we, who are weightless now | stevie/xabi | 2, 964 words
title: we, who are weightless now
author: tasheila
pairing: stevie/xabi, jon/original character
rating: pg-13
words: 2, 964 words
summary: in the years to come, their lives go like this.
notes: thank you thank you, tessalonso for the awesome beta job. i just changed that one scene but it's pretty much the same. this fic totally punched me in the gut and kicked my ass but i love it. xabi alonso better not leave anymore.
eta: due to recent events i decided to change some things. :(
It ends this way:
Xabi stands, back ramrod straight, hands he holds together behind his back tightly (it gives him a sense of constancy, of you are not the only one who has ever had to do this so buck up and get it done), eyes never wavering from that never ending pool of blue.
He speaks, softly, because this is happening on the plane just after Liverpool win their 6th European cup in Prague. The excitement is palpable and everyone is on a continuous state of euphoria, and he’s pretty sure Pepe is about to stand up and start yelling, that bald head turning an unhealthy shade of tomato red, Liverpool red.
But he speaks softly still; almost as if he is hoping the person he is talking to won't hear him. Except, Stevie has the gift of being extraordinarily perceptive in moments like this. It’s strange, Xabi muses, when I want you to know, you never do. And now that I don’t, you already know.
Perhaps this is where it finally happens: two men who were never suited to each other, who never made sense together, who gave of a sense of oneness only because it was expected of them, finally, ultimately reach that moment of complete understanding.
But Xabi knows how much of a lie this is. In a six-year relationship they gave so much to each other, and it only ends now because they no longer have anything to give. They fit so well (in more ways than one), they understood so much, and words never mattered, not off the pitch (a glance was all it took), and on the pitch, all they needed was a pass of the ball to convey the words they never said.
When Xabi finishes, Stevie looks away. It’s silent now between them, and only now, having lived in a relationship with no words, does he realize how starved he is of them.
“Say something,” he whispers, hating the desperation in his voice, “please?”
Stevie gives him a long hard look, and then:
“Good luck.”
Just like that, six years are over. Xabi expects this, welcomes it even. They’re both exhausted now, and maybe a few years ago they would’ve tried to salvage it. But, rivers run their course and ultimately, they dry up, leaving behind only their markings on the soft, damp soil.
Better to leave before they start to hate each other, before the soil becomes harsh and unforgiving.
When the plane lands, Xabi gives a call to his agent and allows him to start a dialogue with Real Madrid. Before he leaves for South Africa he holds his shirt aloft the Bernabeu, and talks about how happy he is to be there, and that Real Madrid is now a long-fulfilled dream. He means it, too. For once, he is weightless now.
He and Stevie never talk again, save for a few customary exchanges in the tunnel with everyone watching, before Champions League games (Liverpool hold the winning record) and England-Spain games (Spain hold the winning record).
It ends that way.
Xabi was not built to stop loving.
He loves Stevie, from afar, silently, just like he used to when he was Rafa Benitez’s latest player and Stevie hated the world
(Briefly he allows himself to think that Carra would’ve given everyone The Talk, with minor changes, from when he gave a few days after Xabi arrived and the gist of it was, Stevie is not happy. I’m not going to explain why. Anyway don’t look at him any longer than necessary, don’t talk to him unless you have to, and prove to him that you fucking belong here and maybe he won’t be consumed with rage/and or anxiety attacks.
And Xabi remembers thinking, The fucking right of this guy, who’s supposed to be captain, who hates everyone.
But then, changing his mind after the Arsenal game, when he proved that he belonged and Stevie held him tighter and he realized he never wanted to have that feeling leave him.)
And Xabi was never sure what to do with him.
Xabi still isn’t sure what to do with him.
In the years to come, their lives go like this:
The summer Xabi leaves, Alex becomes pregnant. Nine months later, the blessed, dreamt-for baby boy arrives. They name him George. Xabi wants to call and congratulate them, but he doesn’t (eventually, Nagore calls for them, and Alex is distant, uncomfortable on the phone), instead focusing his attention on his own son, who had the beginnings of a Scouse accent and then lost it, now developing the smoother, deeper Catalan one he had as a little boy.
Sometimes he sets Jon on his lap, and they watch Liverpool games together, old ones and new. His eyes watch his own, nimble (but not quick) feet, knowing that his brain has moved on to the next step-over, the next pass, the next maneuver, before it’s possible for everyone else to think that way. Since then, he’s only become slower and he knows now he will never be as efficient as he was in Liverpool’s colours. He is never as happy.
When he allows his mind to wander (and after he has put Jon to bed), he watches Stevie. Stevie still runs as if he can beat time (although he’s grown more controlled over the years, the urgency never goes away), still shoots from 40-yards out (most of the time, he scores), still lives and breathes Liverpool. It’s his one love affair that will never end.
Xabi watches as he cuts through swathes of grass and bodies fueled by velocity, watches that self-belief never waver, watches as he holds on, tightly, to whoever scores, watches as if Stevie is discovering for the first time that the world is his to do as he will.
This keen, unemotional observation, he deduces, is probably what Danny Murphy felt over the years, when the yearning, keening love was replaced by a quiet love, by understanding that Stevie was really no one’s to keep, only the Kop's, only by a football, and they should all feel so lucky to have been part of the love he gave back.
It hurts. But like all wounds, it starts to heal.
From what Xabi hears, nothing really happened between Stevie and Fernando.
This all comes from Pepe, the only one he really talks to anymore (Xabi believes in clean breaks), and Pepe tells him that the relationship didn’t start until a season after Xabi left. And it sort of stayed stagnant, until they fell out of love.
And Xabi thinks he’s turned out to be the lucky one, all things concerned. He can’t imagine falling out of love with Stevie: if he did it would be like walking around with a phantom leg, always aware of its presence except you know it isn’t there.
And then, the fact that he had Stevie for much longer, enough that he can’t ever imagine falling out of love with him, even now, when an entire body of water separates them, and Xabi no longer feels the need to call him and just hear his voice.
Yes. He is the lucky one. He believes in clean breaks, but he won’t ever break this one.
Stevie retires from football by 2015, a full two years after the expected date.
It was a career of fulfilled promises: before Xabi leaves they win their first Premier League trophy in 21 years and after that they win it for five years straight before Stevie retires. In those five years there is one more Champions' League trophy for him. There is also, unbelievably, a World Cup, won against their age-old rivals, Argentina, won because Stevie scored in the last two minutes.
It becomes more than a career of fulfilled promises, because by then he is almost unequivocally known as the greatest player in the history of the game. And he retires, to the dismay of everyone, despite being healthy, despite probably being able to play a good three more years.
But the ones who know him, his family, his closest friends in the team, even Xabi (they don’t know each other anymore but Xabi hasn’t loved him for so long just to forget what the desolate slope of his shoulders means) understands that he is tired now, and sooner or later something will give way and Stevie will lose whatever it is that makes him Steven Gerrard.
Let the river run its course. It will dry up. Better to leave before the soil becomes dry, bitter. It’s only the natural progression of things.
More years.
Xabi retires a year before Stevie does. Instead of continuing on with management, as was expected of him, he goes back to school. Gets a degree in business and management, goes to the United States for his masters in Economics. Gets a job analyzing stocks for a company. Disappears completely from the public eye.
By contrast Stevie’s life plays out in the public eye like he’s been there his entire life (Xabi supposes he has). There’s a car accident, and Stevie is left raising three children alone. There’s a public outpouring of grief that comes when someone famous (but not really loved) dies and the public mourns euphorically (as if they just realized they should have loved her in the first place), and it’s all very unique to English culture.
Xabi hasn’t been to England since his last game there.
Their lives live on.
In the beginning Xabi had thought a life without Stevie’s constant presence would be unbearable, except now that he goes through it, it isn’t, really. There are still urges to call, to see his face, but he finds that his days go on easier. He misses Stevie, yes, but it’s a good, fond, kind of missing, where you can survive it if you have things to occupy your mind.
Jon starts to show flashes of his brilliance on the pitch. “Soccer” is played differently in the United States, that is, it isn’t taught with the intent for children to become professional players. They do drills, they pass the ball, they score goals, but it lacks the intuition drilled into Xabi’s brain from the coaches at Antiguoko, and from his own father.
So he teaches the boy everything he knows, from tackling, to scoring, to being patient. Even now, as a 15 year old he can tell Jon will only be as fast as he was. His coaches express their dismay: he never does well in the sprint trials and he lags behind on laps. Xabi expresses his dismay too, since when was football dictated by laps and sprints?
He teaches him the most important lesson, and that is: the speed of your brain must make up for your lack of pace, and Jon takes all of it to heart and rises above the ranks, breaking schoolboy records and representing the US in junior cups. A few months later, Spain starts calling, tentatively enquiring if the boy will play for Spain and for which clubs, and then there’s England, because even they haven’t forgotten that Jon was born in England
(in the middle of the Champion’s League, Liverpool were playing away in Inter Milan, and Xabi stayed behind because he had his priorities straight. This is where all the problems start, where Xabi feels like he has begun to lose Stevie.
Jon is the bright star among all other things as they fall apart).
The clubs start coming soon after, and the US are reluctant for the contact, too many times they have let slip players who grew up on their shores to farther, more promising lands. But both father and son are in charge of the son’s destiny, and there was always the unspoken promise between them and that was
I will play for Spain, but I’ll sign for Liverpool.
When Jon turns 18, this is exactly what happens.
Xabi doesn’t come with him to England, though. It’s Nagore (who Xabi never married, and they fell out of love, but they stay together out of a deep contentment they never want to leave) and Mikel, and Pepe Reina, newly confirmed as a football agent, has his first client all signed up.
Xabi watches from his adopted home as his boy rises through the ranks. He isn’t blind to see that the power of nepotism helped: Liverpool would never have picked up an 18 year old who had no professional association with any of the established football clubs. They took Jon on because of his name and of the hype that surrounds him.
He proves that hype though, and three years later 69-year old Rafa Benitez (no more hair, more rotund, speaks with a slight trace of Scouse, instead of contract spats it has become retirement spats with the long suffering Montse) gives 21 year-old Jon Alonso Aranburu his first team debut.
It’s a fairly inconspicuous debut, nothing much happens, and West Brom doesn’t have much of a defence so that it goes Liverpool’s way, and Jon plays solidly, keeps his head down, his feet moving, and offers himself up when he can.
What must never be forgotten is: 31 years ago a fidgety Scouse boy (who himself now has a son, three years younger and is chomping at the bit to get his first-team debut) had himself a fairly inconspicuous debut too.
And then his career was anything but.
It’s Jon’s third year in the first team when he does what Xabi never had the guts to do.
He’s injured, right in the middle of the season, during Christmas time. It’s the busiest time, the worst time to have a broken ankle, but it happened, and now Jon has nothing to do except spend Christmas at home, in New York with his parents. Xabi can tell: something’s changed, which means this holiday will be much more different than normal.
Xabi and Nagore aren’t blind to their son, there are things they know, and things they’ve known (how his best friend in high school was the only one they met, how Nagore tried setting him up with dates but it never worked, how both of them found magazines under their son’s mattress just after he’d left). But they won’t bring it up, they’ll wait for him to say it.
A few minutes later, Nagore innocently asks, “Have you met anyone?”
A flash of colour passes on Jon’s face, before, “Mom,” he says, jokingly, “are you going to set me up with anyone again?”
“Hijo,” she answers, “I am only concerned. I just want you to be happy.”
Something in her tone, so knowing, so effortless, makes Xabi believe that maybe she wasn’t as clueless as she pretended to be in those days when he himself was a Liverpool player.
“Well,” Jon continues, “I did meet someone. But I’m not telling you until I’m sure!”
Later that night, when father and son are washing the dishes and Nagore is talking to relatives in Spain, Jon tells his son how proud he is of him, for everything.
And the way Jon answers him, Xabi starts to think that maybe even Jon isn’t as clueless as he pretends to be when it comes to his father.
Maybe it’s only Xabi who was the clueless one.
The first live match that Xabi Alonso ever watches his son play in is the Champions' League final, in Portugal, a few months later.
As far as Champion’s League finals go, this is hardly the most exciting one. Xabi had known by the second-half whistle that Liverpool would win it, owing perhaps to the fact that 21-year old George Gerrard had gone and whipped his team up into a dynamic frenzy of young men determined to leave their first final with their own mark. He’d scored the first two goals, by the second half he was setting up his teammates. Xabi thinks he’s seen this all before (he has), and the whistle sounds, 3-1, Liverpool against Roma, a fairly routine win in non-routine circumstances.
They don’t bring the drama, this generation (better for Rafa), but a Champions' League trophy is a trophy, they’ll treasure it, and win more in the days to come.
Keeping an eye on his son, as he runs around amok with bursting excitement, Xabi can’t help but remember his first win
(hands, tongue, nose, kiss oh fuck yes.)
and even more so when Jon throws himself at George Gerrard, lifting his legs over his waist, and they whisper and laugh, hold each other tighter. It’s lots of things and then
(hands, tongue, nose, kiss oh fuck yes.).
Like fathers like sons.
Xabi can feel a pair of eyes boring down his back, he knows who it is without even looking. He turns around anyway, nodding at Stevie’s bemused face.
A love starts one night in Istanbul, ends after one night in Prague, and now a new love, one that may or may not have started in Lisbon.
Oh, those hazy European nights.
Xabi and Stevie have their first serious talk that night, since 21 years ago.
This time, it’s both of them who stand, ramrod straight (it’s constancy, again, the sense that everything has changed, but in all actuality, everything remains the same) and it’s Stevie who speaks first.
“Will they be ok?” he asks. Time has been good for him, the lines adding not so much a pre-mature weariness (as it had on those days), but a look of experience, of knowing. His eyes are still that deep, mercurial blue. He looks so much wiser now, older. They both are.
Xabi looks up at him, smiling and
“They’re braver than we were.”
And they are. They will be.
Weightless, now.
author: tasheila
pairing: stevie/xabi, jon/original character
rating: pg-13
words: 2, 964 words
summary: in the years to come, their lives go like this.
notes: thank you thank you, tessalonso for the awesome beta job. i just changed that one scene but it's pretty much the same. this fic totally punched me in the gut and kicked my ass but i love it. xabi alonso better not leave anymore.
eta: due to recent events i decided to change some things. :(
It ends this way:
Xabi stands, back ramrod straight, hands he holds together behind his back tightly (it gives him a sense of constancy, of you are not the only one who has ever had to do this so buck up and get it done), eyes never wavering from that never ending pool of blue.
He speaks, softly, because this is happening on the plane just after Liverpool win their 6th European cup in Prague. The excitement is palpable and everyone is on a continuous state of euphoria, and he’s pretty sure Pepe is about to stand up and start yelling, that bald head turning an unhealthy shade of tomato red, Liverpool red.
But he speaks softly still; almost as if he is hoping the person he is talking to won't hear him. Except, Stevie has the gift of being extraordinarily perceptive in moments like this. It’s strange, Xabi muses, when I want you to know, you never do. And now that I don’t, you already know.
Perhaps this is where it finally happens: two men who were never suited to each other, who never made sense together, who gave of a sense of oneness only because it was expected of them, finally, ultimately reach that moment of complete understanding.
But Xabi knows how much of a lie this is. In a six-year relationship they gave so much to each other, and it only ends now because they no longer have anything to give. They fit so well (in more ways than one), they understood so much, and words never mattered, not off the pitch (a glance was all it took), and on the pitch, all they needed was a pass of the ball to convey the words they never said.
When Xabi finishes, Stevie looks away. It’s silent now between them, and only now, having lived in a relationship with no words, does he realize how starved he is of them.
“Say something,” he whispers, hating the desperation in his voice, “please?”
Stevie gives him a long hard look, and then:
“Good luck.”
Just like that, six years are over. Xabi expects this, welcomes it even. They’re both exhausted now, and maybe a few years ago they would’ve tried to salvage it. But, rivers run their course and ultimately, they dry up, leaving behind only their markings on the soft, damp soil.
Better to leave before they start to hate each other, before the soil becomes harsh and unforgiving.
When the plane lands, Xabi gives a call to his agent and allows him to start a dialogue with Real Madrid. Before he leaves for South Africa he holds his shirt aloft the Bernabeu, and talks about how happy he is to be there, and that Real Madrid is now a long-fulfilled dream. He means it, too. For once, he is weightless now.
He and Stevie never talk again, save for a few customary exchanges in the tunnel with everyone watching, before Champions League games (Liverpool hold the winning record) and England-Spain games (Spain hold the winning record).
It ends that way.
Xabi was not built to stop loving.
He loves Stevie, from afar, silently, just like he used to when he was Rafa Benitez’s latest player and Stevie hated the world
(Briefly he allows himself to think that Carra would’ve given everyone The Talk, with minor changes, from when he gave a few days after Xabi arrived and the gist of it was, Stevie is not happy. I’m not going to explain why. Anyway don’t look at him any longer than necessary, don’t talk to him unless you have to, and prove to him that you fucking belong here and maybe he won’t be consumed with rage/and or anxiety attacks.
And Xabi remembers thinking, The fucking right of this guy, who’s supposed to be captain, who hates everyone.
But then, changing his mind after the Arsenal game, when he proved that he belonged and Stevie held him tighter and he realized he never wanted to have that feeling leave him.)
And Xabi was never sure what to do with him.
Xabi still isn’t sure what to do with him.
In the years to come, their lives go like this:
The summer Xabi leaves, Alex becomes pregnant. Nine months later, the blessed, dreamt-for baby boy arrives. They name him George. Xabi wants to call and congratulate them, but he doesn’t (eventually, Nagore calls for them, and Alex is distant, uncomfortable on the phone), instead focusing his attention on his own son, who had the beginnings of a Scouse accent and then lost it, now developing the smoother, deeper Catalan one he had as a little boy.
Sometimes he sets Jon on his lap, and they watch Liverpool games together, old ones and new. His eyes watch his own, nimble (but not quick) feet, knowing that his brain has moved on to the next step-over, the next pass, the next maneuver, before it’s possible for everyone else to think that way. Since then, he’s only become slower and he knows now he will never be as efficient as he was in Liverpool’s colours. He is never as happy.
When he allows his mind to wander (and after he has put Jon to bed), he watches Stevie. Stevie still runs as if he can beat time (although he’s grown more controlled over the years, the urgency never goes away), still shoots from 40-yards out (most of the time, he scores), still lives and breathes Liverpool. It’s his one love affair that will never end.
Xabi watches as he cuts through swathes of grass and bodies fueled by velocity, watches that self-belief never waver, watches as he holds on, tightly, to whoever scores, watches as if Stevie is discovering for the first time that the world is his to do as he will.
This keen, unemotional observation, he deduces, is probably what Danny Murphy felt over the years, when the yearning, keening love was replaced by a quiet love, by understanding that Stevie was really no one’s to keep, only the Kop's, only by a football, and they should all feel so lucky to have been part of the love he gave back.
It hurts. But like all wounds, it starts to heal.
From what Xabi hears, nothing really happened between Stevie and Fernando.
This all comes from Pepe, the only one he really talks to anymore (Xabi believes in clean breaks), and Pepe tells him that the relationship didn’t start until a season after Xabi left. And it sort of stayed stagnant, until they fell out of love.
And Xabi thinks he’s turned out to be the lucky one, all things concerned. He can’t imagine falling out of love with Stevie: if he did it would be like walking around with a phantom leg, always aware of its presence except you know it isn’t there.
And then, the fact that he had Stevie for much longer, enough that he can’t ever imagine falling out of love with him, even now, when an entire body of water separates them, and Xabi no longer feels the need to call him and just hear his voice.
Yes. He is the lucky one. He believes in clean breaks, but he won’t ever break this one.
Stevie retires from football by 2015, a full two years after the expected date.
It was a career of fulfilled promises: before Xabi leaves they win their first Premier League trophy in 21 years and after that they win it for five years straight before Stevie retires. In those five years there is one more Champions' League trophy for him. There is also, unbelievably, a World Cup, won against their age-old rivals, Argentina, won because Stevie scored in the last two minutes.
It becomes more than a career of fulfilled promises, because by then he is almost unequivocally known as the greatest player in the history of the game. And he retires, to the dismay of everyone, despite being healthy, despite probably being able to play a good three more years.
But the ones who know him, his family, his closest friends in the team, even Xabi (they don’t know each other anymore but Xabi hasn’t loved him for so long just to forget what the desolate slope of his shoulders means) understands that he is tired now, and sooner or later something will give way and Stevie will lose whatever it is that makes him Steven Gerrard.
Let the river run its course. It will dry up. Better to leave before the soil becomes dry, bitter. It’s only the natural progression of things.
More years.
Xabi retires a year before Stevie does. Instead of continuing on with management, as was expected of him, he goes back to school. Gets a degree in business and management, goes to the United States for his masters in Economics. Gets a job analyzing stocks for a company. Disappears completely from the public eye.
By contrast Stevie’s life plays out in the public eye like he’s been there his entire life (Xabi supposes he has). There’s a car accident, and Stevie is left raising three children alone. There’s a public outpouring of grief that comes when someone famous (but not really loved) dies and the public mourns euphorically (as if they just realized they should have loved her in the first place), and it’s all very unique to English culture.
Xabi hasn’t been to England since his last game there.
Their lives live on.
In the beginning Xabi had thought a life without Stevie’s constant presence would be unbearable, except now that he goes through it, it isn’t, really. There are still urges to call, to see his face, but he finds that his days go on easier. He misses Stevie, yes, but it’s a good, fond, kind of missing, where you can survive it if you have things to occupy your mind.
Jon starts to show flashes of his brilliance on the pitch. “Soccer” is played differently in the United States, that is, it isn’t taught with the intent for children to become professional players. They do drills, they pass the ball, they score goals, but it lacks the intuition drilled into Xabi’s brain from the coaches at Antiguoko, and from his own father.
So he teaches the boy everything he knows, from tackling, to scoring, to being patient. Even now, as a 15 year old he can tell Jon will only be as fast as he was. His coaches express their dismay: he never does well in the sprint trials and he lags behind on laps. Xabi expresses his dismay too, since when was football dictated by laps and sprints?
He teaches him the most important lesson, and that is: the speed of your brain must make up for your lack of pace, and Jon takes all of it to heart and rises above the ranks, breaking schoolboy records and representing the US in junior cups. A few months later, Spain starts calling, tentatively enquiring if the boy will play for Spain and for which clubs, and then there’s England, because even they haven’t forgotten that Jon was born in England
(in the middle of the Champion’s League, Liverpool were playing away in Inter Milan, and Xabi stayed behind because he had his priorities straight. This is where all the problems start, where Xabi feels like he has begun to lose Stevie.
Jon is the bright star among all other things as they fall apart).
The clubs start coming soon after, and the US are reluctant for the contact, too many times they have let slip players who grew up on their shores to farther, more promising lands. But both father and son are in charge of the son’s destiny, and there was always the unspoken promise between them and that was
I will play for Spain, but I’ll sign for Liverpool.
When Jon turns 18, this is exactly what happens.
Xabi doesn’t come with him to England, though. It’s Nagore (who Xabi never married, and they fell out of love, but they stay together out of a deep contentment they never want to leave) and Mikel, and Pepe Reina, newly confirmed as a football agent, has his first client all signed up.
Xabi watches from his adopted home as his boy rises through the ranks. He isn’t blind to see that the power of nepotism helped: Liverpool would never have picked up an 18 year old who had no professional association with any of the established football clubs. They took Jon on because of his name and of the hype that surrounds him.
He proves that hype though, and three years later 69-year old Rafa Benitez (no more hair, more rotund, speaks with a slight trace of Scouse, instead of contract spats it has become retirement spats with the long suffering Montse) gives 21 year-old Jon Alonso Aranburu his first team debut.
It’s a fairly inconspicuous debut, nothing much happens, and West Brom doesn’t have much of a defence so that it goes Liverpool’s way, and Jon plays solidly, keeps his head down, his feet moving, and offers himself up when he can.
What must never be forgotten is: 31 years ago a fidgety Scouse boy (who himself now has a son, three years younger and is chomping at the bit to get his first-team debut) had himself a fairly inconspicuous debut too.
And then his career was anything but.
It’s Jon’s third year in the first team when he does what Xabi never had the guts to do.
He’s injured, right in the middle of the season, during Christmas time. It’s the busiest time, the worst time to have a broken ankle, but it happened, and now Jon has nothing to do except spend Christmas at home, in New York with his parents. Xabi can tell: something’s changed, which means this holiday will be much more different than normal.
Xabi and Nagore aren’t blind to their son, there are things they know, and things they’ve known (how his best friend in high school was the only one they met, how Nagore tried setting him up with dates but it never worked, how both of them found magazines under their son’s mattress just after he’d left). But they won’t bring it up, they’ll wait for him to say it.
A few minutes later, Nagore innocently asks, “Have you met anyone?”
A flash of colour passes on Jon’s face, before, “Mom,” he says, jokingly, “are you going to set me up with anyone again?”
“Hijo,” she answers, “I am only concerned. I just want you to be happy.”
Something in her tone, so knowing, so effortless, makes Xabi believe that maybe she wasn’t as clueless as she pretended to be in those days when he himself was a Liverpool player.
“Well,” Jon continues, “I did meet someone. But I’m not telling you until I’m sure!”
Later that night, when father and son are washing the dishes and Nagore is talking to relatives in Spain, Jon tells his son how proud he is of him, for everything.
And the way Jon answers him, Xabi starts to think that maybe even Jon isn’t as clueless as he pretends to be when it comes to his father.
Maybe it’s only Xabi who was the clueless one.
The first live match that Xabi Alonso ever watches his son play in is the Champions' League final, in Portugal, a few months later.
As far as Champion’s League finals go, this is hardly the most exciting one. Xabi had known by the second-half whistle that Liverpool would win it, owing perhaps to the fact that 21-year old George Gerrard had gone and whipped his team up into a dynamic frenzy of young men determined to leave their first final with their own mark. He’d scored the first two goals, by the second half he was setting up his teammates. Xabi thinks he’s seen this all before (he has), and the whistle sounds, 3-1, Liverpool against Roma, a fairly routine win in non-routine circumstances.
They don’t bring the drama, this generation (better for Rafa), but a Champions' League trophy is a trophy, they’ll treasure it, and win more in the days to come.
Keeping an eye on his son, as he runs around amok with bursting excitement, Xabi can’t help but remember his first win
(hands, tongue, nose, kiss oh fuck yes.)
and even more so when Jon throws himself at George Gerrard, lifting his legs over his waist, and they whisper and laugh, hold each other tighter. It’s lots of things and then
(hands, tongue, nose, kiss oh fuck yes.).
Like fathers like sons.
Xabi can feel a pair of eyes boring down his back, he knows who it is without even looking. He turns around anyway, nodding at Stevie’s bemused face.
A love starts one night in Istanbul, ends after one night in Prague, and now a new love, one that may or may not have started in Lisbon.
Oh, those hazy European nights.
Xabi and Stevie have their first serious talk that night, since 21 years ago.
This time, it’s both of them who stand, ramrod straight (it’s constancy, again, the sense that everything has changed, but in all actuality, everything remains the same) and it’s Stevie who speaks first.
“Will they be ok?” he asks. Time has been good for him, the lines adding not so much a pre-mature weariness (as it had on those days), but a look of experience, of knowing. His eyes are still that deep, mercurial blue. He looks so much wiser now, older. They both are.
Xabi looks up at him, smiling and
“They’re braver than we were.”
And they are. They will be.
Weightless, now.