(no subject)
Title: We're One, But We're Not the Same
Fandom: Cycling RPF
Characters: Lance Armstrong, Johan Bruyneel
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Work of fiction. Never really happened.
Summary: After Fuyu was caught, and after Floyd's email was leaked.
April 22, 2010
“You knew this was going to happen sooner or later, Johan. You knew it.”
Johan didn’t respond, and Lance didsn’t except him to, not that quickly. He really wished they were having this conversation face to face instead of on the phone. Then he could see exactly how Johan was taking what was a huge blow to the team’s already pre-soiled reputation, and by extension his. He remembered back in 2007, during the whole debacle with Basso, another thing said over the phone: “You’re not the only entity with a record of spotless tests, Lance. This whole team is likewise. They can talk about our alumni all they want to but they cannot change that fact.” There was a record gone.
Not that it had meant anything even then. Johan, as it happened, was not guilty of masterminding any team-wide doping activities; Lance had a particular hate for those accusations, the ones that threw implications on even riders the accusers probably hadn’t even bothered to learn the names of. But he was guilty, maybe even more than usual, of the same crime most team directors who weren’t masterminds had been guilty of throughout history: he had a blind enough eye and the willingness to turn it. Of course they’d never said so and they never would, but Lance had always known it, and Johan knew he knew. It was the same way they never talked about the 90s, never asked each other questions.
Even now, when Johan started again, “Lance…did you…” he couldn’t bring himself to finish the question. Have any idea would’ve been the other half of it. Lance actually hadn’t about Fuyu. He didn’t always; Tyler had genuinely shocked him. But all too often, he had suspicions, or outright knowledge, and even during his most defiant early days in the peloton he had always kept silent, the way everyone had, the way most still did. It wasn’t their business, they thought(even when it was their teammates, so it was), or it wasn’t their problem(even when it was again their teammates, so it definitely was).
He’d had a thought Johan might try to ask the question though, and he already had a way to divert it. “Get another email from Floyd? Not yet, but it’s only been a few hours. And you?”
“The same.” And it was easy enough to ignore that Johan would never have hesitated before asking Lance that. “He has already said that he would accuse me directly.” And by doing that, he’d ironically assured Johan that, at the very least, not all of what he said would be true. Very counterproductive of him; Lance was not impressed. Still, it was enough to make them both very anxious about the next month.
And there were more questions they didn’t ask, and things they didn’t talk about, when it came to Floyd, so Johan fled back to their original topic. “Fuyu didn’t protest when I told him he was suspended. No anger, no insults. No denials or admissions either.”
That’s not what I want to talk about, Lance wanted to say. Instead he said, “That’s good.”
“Good?!” That finally got some emotion out of Johan. Lance was so relieved he didn’t even feel sorry. “Nothing about this situation is good! Part of me wishes he had protested, or at least said something about the food in China. Then I might be able to presume some sort of innocence.”
“If he thinks he has nothing to hide…” Lance suggested. He was very glad Johan couldn’t see he was smiling, but the other man probably could hear it.
“Maybe.” But Johan didn’t sound like he believed it. “So, I’ll see you when I fly over there?”
“Yeah, talk to you later. Bye.”
“Bye.” They were both relieved to hang up and escape each other. Lance hated it.
Lately whenever he’d talked with Johan, especially on the phone, he’d been put in mind of a day early in 2004, when they’d been training one of the mountains for that year’s Tour, the weather had been rough, their radios had needed replacing, and as a result Johan’s voice had been heavily staticed and much of what he had said hadn’t been understandable. It felt like Floyd, and now Fuyu too, had thrown up a static barrier, and now they couldn’t communicate properly.
May 20, 2010
Lance’s bags were packed, his travel plans set. The next day he would be home, and he’d probably start thinking himself an idiot for dropping out. For now, though, he was laying on a hotel bed, there was noone around to annoy him, and his face and elbow didn’t hurt quite as much as they had a few hours ago. “It’ll be better when this race is over, I think,” George had told him in the one conversation they’d had since the story broke. If it wasn’t for Levi needing all the advantages he could get, Lance would’ve sincerely hoped for George to win a stage. Though at this point he’d be fine with Zabriskie winning the race. Him or Levi; just someone who was caught up in this mess needed to show the world that it wasn’t going to get to them.
He didn’t even feel bothered when he heard the door open. Only a handful of people had a key, and most of those were fine.
It was Johan. Of course it was Johan, who ought to be focusing on how he could at least get Levi a few seconds back, but he’d already proven the previous summer he was willing to put Lance even above his own ambitions, something Lance had mixed feelings about. He’d lowered the lighting in the room; but he knew that voice and frame like a lover’s. “How are you holding up? Better?”
“Better.” He closed his eyes against the sight of Johan sitting down next to him. This close and he could feel the warmth from his body. But he could also feel his frustration, and fear, and a new kind of anger. He had always worried that one of these days he was going to push Johan too far; had he finally done so?
But Johan’s hand was warm when it touched his, and his voice was very gentle when he asked, “Lance? Do you think you might want to walk away?”
It was a question he had to ask, and a danger he’d known about very well. He’d talked Lance out of quitting already the previous year. Besides that, he knew. He knew how sick Lance was getting of the crazy media, the new questions, the business with Floyd, doping control showing up so often he got paranoid whenever they didn’t show up for at least a week, even of being constantly in pain. He knew that two days after Fuyu’s positive test had been announced Luke had come out of school crying because of what two classmates had said about his father, and that Lance feared it was only a harbinger of things to come as he swiftly approached the age when children were at their most cruel.
The temptation was there, sure, to tell them all to fuck themselves, he wasn’t going to do it anymore. The opportunity to do it had even provided itself.
But his answer was easy: “Not as much as I won’t want to give them the satisfaction of seeing me end here.”
It was going to be hard enough over the next few days, with all the speculations he would end here, and not by his own choice. But he’d been accused before by people with far more credibility than Floyd, and his old teammate wasn’t what he was afraid of now. He had worse things to fear: failure on the road, to not only lose by to not even make the top ten, or even not to finish, for his bike or his body to fail him, or even for him to just fail himself.
This was all going through Johan’s head too, but Lance had the feeling his anxieties were reversed. The brutal truth was even if Lance failed him he could salvage his dignity. Lance had absolutely no doubt that if he himself did not ride the Tour, or dropped out early enough for Johan to change his focus, Levi would be on the podium, possibly even the winner. He could even get them both onto the podium, but the lack of Lance would make it a certainty. But none of that would matter if all his past riders were disgraced; even if he himself was lucky enough to be acquitted, his reputation would be in ruins, his future gone.
So it was understandable that Johan might be much more upset about the whole business with Floyd. But even so, Lance was shocked beyond all other feelings when Johan suddenly leaned over him, pressed his hand down hard, and said, “You knew about Floyd, didn’t you?”
Funny that it could be so easy to lie to everyone else in the world, and so hard to lie to this one man. Lance didn’t even try. “He confessed to me during our first training ride. Under the assumption I was going to help him out. Oh don’t look at me like that, Johan. How would you have reacted had I told you? Be honest with yourself.”
Even in the limited light, Johan’s face was close enough that Lance could see the quiet anger give way to turmoil. He didn’t want to admit it to himself, wanted to keep believing what he’d told himself then, that he would have stuck to his zero tolerance policy and would have definitely believed Lance’s word-anyone else and he could have dismissed it for lack of proof, but not Lance, and that Floyd would have been let go as soon as his contract ran out. And maybe he would have done it, though he would have been deeply angry at Lance for telling him and forcing him to take action. Though maybe that would have led to disaster, if Floyd had resented it enough to make his accusations earlier, to maybe even add his voice to the chorus of the expose published a couple of years later. But there was a very strong possibility he would have told himself they needed proof, and done nothing, because he wanted to keep his eye blind.
“Not the way I ought to,” he finally admitted, and he let go of Lance’s hand. “And as a result, we are now this situation. You can say we really are guilty, and should be punished.”
And for a moment, Lance wished he’d keep asking those questions he’d never dared asked. Who else was there. Was anything Floyd had said so far true, and what was the chance of it being proven. And he wanted very badly for Johan to ask the question that terrified his longtime director the most, the question about Lance himself.
But to ask any one of those questions would open the floodgates. It said enough that Lance was feeling the urge, and was sure Johan was too, just from asking after a fact already established. Neither of them would risk more.
Still, he thought the bit of honesty had done them both good. He was sure of it when he saw Johan smile, and his hand trace Lance’s injured elbow. He barely touched it; he wasn’t going to risk even possibly putting too much pressure on the wrong spot, but he said, “You’ll be all right. And if you get a scar on your face, it might be a good thing. Make you look more intimidating. Maybe even make it iconic.”
And just like that, it felt like the static barrier coming down, the signal clear from the time Floyd had first emailed the team. “We’re going to be okay.” Lance hadn’t meant to say out loud, but he didn’t regret doing so. And he did believe it, then, that they were going to be okay as a team and they were going to be okay for the Tour, that he was going to go for it and go for it gladly, and he even believed, for the first time, not just that there was a possibility that he could win it, but that in fact he could win it; if he just did everything he knew he could do, if Johan did everything he could do, if they could just keep it up and work together and everyone else on the team came through-and they’d given him no reason to doubt them, he ought to win. It was a good feeling. For a moment he was then more frightened of Floyd, because there were no longer other fears to block that out, but that passed quickly enough.
The mood caught; Lance saw Johan grow lighter. “Of course we’re going to be okay,” he said. “Though you’re probably going to need to change your schedule again. I’ve been thinking about the Tour of Luxembourg…”
After that they talked long into the night, plans for the rest of Lance’s season leading to analysis of their standing in California at the moment and how to get the win for Levi even without Lance’s help, to other topics; Lance showed him the latest photograph of the baby Anna had sent him. “There have been points this afternoon,” he told him, “that I’ve been really glad for this baby, because I knew I’d have something to look forward to.” Earlier he would have avoided bringing up that hanging stormcloud, even indirectly, but now they faced it unintimidated.
“I’ll see you again in the morning if I can,” Johan finally told him. “I might not be able to, though.”
“Yeah, I’ll call you when I get home if you don’t. See if I can get back on the bike in a couple of days.”
“Don’t do anything against common sense,” said Johan as he headed for the door. “Good night.”
“Good night.” Lance wasn’t sure Johan heard him, because the door closed even as he spoke, but he didn’t have to. When things were back to normal between them, what they meant to each other was something else they’d never talked about, but in that case, it was only because they both already knew.
Fandom: Cycling RPF
Characters: Lance Armstrong, Johan Bruyneel
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Work of fiction. Never really happened.
Summary: After Fuyu was caught, and after Floyd's email was leaked.
April 22, 2010
“You knew this was going to happen sooner or later, Johan. You knew it.”
Johan didn’t respond, and Lance didsn’t except him to, not that quickly. He really wished they were having this conversation face to face instead of on the phone. Then he could see exactly how Johan was taking what was a huge blow to the team’s already pre-soiled reputation, and by extension his. He remembered back in 2007, during the whole debacle with Basso, another thing said over the phone: “You’re not the only entity with a record of spotless tests, Lance. This whole team is likewise. They can talk about our alumni all they want to but they cannot change that fact.” There was a record gone.
Not that it had meant anything even then. Johan, as it happened, was not guilty of masterminding any team-wide doping activities; Lance had a particular hate for those accusations, the ones that threw implications on even riders the accusers probably hadn’t even bothered to learn the names of. But he was guilty, maybe even more than usual, of the same crime most team directors who weren’t masterminds had been guilty of throughout history: he had a blind enough eye and the willingness to turn it. Of course they’d never said so and they never would, but Lance had always known it, and Johan knew he knew. It was the same way they never talked about the 90s, never asked each other questions.
Even now, when Johan started again, “Lance…did you…” he couldn’t bring himself to finish the question. Have any idea would’ve been the other half of it. Lance actually hadn’t about Fuyu. He didn’t always; Tyler had genuinely shocked him. But all too often, he had suspicions, or outright knowledge, and even during his most defiant early days in the peloton he had always kept silent, the way everyone had, the way most still did. It wasn’t their business, they thought(even when it was their teammates, so it was), or it wasn’t their problem(even when it was again their teammates, so it definitely was).
He’d had a thought Johan might try to ask the question though, and he already had a way to divert it. “Get another email from Floyd? Not yet, but it’s only been a few hours. And you?”
“The same.” And it was easy enough to ignore that Johan would never have hesitated before asking Lance that. “He has already said that he would accuse me directly.” And by doing that, he’d ironically assured Johan that, at the very least, not all of what he said would be true. Very counterproductive of him; Lance was not impressed. Still, it was enough to make them both very anxious about the next month.
And there were more questions they didn’t ask, and things they didn’t talk about, when it came to Floyd, so Johan fled back to their original topic. “Fuyu didn’t protest when I told him he was suspended. No anger, no insults. No denials or admissions either.”
That’s not what I want to talk about, Lance wanted to say. Instead he said, “That’s good.”
“Good?!” That finally got some emotion out of Johan. Lance was so relieved he didn’t even feel sorry. “Nothing about this situation is good! Part of me wishes he had protested, or at least said something about the food in China. Then I might be able to presume some sort of innocence.”
“If he thinks he has nothing to hide…” Lance suggested. He was very glad Johan couldn’t see he was smiling, but the other man probably could hear it.
“Maybe.” But Johan didn’t sound like he believed it. “So, I’ll see you when I fly over there?”
“Yeah, talk to you later. Bye.”
“Bye.” They were both relieved to hang up and escape each other. Lance hated it.
Lately whenever he’d talked with Johan, especially on the phone, he’d been put in mind of a day early in 2004, when they’d been training one of the mountains for that year’s Tour, the weather had been rough, their radios had needed replacing, and as a result Johan’s voice had been heavily staticed and much of what he had said hadn’t been understandable. It felt like Floyd, and now Fuyu too, had thrown up a static barrier, and now they couldn’t communicate properly.
May 20, 2010
Lance’s bags were packed, his travel plans set. The next day he would be home, and he’d probably start thinking himself an idiot for dropping out. For now, though, he was laying on a hotel bed, there was noone around to annoy him, and his face and elbow didn’t hurt quite as much as they had a few hours ago. “It’ll be better when this race is over, I think,” George had told him in the one conversation they’d had since the story broke. If it wasn’t for Levi needing all the advantages he could get, Lance would’ve sincerely hoped for George to win a stage. Though at this point he’d be fine with Zabriskie winning the race. Him or Levi; just someone who was caught up in this mess needed to show the world that it wasn’t going to get to them.
He didn’t even feel bothered when he heard the door open. Only a handful of people had a key, and most of those were fine.
It was Johan. Of course it was Johan, who ought to be focusing on how he could at least get Levi a few seconds back, but he’d already proven the previous summer he was willing to put Lance even above his own ambitions, something Lance had mixed feelings about. He’d lowered the lighting in the room; but he knew that voice and frame like a lover’s. “How are you holding up? Better?”
“Better.” He closed his eyes against the sight of Johan sitting down next to him. This close and he could feel the warmth from his body. But he could also feel his frustration, and fear, and a new kind of anger. He had always worried that one of these days he was going to push Johan too far; had he finally done so?
But Johan’s hand was warm when it touched his, and his voice was very gentle when he asked, “Lance? Do you think you might want to walk away?”
It was a question he had to ask, and a danger he’d known about very well. He’d talked Lance out of quitting already the previous year. Besides that, he knew. He knew how sick Lance was getting of the crazy media, the new questions, the business with Floyd, doping control showing up so often he got paranoid whenever they didn’t show up for at least a week, even of being constantly in pain. He knew that two days after Fuyu’s positive test had been announced Luke had come out of school crying because of what two classmates had said about his father, and that Lance feared it was only a harbinger of things to come as he swiftly approached the age when children were at their most cruel.
The temptation was there, sure, to tell them all to fuck themselves, he wasn’t going to do it anymore. The opportunity to do it had even provided itself.
But his answer was easy: “Not as much as I won’t want to give them the satisfaction of seeing me end here.”
It was going to be hard enough over the next few days, with all the speculations he would end here, and not by his own choice. But he’d been accused before by people with far more credibility than Floyd, and his old teammate wasn’t what he was afraid of now. He had worse things to fear: failure on the road, to not only lose by to not even make the top ten, or even not to finish, for his bike or his body to fail him, or even for him to just fail himself.
This was all going through Johan’s head too, but Lance had the feeling his anxieties were reversed. The brutal truth was even if Lance failed him he could salvage his dignity. Lance had absolutely no doubt that if he himself did not ride the Tour, or dropped out early enough for Johan to change his focus, Levi would be on the podium, possibly even the winner. He could even get them both onto the podium, but the lack of Lance would make it a certainty. But none of that would matter if all his past riders were disgraced; even if he himself was lucky enough to be acquitted, his reputation would be in ruins, his future gone.
So it was understandable that Johan might be much more upset about the whole business with Floyd. But even so, Lance was shocked beyond all other feelings when Johan suddenly leaned over him, pressed his hand down hard, and said, “You knew about Floyd, didn’t you?”
Funny that it could be so easy to lie to everyone else in the world, and so hard to lie to this one man. Lance didn’t even try. “He confessed to me during our first training ride. Under the assumption I was going to help him out. Oh don’t look at me like that, Johan. How would you have reacted had I told you? Be honest with yourself.”
Even in the limited light, Johan’s face was close enough that Lance could see the quiet anger give way to turmoil. He didn’t want to admit it to himself, wanted to keep believing what he’d told himself then, that he would have stuck to his zero tolerance policy and would have definitely believed Lance’s word-anyone else and he could have dismissed it for lack of proof, but not Lance, and that Floyd would have been let go as soon as his contract ran out. And maybe he would have done it, though he would have been deeply angry at Lance for telling him and forcing him to take action. Though maybe that would have led to disaster, if Floyd had resented it enough to make his accusations earlier, to maybe even add his voice to the chorus of the expose published a couple of years later. But there was a very strong possibility he would have told himself they needed proof, and done nothing, because he wanted to keep his eye blind.
“Not the way I ought to,” he finally admitted, and he let go of Lance’s hand. “And as a result, we are now this situation. You can say we really are guilty, and should be punished.”
And for a moment, Lance wished he’d keep asking those questions he’d never dared asked. Who else was there. Was anything Floyd had said so far true, and what was the chance of it being proven. And he wanted very badly for Johan to ask the question that terrified his longtime director the most, the question about Lance himself.
But to ask any one of those questions would open the floodgates. It said enough that Lance was feeling the urge, and was sure Johan was too, just from asking after a fact already established. Neither of them would risk more.
Still, he thought the bit of honesty had done them both good. He was sure of it when he saw Johan smile, and his hand trace Lance’s injured elbow. He barely touched it; he wasn’t going to risk even possibly putting too much pressure on the wrong spot, but he said, “You’ll be all right. And if you get a scar on your face, it might be a good thing. Make you look more intimidating. Maybe even make it iconic.”
And just like that, it felt like the static barrier coming down, the signal clear from the time Floyd had first emailed the team. “We’re going to be okay.” Lance hadn’t meant to say out loud, but he didn’t regret doing so. And he did believe it, then, that they were going to be okay as a team and they were going to be okay for the Tour, that he was going to go for it and go for it gladly, and he even believed, for the first time, not just that there was a possibility that he could win it, but that in fact he could win it; if he just did everything he knew he could do, if Johan did everything he could do, if they could just keep it up and work together and everyone else on the team came through-and they’d given him no reason to doubt them, he ought to win. It was a good feeling. For a moment he was then more frightened of Floyd, because there were no longer other fears to block that out, but that passed quickly enough.
The mood caught; Lance saw Johan grow lighter. “Of course we’re going to be okay,” he said. “Though you’re probably going to need to change your schedule again. I’ve been thinking about the Tour of Luxembourg…”
After that they talked long into the night, plans for the rest of Lance’s season leading to analysis of their standing in California at the moment and how to get the win for Levi even without Lance’s help, to other topics; Lance showed him the latest photograph of the baby Anna had sent him. “There have been points this afternoon,” he told him, “that I’ve been really glad for this baby, because I knew I’d have something to look forward to.” Earlier he would have avoided bringing up that hanging stormcloud, even indirectly, but now they faced it unintimidated.
“I’ll see you again in the morning if I can,” Johan finally told him. “I might not be able to, though.”
“Yeah, I’ll call you when I get home if you don’t. See if I can get back on the bike in a couple of days.”
“Don’t do anything against common sense,” said Johan as he headed for the door. “Good night.”
“Good night.” Lance wasn’t sure Johan heard him, because the door closed even as he spoke, but he didn’t have to. When things were back to normal between them, what they meant to each other was something else they’d never talked about, but in that case, it was only because they both already knew.