes doesn't even know he'sborn. Because owning a club, no matter how much money you're theoretically going to spend, is like Zinedine Zidane's famous, mildly bizarre quote about 'almost magic'.

Almost magic, the mad Frenchman had said, in denial of the admittedly incredible skill behind a goal he had not-quite scored, is just that. Almost magic. And almost magic —

Is nothing.

**

Eduardo Saverin, when he shows up in the hotel lobby, is exactly the same and yet nothing at all like Mark has been expecting.

It doesn't matter how many times he's watched the tall, slightly lanky figure cover ground on the pitch as though he'd been built for sprinting, because Saverin in a suit and the environs of a good hotel is not that man, and it's easy to believe, just for a few seconds, that he can't be, that Mark's made it up, hallucinated a discovery that he never really made.

And then he walks across the room, smiling, and his shoulders shift a little, awkward, under the good tailoring of his suit, and yeah, Mark thinks; yeah, it's okay, I know you, and I was right to make Thiel offer all that money, because you're going to be good, great, even, you're like the defenders the truly fantastic managers can build the back of their team around.

There are so many of them. Mostly unsung, at least to those not in the know, because it's goals that matter, goals that get noticed, and anyone who follows soccer can name five great strikers off the top of their heads, and managers, particularly, have an almost visible hard-on for midfielders, but Mark's got a different catalogue in his head, and it's past and present, and it reads Stam, Blanc, Terry, Desailly, Figueroa, Cannavaro, Beckenbauer, it reads Ferdinand and Vidic, Manchester United's 'Twin Towers', it reads down to the Brazilian defenders he'd flung at Thiel like weapons, reads Cafu, reads Roberto Carlos.

The names of the undeniably great, the names that made and make up stone walls that keep their teams safe.

Cafu never got off the bench much either, as a youth player, he'd told Thiel, when he first started showing him the compilations he'd put together, night after night of scouring everything he could find for the examples he needed, the comparisons he wanted. It was once he got a mentor that people started looking at him.

Flattery for Thiel, honesty as a sop to his own conscience, to his own pride.

And he thinks, looking at Saverin's friendly-polite smile, the barely-contained energy of his body, that he was right in both.

Here's someone who could be great.

Here's someone who will be great, if he gets the right manager, the right team.

The right mentor.

What Mark wasn't expecting, when he came to meet Eduardo Saverin at this hotel, is just how much he wants to be that manager, that mentor; how much he wants to put in that effort toward someone else's career himself.

But he can't be that, he can't do that.

It doesn't matter whether he's the one who discovered Saverin, languishing pointlessly on bench after bench, when the second they let him onto the pitch, he's got all the qualities of a very young Ferdinand, eating up space as though the pitch is no longer than a garden path, getting back to defend his own goal or up to provide some desperately needed, impossibly timed, unbelievable header, or not.

It doesn't matter whether he's the one who'd said again and again to Thiel this one, this one, watch him, this is who we need.

Thiel is the one who bought him. Thiel, as he was saying to Mark only hours before, owns him.

Mark's just the stand-in.

He wasn't expecting to resent that, either.

To his shock, he can't lock that away. He just does, and he can't stop it, can't not feel it, can't switch it off as inconvenient and irrelevant.

It only occurs to him a bit too late that a lot of that is showing on his face, or at least showing via what he's not showing, which is any sort of pleasure or welcome, and the Redwoods' new defender thinks it's aimed at him, because the friendly-polite smile has done more than falter, it's gone, and how, how does Mark always manage to fuck up everything he really wants?

Just be yourself, he thinks bitterly, is probably the worst advice anyone could ever give someone like him.

It always ends badly.

**

Predictably, Sean and Saverin develop a mutual antipathy within five seconds of shaking hands. By this time, Mark's kind of past caring, because any good will Saverin might have been feeling before Mark's little impromptu glare-fest at fate in the hotel, he definitely isn't now, and since that one's actually on Mark, he's more delighted that he can pass the blame off onto Sean's hyperactive marketing strategies than he is worried about whether the two of them can make a vague attempt at civility.

It turns out to be the unnecessary 'formal' medical — unnecessary because if there were any real testing needed, it certainly wouldn't be done by Thiel's barely qualified (forget how good they are, it's how long they've been doing it that really matters to the board) team — which is probably the best thing that could have happened. Mostly because Dustin is an unstoppably friendly force of nature, and Erica's more professional than staff who have about three times her age and experience, and Mark watches all the miserable tension he hadn't really even been aware of

(except he had been, subconsciously, and he'd had the nasty little niggling thought that he's the one who put it there, and it's why he's been kicking himself all the way over to the training grounds and all the way through the miserable meeting with Sean)

drain out of Saverin like someone just pulled the plug on it.

"Um, I think my toes are fine?" Saverin says at last, as Erica finishes up with his left foot, having made what look like, to Mark, far too many joints bend separately.

"Yeah, you all say that," Erica points out, not unkindly, "and then you break something, and it's never occurred to you to mention that, oh yeah, you broke the exact same toe a year ago, no, why should this be a problem?"

"I haven't?" It's more a tentative suggestion than an outright declaration.

"Huh," is all Erica says. "Like you'd admit it if you had. I know you already, Saverin."

"Can you stop calling me —"

"I don't do nicknames," Erica snaps.

"Um, okay? I don't — I just meant I kind of prefer Eduardo?"

"Oh." Erica actually looks up, and smiles slightly. "Okay. Sure. Bend your ankle, please?"

"Honestly, my feet are fine —"

"Let it go, man," Dustin advises from the other side of the room. "Seriously. She won't. Foot fetishist," he adds to Erica, who doesn't even bother to glare at him. "Told you," he adds triumphantly.

"Dustin, sometimes I dream of performing a beautifully expert dissection, starting with unpeeling the scalp, and it's always you, and you're still alive for it all, and I wake up crying. Bereft. Inconsolable. For my lovely, lovely lost dreams," Erica says to the second tormented foot.

"You can dissect me any time you like, sweetie," Dustin says with an eyebrow wiggle, and Erica groans.

"He did the eyebrow thing again, didn't he?" she asks the world mournfully.

"Yes," Mark says, gleefully throwing Dustin under the train of Erica's blistering sarcasm, because that means hooray, it's not him being smashed by it.

His relationship with Erica, short-lived as it was, never did turn out to be one of his (or her, in the spirit of complete honesty) better ideas.

She never lets him forget their mutual stupidity.

Mark's half convinced that Dustin's not only a better target for her serrated tongue, but an actual interesting attraction for her, but he values living too much to suggest it to her, even when they're getting along well or both half-drunk on a Let's Commiserate About Thiel's Idiocy rare night out.

Saverin — no, Eduardo, Mark's not such an idiot as to not know that players state their preferences over names for good reasons — is looking at him over Erica's head with exaggeratedly open eyes.

Help, he mouths. His eyes have gone ridiculously wide, and look enormous.

Mark, not at all affected by the appeal of the slightly anime-look or the silently voiced words, shakes his head. New and valuable acquisition Eduardo might be, but Mark values his figurative and literal balls way too much to just give them up to one of Erica's professional rants, just to make said acquisition feel better.

Eduardo actually pouts. Along with the ostentatiously widened eyes, he just looks cartoonishly silly.

Despite himself, Mark laughs.

"Dustin, did you do the eyebrow thing again?" Erica demands, genuinely annoyed this time as she looks up at them, and this time it's Eduardo who bursts out laughing, and even if it's a little too relieved-sounding for Mark to feel completely comfortable with it

(because seriously, what was Eduardo expecting here, actual dissection? What the fuck can he have been imagining that's so bad Erica and Dustin come as a relief?)

he thinks that it might mean his colossal fuck-up at the hotel, when he just stood there in silence and glared at nothing, might have been forgiven.

He thinks.

He can't, of course, be sure.

**

It's the shirt unveiling

(#5, and who the hell knows if it means anything to Eduardo, or he just stuck a pin in the list of available numbers)

which makes Mark horribly aware that while Eduardo's expressions make him laugh, they make reporters and camera-people get sort of — gooey. Drooling. As ridiculous as Eduardo's expressions, in fact, and while usually this would just make him wonder about the collective sanity of various channels' sports departments, in this case it makes him wonder about what he's missed, watching all those (sometimes very badly captured) games, that Eduardo-in-person is so... so different to how he comes across when he's playing.

And then Thiel says something, light and relatively charming (well, for him) and Mark, who's not wasting his time paying attention either to Thiel or the reporters, catches a glimpse of Eduardo's expression, before his friendly smile appears again, and he really wishes he hadn't.

Because Eduardo doesn't look ridiculous at all.

He looks completely and utterly miserable.

Mark hopes, with a ferocity that takes him completely by surprise — as much as his resentment of Thiel did earlier, at the hotel — that no-one's caught a picture of that look, even by accident.

Because he thinks he'll have to destroy anyone who managed to immortalize that particular moment of lost, frighteningly young-looking despair.

-It's having been thrown for a loop twice in a day, he's sure, that makes him give in without even too much protest, when Thiel makes noises about hotels being a ridiculous added expense, while they wait for Eduardo's apartment to be ready, and how Mark's got three spare bedrooms for just this reason

(never mind the fact that he might want to have guests, or something. He doesn't, but that's not the point)

and so seeing as Mark and Eduardo are getting on so well

(which, yeah, no, they're not actively not getting on, but that's as far as anyone could go who had even minor powers of observation)

Mark can put him up for a while, right?

It's not right, and it's not even a very good idea, but Mark, still worried about how he'd come across in the hotel lobby, and increasingly concerned about the look he'd caught on Eduardo's face, finds himself agreeing.

Which still doesn't explain why, only three hours later, he's trying to cook something relatively balanced that corresponds with anything at all that a) he has available and b) is on the nutritionist's list, and actually making an effort to make sure it's vaguely edible.

Being as he can, quite happily, live off takeout or whatever can be put in the microwave, this seems kind of a disproportionate reaction to having caught sight of one random expression on his new defender's face.

He might have been wrong about that look, after all, so what the hell is he hoping to accomplish, here?

Whatever it is, it's almost certain his approximation of cooking isn't going to do it. He doesn't cook, he reminds himself, not because he can't, but because he never has time, because he's always watching other teams, recording after recording of games he has to miss because of time differences and Thiel; looking at all the new strategies, at new uses of old ones; watching how even the best teams can fail against ones who are a whole league down from them; how sometimes it's enough to just wreck set pieces with a boring, brutal lack of subtlety.

How sometimes you don't have to be the better team, you just have to be really, really good at wrecking it for the opposition.

He can hear that the shower's still running, upstairs. It doesn't make him feel any better. Eduardo's belongings consist of no more than his kit bag, three suits in their dry-clean wrappers, and a weird purple canvas carry-on, and when Mark had asked him if there was more stuff stored somewhere, he'd just shaken his head.

Mark had never been more grateful for anything than the fact his unwelcome housekeeper keeps the beds made up in all three extra rooms, than when he could just show Eduardo into one, point out the shower when he asked, and leave him to it.

That's all far more on his mind

(the still-lost look, the lack of belongings, the suits and kit-bag, as though he'd left in a hurry and grabbed what he knew was essential and what he would need and tried not to think very much while he did that)

than whatever Thiel's pet nutritionist's latest mad idea is — and he thinks that probably, the last time he really considered any of it, he was just grateful that the man had watched some of the behind-scenes filming at the Bernabéu camp, and picked up on the concept that actually, providing food that the players will actually eat from choice is a better idea than looking up new and not very interesting ways of steaming fish.

Real Madrid, when they finally let people in, were good at it. They let the cameras show what they get up to all the time, every day, what the team can take for granted and what the place wants their players to take as their due, and they were a revelation when it comes to the novel approach of keeping players happy. It's not surprising that everyone fights to go there and no-one ever wants to leave once they're in.

(Well, apart from a couple of mad transfers who Mark thinks must have been born without the requisite brain cells that are needed to master more than the fine art of kicking a ball (or possibly the opposite players' ankles) as hard as possible. There's no other possible excuse).

But that's for the players, that's for the team, and Mark doesn't need it or care about it, because it just doesn't apply to him, as long as he's vaguely upright and semi-coherent, no-one cares what he does when he's not at the training grounds — which again goes absolutely nowhere in explaining why he's doing any of this, then, when he doesn't even know what Eduardo does like to eat, so the chances of him emulating the magicians of the Bernabéu even in intent are vanishingly small.

He wonders, idly, trying to find something in his woeful cupboard that might approximate to flavor if he adds enough of it to — fuck, that's a vegetable stir fry, or he thinks it is, it was pretty frozen over when he took it out of the icebox, so he couldn't really see the packaging, but vegetables are involved, he's sure of that — and he's pretty sure it isn't meant to look anything like the mess he's accomplished — he wonders, cursing and trying to think of any way he's ever heard of that can salvage pre-prepared, frozen, mangled vegetables, if the player who started all this with his multi-million transfer, the former galáctico David Beckham, misses what he had with Madrid.

If what he got, arriving in the States, is anything like Mark's so far managed to confront Eduardo with, then yeah, Beckham probably misses Madrid and his teammates and the Bernabéu and even stupid things like changing coaches more than once a year, misses it all desperately, misses it more than he'd notice being suddenly deprived of oxygen.

Mark's not even being deliberately down on himself. He's just realistic. It's not as if knowing some new team's just paid a whole load of money for you makes anything better at all, if you hate the fact you're there, and it's not as if anything's happened, especially not today, to make Eduardo feel like taking the transfer offer, no matter how good, wasn't a stupid mistake.

And whatever he's not-quite cooked isn't going to improve any of it.

"I'm throwing out dinner!" he yells, not in any particular direction, more as an announcement to the household gods, and is sadly not surprised when Eduardo just calls back,

"Okay?"

— which seems to be his default answer to everything.

Mark sighs, gives up on it all, and goes to order pizza. With, as an afterthought, a disgustingly expensive and unnecessarily elaborate salad. It supposedly contains chicken, and is probably the closest thing to healthy anyone's likely to get as take out, and is also more than likely on the nutritionist's Do Not Eat This Ever list, and Mark's given up on thinking much past or caring about that sort of detail.

He is surprised, and unpleasantly, when he finishes doing his splices of last night's games, ready to run them past older ones and look for any game change plans or style alterations in any of the players,

(and is interrupted by Divya, their striker, before he gets very far at all, wanting to know why he hadn't been at the number unveiling, which Mark, with a certain amount of sadistic glee, told him wasn't anything to do with either of them and suggested he talk to Sean. Divya's groan of disgust could probably have been heard by Sean without any need for a phone call at all, but it's little things like that which amuse Mark's not-so-latent sense of sadism)

and comes downstairs at two in the morning, because there have been, as always, a million and one tiny little glitches in every system he's got running on comparisons, and they need to be fixed before his method can work properly, to find that the pizza has disappeared and the salad — well, just under half the salad — has been left for him.

With a note on top, complete with smiley-face, apologizing for having eaten some of it.

"Arrgh," Mark says helplessly to the ether.

He remembers all too vividly that this is why he doesn't like living with people. They keep — being there. In his space. With their unacceptable own decisions.

And considering how much money Thiel's already spent on Eduardo, he's going to be in no hurry to make sure he moves out. Which he needs to do, because Mark is in no way equipped to start making sure someone else's routine is going okay.

(he has enough problems keeping himself off the radar as much as he can, he doesn't need to worry about an investment going wrong)

So this?

It's going to be hell.

**

May, 2010, 4 weeks before the announcements of the World Cup teams

PAR are known for only a couple of things (mostly because they don't really do much that isn't mediocre) and even fewer of the things they are known for are actually true. What is true is that they are indefatigably competitive, even if that's mostly with each other, for some godawful reason Mark doesn't care about; and that the 'competitive spirit' as Thiel happily calls it

(Mark calls it the inability of athletes not to be assholes for longer than two minutes at a time)

is even stronger now that everyone's convinced they'll be called up for their national team. Even Divya Narendra, who stands as much chance of taking a striker's spot on the squad as the other strikers do of all deciding to commit group suicide one morning before the announcement of the official team.

Cameron and Tyler, who are interestingly not as interchangeable on the field as they are in looks, have gone so far down the road of fanatically jealous competitiveness, that it's become their only saving grace that at least they're not in direct competition for a place with each other. For some unknown reason, Tyler makes a fantastic holding midfielder, and a terrible anything else except under dire circumstances and usually at the cost of a card

(and Mark, under those circumstances, just hopes that it's a) only one card and b) it happens by some miracle to be yellow)

while Cameron, who (barring injury or match-bans for other players) plays central defense with Eduardo, helps their goalkeeper Bobby keep a reasonably clean sheet for his goal. Well. Not so much clean as Bobby's the one who ensures they draw almost as much as they lose, which Mark privately thinks is incredible in and of itself, considering that Thiel insists on never, ever employing the time-honored standby of having more than two defenders where that's their actual fucking job, as opposed to two central defenders, one holding midfielder, and any poor sorry bastard who can run up and down the pitch at the speed of light and do three jobs at once on the day while being able to yell loudly enough at Eduardo and Cameron that they don't try and do that. Tyler's yelling always goes unheeded, which is a crying shame, really, since he's firstly got the loudest voice and secondly and more importantly he's the captain, but there are some things even Mark doesn't try and work on.

(To be fair to them, they don't often try. One 'private discussion' — see under: very loud enumeration of all faults — with Chris doing the enumerating, and everyone else doing the unashamed listening on the other side of the door, seems to be enough to stop any attempts at over-achieving.)

So when Mark comes in to find that Tyler is apparently aiming for the national team of vomiting with his usual competitive ferocity, he's not exactly thrilled.

Nor is Erica, who's trying to find an anti-nausea drug that's actually strong enough to have any effect on Tyler at all and doesn't mask any other symptoms that could help them determine what in the fuck is wrong with him.

(Mark rules out food poisoning almost immediately. For a start, he's seen how Tyler eats, and if he was susceptible to anything at all, this would have happened long, long ago. So either a new super-bug has been born in the depths of Tyler's intestines, or it's something a great deal more worrying — because probably infectious, damn it all — than slightly off fish.)

"The nausea is strong in this one," Dustin says unhelpfully when Mark sticks his head round the door of the treatment room, staying at a safe distance and wishing he could be at what he considers a safe distance, which would actually be several miles away, not the other side of the room.

"Fuck you," Tyler groans out.

"Yeah, he kind of threw up his sense of humor about half an hour ago," Dustin says, patting Tyler's shoulder with suicidal sympathy.

Mark quite honestly thinks that the most worrying symptom of all is that Tyler doesn't make any violent move toward him for that.

"Great," he says flatly. "Tyler, did you have to bring this in to share with us?"

"I was fine earlier," Tyler insists, raising his head. He looks completely terrible, fish-belly white with undertones of green, and purple rings under his eyes, to a degree where Mark thoroughly and completely doubts the veracity of that statement.

"Yeah. Sure," he agrees non-committally.

"Fucking kids," Tyler moans, doubling over his emesis bowl once more, and Mark grimaces, because oh shit, of course one of Tyler's horrible children would have brought something nasty back from kindergarten to give their dad.

"Let me guess," he says dryly, "You were up with them all night?"

"Yeah, fuck —"

"Please," Mark says, hoping against hope that for once, just for once, something is going to go PAR's way, "please, please,please tell me you came in by yourself."

"Was late, Cam picked me — oh shit." Tyler lifts his head to stare at Mark, looking genuinely worried. "Uh —"

"Yeah, awesome, Mark, you need to get on that —" Dustin starts, but Mark, cursing everything and particularly Tyler's children, who don't deserve to have their names remembered even if he'd ever tried, is already headed for the training rooms.

Because naturally, everyone just has to have started their day in a nice warm and enclosed space, getting as sweaty as possible while using the weights room for things Mark's pretty sure

(and has been backed up in his suspicions, more than once, by a fuming Chris)

aren't actually on the list of How We Use The Equipment.

Of course they have, because this is Mark's life.

Some days, he actively hates it.

**

By the end of the next couple of days, Tyler is absolutely no-one's favorite person, closely followed by a disgustingly healthy Eduardo, who is the only one not possessed of the spaghetti-limbs and intermittent dizziness that follow a truly spectacular onslaught of what has been accurately, if not particularly elegantly, called the 'vomiting bug'.

"Hate," Divya moans from his prone position on the bench, as he tries to get his breath back after a series of timed sprints that he could have done in his sleep and in half the time before the team collectively descended into gastro-intestinal hell. "So much hate. So much."

No-one even looks at him, let alone sympathizes. Most of them have similar miseries of their own, and Eduardo, who genuinely doesn't and is also genuinely concerned about everyone else, learned quite a while ago that offering sympathy when you're the only one in a suffering team who's stayed healthy is a very, very good way of getting hit.

He's currently working on some kind of set play with Bobby and a very grim-faced and whistle-orientated Chris, which looks kind of hilarious from a distance, as everyone else is just watching from the sidelines and various stages of collapse.

Mark rolls his eyes at the whole thing and goes to find something he can actually do which doesn't involve listening to everyone else moaning and complaining about their gastro-intestinal woes.

He ends up in the treatment room with Dustin and Erica, who are glad to see him for the simple reason that he doesn't need to be in the treatment room, and instead of resenting it, are probably the only people in the whole place who are pleased he's healthy.

They'd probably be glad to see Eduardo, as well — although probably not after Chris has finished with him as the only player he can currently exhaust for legitimate reasons.

"Oh, man," Dustin says gleefully when Mark comes in, "did I tell you Thiel's latest?"

"Do I want to be told?" Mark grumbles. Things that are funny when you only have to listen to Thiel being an idiot are a lot less funny when you have to deal with the results of Thiel being an idiot.

"This one?" Erica grins up at him from her screen. "For once, yeah."

Thiel's 'latest' involves him trying to talk to Chris about how they need to prepare for eventualities like this, in case they become a regular occurrence, and Chris saying very dryly how yeah, having a B squad might just be a plan, funny how no-one ever thought of that, and Thiel

"actually said to Chris that he should do something about that," Dustin finishes up triumphantly. Erica snickers.

Mark is rarely stunned, but they've managed it this time. "Wait. Thiel —"

"Apparently hasn't noticed that Chris is officially the second-team coach, yeah," Dustin agrees.

Mark tries. He really does, because fuck, poor Chris, but he can't stop himself from laughing a bit. "What did Chris say?"

"Walked out, I think, I didn't stick around to find out," Dustin admits.

"Your gigglefit was not subtle," Erica agrees. "Or, you know, quiet."

"I'm amazed Chris didn't kill you," Mark says around an unwilling smile.

"Eh, he needs me too much," Dustin says, waving a hand. "I mean, hopefully a bit less right now than he did yesterday —"

"God, please," Erica mutters.

"—but you know, generally speaking, I'm quite valuable."

"But you don't have to be undamaged," Mark points out, and Dustin, ever mature, sticks his tongue out in response.

It's nice, Mark thinks, the quiet thrum of the treatment rooms, Dustin's unflappable energy and Erica's dedicated focus on making sure that even if things go wrong (and something, somewhere, to someone, inevitably goes wrong every practice session, every game, every day) they're under her control as far as she can make it possible.

He thinks it's a sad state of affairs that he feels more comfortable here, where practically no player ever wants to come, than he does out on the pitch, where he actually has a contribution to make.

"Mark?" Eduardo puts his head around the door. "I think everyone's either dead or dying, so I've got a workout sheet and instructions to 'for fuck's sake go away before one of them takes your head off just to feel a bit better about their life', and we're all going to try again tomorrow."

"Okay?" Mark says, the annoying verbal tic that Eduardo seems to have infected him with, but in this case is an expression of genuine confusion as to why he needs to be told this.

"Okay," Eduardo says, his smile dimming a bit. "I just — right. Later."

He disappears again, probably to do something ungodly with reps, and Mark shakes his head. "Why does he always tell me these things? I don't need to know if he —" He stops, because for once he's being stared at as though he's the idiot. "What?"

"I'll tell you when you're older," Erica says very dryly. "For now, go make sure he's got someone there to stop him tearing something I can't patch up."

Dustin bursts out laughing, and she throws a mug at his head. It's unfortunately not one of the empty ones. In the resulting chaos, Mark escapes, thinking that perhaps the treatment room isn't as comfortable a place to be in as he'd thought, and that he was so very, very right years ago, when he'd decided that he was never going to understand people as long as he lived.

Even the ones he likes (or rather, can tolerate for more than a minute at a time) seem to be completely insane.

**

Eduardo is in fact unsupervised, and working on weights that Mark's pretty sure Chris has told him to never use again if he wants to keep living, so can't possibly be on the discarded workout sheet that's lying sadly on the floor, and Mark thinks that it's a sad state of affairs when Erica no longer terrifies players with a single glance of warning to back up something Chris has already made clear.

(He himself has long since given up trying, with Eduardo. You can't live with someone, day in, day out, know exactly how long they brush their teeth for when they first get up and that they have an inexplicable loathing of heating things in the microwave, and stand any hope of intimidating them just by looking. Even ten minutes of concentrated ranting doesn't really do much any more, and that is when Mark's trying, so.)

"Oh good, you came," he says as Mark walks in.

"Yeah, and what the fuck are you doing?" Mark says, considerably less friendly.

Eduardo goes slightly pink around his ears and neck. "I thought since no-one else was here —" he starts, and Mark cuts him off with —

"You'd do what you've been repeatedly told not?"

"I don't see why I can't," Eduardo says defensively. "I mean, Cam —"

"Cameron doesn't have to make the long runs for the full ninety minutes," Mark says, less than patiently. "He's also built completely differently, and hilarious though it might be to change your schedules around, Wardo, it would also end up with both of you out for weeks and Erica screaming at me, so I repeat, no. And also, stop."

"I love that you're scared of her," Eduardo says, aiming for deflection.

"Bullshit," Mark says, undeflected. "Also, pass me that worksheet. Since apparently I get to play trainer today — what the fuck are Chris and Thiel doing with themselves? They haven't even got a team meeting as an excuse, because there really, really isn't a team right now."

"That's why the worksheet," Eduardo says. "Everyone went home."

Mark resists, with enormous difficulty, the impulse to put his head in his hands and whimper.

"This isn't your worksheet, is it?"

"Yes it is."

"This isn't a worksheet that Chris gave you. For you to use. Is it."

"He did give it to me," Eduardo says earnestly.

"This isn't your worksheet," Mark repeats.

"No. Well, not — exactly. But —"

"I thought not," Mark says with a sigh. "Does anyone except me know that you're trying to work off this specific worksheet?"

"Erica and Dustin?" Eduardo says hopefully.

"Who haven't actually seen the —" The word 'worksheet' is starting to lose all possible meaning, along with Mark's will to live. "This."

Eduardo grimaces. "Um. No?"

"Right," Mark says. "Can you just try and explain to me why the fuck you thought this was a good idea, then?"

"They—" Eduardo says, and stops, blushing again.

"Words are good," Mark says, feeling, if possible, even less encouraging than he sounds. "You know. As explanations go."

"I might. The squad."

"No, that still doesn't count."

"The national squad. Maybe. And there's four weeks before they announce it. So I wanted to —"

"Completely fuck yourself up before then?" Mark asks incredulously.

"Try and bulk up a bit," Eduardo says meekly. "I mean. The group. It's got the Ivory Coast. And they're. Well. Drogba. I'm going to have to stop Drogba. Scoring. If I'm in."

"That's not actually possible," Mark says automatically, and then, catching up with himself, "Wait, what do you mean, the Ivory Coast? We're not in that gr —"

And he shuts himself up, feeling like an idiot, because no. No, USA aren't in that group.

But Brazil is.

And suddenly, Eduardo's reticence about mentioning the World Cup in front of Cameron, whom he normally gets on with incredibly and surprisingly well, and his reserve while everyone else has been going vaguely insane about pushing their every limit (and Chris's every button, and Mark's last nerve) makes sense.

As does the tequila contest with Donovan at that stupid fundraiser.

Eduardo's not in some fake competition with his team-mates, or even actually fighting for a place in the national squad with them directly.

He's going to be the competition.

Mark feels himself go very still, because how the hell do you apologize for that sort of forgetting?

"It's okay," Eduardo says softly. "I haven't been — I mean, we never really talked about this much, so —"

But they had done. When Eduardo first came to PAR, they had done. Because that was when Eduardo had admitted his reasons for taking up the transfer offer, his knowledge that he had to somehow get off the bench and be seen playing regularly, not surrounded by non-appearances and rumours of injury if he ever wanted the Brazilian squad to notice him. And with the sudden attention Beckham had brought with him to the States, and the international televization of the MLS, there was finally a possibility of that happening.

And Mark knows Eduardo's done training with the national squad, has even come on as a substitute in two friendlies already, and he's been so focused on watching him play, that it's somehow failed to register with him that it's for a different country.

"Shit," he says.

Eduardo just ducks his head, and he's got the same look on his face that Mark first saw at the shirt unveiling, lost and despairing and horribly young, and this time Mark is the one to have put it there.

"It's — this is really not okay of me, is it." He's not asking, but Eduardo looks up anyway, shaking his head quickly.

"No, no it's fine, I mean you didn't, you weren't —"

"Wardo. You live with me. I know I keep asking Thiel when you're going to be able to stop living with me, but that's more so he gets reminded you exist as a person as well as a defender. You still live with me. And forgetting that you getting into the national squad is a whole different thing to Cameron and Tyler racing leaves on the water when they can't find anything else to compete against, or Divya whining about the unfairness of a striker's life, forgetting that about you is not okay."

"It might have helped if I'd said something," Eduardo points out.

"You shouldn't have needed to," Mark says bluntly, and repeats, helplessly. "You live with me." And I care, he thinks, and determines not to say.

From the look in Eduardo's eyes, though, and his returning, delighted smile, he might as well have said that out loud.

"Oh, shut up," he grumbles ineffectively.

He's prepared to have to fend off a hug. He's gotten used to doing that, over the last year.

He's really, really not expecting to be kissed.

Or to find himself returning it, and enjoying it — no, more than enjoying it, more than that, wanting it; wanting more, wanting all it promises; wanting to make those promises in return — and keep them.

His life has just become comprehensively more fucked. Because this, apparently, is what he's been wanting from Eduardo; wanting to give to Eduardo, since that first, terrible meeting in the hotel.

Mark's not stupid, and he's not inexperienced, and he knows damn well that kisses don't always mean love, even when they have this much simple want and need to them, they don't necessarily mean love.

But this one, he thinks, this one, and the notoriously fickle gods of the beautiful game help them both, because it's something they shouldn't even be considering —

This one does.

**

March, 2009 (the start of the MLS season)

Eduardo settles in to the team better than Mark had hoped for, after that first edgy, peculiar day of meetings and vanishing pizza and a $30m defender in his house looking like a poster photo for displaced persons.

It must have been the effect on him of so many things happening at once, and becoming permanent so suddenly, Mark thinks, because there's absolutely no way he would have thought that the man with his odd collection of belongings and his five badly and differently worn personas could ever have coped with the hot mess that is PAR on a good day, but Eduardo is, and does, and apparently effortlessly.

Cameron and Tyler, who like to think of themselves as a separate team from everyone else, are surprisingly calm about being shifted into the roles of a central defender and a holding midfielder respectively — not that Mark hasn't always thought that's how they'll do best, but it's still a relief to see that they apparently agree with this new layout.

(mostly because this means there'll be less arguing and therefore less need for Chris to have to soothe everyone's ruffled dignity and egos, but Mark feels no compunction to share that part of it with anyone).

Divya refuses at first to communicate at all with Eduardo, still nursing a sense of injustice about his lack of invitation to the official 'arrival' at the grounds, but he's won over reasonably quickly into a facsimile, at least, of civility, once he realizes the extent to which he's getting better supply from the midfield now that they're not having to cover the defense as well.

Eduardo just seems to find him funny, which does nothing for Divya's temper, but a great deal to make everyone else relax about where the lines of 'how far can we go before someone genuinely gets offended?' are drawn. It seems it may well be impossible to offend Eduardo on the training pitch, and Mark's forced to admit that's something they need as badly as a European-style central defender.

Chris, needless to say, is ecstatic.

"Finally," he says to Mark, loudly enough for everyone to overhear him and take it personally, "someone who understands what I'm talking about during training."

("English pass! English pass!" Divya is yelling at Tyler on the pitch, the phrase that no-one is quite sure about as to precise meaning, but which has become a deadly insult meaning 'way too hard, completely inaccurate, and wow, could you sky the ball a bit harder next time?' and Tyler snarls, pauses, and manages a cross that any midfielder would be proud of. Bobby is uselessly doubled up with laughter in the goal mouth.)

Considering that some of Chris's training sessions, no matter how carefully phrased, have left Tyler in particular standing in the middle of the pitch, arms flailing wide and yelling "Well what the fuck DO you want me to do, then?", Mark both understands Chris's relief and hopes no-one's too insulted by it. Because seriously, sometimes even he doesn't know what Chris actually wants, just that it's very obviously not what he's getting.

With Eduardo there, that changes.

Now that no-one has to worry about playing in any position but their own, or covering for mysterious absences when they know there's a full team on the pitch, they spend more time actually thinking about what Chris has asked for and less time frantically trying to follow instructions while keeping five other potential issues in mind at the same time.

"How the hell does one player make this much difference?" Dustin asks Mark in bewilderment.

("ENGLISH PASS!" Tyler screams back at Cameron, who's managed to kick the ball straight and high and fast and right up the pitch to — empty space.

"FUCK YOUR FACE!"

"I blame you," Chris says to Eduardo, who manages to look horribly innocent while running backwards.)

"How the hell should I know?" Mark snaps in return, not in the mood for another dissection of the importance of set plays.

"Well, you wanted him," Dustin says, and wiggles his eyebrows. Erica, passing by with an armful of painful-looking contraptions, smacks him over the head with one. "Ow."

"Now I know what they're for," Mark says, not even trying to hide his satisfaction.

(They're actually something horrendous for iguinal hernias, but Mark doesn't want to know about that, and doesn't like thinking about it even when he's forced to know that, so thinking of them as portable Dustin-controllers is a lot more pleasant.)

When Thiel (or rather Mark) started talking about transfer fees with the Palmeiros board, there was a fair amount of supposed concern that they were discussing the sale of a 'fragile' player. Mark, who's seen all the footage available, was unmoved. Chris, who has a streak of responsibility-complex a mile wide, was worried.

He's considerably less worried now. Eduardo in practice is about as fragile as a steel wall, and in combination with Cameron's immovability, he makes the defense, suddenly, into a very effective ("if non-traditional," Chris says later, and Mark rolls his eyes and deliberately doesn't quote examples of exactly this combination) powerhouse.

"Gloating," Erica tells Mark, "is a really sickening look on you."

"Yeah, but he earned it," Dustin says.

"I did," Mark agrees. He feels wonderfully, thoroughly, vindicated.

He also feels worried, but that part he keeps to himself, because it's not pitch-based worry, and so it's not relevant to anyone but him.

It's worry about small things that never bothered him before, because he didn't have to see them and he never felt them.

It's the fact no-one outside the team calls Eduardo's phone.

It's the fact that he's not even trying to find a social life.

It's the — envy is the wrong word, because Mark doesn't think Eduardo's capable of envy, but it's something very close to it — that shows briefly in his face when one of Mark's family calls, or Tyler brings in his kids to cause havoc in the dressing room after a practice session, or Divya is showing around photographs of yet another baby cousin or niece or what-the-hell-ever-it-is this time.

It's his continuing wariness and avoidance of Sean — which Mark understands, even empathizes with, and he suspects a lot of players feel exactly the same, but in Eduardo's case it's not even based on experience.

(or at least, not enough experience to make it justified, whereas the endless lengths Cameron will go to just to be on the other side of the training grounds when Sean's around, if he can't get any further away, are completely understandable, if funny. And Sean knows it and can't resist stirring the soup that's Cameron and any mention of his personal life.)

So no, Mark doesn't think that Eduardo's one of the dreaded 'fragile' players.

But he does worry all the same, just a little; just sometimes, he worries as to how fragile the confident, settled façade of this quick and easy defender might really be.

It's only reasonable. He has to live with the man, after all.

**

Mark's nebulous worries are, inevitably, made into something very real indeed by Sean himself, who has a knack for finding just what someone's weakness might be, and promptly digging around in it with a spoon—that is to say painfully, bluntly, and absolutely pointlessly.

"So!" he says brightly on a Sunday morning that sees Mark not yet asleep, having had the world's worst backlog of Saturday night games in Europe that he's ever been faced with, and Eduardo just up and staring hopefully at the coffeemaker with the very obvious and wishful thinking process that it's become magic overnight and will stretch out helpful little paws with a giant mug of freshly made coffee in them, "Game plan!"

"Talk to Chris," Mark says around something that's not so much a yawn as a desperate stretching of his lungs for some air that hasn't been used for staying awake over forty-eight hours.

"We just played a game," Eduardo mumbles unhelpfully to the still resolutely un-magic coffeemaker. Mark takes pity on him, and starts setting it up. Collapsing thankfully into one of the chairs at the table, Eduardo adds, "but Chris probably has the plan still, yeah."

Sean stares at them. "Um, yeah, no, that was more a statement of purpose. As in, we need one."

"Yes, Sean," Mark says with painful patience. "We usually have one. Before the game." He wonders if Sean's developed insomnia too, and is reacting very badly to it by losing days.

"Oh, for fuck's sake," Sean groans. "Forget the game plan."

"What game plan?" Eduardo asks the table, drooping over it and weaving slightly in his chair, like a kind of failing Foucault's pendulum, hinged in the middle. "Ugh. Why am I awake?"

"Fuck knows," Mark says. He certainly doesn't. Sunday afternoon post-mortems are bad enough after a match, without adding early mornings to it as well. "Go back to bed."

"No, get coffee," Sean says sternly. Eduardo lifts his head enough to give him the most pathetic look Mark's ever seen on a human being, and he has younger sisters.

"Why?" he moans.

"Because we need to —" Sean closes his eyes, visibly counts to ten, and starts again. "You need marketing," he says slowly and carefully.

"I did that," Eduardo says, his drawl getting thicker as his eyes begin to slide shut. "Signed things. Nice to children. Advice. No, no, not that, hate that, encouragement. Thingy. Always do."

Mark stifles a snort under the rattling death-throes of the last dregs of water pushing through the machine. If he'd known how funny half-asleep, unfiltered Eduardo was going to be, he'd have invited Sean over for an early morning talk — conference — game plan (what the fuck?) — whatever the hell this is — much sooner.

Sean has lost most of his manic brightness — well, the brightness, at least, and is just looking incredulously if no less maniacally at Eduardo's boneless, slumping approximation of a human being. Mark, in the spirit of fairness and justice and caffeine for all, puts the coffeemaker on again after pushing the first cup directly under Eduardo's nose. He thinks there's a fairly even chance that he might see it and drink it or just drown in it, but either way, it's there.

"Yeah," Sean agrees eventually. "And that's great, but I meant more marketing you. As a $30m commodity," he adds pointedly.

"Ugh," says Eduardo in comprehensive disgust.

"Which means," Sean says pointedly, "getting you seen somewhere that isn't your car, the training grounds, a match, or a post-match interview." Mark notices he doesn't say 'or here', which is probably good for his continued survival, because Mark would feel forced to take a hit out on him if he even thought about doing some tacky 'at home' thing. He likes his privacy, he needs his privacy, and he is not having it destroyed by one of Sean's 'brilliant' ideas.

"I like my car," Eduardo protests, a little more alert now that he's at least noticed the coffee.

"It's a great car," Mark agrees, only partly to wind Sean up. It is a great car. He thinks most of the initial layout of Eduardo's share of the transfer fee went on it. It's an incredible car, and Mark, if he ever thought about things like that for long, would even be jealous of it.

As it is, Eduardo's taken to giving him a lift in to the grounds every day, mostly to be sure he doesn't fall asleep at his own wheel and die, so it might as well be Mark's car too, with no added responsibility of care.

"Yes," Sean says with the slowness usually reserved for the hopelessly drunk or the very, very stupid, "yes it is. But we need to see you out and about, and being less —"

"Dedicated?" Eduardo says softly, so gently, in fact, that Sean doesn't notice the bite behind it until nearly too late.

When he does, he glares at Eduardo.

"No, obsessive. Because don't get me wrong, obsessive is good on the pitch, obsessive is great on the pitch, but no-one wants to see that all the time. They want to believe you can be a great player and have a personal life."

Mark, making the mistake of taking a drink of wonderful, wonderful caffeine while Sean talks, inhales his coffee painfully. "Sean," he says solemnly, after he's finished coughing up his lungs, "you should know something. The cake is a lie."

"I know that, you know that, everyone in the fucking game knows that, but we can't sell shirts with that," Sean snaps straight back, sounding as pissy as Eduardo did a few moments before.

"I think I've got one," Eduardo says. Sean blinks at him.

"One what?"

"A shirt. Saying the cake is a lie."

Mark, through his second coughing fit in as many minutes, carefully puts his coffee where he can't possibly breathe it in. Because Eduardo and Sean are going to actually kill him if he keeps trying to drink while they're talking.

"You are being deliberately obtuse," Sean snarls, and Eduardo gives him a beatific, and very, very fake, smile.

"It's nicer than an outright refusal, though, isn't it?" he asks, and that sense of something bright and sharp and jagged is back behind his words.

"Look." Sean sighs, rubbing his forehead with one palm. Mark, idly, wonders if he should get out the ibuprofen ready for the inevitable, headache-based request. "I know you hate all this. I don't know many people who like it, and even the ones that do hate the fuss after the first month or so. But it's part of the deal. So let me set you up with a nice —"

"No," Eduardo cuts him off.

"No, what?" Sean says, frowning. "All I was going to say you don't have to worry about meeting —"

"No. I'll do it, fine. But you don't set me up with anyone. You don't make me out to be anything other than I am. Which is single and sharing a house until PAR finally sort me out with my own place. I'll do all the appearances you need, but it's going to be just me."

Sean's silent for a long, long time, long enough for Mark to start wondering if that was some kind of player-publicist code for 'don't ever speak again', before he nods slowly.

"Okay," he says at last. "But if things change, or I need to do damage control, or there's someone—"

"They won't, you won't, and there won't be," Eduardo says firmly. "Not while I'm here, or with PAR, anyway."

And Sean's face creases up in something uncomfortably like pity, before he nods again, and gets to his feet.

"Right, I'll send you a couple of appearance options later," he says. "Thanks for the not-coffee, Mark, I'll see myself out."

And he's gone, as randomly as he appeared.

"Okay, I rarely have to ask this, because usually Dustin gets there first, but what the fuck?" Mark asks.

"Work it out," Eduardo says, cold and unfriendly, and gets to his feet. "I think I will go back to bed, after all," he announces, and leaves the room and his coffee and a bewildered Mark behind him without another word.

**

Mark does work it out, because he's not that asocial or oblivious, and he understands all too well why Sean had looked pitying and talked about damage control, but what he doesn't understand is Eduardo's firmness on the subject of there never being any change and his never having 'someone'.

His new-found awareness, however, does not preclude insensitivity, and he finally confronts Eduardo with what's bothering him one evening when he doesn't have much to do with his comparisons and game changes other than review the ones he did the night before, and Eduardo's seemingly quite happy to sit at the kitchen table and read something which looks nastily like a textbook on forensic pathology, which is just another weirdness Mark's somehow becoming immune to; Eduardo's reading choices.

"I don't see why you can't," he says, after staring into the fridge for a pointless few moments of hope, and yet again finding nothing that doesn't have to be prepared and cooked and take so much effort that it's too tiring to even think about starting something with it, let alone contemplate the eating stage of it.

"Can't what?" Eduardo asks. "Oh, wait, is this a trick existential thing?"

"What?" Mark closes the fridge door and turns around so he can actually see whether madness is visible in people when it suddenly strikes them. Eduardo just looks normal, though. "No. No, it's not. And I meant I don't see why you can't have someone."

"Come on," Eduardo says irritably, "you know why. I want to play. And if it got out —hah — that I'm one of those non-existent gays in football, well, I wouldn't be an investment any more, would I? And you know how it goes, Mark. Someone would find out. Someone would sell me out. It's easier to just not."

"So you...what? Don't have someone, don't have anyone, until you finish playing? Wardo, that's — you’re a defender, you could be forty by then, you can't — why are you looking at me like that?"

Eduardo shakes his head, laughing a little, and says, "Nothing. I just. Huh. Never had my name shortened like that before. I don't mind!" he adds quickly. "And you're — it's kind of you. To worry. But I'm okay." As Mark just stares at him with all the skepticism he can put into one glare, he shrugs a bit and says, "Well. Mostly okay. I will be."

"Kind?" Mark repeats incredulously, and then, "you can't really be thinking of staying on your own until you retire!"

"But I'm not alone, am I?" Eduardo says teasingly, and off Mark's blank stare, says, "You're here."

"And you're impossible," Mark says grumpily, and retreats, still hungry and incredibly dissatisfied with the conversation, back to his study and his chopped-up match comparisons.

It's only later that he realizes he's no longer worried — or at least, not in the same nebulous, unsettling way he had been before. Because he might think Eduardo's being ridiculous, and he might think he's outright wrong in how he's doing this, but at least — at least he knows what he's doing.

(at least he seems to know what he's doing)

And just maybe, Eduardo's right, and he will be okay.

(and just maybe, Sean was right about the damage control being needed one day)

And really, it's none of Mark's business.

So why does he feel like he should be doing something about it?

Why does he even care?

**

 

May, 2010, 1 week before the announcements of the World Cup teams

Mark is to think later that it's not even strange, how quickly things go from unbelievably, shockingly good to an equally fantastical form of hell on earth. After all, if things can swing so far and so fast with a realization of stupidity, three unsaid words, and a kiss, why shouldn't they be able to swing that far and fast the other way?

Or perhaps it wasn't the other way at all, he reflects. Perhaps the wheel just kept turning, and spun them with it.

Perhaps it's a swing, or a fairground ride.

( here we go up, up, up...)

Perhaps it's like the children's song.

(here we go down, down, down...)

Dizzying. Sickening.

(here we go backwards and sideways)

And completely out of his control.

(here we go round and around.)

 

**

There are things they will neither of them be able to forget. Mark knows this, even as he lives through and relishes those moments, knows it and thinks fiercely that he is glad he'll remember, whatever is to come he is glad he will remember.

He sees the same burning half-anger in Eduardo's eyes, and feels not shriveled up nor scorched and ashened by it, but catches fire himself; becomes more than himself, better, stronger.

He knows this is how it must feel, when you meet the one midfielder who can pass you the perfect ball; the one defender who will never let the ball too close to your outstretched, desperate glove.

Fire within fire, increasing one from the other, feeding the blaze.

This is how it feels, he thinks, as Eduardo drives them back to Mark's house, the car always, always on the verge of too fast, just as they are, as their breathing is, as their hearts beat. On the verge of too much, too fast, too sudden. On the verge, the edge, the perilous strand of the high wire.

But never quite tipping over. Never falling.

This is how it feels.

Eduardo's profile, in the afternoon sun, is warmed and hardened by the light at once; he is a statue in bronze one moment, and a cameo in gold the next. Light and shadow, and neither one of them acting on him with predictable effect.

Mark will remember nothing of the drive except watching those changes.

But those changes, this; this he will remember this forever; seeing Eduardo like this, seeing Eduardo in an alchemy of light-created metal and stone, of shadows and jet and unpolished ore, and quartz for the whiteness of his knuckles where they grip the wheel too hard.

Eduardo, a medieval impossibility made flesh, the philosopher's stone running through and over and under his skin, bound in his blood so that he becomes a living transmutation while Mark watches.

"Talk to me," Eduardo says. "Mark, I can't, I need, I need to focus, on driving, I can't — talk to me."

Mark talks. He talks over a dry throat and a roughened mouth and a thickened tongue. He talks of alchemy, the alchemy he thinks he might be watching occur in front of him; he talks of the stages of transmutation; he talks of the green lion and the peacock's tail and the pelican feeding its young from its own blood to birth the phoenix.

He doesn't think Eduardo hears a word of it.

But he knows he can hear his voice.

They're the same thing after all, his voice and his words, the same thing in the course of a journey going toward such a place and such a time.

Mark, who prefers silence and diagrams to talking, finds words he never even suspected he knew, and puts out thoughts he had never dreamed himself capable of having in those words.

He will remember this. Eduardo will, too, and the memories will be different; another alchemy to transmute a thing and make it different.

Make it whole.

**

He will remember, too, that the shades in the house are down, and after the bright, burnishing light of outdoors, it seems like total blackness, and that Eduardo, who has been laughing, stops.

Stops, and kisses Mark for the second time

(the second lifetime, the second lifeline.)

and the touch of him, the feel of his skin and his hands and his breath, is utterly serious and sober and still, and it is its stillness which burns hottest, and Mark opens his eyes to see, in astonishment, that neither of them burn off light. Only their invisible heat, this raw new surprising passion, this clear white and coruscating admission, being made by their bodies into a darker flame by far than any true illumination could possibly provide.

He thinks, again and again,

Remember this, I'll remember,

(it's burned into his brain through skin and blood and bone, he'll never forget)

He hasn't spoken since they left the car.

(neither of them have)

There are, in any case, only three words left to say.

(they're already being held in breath, in air, in heat, in touch)

Mark knows it will not matter who says them first.

I love you, he thinks, and wonders if Eduardo can hear him.

The shadow-onyx eyes close when he wonders that, as if Eduardo had, and Mark has no time for more than a flicker of wonder; of disbelief and wonder, before Eduardo is undressing them both, hurried and efficient; the man who can be out of a dressing room and onto a pitch, or into a car, quicker than any other member of the team, is putting his skills to use with a kind of laughing delight; and taking Mark, helpless to do anything but delight in him and with him and for him, along into that same over-exuberant wonder of the here and now.

It's easier than it should be, that first time. Mark knows little of the process bar a few jokes and one compulsory sex health lecture and a couple of films; Eduardo knows more, and a great deal more, but it's all based on what's achievable with toys and fingers and the judicious placement of his own body, he's refused to let himself even think about it with another man until now.

But they know their own bodies; they know them and they trust themselves, and trust each other, and want and need the same thing, and for that first time, that first burning, alchemical, transmuted time, that want and need and trust of themselves and one another are the final ingredients in their elixir — not of life, but of pure, uncontaminated, joyful lust.

It's not as easy the second time. They have more to be concerned with, more to worry about and be afraid of in each other.

No less trust, then, no less joy, but a little hesitancy, and with hesitancy space, a tiny, dear, warm space between some of their skin that feels almost as though it is another kind of touch, caressing them both in the places they do not quite touch; and with that space comes breath that is easier, that moves more slowly, and words that finally make it to the cusp of hearing from the infinite depths of heart and mind coalescing into one thought.

There is laughter, too, even here, and pleasure in their being who they are, and Mark thinks that perhaps this is how all friendships like theirs, unwillingly though they may have started, slowly and carefully though they might have deepened into that profound understanding wherein those half-flippant words of Montaigne

(because it was him, because it was me)

hold their court, perhaps is where all those journeys end, in a lovers' meeting, in a meeting born of love, and the speaking of its name, and the calling on that name as a vow by mind and heart and body alike.

Love.

They think it, and say it, and are delighted by it and by each other.

And, like all lovers, they think this is the beginning of their eternity.

**

They have so short a time together.

"One night," Eduardo says, bitterly.

"One night and half a day," Mark replies, doing his best. "At least we had breakfast. It was — good."

It had been good. It had been lazy and sleepy and filled with sunshine, and they had opened the patio doors, and next-door's cat, who usually likes to just torment Mark, had strolled in and stolen half of Eduardo's eggs before he noticed their company, and then he'd just laughed, given the plate over to the demand of a somewhat imperious yowl, and gone to make more. The coffee machine hadn't sounded like a dying alien with terrible CGI, and Mark, for once, had gotten the time to look over a few of the newspapers' sports pages, and give scathing little commentaries of his own as to whether the stupid fuckers had even seen the match.

And then Sean had rung them, just checking in, nothing sinister, and Mark had looked up at Eduardo's bleak, frozen, wintery expression — and known what they would have to do next.

End it.

What they had just been thinking was their lives was instead a little interlude, not a new act.

And it's over.

Why, he thinks, why are we always so driven by this terrible need to be civilized? He doesn't want his own civility, his own well-behaved acquiescence to the inevitable, and he sure as hell doesn't want Eduardo's. He wants to crawl into a dark hole and howl.

But he can't. He's Eduardo's manager in all but name, and he's his friend before that even becomes a consideration, and oh hell and damnation and fuck, he's Eduardo'shousemate, for God's sake, how is any of this even remotely fair, fair to either of them — and on top of all that, Eduardo is right.

What they had given to one another so briefly, so astoundingly — they can't keep it. They can't accept it. They have to give it back to each other; with as much kindness as they can find within themselves, and as much grace, they have to give it back.

The things that Eduardo is afraid of remain the same, and remain as real. Discovery. The slow, undignified loss of his career in the merciless glare of the press and the gossip columns and every media torment devised.

The way his teammates (not all of them, no, but enough of them) will turn away. Not much, even those who do turn away, it won't be much, but a little is more than enough, a little rejection is the salt on cruelty's meat, flavoring it to its marrow.

(a little, little grave, it will be. Just wide and long and deep enough for a man's soul and his life's hope to be buried in.)

His father finally carrying out his threat of disowning him, and the loss of all his family from that moment on.

The things that Eduardo is afraid of are terribly, bitterly real.

Mark, who is afraid of nothing but losing him, knows that he will lose Eduardo far more surely if he betrays him to the risk he has refused to take his whole life. He knows it as well as he knows that nothing that has ever passed between them, not now when they can only hurt each other; not before, when they didn't know each other, none of it was a lie.

"We need to tell Sean," Mark says. "In case." His throat is dry, constricted, and he swallows, unable to go on.

Eduardo manages it. "Damage control," he whispers.

"In case," Mark emphasizes.

Eduardo shakes his head. "I can't — can't talk to him, not like it's some mistake at a club, I can't, I won't — Mark, can you — I know, I know, I'm being a coward —"

"No," Mark says. "No, you're not. And Sean — it's different if I talk to him, because — the publicity side, it's not — I don't have to — and you do — I mean I know that, I — Wardo, you think I don't know what this is costing you?"

"I'm the one who's running away from this!"

"Yeah," Mark says, worn through and down by the roughness of his emotions into a horrible new gentleness. It tastes exactly the same as defeat does, and he knows that flavor all too well, after over a season and a half with PAR. It's sour and sickly at once; there's nothing soft about its tenderness, just a wincing unwillingness to touch anything too firmly, in case the pain roars up again, all-consuming. "And I know how much it hurts you to do it."

He expects Eduardo to nod, and walk out, to give them both more and more of that space that last night lay between them like an extension of their bodies, another way to be joined by touch; those few half-delirious moments when even the air seemed to be conspiring with them in the mingling of their lust and their joy and their loving desire.

He doesn't expect him to turn from where he's standing at the still-shaded window, and step toward Mark, rather than away.

He doesn't expect him to have silent, painful tears streaking down his face, heavy and relentless and salt-raw with another fresh wave of overwhelming pain.

Mark hates the world as he never has before, because he has seen Eduardo in pain so high that Erica even got a verbal signoff on a small shot of morphine-derivative, just so that he could get enough relaxation to let the oxygen work.

(You cracked three of your ribs, Tyler had said in awe, back in the treatment room while Erica argued about hospital and Dustin argued about sense and Eduardo glared at them both, and Eduardo had responded no, well, yeah, but technically Bobby cracked them, but thanks for pointing it out, Ty, and Tyler had laughed, and reached out a large hand to ruffle Eduardo's hair, taking advantage of the brief period while moving to swat him off was too painful an action to take in retaliation.)

He has heard him curse and scream and even whine about various injuries.

But never once; not under drugs, not in pain, not the appalling time he managed to get juice shooting straight up into his eye from a particularly lethal little jar of piri-piri, and that had elicited genuine screaming; not even from behind the safety of an oxygen mask, has he seen Eduardo cry.

Until now.

He doesn't even think about how he should react.

He gets to his feet, and he holds on to Eduardo as he cries, helplessly and uncontrollably and shaking from head to foot with the pure raging misery of it, and Mark says what even he knows might be just as much of a lie as the metaphorical cake —

"It's going to be okay. We'll be okay."

(They've got to be.)

"We'll be okay."

Eduardo just shakes, head to foot, and it's not negation. It's fear.

"I can't stop," he says. "I can't stop loving you, and I have to."

The next breath Mark takes is jagged, it tears, it rends his lungs, his heart, it brings bile and the salt-sweet iron of blood into his mouth, coating his tongue, weighing it down and thickening it with the sick-sweet and the salt and copper — and all he can say is —

"No. Please, no," he repeats on a shuddering, halting breath. "You just — you can't act like you ever started. That's all. But don't —"

Don't stop. Any lie is better. Any lie at all.

"And how can I live, how can I — like that?" Bitterness in Eduardo's voice, now— no, worse than bitter, this is worse, it's black vitriol, and it's pure malevolence, and it's frightening.

It doesn't make it any better for Mark to know it's not aimed at him. It makes it worse. Because now he knows what he has to say, how he has to behave.

What he has to do.

"Like I will," Mark says, and breathes, and runs his front teeth down his lie-coated tongue, clearing the metallic-feeling slime to the top of his mouth, and swallowing it down. He steps away. "Like I will."

He knows who the coward is. And it's the one of them about to talk to Sean.

It was never going to be anyone but him, in the end, who packaged everything good up into a sellable deal, and put a price on something true.

He's done it before, after all. He's done it before.

He did it when he convinced Thiel to buy Eduardo.

**

 

October 2009 — End of the MLS season

The season doesn't go badly, in the end, or at least not as badly as it could have, which consoles absolutely no-one when they finally work out that while a draw with goals scored may well be a cause for mild celebration at the time, it really doesn't add up to many points on the final table, which is showing pathetically few blue squares and a surprising amount of red, even in comparison to the dominating yellow that proclaims not-so-proudly the indubitable skill of PAR at either preventing a team from scoring while not scoring themselves, or at least keeping things level if the other team do score.

No matter how Thiel dresses it up, it's not good enough; and in particular it's not good enough to attract the attention of any of the national managers.

Divya, embittered as ever, points out that it makes no difference to him, since the one thing no-one's looking for this year is strikers.

"And anyway," he adds, "it's not like I really thought getting on the first team here was going to make my career."

Someone throws a boot at him, and misses, which Mark thinks kind of underlines the point. He's wise enough not to say anything, however.

"We're being held back," Tyler says, and Mark wants to yell at him about acting like the fucking captain for once and not using everyone else's end-of-season feelings of deflation as a soapbox for his own brand of complaining. "If you buy a team, you have to have something in place first, something to build on. We just had money."

"Have money," Mark snaps, willing him to shut up. "Which is going to give us a chance of improving, at least. Next year."

"Yeah, well at least most of us can get bid for and be free of this mess," Tyler practically growls back, and in another lifetime, Mark might feel intimidated by just how up close and personal Tyler's getting, but he's spent too much time in dressing rooms and small conference rooms and fucking airplanes with Tyler and Cameron and their sheer mass to be worried by it, and he just stares up blankly at Tyler's furious expression and hopes he winds down soon before someone (probably Bobby, with his ridiculous goalkeeper's long arms) feels it necessary to put him in a headlock and drag him into the showers to be forcibly cooled off.

"Ty, right now I think they'd take any offer," Cameron says dryly, apparently to the ceiling. "So don't worry so much."

"Fuck off, you know what I'm talking about. No-one's doubting we brought in a good defender, but who the hell's going to try and match that price? Good going, find the talent and waste it because you can, is this the new —"

Mark, who's feeling guilty enough about his over-zealous bidding for Eduardo anyway, is about to explain to Tyler in very small words just how he's cost himself the captaincy

(he'll explain it to Chris later, and Thiel probably won't care even if he notices)

when Eduardo says quietly and cuttingly —

"English pass, Tyler," and Cameron, to make matters worse, actually laughs.

"Yeah, fuck all of you," Tyler says, and manages to make walking out of the dressing room look like a lesson in petulance.

"I'm so glad he's married," Cameron says blandly, and Divya snorts.

"Yeah, but what's the bet he'll be on the couch tonight?"

"Not taking it," Cameron says, "because if he's on the couch he's on his couch, so he's not at my place, so it's all good to me."

Tyler seems to have taken the anger out of the dressing room with him, though, because after that everyone just packs up relatively quietly and with no more outbursts, and Mark's grateful for it.

He can't help asking, though, on the way home —

"Do you ever mind? About being priced out of the transfer market?"

Eduardo's smile is surprisingly sweet.

"Mark," he says, actually sounding amused, "I know you did your research on my game, but did you find out anything about my life outside football?"

(and that's the other thing Mark's gotten used to, like the pervasive Okay? that can mean I'm listening and yes and agreement and refusal, the way Eduardo says not soccer but football, when he's not concentrating, and not even football, really, but futebol, one of the few times his slightly slurred accent marks out the lines of countries and languages, and not just habit)

"No," Mark says bluntly, because why would he have? He's not interested in anyone's life, not really, not even when they're living with him; not even when they've become an accepted part of his space. He accepts that there are things he has to know, because they're there, he accepts that most of what he ends up knowing, he's going to have to chalk up to being right about the world's stupidity, but he doesn't go out of his way to find out, and he never will.

"Yeah," Eduardo says, and now he's grinning. "Of course you didn't. Trust me. Okay? Not a problem."

Mark just shrugs, drops the subject, and takes him at his word.

**

A few days after that, Eduardo brings up the subject of training with a European team for the winter off-season.

I wouldn't expect a game, or anything, he says, just a chance to keep myself match-fit.

Thiel, unequivocally and absolutely, refuses to give permission for anyone to even start looking, let alone putting out feelers or talking to anyone.

Eduardo loses his temper in much the way Tyler had when he actually looked at the table rather than just accepted its presence, and says a worrying number of similar things, about national teams and training and how is anyone supposed to even remember I exist?, and Mark's somewhat despairing call to Sean gets him absolutely nowhere, because Sean has booked most of the team in to make various public appearances, probably with the same agenda in mind, that of reminding everyone that they exist, but while that might be a good game plan for the MLS, it's going to do precisely nothing against the players on the other side of the Atlantic, mid-season, fresh, mostly uninjured, and hitting the perfect time for the national teams to start looking.

And in the middle of it all, Beckham, damn him, goes to Milan on loan for the second time, and explicitly states he's doing it so that he'll be match-fit for international games, and Mark curses his existence for what feels like the thousandth time this season, because of course the man has to get the exact thing — with a really fucking good club, just to make things worse — that no-one can even get the Redwoods' owner to consider.

Mark spends the next day not only dealing with a justifiably furious Eduardo, but with the whole of PAR, who have belatedly realized that yes, this is what they should be doing.

Sean turns his phone off, or possibly blocks Mark's number.

Mark blocks Divya's number on the grounds that they are going to need a striker next season, and probably an assistant coach as well, and if Divya's been murdered and Mark's in prison for it, they'll be in an even worse position than they were at the end of the season, so it's for the good of the team.

Thiel goes on holiday — somewhere, and Mark really couldn't care less where, and hopes that everything is poisonous, venomous, or sends Thiel and only Thiel into anaphylactic shock if he drinks or eats it.

And Chris pulls a very surprising and randomly Scottish rabbit out of his magic hat.

"Queen's Park Rangers?" Mark says, bewildered, "Chris, how the fuck do they even know we exist?"

"They didn't," Chris says, sounding incredibly smug. "But I said the magic words."

"What, please, please, please, I will give you all my non-existent money?"

Chris, unsuccessfully, tries not to laugh. "Yeah, no. More 'Brazilian' and 'defense' and 'doesn't expect a game'."

"And they asked for him?" That's the bit Mark can't quite comprehend. Chris didn't ask QPR. They actually made a request of the Redwoods. And with Thiel away, hopefully dying of an unknown poison somewhere with no medical care, that means they asked Mark, saying they'd heard about Eduardo from Chris, and would it be possible to find a way of sending him over for training, of course they'd pay...

Mark's still not sure whether he's agreed to an off-season loan or bought a koala, but he's fairly sure he said yes at some point in the whole surreal exchange, so it's probably alright.

"Yes, because I'm a genius," Chris says. The smug quotient has, if possible, gone up even higher.

"Yeah, you really sort of are," Mark admits, and closes out of the call to the sound of Chris extolling his own virtues.

He does a good three hours research on QPR and Loftus Road before remembering that oh yes, telling Eduardo might be a really good start.

Still, at least he no longer thinks he's sending Eduardo to Scotland.

**

With their usual gift for being contrary, the Redwoods, instead of indulging in a collective jealous hissy fit, decide that they're going to be encouraging and helpful and full of good wishes.

Mark thinks it's far more disturbing than anything else they could have tried, Sean's coming up with more and more disconcertingly good ideas to use this as a platform for PAR publicity, and Eduardo, higher than a heroin addict on pure glee, is noticing precisely none of it.

(Mark's feeling mildly gleeful himself, but that's more at the thought of Sean trying to wrangle Eduardo long-distance than anything else)

"You have got to bring back a bit of Wembley turf," Tyler says, without specifying how Eduardo's supposed to break that many UK and US laws in one small gesture.

"Take photos," Divya says, more practically, "and don't forget to keep downloading them off your card."

"I've got you tickets to the gala at Covent Garden on the 14th," Sean says.

"Can you take Dustin, and leave him in the London Dungeon?" Erica says hopefully.

"Can you take me anyway?" Dustin implores. "Like, I could be your personal physio, or —"

"Dustin, not even Beckham has one of those," Mark says wearily.

"Even better!"

Eduardo doesn't hear any of it.

Mark's briefly envious.

And unlike everyone else, he sees no reason to go to the airport. Eduardo's perfectly capable of getting on a plane without his help, for fuck's sake, and even of getting off at the other end.

(he's disappointed in himself when he finds he's checking his phone obsessively to make sure Eduardo landed in one piece)

The house almost immediately starts to feel empty.

Mark wires in, brings up the latest game analyses, and starts working on putting his sleep patterns onto GMT.

Five days later, he realizes this may well have been a slight error in judgment, because what it means in practice is an overdose of Sky Sports commentary, and they are all idiots.

I've found something worse than ESPN's commercial breaks he texts to Eduardo, who promptly replies —

So have I, it's called British weather, GO TO BED.

For some bizarre reason, despite irritation at long-distance nagging and wanting to ask how the hell Eduardo knows he's still up rather than has just got up, and what the fuck, anyway, he feels much better.

It doesn't even matter so much that the house is still too quiet. Mark's never been much for the holiday season anyway.

**

By March, with the new season coming up, he's considerably less sanguine. He needs the whole team in one place, he needs to know that Eduardo's match-fit for them, not for a hypothetical place in the national team, and he needs someone to stop Cameron and Tyler from falling back into their bad habit of acting like they're the only players on the pitch.

And then, two days before Eduardo's due back, Beckham tears his Achilles tendon in a game against Chievo, and is out of the MLS, out of the World Cup, and quite possibly out of football.

Mark calls Eduardo.

"You're coming back now," he informs him, and has never been so grateful for the fact that his voice is flat and hard and never reflects any emotion.

"I'm already at the airport," Eduardo says, and he sounds subdued. "I — can you come pick me up? Only I think all the cabs went home, or something, I —"

"Yes," Mark says, and takes his decidedly down-market car out into the rain, not trusting himself with Eduardo's fantastic piece of machinery in the dark and the wet, and tries very hard not to break any speed limits getting to the airport.

He mostly succeeds.

He only realizes he's shaking, that he's been shaking ever since he saw Beckham go down, when he finally pulls up in the pick up area, and just for a moment, just for one moment that is his, and his alone, before he has to be competent and in control and in charge again; just for one moment while he looks around for Eduardo, he lets himself feel, lets himself think the one unthinkable, cruel thing that he's been pushing out of his mind for hours—

I'm glad it was Beckham. I'm so fucking glad.

What he doesn't expect is that Eduardo, when he sees the car and hurries toward it through the rain, is in an equally bad state and unable to hide it at all — but then he's had a transatlantic flight, trying to hold it together, and Mark at least has been able to curse his words into some kind of order in the privacy of his study.

Eduardo's shaking, not like Mark was earlier, with the aftershocks of fear, but with a sense Mark gets of a bone-deep cold that's worrying. Even in the bright lights of the airport parking, he looks cold, his lips slightly darker-tinged with blue and his usual tan bleached out by nearly three months of grey skies and lack of sun. He looks halfway to getting sick, and Mark turns up the heating in the car, figuring that if he gets too hot, he can cope. Eduardo doesn't look like there can be such a thing as too hot for him

(but then he never does, he complains in the summer that it never gets hot enough for him, he likes to wrap himself in the old afghan that lives on the back of the couch in Mark's study, the one his mother gave him before college;

he wraps himself up on it and lies on the couch and drinks tea and is strangely good, quiet company while Mark works —

and oh, Mark has missed that, everything else he's managed to carefully box up and compartmentalize, waiting for the start of the new season to open it again and respond to it with the clarity of time and distance, but not those nights)

and so Mark's not going to say a word, even if he begins to roast.

They get back to the house, and Eduardo still hasn't said a word, and he's still only got his kitbag and the weird purple carry-on, and one day Mark's going to ask about that, but now isn't the time.

"Are you — are you okay?" he asks once they get inside, which, stupid question as well as being out of character for him, but it seems to have been the right thing to say, because Eduardo stops looking quite so unsettled and anxious, and nods.

It's a response. Mark'll take it.

"5 am call out tomorrow," he says. "Early starts are this season's 'in thing'." He doesn't even try to stop himself from using the air quotations.

"Well," Eduardo says, "That's actually great for my jet-lag, because I'll think it's a nice late time." He's not even being sarcastic.

"Okay, um, I'll leave you to get unpacked, and shower, or whatever —"

"Mark?" Eduardo says softly. "Thanks."

For once, Mark doesn't even fight the hug, or protest, or say scathing, irritable things to get out of it. He just stays very still, with his hands on Eduardo's back, and waits for him to feel ready to let go.

He doesn't even care that even for Eduardo, it takes a very long time.

**

2 June, one day after the announcement of the official World Cup teams

Eduardo is named as one of the 23 in the Brazilian squad, and while it doesn't guarantee him a cap, it's better than anyone else in the PAR managed

(not even a spot on the bench moans Tyler, and Divya tells him to fuck off, because at least he had hope, and Dustin starts singing something about rubber tree plants, and everyone tells him to fuck off, and no-one's jealous of Eduardo, but no-one's exactly queuing up to congratulate him, either, except Bobby, who thinks of the defenders as his special property and wouldn't think ofnot offering his congratulations, and Mark is never going to understand this team as long as he lives — he hopes)

Erica and Dustin's not-dating becomes 'you are now officially dating so smile and be happy about it or I will kill you both' after Chris walks in on them using the treatment room for what everyone's always joked about but never quite dared test

(Seriously over-rated, Dustin says, not even vaguely embarrassed, and really not comfortable, don't let anyone kid you. Erica smirks at that, but she doesn't look like she's planning Dustin's demise, for once. She just looks inexplicably fond)

PAR are playing the Sounders, who are just as new to the League and definitely not as new to the concept of being a team as the Redwoods.

Mark and Eduardo haven't spoken outside training in a week.

The house has become neatly divided into areas they have silently, mutually, agreed to leave as the other's space. Eduardo no longer comes into Mark's study, to wrap himself in the afghan and lie there watching him until he goes to sleep. Mark no longer comes down to behave as though civilization is not a foreign concept, and eat dinner with Eduardo and listen to bits from whatever his odd choice of reading material is that week.

They're behaving as Mark had assumed they would, right back at the beginning.

He wishes he didn't know any better now, about how much he would have disliked it.

Sean thinks (and says, and keeps saying) that they're both idiots. That he'll support them, but they're idiots. That he would have supported them if they'd wanted to keep it private, for fuck's sake, what kind of bastard do they think he is? — and they're both idiots.

"I should look at transfers," Eduardo says.

"You should finish your fucking contract," Sean snaps back without sympathy. "You don't get to make all the decisions around here."

"I could buy myself out —"

"And I will make sure Thiel takes you to court and fucking destroys you," Sean replies. "Like I said, you chose this, you live with it. You don't get to opt out."

Mark would leave, could leave, except for one thing. No-one else would give him half the freedom or responsibility that Thiel does.

And because of his comparative lack of experience, no-one else would even want him.

They're stuck in a house that isn't a home, and a team without any hope of improving, and love isn't an answer, it's a fucking bulldozer, and it doesn't belong in lives, it belongs on a building site.

And Mark sometimes thinks that it is, in fact, quite possible to die from unhappiness.

Not in any melodramatic way, not in any way that requires action, but simply because sometimes, oh, sometimes, it would be so easy just to lie down and not — bother to breathe, any more. Just give in, let it go, stop fighting.

But his body refuses to stop and his mind can't, and he stands with Chris at the front of the room and shows them on the board exactly why they're going to be using Luxemburgo's magic rectangle, and no, Divya, it's not because I hate you, it's because I'd like everyone to be where they're supposed to be for once.

"I do hate you though, obviously," he says, trying to make a joke of it, but it falls flat, because everyone has worked out that something is more wrong than usual, and it's not just Mark being pissed at the fact that they're going to be missing one of the squad very shortly, so this game had better be a win.

"All. Equally," he adds quickly, and at least they relax a bit at that.

He leaves the room so Tyler can give his usual pep-talk — which usually ends up with someone throwing something at him, but seems to work at the same time, because — and Mark cannot emphasize this enough — PAR are insane.

Unfortunately, he runs into Dustin.

"Soooooo," Dustin says, and Mark groans, because a bout of Dustin being inquisitive and percipient is really more than he can deal with right now, "how come you're not joining me in the adult relationships corner? 'Cos I thought..."

"Yeah," Mark says. "Keep thinking. It's working so well."

"Ouch," Dustin says mildly. "What'd you do?"

"What makes you assume it was me?" Mark says, and now he really is angry, because he would have happily never told anyone, he would have kept it even from his family, from Dustin, from Erica, for fuck's sake, from Erica who knows him better than anyone

(except Eduardo, but he can't think about that)

he would have lived a life that was not-quite a lie but didn't have another name, either, if he could have had Eduardo in return.

All of it, all of it, wasted on a night and half a day of almost magic.

And almost magic was nothing, as it always was, as it always would be. It was nothing.

"Mark..."

"It was nothing," Mark says, and he knows that even though he's lying, he's not, because what else can you call something that might as well have never been attempted, never been experienced?

Nothing.

"Okay," Dustin says softly. "Okay, Mark. But if you ever decide it's something, and you want to talk —"

"Yeah," Mark says, awkward and vague, stuffing his hands in his pockets. "Yeah."

Dustin tries out a smile, which just makes him look more worried than ever, and goes off to get his equipment ready and join Erica.

And Mark is suddenly so envious, so jealous, that he can hardly even stand upright; ends up leaning against the wall with his breathing too shallow and too fast, and damns himself for a fool.

**

The game, which had been shaping up as yet another middle-of the road draw, goes completely to hell in the second half. The magic rectangle, which was never staying in shape anyway, reverts to a sort of vaguely ovoid scatter, Tyler's being ignored in a way no-one's done in months, and no-one can keep Seattle out of the goalmouth.

"What a mess," Chris says gloomily from his seat beside Mark. "Seriously, why do we bother, again?"

"Just what I was wondering," Mark says, and goes back to streaming and recording all the different camera angles for later, so he can work out what the hell went so very wrong.

Later, when he plays what happens next over and over again, trying to work out how it happened, how everyone missed it, he still doesn't see what must have been a moment of impact so hard that it's the sound which hits everyone first; it's the sound which will be on the recordings Mark plays obsessively; the sound which he's never heard before and yet knows instinctively what it is; the sound which brings him and Chris to their feet and as near as they can to the sideline, trying to make out through an increasingly growing huddle of players as to what's happening.

It's the sound of a bone breaking, and it's louder than a gun shot.

Tyler's using his height to wave frantically for attention that's already halfway across the pitch, and it's only then that everyone seems to realize the ball's still in play, and the referee must be stupid, and that's when Tyler says something very quietly that Mark just knows is 'English pass', because nothing, however bad it might be, can stop Tyler being Tyler, sprints over, and kicks the ball so hard and fast out of play that it knocks over one of the sidings.

"Christ, get out of the way so we can see!" Chris snaps at the oblivious players.

But Mark doesn't need to. He's already making his way from the sidelines and into the tunnel, because he knows.

Not from Tyler's behavior, but from Cameron's face as he backed away from the group of players, shaking his head, backed away and sat down, hard, head dropping to his knees.

The downed player is Eduardo.

**

They didn't let him in the ambulance, they were openly skeptical about his status as primary contact, they gave him more forms than Mark had ever seen in his life, and he argued with none of it.

He was working against time, and he knew it: time in which to find out what kind of specialist would be needed, time to contact the specialist, time for the specialist to get there — and his anger and frustration would solve precisely nothing.

For the first time in his life, Mark keeps his mouth shut and does everything he's told.

And eventually,eventually they accept he knows what he's doing, and has a right to be doing it.

That's when they tell him the extent of the damage.

A broken femur — bad enough, but not career-threatening. Not on its own. But the broken ends had torn through muscle, almost broken the skin, and the force of it all had torn the hamstring.

"He'll have to wait," someone is explaining to Mark. "Of course, it can be repaired, but as to a full recovery —"

"A full recovery for a soccer player, you mean —"

"In this instance," whoever this poor woman is who pulled the short straw and got to be the one talking to Mark says, "it's going to be the same thing. And it's going to take time to find out just how severe —"

"Yeah, I heard you," Mark cuts her off. "You've told him this, right?"

"No, and even if we'd wanted to, he's not conscious. And he'll be on enough drugs for a few days that —"

"There aren't enough drugs for him not to realize this," Mark says absently.

"I have to emphasize the importance of an optimistic attitude from those around —"

"Yeah," Mark says, waving a hand. "I know. But I can't optimistic attitude my way out of the one thing he already knows and he's going to wake up knowing and no amount of drugs can stop him knowing."

She looks at him blankly. "I'm sorry, but I don't —"

"The World Cup teams got announced yesterday," Mark says flatly. "You really think he doesn't know this puts him out?" He looks at her slightly horrified expression, thinks that the horror is more than likely due to his priorities, and almost smiles, because they're not his priorities at all, they're Eduardo's, and what Mark thinks or feels or wants has just become supremely irrelevant. "As I said. There aren't enough drugs. There weren't going to be from the second that bone broke."

**

He's proved horribly right.

It doesn't take even a day before 'no, you can't see him yet' turns into 'please, for God's sake go and talk some sense into him before someone snaps', which considering everything, is mildly ironic, because Mark's fairly sure that he's the last person Eduardo wants to see and the least welcome.

The thing is, he's there

(he was never going to be anywhere else)

and he was right

(and oh, but he wished he hadn't been)

and there's no-one else

(and that's the saddest of all, because since Eduardo arrived, that's been true, and it shouldn't be).

So of course, after all that, when Mark actually gets there, Eduardo's either given into the drugs and has gone to sleep, or has suddenly discovered superb acting skills.

Mark sits down in a chair by the bed, and considers his options.

In the end, there aren't any. He's going to stay exactly where he is.

For however long it takes. All of it. For Eduardo to wake up, for Mark to explain, for them both to understand all the things this could mean and all the things it might not have to mean.

However long it takes, he's staying.

**

It's both better and worse than Mark expected. The conversations are (mercifully) short, but they're repetitive and anguished and there's nothing Mark can do or say that makes any of it less painful or less true.

"I'm not going to the World Cup." It's the first thing Eduardo says to Mark when he surfaces, and it's all he says after that, when he says anything at all. And all Mark can say, feeling helpless and useless, is —

"No," and "I'm sorry," and "Do you want, um, here, ice chips, I think —"

(Eduardo takes the bowl and throws the ice in his face, which Mark has enough sense not to say out loud is a pretty encouraging sign as to the state of the rest of Eduardo's muscle control)

After the first operation, which the surgical team are revoltingly self-congratulatory about, because there wasn't as much tendon and muscle damage as they'd feared, and they can actually start thinking about rehabilitation plans rather than lifestyle management, Eduardo is in an even worse mood, though at least he's less depressed, and Mark starts to think that maybe he could go home for a bit longer than four hours, which when basic hygiene and eating is factored in, is not really that long a period in which to get some sleep.

And then some idiot whom Mark is going to find and personally destroy gets Eduardo access to the sports channels and news from South Africa, and Mark comes into the room to find that apparently all normal life has been cancelled and for some reason the World Cup has, like black mold, gone everywhere while he wasn't looking.

"I'm supposed to be out there," Eduardo says, and Mark's never heard him sound like that before, not even when it physically hurt to listen to, there was so much black loathing in it. "This was — I was supposed to — everything I decided —"

It's defeat, Mark realizes, this unknown tone in Eduardo's voice is defeat, and he has no idea what to do with it.

There's nothing he can do, except let Eduardo work this out for himself, that it's the end of one thing, but not of so many others, that he's young enough for other World Cups to be a possibility, that the next few months are going to be awful, they're going to be unspeakable, but they won't be pointless and they won't be for nothing, and all that went before, all the things Eduardo decided he had to do, and had to do alone, they weren't for nothing, either.

He doesn't say any of that. He sits in what he's come to think of as his chair, and stays quiet.

"Why aren't you saying anything?" Eduardo demands eventually, and oh, there, there's the anger, it hasn't been pushed away by defeat after all.

"I'm working out how long it is until the Olympics," Mark says, and shrugs a little. "Even working as slowly as possible without being in stasis, you should be ready for those."

Eduardo stares at him, eyes wide and mouth slightly open. "Have you been listening to what —"

"Yeah," Mark says. "I've been listening to what you can't have. I'm thinking about what you can have. And I'm wondering why you aren't."

"Maybe there's only so much I can give up on before I just give up," Eduardo says nastily. "You've seen me do it before."

"Some situations you have to give up on," Mark says, and his heart is hammering in his chest now, too fast, too hard, probably visible, and he tries not to feel embarrassed by it, tries not to think that Eduardo knows nothing about being betrayed by his own body in the same way the rest of the world does, tries not to let the old, old resentment of players that he could only ever study and manage and train and never emulate overcome him. "So you find a new situation. Right now yours is the next operation. And starting rehabilitation. And looking two years, four years down the line at what you can make happen."

"And — us?" Eduardo's looking very carefully at his hands, and not at Mark. "Because I'd really like to think — did I fuck it up? For good? Is there any way of making — of finding — of something else?"

Mark takes a deep breath, and knows it's audible, and doesn't care.

"Well," he says. "I'm still here."

"That's not what I—"

"Wardo. I'm still here. And I'm not planning on changing that. I haven't changed anything. Not what I want, not what I feel, not — I haven't changed anything."

"And you think — you think I can?"

"I think," Mark says with perfect honesty, because this is the one thing he's known to be true, from the first time he saw the terrible recordings of Eduardo's early games, has known since before he even made Thiel put in that ludicrous bid for him, before they even met in that hotel, this one thing is something he knows is a fact, "I think you can do anything you want."

Eduardo looks up at him, then, finally, and oh, it's a good thing that he didn't before, because what Mark sees in his eyes would have undone him completely, would have turned his words into more of a jumbled nonsense than he's afraid they already were.

It's everything he's ever wanted and it's too much at once, and it's one thing to believe something, and one thing to know something, and it's quite another to have all that turned on him, one entire moment of pure focus that makes everything else fall away before it.

And Eduardo holds out his hand, waiting for Mark to cross to the bed; for once he's the one waiting, not running to or from anything, he's waiting, and he's steady, and he says without hesitation –

"Then yes."

And Mark walks over, and takes his hand, and feels how they fit; how different they are and yet how they fit, and that tiny, warm, beloved little silk-layer of air is trapped between their palms, and he thinks –

Alchemy.

And Eduardo smiles.