Chapter Text
MADRID
AFC Richmond's first match in the Champions League in well over two decades is against Madrid, and the moment they land in Spain, Nate feels jittery with anticipation. For the match, sure, which they’re probably ill-prepared for despite a strong start in the Premier League season just a few weeks ago, but for the rest of the trip as well. Last year, when he was travelling as the manager of West Ham, he was so caught up in trying to prove himself that he barely even registered what country he was in, let alone allowed himself to enjoy the change of scenery, and now he’s determined to make up for lost time.
Roy is well-versed in Spanish dining from all the time he spent here back in his Chelsea days, so Nate isn’t surprised when he directs his fellow coaches to a tapas restaurant and quickly points out what’s worth getting after half a glance at the menu. Nate isn’t surprised either when Beard nods in agreement and points to a wine he thinks they’d like before ordering for them in Spanish, but that’s mostlybecause Nate’s come to expect the unexpected from Beard.
Nate supposes he could ask how Beard came by his knowledge of Spanish wine or his multilingualism rather than letting it remain a mystery. He isn’t sure if he and Beard are friends exactly, but he likes to think they’ve grown closer after that night at the end of last season when Beard showed up at his door with a peace offering in the form of a personal story that sounded remarkably like Les Mis . Nate imagines Beard would respond with something vague rather than an outright dismissal. But he never quite works up the nerve. Soon enough, however, the banter starts to build up about this and that: Ted, who just went to a promising job interview; the English women’s league, which Roy and Beard have both started following obsessively and which Nate has been following casually since childhood; the match against Real Madrid tomorrow, which they’re sadly all a bit too resigned won’t end well for them. Roy asks how Jade’s doing, perhaps in some attempt at making polite conversation, and Nate averts the question as best he can, telling him she’s still visiting family in Poland, which is technically true. He doesn’t clarify that she left at the end of July and has been there for over a month now.
Nate’s grateful when he leaves it at that and then changes the subject by digging his guidebook out of his messenger bag and flipping to one of the sections he’s marked off. “It’s too late for museum visits, but we’re right in the heart of the city. There’s plenty to see in walking distance. Who’s with me?”
Roy declines with a vague dismissal and a grunt, but Beard merely shrugs in a way Nate now knows to interpret as a yes.
“Don’t take it too hard,” Beard tells Nate, as they’re walking out of the restaurant, seemingly picking a direction at random. “Roy just discovered Stieg Larsson. Probably left his book on a cliffhanger. Maybe he’ll want to come with you next time.”
“What about you?” Nate asks, following his lead. The streets are old and bend in unpredictable ways, making it difficult to get a sense of where they are or where they’re going.
“I’m reading a non-fiction book about microbes,” Beard replies. “Not a lot of plot twists so far.”
“I mean, would you want to go sightseeing with me? I picked this up before we left. Seems there’s quite a lot to see.” Nate gestures to his Lonely Planet and suddenly feels self-conscious about how heavily annotated it is. Perhaps the dozens of colour-coded sticky notes peeking out the top is a bit much for a two-day work trip.
Beard raises his eyebrows slightly in a gesture that makes Nathan feel a little judged, but he thankfully doesn’t comment on the book. “Sure.”
“Did you know that Madrid is the highest city in Europe?” he asks, remembering something he read in the guidebook. “In terms of elevation, I mean. It’s part of why the climate’s so different here.”
“I didn’t,” Beard replies. His tone is casual as ever, but he seems genuinely interested. “Do you know what the Royal Palace looks like?”
“Uh, wait, I think I saw that somewhere in here,” Nate responds, flicking through his book. “Let me check.”
“Nate,” Beard says, somewhat curtly with a hint of a command in his tone. “Look up.”
“Oh,” Nate says, doing as Beard says and looking up at the building in front of them. He hadn’t even realised they were headed in the direction of the palace, but here it is, right in front of him. “It’s pretty.”
Beard nods in agreement. “It’s too bad so many palaces were built by fascist European royalty. Kind of takes some of the enjoyment out of the prettiness.”
“Actually, this one was built by Muhammad I of Córdoba. The guidebook said it’s been restored and embellished some through the years, so I suppose what you were saying about the Europeans is still true.”
“Really?” Beard asks. He has that look about him he gets when Nate’s telling him about the intricacies of a bit of football history, or even the look he had on his face earlier today, on the plane, with his nose in that book. It’s a look he gets when he thinks something may just momentarily satiate his unquenchable thirst for knowledge.
So Nathan does his best to recite what he learned from his guidebook and the few hours he’d spent burrowing down the Wikipedia rabbit hole, clicking through pages and pages about places and people he’d never even heard of before, and Beard listens as they carry on walking. They stop on occasion when they spot peculiar details in the architecture, exchanging facts as they occur to them. Unlike Nate, who did all his research this past week in preparation for this specific trip, Beard’s facts all seem to be stowed away from books or documentaries he’s come across through the years. It doesn’t seem his extensive pop-culture knowledge extends very far in this region, though; apart from an offhand comment about Pedro Almodóvar, there are blessedly few non-sequiturs of the sort that often make his conversations with Ted a little difficult to follow.
Nathan doesn’t realise how late it’s getting before dusk starts to settle, but Beard doesn’t seem like he’s in any hurry to get a good night’s sleep. When he suggests they grab a beer before heading back for the hotel, Nate agrees. They have work to do in the morning, but they’ve walked off the wine they had with dinner anyway. A beer won’t hurt, and Nate doesn’t feel ready for the night to be over quite yet.
“Thanks for that,” Nate says, once they’re seated. The bar they found is a little crowded, so they got a table outside, and Nate’s grateful that he doesn’t have to strain himself to be heard over the music from inside. “I’ve always wanted to see Madrid.”
“Why haven’t you?” Beard asks. It’s a fair enough question. Nate’s still getting used to earning seven figures, but even when he was working as a kitman, he could’ve scrounged up enough money for a weekend trip.
“Never liked the idea of travelling alone much,” Nate admits. It’s one of the many things he regrets about the years he spent with his head down, afraid of experiencing the world.
“But last season,” Beard starts, and Nate tenses slightly. Things are better now, but he sometimes worries that if Beard recalls how much he hated him only a few months ago, he might decide that forgiving him was premature. “Didn’t you travel a lot? Plus, Rupert arranged those friendlies in preparation for his stupid supervillain league.”
Nate nods with an averted gaze. When he’d gotten the job at West Ham, he’d been driven by spite and ambition, the entire weight of his being hinging on his ability to prove himself to Ted, to Rupert, to the world. “I didn’t really take the time to appreciate it.” In truth, he’d barely left his hotel rooms at all, waking up early to go through every possible strategy and probable outcome, getting room service so the players wouldn’t catch a glimpse of him at a restaurant and see that he was eating alone.
Beard looks at him, something analytical in his gaze. “I’m glad you’re taking that time now.”
Nate nods again, taking a nervous sip of his beer. “How’s Jane?” he asks. He doesn’t think he’s ever asked about Jane, but the prospect of hearing about Beard’s slightly worrying romantic life strikes him as suddenly preferable to the current topic of conversation.
Beard lets out a complicated sigh. “Five months pregnant.”
“Oh!” Nate doesn’t manage to contain his shock before he’s fully processed the information. “That’s… well that’s great news. Congratulations.”
“Thanks,” Beard says, smiling, and for a second or two his expression is entirely uncomplicated — pure, unadulterated happiness.
“So, she was already pregnant when you were going to leav—” Nate starts, doing the math in his head before it occurs to him how that sounds, and then stops with an apologetic cringe.
Beard lets out another sigh as he takes another swig of his beer, nearly finishing the bottle. “Yup.”
When Nate realises the obvious direction the conversation is headed in is that Beard will ask him about Jade, he decides he'd better finish his own beer and then stands up, only a little awkwardly, before suggesting they call it a night. They’ve got a match tomorrow after all.
LONDON
The nil-one loss to Real Madrid was perfectly respectable considering their opponents, but it still stings, and the team spend most of the plane ride back to London in silence.
The coaches are mostly quiet too, Roy somehow managing to nod off the moment they get in the air. Nate likes observing Beard when they travel. He’s so good at keeping calm on long bus rides and tightly packed airplanes, exuding a cool and casual air that is sometimes the single ingredient needed to keep two dozen stir-crazy athletes from erupting into chaos. Sometimes he’ll sit and listen if one of the players has something they feel the need to talk over with him. Beard does talk too on occasion—he’s not as mute as he sometimes gets accused of, and now that Ted’s not here, his disinclination for long rambling rants doesn’t feel as jarring. If anything, he fits in. On occasion, he’ll sit with his phone texting—with Jane, mostly, Nate assumes, although he’s never dared take a peek—but mostly he reads. Nate has always been fascinated with Beard’s ability to read whenever he has the chance. He reads at cafés, on the team bus, and in his office. He reads fiction when he’s supposed to be working and strategy books when he’s supposed to be socialising. Nate even caught him once picking up a book in the middle of a match, just to get a few pages in while a player on the opposing team was arguing with a referee. Thrillers, classics, romances, and a solid dose of non-fiction. No genre is beneath him and no topic seems out of his reach. He’s talked about what he’s reading to make it clear that he absorbs the knowledge as well. Nate sometimes thinks Beard would have made a rather good academic, but it’s not as if his talents are wasted here—he’s one hell of a coach.
Beard and Jane announce their wedding about a month later. The pregnancy isn’t news to anyone by now, but it still comes as a surprise to just about everyone when they receive the invitation, which is delivered in the form of a very chaotic group text less than two weeks before the date they’ve set. They don’t have a match that week so Rebecca ensures that the whole club has the day off, which means that, despite the short notice, Beard’s closest friends in London will be able to go. It’s not until Beard phrases it that way that Nate realises he belongs to that group.
Ted can’t make it. It would have been unfair to assume otherwise, but it still hurts to hear it. He has a son and a new job consulting for a football team in Kansas City that’s hoping to go pro, so thirteen days isn’t nearly enough time to accommodate the arrangements he would have to make in order to plan out intercontinental travel. Nate has a weird feeling that the short-notice invitations were on purpose, that maybe Beard didn’t want Ted to be here for this. It’s a ridiculous thought—Beard’s been missing Ted more than anyone, but knowing why Beard stayed, Nate can’t help but wonder if perhaps Beard didn’t want his relationship with Jane to be the reason Ted returned.
Jade comes back from Poland just in time to join Nate at the wedding, but he can sense a coldness from her that’s different from the coldness he’d come to love. He’d be all in his head about it, but he’s a bit distracted, because an hour before the wedding, Ted sent him a very long text with a speech in it that Ted apparently had already started penning months ago, after Beard had decided to stay in London to be with Jane.
It’s a short speech, thankfully, because Nate’s shaking as he stands up to give it on behalf of the absent best man, but by the time he’s done speaking, Beard’s crying, and afterwards he hugs Nate so tightly that he’s certain Ted must be able to feel it all the way across the Atlantic.
When he steps back to the table, Jade smiles at him, and although she doesn’t say it, he can tell that she’s proud of him for breaking through his anxiety enough to stand up and say those words. She didn’t know him before Ted taught him the power of speaking up, but she knows how far he’s come. That’s been the best thing about their relationship in a lot of ways, having someone to witness his life up close, someone who has been in it all with him. For a fleeting moment, he thinks there’s hope for them yet, but he doesn’t tell her as much, and she doesn’t say anything either. Something’s been off lately, there’s no denying it, but they haven’t addressed it either. They’re in a limbo now, together but not. He catches himself thinking that if he wanted it more, he’d fight for it and resents himself for having the thought.
When there are no more speeches, Jade makes up some vague excuse and he doesn’t bother calling her out on it as she says she'd better head home early. He should stay behind though, she insists, and he doesn’t fight her on that either. Nate decides to quash the uneasiness he feels in the free bar.
People may have mixed feelings about the happy union, but there’s no denying that they know how to throw a party. Dani’s brought a bottle of mezcal even though there’s a free bar, and it doesn’t take long before someone convinces the DJ to turn up the music. A couple of the players start flirting with Jane’s friends, which will surely only end in disaster. Nate doesn’t join in on the dancing, but he finds a good spot near the dancefloor where he can soak up the joy from a safe distance and makes sure to order himself a triple scotch. He feels the remnants of the hangover linger for a full week.
When the team travels to Scandinavia a week later, there’s still an uneasy feeling in his stomach that doesn’t seem to go away.